Mount Jupiter Reports

It’s oh so cold! Whilst galleries take an extended break to save on paying freelancers, artist-led spaces stay well below zero, and the opening hours of art-adjacent bakeries and pottery shops remain inexplicable, there’s not a whole lot for the Mount Jupiter team to do. Shows at the Gallery of Modern Art now run for two years and at Tramway for nine months. Maybe there’s some good repertory stuff at the Glasgow Film Theatre? They have heating and working toilets. It’s another Jean-Luc Godard season or Marty Supreme. We’re doing dry January, our toes are cold, and I think our critical faculties have begun to atrophy.

Maybe it’s a good time to leave the city? If we had the money we might head east to the scenic Collective Gallery atop Edinburgh’s Calton Hill which now closes to the filthy public for three months of the year in order to focus on their core offering: a luxury self-catering holiday let, festooned with artist commissions; a Love Island inspired terrace bar for the Fiat 500 crowd; and a burgeoning weddings business hosted inside the the refurbished gallery spaces, much like that zombie fungus which reanimates the exoskeleton of dead ants. Like the Ship of Theseus or the Sugababes, you do have to ask: at what point does a contemporary art centre cease being a contemporary art centre? Questions of curatorial ontology aside, we don’t have Edinburgh kinds of disposable income so will make do with roaming the streets of Glasgow on the public art trail.

Let’s start at the original and best Calton on Visit Glasgow’s official City Centre Mural Trail™. There’s a gable end with Billy Connolly done up by Rachel Maclean in 2017, soon to be occluded by 6-storey build-to-rent. It’s pock-marked with craters where the purple paint has trapped moisture, turning the brick to red velvet cake until it bursts and crumbles out. Now home to pigeons, rats and the skeletal fronds of invasive buddleia, these holes bestow the work with a new kind of interspecies engagement rather befitting our anthropocenic moment—and well aligned with the strategic priorities of funders. Westward, there’s its sibling portraits: one by the late great John Byrne soon to be occluded by luxury student accommodation (Ambassador Group); and one by the late terrible Jack Vettriano, on the market with permission to be occluded by 22-storey luxury student accommodation. If you don’t fancy Big Yin themed art, there are dozens more council-subsidised murals by the indistinguishable trite photorealists Smug and/or Rogue-One: breastfeeding St Enoch, breastfeeding mermaid, sexy Charles Rennie Mackintosh, sexy one-eyed Thomas Muir, sexy unidentifiable indigenous person. Such brave diversity is unfortunately not shared by the muralists themselves.

If you find the neoliberal flavour of state-sanctioned graffiti offputting, why not try Visit Glasgow’s official Contemporary Art Trail™ (this is different?). If conceptual sculpture is more your bag, we have two works of ironic post-empire word art by white dudes. Douglas Gordon’s neon Empire (1998) was last seen girded to the Britannia Panopticon, offering vague gestures to the cinematic and the colonial. If that’s simply too dumb, head to the river where the hulking support columns of the demolished Caledonian bridge bear the ghostly Hellenic carvings of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s All greatness stands firm in the storm (1990). Borrowed from Plato’s Republic, this one is crowned with the same buddleia which now scaffold most of the city, portending the collapse which eventually follows. Last summer we observed a bumptious art student grab a branch and declare it was lavender, but locals know that sweet-smelling things can’t survive this cold.

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Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.