Pieces in the Times and the Sunday Herald both focus on artist Shahin Memishi. Seeking asylum in Glasgow, having been forced to flee his native Kosovo, Memishi (an art teacher) had something of a revelation on seeing work by the so-called New Glasgow Boys for the first time, and this show matches his portraits of the artists he admires with examples of their work.

I’m absolutely not having a go at the writers of these pieces. The curatorial conceit of showing a relatively unknown artist alongside the old guard who inspired him is intriguing, the story of Memishi finding succour in their work is a good, moving one, and a show featuring work by Steven Campbell, Ken Currie and Peter Howson is certainly newsworthy. Also newsworthy is the fact that the works by these artists are from a private collection, and are all for sale. Hmmn.

Anyway, here’s the thing: it’s an awful show. Awful. There’s some good stuff, sure, but none of it is by Memishi, and the hang is farcical. Half the paintings are at wonky angles, a few are sat on the floor, and a decent set of Peter Howson drawings is placed so high on the wall that you’d need to stand on a chair to get a good look at them. One of Memishi’s paintings is set on an easel right in front of a Ken Currie, obscuring it completely. The late Steven Campbell’s name is spelled ‘Stephen’, on the label beside his painting and in the title of Memishi’s portrait. Really. To me, that looks more like an insult to Currie and Campbell than a tribute. And so do Memishi’s paintings, however well-meant they may be. They don’t make you want to claw your eyes out in horror or anything, but they’re the sort of thing you see in those gallery-cum-shops that sell inoffensive stuff by local artists alongside novelty tea-towels and jewellry made by hobbyist housewives. I’m amazed that his subjects, having seen his work, agreed to sit for him (Campbell didn’t, for obvious reasons, but I’m told the rest did). And I nearly got the giggles when reading in the Times that Memishi is, according to Ally Thompson, ‘one of a new breed of European artists galvanising the city’s art scene’. This is not the case.

So, the show doesn’t deserve the oxygen of publicity - it should’ve been suffocated at birth! - but it drew more press than any exhibition in Scotland since the big Emin retrospective and Campbell’s posthumous showing of new work.

My point, I suppose, is that it’s depressing that the visual arts only make the news pages when there’s a whiff of scandal, a record-breaking auction or, as in this case, a heart-warming tale to be told. These things don’t have very much to do with art. My other point is that you shouldn’t waste your time visiting ArtDeCaf this month. Not for the art, anyway, though I feel duty bound to report that they make a pretty decent plate of scrambled eggs.

Update: My review of the show was spiked, for reasons I probably shouldn’t relate here, but you can read it on my Work weblog, if you like.

It was a slightly tricky piece to write, because the show shoots itself in the foot, to great effect. As the subtitle suggests, its premise is that you can split Warhol’s work in two - life on one side, death on the other - which is hardly a new idea, and, before seeing this show, one I pretty much agreed with. But after seeing it I’m inclined to think that almost all of Warhol’s work, even the most obviously jolly stuff, is more about death than anything else.

Admittedly, this might be down to the fact that I’m always inclined to kick against didactically curated shows, but seeing the relentlessly morbid work - the skull paintings, the death and disaster series, the Marylins and Jackies, most of the self-portraits - alongside cheery Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, soup cans and celebrity portraits really does cast the latter lot in a new light.

In this context, the portraits become attempts to preserve the living, not celebrations of beauty/celebrity, and the standard reading of work like the Brillo boxes as, in part, being celebrations of egalitarian American sameness (“All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good”) collapses, and they begin to look something like (cue spooky music!) grave goods, with Warhol’s post-Duchamp handmade readymades less a studied removal of the artist’s presence in the work and more an artistic suicide. Okay, so I’m going a wee bit far there, but that possibility will at least colour the way I think about Warhol from now on.

Anyway, it’s a really great show, chock-a-block with work that’s never been shown in Europe before, brilliantly installed (especially when it comes to the recreation of installations), and I very much enjoyed the way that its curatorial conceit pushed me away and pulled me back in, prompting a bit of a re-evaluation of an artist I thought I had all worked out years ago.

I’ll be doing meandering reviewlets like this for most of the shows at the EAF this month. Next up: Alex Hartley at Fruitmarket.

These drawings of stuffed birds and other things by Stephanie Black are thermally-printed so that over time they will disappear, becoming a blank sheet of paper.

