Rubbish or art - it makes you think

Gallery.

A BALE of compressed rubbish displayed in Glasgow Art Gallery's august

setting. What next? Yet, Christine Borland's installation is a very

welcome indication of the wide range of art practised and displayed in

Europe's current city of culture.

It's all too easy to make jokes at the expense of exerimental art. The

Impressionists were derided. Picasso attracted his share of public

outrage. Long ago the Egyptians and Greeks suffered similar scorn. Today

industry encourages research and development. Medicine applauds tests

and trials. Without them things would never progress. The same applies

to art. When the Queen came to Glasgow recently her witty reprimand to

the sniggerers on the subject of contemporary art at the McLellan, ''I

enjoyed the experience'', shows that even an establishment monarchy can

recognise its value.

Borland's project begins at Balmuildy Coup, Summerston. It smells not

bad, considering that half a million tonnes from Polmadie and Dawsholm

end up there. In 1996 the 1,220,000 tonnes infill will be landscaped and

planted with trees. Borland's idea to highlight the packaged remains of

twentieth-century existence by placing it in a museum setting alongside

Egyptian relics and traditional sculpture certainly taught me about the

realities of our greedy throw-away society.

Her provocative comment on consumerism is just one of a dozen

Sites/Positions initiated by EventSpace, a brand-new Glasgow

organisation concerned with the innovative arts of Intervention and

Interaction which aim to take art out of the galleries into the street,

on to billboards, walls, stickers, till receipts, stations or, as with

George Wyllie's Straw Locomotive, the Finnieston Crane.

The work is site-specific in that it draws on the historical, social,

political, architectural, resonances of the place. It is also

issue-based, addressing topics like racism, consumerism, war, thus

highly critical and offering an alternative point of view. ''It makes

gallery work seem very tame,'' said one artist.

In an empty tenement in the shadow of Govan dockyards Alison Marchant

tries to re-present events generated by the Rent Strikes of 1915/27,

using tapes, text, and photos. At its peak 25,000 tenants refused to pay

''the largest wave of working-class struggle since Chartism''. Inspired

by Sylvia Pankhurst, women played a major role, as co-ordinators and

activists. Missiles included flour if baking; wet cloths if washing.

Today's poll tax objectors take note.

Euan Sutherland focuses on an abandoned Cowlairs council estate and a

closed-down school at Colston. Here, in one of the more successful

projects, he attaches bright blue school furniture to the outside of the

boarded-up sturdy stone building.

Other sites include numbers on the inside of what remains of Glasgow

Green station and eye-catching billboards by Mona Hatoum, Tam Joseph,

and Mitra Tabrizian and others scattered from Balmore Road to

Sauchiehall Street.

Much of the work is too obscure in intent and location but at Maryhill

Arts Centre there's a great animated film on the trials and tribulations

of teenage discos put together by Gillian Steel and six girls from

Sighthill. The 12-year-old who does the voice-over is definitely a star!

Today's young have an intelligent and compassionate approach to life and

this reflected in the honest concern voiced in Sites/Positions.

More billboard art from Roger Palmer who specialises in juxtaposition

of photo and text. The key words are again detritus and greed. Treble

pairs, half white-on-grey chalk text (relating to birds' nesting and

gruesome feeding habits); half image (usually debris on the Shetland

shore) can be seen at Street Level, while a dozen text billboards are

located round town. The difficulty is finding them.

Understatement is all very well (indeed Palmer excels at succinct if

alarming messages) but, as with Graham Budgett and Michael Peel's Sites

Posters I think it likely they will go unnoticed. Intelligibility of

ideas is essential in any art form. Divorced from the exhibition

Palmer's Billboards lose their relevance.

Poster art is nothing new and neither are Prolific Pamphleteers. An

anonymous group of that name, critical of Glasgow, European City of

Culture, are busy debating the concept courtesy of, yes, you guessed,

funds from Glasgow 1990 Festivals budget. Back in the 1840s, a French

jobbing printer, Francois Georgin, produced a popular series on the

Battle of the Pyramids. Sixty years later Kokoschka published a set of

cheerful colour postcards. Both now hang alongside Picasso's famous

prints in the Hunterian's splendid display The Art of the Print (to

April 28).

The Hunterian's collection of artists is the biggest and best in

Scotland. Its riches are due to generous gifts and good judgment over

almost 200 years from founder William Hunter to unsung hero McLaren

Young who died in 1975.

Its core comes from local solicitor James McCallum (1862-1948) whose

firm Mitchells Roberton are sponsoring the show -- a nice link with the

past. McCallum took advice from British Museum expert Arthur Hind and

thus bought well. He was also an enlightened collector and acquired

avant garde work by Matisse, Rouault and the surrealists when he was

well over 80. Sadly, current committees are less adventurous and their

general lack of interest in contemporary work will certainly be heavily

criticised by future generations. Moreover, while local artists attract

international attention, the Hunterian spurns them.

The Hunterian's 10,000 prints contain many well-known images: Toulouse

Lautrec's vivacious Mlle Lender, Degas's elegant Mary Cassatt,

Beckmann's Night, and Paolozzi's Calcium Light screenprints whose design

is echoed in his vast aluminium doors commissioned for the 1980 opening

of the new Hunterian Gallery. Unusually for a British institution,

American printmakers like Martin Lewis and George Bellows (a spirited

Dempsey Through the Ropes, 1923) are also represented. However, the only

prints from the 1980s are Japanese.

To see a really impressive array of new Scottish Prints visit Glasgow

Art Gallery before April 1 when this formidable British Council display

sets off on a two-year tour of Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland,

Yugoslavia, Belgium, Russia, and maybe North America. The printworks of

Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Glasgow benefited from considerable Art Council

investment in the 1970s and 80s. It has paid off handsomely. Few places

in the world can call on such expertise and encouragement as Scotland

with its cheap, open access workshops.

The exhibition focuses on eight Scots, Bellany, McLean, Campbell,

Howson, Wieszniewski, Hardie, Currie, and Whiteford. Many prints are on

monumental scale; many are new (Bellany's hospital self-portraits and

Currie's Story from Glasgow); all are punchy -- so dispelling the

postage-stamp knee-jerk reaction to word print.

We are used to the impact of Howson and Campbell's woodcuts,

Whiteford's red and green vibrations, Bellany's graphic genius, but

foreign and London visitors to last week's Art Without Frontiers

conference were astounded at the high calibre of Scottish printmaking.

''Breathtaking'' was the word on several eminent lips. Last time the

British Council circulated a ''British'' print show abroad it contained

not a single print from Scotland. The enormous change in perception of

Scottish art is reflected in this truly triumphant show. Don't miss it.