| Another day, another dispatch from Glasgow and it seems like no time since the last Glasgow Art Fair. Now in its 11th year the event has established itself as a major fixture on the European circuit and a showpiece for the city’s investment in large-scale cultural events, sited in a giant marquee in front of the city chambers. |  |
Piece and Jammed – Mitchell Miller
Another day, another dispatch from Glasgow and it seems like no time since the last Glasgow Art Fair. Now in its 11th year the event has established itself as a major fixture on the European circuit and a showpiece for the city’s investment in large-scale cultural events, sited in a giant marquee in front of the city chambers. This year’s shindig attracted 44 galleries from the UK and Europe, over a thousand artists and around 15 times as many visitors to one of the UK’s most significant events held outside of London.
With its first decade is in the bag, the fair has set itself some high standards that are only amplified by the growing reputation of the city as a centre for the visual arts. Producing major artists such as Douglas Gordon, soon to be appearing at the MOMA, Illana Halperin, the Boyle Family, David Shrigley and Neil Mulholland, to count on just one hand, has secured Glasgow as a destination, as much as a point of origin, for leading visual artists.
In the wake of the artists come the buyers. It almost goes without saying that fairs are not the optimum environment for actually appreciating the art on display to which Glasgow is no exception. Not only are the works jammed into every available space, it is often a task just finding somewhere to stand still and just look. But serene contemplation is probably best left to the International Festival of Contemporary Arts (April 19th to May 1st), which in its second year features a special exhibit of drawings by Patti Smith.
In the meantime a degree of ingenuity is sometimes required to get a good look at the better pieces. For us browsers the accumulation of galleries from across the country offers useful indicators of the current buyer’s market and the seller’s response, insofar as artistic currents relate to chasing the proverbial buck, of course. In this case we could sum up 2006 as “the terrible revenge of the figurative.” Glasgow 2006 was at times reminiscent of a historical exhibit. There were numerous instances of Scottish stalwarts such as John Bellany and Peter Howson. “As you’ll see,” said Andrew Stark of London’s Stark Gallery “it’s fairly dominated by the figurative. I think because we’re the only abstract gallery here we fill a niche.”
The Stark Gallery was also one of the few stalls to display large-scale sculptural pieces. Ian Marshall exhibited a number of pieces that harnessed the qualities of steel, folded, crumpled, dimpled or creased, hung on walls or free-standing. They illustrated on the artists of ongoing investigation of the material and its capacity to mimic more organic textures such as skin, leather or even vegetation. They are mostly abstract propositions but Stark’s Screwed Up, a gigantic drill bit presented as a piece of pseudo-serendipitous industrial art seemed to give pause to a number of patrons.
Literally, more lightweight were the papier-mâché trophies of David Farrer whose White Cock and Dodo (Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London) tempted browsers with large living rooms. The Hossack gallery has been an enthusiastic promoter of Scottish painting, including works by Joseph Davie and Helen Flockhart. There was also Peter Clark’s Bull Shirt, a mixed media work that transcended its own physicality to mimic the excruciating tweeness of an illustration from the J. Peterman catalogue.
Some galleries slotted in smaller sculptural works alongside the hangings. Carol Peace’s Block Figures I-VI (Fairfax Gallery, London) presented a striking yet compact array of wall mountings combining diminutive stick figures with oppressive cubes of iron resin. Hugh Pizey’s Standing Stone (Lapland, Glasgow) was a forlorn miniature megalith, a ragged block of sandstone carved with painstakingly precise flutes using a water jet, which conjured notions of either a fragment from some lost civilisation or the inexcusable desecration of an earth temple. Lois Carson’s bastardised David’s, dressed in rugby strips and camp kilts returned to New Yorker Cynthia Corbett’s (London) stall, though they were somehow less funny than they were last year.
So much for the ravages of time picking out the abstract sculptural needles from a vast haystack of figurative straws, here I hastily jettison this metaphor. But figurative works had more or less bearded everything else from the big tent to such an extent that it was difficult to pay attention. Glasgow Print Studio representing the city’s strong tradition of print and text-based art presented some wonderfully unsettling etchings by Ken Currie, such as Obese Man Pissing, a print by Eduardo Paolozzi and the ever-involving Elizabeth Blackadder.
Giving himself over to text altogether is Glasgow artist David Bellingham (Lapland). For six dollars patrons could buy a jar of his Blackcurrant Jam or a bottle of Wine Dark Sea, Sea Dark Wine, real jars and real contents with a Bellingham label. Let the buyer beware indeed, but one wonders what is more important about these objects, the label or the substance, the sign or signified? Put another way how much of your initial investment would be lost where you to round off your day in the big tent with a piece-and-jam (jam sandwich, for the non-Scots in the readership) washed down with a glass of the Bellingham vintage?
Standing out from the rest of the Cynthia Corbett stall was Stine Ljungdalh’s The Impression of Miss Isotope 1 (edition 2 of 5), a light photo that occupies a common ground between Holbein’s The Ambassadors and assorted Pre-Raphaelite melodramas. Bleu Gallery (Aude, France) offered an impressive array of figurative works from Scotland’s Colin Park whose human heads take many interesting formal and material detours, from the totemic cherry wood sculptures to the thick oils of his schematised portraits. Viewed together even in the cramped confines of a stall they presented a fascinating unity of theme and treatment.
One of the star Glaswegians, I left for my phantom sixth finger, was Toby Paterson, whose paintings and installations inspired by modernist architecture have won deserved acclaim on the international circuit. Paterson wasn’t showing at this year’s fair but his concerns seem to resurface in the paintings of his compatriot Michael Craik (Amber Rooms, Edinburgh). Whereas Paterson reproduces whole buildings or isolated structural forms Craik is interested in the geometric qualities of facades, often viewed at a diagonal, trailing into white or blue space. The eventual realisation that we are observing something representative comes as something of a shock as we are led, from an initial appreciation of abstract form and colour, to considering the hinted at physical presence of the original building.
There is always a strong presence from more community-based and philanthropic galleries whose stalls skirted the café. A first timer was Stirling’s Changing Room, part gallery, part training facility which offered an impressive line up including Jason Nelson’s DVD piece, one of the few video works on display. Aspiration’s Not for the Likes of You was presented on a tiny screen in a wooden pillar. This piece took the artist’s exaggerated ghetto-chic and made it compelling and for those au fait with the class system, dangerously vicarious.
From a few miles up the road came Perth’s Frames Contemporary Gallery with a range of intriguing ink drawings by Arron Lindsay strongly reminiscent of 1970s blaxploitation ephemera. Both of these are encouraging twists of the weather-vane, that offer hope that Glasgow and Edinburgh’s recent arts Renaissance may be spreading to the rest of the country. Scottish galleries were generally well represented, comprising 56 per cent of the exhibitors (37 per cent from London) and offering some very strong work. It is in short, a good time to be a Scottish artist.
This year’s fair was always going to be somewhat muted in comparison to last year’s tenth anniversary celebration, which attracted galleries from as far a field as New Zealand. There were no antipodean or even non-European galleries for 2006, which seems a shame given the promise of expansion and growth by last year’s truly international line up. Glasgow seemed to play it safer in 2006, focusing on maintaining its position in the international trade circuit. Last year recorded sales of nearly $2 million across the four days and this year recorded respectable attendance figures, up three per cent on last year.
If 2006 was the year of taking a breath and a great deal of stock, then hopefully 2007 will see renewed signs of growth, a more diverse range of exhibits and a more successful balance between figurative and abstract works. It may be time to consider how to accommodate sculpture and installed works, which this year vied unsuccessfully for space. But then, it is still a buyer’s market and much will depend on what captures the public imagination over the next financial year. Some clues may be forthcoming at the Glasgow International and the Mackintosh Festival in late September, though no sooner will they be over than the fair comes to town again.
