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.

Interview: US artist Ingrid Calame

Transferring transfers marks and cracks from ground outside to gallery walls

‘This is it!’ exclaims US artist Ingrid Calame, waving towards a radiant tabletop awash with transparent sacks of bright pigments, a sea of reds, pinks, blues and greens. She’s referring to a new drawing based on tracings plucked from the cement embankments of the Los Angeles River, and destined for the walls of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery.
Using a range of materials from coloured pencils on Mylar (architectural tracing paper), to enamel paint and most recently, oil paint, Calame is an artist who has long evinced a fierce commitment to an uncompromising working practice. It’s unsurprising, then, that when prompted to discuss this new commission, the artist dives into the technical nuances of her work, enthusing about her template, method, unconventional use of material and ultimate ambivalence over its final colours and composition.
A pure sweep of pigment ‘pounced’ onto the wall through tiny perforations in a transfer drawing, her new wall-based work ‘LA River at Clearwater Street, 2006-8’, although presenting a divergent technique, exemplifies the artist’s long-standing method of working. Since 1997 she has been tracing the marks and stains on the tarmac and concrete of parking lots, sidewalks and highways, forensically detailing the impressions of forces unknown – skids, slips, falls and drips – as well as the ephemeral traces of tags, graffiti and bill posters.
Reclaiming these neglected spaces, Calame’s endeavor has seen her map stretches of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Las Vegas Strip, as well as venturing inside the New York Stock Exchange. Once captured, each tracing is annotated and archived for use in future drawings and paintings. Unlike many of her previous works, this new wall drawing, detailing graffiti, is made from a single layer of unconstellated tracing and its composition has been determined over time, following return visits to the site, as opposed to in the studio.
‘The last time I went and looked at the graffiti, it had been completely rolled over by the city,’ admits Calame. ‘How funny that I have this drawing, for in a way, it’s a monument.’
Her practice is framed by the desire to capture, render or recuperate the unintentional mishaps of our existence. And seen as a whole, her incessant ‘making’ comes to represent a collective desire to fix those things that are often lost to us, parts of our lives that frequently come unstuck. It’s therefore poignant that Calame turns her tools to street art, a marker with a political legacy, as these urban traces are frequently erased or concealed. ‘I do set out to capture something,’ says Calame, ‘but I’m not thinking about making it permanent, I’m responding to something in the moment that I’m collecting and I’m making them finite. Because often they are not. Take a coffee stain on the ground, for example, it isn’t demarcated in the way that a drawing is.’
It is possible to trace an evolution in Calame’s practice from her earlier works, some of which will be on show at Fruitmarket, that involved a static working process and a hugely systematic approach, tracing stains around LA, returning to the studio, layering the drawings and filling in the colours, towards a wider organisational system that involves complex plans and working with a crew of tracers. It has become essential for Calame that a synthesis of experiences informs the creation of each work. Working with a team, Calame has found that she has begun to use her artisans creatively, giving voice to their different styles of translation.
‘What ends up happening, which is the opposite of what I intended to happen, is that the tracing becomes a little bit of a memento. A memento of what it was that I was tracing, that period of time that we were tracing and who it was that was helping me to trace,’ she says. ‘The drawings are not neutral at all. As much as the intention was to go out and find something to trace that I didn’t make, when you make it, it becomes personal to the community of people who have helped, even to the people who walk by and interact.’
Warmly referring to this exhibition as a ‘circus’ of kinds of work, Calame is showing her Mylar pieces alongside her drawings and paintings for the first time, and eagerly admits that this retrospective has prompted her to ‘ re-think the magnitude of her processes. ‘As much as I trace out in the world, I keep a trace of what I’ve done, and going back through this archive, I’ve found a new respect for what I do,’ recognises the artist. Renowned for their beguiling, strange abstraction and striking finish, it’s apparent that this exhibition of painstakingly considered compositions presents the laden results of great artistic labour.
Ingrid Calame, Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, 4 Aug–9 Oct, free.

