Glasgow: The Grit and the Glamour imagine...

Now, where am I?

People milling about. This must be the right place.

I've been told I'll meet more Turner Prize winners here

in this house in Glasgow than anywhere else in the world.

He looks familiar.

So, the winner of the 2011 Turner Prize, Martin Boyce.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

All I wanted to do was go to art school, and I went there

and there was the most amazing group of people waiting for me

and most of them are in this room

which is quite amazing, 20 years on.

Many of them are in this room too,

an opening of the Glasgow International Arts Festival.

..This year's Turner Prize, Simon Starling!

Contemporary art in Britain appears to have been taken over

by artists drawn from this group of friends in this city.

The winner of the 2009 Turner Prize is Richard Wright.

CHEERING

Richard Wright. I recognised him as soon as he walked in.

And there's another two winners -

Jeremy Deller talking to Wolfgang Tillmans,

but where is the head of the clan?

The winner of the 1996 Turner Prize

is Douglas Gordon.

CHEERING

Yes, Douglas Gordon,

the first Glasgow artist of this generation to win,

thanking "the family" in his own inimitable way.

I'd first of all like to say thanks to my family

and also the other family, the kind of Scotia Nostra.

LAUGHTER They know who they are.

Douglas Gordon's Scotia Nostra.

He's here somewhere,

but I can't find him.

Which is odd, because this is his house.

Hmm. If this crowd is the Scotia Nostra,

does that make Douglas Gordon the Godfather?

20 years ago,

Glasgow's young artists set out to do their own thing

in a city that's rather better known

for football, fizzy drinks and fish and chips than it is for...

well, the visual arts.

And yet, in this place of grit and glamour,

they created groundbreaking art

and turned Glasgow into an international art capital

where the unlikeliest things can happen.

The astonishing rebirth of Glasgow's art scene

didn't go entirely unnoticed. 20 years ago,

it captured the imagination of a new generation of star curators

such as this man, Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

You know, this very small artwork in Glasgow

has really made an unbelievable impact globally, this Glasgow model,

or as I always call it, the Glasgow miracle.

So, come on, Nathan. What is this Glasgow miracle? What's the secret?

Kind of feel a bit hesitant to tell you what the magic is,

because then I'm kind of worried

you're going to take it from me, so...

if there is a secret, you're not getting it from me.

This is Frankfurt. The don was not to be found in Glasgow.

Douglas Gordon is the visiting professor at the Stadelschule here.

And this is his classroom.

It says on here, "Teach me tonight.

"Did you see that I've got a lot to learn? Ooh, teach me tonight."

This is interesting.

It's supposed to be a classroom

but there are seven bottles of gin here,

olives, six packets of matzos...

..and an empty fridge.

Mmm.

In a neighbouring museum, a retrospective

and a chance to encounter Douglas Gordon's work -

all of it immediately striking in scale and ambition.

A contemporary artist who works across text, photography and film.

That kind of Hitchcock thing.

Look at...

That's just amazing.

It's a bit tough to look at a vagina that big as well sometimes.

I edited it in Glasgow

and me and the editor were like, "This is such a..."

-Oh, here we go. No, maybe not.

-I mean, the editing is...

There's something so human about that.

Strange, it's a very curious...

-physiognomy, in a way.

-Yeah.

-You know, like a baby.

'In 2002, Douglas Gordon woke up one day in New York

'with an unexpected thought.'

It was a very strange and funny thing, you know,

I hate the idea that ideas are divinely dropped into the world.

However, it does happen sometimes

that you do wake up in the morning and you think,

"Shit, did I ever see an elephant lying down, sleeping, playing dead?"

And by a stroke of luck, Douglas was aided and abetted by Larry Gagosian,

the most powerful man in the art world.

You know, one of the great things about being in New York -

I mean, I really literally made a telephone call and said,

"can Larry get me an elephant next week?"

And of course, they said, "Sure, of course."

And they did.

The elephant's name is Minnie, actually, funnily enough,

so Minnie came down in a huge truck.

You're only allowed to bring in these huge trucks at about 1am

and the gallery has a huge roller shutter door

and Minnie comes out and she just goes up like that

and nudges the door, and that's the door kaput, it's completely...

-Amazing.

-So then we had to walk her down the street,

down the avenue, onto 24th Street,

and luckily enough, the gallery had a big enough front door,

but there was also an Ed Ruscha exhibition on

and the elephant had a cold.

So she was sneezing through the trunk all the time

and I thought, "I don't even know if Larry knows about this

"but he'll know about it tomorrow morning if she sneezes all over..."

-Ed Ruscha.

-A couple of million dollars' worth of Ed Ruscha.

What about Glasgow and all this?

Was there any question that you wanted to be an artist?

Well, there was nothing inevitable about it.

But I think my peer group that I had when I was at school in Glasgow,

we all knew that we were committed, you know.

