Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Tramway, Glasgow
16-17 February (continuing in part until 16 June)
Reviewed by: Alex Hetherington
Tramway is a decaying, ascetic exterior, shedding paintwork, shedding particles of old architecture, mended, repaired and remodelled with fillings on fillings, painted-out windows, bricked-up deleted functionless voids, cobwebbed gaps collecting street material. Tramway is an enchanted, replete interior with a mirrored chaos: constantly, consistently, instinctively adapted with a bias towards intellectual speculation, diverse creative pursuits – simultaneously experiment, confrontation and laboratory, giving physical and conceptual dimensionality and receptivity to notions of a ‘work in progress’. It is a document of sequential changes in values and incarnation, progressions of history, economy, regeneration and culture. From operational tram depot to transport museum to its present unfastened radical theatre/art/performance schemes, diversions and adventures. It is like much of Glasgow, existing in an agitated disarray of the old, rejected and falling apart and a stimulated present/future all speculative, contemporaneous and flawless.
Minty Donald, Glasgow-based artist and academic, presents within this restlessness a depiction of our relationship to this specific environment and delivers a ‘limbo’. Her suite of installations attempt to bring these agitations to a standstill – to observe, interrogate and intervene – and regards Tramway’s physical, creative and mental spaces and its extended geographic territory as emblems of perception, self and location. The project is the result of a three-year residency, concluding its formal research as a temporary ‘insertion’ while gesturing towards a new phase in Tramway’s twenty-year evolution.
Glimmers is made up of four ‘interventions’ corresponding to specific spaces in the building: Box Office is a projected loop of stills of performances over a year: recorded from above, the images dislocate the original works, setting up a challenge to perspective and spectatorship; Tour allows us to negotiate the building according to maps of tramlines from 1896-98 and turns us into perpetual passengers; Tramway 2 uses video footage and moveable trolleys which make the vast principal exhibition space an interactive timeline, an everyman-as-cinematographer edit of movement around the exterior streets of the building, turning it inside out; and Tramway 1 (the main performance space) propels us back in time to Peter Brook’s 1988 production of The Mahabharata, projecting the ‘Brook’ wall as a countenance and emphasis on how the temporary becomes the permanent. The latter piece is accompanied by a sound installation set on suspended headphones. The sounds are an indistinct tangle of ambient noise and spoken stage instructions. The muscle of this work is its sanctioning of entrance to otherwise prohibited space – Tramway’s stage and backstage. Here we occupy the role of performer and observer. While imagined voices, interchanges and movements of its past performances become recollection – ‘real’, all shimmering and immediate. We recoup the prior and the prohibited. And in the light of my practice as an artist who works with performance this encounter is intoxicating.
Tramway has more meaning for me than any other arts space in the UK. I grew up in its galleries and theatres and have experienced within it some of the most significant work with serious impact on my practice, on my life; it has allowed me to participate and mature in its difficult-to-occupy massive spaces, its unreserved, rude, disintegrating extent, its solid isolation. It has allowed me to generate, alter and question myself through its diverse programming: The Wooster Group, Christine Borland, Les Ballets C de la B, Pipilotti Rist, Robert le Page, Goat Island, Douglas Gordon etc.
With this emotional and intellectual investment to bear on my approach to this project, engaging with Donald’s academic estimation of the identity of Tramway as a building/document/cultural depiction is both alluring and disappointing in equal measure. Donald’s practice in the past worked along identical lines of environment as context through residency and research, finding voice in a concluding result. Here the outcome is, in respect to its vibrant context, perpetually conventional; its concentration relies entirely on fabric and volume and not enough visibility is given to Tramway’s tensions and assets of vulnerability, conscientiousness and authority, its collisions of audience, substance and reputation. Ultimately she supplants its vociferous activities with fragile notes on surfaces and architectural features.
Glimmers in limbo’s unequivocally academic judgment offers short-lived contemplations; its transitory interventions suggest only intermissions for reminiscence. Meanwhile this juggernaut of a building moves up a gear, continuing on with its agitated, flamboyant, inimitable exploits.
Alex Hetherington
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By Alex Hetherington
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