"That's my house," said an Edinburgh friend emphatically after seeing Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's installation Opera for a Small Room. I frankly hoped not, given the rather creepy atmosphere of the installation, and yet I could feel the pull of the work too. The piece, part of an unmissable exhibition titled The House of Books Has no Windows, at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery, seems to summon up precisely the experience of being an opera-obsessive (or, by extension, any kind of music obsessive): it is a tiny, record-filled room, rather claustrophobic, that also seems to stand for an inner life and imagination where real life, memory, fantasy and arias crowd together.
Craning your neck to see into the cramped, shabby, ill-lit room, in which records set themselves playing of their own accord, lightbulbs flicker into life and shadows - created by no one - dance across the dusty walls, you feel as if you were gazing into someone's dark psyche.
Janet Cardiff is also the artist behind a wonderful work - not in the Fruitmarket show - called 40 Part Motet. The spectator enters a room in which Tallis' Spem in Alium, his motet for 40 parts, is heard, each part played through a different speaker. It's the most gloriously immersive piece, deceptively simple. It's somehow generous: an act of sharing her engagement with this extraordinary music. In fact, I can't think of another artist who communicates the experience, the feeling and the emotion of listening to music as vividly she does.
Anyway, there are many more treats in the Fruitmarket show - The Dark Pool, for one, which I think ought to be visited alone: a kind of mad attic, as if recently abandoned, where curious things occur as you move through the space (more detail would ruin it). If I sometimes felt the works were somehow a little clean and tidy (maybe I'm used to the roughed-up, dark-and-dirty feel of Mike Nelson's best immersive installations), there is none the less much to enjoy here.
More art worth seeing, meanwhile, includes Doggerfisher's Alexander Heim show, to make you see the world from a pigeon's perspective; Ingleby Gallery's new space; and Inverleith House's strong Richard Hamilton exhibition. And last but not least, Tracey Emin's first UK full retrospective.
