May 16 & 17: Two sleep-ins & two contemporary galleries
In terms of actual, not-our-apartment
Glasgow, it kind of reminds me of Melbourne.
It’s very grey, wonderfully dirty and grimy, constantly drizzly and has
a fair amount of street art. There’s a
lot of young people, a lot of tourists, galleries, chain stores and tourist
shops. There’s a river,
impractical-looking bridges and not enough bins. Everyone walks quickly and jaywalks and there
are more buskers than I feel entirely comfortable with. It’s pretty bustling and just noisy enough
that you don’t have to whisper to have a private conversation. In place of seagulls shitting on statues,
they’ve got pigeons, but that’s the biggest difference I’ve found so far.
It was Saturday, midday and raining when we
left, so we made a beeline for GoMA.
There were two reasons for this: a) I was keen to visit GoMA, b) GoMA
was quite close to Lush, and it’d been too long since I got the homey,
comforting sensation that came with entering Lush.
The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow was a beautiful old building with fantastic pillars. A statue of a man riding a horse greets you at the entrance to the building, and he’s wearing a traffic cone on his head. That’s how you know you’re at a modern art gallery, as opposed to a national gallery. Inside are rows of mirrors and people with lanyards and nametags and girls in Dr Martens. A video work by an artist my animation teacher mentioned in second year plays in another room. The work is quite nice, but I wish the room wasn’t so dimly lit, so I could see the architecture.
From GoMA we head to George Square, where I encountered many pigeons and statues of accomplished writers and poets. A tent had been erected on a grassy patch in front of the square. Next to it was a sign that read, “to let”. We thought it was maybe an artwork, but you can never tell. We went to Lush, I spent less time talking to the manager in this particular store, and we went back to the apartment to get out of the drizzle.
The roof at GoMA
The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow was a beautiful old building with fantastic pillars. A statue of a man riding a horse greets you at the entrance to the building, and he’s wearing a traffic cone on his head. That’s how you know you’re at a modern art gallery, as opposed to a national gallery. Inside are rows of mirrors and people with lanyards and nametags and girls in Dr Martens. A video work by an artist my animation teacher mentioned in second year plays in another room. The work is quite nice, but I wish the room wasn’t so dimly lit, so I could see the architecture.
Last year I visited a symposium that focused on contemporary shows and works that employed the artist at curator, and in GoMA I stumbled upon a show I’d heard mentioned at the symposium. A series of presumably Glaswegian artists had been employed to select works from the archives that hadn’t been on display in quite a while, then detail why they’d picked them. One was an Aboriginal artwork and it was quite evident that the artist who selected it wasn’t too well versed in Australian Indigenous art. It made me cringe to read their statement.
We got into a heated discussion about the role of analyzing artwork and reading paintings, which worked up an appetite, so we took a lunch break before heading to the next room. This was my favourite exhibition, because it was all by female artists and a lot of the work utilized maps. One particularly beautiful work was by an artist named Louise Hopkins, who had embossed some sheet music onto heavy paper. From a distance it was unnoticeable, and even up close it was hard to decipher. The gallery attendant and I got talking about how people were attracted to certain works, and she handed me a book of Louise Hopkins’ work to flick through. It was beautiful and put me in a happy place.
Louise Hopkins' work
"Ilana Halperin's work explores the relationship between geological phenomena and daily life. In 1831, an island named Ferdinandea appeared off the southern coast of Italy during an underwater volcanic eruption. This sparked an international dispute over the ownership of this strategically positioned new landmass. Within a few months and before any serious conflict developed, the island disappeared, crumbling back into the sea. Halperin remembers working intensely on this drawing, which she developed over three months." I enjoyed the artist statement for this work more than I enjoyed the drawing.
I can't remember what this was a drawing of, but I took a picture of the sea monster in it.
From GoMA we head to George Square, where I encountered many pigeons and statues of accomplished writers and poets. A tent had been erected on a grassy patch in front of the square. Next to it was a sign that read, “to let”. We thought it was maybe an artwork, but you can never tell. We went to Lush, I spent less time talking to the manager in this particular store, and we went back to the apartment to get out of the drizzle.
From GoMA we head to George Square, where I encountered many pigeons and statues of accomplished writers and poets. A tent had been erected on a grassy patch in front of the square. Next to it was a sign that read, “to let”. We thought it was maybe an artwork, but you can never tell. We went to Lush, I spent less time talking to the manager in this particular store, and we went back to the apartment to get out of the drizzle.
We were still lying in bed when Eilidh came up to change our towels the next morning and we had to confess we were still recuperating. It was officially two months since we’d left Australia on our adventure and Glasgow seemed like a place to organize ourselves and catch up on some sleep. Nicholas had stayed up until past four that morning, reading Casino Royale, so didn’t remotely wake until midday. We were headed to the Centre for Contemporary Art anyway, and they didn’t open til 12. How civilized.
Eventually, we head down to the CCA, which wasn’t too long a walk from where we were staying. They only had one show at the moment (they were also running a couple of residencies that looked interesting, but neither were open to the public/had culminated in a show yet) but it was worth the walk down.
Discussing and viewing contemporary art with Nicholas is always fascinating to me. I’m someone who spent three years learning how to read contemporary art, while Nicholas tends to stick to the Old Masters and considers anything less refined as a lack of proficiency. I think we both were a little confused and a little intrigued by the work displayed at the CCA, which was less an exhibition than it was a proposal. The proposal was for two people to donate their bodies to art, but what the artists were, in fact, going to do with the bodies, was a little more ambiguous. I assured Nicholas that they must have known what they planned to do, or they wouldn’t have had the funding and gallery support.
They referred to an indentation on the skin of a dead person, which they presumably had seen in a wet specimen lab. A video work in the back of the room, which was called a Rehearsal, showed intricate indentations on the skin of somebody living. Two works displayed on the floor mirrored the indentations in style and shape, but were made of clay and 3D-printed plastic. There were constant references to the Neolithic and to Orkney, and Nicholas felt there might have been a relationship between the shapes on the ground and the cairns and burial mounds. It asked more questions than it answered, and there was a certain allure to the work. I almost hoped the donors would die more quickly, so that we could see the work come to fruition, but that raised even more questions about myself and the artwork.
The building we're staying in while we visit Glasgow
This building is currently for let (!!!)
We wandered some more and eventually head
home, Nicholas having Bond on the brain, so we watched Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale until the early hours,
constantly readjusting the volume, so we didn’t wake up our hosts.
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