Leading the Way

Following the St John Ogilvie exhibition in 1979 the Third Eye Centre maintained its precedent for engaging communities beyond visual art when it teamed up with the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics to produce The High Frontier.

Image Credit: The Third Eye Centre Archive

‘One of the most ambitious spaceflight exhibitions ever held in the UK’, exhibits drew from photographic coverage of various national and international space programmes, along site models and actual space hardware.  A full supporting programme of events and seminars included Spaced Out season of Science Fiction Film at the GFT.

The exhibition catalogue discusses the imperative issues and questions surrounding space research with an enthusiasm and imagination that seems somewhat outmoded now after the public excitement and novelty of space exploration has faded.  This then innovative concept of collaboration between visual arts orgnaisations and divergent communities remains so and is still prevalent at the CCA today.  But public issues and interests change and innovations become commonplace, and as a consequence, the content of these pervious collaborations perhaps no longer retain their place at the front line of  our interest...

A Community Spirit

The 1979 exhibition on St. John Ogilvie was the first in a series of documentary exhibitions and related publications produced by the Third Eye Centre on famous men and women in Glasgow’s history.   The exhibition concentrated on the life and times of the Scottish Saint and included reproduction documents, maps, models and portraits of key figures that featured in his life and subsequent canonisation in 1976. 

The exhibition involved contributions from local institutions including Aloysius College, The Mitchell Library and the Scottish Catholic Archives and produced an ambitious publication which included the first bibliography on Ogilvie.  

The archive material reveals that this exhibition was prepared and treated in the same way as any visual arts exhibition or event at the Third Eye Centre, and the breadth of participants communicated to in the files of correspondence highlight the curatorial vision of the Centre to engage with and educate social communities beyond visual art.  

Image from Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner Vol. XCV No. 3092

The CCA now has an official Education and Outreach programme which takes an alternative approach  to working with people in Glasgow with initiatives such as ‘This Land is Your Land’.  Other Third Eye Centre  files recently cataloged  document the preparation of a similar gardening and allotment project called  ‘Dear Green Place’ as well as  ‘Garnethill Exhibition’ and ‘Modernisation by Inches’  which  observed and discussed Glasgow’s urban planning and communities.  All early evidence of  green shoots for the Third Eye Centre and CCA’s spirit for community investment and engagement. 

---

Archive Observations

Last week the Glasgow Miracle’s Research Assistant and I visited sunny London to find out more about the work of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Archive and Cinenova. Many thanks to the individuals at these organisations who spent time talking to us!

We found it really useful to see how Whitechapel’s archives form a key part of the Gallery’s exhibition and education programme, encouraging reflection on past events and acting as a stimulus for new creativity. The Glasgow Miracle project hopes to organise a number of public activities utilising the archives we are working with. More details will be posted here as soon as they become available...

Cinenova work with women filmmakers to support the distribution of their work. In doing so, they also work closely with the users of this material. By establishing dialogue with and between film makers and film users, Cinenova are able to accrue more information about the films they work with and observe changing approaches to the perception and use of this material. We are also keen to establish a dialogue with people who were involved in the ‘making’ of activities related to The Third Eye Centre and CCA and/or who are interested in potentially using the Third Eye and CCA archives once they have been indexed.

Finally, this week’s image – a list of material (including archive items!) used by The Third Eye in an exhibition about Garnethill in 1976. The files show that this exhibition used a wide variety of artefacts and archives to explore Garnethill’s past and its present, confirming our belief

that archives can play a key role in cultural engagement.

Image Credit: Third Eye/CCA Archive