Edinburgh Art Festival Roundup 1 This year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is a quietly confident offering: no Monets or Tracey Emins this year, but a programme which brings quality art to the punters. The Northern Renaissance, for example, might sound like an also-ran to the main Renaissance event, but the Queen’s Gallery show is a cornucopia of delicate detail and crisp, linear quality from the likes of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger. The Queen’s Painter and Limner in Scotland, Elizabeth Blackadder, has centre-stage at the National Gallery of Scotland. The 80-year old Scot has long been admired for her eastern-influenced arrangements of quietly domestic objects, and this show unearths the power behind them. The Queen herself features downstairs, where a quirky selection of royal portraits, official and unofficial, tell the story of how royalty, the media, and society at large have changed in the 60 years since she was crowned. An entertaining show, and an education for royalists and republicans alike. Inverleith House boasts the first major UK show in 30 years of 20th century American art hero, Robert Rauschenberg. He was the rule-breaking giant who made everything possible, from Pop Art to Arte Povera and much of Performance and Conceptual Art into the bargain. If you’ve yet to be convinced, this range of work in metal will prompt the penny to drop. At the Gallery of Modern Art is contemporary giant of sculpture, Englishman Tony Cragg. Several pieces occupy the grassy lawns outside the gallery, like alien lifeforms standing very still and hoping in vain that nobody will notice them. Cragg has been based in Germany since 1977, and this is his first big UK show in a decade. It concentrates on work from recent years: not just sculptures, but also enticing prints which offer a way into the artist’s thought processes. There is something very alive about Cragg’s sculptures. They stretch and melt and squirm and reach. The fact that they are made of bronze, stone and wood doesn’t hold them back. The fact that they must be massively heavy doesn’t stop them leaning at a dizzy slant, and teetering on tiptoe. Many of Cragg’s more recent works take profile heads and extrude them to abstraction. You walk around them, catching sight of a nose and chin. It becomes a sheer cliff face, and then a soaring wing, and slides back into recognition as an ordinary face again. It’s amazing how finely attuned the brain is to any clue of a human feature. Some of the best sculpture makes you ache to touch it. Cragg is no exception; you want to climb in and explore his big, chunky curves, run your hand along the smooth surfaces, see how your body fits with them. They are very large objects of desire. Wooden Crystal is an amazing thing. A giant red wooden pillar towers above the main gallery, like a totem pole with its features melted down. The bulging swells of wood tilt forward over you, in complete command. Hedge is a weird and wonderful otherworldly organism, snaking and squirming in amongst its own luminescent tendrils. Cragg was clear that he didn’t want the sculpture muddled with interpretation, so this is a show with a light touch. The objects sit, uncompromised, indoors and out, like creatures with their own free will. Our job is to get in there and mingle, and let the creatures make us smile. Ingleby Gallery shows itself off at its best with Mystics or Rationalists?, an elegant group show brought together with a tender touch. The starting point is Sol LeWitt’s statement that “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” The result hangs together exquisitely in Ingleby’s stunning light-filled galleries. The thread that brings the works together is creative intuition: that extra indefinable something that makes art more than the sum of its parts. So, for example, Cornelia Parker makes spider-thin nets from bullet metal, hinting at the trajectory of the bullet itself. Katie Paterson takes pictures from telescopes of infinite darkness, 1000 light years away. Ceryth Wyn Evans places glistening text high up on the wall; you shimmy from side to side, trying to read the words as they shimmer in and out of view. They tell you about the advent of radio astronomy, when astral bodies were discovered and named, then found to be nothing more than dust and dandruff in the photographic emulsion. These artworks are not just visually beautiful, they contain beautiful thought. They are the taking apart and putting back together of logic, with a little magic hidden inside. At the Fruitmarket Gallery, New York artist Ingrid Calame is shown for the first time in Scotland. Think Boyle Family crossed with Andy Warhol and you might be on the right track. Calame traces the marks she finds on urban streets: cracks, paintwork, stains: it’s hard to tell, because they are layered up, flattened out, and coloured in, becoming highly decorative paintings and drawings. Visually, Calame clearly belongs to the American tradition, from Jackson Pollock’s action paintings (though these are the antithesis in terms of discipline and control), to Andy Warhol’s pop art camouflage. Her huge wall drawing is the best of the lot: something dirty and rough from the dried up LA River bank is elevated all the way to the skylights, delicate, glowing, utterly transformed.
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