Scotland's Art Revolution: The Maverick Generation

In the early 1990s, something startling happened in Scotland

which would cause an earthquake across the international art world.

A group of young guns challenged the establishment to create works

so audacious and so arresting that critics proclaimed

the coming of a "Glasgow Miracle".

This close-knit generation would produce no fewer

than six Turner Prize winners,

beginning in 1996 with the godfather of the gang, Douglas Gordon.

APPLAUSE

I'd first of all like to say thanks my family and also the other

family, the kind of Scotia Nostra. LAUGHTER

They know who they are.

These days, the Scotia Nostra is less a secret society

and more of a global phenomenon,

and its members are international figures whose diverse work is

sought-after across the world.

To mark 25 remarkable, revolutionary years, Scotland is hosting one

of the most ambitious celebrations of contemporary art ever staged.

Featuring more than 100 artists in 60 venues from Orkney

and the Outer Hebrides to the Borders and the big cities,

Generation shines a spotlight on one of the most important

and misunderstood cultural stories of modern times.

Over the past few decades, Scotland has reinvented itself.

A declining industrial powerhouse now advertises itself

as a world centre for artistic creativity.

But I want to get behind the headlines to find out

how this extraordinary transformation happened,

who drove it and what might happen next.

It's the opening day of one of the most anticipated

of the Generation exhibitions.

Taking centre stage at Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art is

a dazzling installation - Douglas Gordon's Pretty Much Every Film

And Video Work From About 1992 Until Now.

Remarkably, this is the first time since the early '90s that

the internationally renowned artist, born and bred near Glasgow

but now based in Berlin, has had a show in his home city.

Little wonder that his kaleidoscopic retrospective

is proving such a sensation.

Does it matter to you that you're being celebrated in your home town?

Oh, I'm not being celebrated yet.

Oh, you're being celebrated. Get over yourself!

Of course you're being celebrated!

I don't think...

You're someone that doesn't have a bit of a hit for himself,

I think that's really interesting. You don't have an arrogance.

I don't like to be happy.

I think it's...

Happiness is not my...metier. Um...

It's more interesting for me to be disturbed and agitated.

Perhaps the most famous expression of Douglas Gordon's agitated

and agitating imagination was his 1993 work, 24 Hour Psycho.

His obsessive slow motion version of the Hitchcock classic

made his name and opened the eyes of the art world to a whole

generation of contemporary artists from Scotland.

One of the attractions to Psycho was that,

you know, that my mum had always said it was too dangerous

or frightening to watch.

And the same thing, The Exorcist

was kind of a forbidden fruit type of a thing.

The Cramps were DEFINITELY forbidden.

The Smiths were dodgy, and a lot of these references

that I'm using all the time are to do with what I wasn't allowed

to watch or allowed to do.

And, you know, I think a lot of the work that you'll see here

and a lot of the work from people in Glasgow is transgressive.

It's very important to be transgressive.

This is the first time you've ever had anything like this in Glasgow.

I mean, what does it feel like to be here?

Erm, I suppose it's like the anxiety of...

playing at the home ground or something.

So, aye, it's good to be back, but, aye, a wee bit nerve-racking.

-Really? For you?

-Aye, yeah.

Even for me, it's nerve-racking.

But, you know, it's kind of...

It's strange how sometimes things can become...

differently significant.

You know, I knew that I was going to be doing this

and I was nervous about it,

and then suddenly the Mackintosh building goes on fire, and that puts

things into a different perspective.

You know, I'm very proud of what I've done here,

but that's nothing compared to the Mackintosh building.

One of Scotland's most significant buildings,

the Glasgow School of Art, has been badly damaged in a fire.

SIRENS BLARE

The 23rd of May 2014.

A devastating fire tears through Glasgow School of Art's

famous Mackintosh building.

On the city streets and around the world,

onlookers watch in dismay.

The emotion, real and raw.

Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

in the early 20th century,

this marvellous invention of stone and glass

has always been a very special place.

At the heart of Scotland's artistic success story,

the iconic building has beguiled and inspired

countless young art students.

What was your notion of what would happen to you

when you went to art school?

The real draw was the romanticism of the Macintosh building.

Here was this beautiful and stand-alone kind of...

I guess, a kind of window to the rest of the world.

You could kind of sense that this was quite magical.

And then I think the fortunate thing was, you know,

being there at a time where my peer group were equally...

inquisitive and smart and hardworking and a bit gallus.

That colourful Scottish word, "gallus",

perfectly captures the gutsy swagger of a group of students who

came together at Glasgow School of Art in the mid-'80s.

The gang that would later become the Scotia Nostra included

Nathan Coley, Douglas Gordon, Roddy Buchanan, Christine Borland

and Ross Sinclair.

You were a kind of merry band.

Erm, you're still all in touch.

Is that because you just like each other as human beings or is it

that you have this great creative conversation?

There's a real sort of deep-seated connection there which,

actually, isn't to do with a formal style of work.

It was never to do with that.

Maybe that's why it was sort of difficult to do any definitive

exhibition of that, because, you know, it all looks quite different.

But I think the connection came from environmental art and David Harding.

For me, anyway, that was the unfolding of all those possibilities.

The catalyst for the Scotia Nostra - what bound them together -

was Environmental Art,

a ground-breaking new course being pioneered by tutors

David Harding and Sam Ainslie.

You were the two revolutionaries, weren't you?

You started it all.

Yeah, well, we had the great opportunity

to found our own department.

And not many people get the chance to do that within an art school.

That was a great privilege and gave us great freedom

to invent and introduce...

elements to art teaching that we felt were important.

The radical philosophy behind environmental art

came out of David Harding's public artwork in Scotland's new towns

in the early 1970s.

His mantra was that the context of an artwork,

its physical and social setting,

was just as important as the work itself.

I just want you to press this into here, all right?

For the eager students who signed up for the new course,

it was an inspiring vision.

Was it a certain type of student that wanted to take this course?

Had they any idea what they were letting themselves in for?

No, I don't think so.

I mean, they may not have had a clear idea, but what they did know was,

they didn't want to specialise in one medium.

-They didn't want to be painters, photographers...

-Sculptors.

..sculptors, printmakers.

But there's an interesting thing, I think. In that first three cohorts,

all the students came within 20 miles of Glasgow.

Rather like the Celtic team winning the European Cup.

-The players all came from 15 miles around Glasgow.

-Mm-hmm.

And, I think there was something about that

that built a sense of community.

They believed in their work.

You know, they were passionate about what they were doing.

And they debated constantly amongst themselves, you know,

and there was a real sense of, you know, commitment to

the life of an artist, even if you ended up poor.

David Harding and Sam Ainslie's students

felt they were a tribe apart,

something only reinforced by the fact that Environmental Art

was housed in a semi-derelict former girls' school

round the corner from the Mackintosh.

We were banished from the Mackintosh building.

None of us were ever in there after first year.

We were in the kind of Salon de Refuses down in Hill Street.

You were the kind of outriders?

Yeah, and we all had keys for the building

and folk were sleeping there and we were doing raves.

I mean, it's not that...

I think we were tolerated up to a point,

but mostly they just didn't really want to know what was going on.

Beneath the feverish creativity and equally feverish party going

at the former girls' school,

something new and quite profound was being worked out.

A kind of art that was in dialogue with its surroundings

and which encompassed everything from text to installation,

from performance to video.

It was an inspirational course.

You had a lot of time on your own, but you also had your peers.

And, really, it was like a sort of peer group school.

I mean, David and Sam mentoring, but, really, you know,

they really encouraged you to talk about work together.

It was just a course that had a vibrancy to it,

and it seemed very immediate and relevant.

They were making work that was grounded in the here and now

and the things that were immediately around them.

They worked very cheaply. The sort of materials they used,

you could say, were unsanctioned, so they just used ordinary things

rather than more obvious art materials like bronze or oil.

You know, so it's an attempt to cast off that idea of art being

somehow elevated and above, or being different from,

your everyday life.

Taking part in Generation are some of the most famous graduates

of the Environmental Art course.

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2011, Martin Boyce.

Turner nominees, David Shrigley and Jim Lambie.

Beck's Futures prize-winner, Roddy Buchanan.

And Scotland's first Venice Biennale representative,

Claire Barclay.

But as Generation highlights, the eye-catching conceptual work

of the environmental artists wasn't the only show in town

in the late 1980s and early '90s.

The painter, Alison Watt, was, from the very beginning,

committed to a very personal kind of art.

When you went to art school in Glasgow, it was the time

of Martin Boyce and Douglas Gordon and Nathan Coley and group.

They feel like a community. Their art's all very different,

but they feel like a community. Did you feel part of that community?

No, I mean, I know them all and I'm friends with them,

but we all have very different ways of working. And I think that's one

of the sort of beauties of this project because, if anything,

it's impossible to categorise all of us. For me, the Generation project

is more about marking a particular period of time, because that's

all you can really do, because we all have different ways of making

and inventing. And I'm glad that's the case. I'm glad it's so diverse.

I've always felt very strongly that I wanted to be a painter.

I have no memory of ever wanting to be or do anything else.

Being a painter is a solitary business,

because when you make a painting, you can't delegate.

No-one can go through that process for you,

and I spend almost every day of my working life entirely alone.

At the time when, you know, there was increasing hubbub

around conceptual art in particular, I've always

thought of you as somebody that, really, was quite quiet,

I mean, about your work.

Although, you have been commercially successful as well.

-But you were very quiet about your work.

-Yeah.

I feel that's part of... That's who I am, and I think you have to

be true to who you are. I would prefer that the work speaks for me.

