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The Glasgow Effect


Mr Bairn

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The Glasgow Effect is is year long ‘action research’ project / durational performance, for which artist Ellie Harrison will not travel outside Greater Glasgow for a whole year (except in the event of the ill-heath / death of close relative or friend).

By setting this one simple restriction to her current lifestyle, she intends to test the limits of a ‘sustainable practice’ and to challenge the demand-to-travel placed upon the ‘successful’ artist / academic. The experiment will enable her to cut her carbon footprint and increase her sense of belonging, by encouraging her to seek out and create ‘local opportunities’ - testing what becomes possible when she invests all her ideas, time and energy within the city where she lives.

The Glasgow Effect is funded by Creative Scotland through the Open Project Funding Programme and supported by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Follow all the action at: http://glasgoweffect.tumblr.com/

This has caused bizarre levels of seethe and multiple head explosions by Glaswegians on FB.

Any P&Bers ever been awarded modest incomes in return for agreeing not to leave a city for a year?

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This has caused bizarre levels of seethe and multiple head explosions by Glaswegians on FB.

Any P&Bers ever been awarded modest incomes in return for agreeing not to leave a city for a year?

I believe that some people received compensation due to having to slop out, does this count?

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£15k which could have been used for something far better than this, but instead it's going to some bint getting paid to not leave the city, which thousands of people can't afford to do anyway. Good move.

This post deserves the 3000 likes it's got tbh click or

A 4-step program to make folk less raging:

1. People are pissed off because of the project's implication that living/working in Glasgow is like survival mode for your career. Glasgow's a big city and a prominent arts hub, not much of a challenge. Living in a croft on some desolate Hebridean crag, making sculptures out of peat and driftwood, riding into town on a donkey and selling them at the market would be far more interesting - as would virtually anything that isn't just getting paid to do what an artist would be doing anyway.

2. People are pissed off because you're getting £15,000 to live and work in Glasgow, something that a lot of people do anyway, often without thinking about it and sometimes for less money in total income than you're getting in funding alone. If you want to make a project about living constraints in the Glasgow area, do something with poverty - do some work in the East End, paint a mural or something so that people will see the money is going back into good things for the community, and they won't begrudge you it.

3. People are pissed off because you're doing a year-long project about how hard it is to exist in Glasgow, yet your page is full of wee chuckles at the poor - the reference to low life expectancy (that's what the Glasgow effect is) and the cover photo of hunners of chips. You might not give a f**k about poverty, but I bet you there's folk in Shettleston that would swap their right eye for a shot at £15k and a year of arts and crafts.

4. People are pissed off because it looks like you're getting free money to do the fattest part of f**k all. You've got a blog linked at the top of the page with nothing on it. If I could click on that and see tons of interesting stories about what you'd been up to, how you're spending the money, what lessons you've learned and how it's actually a lot harder than folk are giving you credit for, maybe I wouldn't be nearly as cynical about this. At the moment though, the blog is barren as f**k and for all we know you're spending the money on Diet Coke and fucking lycra deerstalkers or whatever it is that art students are into these days. If it's a genuine challenge that the average person can't do, prove it and show us some interesting shit; if anyone can do it, what's the fucking point in the first place?

At the end of the day, art is art and you can do what you like - you're already on £15k and the kind of free publicity you'd struggle to buy with double that, so fair play to you. If you want folk to get off your back though, either address the above points or go live in a basement flat in Easterhouse for the duration, invoking a legally binding, Trading Places-style pact whereby you send some random jakey with a heart of gold to art school for a year so he can learn how much fun he could have been having with felt and ceramics if only he hadn't been trapped in the cultural wasteland that is Glasgow for all these years.

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