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.