In the 1980s , the Smith Museum's Bienniale open art exhibition gained a national reputation, but it seeped away when the Museum lost its way at the end of that decade. One of the current curator's first actions was to run an open exhibition during December 1994 and the new Brave Art exhibition continues that open policy. There was early fear of a low level of entries and, certainly, some artists didn't submit anything because they were out of sympathy with the subject. Different aspirations, material interests and even different peoples are all blended into the one unproblematic hero figure.
Few works seem to step back and question the role of the hero.
But the two most interesting works are interlinked to the extent that one is a commentary on the other. This is deftly positioned both in the context of Stoddart's own attempt to reclaim epic form and in the historical invention of the Wallace myth. And what is more, he sees that the epic tradition which he would like to retrieve is one which became unsustainable after the Enlightenment. Both these works, it seems to me, take opposed but intelligent positions which recognise our alienation from either the life-world of the real William Wallace or his mythical shade. Curator Elspeth King's introductory essay recognises that Wallace is a historical construction and focusses on the problem of history painting as a genre outside the modern artist's vocabulary.