It was a slightly tricky piece to write, because the show shoots itself in the foot, to great effect. As the subtitle suggests, its premise is that you can split Warhol’s work in two - life on one side, death on the other - which is hardly a new idea, and, before seeing this show, one I pretty much agreed with. But after seeing it I’m inclined to think that almost all of Warhol’s work, even the most obviously jolly stuff, is more about death than anything else.

Admittedly, this might be down to the fact that I’m always inclined to kick against didactically curated shows, but seeing the relentlessly morbid work - the skull paintings, the death and disaster series, the Marylins and Jackies, most of the self-portraits - alongside cheery Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, soup cans and celebrity portraits really does cast the latter lot in a new light.

In this context, the portraits become attempts to preserve the living, not celebrations of beauty/celebrity, and the standard reading of work like the Brillo boxes as, in part, being celebrations of egalitarian American sameness (“All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good”) collapses, and they begin to look something like (cue spooky music!) grave goods, with Warhol’s post-Duchamp handmade readymades less a studied removal of the artist’s presence in the work and more an artistic suicide. Okay, so I’m going a wee bit far there, but that possibility will at least colour the way I think about Warhol from now on.

Anyway, it’s a really great show, chock-a-block with work that’s never been shown in Europe before, brilliantly installed (especially when it comes to the recreation of installations), and I very much enjoyed the way that its curatorial conceit pushed me away and pulled me back in, prompting a bit of a re-evaluation of an artist I thought I had all worked out years ago.

I’ll be doing meandering reviewlets like this for most of the shows at the EAF this month. Next up: Alex Hartley at Fruitmarket.

As you can see, Submit Response has risen from the dead with a brand new look, like some crazy hypertext phoenix. Assuming I didn’t cock up the DNS thingy when I changed hosts, that is. Some things may well be horribly broken, or look hideous in your browser—if you spot anything amiss, do leave a comment on this post and I’ll try to fix it. Screenshots from Internet Explorer users would also be appreciated.

Tumble is back too, though I still have a bit of tinkering to do before various other sections of the site are ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

Apologies to my tiny band of readers for going quiet for so long. To be honest, I could’ve had the site up and running back in September, but… I couldn’t be arsed and decided I fancied an extended hiatus from wittering online.

Since last we spoke, I got a new job, as art critic for The Herald (the world’s oldest continuously-published English-language newspaper, fact fans), which is proving to be great fun—looking at art and writing about it are two of my favourite things, and I’m getting to do a lot more of both. I’m hoping to be able to post some of that writing on Submit Response, but since The Herald keeps its content behind a paywall, I’ll have to consult the powers that be. Whether or not I can re-publish reviews from The Herald, I expect Submit Response will be a bit more focussed on visual art than it was before.

A not-particularly-interesting post about the redesign of the site follows shortly.

Here’s the little text I wrote for the show:

Jackie Anderson paints people in places, Toby Messenger paints the places in people.

Anderson’s portraits dispense with the relationship between artist and sitter, catching her subjects unawares, presenting their most private moments, those spent alone in public. These are works full of movement, too, sometimes doubling a figure to catch a shift in expression, sometimes painting only the place that her subject has been, will be, or, even, might never be. The public spaces through which Anderson’s subjects pass are reduced on her canvases to thin shadows and abstracted forms, just as her subjects pass by buildings, cash machines and doorways without seeing them, their surroundings rendered invisible by familiarity. This not only serves to foreground, figuratively and literally, the people painted, it also further absents Anderson from her work as a painter of portraits; the result is a communion between subject and viewer as private as the fleeting moments she has captured.

Messenger’s work is, for the most part, unpopulated, but he tackles landscape at a tangent, matching Anderson’s slippery approach to portraiture. In works made on daily walks in Sienna, always along the same route, Messenger is looking from the corner of his eye, turning his attention to the forms and spaces others might miss - he sees the curve of a roundabout, or the gap in a fence, ignoring grand architecture, blind to sweeping vistas. These are drawings of the spaces that enter memory, but are never remembered; the spaces, perhaps, that reveal more about a place than we realise. In the other series here, the quotidian again fills the frame. There are views from Messenger’s studio window, or chance glances around his working space. Here representation is almost, but not quite, irrelevant, with form and colour worked at for their own sake. These paintings are made not to describe, but because they must be made, like this.

