Essays
7th June 2020
Having quietly endured almost twenty years of managed decline, writes Hailey Maxwell, it is crucial that we consider the possibility that the Peoples’ Palace on Glasgow Green – a valuable civic asset and monument to Scottish history and working-class life may presently be at real risk of being neutralised, misappropriated and entirely co-opted into a neoliberal agenda. Spaces and places which were once public are being repurposed and reimagined not for the benefit of the citizen but for the property developer, the multi-national corporation and the tourist.
31st May 2020
A new work commissioned from artist Susan Phillipsz was set to open at The Woodland's historic Hamilton Mansion. As the pandemic made the presentation impossible, the artist remade the work as a series of files that can be downloaded for lockdown , Neil Cooper describes the experience.
29th May 2020
In part two of her extended essay on the prejudices and stigma still faced by contemporary Travellers, Candace Thomas challenges the callousness both casual - and causal - of media and policy makers in a way very recently, proven to rattle those in power: checking the facts and recovering reality.
25th May 2020
How long will the patriarchy last?
-How long have you got?
The universal quality of Butler's work demands, ironically, that you find it, not as some pristine, independent, already perfected example, but as situated in the relational context of, and with all the potential of, your own local world.
17th May 2020
42 Carlton Place has become known for its regular contributions to Glasgow International, its frequently historical-leaning painting shows implicitly questioning what it means to be ‘contemporary’ art. ‘Fieldwork’, the space’s GI 2020 presentation, has been rendered inaccessible due to recent events, but remains up and running remotely. Jamie Limond responds.
15th May 2020
Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was a man of many contradictions: a writer of words and a conceiver of objects, a collaborator and a fighter. Acutely conscious of the presence of history, he was witty and urbane, yet lived in rural isolation, making a barren Scots hillside into a garden and invoking his revolutionary heroes there. Greg Thomas examines his performative relations with the functionaries of the art world, and assesses the ethical worth and creative achievements Finlay worked into those bureaucratic processes apparently so devoid of artistic potential.
10th May 2020
On what would’ve been the last day of Glasgow International 2020, and in lieu of Teneu Radio, a radio play originally commissioned for and reflecting on the festival, Adrien Lester and Elizabeth Murphy reflect on the experience of absence, and the gaps left in the city as it’s in the process of reimagining itself.
9th May 2020
It's a story very familiar to anyone from a Traveller culture; with depressing familiarity sections of the British media dust off every shopsoiled prejudice and trope to demonise a culture already far off on the margins. But as researcher and activist Candace Thomas explains, Travellers are no longer inclined to suffer in silence.
Imagination in the Contemporary Society of the Spectacle by Jacob Lund