Arts review: Running Time: Artist Films In Scotland 1960 To Now

Published on Friday 23 October 2009 16:49

Running Time: Artist Films In Scotland 1960 To Now Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

I'M watching an indistinct and far off man in grainy black and white, caught, it seems, in perpetual motion. He's in some unclear grassy landscape and he's not alone. Superimposed on this image is a thin spectre like image: the same man, but closer up. In effect he is chasing his own shadow, always tantalisingly out of reach.

Running Time, by the artistic duo Madelon Hooykaas (from the Netherlands) and Glaswegian Elsa Stansfield (1945-2004) is an art work of its time, concerned with the structure of film and the new (and limited) visual trickery that early video technology could make in 1979. It lends its name neatly to this much heralded survey of artists' film and video in Scotland currently occupying the top floor of the Dean Gallery in a rotating five-week programme of 100 works by more than 60 artists.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Hooykaas and Stansfield's work is too apt a metaphor for a show which chases ghosts without evident success. Running Time never reaches a clear destination, either visual or intellectual. It reduces a complex and rich visual history to an endless loop, as empty and without context as the grassy expanse in which our running man is caught.

If the artists sound good – everyone from Eduardo Paolozzi, the Boyle Family, Margaret Tait and Douglas Gordon to Hayley Tompkins and Katy Dove – Running Time is, on the face of its first instalment, a dreary experience. Economically slotted in to the viewing spaces vacated by the Dean's last exhibition, The Enlightenments, it consists of two big screens and a viewing room with three video monitors.

Moving image is a complicated and expensive business to present, but this is a horrible and low-rent halfway house: neither the intense privacy of the viewing booth, nor the investment-heavy luxury of film and video installation.

To find out what's actually showing you must negotiate a complex thematic programme, based around ideas such as "portraits in action" and "drama and suspense". The programmes, I guess, are meant to draw out unexpected influences, narratives and parallels. But judging on week one alone, it's a horrible approach, placing apprentices, journeymen and old masters in close collision without ever really drawing out an intellectual coherence.

A survey of 50 years of artists' film-making in Scotland is an outrageously overdue idea. If it's a commonplace that all artists nowadays make film, then it's also a concern that early pioneers have been horrendously overlooked.

In recent years much has been done by Professor Stephen Partridge and his colleagues at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee. His research project, REWIND, has restored and preserved the archive of early British video artists like Kevin Atherton and David Hall whose pioneering TV Interruptions were dropped unannounced into mainstream television in the summer of 1971. At the same time the important Orcadian filmmaker Margaret Tait's marvellous archive has had renewed attention through a complete retrospective at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2004 and a Lux touring programme.

Some of these works will emerge in Running Time over the new few weeks. But where does this complex and particular history move into the way that artists work now? Some, like Rosalind Nashashibi for example, are making serious investigations into the special nature of film, others like David Shrigley dip in and out of animation alongside drawing and sculpture. Where does artists' film and video sit now in an age of mass culture, from the Hollywood blockbuster to the homespun values of YouTube?

Running Time doesn't answer any of these questions. There is no explanation of why artists were selected (there's an omission list as long as your arm) or why some artists are represented by their keynote works and others by what appears to be simply expedient recent examples. There's no sense of technology, of history, of why and how artists started making film, or of where and when they showed it.

Of course, there are individual treasures in store. In the current selection I loved the chance to see Beagles and Ramsay's brilliant Trilogy again, and Torsten Lauschmann's elegant and eloquent animation The Mathematician. In future showings, alongside the key historical works Luke Fowler's Pilgrimage From Scattered Points is a tricksy elegy for 1960 idealism and Mandy McIntosh's Oompie Ka Doompie is a brilliant and complex constructed memoir.

Running Time itself, though, is a squandering of opportunity. Scotland has been crying out for a proper historical survey of its artists' films, for a proper catalogue, for serious critical analysis. This is not it.

The gallery may have felt it was righting a historical wrong, travelling light and economical in straitened times. But if the National Galleries of Scotland can't provide either the serious scholarship required or the sheer intensity and often great fun that artists' film and video can provide, I'm not sure what it is they can do. On the back of this effort, we won't now see another serious survey of the field in this country: both the audience and the art historians have been seriously short-changed.

Until 22 November.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009