Coals To Newcastle By Malcolm Dickson I dislike the way most art functions. It’s both WXM¾MRK ERH WXM¾IH HMZSVGIH JVSQ PMZMRK -X´W anti-life. I go to galleries expecting little. One ½RHW QSVI PMZMRK ERH EGXYEP GVIEXMZMX] MR PMJI on the street and can engage with direct communication without pretence. There is still the assumption, walking into many galleries, that here is ‘hallowed ground’, but it’s so dead, not PMXIVEPP] FYX TW]GLSPSKMGEPP] %GXYEP HIEXL MW ½RI (if natural). Pretending to live isn’t….Alternative art spaces and organisations are not enough in themselves…We need to re-examine the basis of our art practice – what it is, ‘how’ it conveys ‘what’ with whom, when, where – why. Then act accordingly, as conscience dictates.1 -Alastair MacLennan Mass production’s vibrant energy has been harnessed not to provide the basic needs of life in abundance, but for the endless reduplication of effort and the trivialisation of diversity…In this way, all contact with the past is erased. We are borne along in the present on the crest of a wave of consumables. We are aware of the passage of time by the rate of circulation of new commodities. Anything which is older is seized upon, labelled ‘antique’ and put in a special place and price bracket, almost in amazement that it should still exist. It is reassured as a lone assertion of permanence against the current of transience. Increasingly we pass through life with no connection with or recollection of the past. Sealed as it were in a capsule of the present, we are allowed contact only with a reality authorised by the manufacturers of novelties; and allowed to visit the past only in coach-tours to a theme park, as part of another revenue generating activity. -Here & Now/The Pleasure Tendency, 1984 In July 06, the Manchester art group UHC organised a guided bus tour of Manchester’s regeneration landmarks. Like their installation Incursions into the Knowledge Capital, being LIPH GSRGYVVIRXP] EX XLI HIVIPMGX 'EWXPI½IPH Chapel (Pete Waterman’s former recording studio, apparently), the exercise focussed on the network of power relations currently shaping the local environment. What it gradually uncovered was the existence of a neoliberal IPMXI VIWLETMRK TYFPMG WTEGI JSV XLI FIRI½X SJ business. As one member of the group pointed out in the discussion afterwards, it is not so much that UHC are against any development,
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but that there has been no consultation with the public over changes and no interest shown in any kind of democratic accountability. UHC’s web project OpenCity, meanwhile, describes itself as ‘an attempt to provide shelter from the rain of narrow economic orthodoxy shaping our city. Our vision of the ‘open city’ is a place where people participate directly in the running of their city, where the wellbeing of the population is RSX WEGVM½GIH JSV TVMZEXI TVS½X ERH [LIVI XLI populace has free access to civic space.’2 Public policy has for some time now recognised the potential value of art and culture for both social and economic regeneration, but few cities have got it right in their forward planning or process. With reputations to rebuild, both Newcastle/Gateshead and Belfast bid for European Capital of Culture 2008. Like many cities, they modelled themselves on arts and cultural quarters exuding a post-modern urban aesthetic with an intoxicating mix of residential, retail, entertainment and cultural venues for consumption and leisure – together regarded as offering the major added value of inward investment, tourism and regeneration. Some necessary work is now underway on the longer term social effects of Glasgow’s reign in 1990, although much of this tends to concentrate on the cultural investment angle.3 Glasgow’s support of its visual arts infrastructure as a result of 1990 has been considerable – and considerate for those in receipt –but the legacy as a whole still remains contested and unresolved, mainly for what is seen as an attempt to mortgage the city’s working class heritage to the leisure industry (‘Glasgow’s Glasgow’).4 Gateshead is held up in some quarters as a notable exception to the shallow regeneration that UHC accuse Manchester of. In the 1980s Newcastle’s north bank witnessed a property-led regeneration, whereas in Gateshead in the 90s an arts-led regeneration strategy included a long gestation period involving a public arts programme and small-scale regeneration schemes, projects aimed at stimulating social and community regeneration, artists residencies and community art activities.5 Although many variations exist between the dialects of Glasgow, Newcastle and Belfast, there are intonational connections in their respective vernaculars. Places of marked geographical IHKIW ?]IW MX MW TPEGI SJA XLI EJ½RMXMIW I\XIRH
Douglas Gordon's mural installation. Part of 'Sites/Positions' March 1990
(SYKPEW +SVHSR W ½WX LMW QYVEP MRWXEPPEXMSR ERH +SVFEPW MR FEGOKVSYRH 1EVGL
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back in history, especially between Ireland and Scotland, where the Irish diaspora from the South and from Ulster shaped much of Glasgow’s topography and culture (both Belfast and Glasgow were centres of radical politics, and &IPJEWX [EW ZIV] QYGL MR¾YIRGIH F] XLI 7GSXXMWL enlightenment). The three cities, like many others, experienced the great decline of their industrial bases, with high levels of urban decay and unemployment. Across the UK and Europe, numerous leisure and retail developments have been built on the former sites of factories and heavy industries. Culture has been imported XS ½PP XLI ZEGYYQ ERH XS VITPEGI [SVOMRK GPEWW use value with aestheticised, symbolic value. In these three cities, riverbanks rendered ghostly due to the loss of their shipbuilding soul have been reanimated to become entertainment and residential centrepieces, new playgrounds for property developers (as Wikipedia says of Glasgow’s Clydeside).
a preamble to Newcastle and an excursion to Belfast, to make the assertion that this expansion represents an increased regional selfassurance in visual arts activity. The aim to revisit a number of these historical activities within the context of art’s current role in social and political processes is informed by a desire to supplement the many critiques and alternatives already in existence, and to reinforce the need for a sense of informed historical continuity. An analytical gap seems presently to exist in the ‘art boom’ period of the early nineties, when ‘critical’ and ‘intellectual’ artists became the accidental henchmen for a gradual neoliberal enclosure, one consequence of which was the assimilation of the ‘artist-run’ venture into a market driven conception of the art world. More than question the ‘exclusive’ values of the white cube, the activities discussed challenged cultural ‘inferiorism’. Ronald Turnbull and Craig Beveridge apply this, Frantz Fanon’s trope, to pre- and postdevolution Scotland in their book The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, arguing that the cultural and social power held within Scottish institutions is represented by an ‘out-posted sub-metropolitan intelligentsia’ on the one hand, and a reactionary conservative nationalism on the other.7 These forces of ‘containment’, they suggest, are often unable to respond to Scottish practices which are not sanctioned by metropolitan culture, and this thwarting of the ‘indigenous’ helps maintain negative perceptions of Scottish culture, distort cultural expression, and reinforce Scotland’s political subordination. As Cairns Craig says in the book’s introduction:
Alongside the ‘regeneration’ (positive and the negative) of these cities, the areas also forged, and importantly have retained, particular artistic tendencies and legacies emerging from the grassroots, namely the Projects UK trajectory, the Transmission orbit, and the Catalyst nexus. Although in these loci thinking was formed by different circumstances, the problems and potentialities were and are essentially the same. Concerns with place, the spatial particularities of the city, and a discursive zone involving ownership over the production and reception SJ MRXIVTVIXEXMSRW [IVI WMKRM½GERX MR IEGL In Glasgow, the high concentration of arts organisations in the previously disinvested and Too often, in Scotland, a particular way WMRGI VETMHP] KIRXVM½IH EVIE SJ XLI 1IVGLERX 'MX] of seeing your culture, or representing has resulted in the development of a ‘Housing ourselves, has come to dominate the Visual Arts’ strategy by the City Council. our perceptions because it has gone This seeks to ensure that artists do not get unchallenged – worse, unexamined. squeezed out in the regeneration process they The vitality of the culture should be help catalyse and, uniquely perhaps, has created measured by the intensity of debate a framework for the sustainable development which it generates rather than the of a visual arts infrastructure. The outcome of security of ideas on which it rests. this process will be the development of two And it should be measured by the key buildings, namely the North Block of King extent to which creative, philosophical, Street, a Victorian clothing warehouse, and the theological, critical and political ideas Briggait, a 19th GIRXYV] JSVQIV ½WL QEVOIX confront one another.8 8SKIXLIV XLIWI [MPP LSYWI ³RSX JSV TVS½X´ EVXW organisations with production facilities for artists In the mid-eighties Transmission re-tuned its as well as a wide range of media and facilities antennae. Pre-internet, knowledge of what was accessible to the public.6 LETTIRMRK JYVXLIV E½IPH MR XLI EVXW WIGXSV [EW provided by a few links: the pioneering work This article aims to look at these regional of Projects UK (already an institution by then), developments within a time frame from the who saw in Transmission a similar ethos to mid-eighties, with a focus on Transmission that of The Basement; Performance Magazine, Gallery in the period 1985-1987 and Variant the only periodical outside of Scotland that magazine over the issues of 1987-1991, via took an interest in what was happening within
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Christine Borland, installation at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Part of 'Sites/Positions' March 1990.
