Forget Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery, don’t worry about Dundee Contemporary Arts. There’s a new art museum in Glasgow and we don’t still mean the Gallery of Modern Art. Welcome to Museum Magogo, constructed from cardboard and glue by Beagles and Ramsay, the city’s current answer to museum maker Peggy Guggenheim. But while the pair have patiently crafted a working architectural model using scrumpled up paper and cereal packets, they’re not (only) joking.
The Glasgow Project Space has become the crazed art museum of the month. It has all the facilities you would expect from such an august institution with it’s varied rooms named after illustrious benefactors: there’s the Jameson Memorial Annexe, The Chicken Wing and, best of all, the Rope-a-Dope Sculpture Garden, beautifully landscaped with astroturf. Filling the gallery walls, floor and even the ceiling are contributions from literally hundreds of artists. The result is a bit like a drunken party. Crossing the room you engage in conversation with one work, turn your back on another, narrowly miss stepping on something and laugh loudly at a joke, while someone is weeping in the corner having just been chucked.
As well as practically every young Scottish artist you’ve ever come across (and many you haven’t) Beagles and Ramsay have contributions from impressively wide sources. Unfortunately, the expected Andy Warhol couldn’t make it due to insurance problems but there’s input from Terry Atkinson, posters from Bob & Roberta Smith, a questionnaire to fill in from London collective Bank and work by New York’s Guerrilla Girls. But museum as muse? This is museum as monster. But it is also museum as mate – a mad, inspired, generous, exhausting, down-the-pub kind with underlying serious intent.
