Like London, Glasgow is fiercely divided into north and south. Some residents go a whole life without crossing the divide, but many of those who do use the Clyde Tunnel, an unprepossessing subterranean half-mile that was recently the setting for Roddy Buchanan's award-winning video, Gobstoppers.
Enter one Stephen Skrynka into the cycle and pedestrian tunnel to create a site-specific sound installation. Sixty-four speakers transmit furtively recorded sounds from the city, plus sounds made using the graffiti text found on the tunnel's walls. Transcribed by the artist and then whispered, chanted and shouted through speakers that line the route, this invisible wave of words -some filthy, much sectarian, some just crackers - travels at different speeds. So far, so good. The tunnel has been spookily lit, so it looks like the kind of place that haunts uneasy dreams.
The limitation of the project comes from a clash between the found space and concept. Not only did the tunnel already emphatically embody all the life, contradictions and dangers the intervention seeks to highlight - none of which are amplified by the installation, ironically - but Skrynka has taken it upon himself to whitewash over the graffiti after copying it all down. There are some photographs of it visible through peepholes he has installed and there will be a book of the text he has covered up.
This act of appropriation nags. What gives an artist - anyone - the right to do this, not just the painting over but the transferring into book form? For three weeks, the tunnel is made clean, safe and well lit. Afterwards, the artist and the invigilators will leave and it will turn back into the kind of place you might not want to walk through alone, another place some of us can choose to avoid. So who is the vandal now?
Until June 18. Details: 0141-576 7956.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
