Art reviews: Drawing for Instruction | Smugglerius Unveiled

Published on Tuesday 9 March 2010 18:09

DRAWING FOR INSTRUCTION: THE ART OF EXPLANATION **** SMUGGLERIUS UNVEILED *** TALBOT RICE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

MUCH ink has been spilled about the demise of drawing in teaching art. Drawing for Instruction, at Edinburgh University's Talbot Rice Gallery, manages (almost) to sidestep this quagmire by looking at the role of drawing in academic contexts, past and present.

By taking visual communication a step away from aesthetic, it enables us to see how the act of drawing has changed in the digital age: what can be gained through technology and what lost.

One of the oldest groups of drawings is in the submission of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, a collection of studies of horse anatomy by Charles Landseer, older brother of Edwin (Monarch of the Glen). His works are exquisite and occasionally gruesome, his pencil a scalpel which pulls aside flesh and studies the workings of muscles. This is drawing in a tradition which has endured since the Renaissance: drawing as a means of exploring the world.

These are accompanied by a series of charming diagrams on cloth painted by Vet School staff around the turn of the century. They are less concerned with aesthetics, but for those seeking to understand the structure of subcutaneous tissue, have a clarity which is worth a thousands words. The artists of the Medical Illustration Graphics Lab at the Western Infirmary, are working on similar subjects: describing the structure of blood vessels, or elbow joints. But for them, in the 21st century, the hand-drawn is increasingly enhanced, or replaced , by software. There is no doubting the polish and clarity, but there is little of the artist's hand.

Chemists might not seem to have much connection with drawing but, in fact "it is unusual for a chemist to work anything out and not to draw". Some of the work gathered here from Edinburgh University's School of Chemistry is the most immediate in the show: diagrams dotted with chemical symbols sketched rapidly in ballpoint on the back of a letter: drawing as a means of fleshing out a fresh calculation.

The School also presents a century of three-dimensional teaching aids, from Krantz Models of crystal structures in varnished cardboard, to wire-and-plastic models created by Edinburgh University's Arnold Beevers (still exported all over the world), to today's digital models, watched by first-year undergraduates using 3-D glasses. Drawing as documentation is explored through a small selection of botanical drawings from Edinburgh University Library Special Collections, by William Roxburgh and Alexander Walker, both of whom were drawing plants in India in the 18th century. There is a sense of drawing to understand, relaying information in the cause of further discovery. And there is that same sense in the sketches of inmates at the Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital, commissioned by the physician-superintendent in 1872, and now in Lothian Health Services Archive. But this post-enlightenment spirit which thought the human mind and its damage could be mapped as easily as the plant life of the Malabar Coast seems to us now at best naive, at worst exploitative.

The spirit of the passionate documentalist is, however, alive and well in the university's Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, in the meticulous drawings made by assistant curator John Raymond of an 18th-century Francis Coston harpsichord. This is draughtsmanship at its fastidious best, describing the instrument with precise measurements from the placing of its strings to its decorative hinges. While he admits he may have overdone it on detail, the effect is to communicate passion, not tedium. His sheer craftsmanship brings these drawings close to works of art.

One might have hoped for something similar from the architects, but their submission – the work of a single student, Paul Pattinson – hardly does justice to the range of uses of drawing within architectural practice. His documentation of the stages of building a cardboard scale model is detailed and meticulous, but it doesn't convey the immediacy of idea becoming line.

And what of the artists? There is a wall here of drawings from Edinburgh College of Art, "used in instruction", though it is unclear exactly how. They vary in style and approach, from a beautiful nude from 1880 to an earnest attempt to get to grips with the bones of the foot. It is a pleasure to see them, but the presentation feels more historical than contemporary. Ironically, they are less vivid than the messy diagrams of the chemists upstairs.

Certainly, the cast known as "Smugglerius" was found languishing in a cupboard by artist and ECA tutor Joan Smith and anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo. A plaster cast of a (now lost) 18th-century bronze of a man, flayed or "corch", and arranged in the classical pose of the "Dying Gaul", it had been used by generations of students at ECA in anatomy classes.

Looking at it with the sensibility of contemporary art, Smith and Cannizzo saw it – him – rather differently. This was the cast of a human body. Was it possible to discover who he had been? Having obtained Heritage Lottery Funding to repair the cast, they now present it alongside a series of new photographs by Caroline Douglas and the results of their research.

The man is "most likely" to have been highwayman James Langar, hanged in 1776 and saved from the dissection table by anatomist William Hunter, who noticed his well-formed muscles. Casts of his body were used at the Royal Academy, where he got his mock-Latin nickname, and ECA.

Now presented in Talbot Rice's Georgian Gallery, we are made freshly aware of his humanity, the pathos of his broken ear and chipped foot, the way he holds us between fascination, sympathy and revulsion, and highlights the striking differences between the attitudes of his age and ours.

This is the great strength of contemporary art – art as research, as concept – to show us all this. But it also reveals its limits. It's fascinating, but the object with true visual power is Smugglerius himself. He has been here for 200 years, we're just seeing him in a new light.

&#149 Run ended