Lineage: Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport and Julian Opie

Edinburgh Art Festival 2010 - Printmaking, but not as we know it

Drip, drip, drip go the variations on a theme that form the quartet of works culled from Ian Davenport’s ‘Etched Puddle’ series, in which assorted rainbow-arrayed, candy-striped, multi-coloured streams trickle down into a similarly hued liquid carpet at the bottom of each frame. Seen together, they appear playfully and trippily retro, recalling the opening credits of that groovy 1970s teatime alternative to Blue Peter, Magpie. In the next room, something similar occurs in one of Julian Opie’s four ‘Japanese Landscapes’, a series of three-dimensional reflective treats akin to old-time breakfast cereal free gifts.
This is print-making, Jim, but not as we know it, and it’s perhaps telling that both Davenport and Opie are former students of Michael Craig-Martin, whose other Goldsmith’s alumni include the YBA generation of self-styled art stars. Davenport’s penchant for minimalist repetition is further explored in his ‘Ovals’ series, in which a simple shape moves from black and white definition to lemon yellow blanching out to a rich black and blue moonlight. The two examples of Opie’s series ‘This is Shanoza in 3 Parts’, meanwhile, suggest TV spy The Saint doing gymnastics.
Craig-Martin’s own works are a mix of the classical and the mundane, dominated by ‘Tokyo Sunset’, a series of six sunnily-delighted strip-cartoon depictions of everyday consumables: a watch, an opened drink can, a mobile phone, a light bulb, a guitar and some innocuous-looking handcuffs. Turning Japanese has rarely looked so lip-smackingly enticing.
Edinburgh Printmakers, 557 2479, until 3 Sep (not Sun/Mon), free.

David Mach: Precious Light

 

Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition of biblical proportions by Fife-born artist

Without doubt, Methil-born artist David Mach’s work ‘Golgotha’ will stand out as the defining image from the artistic strand of this year’s Edinburgh Festival. Three enormous figures of threaded steel nailed to metallic crosses, which take up the entire ground floor and reception area of the newly refurbished City Art Centre, they recast the biblical suffering of Jesus and his fellow crucified as a strikingly modernist monument and an otherworldly tableau of religious art.
Although it’s subtitled ‘King James Bible, a Celebration, 1611-2011’, however, it’s hard to tell where reverence and parody diverge in this epic exhibition by 1988 Turner Prize nominee Mach. A similar cruciform mounted in the escalator well, for example, is titled ‘Die Harder’, while the large-scale photographic collages, which comprise most of the show, are laden with the visual weight of a Hollywood movie. In these often stunning narrative pieces, ‘Noah’s Ark’ is a timber frame mounted on Salisbury Crags; ‘The Nativity’ occurred in a post-apocalyptic shack made of telegraph poles and upturned cars, and ‘The Destruction of Jericho’ is viewed from the inside of a family people carrier as if it were a scene from Cloverfield.
Although this is superficially a bright and modern (and not always child-friendly) update of unfashionable religious art, there are also deeper contexts and meanings to be found – in ‘The Resurrection’, for example, a pair of holed and bloody feet shuffle through a trash-strewn dump, a possible commentary on the wastelands of consumerist outflow left behind in countries where religious feeling remains most powerful.
City Art Centre, 529 3993, until 16 Oct, £5 (£3).

Ingrid Calame

Water water everywhere with only a doodle to drink

A river runs through Ingrid Calame’s work. But this river has been drained and all that remains are detritus and old stains. Somewhere between Google Earth screen grabs, weighty childhood nature books with their own illustrative key codes and fey graffiti lies Calame’s vibrant and polished body of work. It represents a journey towards that moment snatched from eternity with all its itinerant blemishes.
This exhibition of drawings and paintings from 1994-2011 kicks off with a bang. Her enormous 1997 painting ‘sspspss … UM biddle BOP’ is an amazing riddle of green and grey abandon that’s part Pollock and part bubbling sewer caught in the Los Angeles light. Tracing paper soon gives way to enamel paint on aluminium, however, with a series of Calame’s signature paintings. They are beautiful and baffling, the spirit of Rorschach threatens to make a parody of them but charm and chaos seem part of their very make-up.
Further in a shipping vibe takes hold. Simulated numbered steel sheeting that could have once been forged in the docks of Glasgow fill the walls alongside pencil works and studies like a half thought out proletarian pop art experiment.
Upstairs the light meets Calame’s beautifully tasteful etchings and scribblings. It’s all about the water metaphors, the river basins, the desalinated concrete troughs that cleave and cut through her native land. These are the tracings of a barge dwelling mad lady. Happy and serene in her liquidy grid lock. These are memorial maps to an old world that man has made new but not better.
Fruitmarket Gallery, 225 2383, until 9 Oct, free.

