Each year, from mid-summer to early fall, the arts converge in Scotland’s capital city.  The Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are well-known venues for the performing arts.  The Edinburgh Festivals have expanded to include art forms such as film, jazz and blues, storytelling, and books.  The visual arts is no exception in having its own festival platform.  Taking place throughout August and the first week of September, the Edinburgh Art Festival is Scotland’s largest annual festival of visual art.  Daily Serving brings our readers some of its highlights.

The Edinburgh Art Festival annually commissions new works of art and partners with the local art community to provide a strong exhibitions program throughout the city.  The 2010 EAF presents commissions of new work by artists Martin Creed, Richard Wright and collaborative partners Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth.  Coleman and Hogarth’s Staged, which concluded August 15th, was produced by the Collective Gallery and situated at the City Observatory on Carlton Hill.  The artists turned the space into a multi-channel video installation described by the EAF Guide as both a ‘digital camera obscura’ and ‘a mise-en-scène’ for the city.  Capitalizing upon the theatrical emphasis of the Edinburgh Festivals, the artists included visitors in their work by projecting live CCTV footage along with pre-recorded filmic images of Edinburgh.

The 2010 EAF also commissioned intervention and performance works to take place throughout its run.  Among them is Ross Christie’s Mobile Art Market.  His environmentally friendly cycle-powered market stall travels around Edinburgh, offering up affordable prints, multiples, books and fanzines created by local artists.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents new and recent work by 2001 Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed in Down Over Up.  Down Over Up – an evocative title – is inspired by the artist’s commission to refurbish the Scotsman Steps.  Creed notes the strong use of repetition in his work, which is for him a comfortable means of approaching our chaotic world and creating some semblance of regularity.  The exhibition’s strong thematic emphasis upon repetitive, incremental changes allows one to see differences where things might have otherwise appeared to be the same.

Down Over Up is centered upon the concept of ’stacking and progression in size, height and tone’.  The exhibition features work where Creed has stacked or piled planks, chairs, tables, boxes, or legos.  The artist also uses paint and ink to explore the theme.  Creed’s new commission within the gallery transforms the central staircase into a synthesizer and is one of the conceptual highlights of the exhibition.  Ascending and descending the staircase causes notes on a scale to sound – making visitors’ movements through the gallery take on heightened participatory purpose as they both enact and complete the work

The Scotsman Steps Commission. Artist's impression of EAF commission for the Scotsman Steps, curated by the Fruitmarket Gallery and supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Down Over Up aptly references Creed’s permanent public work commission to refurbish Edinburgh’s Scotsman Steps.  The Steps, which take their name from the newspaper whose headquarters they were built to serve in 1904, are located by the Fruitmarket Gallery, connecting East Market Street and North Bridge in Edinburgh’s uniquely elevated Old Town.  The city seeks to give the Steps new life through the commission, as they have fallen out of favor due to disrepair and association with crime.  While the work has not been completed, Creed plans to resurface each step with contrasting marbles sourced from around the world.  The materials will not only infuse the Scotsman Steps with visual interest and a sense of permanence, but will also inject it with global character.

Martin Creed: Down Over Up will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 31 October 2010.

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Richard Wright, The Stairwells Project, An EAF Commission in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Supported by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund. Photo: Angela Catlin.

2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright presents Stairwell Project, a new permanent work at the Dean Gallery.  The Dean Gallery, a part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1990s, was designed by Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital in 1831.  The Gallery’s staircases are among the building’s most prominent features and provide an expansive, architecturally unique background for Wright’s work.  Known for his ephemeral, wall-based painting, Wright brings this character to the Dean Gallery’s western staircase – placing the tradition of stairwell painting within the modern art gallery and presenting it in a new way.

