Picture: Robert Perry

Don't let this spin out of control

It’s a late September evening outside Glasgow’s Tramway arts centre and the talk is of conspiracy. "It’s a stitch up," says the artist Toby Paterson. How does he know this? "I have sources," he says. He won’t reveal who these are, but Paterson, like most of the 50 artists, writers and curators protesting outside Scottish Ballet’s new show, is convinced - Glasgow City Council and Scottish Ballet (and, a few believe, the Scottish Arts Council too) are in league against Scotland’s visual art community.

Conspiracy theories are dangerous things, especially in Scotland’s cash-stretched arts world, where people badly need to work together to prosper. But the Tramway conspiracy theory is spreading and the atmosphere is poisonous.

It goes something like this: Glasgow City Council, which owns Tramway, has secretly agreed to let Scottish Ballet make the building its new home, even though this will mean the closure of Tramway 2, one of Europe’s most striking exhibition spaces and, its supporters argue, vital to Glasgow’s reputation as a centre of excellence in visual art. Why? Because, one well known artist told me, "It’s very clear that they [the council] don’t care about the visual arts and would rather be rid of it. What they’ve done with the Tramway visual arts programme is slowly strangle it." This was one of the more measured responses.

Naturally, Glasgow City Council denies this. The facts, it points out, are these: this week Scottish Ballet applied to the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) for funding to convert Tramway into its new headquarters. The City Council is open to such a plan but will not debate it further until funding has been approved. Until then protest is "premature".

Nonsense, the conspiracy theorists reply. "Very few people would go ahead with a lottery application without nods from the right people," says artist Alan Currall, "which makes me think there’s more going on than has been disclosed."

Viewed a certain way, a memo sent by the council to Tramway staff a month ago supports this view, describing how "the presence of Scottish Ballet in the building would enrich the arts programme". Why would the council send such a memo before Scottish Ballet submitted its bid to the SAC? No-one has yet come up with a satisfactory answer to that.

The SAC’s position muddies the waters further. Its spokesperson won’t discuss specific applications but, talking "hypothetically", said that if someone applied for money to convert a building, the SAC would normally expect the application to have the backing of the building’s owners. "I think the reason they [the council] are saying nothing’s happening yet is that it’s a done deal," says Paterson. "And that’s a really dangerous thing to be doing, setting one art form up against another."

This sounds like a threat but is really just concern; Paterson is mild-mannered and thoughtful, but others are spoiling for a fight. Already one artist, Lucy Skaer, has blocked the sale of her work to the council-run Gallery of Modern Art. Others look set to follow. Glasgow City Council, meanwhile, has suspended Alexia Holt, Tramway’s respected visual arts programmer - a decision that shocked and angered the visual art community further. Up to now, the protests have been admirably civilised, but things could get ugly if this atmosphere of mistrust remains.

How is a fight avoided? Not easily, since the wishes of the visual art community and Scottish Ballet (which refuses to comment on the protests) are directly opposed. The commentator Ruth Wishart sensibly pointed out this week that the debate must be about how best to use not just Tramway 2 but the whole building - the Scottish Ballet plan would regenerate areas that badly need repair; the rest, Wishart argued, suffers from "underuse", with only 11,000 people attending ten exhibitions over the past year.

This is true, but will have angered more people than it pacified, since it is not the complete picture. Thousands more now visit Tramway to see NVA’s beautiful Hidden Gardens. And yes, exhibition attendance has not been high but that, artists argue, is due to a lack of marketing support from the City Council, not the work.

"The idea that because attendance figures are poor they can just shut it down rather than addressing that seems nonsensical," says designer Robert Johnston, one of the protesters. "The City Council seem continually not to know what they have in their hands. Glasgow is considered internationally as a rival to London and New York in terms of its art scene."

Johnston talks of a "catalogue of blunders", from Julian Spalding’s unpopular reign at the Gallery of Modern Art to the "unmitigated disaster" that was the refurbishment of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). The CCA comment is a little unfair but reflects a widespread feeling among artists that what was a hive of creative activity is now a stylish but unwelcomingly soulless building.

In other words, distrust of Glasgow City Council is deep rooted. The irony is that the Tramway row has begun just as relationships were improving. This year’s Real Art Weekend festival, for example, was a high profile show of council support for visual arts; but because its success was down to artists, galleries and the council co-operating closely many months in advance, next year’s could already be under threat.

Two things need to happen now. Instead of simply repeating the same denials, Glasgow City Council must go out of its way to convince artists it has their best interests at heart. And Scottish Ballet needs to think very hard about how much longer it can sit in silence. As it is, both parties are allowing the Tramway conspiracy theory to thrive, and that’s not good for anyone.

original article : http://www.arts.scotsman.com/headlines_specific.cfm?id=7755