Rastafarian Burns defies Scottish artistic traditions

YOU can’t grow up in Ayrshire and escape Robert Burns. From annual recitations in schools to tourist signs on every corner, you are left in no doubt you’re in the shadow of the national bard. Graham Fagen grew up in Irvine, at the heart of Burns country, though he always felt more affinity with the sounds of Jamaican reggae.

Later, when he became an artist, he decided to look further into this personal paradox. When he realised that Burns himself had planned to leave Scotland for a new life in Jamaica in 1786, he knew he had found fertile ground within which he could explore issues of cultural identity.

He has returned to it several times but never as directly, or perhaps as effectively, as in his new show, Clean Hands, Pure Heart. Visitors to the darkened space will be greeted by familiar words, in an unfamiliar accent: a video projection in which Burns’s The Slave’s Lament, spliced at each end by verses of Auld Lang Syne, is sung by reggae vocalist Ghetto Priest.

"I wanted to clash two songs together which have opposite sentiments, but make sense as a whole. The first rendition of Auld Lang Syne sounds almost like you’re hearing it on the radio. Then there’s a heartfelt rendering of The Slave’s Lament by a young black Rastafarian man, which is powerful in terms of the history and meaning of the song. Then Auld Lang Syne again, revitalised and intensified."

Like all Fagen’s work, it is a product of careful thought and research. Fagen, a contemporary of Douglas Gordon and Roddy Buchanan at Glasgow School of Art, is one of Scotland’s most versatile artists. He has, he says, "a library of ideas, questions, curiosities, intrigues" from which he plucks the concept for each new work. Research will then guide him to a suitable medium.

That might be photography, drawing or watercolour. Or it might be making a neon sign, developing a new variety of rose, setting up a pirate radio station, or designing a public park. Fagen doesn’t hang around waiting to be pigeon-holed. At 39, he has shown all over the world. There have been Biennales in Venice, New Zealand and Korea. This summer, however, he’s concentrating on matters closer to home, the arrival of his second child.

Fagen is an ideas man. He may or may not have hands-on input in the finished work, but you can be sure he has overseen it carefully, pulling together the necessary expertise to realise his idea - rose growers, bronze casters or, in this case, a music producer. Adrian Sherwood has worked with Madonna and Sinead O’Connor, but, crucially for Fagen, runs his own reggae label, On-U-Sound.

"I went to our first meeting, thinking he would want to think about it get back to me," Fagen says. "I stumbled through my pitch, and he went: ‘Sure, great,’ and spent the next 15 minutes talking about how we could do it.

"Adrian played a version of The Slave’s Lament to Ghetto Priest and he just sat and cried. He said that he somehow knew I would bring this song to him, that he was born to sing this song. You can see by his performance how much he understood and felt the lyrics."

It was with Ghetto Priest’s moving rendition of Burns ringing in his ears that Fagen sat down to watch Hogmanay TV, trundling out its usual tired versions of the bard. "It sounded pathetic," he says. "It’s as if the most radical we can get is having someone who used to be in a pop group singing Burns, and it’s awful!"

Scotland, he says, has a paradoxical attitude to its national poet. "Take Shakespeare or Goethe - they have academic, political and cultural examination and re-examination, as with any serious literary figure. We have a serious figure in literature who is good for selling shortbead!"

It is part of the artist’s job, he believes, to question these things: "The artist is someone who lives and works and functions within the culture. Maybe the artist is in a position to work with that culture, to examine that culture, compare it to others, to question it, to analyse it, to try to understand it in order to present the views and understanding back in some way."

Any conversation with Fagen will range widely. One minute we’re on a cultural critique of Scotland, the next we’re talking about the still-life painting of the 17th-century Dutch masters. The other works in Fagen’s Tramway show, four meticulous bronze casts of flowers and plants, he considers "still lives".

There is a delicate black pansy ("It’s the whole idea of seeing a familiar face in an unfamiliar colour, like having a young Rastafarian man singing The Slave’s Lament"); a vase of arum lilies, formal and with overtones of mortality; a large leek, wrapped in a sheet of Kosovan newsprint, a reference to Fagen’s time as a war artist in Kosovo ("It weighs a ton!"); and a pineapple and orange. Add rhyming slang (pineapple-chapel) and you have the sectarian divisions of Scotland on a plate.

His fascination with still life, he says, lies in the depth of its tradition. The lowest genre in the table compiled by the artistic academy, it nevertheless had its own artistic language, one which he can play with and subvert. The best still-life paintings create an illusion of being three-dimensional. Fagen’s really are. Not just clever replicas, they are physical casts of the objects they represent. Not to mention what might just be the heaviest leek in the world.

Clean Hands, Pure Heart by Graham Fagen is at Tramway 2, Friday until 13 March, with a panel discussion and publication launch on 10 March.