The GAM GI Guide: Friday | Mount Jupiter Reports: Glasgow International
Part two of your full guide to the Glasgow International weekend, plus MoJu does GI.
Happy Friday folks! As promised, your GI Preview Guide for next Friday, 5 June! It’s all on the website now too btw – don’t say we’re not good to you! Stay tuned for more over the weekend…
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But firstly, in this absolutely massive newsletter, for all subscribers, here is your monthly scene reportage from Mount Jupiter with a history lesson on Scotland’s biennial contemporary art festival!!
GAM xoxo
Richard Parry’s Glasgow International, 2018
Glasgow International
We considered Veniceposting this month but engagement with the returning spectacle, or lack thereof, speaks for itself. Beyond deafening silence amongst the artistic community, there’s some vapid Versace x ArtReview spon-con and exceedingly bland press-release-munching from the likes of the Fleming Collection—the self-appointed authority on ‘Scottish Art News’, whose fascinatingly monied London-based child-director pronounces Edimbra in international-yank English as ‘Edinboro’ (let’s pin that whole situation for a future investigation). Ultimately, the show looks fine and we wish the artists every success as they inevitably springboard themselves outta here. We’re just not sure that ironic decadence backed by the Marquessate of Bute hits the right note amidst, you know, the rise of global fascism.
On home turf, that which remains of the Glasgow Art Scene™ is under lock and key in preparation for Venice’s little changeling, Glasgow International, opening next week. We’re already pushing our caffeine and martini tolerance, training our gut microbiome for inevitable indulgences. To get your Gastro-Intestinal tract on track for Glasgow International, we present here MoJu’s patented prebiotic: a primer on all things GI.
What’s it all about?
Before the PR machine cranks into mythologising anew, here’s the lore. GI was founded in 2005, but seemingly forgot its big anniversary last year. Much like its older cousin, Edinburgh Art Festival, it began as an overblown brochure which sought to designate a few key weeks in existing exhibition-making as uniquely festive and marketable to the city’s tourism board. The trick worked and slowly the cultural calendar reformed around its three-week stupor.
By the 2010s (peak GI for the real heads), something of a signature was found in the re-use of forgotten civic spaces and ex-industrial caverns, with established galleries big and small saving their zingiest programming for the moment of maximum exposure. Commonwealth Games cash was flowing—the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme budget was £13.2m—and drinks sponsorships were really good back then (s/o Caorunn).
The festival suffered a fall from grace in 2018 when a change in direction solicited vast amounts of ick, hitherto suppressed. Wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the phrase “I Might Be Wrong” (or something like that) for a panel event with participating artists, the new director’s famously performative deference did little to ingratiate him with the intelligentsia. A research project by artists Ailie Rutherford and Janie Nicoll estimated the total value of labour given to the 2018 festival to be £1.6m, roughly commensurate with reported benefit to the local economy. Suddenly, in the curating-means-care era, the whole thing felt very extractive.
After the wilderness of COVID and the offensively trepidatious years that followed, the festival rehabilitated itself in 2024 to resounding okayness: no money, no bombast, no aggro. The wheel turns and, after being dumped by the Australians, the Commonwealth Games are back in town. The Glasgow 2026 Festival Fund is now worth £1.25m (91% less for the scientifically inclined) and GI didn’t get a share. With Helen Nisbet at the helm, a new horizon awaits, its bounties as yet unknown.
What’s good?
Most biennials stand firm in their aversion for the locals but GI is uniquely hampered by its own democratic promise. In inviting the community in, so too has the festival invited that community’s wildly divergent and often wrong opinions. GI should be small, big, intimate, exposed, inward, outward, audience-centred, artist-led, ambitious, caring, political, themed, themeless. GI should show the Glasgow Boys. GI should show emerging artists, no, older artists. GI should show me, specifically.
In varying configurations and with ever-changing names, its programme has involved competing strands: stuff the director has organised, stuff the festival has funded, stuff that is happening whether they like it or not. This caste system has long been cause for consternation for those sat invigilating portakabins in the peripheries where VIPs daren’t tread.
In the newest fashion, the lede is entirely buried. All parts sit side-by-side, undifferentiated. The c.£70k co-commissions on seemingly equal footing with the show which has already been on for six months. Nothing is a highlight and everyone is asking, sure, that’s nice, but, what is actually worth seeing?
MoJu recommends:
Rehana Zaman: Plantation – Rural-maxxing indoors
Lisette May Monroe: Hard Lines – Girl about town bares all
Jamie Crewe: Defiling Rain – MTV Hits for Victorian orphans
Milngavie Columbo – Andrea Fraser does River City
It’s almost ten years since the facade of community goodwill began to crack and that rare buy-in crystallised into a double-bind. Strapped to the censorial and impossibly unremarkable patronage of Glasgow Life in the post-post-austerity moment, who or what GI is for has remained a question successive directors have stumbled over. Will the incumbent be gallus enough to answer?
FKA Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s relentless sexual healing, 2016
Glasgow International Guide
Guide key:
🌎 = Official GI Programme
💫 = Alt– GI Programme
Friday 5th June
💫 10am–5pm | Giveth & Takeaway, David Sherry, Jason Nelson, Rob Kennedy, Sue Tompkins | Studio 32, 32 Washington Street | Continues until 21 June, open Saturday and Sunday, 10am–5pm, and by appointment: notkrakatoa@gmail.com
💫 11am–6pm | Unit 42 Open Studio 26, Connor Bardsley-Hodgkiess, Amelia Morgan, Maia Leung, Finn Ross, Culloden Robertson, Eleanor Polatch, Ciara Courtney, Finn Murphy Hewison, Ingrid Evans, Madeleine Howden | Unit 42 Studios, The Hidden Lane | Continues until 7th June, open Saturday and Sunday, 11am–5pm
🌎 3–7pm | The Subtle Body, Katy Dove and Lygia Clark | Kinning Park Complex | Continues until 21 June, open daily, 11am–6pm, and and by appointment
💫 4–6pm | Signals & Echoes, Gori Mora & James Rigler | Kendall Koppe | Exhibition open 2 June – 17 July, open Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm