John Calcutt, 'Made in Glasgow' (The Map, 4, 10/2005)

It’s one of those awkward questions that invites the asking but then refuses simple answers. How has Glasgow consistently managed to produce so many successful artists over the last 15 or so years? This is already the stuff of academic theses, and Sarah Lowndes’s Social Sculpture (StopStop, 2004) provides an invaluable source of relevant material here. The nature of success depends, of course, upon variable criteria, but if we take annual juried events such as the Turner and Beck’s prizes as our relatively objective benchmarks, we then see that over the years Glasgow-connected artists have maintained an extraordinary presence within the ranks of winners and shortlisted nominees. The evidence suggests that, after London, Glasgow is home to the UK’s most thriving contemporary art scene; a scene, moreover, that is plugged directly into the international circuit. Try explaining this phenomenon and you’ll almost certainly fall short. Yet the lack of consensus in this matter is probably a good sign. It means that events are still unfolding, events that continue to modify the relevance and significance of other events. The situation is still live, and resists any premature verdict.

The following comments are based upon a conversation between artists Karla Black, Mick Peter, Michael Stumpf and me. There is something fairly arbitrary about this collection of individuals, but such apparent arbitrariness seems appropriate. We have come together because I have invited the three of them to exhibit together in Like It Matters, a show at Glasgow’s CCA, and the exhibition coincides with my invitation to write this piece. I knew them all as former students on the Master of Fine Art (MFA) course at Glasgow School of Art where I teach, although they were not exactly contemporaries on this course and prior to the exhibition they knew each other to varying degrees. Our experiences and perspectives are often similar, but they are also frequently at odds. Thus, our conversation offers a typical mélange of impressions, opinions, experiences and judgments. Equivalent conversations take place in bars and kitchens and seminar rooms across the city: they are not only ‘about’ the Glasgow art scene; they are an important part of it. There is no pretense at balance or objectivity in this report: this is simply how it appears to us at this moment. There will doubtless be many artists and gallery-goers for whom the cardinal reference points in our conversation have little bearing. This is also part and parcel of the way things are.

I was interested to know how each of these three artists finally fetched up in Glasgow. Did they know what to expect? Were they attracted by the lure of ‘Glasgow art’? Karla Black is the only one from the group with any claim to local origins (she is from Alexandria, about an hour north of Glasgow), but she showed no great interest in art until well after leaving school. She worked in a bank for a while before becoming a journalist. During this period contemporary art was mostly a source of amusement for her. Eventually, however, she rented a studio and began working on her own in the evenings after work and at weekends, producing figurative clay sculptures. She applies to GSA, was surprised to be accepted, and entered the sculpture department before progressing to the MFA.

All three artists recognized that Glasgow School of Art plays a major role within the local art scene, even if the precise nature of that role is hard to define. Mick Peter, for example, gained his first degree from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and then entered a residency at the British School in Rome. Here he met Julie Roberts, a successful painter and former MFA student. Julie recommended that he come to Glasgow to work with Sam Ainsley, the MFA course leader. As Mick notes, it was the recommendation to work with Sam – rather than the pull of the MFA course or the city’s art scene – that drew him here. In fact, he admits, on arrival he knew little of that scene. Once again it was contact with an individual that eased his entry into this new situation – in this case his then flatmate Sarah Lowndes, who generously introduced him to all of her friends and took him to galleries and gigs. It was only after he had left the two-year MFA course that he began to actively engage in the wider scene by taking advantage of the opportunities to exhibit his work.

Michael Stumpf studied in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was here, at ZKM in 2001, that he saw Circles, an exhibition featuring work by Glasgow-based artists such as Douglas Gordon, Ross Sinclair, Toby Paterson and Christine Borland. Douglas Gordon’s association with Glasgow and the MFA (even though, in the latter case, his presence as a tutor was becoming less frequent) did much to enhance the reputation of both, and Christine Borland’s international reputation was similarly persuasive. Yet Michael was more struck by the overall impression created of grassroots activity. The exhibition focused on the ways in which artists in different cities ‘clustered’ themselves, and Michael likes what he saw in the Glasgow model and so joined the MFA on completion of his studies in Germany.

Each of these artists, then, arrived with different experiences, came for slightly different reasons and harbored varying perceptions and expectations. On reflection, however, they tend to agree that the ‘world’ they eventually entered and now inhabit is a world within a world, a subculture with an occasionally uneasy, contradictory relation to its parent culture. This is a subculture of close friends and peers. It is intense and specialized, and its values are not necessarily shared or understood beyond its natural habitats. Conventional notions of success (popular success) don’t hold much sway here. Karla compares it to the music scene, in which the most vital, exciting and innovative bands may not have a recording contract, let alone ride high in the charts. For her, the most important audience is composed of friends. Mick agrees, and adds that whilst this may lead indirectly to a certain sense of limited accessibility in terms of ideas and concerns, this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the idea of easy and immediate ‘consumption’ of their work is not of great interest to any of them and their associates. This is not seen as a question of willful obscurantism, more a matter of refusing to compromise. Under such circumstances, the existence of a tight and informed community is utterly essential. As Michael says, your work is always under scrutiny within this subculture. It is always subject to informal review and response, so you have to be constantly on your mettle. You can’t get away with second best. But all three agree that a spirit of generosity prevails. There are rivalries and differences, sure, but ultimately everyone is in this together, and if one person happens upon success, then there is a sense that this is potentially good for everyone else.

