CIRCACONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE IN IRELAND NO. 130 • WINTER 2009 • E7.50 / £6.50 CIRCA 130

C A O A A

O U A A R 2

CONTENTS

Editorial Peter FitzGerald 15

Update 17

Feature articles Resonant ecologies…towards listening Jessica Foley 18

The suppression and realisation of the Northern Irish imagination Justin McKeown 22

When art is a dialogue: David Brancaleone in conversation with Mike Fitzpatrick about Noughties but nice at LCGA David Brancaleone 26

Letter from Helsinki John Gayer 30

King of pain/ pope of pop/ memo from Turner Tim Maul 32

The collision of things: Andrew Duggan in interview Karlyn De Jongh 35

Project The Fire of the snow Victoria McCollum 39

Reviews Belfast ISEA David Hughes 44 The Visual force Declan Long 46 Carlow VISUAL Gemma Tipton 48 Cork The Avant David Brancaleone 51 Derry Benji de Búrca Ursula Burke 53 Dublin Andre Dodds Craig Margin 55 Brian Henderson Michael Casey 57 Breaking ground Hilary Murray 59 Nicky Larkin Jessica Foley 61 Galway Galway Arts Festival Lúc Verling 63 Kinsale Kinsale Arts Week Gemma Tipton 66 Linz Ars Electronica Paul O’Brien 69 New Forest Eamon O’Kane David Trigg 71 Paris Malachi Farrell Peter FitzGerald 73 Portadown Guerrilla Girls Brian Kennedy 75 RTÉ David Farrell Stephanie McBride 77 see page 39

Editor: Peter FitzGerald For our subscription rates please visit www.recirca.com where you can subscribe online.

Administration/ Advertising: Barbara Circa is concerned with visual culture. We welcome comment, proposals and written contri- Knezevic butions. Please contact the editor for more details, or consult our website www.recirca.com Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Board: Graham Gosling (Chair), Mark Garry, Board. Circa is an equal-opportunities employer. Georgina Jackson, Isabel Nolan, John Nolan, Brian Redmond, Gemma Tipton, Tim Circa Stott, Audrey Brennan, Mary Cremin The Priory, John Lane West, Dublin 8 Ireland Contributing editors: Brian Kennedy, Luke +353 1 442 9616 Gibbons [email protected] Assistants: Niamh Dunphy, Franziska Panitz www.recirca.com

Design/ layout: Circa © Circa 2009

Front cover: Amanda Coogan: Cut piece, live performance, 24 September 2009, Digital Gallery at Visual; photo Colm Hogan; cour- tesy Visual; see VISUAL review page 48

Black-and-white is the new black.

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EDITORIAL

Do we look good in this? Circa has There are always going to be pluses go to our website and subscribe – been going through some tough as well in difficult situations. Circa will and please recommend the same to times of late. Our advertising, a key not be alone in having to retrench and your friends and colleagues. component of our overall income, has re-analyse what its core values are. A dropped by around 80% over the last lot of frills will be disappearing from • 18 months. Just to test our wits, it has the art scene, and some of those done so in two stages – one big drop, were probably distractions; however, What about this issue? I believe it too relative stability, then once more over there have also been damaging cuts, is very rich; for once, I am going to let the edge. And in the back of our and more are on the horizon. it speak entirely for itself. minds has been the high probability of a significant cut in funding from the Perhaps the most positive, and hope- Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon. fully most enduring thing to come out of the present turmoil is a re-assess- Circa has been in continuous publica- ment of the value of the arts. In the tion for 28 years now; it is the maga- Celtic Tiger years, the arts were often zine for the analysis and promotion of treated as an add-on – a bit like an contemporary art in Ireland, and we app you’d stick on your iPhone (if you have no plans to go away. But we do happened to have one). But when the have to adapt to our changing recent blasts of cold air blew away circumstances, and the choice to the frippery and left us near-naked, print cheaply in black and white was we had to ask ourselves what we our only option. It’s a throwback to were, in essence, worth. And the the very first issue of Circa, whose surprising answer – surprising design we have in part copied here.1 because it has come from unlikely Maybe in the process, without sources, including many in the busi- seeking it, we’ll acquire some radical ness world, from economists and chic. from some in government – is that our culture expresses our (admittedly To compensate for the print changes, undefined, undefinable, contradic- we have online improvements. In tory, contentious, multifaceted) particular, if you subscribe to the print essence, that our essence is our or PDF version of this magazine you culture, and that the rest of the world also get an ‘image supplement’ – lots seems to like us that way. With this more visuals to accompany what you take on culture gradually gaining see in the magazine, and in glorious ground, more and more people seem colour. to be getting behind the notion that cutting funding to culture would be It’s time to thank our supporters, but the greatest folly at the moment, it’s hard to know where to begin – because cultural production is our with the readers who ultimately make greatest asset.2 the undertaking worthwhile, with the two Arts Councils who fund us and Governments govern in unpre- who have been of great support, with dictable ways, and it would be under- our individual subscribers whose standable if the Republic’s present support we couldn’t do without, with government felt utterly mithered. We our institutional subscribers who all need government funding, but we make the magazine available to a can’t rely on it. As we head into the 1 In this regard, I am very sorry to lose large audience, or with the advertis- next phase in 2010, we are most the design skills of Peter Maybury. I ers past and present who have likely going to thrown back more on never knew how he would make the believed in what we’re up to? There our own resources; those are very magazine look until the PDF proofs are some advertisers in this issue, rich. came in; permanent freshness. and we are very grateful to them; 2 The Indecon report to the Arts Council/ there are many others, though, who • An Chomhairle Ealaíon, just published, would have liked to be advertising provides an invaluable overview of the here but who just can’t at the moment Can you help Circa at this time? financial importance of the arts to the economy of the Republic of Ireland. – these are very tough times for the Yes, simply: you’re probably a See the Arts Council website – visual-arts infrastructure in general. subscriber already, but if not, please www.artscouncil.ie

UPDATE

Visual opens Street in Dublin in 2006, and one sits at • Cristina Bunello – whose work the main visitor entrance to the Irish featured on the cover of the last issue A stunning new art space has opened in Museum of Modern Art. of Circa – has won this year’s Peter Carlow – Visual. The huge main exhibi- O’Kane Solo Exhibition at Cavanacor tion area is surrounded by further Gallery Award. galleries, such that the venue can cater Arts petition for larger- or smaller-scale works. Visual is run by Carissa Farrell, formerly More than 10,000 people have signed Ulster Museum reopens of Draíocht in Blanchardstown. In this the petition of the National Campaign issue we carry an assessment by for the Arts. The campaign has these The Ulster Museum in Belfast reopened Gemma Tipton of both the new building objectives: in October after a protracted closure for itself and its first shows; see page 50. • Maintenance of current levels of refurbishment. It now boasts a suite of funding to the Arts Council; nine adjoining art galleries, some of • Retention of Culture Ireland, the which are hosting a major retrospective Four closes agency for the promotion of Irish arts of the work of Sean Scully (which runs worldwide; until February 2010). The museum Four Gallery in Dublin has closed. Over • Retention of the Irish Film Board, houses a great deal of material, includ- the past years of its existence Four has development agency of the Irish film ing fascinating collections of artefacts had 35 shows involving a total of 91 industry; dating back thousands of years. artists. Lee Welch, its former director, • Retention of the artists’ income tax plans to “facilitate events with a shift exemption scheme; towards projects, extending from my • Commitment to retain the arts portfolio Errata own practice.” at cabinet as part of a senior ministe- rial portfolio. Apologies to reviewer Rosa Lleó in the The fate of the arts in the Republic of last issue of Circa; there was a series of Edward Delaney passes Ireland depend very much on the very odd typos and repetitions in her government’s budget, due 9 December. text, which we should have spotted. Edward Delaney, one of Ireland’s best- known sculptors, passed away in September. Winners

Delaney was born in Mayo in 1930. He • Niall de Buitléar has won the fourth studied at the National College of Art annual Wexford Arts Centre and Design, but also in Munich, Bonn Emerging Visual Artist Award. The and Rome. His works are among the award carries with it a 5,000 most prominently situated in Dublin – payment and a solo exhibition at including the Thomas Davis memorial Wexford Arts Centre. De Buitléar has on College Green and the Wolfe Tone/ also won the Irish Artists’ Residential Famine memorial on a corner of St Studio Award 2009 – 2010 at the Red Stephen’s Green. Both date from 1967. Stables in St Anne’s Park, Dublin.

• At the Claremorris Open Exhibition 2009 Barry Flanagan passes in September, joint First Prize winners were Laurence Kavanagh (London) for Very prominent British sculptor Barry his installation Volta and David O’Kane Flanagan passed away at the end of (Donegal) for his video Palabras. Lisa August. His trademark hare sculptures Fingleton (Kerry) picked up the are very widely known – many of these Emerging Artist Award for her video massive sculptures adorned O’Connell installation Outside I’m singing.

18 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 Resonant ecologies… towards listening

Jessica Foley is a writer and artist currently working as Assistant Lecturer in Visual Art Education at MIC, Limerick.

Linda O’Keeffe: image relating to The Ecstasy of St Theresa; courtesy the artist

…anything but going into into the minutiae of the cosmos, undu- demands of that damned concern spell ourselves. lating exponentially towards a fractal revolution regardless of the inconven- Siobhán McDonald universe altogether unfathomable. ience. The archaeologists dig away, Absorbing into matter. discovering ruptures – “Here there was Stuff to occupy the mind – to fold some rupture in the status-quo,” they between the membranes of the day’s Dirt behind the fingernails – more cry, “some discrete shift that changed events. The apparent stillness of the specifically clay – now mounted high, the manner of following events.” classroom moments after the final compacted, layer after layer – a small Excited, they carry on. participants pass out the door – the ecology listed there, imagined to be strange alteration in time’s duration – excavated by some tiny archaeologist, A gradual focus comes back to the lingering static hanging upon an atmos- peeling away at the layers of preceding room – eyes impact upon the paint- phere laced with ghosted words and hours spent teaching… teaching – smattered tables, the paintings of action exclamations. Seemingly there is no concerns list themselves off the length and carelessness, those unintentional such a thing as Silence. Sounds, it turns of the arm. Most adamantly pricking at masterpieces performing functions well out, do not evaporate, they do not ‘dis- the brain though, the one that won’t beyond the call of duty, vague appear’, so to speak, but they gradually whisht, the one that won’t be quieted, reminders of reinforced chicken coops. dissipate their wavelengths, unravelling the one that wants to think…all the The space becomes cavernous; the

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 19

high oak ceilings of a long-ago library listening, but a casual hearing, the kind the mega-phoned voice speak- form reassuring patterns of line. Every brought on by fatigue, reticence, ing of the ‘Book of Life’ – “this is now and then they creak a little, caused surrender. The mind at the mercy of the a second death,” the voice maybe by the inaudible echoing of the ear and the unpredictable connotations repeats through the ear canal thousand voices battering against them brought forth from the acoustics of the from left to right – and the televi- as if waves on the bough. What voice environment – the ecology of sounds sion kicks in with an earnest echoes longest? A quote enters the and the invisible sediments left wasting voice speaking about attacks – mind: in the air. sticks snap – and traffic – and rumbles – a little girl’s voice Whenever Goethe spoke, his Though this is no music room, the meanders through some kind of voice produced vibrations as diamond tiles of the corridor outside, a rhyme – clearer and beyond harmonious as, for example, the inlaid with symptoms of fleur-de-lis, the television noise – the strings soft voice of your wife, dear throw out their percussive qualities boing – the voices chant back Reader. These vibrations when pressed. The windows and doors again, through them a peppy encounter obstacles and are can scarcely prevent it. That separation pseudo gospel song about your reflected, resulting in a to and fro of sound from itself; the lilt of pianos in soldiers dying for you – argu- which becomes weaker and practice manages still to creep down ments that are irrefutable, the weaker in the passage of time these aisles and pathways, around the voices say – irrefutable. Click but which does not actually tables and under the arches. A man like a mouse – something equiv- cease. So the vibrations called R M Shafer believed, “…it would alent to bike spokes turning – produced by Goethe are still in be possible to write the entire history of the rustle of air on a receiver – existence, and to bring forth European Music in terms of walls” – all the vowel shapes a mouth Goethe’s voice you only need chambers of ‘silence’ overthrowing the would make – that is the sound, the proper receiver to record medieval fantasia of sounds – the sonic deep and echoing and vowel- them and a microphone to experience. He wrote: “With indoor shaped and swirling and amplify their effects, by now living, two things developed antony- suddenly interjected by traffic diminished.1 mously: the high art of music and noise and TV, street criers and profes- pollution – for noises were the sounds sors upon a foundation of the Remembered and excerpted from a that were kept outside. After art music resonances of men’s voices strange tale about a professor who goes had moved indoors, street music rising within the walls of some to great and extraordinary lengths to became the object of particular scorn.” grand cathedral – the deep amplify the resonating remains of The separation incurred through the reverberations strapped into Goethe’s voice, in order that he may development of a sand-based technol- layers of thin sound, backwards seduce a young female student by ogy: glass. This separation between the talk, boing, boing, boing. exploiting her infatuation with the great outdoor living spaces and interior archi- Incessant sighs – tinkling and writer. Her infatuation is based upon an tectures evolved the western concep- light, subsumed by deep lower idea of the man and lies in her suspi- tion of music: “It is always the contexts registers. The beat bounces on cions that his voice would sonorously of culture which generate the shapes of off the strings and a voice penetrate her to the core, reverberating its artifacts, and the thick walls of speaks in tongues and a crackle through her; she would feel his effect, European architecture have been a like vinyl gets in the way of regardless of the matter of the words shaping force behind the development silence – the guitar tunes up, the spoken. of European music from Gregorian needle comes out of its chant to serialism.”2 groove…and ever, and ever, Surprising the thoughts that come as and ever – reverberation time the dust settles – brought on by a What chants have graced these less than a second. phasing out of the eye, something in surrounding walls? The footstep fall of behind attunes – the skin becomes the long-robed and solemn, rigorously …Recollections of a conversation with more receptive, and the air inside the tip paced by the pealing bell, the arm Linda O’Keefe – and subsequently of of the nostrils becomes suddenly famil- pulling the fraying rope. her sound works. The Ecstasy of St iar. Sunlight is vaguely observed Theresa, a piece developed by O’Keefe chasing through the softly circulating air The Ecstasy of St Theresa 3 while journeying in the United States in – the contagion of earthy particles 2008 – combinations of samples therein suggesting a rivalry between the Boing – dull boing – feeling out recorded from the street, of street criers elements. and repeating, slowing into a and religious advocates, incantations rhythm more in line with the from biblical passages, samples taken What is this state? As if the whole steady heart. Beat. A chant from the media – TV, radio, internet – surrounding space were complicit in a soothes and slips in amongst and distilled through considered trickery to pull away the curtains on the the pulling and plucking of the musical compositions and arrange- mind – the eye reduced and the ear guitar. Swirls and ruffles, hisses ments. R M Shafer uses Hogarth’s The enhanced, and yet not a deliberate and whispers of other things – Enraged musician to illustrate that

20 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

constellations? “Wherever we are,” tivity. Rather than remaining John Cage writes, “what we hear is subject, in perpetuity, to the mostly noise. When we ignore it, it seductive efficiency of economic disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find competition, we must reappro- it fascinating.”6 Oîkos – house, dwelling priate Universes of value, so place, habitation in Greek – + logia – that processes of singularization the study of. Ökologie in its initial, can rediscover their consistency. German form – transmuted to ecology – We need new social and the relationship between things as they aesthetic practices, new prac- co-exist, and the patterns and tones of tices of the Self in relation to the that relationship. Ideas of acoustic other, to the foreign, the strange ecology draw out the poison from the – a whole programme that apple – that there is choice, that “in the seems far removed from current external soundscape the ear is always concerns.10 wavering between choices. It soaks up information from all directions”;7 and ‘Dominant subjectivity’: a universal occi- that there is an important distinction to dental people, whose perceptions are be made between hearing and listen- delivered into thought predominantly ing, and indeed that there is a myth to through the optical function. All other be dispelled surrounding the ‘separa- sensory experiences remain as second- Siobhan McDonald: work in progress; tion’ of the senses. ary, scaffolding senses. Perhaps. courtesy the artist Though within the visual the aural is The bell’s pealing ceases – the air present, and vice versa. Shafer separation between music (indoors) vibrates, and once again the oak-lined believes, “One of the significant charac- and other sounds (outdoors) which ceiling re-establishes its presence. That teristics of all sense perceptions is succeeded the advent of glazed concern for thinking recurs – in focusing.”11 Surely focusing can be trig- windows; the figure in the etching constricted time how can thinking gered – spontaneously – by the listen- comes to his music-room window in happen? Amidst the apparent violence ing mind. The mind that listens is obvious distress, hands clasped to the of the soundscape (as Shafer refers to inclusive of its body, and of whatever head to protect the ears, the boisterous it), how can the choice to listen be made sense faculties are available to it… scene below graphically alluding to the when focus moves towards a defence diverse projections of sound: street of sanity through vaguely conscious A draught from an open window criers, drummers, traders and common hearing? Wavelengths manifested touches the surface of the skin – hairs folk amidst the business of the day. through light and sound pulse out from stand on end. The meeting in the “The street,” Shafer writes, “had now every street corner, from train carriages teahouse elicited a similar effect – a become the home of non-music, where or shop stereos, those truly disinter- wind penetrating through the narrow it mixed with other kinds of sound swill ested voices and audio trends fashion channel of the space between the and sewage.”4 The rubbish of sound – the aural terrain for the average individ- open front door and the entrance to the the wasted wavelengths, collected up ual. Can anyone bear to listen to that? A stonewalled garden. A rain-soaked and parcelled into digital packages – philosopher said: “A will to deny or summer afternoon, the mildness pulled into multifarious forms by the damage ourselves intellectually could drenched out of the air. “…Anything avid acoustic ecologist. Developing a be seen also as a desperate maneuver but going into ourselves…” Her voice profile and practice of Acoustic Ecology to cope with our inability to listen in expelled the words with that sincerity seems something of a mission for depth.”8 Perhaps this listening is difficult that comes when thoughts are uncer- O’Keefe, the documenting of events – as difficult perhaps as thinking in tain. There was a profound sense of and sounds no casual enterprise but an depth. Wittgenstein’s theory was that presence – that the tables and chairs obsession – an acute awareness of a “One keeps forgetting to go right down were actually holding weight – that the certain density in the air, the sound- to the foundations. One doesn’t put the tea was indeed steaming into the scape – myriad stories to be told, to be question marks deep down enough.”9 airstream. A particular coolness in the gathered, yet to unfold. Again Shafer Who has the time, or energy, or inclina- space that prevented the mind from comes to mind: “There is always a rela- tion for such planting? becoming soft – all senses were tionship between the social aspirations tugged into action that day. Her car of a society and the art it produces and Felix Guattari begs the question: had been flooded with the rains the when music moves into new contexts night before, a window left open. This and takes on new forms, something is Do we have to invoke History yet was a first encounter that skimmed profoundly astir.”5 What is it that stirs again? There is at least a risk around the immediate and slipped here? The curiosity of the atheist that there will be no more human straight into the cosmos – the universe aroused by the fervor of the professor history unless humanity under- of unknown and undetermined things – and the believer? A keenness to draw takes a radical reconsideration all carried around more or less within attention to the levels rising – to the of itself. We must ward off, by the body and mind of the artist as she surplus of sounds building themselves every means possible, the brushes away at the surfaces of the into indistinguishable forms and entropic rise of dominant subjec- world. She travels a great deal and

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 21 collects on her ways the textures of her experiences – feeling through them, and consequently transposing them into a visual expression. Siobhán McDonald is a painter. A most recent adventure brought her to Montserrat in the West Indies – to Mount Chance, where she worked in an observatory with the scientists. There they record ground movements using seismometers – stations dotted around the base of the volcano, powered by batteries and energy from the sun – their outputs graphed onto lengths of paper for the scientists to decode. “I began to see it as a form of mapping,” she said, “The layers of line and latitude create a visual score, which maps the vibration of the earth’s signals.”12 A trav- eller conscious of new terrain through vibrations and senses – the practice of her making embedded in a deep listen- ing… The visual remains of the paint- ings are powerfully suggestive reminders that the mind forgets the movements and experiences and encounters that give rise to the score – becoming layered articulations over time – the beginning indistinguishable Siobhan McDonald: Falling softly, 2009, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm; from the end – right at the centre of an courtesy the artist entropy that is not destructive, not futile, but simply is – “…there is no mystery. Purity, simplicity, truthfulness and the borders of obscurity, might be the condi- 1 Friedrich A Kittler, Gramophone, film, absence of pretence or pretention are tion that makes it possible for us to typewriter, Stanford University Press, the marks of sound art, and such art is remain open to further linguistic and 1999, pp 59 – 68 2 R M Shafer, ‘Music, non-music and the universally understood, as are simple theoretical fields of concern. We are soundscape’, Companion to folk tales and moral stories. Ordinary thus released from those causalistic contemporary musical thought: people know instinctively that art ‘explanations’ for which we have devel- Volume 1, ed John Paynter, Tim becomes degraded unless it is kept oped a kind of addictive tolerance: basi- Howell, Richard Orton and Peter Seymour, Routledge, 1992 13 2 simple.” Falling silence – 1,000 cm cally, unrecognized shifts in the 3 www.lindaokeefe.com square canvas – stratified oils and sumi meaning of ‘because’ or, motives are 4 R M Shafer, op cit ink – a paling horizon disguising the not causes.”14 – a cultivation of listening 5 Ibid shadows underneath, the coarser might be a way towards a cultivation of 6 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writ- ings, Wesleyan University Press, ground hulking through the centre, thinking… The openness of the 1961. pp 3 – 5 resting on the still depths of blood red acoustic ecologist – the acknowledge- 7 R M Shafer, op cit below. And all in between like some ment of choice – the open-ended 8 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other labyrinth of pathways, crusted walls travels of the painter facilitating a side of language: a philosophy of listening, Routledge, 1990, pp 83 – 94 rising up around, the walls of the world sensory focusing – both recording and 9 Ibid – an imagining of a landscape suited to compiling; but without that imaginary 10 Felix Guattari, The Three ecologies, the most courageous archaeologist, the climax limiting the importance of the The Athlone Press, 2000, p 68 most intrepid ecologist – navigating process, or hindering the presentation 11 R M Shafer, op cit 12 Notes from a conversation with the through without a destination in mind, of formalized output. artist Siobhán McDonald, and from the without a summit to attain, without artist’s writing; see www.siobhan- opposition, but with a determined ear – That concern for thinking reestablishes mcdonald.com a listening consciousness. itself; perhaps it should be voiced I3 Irish Murdoch, The Fire and the sun: why Plato banished the artists, louder here under these grand oak Oxford University Press, 1977, p 17 The surface of the paint-splattered table panels, allowed to reverberate through 14 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, op cit once again demands attention – the this ‘teaching’ space – perhaps with one relief of it pushing softly into the palm – or another it might resonate at some a reminder of someone else’s thoughts; point in time… “The ability to listen, which allows us to hold firm and remain vigilant at the

22 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 The suppression and realisation of the Northern Irish imagination

Justin McKeown is an artist and researcher from Northern Ireland; he is currently lecturer in Art Theory at the University of Ulster.

