Arts review: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

Published on Monday 26 April 2010 19:01

CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL: LAST MAN OUT TURN OFF LIGHTS **** TRAMWAY, GLASGOW JIM LAMBIE: METAL URBAIN **** MODERN INSTITUTE, GLASGOW CLAIRE BARCLAY: OVERLAP **** GLASGOW PRINT STUDIO CORIN SWORN: PROLOGUE *** Washington Garcia, Glasgow VESTIGES PARK *** LOWSALT, GLASGOW

ON MY way into Christoph Buchel's much-anticipated installation at Tramway, I'm handed a list of warnings. Sharp edges; narrow and tight spaces; sturdy, flat footwear must be worn. Those of a nervous disposition need not apply. Almost as an afterthought, someone has added: "We hope you enjoy your experience."

I have to admit, I'm excited. I've been combing Glasgow International for a show with ambition, which takes a few risks, which requires a bit of intrepidness on the part of the viewer. Open at last after various delays – some, one must surmise, caused by Health and Safety inspectors – this might just be it.

In scale and ambition at least, Bchel's transformation of Tramway 2 using shipping containers into a multi-level environment navigable by stairs and ladders is that show. Even with the ladders out of use, it's still the kind of talked-about show which makes a festival more than just a conglomeration of events trying to reach critical mass. It's one of those things that make you go "wow".

The show starts with two pubs, one a Celtic bar, all green and white, football shirts and team photographs, the other its mirror image in Rangers' red, white and blue. They're real pubs, with beer pumps, sticky photographs of locals on the walls and televisions blaring out football commentary.

By rights, one should access the rest of the installation this way, via ladder. Instead, we must take the next door along, which takes us into a prison visiting room – noticeboards warning of "valid visiting orders", grey institutional paint, a row of chairs in front of a metal grille. Through that, you reach a dormitory, bleak institutional living quarters personalised by girlie pin-ups or a half-built model ship.

At the centre of the main space – the fenced exercise yard of the prison ("No running") is the partially reassembled wreckage of a passenger plane. The fuselage is being pieced together on a wire frame like some macabre jigsaw puzzle. Further pieces are laid on tables, or bagged and numbered. Elsewhere, we can see broken suitcases, plastic vats full of unsorted clothing, a child's Disney rucksack, a Mills & Boon novel, the human detritus of a disaster.

Seeing this work in Scotland, it's impossible to ignore the parallels with the Lockerbie crash, although Bchel insists his scenario is present-day and entirely fictional. It prompts a visceral response. Damaged aircraft paraphernalia – melted oxygen masks, a charred and twisted bank of seating – taps directly into recent collective memory, sending involuntary shivers up the spine.

Elsewhere, in the rooms of the prison, we become voyeurs: the Administration Block with its dusty, overflowing filing cabinets, the washrooms with communal showers, the canteen, the workshop, the little plastic football pitch, soulless institutional spaces meticulously reconstructed. In solitary confinement, you can even step in to a cell 3ft square, just to see what it feels like.

Buchel believes that our society is so image-saturated that, to an extent, the power of the image has been lost. His response is to create such an authentic, three-dimensional world that the viewer suspends his or her disbelief. It's somewhere between art and theatre, in which we – our feet clattering on the wire walkways, not knowing what we'll find round the next corner – are the performers.

Its power is immediate and visceral, coming from its scale an obsessive attention to detail. In terms of ideas, it's weaker. The connections between drinking, football, sectarianism, prison and terrorism seem clumsily drawn, not taking enough account of the subtleties all these big subjects contain. But in terms of raw power, it can't be faulted.

In a different way, Jim Lambie is also an artist who goes for the immersive approach. He deals in floor-to-ceiling transformation of space, in this case the Modern Institute's smart new premises in Osborne Street, last seen in GI two years ago as a derelict space showing work by Simon Starling.

Lambie's work is a confident blast of colour, celebratory rather than questioning. In a new series of "Metal boxes", he stacks coloured metal sheets on top of one another, bending at the edges like peeling billboards. The same brightly coloured pages are matched with blocks of dull grey concrete to create a larger sculpture.