Alison Watt is one of the country's most significant

and successful artists.

As part of Generation, she has a show at Perth Museum and Art Gallery

where recent canvases hang side-by-side

with some of her earliest paintings.

Even early on, her work was poetic, luminous and self-contained -

qualities not necessarily in tune with what was happening elsewhere

in the late 1980s and early '90s.

This was the moment when contemporary art

met popular culture.

In England, the YBAs, or Young British Artists,

led by the entrepreneurial genius of Damien Hirst,

were staging barnstorming shows that wowed the art world.

Nick Serota from the Tate came, Norman Rosenthal,

and a lot of people from, like, London galleries.

Practically everybody, really.

But while the London artists were grabbing headlines and transforming

themselves into celebrities, north of the border, their exact

contemporaries were also tuning in to the buccaneering Zeitgeist.

I've often said I'm a child of Thatcherism,

that notion of entrepreneurial spirit and the individual.

It's the opposite of my personal politics, but it was...

it was a time when you didn't need to fall into the structures

of the establishment and you could make your own rules.

-They were enterprising...

-Yes.

-..and that, actually,

funnily enough, is a word that we might associate with the YBAs,

who were kind of setting up shops and urgently self-promoting.

Well, it seems to me that the Glasgow artists were

a little bit like that too.

You know, they had to make their own luck. But that was...

It was sort of more about cooperation than competition.

That cooperative DIY spirit had already found

a focus in Glasgow's Transmission Gallery.

Set up by artists disillusioned with the lack of opportunity

to show their work in the city,

it quickly became a hothouse for a new kind of artistic enterprise.

We made, like, 17 shows, I think, in one year.

I always call it, Transmission, a sort of post-grad course. You know,

it's really, like, practically working out experiments and working

with artists, having to get in touch with artists, friends, networks.

We were very keen to bring people to Glasgow

and it was always about this sort of exchange.

Transmission transmitted.

International critics and curators began to notice that

something extraordinary was happening in Scotland.

A very few people in Glasgow have really

made an unbelievable impact globally.

This Glasgow model - or as I always call it, the Glasgow Miracle -

is now really internationally discussed.

How a very small city, in a do-it-yourself way, all of a sudden

can create out of itself this very unique and dynamic situation.

Swiss-born Hans-Ulrich Obrist

was an early devotee of Scotland's young artists,

and is now one of the art world's most influential figures.

I was 23 years old and I had never been to Glasgow.

I'd never been to Scotland

and I also had never heard of Transmission, which

proved to be this amazing artist-run space. And I did my first lecture

there and then, all night long, I was brought from one studio to the next.

And it was amazing to see the energy, to also see the solidarity

among the artists, because, you know,

one artist would show me his or her studio but would then say,

"You've got to see my friend next door."

And I think it went until four or five in the morning.

It was actually an incredible, incredible revelation.

Did you not coin the phrase, "the Glasgow Miracle"?

I think that has often been a misunderstanding,

because that was obviously, you know, never meant

in a literal sense.

The term "Glasgow Miracle" might never have been meant literally,

but it has become a handy marketing slogan.

So, hello and welcome to the Glasgow School of Art

and to the Glasgow Miracle City Walking Tour.

Every summer, the city's famous art school

runs Glasgow Miracle walking tours,

attracting tourists and art fans from across the world.

So what kind of people take this tour?

You can get somebody who's really interested in architecture,

somebody that's really interested in contemporary art, or somebody

who has absolutely no idea what you're about to lead them into.

And then, it's amazing, you get these lovely little moments

in the tour where people are discovering little things

that they had absolutely no idea would have existed in the city.

Tourists visiting Scotland's largest city might be surprised,

even astonished, by the Glasgow Miracle.

But it is a phrase guaranteed to provoke those who were

actually there at the time.

I feel uncomfortable with that notion of the Glasgow Miracle

because it somehow means that

it's landed from another world and from outer space.

It also denies the fact that it's hard work, endeavour,

a degree of luck, perhaps, and also that there's a longevity to it.

You know, a miracle is a moment and the situation is not a moment.

The Glasgow Miracle's a creation myth and it implies

that nothing happened before the 1990s,

that it was some sort of spontaneous act of creativity, and there

has never been anything of worth to have emerged, say, from Glasgow.

So it's like Scotland coming out of the dark.

To many, Scotland before the 1990s did indeed seem like a dark place.

Heavy industry - the mainstay of the economy - was in steep decline,

and the country was racked by high unemployment and social deprivation.

But for writers, artists and musicians, this was a creative spur.

I think people responded

to this post-industrial lack of hope.

People were politicised. People, crucially,

were meeting up and interacting and talking to each other.

And you wrote or made art perhaps not with the expectation

that it would be recognised or that it would get anywhere, but because

you actually had to do it. You know, it was an urge, it was a need.

