CIRCA 125 CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE IN IRELAND AUTUMN 2008 | ¤7.50 £5 US$12 | ISSN 0263-9475

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

______2 Editor Subscriptions Peter FitzGerald For our subscription rates please see bookmark, or visit Administration/ Advertising www.recirca.com where you can Barbara Knezevic subscribe online. ______Board Circa is concerned with visual Graham Gosling (Chair), Mark culture. We welcome comment, Garry, Georgina Jackson, Isabel proposals and written Nolan, John Nolan, Hugh contributions. Please contact Mulholland, Brian Redmond the editor for more details, or consult our website ______www.recirca.com Opinions Contributing editors expressed in this magazine Brian Kennedy, Luke Gibbons are those of the authors, not ______necessarily those of the Board. Assistants Circa is an equal-opportunities Gemma Carroll, Sarah O’Brien, employer. Copyright © Circa Madeline Meehan, Kasia Murphy, 2008 Amanda Dyson, Simone Crowley ______Contacts Designed/produced by Circa Peter Maybury 43 / 44 Temple Bar www.softsleeper.com Dublin 2 Ireland Printed by W & G Baird Ltd, tel / fax (+353 1) 679 7388 Belfast [email protected] www.recirca.com Printed on 115gsm + 250gsm Arctic the Matt ______c ______

______CIRCA 125 AUTUMN 2008

3 Editorial 26 | Letters 28 | Update 30 | Features 32 | Reviews 66 | Project 107 |

(front cover) Ben Craig degree-show installation 2008 courtesy the artist

Culture night 2008 c . Circa video screening

Circa screens the selected videos from the open submission

Curated by Lee Welch, artist and co-director of Four Gallery, Dublin, videos will be shown in the Atrium of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin on 19 September 2008.

The Selected artists are: Candice Jacobs, Serge Le Squer, Emily Candela, Gabriela Vainsencher, Sergio Cruz, Tony Burhouse, Claudia Mateus, Andrew Sims, Angel Bellaran, Dave Griffiths, Barry W. Hughes, Funda Ozgunaydin circa: two critical writing competitions

Calling all (a) undergraduates and (b) transition year/year twelve students! We are looking for new writers who are fascinated by contemporary art and visual culture. What do we want? Either a review of an exhibition, or an essay on any topic relating to contemporary art or visual culture. The winning texts will be published on recirca.com Details: (a) You are resident in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland (b) You have not been published in Circa before, either online or in the magazine (c) You are writing about an art exhibition (up to 750 words) or an art- or visual-culture-related topic (up to 2000 words) (d) Closing Date: 31 January 2009 (e) Submissions to [email protected] or to our postal address. (f) Please state the course you are following and where. ______c Circa 43 / 44 Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland tel (+353 1) 679 7388 [email protected] or [email protected] www.recirca.com

c . Peter FitzGerald 26 Editorialc Art college. Do you leave it, or does it leave you? “… down the street, bouncing an empty can…” (see The final weeks in art college can be very fraught, as the above). Think cityscape. We inhabit cities, for the most struggle is on to get the work into a form ready for the part, and they inhabit us. To take one trivial example: assessors and the world at large to observe and judge. outside the Circa office window, in the middle of Dublin’s And then one day, shortly after, it all stops. You were Temple Bar, buskers murder the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s inside, now you’re outside. Sunday morning coming down – the source of the empty can – in what seems like a daily, ritual sacrifice. It’s an To draw out this whole process a little, for some, I am ‘outsider’ song, to judge by the lyrics, regurgitated in delighted that we are again hosting a ‘critics’ choice’ from Temple Bar in a way that possibly comforts the passing the degree shows. This is a series of short texts in which visitor in his or her temporary outsider status, or at least selected writers have themselves chosen one artist from a creates a moment of unmelodious but otherwise harmless bachelors- or masters-level Fine Art course. This is someone complicity. whose work particularly took their interest; in general, the word is, the standard is high and, as can be seen in Cities get into our headspace in a million ways, bad the pages here, the output diverse and stimulating. buskers being just an obvious example. Artists often try to pin down the where, when and how of the city’s effects. I do have misgivings that we were not able to cover all Sometimes the city itself, in its official form, encourages 27 degree-level shows, or to give fair weight to the different such artistic exploration, sometimes it seems to thwart it, colleges. Reasons are various, but it certainly doesn’t help and sometimes it does both simultaneously. Taking as her if a college provides no information about when its degree starting point one recent artistic intervention, bodycity, show is on. There is particularly small coverage of Gemma Tipton looks in her article in this issue at various degree-show work in Northern Ireland; again, reasons city/ art dialogues. are various, but one is worth mentioning because it is puzzling: there is only one college, the University of Ulster, Also often battling their outsider status are those whom Belfast Campus, offering Fine Art at degree level; in the various artistic interventions seek to re-enfranchise, Republic there are at least nine. to give a voice to – there are very many forms of art in the community that seek to involve disadvantaged people, But back to this particular artist presented in the opening and very many other ways in which artists seek to help paragraph, as he or she steps beyond the art-college those who are marginalised. And then along come the doors for the last time. Perhaps heighten the drama by Olympics and, it seems, much of this artistic work may having a bitter wind blast down the street, bouncing an cease – at least, this may very well be the case in empty can along the gutter (this is Ireland in June, after all). Nothern Ireland (NI), as the the London Olympics of 2012 Art students occupy multiple and contradictory positions siphon cash, especially Lottery money, out of the ‘good in the social hierarchy. There is a fair bit of the outsider cause’ sectors of UK society. As Justin McKeown argues about them, as they produce work regarded with varying in his article in this issue, now is not a good time to be levels of suspicion by the rest of society. And contrast taking money out of community-, cross-community- and “Hi, Dad, I’d like you to meet my boyfriend John, he’s just disadvantage-related arts activity in NI, not when people graduated from law school” with “…he’s just finished art in NI are trying to establish an identity away from the college.” Artists tend to welcome the freedom to think and shadow of violence. Yet, it seems, this is just what is going act differently that comes with being a bit on the fringes, to happen. I’ve mentioned above that NI seems peculiarly but for most there is still the comfort of knowing the lingo underresourced when it comes to Fine Art courses. It is of the middle classes and of being able to ‘reinsert’ with well known that NI is greatly disadvantaged when it relative ease. Not proper outsiders, so, at least not at the comes to central-government funding of the arts. And level explored by artist Brian Maguire. Maguire brings us now, apparenlty, someone is about to fire a javelin though prisoners, psychiatric patients, favela-dwellers, any and all what funding remains; doesn’t seem fair. who are in danger of existing, ‘passing through’, without apparent consequence. Maguire’s commitment to the On a happier note, Patrick Ireland is dead. Northern Ireland marginalised is certainly not common. What is very unusual, is again the reason, but the context is considerably better. however, is twofold: the incisive, arresting, unapologetic In this issue, Declan Long interprets an unusual interment. visual language that demands the viewer’s attention; and the way his work has found its way into the highest What else? Much – enjoy! reaches of the fine-art establishment in Ireland. In this issue we carry an interview with Maguire by Cian Traynor; it’s hard not to be struck by the simplicity and honesty of Maguire’s message. c . Letters In the first paragraph, story around an historical NSF exists to support Kelly quotes a report from fact and then make the artist’s work and its an advertising agency in image ambiguous?” Here, visibility is vital to this, Australia. In the layout Kelly’s observational both in relation to public and format adopted, this abilities are not capable understanding and support quote is placed directly enough to notice that the of art and artists. If Kelly over the words “The new image is not ambiguous; wants to know the means piece [ie, Beuys (still a it is actually very clearly of promotion adopted discussion)] consists of a explained by the text piece here, the artwork was photographic billboard on below if he wanted to read specifically promoted by the front of the NSF with and quote it correctly. the NSF’s newsletter an accompanying text.” and brochure for spring With Kelly’s structure, Kelly then continues to – summer 2008, by a casual reader might write that the NSF made electronic mailout, by an mistakenly read the posters and postcards of artist’s talk (which Kelly advertising quote as part the artwork. This is typical attended), and by an 28 Sir, of the artwork’s text. of a situation that Kelly advertisement in Circa We wish to respond to A correlation between the imagines; “art and artists magazine. a review written by John artwork and advertising is reduced to gimmicky Kelly that appeared on then tediously developed advertisements for Compounding this pages 90 – 91 of Circa throughout the review, contemporary-art [sic] mistaken assertion, 124, summer 2008.1 suggesting that the work, organisations.” No posters Kelly fails to deal with the Kelly wrote about a pho- because of its public were actually made. artwork under discussion tographic and text artwork location and similarity to Postcards were made on and confuses the reader, made by Sean Lynch, a billboard, is an advert behalf of and requested twice referring to an ‘idea’ which is now exhibited on for the NSF and Sean by the artist as an integral which was exhibited at the the façade of the National Lynch. Kelly continues this part of the commission, Lewis Glucksman Gallery Sculpture Factory in Cork. argument, leaving behind to further disseminate the in 2007 as a continuing The purpose of this the context and content content of the artwork. part of the artwork Beuys response is to correct of the artwork he purports However, Kelly’s assertion (still a discussion). What and clarify a series of to review, using factual that the postcards were exactly is this idea? Its factually incorrect, disin- inaccuracies to reinforce somehow part of an context and subject genuous and misleading his agenda. attempt to brand the work matter is not mentioned in points contained within or showcase the NSF Kelly’s text.3 While we the review. Indicative of In a very brief description (rather than the artist) is presume he is aware of Kelly’s approach, he of the artwork, Kelly a deliberate misunder- Joseph Beuys’ trip to begins his review by paraphrases its text; “it standing of the intention Limerick, Dublin and Cork mistitling the artwork in tells us that a mysterious behind the work. The in September 1974, at no question, calling it person saved white chalk postcards, funded through point is such information “Joseph Beuys (still a dust from a Joseph Beuys the core commission disclosed in his review, discussion),” rather than lecture at the Crawford budget (rather than any despite its clear contextual its actual title, Beuys (still Art Gallery in 1974.” At no advertising budget), relevance to the artwork a discussion). point in the artwork’s text were very much part of he should be reviewing. was a ‘mysterious person’ the artwork and part of its Instead, Kelly uses his mentioned.2 While it is the communication. Any misreading and negation reviewer’s prerogative to reflected promotion of of the situation as deduct that this particular NSF is irrelevant and leverage to claim that all situation might be mysteri- tangential. This does not involved parties are only ous, what is problematic negate NSF’s stated concerned with buying here is an assumption intention behind the into the Beuys name. that Kelly then makes. commission: “to provide a This is another incorrect He uses his own prominent platform for an assumption. paraphrasing as the actual artist, as well as drawing content of the artwork in attention to the work of his argument, continuing the NSF.” It needs to be to ask “… why fabricate a borne in mind that the A final contradiction is 1 This follows two other articles enough to notice that the present in Kelly’s review. by the same author, referring image is not ambiguous...” to NSF activity, that appear on Earlier in the prose he the Circa website. If I understand their stance writes, “My first reaction to 2 For clarity, the artwork’s text correctly, no secondary the pile of white powder must be quoted: “A small reading of Sean’s image mound of chalkdust was located was that the NSF was in Cork in recent months. is permissible. However, selling cocaine.” Despite Originally, this dust fell from if you use the Google the subversion that such a blackboard used by Joseph ‘Images’ function and type Beuys in his lecture at the an idea might imply, Kelly Crawford Municipal Art in the word ‘cocaine’, later contradicts himself Gallery, on September 26 the results will show a by concluding that 1974. A local clergyman number of photographs erased Beuys’ notes and “Neither the NSF nor the drawings afterwards. A young that look like small artist have changed or man in the audience then mounds of white chalk! subverted the function of collected the chalkdust off the the medium that delivers floor, and put it in his pocket. To be fair, they do get The next day’s Cork Examiner Lynch’s photograph, nor summarized the ideas two things right: in the have they changed its discussed that evening, Dear Editor, title I incorrectly added 29 context.” Firstly, the ‘Beuys shows man as an Sean and Tara state that, the name Joseph to essential creative being in a Beuys. I apologise for this medium here is art, not state of evolution. He searches “At no point in the advertising. Secondly, for a means of restoring artwork’s text was a mistake. They also state would Kelly’s own sug- this sense of creativity in all ‘mysterious person,’ that “…because of its spheres of life.’” public location and gestion of a state-funded 3 For the record, the artwork mentioned.” But they organization selling referred to as an ‘idea’ by footnote this with the text similarity to a billboard…” cocaine not be enough Kelly consisted of a large that mentions this person I correlated the work with appropriated photograph, advertising. They are subversion for him? wall panels, printouts of - “A young man in the e-mails, a reconstruction of audience then collected correct and I stand by It is a great disappoint- Beuys’ 1974 sculpture Irish the chalkdust off the floor, my review. ment that Kelly has wasted energies displayed in a vitrine, and the original signage of and put it in his pocket.” column inches with an the Carnegie Free Library and When quizzed during his Regards ill-thought approach. Museum, Limerick. In its NSF talk, Sean could not John Kelly A carefully considered content the artwork specifically divulge this man’s identity review on the artwork dealt with recollections of Beuys’ time in Limerick City, on and the text does not itself might have been 25 September 1974. reveal it either. He remains valuable. Beuys (still a a mysterious person from discussion) will remain in the ’70s, who collects situ on the façade on the dust. NSF until the end of 2008. Perhaps Kelly will Sean and Tara state, have ample time to give it “No posters were actually a second look. made.” The NSF brochure folded out to reveal a Sean Lynch large reproduction of the Tara Byrne work on one side. The image had text over it promoting the NSF.

They quote me as saying, “My first reaction to the pile of white powder was that the NSF was selling cocaine.” I used ‘advertising’, not ‘selling’.

They also state, “… Kelly’s observational abilities are not capable c . Update New portrait competitions Davy, "Ireland's leading provider of stockbroking, wealth management and financial advisory services," has launched a portrait competition, the Davy Portrait Awards. The prize is an extremely healthy ¤12,600/ £10,000 if you hit the jackpot, with further prizes as well. One impor- tant caveat: only traditional, nondigital media accepted. Initial selection is by open Circa and Culture Night People for Venice They’re back: two 30 submission, but the Culture Night is back, Susan MacWilliam has Circa critical-writing deadline passed this 29 specifically on 19 been chosen as the artist competions August. The judging panel September. That’s when a to represent Northern Following the success of is prestigious: Rita Duffy, load of arts venues in Ireland at the 2009 Venice last year’s competitions, president of the Royal Dublin, Cork, Galway and Biennale. Karen Downey, calling again all (a) Ulster Academy, Stephen Limerick will remain open Exhibitions Director at undergraduates and (b) McKenna, president of the until 11 pm, and all sorts Belfast Exposed transition-year/ year-twelve Royal Hibernian Academy, of special activities will Photography, will curate students! We are looking and Gemma Tipton, take place. Circa is the solo show. MacWilliam for new writers who are "international art critic and delighted to be participating is best known for her fascinated by contemporary writer" who often graces this time round, thanks to ambiguous take on art and visual culture. the pages of Circa, this Temple Bar Gallery and paranormal and parapsy- We want either a review of issue being no exception. Studios, to artist and Four chological phenomena. an exhibition, or an essay There will be exhibitions of Gallery director Lee on any topic relating to the selected works at the Welch, and to all those Meanwhile, Sarah Browne contemporary art or visual Naughton Gallery, Belfast, who submitted videos to and Gareth Kennedy have culture. The winning texts in November and at our Culture Night video been selected by will be published on Farmleigh House, Dublin, competition. Those whose Commissioner Caoimhín recirca.com. Full details in early 2009. video works have been Corrigan to be the are on p 22 of this issue. selected by Welch are Republic's artists at the Portraiture is clearly in Candice Jacobs, Serge same gig. Browne and favour, as there is also a Le Squer, Emily Candela, Kennedy’s project in Circa new Photographic Portrait Gabriela Vainsencher 120, summer 2007, gives Directors Prize. This one is in (two pieces), Sergio Cruz, a flavour of how they often Darragh Hogan and Tara conjunction with the Irish Tony Burhouse, Claudia reconfigure aspects of Byrne have left the Board arts review and the Royal Mateus, Andrew Sims, common culture in their of Circa. Our sincere Hibernian Academy – Angel Bellaran, Dave practice. thanks to them for all their in fact, you submit your Griffiths, Barry W Hughes valuable contributions to portrait photo as you and Funda Ozgunaydin. the magazine. would any other artwork to Please join us on 19 the RHA Annual Exhibition. September in the Atrium That exhibition is in of TBG&S to see the November, but the closing outcome. date for submissions is 5 September. Could be worth it: there’s ¤6,000 on offer for the winner. Errata In the last issue, we incorrectly stated that Brendan Jamison’s JCB Circa gratefully BUCKET series show was at the Old Museum acknowledges the Arts Centre; in fact it was at Queen Street Studios; support of its Major many apologies. Supporters, Partners Gremlins also munched at parts of Jessica Foley's and Friends. ev+a review. A correct To find out more about version is now online, at More dosh recirca.com/backissues/c1 the Circa Friends The Taylor Art Award, Ireland’s 24/eva.shtml. The transcript highest no-strings-attached of the audio file on which Scheme, please visit award in the visual arts, has the review is based is also been scooped at the RDS available there. www.recirca.com/ Student Art Awards this year friends by Robert Manson. Manson, New director for Model a graduate of IADT Dún Séamus Kealy is to be Laoghaire, pockets a cool the new Director of the ¤20,000. Gerry Davis (LSAD) Model:Niland Gallery in took the Lewis Crosby Award, Sligo. He leaves his post Justin Larkin (NCAD) the as Curator of the Freyer Award, Sharanne Lone Blackwood Gallery, Major Supporters: (Carlow IT) the James White University of Toronto, Award, Leila Pedersen has an impressive list of (NCAD) the Printmaking curated shows under his Award, Ruth Medjber (DIT) belt, and apparently is also the Henry Higgins Travelling handy with a paintbrush. Scholarship, and Susan He lived in Sligo as a O’Brien (NCAD) the Peter child. Meanwhile, the O’Kane Award. Model’s previous Director, Sarah Glennie, takes over The Arts Council/ An as head of the Irish Film Chomhairle Ealaíon has also Institute in Dublin. been shelling out. A lot of artists have reason to be pleased with the Council’s Bursary decisions this year, perhaps most notably Tom Molloy and Margaret O’Brien, each of whom get ¤35,000 over three years. Partners: c . Features 32 Retrieving what we choose to forget: Brian Maguire in interview Cian Traynor 34 | Ready, steady, gone Justin McKeown 40 | Exit ghost Declan Long 46 | Bodycity Gemma Tipton 49 | Degree shows: Critics’ choices 54 |

(background) Kevin Gaffney The Black plum video still

DVD video, 12 mins

courtesy the artist c . c . Cian Traynor Retrieving what we choose to forget Brian Maguire in interview

34 [opposite] Gallery, Hidden islands: notes from the war on the poor, Brian Maguire reveals a clarity and sophistication that suggest a style still Chair, 2007 acrylic on canvas evolving. His most successful show to date, it brings 60 x 60 cm together a range of topics under an impressively cohesive courtesy Kerlin Gallery socio-political commentary and is considered by many to be a significant breakthrough for an artist widely regarded as an informed and compassionate observer of human rights issues. Here, in a rare interview, Maguire speaks candidly about the long-term commitment of his work and Brian Maguire’s paintings have never been suited to the ideas that inspired his latest collection. passive consumption. Drawn to figures wounded, alienated and vulnerable, the body of his work has always proved What attracts you to working with people on the margins provocative if not altogether unsettling. Consistently of society? attempting to counteract a process of erasure from I remember saying that art comes from the spirit of society, Maguire is conscious of the ‘trap’ that people revenge. Sometimes it’s from the spirit of love, but mostly often get caught in for reasons beyond their own control. revenge. What attracts me is the unfairness of the whole fuckin’ thing and the necessity to make a gesture. Just a 35 It’s this fascination with the human condition that has gesture in counterpoint to it. inspired various collaborative projects, culminating in exhibitions across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Does that gesture attempts to reclaim dignity on behalf His work as artist-in-residence in prisons throughout of the subject? Ireland and North America effectively sought to re-humanise It may do so, certainly. Normally what I have done, like my his subjects; his time working in the impoverished work with prisoners before, is to show that they have a communities of Brazil juxtaposed the faces of children and social identity; that they are citizens too. With the work criminals in an air of inevitability; and his involvement with that I’ve done in institutions, I received feedback from the Derry’s Gransha hospital questioned public perception families of patients who were touched by the simple of mental illness by highlighting patient individuality and recognition of humanity there. One woman in particular empowerment. broke down at an exhibition which dealt with mental patients in Derry. She felt that this was the first time she Yet it was Maguire’s collaborative project with Galway’s had seen her people honoured. To me, that is retrospective Fairgreen homeless shelter that epitomises his engaging justification…which I would not have had at the time. There and deeply personal approach. The project was driven by would have been grumbles of exploitation, the argument the notion that those who had passed away while living being that if they’re mental patients, they can’t give on the streets had not only been relegated to the margins permission. But when they died, their families were thrilled of society, but had seemingly left no trace behind them at to have a portrait. There was no enquiry into who gave all. Undertaking an extended period of research, Maguire permission. Each of the subjects had stood into their sought out anyone who could provide recollections or photo with absolute pride. No one can tell me they weren’t photographs of certain figures, gradually developing a sane enough to do that. People have different levels of sense of the person before committing their memory to illness like they have different levels of consciousness, so canvas and honouring their right to be remembered. to brand everyone the same is actually quite discriminatory. Some of the patients, while disabled, could decide their By capturing an existential character rarely found in participation because the whole thing was voluntary from portraiture, Maguire has a way of unearthing qualities in the start. That’s what the whole thing was about. his subjects that narrow the gulf between viewer and subject. When political reality invades personal life, the You have a few paintings in the exhibition that are ideological issue becomes an individual one, challenging based on photographs. Is that a new way of working the viewer to question what is deemed conventionally for you? acceptable. These works act as the raised voice of one I’ve always worked with photos. In fact I spend most of person’s subjective truth, examining the balance of power my life hunting photographs, sorting through newspapers with a damning ferocity. for historical images. When you paint, you edit. You’re Maguire’s paintings are traditionally guided by an apparent changing it. So the image is where you start. The difference primal energy, the paint smeared roughly as if to apply with an iconic image is that it’s already there and in a pressure on the message behind the image. While still sense is being reinterpreted, so the audience is bringing retaining the multiple depths that have characterised his a context to it which otherwise wouldn’t happen. It creates previous output, the artist’s recent exhibition at the Kerlin an expectation. their beds, they whipped those houses down, set them on fire and disconnected the electricity. Can you imagine if your house was built of tin and a bulldozer went through it? They succeeded in stopping them for a number of hours. They had tried it legally, taking the case to the high court of Kenya and fighting for the right to live there. The case was only being heard when the bulldozers went in and the place was eventually destroyed. All that was left was a big mound of earth and sheets of metal, glistening. And that’s essentially what I painted. The richness of the earth just contrasted so much with the galvanised metal. It stays the one glistening colour because it doesn’t rust under rain. That contradiction took over the painting to a When you say you’re editing, what are you adding? large extent and imbued it with a unique kind of energy to Desire and fear distort the way we see things. It’s what itself. The title of the painting refers to the date and time you leave out that counts. The viewer completes the work of the eviction. And if you take that date and go through 36 on their own. For example, there was an investiture of the the BBC broadcasts for that day, you’ll find the report. So Queen taken at eighteen and what I saw was institutional maybe the painting will keep that story alive a little longer. violence: all these old men around her draped in theatrical costumes, putting clothes on her that are supposed to You have a very idiosyncratic way of capturing people, carry power…essentially interfering with a young person. there’s almost a metaphysical quality to your portraits. Now that’s a completely different way of reading that. What do you look for in faces? I read it as a form of child abuse, so I painted it that way. I try and catch what I think the person is about. It’s intuitive. I emphasised the figures as ogres, the darkness in their You never know what it’ll be. Overall the context in which black cloaks, then painted her in yellow so she was slight, a portrait is made is very important to me. The act itself is tiny…like a bird. That’s painting a historical image and based on a certain value of the individual as traditionally distorting it through what I see in it. only people of value have their portrait taken, so it’s harnessing that. In a way that was the same with the If the viewer is to complete the picture in the way homeless people. Those paintings were about complete that you say, does that mean that your role is to raise respect for whoever I was drawing. questions? If there’s a good reason to do it, you get enough fuel from Well when I look at that picture, I have the sense of a very that to carry it through. The more you understand them, young person being surrounded by older people. I must the more you can overcome technical difficulties. I’m just have experienced that in my own life, of being quite surprised how easy it is to paint people I know. powerless and being surrounded. I remember seeing drawings in Portlaoise Prison of men being surrounded by You wouldn’t have known the figure in Kick boxer, so police in their interrogations which reminded me of a how did your impression of him form? similar construct to the investiture. But they weren’t No, I wouldn’t have known him but I had good reason to benevolent discussions, I can tell you! So what I’m saying do him. I was sucked into this warren of little shops in is that I had some understanding – correct or incorrect – Cameroon, asking permission for photographs and no one about relationships which this picture awoke in me. I paint wanted to be in one except this man. He was the one man the picture. You come in and look at it. If you have had a in the market where the consensus was that he had to be similar experience, the picture will speak to that experience photographed. He was their hero, this champion kick and enlighten it. And that’s how it works. That’s how all art boxer. He was also an African man living in Africa and that works. The medium tells us what we already know. was enough power to make me work from the photo. It’s funny, I remember being lost in the painting and it became So for those who aren’t familiar with the stories behind really important to me. He was very quiet, very proud. I’m some of the pictures at the exhibition, such as Nairobi not saying his face was damaged, but you knew he’d been – 28/01/07, can it still speak to them? through something. I remember his pride, his presence. You would need to know that there was an eviction… And that sticks out when you’ve walked into this market You’re turning me into my own critic, which I don’t like and you’re the only white man for a long distance. (laughs). But we’ll go along with it and see where it goes. Sometimes when you see a person on the street and they There are two Nairobi paintings: a huge one and then a just look at you, a consciousness is exchanged. It has tiny, gentle one of a guy asleep. It was a horrendous an impact. eviction. Bulldozers were driven at midnight into a tiny little shanty town of fifty families. With the children asleep in Brian Maguire Memorial for Crumlin youth, 2007 acrylic on canvas 46 x 38 cm courtesy Kerlin Gallery

31 The title is as honest as I could get. The ‘hidden islands’ refer to the stand-alone sections, usually two or three paintings in each section, such as the two presidents at Directly beside that painting was Memorial for Crumlin either end of the gallery, and similarly the two Nairobi youth, a face that’s bleached out. It’s almost like a ghost paintings. The subheading is ‘notes on the war on the or an inverted face… poor’ – most of these incidences are about poor people It’s lovely what you say because that was my intention. who have been kept poor for a variety of reasons. He’s a man who wreaked immense damage on himself Now, you may ask: how does the portrait of a black man and indeed the others that came across him. But he never become a note on the war on the poor? Well it’s there lived. I don’t wish to go into the details publicly, but all I because the life expectancy in central Africa is 41. can say is that when I was as at the funeral, I spoke to The life expectancy of you or me, based solely on where someone who held a similar view, and there was a solidarity we’re born, is 82. Now if that’s not a war on the poor, there, a sense that there was another human being in the I don’t know what is. world with the same notion as myself and that kept him in my consciousness. So when you say it’s like a ghost, How does St. Patrick’s Dublin fit into this theme? that’s what I was looking for. That’s the effect I wanted. That one is about the fact that all these regiments that 38 He was never really here. Because I think he lived as a fought in the British Army were made up of Irish people – ghost, he never really did the things we all take for granted the second and third sons of tenant farmers. We’ve in our lives: to get to grow up, to have families, to have always had the anti-conscription ballads and I sung them careers, to have achievements, to have failures, to have myself. But it was Irishmen that went into these regiments life… to be remembered by people when you go. and surely we ought to remember them. I know because of the politics in 1916 and 1922 that it became really This act of remembering seems to be a unifying difficult to acknowledge Irish participation in the British theme behind your recent exhibition; were you Army and the very abuse that their colonial wars conducted, conscious of that when you’re putting it together? but this is our heritage too. So it baffles me to be greeted The notion behind the exhibition began when I started with amazement upon entering the Cathedral in Christchurch work last year. I’ve always had an interest in how some to go and see those banners. The man at the gate said: people are invisible and things get forgotten. I think the “what? Are you from around here?” In that sense the first picture in the show came from when I was driving banners are secret, they’re hidden. They’ve been perceived through Brooklyn and I noticed this very fit red-haired man as anti-republican but that struggle is over now. It should strapped to a chair on the side of the road. He was left all be in the past. To wipe out the memory of those there, sitting immobile at midday, with no sign of police regiments is, again, an attack on the poor. anywhere. So he was obviously invisible to the people who were supposed to be minding him. It got me thinking Traditionally your work is known for anger and injustice. about other things that had been utterly visible to me yet Is there room for optimism? had seemingly disappeared from collective memory. One I honestly think the doing of them is optimistic. I wouldn’t of those was when the Iraqi war began and the weapons make a show like this if I didn’t have a sense of grievance, of mass destruction were nowhere to be found. The main a sense of structure in an inequitable way. So to actually purpose – which is always like a subsidiary purpose, really stand up and do what’s required is optimistic. The work – of the invasion was to bring democracy. And we were itself may expose something but the doing itself is enough. led to believe that this was the generosity of the American I’m not decorating people’s houses. government in sending their troops in. Nowhere in the English-speaking world were the ghosts of Patrice The one that sticks out the most in the exhibition is Lumumba or Salvador Allende quoted. They appeared in Chair, because I can’t tie it to anything… the French press, but not in the English-speaking press. I did get some advice to leave it out but forgot (laughs). Democracy had already existed in the Congo and Chile, It’s a lovely contradiction. The chair is my own but it’s also and American presidents were instrumental in giving a symbol of bourgeois power. It’s a kind of an everyman’s instructions in how that democracy was to be destroyed throne. In one way it represents what you can achieve if and their leaders executed in both of those countries. you operate the system: equality. But nobody’s sitting in Now, many years after the events, the ambassadors that the chair, so I used it as a triptych with Allende and were there at the time have gone on record describing Lumumba where the chair represents the faceless people those experiences. So in the same way that prisoner who ordered these men killed. These are the thoughts I became invisible, so too did these men. The purpose of have. It’s been criticised, interestingly enough, because the exhibition is essentially to make visible that which has it’s so beautiful. It’s too flawless to be a Maguire. But that become invisible – that’s the thread running through it. was the thinking behind it. This collection seems to be a lot more accessible than your older work. Have you been aware of that at all? Yeah, you know accessibility must have something to do with clarity and I think I am clearer as I get older. Funnily enough, I remember a woman standing in front of a painting in Athens complaining: “But I understand it!” She felt that art should be inaccessible and that if she understood it, it was no good. It was actually offensive to her. I don’t share her view (laughs). In my own experience, I’ve been able to travel Europe and look at pictures, which was a real education. To this day, I remember seeing Edvard Munch’s Jealousy and understanding it completely. My connection with this painting that was 100 Brian Maguire’s painting Cian Traynor is a freelance years old made me feel like I was not alone in the world. Tommy Smith/ Peter writer and subeditor who This man and I shared something: the experience of Norman, Mexico from has contributed to a range Hidden islands: notes from of publications including jealousy. I had the proof in front of me. He didn’t know me, the war on the poor will The Times Educational 39 I didn’t know him, but I realised another man had lived represent Ireland at the Supplement, The Irish with the same feeling that I had and that meant that I Beijing 2008 Olympic Independent, Film wasn’t alone. That’s what the whole thing is about, actually. Games. A catalogue of International, State, Foggy It’s about not being alone…and that’s enough to carry on. the artist’s work will be Notions, The Event Guide, published later this year. Beat Happening and Connected.

Brian Maguire Brian Maguire In police custody Brooklyn, 2007 Dr. Salvador Allende 9/11/72, acrylic on canvas 2007 courtesy Kerlin Gallery acrylic on canvas 162 x 154 cm courtesy Kerlin Gallery c . Justin McKeown Ready, steady,

40 gone

In 2001 I had the epiphany that just as the twentieth century demanded new forms of art, so too does the twenty-first century demand new forms of leisure. To this end I proposed SPART: the ultimate hybridisation of sport and art and therefore the most evolved form of leisure on the planet. My neo-avant-gardist rhetoric aside, what interests me as an artist is exploring radical approaches to creating and structuring social relationships. Within this I am very interested in the latent potential of expanded forms of game-play as strategies for configuring/ exploring social relationships. What fascinates me about both sport and art is their latent potential to configure social dynamics in ways in which even the most adept exponents of statecraft might struggle to achieve.

While hard-nosed Westminster government bureaucrats may not be too enthused by my concept of SPART, they are definitely beginning to seize upon the potential of sport and art as a tool to shape UK society. Nowhere is this better personified than in their desire to host the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In this regard, it is with deep dismay that I note Westminster’s decision to fund this event with Lottery money that should have been destined for art, sport, community and heritage organisations around Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The actual projected loss to these organisations is £1.085 billion, although some sources have estimated the cost to be much higher, at around £2.034 billion. [opposite] itself estimates the loss at £4.74 million spread out over Justin McKeown four years (2008 – 2012). This represents a loss of over 'tonight the city lies before us but we are beside ourselves £1,000,000 per year. with boredom' (SPART slogan) courtesy the author However, if one is thinking within the much wider framework of culture in Northern Ireland, of which the arts is only a section, then the losses may be considerably more. One estimate that is significantly higher than those provided purely on the basis of the provision of art has been made by Neil Irwin of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA). In a recent article published 10 March this year Irwin estimates the overall loss to good causes in Northern Ireland – arts included – at around £80,000,000.2 I would urge interested parties to read Britain’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games began with Irwin’s article in full. One of the most interesting aspects a parliamentary debate in January 2003. On 15 May 2003 of Irwin’s analysis – the thing that makes his estimate of the Secretary of State, Tessa Jowell, formally announced loss much higher than those found elsewhere – is the loss 41 governmental support for London’s Olympic bid. London incurred by ‘cannibalisation’.3 In economic and marketing was now in the running against nine other cities, which terms, ‘cannibalisation’ refers to the reduction of the after assessment by the International Olympic Committee volume of sales of a particular product when its (IOC), was reduced to five in May 2004. From 16 to 19 manufacturing company introduces a competing product May 2004 the IOC paid a visit to London, inspecting its to the marketplace. For example, Coca Cola also produce potential to host the Games. On 6 June the IOC released Diet Coke. Therefore some of the initial profits that would its reports on the various cities and praised the British bid have been raised through the sale of Coke are eaten into for “its high quality, while highlighting the legacy the by the sale of Diet Coke. Irwin raises the issue of Games would leave in the city of London.”1 On 6 July 2006 cannibalisation, highlighting the fact that the Westminster the president of the IOC, Jacques Rogges, announced government plans to run a series of National Lottery London as the winner of the bid, Paris coming in as games in 2012 for the dedicated purpose of raising runner-up. money to fund the London Olympics. These dedicated Lottery games will eat into the lottery-game market, and as London celebrated. Indeed London had every reason to none of the profits from these games will go to National party because it had just won the opportunity to host the Lottery good-cause schemes, the government manages most major international sporting event on the planet. to stealthily cream off money that would otherwise be Not only would this mean that the eyes of the world were destined for good causes. on it for the period of the Games, it would also mean a great influx of tourism and all the economic benefits that Drawing on statistics provided by Camelot, Irwin this brings. While it is obvious why London would be so estimates the losses incurred to the National Lottery pleased, it is slightly harder to understand why we in good-causes fund as a result of cannibalisation at around provincial Ulster – in ‘the sticks’ – should celebrate such “£575,000,000.”4 To this he also adds another an event, especially since none of the Games are thus far £34,000,000 as a result of Lottery money being used to scheduled to take place here. Yet we still have to foot a fund the specially established Legacy Trust. The Legacy substantial portion of the bill to pay for the whole thing. Trust is an independent trust set up to “support a wide What effect will the London Olympics have on us, and range of innovative cultural and sporting activities for all, more importantly, what effect is the cost of hosting the which celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Games going to have on those working in the arts and Paralympic Games and which will leave a lasting legacy in cultural sector in Northern Ireland? communities throughout the United Kingdom.”5 Of the money going to the Legacy Trust, £5,000,000 of it would Perhaps the best place to start in trying to answer this have been destined for division among Arts Council question is to look at the economic impact of the Games bodies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. on Northern Ireland. As mentioned earlier, estimates of Therefore, taking all this into consideration, Irwin concludes this have varied. Indeed estimates vary greatly depending that “the overall loss to good causes because of the on how wide a framework one is thinking within. If one is Olympics could be as much (or more) as £2.034 billion thinking explicitly about direct losses to money made made up of £1,085m (Good Causes) + £340m (Sports available through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Distributors) + £575m (Cannibalisation) + £34m Legacy (ACNI), then the most common estimates discussed set Trust. £80,000,000 of which would have been destined the direct financial loss at £4.5 – £4.74 million. ACNI for Northern Ireland.”6 Irwin’s figure of £80,000,000 is significantly higher than We are committed to delivering not only the £4.75 million that has been directly cut from the ACNI the best Olympic Games and Paralympic budget. Indeed, Irwin’s calculations seem alarming. Yet, Games ever, but also environmentally, how alarming they actually are may depend on who you socially and economically sustainable are and what aspect of the arts and cultural sector you’re Games, leaving a lasting legacy for the involved in. If, for example, you’re a painter selling your Olympic Park site, the Lower Lea Valley wares through Gormley’s Gallery on the Upper Lisburn and the UK as a whole.7 Road, then you mightn’t be just as worried by Irwin’s projections as someone working as a community artist in Essentially what the government is saying is that the North Belfast. Yet in saying that, the reality of the situation Olympics will be of economic benefit to the whole of the should already be apparent to most: for art is not produced United Kingdom. Therefore by extension of this logic we in a vacuum and to think such a thing would be equivalent in Northern Ireland should profit from the Games, not only to thinking that economic fluctuations do not alter the socially and economically but also through some form of dynamics of society, of which culture is a reflexive lasting legacy. If we were to take this at face value we materialisation. The Northern Irish cultural eco-system is might think that it all sounds quite promising but then volatile, and if money disappears that is supporting the again, it’s the same kind of rhetoric from the same people 42 development of grassroots cultural initiatives then we will that gave us the Millennium Dome. more than likely notice other changes in our wider society as a result of this. Putting my ever-creeping cynicism to one side for a moment, it is only fair that I give proper examination to Perhaps, to err on the side of pessimism, it might be what exactly Westminster is offering us in the long term worth bracing ourselves; for as anyone who has kept an in exchange for our immediate losses. On the UK-wide eye to economics will know, when Britain goes down with section of the same website the government makes a a three-day cold Northern Ireland ends up in bed with the similar statement to the one quoted previous. They then flu. Indeed these financial cuts, considered within a much go on to expand on some of the business opportunities wider picture of Northern Ireland’s cultural development, available. These are varied and include everything from couldn’t come at a worse time: as a society we are only catering to construction. What may stunt the economic now entering into some form of cultural re-think and benefits of these opportunities reaching us in the province regeneration in the wake of the Good Friday agreement. is the fact that as yet none of the Games have been Now more than ever we need cold hard cash to fund not scheduled to take place in Northern Ireland. Therefore, only the development of projects that encourage cross- while it is possible that some businesses in Northern community dialogue, but also projects and events that Ireland may reap some benefits through winning contracts enable us to re-define what it means to be Northern Irish. to do work in Great Britain, we will not benefit from any Therefore, in the long term, these cuts will not only create of the other aspects of the Games that we might if feelings of disfranchisement among the professionals Northern Ireland working in the arts and cultural sector, but potentially also within the communities who benefit from their services. actually hosted an event, such as increased foot-flow through the shops of our towns and cities and all the That said, the Westminster government does keep rattling economic benefits that come with this. Hence – promises on in their promotional material for the Games about the notwithstanding – it’s hard to understand how these benefits the event will have for the UK as a whole. As well promises of benefits and legacy will actually come to we all know, the difference between Great Britain and the fruition in Northern Ireland. Perhaps a better legacy for us UK is the six little troubled counties of Northern Ireland. in Northern Ireland would have been the maintenance of So what is Westminster offering us as UK citizens? the continued economic support from the Lottery that was On the government’s Department for Culture, Media and bolstering the development of cultural programmes in Sport website – one of the sites that the government is Northern Ireland, which is something we need to plug the promoting the Games through – there is no direct vacuum left by the cessation of violence. discussion of the impact of the Games on Northern Ireland. So in order to answer the above question we have In looking for some more information that might dispel to look into their UK-wide plans. Regarding their vision my now evident pessimism, I found myself on the Northern for the UK for the 2012 Olympic Games, the British Ireland section of the 2012 Olympic Games website. government has stated: This section of this particular website contained a statement from Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL). Here they expressed their vision for the 2012 Olympic Games: 39

