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Glasgow’s first Festival of Contemporary Visual Art begins next week for 12 days, with over 150 contributing artists and 29 exhibitions, installations and events taking place across the city. And in a sea of exciting talent, two recurring themes seem to stand out most: politics and darkness. Vicky Allan meets the curator and five aspiring young creatives on show.

Some ideas seem to come from nowhere. The one where Glasgow hosts a big international festival of visual art, is not one of those. It’s more a case of right time, right place. Lunchtime in the CCA café, and Francis McKee, director of the Glasgow International is explaining how it came about. ‘The tourist board finally realised there is a contemporary scene here. You go to New York and people know about Glasgow, but in Glasgow people don’t know about Glasgow.’

Art couldn’t seen less intimidating. An engaging Irishman, with a sporadic chortle, McKee is not, he says, aiming to say anything about Glasgow or Scottish art world through this festival. ‘I thought that would limit it. I thought instead if I went with whatever everyone wanted to do within their own thing, then that’s what is making Glasgow successful and well known. Why change it at this time of year, just when you’re introducing it to a wider public? Keep it going, only more so.’

There are a lot of things you could say about Glasgow and the Scottish art world. That there has been an industrious and prolific hive of artistic activity here over the last ten to fifteen years. That Glasgow School of Art has a reputation internationally. That it has produced big names; Douglas Gordon, Smith/Stewart, Christine Borland. But McKee is just letting those facts sit casually for everyone to read. He wants what’s going on in the city to breathe, do its own thing.

He doesn’t want it to appear, as so many festivals do, like something that has just been parachuted in from outside. There are, however, two features which stand out in the festival: darkness and politics. It wasn’t deliberate, just the way it turned out. Yet neither seems a surprise, neither a new taste for Glasgow. Politics comes in the form of work from the Jumex collection in Mexico, selected by McKee to reflect an interest in the way landscape, politics and history are interrelated. There is, too, the show Risk at the CCA, planned before the International was underway, and brings together activist artists working for political change. Meanwhile, darkness seeps through many of the works and exhibitions; into Dougls Gordans’s new video studies and the Chapman brothers’ After The Fire, a series of miniature tableaux of hell in which evil is rendered cute by its small scale.

McKee is particularly interested in bringing in work that wouldn’t ordinarily be seen in Scotland. ‘Everyone’s talked about After The Fire but no one has seen it and you suddenly think, have the Chapmans ever been shown in Scotland? I’ve never seen them in Scotland. But everyone knows about the Chapmans, and if the works have never been shown here and everybody’s talking about them, it means it’s just a newspaper thing. A lot of those YBAs have just become talked about, like Tracey Emin. Tracey Emin in Scotland? I don’t think so. Damien Hirst? Not for a long time.’ Partly this is the result of a London-phobia, a desire not to get sucked into what is going on down there, to remain independent of that influence.

‘There was that old thing,’ says McKee, ‘that if you’re a successful artist you went to London from Scotland. Now there’s the reverse, that you kind of ignore London. You resist it. And also, if you’re trying to create something different up here as a culture, you probably need to avoid London.’

One of the remarkable things about Glasgow is the scale of the artists community. As McKee says, ‘For the city, it shouldn’t be this big. It’s kind of completely out of proportion to the size of the city.’ How to account for this? No one can really quite explain why Glasgow has been the hub of so much activity over past decades but, whoever I talk to, the same ideas, words and concepts keep cropping up again and again, like a scratched record. A good infrastructure, a good School of Art, an almost irreverent spirit among the artistic community of not waiting for recognition, of self-starting. McKee notes that often when he goes to other cities it’s as if everyone is waiting for the curator, who is held in some kind of awe. ‘They wait for you to give them a show. It’s wonderful. Here there’s no respect. People think, why should I wait for him when I could do it for myself? That’s kind of healthy. People don’t respect institutions in a way.’

Here there are people such as Mary Mary’s Sara Barker, Hannah Robinson and Harriet Tritton, who set up a gallery in an emptied tenement flat. Will Foster who placed portacabins throughout the city and allowed 40 artists to do their own thing in them. It’s not difficult to see some of the steps up the ladder of this infrastructure, how people grow from small beginnings to larger things. Next step up in terms of scale and establishment is Sorcha Dallas. Two years ago I interviewed her as a recent graduate just starting out. Back then, she and her friend Marianne Greated had set up their own exhibiting organisation Swithspace, inspired by a talk by current Venice Biennale Selectee Cathy Wilkes. Wilkes had explained how she had converted her flat for a period and done six shows in it. It was as if the baton was being passed on, each generation taking it up, in a line that goes back through to the Eighties when Collective and Transmission were started by groups of artists. ‘People see how people grow,’ says McKee, ‘and these things become larger entities. So I think that whole process keeps happening again and again.’

This means for artists there is a clear career route. On top of these smaller artist-created institutions is another layer of larger art institutions which include the CCA and Tramway, the largest art space in Europe when it opened. Artists tend to move up through the rungs. A show with Sorcha Dallas might lead to one at Transmission and another at the CCA and you’ve made it. ‘There’s a kind of logical progression, which is useful if you’re living here as an artist, because otherwise you might come out of the School of Art, look around and think, I’ll go somewhere else,’ Mckee continues.

