Graham Fagen: National Treasures

If you thought that your 2014 visual art schedule was shaping up to be a bit brutal, then please spare a thought for Graham Fagen. En-route to representing Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale next year, the artist, whose genre-defying work evaluates Scottish cultural heritage in refreshingly unexpected ways, limbers up for his position on the world stage by exhibiting in no fewer than seven projects for Scotland’s own national art survey, GENERATION.

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has selected Fagen’s Peek-a-Jobby (1998) as a pivotal work from the last twenty-five years. Gallery-goers are invited to enter a stage-set depicting a shabby student flat replete with John Waters videos, empty tinnies and overflowing ashtrays. The invitation to engage is formalised by a scripted narrative which uses language as a framing device for the installation, to examine how meaning can be created and corrupted within the mind of the viewer. Fagen refuses to divulge the famous writer who performed the titular "shocking act of depravity" which forms the climax of the narrative but admits with a grin that it is based on a true story. Although Fagen tells us that he’s less interested in looking back along this timeline, he concedes that the piece played an important part in breaking rules and preconceptions about what could be shown in a gallery space. And that it still feels fresh and relevant today.

Elements of Peek-a-Jobby’s revolutionary approach to theatrical narrative have echoed through the work made over the following eighteen years, most notably in his collaborations with theatre director Graham Eatough (the pair have re-configured their 2007 film Killing Time for Dundee’s Cooper Gallery). An upcoming show in Marseille will use similar devices to depict an incident of artistic vandalism; however this time, footage within the set will reveal the provocative deed being done.

In performance it is said that tits and teeth will get you through. Time spent working in America led Fagen to self-consciously reconsider national aesthetic standards of the latter. “Teeth are common to everyone, yet totally unique as an object or form.” says Fagen. His striking tooth drawings, which blossom out of vibrant black-eyed pansies, form a central part of a new body of work shown at Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery. Cabbages in an Orchard; The Formers and Forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen began in 2011 with a commissioned essay in which Fagen reconsiders his own ‘difficult’ relationship with the fellow lover of flowers and plants during his student days at GSA.

Institutional force-feeding of Scotland’s cultural poster boys led to resistance from Fagen: “We were made to recite Burns at school [without understanding its context]; we were taught that that was our cultural heritage; but to me it was always a heritage which came with a biscuit-tin aesthetic.”

Finding common ground in the unexpected territory of Jamaican reggae music has enabled Fagen to reconnect with Burns. For the South By South West partnership, Fagen is exhibiting audio work which looks at the legacy of the slave trade alongside the notion that we almost lost our national bard to the West Indies. Similarly, his ‘huff’ with Mackintosh was exorcised through finding “three wee watercolours, deep in the archives” which used text as a framing device for the visual composition, adding the kind of drama and context so important throughout Fagen’s own work.

As Edinburgh’s High Street sings with a cacophony of contemporary bagpipe mash-ups and souvenir shops do a roaring trade in punting tartan tat, it is easy to understand why Fagen has developed such a complex relationship with Scottish cultural identity. Though this busy year leads up to the chance to see oursels as ithers see us on a worldwide platform, for the artist representing us in Venice he has bitten off quite enough for the time-being on his home turf.

“It’s great that [GENERATION] is happening,” concludes Fagen, “but you have to hope that Scottish contemporary art might get a chance to stay [and be shown] in Scotland a bit more often. That’s what we really have to think of for the nation – the legacy of all this cultural production.”