We will use the 2012 Games to get young One aspect of the Westminster government’s plans for people into sport at both a domestic and the Olympics, one that I have not so far discussed, is the international level, with the ultimate aim cultural Olympiad. The government have stated their aim of winning medals at the Games. for the cultural Olympiad to be as follows: We want to create better facilities to help athletes, leaving a legacy for the The 2012 Olympic Games and future. And we want to go beyond sport, Paralympic Games are not just about to benefit the people of our nation sport. They will offer a unique economically and socially.8 opportunity for the British people to engage with and participate in a major Also on the site there are statements proposing the cultural celebration… From the closing development of new facilities etc, to aid in the growth of ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Games, our young athletes. However, given Irwin’s previous the UK will commence its “Cultural calculations, are any of these ideals realistic? Surely Olympiad”, a developing, four-year DCAL needs money to train young people in sport and to period of cultural activity designed to build facilities? I couldn’t find any projected budgets on celebrate the Olympic spirit throughout the website, so I can only assume – given that they are a the UK. It will inspire people around the government department – that there is money to back up country to participate in a range of their posturing. cultural activities, which will reflect and celebrate the diverse communities which make up London and the UK.9 In Northern Ireland the Arts Council have engaged The second option suggested, the ‘Inspire Mark’, is something Deloitte to run a Northern Ireland-wide consultation that many will not have heard of. The first thing to clear up programme. The initial phase of this consultation took is that Inspire Mark is not a pot of funding money. Rather, the form of a series of consultation days around Northern the Inspire Mark is essentially a mark of quality awarded Ireland, tabled as “BIG IDEAS workshops.”10 These took to projects that are inspired by and support the 2012 place at the end of April in Antrim, Belfast, Newry, Lisburn, Games. It is hard to imagine how this could be considered Derry, Coleraine, Ballymena, Enniskillen and Cookstown. a potential source of funding, especially since “the The intention of these workshops was to provide scheme is predominantly for projects which have entirely communities with an opportunity to contribute their views non-commercial funding.”14 To double check my facts, and ideas to the planning of the Northern Irish Olympiad. I contacted Northern Ireland’s Cultural Programmer for This at least is a positive sign, since a clear effort is being the 2012 Games, Pat Wilson based at DCAL. Wilson made to communicate with people all over Northern confirmed for me that Inspire Mark is not a funding pot. Ireland and not just in Belfast and Derry. I also asked, given than the Inspire Mark is awarded in support of noncommercial projects, if it would be possible When I contacted Deloitte they informed me that the to use it once it had been awarded as leverage to procure consultation process had now ended and they had sponsorship from local industry. Wilson informed me that 44 passed their results on to DCAL. I have been in contact this would be unlikely as using the mark in this way might with DCAL requesting information regarding the findings conflict with sponsorship deals already made for the of the Deloitte consultation and asking about their plans Olympics. This seems like a bit of a grey area. And even if for Northern Ireland’s cultural Olympiad. Although their it were possible to use the Inspire Mark in such a way, representatives were quite friendly on the phone they have one would be using it as a mark of quality to reassure not, at the time of writing this article, replied to my request potential sponsors in the local community; the pending for detailed information regarding the Olympiad. However, recession makes the procurement of sponsorship from my attention has been drawn to the very recent publication such sources seem quite unlikely. of the results of Deloitte’s research11 on ACNI’s web site. In reading it I am immediately struck by several factors. The final source of money named, the National Lottery fund, is really a nonstarter given its depletion to fund the The first and perhaps the most significant is the low number hosting of the 2012 Olympics. That is of course unless of people in attendance at the ‘Big Ideas’ consultation there is some unknown factor that the government is not events. All in all, a total of one hundred and fifteen people making us aware of? However, given my research, I doubt attend the nine consultation workshops held around the this very much. I think what we are looking at is the harsh province. For those not aware of the demographics that’s reality of when statesmen’s dreams of prowess collide approximately 0.007% of the Northern Irish population. with economic realities and the little man gets crushed in Even by Northern Irish standards, this turn out seems between: for what is apparent is that there is only so poor. Page twenty-nine of the report suggests that one of much money to go around, and if money is being taken the reasons for low attendance might be that arts and from the Lottery to fund the Olympics then there is not cultural organisations in Northern Ireland had heard that going to be enough money to fund the provision of events there was no funding for projects available through the for the Cultural Olympiad. Unless of course the government cultural Olympiad. They may not have believed it worth expect us to labour on these projects for free? their while to attend. Organisations need developmental money to do things, and a lot of this developmental money has been “raided So what about funding? The report states on page 29 in order to boost the Exchequer”15 – as former Tory Prime that there is no money available for projects through the Minister Sir John Major put it – so as to fund the London Cultural Olympiad. However, it does suggest three possible 2012 Olympics. sources of funding: sponsorship (presumably by local industry), Inspire Mark and the National Lottery.12 Given Funding issues aside, the events proposed in the report that the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) has recently as the fruit of the ‘Big Ideas’ consultations and therefore warned that the UK is at very “serious risk of a recession,”13 as the projects for Northern Ireland Cultural Olympiad and considering how much Northern Ireland tends to be make me feel a deep sense of dismay. For the most part, affected by such things, Northern Irish arts organisations the events themselves do not stand out: there is nothing might find themselves hard pressed over the next four particularly Northern Irish about them. In terms of the years to find adequate sponsorship from local industry Cultural Olympiad, arts organisations should be asking for Cultural Olympiad projects. With that in mind, it is themselves on behalf of our culture: do the things we are important to consider the other two options seriously. proposing actually contribute anything to our own sense of ourselves? Do they present to the world’s media eye anything unique, particular and/ or exciting about our it’s time to move on to the next big project. Further, culture here in Northern Ireland? The answer – for the it seems that they’ve done this without a serious thought most part – is ‘no’. The question therefore is, what is to what these funding cuts might mean to the development the point in realising them? Surely doing nothing would of culture here in Northern Ireland, at a time in which the be better than adding one more thing to the image of development of culture is in dire need of bolstering. ourselves as a parochial province. One would think that somewhere along the line somebody But a couple of the projects did seem genuinely interesting. in Northern Ireland would get it together enough to mount For example ‘Big Idea Nine’ proposes the highlighting of a viable campaign of protest about funding cuts to Northern Ireland’s boxing tradition. What is especially Northern Ireland caused by the Olympics: for while there interesting about this is the reference to the travelling have been protests in London regarding the cuts, there community’s bare-knuckle boxing tradition and also to has been no mark-worthy protest in Northern Ireland, Northern Irish actors who have boxed in the past. Another and it seems like we are set to benefit least from the project that grabbed my eye was ‘Big Idea Eight’, which whole thing. proposed the reactivation of outdoor swimming pools that are no longer in use in Northern Ireland. However, by and 1 www.culture.gov.uk/3434. Ireland&hl=en&ct= large, most of the proposals lack the presence of anything aspx, site visited 28 May clnk&cd=2&gl=uk& 45 particularly Northern Irish. 2008 client=firefox-a; site visited 2 www.nicva.org/index.cfm/ 8 July 2008 In terms of the development of business, culture, sport section/news/key/05mar 15news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/ 2008olympiccosts; site visited 4628492.stm; site visited and art, what we in Northern Ireland desperately need as 28 May 2008 30 May 2008 a society in order to get on our feet in the international 3 ibid 16 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ arena – Olympiad or no Olympiad – is the re-imagining 4 ibid northern_ireland/ 5 www.legacytrustuk.org/ 6951887.stm of our conflicted selves. Key to this is the nurturing of about; site visited 28 May grass-roots culture and the steady growth of an economy 2008 that can self-support a local cultural economy. Yet the 6 www.nicva.org/index.cfm/ Justin McKeown is an Lottery money that would have gone to supporting these section/news/key/05mar 2008olympiccosts; site visited artist from Northern developments has been usurped in order to fund the 28 May 2008 Ireland; he regularly 2012 Olympics. At the heart of the problems facing us 7 www.culture.gov.uk/3432. exhibits work throughout because of this is a tension between day-to-day culture aspx; site visited 28 May Europe, as well as in 2008 in Northern Ireland, which is currently only getting back Canada and the US, and is 8 www.london2012.com/ known internationally for on its feet, and a spectacular cultural façade that about/the-people-delivering- his concept of SPART Westminster wants to create so as to sell the UK to the the-games/the-nations-and- regions-group/northern-ire- (see www.spartaction.com); world, using the Olympic Games as a platform. When land.php; site visited 27 May he is in the final stages of asked about the decision to pull the money out of 2008 completing his PhD with Northern Ireland, former Culture Minister Edwin Poots 9 www.culture.gov.uk/3430. the University of Ulster, aspx; sited visited 29 May Belfast. remarked that the decision to pull this money was taken 2008 at Westminster level and that it was “not something that 10www.artscouncil- we can do anything about.”16 ni.org/news/2008/new1104 [previous spread] 2008b.htm, visited 29 May Shoot the rabbit, Winter Games So it seems again – Stormont or no Stormont – we are 2008 event, Ormeau Park, Belfast. 11 The full document can be Meabh McDonnell as the rabbit, at the whim of those in Westminster. Why is it that we down loaded at while Sinéad Bhreathnach- always seem to be playing the poor relation of Great www.artscouncil-ni.org/ Cashell hunts her with a Britain? If anyone doubts this assertion, then all they need subpages/strategyandpoli- paintball gun. cies.htm#Olympiad courtesy the author do is look at the spending per capita on provision for the 12 Or these sources of funding arts. In 2007/ 08 The Arts Council of England allotted were suggested by the £8.17 per capita for spending on the arts, the Arts Council consultees – it is not entirely clear which occurred. of Wales spent £9.60 and the Republic of Ireland’s Arts 13www.itv.com/News/ Council spent £14.42. This is all in contrast with Northern Articles/Serious-UK-reces- Ireland’s allotment of £6.04. sion-warning- 707291712.html; site visited 8 July 2008 For Tony Blair, bringing peace to Northern Ireland was 14 64.233.183.104/search?q= as much an act of legacy-building as it was an act of cache:PXYj18wu4xMJ:www. statesmanship. It would seem that now that we have the london2012.com/plans/ culture/now-to-2012/ semblance of peace in the North, inasmuch as people getting-involved.php+Inspire have stopped shooting each other, Westminster now feel +Mark+Northern+ c . Declan Long [below] Burial of Patrick Ireland: the coffin is lowered courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art Exit ghost

46 On the evening of 20 May 2008 – just over a decade from the vital features of a living artist, is certainly difficult since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast to determine. In one sense, this pale, plaster sculpture has – a select but substantial crowd gathered at the Irish an inevitably and admirably unresolved ‘character’ suited Museum of Modern Art in Dublin to attend a solemnly to an exhibition and event concerned with marking endings theatrical ‘Troubles’ funeral. This strange simulation of ritual and forging new beginnings – properly prompting, through mourning involved the laying to rest of a persona rather its dual life/ death connotations, contemplation of survival than a person: the celebrated and influential Irish-American as well as traumatic loss – but it is also dispiritingly artist Brian O’Doherty having chosen, in the context of suggestive of an atavistic, martyr-centred political rhetoric profound political progress in the North, to publically and is an overtly self-aggrandizing addition to these proclaim the passing away of his once-contentious, proceedings when further viewed, as it must be, within the ideologically explicit alter ego Patrick Ireland, a conceptual wider contemporary Irish context of confusion, caution and identity pressured into existence by the appalling force of anxiety about commemoration and lasting reconcilation. historical reality, the name taken by the artist as an act of desperate, meagre protest against the savage killing of At the time appointed for the final burial of Patrick Ireland, thirteen innocents by British soldiers on the open streets the unadorned casket was closed and hoisted onto the of Derry on Sunday, 30 January, 1972. shoulders of six black-clad local artists (Robert Ballagh, Fergus Byrne, Jeanette Doyle, Brian Duggan, Brendan 47 The story of ‘Patrick Ireland’ – the story of a steadfastly Earley, Joe Stanley) who had agreed to perform the role assertive pseudonym that is a story borne out of a wish of pallbearers at this “celebration of peace in Northern that the deeper, darker story at its source might be heard Ireland’ (I hesitate here to describe these guest artists as each time this bluntly patriotic name appears – was ‘volunteers’). A short, dignified procession then brought valuably set out by IMMA prior to the ultimate ceremonial the assembled mourners from the relative intimacy of the interment in a modest, muted exhibition of relevant gallery space (taking us beyond the white cube, as it images, texts and artefacts. Featured here were crucial were) to the wide-open arena of the designated grave-site: documentary records of the original, symbolically forceful, a patch of well cared for, unconsecrated, grassy ground name-change performance at Project Arts Centre in 1972 perched above the Museum’s elegantly manicured formal – during which the artist, masked into anonymity, had his gardens. In this splendid setting – with the cultivated supine body heavily painted with, and so personally orderliness of the garden’s symmetrical avenues providing obliterated by, overlapping tides of Ireland’s turbulent a calm immediate backdrop, and the extending, intensifying orange and green. There were fragments too from the jumble of the city’s restless margins completing an critical and public fall-out of these dramatic events, some expansive, variegated mise en scène – friends and family evidence of wider acknowledgement of O’Doherty/ members stepped forward to honour the thirty-six year Ireland’s personality-split captured in a small selection of commitment made by O’Doherty, paying a long-delayed intriguing archival cuttings (including two entries in Who’s and concluding tribute to ‘Patrick Ireland’ now that the who?: one for O’Doherty and one for his ‘younger’, and once-required political conditions were believed to have more propagandistically radical, substitute self). Here also, been met (the artist had resolved not to use his birth in the serene space of the Gordon Lambert Galleries, name “until such time as the British Military presence is a basic effigy of the now ‘late’ Patrick Ireland was presented removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted in a plain, pine coffin – the face of the feigned corpse given their civil rights”). Several fitting, hopeful poems, in several grim exactitude in a death mask cast by the respected languages, were read with tender authority: reflections not American artist Charles Simonds directly from O’Doherty’s only on death and the agonies of the solitary artist, but august septuagenarian features. The mask had an also on moral duty and on the place and potential of art undoubtedly ambiguous morbidity – and an uncertain, in testing times. No doubt by careful design, a mood of unsettled ‘meaning’. This was an obviously charged quietly respectful conviviality was maintained for a time, symbolic representation of death, problematically heroic in until the artist Alanna O’Kelly approached the microphone its aesthetic and political overtones, that simultaneously to begin a long, heart-wrenching keening, her surging bore faint traces of stoic life: the essential tensions of a cries instantly cutting through the relaxed decorum of the patiently held pose being surely evident in the taut stillness occasion. It was an extraordinary, truly unsettling sound: of the caught expression. If, as Marina Warner notes, the amplified voice rising, roaring, hoarsening, quietening, death masks have conventionally derived “their potency repeatedly building in anguished strength again and from their contact with the actual deceased, with his or again and then – unexpectedly – returning in the form of her flesh” – these culturally resonant objects being uncontrollable, insistent echoes as the electrically “the nearest remnant[s] that can be preserved of a body empowered screams were bounced back by the brash before its disintegration or embalming”1 – then the status new building developments at the borders of IMMA’s land. or significance of this odd indexical record of an imagined identity, a mask made in mourning for an ‘idea’ but formed O’Doherty was right to later praise O’Kelly’s performance to the contingencies of any given moment.3 It is tempting as “nearly frightening, very primal.” But we might also stress to see in the more compelling effects of the Patrick Ireland how in the tensions and accidents of these harrowing funeral some trace of this structural chaos – “the overall moments (with the dominant architecture of another picture of society that you arrive at from this angle,” recently invented ‘Ireland’ exerting an unplanned influence, Verwoert argues, “immediately seems less closed, making for instance) the structured theatricality of the mock-funeral interventions appear possible.” In bringing the ‘life’ of was unnmistakably opened up to other possibilities, to a Patrick Ireland to a close not with a revised name-change significant level of unpredictabilty. During the ebb and flow but with an emotive, theatrical version of a complex, of O’Kelly’s remarkable keening, the focus assuredly recognizable social form, O’Doherty has offered a further shifted from adulatory concentration on O’Doherty’s own response to the damaged society of Northern Ireland that struggle or achievement, towards a much more abstract, implicitly and appropriately prioritizes an urgent need for far-reaching and inclusive process of lamentation: the public openness. Yet, the specific forms employed by mighty sounds and silences of these few atmospheric O’Doherty remain questionable – gravely so, it might be minutes making possible a heightened awareness of one’s said – in a post-Troubles context. As Susan McKay has own sensory relationship to this environment, and of one’s noted in a typically trenchant chapter on commemoration embodied position within it. At such a point, the prepared, in her extraordinary recent book Bear in mind these dead 48 stage-managed gestures of mourning and commemoration (itself a magnificent memorial to the many, diverse victims – the established and comprehensible aspects of the of Troubles violence), “the republican tradition is replete funeral’s symbolic space – might, momentarily, matter only with stirring graveside orations [and] the cult of the martyr as the basis for another aleatory situation, one of undevised, has been a powerful engine for the ‘armed struggle’ for altered connections to the contemporary world. This is, centuries.”4 Similarly, in their book Talking to the dead: of course, a happy (and no doubt hoped-for) outcome of a study of Irish funerary traditions, Nina Witoszek and Pat O’Doherty’s decision to ‘go public’ with the death of Sheeran describe Irish politics in terms of a “cult of death,” Patrick Ireland: the artist shifting register from the language/ identifying a “chronic cultural fixation” on symbolic body interplay of the founding Name-change artwork to performances such as processions and funerals which, an engagement with social ritual and public space at this they suggest, “hardly encode a futurological orientation.”5 “joyous wake and burial.” (Aptly, the first lines of the first When considered in relation to this residual, variously poem read at the event ran “Let the city be spectacle, macabre and militaristic tendency, O’Doherty’s well-meaning circus, arena this evening, / Its justification sensation, comment that “we are burying hate” is rendered, at best, its poetry wonder.”2) somewhat ironical. Feasibly, of course, all established, evocative, persuasive public gestures are in some way In a recent essay on the use and value of public gesture contaminated by prejudicial previous use (a point properly in art and politics, Jan Verwoert proposes that the considered by Verwoert), but it remains reasonable to ask “performative dynamics of the practices that bind society if indeed a funeral – yes, yet another Troubles funeral – together” can be productively understood as “inherently can best mark these daunting, if indeed potentially joyful, chaotic” – though intricately formalized and “regulated,” artistic and historical endings. ritual social forms have a “multiplicity and theatricality” that allows their presentation and reception to remain subject 1 Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p 24 2 Anthony Cronin, ‘Sonnet 93’, Burial of Patrick Ireland: from The End of the modern the coffin is carried through world, 1989 the crowd 3 Jan Verwoert, ‘Private lives, photo Peter FitzGerald public gestures’, Frieze, Issue 113, March 2008 4 Susan McKay, Bear in mind these dead, London: Faber & Faber, 2008, p 319 5 Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the dead: a study of Irish funerary traditions, Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999

Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. c . Gemma Tipton [below] Regina José Galindo viva España / Long live Spain 2004 video still from video performance, 3' 30” image © Pilar Albarracín courtesy bodycity

49 BodyCity The city is hot. Not the heat of global warming, or a break In addition to these initiatives, Cork caucus was a year- in the bad weather, but as a topic for artistic exploration long event supported by Cork 2005 (and therefore by (art with a distinct theoretical underpinning, that is). Culture 2000, the European cultural foundation, and the Internationally, and in different disciplines, it has been thus Arts Council, among others), with diverse (or to use a for some time, but we in the arts in Ireland are catching different, preferred word: rhizomatic) concerns that up. Fast. Finally fatigued with exploring identity in relation extended beyond urbanism to address the role of the to a mythologised rurality or peripherality, we are now artists in developing and sustaining critical issues in the invested in investigating the city. Part of this investment spheres of politics, power, aesthetics and possibility. involves catching up and connecting with existing The results of these discussions, events and workshops international research and study networks (such as have just been published in a 472-page book. Another Erasmus PC, www.erasmuspc.com, and PEPRAV, Culture 2000 project (Culture 2000 being the main www.peprav.net), and part lies in projects initiated here. European Commission funding conduit to the arts) is Urban act, a publication that documents the work of a loose CREATE’s Suburbs and cities discussion days were network of practitioners and practices researching the city.5 pioneering in addressing the relationship of the hinterlands Belfast’s PS2 represent the involvement from this island. to the centre, as seen through creative practice,1 but the 50 impetus to many of these investigations has come, ironically Both Urban act and Cork caucus set out to function in the perhaps, from capital generated by the large urban same way that cities have historically done – as a collection developments that the investigations set out to critique. of networks, growing through linkages, intensifying and Thus, bodycity, a visual-arts project set up “to explore the becoming denser through participation. There is also a complex ideas surrounding the human body in relation to hopeful sense pervading both publications as they the cities in which we live today” was commissioned by document projects, practices and discussions that these the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA).2 endeavours will not just make a difference, but will continue Curated by Nigel Rolfe, Cliodhna Shaffrey and Shelagh some way, somehow, into the future; that there will be Morris, bodycity was to have been realised over three some form of legacy. This is perhaps the individual’s only parts, the first being Video apartment, showing a series of rational response (in the cause of despair-avoidance) to video works in a Docklands apartment. This was followed the hegemony of the power structures of the city. Seán by bodytalkcity, a day of discussions and lectures focusing Kelly, in the Caucus book, describes “the oft-repeated on “the cities we are building today and their effect on our rationalisation for setting up Caucus as it was (both lives.”3 This took place on 17 November 2007 in St Michael conceptually and structurally), was the notion (conceit?) and John’s Church in Temple Bar – there being no that art might provide both an alternative space for appropriate space in Docklands to host such an event. discourse, and a space for an alternative discourse.”6 The final realisation of bodycity was to have been PROJECT bodycity, in which eight artists (Willie Doherty, Graham Ana Devic,ˇ of the curatorial collective What, How and for Hudson, Bethan Huws, Idris Kahn, Daniel J Martinez, Whom (WHW) developed the rationale for collectivisation Julie Mehretu, Marjetica Potrcˇ and Kathy Prendergast) of practice: “we were interested in tracing the strategies were to have developed projects. that are taken by collectives in public space, in alternative forms of ‘sociability’ they are generating. How do they What this roll call of artists’ names demonstrates is that occupy and change the system and the conditions of artistic investigation of urbanism is not new. Neither are production and representation, how do they affect the these individuals unique in their concerns; artists’ groups social order?” she questions, before continuing “Artists’ have also focused on urban issues, and doubtless will groups were taken as a paradigmatic mode and form of continue to do so. What has been the hallmark of the collective artistic creativity because they include a certain current period, however, are a number of significant continuity and duration in time, as well as the decision to projects with direct relationships to the supporting stay and work together, a decision which cancels all other structures of urbanism themselves. While bodycity came potentialities, no matter how temporary.”7 The issue is, out of private-sphere capital (Docklands), Dublin City however, how successful are such strategies? Do they Council is engaged in an arts research project looking at represent radical transformations and the potential to “international models of practice that support innovative overthrow the power structures of capitalism and the engagement of artists with Urban and Suburban Open politics of urbanism? Or are they instead the necessary Space.”4 culturalising, humanising force on which urbanism has always relied? 47