Culturally, things were stirring in Scotland, despite the referendum

vote in 1979 which had failed to establish a Scottish Assembly.

The referendum was hugely deflationary

for the national mood and character, but in the undercurrents of that,

much was changing. In fact, an awful lot of things were

changing in Scotland that would be changed and could never be reversed.

There were a range of different art forms,

cultural forms that were beginning to emerge.

One of the things that Scotland had always had was what you might

call popular theatre.

There were a lot of touring companies

and one of the biggest and most important of them was 7:84.

And, of course, the biggest single play that they did was

The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil.

WOMAN SINGS IN SCOTTISH GAELIC

The song says, "Remember that you are a people

"and fight for your rights.

"There are riches beneath the hills where you grew up.

"There's iron and coal there, grey lead and gold.

"There is riches in the land beneath your feet."

In '79 and onwards throughout the '80s,

you began to see a revivification

of Scottish traditional forms of Scottish culture.

But alongside that as well was a much more kind of globally

astute culture which was looking outwards from Scotland.

And the one area that I would single out for that is the rise

of Scottish bands, Scottish singers.

MUSIC: "Rip It Up"

# Rip it up and start again

# I said, rip it up and start again... #

MUSIC: "Walk Out to Winter"

# Walk out to winter

# Swear I'll be there... #

'The Postcard bands of Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera

'and things like that, they were living in a Glasgow that'

itself was changing. It was a city that was becoming more metropolitan,

it was a city that was becoming more interested in the arts.

It was transforming profoundly

about how it could actually imagine itself as a creative city

rather than a city of industry, so all of these forces in a kind

of odd kind of cocktail of things were coming together.

A vital ingredient of Scotland's intoxicating cultural cocktail

in the mid-1980s was a loosely linked group of young painters.

Nicknamed the New Glasgow Boys

after an even earlier generation of Scottish artists,

Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell took

a fractured landscape of declining industry and social deprivation

and transfigured it through the prisms of their imagination.

People like Peter Howson and Wiszniewski

and Ken Currie, they were all like gods to the students like me.

There's a real lack of decadence to that work.

It's real and it's solid and it's not always comfortable to

look at, but life is not always comfortable.

The New Glasgow Boys might have been like gods to some students,

but others were much more agnostic.

In the current climate,

it's just not a feasible thing to even think of taking those people

as role models or anything. Plus, I don't really like their work!

For the up-and-coming generation of environmental artists,

the New Glasgow Boys and their expressionistic,

figurative painting style seemed of little relevance.

That was what the public knew about Glasgow Art School,

were the Glasgow Boys. And where did you fit into that?

It wasn't really of much interest to me or my sort of peer group.

Actually, I think we just wanted to do our own thing.

And some of these painters, for me, anyway,

that looked a bit like a monologue.

You know, you sat in your studio, you did your canvases

and then you shipped off to the gallery and never saw them again.

But that never interested me, you know,

and I think there was a lot more outward-looking sort of ideas.

That's one of the unfortunate things that happened,

that that cluster of artists,

who were remarkable in doing incredible things internationally,

quickly sort of congealed into this "Glasgow Boys" tag which

tended to suggest a sort of macho, industrial, working-class hero

sort of culture that was anathema for a lot of people coming through

Glasgow at a younger age, partly because a lot of them were women.

Christine Borland was one of the original Environmental Art course

alumni and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997.

Her fascination with forensics, genetics and family history

gives her work an unsettling and deeply moving quality.

For one of her Generation exhibitions,

she has come home to Ayrshire, where I'm from too.

In what must be one of the country's most idiosyncratic

and cherished museums, The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock,

Borland has installed her towering work,

Daughters Of Decayed Tradesmen.

Explain to me what the cards represent.

The great thing is that they don't need to represent,

they just are.

They are pattern cards that would fit a Jacquard loom.

It's the same technology that's used in the lace looms that still

exist today, in one particular factory near where I grew up

a couple of miles down the road.

Your parents worked in lace mills all their lives?

Yes, they both worked on the factory floor, really.

Left school as teenagers, they worked in the lace factory.

So I remember these places from childhood. You know, cathedral-like,

because these patterns go up into the ceiling just the way that

they do here, and then they run onto the loom to make the cloth.

But the cards are the first, what, iteration of computers?

Yes, they are an early form of binary code

which led eventually to, you know, to the development by Babbage

of the computer using the very same kind of dots and blanks principle.

These actually contain the oral histories of two ladies

who were in an institution that was set up in the early 1700s

to educate and care for the daughters of decayed tradesmen.

So these contain their stories, their oral histories.

So this is an evocation of memory, and it's not

necessarily just the memory of the women, it's your memory.

Yes, it is, it is amazing how that has all come together.

All these layers are in there, yep.

The way that Generation has kind of unfolded,

it's very, very obvious that there may have been lots of women artists

working 25 years ago, but the celebration of women artists

was not the same as it is these days.

