+billion- journal 2010—2017 by James Merrigan

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+billion-

(2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017) [billionjournal.com]

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2010 – 2017_

7-YEAR ITCH We all end up monogamous in the end; with our sense of regret for the things we didn’t embrace in the moment, or with the things we embraced for too long. +billion has been both for me — a moment I embraced for 7 years. Resources have been tight over the years. I’m still using the same shitty camcorder for the video reviews, and the outdated website software is going to break one day soon. But not depending on or being controlled by funding was perhaps a blessing – I never got to go full Atelier on it. Writing criticism ‘in the moment’ is a drug. But +billion- was never about dumb things like truth, contrariness or meanspiritedness. I could say so much here about the present conditions of writing on art in this country but I won’t.

When I think about it, this has been a long goodbye. I wrote a piece back in October 2016 that expressed a lot of what I felt towards the local art scene: ‘Towards a Subculture of Art’. So, for now, from +billion-, thank you so much readers ! Especially artists for supplying the thoughts and feelings and words. After all, I am just an empty receptacle. Also, thank you for the supportive emails and comments – especially the unsupportive emails and comments, which revealed to me so much more about the state of play. As I have said before, being an art critic in a world of such fragile resources and hearts is perverse, but leaving a readership that averaged 600 is harder. Next up... I don’t know. But words will be involved, and art too. Maybe I’ll do something safe and validating like curating;) Safe Passage through the Art World... Towards a Subculture of Art ! James Merrigan, February 2017.

I won’t spell out what is being uniformly fostered by art institutions, educators and little art writing cliques. You can spell.

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4 Copyright ÂŠ authors, artists, +billionjournal, 2017 Acknowledgements Thank you to the writers, galleries, assistants administrators, curators, and of course artists for providing me with information and images.

2010 – 2017_

INTRO

TOWARDS A SUBCULTURE OF ART

1—267

REVIEWS

268—282

NOTES

283—479

IMAGES

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#59

ALAN BUTLER Come Together 2013 Still Image, HD-Video, 10min 40sec ~ courtesy of the artist.

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

ALEX CONWAY ‘Right Here, Right Now’ Kilmainham Gaol November 4, 2010 ~ photo: Margaret Byrne.

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TEXTS ~ NOVEMBER 2010 – FEBRUARY 2017: (#1 – #121)_ 2010 –CONTENTS_ 2017_ NOVEMBER 2010 (#1): COCK A LEG, OR SQUAT? ALAN BUTLER, ‘I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant’, Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin, 20 October – 27 November. BEA MCMAHON, Two-fold, Green on Red gallery, Dublin, 11 November – 11 December. DECEMBER 2010 (#2): ALTER-EGO(LESS) ALAN PHELAN, ‘Cabbages and Things’, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, October 30 – November 27. DECEMBER 2010 (#3): A POST-PATRIOTIC PERFORMANCE HELENA WALSHE, SINEAD MCCANN, ALEX CONWAY, ‘Right Here, Right Now’, Kilmainham Gaol, November 4. JANUARY 2011 (#4): A MAGPIE’S EYE FOR APPROPRIATION GAVIN MURPHY, ‘Remember’, Dublin City Gallery/ Hugh Lane Golden Bough suite, November 4, 2010 – January 16, 2011. JANUARY 2011 (#5): THE AESTHETICIZATION OF GRIEF CECILY BRENNAN, ‘Black Tears’, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 13 January – 26 February. JANUARY 2011 (#6): A GAME OF THREE HALVES ANNIKA STROM, ‘From the Community Hall’, Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin, 10 December, 2010 – 7 February, 2011. FEBRUARY 2011 (#7): READYMADE RE-ANIMATOR TRACY HANNA, ‘Things Fall Apart’, SOMA Contemporary, Waterford, 3 February – 26 February. FEBRUARY 2011 (#8): THE GENESIS OF A COOKIE-CUTTER OR HOT POTATO Introducing the curators of Dublin Contemporary 2011. MARCH 2011 (#9): AN ELEVATOR FOR THE IVORY TOWER CEAL FLOYER, ‘Things’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 11 March – 23 April. MARCH 2011 (#10): BAGGAGE AND ABSENTISM PETER FITZGERALD, ‘Wall Works’, Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast, 24 February – 26 March. APRIL 2011 (#11): A(WAKE) FOR THE DEATH OF THE EVENT MICHELLE BROWNE, ‘out on the sea was a boat fu! of people singing’ & other stories, The LAB, Dublin, 4 March – 9 April, 2011. APRIL 2011 (#12): COFFEE BREAK CRITICISM (AFTERTHOUGHTS) A&E SESSION ON ART CRITICISM, Monster Truck Gallery, Dublin, April 4. MAY 2011 (#13): TO BE – TO SEE – TO BE SEEN SUSAN MACWILLIAM, ‘F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N’, NCAD Gallery, Dublin. MAY 2011 #14: INTERNET ATROPHY: ‘O1 FOR ALL AND ALL FOR 01’ ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC, JOEL HOLMBERG, PARKER ITO, EILIS MCDONALD JONATHAN RAFMAN ‘Offline’, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin, 8 April – 14 May, curated by Rayne Booth. JUNE 2011 (#15): PHANTOM PROSTHETICS VERA KLUTE, ‘Blindgänger’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, May 7 – 19 June. JUNE 2011 (#16): THE SEQUEL, OR THE UMADE PREQUEL? DUBLIN CONTEMPORARY 2011 Programme Announcement, Earlsforth Terrace, Dublin, 23 June. JUNE 2011 (#17): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY SLAVKA SVERAKOVA* ‘SHIPSIDES AND BEGGS PROJECT: AT THE DEATH OF DELAWAB’, 2010. JULY 2011 (#18): REFLECTING IN THE INSTITUTION REVIEWS OF DUBLIN GRADUATE SHOWS AT NCAD, DIT, and IADT.

AUGUST 2011 (#20): READY-MADE GEOMETRY NIALL DE BUILTÉAR, ‘Out of Order,’ The LAB, Dublin, 8 July – 20 August. AUGUST 2011 (#21): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY JOANNE LAWS* ‘SEAN LYNCH + BRIAN HAND’, The Dock, Carrick on Shannon, 8 April - 11 June. AUGUST 2011 (#22): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY RUTH HOGAN* CHRISTOPH BUCHEL, ‘Piccadilly Community Centre’, Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London, 13 May – 30 July. SEPTEMBER 2011 (#23): SPACE INVADERS KEVIN COSGROVE + BRENDAN EARLEY, ‘Nor for Nought’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 14 September – 29 October. OCTOBER 2011 (#24): ad hoc MUSEUM DUBLIN CONTEMPORARY 2011, 6 September – 31 October. OCTOBER 2011 (#25): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY ÁINE PHILIPS* THE DEVIL’S SPINE BAND, ‘A Wild West Imaginative Space’, Galway Arts Festival, 20 – 23 July. NOVEMBER 2011 (#26): HISTORICAL CASES OF THE SUBTERRANEAN KIND ‘Underground’, 10 – 13 November, 2011, Basic Space, Dublin. DECEMBER 2011 (#27): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY MICHAELE CUTAYA* DAVID BEATTIE, KARL BURKE, CHRIS FITE-WASSILAK, ‘Feedback’, Galway Arts Centre, 2 September – 1 October. JANUARY 2012 (#28): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY LAUREN HISADA* ‘Death and Sensuality: A group exhibition of contemporary Irish artists’, curated by Jim Ricks, Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco, 4 November – 3 December, 2011. FEBRUARY 2012 (#29): REPETITIVE ‘STAIN’ INJURY ANTTI LEPPANEN, ‘The Second Iteration’, Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast, 23 February – 31 March. MARCH 2012 (#30): UNDERDOG MERLIN JAMES, ‘In the Gallery’, Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, 3 February – 28 March. MARCH 2012 (#31): ARCHITECTURE’S HANDMAIDEN BRIAN DUGGAN, ‘Three Lives’, Rua Red Arts Centre, Tallaght, Dublin, 19 March – 28 April. APRIL 2012 (#32): HOW TO NOT GET GALLERY REPRESENTATION! APRIL 2012

(#33): THE CRITIC &/OR/VS. THE ARTIST

MAY 2012 (#34): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY MICHAELE CUTAYA* ANGELALYNN DUNLOP, ARIANNA GARCIA-FIALDINI, HAYNES GOODSELL ‘Korporeal’, MFA Show, Burren College of Art , 14 – 29 April. MAY 2012 (#35): IRON BUTTERFLY 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012. MAY 2012 (#36): GROPING WITH ALCHEMY BRENDAN EARLEY, ‘A Place Between’, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin, 15 March – 29 April. JUNE 2012 (#37): AFTER THE FUTURE eva International: Biennial of Visual Art, Limerick City, Ireland, 19 May – 12 August. JUNE 2012 (#38): SUBJECTIVELY YOURS Response to Roberta Smith’s casual resurrection of Roland Barthes’ death of the author discourse in the New York Times. JUNE 2012 (#39): MILK MINERS & COAL MAIDENS MARIE FARRINGTON + SARAH DOHERTY, ‘Outside the System of Difference’, The Joinery, Dublin, 16 May – 27 May. + ALEANA EGAN, ‘day wears’, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1 June – 18 July. JUNE 2012 (#40): CROWNING COLIN MARTIN, ‘The Garden’, Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Institute of Technology, Curated by Kate Strain 6th June – 20 June, 2012 + Panel Discussion on the 7 June, 2pm with Alice Butler, John Graham, Maximilian Le Cain and Seán O’Sullivan. JULY 2013 (#41): SHITLIST DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS 2012: SEE: [http://billionjournal.com] JULY 2012 (#42): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY JOANNE LAWS* Sligo I.T Fine Art Graduate Show.

JULY 2011 (#19): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY MAEVE MULRENNAN* RUTI SELA + MAAYAN AMIR, ‘Beyond Guilt Trilogy’, 126 Gallery, Galway, Ireland, May 26 – June 18.

www.billionjournal.com _ www.billionjournal.com_ SEPTEMBER 2012 (#43): BEATING THE EMOTIVE DRUM ALEX CONWAY + FRANK WHELAN (Hi Dó), SITEATION (Launch), Unit 4 James Joyce Street, Dublin, 6 September. SEPTEMBER 2012 (#44): A DEFLATED HOORAY FOR PAINTING A Response to Gemma Tipton’s Irish Times article ‘Painting is not dead – it’s hard’ OCTOBER 2012 (#45): BECOMING SELF AWARE Panel Discussion with editors from Irish art publications, The COMMISSIONS+ Symposium, 9 October. OCTOBER 2012 (#46): CLEAN & CLEAR NINA CANELL, ‘Tendrils’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 29 September – 14 November. NOVEMBER 2012 (#47): *SUBMITTED TEXT BY ÁINE PHILLIPS* THE PERFORMANCE COLLECTIVE, ‘Subject to Ongoing Change’, Galway Arts Centre, 16 – 29 July. JUNE 2013 (#48): MAGICIAN_OR MIME? AURÉLIEN FROMENT, ‘9 Intervals’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 6 January – 16 February. JUNE 2013 (#49): A KEYNOTE ADDRESS MICK WILSON, ‘some songs are sung slower’, The Lab, Dublin, 18 January – 9 March. JUNE 2013 (#50): SEMANTIC TERATOMAS FOR THE TECHNO-CARCASS ED ATKINS, ‘Of tears, of course’, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, 15 February – 30 March. JUNE 2013 (#51): IT WAS THE BUTLER WITH THE CANDLESTICK IN THE LIBRARY ALAN PHELAN, ‘HANDJOB’, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, 14 March - 26 April. JUNE 2013 (#52): HALF EMPTY/HALF FULL NIAMH O’MALLEY, ‘Garden’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 26 April – 22 June. JUNE 2013 (#53): THE BREAKING YARD KATY MORAN, ‘Katy Moran’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 8 February – 28 March. JUNE 2013 (#54): OF GIRLY PAINTINGS AND THE ART MARKET, NEWSPAPER REVIEWS AND PHIZMONGERS GENIEVE FIGGIS, Genieve Figgis at Talbot Gallery and Studios, Dublin , 11 April – 4 May. JUNE 2013 (#55): PROVISIONAL PAINTING? Irish artist Damien Flood first drew my attention to Raphael Rubinstein’s article ‘Provisional Painting’[1] for the periodical Art in America (first published: 04.05.2009).* ... JULY 2013 (#56): SHITLIST DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS 2013: SEE [http://billionjournal.com] AUGUST 2013 (#57): THE ART OF IDLENESS MAGNHILD OPØDL, ‘point of no return’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 15 June – 28 July. AUGUST 2013 (#58): THE SPRINKLERS ARE ON LIAM GILLICK, ‘For the doors that are welded shut’, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 27 July – 14 September. AUGUST 2013 (#59): JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS! ‘Circulation’, Starring ALAN BUTLER + JEFFREY CHARLES HENRY PEACOCK + 62 open submission artists (= 51 artworks/proposals), FLOOD + Monster Truck gallery, Dublin, curated by Paul McAree, 9 – 24 August. SEPTEMBER 2013 (#60): BETWEEN THE MAID AND UNMADE PAUL DORAN, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 29 August – 28 September. SEPTEMBER 2013 (#61): DARK, DARK EOIN Mc HUGH, ‘Augury’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 26 July – 11 September. SEPTEMBER 2013 (#62): TRAGIC ATTACHMENT(S) MARLENE McCARTY, ‘Hard-Keepers’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 5 September – 20 October.

OCTOBER 2013 (#63): DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH MARCEL VIDAL, ‘#untitled’, Basic Space, Dublin, 20 – 26 September (10 October by appointment). OCTOBER 2013 (#64): PERSONAL INVESTMENT (PAUL DORAN in conversation with ROBERT ARMSTRONG), Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 20 September, 7:30pm. OCTOBER 2013 (#65): PAINTING WITH LYRICS RAMON KASSAM, ‘Portrait Cuts Itself Out On The Floor’, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 26 – 30 June. OCTOBER 2013 (#66): LIQUID FIRE’s PROMISE SHANE McCARTHY, ‘Words, sometimes, get in the way of meaning’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 25 September - 2 November. OCTOBER 2013 (#67): THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED TOM WATT, ‘Opening’, 8 Seville Place, Dublin , 10 October – 5 November. NOVEMBER 2013 (#68): THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE INDIFFERENT CONOR MARY FOY, ‘Adiaphora’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 30 October (Live performance 7:15pm) – 2 November. DECEMBER 2013 (#69): THERAPY SESSION MARTIN CREED, ‘Concert’, Broadstone Studios, Dublin, 30 November, 8pm (LIVE gig), (initiated by PAUL HALLAHAN). DECEMBER 2013 (#70): ADAM FROM EVE TRACY HANNA, ‘Everything’s moving below the surface’, Saint Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, November 13 – 24, 2013. MARK DURKAN, ‘I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins’, The Lab, Dublin, 14 November – 25 January, 2014. FEBRUARY 2014 (#71): LOOK AGAIN RICHARD MOSSE. ‘The Enclave’, RHA, Gallery II, Dublin, January 30, 2014 – March 12, 2014. MARCH 2014 (#72): THE LIMELIGHT ALSO COMES IN MAGENTA: Thoughts on Envy, Community and ‘The Limelight’ with regard to Art Judgment APRIL 2014 (#73): TO THE COSMOPOLITAN IN THE SCRUB; CHEERS! MARK SWORDS. ‘The Hinterlands’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, 28 March – 26 April, 2014. APRIL 2014 (#74): GOLDEN CALF, BLACK SHEEP For WILHELM SASNAL’s solo exhibition ‘Take Me To The Other Side’, at Lismore Castle Arts, 25 April, 3pm. JUNE 2014 (#75): SCHOOL’S OUT LILY CAHILL & ROB MURPHY. ‘Prodigy’. Broad Stone Studios. Dublin. 28 May – 1 June, 2014. JULY 2014 (#76): SHITLIST DIGITAL REVIEW OF IRISH DEGREE SHOWS 2014: SEE [http://billionjournal.com] EVA INTERNATIONAL: BI-FOLD INTERPELLATION (#77 – #82) APRIL 2014. ‘DEAR PATRICK JOLLEY’, THIS MONKEY (2009). KERRY GROUP PLANT. APRIL 2014. ‘DEAR LUIS JACOB’, ALBUM XII (2013-14). LIMERICK CITY GALLERY. MAY 2014. ‘DEAR NESA PARIPOVIC’, N.P. 1977 (1977). KERRY GROUP PLANT. MAY 2014. ‘DEAR DAVID HORVITZ & MARTÍ ANSON’. KERRY GROUP PLANT. MAY 2014. ‘DEAR CHIMURENGA & STACY HARDY’. KERRY GROUP PLANT. JUNE.2014. ‘DEAR URIEL ORLOW’. BOURN VINCENT GALLERY. JULY 2014 (#83): PROMISES, PROMISES SHANE McCARTHY. ‘Tangled Hierarchies’. Studio 4. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Dublin. 24 July – 2 August, 2014. AUGUST 2014 (#84): THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY ‘A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin’ Derek Jarman / Gunilla Klingberg / Bea McMahon / Richard Proffitt / Garrett Phelan / Dorje De Burgh (Curated by Pádraic E. Moore) Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. 19 June 2014 – 7 September 2014.

