Simon Patterson: High Noon
Until May 1; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Most solo shows at the Fruitmarket Gallery start off with a bit of explanatory text, but for Young British Artist, Simon Patterson, it seems that no words are necessary. Instead, you’re greeted with an instantly recognisable image which you probably last saw in a student flat.

Patterson’s The Great Bear, made in 1992, takes the famous London Underground map and substitutes all the station names with those of philosophers, journalists, footballers and saints. It has the appearance of something clever, without actually making any profound connections. As such, it sets the scene perfectly for much of the exhibition.

Sixteen years into Patterson’s career, it’s a little early for a retrospective, so the Fruitmarket is combining two new commissions with a selected survey of the artist’s works so far. Patterson’s past work is like a New Labour document: pithy, glossy, formulaic, and, once you’ve decoded the creative use of language, disappointingly short on substance. Fortunately, the new commissions point to a more complex development of ideas and imagery.

Patterson’s work relies on the double-take. The map of an ancient palace turns out on closer inspection to be a diagram of electronic circuitry. The in-flight security video incorporates lessons on escapology from Houdini. The football team in sweeper formation comprises Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles.

By conflating and confusing different modes of communication, Patterson gives us a wake-up call. Any language, whether it be visual, verbal, corporate or scientific, carries with it so many basic assumptions that a truly neutral form of communication is impossible. By jerking us from one channel of thinking into another, Patterson exposes the gulf between them. In fact, he leaves us straddling the gulf between them, lost in linguistic space.

To this extent his work is successful, but it’s Patterson’s frequent failure to penetrate any deeper which disappoints. The Last Supper Arranged According To The Sweeper Formation (Jesus Christ In Goal) is funny, but its impact is short-lived. Twenty years before Patterson dreamed up the wall-drawing, Monty Python did it so much better with the Philosopher’s Football Match.

Throughout his career, Patterson has rehearsed his one basic formula in a series of slick Pythonesque one-liners, rarely moving beyond the punch-line. His success must be due, partly, to the fact that he has done it with style. The Fruitmarket’s upstairs gallery, cut through the middle with a stairwell, is difficult to fill; so often it looks bitty and divided, but Patterson’s large sculptural piece, General Assembly, draws the space together quite beautifully.

The old-fashioned typewriter keys, enlarged and arranged right around the walls, spell out a nonsensical sentence in English. Above them are the names of fictitious countries from Gulliver’s Travels, along with real UN countries, and UN general secretaries. These people are charged with avoiding war through negotiation; in this context the absence of a universally reliable form of communication becomes a matter of life and death.

In one of his two new commissions, Patterson develops the theme of war, adding some depth to the sprawling surface of his work. The massive wall drawing, Ur, revisits the electronic circuit board of the artist’s previous work, but this time the circuitry is arranged as a plan of the world’s most ancient city of Ur, in present day Iraq.

Ur’s ziggurat is thought by some to be the biblical Tower of Babel, where God introduced tension and misunderstanding to the world by separating its inhabitants into tribes with different languages. Next to the circuit, Patterson lists the dynasty of Ur kings alongside every US president and vice president. Between the lists, the phrase “semper fe” refers to the ziggurat’s vandalism in 2003 by US marines, who scrawled their Latin motto into its ancient stones. Indeed, those tribes are well and truly separated.

Patterson’s second new commission is a short film called Timepiece. Shot with the luxury of 35mm film, it depicts two pocket watches swinging with increasing urgency, to the sound of male and female panting. The watches are an age-old reminder that death will come to us all, while the erotic soundtrack suggests reproduction. Time, Patterson could be saying, is one of the few languages which can be universally understood.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.03.05