The Associates

Issue 33, Summer 2009

Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland
20 March – 21 June

By Neil Mulholaland

It’s ten years since Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) opened in Dundee’s West End, one of a fleet of arts dreadnoughts built and launched with National Lottery booty and kept afloat with little more than the steam of enthusiasm for all industries cultural. DCA’s tale is, in microcosm, the shanty of the visual arts in the UK under New Labour kunstwrights. By incorporating the old Seagate Gallery, Dundee Printmakers’ Workshop and the research activities of the neighbouring art school, DCA has become a mainstay, the city’s ‘cultural hub’. It’s a controversial approach to arts management that’s been resisted particularly vociferously in Scotland. DCA, however, came along in the right place at the right time. Tayside art has witnessed a steady renascence since the late 1990s. Since Generator Projects opened up its hatch, groups like Ganghut and zines such as Yuck ’n Yum have blossomed. An asset to its community, DCA has proved to be very popular with Dundonians. It is always far busier than other Scottish arts centres, its bustling bar as much a draw as its programme, the DCA Print Studio or its Visual Research Centre archives, such as REWIND.
Seventeen artists who have trained at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) are the focus on this exhibition. These artists are internationally renowned; in what sense has Dundee contributed to this? There’s certainly something of DJCAD’s mix of twee archaisms and nosebleed high-tech. DJCAD has long been an international centre for electronic imaging and new media. The associates who make the most use of audiovisual technology – Stephen Sutcliffe, Andy Wake and Katy Dove – opt for relatively lo-fi approaches that have the directness and clarity of the pop promo about them. Sutcliffe’s two short films stand out particularly in their candour and satirical prowess. The archaisms of DJCAD are borne out far more frequently in works that are overtly academic or laboured in their technique – in the use of trompe l’oeil (Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael), decorative effects (McKenzie, Scott Myles, the Lonely Piper) or the overtly figurative (Duncan Marquiss and Clare Stephenson). While lo-fi is hard to avoid, especially in Scotland, it’s the craftsy aspects to the work on display that are notable and distinctive, and which give the work of these DJCAD grads its peculiar tone.

The Associates screams out its subcultural credentials – something that many of the participants attribute to the détourning influence of their tutor Alan Woods. The underground 1960s are a recurring reference point for Luke Fowler and Myles, but it’s the more flamboyant spectre of the 1980s that haunts the majority of these associates: Graham Little’s Facts Are Stupid Things (Fruit vs Fashion), Mockintosh chairs and the musical Chess (Ellen Munro), the Berlin Wall (Steven Cairns), retrofuturist Top of the Pops sets (Robert Orchardson), The Face’s typographic totalitarianism (Myles) and profligate femme-romos (Stephenson). The more contemporary pop references have a conspicuously Dundonian lilt – a quasi-mystical transcendentalism shared by locals such as the Beta Band and Andy Wake’s the Phantom Band. This neomedieval vernacular is most evident in the work of Marquiss, in Dove’s Flash-animated lysergic biomorphs and in the Lonely Piper’s spidery folklore.

This constitutes a folk taxonomy, and predilections that have surfaced in other shows curated at DCA by Graham Domke, so it’s testimony to his skill that they should emerge so strongly, and openly, in what could easily have become a grown-ups degree show. Equally, the title of the exhibition relates to the idea of ‘the group’, to strong social bonds and loose federations between friends and acquaintances. McKenzie and Orchardson’s works, in providing tableaux for other artists to bounce off, work best in this sense. Beyond this, the camaraderie is largely symbolic. Certainly many of the artists have shown together and shared studios, but there’s less of a sense that they jointly constitute anything bigger than their alma mater or their shared experience of the silvery Tay. This much was typical of artists working in the last decade, an increasingly postcollaborative era which saw a larger number of art grads emerge into the much more comfortable, linear and professionalised infrastructure that DCA heralded. The desire to stick around in Dundee and set up anomalous things is dissipating; the path of least resistance beckons DJCAD’s current incumbents. The Associates is a much-welcome counter to the apathy that always threatens to make Scotland just that little bit less interesting.

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