In the spring of 1995, artist-organiser James Thornhill staged a series of group exhibitions in a dilapidated tenement on the corner of Glasgow’s Wilton Street and Belmont Street, which included work by 15 local artists (including Will Bradley, Tom O’Sullivan, Edward Stewart, Stephanie Smith, Richard Wright and Cathy Wilkes) over the course of three weekend openings. Thornhill remembered, ‘Each weekend there was an opening, it was quite an event. The basement of the building had been a jazz club in the 70s and the top half, which we were using, had been a brothel. It created quite a strange dynamic in the street, people wondered what was happening and I had a neon work, which read ’Saturn’ hanging on the front of the building, which had originally been called The Belmont Hotel. Everyone made work specifically for the space, which was really run down. The last weekend, three days before the opening, these guys came in and erected a scaffold in the stairwell, knocking a hole in the ceiling. The next day everyone was here, dismantling the scaffolding and tidying up so we could have the opening. Then, after the opening, we had to put the scaffolding back up. It was a real community event, it was very involved and everyone had to muck in. It was hard work and quite mad.‘¹ Fifteen years later, no visible traces remain of The Belmont Hotel project, but throughout that Glasgow spring it was a place in the sense described by the cultural theorist Chris Barker: ’a site or location in space constituted and made meaningful by social relations of power and marked by identifications or emotional investments.’² Even while the project was happening the boundaries of this site were hard to distinguish, and so too was the nature of the meanings generated there – but this in itself was a reflection of who the participants were at that time in their lives – in the words of the poet Noel Arnaud ‘Je suis l’espace ou je suis (I am the space where I am).’³

Arnaud’s idea has relevance in terms of the Glasgow art scene of the last twenty years – an art scene characterized by independent practice, temporary exhibitions and one-off events, which I sought to document in my book Social Sculpture: Art, Performance and Music in Glasgow (2003). Much of the most notable work that has emerged from the predominantly self-organised and autonomous arts infrastructure in the city since the early 90s has been deliberately non-permanent, short term and ephemeral. It happens in one-room galleries in tenement flats, in stairwells, on bits of wasteground, on rooftops, down alleyways, in derelict buildings. It happens for one night only, or else the work is made and then abandoned to meet its fate in the wind and the rain. In his recent essay ‘How Not to Commission’ (2009), published by Public Art Scotland (PAR+RS), Ray McKenzie described ‘the slow but relentless process by which post-industrial capitalism is transforming the city into a habitat in which the citizen has no place and only the consumer can thrive.’ ⁴ While there is truth in these words, I wanted to outline exceptions to that encroachment, and mostly the places I thought of were libraries, parks and those other places where people who have nowhere to go might linger, like wasteground, stairwells and street corners. Much of the most interesting work undertaken by artists and musicians in Glasgow has been made in a corner – but the corner provides possibilities as well as limitations. As Gaston Bachelard noted in The Poetics of Space (1958), ‘The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door. It will serve as an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside …’ ⁵

I’m currently preparing a new edition of Social Sculpture, and have been researching the notable increases in the range of venues, galleries, studio complexes, commissioning bodies and institutional support that has emerged in Glasgow over the last seven years.
Although for many years the scene that emanated from Transmission, the city’s oldest artist-led gallery, went about its business unremarked and (in the opinions of many) unsupported, that situation has gone about a sea-change in recent years, with Transmission (along with other arts organizations such as Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow Independent Studio and Project Room, and Glasgow Media Access Centre (GMAC)) being incorporated into the mainly Glasgow City Council and Culture and Sport Glasgow funded Trongate 103 arts centre. When the city’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) opened in 1996, works by Glasgow-based ‘post-conceptual’ artists such as Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland were notable by their absence – yet in the last decade their work, plus those of contemporaries including Toby Paterson and Graham Fagen has been acquired by the GOMA.

Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) director Francis McKee, who directed the city’s Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art in 2005, 2006 and 2008, recalls that the budget for the festival was increased 10 times following the 2006 edition, when it was found that for every £1 spent on Glasgow International in that year, £9 came back into the city. ⁶ The 2008 edition of Glasgow International, curated by McKee on the theme of ‘public and private’ was the third and largest installment of the festival so far (set only to be eclipsed by the 2010 edition, under the direction of The Common Guild director, Katrina Brown). In 2008, McKee’s loose theme of ‘public and private’ translated in many projects in as an imaginative interrogation of the history of Glasgow, as for example in The Modern Institute’s presentation of a new work by Simon Starling, Project for a Public Sculpture (After Thomas Annan) in a semi-derelict former public baths and washhouse in the Saltmarket. Starling scanned silver participles from a reprinted 1866 Annan photograph of a Glasgow slum and built a virtual model of their form – resulting in an large, amorphous pale grey sculpture, like an unpainted Franz West. However, Starling’s work also described how technology and gentrification have erased a complex history of communal domesticity.

I see a connection between the communal activity of the washhouse and recent artistic practices in Glasgow, which might crystallize in the image of the ‘jawbox’, a slang expression which was used historically to describe a communal sink – jaw meaning both ‘conversation’ and ‘to pour’. I believe the Glasgow art scene to be predicated upon a combination of social co-operation and an interest in process-based practices, as for example in the work of artists such as Cathy Wilkes and Richard Wright, whose work is concerned with material and its poetry, and grounded in ‘actual bodies and social sites’.⁷ In a pleasing piece of symmetry, The Modern Institute, which represents the interests of Wilkes and Wright, has completely renovated the former public baths and washhouse used for Starling’s exhibition in 2008 in order to use it as their new premises. The building, which had been earmarked for demolition, will open to the public with Metal Urbain, an exhibition of new works by Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie, during Glasgow International 2010.

The establishment of The Modern Institute by Will Bradley, Charles Esche and Toby Webster in 1998 has been followed more recently, by the young commercial galleries Sorcha Dallas and Mary Mary, and the emergence of artist-led projects such as LowSalt, SGW3, Dias, Market, Washington Garcia and The Duchy, but Glasgow remains a city in which many artists make work that they do not expect to sell. Although Glasgow still lacks the established infrastructure and opportunities of a major centre like New York or London, the relative absence of a commercial scene has also allowed the development of an art scene built with an economy of means and materials.

Social Sculpture was mainly concerned with describing performances, openings, gigs and parties that have no ‘value’ as commodities. The value of this kind of activity lies in how it may start an ‘idea chain’, inspiring others to set up a gallery in their flat, start a band or write a fanzine. Despite the many changes in Glasgow in recent years (and in particular the recent gentrification process that has taken place as the city has reinvented itself as a retail and tourist centre), the resonance of the city’s recent political and artistic history remains. In the conclusion to the book I wrote, ‘Although many of the places the city’s artists and musicians used to congregate have closed down or been ‘redeveloped’, although many of the projects may have lasted only a few weeks or months, the combined effects of the times people spend together remains hard to erase.’⁸

Many of the most significant artists to emerge from Glasgow in the last decade work with less readily consumable forms of art, producing work that is often site-specific, process-based and performative, such as Karla Black’s process-based sculptural pieces, made using familiar domestic materials such as Vaseline, clothing and flour or Torsten’s Lauschmann’s use of software design and experimental editing to generate new approaches to performance and unfold the sculptural potential of video installation.

Both Black and Lauschmann have carried out significant public art projects: Black co-organising the project October (2001) in which thirty one artists were invited to make works on the city’s St. Vincent Street on consecutive days throughout that month. She described how the artists ‘could make and show a work in any site along the street: bars, cafes, banks, offices, wasteground, churches, pavements, walls’.Presenting public art in this way allowed the artists the freedom to bring their practice into the public realm without the constraints of producing a permanent work’. In summer 2002 Lauschmann embarked on a one-man trans-European busking tour under the guise of Slender Whiteman, his music-alter ego. He explained, ‘I constructed a portable solar powered sound system influenced by Jamaican dancehall sound systems; it also powers a laptop, keyboard and midi-controller. This system was produced without public or private funding and money that is immediately generated by using it is done so in a relatively simple way. The aim is to travel around Europe playing the sound system to bring my own music (made with Absynth, Abelton Live, MAX/MSP) and other music which doesn’t get supported by mainstream media into real public places, amongst people.¹⁰

I think the emphasis on ‘real public places’ described by Lauschmann is still important to those involved in the Glasgow art scene, although over the last decade the advent of digital technologies and Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube, MySpace, Vimeo, Flickr, Wordpress and Facebook has meant that it is possible for artists and musicians to reach much wider audiences and at far greater speed. Web 2.0 websites can be viewed in the context of ‘Do It Yourself’ – as descendants of open access forms such as demos recorded on cassette and photocopied fanzines, yet as Sinead Young, artist and lead singer of Glasgow noise band Divorce avers, ’It’s so much easier now to share MP3s, through Myspace, blogs and other sites… there’s a sense in which other people give you permission to put your own work out there, even if it is a bit rough.’ ¹¹ In contrast to 1980s Glasgow art school bands like Strawberry Switchblade (who formed as teenagers in 1981 but didn’t release any records until 1983), members of emerging Glasgow bands such as Divorce and Ultimate Thush who are still students at the city’s art school, have already made their music accessible on their MySpace pages and available to download via the Glasgow-based music file-sharing website Winning Sperm Party.

Perhaps ironically, the increased collaborative and distribution possibilities brought by these innovations could be said to have been most revolutionary for artists whose work is engaged with ‘social reality’ – as it is now far easier, faster and less expensive to share documentation and to publicise events than at any other point in history. Some of the implications of these new approaches are evident in the practice of the Glasgow-based artist Shelly Nadashi, who has recently been commissioned by PAR+RS to devise and present public projects, including a blog and a number of short filmed performances ‘broadcast’ through the PAR+RS website [Shelly’s work will be visible here shortly – ed]. The relationship between ‘the individual situation and the social situation’¹² is an important aspect of Nadashi’s multi-disciplinary practice, which includes video making, live performances, sound design, puppetry and written texts. The implications that accompany telepresence (a term derived from virtual reality, describing the sensation of feeling in a different place or time afforded by certain technologies) as opposed to the actual presence associated with live performance have interesting implications for Nadashi, whose work calls into question the nature of biography.

Nadashi’s recent collaborative performance Ambush in Wedding was ‘a complicated exploration of the relationships between public and private histories and spaces, and hinged around a powerful autobiographical re-telling of an urban public landscape.’¹³ The work dissembled the artist’s experience of a misfired romantic liaison in Berlin, a process Nadashi describes as: ‘constructing a performative narrative that helps me to understand the reality of my life better. I find it interesting that this is something that requires the public – as if I need the public’s live participation in order to contextualize my own individual emotions.‘¹⁴ She ended her Ambush in Wedding performance by describing why she had revisited the events described in the performance: ’I wanted to break this story. I am the one to decide how my biography is going to look like. There are some many things that we can do that can change so many things that other people will ever do. This is the street, this is the staircase, this is the door. Break the story.’¹⁵ In her retellings of personal experiences, especially as reconfigured through internet-broadcast videos of her performances, Nadashi’s home page and blog allow the artist as subject to be ‘progressively erased, redefined and reinsubscribed as a persona/performer within the proscenium arch of the computer monitor.’¹⁶ However, as Nadashi herself has pointed out, her work relies upon ‘the public’s live participation’, as indeed do gigs by Glasgow bands like Divorce and Ultimate Thrush. It is not a question, as Miwon Kwon puts it, of choosing ‘between digital interfaces and the handshake. Rather, we need to be able to think the range of seeming contradictions and our contradictory desires for them together; to understand, in other words, seeming oppositions as sustaining relations.’¹⁷

