Is this Newcastle’s moment? Memory is fallible but it’s hard to think of any time like it in the last thirty years.

Only 1990 comes to mind. There were two extraordinary events that year: the Tyne International and Edge 90 [Art & Life in the Nineties]. As the title suggests, the first of these, curated by Declan McGonagle, took place mainly on the Quayside. I particularly remember two telling pieces down by the river, both of which drew attention to the commercial exploitation of the area that was just beginning to happen at the time. The first by Krzysztof Wodiczko was one of the artist’s trademark projections, an image of skeleton hands paddling their way through mounds of coins, on the side of the nightclub-cum-ferry moored under the main Tyne Bridge. The other by Paul Bradley consisted of just two words, ‘True North’, in big steel letters on the north wall of one of the then vacant nineteenth-century industrial buildings on the southern, Gateshead, side of the river. These were positioned in such a way that they were all but impossible to read except from across the river in Newcastle and this was important because it served as vivid reminder that power in Britain always tends to be located in the South. That is, it’s not in the north you will actually find true north; the south, particularly London, is where ideas about northernness always turn out to be generated and ratified.

However, the event that really made 1990 special was Edge: two or three delirious weeks of performances and installations in buildings and spaces along the Quayside, a part of Newcastle that at the time few knew about, let alone visited. All kinds of interesting artists were involved. Orlan, for instance, was there, starting her celebrated personal transformation project. There was a mesmerising performance by Marina Abramovic in All Saints with pythons – live pythons – slithering across the floor. I also remember a live version of Isaac Julien’s homoerotic film Looking for Langston in which some twenty or so performers did strange, troubling things beneath the Tyne Bridge, in the official rooms upstairs at the Guildhall or amongst the headstones in All Saint’s churchyard. In addition, the dark, low-ceilinged, labyrinthine interior of the now mostly burnt-down nineteenth-century bonded warehouses in Hanover Street (opposite the site of what is now the Copthorne Hotel) was the venue for a number of remarkable installations. Richard Wilson’s was especially neat: another timely snipe at the impending gentrification of the Quayside, in the form of one of those dinky little balconies that seemed to epitomise stylish loft living made out of ancient planks that appeared to have been taken from the warehouse floor. Indeed, one’s sense of what might be called imminent Slug and Lettuce-ization was what gave a special urgency to Edge. It made the dark and dingy Victorian office buildings of the Quayside suddenly seem rich in possibility in a way they never quite had before.

However, there was a down-side. When Edge was all over there was nothing much left behind. Which, of course, is not how it is with the various DIY artist-run initiatives that Tyneside has now. They aim to stay. I am thinking of the yearly VANE jamborees and the Vane gallery on Forth Banks that they eventually spawned, and Waygood, Globe, Workplace, Gallery North, Platform Projects, Star and Shadow cinema, the artist communities in Berwick and Allenheads and, yes, Novellus Castellum. Together these all seem to add up to something we’ve never had before in Newcastle and certainly didn’t have in 1990: an established, self-sustaining art scene.

Naturally, when people talk about contemporary art on Tyneside today, they tend to focus on the Baltic. And indeed, as one of the largest dedicated contemporary art spaces in the world, the Baltic is undoubtedly a wonderful asset. However, it is becoming clear that as with any major public gallery, say Tate Modern, it is under pressure to offer star names, tried and tested acts and a kind of ambience that will appeal to, or at least not put off, a mainly tourist audience. So there is definitely room for small shoe-string galleries and grassroots organisations as well, the advantage of such spaces being that they can offer the offbeat, the surprising and the transgressive and can take risks in a way that the Baltic can’t. Also, they don’t have to apologise for showing the work of young, locally based artists at the start of their careers. Yet such spaces in turn obviously have their own drawbacks. For instance, after the opening evening they tend to attract only small numbers and that can make the experience of visiting an exhibition at that stage seem somewhat forbidding.

However, maybe Novellus Castellum has an answer to that. Their inaugural shows seemed to demonstrate that it is possible to put on exhibitions that are every bit as edgy and interesting, as in touch with what’s happening in the international art world and as professional in terms of presentation as anything you come across elsewhere and yet still command an audience. The way that they did this was in part simply by confining the event to just one evening – the evening of the private view. This tactic seemed to allow them to recapture the excitement and bountifulness of 1990 - plus there was the added bonus that you felt you were experiencing something that might lead on to other good things in the future.

Paul Usherwood

Paul Usherwood is a History Art Lecturer at Northumbria University and writes for Art Monthly, UK.