Like the death of Mark Twain, reports of the death of Tramway have been greatly exaggerated. The rumour has been going around that Scottish Ballet is to take over the huge, combined performance venue and exhibition space, pushing out the present inhabitants. It is the threatened loss of the visual art space that is causing most grief.

In fact nothing is so far advanced. The present position is that Scottish Ballet is currently seeking approval from the Scottish Arts Council (SAC), its principal funder, to explore two options involving the Tramway space. This will be discussed in principle by the SAC in January. The first option would be for the Ballet to take over the whole of Tramway, including the part which is currently derelict, closing the gallery, but keeping the present performance venue. If this did happen, however, it would not be before 2006. The second proposal would involve a completely new building on a part of the site that is currently empty, but keeping the present venue pretty much as it is. As this proposal would involve a new build, it has a much bigger capital cost attached to it.


‘What we have here is not difficult because it is cutting-edge. It is difficult because it is simply very bad’

Whatever encouragement Scottish Ballet may or may not have been given for these ideas so far, neither has yet been debated by Glasgow City Council, which owns and manages Tramway. If the SAC thought it a good idea, then the City Council would discuss it in the light of its own budgets and priorities. If it is tempted by what is proposed, then it is up to the visual art community to make the case that the loss of Tramway would be too high a price to pay. Meanwhile it is all hypothetical.

SAC and Glasgow City Council fund Tramway currently with matching annual grants of £192,000 - though the total budget that this provides of £384,000 is evidently still not the full cost. It seems some other fixed costs are also met by the City Council. Around £100,000 is spent on the visual arts programme. This provides three exhibitions a year in the main space and alongside them three smaller projects in the upstairs gallery. In the current year, however, the exhibition budget is already spent and so there will be no new show till the Glasgow Art Fair in the spring.

In addition to its own shows, however, Tramway also hosts the annual exhibition of the work of students in Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art programme. This, I suspect, is the cause of some of the current protest. Tramway hosts this free of charge. GSA only pays technical costs. And because Tramway has a reputation beyond Glasgow it is also a very good shop window. This is a major subsidy that GSA will be reluctant to lose.

Is Tramway value for money? Would the money be better spent by both funders if the building was headquarters for Scottish Ballet? For myself I am sure Tramway should, in principle, remain a visual art venue. I am prejudiced no doubt, but in a straight competition for space, ballet will always be relatively a minority interest. Visual art is universal. We all use images all of the time and because of this there is enormous popular interest in art generally and genuine curiosity about any new kinds of image that our artists come up with.

But here Tramway’s current exhibition, The Echo Show, which is fairly representative of its programme generally, does it no favours. Perversely, in spite of the immense popular currency of images, perhaps because of it, a good many contemporary artists seem determined to eschew images altogether in favour of oblique and often obscure statements in almost any other form.

This exhibition brings a group of these artists together and, as an exhibition, it really is almost completely impenetrable. Turn to the press release for a clue and it offers little help. Indeed it starts out with a breathtaking generalisation: "In 20th-century art, the echo meant chaos: it was the cancellation of any Utopia because it upset the logic of time and space and humbled free will."

What the grounds for such a view may be I have no idea. But it gets worse. The press release then claims: "The exhibition aims to reveal authorship as process: artists are therefore represented by their practices rather than their single works." I don’t know what that means, but I suppose we have to guess that the show offers some commentary on these bizarre ideas. But it is hard to see even how it does that. There are 15 or so works by a dozen artists whose names suggest that they come from all over the world. There are no labels, but a map indicates where the works are, or at least that is the intention.

I spent some time trying to work it out. In one corner a film is playing. It was made by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joeige. Its theme is the paradox that all that survives of a film made in Lebanon is the bits that were cut out by the censor. In the opposite corner another film shows a group of girls looking self-conscious in carnival masks riding in a boat through a derelict post-industrial harbour. At one point a small boy cheerfully throws a stone at them, a piece of impromptu art criticism with which I sympathise. In another place, Sunset Song by Susan Philipz consists of two loud speakers facing each other and sporadically playing a lugubrious recording of Down by the Ohio. What would Grassic Gibbon think of that? There is a group of abstract sculptures by Camilla Løw, but they look out of place and ill at ease. A grey painted wall at one end has a sign stuck on saying "unfinished work" - engaging honesty, or is this what is meant by representing artists "by their practice"?

In the centre is a bank of monitors that were supposed to be playing Films on the Society Liberated from Work by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. There was a car with its boot open to reveal a gramophone. The work was called Earworld/Volume, but it was silent when I was there.

There is more, but it is no better. The press release suggests that the show "will surround us with echoes from historical and future times and spaces" and a great deal more besides. It does nothing of the sort. Indeed it does nothing at all. Yet we read that this was a special Tramway show including new commissioned works.

Tramway is difficult to get to. If it is going to draw a public it will have to generate real interest and make people want to go there. The recently opened garden is a step in the right direction. But shows like this do the opposite. They are a complete turnoff. What can their justification be? I suspect it has to do with Tramway’s reputation. Art is like any other economy. It depends on confidence. But more and more we see that confidence being manipulated by a small group of international artists, dealers and curators talking to each other, but to no-one else. If Tramway’s reputation depends on shows like this, it can only be because it attracts their support, makes it part of that enclosed conversation.

But this is like having confidence in Enron. All the high-sounding nonsense that accompanies it obscures the fact that what we have here is not difficult because it is experimental, cutting-edge and all that jazz. It is difficult, completely impenetrable, because it is simply very bad. If we believe art deserves financial support from state or city, it has got to reach out to the public. This is not the same as dumbing down, but it does mean persuading others to share our sense of its value. Shows like this will never achieve that and I am afraid that by default Tramway may find it has no defence against the rapacious plans of Scottish Ballet.

• The Echo Show runs until 21 December.

original article : http://www.news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1272232003