Down at the Meanwhile Farm

We’re proud to be supporting so many artists with the space and opportunities they need now across Scotland. We can’t wait for the next five years, and beyond!

— Outer Spaces, fifth-anniversary press release, October 20, 2026.¹

The org[anisation] seems here to stay, normalising a perennial condition of temporariness and letting those who long to abnegate custody for cultural life breathe a sigh of relief. Creative Scotland and your local council needn’t worry about supporting studio non-profits any longer, Outer Spaces are “building an alternative infrastructure for the arts” without the archaic inconveniences of ownership, visibility or integration.

— Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter, Outer Spaces?” (#5). April 2026.²

1. Farquhar’s Doubt

Two years ago, Keith Farquhar started printing photographs documenting his everyday life onto polyester faux fur. Farquhar’s use of faux fur builds on his earlier disruptions of painting’s support surface: graffitiing corrugated sheet metal with cryptic texts and whirling skeins, for instance, or painting trompe l’oeil cycling shorts directly onto a male model’s lower body. This approach also brings to mind comparable strategies in practices associated with so-called ‘network painting’: Martin Kippenberger’s early-1990s paintings on latex-covered canvases, or Michael Krebber’s and Cosima von Bonin’s respective uses of patterned textiles in place of canvas a decade later. My concern here, however, is not with the way these works defamiliarise painting’s support surface, but with the effect of ‘painted’ fur in one work from the series in particular.
In Taking Down the Strip-lights at Charity (2024) [fig. 1] we encounter the fuzzy outline of a figure who has climbed a stepladder and is labouring to remove a glowing fluorescent strip-light attached to the ceiling above. Below, three further fuzzy figures form a close huddle. A dome of shaggy blonde hair reveals a fifth otherwise obscured figure behind this group. All in all, the scene is quite unremarkable. And yet the work’s cryptic title (what is ‘Charity’? Why are the lights being taken down there? Why are we even looking at this workaday scene?), combined with these figures all having their backs turned to us, or their faces obscured from view, laces a
sense of inscrutability through the scene. This is a feeling that is extended and amplified by the material properties of the picture’s napped support surface—this dissolves the figures and their surroundings into a soft blur.

In a text accompanying a recent exhibition of the fur paintings, the qualities of dye-sublimated fur are described as ‘impressionistic’—an allusion that seems to gesture towards the conventions of doubt and uncertainty characteristic of vanguard painting of the late nineteenth century. But what, if anything, is being doubted here? For an artist such as Cézanne, the task of painting was to develop an optics capable of capturing the emergence of order within perceptual experience itself. In this way, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s painting was engaged in the paradoxical enterprise of “pursuing reality” without giving up painting’s “sensuous surface”.³ But Farquhar’s impressionistic composition cannot make the same claim to direct perceptual inscription, since its image is mechanically transferred using an industrial dye-sublimation printer. If, then, we are not encountering the work’s perceptual doubt as a direct trace of its maker’s embodied perception, perhaps the doubt enacted in and through the materiality of the picture is contextual—something caught up in whatever social relations undergird the gauzily depicted scene? To pursue this possibility further, let’s now look into the circumstances of this picture in more detail.
Taking Down the Strip-lights at Charity captures a moment that occurred in a project space—Charity—organised between 2023 and 2024 by artists Theo Christy and Gregor Horne— both former students at Edinburgh College of Art, where Farquhar is a lecturer in fine art. Charity was located in a small office on the top floor of the former Marks & Spencer store on Sauchiehall Street in the city centre of Glasgow. Empty since late 2022, the building was the first major site in Glasgow operated by studio space provider Outer Spaces: an arts charity that leases vacant commercial properties across Scotland, making them available, free of charge, as studios and project spaces for artists, collectives and arts organisations. Since 2021, Outer Spaces has placed nearly 2,000 artworkers in temporary spaces located in vacant commercial properties across Scotland and, given the recent crisis of affordability in studio space triggered by increases in the rents charged by more traditional studio providers such as Wasps, has rapidly become one of the most prominent providers of artists’ workspace in Glasgow.⁴ While artists gain access to free temporary studio space as part of this arrangement, the charity’s ‘meanwhile’ tenancies are short-term, studio access hours are often reduced at short notice, and evictions can occur with as little as a week’s notice. Further, when Outer Spaces becomes the rateable occupier of a vacant commercial property, its owner ceases to bear the business rates liability they would otherwise face. Temporarily passing the property over to Outer Spaces can therefore secure 80% mandatory charity relief on a commercial building, potentially topped up to 100% at the local authority’s discretion. In this way, artists find themselves in effect subsidising large private landlords and major property conglomerates—all while much-needed public revenue is forgone through the award of statutory relief.

