Exhibition of the week Edinburgh Art Festival
Various venues around the city (www.edinburghartfestival.com). Until 28 August
For years after it first began, in 2004, the Edinburgh Art Festival didn’t have much of an identity, said Sarah Urwin Jones in The Herald (Glasgow). The festival – a subsidiary event to the wider programme held in the Scottish capital every August – seemed more like a “catalogue guide” to the various exhibitions already taking place in the city than a “curated entity” in its own right. But this year, there is a sense that it has really “grown into itself”. As well as the assorted museum exhibitions on display in Edinburgh, the festival’s “huge” programme features specially commissioned events in the form of “innovative” pop-up shows and lectures, in locations from the Southside to Leith to the Jupiter Artland sculpture park just outside the city. From Mexican artist Damián Ortega’s “thought-provoking” show at The Fruitmarket Gallery to More Lasting Than Bronze, a series of seven contemporary art displays sited across the city as part of the ongoing First World War commemorations, there is a “vast array” of art on show.
The festival’s art takes you in “all sorts of unexpected directions”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. At Leith Dock, Ciara Phillips has painted a ship in “pink and blue post-pop camouflage”. It is both a homage to the “dazzle ship” camouflage created by artists during WWI to confuse the enemy, and a meditation on women’s work in that war; the words “Every Woman a Signal Tower”, embedded in the pattern in Morse code in reflective paint, glow at night. At Jupiter Artland, we get the “beautiful sight” of French artist Christian Boltanski’s Animitas, an installation for which he has capped reeds in a pond with tiny ceramic bells that jingle in the breeze. Elsewhere, the Talbot Rice Gallery has a show devoted to the portraitist Alice Neel that showcases her “marvellously awkward insights” to “uneasy perfection”.
While the programme is hardly “bursting with aesthetic opportunity”, there are signs the festival is finally becoming as ambitious as it should be, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. A “spirit of adventure” runs through the exhibits, which make imaginative use of the city’s architecture. A case in point is the “beautiful sadness” of the Pakistani artist Bani Abidi’s sound installation in the disused Old Royal High School – a series of ballads sung by the mothers of Indian soldiers in WWI, begging their sons not to go to the front. For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine anything that triggers such “memorial profundity” being commissioned in London. Events like this suggest that “something real” is stirring in Edinburgh.
The music journalist David Hepworth selects his five favourite books about pop music. His own latest book, 1971 – Never a Dull Moment:
Rock’s Golden Year, is available from Bantam Press at £20
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom
by Nik Cohn, 1969 (Vintage Classics £8.99). I read this when it first came out and I can still reel off whole paragraphs of its intoxicating hipster prose all these years later. In Cohn’s view, the kind of pop he loved was all over by then. I didn’t agree with him at the time. Now I know it doesn’t matter whether I agree. What matters is the point of view.
The Beatles – All These Years: Volume One: Tune In
by Mark Lewisohn, 2013 (Little, Brown £18.99). Pop’s equivalent of Robert Caro’s still unfinished biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, this succeeds in the same way. It tells the story of the times which The Beatles were to change, and by including every last detail it makes every last detail fascinating.
Baby, Let’s Play House: The Life of Elvis Presley Through the Women Who Loved Him
by Alanna Nash, 2010 (out of print). Since he was almost never alone, Elvis’s hectic love life was played out in front of witnesses, most of whom are consulted here. It’s a thick book. It’s what he would have wanted.
The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
by John Seabrook, 2015 (Jonathan Cape £16.99). Seabrook, a writer at The New Yorker, sets out to discover how today’s chart music is made and played. Much of it is made in Sweden and, to a certain extent, is played by machines. This is an amazing story, encompassing technology, the digital revolution, crime and unimaginable sums of money.
Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music
by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, 2007 (out of print). There’s a fallacy that some music is real and some isn’t. This book traces the power of that illusion, from Leadbelly, via The Monkees and disco, to Nirvana.