CIRCA 120 CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE IN IRELAND SUMMER 2007 | ¤7.50 £5 US$12 | ISSN 0263-9475 02> 9 770263 947008

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

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3 Editorial 20 | Update 22 | Features 24 | Reviews 57 | Project 105

(front cover) Gerard Byrne 1984 and beyond (detail), 2005 DVD still courtesy Green on Red Gallery

circa subscribers offer… Circa, in association with IMMA, is delighted to offer Circa subscribers access to the following talks:

June 5: Lucian Freud: Gallery talk & private view (5pm, The Chapel) Catherine Lampert, exhibition curator, will discuss preoccupations that connect various paintings by artist Lucian Freud, followed by an invitation to attend the private view at 6pm. June 19: Lucian Freud: Gallery talk (3pm New Galleries) In an informal gallery talk, portrait painter Mick O'Dea (RHA) will offer an artist’s perspective on the works in the Lucian Freud exhibition. June 26: Anne Madden: Private opening (6pm East Wing, First Floor Galleries) An invitation to attend the private view of one of Ireland’s most highly-regarded painters. July 10: Nalini Malani: Gallery Talk & Private View (5pm, East Gallery) Nalini Malani, one of India’s most distinguished artists will present a talk on herc solo exhibition at IMMA, followed by the private view at 6pm.

For further information please contact: Jennie McGinn PR and Marketing tel: 01 679 7388 email: [email protected]

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20 Editorialc c . Peter FitzGerald of the everyday, the way the spectacular and the commonplace come together under our noses and in our museums. There’s a chicness and a trendiness. The issues tackled by Gavin Murphy are similar, but he looks at that spectacle of spectacles, the Venice Biennale.

So what do we think of the artworld, and do we like it? Well, Circa is in it, perhaps not yet right at the centre of it. We also put a mirror to ourselves in this issue, in two ways. First, we revisit the question of gender balance in the magazine. It is a topic that yields to facts and figures, commodities that are a rare currency in the artworld; judge for yourself how Circa is doing. Second, we look at the results of a recent online poll. For every opinion expressed there, it seems there was a direct counter- opinion. However, our readers clearly want quality, and so What is the artworld? Do we like it? I don’t know if my we will keep tacking towards that fixed point. 21 own early experience of the artworld was typical, though I suspect it is still common. The artworld first materialised Conveniently enough, use the term ‘artworld’ and before me as something both romantic – it seemed such everything in this issue slips under its wings. Paul O’Brien a desirable place to be – and Romantic – it promised has written here a very valuable analysis of new-media individualism, freedom, and lots of high-falutin’ self- art in an ‘Irish’ context. But he is aware that forces of indulgence. technology and globalisation make the term ‘Irish’ a very slippery one (and perhaps that is no harm). Almost as if As I tracked from artworld outsider, via art classes, life- counterpointing Ireland’s rocketing development over the drawing, exhibitions, NCAD, Circa, to being a bit more past twenty years, Jason McCaffrey’s short report from of an insider, my perceptions had to change. Who knew, Vancouver presents a surprising picture of wealth and for example, that artists need to eat and sleep, that some poverty, with art as ever playing both ends. And finally have it in for painting (mild shock), that some even play there is the project by Sarah Browne and Gareth tennis (somehow, this was a bigger shock)? Gazing Kennedy, Episode 306: Dallas, Belfast. Art, past, present, around the artworld from within, it seems that creativity is local, global, new media, old values, all compete for our what makes the artworld happen but money what makes attention as we try to imagine Bobby and JR in the it spin. Creativity itself has turned out to be this odd thing Titanic Quarter. that sometimes adheres to an individual, sometimes not, depending on the theoretical goggles of the beholder; In her article, Joan Fowler notes a recent quirk of and the poor, benighted artist gets fractured and remade programming: in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, to conform to the slant – perhaps the neuroses – of one Kilmainham, we simultaneously had a ‘cutting edge’ show star writer after another. of contemporary art and Fossetts Circus. Trapeze artists and clowns drawn from the four corners of the world, But through it all, this artworld-galaxy is in thrall to the both events were great fun; I don’t mean to be cynical – push-pull of two types of dark matter. One is economic. in the artworld, there is much to entertain. Money puts the paint in the tubes and the artists on the airplanes. Sometimes art chases money, sometimes it runs away from it; some artists manage to do both at the same time. Then there’s the dark matter of theory. Some artists gird themselves in it, others have it thrown over them like a mantle.

Art emerges in concrete forms, and the fun lies then in examining how those forms come about and what we are to make of them. The bigger the manifestation of art, the more it snuggles under the ‘artworld’ blanket, and the more we may feel moved to investigate its hidden motivators and motivations. In this issue, two of the feature writers engage in just such an analysis. Joan Fowler takes as her starting point the ‘Baudrillardian’ aestheticisation c . Update

22 Circa news King awarded GTG move Patrick Scott becomes There are two new faces commission Belfast's very successful Saoi at Circa: Barbara The Republic’s Minister Golden Thread Gallery The highest Aosdána Knezevic, who has an for Defence, Willie O’Dea has shifted to new award, that of Saoi, has MA in Fine Art from TD, has unveiled the premises on Great Patrick been granted to painter NCAD, has joined on design, site and artist of Street. “Across the road Patrick Scott in the administrative side. the first-ever public from the Cathedral recognition of his Jennie McGinn, who is National Memorial to be Quarter, we'll be easy to lifetime’s work. Artists completing an MA in erected to members of get to, and with larger elected to Aosdána at a Cultural Policy and Arts the Defence Forces who premises and even a café meeting in March were Management at UCD, died in service. Artist planned, there'll be more Brian Henderson, Eamon has taken on advertising/ Brian King won the reasons than ever to visit Colman, Vivienne Dick, marketing/ PR. commission, valued at us,” according to the press Pat Harris, Paul Mosse ¤175,000, following an release. The inaugural and Bernadette Kiely. international tender exhibition in the new Write, right? competition to which space, Things we may Can you write well about more than thirty artists have missed, featured Correction art and/or visual culture? applied. The site for the work by up to sixty artists Maybe you should be Memorial is Dublin’s who contributed to the In the review by Treasa writing for us. Merrion Square. All future gallery since 1998, O'Brien of Niamh Lawlor If interested, please commemorations for the year it was founded. and partners' Based on contact the editor – deceased members of the GTG's new address: a true story (Circa 119), [email protected] defence forces will take Golden Thread Gallery, reference was made to place at the National Switch Room, 84-94 'Robert Slattery'; this Memorial. Great Patrick Street, name should have been Belfast_BT1 2LU; Raymond Scannell. +44 2890 352333 [email protected] www.gtgallery.fsnet.co.uk Copperwhite takes AIB award Diana Copperwhite has won this year’s prestigious AIB Prize. She was nominated by West Cork Arts Centre (WCAC). Copperwhite gets ¤20,000, to go towards creating an exhibition at WCAC and towards a catalogue. The other artists shortlisted for the prize were Seán Lynch (nominated by Galway Arts Centre), Alan Phelan (Irish Museum of Modern Art), and Jennifer Trouton (Millennium Court Arts Centre). The panel of adjudicators was Aidan Dunne, art critic; Gemma Tipton, writer and critic on contemporary art and architecture; and Frances Ruane, AIB art adviser.

Mike Nelson helps artists The two Arts Councils in Ireland have scored a significant IMMA comings and goings coup by securing Mike Nelson – recently shortlisted 23 Conor Bowman and Anne O’Donoghue have been again for the Turner Prize – as the curator of a significant appointed by the Republic’s Minster for Arts, Sport and new initiative. Nelson is widely acclaimed for his often Tourism to the Board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, ramshackle-appearing installations that challenge, among Dublin. Rosemary Ashe, Kevin Kelly, Chris Flynn and Emer other things, First World/ Third World perceptions. O’Kelly were re-appointed for another five-year term, while Pauline Flynn and Jackie Gallagher departed the board. Nelson will curate two artists, selected by open submis- sion, for shows at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin and Void Gallery in Derry. The aim of the initiative is “to New CEO for Culture Ireland promote the visibility of artists from Northern Ireland and Culture Ireland, increasingly important in the promotion the Republic of Ireland, encourage greater cross-border abroad of arts from Ireland, has chosen a new chief mobility and provide an opportunity to work closely with executive. He is Eugene Downes, a consultant on an invited curator.” The Curated Visual Arts Award, valued international arts and cultural relations. He has worked at ¤56,000, is “designed to enable the selected artists as a cultural adviser to government, and has programmed to produce pivotal work that will advance their own many ‘showcase’ events around the world. Music would practice.” Nelson will “provide support to the selected be his strongest suit. artists throughout the creative and exhibition processes.” The names of the chosen artists should have been announced by the time this magazine appears. Ormeau Baths gets new Chair, set loose The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) has handed over of the Ormeau Baths Gallery (OBG), Belfast, to a new board of management. The Chair of that board “of Northern Ireland’s premier contemporary art gallery” – press release – “is Professor Kerstin Mey, Director of Art and Design Research Institute at the University of Ulster.” OBG had been under interim management by ACNI since the dramatic closure of the ‘old’ OBG last year. It is obviously much too soon to discern the new direction of OBG. However, there are indications that it will be more locally focused, and less concerned to ‘compete at an international level’, than the previous version of OBG.

Mey comes bearing an impressive CV. She has a PhD in Art Theory/ Aesthetics from Humboldt University, Berlin. She is Chair in Fine Art and Research Area Leader in Interface: Research in Art, Technologies and Design, University of Ulster. She also has many publications and curated exhibitions under her belt. c . Features 24 Gobal enterprise: Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty at the 2007 Venice Biennale Gavin Murphy 26 | New-media art: An Irish context Paul O’Brien 34 | The gender gap revisited Cristina Martín de Vidales and Sophie Nellis 40 | What exactly is your reader profile anyway? Peter FitzGerald 42 | Well, speak of the devil! Art-world spectacle from Dubai to Dublin Joan Fowler 44 | Letter from Vancouver Jason McCaffrey 54 | (background) Gerard Byrne 1984 and beyond (detail), 2005

DVD still

courtesy Green on Red Gallery c . c . Gavin Murphy global enterprise gerard byrne and willie doherty at 26the 2007 venice biennale (opposite) fair’s selling point should be cause for concern. Just as Gerard Byrne Coca Cola markets an illusion of freedom as a means A Country road, a tree. Evening 2006 – ongoing to shift its product, the art fair sells us the illusion of the DVD still critical as a means to shift its goods. courtesy Green on Red Gallery Between here and there I would like to believe that the latter point is just not true: that contemporary forms of art deemed critical can speak antagonistically against the frameworks in which they perform. The selections of Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty for the forthcoming Venice Biennale offer a useful point of investigation for this proposition, since their art- works have been lauded in terms of their critical vision and international standing. Byrne’s work has attracted the attention of leading critics such as George Baker and has been shown in major venues such as the Tate Gallery, London, and the Whitney Museum, New York. For the 27 Biennale, Byrne is selecting to strike a balance between I have been haunted by an image while considering issues previously exhibited pieces and newer work such as the and debates around the forthcoming entries for the 2007 photographic project A Country road, a tree. Evening Venice Biennale. I do not remember the magazine it (2006 – ongoing). In the case of Doherty, this will be his appeared in. The image was used to advertise a forthcoming third appearance in the Venice Biennale. He has already art fair. Like most adverts, it was only given a glance. All I been selected to represent Ireland (along with Dorothy have to go on is what lingers. Cross) in 1993 and was selected for The Experience of art in the Italian Pavilion for 2005. For this year’s Biennale, The photograph featured two figures in a plush casino Doherty will be showing previously exhibited works, Closure setting. A woman, dressed suitably for the occasion, (2005) and Passage (2006), with a new commissioned is seated at the table. Standing over her shoulder is a piece for the exhibition, Ghost story (2007). male figure wearing a tuxedo. He is about to roll the dice. The gaze and demeanour of the female figure captivates. The solid reputations these artists enjoy in terms of their Her face is aged to the point where it hints at a knowing- actual practice, venues where this has been shown, and, ness born from life’s choices. Her direct gaze confronts us the critical attention they have attracted would suggest in a manner similar to the young woman in Manet’s Bar that both artists are in a prime position to make a signifi- at the Folies-Bergères. However, the blank innocence of cant impact on this year’s Biennale. It makes sense that, Manet’s figure is replaced by a jaded glamour, somewhat rather than review the work of each artist as some kind uneasy beneath the protective veneer of affluence. Her of preparation for the forthcoming show, it is better to demeanour is in dramatic contrast to the assured authority explore the frameworks in which such practices are to of the older bearded gentleman. His is an image of the perform. Three such contexts can be identified. speculator taking his chances in a game in which he appears to have been amply rewarded over time. In the first place, there is the context of the Biennale itself with all its razzmatazz, competition, networking and spec- The image is taken to be an artwork acting as an advert tacle. The Venice Biennale is a major focal point in the for the art fair. In this instance, art appears subservient to contemporary visual-art calendar and an important feature the demands of marketing the fair. I imagine the image is of cultural tourism in Venice itself. It seems fair to ask how not even part of the fair other than as an orbiting publicity the respective contributions to the Biennale perform in shot. Yet for all its peripheral status, a certain unease is relation to this visual spectacle and the accompanying registered on a number of levels. First, it captures all the discourses surrounding it. art fair represents: the world of speculation and invest- ment around the commodity status of art. Second, it Secondly, there is the local context, in the sense that each exposes a familiar axiom in that the hierarchies of art have artist is representative of the two art administrations in most often served, and been moulded by, the interests of Ireland, north and south. Byrne’s exhibition is curated by a moneyed elite or hegemon despite the best efforts to Mike Fitzpatrick (Limerick City Gallery of Art) and is subvert this. Third, the allure of the image lies in its ability backed by Culture Ireland and The Arts Council/ An to speak back to that world by registering the unease of Chomhairle Ealaíon. Doherty’s show is curated by Hugh the seated figure caught amidst it. And finally, if this latter Mulholland (The Third Space) with the backing of the point suggests a critical edge, the very fact that this is the British Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. If the initial two contexts suggest a certain polarity (Anish Kapoor, Tony Oursler and Sol LeWitt among others) between the local and global circuits of practice and to get a sense of the prestigious company Byrne now knowledge, it should be noted there is a significant blurring enjoys. In fact, the Lisson Gallery is taking a lead role with of the terrain not only between the local and the global five other partners in producing the catalogue that will be but between state-funded art infrastructures and the launched at the Biennale. The catalogue will then accom- commercial interests of private galleries. This is the third pany the subsequent shows in Sligo, Dublin, London and context to be considered. These commercial interests are Vancouver. Likewise, Doherty has associations with the not bound by national or regional remits (even though Kerlin Gallery (Dublin), Matt’s Gallery (London), Galería those based in Ireland have a distinct interest in promoting Pepe Cobo (Madrid), Peter Kilchmann (Zurich), and their local stable of artists on a wider platform). In some Alexander and Bonin (New York), with the latter gallery cases, they have been supported by state funding. This backing the production of Doherty’s new piece to be appears to be an increasing trend, particularly in the light premiered at the Biennale (Ghost story, 2007). Passage of decreasing opportunities for state organizations to (2006) has recently been on show in New York and, along mount national representations at major biennials. The with Closure (2005), is included on the current tour of recent shift to dispense with national representation in Doherty’s video works in South America. There is a mix of favour of a curatorially led exhibition at the São Paulo vested public and private interests surrounding the work 28 Bienal is significant in this respect. The dilemma for the of Byrne and Doherty, and the prestige of the Biennale Arts Councils, Culture Ireland and the British Council now should be to the mutual benefit of all concerned in the lies in how best to fulfil their remit, when the international business of art. visibility of artists relies more and more on the influence of market forces. Caught in such a bind is to be ever This is taking us some way from the traditional coverage more vulnerable to criticism. One such criticism is that it of representations from Ireland at the Biennale. Here, a compromises the Arts Councils’ commitment to attaining discourse of Irishness – the tendency for multiple debates the highest standards in the visual arts (and the problems around art and culture to gravitate towards questions of of how this can be defined), by allowing market principles Irish history and identity – has dominated. But already it to shape such standards. A retort to this criticism is that seems that the view of the Biennale as being defined by it seems obvious to state that one definition of successful the problematics of national sovereignty and modes of local practice is to witness how it flourishes on the representation deemed significant in relation to this may international stage. This inevitably entails an engagement not be wholly appropriate. The combination of the interna- with the wider art market. tional profiles already enjoyed by Byrne and Doherty, the public/ private partnerships that stretch beyond the Either way, there are echoes of the grander relationship immediate remit of national representation that have been between contemporary art and neoliberal forces shaping trusted to the respective commissioners, and, most the cultural economy that has been the focus of much importantly, the nature of the artwork on show make the discussion. Julian Stallabrass, for example, adopts question of Irishness somewhat peripheral. Derrida’s notion of the supplement as a means to clarify this relationship. He argues that “art has a disavowed affinity with free trade, and the supplementary minor practice [contemporary art] is important to the operation of the major one [free trade].”1 His conclusion makes for an interesting touchstone for questions at the heart of this essay:

It may be concluded that the most celebrated contempo- rary art is that which serves to further the interests of the neoliberal economy, in breaking down barriers to trade, local solidarities, and cultural attachments in a continual process of hybridization. This should hardly be a cause for surprise but there is a large mismatch between the contemporary art world’s own view of itself and its actual function.2

In this light, it is important to acknowledge that both representations receive significant backing by a number of galleries. Byrne is attached to the Green on Red Gallery (Dublin) and the Lisson Gallery (London). One only has to look at the list of artists attached to the Lisson Gallery [above] Willie Doherty Closure, 2005 duration 11:20 minutes, looped installation: one 16:9 video projector, one DVD player, one stereo amplifier, two speakers, one DVD (colour, sound) projected to a size of 1.3m x 2.3m onto wall of a self-enclosed space courtesy Hugh Mulholland

[below] Willie Doherty Passage, 2006 duration 7:52 minutes, looped installation: one 16:9 video projector, one DVD player, one stereo amplifier, two speakers, one DVD (colour, 29 sound) projected to a size of 1.3m x 2.3m onto wall of a self-enclosed space courtesy Hugh Mulholland Competing for visibility part of the collateral events. While participating countries The concern with the problematics of state and nationhood are obliged to tailor their exhibitions to the curatorial is not specific to debates within the visual arts in Ireland. theme of the Biennale, the recent emphasis on grand, The Biennale remains one of the few major international and often sprawling, curatorial themes ensures that, in art shows where national organisations are invited to effect, anything goes (Szeemann’s ‘Plateau of humanity’ mount their own exhibitions. Its roots lie in the nineteenth- in 2001, Bonami’s ‘Dictatorship of the viewer’ in 2003, century penchant for spectacular shows. By the early and, Martínez’s ‘Always a little further’ and Corral’s twentieth century, many of the national pavilions were ‘The Experience of art’ in 2005). established, beginning with the Belgian pavilion and quickly followed up with British, German, Hungarian and The Biennale is also characterized by the sheer French pavilions. The assertion of national, imperial and razzmatazz that marks its opening days of press launches, cultural prestige is echoed in the architectural forms parties and fringe events taking place throughout the city. deemed appropriate for each. These range from the Artists, curators, arts administrators, critics, dealers and vernacular (with its associations with ethnicity) to the buyers all fly in to party, gossip, network and do business classical (the language of empire) to the international style amidst the scramble for invites to the more exclusive (utopian aspiration). The imperial bent at the heart of the gatherings and launches. And all of this is before many in 30 Biennale’s history is brought to light most glaringly by the business fly off to the next art event on the calendar. the infamous Biennale of 1934, when Hitler visited the German pavilion before meeting Mussolini for the first time It is amidst this social glitz and the growing commercializa- in the Italian pavilion. tion of the Biennale that the art on show competes for visibility and sustained attention. Alison M Gingeras cites The desire to question the authority of national pavilions the notion of ‘festivalism’ as a means to account for a in the light of such events has ensured that the certain attention seeking that characterizes much work on organizational principles of the Biennale have not gone show. She identifies the tendency for artists to devise unchallenged. This has been encouraged by profiling snappy one-liners as a means to rise above the sheer avant-garde practices from the post-war period onwards excess of material on show.4 Tino Seghal’s dancing guards and by the growing participation in recent years of regions in 2005 seems a good case in point. Not surprisingly, emerging from the legacy of colonialism. The central role critical reactions to recent Biennales are often jaded if not of this more recent dynamic is typified by Beral Madra melancholic. Benjamin Buchloh, for instance, has gone so when she proclaimed the following: far as to lament the misguided assumptions of much art set within the Biennale experience: Two issues should be considered in answering the question of the validity of the national pavilions. One is to … it somehow still anticipates a traditional humanist find out to what extent the transnational (migration, subject as its primary spectator – someone willing to be diaspora, displacement, relocations) and translational enlightened, desiring to be provoked, wishing to remember, (how culture signifies or what is signified by culture) is for example. That kind of subjectivity is now more alien to reflected in the national culture. And the other is to detect the reality of contemporary spectatorial behaviour than it the pluralism (recognition and endorsement of differences) ever has been in the post-war period.5 within the post-modern democracies. In the case of the absence of these two aspects, the national pavilion Once again, the memory of visitors being more interested negates the concept and essence of the Biennale.3 in getting their hands on the free Agnes B bag at the Arsenale for the 2003 Biennale than considering the One might not agree with the severity of the final point, sheer density of material in Utopia station adds credence but it is clear how this dynamic has characterized recent to Buchloh’s point. Biennales, particularly in relation to its central hub in the Giardini. The tension between this sprawling, spectacular nature and national concerns distinguishes the Biennale from However, there is another dynamic at play that helps the other major exhibitions that will be taking place this counter this primary concern. Its roots can also be found summer. Documenta has built a reputation over the years in the origins and development of the Biennale. It lies in based on an astute, politically informed reading of the spectacular and competitive nature of the event. The contemporary culture. Liste 07: the young art fair in Basel Biennale will run for six months this year before awards chooses the glamour of youthfulness as its marketing are handed out, thereby extending the tourist season for hook, limiting participants to galleries less than five years Venice. The financial implications are obvious, particularly old and artists under forty. The M?nster sculpture project when considering the proliferation of participating 2007, by contrast, is organized around the idea of art in countries and fringe events in recent years. Moreover, public spaces. newer participants are now paying an extra ¤25,000 to be Marketing difference of doing business. It is also a confluence that fuels It could be argued that the location of Byrne and critiques of contemporary art, since marketing is often Doherty’s shows outside the Giardini and the Arsenale seen to take precedence over an inherent critical vision. protects them from the worst excesses of the Biennale experience. Both Fitzpatrick and Mulholland have secured It has long been acknowledged that corporate involvement floors in the Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia ‘Santa Maria with the visual arts is based in part on finding in the latter della Pietà’. This is in a central location in Castello, just off a counterpart to the entrepreneurial pursuit of new products a main thoroughfare. Mulholland is using the same venue and markets. As Barthes noted, “meaning is what makes as last time, albeit a different floor, having recognized the things sell.” Yet despite the promotion of entrepreneurial value of the location in terms of continuity and accessibility vision in the business world, the old adage of finding out to a visiting public. The Republic of Ireland’s representa- what others are doing successfully and then copying that tions over the years, by contrast, have shifted from venue so to take a modest slice of the pie still holds strong. to venue, with some shows securing a higher profile than others. Given the appearance of an independent This tension between the illusion of risk-taking and the representation from Northern Ireland at the 2005 pragmatics of conformity is echoed in visual-art debates Biennale, comparisons with the Republic’s entry were regarding the critical standing of works of art. Miwon inevitable. The general consensus seemed to favour the Kwon, for example, has argued that artworks are now 31 former’s site as a suitable location. Hence the scenario subordinate to a discursively determined site. This new where the two events are taking place under one roof. site-specificity is less defined by location or a politics of The implication of this with regards to questions of place than as a discursive field “organized intertextually nationality seems to be less contentious than previous through the nomadic movement of the artist” within a 7 years. Indeed, the very fact that The Nature of things: globalized art network. Kwon’s point is underpinned by artists from Northern Ireland appeared as a collateral a sense of the introverted nature of the artworld: that event whereas Ireland’s 2005 representation fell under artworks ultimately perform to those with the knowledge the rubric of a participating country, reminded us once of, or social standing within, the international network. again that Northern Ireland is not a state. All in all, the set Indeed, Sherman Mern Tat Sam, in a review of the 2003 up is very Good Friday. Biennale, noted how the Kenyan entries seemed out of time and place as the artwork on show did not display the Yet, the idea that the current location offers a reprieve signposting common to the international artist.8 Another from the noise and clutter of the Giardini and the Arsenale critic, Gao Minglu, when commenting on contemporary is one left unresolved. Both representations must still Chinese art, has also noted the emergence of “a pragmatic compete with the burgeoning array of participating neo-avant garde that strives to transcend the local in countries and other offsite projects and forums organized favour of acceptance in the international arena.”9 The tension by private galleries, various foundations, and universities between conforming to and negotiating with a learned eager to accumulate research points. In other words, the and restricted discourse within a global cultural economy question of location must be seen as one element in the makes for a compelling definition of contemporary art. larger issue of publicity. Again, it could be argued that the shared location, the established profiles of the two artists, and the publicity boost to be gained from the combined interests of multiple national cultural organizations and major international private galleries sets the stage for each show making a significant impact within the Biennale. The grounds are promising, but ultimately the kind of impact these shows can have remains to be seen.

