Between Scenes: Glasgow's Alternative Film Spaces in the 1990S
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Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Alexandra-Maria Colta; María Vélez-Serna Between scenes: Glasgow’s alternative film spaces in the 1990s 2019 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/4187 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Colta, Alexandra-Maria; Vélez-Serna, María: Between scenes: Glasgow’s alternative film spaces in the 1990s. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 8 (2019), Nr. 1, S. 51– 68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/4187. Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0/ This document is made available under a creative commons BY- Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz NC-ND 4.0/ License. For more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Between scenes: Glasgow’s alternative film spaces in the 1990s Alexandra-Maria Colta & María A. Vélez-Serna NECSUS 8 (1), Spring 2019: 51–68 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/between-scenes-glasgows-alternative- film-spaces-in-the-1990s/ Keywords: alternative film cultures, cultural scenes, culture-led urban regeneration, festivalisation, grassroots creativity Introduction[1] In the final decades of the twentieth century, the ‘creative city’ dominated cultural policy in Western Europe and provided a blueprint for the assimila- tion of grassroots and independent artistic practices.[2] In the United King- dom, the emergence of Glasgow as a hub for visual arts and music in the 1990s became a widely studied model of culture-led regeneration. The so- called ‘Glasgow miracle’ has been typified by an array of Turner Prize nom- inations and victories for locally-based artists such as Douglas Gordon, Chris- tine Borland, Martin Creed, Duncan Campbell, and most recently, Charlotte Prodger. Many of these artists referenced cinematic tropes and experi- mented with video installation and projection. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to film culture in Glasgow during this period. Alter- native practices of film exhibition shared spaces and participants with the arts and music scenes, and were part of a network infrastructure. DIY traditions thrived in the interstices of a cultural funding landscape that was moving to- wards festivalisation on the back of the success of Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990. Art, music, performance, and film festivals became spaces where urban culture was produced and contested. We use a case study of New Visions Ex- perimental Film and Video Festival, running biennially in Glasgow in 1992, 1994 and 1996, to explore the sites, practices, and framings of alternative film NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES exhibition, artists’ moving image and new media, in relation to this process of ‘festivalisation’.[3] Unravelling a fragment of history that is mostly absent from official archives and mainstream narratives, this article presents grass- roots film and video festivals as spaces of dissent that gradually became as- similated into the festival boom that continued beyond the 1990s. This his- tory is reconstructed through archival research and the analysis of internal documents, festival ephemera (promotional materials, interviews, reviews), interviews, and conversations with key people of the scene at the time, such as: John Williamson, who was a music promoter and venue manager; Marlies Pfeifer, former programme coordinator of Goethe Institut in Glasgow; and Paula Larkin, former co-ordinator of New Visions. Grassroots creativity in the European City of Culture Glasgow is fertile ground for the study of urban history and cultural policy. Over the space of a hundred years it went from a world-leading centre of heavy industry with a population of over a million to a decaying patchwork of tenements and warehouses with half the population, and over a quarter of them unemployed by 1988.[4] And then, or so the story goes, Glasgow’s for- tunes changed: the tenements were scrubbed clean for the Garden Festival in 1988, the central shopping precinct was cleared of cars and of non-shopping folk, and service sector jobs replaced those lost in heavy industry. It became possible to be a successful and well-connected artist or cultural entrepreneur in a city with lower rents than London, and Glasgow became a hub of the art world. By the mid-1990s, London curators had started to pay attention to the work of some Glasgow-based artists. After Douglas Gordon’s Turner prize in 1996, Tate curator Hans Ulrich Obrist described the local blooming of con- temporary art as ‘the Glasgow miracle’.[5] This mythologisation was always contentious, and has been challenged by new archival projects.[6] These ‘ma- terials for alternative histories’ have helped make visible the ‘mixture of tim- ing, chance and group dynamic’ that powered the miracle narrative, but they also reveal the exclusions and distortions of its legacy.[7] Imbricated with a story of urban transformation, the ‘miracle’ narrative risks ignoring the deep inequality that marks the city.[8] Indeed, the other phrase associated with the city’s name is the ‘Glasgow effect’, a term coined by public health scholars exploring the causes of low life expectancy in parts 52 VOL 8 (1), 2019 BETWEEN SCENES of the city and pointing at social deprivation and relative poverty as contrib- uting factors.[9] Glasgow’s post-industrial history has been studied and theo- rised extensively, as an early test case for Thatcherite approaches to urban regeneration. The city had entered the 1980s with a Labour-controlled coun- cil expected to address the causes of widespread deprivation, voter apathy, and a poor external image, while facing a sharp decline in tax revenue due to the engineered depopulation of the city in the preceding decades.[10] The ideology of urban regeneration fuelled by capital investment (in the form of privatisation) offered in the ‘creative economy’ a second chance for deindus- trialised cities. The emblematic moment in Glasgow’s transformation was its nomination as European City of Culture (ECoC) for the year 1990. ECoC was a big deal in Glasgow. The previous cities to hold the title, cre- ated in 1985, had been Athens, Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris; Glas- gow was the first ‘post-industrial’ city to be named, and its tenure has since become a template for others, such as Liverpool, which held the title in 2008 and which also used culture-led regeneration strategies.[11] The scale of the project was often expressed in numbers: ‘3,649 events involving 1,066 organ- isations, costing over £50 million, 40% coming from public funds’, according to Tessa Jackson, Head of Visual Arts.[12] The objectives of Glasgow’s year as ECoC were to improve the city’s image in order to attract inward investment and tourism, and even critics acknowledge that this was achieved.[13] But, as the militant writers’ group Workers’ City argued in the lead-up to 1990, the benefits failed to ‘trickle down’, instead exacerbating social injustice.[14] At the same time, however, many artists and cultural workers who were critical of ECoC’s spectacle and bureaucracy also seized the funding opportunities it did afford.[15] This created paradoxes like Women in Profile, an organisation set up ‘in anticipation of their exclusion from the “official” celebrations’, ob- taining funding from Glasgow District Council to open and run Woman- house, a community centre in a disused tenement.[16] Taking projects out- side institutional spaces was one way to mediate such contradictions. Site-specificity The political edge of art practices at the time was connected to site-specific- ity, an approach that had a stronghold in Glasgow School of Art’s flourishing Environmental Art Department. Founded by Sam Ainsley and David Har- ding in 1985, the Department’s influence had persuaded many contemporary COLTA & VÉLEZ-SERNA 53 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES artists of the premise that ‘context is half the work’.[17] By 1991, some artists were declaring that site-specificity had become an empty formula rather than a resistance to the art market. This was particularly worrying due to the neoliberal enthusiasm for strategies of ‘place-making’, which directed funds to site-specific work and rewarded its more instrumental forms. The late 1980s and 1990s were pivotal years for the reinvention of Glasgow in align- ment with neoliberal cultural policy. However, as Boyle et al argue, ‘actually existing’ deployments of neoliberal doctrine are more complex and hybrid, ‘with local path dependencies and entangled with local agendas’.[18] On the ground, Glasgow’s cultural landscape was made up of disparate tangles of DIY and institutional, autonomous and top-down activity. Its characteristic for- mation was the Artist-Run Initiative (ARI), ‘inclusive associations, founded by early-career artists who had no capital and no wealthy patrons’.[19] This sit- uation both required and permitted distinctive uses of space, venturing be- yond established, institutional venues. Glasgow’s DIY approach to place was not confined to the visual arts. Music and theatre promoters also roamed the city, with initiatives such as Mayfest which took events out into residential neighbourhoods. As organiser John Williamson recalls, this example proved to music promoters ‘that you could do things that weren’t in a student union, weren’t in a tacky nightclub, and weren’t in a pub somewhere’.[20] Williamson had started programming films alongside music events for the New Music World conference in 1994. The following year he organised Ten Day Weekend, a festival during which music-related features were screened in pubs, gig venues, and other spaces that had ‘a clear identity and a community based around them’.[21] The choice of non-theatrical venues was justified by the intention to reach sub- cultural audiences, so the attraction of these one-off events must be under- stood in relation to the more permanent uses of those spaces that sustained communities.