Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 13 August 2011

SEE, this is what happens when you get old – young turks take your history and re-invent it better. Constant Reader, I was there in the 60s, and unlike many, remember it.

I remember  my Biba trouser suit, my long white socks, the day I asked the Stromness hairdresser to do me a Mary Quant, and the day I went to Margaret Dowie’s fish shop to buy the tea, in a hippie skirt, headband, and no shoes. She said, “are your feet no kinda cowld? That’ll be three and seven…” She was a materialist, who had a point. My feet were freezing.

Jim Lambie Beach Boy installation at the Pier

Walk into this exhibition and you’re immediately in a haircut Quant world – the floor is Op Art – and it’s stunning. Move closer and you get, really, an investigation of masculinity and freedom. Lambie uses the 60s zeitgeist – that innocence and energy – to investigate his own, new century concerns.

The knight’s helmet, buckler, lance, appear, battered and broken. The  brash colours escape from the floor and re-emerge high up (‘that een’s escaped’ said my old school pal, pointing to a fleur de lys-like emblem high on the wall. The exhibition – not least the titles – bubbles with warm wit and you almost want to hear the sound track.

Poignantly, in the wee room, a video track of a bottle, randomly rolling around the back of a van, perfectly sums up, I think, both my generations’ frustration with the failure of the dream, and Lambie’s own sadness that he can’t, somehow, find a way back into that daft gaiety, find a way to emerge past the vileness that was Thatcher and then – even worse – Blair.

Upstairs – Orkney in photographs. You have to hand it to the Pier; they do contrast really well. You can meander about amongst rural vistas, and then go back downstairs for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Don’t miss this exhibition – if you are young, it’ll give you stuff to consider; if you are old, it’ll make you wonder where we all went wrong (was it the bare feet?) and get some comfort from the fact that the Jim Lambies are paying attention to those great 60s lyrics.

With apologies for the amendation – ‘he’s got everything he needs, he’s an artist, he don’t look back.’

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre