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binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:20 Pagina 1 noughties but nice 21st century irish art an arts council of ireland touring pilot in the visual arts binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:20 Pagina 2 binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:20 Pagina 3 NOUGHTIESCurated by Mike Fitzpatrick and Susan Holland BUT NICE 21st Century Irish Art Limerick City Gallery of Art in association with Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny | VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow | Solstice Arts Centre, Navan binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:20 Pagina 4 binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 5 contents SEVENintroduction The Audience of One and Many — Mike Fitzpatrick NINEArt Now, Art Here, What Next? — Niamh Ann Kelly ELEVENartist’s perspective Locating the Noughties — Sarah Browne THIRTEENartist’s perspective Slipping Through the Tax Net — Sean Lynch FIFTEENAudience Engagement — Shaun Hannigan SEVENTEENcatalogue of works SEVENTYacknowledgements ONE NOUGHTIES BUT NICE 5 binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 6 Plus/Minus, 2006 Denis Connolly/Anne Cleary Interactive Video Installation Installation View 6 NOUGHTIES BUT NICE binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 7 introduction mike fitzpatrick THE AUDIENCE OF ONE AND MANY Noughties but Nice encompasses a very particular having the energy, enthusiasm and the resources to view of the Irish Art scene of the 21st Century. The let people know these windows to creativity exist. exhibition comprises a series of artwork by both Consider some of the thirteen artists in Noughties renowned and young artists which is varied, exciting, but Nice; contrast Tom Molloy’s politically subtle challenging and engaging. In order to offer the widest work Behind Every Good Man, from the Arts Council possible experience of contemporary art the scope of Collection, featuring portraits of the forty-four First the exhibition is purposely diverse, not narrowly Ladies of the USA as drawings executed through the thematic, or based on one concept of what art might medium of cross stitching with Andrew Kearney’s be. Noughties but Nice includes large components of science-fiction like, giant, pulsating orb, responding technologically advanced digital and interactive through blasts of sound and light to the random media which place the audience as a central focus of environment outside. Reflect on the participatory the art experience. Given the diverse nature of the installation by Connolly / Cleary, who entice you to selection it also includes the traditional forms of interact with their computer generated projections, drawing, painting and sculpture. The exhibition to become your own image director and performer. pulses with ideas but primarily it is intuitive, Finally, to an artist who abhors art that must be experimental, playful and process led. It embraces plugged into a socket, the exhibition includes the and responds to life with thirteen separate seminal Scarecrow Portraits by John Shinnors, one of conceptual and visual interpretations that collectively Ireland’s finest painters and Limerick’s best known explore the current zeitgeist. artists. Designed and developed with the support of an Given that the exhibition is curated from Limerick Arts Council touring grant this exhibition seeks to City Gallery of Art (LCGA) it is an appropriate time to balance the idea of participation of both the audience revisit some of the important works encountered since and the artist. Having experienced nine years of the 2000 in the gallery programme, reconsidering them in joys of making and facilitating exhibitions here at this collective context and taking an opportunity to Limerick City Gallery of Art I can only confirm a present these works to a new audience. Noughties but personal credo, based on understandings as an artist, Nice is also a chance to celebrate the work of artists educator and curator, that each exhibition has a and from a curatorial perspective to try out new fresh primary audience of one, the artist. The exhibition and innovative combinations, in the sense of provides the artist with an opportunity to see their examining if these very different works and ideas work in the public context, to become the spectator function together. Curatorial engagement is and hopefully to be joined by many more. The essentially to serve, separately but coherently the one curator’s and the artist’s role is to work together to (the artist) and the many (the audience). In this engage with the many in the context of the work being exhibition the success of that endeavour is of course placed in this public domain. My experience is that for you, hopefully the many, to decide! the public, like the curator, choose the artwork they wish to engage with. The role of the gallery is to help them to find and cross the threshold, which means being excited about the work that is shown and NOUGHTIES BUT NICE 7 binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 8 Social Turkey, 2006 Ciara Finnegan Video Installation 5 minute loop Video Still 8 NOUGHTIES BUT NICE binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 9 niamh ann kelly ART NOW, ART HERE, WHAT NEXT? The distinguished art historian, Brandon Taylor, within an ever-expanding participatory audience. dared to write on what he called ‘art today’ and ‘the Passivity is sidelined in contemporary art works in art of today’ in his books of the same titles which agency passes back and forth between artist (respectively, 2004 and 1995). Each phrase is a brave and viewer. Maybe the imperatives of the elite aspects conceptual capture of a wish to define the of the marketplace, now crumbled, can take a contemporary, knowingly displaced by anything and backseat for a while, as art finds a place in the front everything the moment it is uttered. In much the and its readership grows. Through this freedom same way, through spoken word or text, art now, art artists can assert a soaring bird’s eye view of where here can quickly become art then, art there. Within and how we are and proffer a usefully explicit this type of temporal template, to depict a decade panorama for whoever chooses to look on. appears to be an endeavour of arbitrary merit. The Identifiable today are new trends of part-time perceived break between 9 and 0 is a mythical rupture galleries, growing numbers of artist-led initiatives, — helpful to historians, an aid to authors and, a cue to temporary studio spaces, transient curators, web lucrative ‘Hallmark’ hagiography for everyone. But networking and information pooling and even shared how better to mark a desire for change than to make accommodation. Are these indicative of clique-isms the distinction of a decade? or radical reassignments of what it means to be part Hoping to see differences in the future we assign, of a community? As instigators of contemporarily in the present, these splits in time — tiny invisible relevant directions for art these interests give rise to dividers, most noticeably marked in scripts of schemas of cultural choice, meaningful identification cultural practices. Amazingly, we repeatedly of differences, exhibition autonomy, community recognize effects of these fissures in the past also practices, kinship through collaboration, societal when we differentiate, for example, between art of the reflection, intellectual intervention and, the eighties and that of the nineties. The arrival of the contentiously definitive praxis of our time, the noughties was thus weighted by expectation. Not just promulgation of individual voice. a new decade but a new Century and a new In Ireland, artists are truly conversant with art millennium bore down on artists, viewers, art beyond Ireland. Mixing on international scenes, with workers, curators, critics and collectors charged with recognition and exhibition, is just part of any artist’s mentoring art in the sanguine ambiance that attends journey to maturity. The subjects of art produced in so-called turns in time. For art, what would be socially Ireland are cognizant as well of what it means to be acceptable sources of inspiration, cultural agendas inter-national: between states, from, of, in and worth fighting for and fitting means of expression? outside nations. Art works shown on this island Art at the start of the noughties decade seemed to during the past decade or so have crossed an exciting blend seamlessly to the best of what was produced at spectrum of such ideas, fearlessly using a wide range the end of the last. However, the same works that of both new and revitalised media. Projects also were seen through the plastic prism of the Celtic successfully combine exhibition and production in Tiger are more recently seen differently, for what they the north and south of the island. Some ventures really, more productively, are. The alterations in incidentally re-iterate the border, which just reminds culture, in other words, are emerging most rapidly us that the idiomatic reduction of the expression NOUGHTIES BUT NICE 9 binnenwerk noughties:Noughties But Nice _Innerwork 18-08-09 15:21 Pagina 10 niamh ann kelly art now, art here, what next? ‘post-conflict’ is a potentially inadequate descriptor for the gaping post-nationalist future it fingers. Global economies of art, as of so much else, are closing in on the self-styled west, now a paradoxically defunct and frighteningly emphatic term depending on the constituents of the discussion. In the recent past, artists — and their support workers — have rarely ignored cultural shifts, from migration to music. Now, societal changes are almost too swift to comprehend. We seem to live in a world of speeded- up time: crashes, crises, downturn, crunch.