ShowCASe
Until March 12; City Art Centre & Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Every four years, the London-based Contemporary Art Society (CAS) shows off its latest round of purchases. Galleries large and small, courtesy of their annual subscription fee, can pick out their favourites from this up-to-the-minute treasure trove of must-haves.

Although a scrupulous system of paperwork ensures a fair chance for everyone, it’s easy to imagine the scene somewhat differently. Like January sales for the art-world, curators and gallery directors elbow their way to the biggest bargains, Prada handbags swinging through the air, and manicured nails sharpened in readiness for hand to hand combat.

To be fair, that description doesn’t match most curators in Scotland. It certainly doesn’t describe Ian O’Riordan, manager of Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, who persuaded the CAS to hold its quadrennial exhibition in Scotland for the very first time. Spread across three floors at the City Art Centre, and two more at the Talbot Rice Gallery, it’s a veritable supermarket of contemporary art.

There are over 150 works from both emerging artists and well-established ones, all mixed together without prejudice. It’s odd to see the art-works adjusting to their new status as museum pieces, torn from their original context and bundled together as a collection of cultural commodities. It happens to art all the time, but because the paint/glue/celluloid is barely dry on these pieces, the process is intriguingly transparent.

For many contemporary artists, each art-work is like a word in a sentence, the message only revealing itself when you take in their entire solo show. When extracted from that context, a single work can be baffling, particularly if it relies on certain background information. It’s true that Pictish artists, medieval artists, and artists of every period have employed signs which need to be unravelled and explained, but postmodern art is particularly reliant on language and interpretation.

In this entire show there is only one artist who gets an interpretative text. Hayley Newman’s photographs from the series Connotations – Performance Images come complete with the artist’s own texts, describing the bizarre performances which they document, including bouncing naked on a trampoline for three hours. The curators have felt it necessary to add their own panel, explaining that Newman did not in fact bounce naked on the trampoline for three hours; but that she wants to bring into question the role of documentation in performance art.

Newman’s work raises fascinating questions in a very lively way, so it is frustrating to be faced with two more of her works without interpretation. One, entitled A Translation of the Sensation of the Left Hand into the Right, is a book containing braille and photocopies. Unfortunately, it’s open at the braille page, in a glass box, which makes it intelligible to no-one.

Ripped from the bosom of their makers, these art-works have endured the trauma of losing their explanatory texts along the way. There is another thing that has happened to them: removal from their place of birth. Again, this problem is not exclusive to modern art: Pictish stones lose their territorial meaning when dragged off the hill-tops, and medieval altar-pieces lose their spiritual impact outside of the church. But in the case of contemporary art, it is often the artists themselves who are looking for ways around the problem.

David Musgrave’s wall painting, Giant (4), is a massive, elongated stick figure, assembled originally out of torn masking tape and then reproduced on a large-scale. For this show it was painted by Glasgow artist Gregor Wright. So what did the CAS buy? Not the paint. Not the hand of the painter. It probably bought a plan of the work, to be copied exactly, and permission to use it.

Glasgow artist Richard Wright has struggled with the same problem over the course of his career. From Dundee to Germany he has improvised patterns directly onto gallery walls, responding to architectural detail and the play of light and shadow. He compares his paintings with live musical performances, to be savoured in their fresh state. Once the last visitor goes, Wright always ensures that the wall is painted over and his work obliterated.

That leaves nothing for the art world to collect but photographic documentation, and you will remember the doubt which Hayley Newman cast on the authenticity of such evidence. But, worn down by the financial implications of being uncollectable, Wright has begun to produce screenprints in the style of his wall paintings, and the CAS has snapped them up. Unfortunately, these portable prints are a sop to the art market and will never have the freshness of the artist’s wall paintings.

This show is a real testing ground for our cultural heritage of the future. Can individual works of art hold their ground away from home, and without explanation? The CAS bought the Tate its first Picasso, its first Henry Moore, and its first Damien Hirst. Can the latest round of works stand the test of time as they did? They will enter public collections from Orkney to Plymouth, and could find themselves next to anything from Edwin Landseer’s Victorian landscapes to Barbara Hepworth’s modernist sculpture.

Stripped bare of the usual props of artist’s statements and curator’s blurbs, some works look more likely to survive the journey than others. In these more successful works, the explanation is inherent, so the objects are self-contained and portable. This gives them a legitimacy in the world of tradeable objets d’art, and it favours those who lean towards modernism, rather than postmodernism. This should come as no surprise, because postmodern art has kicked against the gallery system from day one.

Modernism, on the other hand, offers art objects which are at home in galleries, and which don’t change their meaning in different contexts. It is most noticeably present in the grids which are everywhere in this show. Repeated modules and grids have been a key component of modernism from Piet Mondrian to Carl André, and, albeit in new guises, they seem to have made a comeback.

Kate Davis’s Drawing Towers While Lying Down is a huge glass sheet leaning against the wall. On it, a grid of 72 rectangles have been painstakingly drawn with biro through carbon paper. Tiny obsessive scribbled lines fill each rectangle, putting maximum personal effort into an ostensibly minimalist structure. This emphasis on the personal process of making is reinforced in the name of the piece, which reminds us that the artist’s body is a vital part of the equation.

In the craft section, Dail Behenna’s pair of black and white bowls are carefully pinned together from regimented lengths of straight willow wood. The grids are three-dimensional, and the patterns uncompromisingly geometrical. However, the typically industrial materials of minimalism are here replaced by traditional, organic material, its rawness evident at the untreated edges.

Alan Reynold’s muted pencil study is a chequerboard of greys, while next to it Linda Karshan’s paper pulp drawing uses the fabric of the paper itself to create a black and white grid. A few feet away, Lesley Foxcroft has stacked hundreds of small sheets of cardboard together to make bricks, which are themselves stacked into a tower. In the corner of the same room, Nicky Hirst has combined tiles and pins to create another strict grid.

So it looks like grids are back in fashion, but maybe that’s not the whole truth. Remembering the purpose of the CAS collection, it could simply be that such works, with their explicitly modernist concerns, fit easily into the historical canon. That makes them ideally suited for slotting into museum collections, and therefore an attractive option for the CAS buyers.

The CAS commissioned six experts to do its shopping for it. One of them was Andrew Patrizio, Head of Research at Edinburgh College of Art, who made a valiant attempt to bypass the London gallery system. If it wasn’t for Patrizio, the artists’ biographies would make pretty depressing reading; “lives and works in London” is by far the commonest sentence in the catalogue.

A special mention should go to the video works in the show, which are well-presented at the City Art Centre, and are, without exception, of the highest quality. Adam Chodzko’s Plan for a Spell deconstructs the mechanics of video-making, and at the same time plays with our human tendency to project meaning onto what we see. Eventually, he hopes, the randomly ordered sound, images and subtitles will hit a certain, magic configuration, and cast a spell.

That will be what the curators of this exhibition hope too. Unless we’re all well-informed encyclopaedias of contemporary art, we’ll impose our own ideas on the works in this show. Plucked from their context, as Chodzko’s video clips are, and rearranged more at less at random, the art works vie for attention in some places, and occasionally find parallels in each other (quite literally, in the case of the grids).

Once the Prada-wielding curators have made their selections and gone home with their trophies, the art-works will find new configurations in museum collections the length and breadth of the UK. Hopefully, there, they will find the magic spell.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.02.05