As far as I understand it, there is a divide between what is sometimes called “High Art” (traditionally ballet and opera and Shakespeare, but now including Performance Art) and “community art”. The division seems to be clear- although it does ignore areas like “popular art” and probably, cinema- and has certainly been a factor in the allocation of funds since the creation of the Arts Councils after WWII. Every other company that I have interviewed has expressed, to a greater or lesser degree, cynicism about the recent SAC emphasis on “community”.

The artists’ objection is usually fair, if a little self-serving. They tend to maintain that “community” has become a box to tick on the funding application and that other companies, more cynical than themselves, chase funding through a deliberate policy of community tokenism. Having been once warned not to bend my art out of shape to get funding, I agree. Then again, I am getting pretty bent out of shape by the lack of money rolling my way.

Today’s company, Amici, exists in the zone between High and Community Art. Sort of, I think. I know that what they do- encourage integration between able and disabled bodied performers- ticks plenty of community boxes. Like Indepen-Dance, another company I’ll get round to considering soon, they don’t come off as a charity job, though. They make work that gets reviewed in the same terms as any other dance outfit.

Amici was founded in 1980 by Wolfgang Stange, a student of the expressionist dancer Hilde Holger. Stange had been a professional dancer who, while performing at a home for disabled, found himself asking profound questions about the relationship between able-bodied dancers and a disabled audience. Amici tries to bridge the gap.

Amici aren’t just a performance company: Stange is a teacher, holding weekly classes and workshops: his website stresses that his approach is based on sharing abilities, rather than imposing a top-down model on his students.

This rounded programme strikes me as being where the real community aspect of Amici comes in: they are not “community” because they allow disabled people on stage. For all of Stange’s good intentions, he made an aesthetic choice to be inclusive. This is very different from tokenism or altruism, even if it happens to tick the right box.

Hilde Holger is one of the less famous names in the dance world, but her students- ranging from Ivan Illich to Lindsay Kemp- seem to be very loyal to her, and her principles. There is an anarchist inclusiveness in their works, a consistent effort to break down barriers and question boundaries. Amici don’t include the disabled in order to make a point, get money or please an arts council. They are posing interesting questions about possibility, and the gifts of each individual.

Shallow Water, the first work from Third Angel to appear at Tramway was an installation in the Project Room. A bathtub, half-filled with water, was surrounded by towels, “too many towels” and six thousand bars of perfumed soap. A single metal chair is lit by a single light bulb.

I think that the artist was submerged in the water- the press release talks about an exploration of the idea that cleanliness is next to godliness (an idea that, as a believer, I don’t think deserves any exploration). Perhaps it is best to ignore the commentary- even in descriptions, the visceral impact of this performance-installation is obvious. The smell of the soap, the silent threat of the chair in the harsh light, the body cleaning itself sick.

Experiment Zero, which toured to Tramway in the same year, bounced between cinema and performance. The three characters believed that they were movie characters, living life as if it were a film. The clear distinction is made: they do not see themselves as actors, but the characters. They dress and behave accordingly.

Something must have happened in the piece- perhaps a murder, perhaps a suicide. The three tell their version of events, the blurred lines between reality and film become more difficult to discern.

The version of Experiment Zero that reached Tramway was a version of an earlier work, redesigned for touring. With a title taken from long-forgotten indie-rockers Man or Astroman, an interest in 1950s Science Fiction and a desire to use film without having a big screen at the back, it was staged in gallery over three nights as a work in progress. Despite the bundling together of diverse concepts- flying saucer attacks, endless journeys, cold war paranoia and the disjuncture between the image on film and the live person- Experiment Zero has the appeal of theatrical formalist experimentation exploring engaging subjects. By the time it reached Scotland, the cast had changed. It was already moving away from its original format.

I have the poster for their next work, Where From Here on my wall. It is one of the posters that receives admiring glances from my few guests. A woman is seated at a table, a man is blurred as he stands by the window in sunlight. There is a wooden table, a rose and breakfast items. It reminds me of the relationship that I had around that time (2001). I am not sure whether it is deeply melancholic or just natural.

It was a two-hander, a man and a woman. They were remembering happiness, then sadness- times together and times when they were homicidal. It does sound like that relationship.

Ironically, the only piece I saw by Third Angel was the result of their collaboration with the RSAMD. It was called Tiny Moments of Happiness and featured Julie Brown and Johnny McKnight, who would later become stars of Glasgay! They’d been working with the RSAMD for six weeks, and this piece happened in Tramway 4. It was early on in my experience of this Live Art business, and I can only really remember the café setting and the considerable mayhem. The performances, as far as I can tell, were uneven but mostly solid. I only remember not be bored, not really understanding and- now this is telling- beginning to realise that there was more to the theatre than scripts and plots.

I think that Gob Squad sound pretty cool. They only did one piece in Tramway- the big party in a tent piece Say It Like You Mean It. There is a video of the performance on-line: it looks like a disco with occasional outbursts of obscure ritual.

Apparently, it is set at the end of the world, and the six actors are stuck in a forest with limited resources, trying to decide what to do next. There is a beautifully concise description of the show in their archives. It was probably written to explain the idea to promoters.

Say It Like You Mean It creates a make-believe environment in a tent set deep in an imaginary forest. Gob Squad announce the end of the world and ask the remaining survivors to build a new future out of sellotape and cardboard. Protective clothing, new schools, a transport system and the internet are made. Gob Squad make rousing speeches throughout the evening and people are invited to ‘let go’ in order to be 'in the moment'. Some people make guns, while others make an incubator for a baby which will be born imminently. At the same time, participants are invited to step out and view the situation from outside the marquee through special eyeholes while listening to a commentary on the event. Finally a commemorative ceremony is held to celebrate the first day of the new world. The evening is re-played back to them from the start in digital images.

Sellotape and cardboard- for a company based in Germany, they can be very Blue Peter. All of the classic features of avant-garde theatre are present: the audience gets involved, the company’s name sounds a bit punk, the atmosphere is somewhere between threatening and celebratory and multi-media is alleged. They would go on to tackle reality television, but it looks as if they were already exploring some sort of reality theatre back in 2001.

The press release is delightful.

“Say It Like You Mean It builds on the twentieth century live art tradition of the Happening from Dada, the artists of Fluxus, Richard Schenechner and Hermann Nietsch (sic), but it also draws on wider cultural forms like the party or the family reunion.”

I love the combination of innocence- the party- and academic justifications: together they sound like a six year old birthday girl suddenly busting out a series of epistemological meditations. And so much Live Art is in that mood- child-like, charming but sincere and demanding.

The release goes on to admit that they are being deliberately childlike. The piece can never hope to really achieve its aim- to persuade the eighty audience members to come up with a plan for a new society in under two hours. What they are interested in, however, is how far they can go. They claim that they’d gently mock religion and politics, and thereby ‘wipe the slate clean’.

More than this, though, it seems that Say It repositioned the performers as facilitators. The audience gets to make up their own new song- out of bits of remembered pop songs- build the first building (from a B and Q kit) and eat the first meal. It’s a bit like a playgroup for adults. The final picture of the group creates a false nostalgia for an event that is totally artificial.

I wonder. I wonder how I would have enjoyed it. As an introvert, I hate it when the performers ask me to shout at them. This time, they’d want me to act like I was having fun at the end of the world.

Tramway 1998: the programme came as small as a suit jacket’s pocket and proclaimed in beige, in brackets, HIT AND RUN. A small brown photograph of a travel-case was the only other clue.

This season ran from 23 January until the 28 March. Mysterious: these were the days before the National Review of Live Art had settled in the stables and spaces, so the programme was mostly generated in-house. There was the usual mixture: GSA staged a fashion show, plenty of dance, plus a few real pearls- a double bill from Third Angel and an exhibition of Ulay/Abramovitch. Primary inspection of the bill suggests no reason for the title.

