Edinburgh Art Festival: Own Art

Never mind that the city of Edinburgh is full to the brim with good art exhibitions all year round, there’s still a genuine rush of exuberance and excitement at the very mention of the words ‘Edinburgh Art Festival.’ Muster all the youthful vigour you have (or failing that, pack a hip flask) and prepare to take on the annual splurge at full pelt. Careful, mind that tram!

If you’re wondering where the hell to start, how about Peter Liversidge’s show at Ingleby Gallery. Liversidge is an artist who begins every work by sitting at his kitchen table with an old manual Olivetti typewriter, writing pages of proposals and sending them to galleries by Royal Mail.

Ranging from the absurd and utterly impractical to the rather mundane, Liversidge’s works differ wildly - often all that unites them is their origin as this proposal formula. He is as likely to write, “I propose to dam the Thames and flood the City of London,” as “I propose to paint the wall that the proposals are hung on a dark grey.” Some of his proposals don’t sound like works of art at all, such as, “I propose to sit with my sons George and Thomas and eat biscuits.” Then his simple repeated formula also serves to frame the actions and legitimise them.

Though we’d be mistaken to think Liversidge is taking the piss - he’s been tapping out these ideas and mailing them off for a decade - there remains a wonderful flippancy to his work. After all, there’s only so much seriousness you should invest in a pledge to eat biscuits.

His show at Ingleby, doppelgänger, is based on some etchings from 1881 by Max Klinger which tell the story of a lost glove dropped by a roller-skating woman and found by the artist. Liversidge will re-present the etchings as screen prints and install them with an exquisitely carved marble glove. This eminently practical-sounding show appears at the same time as his commission for Parley, the public art programme strand of the festival. For this, Liversidge has exhibited his trademark buoyancy and invited anyone in the city with a flagpole to fly a white flag bearing the greeting: HELLO.

Over at Edinburgh Printmakers, you’re likely to see another flag flying: the Saltire. I HEART SCOTLAND, the title of Rachel Maclean’s solo show, says it all. Maclean is known for videos that riff on aspects of Scottish culture and national identity, stretching them into grotesquely kitsch displays in a hyper-saturated, Fantasy Art-style aesthetic. With extensive use of green screen, Maclean acts every character herself - even, in this show, the Loch Ness Monster, and Clyde, a cartoon thistle that is the Glasgow Commonwealth Games Mascot.

The show features two new series of digital prints which explore Scottish national identity and its founding mythologies. Particularly pertinent with the upcoming Referendum on Scottish Independence, the show also includes Maclean’s video The Lion and the Unicorn, in which the heraldic characters quaff Northern Oil in Jacobite crystal, in the historical setting of Traquair House.

Referencing the banking crisis, Old Firm rivalry and hilariously, Donald Trump, Maclean’s tableaux of Scottish culture assemble and mutate as we watch. She cites an anecdote about the film Brigadoon, which was shot entirely in a Hollywood studio after the director supposedly visited the Highlands and declared the landscape just wasn’t Scottish enough. A deficiency that’s laughable, looking at Maclean’s work - well, if it wasn’t in 1954, it is now.