Art in the Real World

It's not often you hear an artist claiming to make work that 'responds to the banister'. But experiments of this kind were de-rigueur at a weekend festival called Close Projects, which took over the shared stairwells of several Glasgow tenements late last year. Getting a whole block's permission to stage art interventions on their front porch was impressive enough. Even more impressive was managing to score sponsorship from Grant&Wilson, one of a few factors that everyone living in Glasgow tenements is obliged to pay, without any clear idea why. Over the weekend, closes were filled with gigantic cats-in-the-cradles, banisters were sheathed in beautiful embroidered coverings, streets twinkled with light installations and poetry readings, films and performances took place at venues dotted around the city. For a weekend, art left the gallery and quite literally kicked down Glasgow's front door.

Yet these festivals are bound to attract more attention than the small scale activity that is still proliferating. All over the country, artists dissatisfied with the constricts of mainstream gallery spaces or sidelined by commercial gallery spaces are staging exhibitions in non-traditional spaces. In London, perhaps the most famous of this sort of organisation exists: Artangel, which commissioned Rachel Whiteread's House and has been responsible for some of the most daring, unforgettable happenings of the past decade. Closer to home, Glasgow has a long tradition of art outside the gallery. Sorcha Dallas, now a fully fledged gallerist in her own right, started her career at the helm of a peripatetic project called Switchspace, which took over artists' living rooms and commandeered coffee shops. Franz Ferdinand made the Chateau - a pigeon sanctuary and multi-disciplinary studio cum squat rave - famous. Even a disused jail in the East End has been commandeered and turned into an artistic battery farm. They even hold parties where visitors queue up to go to the loo in the suicide block. All these projects share a dogged independent spirit, which refutes the kind of art superstore mentality evident in Glasgow City Council's plans to turn Kings Street into a prefabricated artists' quarter. In this city, as in poetry, the best things happen in between the lines.

Two new projects are currently blazing a trail for independent art. A peripatetic gallery called Washington Garcia held its first exhibition recently, showing a Glasgow-based artist called Sigga Bjorn Sigurdardottir, in a flat in the Southside. Sigurdardottir is internationally known for her drawings of nightmarish visions, deformed figures and strange, warped beasts. But at Washington Garcia she was able to move beyond the work she would normally produce for the Frankfurt gallery that represents her, showing a film as well as an installation in one of the flat's rooms. Its joint head Ruth Barker, who shares responsibility for the gallery with two members of Mother and the Addicts, Dougie Morland and Kendal Koppe, says the advantage of moving outside the gallery is that artists can make work in a way they could not in a commercial space. "It's liberating, giving artists that may not have a profile in Glasgow the chance to experiment. We try to be generous and allow different people, with different agendas to show their work." Washington-Garcia is resolute that it will never become a commercial gallery. Neither does it have funding from the Scottish Arts Council. "We show work that doesn't have a commercial bent," says Ruth, "work like Sigga's that's very new, very fresh. There are loads of commercial spaces opening up in Glasgow and we wanted to do something different. Anyone could do this, we feel, it's very exciting."

In the West End too, Flat 0/1, run by Bloomberg New Contemporaries alumnus Morag Keil and Fiona MacKay, runs one-night only shows in the living room of their flat. It was started after the pair found that many of the spaces in Scotland were unreceptive to their ideas. Morag says: "In most galleries there's that air of big money and everything is perfect. We're not like that. Our shows have worked that we feel is finished enough, or work from artists that are just starting out. We curate the show on the day." More than just an exhibition, the shows become social events, with bands like Tiny Little Hearts playing. "Most of the people that turn up, we don't know," Morag says. "We advertise our shows in the Metro and the List so we get lots of different visitors." The difficulties of non-gallery spaces - windows, odd nooks and crannies - are incorporated into the show, with all artists responding to the space as they see fit. To make a bit of cash, the pair wants to turn the space into a clandestine shop, stocking independently released records and artist produced magazines.

Money, that perennial absence in an artist's pocket, is never the driving force of such projects. They all share a similar intention: to let artists exhibit their work to each other and the rest of us. Whether the Arts Council gets on board or not, the front rooms and dank staircases of Glasgow will continue to provide a thrilling forum for the penniless upstarts that may one day be the flag bearers for British art. "A good gallery is not necessarily going to be a good business," says Morag Keil, "but we try not to worry about that."