Carol Bove @ The Common Guild, until 29 Jun

Carol Bove’s show The Foamy Saliva of a Horse seems in many ways typical of Common Guild fare. The installation takes various small-scale objects, made and found and seemingly fairly disparate, and elevates their significance, making them precious and setting up aesthetic and cultural relationships for the viewer to unravel. Impeccably displayed and playing with the domestic setting, it neatly fits the gallery’s house style.  

A hulk of dirty Styrofoam, perhaps washed up by the sea, is suspended in the stairwell from a heavy industrial metal form. Lemon and coral-coloured seashells displayed in a custom-made candelabra-type ornament decorate the mantlepiece in each room. Further allusions to the sea are present in a net made from delicate silver chains and a hearthrug of carefully placed peacock feathers suggesting fish scales. The view from the window behind the shells shows the Clydeport Crane and the site of Glasgow’s shipbuilding past. 

Doubtless the work looked very different when installed at the last Venice Biennale, in the massive warehouse of Venice’s former shipbuilding industry. Here, it provokes recollection of many previous shows that have occupied the space, each with their own lexicon of materials and associations. The ghost of Roni Horn’s sheet of gold curls brilliantly at right angles to the shimmering bodily presence of Bove’s peacock rug. While this adds another layer to the work, it also feels slightly like just another show in the Common Guild’s programme – perhaps inevitable, with the gallery’s domestic character. There’s an uncomfortable sense that the original and specific associations you’ve inferred are in fact common tropes.

Bove’s private museum of objects has a lot to yield if it interests you. But like any amateur collection or beachcombing haul, the prized spoils of one can mean nothing to another.  [Jac Mantle]