George Wyllie: The Cosmic Voyage
Until October 8; Collins Gallery, Glasgow

I picture George Wyllie, at 83, zooming around the starry skies in his silver-sprayed Boots of Icarus. A feather protruding from each heel is enough to propel the self-styled scul?tor to the greatest heights, and his Cosmic Bunnet, with its little paper gold star, is enough to protect him from the sun’s rays.

The boots and cap are worn and moth-eaten, but with cheap and cheerful modification they have become symbols of hope. They take their place amongst a veritable jumble-sale of cosmic junk at Collins Gallery, almost thirty years after Wyllie launched his artistic career in the very same place.

Wyllie is most famous for his Straw Locomotive, dangling in 1987 from Glasgow’s Finnieston Crane, and for his world-touring Paper Boat, another symbol of Scotland’s lost heavy industries, He is a showman, happier taking his art to the people than hiding it away in galleries; this is an instinct he shares with his contemporary Richard Demarco, and with the legendary German artist Joseph Beuys, whose personal influence is clear in Wyllie’s work.

For all three artists, action has proved as crucial to sculpture as metal or stone. The late Beuys’s Actions, including lectures and ritualistic performances, left behind by-products which are now cherished by museums like remnants of the true cross. Richard Demarco’s Road to Meikle Seggie is a life-long work of art, a metaphorical quest for enlightenment, documented by countless photographs along the way.

George Wyllie, too, is on a life-long quest, to unhinge the entrenched absurdities of this world. The question mark in his trademark Scul?ture stands for doubt – the kind of doubt that the Scottish Enlightenment turned into an artform. If, to get people questioning the status quo, he must sail into Wall Street on a paper boat with a copy of Adam Smith’s complete writings on board, he’ll do it. If he must burn a train made of straw to reveal a giant question mark inside, he’ll do that too.

This kind of showmanship is double-edged. Demarco knows it, and Beuys is only exempt because he’s dead. Wyllie’s couthy self-promotion is matched by boundless energy and enthusiasm, just like Demarco’s. But their generosity, their willingness to speak and write freely about their work without a hint of mumbo-jumbo, leaves them outside the contemporary art game. They’ve been making social sculpture too long to fit the mould of groovy young Turner Prize types. Their importance won’t be fully acknowledged until, like Beuys, they’re gone.

Fortunately, Wyllie is most definitely still here, and his show at Collins Gallery is testament to that. Of over fifty works, there are at least fifteen brand new sculptures and prints. The mood, despite the death last year of the artist’s beloved wife Daphne, is more ebullient than ever.

Daphne’s smiling photo is tucked gently into the first work in the show. The Happy Compass, though not a new work, sets the scene for a cosmic journey, its needle a lump of quartz, poised above a celtic spiral (or a question mark). Robinson Crusoe extolled his wife as “the stay of all my affairs; the centre of all my enterprises; the engine that, by her prudence, reduced me to that happy compass I was in”. Wyllie’s Happy Compass is a tender, cheery tribute to Daphne.

The territory beyond the Happy Compass is a forest of vertical objects, reaching up to the heavens, occasionally interrupted by the ceiling tiles. Wyllie has mused often about mankind’s tendency to build upwards into the skies, and despite a declared admiration for sideways-burrowing rabbits, he hasn’t resisted the vertical urge. The result is an instant impression of exuberance; a sense of aspiration confirmed by the winged boots and Cosmic Bunnet.

There are spires everywhere. These little machines, invented by Wyllie in 1986, are designed, with tall swaying masts weighted down with quartz, to find their own balance between earth and sky. The first was installed on Rannoch Moor in tribute to Joseph Beuys, and Wyllie has scattered them around the world in the twenty years since then in an expression of ecological equilibrium, tinged with a little bit of pagan worship.

The latest addition to Wyllie’s pseudo-pagan iconography is the Cosmic Tree, whose branches reach up to the heavens while its roots find their way to the underworld. Like the spires, this tree signals a balance between two worlds, physically and spiritually. Wyllie is not afraid to “introduce a touch of Shaman hocus-pocus”, and this is most evident in another new work, Quivering Horse.

This installation provides the equipment for a ritual carried out by Shamans, to return the soul to a sick person’s body. A red rope runs from a steel arrow to a birch, along which the soul will run. Nearby, a crudely carved horse’s head on a spring will quiver to indicate the return of the soul. The patient, in this case, is society. We are sick; we’ve lost the ability to celebrate the unknown.

At the back of the exhibition catalogue, under “interests”, Wyllie has put “re-generative art”. He, like Beuys famously did with felt and fat, wants to heal our gaping wounds, and to return the soul to the body politic. He directs our eyes and minds to the greater cosmos, with a cheery question mark pointing the way to the great unknown.

Hope Is Hard, he does admit, but even a boat weighed down by heavy slate is a vision of optimism, when guided by a floating metal bird. A rusty old plough, with the help of a string of light bulbs, is metamorphosed into a constellation. A series of trees is photographed growing miraculously out of hard rocks. While early works are fierce and incisive, recent ones are just as fiercely positive. If Wyllie’s aspirations manage to touch enough people, then maybe, just maybe, that horse’s head will quiver.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.09.05