CONTENTS_ 2010 – 2017_ TEXTS ~ NOVEMBER 2010 – FEBRUARY 2017: (#1 – #121)_ AUGUST 15. 2014 (#85): ARM-WRESTLING TRANSCENDENCE RUTH E. LYONS. ‘The Pinking’. Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Dublin. 8 – 30 AUGUST, 2014. AUGUST 2014 (#86): SO ... WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY? Niamh Forbes & Aoife Mullan, ‘What Stands Forth’, Basic Space. Dublin 21 – 28 August, 2014. SEPTEMBER 2014 (#87): I’M WITH STUPID NATHANIEL MELLORS. ‘The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview’. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. 5 September – 1 November 2014. (Curated by Rayne Booth.) FEBRUARY 2015 (#88): TOWARD A REGIONAL ART CRITICISM: Thoughts on PVA’s Regional Art Criticism Programme. APRIL 2015 (#89): WHATCHAMACALLIT: KARI ALTMAN. ‘Xomia (Return Home, Realflow, All Terrain)’. Ellis King Gallery, Dublin. 27 March – 2 May 2015. APRIL 2015 (#90): WATER HAS A MEMORY: TERESA GILLESPIE. MARIA MCKINNEY. CATHERINE BARRAGRY. DEAD ZOO. ArtBox, Dublin. 20 March – 25 April 2015 APRIL 2015 (#91): STRANGER THAN HISTORY: AOIBHEANN GREENAN. ‘DMC – Dunmurry May-Day Conspiracy’. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. 17 April – 20 June 2015. MAY 2015 (#92):DRESSED TO THE MACK: DECLAN CLARKE. ‘Wreckage in May’. The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. 30 April – 13 September 2015. MAY 2015 (#93): THE DANCE: SUSAN CONNOLLY. ‘When the Ceiling Meets the Floor’. / GABHANN DUNNE. ‘Magenta Honey’ The LAB Gallery, Foley St., Dublin. 1 May – 13 June 2015. MAY 2015 (#94): LIFE’S GOOD ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON ADRIAN GHENIE, PIETER HUGO, OLAF BRZESKI. ‘I will go there, take me home’. (Curated by Gregory McCartney) The MAC, Belfast. 8 May 2015 – 26 Jul 2015. JUNE 2015 (#95): SHITLIST DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS 2015: SEE [http://billionjournal.com] OCTOBER 2015 (#96): YOU LIKE TO WATCH, DON’T YOU DAVID CLAERBOUT, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 14 August – 10 October 2015. OCTOBER 2015 (#97): WHAT IF..? CHRIS MARTIN, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, October 9 - December 2, 2015. OCTOBER 2015 (#98): WAITING FOR THE PILLOW FIGHT. ANN MARIA HEALY, ‘Your ass protrudes toward the malaise’, Eight Gallery, Dublin, 23 October – 5 November, 2015. DECEMBER 2015 (#99): DRY-HUMPING. EMMA HAUGH, ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’, NCAD Gallery, (Curated by RGKSKSRG), 6 November -– 2 December 2015. DECEMBER 2015 (#100): HUT LIFE ELLA BERTILSSON & ULLA JUSKE, ‘Time is what happens when nothing else does’,The HUT Project (Part I), Dublin (Presented by OPW and RHA), 18 November – 23 December, 2015. JANUARY 2016 (#101): NO SPOILERS! JONATHAN MAYHEW, ‘a preamble to an exhibition...’ (The HUT Project (Part II))

MARCH 2016 (#103): COULDA-WOULDA-SHOULDA ALAN PHELAN, ‘OUR KIND’, THE HUGH LANE, DUBLIN, 10 MARCH — 2 OCTOBER 2016. MAY 2016 (#104): GETTING OUT OF GODARD AN ALMOST REVIEW THAT BECAME A MANIFESTO OF TRANSGRESSION AND ART MAY 2016 (#105): NIGHT PAINTER RAMON KASSAM, ‘WORKS’, GREEN ON RED GALLERY, DUBLIN, 20 MAY – 2 JULY 2016. JUNE 2016

(#106): SHITLIST — VIDEO REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS.

JUNE 2016 (#107): FUGITIVES #1: VIDEO REVIEWS ART WORKS, CARLOW, 10 – 19 JUNE 2016. JULY 2016 (#108): LIMINAL IS FINE, BUT... SOME THOUGHTS ON EMBRACING SUBJECTIVITY IN THE ACT OF WRITING ON ART, PROVOKED BY CAOIMHE KILFEATHER’S SOLO SHOW AT DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY, DUBLIN. JULY 2016 (#109): THE ART OF COMPROMISE ANDREAS VON KNOBLOCH, ‘IN SUPPORT’, MERMAID ART CENTRE, BRAY, 22 JULY – 3 SEPTEMBER 2016. AUGUST 2016 (#110): FUGITIVES #2: VIDEO REVIEWS Sectional video review of group exhibition ‘Pull the Rug Out from Under the Carpet’, with AUSTIN HEARNE, DARREN CAFFREY, MARIAH BLACK & MADELEINE FAIRBARN, CHANTEL ROSARIO and CAC O’DAY, Dore’s Factory, Kilkenny City, 5 – 14 AUGUST 2016. AUGUST 2016 (#111): BREAKING PAINTING PAUL DORAN, HILLSBORO FINE ART, DUBLIN, 11 August – 5 September 2016. SEPTEMBER 2016 (#112): FUGITIVES #3: VIDEO REVIEWS TARO FURUKATA, ANN MARIA HEALY, CLAIRE HUBER, KVM, ‘I Like to Eat with my Hands’, (Curated by RGKSKSRG – In association with Cow House Studios), Wexford Arts Centre, 29 August – 5 October 2016. OCTOBER 2016 (#113): OF SHEEP & WOLVES & THE SOCIAL TOM WATT, TANAD WILLIAMS, ANDREAS KINDLER VON KNOBLOCH, ‘Brute Clues’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2 September – 29 October 2016. OCTOBER 2016 (#114): FLOWERS!? REALLY!?MAIREAD O’HEOCHA, ‘Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms’, mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin, 21 September – 29 October 2016. OCTOBER 2016

(#115): TOWARDS A SUBCULTURE OF ART

NOVEMBER 2016 (#116): TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T KISSYURI PATTISON ‘sunset provision’, mother’s tankstation limited, 16 November – 21 January 2017. DECEMBER 2016 JANUARY 2017

(#117): DUB_SESSIONS (1) ROBERT AMSTRONG & ANNA BJERGER IN A GALLERY SOMEWHERE. (#118): MATINEE: AN IMAGE OF ART CRITICISM

JANUARY 2017 (#119): PYRO SIOBHAN HAPASKA, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 17 December 2016 – 4 February 2017. FEBRUARY 2017 (#120): UFO KATHLYN O’BRIEN, ‘Altered Light’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 12 January – 11 February 2017. FEBRUARY 2017 (#121): DEVIL JOY GERRARD, ‘shot crowd’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 20 January – 26 March 2017.

FEBRUARY 2016 (#102): BOYS&GIRLS! flattery and art criticism and two exhibitions, Platform Arts Belfast and Catalyst Arts Belfast, February 2016.

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OCTOBER 2016

(#115): TOWARDS A SUBCULTURE OF ART

IT WOULD HAVE SERVED THE LOCAL ART SCENE BETTER IF NEVAN LAHART’S RECENT PROCLAMATION CONTEMPORARY ART IS A HOAX STATED THE ART SCENE IS A HOAX. [Exhibted at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 8/9 – 8/10, 2016]

Let me explain... I recently watched a documentary on Aaron Swartz that affected me greatly, The Internet’s Own Boy. Those of you who don’t know Aaron Swartz I’ll keep it simple: he shaped the evolution of the Internet. But we have lots of them. What made Aaron Swartz special was his ideology of fairness and freedom that was the driving force behind this evolution. An ideology that tragically ended in his suicide after the American federal government hounded and pressured and isolated him after, of all things, the harmless hactivist heist of the digital library, JSTOR. He was 26.

Beyond the feelings stirred by this film, what got me thinking was the sacrifices Aaron Swartz made and the risks he took for what he perceived as a fair and free cyberspace. Further, he did this with an outspoken criticality and worn-on-the-sleeve sensitivity. Combined, however, criticality and sensitivity was the double-edged sword on which he fell upon. In a sense the Internet was Aaron Swartz’s baby, and he risked limb and ultimately life to protect how he personally envisioned it being used – as a Creative Commons. But in the end he underestimated real power and how real power can set things in crushing motion when it feels its authority and way of life is being threatened. So... where am I going with this? It’s simple, really: what if you transferred Aaron Swartz’s free and fair ideology onto our very own art scene? What if we all embraced a little more self-sacrifice and a little less self-preservation in our art scene? What if we looked at the art scene as something that should be protected like a white-faced goth from a herd of farmer tans? What if we thought of the art scene – in the strictest of terms – as a subculture? I’ll tell you a story... My first experience of exhibiting in this art scene was when I went through a long submission process for selection for a solo show at an artist-led space in Dublin. To my delight I was selected out of hundreds, and better still I was fresh out of art college so I had momentum on my side. To my dismay I learnt in tandem that I would have to pay hundreds of euro to exhibit there. I was shocked. I was on the dole and I knew if I saved I could pay the fee with little sacrifice. But it was the principal of the thing – was this where I wanted to begin my life as an artist, by paying to show my art? I really didn’t know that artist-led spaces worked in this way (FYI: I was a country bumpkin fresh off the bogger bus).

2010 – 2017_

I spoke to others about the situation, my family and art friends. The former thought it ridiculous; the latter thought it normal. I went with the former’s opinion, rejecting the offer, even though I fought with my decision long afterwards. I was turning down a solo show in Dublin after all. Luckily I got lots more opportunities – eight solo shows and numerous group shows over a four-year period. But I paid to be an artist during that time, like every other artist in the art scene. Normal, right!? Over those four years I forked out over 10k for materials and travel. Considering my work was easily recyclable – the materials from each installation broken down and recycled into the next crude take – my outlay was nothing compared to other artists. You could say my junk art was an evolutionary adaption to an unfair and unsustainable art environment. To my astonishment things didn’t change when I exhibited at larger art institutions that, you would think, should have the means and morals to support artists fairly. I still ended up paying six times or more (relative to my fee) to produce every exhibition. And this is just the bare bones stuff, not considering time in the studio.

The dumb thing is, those projects that are awarded funding become very different projects due to the shortfall in funding; or sacrifices are made on the part of the artist, which I believe is mostly the case. The times I have personally been awarded funding the resulting projects have always swallowed my fee and invariably more than my fee. Once again, it’s a choice that most artists make for the sake of their art. No big thing, right!? As an artist I swallowed these customs time and again until the day came when I couldn’t anymore. Four years on I now look back on my last solo show at Dublin’s The LAB – THELASTWORDSHOW – as an extinction burst of the disillusionment I felt for the accepted inequalities and censors in the art scene. Now, as an art critic, I’m not as accepting as I once was as an artist. Back then I knew there was an art game to play and if you didn’t play it well you were out. But now I can allow myself to be critical of the art scene in my unmarried status or unnecessary flirtations with either artist, curator or institution. It’s fucking liberating. Being an artist should be fucking liberating too. The art scene should be fucking liberating, right!? But liberation always comes at a price in the art scene. As an artist when you run out of hope and momentum and money you always end up at a decisive crossroads (unless independently bankrolled or barefaced lucky): you stop making art to make a living; continue making art on the breadline; get discovered by the art market; fuck off somewhere else; or have a local institutional art career blindly perpetuating the inequalities. My mistake years ago was I thought the art scene was an antidote to the mainstream status quo. I thought it was a subculture that was the centre of the world for those that

The same went for funded art projects, through which you envision a project, write it up, price it up, put everything into it as if it is going to be realised, and then, when you do get funded (if you do) you are awarded significantly less than you asked for. This is normal too. The not-so-secret hoax is, you price-up your proposal with the forecasted shortfall in mind so you end up getting what you realistically need to realise the project. But I have never been able to fudge the figures, to add imaginary things that are not relevant.

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were part of it and nobody else really mattered – I was wearing Nan Goldin’s eyes. I have always viewed subcultures as exclusive; that rather than the subculture reaching out to the public continually to prove its worth, it was the public that had to prove their worth if they were to be invited into the subculture. I suppose I was ideological and green and thought commerce was a disease of the mainstream not relevant to things that people supposedly love. More and more I hear of unbalanced wage packets (too high, too low) handed out in Irish art institutions that are a mirror of the inequalities that transpire in the real world. Don’t get me wrong, this is not just about money. Granted, I have got a little sidetracked here, venturing into the monetary inequalities practised in the art scene. This was not my intention. Paradoxically, ironically, contradict-ally, I believe art and money don’t mix. As an art critic I usually turn down catalogue commissions because the shift to passive tone rarely suits my critical writing. Those who invite me to write have to understand that their polite asking doesn’t preclude criticism. It’s laughable how many times art directors have invited me to write on their exhibitions promising me travel expenses and nothing more. Once again, normal. I wouldn’t take anything anyway because it corrupts the critical writing process, but again, it’s the principal of the thing that hurts. That they think that’s normal. Not to mention it’s disappointing but predictably petty when art directors email me defending themselves (not the exhibition) if my review is more critical than promotional.

The problem as I see it is, those that are safe in the knowledge that the art scene serves them well as is, will not allow themselves to see a problem. They will like and share and shout at lunch breaks about the inequalities of the art scene but they won’t sacrifice their status. (Before you get on your high horse, of course there are those of whom have sacrificed and are sacrificing more than you or me or there wouldn’t be an art scene to give out about here. But it’s not enough.) Unfortunately, it is always up to the emerging and have nots to make sacrifices and form alternatives to the supposedly alternative free and fair space of the art scene proper. Allow me to return to one of my first points: we need an antidote to the antidote to the mainstream. The crux, however, for change to go from a whispering ideology in the bar snug after the exhibition opening, to concrete implementation, we need the usual suspects, the real power, to sacrifice their lot for the sake of the art scene (Maybe underground is a better alternative!). The thing is we are only forced to make sacrificial choices on-the-hop, not on two legs hog-tied to the institution. So the short of it is, those with the means, those in power, have to be convinced that there is a problem (I am talking about individuals here, not institutions). Then they have to sacrifice a lot more than their strategic pro bono stuff or promoting their own turf in the art scene. We cannot depend on public funding anymore or the perennial emergence of art graduates to enliven the art scene with good but unsustainable intentions. We have to go to the personal well, the mattresses even. If we really care about the local art scene and see it as an alternative to the mainstream, then real sacrifices have to be made. Not just once in the rags-to-(relative)-riches of the established artist, curator, director, lecturer, but again and again and again, because that’s what it takes to shelter a subculture, if that’s what the art scene really is...

