The Recent Future of Scottish Art Robin Baillie and Neil Mulholland Scottish Art Since 1960 Institute
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variant 42 | winter 2011 | 3 The recent future of Scottish Art Robin Baillie and Neil Mulholland Scottish Art since 1960 Institute. In terms of institutions, these are the Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews narrow limits of the book’s structure. Craig Richardson He starts in 1960 with the Scottish National (2011) London, Ashgate, 230 pages Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA) and laments ISBN: 978-0-7546-6124-5 (hardback) that it never took the form that it might have. In a discussion recorded over two sessions, Robin He describes its residency in Inverleith House Baillie and Neil Mulholland address issues raised by and its move to the West End, but there’s never Craig Richardson’s recently published book ‘Scottish any conclusion reached regarding why this entire Art since 1960’, which describes its intention as: episode might, ultimately, have any import. This is especially odd given that what sometimes ends up “Providing an analysis and including discussion being, rightly, celebrated in the book is the value (interviewing artists, curators and critics and accessing of independent curatorial activity. I wonder, why non-catalogued personal archives) towards a new bother with the perceived ‘centre’? chronology, Richardson here examines and proposes a sequence of precisely denoted ‘exemplary’ works RB: What he doesn’t say is what a national modern which outlines a self-conscious definition of the art institution should be doing. He criticises interrogative term ‘Scottish art.’ Richardson addresses existing institutions for conservative bias, key areas of cultural politics and identity to illuminate establishment bias, traditionalist bias, and possibly the development of Scottish art, enhancing our anti-Scottishness, but he doesn’t actually map out understanding of the dynamics of art practice today.” a possible alternative programme. Maybe because that’s a tendentious thing to do. The introduction Neil Mulholland: The introduction is something of a describes an institutional structure that he can literature review with spoiler, it tells you more-or- trace over time, through various galleries and their less everything that’s in the book. The sense of a exhibitions. polemic that’s in the introduction, it’s never really In scholastic terms, it’s easier to map out this substantiated in a lot of cases. NM: Above and territory, because the SNGMA is still here, there Contemporary Arts (DCA). DCA’s tall exhibition spaces right: An Turas, Robin Baillie: Craig has an agenda which he sets are people you can speak to who were/are there successively opened out and upwards in sequence, it’s Ferry Terminal out, but then he does a survey and tries to suffuse and there’s a good archive. In general, the bigger programme frequently presenting Scottish artists at shelter, Tiree, that agenda into it. The artists only come in as and older the institution the better the historical key pre- and mid-career points and fully presented in opened 2003. descriptive framing, you get these wee thumbnail resources. comprehensive catalogues.” (p165) A Scottish Arts sketches. I’m not saying they’re totally off, that He seems to be genuinely excited about the He also lays out a chain of critical writing, Council funded they’re not without validity, but they’re not an RB: height of the ceilings and quality of the building, and a chain of artists, for which he’s relying collaboration unpacking. They’re not analytical deconstructions certainly more so than, say, what the Dundee on interviews from personal sources – “non- between of what these people are doing. artist-run space Generator had been doing since catalogued personal archives”. Sutherland There are places where the book does achieve 1999 or what Duncan of Jordanstone College of NM: On the one hand, he is quite heavily Hussey this. The section on Steven Campbell does this job NM: Art & Design graduates had achieved since the tied to institutions, and so to an (unspoken) Architects and well. Craig looks through work as a thing in itself, ‘60s – all of which he neglects to mention. This institutional theory of art. It is a ‘Police Force’ artists Jake then looks at its reception and does it justice. reads like it’s cribbed from DCA’s business plan, institutionalism, more George Dickie than Arthur Harvey, Donald There’s a sense of this subject being taken as a or a review that’s actually a press release. DCA is Danto. It’s all about joining clubs. Yet there’s Urquhart, Glen case study and carefully built up. a similar kind of building... it’s very ‘90s. There’s another incongruous trope regarding landscape an aspiration