Glasgow International reviews: David Wojnarowicz | I Only Have Apple Juice | Bettina Grossman & more

Patricia Fleming Gallery hosts a show by two young painters, Amelia Barratt and Anna Paterson at Oxford House, and an offsite show by Sooun Kim at 44 Carlton Place, which includes a compelling, dream-like film called Quiet Folds Dispersing You, alluding to the death of a Korean independence activist in 1907.

Next door, at 42 Carlton Place, the artist Merlin James continues to host quietly surprising exhibitions, this year pairing contemporary American painter Patricia Treib with Dutch-born Bran van Velde (1895-1981). Then, off the lane at the back, you’ll find Raydale Dower’s Castles in the Sand, an immersive show in which codes and cyphers, sound and image play off one another and time slips backward, or is it forward?

Meanwhile, 48 Carlton Place delivers one of the real surprises of the festival, David Wojnarowicz: some day this will all be crumbling ruins (★★★★★), curated by the Modern Institute’s Toby Webster. A key figure in the queer New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, which colonised the disused piers on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, he worked across photography, film, graffiti, painting and writing.

Over four floors of an empty house which has been stripped back to the bricks, this is a significant survey of Wojnarowicz’s work and his life. Photographer Peter Hujar, his mentor, friend and, for a time lover, haunts it like a benevolent ghost, from acting up in films made by Wojnarowicz and his collaborators in the basement, to the poignant photographs on the top floor which Wojnarowicz made when Hujar was dying of Aids.

After Hujar’s death in 1987, Wojnarowicz’s work became increasingly politicised. His “Sex Series” of photographs (1988-89) are as arresting as they are sophisticated. In them, he collages photographs, medical imaging and newspaper headlines, by hand in the dark room, to confront an America trying to ignore the Aids crisis.

His work seems to sharpen as it becomes more politically acute. Pieces such as Untitled (Face in Dirt), or David Wojnarowicz (Silence=Death) in which his mouth is stitched shut and bleeding, are as fresh and fierce as they ever were.

The show also evokes the community who let their raw creative energy loose in those derelict buildings, in a setting which seems not dissimilar - the basement even has traces of its former life as a bar and nightclub. This is one of those special exhibitions where location, curation and content combine to send shivers up the spine.

READ MORE: Glasgow International reviews: Jasmine Togo-Brisby | Rehana Zaman | Kate Cooper | Tanoa Sasraku

Peter Hujar surfaces again in I Only Have Apple Juice, at Bonny Don’t Live At Home, (The Coach House, 12 Sydenham Lane) curated by artist France-Lise McGurn and writer John Douglas Millar (★★★★★). The show is not about Hujar, but he is its guiding spirit: present in the new photographic collage made by his contemporary Vince Aletti for the kitchen table, performing the part of a narcissistic voyeur in Gary Schneider’s 1981 film, Salters Cottages. His own slides, colourful street portraits of stylish young Puerto Ricans in the area around East 14th Street, are playing on a slide show in the bedroom.

The show reflects on the artistic community in New York in the 1970s, and in Glasgow in the Noughties, the links between the two cities and the creative connections forged between artists - even across time and space - who admire, and are inspired by, each another’s work.

The show features photographs from Phil Collins’ Real Society and Becoming More Like Us series, and the 2022 film Horse Opera, by New York-based Moyra Davey, which reflects on her own story and community, alongside lockdown footage of horses, deer and birds.

As well as new works by Davey and Schieder, there are paintings by Paul Becker, McGurn herself - including recent work painted on printed surfaces, where the figures interact with the layers of existing imagery - and by Scots-born Patrick McAlindon, who is one of my main discoveries of this festival.

At about the time Hujar, Wojnarowicz and others were starting to colonise the broken-down piers on the Hudson River, Bettina Grossman was taking up residence in the Chelsea Hotel, where she remained almost until her death in 2021 at the age of 94. She lived there as a recluse until she was discovered by the art world in her final years and began showing work in major museums. Bettina: Finite Structures, staged by Cento at 20 Albert Road (★★★★) is the first exhibition of her work in the UK.

Grossman worked in a range of media, but photography was at the core of her practice. The show includes images from her Phenomenological New York series, which depicts the city reflected and distorted in the glass of its skyscrapers, and from a series of self portraits, Rencontres Psychic, which play with similar distortions on the female body.

Originally a textile artist, she maintained a lifelong interest in pattern, which is evident in a series of marble eggs, each with a different geometry of black and white, and a newly digitised animation from 1975 which is exhibited here for the first time. The work she left behind is still being catalogued, and this is but a snapshot, but it leaves the viewer wanting more.

A posthumous conversation between two artists blossoms in The Subtle Body at Kinning Park Complex (★★★★), bringing together the work of Scottish artist Katy Dove, who died in 2015, and the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Curatorial platform Chorus worked with the Katy Dove Archive, run by Katy’s sister Emma, to create the show after finding a MoMA catalogue of Clark’s work in Dove’s personal reference library.

Two practices which seem, at first glance, to be quite different turn out to have many points of connection: an interest in abstraction and shapes, in psychology and the inner life (Dove studied psychology before her art degree), and in art practice which is embodied, even therapeutic.

It’s particularly strong in the way it draws out key moments from Dove’s career: an early collaboration with choreographer Sheila Macdougall and a group of Glasgow children, for which she made one of her first animations; a 2009 work responding to the archive of Norman McLaren with the all-girl band she was part of, Muscles of Joy; and her last, unfinished commission, exploring gardens and medicinal plants at Duff House near Banff.

Clark’s work is mainly represented by photographic documentation; she never called her works performances, preferring to see them as group acts of participation. There is less of her work here than Dove’s, but there is enough for a conversation which sheds fresh light on Dove’s practice, reminding us how innovative she was and how timely her work still is, more than a decade after her death.

And there is a different kind of conversation in Protect Me From What I Know at David Dale Gallery, 161 Broad Street (★★★★), where artist Adam Lewis Jacob brings to Scotland for the first time the work of Jill Westwood, a pioneering figure from the early 1980s, and Sohrab Hura, an Indian photographer whose work is among the highlights of this year’s Venice Biennale.

Westwood, who featured in the 2023/4 exhibition, Women in Revolt, made performance work using the language of the S&M world and feminine dominance. Her portrait Potent-Female (1983), a side-on, seated portrait of the 23-year-old artist in a chair, dressed in black latex and thigh-high boots, is on the outside of the building.

Her 1984 film, The Wound, uncompromising in its physicality, still makes uncomfortable viewing. This, by its sheer force, becomes the centre of the show, with photographs and ephemera conveying a sense of Westwood’s life-as-art in the post-punk and industrial music scene of the early 1980s.

Jacob’s blazers, deconstructed and made into dresses, and sculptures made from high-heeled shoes respond to Westwood’s imagery and world. Hura’s work is different: the photographs in his “Bloom” series were made from early slides which had been damaged by floods, distorting their colours and creating new images, like unreliable memories. However, his 2019 film, Bittersweet, about his mother’s mental illness, has an uncompromising honesty and vulnerability which seems to circle back into the Westwood conversation.

This show is not about conclusions. It brings together three groups of works and allows them to speak to one another, in another remarkable building - a former factory. What stands out most, though, is the realisation that Westwood’s work, made in the era of Margaret Thatcher and the Cold War, is as radical and relevant now, at a time of resurgent toxic masculinity, as it ever was.

Glasgow International runs until 21 June; David Wojnarowicz until 28 August. For details and opening times visit www.glasgowinternational.org. Bonny Don’t Live at Home is open Saturday and Sunday, 10am-5pm, or by appointment: email [email protected]

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