Review: Clout of the ordinary

Published on Friday 15 August 2008 17:22

The Golden Record, Collective Gallery Three stars

Martha Rosler Library, Stills Three stars

Richard Wilson, The Grey Gallery Four stars

Alexander Heim, Doves, Doggerfisher Three stars

Chad McCail, Edinburgh Printmakers Four stars

WHILE the Edinburgh Art Festival, like the Fringe, has no declared theme, we critics will always strive to find some pattern within the randomness. This week I've been looking at shows in which the quotidian, the ordinary and the overlooked come to the fore.

Curiously, one of these shows is about space travel. But there's no silver foil in sight. THE GOLDEN RECORD is the Collective Gallery's re-imagining of Carl Sagan's project to send a phonograph record into space on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. There is a set of album covers designed by artists, cartoonists and comics and a rotating series of taped messages in which Earthlings address aliens about everyday life on Earth.

The Collective has done well to forge new relationships and new audiences at Festival time. Last year it staged a genteel assault on the book and film festivals. This year it has forged an alliance with that Festival leviathan, the comedy circuit, and a series of comedians will make live pitches at the Pleasance to be elected as the representative human on a new Golden Record.

Festival comedy, I'll admit, is my pet hate. One of the reasons I like galleries is that they are the one place in the city where there's practically no chance of bumping into a stand-up. I'd rather clean the loos at the Gilded Balloon for the entire month of August than attend Late'n'Live, so most of this show is lost on me. If you're a comedy fan you'll love it. Me? I'm just popping out to the shops to get my bottle of pine-fresh Flash.

Across the road at Stills Gallery, I could see visitors hesitating at the threshold, wondering if they'd stumbled into a rather downbeat lending library. The MARTHA ROSLER LIBRARY is the brainchild of artist Anton Vidokle, who persuaded Rosler, a major figure in American art and queen of New York radical circles, to put her collection of almost 8,000 books on public display. It's an absolute joy, a shabby corner of untold riches, ranging from the history of the labour movement to the latest glossy art catalogues. It'll beat any art school library you care to mention for depth, range and plain individuality.

The library's setting is utterly prosaic, a handful of pot plants, some institutional-looking chairs – the kind of naff ordinariness we experience every day. Over at Doggerfisher, the young London-based German artist ALEXANDER HEIM has made a film of a similarly banal scene: a pigeon hopping around outside an unidentified branch of coffee chain Costa. The entire show is contrived as a pigeon's-eye view of the world, from a sequence of photos of pavements and road surfaces to large papier mch sculptures of concrete greyness. There's attention to detail and visual pleasure in even the most mundane reality.

Nearby, in a vast city centre lock-up, the eminent installation artist RICHARD WILSON shows how he takes everyday objects and crafts the extraordinary out of them, with a series of increasingly ambitious interventions.

Two tiny models show his project 'Turning The Place Over', in which a Liverpool office block was sliced through the middle and rotated on an axis. There are drawings and story boards for a series of films also showing and a recent sculpture, Hot Dog Roll, of a burger van that has morphed into a futuristic monument. My favourite of the films is Breakneck Speed, a low-key, shambolic pyrotechnic display which appears to have been staged without human intervention in an abandoned shed and the back of a container lorry.

At Edinburgh Printmakers, CHAD McCAIL, one of Scotland's most singular artists, continues his one-man crusade for a better world. Where the rest of us worry about exams, McCail tackles the philosophical and political roots of education in a series of agit-prop cartoons.

Upstairs a series of new monochrome prints explores the taboo subject of puberty. While other cultures mark the transition from childhood to sexual maturity through rites and symbols, we bury our heads and hope that, like teenage acne, the embarrassing phase will simply pass. McCail argues that this is one of many ways in which we repress our better instincts for kindness and mutuality. His subject is not sex so much as freedom and its concomitant, responsibility. With images that are halfway between Ladybird book and lush fable, he is, as ever, a persuasive advocate for his overlooked ideas.v

Collective Gallery (0131-220 1260), until September 13, www.collectivegallery.net; Stills Gallery (0131-622 6200), until November 9, www.stills.org; doggerfisher (0131-558 7110), until September 13, www.doggerfisher.com; Grey Gallery (07910 359 086), until August 31, www.thegreygallery.com; Edinburgh Printmakers (0131-557 2479), until September 6, www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk