Claire Barclay: Foul Play
Until September 17; doggerfisher, Edinburgh

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Until October 23; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

Teaming
Until September 4; The Embassy, Edinburgh

Claire Barclay is one of my favourite artists, and in the run up to her festival show at doggerfisher, I’ve harboured a secret fear that it might not live up to my expectations. In fact, there was no need to worry – she has surpassed herself.

The Glasgow artist has a way with materials which has more in common with black magic than with any weighty aesthetic theory. A raw mix of component parts – in materials such as oak, leather, silk, and brass – hangs casually together. No piece of wood is planted squarely on the ground. The central structure, like a ballet-dancer on her tip-toes, is propped in the high light-well of doggerfisher’s ceiling, bathed in sunlight.

Planks of splayed oak are fixed in place not with glue or nails, but with faith and gravity. Bits and pieces dangle and lean, pull and push. They exert silent pressures on each other, creating a precarious balance of tensions beyond any feat of engineering. A silk scarf, feathery light, gently persuades a clutch of metal tubes not to escape their twisted leather noose. General collapse seems only seconds away, but never arrives.

All of this is to be expected from Barclay, but what’s new is the distinctly Japanese feel. The delicately bending wooden beams have something of Japanese architecture about them. The silken flag, painted with needley flicks of black, looks calligraphic. The shiny black tubes, like lacquered wood, might be martial arts weapons.

Alternative readings of the work might find hints of the colonial hunt, or indeed of the crucifixion. Whether oriental, colonial or bliblical, all of these interpretations hang in the balance as precariously as Barclay’s materials do; nothing is fixed, and instead there is a world of ambiguously poised suggestion.

Staying with poise and balance, the Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective – on its only UK stop – is pulling in the punters at the Dean Gallery. Last weekend saw 3000 photography lovers shuffle through the door, which, by my calculation, means that nobody ever got a whole picture to themselves without some radical elbow usage.

That is certainly the case in practice. During my visit the walls are thick with one long queue, shuffling its way contentedly around five rooms, picture by picture. Thinking back to the day I saw my first Cartier-Bresson photographs, on the internet, they literally made me laugh, and cry. But at the Dean, two rows back from the pictures, my only emotion is frustration. For an exhibition such as this, of black and white photo-journalism, I wonder whether there’s much to be gleaned from seeing the originals that you can’t get from a good book of reproductions.

Whether in a vintage print or a reproduction, Cartier-Bresson’s genius shines through. A flawless eye for geometry lends harmony to every picture. Then, balanced perfectly on this structural framework, he captures a single, pivotal moment of spontaneity. A running Greek girl completes the zigzag pattern of sun-baked steps. Three rowboats form a perfect diagonal in the choppy Rhine. An ordinary Russian man echoes for one instant the giant Lenin statue behind him.

While most retrospectives have a beginning, middle and end, there’s no need with Cartier-Bresson. A photograph of 1936 hangs with one of 1951, and one of 1999. There’s no stylistic leap, no evidence of formative years or of late maturity. Spanning 70 years and five continents, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are all just perfect.

The world of formal balance comes crashing down at the artist-run Embassy gallery, not least in a previously unseen early work by Boyle Family. In 1965 Joan and Mark Boyle organised a performance at ICA which instructed the audience to make their own entertainment. Their video documents the ensuing chaos, including the smashing up of a piano. “Owing to the over-whelming success of the first event,” the ICA announced at the time, “the rest of the series has been cancelled”.

The Boyles’ is one of ten diverse works at Embassy made in collaboration. Christo Wallers and Mat Fleming’s 16mm film is lovingly presented in a miniature cinema, complete with plush seats, projectionist and curtained screen. Boat Action shows the two rowing a canoe down the Tyne, and is as much about collaboration as it is the result of one. Almost all the way through, we see each man only through the eyes of the other, and when the final shots show both from a third point of view, the intrusion comes as a shock.

John Mullen and Lee O’Connor’s typically raw 46 minute video, The Smartest Artist, greets you at the door. Badgered by O’Connor about the meaning of his paintings, Mullen’s incoherent mutters become a defensive rant. Eventual the pair are seen smashing and burying Mullen’s paintings on a slag-heap.

“The smartest artist saves face on leaving no trace,” declares O’Connor’s drawing, exhibited alongside. The scathing moral of the story is that performance artists, leaving no objects behind them for scrutiny, are conveniently immune to critical attack.

The Embassy’s show is, as always, irreverent, but there’s substance in the cheekiness. That Mark and Joan Boyle’s 40-year old video sits comfortably among the products of the current generation, is surely proof.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.08.05