Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art April 12th-May 12th 4 stars A gaudily attired couple sit astride some scaffolding watching the debris-ridden legacy the best minds of their generation inspired. Or at least that’s the sense you get of Dutch artist Folkert De Jong’s site-specific sculptural intervention, which looks to the gallery’s namesake and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, for inspiration. Looking for all the world like paint-spattered dayglo-punk charity-shop dandies, it’s as if the pair are occupying some building-site royal box while a cheap seat variety show plays out below. The effect is heightened by the figure of a woman sporting a hat which from a distance looks straight out of Cabaret holding on tight to two male figures, while beside the scaffolding a male figure holds on to a battered approximation of a wooden acoustic guitar. A solitary female figure stands astride a trestle table in the midst of some carefully choreographed dance of death. Positioned in the midst of more regularly classical statues, this is theatre as still life, captured for posterity and ready for their close-up. The List magazine, April 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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