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Preview Aug 10 2009 « | »
New shows this Week A preview of openings and events for the coming week in London and Edinburgh

Dean Kissick

WEDNESDAY

So the art world is on its summer holiday, a well-deserved break for all after a busy year of watching the market collapse and not selling very much. London's most illustrious dealers have been saving up The Sun's '£1 Camping' tokens all week, and are hoping to hop on the Megabus down south this evening. which is very exciting, but unfortunately leaves us with little to write about.

Still there's one thought-provoking opening this week: the '2009 Vice Magazine Photography Exhibition' at Exhibit X in Shoreditch, featuring a selection of the magazine's best photographers, including Tim Barber, Angela Boatwright, Jonnie Craig, Dana Goldstein, Richard Kern, Maggie Lee, Ben Rayner, Alex Sturrock, Peter Sutherland, Jamie Taete and Martynka Wawrzyniak. All further details are available on the gallery website here.

Though this is not really a traditional art exhibition, it's interesting because Vice uses photography and film in a very provocative and current way; blurring the boundaries between photojournalism and raw photography, between compelling issue-based investigation and quasi-pornographic superficiality. And so it sort of represents the contradictory nature of 21st-century media, and highlights the role that rapidly disseminated digital photography has had in creating such a two-headed monster.

Some people (most people) think that the magazine is awful, terribly awful; and certainly it's associated with a particularly apathetic blend of self-indulgent post-millennial cynicism, the very opposite of our new age of optimism. But conversely, Vice's innovative online documentaries are actually a rich source of honest and unmediated reportage, far removed from carefully controlled corporate news broadcasting. There's a good article about this in last weekend's Guardian, now online and worth a look.

Some critics claim that photography is dead as an art form, and others soothsay that newspapers and even television are in collapse. And it's interesting to consider how photography and film exist in the internet age, and the consequences for art and journalism. So actually. maybe we should all stay away from the exhibition and dystopian Shoreditch hell, run off on holiday, and watch VBS.TV online.

Donald Eastwood

While we have a moment of quieter, though never silent, activity in London it might pay to look at openings in Edinburgh. Though the Edinburgh International Festival starts on Friday, its more famous Fringe festival began last week along with - most importantly - the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Range is certainly the priority of the programme, which is comprised of shows in the Scottish Academy, in private galleries, in public space and in a caravan, and which has events from discussions with big name artists to an giant omelette making day.

Sadly we have already missed the opportunity to preview a caravan photography exhibition on the way we live and a 'site-specific, one-weekend exhibition in an empty Edinburgh City Centre flat' entitled PALIMPSEST, both of which closed this weekend and carrying a faint essence of 'I need a place to stay for the Edinburgh Fringe', despite interesting concepts/preview photography.

MONDAY

Tonight sees the opening of Roger Ackling's show at Sleeper's white cube gallery space. Ackling's practice, which involves emblazoning marks on found and mostly wooden objects by focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass is difficult to divorce from the image of a child burning ants. But the intensity and focus (!) involved in his work, the beauty and equally inescapable considerations of the painstaking process are compelling.

THURSDAY

Thursday's offering is what we like to see, an ambitious-sounding show with new and up-and-coming artists. Its easily exciting enough to excuse the hackneyed phrase 'the works plays with the concept of what it is to be an artist' in the teaser, which also promises to look at identities formed by networks and places and it looks to progress as a show through a program of performance an video as well. The launch party has gone, but it opens at midday at the well-named Art's Complex. The curator's blog is here.

SATURDAY

Sculpture gets a good showing all round at the festival, with Edinburgh College of Art putting on Milestone, where 10 internationally reknown sculptors carving a large stones in the college quad. There is also MAGAZINE 09: Creative Spaces, a pre-cursor to the forthcoming Edinburgh Sculptor Workshop around the idea of what relationships form creative spaces. There are events too, which you can read about on their website.

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