The trend for artists using un­con­ven­tion­al, mostly domestic spaces as temporary galleries has long been a part of the Glasgow art scene. From Cathy Wilkes gallery, Dalriada, set up in her council flat, to the long-running, now defunct Switch­space project run by Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated, which began life in Dallas’ living room, to the first in­carn­a­tion of Mary Mary gallery, these projects were born of economic necessity, and a desire by emerging artists and curators to get their work out into the public eye, sidestep­ping the es­t­ab­l­ished ex­hib­i­tion system.

Now, with a col­l­ab­or­a­tion between Katrina Brown, director of new arts or­gan­isa­tion the Common Guild, and artist Douglas Gordon, the es­t­ab­l­ished - I hesitate to use the word ‘es­t­ab­l­ish­ment’ - are getting in on the act. Always Begin By Degrees takes its title from a piece by Roni Horn, which itself quotes from Emily Dickinson. Horn’s work, which sets the line in aluminium, also sets the tone: language, com­mu­n­ic­a­tion and con­ver­sa­tions are ever­y­where. Philip Parreno presents a pair of car­toon­ish speech bubbles, floating silently. Adel Ab­desse­med acts as an angry censor in his brief video loop, Talk Is Cheap, which sees a jack­booted foot stomping re­peatedly on a mi­cro­phone, replacing speech with a violent staccato rhythm. Pavel Büchler’s Bengal Rose consists of a found tube of paint con­tain­ing the titular colour, and described as a re­place­ment ‘for the last rose cut in my garden on the last sunny day of the Autumn’, a physical analogue for Juliet’s thorny med­it­a­tion on the nature of naming.

Anna Gaskell’s film Eraser sees a group of school­girls re­coun­t­ing a story that begins with the mundane - a mother hurrying to get her daughter to church on time - and ends in implied tragedy, with the daughter in a car-crash coma, hearing the voices of everyone but her mother. Each girl filters the tale through her memory of events, adding details of her own, taking personal routes to the grim de­n­oue­ment, making it clear that Gaskell is as in­ter­es­ted in the mechanics of memory and st­ory­tel­ling, and the shared language of a group, as she is in the tale being told.

As well as the works on show, Always Begin By Degrees offers visitors the chance to read books in Gordon’s library, a room designed by Andrew Miller, who has made a higgledy-piggledy ar­range­ment of shelving backed with bright flashes of colour, and provided a reading table.

A monitor set on the table shows Marcel Marcel Broodthaers’ 1972 Speakers’ Corner Per­for­m­ance, which sees the Belgian con­cep­tu­al­ist chalk up in­struc­tions on a child’s black­board. ‘Silence’, he writes, then ‘Silence, please’, as his Hyde Park audience chat, heckle and, in the case of one older woman, sing. Finally, Broodthaers ac­k­now­ledges the spec­tat­ors, writing ‘You are artists’ on his board. It’s a well placed piece, filling the usual hush of a library with fuzzy noise, and raising questions about the visitor’s role in the room, an artist-designed space holding Gordon’s col­lec­tion of twinned books, a work in itself.

There are also two sofas in the building, but not ex­pli­citly in the show, by Franz West, ac­com­pan­ied by a text by Gordon which reads ‘Every time you think of me,’, a sentence completed on the wall opposite, ‘we die.’ West, born and based in Vienna, and his sofas call to mind Freudian talking cures, Gordon adds the spark for a dis­t­inc­tly dark, soul-baring con­ver­sa­tion.

These un­cred­ited works, the de­scrip­tion of library designer Miller as an artist in residence, and the fact that details of each work are lightly sketched on the walls in pencil show a keen cur­at­or­i­al en­gage­ment with the status of the space, at once a gallery and a home. Cerith Wyn Evans has picked up on this facet of the show with Untitled (Threshold), a length of rope barring entry to the upper floors of the building, adorned with Tibetan prayer bells, a pairing which invites visitors to re­con­sider­ their sur­roun­d­ings with a nod to museum-like formality, in turn un­der­mined by the joke of turning aids to med­it­a­tion into a primitive alarm system.

This is how group shows should be done: there’s no sign of an over­ween­ing theme, and so no attempt to set up awkward in­ter­con­nec­tions between disparate artists. Instead, visitors are free to eavesdrop on the quiet con­ver­sa­tions between works on show. It is, too, I suspect, a manifesto of sorts for the future act­iv­it­ies of the Common Guild, an or­gan­isa­tion with an in­ter­n­a­tion­al outlook, but rooted firmly in Glasgow, and one that, like this opening ex­hib­i­tion, sets out to foster an open con­ver­sa­tion, about art in the city, between artists, curators and audiences alike.

This review was first published in The Herald on March 14th, 2008.