In Glasgow, in the marble grandeur of the Mitchell Library, you can borrow a work of art with your books. The librarians will help you choose between a Korean watercolor and a Russian abstract. They don’t just stamp your card, or fine you when the art is overdue, they will come to your home and mount Alec Finlay’s beautiful word work on the wall or install Henna-Riikka Halonen’s marvelous underwater film on your DVD so that you can watch the swimmers perform what amounts to a satirical ballet-cum-circus at any hour of the day or night. The librarians are, of course, artists in disguise.
At Transmission Gallery, artist-run since 1983, they are reading Finnegans Wake every lunchtime in solidarity with reading groups from Antwerp to New Mexico who have been reciting that stupendous novel (sometimes from memory) for decades. On the walls are works that have no market price, since they are simply gifts exchanged between the artists themselves; nor are the names of these artists declared. Anyone can spot Alasdair Gray’s mordant two-part graphic sequence, but who made this alarming moss-covered mask or that fantastical curved landscape?
Interpretation, context, value: all are undisclosed. Visitors will have to make up their own minds purely by taking a good old-fashioned look at the actual art.
Photo: Reuters
Leaving with your free CD of Gogol’s The Overcoat, you might cross the River Clyde to the Tramway, where dancers in Russian costumes shaped like letters of the alphabet are cutting and sculpting that cavernous white space with their disciplined sweeps and arabesques. You can join in, if sufficiently high on the hypnotic black-and-white patterns that progress in geometric series across the wall, and not too afraid of your own nervous laughter.
This multimedia environment, by the Los Angeles artist Kelly Nipper, looks like a cross between Merce Cunningham, Peter Greenaway and the dynamic art of the Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. It is meant to draw you into its all-embracing structure, make you a component of its grand design. And it works. Some of us hung back among the alphabet cushions, but others were soon losing themselves on the dance floor.
Openness — that’s the spirit of this year’s Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art; openness, involvement and an honest directness. It’s what you might expect of the city itself, with its famous warmth, but it is characteristic of the art scene too. Transmission may be the oldest, but it is by no means the only artists’ co-operative. Of the 50 or so venues in this year’s festival, almost half are run by artists, or writers, or writers who are also artists.
Photo: Reuters
Go to their flat at 83 Hill Street and John Shankie and Andrew Miller will give you lunch in exchange for your conversation; food for thought. Go to the house of the painters Merlin James and Carol Rhodes, at 42 Carlton Place, and you will see an extraordinary miscellany, including paintings by Sickert and Derain, to make one ponder how (and when) contemporary art becomes the art of the past. The Turner prize-winning photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is showing new work in the house of the Turner prize-winning film artist Douglas Gordon.
And the oldest of all the city parks, Glasgow Green, has been handed to Jeremy Deller for the installation of an exact facsimile of Stonehenge in inflatable form. Everyone is welcome to leap to their heart’s content among these precious stones, this sacred site, no need to be confined (or charged) by English Heritage. The tinge of sacrilege enhances the free-for-all.
GI, as they call it, has a better balance of the local and the international than any other art festival in Britain. Perhaps that is because in Glasgow they so often amount to the same thing. Many of the most prominent shows this year are by artists born or based in Glasgow who have a huge following overseas, such as Richard Wright, Karla Black and Rosalind Nashashibi.
Black has filled the Gallery of Modern Art with 17 tonnes of sawdust, layered in shades of chocolate and vanilla like a gargantuan block of tiramisu. She calls it, in her increasingly sententious way, Empty Now. Tiny incidents involving makeup are taking place on its crumbling surface, while smaller breakaway events occur on the floor — miniature trees seem to grow back, reconstituted, as it were, from the sawdust. And above it all, colossal swags of polythene and sticky tape dangle like Spanish moss from the ceiling, turning the Corinthian columns into a forest of tree trunks.
The associations run free: cakes, classical arenas, spit-and-sawdust pubs, glossy spiders’ webs connecting the ruins of some enchanted wood, baroque, rococo, Carl Andre, Richard Serra (she’s always nudging at art history). But that is all. Black is simply delivering enormous hints, and huge headaches for the gallery guards. Her whimsical confections are beginning to seem too much like a trademark.
I loved Nashashibi’s 16mm film, Lovely Young People (Beautiful Supple Bodies), a work of outstanding empathy and grace. It shows members of the Scottish Ballet rehearsing scenes from Sleeping Beauty, in turn observed by members of the public. A quartet of old ladies is charmed. A child is surprised. A grandmother is so guilelessly receptive that the camera cannot stop watching her eyes.
The film has no obvious narrative, no climactic incident; its only action, as it were, is the twining of two strands — the dancers, straining, diligent, often apologetic, and the way in which the rehearsal is slowly becoming a performance. So subtle is this convergence that when the pale winter’s light traces the profile of two principals towards the end, it is a revelation to see who they really are. The camera glides down to the handcuffs at their waist: two amazed Glasgow policemen.
I’d like to think they might turn up at the Tramway too, for today’s chance to be an extra in The Making of Us, a collaboration between artist Graham Fagen, theater director Graham Eatough and photography director Michael McDonough which, from its dress rehearsal, seems tantalizing in its every possible outcome. And there are many, for the scenes of an actor’s life and the moral choices he makes to get to the top will be performed in promenade like a medieval mystery play (a noose awaits) while simultaneously filmed from many angles to incorporate the extras’ spontaneous responses, then edited accordingly. It’s a conceit of real ingenuity, turning the film (and the film industry) inside out. The result will be screened, with further surprises, exactly where it was filmed in the Tramway.
Art festivals throw up hundreds of images and ideas all at once, too many for the mind to carry forever, or even just for the days spent in that city. Sometimes the experience is more burdensome than fulfilling. But this year’s GI feels rich, dense, organic, inspiring. I shan’t forget the testimonies of the last surviving members of Glasgow’s socialist Sunday schools, assembled in Ruth Ewan’s celebration of that singular movement which educated so many poor children, nor the images of their May Day parades (Leningrad on Sauchiehall Street, as one recalled).
Nor the belated realization that Richard Wright’s abrupt and delicate drawings, at Kelvingrove, are far more powerful in their epigrammatic way than the wall-sized works that won him the Turner Prize.
In Tillmans’ show I saw the night sky over Kilimanjaro in a magnificent photograph that beggars belief, as the stars appear to twinkle in front of the distant peak; a poetic truth in that the mountain came after the stars.
And in the grounds of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover I had the true festival joy of stumbling on something new: Henry Coombes’s coruscatingly zany black-and-white film I Am the Architect, This Is Not Happening, This Is Unacceptable in which architecture fights art to a thrilling soundtrack and overtones of Fritz Lang, Francis Picabia and those Russian constructivists. Hard to say in all the wild invention, but I think art won.
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