We're jammin'

As the weekend approaches I wearily notice I haven't updated this in an age.

Work is the curse of the discursive classes. Or some old winsome guff like that.

Any road. This week is the last chance Edinburgh residents will get the chance to check out the unmissable Francesca Woodman retrospective. Anyone who doesn't bother to do so is on the shit list forever. Or at least goes into the book as a philistine who chose not to take a rare opportunity to gawp at a distinctive and unnerving body of work by a fascinating and obviously uniquely talented photographer.

There's some great background information and online galleries at the Ingleby site for those of you who can't make it along but it's well worth the trip. There's a limnal, haunted melancholy to Woodman's work, the circumstances of her death (by suicide, aged 22) amplifying the already creepy and disturbing erasions and distortions in the pictures- it's absolutely incredible to think that many of the earlier pictures featured in this exhibition were taken by Woodman when she was (by my calculation) only 13 or 14. This poignancy is heightened by the knowledge that few prints saw the light of day during Woodman's lifetime.

The exhibition coincides with a smaller collection of Woodman's work in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of the Artists Rooms series.

The experience of being in the Ingleby pristine, quiet, sun-drenched gallery is slightly disconcerting as the building previously housed Edinburgh's legendary dark, sweat and booze encrusted "Venue".

Anyway. Event of the weekend is the Firecracker night at Jam the Box in GRV.

Local friendly vinyl pusher Fudge Fingas goes back to back with Linkwood Family member House of Traps in a three hour vinyl pile-up. Hopefully it'll whet appetites for the forthcoming Disco 3k weekender in Croatia.

Deviants may want to check the bizarro burlesque bacchanal Confusion is Sex tonight with FriendOfClom Kris Wasabi playing bangers in the main room after Gutter Klinik, a band "specialising in gayer-than-cum-on-a-moustache pop". Indeed.

I'm tempted but I'm a one-night a weekend man this weather.

More to come soon, I promise, including something about all these fuds who've retrospectively decided they never liked Sonic Youth because they were never really a band anyway more a late-capitalist curatorial project enslaving us all in some sort of po-mo whorl of tasteful countercultural signifiers until you just can't tell what's properly avant-garde anymore! Or you can obviously, and do, with a side order of obfuscatory dialectical mince.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Again.

Adrian Searle gets it wrong wrong wrong in his analysis of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's excellent "The house of books has no windows" exhibition which has upped sticks from Edinburgh's Fruitmarket and moved close enough to London for the esteemed London art critic to bother his behind attending. There's the statutory London bashing out of the way. Lovely. I saw this exhibition in Edinburgh and have rattled on about it at length already but some of Searle's arguments are ill-construed and occasionally just plain wrong.

Firstly the Killing Machine, the “interactivity” (the installation is activated by pressing a mundane red button, like you might find on a building site) which Searle derides in an infantile manner is entirely the point. It is an effective and vivid statement about capital punishment and the public discourse in the US relating to the state sanctioned murder of wrongdoers. It is a mechanical and dehumanised process which has become disinfected of all the messy business of stoning, shooting or beheading. This antiseptic process is perfectly elucidated in Erroll Morris’ “Dr Death” in which “death systems engineer” Fred A. Leuchter shamelessly declares himself a humanitarian for speeding the passage of his charges. The cabaret/disco/entertainment elements of the piece are surely echoes of the legal/media and political circus that surrounds the death of the condemned, all distractions from the ugly clacking truth of the chair in front of us.

And on we go to the risible notion that Opera for a Small Room is less successful than a Tom Waits song. It’s a little tragic when art critics start talking about music, especially when they appropriate Waits’ vocal affectations (“He don’t need no etc…). If anything Opera… evokes the more recent work of any number of Godspeed! You Black Emperor/Silver Mount Zion projects. There’s doom, regret and isolation in the narrators voice, Waits’ world teems with humanity, his lonely songs sung when everyone’s gone home, not alone in the dark in a shed with an owl. The real treat, as in the Killing Machine, is in the clanking eccentric mechanics of the piece (in a way, this is where Bures Miller & Cardiff actually do share something with Waits)- the way that automation is used to create an unnerving post-human atmosphere in both pieces contributes to the eerie, uncanny atmosphere that both pieces but particularly Opera for a Small Room, evoke. When left to themselves the machines will find their own way to express themselves, recontextualising the work of long-disappeared humanity.