You can get your own from the Atrium gallery at Glasgow School of Art, until the 2nd of September, when the Things Unhappen show closes. The exhibition is of work by recent Visual Communication graduates who were asked to ‘create something that could not be sold’.

E m e r g e D launches [vsf] II, the new platform for emerging artists to research, practice and present experimental contemporary art, located in the historic heart of the Glasgow’s Merchant City.

Two local contemporary artists, anthony SCHRAG and danny HOLCROFT have been commissioned to respond to the site and context of 54 Bell Street, radically transforming what is currently a standard and anonymous empty retail unit.

SCHRAG responding to the physicality of the site and HOLCROFT using old, discarded found objects to create and ignite an active environment for visual research and dialogue; signifying E m e r g e D’s commitment to the development of contemporary visual art.

‘You Are Not As Safe As You Think You Are’ is a one-off, live performance by anthony SCHRAG and will be performed 9pm, Saturday, 23rd July 2005. Understanding space physically is at the crux of SCHRAG’s live-art practice. His interests stem from the democratic nature of physical experience, and the ability of this type of specialism to engage and excite a wide spectrum of audiences. SCHRAG has created a new work which will be viewed through the window and involve florescent tubes.

SUNDAYTWENTYFOURTHOFJULYTWOTHOUSANDANDFIVETOSUNDAYSEVEN THOFAUGUSTTWOTHOUSANDANDFIVE, a solo show of new work by danny HOLCROFT running 24hrs daily, Sunday, 24th July – Sunday, 7th August 2005.

HOLCROFT will develop a process-based mixed-media installation, merging found objects, together with new materials and reworking existing interior surfaces to encourage viewer awareness of space and function.

Closely aligned with the aims and scope of [vsf] II, HOLCROFT’s practice has long been engaged with the conditions of site. His work has developed from the field of drawing into the expanded terrain of installation, architecture and public space. In previous projects, he has produced temporary urban interventions and drawings that aimed to reveal the architectural qualities of interior environments and heighten the viewer experience of space in time.

Sounds good to me.

Here’s the little text I wrote for the show:

Jackie Anderson paints people in places, Toby Messenger paints the places in people.

Anderson’s portraits dispense with the relationship between artist and sitter, catching her subjects unawares, presenting their most private moments, those spent alone in public. These are works full of movement, too, sometimes doubling a figure to catch a shift in expression, sometimes painting only the place that her subject has been, will be, or, even, might never be. The public spaces through which Anderson’s subjects pass are reduced on her canvases to thin shadows and abstracted forms, just as her subjects pass by buildings, cash machines and doorways without seeing them, their surroundings rendered invisible by familiarity. This not only serves to foreground, figuratively and literally, the people painted, it also further absents Anderson from her work as a painter of portraits; the result is a communion between subject and viewer as private as the fleeting moments she has captured.

Messenger’s work is, for the most part, unpopulated, but he tackles landscape at a tangent, matching Anderson’s slippery approach to portraiture. In works made on daily walks in Sienna, always along the same route, Messenger is looking from the corner of his eye, turning his attention to the forms and spaces others might miss - he sees the curve of a roundabout, or the gap in a fence, ignoring grand architecture, blind to sweeping vistas. These are drawings of the spaces that enter memory, but are never remembered; the spaces, perhaps, that reveal more about a place than we realise. In the other series here, the quotidian again fills the frame. There are views from Messenger’s studio window, or chance glances around his working space. Here representation is almost, but not quite, irrelevant, with form and colour worked at for their own sake. These paintings are made not to describe, but because they must be made, like this.

On the surface, the work before you could not be more different. Anderson is ever precise, light, recording; Messenger moves heavy paint, suggesting, transforming. Beneath those different surfaces, though, both work to reveal the in between.

For those who can’t be arsed with 1,500 words about things in a gallery, here’s the short version: I want to watch Luke Fowler’s films over and over again, Donald Urquhart’s installation is absolutely fucking amazing, everyone else is pretty bloody good, except Christina Mackie, who, inexplicably, won the prize.

More often than not, prize exhibitions are hotchpotch affairs. They gather artists together by perceived quality, grouping them according to the whims of a committee; the antithesis of a well-curated show, which guides visitors along the highways and byways of artistic practice.