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reviews 1 – 121

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(2010 – 2017)

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NOVEMBER 2010 (#1): Cock a Leg,or Squat?

ALAN BUTLER, ‘I know that you believe you understand what you think I

said, but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant,

Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin, 20 October – 27 November.

I IMAGINE that Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S) is usually approached with trepidation by the uninitiated art crawler. To put it kindly, it is an architecturally austere modernist block of black and white squares, a Liquorice Allsort of sorts. This confectionary metaphor accidentally extends to Butler’s sickly-sweet aesthetic at TBG+S. First impressions offer obvious associations with the glossy plastic and tarty colour of Jim Lambie and Eva Rothchild, both of whom have a predilection for a similarly sexy, psychedelic formalism. However, there is also violence at play in Butler’s corrupted aesthetic, similar to early Bruce Nauman; an artist whose obsessive compulsion to mark time and territory with a blend of murky death- and sex-drive is re-imagined by Butler via the viral elasticity of the internet. Butler’s art is hardcore digital to Nauman’s softcore analog: it’s Tacita Dean on CRACK! The Irish artist is heard loud and clear at TBG+S as a ‘remediator’ of, pretty much, anything goes: nothing is sacred in his digital malformations. In one instance, against eye-popping vinyl graphics, can be found three ‘sincere’ reproductions of paintings by Robert Hunt. The twist is, they’re not by Butler, but by a painting reproduction business in Dafen, China, hired by the artist to make the hollow replicas.

Against the same gridded, black vinyl wall-scape, two flat Screen TVs are situated on the floor of the gallery. As always, the viewer arrives late to the invariably looped art video, it’s expected. Stepping between the two TVs, aware of my feet more than usual, the two apposing video works switch from animated abstraction to repurposed film. Warped animations of multicoloured rotating spirals act like the test cards that once decorated our grainy TV screens outside broadcast hours. The repurposed film is documentary footage of a U.S. State Department media briefing during the Vietnam War. Opposite, Butler’s digitally mutated edition of the film trailer for Sex and the City 2 loops on the other, incongruously retitled Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster. Reaching for contexts for Butler’s brazen appropriation ... the American TV series Sex and the City did flirt with the New York art world. I have seen the likes of Jeff Coons and, I think, Marina Abramović (or a fictional version of) being referenced in the series. There is also an image imprinted on my brain of the artist ‘love interest’ reading Artforum. And, not to forget, Sarah Jessica Parker herself is the producer of American Artist, an X-Factor for emerging artists in the US. Butler’s twisted, digital deformation, inflicted upon the sexed-up, feminine gloss of Sex and the City 2 in Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster, is literally a show-stopper: almost too dominant for the rest of the work scattered and stuck in the gallery to make an impact. This digital corruption, sometimes veering on the cynical, could be viewed as misogynistic by the female persuasion; stereotypically, women are the primary viewership of the Sex and the City TV and film franchise. The reasoning behind Butler’s appropriation, however, must have something to do with the stupid and random film plot, combined with the hedonistic bling of the ‘out there’ film setting—Abu Dhabi, Arab sheikhs, Rolex Oysters, Oil—, all elements acting as the perfect foil for Butler‘s encrypted critical engagement with socio-political themes (one of the infamous and more iconic photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures makes a shadowy appearance in Sarah Jessica Parker’s walk-in wardrobe 13 seconds

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in). In Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster the artist transforms, what was, an innocuous promotional film trailer into a virtual testing site for measuring fantasy against reality. In an age when news media airbrushes American involvement in the Middle-East in times of war (CNN); drone pilots replace frontline ground soldiers; teenagers socialise via Xbox and Facebook; detachment from reality is an everyday ‘unreality’. But it is Butler’s use of the floating firearm ‘red dot sight’ in Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster— humourously appearing on the foreheads of the Sex and the City cohort— that the artist achieves the greatest affect with the finest subtlety: a violent signifier for sensory detachment imagined through the unseen lens of a long-distance sniper. Butler’s Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster is a mishmash of Catherine Bigelow’s Hurt Locker (2009) meets James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Technically media savvy, Butler’s digital manipulations push beyond an angry adolescent YouTube version. It is the artist’s surprising technical proficiency that is a welcome surprise in the usually awkward and harsh new-media collages that hide under the umbrella term of ‘Art’. This work is about marking territory, the way a dog would, rather than a bitch.

BEA MCMAHON, ‘Two-fold’, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 11 November – 11 December.

IN THE CONTEXT of ‘marking territory’ in the gallery, Alan Butler’s work is situated at the very centre, eye-to-eye with the viewer; while Bea McMahon’s solo, Two-fold, at Green on Red gallery, Dublin, is all about peripheries: just out of sight. On entering the gallery, I was taken aback when I noticed, at the corner of my eye, two of McMahon’s water colours were left in a dark aspect of the gallery with no spotlights, just the refracted light from a mirror and milk-surfaced projection screen, on which the 3D film InDivisible projected with subtle affect. Walking into the gallery without noticing the 3D glasses in the entrance corridor, my preview was blurred with the inadequate naked eye. After a couple more seconds of blurred vision, the gallery Director, Jerome O’Drisceoil, led me to the 3D glasses that I had missed in the corridor. The work in the gallery initially catapulted me back to a previous work by McMahon entitled Field (2010), in which there was a literal marking of territory, with the actual digging up of soil which formed 8 excavated circular holes. At first glance, this act of demarcation could be viewed as territorial, but there is always something in opposition to that stance in McMahon’s work. In Field, passive ritual is dabbled with in the name of Wicca (a form of modern witchcraft). Something similar occurs in McMahon’s film InDivisible, where a dissolution of vision and meaning slips between something solid and something ethereal. In one instance of the film, a digital image of Dante’s painted portrait by Sandro Botticelli hovers over ‘not actual game-play’ footage from the video game Dante’s Inferno*. In a review of the same video game in the New York Times, the game

Cock a Leg, or Squat? (PART 2)

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producer Jonathan Knight is quoted as saying: “It’s a highbrow/lowbrow project by design … It’s Dante, who’s kind of passive, and he’s a poet and he’s philosophical. We had to take the bold step of saying, How do we make this guy an action hero?” Knight’s marketable ‘Dante’ for commercial gain is suggestive of the notion put forth in McMahon’s press-release, regarding the capitalist “robbery” of myth. To get a foothold of what is an impalpable artwork at first, hours after the gallery visit I put ‘milky-eye’ into Google, a random word association that personally summed-up the material and sensory ’after-affects’ of McMahon’s InDivisible. I was intrigued by one specific blog post titled ‘Blur of the Milky Eye’, that went on to outline a series of role-playing novel tips: “The Garou’s form becomes a shimmering blur, allowing him to pass unnoticed among others. Once the Garou has been seen, however, this Gift is negated until the viewer has again been distracted. A chameleon-spirit teaches this Gift.” McMahon’s in-and-out interludes between real time events and fantastical episodes manages to create a tension between what ‘I think I see’ and what ‘I imagine I see’.

The best moments of McMahon’s film hang like suspended phantom images long after you have left the gallery. Like Alan Butler’s digital mutations, McMahon corrupts the viewer’s sight by making them see double. In one scene two women share a horseback ride, back-to-back, while holding twin shields: the doubling is compounded by the 3D interference, and furthermore by the awkward, and nostalgic, paper 3D glasses. Other ‘twinning’ includes the twin-moving image of a hawk and a lion, which could be a reference to the mythological Griffin (body of a lion/ head of an eagle), which coincidently, in the context of McMahon’s overarching theme of vision, is described as having medicinal properties in its feathers that restored sight in the blind. From a dual perspective, Butler and McMahon’s exhibitions offer polar oppositions that question the very notion of what art is, and what are the boundaries for the production and reception of art. Butler’s work is a slap to the face. McMahon’s is a sensory, slow-burn. Both artists ignite the retina and the imagination. Both are “undeniably art”[1].

DECEMBER 2010 (#2): ALTER-EGO(LESS)

ALAN PHELAN, ‘Cabbages and Things’, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan 30 October – 27 November.

ONCE THE IRISH were good at political and religious segregation: there actually existed a political left and a right, no centre, no grey area. We were also good at land demarcation: it seemed divisiveness was in the blood. But then capitalism entered the mix, with a smidgin of feminism, a dash of democracy, and the ‘anything-goes’ cherry of postmodernism, and ‘truth’ went a shade of grey. The stone walled fields to the West are quirky remnants of our obsession with land ownership. The current economic crisis is blamed on the banks, but it was our ingrained desire to possess good auld ‘blocks and mortar’ that was the genesis of this crisis.

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Walking through Navan town centre en route to Solstice Arts Centre to see Alan Phelan’s solo show, ‘Cabbages and Things’, I notice the streets are static with, ironically enough, gobs of people for a midweek afternoon: it feels like a filmset between takes. One man wears plaster-splashed workwear, but he is just ‘hanging’, with false optimism―NO WORK HERE!

Phelan’s ‘Cabbages and Things’ is a temporal seesaw. The artist’s visual metaphors, built on the unusually textured back of one ugly superhero, and formed from the printed matter of our economically sunk era, slips between boyhood nostalgia and adult crisis.

On the other hand, “Things” could be equated directly with art, as a hard, or no need to define, functionless object. But, “Things” for Phelan references the unlikely superhero, ‘The Thing’ (Ben Grimm), from The Fantastic Four by Marvel Comics. Although The Thing was an American manifestation from the middle-aged Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the former admits that the character was shaped by a challenging childhood growing up in New York’s Lower East Side. Phelan either has an affinity, or empathy, for the science-fiction fantasy hero, the likes of ‘Darth Maul’ from Star Wars and ‘Odo’ from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, have been chosen ‘art protagonists’ in his previous work. This pattern of nerdy character appropriation is not just for the sake of ‘cool’. These drawn, plastic, computer generated superheroes and villains have a long printed history: a teenager’s morals and ideology are oftentimes borne out of reading, and living through the flawed superhero. Personally, The Thing is Phelan’s best character appropriation yet. Why? For the very reason that The Thing is a printed character which aligns with Phelan’s own layering of political history in his continuing use of the printed newspaper, especially in his previous character busts of Éamon de Valera in Éamon Often Spoke in Tongues, and Odo in Barbara’s Boy (The Alternate). Phelan’s ‘Things’ are injected with a psychodynamic pensiveness. Unlike other superheroes, The Thing cannot hide his deformity in either an awkward alter-ego or spandex mask. On the outside, he is more villain than hero. That is why his character development has an added amount of insecurity and self-pity: ultra-human traits. When Phelan cuts the character’s unfortunate facial template into a piece of fabric, which could otherwise act as a mask, there is a paradox between exposure and covering-up. In these instances, the artist achieves pathos for the ‘Things’. Phelan’s repeated portrait of the character further frustrates the paradoxical covered/exposed conflict: we are left to imagine the vain effort made by the ‘ugly’ Thing to cover up with a cut-out fabric portrait of himself; the mask ends up ‘unmasking’ the primary characteristics of The Thing’s deformity. Pinned to the white walls of Solstice Arts Centre, Phelan’s ‘Things’ are transformed into prophets of torment—kitsch ‘Turin Shrouds’. The best of the ‘Things’ is cut-out

Semantics is as good a place as any to start discussing Phelan’s textually layered work. Words can sometimes be powerful conduits for latent memories when constructed from sensory experience. The word ‘Cabbage’ was an unpalatable word for me as a kid: I can smell the sweaty steam (with a hint of BO) from the pressure cooker. It could be a rural colloquialism, but for those of you not from such a backwater, ‘cabbage skin’ refers to the unpleasant skin odour you might get from drinking too much the night before. Contextually apt, the loitering Navanites that I passed on the way to the arts centre could be described as ‘cabbaging’, combined with a tangible staleness in the air.

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in a striped pink|grey|white cotton bed sheet that is strewn on the gallery floor: a signifier for an unkept teenage boy’s bedroom, the space where the superhero is born. The “Cabbages” element in Phelan’s solo exhibition are sculptural counterparts to the flattened ‘Things’: it’s important to note that the newspaper cabbages were made by local people in a series of fabrication workshops. The press-release states that “The cabbages form a disjointed labyrinth through the galleries [some exiting the gallery into the tiled sky gardens], guiding viewers to the ‘Thing’ works.” This is a very functional description of their purpose, as a secondary guiding-light to the primary devotional ‘Things’. The cabbages segregate rather than lead the way (the reference to the granite stone walls to the West of Ireland earlier was probably suggested to me by the textural grey configurations of the cabbages in the gallery). They are almost funerary in how they mark the ground, wreath-like, as if commemorating something that is dead, concluded, long-gone, devoid of colour, archival. In other instances they look like playful, ecological signifiers, as they traverse Phelan’s improvised wooden trellises. The trellis display could also be equated with the elderlies’ partiality for gardening: Phelan spans the age of man, from comic book adolescence to greenfingered old age. But then again, when you manage to decipher the word “BAILOUT” in the elegant ‘origami’ cabbage heads, you are brought back to the present, permanent immanence, the newspaper headline is held in time, paused, as we loiter as a culture for what will economically befall us in the future.

20 DECEMBER 2010 (#3): A Post-Patriotic Performance

HELENA WALSHE, SINEAD MCCANN, ALEX CONWAY, ‘Right Here, Right Now’, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, 4 November.

[Artists] exist in constant tension between heritage and culture, between the forms and feelings that they inherit from tradition and the living confrontations with change that they have to create themselves. Fintan O’Toole, quoted in the essay ‘Kilmainham Gaol: Interpreting Irish nationalism and Republicanism’, by Pat Cooke, the curator of Kilmainham Gaol. O’TOOLE WROTE the above in reference to the ‘In a State’ exhibition, hosted by Kilmainham Gaol during the summer of 1991, the year Dublin was chosen as European Cultural Capital. The show involved specially commissioned work from twenty-one leading Irish artists from north and south of the border, and from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. But Toole’s statement regarding the “tension” between heritage and culture is outdated. Since then, heritage has lost it’s patriotic bite. Economics has tamed our ‘Irishness’. The now ‘spent’ Celtic Tiger not only symbolised the voracious growth of the Irish economy, but signified a step outside of ourselves as a distinct culture. The term Celtic Tiger refers to Ireland’s similarity to the East Asian Tigers: South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during their periods of rapid growth in the late ’80s and early ’90s. For the Irish , and the world at large, the Celtic Tiger has come to represent black-hole capitalism. The offshoot of this inflated consumerism is culture and heritage are forgotten. As our economy contracts, the obvious psychological reaction will be a growth in our patriotism: ironically, this is something that we can sell, Leprechauns and all!

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This reflection on heritage, patriotism, economy, was offset by the collective, live durational performance art event sited at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, on the 4 November, 2010. Under the banner ‘Right Here, Right Now’, 20 performance artists were allocated space on the ground floor of Kilmainham Gaol. Some roamed freely, while others chose to stay within the prison cells, or within a controlled site of props.

“Durational’ is a common word within performance art vernacular. The four hour live event could only manifest itself properly, conceptually and experientially, if the viewer was willing to stay for the duration. The idea of duration is especially pertinent if you consider the site of Kilmainham Gaol. The general function of the ‘prison’ is based on two principals of experience: confinement and temporality. The latter has become the main tenet of contemporary art. In this sense, the event was less about performance art defending its sidelined position as a misunderstood art form, and more about the ‘aesthetic relations’ between art, site and Time.