Katri Walker: North West

Intriguing exploration of Scottish/Wild West links

This triptych of work by Edinburgh-born artist Katri Walker recasts the landscape of Scotland as the wilderness of the American old west, quite literally in the case of the titular central work. Projected over three connected screens, the rocky cliffs and plains of Assynt are recast in ‘North West’ as an undiscovered prairie promising exploration and adventure simply through their widescreen cinematic presentation. In the context of the rest of the exhibition, we consider the Scots who settled in America in its early years and their reaction to the arid landscapes of the Midwest compared to the grassy glens of their home country: a lone sheep on a hilltop in ‘North West’ echoes the desolation of the Highlands post Clearances.
Elsewhere, the perspective of America from Scotland is brought up to date and focused quite precisely through the lens of half a century of Hollywood interpretation. In the film ‘The Making of Three Guns for a Killing’ a group of enthusiasts are filmed making a low-budget home movie in one of their Aberdeen gardens, amidst a custom-built Western town set called ‘Tranquility City’. Their enthusiasm is endearing, their accents earnestly mid-Atlantic, the tropes they use – dirty leather dusters, low-slung six-shooter belts, grizzled verbal drawling – studiedly culled from the films of John Wayne and John Ford.
As in the photographic portrait ‘Pipe Major Wyatt Earp’, a kilt-wearing piper whose huge moustache echoes that of Earp on his tattooed upper arm, this work reflects historical representations of both countries that are largely constructed, yet enduringly ‘real’ through the repetition of cultural narratives. The idea us intriguing, yet the subject feels only partially explored here.
The Old Ambulance Depot, 77 Brunswick Depot, until 4 Sep (not Sun/Mon), free.

Elsewhere on the web

www.katriwalker.com

Tamsyn Challenger: 400 Women

Stunning artistic memorial to victims of gender violence

What unites the collection of heterogeneous portraits in 400 Women is the fate of each subject depicted. All are the victims of rape, abduction and murder, devastating crimes which have taken place on the Mexican border region of Ciudad Juàrez.
In direct opposition to the passive acknowledgement of these crimes by the region’s authorities, who consistently issue a generic statistic of 400 deaths-per-year to ‘record’ this gender persecution, Tamsyn Challenger’s intervention on Canongate is sensitively constructed, taking each of the women into account.
The project atomises the government’s anonymous approach. Through collaboration with Amnesty International, the victim’s families and the 175 artists Challenger has so far commissioned to produce an artistic memorial in their honour, she manages to reinstate the women’s formerly lost individual identity. The subsequent portraits are then installed alongside one another, this time in a collective that symbolises resistance and strength.
Every woman has gained a voice in this project and her image is transformed.
The postcards desperately thrust into Challenger’s hands by the victim’s families are the starting point for painterly works influenced by the art-historical canon and carefully constructed according to each woman’s story.
Canongate Venture, the deteriorating school that they are currently grouped within, instils further poignant, symbolic layers. Paint crumbles from the walls, ceilings have fallen in and dirt is scattered over the carpet. The damage highlights and emphasises the destructive violence endured by the women that peer out from the walls.
The works are not hung to correlate with the order in the accompanying pamphlet so viewing the exhibition becomes a search for the missing once again. Yet, unlike in reality, when they are eventually found the viewer is confronted with a message of hope. For what is encountered is the memory of a woman who shall no longer be forgotten. To be aware of these past crimes is to move closer to their future end.
Canongate Venture, 07870 935442, until 4 Sep (not Mon), free.

Interview: Jeremy Millar on exhibition Mystics or Rationalists?

