ARTS
Scottish crafts
Pioneers of public art
Tanya Harrod
To get an idea of the range and diversity of the crafts in Scotland avoid the depress- ing Scottish Crafts Collection at Burberry's, Princes Street, Edinburgh (until 9 July). Perhaps because it has already been. there for almost a year it looks very dismal and lacklustre.
There is no Scottish equivalent of the Crafts Council. Instead the crafts are funded by the Scottish Development Agency in the south and by the Highlands and Islands Development Board in the north — but largely in their role as small businesses. Both support Craftpoint, an excellent centre at Beauly, Inverness-shire, which provides every kind of practical support for makers. There is nowhere else like this in Britain and several European countries are using it as a model. But in other ways the crafts in Scotland lack some of the admittedly fragile infrastructure which exists in England. The Scottish Gallery and the Open Eye Gallery put on fine shows in Edinburgh, and Collins Gal- lery, attached to Strathclyde University, has mounted some good scholarly exhibi- tions, but there is no top-flight commercial gallery like Contemporary Applied Arts in London.
It is the collections rather than the commercial galleries in Scotland which are the major attraction. In Glasgow there is the Burrell, and for admirers of Mackin- tosh, the Hunterian and Kelvingrove. In Edinburgh, European Art 1200-1800 is a new permanent exhibition at the Royal Museum of Scotland which at last displays the museum's magnificent collection of decorative arts — maiolica, bronzes, tapes- tries, glass, wood-carving and furniture. It, incidentally, gives some idea of the gran- deur and scope of 18th- and 19th-century patronage and collecting in Scotland. The museum is also planning to extend its decorative arts holdings to include the 20th century. This needs careful structuring: so far the buying policy has been glamorous but unfocussed. There is surely a case for concentrating on Scottish design and Scot- tish influence. Outside Glasgow, at Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, aside from the shawls, there is a first-class collection of British studio ceramics. This was largely put together by Cyril Rock in the late Fifties and Sixties and can only be matched by the V & A. It has lately been redisco- vered and brought up to date by an enthusiastic young curator, Robert Saun- ders. It is currently touring Scandinavia but the museum has an excellent catalogue.
Designs by Willie Rodgers for decorative panels for ScotRail Scotland is a pioneer when it comes to schemes which integrate art and craft with architectural projects. There are two in- novative courses in public art — at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art in Dundee and at Glasgow School of Art, where Mackintosh's building must itself act as a vital inspiration. Tapestry is the most portable of the site-specific art forms and the Royal Museum has recently shown an impressive group of tapestries made at the Dovecot Studios by the Edinburgh Tapes- try Company. This famous institution is currently going through a period of change. Tapestry weaving is a labour- intensive craft which needs extravagant patronage. Dovecot originated as work- shops simply serving the fourth Marquess of Bute, weaving to adorn this Medicean nobleman's many houses. It reached its apogee of fame in the 1960s under the artistic direction of Archie Brennan. To- day, in order to survive, the company is diversifying into less labour-intensive forms of textile. This seems a pity. Tapes- try is a noble way of embellishing the bleak vestibules of modern architecture. The master weavers at the Dovecot Studios are the most skilled in the world when it comes to imaginatively interpreting an artist's designs. Corporate patrons should be queueing up to avail themselves of the Dovecot weavers' skills.
More and more makers, not just in Scotland, realise that architectural and public art projects are a way out of the patronage impasse. All too often, how- ever, it is the fine artist who walks off with these valuable commissions, despite the obvious relevance of craft-based skills. The remarkable Dundee Public Arts Program- me, which began in 1982 in a run-down area of the city known as Blackness, is largely the work of fine artists. It would be difficult to overpraise this project in which, for instance, an entire dilapidated street is given over to the care of an artist or in which the entrances to some previously squalid flats are transformed after con- sultation with the residents. We are all familiar with the massive public sculpture dumped in front of a corporate building, coarsely but accurately described as 'the turd in the plaza' by American pundits. The Dundee scheme is, by contrast, subtle, modest and sensitive and accordingly sur- vives unvandalised in a community which is profoundly economically depressed. The scheme appears to have grown out of the New Towns projects in Scotland, seen at its most ebullient at Glenrothes. But Dundee is a definite improvement on Glenrothes which with its giant irises and hippos errs on the side of the joky and the banal. There are numerous other projects: the Edinburgh-based Art in Partnership has helped initiate two interesting schemes with ScotRail, in which painters John Houston and Willie Rodgers have beauti- fied areas of track and station. Craftsmen and women are getting commissions too. There is a good deal of decorative art integrated into the Princes Square complex in Glasgow. John Clark's glass ceiling is
particularly fine and he has also made stained glass for Glasgow's Café Gandalfi in Albion Street. This is not quite the Willow Tea Rooms — Tim Stead's com- missioned tables and chairs are heavy and rustic — but it is certainly a nice bit of patronage.
The Glasgow Garden Festival opens on 28 April but, alas, there the crafts appear to have been ghettoised into a dismal little `village'. In many ways the Festival is an aesthetic nightmare which is only saved by the impressive sculptural presence co- ordinated by Isabel Vasseur. Once again the artist has got there first. For instance, Ian Hamilton Finlay's landscape sculpture, all craftsmanship in facture, suggests the kind of imaginative craft presence which
there could have been at the Festival: Instead there are to be demonstrations of weaving and pottery which firmly place the crafts in the therapy and entertainment section of the visual arts. So the Festival appears to have been a missed opportun- ity, suggesting that on occasion craft in Scotland risks being short-changed by the business-orientated agencies which are supposed to encourage it.
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