Sorcha Dallas

Non-commercial, home-brewed, multi-media-Glasvegas pushed back art’s frontiers. Now ScotArt is taking on the world.

A club night called Optimo, held every Saturday at Glasgow school of Art, is currently drawing devoted crowds and national media attention. The treatment of sound at Optimo is audacious, innovative and infectiously modern – an archive of iconic pop music is filtered through laptop-aided sampling, so you may hear Depeche Mode, the Ronnettes and Grace Jones on a simultaneous loop. Principal DJs are Jonnie Wilkes, as artist who has exhibited at Transmission, one of Glasgow’s leading art spaces, and his accomplice twitch.

Jonnie Wilkes is the brother of Glasgow-based artist Cathy Wilkes (who ran the art space Dalriada from her council flat). His club is now so popular that he returned early from the Venice Biennale so he wouldn’t have to cancel the night. This densely networked yet utterly unselfconscious fusion of art and pop – a convergence which in London or New York still seems mired in a rather Knowing fashionability for much of Glasgow’s current visual-arts-based activities. The more you explore the city’s new art, the more you realise that there is not only a local unity of intent, but also a genuine questioning of cultural status and of the boundaries between media, audience and intentionality.

But one club does not a renaissance make. Rather, Optimo can be seen as a consequence of a healthy cultural climate in Scotland. On the club’s website, a refreshingly unironic mission statement summarises an attitude common in much of Scotland’s current cultural practice, and highlights the complex interconnections between many of the country’s artists, their projects, enablers and venues. The fluency of these connections can be taken as the common denominator of the present sensibility. ‘Lets make the most of it while it’s here,’ runs the Optimo statement ,’ and try to build on the ‘local’ nature of this, bringing in disparate elements of creativity from the city.’

Vitally, however, while Glasgow is championed as a white-hot centre of art fashionability – ‘Viva Glasvegas, Fun Capital’ ran a headline in The Times – it is important not to fall for the usual lazy packaging of ‘scenes’ (the quickest way to destroy their actual interest or potential), and not to isolate Glasgow activities from those in Dundee, Edinburgh, Orkney, Lewis or Sky. Artists working in Scotland are making an increasingly strong impact on the international art scene – four of this year’s finalists in Beck’s Futures, including the winner, Rosalind Nashashibi, are Scotland-based, and the first Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opened in June. There is a parallel, answering directive to sustain the nation’s independent cultural ecology.

Glasgow has always been an impressive city, in terms of its architecture and planning. For the visitor arriving by rail, the theatrical sweep of Central Station provides a stately overture to the crescendo of high Victorian and early-20th-century buildings. A city of steep hills, the almost Gershwinian tone of the central district – elegant arcades and classic, mid-1980s post-modern precincts – gives way to the more austere (yet mellowed) sandstone townhouses of streets running parallel to Bath Street. The East End and West End of the city, to presume a massive generalisation, could be likened to the Uptown and Downtown divisions of New York. The East End is generally cheaper – although certain high-profile artists have invested in property there – while the West End, hard by the Gotham City Gothic of the old University, is known to be more genteel.

Visiting apartments in the West End, you might be reminded of residential Vienna: twilit by panels of delicate-hued stained glass, richly atmospheric flights of stairs lead to ceiling-high doors on every landing. Rooms tend to be enormous, the legacy of Glasgow’s mercantile bourgeoise, now adapted to urban minimalism. And yet, significantly, one immediately notices that Glasgow is a city, which has remained admirably resistant to the pasteurising effects of gentrification. Where swathes of south London seem now to be one vast branch of Pizza Express, there is a residue of undeveloped urban fabric in Glasgow, such as that found until a few years ago on the edges of the City of London. Glasgow has escaped the sheen of good taste, which is largely more poison than polish.

The identification by Optimo of Glasgow’s ‘disparate elements of creativity’ gets straight to the point of its current cultural practice – a whole sequence of projects, taking place in a network of official, semi-official, unofficial, virtual and institutional venues. Best known are Transmission, Tramway, CCA and the Museum of Modern Art. But the emergence of new spaces, such with its own directives, has expanded not only the number of Glasgow’s venues but the entire social framework around which much art-making is now based. Key players include artist Lucy McKenzie’s ‘Flourish’ project and the Switchspace initiative set up by Sorcha Dallas. Both tap directly into the ways artists make work, while questioning expectations of how we think art should operate. This approach lends itself well to the idea] of ambient artistic practice – art which occurs across all manner of pervasive media, proceeding in its own way at its own pace.

Things were more structured in the mid-1990s – the gallery system and so forth,’ says Francis Mckee, co-curator with Kay Pallister, under the collective title of Zenomap, of the Scottish Pavilion in Venice. ‘Now, its more ‘Well, I do this – but I do this and I do this.’ Artists make music, film, editions and DJ – all with equal seriousness. It’s sometimes difficult for institutions to place boundaries: but that’s excellent, that’s healthy.