Of course, these fairly loose and mobile groupings of friends and peers also have to negotiate the more structured world of art institutions, primarily, perhaps, the various galleries and exhibition spaces within the city. Of these it is the so-called artist-run, or artist-led, initiatives that have contributed more than any to the complexion of the current situation. These three artists all acknowledge the historical and continuing importance of Transmission, for example. By now it has become something of a common place to locate the origins of Glasgow’s international aspirations within that group of Transmission artists who, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, determined to take responsibility for their own career, by-pass London and establish direct contact with other international artists and organisations. (I point out that when I arrived in Glasgow in 1987, Steven Campbell and other painters of his early 1980s generation had already broken through to international territory, albeit by different routes.)

Transmission is now, however, part of a wider network of artist-run spaces, including Intermedia, the Project Room and Mary Mary among others. It is this network that perhaps gives Glasgow-based artists their advantage. Unlike many other towns and cities, Glasgow offers a range of opportunities for artists to exhibit their work to a receptive audience of fellow artists. Being an exhibiting artist is a realistic and viable proposition in this city. Art is not something made by other people in other places: it is something made by ‘us’ (aspiring young artists) right here and now. And this is because successive waves of artists have made it so since the mid-1980s. Virtually everything here begins its life in a space (both physical and ‘discursive’) formed by the artists themselves. ‘Everyone,’ as someone said, ‘gets their start in Intermedia.’

A recurrent feature of our conversation concerned an incongruity between the various perspectives and interests that compose the multi-layered (and surprisingly fragile) art scene in Glasgow. In other words, it became clear that there are differences within this scene not only in terms of what it ‘is’, but also what it might ‘mean’, who might claim ‘ownership’ of it. (In truth, it is misleading to talk about ‘a’ scene, as if it were singular, coherent and united.) In this sense it perhaps echoes the city itself. Michael ventures that he experiences Glasgow as an ‘unfinished’ city, and there was a shared perception that it has ‘awkward’ aspects. (It has undergone a more ruthless process of ‘modernisation’ than, say, Edinburgh.) All of us were both amused and bemused, therefore, that the art and the art scene had been mobilized in the city’s ‘Scotland with Style’ and tourist campaigns. Experience suggests that once officialdom and bureaucracy are involved (whether well-intentioned or otherwise), the suppleness of innovation succumbs to arthritic stiffening. So there is an element of radical skepticism among these young artists regarding official legitimation. Graduation to the institutions of the institutions of the ‘parent’ culture is not necessarily welcomed with innocent joy. Once removed from the supportive context of the closely-knit subculture, care, concern for detail and sympathetic understanding can easily be lost. And should the work made by these artists ever come to be seen – by visiting curators, let’s say – as exemplifying the ‘New Glasgow Art’ a fresh set of potential problems emerge. It’s the classic trap of art history: the desire to categorize and label (pop art, conceptual art, minimal art, Brit art, Glasgow art) leads to betrayal. Crucial differences within and between the works themselves are erased, and this frequently leads to the art being understood in terms of the convenient label, rather than on its own terms.

Our discussion was not exhaustive by any means, but we did touch upon the role of public funding and the peculiarities of the local art market (which is very limited in terms of ‘new’ work, but in which the Modern Institute has played a key role, recently augmented by Sorcha Dallas). We also raised the fact that most of the art made – or, perhaps more precisely, exhibited – in this city is not made by native Glaswegians ( of the four of us, only Karla is Scottish). The latter does not seem to be an issue: the key factor is a willingness to participate, to contribute to, rather than exploit the potentialities of the city’s grassroots art scene. It’s maintaining and developing the conditions for producing good art, rather than a concern for ‘authentic Scottishness’, or naked careerism, which is at stake here. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why so many artists from so many different backgrounds and nationalities choose to live and work here.

A few years ago I organized an exhibition that included artists from Glasgow and London. At dinner one evening that London artists began to talk about the show and agreed that it was quite amusing by virtue of its seriousness. Perhaps that is what lies behind all of this. Art is a serious business in this town among those who are directly involved. That does not mean that it cannot also be amusing, slight, pointless, self-deprecating or downright seductive. But it does mean that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

Subject Exhibition

Like it Matters, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow
09/2005
With: Michael Stumpf