Art review: What You See Is Where You're At, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

WHEN I speak to Simon Groom it is practically two years to the day since he took over the reins as director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The Edinburgh University and Courtauld Institute graduate came to the post from Tate Liverpool, after an earlier stint at Cambridge's Kettle's Yard.

Groom, however, will have little time to reflect this week as currently he has bigger anniversaries on his mind. On 10 August next year, it will be 50 years since the gallery, then housed in the bucolic surroundings of Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden, was opened to the public by Sir Kenneth Clark as "the first National Gallery devoted exclusively to modern art in the British Isles".

The anniversary programme begins now, with a complete rehang of the displays in the gallery's current home in Edinburgh's Belford Road opening next weekend, the biggest shake-up in over two decades. "It's so good an opportunity to celebrate," Groom explains. "We will be holding a special event in August but we thought we should mark it with a year of activities."

Gallery watchers will be keeping an eye on proceedings because although Groom is emphatic that the rehang is a group effort, from a team that includes some very experienced curators, it may provide one of the clearest indications of the new director's own direction.

The first thing that is striking to the outside eye is that while the Dean Gallery across the road remains the home of the Gallery's collection of world-class Dada and Surrealism, Belford Road is placing as strong an emphasis on living artists as its modern and post-war collections. The whole rehang is being branded like an exhibition under the title What You See Is Where You're At. It is, of course, the title of a recent work of art: Glasgow artist Luke Fowler's compelling film portrait of the maverick psychiatrist RD Laing.

"It's signalling the fact that the gallery engages with the contemporary and it has to be able to talk to artists as well as the public now," Groom explains. "Fifty sounds middle-aged and not with it, and of course the whole point of the history of contemporary art is that it is about now, but that artists haven't come from nowhere, they are always looking back. Really the whole rehang is about seeing the collection through new eyes."

Permanent displays are a vexed area for galleries. They have had to respond to developments in art history that have challenged the linear, chronological approach to displaying modern and contemporary art once pioneered by New York's Museum of Modern Art. In recent times, Tate Modern's thematic hang – juxtaposing a late Monet with a contemporary artist like Richard Long – was both embraced in some quarters and fiercely criticised when the gallery launched.

"There are many different approaches as you go through the rooms," says Groom of his own gallery's plans. "Some are devoted to a solo artist, some are hugely mixed up. Some might have three artists. Some might be about a particular way of using paint, for example. Some might be about the use of colour."

Is he, in art-historical terms, having his cake and eating it. "Well what is cake for?" he jokes. "We're trying to present a variety of approaches. For example, artists now are just as fascinated with a collage produced by Eduardo Paolozzi as they are with the kind of collage you see in Luke's film. There's a whole collage suite in the gallery, which goes back to Picasso."

At the centre of the show, reflecting the gallery's central commitment to major works by living artists, is a spectacular new installation, Electric Trees And Telephone Booth Conversations, by Glasgow's Martin Boyce, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale this year. The work is very much of the moment and has been supported by Homecoming Scotland. But you can also reflect on Boyce's trademark use of fluorescent tubes in the context of a monumental 1975 light sculpture by the American artist Dan Flavin on show in another room.

Much of Groom's challenge is how best to integrate the holdings of Scottish art with broader international collections, rescuing it from a ghetto of Scottishness without misunderstanding its art-historical place. Thus Peploe or Fergusson will sit aside work from the giants of European art. "You're not necessarily saying that they and Matisse are of equal historical stature, but that we know that the colourists worked in Paris, for example; that they were interested in the same things."

The exterior of the gallery will also be transformed, including an installation of Nathan Coley's signature work There Will Be No Miracles Here, first shown in the spectacular surroundings of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. "I'm really pleased to get the chance to show it," says Groom, who curated the Turner Prize display at Liverpool the year that Coley was nominated. "Before I even came here, I thought it was a key work and the way we have placed it draws in the whole landscape, the nearby cathedral, the whole panoramic sweep of Edinburgh."

So will there be Miracles at the gallery in its 50th year? Groom won't be drawn on major announcements, but does want to emphasise that more change is afoot. "I did feel that the gallery had slightly lost its affection, or its place within a community. I'm passionate to engage with younger artists, as well as with older artists. To shake up the perception of what the gallery might have been. I'd love people to feel that everything we do is a must see." v

What You See Is Where You're At opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Saturday www.nationalgalleries.org

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.