‘Take Jim Lambie and Torsten Lauschmann. Jim’s work is sculptural, which fits into a kind of art world, but then he also focuses on pop and psychedelia, and he DJs and has a history in bands as well. Those feed into each other. Lauschamnn came out of photography. But then suddenly the boundaries collapse and you find he also makes videos, or software and images to download from the web. And then he has Slender Whiteman, the project where he wonders around with portable speakers, DJing wherever he sets down his machine. And he composes music. There’s also a lot of collaboration between these people.’

As artists are making non-commercial, transient or ephemeral work – samizdat publishing such as Mainstream or British Mythic Urban Romantic Revolution, or events which last only for an evening – so spaces have emerged in Glasgow to accommodate this kind of non-commercial, often unquantifiable practice. This is a point raised by Sorcha Dallas, whose Switchspace collective is proving so important to artists in Glasgow. ‘Glasgow has a real do-it-yourself ethos, partially attributed to the fact that most artists don’t sell their work, and have less pressure to conform to the predetermined ideals of galleries. As a result they are much more experimental and self-driven. With Switchspace we offer a challenge to artists and audiences, something that artists at all stages of their careers are looking for. This has a knock-on effect. Artists’ groups like Emerged in Glasgow and Magnificat in Edinburgh ask us for advice.’

Even the current chroniclers for Glasgow’s proliferating art scene tend to be artists themselves, whose activities cover a wide range of media. Robert Johnston, for example, is a designer and writer who was formally in a band called Life Without Buildings, alongside Sue Tompkins and Chris Evans, both artists and Will Bradley, a writer who works at the hugely influential Modern Institute, which describes itself as a ‘research organisation and production company for contemporary art.’ A track on the compilation of artists’ video Shadazz: Evil Eye is Source, curated by artist Luke Fowler. This kind of transmedia interconnection of artists is typical of contemporary Scottish art’s labyrinthine genealogies. (Elsewhere on the tape, Stephen Sutcliffe’s breathtaking piece Shut Out, reversing sound and images of people bowling, presents what feels like a CCTV of a mutant breed of humankind, caught displaying spasmodic yet balletic genuflections. Similarly, Rob Kennedy’s eerily beautiful studies of Twilt urban hinterlands effortlessly fuse visual ambience and musical electronica.)

Life Without Buildings was more than an amateur ‘art group’ which got together to play at friends’ parties. They’d blow The Strokes off stage, for a start. Tight, original, gorgeously spikey, and with a sound at once fluid and primitive, they brought to life Jon Savage’s line about the art end of post-punk in the late 1970s: ‘Angular, asymmetrical and herky-jerky.’ The group had a substantial European fan-base, and were on the verge of breaking through when they decided to pull the plug. Now Johnston, who has designed for Douglas Gordon’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London last year, is working on Zenomap.

‘I only work for artists and art organisations, which keeps me in touch,’ Johnston says. ‘Life Without Buildings will, I think, be seen eventually as the vanguard of the whole neo-post-punk thing. In the 2000s, when the Modern Institute went global, people started getting careers again. Now people are moving to Glasgow rather then just staying here after they graduate. It’s all got very fashionable. Another big thing was the shut-down last year of the 13th Note music venue, so the music scene went back to its bedroom for about a year, and is just starting to emerge again with the opening of the two new 13th Note places.

‘From here it becomes hard to get a grasp of things,’ he continues. ‘It looks like Glasgow is starting to turn into New York – kids have realised that there’s a market for art here now, although it’s a market created by the Modern Institute comprising European and American dealers. There are still no local buyers. Toby Paterson won the Beck’s Futures Prize and had a big show at CCA (Glasgow’s lavishly revampted venue for Contemporary art and culture), and that seems to have coincided with a realisation on the part of the Scottish newspapers and big funding bodies – Scottish Arts Council – of what they have on their hands: the most vibrant, concentrated, successful group of artists in the world. People used to say that, outside of London and New York, Glasgow was where it was happening. Now they don’t mention the other two. People are already ripping off Jim Lambie for their degree shows.

This organic diversification of Glasgow’s are-making activities, also reflected in the city’s range of venues, might be said to have evolved – in a largely reactive and distancing sense – from the rise to prominence, in the early 1990s, of what is now regarded as its ‘older generation’ of artists. This group might include Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland, Robby Buchanan, David Shrigley and Ross Sinclair. Many of this generation attended the Department of Environmental Media at Glasgow School of Art, coincidentally creating a specific division between themselves and the New Image Glasgow generation, of painters whose period of international success in the mid-1980s had a substantial impact on Glasgow’s standing within the international art world.

