The House Of Books Has No Windows
Until September 28; Fruitmarket Gallery

Andrew Grassie: Painting as Document
Until September 27; Talbot Rice Gallery

Susan Collis
Until September 24; Ingleby Gallery

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are big on the international circuit, but they’ve never shown in Scotland before. Now the Fruitmarket Gallery has bagged an exhibition of six major works; six worlds in which to lose yourself – some you’ll want to visit again, and others which will haunt you no matter how hard you try to forget.

First off is a small, windowless house built from old books, commissioned specially for the show. In some ways it’s the antithesis of the pair’s usual work: it doesn’t have sound to transport you to another place, and with the books sealed shut, it doesn’t allow you to lose yourself in a fiction. It’s as if Martha Rosler’s Library at Stills Gallery (a relaxed and liberating environment) has been turned inside out, along with our means of escape.

After that, you’re thrown in at the deep end. The gallery is compartmentalised, with generous helpings of sound and light insulation, into undiluted dreams and nightmares. You walk through dark doorways, not knowing what awaits you. It’s brimming with spectacle for the masses, and narratives within narratives for the theorists.

Opera For a Small Room brings automated record players and speakers to a Wagnerian crescendo in a cluttered chipboard shack. Lights and records take their turns in this unpopulated performance, as you watch, like a lurking villain, from one of several improvised windows.

Upstairs, a creaking door leads you into another world – a dusty attic space, filled with abandoned experiments worthy of Dr Jekyll. As you explore mementos, teabags, notebooks and strange, pumping contraptions, your movements trigger speaking voices. Everywhere there are signs of a mysterious couple, like the artists themselves, now melted into the shadows. While other works have set durations, this has no beginning, no end, and countless permutations. It’s somewhere you want to go back to, where new secrets will be revealed every time.

In the last, most chilling room, the Killing Machine is a beautiful ballet of robotic arms, gliding to the haunting sound of a guitar hit by a pre-programmed wand. But it’s also a story of torture and toe-curling capital punishment. The human subject, though absent, is all too easy to imagine, and you are the button-pusher who sets the whole machine in motion. When the hysterical glitter ball eventually slows and all falls dark, I stare at the button. I remain in the dark. Nothing can make me push it again.

The Talbot Rice Gallery hosts a retrospective of an entirely different nature. Scottish artist Andrew Grassie has been making paintings of paintings for the last 15 years, since a crisis at art college led him to set himself some tight ground rules. The artist starts by photographing exhibitions – some he’s arranged for the occasion, or others containing his own work – and then he spends months painting exact copies of the photographs.

The clever bit is when Grassie hangs the finished painting inside the exhibition which it depicts. For the Talbot Rice Gallery, that has presented a few problems. For a start, they refurbished the gallery between Grassie’s initial photograph and the installation of the show (he consequently finished the specially commissioned painting only hours before the private view).

The painting features inside itself, taken from a vantage point at the opposite end of the gallery. Looking at it creates an uncanny feeling of being in two places at once. Many of Grassie’s past works, conversely, view the scene from the exact spot where the painting is hung. Now divorced from their context, these paintings, once potent, have become dry, forlorn jokes which have lost their punchlines.

While building work proved problematic for Grassie, it was a dream come true for Susan Collis. She launches the smaller of the spaces at the new Ingleby Gallery with a deceptively humble and totally enchanting show. The floor is spattered with paint, as are a discarded plank of wood and an old broom. The walls are an unholy constellation of left over rawl plugs and screws. Quite by chance, a perfect echo is found on the gallery’s toilet door, where a screw acts as an ad hoc handle until snagging is complete.

But all is not as it seems. The paint splashes are mother of pearl, carefully shaped and inlaid into the wood. The floor-piece is permanent, a birthday bracelet for the gallery. The rawl plugs are crafted from coral, turquoise and topaz. The screws are silver and gold, with tiny diamonds and sapphires embedded in their heads.

Mess becomes treasure, and makes you think about value. The materials are precious; they are fashioned with care and attention. As Collis herself has said, the rawl plugs and broom have “almost died and gone to heaven”. This will be a hard act to follow.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 31.08.08