Calum Colvin: Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 9 February

Calum Colvin has always had a great knack of scintillating the chattering classes without failing to touch a chord with the rest of Scotland. Not unlike Burns, perhaps, or James MacPherson, who in 1760 published ‘Fragments of Ancient Poetry’, a translation, he claimed, of a great Celtic epic created in the third century by the blind bard, Ossian. Ossianic admirers included Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Yeats, Beethoven, Ingres, and even Napolean, who was said to carry the epic into battle. But the deluge of doubt began when Samuel Johnston denounced the work as a forgery, and despite the more recent academic evidence in his favour, MacPherson is still perceived by many as one of Scotland’s greatest cultural con artists.

This theme was ripe with potential for Colvin, whose work has long been concerned with issues of Scottish identity. Colvin has used kitsch and tartanry to examine our ambiguous relationship with our own cultural heritage, in which we have lost a grip on what is real, what is reconstructed, and what is nothing but romantic nonsense.

This notion of disorientation and reconstruction is literally built in to Colvin’s photographs, which originate as three-dimensional stone sets painted over to create the illusion of a flat image. Introducing yet another layer of doubt and ambiguity, he has used digital imaging in places to manipulate the relative ‘truth’ of the photograph. And to top it all, one of the images in the exhibition is itself a deliberate forgery.

This is the National Galleries’ first touring exhibition, and first to be mounted bilingually in Gaelic and English. It is comprised of twenty-three large photographs which on first sight look disappointingly similar. But train your eyes on the subtleties and these series will prove rewarding: ‘Fragments’, a series of eight works centred on an anonymous male portrait, is animation writ large. What begins as a Maori head (a ‘noble savage’ motif which appears throughout the exhibition), metamorphoses through the series into the laughable image of a Harry Lauder-type character, and is then dismantled gradually before your eyes. Even the objects in the set move about, a saltire creeping in and out of prominence before apparently reappearing burned out in the foreground.

Colvin’s schematic painting style is perhaps too reminiscent of cartoons to achieve a real sense of grandeur, but this may in itself be a cheeky poke at pomposity (nowhere more obvious than in his austere portrait of Sir Walter Scott, littered with See You Jimmy hat and iced biscuits). Also notable is the absence of any visual echo of Celtic or Pictish design – was Colvin keen to avoid touristic clichés, or has he succumbed to the cultural cringe?

Of all the images in the exhibition, ‘Twa Dogs’ strikes the rawest nerve. It takes its title and theme from a Burns poem in which the upper class dog Caesar chats with the ploughman’s collie Luath about the idiocies of the class divide. In Colvin’s photograph, however, Luath stands on his Celtic hearth-rug, back to back with Kaiser, on his own Rangers rug. Each is surrounded by the merchandise of their football clubs, from branded sweets to the RFC baby bottle. The stones which make up the fireplace are re-used from a previous set, with fragments of Ossian’s portrait still visible on them. Here is the sad residue of our proud heritage, Colvin is saying; we have preserved the tribalism of our past and dismissed all the beauty that went with it.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.10.02