Joe Wilson: Is the Glasgow Effect already a failure?

AN artist’s pledge to stay in Glasgow for a full year, a project backed by Creative Scotland funding, has had the city’s residents up in arms on social media. They have a point, writes Joe Wilson

Now is the winter of our discontent, and didn’t we welcome it with open arms and furiously typing fingers. Facebook’s Glaswegian contingent was gleefully disgruntled yesterday, hammering their frustrations into their keyboards to feed the latest social media outrage. The response to artist Ellie Harrison’s year-long “action research/durational performance” piece has been simmering since the Facebook event advertising it first appeared, but boiled into a full blown chip-pan fire on Monday. So, what’s the problem?

The project is most succinctly described as an endeavour where the artist will spend an entire year living in Glasgow, unable to leave, and will be publicly funded for the privilege/burden. The root of the problem lies in the Facebook event promoting it, which is either naively or deliberately fostering this understanding of its premise. The reaction to this pertains to two incendiary elements. Firstly, people are offended at the suggestion that confining herself to Glasgow amounts to some great feat of survival.

The event page does nothing to help this. The chosen feature image of loads of greasy chips is crass, but it’s the name of the project, the Glasgow Effect, that is particularly troublesome. The term of course is already used to refer to the peculiarly poor health and high mortality rates of the city’s population compared to elsewhere in Europe. To use it as the name for the project seems devoid of any logical consideration. Picking a phrase out of the history books and re-appropriating it because the individual words are relevant is dangerous if you haven’t properly considered their combined meaning. It’s like doing “action research” into the optimum concentration of diluting juice and calling the project The Final Solution.

The other prompter of public ire is that the project is being funded by Creative Scotland, meaning people, not incorrectly, feel the money is coming straight out of their own pockets to pay someone to do what many of them already have, not leave their home city for a year. It comes across like some clever conceit by the artist to acquire a sort of “creative” dole money, receiving a better-than-minimum wage salary to do what ostensibly looks like nothing. Whether you view the project as a privileged outsider being parachuted into the city on a “poverty safari,” or just an elaborate benefit scam, it’s offensive.

But people are quick to take offence, because deep down we find a perverse satisfaction in the camaraderie of a mass social media outrage and are always tacitly seeking an opportunity to turn our keyboards, like Bluetooth pitchforks, towards the next deserving culprit. Harrison has given people little choice in this instance though; the magnitude of the backlash towards her project is testament to how badly she has explained it. The Facebook event that attempts to do so contains three paragraphs, and the first and the third are toxic. Sandwiched between the sections about simply not leaving Glasgow for a year and who is paying for it is a second paragraph that attempts, half-heartedly, to flesh out the concept. The trouble is, you can take the finest, tastiest ingredients in the world, but place them between two mouldy bits of bread and nobody is going to swallow it.

But then it’s hardly haute cuisine in the middle either. Harrison’s description of the event is vague and uninspiring. The crux of it appears to be to ascertain if living in Glasgow will have any visible effect on her output, but living here puts little to no strain on her as an artist. It’s a post-industrial creative hub, and materials and inspiration are impossible not to come by. We’re not short of examples of the city’s effect on artists work anyway, be it in its Art Nouveau architecture, the Glasgow Boys and Girls, or the current Gallery of Modern Art exhibition showcasing works from prominent Glasgow School of Art alumni.

The only glimmer of hope exists in the phrase “encouraging her to seek out and create local opportunities.” There is a suggestion here that her work may involve engaging local communities in the arts in some way but it is far from explicit enough to make any assumptions. Arts funding is subject to two public pressures: the economic right, who demand value for the money spent, and the cultural left, who demand some form of societal benefit from the output. When you filter through the cheap jokes and pontification in the responses to her chip-emblazoned Facebook event page, Harrison’s project is being squeezed like a clogged artery from both sides.

To compound matters, if some sort of community engagement was to be her saving grace here, she has already failed at her first attempt. Social media is an incredibly important tool for interacting with audiences these days and not to show it due diligence can be damaging. Just look at the mess she’s made. It is better to forfeit the exposure social media can give you than to make an uncommitted attempt merely for appearances sake.

I am inclined, however, to give her the benefit of the doubt. It is entirely her fault that a lack of detail about the project has been met with such contempt. But someone at Creative Scotland, wrongly or otherwise, has seen value in the idea and I’d like to give her the chance to properly share it with us. If one of her strategic aims was to gain a better understanding of the city then she’s learned a valuable lesson already. To make allusions to poverty and hardship whilst “challenging” herself not to leave the city was stupid. To claim receipt of public funding without explaining what it’s actually for, in a city troubled by poverty and hardship, was stupid. The chips thing was stupid. But this is all just bad social media, and hopefully the project itself, when less lazily communicated, is of some value. Unless of course the event page was deliberately antagonistic, and the real “durational performance” art here is to survive for a year in a city that hates her guts? But that’s really stupid.

• This is an edited article from I Think Of Icarus, a museum blog run by Glasgow-based writer Joe Wilson. http://ithinkoficarus.com/