January 2009

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There is a great photograph dating from 1974 showing Joseph Beuys sitting on an ornate bamboo seat amid the cacti of the Arid Lands House in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens (Fig. 3). Alongside him is the philosopher, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller and the Edinburgh patron Lady Rosebery. Taken during Beuys’s ‘Oil Conference’ exhibition, it is proof of how much a magnet a place can be with an artist like Beuys in town.

Beuys had a strong bond with Scotland. He had been lured to Edinburgh by the sight of postcards of Scotland shown him by the gallery owner Richard Demarco in his Dusseldorf studio. Beuys responded: ‘I see the land of Macbeth.’ The subsequent important and long-standing relationship with Scotland helped to secure the deal done by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2002 to buy more than 230 of his drawings, lithographs, photographs, books and sculptures. With his radical approach to the method, process and display of art, Beuys invigorated the city’s traditionally conservative arts scene. Inevitably, after his last visit, that energy quickly dissipated.

However, there has recently been a change. This year, the fifth Edinburgh Art Festival listed 43 exhibitions to visit. Even though the concept of the festival is a bit of a marketing exercise, the visual arts in Edinburgh have quietly been getting on with a renaissance, and you certainly can sense a new flavour of optimism and enterprise and a willingness to transform the city into an international contemporary art destination. As well as good programming by the Fruitmarket Gallery (director Fiona Bradley) and Inverleith House (director Paul Nesbitt), smaller spaces are also punching well above their weight. Run with energetic panache by Susanna Beaumont, doggerfisher has a roster of artists that includes Lucy Skaer, Claire Barclay and Charles Avery, speaks for itself. Its next exhibition, of work by Franziska Furter, opens on 7 November (www.doggerfisher.com). Collective, a non-profit artists agency and gallery (recent exhibitions by Bedwyr Williams, Margaret Salmon and Artur Zmijewski), Stills (their festival show of Martha Rosler’s library was a hit) and sleeper, a tiny white-cube space set up by artist Alan Johnston and architect Neil Gillespie, all show impressive work by both international and emerging artists.

Edinburgh’s renewed confidence is especially conspicuous in the opening of the Ingleby Gallery’s spectacular new space, now the biggest commercial gallery space outside London (Fig. 4). Previously the Venue nightclub, just round the corner from the Fruitmarket Gallery and Waverley station, this grand space on Calton Road occupies two galleries on the ground and first floor. Complete with a posh viewing room and a set of offices in the basement, it could be taken for a top New York gallery. And it has an ambitious programme to match. The opening show in the upstairs gallery featured new text works by the respected but little seen (in Britain) American artist Kay Rosen. In the ground-floor project room, Edinburgh-born Susan Collis has created a room that looked like a builder hasn’t quite finished, but in fact those screws scattered over the walls are made of gold and set with rawl plugs made from coral and turquoise, and what appears to be paint dribbled on the floor is actually inlaid mother-of-pearl (Fig. 2).

Outside, the gallery has cleverly taken advantage of the billboard on the gable end of the building that once announced the Venue’s gigs, but now presents public-art projects. Mark Wallinger’s ‘Mark Wallinger is Innocent’ (Fig. 1) will be followed by projects by Rachel Whiteread in November, and Bob & Roberta Smith and Cerith Wyn Evans next year. Florence and Richard Ingleby, who spent their first 10 years in a space that doubled as their home, have brought wonderful and challenging artists to Scotland, some – such as Ellsworth Kelly and James Turrell – for the first time. Look out for their October exhibition, works by Richard Forster and Ruth Claxton, opening on 4 October (www.inglebygallery.com).

Wallinger’s inclusion was not a matter of cherry-picking big-name artists and dropping them into the city. He had already spent a fruitful spell as a guest of Randolph Cliff, an innovative residency programme set up last year by Clémentine Deliss and Charles Asprey and jointly supported by Edinburgh College of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland. Nicely described as ‘a watering hole on the road to production’ – a quote borrowed from John Baldessari – Randolph Cliff is offered to internationally recognised artists. It is not like your usual residency, however. There is no timetable of events, no exhibition at the end of the stay, no expectation to produce any work – in fact no demands are made on the artists at all. The time spent is seen as a ‘prelusive or formative phase that leads to the generation of new works’ – in other words, a no- strings-attached facilitation exercise for artists who can use Edinburgh and beyond as they see fit. They also stay in a beautiful Georgian apartment, attributed to Thomas Telford, on the edge of the New Town.

