CIRCA 117 | AUTUMN 2006 | ¤7.50 £5 US$12 | 25TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

ISSN 0263-9475 03> Circa: Around, about and very much still there Anne Carlisle | Splish splash: Baths-time

fun Brian Kennedy | An interview with Grant Kester Tim Stott | On sound Mark Garry |

News | Reviews | Project: Niall de Buitléar | c .

c . ISSN 0263-9475 Contemporary visual culture in circa Ireland

______2 Editor Subscriptions Peter FitzGerald For our subscription rates please see bookmark, or visit International editorial www.recirca.com where you can adviser subscribe online. Elizabeth Aders Circa is concerned with visual ______culture. We welcome comment, Board proposals and written Peter Monaghan (Chair), Tara contributions. Please contact Byrne, Mark Garry, Graham the editor for more details, Gosling, Darragh Hogan, Isabel or consult our website Nolan, John Nolan www.recirca.com Opinions ______expressed in this magazine Contributing editors are those of the authors, not Alannah Hopkin (Cork), Luke necessarily those of the Board. Gibbons (Dublin), Brian Circa is an equal-opportunities Kennedy (Belfast), Shirley employer. Copyright © Circa MacWilliam (England) 2006

______Editorial advisory panel Contacts (this issue) Suzanna Chan, Circa Peter FitzGerald, Georgina 43 / 44 Temple Bar Jackson, Isabel Nolan, Dublin 2 Alan Phelan, Declan Sheehan. Ireland The rules and procedures of tel / fax (+353 1) 679 7388 the panel can be accessed [email protected] at recirca.com/about www.recirca.com ______Assistants Jessica Foley, Hélène Cauchy, Sandra Ruffer, Rebecca Beynon, Madeleine Jarling ______Legal advice Justin Lennon, JJ Lennon ______Solicitors ______Designed/produced at Peter Maybury Studio c www.softsleeper.com

Printed by W & G Baird Ltd, Belfast ______

Printed on 115gsm + 250gsm Arctic the Volume CIRCA 117 AUTUMN 2006

3 Editorial 22 | Update 24 | Letters 27 | Obituaries 29 | Features 32 | Reviews 57 | Project 105 |

(front cover) David Sandlin Nukular Family Silk-Screened light box 24 x 20 x 6 inches Edition 2/5 2005 © David Sandlin; courtesy Butler Gallery, Kilkenny

gwen o’dowd waterbased 19 october - 18 november 2006

Hillsboro Fine Art 3 Anne's Lane South Anne Street Dublin 2 Ireland Telephone: +353.1.6777905 www.hillsborofineart.com

national irish visual arts library

Public Research Library of 20th Century and Contemporary Irish Art & Design

National College of Art & Design 100 Thomas Street Dublin 8 T: 01 636 4347 [email protected] www.ncad.ie/nival

22 Editorialc c . Peter FitzGerald was best, and to obviate, subvert or otherwise avoid what was worst. Understanding in Ireland of art and visual culture has gained in sophistication, self-questioning and self-awareness over the decades; these changes owe some debt of gratitude to the vision of the founders of Circa.

That all is not rosy, however, has been all too clear with the controversy surrounding the closure, and speedy re-opening, of the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast. We already dealt with this topic in the last issue, but its seriousness seems to warrant a return visit. For this issue, Brian Kennedy has talked to the key players. The dust has yet to settle; a tactical battle is taking place over the ownership of contemporary art in Belfast and in Northern Ireland more generally. On one It’s a rare thing, thank goodness, for the Update section side there is the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the 23 in Circa to be followed by two obituaries. We have lost two important artists in the last few months. One, John money- and key-holders. On the other side… there are Kelly, will be best known as a printmaker, initiator and many other sides. The outrage is still there among many, teacher of the highest quality. The other, Noel Sheridan, but there is also great resilience and multiple visions for will be known for just about everything. Noel’s case is the future. unusual: although his influence in Ireland was enormous, This issue of Circa also carries ‘normal business’. he died in Australia, and as a result there has been no Mark Garry completes his exploration of the art / music/ public ceremony as yet to mark his passing. Not least for sound-art trichotomy. He draws together a number of this reason, it seemed better to ask many people to important practitioners and gently grills them on their contribute very short glimpses into Noel’s life, rather work. And Tim Stott tackles Grant Kester, a key t than attempt a single obituary. Apologies to those who heorist on the changes that art – or at least art theory – may feel left out – there was an endless list of possible is undergoing at present. names. And there’s lots more: ads from the key art spaces The first issue of is dated November/ December Circa around Ireland, or relating to important opportunities, 1981. In the current issue, Anne Carlisle gives a the layout, the images, the reviews, the writing, and a fascinating – at least if you happen to be a editor – Circa simple, impishly Derridean art project. Enjoy! insight into how the magazine started. It’s been an eventful twenty-five years. The early feel of the magazine was more oppositional than it is now. Reasons for that are many, and would probably include the Troubles, principally in Northern Ireland; rurality, emigration and relative poverty in the Republic of Ireland; underdeveloped arts infrastructure, unemployment and related job-creation schemes… What we have now, a quarter of a century on, is an abatement of the Troubles, prosperity, expanding infrastructure, near-full employ- ment, high cost of living, a lessening of ‘identity politics’, and a dispersal of oppositional energy – this latter being a global phenomenon not restricted to the arts.

The visual arts here now seem to be characterised, on both sides of the border, by a critical mass sufficient to sustain a belief in the possibility of making meaningful art. ‘Critical mass’ is normally a scientific term. In the present context its double meaning usefully reflects the desire of the founders of Circa to have a magazine that would analyse the conditions under which art and visual culture were created, shown and understood. It was simultaneously a desire to preserve and promote what c . Update

24 OBG reopens handling of events, on Byrne/ Fitzpatrick for Ballagh case forces gov- The controversial closing of 8 June there was one-off Venice ernment hand the Ormeau Baths Gallery show by Jones of her piece Mike Fitzpatrick of the €5,000 compensation has (OBG), Belfast, in February Hotel Moscow – in a van Limerick City Gallery of Art been awarded to artist of this year been followed outside OBG. has been chosen as the Robert Ballagh after the this June by its almost-as- Republic of Ireland's com- Republic of Ireland was late controversial re-opening. As yet, there is no missioner for the Venice in implementing droit de It is being run, temporarily, statement from ACNI on Biennale 2007. Fitzpatrick suite, an EU directive on by the Arts Council of the long-term management has in turn selected Gerard the right of artists to Northern Ireland (ACNI). of OBG. It is certain that Byrne as the Republic's receive royalties from the The first exhibition was ACNI does not itself want sole representative at the secondary market. The Collectors’ collections, an to run the gallery. It also Biennale (Byrne was the deadline for implementa- outing for the major Bank seems that the Royal Ulster subject of a feature-length tion of the directive was of Ireland and Northern Academy (RUA), long analysis by Maeve Connolly 1 January this year. A stop- Ireland Civil Service tipped as the new lease- in issue 113 of Circa). gap measure was finally collections of modern Irish holders, will not be fulfilling put in place five-and-half and international art. that role. It seems fairly Meanwhile, the Arts months late. Visual Artists The exhibition list then likely that the RUA will, Council of Northern Ireland Ireland (VAI) and the Irish runs: Magnum Ireland, the if it wishes, be allowed to has advertised for a curator Visual Artists Rights Royal Ulster Academy, and hold its annual show there, or curators for Northern Organisation (IVARO) are Work [w3:k]; the last of as part of any future Ireland’s second participa- underwhelmed: the terms these is reviewed by Fergal arrangement. tion in Venice; interviews under which artists will Gaynor, in its Lewis were due to be held on receive royalties are the Glucksman incarnation, in Correction 29 August. least favourable the govern- this issue. In issue 115, on page 30, ment could get away with we stated that a project Call for projects implementing. Just before OBG’s return, called Din, which took If you have an idea for a the self-styled ‘OBG-in- place in Arthouse in 2002, project for this magazine – ‘Primary legislation’ on exile’ offered a one-evening was organised by Slavek such as the one printed in droit de suite is promised event. When OBG folded, Kwi; in fact it was organ- this issue – please contact for the future, and the one of the casualties was ised by Sarah Pierce. the editor. The proposed terms may be more Finola Jones' forthcoming project should be specific favourable (given the show, The forward lengthen- Stop press to Circa and complement exceptional delay in bringing ing of the past. This was a ACNI is to appoint a new the nature and constraints in the current measures, loss to Belfast, but also to OBG board via public of the medium (ie, the mag- don’t hold your breath). the artist – artists generally advertisement. At least azine). Your proposal can be Nonetheless, if you have an put an enormous amount two of the board members as rough as you like. artwork that (re)sells for of work into a show of this will be practising artists. over €3,000, be sure to seek sort, and OBG's closure Recruitment will your cut. took no account of this fact. commence in September. With wide support from those opposing ACNI’s Simply the best • The Irish American Arts • Fiona Kearney, Director of localised focus. This, the 25 • This year's winner of the Awards were launched in the Lewis Glucksman fourth annual competition, RDS Taylor Art Award is January of this year to Gallery in Cork, is the first saw 278 submissions from Liam Ryan from Co. Cork, recognise, encourage and recipient of the Jerome 166 artists. The competition a student at the National celebrate contemporary Hynes Fellowship, so is open only to artists from College of Art and Design visual art being produced named in 2006 to honour or based in County (NCAD), Dublin. His paint- by artists of the 80-million- the memory of the late Wicklow. ings Freedom is frightening, strong Irish diaspora world- Jerome Hynes, former Generation and corruption wide. The names of those Deputy Chair of the Arts • Keith Wilson is the winner and Exorcising ghosts, won artists who are shortlisted Council and Chief of the most valuable prize him the grand prize of for the Awards in the under- Executive of Wexford Opera at this year’s RHA Annual €18,000, the largest Taylor 35 category are Katie Festival. Kearney is one of Exhibition. The Hennessey Art Award in its 127-year Holten, New York; Suzanne the twenty-five potential Craig Scholarship, which history. Other prizes given Mooney, Dublin; Katrina leaders of the arts specially celebrates talent in the in the RDS Student Art Moorhead, Houston; Niamh selected by the Clore under-35 age group, Awards included the R.C. O'Malley, Dublin; and Paul Leadership Programme. secured him a bursary of Lewis-Crosby Award for Rowley, New York. Those The total value of the €12,000 for his painting Painting of €3,000, which shortlisted in the over-35 Fellowship is in the region Returning. Two other artists was awarded to David category are Meg of €71,000. Kearney's year- on the shortlist for this O'Kane (NCAD); the RDS Cranston, Los Angeles; long schedule of work will award, David O' Kane – James White Arts Award of Maud Cotter, Co. Cork; commence in September. also mentioned above in €3,000 to Michelle Brown Maureen Gallace, New York; She will participate in relation to the RDS Awards (NCAD); the RDS Mary Kelly, Co. Wicklow; research and training, – and Gillian Lawlor, Printmaking Award of Tom Molloy, Kilfenora. An and receive professional both received €2,500 as €3,000 to Shane O’Reilly, a awards ceremony is to be development through men- runners-up. student at Athlone Institute held in Manhattan in toring and tuition. She will of Technology; the Freyer September this year. The also be seconded to an Stop press Award of €1,500 to Pamela judging panel for the organisation where she will Jeanette Doyle – whose Dunne, a student at Awards are Declan undertake the management recent Broadstone and Limerick School of Art and McGonagle (Chairman), of a high-level project. Ballymun shows are Design; and the Henry Colm Ó Briain, Cheryl reviewed by Mark O'Kelly Higgins Travelling Donegan, Vincent Ferguson, • Co. Wicklow-based artist in the last issue of Circa – Scholarship of €1,300 to Emily-Jane Kirwan, Alice Mary Kelly – just men- is the recipient of this Priscilla Fernandes Maher and Yvonne Scott. tioned above in relation to year's Location One (NCAD). the Irish American Arts Fellowship, which provides Awards – is the winner of for a ten-month residency this year's Mermaid at Location One in Greenstar Open Exhibition SoHo, New York. Doyle gets Competition. The prize of a studio space there, and €5,000 is one of the better- other assistance to a total remunerated in Ireland, value of around €40,000. and is notable for its very context galleries

2 – 30 Sept 11 Nov – 9 Dec Rubber Plans Galleries 1 & 2 Resident 4 Gallery 1 a film by Alex Cheung Lilliput Theatre & Laura Saenz of The Dancing Tree; Christine Mackey Greysteel Womens Activity Group & Tina catalogue available: incontext#20 Christine McLaughlin; Ballylaw Women’s Group & Martha Facilitated by Tracy Cullen Mackey Lewtas; Wheelworks Respect project and workshops (tbc); Maybrook Adult Training Centre & Tracy Cullen Film screenings run from Gallery 2 Live/Archive: North West 7 Oct and run until 4 Nov 7 Oct – 4 Nov Visual Arts Archive Gallery 1 A film commissioned by Nuala Herron New Paintings 16 Dec – 20 Jan Context Galleries to mark Galleries 1 & 2 the Autumn Moon Festival Gallery 2 Miriam de Burca An Autumn Moon Festival Film Supported by the ACNI & 16 Dec – 20 Jan Community Relations Council Public Art Project Sara Greavu Promoting Inter-Culturalism catalogue available: incontext#21 Sara Greavu Programme

incontext is free, please send SAE for a copy

context galleries, the playhouse, 5-7 artillery st, derry BT486R supported by t +44 287 137 3538 f +44 287 126 1884 e [email protected] http://contextgalleries.blogspot.com/ c . Letters approaches to the AICA events were archive developing of all commissioning of probably the closest to the Critical Voices events contemporary music, the niche of art criticism, which includes texts and the outcome of which as in the latter the audi- video, audio documenta- was Ben Dywer’s ence was made up of tion, recordings of radio exceptional composition, many AICA members – shows, etc, and hopefully Voces criticas, for the but this surely misses some money will be renowned classical/ the point that throughout available to create an contemporary guitarist Critical Voices there were experimental publication. Graig Ogdon. (the score continual discussions is available to purchase and presentations on the Elkins shows how deep from the Contemporary functions and role of crit- his conservatism really Music Centre for €7.50) icism/ critical reflection. is as he dismisses “the contemporary art market Next, I am baffled as to As to his belief that there that produces unread the basis on which Elkins is no paper trail, again ephemera” in favour of Dear Editor, thinks there has been no I feel Elkins is using very 27 Please allow me to make “scholarly published attention to history or narrow, conservative a few comments on essays” of the academic historical understanding indicators to assess James Elkins’ article in market. Both markets the last issue of Circa, as in Critical Voices, Critical Voices. He writes have quality and dross a former curator of because he clearly has that there were no (Peter Plagens or Dave Critical Voices. not taken into account published scholarly Hickey, who visited with the 2003 programme, essays. That may be so, Critical Voices 1 and 2, Firstly, Critical Voices, which had speakers like but published scholarly would take a very as it widely understood, William A Christian on research was presented different reading of the is not an initiative on art Visual culture and visions live to Irish audiences for role of an art critic to criticism, but rather a in Spain pre WW 2, Art the first time, and in a Elkins), but then poorly sponsored visitors and Spiegelman on his own manner that encouraged informed opinions are events programme that work and graphic art in many audience members fine with me except when seeks to modestly the first decades of the to buy particular Circa publishes them support critical debate last century, Abigail publications, for example without correction, as it and critical interaction in Solomon-Godeau on Zoë the writings of Ralph lowers the standard of partnership with artists, Leonard’s archive work/ Rugoff, William A the publication. critics, arts companies, fiction (remember that Christian, Abigail etc, across all art forms Peter! you were President Solomon Godeau, etc. Once again, I am really and across the whole of AICA), Sarat Maharaj In partnership with the surprised that, having island. The programme on various artists from Critical Reflection been involved yourself started in 2001 and is the sixties and their Bursary of the Arts in the Critical Voices now in its third term relationship to today. Council, Critical Voices 2 events of Andrea Fraser under a different curator. Now I could go on with a supported the work of and Paul Chan’s visit in I can only really speak least four other speakers two critics, Regina 2001, and the Dorothy for 2003, but information who addressed historical Gleeson and Lucy Cotter, Walker Memorial Lecture is available about 2001, issues in theatre, music, whose work has in 2003, you allowed and of course the current and dance, with some appeared in Circa and Elkins’ comments to programme is ongoing. very noteworthy Third text, both stand unedited. Critical Voices runs on academics including periodicals of record a very meagre budget Robert Levin from Yale and scholarship. Critical Best wishes, and would never succeed and Susan Bennett from Voices 2 also supported a Brian Hand without the co-sponsor- University of Calgary. new publication on dance ing of events by host criticism and theory, but (response overleaf) organisations. Rather Elkins is partially right in Critical Voices’ input was than stopping at art that there were no only in commissioning criticism, its reach is specific events on the texts; the overall budget broader and deeper, subject of art criticism in for the book was to be even extending into a narrowly defined sense sourced elsewhere. There co-sponsoring new – the Sarat Maharaj and is, however, an extensive Dear Editor, I thank Brian Hand for his letter, which let me know about some speakers in Critical Voices that I hadn't known about; but I suppose I'd want to persist with my point. If someone – a young artist, for example – were to want to find out what's been said and thought about art criticism in Ireland in the last few years, she'd have very 28 little to go on. This will make me sound like quite the curmudgeon, but there are plenty of venues around the world where well-known speakers come to talk. Lectures like those really are ephemera: what is needed is a literature that assesses the speakers, compares them, takes a stand, defines a perspective.

Peter Plagens, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Dave Hickey, and Sarat Maharaj are all contributors to a book I am editing, based on a conference I held in Ballyvaughan. It'll be called States of art criticism. I'd invite Brian to have a look at it when it appears, and then draw conclusions about conservatism.

Best wishes, James Elkins c . Obituary: John Kelly 1932 – 2006

John Kelly was born in Mountjoy Department of the National College of Square in the 1930s when ‘inner city’ Art and Design, and a co-founder of conditions still resembled those in the Black Church Studios. He devoted Seán O’Casey’s plays. Like O’Casey, much energy to reforms in the RHA he had a natural dramatic sense that and the revival of its art school. contemplated this neglect and dereliction with the exactitude of John Kelly was never short on pluck, as feeling proper to a poet. Verse from his career testifies, and in the two and his teens evokes the sad mysteries of a half years he survived an illness northside streets and the ruined lives scheduled, according to the medical of some of their more unfortunate profession, to kill him in a week, he denizens. Its language is rich in visual produced some of the most remarkable suggestion. Efforts to give plastic works of his life. These extraordinary representation to these inner visions testimonies to courage and defiance led him to enrol in the National College will outlive much that is more highly 29 of Art as a night student. He had acclaimed to-day and, along with a begun his adult life apprenticed to the life’s production of paintings and trade of painter and decorator and prints, should ensure John Kelly an brought all the skills acquired to his honoured place in histories of art. later profession as an artist. This gave John a unique place in the history of John remained faithful to his northside contemporary art, where his immense roots and never lived more than a mile knowledge and technical grasp made from his birthplace throughout his life. him one of the ablest practitioners and He died at his home off Berkeley Road, teachers of graphic media in the world. survived by his distinguished wife, Mairéad, and six delightful daughters. In the 1960s he wrote two plays, produced in the Gate Theatre by the Michael Kane late John Molloy. They were intensely pictorial and compassionate meditations on the same northside milieu that had informed his early verse.

John Kelly’s first exhibition, in 1957, was in the Hendricks Gallery in Stephen’s Green, one of the few serious commercial galleries in the city at the time. His paintings were raw, passionate expressions of a deeply humane spirituality deriving from his personal vision and exposure to the work of Rouault and Emil Nolde.

