Art review: The Associates: A decade in the making

Published on Monday 30 March 2009 19:54

THE ASSOCIATES **** DUNDEE CONTEMPORARY ARTS

IT IS ALMOST exactly ten years since Dundee Contemporary Arts opened its doors. The first major centre for contemporary art in Scotland outside the Central Belt, it was a significant shift in the country's art landscape. Dundee was a post-industrial city known for various things, most of them derogatory and none of them to do with art. The idea of Dundee having a cultural quarter was enough to make some people laugh.

Now, with the city being considered for an outpost of the V&A, it is Dundee that's smiling. DCA is going from strength to strength under its new curatorial team, Judith Winter (formerly of MIMA, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) and Graham Domke (of Inverleith House) who have been chosen to curate the Scottish show at this year's Venice Biennale. Back home, they are curating a year of exhibitions to mark DCA's tenth anniversary, which will culminate in a staging of Martin Boyce's returning Venice show.

The year started with a fascinating group show about the nature of time, and later the international aspect of DCA's work will be showcased with a solo show by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. However, they chose to mark the anniversary date with the opening of The Associates, a show of young, home-grown talent.

All 17 artists in The Associates are under 45 and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD); many were students at the time DCA opened. All are now building (or have built) reputations in the international world of contemporary art, and are currently represented by galleries in Glasgow, London, Frankfurt and Berlin.

Many of these names are more usually associated with Glasgow's contemporary art scene, including Lucy McKenzie, Fiona Jardine, Alan Michael, Clare Stephenson, Katy Dove, and so on. But they confirm, in their submissions to the catalogue, that Dundee has its own self-starting art scene, with artists curating their own shows in grassroots spaces, and that the city has its own rich ties between art and music (the show is named after Dundee's early-1980s cult new-wave band). The implication is that the Scottish contemporary art world would look rather different if it weren't for Dundee.

The Associates is Dundee's answer to Edinburgh's Young Athenians or London's New Contemporaries. It's provocative, particularly in the way it claims that the level of recognition of its young artists is second only to Glasgow School of Art and London's Goldsmiths. But these claims are backed by a show of considerable substance.

Fiona Jardine, a former DJCAD student who now teaches there, opens both rooms with photo collages which seem to collapse time and space, showing DCA's two exhibition spaces through the years. But if these look briefly backwards, the rest of the show has its sights firmly set on the future.

It is a future which is evolving in myriad shapes and sizes, techniques and media, from Alan Michael's meticulous painting to Katy Dove's mesmerising abstract animations, from Robert Orchardson's tough aluminium sculptures to Kevin Hutcheson's newspaper collages.

Lucy McKenzie has painted an installation of walls, complete with wood panelling, doors and cornicing. They become the backdrop for three paintings by Alan Michael, two text pieces and an immensely skilled piece of hyperrealism showing reflections in a shop window.

Clare Stephenson shows two of her bandaged heads and a trademark collaged femme fatale, Our-lady-of-the-bad-infinity, puffing on a cigarette and tottering on feet too small for her. Ellen Munro makes a work out of floor tiles, beginning with a precise chessboard pattern which is gradually fragmenting, and engages the ghost of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in two chairs made in rough plywood, which reveal unexpected flashes of colour as you look at them from different angles.

Raydale Dower – one of the minds behind the surrealist promenade production of The Secret Agent for last year's Glasgow International – continues to show great versatility with a sound work and a striking installation of empty picture frames around a pillar. The Lonely Piper (aka Dundee-based Colin Martin) continues his reworking of Scots myths with a spider's web painting and accompanying text about a burned-out Scottish film star who returns home, only to be tracked down by the paparazzi while salmon fishing. Luke Fowler shows photographs, there is strong film work by Stephen Sutcliffe.

In among all this variety (there is too much here to mention it all by name), is it possible to conclude anything about Dundee's contribution to the Scottish contemporary art revolution? If there is a common thread here, I would suggest it is in the valuing of core skills, whether painting, drawing or electronic media.

These are always much in evidence at DJCAD's degree shows, and they are still in evidence here, most obviously in the work of artists such as Alan Michael, Duncan Marquiss – whose stunning drawing is part Old Master, part New Romantic and part something else altogether – and Graham Little, whose work Facts are stupid things (Fruit vs Fashion) is more a three-dimensional painting than a sculpture.

But throughout this show, there is an underlying sense of artists who have learned their craft to a very high standard and now place it within an ideas-based framework. One of Dundee's key contributions to the direction of Scottish contemporary art has been in encouraging a broadening of pure conceptualism into a hands-on hybrid in which it is fused with strong skills.

That said, this is not an easy show. Much of this work is challenging, deliberately seeking to avoid easy interpretation, and it doesn't become any easier when shown 17-strong. But there is no doubt about the vigour and the range of these artists, nor the sense that they are shaping the future in front of our eyes. Robert Orchardson's title seems to clinch it: The future is certain, give us time to work it out.

&#149 Until 21 June