Arts Diary: A smashing collection from the man who made it hard to wipe feet in Morningside

Published on Tuesday 1 March 2011 17:48

BAD boy artist Kevin Harman made his name by nicking Morningside doormats for an Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) project, tidying skips and smashing the window of an art gallery. He opens his new show at an old ambulance depot in Edinburgh on Friday.

The work includes a plastercast of a sex doll topped by a gorilla head, a one-pixel photograph and framed receipts. The title of the exhibition, at the Old Ambulance Depot in Brunswick Street, is Mesomorphic. "It's just a young guy exploring masculinity today," says Harman.

Harman's days at ECA, where he graduated from the Master of Fine Art course in 2009, saw him tangle with both college authorities and the police, and he demonstrated a keen flair for publicity. His original thinking and wit have also won several art prizes, while Richard Demarco, one of his biggest fans, signed off on travel scholarships for recent trips to Poland and Romania.

In 2008 Harman "borrowed" 200 doormats for an installation across the floor of the main ECA hall, titled Love thy Neighbour. With his striking sculpture The Big F--- Off, he created a kind of rocket using 480 discarded golf clubs bursting out of a trash can.

In 2009 he smashed a plate-glass window at The Collective Gallery with an iron bar, having written to them warning of his intention to create an artwork called Brick. He showed the subsequent film, and smashed window, at the ECA, but was also fined 200 for a breach of the peace. He now has a day job in a charity shop.

"I've sold a few prints, but the problem is the work I make isn't really commercially viable," he says. "I don't put them out for sale, really." By the standards of the past, the work at Brunswick Street sounds positively tame.

Brick features, along with a skip work - where Harman single-handedly rearranges the contents of a skip with near maniacal tidiness. Guerilla Girl, a title taken from a group of feminist art provocateurs, is a sex doll cast in pure white plaster wearing a gorilla's head.

"It looks relatively sexy, but it seems a bit pregnant, or barrel-shaped around the midriff and belly, and the gorilla mask has a real sadness to it," he says.

For his one-pixel self-portrait, he worked with a friend who developed a camera to use one pixel rather than many millions. The self-portrait is a single colour, an off-pink, greyish hue, but has a "reflective quality".

Then there are the framed receipts: a receipt for a frame, framed by the frame. This piece of "self-containment" costs 60. "They pay 60, they get an artwork which is worth more than 60," says Harman. Produced in a limited edition of ten, all have sold.

Birthday snubbing

The National Galleries of Scotland will devote its main summer show this August to celebrating the 80th birthday of Dame Elizabeth Blackadder. As one of Scotland's "best loved and most active artists" and the first woman artist elected to both London's Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy, she is getting the prime space of the Royal Scottish Academy building on the Mound.

Why, then, asks artist Hugh Buchanan, was she not considered worthy of inclusion in Tate Britain's big Watercolour show? The exhibition spans 800 years with some 200 artworks but it couldn't find a place for an artist who made watercolours "her crowning glory", he said.

The Tate show promises "a fresh assessment of the history of watercolour painting in Britain from the Middle Ages through to the present day". It includes names as Anish Kapoor and Andy Goldsworthy alongside William Blake and the Scottish-born Peter Doig.

Tracey Emin is in there, with Berlin The Last Week in April 1998, and so is Karla Black, Scotland's chosen artist for its pavillion at this year's Venice Biennale, with Opportunity For Girls 2006, made of cellophane, watercolour, emulsion, acrylic paints, Vaseline, glass, shampoo, hair gel, toothpaste, and thread.Blackadder, who is popular for her representations of cats and flowers, might not have that challenging edge but, says Buchanan, no mean watercolourist himself: "She is hugely influential, she and David Hockney were roughly contemporary, and I don't think Hockney is in either, which is absurd. Their composition sensibilities crystalised the 1970s look of watercolur.

"Elizabeth Blackadder created that very sparse look that we all take for granted now, empty space. An iris or a lily, floating in empty space on white paper - it was a revolutionary way to treat watercolour." Not to show her, says Buchanan, whose own fans range from Prince Charles to AN Wilson is "ludicrous", and smacks of "recklessly partisan" scholarship.

The Scottish Gallery's Guy Peploe, who represents the artist, is more sanguine: "You could probably have a parlour game with the list of painters (in that exhibition] and come up with an alternative one."

Monstrously good

DIRECTOR Danny Boyle's "monster hit" Frankenstein is to be broadcast from the National Theatre in London live to cinemas in Scotland on 17 and 24 March. The production features Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating the roles of Frankenstein and the Creature. Tickets are still available for screenings at Aberdeen's Belmont Picturehouse, Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Glasgow Film Theatre.