City Recorder: Alasdair Gray's Practice & The 'Disappearing City' of Glasgow

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Central subject of Alasdair Gray's life's work: the city of Glasgow. This project will research how his practice can be understood as a lifelong attempt to record the people and places of his 'disappearing city'. Through collaboration with The Alasdair Gray Archive (AGA), this project will interrogate the ways Gray's practice centres marginalised people and places. AGA's physical assets represent a rich resource; the planned oral history interviews with Gray's elderly contemporaries ensure this time-sensitive project adds to, as well as draws from, this essential cultural asset. Questions:- In what ways can Gray's practice be understood as an attempt to portray Glasgow as a 'disappearing city' and how can we 'root' this using objects/material/interviews?- How can conducting Oral History interviews with Gray's contemporaries, friends and collaborators contribute to an understanding of Gray's 'disappearing Glasgow' in terms of both people and places?- How can conducting research in collaboration with AGA contribute to new understandings and fresh perspectives on Gray's oeuvre in relation to equality, under representation, life experiences within the framework of multi-artform learning?- How might research into particular Gray works of that record the people and places of Glasgow contribute to a broader understanding of the city's past.Problems: Gray is primarily seen as an influential literary writer of postmodern fictions which show how Glasgow might become a place of imaginative potential. Gray's work certainly had a significant cultural impact, with his novel Lanark (1981) focusing on Glasgow changing the cultural landscape. But Gray's decades of expansive practice in the visual and literary arts shows this view to be too reductive. This PhD will conduct research addressing Gray as a polymath whose primary interest was 'recording the disappearing city'. This meant centring the lives of ordinary Glaswegians in visual and literary art that. AGA contains much detail of Gray's process, approach, belief systems and correspondence. The contents of AGA have the potential to influence views of Gray's oeuvre. The project will interrogate the resources at the archive and add to them with primary research in the form of oral history interviews with those whose voices can contribute to a fuller understanding of Gray's process and Glasgow's broader history. City Recorder:Gray's period as City Recorder for The People's Palace Museum, Glasgow, in 1977-79, he portraited the unemployed of the city in juxtaposition with its Provost and politicians and depicted buildings since knocked down. In his auto pictography, A Life in Pictures, Gray wrote that a key part of this commission was to depict 'streets about to be changed or demolished', 'private members of the general public' and 'interiors of workplaces with the workers'. Gray stated 'The People's Palace museum had been built on Glasgow Green in 1898 as a cultural centre in the city's east end to balance Kelvingrove Museum in the west, yet it had very few exhibits and no paintings of Glasgow streets or people later than the early 20th Century'. He was appointed Artist Recorder because of his consistent approach to depicting Glasgow. The work he produced is a perfect example of that approach at work and deserves fuller attention.Recording GlasgowGray's approach was to resist presentations of Glasgow that sought to erase marginalized voices. In his nonfiction collected works Of Me & Others (in which he portraited unknown Glaswegians), Gray consistently resisted definitions of his city that avoided presenting it in all its diversity. In his Hillhead Subway mural (2011), Gray presented bin men and street cleaners alongside politicians. The very fact that his work was placed in the landscape, in free-to-access places such as subway stations was in itself a statement of intent, the artist seeking to remake Glasgow with ordinary Glaswegians at its heart.