George Wyllie: Marvels of a Georgian era

HE SAILED a lifesize paper boat on the Hudson River. He placed a giant bird on top of the Berlin Wall. He took air from Scotland in plastic bags and released it in London. There is no end to the inventiveness and ambition of Scottish sculptor George Wyllie.

At 90, Wyllie is retired, though only comparatively recently. He’s frail, but chipper enough to enjoy the fact that a year-long festival is about to celebrate his artistic legacy. The Whysman Festival, named after the Channel 4 documentary about Wyllie by Murray and Barbara Grigor, promises exhibitions, events and publications, culminating in a major retrospective at the Mitchell Library in the autumn.

“This year is really about bringing him to the forefront for people who know him and those who might not,” said Louise Wyllie, George’s daughter, and one of the festival organisers. “For us as a family, it’s important to do it while he’s still with us. It’s meant to be celebratory and fun.”

When a series of falls forced George to move out of the family home in Gourock into a care home, his family realised that his work was in danger of being forgotten. Despite making iconic projects such as the Paper Boat and the Straw Locomotive, a steam engine made of straw which was suspended from the Finnieston Crane and burned, he is poorly represented in galleries and museums.

After what Louise Wyllie describes as “a tsunami of support”, The Whysman Festival gets under way this weekend with the opening of George Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary at the Collins Gallery, an exhibition drawn from Wyllie’s extensive archive, which he gifted to the University of Strathclyde. A book of his poetry – he was a prolific and accomplished writer – will be launched on Monday at the Aye Write! Book Festival.

The Collins Gallery show celebrates more than 40 years of art-making, but it is also bittersweet: the gallery, which gave Wyllie his first major solo show in 1976, has had its funding withdrawn by the university and will close when this show is finished. The press release ends poignantly with the words: “We can think of no better way to go.”

Staff are not allowed to speak about the closure of the gallery, but Wyllie - no stranger to funding battles himself – speaks for them, in words taken from an interview for the British Library Sound Archive in 2004. “(Nowadays) because we can, we can completely neglect the stimulation of art, we don’t do it, we let people take over; corporates, engineers, even architects, who have no passion for the arts. That’s a big problem. I don’t know how you can bust that.”

Wyllie was 45 when he gave up his job as a customs and excise officer to become an artist. He had no formal training, but Louise Wyllie remembers her father spending every spare minute on his art. “From our house, he could see the ships coming up the river, and he knew exactly how long it would take him to get down to the customs house, so every available minute went into his work. When he could retire he did, and went into it full time.”

Key stimulation came from seeing an exhibition at Kelvingrove by Italian artists from the Agricoli Movement who made sculptures which looked like agricultural machinery. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I could do that,’” he said later. “‘So I got a welding plant and started making sculpture.’” He never looked back.

His work was often shot through with humour. Though the integrity of his ideas was entirely serious, he loved wordplay and visual jokes. The curator of the Collins Gallery, Laura Hamilton, says: “It’s about celebrating what he got up to without making him look like a complete clown. It’s a problem he had throughout his career, a lot of people didn’t take him seriously. Some things he did deliberately just for fun, but often he used laughter as a way of reaching people.”

Wyllie was an astute commentator on contemporary life. His mantra was “Be suspicious”. The question mark, he said, must be at the centre of everything. His Fringe First winning play, A Day Down a Goldmine, in the mid-1980s, asked pertinent questions about consumerism and wealth. He reserved particular suspicion for bankers.

“There was always a philosophical message and more often than not a political message,” says Hamilton. “He wasn’t ramming it down people’s throats, but it was definitely there.”

Large scale projects such as the Straw Locomotive and the Paper Boat captured the public imagination, speaking of the disappearance of heavy industry from the West of Scotland. The 80-foot boat - actually constructed from tarpaulin wrapped around a steel frame to look like origami - visited Liverpool, London (where Wyllie added a mast so that Tower Bridge had to open for it) and New York, when it sailed on to the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The quirkiness of his work could also be profound. A sculpture of a 21-foot safety pin gained a new and poignant resonance when Hamilton suggested it should be installed permanently on the site of the former Rottenrow Maternity Hospital. “It had only been up about two months when a little posy of flowers appeared an the bottom. People are using it as a shrine.”

The key influence in Wyllie’s artistic life was with German artist Joseph Beuys, whom he met through Edinburgh gallerist Richard Demarco. Demarco, who will open the Collins Gallery show, says: “George is an internationalist. He went to the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, to Budapest, to Bratislava, Sarajevo. He went with me to visit Beuys in Dusseldorf, Beuys cooked him dinner, they talked about Adam Smith. He is the one Scottish artist who dined with Joseph Beuys.”

Demarco is critical of the fact that the National Galleries of Scotland does not own a single work by Wyllie. “They are considering buying one piece, but they should buy at least 20. We should have a permanent display of the work and achievements of George Wyllie. He was no ordinary human being, we must do more to make sure he is remembered.

“I’m extremely interested in what happens (to the Wyllie archive) after the exhibition because the Collins Gallery is closing, I think the university should rethink its responsibility to Glasgow’s artists.”

Hamilton says: “I think the most important thing about George Wyllie is his sheer energy. Deciding to become an artist against all the odds, he went for it and achieved stuff that nobody has on that scale since. I think he should be remembered for his big ideas and the realisation of them. It’s a wake up call to the world at large that these things were important, still are.”

• George Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary is at the Collins Gallery, Glasgow from 10 March until 21 April. George Wyllie at 90: A Celebration is at the Mitchell Library on 12 March as part of the Aye Write! Book Festival. For more information on the Whysman Festival, see www.whysman.co.uk