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EXPANDING FRONTIERS AT THE RSA THE ARTS: VISUAL ART THE ARTS: VISUAL
Sunday Herald, The, May 4, 2008 by BARRY DIDCOCK
IN 1998 the Macclesfield-born, Glasgowbased artist David Shrigley published a book of his absurdist cartoons called Why We Got The Sack From The Museum, the title a sort of two-fingered salute to the art establishment. Writing in the introduction, the author Will Self likened Shrigley's drawings to the ones mass murderer Dennis Nilsen did of his victims. With friends like that . . .
Ten years on, however, Shrigley's symbolic "dismissal" has been reversed by one of the most august embodiments of that same art establishment: the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh, the magnificent gallery at the foot of the Mound more often associated with watercolours and pastels than quirky modern art.
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Shrigley, along with a dozen other artists, has been invited to take part in the RSA's 182nd Annual Exhibition as part of a show- within-a-show entitled New Scots. The mini-exhibition is to be curated by Sandy Moffat, former head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, and collects together artists who were not born in Scotland but who have lived and worked here for at least 10 years. It follows on from a similar strand last year called Visual Responses To Highland Scotland.
"The problem with the RSA's Annual Exhibition for many years is that it's been extremely predictable, " Moffat explains. "It's been the same old people, for better or worse. I think it should be much more challenging in what it shows, and the way to do that is to have this exhibition-within-anexhibition, where we can look at the best things that are happening and look at the work of younger artists. That's our job - to present those things. It gives us a much more powerful voice in the debate that goes on about the visual arts."
Joining Shrigley are artists such as Shauna McMullan (who hails from Northern Ireland and whose works will include scribbled and politically charged maps of Lebanon and Israel), Hanneline Visnes (Norway), Louise Hopkins (England), Ilana Halperin (US), Nathalie de Briey (Belgium) and RSA members Joe Fan (from Hong Kong) and American Thomas Joshua Cooper. There are painters among them - and, in Cooper, one of the world's greatest living landscape photographers - but there are also practitioners of video and (whisper it) conceptual art. That most of the artists are Glasgow- based is no accident either.
"One of the reasons I've concentrated on Glaswegians is that traditionally the RSA has neglected Glasgow, " says Moffat, a Fifer himself though now domiciled in Edinburgh. "The main players in the RSA tend to come from the east coast rather than the west. There's a whole Aberdeen-Dundee-Edinburgh nexus. So everyone agreed it would be a good idea to bring Glasgow into that debate."
New Scots opens this week and will occupy two of the 12 galleries devoted to the Annual Exhibition. Among the artists featured in the parent show are current RSA members such as Calum Colvin, Adrian Wiszniewski, Elizabeth Blackadder and Barbara Rae. There are some 350 works in all. For Moffat, though, it's the New Scots strand which is the most vital and optimistic. Though small, its presence signals a sea change in the way the RSA views contemporary art and contemporary artists.
"The last decade has seen quite a debate going on within the august portals of that neo-classical building, and I think everyone, bar one or two, realises - and wants - the RSA to move forward and become a force. I think the RSA has to realise that if it wants to have the best artists on show it has to change. And I think that's the important thing: to have the best artists."
So are David Shrigley, Louise Hopkins and the rest the Academicians of the future? "It would be nice to think that, " says Moffat. "That's always been the task of an academy, to represent artists and give the best emerging ones a platform." If nothing else, then, it's a start.
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