Visions for the Future VI: Paul Carter | Chad McCail
Until 29 November; Fruitmarket Gallery

The Fruitmarket finishes its special series of commissioned exhibitions with two shows which will stick in your mind like half-finished puzzles for years to come. Paul Carter’s Edge of Darkness takes a typically quirky look at cultural misconceptions across time and space, while Chad McCail illustrates everything that’s wrong with human society in Life is Driven by the Desire for Pleasure – with stick figures.

You can almost smell the dust, walking into Carter’s mock 19th century museum exhibit, one imposing wall-text illuminated in the eery twilight. The panel tells of an intrepid explorer who ventured into the unknown “Dark Lands” – the uncharted territory north of Fife, and in the centres of Ireland and Wales. In these lands he found the river’s Source, a Shrine, and a Burial Chamber, each of which is meticulously reconstructed in the gallery.

Like much of Carter’s work the idea is strong and simple (if not a little heavy-handed), and elegant in its execution. The Source turns out to be a kitsch 20th century water-feature and the Shrine is a common-place mantelpiece bedecked with ornaments. The Burial Chamber, a little more ambiguous, resembles the 1970s nuclear fall-out shelter of Carter’s earlier work.

Throw-away items such as figurines and pin-ups are accorded mystical significance by the text-panel, which offers a heavy dose of obfuscation in place of interpretation – and yet is frighteningly similar to many we learned from in the museums of our youth.

This is the past of our future and the future of our past. We take a neolithic plaything and construct an entire world of speculation around it, all with scholarly seriousness. But it’s not just time that puts distance between peoples – Carter is nibbling at cultural imperialism and its haughty assumptions about “lesser” civilisations. It’s surely no coincidence that his Dark Lands occupy the more Celtic, rural areas of Britain and Ireland where the so-called Dark Ages were in fact an age of enlightenment.

Upstairs, McCail’s exhibition – although ostensibly a graphic novel writ large – is an epic analysis of society’s evils bringing together philosophical thought with psychology, theology, feminism and Marxism, to name but a few. His meticulously detailed pages of stick figures tell multi-layered stories of personal development curbed by systems of power and control.

The artist has over the last three years developed a series of pictographic symbols which allow him to tell these complex stories with very few words, an art once practiced widely by biblical painters to educate the illiterate masses. Exhibition-goers are not forced to sit and contemplate McCail’s works every Sunday, however, and the massive effort of concentration required to decode them will prove too much for most, despite the provision of groovy cardboard seats and user-friendly freestanding panels.

The gallery environment is not right for this work, but the book is perfect. McCail’s explanatory introduction allows everything to fall into place, and the images can be read as a continuous narrative. Buy the book, and life, the universe and everything will suddenly make sense.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 02.11.03