Nathan Coley's blocked room
A FEW years ago, in t
hese pages, I suggested that after being ignored for so long by the International Festival director, it was time for the visual arts in Edinburgh to go their own way. I was delighted to receive a postcard of encouragement from Robert Ponsonby, who had been director from 1956 to 1960. Responsible for several major exhibitions - although his professional interest is music - he understood that the visual arts should be an integral part of the Festival, but also that they command the biggest public. The Epstein exhibition of 1961 that he initiated saw 110,000 visitors.
Last year 130,000 people saw Ron Mueck at the RSA. I will repeat his until somebody listens: in arts and entertainment the big numbers for direct participation are in the visual arts. Monet, a couple of years before Mueck, drew 160,000 visitors. That is more than twice the attendance at T in the Park and nearly three times the maximum gate at Hampden. None of the classical performing arts can come anywhere near those figures. Though he didn't say it, Ponsonby must have been saddened to see two subsequent Festival directors, Peter Diamand and Brian McMaster, who between them have controlled the Festival for almost half its history, stubbornly ignore this fact and pay no attention at all to the visual arts.
At last that has changed. Edinburgh Art Festival is now in its fourth year, but the new director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Jonathan Mills, has taken visual arts into his programme, too. I wish I could say the result was as exciting as the initiative.
Jardins Publics, the first International Festival visual art for years, is curated by Katrina Brown. It was to be a homage to Patrick Geddes and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Gardens had a special meaning for both. For Geddes, public or shared gardens make our cities human. They are a model of co-operation and reconnect us with nature. For Finlay they were a metaphor for the whole difficult business of civilisation itself.
Three artists have taken part. Apolonija Sustersic has taken a forgotten corner of semi-public ground that nobody quite owned in Chessels Court off the Canongate, and filled it with plants. She has actually created a garden. Moreover she has involved the local residents to give them a kind of ownership. This may not be a startling art work, but it is exactly what Geddes might have done, and indeed, there is a Geddes garden in a nursery school nearby. Michael Lin has also done something of which Geddes would have approved, even if it might not have appealed to him so much. Lin has made a low stage around a tree in East Princes Street Gardens. It is curved and in three layers. The two main "floors" are decorated with big, brightly painted flowers. It has immediately become a piece of playground furniture. Children swarm all over it. That is delightful. Though the artist imagined it would become a performance stage, I much prefer the children. They need their own place in the Festival just as much as the visual arts do.
The third artist, Richard Wright, has done two things. One is a small window in a little stone building, called St George's Well, by the Water of Leith. The glass is etched and has a yellow tint. As you look through, and through Wright's etching, from the darkened space to the greenery beyond, it looks sunny. I suppose it vaguely says "garden", but it doesn't say much else, bar "Richard Wright was here". Do we really care? The other piece is in an empty flat in London Street. He has painted a geometrical pattern of small black triangles on the ceiling. I asked Katrina Brown what brief she had given him and she replied, "Oh, I would never give Richard a brief."
Should you really take on an artist to represent the International Festival who is so precious that he can't be briefed? If the result was inspired it might be different, but he has completely missed the point. His little triangles, the curator says, are a reflection on how the New Town is all about geometry. But that is not so. The streets may be geometric, streets usually are, but there is scarcely a corner of the New Town where you cannot see either one of its collectively owned gardens or wild nature beyond the city. That is what sets the geometry of its streets apart from those in any comparable urban planning. It is the model of a philosophic city, a metaphor for human order in harmony with the wider order of nature and carried out on a scale so huge that in the weight and volume of stone moved it is comparable to the Pyramids. With its gardens, the New Town was also part of the tradition in which Geddes and Finlay belong, but Wright did not notice it. Lost in self-absorption, it passed him by entirely.
Richard Demarco, who has been at every Festival since it began, and who has participated in most of them, would not let such a metaphor pass unnoticed. Demarco's Festival is the modest title of an extraordinary gathering at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery of material from his archive. It is in such abundance that the visitor might lose sight of any metaphor at all, but Demarco never would. For him, rather as it was for Einstein - if on a different scale of significance - the whole point of the Festival is the search for one law of everything. The Festival, the Enlightenment, the landscape, the people who have lived in it and the traces they have left of their beliefs and their understanding of the world, are all tied together in his view. That was what drove his extraordinary journeys in the 1970s. He travelled from one end of Europe to the other, from witnesses of the remote past, such as the stones of Calanais, to places vivid with the living present, and he gathered people and ideas like an amazing cultural snowball as he went.
All that is recorded here along with a great deal else and Demarco himself is usually on hand to lead you through the dizzying maze of material. But the evidence is here. Demarco's Festival really was international and an amazing amount of it was very good. Joseph Beuys, Tadeus Kantor, Paul Neagu and many more of the artists he brought to Scotland were very good, as were many of the Scottish artists he encouraged. In spite of Diamand and McMaster, all this activity was framed, if a bit untidily, in the unique window on the world that the Festival offers us.
Nathan Coley at doggerfisher and Alex Hartley at the Fruitmarket might both have benefited from something like a Demarco journey. They both lack the richness of association such an experience might bring. Coley gives us a partly blocked entrance and a lot of confessionals blacked out. Life is oblique, you see. Hartley gives us modified pictures of buildings. Sometimes he adds things. Sometimes he just adds himself by climbing them. He also has architectural spaces that contradict themselves portrayed in misty vitrines. Architectural space is his thing, we are told. He is most interesting when his pictures relate built spaces to the wider world.
But the builders of the New Town did that far better long ago. Both shows are charming, but both are a bit dubious too. A show should make demands of us, but it shouldn't simply ask to be given the benefit of the doubt.
• Until 15 September.