A man who considers himself a realist is a man who wrongly assumes that his efforts are not the stuff of dreams. Those who claim that they are in revolt against realism, rather than being explorers and agents of the imagination are only prey to the same fallacy.1

When considering the political conditions of Northern Ireland and the labours of its artistic community I often find myself thinking about the above quote. What strikes me most about it is the way in which it implicitly points to the imagina- tion as the terrain upon which our most serious dilemmas and our most creative outpourings come to ground. In doing this it also highlights the significance of the imagination in perceiving the param- eters and thus potential of the most serious and frivolous situations we encounter in our daily lives. In short, our ability to imagine is what holds the potential to move us beyond the events of the past and to shape the form our society takes in the future: imagination is the active part of both memory and thought. Considered in this way, the imagination is an incredibly significant political tool.

Depending on one’s knowledge of history as well as cultural background, one may imagine the conditions of Una Walker: White mummified baby figure, 1989, mixed media; from the exhibition Icons from the North: collective histories of Northern Irish Art, curated by Brian McAvera, 2006; courtesy Golden Thread Gallery

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 23

Northern Irish society in a number of tions are also involved in projects that In discussing the construction of the ways. From a personal perspective I am seek to examine and archive the past. In Troubles archive with the archive direc- well aware that as far back as the twelfth most cases this is being done not simply tor Nóirín McKinney, it is apparent that a century Ulster was regarded as “by far so that something can be remembered, lot of effort has gone into its curation. the most warlike and impenetrable of the but so that things can be taken stock of This involved the assembly of a team of Irish Kingdoms.”2 As such, I cannot help as a means of implicitly considering the people who could advise the Arts but wonder if the violent tendency in future. Again, in this situation what is Council on its initial collection for the Northern Irish society expressed through being engaged in is a reconsideration of archive. These included notable individ- the Troubles, far from being a recent the events of the past, as a means of re- uals such as Declan McGonagle, John problem, is not in fact something very old considering and therefore culturally re- Gray, Andrea Ray, Jim McCreevey and indeed. This is not to suggest that we are imagining their significance. Gerry Slater. Much thought was then uncivilised or somehow uncouth; such a given over, not only to the initial artists suggestion about any people from a land In this way these exercises in political whose work would be collected, but also that produced the Brehon laws and who and cultural history are also exercises to the potential for future growth and also produced the first body of written questioning our present self-identity. contribution. literature in her own tongue north of the From my perspective, what is important Alps3 would lack rigour. ‘Uncivilised’ is in all these exercises is that we tread The project is currently still in its pilot not the right term. But what are we carefully, for there may well be some stage but includes work by twenty-nine dealing with in the Northern Irish aspects of Northern Irish culture and artists, including Paul Seawright, Willie psyche? Perhaps a suppressed imagi- thus also the collective though conflicted Doherty, Rita Duffy, Anthony Davis, nation that has never quite had the Northern Irish imagination that are to Gerry Gleason and John Kindness, with cultural and historic space to come to some extent unique and therefore scope for future contributions from grips with its own cohesion? worthy of cultivation. But the question is others. While the archive includes work how to materialise and trace these by visual artists it also includes reference Whatever the origin of these things, at things and also how to nurture their to the murals, political posters, television this current time in Northern Ireland we growth? In order to explore this question archives and work by political prisoners. are undergoing an intense period of further I’m going to look at some of the It also provides links to websites contain- political and cultural reflection upon the larger projects currently underway in ing significant related information, for events of the past forty years or so. Northern Ireland that seek to examine example the CAIN website. The visual- Politically, this has involved the examina- and chart recent history. The authors of arts aspect of the site is only one compo- tion of the Troubles and its impact upon these projects may or may not be think- nent; the site also documents literature communities living in Northern Ireland. ing about these things in the terms I and music produced during the period of The result of this has been capital injec- have set out here. Regardless, from my the Troubles. Through a combination of tions into communities as various agen- perspective, they are playing a part in all these things this web-based archive cies begin to try and instigate a recovery what I am discussing. seeks to become an educational process from the events of the past. resource, in the broadest sense of the Often I hear the term ‘memory building’ Perhaps most anticipated of all the proj- word. It also seeks to act as a virtual used in conjunction with these endeav- ects currently underway is the Arts reminder of the significance of our recent ours. Essentially this means creating Council of Northern Ireland’s creation of history. Through this it actively seeks to events and experiences for communities the Troubles archive.4 This archive will become a horizon against which we may that will help them to re-imagine them- initially be digital in form, although it has re-consider, and thus re-imagine selves in the present, and through this the potential to become physically acces- ourselves within the present. In so doing re-think and therefore also re-imagine sible as well. There is something very it seeks to aid us in imagining the form their relationship to the events of the attractive about the idea of a digital future Northern Irish society may take. past. The other term that is used in asso- archive. One of the problems of many ciation with these processes is ‘normali- archives is that they act primarily as The pilot version of the Troubles archive sation’. This term is particularly loaded collections and not as discursive bodies. will initially be made available through and even potentially problematic inas- As such, it is hard for users of the archive the Ulster Museum as part of its reopen- much as it implicitly encourages us to to enter into direct documented dialogue ing in October 2009. Through examina- imagine our own society after the image with the archive. However, with a digital tion of how the resource is used and the of other western models of civil society archive the technological potential exists public response, ACNI aims to then as though others elsewhere were to make it possible for users to not only modify the presentation of the collection, somehow ‘normal’. The danger here is view the material but also to comment or making it publicly available through the that this may foster a way of thinking that respond to it and have these responses World Wide Web. seeks to make Northern Ireland appear documented within the archive itself. This like everywhere else and in the rush to is an exciting prospect if one wishes to Other projects seeking to document the do this we may not give full considera- begin a dialogue surrounding not only the recent history of Northern Irish visual tion to the aspects of our own culture contents of the archive, but also the arts and culture have also taken the form that may well be worth preserving and nature of the Northern Irish imagination of an archive. These include the nurturing. as personified through the artworks Interface Archive, located within the It is therefore reassuring that within the therein. University of Ulster, and the North West arts and cultural sector many organisa- Visual Arts Archive located in the

24 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

by John Duncan, Dan Shipsides and Darren Murray to name but a few.

In contrast, the fifth instalment, curated by Declan McGonagle, took a unique approach in considering the work of specific Northern Irish artists as a “moment of anxiety, in a dialogue between what is validated as art and what is not, between what comes from the gallery and what returns to it, and what comes from beyond the gallery – from the street and the media.”5 Focusing on works by Alastair MacLennan, Sandra Johnston, Victor Sloan and others, McGonagle presented a compelling exhibition through which one could consider the reciprocity between art and context in Northern Ireland.

In the sixth and most recent instalment of this series, titled Visual force, Dr Slavka Sverakova takes as her curatorial starting point Joseph Beuys’ visit to Northern Ireland in 1974. Given the influ- ence of Beuys’ upon much of the work produced in Northern Ireland, especially the performance work, this is a signifi- Gerry Gleason: from Ulster triptych, 1987, mixed media on paper, 127 x 74 cm; from cant curatorial project. Upon seeing this the exhibition Icons from the North: collective histories of Northern Irish Art, exhibition one realises that something curated by Brian McAvera, 2006; courtesy Golden Thread Gallery would have been missing from the cura- torial series if Sverakova had not curated Context Gallery, Derry. Both these 1969. Following on from this in 2006, this show. This exhibition featured a wide archives are publicly accessible. In McAvera curated the second instalment range of artists including Una Walker, contrast to these archiving projects, focusing on socio-political art between Tony Hill, Alastair MacLennan, and Fiona another very interesting project has 1969 and 1994. McAvera hypothesises Larkin. taken the altogether different approach that the art establishment largely ignored of a long-term exhibition program as a artists producing work addressing the What is most interesting about all these means of surveying the history of Troubles during this period. Further, that shows is that each show uniquely Northern Irish culture. Here I am refer- it is only now in the wake of the Troubles embodies the chosen curator’s vision of ring to the Collective histories of that the value of this artwork is being what is significant in the art produced in Northern Irish art exhibition series by regarded. Although these first two instal- Northern Ireland over the past 64 years. Golden Thread Gallery under the direc- ments had a very specific historic focus, When considered as an ongoing project, tion of Peter Richards. With a plan that is other succeeding exhibitions in the these exhibitions find both agreement as ambitious as it is thorough, the gallery series have been less chronological in and contradiction within each other. For is presenting a series of twelve shows their look at Northern Irish art. example, it is interesting to consider the curated by twelve different curators over points of ebb and flow in McGonagle’s the course of twelve years. Currently half In the third instalment of the series view of what is of political significance way through its programme, each instal- curator Liam Kelly explored the impact of when contrasted with that of Liam Kelly. ment covers a different aspect of the surveillance on the culture of Northern This is not to suggest that both shows visual arts in Northern Ireland from the Ireland. In this show he presented the contradict each other, merely that they perspective of each individual invited work of artists such as Paul Seawright, present interesting contrasts in empha- curator. The result is that each exhibition Rita Duffy, Willie Doherty and Locky sis. Walking round these exhibitions is embodies a specific subjective take on Morris, whose work has explored this as much like entering an open and the history of Northern Irish art over the issue in one way or another. Through ongoing dialogue as it is like viewing an past 64 years. this he illustrated his own position as a exhibition. curator on this matter. Following on from Beginning in 2005, the first exhibition in this came the fourth exhibition in the Also very interesting is the choice of the series was curated by S B Kennedy series focusing on contemporary paint- artists. Some artists reappear, such as and Brian McAvera. The primary focus of ing, titled The Double image, curated by Alastair MacLennan, Dan Shipsides, this exhibition was the period 1945 – Dougal McKenzie. This featured works Una Walker, Locky Morris and John

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 25

question is, how do we treat this informa- tion? Further, how do we orientate ourselves in relation to it?

To address the first question, one of the largest temptations will be to formulate a canon of Northern Irish art. In itself there is a certain logic to this, given that the unspoken drive of these projects is to explore and better define Northern Irish cultural identity. On the other hand there is something very last century about the idea of actively formulating a canon of art. If Northern Ireland is to ever shake its parochial image, I feel it would be a mistake to actively seek to form a canon of Northern Irish art, or at the very least to discuss Northern Irish art in these terms. Instead, a much more useful approach might be to begin to chart the relationship between artists working in Northern Ireland and those working else- where, so that the work produced here can be understood in relation to wider cultural production on the planet.

This brings me to the second question: how do we orientate ourselves in relation to the information produced through the Installation shot, A Shout in the street: collective histories of Northern Irish art, curated projects discussed here? This is not by Declan McGonagle, 2008, showing bonfire stack created by two boys from the Dee Street Community Centre in East Belfast something I as an individual can answer for anyone except for myself. As an indi- Duncan. Others appear only once. Gallery is to survey the history of vidual it is my personal belief that if we in Those possessing more of an audit Northern Irish art through the curatorial Northern Ireland wish to make any signif- mentality may see this as the emergence endeavours of individuals who have icant contribution to an international of a canon. However, such a view may been actively involved in the production understanding of culture then we must be considered short-sighted, especially of Northern Irish culture over the past first get to grips with the cultural and in Northern Ireland where there exists a several decades. In this way the remit of historic conditions of our conflicted plurality of histories. The creation of a these exhibitions gives voice to multiple collective imaginations. This would canon is far from the intentions of the perspectives on the significance of differ- necessarily involve some kind of exami- gallery director Peter Richards, who ent cultural events in the province, nation of the conditions that give rise to conceived of this series of exhibitions. It sometimes reframing these events cultural conflict, as much as it may well is worth here considering the collective within different theoretical and cultural involve the artistic manipulation of these title of these exhibitions: Collective histo- discourses. Through this the gallery not conditions. One need only stop to ries of Northern Irish art. The word ‘histo- only manages to present a significant consider the wider socio-political condi- ries’ is important. As Richards states: survey of the events of the past several tions of the world today to understand years, it also manages to manifest the how this could be significant. It is a project that sets out to heteroglossic and conflicted nature of embrace the overlapping and Northern Irish society. In this way the 1 Anon. ‘The dream of utility’ published in sometimes contradictory series arguably embodies the dynamics Arkive city, Interface, Belfast and versions of history. Its aim is to of the Northern Irish imagination in such Locus+, Newcastle, 2008, p 211 create a useful historical context a way as to not be explicit although still 2 Edmund Curtis, A History of Ireland, from which audiences can cause dialogue around this subject University Paperbacks, UK, 1968, p 62 engage with contemporary prac- matter. 3 Ibid, p 21 4 www.artscouncil-ni.org/artforms/ tice. It is not an attempt to create TroublesArchive.htm one history: central to the project In considering both the Troubles archive 5 Declan McGonagle, A Shout in the is an acknowledgement that and Collective histories of Northern Irish street, collective histories of Northern there are many versions of art it is evident that a matrix of informa- Irish art, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast history.6 tion constituted by individuals, institu- 2008, p 11 6 Peter Richards, in The Visual force: tions, events and discourses is emerging collective histories of Northern Irish art, In considering this it can be seen that the that is indexical of Northern Irish culture Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2009, p primary agenda of the Golden Thread over the past several decades. The 7

26 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 When art is a dialogue David Brancaleone in conversation with Mike Fitzpatrick about Noughties but nice at Limerick City Gallery of Art

David Brancaleone is an art historian who teaches Art Theory at Limerick School of Art and Design.

Denis Connolly Anne Cleary: Plus/ minus, 2006, installation shot, interactive video installation

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 27

happiness in Iceland) is more tenuous art work (as the quote on the wall might than in her Carpet for the Irish Pavilion imply). But certainly the luminous for the Venice Biennale (2009) which inflated sphere the height of the ceiling resulted in a carpet (in Modernist encourages you to become aware of geometric pattern designed by Browne) altered perception, placed as it is inside and a black and white film documenting a gallery, but all the while conveying the its making by weavers who were once sounds from the street. As I was think- employed in the old factory. Perhaps ing along these lines, I was reminded of the link between the two works is actu- Bachelard or Lefèbvre and notions of ally the expropriation of craft by capital architectural space as lived space, of in the so-called ‘post industrial’ West. John Cage on noise or, just to be flip- pant, of an early Woody Allen movie. All The more I heard Mozart’s ghostly the while, John Shinnors’s Scarecrow Requiem in the operatic singing for portrait 17 (2001) looked on, in its Amanda Coogan’s Adoration (2006), painterly and stubborn Late Modernist the more the exchange value of the mastery. designer label handbag that is being adored in the video dropped, as the I spoke to Mike Fitzpatrick to get more autonomy of the music defied the false of a sense of the show and compare values of consumption and the bag notes. looked more and more gross in the context. Tom Molloy’s Behind every DB Mike Fitzpatrick, Noughties but nice great man (2006), forty-four embroi- is contemporary and international in dered portraits of North American First scope. Ladies in cross-stitching, is a tight- lipped, understated work about Empire, MF The exhibition is deliberately eclec- Curated by Mike Fitzpatrick and Susan made in the last years of the Bush pres- tic and broad-ranging. I think the work Holland, Limerick City Gallery’s idency. I say this because displacement is both local and international. All of the Noughties but nice will be touring here neither shocks nor transgresses artists I wanted to work with had some Ireland for a year. Anything but our perception, but instead creates connection with Limerick, many I had thematic, combining very recent work distance through near-monochrome worked with before and were based in with art made during the last decade, it images made of simple contours and Ireland and abroad, mainly in London. includes different forms of contempo- schematic drawing. His muse is the This is the Ryan Air generation: the rary art practice by very diverse artists: Web, but he selects its virtual images nature of their practice means they have socially engaged works, politically and converts them into solid craft. to travel. It represents a range of people engaged works, and just visually Seamus Nolan is well known for his who had been connected with the gallery engaging pieces that don’t fit into any of collaborative Hotel Ballymun, but for in the previous decade, people making our neat categories. There are works LCGA he has made a statement that fits significant work. which seek to coax the viewer/ specta- crushed cardboard boxes into the tor into becoming an actor, suggesting a shape of a riot police van: Get in the DB The idea behind it? partnership of sorts, as if we were back of the fuckin’ van (2008). equals; either by breaking down barri- MF The brief for this show came about ers and appealing directly to feeling Aideen Barry’s video Slippage (2009) from the Arts Council, in conversation, rather than to thinking, or by being the reminds me of a 1960s Hammer Horror in a sense, –it’s a touring initiative. The outcome of collaboration.1 This is true of short story in which the protagonist is idea was that the work would be acces- the making of Sean Lynch’s video, afflicted by growths that pop out from sible and spectacular, in a way. As a Peregrine falcons visit Moyross (2008) the surface of his skin, giving birth to curator, I began to form a gathering. I that involved residents from Moyross small talking heads that taunt, trick and knew that the Shinnor’s work, which is estate, and of Ciara Finnegan’s Social question him, whereas Andrew really perhaps his masterwork, hadn’t turkey (2006), which enlisted the help of Kearney’s Silence (2001) and Connolly/ been seen in many years. It was made another group of people, in their sixties, Cleary’s Plus/ minus are both touchy- for the South Gallery space and first also from Limerick (who knows, maybe feely. Plus/ minus (2006) is an interac- shown there then bought by a collector, some live in Moyross) who resist ageist tive video installation which records and lent to IMMA for a number of years, media stereotypes in a digital dance duplicates your silhouette and projects and I don’t think was ever shown. So a video. it in overlapping tones of grey, adding touring exhibition will allow people to layers if you respond with movement to see it for a year. In Sarah Browne’s Model society (2005 what you see on the wall, and it is so – 2007) her commitment materialises in good that it makes you want to photo- The risk was whether these people handiwork, though the link (traditional graph the results. As for Silence, maybe could work together, as their practices Icelandic knitwear and surveys on there is a trace of Foucault in Kearney’s are very different. Could that clashing

28 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 together work? I can reference Aideen MF I understand he found the idea for Lynch’s bird piece, Peregrine falcons Barry, one of the youngest, in terms of a church while on a residency in visit Moyross, is a really clever double- career. My co-curator Susan Holland Newfoundland then decided to bring take on the idea of a commission and had just done a show and included one of these churches to his exhibition the idea of working with the community Aideen. I had known her work. Very in Rome, as if it needed a new church or of doing public art. It’s a wonderfully media-related, very process-driven building! Joe really enjoys playing with ironic commentary. The day he was work and we watched her process on ideas, but he is also a wonderful maker introducing the falcons to the commu- site. It seemed interesting to make this and this is central to his practice. This nity lots of people turned up, lots of fast decision to include her work in the goes for all the work on show, even kids, excited about seeing the falcons show. Let’s see how we can select one Seamus Nolan’s police wagon made of and the handlers, and lots of commu- work from almost ten years ago and one cardboard. Again, there’s an enjoyment nity police. The police were interested from two weeks ago and just play with in the making of the thing. Seamus has in the little cameras, what wonderful that. quite an intense social practice, most devices, in terms of surveillance! This notably Hotel Ballymun, a very impor- work says something about Sean’s While I can appreciate thematic shows, tant piece. Whereas this work centres activism. He had to liaise with the local they are also counter to my curatorial on an object combined with notions of pigeon fan club, because obviously he practice in which I feel that the artist is policing. The range of his work is quite didn’t want to take down one of their better served by the monograph show. interesting. He’s one of a few Irish birds (there might have been repercus- If you want to honour an artist’s work, artists who are ‘scanning’ society. Tom sions). Except that the falcons didn’t you work with just that artist. Then Molloy also uses traditional means, follow his plan, they flew back to the there is only one dialogue. You honour drawing, to make something wonder- estate and the handlers had to follow in the audience more if you have a specta- fully subversive. Although he has lived hot pursuit in a station wagon. So, local cle of interactivity. To go from one form for many years in County Clare, the negotiations were another part of this. of thought to another in group shows is work is predominantly related to A community event became an exem- great fun for the audience, but an artist America. It’s just very focused on how plary practice, in the sense that there is rarely happy to be involved in that. So we receive information. He harvests the was a duality between the artist’s criti- continuously over the decade I worked Internet, but the critical lens is always cal view and the touchy feely bit. So, it’s with the gallery, I favoured the idea of there. There is an element of quirkiness as good a comment in terms of the situ- working with one artist in a singular in all the work. ation in Limerick as any that I’ve seen. dialogue between artist and audience. DB In an interview, you said: “I am DB I’m fascinated by Lynch’s video DB You don’t like thematic shows, so always concerned about the notion of installation, combining minimalist what defines this one? the artist consumed with a sense of simplicity with a neutral perception of agency, and the difficulty of artistic prac- land, a bird’s eye view which is indiffer- MF I had two forms of practice in tice to be at the forefront of social ent to the choices the human eye mind: one is socially engaged practice, change.” makes in viewing, as framed, as seen the other, works that are about materi- on screen, a view that becomes land- ality; for instance, the importance of MF It’s interesting because right now scape and takes you by surprise. Is this painting for Shinnors, and Andrew we’re thinking of putting together an peripheral to the main story? Kearney’s work, even though it is instal- MA about socially engaged art practice. lational and very involved, in the sense I’ve always engaged with the possibility MF It’s what contextualises the work in of physicality that engulfs you. The of agency – that interesting work is many ways. We are studying this area same is true of John’s painting. Both always full of the possibility – but I am for the future. But it’s not about the works involve this physical encounter. certain that it doesn’t deliver. In the area; it’s about how we feel when we sense that though it may form part of a look at the piece. People receive it DB And Joe Duggan’s work? perceptual shift, but, I think, in itself, feeling: ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s society moves slowly. According to transgressive, this bird’s eye view, this MF Joe is from Limerick, went to art Buchloh et al, Beuys was needed, in the scratchy view’. Also, the superficiality of college in Birmingham and the Royal sense that he came out of something the it; and that, in a way, is our view of this, College, so is not known here. I came to German people were feeling. quote, ‘rundown area’ which they feel is know him though the Family man inappropriate. By any standards, this is series, beautiful photographs in which DB A totemic figure, a spokesman? a very ordinary place. So it’s quite he features and there are other figures mundane: a housing estate, in a very including a boy, so you begin to worry MF Yes, in the same way that in the spread-out district. So, it’s not about about this relationship. Then you eighties Willie Doherty’s work was seen identity, but implicates those kinds of realise that apart from Joe, the accom- to represent Northern Ireland from an issues. panying figures are all mannequins. international perspective because They are beautiful images, both charm- Ireland needed to be represented in DB I was thinking about the show in ing, compelling and disquieting. some way. Just as Dorothy Cross’s work light of Benjamin’s idea of history as was chosen to represent aspects of an now-time, relating cultural memory to DB And then there’s this religious Other Ireland. Going back to my main the present, not in terms of nostalgia, theme. point, the nature of agency: Sean but to argue that we can be more effec-

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 29 tive in the present. So now-time in the breeding ground. In my own empirical part of a project and will disengage Irish context is the time frame that learning, I began with an artist’s again. We got our audience up to embraces the Celtic Tiger, the Good conception of presenting an artist’s 30,000 for the gallery in the last couple Friday agreement, and the crash of work to the public. Then over the nine of years which for the size of the city is neoliberal capitalism. years I became more and more engaged pretty good. You can increase audience, with the public and then you begin to but you never reach some people and MF Let’s look at this by using a deliber- imagine multiple publics in your head. equally that’s OK. I am more interested ately nonthematic curatorial approach. When I think about audiences I like to in the idea of how do we, as curators, or You just take things that you think are quote my colleague Patrick Murphy, practitioners or the cultural industry, interesting in themselves and imagine Director of the RHA, who points out choose to operate in society, how do we that people form this dialogue for them- that being an audience of one in a segment our process. Sometimes you selves. So I can’t possibly understand gallery space is much more enjoyable can think of art practice as a way of how people might perceive it; I am than standing there with hundreds of engaging people, in the way that Lynch more interested in your view than in my others. In terms of negotiating with does. view, in a sense. You read it with a artists for doing a show, they’re the first particular context in mind, as a contem- audience; it’s an audience of one. Does porary summation of ‘nowness’. I keep it make it better if many people see it? seeing the drive in Lynch’s interest is It’s obviously better for the institution. I history: he’s a scavenger. with this know that if you take a bunch of 11- or 1 A lecture given by Grant Kester in amazing archivist sense of gathering of 12-year-old kids in the space, they’ll Ireland in 1998 (the same year Nicolas stories, of narratives and these feed into certainly tell you something you didn’t Bourriaud’s confused Relational his overarching themes. While Sarah know about the work. Their response aesthetics was published) pinpoints Browne, probably, would be more like rate is quite high, their reading of it or dialogue as a key feature, referencing Mikhail Bakhtin. Trouble is, Kester Seamus, scanning, looking for signs, nonreading of it. As for the audience, settles for Jürgen Habermas’s logical, trying to make sense of society in a way, you can never decide how things will be but unreal, communicative action as a trying to break it up or whatever. received and also there will be multiple workable model for art practice. See Connolly and Cleary are trained as reactions. I notice, for instance with the version of the conference paper (revised after 9/11) ‘Conversation architects. They are so enjoying life, in a students or younger artists, that they’ve pieces. the role of dialogue in socially- way and are creating work that is a very fixed notion of how their work engaged art’ in Zoya Kocur and Simon incredibly balletic, allowing the viewer will be perceived and in that fixed Leung (eds), Theory in contemporary to become the actor, author of the piece notion they predetermine: ‘this is the art since 1985, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp 76 – 88. in the show. The work in the foyer in experience’. They limit it. Collaboration, participation, relation Clare Street, LSAD, is based on a piece and other such terms refer to an art for a show we did a couple of years ago, DB But I’m still convinced by Bourdieu’s practice that draws on the everyday a show that was transferred to the claim that an audience-centred and ultimately has its roots in Dadaism, approach is not a given; that any ability Guy Debord’s Society of the spectacle Pompidou, so it’s a circular conversa- (1967) and the more accessible 1973 tion. But the version they did for the to interact is influenced by educational film (available on ubuweb.com), Henri School of Art seems particularly apt for background, visual and linguistic Lefébvre’s Critique of everyday life the transfer of time; it was the first competence. So is there a danger, even (1947), and a more conservative with socially engaged practice, that the version in Michel De Certeau’s Practice piece they made for that series. of everyday life (1984). See especially, people the artists want to engage with for example, Michael E Gardiner, DB This Connolly and Cleary piece has are the very ones who are not going to Critiques of everyday life, London and an immediate, experiential, tactile cross the threshold? New York: Routledge, 2000, who quality, to do with perception, engaging, provides a critical overview. In this respect, I find particularly convincing challenging on a physical level. If the MF Over the ten years in the City Paulo Freire’s masterly Pedagogy of first viewer is the artist and the public Gallery, one of my aims was that I the oppressed (1968) and, influenced chooses the art it wants to engage with, wanted people to know the gallery was by that, Augusto Boal’s important how do we square that with what are Theatre of the oppressed (1973), which there. But there were those for whom both document the actual experience of still valid reservations about inclusion (I the gallery didn’t exist, as if they had putting the participant at the centre of am thinking of Pierre Bourdieu)? Isn’t erased it, blocked it out. I fully realise the dynamic through dialogue – with there a difference between Bourriaud’s that. After ten years, I can still meet brilliant results. Slightly earlier, idea in Relational aesthetics about Umberto Eco’s half-forgotten Open people who don’t know the gallery is work (1962) theorised open-ended art creating micro-communities of partici- there. We found that some of the audi- forms. Recent versions of collaboration pation in the gallery space and then the ence while working on ev+a were seek to question or even suppress indi- exclusion due to habitus that Bourdieu boatmen and drivers. Because some vidual authorship, in favour of facilitat- wrote about? (Take, for example, Tom ing creativity in participants or viewers, artists wanted to do a project that see Claire Bishop, ‘Collaboration and Molloy’s politically subtle Behind every involved a boat or keeping pigs or what- its discontents: the social turn’ in great man and what Kearney’s giant ever. So you went to them to explain the Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony inflated orb says about public spaces). artwork, and suddenly they were O’Connor (eds), Rediscovering aesthetics. transdisciplinary voices engaged because they were implicated from art history, philosophy, and art MF Kearney makes that an incredibly in the project and could respond. practice, Stanford: Stanford University human space as well. It becomes a People will engage when they become Press, 2009, pp 238 – 255.

30 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 Letter from Helsinki

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

Heli Konttinen: It’s a man’s world, 2009, C-print, 72 x 85 cm; courtesy the artist

Located midway between St. of 300 islands into its urban fabric. reality. The Finnish National Gallery, for Petersburg and Stockholm on the Gulf Traditionally its cultural life has been instance, has instituted a Community of Finland, Helsinki has often been ruled by a small, but affluent, Swedish- Relations and Development cited as offering a blend of east and speaking population, but the face of the programme office where the outspoken west. Having been dominated by city continues to change. An influx of former journalist Umayya Abu-Hanna, Sweden for close to half a millennium new residents is altering its make up. a Palestinian educated at Christian and Tsarist Russia for an additional Of foreign-born residents, Russians schools in Israel, currently holds the century, the past informs the present form the largest minority and Somalis, post of Cultural Diversity Adviser, and through its bilingual character and Chinese and Thais out rank Brits and in early 2009 the Arts Council of historical architecture. The city also Germans.1 While Finns now struggle Finland established a grant for art proj- unites land and sea by incorporating with the idea of diversity, Finland’s ects supporting multiculturalism. Open areas of woodland and an archipelago national institutions adapt to the new to immigrants, national ethnic minori-

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 31

ties and projects involving intercultural of discontent with existing options, on the act. Witness New York artist interaction, this initiative has the poten- programmes innovative work in two Blake Carrington’s Suomenlinna tial to enrich a continually expanding locations. The nearby suburb of Espoo Ornithological Society (2009); his new cultural scene. boasts the largest exhibition space in bird species’ sounds were featured in Finland. Humorously tagged Karisma Artists’ Association Muu’s Audio auto- Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary before its launch in late 2006, the graphs series. Art, Kiasma, has steadily fuelled this Espoo Museum of Modern Art splits its openness toward ‘other’ cultures. Eight focus between modern and contempo- Less common are artists pursuing years ago the museum’s curators rary art. social and political issues, an architec- delved into cultural hybridisation and tural critique or, like the photographer globalisation through the major interna- The advent of pluralism has made it as Raimo Lång, an investigation into tional survey exhibition ARS01: difficult to categorise contemporary urban upheaval. Known for architec- Unfolding perspectives. And in recent practice here as anywhere else, but ture, design, and an extensive social years a vibrant series of group exhibi- themes relating to the human psyche safety net, Finnish people appreciate tions highlighting contemporary-art and the natural environment do rico- innovation and community-serving activity in several of Asia’s regions took chet through the artscape. Frequently, programmes. Helsinki supports an place. Upcoming exhibitions in the they overlap. While the troubling stories international cultural centre, skate- schedule prove that Kiasma will told by Eija-Liisa Ahtila form the most board parks and a 100-metre-long graf- continue to respond to the changes in prominent exponent of the psyche fiti wall, a temporary version of which the local scene as well as examine the theme, artists flesh out the topic in all was erected this past summer. Last practice of contemporary art outside types of media. Evident in Heikki spring the independent and all-new Pro Finland’s borders. February 2010 sees Marila’s grotesque portraits Oh, so Arte Foundation added a new dimen- work by Adel Abidin, an Iraqi-born artist Shameful 1 & 2 (both 2008), it also sion to the local scene with Antony who lives and works in Helsinki, being informs Markus Copper’s complex Gormley’s Clay and The Collective highlighted in the museum. In 2011, a kinetic sculptures that recount personal body (2009), the first of an annual comprehensive overview of Africa will experience and delve into the horror of series of community-based art events.3 take over the entire building for the the Kursk and Estonia sea disasters. With more than 1,300 individuals eighth edition of the ARS exhibition Heli Konttinen, on the other hand, producing sculptural objects, it resulted series. Curator Jari-Pekka Vanhala works in a more clinical vein. The visual in one massive group exhibition. As notes that the aims of the Africa exhibi- expressions she derives from her popular as these initiatives may be, tion, which for practicality will be limited research into the moral intelligence of considering them under a critical light to sub-Saharan Africa, include raising ordinary people force us to question the raises a host of issues. For one, it awareness and changing perceptions. idea of normalcy. points to a philosophy linking the He finds the idea that African art must cultural centre, skateboard parks, graf- be craft-based – that it cannot, for More widely prevalent as a subject is fiti wall and massive art event. It also example, involve the use of video – far nature. Of the twenty-eight artists engenders questions that apply to all. too common. The projected tripartite taking part in the Finnish Painters’ Do they celebrate the specific activities focus aims to include artists working Union’s eightieth-anniversary exhibition or – albeit unintentionally – circum- within Africa and outside it, as well as in the summer of 2009, the conceptual scribe them? Does sanctioning them non-African artists that have used approach to this theme by Tapani help them thrive or induce mediocrity? Africa as their subject.2 Hyypiä’s mesa structures, Petri Ala- And, by broadening or legitimising their Maunus’ sunsets and Vaula Siiskonen’s scope, do these initiatives foster talent While Kiasma stands as the premier racks of landscapes stood out. and refine experience, or dilute it? This showcase for groundbreaking artistic Supporting the notion that the woods malaise of contradictory qualities activity, Helsinki offers an abundance of reside deep within the Finnish mindset exemplifies one of the predicaments of museum, commercial and alternative are Forest, a summer group show at contemporary Finnish life, but seeping spaces, several of which operate multi- the Arts Academy’s Galleria Fafa that through it is a tempered vivacity ple venues. The Helsinki City Art explored the concept in the broadest embodying openness, participation and Museum comprises two museums plus terms, and the book Sähkömetsä discovery. the Kluuvi Gallery. Though Kluuvi dedi- (‘electric forest’), which covers the cates itself to the presentation of exper- history of video art and experimental imental and non-commercial art, it film in Finland. Then you have Antti stepped out of this role in 2006 to Laitinen, an artist whose videos, photo- mount Finland’s first survey of the life graphs and performances intimate a and work of Touko Laaksonen (1920 – relationship with the earth’s surface 1 Statistics Finland (www.stat.fi/tup/ 1991), an illustrator of homoerotica that borders on perversity. Seppo suoluk/suoluk_vaesto_en.html) better known as Tom of Finland. The Salminen’s performance Moonwatcher accessed 28 August 2009 Finnish Arts Academy runs three (2009) at Forum Box lends a poetic air 2 Personal communication, 10 July 2009 3 Berlin-based Scottish artist Susan galleries and Galleria Huuto, an adven- to the subject and even foreign artists Philipsz has been selected for the 2010 turous artist-run organization born out doing residencies in the city can get in programme.

32 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 King of pain/ pope of pop/ memo from Turner

Tim Maul is an artist and critic living in New York City.

Studio item – photograph of Francis Bacon by John Deakin; collection Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon; courtesy Hugh Lane

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 33

Francis Bacon was no one’s child. His John Deakin and other grimy source fan base where I teach (School of material from Bacon’s picturesque ruin Visual Arts) is overwhelmingly male of a studio – an art supply graveyard/ and searching for authenticity in these laboratory where the artist gathered his wavering times. Along with other post- powers, animating the living and reani- adolescent infatuations (weird bands mating the dead. Holding the artist’s and cult novelists), attraction to Bacon ‘ashes’, vitrines double for reliquaries, was something one grew out of and suggesting an unsanitary parallel rarely acknowledged. version of the exhibition. The Hugh Lane website describes that studio’s Bacon’s long representation by repatriation to Irish soil as an “excava- Marlboro Gallery contributed to the tion” by “archeologists,” giving this aura of affluence attending perception controversial action occult connota- of his art, by that gallery’s plush tions; especially to those familiar with I find it difficult not to watch the crowds midtown location and stable of blue- the conditions necessary to reinvigo- file solemnly through Francis Bacon – a chip artists which included hardcore rate Bram Stoker’s fictive Count. centenary retrospective at New York’s bohemian Larry Rivers, another mainly Metropolitan Museum of Art. What figurative painter that history does not The photograph held for Bacon talis- must they take away from this crash know what to do with. New York critics manic access to the revival of memo- course in carnality and grief? The text generally dismissed Bacon as expen- ries, and like smelling salts held under panels throughout this exhibition of 66 sive ‘feel bad’ art mired in the transi- a boxer’s nose it aroused him and got paintings provide the standard biogra- tional period between chic surrealism him back in the ring. Here Bacon is phical information, acknowledge and abstract expressionism. important, intersecting with other Bacon’s sources (Muybridge, Skepticism was fueled by the belief that painter archivists Gerhard Richter, Velázquez and Eisenstein) and include collectors overlooked such atrocious Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol. gossip on the artist’s disastrous rela- content because it ‘went’ with the furni- Although years apart in age, our tionships with lovers and muses. ture – frequently the ‘French provincial’ Warhol and your Bacon have some Whispering audio guides dangle the style favored by ‘60s decorators, which intriguing parallels; both were homo- back-story of the artist in front each employed mirrors to extend the illusion sexuals and began careers in the deco- painting and the art, the narrative, and of space. Bacon insisted on gold rative arts. Bacon lived through Art the Met make for a great fit. Here is a frames and floated a layer of glass Deco while Warhol collected it – which tale of exorcism, an expulsion of one’s between the viewer and the festering could also be said for pornography. demons onto canvas in a performative surface of the canvas, ‘delaying’ recep- Both slowed people down in their art. manner befitting such torment –culmi- tion and suspending our own reflection Both artists were messy, Warhol in his nating in the suicide of his partner in a Dorian Gray moment of self-recog- infantile ‘piss’ canvases and Bacon in George Dyer which extends itself over nition. Isolated from other surroundings terms of his personal life and studio the three operatic canvases of Triptych by a gleaming frame, this act of optic regimen. Wounded by a violent act and ‘73. entrapment may be this art’s most ‘resurrected’ from near death, Warhol salient feature. Each frame functions the practicing Catholic and ‘Pope of Local critical resistance to Bacon stems as signifier to the connoisseur and as Pop’ heavily retouched, on request of from the artist’s dismissal of our ornate sealant, bracketing an airless the sitter, commissioned portraits while abstract- expressionist dream-team in dead zone that briefly includes us. Bacon’s brush magnified human flaws favor of a continued restaging of the like a funhouse mirror. If debauched, figure – a hybrid of Futurism’s cine- American ignorance toward British Bacon wasn’t a freak; one could only matic overlays rendered in greasy postwar painting developed out of ego imagine Warhol’s physical appearance surrealist trompe l’oeil. America, once and lack of reportage; the craft, ‘tech- if he had lived into the present – at the the dream factory of the world, could nique’, and populist content found in time of his death in middle age he was never embrace the surreal when it the art that did manage to cross the already dependent on cosmetic surger- already had Busby Berkeley. Secular in Atlantic signaled the provincial – a ies, collagen injections, and other our art, the overt symbolism favored by venial sin NY critic’s would also level at beauty treatments to compensate for Bacon was rare beyond ‘outsider’ art from ‘60s Los Angeles or twenty- crippling insecurities. movements, beatnik mysticism, and first-century China. A derisive tag of the hiccup of kitschy ‘80s ‘East Village’ ‘slickness’ could be hung on a figure as A touchstone for Bacon, the photogra- expressionism. No longer – kid stuff important as Richard Hamilton, while phy of Edward Muybridge (of which rules now, the dark pagan language of applauded in Jeff Koon’s sour monu- there are only four examples at the youth culture is a ubiquitous gallery ments to childhood. Halfway through Met) confined humans and animals in a presence tolerated with parental the Met exhibition, a dim room, perhaps grid of a single repeated space. patience. Banished and adrift in the to preserve the delicate prints, displays Purported to investigate the mysteries European capitals of the 1920s, a small selection of photography by of propulsion, Muybridge’s mildly sadis-

34 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 tic proto-cinema was admired by the many to Bacon’s art, specifically Figure futurists and later by minimal and ‘body’ with meat (1954), through a scene artists for the clinical documentation of where the disfigured Joker (Jack mundane action. In Bacon’s late work Nicholson) and his band of droogies seriality allowed for the playing out of pass up vandalizing that painting literal ‘kitchen sink’ narratives and during an invasion of the Gotham City lugubrious portraiture. Bacon held on to Museum. This scene has contributed to Futurist simultaneity, which grew out of, numerous internet inquiries about the among other things, excitement for the art and artist. Much earlier, director new medium of moving pictures. What Nicolas Roeg nailed the atmosphere of Bacon derived from his scrutiny of still Bacon’s milieu in Performance (1970), images was the thing you did not see – a London tale of criminality, decadent the blur, a trace of a motion’s history withdrawal, and drug-induced psychic upon a receptive surface. Originating in collapse. Mick Jagger’s sneering the fluid of the eye and later in the performance of his song Memo from chemistry of the darkroom, the blur is Turner should be You Tubed for anyone almost nearly liquid. Purposely blurring wondering how a sensibility resembling an image, transforming an original, Bacon’s would translate to the screen. unfixed mark into another, is an act of James Fox, playing an East End crimi- negation followed by nostalgia for nal fleeing the police who stumbles into whatever was first there. Bacon’s Turner/ Jagger’s hermetic Yellow book people are often initially read as world, could have stepped out from a convulsive, but their actual rendering Bacon ‘men in suit’ painting like Man in is, upon close inspection, laborious. An a Box (1954) included at the Met. artist of all that is viscous, Bacon lavished attention on liquids, puddles, The original YBAs channeled into and the scabrous – luring us close. Manhattan’s Soho through the Modernism drained the visceral from Gagosian Gallery in the early ‘90s were the canvas – the color pink could be a game-changer, toppling New York as ‘fleshy’ but was forbidden to stand in for an art capital that produced the novelty flesh itself; Bacon’s deft handling of oils necessary to fuel an art boom. Deep- with its purposeful detailing of gesture – pocketed production values married to no ‘happy accidents’ marooned him the thrills, chills, and eroticism of the outside the Modern conversation wax museum attracted diverse, carni- anywhere but Europe. His influence fell valesque crowds, making the average on few beyond a small appreciative New York gallery opening look effete circle; Ralph Steadman took a frenzied and repressed. These artists, with the Baconian approach in his popular illus- exception of Damien Hirst, came and trations for the chemically fueled went like music industry ‘one hit ‘gonzo’ journalism of Hunter S wonders’ – grabbing some cash along Thompson. with a page in the history books. Francis Bacon: Untitled ( man at wash- Bacon’s episodic re-enactments of basin), c 1953; © 2009 The Estate of Bacon as scenarist and conductor of Victorian sensation, where an unseen Francis Bacon; courtesy Hugh Lane sequential delirium may have curtain rises and falls on each individ- contributed to his following among film ual painting, once frustrated placement directors; stylists including Bernardo of his work in the genealogy of western Bertolucci, whose grieving Marlon art history. No more. A familial term of Brando in Last tango in Paris (1973) ‘grandfather’ may be finally conferred suggested to that director a Bacon upon Francis Bacon. subject, David Cronenberg’s genetic mishap of The fly (1986), David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Ken Russell. Lynch’s The Elephant man (1981) centers on the Victorian Joseph Merrick, whose deformities could be seen as an embodiment of any Bacon figure – a living blur. The oranges, inky blacks, and liturgical purples used by Bacon recall the lurid covers of classic comic- book art with heroes and villains locked in apocalyptic showdowns. Burton’s grotesque Batman (1981) introduced

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 35 The collision of things Andrew Duggan in interview with Karlyn De Jongh

Karlyn De Jongh is an independent curator and author from the Netherlands.

