05 Jul 2023
By Alison McRae, Senior Director of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
Glasgow has had a reputation for being opportunistic and creative – some would even say gallus at times - for many decades. How fitting then that the city, through Glasgow Life, has attracted exhibitions from two of the world’s major disruptors as part of its tourism and cultural offer this summer. Both promise to give an incredible boost to Glasgow in terms of profile and footfall, bringing a much-needed injection to our city’s visitor economy.
Firstly, we have Mary Quant Fashion Revolutionary, the globally renowned V&A exhibition of Dame Mary Quant. Making its final stop on a world tour in Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, it showcases over 100 garments, accessories and artefacts drawn from the extensive collections of the V&A, the designer’s archive and private collection pieces. The exhibition is a beautifully curated show of the fashion icon’s pioneering work.
Quant epitomised the global movement to freedom and self-expression. She is probably most famous for her creation of the mini skirt, which became the symbol of London’s youthful look and women’s liberation.
She was an innovator and, through the work of her partnerships, anticipated that visual branding and marketing were going to play a critical role in fashion and she was instrumental in shaping the global identity of fashion today. Quant focused on new technologies and materials, including the emergence of nylon, Lycra and PVC, to experiment with affordable designs enabling mass market consumption.
Perhaps most importantly, her legacy is the vision she had of how to use fashion as a means of communicating new ideas and change through her playful style of clothes, which mocked traditional British institutions and attitudes towards gender, whilst also representing the possibility of looking better than when you were born. This proved to be a remarkably seductive proposition.
Then, complimenting and contrasting with this in equal measure, we have Banksy’s ‘Cut and Run: 25 Years Card Labour’ exhibition which uses street art as a means of communicating through sardonic wit and humour to challenge the viewer to grapple with current globally potent themes across culture, politics and society.
Glasgow has a long-standing relationship with street art with its own mural trail and the annual SWG3 Yardworks festival – now one of Europe’s biggest public art projects, and centre of Glasgow’s street art renaissance.
Hosting the exhibition in the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) is apt as this Glasgow institution has been welcoming artists who champion social justice and use innovative practice for nearly three decades now.
Banksy also chose it because his favourite piece of art in the UK sits outside the venue in the form of the cone-adorned Duke of Wellington statue.
Security inside is understandably tight, albeit somewhat ironically so, given the rebellious nature of the work. However, subtle signs of the artist’s anti-establishment message are even present in the ever-vigilant security team, with some even sporting a traffic cone earing as they continuously scan visitors discovering their way through the dramatically reimagined GoMA spaces.
Banksy’s dichotomy from an early age was that he found himself caught between two worlds: graffiti and fine artists with their separate discerning audiences and so he opted to plunge into the significant space occupied by the general masses to create his illicit and disruptive expressions. But over the last 40 years there has been a shift and what was once considered graffiti and vandalism has now been given societal permission to be considered and showcased as art.
This groundbreaking show runs to 28 August and also intends to give the city a night-time economy boost with unique opening hours until 11pm during the week and 5am at the weekends, giving visitors the opportunity to share the ambience of the wee small hours when the artist would have been creating his works under constant surveillance.
I really enjoyed both for different reasons and it’s definitely worth making time to visit these two iconic exhibitions whilst exploring two very different parts of our city.
This article was first published in The Herald on Wednesday 5 July 2023
