“Thank the dark gods for Summerhall, a true fringe venue” The Guardian


The Guardian – Edinburgh Art Festival 2014
Article published Guardian.com 31.07.14

Jonathan Jones.

In a basement hidden at the heart of Edinburgh’s botanic garden, while families admire flowers in their wholesome beds, two German prostitutes are discussing their trade. One is telling the other in a raucous machine-gun-like accent how her client put Tabasco sauce on his cock. As they discuss this, both collapse in laughter in their wigs and suspenders.

Isa Genzken’s video The Little Bus Stop (Scaffolding) is a hilarious homage to the decadent 1970s German film classics of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with a dash of the German schoolteacher from the British comedy The League of Gentlemen thrown in. Genzken is one of the prostitutes; the one with the fantastically strange voice is painter Kai Althoff. He throws himself into the role while she makes deadpan comments such as: “We have a really good job. You meet a lot of interesting people.”

Cities and art have a mysterious relationship. Some cities have marvellous museums but no living art, while others are rancid dumps with a superb community of artists. Edinburgh is a lovely place, but it does not want that handicap to stop it having a vital art scene. The Edinburgh art festival that opens this week is its annual bid to be a great Art City. Sadly, I found myself wishing I was in Berlin instead.

That’s where Isa Genzken lives, and her art makes me want to move there, right now. Genzken is a genius. She’s also a clown – “the only female fool”, as she has described herself. Her exhibition at Inverleith House in the botanic garden is at once painfully contemporary and a moving affirmation of the great subversive German art of the 20th century, of all that the Nazis feared and called “degenerate art” – from the decadent Weimar portraits of Otto Dix to the punk photomontages of Hannah Höch.

Mannequins in bizarre fashion-disaster blends of sunglasses and riot gear, plus a toy monkey dressed up for some appalling art fair, ape the puzzled spectators who wander among Genzken’s sprawling collages and junk sculptures. Through it all runs a fascination with the nature of beauty that is oddly appropriate for the botanic garden, after all. In one rollicking combine laid out on the floor, posters of artistic masterpieces from Berlin’s museums including Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid collide with contemporary ephemera in a meditation on beauty and desire, love and loss, in the modern world.

Other collages are just funny. I’ve always thought the artist Joseph Beuys bore a certain resemblance to his contemporary, the crazed actor Klaus Kinski, and Genzken juxtaposes their images in a work that jokes about machismo, romanticism and German identity. And yet, her humour has massive intelligence, just as her dadaism is infused with deep aesthetic passion. Genzken is one of the indispensable artists of our time.

But where are such artists elsewhere at the Edinburgh art festival? And are they, as the current eve-of-plebiscite national mood would have it, coming from Scotland?

The big, supposedly defining event of this year’s art festival is an exhibition at the City Art Gallery, a venue with all the atmosphere of a 1980s public library, to celebrate Scotland hosting the Commonwealth Games. This worthy and didactic attempt to shoehorn art from all over the Commonwealth into a cod-socialist exploration of “notions of community, common-wealth and the commons” is deeply dull. From Derek Sullivan’s Kiosk, which draws attention to global labour abuses, to Amar Kanwar’s film The Sovereign Forest, shown off-site in the admittedly fascinating and surreal setting of Scotland’s abortive 1980s assembly building, works have been selected not to reveal the richness of art in the many nations once ruled by Britain (oh sorry, England) but to make an overwrought political statement.

It’s a load of balls. You will learn more about the world we live in from two minutes with Isa Genzken than in four hours laboriously attending to the “message” of this self-righteous show.

Is that a comment on Edinburgh itself, on a city with a strong moral tradition and sense of virtue? Perhaps this is why Edinburgh is no Berlin. In Berlin, a moral squalor has been inherited from the vile 20th century that is strangely liberating for today’s artists. The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, who moved there, once claimed he saw the devil in a Berlin bar. Now that’s an art city.

Something is definitely wrong in the centrally planned bits of Edinburgh’s art festival. The special commissioned projects, like the Commonwealth Games show, have an over-determined theme: “remembering the future”. Craig Coulthard remembers the future in a video of a Highland piper and drummer playing laments for robotic drones sacrificed in future wars. It’s a queer mix of one-idea sci-fi and sentimental Scottishness that does not really deserve to be promoted as major art at a major festival.

Thank the dark gods for Summerhall, a true fringe venue whose name suggests the sinister Summerisle in the Hebridean horror film The Wicker Man, and whose mad exhibitions in sprawling corridors and basements fully live up to this promise. Here at last, Edinburgh shows that it too has a wild side. The ruinous grandiosity of the place is like the much-mourned Berlin art squat Tacheles. And Isa Genzken meets, if not her artistic match, then definitely a fellow decadent spirit in an exhibition of stuffed wolf heads, sleazy digital shots of sensual flesh, literally cocky paintings and rude religious art by avant garde hero and pioneer Genesis P-Orridge. Throbbing gristle is everywhere in this encounter with a lion of counterculture. Here are Mr and Mrs Hyde for real.

Edinburgh has the making of a real art city, if only it curbs its virtuous side. Dr Jekyll, sadly, was never the creative one.

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian Thursday 31 July 2014