Arts reviews: Jimmie Durham/Gerard Byrne/Jacques Coetzer

Published on Monday 24 May 2010 20:15

JIMMIE DURHAM: UNIVERSAL MINIATURE GOLF (THE PROMISED LAND) **** GLASGOW SCULPTURE STUDIOS GERARD BYRNE: IMAGES OR SHADOWS OF DIVINE THINGS *** COMMON GUILD, GLASGOW JACQUES COETZER: WEEKEND CATHEDRAL **** PEACOCK VISUAL ARTS, ABERDEEN

IN THE clamour of Glasgow International, it was possible to miss the residency by important American artist Jimmie Durham at Glasgow Sculpture Studios. However, GSS fully intends to make the most of its coup, showing his work for the rest of the summer and giving us plenty of time to catch up on what we may have missed.

Durham, who is 70 this year, has made a new body of work which responds specifically to Scotland, finding links in it to his own Cherokee heritage in ways which are whimsical, multifarious, occasionally random and sometimes brilliantly astute.

His style is a deliberate challenge: homespun, quirky, hand-made, at times playing the audience for laughs. We are used to seeing contemporary art which is endlessly polished, far removed from the artist's hand and wrapped up in reams of discourse. Can we – dare we – take this work equally seriously?

In fact, the issues here are both serious and engaged. While Durham make playful sculptures out of golf clubs, central to the exhibition both physically and thematically is a text relating to Mohawk artist Joe David, a leader during the Oka Crisis in Quebec in 1990 when an armed struggle broke out over the proposal to build a nine-hole golf course on an ancestral Mohawk burial ground.

Here, a struggle over land versus golf has erupted in Aberdeenshire, where Donald Trump is proposing to build a luxury golf resort in an area of outstanding natural beauty. And in Aberdeen city centre, another conflict, not dissimilar, is being played out over plans by millionaire Sir Ian Wood to build a city square on a much-loved green space.

Closely linked to all this is oil, perhaps the biggest cause of land grabs the world over. This, too, Durham knows, but his brightly painted oil drums are also a reminder that the insatiable Western demand for products made from petrochemicals only fuels (no pun intended) the oil firms' greed.

Durham weaves webs of references around his subjects, at times pertinent, at times flippant. There are the Scots who went to live among American Indian peoples, who ended up fighting Scots who had joined the US Army. The Gordons of Glenfiddich distillery are linked, in his freely associative imagination, to American Indian activist Jo Ann Yellowbird (from Gordon, Nebraska), to Lord Byron (real name George Gordon), "a cousin of Douglas Gordon".

No one seems quite sure of the purpose of the wired-up wooden frame which looks a bit like an airport walk-through metal detector. There is a cheap white shirt on which Durham has written a discourse in marker pen about the relationship between medium and message, a film in which he smashes objects to pieces with a rock and an absurd self portrait in a "kwilt".

One has to accept a certain randomness, a fizzing creativity which branches off in all directions at once only some of which will touch gold. And there is a niggling sense that Durham himself is important in making the whole thing fizz, and if viewed in isolation, the works may look less strong. But at its best it is both serious and outspoken without ever being ponderous.

Gerard Byrne's photographs at Common Guild were intended partly as a companion piece to his films, shown at GI, looking at the history of minimalism. These, however, also stand on their own, an ongoing series of black and white images taken in the United States since 2005.

This date is important, because Byrne is playing a game here. The images – passers-by on city streets, a display of shoes in a shop window, a neon sign outside a bar – look as if they might have been taken 50 years ago, part of the American tradition of street photography which helped define our image of the United States. Fashions, cars, brand names should mark out an era, but are shown to be ambiguous.

The title, from 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards, poses a question about temporality: is the past really the past or part of a present which is constantly renewing itself? Take the photograph of fireworks: it depicts a single moment, when the colours explode into the sky, but it could be any firework display in any decade.

The images themselves are mixed, some carefully composed, others snatched, impromptu, but as a whole they never quite deliver the moment of transcendence the title seems to promise. There is a sense that the game of ideas which they embody matters more to Byrne than the images themselves.

Those in search of transcendence would do better at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen where an unassuming little show by Jacques Coetzer offers a fleeting sense of the ordinary world touching the sublime.

During a residency at Deveron Arts in Huntly in 2008, Coetzer went on a series of weekend trips in his cathedral-shaped tent. The exhibition of large-format photographs show the "weekend cathedral" pitched in a variety of landscapes: in the snow by Loch Cluanie; under brooding grey skies at Sconser; in the midst of green bracken and blossoming heather; perched on a cliff above the sea; on the shingly banks of the river Deveron.

It's a journey through the seasons in search of quietness and transcendence, nodding to the artistic sublime (the shape of the tent also recalls the Watzmann as painted by Friedrich). This could be pretentious, but the attitude it embodies is both modest and sincere. Not all these places are particularly remote, either, yet the sense of stillness and separateness in them suggest that it is possible to touch something like beauty a stone's throw away from the ordinary world.

It is more than sad that even since this exhibition opened, Aberdeen City Council has voted in favour of local millionaire Sir Ian Wood's City Square, which threatens the destruction of Union Terrace Gardens and tramples Peacock's plans to regenerate the area with a new arts centre. It is, as Jimmie Durham might testify, an echo of David-and-Goliath conflicts past and present, though this is cold comfort at best as Aberdeen's leading contemporary arts organisation is forced to consider the ruins of its hopes.

&149 Jimmie Durham runs until 4 September; Gerard Byrne until 26 June; Jacques Coetzer until 19 June.