The artists seem to enjoy themselves. In fact, Deliss and Asprey have noted that with such freedoms, the artists tend to be very productive. Christian Flamm (who did a bit of dj-ing and worked with a local record label) designed a tartan turntable mat as well as some wallpaper. Franz Graf produced an elaborate sculptural installation, while Wallinger took a busload of people to listen to Lord Elgin at his home in Fife. Confirmed artists for the future include Dexter Sinister (aka David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Dan Peterman and Adrian Piper.

Perhaps one of Randolph Cliff’s next artists will also get a chance to be involved with Dovecot Studios, a tapestry studio and exhibition space in the Old Town. After a sensitive £5m refurbishment of its former Victorian baths it is now commissioning contemporary artists again. Dovecot’s master weavers are currently working with Glasgow-based artist Claire Barclay (who has an exhibition at the Fruitmarket at the end of January) on new works that will extend the traditional expectations of what weaving can do. The Dovecot has a long history of working with artists. It was established in 1912 with weavers from William Morris’s Merton Abbey workshop. Since then, the weavers have worked with great artists from across the world, including Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Jean Dubuffet and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Dovecot’s director, David Weir, has done a fine job in rescuing this underrated venue (www.dovecotestudios.com).

No doubt the National Galleries of Scotland – which has a new director of modern and contemporary art, Simon Groom (formerly head of exhibitions and collections of Tate Liverpool) – will be encouraging the conversations between all these venues. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2010, is undergoing a revamp. As well as sharing with Tate the fabulous D’Offay gift, which features 50 ‘rooms’ by 25 artists, including Beuys, Richter, Warhol and Nauman, the gallery will undergo a much needed rehang, which will include some interesting pairings (for example, Callum Innes and Sol Lewitt, Beuys and Douglas Gordon, John Bellany and Léger). More radically, the Dean Gallery, located across the road, and currently burdened with the overarching presence of bad Paolozzis, will become a gallery for art from 1900 to 1945 while the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will display work from 1945 to the present in an attempt to bring these two branches of the National Galleries of Scotland closer together. About time too.

Frieze: hungover dealers & barking parrots
Collectors love art fairs, but for the gallerists the excitement is tempered with battling with hangovers and hours of standing up and talking artspeak. Sometimes art fairs can be boring. A gallerist who went to Puerto Rico’s art fair this year said it was so quiet that they played marbles on the floor with colleagues in the opposite booth. No chance of that at Frieze art fair in London, which always manages to attract both die-hard collectors and browsers.

Once again, the fair includes artists’ commissions in or around the fair. This year’s commissions aim benignly to disrupt nature’s way of doing things. Jeppe Hein’s installation of trees at the entrance to the fair will revolve, while Andreas Slominiski’s signage of times and temperatures will be willfully incorrect – perhaps in an attempt to fluster those in search of their next important appointment. Agnieszka Kurant has taught three parrots to bark. Would it not have been more fun, considering the context, to train the bird to imitate the fevered squawks of an auctioneer? Pavel Buchler’s sound sculpture will create the sounds of weather opposite to what is outside the tent – so that probably means tweeting birds enjoying the sun.

To coincide with the arrival of the world’s dealers and collectors, two new contemporary galleries are opening. The first, Pilar Corrias, on Eastcastle Street, is designed by the great Rem Koolhaas and opens with a playful piece – a painted aluminium cast of a Christmas tree by Philippe Parreno called Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas. Corrias is already working with an exciting mix of contemporary artists (some of whom will be doing offsite projects), including Tobias Rehberger, Ulla von Brandenburg and Keren Cytter. In production is ‘The Cephalopod Project’ – an intriguing-sounding collaboration between Miquel Barceló and Parreno, based on their fascination with octopi, squid and the like. A kraken for the Thames? The second is Yvon Lambert’s (he also has galleries in Paris and New York), which opens in Hoxton Square with work by the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales (Fig. 6). More proof, if it were needed, that London
is still the centre of the contemporary art world.

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