Visual art reviews: Georeg Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary | RSA New Contemporaries 2012

I once conducted a straw poll around Edinburgh University to find out how many departments used drawing, and found it was used in all sorts of different ways in subjects ranging from architecture through engineering and medicine to a good many of the sciences. Not many of those using it as a practical tool reflected perhaps that they had anything in common with art, but they do.

GEORGE WYLLIE: A LIFE LESS ORDINARY

COLLINS GALLERY, GLASGOW

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RSA NEW CONTEMPORARIES 2012

ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY, EDINBURGH

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As science is based on empirical observation and record, historically its alliance with art was central. It may be less obvious now, nevertheless visual description, analysis and design, all the province of drawing, remain critical to a good many disciplines. The interpretation of images is important, too, and in really serious places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology they employ art specialists to teach image interpretation to scientists. All that in a wider society in which images are ubiquitous as never before and are used to convey information of every possible kind in every possible context.

These arguments might suggest that having an art gallery in a university would make good sense. Not so at Strathclyde, although with its tradition of engineering, it is one place where you might think the importance of visual tradition would be well understood. After almost 40 years, the Collins Gallery there is to close next month. Previous Strathclyde principals saw the point of it and provided imaginative support, but the present administration thinks otherwise. It is not a matter of budget apparently. It is simply their view that an art gallery does not fit into the university’s strategic plan. Without its gallery, it will be a poorer place.

The last exhibition to be held in the Collins is taken from the archive of George Wyllie. There are several ironies in that choice. This is the third exhibition the gallery has given the artist since his first major show in 1976. It has played a key part in his success and indeed adopted him as a kind of personification of its identity. Strathclyde gave him an honorary degree and also a significant role in its bicentenary celebrations. Wyllie in turn presented the university with the archive from which this show is selected. It was, however, just a year after that act of generosity that the decision was taken to close the gallery. It is ironic too that Wyllie himself set out to be an engineer and so personifies exactly the creative crossover that the university has missed. As the fascinating documents from his archive also make clear, from his first show which he called Scul?ture, he has asked questions, challenged assumptions in a way that should surely be the ultimate justification of the existence of any university. The exhibition documents Wyllie’s major undertakings like his Paper Boat and his Straw Locomotive, both potent expressions of outrage at the social and economic policies that destroyed this country’s industrial base and ultimately landed us in the financial mess we are in now. There is much else here too, documenting a remarkable career. Ninety last year, he was once a customs officer like Robert Burns. He was in his fifties when he started to make serious art. He hasn’t looked back.

While Strathclyde was deciding to close its gallery, Edinburgh University was busy taking over Edinburgh College of Art. Edinburgh evidently saw the arguments about the visual that escaped Strathclyde, but the RSA New Contemporaries suggests there was something else equally important at stake. George Wyllie is a Joker. Not that he simply makes jokes, though his art is often amusing, but, like a court jester, he can say things that nobody else can say. That is what we try to train our young artists to be. That tradition of nonconformity was clearly a significant part of the College’s appeal to the University. It would bring in some fresh and independent thinking, a leaven of the unorthodox to shake up a complacent institution. Whether it works either for the university or the college, only time will tell. Meanwhile, however, the RSA New Contemporaries show reveals some lively talent in all our art schools.

The exhibition is selected from the final year shows of the five Scottish art schools, to which are added five schools of architecture, including the new unit created by the merger of Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University, the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

The show begins well with a pair of huge black doors by Clare Flatley that greet you at the top of the stairs. The doors are a homage to Ghiberti. Clare Flatley is an Edinburgh student and Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise are one of the most striking pieces in the College of Art’s historic cast collection. Nearby, Andrew Mason’s multiple sinks piled up with potatoes under running water suggest a nightmare of what in the army used to be called “spud bashing”.

In the central gallery is an installation of empty plastic bottles by Holly Keasey. She is described in the catalogue somewhat ambiguously as “immersing herself in Edinburgh’s water”. She also performs, immersed in water perhaps? One of the most elaborate installations is by Louise Pearson from Dundee. It involves a grand piano and much else, all for the rather dotty objective of turning the lunar cycle first into a system of colour coding and then into sound. Also from Dundee, Emma McGregor’s big abstract pictures are much simpler and indeed more immediately effective, but we don’t really need to be told that they are actually composed of substances like bitumen, iron, oil, brass and wood in homage to the industrial past of her home town of Bradford.

Heather Pugh from Aberdeen has created a series of very satisfying small painted collages. Emilie Lundstrøm is one of several photography students from Glasgow. Her pictures find the sinister in the everyday ever so slightly dislocated, a nightjar on the ground, wings spread out, for instance, or a pigeon trapped in a box labelled “fragile”.

One of the most startling images in the show however is a photograph of a woman with two octopuses draped over her shoulders, by two artists from Gray’s School in Aberdeen, Joanna Lyczko and Seila Susberg. It’s a genuine piece of surrealism. Man Ray would have been proud of it. The Surrealists also feature in some of the abundant, entertaining detail in two enormous line drawings of crowds of people by Chris Wells, also from Aberdeen. Another Aberdeen student, Hannah Harkes, is in part her own art work. Dressed all in red to match the red details in her painted furniture, she is there in a corner working away at the art works that adorn the wall above her.

Moray School of Art, Scotland’s newest art school, is the most recent arrival here, but it has also been pioneering distance learning under the aegis of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Marnie Kelty who lives in the Western Isles has taken advantage of this, doing her course from her home which is in a sense also her subject. She has made a big and rather beautiful wall drawing using pigments derived from the beach near where she lives. The architecture entries are more enigmatic, but I particularly liked Andrew Morris’s sculptural take on the forms of buildings. Altogether it is a lively show. We are lucky that our educational system can still encourage such diversity of talent. Perhaps the next George Wyllie is not here, but he certainly won’t be at Strathclyde either. Without the Collins, it really will be a poorer place.

l George Wyllie until 21 April; RSA New Contemporaries until 11 April