Sorcha Dallas

Neil Mulholland looks back at various influences informing art produced in Scotland during the 1990s. He argues that one of the distinctive features of contemporary Scottish Art is that it functions as a ‘cottage industry’, having grown out of a proliferation of artist-run initiatives and grass-roots activity rather than through support from major publicly funded organisations. If this is the case, have these origins resulted in a specific aesthetic which can only be appreciated by those intimately involved with the works production and reception?

*’Internationalism is strong in Scotland. England suffers from provincialism (all trains go to London), but Scotland looks as much to Paris, Amsterdam or New York. Glasgow will be a European capital city, no longer where windows are broken from both sides, but where walls are sandblasted from both sides.’ * Malcom Miles

*’Increasingly, today, geographic position and distance alone do not dictate whether a city or a country are culturally (or even economically) peripheral…Glasgow is perhaps the classic example of a cultural makeover in recent years.’ * Keith Hartley

Scottish neo-conceptualism had a symbiotic relationship with the network infrastructures developed in the early nineties. This has created a master narrative of nineties Scottish art as being resolutely internationalist in its basic concern with the foremost-received ideas of eighties critical postmodernism and the politics of identity, an internationalism that benefited enormously from the profile of the New Glasgow Boys in the mid-eighties. The linguistic turn in Scottish art came late, but was successfully disseminated by the Scotia Nostra. Douglas Gordon, Ross Sinclaire, Roderick Buchanan and Jacqueline Donachie’s early works reveal a preoccupation with the ways that identity is formed by cultural conventions, looking specifically at popular cultures as rites of passage and ciphers of avant-garde cliché, Key theoretical concerns of the eighties were mooted, proving that Scottish artists had carried out the appropriate research to play the game of global art. Such postmodern paradigms were established largely by the October group of critics in New York, critics who were resolutely opposed to the parochial postmodernism allegedly represented by neo-expressionism that they castigated as a ‘postmodernism of reaction’. The ‘triumph’ of this branch of critical postmodernism, which was allegedly opposed to the centrist readings of cultural production, led to a recentering of international art around the readings of a tiny group of ivy-league scholars. Scottish neo-conceptualist benefited from being hot-wired into this discourse, but did it, as a result, lose its relative autonomy?

This is a complex question. Firstly, it is impossible to locate the answer in ‘Scottishness’ given that the field of production in this period expanded beyond the boarders of Scotland. Scottish artists themselves are not, of course, necessarily from Scotland, nor do artists born in Scotland live in Scotland as a rule. However, it is abundantly clear that the Scotia Nostra all made socially engaged work that had concerns with historical and contemporary Scottish culture. Sinclair, most obviously has produced art and writing specifically examining Walter Scottishness. In this sense, the Scotia Nostra continued a preoccupation with local identity politics found in Scottish neo-expressionism. However, these issues were broached with a disposition that entirely prevents them from being read as expressive evocations of national character. In neo-conceptualism, Scottishness was a clearly defined trope, a cultural imaginary. The work maintained governing postmodern readings that encourage critical regionalisms so long as argots are located within a hegemonic anthropological matrix that can be translated internationally.

This paradigm tended to encourage a research-based committee to detouring enlightenment logic and material culture within a great deal of Scottish art practice in the nineties. Christine Borland’s work negotiated medical science and that major concern of late eighties posrmodernism, museological spectacle. Nathan Coley, Martin Boyce and Simon Starling meditated on (international) Modernist architecture and design, themes that fit well with numerous international shows focused on architectural utopianism. Reconsiderations of modernism corresponded directly with neo-modernism in nineties (art centre) design and investment friendly ‘Caledonian Cool’ (read Glasvegas). Such Scottish art was admired for its translatability, for the alleged rigour of its research and for the formal rigour it derived from the international style.

