Arts review: Rough Cut Nation | Rose Frain | Joachim Koester | Aleksandra Mir

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Miracles Gallery, Stills, Collective

WHEN I was a child, my parents decided to get their living room redecorated. In a stroke of genius my mum invited all the kids in the street to draw all over the walls. An orderly riot of marker pen ensued. It was great fun… and then it was gone. The wallpaper patiently scraped off to allow refurbishment to begin.

Far be it from me to equate my upbringing with the cultural riches of the Edinburgh Art Festival but there's a similar process on a much larger scale going on the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where the venue's once-troubled transformation plans are now well under way and the Portrait of the Nation project is scheduled to be completed, and the gallery re-opened, by autumn 2011.

Until the end of this month, though, the great hall and the large ground floor gallery are unrecognisable. The echoing hall is now a caf. The vast right hand room which has played host to everything from Ramsay and Raeburn portraits to a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been daubed, sprayed, carved and crafted, painted and plastered in a massive room-sized installation that brings together street artists, painters, graffiti artists and designers for Rough Cut Nation.

Street art, of course, isn't my area of professional expertise. When I bumped into Richie Cumming, the national galleries' Outreach Officer and also a street artist of some repute who instigated the whole thing, I felt like his grandmother tentatively testing out the youth lingo, desperately trying to distinguish a "tag" from a mere scribble.

This is a project that reimagines William Hole's famous Scottish history mural for the building as it might be enacted by less celebrated (and sometimes less legal) muralists. The gallery walls are transformed into a series of tableaux, hopped over by antlered rabbits and spacemen, daubed into an expressionist melange of word and text. There's a giant hoodie Jesus, by Inverness duo Dufi, and a series of individual portraits by Fraser Gray and Martin McGuinness. There is stunning gothic wallpaper by Johanna Basford and a whole section devoted to the heroes and villains of Scottish healthcare and the demon nicotine.

While much of this is fun but fairly forgettable, among the individual artists are two real successes, Edinburgh's Elph, a street art star of real international repute whose fusing of manga, Celtic symbolism and his own unique style makes his contribution a muscular delight. The painter Kirsty Whiten, whose photo-realist drawings and paintings have always drawn on pop culture and street art, looks brilliant in this context. Existing works have been blown up poster style and pasted to the walls. One such image is her Schemie Centaurs, a striking image of shell-suited boys, each cocky individual half human, half beast and all testosterone. Whiten is a born portraitist, and just on the right side of ruthless as an artist. Schemie Centaurs strikes me as the real Portrait of the Nation.

There are loads of lessons for the galleries in this project. First is a striking architectural revelation. The vast Victorian proportions of the gallery are full of untapped potential and future installations in the space should be unafraid to look up to utilise the building's height. The second is about the use of the great hall, an area of under-use in a prime city centre site. It's not that I'm an advocate of large cafes as a solution for everything, but this is an astonishing building which must find a way to put people back at its centre rather than echoing emptiness.

The largest lessons though are about ethos. When I spoke to Richie last week, he had already seen 8,000 people through the doors, and the gallery was heaving with people who weren't simply looking but participating actively, asking questions, playing with the gallery "toys". The project's schedule of music, some brilliant bands programmed with the support of record emporium Avalanche, should be a model for a regular slot like the monthly Tate Late programme, which turns Tate Britain on a Friday night into a hotbed of performance, music, talks and events.

Rough Cut Nation is a minor key triumph, but it must be more than simply child's play. When Bristol invited Banksy in, he got to mess with a whole museum. When Tate Modern staged their Street Art show in 2008, curator Cedar Lewisohn invited the best street artists in the world and gave them the entire faade of one of the biggest public buildings in London to play with. If Rough Cut Nation has temporarily transformed the walls of the institution its true success must be measured on whether it has also transformed the National Galleries of Scotland's heart.

Rough Cut Nation opens up a traditional space to a new audience. This year's Art Festival programme has made much of the opening up of non-traditional spaces too. There are a host of temporary galleries. Among the tiniest is Rose Frain's tenement room installation Alexandria Light at Miracles Gallery, evoking both the fraught lived experience of contemporary Egypt and the ancient knowledge of its culture. From a pristine cabinet of curiosities (most of them fictional artefacts) to an evolving book-work that covers everything from Anthony and Cleopatra to the Arab branding of fast food chain McDonald's, this is a compact show bursting with ideas.

If there's a hefty measure of traditional Scottish ill health in Rough Cut Nation and a distinctively alchemical aspect to Rose Frain's Alexandria Light then Joachim Koester's Poison Protocols And Other Histories at Stills Gallery features altered states, hallucinations, madness, esoteric knowledge and assassinations. This is a stunning show of photographs and films in which Koester creates whole alternative histories from Charles Manson's ominous ranch, to the cult of marijuana, and the origins of the Italian dance the tarantella (an ecstatic cure for a poisonous spider bite). Evoking 19th century travel photography, documentary, performance art and the centuries old literary traditions around hallucinogens, this is a great show and a significant step up for the gallery which has been through its lacklustre moments in recent years.

Across the road, the Collective is busy telling us all how not to cook. This book project by Aleksandra Mir is a sign of Collective director Kate Gray's big ambitions and bustling confidence. Mir is a big name on the international merry-go-round and the chutzpah of How Not To Cook is admirable. Entering the gallery, all you find is a slightly lopsided library (deliberately designed by architect Ewan Imrie) each shelf containing dozens of copies of Mir's publication, the How Not To Cookbook.

Do spend your time reading them. One thousand cooks around the world share their disasters, both helpful and simply outrageous, and all presented in best Nigella style: "Do not fry chips when wearing shorts" or "When you are icing a cake around other people do not lick the spatula before you have finished. Someone will see you."

While the book is an elaborate metaphor for the building and sharing of collective knowledge it is also much, much funnier than the thousands of comic books that will shortly hit the shelves for Christmas. Where else might you find the protocol for gay barbecues, learn the necessity of avoiding washing up liquid in the salad dressing or find such helpful cooking topics as Splatters, Stocks, Dating, Drugs and Defrosting. Across the city, it's time to listen to the word on the street. v

Rough Cut Nation, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, until 30 August; Rose Frain, Alexandria Light, Miracles Gallery until 5 September; Joachim Koester, Poison Protocols And Other Histories, Stills until 25 October; Aleksandra Mir, The How Not To Cookbook, Collective until 27 September www.edinburgh-festivals.com