What does emerge at this juncture is how the notion of a positive impact on the Biennale and, by extension, on the international art scene, is predicated on a successful pub- licity drive. It is assumed that success can come to those who manage and publicize the work most efficiently with an appropriate budget.6 It is in the means by which this can be done that there can be found a distinct confluence with models of business expansion and the practices of advertising. It is a confluence that many in the artworld feel uncomfortable with, since it clashes with an older division between aesthetic pleasure and the pragmatics Critical voices distance while the audio consistently traverses the bound- This is quite a den to throw the work of Byrne and aries between viewer and subject (“I am inside you … I Doherty into. But it is to recall the central theme at the am unknowable… I am beyond reason… I am everything outset of this essay regarding the critical role of art and its you desire… Your death is my salvation… I disappear in a antagonism towards the circuits in which it performs. It is crowd”). The contradictions, the sense of foreboding, the significant that the works of both artists are not bound by threatening ubiquity of the figure is mixed in with allusions questions of national identity and avoid the performative to wider global conflict (“There will be no television… excesses often demanded by a Biennale context. It is also there will be no water… there will be no flights… there significant that their work can be located within the drift will be no oil… there will be no art”). What results is a from a concern with place-bound politics and cultural spectral other haunting the spaces between us and them, difference towards more globalized and homogenous paranoia and terror, empire and jihad. forms of subjectivity and identity. This discernable drift away from local concern in the work Byrne’s 1984 and beyond (2005), to take one example, of Byrne and Doherty goes against the grain of critical restages an interview that took place among twelve sci-fi voices insisting on the centrality of Irishness as a marker of writers and subsequently appeared in Playboy in 1963. value in contemporary art practice. Consider, for example, 32 The topic of conversation considers the kind of future that Lucy Cotter’s prescriptive tones for Irish art practice: can be imagined beyond 1984. This ranges from fantastical speculations (from lunar real estate to uncovering the A critical engagement with the notion of Ireland as a former secrets of eternal life) to participants revealing their cold- colony could lead to a renegotiation of Irish art’s critical war and racial paranoia. The film element of this installation position within international art discourse – both historically visualizes the text, removing it far from its kitschy origins and currently – and give new critical direction to contem- to restage it amidst different locations. These include the porary Irish art practice.10 Sonsbeek sculpture pavilion in the Kröller-Müller Museum which, interestingly, has its origins in Helene Kröller- One senses a retreat to postcolonial models of thought Müller’s dream of a ‘museum-home’. The film can be seen that took root in Ireland from the mid-1980s at the very as a present reconstruction of a past’s dreamed future of point when much Irish art practice in the new millennium where we are now. Various strategies characterize this can be found deserting it. Cotter’s claim is motivated by piece, such as the geographical shift to film the piece in her objection to the institutional drive to promote certain the Netherlands, the use of Dutch actors, the modernist forms of Irish contemporary art on an international stage backdrop, the attention to actors’ gestures and grain of that match governmental notions of innovation and the voice, the shifting locations, the mise en scène, and, dynamism. However, Byrne and Doherty’s practices are various jump cuts. These temporal, geographical and not bound by an accompanying historical amnesia that cultural fissures ensure a form of distantiation characterizes Cotter finds unpalatable. Nor are they bound by notions the viewing experience. What is striking about this work of Irishness. Rather, it has been shown how their work is how past writers’ fantasies of an imaginary future are negotiates the problematics of new subjectivities and rooted to historical fears and desires. While these are identities as a critical act within an international circuit. hopelessly bound, their shifting place between an old and This tension reminds us of the enduring dynamic upon new internationalism is not. This creates a void that can which art practice and art criticism rests: that each holds only be filled by a self-conscious consideration of our own the capacity to undercut as well as support the other. utopian aspirations, if indeed we have them at all. Most often, the art that can be found most intriguing is Doherty’s work can also be seen in terms of the drift from a that which confounds the contours in which criticism politics of place towards negotiating an international circuit traditionally operates. Accordingly, the assumption that less bound by the subtleties of geopolitical difference. the work of Byrne and Doherty represent a robust form His earlier phototext works from the 1980s are charged of critical practice from these shores should equally fall by a socio-political reading of the local landscapes of under scrutiny. For one has more sympathy with Cotter’s Derry and Belfast. Non-specific threat (2004), by contrast, recognition of the problem – the issue of globalization – is less dependent on an intimate knowledge of location. than her proposed solution. The video installation centres on an image of a male figure whose appearance falls in line with media characterizations of the working-class tough nut. The camera pans 360˚ degrees around the figure in a darkly lit and nondescript urban setting. The visuals are accompanied by an audio soundtrack that helps define our perception of the figure. The uniform rotation of the camera keeps the figure at a At root, globalization can be recognized as a multifaceted, begin to explore our notions of the critical in art, if only unresolved and contradictory phenomenon. A key aspect to challenge ubiquitous attributions of value serving the of this dynamic centres on the advances of multinational art market and the wider forces of which it is complicit. capitalism, the supposed obsolescence of the nation The forthcoming shows of Byrne and Doherty offer state, and US hegemony. In terms of contemporary art, excellent case studies for this. the role of Biennales is a particular cause of concern. For Stallabrass, they help bind art practices to the model 1 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press, Oxford, of corporate internationalism by extolling the virtues of 2004, p 6 globalization: 2 Ibid, p 186 3 Beral Madra, ‘Dark rooms and national pavilions’, Third text, 57, Winter 2001–2002, p 105 The filtering of local material through the art system 4 Alison M Gingeras, ‘Stealing the show’, Artforum, Vol 44, No 1, ultimately produces homogeneity. This system … tends September 2005, p 268 to produce an art that speaks to international concerns. 5 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘The curse of empire’, Artforum, Vol 44, No 1, September 2005, p 254 More specifically, it reinforces neoliberal values, especially 6 This is not always the case. The shifting trends of international those of the mobility of labour and the linked virtues of taste also have a significant bearing. See, Anne Pontégnie, ‘Debt multiculturalism.11 collectors’, Artforum, Vol 44, No 1, September 2005, p 269, for a fascinating account of the success of the Central Asia Pavilion at the 33 2005 Biennnale. Similarly, Kwon’s identification of a new site-specificity is 7 Miwon Kwon, One place after another: site-specific art and locational troubled by the question of whether, at the end of the day, identity, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, p 3 this is “a form of resistance to the ideological establishment 8 Sherman Mern Tat Sam, ‘The dictatorship of the viewer: some th of art or a capitulation to the logic of capitalist expansion.”12 thoughts on the 50 Venice Biennale, Third text, Vol 18, Issue 4, 2004, p 316 9 See Mónica Amor, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Minglu, Oscar Ho, Kobena These wider examinations of the context within which Mercer, Irit Rogoff, 'Liminalities: discussions on the global and the contemporary art performs cast a dark shadow over local', Art journal, vol 57, no 4, Winter 1998, p 36 claims of a vibrant, critical art practice. The Venice 10 Lucy Cotter, 'Globalisation, cultural baggage and the critical direction of Irish art practice', Circa online article: recirca.com/ Biennale is as dependent on maintaining a sense of, if not articles/cotter/index.shtml, uploaded September 2004, p 4 of 6 an illusion of, art as a critical force as it is on spectacle for 11 Stallabrass, op cit, p 42 cultural prestige and tourism. At best, to perform therein is 12 Miwon Kwon, 'One place after another: notes on site specificity', in eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, Theory in contemporary art to live out the contradiction of being a critical agent and since 1985, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, p 40 servant of the international art market; caught between, as 13 Niru Ratnam, 'Art and globalisation', in eds. Gill Perry and Paul one critic put it, “the hope of making a difference and the Wood, Themes in contemporary art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, in association with The Open University, 2004, p 310 risk of colluding with forces beyond its control.”13 At worst, it is to be complicit with the illusion of critical practice: that in the end, the various manoeuvres amount to little Gavin Murphy is a lecturer more than fluff in the furnace of capital and empire. It is in Art History and Critical in the light of this final point that I am beginning to get a Theory at Galway-Mayo sense of why the initial casino image has haunted me. Institute of Technology. I am too long in the tooth to believe artworks really can overturn the grander social order and not cynical enough to believe them to be mere bunting on life’s journey. There will always be a pleasure in viewing imagery, no matter the context in which it operates.

The pensive character of the work of Byrne and Doherty lies in how each navigates a new terrain that is as yet uncharted by contemporary criticism in Ireland. To acknowledge international market forces at play in each exhibition, and in the

Biennale as a whole, is also to recognize the limits of Irishness as a marker of value in contemporary circum- stance. In an era of an expanding research culture in Ireland, there is an opportunity to explore these new contexts and practices in some detail. Much criticism will continue to limit its scope to analysis of exhibited works alone. Important as this is, it seems equally important to c . Paul O’Brien

34 New-media art: An Irish context (opposite) in computer-based media can live, exhibit and collaborate Conor O'Boyle anywhere there is an internet connection. In Mark Poster’s Looptracks screengrab at looptracks.net terms, the internet has become a “paranational,” local/ global or “glocal” culture: as he puts it, we are entering the age of “virtual ethnicity.”3 (Perhaps in the future being ‘Irish’ will be a matter of choice, like picking an avatar to represent you in an on-line world – you may be able to put on or take off your identity as you please, at least in a cultural sense.)

While the Republic has been to the forefront of computer A discussion of new media artists in an Irish context software development for a number of years, it is probably immediately throws up some problems. In defining ‘new fair to say that ‘Irish’ new media art has not kept up with media art’,1 one is usually thinking about digital, computer- this economic dynamism. (That goes for the related, based media (not quite synonymous with ‘electronic art’), potentially lucrative area of computer games development but should new media include (eg) bio art or genetic art, as well, though the slowness of this to develop has probably whose basis is wetware and biology rather than hardware as much to do with the conservatism of Irish venture 35 and engineering? Admittedly, this is something of an capitalists as with anything else.) A number of factors academic question since Irish or ‘Irish’ artists working in have contributed to the problem, including the long delay the area of bio-art are few and far between. (Two artists in establishing new media courses in third level educational come to mind in this area: Catherine Fitzgerald institutions; the difficulties students (and faculty) have (seeartscience.com) an artist/ biologist originally from found in collaborating across different disciplines with New Zealand but based in Ireland; and Priscila Fernandes their entrenched definitions and power bases; the lack of (priscilafernandeshome.blogspot.com), originally from understanding of, or support for, research that is not of Portugal but currently based in Ireland, who incorporates immediately obvious use; and the unfortunate collapse of elements of biology and music as well as video in her once-promising, ostensibly cutting-edge entities like work.) Dublin’s Arthouse and Media Lab Europe (MLE). On the positive side, the development of spontaneous initiatives The second difficulty is that – while there is Irish-related like the Darklight digital film festival, and DATA – Dublin work as recondite as the “space art” of Anna Hill Art and Technology Association4 – have helped to keep (spacesynapse.com) – new media artists are predominantly digital and new-media art alive in Ireland. (The tireless concerned with digital video and photography, rather than input of Jonah Brucker-Cohen, formerly associated with art with a more interactive dimension. (That is, if you exclude MLE in Dublin,5 should be noted in particular in this area, from the latter the process of clicking on an internet as should that of Nicola Gogan.) hyperlink.) Digital video/ photography is something that can be – and increasingly is – done by anybody, so that Already achieving international recognition, Brucker-Cohen the boundary between artists and non-artists tends to (originally from the US and currently living in New York) is become diffuse. If anyone can take a photograph or a one of the artists who readily come to mind in this context. video and upload it onto the internet, the ever-present His website (coin-operated.com/projects) details a prolific threat of ‘deskilling’ is on the agenda for artists, just as it and endlessly-imaginative intervention in the space has been for other workers for many decades.2 between art, technology and politics, an underlying theme being the threat of a new, post-9/ 11 totalitarianism under The third major issue is the growing difficulty of pinning the guise of national and international security.6 This is a artists down in a national or geographical sense. That has concern that is found in his Homeland insecurity advisory always been something of a problem, but in the age of system, where participants can rate the US government’s the internet it has intensified. While Irish people celebrate ‘threat level’, in an impudent parody of the official system. (what they hope will be) the ending of internal tensions Police state playfully reverses the surveillance role of law with photos of Bertie Ahern shaking hands with Ian enforcement, making toy police cars move around in Paisley, globalisation and the EU threaten to make both response to data achieved by surveillance. Less politically Irish nationalism and Ulster loyalism irrelevant. (Polish voices and more philosophically, Alerting infrastructure was a proliferate in Dublin; tensions with Chinese immigrants gallery piece whereby direct damage could be caused to supplant sectarian struggles in Belfast.) Under the neo- the physical structure of a building as a result of each hit liberal pressure for new markets and cheap labour, the to a particular web site, in a commentary on the dominance internet increases the globalising tendencies already of the virtual over the physical – a ‘telematic’ project inherent in society, so that the already amorphous concept reminiscent in some ways of the networked projects of of ‘Irishness’ becomes increasingly clouded. Artists working Ken Goldberg (goldberg.berkeley.edu/index-flash.html). A similar sentiment – a love-hate suspicion of new aesthetic, perhaps absorbed from their French milieu and technology together with a quasi-ironic nostalgia for a the dialectic between French and Irish cultural sensibilities. simpler time – pervades Brucker-Cohen’s piece Crank the web, whereby you can access the internet in proportion to Belfast-based Saoirse Higgins the speed with which you turn a handle. (Kind of amusing, (alumni.media.mit.edu/~saoirse) explores political issues but then one thinks of the wind-up radio that offers radio around war and peace with her interactive Mechanism no. access to people living in remote African villages, so 1: war (recently exhibited at Dublin’s Four Gallery): you maybe it’s not so off-beat after all.) This artist has also can make virtual bombs fall from the ceiling by picking up worked in the sub-genre of new media that uses the a toy. Doom machine, based on the Bulletin of atomic mobile phone.7 Brucker-Cohen’s Simple text (in collaboration scientists, references paranoia about the state of the with Tim Redfern and Duncan Murphy) is an interactive world (just as Brucker-Cohen cites paranoia about national performance enabled by the ubiquitous device. A dominant security). Earlier works of Higgins explored sand as an theme of Brucker-Cohen’s work is intervention in networked interactive medium between reality and virtuality. The artist communication. For example, there is his Bumpnet, a kind also produced (with Ian Gwilt) an interactive exploration of of ‘musical chairs’ game played over a network – you the decoding and reading of human emotions (along com- bump others off the system and in turn you are yourself parable lines to work in this area by Japanese virtual artist 36 bumped off, in a work that questions reciprocity in Naoko Tosa). Fionnuala Conway has also produced work networked systems. A current project Umbrella.net (in which references issues such as the under-representation collaboration with Katherine Moriwaki), focuses on issues of women in the political arena – an interactive exhibition around the weather and networks. (Moriwaki is currently exploring these questions took place in The Digital Hub in involved in Dublin-based projects in the interface of art, Dublin in May 2005 (see artofdecision.net). design, gender and technology, including interactive clothes and accessories: see, eg, kakirine.com). Benjamin Gaulon is of French origin but currently lives in Ireland. His work (recyclism.com) explores recycled hard- With a less overtly political focus than Brucker-Cohen, ware and information. Some examples are his paintball John Gerrard (johngerrard.net) is probably the one new- gun combined with an inkjet printer; the distortion of media artist who comes to mind for people here who may photographic imagery; an adapted version of Pong played not be too familiar with the area – his work has become on the side of a building; and a recycled entertainment increasingly accepted in the ‘traditional’ international system. Gaulon’s work relies on a neo-Situationist notion gallery system. Gerrard’s industrious creativity, combined of ‘détournement’ (with its origin in the theories of Guy with his collaborative abilities, have enabled him to fast- Debord and others), whereby found works are changed track his cool, conceptual pieces onto the international and recycled into new forms. In this context, mention stage. The interactive photographic works raise issues of might also be made of Niall Flaherty’s artistic play with simulation and the hyperreal, as well as disproving the that nightmare of all computer users, the virus. Flaherty concept that digital art is uncollectible because ‘immaterial’. proposes the humane solution of imprisoning viruses Works such as Thousand year dawn raise trenchant rather than killing them. The thought-provoking work of issues around life, time, perception and experience. this artist also refers to issues of conceptualism, identity, power, death, resistance to oppression, and alternative A consistent feature of prominent artists working in new means of distribution in the digital age. Information on his media is their internationalism. Brucker-Cohen lived in work can be found on niallflaherty.com. Flaherty also helps Ireland for a number of years and still maintains run the informative site concerned with new media art, connections with this country, while Gerrard divides his blackletter.ie, with video artist Cliona Harmey and Alan time between Dublin and Vienna. Two notable new media Butler. Butler’s work (“information is my paint”) involves artists are Anne Cleary and Dennis Connolly, originally an exploration of issues of virtuality and the hyper-real. from Ireland but now living in Paris. Their sophisticated Particularly notable is the interactive work 1+1=3 and the work utilises dance, classical music and feedback, and haunting video Brain breathe. (See also their interactive (self-reflexive) installations, reminiscent newmediaart.co.uk/blog) of some of the work of Myron Kruger and Bill Spinhoven, give the spectator an interactive encounter with the projected imagery. Their work makes intriguing reference to the paranormal, in its creation of technologically originated ‘ghosts’. (A multiple-screen video of their domestic life in Paris and their interaction with the local (opposite) + Conor McGarrigle neighbourhood was a memorable entry in Limerick’s ev a The Bono Probability Positioning a couple of years ago.) The work of Cleary and Connolly System 2, Google Bono, 2006 has an extraordinary resonance and a sophisticated screengrab courtesy the artist The prolific Conor McGarrigle has, for some years, been participants to send in chosen sound tracks. These were producing humorous and culturally incisive work on the then attached to individual piano keys and made internet, including a spoof site of the Irish Museum of available, in an interactive exhibit, to users of the piano. Modern Art (see stunned.org/cmg.htm). At the time of His interactive work Snow, exploring the effects of a TV writing, he has a piece entitled Unreliable narratives at screen, might be described as a meditation on the Limerick’s ev+a. This censors the vowels of James Joyce’s techno-sublime. The ongoing, related work, Untitled Ulysses – turning it into nonsense – in a commentary on (recall), involves participants responding to the ‘abstract’ the conflict between freedom on the one hand, and issues images generated by Snow, in a kind of collective of copyright-restriction on the other.8 Joyce is a recurrent psychological Rorschach test. In Murnaghan’s disturbing theme in McGarrigle’s work, as in his Dublin-themed Requiem for a fly, a musical piece was composed from projects Proteus and Cyclops (though he is perhaps open the sounds of flies to accompany the viewing of one of to the criticism of jumping on the Joyce bandwagon in this their deceased colleagues, laid out in a stone mausoleum regard). Dublin is also the locus of McGarrigle’s amusing lined with sugar. The work has some haunting Gothic Bono probability positioning system, described on the (and perhaps even slightly demonic) resonances. A current stunned.org website as follows: “a mashup utilising Dublin’s project explores the relationship between past and present. extensive surveillance camera network in conjunction with Murnaghan’s work has an unusual aesthetic depth and facial recognition software, Google maps and advanced maturity. 37 probability techniques to allow visitors to determine the probability of seeing Bono in any of the most probable Kevin Atherton’s time-shifting video work, involving locations in Dublin city centre in real time.” The absurdity discussions with his younger self in the past, raises of the project raises issues about the cult of celebrity, intriguing issues of a science-fictional nature and recalls and the triviality of mass cultural obsessions versus the some aspects of the work of Jorge Luís Borges and Flann complexity of contemporary technology. And of course O’Brien. His best known performance piece involves a there is the ubiquitous theme of surveillance – already virtual tour of a fictional gallery, with his present (physical) noted in Brucker-Cohen’s work – which also comes up self interacting with the virtual tour guide (an Atherton in McGarrigle’s piece Spook. Based on computer-game persona). This work raises philosophical and aesthetic conventions, this web-based work turns covert official questions: the nature of art, the relationship between the surveillance on its head by attempting to track the tracker. real and the virtual, the connection between self and persona, and the role of the gallery ‘system’ in establishing Tim Redfern (eclectronics.org), mentioned already as a what is and what is not art. The humorous, self-reflexive, creative participant with Brucker-Cohen, is a prolific artist/ postmodernist irreverence of Atherton’s work undermines designer working in the area of new media. His Dancing portentous, conventional discourses about art. At the risk robots (2005) was an interactive installation whereby of ethnic essentialism, one could argue that a kind of robots responded to text messages. Milieu (2003) was surreal, ‘Celtic’, irreverent humour is something shared by a sculptural audiovisual installation, in collaboration with artists like McGarrigle and Atherton. (Atherton, who has Roger Doyle. Redfern’s mesmerising Naughtix (featured lived in Dublin for some years, is originally from the Isle on the latest Darklight DVD collection of video works) is of Man.) a piece deriving from the simultaneous composition of music and videos. Like other notable artists in this genre, Redfern has the essential ability to work across disciplines on collaborative ventures, including in his case dance and theatrical projections. (The ‘Renaissance team’ seems to be a growing phenomenon in the new media field, whereby people with widely different backgrounds and skills work collaboratively on the production of art works.) Mention should also be made here of Conor O’Boyle’s amazing Looptracks (looptracks.net) which offers the par- ticipant the possibility of becoming an instant, amateur ‘VJ’. (One could waste many happy hours of company time playing with this – which is high praise indeed for a piece of internet art.) In the context of robotics or semi-robotics – or kinetic sculpture at least – the work of artist Peter O’Kennedy, with his animated beetle-like creatures, also has some relevance.

Paul Murnaghan’s mp3 abode involved an internet call for Taking irreverence a step further, Nevan Lahart revels in English, US or German culture do not? Is it something to the liberation of repressed, stereotypical ‘Irishry’ (of the do with insularity and a postcolonial mindset? Is it even a leppin’ leprechaun variety), no doubt much to the chagrin very interesting question any more? Artists prominent in of those who thought we had left that sort of thing behind this arena have included some from abroad who live or us. Lahart’s work reflects on notions of Irish national have lived in Ireland – others, Irish in origin, have spent identity as mediated through the lens of American mass time abroad or currently live abroad. (In the era of cheap culture. His highly entertaining – though at times over-the- flights, mass immigration/ emigration and outsourcing, top – website is worth a visit (nevanlahart.com). It comes when people may take five or ten or twenty trips out of the as a surprise to find that Lahart has a serious interest in country every year, does ‘abroad’ mean anything much any German culture, particularly film – the stereotype of more?) Indeed, an international dimension often seems to Teutonic uptightness and self-discipline is in some ways be an essential feature of this kind of art, and one that adds the opposite of the untrammelled animal spirits associated to its strength. In many cases, the art is available on the with ‘craic’ and Irishry. Lahart has made a somewhat internet, which means it is produced, often collaboratively, outrageous video, with a scatological dimension, of a trip within a context that radically transcends national barriers through Germany (shown some time ago at the Goethe- both in terms of production and consumption. Institut in Dublin). As an artist, one of his persistent 38 interests lies in rooting around for the crap under the But an attempt could be made to answer the question, gloss – a therapeutic, if occasionally juvenile, practice in if it needs answering. One could point – in the case of the era of pretentious new wealth on this island. The title new-media art that has something to do with Ireland9 – – AH FUCK: not another art video – conveys the typical to some apparently specific qualities: humour, irreverence, combination of ironic self-depreciation and lack of inhibition a nostalgia for Dadaist and Surrealist irrationality, an occa- found in this artist’s work. His computer animation is worth sional flavour of the Rabelaisian and the carnivalesque, viewing, particularly the skit on George Bush’s relationship some remnants of Romanticism, the ever-presence of the with George Bush Snr. unconscious, a neutralist pacifism, a suspicion of the State, a rejection of common-sense notions of time and In the area of digital film documentary, Eamonn Crudden’s logic, a touch of the occult, the paranormal, the Gothic impressive video documentary, Berlusconi’s mousetrap, and the sublime,10 as well as resonances with the older is noteworthy. The film, documenting the anti-globalisation literary tradition of Joyce, Flann O’Brien and (in Atherton’s movement and reactions to it, has been widely shown on work for example) perhaps Beckett as well. the independent circuit. It is notable for the absence of didacticism, a self-reflexive perspectivism, and the (at times In the era of the Celtic Tiger – though that heavily clichéd somewhat heavy-handed) employment of Situationist feline may be now on its last legs – all that was previously theory. Mention should also be made of Irish interactive solid has melted into air. A brash, nouveau-riche commer- filmmakers Neill O’Dwyer (abyss.ie) and Kelly McErlean cialism threatens to swamp all before it, from unspoiled (kellymcerlean.com). scenery and clean drinking water to the intellectual space of the academy. In a wide-open, globalised economy with Like Atherton, Andrew Folan was already an established all the advantages and dangers that that entails, the artist when digital media came on stream, and he has middle classes react – apparently contradictorily – by incorporated it more or less seamlessly into his work. buying property in Croatia and sending their children to Impressive animation pieces can be found on his website Irish-speaking schools. There is simultaneously an (andrewfolan.com) including (with a nod to previous impatience with the constraints of an island nation and a conceptualism) Erased Mona Lisa, whereby the iconic (perhaps unconscious) desire to find one’s cultural roots. female vanishes into the background. There is also the (At the same time, the once-cherished notion of Celticity unsettling shape-shifting work The Owl and the Pussycat, is melting away under the influence of cultural and genetic which simultaneously seems to reference oneiric Surrealist research.) The nation-state and the trade unions – those practice and the possibilities of genetic manipulation of last, however compromised, defenders of the rights of nature. Folan’s current explorations are at the interface of citizens and workers – have been reeling in recent years the virtual and the real, involving an investigation of the under the pressures of neo-liberalism and globalisation. ‘realisation’ of the virtual (as distinct from the ‘virtualisation’ Simultaneously, with the development of technology and of the real). the internet, there has been a cultural melting into the ether of cyberspace. It has to be admitted that Irishness, To reprise a question asked at the beginning: what is it if it pervades digital culture at all, is a diffuse and that makes digital or new media art ‘Irish’ in the first place? contradictory kind of Irishness; but perhaps no more so Why do writers about Irish culture seem constrained to than its parallel in the ‘real’ world is becoming, or has ask that kind of question, in a way that (eg) writers about already become. 1 The term ‘new media art’ is 5 In this context, the informal Anthony Hobbs, Anthony used here to include: internet Café Philosophique organised Holmes, Barry Hughes, Ian art, database art, interactive by interactive artist Michael Joyce, Bear Koss, Garrett art, virtual art, immersive art, Lew of MLE, which met over Lynch, Katherine Nolan, nano art, robotics, sound a number of years in the Aisling O’Beirn, Rachel installation, telematics, Cobblestone Bar in Dublin’s O’Dwyer, David O’Kane, telepresence, augmented Smithfield and debated Matthew O’Kane, Barry reality, computer animation, everything under the sun, Prendergast, Linda Quinlan, digital music, etc. For the should be remembered. (One Marjetica Potrc, Stuart purpose of this article, I have should consider the spinoffs Simpson, David Stalling, Sean focused on art with some kind of cultural institutions in Taylor, Una Walker, Lee Welch, of visual dimension. (See, eg, helping to make a city a great and Oliver Whelan. Some Michael Rush, New media in place to live and work, not further websites of note in late 20th-century art, London: just their economic cost.) the area of Irish-related new Thames and Hudson, 1999; Other young artists with a media art include: Christiane Paul, Digital art, connection to MLE who have aphasiarecordings.com/index London, Thames and Hudson, contributed to Dublin’s new- .htm; 2003; Oliver Grau, Virtual media art scene include Sven mee.tcd.ie/~ledoyle/DDT/DD art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Anderson, Jusi Ängeslevä, T.htm; robots.ie; softday.ie; Press, 2003.) Valentina Nisi, and Alison irishscientist.ie/2001/con- 2 See, for example, Harry Wood. Stefan Agamanolis, tents.asp?contentxml=01p171 Paul O’Brien 39 Braverman, Labour and formerly of MLE, has made b.xml&contentxsl=IS01pages. ([email protected]) teaches monopoly capital: the an impact on the international xsl. degradation of work in the scene, including the show- 10 As, for example, in the work at the National College of twentieth century, New York case Ars electronica festival of artist Susan MacWilliam. Art and Design, Dublin. and London: Monthly Review in Linz, Austria (see Press, 1974. (As a result of recirca.com/backissues/c110 this process of deskilling in /p62_63.shtml). the arena of cultural work, 6 Hannah Arendt’s key text, perhaps the theoretical/ The Origins of totalitarianism, historical element in art has not been surpassed for education may become as its (unfortunately still relevant) much a matter of helping to insights, while George define an artist in career Orwell’s fear in Nineteen terms as consolidating the eighty-four of the loss of Andrew Folan substance of the work itself.) freedom in a nightmare Erased Mona Lisa, 2003 3 Mark Poster, What’s the matter future of ‘English Socialism’ (see with the internet? is, in the era of Blair and www.andrewfolan.com/03digital/ Minneapolis: University of Blunkett, perhaps more dig01.html) Minnesota Press, 2001, pp relevant than ever. courtesy the artist 105, 180. In this connection 7 For example, see the interactive see also Vincent J Cheng, musical work Dialtones by Inauthentic: the anxiety over Golan Levin et al, culture and identity, New flong.com/telesymphony/ Brunswick: Rutgers University index.html Press, 2004; Jerry Everard, 8 Creative Commons has Virtual states: the tnternet attempted to resolve this and the boundaries of the issue for artists, by offering nation-state, London: a ‘copyleft’ alternative to the Routledge, 2000; Colin restrictions of conventional Graham, Deconstructing copyright. With Creative Ireland: identity, theory, Commons, artists decide culture, Edinburgh: which rights they wish to Edinburgh University Press, retain and which they wish 2001; Michael Mays, ‘Irish to concede – see identity in an age of creativecommons.org globalisation’, Irish Studies 9 Space has allowed the Review, Volume 13, Number inclusion of only a selection of 1, February 2005, pp. 3-12; Irish or Irish-related artists John Tomlinson, Globalization working in the area of new and culture, Chicago: Chicago media. Other relevant artists University Press, 1999. – some of whom have created 4 DATA, a venue for participants impressive work in this area, in the new-media culture, predominantly though not which used to meet upstairs exclusively in the area of in The Stag’s Head Bar and digital video – include Paul elsewhere in Dublin, has an Bailey, Aideen Barry, John online presence as a Yahoo Buckley, John Callaghan, group yahoogroups.com. Michelle Deignan, Jeanette Darklight can be accessed at Doyle, Brian Duggan, Sean darklight-filmfestival.com Fitzgerald, Susan Gogan, Anthony Kelly, Vera Klute, Slavek Kwi, Leah Hilliard, c . Cristina Martín de Vidales and Sophie Nellis

40 the gender gap revisitedc We have divided images into several categories, and within each there have been significant increases in the number In Issue 100 of Circa (summer 2002), Hilary Robinson of images featuring the work of women artists. In her was asked to review the magazine’s coverage and analysis of issues 1 to 99, Robinson felt that the number treatment of gender in issues 1 to 99. She produced a of women with work on the front cover of the magazine statistical, quantitative survey, and concluded that, on the (23%) was “truly embarrassing.” The front cover is per- whole, women artists were under-represented in Circa. haps the most significant illustration and we were pleased To monitor progress since issue 99, we have produced to find that in issues 100 to 119, 50% of images on the a similar survey of issues 100 to 119, and in order to front cover featured the work of female artists. Similarly, determine whether the magazine’s treatment and coverage the number of women whose work featured on artist’s of gender has changed over the past five years, it is worth pages increased from 38% to 50%, and within the artists briefly outlining some of Robinson’s findings. with photos category, the number of women who had work illustrated in the magazine increased from 31% to 44%. Of the total number of artists featured in issues 1 to 99, only 36% were women. Women artists were given 21% As in Robinson’s analysis, the most evenly balanced of the solo-artist feature articles, and their work was category in terms of gender is the total number of writers. reviewed in 36% of the solo artist reviews. In group The number of women writers who contributed to Circa 41 reviews and group features, just over a third of the artists increased slightly, from 41% to 44%. More significantly, mentioned were women. Futhermore, only 32% of the whilst the percentage of women writers still exceeded the photographs and 28% of the front covers featured the percentage of women artists being written about, 45% of work of women artists. Lastly, 41% of the contributers to the writers and 43% of the artists were women: the gap issues 1 to 99 were women, and Robinson noted that the between them was much less than it was in issues 1 to 99. percentage of women writing exceeded the percentage of women artists being written about. Finally, we decided to include advertisements in our survey because we felt that they offered an insight, albeit For the most part, we used the same categories as a limited one, into the gender balance within the Irish art Robinson did in her survey. Solo artist features and scene. As the advertisements are not subjected to editorial solo artist reviews list the number of artists given feature control, they offer a means of comparing the number of articles and reviews to themselves. In group reviews women artists represented in art exhibitons with the and group features we included all artists who were representation of women artists in Circa. 43% of the mentioned or whose work was discussed, but we did not advertisements published in issues 100 to 119 advertised include artists who were merely listed as examples or women artists, either as individuals or within a group. participants. See was a preview column, written by an This figure directly correlates to the overall percentage editorial advisor, which was dropped from the magazine of female artists featured in the magazine. Although after issue 111. Artist’s pages refers to all page-projects the advertisements are by no means representative of by artists, and these images were not then included in the number of female artists practising in Ireland, the the total number of images. correspondance between these two figures suggests that Circa has, to a certain extent, got the gender Overall the representation of women artists has improved balance right. in issues 100 to 119. The number of women given features as solo artists has almost doubled, from 21% to In conclusion, our figures show that the coverage and 40%. On the other hand, the percentage of women treatment of women artists in Circa has clearly improved included in group features has diminished from 35% to in issues 100 to 119. Although we would like to see a 31%. This indicates that women artists are more likely to stronger female presence in group features and group feature in the magazine as solo artists than within a group. reviews, we feel that Circa has made significant progress in reducing the gender gap. In issues 100 to 119 the number of female artists mentioned in group reviews has increased by just 7%, from 34% to 41%, whilst the number of women artists Cristina Martín de given solo reviews has increased by a much greater Vidales is a History of Art graduate. percentage, from 36% to 52%. Again, these figures suggest that women are more likely to be reviewed as Sophie Nellis is a recent solo artists than as part of a group. One could perhaps graduate of Trinity infer from this that it is, relatively speaking, more common College, Dublin, and is for women artists to exhibit on their own than as part of currently living in Paris. a group exhibition. c . Peter FitzGerald Peter FitzGerald is the Editor of Circa.

What exactly is your reader profile anyway? 42

Good question! – the title of this article is a query posed by a respondent to our recent survey about Circa, which was online in the winter 2006/ spring 2007 period.1 Thanks to the generosity of those who gave of their time, we are in a position to attempt a few answers. And what of our reader profile? We asked which magazines they (also) buy.2 The Top Ten, in descending order, turned out to be Irish Arts Review, Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Modern Painters, Contemporary, Art Review, Source, The survey started out with a few general Printed Project, Flash Art. It looks as though questions, such as, “Which is more important Circa has a readership equally interested in to you in the magazine – feature articles/ visual culture in Ireland and further afield. We reviews?” I am just going to pick out a very also asked which magazines Circa was most few key results. 62% of the 56 respondents comparable to. The results were very similar, found feature articles more important, 38% though “at the moment, a fashion magazine” the reviews. 30% of readers also found fea- stood out. tures the strongest aspect of the magazine, though 18% found them the weakest; the comparable figures for reviews were 25% and 26%. So reviews could do with a bit of beefing up. Readers also preferred profiles of artists (56%) to issue-related features (44%). That’s the drier stuff. It gets more fun when the respondents What do you like about Circa? are given freer reign. The panels below give a small taste It’s the only Irish art magazine that has an independent of the opinions and contradictions we collected.3 Where outlook, that does not pander to the market. do we go from here? We dry our eyes (is that laughter or ...... tears?) and move forward, very grateful for and informed New design is great, feels very European, refreshing as a by these responses. We’ll work on the quality, relevance, lot of the UK mags are similar in feel and tone. balance, and the rest. Let us know how we are doing...... Good for posing with – impresses people as it languishes on the coffee table… What are Circa’s strengths? ...... Well informed, providing a comprehensive picture of art The fact that it is the only magazine that has such from Ireland abroad. extensive knowledge on the contemporary art scene in ...... Ireland; both its position within Ireland and its international Its visual appeal. Looks very good, well designed. Quality presence. 43 paper stock. Its obvious contacts with those in the art ...... world North and South. The fact that it covers all parts of High-quality articles – usually interesting and thought- Ireland. Its price! provoking...... Its comprehensive coverage of contemporary art issues in Variety of positions and reviews and news is democratic Ireland. and often not about overt trendiness...... ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Design, strength of writing, willingness to drive debate and dialogue, in-depth reviews and balance of issues and reviews, comment, focus on contemporary practice and What do you dislike about Circa? theory. It’s disappearing up it’s own orifice! Its independence has ...... left it talking to itself. Sometimes direct and unpretentious...... I detest artists writing reviews. Especially Goldsmiths ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– graduates. It’s wrong. Wrong. WRONG! ...... What are Circa’s weaknesses? Its heavy theory-based articles, sometimes the feeling that Not enough reviews. reviews are picked solely on people choosing friends...... Articles that only ten people are interested in! Pretentious, quasi-intellectual waffle which kills one’s interest ...... on contact! There isn’t more of it and that it doesn’t cover enough of ...... what is going on in Irish Art. The smell from the pages...... Some of the articles are just SOOO boring… written in ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– such an abstruse, ever so clever-dick , ‘aren’t we terribly 1 See intellectual’ way so as to be really offputting. I’m not a recirca.com/poll/2006/poll20 moron and can manage two- and three-syllable words – 06_evaluation.shtml I have also been a graphic designer for over twenty years 2 It is probably a pity that we asked which magazines the and art and art history are my passion but I’m afraid much respondents bought, as there as I loved the look and feel of Circa and the visual promise are free publications which of what it contained – I felt irritated by much of the content!! many of Circa’s readers undoubtedly read, chief among Try aiming the writing at intelligent but human beings – it them being Visual artists’ may help. news sheet and The Vacuum...... 3 Apologies if your response is Pretension. Known to be pretentious, not catering to not here; there was a large number of stimulating outside the art elite. responses – see the URL in ...... endnote 1. A bit sombre at times. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– c . Joan Fowler