Working with such established art languages, such Scottish artists risked diluting the indigenous infrastructure that they had carefully established. The attention that Glasgow artists have received from the London media since the inauguration of the Beck’s Futures prize is potentially damaging since it seeks to annex Scottish culture as ‘British’ cultural achievement, placing these achievements squarely within lifestyle markets focused on models developed for the metropolitan English capital. The sources of such capital have no understanding or cultural investment in the largely non-commercial infrastructure that spawned such work in the first place. To uncritically allow Glasgow to be ‘transformed’ into Scotland’s contemporary art capital is also to be sold on the myths of Scottish enterprise. The further danger lurking in a lack of internal critique is, that in being lavished with attention for serving the crumbling Empire, contemporary Scottish art might be willingly transformed into a mere satellite of the unaccountable British art/service industry.

This is a political issue that is largely outwith the control of the artists. Westminster’s policy of cultural inclusion has seen a number of Lottery regeneration projects appear across the UK such as Tate Modern and BALTIC. In Scotland, large organisations such as the Centre of Contemporary Art, Tramway and Dundee Contemporary Art have all benefited from such funding. However, the vast majority of contemporary Scottish art functions at a grass-root level and is based in small self-organising venues. The British model of public funding is based on inappropriate demographics relating to the enormous power and population of the English capital and its strained relationship with regional competitors such as Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. The English model of over-centralisation does not need to be duplicated by the Scottish Executive. Neo-conceptual models for hypothesising the organisational situation in Scotland have long been inappropriately derived from the sociology of popular culture. Artists living in London find it difficult to avoid the ‘dilemma of romantic art – how to be subversive in a culture of commodities.’ Contemporary Scottish art, in stark contrast, functions more as a cottage industry than a sector of the globally networked mass media. The neo-conceptual professionalisation of cultural managers who favour proceeduralist or sociological accounts of art given the emphasis that proceeduralism places upon the role of and importance of art institutions. Scots should not forget the changes wrought by Thatcherite economic determinism tended on ‘peripheral’ cultures in the name of ‘relevancy’ and ‘global’ market reforms.

In the mid-nineties, key commentators began to question the ubiquity of social accounts of cultural practice, arguing that for ‘popular music listeners just as much as classical music listeners, ‘good music’ describes something unusual, unusual because it can not be easily explained away in terms of everyday social practice as a matter of class or commerce or functional routine’ . Simultaneously, the stress on performativity and the growing receptiveness and trust in art audiences became increasingly important factors in Scottish art. While welcoming growth and devolution for the arts in Scotland, Transmission gallery committee member Robert Johnston was ungratified with some of the work being produced for its managerial sectors: ‘People have been looking at work and saying ‘that’s a nice idea’. I really hate good ideas. Why not just write them down?’ For Johnston, the demotion of the visceral in established Scottish neo-conceptualism meant that it was not discordant enough. ‘The best things in life, and love, are never simple or tidy. The best art can’t be described in a few sentences, if at all. Sometimes all you can really do is grasp your faith in something, faith that although you don’t quite understand it, it’s worth something, it’s good.’ Such a vague value judgements may be socially constructed, but as the working practice and materialisation of contemporary Scottish art became more performative and nuanced, it benefited little from the reiteration of flat sociological givens. Robert Veturi’s principles of ‘complexity and contradiction’ were more apposite. Veturi’s Learning from Las Vegas, saw that Modernist constructionist principles could lead to structures that disobeyed the ‘truth to materials’ edicts of modernism. Likewise, in the late-nineties Scotland, artists were building domes, Baroque edifices and neo-Baronial crow-steps on the generous foundations laid by Scottish artists in the eighties and nineties. Following Venturi, Scottish artists were learning from Glasvegas, acknowledging that the forms produced by the Scottish art world needed bare little obvious resemblance to its international structure.

In recent years, a distinctive body of Scottish art has asserted its opacity, rejecting the received critical postmodernisms and clearly articulated forms of research and presentation that dominated many Scottish art practices in the early nineties. This accompanied by a renewed investment in the parochiae. Lucy McKenzie has remodelled Scottish cultural heritages that are missed in the rush to reconstruct, looking at the former Strathclyde regional Council (itself modelled on the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde), the idiosyncrasies of Scottish banknotes and the paintings of Steven Campbell. McKenzie’s work on Mackintosh-inspired paintings is a deliberate volt-face against the mores of early nineties Scottish neo-conceptualism, seeking to rescue Mackintosh from Mockintosh ubiquity and re-establish his credentials as a leading Scottish internationalist. In McKenzie’s work, this is pursued in conjunction with a broad yet intense interest in Northern European culture, particularly that found in the former soviet bloc, leading to collaborative work with artists from Poland and Germany.