No, that's true. It's something that I was aware of at college.

The sort of attitude exemplified, I suppose, by the generation

-right before the Glasgow Boys.

-Which would seem quite macho?

It was extremely macho and, in a way, that's just great

for a young artist, to have something that overt to kind of say,

"That's what I don't want to be like, I don't want my work to be about,

"I don't want the image of the artist kind of struggling in the garret,

"stripped to the waist, covered in oils."

You know, that's... You know,

we're more into the intellectual kind of traditions, really,

so it was very useful to have that as a, you know, as a predecessor.

At the time, the younger artist might have self-consciously reacted

against the heroic image of the New Glasgow Boys

but, 25 years on,

it's now possible to see much more continuity than cut-off

between the two generations.

Was it a fundamental shift with the Glasgow Boys to what happened,

or was it a continuum?

I think these shifts always only appear as such with hindsight,

you know, I think at the time it's all part of a continuum, really,

and one of the things that we have done with the Generation project,

which seemed so obvious,

was looking at a moment that happened in 1990

when Steven Campbell made this extraordinary exhibition

at the Third Eye Centre called On Form And Fiction.

Steven Campbell's On Form And Fiction show

was a game-changer.

# Je t'aime

# Je t'aime

# Je t'aime... #

It's not just another traditional painting show.

It's almost like you're getting to see the sketchbook work

at the same time.

Large paintings were surrounded by sketches

made on rolls of cheap wallpaper.

Every square inch of the room was covered in imagery.

Wooden benches from Kelvingrove Park

sat in the middle of the space

while Serge Gainsbourg's Je T'aime was played on a loop.

This wasn't a traditional exhibition.

This was something closer to an installation,

a sensory and intellectual overload.

It's daunting to see the amount of...

You know, the amount of narrative in this room.

It's incredible.

Steven Campbell sadly died in 2007,

but his ground-breaking show has been recreated for Generation

at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

I'm meeting Campbell's personal tutor

and the former head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, Sandy Moffat.

God! Well, you haven't seen this for a very long time,

so what are you thinking?

I mean, I think it's extraordinary to see this!

Well, it's bit of a wow factor.

Haven't seen this since 1990.

Nearly quarter of a century.

But, I mean, this is literally...

I'm not going to touch it,

but it is kind of just as it was.

I mean, nothing protecting it. You think he would have worried

about what would have happened.

No, he didn't worry about things like that.

The main thing was just get the work done,

the expression, you know, the idea had to be immediate,

you know, spontaneous and...

-My goodness.

-I know.

My goodness! It's incredible, the kind of energy that went into this.

I mean, is it quite emotional seeing this, for you?

It is.

It is, because we were really quite close,

and, you know, I saw him, I was in his studio often.

I saw him making these things.

If Generation is about showing us what happened in the last 25 years,

I mean, is that an indicator for the future,

I mean, are things healthy

or do we need to really, really work at it?

Things are very, very healthy, I think,

but we can never become complacent,

that's something that Steven Campbell, you know,

told us in his own work.

Never be complacent - you've always got to be seeking,

as it were, you've got to be pushing on.

If Steven Campbell pushed at the boundaries

of what painting could do,

then, in the next-door room at the National Gallery of Scotland,

you can see how another Generation artist

took the medium in a radical new direction.

Edinburgh-based abstract artist Callum Innes

was nominated for the Tuner Prize in 1995.

Critics dubbed his mesmerising canvases "exposed paintings"

because of his technique of applying layers of paint,

then stripping them back.

The violet, in this case,

has gone on the painting several days beforehand,

and it's left to dry.

Then I've taken this vine-black

and taken it across the entire painting.

Then by freehand I've taken a single line through the painting.

-With solvent?

-With solvent, but doing it from the bottom to the top,

because if you put a brush onto a canvas with turpentine

and it's got a thick surface it'll meander.

So everything is controlled.

So it's taken from the bottom to the top.

So you make the line that way.

And I've dissolved one side off

and I've taken it as far back as I need to take it back.

So you still get the history of the black being there,

but it's also slightly damaged the violet

so it's not a pure violet.

It retains a fragility.

Not every artist has been able to make new work for Generation,

but you have.

I made one new work for it, which is an exposed painting here,

but we're only showing a body of exposed paintings.

There's six paintings in the show dating back to 1995,

if I'm correct.

Over the years, I've become synonymous with exposed paintings -

hate that word.

Erm...

And almost this is... not the last one,

but I think of them almost coming to an end.

Do you see a return to painting

when you're looking at the art that's been made now?

Return to painting - has it ever gone?

Has it ever gone?

No, I don't think painting will ever go.

Painting can be conceptual, it can be many things

and...

..if painting is relevant, then it's relevant.

I'm interested in where you're anchored,

I mean, intellectually and everything else,

but actually physically anchored.

