Once
Until February 25; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Still gleaming with newness and already enjoying visitor numbers into the millions, the Kelvingrove has opened its first major art exhibition. Asked if he would compose a piece to celebrate the museum’s reopening, Craig Armstrong (whose film soundtracks include Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet, and World Trade Center) decided to collaborate with Dundee-based artists, Dalziel + Scullion.

Among the whitewashed brick arches of the museum’s lower hall, three floor-to-ceiling projection screens line the walls. Constantly panning, the faces of over 200 Glaswegians slide in and out of view, while Armstrong’s filmic music washes through the room. Lingering behind the faces, the Glaswegian locations play as strong a part as the human cast.

To achieve the camera’s slow panning movement, Dalziel + Scullion rigged it up to a telescope’s motor. The name of the video installation, The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer, is a further clue that they wish to evoke the constant movement of our planet, and our fleeting presence on it.

That’s not something which comes through strongly in the work. The pan is such a familiar part of cinematographic vocabulary that its special symbolism for Dalziel + Scullion is lost on the viewer, unless it is explained. What does come through is a sense that this is a snapshot of a moment in Glasgow’s history.

The city’s streets are captured for posterity, along with museums, shops and fashions of 2006. While they grind past at a snail’s pace, we learn little that we didn’t already know, but this is the archive material of the future. Maybe in centuries to come, they’ll be laughing at the hairstyles, spotting buildings long-gone, and wondering about the cars.

If the piece is to function as an honest portrait of Glasgow and its people, the half-hour or so which I witnessed seemed seriously flawed. There was Kelvingrove, and the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Burrell Collection. There was Glasgow School of Art, and sculptor Kenny Hunter in his studio. Sure, there were also shots of Sauchiehall Street and the dockyards, but where were the schemes and the high-rises?

Heavily sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, what I saw was a sanitised portrait of Glasgow, reflecting the tastes and associations of the artists. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for their tendency to make work which has all the hallmarks of a precise and utterly objective study.

Dalziel + Scullion’s work always has impeccable production values. The artists take time and money to execute technically flawless pieces, whether in video or photography, which seem to gaze down on our world from some distant, wiser place. That clinical gaze occasionally brings their art perilously close to dullness. Here, but for the uncomfortable closeness of the camera to its subjects, it might bring us a corporate video in slow motion.

That uncomfortable closeness is the real success of this video installation: the trembling, twitching faces of people trying to stand stock still while a camera creeps unnervingly near. This too is accentuated by the artists’ millimetre-perfect precision; as the world glides past with mechanical confidence, human features contort uncontrollably under our heavy scrutiny. Meanwhile, Armstrong’s music, expansive and gliding like the artists’ camera, shares that tinge of tension, that uneasy edge.

Up close and personal with the quivering faces of Dalziel + Scullion’s subjects, the frail transience of human experience is set against the inexorable march of planetary time. And in that small way, it seems the Earth does turn to bring us closer.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.10.06