This Peaceful War: The Jumex Collection
Until May 23; Tramway

When the Sun Goes Down
Until May 28; Glasgow Print Studios

Smith/Stewart
Until May 2; 64 Osborne St

Robb Mitchell & Steven Dickie
Until May 7; Intermedia

At the heart of the Glasgow International is a Mexican collection, never shown in Europe until now. Over the last eight years the juice company, Jumex, has collected over 1200 contemporary works of art, and festival director Francis McKee has had the pick of the bunch.

The result is serious without being dry, and entertaining without resorting to gimmickry. That the show feels truly international belies its largely Mexican pedigree; Mexico City, like Glasgow, seems to be a place where foreign artists are happy to make their home.

Having refused to set a theme for the overall festival, McKee allows himself the luxury for this exhibition, focusing loosely on the politics of place. It’s a fashionable topic, seen recently in group exhibitions at both DCA and the Fruitmarket. But this is the best version yet, touring well beyond the confines of downtown culture to give us the bigger picture.

The bigger picture – taking in the politics of town, country, flora and fauna – displays a strong sense of social conscience. Minerva Cuevas’s specially commissioned mural mixes corporate imagery with old-fashioned botanical illustration, bringing home the message that the old days of imperialism are far from over, as global corporations continue to plunder Mexico’s “green gold”.

Spanish-born Santiago Sierra implicates the viewer in his disturbing transactions, dragging us into the dark grey areas of the art trade. Six workers allow their backs to be tattooed in one long line, in return for a small sum of money, and another eight agree to curl up inside cramped cardboard boxes.

The boxes, neatly arranged in a loft apartment, echo the high rise buildings beyond, reminding us of our own cramped existence in this modern world. But we can’t wallow in self-pity because we’re simultaneously guilty of participating in Sierra’s exchange. By consuming his artistic product, we are implicitly validating his exploitation of the workers.

Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs is good guy to Sierra’s bad. In one audacious project Alÿs recruited 500 residents of Lima, gave them shovels, and instructed them to move a mountain sideways by four inches. It’s not exactly a mountain, actually a giant sand dune, but it’s massive nonetheless.

Alÿs’s real triumph is to create a myth which will resound in Lima long after his departure, a story which will belong to the people who moved the mountain, and to their children and grandchildren.

Myth-making is a strong thread through the show, from the day that Sierra decided to block a major road, unannounced, with a Jumex truck, to the weeks that Marine Hugonnier spent in Afghanistan, trying to persuade the military to let her film a panoramic view.

As the works tell their own stories, the minimal interpretation provided by the over-worked curator (Francis McKee) doesn’t spoil an appreciation of the show. It is a substantial test of an artwork’s effectiveness that it can operate without screeds of explanation, and these works, with the exception of Stefan Brüggeman’s bewildering collages, pass the test.

Now, if only Scotland had a juice company which bought 150 new works of art every year, and was willing to park a branded truck across a busy highway in the name of art. Mr Barr, how about it?

From the politics of place, Glasgow International can bring you swiftly to the politics of hell. When Jake and Dinos Chapman’s three-year epic, Hell, perished in Momart’s art warehouse fire last year, the brothers promised to make another one, only this time it would be bigger and better. Glasgow Print Studio boasts the brothers’ first reincarnation of the work, which is in fact smaller, and similar.

To be fair, hell wasn’t built in a day, and there is something of the new works’ petiteness which magnifies the horror. Hell #1 was a whole roomful of inch-high Boschean violence, numbering 5000 toy figures in various states of dismemberment and conmemberment.

My Brother Went To See Hell And All I Got Was This Lousy Souvenir, on the other hand, is composed of a handful of tortured figures on a discrete grassy knoll. But for the blood and guts, this could be the kind of ornament your granny would order from her favourite magazine. She wouldn’t be too chuffed with the headless nazis and crucified skeletons, though.

As well as Hell, the Chapman Brothers are renowned for their suite of defaced Goya etchings, whose tortured victims acquired the heads of leering clowns and grinning puppies. A new suite on show in Glasgow, called My Giant Colouring Book, reverses the process; the artists join the dots in a twee children’s book to create demonic images. The effect, however, is remarkably similar; innocence and evil collide, and the real horror lies in the blur between the two. Where do the wise owls end and the vicious gremlins begin?