Nigel Rolfe image of Dublin Docklands courtesy the artist/ bodycity Vito Acconci, another Caucus participant, conceptualises bodytalkcity included a filmed interview with philosopher the individual’s relationship to the city in a different way. and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who described the Describing the development in his own practice, from problematics inherent in attempting action; “the only realistic performance pieces in the late 1960s early 1970s, that politics today is local politics, but the issues are global, included his own body in the enactment and realisation of so there is a discrepancy…,” as well as presentations by each piece, he made the decision to rearticulate the idea fellow sociologist Saskia Sassen and artists Stelarc and of the ‘self’: “Maybe ‘self’ was only a system of feelers – Paul Seawright. The picture that emerged was of the taught maybe self existed only as part of a social system, a cultural dynamics of the urban, alongside an acknowledgement of system, a political system. I wanted stuff of mine to connect the levels of acquiescence that enable them to function. with these systems, so I had to take myself out of the pieces.”8 This marked Acconci’s move to a kind of Sassen’s description of the “brutal savagery” of architecture that he now practices with the Acconci Capitalism was compelling. Linking it to the brutality of Studio. But this relation of the body to a larger system, Manchester’s factories in the Industrial Revolution, she or rather this understanding of the self as a system pointed out that today’s Capitalism and urbanisation are analogous to the wider systems of culture, politics and the no less brutal for the fact that they are elegantly dressed. built environment, also marks the starting point for the This is the Capitalism of urban renewal, covering vast 52 bodycity project. stretches of run-down cities with beautiful buildings, at the same time as causing displacement and eviction; and the Seeking to understand the systems of the city in relation visible brutality of designer handbags manufactured in to the body, of cities and bodies as interconnected entities, third-world countries that demonstrate income inequality bodycity asked “how does the city, both the material and and show “what the system is able to do.” Being a social environment – which we produce and build, occupy sociologist, Sassen was able to support her thesis with and move through, inscribe itself on our corporeality, and, graphs, charts and figures that, in a hierarchy of information in turn, how does the body as it is lived – as experiential absorption, seemed to lend her a greater credibility than body – allow the world to be for us?”9 A series of her fellow artist-presenters, even when one was disposed quotations, both on the bodycity website, and as a to believe both. What was most significant in this is the projected introduction to the discussion day, underlined case for cross-disciplinary action and participation, at the the pedigree of thought that has accrued to create the way same time as the different languages and approaches of we imagine and inhabit cities (from William Shakespeare: art, architecture, literature, sociology and philosophy make What is the city but the people?, to Henri Lefebvre: such collaborations often overly fraught. The users space is lived – not represented or conceived, to Angela Carter: Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris This is a key issue in another current project – that of the a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual).10 Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon) to investigate public What is also underlined by these is the relative paucity of engagement with architecture. Architecture has, of necessity, input by visual artists, in terms of smart or witty epigrams its own professional language and practices, and this has at least. served as a stumbling block for engagement with wider publics. It has also been an issue in collaborative projects, This is not to say that artists are not active in their and the Percent for Art model of ‘something artistic’ to be investigations of the urban in Ireland. Joy Gerrard, installed at the end, or of a lip-service collaboration that is Brendan Earley, Mary-Ruth Walsh and Jesse Jones have insulting to both architect (not creative enough without an all been engaged on recent projects in this vein, as has artist present) and the artist (your job is to humanise Pádraic E Moore, in a curatorial capacity with his Unreal things), is in urgent need of re-imagination. From Urban act city edition. Joe Kerr, Head of Critical and Historical to bodycity to Cork caucus, it is clear that many different Studies at the Royal College of Art in London, described cultural disciplines are engaged in parallel projects and in his panel discussion presentation at bodytalkcity, research. Such a weight of activity must surely lead to the King’s Cross area of London, where “all you’re sure of some kind of change? Some development of more is meeting another psychogeographer,” but he could just accommodating social and architectural urban models? as well have been describing so many contemporary cities, Possibly not – in understanding the city in terms of the Dublin and Cork included, where all you’re sure of is body, perhaps such action is simply similar to a virus coming across another art project critiquing urbanisation dormant in the bloodstream, sometimes active, and and, sometimes, a lack of space for art. This is, in fact, sometimes in abeyance, existing in a symbiotic state with amply illustrated by Urban act, which shows a fascinating its host. world-wide network of cultural activism. The relentless tide of Docklands development, so heavily critiqued by bodycity, particularly in the panel discussion section of the day (Peter Sheridan: commercial modernity, Ellen Rowley: privileging spatial geometries over social structures, Fintan O’Toole: the city is being impoverished at an imaginative level…), has recently been checked by negative financial developments. With some major projects now on hold, financial support for cultural initiatives has also been checked, and with this, the third part of bodycity: the work by the eight artists that was to make up PROJECT bodycity has, in the words of the DDDA, been “stalled.” The creative and cultural responses to development have been limited by a lack of development itself. Financial constraints notwithstanding, there are plans to publish the proceedings of bodytalkcity, at the very least on the website, and perhaps in book form. 1 See www.create- Gemma Tipton is a writer 53 This will be another contribution to the tomes on cultural ireland.ie/news/suburbs- and critic on art and urbanism, and yet another contribution that will be necessary and-cities.html and architecture based in www.create- in its own way. The city is a collection of cells and organs, Dublin; she is currently ireland.ie/news/suburbs- just like the body, and all its constituent parts are vital for and-cities-2.html a research scholar at it to function as a healthy whole. 2 Quote taken from GRADCAM, the Graduate www.bodycity.org, accessed School of Creative Arts 2 August 2008 and Media. 3 ibid 4 Taken from the Art in urban and suburban open space tender document published by Dublin City Council, 2007. 5 A free PDF version of Urban act is available to download at www.peprav.net 6 Cork caucus: on art, possibility & democracy, ed. Tara Byrne, 2006, National Sculpture Factory & Revolver, Frankfurt-am-Main, p 418 7 ibid, p 125 8 ibid, p 41 9 Quotation taken from www.bodycity.org, accessed 2 August 2008 10 ibid c . Circa invited a number of writers to pick their favourites from some of this year’s degree shows.

54 Degree shows Critics’ choices Ruth Cadden Ruth Cadden Elaine O’Sullivan is a Crawford College of Art and Design Degree Show Pasiphaë in cow freelance writer on visual papier mâché with found objects and performance art. life-size courtesy the artist

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Pasiphaë, in Greek myth captured the psyche Pasiphaë is infused with mythology, was the is evident in the titles of an erotic agency in Queen of Crete who Albert Skira’s Surrealist scenes of flirtation with the was cursed with publications, Le Minotaure bull, while the sculpture a lustful desire for (1933–1939) and Pasiphaë in cow overtly a bull. In order to Labyrinthe (1944–1946). addresses the explicit gratify her lust, and subversive aspects the great craftsman Ruth Cadden’s work of a myth centred on Daedalus made a focuses on the figure of trans-species sexuality. wooden cow, into Pasiphaë prior to the birth The Ovidian obsession which Pasiphaë fitted of the Minotaur. Many of with metamorphosis is so she could mate the sketches depict revealed to be of with the bull. The Pasiphaë with her taurine contemporary significance, result of this mythic lover in banal contexts; as the hybrid figure coupling was the a pregnant Pasiphaë is explores issues of identity, birth of the Minotaur. seen kneeling beside her transgression and lover in a stable. These transformation. Cadden’s Images from the Minotaur playful figurative sketches merging of organic and Cycle played a prominent contrast with the chaotic mechanical elements is role in twentieth-century abstract and cubist style beautifully crafted to art, in the work of both of many earlier create fluid, enigmatic and Masson and Picasso. representations of the thought-provoking works. The extent to which the Minotaur Cycle. Kevin Gaffney Sara Baume is an artist Kevin Gaffney Dublin Institute of Technology Degree Show and writer. The Black plum video still, DVD video (12 mins) courtesy the artist

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In a show littered with consequently engaging. represents an overall contemporaries. The Black clumsy attempts at Piano notes chime impeccable product of plum should appeal to tackling issues of global through the shadowy the system, displaying the active but self-effacing importance, Kevin atmosphere, characters himself to be dedicated, exhibitionist in all of us. Gaffney’s compelling dance and drown in skilled in his chosen video piece was theatrical flickers, discipline, creative, well refreshingly self-indulgent effervescent lighting read and imaginative. and egocentric. In a enhances the dramatic There are obvious society engulfed by effect of every action proclivities toward Cindy excess and narcissism, and scene. The narrator Sherman and Isaac Julien, it was revitalizing to be employs the sing-song but the artist has confronted with an artist tones of a primary-school managed to remain loyal who unashamedly teacher, reading fairytales to himself and his own explores and celebrates of unknown lands to lavishly embroidered his own complicated innocent ears. versions of reality vanity. The Black plum throughout. It is this tells the vibrant story of Fine Art departments self-assured honesty Felix and his two fractured increasingly advocate and authenticity that allow personae, Verity and teaching methods that him to touch on broader Roger. Throughout this develop thought issues such as sexuality charming and engaging processes first and and suicide with effect relay of imagery, narrative foremost, to the detriment and sincerity, instead of and sound effect, of physical craft. Gaffney, dissolving into hackneyed every detail is precisely despite his frequent meaninglessness like attended to and forays into the fictitious, too many of his Pamela Myers* Jessica Foley is a writer Pamela Myers Limerick School of Art and Design Degree Show and artist. from Fuck art 2008 courtesy the artist

Become Idea Complete Pedagogical Course Derivative Metaphor Eroded Illusions Consumptive Corrosive Penetrating Difficult Slippery Dry Ironic Confusing Parody Pastiche Painful Fearless Empty Speaker Designer Artist Manipulator Truth Speaker Genuine Good 57 Real Fake Orator Announcer Rhetoric Dictator Peddler Trickster Trickster Trickster.

*Fuck art was exhibited as part of the LSAD Graduate Show 2008. The show included several canvases by the artist, digital prints of Flash Art, altered to read FUCK ART, A ‘video statement’ Emulsion Canvas White “Personally what I think “It is important that my showing the artist in her Paint Video Speech is most important in art ideas are communicated studio explaining her Discourse Babble Talk is the artist, so keeping effectively so every work, a ‘handbook’ to Talk Art Declaration it close to the artist, ah, aspect of my work aims further explain the work, Journal Publication Text I think is very real, very to reinforce the a reading desk and Claim Object genuine, em, what I find communication of my display bookshelf, Merchandise Commodity most important about concepts.” Excert from merchandise such as Statement Fetish art is the artist and it’s Exhibition Handbook pencils, rubbers, Controversial Game ideas rather than the postcards with brand Dress-Up Fake Genuine work created and the “Em, I think a good identity of the artist and Fake Cover-Up Highlight image.” Quote from artist is someone who exhibition, black-and-white Emphasise Black artist’s exhibition video comes up with good gallery logo and window Categorise Tape Practise statement genuine ideas and dressing, black border Practise Practise. communicates them tape to define the viewing Down Write Observe to the target audience, area in front of the Visible Speech Language in the best way canvases, copies of Circa Art Discourse Normative possible.” Quote from and Art Monthly with Performances Generating artist’s exhibition video cover images of Pamela Artist Defence Present statement Myer’s work, as well as Apparent Unclear graphic symbols indicating Ambiguous Naïve Straight the rules of the gallery, Forward Partition such as ‘Do not touch’ and Assignment Agenda ‘Food/Drink not allowed’. Objectives Ambition Motivation Success Success Success. Meabh Redmond Laura McGovern is an Meabh Redmond Institute of Art, Design and Technology, artist practising in Dublin. montage of images from Videotape and Video art Dún Laoghaire Graduate Show, Visual Arts Practice video stills courtesy the artist

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In one of the smaller presented as a large- seconds on screen before manner and often appear rooms that form the maze scale projection that fills being sucked into the only as a result of a that is the IADT Graduate the entire height and black abyss of the blank fleeting glimpse through Show resides the work of width of the far wall in this monitor. intense distortion. video artist Meabh white room. A large sofa Redmond. Redmond has invites you to sit down to In rather a different Redmond’s work is both mastered her chosen view the five video artists approach Videotape a comment on her chosen medium to great effect. that are shown on a takes the aesthetic of medium, with a constant What results is a looped DVD. Redmond’s interference and VHS focus on and awareness sophisticated series that Video art (i) appears on manipulation whilst of the material, and an not only captures you with the wall and floods the playing it against the exanimation of how we its digital beauty but is room with vivid blue light, premise of memory and interact with that medium also engaging in both its the blue gives way to its subsequent distortion. both on and off-screen. execution and exploration. white as the vertical roll of The fast forwarding and The resulting work is interference presents rewinding of family home visually stunning, Redmond has presented itself. Parts (ii) and (iii) videos fragments the particularly the imagery two series, Video art and also explore this concept, linear nature of the video from Video art, while Videotape. Video art with static being the tape. The images differ; Videotape has adopted consists of three parts dominating feature for a family holiday to a tone perfectly suited to with all exploring the Video art (ii). Video art Disneyland and Sea the complex familiarity of effect of interference (iii) examines the RGB- World, a banal drive its subject matter. when recording digital channel breakdown as down a street and a video from a standard one switches off the child sleeping. They are television set. The work is television set; it lasts only presented in no concise James Merrigan Alan Phelan is an artist James Merrigan National College of Art and Design from Dublin. “…could we talk before and after… (Part 2)”, 2008 Master of Fine Art installation shot, Digital Hub courtesy the artist

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All too often grad shows pieces looked like some a concrete block; are over-packed, too discarded broken-down a basketball stuffed with much stuff and not stage set that there had wood; a travel bag; enough space. The former not been enough time to a throne-type armchair cash-and-carry warehouse, clear away. Positioned at covered in bin liners; which serves as primarily the rear (or one far end) and more. These elements a Masters venue, has the of the warehouse, it was created an air of mystery, potential to do away with dwarfed by Sinéad as there was no specific this. Sadly, this year what McCann’s cement structure way to read or necessarily emerged instead was a with unfriendly performing connect anything. This temporary cubicle city, people and the busy mixed-up possible narrative mirroring the cramped domesticated chaos of invited audience conditions of Thomas Margaret Fitzgibbon. participation through Street only with a bit more interpretation, as a site of room to spare. The grads Merrigan’s work was possibility over some who managed to work composed of many nihilistic introspection, around this generally elements: partially made with potential outshining fared better. What I liked wood steps; various the apparent readymade most about James horizontal fabric-covered failure all around. Merrigan’s installation frames/ pillars/ partitions; was that, in and around two kitchen chairs the cubicles, I missed it joined with gaffer tape; completely at first. With a cardboard box with a no specific lighting, jigsaw encased in wood; Merrigan’s sprawling a torch strapped to Leigh San Juan Eimear McKeith writes on Leigh San Juan National College of Art and Design Degree Show visual art for the Sunday The Poetics of shadow (detail) Tribune. 2008 various framed digital prints, 'Resurrected worlds' paper theaters with positive slides installed in found chemists drawers, collected furniture items and slide projector courtesy the artist

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For me, many of the with ideas of artistic Patchwork-style collages with contemporary highlights of this year’s celebrity, movements featuring flitting bird technological media, San NCAD Fine Art BA in art history and the silhouettes hung on Juan’s work evokes both Degree Show were to documentary form in an the wallpapered walls, a feeling of nostalgia and be found in the Media imagined retrospective while the space was filled a desire for a renewed section at the Digital Hub of himself from the year with looming, lopsided sense of wonderment. where, overall, the exhibits 2045. old-fashioned furniture. San Juan celebrates the were of an impressively The drawers and doors theatrical in the everyday, high standard. Among But forced to select of wardrobes and presses using surrealistic the most noteworthy one graduate worthy of were opened to reveal techniques to encourage installations were Ruth attention, I would say hidden treasures: small, us to embark upon a Chadwick’s painstakingly I was particularly struck intricately decorated contemporary voyage of created cardboard office; by the work of Leigh San handmade model theatres discovery that can be Sarah Lawson’s poignant Juan (23) from Fine Art that framed delicate, enjoyed simply by looking stop-motion animation of Media. San Juan is an whimsical drawings, around us. a robotic figure in search imaginative, thoughtful simple animations and of a flower; and David talent who is certainly one looped films depicting Chandler’s Buster of the most promising urban spaces, shadowy Keaton-esque multiscreen graduates to emerge from forms and vignettes video installation of a man NCAD this year. For her from nature. By taking traversing a wayward installation, she created a eighteenth-century toy urban landscape. For sheer slightly surreal, theatrical, theatre and Asian shadow wit and inventiveness, Alice in Wonderland-style theatre as her inspiration, Philip Kennedy is to be room that felt both familiar and by integrating a low- commended for playing and fantastical. fi, handmade aesthetic Richard Gibson Susan Thomson is Richard Gibson National College of Art and Design Degree Show a writer/artist based The Audacity of hope in Dublin. 2008 courtesy the artist

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Gerry Adams sits at the This is not the fake walrus moustaches). abstract expressionism foot of a candyfloss historicity of postmodernist at the edges, are evident, mountain in the painting retro. No, more a real These grand narratives all in one painting. This Meeting, preaching to engagement with history, are relentlessly male, seems a pastiche of the the crowd beneath, perhaps reflecting the with women here largely postmodern itself, as visual a contemporary Sermon presentness of deep past reduced to pinups and quotes abound. on the Mount. Barack in Northern Irish politics. ads and it is hard to tell Obama starts to dance, The memorial to the whether this is pre- or dressed in the draped 200-year anniversary of postfeminist. There is sheets of a prophet as the Battle of Trafalgar in a large Portrait of the a close-up Hillary claps New world cannot help artist as a young man, beneath in The Audacity but evoke the Battle of whose face dwarfs the of hope. Contemporary the Boyne as its unspoken contemporary scenes. events and famous figures ghost. The work also The artist reappears as a take on an archetypal or references social realism crowd member in two mythical quality, as and its descendants; other paintings, a witness, newspaper image meets the murals of the North, like the strange, angelic Old Master in these Diego Rivera, Neo Rauch outsider in Kieslowski’s parodic restagings. Time and political cartoons. Dekalog. The history of seems to collapse and But they also resemble painting is contained history is present, the Sergeant Pepper here just as history itself perhaps endlessly to be album cover with their is. Techniques evocative repeated, in Richard motley collection of of social realism, impres- Gibson’s large-scale the known and unknown sionism, photography and anachronistic comedies. (wearing countless collage through to Cecilia Danell Michaële Cutaya is an Cecilia Danell Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Degree Show artist and writer living Is this Utopia? in Galway. 2008 installation shot, GMIT courtesy the artist

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It probably was the title painting and animation. urbanism is furthered 1 Is this Utopia?, as well as that did it: in these days alluded to in a series of images of her paintings, documentation of work in of atrophied imagination, In a five-minute animated one-metre-square progress can be viewed 1 in which fears stand in for short, Is this Utopia, paintings. In the luridly on Danell’s website, political program, the very a curvilinear-patterned idealistic colours of an www.ceciliadanell.com mention of Utopias is world is the set for a advertisement are enough to suggest times series of arrangements represented views of when a better future was of urbanistic elements, Stockholm’s suburbs still being dreamt. the construction and which are disrupted by deconstruction of prominent areas of The initial impression of buildings using Lego splashed and dripped Cecilia Danell’s show is blocks – themselves a paint. The featureless one of a brightly coloured legacy of that 1960s spaces left in the painting playfulness. The show is optimism that the world is seem to suggest the suffused with 1960s ours to be built in endless ultimate unfathomability imagery, from the geometric colourful possibilities. of the inhabitants. designs of the wallpaper The alienating effects of covering the installation such planning are pointed Alternatively, these vacant room to the photographed to by having round and uncertain shapes retro objects, which are Maltesers-looking superimposed over the part of the artist’s collection. creatures attempting to representation of places It is however more inhabit this cubic world. which were inspired by pointedly to modernist modernist utopias, could architecture that Danell’s The top-down thinking be left to be filled by work refers through underlying modern future ones. Ben Craig Susan MacWilliam is Ben Craig University of Ulster Degree Show Northern Ireland's solo degree-show installation representative at next 2008 courtesy the artist year's Venice Biennale.

