Art review: Inspired

Published on Friday 10 April 2009 18:26

DESPITE its occasional ironic insights, a Burns-inspired exhibition in Homecoming year brings out the Jeremy Paxman in Moira Jeffrey

IT'S ONLY April, but I'm already beginning to feel that Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, is right on the money this year. Last month, when Mills announced that his 2009 festival would not be featuring anything to do with Robert Burns in the Year of Homecoming there was a fair bit of public grumbling. In fact, the programme includes some really striking Scottish elements but manages to avoid themes that will appear thoroughly dog-eared by August.

This being a nation of real cultural sophistication, though, any discussion about what was in the programme was quickly superseded by outrage about what was on the cover. The rather ravishing "toile" by west coast design duo Timorous Beasties, featuring Edinburgh landmarks such as perpetual roadworks, was revealed by outraged Holy Willies to be a nasty Glasgow plot to undermine the Athens of the North.

The question raised by Mills's decision, of course, is that of how Homecoming's Burnsian celebrations might maintain their momentum right throughout the year. I began my Homecoming year optimistically with the National Theatre of Scotland and Andrew O'Hagan's play Be Near Me. Well, as optimistic as one could be seeing a play about deeply embedded sectarianism and small-town sexual frustration.

Later I enjoyed the artist Graham Fagen's Burns-tinged exhibition at the Changing Room in Stirling. The tracks created for that city's Roots festival – for which Fagen and reggae producer Adrian Sherwood imagined Burns had travelled to the West Indies and created dub versions of classic ballads – have made it on to my spring play list.

But I think that might be almost enough for now. If I read the names Tam O' Shanter, Jean Armour or even Banffshire singer Sandi Thom once more, I may need to declare the year over and put my well-thumbed copy of Burns in the bin.

Clearly, I may not be the best placed reviewer for Inspired, the flagship show at Glasgow's Mitchell Library, which comes with the rather long-winded subtitle of "Major Contemporary Art Exhibition celebrating the life and work of Burns".

I'm actually a true believer when it comes to Rabbie, but Inspired, with artists as diverse as Ed Ruscha, the Chapman Brothers and John Bellany, has finally brought out my inner Jeremy Paxman. The broadcaster couldn't control his innate contrariness last year and announced his antipathy towards the poet in the foreword to a Scottish dictionary. Is it perhaps about the way Inspired turns the complicated, infuriating Burns into something like official culture that is making my knee begin to jerk?

I love the Mitchell Library dearly, though, and am always thrilled when its magnificent Reading Room is opened up for exhibition purposes. Its Burns collection is second to none and deserves a serious showcase. Inspired opens with a dark and deliberately shrine-like selection of objects and manuscripts. As you thrill to the poet's handwriting you are brought up short by a facsimile of his skull. Is Burns worship a form of cultural necrophilia as outdated as the "science" of phrenology? Is Burns' output a timeless, universal resource or is it reshaped and re-understood according to time and place?

There may be a chance to engage with such themes as the exhibition comes with a talks programme of real distinction with scholars and artists at the most serious level, from Sheena Wellington to Hamish Whyte. But, in comparison with this, the exhibition itself includes twaddle of the first degree.

Despite featuring 45 international artists, many of whom are very good and some of whom have submitted more than one work; there is no visible attempt to organise the material. Is this a show about the influence of the oral tradition on visual culture, about Scottish enlightenment thought, about sex, class, the rural and the urban, or the modern heritage industry? Is it about the co-existence of organised religion and the traditional belief? Is it a serious engagement with the poetry?

Well, no. Its curatorial philosophy goes something like this: in 1996 the super-realist sculptor and puppeteer Ron Mueck made a dog called Family Dog. Burns wrote a poem that mentions a dog. Here is a sculpture of a dog.

That is not to say that some of the work doesn't have origins in more serious speculation. Graham Fagen inevitably features. He has explored Burns for some years now, not for the poet's own sake but as an exploration of the way the artist as an Ayrshire child was expected to venerate Burns, when it was the siren call of punk rock or Jamaican reggae that really lured him. Here he reworks images of the Tree Of Liberty and what a shrivelled and withered thing it has become.

Douglas Gordon is an artist who has long looked to Scottish literature for models, although here he submits a trite one-liner, the word houghmagandie spelled out on a Scrabble board. Calum Colvin looks at the way Burns's image was used as a rallying point for subsequent generations of radicals. Peter Howson gives voice to a complaint about the "degrading" use of Burns's portrait image over the years by, er… making another one.

Inspired is a tremendous feat of organisation, yet at times it suffers from a failure of imagination. If a handful of works evoke satire on the ubiquity of Burns, an equal number seem to pander to the worst ploughman poet clichs. The nadir of the show comes in a darkened ante-chamber where a wooden figure, a plywood ploughman, looks into a pool which is actually a video screen streaming images of passersby. At first I thought it was a satire on the heritage industry, but I have since read the work by Itamar Jobani is heartfelt tribute.

The most beautiful work in the show is a polished granite headstone by Timorous Beasties; it is engraved with a graphic silhouette of a wreath, referring to the graveyard-set poem 'Death And Dr Hornbrook' but narrating a more shell-suited encounter with the grim reaper. The duo are designers not artists but that gravestone captures a whole complexity about the nature of memorial, as well as the questions of beauty, the supernatural and gritty reality that are threaded through the poems. It's odd how it's meant to be Robert Burns's year, but this pair have stolen the show twice already. v

• Inspired is at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow until September 20 www.inspired2009.com