Campbell’s Soup
Until May 7; Glasgow School of Art

Barbara Kruger
Until September 26; Gallery of Modern Art

Michael Stumpf
Until May 7; Sorcha Dallas

Alex Frost: Maverick
Until May 2; Sorcha Dallas offsite: Gallowgate

So this is it: the first Glasgow International has begun. Judging by its beginning alone, this will be very different from any art festival Edinburgh has to offer. The Arches, a notoriously difficult venue to fill, was buzzing on Wednesday night with activity from post-rock band F*** Off Machete to the “spandex funk in the expanded field” of Nut Bros.

A second stage was geared up for experimental music and video, and grungy works of art were dotted around the venue. Neither art nor music was signposted, and it was never quite clear what was going to happen next. One thing that didn’t happen was the exhibition of specially scratched cars, in which Strathclyde Police had taken a particular interest. The last laugh is on them, if the attention-seeking tendencies of culprit, Mark McGowan, are anything to go by.

The festival’s director, Francis McKee, has been at pains to point out that nothing’s been shoe-horned into any pre-set theme (something which can’t be said of our next contribution to the Venice Biennale). Instead, as the party suggests, Glasgow is just doing what it does, only more so. Given that nobody really understands what it is exactly that Glasgow does, and how it does it, that’s a sensible strategy.

One of the first exhibitions off the starting block is Campbell’s Soup, curated by Neil Mulholland from Edinburgh College of Art. Mulholland has taken on the ambitious project of connecting former New Glasgow Boy Steven Campbell back in time to a previous generation of Scottish painters, and forward to the next.

It’s a join-the-dots game that’s usually only attempted centuries after an artist’s death, when the hopeless muddle of reality is swept away by the pronouncements of art historians with rationalising agendas. Mulholland escapes a fall down the rationalising trap by leaving us to draw our own conclusions. His “soup” of images, ranging from the 1960s to the present day, is a heap of ingredients without the recipe.

Campbell himself is represented by two fine canvases, one from early in his career, and the other still barely dry. His 1984 image is a typical debacle between two tweed-suited figures playing ping-pong in a tent. It’s much emptier and looser than his latest offering, an eye-poppingly dense spread of paisley-patterned foliage, which reveals its secrets slowly.

While Campbell’s style has tightened considerably in the past 20 years, the basics remain consistent: the enigmatic characters, the uneasy atmosphere, the story-telling drive. Above all, his characters are all caught a world whose securest boundaries have just been punctured.

Mulholland has mined the seam of contemporary art and found similar ore in, for example, Iain Hetherington’s All These New Forms, a tangle of wooden stretchers which brings to mind the unfortunate architects of Campbell’s early work, at the mercy of vengeful ceilings and floors.

Then there’s Rory Macbeth’s Magic Eye Painting, whose chunky expressionism renders the optical illusion useless, while at the same time its effect is implied by the throbbing surface of the painting (literally, with the use of an electric motor). The all-over visual impact of the work sits well next to Campbell’s paisley-patterned masterpiece, but whether the comparison extends further is open to question.

Mulholland stretches the Campbell link pretty fine in places, but the overall result is an entertaining exhibition, covering several generations, with a subtle sense of cohesion. A veritable soup indeed.

It’s definitely not soupy at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), where American artist Barbara Kruger has been invited to show for the first time in Scotland. Kruger is a big name in art: look in any recent textbook and she’ll be there amongst the artists of the 1980s, with her high impact feminist images.

For the past 25 years Kruger has toured art galleries and billboards of the world with her messages of repression and revolt. Her method has changed little, if at all, since 1980: photographic images are combined with fragments of text, often accusatory in tone. In bold red, black and white, they borrow their visual style directly from the revolutionary Soviet posters of the 1920s.

The room installation at GoMA is largely made up of existing work by Kruger, customised for the occasion with Scottish material. It’s definitely high impact: every nook and cranny of the room is plastered with bold type and enlarged newspaper stories of domestic abuse. It’s not in Kruger’s trademark red, but instead bright green: still bold, but less ferocious.

The words under your feet address you in simmering disdain, and the words above your head plead with you for kindness. The pictures on the walls scream accusations at you, and the pillars bear opposing pairs of words (love/lust; fear/power) of which you can only ever see one at a time. You are placed in a tug of war with the room itself, never escaping the power imbalance.

Kruger cut her teeth at a time when language was a major preoccupation for artists, and when the appropriation and repetition of images from the mass media had moved far beyond Warhol’s pop whimsy to a rigorous intellectual analysis. This almost curatorial approach has become part and parcel of contemporary art, and if Kruger’s installation seems dated, that’s because it is. If it seems derivative, it’s because she was the first in a long line.

If anyone is in tune with Glasgow’s do-it-yourself success story, it has to be Sorcha Dallas, whose eponymous gallery developed out of the nomadic Switchspace project. German-born artist Michael Stumpf is currently showing in the tiny space, and with three solitary objects he has created a magical forest worthy of the Brothers Grimm.

A roughly assembled white tree rises out of a rock of black paper, pewter gloop at its roots. Two pewter walnut halves dangle from the upper branches, and swathes of black denim on the wall suggest the arrival of a huge, swooping black crow. On the opposing wall, sculpted letters spell out a cryptic sentence as if from the pages of a gothic storybook. Indeed you feel as if you are inside that storybook, inhabiting the illustration and within touching distance of the text.

There’s more story-book trickery along the Gallowgate, in one of Dallas’s offsite projects. Sitting in the middle of waste ground just beyond the Barrowlands is an egg-head on its side, looking like it rolled off its body somewhere in Dennistoun. The huge polystyrene creation, entirely mosaiced with broken tiles, is the work (and face) of Alex Frost.

Frost has long been concerned with the reproduction of images by mechanised means, using systematic approaches to build abstract fragments into a meaningful whole. Mosaic is an obvious extension of this investigation. But leaving Frost’s conceptual framework aside, there is a simple pleasure in seeing this unexpected, glitter-ball head abandoned in a pile of muck and rubbish.

And that, I suspect, will be the success of the Glasgow International: unexpected things in unexpected places. If there is a secret to Glasgow’s success, it’s surely got to be audacity.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.04.05