Welcome Back
Stills; until December 21

Feedback Loop
CCA; until January 4

After the sweaty stampede for June’s opening parties and the ensuing months of silence, you’d think the 50th Venice Biennale was long gone, but actually Scotland’s exhibition at the Palazzo Giustinian-Lolin has another fortnight to go. That’s the three exhibiting artists, but in June Scotland was also represented by screenings, publications and web-based works from a further 24 artists, all under the banner of the Zenomap project.

Stills has been quick off the mark and is the first to host a selection of the work on home ground, combining the three categories of video, web and printed material.

Dan Norton’s RAMShack is a high-tech interactive piece, generating a seemingly infinite number of combinations of sound and pattern at the push of a button. Norton (a.k.a. ablab) plays on intuition, patterns of thinking, and the moment of decision, to get you addicted to exploring his boundless world of abstraction. Previous expeditions into Norton’s world are captured like landscapes in glossy images around the walls, while his lurid wire and clay maquettes are reminiscent of planetary models.

I have in recent years struggled to comprehend the significance of Katy Dove’s work, which is aggressively naïve in approach. Her drawings, in felt-pen or coloured pencil, are rarely more complex than simple doodles, and her animation, You, is simply a case of shifting these shapes around a bit with the help of some software. The result is a pleasant, but mediocre, combination of moving patterns to a pleasant, but mediocre, soundtrack of Moomins in the jungle. Norman McLaren did it all – much better – in the 1950s.

Last but not least is the prolific output of Beagles and Ramsay, who have created a limited edition poster of proposed projects in the style of Leonardo da Vinci. The original drawings and manuscripts, prematurely aged and rich with detail, are exhibited individually at Stills, allowing us to get a good look at these sumptuous – yet ridiculous – Unrealised Dreams. The duo’s long-held interest in macabre double-portraits continues with their suggested Double Self Portrait – Black Pudding (a recipe which requires a pint of blood from each artist) and the grotesque double-headed portrait called The Thing.

Beagles and Ramsay’s quirky sense of humour is present in each of the proposals, which are sprinkled with peculiarly Scottish institutions such as Buckie and The Krankies. On a more profound level, the pair have repositioned Leonardo as the western world’s first conceptual artist, whose unrealised proposals are works of art in their own right.

At CCA a monumental piece of public art stands inside the foyer of the Sauchiehall Street gallery. Kenny Hunter’s Feedback Loop is a three-metre tall Japanese teenager made out of grey plastic, holding aloft a bunch of pink flowers. She is a mass of contradictions: her luscious Pre-Raphaelite face is combined with contemporary fashion in a Socialist Realist style. Her triumphant, classical pose is combined with a modest, downcast expression, and her obvious role as public art puts her on the wrong side of the glass which fronts the building. All of which confusion most probably makes her Glasgow’s first 21st century mascot.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 19.10.03