Jamie Kenyon: Baptism by Fire

Is there anyone more ubiquitous in the Glasgow art scene than Jamie Kenyon? It’s doubtful. Newly appointed as Programmer at the CCA on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, Kenyon has gone from being a central figure in Glasgow’s underground art scene to holding a senior, and much coveted, role at a major art institution. How does he feel about this move, I want to know, is he terrified? “It’s a challenge,” he answers. “I love it.”

Which is just as well, seeing as the Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan exhibition is due to open at the CCA less than two months into his new job and will undoubtedly require an epic amount of brow moistening, hands on work as the opening date draws nearer.

But Kenyon’s not averse to getting his hands dirty and is a time-served veteran of exhibition installs having spent the years since graduating from The Glasgow School of Art in 2007 working at Glasgow gallery SWG3. Speaking of his integration into the now well established gallery Kenyon explains how he wound up working there: “Initially I became involved at SWG3 through proposing to curate a group exhibition of fellow graduates from across Scotland. This in the end became the first exhibition in the gallery as it has become… I basically grew into a role which hadn’t existed. I helped out the artists installing their exhibitions and got more and more involved.”

After a trip to London to take part in the Tate Modern’s prestigious curatorial internship programme Kenyon returned to SWG3 as Gallery Curator, cementing his position there for the next while and aiding the gallery’s rising success as an important landmark in the Glasgow art scene.

The CCA, meanwhile, had started revolutionising the way large art institutions operate and how they programme exhibitions. Francis McKee, the current Director of the CCA, had been interested in the open source model as a new way of structuring organisations, encouraging alternative, less centralised and more egalitarian programming. “Effectively what the model allows,” Kenyon explains, “is the possibility for CCA to be reflexive and proactive at the same time… It's more about having a number of different voices that make up what the programme is, crossing audiences and exposing the potential on stumbling on something you might not have in any other organisation like CCA.”

Since beginning at the CCA Kenyon has been developing a programme of events and screenings in the run up to the Tatham and O’Sullivan show that begins on 2 October and, like their work, the events will be eclectically absurd, including a mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster.

Other than curious films about mythical beasts what else should we expect to see at the forthcoming exhibition? “Really it’s about not expecting too much, in a way, not necessarily trying to take the work too seriously,” Kenyon advises, which is pretty good guidance when approaching Tatham and O’Sullivan’s renownedly difficult work. Offering little in the way of access, their art is often oblique, playing a contextual game that is about incongruity more than anything else. To understand the work better, Kenyon suggests, “Put things into the context of what it means for the objects to be in a space such as this, the galleries as well as the foyer and café spaces of the building.”

Drawing on a limited series of objects, motifs and symbols Tatham and O’Sullivan are first and foremost sculptors, but the work, unlike much traditional sculpture, exists outwith the object, in the same way as conceptual art subsists chiefly in our minds. What is more, according to Kenyon, there is a playfulness to their work that often goes unseen by viewers, a kind of good-humoured probing into the nature of art and how it functions as such. “Often the absurdity and humour in the work is unseen,” Kenyon informs, “but the artists are really just asking if you can think about the fact that you are thinking about the work.”

Both in collaboration with and against the conventions of the CCA, the show looks to be a baptism by fire for the new Programmer. And despite his recent success in taking up a principle role in one of Glasgow’s foremost art institutions, perhaps he’ll uphold his humility nonetheless: “The rewarding thing is feeling like you have played a small part in the realisation of an exhibition that the artists have been developing towards for a long while.”