Fair Exchange

24 August 2011
The List (p.68-69)

Rosalie Doubal lifts the lid on an inventive new art market opening in Glasgow this month and profiles some of the artists showcasing their work.

Vault is a new art fair that will take place inside an art installation, set inside an arts space, that houses artists’ studios. Like a Russian doll the event playfully peals back the dominant layers of today’s art market, to reveal independent practice as ripe for investment, while simultaneously granting young artists the opportunity to sell their work.

Curator-led by Patricia Fleming in collaboration with not-for-profit arts organisation UZ Arts, this new fair has been programmed specifically for the recently-refurbished Briggait building – previously home to Glasgow’s fish market. The organisers have invited some of the city’s most exciting independent organisations, including SWG3, David Dale Gallery and The Mutual, to sell work by early career artists alongside more established practitioners such as Alex Frost, Christine Borland and Martin Boyce.

Paying homage to the mercantile history of the building, many works have been made for the fair with the theme ‘art and commerce’ in mind. Interest-free loan scheme Own Art has pledged its assistance and loans of up to £2000 will be available for every sale. While exchanges are certainly on the agenda, the fair promises to be an impressive exhibit in its own right, with site-specific commissions, tours and workshops also on the agenda.

Dawn Youll

Youll’s high-gloss, high-finish ceramics depict familiar objects or homely vignettes. Beautifully evoking notions of ritual, commemoration and souvenir, the Glasgow-trained artist is interested in our use of ceramics to create votive-like objects that represent reflection or provide a mental link. The recent winner of a prestigious Arts Foundation Fellowship, Youll’s work has been widely buycheap-pillsonline.com exhibited across Europe and has been presented at London’s V&A Museum. The artist was also last year selected by the Scottish Arts Council and Crafts Council UK to represent the UK at the Ceramics New Generation exhibition in Paris. These are ornate, intelligent and often-humorous works that explore our shared desire to collect, organise and display.

Ellie Harrison

Short-listed for this year’s Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Award, Ellie Harrison has been garnering much attention over recent years for her works of obsessive documentation and, latterly, for her political and activist-based art. Often relying on the internet or public interaction, her works parody bureaucratic processes. As demonstrated by recent project A Brief History of Privatisation (Inspace, Edinburgh, until 4 September), they mostly work towards highlighting the slow and severe annexation of every aspect of our lives to capital. For Vault, Harrison will gamble her entire artist’s fee (£500) with fair goers, by setting-up and running a hoopla stall, inviting punters to take one free throw each in an attempt to claim some of the artist’s earnings.

Risa Tsunegi

A Glasgow School of Art 2009 MFA graduate, Japanese artist Risa Tsunegi is a fresh talent and makes large-scale sculptural works and paintings. Often forcing an uneasy navigation of the spaces that they inhabit, they have in the past materialised as obtruding bars or jutting girders. Although adhering to an anti-aesthetic, Tsunegi’s forms are strangely purposeless, and her architectural constructions play out tensions between ideas of use and uselessness, objects and art objects. For Vault, Tsunegi will present a new work that reflects the current condition of the Briggait building, drawing on its interesting structure and adapted usage.

Vault, the Briggait, Glasgow, Fri 9-Sun 11 September 2011.

Rosalie Doubal

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Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.

24 August 2011 The List (p.68-69)

Ellie Harrison

Rosalie Doubal

24 August 2011
The List (p.68-69)