During the following years, John’s friendships and alliances in the art world, with such figures as James McKenna, John Behan, Joseph O’Connor, Brian Bourke and Charles Cullen, would place him centrally in the movement that led to the formation of the Independent Artists, the Graphic Studio, the Project Arts Centre and an efflorescence of modernist figuration in painting and sculpture that predated ‘New Expressionism’ on the Continent by twenty years. He was a key figure in the development of the Print c . Obituary: Noel Sheridan 1936 – 2006

Noel Sheridan was a charismatic wit and lyric he would then gather, pull Noel Sheridan was always a pleasure man who had a huge passion and the drawstring and, neat as you like, to meet and be with. A very funny man, commitment to the arts. He was a rest it on your lap. He was a charis- of great charm, wit and insight. gifted artist and actor, and later a matic old hand and master conjuror. A wonderful player on the cultural popular and respected educator and I would always think, “How did he stage who moved effortlessly from administrator who championed the do that?” Conor Kelly, artist and continent to continent, bringing his National College of Art and Design. composer based in London considerable experience and insatiable He was honoured and respected for his appetite to the various leading roles work abroad, particularly in Australia. Circa offered fifty words to say that he played out as artist, actor, As a man, Noel will be remembered for something about Noel Sheridan. Director and wonderful human being. his humour and his sometimes blunt Rather than list off a set of adjectives So sorely missed and loved by many, opinions, but above all for his honesty and compose some sincere platitudes, Noel Sheridan, RIP. Michael O’Dea, and integrity. An Taoiseach Bertie suffice to say I'm still figuring out his artist and lecturer, NCAD Ahern TD immensity. He is missed. Patrick Murphy, Director, RHA and 30 It was a pleasure to work with Noel. Curator, Noel Sheridan's Survey A painter, his work in education was Exhibition, RHA, 2001 Noel's approach to Industrial Relations firmly based on his personal artistic and benchmarking at NCAD was in a experience; generous to friend and foe First and last impressions (1976 – civil-service-free zone. “Man, I'm havin' alike,he used performance as a tool 2006): nobility of gesture, burning to go in disguise on my way in in the of engagement with academic desire to help heave all who cared to mornin'. These guys keep ambushing council, the HEA and the students. listen beyond the known; though me on the stairs on the way to the Often, when the demands of knowing this an impossibility office; they just want the bread.” bureaucracy and common justice obstinately and exquisitely integrating (Noel's introductory statement at a collided, he ensured that common it into the doing of the thing itself, union/ management meeting to justice prevailed. My single most referring always to the countless negotiate overtime rates.) compelling memory is of him joyfully micro-spaces in between as the loving Joan Fowler, lecturer, NCAD greeting a long-forgotten primary- macro-space beyond. Domenico de school fellow student (Christy D), then Clario, head of school of contempo- When visiting curators, I would take held prisoner, on the E 1 landing in the rary arts, Edith Cowan University the opportunity to see inside their maximum security wing of Portlaoise office, check the wall planner and get Prison – two middle-aged men recall- The appointment in 1980 of Noel information and gain insight into their ing their school days.They could have Sheridan, painter, performance and working process. When I entered been anywhere. Brian Maguire, Head installation artist, as Director, placed Noel’s office in the Perth Institute of of Fine Art, NCAD NCAD in an entirely contemporary Contemporary Art there was no wall context. A good administrator and chart, just an enormous blackboard Before Noel departed for Australia, communicator, whether reading with energetic chalk marks, words, he gave me a battered old suitcase Beckett’s Krapp’s last tape on thoughts, drawings, diagrams, filled with his own books about music. Australian radio or taking a student scribbles, smudges and erasures. Typical of Noel, this was both a through a difficult problem. Formidable It was a glorious graphic glimpse into generous passing on of knowledge and in defence of creativity over the extraordinary, complex, brilliant a celebration of the good things in life. bureaucracy. The humour of Dublin, and entertaining mind of the man. A sweet, wise, cool, hip, talented, brave New York and Australia combined is John Carson, Head of the School of and inspirational man. John Kelly, irreplaceable. And the loss of a very Art, Carnegie Mellon University writer and broadcaster real friend. Campbell Bruce, former head of Fine Art, NCAD I was privileged to share some of A nutshell phrase or two is an Noel's latter months at NCAD, when impossible container for all the levels To Bexley-on-Sea for Noel's last I was engaged to work with him and on which Noel affected our lives – performance. Out of season, stormy a remarkable group of supporters to but on “the bumpy road through life,” and surreal English south coast. Ian set out a vision of what NCAD might with Noel as company as a friend and Breakwell is dead. A small group of become, all in a very compressed colleague, or travelling abroad, the good friends. An intense, sad, rich, timeframe. Wit, irony, insight, situation was always enhanced. A rare warm, introspective, funny, questioning innocence, scepticism, and most of all person. Jacquline Stanley, artist event of art/ theatre brings a kind of optimism and passion, combined to closure, a wheel nearing full circle. make the lances he tilted yet again at When Noel was inspired, he would Edward Murphy, Senior Librarian, bureaucratic windmills. Beir Bua is whip up ideas in front of your face like NCAD Beannacht. a riot of free music. All the knowledge, Sean O'Laoire, Architect I first met Noel in his studio about forty We immediately inspired one another, as an unofficial ambassador for Ireland years ago, and at that time he was hopefully for the benefit of the College. in the arts; his practice will be very working on at least four paintings at I was inspired by him, because he was hard to equal. the same time, darting from one to unique, dedicated, honest and admired Barbara Dawson, Director, Dublin the other and talking non-stop about by the Board, the staff and the most City Gallery The Hugh Lane Australian and American art. I was important group in the College, the dumfounded by his energy and students. He was the most important As CEO of the Higher Education enormous intellect. This encounter was communicator I ever met. He worked Authority, I had considerable business more like a performance. Many years tirelessly for the College and students, with Noel over the twenty years he was later, Noel arrived back in Dublin to and they responded with respect and Director of NCAD. This very honourable apply for the post of Director of NCAD. affection. He was his own man – he man showed a passion for education in Noel had no real information regarding was every man’s man. art; he cared for his students and the Irish art education, but in the space of Charlie Hennessy, ex-Chair, NCAD neighbouring communities as he one day we brainstormed the structure pressed the case for the College. of the college, etc; the next day I drove My last memory of Noel was him John Hayden, former CEO of the HEA him to the interview and the rest is sitting on his front verandah in the history. Australian winter sun wearing Noel had great skills with real finesse, Brian King, Head of Sculpture, NCAD wrap-round sunglasses, looking rather a sparkle, an analytical ability and 31 cool. He was chain-smoking and his flippancy, yes, but with intense magic. Wouldn't it be an appropriate tribute voice was a shade deeper than normal. An entertainer, the funniest jokes, to Noel if Government were to provide His animated conversation ranged always stories, always a different the resources to realise the Master from Philip Guston to Francis Bacon angle, the quintessential performer, Plan for the Thomas Street site which and Matthew Barney. We were yet the most revealing moments and he, Ken Langan and Sean O'Laoire, planning the next stage for his insights, a diamond. See ya Noel. Architect – among others – performance The head. Noel was Jesus, you played a blinder. articulated? I very much enjoyed making and talking art right to the end. Oliver Whelan, artist and lecturer, Noel's company when we met; it is a David Carson, Fremantle NCAD poorer world for his passing. Danny O'Hare, former President of DCU The initiators of the Experimental Art … Inspirational, funny, warm, creative, Foundation did not expect that it would idealistic, humane, exasperating, Noel to a few of us: “Every time I hear become one of the legendary sites of kind, expansive, sharp, quixotic, someone say ‘That’s not art!’ I reach art in Australia. But then, we did not enthusiastic, perceptive, grounded, for my gun.” Immensely positive, Noel expect that Noel would come to irascible, inventive, big-hearted, was always up for negating a negation. Adelaide and stamp his mind on it. mercurial, exciting, charming and Peter FitzGerald, Circa That was the sort of luck that happens much loved… Niamh O'Sullivan, only once in a generation or – more Professor of Visual Culture, NCAD The classic cloverleaf, they say, allows likely – never. nonstop access between two busy Donald Brook, art critic, theorist and I have more to say… roads. In Noel Sheridan those two initiating member of EAF, Adelaide Brian O’Doherty/ Patrick Ireland, roads were art and life. And like his artist and writer dazzling talk, if you missed the first There are so many fond memories of ramp, you just took three loops in a row Noel. He had style and his passion to get back on track. Hat, Wyatt Earp for NCAD inspired him to pursue a moustache and tailcoats flying, is how wide canvas and a very large agenda. I’ll remember him. And the nicotiney He had an insatiable appetite for the laughter. See you at the Oscars, Noel! new and a great interest in what stu- George Alexander, Co-ordinator, dents and staff were working on. Noel Contemporary Programs, Art Gallery was a uniquely exciting experience. of New South Wales Ken Langan, Registrar, NCAD

There are happenings in life that one is Noel Sheridan was an illuminate whose so grateful to experience. One for me work is provocative, enlightening, and was meeting and working with Noel often humorous. He is unforgettable. Sheridan. I knew of this remarkable He lit up the room, the company, the artist before I ever met him, and then space with a shrewd, perceptive and we, as strangers, became Director of entirely original discourse, which was, NCAD and Chairman of the Board for me, often more fully appreciated respectively. He was the incumbent after the event. He is a great loss to us Director, I was the new Chairman. as an artist and as a personality, and 3238

3339 Features c . 33 Circa: Around, about and very much still there Anne Carlisle 34 | Splish splash: Baths-time fun Brian Kennedy 38 | An interview with Grant Kester Tim Stott 44 | On sound Mark Garry 48 |

(background)

Circa covers c . issues 1 – 117 1981 – 2006 c . Anne Carlisle

34 Circa: Around, about and very much still therec should influence early editions of Circa. The debates emerging at that time argued for the need to examine art production within the context of sociopolitical realties and to investigate the relationship of art and artists to audiences both within and outside the conventional gallery space. It was against this backdrop that ARE was inspired to send out a general invitation to the artistic community in Northern Ireland to attend a meeting to establish an artists’ collective. Little did we realise that over one hundred artists would turn up to give the idea credence and to underline the fact that artists had something to say and they wanted to say it now. At that first meeting in May 1981 the Artists’ Collective of Northern Ireland was established and laid out its ‘manifesto’, which included amongst other things an intention to actively and critically comment on a range of financial and policy decisions affecting the arts in the 35 region. This was coupled with a strong desire to enhance the artistic environment through the establishment of practitioner networks, studio and workshop facilities, alongside the aim of developing a wider-ranging cultural discourse, which it was generally agreed was undernourished and lacking in focus, but which it was believed could be remedied by publishing an art magazine with a critical edge. It was the prospect of generating dialogue and taking more control of the visual art discourse which, perhaps more than any other aspect of the Artists’ Collective initially inspired the group’s imagination. As Chris Coppock and I recollected in an article in Circa’s fiftieth edition,

When the seed of a visual art magazine was first sown, Twenty-five years is a long time in the life of a optimism fuelled by collective energy signalled that change contemporary magazine and Circa has beat the odds and within the visual arts was possible. Not radical change outlasted many of its counterparts and outmanoeuvred perhaps, but rather a belief that if a unionised visual art most of its critics, not least by simply continuing to exist, lobby discussed ideas rationally and constructively, but also by being prepared to be fundamentally the climate for the visual arts could be altered to create evolutionary, adaptable and at times cast entirely in its more democratic structures. In turn this would cater for a own mould. The history and process by which Circa growing body of younger artists, who up until this point came into existence is a lesson for anyone interested in were largely ignored and forced to work in isolation, or embarking upon a similar venture, as it explains how the destined to leave the country in pursuit of better prospects combination of extreme naïvety and a high degree of elsewhere. artistic urgency can propel the most unlikely products into existence even in the most seemingly unpromising At the time it all seemed terribly straightforward, except contexts. When I briefly recount its origins, you could be for the fact that collectively we had little experience of forgiven for thinking that Circa’s parentage was located the world of publishing, and when the meeting dispersed somewhere in Berlin circa 1970, because Circa was the we quickly realised that those who organise meetings brainchild of the Artist’s Collective of Northern Ireland, usually discover after the noise has died down that most which in turn was the offspring of Art & Research of the actions are upon them, and so it was twenty-five Exchange (ARE), which was itself an offshoot of the years ago. In the cold light of the morning, we reflected Free International University, which had originated as that here we were now committed to publishing a a concept from amongst others the German artist cultural journal, and although we could enjoy the Joseph Beuys. With this type of parentage, it is therefore expressions of moral support from the not inconsiderable perhaps not surprising that ARE’s agenda, which was sized artistic community, the reality was we had little informed by the rigours of late modernism and the publishing experience, no technical resources, no stable of polemics of conceptualism and socially engaged art established writers, and absolutely no financial backing. Despite these initial obstacles, the first edition of Circa and misconceptions about perceived differences was produced and launched as a bi-monthly publication between these artistic communities, which in those days five months later at the Ulster Museum. I have no doubt, tended to represent them as two distinct cultures. given the circumstances, that the first edition would not Pre-Circa these conceptions were often embodied in a have been achieved except for the enthusiasm of its first largely rural south, whose gallery-attuned artists were editorial panel consisting of eleven individuals. However, supposed to have a special affinity to the land, and a although the membership of the Artists’ Collective problematic north whose artists were overtly influenced continued to swell to around one hundred and fifty by politics and alternative artistic contexts. In fact, both members – and to gain its own separate momentum in of these paradigms had truths and untruths embodied its role of representing a broad spectrum of the visual within them. However, it was agreed that imploding into arts from artists, educationalists, administrators and such simplicity would not be helpful in the endeavour to curators – the editorial panel of Circa had shrunk to four carve out a space that liberated a wider set of concerns. by the end of the first year. In retrospect, this may have It is ironic that to create such a space, early Circa been because at times it felt like extremely hard work, focused in detail upon and attempted to disaggregate and a large commitment without the necessary some of these binary constructs with the objective of resources. But as sales and advertising revenue grew moving the discourse on. However, it is also possible in 36 and the chapters of Circa unfolded, it was on reflection the eyes of some that this process may have served not probably both “the best of times and the worst of times,” to dismantle but to compound the differences. which variously felt exciting, hectic, exhilarating, relentless, but ultimately satisfying when another issue Right from the start, Circa had from time to time to emerged. As most publishers will agree, there is no defend its position as an independent publication. There feeling to compare with seeing a new issue for the first were members of the Artists’ Collective and the wider time and that experience of checking to see if it is artistic community who felt it should be their voice-piece perfect, or as near perfect as you hoped it would be (a licence to print), and there were advertisers who felt when you lovingly ‘put it to bed’. In this sense, from the buying advertising space should lead to editorial space moment Circa was born, the lesson about the power of (a licence to punt). However, Circa was deliberately and the printed word was apparent, which is that however sometimes irritatingly independent and nonaligned to speculative ideas may be, once they are forged and the point that in the early issues it consciously decided hammered into published form, hopefully something never to cover/ review the published/ exhibited work of magical begins to happen (which is why e-forms of its editors/ production team in order that it could not be communication have not destroyed or replaced the accused of any form of self-publishing/ promotion. Given potency or desirability of the journal or the book). that most of the core team were artists, this may have seemed self-sacrificing, but it was a necessary stage in Twenty-five years on, it is gratifying to see that Circa its evolution and I doubt, given the wider context Circa has retained its original title, because the christening operated in, that its credibility would have survived of Circa was an exercise in avoiding anything that could beyond its first year if it hadn’t done this. Another factor become time-limited or regionally specific. Hence the which emerged early on was due to the magazine’s name Circa, which recognised that, although it had to be monopoly position, which meant that sometimes it was physically produced somewhere, its spirit shouldn’t be necessary to explain that Circa didn’t seek, nor could it anchored, just be around, or about. This approach also be, all things to all people. It soon became clear that extended to its remit and definition of visual culture. negotiating the range of needs and expectations of From the outset, the magazine’s take on visual art had different constituencies and interest groups was always relatively soft walls, and it soon replaced ‘visual art’ with going to be challenging and something possibly never to the term ‘visual culture’, as activity on the edge; it was be resolved. shifting and less defined and so seemed much more This is not to say that Circa didn’t have key defining interesting. In this way Circa staked an early claim to themes, some of which it revisited over and over again. occupy a discursive space on the interstices between In the early days, one of these, which emerged in various visual art, performing arts, sound and new technology. forms, was an investigation into the importance of place, Shortly after its inception and within the first year, nationhood and cultural identity. In many respects, Circa took the logical next step to become a pan Ireland even twenty-five years later, these themes are just as publication. This meant first and foremost engaging current and they certainly haven’t gone away, but to the artistic communities north and south of the border, understand why they were at the forefront it’s important achieving an equal spread of coverage, and getting to explain the context twenty-five years ago. It took over backing from both Arts Councils. Pursuit of these three hours to drive from Belfast to Dublin, with at least objectives meant unravelling some of the perceptions twenty minutes spent at the border; the British Army had only recently ended their occupation of the Grand Circa. In a short period of time, we went from having to Central Hotel in Belfast; and there were only a couple do everything at one remove with typesetters and of restaurants in the city, with not a single celebrity chef printers, which created inflexibility, to being able to or wine bar in sight. It is not perhaps hard to imagine acquire and play with our own technology and to take that in this environment to attempt to produce a cultural greater risks. This also allowed Circa for a period to publication and to make a serious claim for the develop into an expanded publishing house, which importance and role of visual culture within this highly enabled Circa Publications to emerge and produce other charged political context seemed in the eyes of some cultural publications in the areas of theatre, visual and political activists to be pure indulgence. However, you community arts. only have to move away from Ireland to starkly see that in the national psyche (particularly in the north) the Looking at Circa now it feels all grown up, no longer a two – art and politics - were indivisible and closely inter- demanding teenager, but definitely not yet approaching twined. Early-years Circa could not have pretended it was middle age. Its angle on covering the arts is still fresh, otherwise. Evidence for this, if it was needed, was found and hopefully it won’t forget its more gritty beginnings or in events such as the Hunger strikes, which in a specific neglect its traditions, some of which I believe continue to period spawned on a daily basis a fascinating new this day. For instance that (mostly) anyone could write subculture of nationalist gable end paintings. As this was for it. In this sense, it was about multiple voices and a 37 such an unexpected departure and a break from cultural kind of early manifestation of bedroom rap culture in tradition, this led to huge external interest, particularly that it allowed and even encouraged the most unlikely when cross-community interaction and dialogue people to pick up a pen and speak out alongside orthodox surfaced, as loyalists travelled across sectarian writers, theoreticians and critics. I am convinced that boundaries to admire the skills of the newly emergent it has played its part over its twenty-five years in Catholic muralists, who in turn gained technical insights developing and extending the pool of writers and critics from the long-standing wall-painting traditions of their in Ireland. In the early days, a small number of Protestant counterparts. Looking back, I realise that this established critics and some of the academic community was one of those rare moments when an opportunity in Ireland were sceptical about a publication produced by arises to observe first-hand a wholly unexpected cultural artists. Now steeped in the world of academia myself I expression emerging from the ashes of a political can almost see their point, but imagine the pleasure back wilderness. How could we not have written about that? then of seeing those same critics who initially dismissed This naturally led to the production of an issue of Circa it, change their tune when they were eventually asked to, which went all over the world and which we could have and readily agreed, to write for it. sold a hundred times over, as it charted the fleeting A view that I share with some others is that all nations existence of many of these cultural expressions before and regions need self-reflective tools, and when I first they were either obliterated by the British Army or came to Wales I was asked if I would like to help start up destined to become, as they are now, part of the an arts magazine in Wales. It took me less than a Northern Irish Tourist Board trail. nanosecond to say “no.” But in a way I kind of regret that Although the visual arts climate in Ireland is very now, because several years on I can see that Wales for different today, it is still a sign of healthy discourse that one needs a Circa, or at least an equivalent critical voice. Circa’s approach included then, as it still does now, occasional tilts at the policies and activities of the art Anne Carlisle is the Pro establishment and the Arts Councils of Ireland in Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and a Professor at the particular. However, it should not be overlooked that to University of Wales, their credit both Arts Councils responded fairly early Newport; she was one of the on to what in retrospect may have seemed like a fairly co-founders of Circa and its high risk-initiative. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland first managing editor from its agreed to part-support publication costs after the first inception in 1981 to 1989 few issues, and by year two An Chomhairle Ealaíon had (issues 1- 43). also agreed to offer financial backing, which in effect meant Circa was able to become what many cultural initiatives in Ireland had not managed to do, which is to be pan-Irish, peripatetic, issue- not place-based, and not exclusively dependent on and therefore independent of either funding body. That said, it is the lot of most cultural publications to be underfunded and the techno- logical revolution occurred at just the right moment for c . Brian Kennedy

The cover of the last Circa asked “At what point will common sense prevail?” The issue in question could have been the closure of the Ormeau Baths Gallery. Well, “not for some time,” I thought, when I first read the question. After all, this is Belfast, and we like nothing better than to argue among ourselves. Given the coverage the conflict is getting, there is a danger this one could run forever.

