Journal Article

Culture and the City: Poetry, Painting and Music in 1960s Glasgow

McCulloch, Margery Palmer

2013

Overview

Alasdair Gray, for example, in a poem published in Lines Review in 1963, laments that 'Terrible structures have been erected on the skyline';7 structures characterised by Tom Wright in 1967 as 'the egg-boxes/that have replaced/the hated, loved, and lousy slums'.8 Kenneth White's 'Glasgow Night' (1966) ignores the rising new Glasgow, focusing instead on 'the cargo that Glasgow / unloads on my mind... the fog / the rain/the mud / the grease / the stench', while his speaker 'improvise[s] a lonely blues' taking him away from the city and the city away from itself 'to jazz with the sea'.9 In contrast, Adam McNaughtan seeks to diminish the impersonality of the new through humour in his ever-popular 'The Jeely Piece Song' (1967) with its repeated refrain: 'Oh ye cannae fling pieces oot a twenty storey flat'.10 Photographs in the 1960s by Oscar Marzaroli record objectively this movement from city tenement slum to technological tower block, but the rupture in the city's living patterns is nevertheless clear in his images of traditional communal backcourts and contrasting high-rise new buildings in Hutchesontown towering over the remains of the old Gorbals.11 Morgan has spoken of how he was introduced to technology through his father taking him on the Clyde steamers and explaining the workings of the engine room to him: Here the underlying leitmotiv is that of Glasgow's religious and football sectarianism, and the social comment is presented ironically through its implicit biblical references to the crucifixion of Christ. [...]the drama of the secular happening is communicated through the 'music' of the poem: the ebb and flow of the speaking human voice, its urgent questioning contrasted with slower reflection, with pauses between utterance, then with renewed urgency. The Glasgow Group as a whole, and individual members in one-person shows or in smaller groupings, soon extended their exhibiting beyond Scotland to London and other UK venues, as well as inclusion in important international exhibitions such as Three Centuries of Scottish Painting, arranged by and shown in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1968.24 Another venture which greatly assisted young Glasgow artists by providing exhibition space was the founding of the New Charing Cross Gallery in 1963 by three Glasgow artists, Bet Low, Tom MacDonald and John Taylor, together with the businessman and art collector Cyril Gerber. Unlike Scottish literature, which has had much critical and historical documentation in books and journals from at least the mid-twentieth century, the story of Scotland's visual art over the centuries (and especially in the twentieth century) is still poorly documented, and the continuing hostility on the part of the Scottish art establishment to the idea of establishing a National Gallery of Scottish Art means that there is no place where one can study the history of Scottish art and trace the development of specific artists or movements at first hand through the works themselves (as can readily be done in the literary context through histories and anthologies of literature, as well as individual publications). [...]not only the contribution of the innovative visual artists of the 1960s to their own city of Glasgow is lost, but the wider contribution of Scottish art to its own culture, and its interaction with art outwith Scotland, cannot be properly examined and understood.

• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers, Inc
• Subject: Poetry