On the surface, the work before you could not be more different. Anderson is ever precise, light, recording; Messenger moves heavy paint, suggesting, transforming. Beneath those different surfaces, though, both work to reveal the in between.

If you emailed me or called my mobile ‘phone in the last couple of days, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible today.

A full report of my brave and selfless investigation into technology-free living will appear in the next issue of the List, and here, too, after publication. One tidbit: you miss out on a lot of opportunities to get drunk in fine company if you cannot receive text messages, but, conversely, nice people will pop by your house to make sure you’re still alive if you’re offline for a day or two.

I’m breaking into a cold sweat at the very thought. And the fact that my first thought was to post about the experiment to my weblog suggests that I might find the task something of a challenge.

If you need to get in touch with me during my period of noble sacrifice for the entertainment of List magazine readers, um, well, I suppose you’ll have to come round my house.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully be interviewing Jim Lambie and Simon Starling in the near future, for a calmer look at the shortlist. (In the meantime, here’s an old interview with Jim.)

Congratulations to both, and best of luck.

The Turner prize thrives on controversy, and this year the more shrill quarters of the press have been handed their annual excuse to browbeat contemporary artists gift-wrapped, in the form of nominee Gillian Carnegie. In a reversal of the usual fuss, Carnegie is the centre of attention not for being an artist of the ‘Call that art?’ variety, but for being a painter, and one who paints landscapes and still lifes to boot. Fellow nominee Darren Almond might reasonably feel a little peeved - in any other year, his cool examination of the Holocaust in the form of recreated Auschwitz bus stops would have drawn the tabloid fire.

In the midst of the brouhaha, you might be forgiven for missing a fact about the other two contenders, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling. Both are Glasgow-based - Lambie born and bred, Starling an adopted son after attending the city’s School of Art - and both are represented by the Modern Institute, the very Glasgow gallery that backs last year’s Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller.

So, should Scots put aside the usual qualms about contemporary art and, as they would in any other field, back their team? In a word, yes.

Simon Starling’s work is perhaps the more challenging. He has a tendency to make journey’s. In the past, he has driven from Italy to Poland in order to swap Italian-made parts of his Fiat car with Polish-made equivalents. For his widely-acclaimed solo outing at Dundee’s DCA, Djungel, he traced the process of transforming a West Indian cedar tree into the printing blocks to make a curtain bearing a 1920s botanical design. The work which earned Starling his Turner nomination, Tabernas Desert Run, takes this peripatetic poetry a stage further. After riding a motorbike, modified to run on hydrogen and emitting only water, across the Andalusian desert, Starling returned to Glasgow and used the water produced by his bike to paint a picture of a cactus, and the Spanish sun, collected by solar panels en route, to power an airbrush used to paint the Spanish sky. This elegiac bicycle cycle is pure Starling - convoluted concepts, environmental concerns and witty transformations, transubstantiations even, expressed with a deft, light touch as beautiful as any painter’s brush-mark on canvas.

As for Lambie, he is, first and foremost, a sculptor. This fact has not excited commentators as much as Carnegie’s status as a painter, perhaps because Lambie’s work is characterised by the use of familiar materials. He uses turntables, dousing them in glitter, transforms junk shop mirrors and, most famously, applies cheap vinyl tape to gallery floors in eye-bending geometric patterns. Lambie is, too, closely associated with music - he was in Glasgow band The Boy Hairdressers, and has designed an album cover for Primal Scream - but, the artist insists, the references to music in his work are almost incidental, the result of reaching out to the stuff around him to make work. Or, as he has put it in the past, ‘I make sculpture. I start the work from a sculptural point of view. I might use the stuff that’s lying around, but as pure material. As opposed to other artists who try to get away from objects, I’m trying to get into them.’ He might be being a little disingenuous there - many of his works are named after song titles, after all - but look past Lambie’s surface themes it becomes clear that his insistance on placing sculpture at the heart of his practice is honest. Those lines of tape aren’t an abstraction of seedy discoteque dancefloors, they’re an eloquent, beautiful attempt to engage with what a floor is. His glitter-drenched turntables aren’t just co-opting a bit of DJ glamour, they are objects transformed, as surely as a chisel transforms marble.

