Still Glasgow art review: Snapshots of the city
Featuring work from Alasdair Gray and Roderick Buchanan, amongst others, Goma’s latest tentpole exhibition favours academic interest over charm
When I came to study in Glasgow in the 1990s, I used to walk to university along Duke Street, passing the hulking Great Eastern Hotel, a homeless hostel. A few of its residents would gather outside each morning, sometimes already the worse for drink. Those who wandered up Sauchiehall Street could enjoy the songs of the buskers. One had dreadlocks and a guitar and sang a mean version of Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. Both groups, the homeless men and the street musicians, even the dreadlocked busker of memory, are present in Goma’s Still Glasgow, a photographic portrait of the city which offers a nostalgic hit but little aesthetic punch.
It is modest to the point of underwhelming: three small rooms, arranged around themes of community, portraiture and the meaning of place. The middle room contains the best-known pictures, best known for a reason. Here are the gallus icons: Bert Hardy’s ‘The Gorbals Boys’, Joseph McKenzie’s ‘Beatle Girl’ (pictured), Oscar Marzaroli’s ‘The Castlemilk Lads’. Elsewhere, too many pictures seem to have been selected as documents of place and period but lack any special quality in themselves. Works of charm, therefore, stand out. ‘Frances Gordon, Glasgow Teenager’ is a 1977 portrait by Alasdair Gray, a painting of a young worker at the People’s Palace, framed by a collage of items from her handbag, including a ticket stub for Elton John at the Apollo (price £3).
Equally delightful is Roderick Buchanan’s ‘Gobstopper’, a 1999 video work in which children hold their breath while travelling through the Clyde Tunnel. One wee boy exhales in pleasure and relief on exiting in Govan, a noise somewhere between a sneeze and the pop of a champagne cork. A small moment of joy in an exhibition that could do with more of them.
Still Glasgow, Gallery Of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sunday 13 June 2027.