Maybe we should have been committed, actually,

but we were all committed to do this for the rest of our lives

in some way or other.

MUSIC: "Just Like Honey" by The Jesus and Mary Chain

Glasgow's a magnificent city. Why do we hardly ever notice that?

Because nobody imagines living here.

Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York.

Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger

because he's already visited them

in paintings, novels, history books and films,

but if a city hasn't been used by an artist,

not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray's impassioned plea for the redemption of Glasgow's soul,

written in the early '80s, was a call to action.

The Glasgow of the '60s and '70s

that Douglas Gordon and his fellow artists were born into

had become a city in the doldrums, on the verge of economic collapse.

The building they were drawn to,

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's magnificent Glasgow School of Art,

completed in 1909, is the place where modernism began,

a bridge from Victorian Glasgow to the modern post-industrial world.

Generations of Glasgow's artists studied here

and went into the world transformed. Martin Boyce was one of them.

He came here in 1986.

The building... I guess it's just the place.

I used to, even before I started,

I used to come and just stand outside the building or walk around

and I guess there was a sense

that this was a place where something was going to happen to me,

you were going to meet amazing people

and your life was really going to begin.

By this time, in the early '80s, Glasgow School of Art

had already produced a generation of successful figurative painters.

Among them were Peter Howson,

Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie

and Steven Campbell. They were known as the new Glasgow boys.

Their work was both accessible and commercial.

But this new group of students,

which included Martin Boyce and Douglas Gordon,

saw a path towards a new vision of art -

an art that wasn't only about painting or sculpture,

it wasn't restricted to the studio.

It could be everything and anything,

or nothing at all.

They sought their inspiration from an earlier generation

of radical conceptual artists,

artists like Joseph Beuys.

'And they found a home for these new ideas

'not in Mackintosh's masterpiece,

'but in an old girls' high school 100 yards down the road.'

-So you haven't been to the girls' high, then?

-No.

OK, it's around the corner.

Because the photography... Let me think, photography department

was down that street in an old building,

sculpture department was over there.

Yeah, and environmental art was around the corner.

'They weren't just taking over an old building.'

They were embarking on a new adventure

in the name of environmental art.

We occupied the first half of the building,

but then there was another kind of half of it

that was technically unsafe, it was quite derelict.

People would come in or out, any time of the night or day

and either work or, you know, party or just hang out.

And that's how a girls' high school turned into a playground

for a new school of contemporary art.

It's a really amazing building itself.

It had these twin, these two staircases

that wrapped themselves around each other,

so you had this sort of weird... You'd be walking up the stairs

and you'd hear footsteps

of someone else walking upstairs, but you wouldn't meet them

as they'd be on the other stairs, so there was a strange sort of phantom.

Now, he looks familiar.

It was only around the corner from the Mackintosh building,

but it was a world apart.

It was in the wet, leaky annex

and I kind of liked that as a possibility

in terms of being somewhere that you could be a gang

and you could do your own things.

Because we were the first year of students, really, in there,

a lot of these spaces hadn't been used,

so there was a freshness about that.

It was a definite Alice in Wonderland feel to the place.

There was this year of total anarchy and freedom,

and that's just what you want to be doing when you're sort of 19,

it was amazing.

You know, it was almost like

your friends saying, "Hey, my mum and dad are away this weekend.

"Let's get back to my place."

And, you know, it really was absolutely possible to do anything.

Believe it or not,

there was a serious purpose behind the fun and games

and it was driven by this man, David Harding,

a champion of public sculpture who was known for his determination

to bring art into everyday life.

I think the exciting thing is that when people come around this corner

and they're confronted by these things,

I think their imaginations are stimulated.

David Harding's ideas would educate and influence a generation,

and he did it alongside fellow tutor and artist Sam Ainsley.

I mean, there was no other course like it.

All of our students, I think,

would say that, you know, the ideas they had

were generated by... often by things outside the art world.

But we did have a philosophy,

which was that context is half the work,

so that was a thread that ran through all our teaching,

that the context was really fundamentally important

to any artwork.

Many of us came from suburban estates

or whatever, you know, that had these concrete objects in them

and they hadn't worked for us

so there was a real tension there.

We had a huge amount of rows and arguments

because those words, environmental and art,

just didn't seem to go together.

I mean, now, I don't really...

I have no problem with it now, but when I was young and feisty,

it was a bit of a pain.

The tutors, David Harding and Sam Ainsley, kind of mapped it out.

The ethos of the department was that we shouldn't be driven by material

and that we shouldn't be suffocated by technique.

You were sent out and told you had to make a work in public

and you had to get permission for it and you had to negotiate the space

and that was such an exciting project for me. I loved it,

I loved having to make those connections to the outside world.

There was a focus on directing the students' thinking

outside the museum and the gallery,

that outside the studio was a rich source of ideas.