‘The older generation are probably in their mid-thirties,’ says Francis McKee of Zenomap, ‘while the younger are in their early twenties. To make it more confusing, some of the older artists are regarded as belonging to the younger generation, and some of the younger ones to the older. Claire Barclay, for instance, whose work is in the Scottish Pavilion in Venice, is of Borland’s generation, but probably more aligned with the younger generation of artists in terms of the way her work operates.

‘The younger generation of artists might include Toby Paterson, Rosalind Nashashibi, Michael Wilkinson and Jim Lambie. While this is a horrible generalisation, you could say the older artists are interested in ideas, while the younger emphasise form and intuition. Wilkes’s work is incredibly intuitive. It resists explanation.’

Zenomap’s selection of artists for Venice – Lambie, Simon Starling and Barclay, shown with another 20 artists represented in film screenings or websites – can only aim to present a particular view of the current Scottish art scene. The choice is electric, and confounds any single theme. What emerges is a continuance of Scottish art’s engagement with form, materials and colour, matched against a similar concern with narrative. ‘The expectation was that it would be artists from Glasgow and Edinburgh,’ says McKee. ‘If you’re an artist in Orkney or Aberdeen, you’re likely to think nobody’s going to consider you. But we looked at a hundred artists in the flesh, and another hundred by mail and submission. You could say, ‘Glasgow’s the centre,’ then you get out and discover it isn’t. That’s a healthy shock. We’ve chosen artists from Lewis, Orkney and Aberdeen. There are artists in Scotland for whom romanticicism is a key concern, artists working with environmentalism, legends, shamanism.’

Writer-curator Neil Mulholland, based at Edinburgh College of Art, proposes perhaps the most politically sharpened view of Scottish art’s current desirability as an international contender. In an essay, entitled ‘Learning from Glasvegas: Scottish Art after the Ninties,’ tracking the intellectual etymology of Glasgow’s contemporary art scene, he writes:

‘The attention that Glasgow artists receive from the London media since the inauguration of the ¬£24,000 Beck’s Futures Prize is potentially damaging, since it seeks to annex Scottish culture as a ‘British’ cultural achievement, placing these achievements squarely within lifestyle markets focused on models developed for the English capital. This may provide more opportunities for exhibiting and funding for Scottish artists, but the sources of such capital would have little understanding or cultural investment in the largely non-commercial, non- competitive infrastructure that spawned such work in the first place. To allow Glasgow to be ‘transformed’ uncritically into Scotland’s contemporary art capital is also to be sold on the myths of Scottish enterprise. The future danger lurking in a lack of internal critique is that in being lavished with money and attention for having served the crumbling Empire, contemporary Scottish art might be willingly transformed into a mere satellite of the unaccountable British art/service industry.’

McKee and Mulholland are both visceral, erudite writers whose work is as potent as the arts which they chronical. Both are exceptional stylists, unafraid to use a variety of literary techniques in order to infiltrate or intervene in the rhetoric and ideas of their subjects. You image that these highly influential figures on the Scottish scene might disagree on the direction and curatorial management of much contemporary Scottish art, yet they seem to share a passionate commitment to the preservation of its independence. For Mulholland, though, a fundamental issue is maintaining independent art-making operations which are not afraid of their own idiosyncrasies and which can make an artistic virtue, even, of failure. He cites Lucy McKenzie, Keith Maclsaac, Michael Fullerton, Keith Farquhar and Alex Pollard as particularly interesting artists. His perspective emerges as a near-philosophical position, which remains profoundly opposed to the cultural power-brokerage called in to play by Scottish art’s relation to the big international art fair. ‘By the mid to lat 1990s there was this idea that if you made stuff and it was backed up by your peers, then in Glasgow that was enough,’ says Mulholland. ‘you didn’t need to worry what some Kunsthalle in Germany thought about it, or some big curator. The Venice Biennale and Documenta are completely establishment organisations, and if artists are willing to hand over their work and be represented in that context, I can see why it would appeal. What’s been special about Scotland for 20 years is that it has resisted incorporation into something artists don’t have power over. I’d say that’s the Scottish political inheritance – because in Scotland the people are sovereign, not the state. Artists in Scotland should stick to those principles, and continue to build their own infrastructures, and if they do things in other countries then they should base them on friendships they’ve cultivated: shared aesthetic or political goals. And they should be supported financially directly – rather than going via official conduits organised by the British Council or the Scottish Arts Council.’

Ultimately, it would seem that if the visual-arts-based culture in Scotland is capable of provoking such an articulate and committed level of debate, then it is succeeding at the most profound level of engaging with emotional and intellectual responses to it. For McKee, the Scottish scene is now developing its own internal exponential momentum, with artists exhibiting through their own networks of friends and associates in such a away that ‘they curate the curators – which can only be good.’

In such a manner, the broader Scottish scene – of which Glasgow is one element – may yet avoid the sterilising grasp of cultural commodification, and continue to develop through its own reactive networks, half in love with awkwardness and indurate to fashion.