Artist discusses his contribution to Ingleby Edinburgh Art Festival show

How far do you agree with Sol LeWitt’s comment that ‘conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists’?
I think I’d tend to agree: they’re certainly rather more mystics than rationalists. Art isn’t rational, but it can be mystical.
What is the process of selecting work for a group show on a theme?
First of all, create the circumstances by which the exhibition might begin to accumulate, and then generate, its own intelligence; then, follow what it does. It’s nearly always right.
How important is the space at the Ingleby to your current work?
The works I’m showing weren’t made especially for this space but they are activated by it, the mirror cubes, especially. They create more space than they take up so they’re as important to the space as it is to them.
Can you tell us about your next project (we’ve heard that you are making a musical theatre piece with some Balinese performers)?
I’m working on a number of projects. The Bali project is rather long term, and work continues; more immediately, a number of videos: I’ve just finished one for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, am working on another about Samuel Beckett’s secret marriage in Folkestone, and I’m developing another on curiosity and museum collections. I’m always developing new works, in one way or another. And it’s usually ‘another’.
Mystics or Rationalists, Ingleby Gallery, 556 4441, until 29 Oct, free.

Norman McBeath & Robert Crawford: Body Bags / Simonides

Mournful collaboration between photographer and poet

Scots translations of epitaphs by the ancient Greek poet Simonides, coupled with black and white photographs, adorn the high-rising walls of two lofty Edinburgh College of Art studios. Joined by tall vases of white lilies, classical casts from the College’s collection and a line of body bags lain in sand on the floor, it’s fairly obvious that we’re meant to think of these galleries as mausoleums. Further, the aspect of the rooms – pouring directly out onto the rock face of the castle and its army barracks – heavily enforces not only thoughts of loss, but considerations of loss through conflict.
While Robert Crawford’s texts are elegant, translating epitaphs composed for civilians and soldiers killed during the Persian Wars, in battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis, a certain nuance is lost through their pairing with the photographs of Norman McBeath. Square-format studies of scenes from contemporary life, it is easy to appreciate that the collaboration intended the relationship between text and image to be tangential. The texts, however, speak as eloquently of today as they do of their historical birthplace. Coupled with the overbearing symbolism of the deathly gallery setting, McBeath’s poignantly commonplace images become strangely illustrative.
Edinburgh College of Art, 221 6000, until 9 Sep, free.

Elsewhere on the web

www.normanmcbeath.com

Carmen Sylva

Established artists take on a new and exciting identity

A procession of odd assemblages punctuates the centre of Sierra Metro’s exhibition space. They are Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff's latest artistic response to Peles, a late 18th Century Romanian castle that has inspired their practice for over six years.
Until now the site has been the source material for two-dimensional pieces with the pair lining the walls of exhibition spaces with A3 images of Peles’ interiors. These have set the stage for invited artists to showcase other works, with the impressive castle represented in the backdrop. For their contribution to the Edinburgh Art Festival, however, they have moved from flat copies of the building to three-dimensional renderings of it.
This is a decisive break in their ongoing body of work yet it assimilates fluidly into their enquiry. When broken down the stacked objects (which range from clay sculptures, glass and copper cabinets and plinths, tassles, carpets and fire hoses) are paraphernalia distinctly drawn from the castle (itself a pastiche of Gothic, Art deco, Rococo and Renaissance styles). They are also ordered to replicate the sequence in which the viewer would encounter them if touring the original site, injecting a further rational conception to what may initially be approached as the articulation of purely materialistic concerns.
The show is called Carmen Sylva, the alias used by Queen Elizabeth of Romania who lived at Peles. The selection of a pseudonym for this show is apt for Stoever and Wolff who here too shed their former associations and take on a new, and exciting identity.
Sierra Metro, 07731 302960, until 11 Sep (Thu–Sun or by appointment), free.

