Scotland's artistic treasures: Duncan Macmillan on the Edinburgh art festival

As the Art Festival develops into a force to be reckoned with, remember that we have another who is here all year and his collection deserves proper recognition

• Richard Demarco brought Joseph Beuys to Edinburgh Picture: Jon Savage

AS A BOY, the experience of seeing the Royal Scottish Academy at the Festival - filled, in successive years, with exhibitions of Czanne, Monet and Gauguin - has a lot to do with the fact that I am writing these pages now.

Those exhibitions, put on by Robert Ponsonby, Edinburgh International Festival director from 1956-60, in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy, were a life-changing experience. But since then, although the three weeks of the EIF have provided a showcase for art in Scotland, it has played a minimal role in the event itself.

I argued the case with several directors, and really got under John Drummond's skin by suggesting that all the EIF venues together filled to capacity every night couldn't come close to the attendance for the visual arts. I raised it with Brian McMaster, but he wouldn't budge either. The galleries were too independent to enlist in what he saw as his festival and he had neither the interest nor resources to undertake an art programme himself.

After that abortive conversation, it was clear the visual arts were on their own. The Edinburgh Gallery Guide was launched to provide independent collective publicity for Edinburgh's large and diverse gallery community. Funded entirely by the participating galleries, it ran for a number of years, but the growing importance of the visual arts meant something more ambitious was needed.

I was delighted to get support from Robert Ponsonby himself when I proposed an independent Visual Arts Festival on this page a few years ago. The idea was taken up, the Art Festival was born and is now in its seventh year. It has a director, Joanne Brown, and a small staff. The director's role is administrative, not curatorial; artistically the festival is still a collective enterprise, like the old Gallery Guide.

It does get public money, however. Grants from the City of Edinburgh and the former Scottish Arts Council amount to 70,000 this year; fundraising added another 170,000 - serious money to raise the profile of the largest gallery community outside London. Even so, one senior gallery director complained bitterly that some of the London critics on their brief, annual swing through Edinburgh actually walked right past his gallery.

This year there were 54 listed events, including performances, interventions, open studios and so on, as well as exhibitions proper. The Art Festival asks participating galleries to add activities to static displays, so there is an impressive list of lectures, workshops, demonstrations, exhibition tours and the like in the programme. In addition, 15 galleries across the city joined in a late-night party/opening last Thursday.

It is too soon to judge the success of this year's Art Festival, I am told, but the feeling is that things are going well. Portobello Beach saw an installation of fruit machines by Miles Swan that proved a hit by its sheer oddness.

Granton Lighthouse was venue for timely reflections by Shaeron Averbuch on the disastrous development of the Edinburgh seafront, important even if nobody had come.

The major venues draw visitors in their tens of thousands. Impressionist Gardens at the RSA is doing well - ticket sales are already better than expected - but if you can't make success of a show that combines Impressionism and gardening, you're in the wrong business.

This year the Art Festival was also the agent for several commissions, chosen from submissions by the galleries. Most were ephemeral, but two are permanent. Funded by the Scottish Government's Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund, Richard Wright has doodled on the ceiling above the stairs at the Dean Gallery. The kind of thing you might have to paint out if you were doing up a run-down student flat, they do not improve Thomas Hamilton's elegant architecture at all. Martin Creed, on the other hand, has developed a proposal for the restoration of the Scotsman Steps in magnificent polychrome marble, so there will be at least one monument worthy of the place the visual arts have occupied in festival Edinburgh for the past 60 years in spite of the apparent aversion to them of the majority of the EIF's directors over that time.

Jonathan Mills has taken a more positive attitude, and has instituted a biennial visual art component to the EIF. Neither of the two biennials so far has been distinguished, but there is always hope.

However, there is another monument to the place of the visual arts in festival Edinburgh, and not just to this year, but to every year since 1963. At Craigcrook Castle Richard Demarco is showing the astonishing archive of his contributions to Edinburgh during the EIF since his gallery in the Traverse opened in 1963.

What is on show is baffling in both its complexity and its sheer quantity, even if, as I was, you are privileged to be taken around by Demarco himself. There is a full chronology in the book The Demarco Collection and Archive, and it lists the countless events that he has promoted over the years and also some of the innumerable people involved in them.

He has had very little public support, but for almost 50 years he has been, quite simply, a one-man international festival of the visual arts. Demarco has witnessed all the festivals since it began. Now 80, he was 17 when it was launched in 1947 at the darkest moment of post-war austerity. As I was, he was inspired by the major exhibitions of the early years and as soon as he got the chance he began to make his own contribution. Over the years, he ran galleries in a string of different places. He even used the Fruitmarket and the building that is now the City Art Centre before they became permanent galleries.

From the start, he saw that the EIF was an opportunity to bring people of talent and originality to Scotland and so raise the game and the ambitions of people here. He put on Strategy Get Arts during the festival in 1970, for instance, where famously he first brought Joseph Beuys to international attention. It was for the EIF in 1972 that he first brought Tadeusz Kantor and Cricot 2 to Edinburgh.

Photos by Andrzej Wetminski of Kantor's Dead Class of 1975 are on display at Craigcrook Castle. Printed on silk and hung against the light, ghosts of a great performance, they are strange and beautiful. So are the gold and porcelain hammers of Steven Earl Weber. He's a young American artist; Demarco is still creating opportunities.

His forays behind the Iron Curtain to find artists and performers flourishing in adversity such as Kantor, Marina Abramovic and Paul Neagu were important for both sides. He showed them alongside Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fred Stiven, Will Maclean, Pat Douthwaite and many other Scots who have since made their own mark.

There are art works by all these people and many others here. Showing me the castle, Demarco recalls enthusiastically that former tenants included the publisher Archibald Constable and the lawyer and critic Francis Jeffrey. During their tenancies it hosted most of the leading figures of the Enlightenment. It is a beautiful building, too. Harmoniously combining elements from every century since the 16th, it links the Renaissance with the Enlightenment and the present day.

It is a fitting home for Demarco, but the rent is steep and the future of his collection and archive uncertain. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has acquired some of Demarco's archive and a small part of his collection, but there is much more. These things are surely of more relevance to us than Anthony d'Offay's gift, and we owe it to Demarco and to our own sense of history to see them given a proper home.