Edinburgh 2012: Sunday, Day Two

 So attempting to move on a bit through my Edinburgh experience (after all, I left on Wednesday): Sunday was relatively sedate. I got up later than I should but made it, just (see below) to Summerhall for Rime.

This might make me sound old (it makes me feel old) but I'm not sure how else to put it: Square Peg are young, good looking, enthusiastic, incredibly skilled and make it seem almost easy. Their acrobatic, dance and aerial skills are amazing and the piece was produced to a high standard, with fantastic sound both live and recorded. I guess my reservation was that it just was a little bit too slick and pretty. For example that mock Victorian look with tan and brown shades, knickerbockers, shirts and corsets is nice to look at but feels clichéd. It was very clear how talented they were but I didn't quite believe them. And particularly when - and this is just me being pedantic - they used granny knots to tie the sails when any sailor would use a reef. I'm interested actually - is this a circus rigging thing? It was consistent, at least.

Still. It was incredible to watch, they gave me an apple (see my previous post, I'm easily bribed), and to have a window open might not have been a deliberate part of what was going on but worked brilliantly - before I realised it gave me goose bumps as I felt the breeze on my neck as a storm gathered in the play. Maybe we should think about sensation effects more often as well as sound and lighting.

After Rime I popped back to the Hunt and Darton Cafe, in residence on St Mary's Street for the Festival, where I had an absolutely fantastic roast beef sandwich (complete with parsnips, stuffing and gravy - I was unsure, but it was good! - and managed to earn my copy of Forest Fringe's Paper Stages by giving time to an artist/waitress who was asking punters for helpful advice on her career. She seemed pretty sorted actually, but then I know that feeling of still wanting to be told what to do. My only complaint at Hunt and Darton was that the admittedly charming mismatched crockery was completely impractical - my tiny coffee mug had a curved in rim that made drinking from it tricky and my knife did not match up to the sandwich!

I didn't see any more shows on Sunday but very much enjoyed returning for a bit of a look around Summerhall. There are incredible spaces, with many original features from the venue's past life as the vetinary school, and exhibitions, including Figure Studies which are Muybridge-esque films, slowing down of the movement of people so that every movement and ripple of the skin can be observed in fine detail. I also attended the deliberately provocatively titled "Taking On The Boys" talk from Stellar Quines which was really interesting both on women's presence in the industry and their attitude to each other. The basic message was that only 30% of creative theatre roles in Scotland are filled by women, so it's clear that gender is still an issue, but also that people feel quite passionately, and often differently, about it. I'm looking forward to reading the full report from the research they have had carried out.

A question of perspective?

I went to the Hayward Gallery on Monday after finishing work. It's not going to make it into my 100 things to love because it's a bit too obvious a choice, but on the other hand I've never been there before. It feels a little too inaccessible and concrete, somehow, though I've admired all the artworks outside for years. Do they have to do that because other people don't walk in either?

The irony is that when I got there, I discovered that the exhibition currently on display is Invisible. It's a bit like the "What's the password" joke or the one about "The storage is in Ware" "Where?" "Ware" that came up at work recently. The subtitle is Art about the Unseen. All very modern and when I walked in to practically empty walls and pieces about thoughts and gazes it was all a bit too much like nonsense. Some of it funny nonsense, like the man who'd forgotten to bring a piece of artwork to an exhibition so put in a police report for his invisible art which had been stolen. Other nonsense verging too close to the pretentious.

Once I'd wandered around a bit though, there was also some fantastic stuff. Or stuff I really liked, anyway, and that makes it fantastic in my book. Some of it was there, some was mementos from stuff which had been fantastic before.

I started to warm up with the piece of a platform which had been an installation by Chris Burden called White Light/White Heat where the artist lay unseen above the gallery for every day of the exhibition. I quite liked Bethan Huws's "...from New York to San Francisco to..." - that sometimes there would be an actor in the gallery, behaving like a member of the general public, so you'd never know they weren't just another visitor.

I found "The Ghost of James Lee Byars" quite scary - you enter a room through a curtain, thinking it'll be one of those shadowy exhibition rooms with a film in or something and actually it's seriously dark, so dark you can't see where the wall is, and only, eventually, a faint chink of light where the opposite exit is. You have to walk through it to get to the rest of the exhibition (though you can get help) and I, like I suspect many other people, crashed through pretty quickly. I swear I could hear someone breathing, though when I lifted the curtain and let the light fall through there was no one else there. James Lee Byars was the artist and was originally alive when this was first exhibited, but no longer.

Then back to the funny again - I loved Carsten Höller's "The Invisible" - one of a series of fantastical cars invented as competitors for the "New World Race". This one, on spot four (which they had laid out on the floor) was so advanced it was invisible. I also found the realisation I was in a drawing quite lovely - Lai Chih Sheng's "Life-Size Drawing" where every edge and line in the room (though presumably not the oher exhibits) had been drawn over in pencil. Less successful, I thought, was Tom Friedman's Untitled (A Curse) which was meant to be a spherical patch of air over a pedestal which had been cursed by a witch.

The one I found the most disturbing, even more than "The Ghost...", was Teresa Margolles's "Air". I almost wish I hadn't read the display outside first, to see if unknowing it'd have had the same affect, though I guess they have to warn people. Earlier in the exhibition there'd been a room with aircon making a point about atmosphere but this one was cooling systems using water, and the water had been used to wash bodies in a mortuary. I was fine about reading this, but went in and suddenly went crawly all over. Not because it was distasteful particularly (though it does feel a bit icky) but with the sensation of desperately sad souls. Why this felt meaningful when Tom Friedman's didn't... I guess is half the point.

Ceal Floyer's plumb line, marking the centre of the gallery space (randomly on the edge of a staircase) is worth a mention if only because she's a distant cousin but then I finished with an invisible maze - I didn't find out who this was by. You pick up kinesthetic headphones (I've made that term up. They vibrate rather than making noise) from a rather beautiful display, and sit them just above your ears. There is a map of the day's maze which you have to walk through, with the headphones vibrating every time you hit a "wall". I kept finding dead ends where there shouldn't have been dead ends and gave up.

If there is a meaning in that then it's worrying, but the exhibition is definitely worth something which may not be a look.