Jeremy Scott's GSA art collection donation

The Scotsman

Jeremy Scott's GSA art collection donation  GSA library has received a large art collection, donated from the personal collection of Jeremy Cooper, a British novelist, author and art historian, and former antiques dealer (and presenter on antiques rd show).  The personally curated collection is focused on the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s and early 2000s, including materials related to Tracy Emin, Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George, Rachel Whiteread, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.  The collection includes limited edition labelled beer bottles, hundreds of books, artist multiples, T-shirts, framed flyers, exhibition catalogues and monographs, and related ephemera.

Transcript

00:00I'm Duncan Chappell. I'm Librarian and Collections Manager at Glasgow School of Art.

00:04We're in the reading room of the Library's Special Collections at Glasgow School of Art.

00:09This is where we keep all of our valuable and rare materials.

00:12And today we're here to look at a collection that's recently come to the school

00:16from Jeremy Cooper of about over 2,000 items of artist's ephemera.

00:23Jeremy's been collecting this artist's ephemera since probably about the 1990s.

00:28He was a very close personal friend with lots of the young British artists of that time,

00:32people like Gary Hume and Tracey Emin.

00:36And he lived in Shoreditch in London at that time,

00:40where many of the other artists lived at the same time.

00:44And he became very good friends with them, very close friends with them.

00:47And he collected this material as part of his relationships with them.

00:51So a lot of it's incredibly rare material that won't be available anywhere else.

00:56Small little private view cards, exhibitions, personal letters, and so forth.

01:01So by artist's ephemera, we mean transitory publications,

01:07smaller publications such as leaflets, private view cards,

01:10posters that may have accompanied gallery exhibits.

01:14And historically, this kind of stuff just hasn't been collected,

01:17unlike, say, published books, which are well documented and collected.

01:20This tends to be stuff that people just take home and then it gets thrown away.

01:25It doesn't get collected.

01:26But Jeremy has been really astute in keeping all of this stuff together.

01:32And now, of course, it's incredibly rare.

01:34You know, some of these private view cards to early exhibitions,

01:37say of Tracey Emin, for example, probably are going to be held in very few places in the UK.

01:43What's great about the collection is it includes lots of artist multiples.

01:47So we have some bottles of beer here, for example.

01:51That were produced in very limited edition for the company Beck's Beers

01:58by artists including Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

02:02This one here is by Sam Taylor Wood.

02:05We have a bottle of wine here that was produced to celebrate the

02:10China 1993 exhibition by Gilbert and George,

02:14accompanied with the menu of the banquet that they ate,

02:19including dishes such as braised shark's fin soup, which I think is a bit of an acquired taste.

02:26There are some lovely, beautiful objects like this.

02:29This is a set of six hand-painted porcelain apples by the artist Annie Galatio,

02:36who was born in Paisley, actually up here in Scotland.

02:40And this is an edition of six,

02:43of which obviously we have one of the copies,

02:46really beautifully hand-painted and hand-decorated porcelain apples.

02:50And the apple was quite talismanic for Annie Galatio and her work.

02:55And it also includes manuscript materials such as this,

02:59which is an invite from Tracey Emin to Jeremy Cooper,

03:04asking him to attend her birthday party,

03:07but to not wear any grey or black or beige,

03:11and to wear something bright,

03:12because she's fed up looking at people wearing beige and black and grey.

03:17Jeremy, I think, has been looking to donate his collections across the piece to lots of institutions.

03:24So he has made donations to other institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum,

03:29the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

03:32And he reached out to us, looking at the potential for us to take the artist's ephemera.

03:38He thought that the Glasgow School of Art would be a really good place to hold his material,

03:43being a working arts school,

03:45it being available to current and future generations of artists to look at and work from.

03:52So we entered into a negotiation,

03:54and Jeremy very kindly donated this collection to us,

03:59which we're really thrilled to have.

04:01Jeremy has always enjoyed coming up to Glasgow.

04:05He views it as a city with a really important and lively arts scene.

04:13Although he has been mostly based in London, I think, throughout his collecting career,

04:17he would make regular trips up to Glasgow to see various exhibitions.

04:21And he does talk about encountering the work of people like Douglas Gordon, for example,

04:27for the first time, and how revelationary that was to him.

04:33He also has connections right up to contemporary day, actually.

04:36I mean, the recent Turner Prize winner, Jasleen Kaur,

04:40who is a Glasgow School of Art graduate,

04:45rented studio space from Jeremy down in Somerset.

04:51So it's a connection to Glasgow that he has kept throughout the years.

04:56And I think he just felt that it was a really fitting place

04:59that this stuff, some of it collected in Glasgow, should come back to the city.

05:03We will be concentrating on the next year in cataloguing the collection,

05:08getting it processed so that we actually know what we have.

05:11Obviously, over 2,000 items,

05:15no doubt we'll discover all kinds of hidden gems while we're processing and cataloguing them.

05:21In the meantime, the collection is available to researchers or students

05:26here in the reading room of the Library's Special Collections.

05:31And we'll be looking, hopefully, at exhibitions in the future,

05:36either here at Glasgow School of Art or with other institutions.

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