Interview: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Renowned photographer on his EAF exhibition

Is this your first visit to Edinburgh?
I did pass through here once in the late 90s. I was shooting seascapes around the Scottish coast. Which wasn’t so successful: mostly, I saw many oil towers, so I couldn’t get clear seascapes. I thought it was a Shakespearian, mysterious sea – but well, there’s the oil!
Do you feel your lightning pictures [inspired by the techniques of the 19th century photographer, Henry Fox Talbot], are more of a scientific experiment rather than just art?
Well, science and art have the same origin. So I am going back to the origin … like a Renaissance time, and Talbot was in the middle of this chaotic period of science and art. So, this study of static electricity that Talbot was involved in … I decided to keep it up. If Talbot had lived longer then this is something that he would have done.
How do you see yourself in relation to Fox Talbot?
He is my most influential figure … he was the inventor of photography, so there’s the highest respect to pay to him. The lightning field practice is partially learned from Talbot’s study of electricity with Michael Faraday. I didn’t know that he was a serious scientist, I just knew Talbot as the inventor of photography. But he was also scientist, an anthropologist, a philosopher, a mathematician …
What are you working on at the moment?
Ah many, many different things! Besides photography, I am working with architects. I established my own architecture firm so I have just finished one museum building in Japan, and one in Marrakesh, and then also a theatre production! This month in Japan I have a very big production at the national puppet theatre. I produced and designed the stage and composed the music. So the photography is less ‘now’. I still keep practising but my curiosities have so much expanded.
Much like Talbot?
Yes. And also maybe I will continue studying the electricity sparks, and then I may find some new theory of how life started on planet Earth and then be a Nobel prize winner (laughs).
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, £7 (£5).

Elsewhere on the web

www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Mystics or Rationalists?

Elegant conceptual works bend associations of the ordinary

Stealing the show, Susan Hiller’s new levitation works are exemplary of the conceit at the heart of this group exhibition. Having infused conceptual and minimalist strategies with the influence of psychoanalysis and pop culture since the late 1960s, Hiller’s explorations into the idea of transformation here materialise into two black and whites of floating figures. These graceful works pay homage to Yves Klein’s seminal avant-garde photograph ‘Into the Void’, and simultaneously, the phantasmagorical legacy of Modernist artworks. Similarly drawing reference from an artist of times past, this exhibition takes its lead from the opening statement of Sol LeWitt’s defining text, in which he stated that conceptual artists jump to conclusions that logic could not achieve, that they are ‘mystics rather than rationalists’.
A simple light bulb emanating the pale light of the moon, Katie Paterson’s inclusion conceals a wealth of thinking and scrutiny. She’s created enough of these bulbs – which work by transmitting identical wavelengths of those to moonlight – to span the average human lifetime. Similarly considered, Simon Starling’s slide show documents his performance ‘Autoxylopyrocycloboros’ (2006), in which he sailed a steamboat on Loch Long, fuelling its fire with the boat’s own timbers, until it could no longer float.
Comparably spotlighting shifts in the ordinary, Iran do Espirito Santo’s elegant ceramics toy with changes in scale and material. Likewise, upon further scrutiny, Susan Collis’ arrangement of seemingly scrap materials reveals itself to be fashioned from rosewood, ebony veneer, mother of pearl and 24-carat gold. Further conversions come from Cornelia Parker with ‘The Collected Death of Images’ (1996), in which a beaten, spectral, sheet of silver has been styled from the remnant particles following the process of ‘fixing’ an image with photographic chemicals.
Are not only mystics or rationalists at work here, but alchemists too? Led by Hiller’s consummate works, the gentle emphasis upon transformations in this show provides an interesting departure for many of these now-familiar works.
Ingleby Gallery, 556 4441, until 24 Oct, free.

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys

An art world friendship under a Scottish sky

A single rose can make a garden; a single friend can make a world. Writer, artist and philosopher Richard Demarco’s friendship with the humanistic artist Joseph Beuys was something special. These two passionate, occasionally obtuse men were drawn to each other like moths to light. ‘When shall we meet again?’ Demarco would ask of Beuys on parting. ‘When the hurly burly’s done, when the battle’s fought and won,’ Beuys would reply, revealing his knowledge of the Scottish play. Anyone who has the privilege of being allowed to visit Demarco’s archive at Skate Raw can witness the mountains of Beuys in Scotland-related ephemera Demarco has collated and here he allows some of it into a more public arena alongside some of his own sketches and paintings. It makes for a suitably Celtic juxtaposition.
Demarco’s lovely sketches and paintings of Scottish and Italian landscapes (with their hints of the righteous influences of Piper and Chagall) serve to link Beuys’ best-known work in Scotland – the Celtic Kinloch Rannoch: The Scottish Symphony – with the Road of Meikle Seggie, the road that Christians, Romans and Demarco’s forbears used to travel to Scotland which also passed through Beuys home town Kleve.
Anyway, let’s not get into the anthroposophy of it all; essentially this is Demarco’s art alongside photographs of Beuys at work and play. It’s a conceptual love letter to a master too long in the ground.
Axolotl Gallery, 557 1460, until 5 Sep (not Sun), free.

