INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH
ANNA CONSTANTINOU AND THOMAS WINSTANLEY: DISLOCATION ***
CORN EXCHANGE GALLERY, EDINBURGHTHE Ingleby Gallery is counting down the weeks to its move to the former Venue building in Calton Road wher
e it is scheduled to open at the beginning of August. Meantime, it is continuing with its tranche of week-long shows that pair a contemporary artist with a work that has been influential, often from the past.
This week, Cornelia Parker, shortlisted for the 1997 Turner Prize, and probably best known for exhibiting Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case at the Serpentine Gallery, shows two works alongside a film by Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist who died in the 1970s and is considered an important influence on contemporary art practice. It's not hard to see why. The whirring 16mm film is a meditation on a theme that exercises a lot of artists today: the difficulty of making art. Project pour un text, La Pluie shows him beginning to write with an ink pen, but being interrupted by torrential rain that blurs the text and threatens to wash it away. He continues for a while, but the water is seizing the words almost before he can form them. Eventually he puts down his pen in resignation.
This has plenty to say about the difficulty of making art that will endure, about the possibility of attaching words and images to real things and how slippery a business this is. Broodthaers is known – as Parker is – for the wit he employs in his art making, and there is a touch of the absurd about this undertaking, but the final message is nihilistic. In the face of these odds, the attempt to create is futile, and the artist gives up.
This kind of thinking underpins the history of conceptual art, whether or not it is evident in today's generation of artists. A strand of Parker's work is drawn to materials and objects associated with creativity – she has made work with dust and fibres from Freud's couch, Charles Dickens' writing quill, Emily Bronte's blotting paper. Although she's fascinated by the power of creativity, she is ambivalent about it. The capacity of art to move, anger and delight is so last century.
Instead there are questions. The poetically titled The Negative of Words is a pile of silver shavings left by an engraver. It is a beautiful object and not a little tantalising: if we could disentangle the glimmering pile, would it spell out the words the engraver carved?
Collected Death of Images is a flat metal sheet reconstituted from silver particles, the residue of a photographer's darkroom. It is a scratched and tarnished thing, but we are encouraged to wonder if it contains the ghosts of past photographic images. This is a useful way of stimulating interest in an object that is not very interesting visually. These days, the viewer has to meet the art halfway.
Meanwhile, the Corn Exchange Gallery in Leith has paired two living artists, Anna Constantinou, an established Edinburgh-based painter, and Thomas Winstanley, a sculptor and recent graduate from the Royal College of Art. The result is two intense bodies of work that don't quite meld together, and they aren't meant to: both are in some sense about dislocation, and this is the combined effect they create.
Winstanley is interested in the nature of his materials, the difference between the inside and the exterior. Thus he presents objects shaped like monumental plinths wrapped in tight black plastic, and egg-shaped structures made of densely coiled wire. Are we seeing the inside or the outside? Are we interested enough to ponder this for long?
But Constantinou, particularly, is invigorated by the partnership. Known for painting rigorous but calming abstracts, Constantinou has produced a fresh body of work imbued with urgency and vitality. These paintings are about conflict, with their images of fractured tree branches and bombed-out buildings. Even the abstracts are noisier picking up the textures of Winstanley's wire sculptures.
They are complex works that seem to hold ideas and possibilities in tension: black-and-white photographic images of shattered buildings are juxtaposed with colourful abstracts, like futuristic cityscapes. Are they about destruction or hope? A painting of branches has a white fissure down the centre – is this about damage or freedom? Constantinou doesn't answer her questions. However, there is a sense of striving towards an answer, rather than being trapped in a world without meaning in which the only response is the self-referential web of conceptualism. It is important to remember both approaches still have merit.
• Cornelia Parker & Marcel Broodthaers until tomorrow. Anna Constantinou and Thomas Winstanley until 29 May.
The full article contains 791 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
