On my way to Tramway in Glasgow’s Southside I spot the artist Jenkin van Zyl walking past the McDonald’s on Pollokshaws Road. I know it’s van Zyl because I watched an online video about his make-up routine. He’s wearing prosthetic horns, hooks for hands, and nothing much on the bottom half, except for some strapping that reveals pretty much the whole of his arse. Van Zyl’s film Machines of Love (2020–21), showing at Tramway as part of Glasgow’s biennial arts festival, unfolds like a World of Warhammer cosplay fantasy with heavy shades of Paul McCarthy, in which a group of orc-like people with rat teeth and squashed noses conduct squalid sex games in an underground lair. The prosthetics are impressive, yet while van Zyl has understood the look, after 40 minutes of writhing around it’s less clear what he wants to say with it: a problem endemic in a culture that specializes in polishing and grafting pre-existing aesthetics. The theme for this year’s festival is “attention.” During an era in which convoluted curatorial agendas have become de rigueur, director Richard Parry has opted for the opposite approach, picking one so open that you’d be hard pressed to find an artwork to …

Jack Smith (1932–1989) embodied a certain kind of New York—a chaotic, unpredictable, and unregulated city where creativity thrived amidst squalor and raw energy. Smith’s performances (from 1969 onwards) often took place in domestic spaces tipped towards catastrophe by his accretions of junk and debris, and by his regular assertions of his own failure. Reduced now to bare documentation, these performances are difficult to convey in their anarchic immediacy. The inevitable problems of exhibiting documentation are only enhanced by the clean, professional curation of contemporary galleries. Despite those hurdles, something shines through in this exhibition of documents related to Smith’s performance work. Perhaps Smith is just irrepressible, but the evidence presented in the drafts and fragments of his performance ephemera reveal more than might be expected. The layout of the show anchors his work at either end of the gallery. Towards the entrance there is a large, luminous projection of Exotic Landlordism (1964­–69) that blocks sight of the remainder of the works. The film has all the classic traits of a Jack Smith 16mm work, but in this context what is most important is the magnificent burst of color that confronts the eye. The sheer sensuality of the image bypasses rational consideration …

Positioned like sentries on either side of the North Sea as it collides with the Atlantic Ocean, Norway and Scotland have long been held under the sway of this most frigid body of water. Crane-filled shipyards, woolen fisherman’s sweaters, mythical horned Viking helmets, and—as the exhibition “Sea Salt and Cross Passes” emphasizes—billowing canvas sails underpin both the mythic romance and gritty realities of these two nations. In her new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, writer Rebecca Solnit remarks that walking “into an exhibition can be like walking into the middle of a conversation that doesn’t make sense unless you know who’s talking and what was said earlier.” This is certainly true of this exhibition, which marks the first half of an exchange between two galleries, STANDARD (OSLO) and Glasgow’s The Modern Institute, and takes as its starting point the stretch of water that separates the two countries and informs both their cultures. The image of sails, so often captured in the maritime paintings that proliferate in seafaring nations, is what opens the exhibition’s conversation—and in particular, the diagonally sketched lines of masts attached to ships yawing off-center. With its depiction of not only one, but three diagonal masts, Losbåten “Arendal 2”—an undated …