Antisocial Behaviour: ECA Degree Show

A smashing time is had by all at this year's ECA degree show

Feature by Andrew Cattanach | 28 Jun 2010
It’s difficult to gauge the success of a degree show as a whole. There’s no prevailing theme, no curatorial selection process, and no vetting procedure. What you get is a cacophony of creative endeavour that very nearly always hits the mark and is invariably charming. In many ways it’s a celebration, a kind of collective coming of age for what will unquestionably be the next generation.
Edinburgh College of Art never fails to astound me with its ability to impart top notch technical skills to its students, particularly in the sculpture department where slick, autonomous objects are largely prevalent. It’s in many ways the most mature of all the degree shows, if not a little conservative at times.

It’s difficult to gauge the success of a degree show as a whole. There’s no prevailing theme, no curatorial selection process, and no vetting procedure. What you get is a cacophony of creative endeavour that very nearly always hits the mark and is invariably charming. In many ways it’s a celebration, a kind of collective coming of age for what will unquestionably be the next generation.

Edinburgh College of Art never fails to astound with its ability to impart top notch technical skills to its students, particularly in the sculpture department where slick, autonomous objects are largely prevalent. It’s in many ways the most mature of all the degree shows, if not a little conservative at times.

Conservativism is not a criticism that can be applied to the work of Kevin Harman. As his final project for the College’s masters program he panned in the window of The Collective Gallery with a piece of scaffolding, displaying the instruments of his antisocial performance as indexes of the violent act, including the shattered window itself. On one wall he has framed all the correspondences between himself, the gallery, his lawyer and the police. Even though Harman warned the gallery and replaced the window moments after the performance, The Collective still saw to it that he was charged for his transgressions.

The work, a wonderful piece of straight-faced conceptualism, highlights the possible contradiction between the gallery’s responsibility to emerging artists and its willingness to penalise them. It is a bold contribution to a long history of institutional critique within the arts.

Arwen Duncan has made a courageous and yet subtle addition to feminism. Using sculpture, installation, photography and found objects, Duncan explores the aesthetic of the domestic. All washed-out pastel colours and gloopy foodstuffs, she expertly marries form and content, where conceptually affective works are nonetheless beautiful objects. One in particular, a stack of cupcake holders and plastic jugs is a restrained and elegant work. As a backdrop to this she has smeared an entire wall with custard, forming a sinister, mucousy crust that seems to parody the female stereotype of the abundant provider.

Two stand-out painters are Alex Gibbs and Matthew Swan. Gibbs paints distant, flat landscapes that remind one of the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. With a limited and measured palette he imagines stark planes of loneliness and post-industrial nothingness. Truly existential.

Swan’s wall paintings, on the other hand, are a hectic scrawl of faces, fruit and lower colons. Where Gibbs is a measured modernist, Swan is a postmodern shambles of pop culture and surface-vacuity. The body is the main point of reference and each figure seems to be reflected in the objects and abstract marks that surround them. If the ECA had a prize for the creepiest sculpture it would go to Swan. A hooded figure with what looks like a porcelain face has droopy, gloved hands and an ominous blank gaze. It thoroughly gave me the willies.

Katy Thomson’s detailed drawings of tanks and aircraft that have mysteriously sprouted villages and travelling communities wonderfully humanises the West’s military-industrial complex. Groups of tiny tents congregate in the fuselage of a fighter jet while a tank is more like a funfair than a weapon of war. It’s a pity, however, that Thomson also went to so much bother to make what is a confusing installation that neither fully evokes a fantastical or a real world.

And so another year is concluded at the ECA. Whether this one will prove a fine vintage is yet to be seen. It certainly looks promising.

http://www.eca.ac.uk/index.php?id=1369