Somewhere Everywhere Nowhere
Until November 28; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Until December 4; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Somewhere Everywhere Nowhere is a consciously nebulous name for a show, and in that sense, very appropriate. It’s both one exhibition and two, spread between Dundee and Edinburgh. It’s drawn from five regional art collections in France which have no physical home, and which constitute part of the country’s national collection of international artworks.

The theme of the show – place, space and context – was created as a way of shaping the selection process. Ironically, not all of the works fit comfortably together under this banner, thus demonstrating the fickle nature of context. Some of them seem shoehorned into the theme, while others are so much in tune with each other that they cancel each other out, like sound waves in a pattern of destructive interference.

If you didn’t read the exhibition literature, you could easily be forgiven for assuming the theme was urban landscape, rather than a more general idea of place. Everything seems to question how the built environment shapes our lives, how we try to conquer nature and reconstruct it in neat packages, how buildings say more about us than we realise. The few works in the show which depict the natural world can’t escape this general thrust. Whether or not they are meant to, they end up looking like urban projections, city-dwelling fantasies.

There are a few works which stand out from the crowd. Douglas Gordon’s slowed-down video footage of Captain Kirk kissing an endless sequence of swooning ladies is entertaining, but entirely out of place. Sarah Morris’s pacey film combining Manhattan crowds, cars and neon lights with an edgy, pulsating soundtrack, is utterly entrancing.

Guy Limone’s three fluorescent tubes display hundreds of tiny, colourful transparencies of people in public places, photographed in three different parts of the world. You journey from one end to the other of each tube, like a tourist in miniature, absorbing information without resorting to statistics. The visual rhythm of these static images echoes the pacing of Morris’s video downstairs. These works, reflecting the crowded nature of contemporary life, are in fact the odd ones out.

If there is one work that can be said to sum up the key concerns of the exhibition, it’s Sélestat by German artist Jürgen Nefzger. Six colourful photographs, spread between the two venues, document the saccharine sweet new houses which occupy the Alsace countryside. They are like toy towns, dropped from some developer’s heaven down onto earth. The buildings’ relationship with their predecessors – the grass and trees – is dubious to say the least.

It’s the weeds which come as a huge relief. While there is no evidence in these pictures to suggest that the newly constructed houses are real, or that their manicured rows of shrubs and flowers are any realer, you know that the messy bits have not been engineered. A few stray sunflowers gone to seed are a crucial lifebelt thrown to the viewer, who is lost in this town planner’s unfettered dream-come-true.

Nefzger’s long, hard, look at new town (un)reality comes partly from the influence of two older German photographers: Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers, whose work features in the Fruitmarket, endeavour to capture things and places as objectively as possible. They have photographed post-industrial sites all over Germany like corpses laid out on the mortuary slab. Their three images in this exhibition, of steel plants in Lorraine, are silent monuments to a past age, now empty and functionless.

The Bechers’ influence is strong in Germany: their pupils in Dusseldorf have included Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. Struth is represented here, with a series of emotionally numb images of streets from around the world.

In fact the cold, clinical stare is present throughout this show, whether in photography, video or installation. Tobias Bernstrup presents Potsdamer Platz in Berlin as an interactive environment, which you can navigate with a mouse. The streets are dark, empty and intimidating. The music is creepy, the buildings faceless and corporate.
Jonas Dahlberg’s One-Way Street is similar, but with the element of choice entirely removed. A looped video projection creates the impression of walking endlessly down a straight, modernist street. No one enters or leaves the buildings or pathways on either side, and the space you’re approaching, a few metres ahead of you, is always shrouded in darkness. You’re afraid that someone will jump out of the shadows, but you’re more afraid that they won’t. One-Way Street may be a comment on life, on cities, or more explicitly on the destination of modernist architecture.

The noticeable thing about these works, and many more besides, is the lack of people. When landscape was born as a socially acceptable kind of painting, it was expected to contain a handful of classical or biblical characters (think Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorraine). Then rustic peasants were sufficient (in Dutch landscapes, or Constable for example). Not until the Impressionists came along was it entirely acceptable to lose the figures, and now we are quite comfortable with a mountainscape or a river scene entirely devoid of human presence. That’s not so true, it seems, of the urban landscape.

In the towns and cities of this over-populated world, it’s hard to escape from people. They are, in a sense, a part of our architecture. It’s just plain weird when they’re not there. Remember the fear-factor, in Steven Spielberg’s film, Duel, of not seeing the human being inside the huge black truck? Think too, how you can feel more vulnerable walking empty streets at night than busy ones, even if the busy streets are full of dodgy characters.

With the people plucked out, our urban landscapes are empty shells. Stripped of their familiarity, they become specimens for study. This is by far the most insistent element of the exhibition, in both venues, but at the same time it is the culprit which cancels itself out. There is something about this attempted objectivity which can only work once. When different kinds of objectivity are competing for attention, you recognise that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity. The positive values of one balance the negative values of another and the overall result is nothing.

The title has it: Somewhere and Everywhere do indeed add up to Nowhere.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.11.04