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Stewarts was Northern A cigarette butt stands Salvador Dalí grins Ireland’s biggest erect on silver-foil manically, pasted on top supermarket chain until milk-bottle lid, and looking of a mountain with Tesco bought it out. at Ben Craig’s installation Hockney and Hirst lower It was part of the Crazy I find it impossible not down. A very male Prices group which had to think about the past mountain; mountaineering a series of cringe-worthy and ethnology and is very male and this TV ads fronted by consumerism and installation is definitely Managing Director Jim capitalism and younger male. This boy is McGaw. McGaw was an brothers. Craig seems to transgressing childhood ironic local folk hero. have transplanted an and navigating art-making entire history of himself and defining a foothold. Lego, Tunnocks Teacakes, into the studio, creating Behind the mountain is Meccano, Look and Learn, a mass of piles, a sleeping bag – it feels processed-photograph arrangements and papier a little sordid. I think of envelopes. There is a lot mâché mountains and hoarders drowning in of evidence. The work silver-foiled structures. newspaper seas. triggers associations and I think of growing pains Emerging from the junk, memories – artefacts and and a time when milkmen a plastic bag bears the cultural detritus abound. delivered milk bottles unmistakable yellowy- Mini Frosties cereal boxes with silver foil tops that orange Stewarts flower. have me in English service opened with a satisfying Tove Jansson’s book Who stations. squidge of thumb. I think will comfort Toffle lies on of Thatcher taking away the floor and now Ikea free school milk. has arrived in Belfast. Martin Boyle Slavka Sverakova is Martin Boyle University of Ulster Master of Fine Art a writer on art. Untitled 2008 video projection courtesy the artist

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Their catalogue and objects, one at the time, the artist, dressed in white, website on a shelf, then an sits in a quasi-lotus position (www.irishartnow.com) invisible force, gravity, and brushes mortar away confirm that the artists of pulls each out. While from one used brick. More the 2008 MFA, Belfast, filming, the camera and masonry fills the nearby share a commitment to the shelf were positioned travel trunk. succeed. at an angle to facilitate a corresponding correct IV. A digital counter of 60 Martin Boyle’s installation illusion. numbers in 60 seconds with videos, Untitled I – alternates with a minute IV, aspires to the dictum II. A synecdoche for of irregular intervals, and that good art is “beautiful cleansing is evoked by always returns to the and not yet beautiful… a video of a dozen white start. The headphones (and) always efficacious” toilet rolls nailed to a issue synchronized clicks. (Rein Wolfs). Skinless, board, allowing long see-through walls strips of paper to move in The tropes add up to an constructed from the a stream of air. The piece absurd hero, a modern batons both allow one to recalls white ribbons in Sysiphus, who is tragic see the whole space and the wind delivering only in his hour of divide it into four ‘rooms’. prayers to the deities. consciousness. At other times, ‘all is well’. I. In an elegantly simple III. The three-minute loop metonymy for shopping, works as a metaphor a person outside the for both repetition and frame positions small a hierarchy of values: Lee Welch Alan Phelan is an artist Lee Welch National College of Art and Design Degree Show from Dublin. Between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow, 2008 aluminum and rope 750 x 31 cm courtesy the artist

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Across a few colleges classmates. As self- structure, and an this year it was interesting directed studies go, he unrealised sculpture, that the strongest work pushed the idea of a final he cross-referenced ideas I saw was by students show as far as possible by: between fact and fibs, already practising as attempting to re-zone part belief and bonhomie, artists. These few have of the college campus for aspiration and failure. been active in the art art (but failing); producing Somewhere between scene already – making, a small catalogue (with an fake mountaineering curating, showing and essay by Jason Oakley photographs, Alfred organising. Lee Welch, one and other related texts); Hitchcock gazing at an such, runs the exhibition as well as securing a slot Indian rope trick, space Four and his to exhibit the work ‘for real’ the apparent mysteries experience of how things later this year in the LAB. of divining, Welch has work was obviously re-invigorated his practice invaluable in contributing Despite being in a painting by, oddly enough, starting towards a refreshingly course, it was no surprise all over again. tight, conceptually that Welch was not complex, and witty engaged in medium- cubicle installation as part specific dialectics. Using of the Painting-depart- appropriated (but credited) ment degree presentation. photographs, an audio He may be the obvious interview, a video choice as a familiar face projection, a bronze cast about town, but the work divining twig, a 7.5 m-tall did stand apart from his metal-pole ladder Reviews

Belfast On reflection Ruth Osborne 82 | Majella Clancy: Boundaries, spaces c . 66 and subject positions Slavka Sverakova 98 | Cork Danny McCarthy: Listening with the sound turned off Matt Packer 100 | Derry Maria McKinney | Aideen Doran, Alyson Edgar, Fergal McSwiggan: Derry? London? London? Derry? Declan Sheehan 78 | Dublin John Lalor: Forward pass Charlotte Bonham- Carter 68 | Sigune Hamann: A very short space of time through very short times of space Gemma Tipton 70 | Under erasure Declan Long 72 | Sonic Youth Karlijn De Jongh 93 | First shot Aileen Blaney 104 | Hobart Repetitions Robert Stevenson 75 | Kilkenny Ailbhe Ní Bhriain Eimear McKeith 90 | London Susan MacWilliam: Eileen Riann Coulter 86 | Offaly Patrick Dougherty at Sculpture in the Parklands Emily Mark FitzGerald 88 | Wexford Once removed Kevin Ryan 96 | Book Jack B. Yeats Old and new departures Jeannie McCollum 102 | (background) Patrick Dougherty Ruaille buaille, 2008 installation shot Sculpture in the Parklands photo James Fraher

courtesy Sculpture in

the Parklands c .

c . Charlotte Bonham-Carter Pallas Contemporary March – April 2008 Projects Dublin

John Lalor Forward pass

68 Immediately upon entering Lalor’s architectural intervention of Forward pass feels a bit like the Forward pass, an exhibition by in the Pallas Projects space – his task of trying to cross-reference John Lalor at Pallas Contemporary construction of pillars – also has the the encyclopedia. However, with Projects, the visitor was confronted effect of assuming the gallery itself earplugs to the din created by too with a poster which resembled as a kind of maquette, or a malleable much to say in too small a space, the kind of advertisement used to site for experimentation. The use the cohesive elements of Lalor’s announce coming attractions at of the pillars radically alters our interests emerge as innovative and the cinema. In this case, the poster perception of the gallery space, while insightful investigations of space, addressed the exhibition at Pallas changing the character, viewing representation, and the processes Projects, and specifically Lalor’s film, angle, and physical presence of the of translation. Very dark skies over social housing. paintings. As we move between and However, unlike the kind of facile amongst the paintings at Pallas rhetoric that is usually employed in Projects the flatworks take on a kind the service of promoting films, Lalor’s of sculpture presence. The paintings announcement is tricky, convoluted in Forward pass are all unique and dense – a suitable prelude to renditions of the same grey house Charlotte Bonham-Carter 69 the project at Pallas. against the backdrop of a brooding is a freelance art critic sky. The multiple paintings are part and an Assistant Curator The exhibition Forward pass was of the Democratic paintings series, at the Barbican Art comprised of a variety of mediums, which have included multiple Gallery, London. including the poster and the film, as portraits, as well as a series entitled well as a series of paintings, and an Blue skies over social housing. [opposite] intervention of columns in the Pallas The serial nature of the work is John Lalor space. Rather than perceiving the further demonstration of Lalor’s Forward pass exhibition as a group of independent, installation shot, Pallas tendency to rework subject matter. Contemporary Projects isolated, and complete works, it is The paintings in Forward pass were courtesy the artist helpful to understand the show executed to a larger scale in the holistically, as a nexus of open-ended exhibition shown in the film. investigations into a series of interre- Lalor’s use of maquettes and lated ideas. The use of the maquette, experimentation with scale or the mock-up, for example, is an questions our understanding of the important, and recurring concept for differentiation between reality and Lalor. The poster contains a grainy illusion. The filmed footage of the image of what appears to be the maquettes, for instance, is almost gallery space, but is in actuality an indistinguishable from the footage of image of a maquette of the space. the gallery space. However, the use The film is made up of footage from of a small mobile phone camera to one of Lalor’s previous exhibitions, film within the small space of the as well as filmed footage of a maquette lends the film a slightly maquette of that gallery space. disorientating quality, which alludes The maquette itself was built after to the artist’s intervention in the the realization of the project in that representation of that space. space. In this way, much of the show at Pallas Projects is about the As Lalor details in the poster about translation of an idea from one space the exhibition, his project is concerned and medium to another. In reworking with both representation and memory. material in this way, and obfuscating According to the stream-of-conscious the boundaries of preparatory material philosophy that constitutes the and finished products, Lalor’s poster’s text, Lalor understands projects emerge as an investigation memory as a construction of reality, in progress, a constant revisiting, and compares it to the idea of the and re-inscribing, which becomes, novel. However, the metaphor is in turn, an act of creation. circuitous and sheds scant light on the project, while also beginning to explain too much. At times, trying to unravel all of the multiple meanings c . Gemma Tipton Gallery of Photography March – April 2008 Dublin

Sigune Hamann A very short space of time through very short times of space

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Sigune Hamann Film strip (Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen) 2008 courtesy Gallery of Photography When it comes to capturing either 2002). The Gallery of Photography now. Think of the sheer multiplication movement or a moment, both painting was designed by architects O’Donnell of works of art available to every one and photography are deceitful. + Tuomey to resemble a Box Brownie of us, superadded to the conflicting The implication of the painterly camera, and this sense of exploring tastes and odors and sights of the techniques employed by artists like the idea of a camera, in a building urban environment that bombard our Jack B Yeats and Basil Blackshaw created to resemble a camera, senses. Ours is a culture based on (I’m thinking particularly of Yeats’ while looking at the implications of excess, on overproduction; the result horse-race paintings, and photography, adds an extra layer of is a steady loss of sharpness in our Blackshaw’s Bulldog, 1981, which cleverness to the work. It also sensory experience.”2 And this is the is in the AIB Collection), that here is distracts from the more interesting territory in which Hamann’s work movement frozen in time, yet poised aesthetics and poetics of viewing. really sings. on the cusp of further dynamic action, is an illusion. Obviously. Another addition, perhaps illuminating, So, returning to that idea of the Equally illusory is that still quality of perhaps another distraction, is the moment of an image, what it a single moment, preserved in paint, exhibition’s title, carried through represents, and how it is to be seen that was the stock-in-trade of to an epigram at the end of the in terms of a reflection of, or comment seventeenth-century Dutch genre catalogue. a very short space of on, the real: John Berger suggests 71 painters, with their vignettes of time through very short times of that a painting is only finished, interiors. There is duration in painting, space, comes from Ulysses. “not when it finally corresponds to a process. The period of a painting Stephen Dedalus is walking on a something already existing – like the is the time it takes to create it. beach, “a stride at a time,” his steps second shoe of a pair – but when bringing with them the idea of the foreseen ideal moment of its Not so with photography, its period inevitable progression, one after being looked at is filled, as the being the fraction of a second for another. It is also preceded by the painter feels or calculates it ought to which the aperture is open. Yet line “shut your eyes and see.”1 be.”3 Even though this is applied to photographs are equally unable to And with this, the notion of cleverness painting, it can be extended to replicate the quality of seeing, for grows to a threatening suspicion. embrace contemporary photography. not only is there composition, and It is to be found again in the series It is not the object, but the seeing of exclusion, within the frame of the of inverted photographs, heimlich, the object that closes the circle of photograph, but also the eye does 2007, where the everyday bucolic meaning. Sigune Hamann’s project not see a fraction of a second’s scenes are reflections in water. in the Gallery of Photography is an stillness. Our idea of the still image Flipped over, their uncanny beauty attempt to capture both the dynamics comes from a personal editing of becomes a little more ordinary. of looking, and the dynamics of moving data. Sigune Hamann’s making; to extend the period of the exhibition, a very short space of time This is at the heart of Hamann’s photograph, and multiply the moments through very short times of space, project, not the ordinariness, but its at which it may be completed. at the Gallery of Photography, opposite. From “shut your eyes and addresses itself to these dynamics see” to re-orienting your eyes and by use of long exposures of stills, seeing differently, the exhibition 1 James Joyce, Ulysses, Bodley and of film strips, to create images brings a little magic back that which Head, London, 1958, p 34 that are painterly in quality, filmic in should never, perhaps, have become 2 Susan Sontag (1964), and collected in Against movement, and yet are ultimately, ‘normal’ in the first place. The only interpretation, Vintage, nonetheless, static photographs. issue is to divest yourself of the London, 1994 intellectual gimmicks of site-specificity 3 John Berger, And our faces The most dramatic of these, film-strip and epigram, and to instead revel in my, my heart, brief as photos, Pantheon, New York, 1984, (whatever it’s doing it’s doing it those aesthetics and poetics. This is p 26 now), 2008, is placed in the long not to adopt an anti-intellectual window of the gallery, as a site- stance, rather an anti-intellectualised specific installation. And, by its one, perhaps borrowing from Susan Gemma Tipton is a writer site-specificity, it addresses itself to Sontag’s Against interpretation and critic on art and the architecture of the gallery as well exhortation which, although made architecture based in as to the history of photography back in 1964, carries a resonance in Dublin; she is currently a research scholar at (nineteenth-century dioramas, the this context: “Interpretation takes the GRADCAM, the Graduate camera obscura – and in particular sensory experience of the work of art School of Creative Arts Richard Torchia’s camera-obscura for granted, and proceeds from there. and Media. installation in the same space in This cannot be taken for granted, c . Declan Long Temple Bar Gallery and April – June 2008 Studios, Dublin

Under

72 erasure [opposite] The show’s title nodded respectfully format (also employed by Gonzales- John Duncan in the direction of Derrida: the Day) effectively erased the prized We were here 2006 designation ‘under erasure’ (or ‘sous objecthood of the photograph itself, courtesy the artist rature’) arising out of the often showing a fading message in an puissant paradoxes of deconstruction obviously ephemeral form. When as the post-structuralist X-factor, previously exhibited as part of an a mark of deletion that must impressive, elaborate installation at accompany philosophical declaration, Documenta 12, this image was one a pronounced crossing-out that calls in a substantial series painted and the meaning of a term or a concept pasted over by the artist after very into question even as it is grudgingly short spells on display; isolated in but unavoidably employed. Yet any Under erasure, the Jerusalem strict, studious application of this photograph loses some of its earlier nullifying self-referential principle anecdotal poignancy — its fleeting seemed to be of limited interest poetic and political charge — being here. Rather, several dissimilar ‘cut forced to bear too much portentous outs and cut aways’ and a number allegorical weight in this context. 73 of politically uneasy reflections on disappearance or impeded visibility John Duncan’s photograph of a were plausibly covered by this whitewashed regimental banner on convenient catch-phrase (oddly the dismal exterior of a dilapidated enough, the term ‘catch-phrase’, Belfast building was an equally with its incidental assocations of focused study of blotted out public verbal entrapment, suddenly seems propaganda, but it had more rogue aptly deconstructive). If there was elements, more sense of the messy a directly Derridean dimension to the material residue of recent history. curatorial interest in erasure, however, Less imposing in scale, there was, it was most obviously manifest in however, a tragicomic kind of the recurring contemplation on the theatricality to this ostensibly empty (in)capacities and compromises of scene: the barely visible military-style representation, especially with regard emblem at the ‘blank’ centre, to the problematic, ‘partial’ witness streaked with broad, uncontrolled of photography: a medium that strokes of thick white paint, was appeared both dynamic and deflated framed by the wretched proscenium in this exhibition, visually dominant of the crumbling, battered building; while at the same time drained of a drama, then, as much characterized referential power and authority. by collapse and indecipherable A grouping together based on detritus as it was by the ‘progress’ taking away: crudely cropped to its Dramatic, large-scale (and larger- suggested in the deletion of essentials, this was the guiding again-scale) photographs by Lidwien militaristic iconography. Consistent theme of Under erasure, an intriguing- van de Ven, John Duncan and Ken with Duncan’s other engrossing sounding exhibition staged by Gonzales-Day ironically paired views of ‘post-troubles’ urban Temple Bar Gallery and Studios ambitious formal monumentality with settings (and recalling Eoghan during June and July. Six international obscure images of next-to-nothing, McTigue’s related investigations of artists were selected based on a notionally ‘addressing’ historical overpainted paramilitary murals), loosely converging interest — quite events, or more precisely their this is a photographic ‘absence’ diversely understood and addressed anxious aftermath, but grandly packed tight with seemingly — in strategic deletions or observed foregrounding photography’s un-erasable traces. obliterations of interpretatively unavoidable ‘failure’ in this task. necessary, telling or troubling detail, Van de Ven’s Jerusalem 24/04/2006 assessing the impact of extreme (Memorial Day) was a vast, muted forms of visual and textual editing, and minimal wall-pasted image of both as practical, aesthetic-conceptual a weathered, pockmarked city wall experiments and as cultural or on which the scrawled word ‘nation’ historical phenomena. was the final, faint trace of a mostly smeared-over graffito. The poster Gonzales-Day, on the other hand, the contemporary world. Thin image photography is, nevertheless, has been compelled by specific fragments, the result of a persistent extraordinary. Detailed images of page historical ‘erasures’ — the numerous, peeling away at the surfaces of after page from culturally influential brutal lynchings that took place in urban photographs, combined to texts are digitally layered to create California at the end of the nineteenth create strange, sprawling architec- wholly illegible, but aesthetically and beginning of the twentieth tural (and perhaps anti-architectural) absorbing, representations of entire centuries — to actually undertake forms. These elegantly chaotic works. All potentially comprehensible procedures of deliberate creative assemblages (referred to as script is obliterated — but this isn’t erasure, dealing with deletion ‘clusters’) at once evoked the so much erasure or deletion as a in extremis. A majestic colour advanced sci-fi visions of today’s startling process of visual accretion photograph of a single, massive tree, most ambitious virtual re-imaginings and creation, new forms and patterns set in dusty, deserted terrain against of the built environment, and at the emerging as ‘sense’ is reduced. unbroken blue sky, demonstrated same time prioritized an obsessively Every page of the Holy Qur’an is one approach: the luridly beautiful lo-fi tangibility: the little ragged tails therefore a vibrantly plural all-at-once image showing a place where Latin left by scalpel cuts providing subtle archive of a text deemed resolutely American men were killed in vicious evidence of a curious artisanal unambiguous in certain contexts — 74 racist attacks. This seemingly peaceful commitment (it’s worth noting that the compacted pages fizzing with landscape scene therefore functions Galpin apprenticed as woodcarver) noisy possibility. But, as with all the as a self-conscious instance of the at odds with the elaborate diverse works adapted by Khan — trick played by almost all landscape hyper-modernism of the designs. and as with much work featured in imagery: Gonzales-Day constructing a The concentrated craft simplicity in this exhibition — this photographic seductive vision of nature that masks Galpin’s work also corresponded in image of a ‘trembling at the limits the actual conditions and histories small measure with the determinedly of language’ (to adapt a Derridean of the framed territory. In another, crude mark-making technique formulation) somehow also makes closely related set of small, framed employed in Candice Breitz’s Ghost ‘present’ spaces of intense, forbidding, photographs, Gonzales Day dealt write series: a body of work drawing impenetrable absence. with erasure not through suggestions on, and deleting from, stories of a of buried significance, but through body at work — Breitz taking an direct, disturbing manipulation of enticingly salacious novel called Declan Long is a lecturer archival imagery: here editing out the The Ninety days of Genevieve and at the National College of central figure of the horribly abused tippex-ing out much of the essential Art and Design, Dublin. victim from photographic documents erotic detail (the book itself is worth of lynchings — leaving a haunting, Googling: when a businesswoman harrowing vacant space. The strategy is “thrown into a world of sexual is in an obvious way reminiscent of challenge, she must learn how to Paul Pfeiffer’s digital amendments of balance her career with the world Muhammad Ali matches, in which of fetishism”). Breitz’s acclaimed the fighters are actually removed oeuvre includes some masterly from the footage; and though re-editing of popular entertainment Gonzales Day’s compelling work has (the multi-screen compilations of quite distinct and difficult historical emotional fathers and mothers in concerns, in each of these cases our Hollywood movies were a deserved attention is artfully turned towards hit at the 2005 Venice Biennale) the circumstances of spectacle but the Ghost write series finds and, inevitably, towards the politics diminishing returns in its repeat of spectatorship. engagements with a trashy text.

