Fred Sandback is one of the lesser known and less celebrated of the artists loosely termed 'Minimalists' from their breakthrough in the mid 60s onwards. Where Donald Judd was all about the box, and Dan Flavin all abut the light fitting, Sandback is all about (largely) string, twine, cord, thread or any kind of thin flexible line. His big thing is creating planes, spaces and forms by making taut shapes with his material across the corners and surfaces of a gallery's walls, ceiling and floor. I like it a lot - it's spatial and delicate and interesting to not simply look at but walk around. It's kind of architectural, and kind of drawing in space. I like it formally, pure and simple. I hate the guff that gets written about it to justify it (see a recent entry on Flavin below).
So I was drawn to a show of his work in Edinburgh that was due to close last week. Billing itself as a 'retrospective', it was at the Fruitmarket Gallery where ironically I once worked in the mid 1980s - as a lowly gallery assistant, mind, not a high flying drug-fuelled curator in Armani shades with Bottega Veneta luggage.
What can I say - this show was an utter nonsense and total disgrace. The Fruitmarket is currently one of the worst examples of a loathsome provincial, vaguely state-supported, UK art gallery. Given funds by the Arts Council it renovated for commerce not aesthetics. So the large glass-walled ground floor space houses - you guessed it - a poncey café and a bookshop treading the preposterous line between Lacanian theory and gift wrap. Behind them lie two cramped 'gallery' spaces entirely devoid of artificial light with tatty detailing. In one of them, a Sandback piece formed of rising vertical lines of pure white string was installed in a corner, dreadfully lit, rising from floor to ceiling but eventually having to go through an air duct or ventilation system that runs across the roof of the space. I'd seen this work at Dia:Beacon a few years ago so I know it's beautiful. Here it was ineffectual, pointless, rendered ugly. After that I ventured upstairs, where there is some semblance of natural light. Flat rhomboids and floor works that could easily have been situated downstairs were crammed in among pillars, staircases, and all the architectural obstacles that make this more of a corridor than a viable contemporary art space. I hate to say it but nothing looked even vaguely powerful here (apart, perhaps, from a cluster of vertical yellow string lines that mirrored the pillar they lay behind).
I know that good art should be able to survive a bad space, but this was just shocking. With probably only around 15 real sculptural planar shapes padded out by a load of prints and drawings, this was certainly far from a retrospective. It was a desecration. I know I've fallen out of love with the nonsense of the Art World over the last few years, but few shows have actually left me this angry. Fred Sandback deserves better - as do Edinburgh's cultured classes, even if they're only popping in for a lemon tart, a latte and a Moleskine notebook.