LVMWXMRI &SVPERH MRWXEPPEXMSR WMXI EX 7YQQIVWXSR PERH½PP WMXI Part of 'Sites/Positions' March 1990
Christine Borland schools workshop. March 1990
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MX ZME 8VERWQMWWMSR ERH XLI ½IPH SJ TVEGXMGIW MX embraced, as well as the occasional advocacy article being written, which was rare at that time9; CIRCA and through that, Art and Research Exchange, whose encouragement to link artists working as isolated individuals in garrets with KVEWWVSSXW GSQQYRMX] EGXMZMXMIW [IVI VIžIGXIH in Transmission’s mission statement; Parallelogram, the magazine of the artist-run centres in Canada; and the occasional gem in Art Monthly, usually the letters page. Magazines such as Stewart Home’s issues of Smile, and Here & Now provided further enlightenment and escape from the GSR½RIW SJ EVX ÂłHMWGSYVWI´ *VSQ XLI GYPXYVEP and geographical vantage point of Glasgow, the Hal Foster-edited Postmodern Culture also helped GPEVMJ] QEXXIVW MX EJ½VQIH E ÂłTSWX QSHIVRMWQ SJ resistance’, which ...arises as a counter-practice not only to XLI SJ½GMEP GYPXYVI SJ QSHIVRMWQ FYX EPWS to the ‘false normativity’ of a reactionary postmodernism. In opposition (but not only in opposition)‌In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political EJ½PMEXMSRWŠ 10 -HIEW XLEX [IVI XS WSQI I\XIRX VIžIGXIH MR Variant magazine – certainly in its desire to make PMROW JYVXLIV E½IPH XS HMWTPEGI ERH TMGO ETEVX tradition, and to write polemics describing the importance of doing so. The Basement emerged out of a 70s environment where everything seemed possible;11 where non-object and time-based art helped XS VIHI½RI ZMWYEP EVXW TVEGXMGI 8LI &EWIQIRX´W VIWTIGXMZI MRžYIRGIW [IVI EW .SR &I[PI] recalled,12 %GI 7TEGI MR 8SVSRXS XLI ½VWX incarnation of De Appel in Amsterdam, and, in the UK, Jonathan Harvey and the Acme Gallery in London, who ‘provided uncompromised support for emerging artists whose work in installation and performance, particularly, was XSS HMJ½GYPX ERH HIQERHMRK JSV QEMRWXVIEQ galleries to show.’13 3J QSVI WMKRM½GERGI however was the expression of geographical and artistic independence accompanied by the fostering of a diaspora away from the centre. This was a situation not unique to Newcastle, however, in the development of performance art: The beginnings of English performance art are rooted in a number of English GMXMIW MR XLI ½VWX LEPJ SJ XLI RMRIXIIR sixties‌it is probably true to say that it was in those midland and northern cities that the very beginnings of English
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TIVJSVQERGI EVX ½VWX IQIVKIH ;LEX they shared was medium-city size and thus close cultural networks, successful art schools, polytechnics and/or universities, some sort of music scene, but a geographical and cultural distance from Swinging London that bread a particularly anarchic and disrespectful sort of artist.’14 This ‘tradition’ was very much prevalent prior XS 8LI &EWIQIRX +VSYT SV MXW WXEXIH MRžYIRGIW Roland Miller formed the The People’s Show in 1970 at Leeds Polytechnic (Jeff Nuttall had also been involved at one point) and also the Cyclamen Cyclists and the New Fol-de-Rols who appeared at many of the arts festivals in England MR XLI IEVP] W 8LI MRžYIRGI SJ LETTIRMRKW ERH socially driven performance theatre was also at the heart of the work of Welfare State. Their legacy is one of undercutting the emphasis on product rather than process, and participatory theatrical happenings that were celebratory but critical of the socio-political structure. Miller had organised and had been touring the exhibition The Art that Moves, an exhibition of documents from the development of British Performance Art, from the sixties to the eighties to several regional galleries in 1987/88, and in an article for Variant takes to task the establishment promotion of live art which he sees as defusing its radical intentions.15 Jon Bewley and Simon Herbert stated: In the course of the last decade or so, British artists, instead of regarding their geographical position as a liability, have been bold enough to assume the opposite‌We were operating politically within a geographical context; we wanted to gradually foster the idea that there was an alternative to London and the South‌allow artists access to alternate methods of production, presentation and distribution‌In times of social repression, the boundaries are drawn back and regress. We are an organisation that offers the chance for artists to contact us if they want to cross disciplines and practice. To expand...16 Transmission hosted many talks, readings, and SXLIV IZIRXW VIžIGXMZI SJ XLI GYPXYVEP ERH political milieu of Glasgow (and Edinburgh) at the time, with the social glue of the Free University giving activities their critical WMKRM½GERGI [MXLSYX FIMRK MRHI\IH XS ER] SRI
%PMWSR 1EVGLERX ,SYWILSPH MRWXEPPEXMSR +SZER XIRIQIRX ¾EX 4EVX SJ 7MXIW 4SWMXMSRW 1EVGL
place or line of thought. There was a culture of magazines and self-publishing and The Edinburgh Review, Here & Now and Variant were key to the Free Uni’s diversity. The Edinburgh Review17 under the editorship of Peter Kravitz, initiated a debate EVSYRH 2I[ -QEKI +PEWKS[ XLI ½VWX Glasgow miracle!), which resulted in a public stooshie that disturbed the much-desired promotional EXXIRXMSR SR ½KYVEXMZI EVX 2IMP %WGLIVWSR [EW recruited to quell the ‘counter-attack’ on New Figuration, and in a lead column in The Observer titled ‘Enterprise and the Cult of Failure’ stated ‘…beyond the politics, [there] is a dire old song which says that if you make it, you have – in both senses – sold out. Integrity lies in failure, and deliberate under-achievement is a revolutionary act.’18 The polemics continued in the letters pages of Edinburgh Review and Variant, and although it provoked a debate around the conservatism of the visual art narrative, it was less of a dialogue than a confrontation, serving to polarise positions between the old media of painting and the ‘new’ cultural forms of video, performance and installation – now considered to be pre-eminent at Transmission. This overlooked the role of painting exhibitions in the gallery’s programme19 and it also helped further distance the Scottish visual arts establishment JVSQ XLI MR¾YIRXMEP FYX MKRSVIH EZERX KEVHI practices in Scottish art from the 70s.20 8LI ½VWX [SVOMRK PMRO FIX[IIR 4VSNIGXW 9/ ERH
Transmission occurred through a visit to New Work Newcastle 86 and to the terraced house which contained Stuart Brisley’s sound piece 168 Helmsley Rd. With Project UK’s help, this led to Brisley returning to live work after several years, with Red Army II (1986), a three-day durational performance enacting the memory of notes from a diary made in Helsinki. The recurring image in this was that of a ship forging a path EGVSWW ER MGI ½IPH XS[EVHW ER MWPERH [LIVI Brisley had been told the Red Army were once interned. A highly effective and resonant work, Brisley, like many artists, managed to use this small walled-in cobblestoned space in a highly appropriate fashion: broken bottles evoked the ice being crushed; the setting off of a chemical ½VI I\XMRKYMWLIV [LIR XLI PMKLXW [IVI SJJ LEH the effect of a gush of freezing cold wind; the XLVS[MRK STIR SJ XLI ½VI I\MX XS FEXLI XLI space with light caught the sea gulls in the tenement back close at the right moment in the VIGSPPIGXMSRW ,MW VIJIVIRGIW XS ³VIH ¾EKW YRHIV the eyes’ alluded to the statement scrawled on the wall of the damp basement below where he was performing, which paraphrased famous Glasgow socialist John McLean’s intent to ‘make Glasgow a Petrograd, a Revolutionary storm centre second to none’. The performance coincided with his exhibition The Georgiana Collection at the Third Eye Centre, and Ken 1G1YPPIR´W ½PQ Arbeit Macht Frei, which was also screened at Transmission. Rob La Frenais of
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Performance Magazine was to write: ...he points out his preference for working out of the gallery context, in the bare space of Transmission, where he can reuse the simple materials of the space…stimulated by the ‘underground’ activity of the Transmission collective… he has returned to live work as the traditional storyteller, the passer-on of oral tradition, dealing with the creation of myth on the fringes of society.’21 EventSpace 1 had taken place earlier in 1986 ERH [EW XLI ½VWX QENSV ZMHIS MRWXEPPEXMSR WLS[ in Scotland for 10 years.22 It was organised by Steve Partridge, who was based at the Electronic Imaging department at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and the Transmission committee (principally Doug Aubrey and Alan Robertson).23 EventSpace 2 featured video art JVSQ *(6 MR +IVQER] RI[ ½PQW F] [SQIR (introduced by Cordelia Swann, then with the Film and Video Umbrella), and new performances by Richard Layzell and Charlie Hooker.24 When Doug Aubrey and Malcolm Dickson’s time on the committee ended after a period of two years, they set up EventSpace and were later joined by ex-Basement Group/Projects UK member Ken Gill, who had recently moved to Glasgow from Berlin to take up a post at Glasgow Film and Video Workshop. Gill had heard of Transmission from Projects UK, but also, ahead of Glasgow’s imminent reign as ‘Culture Capital’, that the city was ‘the best kept secret in the UK.’ EventSpace was set up as an association with charitable status – there was no funding available except on a project-by-project basis, and it modelled MXWIPJ SR XLI SJ½GI FEWIH EKIRG] 4VSNIGXW 9/
FYX XLIR [MXLSYX XLI SJ½GI -XW GSSVHMREXSVW were artists making their own work and facing XLI WEQI HMJ½GYPXMIW XLEX XLI SVKERMWEXMSR was established to alleviate – to ensure that innovative work was ‘taken care’ of curatorially, exposed to a wider range of people, and that as a consequence an attempt was made to broaden the visual arts discourse. Variant originated in 1984 supported by the Students Representative Council at Glasgow School of Art and re-launched in 1987 with some paid ads upfront and two supporting donations of £50 from interested members of the Scottish arts establishment. Variant was very much embedded in events as well as covering them and set out to deal with art in its social and political context, a remit continued in its current free circulation format. Analysis was often by artists and the writing usually polemical,
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giving priority to the need to ‘document and encourage new forms of artistic activity in Scotland’. Distribution up until issue No. 9 had been by hand and snail mail – there was a Federation of Radical Bookshops then, many more outlets willing to stock small titles, and supportive networks such as the Independent Publishers Group.25 Contacts were also built up where events were happening or where people known to the magazine’s editors were located.26 In 1989, Projects UK contributed £500 towards duplication of Variant Video, ‘the magnetic magazine’, which consisted of two tapes and was produced as an extension of the printed version as a way of tapping into other modes SJ HMWXVMFYXMSR JSV EVX ERH MHIEW 8LI ½VWX XETI explored the use of video as a medium in an arts context whilst commenting on the politics of electronic media.27 The second section aimed to record some aspects of Scotland’s militant cultural and political history in order to show the richness and diversity of oppositional culture.28 Nik Houghton wrote at the time: [Video Art: Midnight of the Decade] is a fast moving introduction to video art. It features some stylishly executed interviews with video artists and curators, alongside a collection of striking video art pieces from students at DJCA… [it] looks set for success, with potential markets being libraries, galleries and overseas sales.29 The video arrived at a time when in the UK there was very little well-produced and innovative information on video art, but it just predated the rise of the yBa-effect in English art and the proliferation of video art and projection in galleries that previously would not otherwise show video art.30 8LI ½VWX )ZIRX7TEGI TVSNIGX MRHITIRHIRX SJ Transmission was Stuart Brisley’s and Maya Balcioglu’s The Cenotaph Project:The Class of Rulers in Glasgow, a project which set out to examine the role of public sculpture as the possible embodiment of a ruling class’s authority over the rest of society, and to open up a discussion of issues relating to such. Initially supported by Projects UK and installed in Gateshead (as The St. Cuthbert’s Village Cenotaph), it travelled to several locations where issues pertaining to its locality were explored. A time-based, site- and GSRXI\X WTIGM½G XSYVMRK MRWXEPPEXMSR EX IEGL location a new cenotaph would be built and installed alongside the others from previous WMXIW MR +PEWKS[ XLIVI [IVI ½ZI 8LI WIXXMRK for the installation in Glasgow was a community hall called The Pearce Institute, established in
1906 in the heart of the ex-shipyard area of Govan. Ironically this happened coincidentally with The Garden Festival on the site of the Albert Docks in Govan, whose advertising byline was ‘a day out of this world.’31 Govan, again like many areas of Belfast and Newcastle, is a socially deprived working class neighbourhood, which spiralled into decline with the demise of the local industries. It was a highly appropriate location for The Cenotaph Project, with its history of shipbuilding for the First and Second World Wars, and the role of the workers movement in Clydeside, which also appropriately echoed back to interests raised by Brisley two years previously during his performance at Transmission... Discussion as a means of socializing art is one that Brisley began using in the mid 1970s. His arduous performance actions became less frequent and a change of media seemed to occur in a piece entitled ‘The Peterlee Reports’, a project Brisley involved himself with whilst Artist in Residence in Peterlee arranged through the Artists Placement Group (APG)…Instead of producing ‘performances’ in this placement, Brisley concentrated on collecting a body of work based on aural history…There is a direct link between The Cenotaph Project [and what was] present in the APG in 1966: collaboration, a social awareness, a move away from the saleable ‘art object’ and a wish to penetrate society from within as a means of enacting social change’.32 Murdo MacDonald notes the project’s references to the ‘riots’ of 1919 in Glasgow’s George Square: While Lutyens [designer of the cenotaph] was HIWMKRMRK XLMW WXEXIP] VI¾IGXMSR SJ QEWW WEGVM½GI in the name of the British Empire, the army of that empire was called in to suppress protest on XLI WXVIIXW SJ +PEWKS[©-X MW XLMW OMRH SJ ¾E[ MR SJ½GMEP LMWXSV] XS [LMGL The Cenotaph Project draws attention. It is the development of the E[EVIRIWW SJ XLIWI ¾E[W XLEX KMZIW MX MXW ZEPYI 33 The references to Glasgow’s radical past and troubled present were also addressed in several of the projects included in Sites/Positions in 1EVGL [LMGL MRGPYHIH WM\ RI[ WMXI WTIGM½G artworks commissioned by EventSpace. Govan again was returned to in Alison Marchant’s installation Household in a traditional tenement ¾EX [LMGL MRZIWXMKEXIH XLI IZIRXW SJ XLI +PEWKS[