44well, speak of the devil! art-world spectacle from dubai to dublin (opposite) She goes further by arguing that the art world’s views of IMMA hoarding and Fossetts itself are being radically transformed by these processes, Circus sign at Main Entrance to Royal Hospital Kilmainham, yet the art world’s representations of globalisation and of December 2006 – January 2007 itself in relation to it are at best “fuzzy.” As Lee says, the photo/ courtesy the author art world “still sees itself as distinct from the ‘real’ world ‘outside’ it, analogous, say, to the way that a figure is positioned in relation to its ground.” She continues, “the activities constitutive of the art world’s horizon are Lauren Weisberger may not have made the most notable indivisible from the activities of globalization itself. What contribution to theories of the disappearance of the dis- we treat as a given to our metier is, in fact, immanent to tinction between the real and the aesthetic (simulacrum) the processes we usually associate with the emerging with her novel, more recently turned Hollywood movie, transnational order.” By this account we have swapped the The Devil wears Prada, but she certainly added colour of desire for autonomy, which we have characterised as an expensive variety. It is something of a platitude that the modernist, for another form of insularity which Lee would fashion industry is not for the fainthearted. But what of characterise as post-postmodernist, as, in effect, ideological the art industry? Back in 1982, Ingrid Sischy and ‘globalism’. Germano Celant caused an outcry when they splashed 45 a fashion model in an Issey Miyake ensemble across the Lee bases her analysis of the contemporary art world on front cover of an issue of Artforum. Incredibly by today’s that originally put forward by Arthur Danto in the 1960s.3 standards, Sischy and Celant, predicting the reaction, While Lee updates and extends Danto’s original concep- took the trouble to back up their decision with an editorial tion, other critics arrive at much the same conclusion from in which they challenged what they saw as the elitism of their observations and understandings of the art market. In art: “In part, this issue seeks to confront artmaking that a panel discussion under the blunt rubric of ‘Money’,4 Lane retains its autonomy as it enters mass culture at the Relyea says, “It’s easier for me to think in terms of an art blurred boundary of art and commerce, and partakes of economy rather than a market. Success isn’t just quantified the wandering multiplicities of the body of popular art.”1 in terms of how much a work sells for; it also is measured Sischy and Celant interestingly locate what they see as by how often an artist appears on the visiting-artist rosters elitism as immanent within the process of art production; at art schools, or how often one is commissioned to do with the conscious and perhaps unconscious decisions site-specific projects at Kunsthallen and contemporary art of the artist. Twenty-five years on, the art industry impinges spaces.” Where once the art market was a given – a small to an incredibly greater extent on how we figure ‘art’. network of dealers, buyers and auction houses – now that The proliferation of biennales, art fairs (over 100, according untheorised notion (which has not featured significantly to one count), and media hype, not to mention gallerists, in the discourse of the art world) has opened itself up to curators, curator-dealers, curator-writers, and celebrity include a much expanded set of negotiations and collectors, predominates in a way that was inconceivable interactions, so that the ‘art market’ looks closer to the twenty-five years ago. Many of the ‘leading’ international (more theorised) concept of the ‘art world.’ In the same art magazines take it for granted that their advertising panel discussion, the sociologist Raymonde Moulin sug- revenue arrives as much from fashion houses as from gests that today roles within the art world are much more art galleries: Prada and Paula Cooper happily co-exist in interchangeable than they used to be. “The interactions glossy colour advertisements alongside reports on between economic and cultural actors are even more art-world gatherings. Sischy’s and Celant’s comments are evident because today more than before the international indeed from a different era. Is it possible then to turn contemporary art world is characterized by the inter- around their critique and ask, what, at this juncture, is at changeability and versatility of roles. Every actor is in fact the heart of art-world chic? required to act at the intersection of two universes – the artistic and the economic.” Moulin argues that where the dealer previously acted as intermediary, increasingly the The art world, Pamela M Lee writes, is in identity crisis.2 state of the art world today is that with “new technologies The crisis, as she describes it, is bound up with the art and new methods of production of artworks (an economy world’s relation to globalisation because, on the one hand, of intermediation is being replaced by an economy of the great expansion of art in the last decade through art production)… It is the artist himself who enters into the fairs, biennales, mega-exhibitions and the art-dealing that circuit of supply and demand.” While more empirically emanates from these events opens possibility for non- based sociologists may not agree with the intensity and North American and non-European artists in particular, extent of change over the last two decades that Moulin while on the other, these very processes, homogenise the suggests,5 nevertheless there is general agreement within art produced and are neo-colonialist in their global thrust. the art world that radical transformation is taking place.6 The drift of this panel discussion is echoed by Julian Stallabrass, who proposes a variant on Lee’s point about In the mid-1980s, a major discussion took place across ‘autonomy’ in the performance and ideology of those the spectrum of cultural studies in the English-speaking directly and indirectly involved with art.7 Stallabrass world over Centre versus Periphery. In this discussion, the describes contemporary art’s flirtations with the commer- world was seen in spatial terms, with power and influence cial world while at the same time he identifies a trend in emanating from political and economic centres. Within this which the artwork itself seems to aspire to the condition worldview, art was something which accumulated around of the everyday commodity whether as object or as instal- the centres of capital, predominantly within the First lation. Sylvie Fleury’s supermarket trolleys and Guillaume World. While the debate was about the ethics of such Bijl’s supermarkets are two such examples, according to politics, it was also, importantly, recognition of the interface Stallabrass. Despite the fact that these artworks are close between the cultural and economic spheres. It was a to being actually indistinguishable from the real articles in debate of particular interest in Ireland, which for stark their appearance, this is not to say that art merges or will reasons at that moment in history was in identity deficit: merge with commodity culture. There are institutional between a colonial legacy, near insurrection in the North, forces at work which protect art’s ‘autonomy’. In this, and a State in the South which aspired towards neo-liberal Stallabrass concentrates on three such forces: the market, capitalism. It was a time when the Eastern Bloc was still 46 the university, and the museum. There is a large irony a presence in the world, and with NATO on one side and winging its way here, for, in Stallabrass’s view, no matter the USSR on the other, Ireland floated on the margins how much art may want to abandon itself to life, or to the between Europe and America as something of an anomaly. condition of the commodity, the uniqueness of art – that is A Belfast joke of the time pointed to the city’s lowly to say, its luxury status and exchange value – is precisely position in the pecking order with a double-entendre that what the market must sustain and expand. Similarly, the Moscow had a McDonald’s restaurant before Belfast. In university has vested interest in maintaining the allure of today’s context, it is fair to say that Dubai has had an art art. The popularity of Fine Art as a student choice continues fair before Dublin, such are the changes of the last to increase while at the same time academic jobs are decade.9 The so-called New World Order, or New World seen to relate to the promotion of theorising and high- Disorder as some would have it, has served to inflate blown jargonese which have the effect of distinguishing globalisation and, as with the Cold War World Order, art art from other objects in the world. Again, this has the has not only followed the money but has expanded expo- effect of elevating the special status of art.8 And, for their nentially in the process. The oil and gas of the Middle East part, the museum and public galleries, according to allow the super-rich members of Arab states friendly to Stallabrass, serve to mediate between the market and the the West to extend their enjoyment of commodities to the university and the art audience. The museums of contem- purchase of Western and western-styled contemporary porary art attempt to popularise some of the obscurities art. After the Gulf Art Fair which took place in Dubai of market and university – try to make more accessible art earlier this year, plans are forging ahead to create the new that is ‘hot’ for example – because they are public- or cultural district of Saadiyat (Arabic for ‘isle of happiness’, private-sponsored institutions with the remit to generate according to the press releases) on an island just off Abu as much public appeal as possible. Their funding depends Dhabi. The city hasn’t hit the tourist trail in the same way on their ‘success’ in carrying through this remit. Stallabrass as its neighbour Dubai, and it is hoped that the new therefore understands the art market in the extended centre will change that. The main attraction will be a new sense of Relyea and Moulin; it is continuous with the “art addition to the Guggenheim chain which is to be the largest world” as defined by Lee. In essence then, Stallabrass Guggenheim museum yet, designed again by ‘starchitect’, believes that the old, core art market deals in luxury Frank Gehry.10 Also planned are a Performance Arts commodities produced by the few who manage to sell, Centre designed by Zaha Hadid along with a branch of and is destined for the few who are rich enough to buy it; the Louvre, though it appears the French media response art is produced in conditions which are pre-industrial and is one of dismay at the prospect of leasing out the family distributed in conditions where the usual market forces silver from its home in Paris for the new building in the do not apply. To ‘modernise’ the art market will have the Middle East. While this new cultural district turns out to consequence that it will destroy art, but it is obviously not be just part of a larger financial district for Abu Dhabi, in the interests of the art world to do so. Stallabrass what is more remarkable is the way in which the new would argue that this contemporary form of commodity Guggenheim is being compared to its predecessor at fetishism surrounding the artwork ensures an ‘autonomy’ Bilbao. Prior to the Guggenheim, Bilbao was another just that far exceeds the reflections on this subject of both another, small, out-of-the-way city. After the Guggenheim, Greenberg and Adorno in the mid-twentieth century. it became a tourist destination. The same is planned for Abu Dhabi, where undoubtedly tourism and business will work hand in hand. The Guggenheim franchise is therefore symptomatic of these decisions were a result of dialogue, but it seems it globalisation in literally consuming peripheries. While the was internal dialogue only because there was little attempt new museum buildings are fixed to their location, there is at standard lines of explanation via exhibition literature, a category of artist who regularly attends the leading etc. By the standards of the art-world circuit, Dublin is a biennales and fairs and who are extremely mobile. This slightly off-centre location for such an event as all hawaii year sees the grandest of Grand Tours for the art world eNtrées/ luNar reGGae (with all due respect to the efforts entourage: the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, Documenta of IMMA staff to bring this exhibition to Ireland). While it is at Kassel, and the Münster Sculpture Project. Even back possible to read these acts as a symbolic sabotage of the in the 1970s, the critic Peter Fuller had a word for it: art market as a market based on authenticity and unique- BICCA, or Biennale International Club Class Art. ness, the gestures served rather to bemuse in the context However, there is a slightly different category of artist who of a public museum in Dublin which is merely ancillary to not only shows at leading biennales and fairs, where the the art market. media glare is at a premium, but also seeks destinations beyond the established art centres. Since 1998, Rikrit In this respect, I want to follow two contributions to all Tiravanija has held two rice fields in a rural locality in hawaii eNtrées/ luNar reGGae, one by Liam Gillick and Thailand where he and various artist and designer friends the other by Douglas Gordon (Gillick acknowledges have developed projects in which the proportion of water authorship of this particular contribution, while Gordon’s 47 to land mass is maintained at the same level as the human piece is a reworking of an earlier, attributed installation!), body. Another example is Philippe Parreno, who has who are perhaps the best known of these artists in this travelled to a locality in Patagonia to deliver a four-hour part of the world, and whose work has signature features lecture to the inhabitants – a group of penguins. If these often regarded as branding in another guise. The contribu- projects seem reminiscent of Earthworks of the late tions in question are not specific to the IMMA exhibition, 1960s and early ’70s where the principle intention was to but are ongoing aspects of the work of these two artists get away from and attempt to defy the commodification of respectively. The issues are this. Raymonde Moulin art as seen to have assumed primacy in the gallery sys- believes that, where previously artists did not taint their tem, this is definitively not the case. Since the mid-1990s, image with the commerce of art, this has changed. In this, Tiravanija and Parreno have been part of a loose grouping Gillick and Gordon do not deny the nature of their careers of artists (and designers) who have worked collaboratively in the art world.13 Secondly, Julian Stallabrass believes that as well as individually with the gallery as their focal point.11 the high-powered contemporary-art museums are now Not only do these artists collaborate in their art, but several commercialised to the point where the buildings are of them have helped to spearhead a tendency where brands or logos, and the art installed in these museums is artists curate other artists. It is a case of poacher turned merely an accessory to the branding (installation means gamekeeper. taking account of the location).14 These are issues which have beset contemporary art for a long time; it is over the What then are we to make of the arrival in Dublin of past decade that these have intensified. Modern art does Parreno and Co. for all hawaii eNtrées/ luNar reggae, the not perform the same function as architecture; as Stallabrass group show at IMMA between November and February says elsewhere, art is useless, or, its nonfunctional last? The show was co-curated by Parreno (along with function is its appeal outside function. Most crucially, IMMA’s Rachael Thomas), and included Parreno, Gillick and Gordon emerge from an avant-garde tradition Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, and several other where, among the main aims, were the critique of artistic artists in and at the margins of the main grouping of artists and social institutions and resistance to commodity stemming from curator Nicolas Bourriaud and his ‘relational culture. Admittedly this is a redundant appeal to history if aesthetics’ thesis.12 The exhibition was an extravaganza of we accept the Baudrillardian argument of the simulacrum, an installation of flashing lights, signage, and coloured ie society is already aestheticised and therefore the aims tape. The fact that another circus, Fossett’s Circus that is, of the avant-garde, as carried over to a neo- or post- had also decamped in the same grounds of the Royal avant-garde, are illusory. These issues are clear, but the Hospital Kilmainham for the Christmas holiday period was answers are not. probably not lost on the artist-participants. The show, including the catalogue/ book accompanying it, pursued well established forms of engagement by these artists/ curators. In the installation itself, it was often unclear who authored what while the accompanying book of the same title rendered postmodern issues of authorship literal by the blurring of all the contents so that everything therein was nearly illegible which, at 39 euro, might not be regarded as value for money. It must be presumed that For the catalogue/ book accompanying the IMMA show, The Douglas Gordon piece in all hawaii eNtrées/ luNar Gillick, in typically obtuse mode, has included a condensed reGGae I want to highlight is the text which was applied version of an essay on methods of managing production to the ceiling of the entrance to the so-called New in industry. Gillick introduces the essay in a few short Buildings which housed one of the two main sections of paragraphs entitled, “Construction of Nothing” (the text is the exhibition at IMMA. Entitled Above all else, the text, short enough and clear enough to be legible).15 This is the in white against silver ground, read “WE ARE EVIL.” The provisional title of an ongoing project of which he says, starkness of the phrase evokes the Pentecostal fundamen- “A primary motivation remains focused on the potential of talism familiar in this part of the world, and presumably the disordered or spontaneous group once it has been familiar to Gordon because of his upbringing in Scotland. abandoned or disbanded by the society. It attempts to However, this is the inverse of the absolutist, pre-modern look again at the tensions between agency and critical messages that have been crudely and starkly painted on passivity in the face of a return to simple imperialism on hoardings beside roads and churches for many decades. the one hand and the disordered response to the contra- In these signs, evil is invisible; the address to the beholder dictions inherent in trying to identify with the focus of that of the words is the invocation to enter into the realm of imperial drive.” Gillick later repeats himself in slightly the good. “Repent Ye Sinners” is an invocation to the different language with reference to his interest in what individual to become visible in the eyes of God. Gordon 48 happens in post-industrial societies if social collapse reverses this. The positioning of the piece – just beyond occurs. The reprinted essay is so difficult to comprehend the threshold of the door – serves almost like a juvenile (blurred and recalibrated) that recourse to the original is joke on the crossing over into the hallowed ground of necessary.16 The author of the essay, Hans Pruijt, presents a church. But then Gordon’s work is enmeshed in an analysis based on empirical enquiry into models of mass-cultural forms and cinema in particular. For example, management on the shop floor after Taylorism. The issue, Darkness and light (after William Blake), 1997, is a video believe it or not, is the delegation and level of decision- projection which overlaps the films The Song of making allowed where team-working is introduced with Bernadette with The Exorcist, thus creating a ‘third image’ the sole intention of increasing production.17 The inclusion which combines the Devil and the Virgin Mary. Gordon of such a text in the context of this exhibition could be sees these as co-existing quite comfortably in formal and read in a number of ways. One is that is a metaphor for conceptual terms. Morality tales of possession, good decision-making processes in an exhibition where there versus evil, are transmogrified onto celluloid and into are curators who must collaborate with artists and several digital. The body is expunged. Even in the feature-length artists who have already collaborated with one another film, Zidane: a 21st century portrait, 2006, co-directed by both as artists and as curators. Another, more abstract Gordon and Philippe Parreno, where the subject is the reading, is that it is a metaphor for the potential utopia of footballer Zinédine Zidane, the concentration is on the artist collaboration versus the dystopia of modernisation aesthetics created through the filming with high definition and globalisation. However, Gillick situates his work more cameras as contrasted with the blurred qualities of the literally than this. He does theorise his work as an investi- TV screen filmed as the football match is broadcast. gation into post-industrial society. The question as to how Even here, the visceral nature of the sport gives way to seriously one takes the role of art in this respect is the the aesthetics of perception. There is a brief interlude in moot question. Gillick’s work has played on concepts of Zidane where a voice-over relates incidents from the the “relational” and of “equivalences”18 and, as such, his significant to the insignificant that occurred during the thinking seems to follow more closely the writings of the day the filmed football match took place. The sweep is likes of Laclau and Mouffe than classical Marxist thought: comparable to a Gordon exhibition catalogue for MoMA for ‘versus’ Gillick is likely to substitute ‘and’. While Gillick, in New York, which consists largely of full-spread like many artists and critics, is coy about his theoretical photographs bled to the edge of the page. Approximately sources, he seems to seek accommodations with tradi- half is of Gordon’s work, but the other half, when flicked tional oppositions and contradictions as his comment that through like a Douglas Gordon flick book, reads as the Hans Pruijt – who to all intents and purposes operates in iconography of the past half-century.19 Individually, the a different world – offers possibility for “exchange” would photographs record incidents that are see as momentous; suggest. Like all such collaborations, one wonders, on collectively, the photographs are mesmerising – our whose terms? Pamela M Lee’s comments on the ‘autonomy’ collective (Western) histories, as defined through our of the art world looms large here, and serves as a reminder mass media, passing before us. that Gillick’s work is more utopian than he would have us believe – while at the same time, the more explicitly commercial dealings of his work are acknowledged. (below left) 'Evangelical' messages on a tree photo/ courtesy Philip Napier

(below right) Douglas Gordon Above all else, 2006 installation view, Irish Museum of Modern Art courtesy IMMA There is perhaps repetition and memory at play in exhibition could be anywhere. Gillick’s work is a symptom Gordon’s thinking towards all hawaii eNtrées/ luNar of this (he would say, also critique); he locates this as the reggae. A number of his contributions to the catalogue condition of post-industrial society. In so far as all hawaii and to the show refer back to an early residency at IMMA, eNtrées/ luNar reggae is an off-centre exhibition in relation an extended, interrupted stay in the early 1990s in to the art circuit, it is as if a group of post-avant-garde association with four other Scottish artists. This culminated artists, who have the freedom to make certain choices, in a group exhibition in 1992 which, suggestively, was decide to bring news of the globalised condition to a entitled Guilt by association.20 We can take from this that venue where the audience, generally speaking, may not concepts of good and evil already played a part in yet be familiar with the terms of the discussion (patronising Gordon’s practice from the early part of his career. It was as the suggestion might be). in 1991 that the piece, Above all else, was originally installed in the Serpentine Gallery in London. In that installation, the text “WE ARE EVIL” was written in black Where Liam Gillick’s installations look as bland as the against the white ground of the ceiling. This was almost social structures they reference, Douglas Gordon’s work reversed for the IMMA repeat of 2006 – 07, bar the silver most usually uses imagery from mass culture. Where ground. What is more striking though in regard to this Gillick employs discourse to attempt to generate critique, 50 history is the difference as much as the similarities in Gordon aims to use his chosen media to cut through the conception between the two exhibitions. The catalogue for conventions of the symbolic in order to, in Lacanian terms, Guilt by association begins with two overlapping texts, allow the play of ‘the real’ and its traumatic effects.21 one by the artist-critic invited to write a catalogue essay, This discussion has concentrated on the context of the Thomas Lawson, and the other, collectively written by the artwork, but what of the image itself? Dore Bowen, in a artists. Both are self-reflexive. Later, in discussion with discussion of works by several artists who have used Lawson, Gordon explains how the group had come to appropriation as a method, writes, “appropriation involves IMMA via Declan McGonagle who recently had changed staging a confrontation with memory.”22 According to jobs from the Orchard Gallery in Derry to Director of Bowen, Gordon’s 24 hour psycho (1993) involves “third IMMA at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Gordon memory” because the digital manipulation, whereby says, “In the mid/ late 80s the issue of ART in relation to Hitchcock’s Psycho is radically slowed down to extend PLACE in relation to INTERNATIONAL art practice was over approximately 24 hours, is another malleable layer to an engaging focus for any young artist who wanted to the original and to memories of it. Moreover, the memories shift his/ her practice from a provincial forum to an of the context of the original viewing come into play, just international dialogue… Derry was/ is an ancient site as the new work adds further layers. Bowen, developing whose interface with modernism was/ is scant: suddenly Jonathan Crary’s writings, sees the development of digital the Artists, the Armalite, and the Nikon arrived along with imagery as another stage of the Society of the Spectacle23 a whirlwind of postmodern theory. Absolutely a classic… which, through artists and their audiences, has potential Dublin was always going to be difficult in comparison… for resistance not least because digitalisation is so extensive What we decided we wanted to do was to realise work – is part of the endless information flow of globalisation – in Dublin that we could not make elsewhere and that that the image may no longer be separate from the body would change the work we had done elsewhere. I think (separation as the negation of life experience in Debord’s our strength is to indicate, as opposed to highlight, the analysis). This optimistic view of the spectacle as the presumptions and expectations that are relative to any aesthetic seduction of the commodity world can be also context.” While the mediations of the mass media are appropriated for purposes of exposure of its allure as already very present in Gordon’s thinking, ‘place’ is still inauthentic and involves the retrieval of time and history, a concrete thing where concrete relations can be which are lost in the spectacle. This is where Bowen engaged. Yet ‘place’ is the inferior relation to ‘international’. sees the intervention of memory as constructed and The centre/ periphery opposition goads Gordon, its reconstructed in a work such as 24 hour psycho. Just as inequalities are a stark social, cultural, and political issue; she is keen to stress the potential of the digital to exceed but Gordon believes that with the right will art can cross the commodity because it is so extensive and available, the divide between provincial and international through the so she emphasises the physical scale of Gordon’s piece: media, as the Orchard Gallery had demonstrated. By the “The installation consists of a suspended screen, 20 feet time all hawaii eNtrées/ luNar reggae comes along, the wide, set diagonally in the middle of the gallery.” In other nature of the divide has changed. The spatial relations of words, these are not normal viewing conditions; it is “a place envisaged in 1992 have evaporated just as surely public manifestation” rather than a private experience. as in the intervening years the money markets operate in purely digital interactions. In so far as there is no connection with place, except as memory in Gordon’s case, the later Where Bowen is perhaps too anxious to find a positive and comes to see itself. The ghosts of those ideals still line of enquiry in the work she examines, what of other cling to the arts…”26 Yet this is too simple. Or at least it is digital work where spectacle is addressed more directly? too complacent in implying that these ghosts will continue In 2005, Thomas Ruff showed three digital images which to linger. A recent book analysing September 11 and had been appropriated from the internet at the David events since, most particularly the ongoing Iraq war, gives Zwirner Gallery in New York. Ruff changed these images a much more pessimistic view of spectacle and Western merely by blowing them up to the extent that the pixelated society. The book, written by members of a group calling grids are all that can be seen at close quarters and he itself Retort, is entitled Afflicted powers after a line from then printed them. These are images of the Twin Towers John Milton’s Satan in Paradise lost.27 ‘Afflicted powers’ burning before their collapse on September 11. Where refers to both the perpetrators and the target (the Towers Gordon’s appropriations are from mass-media fictions, as symbols at the heart of capitalism and its political Ruff appropriates from the most spectacular event of order) of September 11, and is intended to highlight the recent history but blows up the artificial nature of the afflictions within both sides and how both are involved in medium in the process. Eleanor Heartney gives an account the same process of globalisation. The authors insist the of these appropriations: “Ruff is engaged in an exploration book is written by materialists who wish to revive Debord’s of how mechanically produced images establish and original conception that the spectacle and everyday life, undermine visual meaning.… Abstracted in this way, which have come to be seen separately, indeed need one 51 the scene takes on an almost romantic beauty, bringing another. The authors believe commodification to be total. to mind Turner’s paintings of the Houses of Parliament in They write, “no-one should leap to the conclusion that flames.”24 Heartney believes that the beauty is “incidental” ‘materiality’ in this case equals capitalism, whereas to Ruff’s purpose, which is to point to the artifice of the ‘spectacle’ is a disembodied image-world, or a realm of image. This may seem extraordinary in the circumstances, internalized (impalpable) representations. Spectacle is an that it is the artifice which excites, not the horrific reality exertion of social power. It does violence to human actors of what the images depict. J J Charlesworth25 has referred just as much as does the discipline of the production line.” to “the cold, sceptical empiricism of Thomas Ruff.” Charlesworth’s view can sit alongside Heartney’s “romantic beauty” in so far as the doubleness of spectacle is evoked. On the one hand, there is the precision attributed to Ruff’s training in photographic technique under the Bechers along with the emotion-less detail of his Portraits series, on the other, images he has pulled from the internet which are blurred, imprecise, whether the soft-porn of the Nudes series or the enormity of the September 11 event.

The seemingly absolute nature of Ruff’s Jpegs closes rather than opens discussion. These apparently unmediated images seem to simply re-present what is understood as one of the cataclysmic events in recent Western history, something which strikes at the centre of the West’s self-image of its power. Where the shower sequence of 24 hour psycho is a construct (a fiction) of the individual’s vulnerability, the destruction of the Twin Towers is more of the nature of an attack on Western civilization’s self-image. From an attack on the individual to an attack on the society itself, but both are originally conceived in cinematic terms. It seems there is nothing added to these images which counters Stallabrass’s argument that there is nothing intrinsic to fine art that sets it off as superior in terms of its insights about our world. When Duchamp is said to have redefined art from making things to choosing things, what significance was left to the artist? In the end, Stallabrass believes, we turn to art because we continue to have an expectation that it is indeed special even if, in reality, our expectations of this quality are rarely met. Stallabrass, with reference to Benjamin Buchloh, suggests there is still “a democratic ideal of culture in which the public defines (below) Thomas Ruff jpeg ny01, 2004 C-Print with Diasec courtesy David Zwirner, New York

52 1 Editorial, Artforum, Vol. XX no. 6 119, pp 38 – 41. 14 “If the building which houses the part of a larger phenomenon – (February 1982), p 34 10 Gehry has enthused about the works has become an exceptional the spectacle. The spectacle is, 2 Pamela M. Lee, ‘Boundary issues: unique opportunity offered by the logo…so the museum’s contents while an image, also a symptom the art world under the sign of “possible resource to accomplish” are implicitly branded too, even of the alienation that it seeks to globalism’, Artforum, Nov. 2003, such a building: “‘Approaching by the labelling and interpretative conceal. …Debord repeatedly pp 164 – 167. Lee’s synopsis of the design of the museum for material.” Stallabrass, op cit, pp warns that the spectacle – those the art world is as follows: “the Abu Dhabi made it possible to 145–46 images produced by and for conventional understanding of consider options for design of a 15 all hawaii eNtrées/ luNar capitalist profit – erodes and the term ‘art world’ betrays a building that would not be possible reGGae, Milano: Charta/ Irish feeds on authentic experience. set of prejudices under threat by in the United States or in Museum of Modern Art, pp 88–89 … the spectacle is… ‘affirmation the very global conditions the Europe,’ said Gehry. ‘It was 16 Hans Pruijt, ‘Teams between of appearance and an affirmation contemporary art world seeks to clear from the beginning that Neo-Taylorism and Anti- of all human life, namely social represent. In common parlance, this had to be a new invention. Taylorism’, Economic and life, as mere appearance.’… the ‘art world’ signifies a society The landscape, the opportunity, Industrial Democracy, Vol. 24 separation ‘has become visible.’ of individuals and institutions – the requirement, to build No. 1, pp 77–101 This appearance, this visible a social, cultural, and economic something that people all over 17 It is tempting to point out that form is, however, illusory; it is world organized around the world would come to and the these models of team-working the separation (negation) of life museums, galleries, and the art possible resource to accomplish have been adopted by the Irish experience,” (Bowen, 2006, pp press and the legions of artists, it opened tracks that were not government in order to apply 536–537). critics, collectors, curators, and likely to be considered anywhere them to the public sector, which 24 Eleanor Heartney, ‘Thomas Ruff audiences who have truck with else.’” Posted at www.dezeen.com, of course includes third-level at David Zwirner’, Art in such sites. The image of this 31 January, 2007. education. The reduction of America, June 2005, p 173 53 world is typically one of gala 11 These are the artists associated education to a production line 25 J J Charlesworth, ‘Reality openings and social privilege – with curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s has long been a metaphor with check’, Art monthly, No. 262 at once a specialized community concept of Relational Aesthetics. which to criticise the philistinism (Dec 2002/ Jan 2003), pp 7–9 and the locations that community The two artists discussed here, of successive governments’ 26 Stallabrass, op cit, p. 149 would occupy (the New York art Liam Gillick and Douglas Gordon, attitude to higher education, but 27 Retort (Iain Boal, T J Clark, world, for example, or the gallery in the context of a pretentious increasingly the reality surpasses Joseph Matthews, and Matthew scene in Los Angeles) – and piece of correspondence the metaphor. Watts), 2005, Afflicted powers: decidedly Eurocentric in its between the two which was 18 While the former can be related capital and spectacle in a new orientation.” originally published in 1997, to Bourriaud’s ‘relational age of war, London and New 3 Arthur Danto, ‘The artworld’, make reference to their gallery aesthetics’, the latter is from York: Verso The Journal of philosophy, Vol. affiliations. Gillick says of Gordon Gillick’s recent, on-going series 28 Ibid, p 15 61 No. 19 (1964), pp 571–584 and his work: “what could be of exhibitions and seminars 4 ‘Talk: Rainer Ganahl, Paul described as an aestheticisation around the title ‘Short texts on Mattrick, Raymonde Moulin, Lane of trauma and reassurance has the possibility of creating an Joan Fowler is a lecturer in Relyea, Richard Schiff, Katy been combined with an on-going economy of equivalence’. the Faculty of Fine Art at Siegel’ in Katy Siegel and Paul desire to acknowledge his 19 Douglas Gordon: timeline, New Mattick, eds., Money. London: position as a self-conscious York: Museum of Modern Art, the National College of Art Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp artist working within the specific 2006 and Design, Dublin. 181–193 power structure of the art 20 Guilt by association, exhibition 5 See David Hesmondhalgh, 2002, world.” (Liam Gillick, ‘A catalogue, Dublin: Irish Museum of The Cultural industries, London: Correspondence between Modern Art, 1992, unpaginated. Sage Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick: The artists in the exhibition were 6 See, for example, panel discus- sailing alone around the world’, Christine Borland, Roderick sion moderated by James Meyer, in Liam Gillick Proxemics: selected Buchanan, Douglas Gordon, introduced by Tim Griffin, ‘Global writings (1988–2006), Zurich Kevin Henderson, and Craig tendencies: globalism and the and Dijon: JRP/ Ringier/ Les Richardson. large-scale exhibition’, Artforum, Presses du réel, p 187) 21 Gordon’s best known work Nov. 2003 pp. 153–163, 206 12 The exhibition literature lists remains 24 hour psycho, 1993. 7 Julian Stallabrass, Art the artists Bas Jan Ader, Doug By stretching Hitchcock’s film, Incorporated: the story of Aitken, Carles Congost, Keren Psycho, to 24 hours, the now contemporary art, Oxford: Cytter, Thomas Demand, Peter familiar sequence of the murder Oxford University Press, 2004. Fischli & David Weiss, Liam in the shower is changed. We Like Raymonde Moulin, Gillick, Dominique González- know the original scene but, Stallabrass refers back to Pierre Foerster, Douglas Gordon, by rendering it unfamiliar, it Bourdieu for his structural Carsten Höller, Jim Lambie, becomes possible to experience analysis, rather than to Danto. Sarah Lucas, Jorge Pardo, its shock anew. In this regard, I 8 This is an underdeveloped aspect Phillippe Parreno, Garrett would say that Gordon’s work in of Stallabrass’s thesis. The con- Phelan, Paola Pivi, Eva general achieves mixed success. temporary university in the UK, Rothschild, Anri Sala, Rirkrit 22 Dore Bowen, ‘Imagine there’s no Stallabrass’s habitat, but more Tiravanija, and Cerith Wyn Evans. image (it’s easy if you try): particularly at present the Irish Others, who in one way or appropriation in the age of digital university, is more subject to the another contributed, are also reproduction’, in Amelia Jones, model of the private sector than listed. The exhibition title is ed., A Companion to contempo- it is to the traditional university explained as an anagram in rary art since 1945, Malden, MA ethos of the development of English and Irish for ‘New and Oxford: Blackwell 2006, pp knowledge for its own sake. Galleries’, the building in which 534–556 9 The new art fair in Dublin, Art one section is installed. Some of 23 Guy Debord’s hugely influential 07, took place in May as part of the literature also has a full-stop Society of the spectacle, first Interior Design 07. See Peter at the start of the title: “.all published in 1967. Bowen FitzGerald’s interview with the hawaii eNtrées/ luNar reggae.” explains Debord’s spectacle thus: organiser, Helen Mason, in Circa 13 Ibid “For Debord the reified image is c . Jason McCaffrey