It is a shame to take such a defensive tack, but, year after year, the Turner is set up as a standard-bearer in a battle between the cynical traditionalists and arty cognoscenti. Look inside that art world, though, and few would deny that Lambie and Starling are major forces. For one, the pair have represented Scotland together before, exhibiting at Zenomap, the inaugural Scottish pavillion at the Venice Biennale, and both have worked prolifically over the last year to mount a slew of significant international solo shows, Lambie at Oxford’s MOMA, Dallas Museum of Art New York gallery Anton Kern, while Starling drew crowds at Barcelona’s Fundacio Juan Miro and earned a nomination for the prestigious Hugo Boss prize. They are not alone, either. Scottish artists, particularly those based in Glasgow, have dominated for some time, with Lambie and Starling bringing the total of Glasgow School of Art graduates to win Turner nominations to five since it’s inception in 1984, including outright winner Douglas Gordon. The Beck’s Futures award - a cheeky little brother to the middle-aged Turner - has been over-run by Scots too, with Toby Paterson (another Modern Institute artist) Rosalind Nashashabi and Roderick Buchanan all scooping that award, leading some to redub it Jock’s Futures.

You might think that this would be a source of pride, but, as the focus of British art continues its shift North of the border, it is the naysayers that shout the loudest. Julian Spalding, one-time director of Glasgow Museums and Galleries, responded to the latest sign of Scottish dominance by writing in the Scotsman that the Turner Prize ought to be scrapped, forgetting to mention in his rush to decry the selection process, that half the shortlist are based on his home turf.

Spalding was also quick to point out, quite rightly, that prizes that pit one artist against the other are, in the end, impossible to judge, and national pride is hardly the criteria by which to make any such judgement. But nor is an artist’s medium of choice, yet it is Gillian Carnegie’s liking for paint on canvas that has made the headlines.

So, we find ourselves faced with a rather undignified race between artists - with Lambie and Starling at the starting gates with odds of 4/1, for what it’s worth - for a prize that most choose to use as a peg on which to hang arguments as old as Duchamp’s Fountain. And something has gone missing in the midst of this tired response to the shortlist announcement: the art. As the world’s eyes turn to Scottish artists, artists who more than deserve that attention, isn’t it about time we looked to their work, instead of joining the chorus of skeptics?

For those who can’t be arsed with 1,500 words about things in a gallery, here’s the short version: I want to watch Luke Fowler’s films over and over again, Donald Urquhart’s installation is absolutely fucking amazing, everyone else is pretty bloody good, except Christina Mackie, who, inexplicably, won the prize.

More often than not, prize exhibitions are hotchpotch affairs. They gather artists together by perceived quality, grouping them according to the whims of a committee; the antithesis of a well-curated show, which guides visitors along the highways and byways of artistic practice.

But this year’s Beck’s Futures show is no such thing. In a different world, one where no one feels the need to judge artists like show ponies or search endlessly for the new, it would be a fine group show. First and foremost, the nominees share a desire to question the modes of artistic practice, either simply, by slipping their work into the gaps between different media, or, more deliberately, signalling their ambivalence towards their role as makers of art. On top of this questioning discomfort with the very idea of being an artists, there are thin threads connecting the nominees, including a tendency toward the evocation of emotional states, examinations of the role of performance and collaboration in art, and a quietly confident inclination to borrow from and renew art of the past.