I think identity for an artist is really important

and my identity as a Scottish artist is very important to me,

I don't shout about Scotland,

it's not about Scotland,

but I live and I work in this country and...

I think placement, in my head, is very important for me.

That sense of psychological rootedness

is profoundly important for many artists

who live and work in Scotland.

But a distinctive Scottish identity

also has other less-obvious advantages.

Let's not play down the notion of,

erm, being different.

Any activity which is seen on an international stage,

people are attracted to the exotic.

And I think Glaswegian artists

have benefited from the way that we speak,

which sounds slightly different to everybody else.

I do!

I can be as Glaswegian,

and I can roll my Rs when I feel I need to,

and then I can be as British Council as I choose to be also.

-Great answer.

-It's kind of relevant

in the whole kind of independent debate,

in terms of I can be Glaswegian, I can be Scottish, I can be British.

I can be European.

I would never describe myself as being a Scottish artist.

I would describe myself as being an artist living in Glasgow.

Although many of the Scotia Nostra artists might feel hampered

by demands that they specifically address ideas of Scottishness,

others have revelled in the country's multi-layered stereotypes.

A lot of the works I've made over the past 20 years

have touched on ideas of Scottish identity

and I've always kind of described it

as a sort of identity in a small, damp,

northern European nation. One of the things I'm doing

is called Real Life Rocky Mountain,

which I did first in 1996.

HE SINGS

Basically it's this chunk of sort of Highland mountain landscape scenery,

clearly constructed with wooden supports.

And the grass is fake, the animals are stuffed,

the waterfalls are electric,

the trees are made of fibreglass.

# Will you no' come back again

# Will you no' come back again? #

I'm in there in the middle of it,

playing this selection

of maybe 300 years of popular Scottish songs

from, you know, Jacobite,

chapbook sort of classics, you know,

through to Teenage Fanclub, Edwyn Collins,

Arab Strap maybe even this time,

which wasn't around that time.

So I'm trying to look at, I suppose, that historical spread,

through something that is genuinely popular.

While Ross Sinclair has been exploring

the mythical landscape of Scotland,

at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art

Nathan Coley has been unravelling its sprawling religious architecture

and its deep Calvinist roots.

His installation The Lamp Of Sacrifice

was originally created for an exhibition in Edinburgh.

This is the first time his Lilliputian collection

of the capital's religious buildings

has travelled across country to Glasgow.

When you got this back out,

what were the memories of making this, how long ago?

Ten years this month.

And it felt...

like seeing an old friend

and not really knowing what to say to them.

These are the churches of Edinburgh, how many of them are there?

-These are the places of worship...

-Places of worship.

..listed in the Yellow Pages of Edinburgh.

People perhaps will ask the question,

"Is this the artist's homage to religion?"

I'm always conscious

that publicly I never take sides with any of the institutions.

But yet, unlike me,

people believe, and people gather themselves

and sing together and baptise their children,

and there's clearly a social and a spiritual need

for the institutions.

So I'm still fascinated by that.

You're not religious, but I would think that actually

what kind of informs you, in a funny way, is Calvinism.

I think this generation of artists

are coloured here in Scotland by Calvinism

in the extent that, in its purest manifestation,

there's a fear of the image.

And I think...culturally in Scotland

we still trust and honour the word

more than we do anything else.

I think that's a really interesting filter, perhaps,

in looking at this generation of artists.

That very Scottish fascination with the word

and that ingrained iconoclastic spirit

is something which also marks a younger group

of up-and-coming artists.

-VOICE OF DAVID CAMERON:

-Yes, we are a small island,

in fact, a small group of islands,

but I would challenge anyone to come up with a country

with a prouder history,

with a bigger heart, with a greater resilience.

Using found audio

such as political speeches,

movie soundtracks and TV clips,

Rachel Maclean conjures delirious worlds

that are somewhere between dream and nightmare.

BELL TOLLS

Maclean studied at Edinburgh College of Art

but now lives and works in Glasgow.

She's an extraordinarily precocious talent,

not only writing, designing, directing and editing her videos,

but also playing all the roles.

In pieces such as A Whole New World,

she takes mischievous pot shots at national stereotypes.

PIPER PLAYS AMAZING GRACE

GUNSHOT

The cultural identity in your work is kind of fantasy land.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Is that to encourage people to think or just to have fun?

Erm... Maybe a bit of both.

I think a lot of that started

when I lived in Edinburgh

and I'd walk up and down the Royal Mile a lot

and there's a sense, quiet an intense sense,

in that part of Edinburgh, of tourist culture

and tourist tat.

And it started just with that

being kind of material that was available that I could work with.

And more recently, with the referendum,

it's become much more politicised.

-VOICE OF JEREMY PAXMAN:

-We've got £1 trillion worth

of public debt in this country. How much would the Scots take?

-VOICE OF ALEX SALMOND:

-Well, the normal way to divide up debt

would be either a population share or a GDP share.

