SWG3 (Studio Warehouse Glasgow) is a multi-disciplinary arts venue that exudes eccentricity as you walk through the steel doors. The huge open spaces can be transformed into whatever you wish; an exhibition space, a nightclub, a wedding venue, the space is a mean contender as one of the most popular venues in Scotland. Tucked down a lane in the heart of Finnieston in Glasgow, SWG3 thrives on its reputation for being a stellar venue and a huge player in the creative scene, inspiring young individuals to create and fulfil their potential in an open and free space.

SWG3 is a popular nightclub, the home to roller discos, themed nightclubs, resident DJs and music festivals. The venue can be hired for creative ventures and the space can be admirably catered for a variety of different events.

SWG3 prides itself on large contemporary spaces that can be used for a multitude of creative processes. Inside the vast space there is a Photography studio which is available to hire for commercials, editorial pieces, test shoots, music videos and more. Spaces also available include individual artist studios alongside a Design Studio which is shared by some great creative businesses, graphic designers and illustrators.

SRD Fashion show @ SWG3

Gallery space @ SWG3

SWG3 have a number of gallery exhibitions, and frequently Scotland’s creatives descend to wander around the vast space to experience up and coming national talent. This year SWG3 is taking part of Glasgow International, the world renowned festival of contemporary art where there will be an install of Don Levy’s exceptional, innovational work.

For further information or to arrange a site visit contact info@swg3.tv

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

There are several divides within my practice, like I imagine there are for any contemporary artist. For instance- a lot of the personal myth surrounding my practice comes from self-generating a lot of my projects, but more and more I am undertaking commissions for galleries and institutions. Doing both at the same time can take your practice in several very different directions at once, and often leaves audiences a bit unsure of where to place you. There is also a strange split in my practice between data-heavy analytical works, and accessible bright colourful theatrical performances; I have previously undertaken public works with communities in the highlands and islands that have lead to unusual looking images of part neon hiker, part wicker-animal characters. And I’ve also found myself making work about archival systems for whom the main audience was librarians, or museologists!

So a commission to respond to the ATELIER PUBLIC#2 program at GoMA during G.I. really could have gone either way!

Boar-Headed Hiker, 2013

AP2 is a fantastic public engagement activity, taking place over several months, and breaking through a lot of the G.I. veneer, sandwiched between two of the main G.I. exhibitions- Sue Tompkins and Aleksandra Domanovic. Members of the public (and visitors to the G.I.) are encouraged to create their own slogans and images, and what has resulted over the past 2 months, is a constantly changing canvass of ideologies and (often highly personal) imagery. There are also few rules in place, and so existing images are often re-used or destroyed in the production of new ones. There is also no quality control or age restriction, so the content is as varied as the people walking the streets of central Glasgow.

Tale-twisting documentation, 2013

These slogans, symbols and amorphous shapes, have had a habit of mimicking and responding to what existed already on the walls around them. Thus an image of a rocket has seeded several more personalised rockets, a provocative slogan has inspire many more slogans along similar themes, and in comparative display styles. Like Chinese-whispers, messages and visual imagery has shifted and transformed, amalgamating and dissolving existing materials and influences.

To explore this process and create my own version of the phenomenon, I spent 8 days in the gallery at the beginning of April, employing a “copycat” approach; creating a likeness of each shape, form, slogan, scribble, pictogram, and amorphous cut-out that took my fancy. Members of the public and invited guests came in and helped- applying their own re-interpretation upon the symbolism of each icon by re-making it. It was also interesting to have to work with a limited amount of similar material, meaning colours and material often had to be substituted.

Exegesis film still, 2013

The original emotive images and words (many still visible on the walls of Gallery 2) often came from someone’s personal rhetoric, something tied up with their identity and things that mattered to them, symbolising more than is immediately accessible to others. By copying (or attempting to copy) these symbols we can only take the ‘likeness’ of them, and most of the meaning is left behind.

Following the creation of over a hundred ‘likenesses’ in vinyl, I have taken these symbols through a further process of re-interpretation, transforming and amalgamating them into a single mural.

New combinations of the slogans and text has produced a single paragraph of evocative phrases, and every word has been assigned its own symbol allowing new readings of what is now ‘mute’ material.

Exegesis film still, 2013

This curious “copycat” exhibition is both subversive and archival, so that in creating something away from the institutions intentions, the material has been placed within an even more institutional context. But the meaning/s of the new arrangement is in appearance only, where readings and connections can be made but become looser as the text work spirals up towards the ceiling.

Audiences who have already contributed to the ATELIER PUBLIC #2 project these past weeks will return to find a mirror of their own artworks being put to new use, in a re-interpretation of the entire exhibition.

“Counterscript” opens in the Round Gallery of Balcony 2 at GoMA on 24 April, and runs through to 27 May.

See more of Alexander’s work in VERGES/The Wild Project from 2 – 17 May at Interview Room 11 in an exhibition that examines personal and public perceptions of Wild(er)’ness.

More:  Website | Blog

//////

Want to read more blogs by artists? Look here.

The 6th edition of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art returns from 4-21 April. Known throughout the world, the biennial contemporary arts festival will feature over 50 exhibitions and 90 events and will encompass the work of over 150 artists from 24 different countries. With several innovative venues throughout the city, including a public bath house and an underground car park, the festival will also offer a unique series of commissions and projects curated by new festival Director Sarah McCrory.

Image credit: Aleksandra Domanović, Untitled (30.III.2010), 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin.

Selected highlights for the 2014 Festival include:

• Major new commissions by critically acclaimed international and local artists including Bedwyr Williams, Aleksandra Domanović, Sue Tompkins and Simon Martin.
• A programme for the year of Homecoming Scotland 2014 which will include off-site projects by Jordan Wolfson, Charlotte Prodger and Avery Singer.
• Over 50 solo and group exhibitions by up-and-coming Glaswegian, Scottish, UK and international artists at diverse permanent, temporary, converted and unexpected venues across the city.

Glasgow International runs from 4-21 April at various venues throughout Glasgow. For more information and the programme of events see the GI website.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Flickr

Woke up to perfect weather, that rare moment in Glasgow where it is just what you wanted, odd patches of cloud and sun and a gentle breeze. Spring has well and truly sprung. Down to Kelvingrove Park and all the white bikes are arrayed in a perfect circle round the fountain. It’s a stunning opening image, without anyone there. As we approach the set off point there are more and more cyclists turning up, with all sorts of ingenious systems to film the ride out. One woman has ten cameras strapped to the front of her bike, people have head cams and mobile phones. There will be a huge amount of footage…I’m fascinated to see how it will all cut together.

The ride out starts up Sauchiehall St and the pace is perfect, leisurely and slow and 200 odd bikes fill most of the road, so you can do that thing you never normally do in the city, have a conversation. It is incredibly relaxed. The only sound is the ringing of different bells on each bike, a tinkling backdrop. We arrive at George Square too quickly. I really wanted the pleasure of riding on mass through the city to last forever, it was tantalisingly short.

In the square, there is an old abandoned Peugot bike hanging ready to be painted white, I go for it with a vengeance and the original Provo anarchist white bikes manifesto is read out in dutch by Alexandros (brilliant gutteral voice) and the english translation by Peter McCaughey in his best Omagh accent. There is a great atmosphere and at one point as we present the white bike plan, people lift their bikes above their heads. It felt like a genuine homage to the original and I look forward to some of the original Dutch anarchists seeing footage and pictures and how they will feel to see their visionary ideas take flight again nearly half a century on.

It’s been a strong start to Glasgow International Festival and particularily the prominence given to non-gallery based contemporary practice that works with event, performative action, site-response, evocation and re-enactment. Its also been two years since we made a live work and this was a great way to start again.

Irreverent dispatches from the frontline as comedian Phil Kay lands on Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010.

Central Station captured the Scottish comedian as he discovered exhibitions, performances, happenings, clubs, gigs and  radon encounters and ‘did GI’. His antic were caught on camera and made into a series of comedic shorts, released daily throughout the festival and seeded through the comedy networks like Chortle, The Humor Blog and rereleased on Central Station Facebook and Vimeo.

We asked our members to get involved via Twitter, telling us the most exciting exhibitions and events that Phil should cheek out and giving them the chance to meet the man himself.

@Censta would #GIPhil like toe meet at Kelvingrove to check out Shrigley this avow?

“Leave me a comment or tweet us an invite @Censta and tag #GIPhil. That’s me – for this weekend I’m an artistic soldier. Sir yes sir.”
/philk

“Today we’re going in search of a white bike, looking at collages, making some flickboos and probably playing my guitar. Rumour has it, we’re also going to be followed by a BBC reporter. Stalker.”
/phlk

“We’re going to someone’s flat…a lady called Janie Nicoll. She invited us by tweeting at us. I hope she has tea. You’d think she would, since she’s invited 15 artists into her living room, plus all the GI visitors too. Might put a wash on while I’m there.”
/philk

“Exhibitions, performances, happenings, clubs, gigs and random encounters, Phils going to be doing the lot with Central Station”
/Censta

///

Watch Phil Kay doing GI here.
Browse our Top 5 dispatches from Phil here.

Read through these blogs for more insight into the weekend:

Thoughts from Phil:
And so it begins…
Art and bicycles

Thoughts from folk who experienced Phil:
Phil Kay Does G.I – Title Sequence Funtimes by Jessica Ashman
Sunday Somthings… by Kirsty Swain
Those were the days… by Kirsty Swain
My GI with Phil Kay & The Film Crew Pt. 1 (Sat) by Heidi Kuisma
Openning of GI with Phil Kay by Mathieu Sagnet
Very Funny by Kirsty Swain

I will begin by describing a moment I had a few days after finishing the show at Glasgow, while on a road trip with Richard Demarco which traced the historic journey that Joseph Beuys made to Rannoch Moor and Oban.

“I am standing right on the edge of the pier at Inverary, looking out across a sea loch at dusk. It seems at first view of permanence. Looking down, I see a world in motion, the solid ground replaced by the endlessly moving, reflecting surface of the water. I look across at the hills, formed once by massive volcanic activity, glaciers, millions of years of weather erosion, still eroding. I consider the movement of tectonic plates, discussed usually in lessons of how this country was formed. Yet still they are moving, separating, joining, creating fissures, oceans and mountain ranges. The wavelets beneath my feet lend to this contemplation of geological time their sense of movement, of time sped up, the whole earth forming and deforming, a constant flux. And then, imagining myself transported in time to this very spot before the earth itself were formed, I wonder would this spot even exist, or be contracted to non-existence? I wonder how these waves would look a few seconds ago, or tomorrow. I imagine myself standing upon the loch floor, looking up at the surface movements, not down upon them. I imagine myself looking down from the moon, or looking at the water surface from two inches away. Were I, at this very moment, even to be transported to the other side of the loch, everything would be changed, my experience of this moment changed quite completely. Surveying the scene I perceive, it is just one view of constant movement, and all I can take from it are a flow of momentary perspectives among an infinite number. A complex sampling of an impossibly large total reality. As the number of perceptions and possible perceptions begin to flood in, of an eternity of time, an infinitely varied dynamic of movement, infinite possible perspectives, any ability I might have to process them is overwhelmed. I become quite dizzy with a kind of psychological motion sickness, and turn away.”

What is happening here? It is neither a purely objective, nor a purely subjective experience. It is certainly not transcendent; there is no other place reached here, just a dizzying and overwhelming onslaught of thought, memory, imagination and actual perception upon my consciousness.  On one level it represents a kind of oscillation between the subjective and objective, between the imagination and the world of matter.  It is observational, but equally it is a dynamic interplay of thought, memory, imagination and knowledge. It is from this dynamic that creative thought emerges. But it is also an essentially failed attempt to penetrate the flux of fluid reality. It is a failure, because in perception I cannot grasp the thing itself, because the thing in itself is impossibly large, impossibly fluid, and ungraspable. And if perception fails, what chance does art have? In this sense, I must describe all my work as a catalogue of failure, of death.

But, returning to the moving image vs the static image in a work of art, the first point to make is that the moving image never shows us reality, even in the most apparently ‘real’ of images. To choose a slice of temporal reality, frame a shot, record it, present it – all of this is a profound abstraction of a moment of perceived time and reality. It is as illusory in itself as the most abstract of abstract works of art. But, perhaps more profoundly, moving image art deals with movement and with duration. It is this aspect,  in its inherent fluidity, that it comes closer to philosophical truth, for me at least, than any fixed image ever can. A painting for instance, can contain duration in its creation, but the moment it is finished, it appears as a fixed image, and fixed idea, and it begins to die. Its temporal dynamism is no longer situated in the medium of the work itself, but transferred, more or less successfully, to the subjective experience of the viewer. The most interesting thing for me, for example, about Malevich’s black square is not its fixed conceptual significance (supposedly containing at once the negation and immanence of everything), but its element of actual duration, the way in which the paint on this fixed image of an idea has degraded over the nearly 100 years since it was painted. It is now no longer a flat black square, but has become dynamic image of degrading, cracking blackness. Nothing wants to be fixed in time.

So, I believe the moving image comes closer to reflecting the duration, fluidity and dynamism of life. It still fails, but it comes closer. But the fact of its fluidity challenges the way we are used to looking at art and as such, becomes problematic. A fixed image invites an entering into a fixed idea, a fossilized sample that can be looked at again and again with the same result, or even with deepening engagement, but always centered around a fixed point. In a contemporary context, this is something audiences and curators want from art. We want to ‘get it’, to understand the fixed point, the idea, the concept. We are more comfortable and satisfied with work we can intellectually grasp, work we can fix, frame and contain within our cultural context. But all of these fixed concepts represent only lifelessness. Moving image art has the potentiality of fluidity, a potentiality to contain within its form a multiplicity of perspectives, a fluidity of ideas and a life of dynamic concepts.

However, I must admit this potentiality is often both problematic and unrealized within a contemporary art context. The deathly characteristic of the fixed concept is still prevalent in much of the more acclaimed moving image art we see today. Many moving image works are celebrated for their slight, banal, singular ideas, or even their very emptiness. My argument moves against this trend, toward a celebration of complexity and fluidity of idea, form and concept that truly honours the medium.  I shall end this post with a quote from Gilles Deleuze:

“The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any fixed point.”

It proves that if an idea is really good it can inspire change and that the seemingly leftfield can often influence the mainstream without compromising itself.

It’s good to know that the moronic right wing is still alive, if not kicking in Scotland. We had a first critical article in the Daily Mail, railing against the waste of public money on free bikes that will be stolen by Neds; (I suppose for once they can’t blame asylum seekers). When a paper as lacking in moral acuity as the Mail is on to you- then you must have something worthwhile to attack!

Angus

P.S. Unfortunately the Mail article is not available online, but check our write up from The Sunday Herald of the same week.