Natural Situation: David Sherry
Collective Gallery, Edinburgh until September 7

Fresh: Contemporary British Artists in Print
Edinburgh Printmakers until September 13

David Sherry is a bullshitter, and I mean that in the nicest way. The young Glasgow-based artist is notorious for that recent Becks Futures-nominated video where he stitched balsa wood to his feet while talking through the task with all the mundanity of daytime TV. His latest work, commissioned by Collective Gallery, is a typically eclectic mix of performance art, video, and brow-scrunchingly abstruse floor and wall pieces.

In the 12 minute video, Sun’s Fucked, Sherry presents a straight-faced monologue proposing the replacement of the sun with a minimalist Italian-designed lighting unit, railing against the British government for lagging behind Icelandic progress on the issue. The video is, like Sherry’s previous works, a low-budget, unembellished head and shoulder shot whose success depends entirely on the strength of the artist’s unscripted performance, containing shades of both eager political activism and self-serving corporate spin.

Add that together with Serial Psycho Interviewee, a £5 booklet hilariously documenting Sherry’s attempts over a three month period to get – and fail – as many job interviews as possible – and a strong wave of 21st century cynicism rolls through the gallery. Sherry is deeply suspicious of the manipulative, media-controlled bureaucratic framework in which we live, and he subverts it, playing the corporate bullshitters at their own game, and probing the public’s willingness to accept every idea that’s fed to us.

For the most part we are let in on the secret, but I’m not convinced that the wrinkled, space-filling floor-painting, The Anus of a Really Large Person, isn’t an attempt to take the proverbial out of anyone who tries to take this particular piece of school-boy humour seriously.

Edinburgh Printmakers’ new exhibition, Fresh, really does live up to its name. 21 major British artists – many of whom are not known primarily for their prints – are represented by a range of work which is vigorous, unassuming and beautifully made.

There is plenty of work from the Young British Artists, including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Gary Hume and Tracey Emin, and a strong turnout of established and emerging Scottish talent including Christine Borland, David Shrigley, Martin Boyce and Toby Paterson.

It is foolish to generalise, but there is a strong sense in this exhibition of a quiet empathy and humour which has its roots in minimalism, realism and ultimately Northern European presbiterianism. Gillian Wearing’s screenprint, My Man, presents us with an evocative photograph of a 16-year old girl on a colourful seaside bench, paired up with the teenager’s three-page, handwritten description of her relationship with her boyfriend. The contemporary txt language and its sentiment are unmistakably youthful, but at the same time sincere and touching, without apparent intervention.

Gavin Turk’s untitled lithograph of a bulging black bin bag, shot through with dashes of reflected colour, is cheerful and attractive, despite the banality of the subject. Where Ceal Floyer’s 1996 installation, Garbage Bag, emphasized the nothingness of the bag, Turk’s approach is a celebration of its dazzling jack-a-dandy surface.

Jaqueline Donachie’s Blondes Versus Blondes is a glowing photographic screenprint of a group of bottle blond boys in a gym hall, bathed in golden light. The print is a sublime spot the ball contest, as the boys’ attention is intensely focused, like the unselfconscious hobbyists of Nashashibi’s films, on a part of the composition we do not see.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.08.03