Press

The idea of ‘serious art’ always turns people off – isn’t it already serious enough? Images generated out of the anal adventures of bookish artists who have lost their aesthetic sensibility flood to ones mind. An artist’s mother complained at a recent opening that there were ‘too many colours’, and it’s hard to disagree; eye vomit drips off the sculptures and paintings that furnish the best galleries. In an age of extremes art too is extreme, but a dialectical trend is always present underneath the Techicolor variety that grabs your attention and then says very little.

Within Glasgow and Edinburgh the art world is moving away form the inane celebration of superficiality and the YBA’s 15 year-long romance with big budget ego-art, towards something quieter yet essentially more generous. Art need not be like a comfy chair, as Matisse prescribed, but neither does it have to be like a deadened head, as Saatchi preferred. High art has to appeal to the viewers it so desperately relies on, although it does not have to give them exactly what they expect or want. This is art’s greatest strength – its apparent autonomy.

In the Scottish Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the move away from pop-infused ‘high art lite’ to a more substantial expression could be felt. Both bases were covered, but this year’s exhibitors – especially Alex Pollards and Cathy Wilkes – presented quietly confident work that shunned glitz and bombast. Their work will be on show with Tatham and O’Sullivan from Wednesday 7 December at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, but you don’t need to wait that long to see other examples of this trend for the unashamedly cerebral yet gutsy.

Jane Topping’s recent show at Glasgow’s GoMa, elegantly gestured in the right direction, and the subtly brilliant erased works on paper in the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh by Louise Hopkins buck the fashion for showing off. Karla Black, one of the artists exhibiting at the CCA’s, Like it Matters, also lets her work quietly speak for itself, not playing lip service to roaring one-liner art. And Laurence Figgis’ recent exhibition of drawings at Transmission and his current show at Mary Mary are further ecidence of this increasingly introspective and poised art. Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman’s performance, Raiding the Icebox in the Georgian Gallery at the Talbot Rice, also questioned the current rage for shiny and sickly slick ad-man art, with paper, light and bodies overlapping and only temporarily leaving fleeting traces on walls, sheets and each other.

You have to take your time over these works; they don’t give themselves away quickly or sell themselves short. Delayed gratification has always been the cornerstone of aesthetic experience, reflection rather than instant satisfaction being generally more rewarding. No, art need not be like an armchair or a shot in the arm; the mind can engage even when the eyes are not out on cartoon stalks.

The idea of ‘serious art’ always turns people off – isn’t it already serious enough? Images generated out of the anal adventures of bookish artists who have lost their aesthetic sensibility flood to ones mind. An artist’s mother complained at a recent opening that there were ‘too many colours’, and it’s hard to disagree; eye vomit drips off the sculptures and paintings that furnish the best galleries. In an age of extremes art too is extreme, but a dialectical trend is always present underneath the Techicolor variety that grabs your attention and then says very little.

Within Glasgow and Edinburgh the art world is moving away form the inane celebration of superficiality and the YBA’s 15 year-long romance with big budget ego-art, towards something quieter yet essentially more generous. Art need not be like a comfy chair, as Matisse prescribed, but neither does it have to be like a deadened head, as Saatchi preferred. High art has to appeal to the viewers it so desperately relies on, although it does not have to give them exactly what they expect or want. This is art’s greatest strength – its apparent autonomy.

In the Scottish Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the move away from pop-infused ‘high art lite’ to a more substantial expression could be felt. Both bases were covered, but this year’s exhibitors – especially Alex Pollards and Cathy Wilkes – presented quietly confident work that shunned glitz and bombast. Their work will be on show with Tatham and O’Sullivan from Wednesday 7 December at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, but you don’t need to wait that long to see other examples of this trend for the unashamedly cerebral yet gutsy.

Jane Topping’s recent show at Glasgow’s GoMa, elegantly gestured in the right direction, and the subtly brilliant erased works on paper in the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh by Louise Hopkins buck the fashion for showing off. Karla Black, one of the artists exhibiting at the CCA’s, Like it Matters, also lets her work quietly speak for itself, not playing lip service to roaring one-liner art. And Laurence Figgis’ recent exhibition of drawings at Transmission and his current show at Mary Mary are further ecidence of this increasingly introspective and poised art. Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman’s performance, Raiding the Icebox in the Georgian Gallery at the Talbot Rice, also questioned the current rage for shiny and sickly slick ad-man art, with paper, light and bodies overlapping and only temporarily leaving fleeting traces on walls, sheets and each other.

You have to take your time over these works; they don’t give themselves away quickly or sell themselves short. Delayed gratification has always been the cornerstone of aesthetic experience, reflection rather than instant satisfaction being generally more rewarding. No, art need not be like an armchair or a shot in the arm; the mind can engage even when the eyes are not out on cartoon stalks.