Nakedness and nudity at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The Naked Busker and lap dancing photography exhibition among highlights

It may get the moral minority’s g-string in a twist, but nudity and Edinburgh go hand in hand. Here are some naked highlights.

Pot of Dreams - Jannica Honey & Holly Davidson photographic exhibition

The multifaceted human aspects of Edinburgh’s lap dancing community are revealed.
Sapphire Rooms, Lothian Road, 7–29 Aug, Sun–Thu 2–6pm, free.

The Naked Busker

In nothing but his boxers, Donnie Rust hitchhiked across Britain and came back with tales of girlfriends, employment, masturbation, drunkenness and bathtubs.
Laughing Horse @ City Café, Blair Street, 0131 220 0125, 20–28 Aug, 6.45pm, free.

Strip Search

A frank performance piece from Titus Rowe about a male stripper who used to be a squaddie.
theSpaces on North Bridge, Carlton Hotel, North Bridge, 0845 557 6308, 8–20 Aug (not 14), 9.05pm, £10 (£7). Previews 5 & 6 Aug, £7 (£5).

Skitch Tease

Wearing nothing but heels, fishnets and a tiny squeezebox, Liz Skitch delivers an intimate accordion cabaret.
C aquila, Roman Eagle Lodge, 0845 260 1234, 4–29 Aug (not 16), 10.30pm, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).

Princess Bari

World class Korean dance can also contain some rude bits and there’s a ‘partial nudity’ warning for this EIF show.
Edinburgh Playhouse, Greenside Place, 0131 473 2000, 19–21 Aug, 7.30pm, £10–£30.

Dürer’s Fame

Tribute to the German woodcut and engravings master Albrecht Durer

German handball star Pascal Hens gazes out from a black-and-white poster, his torso naked, gaze serious, his pose one of self-deification. This is enhanced further by a tattoo on his stomach of two disembodied hands clasped together as if in prayer. It’s an image made familiar by its own iconic status, which, in the context of the poster, borders on a state of heroic kitsch. Further down the corridor in a glass case sits a green-moulded plastic hare taken from an installation that filled a Nuremburg square with 7,000 of the little critters. Again, the familiar 21st-century apparel of this piece points to both parody and homage.
Both works, in fact, are two of the most recent examples that take from 16th century German maestro of woodcuts and engravings, Albrecht Dürer. Hens’ buff-bellied tattoo is inspired by Dürer’s ‘Study of Praying Hands’, while the electric green hare looks to one of Dürer’s most vivid images for inspiration. This isn’t some recent postmodern appropriation, mind, but, as this striking selection of Dürer’s own explicitly monochrome works set besides some of his contemporaries and acolytes proves, Dürer was in fact one of the earliest examples of art star, whose fan-boy copyists manufactured their own output in his image.
The opening woodcut in this laterally-inspired show, ‘The Circumcision’, has no less than three homages by Dürer’s contemporaries, while 19th century Scottish artist William Bell Scott depicts the man himself looking out over Nuremberg in the nearest thing found here to a pin-up. Beyond the romanticised image, Dürer’s biblical works for the tellingly entitled ‘The Apocalypse’ are knee-deep in an ecclesiastical and transcendental melodrama that holds an eternal appeal for serious young men everywhere, whatever century they’re in.
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, until Tue 11 Oct.

Elsewhere on the web

www.nationalgalleries.org

Elizabeth Blackadder

Brilliant retrospective of work by one of Scotland’s major artists

Elizabeth Blackadder is a Dame, a Royal Academician and arguably Scotland’s most popular female painter and printmaker. A major retrospective of her work at Scotland’s biggest gallery space was only ever going to draw sighs of resignation from art snobs who value provocation and semantics over talent and craftsmanship. This eternal star of Falkirk is a major artist and this excellent exhibition reminds us that she is about more than just cats and flowers.
Simply but boldly curated to allow the visitor to follow Blackadder’s journey from serious, mildly joyless student portraitist on her continuing search for a personal style through her scholarships and travels in Italy, America and Japan (among others), this show is as much about the emotion of the journey as the archaeology of influence.
Again and again it becomes evident that Blackadder is in search of something deeply elemental, different and very much her own. Her botanical portraits are beautiful but seemingly rootless and alone, her interpretations of Japanese Zen art works in opposition to the subject matter – it is chaotic, vibrant and full of roaring humanity. Her much-loved still lifes shudder with abstraction and skewed perspective. In her most profound paintings, which include Flowers and a Red Table and Grey Table with Easter Eggs, she prostrates herself on the altar of amateurism in search of the individual and the guttural. Blackadder’s brilliance is in the sacrifice.
Scottish National Gallery, 624 6200, until 2 Jan, £8 (£6).

Tony Cragg

Stunning showcase of sculptor’s poetic, monolithic output

From Scouse lab technician to director of Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Cragg’s prolific artistic journey has been one of inspiration and rejection, absorption and a will to move beyond. While the works of Max Ernst, Richard Long, Joseph Beuys and Henry Moore may have been staging points in Cragg’s trajectory his separation from the ‘ego sculptors’ he is most often parcelled in with – Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor could not be more acute.
With a few notable exceptions this excellent exhibition presents the majority of Cragg’s poetic and monolithic output so far. Cragg’s giddy sketches guide the visitor in like a skipper to dolphins and then you are there. ‘Wild Relatives’ shimmers like an alabaster cloud, ‘In Camera’ is all pottery school Ernst, ‘Constructor’ is part circus mirror/part sea lion, while ‘Hollow Columns’ is the first of many anthills that look good enough to lick. The modus operandi is simple – nature recast in bronze, wood, stainless steel, kevlar or fibreglass – sometimes vulgarised, always surreal.
Things begin to shudder with primordial intent. The stunning ‘Distant Cousin’ is a Venus fly trap re-imagined by some Dadaist Dr Moreau; ‘Outspan’, ‘McCormack’ and ‘Declination’ are nuclear bloated clams as envisioned by the futurists. ‘Forminifera’ is the giant wasp’s nest Patrick Caulfield never designed. Only the wood and hook amateurism of ‘Under the Skin’ disappoints, but that’s small beer in a brewery of wonder.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, until 6 Nov, £7 (£5).

