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

______2 Editor Subscriptions Peter FitzGerald For our subscription rates please see bookmark, or visit International editorial www.recirca.com where you can assistant subscribe online. Elizabeth Aders Circa is concerned with visual ______culture. We welcome comment, Board proposals and written Peter Monaghan (Chair), Tara contributions. Please contact Byrne, Mark Garry, Graham the editor for more details, Gosling, Darragh Hogan, James or consult our website Kerr, Ken Langan, Isabel Nolan, www.recirca.com Opinions John Nolan, Orla Ryan expressed in this magazine are those of the authors, not ______necessarily those of the Board. Contributing editors Circa is an equal-opportunities Alannah Hopkin (Cork), Luke employer. Copyright © Circa Gibbons (Dublin), Brian 2005 Kennedy (Belfast), Shirley MacWilliam (England) ______Contacts ______Circa Editorial advisory panel 43 / 44 Temple Bar (this issue) Suzanna Chan, Dublin 2 Peter FitzGerald, Georgina Ireland Jackson, Isabel Nolan, tel / fax (+353 1) 679 7388 Alan Phelan, Orla Ryan, [email protected] Declan Sheehan. www.recirca.com The rules and procedures of the panel can be accessed at ______recirca.com/about

______Assistants Elizabeth Bowley, Allyson Corcoran, Flavia Garelli, Emma O’Brien, Juliane Streich ______Designed/produced at Peter Maybury Studio c www.softsleeper.com

Printed by W & G Baird Ltd, Belfast ______Printed on 115gsm + 250gsm Arctic the Volume. CIRCA 114 WINTER 2005

3 Editorial 18 | Update 20 | Letters 21 | Features 22 | Reviews 60 | Project 105 |

(front cover) Sandra Johnston performance still Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia, Venice, 2005 courtesy the artist phil kelly

Hillsboro Fine Art 3 Anne’s Lane South Anne Street Dublin 2 Ireland

Telephone: 00 353 1 677 7905 http://www.hillsborofineart.com

Jeanette Doyle and then I place my face against the glass

Broadstone Gallery and Studios Hendrons Building, Dominick Street, Dublin 7 10-22 December 2005 and 3-14 January 2006 11am-6pm (closed Sunday/ Monday) For details please contact 087 626 8187 / 055 25339 / 01 830 1428

Jeanette Doyle with the women of the STAR project Portrayals

Axis Main Street, Ballymun, Dublin 9 12 January – 24 February 2006

A Breaking Ground 2 commission. Breaking Ground, the Ballymun art commissioning programme. www.breakingground.ie

Both exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue. For details contact [email protected] context galleries

Dec 10 – Jan 21 Gallery One ‘New Irish Painting’ A Survey of emerging Irish painting curated by Marianne O’Kane

Dec 10 – Jan 21 Gallery Two Katie Blue A Playhouse Education Project

Jan 28 – Feb 18 Gallery One Norma Lowney

New publications: New Irish Painting – Abridged: Damaged Collateral – Aileen Kelly: Laundry – Robert O’Connor (contact gallery for details)

context galleries, the playhouse, 5-7 artillery st, derry BT486R t +44 287 137 3538 f +44 287 126 1884 e [email protected] http://contextgalleries.blogspot.com/

national irish visual arts library

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

National College of Art & Design 100 Thomas Street Dublin 8 T: 01 636 4347 [email protected] www.ncad.ie/nival 18 Editorialc c . Peter FitzGerald another, is unlikely to change the world – though some of the works that come under the ‘relational’ banner do seem, perversely, to harbour just that hidden wish, perhaps in a more interpersonal, interactive form. Claire Bishop’s article in October in 2004, which took as its starting point Nicolas Bourriaud’s highly influential Relational aesthetics, is ‘reprinted’ here in abridged form: actually, it is the text of a paper read in London in the same year. Grant Watson in turn responds to her text. Given the importance of teasing out the nature of relational art, the next issue of Circa will carry further responses on the theme.

Two artists are given considerable individual attention in this issue. Jaki Irvine’s oeuvre is assessed by Cherry Smyth. It is very satisfying to get an overview, in one text, of both the consistency and diversity in Irvine’s 19 output. The article is occasioned by the showing at IMMA of Irvine’s The silver bridge from 13 December 2005 to 7 May 2006. Also showing at IMMA is a season of films by Isaac Julien, and we carry here an interview with him by Áine O’Brien. Julien’s work mines the very fertile intersection of identity politics, queer culture, migration, multiple realities, and the opposition of cinematic and Do we look good in this? Certainly hope so. The redesign fine-art contexts. of the magazine has been a long time in the planning, One of the great bugbears of artists is the requirement and I believe Peter Maybury’s overhaul has been worth imposed on them from time to time to justify what they the wait. See what you think. do, to provide some sort of extrinsic explanation of the We promised to bring you more on the Venice Biennale. value of their work. Needless to say, though, artists often This year, for the first time, Northern Ireland has a pose this question to themselves anyway, especially representation all of its own, and this fact has prompted in those passing moments of feeling privileged. Most a response by Declan Sheehan of Derry’s Context artists want to be of use, but they’re not so happy being Gallery. As a prelude to his article, Declan designed a used. Governments and their servants, except in the questionnaire, which has been on our website, to garner case where they are handing out truly massive amounts the views of a more general readership. The results are of money, tend to see things the other way round: they given here. As Declan points out in his article, an don’t like being used either, and they want to know what interrogation of the Northern Ireland presence in Venice the value is of what they are getting. It’s a recipe for throws up lots of questions which are “in error,” and considerable misunderstanding and ill-feeling. Pauline it is what feels wrong about them which needs to be Hadaway writes here about the issues involved, taking explored. Declan also invited other contributors to as her starting point the ongoing Review of Public respond to the topic. Rachael Thomas of IMMA, who Administration in Northern Ireland, an offspring of the curated the first, unofficial Welsh representation at Good Friday Agreement. This Review threatens to tear Venice in 2001, and Colin Darke, artist and Co-director of apart the established ‘understandings’ among artists, Void Gallery, Derry, share their thoughts here, in accom- arts practitioners, civil servants and politicians. “Good,” panying articles. We carry reviews of the two ‘pavilions’ some may say, but it’s not going to be as simple as that. from Ireland as well, of course. In fact, given the nature As an organisation part-funded by the Arts Council of of the Northern Ireland contribution, it gets two reviews Northern Ireland, Circa input its tuppenceworth to the of its own. For one of these we were very lucky to get the Review. “Decisions on which organisations and projects services of Valerie Connor, who was Commissioner for to fund must be at arm’s length from government; the Republic of Ireland representation at Venice in 2003. otherwise, brave, publicly funded art is not possible” was just one of our pithy arguments. It’s a worrying time ‘Relational aethetics’ and ‘relational art’ have been for the future of the arts in Northern Ireland; what the kicking around in various forms for a while now. In some sector is undergoing is of relevance everywhere. ways, they are attempts to circumvent the realisation that art, despite the bombast of one avant garde after What else is there in this issue? Oodles. Enjoy! c . Update

20 NCAD to UCD? New name for SSI Factotum gets Paul Hamlyn Let’s be having it! The National College of Following an extraordinary Award In line with recent content Art and Design, Dublin, general meeting on 22 Richard West and Stephen Hackett, changes to the magazine, is to enter into detailed September, the Sculptors’ collectively also known as we are open to the negotiations with Society of Ireland Ltd has Factotum, have jointly been named submission of articles on University College Dublin adopted the business name as one of five recipients of this visual art and culture. (UCD) about becoming a ‘Visual Artists Ireland’. year’s Paul Hamlyn Foundation You can send in a finished part of UCD. If satisfactory, The move had been Awards for Visual Arts. The cool text, a draft, or an outline NCAD would move to a prompted by the expansion £30,000 they receive will doubtless of an idea – we’d love to green-field site in Belfield, of the SSI’s remit beyond help with the court case West is hear from you. Contact potentially trading in its sculpture, which has in taking against Belfast City Council [email protected] inner-city cred for a bit of turn been prompted of for alleged breach of the European Or if something we have suburban plush. Students the demise of the Artists’ Convention of Human Rights, published seems to demand at NCAD are apparently not Association of Ireland. following its withdrawal of a £5,000 a response on your part, too enamoured of the idea. grant to Factotum. Some members please do so: we are also There is talk of loss of To see VAI’s excellent of the Council were offended by open to letters. identity, and loss of ease website, surf over to the content of Factotum’s excellent of access to the city and its www.visualartists.ie publication, The Vacuum. Meanwhile, if you’re cultural offerings. Apparently inexhaustible, West is wondering how we decide also co-editor of Source magazine. what gets published, our Another Award winner, Ian procedures are available Breakwell, is well known on these to read online, at shores, particularly at the National recirca.com/about College of Art and Design, Dublin, Central to the process is where he frequently tutored. our Editorial Advisory Alas, in his case the Award is Panel, whose members posthumous. each serve for approxima- tely one year; the Panel Circa subscription-prize winner currently consists of Orla On 31 August 2005, the name of Ryan, Isabel Nolan, the winner of our subscription prize Georgina Jackson, Declan was drawn from a hat by Bea Sheehan, Alan Phelan, Kelleher, Executive Producer of the Suzanna Chan and Peter Dublin Fringe Festival. The winner FitzGerald. is Ceri Hand, Director of Exhibitions at FACT, Liverpool. She wins an original, Circa-commissioned oil painting by Geraldine O’Neill. Our congratulations to her, and our thanks to the hundreds who participated, to Geraldine O’Neill, Bea Kelleher and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. c . Letters Dear Editor, some images (without you risk conflating two I am writing to you regarding captions) relating to things which are, regrettably, some factual errors in Tim Amaptocare, just for your discrete. Stott’s ‘Fiat ars’ article in further information. I fully Circa 113. Specifically, appreciate that as editor, you Neither the selection of I am seeking clarity as to why decide what visuals are images nor the introductory images which uniquely relate reproduced and that, in this text to ‘Fiat Ars’ were made to Jochen Gerz’s Amaptocare instance, you may have felt in consultation with me. commission in Ballymun that the ‘people shots’ at the My sole responsibility was for were reproduced in an article conference were not visually the main text, and nowhere in which focuses exclusively on interesting. But the The that text are Amaptocare and a different work: The national national memory gove is in its NMG presented or discussed memory grove? very nascent stages and as one and the same project. therefore there are no real From the very beginning, it Put simply, Jochen is doing images available of any work was clear that my proposed two works in Ballymun, as such. text would take as its point of Amaptocare and The national departure nothing other than memory grove. The fact that As I said, I can understand NMG. This was clear in my the two projects share some the potential for confusion, discussions with Jochen formal and conceptual Dear Editor, but feel that had Tim Gerz, in my correspondence elements such as tree researched the article more 21 I am very much impressed with Sheena Barrett of Axis, planting, lecterns, public thoroughly he would have and in my request for images. by the depth of research, authorship, anti-monuments fully understood and made I failed to mention Amaptocare general cultural and etc may be a little confusing, clear the fact that there are not because I was unaware political interest and – but they have a different two discrete projects by of it or because I thought it why not? – intellectual genesis and motivation. Jochen unfolding in indistinguishable from NMG, Ballymun, that Ballymun is honesty of the feature I understand that the article but precisely because I knew in Dublin 9, and not in article ‘Disciplining the follows on from a press the two to be distinct: any County Dublin (this is of avant garde’ by Gregory conference that we held in mention of Amaptocare would some significance locally as Sholette in the summer Project last Spring, to launch have only confused matters Ballymun is part of the city, issue of CIRCA. It is very The National memory grove. and distracted from the main and it is has been the long- Subsequent to that Tim came body of the argument. rare to find this kind of held perception of its being to Ballymun to interview article in international art beyond the city that has At no point, I might add, did Jochen about his work here, magazines, which are more contributed to its abandon- I suggest that Ballymun was and was made aware of and more keen to ‘analyze’ ment and neglect by the city in County Dublin. the other commission, – however that is another – if we can spoil this Amaptocare,through his The contradiction between matter entirely!). Finally, respectable word – the discussions with Jochen. the images and the text is not outcome of the latest art all images are courtesy of a contradiction inherent to fairs, or to print these I feel that this confusion Breaking Ground. the text itself, and, moreover, could have been very easily I’m sorry to have to bring this depressing group photos it is not the result of less- avoided, had Tim briefly to your attention and I’m sure of the beautiful and than-thorough research or a referred to Amaptocare in the the situation can be easily lack of understanding on my powerful people of the art article. Then the decision to redressed as it is very part: had you engaged in a world, half-drunken but use images from Amaptocare important for the public to more thorough reading of the still keen for the spotlight, would have been understand- read the difference between text this might well have at some opening: how sad! able for the readership. As it the two works. become apparent. Life is too short to favour is, the images don’t relate to I look forward to hearing I understand that some of stupidity. Thank you and the article and the captions from you, the misleading use of please, if this is not done by are totally incorrect and misleading, for example: imagery for this article might chance, continue this way! With all best wishes, “Jochen Gerz: Amaptocare, have resulted from a lack of Aisling Prior dedication for one of the communication between Director, Breaking Ground Vittorio Urbani trees, National Memory Breaking Ground, Peter Director of Nuova Icona, FitzGerald and me, and for Grove, courtesy Axis ______Venezia Ballymun.” Axis is not my part in that I can only Dear Aisling, involved in either commis- apologise; but I do not believe In response to your letter sion; Breaking Ground, the that this mistake gives you regarding some ‘factual commissioning body, is grounds to draw attention errors’ in my article in Circa merely a tenant of the axis to other shortcomings 113, I should like offer my building. which, upon closer scrutiny, own clarifications. Whilst I are simply not there. I have checked with our understand your concern at office, and see that on 9 the misleading use and Best wishes August, Felicity Williams sent attribution of images in the Tim Stott you two visuals with detailed ‘Fiat Ars’ article, in accusing captions of the NMG press me of not distinguishing conference for reproduction between Amaptocare and The in the article. She also sent national memory grove (NMG) c . Features 22 What is my nation? Who talks of my nation? Declan Sheehan 24 | Venice Colin Darke 28 | Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi… When the dragon wakes… Rachael Thomas 30 | Art of the encounter: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics Claire Bishop 32 | Response to Claire Bishop’s paper on Relational Aesthetics Grant Watson 36 | Jaki Irvine: A retrospective Cherry Smyth 40 | Suturing the aesthetic and the political – multiple screens, multiple realities: An interview with Isaac Julien Áine O’Brien 46 | Soul-searching and soul-selling: the new accountability in the arts Pauline Hadaway 54 |

Jaki Irvine The silver bridge, 2005

DVD still

courtesy the artist c . 112 c . Declan Sheehan Declan Sheehan is Director of Context Galleries, Derry

24 What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?

Aisling O'Beirn Stories for Venetians and tourists, 2005 installation shot, café, Giudecca, Venice courtesy the artist This started with an error. There was in fact no pavillion select from those active in the Republic of Ireland and representing Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale the attendant sense that artistic practice from Northern 2005.1 To avoid further confusion, let’s revise events: Ireland suffers – in terms of international exposure – as there was a separate and distinct Northern Ireland a result?” presentation of artists at the Biennale, for the first time ever. Previously, the representation at Venice from the The poll, Research towards ‘What is my nation?’ : Part island of Ireland was selected and presented as a single one, is a conscious elaboration of questions in error Irish pavilion. My understanding is that there was a and not in error: of questions which inevitably lead to certain dissatisfaction with this state of affairs as there answers in error; of answers in error each with the other; was a continuing sense that the commissioners for in short, an elaboration of complexities. It is a conscious Ireland at the Biennale would always be selected from riposte to any solutions that are elaborated by a simple those active in the Republic of Ireland. And that there rather than a complex nature; to any solutions was also an attendant sense that artistic practice from elaborated by a simple rather than a complex sense of Northern Ireland would suffer – in terms of international identification with a community, or a national or a exposure – as a result. So a separate presentation of political identity. There is no reasonable dispute over the artists based in Northern Ireland was established at fact that identification with a community, or a national Venice – but distinctly not intended as a ‘national or a political identity, has been and continues to be a 25 pavilion’.2 Here is, however, some indicative evidence hugely complex, multiple and often dangerous concern of what has actually happened, regardless of stated in the island of Ireland. A statement or event that states intentions – and this is manifest from personal or aims at a disregard for these concerns does not in experience, anecdotal evidence, and responses to the effect constitute an act that disregards these concerns. What is my nation? poll. This year for the first time, The concerns haven’t gone away. Peter Gay, writing of audiences at the Venice Biennale have returned making his complexities regarding identification as a German one of the following statements: “The Northern Irish Jew, writes that “If these ruminations, these sudden artists/ pavilion/ exhibition was better that the Republic,” shifts in mood, sound inconsistent, they were…”4 or “The Republic’s artists/ pavilion/ exhibition was better This is a realm of inconsistency, of ruminations and than those of Northern Ireland.” shifts in mood, of ambiguity.5 It is obvious that these new structures of the selection, There was a concern that artists based in Northern the presentation and the reception of the artworks Ireland were missing a platform at Venice. But to from this island at Venice have now embodied elements attempt to remedy this by presenting artists from involving all participants in a process of ‘defining territo- Northern Ireland as simply ‘separate’ and ‘apart’ from ries’.3 It is the case that such distinction represents a artists from the Republic of Ireland, and to not expect whole new state of affairs: there exists no reasonable this act to be obliged to recognize complexities regarding argument that can be made against that fact. It is a identification, is funnily enough simply another ‘Irish major paradigm shift in the national and international solution to an Irish problem’. presentation and reception of artists from this island. And it is the case that there was massively insufficient The title is from Shakespeare, HENRY V - ACT III SCENE I debate, critique, or discussion prior to this state of (see poll overleaf) affairs changing on the ground: thus only leaving an 1 In my defence, I must point out that this error I made in drawing up opportunity for debate lying in the wake of the event, my poll and using the word ‘pavilion’ within it, is an error also made rather that in advance; and thus denying any potential even in the foreword of the Northern Ireland Venice exhibition for open contributions to finding an adequate form of catalogue: “… 14 of Northern Ireland’s finest contemporary artists to create the first pavilion in Venice…”: The Nature of things – artists solution to the problems and concerns highlighted in from Northern Ireland, 2005 (p.9) the opening paragraph above. 2 See again footnote 1. Also note that many ‘new’ national pavilions have only been established after nonofficial, nonnational representa- If the questions asked are in error, then the answers will tion at Venice: eg Rachael Thomas curating Cerith Wynn Evans as an intervention in the British pavilion. 2001, an act ultimately leading be in error. Here is a question in error, which this whole towards the development of the first separate Welsh pavilion. new state of affairs puts to artists from this island: 3 See points raised by Shane Cullen at a discussion in Temple Bar “Should your practice be represented in a separate and between the Venice Biennale Commissioners from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 24 February, 2005, distinct Northern Ireland presentation of artists at the printed in Printed project: “… [the situation that] exists at the moment Venice Biennale or in the Irish pavilion at the Venice seems to be defining territories”; from ‘One closer to the other’, Biennale?” Printed project, issue 05, May 2005, p.84. Here is a question not in error: “How do we, artists and 4 Peter Gay, My German question, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, p.13 curators, establish an adequate response to a sense that 5 Shane Cullen, ibid: “… I actually think I preferred the situation where the commissioners for Ireland at the Biennale always an artist from this part of Ireland and Northern Ireland worked together in a kind of ambiguous presentation without anything being so explicitly laid down.” c . ______Poll Research Towards What is my nation?: Part One

Fluellen: Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation – MacMorris : Of my nation! What is my nation? Is a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?

Shakespeare, HENRY V – ACT III SCENE I

______Please answer the following (for ease of reading here, the results are presented along with the questions; on the website the reader had a simple ‘YES/ NO’ choice; to see the poll, with a click-through to the results which include comments by readers, go to www.recirca.com/poll/venice). 26 ______Question % YES % NO 1. Are you an artist from Ireland? 84 16 2. Are you an artist from Northern Ireland? 26 74 3. Are you an artist from the Republic of Ireland? 72 28 4. Are you an artist based in Ireland? 75 25 5. Are you an artist based in Northern Ireland? 20 80 6. Are you an artist based in the Republic of Ireland? 60 40 7. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from Ireland? 92 8 8. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from Northern Ireland? 45 55 9. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from the Republic of Ireland? 79 21 10. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of Irish art? 93 7 11. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of Northern Irish art? 46 54 12. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of ‘Republic of Irish’ art? 66 34 13. Would an answer YES to question 1 rule out an answer YES to question 2? 21 79 14. Would an answer YES to question 1 force an answer NO to question 2? 19 81 15. Would an answer YES to question 2 force an answer YES to question 1? 30 70 16. Would an answer YES to question 2 rule out an answer YES to question 1? 12 88 17. Would an answer YES to question 3 rule out an answer YES to question 2? 48 52 18. Would an answer YES to question 4 rule out an answer YES to question 5? 17 83 19. Would an answer NO to question 4 rule out an answer YES to question 5? 30 70 20. Would an answer YES to question 4 force an answer NO to question 5? 15 85 21. Would an answer YES to question 5 rule out an answer YES to question 4? 17 83 22. Would an answer YES to question 7 force an answer NO to question 8? 18 82 23. Would an answer YES to question 8 force an answer YES to question 7? 30 70 24. Would an answer YES to question 8 force an answer NO to question 7? 9 91 25. Would an answer YES to question 10 force an answer NO to question 11? 14 86 26. Would an answer YES to question 11 force an answer YES to question 10? 29 71 27. Would an answer YES to question 11 force an answer NO to question 10? 11 89 28. Would an answer YES to question 12 force an answer NO to question 11? 28 72

Please consider the classifications above and answer the following: 29. Were such classifications as distinct or as relevant previous to the creation in 2005 of the first ever Northern Ireland Pavillion at the Venice Biennale? 51 49 30. Would you be interested in continuing this research further within an art project? 62 38 ______Peter Richards camera obscura installation shot Piazza San Marco, Venice 2005 courtesy the artist

27 c . Colin Darke

28 Venice When I first heard there would be an exhibition of confirmation and blurring of national boundaries in northern artists at this year’s Venice Biennale, my relation to the globalisation of economies and cultural immediate response was one of ambivalence, and the practice. While this was a conceptual determinant in initial doubts remain. the selection procedure, the practical outcomes of that procedure only became apparent when the artists I was delighted that the decision would provide an arrived in Ljubljana en masse. additional platform for artists in Ireland, especially for those who might otherwise have been neglected as So, not only were the four “Northern Ireland representa- a result of their geographical location – so delighted, tives” not indigenous Irish (but in the end, of course, in fact, that I submitted, with a colleague, an application deemed to be OK because we were UK citizens), to curate the show. the selection was based on the concept that work which raised questions about the north/south border Hugh Mullholland made his selection with the necessitated only representation from its northern side. intelligence and foresight we’ve come to expect and In this way, then, an exhibition that aimed at revealing (having myself missed the opportunity to see the show the dissolution of borders resulted in a ratification of and going by reports from trusted friends) the resultant Ireland’s partition. show has proved to be a big success. 29 Hence my ambivalence regarding the northern exhibition Such a move, however, is inevitably going to produce in Venice. A modest proposal: a five-way show, with the a political impact. Even in what is for the most part a involvement of both arts councils, consisting of work self-consciously apolitical Irish art world, the question by artists from Dublin and each of the four provinces. of the border arises from time to time and if there was This would scatter representation across the island and any surprise at the response to the announcement of create whole new arguments which at least sidestep the the northern show, it was at the comparative silence border issue and give opportunities to artists who might regarding the partitionist result of the decision. otherwise have been overlooked. Perhaps the south would prefer to retain its 32-county Colin Darke is an artist. remit, but for the northern show to include the work of an artist outside the six northern counties is highly unlikely. Mary McIntyre This in turn complicates matters for the south. Such is The Italian room, 2005 the nature of the island’s partition – separatist activity lightjet print in the north forces southern bodies to rethink their all- 74 x 89cm courtesy the artist Ireland mindsets. And this at a time when we should be expecting Agreement-inspired cross-border cooperation. As the questions in Declan Sheehan’s survey show, the complications go beyond this. Which exhibition shows an artist from the north but living in the south, and vice versa? And what of the border towns whereby, for example, a “Derry artist” might live ten minutes’ drive from his or her city centre-studio, crossing the border during the journey? Will artists and curators who don’t recognise the border be forced to exclude themselves, because of their political beliefs?

