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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