IN THE 1960s in Communist Yugoslavia, politicians hatched a bold plan for a Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade. Foundations were laid and the corners marked with bunches of upright metal rods, but the project was abandoned and the rods are all that
remain.
In 2007, Dutch artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol – who work together as Bik Van der Pol – visited the site and "reopened" the museum by creating a group of works under the title Art is either Plagiarism or Revolution, or: Something Is Definitely Going to Happen Here (the first part being a quote from Gauguin).
The 30-minute film they made at the site – which is accompanied here by a flashing neon text work and a light-box photograph – is one in which very little happens: passers-by wander through the abandoned foundations; one film crew films another setting up lights and rolling out yellow tape. The paraphernalia of film creates an event out of a non-event, which in turn pays tribute to the impossibility of the original idea – a museum about an event.
All this is central to Bik Van der Pol's practice, which focuses on information, particularly how (and whether) it is distributed and how it can be erased. They shine a torch into buried ideas, disappeared projects, secret histories and open them up to create a space for dialogue. As a result, their work will always be open-ended, which can be frustrating for the viewer. We want them to finish, to conclude, to draw the ideas together, and that is precisely what they are not going to do.
During a recent two-month residency at Cove Park in Argyll, they created a publication, It Isn't What it Used To Be and Will Never Be Again, an open-ended dialogue of words and images which includes contributions from artists such as Fiona Jardine, Simon Yuill and Sarah Tripp. They have also made a "work in progress", which documents Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra making a musical score for the Belgrade film.
The bulk of this show, however, consists of earlier works, finished to a greater degree and highly engaging. Trinity traces their journey to New Mexico, to the little-known desert site which was used for the first atom bomb explosion in 1945, shortly before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Belgrade project, there is nothing much to see, but that doesn't stop hundreds of people making a pilgrimage to the site, or local people selling "trinitite" samples (sand fused together by the immense heat of the explosion) from trailers at the roadside. It becomes a film about this buried history, and the stories and fragments of truth which come to circulate around it.
Past Imperfect is a collection of publications (Casco Issues #9) produced by the artists documenting their own research "guided by curiosity, amazement and suspicion" into other stories like this one.
Beginning with American artist Lee Lozano, whose withdrawal from the New York art scene in the 1960s was itself a work of conceptual art, and traversing through Howard Hughes, Yves Klein and Albert Loos to haunted hotels and silenced conspiracies, it is a source of fascination for as long as you're prepare to crouch and read the mounted pages.
In the same vein is their exhibition of the archive of bankrupt alternative publishing house Loompanics Unlimited, whose tantalising titles included Techniques of Safe-Cracking, Gourmet Cannabis Cookery and Living Naked & Frugal: A Handbook for Parsimonious Nudity. Bik Van der Pol's Disappearance Piece publishes 1,000 copies of a facsimile edition of one of their books, the highly practical self-help guide How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found by Doug Richmond, a book about disappearing, now itself lost, from a vanished publisher. I briefly considered pocketing one, thereby completing the cycle of disappearance, but thought it best not to push my luck.
Meanwhile, the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh is engaged in the first part of this year's New Work Scotland programme, with works by three very different recent graduates. Michael White (Glasgow School of Art, 2009) is a sculptor whose large, ungainly organic forms might have started out as classical gods or primitive totems but have swelled into profane, mis-shapen non-icons of the postmodern age. He juxtaposes them with clean geometric shapes as additions or props.
Anna Tanner (Glasgow MFA, 2009) is a painter whose small, beautifully produced canvases hint at narrative and cinema, a precarious take on the American dream: a tiny house illuminated with fairy lights perches on the edge of a stormy ocean; the lit windows of gated dwellings belie the shadows outside where a beast appears to lurk.
Jennifer Grant (Gray's School of Art, 2009) has created a site-specific work in Craig's Close across the road from the gallery. In this the narrowest of Edinburgh's closes, her three trapezes made from discarded vases, kitsch ornaments and household crockery are surprising and magical. Seen in the late afternoon, with the light failing and the buildings around them dripping from recent rain, they become mysterious and eerie.
&149 Bik Van der Pol runs until 21 November; New Work Scotland until 22 November