Similar questions arose for me in 2000, at Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana. It came about in relation to those artists “representing Northern Ireland”, when it was realised that of the four selected, three were English and one Scottish. The issue snowballed throughout the show, with artists and the exhibition’s four curators questioning the notion of representation. The show included work by artists from eastern Europe who were displaced from their countries of origin, artists who had shifted location for political reasons, for economic reasons, for artistic reasons and, I guess, just because they wanted to. The confusion was ironic, considering that the theme of the itinerant biennale that year was the paradoxical c . Rachael Thomas The Venice Biennale 2001 Plateau of Humankind

Pryd mae 30 r Dd raig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd Pryd maermaer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr codi Pry d m aer Ddraig yn codi Pr yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pry d m aer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr aig yn c odi Pry d maer D draig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd mae r Ddraig y n codi Pryd m aer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pryd maer Ddraig yn c odi Pr yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn c ynodi Pryd codi…maer Ddraig yn codi WhenPryd maer Ddraig yn codi Prydthe maer D draig yn co di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi P ryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pry d ma er D draig yn c odi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr aig yn codi Pr dragonyd maer Ddraig yn codi Prydwakes maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig… yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pr yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi P ryd maer Ddraig y n codi Pr yd mae r Dd raig yn codi Pryd m aer Dd raig yn co di Pryd mae r Ddraig yn codi Pryd m aer Ddraig yn codi Pry d maer Ddraig yn cod i Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer D draig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pry d maer Ddraig yn cod i Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi P ry d maer D dra The 2001 Venice Biennale was marked by a substantial the text as both China and Wales have a rich and very expansion of countries and artists in attendance. The different legacy associated with this emotive, mythologi- scale and magnetism of the event challenged readings cal creature. The Welsh word for dragon is ‘draig’ in the of it as being a “charming anachronism”1 or merely a sense of ‘warrior’ or ‘leader’; the dragon is seen as a “trade fair”2. In reality it became a succession of symbol of national independence. From ancient times, exhibitions, interventions and manifestations that it was the Chinese emblem of the Imperial family and contributed to an ever-changing dynamic of displays, represented a beneficent creature. Until the founding propositions, opportunities and exposures. of the republic in 1911, it adorned the national flag. In Wales, the symbol represents spiritual energy and is a Six months prior I realised that my own country, Wales, bringer of good fortune. did not even have its own pavilion, nor a system or funds to set up an intervention. I felt this was the moment to The project exposed the seemingly arbitrary yet concrete take action, and with guerilla tactics of pushing forward relationship between two cultures. It also raised the for support, and with no funds to speak of, I approached issue of cultural capital through the references to global the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans to see if we could set economies. The project was housed at the British up the first-ever intervention at the Venice Biennale and Pavilion and distributed by The Art newspaper. After actually interrogate government and Arts Council of Venice I then had talks with members of the Arts Council 31 Wales policy towards establishing an independent Welsh who were working towards setting up a fixed site for the Pavilion. Wyn Evans graduated from the Royal College Welsh Pavilion. This has gone from success to success of Art in 1984 and began his career as a video and film- and it’s great to see Welsh artists established as part of maker working as assistant to Derek Jarman. In the an international dialogue. early 1990s Wyn Evans started making sculptures and installations. His work deals with the phenomenology of time, language and perception and employs a variety 1 Charles Esche, Audio arts magazine, of media including firework texts, horticulture, film, Vol.20, Nos 1 & 2, 2001 photography and sculpture. He has exhibited extensively 2 Jon Thompson, International Round Table Conference, Venice Biennale, in Europe and America, including the Hayward Gallery, 2001. London (1995) and the British School in Rome (1998), while other solo exhibitions have included Deitch Rachael Thomas is Head of Projects in New York (1997), Tate Britain (2000) and the Exhibitions at the Irish Museum touring exhibition The British Art Show (2000). of Modern Art.

The challenge was duly accepted by Wyn Evans, and support was offered from the British Pavilion, The Art Newspaper, white cube and the editor of Art in America. Wyn Evans and I then had to come up with a concept. We decided the work would take on a political aspect. The work was entitled ‘Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi.. (When the dragon wakes)’.

Acknowledging the conceptual tradition of Marcel Broodthaers and Dan Graham on the discursive nature of art, the project Pryd Ddraig yn codi was inserted in The Art newspaper. It replicated in translation an entire page from a previous issue. Wyn Evans questioned the use of language – what is lost and gained by the act of translation, how it informs and transforms meaning. This appropriation of the original article (‘When the dragon wakes’) re-inscribes national boundaries divided by identity and history. The article reports on the insecu- rities facing the West’s leading auction houses as China enters the World Trade Organisation and the financial and ideological threat this poses to them. The interven- tion seeks to expose how the language of symbols deter- mines cultural identity and how they proscribe multiple interpretations. The symbol of the dragon is significant in c . Claire Bishop

32 Art of the encounter: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics In this paper I present a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s At 303 Gallery I regularly sat with or was joined by Relational aesthetics from an art-historical and strangers, and it was nice. The gallery became a place theoretical perspective. By this I don’t mean locating it for sharing, jocularity and frank talk. I had an amazing historically in art of the 1960s and ’70s – in social sculp- run of meals with art dealers. Once I ate with Paula ture, installation, performance and ‘service’ art by artists Cooper who recounted a long, complicated bit of as diverse as the Fluxus Group, Joseph Beuys, Daniel professional gossip. Another day, Lisa Spellman related Spoerri, Allen Ruppersberg, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in hilarious detail a story of intrigue about a fellow dealer Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic and others – although trying, unsuccessfully, to woo one of her artists. About a this history certainly needs to be written. Nor do I wish week later I ate with David Zwirner. I bumped into him on to locate Bourriaud’s collection of essays in relation to the street, and he said, “nothing’s going right today, let’s significant theoretical precursors – such as Roland go to Rirkrit’s.” We did, and he talked about a lack of Barthes’ ‘Death of the author’, or Umberto Eco’s The excitement in the New York art world. Another time I ate Open work. Rather, I wish to discuss relational aesthet- with Gavin Brown, the artist and dealer… who talked ics in terms of two connected problems that persistently about the collapse of SoHo – only he welcomed it, felt it intrude upon discussions of ‘relational’ art: firstly, the was about time, that the galleries had been showing too problematic status that this work holds as an object of much mediocre art. Later in the show’s run, I was joined critical and historical judgment, and secondly, the by an unidentified woman and a curious flirtation filled 33 assumption underpinning Bourriaud’s book (and a great the air. Another time I chatted with a young artist who deal of other writing on contemporary art) that art lived in Brooklyn who had real insights about the shows encouraging dialogue between viewers is unequivocally he’d just seen. a ‘good thing’, and moreover democratic. The informal chattiness of this account clearly indicates For the purposes of economy and clarity, I will take one what kind of problems face those who wish to know more artist as paradigmatic of relational art – Rirkrit Tiravanija about such work: the review only tells us that Tiravanija’s – since his art seems to me the clearest expression of intervention is considered good because it permits Bourriaud’s argument that relational art privileges networking amongst a group of like-minded art lovers, inter-subjective relations over detached opticality: and because it evokes the atmosphere of a late-night bar. Tiravanija insists that the viewer is physically present In the glossary at the back of Relational aesthetics, in a particular situation at a particular time – in this Bourriaud proposes some criteria that we should level case, eating the food that he cooks, alongside other at open-ended, participatory artworks in order to visitors in a communal situation, usually within the overcome such problems. He suggests that the criteria gallery. As some readers will already know, Tiravanija we should engage are not simply aesthetic, but political: often includes the phrase ‘lots of people’ in his lists of we must judge the ‘relations’ that are produced by materials – and it is noticeable that the criticism about relational artworks. When confronted by a relational his work is extremely subjective, reflecting the impor- artwork, Bourriaud suggests that we ask the following tance of the viewer’s first-hand experience in the work. questions: “does this work permit me to enter into Every piece of writing on Tiravanija’s work refers back to dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?” the author’s own experience of the piece – which raises (p109). He refers to these questions, which we should the following critical and historiographical problem: how ask in front of any aesthetic production, as “criteria of can we judge Tiravanija’s work – or indeed any work that co-existence” (p.109). Theoretically, in front of any work relies for its meaning on the direct participation of the of art, we can ask what kind of social model the piece viewer – if we didn’t experience it for ourselves? produces: could I live in a world structured by the organ- ising principles of a Mondrian painting? What ‘social To be fair, this problem also accompanies the history form’, for example, is produced by a Surrealist object? of installation and performance art, but with relational So far so good. But in putting this idea into practice, art this situation is exacerbated, since the artist often it is difficult to determine what constitutes the ‘relations’ has a hands-off approach that delegates the meaning we are assessing. For example, what Tiravanija cooks, of the work to the viewer-participant. Photographic how and for whom, is less important than the fact that documentation of relational work reveal little to us of he gives away the results of his cooking for free. the social dynamic that emerged, and written accounts In other words, although his works claim to defer offer only partial assistance. By way of example, the only meaning to their context, they do not question their substantial account that I can find of Tiravanija’s first imbrication within it. We need to ask, as Group Material solo exhibition at 303 Gallery is by Jerry Saltz in Art in did in the 1980s, “Who is the public? How is a culture America, and it runs as follows: made, and who is it for?” I am not suggesting that relational artworks like between full identities, such as a car crash, or the war Tiravanija’s need to develop a greater social conscience against terrorism). In the case of antagonism, argue – by giving free curries to refugees, or using organic Laclau and Mouffe, “we are confronted with a different ingredients. I am simply wondering what it means to situation: the presence of the “Other” prevents me from equate aesthetic judgment with an ethico-political being totally myself.” judgment on the relationships produced by a work of art. The social sciences have innumerable methodologies for I dwell on this theory in order to suggest that the measuring and evaluating such relationships, but relations set up by relational art works such as those of contemporary art criticism remains wilfully immune to Tiravanija are not intrinsically democratic, since they such complexities. The quality of the relationships in rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as relational art is never examined or put into question by whole, and community as immanent togetherness. its critics and curators, nor is the issue of how we might There is debate and dialogue in one of his cooking arrive at this assessment. When Bourriaud argues that pieces, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since “encounters are more important than the individuals who the situation is ‘microtopian’: it produces a community compose them” (Postproduction, p.43), I sense that this whose members identify with each other, because they question is (for him) perhaps unnecessary. But Bourriaud have something in common (the art world). 34 is not alone in this: the problem I am outlining readily By contrast, I wish to argue that an understanding of extends into the bulk of contemporary art criticism about democracy as a relationship of antagonism can be seen interactive and socially engaged works: all relations in the work of two artists who are not discussed in that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be Relational aesthetics: Santiago Sierra and Thomas democratic and therefore good. But what does Hirschhorn. These artists set up ‘relationships’ of quite ‘democracy’ really mean in this context? If relational art a different order to that of Tiravanija: while they produces human relations, then the next logical question emphasise the role of dialogue and negotiation in their to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for art, the work is not reducible to these relationships. whom, and why? Rather, the relations produced by their performances I propose that one way to begin addressing this problem and installations are marked by unease and discomfort is to examine its terminology more rigorously, and rather than belonging, because the work sustains a ‘democracy’ is a good place to start. In their seminal tension between viewers, participants and context. book Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical To give two examples: Sierra’s contribution to the Democratic Politics (1985) the political philosophers Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that a fully involved sealing off the pavilion’s interior with concrete functioning democratic society is not one in which all blocks from floor to ceiling. On entering the building, antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new viewers were confronted by a hastily constructed yet political frontiers are constantly being drawn and impregnable wall that rendered the galleries brought into debate – in other words, a democratic society inaccessible. Visitors carrying a Spanish passport, is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not however, were invited to enter the space via the back of erased. Without antagonism there is only the imposed the building, where two immigration officers inspected consensus of authoritarian order – a total suppression of passports. All non-Spanish nationals were denied entry debate and discussion which is inimical to democracy. to the gallery, whose interior apparently contained Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of antagonism is nothing but grey paint peeling from the walls, left over founded in a Lacanian theory of subjectivity. They argue from the exhibition two years back. The work was that subjectivity is not a self-transparent and rational ‘relational’ in Bourriaud’s sense, but problematised any pure presence, but is irremediably decentred and idea of these relations being fluid, harmonious and incomplete; we have a failed structural identity, and are unconstrained; the work exposed how all our social therefore dependent on identification in order to proceed. interactions are, like public space, riven with social and Because subjectivity is this process of identification, legal exclusions. we are necessarily incomplete entities. Antagonism, therefore, is the type of relationship that emerges between such incomplete entities. Laclau contrasts this to the types of relationship that emerge between com- plete entities, such as contradiction (for example, we can be materialists and read horoscopes, or be in analysis and send Christmas cards); antagonism also differs from what mathematicians call ‘real difference’ (a collision A second example: Hirschhorn’s Bataille monument at It is with this appeal to an art of encounter as activated Documenta XI. The Bataille monument is a more complex thinking that I wish to end this paper. Rather than being work, comprising three installations in makeshift shacks coerced into fulfilling the artist’s interactive require- outside a housing estate in the suburbs of Kassel; it also ments, perhaps it is more political – and provocative – featured a sculpture of a tree, and a functioning bar. to presuppose the viewer as a subject of independent To re a ch t he Bataille monument, visitors had to thought, which is after all the essential prerequisite for participate in a further component of the work: securing political action. It is no longer enough to say that a lift from a Turkish cab company who were contracted activating the viewer tout court is democratic, for every to ferry Documenta visitors to and from the site. artwork – even the most ‘open-ended’ – always Viewers were then stranded at the Monument until a prescribes in advance what participation may and may return cab became available, during which time they not take place within it Such pretences to emancipation would inevitably make use of the bar. The three should no longer be necessary: all art – whether installations included a library of books and videos on immersive or not – can be a critical force that Bataillean themes, a functioning TV studio, and an appropriates and reassigns value, decentralising our installation about Bataille’s life and work. thoughts from the predominant and pre-existing consensus. The task facing us today is to analyse how In locating the Monument in the middle of a community contemporary art addresses the viewer, and to assess 35 whose ethnic and economic status implied that it was the quality of the audience relations it produces. not a target audience for Documenta, Hirschhorn If relational art seeks a unified subject as a prerequisite contrived a curious rapprochement between the influx for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and of art tourists and the area’s residents. The result was Sierra provide a mode of artistic encounter more a reversed ‘zoo effect’, in which visitors feel like adequate to the split, divided and incomplete subject hapless intruders. Even more disruptively, in light of of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated the international art world’s intellectual pretentions, not on social harmony, but on exposure of that which Hirschhorn’s Monument took the local inhabitants is repressed in contriving the semblance of this harmony, seriously as potential Bataille readers. This gesture and thereby would provide a more concrete and induced a range of emotive responses amongst visitors, polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the including accusations that Hirschhorn’s gesture was world and to each other. inappropriate and patronising. This unease revealed the fragile conditioning of the art world’s self-constructed 1 Thomas Hirschhorn, in Jessica Morgan (ed.), Common wealth, Tate Modern, identity. The complicated play of identificatory and p.63 dis-identificatory mechanisms at work in the content, construction and location of the Bataille Monument were Claire Bishop is currently radically and disruptively thought-provoking: the ‘zoo Leverhulme Research Fellow in effect’ worked two ways. Rather than offering, as the the department of Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College Documenta handbook claims, a reflection on ‘communal of Art, London. commitment’, the Bataille Monument served to destabilise (and therefore potentially liberate) any sense This article was read as a paper of what community identity might be, or what it means for the Art of the Encounter to be a ‘fan’ of art and philosophy. In other words, the conference, Whitechapel Art relations established by this work were marked by Gallery, London, May 2004. A full unease and ambivalence, rather than comfortable version can be found in October, togetherness and identification. Significantly, in the two no.110, Fall 2004. works I have discussed, the viewer is no longer required to fulfil a literal participatory role (to eat noodles, or to play the drums), but is asked only to be a thoughtful and reflective visitor. As Hirschhorn says,

I do not want to do an interactive work. I want to do an active work. To me, the most important activity that an artwork can provoke is the activity of thinking. Andy Warhol’s Big electric chair, 1967, makes me think, but it is a painting on a museum wall. An active work requires that I first give of myself.1 c . Grant Watson

36 Response to Claire Bishop’s paper on Relational Aesthetics In her paper Claire Bishop critiques the easy solutions within which society’s tensions can become assumptions and loose talk that goes on around so called productive. The trick for Mouffe is to include as many interactive art. In particular she takes to task ‘Relational social actors in the equation as possible. So, for example, Aesthetics’, which has progressed from being the title to she welcomes the anti-globalization movement into the a collection of essays (referring to a particular group of fold, on the grounds that it participates to a certain closely knit practitioners operating at a particular extent within the current order of existing institutions moment), to become a term that gets bandied about in and so becomes a part of these institutions’ renewal. all sorts of contexts. Quite rightly Bishop is sceptical In this Mouffe is an outspoken critic of Antonio Negri, about the line put forward by some proponents of this whom she characterises as unrealistic and even danger- genre – that it is intrinsically good to talk, that dialogue ous - going the way of earlier revolutionaries who risk the and interactivity is healthy and that this dialogue auto- emergence of nondemocratic forms in the wake of the matically leads to a sense of community. One has to ask, existing order, which they seek to overthrow. In her as Bishop does, what are the effects of the interactions paper, Bishop (who draws on Mouffe’s use of Lacanian which take place within certain art practices? Whom do psychoanalytic theory) explains that the agonistic model they privilege, what do they challenge and what do they is based on an understanding of the individual as leave unchallenged? These questions are pertinent fractured and contradictory. And so agonistic democracy because one would assume that any practice of this kind becomes not a dialogue between wholly rational 37 would gesture towards new social models, ones that are partners, or the frontal encounter of two complete perhaps more collective, democratic, discursive, critical entities at total war with one another, but instead a or liberatory. multifarious negotiation of partial and often unstable subject positions. It is unfortunate (but strategic) that Bishop’s only example of a relational artwork at first hand is so far Bishop uses Mouffe’s argument as a point of entry into removed from any of the above. Jerry Saltz, describing the work of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, his experience of a work by Rirkrit Tiravanija for Art in citing in particular Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, America, gives us an exercise in namedropping and which formed a part of Documenta 11, in 2002. While the nepotism that demonstrates how familiar types of social practice of applying a singular theory to an artwork is practice based on networks of influence and exclusivity liable to produce distortions, there is some mileage in can surface anywhere. But as Bishop points out, this reading Hirschhorn’s gargantuan and rambling public art actually tells us little, because if we were to base our project through an investigation of radical democracy. judgement on individual testimony then every participant Yes, this was a strangely disruptive work on many in the work would have to be taken into account registers and yes, the “zoo effect” she describes, in (suggesting a wildly democratic if untenable form of art which differences and social tensions were made visible, criticism). However Bishop’s paper does not wager its was present. Personally I spent my time analysing the argument on personal experience but instead responds other people, both the Documenta visitors (hawk-eyed to Relational aesthetics from an “art historic and to see if I could detect partially concealed signs of class theoretical perspective.” In this process Bishop produces snobbery) and the inhabitants of the estate who (using a sort of theoretical shorthand along with performed the role of paid workers. examples of current practice) an equation in which the different elements become units that, “for the sake of Moving on from Hirschhorn, Bishop turns her attention economy and clarity” compete with one another within to the work of Tiravanija, who for her comes to stand in her text. And looking to the democratic potential of an for the whole Relational Aesthetics project. And placing engaged art practice, Bishop draws upon the ideas of the practice of these two artists side by side, she finds Chantal Mouffe. In her development of the democratic one to be easy, uncritical, producing of uniformity and idea, Mouffe argues against a deliberative or third-way theoretically and politically naïve, while the other is politics, in which citizens arrive through rational revealing of tensions, agonistic, consciousness-raising discourse and ‘deliberation’ at a consensus, where and productive of multiple responses. The reason for the conflict is overcome and the private exists largely out- success of one and the failure of the other goes back side of the political arena. In its place she proposes an (I would guess) to the difference between the ‘agonistic’ model which refuses to iron out conflict but deliberative and the agonistic model – back to the that also goes beyond the old antagonisms between different types of individual subject that the two artists embedded enemies such as the traditional left/right, or wish to address. In a somewhat reductive passage she the moral majority versus the rights of sexual minorities. states that while “Relational Aesthetics seeks a unified Instead Mouffe presents a dynamic of rivalry between subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, adversaries, who compete across the social field in Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic order to construct aggregate structures and precarious encounter more adequate to the split, divided and c . incomplete subject of today.” It is as if Bourriaud has Grant Watson is the Curator of failed to cotton on to the “divided and incomplete Visual Arts at Project in Dublin. subject of today” and has thus overlooked the developments taking place in the intellectual culture that surrounds him.