54 letter from vancouver

Pavel Pepperstein 2037, 2006 water color, ink on paper 30 x 40 cm courtesy Galerie Kamm / Contemporary Art Gallery Travelling west towards Downtown from Commercial Drive and media based art. Simon Starling gave a talk there last where I’m based, the No. 20 bus follows Hastings Street month to coincide with the opening of his film projection on a route which borders the industrialised area of the and projector construction Wilhelm Noack oHG; this work docklands to the north and Chinatown/ Strathcona to was shown in conjunction with a film from the 1930s by the south. This route goes right through one of the most László Moholy-Nagy. notorious neighbourhoods in North America, and Canada’s poorest, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Established galleries and artist-run spaces in the city Crack dealing, prostitution, and people shooting up on cover a wide geographic area with clusters of activity here the street are all out in the open here, alongside chronic and there. Catriona Jeffries Gallery on East 1st Avenue is homelessness, and the ubiquitous men with shopping showing new work by Northern British Columbian artist trolleys full of their sole possessions wandering aimlessly. Brian Jungen, best known internationally for creating Huge numbers of people live on the margins of society works which bridge Native and consumer culture, such as here, leaving the impression that they have been corralled Prototypes for new understanding, a series of First into this place to do as they please, in order that they Nations ceremonial masks made from disassembled and don’t spread to the more sanitised and salubrious areas re-stitched Nike running shoes. Jungen’s latest offering is of the city. The Downtown Eastside stands in stark an installation concerned with Native land rights, and land contrast to the Vancouver’s image as a safe, clean, if a bit use in particular. Meanwhile, Downtown Vancouver’s 55 bland city. Contemporary Art Gallery is hosting new work by the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein called Landscapes of The 100 block on West Hastings Street marks the transi- future. Pepperstein’s surreal imaginings of an abstract tion from urban squalor to expensive, high-rise real estate. future allow for a free mixing of the abstract and the Alight from the bus a few blocks west of here and you are figurative in which lakes fly or trees bear planets as their surrounded by the polished steel and glass skyscrapers of fruit. The playful and poetic nature of these images could Vancouver’s downtown core. Stan Douglas photographed also be read as portents of ecological or nuclear disaster. this section of the street in 2001, and made a composite photograph, Every building on 100 West Hastings. The absurd possibilities for the future which Pepperstein Douglas side-stepped the human element and focused illustrates are warnings which seem to poke fun at the specifically on the material and architectural signifiers of current scare over impending disaster due to global deprivation. The unpopulated night time image is a slick, warming. But the evidence that nobody can predict the 16-foot-long panoramic view of the south side of the future is written in Vancouver’s changing space. The now block. The Downtown Eastside once housed a number of desolate Downtown Eastside was once the city’s main small galleries, artist-run spaces, and studios, typical of shopping area, and if we go back further, over 120 years any poor area with cheap rents and rundown buildings ago this major city was a temperate rainforest. with studio space. Most artists have left now as the area’s problems worsened and the area steadily declined during Jason McCaffrey is in the nineties. In Douglas’ photograph, the only businesses Vancouver working on a evident are pawnshops and convenience stores; this is new series of paintings. still true today, and if anything the street has gotten bleaker. Incidentally, this is the area where Robert Pickton, a pig farmer who currently stands trial as a serial killer, picked up his victims – women working in the sex trade.

Douglas and fellow Vancouverites Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden and Ian Wallace, are some of the main proponents of what has been dubbed the ‘Vancouver school’ of photo-conceptual art. Preceding this celebrated generation, Fred Herzog, a newly arrived immigrant from Germany, documented the city’s life for forty years or so from the mid-fifties onward. Herzog’s early photographs show a city whose strangeness and newness could only have been captured by the lens of an intrigued foreigner. Herzog’s work is currently the subject of a major retro- spective at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Across the Burrard Inlet on the side of the city with the highest incomes in Canada, the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver is a space which is given over to photography

c . Reviews 57 Belfast joanna karolini the bath is hot Slavka Sverakova 69 | julie westerman thinly veiled and barely there David Hughes 78 | Cork embodied time: art video, 1970 to the present Paul O’Brien 61 | Dublin thomas demand Gemma Tipton 75 | Séamus Nolan Hotel Ballymun Fergal Gaynor 80 | the first antechamber Tim Stott 89 | tacita dean Declan Long 92 | David Sherry Regulations for irrational procedures Chris Fite- Wassilak 98 | Kilkenny david phillips and paul rowley gravity loop Eimear McKeith 72 | Limerick seán lynch retrieval unit Karen Normoyle 66 | ev +a 2007 Fergal Gaynor 94 | London Brian Hand A decision to love Isobel Harbison 64 | New York Armory Gemma Tipton 58 | Paris Samuel Beckett Judith Wilkinson 86 | Portadown rita duffy and paul muldoon cuchulain comforted and cloth — two visual and verbal

collaborations David Hughes 102 | Tasmania An other place Maria Kunda 83 | c .

(background) Maria Fusco For we are where we are not: or Finnegan Begin Again? (detail), 2007 photo Nina Canell courtesy Project c . Gemma Tipton Pier 94, New York February 2007

58 Armory

The Armory Show, 2007 interior shot photo David Willems courtesy Armory These days, contemporary art seems the artworld (be they collectors or natively as intense hothouses of the to exist in dual worlds, running along curators), artists now tend to consider art market cannot be ignored. parallel lines. Alongside site specific, them in a more positive way.”2 Armory Director Katelijne De Backer engaged, time-based, anti-institutional, sees the fair as having a democratic anti-art performance and a whole Positive or not, one thing that the role; “we have effectively become variety of experimental practices, there hype around extraordinary prices for the bridge between the gallery and is also the world of the market, the contemporary art (made mainly at the mainstream public,” she says.5 auction house, the art fair. It seems auction) has achieved is attracting So did Armory 2007 feel like being easy, initially, to dismiss this world as more people – from buyers to present at a democratic meeting one of hype, record figures, inflated collectors – into the market. Two place for gallery and public, or at an sums. Talk persists of a ‘bubble’, of recent books, Owning art and overheating arms race? The answer a collapse in the contemporary art Collecting contemporary, offer to is – a bit of both. Attention-grabbing market, and as it does, there is a help you “navigate the art market like ‘shock’ tactics from some galleries strong sense that to many this would a pro.”3 Owning art, which was suffered by becoming the norm rather be a welcome development, the supported by the Arts Council of than the exception, with a variety of chance for art to return to more England, describes a world in which work that made you feel like you had sound ideological roots, a chance to it seems that if you donate enough wandered into a soft-porn or fetish 59 cut a few ‘star’ dealers down to size. money and buy enough art, artists convention. There was also Social This sense of cultural superiority will speak to you, and you will be mirror, the ‘gesture’ by Mierle adopted by one ‘half’ of the art world invited to dinner parties. It does, Laderman Ukeles, presented by over the other ignores two crucial however, include the refreshing Ronald Feldman Gallery, which saw facts: one is that the world of insight into the world of the art fair a twelve-ton garbage truck covered ‘ideologically sound’ practices (from from Gavin Brown, from Gavin in mirrors and which, in the context engaged to anti-art) also turns on Brown’s Enterprise in New York; “It’s of Armory, raised some unflattering money (in the form of grants, like an arms race – I want to stop thoughts about the value and quality foundations, museum and institutional doing art fairs, but at the same time of what was around it. This is unfair support); and that the more overtly stepping out of them unilaterally to the fair, however, as works that lucre-driven world of the art fair is would cause me great anxiety.”4 demanded your attention, due to a steadily and surely adding to private more considered depth and quality, collections, and from them is feeding Collecting contemporary is more were able to hold it for longer, and into museum collections, and thus interesting, consisting of a series of there were so many of these, is becoming the official history of interviews with all the major art world including particularly a wonderful contemporary art. players: critics, dealers, consultants, Anish Kapoor at Gladstone Gallery, collectors, auction house experts and two Michal Rovner works at Pace. With 50,000 visitors during its four and museum directors and curators; Nonetheless, concerns about the days, and a reported $82 million (60 all the players, excluding, interestingly effect of so much money on the million approx) in sales, this year’s enough, artists. In the world described world of contemporary art persist. In Armory Show was an undoubted by Collecting contemporary’s an interview with the Financial times, commercial and public success. interviewees, to buy the work of very Iwan Wirth, from Hauser and Wirth, Can the art world sustain such sales famous artists from the ‘best’ New has an interesting take on things: figures, and what do artists think of York and London galleries, you need “‘It’s such a beautifully unregulated them? Six further fairs also ran to have either a significant and market,’ he sighs, as if the entire art alongside Armory in New York: respected collection, or you need to world were some particularly fine The Art Show of ADAA (Art Dealers promise to donate the work to a major object. ‘The whole system works Association of America), Pulse, museum. This proviso underlines the with tools that would be illegal in any DiVA, RED DOT Fair, Scope New importance of the market to the other market – fixing prices, having York, and LA Art.1 Pulse Director future history of contemporary art: a cartel. The art market needs that. Helen Allen describes the climate: if, in order to purchase a significant I really enjoy being in a market where “The landscape of the art market has work of art, you need to promise it to one can be a real entrepreneur. And changed in the past few years. a museum, and if the world’s major who knows for how much longer?’”vi Traditionally artists used to hate art collections are due to either become In this “beautifully unregulated market,” fairs and stayed away from them, but museums themselves (the Rubell the real enemies are perceived to be now that many galleries are making Collection), be a “lending library for the auction houses, who sell work the majority of their sales at art fairs museums” (Eli Broad), or become a (obviously) to the highest bidder, and that they have become such an future bequest to a museum, then regardless of what that might do to important platform for all involved in the art fairs as microcosms, or alter- the future career of the artist. Auctions are treated as a not- queue in snowy conditions to see 1 Irish galleries in New York: always-necessary evil by the primary what was on show, but too often it The Kerlin were at Armory, and Rubicon were at Pulse galleries, and the practice of ‘flipping’, was submerged in the stronger 2 Helen Allen, in e-mail whereby a work is purchased, and sense of market forces, growing ever conversation with the author, then turned over almost immediately stronger, drowning out the love. 22 March 2007 3 Louisa Buck and J Greer, to auction, can be enough to get a Owning art: the contemporary collector blacklisted. Armory founder art collector’s handbook, Paul Morris notes that “Armory only Cultureshock, London, 2006; Adam Lindemann, Collecting includes primary market dealers contemporary, Taschen, and we encourage dealers to bring Cologne, 2006; quotation new works by the artist that they taken from back cover of Collecting contemporary. represent.” He also says that “if you 4 Owning art, op cit, p 134 support an artist economically then 5 Katelijne de Backer, in e-mail you are being supportive to conversation with the author, artists.”vii Quite how the art fairs will 9 April 2007 deal with auction house Christie’s, 60 which announced on 25 February, and therefore during Armory’s run, that it had acquired Armory exhibitor the Haunch of Venison Gallery and which has plans to open a New York branch, remains to be seen. Pulse New York Gemma Tipton is a 69th Regiment Armory, writer and critic on art Against the fevered commercialism New York and architecture based of Armory and its satellite fairs, in Dublin. 22–25 February 2007 PS1 provided something of an antidote in Not for sale. All the Not for sale works in the exhibition came direct PS1, Long Island City, New from the artists, brought together on York the basis that they were not for sale. 11 February – 30 April The reasons for this were varied. 2007 Byron Kim said of his Untitled, 2003, “The painting is not for sale because I could not devise a context in which it would rise to the level of art,” while Eric Fishl’s Untitled, 2001, is not for sale because “every once in a while I make a work that reveals (to myself) a tenderness, a simple expression of love, I did not think I was capable of making.” There was a stunning piece, Cortes, 1988, by Julian Schnabel, and a beautiful Janine Antoni, Sigh, 2003, poignantly unsaleable because the materials used make it an ephemeral piece. In the case of Alex Katz, Kate, 2005, was not for sale because “I have nothing left to replace it with,” while other artists told stories of tracking down works they regretted selling in order to buy them back. A sense of love pervaded Not for sale, a sense of love of art. There was a similar sense at Armory, especially from the members of the public who endured a seven-block c . Paul O’Brien Lewis Glucksman Gallery, December 2006 – Cork February 2007

embodied time: art video, 1970 61 to the present That jewel on the Lee, the Glucksman Gallery, hosted an impressive retrospective of interna- tional video art ranging from the 1970s to the present, though with the emphasis on earlier work. Accessible both on conventional monitors and through video projection, the exhibition was a nostalgic experience for those who remember the infancy of this art form, and an eye-opener for others. The problem with video art, now as in its earliest days, is that you need to dedicate time to absorb it – the whole show easily took up the best part of a day to view, and even then there were bits I didn’t get to see. Fortunately, the Glucksman is such a user-friendly environment that what might, under other circumstances, have been something of a chore turned into a pleasure.

Bill Spinhoven It's about time (detail), 1988 interactive installation and Kevin Atherton In two minds (detail), 1978–2006 video installation courtesy Lewis Glucksman Gallery Kevin Atherton’s installation, In two one of his characters claimed, with with mirrors; or perhaps the Lacanian minds, where he engages in a video- the aid of a system of mirrors, to be deconstruction of subjectivity in the altercation with his (much) younger able to see himself as he was in the famous/notorious essay The mirror self – the latter projected on the distant past, a youth of unparalleled phase. Or maybe both. opposite wall from the more recent beauty.) image of the artist – evoked much Other work represented in the show comment from visitors. “It’s very Nam June Paik’s Global groove, included Lynda Benglis’ deconstruc- weird” was the considered response a kaleidoscopic mixture of TV sound tion of the dynamics of subjectivity of a young female visitor and indeed and visuals, anticipates a future and film-making in her piece Now, it is, evoking science-fictional notions (more or less our present) when, he Franziska Megert’s examination of of time-travel (Gregory Benford’s believed, one would be able to youth and age in Arachne – Vanitas, novel Timescape, the film Back to switch to any TV station in the world. Gine Pane’s piece exploring self- the future) as well as, perhaps, He mused that in the future – rapidly mutilation, Ulrike Rosenbach’s foray Beckett’s Krapp’s last tape. The writ- becoming our reality – TV guides into questions of female identity, and ings of Jorge Luís Borges also came would be as fat as the Manhattan Tony Sinden’s Muybridge-influenced to mind. The self-reflexive (solipsistic?) phone book (and, as it turned out, video work. The show also featured 62 discussion focuses on the nature of just about as interesting). work of Marinus Boezem, Peter technology, the audience and the Bogers, Nan Hoover, Joan Jonas, Urs gallery, but ultimately, in quintessential Included also were examples of Luethi, Gina Paine, and Arnulf Rainer. postmodern fashion, folds in on itself the collaborative work of Marina – the older Atherton engaging in a Abramovich and Ulay (F. Uwe The Glucksman retrospective bizarre quasi-Freudian put-down of Laysipen). (The two worked between recalls video artists, over a period the presumptions of his younger self. 1976 and 1989.) In the famous of several decades, playing with Imponderabilia piece, the artists some fundamental psychological, Also in the show was Vito Acconci’s stood naked in the entrance of a philosophical and political issues memorable Face-off, wherein the museum in Bologna. Intending that are as relevant today as they artist desperately tries to shout entrants to the museum had to were in the seventies. The video down the previously-recorded revela- squeeze between the two nude pieces – with what now appears, tions of his own sexual life. (There is performers, evoking disturbing in many cases, to be very basic a parallel with Atherton’s dialogue issues of gender, tactility and sexual technology – open up questions with his earlier self, though in the politics which were recorded by a about the superficially unproblematic case of Acconci it involves repression hidden video camera. (Evidently notions of time, identity, relationship, rather than put-down.) We are all unimpressed by the theoretical reality. The technology has come familiar with those embarrassing dimension, the police stopped the on a lot since those early days. memories that suddenly come to original performance half-way The life-questions remain. mind about things we did or said in through). The disturbing AAA-AAA records a duel of voices between the past – the more you try to get rid Paul O’Brien of them, the more they won’t go the two artists, a dual primal scream ([email protected]) teaches away… Acconci verbalizes, videos that magnifies, perhaps, issues of at the National College of and exhibits these cringe-making domination that occur in more or Art and Design, Dublin. occurrences. less all human relationships. Abramovich’s Freeing the voice (clockwise from top left) Bill Spinhoven’s interactive piece, explores the dynamics of screaming Bill Spinhoven I / eye, 1993 It’s about time, reminiscent of some and the relationship between sound monitor, camera, computer courtesy Netherlands Media of the VR work of Myron Kruger, and the body that produces it. Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA/ plays with notions of delayed action Lewis Glucksman Gallery and the relativity of time – you can Dan Graham’s Audience/ performer/ Tony Sinden Behold , 1974 see yourself not as you are, but as mirror involves a microscopic, quasi- video installation (detail) you were (several seconds) in the Sartrean examination of the minutiae courtesy Lewis Glucksman Gallery past. Of course, since light takes of human actions and responses that Marina Abramovich Freeing time to travel from one point to normally remain uncommented-on. the voice, 1976, video – installation shot, courtesy Lewis Glucksman another, everything we see is in a Through the use of an actual mirror Gallery sense in the past, but the Spinhoven and the revelation of language and Nam June Paik Global groove, piece exaggerates and emphasizes gesture as mirroring phenomena, 1973, single-channel video this fact of science. (Flann O’Brien the work evokes the Hindu notion of 29:00 min, courtesy Netherlands had some fun with the concept – ‘Indra’s net’, the world as a game Media Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA/ Lewis Glucksman 63 c . Isobel Harbison Stephen Lawrence January – February Gallery 2007 London

64 Brian Hand A decision to love I like the idea of a ‘leap’ into about her death are presented to the installation, perhaps referring research, like Klein’s Leap into the through contemporary photography to Sylvia Plath’s struggles for void – not knowing where it’s going and film; the nature of (conflicting) women, and indeed for herself. to go but trusting that the journey information is thus laid open, and the Mary Poppins is referenced through itself will be worth it. Simon Starling subject of Utopia is then broached. the umbrella, the balloons and the aforementioned photograph. In a If creating a research-based artwork Two photographed letters reveal video, all elements of the installation is like taking a leap into a void then Davison’s history of hunger striking collide; a young girl recites the what, if anything, does the artist and self-harm, from the perspectives Poppins’ saga while flicking through present when he or she lands? of her prison authorities. As if blank bound pages; texts type up Outside this exhibition’s entrance, presented with photographs of our accounts of Davison’s death spliced black balloons float together, filling ancestors’ backs, Hand hedges between archive and contemporary the gap between mourning and towards presenting a duplicitous footage of the Derby. As the video celebration. The installation takes portrait, only prevented by his use of begins, a man’s voice distinguishes shape in a small space in the photography. The representation of three types of Utopia: the imaginary University of Greenwich, where three letters through contemporary Utopia, the capitalist Utopia, and doors lead elsewhere, similar to the photography is essentially an image finally the third and real Utopia, 65 work’s intentions. of an image, and the reader must created from a forced rather than question at what point the truth free imagination. If Hand’s intention Where the work began is not clear; began or ended. Similarly, a black- was to align Davison’s struggle with what is clear is Brian Hand’s intention and-white film projected by a a particular version of Utopia, then to distort a linear reading of his Steinbeck, stating that Davison’s to what gain was his thorough research. Green, white and purple, suicide motivation was “to draw investigation of means of communi- a suffragette tricolour is painted attention to the votes for women cating ‘information’? across two of the gallery’s four walls. movement,” is presented in a colour Two bell-jars sit in font of the green photograph. Film reels stacked on Research often encourages one section, upon which text is laid. top and around the projector show particular conclusion; research- A video monitor sits before the white information as object. In this context, based art, however, denies this section, and on the purple section is the legitimacy of the colour impulse, this search for conclusive a traced outline of ladies bearing photograph is also brought into evidence, winking at a poststructural flags and marching (Delacroix-style) question, as merely an updated multiplicity. Hand’s careful use of in rags and gowns amongst men. means of conveying ‘information’. Davison’s history as a device to A revolution, it would seem. On a explore the communication of flanking wall hang two photographs Vinyl texts applied to the gallery’s information is undermined by his of letters, one dated 1913, the other surfaces reveal several attitudes intended communication of 1912. Above these, black balloons of Davison, simultaneously. On the Davison’s forced Utopianism. elevate a black umbrella. On another green wall, Davison recounts an Although A Decision to love wall is an image of a Steinbeck assault that she made on Churchill expands across various forms and projector projecting a caption from on a train, listing a torrent of exple- themes, the installation is almost too a black-and-white film reel. Vinyl lines tives she wished had accompanied conclusive and leaves too few voids of poetry are applied directly to the event. Humorous and resigned, into which the viewer may jump. architectural features. In a doorway the account differs in sentiment to the lines of poetry divided between hangs a small photograph of Mary Isobel Harbison is Poppins’ infamous residence. All the room’s three steps beginning, currently studying for around us information looms; its “ceaseless struggle stifle doubt and an MFA in Curating at sources, however, seem to differ. fear until I cry.” The incapacity of a Goldsmiths College singular text to represent a split London and is a regular Emily Davison, a multiple offender/ perspective at any given moment is contributor to Untitled defender of the suffragette movement, well illustrated through its architec- magazine. was killed on the track of the 1913 tural division, on different surfaces at (opposite) Derby as she tried to pin a purple either side of this room. Brian Hand rosette to the king’s racing horse. A decision to love, 2007 Davison is the installation’s currency: Hand references other figures and installation shot courtesy the artist superficially invisible yet universally ideas associable with Davison, invested. Old letters and films presumably to stretch the work. Two providing conflicting information bell-jars are an ambiguous addition c . Karen Normoyle Limerick City Gallery February – March 2007 of Art Limerick

