A Serious Brain Teaser : MOIRA JEFFREY:
Three years ago Danish curator Lars Bang Larsen shook up Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery with Pyramids of Mars, a project with Glasgow's Modern Institute that included artists dealing in everything from classic psychedelia to open-access internet broadcasting. Now he's back messing with our heads in The Echo Show, an exhibition co-curated with artist Søren Andreasen that takes as its complex founding metaphor the idea of the echo, with its drift, repetition, and, scariest of all, its delays and absences.
There's certainly something mournful about The Echo Show. Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz's soundpieces Aviary – a call-and-response backyard chant recalled from her childhood in Arden – and Guadalupe, in which we hear the artist lost in a Texas bus station, while a plinky-plonk muzak version of the country classic I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry plays in the background, both reverberate with finely tuned melancholy.
The Lost Film is a film which records the search by Beirut-based artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige for a copy of their first feature which went missing somewhere on tour in Yemen. In the end the pair discover that the aluminium cans that contained their work have been cannibalised to make kitchen utensils.
Miraculously, a few frames of their film survive, but in the most depressing of circumstances – the Lebanese censors have literally excised them and have been good enough to return the offending material by post.
But there's something dark, and sexy, too, about the echo, most notably in the work of Camilla Løw, the young Norwegian artist who is an increasingly admired figure on the Glasgow scene. Løw's piece Pirate Love is a suspended sculpture of metal rings, an enlarged version of a necklace, which hangs in the air as though it hasn't really been made at all, but is a self-generated cascade of circles, coupling and decoupling with a kind of self-fulfilling logic. Alongside are some of her smaller sculptural objects: a fractured pole leaning against the wall, like a laconic figure in a nightclub, Cobra is a densely constructed wall piece made from six triangles of black- lacquered strips of wood veneer. Stepanova is a teetering column of painted wood and brass rings like bangles. Contradictory influences like op art, Russian constructivism, new romanticism, and punk seem to coalesce in this work. The dark, night-time throb of its atmosphere is elegantly evoked in the accompanying catalogue essay by Sarah Lowndes.
The Echo Show is also in many ways about what it means to make and show art, how the work can carve a space for itself in the world, whether there are censors or curators, councils or corporations to deal with. It's about the differences and similarities between the spaces we live in and the spaces in our heads.
The Danish collaboration, Rasmus Knud and Søren Andreasen, feel they create their own freedom and space by the very act of co-operation. Along with a dub soundtrack, playing on a stereo ambiguously placed in the back of an old car, they've instigated a poster campaign for an ideal future. Upset proclaims the slogan for one image, featuring dub genius King Tubby and anarchist icon Emma Goldman.
Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, who work between Buenos Aires and Berlin, are showing some of their anarchic animations, including a plasticine sci-fi version of Easy Rider. But they also show Geographical Mapping, the large painting and video seen in Venice this year, which charts the polluted course of the River Riachulo in Argentina, a site loaded with a bitter and terrible history of corruption and political violence.
The complex relationship between the artist and politics, as well as the politics of the art world, were a territory mapped by the late American artist Ad Reinhardt, represented here by copies of his famous cartoons for the communist press.
Reconciling Reinhardt's famous black-on-black paintings with his life as a political activist, typographer, and designer is one of those fascinating conundrums that can make your head hurt. In fact, there is much about the ambitions of The Echo Show, set down in an essay by the curators, that hurts your head. It's no bad thing really.
The Echo Show is the last exhibition in Tramway 2 before the January deadline when the Scottish Arts Council's lottery committee will make a decision on Scottish Ballet's application for funding to make Tramway its new headquarters, including changing the use of the former tramshed from exhibition venue to workshop. In the meantime, I have been told by Glasgow's cultural and leisure services that there will be no further exhibitions in the space this financial year, but that they intend to go ahead, with some timetable rescheduling, with shows planned for later in 2004.
The Echo Show is curated by an internationally respected Danish writer and curator who recently settled in a flat just a few minutes from the venue. It includes artists from Denmark, Germany, Argentina, and the Middle East, an international figure who grew up in Glasgow, and a young Norwegian who has made the city her home. It's just this kind of complex web of relationships, the call and response, echoes and reverberations that make up the international dialogue of art, that Glasgow stands to lose if the venue is closed.
The Echo Show is at Tramway until December 21.
original article : http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/4521.html