IF YOU have ever come home from holiday with a bottle of wine, only to discover that it doesn't taste as good in the chill of a Scottish winter as it did in the warmth of the continental sun, you'll understand the risk in bringing Selective Memory, this year's Scottish exhibition at the Venice Biennale, back to home turf at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Happily, the much-expanded and updated show, with newly commissioned work from Alex Pollard, Cathy Wilkes and the duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, translates well. Scotland's 2003 Venice presentation, featuring Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, was contemporary art at its most theatrical, reflecting the glitzy history of Venice itself. This summer's exhibition, curated by Jason Bowman and Rachel Bradley, showcased another strain of Scottish art: complex, at times oblique, concerned with the language of art, with objects and the meaning we might give to them.
The exhibition is set up like a series of loops, mirrors and reflections, most obviously in the work of the Tatham and O'Sullivan, whose room-sized installation deliberately recycles the methods and motifs of their own recent work. There is the pink neon and mirrored surfaces of theirTransmission gallery exhibition The Glamour, the black letters spelling out the words Heroin Kills from the Tramway show HK, a new reduced version of the giant behatted figure they made for outdoor display at Venice. There is a deliberately uncomfortable collision of materials and textures - wood, bronze, neon, barbed wire and shiny painted surfaces - and odd contradictory moments of art history, including minimalism, figuration and the pagan mysticism of the Scottish painterAlan Davie. None of this, however, quite adds up to the provocative spectacle of their most successful work.
Alex Pollard, who has a background in painting, is showing a series of witty sculptures and drawings that explores the nature of studio practice with a boyish intensity. Ideas of systems, authorship, rule-setting, the real and the fake are visualised in a sequence of cheeky objects. There are tiny dinosaurs made from what appear to be antique articulated rulers but are actually carefully decorated plaster fakes. A set of "pencils" are similarly constructed, and then crafted into tiny figures embarking on a punch up. Pencil marks on the wall seem to be made, not by the artist himself but by sculptures of skeletal hands, one of which is rubbing out the work as soon as it is made.
Selective Memory's real highlight, though, is the untitled work by Cathy Wilkes which brings her recent series of exhibitions exploring themes of childbirth and parenthood, domesticity and difference, to a chilling climax. Wilkes orchestrates a series of found objects and shiny newly purchased items into a sculptural installation which for all its seeming casualness has a careful formal rhythm. It is held together by colour, the rather sickly pale pink and pale blue of girls and boys, and by the repetition of circular and recessive shapes. In a low steel tray, filled with sticky yellow corn oil, Wilkes has placed objects that deal with the recording and transmission of information, there's a video, a silver set-top box, a remote control. They are embedded and useless. A sparkling new television nearby is silent and switched off. This much is familiar from Wilkes's recent shows, but nothing
prepares you for the visceral shock of two female mannequins, their pert fake breasts exposed, their heads bewigged, their faces shockingly obscured by two oil paintings clamped across their faces. This is the artist's most overt feminist statement to date, a creepy invocation of our Stepford expectations of women artists and of the way that certain subjects, certain conversations still seem utterly taboo.
It feels as though Wilkes has saved this moment for this particularvenue and for the home audience. The show in Venice had a particular audience: the incongruent mix of artworld specialists intimately familiar with the contemporary and passing trade reflecting the city's status as one of Europe's prime tourist destinations. The curators dealt with this by setting up a troupe of superfriendly and well-informed young artist invigilators. In Edinburgh, the show comes armed with lots of interpretation and a series of talks and tours including a lecture by Maria de Corral, co-director of this year's Venice Biennale.
At the Collective Gallery in Cockburn Street you can catch more work by Pollard and a series of prints by Tatham and O'Sullivan. The show is called Echo Echo: more loops and mirrors.
Selective Memory Scotland and Venice is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until March 5, 2006. Echo Echo is at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until January 21, 2006.
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