ACCLAIMED playwright and artist John Byrne has made a scathing intervention in the debate surrounding the restoration of the fire-ravaged Glasgow School of Art, saying it makes no difference whether it is rebuilt.
The 78-year-old, who studied there in the 1950s, said: “Neither students nor staff can actually draw”, adding that the famous school had already “lost its soul” before being destroyed by the recent blaze, the second to hit the building in four years.
In a typewritten letter sent to the Sunday Post, Byrne, best known for the Slab Boys trilogy of plays, branded the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building “the school that died of shame”.
Byrne also insisted that even before last month’s devastating fire, it was “no longer in use as a working art school (neither students nor staff can actually draw).”
Tom Inns, director of the Glasgow School of Art, last week moved to end speculation about the future of the gutted building, saying it would be rebuilt, in a painstaking process involving the dismantling of sections by hand, with the bricks logged and stored for possible reuse.
Mr Inns said: “The Mackintosh Building will be rebuilt and will be a working art school. We will rebuild so the Mack can continue to provide creative inspiration to students, staff and visitors.”
However, the plan has sparked fierce debate, with critics questioning the suggested £200 million cost and insisting the new building would only ever be a fake Mackintosh.
Some have called for a contest for young artists and architects to design a new school while supporters insist famous buildings around the world have been rebuilt successfully.
Byrne, however, said: “I really don’t care if they rebuild it or not – the soul of the art school is completely gone, never to return.”
Byrne, who attended the art school in the late ‘50s, said the ethos of the school had been lost to the crass commercialism of modern art, embodied, for him, by the New York pop artist Jeff Koons who once sold a sculpture of an orange balloon dog for $58 million.
He wrote: “In 1958, when I enrolled at Glasgow School of Art, I was in no doubt whatsoever that I was going to be working in a great work of art itself and for the next five years that’s what I did, growing to love it even more and to recognise that it possessed, through Mackintosh’s genius, a Life and Soul of its own.
He wrote that in his view, the building “was no longer in use as a working art school (neither students nor staff can actually draw) but switched roles to become, instead, a ‘museum’, then throws itself onto the funeral pyre on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Rennie Mackintosh’s birth”.
He added: “I believe that every genuine work of art has a soul... the GSA had a Great Soul which it gave up when ‘Artists’ on the Sunday Times Rich last, together with ‘The Infantilist’ from Madison Avenue, introduced the notion that becoming rich and famous should be the goal for young ‘hopefuls’ – but, never mind, we will surely met the ‘art’ we deserve.”
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