Neil Cooper
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Edinburgh Annuale 2012
20 Jun 2012
Essential showcase of city's independent artistic infrastructure
In terms of how art happens at a grassroots level, both Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government are as clueless as each other. The importance of Edinburgh Annuale to the city’s independent artistic infrastructure, on the other hand, cannot be…
Tim Hecker / Wounded Knee / Matthew Collings
23 May 2012
Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh - Sat 19 May 2012
Anyone au fait with Sacred Music, BBC 4's two-series trawl through the history of choral worship, from plainchant to polyphony and beyond, will be as versed in the integral relationship between music and church architecture as they are with presenter…
Scott Myles: This Production
23 May 2012
Dundee artist and former skater reclaims DCA building’s interior
It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage re-imagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers, which, under the…
Paul Thek: If you don’t like this book you don’t like me
23 May 2012
Candid close-up of Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor
‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost a hundred notebooks left behind by Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor Thek, which came to light following his…
Jeremy Deller: Sacrilege
25 Apr 2012
Stonehenge reimagined as a bouncy castle celebrates creative power of play
If you’re feeling down in the dumps, there are few things more rejuvenating than jumping up and down like an idiot for a few minutes. If you can do so without bursting out laughing like an even bigger loon, chances are you’re dead. As a child of the…
Folkert De Jong: The Immortals
25 Apr 2012
Dutch artist references Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh
A gaudily attired couple sit astride some scaffolding watching the debris-ridden legacy of the best minds of their generation. Or at least that’s the sense you get of Dutch artist Folkert De Jong’s site-specific sculptural intervention, which looks to…
Teresa Margolles
25 Apr 2012
Photographic archive of the now decaying Mexican border town
Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ work for Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old whisky bond building, which sources a photographic archive of the now decaying Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from…
George Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary
28 Mar 2012
Valuable retrospective of the Whysman's work
Environmental art may be all the rage these days, but, as with the soon to be mothballed Collins Gallery, George Wyllie was way ahead of the curve. While best known for huge public spectacles The Straw Locomotive and The Paper Boat, as well as a…
Emory Douglas - Creator of iconic imagery behind Black Panther Party
26 Mar 2012
GI show from American Black Power movement linchpin
‘In Revolution one wins, or one dies.’ When this slogan appeared aloft Emory Douglas’ image of a couple of beret-clad African-American guerrillas on a big-screen back-drop at major concert halls around the world, it was a far cry from the roots of…
Jane and Louise Wilson
27 Feb 2012
Major new film installation of surveillance-related work
Jane and Louise Wilson are no strangers to going behind closed doors. In ‘Face Scripting – What Did the Building See?’, a major new film installation that forms the centrepiece of this body of surveillance-related work, they cast themselves as…
Luke Fowler (with Toshiya Tsunoda and John Haynes)
17 Feb 2012
Film installation references RD Laing
‘We are actors in a play... whose plot we don’t know... and whose end I dare not imagine.’ These words, delivered by iconoclastic Glasgow-born ‘anti-psychiatrist’ RD Laing, not only form the opening gambit of ‘All Divided Selves’, Luke Fowler’s latest…
Steve Strange and the Detroit Starrzz - Citrus Club, Edinburgh, Fri 3 Feb 2012
8 Feb 2012
Disappointing gig from the New Romantic
When 80s tribute band, and tonight's support act Party Fears Three dedicate their bombastically unsubtle cover of David Bowie's 'Ashes To Ashes' to Steve Strange,…
Raydale Dower - Cryptic Nights at CCA, Glasgow, Thu 2 Feb 2012
8 Feb 2012
Experimental but playful sound installation
The title of Raydale Dower's new 'spatial sound composition' speaks volumes about the former Uncle John & Whitelock bassist and current Tut Vu Vu clarinettist and sonic architect's methodology.…