Having taken up a space in the former Marks & Spencer store alongside 50 other artists in the spring of 2023, Christy and Horne started curating exhibitions in their studio. While excited at the prospect of having access to free exhibition space, their chosen name for the gallery, ‘Charity’, already hinted at reservations held by the duo about entering into a contractual relationship with Outer Spaces—anxieties that would soon prove well-founded. In the days leading up to a solo exhibition of Charity co-curator Christy’s box paintings—works that transform the viewer into miscellaneous commodities nested at the bottom of cardboard boxes over which ogling consumers loom—an email was received from Outer Spaces titled “Urgent—Unauthorised Changes to Office 6 in M&S,” The email demanded that Christy and Horne clear their studio “with immediate effect” so that the building’s landlords could carry out an “inspection” of a temporary plug-in lighting rig Christy and Horne had velcroed to the ceiling of the space to light the exhibition. The message ended with a stern warning: “after an inspection report has been concluded, we will inform you of any further actions. If there are any further breaches of our terms, Outer Spaces will have to consider whether you can continue to have space in our property.” In follow-up correspondence, Christy was ordered to speak with Outer Spaces’s Business Development Director. During this conversation, he was informed that a ‘specialist team’ had to be called in to remove the velcroed-up lighting rig, at a cost of £1,500 to the charity. While Christy was told he could return to Office 6, he was issued a “final warning.” However, when he did eventually return, he saw that the lighting rig had simply been pulled down from its velcro attachments, which remained fixed to the ceiling, and placed on the floor. With a full programme already planned, Christy and Horne continued to make exhibitions in their space. Over the next nine months they presented a brilliant series of shows featuring artists such as Rhianna Turnbull, Lawrence Leaman and Alan Michael [fig. 2]. For these subsequent exhibitions, the duo would simply velcro the same lighting rig back onto the ceiling for the opening of the exhibition, then remove the lights at the end of the evening. The activity documented by Farquhar in Taking Down the Strip-lights at Charity is the removal of the strip lights after the opening of Charlie Davenport’s solo exhibition Proper Planet, in September 2023. The work, which is based upon a still from a video shot by Farquhar at the time, shows Christy from behind as he stands on the ladder looking at the lights. At the bottom of the picture, left to right, are artists Victoria Smith, Oscar Laughridge and Davenport himself. The head of Charity co-curator Horne can just about be made out behind this group.⁵

The inability of Charity’s curators to secure one of the basic necessities for exhibiting art—adequate lighting—is emblematic of just how difficult working within buildings operated by Outer Spaces can be. I should know. While this situation played out, I was working in a studio just two doors down from Charity, struggling in my own way with the conditions imposed within the Marks & Spencer building. Between 2023 and 2026, I worked in a total of five properties let to Outer Spaces by commercial landlords in the city centre of Glasgow. While I accessed some incredible-looking spaces during this time, all for free, I was also consistently confronted with working environments that were chronically unpredictable, unsuitable and insecure.

Having outlined its context, let me now offer a more precise reading of Farquhar’s painting, one that will set up the arguments about Outer Spaces I want to make here. It strikes me as evident that Taking Down the Strip-lights at Charity captures an act of labour taking place within a designated workplace setting. As such, one way to read the doubtful visibility produced by Farquhar’s unusual method of dye-sublimating faux fur is as an effect that gives perceptible form to the indeterminate nature of artistic labour in the context of Outer Spaces’s operations. Building on this reading, in the following pages I argue that in order to understand why art is so susceptible to instrumentalisation by Outer Spaces and its landlord partners, it is necessary to see artistic labour as a peculiar form of ‘under-labour’ that is structurally distinct from normative forms of wage labour. Examining the indeterminate and peculiar status of artistic labour can help us understand why property capital is so keen to enlist the services of artists via Outer Spaces, and why the terms of that enlistment work so decisively in its favour.

My analysis begins with an account of three disorientating years spent as an Outer Spaces studio holder. Following this, I look at two texts critical of Outer Spaces published after a wave of evictions in Glasgow in February 2026. I then draw on Neil Gray to historicise Outer Spaces’s activities, and on Marina Vishmidt to examine how the instrumentalisation of artistic labour by landlords through Outer Spaces exploits the structural indeterminacy of that labour. Finally, I ask how the provision of essential artistic workspace in Glasgow might be reorganised to better insulate artists from the volatility of speculative property relations.

2. Slime and Asbestos

To work you need to be able to access your studio. However, in my experience, this could be difficult in buildings operated by Outer Spaces. Not only did shared Airbnb-style key safes, slow-to-arrive key cards, and niggly signing-in systems have to be negotiated, access hours at studio buildings could be spontaneously reduced with little or no warning. The Marks & Spencer building, for instance, was closed Monday–Wednesday during its opening months back in 2023—terrible for me, as I usually work regular office hours. Granite House, the final building I held a studio in during the first two months of 2026, initially offered unrestricted access. However, by the time I moved in, the landlord had limited its opening hours to 8am–5pm on weekdays and had ordered the building to remain closed on weekends.

Feeling comfortable and secure in your workspace is also important. Yet some of the Outer Spaces buildings I occupied were clearly not fit for purpose as studio buildings. Having been gutted by the company following the store’s closure in 2022, the Marks & Spencer store was an unheated, partial ruin when it was handed over to artists in 2023—a building evocative of the much-discussed ‘liminal space’ aesthetic of the science-fiction analogue horror web series and Hollywood movie, Backrooms, albeit in a more dilapidated form. At various points throughout the building, ceiling tiles had crumbled apart and crashed to the floor. Reaching my studio on the top floor was a terrifying experience that involved moving through endless poorly lit corridors, the walls of which were pasted with ominous asbestos warning stickers [figs. 3–5]. Whenever it rained, water ingress would form vast slime-rimmed pools on the ground floor and in the basement. And to access the building’s toilets you would have to tiptoe through puddles of fetid water leaking from the plumbing [fig. 6].

A workspace should also be conducive to concentration. And yet interruptions to my working day as an Outer Spaces studio holder were frequent. Buildings I occupied were often undergoing maintenance work. While landlords and building managers were supposed to inform us about work ahead of time, this often didn’t happen. On numerous occasions I would arrive in the morning to the sight of contractors carrying out noisy, messy building work inside my studio. And on one occasion, I arrived at my studio in a recently renovated office building in the city-centre International Financial Services District to find that 26 medium-sized works on paper made during my PhD had been destroyed by a water ingress. Maintenance work had been taking place in my studio over the weekend, again without my knowledge, though the final cause of the leak was not established [fig. 7]. Interruptions by estate agents and their clients were also frequent. One time an estate agent actually took issue with some of the work I was making in my studio. Though I had sought and received written permission from Outer Spaces to design a large sculpture-cum-architectural enclosure for my space, once erected, this structure was deemed to be inhibiting ongoing attempts to rent out the office floor and I was encouraged to take it down for a short period so that a sales visit could be conducted [fig. 8].