But this year’s Beck’s Futures show is no such thing. In a different world, one where no one feels the need to judge artists like show ponies or search endlessly for the new, it would be a fine group show. First and foremost, the nominees share a desire to question the modes of artistic practice, either simply, by slipping their work into the gaps between different media, or, more deliberately, signalling their ambivalence towards their role as makers of art. On top of this questioning discomfort with the very idea of being an artists, there are thin threads connecting the nominees, including a tendency toward the evocation of emotional states, examinations of the role of performance and collaboration in art, and a quietly confident inclination to borrow from and renew art of the past.

Lali Chetwynd gets the ball rolling by filling the CCA foyer with a whopping great cardboard head, some hairy skulls and a rickety shed. These are sculptural leftovers from a performance, a video of which loops on a pile of old televisions. The performance is funny. That giant head looks over a gaggle of women, naked and wearing wigs, who dance about a bit, and play catch with giant fruits and flowers. It is part mystery play, part groovy happening, like the punchline to a bad joke about old hippies gathering at Glastonbury tor for the solstice. This is Chetwynd’s stock in trade: making art of the naff. In the past, she has taken inspiration from Meatloaf, his doppelganger Jabba the Hut and snooker’s greatest failure, Jimmy White. The appropriation of these low culture totems, or the 60s wig-out seen here, is matched by a jackdaw approach to high art influences, so that the laughs obscure but never overwhelm a rather thorough examination of just what art is.

On the face of it, Luke Fowler might not seem to have much in common with Chatwynd’s exuberant, scattershot performances, but the two films presented here , The Way Out and What you see is Where you’re at present a shared non-standard view of the nature of art and its making. The Way Out is a loose portrait in film of Xentos Jones, the chameleon frontman of 80s underground obscurities The Homosexuals, told in anecdotes and reminiscences laid over archive footage and excerpts from Jones’ own film work. It is, though, also a self-portrait of sorts - like his subject, Fowler obfuscates himself, an anti-auteur using blank anonymity where Jones uses reinvention and endless pseudonyms to displace the notion of the creating artist. And Fowler, like Jones, is quite the polymath. Alongside his documentary film work, he runs Shaddaz, a platform for publishing collaborations between artists and musicians, and makes his own music with the group Rude Pravo, all efforts to be considered strands of his artistic practice, rather than sideshows to the main events screened here. What you see… is another portrait, this time of maverick Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing and his patients. Once again, Fowler is interested in assembly, collaboration and alternate models of creation. Bringing together documentary footage, Fowler’s editing eye is drawn to the wall scrawls and dirty protests of the inmates at Kingsley Hall, Laing’s social experiment in communal living for the disturbed, and this, alongside the collection of extant material, is another pointer to the Glasgow-based artist’s freewheeling fascination with working methods.

Daria Martin makes films too, but where Fowler collates old fragments, Martin borrows an aesthetic from stock footage of the past, painstakingly recreating the look and feel of a needlessly melodramatic cinema advertisement, crafting special effects so unsubtle that they feel like uninvited guests at a party. This is good fun, but look closer and another aesthetic is at the heart of Martin’s films. In Closeup Gallery, a smarmy croupier and his glamourpuss companion deal cards across a revolving table, generating a sort of performance sculpture brimming with formal and tonal echoes of Modernism, an aptly stylised tribute to and re-examination of that movement. And so, reversing the trend here toward fractured practice, Martin expresses her disparate concerns by gathering them up together, using film as a sort of ur-medium, a means of coalescing painting, sculpture and performance.

Next comes Ryan Gander. His Loose Association Lecture (Version 2.1) drifts happily from Erno Goldfinger to Captain Birdseye, mixing in personal anecdotes along the way, a grab-bag of ideas that almost serves as a manifesto for the studied inconsistency of Gander’s practice as a whole. Like Fowler, Gander is uncertain about art and the artist, bringing Josef Hartwig’s hitherto unrealised design for a Bauhaus chess set into the world, and presenting a snapshot of his studio wall, which includes a sketch of a trestle and sheet of chipboard, since these are ‘the two objects most vernacular to an art school studio space.’

