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14 - Erasure and Reinstatement: Gray the Artist, Across Space and Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2024

Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon
Affiliation:
Université d'Aix-Marseille
Camille Manfredi
Affiliation:
Université de Bretagne Occidentale
Scott Hames
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
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Summary

Witnessing: The Unfinished Nation

In his home country, Alasdair Gray's art is highly visible. Though much essential work is elsewhere, its presence is most evident in Glasgow, the place he spent his life. In terms of the visual practice, much of that life was dedicated to doing two things. The first was preserving, in pictures and words, Glasgow's disappearing past. The second, also conducted across space and form, was imagining Scotland's possible futures, seeing as he did Scotland as a place with the unfinished business of national self-determination. In this chapter, I wish to look at the possible future, the unfinished present, also at the disappearing past. When studying Gray's visual archive that past is critical, not least because until recently the artist's own work has been disappearing too. Not that visitors to today's Glasgow would know it. In the West End, where he lived until he died in 2019, Gray now seems inescapable. His work is not reserved for locals. You do not have to seek it out. Thousands witness it every day, simply by travelling there.

In the following chapter, I will argue that Gray's art has consistently suffered erasure of various kinds, for decades being – unlike his widely celebrated literary output – largely neglected, replaced or destroyed. Using his murals – now an integral part of Gray's Glasgow – as case studies, I will then trace how the twenty-first century has seen a radical reinstatement of Gray's visual practice into the landscape. Some artists run from their early work. Not this one. For Gray, what appeared to be new was nearly always deeply rooted in the past. Themes reoccurred. Emblems reappeared. Figures resurfaced. The artist sought to reinsert his marginalised or lost works into his city once more, in new contexts, for new futures. He was always this way. Only now, even in death, he has an audience.

With Gray's murals, witnessing is a good place to start. Seeing what the work looks like, close up. Considering its concerns and influences, also its commonalities with the artist's other visual, textual and hybrid work. During a Kelvingrove Art Museum exhibition in 2014–15, an Alasdair Gray West End walking tour directed visitors to the artist's most viewed murals.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scottish Writing after Devolution
Edges of the New
, pp. 282 - 304
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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