China: A Photographic Portrait
Until September 14; City Art Centre

Chad McCail
Until September 6; Edinburgh Printmakers

E-Cyclorama
Until September 5; Edinburgh College of Art

Frances Richardson: Playing Against Reason
Until August 28; Corn Exchange Gallery

The eyes of the world will be trained on Beijing this Friday, at an Olympic Games opening ceremony which includes 10,000 actors and fireworks appearing from 1800 different sites around the city. If you can’t wrap your mind around the scale of the event, a trip to Edinburgh’s City Art Centre might put you in the picture.

China: A Photographic Portrait is crammed with nearly 600 photographs of life in China over the past 50 years, and the crowded walls are a fitting setting for the crowded pictures they contain. Selected by the Guangdong Museum of Art, the documentary photographs are on their last stop before they return home to become part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Filling three floors of the City Art Centre, the photographs spill out into the escalator space, drawing you through the exhibition quite compulsively. You’re plunged straight into the deep end with crowds of people pictured on bicycles, in the gym, in tightly-packed queues for toilets, for lottery tickets and to give blood. Seas of faces are set in grim frowns, where faces are visible at all.

The exhibition’s original title was Humanism In China, to mark the social change from Chairman Mao’s regimented approach, to a society which is turning towards the individual. Having started with armies of anonymous figures, the pictures soon begin to tell more personal tales. There are country people harvesting their crops, while others are forced out of their rural homes to make way for reservoirs (pictures like these suggest that this show has escaped the editing eye of the censors).

Worlds collide: old ladies with bound feet and teenagers in platform shoes; Santa Claus’s first visit to Beijing; a rustic donkey tethered for ambience in a swanky urban restaurant; homeless people shipped out, screaming, on a train. Social “progress” is the backdrop. The players are both winners and losers.

All human life unfolds in front of you, as it does on the streets of Beijing and beyond. Everything seems to happen in public view – children sleep in a row of beds on the street, and a family sits around their dinner table in an alley way. Pavements are full of haircuts and baths, doctors and ad-hoc beauty salons. Self-consciousness is absent. Nothing is private.

There are sights a surrealist would be proud of: a car stuck in the mud, pulled out by a water-buffalo. A fallen motorbike on a country road, geese escaping from the back. Children clambering to school over a bridge whose wooden floor has long gone. Exuberance seems to spill out of every calamity. This is not staged good cheer; you get a tremendous sense of honesty from these pictures.

Everything is so strange and different, and still, these are universal tales of human beings living and loving and taking baths. Bleakness is interspersed with humour, often in the same picture. Whatever this week’s opening ceremony can give us, it can’t match the warmth and candour of this exhibition.

In the early days of the Russian Revolution, artists turned out ROSTA windows on a daily basis. These were propaganda sheets in the form of comic strips, to be posted in the local villages and understood by all. Chad McCail’s art is in many ways a successor to those.

In his show at Edinburgh Printmakers, McCail uses the multi-panel cartoon format to convey his own political message: that the education system is squeezing the spirit out of our children, and that society as a whole should celebrate puberty rather than brush it under the carpet.

If you saw his show at the Fruitmarket Gallery five years ago, you will understand the artist’s visual short-hand: the knotted snake of repressed desire, and the hierarchy of zombies, robots and wealthy parasites. These stick-figures all reprise their roles in this show, with the addition of a surprising new symbol: the genitalia tree which represents budding sexuality.

This unusual tree appears in McCail’s stick-figure prints, but also in images recalling his earlier work, in the style of ladybird books of the 1960s and 70s. These deadpan scenarios, showing faceless figures living in harmony, are the uncomplicated utopia which counterbalances the artist’s angry analysis of the world as it really is.

Neither McCail’s utopia nor his dystopia seems like a place I’d want to inhabit. His ideal world is uncomfortably calm and uniform, using an expressionless style in which the artist has, in the past, conveyed nasty goings-on behind closed doors. It is uncanny, and airless.

On the other hand, McCail’s cryptic critique of our own social systems gets surprisingly close to the bone, considering the limitations of his pictorial language. In Compulsory Education, the artist sets the development of the schools system in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, arguing quite explicitly using text and image that the Prussian three-tier system of schooling was created to produce an efficient war-machine, and that the rest of Europe followed soon after.

Some of McCail’s prints, despite their very basic ciphers, are packed with pathos. Mask 1 tells the story of a child whose much-loved crocodile mask is confiscated by the educators, who tie him to his desk and give him floppy bunny ears instead. Three further prints follow the boy into adulthood, and a world of segregation, sexism and frustrated desires.

At Edinburgh College of Art you could be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. American artist Sanford Wurmfeld’s brand new E-Cyclorama is subtly different from his Cyclorama of four years ago, but in ways only he would notice. The Talbot Rice Gallery hosted the original work: a cylindrical abstract painting whose colours accosted your eyeballs as you stood inside it.

This new work, the second such experiment, is an oval abstract painting whose colours accost your eyeballs as you stand inside it. The intensity of the colour increases at each end of the oval, but otherwise, the effect is the same as four years ago.

Edinburgh has an important place in the history of the wrap-around panorama, which was invented in 1788 by Robert Barker. He painted a 360 degree view of Edinburgh from Calton Hill, inside which people could enjoy a virtual reality. It took off as a form of entertainment, and I think it’s fair to see the E-Cyclorama in the same light.

The repetitive colour experiments of Modernist artists such as Josef Albers can get pretty boring after a while, but Wurmfeld’s is all-singing, all-dancing. The grid of graduated colours pins your eyelids back as you pace the oval walls. It’s tartan in flux. It’s Albers on acid. It’s all-over painting as you’ve never seen it before…unless you saw it already at the Talbot Rice.

Frances Richardson returns to Edinburgh this year with a second solo show, Playing Against Reason, at the Corn Exchange Gallery. The first thing you see is a quote of ominous grandiloquence, about “a beautiful idea” and “falling into the sky”. Richardson’s drawings fail to live up to any such lofty notions, while her sculptures perform on a far more unassuming level.

The drawings are neat meanderings of pencilled plus and minus signs, whose arrangement conjures up playing cards and currency signs. Perhaps she got there first, perhaps she didn’t, but drawings made up from basic binary codes such as these are ten-a-penny in the Scottish art scene, and Richardson’s add little to the mix except an eye for a pretty pattern.

The artist’s sculptures, however, put that neatness to better use. Four MDF ladders, meticulously constructed, loiter casually around the stairs with the playful names of Oops, Lunge, Teeter and Drawn. Their component parts appear to be splaying and disconnecting, but on closer inspection, they never quite added up to begin with. They are performers in a physical comedy, teetering theatrically on the brink of an undignified collapse into mayhem.

And so, with mayhem assured, the Edinburgh Art Festival has officially begun.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.08.08