Thursday 4 September 2014

The smell of art.

Located on Sauchiehall Street is the CCA – the Centre for Contemporary Arts, a hop skip and a jump from the Glasgow School of Art and thankfully a reasonable distance away from the Savoy Shopping Centre. My good friend Lux had come across an app on her phone linked to Eventbrite and signed us up for lots of free arty events including the one we were attending that evening in the CCA. It was our first night out in Glasgow after moving and I felt slightly intellectual that our debut jaunt in the city was going to see a series of short films in an art centre. I think the only thing that let us down on the intellectual front was the bright orange plastic shopping bag we had with us containing our evenings food shop including two cans of value mushy peas.


The evening sunshine was blinding during the walk towards the CCA. The people and buildings around us were hazy silhouettes, the large grey paving slabs beneath our feet awash with a shimmering orange light.  If Lux hadn’t directed me towards the venue doorway I would have continued walking, squinty eyed, into the sunset. The art centre is quite a deceiving building, the front of house contains a reception and a small shop but what lies beyond is quite staggering. Passing through a doorway towards the back of the building and suddenly the ceiling disappears revealing a large glass roof attached to, it seems, another building – I discover later that, at least the front part, was built in the late 1800s and is called the Grecian Chambers – I have yet to find out details of the inner building and whether it’s all part of the same structure. The open space under the glass roof is home to a cafe/bar, multicoloured lights hang in lines above us from the mezzanine that allows access to the upper level rooms and art studios.

I stand for several moments and take in the surroundings. I feel somewhat out of place, my self-image worry-o-meter has almost reached full capacity – my clothing is far too drab and boring. Arty people, and there’s certainly a lot of them at the CCA, tend to have a certain visual style about them and I’ve never been able to rock that style because I don’t feel I could successfully pull off the scruffy “I’m an artiste” look/way of being without looking like a total pillock and feeling like a fraud even though I am an artist. I have somewhat of an inferiority complex around artists, you know, proper ones who can put an apple in the middle of a room, shine a light on it and convincingly say without hesitation that what they have created is an artistic representation of the deep connection between life and death, the apple is the baby out of the womb and as with all life it slowly withers because once we are born are we not already dead? Lux, oblivious to my inferiority worries, finds a tourist information leaflet stand and starts filling her handbag – “reading material for later” she says. As my mind slips into overload I wonder what the cafe clientele think of the two blandly dressed plump hobos picking through the leaflet stand.

The cinema door is opened and as we trundle inside we are given a folded poster, within it a sheet of yellow paper detailing the subject of the event. The title of the evenings proceedings are ‘What does nothing do? Magic, technology and language’. The cinema room is cosy and the seating a glorious shade of red. Allowing for a few latecomers the door is closed and with a brief introduction by the artist to the spattering of attendees the screening begins. The films are varied, some induce chuckles from the audience, whether or not that was the intention, but many are far too abstract for their own good. I turn to Lux during one of the films, my face expressing the look of bewilderment although I probably just looked constipated. I liken the short to a series of home videos I remember seeing by the drummer Josh Freese who had just discovered what his mac movie maker could do. I remind myself that it’s conceptual art and that basically means anything goes.

We leave the CCA but not before Lux manages to pick up a few more leaflets and free magazines shoving them into her already full to bursting handbag. We’re a reasonable distance away from the venue before we begin to discuss what we’ve seen. “Each artist has their own lexicon and as viewers we’re not always privy to it” says Lux. She goes on “it’s like telling an in-joke and expecting everyone to get it”. I nod in agreement and enthusiastically chip in with a reference to ABC’s ‘Lexicon of Love’ album because that’s all I could think of involving the word lexicon.


One thing I noticed during my visit to the CCA was that wherever we were in the building the smell of art was present. The air was heavy with the scent of different kinds of paints, pastels and chalks, solvents and varnish... it’s what you expect an art centre to smell like. Creativity wasn’t just hanging on the walls – it was embedded in them. I like that.

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