All in the best
possible taste
Iain Gale
Scotland on Sunday, 31 March 2002
VISITING an art fair is a little like
what happens when, as a child, you walk into a toy store. You go with a set
idea of what you are looking for. Head for the counter. And then it happens.
You see everything spread out in front of you and some other impulse takes
over, pulling you in unlikely directions. It is only when you get home that you
realise what you have done. How did that Harry Potter game become a Lego
castle? I’ve seen it happen. Some years ago I took two leading art dealers
round a London art fair, each of them armed with a putative - £1,000. Both
claimed to know precisely what they wanted, Both emerged with something
stylistically and aesthetically different. That’s the thing about art
fairs. They make you change your mind. They’re great for shattering
preconceptions. And there is perhaps no better example of their power than this
month’s Glasgow Art Fair.
Here, in the centre of the city commonly
acclaimed as a seedbed of our brightest young artistic talent, is a gathering
of some 40 galleries offering everything from contemplative colourist
landscapes to disquieting video projections. Now in its seventh year, Glasgow
Art Fair has become an institution. From slightly uncertain beginnings it has
grown into a fully-formed entity which demands to be taken seriously. For
Glasgow Art Fair is much more than a shop front. It has achieved the
impossible. And it has done so this year by performing three small miracles
which combine to create a breath of fresh air for the Scottish art world.
Firstly, and most importantly, the fair
has managed the extraordinary feat of shrinking the nation. For years it has
been a platform for galleries from London and the South, and to offer such a
viewing opportunity to a Scottish audience is still one of its functions. But
the lamentably insular tendency of the Scottish art audience has also resulted
in a consistent inability to look anywhere beyond the Central Belt of Edinburgh
and Glasgow.
What the fair has managed, for this one
weekend, is to bring 10 of the smaller, outlying galleries to Glasgow.
It’s an eye-opening experience, which presents merely a small part of the
initiatives taking place throughout Scotland and, if you come with a southern
prejudice, you will certainly be surprised.
You would no doubt expect to find pieces
as engaging as Kate Boxer’s inspired, witty paintings from Jedburgh’s
Mainhill Gallery or Campbell Sandilands’ sublime Japanese-inspired
abstractions from East Lothian’s Stenton on view exclusively in Edinburgh
or Glasgow, if not in London. Similarly, debunking the myth that art in the
Highlands revolves around grouse and stags, the Lost Gallery in Strathdon shows
such estimable artists as Nael Hanna and Pat Semple. Moving across to Aberdeen,
the increasingly interesting Riverside Gallery pitches in with the landscapes
of Derek Robertson and Ian Munro. The Green Gallery in Aberfoyle tends to
specialise in themed shows incorporating paintings by Scottish artists
including Chris Bushe and Dorothy Stirling and perhaps their showing here will
tempt more visitors into Stirlingshire. Not that any of these galleries is
desperate for buyers. The fact that all are thriving says much for the state of
Scotland’s art scene. Frames of Perth are showing work by no less than 14
artists, including the vibrant colourism of Jeanette Lassen and Angus
McEwan’s beguiling still-lifes. In Inverness Highland Arts deals
exclusively in artists from the Highlands and Islands including James Hawkins,
Colin Kirkpatrick and Helen Denerley; all of them worth more than a passing
glance. In the same city, but a far from similar vein, artist-run Art TM has a
programme of shows with themes to rival those of the CCA. A current exhibit by
Hana Sakuma uses old book jackets to construct period dolls’ house
furniture, raising historical issues of social and national stereotyping, while
George Muhlek and Barbara Rauch’s projections would not look out of place
in any future equivalent of ‘Here & Now’.
This great variety of styles and genres
is also central to a wider achievement of the Fair, which has brought together
not only the geographically diverse, but the apparently polarised strands of
traditional and conceptual art.
At best the 15,000 predicted audience
will come away more aware of the breadth of art being produced today and
convinced of the fundamental necessity that the best of all genres should be
able to co-exist.
The organisers have also managed to
coordinate an impressive programme of related exhibitions with some of the
city’s leading public art spaces. RAW (Real Art Weekend) is a
collaboration between six of the city’s galleries: CCA, The Gallery of
Modern Art, the Lighthouse, Glasgow School of Art, Tramway and The Arches. With
the Fair acting as a central hub, each of these venues will offer work ranging
from video and light-based pieces to life-drawings. The effect of the whole
will be to create a pilot for what could eventually feel like a mini-biennale.
The development potential is huge. It is particularly refreshing to see such
champions of the contemporary avant-garde as CCA and Tramway taking part in the
same umbrella event as such diverse dealerships as Edinburgh’s Leith, Open
Eye and Scottish Galleries, and Glasgow’s Roger Billcliffe, Cyril Gerber,
John Green and Ewan Mundy. Too often a potential audience is alienated by what
it perceives to be the elitisim of the contemporary art establishment. RAW and
the fair as a whole, are pivotal to breaking down such barriers. It is
significant too that one stand at the fair should be devoted to a current
initiative at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries, designed to enable artists to
market themselves internationally. It seems to sum up the ethos of an event
which has now transformed itself from a selling opportunity into a chance to
persuade new and established collectors to support our artists at home, in
whatever part of the country they live and exhibit.
Visit this year’s fair
and I guarantee you a mixture of styles and cultures as diverse as you will
ever see in one place. What they all have in common though is quality. Let
yourself go. Watch other people as they broaden their own tastes. And
don’t blame me if you change your mind.
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