00:30Hi, I'm Will Cooper, I'm the Inaugural Director at the Wileyum, a new art gallery in Greenock
00:50celebrating the work and legacy of artist George Wiley.
00:54Why is George Wiley so special?
00:55So George is a really interesting figure, he was born in Glasgow but spent most of his
01:00life living in Goorook and working in Greenock where we are now.
01:03As a young man he served in the Second World War but he spent most of his working life
01:08as a customs and excise officer working on the Clyde, checking in and checking out products
01:13and items that were being traded on the river.
01:16He worked about 100 yards away from where we're stood now in the customs office down
01:19the road and lived at the top of the hill in Goorook so we're really in the place that
01:24was really key to George and it's really exciting to be able to open an arts organisation
01:29that celebrates that legacy in the place that was so important to him.
01:33When did he start thinking about making art?
01:37So when he started thinking about making art is a tricky question.
01:41George was born in 1921 and from a young age started playing the ukulele, started playing
01:46the double bass, he would sing, he and his brother Banks would perform, so he was clearly
01:52an artistic, creative person but because of circumstance and life and the world being
01:57an artist wasn't a thing as a young man that was open to him.
02:02So like I say he joined the post office originally and worked in the post office, he then joined
02:09the military effort in the Second World War and served in the Navy.
02:12He then came back to Scotland, married, had a family, worked at the customs office and
02:18retired in his mid-fifties and the story goes, whether it is true or not, we can all
02:23decide for ourselves, that upon leaving the customs office on his last day he declared
02:28that now was the time for art.
02:30He made a ten sculpture plan that he would make ten sculptures, should he like one of
02:36those ten sculptures, so he would then dedicate the rest of his life to being an artist.
02:40Lo and behold he liked all ten of them, a couple of which we have on display in the
02:43museum here.
02:44So at that stage, about 55, 60, he sort of shifted from his, air quotes, professional
02:50life to his creative life and then made work pretty compulsively up until when he died
02:57when he was 90.
02:58Who was he making this work?
02:59So he made the work, but underneath the family home, so family and home and that familiarity
03:05is really, really important to the work I think, but he didn't have a studio in the
03:09traditional sense of going to the studio, he didn't go to art school and have that
03:13formal training, but the studio was in the basement to the family home.
03:17So you get lovely stories from the estate now which is run by George's dear daughter
03:21Louise about there being sculptures everywhere, about there being bits of metal being worked
03:26on, there was always sculpture in the garden, George was always off down to the river to
03:31borrow some materials, get them back home, weld things, chop them up.
03:36There's a great phrase that he used that he was trained whilst in the Navy in the war
03:40to engineer anything and you can see that in all the work that he clearly wasn't afraid
03:45of materials.
03:46We have works here that are made of steel, that are bits of stone made into a train,
03:50we have playing with ideas of what birds are with bird feathers attached to rocks.
03:55He wasn't afraid of trying new stuff and making things out of new things, it was about
04:00how can I deliver a message and what tools are at my disposal to deliver that message
04:06and then he sort of did what he wanted to I think.
04:09He wasn't attached to a market, he didn't have gallery representation like an artist
04:14with a museum like this might do now.
04:16He sold lots of works whilst he was alive and he worked in a way where he made lots
04:22of public commissions so people might know the ubiquitous chip, the restaurant in Glasgow
04:26that he designed the logo for and did some of the interiors.
04:29There are spots like that all over Glasgow where he took on a public commission.
04:34The Buchanan Galleries, the shopping centre has a giant spire like the ones in our opening
04:39show.
04:40If we could fit it in the building we might have tried to get it in the exhibition.
04:43So he clearly identified ways that he could make a few quid by being an artist.
04:47Selling the work on the market might not have been one of those ways but he was pragmatic.
04:52He was friends with, personally who I would say is probably the best artist of the last
04:56hundred years, Joseph Beuys, who had this incredible ability to get history and feeling
05:01into inanimate objects.
05:04You can see the pivotal moment where George met Beuys and how the work shifted in the
05:09material language and the visual language that he was using.
05:12So he learned all the time.
05:13How much of his work was inspired by the clades?
05:16But I would argue with George that because of who he was, his attachment to the river
05:21that you can see in the way that he wrote to Daphne whilst he was at war, where he lived,
05:26how he chose to work, what he did as a career, the river never was far away from him.
05:31He was paid to monitor what came in and out and he, from quite a young age, articulated
05:39really clearly that it isn't just stuff in boxes that comes in and out.
05:43It's people, it's ideas, it's customs, it's other cultures, it's all of the good stuff
05:50in life comes in and out of places and doesn't stay the same.
05:54And I think you can make a pretty strong argument that that idea of ebbing and flowing and things
05:59changing, that's what's in every single artwork that George made.
06:03George wrote a really, one of his really amazing works was a play that he wrote called A Day
06:07Down the Gold Mine, first performed in 1981, I think, that warned of the inequalities that
06:14the modern banking system that was being rolled out by Thatcher and Reagan at the time was
06:18going to have.
06:19And that was about the ebb and flow of wealth and how in this new banking system, it would
06:23flow in one direction and it would not ebb down to the rest of us.
06:26And he saw that in 1980, and George saw that with banking, he saw it with the climate crisis,
06:32he saw it with European colonisation of the rest of the world.
06:36He was having these conversations about what that unchecked ebb and flow, and I think he
06:40would have argued that the Europeans probably ebbed a bit too far, didn't let enough of
06:44that flow come back the other way, but that would come back and bite us.
06:48And lo and behold, he was right about that too.
06:52You can sort of take quite a lot of these ideas and put them to other different political
06:57moments, different social moments, and that's what the best art can do, is it can be a way
07:01that we frame how we think about the world around us.
07:04He liked work that was in the public realm.
07:07He loved this idea that you didn't have a choice but be confronted by his work.
07:11The straw locomotive, which maybe is his most famous work, which was this sort of funerary
07:16icon for the lack of industry on the Clyde, a life-size replica of a locomotive train
07:23made out of straw hanging from the Finistern crane, he would talk about that being successful
07:27because you didn't have a choice.
07:28If you lived in Glasgow, that was there for six weeks, you saw it.
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