VISUAL ART | Reviews
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MULTIMEDIA ROSS BIRRELL: THE TRANSIT OF HERMES CCA, Glasgow, until Sun 3 Jun ●●●●●
There are a wealth of engaging and timely ideas behind Scottish artist Ross Birrell’s exhibition The Transit of Hermes. However, there is a sense that the process was where the real discoveries were made, and that this documentary display is merely an imitation of a hugely ambitious project. Originally presented as part of Documenta 14, the films which
form the exhibition centrepiece and document two long-distance horse journeys made in the early part of 2017. One entails the Athens-Kassel Ride, a 100-day trek through Europe, from Greece to Germany, which tracks the 3000km route between the two host locations of Documenta. The other, ‘Criollo’, features footage of a single horse transported to the site of three identical horse-riding statues of the Argentine leader José de San Martin in Buenos Aires, Washington DC and New York. The journey surrounding the latter film didn’t attempt to recreate
the entire 10,000-mile horseback journey that Swiss-Argentine explorer Aimé Felix Tschiffely made between Buenos Aires and New York, over three years between 1925 and 1928. But the physical documentation of each trip in the exhibition – the films, some gorgeous landscape photographs, a horse trailer and equipment, and a couple of hundred straw bales – manages to evoke the egalitarian spirit of that original journey.
In the labour of wheezing horses and the gorgeous green vistas exposed in photographs, we find time to consider the themes Birrell appears to be presenting: migration (the route from Greece to Germany is surely no coincidence), reconnection with nature, and reattachment to the flyover states and rural countryside which urban living and jet travel are helping to erase from our consciousness. Yet to an extent, this show feels like watching the holiday video and wishing you had been there for the journey. (David Pollock)
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FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY STILL MOVING: THE FILMS AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF ULRIKE OTTINGER Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 29 Jul ●●●●●
Most of the pieces presented in Still Moving are photographic works which particularly document German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s output from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. This period was marked by her return to Germany following time in Paris during the late 1960s. Many specialist photographers would be happy with such a rich catalogue.
Specifically, the bulk of the pieces shown document
her ‘Berlin Trilogy’ of films (‘Ticket of No Return’ (1979), ‘Freak Orlando’ (1981), and ‘Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press’ from 1984). Together they conjure Berlin as a sumptuously-costumed Brutalist dystopia which absorbs references to Woolf, Wilde, noir cinema, science fiction and biblical costume drama, in a manner which is gorgeously elegant and degradingly violent in turn.
The rest of the photographs refer to ‘Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia’ (1989), which was shot in Mongolia and reflected Ottinger’s interests in colonialism and ethnography, once again conjuring a furiously detailed symbolic psychogeography of the imagination. (David Pollock)
116 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2018 116 THE LIST 1 Jun–31 Aug 2018
MULTIMEDIA JAMES PFAFF: ALEX & ME Street Level, Glasgow, until Sun 1 Jul ●●●●●
‘Ever been Changed by Someone?’ asks the nightclub-coloured neon sign from the corner wall of Glasgow-born artist James Pfaff’s intimate excavation and reconstruction of his own past. As they beam out in scrawly hand-writing, the words might just as well be ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?’ A hormonal rush of doomed amours is all over
Pfaff’s document of a road trip he made in 1998 from Toronto to New Orleans, then back north to New York. He did all this with a woman called Alex, a muse who lingers still in this ever-expanding homage to her that was first captured in a book curated, as with the exhibition, by another woman, Francesca Seravalle.
Laid out alongside a whole pile of scrap-books, this is both a purging and a taking-stock, a not-so- secret diary of fleeting moments which are captured, contained, immortalised and fictionalised as a visual poem and possibly unreliable memoir of times past. Like studied reimaginings of On the Road, A Bout de Souffle and Bonnie and Clyde, Alex & Me is a rom-com, a tragedy and a runaway romance seen through one man’s rose-tinted Ray-Bans. It’s the beginning and end of a beautiful adventure every would-be beatnik wants to have. All of which makes you wonder what Alex is doing now. (Neil Cooper)
GROUP SHOW CELLULAR WORLD: CYBORG- HUMAN-AVATAR-HORROR GOMA, Glasgow, until Mon 8 Oct ●●●●● You can’t escape the elephant in the room in this parallel universe group show. Programmed by incumbent Glasgow International director Richard Parry, he’s beamed down nine artists for a speculative fiction-inspired exploration of possible futures in a messed-up world. The elephant in question is captured in Telepath (2018), a cinema-scope sized close-up by John Russell set against a backdrop of a re-made and re-modelled version of the gallery interior, as if the beast had been captured in the wild and put on show à la King Kong. Frozen in monumental hi-res, the image could be a trophy of an endangered species poached from Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder by way of The Veldt. Elsewhere, Mai-Thu Perret’s Les Gurrillerres XIII (2018) imagines a feminist militia in the desert by way of a female mannequin in repose, reading on a rug with her machine gun nestled beside her. E Jane’s The Avatar (2015) tries on internet identities for size in a series of hi-tech videos. As far as one can tell from Sam Keogh’s recordings accompanying his Kapton Cadaverine (2017), Keogh is a man who fell to earth, the grubby remains of his cellophane-wrapped spaceship blown out of orbit and now in storage awaiting forensics. (Neil Cooper)