The trend for artists occupying unconventional, mostly domestic spaces as temporary galleries has long been a part of Glasgow's art scene. From Cathy Wilkes's gallery, Dalriada, set up in her council flat, to the long-running, now defunct Switchspace project run by Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated, which began life in Dallas's living room, to the first incarnation of Mary Mary gallery, these projects were born of economic necessity, and a desire by emerging artists and curators to get their work into the public eye, sidestepping the established exhibition system.
Now, with a collaboration between Katrina Brown, director of new arts organisation the Common Guild, and artist Douglas Gordon, the established - I hesitate to use the word "establishment" - are getting in on the act.
Always Begins By Degrees takes its title from a piece by Roni Horn, which itself quotes from Emily Dickinson. Horn's work, which sets the line in aluminium, also sets the tone: language, communication and conversations are everywhere.
Philip Parreno presents a pair of cartoonish speech bubbles, floating silently. Adel Abdessemed acts as an angry censor in his brief video loop, Talk Is Cheap, which sees a jackbooted foot stomping repeatedly on a microphone, replacing speech with a violent staccato rhythm. Pavel Büchler's Bengal Rose consists of a found tube of paint containing the titular colour, and described as a replacement "for the last rose cut in my garden on the last sunny day of the autumn", a physical analogue for Juliet's thorny meditation on the nature of naming.
Anna Gaskell's film Eraser sees a group of schoolgirls recounting a story that begins with the mundane - a mother hurrying to get her daughter to church on time - and ends in implied tragedy, with the daughter in a car-crash coma, hearing the voices of everyone but her mother. Each girl filters the tale through her memory of events, adding details of her own, taking personal routes to the grim denouement, making it clear that Gaskell is as interested in the mechanics of memory and storytelling, and the shared language of a group, as she is in the tale being told.
As well as the works on show, Always Begins By Degrees offers visitors the chance to read books in Gordon's library, a room designed by Andrew Miller, who has made higgledy-piggledy arrangements of shelving backed with bright flashes of colour, and provided a reading table.
A monitor set on the table shows Marcel Marcel Broodthaers's 1972 Speakers' Corner Performance, which sees the Belgian conceptualist chalk up instructions on a child's blackboard. "Silence," he writes, then, "Silence, please," as his Hyde Park audience chat, heckle and, in the case of one older woman, sing. Finally, Broodthaers acknowledges the visitor's role in the room, an artist-designed space holding Gordon's collection of twinned books, a work in itself.
There are also two sofas in the building, but not explicitly in the show, by Franz West, accompanied by a text by Gordon which reads: "Every time you think of me," a sentence completed on the wall opposite: "We die." West, born and based in Vienna, and his sofas call to mind Freudian talking cures; Gordon adds the spark for a distinctly dark, soul- baring conversation.
These uncredited works, the description of library designer Miller as an artist-in-residence, and the fact that details of each work are lightly sketched on the walls in pencil show a keen curatorial engagement with the status of the space, at once a gallery and a home.
Cerith Wyn Evans has picked up on this facet of the show with Untitled (Threshold), a length of rope barring entry to the upper floors of the building, adorned with Tibetan prayer bells, a pairing which invites visitors to reconsider their surroundings with a nod to museum-like formality, in turn undermined by the joke of turning aids to meditation into a primitive alarm system.
This is how group shows should be done: there's no sign of an overweening theme, and no attempt to set up awkward interconnections between disparate artists. Instead, visitors are free to eavesdrop on the quiet conversations between works on show. It is, too, I suspect, a manifesto of sorts for the future activities of the Common Guild, an organisation with an international outlook, but rooted firmly in Glasgow, and one that, like this opening exhibition, sets out to foster an open conversation, about art in the city, between artists, curators and audiences alike.
- Always Begins By Degrees is at 21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, until March 28.
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