An Aside
Until July 12; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket’s new show, An Aside, has made a strange imprint on my brain. In my mind’s eye, every sculpture, drawing and painting is shrouded in decades’ worth of cobwebs, all fine and silvery. Time has renounced them, like it did the jilted Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expections, haunting her dust-covered parlour in a mouldy old wedding gown.

The exhibition doesn’t actually look a bit like that, although dust is carefully preserved on one clay sculpture and in another, a typewriter steadily disappears in a shower of flour. No, the exhibition is clean and tidy and neatly captioned like any other Fruitmarket group show. But in that imaginary space with its veils of spider silk, the exhibition is frozen in time, the art-works growing organically into each other.

The show’s curator, Tacita Dean, wouldn’t object to that image. In her own films, time is stretched in empty spaces suggestive of the many human dramas, real and fantastical, which might have unfolded in them. Dean, 40 this year, is a highly respected artist and despite her youth, she was subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain four years ago.

As part of an ongoing project, the Hayward Gallery recently asked Dean to lay down her own tools and to curate a touring exhibition of other artists’ work. The result is a fascinating insight into the artist’s own creative processes, and a welcome digression from the usual familiar role-call of group show regulars.

Dean chose as her starting point the surrealist concept of “objective chance”, which sees chance encounters as deliberate projections of the inner psyche. In other words, if Dean happens across a particular artist, it’s because her unconscious self led her to him or her.

So, when one of her chosen artists, Raymond Hains, reminds her of Jules Verne’s novel, The Green Ray, Dean takes this as a sign, and seeks out an art work of the same name. In fact it’s no great accident – Dean has a long-held interest in the Green Ray and her unconscious is simply allowed to get its own way.

Essentially, Dean is taking a circuitous route from A to B, when it might suffice to make a simple admission from the outset: I am going to pick art works by people I’ve met or admired, and the show will be a product of my own taste, geographical boundaries, and predilections.

There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s what all curators do, whether they like to admit it or not. There’s also nothing wrong with Dean’s experiment in objective chance: while it’s fairly expendable it does add an extra something to the show. Irrespective of what order you view the works in, there are countless quirky links between them.

Some are obvious: Paul Nash’s Event On The Downs is a double portrait of a gnarled tree stump and a tennis ball, situated in an English landscape. On the floor, next to it, sits Two Heads by Italian Arte Povera artist Marisa Merz. The clay lumps, crude, unfinished and partly inverted, look damp and unfired. They sit on a wedge of paraffin wax, its imperfections perhaps caused by the condensation of the (now dusty) heads over the 22 years since they were made.

On the other side of the Two Heads is a tiny doodle by Gerhard Richter, of two scribbled portrait busts on plinths. In itself the drawing is disappointingly meagre, but it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Merz’s squashed heads. The invisible cobwebs running between the two works reinforce their power.

While Dean hasn’t consciously picked out a theme for the show, there are subtle consistencies among the works presented. Lothar Baumgarten’s slide show depicts a place as imagined as it is real; Joseph Beuys projects his imagined inner self as a woman; Paul Nash creates miniature landscapes for anthropomorphic sticks; and Yvan Salomone’s incredible watercolours are hyper-real and unearthly at the same time.

The real blurs with fantasy in all these spaces, which might never have existed except in our imaginations; understanding this is key to understanding Dean’s own work. Her preoccupation with the passing of time is also evident: Rodney Graham’s mesmerizing film is a beautiful black and white poem of innocence and loss. An old-fashioned typewriter, never used and now obsolete, is slowly buried under flour.

The 35mm reel of Graham’s film goes round and round on an endless loop, and just through the door The Green Ray is on a similar journey. A plastic cup tumbles for eternity on a little plastic turntable, an old-fashioned green torch shining through it. This primitive projection machine makes a rippling pattern on the wall, never the same twice. There’s something intangible about this piece which you intuitively understand, but your conscious mind might never get in on the secret. In fact, that goes for the exhibition too.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.05.05