GSA Degree Show 2013: Animal Farm

You’ve probably heard about this one already: someone at Glasgow School of Art has brought a camel into the Mackintosh building and filmed it. It immediately sounds sensationalist. “What’s so good about that?” you might ask. Screened from a large unwieldy box in a corridor, Rosie O’Grady’s video parallels the camel’s ungainly proportions in that selfsame corridor, and the bloody cumbersome act of getting it in there. The creature towers among dismembered marble statues with barely room for the camera, which peers out awkwardly from behind torsos and up the animal’s nose. Fur caked and matted like a mangy bathroom carpet, one wonders how many circuses the poor sod has worked today.

Far quieter and loads smaller than a camel, Patrick Queen’s clay sculptures share with it a distinct animal-ness. Tenderly kneaded, they resemble the inside of an ear, assorted phalluses and other members, enough to re-adorn the school’s marble statues. Curiously deformed, dry and cracked, these pricks have had their day. Their blatant phallic form, standing proud atop table, causes one to consider what else they might in fact be. Things they probably aren’t include the inside of a camel’s nostril. But how do you know? Have you looked up there?

Catherine Cameron also deals in objects of uncertain origin. Her large format, grainy black and white photographs show a room with a couch all draped in fabric, the texture of the drapery and folds echoing a still life tradition. Sculptures of twisted paper appear as symbolic votives. The whole field is heavy with a rash of pockmarks and cloggy toner, giving it a Turin Shroud-type patina and the feeling of something having departed. Unquestionably staged, they leave us wondering about the presence of aura or sacredness in contemporary art.

Larger than life and frankly terrifying, Chris Silver has donned a Marie Antoinette-style frock and wig and set up an Austerity Café, in a bleak view of the Tories’ spending cuts. Handing out tea bags, bingo cards and all you need to make your own gruel – just flour, it turns out – he suggests that for many, life under George Osborne’s austerity programme is akin to that during wartime. In a self-imposed ritual of extremism, Silver has eaten nothing but bread and porridge since January.

James MacEachran has also explored state-sanctioned brutality. In a wooden pen, a music video on YouTube satirises the proliferation of talent-less vocalists by splicing in footage of goats bleating. Highlighting the U.S. military practice of shooting goats for training purposes and our dispassionate corralling of the animals for our base amusement, MacEachran brought in his own goats for the day, thereafter leaving their shit to fester as part of the installation.

Appearing from a distance as traditional figurative portraits, Katie Carlisle’s oil paintings blend acute physical observation with a kind of sci-fi illustration of contemporary social prejudices. Figures covering their faces with gas masks suggest inhabitants of cities with massive pollution problems, but on closer inspection the be-masked figure is that of the homophobe, conferring disdain on others in the picture. Employing the kind of moral impulse currently little seen in painting, it also chimes with recent discourses on queerness and toxicity.