Whatever happened to the art at Edinburgh? It’s always been the backbone of our visits, the Fringe being complemented by the biggest array of art to be found outside of Venice. Until this year, when we’ve been met with an endless succession of closed galleries, ex-galleries, galleries that are no longer free, and artwork which is, on the whole, a bit underwhelming.
Top of the list of closed galleries must be the Collective Gallery on Calton Hill, which has frankly been the only reason to climb all the way up Calton Hill for a number of years. It’s listed in the Edinburgh Art Festival programme, with a whole page to itself, but thank god we found out in advance (from the website) that it’s not open.
Add to this the closed basement floor or The City Art Centre, the closed lower level of the National Gallery of Scotland, the broken lift at the National Portrait Gallery (which formerly gave a marvellous all-round view of the exhibition floors), the closed-despite-being-advertised-as-open Burns Monument, no work this year at the High School on Calton Hill, and the closed permanent and the temporary galleries at the National Library of Scotland, and you have quite a diminution of what’s been on offer before. You now have to pay to see the exhibitions at Dovecot Gallery, which is a shame, and we didn’t bother.
Summerhall has continued to lose exhibition space to performances over the years. When we first discovered it, it had more art on show than any other venue in years, in all its buildings, and on all its floors. This year there was nothing in the courtyard that now houses a tent theatre, nor in the buildings behind which now house performance spaces and a BBC studio. Even the lower cafe area, which 4 years ago housed one of the most impressive installations, is now just some little used tables. And the exhibition from the DeMarco collection hardly compensates including, as it does, a display of drawings by Orson Welles which have to be the most amateurish display on show this year. A supposed exhibition in the basement was also closed.
Not that there isn’t competition on the “slightly rubbish” front. It would be cruel to single out the Institut Francais’s exhibition by Adam Lewis Jacob as the biggest display of “Will This Do” work, but I challenge anyone not to be non-plussed with ennui (how apt the French should have all the bon mots). Similarly disappointing were Tacita Dean at the Fruitmarket (once you’ve decided she’s a bit over-hyped, as I did when she was being a bit dull as a Turner Prize finalist, it’s hard to find anything exciting in her work), and the students work at the College Of Art.
So what was good? We enjoyed The Common Sense video piece by Melanie Gilligan and the sound installation by Shilpa Gupta, both at the Art College. Barbara Rae’s painting, and the accompanying work at the Royal Scottish Academy was very impressive, outstripping the staid and conservative work one sometimes expects from academicians; Raqib Shaw at the Nat Gall of Modern Art was very interesting, if a bit Roger Dean album cover-y; and Victoria Crowe at the Nat Portrait Gallery was good if you like portraits of famous Scots, and heavy use of the colour brown; Lucy Skaer’s curated exhibition at the Talbot Rice was good, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts, and it was made of small and diverse parts.
There were nifty, but slight, installations in a church off the Royal Mile and a bar just behind St Giles, and some lovely films of Edinburgh in the 1950s at Stills Gallery, but nothing you’d be in a hurry to tell all your friends about.
Most impressive was the Jacobs Ladder exhibition at Ingelby Gallery, in their impressive new location in the New Town. This was complemented by an exhibition at the University Library on George Square, which I’ve managed to never visit before in my 30 years of coming here. It was good, but not enough on its own to make Edinburgh feel like a town you’d come to to see the art.
And most fun was Rip It Up, the exhibition of artefacts from the history of Scottish pop music. With an excellent TV series to go with it, this was the most memorable exhibition, full of nostalgic treasures and well produced displays and videos. Not strictly art, but knocking spots off the art for entertainment value.
There is undoubtedly art we haven’t seen - we didn’t venture out of town, and we weren’t going to pay to see the likes of Rembrandt and Canaletto (we may be jaded after the two visits we made to the Venice Biennale last year) - but it wasn’t as if we didn’t try. Genuinely it would appear that Edinburgh has less art on, in comparison to previous years, and what they have is not as impressive as previous years have had to offer. Other opinions may differ.
