Paul Rooney and arts collective Leeds United pair up for show at 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival

• Neil Cooper
• 1 August 2013

This article is from 2013

Paul Rooney and Leeds United, Feral-Nowledge, 2012, Video still copyright EAF

Video and text works blur the boundaries of authorship

If ever there was a match made in northern English heaven, it's this one between Liverpool-born polymath Paul Rooney and arts collective Leeds United. While Rooney has plundered pop culture to create a series of fantastical parallel universes featuring the likes of open-top bus tours, 1960s counter-cultural icon Jeff Nuttall, and a sprite trapped in a 12” vinyl record called Lucy Over Lancashire, the pseudonymously-inclined Leeds United appropriate other artists’ work for their own ends. As Rooney returns to his alma mater mob-handed, he and Leeds United sniff each other out in a series of mutual homages, mythologies and make-believe histories that break cover with a project begun in 2011 that blurs the boundaries of who exactly did what. Such death-of-the-author tactics include a new video and text-based works, including a video that attempts to claim the Loch Ness monster for the Museum of Modern Art and a bleak little film about Yorkshire rhubarb sheds. Wearing their roots on their sleeves, as much as they explode them with a dark urban wit, this is the sight and sounds of the north rising again in a not so grim exchange of ideas.

Edinburgh College of Art, 651 5800, until Sun Sep 1, free.