Glasgow International review: The metropolis as art gallery

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL 2012

VARIOUS VENUES, GLASGOW

BY COMPLETE coincidence, two weeks ago I was driving through the state of Virginia when I spotted a billboard advertisement for “Foamhenge”. Sure enough, we could see it up on the hillside, a lifesize replica of Stonehenge made out of styrofoam. I exchanged a “Jeepers, what-will-those-Yanks-think-of-next?” look with my travelling companion, and we moved swiftly on.

When I got back to Glasgow I discovered that Jeremy Deller’s project for Glasgow International, kept closely under wraps until its unveiling, was none other than an inflatable sculpture of Stonehenge, a kind of neolithic bouncy castle. I doubt Deller has been to Foamhenge, Virginia, but I was struck by the similarities. What makes one a piece of kitsch roadside Americana and the other a work of contemporary art?

In truth, I don’t think there’s much difference. Deller is a clever artist with a sense of humour and an interest in letting people enjoy themselves. While in art terms, Sacrilege (****) is quite slight, there is something pleasingly anarchic about it. Stonehenge began life as a site of revelry and celebration though it is now a fenced-off monument. Deller has made a portable version everyone can enjoy and a wide range of people seem to have been doing just that. For once, here is an “artwork” with no interpretative information, no instruction other than to take your shoes off and dive in. The line between art and public doesn’t get much thinner than that.

The four artists in Dialogue of Hands (***), shown in an “Outdoor Sculpture Park” in a first-floor courtyard at City of Glasgow College, are aiming for something very similar. Corin Sworn’s Tent City, well-made wooden sculptures draped with fabric, are ideal for exploration by children. Camilla Løw’s kinetic sculptures are meant to revolve – or be revolved, Chris Johanson’s steel drums are meant to be played. But the location (the only way in is through the college) the chilly weather, and the sense of underlying seriousness means that they weren’t being enjoyed with quite the same exuberance.

Nevertheless, it’s always interesting to see Glasgow’s artist population engaging in the life of the city. Ruth Ewan’s exhibition, The Glasgow Schools (***) at Scotland Street Museum, uncovers a little known piece of Glasgow history, the city’s Socialist Sunday Schools. Flourishing in the first half of the 20th century, but continuing until the 1970s, they taught good-natured leftism to kids whose parents wanted an alternative to religious Sunday School, with the same mix of moral guidance, rousing songs and healthy outdoor activities. Ewan doesn’t extrapolate or interpret as much as simply show documentary material. There isn’t much here I’d call art, but it’s a fascinating piece of local history research.

Henry Coombes has also been delving into history-rich territory in a residency at House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park. His film I am the Architect, This is Not Happening, This is Unacceptable (***) seems to allude not only to Charles Rennie Mackintosh (a man often frustrated in his attempts to have his buildings realised) but to the temporary futuristic structures built in the park for the Empire Exhibition in 1938. It’s a melodramatic fantasy focusing on an egotistical “architect” figure, and exploring the power struggles inherent in creative endeavour. Like most of Coombes’ work, it’s meticulously made, but loses something from being shown in a draughty outhouse.

Lorna Macintyre’s Midnight Scenes & Other Works at Mary Mary (**) also draws scattered threads of inspiration from the city. Old photographs, the fact that rope was made nearby and the previous use of the gallery building as a hotel all find their way into the work. It’s a pick-and-mix approach to the past, which is then added to a typically postmodern melting pot. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and the show does have a certain formal beauty, but like so much contemporary art, it’s cool and distant, hard for the viewer to connect with.

Something very different happens when an artist is persuaded to look outwards. Glasgow-based Alex Frost has been making mosaic objects for years, from giant sculptural heads to misshapen Ryvita packets, so he engaged readily in the making of The New Easterhouse Mosaic (***). The original Easterhouse Mosaic (now partly destroyed) was made in the early 1980s by a team of artists, covering 1,500sq ft, a many-splendoured mix of the grandiose and the ordinary; Frost calls it “accidental postmodernism”. From then on, the medium took hold in the area, and smaller mosaics were created, often by community groups, for schools, the police station, the shopping centre. Frost’s accompanying exhibition in the Platform building shows “rubbings” of these, archaeological rediscoveries from the recent past.

The new mosaic itself, the design of which is based on the faces of local people in profile, is a little disappointing. Its colours are muted, and it seems to lack both the daring of the old mosaic and the clever detail which Frost seems to realise in his other mosaic work. Nevertheless, it’s still a positive example of a contemporary artist engaging with a public project in a way which has integrity both for the community and for the artist’s own practice.

Meanwhile, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (****), whose work exploring the violent deaths in the border town of Ciudad Juárez was a stand-out at the Venice Biennale of 2009, has spent five months on a residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios. Arriving last summer, she was shocked to find the country mid-riot, and travelled to Croydon to collect debris from the scene. Her work, showing in GSS’s new (and still under construction) premises at the Whisky Bond in Maryhill, is one of the most difficult to find but most rewarding GI shows I’ve seen so far.

Her Mexican concerns are reiterated in a series of billboard works around the city and in the recovery process of a photographic archive, images from the work of a local photographer in Ciudad Juárez in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The smiling young faces from this once prosperous town now decimated by drugs, gangs and violence, leave us wondering if they have survived, fled or become victims.

Meanwhile, Margolles took debris collected from burned out buildings in Croydon in the wake of the riots and had it made into a diamond (carbon subjected to the right amount of heat and pressure will do this). It is perhaps the smallest work in GI this year, and one with the most to say. Catching the light beautifully on its 58 facets, it speaks volumes about beauty taken from struggle, and the surprising transformations good art makes possible.

• All shows until 7 May apart from Ruth Ewan, until 6 May, Teresa Margolles, until 30 June and The New Easterhouse Mosaic, which is permanent.