There is a good international network reaching out of the city too, and with Scotland now hosting a stand at the Venice Biennale, artists can see the possibility of their work getting attention on a world stage. Certainly Scotland-based artists have been well recognised. Year after year, they are selected for the Becks Futures Prize: Donald Urquhart this year, Rosalind Nashashibi (winner in 2002), Roddy Buchanan (winner 2000). Many of the artists in the Scottish art world have come from elsewhere, lured by Glasgow School of Art from other parts of the globe: Canada, Ireland, England, Scandinavia. They tend to stay. They tend, too, to think of themselves as part of the Scottish culture.

It would be easy to isolate and fetishise Glasgow, but as McKee says, Edinburgh is very close in nature and style, as well as distance. Many of the things going on in Edinburgh, are similar, and there are many Edinburgh artists featured in the show. ‘I keep thinking,’ says McKee, ‘it would be nice to slip Edinburgh into the festival, but then it wouldn’t be a Glasgow festival. The logical step, eventually, would be for them both to have a contemporary art festival at the same time. Why not?’

Neil Mulholland sits in the Last Drop in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. He is known for being a little controversial and having opinions about how Glasgow sells itself. As McKee says, that is the reason he asked him to curate an exhibition at the International, that a lot of people will see it as being a Glasgow thing, which is probably good, but they should probably have called it the Scottish International just to usurp the Edinburgh establishment. ‘

His Campbell’s soup exhibition at Glasgow School of Art is a way of telling a lost story of recent Scottish art. Right now, many people are saying painting is back, but his show is a reminder that painting, and a painting-related way of going about art, never went away. It was always with us. It was just that throughout the Nineties a different story, of neo-conceptulism, installation and video –work, was emphasised. In classic conceptual art practice, the idea is everything, hanging god-like over all practice, but many artists continued to do something more experimental, to let their work take its own path.

‘I think,’ Mulholland says, ‘the way Campbell puts a painting together is like making some kind of soup without a recipe. You just start with your onions, and you just chuck stuff in. The analogy is that something like that has been going on since the Sixties. There’s a sort of stock that runs through a lot of the work. It’s got almost a black sense of humour, especially if it comes from the west coast. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re part of this thing that’s been here for a long time.’

One of the features of the current art scene is its diversity. As he writes in the catalogue for his show, ‘The polyglot character of the New York art worlds of the early Eighties is reminiscent of contemporary Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh, where postconceptual painting blends harmoniously with video, installation, performance and music.’

Mulholland has his own concerns about the International. ‘The thing is it’s tied to various attempts to market Glasgow as a cultural destination, rather than somewhere people live and work. It’s like, ‘Come here on holiday.’ It’s all about tourism. They tried it in 1988 with the Garden Festival, they tried it in 1990 with the City of Culture, and it doesn’t work. Well, it might work as a blip when people see it in the in-flight supplements and think Glasgow’s got this thing, go there for your weekend break. But what happens the rest of the year? What about the 49 weeks?’

He points out there were at least 15 major art biennials last year, and that within them there was an obvious hierarchy. Curators do the circuit. If they’re in a particular echelon of the art world, they only work with the big organisations and rarely make contact with the grassroots. Does he think visitors to the Glasgow International will get a good idea of what ‘s really happening at the grassroots in Scotland? ‘They’ll have a better idea than they would if they went to something that was organised here, in Edinburgh. It’s much more inclusive because it’s Glasgow and Francis is doing it. There are a lot of smaller galleries on board, and he keeps adding to the list of what’s happening. There’s a lot there.’

Take 5Artist

Erica Eyres Michael Fullarton Smith/Stewart Alex Pollard

Alex Pollard is just in the middle of casting some rulers when I phone, and has his hands dirty. From these, he says, he will make a wall-frieze of hand shapes that are also bent rulers. ‘I make a mould of a ruler then sort of manipulate it when it’s drying so that it’s totally bent, almost like a melted Dali clock.’

Pollard features rulers in many of his work, in pieces such as Violence Viewed From The Wrong End Of A Lens or Through Crime, where rulers form outlines, part of stick figures, a torso, a picture. ‘It’s not necessarily an obsession with rulers,’ he says. ‘I’m not a ruler geek. I don’t collect them or anything like that. I suppose one of the reasons why I use rulers is they’re a tool for measuring value, and I guess it’s to get the viewer to think about what’s in front of them in terms of the information.’

For Pollard the idea behind his pieces is important, but more important again is the element of fun and imagination, the idiosyncrasy, the way, for instance, his rulers become ‘my wonky system’. He recalls how his sculpture Large Beast came into existence.

’ I was just literally sitting in my studio and I was daydreaming really, and I kept looking at this articulated ruler on the floor of the studio and it kept becoming figurative.’ One of the three artists to be selected for this year’s Venice Biennale, Pollard came to Glasgow School of Art from Brighton in 1996.

‘I wanted to bypass the London art schools, because I think they tend to work on a conveyor-belt system. It seemed a bit machine-like.’