Ouroboros: The Music of the Spheres
Until April 4; CCA

Rosengarten
Until April 17; Hunterian Museum

Making exhibitions can be just as creative as making art, and John Calcutt’s first curatorial stint at CCA demonstrates how. With the circle as his muse, the Glasgow-based art historian has joined the dots from Marcel Duchamp to Jim Lambie in pursuit of an unorthodox goal. If you want to complete the picture, be prepared to bring your own imagination to the mix.

Ouroboros, the show’s title, refers to the snake eating its own tail, an ancient symbol of the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth. Its subtitle, The Music of the Spheres, recalls the Pythagorean belief that ten planets rotated around a central fire, each one’s sonic vibrations adding to the musical harmony of the universe. Calcutt sees the vinyl record as a metaphor for both of these ideas. Despite these lofty objectives, the show’s preoccupation with vinyl does emit a strong whiff of pop glamour and boys with toys (none of the 12 artists is female), tempting you to look no further than its groovy surface.

But if you do, it’s possible to divine three key streams of thought. The first is a search for the pictorial equivalent of the music of the spheres. Lambie has pasted concentric circles across the width of a wall, and adorned them with vivid glitter-coated turn-tables, creating a work which is audibly silent but visually screaming. Equally vibrant are Op artist Julio Le Parc’s silk-screen circles of the 1970s, propped casually against the walls.

From the small ouroboros to the infinite music of the spheres, there is beauty to be found in stretching and compressing scale and time. Calum Stirling’s latest video installation, Tectonic Plates, allows us to fly through the groove of a record as if it is a massive canyon. Robert Smithson’s video of 1970 documents the construction of his Spiral Jetty, whose tiny spiralling salt crystals form part of a huge structure visible from space.

Lastly, the inextricable processes of creation and destruction are inherent in the playing of a record – whose surface is destroyed in the very process. Marclay’s early video explores this conundrum, while Renshaw lets you play some really messed up records on his turntables – well worth a go, if only for the hell of it.

Anne Bevan and Janice Galloway’s collaboration at the Hunterian Museum is a bit more hands off, which is a good thing given that the artist and writer have chosen to focus on obstetric instruments. Nine clinically arranged light tables glow in the museumy dusk, each containing delicately reinvented birthing tools, including silver forceps and glass tubes engraved with poetry.

The two cabinets of historical implements at the door are enough to make any woman slam her knees tight shut, but the exhibition space itself exudes a cool, scientific lyricism. Galloway’s poetry, pinned around the walls, takes a characteristically unclouded view of child birth, while Bevan’s objects tend to mystify rather than clarify the purpose of the tools they are based on.

Galloway and Bevan have collaborated before, and it is a partnership which works well. Their last big project, Pipelines, explored Edinburgh’s old underground water system, resulting in some major upheaval at Fruitmarket Gallery, whose floor sank substantially under the weight of the concrete which Bevan poured liberally all over it.

There’s nothing heavy about Rosengarten, though; it capitalises on the shared gift of writer and artist to capture a glimpsed moment in time, and to suspend it delicately in words and sculpture. The result is a fragile-looking exhibition which haunts your thoughts long after you have seen it, and the beautiful book which accompanies the show will answer many of the riddles which the show so eloquently poses.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.02.04