Julian Schnabel
Inverleith House, until October 26

I wonder if Julian Schnabel realised the dangers of coming to Edinburgh for the only UK showing of his latest work. We Scots are not known for our love of self-aggrandising Americans who made it big in the 1980s, and although we can’t claim to have kent his faither, many have succumbed to the temptation to take the artist down a critical peg or two.

He is an easy target. The artist who became famous for his plate paintings – garish figures daubed onto fields of broken crockery – has now diversified, bringing us an eclectic mix of painting, sculpture and photography. Had he missed out three room’s worth of overblown polaroids which show off his swimming pool, his grand furniture, his tiger-skin rug and his model-wife, perhaps it would be easier to take him seriously, but Schnabel has once again placed his own reputation slap bang in the middle between the viewer and the art.

This show is in effect a rebranding exercise, exchanging 1980s aggression for a delicate sensitivity which is more in keeping with the new millennium. It is a clever one, though, subtle in its nuances. The first thing on show is three big paintings on tarpaulin, full of Schnabel’s trademark lurid brushwork, violent to the point of self-parody. Next are six black surfboards – some fused to eachother – all decorated with a recurrent image in the artist’s recent work, a thrift-shop picture of the all-American teenager with her eyes blacked out by Schnabel’s brush. These are uncharacteristically slick, and seem to combine issues of fashion and trendiness with darker implications of blind loyalty. The twin boards may well also be a reference to the 9/11 disaster, which took place while Schnabel was working on a series of paintings using this blind girl image.

In a further step away from Neo-Expressionism, the next room contains four ten-foot high polaroids of the artist’s bull terriers. The photos are surprisingly lyrical, the black and white dogs emerging gracefully from a blue-toned blur. Animals normally associated with brutishness and violence are here recast as noble, gentle creatures, and this is the crux of the matter. Schnabel identifies strongly with these dogs (one only has to look at his self-portraits with them upstairs) as misunderstood beasts, truly sensitive despite their reputation for selfish aggression. Here he tries to turn the tide. The question is, would these massive polaroids look anything other than mundane if they weren’t printed so big?

Upstairs, the photographs – reminiscent of Hello Magazine on an off-day – tell us more about Schnabel than we need or want to know. Let’s ignore them. Next door there are ten tall panels of 19th century wallpaper containing crudely painted period hunting scenes in grand, luscious country estates. These have been defaced with vicious daubs of purple oil paint, the oil itself seeping into the paper to create an alluring dynamism of its own.

Fox-hunting has been made illegal and its associated traditions will die (one has to wonder, with his bull terriers and his tiger-skin rug, whose side Schnabel is on). Here is the crockery re-invented – those old broken plates, with their out-dated ornamentation, are now replaced with expensive old wallpaper, which is wantonly destroyed in the name of contemporary art.

The truth is, the leopard hasn’t really changed his spots – he just wishes we’d see how fragile he is underneath it all.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.09.03