Best foot forward - Jim Lambie review

Published on Friday 11 April 2008 16:58

Jim Lambie has taken the floor to create the psychedelic centrepiece of this year's Glasgow International festival, writes Moira Jeffrey

JIM LAMBIE, FOREVER CHANGES

GoMA Glasgow

RECENTLY, in the course of bureaucratic duties, I've been trying to sum up Glasgow's contemporary art scene and the aspiration of Glasgow International, its visual arts festival which opened on Friday. I always end up with the same kind of meaningless equations, silly metaphors and contradictions. It's local. It's international. It's low-key, stealthy, and intimate. It's a super flashy world famous brand. It's intellectual, stern and conceptual. It's a sensual party animal. It's only ever seen in a second-hand leather jacket and it doesn't believe in labels. I give up. If you were to sum up Glasgow's art scene in two words it might as well be these two: Jim Lambie.

Lambie, like his friends in the rock band Primal Scream, exudes an effortless cool that disguises keen intelligence and hard-work to match the obvious hedonism. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1994, as immersed in the city's music and clubbing scenes as the art world. He's regarded internationally (quite rightly) as a very serious artist, yet he manages that trick of never appearing to take himself too seriously.

If, across at Tramway, the Berlin-based Glasgow School of Art graduate Jonathan Monk might be the quiet cerebral centre of this year's festival, Lambie is its body. He rocks. Quite literally. With his showpiece solo exhibition Forever Changes, he has transformed the neoclassical grandeur of the ground floor hall of Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art into a restless, heaving sea of curved strips of black and white vinyl tape.

Last week the installation team looked a little green about the gills, having filled a massive 600-square metres of space with intricate patterns by working until midnight the night before completion. The joy of Lambie's floor pieces is in precisely this play between utter simplicity – there's a floor, lets fill it up with stripes – and ludicrous labour intensity. Every floor work is unique. This piece, entitled The Strokes, is a new pattern. If its curved forms are not demanding enough, the attention to detail required to negotiate GoMA's column-filled hall and to visually challenge its ornate plaster and gilded ceiling is daunting.

Sometimes it's hard to see just how far an artist's work has travelled. It's almost a decade since Lambie's first solo show at Glasgow's Transmission Gallery and his signature vinyl art work ZOBOP. In that time his vinyl striped floors, in monochrome or bright colours, in silver and gold or grungy, sticky black have travelled from the down-at-heel intimacy of the artist-led space in the city's King Street to venues as far afield as Mexico City and Tokyo.

They have filled private homes and the establishment halls of Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. In February, ZOBOP was on show in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in an exhibition called Color Chart, a survey show of more than 50 years of colour in contemporary art. Included in the prestigious Carnegie international in 2004 and rewarded with a Turner Prize nomination in 2005, Lambie's work has sailed swiftly into the mainstream currents of art history. The eternal conundrum in describing the Glasgow art scene is in conveying both how swift – and how complicated – that journey can be.

If previous years of the GI festival have been marked by an effervescence that has teetered into occasional chaos at times, the festival must now grow up. This year, figures such as Monk, Lambie and Simon Starling are joined by a controversial new work by Poland's Wilhelm Sasnal and a significant exhibition of contemporary art from China.

At GoMA, Forever Changes is recognisable territory for those familiar with Lambie's work. The show has a name culled from the history of rock music, in this case an album by Love.

The floor itself has new and exciting vigour. While not quite full-on psychedelia, it has a restless visual quality. Floating upon it, like detritus on a choppy sea, are a series of sculptures using typical Lambie materials: a tsunami of sliced and diced wooden chairs, re-sprayed in ice-cream colours, verges on the brink of collapse.

Bobbing, as though semi-submerged on the surface, are series of concrete blocks – cast from the artist's own record boxes - embedded with old record sleeves. In one corner a series of old leather jackets have been stitched together to form a sinister spiked sphere that might be an eccentric octopus or an unexploded mine.

What does this all add up to? A weird splicing of disco aesthetics and nautical themes? Lambie's work doesn't come laden with theory; it comes with the casual insouciance and instant cool of the rock and pop music that informs it. It's stuff made from old stuff, without any of the solemn worthiness of modern recycling. The way that a piece of classic vinyl or an old leather jacket suggests soul and sophistication rather than virtue. You could break it down into a serious discussion of the history of sculpture, but you would always lose something of its instant glamour, its flashiness and the way it staggers and sometimes falls right into the realm of kitsch.

The challenge presented by the dimensions of the space is evident. At the entrance to the gallery, a small wall, constructed from bricks of coloured cloth, might be intended to ensure that visitors don't encounter the full visual blast of the installation straight away. Instead it feels a bit of a hindrance.

On balance though, the new floor piece makes up for everything else. Generations of Glaswegians are going to stroll and shimmy across it all summer. It's a pleasure to see Lambie taking such a central role in his home town. He is, after all, the very definition of the city's unique artistic voice.

• Until September 29