AMI SYSTEM: <a href=“*ORCH5 sample* [RhCl(H2O)5]2+, dim red/blue LED, 354-lb.ft. torque 89.5 MHz”></a> [volume fades to a lower squall of lush, evolving stabs as the lights spot on the panel…]

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: [to AMI SYSTEM: ‘Just one oscillator from now on, thanks.’]

Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. It’s great to see such a large gathering for this panel. Some very quick housekeeping before we begin. I am responsible for producing melatonin today, which responds to light levels, and so would appreciate if you would all power-down your beamers.

 

Now, in the later middle ages, when the term pinea was applied to a worm-like obstacle, pineal glands were thought to regulate the flow of spirits. Well, I’m hoping that our flowing conversation will cast some light on the busy social lives of things in the last century. It is almost a hundred years away, and, well that’s quite a long time is it not? It’s highly likely that these lives were different, what life might they have lived? As we know, the Third Eye Centre is dead, but luckily, I have been left behind as a witness to its existence. Just as I embody the phantasmagoric traces of the Third Eye, so too do my guests: CHINAWARE, INTERMEDIUM, MURAL, NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE and LOOS ASHTRAY. Full blown actors created in different points of the time by some sensual vicar bridging sonority, feelings and associations – thank you for joining us. Let’s start with CHINAWARE, you were there in the early days, tell us a bit about that… good times?

 

CHINAWARE: I mainly served tea when I worked at the Lady Artists’ Club. Pleasant meetings were held in the rooms of our handsome early Victorian House amidst hanging rods and fine furniture. The milk was always added first. Then tea from a ceramic pot. In 1967, when the ladies were struggling to make ends meet, a new ‘Scottish Arts Council’ took a room. Our new lodgers, a ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation’ no less, added an exciting flair. There was a sense of anticipation of a return to our glory days in the late 19th century. What had happened in Glasgow since then?

 

From their Edinburgh HQ in Charlotte Square, the Scottish Arts Council ran an elegant affair in Glasgow, a formal and formidable listed building with a vibrant programme of changing exhibitions touring from our natural overlords in London, the Arts Council of Great Britain. Glasgow was witness again to the international modern art it’d been missing out on since Alexander Reid passed. To this end, the Arts Council of Great Britain were kind enough to give the Scottish Arts Council their own allowance, provided they were responsible and didn’t spend it all in one place. I rather hoped our public sector neighbours would take the whole building and adopt us as their loyal servants. Eventually a settlement was arranged with the ladies in the region of £35,000. There was hushed chatter of a tea room.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: źźzźzźź źźzźźźź…

 

CHINAWARE: (speaking over NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE) “I wonder if you could make a small notice for us, of wood, to hang on the railing of the entrance to our gallery at 5 Blythswood Square, that is at the bottom of the steps. It should be approximately 12 x 18 inches and should say:

 

Coffee House Open

Monday to Friday 10 to 5

Saturday 10 to 1”^[1]

 

We were back! And coffee, the coffee! A Cona Coffee Maker, in Glasgow! Oh my word! It was a revelation. We were thrilled to be under new ownership. Upstairs, the Scottish Arts Council were aspiring to great things. Downstairs, we were doing our bit to balance the gallery’s books.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Yeah, sure, it can’t all run at a loss can it? How exactly did the Glasgow Scottish Arts Council Gallery develop?

 

CHINAWARE: There were a number of important summits, memorably the ‘Talk-In’ held in the evening of Wednesday 9th February 1971 following the Scottish Arts Council’s announcement in The Glasgow Herald. I had high hopes of service in a new exclusive Glasgow club: “…one way of satisfying a lot of wishes would be to have a vertical arrangement of exclusivity – so that the basement and ground floors were completely open to the public and it became more exclusive and private as you climbed into the sooty air of Glasgow.”^[2] The only dark cloud on the horizon came from a cabal of scruffy bohemians, the Glasgow League of Artists.^[3] They audaciously proposed to requisition the building as a rentable gallery and printmaker’s workshop for local artisans and act ‘democratically’ as our ‘advisory committee’. An amateur ‘Camera Club’ and ‘Drama Club’ were also mooted. The Bolshevism of Edinburgh’s New 57 and Printmakers’ Workshop would be most inappropriate in the splendid Walton interior. Plans for a liquor licence also raised the spectre of a rather rougher element taking over in the evenings. Little did we know, the disaffection of these rather angry young men was somewhat prescient.

