Pier Arts Centre, until 8 November 2008

Charles Avery - 'Coscienza Woodcut', 2007 - from Scotland & Venice exhibition

THE VENICE Biennale was established in 1895, to promote contemporary art. It’s now an international showcase. Scottish artists began exhibiting independently here in 2003, buoyed up no doubt by a Scottish Arts Council commitment to identify Venice as a Priority Project, to be supported over three Biennales.

Luckily, the British Council didn’t see sudden devolved enthusiasm from Scotland – and Wales – to be a threat, and supported the initiative. Amanda Catto tells us, in the lush book accompanying the exhibition, “we were clear that our intention should be to complement the programme of the British Pavilion. By presenting new work from Scotland we hoped to strengthen international interest…”

I can imagine the feverish meetings, the reassurances (we’ll no step on your toes!), the visits to check out venues. No talk of recession then. Perhaps the next showcase will have to be in Italy’s version of Pilton.

Each exhibition was different; each challenging. The Pier has brought together work from three artists – Simon Starling (2002, a show called Zenomap); Cathy Wilkes (2005, Selective Memory) and Charles Avery (2007, Scotland and Venice) Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005: Wilkes is on this year’s shortlist. Avery ought to be on the next one, if there’s justice in the world.

I was under the impression that the work the Pier had was shown at the actual exhibitions; in fact, it’s not. In Venice Starling exhibited a pile of rhododendrons on a bed of loam and pebbles, floating on blue and yellow plastic pipes, attached to what appears to be a shiny green oil drum – perhaps a float, rather like a St Kildan message boat? – in a sumptuous Venetian corridor hung with oils and graced with a very hefty chandelier.

(It looks as odd as it reads, believe me.) It was a meditation on the history of the Spanish plant, brought here in the 18th century but now considered a weed. The curators said ‘Island of Weed’ “obliquely challenged the openness of any system, whether natural, nationalistic or conceptual.” I thought the Pier might be challenged, and wondered if it’d be the same rhododendrons.

But no – and rightly, I guess. Artists develop. Starling’s contribution is called ‘Autoxylopyrolcloboros’ (sigh). It was a slide show – 38 6×7 cm colour transparencies, lasting ten minutes, done in 2006 during a residency at Cove Park, close to the Clyde and Faslane, tracking the final journey of a 20-foot clinker boat called the ‘Dignity’. Bear that name in mind.

‘Transformation, of one thing or another…is at the heart of Starling’s work’, the info informs us. The vessel was salvaged and made seaworthy. The slides are of her being made unseaworthy again on a calm day on Loch Lomond. The stove burns away powering the boat; two lifejacketed fellas (wise, those lifejackets) saw off bits of the boat to feed the stove until there’s no more boat. She sinks and the fellas, presumably, swim to the trusty vessel on which the artist is taking the pictures.

Poor old Dignity. The seats, which look like good mahogany, go. The guys cut away at the middle of the boat, not the stern, perhaps to make it all happen more quickly. The propellor sinks last. A bit ghostly, that slide. There’s a sad little pool of oil. Then a lot of flotsam and jetsam. Then a whirring and riffle of projector noise, and the whole thing starts again.

Maybe it’s because I come from a place where boats are iconic in all sorts of ways, and fishing boats seem to be doomed – but I found this to be a self-indulgent and facile piece of work. I hated seeing the destruction of the salvage work, and was not inclined, as perhaps I should have been, to think about change, or returning to the sea that claimed you before.

The images are beautifully shot; the clarity is remarkable, as is the detail of oily pumps and splitting wood. I’d rather celebrate restoration than lovingly film a stubby wee boat with a black stove glowing wood red, funnel puffing white smoke being destroyed. But perhaps the point; it’s a metaphor for all the destructions on the Clyde and elsewhere?

If so – then that’s a metaphor which demands engagement on another level with politics and economics. It had a Boy Scout-ish look about it, a gimmicky look I didn’t warm to. And who’s going to see it? Only me, that morning. It won’t be showing in the dole offices or workingmen’s clubs, that’s for sure. But it certainly got a response from me, albeit an irritated one, and I haven’t forgotten it.

The next room was low-lit too. Cathy Wilkes’ Biennial show She’s Pregnant Again has had some coverage in the press recently because of the Turner nomination. I was expecting a pram, a kitchen sink, a plastic bowl with the remains of porridge in it. Perhaps a mannequin with tights on next to a buggy but cunningly not touching it. Her curators described her work as “scaveng(ing) expression from the orchestation of everyday materials…these…become ecologies of representation just within our grasp, yet they knowingly indicate that they have been touched over and over again by her own hands.” Oo – kaay.

