Glasgow Kiss

The Australian Financial Review

20 August 2015

A new generation of artists and designers are forging a Glasgow style for the times.

It's a crisp Saturday afternoon in downtown Glasgow. Spring is approaching but oh so slowly: the sky is a vault of cold hard blue and the temperature a mere 10 degrees. I've joined the crowds on the busy pedestrianised Buchanan Street and when I step from a woollens store – as you do in Glasgow – a man halts before me, spreads out his arms, and growls to the heavens in a thick Scottish burr:

"Summer – c'mon!"

You can't, it seems, keep a Glaswegian from expressing himself.

These expressive talents extend to literature (Booker Prize-winner James Kelman is a local), the sublime art nouveau-influenced architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Salmon, a celebrated group of hometown postimpressionist painters called The Glasgow Boys, and a fizzing contemporary art scene that has thrust the city to the front rank of European art hubs. And this year, for the first time, the city astride the River Clyde hosts Britain's, if not Europe's, most prestigious contemporary art award: the Turner Prize.

Glasgow once did a vigorous trade in tobacco and coal, shipbuilding and textile manufacture, and even slavery. Today the city trades on its creative smarts. The art scene may not earn as much money as the distilling of the country's best-known export, whisky, but it serves to badge Glasgow nationally and internationally as a hip, can-do culture capital.

In fact, artists born, educated or domiciled in Glasgow have so often won the Turner that the city claims de facto ownership of the prize. They include sculptor Martin Boyce, sound artist Susan Philips, painter and gilder of interior spaces Richard Wright, video artist Douglas Gordon and conceptual artist Simon Starling.

"We share it around now and again," jokes Sarah Munro, director of Tramway, Glasgow's biggest exhibition and performing arts space. This disused tram depot, a post-industrial cathedral, is the chosen site for this year's Turner prize when it ventures from its home at Tate Britain.

"Our aim at Tramway is to respond to the work of artists, to promote new and experimental work, to be in a sense artist-led," she explains. "We like to take risks with younger artists."

On the day I visit Tramway is showing an exhibition of new sculpture by Mick Peter, an artist born in Berlin who received his training at the Glasgow School of Art and now lives Clyde-side. Titled Pyramid Selling, the work is a warren of dove-grey monoliths that look to have come from a concrete pour – in reality they are made from polystyrene – peopled with larger-than-life cartoon-like figures busy making, selling and earning. The two-dimensional figures move amid a jumble of outsized sculptural red zips, one of which is held by a sculpted worker in overalls with sleeves rolled and a thick stubble.

The exhibition is visually arresting and playful and, while clearly at one level about class, is not nearly as preachy as its title suggests. As much as anything it seems to be about the making of things and the imagery of manufacture; a fitting theme for an industrial city turned culture centre.

While the cavernous Tramway is clearly the Colosseum of Glasgow's contemporary art scene, artists are also supported by a growing network of smaller and more diversified exhibition spaces such as The Common Guild, Glasgow Print Studio, the Glue Factory, Street Level Photoworks, Six Foot Gallery, Transmission Gallery, the Modern Institute, Trongate 103, and a new contemporary art fair. The city's recently rejuvenated East End, a big beneficiary of the Commonwealth Games construction boom, is also served by the non-profit David Dale Gallery and Market Gallery.

Glasgow is slowly assembling the infrastructure to support its cultural ambitions. At the most visible end of the spectrum are flashy new buildings by Zaha Hadid (Museum of Transport), Sir Norman Foster (SSE Hydro entertainment bowl) and David Chipperfield (BBC Scotland HQ). But the city is also busy reclaiming and adapting disused sites for cultural uses and establishing a solid reputation as a friend to art. In the centrally located Merchant City district alone some 45 artists and 24 cultural organisations are housed in style at The Briggait, a handsome restored Edwardian building.

"It sometimes seems like everyone's an artist here in Glasgow," says Calum Matheson, an emerging artist whose parents were both painters, and a teacher at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art. "Every year there are more graduates, more art studios opening up in post-industrial spaces, and more international students from Scandinavia or America who stay on. If you throw a rock in the city's East End, it's said, you're bound to hit an artist."

Matheson attributes the flowering of contemporary art in Glasgow in this past quarter of a century to a "DIY attitude" and taste for hard work, the ready availability of disused industrial sites, and a spirit of confraternity among artists, musicians, comedians and other creators. Sometimes, as with Turner-shortlisted Glaswegian Jim Lambie, who is also a musician and DJ, these talents are part of the one protean whole.

Central to it all is the Glasgow School of Art with its famed – though after a fire last year sadly charred – Rennie Mackintosh-designed wing. Matheson refers to the art school variously as an "incubator" of talent and a "castle on the hill". Its creative energies radiate across this compact town where artists, musicians, designers and intellectuals feel bound together by a sense of esprit de corps.

In Glasgow art comes with attitude and there is no such thing as a satire-free zone. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, a refined neo-classical building in the centre of town, revellers have crowned an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington with a traffic cone. After authorities attempted to remove this playful piece of agitprop a movement sprang up with the speed of a flash mob. The council, charged with a "conespiracy", eventually backed off. And so the duke with his comical cone of luminescent orange has become a civic emblem.

You don't have to be a contemporary art lover to feast on the city's artistic riches. Glasgow's core historical art collections are the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Burrell Collection, and the Hunterian museum at the University of Glasgow; and they were amassed when the city was a centre of maritime trade and enormous private wealth; the second city of the empire no less.

A visit to Glasgow is a sweet surprise for a fine-art lover. The city of grit and girders certainly has its grace notes. The Hunterian boasts a ravishing suite of Whistler portraits, while in the Burrell hangs a luminous Rembrandt self-portrait and a Giovanni Bellini Virgin and Child.

The staring attraction at Kelvingrove is Salvador Dali's Christ of St John on the Cross, although on the day I visit it was impossible not to be humbled by Rembrandt's Saskia in Arcadian Costume – a painting on the theme of spring rendered with an autumnal palette - on loan from the National Gallery.

There are no queues to see these and other high art jewels, and no tickets. Shipbuilder Sir William Burrell and prominent anatomist William Hunter established their eponymous collections in a spirit of civic duty, and the city maintains this tradition.

The contemporary art scene builds on the artistic flowering around the end of the nineteenth century, when Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald helped to forge a distinctive "Glasgow style" influenced by art nouveau and the Viennese Secession and flavoured with Celtic and folkloric imagery. The style was not so much eclectic as syncretic: it was less about picking up artistic references bower bird-style as moulding them into something new and distinctive.

Johnny Rodger, a writer, critic and professor of urban literature at the Glasgow Art School, points out that by 1900 the city's wealth was sustained by a highly skilled manufacturing workforce and a reputation for original design. The nuanced interiors designed by Mackintosh were often crafted by tradesmen – wood and metal workers – with day jobs on the docks. The borders between art, craft and industrial manufacture were more fluid in Glasgow's heyday: art drew on industry; industry on art.

These traditions continue to inspire the new Glasgow. "The city has a grittiness, for want of a better word, that is to do with craft and making and manufacture, and a sense that we're all in this together," says Rodger. "That's what we're all about."

An exhibition space at Kelvingrove titled "Expression" highlights the other abiding theme of Glasgow's art tradition: putting it out there, having a say. The town's real brave hearts are the artists whose boisterous spirit defines it. *