But rereading Relational aesthetics, and in particular the chapter dealing with the work of Felix Guattari, a different picture emerges. Using a tortuous snip-up effect of quotations and by paraphrasing the original, Bourriaud makes something of a mentor of Guattari and in this the question of subjectivity is given centre stage. Guattari was a student of Lacan but critical of psycho- analysis, which he saw as seeking to regulate desire into certain configurations. For Guattari, the individual is fragmented into multiple relationships with a changing 38 environment (technological, biological, cultural and so on), forming alliances and couplings, which are motored by the energy of a desire that refuses to be curtailed. In this way subjectivity is described not as unified and inevitable but instead (to use Guattari’s colourful terminology) it is seen as the mobile constellation of points, moving along lines of flight that transverse the human and the nonhuman world. In other words, this is a fragmentation of individual identity, a subjectivity that is in permanent mutation, that is constantly being produced and taking on new forms in different historical periods. Importantly for him, these ideas are not simply abstractions but have immediate political effects – namely the need for a production of subjectivity which is not in thrall to (or defined by) oppressive regimes such as capitalism – and finally, to return to art, he describes the aesthetic paradigm as one in which this subjectivity can be performed and tested.

These ideas may sound like so much utopian, fuzzy and pretentious jargon. It may be difficult to relate them directly to the artworks in question or even to think about them in a practical way in terms of current political debates. Mouffe would certainly say so, judging by the manner in which she attacked the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, as they appear in Empire, at a recent conference. But if we are to assess Relational Aesthetics in the round, then it seems only fair to take Guattari’s ideas on the individual subject and its relation to the political into account, particularly as Bourriaud cites them as important for his practice. Perhaps this is a minor point but rather this than to produce a straw man. Bishop’s paper was written a while back and maybe now the real problem is that, like the YBA movement before it, Relational Aesthetics is suffering the fate of all things that are passing out of fashion. They produce a discussion, which is too late to seem current and too early to bring with it the benefits of hindsight or the pleasure of rediscovery. Jaki Irvine The silver bridge, 2005 DVD still courtesy the artist

39 c . Cherry Smyth Jaki Irvine: A retrospective

40

Jaki Irvine Towards a polar sea: the sound of your wings 2005 DVD still courtesy the artist Rejecting I chose, there’s no other way, sky, the air and you’re not here.” The elegiac tone recalls but what I do reject more numerous is, the exquisitely rendered pain of separation in The take- and denser and more than ever insistent. off, 1999 3, in which the runway is filmed from a plane, Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Big numbers’1 perhaps leaving the beloved behind, to the soaring, searing torch song Io vivrò senza te (‘I’ll live without you’), by seventies diva, Mina: “What’s going to happen to me from tomorrow onwards? I will live without you… I will cry. Yes, I will cry…”

In another sequence, Towards a polar sea: if the Earth…, a member of staff sorts and repacks Irvine’s archive and views a strip of film from Portrait of Daniela, 19994, the companion piece to The take-off. Played to the same Mina song, this black-and-white love poem showed the Polish poet Szymborska describes the gap between her beloved sitting in a lounger in the sun, smoking, looking empty inner world and the over-populated outer world with love into the camera, blowing kisses, teasing, with surprise: “My imagination is as it was… like a torch looking up, as if at the plane in the sky. The pieces ran 41 or a beam… it’s still moved by singularity.” Watching the simultaneously, telling a tale of heartache: the love that impressive body of Jaki Irvine’s short films gives you the hurts with the fear of losing it and the separation that sense that what she hasn’t focused on, as she tries to makes the love object sweeter, fixed in the memory like distinguish the important from the unimportant, the a home movie on a hot afternoon. Irvine’s and Franklin’s extraordinary from the everyday, hovers at the edge of relationship to the past’s painful lessons merge in the the frame, and is perhaps the unseen core of the film. narration of Towards a polar sea: “If the earth moves and swallows me up, this doesn’t prove that my trust in it Having participated in two Venice Biennales and several was misplaced. What better place for my trust could landmark exhibitions, Irvine is celebrating four solo there be?” shows this year at Frith Street Gallery, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Henry Moore In sifting through Franklin’s diary – “Drank tea… Institute, Leeds and the Paradise project space at the between hope and fear… we went silently forward” – Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Through split narration Irvine finds self-evidence, evoking conversations at and ellipsis, carefully chosen scores and constructed kitchen tables in Eyelashes, 1996, and Ivana’s answers, characters, Irvine shapes beautiful, compelling stories 2001, and recalling questions the artist asks herself about intimacy, about losing our instincts, about how we about how stories work, and how to define questions are tamed by love, by waiting. Her narratives are often themselves. submerged, like fish underwater, and her metaphors The sequence discreet. The mood, while melancholic, never slips into Towards a polar sea: whenever the ice is the most eloquent and profound of the bathos or sentimentality. Her special confluence of shifts installation. As one member of staff tells how “the sound and image remains both subtle and distinctive. party is reduced to four persons,” all four sit on the floor Towards a polar sea at Frith Street develops Irvine’s of the empty gallery, backs to the wall, each voice concerns with beauty, loss and artistic endeavour, using recounting a tale of exhaustion, persistence and failure. characters that inhabit a story, or fragment of a story, “F. could go no further, overwhelmed with grief. The that may or may not be their own. This five-part video whole party shed tears.” The piece binds the gallery installation was triggered by the diaries of nineteenth- staff into a team facing challenges on a life-and-death century explorer John Franklin, who failed in his attempts level, heroic in the face of blank expanses of whiteness – to find the Northwest Passage and once lived where the the start to every art. gallery is housed. In a moving and sparse invocation, The sorrowfulness, exacerbated by The Eels’ soundtrack, Irvine blends extracts from his diaries with her own text, is tempered by the resolute attempt to find a way spoken in voice-over by gallery staff and filmed in situ, through: “There was not one single passage, rather the so that the house itself emerges as a character in the intricate maze… provided a number of potential work. The voices, at the halting pace common to Irvine’s passages whenever the ice shifted to open the door.” In work, and the mournful musical soundtrack, ghost the the slow dissolves from one close up face to another, the rooms. In one sequence, rain falls behind the broken piece is a testimony to the commitment and dedication surface of a blacked-out windowpane, recalling the that keeps art galleries themselves open and delicately texture of Fireflies at 3am from 19992. “Showers of snow conjures the artist as explorer of the uncharted. fell through the night. Everything hurts – the trees, the Towards a polar sea delivers the sensation of walking in music and so crucially intertwined in her practice. on yourself doing something else, in a space you’ve Throughout her oeuvre, Irvine is drawn to how one already encountered, shown around by living guides you fragment can stand for a whole; how one aspect of the imagined were already dead. It’s similar to experiences lover’s body can determine or overdetermine the rest, that Irvine’s earlier characters describe, such as Marco as in Eyelashes, 1996, where a lover is mesmerised and one afternoon5, who tells of travelling to an unknown city perplexed by his lover’s eyelashes; or in Holding it all to live for a day, “to see who knows what.” There, in together, 2002, where a button on a soaked jacket on a Borgesian fashion, he spies a more elegant self, fifteen man in a downpour is the eidetic image that remains: years older, and has to turn away. A character who “It’s raining heavy wet stuff, but that’s all lost on him. presses a fortune-teller for clues in Ivana’s answers, 2001, He’s forgotten it even before it hits him.” feels “like someone else is living my life,” that if she’s “distracted for a second, things fall apart.” While Nightingale demonstrates a gorgeous synaesthesia of sight and sound, there is usually a dissonance Unlike many of Irvine’s peers in the ’90s who examined between Irvine’s sound and image, as if the artist is used dislocation and displacement in a geographical and to being slightly misunderstood, experiencing one story, cultural context, Irvine, despite living in London, Rome while remembering another, like sliding from the first 42 and Tuscany, is fuelled by a more ontological attempt to to the third person in your own life. The slippery sense locate having once been, being and coming to life, in of not belonging, being unknown, is indirect, subtle, relation to the self, to others and to the romantic tropes accumulative, enquiring, like a short story in Joyce’s we’ve inherited. Star, 2001, opens with the big brass Dubliners. You voyage into the character’s psyche, section of an orchestra, the sound of a black-and-white undergo a small epiphany and have almost lost it before weepie, the camera sweeping over a black crystal the film ends. chandelier. A woman relates a story about a man and a woman in a bar and too much vodka. The woman gets The impossibility of capturing the essence of a story is drunk and falls over, language failing to describe the central to Irvine’s work. In Another difficult sunset, 1997, precise way she falls. Irvine is interested in why romance a character tells how tigers ate his parents when he was falters and the feelings we project onto things, such as a child and then settled down to ask, “What kind of story hundreds of tiny lights glittering through pieces of pol- would you like to hear?” as if all was all right with the ished glass or a beam of light through celluloid itself. world. Headlines announcing that a tiger has mauled its keeper provide a visual and textual thread throughout the A fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute produced piece, as if to warn of the danger of imaginary beasts in Plans for forgotten works, 2004, which includes stories becoming real enough to destroy us. In Losing Nightingale, one of Irvine’s few unpeopled pieces. Doris, 1996, what appears to be a still of a woman in a Here a classical temple (the Villa Borghese in Rome) is ’30s sitting room is projected with a voice-over telling of filmed at night, but is played obscured by a veil of black- a meeting between a young man and woman during ness. Each time the nightingale, whose song is most which the tiny shift of two ice cubes in a glass absorbs noticeable at night, sings, a flickering hole of light reveals the man’s attention. When he looks up, the woman has parts of the hidden building. This irregular flame pulses vanished. “In ice-cube terms, it was a very accomplished to the birdsong and disappears as each cascade of notes and beautiful kind of movement, a kind of non-movement ends. It’s as though the sound is painting the image itself, movement.” It changes the direction of their lives, of any conjuring the Romantic poets, classical architecture, story thereafter. The non-movement is the crux of their western tropes of beauty, the dream of elsewhere. If you conversation, their inability to communicate. The non- couldn’t hear, this film shows how birdsong could look – doing is the undoing. In the image itself, the woman’s insistent, transient, dappling. As in all of Irvine’s work, head seems to tilt a fraction, her eyes blink, so that the she sees with sound. She allows the materiality of light certainty that this was a photograph shifts too, causing and dark that cause film’s magic to comment about time time and perception itself to become as unstable as and history. The film is an exquisite evocation of the the lovers and switching her position from subject to Romantic ideal of the poet as nightingale producing onlooker to narrator all at once. beauty to defy mortality. “Like stars to their appointed height they climb/ And death is a low mist which cannot blot/ The brightness it may veil.”6 Nightingale also recalls Fireflies at 3am7. In this brief film, the ‘fireflies’ could be blots of light, scratches on the celluloid. We make their meaning as Irvine honours how we signal to lovers, how we create, love and live for illusions – the biggest one of all being romance, told most passionately by cinema and In Eyelashes, the lover can’t disentangle himself from we cannot enter. Footage from the bat-house in a zoo the meaning of his lover’s eyelashes, as though love has plays on another screen. We observe them hang, clean merged them so utterly that he cannot bear to see her their webbed wings, wrap themselves up as if in black separateness. It brings to mind all the small shawls, attempt to mate, to fly. Their cage is decorated imperfections that attraction thrives on at the beginning with a painted mural of a primordial landscape complete of love, which grow to monumental proportions if desire with a robust sun and craggy rocks, as if bats like art. founders. The man’s story, told by a heavily accented The mural is there to appease us for all the wilderness female narrator, as if reading a language in translation, the bats have lost, just as Caspar David Friedrich’s is ever more removed from him. “The eyelashes hold him paintings have returned to vogue with their fantasy of hostage. The rest of the story is gone. He doesn’t know it sublime, untouched nature. Another screen shows a yet but it might not be coming back.” For Irvine, the man woman, slowly blinking at the sight of the display cases “is trying to imagine a woman… He is literally stuck in and stuffed animal head in a natural history museum, his own imagination.”8 as if the blink of an eye is all the time we have left. Our inability to know how to exist in our native landscape is The film is shot in an offhand way, like casual footage shown by a man, aimlessly circling in a field, touching of friends in a shared kitchen. It makes us keep looking, the bark of a gnarled wind-bent tree that will probably thinking about our own eyelashes, our eyelid’s move- outlive him. He sits under the tree, gets up. The image 43 ments, the way the artist uses the eye. The violins tell dissolves. He walks about again like a character who has their own withheld melodrama, the movement of the bow lost his place in another story, the one about rural Ireland like the movement of the lashes, leading the artist, the and making do from the land. The two final sections are experimenter, “to something obscure but beautiful.” shot on a disused footbridge that crosses the Liffey at The spectator walks away with a new knowing about the Strawberry Beds to the west of Dublin, near where the way stories spin out beyond the teller, beyond the artist grew up. On one screen, a prone figure in black, images they conjure, like the set of unwanted false teeth feet bare, crawls along the overgrown rungs of the that haunt the sculpture’s yard of marble statues and bridge towards an arched gateway, in a slow escape. gargoyles in Sweet tooth, 1993, one of Irvine’s first films. It is unclear what time or place she has crept out of. The image lingers, disturbs. The silver bridge at IMMA is a seven-screen installation that develops issues that have driven Irvine’s work, In the final sequence, two women in black hang upside particularly our relationship to other species. In Ivana’s down from the bridge, bonded, batlike, as instinctual answers, falcons provide the questions we ought to ask, and non-verbal as siblings, as lovers. They reflect one while it’s tigers in Another difficult sunset, and birds, bats another, move to support and embrace each other, and deer in The silver bridge. In each there is a sense merging and emerging from each other’s bodies in the that we have lost the perfect communing of creatures dance of rescue and poise of a profound relationship, in in the wild. We have curtailed their freedom, spoiled which we always sense the danger to its existence in the their habitats, catalogued and caged them in an effort to drop below. The bridge, surrounded by a tinted silver learn about, rather than from them. Another difficult forest, is the fixed point, their natural habitat. They are sunset ends with shots of a dog in a park and a woman’s not going anywhere; they have arrived. They cling, voice saying: “And we have to talk to dogs about biting suspended by their hands, until one woman falls out of if we are going to talk to them at all.” In Dani and Diego9, sight, leaving the other alone. The insects’ drone, the Irvine’s loving portrait of the sensual relationship birdcalls and batcalls on the soundtrack lament a lost between a woman and her dog, she glories in their paradise, the inevitability of endings. uncomplicated, unspoken oneness: the woman whistles and sings to the dog while it pants noisily, licks her neck, The theme of journeys leaving the lover behind recurs in her mouth. The film leaves us longing for this easy, Irvine’s work. In Another difficult sunset, the assumed-to- erotic companionship with another human. be lovers ride tube trains, wait at stations, at park benches and at the zoo, but never meet. Ivana’s answers The silver bridge opens with birds patterning a dusk sky. opens with a train pulling out of a station, a woman They multiply, break up in flight, become black ash in the hugging a steel column on the platform, as if to steady wind, or letters that have lost their form, their sequence herself from a parting or the failure of someone to arrive. in written language, or pixels scattering meaninglessly. Towards a polar sea also recounts the corrosive pain of What appears to be blind, squawking panic is a form of abandoning dying friends: “Now that you’re gone, I walk instinct we can’t know. Another section shows deer through this dead land watching the skies for the sound grazing in a sunlit glade. Here Irvine erects four white of your wings.” panelled doors, like a caution for the development that might occur here or as portals to the mythical deer world Cooler in tone than the love affair expressed through 1 Wislawa Szymborska, from People on The hottest sun, the darkest hour, a romance, the batlike a bridge, Forest Books, London, 1990 2 From The hottest sun, the darkest hour, lovers in The silver bridge have found mutual accommo- a romance, 1999 dation, a physical harmony that is interdependent and 3 Ibid. powerful. The silver bridge dispels text and music, 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. preferring the quieter drama of an older time, more in 6 Percy Shelley, The Adonais, lines 390-393, tune with a submerged inner rhythm. While The hottest 1821 sun carries the influence of European cinema, especially 7 From The hottest sun, the darkest hour, a romance, 1999 the Nouvelle Vague, The silver bridge borrows language 8 Jaki Irvine in conversation with Edwina from scientific and anthropological sources, warning of Ashton, Untitled, Autumn / Winter, 2000 the dangers of domestication and romancing the 9 From The hottest sun, the darkest hour, unknown, the unknowable, hovering and swirling in the a romance, 1999 sky. Once again, Irvine has teased and tweaked our Cherry Smyth is an Irish critic and interpretative strategies, bringing together themes of poet; she lives in London. love and loss, of our longing to recover a oneness with nature and a gentler co-existence, using strong visual Jaki Irvine’s The silver bridge, a recent 44 poetry and the right aural intensity. acquisition by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, will be shown there 13 December 2005 – 7 May 2006. Nightingale (2004) and Clever smile (2005) were shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 15 October – 30 November 2005, as The Paradise [22].

(below) (right) Jaki Irvine Jaki Irvine Ivana’s answers, 2000 The take-off, 2000 DVD still film still courtesy the artist courtesy the artist (above) (above right) Nightingale, 2004 Jaki Irvine DVD still For all the lives we’ll courtesy the artist never live, 2000 DVD still courtesy the artist

(below right) Losing Doris, 1996 DVD still courtesy the artist c . Áine O’Brien

Suturing the aesthetic and 46 the political – multiple screens, multiple realities: An interview with Isaac Julien 47