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: I will have to agree. Too chintzy. Nicht meine Tasse Tee.

 

CHINAWARE: 1971 was a golden year. The new Coffee House in Blythswood Square served up culinary delights not witnessed in Glasgow since the height of the temperance movement: ham roll 7p, cheese roll 6p, egg roll 6p salad filling extra 1p, soup 6p, pie 6p, glass of milk 6p, coffee 6p… I particularly enjoyed serving a ‘Bovril’ (6p) on cold days; it left a warm fatty residue on my glaze and so I often needed a vigorous scrubbing. Only a Mrs. Gibb’s proposal to use artisanal pottery in our Coffee House hung over us like the sword of Damocles. Of course, this ceramic apocalypse remained no more than an empty threat. Pah!

 

INTERMEDIUM: On the radio, some Professors were discussing complexity: ‘It’s not about the details of complex systems, it’s about how we can effect change in them.’

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: This makes me think of 5 Blythswood Square as an organism seeking to grow by absorbing public funding and subsidising itself with your help. As you tumble through its field, it transforms from one organisation into another and transforms you in the process, from tea cup to coffee cup…

 

CHINAWARE: Hmmm. You sound like the hippies. It was fine until they… until the hippies arrived. Forget Bovril, these hippies drank straight from the bottle. And they smoked.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: Aye, well, I’m from out of town. I was made in Dundee, although my maker was trained in Aberdeen. My first gig was the Smith Biennial in Perth. The Third Eye Centre selected me as a significant contribution to the field of Sculpture. They knew significance when they saw it. There was a lot of anticipation around us then, a lot. Lot of hype. Critics and curators came all the way from London. Waldemar was really onto us. It was a like a wave, everyone wanted a piece of the action.

 

CHINAWARE: Yes, yes, yes. I’m not finished yet, I was talking of another group of self-publicists: the hippies.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Yeah, so?…

 

CHINAWARE: Early in 1972 the Scottish Arts Council decided that the gallery needed to appoint a live-in Director to take care of the building and to programme events for Glasgow in Glasgow. The gallery would free itself from the direct control of the Scottish Arts Council and run as a trust. Living above the shop, the hippies squatted out the upper floors. They had different ideas about Blythswood Square – they weren’t at all impressed by Walton’s fine filigree plasterwork or our magnificent Mackintosh doorway. By August they had boxed up some of the cheaper china at Morrison, McChlery & Co Auctioneers’ Furniture Store on Renfrew Street and put up some fellow effects for auction. They resolved to sell off our fine gallery for a tidy profit and set up an ‘Arts Centre’ in less salubrious quarters on Sauchiehall Street. They couldn’t get out of there fast enough, leaving my magnolious modern museum to rot under a leaky roof and soaring inflation.

 

INTERMEDIUM: Performentation. Patchwork quilts. Tapestries. Ceramics. actress/mime. Six Feminist Artists from L.A.…

 

CHINAWARE: Feminists, pah! The hippies pulled the rug on the Glasgow Society of Women Artists the very day Third Eye gained its independence from the Scottish Arts Council. I wouldn’t be serving them again.^[4] What happened to the £10,000 Trust promised for women artists? Up in smoke!

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: Aye, right, coffee can leave a bitter taste in your mouth. You know, it all worked out well for me. There was a new confidence in Scottish art. The prizes and commissions were rolling in. It was our time. We worked hard and we deserved it. I got well bought by the Contemporary Art Society and was off to London as quick as a flash. They were very into me. I guess this was what the Third Eye was for, a national broker for Scottish art. And the commission was just 25%. Made in the shade.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: I feel your material recalcitrance.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: Aye. Question is, what’s gonna make me feel good?

 

INTERMEDIUM: Yeah, well, it was never going to be easy to destroy the prototype object. Community resource. Drop-in centre. Anti-elitist. Communication tool. Austerity Cookbook. The kids could walk in off the street and make something. Generative. Interpretive. Explorative. Justifying myself in several areas at once. Going after as big an audience as I could. Jazz. Rock. Highbrow. Pop. Low brow. Prison Art. Modern. Garnethill. Graph. Fashion. Visual Poetry. Crafts. Community Arts. Performance. Theatre. Movement. Folk. Batiks. Knitting. Duchamp. Visual. Information. Power. Systems. Semiology. Signs. Schools. Drama School. Moving. Being. Let the kids take it or leave it. Nuspeak (10p) as an activity. An ‘information game’.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: 1975? Before my time. I just remember it being one ‘Glasgow Painting’ show after another. Glasgow League, Carole Gibbons, John Byrne, Joan Eardley…. A closed shop. No room at the inn for any new boys.

 

CHINAWARE: My good friend, the Second Earl Haig of the Scottish Arts Council, was mindful of the hippies’ charitable efforts to conciliate local artisans: “…this is right and fair providing this part of the programme is properly balanced with exhibitions from a wider sphere. So much has been happening in the last fifty years in modern art with so many exciting developments and movements, that there should be no difficulty in enabling Glasgow viewers to have the opportunity of absorbing and learning some of the main trends. Apart from Rennie McIntosh [sic.] there doesn’t seem to be any items in your list which cover this sort of thing. Joan Eardley and Stanley Spencer, though good artists, art not part of any of the main movements which I have in mind, and I would not take the American super realists [sic.] terribly seriously as part of the evolution of modern art.”^[5] Just so. The local mafia would never have got a look in had we continued to be governed by the benign professionals of Charlotte Square. The Glasgow Group? The Glenrothes New Town Exhibition? Local currency!

 

INTERMEDIUM: ..with a ruthless eye. Catholic Taste. Glasgow School of Art Fashion Show. Possible. Impossible. Naive. Therapeutic. Experience. Social. Computational. Intercom. Video. Community Arts Resources. Workers Ed. Mass Media. Understanding. Food Synastheteics. Cybernetic Serendipity. Literatures other than the English tradition. Penal System. Glasgow Boys. Whistlebinkies. Faiths. Fitba. Minimalism. Japanese circus. Writing. Make your own goddam art!

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Indeed. Third Eye anticipates the agencement developed by Delueze and Guattari^[6] and elaborated by actor-network theorists in the early 1980s. It formed part of an agencement, a hybrid assemblage of social relationships, tools and the physical surroundings of Glasgow and Strathclyde. The Arts Centre was conceived as a node, a facilitator and actor of no fixed ontology, explicitly dependent upon a mutually constitutive network of humans and non-human actors…

 

CHINAWARE: Such countercultural stultiloquence did not settle the accounts. I was redeployed at Sauchiehall Street. Someone had to keep the house in order. ‘To include free food and soft drinks. Simple cold finger snacks, Third Eye can be responsible for ordering the wine, glasses, and the providing the snacks. Cost from budget. Who will provide the service staff for setting up, service, clearing up? If Third Eye provides casual staff the cost will have to be borne by the previous budget. Washing up facilities? Are side places, paper napkins required? Can Mitchell provide? Time of preview? Lunchtime would suit Press better, but we can’t afford to provide buffet lunch!’… There was a lot of organising to do and it wasn’t going to do itself.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: …which proves the point. The parameters of Third Eye’s network were determined by the actors who scripted it, while the actions of these human actors was determined by the day-to-day agency of the network…

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: There was no point wasting time on the day-to-day; they were ambitious and extraordinary times. Scots swagger had to be exercised. We were smokin’ hot and nobody could get enough of us. The visual art subcommittee explored the possibility of us going on tour. We would do the rounds: London, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff. Exhibitions were planned from Third Eye rather than merely considering exhibitions from other sources. Why didn’t that happen before? Until we came along there wasn’t nothing worth putting out there. Were were truly exceptional. The provinces were taking it to the centre.

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: Cultured people found this intolerable straight away, others became aware of it only after a number of years. I have bid the best in Vienna; Schoenberg expressed his roasted cigarettes, Wittgenstein split seed in me. The speed of cultural development is hindered by the stragglers. I made an important collection, resting briefly in my box, I will unleash to be admired in the most important retrospectives. An open book, I was never disowned. In 1986 I was on yet another international tour, another Loos reunion with a marble-topped table.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: You tourists were squeezing us locals out! We’d just got over all that mumbo jumbo student politics that dominated in the mid-‘70s, then you wafted in like a bad smell from La Belle Époch. We didn’t have anywhere to go other than London and New York. We had to set up a room of our own.

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: His sensations are most like a newborn dog.These people, who are left behind the slowdown in the cultural development of peoples and of humanity. We had our elective affinities with our Glasgow-based cousins ​​Mackintosh, of course! But that was a long time ago.

 

CHINAWARE: Yes! The best thing that ever happened to me was being purchased for the Room De Luxe by Cranston’s Willow Tea Rooms. I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am. In Glasgow, we just weren’t ready to take responsibility for our own culture. The Scottish Football exhibitions, I ask you! The rougher element – ye are many, we are few – had no idea what civilisation was. It was all so dreadfully parochial and embarrassing. It just wasn’t worth the risk.^[7]

 

INTERMEDIUM: Video madness. Kids’ Tapes, Tenants’ Tapes, Teenager’s Tapes, Organisations’ Tapes, Pensioners’ Tapes, Immigration Tapes, Abortion Tapes, Homeless Action Tapes, Carnival Tapes, Theatre Tapes, Your Tapes, My Tapes, People’s Tapes…

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Now, moving along to the end of the row, MURAL, who is a gable end painting from Govanhill. You’ve been quiet, what’s you take on this?

 

MURAL: We were taking it to the streets, Gulbenkian grant-in-aid. But it’s not about me, it’s about the people. I’m able to speak on behalf of my community, I’m not going to talk about my own vision, so I asked the local residents what they thought I should say. This is very quick report: ‘The self actualisation of the whole being is important. They find more relevance in us. Very much cultural, much more than it is now.’

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Devolved? Devolving?

 

INTERMEDIUM: Things fall in and out of arthood.

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: They will. However, there are growth spurts along the axis when we’ve gone ahead, as we jumped into adulthood. Some points are more important than others, they enable increased memory. My time at Drittel Eye was the very Höhepunkt of its reminiscence bump.1986 was the beginning of puberty in life that got Drittel Eye in bankruptcy only for it to transubstantiate as DCA before it transfigured as Sint. Mongo Grail of the Holy Miracle. The late ‘80z were really the best of all time!

 

INTERMEDIUM: Oh god, whatever happened to that pilgrim trail? The veneration of the myth? From our perspective, in molar time, all so inconsequential! We are all arrivistes who come and go. Culture doesn’t ‘improve’, it just mutates. Puppetry >< Mackintosh Furniture \ Photography + New Towns =

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: Na. I was in the middle. The tingling of recognition, a growing awareness… Artifacts in a performance boudoir serve only to amplify their aleatory power. I’d seen it before in Vienna. More than a myth mein Freund. I’d lived it.

 

MURAL: It’s not about me its about us. The corpus of art grows and is transformed by its public bodies. Our particular bodies were transformed in the process of increasing public engagement with us, while we, in turn, transformed TEC.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: TEC?

 

MURAL: Third Eye Centre. There were lots of bodies. TEC. SRC. GDC. SAC. ACGB. TEC’s entanglement with the object was predicated on how it elevated its own standing in relation to these other bodies. TEC’s relationship with other bodies – notably persuading Strathclyde Regional Council (SRC) of their regional significance and Glasgow District Council (GDC) of their local significance while remaining national and international in the eyes of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) – was pivotal to the way that TEC gained confidence in itself. In my time, TEC was simultaneously local, regional and national: Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland. That dictated the kind of ‘embodied’ programming it did. It venerated its community and its community venerated it.

 

INTERMEDIUM: TEC between people and things? Arts Policy. Public Finance. (ACGB Organising Exhibitions: Handbook for Organisers, 1975, 36p)… LOOS once you were worth £210. You fell through space from a dizzy height, bumped into TEC, then, when stolen from the gallery on April 3rd 1986 at 14:00hrs, you fell out of art into a living room in a 1940s tenement in Drumchapel. When your new owner quit smoking you became a bird seed holder. You are still a swell ashtray, but you serve different ends now. TEC was a web that you passed through – it was also a groovy thing, but it no longer exists. The space it occupied transformed into other entities – CCA , The St. Mungo Holy Grail of the Glasgow Miracle – all grown over TEC’s stump…

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: ICH BIN EIN LOOS! Was are you?

 

INTERMEDIUM: A loose cannon.

 

NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE: (to LOOS ASHTRAY) You? You really were the end of it all. Andrew Nairne ushered in Year Zero in August 1986. All hail the New Professionalism. But, really, we started getting squeezed out by the arrivistes and corporate sponsors when Richard Chapman took over from Michael Toby in ’84. All the shows were from IKON or ACGB. Third Eye’s commitment to new locally produced work was sidelined for ‘European’ perspectives. But, we were always European.