Steven Severin: Vampyr - Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh, Thu 12 Jan
1 Feb 2012
Ex-Banshees bassist delivers brooding live score to 1930s horror classic
The man with the flowing white hair walks towards a small table and chair to one side of the Cameo’s big screen. Sporting a long black winter coat and carrying a glass of red wine, the man looks as if he’s stepped in from another, altogether darker age…
Allan Sekula: Ship of Fools
1 Feb 2012
Large-scale images explore shipping industry’s role in exploitation of labour
Now that capitalism is a sinking ship with assorted captains scrambling for the lifeboats, Allan Sekula’s ongoing photographic exploration of globalisation in motion is the perfect metaphor for a world all at sea. This most recent series by the…
Michael Nyman - Michael Nyman
1 Feb 2012
Handsomely packaged re-release of early scores by minimalist composer
(MN Records) Long before his soundtrack for Jane Campion’s The Piano, Michael Nyman’s very English form of baroque minimalism had impeccable art school credentials. Following his debut on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, this 1981 follow-up five years…
GFF 2012 - Silver Apples set for Glasgow Music and Film Festival
27 Jan 2012
Live set from the cult 60s space rock pioneers
When Simeon Coxe III took a 1940s vintage oscillator onstage with him to liven up the psych-rock band he fronted, sparks flew to the extent that half the band left, and, with only drummer Danny Taylor in tow, Silver Apples were born. With their name…
What Presence! – The Rock Photography of Harry Papadopoulos
19 Dec 2011
Stunning exhibition of post-punk music photography
Harry Papadopoulos is the great unsung documenter of post-punk, who, between 1978 and 1984, captured a crucial era in pop history in all its geeky glory. Having started out taking snaps for Bobby Bluebell’s fanzine, The Ten Commandments, and orbiting…
Andrew Kerr – So Ensconced
19 Dec 2011
Over 70 new paintings in this debut solo exhibition from the Glasgow-based artist
Absence makes the heart grow fonder in Andrew Kerr’s first major solo show in Scotland. Almost 70 new paintings discreetly dominate both floors, only interrupted by the odd smattering of drawings or sculptural intervention. Most of the mainly…
The Hot 100 2011 - No. 7: Martin Boyce on winning the Turner Prize
16 Dec 2011
The Glasgow artist on Glasgow School of Art, fame and the future
Unlike his work, Martin Boyce doesn’t appear to have any angles. Two days before scooping the 2011 Turner Prize for A Library of Leaves, his 2010 show at Zurich’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber, the Hamilton-born, Glasgow School of Art-trained maker of…
Beholder
9 Dec 2011
Gloriously disparate jumbled-up wonderland of art for art’s sake that’s a joy to wander through
‘Beauty’, according to that man David Hume, whose tercentenary year is almost up, ‘is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’ So it goes in this bumper grab bag of some 50 works, each subjectively…
Torsten Lauschmann: Startle Reaction
9 Dec 2011
Explores tangled-up mess of interconnectivity
You don’t immediately notice the quieter, more domestic pieces in Torsten Lauschmann’s biggest box of tricks to date. The subverted digital clock above the DCA box office and the wired-up chandelier that hangs in Gallery One, where two of Lauschmann’s…
Bill Wells' National Jazz Trio of Scotland to appear at Tracer Trails' Christmas Party
9 Dec 2011
Another engagement for the ubiquitous collaborator and jazzman
The National Jazz Trio of Scotland has never really been a trio. Nor has Bill Wells’ cheekily-monickered combo ever played jazz in the conventional sense. With a first album of original material – the waggishly christened Standards Volume Two…
Fordell Research Unit - The Illusion of Movement
7 Dec 2011
Edinburgh noise auteurs' exercise in metal machine minimalism
(At War With False Noise/Braw Music) Following the textured nuances of his Pjorn 72 label’s Songs For Dying compilation, Edinburgh noise auteur Fraser Burnett joins forces with Muscletusk’s Grant Smith for a relentless exercise in metal machine…
FareWell Poetry / Matthew Collings / Hiva Oa / Opul, The Third Door, Edinburgh, Mon 14 Nov
18 Nov 2011
Carefully crafted multi-media, poetry-meets-noise and guitar assaults
Salsa class is cancelled tonight, according to the blackboard outside what used to be after-hours hippy student dive Medina, but which now looks intent on filling the DIY boho gap that the Roxy Arthouse and The Forest once occupied so randomly. The…
