Visual art: WhoseSpace?

Published on Friday 28 March 2008 20:02

IN DECEMBER LAST YEAR, GLASgow's Gallery of Modern Art found itself, briefly, at the centre of a battle. For once, this was not a battle about the merits of Beryl Cook paintings, or the public funding of obscure video art, it was about the space around the building itself.

For years, Royal Exchange Square has been a meeting point for teenagers in black eyeliner and extravagantly ripped clothing, who hang around on the steps under Niki De Saint Phalle's mirrored mosaic, harming no-one in particular. But the council was attempting to clear the square: the "GoMA Goths" were being moved on.

Such are the difficulties when it comes to drawing a line around what is public. If a space is "public" for those shopping and eating out in the chi-chi stores and restaurants clustered about Royal Exchange Square, it must also be "public" for the goth kids, and the revellers who like to crown Wellington's statue with a traffic cone.

Issues of public and private, greatly in contention in the modern city, will be held up and examined from a variety of angles next month in Glasgow International, the city's visual art biennale. Alongside shows in major art spaces by the likes of Jim Lambie, Jonathan Monk and Catherine Yass, creativity will spread out into disused shops, derelict buildings, private houses and on to the city streets.

As curator Francis McKee understood when he chose "public/private" as the festival's theme (it is optional for artists), the boundaries between the two are becoming increasingly blurred. A person on a train has an intimate conversation on their mobile phone in full earshot of two dozen other passengers. A conversation between two smokers outside a pub is being filmed on CCTV. An employee is sacked because of something their boss read on their MySpace or Facebook page. Private indiscretions are filmed and posted on YouTube.

Artists are increasingly operating on the edges of that world. New York-based artist Kalup Linzy, who will have his first UK exhibition at GI, shows his videos on YouTube as well as well as in galleries. He is also the star of his own work, typically scripting soap-opera shorts in which he plays all the parts.

Kendall Koppe, of artist-run gallery Washington Garcia, says: "We thought of him as soon as we saw the theme. His work deals with personal issues in a very public manner. There is that tension of an artist leading a public life and still trying to be a private person."

McKee is also keen to kick-start a debate about public and private support within the art world. "What's the nature of public institutions?" he says. "Do we have a contract with the public any more? Post-1945 there was a consensus that public money should be used to fund contemporary art. That contract has fallen into disrepute as contemporary art has become seen as more difficult. Now it's too much of a hot potato to be discussed by politicians. So, stupidly, I thought that I would discuss it!"

He is also stirring the pot about Glasgow itself, and the wave of new privately funded developments at the riverside, which has created space that is nominally public but feels corporate.

Where is the public space in the modern city? Artist Simon Yuill directly addresses the issue of land ownership and public access in his work for GI, a film work exploring the story of Pollok Free State, a campaign against land which had been gifted to the people of Glasgow being used for private housing and the building of the M77 motorway.

"It wasn't just about the motorway and the environmental damage," says Yuill, whose work, using video footage made at the time, will be shown at the Gal Gael community boat yard in Govan. "It is about land ownership. It was an urban equivalent of the crofters' struggles for land on Skye and Knoydart."

Meanwhile, artist-run organisation A.Vermin will explore the public/private boundaries in another type of location: the pub. "You're in a shared space with people you don't know, but you're also discussing things, there are arguments, people getting drunk, it's a public venue but quite intimate," says founder Alhena Katsof, who is behind the project in the State Bar in Holland Street. "Since we're subject to so much surveillance in the city, places like pubs are areas we like to think of as our own space.

"We're not clearing out the pub and hanging an exhibition; all the artists are creating works in conversation with the pub as a functional space. Regulars will come in and find the pub transformed. Others might come in expecting an exhibition, but might have a pint, sit and engage with the show."

That puts a new meaning on the phrase "public art", but what about the more traditional one? Another of Glasgow's artist-run organisations, Lowsalt, is working with artist Iain Kettles to take inflatable sculptures out onto the streets. During GI, Kettles's work will appear randomly around the city, hanging from windows, sitting atop bus shelters, in open spaces.

The element of surprise means the sculptures are like threedimensional graffiti, a kind of benign vandalism that challenges preconceptions. Rebecca Anson, co-founder of Lowsalt, says: "In Glasgow at the moment, the city council is clamping down on fly-posting, painting over posters with blank paint or sticking 'cancelled' notices across them, and putting in pillars which you have to pay to put posters on. The landscape of the city is being changed, cleaned up. Iain is planning to make reference to that."

Both "public" and "private" art galleries will contribute to GI; indeed the two collaborate so closely in Glasgow it is sometimes hard to draw a line between them. McKee is interested in how the rise of private galleries working with contemporary artists, such as the Modern Institute and Sorcha Dallas, is "changing the centre of gravity of the city's art scene".

Running parallel to this is a question about the role of publicly funded galleries, and whether they need to appeal to the widest possible public, thus restricting the work they show not according to the market, but according to its public appeal.

McKee, who is also director of the CCA, says: "There is a valid argument for saying that places like the CCA should do some experimental work rather than things that a lot of people will come to. You need to have spaces where people can try things out that might work or might fail. Small visitor figures may not give a true representation of the value of what's just happened.

"The art world is one of the last homes of experimentation. As other art forms are becoming more homogenous, less experimental, the art world is becoming the home for lots of projects that can't survive in film or music or dance. If mainstream publishing is churning out infinite biographies of people like Wayne Rooney, anyone who wants to do anything vaguely experimental ends up in the art world."

At the same time, private galleries give artists a means of selling their work, of tapping into the international world of contemporary art collectors, without leaving Glasgow. Gallery owner Sorcha Dallas believes both kinds of gallery are important for a healthy art scene, but that artist-run projects, which often have little or no funding at first, are perhaps the most important of all.

"Artist-run activities aren't conforming to a market, they are pre-empting it, setting new standards. They are a really crucial part of why Glasgow is the interesting place it is."

Many artist-run galleries such as A.Vermin and Mary Mary started off by mounting exhibitions in their homes. There is a throwback to this in one of Glasgow's most intriquing new art venues, Douglas Gordon's Glasgow home in Woodland Terrace (in GI it will show work by Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed).

"It's a very nice gesture by Douglas to take a private house and make it public," says McKee. "Also because it is a famous person's house, there is that almost prurient curiosity about it. He's well aware of the tradition of showing works in homes in Glasgow; it was going on while he was a student. It's that Glasgow DIY ethos: 'We're not going to wait for someone to come and offer us a show, we're going to do it ourselves'."

Another well-loved Glasgow tradition is to use the whole city as the backdrop for a work of art. "One of the things emerging in GI over the last two festivals is that people like exploring the city," says McKee. "The character of the city is a very important part of the festival, it's still quite raw and people enjoy roaming around it."

Lowsalt are currently mounting one such project: a promenade performance based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, by artists Raydale Dower and Judd Brucke, who will lead their audience through some of the city's more unusual and undiscovered spaces.

"Lowsalt sent me an e-mail listing the places they would like to make work and asking who owns them," says McKee. "The fact is that we don't know either. All this makes the question of ownership of the space more visible. We may be on the verge of finding out just how much public space there is in this city."

&#149 Glasgow International runs from 11 to 27 April, although some exhibitions continue beyond that date. For more details, visit www.glasgowinternational.org