Andrew Duggan’s work addresses what he calls “the space between tradi- tion and contemporary space and time.” For him, language and location are key elements; whether in New York or the Gaeltacht, Duggan discusses the tradition he is in, walking the fine line between definitions.

His daily questioning has resulted in a series of video installations addressing various aspects of tradition. In his works, Duggan collaborates with dancers, musicians and cultural institu- tions. The encounter with the other seems important for Duggan, trying to see, question and define ordinary things – or things that were once ordi- nary and became something different. Duggan brings this to a direct encounter, when confronting the viewer and presenting his projects in the public domain.1

I met with Andrew Duggan at The Clarence in Dublin on 10 January 2009, and this interview is based on our talk then and subsequent interactions.

KDJ In the titles of your work you often use a Gaelic phrase followed by a slash and then a phrase in the English language. In the names of cities in Ireland a similar system seems to be used. Although in this instance the Gaelic and English often differ in meaning, the names do indi- cate the same place. How important is knowledge of the Gaelic language

Andrew Duggan: from the conjugation of the verb ~ to america, 2006; courtesy the artist

36 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 for you and for understanding your to own, apart from anything else. As something. Also they became a work? Do the English and the Gaelic soon as you define something, you language that I can play around with part of the title denote the same? question it. It fluctuates; there is and re-appropriate and readjust to What is the function of the slash? nothing solid. It’s like what Francis specifics. Bacon said in an interview in which he AD Imbued in the work there are slight was quoted from another interview: “I In February they burn the gorse and differences in meaning between two said that? I lied.” There is a kind of the heather; all hills are in flame. I am languages. Most of the time the two truth in that lie. It’s not that artists working on a piece that comes directly titles mean more or less the same. The don’t stick to their principles of being from seeing them light the hills to clear best way to discuss this is through a an artist; their tense of questioning away something. The reason for project I am just completing, called fluctuates. I think, that’s the pure joy of burning the heather is to get away with Iarsma. In English it translates as being an artist: daily questioning. it, to make the land fertile again. The ‘remnant’: what’s left behind. ‘Iarsma’ same could be said about making a seems to be more intangible, Tradition is very solid and very defined. piece of work: by erasing or subtracting ephemeral or emotional than Yet a lot of Irish tradition isn’t. In fact, something, you allow for new defini- ‘remnant’, which to me always seems I feel more at home with the avant- tions or interpretations of that very tangible. I always find it easier to garde of the Gaeltacht than I do with same object. That subtraction and in- express emotions through Gaelic and the constructed avant-garde of the city. between has always been intrinsic to something more Germanic through I did a project there called Milk and the work that I do. Language as well as English. English words I find more honey. It was in a disused creamery, a the act of taking something away from descriptive; Irish is more emotional. really interesting space. I was playing it. The space in-between isn’t historic The English is a bit more calculated. with the idea of the distance between and isn’t time. It is more the relation- The Irish ‘iarsma’ contains more where we are and where we want to go: ship or collision between the two. images than the word ‘remnant’. It’s the distance between now and then just like when you are travelling and changes our perception of the destina- KDJ Besides the Gaelic/ English titles visit a lot of places and see a sign: the tion. I thought of this destination as the of your work, you seem to stress the Irish version of the sign can be more land of milk and honey. I started to get importance of language. Why is poetic. I am even interested in it being an interest in the notion of the Irish language so important to you? How do written in italics. In italics the reading Republic at that time as well, in partic- you see language in relation to tradi- of the place seems more poetic, as the ular the moment which was named the tion, which to some extent seems to vertical is more “this is where it is.” ‘Free State’, after the treaty. I feel it is a depend on the celebration or repetition time of optimism and idealism. of that same tradition? KDJ You have described your work as Identities were forged at that time. I an investigation of “the space between made two video pieces that went inside AD I was a language teacher for three tradition and contemporary space and the old creamery building. To do that I years and became completely absorbed time.” How do you understand this in- had to approach the local co-op and in language structure. I like how we between space? To what degree is the dairy company to be able to use the position ourselves within the tense distance between tradition and contem- space. There I was, this Dublin guy, system: that we talk in the present, but porary space and time indeed a spatial trying to convince this Kerry man about also talk in the future. I recently did a and not a temporal distance? what it is that I wanted to do to the piece called Future perfect, which is a creamery. He was interested in the film tense system: you will have done some- AD I think there is no specific distance and started to tell me about the thing by the end of the day or you will between a tradition or a past and a workers that used to work in the build- have done something in twenty years particular present. That distance ing. Many of these ex-workers eventu- time. I like that mental throwing back changes, with whoever is looking or has ally came to the exhibition. The work and forth and how we do that; we don’t the power or knowledge to transcribe became a sort of catalyst for them to necessarily draw a line, but are sort of the past, to be the historian or gate- talk about their experiences. That bouncing back and forth within our keeper of tradition. As an artist you moment I felt there was very much an language. Many things are trying to walk a fine line between worlds acceptance of the poetry of the avant- give this linear life. When looking at the anyway. If you look at people who are garde in the Gaeltacht. Gaeltacht, for example, they don’t live involved in traditional music or linearly there; they live more zig-zaggy writing, they are very much in owner- KDJ Does that mean that the in- between what all the cultural refer- ship of it. I would never feel an owner- between space between tradition and ences are. That often happens in the art ship of it. I feel part of tradition, but contemporary space and time is more a world as well: to repeat something would never say I own it. relation than an actual gap that makes historic; to keep it alive. That idea of them two separate things? language and how we think linguisti- KDJ Why do you feel that is? Is that cally, I feel very close to that. because you are from Dublin or AD Yes, I would not see them as two because of your position as artist? separate things. And I think certain KDJ You have spoken about taking traditional forms – or the vocabulary over words from other languages: AD I think it is a bit of both. As an – do two things to me: They become ‘folk’, for example, comes from the artist I don’t think you are in the need motive objects; they make me do German or Dutch ‘volk’. Also you

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 37 created work around the conjugation KDJ Your work is about culture. How with an amateur way of making work; of ‘to folk’ and ‘to america’. Why do do you find touching upon a culture that somehow your work must have a wry you want to activate these nouns into isn’t your own? slant on a particular subject. verbs? AD I think it is quite easy to integrate KDJ To touch upon tradition: that AD I like activating, yes, but mainly the as an artist and as an Irish national into seems also quite personal or perception of language. The word New York. It’s a city you are immedi- emotional. ‘america’ is such a huge, huge word, ately part of. Growing up in Ireland in especially when it is capitalised. If you the ‘80s, going to London was always a AD But you should not be afraid of it, de-capitalise it and make it into a small nightmare: you’re always afraid that just because a work has an emotional word, and make it into a verb that something would happen. Every young reason for making it. If you make work doesn’t exist, you’re leaving open for Irish person was seen as a possible from an emotional point, it does carry interpretation of what it is to do that. terrorist. through. That is where the debate is interesting. I am not trying to achieve a definition Irish culture is about duality, about KDJ Do you feel your work is about of it, but to debate what the possible different communities within one you? About your life, your culture, and definition of that word is. I’ve only island. I like that duality. That’s also your language? done this with the nouns ‘folk’ and going back to the Irish/ English ‘america’ but the debate around it is language theme. I like the counter AD I think it has to be, but I don’t think completely different. argument in a way. I think the Irish you can separate that. I wouldn’t go language and history does that. Also around making work specifically about In relation to the word ‘america’, I had between the countries there is always myself: I wouldn’t find that interesting been working with missing-person something other to be defined. to do. posters and found something really sad about it. These people are missing: a KDJ Where do you position yourself as KDJ You do seem to touch upon things hole has been left for this person; he or an artist? Do you consider yourself to that are present in your direct surround- she exists but also doesn’t exist. The be somewhere in between? ings. I mean: since you moved to two things jar, but it makes the image Dingle on the west coast of Ireland even sadder. The photographs are AD I think you walk that fine line several years ago, the town seems to usually snapshots; you know that other between definitions. Your role as an have become interwoven in your art people were in that photograph. To artist is to create work that is a social practice. Many of your projects took question how it is that this happens, moment. I do think that the creation of place in Dingle and address aspects of seemed to lace well with the word art is a social moment, that does some- that site. Would you consider your work ‘america’. It became a booklet with thing. Being one side or another isn’t to be site-specific? photographs and the conjugation of ‘to the role of an artist, at least not for me america’. By activating the word, you personally. I am trying to be on the fine AD No, not necessarily site-specific, it’s question it. line, trying to tip the balance. more about being definition-specific or meaning-specific: what the place is KDJ Do you think you change the It’s important to me not to just re- about. I know that that can lead into meaning as well? enact, to be the observer and to docu- site-specific, but that you’re somehow ment. Artists have a bigger adding a layer to it as opposed to doing AD I think you are inventing something responsibility. I like the definition of an something that can only be understood else with a meaning that hasn’t been image. I like the creation of something in this location. For the piece I did in defined yet. Meaning becomes personal: new from something already existing: the Sculpture Centre, in Leitrim, I took after seeing the booklet many people came firstly, it does something when you see handwritten notes from kids who hung with a negative connotation to what ‘to it, but it also has other elements and around a disused ball alley. It was about america’ means. That was in 2005/ 2006 layers to it. I like the collision of things, the future-perfect ideas: what they want when America was in the heat of a combat. such as in the Milk and honey film to do in the future. The notes were These people came up with definitions of where there is a collision between the pinned to the wall of the handball alley. ‘to america’ saying that it’s imperial. I milk and the patriot image of the man. That could be seen as site-specific, but wonder if that will change with the new Of something possibly that’s lost, that’s it’s not in the way that I could take these president. not tangible any more. pieces of paper and put them in any handball alley or any place that is With the word ‘to america’ I am taking KDJ Why do you feel you have a imbued with a similar meaning. I am something, but at the same time I am responsibility? not sure whether there is a category for creating something new with it. That can that. Looking back at Milk and honey: be open for definition, but essentially it’s AD I feel responsible to myself as an it’s in a creamery, that’s a social cross- something that is newly created and can artist and also to being an artist. I think roads; I could have had that image at refer to either language – definitions and there are a few artists out there at the any similar space that was a space for meanings – or to what it comes from – moment who create emotional spaces social interaction. America. There is a duality there, but to exist in. There is a sort of fear of essentially it’s that fine line in which you making pieces of work that are KDJ What do you think happens to created something new. emotional in Ireland: it’s associated your work when you take it out of the

38 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

AD The space has to mean something to me.

KDJ What is this meaning? Is it some- thing emotional or – to speak like Dorothy Cross – does it spark off some- thing?

AD I think the building must mean something in relation to… I don’t know. In a way it is indefinable what an archi- tectural structure does to you. But there must be a motive; it must make you want to do something. I think it’s a bit of both: something emotional and it also sparks something off. I don’t have any particular definitions on a site. I don’t go to a site to see if it adheres to certain criteria. It’s something I come across as opposed to to look for: I wasn’t looking for the creamery nor for Andrew Duggan: Milk and honey, 2002, video still, double video projection; the handball courts. They came into my courtesy the artist visual landscape. It’s like how you exist in this world and how an artist travels through it: some things become inter- location and tradition it is originally situ- artist. What do you yourself think about esting and some things don’t. ated in and present it within another these terms? When you yourself culture and in an urban context? Is the change location, do you dis-locate? When you stay in one place, you can go moment you place it outside its original What about your works? The word ‘dis- crazy. Or else that place must change culture the moment it is seen as ‘folk’? locate’ seems to have quite a negative constantly for you. That you can find How important is the ‘outsider’ in deter- connotation. Do you see it as a nega- new meaning and definition in that mining what ‘folk’ is? tive change? place. But you shouldn’t move from one place to the other without making any AD It’s interesting to see how people AD The idea of dislocating came to me connection to that place; for me it run with certain pieces you made. They with this idea of digging a hole. People wouldn’t be nomadic. seem to have a local relevance. That talk about it in terms of relocating relevance can be taken, what the work oneself or putting oneself within a is about can be brought elsewhere. particular context: as if you’re plucked People have said I am kind of precious from one context into the next. Artists about the work I made. I kind of am: in residence often do that: relocating it’s important to me not just to show oneself and relocating the practice, the work out there and see who’ll pick without responding to the new environ- it up. I haven’t shown the Milk and ment. I find that strange, but also kind honey piece anywhere else, for of interesting. Obviously you still example. If I would put it somewhere, continue your practice when you are that place should be equally as impor- going somewhere else, but part of my tant as the place I originally put it in. practice is always that I can’t help With regard to Milk and honey: I have feeling responsible for the space I am never seen a space that has done the set in. In particular architecture: archi- same thing to me as the creamery has tecture, such as in the creamery or the done. Although it’s specific for a handball alleys, has always been a creamery, I would love to present it in strong point in my work. I find these one of these abandoned, ideological disused or unoccupied spaces fascinat- spaces. It has to be a space that does ing. They are in-between spaces that more than give a vehicle for presenting nobody owns. Architecture and two video pieces. construction of spaces have always made me want to make work, employ- KDJ During your residency at Location ing some of the things that that space One you took up the role of interviewer means. and raised questions about the concepts ‘relocation’ and ‘dislocation’ in KDJ Do you feel the space has to give 1 This interview was conducted as part relation to a change of location by an something back to you? of the project Quiccheberg.

Victoria McCollum The Fire of the Snow

A Circa project

44 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

Various locations Belfast ISEA August 2009

David Hughes is an artist I was looking at Wake by Kate Richards, – which the artist had visited. In one and writer who lives in an Australian artist showing in the C-13 sense there was little to tell between the Collective curated freight container sited ports, on the other hand there were archi- Lisburn. He is published at outside the Waterfront Hall. You would tectures and landmarks and signatures www.macwh.net/bridger walk past the container to get to the main that marked them as different. What was symposium building, the Hall itself, and common was the flow, the flow of ship- there was usually something going on: ping, the flow of the carrier from which the installations being installed and de- footage was shot, the sense of being in installed. The showings themselves. those in-between places. The idea had Wake was a montage of footage of ports been to put the screen as though a – Rio, Belfast, Rotterdam, New York, Oslo window in the side of the container, creat- ing the sense perhaps of the drama of being something transported, getting a sidelong view of the ports. But time and technology (the best laid plans of programmers get scuppered by time and technology, don’t they) had obliged them to project Wake onto the end wall of the container. And so one stood inside as though standing on a deck. Rather than an ironic side glance, one had a more immersive experience in this, what Marc Auge calls ‘non-place’, those spaces one typically encounters when travelling such as airports, bus terminals, hotels and so on and which one often only remembers in very generic terms. There was a very real sense of the romantic, watching this piece, in the sense of romance as a fictional narrative dealing with exciting and extravagant adventures (you can imaginatively project yourself into that space by remembering your own travels), an inexplicable fascination for something, the feeling of adventure, excitement, the potential for heroic achievement, and the exotic. I know that it seems like stretching a point to claim that footage of the port of Belfast conjures all that romance, but even the banality of non-places has this heroic quality of adventure about to happen or at least it is full of its potential.

I said to Richards that I thought it was moving. She was delighted that her work had had such a profound effect. I’m not surprised in a way. Don’t we all shoot footage like this (it is really most banal) now with our mobile phones? And don’t we all elevate the banal images we shoot to the giddy heights of art as we edit them together and project them and map them onto blank architectures in Second Life? Realizing my own pun, I turned to her again (literally) and said, “it’s moving,”

Benedict Phillips: 3D thinkers in a 2D world, performance shot; courtesy Interface

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 45

meaning that the image was moving Moving, funny, warm, intelligent, my breath away. I could not speak after it, (moving pictures) that the subject was awesome. Yeah, really not bad for a so it was just as well that there was no- moving (the passage of the shooting deck dyslexic. one to speak to as viewers experienced and the scapes passed). She must have the installation alone. thought I was daft. She smiled and said, I spoke to Petko Dourmana as he was “yes, yes, you said, that’s so nice.” And I installing his installation, Post global One work which really engaged me and said, “no, I mean, it’s moving.” But the warming survival kit, in one of the foyer which could accommodate other partici- moment was past. lecture rooms at University of Ulster, York pants (I did it with a young Canadian Gate. I was attracted to the room by the man) was Geoffrey Alan Rhodes’ 52 card It was good, amongst the welter of fabulous caravan that was in there. It had Psycho: deconstructing cinema through avatars (and I should say I have spent the appearance of a sideways teardrop. mixed reality. Psycho used tags on 52 many hours editing my own Second Life He told me that it was originally designed playing cards on a table. The tags were avatar, so I’m not being snooty here) to in Nazi Germany as a kind of mass trans- readable by an overhead camera and talk to the artist, to experience this docu- portation vehicle, a companion to the each tag referred to or accessed one of mentation of her travels and to have this Volkswagen. It continued to be made in 52 shots from the shower scene from all-too-human exchange, this non-under- the Eastern Bloc. When I eventually Psycho. So as you arranged the cards on standing of my brilliant pun. viewed the installed work, oddly, there the table, the shots would be rearranged Another human moment happened was nothing to see. Unless that is you on the projection screen. A very simple around Cloud car, Andrea Polli and went in wearing night sight goggles. The concept really. And I’m not quite sure Chuck Varga’s installation. A small vehicle whole work was illuminated by infrared what its charm was. Perhaps it was the is fitted with hoses to envelop it in a fine light and the huge projection of the North pleasure of deconstruction, that making mist. Projections are shot through the Sea coast was also only viewable with the that the reader can do which reflects back mist using the shifting materiality of the goggles. the process of reading, the process of mist to materialise and dematerialise. The meaning-making and the arbitrariness of projections are related to the pollution This was a huge work. A big, open, the signifier. Each shot is arbitrary and created by automobiles. The whole effect, empty-feeling space with the trailer in one relatively devoid of meaning until they are rather ironically, is very beautiful even corner and the projection against a far arranged in a narrative order, edited, though it has at its basis the issue of wall. You enter the space disoriented montaged. But one can control that narra- pollution from exhaust emissions. Varga, because it is so unfamiliar to walk and tive, play it in more protracted and more for I assumed it was he, was taking docu- orient yourself in this infrared environ- compacted forms. It allows us to make, mentation shots of the installation and ment (I have the same problem trying to play, create together. was covered in a white waterproof move in Second Life where my avatar is poncho. “It’s just water,” he said, “but it’s constantly saying to pneumatic female Quite a bit of the work shown and meant to suggest pollution.” Whatever it avatars, “sorry, I have difficulty moving”). discussed at ISEA used these tags and a was, he didn’t want to get wet himself. He The scenario is post-apocalyptic. The tabletop that is read by an overhead or and his collaborator chatted to groups of trailer is a kind of lookout in a nuclear underneath camera. The tags are effec- spectators about the event and its relation winter of no light except radiation light. tively barcodes which can be read by to the physical facts of air pollution in The trailer has communications equip- specialist software that can be loaded Belfast. Again an image of travel beauti- ment and books and Morse code onto your mobile. Typically they call up fully realised sets up a romance, a road machines. It has a kind of Stalker-ish websites to augment the space or object movie. Shame about the emissions, eh atmosphere. It was frankly terrifying and I which contains the tag. Also, the move- Chuck? left pretty damn quick. I promised myself I ment of objects and bodies can be would go back and immerse myself in this mapped onto other spaces. This was Another human moment, and of great truly immersive environment, but I didn’t used to rearrange documentary material charm, was the performance lecture by have the courage frankly. It spooked me. in one piece and was the graphic design Benedict Phillips, 3D thinkers in a 2D This was a use of technology which was on a dress on another. Scanning the code world. Essentially the lecture is an so, so effective. There was an extension tags on the dress would take the browser account of the discovery of his own and enlargement of the narrative through of your mobile phone, say, to a site or dyslexia and both the problems of fitting the technology which was both a physical resource that augmented the dress. into given educational structures and the reality of the fiction and a metaphor for creative benefits of being a DIV (which is envisioning the future, for imagining. A Some lovely moments remain. Perhaps to say, having Dyslexic Intelligent Vision). simple fusing of found object (the trailer, foremost was Andrea Zapp’s collaging Whilst the piece had the aspect of worthi- equipment, books, machines), video together of Google map photos and ness (informing the debate about footage and infrared technology. This embroidered features within those land- dyslexia), it had the sculptor’s ability to work, I felt, demonstrated a really deep scapes, Google gaze. It fused together make beautiful objects, the communica- understanding by the artist of the moment the most contemporary ability to view the tor’s ability to make the spoken point very of viewing and the experience of space. distant and the domestic craft of embroi- clearly, the stand-ups ability to make the But also of narrative and poetry. A huge dery. The embroidered Rialto Bridge on a text funny, the actor’s ability to make the work: history, film, fiction, possible fact Google map of Venice was particularly text moving. Not bad for a dyslexic! collapsed into an amazing space. It took funny and charming. LOL.