'Partly I'm interested'

in looking at the absurdity of national identity,

or at least, some of the absurdity of the symbols

and associations of national identity.

Showing at the CCA in Glasgow,

her new work for Generation, The Prince And The Pauper,

once again takes political issues,

this time ones of class and inequality,

and skewers them with her usual disarming theatricality.

The fact that I got a job in an investment bank

during the biggest recession we've ever seen,

especially in terms of financial markets,

and did this after getting a first-class honours degree last year,

shows I'm a very special candidate.

I want people to realise and accept

that I'm an extremely talented young guy.

Extraordinary.

It's an extraordinary construct.

'There seems to be'

a kind of recognition

that Scotland is, at the moment anyway,

an incredibly creative place.

It is a really exciting time for me to be in Scotland,

given, I guess, what's been established

in the Scottish Arts Scene.

And thinking about Generation in the last 25 years,

there's so much available in terms of showing,

in terms of commissioning,

in terms of just the kind of institutions and set-up in Scotland.

It's very supportive to recent graduates, I think,

and young artists.

You would see no reason why you couldn't work here in perpetuity?

Yeah, yeah. I guess that's maybe the difference, in a sense,

that I don't feel I have to move to London

or I have to move to New York

to get people to notice my work.

# Keep watch

# By your weary head. #

What's so extraordinary now

is that you can have all these artists anchored here,

you don't have to go away any more.

No, and that was the big shift that happened, I suppose.

What would conventionally have happened,

pre-1989/90,

or even perhaps slightly earlier, is that artists would study here,

they would maybe stay for a couple of years, but if they were

really going to strive to make it big, they'd leave and go to London

or New York and that just doesn't happen any more, not only do people

stay after art school, but quite often you find that artists are

moving to Glasgow because it's just a viable place to live and make work.

Sculptor, Mick Peter,

is typical of artists drawn to the Scottish arts scene.

For a generation, he's created a playful pair of sculptures

inspired by '70s graphic design.

His levitating, long-haired hippies

are as at home in the Tramway's Hidden Gardens in Glasgow

as Mick is in his adopted city.

You came to Glasgow to do your masters, from Oxford

and you stayed.

Why?

At that time a lot of my

colleagues were going to London, but I felt I wanted to go

somewhere where there was a bit more time to kind of get going.

And then ultimately, once you're settled in and you realise,

all of the interesting projects that are happening

and when you kind of start getting involved with Transmission Gallery,

and you realise all the places you can go to fabricate stuff,

then that's so attractive.

-Lots of space and cheap?

-Yeah, of course, that really helps.

The post-industrial cityscape of Glasgow

provides artists with studios, performance venues

and galleries.

But these spaces are, of course,

only available because the shipyards, steel plants and factories

have largely shut down.

There is an irony, I guess,

that artists have ended up occupying these buildings.

We're colonists.

We go into these places, we find the gaps

and we slip in.

But nobody asked the people of Glasgow, "Would you prefer

"to have heavy industry or art?" It was not a choice.

It was something that happened.

It's not just the ambivalent legacy

of Scotland's industrial past that attracts artists.

For many, there is a magnetism about the wilder corners

of the country that fires their imagination.

The Scottish landscape is totally inspiring and remarkable

in terms of its geology.

For a generation, New York-born artist, Ilana Halperin,

has come to the island of Mull to research a unique two-part project.

I'm interested in looking at the relationship

between our daily lives and the way we think about time

and deep geological time.

So for me there's no better place to be than Scotland

where there's some of the oldest rocks in the world,

there's young rocks,

and laid out bare, you can see the way that the Earth has changed.

The first part of Halperin's Generation project

is rooted in the intertwined geological and human histories

of a remote granite quarry on the island.

Granite from this quarry was shipped all over the world,

including New York, where I'm from.

And I found out, in fact, there are minerals from New York

that have made their way to Scotland and we have them, right here.

And they are part of the Hunterian Museum Collection.

So I wanted to bring minerals from New York

and granite from the quarry together in one place for the first time for the exhibition.

As well as her exhibition at An Tobar

in the island capital, Tobermory,

she's also preparing for a new performance piece

on the nearby Isle of Staffa.

Staffa, as far as I'm concerned,

is one of the wonders of the world.

What I'm doing is a performative lecture

at the mouth of Fingal's Cave.

There's water that runs in and out of the cave

so the acoustics are absolutely beautiful.

On Staffa, you stand on a volcanic island,

a series of lava flows surrounded by water.

We are in volcanic places.

Strewn across the Atlantic fringe of Europe,

Scotland's islands are a powerful source of creative inspiration.

But this far-flung landscape offers a new way of thinking,

not just about art

but also about the art world.

I think it's important that Scotland is an archipelago.

