Johan Grimonprez
Exhibition 22 May – 11 July 2010

Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez was propelled to international prominence when his highly acclaimed one-hour video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a smart, visually complex and imaginatively compelling cultural history of aeroplane hijackings, was first shown at Documenta X in 1997. In 2008, a first version of his new film, Double Take, took the Basel Art Fair by storm.

This exhibition will be the first British gallery showing of Double Take which, like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, is a montage of found film, television and documentary footage, and a complex mix of meanings and counter-meanings. A riveting portrayal of the Cold War era and its defining preoccupations with the space race, sexual politics and the suburban American Dream, the film questions the Contemporary hegemony of the image – the power accorded to the moving image in our culture. Written in collaboration with novelist Tom McCarthy, its central idea is the theme of doubling and mistaken identity, explored through Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo television and film appearances.

Double Take will be shown together with Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and two earlier films, Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter, 1992 and It Will Be Alright If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don’t Bring Any Gear, Except A Tea Kettle, 1994. A sustained presentation of the work of this important international artist, the exhibition offers the chance to trace the development of his interest in the power of popular culture to create new mythologies and cultural narratives.

Martin Creed
Edinburgh Art Festival Exhibition 30 July - 31 October 2010

Britain’s most highly-regarded and popular artists. Creed makes work which captures the public imagination while also attracting critical acclaim for its generous, accessible approach. His work most often takes the form of interventions into a given space, re-ordering readily available materials which are a familiar part of everyday life. In 2001 he won the Turner Prize with Work No. 127: The Lights Going On and Off, and in 2008 responded to the prestigious Duveen Commission at Tate Britain with the phenomenally popular Work No. 850, in which runners sprinted through the space at 30-second intervals.

Consisting of recent and newly-commissioned work, this exhibition focuses on stacking and progression in size, height and tone – stacks of planks, chairs, tables, boxes, pieces of lego; series of paintings; and works which use the musical scale. Creed talks about these works in terms of a picture of growth; showing process, progress and things in movement. A highlight of the exhibition – a new commission – is a work which turns the Gallery’s staircase into a synthesiser, with each step sounding a different note on the scale as the audience walks up or down.

The exhibition’s focus on progression – on going up and down steps – gives a context to a new permanent work of public sculpture commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery and supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund for Edinburgh Art Festival 2010. Due to open later in the year, this ambitious project is sited on the Scotsman Steps, which link Edinburgh’s old and new towns. Creed plans to resurface the Steps with different and contrasting marbles from all over the world, creating a visually spectacular, beautiful and thoughtful response to this historic artery. Creed describes the project as a microcosm of the whole world – stepping on the different marble steps will be like walking through the world, the new staircase dramatising Edinburgh’s internationalism and contemporary significance while also recognising and respecting its historical importance.

 

Childish Things:Fantasy and Ferocity in Recent Art
13 November 2010 – 9 January 2011

Curated by David Hopkins

This exhibition focuses on a very specific moment in the post- dada/surrealist take-up of toys and early childhood as themes in art. Centred on the work of certain British and American artists who came to prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s, the show sets in dialogue a number of seminal works on the theme of toys, childhood, child development and the cultural conditioning of children.

The exhibition examines the work of a small group of internationally significant artists from America and Britain whose work references toys or playthings, children’s entertainment or child-related objects. It sets up a series of ‘conversations’ between the objects on display in order to explore an interconnected set of themes: Jeff Koons’ celebrations of kiddy-kitsch are set against Mike Kelley’s and Louise Bourgeois’ evocations of more sinister or abusive parent-child relations; Susan Hiller’s anthropologically-inflected exploration of the aggression underpinning the social conditioning of children, as in the Punch and Judy show (An Entertainment) is placed in counterpoint to Paul McCarthy’s monstrous consumerist/sexual hybrids and Robert Gober’s playpen is seen alongside Helen Chadwick’s objects which deal with her early adaptive response to playthings.

The exhibition seeks to look at the art of the 1980s and early 1990s art in a new way. The usual critical contexts informing art of this period (postmodernism, post-conceptualism, identity politics) are de-emphasised, and questions about attitudes to childhood, to play and to social conditioning – understood via post-surrealist fantasy idioms – are brought into prominence. The show aims to be playful – on one level, it possesses something of the ambience of a toy-shop or toy museum, but the emphasis is ultimately on a much ‘darker’ poetics of childhood.