Theatre reviews: Ruth Ewan: Brank & Heckle | Toby Paterson: Inchoate Landscape | Roman Signer: Transmissions from the River

AMONG Dundee’s various legacies to the world is the word “heckle”, named for the hecklers in the jute mills whose job it was to tease out knots from the flax. As the Dundee workforce became gradually politicised, they were the most raucous.

Ruth Ewan, who grew up in Fife but now lives in London, draws attention to the word’s origins in the title of her DCA show, which takes its inspiration from radical politics. A “brank” is a scold’s bridle, an instrument which signifies both torture and silencing, so this is a show about speaking out and being silenced.

Ewan, a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, makes art that she describes as “conceptually led but socially realised”. Her work tends to be easy to grasp, and there is a friendly exhibition guide that explains the background. This show has been made with assistance from a local school and, when I visited on a busy Saturday, it was buzzing with life.

At its heart is an exploration of key figures such as Dundee radical Mary Brooksbank, who later became a poet and singer, and black American bass/baritone Paul Robeson, who fell from favour after fraternising with Russia during the Cold War and speaking out on civil rights issues.

Part of the show is a museum to them: Brooksbank’s fiddle and poetry books, the visitor’s book from Robeson’s visit to the Caird Hall in 1934 (“I have enjoyed myself in this lovely hall, and what a fine audience”), and a review of the concert from the local paper, next to extracts from his CIA file.

Other pieces take a step beyond simply being documentary. There is a wall drawing of Brooksbank by school children. an enlarged photograph of an open page of Siobhan Tolland’s PhD on her, marked with coffee stains and children’s crayons. and a small forest of Paul Robeson variety tomatoes in gro-bags (the variety was named in Russia, evidence of his popularity there).

The standout object of this show is Apotheosis (Paul), a replica of the sculpture of Robeson, Negro Spiritual, made by American artist Antonio Salemme in 1924. It was shipped to France for casting in bronze in the 1940s, by which time Robeson was under scrunity for un-American activities, whereupon it promptly disappeared. The replica (whether made for Ewan or already existing, we’re not told) is a thing of beauty and presence. In the context of the end of Robeson’s story (passport revoked, work suppressed) it is a moment of 1920s idealism.

Ewan’s hand in all of this is very slight. She presents objects and invites us to consider them. There is a decimal clock (the system, which divides the day into ten hours lasting 100 minutes, was adopted by post-Revolutionary France) and Tree of Liberty (Stunted), a bedraggled bonsai, recalling those planted at mercat crosses in Scotland in support of the French Revolution.

It’s not hard to grasp the symbolism, but once grasped the works don’t require sustained attention. Some are winning in their simplicity, while others are more problematic. Cone of Power (Margaret) is a giant witch’s hat made from green baize. It’s meant to “reclaim” the object, while alluding to the “green baize door” which separated servants’ quarters from the master’s house. But does the witch’s hat actually need to be “reclaimed”? What is the master-servant connection? And, most of all, why does it need to be about eight feet tall?

There is no doubt that the show pushes all the right buttons: politically and socially engaged, locally relevant, readily accessible. Its radicalism is sketched in such broad brushstrokes that even David Cameron would struggle to disagree with it. The result is that we can all select a record on Ewan’s inspired “Jukebox of People Trying to Save the World” and pat ourselves on the back for being so right-on.

Yet, when one really looks at them, one realises that many of the works are rather slight. The tomatoes, for example, look impressive, but would have little to say if shown without the other Robeson works. Having chosen issues on which everyone is likely to agree, Ewan avoids the more problemmatic territory where complexity is required and real debate is initiated.

Toby Paterson is very different. His work is complex, intellectual and exacting, yet he too engages with social and political issues, as expressed in the built environment. Paterson’s interests have remained constant since he won the now-defunct Becks Futures Award in 2002: he investigates modernist architecture at its most brutal and uncompromising, probing the gap between ideal and reality.

At Aberdeen’s Peacock Visual Arts, he presents a weighty, thoughtful body of work around a suite of seven new prints made at Peacock’s workshop. The prints are shown in the context of paintings, drawings, photographs, reliefs and sculptures, installed on angular painted walls with exaggerated perspectives, so one feels not only as if one is looking at Paterson’s work but that one is somehow inside it. The prints themselves are a triumph, showing his versatility and aptitude with the different processes. Each uses a different technology (or combination of technologies), from Teetering Megastructures. which captures a sense of the old architectural plans that inspired it, to Pavilion Plan, a precise abstract of delicate, ethereal colours.

In A Miniature (Sofia Kiosk), an etching with screenprint, he shows a photograph of a dilapidated news kiosk beside some steps in Sofia and, next to it, the forms of the kiosk abstracted as in an architectural drawing. Rarely does he so explicitly show the gap between form and function, touching on the all-too-common whereby visionary building becomes neglected carbuncle.

There is no doubt that Paterson is interested in failed idealism, from the tower blocks of London’s Canning Town to a park pavilion in Eastern Europe, but he doesn’t draw simplistic conclusions. He abstracts forms and colours from buildings until they are devoid of people, graffiti, love and hate, all the things with which buildings must contend.

Grouped together in a rich show like this one, his work is an aggregation of proposals and approaches – multifaceted, perhaps inchoate: much like a city itself.

An original work by Roman Signer is rare in this country, in fact he had rarely been shown in Scotland until his show at the Fruitmarket five years ago. The Swiss artist, now in his seventies, conducts performances, which are really more like experiments, which he documents in film. They have about them a spirit of schoolboy investigation: being dragged along a road in a canoe until the bottom wears through; shooting a stool into the air with a firework.

In the North-east town of Huntly, where he is the most recent guest of socially engaged arts organisation Deveron Arts, Signer has fused together the experiment and the documentation by placing a camera on a floating platform on the surface of the River Bogie and relaying the film via Skype to an nearby empty shop. The result is a constantly lurching image of river, trees and horizon which might make one sea-sick if watched for too long.

As in Ewan’s work, the artist’s hand is all but absent: the river is making the picture. This is interesting, but perhaps not interesting enough. In a world when Skype and webcams are becoming part of ordinary life for many people, an artist needs to do more than demonstrate how the technology works. In a world of ever-shrinking attention spans, film of the ever-changing but pretty-much-the-same surface of a river won’t retain the viewer for very long.

l Ruth Ewan: Brank and Heckle runs until 9 October. Toby Paterson: Inchoate Landscape runs until 22 October. The Roman Signer show has now finished.