The programme didn’t give any clues. The first entry describes the Ulay/Abramovic exhibition. Along the bottom of the page it warned about male and female nudity. Next to that, they thanked the sponsors.

This is one of the first exhibitions that I heard about (didn’t see- I was in Stoke at the time, dreaming of another life) that took my breath away. It was really important. True, it was only a series of images from their collaborations- they had split up, both artistically and emotionally a decade earlier- but Ulay and Abramovic remain two critically important performers. By herself, Abramovic has a body of work that has helped to define Live Art. Nudity, the threat of death, the breakdown of the boundary between performer and artist: she did it all. When she teamed up with Ulay, she made their relationship an extended artwork- even down to the spectacular break-up on the Great Wall of China.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon an interview with Ulay from about the time of their last work together: they were about to walk across China from opposite ends and meet in the middle, kiss and depart. Apart from Ulay’s surprising defence of modernism- he accused post-modernism of disrespecting the past- the most striking feature was Ulay’s desire to expunge the emotions from this piece. He was acting like it was just another project when, as the video footage shows, it was a gruelling personal adventure that exposed his deepest anxieties and feeings.

Anyway, it is debatable whether this show was part of the Hit and Run concept: it was way cool and all, but the next pages introduce the Hit and Run “skirmish”.

“Tramway undertakes a skirmish into the world of British performance theatre and plans to ambush you with a few surprises.”

I don’t really wish to get into the language too much, apart from noting that the old hit and run theme is a military metaphor, not the car-crash one, continued here with ‘skirmish’ and ‘ambush’. But check out this phrase: “performance theatre’. In two words, I sense the whole awkwardness that these works have defining themselves. Performance Theatre must be tautological somewhere, surely?

“Gearing up for another year on the sharp end of the cutting edge, Tramway takes no prisoners and makes no excuses for the roller coaster ride of the senses it has in store for you. You’ll find Tramway a complex and intriguing mix of visual and live art, with crossovers and coups at every turn. Expect the unexpected and still be surprised at what you find.”

I am not sure, however, that the language is entirely inclusive enough: take no prisoners? The sharp end of the cutting edge? Hell, I’m in.

First act up is Becky Edmunds. I am hoping to talk to her quite soon, so I am not going to say anything about this piece just yet. Later on, Third Angel- and I am calling them this week.

It seems fairly difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tramway’s visual art programme is identified with a sort of neo-conceptualist tradition. It’s hard enough to define what art is, or to put it into any meaningful context, but to discern the importance or meaning of this apparent trend feels impossible.

Starting off with neo-conceptualism. What does it mean?

I suppose I use the word to describe a sort of art work- contemporary, and influenced by the Conceptualists proper, a defined group or movement that emerged in the late 1960s- which places more emphasis on the concept behind the work than the actual object itself. This can range from Jonathan Monk’s visual one-liners (his T1 show was a laugh riot, unless you had to go round twice) through to Ilana Halperin’s angular recreations of tectonic processes. There is no particular medium that the Neo-Conceptualists favour, although painting is generally excluded. The Scottish neo-conceptualists, whom Tramway has supported and respected, have a vague connection to the so-called yBAs (Emin, Hurst and co.). They have also had successes: Douglas Gordon, most notably, got a Turner Prize when the thing was turning hip.

In a way, the object doesn’t matter. The place where we’d usually expect the manifestation of “Art” isn’t that critical. The end product might be a video, a collection of sculptures or, as in the case of Donald Fagin, a rather nifty version of a Burn’s song in the reggae style. But the art-work is a key- at best the doorway- to an idea that the artist is considering.

There are certain patterns to the subjects. The nature of art is often under consideration, and the role of the artist is frequently discussed. The Scottish neo-conceptualists love their football- Roderick Buchanan equally loves to deny that he does- and the male artists share an almost aggressive masculinity- which is undermined by a dry wit and playfulness. Watching Douglas Gordon mess about on a BBC documentary, leading the presenter a merry chase and refusing to be pinned down on his art’s meaning (“if I had one thing to say, I’d be a politician or preacher”), it is hard to decide whether he is being loutish or charmingly reticent.