Although a collective effort, ‘Right Here, Right Now’ was very much about individuality, and the complex characteristics that form the make-up of individualism outside the controlled parameters of civilised behaviour. If we view performance art as uncivilised—within the context of the strict parameters of civility—then the prison represents the control of the spectacle, while the artists represent the subsequent liberation from a high ‘locus of control‘. An obvious philosophical sidetrack would be to discuss Michel Foucault’s philosophy of power and the institution in the context of Kilmainham Gaol, but perhaps it would be more ‘left-field’ to refer to gender and the prison, something that Foucault ignored. The prison, generally speaking, is a male institution of sweat and testosterone. While performance art is stereotypically, a woman’s game. So, there already existed something incongruous and resonant in the presence of artists of the female persuasion that was missing from the male artists. Although there is a certain “maleness“ connected to the general idea of a prison, Kilmainham Gaol has a feminine aspect in the curved architecture of the East Wing. This was constructed with that civilised Victorian sensibility and belief that the prison was a space of reform rather than torment. As a viewer and critic I thought it impractical and unfair to the artists involved to do a complete overview of all twenty performances. To separate the performances into individually closed expressions, however, caused further difficulty due to the looseness of some of the performances that crossed-over, coming into eyeshot against the more static works. It was with thoughts on gender that I gravitated towards one specific quadrant of the goal, where Helena Walshe and Sinead McCann were situated. Walshe was one of the roamers, while McCann fabricated a series of controlled parameters in the form of a ladder, table and winding path of lemons. Walshe was dressed in an improvised garb of cloth and close pegs, a certain kind of modesty pervaded the performance. She held, what looked like a newborn infant, fabricated from a ‘onesie‘ filled with washing powder; a ritual which was reenacted over and over again throughout the four hour duration of the performance. Walshe’s performance was a somewhat cliched representation of a lobotomised domestic goddess, caught in an incessant loop

Kilmainham Gaol is one of the more significant artefacts of what was the Irish cultural imprisonment under British rule. Against this historically potent backdrop, you have to ask the question: how can performance emerge from the revolutionary shadow of Irish history. Perhaps the fact that history (nostalgia) is being continually consumed by the future (desire) affords the potential for such an event to take place at what has become a Victorian husk of forgotten history and cashed-in patriotism.

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of routine, pacing back-and-forth, from cell to open floor space. In a sense she was caught in a ritual loop, every now and again stopping before a baby-blue basin of water to dunk the cloth-baby signifier; which on closer inspection was numbered. The strong smell of Walshe’s washing powder pervaded the immediate area where her performance took place: visual symbolism was overpowered by an olfactory stink. Combined with McCann’s lemons, the nose started to twitch, while other performers, dependent on the viewer’s gaze, fell foul of a more ghostly descriptors. Coincidently, when Sinead McCann was munching lemons, her presence became more tactile. But saying that, what I got from McCann‘s performance (in contrast to Walshe‘s) was an appropriated postmodern image of performance, that fought hard with the clichés that have been packaged very neatly by modern cinema. When things get visually dreamy, violent and uncanny, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, are the obvious references, and the filmic image that such signature film directors created from the ’70s onwards is an unavoidable reference in this instance.

McCann wore what looked like a Venetian-like mask or headpiece decorated with feathers (but on closer inspection was made of either paper or ribbon). This theatrical disguise would traditionally be worn to hide social status and identity so carnivalesque behaviour could take place without retribution or embarrassment. But in McCann‘s case no dancing or uncontrolled revelry took place. The artist would repeatedly climb the ladder prop, announcing “Run Mother, Run Sister.” Parts of McCann’s monologue were swallowed by the gathering crowd. Other times she would sing ...“stay with your family.” I presume this lyric was part of a longer narrative tied to potential loss. A digital countdown clock hung from inside the ladder with 3-, 2-, 1- minute increments: an arbitrary temporal signifier for running out of time to ‘act’. Just like props are used to frame a performance, the ritual loop is a way of navigating duration. Psychologically speaking, a ritual loop, in the context of trauma, follows loss. The function of the ritual becomes a reenactment of something banal when life was on a predicable and safe path. There are increasing signs among a younger generation of performance artists that the once purely LIVE aspect of their expression is not so sacred anymore: the photographic and filmic image acting not just as a document but as a framing device. However, Alex Conway’s performance for ’Right Here, Right Now’ managed to achieve both, by merging LIVE performance within the framing device of a gaol cell. Dressed in denim and a cowboy hat, Conway paced back-and-forth in a cell which neighboured Walshe and McCann’s performances. But unlike the natural crossover between McCann and Walshe, Conway was hidden from general view. The only way to see the artist’s performance was to join the queue which led to a peephole in a closed cell door. Conway signaled his presence in the cell by whistling a jailhouse ditty. References to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and the institutional gaze were ripe for the picking, but an uncanny aspect suggested something other than such an academic reading. The queue and the staggered approach added to the tension. When it was my turn, I self-consciously walked up to the minuscule peephole and peeked through: Conway had his back turned towards me, he seemed to be cut in HD, helped by the intentionally bright cell lights and compressed viewpoint. My eyelash caught in the peephole as I shifted to get a better view. Conway suddenly turned: stepping close, too close. Only then did I notice he was wearing white contacts—an ironic blind cowboy, considering the intensity of the image that the artist had manufactured. In this rare instance, Conway successfully transformed live performance into a heroic flat image.

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JANUARY 2011 (#4): A Magpie’s Eye for Appropriation

GAVIN MURPHY, ‘Remember’, Dublin City Gallery/ Hugh Lane/Golden Bough suite 4 November, 2010 – 16 January, 2011.

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it ... When philosophy paints its gloomy picture then a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly. George H. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820).[1]

It could be said that the Golden Bough curatorial is out of step with the Hugh Lane Gallery audience. The projects that have been curated for the suite are generally not oil on canvas. Murphy also had to contend with a significant twentieth century painters’ painter upstairs—one Richard Tuttle. With Francis Bacon being the Jewel in the Hugh Lane’s crown, painting certainly rules the roost at Dublin City Gallery. If the viewers that I witnessed were willing to stay a while longer, however, they would realise that Murphy’s project, entitled Remember, and curated by Michael Dempsey, offered more than a sweeping glance could ever give. Not a ‘white cube’, the architecture of the Golden Bough suite initially invites a looped appraisal of the work on show. Two large antique wooden benches take a foothold of the floor space. Murphy, with elegant subtlety, disguises both benches with two acrylic and hardwood screens. The long staccato titles of each screen, such as: The Novel as Journey through the Centuries and Continents, echo the zigzag of their structured display. Perception and duration are sensitively played with, in the placement of a potted household plant behind a hinged-to-the-wall tinted glass frame, which cuts varying details of the plant from one’s wandering viewpoint. On the same wall a series of laser-cut acrylic, letter and punctuation “signs,” jut-out perpendicularly to the wall, to make up a long winding sentence, just like the screens. Narrative takes shape as I bob my head up and down to decipher what the letters amount to—a sentence?, poetry?, more postmodern ambiguity? None of the above. The words are appropriated from the script of Federico Fellini’s film 8 1⁄2; a filmmaker who was criticised for a “stylistic tendency to emphasise images over ideas.” The designed font, commissioned by Murphy, reads as follows: We suffocate under words, images, and sounds, which have no reason to exist, they come from the void and go towards the void. A truly worthy artist should be asked for nothing but this act of sincerity: to educate himself to silence. Murphy, as narrator, follows you around the Golden Bough suite as you mentally rummage through the ruin of knowledge presented as intertextual artefact. Brian Dillion is usually the go-to-guy for such ruin-divining, but what I hear beyond the rubble of the ruin in Murphy’s work is the futility of knowledge. The dictation of paragraphs from Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,

WHILE LISTENING to Gavin Murphy’s twenty-five minute audio The Necessity of Ruins (2010) in the Golden Bough “suite” of the Hugh Lane Gallery, three visitors came and went. The duration of their stay was made up of that sweeping arc that the viewer takes when wandering into a museum to glance at the primary medium of painting. I do not know the empirical statistics of one’s general interaction with a piece of art, but the time given to a painting is said to be on average, five seconds. The adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ only holds true if the viewer is willing to take a longer vigil than that.

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to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, is a blatant ransacking of written history. Murphy plucks one sentence from Lyotard’s seminal work when the audio voice announces: Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow. They transcend the capacity of each of their users. They are ‘nature’ for postmodern man.[2] To avoid what would only be a corrupted paraphrase of Lyotard, it is important to add the full paragraph from The Postmodern Condition that follows Murphy’s ‘recirculation’. As long as the game is not a game of perfect information the advantage will be with the player who has knowledge and can obtain information. By definition, this is the case with a student in a learning situation. But in games of perfect information, the best performativity cannot consist in obtaining additional information in this way. It comes rather from arranging the data in a new way, which is what constitutes a ‘move’ properly speaking. This new arrangement is usually achieved by connecting together a series of data that were previously held to be independent. This capacity to articulate what used to be separate can be called imagination. Speed is one of it’s properties. It is possible to conceive the world of postmodern knowledge as governed by a game of perfect information, in the sense that the data is in principle accessible to any expert: there is no scientific secret. Given equal competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but in its production), what extra performativity depends on in the final analysis is ‘imagination,’ which allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979.) [3]

Lyotard’s conclusion regarding “imagination” is a pertinent one with regard to art. A blurring of ideas occurs when image and word collide; imagination is necessary to navigate the fog. Logic is no good, lacking the ‘performativity‘ that Lyotard holds important. Furthermore, it would make the ‘game’ of art about rules rather than the breaking of them. One such rule-breaker, referenced by Murphy by way of a modest colour scan taped to a bare wall with green artist tape, is the High Renaissance Venetian painter Giorgione, via his enigmatic work, La Tempesta c.1505: a painting that has had much “ink spilled on it.”[4] Giorgione’s work of that period did not—as was expected by religious patronage—spread the word of God. Whether by the behest of his patrons (who, it has been written, were an esoteric and intimate circle of individuals); or Giorgione‘s own personal interest in a genre outside the parameters of good theological sense; ‘Big George’s’ (Giorgione’s) art is more in consort with today’s postmodern “identity” crisis than yesteryear’s heavenly faith. By including this photo scan, from what is presumedly a historical catalogue of Renaissance art, Murphy’s other works fall into a niche that slides between ‘ruin‘ and ‘archive’; between the fabrication of history and forgotten history; between imagination and artefact; between word and image. On the opposing wall hangs what Murphy refers to as “framed archival pigment prints,” aptly titled Received Ideas. The title is a double reference to Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas and his unfinished work Bouvard et Pécuchet. Flaubert was a kind of mad comedic scientist who relished putting his written characters and language itself through a tumble dryer of absurdity. His work must indeed glitter for the ‘magpie eye’ of the contemporary artist, as in recent times I have noticed Flaubert’s writings finding many an artist and curator’s nest. Christopher Hitchens of the New York Times wrote of Bouvard et Pécuchet: “The work references

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Flaubert’s own ruthless skepticism about the idea of ‘progress’ ... I think, in the occasional cruelty that results from seeing human and other creatures as potential subjects for experiment.”[5] Not surprisingly, Flaubert hoped that Bouvard et Pécuchet would be his magnum opus, and with additional hubris, the greatest piece of literature ever written.

Although Flaubert was skeptical of humanity’s idiotic and futile ambition for progress—illustrated through his comedic characterisations—he was touched by ambition himself: an ingrained paradox of the human condition. Donato Bramante, whose name Murphy mentions in the audio The Necessity of Ruins (2010), is the poster boy of this human paradox. Bramante was an Italian architect—recognised for his wonderful design of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in 1506—who became known as Bramante ruinante (“Bramante the wrecker”). He gained this nickname for his part in the destruction of the fourth century Constantine Basilica that was in the way of ‘progress’ and a better Rome.

Gone are the days of manifestoes, when a fence stood between those who ignorantly committed to some personal ‘truth’, and those that ‘paraphrased’. Murphy’s modest display for the Golden Bough suite epitomises the postmodern condition of “receiving ideas,” in his recirculation of knowledge from the past, in a present mindset that only has designs on the future.

JANUARY 2011 (#5): The Aestheticization of Grief

CECILY BRENNAN, ‘Black Tears’, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 13 January – 26 February.

PABLO PICASSO and Dora Maar made great art out of weeping, best exemplified by the Spaniard’s The Weeping Woman (1937). But Picasso’s portrayal is a violent sort of grief, whereby the painted handkerchief stabs Marr in the face like a broken pint glass: the pre-fight threat ‘I will rearrange your face’ takes on new meaning through the artist’s cubist vocabulary. Cecily Brennan’s digital work Black Tears is installed on the second floor of the Crawford, where a curved corridor leads the viewer past a series of nineteenth-toearly twentieth century painted portraits of women—a ‘William Orpen’ the best among them. Set in a small dark room, the projection size is more advertisement than intimate. First impressions are that this lager than life emotive gesture presented by Brennan in the reductive form of a woman crying is aesthetically reminiscent of the filmed emotive gesture of Bill Viola’s work. Brennan’s background is painting and her formal painterly strengths are evident here in the use of colour and texture. Her collaborator is the since deceased Irish actress Britta Smith, who is set against a deep red backdrop, which has the same luminosity

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as a live broadcast blue-screen. Smith is crying, but digitally painted black cephalopod tears that drip down Smith’s gracefully wizened face. However, even with the digital enhancement, they are not fat tears. They are not those ‘real’ tears that the griever tries to suppress with clumsy hands when emotion comes upon them too fast. This is a premeditation on grief, with moments that slip into real grief as if Smith, for a split second, is catapulted back into a traumatic past, or forward into a ’what if’ future. They are tears that are struggling to escape dried-up eye ducts. There were moments while watching Brennan’s Black Tears that I became self-aware, embarrassed both by the fabricated portrayal of ‘real’ emotion, and even more so by the prospect of being caught watching this display of personal grief. Aside from the purely aesthetic experience, and an exquisite one at that, it is Brennan’s intention “to confront and question personal affliction.” In an age that Albert Camus called ‘pitiless’, and a period in which art is in retreat from the ‘real’ (Paul Virilio), perhaps the only way art can get close to an emotive reality that has been lost through militaristic trauma and technological progress over the last century, is to present it as an enhanced aesthetic experience, hoping that irony and insincerity won‘t taint the results as it so often does in the postmodern reading of contemporary art.

JANUARY 2011: (#6): A Game of Three Halves

ANNIKA STROM, ‘From the Community Hall’, Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S) 10 December, 2010 – 7 February.

HIGHLY PERSONALISED but universal narratives inhabit Annika Ström’s short films and performances. There is a feeling of the home and unrequited love in her film portraits of her family, especially of her mother, Anna Ström. They register like the shock-smile one gets when one finds old family photographs that have been disappeared to the bottom of the suitcase of our itinerary lives. All my dreams have come true portrays Ström’s mother ironing while being directed by her daughter in Swedish, how to say “All my dreams have come true” in English. The short film poses questions about life and the dreams that we desire from youth to old age, some realised or lucked upon, others left by the wayside—just too late. Ström’s mother in some ways is left exposed: “All my dreams have come true” is both a question(?) and a statement(!), depending on how you have lived your life up to a certain reflective endpoint. Another more socio-conceptual side to Ström’s practice was performed at Frieze Projects (2010), an event that the Guardian art critic Adrian Searle phrased as the “Fool in the King’s Court.” Ström hired ten actors to act embarrassed; a moving male maul to signify the general underrepresentation of female artists at the fair, and beyond. For contrasting reasons rather than similarities, Ström’s art reminds one of Ceal Floyer’s, especially the latter’s Nail Biting Performance (2001), when the artist literally

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bit her nails on the stage of Birmingham Symphony Hall, immediately prior to a concert. But, whereas Floyer exhibits a cold and brilliantly quick conceptualism, Ström’s work floats between art and life, and offers the viewer a vantage point for both to exist in the same space.