Surrounded by these vagaries, Donald Urquhart’s installation comes as something of a shock. It is thrillingly complete, a beacon of certainty in the midst of the unanswered questions that fill up the rest of the gallery. Urquhart has made a little world here, and it is a sad place. Gnomic slogans pepper the walls and upright glass plinths, talking of ‘Letters unwritten and unsent’, ‘The dust behind limousines’ and, simply, ‘Rage’, matched with bold drawings of half-dug graves, balustrades and prickly flower-stems. Tying everything together is Darnley, Urquhart’s sickly fragrance designed for the sort of 1930s gentleman who never married. One whiff of this heady scent is enough to transport the sniffer into Urquhart’s hinted fictions, a flash of feeling that conjours up cruel and giddy laughter at a dissolute literary salon, where the women dare to wear trousers , the men bear traces of panstick, and simply everyone is making wicked whispered asides, most probably in Palare. But for all this intense evocation, this uncanny realisation of a place and time that never was and never will be, Urquhart is up to the same tricks as his fellow nominees - his first illustrations decorated flyers for his London club The Beautiful Bend, while the installation has the feel of an abandoned stage set, a reminder that Urquhart’s is a playwright, poet, performer and cabaret host, yet another artist who casts off constraints.

But what of the prizewinner? Christina Mackie fits in but certainly does not stand out. Her installation consists of a wooden lean-to housing a projector and speakers that quietly babble electronic music. The projector casts images of the artist moving drawings of little flower petals about, and has a twin beside it mounted atop a pile of wood and perspex. It is easy to see what Mackie is up to here, with nods to Modernism and Constructivism that combine with an attempt to loosely couple ideas, to hint and suggest, and, too, to break down her practice into a multidisciplnary mix. There is a problem though - Mackie’s work falls flat, it fails completely to engage the viewer, and feels flimsy compared to the other work here, work considered by the Beck’s judges, inexplicably, to be inferior. This may be too harsh - Mackie is not bad, but placed alongside her fellow nominees, some of whom cover similar ground with greater insight, her collection of things suffers.

This failure might almost be seen as a key to the show’s surprising coherence—if the winner is the worst of the lot, then the Beck’s Futures Award is, as all competitions between artists must be, a nonsense. Let’s remove the prize-giving from the equation then, and in so doing reveal that this exhibition is indeed, after all, a fine group show.

Does anyone know who’s behind the Maryhill Anti-Graffiti Network?

Update: Veryape (aka General Ape) has some information on their inspiration:

It’s a play on posters put up during the 80’s by the philadelphia anti-graffiti network (formed by the then mayor to eradicate graffing) which read the same. pic of the original here. notice original’s spelling =) go pick up a copy of henry chalfant’s “spraycan art” book for more.

Thanks Ape!

Update II: I know who is behind the stencil now, but will respect the anonymity of the artist!

In some cases, the darkness is part and parcel of the installation - Torsten and Ronnie’s shows were, in very different ways, concerned with transforming the gallery space into an alternate environment - but in others, the work might easily have been shown in the usual harshly-lit white cube. For these shows, the dimness is more about light than dark - Dougie’s sculptures and paintings, for example, were spotlit, which served to divide the space, and connect the works.

I don’t know if this is happening elsewhere, but I’d say that many examples add up to a little trend.

Funnily enough, it makes things easier to look at.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow, or, more importantly, to a more peculiar and intriguing artist/documentary film-maker/musician/multi-media art and music collective-runner. Maybe should’ve just said ‘multidisciplinarian’ there, eh?

The other nominees are: Lali Chetwynd, Ryan Gander, Christina Mackie, Daria Martin and Donald Urquhart.

Quite an interesting list, that.

The interview also marks the end of Switchspace, an organisation founded in 1999 by Sorcha and fellow Glasgow School of Art graduate Marianne Greated to explore alternative spaces for exhibiting art.

So, we might as well start at the beginning - what prompted you and Marianne to set up Switchspace?

We were in our fourth year, and were thinking about setting up a studio and gallery complex, to solve some of the logistical problems we were facing, and that our peer group was having too. That proved very difficult, whether it was in terms of getting a space to use from the City Council or arranging funding for the project. Then, around that time, we were given a talk by Cathy Wilkes, as part of our professional practice course, and she spoke about how she converted her flat for a period and did six shows in it, and that just really struck a chord with us. We were both keen to get something up and running instantly, and we liked that DIY attitude of being resourceful and being in full control of starting up and running a project. That was the main reason we set it up. Originally we just had a couple of shows confirmed, and we just set it up like that to see what the response would be, to see if people thought that what we were doing was a relevant thing, to see if people would support it. It really grew and developed from there, because we had such a lot of interest, and such a lot of people supporting us and wanting to show in that unusual space.

It was in your own flat initially?