The potential of new technologies to facilitate the documentation of events and the circulation of information and to stimulate debate around current art practices is especially important in Glasgow, in order to render visible the exclusions and forgotten traces that constitute the secret history of the city. A New Path, a project developed in partnership by Sorcha Dallas Projects and Jenny Crowe Commissions has grown from first hand experience and discussions around the commissioning of permanent and temporary artworks within Scotland, and ‘aims to reinvigorate and herald and a new way (or path) for the commissioning of permanent artworks within the city’.¹⁸ Sorcha Dallas explains that, ‘I think we both feel that there is no real strategy in terms of how artworks are and were commissioned in the city so therefore there is a range of projects, with varying levels of success, failures and quality. As Glasgow has such a strong reputation for visual art being produced in the city we feel this is often at odds with how work has been represented within the public realm.’¹⁹

For their first A New Path project, to be presented at Glasgow International 2010, Crowe and Dallas have selected six public art works in Glasgow city centre, aiming to highlight the commissioning history and background behind the following public art projects: Niki de Saint Phalle at the Gallery of Modern Art; Graham Fagen’s ‘Royston Rose’ Project; Douglas Gordon’s Empire, Ian Hamilton Finlay at George IV Bridge, Christine Borland at Glasgow University and Toby Paterson at the BBC. Crowe and Dallas have created a website containing their research on the history of each project, with accompanying images, and newly commissioned reappraisal texts on each work. They are hoping to encourage visitors to pay closer attention to these existing works while en route to other aspects of the festival, and have asked the Glasgow-based artist Graham Fagen to lead a public tour that connects Ian Hamilton Finlay’s piece on George IV Bridge with Douglas Gordon’s Empire in the Merchant City. Dallas explains that the next phase of the project is ‘to start create temporary and permanent commissions by local and international artists and to create a blueprint for how future commissions can happen in the city. We are aiming to produce some temporary commissions and events in 2011 with the first permanent commission being in place for the next GI in 2012. We have been looking at cities like New York and Chicago and the exciting way they commission and make public art a priority within the urban environment.’²⁰

Crowe and Dallas’s concerns chime with some of those expressed by Adele Patrick, Lifelong Learning Co-ordinator at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), who has had a long and vested interest in the vexed question of the under-representation of women in public space. At the Subject in Process: Feminism and Art symposium which I co-organised at Glasgow’s CCA in 2009, Patrick presented a paper entitled ‘Making space for women’ in which she described how, ‘Glasgow Women’s Library has been variously critiqued as not a real library, not a real artwork or artspace, as not living in the real world (principally for focussing on women and not men). What I hope to illustrate is that despite or because of this liminal, unsettling and indeterminate status GWL has been open to and uniquely positioned to develop work that responds to the heterogeneity of women’s experiences from different worlds often using the agency of art and artists.‘²¹ Since 1991, when GWL opened their doors in a former second hand clothes shop on hill street, the library has moved twice – to 109 Trongate (a premises they were asked to vacate during the Trongate 103 renovations) and then to Parnie Sreet (a premises they have recently been asked to vacate to make way for a new Workshop and Artists’ Studio Provision Scotland Ltd (WASPS) studio complex). However, in 2010 Glasgow Women’s Library will relocate to a permanent, independent base within the Mitchell Library – a move that has given the Patrick and her colleagues pause to reflect even more closely on the specific significance of a ’women’s library’ in the civic, cultural and historical landscape of Glasgow.