Elsewhere on the web

www.tony-cragg.com

The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein

Compendium of works inspired by the Renaissance innovator

There’s something of an inky-fingered Dürer overload in the ‘burgh just now. Following on from Dürer’s Fame over at the National Galleries, this 16th century compendium of more than 100 works uses his output as a springboard for the burgeoning of religious reform and free artistic expression across the continent, tellingly illustrated on the map from 1500 at the top of the stairs with the British Isles dominating.
Not that there’s anything from dear old Blighty in evidence across the three sections of the show, which begins with Dürer, moves on to peers such as Lucas Cranach and co, finishing with portraiture by Holbein that could be storyboarding TV show The Tudors.
Dürer’s output remains the most compelling work on show, from his religious iconography that is the equivalent of pop star pin-ups, with Saints Jerome, Anthony and Eustace a kind of ecclesiastical Take That, to his pen-and-ink studies of greyhounds and a gloriously puffed-up rhinoceros, to the damsel in distress in ‘The Sea Monster’, a clear template for sword’n’sorcery comic-book geekery. Best of all are the furiously busy images from ‘The Apocalypse’, which show where Alasdair Gray copped his moves for his frontispieces to Lanark.
Elsewhere, Cranach’s mythological idylls gets us back to the garden, while Holbein’s studies of Henry VIII’s court shows off a series of conspiratorial-looking men and doe-eyed Liv Tyler-alikes awaiting their own reformation. Maybe that out-of-scale map on the stairs is even more telling.
Queen’s Gallery, 556 5100, until 15 Jan, £6 (£5.50).

Elsewhere on the web

The Queen's Gallery website

Hayashi Takeshi: Haku-u (White Rain)

Impressive hand-carved sculpture

Once upon a time, Japanese artist Hayashi Takeshi looked out over a paddy field in the rain, the texture of the water’s surface as each inverted wet plop rose and fell clearly ingraining itself on his memory. With the primary and titular work on display here (the other is ‘Rin-kan’, five gnarled columns of black granite which might echo a remembered walk in a forest) he’s not only tried to recreate what he remembers of that scene in tangible form, it’s as if he wishes to lend it a permanence that the natural state of water can never possess.
Using 32 roughly rectangular lumps of white marble, a few small enough to fit in a rucksack, most large enough to require two men to carry them, the associate professor at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music has hand-carved and polished their pieced-together surfaces into an undulating, mock-fluid landscape, the rainfall re-enacted as nipple-shaped bumps on each block. This seems to be a piece about the imperfection of memory, as even Hayashi’s supreme effort to remember and recreate brings only fragmentary results.
The discovery that the work was imported from Japan, however, adds another intriguing dimension: in a global era when the transmission of ideas has been exponentially speeded-up, Hayashi has cast the ultimate intangibility of a memory as so many time-bound pounds of air-freight. Whether that makes it any more ‘real’ or not is uncertain, but it certainly lends it monumental, almost archaeological, significance.
Corn Exchange Gallery, 553 5050, until 22 Sep (not Sun/Mon), free.

Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville

Sparkling post-industrial dance on gleaming surfaces

Inverleith House has long carved a niche for itself as a champion of late 20th century American icons, and for the gallery’s British Art Show contribution has gathered up a grab-bag of 37 works made between 1982 and 1998 by Abstract Expressionism’s original skip-diving grease monkey. This late-period collection is a fast-moving mixture of shine-buffed collages and rust-laden sculptural detritus, as if junkyard and garage had been stripped bare after some Ballardian multiple pile-up on the freeway, then the component parts put back together again on some customised Frankenstein’s dragstrip as ornamental signposts forever in motion.
Twisted road-signs are heaped together, connecting up neighbourhoods and no-go areas that one would normally be just passing through. A giant pig is draped in neckties. A windmill made of metal strips dominates one room as if oil was just a hidden drill away. On the walls, mirror images on bronze and brass dazzle like cut-up wall-hangings at a postmodern diner that should be soundtracked by some Link Wray twang on the big-fendered car stereo as its boy-racer occupants go cruising up the strip, so steeped in suggestions of blue-collar teen romance are they.
With the wall-pieces rounded up from the ‘Shiner’ and ‘Borealis’ series of works, and the more sculptural constructions from ‘Kabal American Zephyr’ and ‘Gluts’, it all adds up to some sharp-edged re-imagining of the American Dream with bent out of shape street signs on a mashed-up grid system where playing in traffic is suddenly as safe as houses. In the sunlit quietude of Inverleith House, this transforms into a Zenned-out road movie that surfs silently through the ether rather than cause any kind of congestion.
Rauschenberg’s death in 2008 may have robbed us of the world’s foremost architect of re-imagined urban arcana, but as Botanical Vaudeville proves, even a decade before, the road he travelled was as expansively of the moment as ever. The show’s couldn’t-be-better title piece sums it up. This is work as play, a post-industrial dance on gleaming surfaces that sparkles before zooming into the ether.
Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, 248 2971, until 2 Oct, free.