The excitement of that

and just the kind of feeling that this could be a way to be an artist,

it just made me think, "Oh, there's something in this."

We felt different, and we also felt very separate.

It was something new beginning.

Aha. A tall man in underpants.

Looks like David Shrigley to me.

Now, David Shrigley isn't a Scot by birth, but he is by adoption.

He's also one of the freshest and funniest artists in Britain.

His show here at the Hayward Gallery in London was a big hit.

It's been an incredibly successful exhibition.

It's an exhibition where you actually see

people enjoying themselves because as you walk around it,

you see people constantly cracking up and breaking out laughing

and, you know, I can't really think

of another time when I've seen that kind of response.

And David's very simple style of drawing, I think is sort of about

saying, "I'm not going to wow you with my virtuoso drawing."

But I think there's a lot of levels in that work

so I think people get a lot of different things out of it.

Each thing, there's a little piece of imaginative charge to it,

and that's what makes it work or not work.

I wonder if someone as playful as Shrigley

feels like a square peg in a round hole in today's grown-up art world.

My motivation for going to art school

wasn't necessarily because I wanted to be an artist

because obviously, I didn't really know that you could be an artist,

I didn't know there was such a profession.

-I just wanted to be an art student, I think.

-Did you?

-Yeah.

I mean, I saw...

When I was a little kid, I saw other kids who were in the sixth form

who were doing, I don't know, A-level art

and I was like, "They're so cool." You know, they had long coats

and military surplus trousers on and stuff like that

and they had these canvas bags with "The Damned" written on it in Tipp-Ex

and I thought, "I want to be one of those guys, an art student."

Hmm. A tall man in a pencil skirt.

Looks like David Shrigley to me.

MUSIC: "Girls and Boys" by Blur

'Yes, that was David Shrigley all right.'

So that's the thing you lived right in the midst of?

Yeah, I lived just up there.

I've been here for almost a quarter of a century.

I guess I'm a Scottish artist

and I've been a professional in Scotland for all my professional life

so yeah, I'm very much a Glaswegian.

I used to live on this street here, Bentinck Street.

This is where I...

I can't believe we're going up this street.

We can actually look into my bedroom window!

Let's do that. Show me where your bedroom window was.

It's on this side, yeah. It's number 23.

-I had a neon sign that said "Slum" in the window for a while.

-Where was it?

That's mine, the one with the white curtains there on the first floor.

That's mine, with the bike handle.

This was like an extension of my studio,

where I made all these photographic works.

But they were sort of public artworks, I suppose.

Notes pinned on trees and things.

-The lost pigeon photograph...

-Yes.

-..and things like that.

And now, apparently,

we've stopped here to look at Shrigley's piece de resistance.

So this funny little one-storey building here

is an old public toilets

so I made, like, a hanging sign to make it look like a bar

and then put "lounge" and "bar" over "ladies" and "gents."

So your first public art project was a public toilet.

Uh, yeah. One of my first ones.

This was kind of, I suppose, the most successful one, and...

A lot of people actually thought that it was a pub

or it was being changed into a pub, and were like, "Oh, that's curious."

You sold booze in the bar, did you?

No, it wasn't open at all. It was just the facade.

-Just a facade.

-Yes.

-I must admit it's impressive.

-It does look like a pub, doesn't it?

-Vaguely impressive!

It was called The Ship,

which I suppose is an anagram of "pish,"

which is the Scottish for...

For what?

-For "piss".

-Is it? Pish?

-Pish. They say "shite" and "pish"...

-I've learnt something today.

..instead of "shit" and "piss".

I think the thing about Glasgow is, as we've experienced,

the weather is so crap, it's unbelievable.

When the light comes out,

-like, the light now is rather beautiful, isn't it?

-Yeah.

There's something very existential

about places that have this kind of climate.

In a way, you sort of forget that there is sunshine,

there is a sun in the sky!

-So this is the Briggait, where I had my studio.

-Oh, right, here.

It's still a studio, but it was taken over by somebody else.

-It's a rather beautiful building, isn't it?

-Yeah.

So, over here, this is kind of the area where Transmission Gallery is.

So your studio was very close to Transmission Gallery.

'Transmission Gallery is an artist-run space

'and in the late '80s and early '90s,

'it was literally taken over by Douglas Gordon

'and the young Scotia Nostra.

'It was both a laboratory and a showcase for the group,

'who brought with them new ideas, new energy and a new focus.

'This was what Hans-Ulrich Obrist would describe

'as the Glasgow miracle.'

For me, as a curator at the very beginning of my activity,

Glasgow was an epiphany, because when I arrived there

at the beginning of the '90s, it was actually Douglas Gordon,

Christine Borland, Rodney Buchanan, they were all there

and Douglas was very involved with Transmission,

I think he was part of the committee

and not only did he do this lecture,

the lecture was just a pretext. The main thing was really

that we spent the entire night in the basement,

they took me to the basement of Transmission, looking at slides.

