Sorcha Dallas

The artists of the Scottish pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale have been commissioned to work for display here, on home turf, giving local audience the chance to see who has been deemed representative of Scotland on the international stage. Each artist or collaborative team is shown in a separate space, and it is immediately clear that there is no overt common theme running between the works.

Nevertheless, the initial exhibition guide suggests that the works in the show are united by a rejection of predetermined meaning, by a desire to cause the audience to experience and to wonder rather than to ‘get’ it. ‘This desire to know, to understand, to experience something ‘to the full’ is a desire pandered to in our current culture of information. But such a prospect is illusory; and even if it wasn’t, having all the answers would surely deaden, rather than enliven, the transactions of life.’

It is clear that the curators, at least, have created this show and brought together these artists in an attempt to engage practically and theoretically with questions of meaning in art, of what constitutes art itself, and of the very process of making. This notion is most evident in the work of Alex Pollard, who has created trompe l’oeil pencils, brushes and rulers – the basic materials of artistic creation- from jesomite plaster. On the walls these creations have been formed into hands drawing or erasing lines, mimicking the act of art-making, in a sense representing a pseudo-abdication of responsibility on the part of the artist, in that he has created the illusion of making on the part of his creatures, thereby allowing himself to metaphorically fade into the background in the role of a weird puppet master.

Away from the walls his wee ruler-creatures are exhibited on plinths, the dinosaur-alike ‘Beast’ harking back to childhood Meccano creations, while another plinth displays ‘Figures’, two bent ‘pencil’ assemblages fighting, a thrown punch frozen and spot-lit, a piece containing many signifiers and suggestions which are ultimately, pleasingly, unexplained. There is a playful element to Pollard’s allusions which make his the stand-out works of the show. He has combined a minute attention to detail in his deception of real objects bent to his will with a grand scale in terms of space, small items multiplied and combined to create a greater whole which still leaves enough blank space to conjure the illusion of the room itself as a kind of canvas through which the viewer walks.

The works of the other artists are comparatively underwhelming. Tatham and O’Sullivan’s assemblages of pink fluorescent bulbs, barbed wire and large armature stick-man apparently interact with art history, their accompanying essay claiming the armature to be a reclamation of the possibilities inherent in this substructure before the addition of plaster, form and detail. Simultaneously they state a desire to reject the understanding of the viewer, a desire for conscious obscurity – ‘We have never understood why you believe we crave understanding, and your desire to reassure us makes us uneasy.’ Cathy Wilkes’ work, an installation of female mannequins followed by a film of naked women, one pregnant, doing very little – entitled ‘Most Women Never Experience’ – left me cold and irritated.

While it is interesting to see the work of relatively un-established artists in such a prestigious gallery, and an opportunity to see what is deemed to represent us as a country on the international art scene, the works themselves ultimately pale a little in comparison to the intentions behind the exhibition and the ideas with which the curators have sought to interact.