John Byrne: Moonlight and Music

Major exhibition of works by much-loved Scottish artist

So recent are some of the pieces in this show – timed to coincide with the launch of a biography of the artist by Lund Humphries – that self-portrait ‘Chop Suey’ and Byrne’s children’s book Donald & Benoit: A Story of a Cat and a Boy arrived close to the curtain call of the opening night.
Minute mezzotints nestle among larger creations such as ‘The Hunter’, which is macabre compared to the naïve charm of Donald and Benoit. ‘Patrick’ (Byrne’s oft-used pseudonym) makes an appearance here, with his larger-than-life reclining natives in the faux-naif style. Presiding over the larger of the two rooms is the unmistakable figure of Tilda Swinton, the biggest of the works on display and one of few not offered up for sale.
Byrne’s fascination with the self is well represented, his hirsute face seen in varying guises, each one a rebirth or reimagining of the subject, an indication perhaps of the artist’s journey through his own psychology, or perhaps just a readily available and well-known subject to render immortal through oils or ink. These pieces contrast heavily with the delicate ink and pencil of the Donald and Benoit illustrations which are almost an exhibition unto themselves: some remain mounted and lean against the wall by the Open Eye reception desk, daring the more adventurous viewer to rake through.
While almost everything here is available to buy there is no sense that the exhibition is merely a vessel for sales. Byrne’s love of painting is the obvious theme and there’s an atmosphere of excitement and inspiration around the work.
Open Eye Gallery, 557 1020, until 5 Sep (not Sun), free.

Interview: John Byrne

 

Painter and playwright at 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival

What came first – the art or the writing?
It must have been the drawing and the art, because my mother used to tell people that I was drawing in my pram. We have to take her word for it – she was a very honest woman.
Do you hold writing and art in equal regard?
It’s funny that, I love both. Whichever one I am doing at the time is my favourite if you ask me then. This exhibition is 97 percent all new, so the last two-to-three months I just lived my life as a painter.
Can you write and paint at the same time, or does one take a back seat?
I don’t think so, they have their own timing, telling me which one wants to be done. The next thing is another, slightly shorter version of [his first play] Writer’s Cramp with the original cast, in November. Secret location – pop-up theatre!
Did you approach your children’s book in a different way to your paintings?
I don’t think so, apart from the fact that it’s slightly more conventionalised. It was a bit too dark for the Americans – they didnae want the dogs to be smoking or drinking.
Do you get extra satisfaction out of self-portraits?
No, I’m just curious about myself. I think it’s odd that people don’t paint themselves the whole time. I’m struck by the entire mystery of being here. I’m curious about what makes us tick. I’m perfect to be experimented on for analysis. There’s no chance I’ll come to any answers but I can ask myself some interesting questions.
Are you going to have a break from art after this?
No, I have another pressing deadline! It’s good to move onto something that’s fresh and different. It’s a wonderful thing, people are very honest to the fact that I wear two hats, if not several more.
Open Eye Gallery, 557 1020, until 5 Sep, free.

