Glasgow City Council recently announced details of an exciting new Festival of Contemporary Visual Arts to take place throughout the city from 21st April to 2nd May 2005. Under the curatorship of Francis McKee, GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL will be Glasgow’s first curated and commissioning festival.
Since 1988 when Glasgow hosted the National Garden Festival, the city has been engaged in cultural regeneration on a huge scale. Indeed, during its tenure as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, the city was credited with being the first UK city to use the arts as a strategy for cultural regeneration; a model that has since been taken up and implemented by the British government in numerous other urban regeneration schemes throughout the UK.
GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL seems to be a natural progression for this city that, with more than 2 million visitors per year, boasts of being one of Europe’s most visited cities.
Details of the event programme are not yet available, but according to the official publicity release: ‘The programme will reflect the position of Glasgow as a centre for production and exhibition of internationally significant visual art and will bring to this context a range of work, much of which has either been specifically commissioned or brought to the UK for the first time for the Festival.’ Like its peer festival, the Liverpool Biennial, the festival organisers plan also to utilise new spaces and even open spaces as well as established arts venues in order, ‘to deliver a world-class annual event which will profile Scottish and International contemporary visual artistic talent.’
One of the venues that has been confirmed is Tramway. ‘Glasgow’s Tramway has long been seen as one of Europe’s foremost visual and performing arts venues and it has an established reputation for bringing some of the world’s most challenging and innovative contemporary art to Scotland. In addition to commissioning and presenting international work, its resounding commitment to providing a platform for Scottish artists to showcase their talents and their outstanding history of commissioned work, makes Tramway an exciting partner for this new venture.’
Central to the success of this event will be the curatorship of Francis McKee. Currently Head of Digital Arts and New Media at cca-glasgow, he also teaches on the MFA in Glasgow School of Art and is a researcher in the field of Open Source Software and Intellectual Property. In 2003 he was co-curator with Kay Pallister of the Scottish exhibition – Zenomap at Venice Biennale in 2003. The exhibition was hailed as being one of the best of the entire festival. The Herald’s Phil Miller reviewed the exhibition observing: ‘All manner of benefits will flow from Zenomap . . . every mover and shaker in the visual arts world will be reminded that Scotland is producing an almost embarrassing glut of top-drawer modern artists. The money invested in Venice will be made back in influence, reputation and cachet. The clear conclusion is: Scotland should make an exhibition of itself more often.’
Happily, Scotland will be making an exhibition of itself with GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL aided by the inspiring influence of curator Francis McKee. I caught up with Francis to talk about his past success and about the challenge of being the first curator for a new festival.
What has been your proudest or most exciting initiative in your role as Head of Digital Arts and New Media at CCA Glasgow?
I think it’s been the opportunity to commission artists – two commissions in particular stand out for me: jodi’s ‘untitled game’, a series of works commissioned for the opening exhibition of the refurbished CCA in 2001; and, currently, Simon Faithfull’s ‘Antarctica Dispatches’ in which he emails a palm-pilot drawing a day to a list of subscribers from various locations on his voyage to the Antarctic. More prosaically but just as importantly, I’m keen to help build a profile for the emerging new media art scene in Scotland. This year I was able to fund a very successful series of open source workshops organised by Simon Yuill and their impact will be very significant though less immediately visible than a new piece of art work.
As a curator, whom do you ‘serve’? Yourself, the artists, the venue, the event or a combination? .
All of the above. You try to please yourself first because if you enjoy it then there’s a chance others will as well and you have to trust to what you know of your own taste. Beyond that there are more objective criteria such as the timing of an exhibition for an artist, the possibility of collaborating productively with artists and enabling work to be made or illuminating an aspect of an artist’s work through its juxtaposition with something else in a show. There’s a sense of what is interesting for a certain venue to exhibit depending on its local and national context. Beyond that there’s the motivating interest of communicating with an audience and that basic curatorial desire to show people something that has excited you.
Will there be a specific set of challenges for the Glasgow International, given that you are involved in initiating the inaugural festival rather than following on from predecessors in an established event?
Definitely. There’s the need to create a model for the future and to find out in the first year what works and what doesn’t work within the limits of the event. The festival has to prove itself to the public and to the various participating institutions in the city. Glasgow has a thriving arts scene and so people have the right to ask what can this festival add to a community already acknowledged as a success internationally. I think we need to have a long term approach to the festival – the first year will lay a foundation and in the subsequent years I’d hope the artists and venues in Glasgow will begin to claim ownership to it.
Liverpool’s Biennial has become a highlight of the international contemporary arts calendar in its first 3 outings. Does the UK need another international contemporary visual arts festival; what will Glasgow International bring that is new?
This is closely related to the last question. There are many visual arts festivals, biennales etc in cities across the world and, given that they all have some measure of success, every city wants some of that success. I think Glasgow may have the potential to create something new because it already has such an active art scene and such a large arts community. The city already attracts international attention – curators and visitors are regularly drawn here – and it is home to a disproportionate number of artists of international standing. A festival that builds on what is already happening could have a different sensibility than one that simply parachutes ‘international’ art in for a short period. I think the festival could provide a focus for the public – local and international – highlighting a time when the full spectrum of the city’s arts scene is easily visible.
Glasgow has been cited as the city that innovated the approach of using the arts as a strategy for cultural regeneration – is art as a strategy for cultural regeneration still going to be a part of your approach to Glasgow International?
Glasgow’s fame as a city that used the arts for cultural regeneration stems from the changes that began in the lead up to 1990 and the City of Culture celebrations. In many ways the arts in Glasgow are now in a more mature phase and the issue may not be cultural regeneration but rather sustainability. Artists based in the city have proven themselves at every level nationally and internationally. Now it’s a question of providing a coherent and supportive infrastructure that provides a platform for those artists in Glasgow. I want to draw together the various arts organisations and artist led groups in Glasgow and I hope the festival will help strengthen that broad infrastructure. I want to highlight the work of the younger artist-run projects as much as that of the larger venues, as the success of the arts in Glasgow has most often come from those groups initially. It’s important that they retain their independence and it’s also important to recognise and celebrate their achievements.
Honestly though, I don’t approach the project with ‘cultural regeneration’ in mind – policy makers may think like that but practitioners and curators have to work creatively first. I want to present exciting art and artists and to engage the public. In the overall scheme of things that is likely to contribute to cultural regeneration but my own task is much more practical.
GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL has received financial backing from Glasgow City Council, Scottish Arts Council, EventScotland, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, and is further supported by UZ Events and the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Valley Tourist Board, under the auspices of Glasgow: Scotland with Style initiative. Full programme details will be announced in February 2005. For further information please contact press manager Wendy Grannon: wendy@uzevents.com Mobile: 07916 137 632.
For sources and more information about Glasgow arts:
www.scottisharts.org.uk
www.glasgow.gov.uk
www.gsa.ac.uk
www.cca-glasgow.com
www.simonfaithfull.org/antarctica
www.untitled-game.org
