Glasgow’s Art: New Acquisitions
Until September 25; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Alan Currall: some things I want to show you
Until August 22; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

Since opening in 1996, Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art has leaned towards the old side of modern. That isn’t a huge surprise when you consider the municipal collection of art which was to sustain it. While Glasgow’s new generation of artists has been taking the world by storm, they’ve not – until now – found a home in the city’s own collection.

All that is changing. In 2002 a panel was set up to make new acquisitions of contemporary art, and the results of their first shopping trip have breathed new life into the gallery.

Dead ahead as you walk in is Gobstopper, the video that won Roderick Buchanan the very first Beck’s Futures Award in 2000. A succession of playful kids in the back of a campervan attempt to hold their breath from one end of the Clyde Tunnel to the other. It’s charming, compelling, and silly. At the same time it mixes life with death – these giggling children are depriving themselves of oxygen in the archetypal long tunnel with light at the end.

The other side of Glasgow childhood traditions follows straight on, with Graham Fagen’s photographic prints of ad-hoc weapons, accompanied by po-faced museum-style captions. These are not the sort of thing PC Murdoch would catch Oor Wullie playing with; these are bloody instruments of war. There is no nostalgia here about the very real undercurrent of violence present in the lives and games of children in this so-called civilised society.

At the top floor the large space is dominated by Ross Sinclair’s wooden installation, Dead Church/Real Life. A neon sign invites you into the red hut, in the shape of a toppled church, where you can sit on a pew and watch Sinclair on video. The screen is vertical, and shows the artist’s tattooed back as he sits on bare floorboards singing hymns. The experience is very familiar to anyone with a church-going background, while at the same time it’s all upside down and sidieways.

The strongest piece of all is Christine Borland’s Giant and Fairy Tales, substantial in terms of research, presentation and emotional impact. The outlines of two skeletons – a dwarf and a giant – are sketched in dust on two glass shelves, and the shadows they cast form the complete picture. A book explains the stories of these unfortunates, both of whom died prematurely, their bodies stolen from their families by the medical establishment. The shadows of light and dust are all that’s left to tell the story today.

Sketching stories in an even more tangential way is Alan Currall, whose solo show is also being hosted by GoMA. The young Glasgow artist teaches at the art college, and shows internationally, but this is his first solo show in the city since his graduation in 1995. His video work, like Dave Sherry’s, is based on a confident swagger and deliberate bullshit.

Currall’s two new video works make you feel like you’ve changed the channel and missed the start of the programme. How I would probably do it tells you how to do “it” without ever making clear what “it” is. The artist says in the accompanying literature that if he manages to explain things clearly in a video he won’t use it – ambiguity is the name of the game.

In a new audio work, Head, Currell spends 14 minutes telling an empty white room about the ideal body which he has constructed. It’s a sculpture which only exists in his head, and which has been made up as he goes along. These works are the audio-visual equivalent of the scribbly style prevalent in Glasgow just now, where personal ramblings are defiantly devoid of all finesse, or any possible meaning.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.07.04