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Golden Thread Gallery Belfast The Visual force: September – November 2009 collective histories of Northern Irish art

Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

– and otherworldly – capacities. As Sverakova sees it, art succeeds most fully not when it turns our attention to the world as it is, but when it conjures a realm of ‘ideals’ – ideals that “point to a reality that ought to be better than what we experience now.” Sverakova’s wish to assert the force of the visual, there- fore, does not so much arise from an urge to critique certain dominant visual regimes (such as the authority of capi- talism’s ‘integrated spectacle’ and the penetrating, controlling gaze of surveil- lance culture: subjects that have informed prior episodes in the Collective histories saga) but rather from a need to name ‘the visual’ as a special source of this exhibition’s second necessary f: freedom. Una Walker: Finite and bound, 2009; courtesy Golden Thread Gallery Sverakova’s motivating argument is an ardent endorsement of the ‘visual’ as a Two provocative f-words formed the alternative ways of seeing, for imagin- force-field of liberatory possibility and, basis of the latest Collective history of ing other worlds – and as such this opti- following Kant, she selects freedom as Northern Irish art at Belfast’s Golden mistic aesthetic possibility has a “the essential subject matter for art.” Thread Gallery. The first of these peculiar and ambiguous relation to our Given the fraught ‘social-political emphatic fs (which granted the show its more immediate social world. context’ out of which this exhibition urgent title) was ‘force’ – a word emerges, this is a somewhat challeng- unlikely, we might imagine, to shrug off Slavka Sverakova, the immensely well- ing, but still engaging, proposition. the menacing associations that surely regarded writer and academic invited to ‘Freedom’, like ‘force’, often seems like still cling to it in the post-Troubles curate this latest phase of the Golden a terminally compromised term today – North, but which here, in combination Thread’s idiosyncratic history series, and its progressive retrieval is no easy with the differently loaded term ‘visual’, notes in her impassioned catalogue task. Locally disfigured in extreme began to be willed in a more benign text that the art works selected as vari- nationalist propaganda, globally and enlightening direction. For the ously representative of a ‘visual force’ abused in the neo-liberal rhetoric of ‘visual force’ energising this exhibition (by twenty-one artists, spanning three democracy and ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ might well be understood as a vital generations of art in the North of often in fact implies very restricted surge of resistance to the other sinister Ireland) do not, for the most part, limits within very particular worlds. and powerful forces whose dire influ- “overtly include the given socio-political ‘Freedom’ is, as Edward Said once ence has so impoverished the public context as their subject matter” but noted, one of the “enormous thought- sphere in this part of the world. The rather – crucially – they “emanate stopping abstractions” that today concept of ‘visual force’ here signifies, contexts that ought to be.” This is an “choke” political discourse. Such terms, then, an ever-present potential for upbeat, modernist view of art’s worldly such ideas, Said says, “are as unclear

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 47

as they are potent and refined in their art that was to follow in subsequent we move in relation to it, the interplay of appeal.” Moreover, for numerous other years. Such as, of course, that which its delicate lines allows for the flickering recent thinkers (as the familiar set texts was fostered within the milieu of the emergence and disappearance of of our art theory courses amply demon- ground-breaking Art & Research countless, contingent ‘other’ spaces. strate), it is precisely the field of ‘the Exchange, the aesthetically and Not unrelated are the aging, fading visual’ that is most cynically seductive conceptually radical initiative, kick- photographs taken by John Aiken in and subtly restrictive with regard to started with a grant from Beuys and 1977 of his slender moulded sand what we might think of as ‘freedom’. Yet novelist Heinrich Böll (and imagined as sculptures – long beams of compacted if, to borrow a fine distinction proposed the Belfast campus of their Free matter that cross over each other, by the film theorist Serge Daney, ‘the International University of Creativity collapsing at the intersections – which visual’ has come to signify all that is and International Research), whose show (in a visual form that is manifestly most oppressive, conventional and central artistic presence was the vital subject to the contingencies of time commodified in contemporary culture figure of Alastair MacLennan – repre- passing) a ‘memory’ of a situation in (‘the visual’, Daney suggests, is an sented here in a somewhat low-key which solidity and stasis were revealed ever-present trap, a closed loop that manner with a series of recent works as temporary conditions. Martina reduces response to “the ecstatic veri- on paper, formally ‘free’ charcoal draw- Corry’s experiments with photographic fication of the working of the organs”) ings, at once loose and intense, that principles are also restrained, poetic we might also look for the occasional nevertheless have a solemn power suggestions of formal openness: resistance of what can be distinguished indicative of the profound uncertainties photo-sensitive paper is creased as ‘the image’: those more awkward of MacLennan’s broader practice. But before being exposed to minimal light, forms within the perceived world that Beuys in Belfast, also, more indirectly, allowing slight and shadowy patterns to “bear witness to a certain otherness.” is understood by Sverakova to have become just-about apparent. Despite the contrasting use of the word liberated subsequent generations of ‘visual’, this distinction offers a produc- practitioners “from the academic To borrow from Theodor Adorno, this is tive correspondence with Sverakova’s system of arts” and towards more thor- a type of work which “is barely work at stated interest in celebrating both oughgoing varieties of creative experi- all” and, like much that has been ‘otherness’ and a stubborn ‘free spirit’ mentation – and in particular we might selected for this Collective history, it is in art practices – an attitude of looking note the centrality within the exhibition true to the curatorial commitment to beyond existing ‘realities’ and maintain- of works which bring the unique ‘force’ ‘freedom’ but is itself free from bombast ing resolute noncompliance with of the individual body into anxious visi- and heroic gesture. As with the very ‘visual’ convention. bility (lens-based works by Peter different Friend map (1976) and Richards, Moira McIver, Fiona Larkin, Timelines (2009), two compelling To stress these matters and to forge for instance) or that propose fresh and works by John Carson featured here these connections (and to risk the freeing evaluations of the place and (the former is a map of greater Belfast fundamental error of effectively review- proper subjects of art (sculptural work based on lines connecting the artist’s ing Sverakova’s catalogue essay rather by Dan Shipsides, for example, or friends; the latter is a compilation of than the richly visual exhibition she has paintings by Ronnie Hughes). video testimonies from these friends curated) is worthwhile given the scale three decades later) such varieties of and strength of the claims supporting Part of the ‘force’ of this exhibition, art in this context, even those that the artworks in The Visual force. For then, is in the confident, careful play of appear determinedly formalist, seem to what type of art can shape and sustain ideas and materials – a sense of self- leave us with a sense of having been such a vision of ‘freedom’ in today’s assured artistic probing by representa- presented with modest proposals for world? (And whatever way we choose tives of all the gathered generations – other, stranger ways of seeing. Here to spin it, the category of ‘art’ can only that Sverakova ascribes to the Beuys and there, in its reflection on now and be constructed in historically specific legacy. And perhaps what is most strik- then, The Visual force sought out relation to other social systems and ing in the work on display is the combi- spaces somehow beyond, yet still structures, as Declan McGonagle’s nation of that imaginative vigour with attentive to, the oppressive categories earlier exhibition in this series, A Shout visual and physical vulnerability. of received reality, offering up multiple, in the street, sought to demonstrate.) ‘Force’ here is often found to be in potentially freeing, lines of flight. Significantly, Sverakova elects to take tension with, or, more accurately, is as a model and point of inspiration for discovered through, a certain formal her own ideal of artistic freedom an fragility. Una Walker’s Finite and especially empowering incident within bounded, for instance (a remake of an the art field: an event, to use a voguish installation first staged in 1982) theoretical term, to which she claims features a series of precise grids fidelity. This is the revelatory visit of created through the pinning of taut Joseph Beuys to Belfast in 1974, an vertical and horizontal string lines “utterly atypical” occasion which, she within a contained zone of the exhibi- proposes, had a direct bearing on tion space. It is a ‘fixed’ construction, a much of the most independent-minded formally strict composition, and yet as

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Visual Carlow VISUAL: September 2009 – January 2010 the building and the opening exhibitions

Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture.

Daphne Wright: Stallion (commissioned by Carlow Arts Office under the Visualise programme), 2009, installation shot, Studio Gallery, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art; photo Ros Kavanagh; courtesy VISUAL

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Is VISUAL, the new arts centre in Carlow, (presumably the main entrance), there is a ever to receive on an opening night like complete with one of the largest contem- harmony in the conversations between this. porary galleries in Ireland, visionary? It’s a Gorman and Tyrrell, Shanahan and cop out to say the inevitable: that time will Warren. Cotter’s piece gently but insis- Returning to the space again a day later, tell whether it is a red-hot cultural magnet, tently bisects the space with a quietly because second impressions are far more redefining a town not previously famed as belligerent presence as it spreads across important than first, and to view the space an epicentre for cutting-edge contempo- the floor and reaches for but, with a genius uncrowded with opening-night revellers, rary art, or a costly white elephant. It is of restraint, just shies of meeting the 12- and unclouded with opening night wine, also not a particularly interesting question, metre ceiling. On the end wall, and roped there was a different feel to the exhibition. in that it will only be answered in detail by off as if it were an altar piece (though more Entering by the second opening (to the those who wish to be seen to have been likely because the paint was still wet) right of the Scully wall), and looking at the right, though (to embrace the cop out) Sean Scully’s Four towers couldn’t be exhibition in reverse, so to speak, the they may have to wait a while.1 anything but Scullys, and yet don’t quite hang felt cluttered, over-populated, and attain the singing presence of his works in the conversations between the works On the opening night, there was a sense the Hugh Lane Gallery, for example. more like fractious arguments. I returned of awed astonishment, tinged (I believe) to look at it the ‘right way round’ and all with regret in some quarters that we don’t Outside the main gallery and to the right, was harmony again, demonstrating that have more spaces like this. Imagine – a the Link Gallery, which is essentially a despite its vaunted perfection and brand-new gallery with straight walls, with wide corridor, bordered on one side by a modernist simplicity, this is a gallery with decent ceiling height, astonishingly free of wall of windows, showed US artist Polly as much contextualising personality as architectural gimmicks, uninterrupted by Apfelbaum’s ‘fallen paintings’. These are any space with architectural quirks to work picture windows and with an intelligent strips of shining sequinned fabric, which around. circulation – imagine indeed. The shame on a winter evening were reflected in the of it was that Terry Pawson’s architecture glass, darkly mirrored, giving the gallery And yes, a day makes a difference: made me feel like I was not only not in a weightless feel. Beyond this, the Studio without darkness to reflect back the inky Carlow, but not in Ireland at all: it’s 2009 Gallery held what was the best piece in depths of the pool that lies beyond the and an amazing gallery space is still a the collection of exhibitions, Daphne windows of the Link Gallery, Apfelbaum’s surprise. Wright’s Stallion. A Visualise commission STAX was flatter and, disappointingly, (Visualise being the series of projects nothing more than the sum of its parts. It would be unfair to imply that Carlow has initiated by Carlow Arts Office in the lead- Wright’s Stallion remained triumphant, no tradition of contemporary art: Éigse up to VISUAL), Stallion is a death cast of and yet in this gallery too, some architec- and Visualise have both shown and a race horse, part eviscerated and follow- tural issues emerged. A more concen- commissioned some excellent work, ing in the aesthetic and intellectual tradi- trated look at the space makes you realise although both initiatives have been tion of Stubbs rather than the why so many architects fight shy of utterly hampered by a lack of appropriate space formaldehyde gimmickry of Hirst. Here is pared-back Modernism – there’s nowhere for showing them – I have memories of strength, pathos, subtlety and presence, to hide your mistakes, and any slightly ‘off’ one Éigse hastily rethought when the and a thousand other things that extend elements stand out a mile. Here the off curator discovered that one could not drill beyond words to make a work that element is the floor vents. Set asymmetri- into the walls of St Patrick’s College, the touches on the sublime – in all senses of cally, they offer parentheses to Stallion, designated exhibition venue. Now, there is sublimity. and yet will make it very difficult to hang a space to end all spaces, and the any wall-based work that has its own opening exhibitions have been curated to Upstairs, on the opening night, Amanda strong internal geometry. This is also an show it off to its best advantage, and Coogan initiated Accumulator, a series of issue in Tate Modern, where their floor rightly so. performances, curated by Coogan, in vents (of a similar character) emerge as which each of the following artists (Neva issues during architecturally exacting The Weight of light, in the main gallery, is Elliott, Declan Rooney, Ying Mei Duan, exhibitions such as the Donald Judd a selection of relatively minimalist pieces Brian Connolly, Alastair MacLennan) will (2004). by Maud Cotter, Richard Gorman, Cecil use the props, and take on the reso- King, Eilís O’Connell, Patrick Scott, Sean nances of their predecessors in a series Upstairs, the projections in the Digital Shanahan, Sean Scully, Charles Tyrrell which, as it concludes with MacLennan, Gallery made more sense in the and Michael Warren. With the exception of presents an intriguing accumulation to absence of Coogan, and took on a more Cotter’s contribution (a modular work, reach an origin. Coogan’s presence, appropriate role, of hinting at what was which has hitherto colonised the upper arising in a golden yellow tableau of to come, while McSweeney and Walsh’s floors of the Model in Sligo2), these are draped fabrics, was undermined slightly installations still suffered from the weight works that are fragile in their susceptibility by a corner projection relating to the works of The Weight of light. Nonetheless, they to context, contingent to an extreme of artists yet to come in the series. This fully repaid the time it took to see them degree on the architecture framing them, gallery (the Digital Gallery) was book- as separate and intriguing works, where and the proximity of the works adjacent to, ended with works by Tadhg McSweeney the subtleties lay not in the interplay of and in opposition to them. Entering this and Ciarán Walsh, two installations that colour and shape, but in the kinetics of space from the first opening you come to demanded more attention than they were objects, and the juxtaposition of ideas.

50 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

In a building where kinetics and juxtaposi- to inspire artists to think on a scale that STAX: Polly Apfelbaum; Stallion: Daphne tions are everything, the biggest sufferer has been difficult in this country in the Wright; Accumulator: curated by Amanda was the most famous artist, Joseph Albers. past. And the provisos above notwith- Coogan: Amanda Coogan, Neva Elliott, A collection of prints, on tour from the standing, the galleries are fantastic, and Declan Rooney, Ying Mei Duan, Brian Hayward, deserved and demanded more should be enough to draw visitors from Connolly, Alastair MacLennan (in space than the foyer wall, with its almost Carlow and beyond, whatever is on sequence until 28 November); Screen 1970s feel, where they were hung, practi- display there.3 prints: Joseph Albers; Ciarán Walsh; cally floor to ceiling. These small meditations Generator: Tadhg McSweeney. Sept 2009 on colour and line appeared an afterthought, Initially, the programming will be quarterly, – January 2010. hung to flesh out the opening shows with an so the issue is, following initial curiosity, international/ establishment dimension, but will they be able to afford to put together given closer attention and time, they the kind of exhibitions that people will

VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art and the George Bernard Shaw Theatre with a view of Eileen McDonagh’s Medusa tree; photo Ros Kavanagh; courtesy VISUAL revealed themselves to be the work of an travel to see? In the beginning, perhaps artist so strongly influential that to see the not, at least not on the scale to make an originals one has the oddly reversed sense impact like those other ‘must-travel-to’ 1 For a discussion of the genesis of Visual, including its flirtation with of being convinced one has met them galleries away from major cities: such as ‘national’ status, see my article ‘If you before, and that they themselves are deriva- MoMA when it temporarily moved to build it will they come? And what will tive of what they subsequently inspired. Queens, Dia:Beacon in Upstate New they do when they get there?’, Circa York, the Louisiana near Copenhagen, or 119, Spring 2007, pp 28 – 34, and online at There has been much talk of the bravery – it has to be said – the Guggenheim www.recirca.com/backissues/c119/p28 and vision of Carlow County Council to Bilbao. VISUAL might flounder for a while, _34.shtml go through with this project, although perhaps even for years (although hope- 2 More than anything, Model Arts, Sligo, when it was first mooted, the closure of fully not), like NewcastleGateshead’s Sept – Oct 2004. Reviewed in Circa 110, by Regina Gleeson, online at the sugar factories might have seemed Baltic, but the ‘vision’ part of ‘visionary’ lies www.recirca.com/backissues/ like the greatest disaster that could in building for what is yet to happen; and c110/p88_89.shtml befall the county’s economy (who could the really visionary part of that is driving 3 There is also a theatre, The George have dreamed of what was to follow, what is yet to happen by the things that Bernard Shaw Theatre, where the opening show, Johnny Patterson, the economically speaking that is?), and you do now. Singing Irish Clown, appears to have VISUAL is brave and it is visionary. The been designed to allay the doubts of main gallery is huge, not – as has been Opening exhibitions at VISUAL: The those in the local community that this is reported – the largest in Ireland. Unless Weight of light: Maud Cotter, Richard an elitist space The continuing programme is diverse, including you add height, and go by volume, the Gorman, Cecil King, Eilís O’Connell, Handel’s Alcina, Johnny McEvoy, Marie Gallagher Gallery at the RHA has more Patrick Scott, Sean Shanahan, Sean Jones’ Stones in his Pockets, and floor space, but VISUAL is large enough Scully, Charles Tyrrell, Michael Warren; Mundy.

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 51

Various locations Cork city The Avant July 2009

David Brancaleone is an art historian who teaches Art Theory at Limerick School of Art and Design.

Cork’s new summer arts meta-festival is The Avant. I asked Trevor Joyce, poet and SoundEye founder, if it follows on from the 2005 Cork Caucus. “Yes. Fergal Gaynor and Dobz O’Brien drew together very varied audiences in a year of reading groups, lectures and discussions in which a new, hybrid group of artists, writers and thinkers was brought into existence, hence this new phenomenon, The Avant.” Gaynor’s idea was simple: why not broaden cultural activity in Ireland and show well-established and new experi- mental work in film, poetry, sound art and visual art in a single festival?

Sure enough, the meta-festival chal- lenged the barriers between word and image; for example, the third edition of Sonic vigil, curated by The Quiet Club and Gruenrekorder and performed in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, also came under the Avant umbrella. Sonic vigil hosted some of the foremost sound artists active on the scene who came together in Ireland’s first Field recording festival, contributing to giving The Avant interna- tional breadth. The event also included American poet, translator and antholo- gist Jerome Rothenberg performing “total translations” of Native American ritual texts.

