Arts Review: Desire Lines

Published on Monday 13 April 2009 20:21

GALLERIES closing for refurbishment face a choice: batten down the hatches and prepare a block-busting re-opening, or continue to exhibit, thinking outside the walls. Edinburgh University's Talbot Rice Gallery is using its refurbishment period as an opportunity turn the whole campus into a gallery.

It's an ideal place to invite artists to respond to: a mixture of traditional and modern buildings, indoor and outdoor spaces, infused with the ongoing life of a big, busy institution. The five participating artists are very different, so there is little to unite them in style or theme. Instead, they showed a spectrum of approaches to site-responsive art.

German-born Oliver Godow, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art's MFA course, responded to the invitation by ranging far and wide across the campus with his camera. He immersed himself in the environment, turning his eye for detail on the university's less public side, resulting in a series of images which are exhibited in Talbot Rice's "information hub" in Old College.

Godow has an eye for unusual shapes and colours, and a knack for picking out the strange, surprising or humorous. Sometimes it's just noticing shapes, like the brightly coloured fitness balls in a store room at the Centre for Sport and Exercise. Or it could be a juxtaposition: students sitting an exam in the neo-classical splendour of the Playfair Library; a demonstration skeleton in an anatomy classroom with someone's lecture notes tucked through the pelvis.

One of Godow's photographs shows the tree by the Potterow underpass, a wall of colourful graffiti behind it and a traffic cone in its branches. Walking past it to get to the next part of the show, we find ourselves looking at it more carefully. And that is one of the greatest advantages of a show like this: we begin to look at the environment around us in a different way.

The student union complex at Potterow is an indoor space with an outdoor feel – caf tables spilling over concrete steps under the great perspex dome. It's a communal, social space full of students, and the two artists who have placed work here respond to that.

Iain Kettles makes art with a guerilla flavour. His large inflatable sculptures often appear in public spaces unannounced, without permission. There are currently two works here, but at some point there may be six.

The big balloon-shaped faces, adorned with the kind of masks worn by American wrestlers and colourful phrases from rock lyrics, have a cheeky subversiveness which is just right for this building. They reference the different tribes of student culture, looking at each other across the space with some suspicion, perhaps as different types of students do.

Ellen Munro's work is more subtle, a series of pots congregated around one of the plant areas, but she also has an eye on fun, irony, and fashion. By featuring designs on ready-made pots which reference both ancient finds (Egyptian or Mesopotamian) and 1980s fashion, she is exploring how history is pastiched in the name of "ethnic" style. She subverts this by blending the two, albeit in creating a more knowing pastiche of her own.

George Square Lecture Theatre is a more serious space. The architecture alone tells us this: it is one of the university's most complete expressions of Sixties brutalism, completed by leading Edinburgh modernists RMJM in 1966, and (depending on your point of view) an eyesore responsible for the willful destruction of a Georgian terrace, or a visionary building where form marries function.

Miranda Blennerhassett, who has long had an interest in modernist architecture, has painted two pairs of murals in its stairs and passageways. They echo and explore the features of the building itself – the line of a window; the pattern of bricks on a floor; the turquoise paint on the wall of the staircase – while creating abstract designs of their own.

It's thoughtful, careful work and, like some of the best site-specific art, it draws attention not only to itself but to the environment around it. George Square Lecture Theatre, you begin to notice, is more than a concrete box. It is full of detail (the curved walls, the light fittings) and grand statements (the parallel staircases). It is, in fact, a modernist temple to learning.

Form and function were rarely so happily married than in the bird boxes of Alec Finlay, installed on the trees in George Square. They are part of a larger country-wide project entitled Home to a King. Each is designed with a particular species of bird in mind, and bears a word puzzle or "poem-clue".

They are also entirely functional and may need to remain past the duration of the exhibition if they are found to be "occupied". They are so well concealed that finding them is a game in itself.

The value of a show like this is not so much in the lasting qualities of the work – many of the works here are temporary and specific to these locations – but in the way we experience them. Those who work in the university might happen on them by chance, and notice their environment afresh. Others, map in hand, will find themselves exploring off the beaten track, deviating from official routes, intrepid psycho-geographers of the semi-familiar, noticing the world around them more acutely. And that, surely, is one of the purposes of art.

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