66

seán lynch retrieval unit

(above) Seán Lynch Retrieval unit, 2007 installation shot courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art “Examining the record of past the statue of former American the nuns. Lynch’s recreation of one research from the vantage of president Bill Clinton in Ballybunion of Beuys’ sculptures made during contemporary historiography, the in 2005. Lynch retains a sense of his visit, Irish energies, consisting historian of science may be tempted lightness and satire in this work by of butter sandwiched between two to exclaim that when the paradigms quoting a newspaper headline peat briquettes, pays fitting homage change, the world itself changes declaring, “one of the president’s to the conceptual artist and, more with them.”1 So too Seán Lynch’s balls is missing!” critically, his view of quaint Ireland. solo exhibition, Retrieval unit, in the Finding Richard Long (2006) Limerick City Gallery changes the A keen interest in the absurd is likewise pursues the existence of paradigms of historical inclusion and coupled with a prosaic humour work made during that artist’s visit omission. More than an eclectic throughout the exhibition. Dear JJ, to Ireland in the mid-seventies. Like collection of historical oddities of I read with interest is a letter penned Long’s process of walking through local and national cultural and social by Lynch in response to a letter in the landscape and subtly altering it, significance, Lynch revives the the Irish Times in 1986 alluding to Lynch retraces the journey of both fast-fading art of storytelling. A good a strange monument to Flann Beuys and Long in Ireland and 67 story is one which, although perhaps O’Brien’s novel The Third re-activates their works. based on an historical event, is by policeman. The monument, a bicycle no means bound by the historical erected on the top of Carrauntoohill, All the works so far have been limitations of truth and fact; and in seemed a fitting tribute. The photo- occupied in exploring the veritable Retrieval unit it becomes increasingly graphs exhibited alongside the history behind the myth. Latoon difficult to separate where the story letters reveal the failed attempt to (2006) is a work that demonstrates begins and the history ends. The recover the lost work. Further how myth can alter the course of exhibition is informed by Lynch’s exploring tributes to Irish talent, history. This DVD projection features background as both a visual artist Lynch also uncovers Dana’s return to folklorist Eddie Lenihan as he and an art historian, as historical Irish soil after her Eurovision victory recounts his efforts to save a research reveals the discrepancies in 1970. Almost farcically, one ‘special bush’ from being cleared in behind the stories and “the foot- photograph shows the plane bearing the construction of a bypass in notes that tend to get lost."2 This the banner “Operation Dana County Clare. Lenihan is captivating simultaneity of fact and fiction, the Eurovision 70,” though nothing hints in his account of the local lore real and the surreal, is consequently at the extent of the hype surrounding surrounding the Lantoon fairy bush the show’s appeal. Dana’s win, which eventually led to where the fairies of Munster and rioting in Derry. Connacht fought their provincial From the peripheries of cultural, battles. That the local county council social and historical significance, Significant cultural markers are eventually re-routed the road around Lynch draws together various unveiled in terms of retracing artists’ the whitethorn bush proves the fragmented and dislocated markers practice in the locale. Greeting the power of the story, whilst simultane- in an attempt to counter the “cultural viewer entering the Gallery is Joseph ously highlighting the decline of a amnesia” facing our current society.3 Beuys standing casually in the door- rural community and the vivid art of Derelict fragments of a decorative way. This photograph documents the story telling. Latoon displays how frieze from a late-nineteenth-century lecture given by Beuys in what was history, lore and myth combine to pub are temporarily re-housed in the Carnegie Library in 1974. Here make a valuable moment, one worth the Gallery. Both statues, Daniel the boundaries between fact and remembering. O’Connell and Erin weeping on her fiction dissolve. Caroline Tisdall, in stringless harp, lie immobile and a book on Beuys published fourteen impotent in their new environment. years later, noted that the lecture The Irish house (1870 – 2007)4 lays was given to a pitiful audience bare the question of what to do with consisting of two nuns and a passer- these fragments of history; their by, which prompted Beuys to say original function removed, they “Why have you dragged me off to become fragile and crumble in their the ends of the earth? Fame in the abstracted state. Yet another art world only extends so far!” While abstract fragment is presented in it does make for a good story, in a the bronze golf ball, mysteriously letter from the organiser of the talk, recovered after being removed from Oliver Dowling remembered a very lively discussion in Limerick – minus Similar to this work are the those upon.” Retrieval unit is informed by 1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure that, at first, seem to hold more a thoroughly catholic process in of scientific revolutions, p 111 2 Seán Lynch in conversation regional historical interest. However, which Lynch gathers the seemingly with Mike Fitzpatrick, Retrieval while these works are grounded in insignificant events that have been unit catalogue, 2007, p 2 Limerick, they are indicative of omitted, overlooked and forgotten 3 Retrieval unit press release, 2007 development and change on a in the formation of a history. These 4 The dates refer to the those of national level. The archival historical markers are given a new the original building and of photograph depicting the site where history by Lynch, and like the surreal, Lynch’s piece. 5 Author’s note to Flann the City Gallery would be built cyclical nature of Flann O’Brien’s O’Brien’s The Third policeman, attests to the growth and develop- novel, “it was again the beginning of 1940 ment of the city and the rapidly the unfinished, the re-discovery of changing cityscape, post-Celtic tiger. the familiar, the re-experience of the Designs from J Hodkinson and already suffered, the fresh-forgetting Sons, an ecclesiastical decorating of the unremembered.”5 Karen Normoyle is an art historian and visual arts firm based in Limerick since 1852, writer. become significant in light of the 68 decline in numbers of churchgoers nationwide, and the closure and sale of many of these churches. Against this, archival footage on the closure and attempted demolition of the Ranks flour mill in Limerick juxtaposes the resilience of the unsightly buildings with the gentle resilience of the Ranks workers in Dublin.

Lynch’s exhibition lays bare Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous statement that “history is the version of past events (opposite) that people have decided to agree Seán Lynch Retrieval unit, 2007 installation shot courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art

. c . Slavka Sverakova Catalyst Arts February – March 2007 Belfast

“The bath is hot” is a Polish idiom equivalent to “being in hot water.” It is a trespass of a norm. Joanna Karolini placed a fully functioning sauna (outside surface made from recycled wood) in Catalyst Arts, with the intention to alter a habitual attitude towards art galleries – ie, it is elitist, it is not for me. A sauna in a gallery is an anxious object; it has an ambiguous status, which means that the art can at any moment cease to be art, a shift against which joanna karolini art has no power to object. 69 the bath is hot

(below) Joanna Karolini Drinking the waters, 2006 (Kilcullen’s Seaweed Baths) colour photograph 100 x 60 cm (approx) courtesy the artist The two hundred or so visitors to the Kilcullen Seaweed Baths, Victoria sauna left no clear answer beyond Baths, Manchester, and the Bath their enjoyment of free cleansing and House in Enniscrone. By this she fun, ie, they valued the experience. forged an analogy between video They commented on a “luxurious and photography as art and the moment,” they felt “relaxed and sauna as art. healthy,” they felt “different” on leaving the art gallery, and they hoped that The ‘hut’ has been famously the sauna would make Karolini a emancipated as an art object by “popular artist.” I have no difficulty Tracey Emin: The Last thing I said to in thinking of their responses as you is don’t leave me here (1999) signalling aesthetic experiences, but defined her art as confessional. The I am unsure whether the experiences winner of the 2005 Turner Prize, altered their views of art. Simon Starling, called his Shed- boat-shed a physical manifestation The imposed assumption that the of thought process. The straw walls 70 (below & opposite top) Joanna Karolini sauna-in-art-gallery will both enclose and plastic roof of Glenn Loughran’s Sauna (interior & exterior), and process the participants, and Hedge school (2006) housed the 2007 built with the help of Lawrence thus evoke a unique configuration engaged community for eight weeks Street Workshop, 2.4 x 2.4 x 2.2 of sensual perceptions, connects (www.hedgeschoolproject.com). metres, built in 20 sections, Karolini’s art practice to a theory flatpack; outside: recycled The proposal that creative freedom pallets; inside: ceiling – worked out by Marshall McLuhan in Canadian cedar, his Counter blast (p. 41). Forcing is a worthwhile public value, in the walls – spruce, benches – to the surface of consciousness way in which art evokes a constant Obecia, frame – white wood; emergency for the senses, is worth insulation: Kingspan; stove: some silent structural rules of art, household oil-heater; combustion by extending a particular sense, is repeating. It seems to be proposing chamber; barrel to hold granite expected to alter the way people “Live Art, Love Life.” Karolini’s taking stones around combustion on the non-fictional character of the chamber; enjoyed best at 90 perceive the world. degrees Celsius; courtesy the Karolini could have installed the sauna is ambitious because it calls artist sauna on its own in a rehearsal of both for skills she has to learn and Duchamp’s Fountain. Her intention for courage to present it as art. It is (below right) Joanna Karolini to change the configuration of interesting as it connects to Plato Seaweed sea, 2007 sensual perceptions would have (ideas – objects – representation of DVD still (Kilcullen’s Seaweed justified that. Her opposition to objects), to Aristotle (kallos kai Baths), continous loop; courtesy agathos; cleansing – catharsis) and the artist disinterested art forbade it. Instead, (opposite below) she chose a softer approach, to anti-norm processes in art. It is Sauna (interior), 2007 installing two videos and several dangerous because it has the power courtesy the artist images scanned from her films and to alienate the public while being some digital photographs taken in publicly funded. Karolini offers a ground for reflection: we know what is worth having, but we don’t always feel its importance. By stealth, through sensual pleasure, she confirms that it is impossible to establish once for all what is, or is not, art (see, eg, Mukarovsky, 1936).

Slavka Sverakova is a 71 writer on art.

(below) Joanna Karolini Coathangers, 2004 Victoria Baths, Manchester, photograph, 90 x 55 cm (approx); courtesy the artist c . Eimear McKeith Butler Gallery March – April 2007 Kilkenny

david phillips and paul rowley gravity loop 72 the last two of which were made for At Kilkenny, Gravity loop is shown as this exhibition. While thematically single projection; however, according linked, they are each notably, and to the artists, it can be displayed in refreshingly, distinct in terms of the many different configurations, means, form and content. depending on the space in which it is installed. Thus the work is This exhibition demonstrates how the reconfigured and re-imagined with collaborative nature of their work each installation. stretches much further than the mere fact that they work together. Indeed, The idea of the ever-recreating work it could be seen as forming the basis is also reflected in Sleep no more. of their practice as a whole. Two parallel DVD players project Collaboration with musicians, animated images of tumbling and composers and actors is important, leaping figures onto the wall beside but there is also collaboration each other. The source is a found between sound, image and move- 1960s educational video, Trampoline ment, between the medium and the fundamentals. The DVD players have 73 content, between technology and been programmed so that the (opposite) aesthetics, and between formal images and accompanying musical David Phillips and Paul Rowley Sleep no more, 2007 rigour and the invasion of chance. sounds are selected at random, two-channel audio/ video There is also a collaboration of ideas according to patterns in gene installation, infinite loop – an interaction of concepts from reproduction. When beside each © the artists courtesy Butler Gallery science, sociology, visual culture other, an infinite and unique series of and history – and the use of found pairings is created: the ever-changing material from seemingly unrelated colours, sounds and leaping forms sources to engender open-ended, collaborate to create a continuously chance associations and outcomes. new work. Thus Phillips and Rowley have utilised both the order of our The very title of the five-minute genetic coding and the chance pairing installation Gravity loop exemplifies that is at the very core of our being. this ‘collaboration’: in space, gravity creates the orbits of the solar system Some Americans is starkly different – the pull towards the centre and in tone and format. This work is as the ever-revolving loop that ensures much about interference as collabo- balance within the universe. ration. It is an intense onslaught on Since they began working together the senses, comprising five TV Using a single image of an eggshell- in 1998, Memphis-born David Phillips screens displaying flickering multi- blue cuckoo clock hanging on a wall and Dublin-born Paul Rowley have coloured horizontal lines, with five of the same colour, Phillips and been creating powerful, immersive accompanying speakers emitting Rowley have attempted to create installations that push the limits of loud, droning noises. The images a filmic equivalent of a concept film technology and digital editing were generated using oscillators, suggested within theoretical physics tools to new, creative ends. Their which transferred sound waves from that time does not form a continuum, work straddles the boundaries of Some Americans, an album reflecting but that there are gaps in time. visual art and experimental film, on the post-9/ 11 state of the US, Gravity loop thus forms a rapid as evidenced by the fact that it is into their visual equivalent. As the sequence of multiple flipping images shown in both art galleries and at viewer walks around the space, the that divide the screen and split the film festivals. eerie sounds from the speakers cuckoo clock up into abstract frag- seem to interfere with each other, Gravity loop is the New York-based ments. Interacting with the flickering creating a sense of aural disorienta- artists’ first major exhibition in screen and fractured images is a tion. The unpleasant experience of Ireland since the Glen Dimplex repetitive staccato score, composed this installation subliminally raises award exhibition at IMMA in 2000. and played by pianist Emily Manzo. unnerving questions about It features four key works from recent In this looped film, time is no longer international politics and the degree years: Some Americans (2005), linear; it is multivalent, circular, to which we, as individuals, are Gravity loop (2006), Sleep no more spatial and visual. collaborators – or interferers – in (2007) and Commonwealth (2007), what takes place on the world stage. Commonwealth, a five-minute video Phillips and Rowley’s work is installation, has the greatest sense challenging, fascinating and of narrative but is also in many ways innovative. However, I am not sure the most complex work. Like Some whether the viewer’s immersive Americans, there is a political experience of the installations is undercurrent that is equally complete without understanding the suggestive and open-ended. It is in source and inspiration of each work. essence a collage of images and Knowledge of the layers of meaning source material, often layered, and the process of creating the digitally manipulated and edited. works certainly enhances the viewer’s Found footage from two seemingly appreciation of them, so how unrelated old Russian films – one of important, or necessary, is this scientists experimenting on a dog, information? To what degree do and another of Yuri Gagarin’s return the content and the experience, to Moscow after orbiting earth – the process and the end result, 74 Eimear McKeith is visual are integrated with various filmed collaborate or interfere with each arts critic for the Sunday sequences and computer-generated other? Perhaps that is the strength, Tribune. images, all accompanied by a and weakness, of their work. specially composed score. There is little within the work to reveal the source material, but the sequence evokes a generalised response, hinting at meaning without proposing any definitive conclusions. Instead, it becomes an oblique meditation on social progress, the creation of heroes, and personal and collective (below) existence. David Phillips and Paul Rowley Commonwealth, 2007 single-channel video with sound, infinite loop 5 minute loop © the artists courtesy Butler Gallery c . Gemma Tipton Irish Museum of Modern March – June 2007 Art Dublin

Unlike the constructed images created by photographers Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewsdon, and unlike the depopulated shots of Candida Höfer, Thomas Demand’s constructed, 75 thomas demand depopulated images layer artifice upon artifice, and yet do not seek particularly to comment on artifice itself. While the artist himself insists that there is a what-see-is-what-you- get quality to his work, that it is, as Aidan Dunne puts it, “not a move in a game of critical theory,” a considerable amount of critical considerations do seem to attach themselves to his images.1t r i i e prl sca l’es d’e

Thomas Demand Staircase/ Treppenhaus, 1995 150 x 118cm C-Print/ Diasec. AP © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London 2006, courtesy IMMA image. It is as if Demand’s intensive Does this matter? The Serpentine care and attention elevate the presented a discrete exhibition, mundane. ‘Just a sink’ becomes not a paradigm for all subsequent more than a sink, both through showings of Demand’s work, and yet becoming art, and through our it also raised a bar, presented the knowledge that it was Saddam work in a way that made it unforget- Hussein’s sink in his Iraqi hideout. table, and that, to me, is what the Art as well as history can invest confluence of curator, museum subjects with meaning. And yet space and art should achieve. somehow, despite the quality of the individual images on display, the Meanwhile, IMMA’s recent approach presentation at IMMA felt rather flat. to design as anti-art gesture (see the Perhaps this was because I had now infamous ‘blurred’ catalogue for seen Thomas Demand’s exhibition .all hawaii eNtrées / luNar reGGae) last summer at the Serpentine Gallery continued unfortunately with the in London.3 Here, the particular publication for this exhibition. Demand’s images begin with 76 geography of the gallery aptly Despite excellent essays, a short photographs drawn from the media. enabled the crescendo of disquiet story, an intriguing series of tiny These are the sites where ‘things’ created by the images and their fictions (by Dave Eggers), excerpts have taken place: there is the landing exhibition. from an Antonioni screenplay, and a in Cambridge where the priceless poem by T S Eliot, all of which work vase was smashed; the security gate The main part (but not all) of the wonderfully to illuminate the work in at Logan Airport through which the Serpentine show was a series of different ways, the publication itself 9/ 11 hijackers passed; the count photographs, Tavern, taken from a suffers from a damaging design station where George W Bush was rural German bar, where a young conceit. Staircase-like shapes have finally awarded the Presidency of the boy had been murdered. The simple- been cut from the pages, which is USA… Demand then makes large- seeming ivy-clad tavern leaked a fine when the pages themselves are scale paper models of these images. sense of sinister happenings into the either blank or contain only text, These models he photographs, and gallery, not only because of they way but when, page after page, then destroys. Despite the catalogue in which Demand had constructed reproductions of Demand’s own warning that it “would be sophomoric, the models and then shot the photographs are cut into, nipped at indeed boring, if all it said was that images, but because of the fact that the edges, lose little-but-significant we cannot trust our own culturally he had chosen to do so. Even without sections, things start to get really conditioned impulse to read a knowing something had happened irritating. Is it reactionary to say that photograph as the representation of here, the artist’s decision to choose artists’ images should be presented 2 something real,” this is one of the this image, to spend countless hours intact? That they are more important first things that comes to mind when observing, constructing, recreating, than gimmicks of design? Maybe, apprehending Demand’s images. made the scene significant. The but in this instance I would have Another is their beauty, also their effect was enhanced by Demand’s preferred if the greater part of the sense of the uncanny: it’s hard to own design of ivy-ed wallpaper, visual creativity had been left to put your finger on what’s wrong making a choked hothouse space of the artist. with what you’re looking at – but the gallery, and yet at the same time something is definitely not quite reminding one that the gallery is as right… So in addition to ideas of the artificial a space, construing and construction of ‘story’ and ‘truth’ defining its own realities, as any of through media images, and as well Demand’s constructed images. as the idea of editing truth (why this image, this angle, this frame, this And yet in Dublin, where the focus?), what else do Demand’s enfilade of galleries might have lent images tell us? themselves to a similarly cumulative, intense effect of the sinister, and One intersting aspect is the way in despite Demand’s habitual attention which they balance the mundane to detail (this time the walls were (just a room, just a door, just a sink) papered with grey wallpaper), the with the knowledge of extraordinary works felt merely episodic. Excellent, time and effort spent in making each interesting, but episodic nonetheless. Thomas Demand L’Esprit d’escalier somewhat ambiguous.4) Is Ireland 1 Thomas Demand, interviewed was part of a trio of major interna- too small a country, and Dublin too by Aidan Dunne, ‘Demanding the perfect picture’, The Irish tional exhibitions this spring at small a capital city to ask for the Times, 2 March 2007 IMMA. Shown alongside Alex Katz best we can get? Or perhaps that’s 2 Ulrich Baer, ‘End of a world: and Georgia O’Keefe, you might the problem – perhaps this is just on Thomas Demand’s photography’, Thomas have had the sense that Dublin has that – the best we can get… Demand, L’Esprit d’escalier, become one of those cities with a Irish Museum of Modern Art, choice of incredible, inspirational art Dublin 2007, p 104 3 Thomas Demand, Serpentine on view, an embarrassment of riches Gallery, London, June – almost. Instead, what we had was a August 2006 series of ‘Names’. The problem was 4 Taken from http://www.modernart.ie/ that, while the Alex Katz exhibition en/page_170507.htm, 23 wasn’t necessarily the ‘best’ Alex April 2007 Katz exhibition that could have been staged, the Georgia O’Keefe fell far short. Without the cooperation of the (opposite) Gemma Tipton is a 77 Georgia O’Keefe Museum in New Thomas Demand writer and critic on art Mexico, a survey showing of this Abgang, 2000 and architecture based C-Print/ Diasec artist’s works became impossible. in Dublin. 156 x 250 cm The Georgia O’Keefe exhibition has © Thomas Demand, VG Bild proved extremely popular, and was Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London very good for what it was, but it was courtesy IMMA wrong to give the impression that it (below) was a near-enough-encyclopaedic Thomas Demand presentation of this important artist’s Landing, 2006 C-Print, framed work. (The text from IMMA’s 180 x 286 cm website: “It includes examples of all © Thomas Demand, VG Bild her main areas of interest,” being Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London 2006 courtesy IMMA c . David Hughes Grand Opera House Permanent Belfast Phoenix Gallery March – April 2007 Belfast

78 julie westerman thinly veiled and barely there Julie Westerman is one of two artists Gallery. Here again are wire-frame copper gauze of Thinly veiled is a commissioned to make permanent models of fabric, animated, freeze- technology rooted in and developed art works for the foyer of the new framed and laser-cut into fine card. from engineering, software which, extension to Belfast’s Grand Opera Mostly in the region of a meter for example, simulates the stresses House. The work, Thinly veiled, square, they seem to swing on the and strains of structures. It reminds is a bright incision into the patinated wall, creating a kind of choreography us of Westerman’s history as a copper proscenium arch which across and around the space. sculptor in traditional materials and surrounds the Baby Grand’s doorway. Indeed, they could almost be costume processes, in casting, and of her It suggests a theatre curtain in the designs for ballet or some form of engagement with the computer as act of opening and closing, raising notation for the dancing body. They an engineering tool. But there is and lowering – caught in the act, are fixed and fluid. poetry and beauty here which we as it were. The image is a computer- don’t, perhaps, immediately associate generated, animated, three- The sculptures appear to be with technology. If the purpose of dimensional wire-frame model of a substantial and to have three- CAD is to solve puzzles and curtain. A freeze-framed moment, dimensional volume. But close up eliminate ambiguities, then the on the cusp of opening and closing, of course we see how the flat card’s purpose of these pieces is to is grabbed and the file is transferred three-dimensionality is drawn. introduce them as factors in the 79 to an engraving machine that takes Their volume is an optical illusion. nature of and engagement with art. the patination off the surface of The frozen overall pattern is made up It is at the points of stress and the copper sheeting to inscribe of areas of shape that change slowly tension that we get the ambiguity the shape. over space and, as the eye travels where angles are deformed into and discovers them, over time too. curves, two-dimensionality optically This gives us not red plush but The patterns are open and closed, deformed into three and where copper net. This is not the velvet bunched and stretched, blocked and certainty is simultaneously offered curtain but the cotton, gauze scrim: aerated, mathematical and poetic, and denied. the transformation gauze of Victorian clearly defined and ambiguous, music hall and of pantomime, the three-dimensional and flat, rectilinear David Hughes is a writer ‘reveal’. Lit from the front, the stage and curved. and artist and formerly gauze is opaque, but when the figure editor of Hybrid and Live Art behind is illuminated the gauze In the corner, a video of a computer magazines. disappears to reveal the figure as animation of a rotating fan is a neat joke: here is the virtual breeze that is though by magic. This is the world of (opposite) smoke and mirror, of illusion and animating the gauzes. Julie Westerman effect. The gauze does not mark a Barely there #5, 2007 Towards the end of the series of lazercut fine card clear dividing line between reality 1500 x 1500 cm and fiction, between the stage and sculptures there is a columned plinth the world, but a permeable space, in red card on which stands what a space of traffic and transition, of appears to be the fan with a wire- transparency and transformation. It is frame gauzed fabric over it, the precisely the space which wishes to immediate effect of the breeze confuse illusion and reality and have evident in the folds that pull away us take one for the other. from the blades. Or is the cloth in the process of revealing the In Thinly veiled the medium is the transformation which has taken message. The curtain reveals nothing place on the magician’s table but itself, its own mechanics, its own beneath? The exact nature of the twists and tensions, its own inner object beneath the cloth is not skeletal structure. The solid reveals revealed. The column pulls the itself as perforated. The curtain is sculptures back into the architectural pulled aside to reveal, not the stage, and clarifies for me why I find this but the net. work so poetic and beautiful and engaging. It is yet another paradoxical moment, that of the frozen movement, that The plinth asks us to remember that characterises her sculptures currently the technology that has made the on exhibition in the theatre’s Phoenix sculptures of Barely there and the c . Fergal Gaynor Ballymun March – April 2007 Dublin