This year's GI is concerned with artists' response to the past, and Lambie does this by crushing antique suits of armour into shiny cubes, along with modern metal objects such as a washing machine or filing cabinet, and titling them with relentless puns: The Knight Shift, Tonight's the Knight. The past? Crush it into something cool and ironically postmodern. Minimalism? Reinvent it in an urban scrapyard in colours of lipstick and nail varnish. Throw in a few references to music. Right, that's done, let's crack open the Champagne.

Claire Barclay's dialogue in her show at Glasgow Print Studio is no less confident or carefully unified, though it happens in an entirely different spirit. In contrast to Lambie's bright palette, her's is muted – black, grey, pink, skin tones, her work thoughtful, repaying time spent.

Barclay made her first prints last year for a solo show in the Fruitmarket, and has been trying to work out ever since how this thread of work talks to her sculptures, collections of objects which she puts together to create abstract assemblies. Here, she takes prints out of frames and uses them as sculptural elements, along with objects which recall the paraphernalia of the print studio.

While her use of bold shapes suggests that she has own dialogue with modernism, the show also makes more explicit her ongoing dialogue with craft. Included is a tapestry based on her design made at the Dovecot studio – the small panel shown here represents two months' work. Warp and weft becomes a visual metaphor, weaving together the elements of the show.

One of the ancillary functions of GI is to operate as a barometer for the climate in the city's grassroots contemporary art scene. Over the years of the festival's existence, we have seen galleries such as Sorcha Dallas and Mary Mary, which grew out of artist-run spaces, go on to become major players. Others, such as Kendall Koppe's Washington Garcia, are currently making that transition, this year using the main space at the Mitchell Library for an offsite project with Australian artist David Noonan.

More interesting, however, is the show at Washington Garcia's own space in the arches of Eastvale Place, with Canadian Corin Sworn, a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art's MFA course. Sworn's work is a recorded narrative woven around a set of slides which she claims to have found in a skip near her flat. She knows little about their owner, not even his name, but that he was a clockmaker.

In this subtle show, its sculptural elements echoing the idea of slide projection, Sworn weaves a wandering discourse about the passing of time, and the unreachability of the past. Slides of scenery and interiors contrast with those showing futuristic clock design. We're left with the image of two dogs inside neighbouring houses barking at one another, trying to acknowledge each other's presence. The show marks out a promising talent, and affirms the place of GI in giving such an artist a key platform.

Just up the road from Eastvale Place, in a no man's land between Glasgow Sculpture Studios and the railway line, the artist-run organisation Lowsalt has created Vestiges Park. Taking as its central theme Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a precursor to Darwin and a Victorian bestseller, it creates a land of fantastical creatures and sinister transformations that "floats, tir-nan-og like, on the edges of our world".

Like the Buchel, this also comes with a disclaimer, but in this case, what we must beware is: "footpad, chymera, dirty great hole", and that the strange sisterhood behind the Park, we could be either guests or captives.

Applying themselves with relish to the stranger edges of Victorian science, they exploit to the full the untamed nature of their environment. Following trodden paths among the bushes, we find Rob Mulholland's mirrored silhouette of human figures, half visible among the trees; Robbie Thomson's monster in a cage which, without warning, moves its legs eerily; and Cheryl Field's coiled vacuum tube, which suddenly quivers and roars. A soundscape of animal and mechanical noises reverberates around us. Clara Ursitti uses a shed for her Museum of Gloves: don't miss the one with six fingers.

It's all great fun. One of the things GI has always done well is provide a platform for artist-run bodies to animate unknown corners of the city. A disused glue factory in Maryhill, populated by FINN Collective, is another one, where, if you are intrepid enough to brave the cold and dereliction, you might encounter a few gems. If the GI barometer is any indication, the city's grassroots art culture is still in rude health.

&149 Christoph Buchel until 18 July; Claire Barclay until 9 May; other shows until 3 May. Glasgow International runs until 3 May, see www.glasgowinternational.org