people’s rent strikes (1890-1916) and its relationship to the present, deeply entwined with questions of class and gender misrepresentation. The installation used archive photographs and found materials, and involved recollections from elderly residents concerning their memories of the events (in turn conveyed to them through their elders). Douglas Gordon’s mural Mute VIGSZIVIH WMKRM½GERX HEXIW WSQI ORS[R and some not, relating to periods of political upheaval in Glasgow’s history. These dates were painted onto the interior of what remained of Glasgow Green station, a red sandstone façade and supporting wall, situated next to the park that has long been associated with the people’s struggle for reforms and justice, as a site of gathering and debate for Glasgow’s multifaceted socialist orators.34 Euan Sutherland’s installation focused on the privatisation occurring in the otherwise neglected north of the city, drawing attention to an abandoned council housing estate and a recently closed school in Colston. This was a trigger to open out the themes to wider environmental and public concerns. Another artist, Christine Borland, had recently returned from Belfast, and presented a work that was to hint at developments in more recent practice, namely a consideration of the ways in which social systems and institutions exploit and devalue life. This mainly involved XEOMRK GSQTVIWWIH VIJYWI JVSQ E PERH½PP WMXI on the outskirts of Glasgow and situating this in Kelvingrove Museum, in turn siting museum objects in the dump itself. This represented an early formative opportunity for these artists’ approaches that proved to be decisive in their later practice. With the exception of the London based Marchant, these artists had all been students at Glasgow School of Art under David Harding (and Sam Ainsley) on the Environmental Art Course and were therefore imbued with the Artist Placement Group motto that was the course’s cornerstone and guiding principle – ‘context is half the work’.35 The public art project which every student had to undertake gave them a GSR½HIRX KVSYRHMRK MR MQTSVXERX EWTIGXW SJ RIKSXMEXMRK [MXL SJ½GMEPHSQ JSV I\EQTPI XLI endless correspondences with private and public bodies that would have been necessary to receive permission to stage many of the above works.36 EventSpace also re-presented Project UK’s Metro Billboard Project as the 1990 Artists Billboard Project, involving six works located on various advertising hoardings in the city centre and peripheral areas.37 The project was
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originally commissioned by Projects UK in 1988 and shown in several cities throughout the UK and in Edmonton, Canada, in 1989. Both Sites/ Positions and the Billboard Project – which SGGYVVIH WMQYPXERISYWP] ÂŻ TVS½PIH E VERKI SJ issue-based work by local and nationally based artists in a noteworthy exploration of socially IRKEKIH EVX TVEGXMGI WTIGM½G XS XLI GMX] ERH MXW socio-political circumstances, most of which have a contemporaneous resonance. In 1990, an artistic windfall swept across Tyneside, where socially engaged art clashed with the imperatives of urban regeneration. The Garden Festival in Gateshead saw 30 public artworks leave what many described as a tangible legacy, as art used in a publicpolicy setting helped reclaim derelict areas. The First Tyne International, A New Necessity, curated by Irishman Declan McGonigle, linked Newcastle and Gateshead and included 32 new commissions (according to the publicity at the time), with artists from Tyneside, the UK and the world, and from the emerging to the established. This included a memorable large scale projection on the side of the Tuxedo Royale on the Tyne, organised by Projects UK, possibly the main catalyst and coordinator during that time for XIQTSVEV] WMXI WTIGM½G [SVO RSX NYWX MR XLI north east but in England as a whole. Their other projects in that one year were Force Ten – Artists Flag Project, co-commissioned for Glasgow City of Culture and Newcastle football ground; earshot, the experimental music/performance festival; being the host and collaborating organisation for TSWA 4 Cities, E TVSNIGX SJ WMXI WTIGM½G XIQTSVEV] PEVKI WGEPI public art works; as well as for EDGE 90 (art and life in the nineties), which was held in a disused warehouse on Newcastle’s Quayside. -R XLI ½VWX EVX WGLSSP I\GLERKI FIX[IIR Belfast and Glasgow took place. Shaz Kerr recalls: We were surprised by Glasgow. It felt very ‘art world’. We were living in a war zone. Priorities in our art were different. Life seemed realer in Belfast for me. The art ‘world’ was distant but I made art, about what was happening outside on the street below.38 At least two of the Glasgow contingent had seen images of Alastair MacLennan’s work in the British Art Show catalogue of 1985 and then later at the National Review of Live Art at the Riverside in London as well as at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in 1987. MacLennan, however,
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had made earlier appearances in Scotland with his performance installations To Walk a Stone (1980), the last performance in Richard Demarco’s old Edinburgh gallery; Time (1981), in St. Andrew’s; Neither Nor (1982) at the Third Eye Centre as part of an Irish Contemporary Art season,39 which also included Nigel Rolfe. He also performed as part of Demarcations84 at Edinburgh College of Art (1984);at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh (1985); Art Space, Aberdeen (1986), as reported in Alba, Summer, 1986; and lastly, there was Out the In (1987), at the Third Eye Centre, as reported in Variant, Winter/Spring 1988.40 MacLennan’s use of objects resonant of place and identity (and often using Gaelic chants), the complex interplay of opposites in his work, his holistic ideas concerning art ERH PMJI ERH SJ GSYVWI LMW [SVO MR ½RI EVX education at the University of Ulster, proved XS FI LMKLP] MRžYIRXMEP SR WIZIVEP WXYHIRXW MR the Environmental Art Course at GSA, most memorably The Puberty Institution (Gordon and Richardson) and Euan Sutherland.41 In 1988 Christine Borland attended the MA course in Belfast and, later, Roddy Buchanan. This allowed more frequent visits either way to occur and for more projects to be developed, for example Army by Buchanan and London Road‌ by Gordon at the Orpheus Gallery in Belfast in 1991. According to Craig Richardson, this also opened up connections to the Orchard Gallery in Derry and then to IMMA in Dublin, both through Declan McGonagle, where Guilt By Association (including Buchanan, Borland, Gordon, and Richardson) was staged in 1992. The foundations of Belfast’s arts infrastructure had been sown by the Artists Collective of Northern Ireland, established in May 1981, which emerged out of Art and Research Exchange
%6) [LMGL MR XYVR [EW MRžYIRGIH F] XLI Free International University. At a recent forum exploring its legacy, MacLennan noted that ARE ‘facilitated means that could be used in FSXL GSQQYRMX] EVX ERH ½RI EVXW GSRXI\XW ERH EXXIQTXIH XS žEXXIR SYX LMIVEVGLMGEP HMJJIVIRGIW of value ascribed to community group action ERH MRHMZMHYEP ½RI EVX TVEGXMGI´ 'LVMW 'STTSGO observed: ARE originated at a time when the political climate in the UK generally, and Belfast in particular, was ripe for oppositional and alternative cultural politics‌I mean, the miner’s strike hadn’t yet taken place in Britain. I think the potential for ideological politics to
have a big impact on art practice was still very much alive at that time. Right and Left, issues of working class culture were all available for real discourse and debate. Sadly that doesn’t exist anymore, we no longer are operating ideological times where people can actually commit themselves to sociopolitical development in a way they could all those years ago.’42 In a recent article in CIRCA, Anne Carlisle wrote: The Artists Collective’s manifesto included, amongst other things an intention to actively ERH GVMXMGEPP] GSQQIRX SR E VERKI SJ ½RERGMEP and policy decisions affecting the arts in the region. This was coupled with a strong desire to enhance the artistic environment through the establishment of practitioner networks, studio and workshop facilities alongside the aim of developing a wider-ranging cultural discourse, which it was generally agreed was undernourished and lacking in focus, but which it was believed could be remedied by publishing an art magazine with a critical edge. It was the prospect of generating dialogue and taking more control of the visual art discourse which, perhaps more than any other aspect of the artists collective initially inspired the group imagination.43 %RH WS XLI ½VWX MWWYI SJ CIRCA appeared in November/December 1981, and issues 117 and 118 in 2006 mark its 25th year. The Artists Collective was one of several connective strands, as is acknowledged, and there was much overlap in activities at that time: 1984 also saw the establishment of two studio based initiatives, Flaxart and Queen Street Studios, both initially serving a function for their members, later involving residencies, exchanges, projects and exhibitions.44 Independent artist-run events, such as the Live Work Weekend in March 1991 involving ‘experiments with time-based works of art’, organised in association with the Old Museum Arts Centre, helped connect these existing initiatives with a new generation of artists emerging out of the art school. Discussed in a 1991 Variant by Glasgow artist Euan Sutherland,45 this was one of many experimental live art events occurring around the UK: the same issue of that magazine included articles on key artist-driven projects in Glasgow, Windfall and the Bellgrove Billboard Project, with reviews of Nexus, 8th National Live Art Events Week MR ,YPP 1E] %WTLEPX 6YRHS[R 7LIJ½IPH