From the community hall at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S) is Ström’s first solo exhibition in Ireland. With no small amount of risk attached the artist contrived a LIVE opening night performance to offset the subsequent static exhibition: an event that I admittedly missed. The performance, however, was documented and displayed in the gallery on a small flatscreen TV. In one corner of the gallery a large wooden stage prop, that could also act as an abnormally tall bed, is adorned with textile works. The wooden prop seemed to fulfill nothing more that the function of a piece of furniture, and also dampened the echo of the sparsely decorated gallery. Two flatscreen TVs punctuate the prop on either side, and that’s that, deceivingly simple. Much patience and snooping is needed between these three objects to make Ström’s reductive setup rewarding. On first glance,

The looped one minute The Film consists of a series of spliced clips and images from the artist’s rejected film footage archive. In showing her reject film clips the artist is exposing her juggler to the audience: the stuff that didn’t ‘make the cut’ final cut. A socalled “rough soundtrack” accompanies the reject film montage. It’s like a mixed tape for the 1980s Hollywood Romeo. The backing track to the reject film montage is music composed by the Ström herself, which has a chamber-pop, dough-eyed twang. James Snodgrass referred to Belle and Sebastian—whose music have strong similarities with Ström’s synthesised melodies— as “bully-victim Indie,” and “There was a danger that Belle And Sebastian would be beloved only by those who press flowers and bruise easily.” There is a sense from Ström’s work that the shield has been discarded and her subjects have been left open to the elements. Left gawking at the large wooden prop to extract some meaning from a slipping narrative, I gave up, and moved across to the third and final piece of the puzzle, the filmed documentation of the opening night performance. If the viewer hadn’t noticed by now (I hadn’t!), the documentation pans around the ‘backside’ of the wooden prop, which on closer inspection has a dialogue scribbled down with permanent ink pen. The second last penned line reads “hang-up.” For this viewer (who was late to the ‘party’) the filmed documentation of the performance, along with the simple ‘bit-part’ elements, added up to form the aftermath of a fabricated phone conversation between two arguing lovers. Filmed in black and white, a signature of Ström’s, the opening night performance was framed by three opening night speeches by curator Aoife Tunney, and two TBG+S staff. The performance did not take place either before or after the speeches, but was an intrusive element throughout, unbeknownst to the audience. An actor, who plays

On entering the gallery the viewer can either take a short hop to the flatscreen right in line with the entrance door, or trek across the gallery to watch the trendily reductive, in name and nature, The Film. I perversely chose to the latter ‘trek’.

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the ‘upset man’, restlessly alternates between sitting and pacing around the wooden prop, while talking loudly into a mobile phone. This was not improv, but a scripted monologue—the script was the handwritten text on the backside of the wooden prop that I missed at first. The ‘upset man’ is the other half of the argument that TBG+S audience are seeing unravel before there eyes. The audience are initially split into individually awkward reactions in the wake of this private conversation made blatantly public. When the audience collectively realise that they have been duped, they group together, comfortable in their collective understanding: we are sheep! Ström’s fabricated performance positioned the viewer as a witness of an evolving argument between a couple on a mobile phone—no one wins until the imminent hang-up. Personally, just by looking at the performance through the filmed documentation, rather than the real-time performance on the opening night, my experience of Ström’s work at TBG+S had a gradual, emerging clarity. Walking into the gallery and viewing the work the way I did, from the short reject film clips, the wooden prop with textiles, and the filmed documentation of the opening night performance, there was a gradual piecemeal sharing of the event. However, if you got your step and timing wrong on the night or in the gallery afterward, love would be a long time coming for this exhibition.

28 MARCH 2011 (#7): Readymade Re-animator

TRACY HANNA, ‘Things Fall Apart’, SOMA Contemporary, Waterford, 3 – 26 February.

EARLY ON, artists often employ the readymade as a financially cheap but theoretically relevant crutch to prop up their emerging art practice. When the artist does pluck a readymade from the skip of the everyday as part of some artistic gesture, in what seems an infinite post-Duchampian era of art ‘unmaking’, the question of “art for art’s sake” is unavoidably posed. Tracy Hanna’s dismembered 3-legged office table monuments at SOMA Contemporary suggest that her relationship with the readymade is romantically unstable. Stacked 3 and 4 high, each idiosyncratic table has one leg missing, which are all relocated against a wall as if readied to be photographed for an online auction site for those who have a penchant for furniture prosthesis. A more laborious readymade construct by the artist is a table that hangs from the ceiling with its legs curled up in suspended animation, as if rigor mortis has just set in. On the surrounding walls are pencil drawings suggestive of household timber waste and readymade scraps. Uninteresting in themselves, these obligatory penciled pre/ post-afterthoughts are accompanied by two photographs of Hanna getting in on her own act, by framing herself within precarious partnerships with a chair in one instance, and a skylight that looks down upon an empty domestic interior in another.

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However, the drawings, photographs and readymade ‘crutches’ that populate the main gallery space do not hold up the exhibition on their own, and only for the two film works hiding in the penumbral light of two adjacent rooms, Things [would definitely] Fall Apart.

Irregular Polygon includes an improvised set up wherein the filmic image is refracted off a mirror onto a back-projection screen. A black and white vignette of swimmers in a lake is created via the mirror, which is reminiscent of Duchamp’s peephole tableau of the spread-eagled naked female holding a lantern before a romantic landscape in Etant donnés (1946-1966). This watery thread of improvised film display is taken a step further in another projection-cum-readymade, in which the moving image of a bouncing figure is projected onto a found patterned bed base. The figures—just like the swimmers in Irregular Polygon—are miniature in relation to the human-sized bed, creating a trompe l’oeil effect.

Sometimes one’s reception of the art displayed at SOMA Contemporary cannot help being coloured by the art space’s previous state function as a “taxation office.” Furthermore, even though the title of Tracy Hanna’s Things Fall Apart suggests our limbotic economic present, the artist’s readymade re-animations transcend the utilitarian site of their display.

MARCH 2011 (#8): The Genesis of a Cookie-Cutter or Hot Potato? Meet the Curators of Dublin Contemporary 2011: Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro

POLISH PHILOSOPHER Zygmunt Bauman observes that Jacques Derrida had an obsession with “being away” and to “think travel,” and gives example after example of the creative spark that is born from exile, such as the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who explained that “Intimacy and distance create a privileged situation. Both are necessary.” Our own James Joyce is the epitome of creative exile. In what can be read as a prelude to Ulysses and hint at Joyce’s intention to leave Ireland, Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man says: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”[2] The definition of the ‘exile’[1] posed by Bauman could offer way to define the position of the transient artist, curator and critic. When Bauman cites the French dramatist and poet, Afred de Musset, through the latter’s admonishment that “great artists have no country,” it is in the context of militancy, a war-cry so to speak. If we look at the ‘Biennale’ as a space where the transient artist and curator touches ground to propose a series of dialogues with a culture that they are not in sync with––this is not just a

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case of ‘jet lag’, but what we could refer to as ‘cultural lag’––then, Christian ViverosFauné and Jota Castro could be described as temporary exiles from their point of view, or, the prescribers of alien metalanguages from the eye of the ‘local’. The poetic premise behind Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro’s curatorial for ‘Dublin Contemporary: Terrible Beauty: Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of NonCompliance‘ is William Butler Yeats’s Terrible Beauty, Easter, 1916. Yeats’s identity was split between his Protestant upbringing and the Catholic drama that he objectively viewed from a distance—I have passed with a nod of the head. In a sense, Yeats found comfortable distance in the metalanguages of Irish myth and pagan symbolism. Although the poem Easter, 1916 could be read as a commitment to political revolution, it could equally by measured by the lag in Yeats’s nationalistic response, more memorial than celebration of the “terrible beauty” that was born from the Rising. In retrospect, Yeats‘s may have been a little slow getting out of the blocks, but we as a contemporary culture, amidst another crisis, still haven’t got out of bed, and time is nearly up for our sovereignty. But I digress, let’s leave history behind for the time being and take a look at the identities, both professional and cultural, of the two ‘New’ curators of Dublin Contemporary. Christian Viveros-Fauné is primarily an art critic. His criticism for the Village Voice is a balance of quick wit and quicker opinion on the NOW in art. He’s prose is both brutal and elegant. Better than Jerry Saltz. On a par with Robert Hughes.

Viveros-Fauné’s voice is in sync with the momentum of the New York artworld. “Kill or be Killed,” the words spoken by Dan Aykroyd in the ’80s film classic Trading Places before he dupes his bosses in their own backyard of Wall Street, is a perfect anecdote for New York’s market driven obsession with speed and accumulation of the NEW and ballsy (for the lack of a feminine equivalent). The dressed-up scenarios of “Dom Perignon” art collector parties that are part of the networking propriety of the art centres of the world is a far cry from the Guinness “Slops” served on these shores. We are a less sophisticated bunch, or less exposed to these scenarios. Editor of Circa Magazine Peter FitzGerald’s recent question to Viveros-Fauné in the Circa online podcast was important in identifying the positions that both curators will take: “Are you the person that brings structure, and maybe a bit of international best practice, in terms of how this thing is delivered.”[3] Viveros-Fauné was the former director of US Art Fairs NEXT (Chicago) and VOLTA (New York). Coincidently, considering our ‘Biennale’ is under the thematic banner of Terrible Beauty, Viveros-Fauné’s VOLTA 2008 considered “beauty and its opposite— that is, the twin polarities presented by criticality and aesthetics in contemporary art.” Also at VOLTA 2008 Viveros-Fauné revealed a dab hand for gambling when he altered the usual art fair model of the gallery group show to solo presentations: a risk more in keeping with Vegas than the strict monetary parameters of the art market. He was also the founder of the “former” Roebling Hall—several incarnations of the forprofit art gallery have come about since the Brooklyn original—, which presumedly makes him a savvy exponent of art dealership. What Viveros-Fauné brings to Dublin Contemporary is an interesting mix of sophisticated awareness of what is NOW in the artworld and a way with words, that is oftentimes aggressively critical. It would be a

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pity if he left this “different animal” (art market + criticality) behind in New York to experiment with more ‘relational’ models of interruption and interrogation, the usual template for the Biennale “Cookie-Cutter,” where international artists are pushed, or worse still, curatorially framed within the local political parameters and discourses of art-making. The curators did mention in the Circa podcast that they ‘relate’ to the instability of Irish politics and economy, having, as Latin Americans, there own experience of economic crisis in the 1980s with the Argentine Debt Crisis.

The immediate assumption is that Jota Castro is the socio-political agent of the curatorial pair, and practices all the seriousness that comes with such an ideology. You cannot ignore the first two sentences of Castro’s impressive biography: “Jota Castro is a Brussels-based Franco-Peruvian artist, curator, a former diplomat with the United Nations and the European Union...” The exhibition subheading Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non- Compliance is surely his territory? But the identities of both of these curators is in keeping with Derrida’s notion that there is “no identity” without the “disorder of identity.” Although Castro’s production as an artist is influenced by sociopolitical concerns and culturally differing attitudes towards ‘Race’ in Discrimination Day, and ‘Sex’ in LOVEHOTEL, there is a brutalist humour which gives the work a weighty punch without the trapping of self-righteousness. Both of these performance/projects are designed for the willing participator to make a choice, act or reveal a personal trait, through an action via an obstacle that is fabricated by Castro. A clear description of the work is found on the ‘17th Biennale of Sydney’ website: Castro staged a performance protest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, entitled Discrimination Day, in which he held a sign above a crowded public space indicating separate entry points for ‘BLANCS/WHITES’ and ‘AUTRES/OTHERS’. Affixed to the entry of the museum was a banner announcing ‘Discrimination Day’ in letters painted in the French national colours. Vigilant security made it difficult and uncomfortable for ‘whites’ to enter the show, while ‘others’ walked through with ease. The work highlighted blatant police discrimination against citizens of colour – a phenomenon the French call délit de faciès, or ‘facial crime’ – people who are never usually subject to such actions suddenly found themselves the object of prejudice.[4] For €230 per night, Castro’s LOVE-HOTEL presented another ‘choice’ for the viewer to partake in. The word LOVE is camouflage for Sex: the project was modeled on the Japanese Love Hotel. LOVE-HOTEL was a transaction between artist and audience that included the offer to rent a space ‘after hours’. It was more passive than Discrimination Day, working off absences rather than promoting an ideology or politicised position. Other similar manifestations of this practice of creating a space for people to

The staging of Dublin Contemporary in the autumn of 2011, when hopefully we awaken from the current political malaise, will be set in a context of anti-capitalist sentiment, which could view art as bank decoration rather than politically critical, nevermind politically relevant resistance. The importance of ‘visual’ art was hard enough to sell during the boom times. The potential artistic currency created by inserting a Biennale into a tumultuous environment is viewed by both curators as an exciting time and place to confront issues that have the potential to breath ‘conviviality’ in artworld terms, or a ‘contagion’ from the economists’ vernacular. Like Yeats’s Easter, 1916, which was written months after the event, time will only tell.

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convene is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s full-scale model of his New York flat plonked down in Cologne; or the more recent Revolving Hotel Room by Carsten Höller as part of theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2008. So, is Castro a “Relational Aesthetics” Man? I say diplomatically–– Yes and No? There is something tantilising about the prospect of these two personas coming together to tackle a Biennale on Biennale virgin ground. This is not their first outing as a pairing. As the “Visceralists” they co-curated DIRTY KUNST at Seventeen Gallery, London, and Spasticus Artisticus at the Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, with, to name but a few, but a personal favourite, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, whose motto should ring true for the artworld at large: “Professional problems. Amateur solutions.” Taking the form of an advertisement at the back of the Ceri Hand Gallery publication for the Spasticus Artisticus group show, Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro leave a passing sarcastic pun; but what could also be read as a sincere outstretched hand to the viewer in their joint process as curators.

The Visceralists are also known to be Vicerealists.

In this they could always use your help.

MARCH 2011 (#9): An Elevator up the Ivory Tower

CEAL FLOYER, ‘Things’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 11 March – 23 April.

...the way to resist the talking image is the conceptual image; it speaks. It speaks silently. But loud enough for us to hear it... Paul Virilio in conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), 2005. MY FIRST experience of Ceal Floyer’s work was through a found tabloid newspaper that had been discarded on a bus seat en route to college in 1997. The headline read: “Modern Art is mistaken for rubbish.” The short column went on to reveal that an employee from some large gallery had thrown out Floyer’s Garbage Bag (1996). You can assume by the title of the work—and you would be right—that Garbage Bag was exactly that, a garbage bag, filled with air and secured with a twist-tie. You could also say that there is more ‘air’ than substance to Floyer’s art practice. Most of the artist’s works can be summed up in one sentence:

2010 – 2017_ An office rolodex with alternating representations of a chicken and an egg on the index cards. egg/chicken (2005)

An overhead projection of an actual lightbulb rather than a representation of a lightbulb, onto a wall at ceiling height. Overhead Projection (2006) A ‘stairway’ of speakers with the sound of footsteps rising in pitch. Scale (2007) Oversized projection of a Bonsai Tree. Overgrowth (2004) A projection of a light switch onto a wall. Light Switch (1992-99) A projection of a nail being hammered into a wall. Nail (1997) Two megaphones with the mouths of both placed together. Secret (2009) A till receipt attached to a wall with a shopping list of all white products such as “flour” and “salt.” Monochrome Till Receipt (White) (1999). The artist biting her nails on the stage of Symphony Hall in Birmingham before an actual musical performance. Nail Biting Performance (2001)

There is an instance on entering the work of Floyer when you get the ‘punchline’. There is no spectacle or long winded build-up to the punchline. We enter. We get it. We are left with the residue of language, not an image. Floyer’s art erases the reflective ‘side effect’ of art. Her objects are closed. They are selfish [Self-involved]. This is the reason her art has such a rare objective clarity. They are equations for art, or art equations, reduced to the lowest common denominator. Floyer’s Things at Project Arts Centre (PAC) could stand for an audio-invisible pun for a large ‘fictional’ retrospective of the artist’s work. Once again, without waxing lyrical, Things can be described efficiently: A collection of white standard plinths with individually embedded speakers that chime with the isolated work ‘THING’, sampled from a range of pop songs. Things (2009) There is a desire to fill the gap with text where the ‘object’ should be at PAC. This desire is compounded with PAC’s fold-out press release for Floyer’s Things, which illustrates this ‘missing’ object, and may be too blatantly. The artist or curator’s statement is replaced by a printed representation of an Error 404 response code, (a web page that pops up when an internet server cannot find a requested URL). I presume the search for the webpage–– projectartscentre.ie/cealfloyer–– was a premeditated action by the artist to extract an aesthetic and conceptual outcome, regarding the ‘objectlessness’ of Things, and to locate the artist in Dublin and PAC in some contextual way. The virtual space that the Error 404 signifies is too commonplace and evokes a space that is empty of any content or potential for the object to be resurrected. In a sense, the Error 404 is the perfect model for ‘closure’. We know that the ‘search’ for cealfloyer at the project arts centre is a fabrication. In the context of Floyer’s art practice, the conceptual intent by the artist to include this fabricated ‘invite’ can be read in two ways: as another empty signifier, or another artwork, that

Floyer’s art is situated at the heal of the image and the foot of language. It is where Marcel Duchamp ends and Carl Andre begins, the building blocks of Conceptualism. A time when the dumb aestheticism of the image was replaced by an unadulterated art object that ‘talked back’ so to speak.