While I encountered some helpful and committed front-line staff members during my time as a studio holder, during mass eviction events, staff members seemed completely overwhelmed by their workload and could only extend the barest of support. Communicating with Outer Spaces’s senior managerial team, meanwhile, was almost impossible: leaving emails unanswered seeming to be their métier. Staff members also encouraged me to perform the work of occupation so that council business rates inspections could be passed. Inspections would usually occur early in a tenancy, before I had settled into my space and started work on exhibitions. On one occasion, I received an email from Outer Spaces telling me that my space didn’t look ready to pass a forthcoming inspection and that I should “lay out more work”. This resulted in the absurd situation of me hurrying to fabricate sculptures out of whatever junk I could find in the studio. In one of these improvised works, a floor sculpture now sadly lost to history, I spread a gidouille like the one on Père Ubu’s belly made from portraits of former Glasgow City Council leader Pat Lally onto a cut of fire-retardant tarpaulin—an insider joke hopefully not lost on the visiting council inspectors [fig. 9]. Because there were no on-site staff in Outer Spaces’s buildings, studio holders were responsible for resolving any day-to-day issues that would arise. I recall one incident in the Marks & Spencer building when the obsolete sprinkler system spontaneously switched on, spraying acrid black gunk everywhere, including over the artwork of several artists [fig. 10]. As one of the only people in the building that morning, I spent the entire day handling this situation. In contrast, dealing with on-site building management staff employed by commercial landlords or letting companies to oversee vacant spaces came with its own challenges. These people were completely unused to working with artists and often seemed confused about how the arrangement struck between their employers and the charity was meant to operate day to day, leading to considerable friction and tension with studio holders.

But of all these issues, by far the worst thing about Outer Spaces was knowing that at any time I could open my inbox to find an email telling me I had seven days to move out of my workspace. This kind of precarity generated gnawing anxiety that intensified with each eviction I experienced. While Outer Spaces would aim to offer replacement spaces to artists after evictions, you would sometimes have to endure a wait of weeks or even months before a new studio became available. When I experienced a delay of this sort, I had to transport my entire studio back from my old city-centre studio to my Southside flat, store it in my bedroom for a month, then move it into a new city-centre studio just a few hundred metres from the space I had vacated a month earlier. To be clear, I had applied to and been accepted onto the Outer Spaces scheme not only to conduct curatorial and art-historical research, but to also curate exhibitions in my space. As such, every eviction involved shifting plinths, monitors, chairs, stored artworks, etc. from one place to another, an exhausting and costly activity. I occupied five different buildings between 2023 and 2026. If I include having to move home before moving into a new studio, which happened once, and having to move my studio into storage while building work took place there, which also happened once, I undertook a total of nine moves in less than three years as part of the scheme.

Things eventually came to a head in February 2026. Over the course of 2025, I had been working and curating on a large office floor opposite Central Station. This was the longest and most fruitful period I spent within the network—about 10 months during which I organised a two-person show with Art & Language and Emalia Mattia and hosted a group video exhibition curated by Dora Budor in partnership with Glasgow project spaces Ivory Tars and Broadside, as part of their multipart exhibition, Between Not Everything and Not Nothing, which engaged with Marina Vishmidt’s concept of ‘infrastructural critique’ [figs. 11–12]. However, when the owners asked Outer Spaces to hand back the building in late October 2025, I was plunged into a surreal and nightmarish situation that caused me to leave the network for good. First, I was moved to a new property around the corner at 151 West George Street. However, after just two weeks there, before I had even unpacked my stuff, I was told the building had been sold and I would need to move out in seven days. I was then allocated a new space at Granite House, a large renovated office complex on Stockwell Street. I moved in just before Christmas and, after carefully setting up my office and storage areas, began to make plans for an exhibition programme in an adjacent room. After just a few weeks, I received another email saying that Granite House was being redeveloped (into yet more student flats, as it turned out) and I once again had just seven days to leave. While Outer Spaces did offer a replacement studio on an open-plan floor in a building in the East End, the fact that this would not have been suitable for exhibition programming, combined with the mistrust fostered during this debacle, convinced me I needed to leave the network for good. So I junked or gave away most of my gallery equipment, at a substantial financial loss, packed my studio into a van for the third time in the space of a few months, and, exhausted and disillusioned, moved my workspace home to my tiny one-bedroom flat—where I continue to work today.

I know that some people have had a better experience with Outer Spaces and that the charity has defenders amongst artists in Glasgow—those who are happy to speak publicly about how vital its services have been to their practices.⁶ My own conversations with current and former studio holders in Glasgow have nonetheless convinced me that my experiences were far from unique.⁷ By consulting some of the recent research on meanwhile space schemes in England, I have also come to realise that many of the problems I experienced are endemic to meanwhile space occupation, whenever and wherever it occurs. Constant relocation drains time, energy and financial resources away from artists. And for those like myself trying to publicly programme in temporary spaces, insecure tenure inhibits investment in programmes, buildings, equipment and organisational development.⁸

Despite these obvious limitations, one of the jarring things about my experience of Outer Spaces in Glasgow was the glaring absence of public discussion about evident problems with the model. The absence of a sustained discourse regarding the charity’s operations was only exacerbated by its increasingly boosterish presence in the city over the last few years via high-level partnerships, curated exhibitions, bursaries, residencies and fellowships. Outer Spaces’s pristine public image went more or less unchallenged right up until the start of 2026. However, evictions at Granite House and other studio buildings in Glasgow at the start of the year led to the charity’s operations being subjected to scrutiny in local newspapers and art-world media.

3. Evictions

On Monday February 2, Outer Spaces emailed studio holders at Granite House to tell them that they had seven days to vacate the premises. Home to upwards of 90 tenants, the building also hosted a number of grassroots organisations—including the feminist curatorial collective 16 Collective and the volunteer-led DIY theatre company Theatre 118. Later in February, Outer Spaces evicted Listen Gallery, a cherished experimental sound-art gallery and communal listening space, from a commercial office space leased on York Street in the heart of the city’s financial district, leading to further media coverage.⁹

The sudden eviction of Theatre 118, in particular, prompted a strong response in local news outlets, including a polemic by Neil Cooper published in the 11 February edition of The Herald. While recognising the potential in Outer Spaces’s model, Cooper explains “it is property developers who benefit most, and seven days notice feels like an unnecessarily harsh form of landlordism.” Reflecting on the implications of Theatre 118’s eviction, Cooper also observes that:

Theatre 118’s experience over the last week highlights the precarious nature of the grassroots artistic ecosystem in a way that requires a serious rethink. For all the good work initiated by Outer Spaces, artistic tenants paying zero rent have no voice and no real power over how a space is run. And when a building is reclaimed by its owners, as the last week has shown, it can cause chaos. What is perhaps required instead are cheap spaces that can offer more long-term security, whereby residents such as Theatre 118 have some sense of agency, while building owners give at least two months notice before taking back their property. While it’s unlikely to be an easy negotiation, something needs to be done soon.¹⁰

By far the most cutting critique of Outer Spaces mounted in the months following February’s evictions came from the anonymous satirical Scottish art-world blogger Mount Jupiter. The blogger’s post of 24 April focuses on business rates relief levels of 80–100% available to commercial landlords through Outer Spaces:

For the small trouble of having paint-flecked graduates in your building you can evict whenever convenient, these savings are heaven-sent for owners. Amongst the largest premises leased by Outer Spaces in Glasgow are the old Clydesdale Bank headquarters on St Vincent Place with a rateable value of £1m, and 48 Finnieston Square (Skypark) at £1.2m. Before any kind of relief, these locations alone would be liable for £553k and £657k per annum, respectively. In sum, across the country, this amounts to millions withheld to the impoverishment of local services.¹¹

As the post goes on to note, “the primary transaction here, or lack thereof, is the taxation which is not otherwise supporting your local schools, social care, and, yes, art galleries.”¹² The post also tracks the rapid growth of the charity’s income, from £65k in its first year to nearly £500k in its most recent return, 97% of which comes from “donations”. Given Outer Spaces does not run fundraising campaigns or public benefactor schemes, the blogger concludes that “we can reasonably guess that effectively all of this cash flows from commercial landlords who simply cannot believe the deal they are getting.”¹³ The post ends by posing what its author describes as an ‘existential dilemma’: “is this organised opportunism robbing the rich (landlords) and giving to the poor (artists), or, robbing the poor (the city) and giving to the rich (landlords)?”¹⁴

Mount Jupiter’s decision to apprehend Outer Spaces as a problem of public accounting is justified.¹⁵ It is also correct to decry the public revenue forgone through the statutory relief on which the model depends. It only needs to be added that some of the poorest artists in the city propping up commercial landlords, all while generating substantial revenues for a ‘mysterious’ arts charity, is a topsy-turvy situation to say the least.¹⁶ And yet, if we give fiscal transactions primacy here, we risk only partially demystifying Outer Spaces—penetrating one fetish, the image of a benign charity swooping in to solve Scotland’s entrenched artistic workspace problems, only to risk producing another, an image of Outer Spaces as a mechanism whose social relations can be critiqued in toto by ‘following the money’. What this overlooks is the curious way Outer Spaces is transforming artistic labour into an instrument supporting the reproduction of property capital. By decentring artistic labour within our critique of Outer Spaces, we also risk denying ourselves an opportunity to historicise the charity’s activities. Because Outer Spaces is in many ways only the most recent instance of a more enduring relationship between art and property speculation in Glasgow. I now want to briefly look at an important critical account of a moment in this relationship from the late noughties, before finally addressing the problem of artistic labour within Outer Spaces’s model directly.

4. Art and Property Speculation

Writing in Variant in 2009, Neil Gray brought attention to what Glasgow City Council and its partners were calling an ‘Artist-Led Property Strategy’ focused on regenerating an area in the east of the city centre of Glasgow recently rebranded ‘Merchant City’.¹⁷ Merchant City—a name that struck James Kelman, for one, as revealing a remarkable lack of concern for the grotty and shameful fact that the wealth of these colonial-era exploiters was generated by “the simple expedience of not paying the price of labour”—comprises a network of streets containing residences and warehouses constructed from the 1750s onwards by Glasgow’s wealthy ‘tobacco lords’.¹⁸ The council’s regeneration of the area was guided by the idea that property values could be enhanced by instrumentalising the symbolic power and cultural capital of artists through the creation of a ‘creative cluster’. Through these efforts, explained Gray, “the council hopes to capitalise on the assumed ability of the arts to thrive in ‘edge of success’ urban areas,” with contemporary art in particular seen as “a potentially ‘major regenerative tool’ for the raising of general perceptions and confidence in the area’s future potential.”¹⁹

