A CRUMPLED BALL OF PAPER. MUSIC PLAYED BY THE MOON. A SLOGAN THAT HAS TOUCHED THE HEARTS OF MILLIONS, AND OF COURSE, A HUMAN STATUE. WHY DO WORKS BY SCOTS DOMINATE THE WORLD OF CONCEPTUAL ART? INVESTIGATES

VICKY ALLAN

WHO’S afraid of Conceptual Art? That was the question asked this week in a BBC4 documentary presented by art historian Dr James Fox. The answer, judging by the number that appeared in the show, was “certainly not Scots” – or at least not Scottish artists. For, of the five artists in the programme held up as the standard-bearers of conceptual art, four came from Scotland, with the other from Germany. This fact was not commented on, but clearly it raises the question: why are Scots so good when it comes to conceptual art?

When Fox says “Welcome to the puzzling, sometimes maddening world of conceptual art,” should he really be saying “the puzzling, sometimes maddening world of Scottish conceptual art”?

Conceptual art, essentially, is art that prizes “the idea” over the final object. Across the world there are countless conceptual artists, but the biggest “movers and shakers” Fox featured in his “open-minded guide for the perplexed,” hail from Scotland. When he looks for an example of a work that sums up what is so difficult about this type of art, he lands on Glasgow-raised Martin Creed’s Work No 88, a scrunched-up ball of A4 paper. He buys it for £180 and has it delivered to his house.

“This piece,” Fox says, “perhaps encapsulates why so many people struggle with conceptual art. It doesn’t seem to require much skill. It’s not particularly beautiful. And ultimately it feels like a bit of a rip-off. But maybe we’re all missing something.”

When he searches for an artist that was there when the movement took off in the Sixties, he opts for Bruce McLean, Glasgow-born, and creator of a conceptual work called Pose Work For Plinths, in which he sat, leaned, draped and contorted himself on a series of white platforms as if he himself were the sculpture.

When he is looking for conceptual art that has reached beyond the galleries, art “that isn’t as pretentious and elitist as I once feared,” he hits on Robert Montgomery, born in North Lanarkshire, whose neon text work The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You and Like This You Keep Them Alive pulls up 4.9 million results online in 0.7 seconds. Mostly these are tributes to lost loved ones, sometimes tattooed in ink across people’s skin. It’s just one of the highly effective text works that Montgomery has plastered over buildings across Europe. Others include: “ALL EUROPE MUST BE EVERYWHERE A REFUGE FOR THE BROKEN HEARTED”.

Then, ultimately, when Fox ends his journey declaring that he finally gets conceptual art, it’s with Katie Paterson, the Glasgow-born 35-yearold who has created extraordinary works involving melting down a meteorite, mapping dead stars and arranging the wood of 100 species of trees. Fox describes her work as “sublime”. He raves about Totality, her work in which 10,000 images of solar eclipses are mounted on a mirrorball, as “intelligent and beautiful and hugely ambitious.”

“Katie Paterson is one of the most exciting talents of my generation,” he says. “And for a few years she’s been boldly going where no conceptual artist has gone before… She’s even made music with celestial objects.”

He refers to her most famous work: a piano automatically playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata after the piece of music has been sent into space by radio transmission, bounced off the moon, and received back down on Earth, with some of the notes lost in the lunar craters.

Paterson, when she saw the documentary, says she was “stunned” at being placed in a history “with all those amazing artists”. One of the things that is striking about her art is how much hard work it is. At the moment she is planning a book that will contain 150 ideas for works she reckons are almost unmakeable. Her favourite is “an ice rink made out of water from every single glacier in the world”.

Like many of the artists featured in the show, she appears uncomfortable with labels. She’s not looking to be part of some conceptual scene.

“For me it’s come from the heart and it’s not really designed to be part of something or any movement. I’ve never really tried too hard to do anything other than let the ideas come, assess them in terms of their own value.”

For almost all of the artists, the words “conceptual” and even “art” seem irrelevant. As McLean puts it: “I don’t get up in the morning to make some art. I get up in the morning to work out what I’m doing and why I made that painting like that. Where is it going to go? What’s it for? And why am I doing it anyway?”