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By Peter Plagens
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In any major city these days, you can encounter more neoconceptual artists--and their deceptively artless videos and installations-with-attitude--than you can shake a mahlstick at. What Europe offers is the same hyperhip contemporanea plus stacks and stacks of traditional great art to go along with it. Every two years, the Venice Biennale welcomes practically the whole contemporary-art world to share its precious space with palacefuls of Tiepolos and Bellinis. And every two years, thousands of art lovers descend on Venice to enjoy this cultural one-stop shopping. But as we see it, there's really no need to traipse all the way to the Biennale. (It'll be up all the way through Nov. 15, so you can make it an autumn destination.) This summer we're patching together our own sweet-and-spicy art menu by prowling some grittier--but quite art-nourishing--cities to the north: Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin. Call it the Celtic Option.
Edinburgh is a beautiful town; the city center curls up against an elegant stone fortress that rises high above an ultramarine sea. At first glance, it doesn't seem like the kind of place where old masters and tres cutting-edge art would be exhibited cheek by jowl. But refreshingly, that's exactly the case. Scotland's National Gallery is conveniently tucked right at the bottom of the castle hill. (Watch out for construction detours--there's a sort of Louv-rification of the grounds going on.) Inside, you'll find the best mix of trove (Poussins! Raeburns! Rembrandts!) and ambience on either side of the channel. In fact, on the evening we ventured in to catch the newly bought Titian "Venus Rising From the Sea," not only was the museum offering live guitar music and a gratis glass of the grape, but folks were allowed to wander, sipping, among the old masters as if they owned the things.
Back up the hill near the train station sits the Fruitmarket Gallery, a not-for-profit venue specializing in the very, very new. Its current offering (through July 19) is a pair of solo shows by film and video artists Michelle Naismith and Rosalind Nashashibi. The winner of this year's Beck's Futures Prize (think Turner Prize for rookies), Nashashibi is earnestly, almost numbingly deadpan in her films about model-airplane buffs in Nebraska and British women in a thrift shop. The Glasgow-born Naismith is the intellectual comedian, putting forth mock-documentary evidence about one "Moodle Pozart" (yep, it's a dog in the guise of an 18th-century composer).
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If sitting in austere, darkened cubes watching twee videos isn't your cuppa, the --Royal Botanic Garden contains a lovely, open and bright contemporary-art exhi-bition space called Inverleith House. In it, Simon Periton shows giant, multilayered, colored paper cutouts--avant-gardedoilies, if you will--of leaves and trees that nicely (if somewhat glibly) announce their presence on the wall. Upstairs, humor returns, with Gary Rough's show, called "Mantel-piece," which includes a TV set permanently displaying the word intermission while the theme from "Lawrence of Arabia" drones from the speakers. Some press material describes the show as being about "the polarities of self and other." We prefer to regard it as harmlessly frivolous. (Both shows are up through July 27.)
Whatever your reaction, do stay to tour the world-class gardens themselves. And since the whole Edinburgh mix amounts to postmodernism in the extreme, you might as well include a visit to the Royal Museum and catch the semipermanent display "Mao: Art for the Masses" (hilariously sappy propaganda art, including little porcelain busts of the dictator that are also on sale in the museum shop). You'll run across the world's oldest preserved steam locomotive, circa 1815, as well as a taxidermized Dolly, the infamous cloned sheep.
Glasgow, an hour's train ride west, is a more hardscrabble metropolis, home to the old television program "Taggart," the Gorbals and that inimitable rumbly dialect. It's also lively as hell, especially in contemporary art. Start your initiation by taking the tour of the Glasgow School of Art, the incubator for recent generations of artists like Nashashibi, and boasting the stunning turn-of-the-last-century architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (think Frank Lloyd Wright without the megalo--mania). Then pop down a block to the Centre for Contemporary Art to see all the conceptually oriented finalists for the Beck's Futures Prize gathered together (through July 27) like rebellious students in detention hall. (We mean that as a compliment.) Four of the nine artists work right in Glasgow. Our favorite, however, is Londoner Carey Young. Her "Non-disclosure (Assisted Press Release)" is a document requiring the show's sponsor--whose rep said that everything in the exhibition would be a marketing aid--to keep her artwork secret. Well, the Beck's guy was right, and we've just furnished more proof.
On to Argyle Street, with its shoppers and buskers and bagpipers, and then just off it again for Transmission Gallery, a charmingly democratic, committee-run headquarters for young artists who are, mostly, graduates of the GSA. A dissonant painting exhibition that has feyly pop-ish painters Katharina Wulff and Andrew Kerr playing off a small borrowed-from-a-museum work by Max Ernst ends June 21. Glaswegian painter Michael Fullarton fills the void starting July 1.
Finally, we recommend a stop at the Gallery of Modern Art. GoMA catches a lot of flak from the trendier precincts of the Scottish art world for being too populist, but "Sanctuary: Contemporary Art & Human Rights" (through Sept. 29) is a fine show. Sure, its subject is unassailable (what gallery-goer is against "human rights"?), and it's filled with such hortatory warhorses as Leon Golub, Hans Haacke and Peter Howson. But it's also beautifully installed and--credit the artists--very moving.
Just across the Irish Sea, Dublin--traditionally much more a word town--is nevertheless moving up as a visual-art center. The Hugh Lane Gallery has painstakingly reassembled the late painter Francis Bacon's cluttered, decrepit and absolutely fascinating London studio as a permanent--and quite popular--exhibit. The Irish Museum of Modern Art has gone international with a Spanish director (Enrique Juncosa) and the kind of exhibition program you'd enjoy in Milan or Berlin. Until June 29, the featured show is Brit pop painter Gary Hume. For an off-the-beaten-track treat, however, try the Kerlin Gallery and the ultramodest, totally engaging landscape paintings of Welsh artist Merlin James (through July 19). Come to think of it, if our Celtic tour were a Web site, we'd simply call it seegoodart.com. But nothing could compare to seeing it in the flesh.
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