Yes. We converted my front room, and showed artists there. It was quite intense actually, we were showing one or two artists each month, and ended up showing 15 artists in the flat over 15 months. It was very intense, but amazing for me personally - it altered my whole career development. I came out of art school and had my own studio and was making my own work, but working in such close proximity with other artists - some of them were practically living with me - was such an intense working experience, and I felt really privileged to have all this going on right in my front room. As a result of that, I really got the bug for working with people, and for sort of supporting artists in that way. So for me it really had an impact on what I wanted to do.

And when did things shift up a gear from being in your front room to being in other locations around the city?

From the beginning, we had the idea for there never to be a fixed gallery space. Obviously it was great to start things out in my flat, and during that time it gave us a chance to move the organisation on and develop, but after 15 shows in the flat, we began to feel that it had become a fixed space, and to live up to our name we needed to move things on. We were looking at various options, and we felt that because we’d had such an intense period of exhibiting, that we needed a bit of time getting ourselves kind of constituted, trying to fundraise in some sort of way, because it has been a self-funded project, up until last year, really. So we took a bit of time out to do that, and were approached by Fab Flats, a property agency who’d seen a feature on us in Artists’ Newsletter. They saw that and approached us, and we brokered a deal with them whereby, in exchange for labour clearing out spaces for them, we’d get to use the spaces on a temporary basis to show artists’ work. That’s been the main programme, since 2001, but during that time we also took over the basement space in Offshore Café, focussing more on current students and recent graduates, and we’ve always done one-off projects alongside everything, like setting up The Chateau, or using the Project Rooms, or being involved in RAW, or the Art Fair. So we’ve always been interested in not being completely fixed to one programme, but I guess the project we’ve been running with Fab Flats is the one that’s been closest to the aims of what Switchspace is about - moving around between different communities, and also the education programme we’ve been running alongside the shows, bringing people from the local community and engage them with the work.

So, as well as the idea of using alternative spaces, I guess a big part of Switchspace is the idea of seeing how the artists you worked with responded to those spaces, as opposed to showing in a straight gallery, so to speak?

Yeah, totally. As a result of that it wasn’t about our curatorial vision, it was much more open, a way to offer a range of artists the opportunity to show work in unusual contexts, and as a result for their work to… well, what we wanted them to do was experiment with it, to really push their practice, so that the experience would ultimately be really beneficial to their work at that time, or in terms of their future development. As a result of that, there wasn’t really the pressure to do something really final and really fixes, it was more about using the opportunity to push their practice. So, yeah, that’s really what we wanted to achieve from it all, really.

Obviously there’s tons and tons to choose from, but can you think of a particular artist or artists who really took to those ideas, who really had their practice nudged along in a particular direction?

That’s hard. I mean, I hope that all of them enjoyed the experience, and gained something from it. One show that was really important to us, in all sorts of ways, was Ian Balloch’s show. He was the first artist to show as part of the Fab Flats partnership, and he really did enter into the spirit of coming into this large space, and using a lot of found objects and materials that were left within that space. Also, one of my dreams has always been to work with Cathy and I think the way she works really lends itself to being shown in an alternative or unusual situation, and recently she’s been showing a lot internationally, in more institutional or white cube spaces, so I think this show has come at a really good time for her, to show in the shop unit we’re using.

And it’s a nice neat circle, having her as your last artist when she inspired you in the first place…

Oh yeah, absolutely. We really felt that it’s very important that there’s fixed artist-run spaces like Transmission or whatever, but it’s also really exciting to have a sort of cyclical or regenerating aspect to artist-run activity here. Obviously Transmission have that in place naturally thanks to their committee structure, but for us it’s something we’ve been involved in now for five years, and we felt that since already in that time there were other artist-run spaces starting to come through, and approaching us for advice - places like Mary Mary, who I really feel are the next generation in terms of what we’ve been doing. So, it feels natural for us to wind things up while the project still feels relevant, and while we’ve been able to achieve as much as we’d hoped to. It just seems to have happened at a nice time, and also matched up with the two of us now being busy with our own things. And, yeah, that cyclical thing with Cathy showing as our last artist after she inspired us is a nice way to finish things off.

So to finish up, what’s Cathy up to in the space?

Well, the way Cathy works, she has a very personal response and method of working, and she’s developed that in response to the space. There’s sculptural works, and also paintings - it’s quite an intimate installation.