In some sense, I think that these neo-conceptualists see themselves as anti-artists. They certainly reject those media and genres that are most easily identified as art, like painting or anything figurative. They can be reticent to describe their work as art- Martin Creed stated of his Turner winning pieces that he didn’t call them art at all. This is probably just a trope, once used by every movement that calls itself avant-garde and getting tired after Dada and surrealism. Then again, public response supports their hypothesis.

There is also a slightly forced laziness, an aura of will-this-do? Monk often comes across as mannered in interviews, presenting himself as bemused and hip. The association with rock music goes beyond the odd title or reference. Most of the artists played in or hung out with bands, and the whole decadent posing smacks of the rock-god persona. This is the least attractive aspect of neo-conceptualism, stinking of arrogance and self-regard. It also relies heavily on the persona of the “artist”, suggesting that the artist has a special ability, a special taste, that their words and actions deserve attention. It is caught between the rejection of art and the retention of the artist’s status in the hierarchy.

In the end, the radical claims collapse, because the value of any piece- regardless of the price, or the hype, or the fashionability- comes down to the basic questions. Is the idea good, and has it been well executed? And like every movement, neo-conceptualism has its masters and charlatans.

I indulged myself slightly this weekend, taking in two films alongside the usual two performances: four hours in the big cinema watching CGI graphics and working class Londoners fight each other. I have always been reluctant to critique cinema- partially because there are so many critics out there, but also to have a single art-form that I could watch for pure pleasure.

Half-way through Hulk, I realised that the only pleasure that I was likely to get from this movie was to apply some perversely pseudo-intellectual aesthetics to the stop-start action. Few people realise that Hulk is one of Marvel’s weaker properties. Unlike Iron man or Captain America (but like the original incarnation of the X-Men), Hulk did not start his comics career with a bang. He was cancelled after five or so issues. Given that he was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this makes him a misfire.

Stan the Man and Jack the King persevered with Hulk, shoe-horning him into the Avengers and playing on the obvious and exciting tension between the usual super-men (flawed but noble) and this awkward combination of Frankenstein, Golem, Jekyll and Hyde. They rightly realised that as an iconic figure, Hulk had legs. But at the same time, they were encountering the limitations of his character. The past forty years of Hulk comics have been, more or less, variations on the plot of The Fugitive.

A few writers did manage to give Hulk some depth: Peter David’s extended run invented a new Hulk personality, fleshing out the trauma that led to Banner’s habitual suppression of rage- which fuelled Hulk’s smashing. Ironically, for such an obvious loner, Hulk has been a brilliant team character. The early Avengers stories revolve around their attempts to get Hulk to play nice, and a minor team, The Defenders, was held together by the constant challenge of keeping Hulk under control.

The film, however, doesn’t grapple with any of this- although the late appearance of Iron Man does hint at a future Avengers movies. It just has the usual Swiss clock rotation of scientific Banner, trying to chill, and angry Hulk, trying to get his words out. The relationships between Hulk, Banner, his girlfriend Betty and her dad- and Hulk’s nemesis- Thunderbolt Ross are reduced to filler until Hulk can get his rampage on.

And while the last film was not seen as a success- hence the new actors and director- it shared this problem.

And that is because it is Hulk’s problem. Hulk is a superb idea- a fine example of Kirby and Lee’s ability, unknowingly, to dredge up an image that is the perfect expression of an idea. In Hulk and Banner, they tapped into the same angst as the Marxist philosophers, Adorno and Habermas. To oversimplify them terribly, they noted that the advances of science and humanism seemed to correlate with sudden outbursts of violent irrationalism. Bruce Banner, the compassionate scientist, the man of reason, gives way to Hulk, the big smashing monster. Whether he is a symbol of nuclear power, genetic tampering or Nazism, Hulk represents the uncomfortable split between reason and violence.

Symbols are great, but they are hard things to include within a narrative. It is especially hard within a medium like cinema, which has increasingly embraced a literalist realism. Allegory, as an aesthetic genre, has fallen out of fashion and ‘poetic licence’ is a mere defence than an underlying principle.

Hulk- like most superheroes- is ripe for allegory. Deepening the character is a process to deepen the allegory. The film, sadly, went the other way. It attempted to imagine the Hulk in a real universe. Since Hulk’s very physicality breaks several laws of physics, this is a doomed effort.

But there, hush. Hulk has transformed back and is punching buildings again. I am happy with that.

So, I have been doing a few film reviews on the side. Never mind that I once vowed never to review a film- I wanted to have at least one art form that I could watch for pleasure, not intellectual masturbation. Never mind that the films that I review aren’t really the sort of films I would naturally go and see- I probably would, in the end, but not with the same enthusiasm. The thing is, I am reviewing them for a Jesuit website, which puts me back in the army of the Society of Jesus.

If I were a more considered user of Facebook, I’d be in that group called “I Loves Me Some Jesuits”. Like many other lay people- that’s Christian for non-priests and monks- I have found my adult life inevitably tangled up with the last of the great monastic orders. And that is in spite of not being a Catholic.

The reason that I was so keen to review the films for this site, Thinking Faith, was that I have been using the spiritual technology of the Jesuits on the sly for a while now. Based on the principle of discernment, Jesuit practice seems to be offered me a strategy for aesthetic judgement. Could I be any more unfashionable?

After twenty years of pretending to be a post-modernist, the whole thing is starting to make me sick. There are some things that I love; the stark nihilism, before it got repackaged as vapid consensus; bricolage, or sampling, the rough hewn materials flung together; encouragement of diversity. But post-modernism was unsatisfying, especially in the diluted, popular version. For a critic, it is ultimately self-defeating, because it denies the idea that one opinion is better than another. It also encouraged some very bad writing on the part of artists.

Like many other old men who drop away from a fashionable position, I find myself attracted to the past. Between saying things like “Plato was the last philosopher who really took art seriously” and bemoaning the quality of debate in the metro letters page (I mean, seriously, come on), I am looking very seriously at Ignatius’ spiritual exercises as a template for aesthetic judgement.

Hell, if that statement doesn’t destroy any interest in this blog, I am not sure what I can do next….

I am writing a book about Tramway, a visual and performance arts space in the Southside of Glasgow, Scotland. This blog is a sort of shadow to that book: a place for me to blow off steam when it all gets hagiographic, to invite responses to my thoughts and to test out my prose on some hard ideas. The book provides me with some of the material that I use on here, and it certainly unlocks a few doors for me.

Tramway has been running for about twenty years. It started off as the site for a specific series of performances, got rescued by 1990’s Year of Culture and has alternately limped and sprinted during the past two decades. It has hosted exhibitions for at least three Turner Prize winners- David Mach in 1990, some time after his victory, Douglas Gordon in 1994 just before his and Simon Starling (part of a group show, admittedly). It has been visited by Scottish Ballet, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Brooke and Robert Lepage. Some people have called it the most important venue in Britain. Other people think that it is a nice café with some strange goings-on at night.

Being a determined dualist, I spent most of my time seeking out the tensions in the history. Being a determined Hegelian, I then try to link them. Being pretty sketchy on aesthetic theory, I cobble something together. Hopefully, that is where the comments on this site will come in and help me.

It is probably a side project, but I want to develop some sort of aesthetic sensibility or theory that will help me through the research. Tramway has dealt with a lot of neo-conceptualist art in the past ten years. That’s the stuff that people tend to hate: the Young British Artists, guys switching lights on and off, women going on about sex and filth. Tramway was there at the birth, and has kept faith with these artists. Jonathan Monk has exhibited there a few times- most recently, quite recently- and back in 1994 it was a cabal of curators and neo-conceptualists who came up with Trust, a retrospective collection that set out the sources for the modern movements, caused a major ruckus in the press and won Tramway a special award from the Prudential.

Tramway can claim to be at the cutting edge here: these neo-conceptualists are so up-to-date that they are derided both for being too popular and inaccessible. When I naively picked up a few books on ‘High Art Lite’, I slipped into an aesthetic war zone. It has got so bad that I simply don’t know whether I like them or not.

It was some time ago now that I met Alan and Rebecca Taverner, the prime movers behind Capella Nova. Capella Nova are Glasgow’s choral powerhouse, carrying a repertoire that ranges from John Cage to Hildegard of Bingen. I’ve caught them a few times around Glasgow- mostly in churches, and usually during the religious holidays. I interviewed them for my Tramway project, even though they aren’t really a typical Tramway company.

“We have never booked ourselves into Tramway. We have been part of festivals, and collaborations. But we have never promoted ourselves: it is probably a little outside of our audience’s comfort zone.”

Back in the 1990s, Tramway would have regular festivals. They were probably gimmicks, little more than themed programming given a smart suit. However, these festivals would call in Capella Nova, or other local companies that would never have appeared Southside in normal circumstances.

For Nova, it meant that they were encouraged to include new work in their repertoire. Asked to contribute to a contemporary music festival, they picked up Litany for a Whale and The John Cage Song Book. Both Rebecca and John are very engaged with modern music- they have championed Scotland’s greatest living composer, James MacMillan for many years- and they would have added something equally radical eventually. But, it stands that Tramway is the place that precipitated this addition.

After the nastiness of the previous blog, I am delighted to report on a splendid meeting with another local artist: Phil Spencer, sometime director and performer with For We Are Many, a company that is willing to challenge itself as often as the audience. I had just reviewed their lastest piece, an updating of an absurdist drama, in less than glowing terms. Phil was gentlemanly.

"I agreed with you in places," he said. "But not all of it. I did wish that we'd had a few weeks to rehearse it, though."

I steer the conversation away from their most recent show to older work. Since they have only been together for two years or so, that isn't a deep resource. But I did admire their debut, Shit and Sugar, even if it had more than a slight aura of Forced Entertainment.

What really interests me about FWAM is that they seem very unlike a theatre company. First of all, they swap roles: Phil directed and wrote this one, although he is usually on stage; previous performers have disappeared back stage, building and doing light design. Then there is the collective vibe.
"Yeah, we are more like a band than a company. If we could only play instruments, we'd be a ska band."

I'm glad that they can't: I don't think the world needs a Glaswegian ska troupe like it needs experimental theatre- although, as I type, I realise that many people will think that I am being sarcastic. But I do love FWAM, even when they don't quite blow me away. In three works, they have moved from pretty generic physical theatre- albeit very funny and entertaining- to cod-historical studies in mayhem and attemting to find a link between script and devised work, the absurd past and the live art present.

I caught up with Phil in the CCA cafe- despite the venue's abject failure to achieve any sort of worthwhile performance schedule, it seems to be the centre of the artist lunch scene- and was delighted by his relentless energy and enthusiasm. He'd just been in a butoh workshop- something we have in common.
"I am quite excited about doing more with him (Alex Rigg). He is choreographing for Peeping at Bosch (the show that FWAM are doing with Ian Smith from Mischief La Bas)."

In spite of the brevity of our lunch date, Phil and I raced through a range of subjects- Ian Smith ("He's a bit of a maverick."), Phil's performance art career ("I got a few gigs dressing up as the arse end of a camel- and called that Live Art") and his enthusiasm ("I am sure that it will wear off by the time I am thirty"). On my recording of the conversation, I can barely tell the difference bewteen our voices, as we are both shooting off at the mouth so rapidly. The same infectious energy that feeds FWAM's best moments rattled out from him like nasty one-liners from a bitter critic.

Most productive was Phil's willingness to engage with criticism, and his interest in the theory behind his work. It isn't like his shows are dry- a solo piece called Bluey was witty and emotional- but he has an intelligent grasp of ideas.