An open letter to whomsoever it may
concern regarding: Scotland
Thinking about the things that people forgot about because
they weren't written down in history books.
The year is 2083 Anno Domini and Transmission Gallery
is one hundred years old today. The
place is The Peoples'
The Path to Freedom?
At the Stirling Bridge Referendum of 2061, a handsome
majority of the Scottish people decided that they wished to secede from the
United Kingdom of Great Britain. There were five million or so inhabitants in
this poor, damp, country, for so long under the sword of one conquering invader
or another. And this populace eventually decided, once and for all, to leave the
Union in order to implement a novel plan to completely re-invent the Nation in
a manner never before heard of anywhere in the world. The new official name
they chose for the re-invented
In 2062, almost overnight, a big fence was built along the border with
Most people north of Hadrian's Wall were initially very enthusiastic about this
new development, as
Officially they did not even exist. By the 2040's they had become such a
problem that large walls were built round the major cities to keep them out and
the people who lived inside them tried to forget about those poor wretches who
were outside.
When the idea for the theme park was first mooted in the mid 2050's it fired up
the Scottish people's imagination, galvanising them
into an intense debate and direct action not witnessed for many decades. The
publicity generated by these debates slowly encouraged many ex-patriots to
return home. There were at least twenty million people around the world who
considered themselves Scottish by ancestry, but had never actually been 'home';
this turned out to be quite fortuitous as some of these folk were very rich and
brought back their fortunes with them to invest in the park. It was the first
good idea anyone in
At this point in the 2050's, before the park was built, the Parliamentary
Monarchy of England had many problems of its own. Its coffers were much
depleted after protracted wars with
Most poor parts of the world were really wasted with wars and famines while
diseases and bad planning had made millions of people unhappy. Everywhere had
been discovered, nowhere was remote or savage anymore.
The basic idea for
All Scotland's most spectacular battles and events were re-enacted daily in the
hills and glens of the Highlands; tourists would flock to the most barren and
remote places searching for the theme park's most authentic experiences. Thus a
visitor from
The Scottish people appeared to be quite happy in their new occupation as Real
Life extras in this simulated version of history.
The Main Cities of the Central Belt,
The City of Edinburgh elected to represent the pre-industrial Enlightment period of the city's history, while
There was a major problem though. The educational establishments which taught
people from 5 years old upwards had, at this time in the late twentieth
Century, stopped telling people anything about art and culture because it
couldn't get you a job in an office when you left school at 17. So, it came to
the point where nobody felt they really knew anything about art and culture
anymore, which was a great pity as
The flaw in this 'renaissance' was the approach the city fathers took to make
culture more accessible to the public. They made all the culture so simplified
and banal that it would appeal to everyone, even those who knew nothing about
any form of cultural activity beforehand. Productions of plays which dealt with
complex and difficult issues were discouraged, in favour
of Busby Berkley style musical extravaganzas - everyone loved these. Visual art
was reduced to greeting card designs, though painted in oils, naturally.
Glaswegian literature, which was once incisive, politicised
and independent, was now produced by the city itself, in defence
of its own strategies. This New Glasgow Culture (as it became known) was very
easy on the eye and on the ear, and provided a cosy
hour or two of distraction out of the rain, and everyone - even those who stood
against the imposition of this cultural equivalent of flock wallpaper - agreed
that all these places of culture had lovely coffee bars.
However...
...The initial appeal and excitement of this era quickly-dwindled when the
people began to understand that they were being patronised.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first Century this period was
already seen by anyone who knew anything about life and culture to be truly
daft. It eventually stupefied the locals by patronising
them into thinking that they couldn't understand any kind of culture that you
had to think about for more than ten seconds. This led to the Scottish people
becoming lazy. After being fed this sickly sweet culture mulch for many years
they could no longer digest any kind of solid cultural food. They faded away to
mere shadows of their former, robust selves, becoming thinner and paler and lethargic.
They were losing the ability to think for themselves. Internationally, New
Glasgow Culture was an embarrassment.
The Trongate
Affair
This period ended for good in 2013 in what became known as The Trongate Affair. By this time various members of Transmission
Gallery and other independently minded cultural spaces located in the area, had
succesfully infiltrated over the years various
committees and held numerous important positions in the local and national
culture councils. From these positions they were able to undermine the whole
sorry system and eventually brought the whole New Glasgow Culture crashing down
around the ears of those who had been too deaf to listen to the detractors, who
had foreseen this moronisation of the people.
This 'coup' was unfortunately deemed to be illegal and resulted in Transmission
becoming a proscribed organisation and being forced
underground. Here it flourished under the patronage of a local artist who had
become very rich and famous by selling his work outside
The Irony
So, ironically, although the period of New Glasgow Culture is now wholly
discredited, and has in fact become an aphorism to describe the banalisation of culture, it is this period the new city
fathers chose to represent in Scotia - The Living History of a Small Nation,
fifty years after the debacle itself. This was simply because it was the period
that had garnered the most global media attention and everyone remembered it,
for better or worse. Some say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I'm
not so sure.
Epilogue
Thus, as it was in Real Life, now it is in the theme park.Transmission
is still a proscribed organisation but continues to
flourish to this day, presenting thoughtful, challenging exhibitions in
temporary, out of the way spaces. Some aspects of its exhibition structure
resemble the popular rave culture of the late twentieth Century, where you hear
of a new exhibition from a complex grapevine of friends and acquaintances.
People gather illegally on their days off from working in the theme park
arranging to meet at a particular ferry terminal somewhere, desperate to see
something new and real and engaging. For although the park is
fascinating to the tourists, it is, of course, very, very boring for those who
live and work there. Transmission events and exhibitions have become
somewhat vogueish with the more intrepid tourists who
vie with each other over the most obscure and exciting shows they have seen,
but it is mainly the indigenous population who enjoy them. Unfortunately these
exhibitions get closed down with great rapidity as they are illegal. Records
are always kept in the old book form and these get distributed widely although
they are banned and destroyed if found. Sometimes these books are produced in
such a way as to look like a relatively innocuous text or history book, so they
can be surreptitiously inserted into public library collections. A strategy
currently popular is to place these books into public collections of times gone
by, using a standard linear time shift document transferral.
Thus the books and information of the future are already in circulation decades
before the actual events described have happened.
If you hadn't guessed already, this is how you are able to read this history
now, almost one hundred years early. This document transferral
technique usually doesn't change much of the course of history because the
future always seems too fantastic to believe before it actually happens. I
mean, who would have believed the incredible history of the twentieth Century
if you'd foretold it in 1899? Thus it is with the twenty-first and twentieth
Centuries. So let us take a moment to join together, raise a glass and make a
toast to Transmission. Happy hundredth birthday, here's
to the future...
(To be continued...)
Ross Sinclair
www.rosssinclair.co.uk