HE JUST seems so utterly himself. A man so supremely self-confident that, as a sardonic journalist once put it, he can swagger even whilst sitting down. There is the trademark pyramid of eyebrows, like two furry caterpillars pausing mid-ascent; the
slightly gappy smile; the full, fleshy face. Behind him: a jubilant saltire. It is Alex Salmond, the First Minister. A man, as the writer Muriel Spark might have put it, in his prime.
Salmond's face is familiar enough, but this news photograph by Graham Fagen is part of a remarkable artwork. The ebullient First Minister is placed in a frame in the company of two other, more mysterious images. One is a charcoal pin-striped gent with glasses, the epitome of establishment charm, whose portrait reveals nothing more than an innate or hard-learned certainty that means he need not project any strong persona. The other is a collaged monster, crafted from pixelated newspaper images, mismatched eyes, crooked mouth and scalp, set on a crisp white shirt with pale pink tie. The glass that covers the frame has been inscribed in crude letters, "Heads of Scotland" it reads. "Government, Judiciary and Banks."
Heads Of Scotland is one of those works that may come to define a moment in time or become a millstone around the artist's neck. somebodyelse is a small show, but it highlights an often neglected or misunderstood aspect of Fagen's interest in the formal genre of portraiture as a window to the much wider subject of identity. The show, commissioned for Homecoming, brings together more than 10 years of artworks, charting the distinct bodies of work in which Fagen has examined the forces that have formed him and us.
There is the question of power and ownership in his series The Owners (2001), a sequence of comical allegorical portraits presented as though they might hang in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Also included are some images from Nothank (1999), Fagen's scripted "documentary" about the new town estate in which he grew up.
Also featured is an ominous still from Fagen's time in Kosovo during his 2000 commission for the Imperial War Museum. On his return, Fagen made the film Theatre, but here he shows an informal snapshot. The positive possibilities suggested by the fact he is having a friendly drink in Pristina with an Albanian and a Serb journalist are somewhat undermined by the accidental backdrop in the bar of flags, sending strong messages about cultural and national identities, including a red hand of Ulster.
There is a sequence of restaged portraits of Bonnie Prince Charlie, as a child and an adult, and as a consummate modern politician with his sober suit, tartan tie and Scottish and Italian lapel badges.
The new triple portrait Heads Of Scotland began as a simple enough ambition to explore the further possibilities of contemporary portraiture by capturing its establishment: the First Minister, the Lord President – currently Lord Hamilton – who is Scotland's most senior judge, and the most senior figures of its two banks. Then came the financial meltdown. Banks have, in the popular imagination, turned beastly, and if the corporations themselves have become new public/private hybrids bailed out by the taxpayer, bankers themselves have become veritable monsters, their moral fabric apparently stitched together from avarice, risk-taking and hubris.
The oddest thing is that the Frankenstein's monster crafted from three senior figures: Andy Hornsby of HBOS, Fred Goodwin, formerly of RBS, and his successor Stephen Hester, still looks overwhelmingly like Goodwin. Is his the true spirit of modern banking, seeping to the surface however we might try to stem the flow?
The scratched glass is a reference to Robert Burns. Fagen, who grew up in Irvine, has returned again and again to Burns in his work. He was the presiding cultural figure in his upbringing, force-fed to the child, rejected by the young man and then turned to again in adulthood. Burns often inscribed epigrams on window glass with a diamond stylus he carried with him for that very purpose. There was some Jacobite verse in Stirling and the famous eight lines of his own poetry on his bedroom window at the Globe Tavern in Dumfries.
Next month, the Blend Roots Music Festival, housed like the Changing Room in Stirling's magnificent Tolbooth building, has commissioned Fagen to continue a collaboration he first unveiled at Glasgow's Tramway with dub reggae producers and musicians including Ghetto Priest and Skip Macdonald. I Murder Hate, on March 14, will be an evening of live music: the words of Burns sung as contemporary music by some of reggae's finest practitioners.
So what, meanwhile, does somebodyelse all add up to? In many ways it's a critical master class, a "construction of individual and national identities". In particular, Fagen is reviving an old theme, the question of alienation that has arisen again and again in philosophy, politics and literary culture. Marx applied it to the question of labour, the existentialists to questions of the self. Fagen suggests we are all fictional, constructed. Even – or perhaps particularly – the jocular First Minister.
I remember as a schoolgirl meeting my first adult feminist. She introduced me to her boyfriend. "It's OK," she reassured me, "he's been deconstructed." It seems utterly ludicrous now. But imagine if all of us, men and women, could deconstruct ourselves so efficiently to get rid of the theatrics, the fakery, the false bonhomie, the class and family expectations, the fears and prejudices. Fagen suggests that self-realisation may mean scraping away at the identities ascribed to us, as Burns inscribed those tavern windows first with Jacobite poetry and later with his own.
The most moving portrait here is one in which the human face does not appear at all. Instead, there is just a purple flower, awkwardly delineated. Next to the picture, written in a juvenile hand, appear the words: my favourite flower is the pansy. Painted in gouache, that mainstay of the primary classroom, it was prepared in mock indignation more than 10 years ago by the artist, when a friend laughed at an innocent mention of his favourite bloom.
It's a daft, and also wonderfully brave, bit of art for a west of Scotland male of a certain age to have produced. In this show you look at it and you think back on Salmond and those Jacobite princes and all the flags in Kosovo and you realise sadly that so many of our public figures, and so many ordinary men, still feel they can ill afford such vulnerability.
• Until April 11, 2009 www.stirling.gov.uk/changingroom