Wright hand-painted The Stairwell Project in a physically and mentally demanding process that took four weeks to complete.  Inspired by the honeysuckle design of the original ceiling moldings in the stairwell, Wright designed an organic, abstracted flower shape.  He chose to paint solely in black – a color which points to the building’s melancholic history.  The flower motif is repeated in varying ways several thousand times throughout the stairwell.  The organic nature of the shape notably has the effect of introducing curved lines to a space that is solidly geometric.  Yet, the shape’s simplicity and its neutral color do not overpower.  Instead, the carefully varied size, orientation and placement of each flower subtly emphasizes the stairwell’s architecture and the abundance of light let in by the large windows.

Hito Steyerl:  In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl, still from In Free Fall. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

The Collective Gallery presents In Free Fall, featuring new and recent work by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.  Berlin-based Steyerl works in visual essay or film essay similar to artists such as Ursula Biemann.  This nascent documentary-influenced approach features a montage of appropriated and new footage, interviews and voice-over narrative.  Unlike traditional media, film essays facilitate the analysis of global complexities.  Through the shared language of images and information, Steyerl closely examines the economic networks which define our existence.

In Free Fall – Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Scotland – presents Journal No. 1 in addition to three related works that include After the Crash, Before the Crash and Crash (a new commission).   The Crash works address the global economic downturn by focusing on an airplane junkyard located in the visually bare California desert - revealing cycles of capitalism as seen through the evolution of commodity.  The airplane, which facilitates global mobility, is a recognizable symbol of globalization and reveals a larger story.  As the Collective asserts, these works present ‘an anatomy of crashes both fictional and real’, revealing ‘unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle’.

In Free Fall concludes at the Collective Gallery on 19 September.

Julie Roberts: Child

Julie Roberts, Staying Together (2010), oil on linen. Collection of Mr. Pontus Bonnier, Sweden. Courtesy of Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery presents Julie Roberts: Child – featuring new work by the artist.  Julie Roberts, a painter based in England, is concerned with the means through which ‘our social experience is given shape’.  In the past, Roberts has often chosen to paint the overtly sinister, drawing her to crime scenes and medical instruments.  Child – a thematic departure – focuses on gender roles, domestic environments, familial portraiture, school rooms and domestic labor situated in mid-twentieth century Britain.  As with past work, her new subject matter is underpinned by extensive research.  This allows Roberts to accurately present an entirely different, decidedly austere approach to childhood in a time period complicated by a great displacement of children into orphanages and foster homes.

While Roberts focuses on historic approaches to childhood and the family network, there is no sentimentality involved.  In works such as Staying Together or Meat and Two Veg, Roberts makes once familiar family scenes and portraiture both strange and unrecognizable.  Carefully constructed, unnatural stiffness is tempered by realism.  At the same time, historic subject matter is stylized and set against characteristic patterned backgrounds and wallpaper.  Roberts’ both stylized and informed approach to her subject matter combine to highlight ways in which society has changed over time.

Julie Roberts: Child remains at the Talbot Rice Gallery through 25 September.

life.turns.

life.turns. Uploaded submission.

life.turns. a film made by thousands of people, one frame at a time, is part of the 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival.  Blipfoto, an online photo journal and social networking community, was commissioned by New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund to create an animated film using thousands of photos uploaded by participants. People were invited to submit photographs posed in any of 8 specified stances that represent the progressive movements of walking.  Blipfoto then presented these still images in a rapid succession giving the illusion of thousands of people walking – working together to complete one another’s gait.  The resulting animated film revives the Victorian zoetrope in a new way for the digital world and presents a celebration of everyday life in all its diversity.

life.turns. was completed and presented at Inspace in Edinburgh on 26 August.  The film can be viewed online at Blipfoto.

One of the worst things about summer is also one of the best: it’s transitory.  Like an awkward first love affair, that fact that it’s all over so fast is exactly what makes summer such a mythologized season.  In the art world, summer is the spiritual home to the group show, a time to test out new ideas or bring together artists still in an experimental phase of their own.  Summer Show 2010 at Fourteen30 Contemporary takes the ubiquitous August group exhibition and gives it a raison d’etre by actually being about summer, proving once again that the simplest premise is often the best.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 1 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 3, AP I/II.

