Publications

Show some initiative!

By: Susannah Thompson

Susannah Thompson questions the levels of critical engagement within the artist-led scene.

For over two decades Scotland has been (and continues to be) promoted in the international art press as a utopian fairyland of artist-run initiatives (ARIs), co-operatives and collectives, a place ‘where everybody knows your name’. While the struggles and successes of a myriad of one-off, temporary and long-term artist-run projects are undoubtedly admirable, there is, perhaps, a growing recognition in critical circles that the once-radical motivations of the artist-run initiative have long since given way to a more individualist, entrepreneurial spirit. Whether or not ambition and careerist incentives as a catalyst for artist-run initiatives are a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing is not the argument here. Rather, I would suggest that the artist-run initiative, historically synonymous with leftist, anti-establishment (art) politics, has resulted in a tendency to discuss any artist-run initiative as a positive development, with little revision or re-definition of what some of these spaces and projects have come to signify. It is this perpetuation of ‘givens’ surrounding self-determinist practice (ie that by virtue of simply being artist-run,...

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