Elsewhere on the web

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byrne_(playwright)

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawings

Breathtaking exploration of both photography and science

To say that Sugimoto's contribution to the Edinburgh International Festival is striking would be an understatement. This is the first time these works have been displayed in Europe. The Japanese photography pioneer’s huge analogue 'Lightning Fields' prints, made using a Van der Graaf generator to create bursts of static electricity which are then captured on photosensitive black and white film, are exhibited in tandem with prints taken from original negatives by the inventor of photography Henry Fox Talbot ('Photogenic Drawings').
Lightning Fields is a breathtaking exploration of both photography and science, based on experiments by Fox Talbot in the 19th century. Each piece is a stark blackness punctuated by the intricate swirling and tendrils of light captured at the instant it hits the specially prepared film. There are elements of nature in the patterns that are left, with the marks sometimes hazy, sometimes simply disappearing into infinity. Despite the artificial background of the effect, there is no less awe at witnessing the works – and the depth and detail allows a close glimpse of nature reined-in and glorious.
Sugimoto's ‘Photogenic Drawings’ are calm by contrast, and more a one-man mission to track down and produce prints in homage to one of his heroes than an individual exploration. The two parts to the exhibition go hand in hand, though, both using original and direct processes to produce the end result. The misty past, people, plants and buildings, were the subjects of the day, and Sugimoto has leant heavily on the old techniques to faithfully reproduce what is seen here. Each chemical (some banned by various governments in ages past) has been mixed as per the old recipes (such as those used for cyanotype) and carefully applied.
Additional to the main exhibits are well-written explanations of not only the process behind the works, but also a brief retrospective of Sugimoto's history as a photographer. Make the most of this rare chance to see the work of a legend – much of the artist's time is now spent in architecture and theatre in his native Japan.
Modern Two (Previously Dean Gallery), 624 6200 until 25 Sep, £7 (£5).

Elsewhere on the web

www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Italian museums

From the crumbling ruins of the Roman Empire to the bright colors splayed across canvases in the Uffizi Gallery, for thousands of years Italy has been at the forefront of Western culture. And now the many celebrated historical treasures speak volumes about power and grandeur of the past, remain preserved in the finest Italian art museums.
In fact, considering the sheer number museums in Italy, a complete tour of them all would be an overwhelming challenge. Even the most resolute art lovers have saturation points. Carefully choosing which Italian museums to attend will enrich your experience while saving you hours spent in long lines amongst other tourists or wandering second-rate galleries.
The most formidable of all the Italian museums is the Vatican Museum. Ancient maps meticulously depicting strange lands line many of the corridors of the Sistine Chapel. But they are secondary to the real masterpieces there, Michelangelo"s enduring legacy painted upon the chapel"s ceiling and his Last Judgment on the altar. Raphael"s School of Athens is also found here, the defining work of his career.
The Uffizi Gallery is another of the critical Italian art museums, portraying all the treasures collected by the influential Medici family, Florentine leaders and renowned patrons of the arts for hundreds of years. Here you can find the birth of the Renaissance in all its glory, residing on the walls of the palace used by the Duchy of Tuscany as his administrative offices (or uffizi) for hundreds of years.
The Galleria Borghese rests in the heart of Rome, amongst the green landscapes and quaint roads of its namesake, the Villa Borghese. The most exclusive of Italian museums, it allows only small numbers of patrons at a time to view the works inside, among them pieces by luminaries such as Bernini, Raphael and Titian.
In the same Villa is the famous National Etruscan Museum the abstruse and puzzling ancestors of the Romans. What little of the Etruscan culture that exists can be found in one of the most surprisingly overlooked museums in Italy. The Etruscans were - like the Romans their culture gave birth to - extremely progressive in artistic sophistication, the proof of this residing in this accumulation of bronze and marble interspersed with glittering jewelry dulled only by the onslaught of time.
Unfairly overlooked in the sensory overload that is a tour of Italian art museums, The Spada Gallery features a baroque facade that is one of the most unique in the entire city. The gallery also includes statues looming in strange corners and a sloping floor and convergent walls meant to add to the already impressive grandeur - because, well, it"s hard to stand out in Rome. The inner rooms are adorned with marble, stucco and colorful frescoes.
The Academy Gallery is a superlative collection of Venetian works. One of the best museums in Italy if you wish to view the work of Tintoretto, often considered the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance. This effusive gallery also includes contributions from Bellini, Carpaccio and Titian. If modern art is more your style, the nearby Guggenheim in Venice is the Italian museum for you. Located on the bottom floor in the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni - an architectural wonder located directly on the Grand Canal - 20th century artists from all over the world have works on display.