Roger Cox's Diary: Turning larceny into a fine art

Published on 03/04/2008 21:04

TOO stingy to buy art? Then go to the Arches in Glasgow next week and steal some.

As part of the Arches Theatre Festival, Irish “artivist” Will St Leger will be hosting an exhibition of his work at which people are invited to take anything they want for free.

It sounds like anarchy, but there are rules. Nobody is allowed to walk away with any of the art before the security alarm in the building goes off. If they do, they will be stopped by St Leger (dressed as a security guard) and ordered to put it back. Once the alarm sounds, though, it’s a free for all: if you’ve taken something, and you can get it out of the venue inside 30 seconds, it’s yours to keep.

“When we did this in Dublin it was like the January sales,” chuckles St Leger. “People would be standing next to a piece for ages trying to be all civil and nice to each other but knowing that at any moment they were going to screw over the other person if they got in their way.”

St Leger is a former Greenpeace activist – the last time he featured in The Scotsman, it was for chaining himself to an oil rig – and his art often carries a political message. To get a sneak preview, visit www.willsaint.com.

Big Word interrupted

SOME sad news to report. Big Word, the groundbreaking performance poetry cabaret established by the charismatic wordsmith and rhymester Jem Rolls in 2001 and sustained more recently by sassy poetess Jenny Lindsay, is winding up for the foreseeable.

There will be one last blast of genre-splicing action on 17 April at the Jazz Bar in Edinburgh featuring some of the best acts from the past seven years. Tickets are 4 on the door.

Art to fit the billboard

BILLBOARD art seems to be all the rage these days. Last week in Review, we reported on the cryptic slogans appearing on billboards around Leith as part of a show by artists’ collective Freee; now we learn that Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery is getting in on the act.

The gallery’s owners, Richard and Florence Ingleby, are in the process of moving their operation from its elegant home on Calton Terrace to the building formerly occupied by music venue The Venue on Calton Road.

The new gallery is currently undergoing a major re-fit, but when it opens on 1 August it will have three exhibition spaces – two inside and one on a large billboard on the side of the building. “We’re going to move the billboard higher up to make it even more prominent,” says Richard, “and then get a line-up of international artists to take turns making ‘a Billboard for Edinburgh.’” Watch that space.

An ASBO for Oor Wullie?

Opening at the National Library of Scotland today: an exhibition of comic books called Local Heroes – The Art of the Graphic Novel. One of the stars of the show is the first ever episode of the Broons, in which Oor Wullie gets a tram and a steamroller to crash and makes a hoax call to the fire brigade – he’d surely be slapped with an ASBO if he tried anything like that today.