It appears that Searle didn’t even bother to go back for a second look at the Dark Pool which is packed with funny/silly/spooky little details, a tense repetition of words chopped out from books that become a declaration of love laid on a musty old jewellery box, a patented wishing machine, fractious back-and-forth arguments to be listened to through ear trumpets, scratchy radios evoking Dorothy’s deserted home after the tornado in Kansas. All of this is done from memory and it’s months since I’ve seen the work. Perhaps Searle has tasted and tested too much. Dark Pool was lovely, a bit impenetrable at first but I returned to it a number of times over the months it was at Fruitmarket such was the “purchase” it made on my imagination.

The final and most glaring oversight in Searle’s review is that he doesn’t once mention the title piece “The House of Books Has No Windows”, perhaps he walked sniffily past thinking that a big house made of books doesn’t merit the Guardian art critics attention. And that is his loss. This is the newest piece and was commissioned by the Fruitmarket and Modern Art Oxford specifically for these exhibitions! encapsulates a lot of what they’re about beyond the mechanics and the creaks. It’s a house, made of books, with no windows. I loved it, climbing inside the door was profoundly moving, an immediate, emotional experience that evokes the disappeared who once owned the books, the smell of the books triggering memories of clearing out the houses of the dead, the moldering smell of disuse, obsolescence and forgetting, the slow impassive solitary death of objects as a counterpoint to our own messy, rapid and smelly fate. If you want quiet, undirected understatement Adrian, this is where you’d have found it. But you wanted to climb in the chair.

The sloping brow of a stagecoach tilter...

photo copyright Joanna Kane.
Somnambulists is a fantastic little exhibition of work by Joanna Kane a photographer and artist based in Edinburgh currently showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
It features photographic digital prints of life and death masks from the collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.

The photographs have been subtly manipulated to create an illusion of life from these casts. Through this seemingly straightforward process Kane has extracted an extraordinary amount of humanity from a subject that mightn't appear that gripping. Phrenology is seen as an unfashionable and embarrassing excess from the gold rush of scientific enquiry throughout the enlightenment. The notion that someone's character can be alluded to through their skull structure is laughable but Kane has created the impression that there's something more to these masks than the simple imprint created by the subjects head.

There's a variety of people featured, a fair few doctors and phrenologists, a couple of mining engineers from Leith, some unknowns and a remarkable smattering of early 19th century writers. The photograph of James Hogg's cast was a wonderful surprise as I have been fascinated with him since moving to Edinburgh and first reading The Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg's face is as I'd imagined it, a long drawn spade of a man reminiscent of Noel Browne in his later years. This got me thinking about the kinds of visual games you play with yourself when you go abroad and meet someone who puts you in mind of an old friend.

This also struck me when looking at some of the poets featured. Wordsworth's face is an absolute joy and was completely unlike I'd imagined him, somehow he's just too manly in real life. Keats and Coleridge are also there along with William Blake. Blake's portrait is superb, a stern blank canvas upon which you can project pretty much anything. There's a touch of Brando (as Kurtz) and more than a hint of Terry Gilliam too in his stern sleeping mask. The book accompanying the exhibition refers to a friend of Blake's expressing his disappointment that the cast captures none of Blake's good-naturedness. The book features extensive notes about all the photos and features a hilarious spat between Hogg and the Phrenological fraternity.

The whole exhibition is a fantastic evocation of a period before photography where many exciting ideas were flying around. Kane's photography is based around Phrenology and alludes in the title to Mesmerism which was a fashionable movement at the time.
It also has a great sense of Edinburgh as a place at that time with it's engineers and it's doctors and it's poets and philosophers.

I've always had difficulty imagining real people in the past. I've always had this irrational notion that somehow people looked different. This killed that notion stone dead, the photos could be of people you see in the street- all the more so in Edinburgh where I'm sure I've seen some of the "unknown" casts on the number 25 bus in the morning! They have a life to them that had me imagining them yawning and winking at each other after we had left and the lights blinked off.

If you're in the portrait gallery go into the gift shop and look at the portrait of Edwin Morgan by Alexander Moffatt over the door. It's a stoater.