They had carousels and carousels of slides

of all the young artists of Glasgow

and I had the feeling that something extraordinary was about to happen.

In 1993, Douglas Gordon slowed down Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

so that it lasted 24 hours.

The main thing that Psycho had going for it

is that it's become this kind of cinema icon.

The plot is so simple, everyone knows it,

there's a psycho, he kills people.

MAN SCREAMS

So I wanted to take the idea that the narrative was so well-recognised

that when people came to see it,

the rug of familiarity is swept away.

You know, Transmission Gallery was a very super-important,

probably the most important thing, I think, in Glasgow.

You know, this is where I learned about situationism,

when I realised that performance art

was a valid and important part of what was possible

for you as a young artist.

What was also very interesting is

the generosity and the spirit of how the artists kind of interacted

because it was literally impossible to go to sleep

because once we had looked at the slides, I had to make studio visits.

One artist said, "You need to see my friend, you can't leave town yet."

And so that sort of idea of a solidarity of the artists

working with each other, I just was absolutely mesmerised.

I think it's difficult to imagine Glasgow

without Transmission Gallery in some form or another.

I remember when I first started, it was so...

-(GASPS)

-this weight of what people had done

and you were going in, and eventually, you just realise

you have got to do what you want to do.

It wouldn't be a dynamically exciting place if we were trying to fit in

with what initial premises were.

It has to be that each committee gets on with doing what it wants to do

and taking it a wee bit further or a wee bit in the other direction.

It was very much a "muck in and get on with it" attitude

and as I say, the sense of art or culture as sort of social action

rather than just stuff to look at or contemplate was really vivid.

Making conceptual art as a career move would be a pretty foolish move.

I mean, to be an effective painter would be a good career move.

The whole desire to bring artists

from the rest of the world into Glasgow was really vibrant.

Some of the artists that were involved with the gallery

were travelling themselves to do exhibitions elsewhere

and meeting other people in the world. They were going to New York

or Rotterdam or London and were in group shows

and were coming across other artists, and I think there was a feeling

they wanted to bring some of that back to Glasgow

through the mechanism of Transmission.

We had this great sense of sort of confidence that we could,

you could just get on the phone to your favourite artist

somewhere in the world and invite them,

and often they would come, you know, so people like Lawrence Weiner,

who was a super-important conceptual artist,

turned up and made a beautiful show and gave a very generous talk

and drank whiskey with us all

and, you know, those kinds of moments were, for a young artist,

so empowering, in a way, and demystifying.

What they were looking for was not a lead actor or anything.

They just wanted somebody who was more or less willing

to talk to them about their concerns

and their concerns had something to do with my concerns.

What were those concerns?

Concerns, essentially, with what the position of art was.

How could art be integrated into the society

and at the same time remain art?

Broken Off is a public freehold example

of what could be art within my responsibility.

And when you were there,

what struck you about the people you met

and particularly...

It was a better class of yob

than the west and the north of England that I had been working in.

Are these fellows all artists here?

Well, yes, I would say,

they all are. They're all prominent on the scene, yeah.

Pretty much everybody had graduated through that department

and from that, going out, we all started to show together,

and from there, we joined a gallery

which was up and running called Transmission. It's now ten years old

and, you know, we learned how to tackle the art world from within,

funding, the policy, power, hierarchy.

From that, then, we started to work in other international venues.

It was funny because we were conceptual artists, many of us,

and there was a lot of these footballers

who were conceptual footballers, you know, that really...

There was a game going on in their head that didn't play any,

didn't bear any resemblance to the game that was going on on the field.

Would you say Douglas Gordon has inspired these younger artists

or is he just one element of this movement?

I guess as much as anything,

the inspiration has come from seeing him become successful.

I've heard that Douglas Gordon has a tattoo on his arm

that says "Trust me."

I travelled a lot in the early '90s and late '80s,

and the big thing was that you just said to everyone, "Go to Glasgow."

By now, Douglas was close to the premier league of international artists,

but how did he score on the football pitch?

Douglas, I got a whole bunch of questions to ask you about your art.

I'm knackered.

Jim Lambie was the best player.

Douglas THOUGHT he was the best, but everybody knew it was Jim.

We only knew him as a footballer.

He was a sometime musician and he came along into that football

and I remember him distinctly saying,

"Roddy, I'm thinking about going to Art School,

"what do you think about that?"

And I remember thinking,

"Aye, that's great, that's a brilliant thing to do."

And there you go...ha-ha!

"Somewhere down this curious little Hidden Lane," they said,

"and just keep going."

And that's where I'll find Jim Lambie's studio, or one of them.

He lived and worked in New York City for three years

but returned to Glasgow and set up here, right in the heart of town.

Jim...?

"You drunken..."

I hope that's not personal.

I think that's the artist over there.

The one in the...

Oh! My God, it is it's the artist in the '60s outfit

and the dark glasses.

HE LAUGHS

-Yeah.

-I'm just taking in your studio.

-Yeah.

And where did your inspirations come from, Jim?

It comes from all over, really.

A lot from just being out and about in the city,

noticing things, looking at things,

seeing how things have been put together by other people.

I get a lot of sort of influence from music,

culture that I'm sort of around a lot.

For me it's really important to just always be looking,

alway be listening and, you know, being open.

MUSIC: "Loaded" by Primal Scream

Lambie's high-impact use of colour and bold patterns and stripes

has captured the attention of fashion designers and musicians.

He recently created stage sets for Primal Scream's global tour.

But it's his large scale museum installations,

covering the floor space of the gallery, that have made him famous.

And these have become one of the iconic images used to promote

British culture abroad in 2012.

Where did you get the idea first of all for your floor coverings?

It really came from just messing around with little bits of duct tape

and making small sculptures with scotch tape, duct tape etc.

And then because I'd been using the tape that just developed up again

thinking about the architecture and navigating the architecture

round the room, and then the colours started to come in, because then

I was thinking in order to accentuate the idea of the architecture of the space

by using different coloured strips,

then you would start to see the pattern emerging.

And of course that then brings in other conversations about music

because you're getting a rhythm and a beat going through the piece.

So then, you know, you're taking the strip of tape

and you're repeating that until you meet yourself in the middle.

# Just what is it that you want to do? #

Lambie often uses objects he's found in second hand shops

and salvage yards directly in his work.

Or he'll transform them.

These old leather belts are scaled up and rendered in steel

by his workshop to create giant metal sculptures.

He's even been known to take that sense of discovery

to its ultimate conclusion...

Turning up empty-handed to create the show on the spot.

At the beginning if I went abroad, I would turn up without any materials

and I would go about the town and try and pull things from junk shops

or things that were on the street

and use those materials to produce a show.

And I did a show in the South of France and there was no junk shops

and there was very little stuff lying about the streets,

but because I'd spent so much time IN the space, I began to notice things about the architecture of it,

so the walls were only, like, this thick,

so the only material that I had in abundance was my duty-free cigarettes.

The measurements were just about perfect that I could drill

through the hole in the gallery wall and the curator would give me a light

from the other side and I'd smoke the cigarette down through the wall.

So I did a whole constellation on these walls.

Now, that work would never have existed

unless I'd set that challenge up for myself.

You know, it was in France, so it was kind of perfect because

a lot of the French were talking about nice poetics about the piece -

Jean Genet, when he was in prison,

they would take a piece of straw from their mattress

and they would burrow a hole through the wall to the other cell and they

would share cigarettes through the straw in the wall,

so these are the types of things, these stories,

these things would never have appeared.

Glasgow's Transmission generation - The Scotia Nostra -

are now spread out across the world.

I'm back in Frankfurt at the Museum of Modern Art.

Douglas Gordon's life and work have been hung all over these walls.

This room is called Straight To Hell.

Of course, this takes you back

to this sort of great piece of yours, 24 Hour Psycho.

Have you spoiled this yourself or is this...?

-I don't think I spoiled it at all, I mean, I think...

-It concluded.

HE LAUGHS

If we had a long weekend together in my studio,

you would see how much I love all these things.

I suppose there's something for me,

something very attractive about the idea of excess

and loving something too much, getting too close to it.

There's a fantastic risk involved in that

that you're going to destroy the thing that you love,

so I don't think...yeah, it's not destroyed,

-but there's evidence of...

-Tampering.

..Some passion. Yeah, passionate tampering.

This is another hero.

Again, I'm still trying

but I'll never be quite as good as Laurence.

Laurence looks just like Tolstoy!

Yeah. He's getting more and more...

I could tell a story about every picture here.

You know, why did I keep all of this?

This is a drawing that my son made.

He lives in New York.

He called me actually one day and said,

"Daddy, do you know Picasso?"

And I said, "Not personally, son."

-"Happy Halloween, Daddy."

-Yep.

So this is really a sort of changing

and transformational portrait of you and your memories,

of your obsessions,

of your fond observations.

Well, you know, it's... why do we keep things?

I don't know, I kind of felt that, let's say,

if I died today, what would my children find

when they would go to my studio to visit

and find what I'd left behind?

And I thought it would be kind of interesting for me

to imagine that I was already dead.

And I sometimes feel as if I'm half-dead anyway, so...erm.

There's quite a lot of scary stuff here, too.

I think it's all very...

-I don't think it's scary...at all.

-Hmm.

You know, this is a line form the last book from Don DeLillo

and it just says, "Missing people never make sense."