Lali Chetwynd gets the ball rolling by filling the CCA foyer with a whopping great cardboard head, some hairy skulls and a rickety shed. These are sculptural leftovers from a performance, a video of which loops on a pile of old televisions. The performance is funny. That giant head looks over a gaggle of women, naked and wearing wigs, who dance about a bit, and play catch with giant fruits and flowers. It is part mystery play, part groovy happening, like the punchline to a bad joke about old hippies gathering at Glastonbury tor for the solstice. This is Chetwynd’s stock in trade: making art of the naff. In the past, she has taken inspiration from Meatloaf, his doppelganger Jabba the Hut and snooker’s greatest failure, Jimmy White. The appropriation of these low culture totems, or the 60s wig-out seen here, is matched by a jackdaw approach to high art influences, so that the laughs obscure but never overwhelm a rather thorough examination of just what art is.

On the face of it, Luke Fowler might not seem to have much in common with Chatwynd’s exuberant, scattershot performances, but the two films presented here , The Way Out and What you see is Where you’re at present a shared non-standard view of the nature of art and its making. The Way Out is a loose portrait in film of Xentos Jones, the chameleon frontman of 80s underground obscurities The Homosexuals, told in anecdotes and reminiscences laid over archive footage and excerpts from Jones’ own film work. It is, though, also a self-portrait of sorts - like his subject, Fowler obfuscates himself, an anti-auteur using blank anonymity where Jones uses reinvention and endless pseudonyms to displace the notion of the creating artist. And Fowler, like Jones, is quite the polymath. Alongside his documentary film work, he runs Shaddaz, a platform for publishing collaborations between artists and musicians, and makes his own music with the group Rude Pravo, all efforts to be considered strands of his artistic practice, rather than sideshows to the main events screened here. What you see… is another portrait, this time of maverick Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing and his patients. Once again, Fowler is interested in assembly, collaboration and alternate models of creation. Bringing together documentary footage, Fowler’s editing eye is drawn to the wall scrawls and dirty protests of the inmates at Kingsley Hall, Laing’s social experiment in communal living for the disturbed, and this, alongside the collection of extant material, is another pointer to the Glasgow-based artist’s freewheeling fascination with working methods.

Daria Martin makes films too, but where Fowler collates old fragments, Martin borrows an aesthetic from stock footage of the past, painstakingly recreating the look and feel of a needlessly melodramatic cinema advertisement, crafting special effects so unsubtle that they feel like uninvited guests at a party. This is good fun, but look closer and another aesthetic is at the heart of Martin’s films. In Closeup Gallery, a smarmy croupier and his glamourpuss companion deal cards across a revolving table, generating a sort of performance sculpture brimming with formal and tonal echoes of Modernism, an aptly stylised tribute to and re-examination of that movement. And so, reversing the trend here toward fractured practice, Martin expresses her disparate concerns by gathering them up together, using film as a sort of ur-medium, a means of coalescing painting, sculpture and performance.

Next comes Ryan Gander. His Loose Association Lecture (Version 2.1) drifts happily from Erno Goldfinger to Captain Birdseye, mixing in personal anecdotes along the way, a grab-bag of ideas that almost serves as a manifesto for the studied inconsistency of Gander’s practice as a whole. Like Fowler, Gander is uncertain about art and the artist, bringing Josef Hartwig’s hitherto unrealised design for a Bauhaus chess set into the world, and presenting a snapshot of his studio wall, which includes a sketch of a trestle and sheet of chipboard, since these are ‘the two objects most vernacular to an art school studio space.’