The opening act in the SoundEye cabaret night in the Other Place was the Retorika Quartet with soprano Camilla Griehsel, performing music from the early Baroque period, with a contempo- rary setting of a poem by the Earl of Essex addressed to Elizabeth I. The consensus appeared to be that the strongest-ever session at any SoundEye was Tom Raworth (Raworth has published over forty books of prose), reading with Peter Manson and Maggie O’Sullivan. Sound cast brought

Tom Fitzgerald: from Gaza paradiso, 2009; courtesy the artist

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Is this really such a ‘free’ network of subjective trajectories or a controlled system? Take the Google paradox: what seems completely open, remem- bers where you go, suggests where you should go and produces commercially dictated hierarchies (ranking sites), disguising its economics while implying Deleuzian ‘nomadic’ relativism. Ed Krcma translated claims for aesthetic value in modern and contemporary art into a thought-provoking application of cognitive mapping, scotching facile categorizations, and inviting us to think of overlaps and functions, rather than monolithic identities. Claire Feeley Retorika Quartet with soprano Camilla Griehsel performing music from the early presented typical early commercial baroque period; photo Trevor Joyce; courtesy The Avant representations of radio, in terms of public-sphere theory – the dream come true: H G Wells’s dystopian State in together sound improvisers David took place for the first time last When the sleeper wakes (1899), where Stalling, Anthony Kelly, Danny December in Galway. ‘Babble Machines’ blab news and prop- McCarthy and Mick O’Shea, performing aganda from street corners and private in the Crawford Gallery for four hours. Tom Fitzgerald’s Gaza paradiso, shown spaces, later echoed by the recurring at the Black Mariah gallery, associated period picture of the radio antenna Then there was Tom Fitzgerald’s exhibi- traces of Renaissance drawings of towering over the cityscape invoking tion in the Black Mariah, films in the Dante’s Paradise with fragments of text uniformity: demotic or despotic? I National Sculpture Factory’s Films in from press reports of the 2009 bombing enjoyed the challenge of compressing the mezz, eye and mind’s 24/ 7 in the of the Gaza Strip, showing the West’s ideas and logic into just seven minutes, Glucksman, and readings in the Firkin failure: the Real (the evidence of docu- a balancing act between clowning and Crane and the Cous cous in Meade’s mentary text) confronted with the making a serious point, in my presenta- Wine Bar (a pre-booked poetry reading exhausted Ideal of (selective) justice tion about the 2009 Venice Biennale with an international line-up, loads of (affirmative humanist images also and Daniel Birnbaum’s theme Making energy in a room absolutely packed inscribed on shards of industrial-era worlds in relation to Alain Badious with people – real standing-room only. plastic). philosophy that configures multiplicity Ed Krcma of UCC and architect of Eye into situations and logics of worlds with and mind sees this as a cipher of the Eye and mind, an interdisciplinary a way forward.3 new cultural space and sense of a criti- research forum that began in January, cal mass building in Cork. persuaded its academics, artists, and The last word to Trevor Joyce: “This curators to experiment with seven- was the first year of The Avant and it For The Avant, the Cork Film Centre minute lectures. The format worked and certainly met all my hopes for an initial screened a programme of Spanish numbers swelled, with quite a range of try-out: we had events in all the major avant-garde films and video, contributions. What was especially art disciplines. We now have a robust, Cianoramic profanations, a rare chance interesting about Ciara Moore’s silent resilient and very flexible infrastructure to see an extraordinary series of exper- Powerpoint, with rolling words next to of a sort which I suspect is unique in imental films, in association with the the saturated colours of exotic little contemporary Irish culture, and I expect Márgenes festival (Madrid/ Dublin). For shiny insects and much else, was the will serve us very well as we continue to years, Maximilian Le Cain has been debate provoked by her silence: a poet develop in unexpected directions over working to change the fact that “the raised questions of self-expression, the next few years.” general visibility and appreciation of dyslexia, choices and what is lost (in experimental cinema in Ireland can terms of content) in denying one’s 1 Maximilian Le Cain, ‘Different direc- often seem comparatively close to nil.”1 voice. We all took sides, of course. tions’, in Experimental conversations, Well, he selected and expertly No 3, Spring 2009, at presented films which attracted a good Then there was Rachel Warriner and www.experimentalconversations.com/ crowd and a long discussion, featuring Jimmy Cummins’s double-act spoof, articles/185/different-directions/, accessed 24 July 2009 three of Spain’s most exciting contem- complete with slide-show and commen- 2 For more on Lev Manovich see porary moving-image artists: Oriol tary, an amusing poke in the ribs at www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf Sánchez, Esperanza Collado and Albert academic rigour. Chris Clarke’s lecture 3 For an extended account, see David Alcoz. To put this in context, the Cork about soft and not so soft capitalism on Brancaleone, ‘Alain Badiou, multiplicity and contemporary art’, in screening was a sequel to Different the net probed online aesthetics for a StimulusRespond, Numbers Issue, directions, Ireland’s only festival solely false sense of freedom, introducing the Summer 2009; dedicated to experimental film, which audience to the work of Lev Manovich.2 www.stimulusrespond.com

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 53

Context Gallery Derry Benjamin de Búrca: October – November 2009 The Trouble with context

Ursula Burke is currently completing a PhD at the University of Ulster.

Benjamin de Búrca: from Four horsemen, 2009, alu-foil print reproductions, paper, pins, 56 x 86 cm; courtesy the artist

October saw the opening of The Trouble tions of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and foil sourced from charity shops. with context, an exhibition of new work eighteenth-century genre painting by Fragments from these are strategically by Belfast/ Berlin artist Benjamin de whiting or cutting out the keys players, carved out, repositioned and assembled Búrca at the Context Gallery in Derry. animals or objects within the frame of into a series of technically accomplished The exhibition is made up of several some inexpensive replica of the original. representational strategies. collage panels and three large photo- For this body of work, de Búrca has gath- graphic lightboxes. De Búrca’s work in ered reproduction prints of genre paint- The Four horsemen, a four-panel the past has been concerned to some ing, still life, wildlife and domestic scenes collage, is arguably the most accom- degree with reconfiguring representa- that have been printed onto aluminium plished piece. The level of technical

Benjamin de Búrca: from Four horsemen, 2009, alu-foil print reproductions, paper, pins, 56 x 86 cm; courtesy the artist execution and layering of pictorial city’ is especially evocative of Breugel’s rendition, is made political when a series elements and meaning is impressive. An The Tower of Babel, 1563, which depicts of jets are carved out of the image, abundance of symbols and signifiers a biblical allegorical tale of man’s hubris which are repositioned in the air space within each frame fires off multiple levels and greed. Breugel’s rendition of The of The Four horsemen panels. The of interpretation not only in terms of our Tower of Babel is considered to be a conceptual space that is shared art-historical frame of reference but faithful picture of then contemporary between the strength of physicality of an possibly augur contemporary images Antwerp, which was the financial centre elephant, drawn by nature, and that of that are becoming all too familiar. In the of Western European trade – that meant the jets, carved out of the elephant first panel (viewed left to right for the rapid industrialisation with a huge influx (print) and made by man, does not go purposes of this text), a series of blue of foreigners, and as a result the city unmissed. This pictorial device is imple- foil effervescent fragments are crafted was witness to multiple languages and mented again in the three large light- into a stylized Tsunami wave, evocative conflicting religions. Just as the biblical boxes, which are positioned on the floor: of the eighteenth-century Japanese tale represents God’s vengeance at open ended, like pages from a book. painter and print maker Katsushika man’s foolishness, so too Breugel’s The lightbox images de Búrca made Hokusai, and his ubiquitous print/ poster, depiction warns against the vicissitudes whilst taking part in Paul Butler’s The Great wave off Kanagawa. To the of modernisation in the face of tradition. Collage party, held in the Context right of the frame, and transposed into De Búrca’s ‘golden city’ sits tenuously Gallery in August 2009. De Búrca found the second panel, a large landfill piled within the frame in opposition to a leafy a book titled Murals of Derry (Guildhall high with collage fragments rendered as green, wholesome and pastoral Press) which he then went through cultural detritus, is positioned: children passage within the third panel: flowers methodically and carved out anything scramble to save elements from nature, grow in abundance, deer roam freely, that was remotely political in symbolism traditional architecture, a spinning fish swim in the stream, pheasant and all or rendition from each page. The result- wheel, curious anamorphic hands, manner of birds loiter and men hunt: ing images are scans made through feathers, wings, houses, dismembered perhaps an appeal to the traditional way layered pages that result in an experi- body parts – all composed within a neo- of life. In the fourth panel the four horse- ment in formal abstraction and progres- traditionalist construction, fabricating an men ride out, resplendent and marked sive modernisation. anxious relationship to the past by their hunting dogs. constructed within the present. De Búrca’s work is a modern-day alle- De Búrca’s method of carving up frag- gory, the moral of which rests in the Strange, hybrid people and animals ments of collage from seemingly innocu- cultural, religious and political signifi- wander around the outskirts of a ‘golden ous content such as wildlife imagery or cance placed on the symbolism at play. city’ on stilts, infected with plumes of kitsch landscapes is made all the more The layering of meaning and represen- smoke emanating from the rooftops interesting when he then reconfigures tation leads to a series of challenging whilst jets career over head. the elements into a pictorial narrative and promiscuous levels of interpretation, Contemporary images scramble for that becomes charged with meaning. the likes of which are very satisfying. recognition whilst references to Power struggle is one example of this Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Breugel strategy. The small silver-foil print of an the Elder are inescapable. The ‘golden elephant, again a seemingly prosaic

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Airfield House Dundrum, Dublin Andrew Dodds: July – August 2009 Wunderkammer

Craig Martin is a cultural geographer.

Andrew Dodds: Wunderkammer (detail), 2009, installation shot; courtesy the artist

Landscape is not solely constituted by through the vagaries of multiple scales terms, subsume hidden cultural narra- the visual delineation of site; it is simul- of belonging: the lives of pond skaters, tives within occasional registers of taneously folded across various strata fallen trees, suburban encroachments, clarity. Biographical intricacies are often of space and time. It is entangled pastoral nightmares. Archives, in similar played out through the material culture

56 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 of a lifetime. Both landscape and cacies of wealthy family life: the mythological formations, mirroring archive are chronicles of the complex mementos of cultured travellers perhaps the shared imaginary of the interactions between time, environment perhaps? However, as with the subjec- archive. In doing so it may be argued and history. Wunderkammer, a context- tive entanglements of all archives, that the intention is to project an inven- specific installation by Andrew Dodds Dodds’ choice and placement of these tive potential onto the architectural at Airfield in Dundrum, speaks of an artefacts alludes to the collective form. Focusing on the imaginative analogous density of natural and social archive of the social imaginary. The geographies of the desert island, Gilles orderings. Amidst the manufactured archive per se can never capture the Deleuze argues that “dreaming of landscape of working farm and gardens complexity of biographical affect, and islands – whether with joy or in fear, it at Airfield is a manmade lake populated Wunderkammer exemplifies this most doesn’t matter – is dreaming of pulling by young saplings and fallen trees, pointedly in choosing such strange away, of being already separate, far designed perhaps to mimic an environ- objects as a letter from the Overends’ from any continent, of being lost and ment of ‘natural’ growth and decay. dogs to their owners. These imaginary alone – or it is dreaming of starting from Beached on the banks of this lake lies encounters illustrate one of the central scratch, recreating, beginning anew.” The island in Deleuze’s hands is tanta- mount to a space of separation, a space of becoming: in the present work the raft and cabin serve a similar objec- tive. For surely the cabin can be situ- ated within a lineage of solitude, be it Thoreau, Wittgenstein or Christ. Like the desert island, the ‘vehicle’ in ques- tion offers various potentialities, a craft abandoned post-disaster, or an ark-like construction that will bring safety from impending catastrophe. Not surpris- ingly then the unspecified nature of this past or future disaster and the purpose of the vehicle result in a questioning of temporality through the positive impli- cations of indeterminacy. This is a snapshot of topological time, where past and future come together for an instant.

Andrew Dodds: Wunderkammer, 2009, installation shot; courtesy the artist Landscape and archive present the lived complexities of past histories and projected futures. The success of this what appears to be a raft with wooden arguments that Dodds appears to be work lies in the appreciation of how cabin atop. It is not clear as to the extolling: the conjoining of human and such natural and cultural assemblages origins of this object: has it been nonhuman, the cultural and natural, operate in a common milieu; they are washed onto the bank by some freak within a shared realm of belonging. not purified by the constraints of storm, or is it about to embark upon a Modernity as the sociologist Bruno journey of sorts? The mystery of its Such conceptions of the archive are Latour has similarly argued. Redolent Heath Robinson-esque purpose is extended further by the latent energy of perhaps of Robert Smithson’s stratified exaggerated even more so by the the fictive geographies of the mise en conceptions of the same question, contents of the cabin. Set within a scène itself. The deserted cabin Wunderkammer offers a dense render- lexicon of archival display are an array speaks of the spectral presence of the ing of the nature-culture divide, folding of curiosities: a stuffed fox, birds of departed family but more pointedly of them onto one another through a series prey, animal skulls, abandoned birds’ the possibility of a current inhabitant, of intricate and playful entanglements. nests, photos of family pets, landscape whoever this may be. We are not privy paintings, personal letters, a drawing of to the identity of this new occupant, a rabbit. although there are clear suggestions of a presence by the aesthetic of aban- Like its historical forbear the Cabinet of donment that the work intones. Curiosities, this dioramic assemblage Haunted by the prospective inhabitant, amounts to a narrative of sorts, but it is the viewer is thwarted in their desire to not apparent to whom these lives map a psychological and temporal belong. Drawn from the archives of the stability onto the scene. Interestingly, Overend family who originally owned Dodds favours a form of archetypal the Airfield site, it would initially seem design for the raft and cabin that that this arrangement recalls the intri- acknowledges literary, cultural and

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Taylor Galleries Dublin Brian Henderson: September 2009 Planned palimpsests

Michael Casey is an artist, curator and Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow.

The visual practitioner who nowadays attempts to align his work with historical or narrative materials, essential to its understanding, finds himself in an anomalous situation. The history of art abounds in superlative examples of painting based on the depiction of liter- ary, historical and mythological motifs, yet our experience of modern art predisposes us to regard the contem- porary use of such ‘configurations’ with deep suspicion. Painting, as such, is no longer about illustrating narrative themes. It shuns the notion of a ‘sketch or story’ like the proverbial plague, and the only history of compelling artistic interest to most contemporary painters is the recent history of their own sense of touch resulting from the use of a particular medium or mediums.

The great masterworks of historical and narrative painting from the distant past are likewise examined as if they were pure distillations of form – solutions to pictorial problems rather than interpre- tations of human experience. We have simply lost the habit of taking painting seriously as a medium in which signifi- cant human action can be directly represented. The artist who sets

Brian Henderson: Tangled under rust, encaustic and oil on etched and primed aluminium, 96 x 56 cm; courtesy Taylor Galleries

58 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 himself in opposition to this develop- his reflexive, quirky lines of delineation Henderson’s single achievement is not ment requires, more than anything are identifiable throughout his work, his greatly magnified, expressionistic else, a supreme conviction about the there is more, much more to his image brushwork on expanses of combined important of his subject. Over the past in terms of memory, feeling, energy, materials (which all have a long history: decade, Brian Henderson has been a surface, sensation and erudition. The graphite, oil and encaustic on etched consistent challenger of the position of artist’s physical gesture – brushed, and primed aluminium, mild and cor- the painter. He has been an unrelenting scribbled, dripped, poured and satu- ten steel, lead, brass copper and plexi- inquisitor into the meaning of history rated – is only one of the characteristics glass) but rather, his clear, idiosyncratic and his own philosophical disposition. to which we must look. As Davit Scott statement of a special kind of symmet- He has pondered the traditions which points out in his wonderfully informative rical and asymmetrical space as have formed him and revolted against essay ‘Planned palimpsests’ (a word evidenced in his predominantly rectan- everything ‘inculcated’. He has taken from the Greek meaning a monu- gular serial panels, diptychs and trip- ‘conceptually thought against himself’ mental brass that has been turned over tychs, etc. While his use of colour can in the subtle sense that we experience and inscribed on the reverse), “this be sombre, it is generally illuminated by in the Colour-Field/Colour-Stain style is not something static and moments of florescent intensity. There is an extraordinary velocity in this style and an unexpected empathy. It succeeds in creating a world, and it holds us in its grip.

Very few Irish artists who started out in the 1970s have sustained an accom- plishment of such coherence and drive. In this respect, at least, Henderson enjoyed the advantage of knowing what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. He was not obliged to reinvent his artistic personality with the dawn of each succeeding decade, for he was guided by a sense of mission that drew its energies and inspirations from something larger than the world of Brian Henderson: Rumble, encaustic and oil on etched and primed aluminium, galleries and seasonal reputations. No 152.5 x 300 cm; courtesy Taylor Galleries doubt this cost him a certain isolation from that world, but it also entrenched painters of the 1960s and 1970s, and unchanging, a tic or mannerism that his art more deeply in that sense of the summaries of these thoughts and betrays a rigidity of thinking or painterly communal enterprise that is one of the counter-thoughts are his drawings, practice, a habitual action or uncon- sources of its strength. Such steadfast- paintings, collages and reliefs. Artists scious automatism. Rather it is a reflec- ness of purpose is rarely, alas, so varying from Mark Rothko, Cy tion of a critical awareness of difference triumphantly vindicated. Twombley and Frank Stella have all between similar practices in similar been greatly influential. As a result, the places in a shared world, and yet one painter has required a direct confronta- which brings a certain, almost indefin- tion with the materials and processes of able individuality to the object or series painting itself – a reasonable artistic of objects presented.” endeavour and an essential aesthetic decision. For Henderson, the hand means gesticulated action: it grasps, it creates In view of his ceaseless questing, and at times it would even seem to Henderson’s oeuvre is pitched in think. The artist’s eye, which has widely differing keys. His moods have followed the shapes of things and has ranged from warm to cold, tender to judged their relative density, performs satiric, from lusty to angry, from sensu- the same gestures as that extremity. It ous to austere, from classical to is his eye, his mind, as much as his rococo. His strong personality shows in hand, which shapes the distinctive unmistakable traits evident from the image that are his painted objects. That beginning, but variations are wide. Too mind has been consistently preoccu- often Henderson has been read exclu- pied with the major twentieth-century sively as a painter of gesture, as revolution in painting: the revolution in though the gesture itself were singu- the way space is apprehended, struc- larly significant. But though tured and ultimately condensed by Henderson’s peculiarity of touch, and varying degrees of touch. To date,

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 59

Breaking ground Ballymun, Dublin

Hilary Murray is a writer.

There is an eerie mixture of old and new to the town of Ballymun, Dublin. Besides the dominant police station that stretches for a block, the Axis Civic Centre sits alongside and forms the centre for artistic endeavour for the new Ballymun. Yet for all this newness, the spectre of the tower blocks can still be seen in the breaks between the newer buildings. This arbitrary situation reflects the frenetic development of Ballymun throughout the past ten years. Any move beyond the main street and one is immediately amongst the remains of what was Ballymun, still present, permanent and unchanging.