No. She shows 6 bundles of decaying brown grasses. They either lie on polythene sheeting, or are covered in it, shroud-like. Half way along this mournful sheet are placed 24 red clay tiles in a small neat pile. The tiles have a faded stripe down the middle. Beside one of the bundles is what looks like a bit of expandable trellis – white paint flaking off.

It’s very different from the mechanistic, hard installation I was expecting. No strangers to dead grass, broken trellising and poly sheeting, Orcadians. Part of a day’s work. But this room feels like an Egyptian tomb, a kind of book of the dead. It’s unsettling. The meaning of the tiles eluded me.

It was wonderful to come into the light, and find Philip Avery’s book The Islanders, an Introduction on the windowsill. I opened it at random.

“On the island, the locals are mad for eggs pickled in gin…many of the prospectors who came … during the kelp rush, found ruin in the form of eggs, and now live destitute…”. I’m hooked.

The fronispiece is his own globe, with wonderful names – ‘the principle of the dithering eel’, for example. The story of the Hunter and his companion (they think they are Miss Miss and Only McFew, but that’s a misunderstanding) and his investigation of the Island’s Gods and mortals, is Borgesian in its perfectly compelling evocation of another world.

Avery told Tom Morton: “before The Islanders I had started to find being an artist a bit itty-bitty. I wanted to create something that could grow… the structure is the art… not the artefacts, which are the terms of the structure.” Now that, actually, I understand. This is part of what was at the Biennale – and it keeps evolving, like a world does. It’s an ongoing engagement with philosophy and culture through all kinds of media – the words, the evocative, funny, sad, highly accomplished drawings, the models of Gods .

The Ancients – three sturdy cobras – “stand erect as that is how their beards may be best admired.” Dha accommodates passion on his logical linear outline. Avery tells us ‘when visiting Dha of an evening, take care as you go, lest you catch ardent lovers well advanced, for Dha is the God of ’em. The curves of this strangely familiar form provide an ideal cradle for the passion.”

This mix of sly references, wit and discourse on the meaning of things provides a Swiftian freedom. The book is a treasure house. Avery is an inspired draughtsman – like Laura Knight, like Lucien Freud, like Mentzel. He’s unafraid, witty, observant – Heidless Magregor’s, where Gods and mortals meet to drink, the pickled eggs are piled high on the shelves by the stag’s head and the muzzled lurcher (he’s very good at dogs) sprawls under cigar smokers – is as busy as Frith (his love of detail, of narrative, is very Victorian – but not Scottish kailyark. Kailyard transformed into an Athenian discourse perhaps.)

He’s as moral as Breugel, as compelling as Mervyn Peake. The freedom of creating a world which is an island, like our islands, yet not, provides a perfect space in which to roam, be unfettered by prosaic, literal interpretations. It’s important to say too that this is by no means disengaged, in-me-own-heid work. Avery poses important questions, about the search for knowledge, and about how we learn to live, what we use to get us by.

My favourite picture is of ‘Triangleland Bourgeoisie studying the head of an Aleph.’ It’s a perfect little satire on the audience and the artist. The couple, dressed in their best, peer at their catalogue, and at the Aleph, in utter bemusement. They are from Onomatopoeia, the Island’s town, “outpost turned boomtown, vulgar theme park…”. Islanders will feel instant recognition, yet rejoice in the strangeness.

The accompanying show, Circles In Landscape by Philip Hughes, makes a strange contrast. He records landscape, and there are twenty drawings of stones here, done usually in one sitting. The info says “the physical act of working within (or in some cases against) the elements adds a sense of immediacy to the work which will be appreciated by anyone who has experienced a wintry day in Orkney.”

Well, I certainly thought they were the coldest drawings I’ve seen, but not because of physical immediacy. They look computer generated, like architect’s drawings. It’s as if someone had decided to paint the apses of 20 churches and they all turned out looking the same. Callanish could be Brodgar; Avebury could be Stonehenge. The familiar outlines, rendered so starkly, are so Classical as to be dead. Not a shadow in site. Not a hint of weather.

We have enough terrible Romantic swirly cloud and sunset paintings of stone circles, and enough people desperate to invest meaning in them, be Druids round them and search for alignments with this that or the other, I suppose, so I should be glad of a little severity. But I’m not. I looked for rubbings out, or a slip of the hand. Not one.

They all cost around the four thousand mark (they’re big, mind), and the couple who drifted in beside me thought they were “fantastic.” An odd choice of word; fantastic, i.e., existing only in the imagination, they are not. Nary a hint of the fanciful. But if you want an absolutely correct rendition of a stone circle, he’s your man. Avery’s book is about £65 I think. I know where I’d put my money.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre