GLASGOW ART FAIR ****
GEORGE SQUARE, GLASGOW
THE Glasgow Art Fair has come around again. This year, as last, the quality is certainly mixed, but the fair is lively too. There are around 1,000 artists represented by more than 40 galleries and organisations.
The public is expected to pour in. Last year they did, and the turnover was £1.1 million.
This year should be better. There were already some red spots around when I was there, even before the labels were up or the catalogue delivered, and with 24 hours still to go before the doors opened to the eager public.
Sited in a tent on George Square, from modest beginnings the Art Fair has gradually established itself as a distinctive and valuable contribution to Scotland's cultural calendar.
Not that it has grown exactly; it can't really do that if it stays on its present site, and the advantage of visibility there is such that it would be a real setback if it had to move. But it has grown up. When it began it was more like an art bazaar.
The kind of things on view - small, brightly coloured, pointless paintings and soft porn for the boardroom - would all have looked perfectly at home for sale on some dingy railings somewhere. But by being selective, and being so with increasing rigour, by doing good business for the exhibitors and, most importantly, because of the low rents for stands (made possible by a Glasgow City Council grant) the Art Fair, as well as gathering galleries from all over Scotland, has managed to attract exhibiting galleries from south of the Border and even further afield.
An enterprising Dutchman who has a gallery in Barcelona, for instance, has brought a group of artists this time, including Fernando Alday from Chile.
He makes rather beautiful collages from old papers and documents. Advanced Graphics, Flowers and several other galleries have come from London, plus one from Brighton and another from Bristol.
It is encouraging, too, that a good many of these visitors have brought Scottish artists back to Scotland.
Flowers are showing Ken Currie, for instance. They also have two lovely John McLean monotypes, several very desirable Paolozzi prints and a small, abstract bronze by him from the 1960s. Flowers also have Peter Howson, but he is ubiquitous, showing on at least four different stands.
Advanced Graphics are doing a roaring trade in Craigie Aitchison prints and Bertram from Somerset has brought Andrew Scott George back to Scotland. He paints low-key landscapes, but uses the ancient medium of egg tempera and it gives his painting a distinctive, light-toned quality.
Scottish galleries are showing good stuff too, and not all of it familiar.
The Lost Gallery, up in the Cairngorms and now the only art gallery situated in a national park in Scotland, is showing several of Craig Mackay's meditative compound photographs. They are stock-in-trade, but this year the gallery is also showing a group of small works by Doug Cocker, including an austerely abstract but very beautiful bronze, patinated bright green and called with tentative optimism Hooray, maybe.
The ridiculous Extension, for so-called "cutting edge" but actually simply noncommercial art, has now been dropped from the Art Fair.
A fine set of prints at Artist Statement made by Nathan Coley, Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland and others to raise money for residencies at arts centre Cove Park is a reminder that there is really no valid distinction between cutting-edge art and any other. There is only good and bad.
There is also a fair bit of the latter here, however, perhaps inevitably.
It would be a waste of space to dwell on it, but there are one or two real bummers. PopChoc from Brighton, along with some perfectly respectable Pop art, has some very dubious paintings of nymphette beauty queens clutching teddy bears, for instance, but as the labels were not yet up, the guilty artist will remain anonymous. If these pictures are meant to be ironic, that doesn't wash, certainly not here, where female nudes painted with doubtful intentions have been a too familiar sight in the past.
But on the whole the best of what is on show proves a point. The Art Fair is a commercial enterprise. There is no simple equation between commercial success and enduring value in art.
Nevertheless, the really good stuff will sell and it will keep its value, too.
That is certainly true of an outstanding suite of prints, a mix of coloured etchings and woodcuts, that Adrian Wiszniewski has done with Glasgow Print Studio to illustrate the libretto that he wrote for music by Gordon Rigby.
Called GBH, or The Girl, the Boy and the Hag, the story is a romantic tale of boy-meets-girl, but then, reversing sexist expectations, the girl rescues the boy from adversity as Gerda rescues Kay in the fairytale The Snow Queen.
The 26 prints are simple and very beautiful. They are also very modestly priced.
Equally striking is a four-screen work by two-man team Hamilton and Ashrowan in the Demarco stand.
To call it a video or even a DVD would be misleading. As an art form, videos and DVDs are rarely beautiful, but this is in the way Bill Viola can be when he works on a small scale. The subject of the four screens is melting ice, a topical theme certainly and intended to be so.
But the technology this team has developed is also intriguing. The four screens work together in a sequence that is linked in real time. This has apparently not been done before, but it offers fascinating possibilities.
Also in Demarco's stand are some lovely landscape drawings by Edna Whyte, from Luing.
There are some classics here too. Duncan Miller has a moody, moonlit painting by William Wells, and Cyril Gerber is showing a sharply observed Joan Eardley drawing of a fishing boat and several tiny but quite exquisite sketches by a little-known 19th-century painter called NM Dunbar.
There are even some European classics: James Kinmont Fine Art from London has some beautiful abstract prints by Sonia Delaunay, for instance. All in all there should be something here for most tastes and pockets.
The City Council's grant for the Art Fair this year was less than £100,000, a modest sum and only a fraction of the total cost.
The rest is made up by rents and admission charges. Without the subsidy, one or the other or both would have to go up, or the fair would have to fold.
At present, rents stand at between £2,500 and £3,000.
Most commercial fairs are two or three times as much, or more, but putting them up to that level would turn away some of the most important participating galleries here: those that function commercially, but also push out the edges of what is commercial in a really valuable way, such as Glasgow Print Studio or, showing for the first time this year, Belfast Print Studio. On the other hand, putting up the cost of admissions enough to make up any deficit would turn the public away.
Keep out the public or keep out the galleries, either way the fair would be much diminished.
The best thing would be for the city fathers to keep up the subsidy whatever the outcome of the election. The Art Fair enriches Glasgow and Scotland.
• Until 22 April.
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