An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of Gaelic
Until January 24; City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Edition Alecto: A Fury for Prints
Until January 10; City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Book of Kells, eat your heart out, the Great Book of Gaelic has arrived. More than 200 poets, artists and calligraphers from Scotland and Ireland were brought together in 2001 to illustrate, on large sheets of hand-made paper, 100 poems, old and new, in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Before being bound together as a book in 2008, the eclectic mix of pages is enjoying a hectic exhibition schedule from GoMA to Russia, resting currently at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre.

Judging by the already slightly rumpled look of some of the exhibits, I’ll be impressed if they make it into book form in one piece – Pròiseact nan Ealan did consider following in the footsteps of their Celtic forefathers and using vellum, but that plan presumably failed to win the vote of the vegetarian contingent.

The artists were chosen through a mixture of nomination and open submission, and as a result there are well-known names like Alan Davie, John Byrne, Alasdair Gray and Steven Campbell nestled in comfortably among work by the less well-known. Some of the work is rooted in conventional, romanticised imagery (Alasdair Gray doesn’t stray from the beaten track with his illuminated manuscript page, for example) but a good deal of it is reassuringly fresh and modern, like Doug Cocker’s print for the Irish poem, Thresholds, where Fra Angelico meets 1960s modernism in a pictorial symmetry which only subtly reveals the secret of its escape route.

Frances Walker’s At the Cemetery is a hauntingly faithful drawing of Aignis in Lewis, with grave stones starched white like bones, and silhouetted black figures silently presiding like the dark-suited elders of Scotland’s most presbyterian paintings. Recent graduate Flòraidh MacKenzie’s O.S. map of the St Kilda parliament renders an instantly recognisable image blank, still, frozen in time, as the St Kilda community is destined always to be.

None of us wish the same fate for Gaelic, but sadly, there are hints of it in this very exhibition. While the wall captions are stoutly tri-lingual, the secondary language of the show – English – is embedded in many of the artworks themselves, by artists who were presumably working entirely from translation. But by way of contrast, the vitality of the literature is unmistakeable, and points the language towards a vigorous future.

As if there’s not enough to see in that exhibition, there’s another one, twice the size, on the next two floors of the building. Editions Alecto is a touring exhibition featuring the fascinating work produced by the pioneering London print publishers of the 1960s and 70s. The firm encouraged a whole generation of artists to take up print-making, and crucially, Alecto also produced artists multiples in three dimensions, an adventurous but costly move.

Eduardo Paolozzi, David Hockney, Alan Davie, Richard Hamilton and Richard Demarco were all Alecto artists, commissioned and distributed by the company. Paolozzi’s Moonstripes Empire News, 1967, is a pink perspex box containing 100 screenprinted sheets of images and text culled from popular and classical sources, and two of the artist’s impressions of Wittgenstein in New York show how Paolozzi experimented with producing the same print in different colourways, a concept which Alan Davie had stretched to 34 variations in his exuberant Zurich Improvisations of 1965.

Hockney’s A Rakes Progress, a set of 16 etchings set in New York, connect the artist back to Hogarth and forward to Shrigley, while Anthony Currell’s monumental print, Miner No.3, is a timeless demonstration of drypoint used at its best, the soft edges like coal dust on the creased, shadowy face.

Don’t miss Ed Ruscha’s Dues and Brews, printed using pickle, axle grease and caviar, or Claes Oldenburg’s multiple, London Knees, a pair of latex knees complete with carry case and documentation, proposing a public monument to said knees on London’s Victoria Embankment.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.12.03