Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, 11th September - 8th December 1996
In the 1980s, the Smith Museum's Bienniale open art exhibition gained a national
reputation, but it seeped away when the Museum lost its way at the end of that decade. One
of the current curator's first actions was to run an open exhibition during December
1994 and the new Brave Art exhibition continues that open policy.
However, the reliance on a "Wallace" theme as a means to obtain funding is a sign of
the times. The enterprise boards and other nebulous bodies who come together in the
"Stirling Initiative" are far more likely to fund an event bound to a "theme-parked"
historical narrative than a thematically-open event like the old Bienniale.
So how would Scotland's artists approach the theme? There was early fear of a low
level of entries and, certainly, some artists didn't submit anything because they were
out of sympathy with the subject.
To a large extent, the Brave Art exhibition is what was suspected: a large number of
views of biscuit tin Scotland and a gloomy wallow in Wallace's martyrdom, sometimes to
the point of Christology.
There's little evidence of prising-open the history of people in Scotland; the relevant
and centrality of Wallace is taken as read. Different aspirations, material interests and
even different peoples are all blended into the one unproblematic hero figure. For
example, Leslie Alan Reid's "Wallace" sculpture is a figure which is visually pleasing
but where the medieval Scottish aristocrat is covered in patterns derived from a Pictish
culture which he would not have regarded as his own.
Few works seem to step back and question the role of the hero. James Hardie's painting
"Gary Cooper, Sgt.George Morton and Mel Gibson" at least keeps its wits and its distance
from the mire. So too does Kenny Munro's sculpture on questions and mirrors "Reflected
Feast".
But the two most interesting works are interlinked to the extent that one is a
commentary on the other.
At one side near the gallery entrance is
Sandy Stoddart's sculpture "Blind Harry". This
is deftly positioned both in the context of Stoddart's own attempt to reclaim epic form
and in the historical invention of the Wallace myth. His accompanying text makes it clear
that his invocation of the 15th century poet links to the manipulation of the Wallace
myth in the "developing national culture of revived patriotism" in James IV's court. And
what is more, he sees that the epic tradition which he would like to retrieve is one
which became unsustainable after the Enlightenment.
Some twenty paces further up the gallery can be found Peter Russell's painted collage
"Sketch proposal for a heroic monument to William Wallace, in the style of Stannard
Soddie, sculptor, to be sited on Craigforth Hill in view of the Wallace Monument". Worked
into the texture of this parody of the giganticism of the epic form are commentaries on
the whole "Braveheart" enterprise to which Scots have been subjected in the past year (a
newspaper cutting headed "Braveheart Branded Cynical, Opportunistic and Cruel") and on
the forcing of heritage onto the "autobahn of history".
Both these works, it seems to me, take opposed but intelligent positions which
recognise our alienation from either the life-world of the real William Wallace or his
mythical shade.
Curator Elspeth King's introductory essay recognises that Wallace is a historical
construction and focusses on the problem of history painting as a genre outside the
modern artist's vocabulary. It can be hoped that an artist will try and work within
an awareness of his or her historical context, but all too often an explicit
reference involves claiming an already-existing depth rather than constructing new
resonance within the work. By merely assuming the vibrancy of pre-existing meaning, many
of the works in the exhibition finish up by being inert in the gallery: mere
illustration. Only those which recognise the problematic nature of history, like Stoddart
and Russell placing themselves on either side of the Enlightenment, seem able to avoid
this.