through the text to reach this place, Onwin, Sandra RB: The thing about Campbell is there was and northern-ness that requires a very different this is An Turas, a passage to Venice [Biennale], Kennedy. international recognition of a kind for an approach to this weak institutionalism. It comes it’s a goal, a destination. Does anyone buy this individual doing a non-specifically ‘Scottish’ style. across as volkish. It needs taken apart to avoid modernist myth of cultural progress? At the Heart Campbell’s difficult for Craig to write his bigger this, as a geopolitics or via cultural geography. of Darkness lies a vapour, not a jewel. agenda to, because... maybe he doesn’t like it This narrative reads differently, a simple, slightly He deploys a retrospective nationalism where aesthetically because it’s figurative, it’s expressive, misty-eyed, thesis that might work as speculative RB: Scots seem to him to possess a distinct identity but also because Campbell has to be placed to one exhibition or as a catalogue text, but it doesn’t fit and this identity needs to be seen, represented side to allow the flow of neo-conceptualism to take well with the institutionalism. It’s not historical. place. and recognised. What are the means he suggests to RB: At the end, he invokes a communitarian achieve this? NM: Because it’s one guy as well, as opposed to a art that returns to the land and the sea: There’s an idea expressed in the first chapter, group of people, a ‘movement’ is required. “Communitarian cultural renewal might include NM: that the Scottish avant-garde all move to London the ongoing preoccupation with the values of the RB: Although there was a group of them but no and remain there in exile; these artists are land and the seas in contrast with the resources of one’s writing about them of course. explicitly framed as the avant-garde, a very limited the cities.” (p182) NM: There’s more of a sense elsewhere in the number of artists. An Turas [depicted, left and top] is simply book of people doing things collectively – in the NM: There’s a Freudian-type desire present, a celebrated at the end of the first chapter, then it RB: discussion of the New 57 gallery, or of Transmission prodigal son parable, about how avant-gardeness just ends..! – there’s a social network there, one that we don’t can be achieved in Scottish art. That’s the get in the discussion of Campbell. RB: It feels like the ‘black square’ of Scottish art. prodigality of it – the artists had to go away, when There are five chapters in the book. The NM: A hundred years late for the party. they go we lose them. Their Scottish nature is lost. introduction lays out what we’re going to hear So can we build a home for the avant garde in [Malevich’s Black Square, 1915, is considered one about: National Galleries of Scotland, Richard Scotland? The problem is that you can’t – it isn’t of the first abstract paintings.] Demarco Gallery, The 57, Graham Murray Gallery, produced out of institutional structures. Fruitmarket, Third Eye, Transmission, Modern Craig encourages us to look down this tunnel, RB: I don’t really regard any of these artists to be and what we’re looking at is the landscape and NM: avant-garde, there aren’t any in the book, not in sea framed by the modernist black square. It’s his the true sense of the phrase. Between 1960-67, the perfect form because it sees Scotland through a time covered by the first chapter, the only artist modernist black box. So here we have it – he wants that lived in Scotland mentioned is Joan Eardley. an art that has a nice neo-modernist frame, that Very little is said of her work and nothing that’s shows us an eternal identity via Scottish land/ new. seascape. Eardley gets a mention because of her There’s a section later in the book that RB: NM: engagement with the land and the sea – that’s describes Dundee Contemporary Arts being built Craig’s thing about style, it must reference its that explicitly fetishises it as a modernist gallery, idealised context. It’s a domineering slant... always by which I guess he means the structure rather something about ‘What is this nation?’ than what it shows: NM: This follows hot on the heels of a fairly lengthy “the emphatically modernist new gallery Dundee discussion of Stanley Cursiter and the failure to 4 | variant 42 | winter 2011 build the palace of art in the form of the failed NM: I see very broad relations and connections School of Art. Muralism, environmental art, mixed Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. But between the work of Findlay, Boyle and McLean, media were all approaches taken that are part there’s no discussion of the specific nature of the but not with Turnbull. He just happens to be of a peculiar generalism found in old Scottish collection in the SNGMA.