Scots of the art antics: Andrew Graham-Dixon in Edinburgh on recent art in Scotland, and David Salle
EVERYBODY, it seems, has been celebrating the arrival of a new generation of Scottish artists, except those in charge at the major Scottish art institutions. This year the Edinburgh Festival's main exhibition, "The Vigorous Imagination: New Scottish Art", comes across as a tardy official attempt to make amends.
The show opens with Steven Campbell's characteristically obsure Two Men with a Carriage Royale to Catch a Queen Bee. This is an opaque pseudo-allegory, whose protagonists — a panto horse pulling a coach, a Woosterish portrait of the artist vainly brandishing a butterfly net, tripped up from behind by the hand of a man snaking out from an incongrously stationed tent — stumble crazily over a set of garden frames planted liberally with cauliflowers. Campbell trowels on the paint like cream cheese — art ' high in cholesterol, low in intelligibility. Dinnae ask what it means — it sells, doesn't it?
Campbell, whose figures pose and gesticulate like tweedy Bruce McLeans, is the self-styled inventor of new Scottish painting. What he has actually invented is a kind of knowing, mock-Scottish painting — Landseer's heroic landscape toned down to a silly pastoral world peopled by clowning buffoons. The question is, how long can he afford to go on making the same joke? Similarly, Adrian Wiszniewski's adherence to his own formula — moody young men outdoors and in, always rendered in his distinctive looping coils of paint, pastel or conte — looks as though it might just conceal a lack of ideas or direction.
Campbell and Wiszniewski, who share a room at Edinburgh, have been cannily overshadowed (literally) by David Mach's installation. Outside In, in the same room — eight tons of discarded newspapers wash across the...