Dotted amongst the hellish visions of the Chapman Brothers are three brand new video works by Glasgow’s very own Douglas Gordon. Referring to classic Scottish investigations into split personalities, the artist has regularly returned to images of hands fighting and molesting each other.

The new videos are no exception, depicting one hand shaving the other, then colouring it black; and showing two black-gloved hands in confused conflict. Without interpretation (this is another of McKee’s personally curated projects) the videos are, it must be admitted, baffling.

It helps to know that Gordon shaved one arm in his 1996 video, A Divided Self, to make it look more effeminate than the other. The video’s title referred to the work of Scottish psychologist RD Laing, and in that video and others Gordon pursued notions of internal conflict and division, with reference also to Jekyll and Hyde and to the dreaded black spot of Treasure Island fame.

Strangely enough, Glasgow-based artists Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart (Smith/Stewart), are best-known for their video of two interlocked hands straining unsuccessfully to write two separate signatures. The frustration inherent in that video is repeated in their installation at 64 Osborne Street, but everything else is different.

The space itself is incredible; a dilapidated semi-industrial unit, its ceilings peeling and the lino worn away. It was once perhaps a machine-shop, but now it’s an empty shell, its history lingering in the air like dust. The steady thump, thump as you enter is like the ghost of a machine, left hammering after the machine itself had gone. Through the dim light, the windows screened off, you eventually see a motorised vertical wooden shaft, beating the floor in a palpable expression of despair.

After that you scrutinise every fixture, and every fitting with caution, lest they too should jump into action. Sure enough, a wall quietly rotates in the centre of the room, like a parody of gallery walls, constantly on the move. A shifting shadow through a doorway alerts you to the rotating pole in a room beyond, a large-scale version of the ceiling fans of film noir.

The whole experience is straight out of film noir. The filtered light and shifting boundaries heighten your awareness of the space around you, and fill you with the uneasy feeling that you’re on the threshold of a world where the usual rules do not apply.

Back in the real world, and round the corner, Robb Mitchell has made moving walls too. His rotating Blender doesn’t mess with your head but it does play with your partying habits, dictating your movement around the room and your interaction with fellow explorers. For Mitchell, mastermind of the festival’s opening night party, crowds are his material, and wooden walls merely the means to an end.

Arching over the Blender are an array of wires rigged up by Steven Dickie, leading from 40 microphones stuck to the gallery window. The ambient noise of King Street travels to back of the gallery, working its way through a Stella-like pattern on the wall before it finally gets played back to us through an amplifier. By literally stretching out this process, Dickie reminds us how information must travel, physically, in the world, and that any sound that reaches us (even through the air) is history by the time we hear it.

From Mexican artists to Douglas Gordon, and from the Chapman brothers to Steven Dickie, the Glasgow International is nothing if not democratic. Hierarchies are flattened: artists of several generations are brought together without comment in Campbell’s Soup, and big names rub shoulders on King Street with emerging artists.

The emphasis has been on smaller galleries and ad hoc spaces, favouring venues like Alex Frost’s waste-ground and Smith/Stewart’s ephemeral place on Osborne Street. Everyone who attended Smith/Stewart’s opening tells of the magic of that evening, the setting sun filtering through the perforated windows, and casting a golden glow over the whole event.

The improvisational thrust of Glasgow International has its critics – no doubt they would like Glasgow to be repackaged and branded in air-tight plastic. What they’re getting is more honest: it’s Glasgow in its original, crumpled paper bag.

It’s in stark contrast with the dry run of Edinburgh’s visual arts festival last year, which was, by its own admission, a cautious marketing exercise. In Glasgow, despite the short lead time, something special definitely happened. When the dust settles, it will be time to ask who it happened for; the Glasgow art world has been accused of insularity, and this festival was an invite to the rest of Glasgow, the rest of Scotland, and the rest of the world, to join in the party. Hopefully, they did.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.05.05