Sorcha Dallas

Wit is akin to art. It depends on economy of thought and swiftness and originality in the association of ideas. It was Hogarth who gave art a clear social purpose and he did so by his wit, arguing that the comic is actually more serious than so-called high art because it engages directly with life as we live it and not simply with its own esoteric concerns.

Many years ago, when George Wyllie was becoming a full time artist after a career in Customs and Excise- a life plan he shared with Henri ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau- he was making a reputation with sculptures made from scrap iron and steel.

They were comical and often witty. In an exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery, for instance, he sat seagulls along the railing on the balcony and neatly turned it into a ship. But he was also making what he saw as more ‘serious’ art at that time and I remember him thinking out loud as to whether he should stick with the ‘comic’ or concentrate on the ‘serious’.

That conversation was nearly 30 years ago. He didn’t need me to tell him that what is comical or even absurd is often profoundly serious, and Wyllie’s answer to his own question was to leave it there, to be at once comical and serious with a definition for his art that kept a questioned itself.

He called it Scul?ture and launched it at the Collins Gallery in 1976. Now he has returned to the Collins with an exhibition called The Cosmic Voyage. It shows how far he has come on his journey, though it is still not the retrospective he deserves.

The most famous products of his Scul?ture campaign were the Paper Boat that he sailed into New York Harbour armed with a copy of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, Smith’s own necessary antidote to Wealth of Nations, in which he argued- even more cogently than he argued the case for economics- that sympathy and imagination are at the centre of human affairs.

Wyllie’s other great performance from those years was The Straw Locomotive, a full size steam engine made of straw that he hoisted on the last Clydeside dockyard crane and then burned: a funeral pyre for heavy industry, the Clyde’s industrial history going up in smoke under Margaret Thatcher.

A key moment in Wyllie’s career was his meeting with Joseph Beuys, brought to Scotland by Richard Demarco. Beuy’s influence has been enormous in contemporary art, but not always for the best. His example has been taken to offer a license for self-indulgence, for supposing that the personal will somehow become the universal through the mysterious osmosis of art. Wyllie, however, took Beuys more seriously.

He looked at Beuys’ message, his engagement with the concerns of the modern world and his view of the crucial role that art could play in it- not just at his idiosyncratic methods. The Paper Boat and the Straw Locomotive were deeply serious and both engaged with the questions of value, the real values that we have to fight to maintain in the face of the relentless pressure of merely economic values of consumerism.

It is keeping with this that the cosmic destination of Wyllie’s voyage is meta-physical. The key images in his work have been the gradually refined until they are simple and luminous.

At the centre of this show are what he calls his instruments of navigation, Vent, Tree, and Spire. Vent was inspired by a triangular opening he saw in an Irish byre, a window on the world for cattle, and an image of aspiration that links heaven and earth. Spire also reaches upwards. It is free to swing on a gimbal, but is balanced by a rock- heaven and earth in equilibrium.

Elsewhere he works with variations on this imagery. These are photographs of trees rooted in rocks. A horse-drawn plough decorated with light bulbs, Heaven Sent Plough, brings a constellation down to Earth.

It is all wity, even daft-a meteorite under a glass cover becomes a Visiting Card from Mars-but its purpose is serious. His Cosmic Voyage is not some kind of crazy backyard Star Trek, but a metaphor for ideas that matter. Iti is an invitation to metaphysical reflection about the world we live in an our place in it.

I wish the same could be said of the CCA’s Like It Matters-work by Karla Black, Mick Peter and Michael Stumpf. They represent the downside of Beuys’s influence-the arbitrary masquerading as the significant.

Karla Black’s Differences are Definite is typical: a scattering of meaningless items speciously claiming meaning. Her Proof of the Cure is slightly more interesting: it looks like a sore thumb. There might be a metaphor there.

Michael Stumpf’s The Sound of Leaves is a one legged sculpture dressed in blue jeans. The Surrealists may have made poetry from the random, but he doesn’t.

Mick Peter’s Pig Tanker is the exception in this depressing show. It’s a black oil tanker turning into a pig-simple, graphic and topical.

As if it will somehow authenticate their own work, the artist’s have also chosen to display old film and video works by Bas Jan Ader, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg and Carolee Schneemann.

Three of these are historical curiosities; Bruce Nauman, though, is different-he is actually malign. From Dada to Beckett, the absurd was a powerful imaginative idea. Life might be absurd, no reason it should not be fun, but Nauman, a child of the 1960’s and a latter-day student of Dada, stuck with the absurd without the fun. It was no longer a branch of the comic, becoming a vehicle promoting self-importance as an art form. Bad news.

In the 1960’s, alongside wild and fun fashion, a counter-fashion was born in the arty, anti-couture women’s clothes promoted by the Finnish firm Marimekko, the subject of an exhibition at the Lighthouse.

The tent dress and loud modern prints were Marimekko’s hallmarks, but it also became the vehicle for a kind of lifestyle design that was distinctively Finnish and that has spread worldwide. Next time you step into a sauna, think Marimekko.

By Duncan Macmillan