Patrick pointed out in her presentation that, ‘Working with communities is an antidote to both the endemic global homogenisation of the regenerated city and locally the perpetual modelling and remodelling of masculinised incarnations of Glasgow. […] In the library space and in the other locations we have worked with women who have spoken about: not seeing themselves reflected in the city, confronting male violence in the streets and at home, that they are not heard or consulted and that they feel inadequately served or respected as citizens.’²² One of the most surprising statistics revealed during Patrick’s paper was that there are only three statues of women in Glasgow – and of these, only one is Glaswegian and she paid for the monument herself. GWL have subsequently recruited the Glasgow-based artists, Nicky Bird and Shauna McMullan, and Project Co-ordinator and Adviser Fiona Dean to work with GWL staff, volunteers, Library users and learners on the first phase of an SAC funded Public Art project Making Space which will culminate in a brief for a new public artwork marking women’s history and lives outside the Women’s Library’s new premises at the Mitchell Library.

Another fascinating yet unmarked site in Glasgow’s cultural landscape is the decrepit house that sits on the corner at 27 Bank Street in Glasgow, recently described in The Guardian as ‘possibly’ being the rooming house once run by the family of iconoclastic Glaswegian author Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi’s statement, in his polemical essay, The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds (1963) that, ‘There is in fact no such permanence anywhere. There is only becoming.’ is an important one in terms of thinking both about apparitions (the action of becoming) and reactivating forgotten or dormant histories. Linear time moves onwards (‘the time of being’) on the horizontal axis, meanwhile events unroll vertically (‘the time of becoming’). It feels as though the time has now arrived for Glasgow’s artists and activists to step out of the corners and to begin to shape the city – as citizens it is our right.

¹ James Thornhill, in conversation with the author, 2001.

² Chris Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2004), p.144.

³ Noel Arnaud, L’etat d’ebauche, Quoted in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), this edition (Boston Massachusetts: The Beacon Press, 1994), p.137.

⁴ Ray McKenzie, ‘How Not to Commission’, October 2009, http://www.publicartscotland.com/features/12-How-Not-To-Commission

⁵ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), this edition (Boston Massachusetts: The Beacon Press, 1994), p.137.

⁶ Francis McKee, in conversation with the author, March 2010.

⁷ This terminology is derived from Hal Foster, who writes in his book, The Return of the Real that since the end of the 80s there has been ‘an emphatic turn to the bodily and the social, to the abject and the site-specific.’ Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), p.124.

⁸ Sarah Lowndes, Social Sculpture: Art, Performance and Music in Glasgow, (STOPSTOP: Glasgow, 2003), pp. 356-7.

⁹ Karla Black, project statement published on the website http://www.october.org.uk (no longer active).

¹⁰ Torsen Lauschmann, Artist’s Statement, Axis: the online resource for contemporary art, http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=50

Fn11. Sinead Young, in conversation with the author, Glasgow February 2010.

¹² Shelly Nadashi, in response to questions sent by the author, January 2010.

¹³ Blogs +, Schloss Brollin What Are You, http://www.publicartscotland.com/blogs/21-Schloss-Br-llin-What-Are-You

¹⁴ Shelly Nadashi, in response to question sent by the author, January 2010.

¹⁵ Shelly Nadashi, Ambush in Wedding, (self-published, Glasgow, 2010).

¹⁶ Steve Dixon, Digital Performance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007), p.4

¹⁷ Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), p.166

¹⁸ Sorcha Dallas, in response to questions sent by the author, March 17th 2010.

¹⁹ Sorcha Dallas, in response to questions sent by the author, March 17th 2010.

²⁰ Sorcha Dallas, in response to questions sent by the author, March 17th 2010.

²¹ Adele Patrick, ‘Making space for women: a review of the work of Women in Profile and Glasgow Women’s Library, 1988-2009’, http://www.womenslibrary.org.uk/2009/10/subject-in-process/

²² Adele Patrick, ‘Making space for women: a review of the work of Women in Profile and Glasgow Women’s Library, 1988-2009’, http://www.womenslibrary.org.uk/2009/10/subject-in-process/