38 splish splash: baths-time fun Inside Circa, Slavka Sverakova had an article titled Since the original reason behind this article was the The threepenny essay, which looked at the sequence of situation at OBG, I first met with Chris Bailey, who was events leading up to the closure of OBG. Her allusion to the chair of the board of OBG at the time the Arts the Threepenny opera was certainly being acted out in Council withdrew funding. Chris took over the position the bars and streets of Belfast. It was not long before the of chair during the summer of 2005 and chaired his first placards were being waved up and down in this ‘theatre and last normal quarterly board meeting last November. of illusion’. This ongoing public performance was acted I was not so interested in the details of the protracted by people who often had their backs to the audience and exchanges and correspondence between the OBG Board muttered asides. The saga developed in disconnected and the Council, as this type of information often only episodes. Belfast’s artworld always was Brechtian. obscures the real issues. What I wanted to know was what was the root cause of the breakdown between the The Arts Council of Northern Ireland had a shorter OBG Board and the Arts Council. Chris said, response, which, like all good abstract works, was Untitled. In it, they said that they aimed to open the when I took over as Chair of the Ormeau Baths OBG to the public as soon as possible. This has now Gallery there was an obvious tension between it happened, but there are obviously great changes not just and the Arts Council, which seems to have emerged to the staffing but also to the programming. after the Board’s decision not to become formally 39 involved with the proposed new arts centre for The issue of the Ormeau Baths Gallery certainly excited Talbot Street in Belfast. This culminated in the Arts Circa’s website, recirca.com, more than any other issue Council writing to the gallery stating that it had I can remember. Some comments were funny, others lost confidence in the Board and executive. ironic, while a few actually added to the debate. With Subsequently various meetings were held and I little real information to go on, the comments started to thought we had an agreed way forward, centred descend into ill-informed innuendo and personal attacks. upon changing the governance and staffing The sad, the lonely and those with an axe to grind structures, and thus the decision of the Council to took over and the comments became irrelevant to the withdraw funding with immediate effect in February argument. They did on occasion remain rather amusing, was somewhat surprising. allowing some much-needed relief. I then asked him why the OBG board remained silent Given this background of speculation, I thought it might following the Arts Council decision, to which he said, be interesting to talk directly to some of those involved, to those people whose names had been bandied about in with the cessation of funding from the Arts Council, websites, bars and whispered gossip. I also thought it the OBG Board had no choice but to place the would be relevant to widen out the issue and look at the company into liquidation through a company provision for contemporary art in Belfast. As well as the voluntary agreement and to ensure that we as changes at OBG, the Ulster Museum is going to close for Directors were not accused of wrongful trading. two years and perhaps longer, the Crescent is due for To ameliorate the gallery’s position the Arts Council renovation, which means the Fenderesky Gallery will made a financial consideration, a condition of which close for a period of time, and the Old Museum Arts was a ‘gagging’ clause. Centre’s programme will be interrupted while it moves to the new Belfast Arts Centre. Some of these organisa- tions might even have a presence in the reopened OBG. I then went on to ask Chris what impact he thought the Absolutely. The reasons behind the decision by changes at OBG would have in the longer term. To which Council not to consider the application from the he said, Board of OBG for annual funding for the year 06/ 07 have been repeatedly stated; management, the longer term impact of the OBG saga has yet to governance, deficit. It was not a decision based on unfold. The gallery has reopened, under Arts Council strategy but rather reflected a lack of confidence in management for the time being and it will be the organisation. The Arts Council is committed to interesting to see if its commitment to contemporary the stabilisation, development and enhancement art practice matches the high standards set by Hugh of the visual arts infrastructure. We are therefore Mulholland. I understand that the Council intends considering a wide range of options for the longer recruiting a new Board; I presume through public term. This includes provision at OBG and the recruitment as we had committed to. But this potential for significant visual arts facilities as part episode raises serious issues concerning the of the Talbot Street project. governance of arts organizations. Most have a voluntary Board of Directors, who, I would strongly The one question that has been concentrating minds and advise, should re-evaluate their passion to see the which was still up in the air was the involvement of the 40 arts flourish against the potential exposure of their RUA. So I contacted Carol Graham, President of the personal assets, which could be at risk as a result RUA. Carol did not think it appropriate to meet me at this of funders’ decisions. time, as she is awaiting clarification from the Arts Council. She did, however, send me the following e-mail Since Hugh Mulholland’s name had been mentioned, in answer to my questions. I went to meet him next. He did not want to answer my question about which exhibitions had been scheduled In late February, the RUA was informally approached and would not now take place. He felt that naming by the Arts Council and asked to consider how we specific shows and artists would be irrelevant given the might contribute to the running of a new OBG. Arts Council’s change of direction. What was of more To proceed, we formed a small team of Mike concern to him was Belfast’s place in the international McCann, Colin Davidson and myself. Our response artworld. He said “that an international profile had been was to produce a detailed vision, rationale and built up through the programme at OBG and other imaginative entity. Our proposal included checks and venues, however, this has now been seriously balances to allow RUA (members and nominees) undermined by the actions of the Arts Council.” to be the ‘Anchor Group’ on the Main Board, whilst the INDEPENDENT Exhibition Board would ensure It seemed like a good time to meet with the Arts Council. the necessary programme integrity of the gallery’s I met with Nóirín McKinney, Director of Arts exhibition policy. Development, and Iain Davidson, Arts Development Officer. I started by asking who was going to programme We proposed only one full RUA-led exhibition per and run OBG. They said that the Arts Council would year, with a ‘Banquet’ exhibition to raise funds to go manage the gallery directly for the next nine to twelve towards the new Entity. The current re-structuring months. Their running and programming of the gallery of the RUA, the absence of a selfish agenda, etc, was only to be an interim measure to allow time for a further underpinned the RUA’s commitment to the new, independent board to be put in place. When asked challenge. about the involvement of the RUA in the running of OBG, all they would say was that no final decision as to the The AC seemed very impressed by the quality and structure of the new board had yet been made. I pushed professionalism of our proposals and their potential the point, but all I was told was that currently the RUA’s viability and we reached informal agreement that, involvement was neither ruled in nor out. We then moved in broad terms, this was how the new gallery could on to the question of the lease, which they said has been ultimately develop. negotiated with the landlord on a flexible basis. Finally I asked if the decision by the OBG not to be part of the The RUA then proceeded (with AC knowledge) to new arts centre in Talbot Street had any influence of the a Special EGM (in OBG) in mid April, to brief our withdrawal of funding. “Categorically no,” they said. Are members and seek their approval on the basis of our you sure I asked? negotiations. (Cautions were expressed but the vote to continue was almost unanimous.) An essential part of the AC process was to consult with the Arts Sector on the gallery’s future and seek their feedback. In this exercise, the feedback from the Stakeholders I then asked him to outline how he saw the gallery was largely favourable. However, as you know, the developing. He said that remainder of the arts sector was not only negative but very hostile indeed to the concept of the RUA, they wanted to widen the portfolio of activities, or any other group, as ‘anchor group’. establish a substantial touring programme and explore commercial opportunities that would help The AC consultation report was put to their Council represent artists like they had recently done at the for consideration. Mike and myself were invited to London Art Fair. The gallery would have a sales make a presentation of the RUA’s proposal to the room and an outreach programme in one of the AC at their last meeting on 27 June. toughest parts of town.

Thinking of academies, the RHA came to mind as one OK, o-kay, Peter, I get the picture. that combines showing contemporary art with more traditional work. So I asked Pat Murphy, Director of the Well, from one positive person to another. Since taking RHA, what his experiences were. He felt that while both up his post at the University of Ulster, somewhere else forms of practice were irreconcilable, both were valid to a new gallery is earmarked for, Declan McGonagle has different audiences. I asked about the changes that led played an important role in Belfast’s visual arts. He also 41 to the RHA showing contemporary art and he said that has wide national and international experience, and I ideology was replaced by pluralism between November wanted to talk to him not just about OBG but also about ’98 and Spring 2000. This offered the RHA a range of the wider implications for the visual arts in Belfast. possibilities; essential to choosing any direction were two imperatives: serving the artist and serving the Declan did think it was correct for the Arts Council to audience. He felt that the context provided by the Hyde, reinstate the OBG in the short term; in the longer term IMMA and the Hugh Lane was very specialist and this he felt that they should be looking at best practice allowed the RHA to concentrate on Irish artists and be elsewhere. He also thought that the Arts Council should very innovative in its choice of artists from elsewhere in have the confidence to bring in people with specific relation to the established international scene. expertise. Thinking in broader terms about the provision for the visual arts in Belfast, he thought that there should So far, my meetings seem to indicate that whatever is be a concentration on programming rather than the the outcome for OBG, it is certain that it will change and capitalisation of big spaces, and that it was time to with that change the provision for contemporary art in compare what we have to what the community needs. Belfast will change. Peter Richards, Director of the gt He thought that the Arts Council should see that more Gallery, is a name that has been mentioned a lot recently focused organisations are reasonably funded. Declan in connection with the changing contemporary world in also thought that some provision for ongoing public Belfast. I knew that he hoped to move from the current interventions was needed; he mentioned his experiences space to a new space in Belfast’s supposed new culture with Siteworks in Derry in this context. We also talked quarter, albeit on the other side of the tracks, or the dual about the exciting possibilities that temporary closures carriageway in this case. Peter said that they had been of galleries can create. He mentioned Temporary contacted by the architectural firm Robinson McIlwaine Contemporary in Los Angeles, which MOCA established with a view to using the Switch Room as a gallery. This as a temporary provision ahead of completing a new happened at a time when there was a rumour that the building. ‘TC’, as it became affectionately known, building they were in was up for sale. Peter said that, became so popular with artists and the public that the City of Los Angeles has extended its lease until 2038. the Arts Council indicated that they would be supportive of the move, the local community wanted them to move as they felt the current premises were scary, so currently the leases were at the solicitors. It is, however, by no means a done deal. From my various meetings one thing is clear: the visual arts in Belfast are set for a dramatic change. Even after direct rule has stopped at OBG, it is certain that it will have a much broader remit than before. The RUA look certain to have an annual show there at the very least. Other interested parties will all widen the focus of the gallery. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if OBG is to have a wider remit then it is important that other, more focused organisations are adequately funded.

The temporary closure of some spaces does not mean that something exciting and innovative could not take place. TC in LA is only one example of temporary closure having a positive effect; there are many more examples where imaginations were stretched and innovative solutions found by organisations left homeless for short 42 periods of time. The organisations need to spend time thinking exactly what role they wish to play, which issues they wish to address and what they are focused on. It’s tempting to want wonderful new large spaces, but they are useless unless they have specific intent and are adequately funded. There are many examples all over Ireland of buildings that have been turned into galleries and then left grossly underfunded. When galleries are stretched for cash, artist’s fees are the first thing to go. A small, adequately funded, project-based organisation could address the need for public interventions. Needs would be identified, projects set in place and artists paid to be involved.

The Arts Council has a responsibility to take an overview of the provision in Belfast and apply accurate and considered funding. They need to take into account the needs of the public, the art community and artists.

Everyone I talked to did show a genuine concern for the visual arts in Belfast. What is needed now is clear and Conor Diver image of protest outside Ormeau focused joined-up thinking from all involved. Baths Gallery, 1 March 2006 courtesy zoomnorth.com 43

Brian Kennedy is a Contributing Editor of Circa and an artist based in Belfast. c . Tim Stott

44 An interview with Grant Kester

Art historian and critic Grant Kester has done extensive research into socially engaged art practice, the visual culture of American reform movements, and the relations between political and aesthetic theory. Between 1990 and 1996 he was editor of visual and media-arts journal Afterimage. He continues to publish essays and books, his most recent being Conversation pieces: community and communication in modern art,1 which outlines a critical framework for recent art practices based on performative interactions with participants outside of normative art contexts. He is currently researching a book that will examine the different categories of labour present in these art practices.

He was recently invited to Dublin by City Arts to give an introductory lecture on this latter subject. A couple of days later, on 11 June 2006, he agreed to be inter- viewed for Circa. The following is an edited version of our conversation on the day and as it developed subsequently via e-mail. An extended version will appear on recirca.com in the near future.2 TS First of all, you talked yesterday about there being a can be made? You talked about the traditional autonomy of paradigm shift. Could you describe the basic characteris- the art-object or of the artist as a privileged creator, but tics of this shift? now you claim that autonomy is linked to the ‘permeability of art’… Could you expand upon that? GK Yes, this shift is taking place on two, related, levels. First, there is a shift towards collaborative or collective GK Yes, I’ll try to unpack this argument about autonomy approaches in contemporary art. And second, there is a bit. I would contend that the core function of art a shift towards participatory, process-based experience, changes quite dramatically in the modern period. and away from what I’d describe as a ‘textual’ mode of As early as the mid-nineteenth-century art is beginning production in which the artist fashions an object or event to abandon it’s traditional function of transmitting and that is subsequently presented to the viewer for idealizing dominant forms of power, whether religious decoding. This shift is evident across a wide range of or secular, and begins instead to take on the role of practices, from neo-conceptual, biennial-based works by disrupting or destabilizing them. This agonistic posture figures like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Thomas Hirschhorn to changes art’s self-understanding, its ontology, if you will, more recognizably ‘activist’ projects by groups like Park as well as the kinds of knowledge that it produces. First, Fiction and Ala Plastica. The breadth of this shift is modern art begins to define itself in opposition to, or as somewhat unusual. During the 1980s, the last time that the negation of, certain characteristics identified with 45 activist work was on the radar screen of the mainstream the dominant culture. Early on this ‘other’ was provided art world, there were obvious methodological differences by academic painting and later it became consumer between the collaborative projects of groups like culture. By the post-WWII period contemporary art was ACT-UP, Group Material, or Border Arts Workshop and sufficiently institutionalised and capitalised that it’s the recognized avant garde represented by Neo-expres- survival was no longer at stake. The previously exter- sionist painting and postmodern appropriation, which nalised threat represented by the salon or kitsch was both remained mono-authorial and fairly traditional in internalised in anxieties about the proliferation of rogue terms of media. tendencies within contemporary art itself. Michael Fried establishes this pattern with his attack on ‘theatrical’ art Today the boundaries between socially engaged art in the 1960s, but it’s been manifested ever since in fears practice and the avant garde are harder to determine, over installation, performance, and activist art. This with mainstream artists like Hirschorn, Santiago Sierra, approach lends itself to a hygienic attitude on the part and Liam Gillick working in public space, engaging social of the critic, who must defend art from contamination: networks, and so on. This has led to a certain anxiety a fear that art will lose its specific identity if it becomes among writers and curators who identify themselves too permeable to other areas of culture. with the canonical model of avant-garde art that dominates contemporary criticism, and which is rooted The second feature of this agonistic model involves art’s in the rapprochement between post-minimalism and relationship to the viewer. The appropriate response to continental theory. We might say that the concerns with the work of art is no longer veneration or obeisance, but public space and social networks that motivated discomfort, rupture or an uncanny derangement of the previous activist art have undergone a process of ironic senses. I’ve written about this elsewhere in terms of an appropriation. In this process the traditions of activist ‘orthopaedic’ model of the aesthetic in which art seeks art have been subjected to a conceptual reification and to improve the cognitive or perceptual capacities of the are made to stand in as the naïve, unreflexive, and viewer, who is constructed as always, already in need moralizing antithesis to the cosmopolitan, disruptive, of correction. I would argue that these provocations and self-reflexive advanced art seen on the biennial often perform an affirmative function; verifying the circuit. This tactic runs across the divisions that pre-existing self-image of art world audiences. Or they otherwise separate a figure like Nicholas Bourriaud are consumed rhetorically as the viewer identifies, in a from one his more thoughtful critics, Claire Bishop. self-congratulatory manner, with the subject position of It’s symptomatic of a struggle to confine the current the artist rather than the hapless implied viewer. In fact, proliferation of art practices within a narrative that one comes to the space of art prepared for precisely this privileges the work of art as a kind of deconstructive sort of provocation; disruption is, in a way, expected machine whose primary function is to symbolize or insti- and even savoured. What is happening today, in my view, gate a therapeutic dislocation of traditional identities. is a certain disenchantment with the existing parameters of avant-garde practice and an attempt to rearticulate TS Also, on the back of that shift you get this tendency the specificity of the aesthetic in relationship to both the towards the hyphenated artist – the artist-participant, the viewer and to other cultural, and political, modes. artist-activist, and so on. With so many hyphens, how do you demarcate an autonomous space in which this work TS Indeed, it can be something of a one-way street. but their work ultimately had that effect. They But there remains the question of autonomy. It has been accomplish this through a very subtle understanding of claimed, by Bourriaud in particular, that relational works the relative permeability of the cultural and the political, still have a kind of formal autonomy. And it’s this that as they touch on and interact with each other. As Park gives you space to manoeuvre: artists can use dispersed Fiction argued, in the Hofenstrasse “art and politics networks to move into areas previously unavailable to made each other more clever.” them, but they maintain autonomy throughout because you have this shifting of their work between utilitarian TS But only by rubbing up against each other, and in and aesthetic functions. This shifting allows participants order to do that they must remain separate. to see what they’re doing as a form to be employed in different ways. GK Separate, yes, but connected at the same time. That ambivalence is manifested in the liminal nature of GK That seems like a useful formulation to me; it the artist’s identity: artist/planner, artist/youth worker, essentially replicates the long-standing argument that or artist/not-artist. avant-garde art performs an optical function, allowing participants to take up some critical distance to existing TS In many ways, as a critic or cultural historian, or 46 conventions, to see what was natural as contingent and however you wish to approach it, the material is already subject to change. But the concept of distance is more there. For instance, Jacques Rancière talks about politics complicated than this, we tend to collapse together the being theatrical, performed between proper places: cognitive distance necessary to denaturalize and it’s a matter of setting up an impromptu stage, improvising re-imagine social reality into the discursive and and appropriating roles, parodying figures of authority, institutional ‘distance’ that separates art from a given and so on. social or political situation. My point isn’t that art is no longer autonomous. It’s simply that the nature of this GK Yes, but Rancière still operates within a fairly autonomy, relative to the social and political, is being conventional avant-garde framework. In a recent letter renegotiated. The binary oppositions that have defined exchange critic Claire Bishop concludes with a quote avant-garde art in the past (art vs. kitsch or the political; from Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics along the lines the artist vs. the viewer) are no longer so compelling for that “suitable” political art must be premised on “a younger practitioners. Of course you’d have to begin with sensible or perceptual shock caused … by the uncanny, some discussion of what the ‘political’ or the ‘social’ by that which resists signification.” This is hardly an means now, but let’s take the work of Park Fiction in innovative claim, given the long history of alienation, Hamburg as an example. Here’s politics with a capital ‘P,’ estrangement and defamiliarisation as avant-garde they are dealing with struggles over the control of tropes. While I would agree with Rancière’s estimation valuable urban space. The traditional approach would of the necessary tension between the aesthetic and the insist that art must insulate itself from direct political he misses entirely the decisive shift in the way involvement. It can encourage a critically self-reflexive in which autonomy is being redefined relative to the contemplation of the political situation that might reveal viewer; the movement away from the rhetoric of rupture the unacknowledged ideological grounds of the struggle, and provocation and towards reciprocal, durationally and so on, but it’s forbidden from open participation extensive exchange. in the circuits of political and economic power that structure the development process itself. TS But, following Alain Badiou, is it not precisely those events which emerge unexpected and unannounced from The members of Park Fiction didn’t sequester themselves within a given situation which then provide points of from the political, but they didn’t fully collapse the condensation for those who identify and remain faithful to separation between the aesthetic and the political either. them? I don’t see any antipathy between an event and the They operated through a principle of what I term extensive exchange carried out by those who build upon adjacency. That is, they worked adjacent to or alongside it: strictly speaking, without the latter, the former does not political systems through a parodic re-enactment of happen. This all seems rather appropriate to Park Fiction: planning that nevertheless had a pragmatic effect. improvised identities brought into play; the filling-in of the They didn’t begin by assuming an agonistic or void of power that this play discloses; fidelity to a series of adversarial position based on direct confrontation: disclosures or events. And if it’s a question of autonomy, marching in the streets or territorializing space, naming is this not primarily achieved by marking out a field of play, an enemy. Instead, they operated through the dislocation firstly by naming and secondly by remaining faithful in of the political through the cultural. They didn’t come one’s play? onto the scene and announce their intention to fight real-estate developers or challenge private property, GK That’s useful as far as it goes, but it amounts to Facettes, Ala Plastica and others. We can’t rely on the saying that the work of art-as-event has the capacity usual critical theory suspects to pursue this line of to catalyse new perceptions and new modes of thought analysis because of the privileging of simultaneity, in a given situation. This is comparable to Rancière’s and the implicit disavowal of duration, in the poststruc- assertions regarding art’s relative autonomy. I would turalist tradition. This is a question I’m working on for agree with both wholeheartedly. The heavy lifting, my next book project. It requires a re-articulation of however, involves the question of how, precisely, these labour, outside of the productivist tradition that extends new perceptions are catalysed, and how we define back to Locke. autonomy in specific practices. Further, the very language of the ‘event’ carries with it certain TS So this is as much about proximity as productivity. connotations of simultaneity: the event as a singular, temporally condensed, consciousness-altering GK Yes. In fact proximity is a word I’ve been thinking encounter. This is the legacy of the generation of French about a lot lately: the proximity of bodies in space. thinkers who have dominated Anglo-American art theory for the past two decades. They have, for better and for TS It’s contagious in some way. This co-labouring marks worse, tended to universalise the events of May ’68, out a rhythm of imitation and variation, around which the in all their mythical immediacy and spontaneity, as the group organises itself. It also suspends the habitual 47 only acceptable template for all subsequent political discomfort of reciprocal touching and the closeness of transformations. I think what transpired in Park Fiction’s strangers. But this process of rhythmic imitation is not work in Hamburg, and in projects by Ala Plastica in necessarily of the order of quiet and cosy interaction; Argentina, Huit Facettes Interaction in Senegal, and it can just as easily be raucous and volatile, such as when Jay Koh in Myanmar, is better understood through the a crowd gathers. language of process and an expanded sense of time. GK Absolutely. It impinges on research in psychology TS You also mentioned new notions of labour: labour into the ways in which the body carries trauma, as well which is an aesthetic process, durational, extended in time, as bio-aesthetics. At the same time, this ‘micro’ level of not teleological but open-ended… analysis needs to be combined with some understanding of how these projects relate to broader political shifts. GK Yes, I believe duration and labour are connected Especially relevant here is the dangerous bifurcation in collaborative practice. Labour has traditionally been between forms of solidarity based on religious faith or figured in three ways in modern art. First we have labour nationalism, on the one hand, and the rampant self- as spectacle, from Courbet’s Stonebreakers to Sierra’s interest encouraged by the rise of neo-liberalism on Workers Who Cannot Be Paid (2000). Here the labouring the other. What does it mean to think collectivity body is presented to the viewer as a kind of calculated differently today? This context makes these collaborative affront. Then we have symbolic labour, in the Arts and experiments particularly compelling. Crafts movement for example, where the well crafted object is understood as registering a protest against the 1 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 dehumanising mediocrity of mass production. Finally you 2 I would like to thank Ed Carroll have semantic labour. That is the labour that’s demanded and Jane Speller of City Arts of the viewer, once the ‘difficult’ work of art is set in for their kind assistance in setting up this interview and place before him. The viewer must work through the Grant Kester himself for gen- semantic and cognitive baffles put in place by the erously sharing his knowledge. artist, and in the very labour of decoding the work a new subjectivity is produced; they become more thoughtful Tim Stott is a critic based and self-reflexive. in Dublin.

I think there’s a fourth way to conceptualise labour that is evident in some collaborative art practices. That is, a co-labouring of sorts that occurs in shared praxis and that has the capacity to transform the consciousness of its’ participants and to disclose new models for being- together. It occurs through the thickly textured haptic and discursive exchanges that unfold in these projects, often over a period of months and even years. This accounts as well for the proliferation of the ‘workshop’ as a methodology, which we see in the projects of Huit c . Mark Garry

48 on n s nd The purpose of this essay is to investigate a number of the processes and motivations of contemporary artists who work with sound. This particular field has expanded and taken many forms over the past three decades. This essay in 49 no way attempts to serve as an overview of contemporary sound art, but it is simply four particular practitioners responding to a sequence of questions from me. I have chosen these artists from a range of geographic, sociological and educational backgrounds; they are Dennis McNulty, Slavek Kwi, Jody Elff, and on Randall Packer.

Later in this piece the participants will expand on how they employ contemporary technologies, but on quite a basic level I wasn’t aware of any fundamental difference between two types of musical endeavour. One was experimental music and the field of music categorised as Abstract Electronica – acts such as Autechre, Oval, Murmer among others. The other was focused more within galleries, in terms of the processes employed or the outcomes achieved. Therefore I was concerned with isolating if and where any differentiation occurs between musicians and sound artists, and in particular whether the participants soundcould isolate any difference. 1a: I structured the first question in three parts. Can you differentiate between people who make music and people who make sound art? Slavek Kwi Technically, there is no difference between music and sound art. According to John Cage, “Music is the organisation of sounds and silence.” He adds a psychological dimension: “Any This reluctance to distinguish difference is also felt by Jody Elff: sound situation which attracts my attention becomes In order to do this, you have to make a distinction between the two, automatically musical.” There is no importance as to which is virtually impossible to do in the current creative environ- whether it is intentionally generated by human beings ment, where ‘music’ has been as deconstructed as it can possibly or coincidentally produced by the sound environment. be, and ‘sound art’ is often more carefully crafted than many In the moment I am according, for whatsoever reason, musical compositions. I think one of the simplest and most easily attention to it, it has meaning. In this sense, active definable distinctions is the context in which the work is presented. (generating sounds) or passive (listening) has the A non-performance-space presentation of a sonic work is likely same value. to be labelled ‘sound art’ while a presentation of the same work activated by physical performers will certainly be called musical. 50 On the other hand, there is a very active group of free improvisers around the world whose entire discipline is based on the exploration of sound and sonic relationships. I feel that their work is much closer in spirit to ‘sound art’, whereas many sonic presen- tations in gallery and museum spaces (advertised as ‘sound art’) are actually carefully crafted recordings that repeat over and over; something that is both so clearly fixed in time and so specifically repeatable feels much more like a musical composition to me than a unique, dynamic piece of sonic art.

Dennis McNulty I find the way you phrase this question inter- esting: “people who…” – like there are two categories of people and they are mutually exclusive. Categorisation has always been a difficult issue for me. Some work seems to be focused on more or less musical concerns and some seems to be focused on concerns other than strictly musical ones, but Randall Packer, however, believes the relationship between the two is complicated, in my mind, the distinction is quite clear: Music and has a lot to do with the listener. The emphasis can change composition is more formalist in depending on lots of factors, many of which are outside the nature, while sound art often control of the artist. involves real subject matter as with other art forms in the visual arts. 1b: If differentiation exists can it be simply defined by the cultural context that the work is placed or discussed within?

Jody Elff In a pure sense, ‘sound’ as a medium to work within is a very dynamic ‘material’. It transforms constantly depending on where and how it is presented. In order to craft a purely sonic experience, I feel that it must be presented dynamically. As soon as a sonic gesture is committed to a repeatable process (ie, a recording or score), it takes on the permanence of a composition.

Dennis McNulty Process/ intention/ context are all important, but I don’t think it can be broken down as simply as that. I don’t subscribe to a ‘this equals this’ view of the world. The work will almost always be readable in a number of different ways or on a number of different levels.

Randall Packer Again, sound art addresses issues that lie outside of the medium itself, while music composition is so often self-referential, formally speaking. Slavek KwiThe term ‘music’ can be limiting regarding its cultural reference. Generally it is associated with a conditioned and reducing definition of music: melody and rhythm, conventional instruments, etc However, music is sometimes defined as the ‘art of sounds’, though the criterion stays the same, as noted above. The term ‘sound art’ suggests more options than ‘music’. Sound 1c: Or by the process that the artist/ musicians use or the intended art includes music and anything else dealing with sound media. outcome of the work?

Jody Elff This is harder, because so many people manipulate sonic experiences with so many mediums. There are plenty of contempo- rary musicians who utilize computers to create and craft their music. There are plenty of artists who use their computers to make Randall Packer Sound art is often the sound art. The medium is identical, but the intent of the end result listener as a more active participant, is different. There is a musician here in New York City whose primary while music composition it seems to instrument is balloons. In spite of the fact that his instrument is me is more traditional in the way it completely unconventional by traditional western standards, he engages the passive recipient. still very much considers himself a musician, not a sound artist. 51 Slavek Kwi Sound art seems to be coming from a visual-art background, approaching sound media morphologically – eg, perceiving sounds as colours, textures, etc – and includes also sometimes objects generating sounds as an equal part. Modern electroacoustic music (including acousmatic and ‘musique concrete’), though coming from a ‘classical’ musical background, recognizes the morphological character of sounds too. It seems to stay in therealm of sounds only.

2: The boundary between sound art and music is blurred, if there is one… Perhaps a correlation among these artists, if one existed, lay in methodology, and I asked the artists to outline in either specific or general terms what their practice involved.

Randall Packer: I am interested in forms that derive from the integration of music and other disciplines. I am interested in the transformative potential of art and most recently this has involved the creation of a political work entitled The US Department of Art & Technology, a virtual government agency.

Dennis McNulty: [I am interested in] thinking about the relationships between things. Recording sounds or taking pre-existing recordings/ found- sound (eg CD or the radio). Subjecting them to some simple process. One project I’m working on at the moment involves recording each performance in a series and using that recorded material as possible source material for future performances: folding time and space back in on itself.

Slavek Kwi My interest is in the process of creation as organic phenomena. The form is conceived as a consequent result of this Jody Elff I work primarily with computers in the manipulation of process. I am focused on ‘state of mind’. sound and sonic presentations. In addition to the pursuit of an Creation [and all included in this process] aesthetically pleasing experience, my work hopes to achieve two is clearly a tool. The form documents things clearly – to raise the awareness of the experience listeners momentary states of perception, including have through listening, and to draw attention to the experience of subjectivity, automatically. I would employ space and spatial relationships through the use of sound. The sounds anything that comes to my mind which seems themselves are not necessarily the sounds of ‘things’ (street noise, appropriate during the process of creation. voices, etc) but pure sound in their own right. They may be indicative It changes due to the character of each project, of other things, but that is up to listeners to decide for themselves. of course. The sounds themselves are typically very simple sounds – sine waves, pink noise, or simple oscillators – that are then subjected to a vast array of processes in order to manipulate and transform the simple sounds into much more harmonically rich and dynamic results. 3: John Cage’s seminal piece, 4 mins 33 seconds from 1953, emphasised the performer and audience’s awareness of the informal sonic environment that surrounded them, and in doing so paved the way for an ideology that acknowledged the Slavek Kwi My work is based on intense listening … Over years nonstructured sonic possibilities in a performance and in one’s of practice I developed my sense of self-critical listening; there participation with that performance. Or as David Toop put it, is nobody who could possibly judge my work better than myself “He made people listen to the world.”1 With this piece he fore- – it is my responsibility, what I make available to the public, and grounded a type of nonformal critical listening. This notion of I have to accept the consequences. I will never let you hear critical listening seems to be a crucial element in contemporary something I cannot stand behind. As my work deals with sound art, ie, that one is as discerning with one’s listening exploring unknown territories of sound potential, I rely only on processes as one would be when interacting with the world my own intuition. The response from outside confirms (or not) visually. I asked the participants how, if in any way, the notion my intuition, the only criterion is to obtain a real connection of critical listening impacted on or informed their work. with the listener. I am trying to liberate myself from my own likes and dislikes, focusing more on the creative stream coming from my Dennis McNulty I think lis- unconscious and consciousness as it is stimulated by specific 52 tening happens at a number situations, feelings, states of mind. The perpetual tendency of different levels and they’re towards balancing the paradox, myself and reality, seems to me all important. more interesting than any limited aesthetic or conceptual ideology. The real authenticity seems being able to communi- Randall Packer I am interested in ‘critical being,’ in which cate and connect with others by my work’s fundamental the viewer is entirely immersed in the work, a fully sensory nature. In such a situation, the work is only a bridge connecting experience that engages the whole being as well as the mind. I and other. The intention to connect must be mutual. Jody Elff Critical listening is central to the work. It is my hope that my work will inspire more careful listening in the people who listen to it.

4: I felt it was important to expand the question on critical Dennis McNulty The function of the space, its history and listening to incorporate the elements that inform this listening; where it is are important to me. How the space sounds is specifically, how the artists respond to a physical environment. always important: in a live performance/ improvisation When working in a live or installation capacity, how, if at all, situation, the acoustic of a space is like a collaborator. The does the architecture of the space you are situated in inform architecture of a space usually suggests ways to arrange the or influence your installations/ performances? sound, the performer and the audience/ auditors/ spectators in relation to each other. Randall Packer It is impossi- ble for me to separate the Jody Elff While the pieces themselves can be presented in any work from the space, since I physical space, the architecture of the space is a critical am interested in visceral component of how the work is experienced. Some of my pieces experiences that engage all will work better in certain spaces than they will in others. Any of one’s being. architectural space will impose its unique sonic influence on any sound introduced into that space, and it is essential that this be considered when presenting a sound artwork. Some of my pieces are designed with specific spaces in mind and others are not, but the work is influenced by the presentation space regardless, and often the pieces need to be modified during the installation process in order to better integrate into the space.

5: This question expanded further into how the artists incorporated existing sonic environments into their responses or compositions… Dennis McNulty I think of the sound in a space, and other sound sources like broadcast media or the soundfiles archived on my laptop, as kinds of flows. A particular space at a particular time is like a unique coincidence of these streams of sound/ information. One way to think about a performance is as a harnessing or disruption of these flows for some purpose. I am interested in how these flows and others behave in public or temporarily public spaces. Randall Packer Sound is the most completely immersive of all media; Slavek Kwi The majority of my work takes into it penetrates our being by literally account sound environments and their inner inter- entering into the body with its relationships. I am interested in complex systems vibrations and emotional content. such as urban environments and natural habitats, about the way sounds are organized. Situations stimulating awareness of inter-connectedness fascinate me.

6: Ashley Kahn, in his book A love supreme: the story of John Coltrane’s signature album, tells us of the confusion felt by critics of the time when encountering Coltrane’s solos: “why were his solos so long? Was he performing or practicing? Critics wanted what they were familiar with – polish not process.”2

This desire for a familiar, recognisable structure reminded me of a conversation I had with one of the participants, Jody Elff, a couple of years ago. He differentiated his sound-art work from music in a quite simple way. He said that music was based on repeated structures and patterns that very 53 quickly became familiar to the listener, and that the listener ceased to engage with the individual sounds in the same way as soon as this familiarity became apparent. Jody ensured that this phenomenon never occurred in his works: “by using a computer, I can randomly alter the nature and occurrence of the sounds so that the work is constantly transforming. It is very important that the presentations not be pre-recorded, and because of this the specific sonic events in each work are not predictable or repeatable.” This quite significant differentiation is facilitated by the use of present-day technologies.

Contemporary recording techniques, such as samplers, allow contemporary sound artists the ability to record sonic environments in real time, and computer programs permit them to very quickly manipulate these sounds and re-present them back to an audience. This method is just one way in which contemporary machinery is utilised by artists to heighten a participant’s awareness of the sonic possibilities of a particular environment. This would not have been possible prior to the advent of computerised technology.

Current developments in sound technologies have significantly expanded the scope for the manipulation of sound in both musical and visual-art contexts, and to an extent they have negated the necessity for any formal musical education. Many contemporary practitioners no longer use t raditional formal structural elements in the generating of sound. They may practise in sound without the ability to understand how to manipulate sound through the use of traditional instrumentation and without any knowledge of the practice of scoring notes and rhythms.

One of the unifying elements connecting each of these artists is the use contemporary computerised technology. I was interested in finding out what kinds of technologies they used when generating, capturing/ recording, manipulating or outputting sound. How are these tools incorporated in their practice?

Slavek Kwi I do not design computer programs – so far I haven’t needed to. I have no interest in technology itself, other than as a tool. However, in the last ten years I have been using digital computer-based editing and processing systems. Before, I employed analogue reel-to-reel tapes. Aside from obvious techniques of editing/ mixing, the main processes I am using are filters (eq) and pitch shift (slow/ accelerate) only, sometimes reverbs (almost never effects). The majority of sounds explored would be field recordings made by myself. Recording itself is an important part of whole process. Sounds are mainly captured with binaural microphones and DAT-recorder (or mini disc). Output is mostly on CD, some projects on multi-channel digital tapes (as ADAT 8-track).

I am also creating various ‘low-tech’ sound objects/ instruments using rotating motors, solar-powered devices, shaving machines, timers, etc, and simple, mainly acoustical, sound devices using any material suitable to each specific project (as performances, workshops). Dennis McNulty I set up a process or situation, which usually involves a space, and some idea of an audience. Decisions about what to do and how to do it are specific to each instance. ‘Liveness’ is important to me.

Randall Packer In terms of sound technology, I am interested in real-time systems that enable interaction between the viewer/ listener and the work. For this purpose, I have used Max/ MSP/ Jitter for the past fifteen years.

I tend to design systems that involve the integration of sound and other media. I am also interested in the physical space, and how the performance or installation makes use of the space as an integral aspect of the work.

Jody Elff I create my own programs – in fact each sound work is usually a dedicated piece of software. By not using a piece of fixed hardware or a 54 specific computer program, I am not restrained to doing anything with sound based on what some designer somewhere else thinks I might want to do. Most software available for the manipulation of sound is designed with a linear, music-making process in mind. This kind of working environment is seldom suitable to the presentations I want to create, so designing my own software is in fact much more efficient.

7: I am aware that this is a gross over-simplification of the practice of many composers and song writers, but I feel that the conventional, traditional objective of a song or piece of music is to convey or evoke emotion in some capacity, and much of the negotiation of sound by present-day artist appears in a way to deal in a quite clinical manner with the specific mechanics of sound and the possibilities for the manipulation of a resonance. I was curious to know if in any capacity the participants were interested in evoking specific emotional responses to the work they make?

Dennis McNulty No. I am interested in how people respond to my work, but don’t set out to evoke a particular emotional response in them. Randall Packer I adhere to the ideas of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who believed in the rearrangement or intoxication of the senses as a transforma- tion of consciousness. The emotive, I believe, is directly connected with our perpetual awareness. Slavek Kwi I might observe certain emotional responses within myself during the process of creation; I assume that I am not unique and there must be others who might feel similarly. I am leaving the freedom to the other to connect or not. The intention to connect must be mutual.

Jody Elff Absolutely, and I find it fasci- nating to hear how different people will respond when experiencing the same work. What one person will find immer- sive and comforting, someone else will find disturbing and unsettling. I don’t think it is possible to consistently evoke a uniform emotional response from every- one, but it is intriguing to hear what people take away from the experience of hearing one of my works. 8: I was aware that each of the participants works in different capacities outside of their art practices. Jody engineers and produces musicians, and Slavek works in sound therapy. I was interested in determining, firstly, in what other capacities the participants work with sound outside of their art practice. Secondly, how, if in any way, did this inform their practice?

Jody Elff I make my primary living by audio engineering, mostly in live concert environments, but also for recordings. I work regularly with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Tan Dun, Bang On A Can, and a host of others. The live engineering environment is particularly interesting to me due to the dynamic sonic nature of a performance space, and the challenges of accurately presenting a musical experience in a variety of different spaces. It absolutely informs my artistic process by continually presenting me with new challenges about how to engage sonically with a physical space. Regardless of whether I’m working professionally as an Mark Garry is an artist, 1 David Toop, Ocean of sound, 55 engineer or creatively as an artist, I am always evaluating my curator, writer and Serpents Tail, 1996 sonic experience and learning new ways to participate with it. occasional musician 2 Ashley Kahn, A love supreme: the story of John Coltrane’s based in Dublin. Slavek Kwi My practice of art is signature album, Viking Adult, not separated from life, it is an 2002 integrated part of my life. I consid- er art as a spiritual discipline: changing my mind, enhancing my perception, growing awareness of myself and consequently rela- tions to reality surrounding me, whatever it is… In this sense, all my activities are interconnected, creating feedback to each other. Information is processed and applied as appropriate to each specific area.

c . Reviews 57

Belfast Maurice Doherty Slavka Sverakova 88 | Barcelona Mike Nelson: After Kerouac Sinéad Halkett 60 | Cinemas nationwide United 93 Aileen Blaney 100 | Cork Linda Quinlan: It’s good that life has many circles Sheila Dickinson 66 | Work [w3:k]: Aspects of work in art from 1970 to the present Fergal Gaynor 69 | Dublin Conor Kelly: Aerophone Frédéric Bonnet 58 | Brendan Earley: Towards a large white building Gemma Tipton 63 | Arno Kramer: Over the shadows Marianne O’Kane 74 | Sarah Pierce: The meaning of greatness Tim Stott 92 | Better than the real thing? Paul O’Brien 94 | Kilkenny David Sandlin: Wonderfool world Ruth Devine 72 | Limerick Fresh, re-imagining the collection Karen Normoyle 97 | London Daniel Figgis: Doppler Isobel Harbison 86 | Ellen Gallagher: Salt eaters Cherry Smyth 90 | New York Caroline McCarthy: Grand detour: Vedute and other curious observations off the grand route Joseph R. Wolin 76 | AngloMania: Tradition and transgression in British fashion Tim Maul 80 | Newtownards Angela Darby and Robert Peters: The rumour mill Karl Harron

83 | Sligo Patti Smith Jason McCaffrey 78 | c . Mike Nelson After Kerouac installation shot (detail), 2006 photo / courtesy Sinéad Halkett c . Frédéric Bonnet Green on Red Gallery, March – April 2006 Dublin

Conor Kelly

Conor Kelly 58 Pendulum 2006 Aerophone Three channel video installation with sound Dimensions variable In a precise and rigorous exhibition for this construction which would correlations maintained by the at the Green on Red Gallery, Conor have no justification with its works among themselves, which Kelly, in just three installations, auditory retransmission. The piece cohabit without interfering with composes an independent universe is all the more effective and each other and which seem all which interrogates and redefines pertinent for the fact that it is the the more complementary in that the relations and the complemen- artwork itself which generates the all address, after their own fashion tarity sound/ image. very particular atmosphere which but with great restraint and envelops the visitor, the artist precision, the questions which Is sound definitively soluble in the claiming for his part not to be trying obsess the artist. moving image, condemned to play to construct it. Kelly succeed there the minor role, such as the film in a masterful demonstration of a Furthermore, if one goes back to soundtrack which we readily forget natural symbiosis between the two the idea that it is sound which in the heat of the action, although elements, sound and vision, and makes the image seen, or which at it is an essential force within it of imposes the idea that sound can least aids the grasping of its con- it? This is in essence the main also be a visual phenomenon, and tent, precision or conception, one question that Kelly, an Irish artist as a consequence that one listens might at first be unsettled to find, and musician based in London, to what one sees, overturning paradoxically, a silent installation. 59 poses in his show titled Aerophone. thereby the traditional ordering Piano note, 2006, in effect, with its between causes and their effects. two juxtaposed monitors, letting In a dark space where all openings us see the full gamut of a piano have been sealed, three large- This setting in relation of sound and keyboard, from left to right on one dimension screens, independent of vision receives further illumination side and inversely on the other, is each other, display in large format in Note, 2006, which faces Pendulum not accompanied by any sound. and in black and white an image of and which requires sustained But paradoxically, it is not the cone of a loudspeaker before attention in order to perceive the definitively not, because this purely which dangles a microphone which subtlety of what takes place. Seven visual work, by virtue of its rhythm has been suspended from the monitors placed on the floor with and opposing movements, creates ceiling; this microphone is no apparent order show very close its own musicality. It generates in connected to the loudspeaker via up the strings of a bass guitar, spectators the stimulation of a an amplifier. Thus there are three which Kelly filmed during the sound which their a priori versions of the same action in precise time from their brutal perceptual apparatus forbids them which, sometimes immobile, stimulation to the stopping of their to grasp but which the content of sometimes swinging on its cord vibration. Each screen being the experience allows them to hear. and sweeping across the image in equipped with its own sound It is Kelly’s great success to have the manner of a windscreen wiper, channel, the conjunction and mix know how to make cohabit to this the microphone captures by virtue of the rapid oscillations and exent contradictions which are not of its movements, which are at moments of rest provoke what such. times are so rapid as to be little the artist calls “a choreographed Frédéric Bonnet is a Paris-based more than a flash, the sonorities harmonic chord in space.” The freelance critic and curator; he in its environment, the studio in notion of choreography is not trivial collaborates to Le journal des arts which it finds itself. It captures and for these works where, just as in and Vogue France. thus at the same time produces Pendulum, one attaches such the sound we are given to hear importance to the iea of – the noise of its own displacement displacement and movement – and of its presence in the space – a movement which is largely in which the synchronisation of the vibration, already very perceptible three recordings transforms into in Pendulum and which seems to vibrations, in a sort of captivating, amplify itself in Note, as though to almost hypnotic bass. affirm, following Kelly’s example, that “sound is vibration, and thereby With this work, Pendulum, 2006, the vibration is the visual manifestation sound is not ‘stuck’ to the image, of its noise.” nor composed for it; it becomes a constitutive element of it, especially Remarkable for the precision of as the image on its own is of no par- its staging, the exhibition proves ticular interest since it is intended itself to be of perfect rigour in the c . Sinéad Halkett Centre d’Art March – June 2006 Santa Mònica, Barcelona

60 Mike Nelson After Kerouac ‘When I get these nails out of this Old Bull Lee in New Orleans was of the structure and the textures I’m going to build me a shelf like an oracle of doom amidst are not distracted from. And if that’ll last a thousand years!’ Kerouac’s magnum opus On the mythologies and context said Bull, every bone shuddering road, an incessant account of his reverberate in the heads of the with boyish excitement. ‘Why, hunger for new experiences while audience, they do so without the Sal, do you realize the shelves criss-crossing the United States in aid of many objects, at least not in they build these days crack the early 1950s. Old Bull added the fashion of past works by Mike under the weight of knick- snags to the head-long narrative, Nelson that I know of. Works such knacks after six months or although ultimately he was the only as Spanning Fort Road and Mansion generally collapse? Same with overt junky in the book. Kerouac Street – between a formula and a houses, same with clothes. wrote this semi-autobiographical code3 or Tourist hotel.4 These were These bastards have invented novel using one long, scrolled piece elaborate fictitious dens where plastics by which they could of paper, which some saw as it was supposed that various make houses that last forever. indicative of the novel’s ‘stream of activities occurred - the suggestion And tyres. Americans are killing consciousness’ form. being that they were subversive or themselves by the millions every obsessive acts. They were like year with defective rubber tyres The eyes-peeled and bulging entering the film sets of thrillers; 61 that get hot on the road and blow sensation of walking through the places that you had thankfully only up. Same with tooth powder. house at night when there is been in stressful dreams. But now There’s a certain gum they’ve absolutely no light and you are the whitish/ greyish gallery space is invented and they won’t show it afraid of bumping into something. there, unhidden. The sacred space to anybody that if you chew it as But now it is warped into a of the gallery is laid bare. Most a kid you’ll never get a cavity for disorientation of light-filled foot unexpected. But maybe this work the rest of your born days. Same placement, for the apparently is not that different: maybe the with clothes. They can make contrived-to-be-filthy corridor turns inhabited space in this case is the clothes that last forever. They ever inwards and the end feels as gallery (a place of work and prefer making cheap goods so’s though it will never come. The sometimes recreation, if not a everybody’ll have to go on free-falling feeling is yet to be place of refuge?) and the cube is working and punching explained. After what seems like being refashioned. This refashioning timeclocks and organizing ages (and yet was not – anticipation occurs in the bending and themselves in sullen unions and fattens time) a door appears up perverting of the cube into a spiral. floundering around while the big ahead. Pulse quickens, opens the The ancient, anti-clockwise nega- grab goes on in Washington and door and lo: a pile of tyres! Mind tive spiral of Robert Smithson’s Moscow.’ He raised his big piece races back to a photographic slide Jetty.5 As part of Triple Bluff Canyon6 2 of rotten wood. ‘Don’t you think of Allan Kaprow’s Yard, an Nelson created a replica in sand this’ll make a splendid shelf?’1 ‘environment’ out the back of the of Smithson’s Partially buried gallery. Couldn’t, of course, woodshed, an extraordinary remember his name for a day, but apparition to behold in a gallery. the sentiment sat like a baking Allan Kaprow’s yard was out the residue that smelt distinctly of back of the gallery and Smithson’s rubber. The yard at the back of the Jetty is in the Great Salt Lake in gallery was filled with rubber tyres Utah, but Nelson’s heap of tyres is and wasn’t the audience invited to in the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica jump on them? Can I jump here? in Barcelona. I dare not. And I retrace my steps through the rubber-marked winding hallway to the other door I had seen. In the other room the outside of that spiral corridor is revealed (it seems so much smaller!) and the tyres peep over the circular structure. An auricular and white, anti-cuboid bear-hug around that pile. But it’s so stark! Without clutter or any hint of human inhabitation. The sculptural form The white line is feeding into our of death and loss to this, themes (this page and previous spread) fender like an anxious impatient that were dramatically experienced Mike Nelson After Kerouac electronic quiver shuddering in in the novel that book-ended installation shot (detail), 2006 the night and how beautifully Kerouac’s career, Big Sur – another photo / courtesy the author sometimes it curves one side or auto-biographical novel (this time the other as he smoothly with fewer camouflage devices) but swerves for passing or for now poignant and sad as it mapped something else, avoiding a bump the author’s mental collapse amidst or something.7 an attempted, but failed, retreat from society and his chronic Although the work by Nelson at drinking. As Nelson has quoted Santa Monica seems quite minimal, Smithson before (Triple Bluff the layers of meaning and double Canyon), it is possible to make the meaning of past work still remain. connection between Smithson and In Triple Bluff Canyon a whole Kerouac, whom Smithson had cosmos of theories and ideas known in New York in the 1950s.8 62 became apparent in the fabric of The only difference is that now inter-woven narratives or builds (the we have an almost monolithic narratives taking sculptural form). structure, while the Partially buried I treat the title After Kerouac as one woodshed replica was a quotation of homage then; the work reads as within a larger work. Perhaps the a monument, a furled commemora- myth is the key. The swirling mass tion. The piled-up tyres add an air of myth. c . Gemma Tipton Temple Bar Gallery and April – May 2006 Studios, Dublin

For all its shiny promise of newness, there’s something about Modernism that is now distinctly nostalgic. brendan earley Perhaps it is because Modernism represents the last time we could actually believe that mankind and 63 towards a large society were perfectible, that changes would necessarily be for the better. Of course Modernism white building as it was manifested in literature and art is rather different from Modernism in architecture; one of the reasons for this being that while the underlying philosophies may well have been the same, individuals aren’t compelled to live with (and in) the results of experimental painting, sculpture and writing. Although expressed in a gallery installation explores and (as in the video piece Car Park) as art, Brendan Earley’s concern investigates. To be seen as an hints at the throwaway nature of is nonetheless with Modernism as argument, rather than as a series many contemporary buildings, it relates to architecture. This is of aesthetic elements (although where the implicit criticism is of emphasised in his title to the some, particularly the wall drawing the way these adopt the veneer of exhibition, borrowing from A Large White Building, are nonethe- Modernism, using its rhetoric as Le Corbusier’s collection of texts, less beautiful), Earley deals with an excuse for flaws in concept, Towards a New Architecture. Ireland the natural, human and temporal location, craftsmanship. came to Modernism in architecture forces that disrupt and thwart relatively late, and therefore our Modernism’s aspirations towards The accompanying text to the understanding of it can be confused perfection and perfectibility. exhibition suggests ‘that the with an understanding of Ireland in drawings evoke the longing the sixties and seventies, rather Clues to this purpose abound. expressed for the modernist than in relation to, for example, Veneer , the title of the project’. Judging from the way the period chosen by the V&A for accompanying publication, points the drawings, and the model, their survey exhibition, Modernism: to the idea of investigating what expose the cracks in the certainties 64 designing a new world 1914-1939.1 is going on behind Modernism’s of Modernism (as expressed façade, beneath its deceptively through architecture), it would The V&A dates immediately conjure sleek veneer. Sketches of weeds seem to me that the longing is the experience of two World Wars, found in the grounds of the Adolf instead for the period when we and imply one of the uncomfortable Loos (author of the provocative were sure of where our future was elements of Modernism in Ornament and Crime) Steiner bringing us, rather than for the architecture, which is the idea of House, are fragile delicate pencil means we constructed of getting social engineering and the desire drawings. And yet the weeds they there. If Modernism showed us that to design the imperfections out of depict have a tenacity that, left we can’t create perfection, it also society (Le Corbusier’s 1922 plans unchecked, can undermine both showed how fundamentally the for Paris being a case in point here). foundations and fabric of the environments we do create affect This idea is picked up by Roger M. sleekest white building a Modernist us. And what Brendan Earley Buergel as one of his three intro- architect could imagine. demonstrates here is the futility ductory leitmotifs for Docmenta 12. of thinking that the messy realities Writing under the question, ‘Is The physical centrepiece of the of man, nature and the passage modernity our antiquity?’ Buergel installation is Complex 1, a of time can be controlled and suggests that modernity is “in ruins chipboard veneer model of what conquered through architecture. after the totalitarian catastrophes seems a rather useless piece of of the 20th century (the very same furniture. A flatpack gone wrong. catastrophes to which it somehow Here it is based on Michael Scott’s gave rise)… In short,’ he says, RTÉ building (1962), while a ‘it seems that we are both outside previous version came from the and inside modernity, both repelled now-demolished building at Lough by its deadly violence and seduced Key Forest Park (present in this by its most immodest aspiration or exhibition in a series of drawings potential: that there might, after all, made in felt-tip marker pen). The be a common planetary horizon for cheap quality of chipboard, hidden all the living and the dead.’2 by the thin layer of glossy veneer, reminds that surface looks aren’t While architectural discussions everything, at the same time as it of Modernism tend to focus on its hints at the poor quality of many groundbreaking philosophies; of our contemporary buildings beliefs that allowed architects to masquerading as Modernist, where break away from historicism and white boxes are dumped across the design machines of beauty and land and cityscapes as factories, clarity for living, they often ignore apartments, warehouses, shopping the flaws in those philosophies, malls. How are we to relate to flaws which undermine the rational these? Earley’s use of recycled integrity of Modernism altogether. detritus, of broken pieces of It is these flaws that Earley’s furniture, and dumped Styrofoam Gemma Tipton is a writer and critic 1 Modernism: designing a new world 1914 – on art and architecture based in 1939, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dublin. London, 6 April to 23 July 2006 2 see documenta12.de/english/leitmotifs.html; Documenta 12 will run in Kassel from 16 June to 23 September 2007

(previous page) Brendan Earley Loos House pen and ink on paper 30 x 20 cm

(this page) Tower 3 marker on paper, 210 x 120 cm photos John Kellett courtesy the artist 65 c . Sheila Dickinson Fenton Gallery May – June 2006 Cork

66 Linda Quinlan It’s good that life has many circles (opposite) Although the cup stain is the away the many details, the works Linda Quinlan: It’s good that life physical memory of one object’s eschew decoration for function. has many circles, installation view, 2006; courtesy the artist. contact with another (liquid on As before, Quinlan includes found wood/ paper), it also indicates objects, but in this exhibition these human encounter, of friends sitting objects are all functional domestic around a coffee table, talking, objects, whose primary role is to having a cuppa, placing within the contain things – a table with artwork the domestic, the familiar drawers, cardboard boxes, and the familial. The cup stain wardrobes, even the reel-to-reel conjures up as well the encounter audio player and 1950s slide between artist and viewer, who can projector, are objects that once mutually have effects on each belonged to families to record, other, intentional or otherwise. Art display and keep memories. There becomes gift, an idea reinforced at seems in this a maturity, leaving the opening when the artist gave behind the desire to create childlike one hundred indigenous trees and fantasy worlds to pursue an plants to visitors (courtesy of individual expression that contains 67 Coillte). In our increasingly communal retrospection, as well as fragmented and divided world, a concern for the functionality of the appreciation of things staying things, for how things work. whole, the act of putting things together, regenerating growth as The turning plants, together with well as relating objects and people, the basic construction to power is welcome. The form of the circle, the rotation (partnered with the usually a ring, echoes throughout vault piece, which similarly involves the gallery space, becoming a basic engineering to cause the formal element found in every viewer to shake a flour-filled sieve piece; circles cut from mounting just by entering the submerged board within a picture frame, cup space), speak instead of a genuine stains on two wooden trays leaning nostalgia that flickers through the together with a slide image of a bull exhibition. This is not necessarily ring projected through its triangular a ‘bad thing’, but indicates perhaps structure, wire wound into a circle a desire for simpler times, for hanging on a single plinth, the knowing how things work, for how circular shape created by branches to make things from scratch, for made from coloured resin leaning how to strengthen connections with against each other, as well as the the past rather than always craving There is an inherent optimism to natural elements mechanically the new, the novel, the unreal and the title of this exhibition, which is moving round and round. virtual. It begs to ask for the real, reiterated throughout with the clear, the solid, the substance behind the simple form of the circle. Into a Having been a keen observer glitzy surface, the things that last, red-and-yellow watercolour of Quinlan’s work over the past that continue after generations, rendition of a cup stain, the artist five years, it seems like a logical the connections between people has written in cursive It’s Good progression that recent artworks that are unbreakable and inherently That Life has Many Circles, then cut would begin to literally move. whole, comprising a circle of out the body of the text, requiring Her previous sculptural work has endless encounters. The turning a close inspection to make out the been a phantasmagorical amalga- plants, together with the basic words.The cup stain speaks of the mation of many things, bringing construction to power the rotation circularity of things, the meeting the viewer into a childlike, (partnered with the vault piece, and joining of things, of people and sci-fi imaginary world. I remember which similarly involves basic the cycle of nature, of family. peering quizzically into small engineering to cause the viewer to The cup-stained surface is created domes covering tiny brains and shake a flour-filled sieve just by through the interaction between other synthetic strange things. entering the submerged space), one thing and another, leaving a In this show she has pared down speak instead of a genuine residue, the memory stain of the everything, prioritising the formal nostalgia that flickers through the encounter, intentional or not. elements of each piece. By stripping exhibition. This is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’, but indicates perhaps Sheila Dickinson is a PhD Linda Quinlan: from It’s good a desire for simpler times, for Candidate in the History of that life has many circles, 2006, Art Department at gouche on paper, 23 x 31 cm; knowing how things work, for how courtesy the artist University College Dublin to make things from scratch, for and former Secretary of how to strengthen connections with AICA Ireland. the past rather than always craving the new, the novel, the unreal and virtual.It begs to ask for the real, the solid, the substance behind the glitzy surface, the things that last, that continue after generations, the connections between people that are unbreakable and inherently whole, comprising a circle of endless encounters. c . Fergal Gaynor Lewis Glucksman Gallery, May – August 2006 Cork

Like the Blake and sons exhibition, work involves another short- work [w3:k]:circuiting of the relation between the Cork gallery and the Continental European art scene: this time a aspects of major show originally curated for an Austrian gallery by curators with Austrian, German and British work in art connections, has come directly to 69 the second city without passing the ‘Go’ of Dublin. This is interesting from 1970 toon two counts: it adds to the impression that the Glucksman’s self-image is international (it sees the present itself as a regional European gallery) rather than national (it is not a provincial Irish gallery, a second stop on national tours, or a member of a network of provincial European galleries); and it introduces curatorial practices that, despite their well-established character elsewhere, are new to the Irish scene.

Paul Graham from Beyond caring 1984 colour photograph courtesy Lewis Glucksman Gallery work, as a show dominated by The exhibition itself, although it is that body has undergone a process socially conscious documentary art, overhung by a problematised image of removal. The new service workers and clearly coming from a leftist of Marx and especially interested are ‘transients’, uninvolved in the agit-prop tradition with family in the condition of working women, social formation of their country relations, fraught or otherwise, with is ambiguous in its stance. The of work; the factory workers that Marxist politics, is a good example territory stretches from the out- had for so long dominated the of the latter. Despite such art being and-out avant-gardism of the iconography of socialism live on the a mainstay of the European, and to Berwick Street Film Collective with other side of the world, and walls some extent, North American their 1975 investigation of the plight of officious defence keep their scenes, it has never really become of English night-cleaning staff, working conditions hidden, as established in Ireland, a fact that influenced by the techniques of Michael Blum found when tracking may well be explained by the Godard and Straub, to Carey down the origins of his Nike relative positions of socialist Young’s ironic inhabitation of the trainers. In trying to assert again politics in Ireland and the rest of world of corporate PR, in which she woman’s body as a critique of the Europe. We are the country where is taught by a presentation coach structure of work, when that body is the leader of one of the world’s how best to deliver the lines “I am no longer immediate, some peculiar 70 freest economies can declare a revolutionary” (2001). A sense of effects arise. Ursula Biemann himself a socialist. So although political possibility in the seventies, makes of an analysis of the global Irish art since the eighties has been and a transformative role for art, sex industry an epistemological more than willing to embrace new gives way to wry commentary on exercise, an experiment in media, that embrace has rarely the postpolitical. Between, in the ‘microgeographies’ that resist the included the agitational-political eighties, Paul Graham points an macroscopic power structures dimension of the avant garde. objective lens at the victims of represented by satellite imaging. Despite its formal shifts, it has not Thatcher’s own bit of night-cleaning: In a strange way, the border-trans- moved from the predominantly groups of dole applicants waiting gressing prostitutes seem to aesthetic, lyrical, subjectivist in the Kafkaesque spaces of a become celebrated as political territory already mapped out by the social-welfare office; and Mladan subversives, empowered executives painting and sculpture of previous Stilinovic parodies the exhausted of their bodies, despite the fact that generations. Under the aegis of ideology of real existent socialism. their lives are clearly matters of ‘feminism’, or at least of an An aggressive incarnation of liberal survival and exploitation. And the identity-conscious woman’s art, capitalism stages a confident image of the earnest European for instance, there is an unmistak- assault on its opponents, while on artist joining in the activities of able divide between the work of, the other side of Europe a major Filipino workers in Hong Kong, say, Amanda Coogan, Amy alternative collapses. that is glimpsed from time to time O’Riordan or Dorothy Cross, and in Moira Zoitl’s Chat(t)er gardens, Ursula Biemann, Martha Rosler The question of gender as politics just seems odd and artificial. The or even –Innen plus. It is a matter seems to cut through some of this neutrality of a Jeff Wall photograph of which word you stress in the ambiguity: 1985’s Monument to from 1996, showing a pristine, if formula ‘identity politics’. working women, an action by unsettlingly characterless, hotel Monica Ross with Shirley Cameron room, just about to be exited by If this is a new kind of exhibition and Evelyn Silver, stages a clear a faceless maid (I immediately for Ireland, then, the question is protest at the feet of capitalist assumed she was Hispanic despite begged as to whether it involves enterprise (in the form of a statue having little in the way of evidence), a new kind of viewing, whether it of a Victorian magnate), and as is probably a better strategem: for proposes the gathering of a new early as 1978 Alexis Hunter had the moment the working body viewership. Who, in short, goes to suggested the obdurate otherness evades our firm grasp, is not with exhibitions like this, and what do of women’s condition to the Marxist us, is on its way to an elsewhere they get from it? Are we to expect paradigm in The Marxist’s wife (still where we would be out of place. a new collectivity, adept in the does the housework). Such critique, contemporary terms of leftist however, seems to depend upon the discourse, to emerge? Is the presence of the body, and with the spirit of Connolly to be revived by postindustrial conditions that form a parlement on the site of the the background for the greatest university tennis courts? part of the exhibition (interestingly the show is largely silent about the late-eighties and early-nineties), Wall’s photograph has strong a high aesthetic quotient (apart leftist discourse. It is a kind of aesthetic qualities, which brings us from Jeff Wall, Kirsten Justesen’s collection point for the left in the to another zone of this curatorial complex photo composition and absence of leftist politics, a free territory. If the historical narrative Adrian Paci’s surprisingly old- zone where Marxist and feminist of the exhibition seems to leave us fashioned but beautiful operatic thinking, where social critique may without a distinct direction – DVD projection of unemployed be exercised, and perhaps even socialist and feminist strategies are Albanians, stand out). Does the end refined, but without any risk of a outflanked by the capitalist-driven of the political avant garde bring resultant social agitation. This zone transformation of the working about an aesthetic-thematic divide? is fundamentally aesthetic, and environment – then how are we to One way of overcoming this would can therefore include the openly receive this kind of collection of be to start from the position of agitational while at the same time ‘work’? Something that has been artistic practice as work (or labour disarming it. It also has the capacity markedly absent in my foregoing or unemployment or leisure). On a to preserve and present certain account are the concerns of art number of occasions this avenue aesthetically enjoyable aspects of per se: I have been treating the art of procedure is gestured towards, leftist thought – its rigour, its com- pieces as documentary by curators and artists alike, but prehensiveness, its insight into the commentaries on the work despite examples like Mierle foreign and exotic – in the absence 71 structure of their time. To some Lederman Ukeles’ ‘maintenance of a leftist politics. Whether this extent this is what the curators do: art’, I don’t think it is ever political gym keeps the oppositional their catalogue essay, after a convincingly taken. body politic in trim for the return number of interesting diversions, of real politics, or whether it is the seems to fall back on the notion of So, to return to my initial questions, final dissolution of such politics into the art exhibition being an occasion what kind of viewership is likely the safety of aesthetics, is another for reflecting on social issues. But to gather about a show like this? matter. this is hardly sufficient. In my I think reflection on the fact that experience there has been a lot of socially critical art can happily be Fergal Gaynor is an independent social-documentary art recently accommodated in a well-funded scholar, writer, and member of art that has hardly been distinguish- public institution points us in the intervention group art/ not art. able from journal articles, but the right direction. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a site strongest work in this exhibition has Martin Gostner often displayed an awareness of of revolution or revolutionary Museum der Arbeit/ art-historical concerns and has had preparation, but it is still defined by Museum of Work 2001 three-part print courtesy Lewis Glucksman Gallery c . Ruth Devine Butler Gallery May – June 2006 Kilkenny

72 David Sandlin Wonderfool world The Director of the Butler Gallery, he structures his symbolic of the funny, tacky novelties he Anna O’Sullivan, is committed to schemata or side-shows from sells on screen are recreated as bringing to Ireland at least some of popular culture, myth and fairytales mixed-media objects. the many Irish-born artists she are reminiscent of Hieronymus came to know over her twenty years Bosch’s composition and complex Sandlin began his ongoing Sinner’s working in both the public and symbolic structures. Indeed, progress series of books in 1995. private arts sector in New York. a Bosch of our time, Sandlin Visually powerful, they are works of David Sandlin is one such artist. investigates how man, guided by his art and at the same time a non- Originally from the Shankill Road passions, is susceptible to fraud elitist medium of popular culture. in Belfast, his family emigrated to and charlatanism or is “seduced by He believes that the comic book fits America in 1972, when he was the holy host of hot air.” into the history of printmaking. fifteen years of age, or rather, The books, The Beast years of my he thought “they were going to In the painting Sorrow falls, joy life, Wrathland and Road to nowhere, America but ended up in Alabama.” rises, 2002, Sandlin portrays himself are about moral dilemmas and Sandlin had a grandfather, a sheriff as heroic, on the stage of life, choices, the contradictions inherent in a small town in Alabama, who donning the mantle of adulthood in America’s puritanical drive. had possible links with the KKK after the death of his father. Road to nowhere offers the reader 73 and a grandfather from Belfast who Holding his portfolio of ‘dull cares’, the option of travelling with Bill was in the Orange Order. Such a he accepts the symbols of Grimm, the truck driver/ sinner, family legacy has been the subject puritanical American culture from or with the Brothers Grimm. matter of his work, informing his a cartoon-figure MC: a hair shirt, Content and ‘getting the work thoughts on issues such as good a Puritan hat, a credit card, an out there’ is most important to versus evil, Puritanism and funda- hourglass, amongst others. this thought-provoking artist. An mentalism, more particularly since The ghosts of history and of his excellent catalogue was produced the death of his father and the birth grandfathers rise up before him on for the exhibition. of his son Jake. He has been living an escalator from a great dividing and working in New York since river on the other side of which sit 1980, a city that allows him enough his wife Joni and son Jake. The red distance and freedom to contem- hand of Ulster is at his son’s feet, plate these complex matters. a symbol of the cultural baggage passed from father to son. Family Sandlin has a lot to say and his life can be a honey trap, and in colourful cartoon style, worked in Ooo, my son, all of this is yours Ruth Devine is a paint and drawings, silk-screened (Wal Purgis Nacht Mart), 2004, false researcher/ art historian. lightboxes and books, video and security and dubious truths are (opposite) mixed media-objects/ novelties, presented in fairytale vignettes that David Sandlin vividly expresses in a satirical way lure this nuclear family into a ‘cloud Sorrow falls…joy rises, 2002 the myriad of contradictory images cuckoo land’ suburbia. Sandlin oil on canvas 213 x 361 cm and ideas he needs to communi- refuses to be cocooned: a city in coutesy Butler Gallery cate. A painted theatrical curtain, hellish flames is glimpsed through a Sin-e-Plex façade, 1993, frames a gap in the clouds of this suburban the entry to his Sinner’s progress, heaven. an exploration of American Puritanism and his own upbringing The silk-screened lightboxes in Northern Ireland and Alabama. amusingly signpost the different The recent paintings are thoughtful areas of sin, with titles such as personal narratives in which Hangover hollow, 1995, and So Sandlin lays out his past, present white, 1995. Equally entertaining and future, whereas his earlier is the video, Sell-vation can be works focus on the portrayal of sin yours, in which Sandlin’s alter-ego and human weakness in the guise Bill Grimm, a man moulded from of his alter-ego Bill Grimm (a play his environment and working for the on Pilgrim’s progress and Grimms’ Pur-Ton-o-Fun Company, sells the Fairytales). However, all the work is seven sins to salvation; the aim of essentially interlinked. The layout, the company being “to put the fun the recurring themes and the way back in to fundamentalism.” Some c . Marianne O’Kane Mermaid Arts Centre, May – June 2006 Bray

Arno Kramer 74 Over the shadows

Arno Kramer Untitled (quotation: Seamus Heaney), 2004 charcoal and watercolor on paper 52 x 43 cm photo John Stoel courtesy Mermaid Arts Centre Arno Kramer’s recent exhibition, (horses, hares, swans, deers), and The large-scale drawings are Over the shadows, perfectly cap- trees. Such objects have evidently reminiscent of Renaissance tures the enigmatic essence of true persisted in the artist’s memory and altarpieces in their triptych artistic creativity. In the Mermaid are clearly not unique to Ireland. arrangement. Indeed, if we apply Arts Centre’s compact gallery, All of the animals and symbols a religious reading, the artist acts Kramer has selected an impressive employed have a Celtic mythological as a vehicle of mediation and quantity of sixty-four drawings, significance and represent peace, intercession in relation to his which are carefully installed to best fidelity and renewal. The hare is practice and its significance. utilise the space. While this amount peaceful and retiring, the deer sounds excessive, the opposite is skilful and politic, the swan an The colours employed and true, as the artist has created emblem of perfection, poetic repetition of imagery suggest a clusters of small works in groups of harmony and learning; the horse dreamlike, ethereal world that either sixteen or twenty. There are represents readiness for duty and demonstrates the vagaries of the three cluster sets in this installa- the trees and tree rings signify a artist’s subconscious. The drawings tion, and these can equally be seen mystical connection between earth act as proverbial castles in the sky as single composite works as stand- and heaven and the cycle of life. with potent quixotic connotations. alone narratives. The clusters are Medbh McGuckian’s verse from The As a series of untitled composi- 75 complemented by four large scale tree cloud comes to mind; it com- tions, we are denied verbal clues to drawings, each of these measuring bines some of the central elements the artist’s intentions; this compels approximately 150 x 215 cm and of nature and human activity: the viewer to look closer. divided (three equally, one dispro- Over the past decade, Irish art portionately) into three parts. Light shot like the jerk of a chain a hand disturbing all that was audiences have had the opportunity The works exhibited are denied the warm in him to view the work of Dutch traditional permanency of frames boughs bent inward to their trunks practioners in Ireland’s galleries and placement behind glass. firm snow under the wing.1 and museums. These include Arno Instead they are tacked directly Kramer, Tjibbe Hoogheimstra, onto the wall, enabling the viewer The swan features heavily in the Reinout Van der Burgh, Huib Fens to observe each work without exhibition and has been a key and soon Rineke Marsman. The obstacle. This method of display symbol in Celtic folktales such as work has been featured in galleries also draws attention to the process the Children of Lir, and later in the throughout Ireland including the of drawing as an analytic tool of work of William Butler Yeats where Fenderesky Gallery and Ormeau discovery. The finished pieces incor- it represented perfection and Baths Gallery, Belfast; Limerick City porate watercolour and pencil in beauty in The wild swans at Coole Gallery of Art; Cavanacor Gallery, equal measure, yet the artist insists but also became a symbol of Donegal; Green on Red Gallery and that all these works are drawings destruction and harbinger of death Hillsboro Gallery, Dublin; Model and this assertion makes sense. in Leda and the swan. Niland Gallery, Sligo; and the Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow. The signature piece of the Kramer does not make direct This is a welcome development exhibition is the leaping hare, with religious references; instead he and one that demonstrates the easy ‘over the shadows’ lightly written offers the potential for the viewer to union of art practice with the in pencil. One of these hares is read the work in this manner as one culture and history of both featured in each cluster group, of multiple meanings. In some countries. In all cases, these artists and acts as a subtle linking device. drawings, hands are clasped tightly, have demonstrated their interest in Through the exhibition, Kramer perhaps in prayer. Beads are Irish history, literature, religion, conducts a quiet meditation on incorporated frequently as another music and film, and thus we have a symbolism and spirituality. He unifying element. ‘Bead’ itself is detached, subjective interpretation incorporates a range of themes from the old word ‘bede’ meaning of our familiar culture, one which such as: Christianity, Catholicism, ‘prayer.’ There is then the evidently continues to fascinate us. paganism, mythology, history, connection to the church and the rosary, which developed from the sociology and literature. These the- 1 Medbh Mc Guckian, The tree cloud, matic strands are subtly glimpsed practice of presenting a garland of in Shelmalier, Gallery Press, Meath, rather than literally asserted. roses as an act of devotion and 1998 loyalty, originally a secular practice Recurring elements include: figures Marianne O'Kane is curator of that was later appropriated by the (clothed and naked), hands, feet, Cavanacor Gallery, art advisor at beads, landscape studies, animals church. the Switch Room Gallery and secretary of AICA Ireland. c . Joseph R. Wolin Parker’s Box May – June 2006 Brooklyn caroline mccarthy grand detour:

76 vedute and other curious observations off the grand route In the eighteenth and nineteenth and the insignificant becomes notable sights for a traveller to his centuries, young members of the monumental. A view of a puddle hometown. Like Smithson, British and Irish upper classes took evokes a vast and distant littoral. McCarthy highlights the entropic the Grand Tour, an improving A pile of rubbish assumes the and the dystopic. On her edifying journey to Mediterranean climes. shape of a pyramid. Aluminum visit to America, she explores the Visiting the ruins of Egypt, Greece, cans, plastic bottles, and discarded intensely local and records what and Rome, they returned with sou- bolts of fabric or tarpaper suggest most tourists, and most natives, venirs. These often took the form of the marble drums of broken ignore. She implies that what we vedute – Italian for ‘views’ – paintings columns. The folds of plastic trash overlook may be worthy of notice, or drawings of the picturesque bags bring to mind the draperies of but also that it may be our wretched scenes they had encountered. classical statuary. And crumbling refuse that recommends us to Like those travellers to antique walls and rubble remind us of, well, future generations. But unlike lands, Caroline McCarthy takes her crumbling walls and rubble. Smithson, McCarthy romanticizes own Grand Tour and brings back her subject, transposing it to the mementos of her trip. But she In a signature scene, a paper coffee era of the Grand Tour. And in sojourned in New York and the cup – the blue kind with a Greek Romantic poetry, perhaps, we sketches she compiled picture the key motif, a schematic lekythos might find the closest parallel to her 77 environs of the exhibition’s locale, (a particular type of Greek vase), sensibility. In Ozymandias Shelley, Parker’s Box, which happens to be and the motto “WE ARE HAPPY TO himself once a Grand Tourist, might on Grand Street in Williamsburg, SERVE YOU” printed on it – upended have been speaking of a possible the post-industrial Brooklyn in front of a decaying concrete curb, future for America instead of an neighborhood now home to young evokes a capital that might have ancient king, and of a lonely, artists, hipsters, and galleries. fallen from a lost column. McCarthy tossed-out coffee cup instead of Her vedute depict the remains of repeats this image several times, fragments of a stone figure: our own imperial civilization, the in two drawings and an etching, “Nothing beside remains. Round weathered debris of the United and on a series of bright yellow the decay/ Of that colossal Wreck, States in 2006. t-shirts hanging on a rack with boundless and bare/ The lone and matching baseball caps, the con- level sands stretch far away.” The gallery tour begins with a row temporary ideal of travel souvenirs. Look on our works, ye mighty, of simple framed etchings. With The classical decoration on the and despair! economical means, the artist has thrown-away takeaway cup limned views of the kind of trash represents an instantly identifiable Joseph R. Wolin is an found along city streets the world symbol of New York; the cups are independent curator and over. Discarded cartons, emptied ubiquitous here, a situation related, critic based in New York; his exhibition, This ain’t no fast-food boxes, crumpled plastic perhaps, to the city’s host of Greek fooling around, was on bags, yesterday’s Chinese food diners. The cup rhymes the ancient view at Rubicon Gallery in containers, and other detritus relics seen on the Grand Tour with Dublin in April and at the rendered in outline lie on unswept the disposable cast offs of Letterkenny Arts Centre in corners of Williamsburg’s consumer culture, making it a sly July and August of 2006. thoroughfares and byways. emblem for the exhibition, but also Past the etchings, a section of articulating our remoteness from (opposite) ersatz parquet flooring rests before the values of the past. Caroline McCarthy Grand detour fold-out map a wall painted deep Pompeian red. 2006 Dozens of vedute in pencil and If McCarthy seems to posit her 40 x 30 cm watercolor, finely drawn and more illustrations of the sloughed-off courtesy the artist resolved than the etchings, cover fragments of modern life as the wall, salon style, their borders particularly American views, she banded like French mats to joins a venerable tradition. In 1967, enhance a stately-home impression. Robert Smithson published a Pictured close up and from photo-essay called A tour of the impossibly low vantage points monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (a camera aided McCarthy’s that portrayed the remnants of a sketching), the bits of urban waning industrial age and the flotsam and jetsam in the drawings vernacular of suburbia – the wooden loom large. Small things appear walkway of a bridge, a child’s huge, the nearby seems far away, sandbox, effluent pipes – as the c . Jason McCaffrey Model Arts & Niland May – July 2006 Gallery, Sligo

78 Patti Smith

Patti Smith Ground zero and gold poured forth, 2002 courtesy Model:Niland Before and throughout her musical had some bearing on this decision. that fundamentalism is a textual career, Patti Smith has also been Articulated here is a personal affair. It is an attempt to visualise a prolific poet and visual artist. resistance to oppositional modes of the dangers in believing that “our Collected here are examples of thought and the taking up of flags of linguistic currency is trustworthy photography, drawing, and a allegiance to religious and political only if it is backed by the gold new venture in installation. fundamentalisms on both sides. standard of the Word of Words.”1 The preoccupations throughout an Beside it is another drawing, also intense creative life seem to be titled Plane schematic (2002); this If something momentous largely sex and death, turning time there are no names, only a historically is known simply as an gradually from the former to the diagrammatic plan with the same ‘event’ then it seems logical to latter. The poetic leanings are composition. A series of broken suppose that in not having acquired evident in titles from early works lines leading to one vanishing point a specific name, its current status such as Love’s ass at rest – love’s takes on a more sinister meaning in and future legacy are also up for secretion at best, and also in the retrospect, when considered in light grabs. Unless efforts are made to formal elements where words and of the seized notebooks of the grasp and name an event through imagery occupy space together. alleged plotters and conspirators of both visual and verbal means, then The written word reappears again the attacks. we may as well resign ourselves to 79 and again, omnipotent throughout having vested interests name, write, the show. Untitled (notes from The largest of the drawings here is and twist history to suit their own Howl), gives an insight into a the mesmerising South tower (2001 agendas. Smith’s recent work chaotic creative process where – 2002). This piece is a shimmering bravely attempts to name and all is laid bare in a topsy-turvy textual mish-mash which forms an assess, through opening up a space meandering of lyrical and scattered image of the twisted ruins of the to see these events as other than thoughts. This impulse is offset by WTC’s south tower. A little note a traumatic spectacle. In South the curator’s imperative to impose scribbled on the side imparts that tower birthday cake (2002), the rusty- a stiff order, and a coherent this text is from the Essene Gospel orange, twisted steel girders are framework to the show, which is of Peace. Excerpts: The Holy decorated with coloured lit candles. at odds with the chaotic flights of Screams. These words interlace to Below the image Smith writes that fancy in much of the work. form the fractured remains of the they “came to adorn it festively as tower and, seen with the benefit an act of unpredicted joy.” The earlier sense of irreverence of hindsight, they suggest the and humour seems to have turned destructive powers of dogmatic 1 Terry Eagleton, ‘Pedants and in later works to more sombre belief. When religious words are partisans’, The Guardian, February 22, 2003 preoccupations. This is in evidence uttered or written, there is always in works which attempt to come a resignation to a predetermined Jason McCaffrey is an to terms with the 11 September fate, and helplessness in the face artist and critic. attacks on the World Trade Centre of catastrophe, which is utterly in New York. Smith’s motivation, depressing. The relentless it seems, is personal before it is reworking of this image in political. Plane schematic (2001), screenprints and drawings stems is a work in coloured pencil on from the resemblance Smith paper, encompassing all of the noticed with Brueghel’s Tower of names of the people who died on Ba be l from 1563. The tower’s the flight that crashed into the twisted, ghostly scaffold is equated south tower, including those of the with the Biblical tale of man’s vain hijackers. These names coalesce to attempts to reach the heavens; and form an evocative arrow pointing God’s punishment in confusing the upwards, suggestive of aeroplane people’s languages so they could vapour trails, in text so minute and not understand each other. We are dense that it is almost impossible living in modern times, yet are still to read. It would be very easy to dominated by mediaeval minds. throw the accusation of political While there are many layers to this correctness at this gesture of work, the allegorical strategy of liberal inclusivity. However, the writing the text in a bewilderingly ‘with us – or against us’ doctrine of dense matrix is the most com- the Bush administration must have pelling. This work is visual proof c . Tim Maul Metropolitan Museum of May – September 2006 Art New York

AngloMania: Tradition and transgression 80 in British fashion In 1710, four Native America appears show. Older folks swoon of ‘76 would be destabilizing, ‘sachems’ (civil leaders) traveled to over the furniture, while the subverting the sedate entitlement the court of Queen Anne to lobby paintings are generally ignored captured by Gainsborough and support in the developing conflict by everyone. We thread our way company, cosmetic surgeons of between their tribes and the French through the galleries like their era. Cinema, the medium that and their Indian allies. Getting what townspeople who, having stormed would replace the wax museum as they came for, the heavily tattooed the manor house, are confronted an entertainment of the visualized and scalplocked men were wined with the confirmation of their worst spectacle, lurks close at hand. and dined, attending a military fantasies. In the Garden party Along with Burton, the overstuffed, demonstration, a performance of room, recorded cries of birds, and a neo-Jacobean films of Peter Macbeth and a cockfight at the film loop of drizzling rain projected Greenaway are what initially come ‘Cockpit Royal’. on the windows, compete with to mind. An interface of two great voluminous ball dresses and films by (anglophile) director Cockfighting is absent from the Hussein Chalayan’s hallucinatory Stanley Kubrick – A clockwork social institutions chosen for designs. Around the corner, orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon reenactment at the Metropolitan Chalayan also provides for the (1975) – may be instructive in our Museum of Art’s AngloMania: show’s creepiest moment with his attempts to localize the chill 81 tradition and transgression in British distressed, deconstructed creations emanating from the gloom. Both fashion. Sponsored by Burberry worn by ‘maids’ who scrub the are ‘period’ films that deal with a and organized by Andrew Bolton, floors while their mistress ascends society’s suppression of the it extends the popular success of a staircase. Natty dresser William individual. Little droog Alex’s last year’s Dangerous liaisons, Burroughs prophesized in The Wild malevolence is subjugated through an exhibition whose staging of boys (1968) that the wealthy would tortuous behavior modification; ‘thematic vignettes’ depicted the seek fashions that could, from a while Barry Redmond’s barbarity is note-passing intrigues of the distance, be mistaken for beggar’s stifled by the tyrannical etiquette of eighteenth-century French rags. the class he aspires to. Relocating aristocracy. Set in the Met’s period Punk-era fashion to the time of the rooms, the introduction of a The ‘Goth’ brand has outlived its Enlightenment severs it from its narrative drive proves a complex successful literary beginnings, and origins in various grimy subcul- addition to the stately art of historic brings to AngloMania a welcome tures, and renders its initial costume display. AngloMania has degree of wit. The ‘cult of mourning’ stormhippie menace as an empty more up its lacy sleeve than as popularized by Queen Victoria sign. The gear donated by Adam blue-chip window dressing. It is festers in a ‘deathbed’ display, Ant, David Bowie, and John Lydon a determined promotion of featuring the queen herself and reads simply as ‘rock memorabilia’; ‘Britishness’ through the rearview Alexander McQueen’s deeply while the ball gowns, hunt clothes, mirror of ‘postmodernism’, morbid dress along with Phillip and Saville Row suits look very juxtaposing eighteenth- and Treacy’s vaguely art deco, black-silk secure here – their coded nineteenth-century fashion and hat. An Angelina/ Billy Bob moment messages of power (male, no pun- functional clothes (tradition) is supplied by jewelry that contains kettes allowed) and class intact. with contemporary designers human semen, while a looming An opportunity missed is the (transgression!). Evoked throughout purple four-poster suggests the AngloMania compilation CD for sale, is a mantra of irony, theatricality, imagery of (Goth) filmmaker Tim along with the tote bags and and a privileged eccentricity that Burton. Kiddies may get frightened posters, in the gift shop outside perhaps, like Britannia’s shield, in a room titled Franco mania, where the show’s exit. Besides the serves as defense against the a figure in a grotesque raven jaw-dropping inclusion of Stiff Little arrows of modernism. Period headdress and a taffeta Maria Luisa Fingers’ Alternative Ulster, it furniture, objects, and paintings gown extends its arm to another contains no Punk, or eighteenth- provide lavish background to flying bird – prompting one visitor century music. Couldn’t they have beloved traditional subjects like to whisper, “Eyes wide shut…” to invited some DJ to produce an The hunt, The gentleman’s club and her companion. awesome ‘postmodern’ mash up Upstairs/ downstairs, which are (Mozart and Sham69?) and have The inclusion of any photographic performed by a cast of manikin forgotten Duran Duran? men, women, horses, and hounds. documentation would break the Heavy on atmosphere, there is spell of what is essentially a much to see and read in the murky wax-museum experience. Images confines of this smaller-than-it from the cadaverous1 Punk Class Less intact may be the image of Marie Antoinette as a Versailles- (previous spread left) (above) Vivienne Westwood: John Galliano: white Burberry, the exhibition’s sponsor. dwelling Paris Hilton. Noting the Queen-ish cotton jersey with black Few on this side of the Atlantic absence of a concluding guillotine ensemble, from Harris newsprint, autumn/ Tweed collection, winter 2004 – 05; are aware of its status as the label scene, the audience at its Cannes autumn/ winter 1987 – Stephen Jones: of preference for UK ‘chavs’ premiere responded with some 1988, Burgundy cotton coyote-fur hat; photo velvet with blue wool courtesy Maria (chavscum.co.uk), reminding us that applause and some hisses; as I piping, faux ermine fur, Valentino/ MCV black leather and Photo; courtesy class tourism, as endorsed by the do finally to AngloMania. Pass the natural wood, faux Metropolitan Museum fashion industry, is a two-way laudanum; I have a cockfight to ermine fur and of Art multicolored felted wool street. America’s own enchantment go to. crown; photo © 2002 with monarchism has long Museum Associates/ 1 UK punk personalities always LACMA;courtesy surpassed its worship of Metropolitan Museum seemed Dickensian to me. ‘Hollywood’s Royalty’ to something of Art Johnny, Sid, Siouxsie, Malcolm, more in step with its conservatism, Viv, and even Shane, felt like (previous spread right) isolationism and bull-market escapees from some lost, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood: myopia. Children, (the majority industrial revolution saga; shelved between Blake and Anarchy in the UK shirt being girl children) are shoe-horned and Bondage pants Marx. with bum flap, from into their Manolo Blahniks earlier Seditionaries collection than ever, having grown up in front Tim Maul is an artist and ca. 1977, white cotton muslin with red, blue, of the mega-selling DVDs of critic who lives in New York and black Union Jack Cinderella (1950) and The princess City. silkscreen print, and black cotton sateen, diaries (2001-04). This year we can black cotton terrycloth; expect director (and fashion icon) photo © 2002 Museum Associates/ LACMA; Sofia Coppola’s reimagining of courtesy Metropolitan c . Karl Harron Ards Arts Centre June 2006 Newtownards

angela darby and robert 83 peters the rumour mill Someone once said a rumour is the one thing that gets thicker instead of thinner as it spreads, and that trying to quash one is like trying to un-ring a bell. This exhibition takes rumour as a central theme and develops two different approaches to understanding how reputations are formed through a prism of truth, half-truth and misinformation.

A ‘rumour mill’ implies negative connotations, of being talked about behind one’s back; stories constructed to blacken names, damage reputations or undermine another’s character. It is a place in which stories are fabricated for the purpose of spreading scurrilous gossip with the sole aim to criticise, ridicule or demean. Most people have been on the receiving end at some point of their life and few can claim to be completely innocent of assisting the distribution process.

Angela Darby Ballads and banners fabric, 2m x 1.75m courtesy FullyFormed Projects Positioned in the upstairs gallery used on the wall pieces. These Karl Harron is an artist in Ards, Angela Darby presents a include words with positive and living in Loughries, series of two-dimensional works on negative connotations, such as ‘sly’, Newtownards. one wall, accompanied by a series ‘cuckold’, ‘liar’, ‘lover’, ‘team of sculptural forms placed centrally player’, ‘cheater’, ‘loyal’ and on the floor. The wall pieces consist ‘determined’… On the night of the of two digitally worked images and launch, visitors were encouraged to one large, quilted textile hanging. ‘pick a bone’ they would like to pass The digital images consist of two on to someone ‘special’. gingham guns crossed as in a traditional display, hovering on a Robert Peters utilised the recess gingham background. Lettering, in the gallery wall to house a work with the quality of stitching, spells entitled You are. A geometric out the name ‘May Belle Starr’ on patterned circle painted in white, one set of guns, whilst dates of greys and black spins when pushed birth and death are spelt out on the by the viewer. As it comes to rest, 84 other. Between the handles on one an arrow indicates if we are loved, image is Starr’s epitaph: loathed, perfect, hated, admired, envied, liked, flawed or scorned. Shed not for her the bitter tear, At the base of the circle sits a small Nor give the heart to vain regret; black-and-white figure overseeing ‘Tis but the casket that lies here, the ‘game’. Painted like a The gem that filled it sparkles psychopathic clown, the disturbing yet. character takes on the role of a cosmic joker meting out our May Belle Starr was an outlaw position in the universe. Each of my known as ‘the Bandit Queen’. She spins suggested the wheel was gradually acquired the reputation, weighted towards ‘loathed’ until not necessarily warranted, of a another willing participant took criminal mastermind whose gang their turn and was identified as preyed on travellers, ranchers, perfect – they are not, believe me. and cowboys throughout her part of Oklahoma. She died after being In keeping with the style of Peters’ shot in the back in an ambush, most recent work, the pattern in the possibly by her own son. Starr was centre of the ‘wheel’ is based on an no Calamity Jane as played by Doris optical illusion. When half observed Day or Annie Oakley as played by with peripheral vision, the wheel is Betty Hutton. The artist has taken perceived as spinning, making one gingham fabric and quilting return to full observation only to techniques more usually associated ‘see’ it stop again. The form seems with female activity on the frontier to completely equate with the way and woven them around May Belle’s in which rumours function just story. The scene from Calamity Jane outside of our own perception. in which we see Doris Day in a Ever walk into a room and people s dress for the first time and tidying uddenly change the subject or go her cabin in preparation for a visit quiet? This image creates that same from her ‘beau’ comes to mind. This sense of uneasiness – visually. group of works reflects on the way in which stepping out of defined Over the course of the exhibition, roles can build a negative reputa- visitors were encouraged to interact tion in which fact and fiction merge. with the works, pick out bones, spin the wheel, and judging from On the floor, gingham material has the comments left in the suggestion been used to make lots of little book they enjoyed this ‘permitted’ bones. Each bone has a word interaction. Psychotic clown aside, written in a similar text to the one so did I. Robert Peters: You are, 2006, acrylic on plywood, 1m circum- ference; courtesy FullyFormed 85 Projects c . Isobel Harbison Beaconsfield Gallery June 2006 London

86 Daniel Figgis Doppler

Daniel Figgis Doppler, installation shots, (left) upper space (right) lower space photos Steve Ibb; courtesy/ copyright Beaconsfield The 2006 London Architecture installation is not just an The second space is a redbrick, Week, coinciding with London’s exploration of sound from an barrel-vaulted archway underneath Architectural Biennale, carried a architectural perspective; it offers train tracks and illuminated by strip diverse programme of contempo- something more, an analysis and lighting. Here the sound is of a rary art revealing very different subsequent development of a train passing, with locomotive conceptual explorations of long-established scientific theory sounds played, again at a low pitch architecture. Prototypes, a of sound: the Doppler effect. that is appropriate to the clean, performance by Robin Deacon, bare space. The final ‘Upper Room’, saw the artist study the oft-mocked The effect was discovered by the originally a school hall, contains recreational architecture of nineteenth-century Austrian physi- four large open windows below model-train sets, relating this cian and mathematician, Christian which three speakers face the construct to the self, himself. Johann Doppler. The Doppler effect visitor. The sound this time is of Bill Fontana’s Harmonic bridge used is the variation in the frequency of a repeated emergency-vehicle sirens the Millennium bridge as a musical sound wave at any point due to the passing below. instrument, synthesising vibrations motion of the sound source. Figgis from sensors attached to it and illustrates this theory by playing his The repetition of these seemingly broadcasting them into the Tate, recordings, each suggesting motion transient sounds, played on a fifty- 87 encouraging a sonic as well as and movement, through a motion- five-minute loop, is significant and visual appraisal of London’s less speaker, in an otherwise empty relates to the title. The Doppler Millennium architecture. By further gallery space. By convincing us that effect explains the change in a contrast, Daniel Figgis’ Doppler these sounds are coming from a sound as it passes us by, and yet by explores and develops theories distance and then disappearing, repeating it on a loop it never really of sound from an architectural while we remain still, he success- leaves us; it is constant. The effect perspective. fully exploits the Doppler effect. discovered by Doppler the scientist has now been updated by Figgis Figgis was commissioned by The exhibition space itself is the artist. Beaconsfield Gallery, as the first divided into three rooms: the artist in the new sonic series entryway café, the ‘arch’ over which In all three spaces there are open entitled Soundtrap. Beaconsfield trains frequently travel to and from windows or doors allowing in ‘real’ is an artist-led exhibition space Waterloo, and the large, bright sounds which, when mixed with where, over the past twelve years, ‘Upper Room’, outside which Figgis’ pre-recorded sounds, the director and visual artist David remains a fire-engine park. Each supposedly create a tonal conver- Crawforth has worked with various sound recording is space-specific, gence. By being ‘real’ they were sound artists producing a wide offering a basic narrative on the of an entirely different pitch and array of responses to the space and interior and exterior functions of the nature. Whilst perhaps also being dynamics there. building. All three were originally unavoidable in this old building, the recorded by the director, and then allowing in of ‘real’ sounds along- Figgis’ work is a move away from altered by Figgis, repeated on a loop side those that have been altered, the interactive or live sound of approximately fifty-five minutes created, serves to showcase Figgis’ installations pioneered by John and adjusted to seventy-five beats construct, the artist now aurally in Cage and the New York Happenings per minute. In the café the sound direct comparison, or competition, and Fluxus artists in the late 1950s – that is played is that of a barista with the scientist. still being developed by artists such frothing milk with a cappuccino as Fontana, or perhaps more machine. This sound is not the Isobel Harbison is a freelance appropriately Dave Cunningham, venomous whistle familiar to café- writer and curator based in London; she is currently working who performed The space between goers, but has been adjusted, on the curatorial team of Channel here in 2005 – in that it does not pitches gently rising and falling, 4’s Big art project, London. respond directly to the movements and then repeated, soft and of the audience in the gallery welcoming like the interior building. Instead, Figgis silences itself.The sound of the machine the viewer, makes them listen to the is treated in the same way in the sounds, or noises, which inhabit the following two recordings, Figgis building daily. Thus the building, lowering the pitch of everyday usually treated as an inanimate noises and coaxing them into a viewing platform, is now presented steady rhythm. to us as a listener. However, Figgis’ c . Slavka Sverakova Catalyst Arts June – July 2006 Belfast

88 Maurice Doherty

(left) Maurice Doherty Loop, 2004 video still courtesy the artist (below) Waiting to fall, 2001 video still courtesy the artist Born in 1972 in Omagh, Maurice embraces a conceptual decision unreachable and beautiful. Doherty studied at the University of and a physical set up, but then it Plato considered the universe as Ulster and Glasgow School of Art. centres on ideas. A move from both imaginary and fashioned by His work has been exhibited since physical to spiritual and back – the ultimate craftsman, the 1997 across Europe (Berlin, a necessary condition for being Demiurge, by cutting, measuring, Glasgow, Stockholm, London, an artist- appears as a matrix of weighing… Hinduism offers a belief Edinburgh, etc) and in the USA authenticity, perseverance, integrity that the universe is Brahma’s dream (Chicago). and dedication, while testing that exists only when he sleeps. limitations. Both philosophers and religious The two gallery rooms at Catalyst thinkers represent attempts to solve accommodated three video projec- The Loop, 2004, consists of two the great puzzle of creation. tions effortlessly and in the spirit of images, one on the front of the Doherty deflates this effort by minimalist aesthetics. On the wall screen, the other on its dorso. making the link to the harm opposite the entrance, Waiting to They are synchronised views of smoking cigarettes inflicts on its fall, 2001, raised unlikely resonances a woman spinning a hula hoop adherents. His distinctive switching with the myth of Icarus and the with her body, arms stretched of the scene from light to dark, from tradition of self-portrait. Doherty, horizontally. The intriguing burning cigarettes to a night sky, 89 casually dressed, wearing differences between the expected posits the work into the matrix of protective helmet, is gradually and the delivered, between two flat conflicts and paradoxes of art, losing the battle with induced sleep, images and the added walk that knowledge, and existence. crashing in the end loudly onto the joins them, define the art as a wooden floor towards the viewer. convincing lie, a term I borrowed The role of time changes according The tropes of modesty visualised in fromPicasso. His Acrobat on a ball, to the subject’s ‘appropriate the attire and sensible care allow 1905, is a reminder of the paradox’: the Self is governed by for reference to their opposites: Modernists interest in the subject, natural law, the athlete’s time is putting Self and identity in the his print Acrobat, 1930, after all artificially prolonged, and the centre. It is neither an image of inspired the beautiful blue female universe’s eternity is cut short by Spinozian joy of living nor a Acrobats, 1952, by Matisse. the dying out of burning cigarette subversive criticism of a failing Doherty’s video shares with them ends. Organisms die, skills individual. It is, I propose, an ‘essai’ the silence, the concentration, prolong, and dreams may or may – the noun form of the French verb the calm confidence as significant not succeed. ‘essayer’ that, according to qualities. The sting and the twist scholarship, meant: to try to do come from the medium – the loop Slavka Sverakova is a something, to experience a thing, may run as long as the equipment freelance writer on art. to suffer something disagreeable, lasts – and no longer. and to test something. The verb could refer to a servant tasting In a separate dark room, Life, death a prince’s meat for poison or a and the meaning of the universe, customer sampling the weight of 2001, runs for some fifteen minutes. the coin for authenticity. It opens with Doherty walking in a fully lit room amongst suspended Doherty tests his ability to stand cigarettes, lighting and smoking still while sleep increases its grip. each for a second or two. After the Like Icarus, whose wings were lights are switched off the burning attached by wax which easily ends populate the lens’s frame in melted near the sun, Doherty slow motion, some brighter than undermines his efforts by taking others, forging a view of a night sky sleeping pills. Differently to the art or of satellites circling from left to practices of the last five hundred the right. The red dots do not look years or so, he cannot see the like burning cigarettes any more. image of himself while creating it. An alchemist would take something Exploration of who he is, what he base and hope to change it into a wants to say and how he wants to higher value. Doherty selects be seen is the direct, first level on something accessible and badly which Doherty’s video engages the addictive, and transforms it into viewer. The structure of the video something adorable and c . Cherry Smyth Hauser and Wirth June – July 2006 London

90 Ellen Gallagher Salt eaters It’s significant that Ellen Gallagher’s (paper, pencil, oil, plasticine, gold layers, with one blue photographed latest show is called Salt eaters as leaf, newsprint) and historical and eye stuck on like a comment on ideas around consumption are aesthetic languages continues to miscegenation. (Gallagher’s father central to her work. I first came distinguish her practice. was from Cape Verde and her Irish across her painting in 1995 at the mother from Rhode Island, and she Whitney Biennale and was Technical proficiency and an icy wit once said that “there is a tendency fascinated by its peculiar material inform Gallagher’s investigation of to erase my Irish family, so that it and cultural texture – she collaged how the architecture of race was doesn’t contaminate people’s sheets of blue-lined school writing built. Critic Thyrza Nichols Goodeve narrow definition of blackness.”1 paper onto canvas and ran series of calls her method of constructing disembodied popping eyes and new cosmologies rather than There is also a collusion of formal hotdog lips over this surface, like didactically critiquing existing tactics in Dirty O’s, where 3D ‘wigs’ features looking for a face, a whole social and aesthetic systems engulf watercolour portraits of body, to belong to. These isolated “generative art,” similar in strategy the face itself, in oval layers of elements of minstrel caricature to Matthew Barney’s. Three newsprint and plasticine. The were astonishingly low-key and plasticine pieces in Salt-eaters scaffolding of the face, the intense at the same time, a produce anti-ads from snippets of attempts to construct an identity 91 reiteration of blackness that products claiming to cure bunions, that the self can pass behind, marked how black faces had been drunkenness, headaches, etc, are comic, determined and richly read, reproduced and consumed as jumbling their message to a allusive: while ridiculing the entertainment by white culture. poignant absurdity: “salt-free and conformation to whiteness, After the punchy film and video time-tested, worn by stars, don’t Gallagher also celebrates these work that Black-British artists had send no money, may cause fatal portraits as necessary strategies been producing in the ’80s and ’90s, infection, genuine cultured, of survival and glamour. She this was a piercingly subtle way of immediate delivery…” Made of dismantles white history and tackling the interstices of two-tone, light-drinking grey, representation and puts it together representation that referenced a the panels of sliced and pressed again, her tendrils reaching deftly minimalist fine art tradition, rather plasticine exude aspiration, reek through art history from postwar than a maximalist documentary of lack and dissatisfaction. Like fashion and popular culture to the one. Like Agnes Martin, it was the wig charts, they intervene in history of slavery. So when she stealthily quiet. It didn’t seem to the semiotics of consumption, makes more abstract and care if you heard – it knew it was looking at how we’re moulded like conceptual moves – as in Brava, speaking a language audible to play-putty, then and now. a short filmic loop of an island that every black person who viewed it. never draws closer, and the painting Collaged strips of magazine ads It took me longer to tune in. s’Odium – the clues are there and plasticine appliqué also feature I wasn’t used to minimalism as indelible, slyly readable signifiers in a large painting, Bird in hand, ‘saying anything’ beyond an from her own intellectually 2006. Here, a black figure, dressed aesthetic inquiry. dexterous universe. as a pirate, with a peg-leg, stands Later came Gallagher’s under dreadlocks composed of 1 Quoted in Claire Doherty’s catalogue essay for the Ikon interventions on newspaper adverts paint and amoeba-like cut-outs, Gallery, 1998 for hair-products and wigs in amid tributaries of collaged African-American postwar magazine ads shaped like seaweed Cherry Smyth is a critic, magazines. Here she built tendrils that proliferate like tongues curator and poet. fantastical modernist structures in of broken but beautiful speech. Again, the yellowing writing paper (opposite) yellow (blonde?) plasticine onto Ellen Gallagher the model’s heads which screamed is the base on which Gallagher Light n write, 2006 against discreet assimilation – invents her truth, her version of the plasticine, 89 x 55 cm story of Cape Verde slaves who © Ellen Gallagher; courtesy “Hello! We’re here!” Like the artist and Hauser & Wirth Constructivist head-dresses, gathered salt and gained knowledge Zürich London African masks, sci-fi helmets, of sea-faring to become sailors and Bauhaus bonnets, these intricate, captains. It has the untamed loud ensembles sidestepped, energy of a spreading myth, yet is elegantly and assuredly, from meticulously controlled. There is minimalist satire to futuristic something slightly demonic about figuration. This melding of materials the figure’s face, outlined in 3D c . Tim Stott Project Arts Centre June – July 2006 Dublin

92 sarah pierce the meaning of greatness

Sarah Pierce The meaning of greatness, 2006 installation shot; courtesy the artist The latest instalment of Sarah to use the archive as a “speculative Nothing begins in the archive: we Pierce’s ongoing archival project, tool,” an experiment in presentation remain in the thickness of those The metropolitan complex, uses a and interaction, yet the earnestness stories which have ended up there. monumental dark-blue cloth curtain with which she presents her Pierce acknowledges this and does to divide the Project space into four speculations rather hinders their not feverishly excavate origins sections. The first section is not agility. and certainties. Nevertheless, obviously inviting, presenting the archive becomes too much a visitors with a screen behind which How does an archive construct destination in itself: with (perhaps work might still be in progress ‘greatness’? The accompanying reluctant) nostalgia, Pierce looks The sole prompt is a cardboard box selection of texts contains a quote back from ‘tomorrow’ to past full of catalogues for the taking. from Pier Paulo Pasolini: ‘As long as bearers of a promise of greatness The second section is empty; the I am not yet dead, no one can know that has not been kept. Yet that third contains a reconstruction by me, i.e. make sense of my actions, promise is inherent to the Pierce of Eva Hesse’s Untitled (rope which are, linguistically considered, technologies she makes use of. piece) of 1970; the fourth, upon and therefore difficult to ‘decode’.’ Like Benjamin’s angel, whilst facing above a waist-high black shelf, Death gives a life over to be the past the technologies of the paraphernalia tracing (the decline archived, i.e. to be represented for archive orient themselves towards 93 of) student activism and youthful decoding or unpicking. In turn, the future. The logic of testimony, promise – letters and documents the archive seconds death, as it of reconstructing ‘what happened’, surrounding the Kent State requires finality to a life’s events is thoroughly confused with the University shootings of 1970, to revive them comprehensively, logic of fiction, of recounting ‘what student test pieces from the in memoriam. However, until the could happen’. This is what makes University of Belgrade, student circumstances of Pasolini’s death the archive ‘a singular experience drawings by Pierce’s mother, are settled he will haunt any of the promise’ (Derrida): a promise essays on Hesse, and photographs archival reconstruction of his life. that tomorrow we will know what of Belgrade student audiences in He is still ‘not yet dead’. As long as our current actions will have meant, the ’70s. he remains so, and as long as his but also a promise that what could archive is incomplete, he possesses have happened might still. The threads of this archive soon greatness. become knotted together. The To be archived, then, is to move temptation is often to pick at these The archive also has the potential towards greatness, to live a second knots, unravel them, scrutinise what to make great because it invests life in memory, but to archive, to results and put things in their place. an array of objects with the power assume the position of archon, is to But since Foucault met Borges, the to displace death. Its artefacts be already great in this life. ‘There order of things has been troubled connect mortals to those who is no political power without control by its own flaws and absurdities, possess and apportion greatness, of the archive’ (Derrida). Yet, there and as a result the haphazard the former, with an anxious eye on is little here to put at risk Pierce’s curiosities of the Wunderkammer destiny, preserving and disciplining authority as archon, and so expand have gained favour, to the detriment their share. To archive is to defer this project beyond mere of displays of systematic knowl- anxiety, to create necessity from autobiography. In other words, there edge. After all, before claiming the chance. Yet its impaired processes is little risk to the horizons of what privileges of the encyclopaedia, also create and carry phantoms can be remembered and who can archives were more conundrums, within them. remember it. Had Pierce attempted repositories of secrets and marvels, some of the monstrous acrobatics Pierce’s solemn curtain, for their ‘acrobatic’ irregularities that archives are capable of, then, example, clearly partakes of this enticing and perplexing the perhaps, her failure would have funereality (although, following beholder in cacophonous been more perplexing and more Hesse, it ‘softens’ the monumental, conversation (Barbara Stafford). promising. making it more transitional, more Such collections might offer only labile). This is Pierce’s strength: duplicitous resolutions. However, Tim Stott is a critic based using the material structure of her for all its studied leniency and in Dublin. archive to direct the possible ambivalence, for all its knottiness, meaning of its contents. But this Pierce’s project is less than structure is not fantastic enough, acrobatic (it is more didactic, and lacks the vital friction, to bring although, of course, not its phantoms forth. authoritatively so). Pierce claims c . Paul O’Brien Four Gallery June – July 2006 Dublin

94 Better than

(below) Michele Horrigan Gone again, 2006 the real thing? colour photograph based on Enda O'Donoghue's Gone 410, 2006 (right) courtesy Four Gallery Four gallery, run by US expatriate Viewers were invited to send in of the relationship between artist Lee Welch at the top of a their creative responses based on traditional and new media, the house on Dublin’s Burgh Quay the work, which, featured on the static versus the kinetic, originality overlooking the river, has been internet, then became part of the and reproduction, the remarkable hosting a show entitled Better than show itself. The title Better than and the banal. (Reversing the the real thing. Curated by art critic the real thing? may refer to the link process, Cóilín Rush in turn Regina Gleeson, the exhibition between art and reality, and/ or translated the image through a hovers on the cusp between the relationship between art and complex process back into kinetic ‘traditional’ conceptualism and new technology in the age of (digital) form. Other responses to this work media art. A feature of the show reproduction, but it also raises the came from Michele Horrigan, Paul is the ‘copyleft or alternative-copy- question of the connection between Rooney and Alana Perlin.) Martin right concept: the work is licensed artist and audience. Where does Shannon’s Self-portrait as Amanda under ‘Creative Commons’, which the creative experience begin and Coogan as David with cattle plays attempts to find a happy medium end? Some of the responses sent in with issues of reproduction and between the ‘all-or-nothing’ may be accessed online at auratic originality, by now (perhaps extremes of traditional copyright betterthantherealthing.info overly) familiar from the writings of law. Copyright law traditionally left Walter Benjamin. Responses set off 95 no room for manoeuvre between The show encompasses work by by this work included contributions the poles of commodification on Enda O’Donoghue, Martin Shannon by Tom Flannagan, Justin Watt of the one hand, and anarchic licence and Jürgen Simpson, as well as a insomnia.org, Franziska-Maria on the other. Under Creative joint piece by Saoirse Higgins and Apprich, and Katarina Mojzisova. Commons, artists choose which Simon Schiessl. O’Donoghue’s work rights they wish to reserve and is a painting of a room derived from which they are content to relinquish. a live webcam image, raising issues Simpson’s piece uses classical and partially lamented Media Lab music (Stabat mater) by the Europe, as well as of some recent eighteenth century Italian work by Dublin artist John Buckley composer Pergolesi which, though that commented on the connection played digitally, percolates faintly between war and computer games. from a retro, wooden record player There is the inevitable association placed on the floor. It brings to to be made with Baudrillard, the fore questions concerning Debord and the issue of war as minimalism, attention in the age of simulation or spectacle. The work media saturation, as well as the raised pertinent issues concerning analogue/ digital dichotomy. In fact, war toys, and also the question of I initially thought it was something catharsis versus identification. to sit on and had to be enlightened (Do violent games release anti- as to its status as an art object. social impulses or intensify them? You had to crouch down with your How do, or how should, we deal ear to the box to hear the music with being ‘wound up’?) Having and, being assured by Welch that it experienced the piece, I felt neither was in fact playing, I thought I could more nor less inclined to bomb hear it faintly. In fact it wasn’t and Baghdad than before, but it did had to be turned on, which for me impart a sense of reflexive at least opened up interesting pseudo-empowerment, which is issues of the relationship between perhaps what life in the digital age expectation and reality, setting off is all about. a semi-mystical train of thought ranging from John Cage through Respondents to the Higgins/ Brian Eno to Nelson Goodman. Schiessl piece included Sean Lynch, My response was probably far off Ian Wieczorek, Charlie Powell, the map in terms of the author’s Simon Withers and Tara Bermingham who intriguingly (above) intention – if, as may not be the Cóilín Rush case, such a thing is relevant to the interpreted the toy as a monkey Translation, 2006, aesthetic experience. (Among other rather than a child. (That set off a video still; from respondents, Tim Redfern created new train of associations: we all http://www.betterthantherealthing.info/ artworks.htm an abstract video response to have the oil-monkey on our backs… the music.) Inside the record player when is the West going to stop was a bunch of dried flowers, of monkeying around with the rest of Paul O’Brien elusive import. the world? See no evil, etc.) ([email protected]) teaches It would be interesting to follow at the National College of The most interesting piece was the ‘Chinese whispers’ effect of Art and Design, Dublin. an interactive one by Higgins and distortion-on-distortion as global Schiessl. Even though the term commentators comment via the interactivity has achieved a certain internet on other commentators jadedness by this stage, it is always about work that was in the first nice to be able to play with place commentary itself. The something, to be – in the postmodern breakdown of the developing terminology – a ‘vuser’ dichotomies of art/ reality, original/ rather than just a viewer. It brings representation, artist/ viewer etc, out the child not far below the continues apace in the digital era. surface in most of us, or some of us anyway. You pick up a little toy drummer sitting in a square on the floor, wind it up, and bombs appear to fall from the ceiling in a video- projection on the square. The piece is reminiscent of interactive work by researchers Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Michael Lew at Dublin’s late c . Karen Normoyle Limerick City Gallery of June – August 2006 Art, Limerick

Fresh, re-imagining 97

Before setting foot inside the current exhibition in the Limerick the collection City Gallery , Fresh, re-imagining the collection, I am reminded of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland. Published in 1878, it has come to be regarded as sowing the seeds of the literary revival, and has been described as an “imaginative reconstruction” of ancient Irish mythology and Celtic sagas. Fusing the historical with the imaginative, O’Grady’s narrative influenced literaries such as JM Synge, WB Yeats and AE, not to mention artists like Jack Yeats, all of whom were integral to the total Irish cultural rebirth. Likewise, in this exhibition historical and cultural heritage is reborn in the imaginations of various Irish and international artists. Eleven artists and collaborations were challenged to create works inspired by the city gallery’s permanent collection. As one familiar with the fine collection, spanning early to contemporary Irish art, I was immediately intrigued.

Alice Maher Beautiful Mouth 30 x 51 x 38 cm cast bronze 2006 courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art photo Matthew Gidney Curated by Pippa Little, a sense out-of-focus press photographs. Linda Molenaar’s response to of timelessness pervades this On the surrounding walls hang Patrick Collins’ Rising swan ambitious exhibition as works are various depictions of landscapes, provides a peaceful respite from displayed regardless of and historical and social events the cerebral confusion of Alan chronological or thematic concerns. from the nineteenth century. Phelan’s replicated busts in the However, an ordered pattern is O’Rourke’s work gathers stories adjacent space. Molenaar has taken evident: contemporary responses and press photographs from Irish quite a literal interpretation of are displayed alongside the chosen newspapers sold in London; car the Hans Christian Anderson works that inspired them. accidents (reminiscent of Warhol’s tale, where eleven boys were Jill Dennis adopts Leech’s palette Disaster series) are collaged transformed into swans. Molenaar and her cows pay homage to both alongside graduation photographs has knitted garments for each Dutch genre and Irish landscape and picturesque winter scenes. swan in order to break the spell. painting. Alice Maher’s Beautiful O’Rourke chronicles the ordinary There have been many versions of mouth stands Oliver Sheppard’s and the sensational just as the Raid this legend of transformation and delicate bronze nude Finnbhéal of Ballyneety chronicles a violent Molenaar’s is equally poignant. on its head. The replicated sternum event or George Barrett depicts a Stream of pure potentiality by Marie 98 of Sheppard’s neo-classical beauty picturesque landscape or Daniel Foley is an equally peaceful and becomes a water font taking on Maclise’s superbly observed canvas delicate piece springing forth from sacred and ritualistic associations. At the ball shows the frivolity of a her seed pods in the drawing Maher fragments the classically social event. collection. proportioned figure and creates an artificial orifice; it thus becomes Not all artists were inspired by The collaborative artists revealed the ‘beautiful mouth’ of Sheppard’s specific works in the collection. some refreshing surprises in this original title. Neva Elliot archives her own exhibition. Sam Ely and Lynn Harris collection based on activities of re-present a selection of posters Prized landscapes by Paul Henry, local groups, and though it holds from Michael O’Connor’s Jack Yeats and Walter Verling lead little visual interest it may be of International Poster Collection, beautifully and gently into Alan more historical value in posterity. donated to the city gallery. Magee’s Im/permanent recollection. Amanda Coogan takes her inspira- The artists quote Victorian art The installation consists of two tion from the absence of visual critic John Ruskin as prophetically carefully synchronised projections documentation of the women who declaring that the poster of time-lapse photography defended the walls of the city would replace the Giottos, “the surrounded by cast-concrete cubes. during the Siege of Limerick. Spéir fresco-painting of the bill sticker is The projections expose the mhná consists of three screens of likely… to become the Fine Art of impermanence of the landscape, projected images which simultane- Modern Europe.” Interpretation is always changing yet remaining ously display groups of young, senseless here; whether political, remarkably similar to the energetic women (Coogan included) commercial, poetic or humorous, landscapes painted in the previous dressed in candy pinks as they these posters solely call for century, sharing the huge expanses dance, make strange facial expres- appreciation for their graphic of brooding skies and the sense that sions and strike comical, catwalk vibrancy and eye-catching history is steeped in every crevice poses. Their gestures seem to simplicity. Simplicity and humour is of the land. There is a strange yet subvert contemporary music videos; further explored by Ciara Finnegan effective mixture of natural and these women are not desirable, and the sixth-class pupils of JFK industrial; the sounds of chirping indeed they verge on the ridiculous. Primary School, who animate some birds indicate the changing of time However, the absence of a choice examples from the yet the concrete cubes stand as soundtrack makes it difficult for the collection. The animations range something more permanent, more viewer to engage with the women from the comical, as Grace Henry’s desolate and ultimately nostalgic. and the work itself, and ultimately gossiping island women become reinforces the silencing of the scratching, cackling hens, to more Less poetic though perhaps more voice of the courageous women. revelatory, as Sean Keating’s incisive, Melanie O’Rourke’s Untitled Spéir mhná fits nicely within self-portrayal as a rugged western digital print of mixed media Coogan’s own ouevre, using the fisherman is exposed as a farce. paintings is a stark break from the body to explore contemporary Unquestionably this work is fresh, smooth, plastic surface of her problematics, and it is less engaged for how better to see something previous works. Blocks of bright with honouring the significance of anew than through the eyes of colour and simple silhouette are the Limerick women or rectifying a child? replaced by paintings of faded, their historical omission. Just as Standish O’Grady formed a ‘national narrative’, Fresh fuses myth and history, resulting in works that are, for the most part, informed, inspired and enlivened. Fresh is not a nostalgic harkening back to the glory days of Irish painting and sculpture; it is an invigorating acknowledgement of the relevance and value of such a collection to contemporary artists’ working practice. It throws open the tradition of referencing in art and re-energising works by respected masters. However, this exhibition bears witness that the old Karen Normoyle is an art 99 breathes life into the new just as historian and visual arts much as vice versa. writer

Neva Elliot Archiving Limerick 2006 installation shot courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art photo Matthew Gidney c . Aileen Blaney On general release summer 2006

paul greengrass 100 united

The international media’s adoption The ‘unreal’, real event 9/ 11 of a common eyewitness response prompted a glut of artistic to the World Trade Centre attacks, responses across the globe, some describing it as “like a movie,” of which were more ethically and recast a clichéd phrase into one of politically challenged than others. the primary coordinates of global United Airways Flight 93, which discussions of the atrocity. One singularly failed to hit its target, frequently cited argument proposes is the subject of a telemovie 93that the tragic scenario’s uncanny Flight 93 (Peter Markle, 2006) and resemblance to a brand of a recent feature, United 93 (Paul Hollywood export – the ‘disaster Greengrass, 2006), by the director movie’ – which has infused of the internationally acclaimed collective fantasies since its Bloody Sunday (2002). meteoric rise to blockbuster fame in the ’70s, prompted the incursion If, in the past, the film industry of the hackneyed euphemism. rattled the collective imaginary by Could the hijacking of the phrase churning out nightmarish tales, the ‘like a movie’ denote a proclivity, real enactment of fundamentalist on the part of Westerners, for violence has actualised collectively perceiving national security threats held fears, forcing the migration as occurring uniquely in the of horror from cinema screens to laboratories of Hollywood’s dream the city’s streets, airspaces and machine? If so, this might explain undergrounds. Changes have been why a store in lower Manhattan, concurrently afoot in filmic boasting spectacular views of the representation. In common with Twin Tower s, held hos t t o a cr o wd yesterday’s ‘disaster movies’, of people who watched the tele- current productions peddle vised unfolding of 9/ 11, while their storylines featuring terrorist backs faced the crumbling towers. attacks; formally, however, much Were they seeking confirmation has changed. Post 9/ 11, the that it was ‘not really happening’ by fantastical encoding of terrorist witnessing the event as a televisual attacks, which permitted a variety image?1 of plot devices ranging from the While Salgado’s photographs have equivalent desacralising ritual. on-flight entertainment doled out by been criticised for being too “cine- While United 93 does not ruthless villains and preternaturally matic,”4 the plaudits attracted by graphically display violent suffering, heroic pilots of the ’70s Airport United 93 owe much to its mani- which is hardly surprising films, to the later breed of ’90s festly ‘uncinematic’ style. Its slow, considering anxieties regarding the offerings, which spectacularly sober filming style avoids exploiting visibility of the dead – the White mobilised all the thrills and frills the victims’ story, and fetishising House's efforts to intercept of SPFX, seems less tenable. the violence. Its use of hand-helds journalists wishing to photograph Retro thriller formats, designed to achieves a similar believability to the coffins of US soldiers killed in maximise entertainment values, professional ‘amateur photographs’, Iraq compounding the matter – fall far short of meeting the and by trading the cinematic sweep its representation of the traumatic contemporary ethical and of the wide shot for a more intimate ordeal of those on board Flight 93 political demands of representing televisual style, it mediates a sense arguably enables the viewer to fundamentalist violence and of live immediacy. While empathetically witness their victims’ suffering. documentary photographs suffering. In its ultimate rejection resembling film still risk being of the propagandist exploitation of Retrospective denigration of the viewed as staged events, United the victims’ story, the last shot of 101 inappropriateness of disaster films 93‘s ‘uncinematic’ style distances the film, showing a close up of a for unwittingly predicting terrorist it from conventional, fiction film. hijackers’ hands frantically moving attacks resembles criticisms of Relatives of the dead even over the plane’s controls, is the exploitative nature of endorsed the film for accurately succeeded by an empty screen, aestheticising human suffering approximating how they had imag- in lieu of the pyrotechnical in photojournalism. The late Susan ined the tragedy. The Guardian‘s possibilities of illuminating the Sontag concluded that debates film critic, Peter Bradshaw, evidently screen with fireballs and scorching which raged within the ranks of felt as though he had witnessed flames. A final editorial stroke, photojournalists and their the actual event by cautioning his which substitutes the original, detractors, which she dubbed the readership that, like him, they too ill-fitting, final caption, (which read, “war over imagery”, resulted in the would probably need to lie down in ‘America's war on terror had 2 promulgation of an ‘‘anti-art style.” a darkened room after the film.5 begun’), by one which reads, Although many, including probably ‘Dedicated to the memory of all the best known chronicler of human Far from sharing fiction films’ those who lost their lives on suffering, Sebastiao Salgado, penchant for violence, United 93‘s September 11, 2001’, reveals United defended beautifully composed refusal to fetishise violence is 93‘s paramount concern of paying images of atrocities for their ability evident in its non-display of bodies respectful tribute to those who died to capture world attention, others in pain. In deference to the aboard Flight 93. decried the ‘‘inauthenticity of the bereaved, scenes of violence are beautiful’.’3 Although disaster more suggestive than graphic; 1 David Levi Strauss discussed such movies were not beautiful in the when a passenger’s throat is cut on-the-ground responses to 9/ 11 at a public lecture organised under the same way, their spectacular in full view of his co-passengers, auspices of Critical Voices, the Arts explosions and bold and beautiful we see it from the corner of the Council of Ireland’s biennial pro- leads aestheticised suffering. camera’s eye, before its gaze flits gramme of public debate about art, culture and ideas, which was held in By contrast, United 93‘s stylistic nervously elsewhere in the cabin. the Irish Film Institute, Eustace approach evidences the renewed Likewise, the viewer is spared the Street, Dublin, on 25 May, 2006. appeal of realism by fabricating an details of the pilots’ murder, and, 2 Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of authentic look reminiscent of the sees little more than the air steward others, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003, p 24 work of ‘anti art’ photojournalists. who glimpses their limp bodies 3 ibid, p 69 Notwithstanding United 93‘s being removed from the cockpit. 4 ibid, p 70 fictional properties, by imitating By sparing gory details, United 93 5 Peter Bradshaw, ‘United 93’, The some of the ‘anti-art’ techniques, observes a code of respect for the Guardian, 2 June, 2006 Greengrass instigates a stylistic dead, which is flouted elsewhere, (film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Criti proximity between his film and the as the media’s photographic fixation c_Review/Guardian_review/0,,17876 16,00.html [accessed 1 July, 2006]) catalogue of poorly composed, with the corpse of Abu Musab badly lit professional photographs al-Zarqawi displayed. Similarly, Aileen Blaney is completing a PhD ‘faithfully’ imaging the historical Islamic websites, which posted in Film Studies at Trinity College world. videos of the beheading of British Dublin. hostage Ken Bigley, enacted an c . Judith Wilkinson National Gallery of June – September Ireland, Dublin 2006

102

samuel beckett: a passion for painting (opposite) to celebrate Beckett’s interest in blances are sometimes striking, Gerard Byrne the visual, one can’t help but wonder especially when an image of Construction IV from existing photographs (After Giacometti). what he might have made of the Beckett’s muse Billie Whitelaw A re-construction based on the works being selected in his honour. clutching her chest cross armed is tree made by Alberto Giacometti displayed next to a Gheraducci for the 1961 Paris production Samuel Beckett: a passion for of "En Attendant Godot" (Odéon Madonna in a similar stance, the Théâtre de France, 1961). painting is the latest offering in a analogies drawn from these The 1961 tree was subsequently programme of both national and superficial juxtapositions can exist lost / destroyed. Byrne's work international art events. Housed in is a speculative reconstruction only on a purely formal or at best of Giacometti's tree, based on the National Gallery’s Millennium narrative level. existing photographs of the Wing and curated by head of 1961 production. exhibitions Fionnuala Croke, this Denying the complexity of Beckett’s 1961, 2004, courtesy the artist essentially conservative project has artistic corpus and refusing to a strong historical mandate which acknowledge him as an has been realised with almost accomplished visual artist in his militaristic precision. Drawing upon own right, this kind of exhibition- Beckett’s relationship with the making firmly re-situates Beckett in 103 National Gallery as a youth, and an existentialist humanist context. later on his close friendships with The images on display here are Jack B Yeats and MacGreevy (the simply too ‘Beckettian’, a phrase gallery’s director from 1950 – 63), which has become erroneously the exhibition focuses on Beckett’s synonymous with the plight of the interest in painting as potentially lonely traveller and dejected under- galvanised by these three ling. They fit far too neatly into a influential points of contact. post-war philosophical rhetoric – An influence so important, this a limited historiographical reading exhibition claims, it would persist of Beckett long abandoned by throughout Beckett’s creative life. contemporary artists and scholars. But most importantly the obvious Constructing a pictorial shrine to lack of Beckett’s devilish sense of Beckett, five consecutive chambers humour and indefatigable wit from invite audiences to trace a strict this exhibition is the greatest loss to chronology of works thought to have an Irish audience. influenced his writing. The paintings exhibited range from Old Masters Fortunately the National Gallery’s to works from the writer’s own reserve has not been replicated by collection. Only two of the works all of the Beckett centenary events, shown are mentioned directly in some of which have demonstrated Beckett’s texts. The remaining a more enthusiastic energy and In 1933 Samuel Beckett applied for selections follow a forensic logic of innovative approach. Collaborating the post of assistant curator at the investigation, forcing causal links with the Barbican in London for National Gallery in London. Telling between paintings viewed by instance, the Gate Theatre mounted his friend Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett and images later depicted an exciting series of productions, “I think I’d be happy there for a time in his work. These fastidious including a new stage adaptation of amongst the pigeons… apart from associations inevitably bring to Eh Jo by Canadian film director my conoysership [sic] that can just mind Beckett’s caution to potential Atom Egoyan. The larger-than-life about separate Uccello from a readers of Joyce, “The danger is in projection of Jo’s face, which looms handsaw, I could cork the post as the neatness of identifications…” hauntingly over the audience in well as another… but it won’t come Egoyan’s interpretation of Beckett’s off and I don’t expect it to.” Despite This curatorial strategy, suffocated TV play, reminds us of the writer’s Beckett’s false modesty, for as we by its attendant fixation with own experimental advances in the have subsequently learned he had uncovering biographical and worlds of film, sound, choreography a keen knowledge of art history and pictorial inspiration for Beckett’s and design. It is these creative an astute eye for talent, he never genius, forces the works on display encounters that have secured got the chance to try his hand at into a closed circuit relationship Beckett’s importance as a vital pre- curating. With the recent flurry of that begins and ends with the cursor to current video, installation centenary exhibitions being mounted writer. Although the visual resem and performance art practice. Another project which skilfully a Beckett that refuses to be fixed, avoided the previously outlined evades the exhibition at the pitfalls was the aptly entitled National Gallery and must be photographic diptych Space of sought elsewhere. doubt by Mary McIntyre at the Goethe Institut, Dublin. Allowing the viewer to formulate their own responses to an essentially anonymous image of an uninhabited institutional space, the work reflects far more accurately Beckett’s preoccupation with uncertainty and lack of meaning.

Given the National Gallery’s historical emphasis perhaps, 104 we are expecting too much from Judith Wilkinson is an independent curator and this exhibition in terms of a more PhD candidate at progressive curatorial strategy. Goldsmiths College. And yet the exhibition itself makes gestures towards this potential. Riann Coulter’s incisive commentary within the catalogue alludes to Beckett’s resonance in contemporary art for instance and the inclusion of Gerard Byrne’s After Alberto Giacommetti (1901 – 1966)… is a playful red herring amongst an otherwise predictable grouping. A reconstruction of Giacommeti’s tree, designed in collaboration with Beckett for the 1961 production of Godot at the Odéon – Théâtre de France, it resembles the original with a tongue-in-cheek accuracy. Byrne’s works of re-enactment, with their faltering fidelity to their origins, are ironic provocations to the very obsession with historical veracity demonstrated in this show.

For the Beckett enthusiast, this beautifully installed show will prove rewarding for its impressive depth of research and for the occasion to view some seldom-seen correspondences and rare artist’s books. The centenary celebrations, however, present an ideal opportunity to develop new audiences for Beckett’s work and to acknowledge his increasing relevance for current art practices and contemporary thought. This diverse and dynamic Beckett, c .

Thesaurus-generated text 105 loops

Each thesaurus-generated text loop takes a pair of words with opposite meanings as its starting point. A thesaurus is used to find a synonym for one of these words and then to find a synonym for that synonym and so on. Each alternative word suggested by the thesaurus involves a slight slippage of meaning. These slippages culminate in a complete inversion of the original meaning. The process is then reversed and the loop is completed.

Niall de Buitléar