John Sisley, Ice and Polaroid 12 (2010). Archival inkjet print, 11 x 15 inches. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

The front and back rooms of the gallery are hung mostly with paintings and photography.  In the front, John Sisley’s two pieces Ice and Polaroid 1 and Ice and Polaroid 12 (both 2010) are small black-and-white inkjet prints.  1 shows a set of ice cubes sitting beside an undeveloped Polaroid photograph; 12 shows the now-developed Polaroid (a shot of the original set of ice cubes) next to a puddle of water.  The clean, evidence-based approach to depicting a process—here is the start, here is the finish—gives the pieces a quiet gravity and the photograph-in-a-photograph plays with ideas of representation, duplication, and the passage of time.  On an adjacent wall, Devon Oder’s Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009) provides a counterpoint to Sisley’s stark vision.  The enlarged vintage photograph depicts a sunbleached view of a cave of overgrown brambles and twigs hunkered at the edge of a forest, and it’s unclear whether it’s a natural formation or man-made and abandoned.  No matter, it’s an eleven-year-old’s summer reverie, the mysterious thing that she hopes to stumble on during long unsupervised hours.  Fingerprints and age spots mar the edge of the photo, attesting to its beloved status: this photograph has been looked at many times, and the smudges make for a wistful feel, conjuring that back-to-school pang of impending bus rides, structured days, and having to wear clean clothes.

Devon Oder, Bleed (Tree Cave) (2009). Lightjet print, 35 x 35 inches.

In the next room is Jesse Sugarmann’s I’m on Fire (2010), a deliciously masculine two-channel paean to frustrated love.  The left screen depicts, in succession, a Lincoln Town Car parked in a field, then backing forcefully into reflective mylar; or a man in a grey suit, sunglasses, and white shoes (presumably the artist) playing an amateurish version of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” on an electric guitar.  On the right screen, the same car does hydraulic tricks and falls off cinderblocks; or has the front end propped crazily on (and then falls off) a tall four-by-four; or churns out clouds of smoke that billow over bright green grass and into the hot sky.  In the middle of all this, the arms of a forklift bang an old electric keyboard clumsily; later, the forklift lowers the entire car so that one tire mashes the keyboard, honking out a cacophonic accompaniment to the guitar solo on the adjacent screen.  Somewhere in all of this is a yearning that manifests itself as a pyrrhic desire to destroy things just to get a little fire going in the middle of a dry month.  Whether inspired by real or fictional unrequited love, Sugarmann’s video is pitch-perfect, a charming mix of boyish cool, summer heat, longing, frustration, and semi-dangerous stunts.  I left the gallery with Springsteen’s lyrics in my head-

Jesse Sugarmann, I'm on Fire (2010). Dual channel video, sound: 8:53 minutes. Edition of 5, AP I/II.

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull
and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire

Psychedelia is a state of mind. It is a particular mode of perception that upends our assumptions about the way that the world works. It is about heightened color, glimmering patterns, and swirling constellations of form that challenge gravity and the very boundaries between discrete objects.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.

Milena Bonilla, Variations on a homogenous landscape (detail), 2006. Photograph courtesy the artist.

While the act of mapping conveys authority – giving credence to that which it records – mapping cannot remain entirely static and must be revised to represent changes in power structures.  In efforts to better understand or better represent the world, many contemporary artists eschew two-dimensional map-making in favor of addressing the ways in which traditional maps are transgressed by global complexities.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists currently on view at the Institute of International Visual Arts in London (Iniva) offers creative alternatives to a stale representation of global organization.  Capitalizing on the potentially transformative nature of mapping, nine contemporary artists deconstruct conventions in favor of introducing previously ‘off the map’ concepts.  Whose Map is it? is inextricably engaged with the larger theme of globalization for the way that this present condition problematizes the traditional two-dimensional nation-state map structure.  Presenting new and recent work in diverse media, the exhibition offers freshly layered, content-wise approaches that creatively reposition map-making to more fully represent today’s mobile world.

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #1 (film still), 2008. Courtesy of galerieofmarseille. Produced with the support of Artschool Palestine. Copyright the artist.

The deconstruction of existing map structures is central to the exhibition.  In Milena Bonilla’s Variations on a homeogeneous landscape (2006), traditional scientific cartographic means are questioned by presenting repositioned and disoriented fragments of familiar maps.  In a different vein, Bouchra Khalili’s Mapping Journey films the marking through and across of a two-dimensional map in order to illustrate a path of actual, experienced migration.  As the moving image overrides the flat, two dimensional map, the viewer sees that mobility has become the new global landscape as it crosses political boundaries.  Also mapping in an innovative way, Gayle Chong Kwan’s new commission Save the Last Dance for Me charts the movement and migration of Rumba.  The resulting large-scale, global cultural map is accompanied by a sound piece offering Rumba dance instruction.

Oraib Toukan, The New(er) Middle East, Installation view at Rivington Place 2007. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Map structures take on Post-colonial concepts in Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s new commission A continuing survey of syntatic parsing.  In this work, Wolukau-Wanambwa charts British colonial conquest narratives in juxtaposition with bourgeois British civilian life of the same period.  Also of Post-colonial theme, Alexandra Handal’s Labyrinth of Remains and Migration (2000-01 & 2010) draws visually spare ‘mental maps’ that represent Palestinian dispossession.

The gallery audience is charged with mapping their own Middle East in Oraib Toukan’s interactive magnetic puzzle piece entitled The New(er) Middle East.  This work references the region’s divisive geo-political history that has been marked by Western intervention.  More specifically, Toukan’s work playfully alludes to the catch phrase introduced by the Bush administration’s Condoleezza Rice in 2006 conceptualizing a more stable Middle Eastern political map through further Western interference and map restructuring.

Esther Polak, NomadicMILK, installation view at Rivington Place 2007 2010. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Globalization’s free-trade economics define the ever-more global face of the world and are therefore addressed by multiple artists in this exhibition.  Artist Susan Stockwell’s site-specific commission, River of Blood, focuses on the world’s growing urban populations by highlighting economic disparity in London along a commonly recognized North-South divide.  River of Blood is on one hand a map of the Thames River and its tributaries.  On the other hand, its red vinyl cut-outs resemble human arteries, thereby emphasizing the visceral socio-economic, geographic divide between the haves (of North London) and have-nots (of South London).

Esther Polak’s NomadicMILK (2009) is engaged with mapping the movements of a particular contemporary economic system.  This work tracks the movements of nomadic Fulani herdsmen and dairy transporters throughout Nigeria using GPS technology to illustrate the constant movement required to execute the work of a single industry.  Focusing on a site of dramatic economic transformation, Otobong Nkanga’s Delta Stories (05/06) illustrates the ecological ramifications of harvesting oil repositories in a Nigerian delta region.

Susan Stockwell, River of Blood, 2010. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists was initiated by Iniva curators Christine Takengny and Teresa Cisneros in conjunction with a full schedule of educational events including the Crossing Boundaries Symposium that took place 2 June.   Upcoming events include a July 8th talk entitled The Content and the Meaning of the Spaces We Encounter with Paul Goodwin and Alex Vasudeum.  On 15 July a screening will be held of visual essayist Ursula Biemann’s film Sahara Chronicle, followed by a discussion with visual culture scholar Irit Rogoff.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists is on view at Iniva’s Rivington Place in London through 24 July.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Andreas Templin’s multi-dimensional body of work includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, and urban interventions. His diverse practice is guided by a critical approach to the making of art; each work is the outcome of an insightful process that examines culture from a philosophical point of view. As the artist states, “The adult individual consumer is faced with the creative possibility of reinventing his identity each day, with the wide variety of enhancement products now available for use. The artist, too, must move with the times, and avoid being a fixed label, but use everything available to him.”

Templin’s technically simplistic, and somewhat disconcerting, video work, As if to nothing (9:54), consists of the constant display of earth’s qualitative statistical data, culled from governmental sources, accompanied by a recording of Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. The emotional depth of the audio heightens the impact and immediacy of the dreary data display. Selected statistics include a tally of the world’s population, military expenditures, infectious diseases, and species extinct. The environmental data set “Ocean Oil Spills (tons)” holds particular poignancy in our current cultural moment.

This type of cultural insight, and perhaps critique, appears in Templin’s vinyl record album, Andreas Templin plays Bach, a recording of the artist whistling Bach throughout the city streets. This more playful form of artistic commentary was born out of the artist’s distaste with the “clean and highly competitive virtuoso-recordings” that exist of the German composer, and was recorded in the red light district of Amsterdam. The album cover was created by classical music photographer Felix Broede.

Templin, who lives and works in Berlin, is currently participating in the group show Consume at Exit Art in New York. The exhibition, which is a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates world food production, consummation, distribution, and waste. Consume will remain on view until August 28th.

This week, the Christian Marclay: Festival will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The exhibition celebrates many of the artist’s graphic scores for performance and will take the form of multiple daily performances by individual musicians and vocalists. The Whitney has pulled together some of country’s finest Avant-garde musicians to play more than a dozen of Marclay’s scores dated from 1985 to 2010. Some of the works to be performed include, ChalkBoard (2010), Covers (2007-10) and Screen Play (2005). Many of the pieces take the form of a physical art object produced from videos, photographs, found images, and readymade objects which are intended to elicit a musical response from the performers.

Christian Marclay, Screen Play, 2005. Courtesy the artist. © Christian Marclay

Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is internationally known for his innovative artworks that explore the intersection of image and sound. Over the past several decades, the artist has combined performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video to create unique work that provides commentary on many aspects of contemporary culture, while continuing to push the boundaries of visual art and music. Marclay is often recognized as an early pioneer of turntablism, as he first began to use turntables and physically altered records as instruments for performances in the late 1970’s.

Festival begins this Thursday, July 1st with two pieces performed by Min Xiao-Fen and Elliot Sharp at 1pm and Ulrich Kieger at 2:30pm. The exhibition will continue through September 26, 2010.

Mowing the lawn is synonymous with suburban existence.  It is a task so habitual and perfunctory that it seems unlikely as artistic subject matter.  However, it is precisely this everyday quality of lawn maintenance that enables Jeremy Wood to imbue it with significance by newly exploring it with GPS (Global Positioning Systems) technology.  For Mowing the Lawn, currently at Tenderpixel in London, Jeremy Wood continues his technique of GPS drawing – this time in his own backyard.  Using GPS to record his riding lawnmower’s path over several seasons, data of his movement and location (including latitude, longitude, altitude and time) are essentialized into a linear pattern.

Wood’s use of GPS diverges from the traditional use of the technology, which was invented by the United States military for navigation and combat purposes.  Instead of underscoring the current power structure, Wood creates personal cartographies that reflect the everyday nature of contemporary mobility.  Wood likens the GPS record of his movement to a ‘visual journal’.  He maps his journey through space and time, recording and understanding an otherwise transient experience in a new way.  Unlike some past work, Mowing the Lawn does not cross borders, but instead ignores traditional lines of power all together.

Jeremy Wood currently lives and works in Oxford, England and Athens, Greece.  Wood has worked with GPS technology since 2000 – when military quality GPS first became available to civilians globally.  He holds a fine arts degree from the University of Derby and an MFA from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design.  His work was recently included in Map Marking at the Pace Digital Gallery in New York.

Jeremy Wood’s Mowing the Lawn will be on view at Tenderpixel through 22 June 2010.