Isaac Julien Installation view ArtPace The long road to Mazatlán, 1999 San Antoino, Texas triple-screen rear projection Collaboration Isaac Julien 16mm sepia/colour film & Javier de Frutos. video transfer, sound Director: Isaac Julien duration 20', edition of 4 Choreography: Movement material Javier de Frutos courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery ÁO’B Isaac, you began as a painter and then migrated are projected onto you. You have to report from the ‘field’ to photography and film, but in recent years you have about what is happening in the street. Those positions moved away from the single-screen to the multiple- are important and necessary, but what was really screen format. You use an interesting term, the ‘meta- important was for you to articulate them in a way that cinematic’, in an interview with B. Ruby Rich (2002) to could be assimilated. The question that was always describe the impact of this move from the theatre into posed was ‘Who is your audience?’ If you produced the gallery. Could you elaborate on this? David Frankel anything that was vaguely experimental or involved in a (Art Forum, 2003) describes this transition somewhat metacinematic discourse, it was considered inauthentic differently by referring to how you are now working in a and problematic. There were institutional expectations of “segmented [aesthetic] format,” where there is often a the kinds of works you would make, if you were black. slippage between a continuity and rupture of the image in your work. Could you begin by tracing the history and Those things became quite claustrophobic, since I was context for these conceptual and political transitions, interested in pursuing certain cultural or political indeed aesthetic migrations? questions twinned with an aesthetic approach. The move into a gallery context was also a reaction to both the IJ I think it stemmed from working in film as an artist and political nature and the change in cultural climate that 48 being interested in questions that moved beyond the took place when the independent film sector had been normative, narrative expectations that the cinema-going completely disenfranchised after the shutting down of audience usually wants to receive. In a gallery context experimental film spaces, such as the schools located one was able to shift attention away from those narrative at St Martins School of Art and the Royal College, where concerns to concerns which involved the questioning of filmmakers like Cerith Wyn Evans, John Maybury and spectatorship or the viewer. The viewer embodies a Peter Greenaway all went. The interdisciplinary certain autonomy in a gallery context which is not approaches were the raisons d’être of experimental film necessarily one circumscribed by the kind of framing practice in these schools before the early ’90s. You began apparatus of cinema proper. to see the development of video art in a British context, which was very interesting in its reaction against In a gallery context there is a shift in terms of audience television, as a response to Thatcherism, a development and address. I see my work as being able to occupy within a generation that had been drawn to VCR several positions at any one time. I would say that my technologies, like Douglas Gordon, and later to digital interest, which spanned from painting originally in a technology. This dovetailed with the cultural artistic gallery context, became overshadowed by the develop- revolution that took place in the mid ’90s, dubbed the ment in media taking place up to the mid-’80s, with the ‘Young British Artists’ (YBA), when a younger generation inauguration of Channel 4 Television. of artists began to make film and video works. This video art was completely disconnected from that history and When one began to really push formal questions in that connected to a market place, in a gallery context. context it was something that was questioned in the original moment of Channel 4. What they wanted were You then have encapsulated in these two political rather politically expedient expectations – for example, moments a shift in my own practice, which comes about you were a ‘black’ film-maker, you were expected to in the mid-’90s because I sensed a possibility for produce something that was going to be in a documen- exploring aesthetic questions influenced by the new tary realist mode - and these aspirations were projected digital technology. Because video projection allowed the onto the independent film makers working at that time, possibility to show works with an almost filmic, visceral who came from certain communities, which fulfilled a quality. Also in the mid-’90s several artists, such as middle-class desire for the informative. There were social Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon, Steven problems taking place in mainland Britain and somehow McQueen, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Willie Doherty they had to be explained to a general white bourgeois come to the fore. Hence there are so many artists work- audience. It was not necessarily the interest of audiences ing in this arena that it becomes quite dynamic, some who were working class; they were interested in may even say an orthodoxy, and in a way problematically receiving a certain way of looking and reading images, supplants some of the original developments that took which moved beyond just information. Now we live in a place in the ’80s experimental-film and video scene. time of disinformation – everything has changed But perhaps not with the same kind of political radicality because we don’t receive the necessary information that of an independent film culture that existed before. we need to analyse a political situation. My practice has been shifting and migrating from one way of making an intervention, which was, first of all, in broadcasting, and then cinema. In a cinema space a number of imperatives ÁO’B Yes, it is interesting when you talk about those two perhaps the only way you can rearticulate them is historical and political moments, because there is a through a more ironic strategy. I did this by reviewing noted shift between your early Sankofa material in those modes of representation within the language in addition to perhaps Looking for Langston (1989) or even which those images get constructed, including my work Young soul rebels (1991) and your more current work. for Baadasssss cinema (2002). In the earlier work there is a deliberate, in fact strategic attempt to deconstruct stereotype, born out of a desire While my argument at the beginning was concerned and urgency to generate a new discourse on race and with repudiating stereotypical representations (Looking representation – an alternative discourse which was, as for Langston), I realised that audiences are much more you say, part of a broader pedagogical and collective sophisticated than that. Some of this idea is born out project. Whereas in the later work, and I am thinking of of reading Judith Butler’s essay Gender is burning. It is The long road to Mazatlán (2000), there is an equally about the idea of the performative, of subjects re-per- deliberate foregrounding and negotiation of the very forming an injury, foregrounding the wounding aspect grain of the stereotype. This is twinned with a complex and exploring how people who don’t have the same negotiation of multi-channels and a three-camera set-up, recourse to the dominant culture are able to replay things symptomatic of the move from the theatre into the art in much more sophisticated ways. We have a more gallery. You are clearly exploring a different (though not complicated relationship to those visual influences, since 49 entirely unrelated) set of questions with a different set it is also about ‘bad pleasure’. In Baltimore it is the bad of audiences in mind. What motivated this narrative and pleasure you receive from those kinds of images, thematic shift - to working with the seductive quality of deemed inappropriate and irredeemable, such as ’70s the stereotype as both a site of fantasy and desire for Blaxploitation films, which were the antithesis of my the spectator? earlier films I made as an independent filmmaker. I was also drawing on Stuart Hall, and Ernesto Laclau and IJ I have been concerned with this question for some Chantal Mouffe’s work on hegemony. time. Even with Looking for Langston (1989), an initial response to that film was ‘why does it look so beautiful’? ÁO’B A metaphor that runs throughout much of your Why does an artist like you who is dealing with these work is that of a ‘haunting’, eliciting a preoccupation subjects make a work which is quite formal, aesthetically with questions of history, memory, the phantasmatic and developed and fairly stylised? This question is typical of the cinematic – we see this also in the early Sankofa how one is expected in certain circles to deliberately work. Yet all of these narrative elements seem to come unsuture aesthetics and the representation of pleasure together in Paradise omeros (2002). For me, this is a and politics. Somehow those two projects are considered fascinating and timely piece, given the current discourse separate. My interest is in trying to relocate questions and debates surrounding migration. It is also a very of pleasure and politics within the same frame, which I sophisticated piece in the way in which it weaves fairly have been involved with for some time. I call it the contested and contentious issues. On the one hand, reparation of aesthetics’. I try to, at least in an ethical Paradise omeros explores migration as both a narrative sense, rearticulate the wounding projected by the of physical and cultural displacement, a history of trans- dominant regime of images that one is bombarded with position in terms of the transatlantic passage through and which indeed can be stereotypical. But I don’t think slavery, simultaneously dramatising the dated, neverthe- I am interested in just undoing the stereotype. less remembered, politics and practices of assimilation. Yet it also explores the wider implications of migration It has been very productive to be involved in work which through a dramatisation of history, which takes the form is connected to the notion of the developing phantasmat- of ‘embodied memory’, for example migrant histories ic aesthetic, where I utilise politics and fantasy together. as read through the sensual and the somatic. Could you Within Thatcherism, both her agenda and certain right- imagine creating a work like this in a single-screen wing ideologies were fused together. This is tied to format or could you only create a work like this in a something we spoke about a lot in the mid-’80s: how multi-screen format? could one think through such a dynamic, how could one get to grips with something which was developing at a IJ Actually, there is a single-screen version of Paradise much more deep-seated level. These concerns are omeros which has been shown in film-festival contexts. continued and developed in my gallery films such as The The single screen enables it to connect to a cinema long road to Mazatlán (1999) and Baltimore (2003), which audience, which has been built around my film work. appropriate popular cultural motifs both from black and The multi-screen works begin to interrogate and inhabit queer cultures. By that time, in the late ’90s and early the multi-temporalities which the gallery offers by the 2000, you begin to witness a global spectacularization in multi-screen aesthetic approach I have developed in my relation to these representations, and I started to think practice. At the same time it meditates on the questions of vision. This digital technology continued my interest but lose the migrant’s voice, it seems to me. This is the in cinematic techniques, thus enabling different ways of dilemma that Derek Walcott’s poem expresses within the looking at the moving image, which draws attention to a piece – but the important point is that the protagonist is multi-valiant viewing situation and also enables the also able to find a language to describe the current transgression of time that can occur in and between experience that he is inhabiting, which questions his frames side by side, in relation to each other. It is also a relationship to his sense of being. It is this kind of reflection on the processes of digitalisation, twinned philosophical question that gets continually marginalised with how you can experiment with the aesthetic in a way in the ideologies of subjecthood or nationhood in debates in which vision itself is questioned, for example: Why ‘about national belonging’. What are the psychic three screens? Why this mode of presentation? Of course transitions? I am interested in the notion of ‘affect’ in it could be seen as a modern form of history painting – my earlier works where there is a much more ideological, the triptych has a long art-historical legacy. You are able perhaps political expediency at work. I was always to have a different set of relationships to how you are interested in the ‘interiority’ of what was being said, viewing gallery films, in contrast to a normative narrative and perhaps in these gallery works there is a possibility linear progression in the cinema. In multi-screen work for this re-articulation to be more subtle but not less you are utilising ideas of ‘parallel montage’, 5.1 surround- political. 50 sound, not usually something you have in single-screen works. There is a more disjunctive and creative relation- ÁO’B The concept of ‘créolité’ is a term used quite a bit ship that you can develop and explore around ‘time’ and when critics engage with Paradise omeros but it is also ‘memory’ that cannot be experienced in single-screen rehearsed by artists and critics engaging with work in quite the same way. philosophies, politics and practices of globalisation and the legacy and transcendence of still entrenched ÁO’B Yet there is often a desire, at least in dominant postcolonial and imperial narratives of imperialism, in debates on migration, to pin the migrant subject down, contrast to what is described as “accelerated processes in fact to pin down migrant histories – to trace, map and of cultural syncretism” (Documenta 11_ Platform 3, 2003). control the trajectories of departure and destination. And you’ve pointed to some of these complex This desire to navigate and document migrant journeys configurations of identity with regard to the various can be interpreted as a form of violence in the form of transitions evident in your most recent work. Do you surveillance. In Paradise omeros, however, migration is think that your future work will draw from and contribute depicted within a much more complex global landscape. to ongoing debates about créolité, since ‘accelerated It engages with the politics and lived effects of globalisa- processes of cultural syncretism’ are performed in tion but also challenges these global / local trajectories unpredictable ways and cannot be easily documented? in very provocative ways. I raise this issue because it provides a marked contrast to a question asked of you a while ago, a question which IJ In Paradise omeros you have the representation of the highlights a certain type of prescriptive orthodoxy and football which is meant to be a metaphor of the globe as desire on the part of certain audiences to have you an object and which travels in tandem along with the clarify your position or describe how subject positions protagonist’s geographical displacements. The football is are inscribed in your work. The question was whether or gestured with and kicked around on the English football not you work as a black, gay filmmaker and the answer pitch. This inanimate object takes on a certain positional- you gave was, “I speak from that positionality, not for it.” ity connected to the Hansel Jules’ character, who is the But if you were asked that question again today, how main protagonist in Paradise omeros. His migratory would you respond to it? Indeed, would you even want to subjectivity is in constant motion in the piece, he and the answer it? ball shifting and moving across the different territories and geographical spaces. In the gallery context we wit- IJ It would reveal more to me about the person who ness these from different perspectives simultaneously poses the question rather than how I see myself now as and it is my hope that the viewer is able to view the piece a film maker and artist. ‘Time’ changes positionality and more than once, through repeated viewings. The dialectic the kind of questions that you may find interesting to occurs when there is an ongoing relationship through the answer; take, for example, our current imperial war, looping of the narrative. The thing that is important is not where we have Condoleeza Rice – a black Republican so much the debates around tracing the trajectory of woman who’s rumoured to be a lesbian in queer circles – where certain people are coming from and where they at the forefront of marshalling the war in Iraq. The are going, but what kind of way does migration and promise of radicality through one’s identity – to be gay travelling change a subject’s subjectivity or a person’s and black - would be a nonsense nowadays. If someone way of viewing or experiencing the world? The more we wants to trace the trajectories to the kind of things I was debate migrancy, the more we sensationalise the event involved in, well that position was very important and it was an empowering position in the same way that Fantôme créole, which is West Africa. In the work, I trace feminism was for women, and of course these questions the possibility of thinking about an imaginary political never disappear. For example, the riots in Paradise landscape. The place that I journey through is Burkina omeros are not from the ’80s. They are from the riots that Faso, and I chose it because it is the country of Africa’s took place in Northern England in 2001, in the very most important film festival called ‘Fespaco’, a pan- locations in England where the bombers who took their African film event. I explore the different locations and sad vengeance on the streets of London on 7 July 2005, different architectural sites and spaces as a way of came from; identity seems far more slippery now, and of allowing us to move through these ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ course has come back to haunt the imperial centres. geographical locations and spaces, and the juxtaposition gets played out in Fantome créole across the four screens. ÁO’B Paradise omeros is also a timely piece, because one of the critiques that has been directed at Labour’s ÁO’B Is this your first four-screen piece? ‘multicultural’ policies in the UK, while obviously having IJ Yes. It is quite a visually complex work illustrating an moved on from the discourse and practice of assimila- aesthetic shift. A shift that is also in Paradise omeros in tion, is that these policies have created a form of ethnic that there are different locations being portrayed, but ghettoisation, where you now have a deep sense of it is only at the end of Paradise omeros that you get this disaffection amongst young minority subjects, in 51 juxtaposition happening simultaneously when the two particular those who do not feel part of any civic society protagonists are walking backwards surrounded by structure in any real or meaningful way. A very complex concrete architecture, and you have this image of the cultural and political malaise is emerging, and yet the bird of paradise flower from St. Lucia that blooms in the response to it is quite simplistic and one-dimensional. centre of the triptych. In Fantome créole one makes that IJ Very. If I were to link a work back to Paradise omeros, mélange a prominent aesthetic quest. it would be Territories made in 1984. I think Territories poses a question about political discontent and it is a ÁO’B Did you coin the term ‘post-cinematic video art’? film I made over twenty years ago. It is a single-screen IJ Ye s. piece which has a multi-layered aesthetic approach and polyvalent in the way that it is trying to rearticulate Áine O’Brien is Director political questions, which felt very urgent at that of the Centre for particular time. It is interesting to think about that film as Transcultural Research and Media Practice, one that had riot footage in it and then in 2002 there is School of Media, Dublin yet another glimmer of it in Paradise omeros. Institute of Technology.

ÁO’B Though there is a very different security apparatus With thanks to Elizabeth Bowley. in place now. A season of Isaac Julien’s IJ Absolutely. films takes place at the Irish Museum of Modern ÁO’B What are you working on at the moment? Art, Dublin, 21 September 2005 – 15 January 2006. IJ I have just finished a four-screen piece called Fantôme créole for the Pompidou, which opened in May 2005. It will be shown in a three-screen version at the Victoria Miro Gallery in October 2005. The Pompidou combined True north, which re-frames a historical ques- tion around the possibility that Matthew Henson, an African-American explorer, supposedly the helper and partner of Robert E. Perry during his polar trek in 1909, perhaps got to the North Pole before him. Thirty years after Perry’s death, he confessed to the danger and vio- lence he experienced when he had made it known to Perry that maybe he got there first. My interest in this historical interpretation is also connected to the politics of the sublime and its relation to the trauma or the slave sublime, developed by Paul Gilroy, and this story in the four-screen piece is then linked to the other location of (left) Isaac Julien Paradise Omeros, 2002 triple DVD projection, 16mm film transferred to DVD, 20' 29" installation: Documenta 11_Platform5: Ausstellung/Exhibition Binding Building, Kassel Germany, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery

(right) Isaac Julien Baltimore, 2003 triple-screen projection, 16mm b&w/colour film, DVD transfer, sound, 11' 36" courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery

(below) Isaac Julien True North series, 2004 triptych of digital prints on Epson premium photo glossy, edition of 6 image: 100 x 100cm each frame: 114 x 114cm courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery c . Pauline Hadaway

54 Soul-searching and soul-selling: the new accountability in the arts Within the subsidized arts, important conversations again come under fire from sections of the arts around arts practice, the social value of art and the community for its perceived failure to act as a voice for relationship between art and the public rarely occur the arts in Northern Ireland. While there is certainly except at moments of crisis and then merely as subtext. considerable room for improvement, not least in ACNI’s The ongoing reorganisation of Northern Ireland’s public record of resisting political interference and winning administration has provided the latest field of battle, financial support for the sector, this criticism surely begs where, inevitably in an environment where resources the question, does the arts community, in all its current are scarce and competition fierce, unresolved ideological diversity, have a single, collective voice, and if so, what and aesthetic concerns have tended once again to is it saying? become externally – which is to say politically directed – focused on the prize of official recognition in the form From the earliest days of formal government interven- of funding. tion, official approaches to the arts have exhibited a fundamental consistency, not only in the privileged Organized around the contingencies of conflict manage- status they confer upon art’s incidental benefits, but ment, and bearing an historic legacy of corruption and in preferences shown to art forms and practice which misrule, Northern Ireland’s public sector is currently appear to uphold official points of view. Public invest- governed, or, perhaps more accurately, over-governed, ment in the arts, no less than any other form of 55 through a diffusion of centralized power across an often patronage, demands successful delivery of specific confusing array of local authorities, voluntary agencies, outcomes and benefits, and in favouring product over politically appointed and executive public bodies. Four process tends to underacknowledge the value and years on from the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern purpose of arts practice in and of itself. Meanwhile, Ireland Executive launched “a comprehensive and outside the celebrity spotlight, artists generally find strategic review of all aspects of the public sector” themselves at the margins of political interest. (Review of Public Administration or RPA) in the interests of improving efficiency and cost effectiveness in public- Not to say that political values placed on arts and service delivery and enhancing political and financial cultural activities are intrinsically hostile to claims for accountability.1 As part of a consultation process, a ‘artistic excellence’. On the contrary, in the immediate government review team has been inviting responses post war era, national prestige aside, the role of art as an from interested parties to proposed structural changes. integral element and driver of intellectual or knowledge These proposals are chiefly informed by the idea of a based culture was understood as justification enough for simplified model of public administration, made up of a state subsidy. Indeed, given the failure of the market to regional tier, incorporating the assembly, government deliver these prized public benefits, financial assistance departments and district authorities, and a second tier was often, quite logically, channelled towards less comprising local councils, health agencies and other popular, even abstruse arts practices, where veneration subregional bodies. The proposals also envisage local for the selfless pursuit of excellence chimed with a government as the “bedrock of a reformed and stream- democratising mission to make the best of the arts lined public administration,” where councils would take available outside of a cultivated and well-heeled clique. on new powers and responsibilities transferred from The political landscape has since undergone a radical central government and politically appointed agencies or transformation, where cultural policies based on ‘value ‘quangos’. Within these new arrangements, the position for money’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘accountability’ reflect of independent and executive public bodies remains open wider political intentions to scale down and reorganize to question, with arguments currently ranging from public provision under quasi-market disciplines, an rationalisation and reform to abolition with the transfer environment in which the ambition for human centred of their functions to local or regional government. progress that established Britain’s post war welfare state now seems hopelessly utopian. Disorientated by The latest round of consultation, focusing on the future an increasingly morbid preoccupation with human role of executive public bodies, such as the Arts Council failure, all sections of political life appear to have of Northern Ireland (ACNI), has generated much debate rejected the project of social progress in favour of penny- throughout the subsidized arts sector, disclosing once pinching control, where, in the words of a recent Arts again the complex interplay of motives and concerns, Council chairman, any sentiment or “vague hope that one which underpin so much contemporary discussion day enlightenment might descend” upon the masses, around arts policy. For beyond an apparent consensus now expresses “an attitude that simply won’t do.”2 expressed around the need to effect more efficient and rational administrative systems, divert resources away from bureaucracy towards arts practice, and retain arm’s length approaches to state subsidy, ACNI has once From the mid-1990s, in the context of wider government fracture? For, historically at least, the business of anxieties around growing levels of political disengage- keeping political interests at arm’s length has always ment and social exclusion, official interest has focussed relied on a defence of artistic freedom, defined through on art forms and practices which claim, as their primary the imposition of aesthetic criteria equal to, if not over purpose, a desire to involve or connect with the broadest and above, questions of social or political relevance. possible public. Following the 1997 UK General Election, In other words, defending artistic autonomy as the the new Secretary of State at the Department for expression and manifestation of individual (or indeed Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) explicitly defined one collective) freedom appears by implication to demand a of the key values of art and culture as “their ability to defence of privilege. provide ways for the people to come together to express their belief in participation in society.” In Northern Throughout the postwar period, the so called ‘arm’s Ireland, in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, length’ relationship between the state and state remarkably similar views have been expressed, often sponsored art evolved as a kind of balancing act, where disclosing unanimity between otherwise implacable a self-confident Arts Council appealed to an educative political enemies. In 2002, DUP councillor Nelson and civilizing mission, entirely dependent on its position McCausland, former Chair of the Development (Arts) as the sole arbiter of cultural excellence within a unified 56 subcommittee at Belfast City Hall, listed “the promotion and exclusive sector. Although co-operating with the of cultural diversity, and further exploration of positive Treasury, the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), images of Belfast” as two key benefits of localized supported by the prestige of a membership which cultural and community activity,3 a view echoed by his included such artistic ‘luminaries’ as Jacob Epstein, successor, Sinn Féin’s Eoin O’Broin. Commenting on Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud, remained both Belfast City Council’s 2003 Culture and Arts Plan, unashamedly patrician and doggedly committed to the The Spirit of the City, O’Broin welcomed the proposed preservation of “artistic freedom” and “self government shift of “culture to a more central position on the urban for the arts.” Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, under the regeneration agenda.”4 influence of what critic Ian Hill calls a “distinctly tweedy, west-Brit establishment” within the Arts Council NI, Nor has the Arts Council of Northern Ireland been averse government and the arts were enjoying a relationship to embracing explicitly political agendas, notwithstand- which was perhaps, not so much ‘arm’s length’, more ing its formal commitment to political independence. ‘out of sight out of mind’, an approach which was to In its response to the RPA consultation process, while define official arts policy in ‘the Province’ for much of acknowledging that art is “not always about consumption the following six decades.5 and audiences,” ACNI placed the promotion of “joined up government” at the head of its “vision,” while asserting In this context, ‘arm’s length’ was sustained not only its support for the arts as a contributor to “peace within a progressive or, in the case of NI, disinterested building” and a vehicle for “non threatening” cultural political climate, but by a widely held, though far from expression. uncontested, belief in the unique quality of great art to transcend the limitations and divisions of everyday life. Fluctuating according to the political preoccupations of In 1953, although struggling to define the relationship of the day, official approaches to the subsidized arts, art to “the controversies that agitate the market place,”6 whether militantly instrumental or liberally egalitarian, Clement Greenberg unequivocally lauded the avant- remain pivotal to the formation of cultural policy. garde movement for being “about itself”: “interested Conversely, in a sector where the space between arts above all in solutions to (formal) problems of surface and practice and official policy has always been contested, perspective in painting, of tonality and dissonance in artists have generally recognized and occasionally music, of language and depth psychology in literature”7. resisted official requirements to demonstrate the Yet, in the United States in the era of McCarthyism and external benefits of their work, over and above freedom Cold War imperialism, is it possible that this apparently to make art. It therefore comes as no surprise that during conservative identification of art as a “separable sphere the latest round of RPA consultation, opposition to politi- of human activity”8 not only remained consistent with cal interference was expressed as a key area of shared support for radical social and political movements, but, concern, where even those who opposed each other on for many on the Left, seemed to provide one of “the last the question of abolishing the Arts Council agreed on the defensible enclaves of political activity and dissent” need to retain some kind of ‘arm’s length’ agency. Yet, in an otherwise conformist society?9. As late as 1978, while resistance to external political interference in spite of prevailing postmodernist challenges around appears to offer the sector the opportunity of organising questions of relevance, cultural elitism and even around a shared position, does this apparent unanimity authorship itself, radical playwright David Hare defended simply draw attention to an underlying and possibly fatal artistic autonomy against political interference from both Left and Right with an appeal to the grand narrative of political intentions. Meanwhile July 2003 saw the unveil- human emancipation. For Hare the function of art was ing of “another landmark public art work” in Belfast, the not to proselytise, but to “refresh” our lives “with images, latest in a thirty-piece sculpture trail “connecting people, which are not official, not approved; that break what places and art” and “celebrating the changing face” of George Orwell called ‘the Geneva Conventions of the the city13 ‘The Calling’, standing fifteen metres above the mind.’”10 traffic at the gateway to the city’s newly designated ‘Cultural Quarter’, claims to represent, “positive Of course, beyond public attachments to the principle communication between people and their environment” of artistic freedom, the actual business of keeping in the form of two brightly coloured human figures government interest at arm’s length has always required standing on chairs, calling to each other through cupped extraordinary levels of pragmatism. At the height of hands.14 According to Laganside Corporation, the Margaret Thatcher’s commitment to the promotion of development agency, which commissioned the work, this ‘enterprise culture’, the ACGB freely appealed for “eye catching” structure, designed to glow at night, is government subsidy in the language of economic devel- “unique, innovative and inspirational” and will “generate opment, or as one contemporary commentator called it, a sense of pride and place and encourage further “arts as industry talk.”11 Today, where s o much o f revitalisation of this city centre location.” contemporary art is community orientated, concerned 57 with extending the terms of public engagement and the Whatever its value as a contributor to economic recovery development of a ‘democratic aesthetic’, a skilful and civic pride, the “unique and innovative” quality of administrator can readily discover innate and authentic this kind of work is open to question, given the prolifera- coincidences between arts practice and the ambitions of tion of ‘public art’ as an identikit feature of almost every public policy, through which funding opportunities may urban renewal programme across the British Isles. be realised. In other words, even in the subsidized sector, From Tyneside to Laganside, from Southwark to Salford always constrained by the imperative of political favour, Quays, form and quality may vary, but typically each where art for art’s sake has never really been an option, bridge, statue and signature building derives from a set recognition of external policy objectives need not imply of interchangeable meanings, informed by local political an extension of political partnership let alone abject concerns, usually expressed through the new language submission to the deadening embrace of official of connection, reconnection, transformation and endorsement. Yet somehow pragmatic approaches to renewal. For many critics, the derivative quality of much policy guidelines appear to have given way to an contemporary public art is a product of the current mania unprecedented enthusiasm for political partnerships to incorporate commissioning within strategies for social within the subsidized arts in Britain and Northern inclusion and economic regeneration, demonstrating Ireland. So much so that sections of the arts community once again the increasingly destructive tendency to in Northern Ireland lobby long and hard to promote their impose political dogma onto contemporary arts practice. status as political movers and shakers, bringers of peace, prosperity and progress, while arts initiatives With their assimilation of political language, and concern which promote ‘culture’ as a force to cohere and rebuild to deliver social and economic benefits, documents like civil society often seem so closely in line with the One Belfast and art work like the Laganside sculpture trail political objectives of the Northern Ireland Act that they can be read as simply the latest expression of a new kind could easily be mistaken for operational models. So, of partnership between the subsidized arts and political when precisely did ‘being accountable’ shift its meaning institutions in Northern Ireland, in which relationships from accountability for the allocation of government have become more closely defined, contractual and money to accountability to government itself? formally stated. Yet given such apparent unanimity between political and artistic interests, it is interesting In 2002, ‘One Belfast’, the city’s bid to become European that controversies over issues of funding allocation, capital of culture, loudly proclaimed the value of public consultation and respect for artistic freedom should engagement in cultural activities as an essential element continue to afflict relationships within the sector. in the process of building a shared society. Not content with merely “replacing the peace lines with peace” the While the Arts Council of Northern Ireland finds itself bid further promised to “develop bold policies and at the eye of the current political storm, many of the arts projects” that would “provide opportunities for dialogue organisations now calling for its abolition, alongside and expression,” build “understanding and trust,” and transfer of its powers to “strong local authorities “make Belfast a centre for investment as a global cultural supporting the arts throughout the region,”15 were only destination.”12 The bid was unsuccessful, although its recently and very noisily taking Belfast City Council to failure may have had more to do with weaknesses within task. In March 2002, following internal reorganisation and local arts structures than any objection to an excess of amidst a consultation process which lasted nearly two years, Belfast City Council’s ‘Culture and Arts Unit’ kicking against conformity, and more about what controversially switched 20% away from core funding happens when political and cultural partnerships break for arts and community arts organisations (principally down, one of the most striking aspects of the dispute is city-centre based), into a new ‘outreach initiative’ which the sheer inoffensiveness of the contested material, would channel direct funding to inner city ‘community particularly in a cultural context of mainstream TV where partners’ in designated areas of the city (specifically ‘ordinary couples’ have sex on camera, or even compared underresourced wards in the north). This sudden and to the average content of teenage lifestyle magazines immediate loss of direct funding at once “plunged the and tabloid newspapers. The misunderstanding appears entire (arts) sector into crisis and public protest.”16 to arise from a widespread acquiescence to cultural North Belfast councillor Eoin O’Broin defended the policies that reflect an entirely instrumental view of council’s initiative in the name of “democratising the the arts, in which there is an expectation that publicly arts,” countering sectoral protests with charges of funded arts and cultural activity, lacking their own “cultural elitism.” internal dynamic or agency, will always reflect community interests and produce specified social The timing, within days of Imagine Belfast submitting its benefits. In such a climate, where artists, arts bid, was disastrous, and yet City Council’s position had institutions and policymakers appear to talk the same 58 been made perfectly clear in a draft consultative language, being even slightly ‘off message’ can be document published six months earlier. Culture and Arts, enough to get you into hot water. You failed to deliver a the Spirit of the City (2001) had explicitly stated City ‘positive image of the city’? You published material that Council’s view of ‘culture’ as “an expression of identity… an individual or community found offensive? These are and a force for personal and social development.” narrow boundaries, but unfortunately in a prevailing Having redefined ‘culture’ in terms of its ability to culture of complaint and claims making, the ground is “generate employment and develop the economic infra- further narrowing, as definitions of what is offensive are structure,” “strengthen community networks,” “improve stretched to include hurt feelings, being upset, or just general educational levels and provide a pathway to feeling uncomfortable. knowledge based institutions,” it was surely not unrea- sonable for local councillors representing deprived inner Why does the arts sector appear so defensive in its rela- city wards to demand redistribution of these cultural/ tionship to the public? By linking arts practice so closely political benefits from the centre to the periphery.17 to external agendas, are artists cutting the ground away beneath their own ambition and purpose? Endlessly Overlooking the potentially contentious nature of local claiming public benefit in the face of official incredulity, authority relationships to the arts or appealing for the yet claiming no moral or political agency of their own, do retention of arm’s length approaches to funding while artists become ghostwriters to an increasingly skeptical simultaneously demanding greater “political involvement public? A public who must be courted and flattered but in a partnership-working model,” suggests a sector never seriously challenged? In Northern Ireland, where afflicted with either a serious case of memory loss or a artistic freedoms are increasingly being called into dangerous detachment from principle. Or perhaps the question by the spread of bureaucratic rule-making, the confusion is simply indicative of an environment in which effect has been to further encourage an orientation away artists, arts organisations and policy makers increasingly from supporting art on its own terms towards the find themselves uncomfortably close, yet somehow political imperatives of inclusion and participation. engaged in a form of mutually incomprehensible dialogue. Consequently many arts institutions find their core work The ongoing dispute between Factotum and Belfast City subordinated to external agendas which value footfall Council is symptomatic of both the limitations inherent and the pulling in of new audiences, above aspirations to within close political / cultural partnerships and their artistic excellence; the most prized of all new audiences potential to generate confusion. Last year, Belfast City being the category known as “traditional non attenders Council arts subcommittee passed a vote of censure at arts events.” In seeking to connect with this imagined against Factotum, publishers of The Vacuum, the arts- constituency, audience development becomes less about and-cultural review, after upholding a complaint from a promoting the work artists and arts organisations do, single member of the public concerning ‘God’- and and more about creating new approaches to arts practice ‘Satan’-themed issues published in June 2004. The basis that will supposedly make the experience of art more of the complaint was that the issues contained material accessible. And yet, if the arts or indeed politics serve no which was offensive and in bad taste. Factotum has higher purpose than simply to ‘connect’ with the public, challenged the Council’s position under Human Rights how soon before they are emptied of any intrinsic legislation and the case is currently before the courts in object or meaning? What’s more, if ‘relevance’ and Belfast. Less about blasphemy, pornography or artists ‘participation’ were ever to become dominant features of programming policy, would any arts practice, which the public did not spontaneously embrace, simply be placed 1 http://www.rpani.gov.uk/ out of bounds? 2 Gerry Robinson, quoted in Julian Stallabrass, High art lite, Verso, 1999, p.289 It has, for example, become an orthodoxy among cultural 3 Belfast City Council seeks to empower local policy makers that “traditional non attenders at arts communities with new culture and arts events,” preferring activities, which offer opportunities funding, press release, 22 July 2002 4 Quoted Irish Times, Saturday 3 August for participation and social interaction, feel fed up and 2003 awkward in art galleries, which offer nothing more than 5 Ian Hill, ‘Arts administration’, in M. silent space, white walls and endless gazing at inanimate Carruthers and S. Douds (eds.), Stepping stones, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2002 objects. Many go further, accusing galleries of making 6 Quoted in High Art Lite, op. cit., p.238 their audiences feel ‘uncomfortable’ or even ‘threatened’ 7 Jacob Epstein, ‘What to do about the arts’, by showing work that lacks relevance to lived experience. in K. Washburn and J. Thornton (eds.), Dumbing down, essays on the strip-mining Where art might once have been valued in terms of of American culture, New York, 1995 its ability to unsettle and dislocate audiences from the 8 F. Frascina, Art, politics and dissent. immediacy of here and now, galleries are currently Aspects of the art left in sixties America, more likely to find themselves under fire for showing Manchester University Press, 1999, p.108 9 ibid., p.109 ‘difficult’ work. 10 David Hare, Obedience, struggle and 59 revolt, Faber and Faber, 2005, p.125 Truth is, most speculation on the desires and anxieties 11 Public Funding for the Arts; the Arts in a of this anonymous mass of people simply reflects the State, Adam Smith Institute, 1988 12 One Belfast: imagine Belfast, bid for prejudices of very small cultural and political elites. European City of Culture 2008, published While most in the public sector share a genuine aspira- 2002 tion to open up the arts to wider audiences, the myth of 13 Laganside Corporation spokesperson quoted in the South Belfast News, 11 July the hostile, disinterested public and the pressure to ‘give 2003 audiences what they want’ simply encourages a lazy, 14 South Belfast News, 11 July 2003 patronising style, which underestimates the intelligence 15 Arts sector response to the Review of Public Administration, September 2005 of real individuals and their capacity to enjoy the discov- 16 J. Gray, Variant, Vol.2, No.16, winter 2002 ery of new and surprising experiences. Denigration of the 17 Adopting a ‘cultural power sharing’ audience is perhaps the ugliest expression of contempo- approach to arts funding may prove problematic, given Belfast’s deep sectarian rary cultural elitism, for any genuine commitment to divisions. Artist Daniel Jewesbury recently cultural democracy presupposes belief in an enquiring, addressed the issue of communities conscious and judgemental audience, worthy of respect. appealing to culture as a means of gaining political advantage – “one of the few Many of the arts sector’s problems around agreeing a weapons that doesn’t have to be decommissioned.” Where political positions direction and purpose for public policy ultimately revolve are increasingly backed up with appeals around unresolved questions of how art should be to cultural tradition, and where existing practiced and its relationship to the public. While the political arrangements may encourage an understanding of identity as something arts community in Northern Ireland is yet to find a single culturally, rather than consciously or voice, by arguing that the public benefits of art, whatever socially determined, artists are right to they may be, are no more than the fruits of arts practice, raise difficult questions in defence of their independence. mightn’t it be possible, whatever our differences of approach, to logically defend the practice of art on its own terms? Pauline Hadaway is Director of Belfast Exposed, Belfast. It is imperative to continue the search for shared positions based on collective interests and secured upon principle, and somehow to pull the ongoing conversation around art’s social value and relationship to the public out of the maze of cultural theory, away from the narrow interests of policy makers and off the divisive battleground of competitive public funding. For until artists and arts organisations have begun to seriously address their internal tensions – in a spirit of open enquiry and through clear argument and debate – they should be wary of opening the sector up to further external intervention. c . 60 Reviews

Belfast Perspective 2005 Tim Stott 94 | Prepossession Brian Kennedy 97 | Carlow Cornelia Hesse-Honnegger: Heteroptera: images of a mutating world Martin McCabe 78 | Cobh Julie Bacon: A hymn for travellers and the absent Alannah Hopkin 92 | Derry Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh: Musicpula T2, MO, NO Damien Duffy 88 | Dublin was du brauchst Noel Kelly 75 | Alice Maher: Rood Sheila Dickinson 86 | Heather Allen and NS Harsha: Mural Colin Graham 100 | Galway Ronnie Hughes, Formacopia Gavin Murphy 70 | Kells/ Wales Strata Anne Price-Owen 72 | Linz Ars Electronica Paul O’Brien 83 | Sligo Site-ations International 2005/6: Sense in place, Ireland Sarah Browne 80 | Venice Venice: The long weekend Valerie Connor 62 | Northern Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale Francesca Bonetta 64 | Venice: Pavilion of the Republic of Ireland Alenka Gregoricˇ 67 | Brian Wilson: An art book

Maria Fusco 102 | c . Tomasz Domanski Home sweet home performance still Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, 2005 courtesy Model:Niland 61 c . Valerie Connor Venice Biennale 6-11 October 2005 Venice: The

62 long weekend Patrick Bloomer and Nicholas Keogh BinBoat, 2005 performance shot, Venice courtesy the artists Interviewed by Suzanna Chan in Meanwhile, in the same square, the opened up in a woman’s hand, The Nature of things, the eponymous hoards fed the multitudes, as bringing Johnston closer to the catalogue for Northern Ireland’s tourists acquired sachets of bird- people around her and vice versa as participation in the fifty-first Venice feed to attract the pigeons. The the transgression was assimilated Biennale, Hugh Mulholland little packets were adorned with by Johnston into the unfolding oral describes what motivated him to anecdotes of urban folk and civilian narrative. The lady vanished and the put together the events that life in Belfast, part of Aisling gathering moved from an area with happened around the city over O’Beirn’s project, which also few paths to a paved courtyard, The long weekend, by explaining included the addition of decals of Johnston all the while motioning that he wanted to leave some things voice patterns to cups in a lagoon- the imagination of the listeners, to chance. This intentional pursuit front café on Giudecca, the island challenging the group to lead or of the unpredictable is resonant of opposite but closest to Venice itself. to follow. the curator’s expressed wish to also Elsewhere, walking the streets of foster elements of surprise as part Venice were Richard West and Alistair Wilson’s installation Turning of the curatorial project. With all Stephen Hackett, aka Factotum, the the tide opened the following that happened over the days and publisher of The fair. The freesheet evening, appropriately during a nights of The long weekend it was featured reports, commentary, and Venetian downpour. The installation 63 apparent that those most surprised histories on fairs big and small, of four fountains produced in a of all were the tourists, police, past and present, of guns, cars, industrial block foam replicated the gondoliers, and the people of Venice livestock, leprechauns, and tugs o’ central fountain in the historic in whose field of vision the artists’ war, with contributions by Leontia courtyard of the Locanda ai Santi actions materialised as if out of the Flynn, Gillian McIntosh, Paul Young, Apostoli. The courtyard opened blue. Colin Graham, Vanessa Toulmin, onto the Grand Canal, the ambient Paul Moore, Daniel Jewesbury, sound of the busy waterway adding Moored at Campo San Barnaba, Rok Stupar, Tony Swift, Jason Mills, to the sound and projected images late at night, Nicky Keogh and Eamonn Hughes, John Morrow, of Wilson’s installation. Paddy Bloomer’s boat made of Ruth Graham, Brian O’Kane, and For five days in October the artists Belfast detritus attracted small Gerald Dawe. crowds of local passers-by who and curator had an audience with stopped, smiled, and laughing with The start of the The long weekend Venice and the Biennale. Misgiving pleasure, wondered at the spectacle was heralded by Sandra Johnston’s about the invisibility of the event of the thing. From time to time the performance, in the late evening, due to its being unconnected to boat was boarded from the shore by at the Istituto Provinciale per some other similar Biennale-centred onlookers. The BinBoat, a phantas- l’Infanzia. Johnston, who was also activity betrays a myopic view of magoria of sounds and images, showing a video work in the long- what is possible within otherwise proved irresistible to even the most term exhibition of Northern Irish conventional frameworks and is territorial users of the waterways. artists at the same place, allowed blithely ignorant of the value of Stories circulated of gondoliers a crowd to gather and find their happenstance in the everyday laying down their oars to applaud feet in a small garden otherwise experiences of the chance witness, the vessel on the Grand Canal and hidden by a high wall from the the backward glance, the snap, and of policemen taking photos as adjacent street, or calle. Listening, the souvenir for all the people – and mementos. The latter was all the as Johnston spoke, the need to the artist – who were part of The more poignant as Peter Richards, watch her movements came and long weekend, whether by accident having several locations under his went. The audience was led by her or design. belt prior to setting up his portable fragments of apparently remem- camera obscura on St. Mark’s bered scenes from another place Square, found his progress halted and recollections of her passage through the intervention of the through the city in the days prior to police. A good-humoured the performance. An array of encounter, by all accounts; sounds mingled in the highly nonetheless the presence of the box acoustic environment, where proved to be perplexing enough to minutiae are especially amplified. render it a Rumsfeldian ‘unknown As the performer and the unknown’ and needing removal. assembled moved through their paces, of course a mobile phone rang and a small blue window c . Francesca Bonetta Venice Biennale June – November 2005

64 Northern Ireland at the 51st Venice The 51st International Venice Biennale of Visual Arts, in the year 2005. The first participation by Northern Ireland in a space Biennale separate from the national pavilion of Ireland. That decision, taken by the commissioner and curator Hugh Mulholland, is not a separation from the Republic of Ireland for political or historical reasons, but rather the fitting context in which to give voice and relevance to panorama of artistic activity in Northern Ireland.

Ulster is not a very extensive region, but it is one that is original and interesting in terms of its artistic development. Art often succeeds, despite a world which often devotes itself unconditionally to globalisation, in focusing on and making stand out the experiences of diverse territories, preserving their identity and uniqueness.

Michael Hogg Pivot, 2005 installation shot, Venice courtesy the artist Fourteen artists, eight ‘permanent’ typical landscapes, with trees, other. The artist is playing on two and six invited to participate with waterfalls and hills whose contours levels: on the one hand, there is a performances during the Long are barely sketched. The back- look at nature and its elements, on weekend from 6 to 10 October, grounds, in contrast, are monochro- the other there is a presentiment, exhibited in the ample and bright matic and of deep blue or bright perhaps a warning, which can be spaces of the Istituto provinciale red; and Murray plays with small breathed in the air which is heavy per l’Infanzia Santa Maria della highlighted elements rendered in a with the tension and pathos of the Pietà, in the Castello district, a more naturalistic manner, such as images, inclining the spectator stone’s throw from Piazza San flowers, orchids, birds and leaves. towards an interpretation which Marco. Despite the notable number The effect is fairytale-like and goes below the surface. of artists whose works the commis- surreal, visionary: a reinterpreted sioner wished to present, the path nature which takes on images from Sandra Johnston’s video, Conduct through the exhibition did not traditional figurative art only in their best calculated for obtaining victory, present any particular difficulty in contours, to arrive at scenes freed is a celebration of the resistance of terms of finding a connecting of all formal convention. the citizens of Northern Ireland thread in the various artistic against the forces of order in 1869. experiences: there is in fact a Taking the viewer back to reality, The artist skilfully relives the event, 65 common point of view, a look turned at the end of the corridor, On or through witness testimonies, while to the future with hope, detached about December 1981 by Katrina documentary-style images slip by from the Troubles of the past. Moorhead is a sculpture of wood accompanied by the musical track. and plywood which returns to a There are images of processions There is generally no strong refer- relatively recent period of history in and bonfires which mark, with ence to the political, nor to religious Northern Ireland: the year in which detachment but also with aware- complexity; no politicisation of the De Lorean Factory, a sports-car ness of the popular, nationalist culture, no veiled propaganda industry, opened its doors in force behind them, episodes of message: the artists of the latest Belfast, creating the utopia of new guerrilla warfare against the army. generation, fortified by having lived jobs for Catholics and Protestants in a substantially peaceful period, at a time when unemployment was And there is nature once again. create works in which the aesthetic touching very high levels. The Hidden and intimate, the niche and purely poetic are to the fore, winged doors of the car, the truly created to accommodate the pencil but in a practical sense, with an eye innovative aspect of the design, are drawings by William McKeown, on the international artistic scene. the symbols of this dream of Nest, The bravery of birds, was a The leitmotif of the show, The progress; in the symbolic language window on a world through which Nature of things, indicates an of the artist, however, they the visitor could grasp and investigation of the reality of things represent already the failure of the appreciate its beauty and the at different levels of reading and factory – shut after a few years; two works’ aesthetic pleasure – the interpretation: above all, it is a broken wings, no longer able to fly. soft, pale subject matter, the lines taking stock of how the world is, a On the left side of the corridor other and the flowers sketched and serene look at the mechanisms that rooms opened up like little niches; rendered almost as though to dominate reality, a way of looking caskets. Ian Charlesworth suggest the sacrality of the natural which is simultaneously detached presented the very original work world which surrounds us. but not disillusioned, rather one of From dark passages, a charcoal and Michael Hogg also played on acceptance and consensus. gesso drawing on the ceiling of the various levels of interpretation in But there are other paraphrases: room: traces of a continuous, his Pilot installation, in which the the nature of things, understood circular, harmonious passage, at the principles of physics function as as the link with surrounding nature; same time mysterious, originating pivot and balance as a means of the nature of things, understood in a sense of solitude. exploring a political theme, the symbolically as the political and elections in Northern Ireland. historical reality in which one lives. Mary McIntyre brings the viewer back to photographic realism with Each artist chose the interpretation her prints in which architectural which most closely approached his images based on chiaroscuro or her form of expression. The oil effects (That afternoon I – II), the canvases of Darren Murray, Wailma subtle presence of humanity in a Falls, Brassocattleya clifontii ‘magnifi- city park in autumn (Reverie), and ca’, Cattleya, shown along the the sacrality of the penumbra inside central corridor, are natural, stereo- the Louvre follow one after the Finally, one entered the space in the near-dreamlike dimension of Francesca Bonetta holds dedicated to Seamus Harahan’s the voyage and the unknown, an MA in History of Art video Holylands: the poetic quality looking trustingly towards a future and Conservation of Artistic Goods from the of the images is evident in the on the open sea. Università Cà Foscari, continuous attempt to sublimate Venice; in 2004 worked The other artists invited to the quotidian activities of workers at the Irish Museum of ready for their shift in the factory, participate in the event chose to Modern Art on a Leonardo the scenes of marginal and margin- distribute to Venetians and tourists fellowship, and during alised life in this residential district information related to Belfast, with the 2005 Biennale she of Belfast, the zoomed images the aim of letting emerge an image collaborated with Commissioner Sarah which capture dandelion seeds in of Northern Ireland capable of dismantling the political and civil Glennie as Project flight, a can lifted by the wind Coordinator for the Irish images which all the world knows. which rolls down the street. Here Pavilion. also nature and culture meet each Thus Factotum created a special other, in a work of social character, edition of The Vacuum for the though not one of judgment but of occasion; the publication is 66 taking stock; with a melancholy, important within the panorama absorbed glance at real problems, of Northern Ireland, because it ones that are often too close for us represents a medium of communi- to notice them. cation, critique and cultural discus- sion for Belfast and its environs. Following the same curatorial line of the exhibition, the short week Aisling O’Beirn posed herself the dedicated to performances task of investigating the diverse represented an opportunity to ways in which representations of a create a stronger connection place are transmitted. Her chosen between Northern Ireland and media were coffee/ cappuccino Venice. Apart from the involvement cups and bags of pigeon feed sold of the occasional tourist, it proved on the stalls of Piazza San Marco: the most natural way of making these objects became the supports contact with lagoon-side life, for myths, legends, stories and observed in its habitual activities curiosities about Belfast, casually Aisling O'Beirn and in the images of the city known bringing the locals and visitors Stories for Venetians closer to the Northern Ireland and tourists, 2005 throughout the world. installation at stall, imaginary. Piazza San Marco, Venice Peter Richards’s work attempted to courtesy the artist Thus was The nature of things. observe Venice, using a camera A comprehensive review of the obscura to capture its most famous artistic horizons of Northern views, taken from paintings by Ireland, presented in a direct, Canaletto, Guardi, Bellini and guileless, involving manner. Carpaccio. This installation, A contribution to an international mounted each day in a different Biennale, capable of taking and location between Piazza San expressing the best of Marco, Rialto and the Ponte contemporary art, in all its cultural dell’Accademia, played with the and historical diversity. spectators by involving them, and created a direct link back to past figurative art in Venice. Paddy Translated by Peter FitzGerald Bloomer and Nicky Keogh in contrast played on the Canal Grande, constructing a boat from a rubbish bin and letting it slip round on the lagoon waters: privileging the recycling of old objects, the artist couple gave the objects a new identity, and the boat let itself sway c . Alenka Gregoricˇ Scuola di San Pasquale June – October 2005 San Francesco della Vigna, Castello, Venice

Venice: Pavilion 67 of the Republic of Venice, being one of the most prestigious of the international art biennials, always was ‘the’ Ireland event on the art calendar (although nobody is questioning whether this is due to quantity or quality). Being appointed as the commissioner of a country that one is supposed to represent is a big responsibility and cannot be an easy task, especially because as one is faced with high expectations. The majority of the national pavilions present just one or two artists from their country and only a few try to give us (at least a small) overview of a national art scene.

Sarah Pierce The forgotten zine library installation shot, Scuola di San Pasquale, 2005 photograph: Ronan McCrea The commissioner of the Republic Stephen Brandes’ drawings are on the window towards altar and lands of Ireland’s pavilion, Sarah Glennie, a surface that is made out of a on three blindfolded rabbits. Behind presents seven artists mostly material that resembles the fake them is a painting – otherwise a coming from Dublin, which makes marble that one can sometimes find part of the Scuola the San Pasquale it, as said in the press material, the adorning old tabletops. This reminis- inventory – that shows Mother largest presentation of Irish artists cence of old furniture that once Mary. The fact that it is a site- in the history of Ireland’s graced our grandparent’s houses specific work makes it stand out participation in Venice. Only the makes a nice introduction to the from the typical white-cube-style curator him/herself can really know story – one based on the life story presentations of artworks, thus how difficult it is to make a group of the artist’s grandmother who making it readable in different ways show work as one heterogeneous escaped from the pogroms in such as the one here. unit, and, on the other hand to give Romania. His thoughtful and all of the artists equal presentation. precise drawing style – a combina- The room upstairs gives us a This is often the due to the tion of comic-book shapes and slightly different story. Again three limitations of the exhibition space medieval look-a-like fictional maps – artists are presented – two of them and the demands of the artworks. gives the original story the reso- working together under the name 68 nance of a fairy tale. Walker and Walker who showed Entering the Scuola San Pasquale Nightfall, a video projection which (where the pavilion is being housed Brandes is not the only artist to creates a subtle transition from the for the third time) one is surprised refer to the personal in this way; lower to upper part of the pavilion. to find the artworks displayed in fact all the work on show in this Set in beautiful surroundings alongside the contents of a Chapel. first room had the same sense of beside a lake, Nightfall is imbued At first glance the visitor might be individual stories being treated in with an atmosphere similar to that pleased by the way these ‘art a rather whimsical manner. The of the ground floor. However, Walker intruders’ almost blend in with the drawings, paintings and animation and Walker steer away from surroundings. In fact, they blend in by Isabel Nolan create calm and personal narratives. Instead their so well that it becomes quite hard nonpretentious atmospheres that work is full of symbolism (the to distinguish between individual seem to suggest some kind dream double, repetition, echo), which works (some artists are presented state. Mark Garry uses a range of creates a narrative that positions with more than one work in more materials for his installation which, the individual against nature and its than one medium), which is not based on the surroundings could be invaluable greatness. helped by the fact that works’ titles read as an (ironic) interpretation of are scattered around. The present- Christian medieval iconography ed pieces appear to work as a that often depicts the Virgin Mary continuous whole, the drawings, being impregnated by the Holy videos, animations and installations Ghost as a ray of light coming surround us, as if trying to invoke through the window. In Garry’s some sort of ethereal world. installation a rainbow comes from Death and remembering is some- Texts for the magazine Printed thing that Ronan McCrea deals with project, an issue made especially for in his on-going project Sequences, the occasion of Venice Biennale, scenarios and locations. A series of edited by Alan Phelan, give an slide projections present three overall presentation of the pavilion photographic stories in which he and much more. Text, interviews examines the past (drawings of his and artist’s pages give us an late father), the future (artist’s overview of Irish contemporary art. daughter), memories (found In this reviewer’s opinion, Printed personal photographs) and traces project should not be seen as a (reference to the tale of Hansel and supplement to the exhibition but as Gretel) we leave behind. The playful- an integral part. ness of the installation, which in a way resembles a movie sequence, allows these separate stories also to be viewed as a single one. It Alenka Gregoricˇ 69 softly takes us through the intimate is Artistic Director experience that interweaves his of Skucˇ Gallery, personal and fictional story. Ljubljana.

The exhibition continues into the garden situated next to the pavilion.

Sarah’s Pierce project is based on (left to right) the phenomena of urban structures installation view, Scuola di San (physical and social) and the way Pasquale, Ireland at Venice they are determined by government 2005 policy. Pierce takes The forgotten Ronan McCrea zine library (an archive of fanzines Sequences, scenarios & locations made by various authors) and installation view, Scuola di San places it in the garden where we are Pasquale, Ireland at Venice invited to sit and browse the 2005 collection. Through this intervention Walker and Walker Pierce proposes alternative uses Nightfall, 2004 16 mm film, duration 7' of space by taking one cultural installation view, Scuola di San phenomenon from its original Pasquale, Ireland at Venice environment and placing it into a 2005 new one where both gain a different installation view, Scuola di San value and take on new meaning. Pasquale, Ireland at Venice 2005

photographs: Ronan McCrea c . Gavin Murphy Galway Arts Centre July – August 2005

70 Ronnie Hughes Formacopia It is common practice to find value metrical forms of Cokabana (2005), And to think that this summer was in irresolution when viewing for example, is blunted by an excess marred by the short-sightedness of contemporary art. The exhibition of of glaze. In fact, this is what is most those in power who have threatened Ronnie Hughes’ most recent intriguing about the exhibition. this achievement in the name of paintings, Formacopia, is no excep- It appears to tread a thin line God-knows-what. Can they not see tion. The title and accompanying between accepted technique and value in the preservation of doubt written material suggest this work awkwardness as a means of and an art of questioning? overflows with potential meanings exploring a commitment to paint. and visual pleasures that result In Copernicus (2005), the diluted from the sheer abundance of formal circles are overlaid upon the elements, techniques and materials. gestural capillary-like forms so that the latter are never erased when System (2005), one of the key convention demands that they paintings in the show, would seem should. Initially this appears as to confirm this. It consists of lumpen neo-expressionist abandon, numerous filaments interconnected but when viewed in relation to the (opposite) Ronnie Hughes by orange and lilac circles. Spatial consistent and methodical attempt System, 2005 71 ambiguity is developed by working to extend the range of accepted acrylic co-polymer on linen the conventions of atmospheric painterly techniques, it is at 183 x 214cm courtesy the artist perspective and drawing a fresh once disconcerting and strangely colour over a layer still in the successful. process of drying. The rhythm and Gavin Murphy is a lecturer trajectory of the grander curves and It is said that conviction and doubt in Art History and Critical arches retain an organic looseness. govern the artistic journey, Theory in Galway-Mayo These, like the gestural swirls particularly when sensing the edge Institute of Technology. within the larger lilac spots, focus of tradition. It is no different for attention on the act of application. viewing art. Art-critical rhetoric is Various connotations emerge in the too often an act of suppressing act of viewing – from microscopic doubt. So it can be said that the images of deep sea life to molecular merit of this work is that it keeps models that inspired visual art and this reviewer on edge on a whole design in the 1950s. Indeed, Hughes number of fronts. Technique is one exploits the range of potential such front. Another is where the meanings through enigmatic titling spectrum of colours used in the of works. Cathedral (2004), for show parallels the buzz colours example, associates the array of of upmarket interior design interconnecting arcs to the act of magazines. This raises the question observing a Gothic vault, to the of the relationship between design major work by Jackson Pollock, culture and the ambitions of or to the short story by Raymond painting. Certainly, foregrounding Carver for that matter. the act of painting as an exploration and play with visual tradition While wider associations can cannot create a distance between further stimulate the viewer, it is the two alone. However, that the visual trickery that is painting can and should perform a consistently striking. Bump and weightier role is suggested when hollow (2005) is one example where this latter point is joined with the a perceptual circuit is set up. It is sense of the work being born from dominated by the push and pull action, reflection and the dynamics between the sky-blue form of the of conviction and doubt. upper section and the turquoise slab of the lower. Various perceptual In the end, Formacopia further games lie at the heart of many of strengthens Galway Arts Centre’s the works; some more successful reputation as providing a platform than others. The subtle interplay for the more engaging forms of of texture, layered colour and asym- contemporary visual art in Ireland. c . Anne Price-Owen Pontrhydfendigaid June – August 2005 and Kells

72 Strata

Tim Davies Rag field, 2005 installation shot, Strata Florida photograph/ courtesy the artist Two villages, Kells in Ireland, and familiarity with them, so as to timber structure positioned on a Pontrhydfendigaid in Wales, have create pieces which would not only height, where the spectator can more in common than simply their reflect and illuminate the spirit of contemplate the architecture and Celtic ancestry and the fact that the places – their holy and other- its reverential implications from they hosted a remarkable installa- worldly ethos – but serve also as a inside a hut designed, perhaps, tion of artworks by twelve artists. lynchpin between the medieval and from a Zen aesthetic. It is to the credit of both Ann postmodern eras. With the latter in Mulrooney and Tim Davies, the mind, Philip Napier’s bold textual Commensurate with the medieval curators, that they each selected pieces, where messages are flashed era is Armour boy, Laura Ford’s six artists of considerable repute on motorway screens, document knight in armour. However, his size from their respective homelands. statistics relating to consumerism and prostrate position suggest he The villages, being off the beaten and material values. Alien though is asleep, or dead, so that while he track, are easily overlooked, yet they might appear in these tranquil evokes the past, the figure signifies both deserve investigation. This is settings, they inform the public of a our present disregard for heritage. the conviction held by the villagers twenty-first-century lifestyle that is Ford’s work compares with Bedwyr in both countries, and the success as removed from the medieval Williams’, which is tinged with of the exhibition is due to their team inhabitants as are the methods of humorous irony, as seen in his 73 spirit, resourcefulness and in presenting them. Similarly, Keith packs of playing cards bearing embracing the Strata concept. Wilson’s steel, machine-made photographs of the villagers in both Since 1998, largely owing to their Bull-ring and Calf ring are common Kells and Strata Florida. In these, annual Sculpture at Kells exhibition, utilitarian enclosures on farms, but memorial in implicit, whereas it is the fortunes of Kells are encourag- seen in the romantic context of explicit in curator Tim Davies’ Rag ing, and regeneration is in progress. ecclesiastical ruins they become field. It consists of hundreds of Moreover, the eleventh-century incongruous structures, while sug- stakes pushed into the ground, Cistercian Priory, site of the art gesting a safe enclave, or alterna- with a fragment of cloth impaled installations, is currently undergo- tively, dominance and control. The on each stake, so that the grassy ing extensive restoration. Last year, latter feature in both countries’ areas resemble fields of bog cotton. the community successfully applied histories. Ambiguity is also associ- Situated next to the graveyard at for EU Interreg Funding which ated with Bird, Daphne Wright’s the Abbey, these coloured flags afforded them the opportunity of suspended crow. But being cast in (and their incumbent associations instigating a joint project with the white marble dust, the black omen with identity) are metaphors for inhabitants of Pontrhydfendgaid, of evil is transformed into an irides- tombstones, where the torn who were equally enthusiastic cent dove symbolizing spirituality. garments recall those who once about the scheme. Being on the Although not overtly expressed, wore them. This is familiar territory outskirts of this remote village, the Christine Mills uses the bridges’ for the Irish, whose ancestral eleventh-century Strata Florida handrails at both sites as émigrés attached bits of clothing Abbey was the ideal site, the Abbey conductors of a spiritual presence. to thorn bushes in the hope of sharing its medieval origins with By cladding them with velvet, we eventually reuniting with their loved the Priory at Kells. are invited to touch them and to ones. ‘Raggy trees’ exist all over consider the journey of life as we Ireland, and it was Davies’s Both curators are artists who work gaze at the flowing millrace encounter with the one near Kells within a conceptual framework, so beneath. Touch gives way to that inspired this piece. it is unsurprising that the majority hearing in Cecile Johnson Solitz’s of installations are in the musical score for an epic poem conceptualist vein. The brief was which was performed at both sites. to install works which would relate The monastic equivalent of words to, and transform, the religious and music was reinterpreted by the sites, in addition to appealing to a random tinkling of bells which diverse range of visitors, some Solitz cast for the collars placed perhaps coming to view the syner- on the ubiquitous sheep grazing getic relationship between around both sites. Thus, both medieval ecclesiastical architecture humans and animals, and their and contemporary visual art. mutual interdependence, are praised. Such sounds can be heard The process entailed the artists’ from Niamh McCann’s Hut of visiting the sites in order to gain contemplation, a brightly coloured Memorial is also the theme of Alan skin with the word ‘pobl’ (‘people’) Phelan’s Playboy riot protection and an ‘X’ sprayed in red structure. The title references J.M. referencing Christ. This is Synge’s famous play and the riots compounded by the large iron cross that ensued following its first night inside the bath with its Marxian at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. His quotation ‘opium of the people’ semi-circular screen, daubed in welded to its surface. Being gaudy primary colours bearing the installed on the altar, the piece play’s title, hangs above the prompts speculation on religion’s entrance to the Priory, with two role in our history and politics. ancillary screens, like sentries on Overall, this speculation is what the either side of it, decorated with red entire concept engenders. The sites and blue patterns, respectively. The are part of the specificity of the designs mimic those of the windows artworks, and these have been in the existing Dublin theatre. installed by artists conscious of From the inside of the building, the religious nature of the medieval 74 Anne Price-Owen is a the designs beyond the window legacy surrounding them. Yet Senior Lecturer in the openings simulate stained glass, so despite the layers of meaning and Department of Research that postmodern pastiche is allied years of history permeating these and Postgraduate Studies, to medieval church decoration, hallowed sites, the artists have not Faculty of Art and Design, and the theatricality of the Church compromised their individual Swansea Institute of echoes the spectacle of theatre, artistic practises. Rather, they have Higher Education; originally from Ireland, and vice versa. Less ceremonial are created works that articulate she has written extensively the ornamental motifs, albeit in the postmodern concepts concerning on artists and writers Celtic mode, which feature in Liadin global issues at venues that are as practising in Wales and Cooke’s sculpture, enigmatically valuable to their communities today Ireland. entitled Folly 2005. as they were in the eleventh century – sites that are worthy of Seizing on religion and politics for resurrecting. his theme, David Garner’s Everything should be doubted consists of a tin bath clad in sheep- Alan Phelan Playboy riot protection structure, 2005 installation shot, Kells photograph: Ann Mulrooney courtesy the artist c . Noel Kelly Kevin Kavanagh Gallery August 2005 Dublin

75 was du brauchst

The Kevin Kavanagh Gallery offered up an interesting departure from its usual programming with the exhibition was du brauchst (‘what you need’), a concise group exhibition featuring five young German artists. The exhibition did Notburga Karl not display any particular curatorial Blindgaenger (dud), 2005 installation shot (fluorescent construct, but instead contained tubes) each artist’s individual work and courtesy Kevin Kavanagh practice as a standalone and yet Gallery mutual occupation of the gallery. What each artist did share was an intensive year of “art and art per- ception” in New York, sponsored by a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant in 2003/ 2004. Although there was nothing specifically new about the type of works in this exhibition, it did show an interesting level of experimentation by each artist in forms and media that are familiar in contemporary visual culture. With perhaps more than a nodding Continuing with the lighting theme, patterns, and direct interaction reference to Glasgow based Clara Notburga Karl provided a site- with the observer in a video Ursitti, performance artist Stefanie specific, oversized, architectonic document of the work Lächeln/ Trojan greeted all visitors to the construction of florescent lights smile. In this video Trojan captured private view by sniffing their armpit suspended from the walls and her tactics of confrontation and and reporting to them on her ceiling in the corner of the gallery. objectification in a simple yet reaction to the smell with a short Entitled Blindgaenger (‘dud’), the complicated situation. By challeng- pithy comment. A significant num- work resembled a confused ing people, once again with a ber of artists have looked to explore confluence of viral strands, and physical intervention that took and produce works that go beyond whilst there may be too obvious a place in a German city, Trojan the visual. Ursitti in particular has reference in terms of material to straightforwardly and bodily explored the olfactory sense in a Dan Flavin, the work appeared to be reshaped peoples’ mouths into study of the “animalistic side of more redolent of the aesthetic in the shape of a smile. human nature, and what is the works of Martin Boyce and considered taboo or uncivilized.” Björn Dahlem. The subtle difference The videos on display in the gallery Trojan’s performance added to this lies at the core of Karl’s work. occupy the space of documentation 76 and in doing so challenged the Instead of causing the audience to as art. Both Hobza and Trojan discomfort and invasion of personal address the space through a reincarnate the trauma of their space as she sought to identify negotiation of light sculptures, Karl physical performances through and negotiate people’s personal does not challenge her audience to video and photography as a kind of signatures. Also dealing with negotiate space or any perceived fixed account. It then becomes perceptions, and in this case path in the gallery. Instead, the one of the roles of the viewer to making an interesting reference to title may provide a clear and playful actualize the participatory aspect Ceal Floyer’s Light switch, Ulrich response to the illusory simplicity of the performance, and confirm or Vogl’s Der letzte macht das Licht aus of the work and undoes the deny the underlying energies and (‘the last person may turn off the iconographical meaning behind the notions of the moment. For Trojan light’) brought it a stage further. materials she works with. the simplicity of the record worked Rather than a projection, Vogl in manifesting at least some of the realized the work in a permanent- Also working with light, this time energies of the moment of the marker wall drawing, presenting a in the form of attempted performance. This was not the faux light switch that continued communications, Klara Hobza’s case with Hobza’s work. The brevity with an electrical wire across the Morse code communication provided of the editing process failed to ceiling and down to an ornate video documentation of her bring across the scale of the chandelier drawing on the opposite performance in the clerestory of the project, and unfortunately appeared wall. In the work, Vogl questions Sculpture Center in Long Island to have credits that were the same the relationship that exists City, NYC. Rather than the definite length as the film piece. between the literal, material and message systems of artists such as representational presence of things. Cerith Wyn Evans, Hobza played The very literal notion of the with the idea of Samuel Morse chandelier as a romantic symbol cre- (creator of Morse code) as an artist. ated a metaphorical play on the By placing over a hundred light idea of the work as being German bulbs in the clerestory, she turned romantic. By its very nature wall the building into a Morse code drawing is both impermanent and apparatus. Hobza’s video, shown provisional. However, an additional in this exhibition, documents her installation by Vogl offered an inter- desperate attempt, over two days, esting foil to the delicacy of his wall to communicate with the neigh- drawing. Using industrial wall- bourhood and people in the passing mounted halogen light fixtures as trains and cars in Morse code. light boxes, Vogl compared and In a similar manner, Stefanie Trojan contrasted method of representa- provided a second work for the tion in a way that was both obvious exhibition. On a monitor buried and uncontrived. This also added under Notburga Karl’s lighting an amusing notion of the image installation, Trojan continued to of the chandelier lit and yet not question human habits and social providing light. Finally, Thomas Trinkl’s Lange Anna its very physical presence it Noel Kelly is Deputy (Long Anna) was a direct challenge challenged the audience to Director and Curator for to the physical space of the gallery. negotiate a path around its Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, and a Lange Anna, a large rock pillar in apparent solidity. Senior Partner with the Helgoland in Germany and symbol Art Projects Network. of that region, was recreated and was du brauchst was most definitely given central position. All of the a welcome addition to the Kevin works in the exhibition surrounded Kavanagh Gallery programme. this pillar of painted carbonate, The exhibition provided both a paper and wire construction. Its psychological and material space apparent metallic solidity appeared for reflection and adjusted our at once to echo the monumental ideas of the potential for this gallery late nineteenth century sculptures space. of aggrandizement, and yet the nature of the materials used created a real distortion of any Ulrich Vogl notions of these symbols, and by Der letzte macht das Licht 77 aus (The last person may turn off the light), 2005 wall drawing, permanent marker, wall courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery c . Martin McCabe Carlow Library August 2005

78 Martin McCabe is the Programme Chair of the BA Photography in the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.

Cornelia Hesse- Honnegger: Heteroptera: Images of a mutating world As this review is being written, the Island, Switzerland and Northern status and power as visual ex-prime minister of Australia, Bob Europe. Secondly, that there are knowledge. Hesse-Honnegger uses Hawke, is publicly arguing for the particular and insidious ‘distur- the scientistic and objectivist power promotion of central and northwest- bances’ in what seems to be the of illustration to question and ern Australia as the ‘repository’ for normative scientific gaze of the critique not so much the institution all global nuclear by-products and genre. Without the text, the changes itself but its complicity with the waste. At a cost, of course. Hawke may remain almost imperceptible nuclear industries’ ideological hege- intends to charge the international but these insects are mutating. mony, its poor scientific practices community of nuclear-energy and its lack of public accountability. nations to allow them this ‘secure A former zoological illustrator who facility’. However, what might be had practised for many years in There is something of Mary the other, more profound cost of the field servicing the scientific- Shelley’s Frankenstein about this this move? Cornelia Hesse- research publishing industries, project too that forces us to Honnegger’s timely exhibition Hesse-Honnegger worked on docu- confront what we are doing to points to this overlooked or less menting laboratory-induced insect support our economic well-being visible cost at a time when with the mutations in studies of insecticides. and what the real cost of this is. rocketing cost of fossil-fuel energy However, over a number of years, Nuclear power is producing 79 sources is effecting a review of she became interested in mutations ‘monsters’ by cutting and splicing nuclear as an alternative. In some occurring outside of the lab. She their DNA, and their future we are ways, the timeliness is worth high- brings what is a powerful, resolute unable to predict. By making visible lighting as much of this work has tool of visualizing difference and signatures of this haphazard been in circulation before through- knowledge to bear on what she now reengineering of nature’s blueprints, out the early 1990s, if not in Ireland sees as a blind-spot or cover-up by by subverting a form in which then certainly in the international the scientific community and the scientism is invested, Hesse- art press and beyond. This takes nuclear industry. Honnegger’s field work represents nothing away from what was here. a critical practice that is both sub- In the collection of illustrations, tle, complex and, to use the Housed in the Carlow Library, this the insects are incidental almost, curator Catherine Fitzgerald’s modest show comprised a number as they are commonplace in their phrase, ‘humble’. of painted illustrations mounted particular region, not rare but There is no doubt that Hesse- behind glass and accompanied by overlooked. But they are very Honnegger brings to this single- texts. One would forgive any casual significant inasmuch as they issue longitudinal study a rigour viewer for taking these images function as bio-indicators of the and passion not seen too often. as beautiful, exquisitely painted type of low-level fall-out emanating Her work remains an early-warning entomological illustrations. from these facilities. Further system for a slow-motion Focusing specifically on insects, and more importantly, Hesse- catastrophe. Her stance and these creatures were scaled up and Honnegger’s field work demon- indictment is clear, but its reception illustrated using watercolours with strates that it is not only sites with and effect less so in a geo-political levels of detail rarely seen, certainly histories of officially recognized climate becoming more explicitly in art contexts. Whilst none of them ‘accidents’ but also others working determined by wars over dwindling were readily recognizable as without reportable ‘incident’ where resources. commonplace insects, the body of such mutations occur. work was instantly recognizable as There is a kind of subversion at a genre and visual practice with a work here. The aesthetic of scientific long history from the early modern illustration, which attracts and periods through the Enlightenment seduces the viewer with the detail to their popularization in scientific and workmanship, is compounded magazines, posters, educational and complicated by the intrusion of materials, etc. The text, however, visual disturbances, markedly in the most significantly alerted the form of asymmetry of leg, wing reader to two key pieces of shield, etc. This genre of illustration, information. Firstly, that these with its own codes and conventions, images represent specimens that still maintains within scientific were collected in the environs of discourse a verisimilitude and nuclear power facilities in positivist weight that gives it a Sellafield, Chernobyl, Three Mile c . Sarah Browne Model Arts and Niland August – September Gallery, Sligo 2005

80

(above) Erling T.V Klingenberg Reserved for Erling T.V Klingenberg, 2005 installation, mixed media Site-ations interior installation view photo courtesy the artist

(below) Maciej Kurak InternationalCrying Game, 2005 documentary video still video still courtesy Artist 2005/6 Exchange Sense in place, Ireland The Site-ations programme is a included men of the cloth and a Unfortunately, the van had to be series of artist exchanges and passing nun, before he was removed, supposedly on the exhibitions, accompanied by eventually taken away by the grounds of safety. With an added conferences and an education gardaí. The artist described the dollop of irony, this slyly pointed up programme, to take place in six piece as “referring to the condition the ‘contested space’ of the countries across Europe in 2005/ of the nomad in twenty-first century project’s curatorial theme being the 2006. The overall theme is ‘Sense in Europe, the invisible transient actual gallery itself. Documentation place’, aiming to engage with population of our towns in cities,” of the project was installed both in artists and audiences in European which recalled the many signs I the ‘empty’ room with the plinths – art centres outside the mainstream, have seen taped up in the area in which kind of made that aspect of evoking a peripheral politics and Slavic (I think) languages. This was the piece redundant since the room attempting to set up some kind of a standout work. It was a shame was obviously no longer empty – alternative to the kind of biennial that the video documentation was and in the gallery foyer, with the culture we have been hearing so so poorly shown on a monitor in the letter from the gallery to the artist. much about lately.1 gallery’s foyer space, making it far (This rendered the documentation too easy for the viewer to walk on in the gallery space super- The exhibition in Sligo is the first by yet again. Perhaps this was a superfluous). All that remained of 81 in the series and eight artists deliberate choice but it felt like a the Hiace were a pair of rear view participated: Maciej Kurak and decision more based on PR and mirrors… a nice touch. Tomasz Domanski from Poland; unwillingness to offend. Xavi Munos and Mabi Revuelta from Klingenberg’s other work was a Spain; Erling T.V. Klingenberg and Erling T.V. Klingenberg also generat- video titled Create, where the artist Olga Bergmann from Iceland; Helen ed a degree of controversy. His repeats this word vocally, to the Ann Jones from Wales, and Aigars elaborately staged work was com- image of a moving bodily orifice… Bikse from Latvia. ‘Contested posed of a number of elements, let’s just say the work explores spaces’, ‘Mapping memory’, most conspicuously a navy-blue ideas and myths of ‘male creation’ ‘Margins and inclusion’ were the Hiace outside the gallery that a in every sense and leave its contexts within which invited huge boulder had fallen on from the identification unnamed… artists were asked to respond. sky. This had crushed the van’s con- tents – crates of the artist’s work – Olga Bergmann’s work displayed Attending an artist’s talk in the resulting in the allocated space in a very particular aesthetic set of gallery, my first encounter was with the gallery being left vacant. The concerns. Two ‘visitor centres’ were a man sitting on the floor, head only exceptions were a few white constructed and installed in a between his legs, with a broken plinths with labels reading woodland and a cattle field. These stereo beside him. A handwritten Reserved for Erling T.V. Klingenberg modest huts became centres for sign propped at his feet read “HELP and one crate containing a observation of the animals in the ME I NEED SOME MONEY.” What a damaged plaster sculpture and a area, drawing on a rich tradition of relief when I realised it was actually functioning smoke machine. The observatory image-making, from a body cast with a very convincing number plate on the Hiace read landscape painting to scientific wig and I had no obligation to “IRELAND,” with the second letter drawing, plein air sketching to video address either a performance artist scratched out. A very witty take on surveillance. Elements of the huts in a gallery imitating a beggar or a myth and authenticity, and the were reinstalled in the gallery real person on the streets in the bleeding of the artworld into the space, alongside the photographs, same situation. However Maciej culture /tourist industry, it was an drawings and videos that were the Kurak had actually placed this alternative megalithic monument to result of these Field studies. The ‘man’ out on the streets of Sligo, in cute hoorism. This piece both cele- ‘bovine art pavilion’ was a particu- various locations, and videoed the brated and denied artistic specta- larly charming work, where opera results. With a soundtrack of ‘Walk cle, not to mention becoming some- (Il Trovatore) plays, and the cows on By’, this sharply observed piece thing of a talking point in the town, explore the interior and exterior of made for uncomfortable, shameful acquiring the status of myth in its the structure, scratching against it, viewing. Except for a little girl who own right (several people witnessed licking the walls (adorned with gave him some coppers outside a outside the gallery looking curiously paintings of cows) or pissing bank, or the occasional brief glance, up into the sky). Interestingly this outside. This work humorously and this figure of despair was ignored by event occurred on the same night sensitively explored a number of almost all. I recognised my own another vehicle crashed into the seeming oppositions such as people reaction in these people, who Yeats statue in Sligo… / animals, ‘nature’ / ‘culture’, function / decoration, and the wild In general, it was the works that 1 See, for example, the edition of Printed and the domestic. The play between took on the challenge of the climate project produced as part of Ireland’s 2005 representation in the Venice Biennale, inside and out was quietly pointed outside the gallery that were edited by Alan Phelan. at within the gallery setting itself, successful. Aigars Bikse’s work 2 Hal Foster, ‘The artist as ethnographer’, with a window framing a view of a practically negated the gallery in The Return of the real, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996, pp.171–203. See also Miwon tree, the visitors passing around the setting altogether, by staging a Kwon, One Place after another: site-specific installation in the space not unlike performance in a field. art and locational identity, MIT Press, the way the cows did (obviously no Documentation was presented in Massachusetts, 2004 urinating in the gallery). I did check the gallery/café space but the work Sarah Browne is an artist currently for surveillance cameras, wonder- was essentially absent, really only working in northwest Ireland; in 2006 ing if as a gallerygoer I was being experienced by the witnesses to the she will participate in the Icelandic surveyed in another controlled performance. Site-ations event. environment, a field study within a field study… At their best, this sort of initiative www.site-ations.org/senseinplace offers the artist the opportunity to The challenge with this kind of develop a project in a new, exciting 82 project is always how to balance location, while building on their the artist’s own voice, authority and existing body of work in a way that concerns with a receptiveness to makes sense both for them and the the place (audience and issues) audience. The artists discussed where the work is made. The ‘Sense above made works that seemed to in place’ brief recognises this achieve this. This kind of project necessity to extend the work owe something to the idea of the beyond stereotypical representa- artist as an ethnographer,2 whose tions of a place, to seek out the outsider eye can make incisions and local and the particular. Such observations otherwise invisible or projects are always hit-and-miss. over-familiar to the person who lives Misses are usually the result of in the actual place of the visitation. (left) Aigars Bikse references to the new location that Such ambitions are challenging Resistance of Kilmactigue, 2005 are err either on the side of the indeed and difficult to live up to. image from performance at Kilmactigue, introduction by obvious or the obscure. Certain curator Anna Macleod works in the show fell prey to this. digital photograph, 100 x 75cm courtesy Site-Ations

(right) Olga Bergmann Field studies installation view. 2005 photograph courtesy the artist c . Paul O’Brien Ars Electronica Center September 2005 Linz

Ars This year’s Ars Electronica festival took place during a week of sunshine in the Danube-side Austrian city of Linz. In striking contrast to the ongoing debacle of 83 digital media in Ireland – the collapse of Arthouse and Media Lab Europe, the inexplicable failure to plug into the billion-dollar gaming industry – Linz, with its showcase electro-Ars Electronica Center and the global forum of the Festival, shows what can be done in this sphere by a combination of artistic vision, shrewd business sponsorship and nica enlightened political support.

John Gerrard The ladder, 2005 courtesy Ars Electronica Appropriate to the weather, the but usually hidden relations of flavour (an element which was, Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s production and distribution within however, downplayed by the artist wonderful Strand beasts stole the the agricultural economy, and himself). The film effectively show. Consisting of vast wind- giving ordinary people the brought together computer powered, computer-designed opportunity to reflect on and com- animation and traditional hand- skeletons constructed from electri- municate details of their lives painting, giving a painterly effect cal tubes by the Dutch artist, these which usually remain hidden – a to the piece. Also outstanding in gentle, lumbering creatures evoke de-fetishisation of the commodity, this category was Man OS 1 / similar feelings of amused affection one might say. The work was extraordinateur, which amusingly as the more high-tech robot-dogs socially informative, but perhaps brings a Mac interface alive and on display in the Ars Electronica questionable in terms of aesthetic literalises the metaphors (for Center, and bring up questions of content. (‘Is it art?’) Also striking in example, the Norton Disk Doctor is evolution and design – the artist as this category was Run motherfucker a real physician and the CD burner substitute creator. (One wonders, run by Dutch artist Marnix de Nijs, catches fire). though, how long the sand animals an interactive installation involving – devoid of anti-vandal defence a treadmill and a display of empty 84 mechanisms – would last, say, on city streets through which the the beaches of north Dublin...) participant runs. (Shades of artist Jeffrey Shaw, who offered in one of A special award was given to his works the opportunity to cycle Jansen, as there was a question through a virtual city, and perhaps whether the work fitted comfortably also of a recent video piece by into the Interactive art category. Ireland’s Willie Doherty.) Clearly, The clear, though somewhat there was a strong Dutch presence unlikely, winner in this category was at this year’s Festival, perhaps MILKproject by Esther Polak and reflecting generous support of the Ieva Auzina, which used a GPS arts in the Netherlands. navigation system and documenta- tion to analyse the cross-Europe The winner in the Computer production of cheese, from Latvia to animation/ visual effects section the Netherlands. The work was rich was Fallen art by Tomek Baginski in sociological implications – of Poland, a striking piece of Tomek Baginski / Platige Image deconstructing the complicated grotesquerie with a strong anti-war Fallen Art courtesy Ars Electronica

Theo Jansen Strandbeest courtesy Ars Electronica The winner in the Digital communi- The Digital musics category is enjoyed by younger visitors to the ties category was Akshaya, a worthy always a little separate from the Ars Electronica Center, while else- – if less than riveting – project main visually oriented events. where, in the downtown OK Center involving networked information An exception this year was Paul which hosted the bulk of the inter- centres in the South Indian state of DeMarinis’ intriguing Firebirds – active art pieces, one could play a Kerala. The first prize (or Golden exploiting the relationship between game of virtual tennis with mobile Nica) in the Net Vision section was fire, sound, totalitarian politics and computer screens instead of tennis won by Processing, an open-source concepts of the afterlife. The winner racquets. The prevailing dystopian programming language created to in this category was Maryanne nightmare – of developing human impart the basics of computer Amacher’s TEO! a sonic sculpture, inertia contrasted with the programming from a visual point of based on recordings of muons growing vitality of the machine – is view. Freely available and especially (charged particles) made under the addressed by such developments. suited to those who think visually Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan Kids (and their elders) can now get and spatially (like most artists) in Mexico. fit on a dance mat or through Processing expands the boundaries physically demanding computer of the gift economy in an era where A multitude of events and exhibi- games, rather than sitting for hours corporate control of the computer tions was scattered around Linz as putting on weight at a computer 85 industry is an ongoing spectre. In part of this year’s Ars Electronica. screen. Through the Ars Electronica a spin on the relationship between John Gerrard, a rising figure from Festival and Center, Linz has capitalism and democracy, [V]ote- Ireland in the international new- reinvented itself as a venue for auction by Hans Berhard and Lizvlx media world, displayed an impres- twenty-first-century culture, hugely offered, tongue-in-cheek, the oppor- sive mixed-reality piece entitled The increased its tourist intake, and put tunity for American citizens to sell ladder, which attracted a steady itself on the global map in terms of their votes. The predictable legal stream of visitors. Also memorable digital media. The lessons for difficulties that ensued were no was Barbara Siegel’s evocative Ireland, and Dublin in particular, doubt due to the failure of the US derelictedATMOSPHERES, a 360- hardly need to be laboured. authorities to understand the aes- degree black-and-white video instal- thetic-political logic of pushing the lation consisting of a projection of capitalist system, and the corporate French chateaux, reminiscent of the control of media, to its logical con- panoramas that preceded film as an clusion. Whether such a project audience spectacle (and also of Last year in Marienbad, arguably the could have any serious impact on Paul O’Brien finest film ever made). the dire state of democracy in the ([email protected]) US is another question (but perhaps teaches at the National it’s just art.) Apart from the prize-winners and College of Art and Design, runners-up with their persistent – Dublin. and laudable – references to political freedom and empower- ment, there were the usual fun things at this year’s Ars Electronica: electronic creatures inhabiting vegetation, and a mobile machine operated by a captive live cockroach (happily, the Insect Liberation Front stayed away). Reflecting the title of this year’s Ars Electronica (Hybrid: living in paradox) and the associated intellectual debate – the main intellectual reference in this area being the work of Donna Haraway – these installations played with the ideas of crossover between human, animal, plant and machine. An invisible skipping rope operated by video characters was greatly c . Sheila Dickinson Green on Red Gallery August – September Dublin 2005

86 Alice Maher

Rood Alice Maher Rood installation view, Green on Red Gallery, 2005 courtesy Green on Red Gallery ‘Rood’, a word unfamiliar to most, hedge works, summed up this over- could signify sisterhood or is a medieval word for the screen whelming mass of many details and entrapment. Therefore, the piece that separates the sacred space of unconventional artistic materials speaks the paradox of feminism, the alter from the common into a small organism that appears empowered by solidarity with congregation in churches. By using to be receding in the distance of a women but often left hanging in the word rood, Maher instantly backward glance. After The the margins of cultural and social reactivates consistent concerns in hedge…, Maher’s work moved away forces. Although the Venus figures her art: medieval, pre-modern from using natural materials to look away from each other, they are representations; passage and incorporate other media like bronze, each other’s mirror image. Double transformation from everyday and crystal, silver, refrigerator coils. Venus and the exhibition as a whole, common into sacred and myth; and Her inclusion of beech trees in therefore, are also about reflection. the merging of folk and high art. Rood returns her to this earlier type Not just the reflection of the mirror She recreates a rood, still made of of practice and likewise resumes or lake or window, but also the type wood, because it consists of a row her positioning on the margins of of reflection that ponders the past of upside-down trees hanging from art practice where nature and the and specifically here Maher’s own the rafters of the gallery, but with things she finds around herself (the past art practices that venture intricate carving replaced by definition of ‘folk’ provided by outside art to allow what is below, 87 nature. One needs to overlook the Louise Bourgeois when she first outside on the margins – snails lack of originality, since Siobhán encountered Maher’s work1) in this instance – to surface and Hapaska similarly hung pine trees propels and guides the art practice. propel the work. from the rafters of Scuola San This method is clearly spelled out Pasquale in the 2001 Venice in the snail tracks (snails are Biennale, although Hapaska hung everywhere, in rural and urban the trees like a dense forest and the Ireland alike) in blue and green that needles carpeted the floor, glide over transparent film which 1 Alice Maher, Lecture and tour drenching the space in their smell. cover the gallery windows. The snail of Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time at the Irish Museum of One needs instead to look at the markings look like abstract Modern Art, 21 February, relation of Maher’s hanging trees to paintings and the four globes 2004 their installation in this gallery covered in snail shells look like Sheila Dickinson is a PhD setting. Rood divides the gallery in formal modernist sculptures, each candidate in the History of half, but does not cut each side off in their own distilled space, on Art Department at from the other, leaving room to pass individual pedestals. The fact that University College Dublin at the far end of the gallery by the snails made this abstract art and lectures at the windows and, for the adventurous, pushes the work outside the remit National College of Art a foot of space left open under- of modern art, beyond Pollock and and Design. neath the branches (in which the his drippings, to encounter snails children played at the exhibition and their slow creepings. opening). This seems poignant, the children interacting with the art Snails in the garden get into piece, and recalls her previous work everything and likewise in this constructed from materials culled gallery-cum-garden snails take over from the hedges around her child- the space. This includes the one hood home in Tipperary. piece of artistically created sculpture, Double Venus, in which In fact, Rood revisits her 1997 two classical bronze busts of Venus piece The hedge of experience, are bound by a swerving brown a miniature replica of a hedge snake-like form that could be read sprouting from the floorboards of as a snail’s body escaped from its the gallery. This was a threshold shell. Multiple women’s heads, hair piece in the trajectory of Maher’s that grows wild and covers every- art practice. It came at the tail thing or twists and turns around end of her ‘hedge’ works where she itself on the drawn page, frequently plucked, gathered, and collected surface is Maher’s work. But here elements of the hedge and the the hair turns animal and the twin garden for her work. The hedge of heads turn away from each other, experience, in contrast to the other despite being forever bound, which c . Damien Duffy An Gaeláras August – October 2005 Derry

88 Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh Musicpula T2, MO, NO In an urban garden at the rear of these tropical plants as models, An Gaeláras in Derry, a small interacting with the chorus of plexi-glass greenhouse sits on a speechlessness and incomprehen- platform of sandbags; innocuous, sible utterance, as both counter- suburban, common garden measure and a record of that very architecture. Inside, the waist- wordless fear in the face of possible height trestles are clotted in soil, impending loss. planted with an array of tropical plants, insectivores, venus fly-traps. Ó Dochartaigh’s previous project, Tubular nectar-filled bulbs hang at the Context Gallery, Derry, was from the ceiling; an array of carniv- Mercury contact, in which he built orous plants on the floor. Amongst instruments and apparatus out of this, tangles of amp-wires tease the rotating Leslie speaker drums. hair-trigger plants and traps. He staged a chaotic, experimental ‘music’ performance. It too had a Four speakers play a recorded loop quasi-scientific, action element. www.plundercore.net/ealaion of voices, refrains, gasps, sighs, Like Fluxus events, this installation, 89 Damien Duffy is an artist. starts and ends of sentences, all however, is more alchemical; a edited from spoken fairytales and greater willingness to restore a political speeches, promises and belief inhabits it. The small jungle warnings. The meaning removed, of exotic plants lends it a moribund words lost, these abrupt silences life force. are occasionally filled with an electrical buzz. The wired amp’s The artwork needs to be seen as tendrils make connections from a ritual, not just as an installation. the organic to the inorganic, as These are performative attempts the (venus) trap shuts. Its electric at transformational acts, albeit Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh impulse joins the chorus of ‘shut closed and ‘off stage’ until the Musicpula T2, MO, NO, 2005 traps’ in the loop of silences and crazed alchemy is revealed in the installation views, An Gaeláras remaining apparatus; like Beuys or Derry refrains. photographs courtesy Lorcan Balka, the acts are applied to a Doherty Plants supposedly grow better if very personal narrative (family the gardener talks to them. In this relationships), working through the artwork the cacophony of abrupt helplessness of the situation in a ends refrains from speech. There is cathartic project. something of the crazed botanist in this. The piece has an ambience of The project is refreshing, driven wrong science, misguided study. by the reality of personal narration. However, the title Musicpula T2, The workmanlike construction MO, NO is the key. The artist makes little attempt at formal reveals that his father has recently elegance but its single-minded, suffered a cancerous illness – he is misguided alchemy is charged with since recovering. The piece was a desperate ‘play’; it is obsessive, made during the height of his illness compulsive, indicating a need for and takes its name from the status this to work, harnessing the life of the cancer cells. This personal force of these vegetal carnivores to narrative enlarges the project to a interrupt and interact with the kind of Beuysian intervention, using silenced flow of stories. objects, plants, etc., as coded Musicpula T2, MO, NO stands like objects in transformational action. a folly – in the name of catharsis, The piece itself is inelegant, a of the artist’s struggle with shanty of plants and wires, lights, therapeutic alchemy, a frenzied jerry-built. Yet this tunnel vision and staging in a loop of sympathetic skewed botany is an attempt at belief in art’s capacity to effect real comprehending that organic carni- change in raw reality. vore – Musicpula T2, MO, NO, using c . Patrick Ward Bankley House Gallery September 2005 Manchester

9002890

Doireann O’Malley Untitled dockland, 2004 C-type print, 60 x 80cm courtesy the artist All of the artists in 02890 are to search the edges for something setting. The title “Lost Forever” recent graduates of the Master of from which meaning could be lends a melancholy air but provides Fine Art course at the University of extracted. little to assist understanding. Ulster in Belfast. All were students under Alastair MacLennan and The edges seem to interest Lorraine The viewer is drawn in to Brendan some more recently under Willie Burrell also. In the Hubba bubba O’Neill’s piece to peer through a Doherty, both artists engaging photos she plays games with her viewfinder in a backlit, white picket directly with political issues. friends and family. The participants fence. The cold glow of the fluores- However, there is no Politics here. blow bubblegum bubbles that cent striplight illuminates a slide 02890 sidesteps the stereotyped obscure their faces. The features image of a old fishing port. The expectations of Northern Irish art are masked by the fleshy pink that sunlit warmth of the image remains and artists. None of the traditional dominates the frame. The camera trapped behind the white painted big issues are confronted or even flash bounces back from the wood. alluded to. Even the title of the surface. The slightly drab domestic John Beattie explores the city with exhibition evades its politically backgrounds of living rooms and his paintbrush. His paintbrush is, burdened geography. Choosing bathrooms are visible around the however, attached to the end of a code over name: with what do these edges of the bubble head. We don’t 91 floor-brush shaft that also holds a new artists choose to engage? know if Burrell’s fun is being shared by participant. The obscured face camcorder. The camera records the Paul Coffey takes as his subject a leaves a coldness. dry brush’s journey over the street mass-produced wood-veneer table. surface, brushing over cracks and Pursuit of perfection documents the In the video work Tape reconstruc- detritus. The viewer is invited to obsessive exploration of the table’s tion for Nixon and Halderman Allan take the brush for a walk around the surface in search of flaws and Hughes deals with the search for gallery while watching on the cam- imperfections. The photographs something that is not there. corder’s screen the brush’s previous as colour printouts in cheap Delving into the world of the journeys. The jangling urban noise plastic sleeves are annotated in conspiracy, Tape reconstruction… contrasts with the quiet gallery blue biro with comments such as takes as its subject the infamous space. “looks like it was stuck on.” Pursuit eighteen minutes of tape erased So where does all this leave the of perfection seems to explore from Whitehouse logs. The missing land of 02890? Just another the futile search for meaning in evidence becomes Hughes’ subject. telephone code? Just another consumer items. The camera pans over a reel-to-reel tape player, searching. The erased geographical location to reach or This concern with value and tape provides only an electronic to be? The artists of 02890 counter meaning continues in Jane hum. expectation. They do not produce Anderson’s work You fat bastards. work about the region’s politics. The gulf between commercial Fiona Larkin’s Tail is similarly not Instead their work explores sports fantasy and consumer reality there. The works on show record absences. Voids that were perhaps is exposed through Anderson’s Larkin’s travels through Belfast on easily overlooked in the glare of a recasting of Subbuteo football an Ash Wednesday wearing a tail. greater trauma can now become figures as middle-aged or beer- The drawings made of people in the the focus. bellied men. The players stand street have had tails scalpeled out. around the pitch inert in their Tails that are animal, that stick out, Patrick Ward is an artist that protrude The void becomes the sports/ leisure wear. Consumption based in Manchester. precluding participation. focus. An other that could be but is not. Larkin’s incised drawings alter The photography of Doireann the nature of her unwitting sub- O’Malley withholds rather than jects. She has made her subjects reveals. In none of her three like her, other. photographs can we catch the eye of the subject. Their eyes are closed Childhood narratives are explored or they turn away from the lens. in Amy Russell’s constructed The cold walls and landscapes that photography. A small gnome like form the backgrounds provide only object dominates the photograph a sense of displacement. The lack with vague toy-like objects of human communication forces us surrounding in an apparent garden c . Alannah Hopkin Sirius Arts Centre September – October Cobh 2005 Julie Bacon A hymn for travellers 92 and the absent

Julie Bacon A hymn for travellers and the absent, 2005 installation views Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh courtesy the artist Julie Bacon, an artist specialising sitting on a hard bench, facing the in performance and installation view over the harbour. Because the works, currently resident in Belfast, seat was about four feet above was artist in residence at the Sirius ground level, you were forced to Arts Centre in June and July, 2005. look at the view though the archi- During that time she met a number tectural detail of the upper level of of people living in Cobh and district the windows. Postcards and pencils who have been involved with were to be found on the floor beside maritime life. A hymn for travellers the chair, on which you could write. and the absent was the result of this activity. While in the first room, I had resented the loss of the view from The installation occupied both the windows, and felt unpleasantly galleries of this waterside space, coerced into watching the hands of a classical Palladian-style villa built the people filmed, while being in the early nineteenth-century, denied a view of their faces, the previously the headquarters of the soundtrack of their voices and a Alannah Hopkin is a writer 93 based in County Cork. Royal Cork Yacht Club. Gallery One, view of the surroundings in which on the right hand side of the build- they were speaking. The feathers ing, had both sets of windows and Coleridge contributed nothing. blacked out. A small church bench In the second room I was given the was placed in front of the fireplace, view I had been craving, but was and a film was projected onto the again coerced into looking at it from space above the mantel. The mantel a particular place, to no discernible itself was covered in a strip of lace purpose. cloth. Around the bench a few red and white feathers were scattered, The gallery’s hand-out claims that and on it was a copy of The ancient “Julie’s work questions the mariner and other poems by Samuel functioning of archives, such as Taylor Coler idge. museums, civic records offices or commercial databases and high- The film had no soundtrack. The lights how they influence our sense camera concentrated on the hands of presence, our interactions and of the people talking, rather than our memories.” There was no evi- their faces. An old woman showed dence of this. Was the artist doing a scrapbook and a collection of old something so subtle and esoteric cuttings. Other people featured that I missed the point? Or was the included an elderly man in naval show simply lacking in thought, uniform, possibly a retired harbour- coherence, energy, and creativity? master, a fisherman, a young man It seemed arrogant to silence the in a red and white check shirt with interviewees. This decision turned a pencil. Other hands were shown what might have been an interest- dealing with heavy ropes, then we ing video into a boring one, with were back to the old woman and only one idea behind it. The other her scrapbook. The loop, lasting room simply said “look at the view.” maybe five minutes, repeated. Neither seemed to relate to the promise of the title, nor to gain The central room of the gallery, from the proximity of the other. which faces south over Cork Sometimes when you don’t get it, Harbour, was empty apart from a it is because there is nothing to get. wooden platform, approached by a The emperor had no clothes on. wooden staircase. The sides of the This was a shameful waste of platform were lined by the same funding and resources. lace material (net curtain?) as the mantelpiece next door. One person at a time occupied the space, c . Tim Stott Ormeau Baths Gallery September – October Belfast 2005

94 Perspective 2005

Ayako Yoshimura Places – the city, 2005 DVD still courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery Perspective is the Ormeau Baths with nothing more than the ‘intifada’ above an impoverished Gallery’s annual open exhibition, occasional white elephant. In this West Bank landscape. This is a film now in its eighth year. Terry case, the ‘invisible insurrection’ of the most sober and considered Atkinson and Ariella Azoulay made seems just a bit too…invisible. kind and, given the subject, it is all this year’s selection. The limited More importantly, as the Magiciens the more compelling for it. space available in this review attempt to tackle Belfast’s problems demands that a further selection from a secret location in Soho, Upstairs, Ursula Burke’s must take place. they also pass a wry comment on The pictorial dimensions of Irish the “historical exercise of remote Catholicism series 1: the famine The first work to trouble expecta- power” which compounds these concerns itself with the socio- tions is J. Meredith Warner’s video, problems, and the rather awkward economic conditions behind the Knitting (found). Taking the nature of “artistic intervention in ‘devotional revolution’ in nine- cinematic representation of the other communities outside one’s teenth-century Ireland. Her ostensibly tame practice of knitting own’ (Morse); interventions which manipulated, expressionistic as her point of departure, Warner often seem untroubled by their photographic prints show a child composes ‘found’ film clips into a ‘ethnographic turn.” Playing on the of Erin experiencing what appears rich ‘galaxy of signifiers’. In cinema, historical evidence that revolution- to be a series of conversions under 95 knitting has been used as either a ary politics has tended to eliminate the combined weight of poverty metaphor of or complement to art except in propagandist and and a rudimentary iconography scheming and manipulation, agitational terms, the Magiciens, that reads as both pagan and charged restraint, the intricacies of with a coordinated flick of the wrist, Catholic. Not least, some rather human relationships, and the re-enchant these terms without unfavourable comparison seems casting of spells. In short, knitting being reactionary. They also give to be made between the is tactical. Warner’s subtle and would-be revolutionary art a much- enchantments of Catholicism and precise editing allows her to reclaim needed stiff drink. the fraudulent faerie photographs the symbolic complexity of this to which Burke’s own bear more neglected and pacified practice, Some might say that it would be than a passing resemblance. whilst also exposing her audience to impossible to make something some of its rather mesmeric allure. uninteresting out of a subject such Ayako Yoshimura’s panoramic as the Palestinian intifada, but in cityscape composes one unbroken Simon Morse’s witticisms provide Ya’ni intifada, Richard Mosse tracking shot from countless a welcome foil to the political handles his subject judiciously. He photographs of major urban gravitas found elsewhere. A wall refrains from imposing too much of skylines, from which distinct is covered with propaganda posters his authorship upon the piece, landmarks are then removed. for the ‘campagne belfastique’ of allowing the words of the documen- Yoshimura exposes the fragility of the secretive Atelier Populaire des tary’s participants to resonate of architectural idiosyncrasies within Magiciens Marxistes; a campaign their own accord. As these partici- an increasingly homogeneous urban that seeks to provoke revolution pants go through their definitions of sprawl. Her panorama becomes a through a heady combination of the Arabic word ‘intifada’ – offering phantasmagoria: an inert, spectral cheap drink and industrialised a range of meanings as diverse as a landscape that could be anywhere, magic. The forecast is for “flashes flood, throwing something out, a disturbingly seen from nowhere in of MAGIC followed by widespread mother’s sudden concern for her particular by many eyes striving outbreaks of SOCIALISM”: through children, a violent reaction to to work as one. Perhaps here sustained distractions and the expropriation, and an invocation Yoshimura’s artifice leads us a occasional sleight of hand, ‘hey rising from death rattle, to name a little too close to the truth: presto!’ – maximum political impact few – the complexity of the word exposing the fiction and the is assured. An unlikely combination, and the corresponding complexity dangerous suffocation of that certainly, but deceptively direct, of the Palestinian situation are strictly utopian position (which the nonetheless. A bit of mischief and articulated with profound economy. urban planner shares with the a few belly laughs just might In between the interviews, the view voyeur and God) to which detached, violate some recurrent habits, such from a car window shows us an all-encompassing knowledge is as capitalism, but the Magiciens’ unremarkable landscape, overlaid wont to aspire. rather affected optimism also by a soundtrack that could be wind suggests that the ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ or gunfire. As a companion to the radicalism of some (though not all) video, a light-box image shows in interventionist art might come up stark white capitals the word In the last room, Ellie Rees enacts With eighteen artists selected, Tim Stott is an art critic the premise of an unwritten, semi- things might have been crowded, based in Dublin. autobiographical story by Sylvia but the exhibition was astutely Plath, which follows a dissatisfied displayed, each work being allowed young woman’s attempt to forestall to command its own share of the the decision between divorce and space but not at the expense of suicide by obsessively baking cakes. continuity. Having said this, much One day she bakes a cake an hour of the work used a broadly similar for twenty-four hours. Filmed in real format (video or photography) and a time and presented simultaneously more challenging situation for both in three diptychs, the artist meas- audience and coordinators might ures, mixes, creams and sprinkles have been developed had a greater her way from Battenburg to Lemon range of media been selected. Drizzle. The suggestion is that bak- ing and other domestic activities displace intellectual activity and 96 the presumably uncomfortable decisions that come with it. This is true, to a degree, but there is also not a little ‘cleverness’ to baking, which would question any strict dichotomy between the active and the intellectual life. Although Rees (top left) Ellie Rees does not fully mine the metaphori- The day of the twenty four cal depths of baking as J. Meredith cakes, 2005 Warner does with knitting, still she DVD still dramatises the darker undercur- courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery rents of Plath’s story and presents (top right) baking as an unlikely endurance Richard Moss test. This is laudable, not least when Ya'ni Intifada, 2005 DVD still cooking seems to have infiltrated courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery art as an unquestionably celebratory and communal affair. (bottom left and right) J. Meredith Warner Knitting (found), 2005 DVD still courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery c . Brian Kennedy Golden Thread Gallery September – October Belfast 2005

The exhibition Prepossession brought together the work of three artists from Australia, Destiny Deacon, Tracey Moffatt and Darren Siwes; two from South Africa, Jo Ratcliffe and William Kentridge and two from the north of Ireland, Willie Doherty and Frances Hegarty. From the title and list of artists it was obvious that the exhibition was going to use photography, animation and video to explore issues of politics, prejudice and social conditions.

The project was a collaboration between the University 97 of New South Wales Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics and the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast. Both universities have a continuing research focus on politics and trauma in contemporary art. The exhibition co-curators Jill Bennett, Felicity Fenner and Liam Kelly, say in the catalogue, “Although each of the works included reflect distinct social and political conditions, the exhibition seeks to find a reso- nance between them, opening up a triangular dialogue, which we anticipate, will unfold quite differently in Sydney and Belfast.” Prepossession

Willie Doherty Non-specific threat, 2004 single channel video installation with sound, duration 7' 42" courtesy the artist, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Matt’s Gallery, London and Alexander & Bonin, New York Well unfold quite differently it most quite different in politically correct The television programme certainly did. The Ivan Dougherty America, remote Perth in Western Neighbours is an enduring image of Gallery in Sydney allowed for the Australia and the hallowed spaces suburban life in Australia. Destiny kind of academic ‘resonance’ and of the Venice Biennale than they Deacon takes this bland soap and discourse that one might expect of did up the Crum. The dislocated turns it into Over d-fence that such a project. Using the Golden landscape in the work seemed to be makes a very different comment on Thread Gallery on the Crumlin much the same landscape I had left Australian life. Deacon’s backyard Road in Belfast allowed for another behind to enter the gallery. is not somewhere for a group of kind of ‘resonance’. The week friends to share a pleasant barbie. before the show was due to open The other South African artist, Jo Her backyard is full of dogs barking was when the loyalist violence was Ratcliffe, also dealt with landscape. and people shouting. A mixture of at its height and the Crumlin Road Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by people coexist, drink beer; children was a focal point. shooting) scrolls across images of a play. The editing adds to the chaotic simple landscape of a farm garden. feel by jumping around and The Crumlin Road resonated to It is only when one realises that repeating images. It conveys a real issues of politics, social conditions, Vlakplaas was a training facility for world where the questions of place, 98 racism, trauma and colonization. the South African government’s identity and ownership have not The issues that would soon be dealt secret Death Squad do the images been resolved. with through photographs and video have any significance. This failure of in the gallery were now happening a an image to communicate that The third Australian artist, Darren matter of feet away from the gallery Ratcliffe deals with can also be Siwes, places himself and his wife outside on the street. The gallery seen on the Crumlin Road. It is only in the landscape, signifying a had to evacuate its staff early each when we realise that the colourful definite sense of location and place. day as the trouble started to flowers tied to lampposts signify a The photographs he produces are escalate. The exhibition was due to place where someone was killed do taken at night, giving them a ghost- open on the Saturday; by Friday they have a meaning beyond the like quality further emphasized by morning the work still had not decorative. the use of double exposure to make arrived, the courier company said the two people translucent. Siwes is ‘the Crum’ was too dangerous an When looking at the work of the of Aboriginal/ Dutch descent and area to enter. Things were a little Australian artists, it is important to when the photographs are taken quieter on the Friday and finally at know about the Stolen Generations. in Australia he stands in the fore- three o’clock the exhibition arrived. This was the forced removal of ground with his wife in the Indigenous children from their background. His wife is European The atmospheric spaces of the families and the placing of them so when the photographs are taken Golden Thread Gallery made for an into a white, European culture. in Europe the positions are intriguing venue. There was enough In 1997 the Australian Human reversed. These eerie photographs space to see each work individually Rights and Equal Opportunities give us a glimpse of the importance with just some overlapping of sound Commission in their report went as of landscape in defining identity, tracks and the flickering of lights to far as saying, “The removal remains culture and history. remind one that it was a group genocidal.” Despite this, the exhibition. It was a group exhibition Australian government still have not Portraiture and the self-portrait with artists from three very specific said sorry. have a long history in art and good places, each of which has had to portraiture goes beyond the visual deal with questions of identity, In her beautifully crafted short and deals with the life of the place and displacement. The impact film Night cries: a rural tragedy, person. Frances Hegarty’s work of living in these places can be Tracey Moffatt shows an Aboriginal Auto portrait #2 draws on this seen in how the artists deal with women nursing her dying white history. The strobing video image issues like trauma, anxiety and fear. mother. The daughter’s feelings of the artist constantly changes towards the mother wordlessly tempo, giving the work a visual The gallery’s location and the unfold in front of surreal sets narrative that is accentuated by earlier riots also had an impact. somewhere in the Australian a synchronised ticking noise. I had seen William Kentridge’s work outback. The issues raised by the The artist’s voice can also just be in three different venues during the Stolen Generations remind me of heard, telling the story of her life in past year. The well known animated issues raised by the scandals of the a matter of minutes. The work charcoal drawings of Kentridge’s Magdellan laundries in Ireland. portrays a sense of displacement alter ego Felix Teitlebaum seemed and a questioning of identity. Non-specific threat is a new work Brian Kennedy is a (below) by Willie Doherty which was shown Contributing Editor of William Kentridge Circa and an artist based Felix in exile, 1994 simultaneously in this exhibition animated film: 35mm film, in Belfast who recently and in the selected section of the DVD/video and laser disc spent three months Venice Biennale. The camera simply transfer, duration 8' 43" travelling and working in drawing, photography and but carefully goes around the Australia. direction: William Kentridge shoulders and shaven head of a editing: Angus Gibson man. Nothing happens, the man sound design: Wilbert Schubel music: composition for string never moves yet there is a real trio by Philip Miller (performed potential for danger. In Doherty’s by Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan desolate landscape there is a Vonk-Stirling, Jan Pustejovsky) ‘Go Tlapsha Didiba’ by Motsumi palpable feeling of fear. Makhene (performed by Sibongile Khumalo) Prepossession was certainly the series of 40 drawings in most important show to have charcoal, pastel and gouache on come to Belfast in the past year. paper, dimensions variable courtesy the artist and Golden It allowed for a complex reading of Thread Gallery, Belfast 99 the very issues that exist on the streets outside the Golden Thread Gallery and in similar places around the world. c . Colin Graham Project September – November Dublin 2005

100 Heather Allen and NS Harsha Mural Amidst the cacophony of imagery in Mural, are variations on a some- which is Mural a symmetry is times surreal narrative of home. imposed by two hands. One is Mural links these homes together derived from the Red Hand of through a series of lines that have Ulster, in its loyalist iconography; the appearance of contours on a here, in red and black, it encloses a map, and so there is some sense of dark shamrock. It’s a foreboding, if an engagement with geography, stark and unsubtle, use of an easily place and belonging. The varieties recognisable visual tic of Belfast. of ‘house’ and ‘home’ that appear The second hand is cobalt blue, in Harsha’s part of the painting reaching down from the heavens to seem to have been altered by the enclose a nondescript cottage or gable-wall mural experience of house, which trails smoke from its Belfast which was presumably chimney up and around the muscles (given Allen’s previous work) one of of the forearm above the hand. the main things he saw on his trip This hand of God looks capable of there. But as one house of ‘birth’ being caring and protecting, or, spirals off and finishes with another 101 just as feasibly, of carrying out the house of ‘death’, there is a exigencies of fate with little regard disappointing lack of invention or for human life. But the hands, one specificity to the imagery here. pointing up, one moving down, And while Harsha seems bewil- clearly represent for the artists dered by the chance to engage with Heather Allen and NS Harsha the an alien geography, Allen’s brashly collaborative nature of Mural, and hysterical visual and verbal the apparent cross-fertilisation of concatenation has equally little ideas, cultures and near-stereotypi- space for a genuine dialogue. (opposite and above) Heather Allen and NS Harsha cal imagery which is meant to have Mural, 2005 been in play in the making of Mural. Belfast and Mysore undoubtedly installation views, Project share many cultural and artistic courtesy Project Mural is a wall painting by the two commonalities – the role of the icon artists, and is the result of a in popular visual culture, perhaps Colin Graham is co-editor month’s work in the Project Gallery, underwritten by sectarianism, is of The Irish review. as well as visits by both artists to presumably one such potential each other’s ‘homes’, in Belfast and point of cross-over. Mural seems to in Mysore. The two hands in Mural, hint that the two places share a in addition to being a nice visual pervasively politicised religious pun and a reminder of this process, symbolism, an always-nascent are as close as Mural gets to a militarism and an aesthetic melded coherence of vision and thought. from a contentious cultural history, The possibility of an interchange of which makes the central idea of artistic practices and visions was ‘belonging’ both necessary and undoubtedly contained within this fraught. The dualities of Mural could project, but the final outcome is, have been the beginnings of a in places, a tepid and offbeat affair. collaborative artistic practice that Allen and Harsha share an interest would consider the role of public in the symbolic, the iconic, the art in varieties of postcolonial surreal and at times the naïve, and society, and indeed could have in this at least they both recognise asked us to think about how we that the near-kitsch of public imagine ourselves belonging to that artforms (political murals, graffiti, society. Instead Mural reminds us illustration) can either provide a primarily of the continual difficulty freedom of expression or insist on of cultural translation, and in that, a stifling of thought. Harsha’s at least, it points to the sadness of contribution is at its best in the colonialism’s legacies. finely detailed line drawings which are typical of his work, and which, c . Maria Fusco Paperback, 13 x 20cm 168pp, 48pp colour STG£11.95 ISBN 0 9545025 1 5 Four Corners, London

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Wilson John McCracken, polyester resin and fibreglass Flight, 1995 on plywood, 290 x 52 x 6cm courtesy the artist, LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California / Four Corner Books

Brian book good effect the progress of a steady outside, but somewhat more decline, unthinkable in scale, complexly constructed within. inevitable in action and historic in recent popular history producing a In Farquharson’s preface to the sadly empathic little story that is publication, speaking of his also a cautionary tale. motivation to set upon the task, he states, “Finally, it is about the John McCracken’s written pleasure and challenge of contribution rolls in at just 127 responding to a thing ones loves.” words, as concise, informal yet When seen together, Brian Wilson: formally elegant as his visual An art book could be read as a contributions to the book. simple celebration of a very McCracken’s text is a simple elegy complicated cultural phantasm, There’s something very touching to Good vibrations, a personal prose but the comprehensive and about the idea of Brian Wilson as an poem of sorts: intelligent range of contributions organising principle of a book, or for selected ensure that, when seen Brian Wilson is one of my favorite that matter of anything: so chaotic, together as a meaningful whole, 103 music people, and in particular, his quixotic and neurotic in his public this book adds an invaluable Good vibrations is one of my all-time and private life is he, that his music insight into the influence of favorite pieces of music… whenever is really the only trace of the Brian Brian Wilson’s work across a raft I hear it, I get a tingling sense… it Wilson phenomenon that could be of cross-discplinary practice. suggests to me an infinite and judged as in anyway ‘rational’. almost heavenly space. In spite of such an incongruity, Gate and Aumaka are McCracken’s Maria Fusco is a Belfast- Brian Wilson: An art book is a natty two accompanying artworks in the born writer and lecturer little tome, in which Alex book, resembling glossy planks based in London; she Farquharson brings together the recently edited Put about: propped up against white gallery work of thirty-five writers and A critical anthology on walls, with shiny polyester resin and artists to produce a diverse reader, independent publishing. fibreglass ‘veneer’ covering their which aims to be creatively evoca- plywood interiors, appearing tive of the big man himself. Whilst independent and vulnerable at the most of the visual contributions same time, a direct reflection of obliquely reference Wilson, the texts the alarming (and as it turned out are direct responses and probes illusory) buoyancy of The Beach into his practice and outputs. Boys’ image marketing. Jennifer Higgie hangs her text, Sister Corita Kent’s two silkscreen Guess I’m dumb, off lyrics from prints from 1967 and 1965, The sea Wilson’s song of the same name, queen and Sunkist are weird (penned for Glen Campbell), visually yet delightful citrus outbursts, tracking what could be Wilson’s featuring dismembered slogans mini-autobiography – at the time of floating in hand-rendered yellow writing the song, twenty-two years waves. As one might expect from of age, deaf in one year, on the a nun once based in Los Angeles verge of a nervous breakdown – through the sixties, her work is while also demonstrating his textual optimistic in tone and diligent in gentility: social content, combining The way I act don’t seem like me techniques, references and text I’m not on top like I used to be from advertising and graffiti to Will I give in when I know I should produce pieces that are be strong explanatory, in part, of her roles as As to give in even though I know an artist, teacher and social it’s wrong activist. Her work smells like summer, in the same way that slimy Outlining Wilson’s relationship with coconut suntan lotions or sticky Glen Campbell, Higgie tracks to ice-pops do: initially fresh on the 104 c .

Project by Andrew Dodds. Andrew Dodds is an artist from Belfast currently based in London. He returned to 105 Ireland in 2004 to undertake an artist’s residency. The following images are from a body of work initiated on the residency and were made by digitally reconfiguring Irish landscape paintings using ‘Fill Patterns’ from Microsoft Word.

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