If problems of representing place Then again, Breitz may not have were undoubtedly of interest to been especially well-served by the Lidwien van de Ven, John Duncan positioning of her severely abridged and Gonzales Day — in terms of passages of soft-porn adjacent to the erasure or residue of historical Idris Khan’s infinitely more sober incident — for Richard Galpin the transformation of the written word in challenge seemed more immediately Every page of the Holy Qur’an to do with the modeling and mapping (could we imagine a more unlikely of the indistinct, shifting spaces of juxtaposition?). Khan’s composite c . Robert Stevenson Plimsoll Gallery April 2008 University of Tasmania Hobart

Repetitions

75 Ciara Moore’s recent residency Moore’s Echoes places us in a boat in Tasmania prompted curators on a body of water – it happens to Seán Kelly and Paul Zika to develop be in County Kerry, although the this exhibition at the University of location is not revealed. Our tendency Tasmania’s Plimsoll Gallery. to seek home (so evident in the Four artists, all working in digital ‘New York’ and ‘New South Wales’ media, investigate the complex placenames of colonised nations) relationship between self and place, is clear by the reactions of viewers, questioning the extent to which there who can be heard pointing out to is demarcation between the two. each other evidence of which Tasmanian lake this is. But Moore’s examination of this The effect is quite beautiful, but dear about a notion of home is taken place is largely independent of there are more intriguing things from us by this disconcerting work. geographical location. Her camera about this work than its appearance. lingers on the extraordinariness of We are entitled to ask, for instance, Nor has Hobba quite finished with us. simple acts – an oar pushes against “where is the art?” For while the Bad moon rising is a mesmerising the combined inertia of a trillion screen produces an interesting digital video work. Before we entirely trillion water molecules, triggering tapestry of taxonomy, at its essence make sense of the image we bring chaotic behaviours in particles and this is merely a computer scrolling our own preconceptions to bear and energy flows in its wake. Over and through a database. We could see something beautiful – a white over the oar crashes through a remove the Tasmanian dataset and creature swimming, a dugong surface, shattering a reflection, load instead an Irish one, or load the perhaps. But the creature appears at first unrecognisable, but slowly named stars and their location in the not to be underwater, but above a revealing itself as a clouded sky heavens. Any listing of words and night-time seascape. And the painted on dark water. The genius numbers could be manipulated to fit ‘dugong’ emerges from shadow as loci revealed in this work is magnetic; Walch’s artwork: imaginary landscapes something altogether nightmarish. we are utterly drawn in to the interplay could be flashed before our eyes – One cold, staring fish devours 76 of scales and the mesmerising Middle Earth, or the stock market. another of its own size. This beast sounds of energy being dissipated with two tails drifts across a dark at an entirely human scale. However, because the list is of local background seemingly portending placenames, a fascinating thing only the madness of self-reference Moore’s two works, Echoes and happens within the gallery space: and paradox. This scene gives us a Transmission, offer an appropriation people stand before this work for a glimpse of a pre-conscious landscape of space that is entirely phenomeno- surprisingly long time. Watching – a challenge to our faith that our logical. We see and hear through them, it gradually becomes clear senses deliver to us a true image of the artist’s senses the exquisiteness, that this artwork is situated within the world. A view from nowhere, the multidimensionality and the them – they are waiting until their it alienates absolutely; by corollary, sensuality of real places in a way that place has appeared. They are not it concretises that place and human almost mocks our grouping under fools – they realise that a computer experience are one. one placename of even the smallest is dumbly looping alphabetically fraction of the world. It is said that around the confines of its program, Metre by Daniel Von Sturmer takes Eskimos have 200 words for snow. but they will wait five or ten or more as its starting point the technology of Moore might prompt us to ask: “why minutes just to see “Warren Street” our quantification of place. The work so few?” flash up on the screen. Then they asks us to question what it is we smile and wander off. do when we take measure of our Martin Walch’s Sticks and stones landscapes. A human hand acts as counterpoint to Moore’s Leigh Hobba challenges the viewer periodically gives impetus to a work – hers asking how we might with two works – neither of which pendulum, which consists only of a ever name a landscape, his revealing provides the comfort of a known right angled metal ruler hanging from our obsession with doing so. His landscape. The first, Home, away the edge of a table. This simple digitally generated list of every name from (thinking of) home – objects machine consists of a lever, a fulcrum, given to places (roads, beaches, of desire – (Chairs by Le Corbusier) an orthogonal device, space divided waterways, towns) in Tasmania is – Room 12 Regents Court (the title into the metre of the ruler, time divided not, in itself, great reading. However, alone is a challenge), presents that into the meter of its swing and the Walch has coupled each element space most reviled by the frequent constant intervention of the measurer with its spatial location, so while traveller: the empty hotel room in – the scientific observer – replacing the dry list scrolls down one side a strange city. What Hobba offers the energy that entropy has stolen of a screen, elements appear every to us is alienation stripped bare – away. From various camera angles fraction of a second in their the panic-approaching-terror of we see bizarre and beautiful effects: geographical location, determined by feeling outside of place. All external looking along the tabletop a ruler latitude and longitude, on the other. references here are anxious and teeters impossibly on one of its So the located names, which fade anonymous – occasional subliminal edges. And even in this most simple after ten seconds or so, continually flashes of television screen-grabs and calculable of periodic motions, demarcate the shape of the island. lure us to attempt their decipherment, shadows and angles interplay in but we can judge by the mood that surprising ways. we will not be comforted with any sense of closure. All that we hold From every perspective or focal [ previous spread] point, the marks on the ruler lose Martin Walch Sticks and stones their precision as they recede from screengrab, real-time- the camera. The camera and the generated video stream that ruler both make the claim of the takes approximately 30 minutes to run through a full cycle exact sciences – to provide an (that is, the 32,000 place names objective measure. Yet what may in Tasmania) dawn upon us is our own predicament courtesy the artist – the source of both our frustration [below] and our joy: we cannot escape that Ciara Moore we are subjective observers. Echoes installation shot courtesy the artist In his essay ‘…Poetically man dwells…’ Heidegger recognised in our superficial relationship to place “a curious excess of frantic measuring 1 1 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, and calculating.” Yet even the language, thought, (transl. 77 briefest artistic treatment reveals that A Hofstadter), Harper and our interaction with place is beyond Row, New York, 1971, p 228 what may be quantified; beyond even what may be expressed. Our Robert Stevenson experience of place is perhaps the graduated from the most pervasive and fundamental University of Sydney with aspect of our existence – it is the Bachelor of Arts and totality of us; our first and our last. Master of Teaching degrees; he works independently as a writer and editor. c . Declan Sheehan Context Galleries May – June 2008 Derry

Context Galleries April – May 2008 Derry

Maria McKinney Aideen Doran, Alyson Edgar, Fergal McSwiggan 78 Derry? London? London? Derry? [opposite] Repetition is smooth and it re-iterates, Or what form could that narrative Maria McKinney and it stammers and halts, and it take? Yet this approach – a search Earl of Leicester 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, makes fail (an outcome which is of for narrative – is only one credible hole punches, glue course open to being an intent, and path into reading the exhibitions; courtesy the artist so a success). These latter elements and within that authority there also lies of repetition – as a process of stutter its decoy, its contrary. This contrary or stammer – were apparent across would be, rather than using the logic all the animations of Aideen Doran. of narrative, to use the logic of The overarching aesthetic was neither montage: to move, as it were from smooth nor fluid. There were two shot to shot, rather than by story larger casual screens, leaning or narrative.1 against walls. An animation, Contemplating a nowhere, was projected against one screen, The exhibition by Maria McKinney featuring a mass of scratchy pencil seemed predetermined by a drive to marks, and then the text “A Nowhere” recognize, reformulate and recreate becoming gradually legible amid the pattern. Within it, the Derry?London? 79 marks, then disappearing again into London?Derry? project was opened the miasma of pencil marks, and up to “a frenzy of intertextual then reappearing as legible text activity”…2 There was a process of again. The animation London?Derry? oscillation from, for example, pieces London?Derry? was projected which reworked and manipulated against the other screen of the same crosswords, through a space which size, leant against another wall, featured literal and unembroidered featuring a similar process of a mass re-presentation of jigsaws (both of scratchy pencil marks, and then materials also used in her previous the texts “London” and “Derry” work) to work with more sculptural becoming gradually legible amid the and less representational elements. marks, then disappearing again into An examination of structure itself the miasma of pencil marks, then seemed to become a constant within reappearing as legible text again. the work with an examination of In a work similarly projected against various processes of image-making a casually placed smaller screen, becoming more of a variable. It’s Mapping a place, a mind-map of difficult to decipher which is more theory and concepts – cultural-theory apparent in the artist’s matchstick- tropes and tricks – grows as an chair construction – its function as a organic map of roots and paths, then magnificently menacing image or its shrinks back to nothingness, and character as a structurally fascinating then reforms, branch (of thought) by larger configuration of tiny equivalent branch (of thought). Across these pieces. One other sculptural piece three animations, the element of was a large, interconnected almost repetition is foregrounded (each crystalline structure, an accumulation animation itself is a very brief piece); made up from a multiple hexagon- and contained within the stuttering (or octagon-?) like assemblage of repetitions are fissures which open up limes pierced with cocktail umbrellas. opportunities to engage, dis-engage, The structure seemed capable of regroup ideas, references, and self-regeneration, with a seeming responses, and to re-engage. ability to grow at will; and yet to have halted. There was an exoticism and an otherness within it – which It seems that the authoritative functioned more out of a visceral position to adopt in this context is sense of it occupying space, rather to question if a narrative about than any representational or allegorical London~Derry is presented within status within the piece. the works in these exhibitions. Or a germ of an idea of a narrative? There’s an encounter with three small Multi-narratives functioned within These shows are part of a larger tents in a gallery in semi-darkness... Alyson Edgar’s work, with the one project, six consecutive shows Ulster wayward. As a rule, a tent geographical location of London curated by invited curators, artists presents itself from the outside as a Street acting as a connecting strand and theatre-producer Jonathan route into its interior; and from within between a variety of people who Burgess, with the theme of its interior, a tent presents a vista engaged with the street on a daily Derry?London?London?Derry?, into the exterior. In this installation by basis – people who travelled there to using the existence of London Street Fergal McSwiggan, each tent acted work, to study, etc. Each participant in the city of Derry as a nexus to as a screen for a back-projected gave an itinerary of his or her route, examine a multitude of ideas. video diary – campers’ POV videos and Edgar then traced this path as a London Street is a Georgian terrace, which had neither element of drawing of an abstract route, a line whose nomenclature refers to the escapist idyll, nor of ‘extreme survival’ sketched on empty sheet, without role of London companies in the mythologizing. Instead they featured any other referent. Edgar also Plantation of Ulster. And from within informal scenes of the campers at sketched a portrait of the participant, that historical framework, a host of work and play, walking, making a fire, which worked only as an element of contemporary factors have developed, on a bicycle, alone, with friends, so exchange. The work carried a sense of outlined in the text of Jonathan 80 that the interior of each tent carried the location as active/ contemporary, Burgess, curator as: its exterior vista within it. Each of the almost outside of history. Still acknowledged – whether three tents restaged the ambience consciously or not – London Street of a location – A walk through the still provides one of the many Lagan Meadows, or a walk along invisible boundaries segregating a the Derry walls. A drive through the city from an element of its population. South Sperrins scenic route, or Running parallel with the 4 main through the North-West Passage. thoroughfares through Londonderry, Camping out in Belvoir Park, or London street is a world away from camping on London street. Walking the hustle and bustle of a modern the Ulster Wayward. The work 21st Century city centre. A narrow operated as a good double-mixture street from Pump Street to New of scenographic skills: the physicality Gate with the high church buildings of the installation of three tents and which bank and bolster a heritage projections making a little theatrical and history which is seldom set of the gallery space; and the act acknowledged, creating an echo of camping itself within the production chamber for tightly strung snares, of the works as an intervention which snap the history awake for a making a theatrical set of civic few brief moments each year. Still a spaces, be that an urban space such place of incendiary where a thin as London Street where the artist gloss of modern does nothing to camped out for a night, or the rural disturb the roots of the old. God spaces where the artist camped and bless London Street. which he feels have been neglected in the visual culture of Northern Two ideas in this text are Ireland. In both cases, the artist borrowed from critical works examined a space that is constructed, on Godard: 1 Godard: A portrait of the updated, transformed and transmitted, artist at 70, by Colin MacCabe, addressing what he considered London: Bloomsbury, 2003 “the misrepresented visual culture of 2 Jacques Aumont, ‘The fall of Northern Ireland, and how it was in the gods: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963)’, in Susan the past, often seen as urban and Hayward and Ginette violent, when it is predominantly Vincendeau (eds), French film: pastoral and peaceful.” texts and contexts, 2nd ed, London: Routledge, 2000 Declan Sheehan works in Public Art for Donegal County Council; he is producer of Descendants, a film directed by Otto Schlindwein; writer for Abandoned Donegal, book and exhibition by Denzil Browne/ Abridged; and a curator of the project The Glass album (www.theglass album.moonfruit.com).

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[above] [below] Aideen Doran Fergal McSwiggan installation shot, Context Ulster wayward, 2008 Galleries, 2008; back: London? installation shot, Context Derry? London? Derry?, Galleries in foreground: Mapping a place, courtesy the artist both animation projection onto board courtesy the artist c . Ruth Osborne Ormeau Baths Gallery May 2008 Belfast

On

reflection

82 [opposite] of corporate philanthropy.3 It thus (Women of Belfast series) addresses George Campbell seems what BOI is actually inviting the merciless impact of more recent Still life with oil lamp, 1969 oil on board the viewer to reflect on is the quality, sectarian violence. BOI have 76 x 63 cm value and standard of itself, reflected obviously taken some limited risks by courtesy Bank of Ireland through the quality, value and standard collecting works of more political of the artworks collected during this content despite their jarring with the time. The artist list is certainly banality of the corporate environment. impressive and illustrative of the The resulting questions is, is BOI mid-century Irish art canon. It is no unique or have all Irish corporations surprise to find Louis le Brocquy, taken such an approach? If so, this Norah McGuinness and Robert is an intriguing aspect of the wider Ballagh on the walls of the OBG.4 character of Irish corporate collecting They are of course artists proven to and one that goes some way to be a sound, ‘status’ investment. distinguish Irish collections from common corporate preferences. On first sweep through the OBG, On Reflection does seem particularly Removed from the corporate 83 orthodox, reaffirming some widely environment, the On Reflection held preconceptions about corporate artworks seem to collectively and art. Corporate collections, in Ireland implicitly trace the various changes Corporate involvement in the arts as elsewhere, have been judged as in Irish society as reflected in the art has grown to become a prolific force being relatively safe and formulaic. of the nation – the opening up of Irish in twenty-first-century Ireland, with a Divisive content is avoided in society through the mid-twentieth range of Irish companies seeing the preference for art that is passive century, as signalled by the growing benefits of this affiliation. It is within and easily displayed. Thematically influence of international modernism the midst of this strengthening On Reflection reinforces this trend, (succinctly captured in the exhibition relationship that On Reflection, being dominated by an abundance by Robert Ballagh’s Woman with a the Bank of Ireland’s (BOI) annual of lyrical landscapes by artists such Barnet Newman), the various political touring exhibition, comes to the as Patrick Collins and Camille Souter events that marked and marred Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast.1 and minimal abstractions by the likes the country, and the persistent of Michael Warren. The Bank’s identification with the rural. Certainly The exhibition is part of the Bank’s preference for traditional mediums is grouped together, it seems that this Regional Art Initiative, which sees also obvious, from Tim Goulding’s selection has much to say beyond the bank invest (a suitably ‘bank-ish’ wool tapestry Bean banner, though a constructed corporate role. term) in the arts of a selected region the usual mediums of painting and Obliquely, On Reflection poses the through purchase and monetary works on paper, to a range of metal question of how other corporations awards for emerging and established sculptures. Only Alexandra may address the implicit cultural artists.2 Comprised of 55 works Wejchert’s perspex Green lines value of their collections outside the from the Bank’s continually growing seems to materially buck the trend. corporate environment in more public, collection of over 2,000, and perhaps more neutral, settings. On Reflection seems a fairly Yet to say that the BOI collection, as Will there be a move in Ireland to straightforward affair. It focuses on represented by On Reflection, rigidly in-house or even off-site corporate the direction the BOI collection adheres to all corporate stereotypes galleries, as in Britain and America?6 took during the1960s – 1990s. would be untrue. Its relative safety is The reasoning for this chosen time- perceived from today’s context. frame, we can assume, is that the Many of these works, when created works purchased or created during or purchased, would have been these years are the strongest within considered to carry an element of the collection and therefore have an risk.5 Four such works deal with important role to play in projecting political issues. Micheal Farrell’s a positive corporate image. Poltical pressé, Robert Ballagh’s The contribution an art collection The Marchers 1968 and Oisín Kelly’s can make in constructing a desired The Marchers take on renewed corporate image has been the topic significance exhibited in Belfast forty of much analysis and is recognised years after the incidents that inspired as a leading motivation for this form them, while F E McWilliam’s Help The exhibition does not seek to Given this factor, it seems that showcase the more recent purchases there would have indeed been the BOI have added to their collection. opportunity to create a more Yet BOI’s emphasis has always balanced exhibition. On Reflection been on collecting and supporting provokes rather than answers emerging, Irish artists. While this questions relating to the wider remit continues to guide BOI’s character of BOI’s collection. As a approach, the form more recent corporation at the fore of collecting purchases may take remains in Ireland, BOI has the opportunity ambiguous. Indeed the nature of to make a public statement as to contemporary collecting throughout how corporations in Ireland are and Ireland’s corporations is equally can continue to be representative of unclear, though we are often made Irish art. aware of monetary sponsorship through schemes like the AIB Prize On Reflection has the ability to and BOI’s Regional Art Initiative.7 influence current and potential 8284 corporate collectors throughout So, what has BOI been collecting Ireland – something the bank is since the mid-1990s? The absence certainly aware of as local business in On Reflection of photography and professionals and dignitaries are video art, which became widely used invited to the exhibition’s launch in mediums by Irish artists during the each region.8 Exhibited in Belfast, late twentieth century, seems to where the current economic climate suggest BOI’s contemporary is focused on nurturing growth and purchases may be of a somewhat foreign investment, On Reflection traditional nature. How is the complex brings the issue of corporate terrain of contemporary art being collecting to the North where addressed and ‘married’ to the there are still, comparatively, corporate environment? Another issue few corporations collecting art. is the particularly obvious gender The BOI collection certainly points imbalance presented by On to a number of considerations: Reflection. Of the forty artists included creating fully representative in the exhibition only seven (17.5%) collections, sensitivity to the artistic are female. While this imbalance may climate, taking risks. It also poses not characterise the whole of BOI’s the complex issue of how and collection, the image painted by whether to deal with ‘Troubles’- On Reflection suggests a definite related art. gender bias. This goes some way to project a far from positive image of On Reflection seems to provide the whole collection. There are a more questions than answers as number of key female artists, who to the future direction of corporate were working during the 1960s – collecting within BOI and more 1990s in both an Irish and widely in Ireland. However, it would international context, that one would be impossible to leave the OBG expect to find in an exhibition with without a sense of the strategic this particular ambit – Dorothy and important role that businesses Cross, Kathy Prendergast and Rita can play in the arts of Ireland, Duffy, to name but a few. If these North and South. artists are in fact included in BOI’s collection, the question then is, why have they been overlooked for inclusion in On Reflection? Furthermore, a number of the chosen artists have more than one work included in On Reflection (Patrick Scott, Gerard Dillon). 1 Having been previously and its proven suitability for Ruth Osborne is currently 85 exhibited in Cork (2005), the corporate environment, working as the Curatorial Galway (2006) and Limerick may have provided a stable Fellow at the Lewis (2007). blueprint for this first-wave Glucksman Gallery, Cork. 2 Recipients of the mid-career of corporate collectors in Toradh Award: Mike Hogg Ireland to follow. and Philip Napier; awards for 6 For example, Bloomberg emerging artists chosen from Space, London: University of Ulster 2008 http://www.bloomberg- Fine Art graduates: Karen space.com/ Nikell, Alan Henderson and 7 It is only with the timely Miguel Martin. 10,000 to 50: Contemporary 3 The Business2Arts ‘National Art from the Members of Sponsorship Survey’ (2005) Business to Arts currently on revealed that the majority exhibition at IMMA (30 April of companies surveyed – 4 August 2008) that this highlighted ‘Improving issue has been addressed. company profile’ as their 8 “The intention of the customer motive for arts sponsorship evening is not only to share (69%). Survey available at our collection with the local http://www.business2arts.ie business community, but also /sponsor_of_year.html, to encourage by example, accessed 27 May 2008. the possibility of their support 4 Full artist list; Robert Ballagh, in turn with the local gallery.” John Behan, Basil Blackshaw, BOI website, Brian Bourke, Charles Brady, http://www.bankofireland.co Louis le Brocquy, George m/in_the_community/spon- Campbell, Patrick Collins, sorships/bank_of_ireland_art Barrie Cooke, Michael _collection/index.html, Craig-Martin, Gerard Dillon, accessed 29 May 2008. Micheal Farrell, Gerda Frömel, Martin Gale, Erik Adriaan van der Grijn, Tim Goulding, Patrick Graham, Charles Harper, Patrick Hickey, Neville Johnson, Roy Johnston, Oisín Kelly, Cecil King, Norah McGuinness, Theo McNab, Seán McSweeney, FE McWilliam, Anne Madden, Colin Middleton, Evin Nolan, Eilís O’Connell, Tony O’Malley, Daniel O’Neill, Nano Reid, Patrick Scott, William Scott, Camille Souter, Charles Tyrell, Michael Warren and Alexandra Wejchert. 5 However, the preference shown by British and American corporations for this ‘riskier’ style of work, c . Riann Coulter Gimpel Fils May – June 2008 London

Susan MacWilliam Eileen

86 Interfering voices and invading spirits this exhibition is, surprisingly, her first during a visit to Dublin, Charles is how Eileen Garrett (1893 – 1970) solo show in London. The work is Gimpel admired the work of the described her early experiences of the result of a year-long residency at young Louis le Brocquy at the Irish her psychic powers. After spending the Parapsychology Foundation in Exhibition of Living Art. When le an hour in Susan MacWilliam’s New York, the institution that Garrett Brocquy moved to London a few exhibition Eileen, I felt a certain founded in 1951 to encourage months later, he began a relationship empathy with the famous Irish-born research into psychic phenomena. with Gimpel Fils which has lasted medium. The dark confines of the During her residency, MacWilliam over sixty years. Considering this Gimpel Fils downstairs space is the lived with Coly and became close to history, it is heartening that the perfect setting for the five pieces that both her and her daughter Lisette, gallery has expanded its interest to make up the show. The longest and friendships that are reflected in the include a new generation of artists most engaging piece, a 29-minute casual familiarity of the interviews from Ireland. video also entitled Eileen, explores and images. Coly is also the subject Garrett’s world through a collage of of the stereoscopic image Medium’s Looking back over MacWilliam’s sound, image and text presented on daughter, which depicts her sitting career, from her Glen Dimplex three screens. Flicking between beside a photograph of her mother. nomination in 1999 to her solo show documentary-style interviews and Another stereoscope, Artist as in New York earlier this year, and the 87 discordant passages involving medium, is a self-portrait of the artist recent announcement that she will repetition and competing voices, crouching among the bookshelves represent Northern Ireland in the the woven texture of the piece of the Parapsychology Foundation next Venice Biennale, it would seem disrupts our desire for coherent Library. This photographic format, that the time is ripe for a major narrative and creates a multilayered which requires looking through survey of her work. These recent work that evokes the mysteries of binocular-like view finders, provides a pieces would benefit from being the psychic world. keyhole view which feels particularly considered within the context of her appropriate to MacWilliam’s ongoing interest in all things Divided into chapters, the video mysterious subject matter. paranormal, and such a show would examines particular psychic episodes, reveal the scope and depth of her including one in 1936 in which One of the most remarkable aspects inventive oeuvre. With another North Garrett successfully dealt with of Garrett’s story is that she always American residency in her diary, poltergeists that were haunting an remained sceptical about her powers. MacWilliam is making a name for English stately home. Other sections The remit of the Parapsychology herself across the Atlantic: it is time mention the numerous celebrities Foundation includes encouraging she had a major show at home. who befriended Garrett – from Dalí scientific studies of the paranormal, Riann Coulter is an and Deitrich to Huxley and Fellini – and this spirit of investigation is academic and curator and her ability to restore and reflected in MacWilliam’s work, specialising in Irish and reassure those who consulted her particularly the video piece Library. British art. on psychic matters. Superficially, this piece appears to be a series of stills of the The star of this piece – and the [opposite] Parapsychology Foundation Library, Susan MacWilliam show – is Garrett’s 92-year-old but it is actually a video of the Eileen, 2008 daughter, Eileen Coly, who, in a library shot in real time at night, video still; synchronised disarmingly forthright manner, shares three-screen video work, accompanied by a soundtrack of the 28 mins 53 secs her weird and wonderful stories of air conditioner that adds both a sense courtesy the artist/ Gimpel Fils growing up with a medium for a of foreboding and the suggestion mother. Having inherited Garrett’s that the library and the mystical charisma, if not her psychic powers, books within it are living, breathing Coly mediates between the artist, organisms. the viewer, and her mother’s world. In effect, MacWilliam’s subject is the With this exhibition running directly two Eileens, and attempts to conjure after a solo show by Seamus up Garrett are often upstaged by her Harahan, the basement of Gimpel engaging daughter. Fils has effectively been occupied by Northern Irish artists. While this A continuation of MacWilliam’s schedule was a coincidence, the long-term research into the psychic gallery’s interest in artists from world, mediums and the supernatural, Ireland extends back to 1945 when, c . Emily Mark FitzGerald Lough Boora Parklands May 2008 – indefinite Co Offaly

Patrick Dougherty at Sculpture in the Parklands In 1856 Henry David Thoreau, deep Over three weeks in May and June, If some of Dougherty’s earlier works into his sojourn in Walden Wood, Dougherty utilised eighteen tons of have strayed too far towards whimsy, wrote in his journal that “It is in vain willow and the help of a volunteer his Parklands commission strikes a to dream of a wildness distant from artist team to construct what he more successful balance between ourselves. There is none such. It is describes as his most ambitious romantic or mythic associations the bog in our brain and bowels, the work to date, and one of the few to and a self-conscious primitivism, primitive vigor of Nature in us, that integrate itself so entirely within a demonstrating a deep sensitivity to inspires that dream.” The richness of pre-existing landscape. Interwoven site. The boglands themselves are Irish bogland – its metaphoric and amongst an existing copse of Alder a thick repository of natural memory, symbolic resonance – has long trees behind the Parklands’ newly and a landscape endlessly shaped by inspired craft and art-making traditions erected visitor pavilion, Dougherty’s human intervention and exploitation: on this island, forming an alternative intricate structure is built out of like the cultivated field, they are an history of Irish landscape wrapped branch sinews twisted and shaped illusion of wildness, wrought by in ancient mythologies and couched into forms which balance tension, human hands. The work explicitly in the Sublime. And yet, as Thoreau rigidity and suppleness. The sculpture references the primeval human observes, the dream of a primitive has a bodily presence, its bundles of instinct for shelter-building and Arcadia is paradoxically wrought fibres creating a series of interiors branch weaving, yet also retains 89 from our own dark and instinctual both architectural and plastic. a distinct sense of the uncanny – wildness – the ‘id’ in the idyll. According to Dougherty, the design the scale and texture of the chambers derives from linear compositions, alternatively charming and unsettling. Intertwining such notions of land, built up three dimensionally as the Organic in material and process, memory, and myth, Patrick work progresses: the temporality and gradual decay of Dougherty’s recent artistic residency the work over the next few years will at Co Offaly’s Sculpture in the …these sticks are also lines form an effective counterpart to the Parklands has engaged with the with which to draw, and my Parklands’ permanent installations: Lough Boora bog wetlands to create assistants and I, using the body a reminder of the slow sedimentation a fantastical monumental willow like a pencil, add lines again that accretes to constitute our installation that will be in place over and again to the surface of the physical and psychological ecology. the next few years. Sculpture in the sculpture. And as unlikely as it Parklands itself has emerged since seems, many of the drawing Dr Emily Mark FitzGerald its founding in 2002 as one of the conventions, which we all used is Lecturer in Art History most significant and evocative settings in school to draw interesting and Cultural Policy at for outdoor sculpture in Ireland. pictures are the same University College Dublin. Uniquely, this open-air sculpture park techniques I employ to build (managed and programmed by the drawn surfaces of my Patrick Dougherty Kevin O’Dwyer) was developed in oversized sculptures. Ruaille buaille 2008 conjunction with Bord na Móna’s installation shot transformation of its cutaway boglands Irish artists from Alice Maher to Sculpture in the Parklands into a public recreation site and Katie Holten have played with the photo James Fraher nature reserve. Today Sculpture in atmospheric resonance of wooded courtesy Sculpture in the Parklands the Parklands is home to fourteen groves, the slip from a sunlit world site-specific public artworks, to the shadowed subconscious of the product of a series of innovative childhood memory and dreams. and highly progressive international Like a Pan’s Labyrinth, Dougherty’s residency programmes. Its latest installation relies on a fantastic and addition is by North Carolina-based theatrical immersion into his sequence artist Patrick Dougherty, known for of corridors, canopies and enclosures, his massive sculptural forms woven simultaneously eerie and nostalgic. from saplings, wrapped around The public appeal of the work is buildings or bent into freestanding obvious and instantaneous, as visiting structures, hundreds of which he children immediately adopt the grove has built at museums, parks and as a playground, and as its arched other sites worldwide over the past passageways dwarf adult viewers to two decades. a child’s dimensions. c . Eimear McKeith Butler Gallery May – June 2008 Kilkenny

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain

90 [opposite] both by exploiting the technical eerie images that are part-interior, part- Ailbhe Ní Bhriain possibilities of photography and video, landscape. The photographs are in Perimeter # 5 2007 and in terms of the content of the dialogue with each other, establishing C-print works. Indeed, Ní Bhriain once said a syncopated rhythm across the courtesy Domobaal Gallery she was drawn to ancient Chinese series – a pattern of similarity and brush drawing, as it “attempts to difference in which elements are marry the nature of the materials of played with, reused or changed. the craft with the nature of that which it depicts,” and a similar attempt is Each photograph takes a frontal revealed in her work. viewpoint and has a similar depth of The Butler Gallery’s decision to field, creating room-like spaces not stage a solo exhibition by Cork- There are two overlapping strands unlike stage sets. But these interior based artist Ailbhe Ní Bhriain (b to Ní Bhriain’s work in this exhibition: elements are integrated with 1978) was both shrewd and timely, a series of photographs and a video fragments of landscapes: the floor as the artist’s relative youth belies loosely based on portraiture; and a becomes a flat expanse of water, the technical and thematic maturity series of photographs and three rolling sand-dune or stony grey soil; of her photography and video work. video pieces that take landscape as a tree grows inside a dusty, empty 91 Her academic credentials, too, are their starting point. In each, she uses interior; a wall dematerialises into impeccable: she graduated with a the techniques of photography and a gloomy landscape expanse; first-class honours degree from the video to confront us with our a window frames an unexpected Crawford College of Art, following assumptions about the medium itself vista; a horizontal line on a wall this with a master’s at the Royal and the visual strategies used in becomes a horizon line on a blasted College of Art in London, for which portraits and landscapes – those wasteland; a transparent rickety she received a distinction. At present, familiar devices we have come to bedframe hangs upside-down from she lectures at the Crawford, while accept as ‘natural’. Her work thus a ceiling, its reflection in water studying for a Ph D at Kingston explores representational constructs beneath it taking on a three- University. Ní Bhriain has also won of staging, framing, perspective, dimensional presence. There is a several awards, including the horizon lines and techniques to sense of harshness and decay in Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2004, suggest surface and depth. By these unpeopled constructions, with is represented by the Domobaal revealing such strategies as artistic their crumbling walls, murky corners, Gallery in London, and has constructs, we are by extension abandoned spaces, leafless trees, participated in many exhibitions here invited to question our relationship to fluorescent lights and tiled, and abroad. perceived reality. institutional floors. Inexplicable shadows, strange reflections and The Kilkenny show, however, was The mutability of memory, traces of the uncertain light sources, meanwhile, Ní Bhriain’s first major exhibition in past and fragmentary reconstructions add to an overall sense of Ireland, and featured a selection of are also explored, creating a sense constructed dissolution. photographs and video works made of time as something which is not between 2006 and 2008. Seen linear but is, like her work, fluid and In the three landscape-based video together, the overall sense conveyed inconclusive. This is particularly the pieces – a diptych depicting a by these meditative works is that of case in Perimeter, a series of nine decaying beached dolphin on a boggy contingency: the contingency of the black-and-white photographs. beach; a part-room, part-landscape moving and the still image, the con- Each image plays with the viewer’s of frames within frames; and the tingency of the self, the contingency perceptions and reveals its own nine-screen Palimpsest, where each of reality. In her work, internal and constructedness. They are at once screen shows a view of a constructed external, conscious and unconscious, familiar and alien, recognisable and landscape – an initial impression of stillness and movement, past and strange, like half-remembered stillness is gradually eroded through present, dream and reality – these dreamscapes. The images have the act of looking. Small changes traditionally conceived opposites – been created by compositing and reveal themselves over time: a bird do not so much collapse as merge layering details from videos and flying overhead, a plume of smoke into each other. Through ostranenie photographs of places Ní Bhriain puffing gently, a light flickering, a techniques, that which was once has encountered in Ireland and on boat slowly traversing an expanse of assumed to be familiar or knowable her travels – a tree from Cambodia, sea. Thus stillness and movement is rendered strange, uncanny, a west of Ireland bog, a former prison become intertwined; there is a sense indefinable. This Ní Bhriain achieves camp – to create a series of uncanny, of time stilled, yet passing still. Portraiture, meanwhile, is addressed with In memoriam, playing looped in the works that bookend the on a small television screen placed exhibition. In the reception area of in a modest position on the floor. the gallery, two long rows of A face gradually emerges from black-and-white photographic opaque, lapping water, merging in images traverse the wall, nine per and out of visibility with the ripples row. The top row features indistinct of the water: but although appearing images of a face at various angles; to be submerged, the face is in fact the bottom shows different sections projected onto the water’s surface. of a body, blurry under water, its The chimerical visage is both present curves and indentations abstracted and absent; it is a vision that hints to evoke a watery underworld at hidden depths – but only on the landscape. The title of the top row is surface. These depths take on Aftermath (self-portrait) series one, added complexity when one knows and the bottom row is Aftermath that the projected face is the artist’s (self-portrait) series two. In a sense, portrait, and the water onto which 92 Eimear McKeith writes these images encapsulate the it is projected was the site of a on visual art for the Sunday essence of Ní Bhriain’s practice, for drowning. Thus In memorium Tribune. it could be argued that the fluidity of becomes a translucent, ephemeral self is at the core of her work. In her memorial – to a lost life, to a past photographs and videos, the self is time, to a contingent self – rendered always both present and absent, infinite by the ever-looping video. suggesting something yet revealing nothing; her work is seeking, somehow, to represent the self yet acknowledging, too, the impossibility of achieving such an aim.

Perhaps, more precisely, her work involves the questioning of what it is that defines the self or, indeed, the inevitable inability to define selfhood. Instead, all that can be aspired to are versions of a self, a series of inconclusive images that can only capture certain angles or sections, images which are themselves rendered in such a way as to be vague, blurry, inconclusive. The self is thus in a perpetual state of becoming and, simultaneously, of dissolution. The titles of her works are, in this context, revealing: Aftermath (self-portrait) underscores the impossibility of rendering the self in portrait form – all that can be achieved is an aftermath of a moment, a trace of something fluid and liminal. Titles such as Palimpsest and Perimeter likewise underscore this sense of liminality and contingency.

In the last room, at the end of the Butler Gallery’s colonnade of spaces, the exhibition concludes c . Karlijn De Jongh Green on Red Gallery June – July 2008 Dublin

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Sonic youth

The title of Green On Red Gallery’s exhibition Sonic youth plays with the visitor’s expectations and anticipations in relation to a performance by the famous rock band at this Dublin gallery. The invitation card contributes to this: it shows the image of the group’s well-known album Goo. On the way to the event, the steep stairs and narrow entrance of the gallery leave visitors in the dark for a final moment. Turning the corner at the end of the corridor, however, visitors suddenly finds themselves in a white exhibition space surrounded by eight television screens: Sonic youth is a group exhibition and shows work by seven young video artists who have a love for music and sound in common. Curator Mary Cremin’s play with the exists in moving the piano around distance from each other. Apart from visitor’s expectations gives a first until he lies on the floor with the the videos mentioned above, Johanna indication of what this exhibition is piano on top of him, having his Billing’s Magical world, The white all about. Sonic youth addresses a hands free to play the instrument. and black minstrel show by David crossover between popular culture The screen is displayed vertically to Blandy, Iain Forsyth and Jane and video art and deals with the give the impression of a letterbox Pollard’s film project File under appropriation of icons and the through which the viewer peeks into Sacred Music, and Ben Kinsley’s sampling of other worlds into visual Hunt’s life. Interesting in this respect GESICHTSMUSIK surround the art in order to form an identity of is that at the start of Hunt’s visitor. Standing at the centre of the one’s own. All artists on display use performance the piano is only visible exhibition space, the moving images music to give an impression of a for the viewer when s/he turns his/ all face our direction. Our position person, either themselves or someone her head. The moment Hunt covers becomes ambiguous: we are both else. At the forefront are themes himself under the weight of the audience and centre of attention at such as one’s expectations of the instrument, the object is turned so the same time. future and the exploration of and that it looks horizontal again – how it confrontation with one’s physical is ‘supposed’ to be: the easier it Sonic youth is an intriguing exhibition 94 and cultural limitations. becomes to see and understand the that raises questions about life and video, the bigger the struggle for the identity. The video works in the The most engaging work in the artist, who – despite the weight – exhibition demonstrate different exhibition is Kate Murphy’s Britney is still well able to sing about how approaches to these questions. love. Britney love highlights the life “nothing can hold him back.” Through the combined play of the of the English girl Brittaney; the artists’ different approaches on the exhibition shows the first two parts Yvonne Buchheim’s video Herder’s one hand, and the visitor’s double of this triptych in the making. In the legacy presents amateur singers from function on the other, the video first video (2000) we see the chubby different countries. Inspired by the works do not only show us other eleven-year-old Brittaney giving song collection of the eighteenth- people’s reality; they offer us the seductive performances in her century philosopher Johann Gottfried opportunity to reflect upon our own parent’s living room, dressed in Herder, Buchheim’s work investigates reality, too. shiny dance costumes. Extremely the visibility of cultural identity within self-confident, the young girl talks songs. People of various ages and about her future and the difficulties cultural backgrounds sing a song Karlijn De Jongh is an of deciding what to do when you are they are familiar with. Buchheim independent curator based good at everything. The one thing shows the struggle that the singers in Dublin. she is sure of is that she wants to be have with themselves and with the a singer and she demonstrates her song: a 70-year-old woman wanting skills by singing Crazy, one of the hit to sing an Elvis Presley song cannot singles by her great idol Britney remember anything but “you ain’t Spears. The second video is shot nothing but a hound dog”; a younger seven years later, when the girl is woman sings Over the rainbow eighteen. Here we see a young while being constantly aware of the woman in an elegant black dress, presence of the camera. Because seemingly practicing for an audition the screen is divided into four parts for a girl band. The differences that are not in sync, the singer sings between the two videos are striking: in canon with himself; continuity is sweating and fidgeting, Brittaney has presented by cutting the next singer lost most of her self-confidence and in the screen, giving the impression her hesitation and choice of words of an audience. seem to indicate she already assumes that she will fail. Although all screens in the show display singing figures, the use of A more physical struggle is presented headphones prevents the presence in William Hunt’s Even as you see of sound. The strange atmosphere me now. This video documents and that is created by the absence of investigates his attempts to test his sound is intensified by Cremin’s own limits. The video shows Hunt in decision to place all works at the a room with a piano; his performance same height and at about the same [this and previous spread] Kate Murphy Britney love 2000 – 2007 video stills courtesy Green on Red Gallery

83 c . Kevin Ryan Wexford Arts Centre June – July 2008 Wexford

Once

removed 96 With Once removed, artist and The concept of time and place can of the film, the narrator claims is curator Sean Lynch has brought also be seen in Carl Doran’s piece, “fifteen miles” away from the street together a group of artists who use a slide projection entitled About scene. The soundtrack consists of a variety of documentary processes 4 months (2008). A series of ambient sound and a voiceover that in their work. The work on show drawings are projected depicting an seems at first hearing to be directing documents the research and overlooked landscape of trees and the elements of the scene we are examination of environmental issues bushes outside his studio building. watching. There is a documentary as well as, in the case of John Smith’s Each drawing is dated and shown feel to the film, the combination of film The Girl chewing gum (1977), in chronological order, documenting sound and vision with the voiceover the documentary form itself. the changes that take place over a describing what is happening on period of time. screen. But on closer inspection The effects of environmental connection between sound and pollution on the local wildlife and Included in the show and available image begins to jar. As the narration the inhabitants of the Shannon River for free to visitors is an article by Jim becomes more and more absurd, estuary are the concerns of Michele Cowman published in Horticulture a flock of birds is directed to fly Horrigan’s video and photographic & landscape Ireland in which he across the screen, a clock is told to installation Nature obscured by writes about the agendas involved in move its hands, and we begin to 97 factory/ factory obscured by fog the planning and management of the question the ‘truth’ of what we are (2007). A large projected video often-overlooked areas of public watching. By calling into question shows Aughinish Alumina, the largest landscaping. Cowman, who has the relationship between image and alumina refinery in Europe, located extensive expertise in horticulture and sound, Smith makes us aware of on a 1,000-acre site in Askeaton, has worked in education and the how we can be guided by such Co Limerick, with smoke billowing local-authority area, addresses the devices in our reading of images. out, covering the area in a cloudy conflicts that emerge when discussing fog. Through this haze, wildlife can the issue of green amenities. He The film is thought provoking and be seen trying to survive in this argues that decision-making is not in entertaining. Like the whole show environment. On a TV monitor, the hands of the experts but with itself, it is well worth repeat viewing. various reports and statements are elected laypersons who have little or displayed showing the concerns of no expertise in horticulture. the local people about the impact Kevin Ryan is an artist the plant has on the environment and Sculpture, photographs and video living and working in also calling into question the role of documentation form John Beattie’s County Wexford. both local and national government installation (Ex)change series environmental agencies. (2008). Two videos show a large [opposite] drawing device completing a drawing Michele Horrigan Morning, noon, night (2008) by on a table in an empty room, one Factory obscured by fog Holly O’Brien is a series of close up, the other from a distance. lambda print 120 x 90 cm photographs capturing instances of With no human presence in the courtesy the artist social interactions within the built frame one is to assume that either environment. Each photograph the device is actually drawing by shows the same specific place over itself what seems like random a period of time and how people buildings or the layout of the room, behave in that space at different or that it is remotely controlled. times. In the daytime photographs, Only at the end of the video do we the public seem to be diligently get of a view of a shadowy figure at going about their business and to some undisclosed place working the inhabit a world of their own, while at sculptural drawing device. night a group of drunken revellers are shown engaging with themselves Disclosure, and how it is revealed in and those around them. The photo- the documentary form, is what comes graphs become an investigation of to mind when watching John Smith’s how rules of society – ‘the right time, film The Girl chewing gum (1977). the right place’ – influence and The film consists of two shots, one codify our behaviour. showing a busy street in London the other a country landscape covered by pylons which, during the course c . Slavka Sverakova Queen Street Studios June – August 2008 Belfast

Majella Clancy Boundaries, spaces and subject

98 positions The digital photographs for the eight the paper it has to be poured modern and contemporary in its small images in this show were off away very quickly … it is denial of drama. taken in Sri Lanka, during May 2007. unforgiving surface … I cannot Clancy visited the temples in go back over the areas once Amongst the prominent ID signs of Batticaloa, in the East of Sri Lanka, they are painted.3 Clancy’s art is the role of light. It has in 2004 and 2006.1 a specific job to produce the illusion I read that Juan Miró poured blue of vast depth, or is it just inches When I returned in 2007 paint over the horizontally positioned deep? Contemplating facts as fallible, I revisited a temple in Kandy canvas to inspire a new Convergence presents a large called Perapeniya Buddhist composition.4 In his art practice the red-and-green asteroid/ jelly/ iceberg Temple, I was particularly change and chance were under the form pierced through with a dark-blue intrigued by a small area in this sole supervision of the ‘inner model’. determined line coming from nowhere temple where people make Clancy works in the opposite on the right. Profound and vacuous, offerings through tying pieces direction: first, the ‘outer model’, active and immobile, palpable and of cloth to a railing. It was a the one the lens can ‘see’ and transient, these works of art not only visual feast of colour, form and record is being temporarily ‘fixed’ insist on the impossibility of fixing space. What intrigued me also and then ‘responded’ to by her anything permanently, they celebrate 99 about this area was that it was imaginative powers governed by it! Clancy keeps inventing the rules constantly changing … The the poetics of colour and space. for directional thought and chance to work in the exhibition originated Thus the ground is lens-based, the construct a space, which does not from this area of the temple.2 layers are placed not just by chance, exist outside each image: but by empathy with the final image, Rarely have I seen abstraction which is not known until it is made. Pleae add: rooted in the changeable yet strong This is a risky strategy, for which the “The poet must enter an impersonal identity of age-old rituals being neurology brings some support: our state, in which the familiar division transferred with such a light touch brains have ‘mirror neuron systems’ between subject and object dis- from a far-away culture to the that fire both when we do something solves and feelings are at liberty to Western idiom. No nostalgia, no or watch it being done. Clancy’s enter into a new combination”6 astonished naïveté, just that lightness images start with lens-based mimesis, of being, that feast she notes a record of watching the changeable in the above quote, an intoxication object. Later on she changes that 1 e-mail Clancy to Sverakova, by colour and space, the principle record by ‘doing’, acting upon its 27 June 2008 2 ibid of indeterminacy operating silently surface. 3 e-mail Clancy to Sverakova, under the experience. The final 24 June 2008 image is a seamless co-existence Fiction versus reality5 presents 4 The Birth of the world, 1925, shimmering colours, not unlike MoMA, New York of a photograph and a painting. 5 All works are 2008, unless A careful handling of the materials, Aurora Borealis, in a soft voluminous otherwise stated. as if not to disturb their authentic form closed off from our world by a 6 T S Elliot, The Sacred wood energies, governs both parts of the fragment of blue elliptic brushmark. creative process. The first part The composition has no centre; Slavka Sverakova is a consists of taking the photograph, instead, a small red triangular shape writer on art. manipulating it, overlaying it with bits incises a diagonal into the major of the original take, and printing. form. Kandinsky comes to mind, and [opposite left] The second part is painting over evokes a realization that Clancy’s Majella Clancy print/ paintings are a reflection not Fiction versus reality, 2008 the print: oil on inkjet print on diabond just on the relationship between 51 cm x 61 cm How I paint on it depends on photography and painting, but also courtesy the artist on the history of painting. The colours what is already there and how [opposite right] I want the image to read. range from Rothko to disco. The Majella Clancy Sometimes the photograph is sensuality of hues, tonality and Convergence, 2008 laid flat on the ground and the textures have their forebears in late oil on inkjet print on diabond Gothic and Baroque. It all appears 25 cm x 18 cm paint is poured on, this way I courtesy the artist can predict that the paint will as luxurious materials in The Play is dry in a flat semi opaque way serious. The simultaneity of black … and free of the brush marks with orange and pink with pale blue … to avoid oil marks residue on in Points of departure is utterly c . Matt Packer Triskel Arts Centre July – September 2008 Cork

Danny McCarthy Listening with the sound turned off

100 In the mid 1980s, Danny McCarthy collected from the dehumidifier’s Court care home who participated organised a series of performance air filtration process, it is then their voices for the project, each events at the Triskel Arts Centre, applied to the surface of the work, hello takes on its own character. featuring scores from key Fluxus affecting the fluidity and imprint of Some are assertive, while others are artists such as George Macunius, the paint. The final work is therefore questioning; some are spoken as Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and a trace, not only of sound, but also though addressing another person, others. Twenty years or so later, of other environmental elements others as though speaking into the in the presence of McCarthy's solo that are concurrent. Like in much dark. The effectiveness of Hello/ exhibition Listening with the sound of McCarthy’s work, technology hello is in diversifying a commonly turned off, these same names features as way of transferring spoken word, which not only reveals continue to hover in the air. across material and visual thresholds something about each speaker’s – the use of the speaker cone and disposition, but also emphasises the Indeed, many of the key tenets dehumidifier being prime examples. inconstant and tentative act of of Fluxus find equivalence in speaking to no-one in particular. McCarthy's own work: the play of The specific technologies of chance, the pronouncement of sound reproduction are also featured The second of the installation works everyday materials and processes, in a series of works that fall under is No more/ no more, consisting of 101 the renegotiation of the art object, the investigative rubric of The four hanging silver buckets, each and the emphasis on performance, Rematerialisation of sound as an art embedded with a large white speaker event, and sound-based works. object – a sure reference to Lucy cone at the base. The sound of milk Lippard's seminal book, Six years: dripping into a bucket completes Central to McCarthy's practice is the dematerialisation of the art object the audio-visual circuitry of this work; sound, but rarely does it end just 1966 to 1972. While Lippard's perhaps a reference to George there. Over the years, McCarthy has focus was on the bypass of the Brecht’s Drip music (1959), a musical produced an impressive backlist of material object in works of Conceptual score with the simple proposition of sound works in the way of recordings, Art during this period, McCarthy water being dripped into an empty live performances and audio points in another direction. ‘The vessel. Using milk rather than water, installations. McCarthy’s works also rematerialisation of sound’ in this McCarthy’s work also references the include drawings, paintings, collage, case includes drawings made with old business of hand-milking animals, sculptural works, plus installation magnetic audio tape, vinyl records the sounds of which are now lost to works that are more visually orientated painted gold, and arrangements of automatic processes. – much of which use sound as a foil from shattered CDs. visual-compositional device or In many ways, Listening with the reference. Listening with the sound Despite their playfulness, these sound turned off is a homecoming turned off is an exhibition that seems works are heavy-handed in their exhibition for an artist that has been a little imbalanced if we consider the presentation. Too many of them in engaged and committed to the local full spectrum of McCarthy’s work to too small a space, each in thick scene, while also seeking his date, however. Besides two audio wooden frames, with the artist’s opportunities elsewhere. His first installations, the exhibition focuses bold signature a little oversized exhibition in Cork for over ten years on recent drawings, paintings, and and overbearing in its propensity. felt a little ungenerous, restrained, and collage works. A disappointment also to see the price suspiciously wall-based. Absolutely, of the work so confidently displayed positively, without a doubt: there is Soundscapes are a series of works (rematerialised?) on each wall label. more to Danny McCarthy than this. on both paper and canvas, produced On these matters of presentation, using the vibrations of a speaker more de- than re-materialisation cone that has been dipped in would be welcome here. coloured pigment. In these works, Matt Packer is Curator the visual form is determined by the Aside from the wall works are two of Exhibitions and sound that is fed through the speaker. audio installations, Hello/ hello, Projects, Lewis Glucksman As the speaker vibrates, lines are and No more/ no more. Installed Gallery, Cork drawn, marks occur, and colours discreetly on the staircase that Danny McCarthy are shifted. separates the gallery floors, Hello/ Listening with the sound hello consists of several speaker turned off Curiously enough, a dehumidifier placements that resound a variety of 2008 is also on-site in the production of installation shot with No more/ ‘hello’s at slow, lingering intervals. no more (sound installation) these works. Using water that is Produced with residents of O’Connell in foreground courtesy the artist c . Jeannie McCollum Book

102 Jack B. Yeats Old and new departures The book is a result of a symposium modernists, and together with the by Victor Waddington in nurturing held by the Irish Art Research representation of travellers and the early careers of many young Centre (TRIARC) in Trinity College, peasantry in Western art, demon- artists amidst a climate of relative Dublin, to accompany the exhibition, strates how Yeats’ work borrows sterility and conservatism towards Jack B. Yeats: amongst friends, from a wider international discourse. the arts in general and modern art which took place at the Douglas in particular. Hyde Gallery in 2004. The exhibition Yvonne Scott, editor of this publication was held in honour of Victor and Director of TRIARC, also adopts This book is a scholarly production Waddington (Yeats’ dealer since a more universal approach in her and serves to enlarge Yeatsian 1943) and presented by his son Theo consideration of Yeats’ work in scholarship by taking account of the in association with Bruce Arnold, relation to the concept of ‘chaos’ historical, cultural and political issues Yvonne Scott and the University. theory. Building upon Immanuel facing artists working in the early to Kant’s theory of ‘the beautiful’ and mid-twentieth century. It will be of This publication takes a significantly ‘the sublime’ (explored in Critique of immediate appeal to readers within different approach from somewhat judgment, 1790), Scott attempts to the disciplines of art history and more celebratory accounts of Yeats’ examine whether the ‘deliberately visual studies, but will also be of work to date. A much more critically chaotic’ nature of many of Yeats’ interest to those within the wider 103 considered reassessment of Yeats is later works could be regarded as field of cultural studies, given its late in emerging, and the discourse representing a challenge towards interdisciplinary approach. Yeats’ compiled here goes some way Academic values, generally associated work lends itself to interrogative towards redressing the balance. with calmness and order. Yeats questioning, which is still of relevance The volume comprises a number presents something of a dichotomy today. The questioning here revolves of short essays, based on papers here, in that he continued to exhibit around issues concerning artist’s delivered at the 2004 symposium. with the Academy throughout his identity, hybridity, ethnicity, and It embraces various aspects of lifetime, despite employing relatively neo-colonialism. The essays compiled Yeats’ work ranging from subject nonacademic techniques. here make a substantial contribution matter, technique, patronage and to Irish art research and will the positioning of Yeats within the Significant questions concerning undoubtedly serve as precedents international arena. Yeats’ technique and method of for further study. They also serve to working are raised in an article by highlight that within the discipline of Debate over the nature and extent of Bruce Arnold. To date, little is known Irish art history, there is still a long Yeats’ nationalism are issues which about Yeats’ method of mixing way to go. concern many of the authors here. pigment, priming the canvas, method Róisín Kennedy’s article considers a of composition and application of Yvonne Scott (ed), Jack B. Yeats: selection of discourse to date and paint, an area which is clearly in need old and new departures, Dublin: comes to the conclusion that certain of immediate scholarly attention if Four Courts Press, 2008; ¤55.00; attempts to “depoliticize” Yeats’ work potential restoration problems are to ISBN 978-1-84682-021-2 could be interpreted as a desire to be addressed in years to come. Yeats’ reclaim the artist from his national relationship with the Cuala Press, identity. Whilst Kennedy perceives and his approach to printmaking, Jeannie McCollum is such ‘depoliticization’ as vital to a is explored by Angela Griffith, who a PhD student at the University of Ulster in more unbiased understanding of attempts to evaluate Yeats’ direct Belfast. Yeats’ aspirations, she also warns that involvement with Cuala, despite his issues concerning Irish nationalism deep reservations about the possible cannot be totally removed from the detrimental effects such reproductions equation. The way Yeats’ work may would have on his career as an be related to issues concerning artist. Whether such prints had a national identity is examined by negative impact upon his reputation Tricia Cusack. In particular, Cusack is difficult to assess. Arguably, explores Yeats’ portrayal of the as with Albrecht Dürer’s prints in western landscape as a critique of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth modernity, signifying a desire to centuries, the Cuala prints served to return to a more primitive, less mate- bring Yeats’ art to the attention of rialistic pre-modern era. This search the wider public. The final essay in for the primitive was, of course, this publication is by Riann Coulter, central to the work of many European who examines the vital role played c . Aileen Blaney Paul Kane Gallery July – August 2008 Dublin

First

shot 104 [opposite] The presence of Grogan’s gelatin Last tree of the Elders, asks the Ciaran Dolan silver prints here would have viewer to loose their adult selves to Untitled lambda colour print satisfied photography purists, while the storybook charm of myth and courtesy Paul Kane Gallery his camera’s playful interaction with folklore. Even if Murray’s fantastical domestic and social spaces ensured forestscapes speak to one’s inner that his photographs appealed child, there is nothing childish about simultaneously to a larger audience. the painterly textures and colours of Without sacrificing quality for quantity, all four digital images that delight the relatively smaller dimensions of the eye as much as the imagination. his prints allowed his series a Bathed in sunshine, the images numerical advantage to those of his appeared on the one hand to be co-exhibitors. Generously dotted indebted to the light-reflective across one of the gallery walls, properties of photography, while on First shot provided visitors to Grogan’s series of photographs the other, their palette of glorious Dublin’s Paul Kane Gallery with a invited viewers to let their attention greens and golds seemed less first and lasting impression of four skip giddily back and forth between faithful to a photographed reality emergent visual artists – Ciarán disparate yet accessible images than to painted days of halcyon yore. 105 Dolan, Diarmait Grogan, Philip taken from scenes of the everyday. In these instances, the photographic Murray, and Jamie Saunders – in Although at first glance the image served as a point of departure their first big break following degree photographs’ sequencing might for the artist’s flights of fancy, shows at IADT and DIT. Under the appear disjointed, their layout owed allowing him to digitally dabble in curatorial guidance of photographer a lot more to design than accident. colour and light. Jackie Nickerson, whose outstanding Grogan’s motley assortment of ethnographic projects have images conveyed the extent to which Saunders’ series of photographs, summoned critical attention at both urban and suburban life is titled Conditioned space, was singled international and local levels – most saturated with diverse and oftentimes out for being “the most sophisticated recently, she was the winner of the jarring visual information. For example, treatment of designed spaces” in 2008 AIB Prize – the exhibition gave a cutesy picture of a poodle peering an Irish Times review of this year’s a fascinating cross-section of glumly out from behind the glass of Dublin art-college degree shows. contemporary art-led photographic a shop door-front bore no sequential Across the five fine-art giclée prints practices. relationship to the dizzying perspective selected from the project for exhibit of a clouded sky, a deserted street in First shot, Saunders displayed a Notwithstanding that creative and scene by night, or a man and woman precocious mastery of the medium technical sophistication common to clinched in an embrace. Although of digital photography. All but one all of the artworks made a level these intimate, solitary and public of these images made the familiar playing field out of the gallery space, scenes appeared in random order, space of the car park unfamiliar by thematic dissonances between the their dispersed distribution recalled zoning in not on the nearest available symmetrical beauty of Saunder’s the constancy of movement between parking space but on the architectural carparks, Murray’s fantastical forests, “private and familiar worlds” – a theme designs of ramps, multi-story Grogan’s everyday images, and which Grogan himself alludes to in parking facilities and office parking. Dolan’s theatricalised mises-en- his artistic statement accompanying By showing form before function, scène made for a vertiginous the exhibition. these photographs enabled viewers to viewing experience. Productively, look at what is more often overlooked, these variances brought the Murray’s digitally enhanced forests and become reacquainted with exhibition’s range of photographic might have been torn straight from intensely familiar urban environments. languages into focus, and testified the pages of an illustrated children’s As thoughtful contemplations of to the photographers’ fluency in storybook. In this series of digital spaces ordinarily seen and their respective idioms. While the photographs, the indexical relationship experienced in practical as opposed collection’s indelible images are between the image and its referent to aesthetic terms, the photographs certainly beholden to the expert eye disappears into the gilded boughs evoke the powerful irony of the of the photographer-beholder, it is and babbling brooks of Murray’s extraordinary nature of the ordinary. nevertheless worth mentioning that enchanting world of make-believe three out of four artists exploit the and fairytale. In a similar vein, the technological possibilities of digital photographs’ titles – The forest cameras, photography software and watcher’s hut, Lake of the forgotten, printing to realise their artistic visions. Path through Whisp’s Wood, and Each of Dolan’s four large-scale mobilised in the service of a story – constructed images shows a subject, which in these cases eludes the or character more precisely, in a viewer. Each in their own unique way, moment of the photographer’s the photographer-artists represented making. In one peculiarly contrived here have made auspicious first set-up after another, an actor strikes steps toward promising professional a highly self-conscious pose at odds careers. Judging from the quality of with their surroundings. In one of the this collection, buyers may snap up works, for instance, set in wasteland the photographers’ artworks as fast surrounding the underpass of a they snap their cameras. motorway, a girl stands over a grocery bag spilling potatoes and an old-fashioned milk bottle – its contents tellingly seeping into the earth beneath. Aside from the geographic bearings gleaned from a 106 Aileen Blaney is a large road sign displaying directions research fellow in the to Tallaght, Blessington, and the City Film Studies department Centre, the image leaves the viewer at Chung Ang University, bewildered and adrift. The remaining Seoul. scenes – in one, a conservatively dressed middle-aged man holding a breakfast mug and newspaper wades through knee-deep grass in a wooded area – are similarly inexplicable. The cumulative effect of Dolan’s images suggests that by suspending moments in time, photography conceals as much as it reveals, and that its communicative strengths derive less from any inherent qualities of the image than from the manner in which it is

Philip Murray Lake of the forgotten digital print courtesy Paul Kane Gallery

The Mugshot Project, which is ongoing, has been created by Irish photographer Aidan Moran, now based in Connecticut. More information at www.aidanmoran.com