Leaving Glasvegas

Curated by Neil Mulholland (Scotland)

The traffic lights are changing. Glasgow is taking off its party hat, waking up and smelling the ginger frappe. Following the Moskva down to Gorky Park, listening to a wind of change, Glasgow artists have left the art center café-bars of the ’90s and returned to their quiet redstone tenements. The city’s parochial qualities are there to celebrate once more. The intimacy and responsiveness between groups of discordant artists allows things to be done differently. There is a will to reassert the opacity of art, and to recover anomaly against the virtue of art as ‘concept.’
After all these years of penance, Scotland’s artists have only two personal weaknesses: they are rebellious and they care. These artists are offered accommodation by an inner ring of fallible guardians, bringing back their need for moral works of art, abundant decorative flourishes in the color of the writer’s eyes. Having left Glasvegas for Edinburgh, and with it, the myths and institutions around which a synchronous analysis of ’90s Scottish neoconceptualism was managed, I follow a broken thread of white rags falling slowly down, flags caught on the fences.

Artists:

Katie Dove

Michael Fullerton

Keith Farquhar

Alexander Guy

Keith MacIsaac

Lee O'Connor

Tom O'Sullivan and Joanne Tatham

Alex Pollard

Hanneline Visnes