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Beholder

Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh November 19th 2011-February 18th 2012 4 stars “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 fifty-odd works, each subjectively selected by a far-reaching network of artists, curators, movers, shakers and other organisers who populate Scotland’s fecund visual landscape. Their brief, as with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, is to do it beautifully. The result is a gloriously disparate jumbled-up wonderland of art for art’s sake that’s a joy to wander through. Classicism and conceptualism rub up against each other, as do the institutions with the DIY pop-up spaces in an all too rare fit of democratic inclusivity in the best sense of both words. Beholder also speaks volumes about taste. So what’s an ugly-bugly portrait in the corner to some will have others in raptures.

Startle Reaction – Torsten Lauschmann

Dundee Contemporary Arts, October 22nd 2011-January 8th 2012 4 stars 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 films are looped, aren’t as flashy as the rest of what’s on show. They don’t seek to dazzle and disorientate; they don’t beep or buzz, flash or fade, whirr or whizz like much else on show in Lauschmann’s gently immersive time-sequenced theme-park he hood-winks us into believing in. Yet, for all their functional discretion, these two pieces nevertheless shed light on the big, tangled-up mess of interconnectivity that Startle Reaction is all about. This is clear too in his films. Misshapen Pearl is an impressionistic meditation on the place where natural light morphs into neon. Artifice as well as interconnectivity exists in Skipping Over Damaged Areas, w

Lili Reynaud-Dewar - Blacking Up With Jean Genet

It’s somehow fitting that Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s artist talk and screening of radical author Jean Genet’s explicit 1950 film, Un Chant d’Amour, was postponed last Wednesday night due to the public service workers strike that caused Tramway to be closed. It’s fitting too that another film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75, containing hitherto unseen footage of the radical Black Panthers movement’s leading lights, is on a limited release in Scottish cinemas the same week that Reynaud-Dewar’s new performance piece does appear at Tramway for one night only alongside the delayed talk and screening. The political thinking behind Jean Genet’s Walls, Speaking of Revolt, Media and Beauty, after all, is a vital signifier of both its content and influences. This has been the case with much of Reynaud-Dewar’s work since the Paris-based former lawyer and dancer graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s influential Environmental Art course. “I find Genet's political commitments admirable,” Reynaud-Dew

Fordell Research Unit – The Illusion of Movement (At War With False Noise/Braw Music)

3 stars 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 minimalism. On what sounds like four variations on a theme, each piece is drilled through with the same building site/goth night churn that wouldn’t sound out of place in Silence of the Lambs. Such rawness channels the bass backing track of The Gift, Lou Reed’s grisly short story for The Velvet Underground’s hardcore White Light/White Heat album. Put through a blender and spewed into a megaphone, it barely muffles the sound of suffocation. The List, December 2011 ends

The Tree of Knowledge - Jo Clifford's Free Exchange

Adam Smith is having it large. In an out of the way warehouse in Leith, the noted economist and mid-wife of capitalism as we know it has dropped his bunged-up mummy's boy facade and is all hoodied-up following a trawl through what looks to have been the brightest, brashest and most full-on gay bars in town. What's more, Smith is loved-up on a chemically enhanced high, and is opening up to his esteemed colleague, philosopher and man of letters David Hume, like he's never done before. Where the two once got by on dry discourse, in the modern world, at least, an altogether different form of intercourse looks more likely. Or so it goes in rehearsals for The Tree of Knowledge, Jo Clifford's audacious new play which pits these two men of ideas in a present-day limbo. Here they're led like a pair of Scrooges by a twenty-first century everywoman through a hi-tech, free-market wonderland they might just have helped think into being. As actors Neil McKinven a

Lawrence of Belgravia - A Star Is Born

There's a scene in Paul Kelly's new documentary film, Lawrence of Belgravia, in which his subject is seen riding the London Underground. Although the viewer never sees this mysterious character in plain sight, we're given tantalising glimpses of him in odd-angled profiles, mirror-shaded and baseball-capped, like some off-the-leash stall-holder from Camden Market. Or a rock star. While this is being played out, a Birmingham-accented voice-over earnestly relates how desperate he is to be famous, and about how, once he’s living the dream, he'd never use the Underground again, but would be prefer to be driven around in a limousine. Visually, the scene is a tease, vaguely reminiscent of some celebrity game-show in which a panel are asked to identify one of their peers before they burst through a sliding door to rapturous canned applause. The voice-over, on the other hand, sounds more like the cravings of some Big Brother wannabe milking their fifteen minutes

Ana - Stellar Quines Go To Montreal

As you read this, Scottish theatre company Stellar Quines is in the midst of premiering Ana, a new bi-lingual play by Scots writer Clare Duffy and Quebecoius playwright Pierre-Yves Lemieux. Co-produced with French-Canadian company, Imago, Ana opened last Tuesday night at Theatre Epace Go in Montreal prior to a Scottish tour in Spring 2012. On the face of it there is nothing unusual about any of this. Scotland's theatre scene has had a long and fecund relationship with Quebecois theatre, largely through the work of Michel Tremblay. Eight of his emotionally-charged poetic parables have been translated into Scots-accented English by Martin Bowman and, up until his death, Bill Findlay. The Guid Sisters in particular fired the imaginations of audiences in both countries via an acclaimed 1992 production by outgoing Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd when he was in charge of Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. Almost twenty years later, The Guid Sisters is set to