The submitted publications are concerned with the historicisation of late-modern
Scottish visual art. The underpinning research draws upon archives and site visits,
the development of Scottish art chronologies in extant publications and
exhibitions, and builds on research which bridges academic and professional
fields, including Oliver 1979, Hartley 1989, Patrizio 1999, and Lowndes 2003.
However, the methodology recognises the limits of available knowledge of this
period in this national field. Some of the submitted publications are centred on
major works and exhibitions excised from earlier work in Gage 1977, and
Macmillan 1994.

This new research is discussed in a new iteration, Scottish art since 1960,
and in eight other publications. The primary objective is the critical recovery of
little-known artworks which were formed in Scotland or by Scottish artists and
which formed a significant period in Scottish art’s development, with legacies and
implications for contemporary Scottish art and artists. This further serves as an
analysis of critical practices and discourses in late-modern Scottish art and culture.
The central contention is that a Scottish neo-avant-garde, particularly from
the 1970s, is missing from the literature of post-war Scottish art. This was due to
a lack of advocacy, which continues, and a dispersal of knowledge. Therefore,
while the publications share with extant publications a consideration of important
themes such as landscape, it reprioritises these through a problematisation of the
art object. This approach distinguishes itself from Scotland’s later twentiethcentury
art histories, including Macdonald 2000.

The secondary concern is the reception of late-modernist Scottish art in
relation to Scotland’s independent national development. Particular attention is
paid to the discourses within Scottish art which relate to political developments up
to the 1979 devolution referendum in relation to the imaginative practices which
develop in the 1980s and beyond. The publications explore how such political and
cultural contexts contributed to models of self-determination and collective
agency during this period, within which artistic and curatorial identities are formed
through association, affiliation and belonging.