Slumping in a metal chair for hours of ranting stand-up comedians and aggressively abstract Sartre adaptations is, against all logic, exhausting. A weekend of intensive Fringe viewing will leave your brain pickled, your shoulders lolling and your digestive system pleading for anything that isn’t Irn-Bru or The Whole Hog Roast Breakfast Bap Special. If the ill effects of rhythmic clapping in huddled dungeons have started to claim your sanity, we suggest a wander through the Scottish National Gallery as a mild tonic.
Peter Doig’s exhibition No Foreign Lands, housed in the top floor of the columned Gallery, is a good place to start. Entry costs £6, but don’t get tricked into paying £6 extra for tickets to the Man Ray Portraits and Witches and Wicked Bodies displays – these are at affiliated galleries on the other side of town. Stepping into the exhibition, you will be struck first by the sound of silence: a half remembered noise of no hecklers, no promoters, no half-naked men juggling swords on ladders. And then Doig’s paintings will catch your eyes.
These boldly-hued canvases are studies in strangeness. Trinidad is his subject, and he obscures it in many ways: a dramatic landscape of a lagoon dissolves in bright shimmering colours, where elsewhere a man in a red canoe foregrounds the tiny isle on the horizon; the country is broken up with Cubist regularity, in the next room plunged into fuzzy woodland shadow and finally posterised in a Rothko-esque game of beach cricket.
The formal innovation is impressive, but there are important questions raised. Is the strangeness a product of the viewer’s perspective? Is it inherently within the island? Or deeper still, is it the lens through which Doig, born in Edinburgh but raised in the Caribbean, sees his childhood home? It is not clear how strongly we should agree with Robert Louis Stevenson’s axiom: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
The Doig exhibition is the drawcard of the Gallery’s festival exhibitions, but downstairs one can also find a trio of free events. We would recommend only the briefest of pit-stops here: the lack of entry fee is a mask for the blatant commercial slant of all three displays, which are effectively shop windows. The celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of Richard Murphy’s successful Edinburgh architectural practice seems like a good excuse to show an hour’s worth of very nice renovations of detached homes to clients looking for very nice renovations of detached homes. Likewise the Collector’s Choices halls, which seem to have more plaques thanking Aberdeen Asset Management than actual works of art.
The redeeming feature of the ground floor is the 21 Revolutions exhibit, which offers a number of objects from the Glasgow Women’s Library – and the artwork that this resource has inspired. Sam Ainsley’s map of Scotland collaged from the names of women’s memorials in the poignant This Land is Your Land stands out, as do Kate Gibson’s domestic chores stickerbook Homespun and Helen de Main’s reimagining of feature articles from 70’s femi-zine Spare Ribs.
But the Gallery is not merely a festival pop-up, and there is a lot more to see here than selection of August exhibitions. The Gallery’s advertising is weighted heavily towards No Foreign Lands and the other temporary displays – to the point that I only discovered its splendid permanent collection by accident. Moving from Renaissance to Baroque to the Romantics, these plush rooms are decked with Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, with a cheeky Rodin here and there as a momentary distraction. If you have begun to weary of High Street ska / beatbox renditions of “Smooth Criminal”, go bask in the glory of the Old Masters.
No Foreign Lands will continue at the Scottish National Gallery until 3 November. Tickets cost £6, and are available here. Both Collector’s Choices and 21 Revolutions will run until 8 September, whilst Richard Murphy Architects closes on 24 September.
