Art review: George Wyllie, A Life Less Ordinary, Collins Gallery, Glasgow

HE WAS, he once recalled, the best bogie builder in Cardonald. And, surveying the scene at an exhibition of his personal archive at Glasgow’s Collins Gallery, the artist George Wyllie stayed true to those origins. His is an art of simple forms, basic mechanisms, yet great impetus and speed. Close to the ground, close to the wind, it has whistled its way down the local street and into the nation’s subconscious.

From the Straw Locomotive and the Paper Boat, to the Monument To Maternity, the giant safety pin that found its home on the site of the old Rotten Row maternity hospital, Wyllie’s best public projects combined snappy ideas with a cobbled together aesthetic that collapsed the distance between the artist and his audience.

He once said that his Scul?ture (“the question mark,” he explained “was at the centre of everything”) was a movement that shuffled rather than actually moved. But he was being disingenuous. Like the Running Clock, his bi-pedal time piece outside Buchanan Street Bus Station, Wylie’s art has run fast and far without ever needing to leaving home.

George Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary marks Wyllie’s 90th year and the beginning of a year-long Whysman festival that will culminate in a major retrospective at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library.

The festival has been organised with an urgency, and a slightly histrionic media campaign, that suggests his ideas and his legacy are about to be forgotten. I’d contend that was never even a remote possibility. In Glasgow, in particular, he is part of the very fabric of the city.

But Wyllie’s frail state (he is a widower no longer able to live at his Gourock home), his seniority and his social as well as artistic importance do mean that his family and supporters now need to work with museum professionals and major institutions to secure sensible and sympathetic homes for a number of works.

In the meantime, at the Collins Gallery, we get Wyllie the man and the artist, if it’s possible to separate the two, and a thrilling sense of the personal treasure trove that he gifted to Strathclyde University.

The show is rammed with the kind of ephemera and excessive production that marked Wyllie’s career. Small sculptures climb the walls; models and maquettes teeter on their plinths. The cabinets are fit to burst with family photos, sketches, notebooks and clippings. And there are words. Words everywhere: Wyllie’s posters, his notes, yards of newspaper clippings, his collected poems in a new book with a foreword by Liz Lochhead.

The key Wyllie motifs are all here. There is the form of the spire that he absorbed from his observation of ships masts, a kind of cosmic aerial attuned to the rhythms of the universe. There is the tree, of vital importance in Norse mythology as a link between earthly concerns with the divine and the aspirational. The stone: in Wyllie’s hands even a bulky boulder could take flight. And the birds. In keeping with the democratic intellect, which he both espoused and embodied, Wyllie’s best birds are the humble, familiar ones. The robins roost, the sparrows chatter. The imperial eagle, a welded beast that to be honest is pretty hideous, could never quite take flight.

Wyllie was an untrained artist; the closest he ever got to training was when he successfully auditioned for the Glasgow School of Art jazz band. His legacy, like that of his great inspiration the German artist Joseph Beuys, is a mixed one: a suggestion that all of us can make art out of the stuff of our lives, yet a contradictory insistence on the personality and the status of the artist.

Like Beuys, there is great humour and also darkness to Wyllie’s work, or at least a necessity to confront darkness. As a young man he had visited the site of Hiroshima and had been profoundly affected by its destruction at what he called “the press of an idiot button”.

As a man of the Clyde, he had witnessed the decline and dismantling of the great engineering traditions that had inspired him. Wyllie’s responses seemed to convert anger into a kind of wilful energy. The Straw Locomotive might be seen as a celebration of the 18,000 locomotives built in Glasgow and transported across the world via the Clyde, but the sculpture’s final ceremonial burning in North Glasgow was a big Viking funeral and a howl of rage. The Paper Boat “sailed” in numerous locations, most famously in New York, but Wyllie sent it to its symbolic death in a breaker’s yard.

A Day Down A Goldmine, back in 1982, was his famous and prescient critique of monetarism. His trip to take 100 bags of fresh Scottish air to be released on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral to energise London is a fabulous and poetic precursor to the messy arrival, a few years later, of the Occupy protesters.

This, sadly, is the last exhibition to be held at the Collins Gallery, since the University of Strathclyde has controversially decided to close it. The loss of the curator Laura Hamilton will be felt across the country. Her long-term support of Wyllie has been instrumental in securing his archive and the university would do well to note what a cultural goldmine they are sitting on.

Thirty years ago Wyllie wrote the following words in one of his hand-written posters that fall somewhere between manuscript and artistic manifesto. “You will not, or at least not yet, be able to discover in art archives, glossy publications, Sunday supplements or remaindered bookshops any reference to the movement known as Scul?ture.” Looking at them now the crucial words are “not yet”.

Wyllie always had his eye on posterity, and in many ways he has achieved his aims, but there’s a bit more work to be done. The opening “Y” in the quote above is an illuminated capital in the shape of a catapult. This show represents the first pot shot. Time now to settle in for the long-term campaign.

• Until 21 April