And I think a lot to do with this exhibition here in Frankfurt,

the whole thing is about,

someone is missing and you know,

if you desire to be missing, what kind of a person does that make you?

Absent, you may say.

Mm-hmm...irresponsible, negligent, guilty.

Is that something...does that...?

Well, my girlfriend calls me the worst Polish Jew that she knows.

The most guilty, negligent...

-So, yeah.

-And how...wait...

..you're negligent... I mean, I know that

because while we've been together you've been talking about Ruthie,

you've been talking about your child, where you've been in Israel,

here, there and everywhere,

so you're ambient, you're all over the place.

Is that how you like to be, all over the place?

I mean, here, you're all over the place here too.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one could call it...an infection.

THEY CHUCKLE

Let's say this, you know. I have bad dreams sometimes.

A situation whereby the solar panel charges the battery

and at some point that triggers the grinder

which will sever the chain and allow the battery to come down

and destroy the camera...

Simon Starling is also a professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt.

When he's not here or at his home in Copenhagen, he's likely to

be in some exotic corner of the globe on an elaborate journey

until he returns to the gallery with a curious object

and a story to tell,

such as this shed.

The Shedboatshed project is a small wooden hut

that I found on the side of the river in Basel

and it had this paddle on the side and it sort of prompted this idea

of creating a mobile architecture system with the shed,

and I made a boat from the shed, from the wood from the shed,

and then made this journey 10km downriver to the museum

and then the shed was rebuilt in the museum.

But in that process, the shed kind of gained all these scars

and holes and you could almost sort of read the structure

of the boat in the building when you walked around in it.

There was this strange kind of new layer of history

that had been kind of laid on top of the building.

MUSIC: "Teardrops" by Massive Attack

Another waterborne work of Starling's

took place on a loch near Glasgow and explored the idea of, erm...

autoxylopyrocycloboros.

Or in other words, feeding a wooden boat to its own engine...

..until it sinks.

And now he's made a puppet show of it.

And I'm not sure where the cactus came from.

-That's you, isn't it?

-Yeah, exactly.

-That's so you.

-Yeah.

-Who did that?

This puppet maker in Copenhagen.

We made a piece of puppet theatre

which is again a little bit of an experiment.

A way to try and find, sort of, make an exhibition in a fundamental way.

And I thought that it'd be nice,

all these stories of boats that I've worked with over the years

were conflated into a single story, a single narrative

so that Shedboatshed and Autoxylo, the Steamboat project

and so and so on and we strung together this 20, 25-minute-long piece of puppet theatre,

essentially for children.

It's very closely related to early silent movies, I suppose,

Buster Keaton, calamitous kind of man against the elements idea.

-Yes!

-Which seemed to have a certain sense.

And my hair gets progressively more confused

and messy as we go through the thing.

I suppose my work is often talked about in relation

to conceptual art and this idea of the artist leaving the studio

and going and sort of making work in the world in a conscious way

and that sort of made sense to me, I think, from a fairly early point.

In Venice in 2003, Simon exhibited Island For Weeds.

Yes, for weeds.

Originally created for Loch Lomond,

this is in fact a rhododendron bush, a plant so stigmatised

in Scotland that the authorities refer to it as a pestilence.

So for Simon Starling, transplanting this work to Venice is a kind of redemption.

What you see here is a sort of prototype

for a larger structure

which was meant to be on Loch Lomond at some point,

so I think we've hit a good size.

It's fairly massive, but not overwhelming.

And also, strangely,

Island has established this kind of dialogue

with these grotesque baroque paintings

and the slightly camp pink blooms of the rhododendrons

are starting to talk to the nymphs on the wall in quite a nice way,

I think, so yeah, it's good.

Another kind of conversation

is going on in the world of Karla Black,

who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Karla is a kind of alchemist

who draws her materials from the stuff of everyday life.

She calls her beautiful, fragile works

"almost sculptures, almost paintings...

"..almost performance art."

I was told in the sculpture department,

one of the first things we were told was,

"What a sculpture is is something that stands up by itself,

"that's what defines a sculpture."

Immediately anybody tells me something is something,

it just calls up the opposite in my mind,

that you immediately think, "Is it?"

The materials that I use are left raw or untransformed.

So say they are a mixture of very traditional art-making materials

like plaster and chalk and paint,

and paper and other more everyday substances like make-up and soap.

They're often quite sort of precarious as well.

They look like they might fall over.

I don't want them to look...

..too stable and I want you to see within them the struggle

that it took to make them be able to stand up by themselves.

You know, it wasn't easy and it's not easy for them

to continue to stand there.

Often people will ask, "What does the work mean?

"What does that mean?

"What is the meaning of this sculpture?"

I can't understand that question.

I don't know what THAT means.

It's easy to see why these artists are sought-after all over the world.

But they always come home to Glasgow.

