Art review: Running Time

Published on Monday 19 October 2009 19:10

RUNNING TIME: ARTISTS FILMS IN SCOTLAND 1960 TO NOW *** DEAN GALLERY, EDINBURGH

ONE of the biggest changes art has undergone in the last 20 years involves the widespread accessibility of digital film-making technology. Film has gone from a difficult, costly and experimental medium to just another addition to the contemporary artist's palette. How this has shaped the films being made is a question worth asking.

Running Time is the biggest survey show of artists' films to date in Scotland, including more than 100 works. It illustrates the practical problems involved in a show of this scale: galleries are not designed to be cinemas and some adapt better than others. The programme at the Dean Gallery will change weekly in order to accommodate as much work as possible, but those seeking to see the whole show will need to visit five times.

Inevitably, the films shown on the two large screens (blacked-out spaces, comfy seats) fare better than those which have to make do with televisions and headphones, which includes Douglas Gordon, Roddy Buchanan and others.

But the attention to detail is rigorous. The programme is clearly delineated, along with the length of each film (note to galleries: critics will be your friend if you do this), and the five weeks of the show are divided according to theme: Portraits in Action this week, followed by Places in Time, Drama and Suspense, Sound and Vision and Form in Motion.

There are two films in the show which are titled Running Time. The first, made by Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield in 1979, is a grainy black and white image of a man running across a hillside. The artists are borrowing from the conventions of cinema and experimenting with the limits of their technology. It doesn't matter too much that the film isn't doing a lot more than that.

The second is by Jason Dee, from 2007, in all the sharpness of digital. Here the running man makes wide circles round the panning camera while a Buster Keaton-ish soundtrack tinkles in the background. The music slows down; so does he. Then it stops, but he keeps going. He appears to outrun the camera, then it leaves him behind. It's all mildly entertaining, but it still feels like an experiment in what the medium has to offer.

This is a weakness in artists' films. Sometimes an artist seems so excited by the possibilities offered by the moving image that he or she forgets about having something to say. Audiences for the first motion pictures didn't mind that they were looking at nothing more than a train moving along a track: the fact that they were watching it on film was exciting enough.

Similarly, Split Seconds, the other 1979 film here by Hooykaas and Stansfield, experiments with split screen and time delays, though in essence it is a film of someone chopping wood. That's all very well only when the technology is new.

Though this exhibition purports to be a historical survey, there is little work here from the early decades. The two films by Hooykaas and Stansfield are the only films in this segment made before 1990 (though works by Margaret Tait, Boyle Family and Eduardo Paolozzi will come later). The vast majority of these works are by artists who have graduated from Glasgow School of Art in the last 20 years, which means that though there is a variety of approaches, there is also a certain homogeneity in the cinematic landscape.

The Portraits in Motion strand is perhaps particularly vulnerable to the accusation of self-indulgence which is sometimes levelled at artist films. More often than not here, the camera is turned inwards while the artist (or a willing substitute) engages in some none-too-meaningful act. Kate V Robertson reads Karl Marx to the commuters outside Anderston Station (mostly, they studiously ignore her); David Sherry attempts to smoke a cigarette which is lying on the ground without moving it.

Some artists appear to be deliberately testing the viewer's ability to endure. Watching Wearing the Fur by recent graduate Ashley Niewenhuizen – 11 minutes of a woman chewing a long coil of hair – is enough to make you want to spit your own furballs.

Beagles and Ramsay take self-indulgence and elevate it to a postmodern, knowing art form. In Two Fine Examples of British Dentistry, they cast themselves as artist-romantics and pose languidly about the place in white suits and powdered wigs while the story unfolds in the verbose voiceover. It's a take on the persona of the artist through the lens of celebrity culture, but it still makes you want to cringe.

That's not to say there aren't gems here. Mark Neville's Jump! films, in which he recreates performances first done in the 1960s and films them in ultra slow motion, work a strange kind of magic. Roddy Buchanan's Out, about an inline skater, is one of the few films here that felt too short. Torsten Lauschmann thoughtfully combines animation and spoken voice to create a portrait of mathematician Paul Erdos. Phil Collins's He Who Laughs Last Laughs Longest, a film of a who-can-laugh-longest competition, captures the hysterical desperation on the far side of laughter.

Douglas Gordon, possibly the best known film artist Scotland has produced in the last two decades, should shine here. But unfortunately, his own compilation, Approximately 20 seconds worth of pretty much every video and film work from 1992 onwards doesn't serve him well.

While others have their films shown in their entirety, his works are delivered in tiny (and unsignposted) segments – 20 seconds is about right for a fly squirming on its back or a pair of hands making a rude gesture, inadequate for his better films and completely useless for the likes of 24-hour Psycho.

In fact, the frustrating Gordon programme is something of a microcosm for an ambitious, uneven endurance test of a show. Those willing to go the distance will learn much about the range and quality of film art produced in Scotland in recent years. Those looking for the gems among these three hours of footage will need to go armed with time and patience.

&#149 Until 22 November (this programme until 25 October, programme changes weekly)