I don't know,

780 or 790 islands, I mean, it's a huge amount of islands

and the wonderful philosopher, Edouard Glissant, he always says

that if the 20th century followed mainly a continental logic,

the 21st century is more, an archipelago logic,

and he talks about this idea of the archipelago

being more sheltering, being more welcoming,

and I think that's kind of interesting, the idea of, you know,

Scotland being an archipelago, very much a polyphony of centres.

If the structure of Scotland's arts scene

reflects its scattered island landscape,

then perhaps it can offer its artists something different,

an alternative model,

a less pressurised environment

than traditional centres like London

where power and money are still largely concentrated.

Well, I think, the great thing about being in Scotland is,

and you know, this is not a party political broadcast,

that the thing about Scotland is that we had no commercial scene.

And if you don't have any commercial scene, you don't have artists,

looking over their shoulder all the time, "Which gallery are you with? Are you with that?"

-"Why are you not doing that?"

-Quite good, that, isn't it?

-It's very important.

You're not going to run into gazillionares,

in the street, kind of shopping for Damien Hirsts in Glasgow.

So for those of us, you know,

who might find all that stuff a bit uncomfortable anyway, you know,

that makes Glasgow even more attractive in a way.

Scotland's art world

might be more relaxed and less money-driven than London...

Lot number one.

I'll start the bid here at 120,000.

150,000.

Now 180,000...

But the capital's commercial clout and media dominance

means that artists north of the border

have often been overlooked, even in their own country.

The most famous artists in Scotland

are Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

And it's a celebrity type of, you know, fame and culture.

None of the artists that we're talking about, you know, pursue

or are interested in that path.

And for a long time, there simply was

no possibility of selling work

for these artists we're talking about.

They didn't expect to sell work,

they didn't make work that was saleable,

they felt free to experiment and to be ambitious

and to do weird and wonderful things

that perhaps if they were made for a market might not have been made.

Scotland doesn't have a huge base of collectors

to support its artists.

But the DIY ethic that enabled them

to show their work to the world

also produced its own entrepreneurs.

After studying environmental art and a stint at Transmission Gallery,

Toby Webster transformed himself into an agent and dealer.

His Modern Institute now has

some of Scotland's biggest international names

and most exciting new talents on its roster.

People around the world absolutely love the Scottish thing.

It has such a huge pull for people, you know,

and really, they identify with it in an amazing way.

And we represent something that collectors want to be part of,

and a vision that they want to be part of.

I really admire the artists and I admire their integrity

and their dedication to what they're doing

and I think it has huge relevance

and I want this to be seen around the world.

When this year's Turner Prize short list was announced,

the fact that three out of the four nominees had trained

at Glasgow School of Art

triggered a bout of head scratching

in the London-based media.

But at the home of the Turner Prize, Tate Britain,

the reaction to Glasgow's dominance has been very different.

You're chair of the Turner Prize.

Does anything strike you as strange that out of the four

on the short list, three are out of Glasgow School of Art?

I think that the jurors are not thinking about Glasgow, at all.

They're looking at a range of artists, you know,

they start off with maybe 24 artists and they talk together

and they come to a consensual list at the end,

and it was only when we got to that list at the end

that someone said, "Oh!"

Well, I think it took a while for anyone to realise

that they all had this in common, so that really comes afterwards.

And the fact that the press think it's remarkable, I mean,

you could say it is remarkable and it is a sign of the fact

that Glasgow School of Art has given a very good education to artists,

but I think it also means

that Glasgow has been a good nurturing place

for young artists and they're able to go on living there.

Generation is more than a celebration of contemporary art.

It's a reflection of how one of

the most turbulent periods in recent history

has been refracted through creative imagination.

It's a period of history where there's been moral uncertainty.

There's been moments where the financial world has changed,

where the power of religion has changed, and where our sense

and our notion of our self and place has been questioned.

And I think that's why the exhibition is a reflection

both of Scotland but also of the wider world.

Generation isn't only about works of art,

it's about a creative community.

This year's nationwide event

celebrates what Scotland has been,

what it is now,

and what it might become.

Do you think things are looking healthy for the Scotia Nostra?

I think the future is healthy

because there's new blood all the time

and they look to their forebears, not only for inspiration,

but they aspire to a very high level

of commitment, of hard work,

of quality of work, of ideas,

ambition for the work rather than for themselves,

so I think, yeah, it's not going to go away, any time soon.

If the community of artists in Scotland is in any way

a mirror of the broader society,

then I think that's very healthy

and active and dynamic

and there's really a fantastically interesting mix

of nationalities

and interest and sexualities

and maybe one day

in the free international socialist republic of Scotland,

many years hence, or not,

if that could be a reflection of the kind of society

Scotland might be, then no bad thing.

Generation isn't about an artistic movement,

it isn't even about an artistic moment.

What this unique event celebrates

is an outpouring of energy, creativity

and sheer hard work that's impossible to define

but that continues to provoke, astonish and delight.