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Scottish Art since 1960: Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews by Craig Richardson

The ways in which writers have dealt with the historiography of Scotland’s visual arts have been largely limited to two main vehicles: the broad historical survey (covering a century or more) and the exhibition catalogue. Occasionally, a themed journal or magazine has allowed for more focused and critical studies but these are rare. Notable authors have used either one or both of these vehicles, such as James Caw’s Scottish Painting 1620–1908 (1908), Ian Finlay’s Art in Scotland (1948), Keith Hartley’s Scottish Art since 1900 (1989), Sarah Lowndes’ Social Sculpture: Art, Performance and Music in Glasgow (2003), Murdo Macdonald’s Scottish Art (2000), Duncan Macmillan’s Scottish Art 1460–1990 (1990) and Tom Normand’s Scottish Photography: A History (2007). These authors have each grappled with familiar problems. In particular, challenges include whom to leave out, what the chronological parameters should be and whether to claim an underlying theme such as empiricism, materiality, geographical specificity, genre type or national identity. Richardson, a recognized artist and now Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria, has chosen largely to avoid such challenges, signalled at the outset by his subtitle: ‘Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews’ (I sensed an echo here from Macdonald’s Scottish Art, whose epilogue is called ‘Deconstructing Stereotypes and Reappropriating Symbols’). Richardson’s formidable, provocative and essential work of scholarship comes from a lively and combative mind. This is not a neat chronological overview, despite its four-part division of chapters from 1960 to 2003, but a critical journey across the more literary, conceptual and often ignored territories of Scottish art over the last forty years. Many better-known Scottish artists (whether local heroes or lucrative exports) are simply passed over in silence with preference given to, by Richardson’s estimation, more substantial figures. One hopes that this book will operate as a kind of catalyst for fresher approaches that, as Richardson himself does, build on the best scholarship but refuse to be beholden to it. The book is divided into four sections: Winter Sun (1960–67); The Feel of the Situation: National Identity and the Avant-Garde in Scottish Art (1968–78); The Night Minds (1979–88); and Rational Practices (1989–2003). Putting considerable weight on the second of these sections, the author states from the outset that ‘[t]he core of my project is the restoration of pre-eminent artworks from the period 1968–78. I contend that wilful institutional oversight contributed to an embedded doubt, even lack of confidence, for Scottish-produced avant-garde artwork during this period’ (p.4). Richardson himself is a Glasgow-trained artist very much associated with the rise of ‘second-generation’ Transmission artists in the early 1990s. He is therefore refreshingly open to the importance of peer groups among communities of artists, rather than seeing cultural formations purely as products of strings of individuals. This is ‘an outlook which has been