When you think about the city that Glasgow was, it must have been a very prosperous city,

but it's a sort of curious city architecturally in that

they just had a blip which was, I don't know, 1960s to the 1990s...

-Where they did everything wrong.

-..Where they did everything wrong.

Glasgow wasn't bombed that heavily during the war,

but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was.

It was actually bombed by planning!

-LAUGHING:

-They were sort of co-conspirators.

-Yeah.

-The Nazis.

They did far more than the Germans ever did during the war.

Glasgow decided to destroy itself rather than let some enemy do it for it.

I suppose on a practical level, it facilitated certain buildings

being available at certain times.

So finding space for you guys to find artists' spaces,

that was quite easy.

Yeah, it was, there's always been loads of studio space in Glasgow.

I think the problem is, I've never had a studio that was heated,

even to this day,

I think that's the ultimate luxury.

This is where Richard and Martin

and a whole bunch of other people have got their studio.

-This is, er...

-That's rather grand.

-Yeah, it's quite nice.

I could have...and that's warm as well in there. They've got heating!

But the thing is, you're not allowed to make a mess.

Martin Boyce's studio is...

tidy.

It bears traces of his meticulous approach to his work,

and his distinctive visual style is everywhere.

He's best known for making abstract environments -

a library with reading table and lanterns.

Urban indoor parks like this one,

recently redesigned for a Sonia Rykiel fashion show.

He won the Turner Prize in 2011 with this unique visual language

and his re-imagining of everyday objects -

tables, lights, even wastepaper baskets -

are all based on a single image of a concrete tree.

Martin, this is such a familiar and important sort of motif in your work,

this piece is so critical.

Tell me the story of this and the roots of it.

In 2005, I was offered this fellowship in Berlin.

Round about that time, I had come across

these images of these four concrete

constructivist modernist trees

that were made for a garden by Robert Mallet-Stevens

and they were made by these brothers,

these sculptors called Yann and Joe Martell.

It was 1925.

I was really interested in the brutalism of concrete

and the muscularity of it, the sculptural quality of it

and the way that that form in nature had come together in this object.

So it had this very urban feel to it.

I kept going back to the forms that I found with the tree

and as I reduced this and played around with little forms,

I began to see little possibilities for spaces created within them.

So by repeating this tree within this linear pattern,

I created this graphic forest and then through this forest,

language began to emerge, so even dealing with these

very geometric forms, something quite poetic was happening as well.

The lamps also, they look like little trees, so the table-top becomes like a...

A park.

Yeah, or I kept thinking of it

because again, they're very geometric, modernist forms

that are somewhere between a tree and a streetlamp, so yeah.

I kept think about walking home when you've been with your pals or been on a date,

you know, your first date at school,

you walk home and your head's swimming with all these emotional moments.

It seemed to conjure up this feeling of that walk home

through the town that you live in.

MUSIC: "Dry The Rain" by Beta Band

# This is the definition of my life

# Lying in bed in the sunrise

# Choking on the vitamin tablet

# The doctor gave in the hope of saving me

# In the hope of saving me. #

I was just thinking about this gallery and where it sits.

-As you come round that corner with the pet shop.

-Yeah.

The other side of the street, I mean, that's the grit

-and the glamour.

-I mean, exactly, it's all mixed up in Glasgow

and that's what we have, the grit and the glamour

and the brutality and the beautiful buildings.

If you're surrounded by beauty the whole time,

then you have no touch with the present and reality, I think,

and I think this city has made us be in touch with the present.

I don't think you feel cosseted in historic monuments.

You don't feel cosseted in historic buildings.

You have this great brutalist and Victorian

and Georgian Architecture and industrial architecture.

The history of ship building and things like that.

But you've got a contemporary life that goes on.

It's very present and I think that's something I've always been very interested in,

the present and how that is shaped,

so you've got a lot of empty buildings and space

and I think for somebody who's creative, certainly,

and filmmakers and writers and musicians,

for me, that is an uncommon situation in a city,

to be able to have that space.

It happens in areas and then it changes,

like New York had space in the '60s, now it doesn't.

London had space, now it doesn't.

Glasgow has space.

Toby Webster was also a student on the Environmental Art course

and on the committee of Transmission Gallery in the mid-nineties.

Now he's responsible for the careers of many

of the artists of this Turner Prize generation.

The other aspect of a lot of these artists' work is that

quite a lot of art, a lot of it is about its commercial value

but these artists don't seem to be in that space.

Although they have to make a living,

that's not the purpose, to create objects which then get sold.

If these pieces are sellable, I work out a way that that's possible,

and that's been for me with everything.

I just immediately think these are ideas that are important

and the history of art is not just about the value of something,

and the market has changed towards them

rather than them changing towards the market.

This beautiful gold leaf wall painting is by Richard Wright,

and it won him the Turner Prize in 2009.

