Selective Memory
Until March 5; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

echo echo
Until January 21; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh

This summer’s Venice Biennale saw Scotland represented by four young Glasgow-based artists still in an early stage of their careers. Or, to put it another way, Scotland was represented by two curators who wanted to make a point about the way art is made, and understood, today.

The curators are Jason E Bowman and Rachel Bradley. The point is that art is a continually evolving practice, which can only be decoded over time. The artists are Cathy Wilkes, Alex Pollard, and the partnership of Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan.

As part of their commitment to the evolving nature of art, it was always the curators’ intention to host a second exhibition in Edinburgh after the Biennale was over. As it turns out, we’ve got two. In addition to the scheduled show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), there’s another at the Collective Gallery to celebrate the strong community aspect of all the artists’ practice.

You’ll notice the word “practice” popping up a lot in connection with Selective Memory. Not only are the curators keen to highlight the art of making art (plain old art itself has just got boring), but they have started to replace the word “artist” with the word “practice”. This neatly side-steps the grammatical pot-hole of dealing with one duo and two solo acts, but its significance reaches far beyond tidy descriptive solutions.

For Bowman and Bradley, art is a process which extends through time, individual art-works serving as clues to a bigger picture, rather than as end-products in themselves. This is how art historians view art from centuries past. But in renaming the living artist as a practice, Bowman and Bradley prioritise the process over the artist.

The art shown at the SNGMA is a reconfiguration of the Venice show. It’s not the curators who have moved things around, but the artists. They have re-used certain objects, resized them, or made subtly different ones for the new space.

By following these various iterations and reiterations, we are expected gradually to learn the new languages which the artists are slowly generating. Tatham and O’Sullivan’s pyramids with faces are now wedges with faces. Their characteristic stickman reappears on all fours, a bit smaller than he was in Venice and this time face to face with the wedges.

These objects, like some 1980s pop video version of Easter Island, are resolutely devoid of specific meaning. Their high-impact vibe would out-Lambie Jim Lambie any day, but there is no Rosetta Stone here to help us decode the meanings of these recurring symbols. As with Wilkes’s sinks and saucers, and with Pollard’s articulated rulers, a new language is being forged, but our only hope of understanding it is to hear it spoken as many times as we can.

If you want an artwork to speak to you in a visual language which you have been brought up to understand (like Monet or Picasso) then you will be frustrated. But if you like learning new languages, you will need to see more than one exhibition by these artists, to begin to familiarise yourself with their new vocabulary.

If it’s too soon to figure out the meaning of their embryonic languages, what is there left to enjoy? There is style and poetry, artistic virtues which have been viewed with suspicion for decades. Wilkes’s installation (significantly entitled Non-Verbal) may look like a random scattering of detritus, but look again and its formal qualities are carefully composed.

What else is offered by a language with its meaning extracted? Its presuppositions can betray a world view, and this is what Alex Pollard interrogates with his antique rulers, complete with a predesignated measuring system which somebody somewhere must have made up. What else is there? A history of fusion with other cultures – recognisable motifs lingering from past encounters. The batteries in Non-Verbal are surely a nod to Joseph Beuys, as are the threads running from the female mannequin to the submerged half-moon of towelling.

In the face of these three unknown languages, we pick up on linguistic elements which are usually buried under the surface. But these moments of understanding are tiny fragments in an otherwise frustrating encounter. Perhaps, after all, practice does not make perfect.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.12.05