Country Grammar
Until November 14; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

This is the weblog generation. There’s nothing to stop any of us putting our most fleeting thoughts at the disposal of 580 million web users worldwide, whenever the mood takes us. Scrolling ever downwards, these random thoughts and observations don’t have to apply to rules of publishing or rules of literature. Like a leaf on a tree full of similar leaves, these blogs are tiny parts of the web, fluttering comfortably in their relative anonymity.

While books will always be with us, the weblog is indicative of a new way of working. A new generation of artists is not hidebound by notions of completeness. They prefer instead to see what happens when they try things out, and to let the world peek over their shoulders while they’re doing it. Like that fluttering leaf, these little bits of art are made on 3-ply tissue and scraps of paper, tentatively marked and pinned to the wall.

Country Grammar (named after Sue Tompkins’ performance piece, which you can see on 21 October) brings together seven young Glasgow artists who are all, loosely-speaking, in the same gang. They are part of what might justifiably be called a movement which is making itself felt across a generation of artists. By inviting these artists in, the Gallery of Modern Art has gone straight to the heart of contemporary art.

The difficulty with new movements, and with this one in particular, is that they communicate in a language which the rest of the world has yet to learn. It is a prime target for those who would walk in, point, say “my three-year old daughter could do better than that” and walk out again. To be perfectly honest, I can’t claim to understand it fully myself. This exhibition needs some serious interpretation.

Apparently the artists were reluctant to provide statements of their philosophies for use in the exhibition. Perhaps even they are not sure what their work is about. That’s not to say it’s no good – but that it is deeply intuitive. Hayley Tompkins’ hesitant watercolours, for example, are scattered around on paper, wood and wall according to her instinct for spatial relationships.

It is, however, willful exaggeration to call this as an exhibition of drawing. There are works in pencil on paper which definitely come under that heading. Then there are works in watercolour on paper and on tissue which just slip under the door. The collages, cut from magazines, are a definite grey area, while the typed-up concrete poetry is on the wrong side of black and white.

It all creates a feeling that drawing is being rediscovered from first principles. There is no bravura penmanship here, no confident flourishes or sensuous lines. Instead there are Kevin Hutcheson’s tentatively pencilled outlines, Kate Davis’s heavy shading, and Gregor Wright’s intuitive scribbles (Wright is, incidently, well known for his weblog). Alex Frost’s painstaking system of mapped-out marks precludes artfulness, while Sally Osborn’s combinations of conflicting materials result in crude smudges of colour.

Osborn has been experimenting with relatively uncooperative media for some time – only recently she was exhibiting tin foil painted with watercolour in Dundee. Here, the most interesting piece is made of black tissue paper, its crisp folds dividing the paper into eight. Amidst the folds are dripping lines of watercolour, the colour barely evident against the black, the dried-out lines incised like shadows into the absorbent tissue.

The two drawings by Alex Frost, whose solo show you’ll read about next week, are perhaps the most accessible in the show. These large-scale renderings of snapshots are pencilled in meticulously on graph paper using only symbols like + and = resembling something like a knitting pattern close up. From a distance the image is complete. This is pointillism for the graph-paper generation, turning an image into a mathematical formula, and then repeating it meticulously by hand.

This insistence on frail human marks, when a computer could do it ‘better’, is at the heart of the exhibition, and of this new generation of artists. They are asserting their right to make flawed, hesitant marks on faded or wrinkled material. Without proclaiming their sex-lives at top volume, or dragging us into the depths of their angst, they are making art personal again.

So the rule book has been torn up. The question is whether it heralds a new approach to art, or whether it’s a brief rebellion with nowhere to go. If intuition is to be our guide, is it capable of growing and maturing with us, or will it reduce everything to the lowest common denominator? Let’s hope that Country Grammar is the start of something, and not the end.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 03.10.04