Review by Robin Mc Alpine from
Scottish Left Review Apr/May '06 issue

"On the Street is a book of drawings which seeks to illustrate what the gentrification of areas of Glasgow like the Merchant City and Glasgow Cross is obscuring; the endemic poverty which has been an integral but ambiguous part of Glasgow's identity. In fact, it is more than integral; in many ways it is the defining aspect of Glasgow identity, given that the city has always been identified with its 'gallus' humour - the humour of the gallows, laughing at and through your own affliction. This is an issue which we are struggling with across Scotland. One of the characteristics of Scottish culture (small 'c') is the reductive idiom, the challenging of pomposity, arrogance or excessive aspiration through wry humour. We are struggling with this because we maintain in Scotland some pride in our resistance to the glorification of social climbing which dominates modern British politics (there is a correlation between egalitarianism and the dislike of the 'chancer'), but we are now being endlessly told we are wrong. Leading the charge on behalf of the chancers is Carol Craig and her 'Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing' - which will help you feel more confident so long as you have thousands of pounds with which to pay her fees. It is of course ridiculous to celebrate poverty - it is a vile and destructive phenomenon - but we do not yet seem to be ready to abandon totally the celebration of people's remarkable responses to poverty. The difficulty is identifying the line.

On the Street was commissioned to mark the end of Intermedia Gallery's time at King Street in Glasgow. Artist Stuart Murray has produced over 40 drawings which seek to capture a sense of random encounters with the dispossessed - beggars, junkies, prostitutes, the starving, alcoholics. Each is presented in faux-naïve line drawing (or series of drawings) accompanied by handwritten text capturing the dialogue (or more commonly the monologue) of such encounters. "Sper cheynge?", "Am tryin tae get enough fur a can a lager", "Ye goat a sper note if yur gawnty that bank there then?".

Artists, writers or filmmakers trying to capture a portrait of the dispossessed always face a problem - by their very nature the people doing the capturing are usually necessarily separated from their subjects. With the best will in the world, compassion or genuine anger can nonetheless end up patronising. But perhaps an even greater risk is that the whole project amounts to little more than a fairly obvious comment on how awful poverty is. Murray's approach in this book goes a long way to avoiding these pitfalls. The illustrations and words are stripped back and minimalist. The illustrations feel almost amateurish (they're not) and the words are given straight. There is no contextualisation - the anthropologists referencing which gives the subjects an aura of sub-humanity ("Frank, unemployed, the Trongate"). The effect of each illustration taken individually can be a little underwhelming. The strength of the book is its cumulative effect, the way in which a progression of anonymous characters seem to become increasingly familiar as you increasingly recognise your own encounters. Slowly, as you turn the pages, you begin to realise that in fact the subject of the book is not only (perhaps not mainly) the dispossessed it portrays. In large part, you are the subject of the book. You and your ability to forget these encounters, to fail to see the people portrayed as you scurry by to your train. Your ability to dispossess the dispossessed of one of the few things they had left - their role in our identity."