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collapses the tradition of the artist statement in on itself, closing up all the holes and breaks so it can’t be read in a reflective way. Although this non-textual intrusion is welcome and witty, it simplifies the complexity, and complicates the simplicity of Floyer’s work at PAC, so we, as the viewer are left at a standstill. In one sense, Things acts an intangible and delirious signifier for what Floyer produced before, and what is potentially to come from the artist in the future: ‘Things’ are her signature. As illustrated above, the artist’s practice over the last fifteen years is made up of “things.” Such a spectacular empty pun recalls the intentional ‘absent’ retrospective of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s A Retrospective (tomorrow is another fine day) (2004), wherein the artist did not install previous works, but suggested the works with architectural ‘replicas’ of the spaces that framed the works previously. Although Floyer’s work is inherited from the monochrome seriousness of Conceptualism—I can imagine Octoberists Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss creaming in their pants at the mention of Arctic White—the artist does not take the slow sojourn up the steps of the ‘Ivory Tower’ like her ‘60s predecessors, but jumps on the elevator.

MARCH 2011 (#10): Baggage and Absentism

Peter FitzGerald, ‘Wall Works’, Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast 24 February – 26 March.

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it. In work before 1946 the edges of the rectangle are a boundary, the end of the picture. (Donald Judd ‘Specific Objects’ [essay], Arts Yearbook 8, 1965) THERE ARE instances when the profession of the artist is ‘split’ between writing, curating, educating, ‘PhDing’ etcetera. As a viewer, if you are aware of the other part of the “split” when you see the artist’s work, the ‘other’ could be read as unintentional, excess baggage. But this “excess” has to be taken into account; it is a context, just like the space where the work is situated. As an aware viewer you cannot compartmentalise the parts that make up the ‘art identity’ of the artist. Especially if that identity is one-sided, or weighed down on the part that is not art-making. These questions came to the fore when viewing the work of Peter FitzGerald (the Editor of Circa) at Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast. Before I comment on FitzGerald’s Wall Works, another context needs to be shared. The long haul ascent up the stairs of Queen Street Gallery places the viewer in a predicament. Standing in the windowless gallery space, the committed art trekker feels obliged to stay a while longer than the usual street level gallery; there is no quick escape if the art is bad. The gallery has also been ‘renovated’ or altered, from being long and rectangular to square and claustrophobic (or was this a side-effect of FitzGerald’s work?). There is something fascinating about the logistics of Queen Street

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#10

Gallery that breathes insecurity in the viewer, which is to the artist’s advantage. This is especially the case when the work is ‘difficult’.

I mentioned the words “excess” and “baggage” in relation to identity. Excess can also be ascribed to the hidden history of opinion on the Irish art scene that never made it to the pages of Circa, but which must have left an imprint on FitzGerald’s psyche, even his own art identity: you always bring work home. To carry that type of “baggage” is either a burden or the ‘master-key’ to the psychology of the Irish art enthusiast or Philistine; the nature of the beast so to speak. Personally, the process of carrying all this baggage up the steep stairs in anticipation of seeing FitzGerald’s work was fascinating. I was expecting canvas. Honestly, I was thinking ‘hobbyist’. I was wrong. Walking into the gallery with two others – who were equally intrigued – we were met with a series of painted gestures, no canvas, no stretchers; just wall and paint. Also, there were no brush marks, the paint was scraped on with cardboard, creating a series of rectangular frames in black and red. The three of us were left holding FitzGerald’s press release which was succinct. He wrote:

There is a ‘split’ in FitzGerald’s statement, between “subjectivity” and objectivity, between “inner working” and “spreadsheets.” Mark Rothko was one artist that came to mind when surrounded by FitzGerald’s Wall works. The reason for this could be partly aesthetic – because of the omnipresent black and red in the abstract expressionist’s work, and the utilisation of the stacked rectangles in Rothko’s most successful works. But there was one instance in particular from Rothko’s oeuvre that stood out while gapping into the blank white ‘between’ spaces of FitzGerald’s rectangles. Rothko’s Seagram Murals were commissioned by the Four Seasons, NY, in the late ‘50s. Maybe it was BIG Money (the largest paid for an artistic commission), that was the initial reason for Rothko to agree to what could be viewed as a perverse move for any artist, especially an artist who’s serious, almost metaphysical ideology was sacrosanct. The diners at the Four Seasons were not the type to outstretch their arms in benediction before Rothko’s painted idolatry, which was something he would later achieve at the “Rothko Chapel” in Houston, Texas. Back to Belfast... FitzGerald’s Wall works give as much as you are willing to bring with you as a viewer. There is baggage concerning the artist’s ‘split’ art identity, and as we all know there is baggage concerning the medium of painting. But what is intriguing is the fact that all this baggage combined with the abstract ‘absentism’ of the painted gestures offered something beyond the slim parameters of the individual’s ‘take’ on the world. The ‘baggage’ that I am discussing is the type that is hidden from the public: THE WHITE ELEPHANT. FitzGerald generously offers us an appropriately shaped rectangular space for us to colour in with our own WHITE ELEPHANTS.

Any line breaks a surface, any deliberate line commences the shift from nothing to form, from silence to message. But a rectangle has a little more: like us it has an inside and outside – though the ground on either side of the rectangle walls may be the same, just as the ground on which our subjectivity rests goes beyond our inner workings ... Our stationary world is rectangles. They frame our lives, they frame art, they frame art spaces, they frame numbers on spreadsheets, and they frame this text .

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APRIL 2011 (#11): A(Wake) for the Death of the Event

Michelle Browne,‘out on the sea was a boat full of people singing & other stories‘, The LAB, Dublin. 4 March – 9 April.

HELEN CAREY’S text for Michelle Browne’s solo presentation at the LAB, Dublin (found in the in-between spaces of the fold-out press release), gives a portrait of an art practitioner who, within the formalist guises of her ‘documents’ on show at the LAB, traverses the roles of the artist. In a sense, Carey’s text invited me to write as it solely framed Browne’s art practice within the discourse of the “Museum” – covering the archive and the curatorial. But I wanted to look at the ‘object’ of Browne’s work at the LAB, which reveals, in the artist’s tripartite delivery as ‘artist’/ ‘curator’ and ‘collator’, an art practitioner who is juggling with the game of documentation, and the loss of the ‘object’ after the Event.

The curse of documentation is the performance artist’s burden to bear. It is almost an obsession, revisiting the Event over and over again through it’s mediated versions. The curator Hans Ulrich Obrist describes a paradoxical “amnesic effect” from the over-documentation of everyday events through our growing technological proficiency. The preposition ‘over’ suggests a limit to our ability to over(consume) and over(distribute), like the housing ‘bubble’. There is a loss of the ‘real’ through the lens of our digital camera, but there is a further erasure of the senses when the mediated event is uploaded to the web. To make this discussion more complex, we could view the gallery as another form of mediation, which in nihilistic fashion is the last in a series of erasures of the original object or Event, displaying the results of the mediated journey, from real event/recorded event, to memento or funerary object – A ‘Wake’ for the Death of the Event. However, there is a depressing finality to that summation, which Browne’s ‘documents’ overcome. There is something joyous about her ‘revisiting’ of events at The LAB, even if you are a virgin visitor to these revisited events you are invited to literally take part through the apparatus of a telephone that is placed on a wall close to the entrance/exit for the convenience of the inquisitive viewer who wants to make an inquiry related to the documents at The LAB. Alongside, one small file box with note cards is left for any witnesses of the actions and events from the Mind The Gap project. These objects are not only forms of mediation, but offer the viewer the potential to make a discreet performative gesture. Interestingly, I have never been given so much choice for inquiry and reinterpretation, re-imagining and renewal of the art ‘object’ or the ‘Event’s Death’ in an art space. In the context of the present, which could be viewed as another gap between crisis and unknown potential, these mediated invocations of past events revive a longing for the future, not a dark reflection on the past. And Browne’s themes or impetus for these events should form a memento mori – one video document is titled Nama Taxi Revisited; or perhaps the term ‘revisited’ is suggestive of an invitation to play ‘seriously’. The video document, Nama Taxi Revisited, is one of many inventive scenarios by Browne at The LAB that bridges the gap between governmental opacity and transparency; represented by the unfinished and empty architectural structures that are tragic/comedic landmarks that, for the sake of denial rather than the economy – the mind rather than the pocket – would be better off demolished. The video tracks Nama informed taxi drivers escorting their passengers around Dublin to get the inside

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information on what buildings were sold off to Nama. Once again, there is a reflective analysis of the past events through witness/participator audio accounts of the Nama taxi tour.

Browne’s articulation of the ‘document’ is not serious museology. This is especially evident in the second video document A life on The Ocean Wave Revisited . The display includes a portable DVD player hung on a wall; a plinth with a telescope placed on top and headphones; with a considerable gap between DVD player and plinth. The folly of the telescope in the display reads as an effort to illustrate the real action of using a viewing instrument for the performative event documented in the video, which includes a boat full of people singing on the ocean and viewed by the audience from the distant shore. The video is interrupted by voiceovers – presumably by the initiators of the event – who reminisce about the successes and expectant failures of such performative experiments in art mediation. This reflective analysis of past efforts is persistent throughout. For Browne it seems that the document is not the result of the successful event, but a way to revisit, to even poke holes in the Event.

The project, Mind The Gap, stands out in the memory. I was left with the residual documents and objects from the series of events that were commissioned by Absolut Fringe Dublin in 2009. These included a ‘maneuverable’ wooden bench, a slide show of images and text, and a ‘newspaper’ full of interviews, led in a very open and human way by Jessica Foley. Mind The Gap could be read as ironical because the idea of ‘document’ fits nicely between the ‘gap’, if you are lucky enough to find it, which Browne does at The LAB. The ‘gap’ that I am referring to is the interstices between the fora that shape the parameters of art’s production. I am quick to avoid the term ‘creation’ as this term hints at some mystical process; a Beusyian shamanistic ritual. In general, the contemporary artist needs to be efficient in the age of multidisciplinary art practice. The artist needs to be able to adapt in order to objectively analyse the chaotic process of artistic subjectivism. For the ‘serious’ art professional, objectivism is good – subjectivism is bad. In a sense, the artist needs to be a leader, as well as a good designator for his/her syndrome of multi-personas. With all this splitting of roles and personas, Browne is a surprisingly controlled author/director of events at The LAB. While in this space of ‘documents’ an ‘aggressive’ projected image of the Don’t Quote Me event held outside the Screen Cinema Dublin in 2009 included a quote by the fictional Wall Street finance mogul, Gordon Gekko, which read: “...And you are all being royally screwed over by these, these bureaucrats, with their luncheons, their hunting and fishing trips, their corporate jets and golden parachutes.” Significantly, this filmic intrusion on entering and leaving The LAB was flaccid rather than revolutionary: the blood stayed tepid. There is no Hollywood moral or dramatic speech that will create a tour de force out of Ireland’s real economic mess. But that is why the sociopolitical themes, scenarios, and mediated events conducted by Browne at The LAB collate to represent the failure of such introspection or retrospection as a form of confession. Browne’s documents of previous performative actions reveals an archive that places art at the centre of the civic, the social and the architectonic. It doesn’t presume to rupture these infrastructures, but does push up against them.

The timing of this show is a big part of the success of Browne’s documents at The LAB. If these documents had been shown earlier they may have come across as didactic. Showing them in the future will give the archival nature of the objects a tone of nostalgia or tragedy. There is a balance here. But there is also a loss, a death; no more ‘revisits’ can be contemplated for these documents.

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APRIL 2011 (#12): Coffee Break Art Criticism (Afterthoughts!)

A&E Session on Art Criticism, Monster Truck Gallery, Dublin, 4 April. Something to Salvage

At 2:30am Tuesday 5th April James Merrigan wrote: AFTER the A&E session at Monster Truck with Tim Stott, Niamh Dunphy and myself, I was left once again, disenchanted, with the continuing failure of these types of forums that are setup to discuss the problems of art criticism. Moderated by Kevin Atherton, the discussion folded in on itself, a kind of naval gazing about the histories, the vernacular, and the obstacles that block the way to criticism. I added to this by mentioning Rancière. I regret this but I will explain what I meant. I said at the session that I disagreed with prescribing philosophical texts to student/ artists, which has become a compulsory ingredient in developing the practice of the artist in some local art institutions. The reason for my critic≠≠ism of this practice is that I believe that it invariably becomes an obstacle or a crutch for the student/artist. I must clear up that my definition of an artist is someone who makes ‘art objects’.

The obstacle of philosophy in the process of art-making is not about a fear of philosophy, which was proposed, but a saturation of philosophy, which within the art institution is led by students who can digest philosophy, against those that cannot. There should be a choice as to whether a student/artist reads these texts. I know many an artist who has avoided such prescribed texts and who makes art objects that offer philosophy, without philosophy offering them art objects. As a practicing writer I understand how Rancière’s contribution to aesthetics effects the way we critique politics and aesthetics and vice versa – outlined by Tim Stott. But as a practicing artist I do not believe that Rancière is a sole ingredient in the process of art-making. I believe, through my own process of art making, there is an amnesiac effect which forgets language. This is not the case for every artist, but this is my process. I believe that art-making comes first and philosophy last. I was also asked about my obligation as a critic to diagnose ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. As I outlined in my introduction at the session at Monster Truck, I believe that art criticism is not possible. I also said that I didn’t believe that there was a such thing as good and bad art. First of all, I am not a ‘professional’ art critic that is tied to an institution. The impetus for +billion_ is not out of an obligation to say what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ about art; there is no deadline per se and there are no editors. I have learnt though my own experience as an artist and a writer that the art object cannot be defined through the closed terms of good and bad. Personally I understand criticism as something that happens unbeknownst to the critic, which wipes it clean of any personal agenda. What we term ‘bad’ art is formed by the contexts that shape the art object and the questionable intent by the artist to frame the art object within a given context. Generally, the critic is ignorant of the intent of the artist; we can only assume the intent of the artist up to a point. As critics, our reception of the art object is coloured by history and our own personal reading of that history of the art object. If it is the art writers intent from the offset to critique the art object, then there is an agenda on the part of the critic, to either give a stamp of authority over the art object, or to give their own criticism some gravitas. My position as an art writer (which Tim Stott described as very different from criticism) is to find criticism through the act of art writing, rather than being critical for the sake of criticism. I am a fan of acerbic art criticism, such as Robert Hughes

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(The Younger), Adrian Searle (The Guardian), Peter Schjeldahl ( The New Yorker), J J Charlesworth, Jerry Saltz (New York Art Magazine), and his wife, Roberta Smith (The New York Times). Maybe these examples exhibit instances of opinion that don’t shy away from being impolite. They are also entertaining, negating philosophy, which defines the gap between academic criticism and newspaper criticism. Which brings me to a point that was not discussed, but was mentioned after the session in an instance of what I described during the session as ‘coffee break criticism’; which came from an observation by Hans Ulrich Obrist, who said: “The only interesting conversation happens at the coffee break, in the interstices, the in-between spaces, when we leave that space of representation.” The ‘point’ discussed was the position of the critic, between the professional and the amateur, between myself the amateur – who is devaluing art writing in the proliferation of texts on the web, and Tim, who is a professional art critic, paid by respected art journals.

