Arts, People, Spaces, Inroductions—Charles Esche

‘Culture’ is a difficult subject to talk about because we are all part of it and can never stand apart from it in order to get a better view. Academics constantly fight over it’s definition, but the best definition of culture I’ve come across is ‘social glue’, the stuff that binds us together and makes us into ‘society’.

Culture is highly qualitative in nature and cannot be fully measured, it can only be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. Creativity and the arts are vital in explaining our culture and in helping us to understand the nature of our cultural situation. Because life is constantly changing our culture must be constantly re-defined and re-explained.

Contemporary arts spaces such as Tramway play a vital role within our society as they try not to pre-determine the outcome of a project. Instead they provide space and support to allow new, multi-dimensional creative expressions of culture to occur. They are catalytic spaces which allow the future to form in a new dimension.

Our speaker this morning is Charles Esche who moved from Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge in 1993 to become Visual Arts Programmer at Tramway in Glasgow.

Charles has curated many, many exhibitions and written many catalogue essays and interviews. His curation includes Christine Borland, Christian Boltanski’s Lost and the group show Excavating Ruins which included work by Tony Cragg, Stephen Willats, Art in Ruins and Avis Newman. Charles is a reviewer for may art journals including Artefactum and Portfolio and is a visiting lecturer at many art institutions in Britain, Finland and Japan.