A festival still looking for its own spotlight
Edinburgh Art Festival Various venues ★★★★★
This year sees the 15th annual Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). Those of us whose memories stretch back to the first, in 2004, may remember grand talk of a festival that, in time, would join the Venice Biennale and Art Basel as key fixtures of the international calendar.
It hasn’t turned out that way, of course. In part because EAF has lived forever in the shadow of the worldfamous, long-established Fringe and International festivals, which take place in the same city at the same time. The Scottish capital in summer is more readily associated with comedians than canvases.
One tends to visit EAF in hope rather than expectation – though, any festival with 50 offerings at 30 venues citywide (as this year’s has) shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Among 2018’s special commissions is an atmospheric sound installation by India’s Shilpa Gupta, For in Your Tongue I Cannot Hide, located in the Edinburgh College of Art, in which she gives voice to 100 poets from across the centuries who’ve been jailed for their writings – including Palestine’s Dareen Tatour today. Gupta does so by playing recitations of their poems through 100 microphones dangling from the ceiling, sometimes one by one, sometimes together in a chorus.
If that sounds slightly facile, it’s because my description isn’t doing it justice. The dark room in Edinburgh College of Art’s Engine House lends a suitably prison-like ambience, while the voices provide an uplifting sense that, whatever the repression, writers will never be silenced. On show in the college’s main building, meanwhile, is The Common Sense, a thoughtprovoking video installation by Melanie Gilligan. Set in an uncomfortably familiar future, it’s a dystopian drama – told over 15 screens and 90 minutes – tracking the impact of technology called The Patch. Worn on the roof of one’s mouth, it allows humans to experience other people’s feelings.
As the story progresses, the viewer is left wondering if The Patch will make society more empathetic – and, therefore kinder – or if this new awareness will simply be commodified by multinational conglomerates. In certain scenes, The Common Sense strays into a critique of capitalism to match a back issue of Marxism Today, but it’s still worth a watch.
Sadly, this year’s other commissions are rather a let-down. At Trinity Apse, Scottish duo Ross Birrell and David Harding present Triptych,a filmed concert performance – shown across three adjacent screens – of the Athens State Orchestra playing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). The awed, ecclesiastical setting renders Górecki’s music more moving than I ever remember it. But one struggles to see how this is visual art – and so
One visits the EAF in hope rather than expectation, though it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand
worthy of inclusion in EAF. Surely not just because Birrell and Harding call their work a “triptych”, in the tradition of Christian painting?
There’s a similar problem with Sympathetic Magick, for which artist Ruth Ewan and a group of magicians put on street shows. Her promise is “to bring new layers of meaning to their routines”, but the tricks I saw – with cups, cards and linking rings – looked no more artistic than those on the Royal Mile. Unless “new layers of meaning” had been magically made to disappear.
Thankfully, EAF consists of many exhibitions and the pick of this year’s bunch being John Bellany: The Wild Days at Open Eye, dedicated to the eponymous Scottish painter who died in 2013. It focuses specifically on works – most previously unseen – from the Eighties.
Bellany had made his name two decades earlier with uncompromising, expressionistic paintings that dealt with sex, guilt, death and damnation, partly influenced by a strict Calvinist upbringing. His Eighties’ works are often said to be overblown and lacking in control, but on this show’s evidence, a rethink is required.
That decade, he lost his wife to suicide and almost died himself from liver problems. In many cases, we see personal torment turned to first-rate art: in The Pianist, for example, Bellany depicts himself at a piano wearing a haunted look and is highly reminiscent of Van Gogh. He’s not so much tinkling ivories here as playing the keys of life.
Frustratingly, an exhibition by idiosyncratic Scottish painter Edwin G Lucas doesn’t open until next weekend – meaning, alas, it has to remain unreviewed. Elsewhere, I’d recommend a visit to the Dovecot Gallery, which tells the 140-year history of the department store and design studio Liberty of London, exploring its place at the forefront of different styles, from psychedelia to Art Nouveau. Perhaps best avoided, though, is Ingleby Gallery’s spartan show, Jacob’s Ladder, about man’s relationship with outer space.
The big institutions are staging major summer exhibitions too – which, though organised independently, do appear under the festival umbrella. Standouts are the Scottish National Gallery’s about the long-standing, British love for Rembrandt; and the Scottish National Galley of Modern Art’s retrospective of the German Expressionist, Emil Nolde.
All in all, then, there’s something for every taste in Edinburgh in 2018, so no one should quibble. There are a number of hits, as well as a fair few misses, but that’s inevitable with a jamboree of so many different parts. The challenge going forward, of course, is to turn EAF from a festival to visit because you’re in Edinburgh already into one to visit in its own right.