At 9am 5th April Michaële Cutaya wrote: thank you for that James! I sympathize with your frustration. I wondered whether it would help if discussions were anchored on a specific issue and or/case study to keep the exchange focused? do you know if there will be a podcast? At 10am 5th April James Merrigan wrote: I was planning to record but I am happy I didn’t Michaele. After participating in two of these seminars on ‘criticism’ over a short period of time the discussion seems to always get dragged down into the problems of criticism rather that the potential of art writing. By defining what the rules of criticism are, whether that is the use of high falutin terms or, as Tim described, the potential from the misunderstanding of those terms in the act of criticism; these suggestions locks the writer into a philosophical argument that offers no potential for art writing. I suppose within the format of the panel discussion there is the element of the panelists having different agendas and coming from different art practitioner roles, such as the artist/critic; the writer/ artist; the lecturer/critic; the professional critic; the emerging or established artist/ writer etc. These hybrid models of art practice should spark a discussion around the different valid positions of the art writer or critic, but generally, people want the quick journalistic quip that sweeps the floor with the artist. I would like to ask the question for whom is art criticism for? How does it progress the artwork? Can criticism be more than an individual negative viewpoint on the artwork? Because of the interconnectedness of the Irish artworld, can so called negative assumptions about the artwork be negotiated by the artist/writer? Can we move on from the ‘crisis’ of criticism, which, to my mind, never occurred in a general sense because ‘criticism’ never existed in a general sense. Criticism only existed as singular episodes of rupture. And can criticism be reformed from different positions? Kevin Atherton said something interesting about the ‘first’ problem of the art object coming into the arena of criticism/language? Maybe criticism happens after the review or the article and doesn’t happen when negotiating the art object, or more appropriately, can’t happen?

Other points that were discussed was how PhDs were taking up the time of some of our best writers, such as Tim, and is the PhD the cancer of potential critics or art writers? Other questions that were posed but not discussed were: Who or what is art criticism for? Tim mentioned that he received the best response to one of his more critical texts on an artist. I think this is an anomaly as it is my experience that criticism is not for the artist. Afterward, we discussed certain ‘myths’ of criticism and how they effected the artist in some tragic fashion. It is my personal belief that these critical ruptures (when criticism turns bad) cannot be a form or tone of criticism. These ruptures can only occur when intentionally sought or fell upon by the critic.

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At 10am 5th April Alice Burns wrote: I agree, I feel there is a tendency to expect artists to be both, artist and critic of their own work and too much reliance on justifying the work with philosophy. At 10am James Merrigan wrote: And to answer your question Michaele: “I wondered whether it would help if discussions were anchored on a specific issue and or/case study to keep the exchange focused?” Yes, there needs to be a breakdown rather than broadly discussing criticism. We need to step away from this focus, or break it down into smaller elements. No one really knows what criticism does, how it effects or builds discourse around the art object. The most revealing aspect of Gemma Tipton’s blog entry for Circa online which I read out last night, was what she didn’t say or reveal anything, just inferred criticism. I put forward that criticism can happen in the process of art writing. If you invest enough research into an artist’s work you will find a critical edge. In the end there is the critic’s definition of the term criticism and there is the artist’s or curator’s reception of criticism. At 10am 5th April Sofie Loscher wrote: You’ve characterised the seminar as one that was set up to discuss the problems of criticism, however, the press release outlined the topic as (and I’m quoting here) “a panel discussion on how conceptions of critical dialogue extend from long-form critical texts, into the territory of debates, discussions and online writing.” If you didn’t want to talk about the problems of criticism you could have moved the discussion on.

At 11am 5th April James Merrigan wrote: In response to your comment Alice[Burns]: I don’t want to put forward the idea that we should all be anti-philosophy because it would be a hypocritical stance from my perspective as I use philosophy to back up my art writing. But I do want to put forward, as you wrote: that there is a “reliance” on philosophy before the act of art writing or before art-making has even begun. This brings into question practice-based PhDs, which was discussed at the ‘Artist as Critic’ seminar at Ormeau Baths Gallery last month. Is the art object shaped by focused research practiced through the PhD, and what is the success of this method, or is it too soon to tell because practice based PhDs are relatively still in their infancy. At 11am 5th April James Merrigan wrote: In response to your comment Sofie[Loscher]: There was a private discussion between all the panelists before the discussion began and it was agreed that we really didn’t know how to start, define what our positions are or how to go about starting a discussion. There was even discussion over the term “Long-form critical text” in the press release. This is not a reflection on the specific event at Monster Truck but a general statement on the traditional formats that we use for panel discussions. As I said also, I believe that the format is the problem and that criticism or good discourse rarely happens through the predetermined format for discussion on art. And that after the seminar ends the potential begins. I also admitted that I added to the discussion on the problems of criticism when I invoked the name of Ranciere, which I regretted. It is easy to say move on, but this was not my job as there was a moderator asked to do just that. And usually, the tone is set by the first speaker which is difficult to negotiate away from when in the process of thinking on your feet and trying to find an alternative. And anyway, to discuss problems is always easier than discussing potential.

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At 12pm 5th April Colin Martin wrote: John Hutchinson spoke well about this in a recent talk, when he pointed out that artists are not philosophers. In relation to the event itself, the intention was to create live debate and discussion around various modes/attitudes of critical writing. At 12pm 5th April James Merrigan wrote: I understand that the event set out to do this Colin, and I think it achieved this is some respects (this ‘afterthought’ would not be happening without the event), but this aspect of the “afterthought” is never utilised to it’s upmost potential. I am not ‘dissing’ the event, I am trying to salvage something from the event, just as criticism or art writing tries to salvage something from the exhibition.

At 3pm 5th April James Merrigan wrote: I completely agree Michaele. The potential that the ‘after thought’ offers should be utilised in a more dynamic way, and appropriate to this discussion on criticism, through the practice of writing. Maybe the ‘afterthought is an area where criticism can take place. As participants of these seminars, we always leave disenchanted with either with the trajectory that the event that has taken, or what we did not say in the heat of the moment. One proposal is that this event could be repeated in a different format or same? Maybe it is the problems of the format that offers the ‘afterthought’. What has also come to mind the day after the event at Monster Truck is the replacement of Declan Long at the last minute (who was sick), with Kevin Atherton, who acted as moderator. Although I think Kevin is one of the best conversationalists out there he offers to much of the paradoxical view, the double negative, the double entendre etc. But maybe the “paradox” is the reason why I am writing now. I also want to say or redefine what I said about art being neither ‘good’ or ‘bad’. My evolved position on this is that all art is ‘bad’ (Failure), and that the art object and artist are always skeptical (or in doubt) about their position as artists, and the art object’s position in the world as a success or failure. In essence, the critique starts with the artist, not the critic? At 3pm 5th April Frank Wasser wrote: The potential that the ‘after thought’ offers is being utilised within this format, HERE, RIGHT NOW. Point made, that should be credited to Billionart, something has being salvaged, now we move on. At 4pm 5th April Frank Wasser wrote: I wanted to add to that but the return button no longer gives paragraphs, so I will write a more detailed comment and post later, I brought Ranciere back up in the questions last night first and foremost having studied at a ‘local institution’ pre-the emergence in the distribution of ‘The Politics Of Aesthetics/The Distribution of the Sensible’, as Tim pointed out last night, it was necessary and relevant at the time and to a large extent it is still necessary and relevant now ( I will elaborate later), one further quick thing to mention is that I have NO knowledge of Ranciere being compulsory in any local institutions, so if you could be more specific there that would

At 2pm 5th April Michaële Cutaya wrote: This is great! this kind of exchange makes last night discussion worthwhile, it indeed “create live debate and discussion around various modes/attitudes of critical writing” /discourse. the panel discussion model needs to be critically assessed regarding its “productivity”, its capacity to generate debate otherwise it runs the risk of being an end in itself, a self enclosed object. this kind of exchange, of “afterthought” is a way to make the debate live on and bring in new participants.

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be helpful, also please list the artists who justify what they do by means of philosophy as indicated in one of the above comments. At 4pm 5th April Jonathan Mayhew wrote: hey could you save/continue this on your blog as well as here so it doesn’t get lost in the sprawl of facebook? sounds like i missed a fun night. i bet it was better in the pub after? maybe the ‘event’ should be the ‘afterthoughts’ to allow time to process what is being said to begin a better dialogue? i will try to contribute something when i am less tired. At 4pm 5th April James Merrigan wrote: First point Frank[Wasser]: I heard lately and was asked about what I thought of the process of reading Ranciere as a compulsory exercise in the initial stages of being excepted into an art institution. The only philosopher on the menu was Ranciere and it was framed around painting. I also said that I regretted bringing up Ranciere at the seminar because it is an argument that is well worn, and as you said Tim outlined his relevance, which I agree with to a point, but I don’t see his relevance in the act of art-making, So “let’s move on.” Regarding your request: “also please list the artists who justify what they do by means of philosophy as indicated in one of the above comments.” I am not sure I understand the question? Do you want me to list artists who make work solely from philosophy, I don’t think I indicated this and if I did it is a miscommunication. I don’t want to repeat once again what I have set out in detail above. I did disagree with Tim assertion that art starts with philosophy, or did he mean language?

At 4pm 5th April James Merrigan wrote: Jonathan, I am hoping to bring together all comments in article form on +billion_ as long as the discussion keeps going, or offers alternative potentials for discussions around art, whether through criticism or art writing. At 4pm 5th April Joanne Laws wrote: Hi all. So pleased I’m not alone in feeling more than frustrated at last night’s discussion - These comment boxes are too small - I have a half formulated response which I will complete, and display a link .. And thanks to James for providing this forum for Après-match analysis!.. At 11pm 5th April Roisin Byrne wrote: “Art criticism beyond the newspaper barely has an audience at all. No one has taken this to a more rational conclusion . . . as Boris Groys, with his notion of ‘textual bikinis’. “A critical art text is not necessarily meant to be read, he suggests. Rather, it is there to avoid the embarrassment of discursive nudity. Which is no cause for concern.” Tirdad Zolghadr. At 11pm 5th April James Merrigan wrote: There is a thread throughout the responses, ending - so far, with Roisin’s brilliant summation via Groys and Zolghadr of the ‘failure’ of the formats that are trying to make criticism ‘visible’ and ‘digestible’. But the terms “textual bikinis” and “discursive nudity” suggest that ‘criticism’ is written with invisible ink. At 1am 6th April Joanne Laws wrote: I was disappointed by the A& E session for several reasons. Mainly, I was frustrated that most of the content addressed was a flimsy regurgitation of the issues already in circulation in the context of Irish arts criticism, particularly in light of the

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discussions arising recently from Gemma Tipton’s blog, Cristin Leach’s column, and Circa issue 131 (and its subsequent responses). I would have presumed that most of the audience would be well aware of the well worn debate surrounding the ‘crisis in criticism’, because it has become quite an urgent issue for Irish art writers. I know the problems; I was hoping for some answers, or at least a potential space where some solutions may start to evolve. The problems facing art criticism in an Irish context create a complex list of issues which splinter out into numerous strands. These include; Language; Art Terminology, role of theory/philosophical content, Role of the editor/ editorial voice, Publication/ Platforms; Readership, the function of reviews Audience/ Readership/ The Public; Who is arts criticism for? Is ‘everyone a critic’? Interdiciplinarity; The hybrid writer – artist/critic, teacher/critic, conflicts of interest, potential for new definitions Arts Education/ Institutional Policy

At 8am 6th April James Merrigan wrote: In response to your comment Joanne: First of all, I think the audience at the A&E session was mixed between people who were in the know and people who were not. From the offset, Tim mistakenly assumed that most of the audience were students of his or not savvy to what has been happening over the last year or more in regard to art discourse, I mistakenly read out the Circa blog entry by Gemma Tipton ‘On Mediocrity’, so the tone and trajectory was set to go backwards; but the problem is it didn’t go forwards. Your suggestion regarding “gathering in some shape or form ... people with a vested interest in the future of art writing in Ireland,” and that is not about the promotion of individuals or other, and in which there is no audience or public is a good one - you can count me in. But we have to from the offset state our agendas and positions, and not in a way to form a consensus. For this to work we have to acknowledge that there are different positions for ‘art writers’ or ‘critics’, the term is not important, or maybe it is, depending on your position. Below is an email that was sent to me by Michaële Cutaya detailing a proposed structure of a “panel discussion.” If anyone is interested in joining this discussion in the near future send email to: art@billionjournal.com ‘Some thoughts on the organization of panel discussions’ -Wherever possible to dispose the chairs in a circle and the panellists and moderators/ organisers spread around the circle. (not huddled together) this to avoid a spatial hierarchy between the participants. Panellists are useful to get the discussion started and have informed people at the ready along with moderators (I really don’t like this word) (it would probably be best to keep the number low?) -To focus the discussion on a specific issue with case study (I was excited about the VERGE symposium because we had an object to discuss: the publication, but most panellists just went on to do their thing anyway) the panellists being instructed to engage with the issue (maybe ask for synopsis which will be reviewed beforehand) facts that will be shared by the organisers/moderators. -the role of the moderator(s): not to moderate as such but to keep the discussion in focus and to supply facts if necessary. It is not so much to control the discussion but to keep it tight so that it does not get bogged down into generalities that everyone resort

I agree with Michaële [Cutaya] when she suggests an ‘anchoring’ of particular issues, in order to facilitate a more coherent attempt at solutions, or at least creating options. I think I feel a D.I.Y moment coming on...Can I suggest a gathering in some shape or form, which brings together people with a vested interest in the future of art writing in Ireland. I personally think the ‘panel’ format was insufficient for the task at hand, and would value an opportunity to thrash out some pragmatic approaches to tackling the various issues raised. With no audience, only participants.

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to when their mind go in auto-pilot. -to record the discussion and let know that there will be a follow up on website. At 8am 6th April James Merrigan wrote: The comment by Joanne[Laws] above proposes a ‘closed to public’ group discussion to “thrash out” potential rather than problems of ‘criticism’. If you are interested in joining this discussion with an intent to write, please send emails to: jamesmerrigan@hotmail.com At 9am 6th April Joanne[Laws] wrote: James, I was pleased you quoted from gemma tipton’s blog, it was an acknowledgment of the topical debate, and created the potential for forward looking. I think the panel format was just intimidating all round. It put the panelists in the position of experts when clearly nobody really knows what to do, not just in Ireland. Maybe I was hoping for too much having made the trek from Leitrim on a miserable tuesday evening. But I’m glad I attended as it gives scope, and as you say, something can be salvaged... At 4pm 6th April Dominic Thorpe wrote: I wasn’t at the event the other night but after reading all the thoughts I stood in my kitchen, opened my mouth as wide as possible and kept it open while trying singing an Irish Ballad as best I could. I’ll do it again. Learning happened. Consensus was not reached.

At 9am April 7th James Merrigan wrote: +billion- thanks all who participated in the commentary in the aftermath of the A&E session at Monster Truck. Collated responses will be going online at: [http://billionjournal.com/] tomorrow. To cap the discussion for now, returning to Roisin Byrne’s comment via Boris Groys and Tirdad Zolghadr: “Art criticism beyond the newspaper barely has an audience at all. No one has taken this to a more rational conclusion . . . as Boris Groys, with his notion of ‘textual bikinis’. A critical art text is not necessarily meant to be read, he suggests. Rather, it is there to avoid the embarrassment of discursive nudity. Which is no cause for concern.” I ask: Is textual clothing important for art or should we be ‘formal’ purists? D.H Lawrence sets a premise for this argument in 1936, he wrote: “The puritan and the intellectual has not yet struck them down with his fear and hate obsession. But look at England! Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough,*they are already bourgeois. The coat is really more important than the man. It is amazing how important clothes suddenly become, how they cover the subject.” Some Time Later Jonathan Mayhew wrote: Some quick thoughts on criticism ‘Down with this sort of thing, careful now.’ When considering a review we must consider the agenda of the critic and the publication that it is published in. this is important as it sets the tone for the piece and may be anything from simply getting paid for doing a job to the promotion of ideas or art forms that they are invested/interested in. The critic through a review has the potential to give the artist or gallery cultural value, which if there was an art market in Ireland, could translate into market value. It can also work in reverse with a negative review. There is a limited amount of criticism in the Irish media. Reviews in

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newspapers are hit and miss and many will just describe what the work is. Whether or not this is to allow the less informed public to engage with the work is up to you. But then again this is not a specialised publication, should we expect a high level of criticism in the mainstream media? During a lecture (by I think Ian Burns but I could be wrong) it was asked ‘should you expect the public to understand your work when your making it at a masters or PHD level? In the field of science this isn’t expected. Who are you making your work for?’ In a ‘post-Fordist’ situation the coffee break is no longer a break but a continuation of work under another guise. (Hence my quip about the pub being fun after.) Hopefully this isn’t going over old ground and will continue the conversation. As the most beneficial is the long conversation, things the next day aren’t always the same as the day before, as HUO would say. Thank you to the following for their participation in the ‘after-commentary’: Michaële Cutaya, Alice Burns, Sofie Loscher, Colin Martin, Frank Wasser, Jonathan Mayhew, Joanne Laws, Roisin Byrne, Dominic Thorpe, Sean O’Sullivan.

