Dalziel + Scullion: Breath Taking
Until June 3; billboards in:
Aberdeen: Market Street
Birmingham: Fazeley Street
Cabrach: The Gouls
Dundee: Dock Street
Edinburgh: Waverly Station
Glasgow: Glasgow Central Station
Liverpool: Hanover Street
London – Bethnal Green Rd and Blackfriars Rd
Newcastle: Gallowgate
Manchester: Fairfield St
Pitcaple (A96)

In Central Station, above a coffee kiosk, the billboard cycles silently between three images. One, a bright highland landscape with an empty picture frame in it, advertises a forthcoming BBC television series. The next, bold and eye-catching, warns us about the dangers of domestic violence. The third, like a shy continuation of the first, is a dark, stormy landscape with a prostrate wind turbine in the centre.

This is art central. The television programme is about art and the landscape. The domestic violence poster is a work of art by American artist Barbara Kruger, to accompany her current show at GoMA. And the third image is a brand new work by Dundee artists Dalziel + Scullion.

Dalziel + Scullion have spent the last few months in the North East, examining the controversy surrounding proposed wind farms. Put crudely, the landscape’s last few empty spaces are to be industrialised in order to feed our energy-hungry cities. But Dalziel + Scullion never put anything crudely. In fact their images are usually so subtle that you’re not quite sure of a message at all.

That doesn’t really work for billboards. Barbara Kruger has the right idea with her high impact, brightly-coloured design; one clear image and one clear message. Ironically, Kruger’s work is really too blatant for the gallery space, lacking the kind of subtlety that art-lovers look for.

Dalziel + Scullion’s image is definitely subtle. It’s a dark, stormy night. A huge turbine component is stretched out lengthways in a turnip field, like a nuclear warhead on its lorry. On either side are two upright windmills, like the thieves’ crosses flanking the crucified Christ. The tiny figure of a man is just visible at the base of one of these smaller turbines, demonstrating the impossible scale of these objects.

It’s a highly nuanced image which would work well in a gallery, but it’s not in one. Joining the ranks of the mass media, Dalziel + Scullion need to engage with a new kind of visual language, but they don’t. This tonally dull image won’t attract attention in the train stations or on the motorways, and its nuances will be lost in the high-speed traffic of energy-hungry commuter life.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.05.05