ART: The Ossian colour scene

It’s a simple yet brilliant analogy. What for others is merely an example of sad tourist tat, for Colvin is a potent symbol of Scotland’s 200 years of self-denigrating identity crisis.

Welcome to the world of Calum Colvin. A place where nothing, least of all a tartan bonnet, is what it seems. For the last 20 years, Colvin has been creating extraordinary works of art that play with reality and illusion. Works which, with originality and wit, redefine the way we distinguish high art and popular culture. While his art has dealt with everything from Old Master paintings to package holidays, famously remaking Titian with a Madonna T-shirt and Ingres with a pack of pornographic playing cards, Colvin’s abiding obsession has been with the search for a more specific truth. He wants to peel away the layers of historical image-making which obscure Scotland’s culture. Colvin is on a quest for the roots of the invention of his nation. And he wants to name the guilty men.

"I’ve always referred in my work," he says, "to Scotland as a country of stereotypes. And after a while you begin to think, ‘Just where does all that come from?’"

With his new show which opens in Edinburgh next month, it looks as if he has come close to finding the answer. Colvin, now in his early forties, broke on to the Scottish art scene in 1987 in the Vigorous Imagination exhibition. It was clear then that Colvin was something quite unique. He showed large photographs of what appeared to be part-painting, part-assemblage. The process grew out of a reaction to his frustration with conventional means of expression.

"At art college [Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee] in the late Seventies I’d wanted to be a painter. But paint just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. And I desperately didn’t want to have a ‘painterly style’. So I tried sculpture. But something was still missing."

Then, almost unwittingly, Colvin stumbled on to what is now his trademark technique. He began to make assemblages from junk.

"Dundee was a very different place then," he remembers, "still wonderfully derelict. I was always a great one for hunting through skips."

Having made his pieces there had to be some means of perpetuating them and he began to take photographs as a record. This in turn fuelled an interest in documentary photography and reportage.

Enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1980s, Colvin’s fascination with assemblage took precedence over straight photography. He would build installations and paint over them to produce a two-dimensional image from the three-dimensional structure. This would then be captured on large-format camera and the original destroyed. In essence this is how he works today, and his Portobello studio is filled with the components of past works: children’s toys; reproductions of Old Masters; the packaging of packets of biscuits; an Action-Man.

Where Colvin’s work differs from simple Surrealist recontextualisation of such gewgaws though, is made clear in the new show. Here, more than ever before, he is dealing with history - and all its lies. With this show’s specifically Scottish slant, he has again given new life to an old tale. In search of the origins of our self-image, Colvin looked back as far as he could into the annals of Scotland’s national makeovers. What he found was Ossian. You would be forgiven for asking ‘who’?

Two hundred years ago, however, Ossian was the Captain Corelli of his day. His importance lies in the fact that he was not strictly a ‘fictional’ creation, but the ‘discovery’ of one James Macpherson, sometime Gaelic translator, who in 1760 published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland. The book purported to be the work of the third-century Celtic bard Ossian, son of Fingal, Scotland’s very own Homer. As the only apparent surviving example of ancient Scottish poetry, it was a sell-out and, seeing at once that he was on to a good thing, Macpherson travelled again to the Highlands and ‘found’ two more lost works. Finally in 1773 a collected volume was produced.

The Poems of Ossian was a literary sensation. Not only Scotland, but Enlightenment and Regency Europe resounded to the beat of Ossian’s poems. Mendelssohn and Goethe were big fans. Napoleon never travelled without a copy. But in making his fortune, Macpherson had created more than a passing fad. He had formed a new national image of ancient nobility which would be perpetuated to provide a key component of the cultural baggage under whose weight Scotland still labours. For Colvin’s art however, Ossian’s poetry was tailor-made.

"Someone had given me a copy of Ossian, way back in the 1980s," he says. "and I thought it was extremely important. In fact for my purpose it was perfect. But it took me a few years." As we might expect, his take on Macpherson is far removed from the dusty original. "While it is Ossianic I didn’t want to get too much into quoting Macpherson," he says.

Instead, Ossian acts as the vehicle for a meditation on the authenticity of Scotland’s national identity. Colvin’s starting point was to seek out the early reaction of other artists to Macpherson’s ‘discovery’.

"I discovered that the 18th-century Scottish artist Alexander Runciman had painted a room at Penicuik House in the 1770s with illustrations of the life and poetry of Ossian."

While the original was destroyed by fire in 1899, preliminary drawings for it are in the National Gallery of Scotland and from these Colvin took his opening image of blind Ossian. Over nine photographs, he mutates the face of Ossian, painted on to an assemblage of Pictish ruins, into the stones themselves, echoing the gradual absorbtion of the myth into folklore. In a subsequent image the stones reappear, with superimposed on them like an ancient carving, a gigantic thumbprint. The meaning is clear: the fugitive nature of identity and the notion of how it is impossible to know the truth, aside from looking at first-hand evidence, such as Pictish art.

"The Picts, Ossian’s people, are really important," says Colvin. "They’re a blank canvas - so little is known about them. They can be anything you want them to be. It’s still very easy to do a Macpherson."

Talking to Colvin it quickly becomes clear that this work is itself as complex as the phenomenon of historical and archaeological obfuscation with which it deals.

"It became to be about dualities," he says. "Dualities exist throughout Scotland. In Scottish literature - Jekyll and Hyde. In the north-south divide. In our two languages - three languages: Scots, English and Gaelic."

Importantly for Colvin, when the exhibition tours the Highlands, the catalogue will be available in Gaelic, Ossian’s tongue.

"There’s a sense of full circle here. Here is Macpherson translating into English the romantic epic of an ancient, Homeric race of noble savages. It’s a deliberate attempt to dispel the 18th-century idea of the Highlander as a very real, murdering barbarian."

In 1745, 15 years before Macpherson struck it rich with Ossian, that very idea had enabled Lowland Scots troops to bayonet their fellow countrymen. A key part of the invention of Ossian is to do with Scotland’s post-Culloden acceptance of second-rate status.

Colvin agrees. "The whole idea of Ossian is melancholic and self-indulgent," he says. "It’s the worst aspect of the Scottish character. Negative. Fatalistic."

The extent to which that fatalism survives in the self-image of 21st century Scots is revealed with biting satire in the most powerful work in the exhibition, entitled Fragments I-VIII. Against the familiar ruins, an anthropological likeness of the head of a paint-daubed Maori, a tribal stand-in for the never-depicted Pict, is projected on to a home movie screen. Across a sequence of photographs, the face of the warrior gradually transforms into a cliched, bonnet-clad Scotsman, given the sightless eyes of Ossian. Eventually this image too passes, crumbling into the dust, becoming the stuff of legend. But in a final image the movie screen has been hung with a portrait. It is of Macpherson himself, based on a copy of a lost portrait by Reynolds. This is just the start of the irony. For, as Colvin explains, this photograph is a ‘forgery’. He has taken the previous image of the ruins and had a graphic designer superimpose Macpherson upon it by computer, creating, in effect, a fake Colvin. He has saved the ultimate ignominy for the father of the Ossianic legacy.

"The point I wanted to make," says Colvin,"was to do with the whole idea of authorship. In terms of the creation of Scotland there is no real author."

It’s a fittingly sardonic climax for what to date is Colvin’s masterpiece; the perfect marriage of medium and message and one of the most significant works ever made on the nature of Scotland’s identity.

Calum Colvin: Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, October 4 - February 9, 2003. Then on tour