When directing the Cultural Festival for the 2007 Commonwealth Games, Marcus traveled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, mining underground art scenes around the world. On this journey he discovered Glasgow, which he revisits in his new television series Not Quite Art.
Marcus Westbury is interested in the unique possibilities of any given place. He’s not particularly interested in conventional tourist destinations and even describes himself as a bad tourist. “I’m not a museum guy,” he says. “I don’t want to look at objects.”
This could potentially be a problematic statement coming from an art expert, but as Marcus explained to the ABC, when he was asked to create a new art show, his art expertise covers what might be called Not Quite Art. The turn of phrase caught the commissioning editor’s ear and became the name of the television show in which Marcus explores the art world outside of galleries.
To the founder of Australia’s biggest media festival, This Is Not Art (TINA), the title was somewhat comical. Having done This Is Not Art and then doing Not Quite Art he opened himself up to a barrage of questions about when he was going do Art.
It seems that art, like beauty, depends on the eye of the beholder. In Not Quite Art, Marcus shares a glimpse of the art world through his eyes, having devoted much of his life to the art that inspires him. During the episodes of Not Quite Art the audience is led into a world featuring abandoned warehouses used as art galleries, a shop turned gallery and skateboarding venue, a bohemian theatre in an old bowling club, lanes filled with graffiti, a hiphop collective and socio-politically focused computer games such as Escape From Woomera, giant paper cabbages, sticker art, stencils, video art, rear-projection urinals, magazines posing as advertising posters, exploding garden gnomes, ringtone symphonies, empty shows, uncollectable art and an iconic opera house bearing the words ‘No War’ in red tile paint.
Originally the series was to be set only in Australia. “The budget for the show was not really enough to go anywhere. It’s not meant to be an international show,” says Marcus. Something, however, was missing in the first episode, which focused on Australian arts funding. It posed the question, “Why does Australian society spend far more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones?”
The episode was meant to focus on Marcus’ hometown, Newcastle, a city struggling to shake off its industrial heritage and form a cultural district with what Marcus calls a “cultural vision… much like a real estate development”. The episode focuses on artists in Newcastle struggling keep grassroots studio and gallery spaces alive, critiquing government funding bodies who view culture as something that must be imported from elsewhere.
“The theme for that episode was the idea of where culture comes from, the idea that culture is something that you grow. It’s not something that you build or that you import,” explains Marcus. The director, Brendan Fletcher, felt that looking at what wasn’t working in Newcastle was not enough. Brendan’s advice was to “find a counterpoint of where it works well.” Marcus knew just the place.
In 2006 Marcus travelled to 19 cities in 12 countries in 58 days, scourging the underground art scenes in all the countries in the British Commonwealth, in search of talent for the arts festival component of the Commonwealth Games. “The Next Wave Festival got the job of co-ordinating the program,” epxlains Marcus, “and as the director of Next Wave, that meant I was directing it.”
“I went from Australia to New Zealand to Canada to Belize to the UK to South Africa to Kenya to Singapore, back to India to Malaysia, back to Singapore, then home. In six weeks I worked out that I spent more than six days of those six weeks actually in the air, without my feet actually touching the ground.”
It was during this mission that Marcus discovered Glasgow. Its industrial landscape pockmarked with abandoned warehouses and derelict buildings had something very exciting hidden under the corrugated iron and dark red bricks. Renegade artists. In Glasgow, artists have moved into the derelict sawmills, Chandleries (large ship warehouses), empty fish markets, abandoned shops and many other spaces.
“What I loved about Glasgow,” explains Marcus, “is that there is a whole bunch of people there that are part of the Glasgow scene and Glasgow culture that’s grown out of Glasgow, and Glasgow’s proud of it. I know it sounds almost stupidly obvious, but it’s actually really rare. It’s really difficult.”
Artist collectives around the city avoid rotten patches in floors, deal with water ruined paintings that have been hung on leaky walls, occasionally turn up mummified cats buried under sagging walls and turn them into exhibition icons, build pizza ovens out the back with their seventy-six year old grandfathers for a pizza party gallery opening… and produce some amazing art.
“There’s a cultural energy… an ethos in Glasgow that I think is embraced by people who are just making the culture that they believe in happen, because there’s no-one there to tell them that they can’t. There’s no-one standing around saying, you know ‘we’re the gatekeepers and you have to do this and you have to do that.’ There’s just a lot of DIY stuff going on. To me, that’s the kind of culture that I find interesting.”
Glasgow particularly touched Marcus because it is so physically similar to Newcastle. He regrets not having shot the Glasgow part of the show before the Newcastle part, to match up the almost identical landmarks “for those really nice transitions.” The post-industrial poverty of the towns also led to similar cultural and artistic expressions. As Clare Simpson, a Glasgow council member says in the series, “There’s a lot of poverty in Glasgow. With that comes inventiveness.” What makes Glasgow such a fertile area for artists and what makes it such a good counterpoint for Newcastle is that the local government, the landlords and even the police support the underground art scene. When Marcus tours the ex-fish market (now a sculpture gallery) with Simpson she explains that the council understands that “for the arts in Glasgow to thrive, there needs to be an infrastructure for production as well as presentation.”
Although he doesn’t revisit them for his series, other highlights from his Commonwealth Games tour were Montreal and Nairobi where he discovered similar DIY culture.
“Montreal is quite a different city. There’s quite a different layer going on there for lots of historical reasons to do with French Canada and Quebec,” he explains, “but Montreal had been through a similar process where it was bankrupt in the 70’s and the whole city fell apart and then became a very interesting, vibrant place. It unleashed certain possibilities.”
As for Nairobi, Marcus had “read in the guidebook before I went that Nairobi’s the most dangerous CBD in all of Africa, which makes it the most dangerous CBD in the world, but I actually found Nairobi an incredibly welcoming warming kind of place. I found the most amazing people there doing amazing things. I found a good entry point. I’m sure I could’ve gone there five hundred times and never found the stuff that I found there or even the pathways into being embraced by them, but I really loved it.”
With so little time, travelling to so many countries, it seems remarkable that Marcus got so quickly to the hidden artistic underbelly of each place as can be witnessed in his televised sojourn in Glasgow. He puts it down to thorough planning, the internet, hunches, chance and an unconventional way of doing things.
“Traditionally, I think when you do an international program you’re meant to do it the other way round where you go from the top down,” he says. “We probably could’ve got a lot more money and more resources if we’d gone to the British consulate and said, ‘Who are the best young artists in Britain? Can you please bring them out to Australia?’ When you do something like that, that’s how you’re expected to do it. But we did it from the other way round. Basically we just set out feelers across the networks that we knew and said, ‘Does anyone know anyone that’s doing anything interesting in these places?’ I found out little bits and pieces … I went to Kenya on the basis of one article I read in a newspaper about Kenyan hiphop musicians.”
But although he loves Glasgow, digs Nairobi, finds Montreal interesting, lives in Melbourne and works in Sydney, he says that there’s no place like home. “My favourite place to go to is Newcastle because it’s home,” he says. “It’s the place I get most excited about when I get off the plane.”