80 Séamus Nolan Hotel Ballymun Why can’t I simply say that this was All well and good, within its bounds. a fine and timely concept, realised But the space enclosed, an iconic, with great care – not to mention an ideologically and humanly charged enjoyable experience? It was all of space, was never going to rest easily these things, but that didn’t seem to within such bounds. Clarke Tower be enough. juts as much into the public realm, into our understanding of public I woke in the bright, spare space of mismanagement and its a converted top-floor flat of the consequences of hardship and Clarke Tower and found myself misery, as it does into the sky above admiring the inventiveness of a North Dublin. It was never going to recycled chair, a single object made be possible, within that space, to from an interlocking pair of remains. simply reflect upon the wastefulness It was novel and perfectly functional, and lack of imagination of the both eccentric and Amish, and I dominant economy, no matter how found it difficult to take my eyes off well such a reflection was linked into it. Then again, I could spend as long local circuits of exchange. From 91 as I liked enjoying it: this was, after conversation with Séamus Nolan, all, my bedroom. Nearby, a weedy I was given the impression that to flower in a glass vase caught the some extent such ‘dirtying’ of the sunshine in its intricate threadwork terms of the Hotel had been included of roots. Then up from the perfectly in his thinking. ‘Hotel Ballymun’ was comfortable, mainly recycled bed, also an oxymoron, an uneasy concept, and I was able to sample the view and there was a quiet joke being from the balcony. Spread out like a made at the expense of the guests, socialist model, on either side of unwittingly taking on the discomforts (opposite) an avenue of Central European Séamus Nolan of their situation with the comforts Hotel Ballymun proportions, New Ballymun was of the artspace. That jokiness is installation shots taking shape among the condemned probably sufficient to keep at bay the courtesy the artist remains of sixties planning. Out cascade of news and opinion that there, it was a matter of wiping it out accompanied the project (even the and starting again – bigger, glossier, British Observer covered the story – more desirable to the monied. In here was there a PR company involved?). was a radically different economy, No, it wasn’t about bourgeois artists one that recycled, incorporated enjoying the exotica of a working- fragments of the past, kept matters class district; no, it doesn’t intend simple. It was a quiet and effective to be a permanent ‘interpretation critique. Add to that the continual centre’ of towerblock life. But there programme of satellite projects (on were other alignments less easy to the previous day, apart from an art/ keep at bay. not art ‘Clinic’ in the Towers Bar in which I was involved, Janice Feighery, originally from Ballymun, had conducted an event in which public participants had been led by instruction to local houses, to enjoy tea and conversation with the occupants), and Hotel Ballymun took on the extra dimension of being an artist-run exhibition/ event space, one growing invertedly downwards from its sunny, towertop flower to a filigree of local connections below. ‘Community art’ often involves a deal This final paragraph is going to deal of duplicity. Funding is drawn and with politics, because this is what projects are conducted under I felt was missing from Nolan’s public-policy slogans that are often otherwise fine project: the political. at odds with the spirit of the project At no time did I feel when in itself. To undertake community art – Ballymun that the ceiling of planners and the best, edgiest community art and governance was broached – is undertaken by artists at odds with by the Hotel, by its satellite projects current social values – the artist (including art/ not art’s), by the must often bite their lip and compro- visiting artists, or by the participating mise in the face of perfectly pleasant, locals, and yet this is the very ‘neutral’ in their own minds, essence of what Ballymun means as representatives of managerialism. a public site of discourse. Ballymun Neither the purity of Nolan’s project is all about a class of people, the (a ‘purity’ I’d noticed before in his tenement occupants of inner-city ‘bike workshop’ for the Communism Dublin, being dislocated and radically 82 Fergal Gaynor is an show in Project in 2005), nor the reorganized from above. What is independent scholar, trickiness of the concept, was happening now in Ballymun is little writer, and member of sufficient to extricate its terms from different – the organization may be art intervention group art/ the ideology of the ‘Breaking more sensitive, and there may be not art. Ground’, Ballymun Regeneration considerably more public relations, agenda. In other circumstances, ‘dialogues’ with the locals, press their patronage of the project and releases to the greater public – but their imprints on the catalogue might it is still about one body organizing not have mattered. But because of another. By ‘politics’ I mean the the nature of the space, its strategic participation in power above the importance, Nolan’s project became, locality, by the locals or their despite itself, something of a platform representatives, the broaching of for their agenda. Hotel Ballymun the ceiling. Without this, the people was on the site of a contested must remain ultimately disenfran- ground, and in its perfectly normal chised, their civic efforts continuing collaboration with a funding body it to maintain the character of therapy, decisively ignored a major dimension image-production or consolatory of that contest. It is an ‘ethical’ religion – that is, their activities will project, which is as much as it can always be a matter of adapting to be within a managed space, yet it social circumstances, as if such needs to be something more. circumstances were in some way ‘natural’. Of course, others will find ways to exploit the situation and others again will fall prey to the politics of frustration and anger (the forthcoming election will see a lot of support for Sinn Féin, for instance, in such areas). Either way, its civic life remains removed from the sources of agency, and Ballymun remains Ballymun, in the old, troubled sense of the name, no matter what its inner economy. c . Maria Kunda Salamanca Arts Centre, March – April 2007 Hobart, Tasmania

An 83 other place

Seán Kelly’s curatorial premise for An Other place arose from a stint in Ireland where, from 2003, he held the post of Programme Manager at Cork’s National Sculpture Factory. Having returned to Tasmania, Kelly’s experience of boomerang migration prompted him to bring three Irish artists here to participate with three Australians, in an exhibition that was part of the Ten days on the island festival, in its fourth incarnation in 2007.

Fiona Hall Mire wool pile on cotton warp and weft 200 x 400 cm (approx) courtesy Seán Kelly The act of reverse transit is practically artists’ works were perhaps more We follow an absurd and ungainly a rite of passage for Australians born open-ended in their engagement, figure whose enormous head is of migrant stock. It’s a national understandably, while the three fashioned from knitted toys: literary template, employed by writers Australians were pointed and a pathetic, infantile monster. as different as Patrick White and accomplished in their handling of This personage lopes through Clive James. Typically, the colonial post-colonial issues particular to suburbs and peripheral bushland protagonist is so deeply inscribed this locality. in Hobart, and the film cuts to a with inherited folklore that on arrival colonial-gaol-cum-tourist-destination, in the ‘motherland’ he reels with déjà The three Australians all allude to a direct reference to the convict vu. Initial impressions of familiarity mapping, naming and issues of past, but perhaps also to the quickly unravel and, from a distance, colonial subjugation. For Fiona Hall infamous mass shooting by a lone the place where one grew up as a and Julia Gough, these themes are gunman in 1996. Martin Bryant is recent transplant begins to take form stock-in-trade. Along with Lucy a present-day tabloid bogeyman: as it never could at close proximity. Bleach, the three demonstrated their an isolated and pathetic naïf who The role of the wayfarer is to sing for sustained and informed critical literally ran amok. McQuinn’s film his supper. The very effort of spinning engagement with national history worked in tension with Gough’s 84 yarns about ‘the antipodes’, as one and a depth of familiarity with (an artist with Aboriginal ancestry), struggles to dispel the mystifications Tasmania, through their own highly which also referred to the stains that surround that construct, and to distinctive visual lexicons. A high- of the past. An infamous episode, refashion points of cultural difference calibre artist, Hall has often used ‘The Black Line’ was an attempt and commonality, reinforces the visual references to plants and by the colonial administration to function of the ‘new country’ as botanical classification to present round up the indigenous inhabitants counter-narrative. beauty-as-strangeness, and to of the Tasmania, and to confine explore power-knowledge relations. them to a compound. Part of With that sort of thematic grounding, Here, her three works were a Gough’s treatment of the episode and in other respects, An Other camouflage-coloured floor rug is a re-enactment in which she is place was a daring proposition. The entitled Mire that depicts Iraqi photographed as a fugitive in flight. Irish artists’ part of the bargain was wetland plants and Arabic script; certainly the most difficult to fulfil, coloured photographs of Tasmanian since their transit experience was lichen species; and a design cartoon not a return, but a first encounter. for another rug based on Tasmanian To arrive, engage, and present work lichen forms. This selection of works in a foreign place is a big ask. The presented polar opposites of distance curatorial task was to utilise the and proximity: a distant, alien cultural Long Gallery, a challenging exhibition ‘other’, an intimately observed local space within the colonial warehouses ‘self’. Irish artist Alex Pentek’s work, that house Salamanca Arts Centre. Otherness, formed a powerful This is the fourth time that SAC has counterpoint to Hall’s. A large, hosted a major exhibition as part of white cartridge paper möbius strip, the Ten days festival. To date, each it floated in space, taking up the exhibition has been different in height and light of the gallery. scope and content and, with its The surface of the looped form was cross-reference to Ireland, this show folded like the lining of a chocolate provided yet another variation. Kelly’s box. Escher fashion, its angular sure hand made the utmost of the herringbone pattern transmogrifies gallery space and, by setting in train into curvilinear scallops and so, by a comparative oscillation between purely formal means, it exemplifies Tasmania and Ireland – as islands, the melding of binaries, the collapse as hinterlands, as having colonial of categories: outside with inside, ties through forced migration, the straight with curved and – by curatorial frame permitted diverse implication – self with other. responses. Each artist took up the theme of alterity in their own way, Austin McQuinn’s raw DVD projec- and there was a discernably different tion, Bogeyman, expresses the accent distinguishing the Irish and alienation of the innocent abroad the Australian responses. The Irish and resonates with local horrors. Linda Quinlan’s work operates from plywood, positioned so as through personal associations and to direct the gaze out of an end multiple allusions. Her provisional window, across the narrow lane to a constructions certainly capture a backlit photographic image set onto mood of dislocation, but the results an adjoining building: a mesh gate are tentative. A DVD projection is a provides an outlook to the open sea. diaristic reference to Quinlan’s arrival These simple poetic cross-sections in Tasmania, which coincided with of reality dignify ordinary experience, the appearance of a comet. It shows and allude to what is beyond. a camera in a bush setting, paired with a punctum of light on a black ground. Demanding extended interpretation, her constructions offered little visual or conceptual return. By contrast, three unlikely elements of Lucy Bleach’s Maria Kunda is a 85 installation, cirumnarrative, interrelate lecturer in Art and Design so assuredly that they avoid both Theory at the University obscurantism and literalness. of Tasmania. A suite of five framed wall works are embroidered sections of asphalt, inscribed with short, evocative captions from road workers. Julie Gough These informed the floor piece: We ran/ I am (detail) a snaking roadmap of sorts, made black-and-white photographs, calico trousers, dirt 700 x 250 cm courtesy Seán Kelly c . Judith Wilkinson Centre Pompidou March – June 2007 Paris

Samuel Beckett 9686 (opposite) resistance, Beckett wrote the majority ‘60s and early ‘70s shared not only Jean-Michel Alberola of his work in French, spending a certain subject matter with these Rien, 1995 neon, 30 x 30 cm total of 52 years in France before his artists but also a very real and distinct photo Florian Kleinefenn death in 1989. method of working. The blurring, © private collection dimming and disintegrating images © Adagp, 2007 Focusing on Beckett’s lesser-known courtesy Centre Pompidou so familiar to us from early video art activities as a filmmaker and theatre were appearing not only on Beckett’s director, the Pompidou exhibition stage but also in the pages of his aims to highlight both the signifi- prose and in the flickering presences cance of the writer’s bilingualism on his television screens. The and the pioneering nature of his sensitivity to light so important to artistic vision. With an astounding Beckett’s work is beautifully embodied number of supporting manuscripts, in Nauman’s Gauze from 1969. letters, notebooks and photographs, In it, the artist pulls slowly from his Beckett’s works are presented mouth a piece of fragile white gauze. “Art loves leaps,” remarked Samuel throughout the exhibition in both Barely there his image fades into the Beckett in his 1946 essay La peinture English and French. background, bathed in the grainy 87 des van Velde ou le monde et le intermittent light of a16mm camera. pantalon. Part of his postwar Divided into eight interrelated Similarly, McCarthy’s Black and Parisian côterie Beckett lauded the thematic spaces, the exhibition white tapes 1970 – 1975 shows the work of the van Veldes for its ability moves conceptually rather than artist wriggling along a white painted to “force the fundamental invisibility chronologically through Beckett’s line on his studio floor as the world of exterior things till the very invisibility oeuvre. Exploring important motifs is reduced to the Beckettian mono- itself becomes a visible thing.” A bit for Beckett such as Voice, Eye, chromes of black, white and grey. of a jawbreaker admittedly, this Cube and Remains, the works of the statement embodies much of what almost thirty artists included in this Beckett’s obsession with modes Beckett was to think and write about exhibition in some way reflect the of perception and visibility is further art. Following suit sixty years later, writer’s ongoing philosophical and investigated with the inclusion of Marianne Alphant and Nathalie Léger aesthetic preoccupations. his work Film (1964). Produced in have managed to make visible many NYC on the writer’s only trip to the Beginning with Voice, we access the previously uncelebrated aspects of US, it stars Buster Keaton and is initial space through a dark narrow the Irish author’s practice in their born out of Beckett’s interest in the passage flanked by grey eerie light. courageous Samuel Beckett exhibition philosophy of Bishop Berkeley. In Confronted by the unforgettable at the Centre Pompidou. this black and white classic of avant- image of an isolated mouth, it is only garde cinema, Berkeley’s central The exhibition boasts several new as the viewer approaches that he or tenet, “To be is to be perceived,” is commissions by artists such as Stan she realises that an image which first hilariously tested by the vaudeville Douglas, Alain Fleischer and Jérome appeared still is actually struggling antics of Keaton as he is relentlessly Cômbier and is accompanied by an to communicate. Projected onto the pursued by an unidentified eye. extensive catalogue with responses wall the way one would expect to In a contemporary twist on Beckett’s to Beckett’s work from a horde of encounter a video work, Beckett’s project, Stan Douglas, one of the international writers and artists. With revolutionary teleplay Not I (1972) specially commissioned artists, a variety of events running throughout is no longer isolated as an has made a new work entitled Video the summer, the Pompidou has also experiment in dramatic form, but (2006–2007). Referencing the mounted an extensive music and film instead recognized as an early recent racial riots in Parisian suburbs, programme to honour one of example of time-based art. Douglas’s work picks up on France’s best-loved interlopers. the more sinister aspects of the Although moving next to more familiar possibilities of constant surveillance. Making Paris his permanent home in early practitioners of video and film, 1937, Beckett wittily declared, upon Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, returning to his adopted city after a Andrew Kotting and Mona Hatoum, brief stay in Ireland, that it was “like the curators avoid obvious choices coming out of gaol in April.” Awarded from these artists and allow a whole the Croix de Guerre and the new range of aesthetic correspon- Médaille de la Reconnaissance dences to emerge. The work that Française for his efforts in the Beckett was producing in the late In another space, dedicated to contexts allows even the old (below) the Cube, Beckett’s concerns with favourites of Beckett exhibitions, Samuel Beckett Film, 1966 formalism, mathematics and logical Avigdor Arikha, Bram van Velde and 35 mm film, silent, 30 min games are explored. Sol le Witt’s Jack BYeats, also present here, to be script Samuel Beckett, with minimalist drawing Geometric imbued with new meanings. Buster Keaton, direction Alan Schneider© Centre Pompidou, figures and colour (1979) is so Paris, 2007 © The Estate of visually analogous to Beckett’s Returning to black, the exhibition Samuel Beckett teleplay Quad (1980), in which four ends as it began, in darkness. In the courtesy Centre Pompidou figures robed in primary colours final section, a cacophony of voices scurry repeatedly to the four corners resound as Beckett’s late prose of a square, it could almost be a texts emanate from bell shaped preparatory sketch. speakers above clear plastic chairs. Beckett’s ghostly presence that What emerges most forcefully from seems to stalk these chambers is these innovative artistic couplings is finally given the last word in the only the power of the image in Beckett’s known recording of the writer’s 88 work. The same images re-appear in voice. As Beckett reads Lessness Beckett’s prose, theatre, television, (1969), “Figment dawn, dispeller of radio and film in continually changing figments and the others called dusk,” configurations. Now-familiar scenes tapping its regular beat on a now of fading, hapless wanderers, starkly long gone table, images emerge, lit truncated body parts (heads, almost inevitably, in the mind’s eye, mouths, eyes), disintegrating as if “all coming out of the dark.” bicycles, ditches and trees, form a visual lexicon that can be traced across his experiments in different media. The importance of light for Beckett is also stressed, both in the Judith Wilkinson is an unusual selection of works and in independent curator and the sensitive exhibition design. PhD candidate at Creating spaces where Beckett’s Goldsmiths College. artistic practice can be read in new c . Tim Stott Project Arts Centre March – April 2007 Dublin

At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn the first 89 In an antechamber one waits and expects. Between events. In the antechamber dark. Imagine changeable constellations of voices and images filling that darkness. Perhaps in the next room, to which one was heading upon arrival, one might expect these to settle out into recognisable figures and stories to be carried away and retold. But instead, waiting, with no view of what might come next, expectations go astray. filters of memory whilst the present in thrall to those breezy and erotic with all its stories unrolls towards the sorrows coming in off the sea, future. This incessant crumbling away gazing wistfully towards familiar and can induce vertigo if those narrative forgotten horizons without journeying voices that ordinarily give support fail abruptly into the future that they to do so. In Charlotte Moth’s have become. Installation for Dolores (2006) when image and voice disjoin, and during Alexandre Singh’s A Thousand and One becomes suspended those long periods when slides one Knights of the Roundtable of without recourse to the dramatics follow each other unaccompanied, Knottingham (2005) assembles of suspense and wonder: the former correspondences and metonymic around the absurd convolutions of a an arresting anxiety that propels progressions across sequences rather tall tale. Narrated in a slightly plotlines and the latter a dénouement check any encroaching dizziness. distorted monotone, every word is that retrospectively configures Here, once again, allegory recovers matched by a monochrome projection events into causal chains unknown meaning from the ruins that are its of an appropriate hue. The fantastic up to that point – “Now I see. It just emblem (Walter Benjamin), reinter- density and charge of this central 90 had to turn out like that because…” preting the past through the present conceit then disperses through an Suspended without suspense. Not in an attempt to preserve it; and here elaborate and irregular assemblage strung out on a line but dispersed again, allegory shows its deep affinity of props, but here the piece across multiple courses. with archival photography. becomes rather too illustrative of its bricolage methods. Its components Gabriel Lester: “All the images are Allegory is a nonlinear construction. seem too articulate, its incongruities at the same time part of the movie Sequential, but not dynamic, it accu- too easily translated into conventional and a story by them self.” In All mulates fragments blindly, aimlessly: art discourse, its irony too studied. wrong (2005), Lester realises the This makes those components vital duplicity of fragments. A whole It is thus the epitome of counter- cumbersome and banal. in itself and a part of some greater narrative, for it arrests narrative in composition, the fragment is place, substituting a principle of Allegory can be explosive, emergent. complete when it fails to complete syntagmatic disjunction for one of Here it defuses in the diagrammatic. itself. The fragment is, if you like, diegetic combination. In this way bound to fail and bound by failure to allegory superinduces a vertical When a sequence of images forever give a part of itself to some or paradigmatic reading of and voice-over are in disjunction – unrealised whole. Each fragment is correspondences upon a horizontal each to each and each to the other a project, thrown open towards a or syntagmatic chain of events. – the intervals between lose their complete future. This is the romance Craig Owens, The Allegorical impulse ‘stickiness’. Instead, they become of the fragment: it takes to the air on incommensurable and absolute. a promise. Abandoned art deco interiors, bland, Time crystallises (Gilles Deleuze). equivalent tessellations, flat grey Fragments cannot be neatly horizons, monoliths of a forgotten In All wrong crystalline time has arranged; they are agitated, piling up public at leisure, exotic modernism an uneven, digital texture, lacking and falling athwart one another. One meets the mundane and inscrutable the organic gradients of analogue tends to stumble across them. sea: every surface in Moth’s but carrying with it similar promises photographs dreams of a time when of equivalence. Imagine whilst waiting, expectant, Formica promised the familiar that one stands on perforated abroad. There are certainly bold ground that might give way at any aspirations in these interlocking, time, like Sebald watching sand equivalent patterns that Moth martins vanishing into the cliff-top attempts to recover. But there is beneath his feet (just after he always that ‘last light’ in which they dreams of swallows). are remembered.

Each present moment splits as Moth returns frequently to the images crumble and fall away into eloquent couple of shelter and vista, the past through the variegated but perhaps she remains too much As the cod-noir narration undoes With images selected and (page 89) itself, its gumshoe-cum-petty hood processed largely according to a The First antechamber, 2007 installation shot embroiled beyond his ken, walking cold logic of command and address, with Gabriel Lester’s All Wrong blindly into his demise, so too images All Wrong presents an encounter and Alexandre Singh’s A decouple and take aleatory strolls, that does not call out for some Thousand and one Knights of the Roundtable of Knottingham forming divergent and occasional empathic meeting of interiorities photo Nina Canell patterns of association. Again, the constituted through loss: it is more, courtesy Project piling up of fragments, clues without to grossly paraphrase Foucault, (below) a riddle, a man without an idea, ‘thought on the outside’; an outside Maria Fusco without ambition. whose depth is not that of a For we are where we are not: perspective illusion drawn out from or Finnegan Begin Again? (detail), 2007 some ‘last light’ but the refracted, photo Nina Canell flickering density of a crystal. courtesy Project

Splintering and proliferating without breakdown, becoming possessed without becoming lost at the Tim Stott is a lecturer in 91 the National College of Art borderline of pattern and accident … and Design, Dublin, and this is what can happen in the dark. Dublin Institute of Technology. c . Declan Long Dublin City Gallery the March – June 2007 Hugh Lane Declan Long is a lecturer Dublin at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Tacita Dean at the Hugh Lane Gallery can be easily placed among the most stimulating and rewarding exhibitions of contemporary art staged in Ireland in recent years. But what strange and subtle stimulations we experience in contact with Dean’s richly contemplative work; what indefinable, tragically ephemeral, rewards we receive. 92 tacita dean Much of what is encountered in Tacita Dean’s art is stirringly elusive. Like Werner Herzog chasing mirages in his esoteric documentary Fata Morgana, or like Bas Jan Ader forever lost “in search of the miraculous,” Dean is consumed by mystery. She demonstrates lasting delight in traces, apparitions, transcendent possibilities, yet there is an inexorable drift towards distraction and disappointment; the prevailing tone is elegiac. Often, we are brought to the brink of revelation — we may even catch a glimpse of ardently Tacita Dean sought-after marvels — only for the Presentation Sisters, 2005 epiphanic moment and any sure film still grasp of its significance to instantly 16 mm colour anamorphic film courtesy the artist/ Frith Street pass, to flicker into nothingness. Gallery/ Marian Goodman Gallery/ Hugh Lane In The green ray (2001), we watch slow-moving depiction of daily life at a mode of viewing now passed by — the setting sun as it disappears into the South Presentation Convent in and at a glance it even resembles an a distant horizon beyond the coast Cork (originally commissioned and industry propaganda clip from an of Madagascar, Dean’s camera shown as part of the Capital of earlier era. But Kodak is more of an studying the scene in the hope of Culture celebrations in 2005). information film without information: capturing a rare trick of refracted Filmed with great aesthetic subtlety no supporting facts are given to light in the dying moments of the on 16mm anamorphic film, this is an guide us through the complex day. And yes, suddenly, we see overwhelmingly rich visual account of mechanical systems, no explanatory (or think we see) this famed green essentially very little: prolonged voiceover confidently proclaims glow as the sun finally sinks out of fixed-camera views of the still the power and possibility of the sight; but within seconds of it having surroundings of the convent and machinery. Instead, this is an odd, become barely visible, the sliver of lingering shots of empty, sunlit ambiguous document: boring in a unearthly light is gone. Similarly, in hallways are combined with scenes way, but blissful too. Long, dark ‘still the closely linked Diamond ring showing the banal simplicities of life’ sequences of life on the factory (2002), a total eclipse of the sun is religious life. We see next to nothing floor are interrupted by sudden, caught on film — though only just, of obvious consequence: the sisters brilliant bursts of light and colour; and with agitated, anguished iron clothes, bake bread, they even Dean finding traces of the marvelous 93 inadequacy. Following an accident watch a GAA match together; only in a mundane labour process, urging with her carefully poised camera a communal evening prayer seems us, perhaps, to watch with wonder equipment, Dean’s film becomes a to directly introduce ‘the spiritual’ as this treasured film stock — the desperate, panicked attempt to hold into these secular rituals. Yet as this material support for the entire history onto something of this spellbinding vocation, this world, is on the verge of cinema — comes into being for scene: uncharacteristically, her camera of vanishing, Dean scrupulously almost the last time. jerks and swerves; a surprising, invests every ordinary detail with the decisive, save-the-day zoom bringing precious significance of the soon-to- These and other mesmerizing films the eclipse into belated focus. But be-forgotten. The film is utterly, were featured in the Hugh Lane just as this clumsily dazzling close- weirdly, compelling. And much as exhibition alongside a varied selec- up view is attained, sunlight begins this is a reflection on faith and reli- tion of typically oblique work in other to break from behind the shadowed gious observance, it is also, of media — among which a monumental, moon and the filmic record is course, about faith in observation, intricately detailed, twenty-five part reduced to bleached-out emptiness. or in a certain disappearing form of photogravure landscape, cryptically observation: Dean employs the entitled T&I, was most obviously Both of these short films promise anachronism that is her beloved striking. Undoubtedly, it would have limited access to out-of-the-ordinary 16mm film in such a way as to been pleasing to see in Dublin certain phenomena, and both in different accentuate the poetic frailties of ana- recent works that were ‘missing’ ways play on the anxieties of logue recording while also lamenting from this selection — the celebrated registering the intensity of specific, the superceding of its distinct visual films Boots (2003) or The Uncles special, points in time. In making sophistications by digital technology. (2004), for instance — but ultimately, such captivating documents, there is This enduring love finds more overt to have sought a more ‘comprehen- usually lengthy and elaborate prepa- expression in Kodak (2006), a kind sive’ representation would seem to ration, only for the pursued vision to of industrial companion-piece to miss the point in responding to an vanish with inevitable but agonising Presentation Sisters that takes a artist for whom absent elements and haste. This temporal fascination flows protracted look at the workspaces unexpected tangents have always (or perhaps refracts) endlessly in and everyday routines of the Kodak been so profoundly important. In this Dean’s work: in her films there is an film-manufacturing plant in southern regard, one non-film work, her unyielding sense of “the pressure of France. Celluloid production has ongoing Four, five, six and seven time in the shot” (the definition of finally come to an end here — only leaf clover collection, is finally quite cinematic affect according to Andrei the ongoing demand for X-ray film revealing: here is an unorthodox and Tarkovsky) and an ongoing effort keeps these otherwise outmoded necessarily incomplete archive that to highlight or hold onto curious ele- machines in motion — and so Kodak allows for a graceful patterning of ments of the passing world, however is Dean’s effort to visually archive the found fragments; it is, as with so ultimately futile this task may be. redundant technological processes much of Dean’s work, a continuing that, until now at least, have made tribute to everyday mysteries. Two longer recent works in particular possible the creation of her distinctive signal and extend these interests. cinematic time-images. In a way it is Presentation Sisters is an astonishing, her nostalgic promotional movie for c . Fergal Gaynor Various venuse city-wide March – June 2007 Limerick

ev +a 2007

94 Siobhan Tattan: a rag-week event, the students were The selection is also radically Brilliant failures largely absent, but the essence of apolitical: in a time of global crisis 2006 16mm film transferred to DVD, the subdued atmosphere could be and with a great number of the DVD projector, DVD player, traced back to the form of the biennials dedicating themselves to sound, stools, installation in the exhibition itself. The City Gallery, issues of migration, transnationalism, Limerick City Gallery of Art + © Studioworks Photography ev a’s core, felt, if anything, stripped- global exchange and governance courtesy ev+a down for the show: its foyer area, and the economies of public institu- for the opening night at least, was tions, the works on show address empty; in its other spaces the white themselves quietistically to matters of walls were strangely noticeable. perception, cognition and aesthetic Moreover, the demographic of the experience. I don’t necessarily mean opening-night crowd had changed: this by way of criticism, but simply to a large section seemed to be demonstrate that this year’s ev+a has missing, and this was reflected in a strong authorial presence, that of the selection on the walls. This was the New York-based German-born an ev+a with a difference. philosopher and independent curator, Klaus Ottmann. 95 There is a budget put aside so that a number of artists may be invited to Ottmann’s stamping of his personality exhibit (as opposed to having to go on the exhibition has less to do with The opening night of ev+a is one of through the process of open submis- the courage of his convictions about the most vibrant social events of the sion) every second year. This means particular pieces than with a consis- Irish artistic calendar. It always that the last ev+a that is comparable tency of treatment. As he pointed seems like most of the practicing to this year’s is that curated by out in his opening speech, he artists of Munster and South Leinster Dan Cameron in 2005 (incidentally, believes in giving artworks proper have turned up, not to mention a these are non-invitation years). The circumambient space, on the wall or scoopful of dignitaries, administrators comparative numbers are telling. in the room, and if he can, he repre- and writers. In addition, by virtue of Two years ago there were 68 artists, sents the artist with at least three its alignment with ‘contemporary art’ this year 32. This naturally translates or four works, so that they appear in – in other, fairly rough words, with into a radical drop in Irish participants, some kind of context. Indeed the current art on the edges of and from 48 to 18 – the missing section placing of the work encouraged the outside traditional media – it tends of the crowd on opening night – granting of attention and time, the to draw on the tide of emerging but, perhaps more significantly, there rooms of the City Gallery, City Hall talent, on artists within six or seven has also been a radical shift in the and UL at least being visually simple years of graduation, and this party of proportion of Irish to international and uncluttered (the Belltable was the young, who often bring family artists, from over 70% to 56%. The a little more fussy and there was too and friends, is swelled by the students move away from a primarily national much environmental interference in of Limerick Art College. Finally add exhibition may not be a bad thing in St. Mary’s for Ottmann to carry the representatives of the international itself, but it certainly changes the through his method), with a number art scene and, at the centre of this character of the event and, with this of related works representing the interesting entourage, moving politely selection at least, has some strange artist. In one case the result was from exchange to exchange, the effects, especially on the representa- eminently successful. The American slightly distanced curator, and all the tion of the state of Irish art. To put it Joanne Lefrak’s work at the University elements are there for a bubbling bluntly, the artistic Ireland that is the of Limerick is a show in its own right, mix of new encounter, excited cachement area of this magazine its meticulously sliced-away paper conversation and general exuberance looks a bit provincial. At the same constructions, simultaneously in the designated late-night venue, time, it is clear that the selection of pleasing as abstract works and realist which spills over into various private Irish works is the result of a very evocations of New Mexican ghost houses and flats in the early hours of particular encounter with the art of towns, have a conceptual sophistica- the morning. this island. tion in their incorporation of the effects of lighting and cast shadow, This year, however, despite the A similar singularity of perspective is as well as a fragile beauty. These thumping Berlinesque DJ-ing and the evident in the choice of international were works that grew in power with occasional flurries of transmission works. Not only is it all art of the the room given them, and deserved among the ostracised smokers, the West, and of the Northwest at that, their monopoly on the space of the party never really started. Thanks to but it is dominated by art from the US. Bourn Vincent Gallery. The Irish contingent fared less well impoverished amalgam of snippets or paint once again the wild Irish in this regime. Normally at ev+a there from the cutting-room floor and landscape, even with the twist of is a certain thronging effect with the recorded directions for a play-that- including a few superimposed wind Irish work: the quantity and variety never-was about the frustrated generators or mass-produced of the pieces provide a sense of postwar generation of Irish writers, apartment blocks (the ‘non-place’ scene and context, with strong the Brian O’Nolans and Patrick being simply the cancellation of the works becoming forefronted and the Kavanaghs delivering their bitter former ‘whole-place’). It is all so weaker retreating into the back- judgments between mouthfuls of much of a peat smokescreen, behind ground noise. After all, the greatest black porter. which open unnamed social and proportion of entrants to ev+a are spiritual abysses. Not insignificant fairly young and come from an Irish And in so writing I fall into the trap among these is the crisis of poetry culture where ‘contemporary art’ is of a particular Hibernophilia that also itself. There were a number of signs a relatively recent phenomenon (one claimed Klaus Ottmann: a hopeless that Ottmann, like many a cultural has only to look at the continuing grá for its cultural past, so rich in visitor to Ireland before him, had predominance of ‘modernism as the inner life, and dying ruralism. been sipping from the bottle of tradition’ in certain art colleges to The moment I saw Seamus Heaney Heaneyism, and there were quite a 96 realise how recent): in an international quoted in the curator’s statement my few works on show that pandered context much of it seems a little heart sank – here was another case to that weakness. innocent and derivative. Ottmann’s of an outsider seeing Ireland through isolation of the work put considerable bog-water-tinted glasses, of Ireland So much for Irish ‘inconvenient critical pressure on each artist and it being given special treatment in truths’. To finish with, I feel I should wasn’t just the Irish who looked terms of world culture, of never really take a leaf from the curator’s book exposed. I was completely baffled by having to face up to its contemporary and give him space enough in turn Margot McLean’s Birds in the Hunt predicament. Personally I’m an to present himself – try to give an Museum: at their best there was admirer of Heaney’s gift for the poetic idea of the personal interests that something of the economy of word, and I’ve even taken the time to manifest themselves in this more Japanese ink-painting to them, at follow his thinking in prose, but it personal ev+a. Ottmann’s study of their worst they resembled West of often seems to me that his acquisition the work of James Lee Byars (who Ireland craft-shop fare. I can only of the Nobel Prize was a far from worked between the late fifties and imagine that their inclusion has happy event for Irish culture. The late nineties) is a good pointer. something to do with a taste in particular constellation of Heaney’s Byars was in many ways a maverick Ottmann for outsider practices. work, that part of it at least that who moved in and out of the major captures the public imagination, Irish North American art movements of But the ill-service of Irish art went and international – the meeting of his time, his work following a logic deeper than the placement of the prehistoric and oral with the of its own. Ottmann appears to be inexperienced or marginal older Northern Troubles, in other words, attracted to artists of this kind, artists on a par with established his distillation of a Heideggerian who remain somewhat detached figures like Aura Rosenberg and language from Ireland’s rural culture, from the debates and styles of the Anthony McCall. How could the delayed in its fatal transition to the time. Moreover, Byars’ ‘performative self-funded aesthetics of the Irish not modern totality – is potent within its sculptures’ have an ambiguous look a little amateur next to the historically and locally determined relationship with the Minimalism of ‘shock and awe’ HD production bounds, but is pastoral and almost artists like Carl Andre and Robert values of Jesper Just (whose flaw- escapist when treated as an adequate Morris: although they often resemble less-to-the-point-of-turning-into-an- model for Irish culture. You cannot such work, they are in ways excessive; ad-for-Audi-cars video projection hope to think modern Ireland they have an extra dimension, of ritual includes the famous Finnish shouting through Heaney (on his own at least) or performance, that undoes the choir jumping off a high-rise building) and doing so simply deflects from self-sufficiency of the object, even or Alix Pearlstein (a formalistic study the real affairs of Irish life – the as installation. Looking at Joanne in organisational power relations and psychic catastrophe that is currently Lefac’s cast shadows, I was reminded the constructedness of group unfolding in Ireland’s countryside, for of Duchamp’s use of shadow, à la performance projected in slick split- instance. It is not enough to churn Poincaré, as an indicator of a further screen)? Only in one case did this out (forgive the farming metaphor) dimension (the fact that a three- modesty of means turn to the images redolent of a ‘sense of dimensional object can be generated advantage of an Irish artist; I really place’. It is not enough to simply from a two-dimensional shadow liked Siobhán Tattan’s atmospheric appropriate the eeriness of a Marian suggests a further fourth-dimensional installation Brillant failures, an shrine, throw in a reference to Joyce projection from the object). Something of the same logic informs unfunctioning Fog area/ watermark), Ottmann’s predilection for artworks appear to be at the centre of that include temporality in their Ottmann’s practice. Whether such working: the changing shapes of a practice is suited to so nationally McCall’s spectacular light sculpture; and locally involved an exhibition as the extension of painting into ev+a is another matter. stop-motion animation in Eamonn O’Kane’s Regeneration (despite appearances, ev+a 2007 does not witness a return of interest in painting per se; what are on show are either anti-paintings or supplemented paintings like O’Kane’s); Wolfgang Staelhe’s day-long maintenance of the border between photography and film; Lefrac’s own inclusion of Fergal Gaynor is an Joanne Lefrak 97 moving car headlights and sounds of independent scholar, Super service drive-in, 2007 passage in Super service drive in. writer, and member of burned screen, shadow, DVD projector, DVD player with art intervention group art/ sound, 4:00 min. loop, Such topics are quietly fascinating, not art. installation in the Bourn Vincent and along with similar interests in Gallery, University of Limerick the aesthetic dimension of scientific © Studioworks Photography + thinking (Barry Foley and Ronnie courtesy ev a Hughes) and the cognitive dimension of perception (Amy Hauft’s strangely c . Chris Fite-Wassilak Mother’s Tankstation April – May 2007 Dublin

David Sherry

98 Regulations for irrational David Sherry Regulations for irrational procedures, 2007 installation shot procedures courtesy Mother's Tankstation

Peter, I’ll give you caption(s) when you’ve chosen the image(s). If I eat at a restaurant, then it follows on acid, set forth and made a series tip of my nose with tape.” In a I pay for the meal. To conclude that of askew domestic DIY shows, performance accompanying the if I pay for the meal, then I must have how-to cooking programs and opening of the exhibition, the artist have eaten that meal, however, is a documentaries, as we channel-surf spent the evening with exactly that, non sequitur. In Great meals I never among these moments presented making a humorous suggestion into had (all works 2007), David Sherry as being as everyday as any episode a social elephant in the corner – documents in two tense paragraphs of Gardener’s World. when you find yourself wondering his attempts to situate himself at why you feel it would be rude to recently vacated tables, order the bill, The sound work Levitational masters stare at, much less bring up in and pay for the departed occupant’s features eight people giving testimo- conversation, the purposefully alimentary remnants. He finally nial accounts of their experiences of placed bit of keratin. succeeds, paying £10.50 for the levitating, from conversational tips to fish; “I’d paid for nothing, and it felt traumatic confessionals. We hear At a glance, the drawings also good.” the artist give his own method for suggest that a regular presenter on achieving levitation: meditating on this alternate-reality TV would be Regulations for irrational procedures the image of an onion, removing David Shrigley, whose prioritisation draws on both the logical and layers until nothing remains. He of the informal gesture over craft in 99 comedic aspects of the non sequitur remains cautional, however, insisting his prolific drawings has brought as the collapsing point from which to that levitation instigates a “radical attention to the kind of practice explore a similar set of social fallacies, change in the perception of reality.” formerly reserved for ‘outsider art’ casual impossibilities and alternative It is when we ourselves are looking and drawings by celebrities. While realities that seem to hover just at Meditate on the onion, a simple, similarly accessible and absurd, above our own. A row of drawings black-line outline drawing of the Sherry’s layers of performance go a formd the majority of the exhibition; bulbous vegetable, that the perfor- step further to imbue this imaginary each set out in shaky, single lines on mativity of Sherry’s suggestions territory with the threat of its realisa- graph and note paper, informally they takes body. tion. You could envisage Sherry’s sketch glimpses into this parallell daytime programming starting with a universe: miniaturised wildlife for We are willed to accept Sherry’s comedy sketch show with Shrigley, case displays, fields of cheese, a narrative authority in his texts – that followed by Ready steady cook fried egg half-balanced on the heel they actually document completed hosted by an early Raymond of a stiletto. Man with two willies performances, such as in Great Pettibon, the evening news by an depicts a messily bearded man, with meals, or with the text document No uneasy Dan Perjovschi, and a talk red tubing extruding from various rolo, in which Sherry narrates a plan show on social etiquette brought to parts of his naked body, facing us to buy all the available Rolo sweets you by Andy Kaufman. In Regulations, earnestly, his arms held out limp. from a shop, shortly followed by a Sherry uses elements involved in our In the scribbled text alongside, he ‘partner in crime’ who swoops in to social constructions to enact an describes the testing he is going demand Rolos from the hapless ongoing relay between the playfully through because of his extraordinary shopkeepers. This particular piece imagined and the embodied real, condition; the majority of the text is is complemented on the facing wall to create a space where it could spent on an ordinary complaint to do by a photo of the eighteen packs of be considered that levitation is with his examiners’ “asking questions Rolos in question, bundled like a “eminently do-able.” about how I feel and I say fine and stick of cartoon dynamite, as if they say how fine? And this infuriates verification that the sting took place. A series of commodities like the Chris Fite-Wassilak is me and I say think of the last time a writer and curator you felt fine and that’s how I felt until Rolo, plastic bottles, or cheese recur currently based in London; you wanted fine explained.” as leitmotifs connecting the sculpture, he and David Beattie are video, and sound works to the co-curating the Lighthouse These works, in their varying drawings, and the drawings begin to caravan cinema, to take degrees of offhand surrealism, act as documents in themselves of place on London’s Brick present the horrific and the plain silly possible performances and potential Lane in June this year, as part of the wider as cohabiters of the same mundane realities. Regulations for irrational House projects series of potentiality: not just charting the procedures features a blue pen exhibitions abnormal, but daytime-televising it. drawing of a large, shapely nose, (www.houseprojects.net) It’s as if a slew of BBC Three a crooked crescent shape hooking producers, giddy from the possibilities out from the front with the written suggested by their first experience caption, “finger nail stuck onto the c .

100 101 c . David Hughes Millennium Court Arts April – May 2007 Centre Portadown rita duffy and paul muldoon cuchulain comforted and cloth — two visual and verbal 102 collaborations This is the second exhibition and The mythic character that presides compacting of the white room in publication in a two-part series of over this exhibition is not ultimately which he was born, a very modern new work commissioned by the Cuchulain, but rather Elision, the god hospital at the time, and the room in Millennium Court, under the general of suture. The sacred shroud of which he now re-imagines himself: banner ‘Interrogating Contested Elision is shown in the painting of a this spanking new white room of the Spaces’, and involving the parka, Relic (2001), the raw red exhibition. collaboration of major Northern Irish stumps and cavities showing where visual and verbal artists. the heart and hands have been Sutured by frame, the text ripped out and off. Relic and reliquary, Folding a napkin. Portadown figures explicitly in the this vestment is an empty shell Straightening the tablecloth. essay of County Armagh-born writer holding the shape of its previous No washing of dirty linen in public. Paul Muldoon. Rita Duffy’s graphics incumbent. Equally empty and No flags or emblems are both domestic (napkins, table- postured are the Police jacket is printed on the wall below the cloths, chests of drawers) and (2002), the lego-clerical garments of painting Console (2006), a wooden institutional (the garments of priests the Justus series (2006), the scarlet hostess trolley, one wing out, covered and lawyers). Both artists are surplice of Mantle (2006) and the by a white linen tablecloth. It is the concerned with the flax-growing and flak jacket of Flak (2006). All of them table of intimate meals, the gurney 103 linen producing history of Northern contested spaces, hollowed out, of the body laid to rest, the altar Ireland, but their treatment of ‘flax’ abandoned, disgraced, impotent, of worship, the shroud and the as skin, as badge, as uniform and posturing, saturated with blood. magician’s table of transformation. camouflage brings the material Who will occupy them now? Where Sutured by gutter, in Cloth, the same politically right up to date. have the lawyer, cleric, paramilitary, four lines sit on the left-hand page soldier, policeman gone? Do they opposite the painting Objection Yeats’ poem of 1939, Cuchulain occupy each other’s clothes, or (2006), the floating, empty robes comforted, of course, casts its other kinds of suits? Do they have and wig of a barrister, right hand shadow over the exhibition. One a role at all? raised in an endless gesture of amongst a group which includes objection. A Needle’s eye and Veronica’s The controlling trope of the show is napkin, in which he uses textile embodied in Elision (2003): a white One image speaks of the private metaphors. linen shirt, into which all the other object that resonates with cultural vestments are metaphorically and religious significance: the napkin One could use the Yeats poem as a collapsed, which holds the shape of of swaddling clothes, of burial checklist for the elements within the the elided or excised torso, and which shroud, of communion, of the altar. show. The “six mortal wounds,” the floats in the centre of the linen The legal gesture is public but “violent and famous,” the “certain ‘canvas’. The extreme background vulnerable and tentative and exposing. shrouds” talking amongst themselves, is a mottled camouflage field. The text speaks of a genteel gesture, the “meditation on wounds and Floating between these two grounds possibly anachronistic and nostalgic. blood,” the “letting fall of a bundle of is an array of skeletal drawings of It at once lets rip the flying of flags linen” by a shroud “that seemed to armaments. and waving of banners and effaces have authority,” all these images them. A kind of needle’s eye. All that would find corollaries in the show. In the writing, portmanteau words has been. All that is to come. But such a conceit would oblige us stitch concepts together. Muldoon to ask who the convicted cowards the child wants to know where the David Hughes is a writer are within the exhibition and who has chocolate Quakers are, rather than and artist and formerly been driven from home and left to the cambric Quakers: “where editor of Hybrid and Live Art die in fear? were the chocolutherans, the magazines. chocatholics?” Time is elided in the For Yeats, the needle’s eye is the coincidence of his father’s return to (opposite) Rita Duffy space through which all that is has start flax-cropping in the year of roared and coursed and through Console, 2006 publication of Cuchulain comforted. oil on linen which the thing unborn will come. A fluttering handkerchief the suture 76 x 76 cm The needle’s eye has agency. It is courtesy Millennium Court that elides the linen barons of his Arts Centre time, it goads the stream on; a kind infancy and Father Edward Daly as if black hole into which all things he walks through the dead and collapse and from which all things dying of Derry on Bloody Sunday are spewed out. in 1972. Space is elided in the c .

104 Image courtesy of Titanic Quarter Ltd.

EPISODE 306: DALLAS, BELFAST A project by Gareth Kennedy & Sarah Browne, 2006-7

Episode 306: Dallas, Belfast was a re-enactment of a fragment of a script from the 1980s TV show Dallas with three casts of three Belfast actors, selected by open audi- tion. Filming was completed in September 2006 and the work was premiered in April 2007 as part of the concluding Space Shuttle event at PS2, Belfast. See www.spaceshuttle.org.uk

Episode 306: Dallas, Belfast was commissioned as one of six projects in the Space Shuttle pro- gramme, initiated by Paragon Studios/ PS2, Belfast; the projects were funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through National Lottery Funding, and Belfast City Council through Celebrate Belfast 2006. Details for Actors

Cast No 1: Liam O'Carroll Norris as JR; Stephen Angus as McKay; Carly Young as Bobby.

Cast No 2: Adrian Cooke as JR; Jim McGookin as McKay; Andrew Higgins as Bobby.

Cast No 3: Kelly Anne Flynn as JR; Olivia O'Kane as McKay; Carly Young as Bobby.

About the Set:

For the set, the 'Space Shuttle' (the sil- ver box you saw at auditions) is convert- ed into a typical office. This is fur- nished with a desk, executive chair, water-cooler and wall decorations. In effect, this simulated space could be a modern office anywhere in the world — it's often the case that big decisions and choices that have far-reaching conse- quences are made in such places.

Significantly, the set is located in the post-industrial landscape of what will soon be redeveloped as the Titanic Quarter. At 75 hectares (185 acres), it represents one of the largest waterfront developments in Europe (www.titanicquarter.com). The set has been positioned so its windows carefully frame this landscape, and the views are impor- tant in providing a sense of place. (This is at odds with the interior that could be anywhere).

Think of the space inside the box, the set, as a kind of isolated bubble or think-tank. It is a place slightly removed from the city, a place for reflection on the city's past and possible futures. We will be repeating lines and scenes over and over so it may be useful to think of it as a time warp or something like that.

Why Dallas?

As one of the most watched TV shows in his- tory, Dallas was an important cultural presence and gathered a mass audience on an international scale. In America, it served to promote a lifestyle of conspic- uous consumption and act as a social balm following the American recession and oil crises of the ’70s. It occurred at a time when the US was entering its post-indus- trial phase.

We are working with a small fragment of an original, fictional Dallas script from 1987. This fiction describes the now-dom- inant forces of global capitalism, such as foreign investment, multinational corpo- rations and de-nationalised industry. We are interested in how you will interpret and bring this script to life through a kind of cross-cultural translation enact- ed with Belfast’s docklands (rebranded as the Titanic Quarter) as backdrop.

We want to work closely with the differ- ent casts to enact 3 different interpre- tations of this script within the Belfast context.

Why the Titanic Quarter?

We are interested in what the redevelop- ment of this historic site promises. For instance, in the Titanic Quarter's promo- tional brochure it proposes to 'democra- tise luxury', and offer 'the cruise liner lifestyle' to Belfast.

Also in its own way we find the site beau- tiful, and see this as an opportunity for the work made to be a marker in time, between Belfast's industrial past and the proposed vision of the future. These mas- sive complexes of apartments, retail envi- ronments and leisure spaces will act as rebranded 'cities within cities': ironi- cally exactly what cruiseliners such as the Titanic were originally intended to be. Where such places were previously sent out in the world to be experienced as 'floating communities of luxury and leisure' (Titanic Quarter publicity video), they are now being built for the docklands sites, to be experienced in situ.

You will not be asked to adopt the Texan accent.