Gallery of Modern Art .'Off The Wall'. Edinburgh. 14-Jan-07

14/01/07

Jim Lambie. Bed-head.
A standard mattress used in bedsits. Covered in multi-coloured/ types of buttons.
Alas, you need to read the curator's notes but when you do, the work mattress becomes very poetic and beautiful. Each button represents every dream he had on the mattress.
I misread it slightly to think of it as every dream every person who had ever used a particular bedsit mattress had very had.

Jim Lambie. Zobop floor. Everyone smiles when they walk on it. Filling up a room without putting anything in it.
I also like the way the pattern makes 3D architectural shapes.
What would it be like if you also covered the walls & ceiling?

Christine Borland. Spirit Collection: Hippocrates.
A treat to see this again.
What I thought of this time is that every leaf is like its own world. Maybes not as dramatic as other things but this surely will come to be seen as a great work of modern sculpture.

David Mach. Dying for it. Hypocrisy in a way. (Exploiting a woman's form to complain about the expoitation of woman's form. - Of course I am being guided by the curator notes here.) I There is something in the idea of the St Andrew's cross really being a human figure but why pick on the Saltire/ Scotland in particluarl as the culprits of sexism? Although I would not make too much of this... Why not make a pretty picture of the pretty Saltire?. I love the 3d sculpture of the woman.

Nathan Coley. The lamp of sacrifice.
Again. In the exhibition space it felt really squashed up. Not very exciting. Though I liked the fresh cardboard smell. (Which I remember as the biggest impact first time I saw it.)
On the wall was a yellow pages list of churches. These had been numbered to serve as an index. This felt very Wittgensteinian (picture theory.)

The Great War. Prints commission by the Ministry of Information 1917.
Nevinson's 'Banking at 4000 feet' Really gives a physical sense of the plane's height and the stomach churn as it banks. (The bloke gripping the side of the fuselage. The tiny cockpit looks like a bath.)
As you look more at these prints they become overwhelming. A visceral & emotional impact that is just not trendy now. (Or not honestly justifiable for soft citizens of the West such as myself?)

Otto Dix (not one of the Min of Inf commissions) has a detachment / clarity that makes the surprise rather than be a cliché. Cardplayers. - The cripples from the war. Soldiers killed by gas. Craterfield near Dontrien lit by flares. In the last, even the mud seems to be made of corpses.
(He served in the war.)

Percy Smith. The Dance of Death.
Seven scenes of Death (who is a shrouded skeleton) in the trenches. This should be rubbish. It is so Edwardian. At first I had a guilty pleasure in enjoying the Gothic shrouded Death.
But this is a case where the intention and skill overcome the form.
The commulative effect make you stop and take it seriously. After a couple of runs through the set, the print Death Awed says it all.