Ross Sinclair: Real Life Painting Show
Until June 3; CCA

Fiona Jardine & Will Daniels
Until May 13; Transmission

Material World
Until September 25; GoMA

AR Lamb
Until April 30; GSS Gallery, 144 Bridgegate

Last year, as the inaugural Glasgow International opened its doors, I predicted that the art festival’s success would ride on “unexpected things in unexpected places”. Little did I know that this year’s programme would include almost as many temporary spaces as it does permanent galleries.

“Offsite” is the word of the fortnight, as galleries annex curious nooks and crannies across the Merchant City. The festival’s majority funder, the city council, has got into the spirit of things, opening up an array of disused shops. With exhibitions bouncing from venue to venue right up to the last minute, further shops were unboarded at lightning speeds. Tucked in amongst butchers, bakers and criminal defense lawyers, artists worked furiously to install in time.

“Offsite” doesn’t just mean shop units blinking at their first shaft of daylight in years. Visitors wander, dumb-founded, around the grand, light-filled Trongate gallery housing Beck’s Futures. What was a boarded up shell of a building for years is suddenly an oasis of grandeur and natural light. In just two weeks, Glasgow International turned it into a fully functioning “CCA offsite” gallery. In three weeks, offices will move in, and the building’s role as a gallery will be reduced to a fleeting memory.

Even the grand décor of the Mitchell Library, home for the next two weeks to Patti Smith’s vigorous drawings, is described somewhat bizarrely as a “GoMA offsite” venue. According to Francis McKee, the Gi’s director, the offsite tendency will flourish in future festivals, as more and more standalone projects are commissioned specifically for the Gi.

Standing in the ornate, cavernous library, I witness McKee fantasising for a moment about tempting international art star, Matthew Barney (creator of the Cremaster Cycle) into the space for a future festival. To give himself the time to pull off such feats, McKee has announced that from now on, the Gi is to be a biennial feast. That way, he’ll have time to work on big names, on funders and on ambitious projects.

So feast your eyes on this year’s Gi – the next one is two years away.

While the galleries themselves are ephemeral, their contents include a lot of good old-fashioned painting, drawing and sculpture. After decades of elusive conceptual art, artists are rediscovering the joys of making traditional art objects. This Thursday’s symposium, Painting As A New Medium, seems to suggest that painting is once more a radically new form of artistic activity.

For this odd concept, we have Ross Sinclair to thank. Of the Scotia Nostra generation which includes Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland, Ross Sinclair has spent the past 15 years exploring the theme tattooed on his own back: REAL LIFE. He has thrown himself, with everything from neon signs to standing stones, into big and bold projects bringing people face to face with dreams and realities they’d often prefer to deny.

Sinclair is not a shrinking violet. He is a man of big capital letters and throbbing primary colours. Not a painter by training, he has filled CCA with 130 paintings, all big bold colour fields with big bold words on them: BLUE REAL LIFE; RED REAL LIFE; GREY REAL LIFE. They hang on artificial walls, marching defiantly into the centre of the erstwhile bookshop, closing in on you in the lobby.

Painting doesn’t get more in-your-face than this. Sinclair has jammed the modernism of Ad Reinhardt together with the postmodernism of Lawrence Weiner, to see what he’ll get. Just as you can’t look at Sinclair’s back without reading its caption, you can’t absorb his colour fields without simultaneously reading what they are. The paintings do it all for you, cutting you out of the loop with an aggressive dose of exuberance.

At Transmission, the painting couldn’t be more different. Will Daniels’s tiny little acrylics have the muted, chalky colours of a Chardin; a soothing symphony of browns and greys. That’s because they are pictures of cardboard, torn, cut and folded into the shape of classic works of art.

The paintings are meticulous reproductions of the cardboard models; every tiny fibre and pencil mark rendered in paint. The series of images of Mont Saint Victoire, Cézanne’s favourite subject, echo the Post-Impressionist artist’s obsession with painting the mountain in different conditions. Daniels repaints the scene four times, each time with artificially altered lighting. These are homages to art several times removed from their original subject, miles away from Sinclair’s Real Life.

Daniels’s paintings share space with sculptures by Fiona Jardine. Two imposing doors, set against the walls, lead to nowhere. Their black, studded surfaces could be weighty bronze; in fact, like the artifice in Daniels’s paintings, they are made from MDF, cardboard and papier mache. Though Jardine’s works are monumental and Daniels’s no bigger than a postcard, the balance between the two is perfect.

Sculpture makes a particularly strong impact at this year’s Gi. Up until September, GoMA will play host to 17 large sculptures selected from Arts Council England’s collection of 7500 works. The highly accessible show rounds up household names such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Grayson Perry, with works which have never been seen in Scotland before.

In amongst the neo-classical pillars and gilt cornices of GoMA, the contemporary sculptures look like Victorian museum exhibits. Sitting in glass cases on plinths, or scattered on the floor surrounded by museum ropes, their shock-value is deadened by the sombre stone interior.

For some works, the setting is perfect. Claire Barclay’s Anodyne, a restraining leather strap sitting menacingly on white cushions, looks like a morbid specimen from the past. Grayson Perry’s vase sits like a proud antique on its plinth, until you get close and see the leering figures and the decorative swastikas skulking on the lustrous surface.

Lucy Wood’s Can’t Play, Won’t Play is an inspired choice for this setting. The huge trampoline, with its sheet of glass for a hazardous bouncy centre, echoes the hall’s great glass façade. In turn, Damien Hirst’s claustrophobic glass box repeats the echo. It’s not a cow or a shark that’s sliced through by glass, but anaesthetic machinery and an office chair, suggesting the bifurcated presence of a desperately isolated human being.

With yet more sculpture at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios Gallery, AR Lamb has created a realm worthy of Alice in Wonderland, where laws of nature cease to apply. A solid metal table is a giant mousetrap in the making. The wall is dressed with floorboards, as if the building is skewed by 90 degrees. This vertical floor is littered with real mousetraps, all sprung. The rear end of a plastic rat disappears into a hole in the ceiling, which in this topsy-turvy world would be a wall.

Upstairs the story continues. A black mousehole is painted on the wall, roughly where the rat should emerge (the world has flipped back into horizontal mode). A black plastic anteater, reduced in scale, sniffs at the opening, while a muscley dog with a pussy cat head strains against its chains to attack – even though its chains are clinging to thin air.

There is a great playfulness in Lamb’s show, seducing you willingly into a cartoon world with its own rules of engagement. Little mirrors exchange the word “trap” with the word “art”, and you do indeed find that you have become ensnared.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 23.04.06