Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Unfortunately Roderick Buchanan’s Histrionics has taken over Gallery 1, on the ground floor, until 28 October. It’s a worthy political initiative supported by Glasgow City Council as part of Blind Faith, an anti-sectarianism programme. But it’s not much to write home about artistically. The installation Beyond Use is a typical small-scale conceptual work making an extremely vague point about the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons in Northern Ireland. But it may be the best piece here. The videos of a loyalist and a republican pipe band are fairly interesting, but only really because of the bands. There’s a statistical mural analysing the origins of the artist’s family and that of his wife, which would seem more at home as part of a museum display than in an art gallery. And I had very little time for the three-part work Thomas Muir Helpdesk, a kind of monument to an 18th century radical. I’m afraid dry lists of dates and events really are just that. Apart from that, there was a wall full (predictably) of Celtic and Rangers footballers and a montage of photographs of the John Knox statue in the Necropolis. The reactions of visitors top the exhibition, posted up on notice boards at the back of the room, were more engaging of attention than the exhibition itself, which was socially laudable but otherwise simply worthy.
In Gallery 3 at the moment there’s an exhibition of Andy Warhol posters, which is as disappointing as you might expect. Yes, there are a couple of examples of Warhol at his best, visually – there’s a poster incorporating the famous acid vision of Liz Taylor, and another one masquerading as an ad for a soap power. But mostly these posters are noteworthy only because they’re so ordinary and unoriginal. Above the posters, the walls are covered in quotations from the great man saying things like ‘art is too hard’ and ‘why can’t I be non-original?’. Below the quotations, the posters reflect the same philosophy. Never mind.
Galleries 2 and 4, the collection of recent acquisitions of essentially British contemporary art, is where the real action is in GoMA just now, and I’m afraid even that isn’t very inspiring. There’s an awful, vacuous video by Douglas Gordon, A Moment of Silence, and the bike in a glass case that helped Simon Starling win the Turner Prize in 2005. Ian Findlay Hamilton’s and Pia Suming’s Patriot’s Room is at least a mildly intriguing installation, a mock bedroom displaying rustic embroidered sayings on the walls that reflect some sort of ironic political stance. But it’s not more than that. The best things on display are I think Daphne Wright’s House Ornaments – especially the cacti collection, which are fun and pretty knitted objects – and Hannelore Visnes’s portrait of Farah Dibnah.
I was disappointed overall, by lacklustre exhibits on a gallery that could be so much better. A lot depends on the ground floor, though, I reckon.
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