Simon Starling @ The Modern Institute

Simon Starling's show at The Modern Institute is just the kind of essayist rubbish that I've come to expect from the 'vibrant' Glasgow art scene. I'm sure I'm supposed to be impressed by the heavily researched back-story that's presented in the show's accompanying ten page booklet: oooh, you managed to forge esoteric links between a sixteenth-century Japanese Noh play and various occidental showbiz characters that you've decided should play roles in the aforementioned drama. What wit!

No. It's boring.

Mr Starling obviously spent a lot of time in the library, or on Google, prior to this show, doing all the work. As a result there's absolutely nothing left for me to do but leaf through a stack of information that 'informs' it.

What is this tendency? The visual has died in Glasgow and been reincarnated as aesthetic dogmatism: work has become subservient to text, becoming only a linear presentation with a high level of finish. (This is the case even with the kind of slop presented at Mary Mary – the other side of this Janus-faced scene that somehow still thinks un-monumentalism is radical.) Why is work so often left simply illustrating something outside the work – an 'hors d'oeuvre'? I want a main meal and I want that meal to be the work itself: unstable, moving, explosive, suggestive, becoming, resistant, slippery. In short: contemporary.