Gi Festival 11-27 April 2008

Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art (Gi) is a growing phenomenon. Grounded in the large network of galleries and artist-run collectives that have created a renowned art scene in the city, the festival highlights the work of the many local artists who are recognised internationally and presents a vital selection of artists from abroad. Gi has always extended beyond the established art spaces in the city to inhabit derelict or renovated lesser known sites. In 2008 this will continue as the festival spreads across 30 venues and alternative sites across Glasgow.

Curated by Francis McKee, the Gi Festival is set to become biennial from 2008. The curator’s themes for this third edition of Gi explore ideas of public and private – examining the changing nature of public space, the evolving landscape of public and private art funding and the fluid boundaries of privacy in a world of converging mobile technologies.

Ninety metres above the ground, a figure steps out onto a network of wires which connect the tops of three tower blocks in north Glasgow. The gusts of turbulence are clearly discernible from street level as the wire walker, Didier Pasquette, steps out towards the centre point between two of the towers – the wire swinging precariously – before reversing back in an astonishing manoeuvre that held the watching crowds in raptures. His high wire walk is being filmed by artist Catherine Yass, and will form the basis of her contribution to Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art in 2008. Even as a work in progress, the piece could hardly be more compelling, or make a more direct intervention into the quotidian cityscape of Glasgow.

The visual arts are deeply engrained in Glasgow’s civic history. Like Milan and New York – the faintly Gothic grandeur of which Glasgow’s dramatic, red brick central streets appears to echo – the city has provided a heady urban context for the development of not just modern art, but a singularly agile cultural identity. And at the heart of Glasgow’s art scene – in a lineage which refers back, in part, to the history of the city’s famous School of Art – there is above all a vibrant, ceaselessly self-scrutinising inter-connectedness: a dizzying topography of artists and attitudes, venues and concepts.

One of the most recent manifestations of Glasgow’s international importance as a centre for the visual arts has thus been the suitably titled Glasgow international: a city-wide festival of the visual arts, which in 2008 will be curated for the third year running by Francis McKee. McKee is a critic, writer and ideologue whose earlier projects have included, in 2003, co-curating with Kay Pallister the hugely successful Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, organized under the title Zenomap.

As a curator and enabler, McKee has been as important to the development of contemporary art in Scotland as any of the country’s leading contemporary artists. With a founding interest in the history of popular music and film and their relation to visual culture, he has had a career-long involvement in the unique constitution and temper of Glasgow’s art scene, and the perception of that scene internationally. Since the emergence in the early and middle 1990s of artists such as Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland and David Shrigley, through to more recent artists such as Jim Lambie, there has been a broader sense in which popular culture, film, music and video-based work has been routed by younger Scottish artists through an awareness of the potential of both ‘underground’ culture and museological traditions.

“Glasgow International 2008 is set to be a watershed year in the history of the Festival,” says McKee, who is also the current Director of Glasgow’s prestigious CCA arts centre, “When I first took on the Festival it was seen in many ways as an adjunct to the Glasgow Art Fair which is primarily a commercial event for galleries and dealers. The first two Festivals were done quite fast, and they also had a feeling of being somewhat ‘under the radar’ in terms of wider awareness of what we were attempting. From 2008 Glasgow international is set to become a Biennial – which means that the 2010 Festival will make a big splash.”

McKee has overseen an epoch in Glasgow’s cultural history during which successive generations of at times vastly differing artists have at the same time shared a common interest in broadening the entire concept of artistic practice. In this, Glasgow during the last two decades has resembled in many ways one of the major European capitals during the height of Modernism at the turn of the twentieth century: a city in which artistic enquiry and experimentation have been celebrated and pursued within an intimate, exceptionally forward-looking peer group of resident artists.

The development of Glasgow international is thus a key example of the way in which, during recent years, contemporary art has become a major agent of urban regeneration. This is due in one sense to the renewed fashionability of contemporary art towards the end of the 1980s [the point at which the previously marginal East End of London would become the centre of the capital’s new art scene]; but there is a parallel history specific to Glasgow in which contemporary art and the city have been related.

Back in the middle years of the 1980s, Glasgow saw the emergence to international prominence of a generation of painters who would become known collectively as New Image Glasgow, and whose loose-knit grouping would include Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell. Richly romantic, inward looking and deeply literary, the style and temper of the New Image painters could not have been more different to that of the generation who would succeed them.

But their prominence would coincide at a Glaswegian civic level with the spectacular success of the Glasgow Garden Festival, held in 1988, and which is still largely regarded as marking a major shift in both the city’s conception of itself and the way in which Glasgow was perceived from elsewhere. In cultural terms, the Garden Festival would coincide with not just a renaissance in the Glaswegian visual arts, but also the rise of a new generation of Scottish realist writers, headed by James Kelman. In very simple terms, this was the point at which Glasgow seemed to put its post-industrial landscape into the service of contemporary culture.

A subsequent example of the ways in which artists, curators, events and venues would become so densely layered in Glasgow during the 1990s, would be the emergence of the Sorcha Dallas’s now hugely influential and highly regarded gallery. Dallas herself graduated in Fine Art from the Painting School of Glasgow School of Art in the late 1990s and swiftly became interested in the idea of creating transient exhibition spaces across the city, under the title Switchspace. This, in turn, enabled a dynamic inter-connectedness of activity, with artists exhibiting their work, hosting live events, films and video, bands and one-off publications. For McKee, such an approach to artistic and curatorial practice has been fundamental to the creation of Glasgow international. By working with similarly minded contemporary art spaces in the city, such as Transmission [who had been amongst the first galleries to hold exhibitions of work by David Shrigley] and The Modern Institute, McKee has managed to transpose the unique [and at times intentionally fast moving] character of Glasgow’s art scene into the framework of a major city-wide festival.

“After the first two Festivals,” he explains, “the city realised that for each £1.00 that was spent, it brought £9.00 back to the city – which meant that our budget was increased from a modest £50,000.00 to around £500,000.00. These are changing times as regards how public money should be spent on art, and this is a very loose theme to the 2008 Festival which derives from the relationship between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’. One example of how this theme might be pursued is the way in which The Modern Institute, for instance, is a private gallery which now has a public ‘wing’, so to speak, called Common Guild. Likewise, Sorcha Dallas Contemporary Art is a private gallery with a very high public consciousness.” From a civic point of view, also, the Gi Festival is becoming increasingly important – bringing Glasgow’s unique networking of contemporary art practice to broader recognition and thus raising the city’s profile.

“Glasgow International has responded to and drawn on the grassroots visual arts community in Glasgow,” says the city’s Senior Arts Development Officer, Clare Simpson, “and as such it reflects the range and diversity of practice, as well as the sheer number of artists and artist led organisations in the city. Glasgow international is important to the city in that it gives a platform to visual arts activity, giving it increased visibility and making the sector as a whole more legible to local as well as international audiences. It is hoped that in the long-term Glasgow international contributes to the strengthening of the visual arts community through developing and strengthening audiences, and consolidating the city’s reputation as a significant international centre for the production and presentation of art.”

Given Mckee’s exceptional record and flair as a curator, it seems certain that Glasgow international 2008 – featuring new commissions from a wide range of artists – a significant number of whom are choosing to work in film and video – will provide a bravura example of how contemporary art acquires fresh resonance and relevance within the workings and landscape of a modern city.

A comprehensive list of artists who will feature at Gi 08 is available at www.glasgowinternational.org