Graffiti and terrible cooking grace art festival

Published on Wednesday 27 May 2009 21:59

FROM the legendary Beatles cover designer Peter Blake, to the Scottish Turner Prize contender Lucy Skaer, exhibitions at 50 galleries were unveiled as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival yesterday.

The sixth festival will see a group of young Scottish spray-painting artists take over parts of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where the usual pictures have been removed as the building closes for a multi-million-pound refit.

Other offbeat shows range from hundreds of disastrous culinary adventures in the "The How Not to Cookbook" and a sculpture knitted together by grandmothers.

Director Joanne Brown said the festival line-up reflected a rising confidence in Scottish contemporary art, with two Scottish nominees this year for the Turner Prize. One of them, Skaer, is showing a new film at the Doggerfisher gallery.

Ms Brown warned a visual art festival was particularly at risk from the credit crunch, as the slump has had a "triple whammy" effect on corporate sponsorship, the finances of foundations and donors, and government spending.

"There is no box office," Ms Brown said. "It's not about selling tickets. We are more vulnerable in a downturn."

Some projects have already been scaled back. In last year's programme, Big Things on the Beach featured some 25 art installations on the Portobello Promenade and High Street, with a van ferrying people between exhibits and events. This year it will be staged on a much smaller scale.

The festival also has a "counter-culture" edge to the art this year. Routine programming shown on the Big Screen, the giant outdoor video screen in Festival Square, will be broken by a series of "interruptions".

"You might be in front of it, watching sports, and for 30 seconds in will come a piece of video art," she said. "It's a little bit of subversion."

The same theme is at work in the portrait gallery, which will reopen to show Rough Cut Nation. A group of young artists with rollers, stencils and spray-paint will plaster the walls with their own version of Scottish historical portraits.

Elph, an Edinburgh graffiti artist, said: "They are going to redo the space, so we have got free range to do whatever we want inside it. It should be quite good fun, because of the scale."

Offbeat venues at this year's EAF include Granton Lighthouse, with Dundee sculptor Aileen Stackhouse filling it with vast lengths of cut paper.

Two Scottish veterans, John Bellany and Alan Davie, 89, this year have major shows.

The EAF's funding of 210,000 is far less than other major festivals, but it aims to work on building audiences for galleries year-round, Ms Brown said.

"Visual arts have always been a little bit of a poorer relation in this city, but look at the wealth of stuff going on; we have more galleries per head than any other city outside London."