The Glasgow Effect: An Ineffective Response to Glasgow’s Very Real Issues
Several people have asked me what I think of The Glasgow Effect, a performance piece launched on the 1st January 2016 in which the artist, Ellie Harrison, born in 1979 in London, has pledged to stay within the Strathclyde region, limiting her ability to travel and work as she usually does, for a period of one year. Harrison wishes to explore the limits of “sustainable practice” and demonstrate the degree to which “successful” artists must travel in order to work.
Controversially, her project has been awarded a £15,000 grant from Creative Scotland, which Harrison states will partly be used to allow her to let go of teaching commitments outside of the Greater Glasgow area. She openly publicises her transportation policy, part of a wider environmental policy which informs the way she makes her work, and comments that, for the duration of the Glasgow Effect project, her transportation rules will be even stricter. Harrison lays down strict rules for herself, stating that, while she holds a UK driving license, she does not own or run a car on a regular basis, and that she does most of her travel by public transport, only using taxis when necessary. While she has published her policy in an effort to encourage transparency, it comes across as smug while residing in a city where thousands rely on public transport as the cost of owning a car is beyond their means.
Naturally, Harrison has received a large amount of criticism on social media, particularly from Glaswegians themselves. This is no surprise - firstly, £15,000 is a large amount of money, especially given that one in three Glaswegian children live in poverty. In an era of Conservative cuts and austerity, it's not shocking to see many Glaswegian people protesting, while their community centres are long gone and their education funding has dried up, that an artist should be given thousands of pounds to stay in one place.
Now, to be fair to the artist, performance art gets a lot of stick, partly because the artist doesn’t necessarily produce a documentation of the performance that can take the place of a physical item. While many see the value in skills such as painting or photography, performance art is often seen through the lens of “well anyone can do that.” Harrison hasn’t spoken as to what she sees the physical outcomes of the project to be, or even if there will be one - in fact, her art has a far more refreshing approach of moving outside of the gallery, interacting with the community around her and exploring art in the context of community instead of institution. That’s great, and I, for one, am extremely excited to see an artist getting a grant for such an intangible piece of work, because it speaks volumes as to how Creative Scotland fund pieces and how open they are to working with 21st Century ideas about what a piece of art is.
But - and believe me, this is a very big but -
Harrison’s work seems less about The Glasgow Effect and more about The Narrow Segment of Glasgow Effect. As someone who moved to the city principally to study at Glasgow School of Art and who was launched into the city’s artistic community from day one, she speaks about Glasgow with the rosy view of the incoming student, the one who’s only ever lived in the nice parts of town and never had to grow up watching the slow death of the community they know as home. Harrison talks about the opportunities open to artists in Glasgow which are numerous, but completely inaccessible for the vast majority of young people who grow up in Glasgow.
Glasgow has a great art scene, but it also has unimaginable levels of poverty for being in a developed country. The title of “The Glasgow Effect” is actually derived from a catchphrase developed to describe the huge health inequalities of the city. It came from a study conducted in 2010 about the difference in health and life expectancy of Glasgow compared with equally deprived cities, and found that Glaswegians from poor communities have lower health levels and lower life expectancy as compared to counterparts from equally poor communities in places like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.
Harry Burns, formerly Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, described the Glasgow Effect as a “psycho-social” problem, suggesting that poverty alone is not responsible for the sinking average life expectancy in certain parts of Scotland, but that poverty’s bedfellow of poor social cohesion is partly responsible. Indeed, many communities in Glasgow fell apart during the de-industrialisation of West Scotland, and many have never recovered.
The Glasgow Effect in itself is a puzzling problem unique to Glasgow, an issue with a million possible factors and only one key cause that experts seem to agree on: poverty. In comparison, Harrison’s Glasgow Effect is a twee round up of all the ways an established artist can continue to engage in art without necessarily making any serious or meaningful engagement of the true Glasgow Effect.
Creative Scotland defend Harrison by stating that her project is meaningful - can an artist make a living in one city, unlike the way most modern artists have to operate? What Harrison forgets is that to live as a full time artist is a privilege denied to most of the inhabitants of the city she has voluntarily locked herself in. When at least one in five working Glaswegians earn below the Living Wage, Harrison has been awarded a grant that surpasses the annual wage of many, most of whom will never be given the opportunity to attend art school, host a show or be able to gain a grant because of the exclusive nature of art. Art within the system of capitalism is inherently classist and elitist, and being able to live as a full time artist requires the ability to pass through a system that will judge where you came from, what school your degree is from and how you talk.
Harrison’s Glasgow Effect has so far not provided any response whatsoever to the very real issues in the city. So far, this project is more an academic exercise into the economics of working as an artist in a city with a smaller art scene than London. To give Harrison her due, she has previously made work on the themes of inequality and her intentions are likely good - but she has launched her project half-cocked, talking mostly about how the funding will be used to explore the ideas behind “career progression” with very little outlining how she plans to engage local people.
Scotland is a place of extreme contrasts, and Harrison’s project seems only to engage with the more respectable aspects, while trying to make light of the serious issues of poverty and ill-health in Scotland. At a time when many Glaswegian youth are trying to get together the funds to leave the city to pursue education or employment, Harrison’s declaration that she will stay within the Strathclyde region has failed to impress with its un-nuanced view of Scotland.
If Harrison really truly wishes to engage with the local community, I’d encourage her to look at the work of artists like Iseult Timmermans, who coordinated the Red Road Community Studio for over two years while actively working with the community from Red Road and working to document their community before the demolition of the high-rise buildings. Timmermans’ projects included building a camera obscura in an empty flat and teaching members of the community to build pinhole cameras. Timmermans is an example of an artist who I would truly applaud for her community engagement - her work was made during the process of that engagement itself, instead of simply occurring in the spaces communities use without actually creating a connection with the people who view it.
