Appreciation: George Wyllie

‘Who is the man/ it please as much to doubt/ as to be certain?’ wrote Liz Lochhead on George Wyllie’s 75th birthday.

She puts her finger on something essential about the man and his art.

He used it to ask questions, to raise issues and sow doubt among the flimsy certainties we are offered by those who seek to shape our society in their own interest.

The question mark was his chosen symbol, his signature almost. So he didn’t make sculpture, he made Scul?ture.

Liz Lochhead again, ‘Which Great Scot/(pronouncedly Scottish) pronounces/Scul?ture/most Scotchly with a question mark and a/glottal stop?’

Wyllie’s Scul?ture often involved performance more than the production of static objects, though he could make those too.

One of his most dramatic Scul?tural interventions was the Straw Locomotive. It was a full-size replica in straw of one of the great steam engines once built in the west of Scotland and was hung from the Finnieston crane in Glasgow before being carried through the streets and ceremonially burnt. It was a potent symbol of the effect of the government policies under Thatcher that were destroying Scotland’s industrial base.

Wyllie threw out ideas like the sparks from a locomotive’s funnel. He built a Paper Boat, 60 feet long, and sailed it on the Thames and in New York Harbour.

With it he delivered to the World Trade Center, symbolic centre of modern capitalism, a copy of Adam Smith’s other book, his Theory of Moral Sentiment. It is the book in which Smith balances economic theory with the marvellous insight that what holds us together in societies is not self-interest, but sympathy.

Sympathy is a function of the imagination and so Wyllie quietly demonstrated that his own art, indeed all serious art, is not marginal, but central to the proper working of society. Wyllie took to art late in life. Like Robert Burns – and indeed the douanier Rousseau in France, also a creatively unorthodox self-taught artist – Wyllie worked as a customs officer. Before that he had been a sailor. Serving in the Pacific, he visited Hiroshima soon after the city’s devastation, an experience that helps illuminate the underlying seriousness of his art.

When he did take up art, however, he wasn’t sure at first whether he should be comic or serious. It must be said that some of Wyllie’s comic art is very charming, but it soon became clear that, like Burns, he could be most serious when he was most comic, that wit can be the vehicle of truth.