Contemporary Arts Trust, July, 1991; the EDGE Biennale Trust-organised The Last Weekend, June, 1991 in Alston in the Pennines; and Intervals in Glasgow, including work by Tracy Mackenna, Jim Buckley and Phil Powers. Arts writer Fiona Byrne-Sutton was to remark: ‘While a market and sponsorship oriented approach can be forced on the public galleries, artists…can simply vote with their feet and establish their own exhibition circuit.’46 In October 1993, an ‘Invitation to an Open Discussion’ was circulated by Catalyst in Belfast concerning the need to establish an alternative but more permanent art space than its existing temporary venue at Temple Court (which had recently hosted exchange shows with Transmission.47 Consciously or not, it was an attempt by a new generation (with some disaffected members of the existing arts community) to re-ignite some of the issues that had been pertinent to the establishment of ARE ten years previously, namely to create a more solid infrastructure to retain artists in the city after art school, and to bring more international artists into the city and generate exchange. Soon after, its management committee issued a statement declaring their intentions: Over the past two years a growing number of artists working in Belfast LEZI FIIR GSRGIVRIH F] XLI PS[ TVS½PI given to visual art and the cultural climate within which they work. It seems a limited form of art is being produced for a small number of outlets and being seen by an elite minority audience. The major funding body’s approach is retrospective and its grant system constructed in such a way as to divide artists, promote competitiveness and the worst traits of individualism. Artists have become caught in a grip of a dream of patrons awards and exhibitions with no real agenda of our own. Attempts at collective organization sit uneasily within the competitive framework of studios and galleries. Any group fortunate to acquire funding for equipment and premises seemed to take on the form of small oligarchies impossible to access…48 8LI ½VWX TVSNIGX ,MX ERH 6YR MR MRZSPZIH around 60 artists in disused industrial buildings around the city’s old gasworks by the river Lagan, followed by In and Beyond, a four day bus tour around the north coast of Ireland in 1994; Exchange Resources (including work
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by Roddy Buchanan from Glasgow, and Simon Herbert and Jon Bewley from Newcastle), a multidisciplinary art event involving 27 national and international artists over a two week period in November 1995;49 and Fix 96, a festival of performance and installation (initiated by Dougal McKenzie and Duncan Campbell). Other innovative artist-initiated projects that were to emerge from the Catalyst axis were Showing Off, an exhibition exploring location and gender in photographic practice (which took place at Ormeau Baths Gallery before touring to Zone Gallery in Newcastle) in 1996;50 and Resonate, organised by Grassy Knoll Productions (Eoghan McTigue and Susan Philipsz), in 1998: ‘Resonate’s participants did not aim at the spectacular but instead at the tangential, the often unnoticed and the apparently marginal or commonplace, and in doing this set up a series of vibrations rather than shock waves, “adjustments” rather than extreme acts of criticism, commentary or intervention.’51 The Centre is Here was organised by Street Level in 1996, as part of Glasgow’s Year of the Visual Arts, and it aimed to explore the multitude of temporary public art occurring in Glasgow and connect that with projects outwith traditional art spaces and outside of ‘centres of power’.52 The title was ironic and was taken from a comment made by Alastair MacLennan when he discussed the notion that ‘the centre is wherever you happen to be’.53 Mark Dawes, writing in Artists Newsletter in January 1997, wrote: All these ‘provincial’ places possess indisputably vibrant and distinct cultural scenes of their own which reverse the dominant trend – from here London now seems provincial, spoilt, and slightly decadent. In northern areas, London is no longer the primary driving force in cultural matters.54 In the same review Dawes acknowledges the powerful bond forged between cities such as Glasgow and Belfast, apparent in many of the discussions and presentations throughout the event. Coincidentally, MacLennan’s large-scale installation Mael was also taking place at the Arches as part of the National Review of Live Art in November 1996. Tara Babel at The Centre is Here stated: I’d lived in London for 8-9years but I’d wanted to move…[London] is very cliquish…I don’t know why Glasgow appealed to me; it seemed to have a lot in common with Belfast…someone once said that Glasgow was like Belfast
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without the bombs…I was losing faith with the people around me in the art world...55 On the Buses was initiated by Catalyst Arts56 and involved Street Level as one of a few partners en route. Reminiscent of the Projects UK’s Touring Exhibitionists, On the Buses transported the artists around chosen regional centres, but also used the bus as a site in which the work [EW PSGEXIH 8LI ½VWX IZIRX XSSO TPEGI EX 7XVIIX Level and then the project went onto the Globe Gallery in North Shields, next day with invited artists from Street Level.57 This project, by aiming to create a greater network of cultural crossfertilisation for artists, venues and audiences, encapsulated much of the sense of mission characteristic of the ‘artist-run project’, given KVIEXIV HI½RMXMSR EKEMR F] 'EXEP]WX MR XLIMV statement for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Life/Live at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris: Artist-run means initiating exchange; emphasizing cross and inter-disciplinary approaches to making art; developing networks; through curation, putting creative ideas and arguments into action; challenging formal structures with ill and inventiveness; basically acting, as curators and administrators, as we would as artists. It’s not a chore, it’s not administrative hell. It’s a chance to push at the limits and assumptions of our practice in a way that studio work can never.58 Recently, in Belfast city centre, an arcade, which has in the past housed several arts organisations, was burned in an arson attack in circumstances still unknown. The site had been earmarked for development as part of the Cathedral Quarter’s new builds and it was noted by writer Daniel Jewesbury that the owner of the arcade ‘had coincidentally drawn up plans for the redevelopment of the area WLSVXP] FIJSVI XLI ½VI TPERW XLEX MRGPYHIH E massive new retail complex and multi-storey car park’.59 6IGIRXP] E GMX] SJ½GMEP HIWGVMFIH XLI event as a ‘regeneration-led apocalypse’. Belfast, PMOI 1ERGLIWXIV LEW FIRI½XIH KVIEXP] JVSQ XLI GSQQSHM½GEXMSR SJ MXW GYPXYVEP EWWIXW ERH MR using art to pave the way for the entry of capital. Speculation abounds also that the closure of the Ormeau Baths Gallery is the result of a grudge due to the organisation’s refusal to comply with ACNI’s request to move premises to a site in the Cathedral Quarter which is owned by a private company. Jewesbury declared in the same
Euan Sutherland 'Ecology Concern One', National Review of Live Art at Third Eye Centre, 1988.