We can frame this kind of intervention into regenerate urban space as exemplary of the way urban elites and their corporate partners have consistently sought to harness Glasgow’s ‘monopoly’ tradition as a home to artists and the arts.²⁰ By channelling a creative community into Merchant City, it was hoped that their activity would generate economic value, while also making a substantial impact on the area symbolically, bringing precisely the kind of buzzy and dynamic urban ambience appealing to young professionals, hospitality companies and, ultimately, the council, private landlords and property developers. This kind of artist-led property strategy is just one policy initiative amongst many in Glasgow that has attempted to apply ‘creative class’ or ‘creative city’ thinking.²¹ As Venda Louise Pollock has recently observed, Glasgow is, for many, “the ‘poster city’ for the argument that culture could be a means through which urban fortunes could be restored.”²²

What Outer Spaces is doing is in some ways consistent with this earlier artist-led property strategy in Glasgow. In both cases, we see social actors deeply invested in Glasgow’s property markets developing methods that use artists as instruments to enhance or secure the value of their assets. However, there is an important distinction that needs to be made between these examples. In the case of the Merchant City, artists were introduced to facilitate increases in the value of newly redeveloped properties largely owned or controlled by the council. In contrast, in most Outer Spaces buildings, artists are being introduced as ‘fiscal buffers’ within privately owned commercial properties rendered unlettable on the open market by a supply-and-demand crisis born of a complex post-Covid grading issue, as a recent article in The Bell has examined.²³ It therefore follows that, in the case of Outer Spaces, the symbolic power and cultural capital of artistic practice are attenuated. After all, landlords seeking Outer Spaces’s services are not looking to harness the practices of artists in order to generate an attractive urban ambience in and around their properties—all in the hope of increasing the marketability and future value of their assets. Rather, landlords partner with Outer Spaces to reduce the business rates liabilities associated with otherwise vacant properties.²⁴ And while some aspect of art’s symbolic power is retained in this arrangement—it certainly persists in Outer Spaces’s self-image as a benevolent arts charity—the core economic operation of its meanwhile model amounts to facilitating an occupancy-based business rates mitigation scheme for commercial landlords in which anything particular, special or distinct about art practice is more or less subsumed under its basic capacity to convincingly generate an image of occupation within empty commercial buildings.

It is perhaps telling that the specific function artists are performing for commercial property owners via Outer Spaces is now also being served by a range of other ambiguous or marginal activities whose occupation of commercial premises can similarly enable business rates relief. One prominent example that has been in the news recently involves heliculture: the farming of snails in unlettable office buildings [fig. 13].²⁵ In the perfunctory guise of occupancy alone we can therefore see how art’s determination by the speculative logic of financialised urban capital assumes a new, brutally reductive form in which the social function of the once-lauded contemporary artist has become indistinguishable from that of a factory-farmed garden snail.²⁶

What remains to be explained is why art is so susceptible to the predations of urbanised property capital? Let me now address this question by demonstrating the role the structural indeterminacy of artistic labour plays in its instrumentalisation by landlords and Outer Spaces.

5. Artist as Under-labourer

It is widely understood that artistic labour occupies a position of relative externality to the normative operations of capital. Artists usually own their means of production; artistic labour time and remuneration rarely correlate; payment for work may be indirect or absent; and the valuation of art relies on institutional validation rather than normal market operations. Marina Vishmidt offers a concise formulation of this relative externality: “one of the distinguishing features of art production is that—by and large—it is not organised through the same structures as, nor is it accessible to, the same forms of measure as labour ‘proper’.”²⁷ It is for this reason that art’s relative autonomy from prevailing capitalist social relations—particularly those of wage labour—renders it comparatively useless to the reproduction of capital. As Adorno famously pronounced, though art “exists in the real world,” and has a role within it, it nonetheless “remains the antithesis of that which is the case.”²⁸

However, what Vishmidt describes as a “new instrumentality” has emerged in recent decades to compromise this antithetical status: “with art undergoing a dissemination over the last 50 years into social practices, policy frameworks and economic activities outside its inherited modern domain, it is ‘instrumentalised’ or gets nearer to a kind of ‘use-value’.” ²⁹ The historical example of artist-led urban regeneration explored earlier via Neil Gray’s writing, as well as Outer Spaces’s use of artists’ studios for commercial landlord tax-mitigation purposes, can be understood as expressions of this new instrumentality, which Vishmidt describes elsewhere as art’s reimagination as “a tool of socialisation and re-valorisation of land, populations and political entities.”³⁰

Although art’s relative uselessness is, at one level, cancelled or negated as it becomes increasingly useful to social and policy initiatives, at another level its distinction from capital’s normative social relations, including formal wage relations, is something these initiatives seek to preserve and harness when they instrumentalise artistic practices. In the case of the artist-led property development strategies, buoyed by the creativity-forward theories of neoliberal urbanism, urban elites and their capitalist partners in Glasgow have for decades now drawn from and exploited art’s apparent externality from and resistance to the everyday world in the hope of adding “imaginative value to places and situations.”³¹ An element of the traditional autonomy of art is therefore retained and exploited as part of this symbolic instrumentalisation. In the case of Outer Spaces, this contradiction remains operative. However, as suggested earlier, the waning of art’s symbolic function and its reduction to a crude or basic tool of property occupation mark a qualitative shift in how art is being instrumentalised. This is a shift, I want to propose, that brings the structural indeterminacy of artistic labour into much sharper focus.

Needless to say, if business rates relief is secured through charitable occupation, and the artists supplying that occupation function are prohibited from conducting commercial activity in their studios—which is the case with Outer Spaces contracts —then it is clearly the relative market independence of artistic labour, its characteristic separation from the wage, the boss and formally organised labour relations, that is being exploited here to generate a substantial surplus for Outer Spaces and significant savings for commercial landlords. This same separation helps to explain why artists are so well suited to the Outer Spaces model. Our exemplary flexibility and adaptability as a workforce —qualities associated with artistic labour that, as Boltanski and Chiapello argue, were incorporated into neoliberal capitalism’s normative ideal of the mobile, project-based worker, despite artists’ continuing structural exclusion from ordinary wage relations—make us perfect candidates to be dropped into and then evicted from countless empty commercial buildings, all at short notice.³² We might even say that the precarity internalised and normalised by ‘Structurally F-cked’ artworkers engaged in the inherently marginal activity of ‘professional’ artistic production is precisely what allows us to mesh so perfectly with conditions of endemic volatility characteristic of Glasgow’s crisis-subsumed, inner-city commercial property markets.³³ After all, what other ‘workers’ could be mobilised so easily in response to the threat of lost landlord revenue?

Viewed this way, Outer Spaces studio holders come to occupy the position of what Vishmidt calls ‘under-labourers’—workers who provide an external, supplementary and necessarily underacknowledged form of labour that contributes to the reproduction of capital. Workers, in this case, whose ‘work’ must vanish in order that ‘the work’ of reproducing the city’s teetering commercial property markets can appear.³⁴ It is this status as under-labourers that makes the work of artists, in this particular context, comparable to forms of domestic and care work that, as the arguments of 1970s Italian Marxist feminists observed, also fall outside of direct value production and organised wage labour. While the scale of the latter example obviously dwarfs what is happening with the new instrumentality of art, in both cases we encounter forms of labour that are exploited, without proper recognition, in order to facilitate, with varying degrees of directness or proximity, the reproduction of capital. We might also raise Alyssa Battistoni’s recent work on the ‘free gift’ here. This concept has its roots in political-economic thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is ordinarily used to describe the natural world’s contribution to human wealth. However, in addition to indicating the raw materials derived from plants and animals used in production and the harnessing of natural phenomena such as water, air and light in capitalist processes, Battistoni argues that the term can be expanded to include “kinds of human labor that can’t easily be organised by the wage and the boss, and that persist in seemingly anachronistic forms.”³⁵ Understood this way, one way to frame artistic labour within Outer Spaces is as a kind of free gift readily exploited by property capital in order to limit the impact of taxation on its capacity to reproduce itself during a sustained period of market disruption.

6. A Perennial Condition of Temporariness

Outer Spaces claims to be removing “the barrier of studio rental costs that often prevent artists and recent graduates from practicing and progressing their careers,” while “offering a unique environment for professional development, artistic research, studio practice and collaboration.”³⁶ It is certainly true that a rent-free studio can represent an extraordinary opportunity, particularly for new graduates and economically disadvantaged artists. Also true is the fact that for most artists a rent-free studio, however precarious or inappropriate, is better than no studio at all. It also needs to be made clear that Outer Spaces is transparent about the limitations of its offer, particularly the temporary nature of its studios and the short notice periods it gives to artists. Nonetheless, partial reciprocity and transparency do not mitigate the obvious problems with Outer Spaces, and a pronounced structural asymmetry remains at work in the charity’s meanwhile model, one in which an activity useful for the reproduction of capital is appropriated without being properly compensated and supported.

However valuable Outer Spaces’ free studios may be to artists in the short term, their temporary nature means they cannot provide a lasting answer to Glasgow’s studio crisis. Significantly, and perhaps surprisingly, Outer Spaces founder and director Shân Edwards makes this very point in a 2023 interview in Art Monthly. Reflecting on how austerity, Brexit and Covid have “hollowed out whole areas” in Scotland’s cities, Edwards acknowledges the limitations of meanwhile studio provision: “I don’t think temporary space is the answer for artists, ultimately. But this is an opportunity to seize now, because nobody knows what’s going to happen long-term.”³⁷ Despite being a model built upon exploiting short-term structural opportunities within urban space, three and a half years on from this interview, Outer Spaces only seems to be consolidating its position in the Scottish art world, taking on more studio buildings, partnering with major organisations, including the British Council, UNESCO, Creative Scotland, Glasgow School of Art and ECA, branching out into programming, commissioning, residencies, production support, professional development, awards and prizes, and even taking over culture magazine The Skinny. At what point, then, does Outer Spaces actually start to look more like a default long-term solution to the studio crisis, despite what its director says? More troublingly, might the charity’s runaway institutional success itself be impacting the prospects for developing the kind of long-term, affordable studio provision Scotland’s artists actually need? After all, by offering a ready-made solution, albeit one that, in the words of Mount Jupiter, normalises “a perennial condition of temporariness”, Outer Spaces seem to be taking the pressure off organisations such as Creative Scotland who might ordinarily be expected to intervene to resolve the crisis.³⁸
Given the substantial business rates savings apparently accruing to landlords and the income meanwhile studio provision appears to be generating for Outer Spaces, exposing artists to the kind of structural insecurity we have seen within the Outer Spaces network in Glasgow this year is wholly unacceptable. At a bare minimum, Outer Spaces should undertake a consultation with studio holders, past and present, so that a vastly improved set of contractual terms and working arrangements can be negotiated. Improvements might include tenancies guaranteed for years rather than months, much longer eviction notice periods, assurances regarding building suitability, proper staff support, better communications and the extension of logistical help during moves—particularly to the most vulnerable artists in the network.

However, reforming the model may not be enough. The speed and ease with which Outer Spaces has colonised Glasgow’s studio landscape demonstrates just how susceptible artists remain to the schemes and strategies of urbanised capital. Needless to say, leaving the provision of essential work infrastructure to an organisation whose model of valuation, as I experienced it, is at best structurally oblivious to and at worst actively dismissive of the conditions artistic production needs to actually thrive should be resisted. More broadly, the goal should be to disentangle the provision of essential workspace in Glasgow from the speculative property relations that make Outer Spaces’ studios so precarious. Because as long as artists are reliant on Outer Spaces for studios, artistic labour will continue to appear as a flattened-out cardboard figure to be cut up and reshaped at will as part of countless landed speculations—a fetish sprung from the garbled brain of fictive capital itself. We must instead try to encourage the development of workplaces that are insulated from the endless and tiresome machinations of property capital. Such an effort could find potent affinities with adjacent struggles against property speculation in Glasgow, particularly those around private-rental sector housing. Indeed, overcoming the tendency to mistake economic exceptionality for political exceptionality will be essential if we are to successfully agitate and organise for studios that support, rather than exploit, art’s peculiar economic status as “the antithesis of that which is the case,” whatever those spaces might look like in reality.

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Figs. 3–4 The former Marks and Spencer building
Fig. 5 The author, in front of an asbestos warning sticker in the former Marks and Spencer building.

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Fig. 6 Flooding in the toilets of the former Marks and Spencer building
Fig. 7 Works made during the author’s PhD and destroyed by a studio water ingress
Fig. 8 A large sculpture/architectural enclosure created in the author’s open-plan studio in Glasgow’s Broomielaw/International Financial Services District

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Fig. 9 A faux sculpture assembled from portraits of former Glasgow City Council leader Pat Lally improvised by the author in his Outer Spaces studio
Fig. 10 Sprinkler-system incident

Fig. 11 Art & Language and Emalia Mattia. An installation view of the two-person exhibition organised by the author in 2025
Fig. 12 Between Not Everything and Not Nothing. An installation view of the group video exhibition curated by Dora Budor with Ivory Tars and Broadside in 2025.

Notes

1. Outer Spaces, “Celebrating 5 Years of Supporting Scotland-Based Artists,” accessed October 21, 2026, https://outerspaces.org/news/5-years-of-outer-spaces. ↩
2. Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter, Outer Spaces? (#5),” Glasgow Art Map, April 24, 2026, accessed August 5, 2026, https://www.glasgowartmap.com/mount-jupiter-reports-5/. ↩
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 63, accessed September 3, 2026, https://tfreeman.net/resources/Phil-330/Cezanne%27s-Doubt.pdf. ↩
4. In 2024, Wasps increased studio rents by 16% for the second consecutive year, while also adding a new electricity surcharge. This led to widespread protests and the founding of the campaign group Save Our Studio. See Anita Chaudhuri, “‘My Studio Costs Half My Income’: Can British Art Survive Soaring Rents and Property Developers?,” The Guardian, June 24, 2024, accessed October 1, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/24/studio-costs-half-income-can-british-art-survive-soaring-rents-property-developers. ↩
5. While I have used Farquhar’s work as my way into this context, it’s important to acknowledge that this programme contained multiple other reflections on the tensions and dilemmas of trying to function within an Outer Spaces studio. For instance, Sick of It, a group exhibition organised in December 2023, presented a range of works that reflected on the gallery’s problematic context, including a work by Gallery Malmo, the name for collaborative artworks made by Christy and Horne, in which the thin aperture between two layers of glazing in the gallery space’s two windows was filled up with dirt so that only one third was free to let natural light into the space. This not only exacerbated the by then already charged context of illumination, it also offered a suffocating image of enclosure that resonated with the institutional context at hand. ↩
6. See, for example, an email circulated by Outer Spaces on the 20th of October, 2026. Titled ‘Celebrating 5 years of Outer Spaces’, the email contained positive personal testimony from a number of artists, including two prominent and successful Glasgow artists: Alberta Whittle and Luke Fowler. (Outer Spaces, “5 Years of Outer Spaces,” accessed October 20, 2026, https://outerspaces.org/news/5-years-of-outer-spaces). ↩
7. I am referring here, in particular, to a workshop and panel event organised by Emma Coffield and Gareth McMurchy in Glasgow in April 2026. Coffield is the principal investigator Creative Scotland-commissioned scoping report on meanwhile spaces in Scotland, which is due to be made public in November 2026. Alongside surveys with local authorities, site visits and interviews with key providers, the project included five workshops across Scotland. I attended the Glasgow workshop. What was noticeable was just how little support there was for Outer Spaces’s activities in Glasgow from participants, many of whom had recently experienced evictions. In particular, people – including myself – discussed the experience of gaining then losing spaces in terms of the language of loss and grief, while also explaining a range of problems with the buildings Outer Spaces were offering to artists in Glasgow. See here for more on this research project, which is due to be made public on the 9th of November, 2026. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/meanwhilescotland/ ↩
8. Emma Coffield et al., More Than Meanwhile Spaces II: Creative Enterprise/Action Zones—Exploring the Scope for Supporting Artist-Run Initiatives and Cultural Workspaces in North East England, feasibility report (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University, 2020), 9–10, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/meanwhilespace/library/MWS-II-web.pdf. ↩
9. Emma Bainbridge, “Glasgow Event to Help Listen Gallery Find Permanent Space,” Glasgow Times, April 11, 2026, accessed September 16, 2026, https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/26007241.glasgow-event-help-listen-gallery-find-permanent-space/; Marissa MacWhirter, “Inside Story: Scotland’s Grassroots Arts Scene Is Thriving but Fragile,” The Herald, April 22, 2026, accessed September 16, 2026, https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/25958674.inside-story-scotlands-grassroots-arts-scene-thriving-fragile/; Rachel Ashenden, “What’s Gone Wrong in the Glasgow Art Scene?,” ArtReview, May 13, 2026, accessed September 16, 2026, https://artreview.com/whats-gone-wrong-in-the-glasgow-art-scene-rachel-ashenden/. It’s worth also mentioning that more recently The Bell have been covering Outer Spaces, dedicating an article and podcast to the charity. See Beth Templeton and Evie Glen, “The Mysterious Charity Saving The Skinny,” The Bell, October 8, 2026, accessed October 8, 2026, https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/outer-spaces-the-skinny/ and The Bell. “Listen: The Tax Avoidance Scheme Propping Up Glasgow’s Artists.” The Bell, October 20, 2026. Podcast. Accessed October 20, 2026. https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/glasgow-bell-podcast-outer-spaces-the-skinny/. ↩
10. Neil Cooper, “Sudden Closure of Glasgow’s Theatre 118 Is a Tragedy,” The Herald, February 11, 2026, accessed August 5, 2026, https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/25844809.sudden-closure-glasgows-theatre-118-tragedy/. ↩
11. Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter, Outer Spaces? (#5),” Glasgow Art Map, April 24, 2026, accessed August 5, 2026, https://www.glasgowartmap.com/mount-jupiter-reports-5/. ↩
12. Charitable rates relief is fully-funded by the Scottish Government and discretionary top-ups are centrally funded. Revenue forgone does not therefore necessarily imply an equivalent loss to local authority budgets. ↩
13. Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter.” ↩
14. Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter.” ↩
15. It’s worth noting that Mount Jupiter considers it morally negligent for artists to take up studios in Outer Spaces buildings. Whether this is true or not is a debate for another time. My own opinion is that this is an issue of constrained resource dependence and that Outer Spaces and landlords, as well as failed legacy workspace providers and their funders, are the main problem here. ↩
16. Beth Templeton and Evie Glen, “The Mysterious Charity Saving The Skinny,” The Bell, October 8, 2026, accessed October 8, 2026, https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/outer-spaces-the-skinny/. ↩
17. Neil Gray, “Glasgow’s Merchant City: An Artist-Led Property Strategy,” Variant, no. 34 (Spring 2009): 14–21, https://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/mechantcity34.html. See also Gray, “The Tyranny of Rent,” Variant, no. 37 (Spring/Summer 2010): 37–43, https://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue37_38/V37rentyrany.pdf. ↩
18. Gray, “Glasgow’s Merchant City,” 14–21. ↩
19. Gray, “Glasgow’s Merchant City,” 14–21. ↩
20. For more on urban monopoly rents see David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture,” Socialist Register 38 (2002): 93–110, accessed August 18, 2026, https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5778/2674. ↩
21. For foundational statements of ‘creative class’ and ‘creative city’ thinking, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), accessed August 18, 2026, https://archive.org/details/riseofcreativecl00flor_1; and Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini, The Creative City (London: Demos, 1995), accessed August 18, 2026, https://www.demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/thecreativecity.pdf. ↩
22. Venda Louise Pollock, “Revisiting the Creative City: Culture and Regeneration in Post-Industrial Glasgow,” in Transforming Glasgow: Beyond the Post-Industrial City, ed. Keith Kintrea and Rebecca Madgin (Bristol: Policy Press, 2019), 239. ↩
23. Moya Lothian-McLean, “Glasgow Is Filled with Empty Offices. So Why Is There a Workspace Crisis?,” The Bell, October 23, 2024, accessed August 20, 2026, https://www.glasgowbell.co.uk/glasgow-is-filled-with-empty-offices-so-why-is-there-a-workspace-crisis/. ↩
24. Lothian-McLean, “Glasgow Is Filled with Empty Offices.” ↩
25. Jim Waterson, “The Snail Farm Don: Is This the Most Brazen Tax Avoidance Scheme of All Time?,” The Guardian, December 4, 2025, accessed August 3, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/04/the-long-read-snail-farm-tax-avoidance-scheme-terry-ball. ↩
26. Though not a problem for this study, the transformation of art into the means of mere occupancy, rather than being central to bold new forms of neoliberal urban experience, could be read as being symptomatic of a wider downgrading of art in Glasgow––its transformation from the jewel in the city’s monopoly rent crown to something of an anachronism undergoing the indignity of passive rundown. I am referring here, of course, to various controversies regarding contemporary art institutions in the city, including the closure of the CCA, the imposition of impossible rent hikes on the tenants of Trongate 103, and issues regarding the rebuild of Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building. ↩
27. Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 139. ↩
28. Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, 97 ↩
29. Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, X. ↩
30. Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, IX. ↩
31. Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, IX. ↩
32. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005). ↩
33. Industria, Structurally F–cked: An Inquiry into Artists’ Pay and Conditions in the Public Sector in Response to the Artist Leaks Data (a-n The Artists Information Company, 2023), https://static.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Structurally-F%E2%80%93cked.pdf. ↩
34. Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, 143. ↩
35. Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), 11. ↩
36. Outer Spaces, “About,” accessed September 30, 2026, https://outerspaces.org/about. ↩
37. Greg Thomas, “Outer Spaces,” Art Monthly, no. 466 (May 2023), accessed August 12, 2026, https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/outer-spaces-by-greg-thomas-may-2023. ↩
38. Mount Jupiter Reports, “Dear Mount Jupiter.” ↩