'A riot of talent' Few shows at Scotland’s galleries are this vibrant

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (until December 11)

Four stars

With art curation now taught at universities, and the success of a blockbuster exhibition as important to an institution’s bottom line as it is to its home city’s cultural standing, it’s refreshing to be reminded of what a gallery show need not be. An exercise in careful selection within the narrow parameters of what passes for taste, for example. Or something which costs a small fortune to get into then fills a vast airy space with not very much.

That is not to say the work in the 126th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) hasn’t passed a threshold of quality and does not respond to current trends and themes in art. It has and does, and in that regard the bar to entry is high. But even group shows at Scotland’s established institutional art galleries rarely offer anything as vibrant, varied and crowded as this one. There is tumult here, but of the energising sort. That sort which celebrates creativity and drives it further.

Installation shot of 126th Annual Exhibition showing Ramon Robertson's piece Column Courier (Image: Stewart Attwood)

On that score we would do well to remember the importance and significance of these kinds of events. In 1874 it was the fact of their being barred from the Paris Salon, the official exhibition of the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, which caused a group of French artists to mount their own show in protest – and so was born Impressionism.

Four decades on, it was to the inaugural exhibition of the New York-based Society of Independent Artists in 1917 that Marcel Duchamp contributed a urinal and, in doing so, became the grand-daddy of conceptual art. More on him and the lasting influence of his artistic piss-take a little later.

The SSA exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy building is the result of an open call to artists, and from the more than 2000 works submitted around 200 have been chosen for the show. They range from performance pieces, sculpture and video work to paintings and installations. It’s the last two which dominate – the paintings because they are numerous and crowd the walls, the installations because they draw the eye and (especially true of the larger ones) determine how visitors move around the space.

Even a quick birl round the five large rooms of the RSA tells you this is not the province of amateur daubers or dilettantes. History tells you the same. Founded in 1891 as a breakaway from the Royal Scottish Academy organisation, the SSA held its first annual exhibition a year later. That show included works by Rembrandt, Auguste Rodin and Sir Henry Raeburn, and in the decades which followed the SSA’s annual show would give space to work by Picasso, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne and Degas alongside SSA members such as the Glasgow Boys and noted Scottish Colourist Francis Cadell.

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The annual exhibition of 1931, for example, offered Edvard Munch his first British solo show – cue press outrage and massive crowds – and two years later it was the turn of Paul Klee to make his British bow when the SSA exhibited 24 of his works. One of them, Drohender Schneesturm, never left these shores – it was bought by a private collector and later bequeathed to the National Galleries of Scotland. Among the artists who have served as SSA President, meanwhile, are William MacTaggart (grandson of the better known William McTaggart), George Wylie and Barbara Rae.

Back in the here and now, it’s Hans K Clausen’s massive installation The Winston Smith Library Of Victory And Truth which greets visitors and dominates the largest of the rooms. It’s made up of three large chipboard bookcases in which are housed 1,984 copies of George Orwell’s most famous novel – the one written on Jura, where this piece had its grand unveiling in June. Clausen is an invited artist and a previous recipient of an SSA Award.

Centrepiece of the centrepiece, if you like, is a desk at which you can sit and bash away on a Remington Home Portable typewriter, the same sort Orwell used to write 1984. Browsing the shelves I find my old schoolboy Penguin edition of 1984, the one produced throughout the 1970s and 1980s and featuring on its cover Humphrey Sutton’s photograph of a man hidden behind a massive red bullhorn. It still chills me. As I wander the exhibit, two scary-looking speakers on the largest bookcase crackle into life.

Installation shot of the SSA's 126th Annual Exhibition (Image: Stewart Attwood)

Taking up floorspace elsewhere is David Faithfull’s Avian Ark, some 60 or so carved and turned cedarwood bottles embossed with the names of birds – Tree Sparrow, Greenfinch, Lapwing, Smew. Nearby is On The Pot’s Road, ten exquisite porcelain pots perched on low pedestals made from logs and what look like roof slates. It’s the work of Kristína Gondová, fresh from Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and winner of one of the prestigious SSA New Graduate Awards.

There are 12 New Graduate Award winners, including Gondová. Among the others are Amy Storey, from the University of the Highlands and Islands, who presents two wall-mounted works blending embroidery and photography, and Edinburgh College of Art’s Ahed Alameri. She sits in front of her participatory performance work, We Love The Country, tapping a microphone. It sounds like a a heartbeat but feels like a provocation.

The piece itself consists of the title phrase chalked over and over in black on the white corner wall. Only not quite: the sentiment (and the hand-writing) changes as you read down. Some of us don’t like the country at all, it seems. Others like the country but not the state. Elsewhere there are crossings out and additions. Someone has scribbled something in what looks like Chinese.

Glasgow School of Art is represented in the New Graduate Awards by Megan Josephine, whose figurative work Touch II is probably the largest painting in the show, and Irene Buchan, who presents a group of pink urinals cutely titled Pink Urinals. Unlike Duchamp’s boringly porcelain appliance, hers are fashioned from soap and expanding foam and look pleasingly like ears or, scaled down, something you’d find on a climbing wall.

SSA Council Member, Greg Bryce, takes in Hans K Clausen's installation The Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth (Image: Stewart Attwood) That’s not the only dose of humour on show. Kate Bell’s Moth Soup: Unthought Series is a selection of soup spoons fixed to the wall, each one sheltering – or imprisoning? – a moth. There’s also Reinhard Behrens’ mysterious and cartoonish painting Left, Right And Centre, and Ramon Robertson’s enigmatic and ever-so-slightly creepy piece Column Courier – an eyeless and armless figure cast in plaster and concrete, ghostly white and wearing a helmet and visor. And I love Darren Duddy’s bling-tastic memento mori Kingdom Of The Dead Altarpiece and, beneath it, A Is For Apocalypse, Joanne Kerr’s artist book in hand-embroidered cotton (J for Junta, T for Terrorism etc.).

Other works catching the eye are Heather Nevay’s weird, vivid oil painting Lonely Boy, Iain Black’s group study They Know – four women breaking from lunch to star enigmatically at the viewer as a maid in uniform hovers – and Emily Moore’s Immortal Alps Look Down. For the record, most of the works are for sale, with prices ranging from £100 to £10,000, and entry is free on Mondays.

Everywhere you look, the breadth of interests and the variety of subjects is, quite literally, bewildering. But this storied annual event is all the better for that barely contained sense of chaos. If nothing else it reflects the riot of art talent in Scotland today.