Surrounded by these vagaries, Donald Urquhart’s installation comes as something of a shock. It is thrillingly complete, a beacon of certainty in the midst of the unanswered questions that fill up the rest of the gallery. Urquhart has made a little world here, and it is a sad place. Gnomic slogans pepper the walls and upright glass plinths, talking of ‘Letters unwritten and unsent’, ‘The dust behind limousines’ and, simply, ‘Rage’, matched with bold drawings of half-dug graves, balustrades and prickly flower-stems. Tying everything together is Darnley, Urquhart’s sickly fragrance designed for the sort of 1930s gentleman who never married. One whiff of this heady scent is enough to transport the sniffer into Urquhart’s hinted fictions, a flash of feeling that conjours up cruel and giddy laughter at a dissolute literary salon, where the women dare to wear trousers , the men bear traces of panstick, and simply everyone is making wicked whispered asides, most probably in Palare. But for all this intense evocation, this uncanny realisation of a place and time that never was and never will be, Urquhart is up to the same tricks as his fellow nominees - his first illustrations decorated flyers for his London club The Beautiful Bend, while the installation has the feel of an abandoned stage set, a reminder that Urquhart’s is a playwright, poet, performer and cabaret host, yet another artist who casts off constraints.

But what of the prizewinner? Christina Mackie fits in but certainly does not stand out. Her installation consists of a wooden lean-to housing a projector and speakers that quietly babble electronic music. The projector casts images of the artist moving drawings of little flower petals about, and has a twin beside it mounted atop a pile of wood and perspex. It is easy to see what Mackie is up to here, with nods to Modernism and Constructivism that combine with an attempt to loosely couple ideas, to hint and suggest, and, too, to break down her practice into a multidisciplnary mix. There is a problem though - Mackie’s work falls flat, it fails completely to engage the viewer, and feels flimsy compared to the other work here, work considered by the Beck’s judges, inexplicably, to be inferior. This may be too harsh - Mackie is not bad, but placed alongside her fellow nominees, some of whom cover similar ground with greater insight, her collection of things suffers.

This failure might almost be seen as a key to the show’s surprising coherence—if the winner is the worst of the lot, then the Beck’s Futures Award is, as all competitions between artists must be, a nonsense. Let’s remove the prize-giving from the equation then, and in so doing reveal that this exhibition is indeed, after all, a fine group show.

For four years, Sandy Sharp has visited the abandoned Ravenscraig steelworks, documenting the site as it is slowly-but-surely reclaimed by nature. The results of his project are gathered here, presented in three parts: Creation, Achievement and Renewal.

These are, make no mistake, beautiful images, and Sharp, a founding member of Street Level Photoworks, shows his colours as a photographers’ photographer. The Creation and Renewal sets are mostly small studies, in lush colour, often gathered together as diptychs or triptychs. ‘Furnace,’ for example, shows an outcrop of rusted ore in sharp focus, with plant life behind a near-abstract blur, while ‘Prospect’ sees a plucky little tree, alone under an impossibly blue sky, battling against the wind.

At this point, in the corridor-like space leading to Street Level’s gallery proper, Sharp’s work falls a little flat: the concepts covered here are immediately grasped, and, while the colour prints are fine studies, taken together they fail to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Face the final set, Achievement, though, and the thinking behind the show’s title becomes clear. This is indeed Another World. Low-contrast landscapes verge on being greyscale abstracts, slag heaps layered in snow have a lunar look, and long exposures make wind-blown shrubs struggle against the lumpen mass of abandoned equipment. Four large images, of bridges and flyovers, demand to have time spent with them, slowly revealing familiar forms through a blur of deep black and smoke grey.

One thing, though, is missing from these photographs: people. First, Sharp himself is wholly absent, leaving no clues to his motivation. Is this a eulogy for a lost industry, with one hopeful eye on the future? Or is it reportage, a beautiful document of an ugly landscape? Or could it be that the location is irrelevant, serving as a foil for Sharp’s unnerring skill for drawing wonderfully precise compositions from chance juxtapositions? Second, for a show that takes as its central theme the clash of man and nature, there is little that is human here. The Achievement series is peppered with human objects - a discarded gas-mask, a dusty pair of shoes - and the section’s title itself speaks of a pride in lost industry. But the images themselves are cold, and there is no pathos in these abandoned artifacts.

We cannot but admire Sharp’s skill, and soak up the beauty in his images with pleasure, but, in the end, there is nothing behind them to latch on to.