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article that had him threatened with legal action by the owners of the arcade: the destruction of the North Street Arcade, whoever is responsible for it, demonstrates that the various ‘partners’ in the Cathedral Quarter have clearly always had very different priorities. It’s time to stop using cultural activity in an attempt to generate private capital in the name of ‘regeneration’. In a separate article he also puts Belfast’s failed bid for European Capital of Culture into some clear perspective: ‘here was another grand project that would fail because it had no connection with the activity that already existed in the city,’ and makes a connection to the failure of Arthouse in Dublin’s Temple Bar and the lack of consultation of or involvement with the artistic community it presumed would be its customers: ‘it’s naïve to assume that lessons will be learnt from the calamitous demise of such MPP HI½RIH MPP YWIH JEGMPMXMIW -J ]SY´ZI KSX E FMK idea, the last thing you want is a rabble of scruffy creative types telling you it just won’t work.’60 If UHC think Manchester is the sickest city in Britain, many inhabitants of Belfast – who are after all its best critics – will be viewing their city as no less of a hilarious parody of itself. There were a combination of factors in the early nineties in Glasgow that may help explain the current malaise, and some of them are interlinked: the demise of the social habit of public debate; the withdrawing of funding to Variant, a consequent critical vacation, and a lack of coverage of artist-driven events from this vantage point; the ascendancy of the yBas over E ½IVGIP] MRHITIRHIRX ³GVMXMGEP VIKMSREPMWQ´ MXW restocking of the art market with de-politicised product, and, as Nick Evans has pointed out, a ‘shift in values which has enabled the cultural hegemony to expand in line with the increasing professionalisation, careerism and commercialism of the artworld, leading to the integration of previously marginal interdisciplinary forms,’ which included work sited outwith the gallery.61 Of course, working outside the gallery does not necessarily mean a rejection of it. The absorption of a core group of Glasgow artists associated with the Windfall artist project into the institutional mainstream gave them a much needed validation and entry into the art market, a market not residing in Scotland, and thus, like with many of the New Image painters, liable to thrust them to ‘international status’, both individually and as a group. These factors are discussed by David Harding in his paper,
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‘Friendship, Socialisation and Networking Among Glasgow Artists 1985-2001. The Scotia Nostra – Myth and Truth’.62 This is not to belittle the WMKRM½GERGI SJ ER] MQTPMIH EVXMWXW [SVO QYGL of it rich in its engagement with a critical postmodernism. However, one has to be sceptical about the role of exhibitions on their own, and their potential to articulate and convey information beyond an art world cognoscenti. One person’s network is another’s ‘closed shop’. As some will testify, ‘scenes’ were formed by good parties63– the more successful these became the more others wanted their own parties. Now of course there are many different ones and it’s ‘regulars only’ at most, which inevitably leaves others left out. That is part of the course, but in the visual arts, access to representation and the dominant discourses is controlled through the inevitable hierarchy of public subsidy to galleries and magazines. Artists are able to be kept in line through these systems of patronage due to their powerlessness as a collective voice, but also – and perhaps because of this – their collusion with these systems of validation. Also known as cronyism in the public sector and a self-serving academicism in art education increasingly rotating on a research culture severed from the needs of the ‘artists-tobe’ (students). In his article ‘Tired of the Soup du Jour’, Nick Evans calls for a reinvestment in the critical potential of gallery based art: we need to look at the means through which artists can make politically pertinent contributions in whatever ½IPH XLI] EVI [SVOMRK MR 8LMW HSIW not necessarily mean that abstraction is out and social realism is in…If it is possible for idiosyncratic formal experimentation to have a positive impact on critical discourse, then artists will have to invest time and effort in making gallery conditions available to themselves and others.64 Critiquing JJ Charlesworth’s assertions over a New Formalism, he continues: A paradigm shift suggests a new beginning; a moving on from a reappraisal of what has come before, a sense of progressive engagement with the trinity of form, content and context. Instead, what we seem to get with many of these loosely grouped new formalist works is a sense of retreat, a sense of
taking comfort in the assumptions of the white cube…Why is it that whilst the world outside spirals in every tighter circles of terror and repression, and the potential avenues of avoidance or resistance become squeezed by the growing dominance of capital and its civil and military bulldogs, artists retreat further into a hermetic world of abstraction, formalism, deferred meanings and latent spiritualism?65 The search for an alternative to the present impasse does not need to be conducted in the future, or if so, not to the exclusion of the present, for it can build upon the enormous culture and history that already exists. The depoliticisation of art, atomisation of social movements, and the revision or erasure of aspects of history are components of neoliberalism, an ideology which is as false as it is powerful, and in which we are all enveloped and involved, but which conscientious cultural workers have to remain critically alert to. ‘Enduring values are dangerous,’ the Pleasure Tendency wrote, and what can be applied to their critique of commodities is equally true of ideas and the systems of art: Connection with the past provides standards by which present existence can be evaluated. Not only is this dangerous today when standards of all sorts are being ground down, but also in that there must be as little public resistance as possible to the ever swifter adjustments which are necessary in consumer society – a society which consumes ideas as fast as it consumes useless objects. And an awareness that everyday things are supplanted and disappear with ever increasing speed, replaced by shoddy or ridiculous subs,titutes, is only the beginning of a critique condemning the whole system of Economic Organisation.66 Endnotes ³&I]SRH XLI ;SVPH SJ %VXM½GI´ MRXIVZMI[ F] (IGPER McGonagle in Is No: 1975 – 1988 %VRSP½RM &VMWXSP 3VGLEVH Gallery (Derry) and Third Eye Centre (Glasgow). 2. UHC is an eight-member group working across multiple disciplines exploring collective art practice and political action. See their book Collective Works 2005-06 and the website http://www.opencity.org.uk.
