Opinion: Celebrating the Mac

It’s an image I’m unlikely to forget. Standing on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street I looked on as flames gently licked the roof of the Glasgow School of Art. Smoke filled the surrounding streets as hundreds of passers-by gathered to watch Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece smoulder. It was a profoundly sad sight, to say the least, and one that could have easily tipped into tragedy had not the staff and students escaped in time.
For me, as with most GSA Fine Art graduates, the Mackintosh Building was the alpha and omega of my university days. It was in the basement of that building (where last month’s fire broke out) that I spent my first year as an undergrad, learning to draw naked people and making poor casts of my own limbs. And it was there that I had my degree show four years later, my family gathered around as I made yet another excruciating performance.

My former tutor, artist and GSA lecturer Ross Sinclair, was present when the fire broke out. He began his art career in the basement of the Mackintosh building where he shared a class with Roddy Buchanan, Douglas Gordon, Louise Scullion and Graham Fagan, to name but a few. “I keep thinking about the basement of the Mac,” he tells me. “This was my first year studio where I began my real life with GSA exactly 30 years ago this year. The trajectory of my life was inexorably altered from that day in 1984.”

Sadly, for many students, their memory of the Mackintosh building will now be tainted by last month’s incident. The fire broke out on the same day that this year’s graduating students were due to submit their work for assessment. Some of those students lost an entire year’s worth of work in the blaze. Most of them, thanks to Glasgow’s fire brigades, who managed to prevent the flames from spreading east of the building’s main entrance, still have much of their work intact, if not a little smoke-damaged.

One such lucky individual is Environmental Art student Winnie Herbstein. She was due to exhibit her work in the Mac building at this month’s degree show, in what was set to be the finale of her time spent at GSA. She had just about finished installing everything when she was evacuated from the building. 

On the day I talk to Winnie, nearly a week after the fire broke out, it is as yet unknown what alternative will be offered to fourth year students who have been robbed of their degree show. But she tells me that the school have been tremendously supportive and communicative and that there will likely be an exhibition this month in an alternative space. On top of that, she explains, the art school looks set to offer bursaries to students that will help them build a new body of work. “There’s a considerable sum of money and they’re looking to offer Fine Art students a six-month working period that is funded, with offers from all over the world – and as far as the US – giving students the opportunity to go out there and study,” she says.

Likewise, Ross Sinclair remains optimistic about the effects of the fire, despite his 30-year relationship with the now damaged Mac building. “Someday, this terrible calamity will become a mere blink of an eye in the long and prosperous life of this mighty building,” he says. “Artists will continue to be made here at GSA – this is what we do.”