Autumn 1967: 40 Years Ago Today

HEART FINE ART

DAVID BATCHELOR: UNPLUGGED ****

TALBOT RICE GALLERY

DAVID BATCHELOR & NIKOLAI SUETIN ****

INGLEBY GALLERY
IN THE crazy kaleidoscope that is the Fringe, it's easy to miss the art, just by virtue of the fact that it's standing still while everything else is in a whirlwind of attention-grabbing motion.

But it's worth seeking it out, and not just in the obvious places: many Fringe venues have their own exhibitions, organisations such as Glasgow Print Studio move in for the season (this year next to the Assembly Rooms in George Street), and it's a good time to seek out the permanent spaces you might otherwise miss.

Heart Fine Art in Waterloo Place is one such. Proprietor Paul Robertson has a special interest in ephemera relating to modern and conceptual art, and his Festival show celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love and the art movements that were contemporary with it, a companion show in different ways both to Andy Warhol at the Royal Scottish Academy and Richard Demarco's Festival at the National Portrait Gallery.

There's psychedelia from Haight-Ashbury, Fluxus, Situationism, early conceptual works by Yoko Ono and Ed Ruscha, rare prints by Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Paolozzi, a multiple by Beuys and political ephemera from the Vietnam war. Well worth a look if you have even a passing interest in the period.

Meanwhile, something slightly psychedelic is afoot at Edinburgh University's Talbot Rice Gallery, at least in terms of colour. David Batchelor has filled the main space with a little forest of sculptures, his tree-like "parapillars" made by attaching plastic household objects, bought in pound stores (clothes pegs, mirrors, washing-up brushes and the like), to a central metal trunk.

Unlike those sculptures placed in niches on Calton Hill during last year's Festival, or at Glasgow's Radiance festival, these works do not involve light (hence "Unplugged"). The light in Talbot Rice is entirely natural, thanks to curator Pat Fisher's decision to reveal the windows down the south-facing wall, which had been covered for many years.

It's not hard to see that Batchelor's fascination is with colour: the parapillars are almost obsessively ordered along colour lines: one pillar of pink objects, another of green, a minimalist one in black using sieves and magnifying glasses, and so on. Occasionally a multicoloured pillar bursts out from the crowd, resplendent with flamboyant purple feather dusters or fluorescent pink flyswats.

There is no doubt that these works are fun to look at. They bring a smile to the lips by the very ordinariness of their components, yet Batchelor has built them into something more monumental, more dignified.

He uses them to question our feelings about colour, which he explored in his 2000 book Chromophobia, arguing that we are ambivalent, at best, to bright shades.

Usually, in Western culture, the most sophisticated an object is, the more neutral it's colours will be. There is an economic side to this, too: these objects, made mostly in China, are so cheap they represent purchase-power even in the hands of the very poor, though the impact of their carbon footprint should not be ignored.

It's possible to enjoy Batchelor's pillars, his "eyeballs" (spherical sculptures made of plastic sunglasses) and his sad, sequined cuddly toys without really exploring the ideas. To go deeper and begin to understand what he is about, one must go upstairs where a range of drawings never before exhibited are being housed.

From jottings on pages torn from notebooks to fully finished drawings using unexpected materials, these are the thought processes at work, and somehow they are always sculptural: even confined to working in two dimensions on the paper, he is clearly always thinking in three.

One gets a further insight into Batchelor in the show in the back room of the Ingleby Gallery, part of a rolling programme of short shows of contrasts and comparisons.

Here, his photographic series Found Monochromes of London, Volume I is shown together with White Square (Suprematist Volume) by the Russian Suprematist Nikolai Suetin.

Batchelor spent several years trawling the city photographing the white rectangles of faded notices, blank billboards. The images make an immediate visual connection with Suetin, pointing us to Batchelor's interest in the monochrome, from Malevich to Yves Klein.

Yet, it also illustrates the differences between them. While Suprematism seemed to strive for a kind of visual and ideological purity, Batchelor finds white squares within the landscape of the modern city, on the window of a car, on a phone box, a park gate, a brick wall.

He is a collector of signs that don't signify, a flâneur of pound shops, a creator of a kind of arte povera for the urban 21st century.

• David Batchelor: Unplugged until 29 September; David Batchelor & Nikolai Suetin until Thursday; Autumn 1967: 40 Years Ago Today, until 1 September