3. See the Centre for Cultural Policy and Research Cities Project, http://www.culturalpolicy.arts.gla.ac.uk 4. The city’s campaign to clean up its image, initially through the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ and ‘Mr Man’ campaigns were soon counteracted by pamphlets and posters stating ‘Glasgow Smiles Bitter,’ a stark reminder that the city’s high crime rate, huge unemployment, religious bigotry and general poverty were not be glossed over. Through the work of the ‘Workers City’ group, who produced a broadsheet of the same name, as well as the Glasgow Keelie news sheet, a high TVS½PI ERH EGXMZI GEQTEMKR XSSO TPEGI GYPQMREXMRK MR XLI ‘Elspeth King’ affair. These events are chronicled in Workers City:The Real Glasgow Stands up (1988) and The Reckoning: Beyond the Culture City Rip Off (1990), both edited by Farquhar McLay and published through Clydeside Press. 5. A claim of ‘grounds for optimism’ is made in the article ³%VX +IRXVM½GEXMSR ERH 6IKIRIVEXMSR *VSQ %VXMWX EW 4MSRIIV to Public Arts’ by Stuart Cameron and Jon Coaffee. In their discussion of Gateshead, they ask ‘whether the linking of EVX VIKIRIVEXMSR ERH KIRXVM½GEXMSR EW TYFPMG TSPMG] GER FI extended beyond the usual “Docklands-style” localities of urban renaissance, in particular [whether] this may play a role in the transformation of unpopular and stigmatised urban neighbourhoods and the renewal of urban housing markets.’ 6. See http://www.trongate103.org for information on this development; for a history of the Merchant City area, see http://www.glasgowmerchantcity.net/history1. 7. Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull (Eds.), The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989 8. Craig Cairns, INTRODUCTION ESSAY TITLE, Ibid., p. XX? 9. ‘All the Rage’, Performance Magazine No. 54, June/July 1988; ‘Underneath the Arches’, Video Guide Vol. 10, No. 1, Issue 46, March 1989, guest edited by Simon Herbert and Jon Bewley of Projects UK; and ‘Future Dread’, The List, December 1989, by Malcolm Dickson. 10. Originally published in 1983 as The Anti-Aesthetic: essays on postmodernism, Bay Press. 11. See Richard Cork’s book of the same name,Yale Books, 2002. 12. Presentation at The Centre is Here, a Street Level Photoworks seminar, 26-27th October, 1996. The project is also discussed later in this article. 13. See David Thorp’s article ‘Alternative Practice’ at http:// www.zooartfair.com; also see an interview with Jonathan Harvey at http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk and more information on Acme in http://www.artistsineastlondon.org. The London lineage of progressive artist-run initiatives was explored recently in the Centre of Attention’s show fast and loose (my dead gallery) – London 1956-2006. This included 2B Butler’s Wharf, who had similarities with The Basement Group and also involved exchanges in personnel. See article by David Critchley on 2B Butler’s Wharf from 1975-78 at http://www. thecentreofattention.org. 14. Robert Ayers and Barry Smith, NRLA Archive at the Live Art Archive: http://art.ntu.ac.uk/nrla. See also Adrian Henri’s Environments and Happenings, Thames and Hudson, 1974, and Jeff Nuttall’s Performance Art: memoirs, Riverrun Press,
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1979/80, both of which capture the milieu of the times in which live art emerged. 15. ‘All Mad, Drugged or Drunk’, Variant issue 4, Winter/ Spring 1988. Miller also gave a talk on the political potential of live art at the Free University around the same time. 16. Projects UK interview by Alex Fulton, Variant issue 4, ibid. This issue also features articles on performance events at the Collective (in Edinburgh), EDGE, an interview with Alastair MacLennan, and the article mentioned in footnote 17. 17. The ER organised a number of literary and poetry readings at Tranmission in the 80s under the title ‘Transmission Goes Verbal’. 18. Neil Ascherson, ‘Enterprise and the Cult of Failure’, The Observer, date unknown. 19. In particular the exhibition War of Images, a nationally selected show of issue-based work featuring Tony Rickaby, Peter Seddon, Gordon Muir, Peter Thompson; John Yeadon’s celebrated Mayfest show The Shining City on the Hill; a number of other exhibitions by ex-GSA Painting Department defectors and defenders. 20. See Craig Richardson’s ‘Breathing Space’ in Free Association, issue 1, May 2006 Also, Variant, issue 12 (News 57 Gallery), 13 (Demarco) and 15 (Third Eye Centre) as part of a planned, ongoing series of historical footnotes. 21. Performance Magazine 43, Sept/Oct 1986. :MHIS XS[EVHW HI½RMRK ER EIWXLIXMG XSSO TPEGI EX XLI Third Eye Centre in 1976, and was also organised by Steve Partridge, Tamara Krikorian and Lindsay Gordon. 23. This included video installations by Partridge, Pictorial Heroes, Steve Littman, Zoe Redman; video performance F] /IZMR %XLIVXSR 8SR] .YHKI ERH &VMER 6S[PERH E ½PQ installation by Jane Rigby and a music performance by Tom McGrath and Peter Nardini. See review article ‘Come on in, we are open, this is art and this is free’, Malcolm Dickson, Performance Magazine, May/June 1986. 24. Students from the Environmental Art Course at Glasgow School of Art participating in Hooker’s performance were Craig Richardson, Douglas Gordon, Andrew Lockhart, and John Oliver. 1IQFIV XMXPIW VIžIGXIH XLI VERKI SJ PIJX TYFPMWLMRK EX XLI time: Feminist Arts News, The Ecologist, The Ethical Consumer, Jewish Socialist, Scottish Child, Sanity, Tribune, Open Mind, Socialist Lawyer, Everywoman, Spare Rib, and others. 26. For example, Christine Borland extended its contacts in Belfast by distributing it when she was on the MA course there, and Douglas Gordon likewise at the Slade in London. -X MRGPYHIH E RYQFIV SJ MRXIVZMI[W EX XLI ½VWX :MHIS Positive Festival in Liverpool in 1989: Steve Bode, Jez Welsh, Eddie Berg, Mike Stubbs, Moira Sweeney, Maria Vedder, Willem Velthoven, Michael Maziere and Simon Robertshaw, plus a feature on Pictorial Heroes on collaborative video practice and oppositional culture. A later issue of Variant, No. 14, 1993, was a special issue produced in partnership with Video Positive and edited by Helen Cadwallader. 28. The title of this video, Workers City: the subversive past, paid homage to both Workers City and The Pleasure Tendency (see footnote 67). The video included interviews with Hamish Henderson, Farquhar McLay, James D.Young, and John Taylor Caldwell.
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29. In the course of this article I discovered from Stewart Home’s website (http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/snip. html) that Nik Houghton had committed suicide earlier in XLI ]IEV E JEGX GSR½VQIH F] 0Y\ 3RPMRI´W RI[W[MVI WIVZMGI EX LXXT PMWXW PY\ SVK YO ,SYKLXSR [EW SRI SJ XLI ½VWX FYX most consistent champions of video art, principally through the magazine Independent Video, which he edited for a while. He had recently been working as a teacher with Bengali children and performing in various East End art venues with The Lonesome Cowboys from Hell. 30. It was premiered at Transmission in October 1989, then presented at the Brussels International Super 8 Film and Video Festival, AVE in Holland, the ICA in London and at The Next Five Minutes: Tactical Television festival in Amsterdam. Two Variant Audio GEWWIXXIW EPWS ETTIEVIH XLI ½VWX EZEMPEFPI in limited edition with issue 7 and the second with issue 8 – both compiled by William Clark. Other events were recorded with a view to continuing the magnetic magazine format, but a combination of lack of resources, time, advancing technologies and lack of access to them prevented that from happening. 31. The former site is now home to the Science Centre and to a base for the BBC. Talk of a ‘world-class’ media village in the riverside location are now taking shape in the alleged ÂŁ72 million development (Sunday Herald, Aug 26, 2001). This includes the recent completion of a purpose built bridge onto the site itself for the convenience of car owners. 32. Tim Brennan, Variant, issue 5, Summer/Autumn 1988 – this issue also included documentation of billboard interventions undertaken by Roddy Buchanan in Belfast and Glasgow (also used on the cover), material by Alison Marchant, ‘The Garden Festival Plot’ by Louise Scullion, the artist led events Order Out of Chaos and Artists for the Environment in Rochdale, a footnote to The Festival of Plagiarism, and an announcement of the 1988 Festival of Non-Participation advocated by Dundee Neoist Pete Horobin. 