In 2010, he erased it.

Toby Webster has worked with Richard Wright for over ten years.

I mean, something like Richard Wright,

his works are transitory,

they're not about being there for ever

and they have a power because of that, and that's something that is

more interesting than if he was making canvases.

It just wouldn't be him, and the work survives on that kind of edge...

When he's decided to remove it, it's gone.

It's usually rubbed down and taken off.

And the idea with Richard really is the work,

that you go and see the work rather than the work comes and sees you.

Today Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum is host to a very unusual event -

the first exhibition of Richard Wright's drawings on paper.

They give a rare insight into how he works.

I draw every day, and drawing is a process for me of thinking.

And often drawing leads to nothing, but it's a key part

of what I do and an opportunity presented itself to bring

some of these works that were made here back here.

Many of them have come from various parts of the world.

I think it's probably fair to say if these things hadn't gone away,

they probably would've been destroyed by now.

And I feel like cutting a few bits off one or two of them now, actually!

But I can't.

What made you approach your work in that way?

I think there were a lot of different trajectories that brought me to that place.

I had been a painter, a very traditional painter

and I reached a point, I was quite young, I suppose, at that time,

but I'd reached a point where I felt

that what I was doing sort of belonged to another time.

The ideas that informed me

seemed to belong in the early 20th century or the late 19th century

and it seemed to me that I almost had to go into another room to be a painter,

to be outside the world and what I wanted to do was

to try and bring the work into the world and make it part of everything else,

so it seemed kind of obvious to just paint on the world.

I very much liked the idea of there being nothing left when I was gone

and it seemed to me to make the action more poignant, more sharp,

you know, whereas in the past, the object had become the thing.

The painting itself was the thing.

These tantalising fragments, these remnants in a way of what

remains of Wright's work, have drawn a huge crowd.

It's the opening of GI, Glasgow's International Festival Of Visual Art.

With 50 different venues across Glasgow,

GI has turned the city into a playground for the visual arts.

It feels like a place where anything can happen.

While Karla Black has transformed the grand interior

of the Gallery Of Modern Art...

..a giant inflatable Stonehenge seems to have popped up in the very heart of the city on Glasgow Green.

This is the work of artist Jeremy Deller

who, though based in London, has been captured by Glasgow.

You know, I can see how your whole career from teenager to now

is absolutely in synch with this Glasgow school.

I never lived here and I didn't go to college here,

but I knew a lot of people from here

so I used to visit a lot, so I've kept connections,

and of course people you knew 20 years ago as struggling artists

are know running galleries, or curators or big artists

and so you just go with them really, with the flow

and you keep in touch and it's a social thing, really.

It's funny where you fit in to the art world,

because you can fit in in a traditional way

with the dealer system and money and auction houses,

but there's other ways to operate as an artist

and this is one of them,

and I think the public understand that instinctively and they enjoy it.

London's more difficult to work in.

Glasgow's easier to work in, I think people are more up for it

and there's more space.

And people are less jaundiced and maybe cynical, I find.

I think it's important to be curious but also again,

with this as a background,

to have a child-like interest in the world and not to forget that.

And it's actually quite difficult to be open-minded a lot of the time.

It's easier to be cynical and I'm naturally quite a cynical person, so I make art

to make myself less cynical and more happy with the world around me.

Public art doesn't have to be pompous,

doesn't have to be something you admire,

it can be something you take part in and part of,

so I'm very happy with this.

-I think we should have a bounce now.

-We should have a bounce.

MUSIC: "Lust For Life" by Iggy Pop

I think that artists from Glasgow have won the Turner Prize

because they're not in London,

so they don't have this pull of the galleries

and so they don't feel they have to satisfy the galleries.

It's quite a good thing to have a distance from the art market,

because it means you don't get too influenced by it

and you just do your thing.

Meanwhile, in Frankfurt, Douglas Gordon

and Simon Starling are engaged in a new adventure.

In a way, they're starting all over again.

The first time I came to the school here in Frankfurt,

I felt something very familiar.

'What we want to come from Frankfurt is something similar to what we had in Glasgow.

'It doesn't have to be always about Berlin,

'it doesn't have to be always about London,

'it doesn't have to be always about Paris.

'Things can pop up and perpetuate.

'These are the conditions where the future comes from.'

MUSIC: "Solid Air" by John Martyn.

'Glasgow's a magnificent city. Why do we hardly ever notice that?'

'Because nobody imagines living here.'

'Then think of Florence, Paris, London or New York.

'Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger

'because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films.

'But if a city hasn't been used by an artist,

'not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.'

Looking at Glasgow now, I can see traces of all these artists.

And the echoes of a conversation with this city

which has been going on for many years

and is likely to continue for many more to come.

You can see more of the work of these artists

and work from a new generation from Glasgow School Of Art on:

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd