1.
When the Tom McGrath
Trust held a fund-raising event at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in
Glasgow on March 1st this year, its melee of jazz, performance and
poetry captured the polymathic chaos of the late playwright, poet and
pianist in all its inclusive glory. It was, said someone, ;like
spending a night inside McGrath's head. With the CCA housed on the
site of the old Third Eye Centre, the event also marked something of
a spiritual home-coming.
It was McGrath, after
all, who was the Third Eye Centre's first artistic director when the
hippified arts lab opened its doors in 1974 to become Glasgow's first
multiple artform space. Theatre, music, exhibitions, readings and out
and out happenings could all be housed under the same roof, with the
best book shop on the planet and one of the city's first vegetarian
cafes thrown in to plot, scheme, dream or just hang out in. With his
own artistic roots at the centre of the 1960s London underground, be
it editing counter-cultural bibles Peace News and International
Times, arguing the toss with fellow Scottish travellers, novelist
Alexander Trocchi and radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, or reading his
poetry at the Royal Albert Hall alongside Allen Ginsberg, McGrath
oversaw all this like some avuncular Glasgow Buddha, calling on
connections and making new ones to present a major platform for the
avant-garde which Glasgow had never seen or heard before.
Much of the Third Eye's
wayward counter-cultural spirit was captured on video by McGrath on
primitive equipment he learnt how to use as he went along. When the
fruits of McGrath's curiosity were re-discovered in box-loads of VHS
tapes in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, it revealed a treasure
trove of unedited footage documenting a a crucial era, when Glasgow's
multifarious art scenes were finding their feet and paving the way
for Tramway, The Arches and other cross-artform venues.
More than a hundred of
these excavated tapes could be seen in What We Have Done, What We Are
About To Do, an exhibition hosted at the CCA between August and
September 2012, which brought the Third Eye archive into the open,
and allowed a new generation to see that the current swathes of
artistic activity in Glasgow didn't come from some year zero
'miracle' as some commentators have mythologised, but was umbilically
linked to a past which looks even more radical today.
On screen and in
performance, Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Jimmy Boyle, Morton
Feldman, Keith Tippett, The Brotherhood of Breath, John Byrne, Derek
Bailey; poets, performance artists, folk musicians, thinkers and
philosophers all rubbed shoulders in a way which in many other cities
prefer to keep separate, be it in theatres, galleries or book shops.
What we Have Done, What
We Are About To Do was the first public sighting of a long-term
project instigated by Glasgow School of Art's Arts and Humanities
Research Council in partnership with the CCA. With the centre's
current director Francis McKee at the forefront of the project, what
it does is reveal an almost lost world that existed long before the
'centres of excellence' approach to arts venues that arrived on the
back of Thatcherism in the 1980s, when the arts were in many ways
respectalised. The CCA itself was originally a product of this, and
it's telling that it's ditched the gloss to reclaim its roots via
speak-easy, Liberty Hall vibe. There's a book shop, a vegetarian café
and an enlightened attitude to use of the premises which has given a
platform to a new generation of left-field artists.
2.
Arriving in Glasgow in
the mid-1980s, I was alerted to the Third Eye by as theatre director
friend. McGrath had moved on, with Chris Carrell now in charge, but
the Third Eye had developed its own publishing wing. One of the first
books I discovered by the imprint was Noise and Smoky Breath, a
wonderful compendium of Scottish poetry that was essential at the
time, but is now long out of print.
I was aware that Ivor
Cutler had recorded his Life in a Scotch Sitting Room album at the
Third Eye in 1977, and would rummage through the book-shop, which
seemed to be the only place on the planet that stocked William
Burroughs novels. The New Image Glasgow exhibition introduced the
world to a generation of major painters, all graduates of Glasgow
School of Art a stone's throw away. Steven Campbell, Adrian
Wiszniewski, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Ken Currie would go on
to world acclaim.
I saw Polish theatre
troupe, Theatre of the 8th Day, in the upstairs
performance space, at a time when a radical, oppositional form of
avant-garde drama was venturing out into the world beyond its own
borders. There was no Arches or Tramway then to showcase the
international avant-garde alongside an increasingly fecund local
scene.
Without the Third Eye,
it's unlikely that the circumstances for either of these places would
have existed, or that these initiatives in turn would put Glasgow on
the international map in all artforms. It's significant that both
tramway and the Arches opened their doors in 1990, when Glasgow was
European Capital of Culture. The Third Eye Centre had known its home
town was a capital of culture for years.
Now things have come
full circle. No-one has much money, but Glasgow is bursting with
ad-hoc, pop-up life, which again owes much to the Third Eye spirit.
This isn't anything to do with careless talk of miracles, as if the
sense of expansiveness and ambition that pulses through the arts in
Glasgow had been beamed down from space. It's to do largely with the
myriad of things that happened at the Third Eye and the enabling
spirit Tom McGrath fostered. What We Have Done, What We Are About To
Do and the ongoing archiving of the Third Eye Centre is a vital part
of Glasgow's cultural history that lives and breathes that spirit.
Line magazine, June 2013
ends
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