33.The Scotsman, July 25, 1988.Concurrently in Edinburgh, ERSXLIV WMKRM½GERX TYFPMG EVX [SVO [EW FIMRK YRHIVXEOIR by Krysztof Wodizcko on Calton Hill which also provided a focus for cultural and political debate and continues to have great social resonance. The Edinburgh Projections were organised by Artangel and occurred as part of the Edinburgh Festival. The work included projections onto the columns SJ XLI YR½RMWLIH GST] SJ XLI 4EVXLIRSR MQEKIW XLEX VITVIWIRXIH XLI HMWIRJVERGLMWIH SJ XLI GMX] Âł4IVWSRM½GEXMSRW of homelessness, single parenthood, unemployment, alcoholism and drug addiction loomed over the city. The text “Morituri te Salutantâ€? (those who are about to die salute you) was projected onto the lintel above. Across the hill the face of Margaret Thatcher and the words “Pax Brittanicaâ€? were projected onto the dome of the observatory.’ http:// www.artangel.org.uk/pages/past/past_frame_04.html. 8LI QYVEP MW ½XXMRKP] HMWETTIEVMRK SZIV XMQI FYX GER WXMPP be partially viewed at Binnie Place, off of London Road and by Templeton’s Business Centre. (EZMH ,EVHMRK [EW 7GSXPERH´W ½VWX XS[R EVXMWX MR Glenrothes New Town from 1968-78 and also taught on the Art and Social Context course at Dartington. See interview, Variant issue 8, 1990, and also http://www.davidharding.org
36. Sites/Positions’s budget at the time didn’t exceed ÂŁ12,000, with ÂŁ6,000 of that going towards the artists’ commissions and presentation costs (ÂŁ1k per artist on average). An EJXIVRSSR WIQMREV I\TPSVMRK XLI ½RI EVX ERH GSQQYRMX] art connection was undertaken at the time in The Pearce Institute, Govan. 8LI &MPPFSEVH TVSNIGX [EW ½RERGMEPP] WYTTSVXIH F] Glasgow District Council Festivals Budget and was sponsored by Trainer Displays Ltd. This included work by Mona Hatoum, Willie Doherty, Mitra Tabrizian & Andy Golding, Graham Budgett, Michael Peel and Tam Joseph. 38. E-mail to the author (2006). The exchange involved Shaz Kerr, Nuala Gregory and D.A. Morrison from Belfast, and Craig Richardson, Douglas Gordon and Roddy Buchanan from the Environmental Art course in Glasgow. 39. discussed by Peter Hill in Aspects magazine, 1985, no 30. 40. MacLennan had also performed at The Basement Group in 1981 (24 Hours), was included in Projects UK’s Touring Exhibitionists at Rochdale Art Gallery and Liverpool Garden Festival in 1984, as well as in 1986 with Lie to Lay, another Projects UK-organised event. 41. These artists all ‘activated’ the Third Eye’s external features in the NRLA in 1988, with Sutherland’s 1988 durational performance Ecology Concern One in the lane adjoining the busy thoroughfare of the main street, and The Puberty Institution’s Refuse, which was installed on the roof of the building. The latter duo undertook a number of installation/performances in that one year: 40 Years from Cradle to Grave at the SSA, Edinburgh; an untitled work for Transmission off-site underneath Midland Street car park; Forget Names and Faces at Oceaan Gallery, Arnhem, The Netherlands, as part of the AVE Festival. Sutherland, Gordon and Richardson then undertook a performance installation at the Riverside under the name of Tradition/Debilitation. 42. Art and Research Exchange: The Legacy, public seminar at Belfast’s Linenhall Library, 21st November 2006, organised by Interface. For more information, see http://www.interface. rehabstudio.co.uk and go to ‘Media Room’. 43. Anne Carlisle ‘CIRCA: Around, about and very much still there’, CIRCA issue 117, Autumn, 2006, pp. 34-37. 44. Locus + project connections to Ireland, North and South, included Nhan Nguyen’s The Temple of My Familiar in Belfast, Mark Wallinger’s A Real Work of Art (both occurred in 1994 and were produced in collaboration with Flax Art Studios in Belfast) and Shane Cullen’s Fragmens sur les Institutions RĂŠpublicaines (panels 1-48) at Tyneside Irish Centre in 1996. 45.Variant, issue 9, Autumn 1991. 46. Ibid, p. 47. 47. Artists were Richard Wright, Jacqueline Donachie, Anna Millson, Emma Neilson and Gerard Byrne. 48. The Catalyst committee then included included Karen Vaughan, Mark Orange, Robert Peters, Derval Fitzgerald, Eilis O’Baoill, Bob McDonald and Siofra Campbell. Like at Tranmission, many of the city’s artists and cultural workers passed through its committee. 49. Brian Connolly observes that this event was preceded by the event Available Resources in Derry in 1992, and before that the Irish Art Now exhibition held in Turin in
1986, featuring Alastair MacLennan, Brian Connolly, Nick Stewart and Brian Kennedy. See Slavka Sverakova, ‘Available Resources’, Variant, issue9, page 42/43, Autumn 1991. 50. Two members of this group – Karen Vaughan and Mhairi Sutherland – returned shortly after to Glasgow and subsequently set up the artists’ group Not in Kansas with Rachel Mimiec. 51. Peter Suchin, ‘Resonate: Some Markers for the Memory’, catalogue 1998. 52. It included contributions from Ross Sinclair, Peter 1G'EYKLI] 8EVE &EFIP 2MGSPE %XOMRWSR +VMJ½XL (EZMH Harding, Mark Dawes, Doug Aubrey, Hettie Judah (all Glasgow), Susannah Silver (Aberdeen), Kevin Henderson (Dundee), Jon Bewley (Newcastle), Karen Strang (Stirling), Eoghan McTigue (Belfast), Martin McCabe (Dublin) and Mike Stubbs (Hull). For some other commentary on the event see Malcolm Dickson, ‘Another Year of Alienation: on the myth of the artists run space’ in Duncan McCorquodale, Naomi 7MHIV½R ERH .YPMER 7XEPPEFVEWW )HW Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, 1998. 53. See interview ‘I SEE DANGER’ by Declan McGonagle, Performance Magazine no. 47, 1987. 54. Mark Dawes, Artists Newsletter, January 1997, pp. 15 55. Tara Babel, presentation at The Centre is Here, held at Glasgow School of Art, and organised by Street Level, October , 1997. 56. Mainly Angela Darby. 57. The event at Street Level included three Belfast artists (Jo McGonigal, Ciara Finnegan and Theo Sims), plus three from the Three Month Gallery in Liverpool (Kate Wise, Richard Hughes and Graham Parker); as well as artists from Street Level (Mhairi Sutherland, Mark Dawes, Tara Babel and Kevin Henderson). 58. Life/Live catalogue, Editions des MusĂŠes de la Ville de Paris, 1996, pp. 45-46. The entry was accompanied by a photograph of the Locus +/Catalyst Arts project by Daniel Matinez, How to Con a Capitalist in Belfast 1995. 59. ‘Upping the ante in the culture wars’, Visual Artists News Sheet (formerly Sculpture Society of Ireland), issue 4, July 2004. 60. ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail spectacularly (No sanctuary from caricature, parody and oblivion...)’, Variant, issue16, Winter 2002. All back issues of Variant are archived at http://www.variant.randomstate.org. Individual copies SJ XLI ½VWX ZSPYQI JVSQ ÂŻ TEVXMGYPEV MWWYIW within which are referenced here – can be downloaded to view. The second volume from 1996 to the present can be viewed as individual articles and printed out as text or PDF. An accessible and fully searchable index is available for the volume. 61. Nick Evans, ‘Tired of the Soup du Jour’, Variant, issue16, Winter 2003. 62. See http://www.davidharding.org. According to Harding, the term ‘Scotia Nostra’ was originally used by Peter Stitt, who applied it to himself and colleagues such as John Bellany, Bill Crozier and others who populated a number of English art schools in the 70s. Harding used this term with his students and it was subsequently used in Douglas Gordon’s speech on receiving the Turner Prize in 1996, and as a
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consequence is a term used to describe that close network of artists from GSA. 63. See Life is Good in Manchester:The Annual Programme 1995 to 2000, Trice Publications, available from International 3 artists run space and see also: http://www. theannualprograme.com. 64. Nick Evans, op. cit., pp. 37 65. Ibid. 66. From a discussion paper circulated in May 1984 to individuals who would subsequently publish the magazine Here & Now which was undertaken in Glasgow and West Yorkshire where The Pleasure Tendency were based. It appeared in Here & Now in the Summer of 1985 and was published by the The Pleasure Tendency as ‘The Subversive Past’ in October 1985. ISBN 0 948688 017.
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