Keith MacIsaac has produced a number of idiosyncratic films trading on Greco-Roman Scotland and the modern leisure industry. His work is complex, involving elaborate sponsorship schemes and an approach to directing that bears comparison to Ed Wood. He has amplified the scale of his work by seeking increasingly lavish and obscure forms of financial support, a satire on the over-reliance of the early nineties Scottish art on public subsidy and attendant institutionalisation. ‘The ability to take council is the kind of advantage that Jason understood when he selected the Argos expedition crew 4000 years ago. I am fortunate to be flanked by good artists, merchants and musicians who help me in the realisation of my aims.’ Beguiling benefactors and advocates is his art. His work is not conceptual; it has little in common with the idea of art as generated by a preconceived idea. His trafficking skills and performative movies form their own limitations in real time, making up a new culture with each enunciation.

This has become a motivating discourse for the work of a growing number of artists working all over Scotland who flutter between media, producing personal, collaborative and uncompromisingly innate works. Following the Moskova down to Gorky Park, listening to a wind of change, Scottish artists abandoned blockbusting neo-conceptual art tactics and art centre café-bars for quiet tenements. Alex Pollard relates to languages ‘developed by people outside of sublimated behaviour, like thieves or gay Palare. These languages are usually invented to communicate with a group, excluding those outside the set of rules. I like the idea that expression is still possible and these groups are romantic and elitist.’ Keith Farquhar, correspondingly, is interested in ‘setting up a sort of idiosyncratic faith system. Of course, everyone uses irony and there’s no good reason why that shouldn’t come into their art. But for me its more about setting up a faith system that can deal with these historic issues about painting, and can be a bit irresponsible with it.’ Katy Dove works in ‘random ways that lead to relatively clearly defined results.’ Similarly, members of art and performance group Elizabeth Go (Victoria Morton, Haley Tompkins, Sue Tompkins, Sarah Tripp and Cathy Wilkes) refuse to explain their actions to one another, basing their sentient collaborations in trust and intuition in the hope that this will enable their work to function more directly. Drawing on Arte Povera rather than conceptual heritage, Wilkes’ avoidance of the tendency of neo-conceptual art to package meaning and metaphor has been particularly influential: ‘The temptation for the viewer is of narratives, and make incongruous signs cohere. Wilkes surely parodies this characteristic of academic and critical discourse, through the motif of the domestic jigsaw, with its child-like connotations and also its resonance of bourgeois tedium. At the same time thee is the hint of the gaming pleasures behind the work, of constructing these clusters of signs, of moving and replacing objects, the mischievous process of fragmenting texts and of shutting the viewer out even as you invite them in.’

The problem with some of this work is that it leaves little room for evaluation. When is something deemed to fail? Can we judge this work on anything other than our own varied psychological standards? Perhaps this is the point. Such art can only really be appreciated by those involved intimately with its production and reception. It encourages cultural commitment which militates against larger audiences and cultural managers. Having long left Glasvegas, and with it, the myths and institutions around which a synchronous analysis of deconstructive Scottish neoconceptualism were managed internationally, contemporary Scottish artists are readily resurrecting the art myth, establishing performativity as the discursive and impure act at the core of working practice.

Neil Mulholland is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art in the Centre for Visual & Cultural studies, Edinburgh College of Art, and author of The Cultural Devolution (Ashgate, London, 2003). He is also curator of the Scottish section of the Prague Biennale 2003.

This essay is an edited version of ‘Learning from Glasvegas: Scottish art after the ‘90’, published in the journal of the Scottish society for Art History, Volume 7, 2002, p61-70.