The most recent commission by Breaking ground, the art-based regen- eration programme for Ballymun, is an installation by artist Kevin Atherton at Balcurris Park. The reflective surface of this piece morphs the surroundings into a concentrated viewing platform of the estate behind it. The idea of the instal- lation deals with notions of broken iden- tity; each part of the sphere is separate and incomplete, much like the original idea behind Ballymun. However, the question arises, does the idea of Ballymun alter a work of art in such a manner that we come to the work with the same prejudices that we come with to Ballymun itself? Atherton’s Another sphere and Andrew Clancy’s Cathode/ anode, which sits outside the Civic Centre, are unusual in that they can be easily accessed from the outside; other projects are intricately involved in the community. Paul McAree, the project manager for Breaking ground, argues that the idea behind the work commis- sioned was always to have a varied programme, from works accessible to everyone, such as Another sphere, to

John Byrne: Misneach (courage), at the foundry, April 2009; photo Paul McAree

60 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 more private projects such as Jeanette outlays, such as galleries and theatres. tecture of the place, such as Stephen Doyle’s Portrayals, developed in collab- The integration of art into such estates Brandes and Brigid Harte’s Superbia, oration with the women of Star Project, is easier than might seem likely. Paddy Jolley’s Here after, and the exhi- a local drug-rehabilitation initiative. bition Art in the life world, which was In 2007 Breaking ground became inter- held in the old swimming pool, incorpo- Much of the artwork commissioned nationally noted as an important art rate the social identity of Ballymun over the past nine years has, however, initiative with their commission of whilst actively engaging the community. remained intimately related to an older Seamus Nolan’s hugely successful Another move by Breaking ground to idea of Ballymun. In fact, the dramati- Hotel Ballymun. This work focused on challenge the pitfalls of compromise is cally changing environment that the sense of abandonment felt by the the commissioning of well established surrounds the populace situates the removal of the towers. Nolan’s ‘occupa- artists such as Mark Francis and inhabitants in a constant state of flux. tion’ of the towers advanced the notion Corban Walker. Francis’ painting When one examines the historicity of that by abandoning the towers (them- Expose and Walker’s Zip are classic Ballymun we can see that this situation selves so synonymous with Ballymun) pieces by well known artists that just is the exact problem. In 1966 the first one risks eliminating the historicity of happen to be situated in the Axis tenants moved into the ultra-modern the place and those that grew up there. Centre, Ballymun. Placing works such Ballymun complex, frequently from city- A certain denouncement of heritage as these, works that can often be seen centre slum-clearance areas. The occurs when the childhood home is in larger gallery spaces, situates estate was still in the process of being permanently erased and can cause a contemporary art in relation to the built. The government pursued a policy dissociated ambivalence within the community; however, it does not limit it of providing incentives to those vacat- neighbourhood. As we have seen from to such a community relation. ing local-authority dwellings in an effort discourse surrounding Irish emigrants to increase the number of units avail- living abroad, their sense of identity For Ballymun on the eve of 2010 there able to those on housing waiting lists. and belonging has been dislodged, is a sense in the community of moving Therefore a constant wave of disloca- resulting in a semi-existence where past the old idea of Ballymun. For tion attached to the towers; they were they do not belong to their foreign McAree this has been reflected in the rarely viewed as a full-time home, home, yet remain permanently Breaking ground commissions; “we though as we know, for many people removed from their place of birth. This realised that halfway through the they became just that. The situation of isolation is felt more severely when regeneration process, Hotel Ballymun Ballymun and the lack of infrastructure economic upheaval occurs within the would probably be the last moment to left the burgeoning community socially time-space of emigration. work within the flats – after Clarke isolated and stagnating. Social-policy Tower was demolished we were expert Anne Power, who first visited McAree argues that people are nostal- symbolically beyond the half-way point, Ballymun in 1968, argued that “people gic for the flats and old buildings, and and wanted to focus more on the were being plucked out of established so projects such as Hotel Ballymun future, the Ballymun that was ahead.” communities into isolated, separate create “an immediate relationship, Commissions for 2010 reflect this and dislocated boxes, with few social something familiar”; it also “allows an forward-looking attitude. John Byrne’s networks.”1 opportunity to think about what might Misneach (Courage), a monumental have been.” It is asking a lot for artwork sculpture of a teenage girl on a horse, What is often levelled at housing strate- to provide this connection to lineage as is to be installed in February 2010, gies such as Ballymun is that they well as repair the sense of isolation felt incorporating the heritage of Ballymun created an overly aestheticised vision by the residents, yet many of the and the determined community attitude of the home, one that was impractical artworks chosen by the regeneration of moving beyond their imposed iden- for families. Images of modernist archi- project do attempt this feat. tity. tecture and their demolition seem to coexist in today’s society such is the In earlier works such as Doyle’s An Art Map of all offsite permanent ease with which we have seen so many Portrayals and Niamh Breslin’s commissions across Ballymun and a disappear. Modernism espoused Playhouses, we see that socially major publication documenting rationality, lack of sentimentality, lack of engaged commissions run the risk of Breaking Ground projects from 2002 – historical context, and functionality; becoming an outlet for much-needed 2009 are available from Axis Ballymun. such buildings are definitively not ideal counselling or childcare services within for use in social housing. Yet in saying the community. One can argue that this, apartments such as those in here art has entered into the dilution of Ballymun are architecturally historically the public sphere. Does this compro- relevant. Many similar developments in mise art? Or, more to the point, is this the UK have remained and been re- the only way one can cajole the packaged for single occupants and community into art, by playing to their pensioners. The bonus to such a weaknesses? In recent years this scheme is that many of these buildings, distinction has been ironed out. Firstly so influenced by the aesthetic of the the Axis Centre is based here – perma- 1 Anne Power, Estates on the edge: social consequences of mass housing contemporary, are naturally at ease nently, so it is part of the community. in Northern Europe since 1850, with a host of concomitant artistic Works that deal directly with the archi- London: Routledge, 1993

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 61

Molesworth Gallery Dublin Nicky Larkin: July 2009 Pots and kettles

Jessica Foley is a writer and artist currently working as Assistant Lecturer in Visual Art Education at MIC, Limerick.

“I am firmly in the 10%,” he said to me. I stirred my cappuccino, feeling the damp rise in my socks, a negative side-effect imposed by Irish rain and the drawbacks of generic tailoring. He had a copy of the Irish Times distrib- uted across the edge of the little circu- lar coffee table at which we were sitting, allowing it to spill onto the next. The pages featured images of build- ings burning; it became a temporary and fiery tablecloth. It seemed appro- priate, or at least it seemed to be in some kind of semiotic collusion with the conversation we were having.

The air was in some halfway place – and it all felt very out of time: simulta- neously young and old, impatient, waiting, livid to get rid rather than change…or to just push off, push out, get gone. I wondered if the encounter between us was becoming some kind of a character in itself. His speech was neither self-conscious nor polite – he seemed to be well rehearsed of his own script: here was a guy who knew more about what wrecked his head rather than what satisfied him … or at least, seemed more interested in conflict than resolution – as if resolu- tion was some kind of cop out, a sedate and fluffy place of denial and self-delusion. Sustaining the advance into torched and desolate terrains seemed to be an imperative for him. Listening to him, I felt that everything to do with his approach to life and his work seemed powered by an assertive and aggressive certainty, fatalistic I suppose. His attitude reminded me of

Nicky Larkin: Matchboxes & bullets, Lambda print, 2009, 61 x 41 cm; courtesy the artist

62 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 a handwritten sign that I’d noticed ogy, steadied by a humour gravitating others can’t cross – it will get him over earlier on my way to meet him – it was towards the darker recesses of the again and again. And I suppose that taped up inside the back windscreen human soul, and with an emphasis true he sees all the lines and the tape – of a small maroon car, facing out either to his origins in the flatlands of Offaly: perhaps he’s going to watch till time to the passer-by or to the traffic bound no-place-to-hide-call-it-as-you-see-it- itself strips away all the categories – driver. Scrawled in black ink, it read: blunt-as-a-hurl eloquence. he’ll watch – and time will force reality Good health is simply dying at a Meanwhile, in our corner of the through – the inevitable is usually slower rate, or something to that makeshift coffee shop, a third round of invisible – the entropy of humanity. effect; the kind of logic that is just plain caffeine is ordered and he’s talked to What comes across in his work, and in difficult to deny. me about the implications of filming in meeting him, and maybe this is a place like Bosnia, the necessity of a because I’m tying my interpretation to On his website he has a short state- bodyguard, and the dangerous driving the land we’re both from, is that there ment about the terrain of his work: habits of the natives. Sure, he goes off is no exterior so to speak, or there is and watches buildings and people in no centre – there is us and there is vastness, there is up and out and time and space in every direction – all these other delineations are arbitrary, they are barriers, they are distractions – and maybe that’s why he’s looking so long at them all – staring them out of it – staring out the divides with his lens. It’s not the image really, it’s the watching, and the translation of the watching into seeing, or thinking, or something. The caffeine has definitely hit at this point. And he’s gone, and I’m remem- bering, or trying to. Trying to piece it all together. And later I go to see the images he’s taken, displayed on the walls in the Molesworth Gallery. I’d never been there before, and am slightly nervous about the crowd – the nervousness of the old familiar – faces from home, speckled between images of Bosnia. The starkness of them Nicky Larkin: Yesterday’s television, Lambda print, 2009, 45 x 70 cm; courtesy the artist straining out of the white walls – the earnestness of the gallery space. I think about the stories he’s told – I am interested in these grim other lands, particularly places of rela- remembering the metre of his speech places, places where aesthetic tive ruin, places of economic, political – I think how it’s all baffled out within value is no longer viewed as or social disintegration, but as far as I an art world, on an art market. I think important or enforced. A can tell he’s not judging anybody, he’s about how important the watching is – nomadic existence is at the just formally expressing an observa- though it’s the eye of a different beast centre of my practice, I travel tion, as an outsider. This nomad at openings – but then I think that around in search of these new seems pretty straight-up – he’s taking maybe there’s something suitable in it environments in order to create himself out into the world to remind at the same time – all conflict against work, often empty places, himself of his existence in it – and he’s resolution – the eye against the lens – deserted by people for some acknowledging the lottery of his birth – an acknowledgement that certainty is reason, temporary or perma- the fact that he’s a part of the tenth- fatal. nent. percentile privilege of a boggy grey, green and brown lineage – what His most recent travels had led him to Geographical Fortune! In the places Bosnia and Herzegovina – well, there he goes to he watches – keenly. He was nothing so passive about it – he’d meets the people and chats with them grafted his way to Sarajevo, twice, – briefly he shares their habits, and once in 2006 and most recently in engages in their sales techniques – it’s 2009. He’d sent me a text he’d written; not about them – no more than it is Pots and kettles – scenes from a split about him – it’s a bit bigger than that, city – wherein he elaborates upon his probably a good bit bigger. He knows observations with a voice blessedly his luck – his passport is good – it will free from condescension or anthropol- get him over that line that so many

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Various locations Galway Galway Arts July 2009 Festival 2009

Lúc Verling is a writer and publisher based in Dublin.

Yannis Kontos: Female Maoist guerrilla on the march, colour photograph; courtesy Galway Arts Festival 2009

Galway Arts Festival, over the thirty- tional (Kingerlee, Minihan, Shavrova) and Artistic Director Paul Fahy, who gave few two years of its existence, has evolved local artists (Brady, Lyne) embrace of clues in the exhibitions’ limited literature of to become part of the fabric of its local commercial galleries and non-art the aesthetics or logic which informed his bustling host city, while simultaneously spaces, and breadth of address from curation of the shows. elevating the city’s stature in the art abstracts (Ger Sweeney) to audience- world internationally. participative works (Mart), represented The visual-arts programme of the festival and catered to a broad spectrum of inter- has been steadily prioritised over the past Of a previous GAF a Guardian reviewer ests well beyond the western hub’s city number of years, with no fewer than wrote, “I’ve rarely encountered a better boundaries. sixteen exhibitions included this year – a curated festival or one that more exhilarat- remarkable achievement given that the ingly mixed the local and the interna- All the exhibitions (to say nothing of the exhibitions were presented in a city tional.” This year its mix of international other festival events) were under the lacking any municipal art space, and more (Hockney, Absolut Art, Laumann), transi- directorship of one man, the reticent extraordinary in light of the present

64 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

world would go to Miquel Barceló, whose mixed-media painting quoted other Abolut artworks, even works in the Galway exhi- bition, by Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. More controversial in every way, at least for this viewer, who must own up to having invigilated at the exhibition, was the work Linn Fernström: Absolut Fernström, 2003; courtesy Galway Arts Festival 2009 of five photojournalists on a Child soldier theme. What the intention was in showing this body of visual reportage remains obscure, as there was no catalogue or economic climate, since the visual-arts product so obviously placed as to work as statement accompanying the show and programme generates no box-office ad posters (though they weren’t all the limited literature (desk copy only) revenue for a festival whose growth is commissioned as ad posters) rather than provided little insight into the motivations fuelled with income from that quarter. artworks. The exceptions were Francesco behind it. Clemente’s, a watercolour of a generic Fortunately, if not uncontroversially, bottle between a pair of arms that was Child soldiery is of course scandalising, Absolut Vodka stepped in this year to previously exhibited in one of his own and naturally is an issue that needs to be become the first corporation in the history shows, and Linn Fernström’s self-portrait, raised in public awareness. Not, however, of the festival to sponsor the entire visual- with a cradled severed head in one arm in this manner. Not as a series of photo- arts programme, the Absolut campaign of and an Absolut bottle with a flower in the essays without the essays, nor as a course intentionally probing conceptual or other. disjointed series of images of kids with perceived borders between advertising guns in Nepal, Palestine and Africa. and art, and happily raising the old chest- One of two Kenny Scharf paintings was If it had been staged by a charity such as nut ‘but is it art?’ dubbed ‘controversial’ in the Absolut Art War Child or Zest for Kids, then it might catalogue as it represented spirits of have made some sense, and provided a Within the sixteen shows in the Absolut drunkenness emerging from the iconic focus for the pity and fear the sometimes visual-arts programme was a stand-alone bottle, but a notional prize for creating an shocking images induced. This focus, exhibition of Absolut works that had Absolut art world within an Absolut art however, was absent. Instead Child

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 65

Lisa Sweeney: Cage, mixed media on board, 5.5 x 56 cm; courtesy the artist

soldier induced mere hand-wringing based but internationalist art-students’ concrete-block walls outside the gallery about Africa and the Developing World. initiative allowed visitors identify contested proper at Kenny’s. Without providing an historical or geopolit- public/ private territories in Galway and ical context for the phenomenon of child engage its community locale on Henry In our as-yet predominantly literary soldiery, what emerged from Child soldier, and Dominic Streets on many levels with culture, viewers need literature – brief at least for me, was a reinforcement of the video, performance, installation, audio CVs, artists’ statements, excerpts from realisation that Africa remains our theatre and process artworks, reaching out reviews or endorsements, introductory of suffering, our pity and fear, and our beyond the boundaries of traditional art essays – in exhibitions for orientation. catharsis. With shows like this it seems practice, audience and modes of recep- This literature was generally lacking at destined to remain a non-historicised tion, and generating one of GAF 09’s GAF. tragedy wherein the fates are to blame for stand-out shows. human anguish and where intervention is More than the sum of its parts, GAF is futile. Local artist Lisa Sweeney’s Magpie’s attic making a significant contribution to local body of new works had to contend with and national visual-arts culture, if not also Nor was there any suggested interroga- other artists’ sculptures and paintings in to the international visual arts. Part of its tion of the photographic medium or how it the window ledges and halls of the gallery effectiveness is due to the artistic direc- might qualify under the circumstances as where her mixed-media exhibits were on tor’s hands-off policy towards the shows, art. On the other hand, an exhibition like show, distracting the viewer from appre- refusing to homogenise them into a single the artists’ collective Mart’s Open door hending uninterrupted the layers of vision through the introduction of a stated, policy benefitted from the art director’s meaning, language of symbols, and procrustean rationale. However, the seeming laissez faire attitude. Mart’s personal issues surfacing to engage her visual-arts programme, I believe, would open-submission, site-specific show was or him in the artist’s private world. benefit by the director asserting more allowed develop the collective’s ethos of Sweeney’s works’ juxtaposition of the authority, presence and ‘ownership’ of the participatory art and, anecdotally, at least pulchritudinous with the abject, in works shows, generating more written informa- one little girl from the community returned that were equally forceful and subtle, tion from the artists and creatives, without to the exhibition with a drawing of her own deserved better. As did John Minihan’s diminishing the ethos of allowing each for inclusion. photographic portraits of Samuel Beckett show discretely breathe and present on and Francis Bacon, which were hung, as its own terms its challenges, attacks and Fahy’s latitude in embracing this Irish- if by after-thought, on un-plastered talking-points.

66 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009

Various locations Kinsale Kinsale Arts Week July 2009

Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture.

Brian O’Doherty: Lookout, 2009; photo Brian O’Reilly; courtesy Kinsale Arts Week

The level to which publicly funded arts ences to be introduced to different art not being nearly as fêted as those who venues need to make their forms (and maybe to begin long-lasting haven’t been before, and may not programmes accessible (as the line love affairs) is during Ireland’s summer come again. The challenges faced by runs in so many Arts Council applica- festivals. this type of programming were met tions) “to the widest possible audience” with varying degrees of success is debatable. That said, there’s wriggle The summer festival has become a around Ireland. room in the above phrase – in that phenomenon, with cities, towns and ‘widest possible’ for difficult and villages across the country program- One of the most notable features of the esoteric practices is different from ming a diversity of cultural Irish summer festival is the ability to ‘widest possible’ for, say, Rasher. programmes, and attracting arts audi- make positives from negatives: a lack There is also a difference between ences, who mingle with locals and of dedicated spaces meaning that making a programme accessible, and tourists to experience them. With that exhibitions appear in temporary making an accessible programme, and in mind, there is a considerable oppor- venues, and thus are integrated into part of the point of public funding is to tunity to attract new audiences, the fabric of a town in a way that facilitate practice that does not neces- although I often wonder about the makes one wish art exhibitions inte- sarily lend itself to popular and private aggressive valorisation of the ‘new’… grated into the fabric of a town could support. Nevertheless, one of the It’s a little like the parable of the prodi- happen more frequently. In Kinsale, greatest opportunities for new audi- gal son – faithful stalwart audiences and thanks (perhaps) to the recession,

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 67

animals were once cut up for consump- tion? – the experience of becoming at home in Mullarney’s Home was one to savour. In the former cold-room, an enormous aluminium leg was spot-lit and dramatic. Elsewhere, a small side space housed a film, projected onto the floor, in which an Indian pigment deco- ration was created and recreated, marking a moment where a small spot of magic had been noticed and given significance. Home-making takes all manner of forms, and happens in the most unexpected places.

Elsewhere, a raised table of objects and artefacts saw memories and more moments laid out, hinting at things, though not giving away their stories too readily. At the front of the shop, where the empty counters might have invited further intervention, a series of glass animal masks were ranged high on a wall. In this bright room, it was as if one were emerging back into the world from the slightly claustrophobic space of the artist’s mind. Here, I began to want more, to experience more, to feel more, but here To make it home loos- Brian O’Doherty: Lookout, 2009; photo Brian O’Reilly; ened its grip, and left you back again to courtesy Kinsale Arts Week yourself. a butcher’s shop, a café and a hair- Butcher’s shop. With the title of the While Sheenagh Geoghan’s One stop dresser’s all became galleries for the exhibition implying both a sense of shop, and X to the power of three, duration of Arts Week (KAW). In addi- return, and also of creating a place that curated by Katherine Boucher Beug, tion to the artists trail, where buses feels like home, Mullarney’s installation which included work by Boucher Beug take visitors on a tour of local artists’ hovered between the welcoming and with Joachim Beug and John Halpin, studios, and figurative and decorative the strange. In keeping with the aspects were more instantly recognisable as art by local painters appearing in shop of Mullarney’s practice that tame poten- ‘exhibitions’, and worth making time windows, there is a programme of tially frightening beasts, which may or for, around the headland at Charles exhibitions and installations that make may not be demons of the mind, by Fort, Brian O’Doherty’s first major sense of the different speeds at which adding the charm of affection to their installation since he reclaimed his Arts Week audiences may wish to sculpted forms, Colohan’s became, for name, and his first outdoor installation view. (Here, I have to declare an inter- the duration of the festival, a place to for decades, created an environment est, having curated one of the KAW explore aspects of the psyche, and to of a different kind. Charles Fort is a 2009 exhibitions: To have and have discover some of the things that might grey sort of a place, albeit with magnif- not.) travel with us, unbeknownst. icent views. Last year’s KAW installa- tion there was by Anya Gallaccio, in Janet Mullarney’s To make it home was Initially unsettling – after all, how often which that artist inserted hundreds of a site-specific installation in Colohan’s does one get to explore a place where coloured perspex panels in the

68 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 windows of the ruined buildings. It was Lewis Glucksman Gallery’s Then + Visual arts, Kinsale Arts Week, July, 2009: a project that repaid slow viewing and now: evolving art practices exhibition. Janet Mullarney: To make it home; Sheena Geoghegan: One stop shop; Katherine time, rewarding the patient with a medi- While the rope drawings articulate the Boucher Beug with Joachim Beug and John tative and yet energising play of light sensitivities of ‘empty’ space, and Halpin; X to the power of three; To have and and colour. Charles Fort was designed describe how a single line can alter our have not (Brian O’Doherty, Martin Gale, Nick by William Robinson, who was also the sense of physical presence, The Miller, Alice Maher, Eithne Jordan, Diana Copperwhite, Donald Teskey and Stephen architect responsible for the Royal Lookout, with its solid planes and steps McKenna); Brian O’Doherty The Lookout: Hospital Kilmainham, which now creating viewing patterns, sightlines fort within a fort, Charles Fort, Kinsale July – houses IMMA, where O’Doherty’s alter and vistas, felt like a masterclass for October 2009. Then + now: evolving art ego, Patrick Ireland, now lies at rest. architects in the complexities of site, practices, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, July – October 2009. This made O’Doherty’s installation The positioning, solid and void. Lookout: fort within a fort feel particu- larly apt in a circular sort of a way. If The Lookout was a masterclass, it was also a playpen, drawing children O’Doherty’s Lookout appeared at first like a magnet to play and perform at its small in relation to the vastness of its centre. Amid the bad building, the lazy solid and heavy stone surroundings, architecture, and the well-intentioned but its presence was so highly charged failures of those trying to create some- that it acted like a core capsule, a focus thing ‘different’, The Lookout was a point, distilling and intensifying the lesson in why art and architectural energies within the fort. Set precisely collaborations should not simply ask so that visitors were rewarded with a artists to decorate the windows or ‘do sightline to the sea, KAW audiences the bar’, but instead should draw on the were again treated to an experience expertise of those who have made a where the initially strange became lifetime study of how the merest move- entirely in place and at home. The solid ment of line can make us experience planes of the installation are a step the world in a different way. beyond the rope drawings for which the artist is famous, one of which was simultaneously on show as part of the

Janet Mullarney: Reclining nude, 2009, aluminium, 170x 28 x 44 cm; courtesy the artist

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Linz Ars electronica 2009 September 2009

Paul O’Brien ( [email protected] ) teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

The 2009 Ars electronica event coin- cided with Linz’s designation as European Capital of Culture. This industrialised but elegant city took full advantage of the cultural opportunities – the contrast with Cork’s recent half- hearted attempt is obvious, but unavoidable. Numerous exhibitions marked the year, including a laudable attempt to come to terms with Linz’s Nazi past, marked by public text on appropriate sites detailing the personal tragedies resulting from the Nazi takeover of a less-than-reluctant Austria. The most notable happening, however, was the opening of a brand- new Ars Electronica Center on the banks of the Danube, including Deep Space: a state-of-the-art, large-format space for interactive, stereoscopic and high-definition content, including virtual reality and 3D cinema – quite an achievement in an era of economic trauma, which has affected Austria like most other countries. Screenings included a visual trip inside molecular structures and a high-resolution analy- sis of da Vinci’s The Last supper. The Center also contains a brain-lab, a bio- lab and a robo-lab as well as some high-end interactive toys, including Hiroo Iwata’s Media vehicle inspired by the Japanese manga classic, Ghost in the shell: the vehicle in the comic performs both as a car for the real world and as a VR terminal. (Unfortunately I became a victim of high-tech sizeism – my real-life body

Hiroshi Ishiguro: Geminoid (with artist); photo ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories; courtesy Ars Electonica

70 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 was too big to fit inside and I wasn’t Center, visitors could experiment with a applied science. The tensions between allowed to try it.) headpiece which gave a warning buzz aesthetics and ethics, art and politics, whenever you came near an object – are particularly acute in the area of The theme of this year’s September something of obvious potential benefit genetic and bio art. (Of course, hybrid event (‘human nature’) gave ample to the visually impaired. art is not confined to bio art, and indeed scope for exploration of what it is to be one of the runners-up in this category human at this point in time, exemplified The exhibition in the nearby was the famous ‘special edition’ of The by the focus of the symposium on the Brucknerhaus on the opposite bank of New York Times, announcing inter alia dispersal of information in the context the Danube focused on the topic of the end of the Iraq war and the indict- of cloud computing. Most intriguingly, human nature, included Shen ment of George W Bush on charges of the featured artist in the Ars Electronica Shaomin’s reconstruction of large- high treason.) Center was a Japanese professor of scale (imaginary) fossilised creatures, robotics, Hiroshi Ishiguro. Ishiguro, and Lawrence Malstaff’s shrink- The four-minute HA’Aki by Iriz Paabo, who also gave a presentation on his wrapped actors (don’t try it at home). with its theme of ice hockey, was the work, has constructed an uncannily life- Art works by Adam Brandejs (Genpets somewhat perplexing winner of the like robotic version of himself, called series 01) and Michael Burton Computer Animation section, while Geminoid, with which the visitor can (Nanotopia) raised critical issues about Speeds of time by Bill Fontana, interact, evoking the question of how to genetic engineering and nano-technol- focused on the bells of London, won capture artificially the ‘presence’ of a ogy. Other exhibits evoked ecological first prize in the Digital Musics category. person. Geminoid is seated and its concerns, including a ‘green’, energy- More memorable in this category was responses are tele-operated, but its efficient sex toy (The Earth angel) the amazing Nabaz’mob – opera for micro-movements are minutely developed in Ireland: devilry in the 100 smart rabbits by Antoine Schmitt designed to correspond to those of an bedroom perhaps, but with an angelic and Jean-Jacques Birge. The rabbits actual human (indeed to those of attitude to the environment. with their coloured lights, synchronised Ishiguro himself). The android raises with the music, are wonderful. Digital interesting philosophical questions, Malstaff’s Nemo observatorium was the music is becoming visually oriented to including whether a person’s mind is winner in the Interactive Art category: an increasing extent. separable from their body. Like every- you sit inside a transparent cylinder one else (including a visiting delegation while styrofoam beads are blown Winner of the Digital Communities from the Austrian government), I found around you in a ‘blizzard’ effect that is section was the worthy HiperBarrio, a the interaction with the android fasci- slightly hypnotic. The user is in the eye project for the digital transformation of nating, but for some reason I had little of a storm and the effect is somewhat libraries in Colombia. Equally worthy interest in talking to its ‘real life’ double, disorienting, though in a meditative but more subversive was a runner-up who was only a short distance away. rather than an alarming way. Runners- entitled WikiLeaks, an uncensorable The machine had taken on a life of its up in this area included a piece by and untraceable project for document- own. Visiting schoolchildren clustered Osman Khan and Kim Beck, consisting leaking and -analysis. The running around the entity, becoming increas- of a glass sliding door, supermarket battle between the Internet and govern- ingly physical until warned off – it is, style, set up in the middle of a park. mental secrecy continues apace. after all, a very expensive robot. The aesthetic and the play principle confront the economic and the rational, Events also included a show of work In Arthur C Clarke’s well-known phrase, public space contrasts with private, from the MIT Media Lab, an exhibition any sufficiently developed technology work with leisure. The issues have of student interactive work in the form is indistinguishable from magic. been asked before, but the piece is of a masquerade ball, and a spectacu- Technology is encroaching more and elegant and succinct, and kids like it. lar son et lumière on the banks of the more on the realm of what was once Danube. As expected, Linz pulled out known as the occult: the android might Eduardo Kac, the creator of the notori- all the stops. be viewed as a modern version of the ous, genetically engineered green- traditional Golem. Elsewhere in the glowing rabbit, won the ‘hybrid art’ Center, one had the opportunity to section for his creation of a flower that experience another bit of witchcraft, is part petunia and part Eduardo Kac: a interacting this time with a thought- ‘plantimal’ called the Edunia, express- operated computer. The interface is a ing his DNA in its red veins. Kac’s bit messy (involving a headpiece and provocations can be balanced against gel on your head) and typing out letters the critical work of Brandejs and Burton one by one with your mind can be labo- mentioned earlier, and are guaranteed rious – and sometimes hit-and-miss. to raise the hackles of those who However, the possibilities down the line distrust the whole GM project. Kac’s for a kind of electronic telepathy are work may help, as he claims, to fore- enormous (and not just for physically- ground the issues around genetic engi- challenged people for whom the tech- neering. Conversely, it might be seen nology is obviously beneficial in an as part of a subtle, cultural desensitisa- immediate sense). Elsewhere in the tion to a potentially disastrous area of

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ArtSway, New Forest Eamon O’Kane: June – August 2009 Re-enactment

David Trigg is a writer and critic based in Bristol.

Eamon O’Kane: Re-enactment: hunt, production still for HDV film, 20 mins, 2009; courtesy the artist

The sporadic crack of gunfire rings out presenting paintings, sculptures, draw- Donegal. It is believed that King James across ArtSway as a band of seven- ings and installations that subtly II once dined there, under the teenth-century soldiers are seen explore the notion of history as a sycamore’s canopy during the Siege of roaming through ancient woodland, contingent construct, focusing on the Derry in 1689. As a result of the hospi- firing matchlock muskets at unseen ways in which it is manipulated and tality he received, the ‘unfortunate targets. This is Re-enactment: hunt (all transmitted. monarch’ spared Cavanacor while the works 2009), and the soldiers are ‘living surrounding area was laid to waste as history’ actors. The work is one of two In this latest show O’Kane builds upon his army made their violent retreat from newly commissioned films for the sixth his Bristol presentation Plans for the Derry. Working with a carpenter in and final instalment of Eamon O’Kane’s past and the future, where he exhibited Bristol, O’Kane transformed the tree, somewhat disparate touring project the sawn remnants of a huge sycamore which was toppled by lightning in 1991, Case histories. Over the past year the tree that once stood in the garden of into a beautifully carved collection of prolific artist has exhibited in Rugby, Cavanacor House, his seventeenth- seventeenth-century-style furniture, London, Berlin, New York and Bristol, century childhood home in County including a dining table, stools and

72 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 chair similar to those used by James II Forest National Park reminds us of how of age. But while O’Kane’s masterly and his men. This wonderfully astute mendacious history can be. The link paint-handling is impressive, his royal meditation on mutability is re-presented between the two locations is extremely portrait, with its vivid colours, doesn’t here alongside the aforementioned film tenuous and other than the fact that quite compare with Sir Godfrey and its counterpart Re-enactment: King James II was the last monarch to Kneller’s original on which it is based. meal, for which O’Kane worked with hunt in the Forest, there is little ostensi- Similar strategies are used more effec- members of The English Civil War ble reason for the juxtaposition; tively on the nearby etchings Soldier Society to re-stage the King’s meal O’Kane’s rationale remains perplex- and King James’ tree, which are osten- using the replica furniture. ingly elusive. sibly printed on old paper and presented in ageing frames. Like the Shot on location in the New Forest and Back in the main gallery, beyond the films, these works playfully interweave shown in a darkened side gallery, the furniture, a loosely sketched drawing of truth and fiction to create alternative film features James II and his officers the sycamore tree fills one wall. Drawn histories, but to what end? enjoying a sumptuous open-air lunch with charcoal produced from the tree with John Keyes, the then owner of itself, the work demonstrates O’Kane’s Despite the technical virtuosity charac- Cavanacor House. The distant sound tremendous conceptual rigour. Several terising much of O’Kane’s work, one of musket shots emanating from the paintings are also included here, which can’t help thinking that the Re-enact- opposite gallery infuses the genteel feature portraits of James II, John ment project would carry more potency meal with a peculiar air of tension. In a Keyes and his wife Jane. O’Kane takes had it been staged in the grounds of move recalling Hollywood’s tendency to the opportunity to riff further on the Cavanacor House itself and presented ride roughshod over historical accu- tension between the authentic and the in the gallery that is now housed within racy, O’Kane’s curious decision to counterfeit by applying thick layers of the artist’s familial home. O’Kane’s very transpose James II’s meal from north- varnish and old second-hand frames to personal mythology feels awkwardly west Ireland to the heart of the New imbue the paintings with a false patina out of place in rural Hampshire, a notion accentuated by the inclusion of a rather dry selection of maps, photo- graphs and other historical documents charting the history of Cavanacor, which seem somewhat superfluous in this context.

In presenting a conflation of individual histories, O’Kane’s compelling films and other works highlight the fact that history never repeats itself exactly, while his implied critique of historical re-enactment questions the authentic- ity and veracity of such endeavours. In appropriating the past, how much do these contemporary portrayals impact and even distort our understanding of the histories they re-present? This, it seems, is the unanswered question lying at the heart of O’Kane’s ambitious project.

Eamon O’Kane: Re-enactment, installation shot, ArtSway; courtesy the artist

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Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris Malachi Farrell: October – November 2009 Gaz killer

Peter FitzGerald is an artist and the editor of Circa.

Malachi Farrell uses the absurd to investigate the absurd. But there are two absurds here – the first is in art, the other in how humanity goes about its often-bloody business. The artistic approach itself is not new – we have, at the very least, Dadaism and Cabaret Voltaire to thank for that and, perhaps most enduringly, to my mind at least, the collages of Hannah Höch.

But to backtrack first: in a beautiful courtyard at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, set discreetly but not hidden, is a row of doglike, potlike structures, each at most a metre high, with the whole thing stretching over, say, five metres. A child approaches, a sensor reacts, and the doggish heads on the structures begin to move. On those heads are improvised gas masks. There is a syncopating clatter and industrial hissing as the heads turn back and forth, sometimes in unison, sometimes not. There is a military madness going on here, on a small scale, a mini theatre of the absurd. In the middle of it all, a puff of smoke from a box at the back envelops the scene; the dogs pause, then bang on.

The work ‘works’. I believe the reason it works lies in message and meta- message. The relationship between art and message is not an easy one; if the artwork delivers a one-liner, at least two

Malachi Farrell: Gaz killer, 2009, installation shot, Centre Culturel Irlandais; courtesy Centre Culturel Irlandais

74 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 things are lost. First, the viewer – who gas as a weapon. There are moments This review was facilitated, very comfort- moves on to the next artwork, having in the head-dances of the gas-masked ably, by Cityjet. ‘consumed’ the previous one; second, dogs that capture this advance in its the opportunity to open up an interac- absurdity: when two dogs turn to face tivity, to create new possible meanings, each other, the bottoms of the gas to plant a seed. As humans we’re masks complex, and we need to be fed still bobbling, in a second of apparent complex ideas or we’re just being told mutual recognition, surprise, and what we already knew. implicit futility. There is also a real- world twist here: the installation in But back to the dogs. Gaz killer was Dunkirk was destroyed one night, first installed in a public area in Dunkirk. apparently by locals who mistook the This is an industrial town on the north- work as being a statement imposed ern French coast, backed up against from outside rather than one invited in; Belgium. Of course its name immedi- like the dogs, we march both with and ately conjures up World War II, but the against our own. town was equally involved in WWI. Now it’s a centre of some fairly heavy This isn’t a simple anti-war artwork. It and potentially noxious industrial activ- seems to be more about human nature ity. Gaz killer, as I understand it, was in general: the allure of the industrial installed in response to a community and mechanical, the slide towards invitation; its role was to open up a uniformity and anonymity, our ability to space for thought about Dunkirk. recycle old mistakes in fresh guises. The work offers glimpses of messages, The work’s opening premise, if you like, but in the end what results is a credible is the gas masks for dogs. There really meta-message: that the messages we were such things in WWI; by WWII they generate are themselves sinking into were gone – thanks to a ‘humanising’ of the mire of our material reality. war that banned the use of poisonous

Malachi Farrell: Gaz killer, 2009, installation shot, Centre Culturel Irlandais; courtesy Centre Culturel Irlandais

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 75

Millennium Court Arts Centre Portadown Guerrilla Girls: October – November 2009 I’m not a feminist, but…

Brian Kennedy is an artist and Circa Contributing Editor.

Guerrilla Girls: I’m not a feminist but…, 2009, poster design; copyright 2009 © Guerrilla Girls, Inc.; courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com/ MCAC

Fighting discrimination with facts, sexism, racism and corruption. The Walking in from the streets of humour and fake fur! That’s the claim issues they deal with are very real, but Portadown, I entered a gallery and of the Guerrilla Girls and certainly the use of humour helps bring home found myself in a New York street. The any posters of theirs that I had seen the facts, figures and percentages they gallery space was covered with images would indicate that they had an irrev- quote in a more forceful way. of outdoor walls; images of New York erent approach to an art world often covered other walls; graffiti art adorned in danger of taking itself too seri- A question at the back of my mind one wall and was sprayed on others. ously. was, how would the work look in a Wooden pallets, plastic cones and the gallery situation? Twitter, fly-posting detritus of a city lay in corners; no hint Hiding their identity behind the names and direct action would all seem to be of a white cube gallery remained. of dead women artists and donning more fitting than the white hallowed gorilla masks, they set out like intrepid walls of a gallery. Megan Johnston, the gallery director, superheroes to tackle the evils of and her staff had decided that the

76 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 clinical white cube was not right for than an ongoing one; there certainly it today? Sadly, yes, as little has the Guerrilla Girls’ show. The transfor- are some women in the history of art changed since they started…the mation of the space had the effect of who are under-represented but it is injustices still remain. gelling the team and making everyone difficult to see how that percentage involved an active participant in the could be radically changed. The same Perhaps the one area where they show. Dermot Burns, the gallery tech- could be said for the Hugh Lane could develop the work would be to nician, had supplied the images of collection: 90% male. take it out of the safe arena of the art New York. Jackie Barker, the exhibi- world. I would be interested to see tions officer, put on her hard hat and More worrying are the percentages in how, if challenged by the Guerrilla headed for the council depot; her more contemporary museums and Girls, the political groups here would husband, a builder, supplied cones, galleries. Solo shows at the Irish deal with the issues. The banners signs and a wheelbarrow. Martin Museum of Modern Art last year were they produce are very eye-catching; Ferguson, the buildings’ maintenance 86% male and group shows at the could they have a place in the North’s person, and someone who rarely Glucksman Gallery were 75% male. parade-ridden society, I wonder? shows an interest in the arts, became One would have expected these Given the dearth of women’s lodges, involved and supplied pallets, bins museums/ galleries to better reflect they might consider setting up their and an old bench. the fact that half of the major art own feminist lodge and returning for prizes in Ireland go to women and the marching season. The Guerrilla Girls were happy to 71% of art students are women. allow the gallery to do this transfor- Perhaps what it does reflect is the fact Feminist banners carried by women mation of the space. This in itself that although 93% of regional wearing gorilla masks heading to the might be a feminist approach. Would museums have female directors, all field on the ‘glorious twelfth’ to shout male artists let go of their work in this national museums are run by men. about injustices to women – way to go way? I am thinking of other women Guerrilla Girls. artists who have released the stran- Let’s take the statistic that 71% of art glehold on their art and allowed students are women; that should groups of people, usually other bode well for the future. Not if we look women, to become involved; Judy at who controls the academic hierar- Chicago’s The Dinner party comes to chy: University of Ulster – students mind. I do think that male artists tend 69% female, full professors 70% to be more anal about the authorship male. National College of Art and of their work. Design – students 70% female, department heads 89% male. Finally, The Guerrilla Girls work did look well to totally illustrate the absurdity of the in this situation. Some of the posters situation, Crawford College of Art and dealt with the inequalities that exist Design – students 77% female; specifically in the Irish art world. Only department heads 100% male. 5% of artists in the National Gallery of Ireland collection are women. This is The Guerrilla Girls started in 1985 really a documentation of past and the work certainly has an ‘80s discrimination against women rather feel to it. So is it still relevant to show

Guerrilla Girls: I’m not a feminist but…, installation shot, Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2009; copyright 2009 © Guerrilla Girls, Inc.; courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com/ MCAC

CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 • 77

RTÉ The Look of the Irish: August 2009 David Farrell

Stephanie McBride writes on visual culture and is based in Dublin.

David Farrell: from the series Né vicino né lontano. A Lugo, 2007, colour photograph; courtesy the artist

French historian Jules Michelet once Innocent landscapes, winner of the Promisingly, the week-long series in wrote that the task of his profession European Publishers’ Award for the first half of August announced that was “to make the silences of history Photography in 2001 and the subject of it would “celebrate Ireland and our speak.” In a way, that same task is at a documentary which was screened as heritage through the photographs that the core of photographer David part of RTÉ’s recent series on Irish have shown us who we are since 1893 Farrell’s best-known body of work, photography, The Look of the Irish. in a series of formal and informal snaps

78 • CIRCA 130 • Winter 2009 taken by amateur and professional documented Farrell’s working practice understanding how the landscape photographers.” on various projects over two years, changes, how its natural vegetation from initial reflections on how to asserts its own claims, as the traces on Yet RTÉ’s scheduling of this celebra- approach shooting a body of work on the surface of the burials and the tion was unwieldy and topsy-turvy, with delicate subject matter to the problems searches fade in turn, over time, in the archive pieces early in the evening and of fluctuating light in Irish weather, timescale of the bog. contemporary figures left to late tentative musings on how a piece might evening graveyard slots. Overall, the work, and unveiling an image from its Farrell’s work has also explored series fell way short of the impact it plastic coating and hanging a show. modern institutions such as the Central might have achieved: it came across Bank in When a building sleeps, a not so much as a sustained investiga- Taylor Black offered glimpses of Farrell series which is a reminder of one of tion into photography as a challenging walking through Dublin streets, carry- photography’s central forces, the fasci- artform, more as a comfortable ing a ladder on his way to a job, or nation with the play of light and reflec- bubblewrap packaging to make accompanying him on his journeys tive surfaces. While these images are photography more TV-friendly. through the Irish countryside with his devoid of people, there is a palpable tripod and camera – his own means of trace of human agency in many of the The differing modes of address excavating the landscape and making pictures – the pen on an office table, compounded the uneven quality of the the silences speak, as he visited the the graph scratched on a whiteboard, exercise, with talking heads offering “sites of the disappeared,” the bogs the picture hook on a green wall, each superlative summaries of archive and fields where bodies were said to bristling with narrative expectation. photographs of Cork being the most have been buried by the IRA during the irritating. Too much arts television Troubles. By contrast, his Ash series consists of seems to equate popularity and acces- portraits of different generations sibility with a drive to reduce everything An ordnance-survey map dissolved photographed on Ash Wednesday, down to the final image and product, at into an image of the landscape itself, following the annual ceremony in a the expense of any proper discussion yielding the details and contours, local Catholic church and all linked by the of the processes involved in artforms. placenames with their layers of history traces of the ash imprint, at one time a and people. Farrell refers to the bog “as pervasive sign, but now more a sign of In Elusive moments, however, director a memory bank, the witness of history a tradition in decline, more and more Donald Taylor Black’s documentary and trauma,” echoing writers such as out of synch with the new rhythms of about David Farrell opened out to Seamus Heaney, William Trevor and modern Ireland. explore the creative impetus, the wider others whose work also sees these demands and pressures of digital tech- same landscapes as a kind of scarred Visual storytelling is at the core of nology, as well as funding issues and canvas, scored and etched by historical Farrell’s work, and the editing process the commercial imperatives of the art events. In a kind of pilgrimage, Farrell is a central force as the documentary market which underpin cultural produc- regularly returns to these same sites, showed him working his way through tion. Visually elegant and eloquent, it recollecting and recording but also selecting from around 900 images, to fashion and shape those narratives.

Taylor Black’s credits include documen- taries on a range of diverse topics, from profiles of Jimmy O’Dea and Micheál Mac Liammhóir to Liam O’Leary, as well as the socially critical edge of The Joy and Hearts and souls. Here again he demonstrated his engaged approach and insight into his subjects. The director’s signature skill, richly textured and empathetic with artists’ perspective, shows how arts documen- taries can enter the world of the artist and artform, examining the economic and cultural strands within artistic processes and exploring the silences at the heart of photography.

David Farrell: from the series Né vicino né lontano. A Lugo, 2007, colour photograph; courtesy the artist