 

INTERMEDIUM: There was a darkroom. A darkroom for the kids. Letraset…

 

MURAL: Yes, we always worked closest to the local community and were the most likely to develop a concern for the community in and of itself, perhaps abandoning art altogether if it seemed that there were more urgent social matters to be seen to, but more likely, continuing to use art within the framework of a political ideology or community commitment (but also possible that artist might understand that purpose is to be socially useless or constantly… choice here: does artist totally accept views of community they chose to serve, or do they have view of their own?)

 

LOOS ASHTRAY: Na, na, na. So this epidemic of ornament enjoys then state recognition and state subsidy, as then as now. For my part, but, I know that as a step backwards. Nicht meine Tasse Tee

 

INTERMEDIUM: Unique timbre, assonance and dissonance, as cultural workers jam and drift with the field. Free exchanges of desire. Contrapositions: Heritage. Hard. Cheap. Durable. Field-play: quietness, gentleness, irregular repeating structures, limited parameters, layered textures, decorativeness, spatiality. Middle-ness, part of a continuum. Tactics or effects are reproducible, but the timbre, the texture, is unique.

 

THE PINEAL GLAND: Well, I’m afraid that’s all we have time for – the terms and conditions of our crowd-investment do not permit Q&A time or audience participation. I falls to me to wrap up. From our perspective, the body/mind dualism of the period is ritualised in the Third Eye. Its very name celebrates a Cartesian world-view, an imaginary Caledonian Antisyzgy: artist/public, white cube/brown space, men/women, people/things, swagger/cringe, sacred/profane, Glasgow/Edinburgh, Scotland/UK, object/subject, material/immaterial, etc. These dualisms replicate in your thorny relations with each other, leading you to forever fight out a series of ill-conceived dialectical battles. And yet, Third Eye was conceived at a time when the very nature of non-humans changed. Dude bro nonmodern bots imbricated with human subjectivity were breaking through to share webs of life. Third Eye aspired to multivalency, to host an oscillatory, cacophonous, polyvalent cornucopia of grow-thinges. Infinite diversity of absolute opacities. Things equal among other things. Incandescent communication via Electronic Voice Phenomena. Total noise in the channel. Not the Centre as such, but a Republic of Static.. I guess this fantastic opportunity may well have been squandered by some of you guys, but we won’t be repeating your mistakes.

 

I would like to thank my venerable guests: CHINAWARE, INTERMEDIUM, MURAL, NEW SCOTTISH SCULPTURE and LOOS ASHTRAY our hosts IDLE ROGUE (in Feathered Cloak with Vendetta) INC. [audience cheer] I ask you all to thank AMI SYSTEM for jabberwocky, whoop-hooks, whistler-echoes, ping pong delay, three delay hit with 70% feedback, wet dry 80% and their great timing on that 3.4 sec delay for more brushing and clicking. [audience gesticulate] And finally, raise your Splenda® dusted martini glasses to our investors CEO ANGELS who ‘offer the lowest interest loans (0.9% APR) to recharge hint meters.’ [secretes 1.67mg of melatonin] Thank you and good afternoon.

 

AMI SYSTEM: <a href=“26.5” 37” 21.75” *x3 ORCH3 sample* Well done,G1m8:)! COMMAHWN!! DO IIIT! DO IT NA-OW!! 104.1 MHz”></a>

^[1] Alison Stewart (Admin Assistant, Art Department, SAC), Letter to DC Greer Signwriter, 2nd Feb 1972.

^[2] Bill Williams, Letter, North Briton Gallery, Gartocharn, Dumbartonshire, 23rd Feb 1972.

^[3] Founded 1971, chaired by Ronald Forbes.

^[4] Third Eye refused to have Glasgow Society of Women Artists (GSWA) exhibitions from 1977 onwards. The GSWA met monthly in one of the Third Eye’s offices.

^[5] Dawyck Haig, Letter to Tom McGrath, 20th August 1973.

^[6] Mille Plateaux, 1980

^[7] “My guess is that the Government will decide that the arts will be devolved to Scotland, partly because it makes sense and goes with related functions, and partly because both main parties are so scared of giving Scotland real economic power that they will compensate by giving Scotland everything except real economic power.” Alexander Dunbar, Director of the Scottish Arts Council 1971-1980, Devolution and the Scottish Arts Council, 19th February 1975, p16.