MAY 2011 (#13): to be – to see – to be seen

Susan MacWilliam, ‘F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N’, NCAD Gallery, Dublin, 2010.

IN 2010 at NCAD Gallery, Dublin, Susan MacWilliam restaged the video installation F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N. This was one of three works that were shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. The press-release for F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N stated: F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009) is based on MacWilliam’s research into the spirit photography archive of T.G. Hamilton held at the University of Manitoba Archives in Winnipeg, Canada. Named after the French astronomer and psychical researcher Camile Flammarion (18421925),the work is inspired by a photograph which documents the appearance of a ‘teleplasmic text’ at a séance in June 1931. 10 years earlier in the short film work Faint (1999) MacWilliam finds herself dressed as a medium whom collapses repeatedly on a grassy clearing. It is the first work I experienced from MacWilliam’s art practice – now resembling and measuring an archive. I say experienced and not viewed, or saw, because it has stayed with me since, wedged in my memory. Not because it was that visually traumatic; but it left an imprint, a vestige. In Faint, This repeated moment, of what could be called “old fashioned female hysteria,” is interrupted intermittently by details of poised hands against a backdrop of folds of drapery and filigreed furniture. There is also what I imagine to be, a male voyeur present – breathing heavily while watching the episodes of collapse. MacWilliam is fully committed to the fall in the work, you can see her upper body collapsing in on its haunches; it is almost believable, but it is not real. The event is a fabrication; the faint, the dress, the birdsong: it is all a reworking. In a sense, MacWilliam is acting out a desire – to be – to see – to be seen. Teasingly at NCAD Gallery, MacWilliam has placed two stereoscopes in plain view from outside the full window of the Gallery’s facade. As an introduction – and also

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seen in full view of the street – the artist has sited a plywood cutout text spanning 12-feet across, which spells out the unfamiliarly exotic word F-L-A-M-M-A-R- I-O-N. The placement of the stereoscopes suggests a view within a view and supplants a kid’s desire to enter the space to get a sneak peek. Traditionally, the common themes seen through a stereoscope was either fairy tales or travel destinations; commonly procured as a last minute ‘panic buy’ from the foreign gift shop. The recipient, usually a child, had one look and then it was discarded, the image trapped inside without an audience ad infinitum. The structure of the stereoscope can give some insight to where my line of inquiry is going: two images of the same subject are placed side-by-side. The trick of the eye is caused by one of the images being a slightly different view of the subject. The lens of the stereoscope aligns the two images at a virtual distance of infinity (vanishing point), and what you get is a 3-D effect. It is this articulation of a view through the nostalgic stereoscope that is pertinent to the themes that underpin MacWilliam’s art practice. The multifarious viewing and articulation of those varying points of view is what dislocates her work from pure research. Image and language are placed side-by-side in this private theatre. The British Philosopher Gilbert Ryle denounced the Cartesian theory of mind, which claimed that the soul was a separate nonmaterial entity - a ghost. Ryle, (following Wittgenstein), also thought that philosophical problems were caused by our misuse of language.[1] From this philosophical standpoint, the basic nature of our understanding and view of the world is always compromised by the very things that we try to explain it with – language and speech. This path of inquiry situates MacWilliam’s work in an argument that not only revolves around issues of an “extramundane” nature but also one that is concerned with language.

As I look through one stereoscope and then the other (both of which I learn later show portraits of the two participants of the video work F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, Dr. William G. Roll, Poltergeist Investigator, and Ciaran Carson, Poet and Novelist) I am conscious of being watched from the busy street level of Thomas Street, Dublin. There is something perverse about bending down to look, arse backed up to the people who walk past the full clear window of NCAD Gallery. Consciously or not, MacWilliam has created a scenario that harks back to the view assumed in Faint, with the exception that the viewer is being viewed. I look in MacWilliam’s Biennale Monograph, titled Remote Viewing, a particular page is open, p. 111. It shows a view of the séance cabinet that was used for the performance by Carson in F-L-A-M-M- A-R-I-O-N. It all becomes a little clearer as I walk through the fabricated architecture that MacWilliam has designed for the display of the work. This is made up of a light corridor to house the stereoscopes and a dark intervening corridor that leads to a darker viewing space for the projected video. The space seems to turn in on itself. As I enter the dark space within, I realise that moments earlier – from without – I was looking through the stereoscopes on the backside of where the video is now projected. Images of B.F. Skinner (the American Psychologist) and his philosophy of Radical Behaviourism come to mind.[2] Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Chamber, or more commonly referred to as Skinner’s Box, was a fabricated space to analyse human behaviour; with the help of rats and operandum (levers), or the more appropriately sounding term manipulandum. Reinforcers such as food and water were used to get the participants to do the psychologist’s bidding. The chamber was sound and light proofed, stimulus control was paramount. There is a similar tendency for environmental control inherent in MacWilliam’s display of F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N at NCAD Gallery. Such control was plainly illustrated in an earlier press image for a previous work by the artist at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios entitled Headbox. For the sake of documentation and maybe

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‘correct’ procedure, the participant in the photograph looks into a less sophisticated stereoscope and holds onto a handle, or what could be equated to a Skinner lever. This leads me to aspects of MacWilliam’s work which suggest that control is paramount to her method.

Interviews generally take the form of a one-to-one with perspective interviewee sitting across from the interviewer. The setting is intentionally intimate and polite. The interviewer wants information that is relevant to the trajectory of their research. In F-L-A-M-M- A-R-I-O-N, MacWilliam is outside of the vanishing point, almost swinging from the chandeliers to get another view. In a first-person narrative that Ciaran Carson gives in the monograph, he discloses the directorial process that the artist uses with her “guests.”[3] I begin to recite the wordlist Susan has given to me to recite. Not a glossary, since no meanings are given. Just the bare words, the bare boards deprived of their contents. Terms relating to film, over 180 of them. Some of these are familiar to me. Some leave me guessing. Some others are beyond my ken ... From time to time I take my eyes off the list, memorising a few words in advance of speaking them to look into the lens of Susan’s camera...[4] The diaristic form of writing that Carson plays with in the monograph suits his position in F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N. He is a subject in an experiment. Whether these experiments are true or false is beside the point. The ‘teleplasmic text’, which is the accelerant for MacWilliam to re-fabricate these events, finds form in Carson. His accent trips over meaning to form clear pronunciation, from the gut. Looking at the documentary photographs of the séance and the sporadic positioning of the teleplasm (or more commonly termed ectoplasm) the séance sitter’s body becomes a maw, when unable to speak, the human conduit either faints or vomits out ectoplasm; spirit, ghost, meaning, communication is made fleshy. MacWilliam threads a fine line between document and fabricated fiction. In some revealing e-mails the artist says: have always thought the process of manifestations and materialisations of the séance room to be similar to the realisation of ideas and objects in the studio. (email to Slavka Sverakova, 21/12/2008, 14:32.). On the same day – 7 hours later – MacWilliam goes on to describe the materialisation of these fabrications: Last night, at 11pm, I found myself on the sitting room floor stitching a teleplasmic ship using muslin and working from the photographs from the Hamilton archives. (e-mail to Slavka Sverakova, 21/12/2008, 19:29.)[5]

Straight forward narrativity is already shot when you go to view video in the context of art. Unless you know the score you will always arrive late to an already fragmented art narrative. On arriving at NCAD Gallery I asked the gallery invigilator what the duration of MacWilliam’s video work was? In the process of explaining there was a mix-up, a misunderstanding. To cut a convoluted story short, the timescales that were juggled about was, 7 minutes, 17 minutes, 70 minutes. I took the latter dubious timescale, saying I was parked two minutes from the gallery. I persuaded myself that MacWilliam is playing with duration, maybe the true length of a séance, or twenty minutes more than a therapy session. The Freudian hysteria case of Anna O popped into my head, probably due to the change of position that MacWilliam herself has taken since Faint, from inflicted to observer, victim to dominant. This transformation is cemented by way of the relationship between the two protagonists in F-L-A-M-M-AR-I-O-N and MacWilliam the director of proceedings.

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Like the appropriated boards from Orchid Studios, Belfast, that formed the séance cabinet, or MacWilliam’s own stitched muslin teleplasmic ship, Carson is a fabricated ‘character-object’ in the video. He has been given a script to adhere to, but it is not a script that forms a narrative per se. It is a recipe. A menu. A word-association test. Dressed in a dark wool suit, white shirt and red tie, the cut of his jib is not poet-like. The odd camera angles compound the sense that the séance is staged. Carson is made into a false prophet without knowing the meaning of the words; he’s a Skinnerian rat. He is left guessing while trying to form a meaningful sentence. The differences between Carson (the viewed) and MacWilliam (the viewer) is knowledge. Carson has no-knowledge (in the context of MacWilliam’s process), so he works off spontaneity drenched with hope. The artist on the other hand has some idea of the outcome, or the result of the fragmented edit. Twice on one page of the monograph Carson likens the séance cabinet to a “coffin.”[6] His unease is especially heightened by the downward shot by MacWilliam, catching Carson pale and perplexed, rubbing his palm along the boards that shadow him. Or is it all an act? All participants become interlocutors through the perpetual unwinding of the event in F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N. There is no beginning or end; no scientific conclusion. Snippets of reworked séance episodes shuffle indiscriminately throughout the duration. Bodies slump over wooden kitchen chairs. All objects and subjects cornered in the cabinet. MacWilliam seems to like alcoves, where you can trap what you are looking for: ‘it’ can’t get out if the perspective end is a wooden corner. There is no Shakespearean EXIT for ghosts here.

Dr. William Roll is also cornered in his own study. The stereoscope portrait and the video interviews are set at a fixed stare. Dr. Roll is the counter-Carson. Gilbert Ryle created an analogy for learnt and experienced knowledge: Competent speakers of language are to a philosopher what an ordinary villager is to a mapmaker. A local villager knows his way by wont and without reflection to the village church, to the town hall, to the shops and back home again from the personal point of view of one who lives there. But, asked to draw or to consult a map of his village, he is faced with learning a new and different sort of task: one that employs compass bearing and units of measurement.[7] Like Ryle’s “villager,” Carson is unconsciously playing the part of the experienced séance sitter; performing blindly and intuitively for MacWillliam who holds the strings. Dr. Roll on the other hand is portrayed as the equivalent “mapmaker”. There is something to do with the changing of positions in MacWilliam’s work that allows it to be allusive; like the subject that she is fabricating. A change of position occurred to me halfway during watching F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, caused by two events which interrupted my viewing. The first event: another visitor arrived to view the work which setoff a chain of shuffling events. Secondly, my alarm went off; time to fill the parking meter. Two minutes later I arrived back to see the visitor is not on the bench. I take a second, sit down, adjusted. Minutes later – with a bodily jerk – I hear a sound to my right in the darkness. I realise that the visitor has not left, but is lying on the floor; comfortable enough in heir surroundings to lounge and watch from that perspective. MacWilliam’s direction goes up-and-down, side-to-side and zooms. Maybe the other visitor to the gallery saw something off kilter, so they changed their position. Did you ever notice that when we witness anomalies we change our position or stance in order to see whether what we are seeing is real? Maybe for the witness the image becomes truer from a different angle? Like MacWilliam’s camera, we see things from side-to-side or up-and-down. The angle disturbs the viewer. When we are faced with something that is off-centre don’t we imitate it by standing askew?

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What I am left with are questions like the one posed by MacWilliam in the title of the stereoscope with the portrait of Dr. Roll – Can we explain the poltergeist? Dr. Julia Tanney, suggests that “Ryle’s target was not merely the ghostliness of the mental processes hypothesized by the Cartesian; it was their essential hidden-ness.”[8] Descartes’s theory of mind hypothesised that the mind existed outside of the body, controlling the puppet-like human body with Skinnerian efficiency (levers); the Ghost in the Machine. MacWilliam’s practice seems to intentionally pose an answerless question in a space that threads the everyday and what Ryle describes as the “Occult” processes of language and the mind.[9] Art succeeds when it is paradoxically distinct from the everyday and recognisable as life. MacWilliam’s F-L- A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N serves the viewer potential by successfully managing multifarious viewpoints from a controlled objective standpoint.

JUNE 2011 (#14): Phantom Prosthetics

Vera Klute, ‘Blindgänger’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 7 May 7 – 16 June.

THE BUTLER GALLERY reads like a latrine in the context of Vera Klute’s work – especially considering the artist’s ‘pissing ear’ work at the far end of the Kilkenny art space entitled It’s coming out of my ears. The grey tiled floor and series of ‘alcove galleries’ force the viewer to walk to the right and look to the left. Unavoidably, the artworks are given a serial and segregated presentation, while the artist tries to form a cohesive hole. Saying that, the staccato architecture is perfect for Klute’s work, which presents the body as a series of disconnected bit-parts; divine and maybe not so divine. The terms or literary modes of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism given to us by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, come to mind when viewing Klute’s videos and kinetic sculptures. You almost have to break down her art practice into genus and species: drawings and paintings are also present. In each disconnected space of the gallery the viewer is presented with a limb, limbs or internal organs, that are being manipulated by kinetic or digital means. However, the first ‘alcove’ is ‘dead still’ with traditional methods of fabrication. A series of large drawings hang volute-like from the ceiling with a top-heavy composition of what can only be read as cherubim. However, the composition crops the heads of the figures, suggesting decapitation or Icarian hubris. The latter seems to fit Klute’s playful fabrications, which suggest the daring of science and technology to play God through cybernetic experiments. Michael Bell and Michael Gardiner promote the intriguing idea that Bakhtin’s interest in the carnival and the grotesque as due in part to his own affliction with osteomyelitis (bone marrow disease), which resulted in the amputation of his leg in 1938. Following this diagnosis they write:

Soon enough I notice that the video has looped back to the start. I think I have watched it one and a half times, realising that it is 17 minutes rather than 70 minutes. On the way out I ask the invigilator “how many visitors have been to see the exhibition today?” He looks, counts and says “17.” Afterward I read that “MacWilliam relishes the playful insistence of coincidences...”[10]

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The phantom limb is the scene of trenchant cognitive confusion: the reality of the stump is coexistence with the reality of the phantom; that is, one indicates a manifest absence in the same/ time space relations as that which indicates a manifest presence. Thus, the phantom limb asks the first question of grotesquery: where does your body end?[1] The amputee also experiences the “phantom limb” as an “image” rather than a “copy” of the amputated limb. It is invariably “shorter” and shows more “dexterity.”[2] Klute’s own dexterity comes into question in two works – Es hat sich schon mai einer tot gerührt (German Proverb: ‘People have stirred themselves to death’), and Linkshänder (left-handed). The former kinetic work includes two animatronic left arm/hands that make a ‘stirring’ motion with spoons. The drawing Linkshänder (left-handed) is also a portrait of left-handedness where two arm/hands hang together on the one page. Both of these works are exercises in paradox: on the one hand – awkwardness, and the other hand – dexterity. One can only presume that Klute is left-handed. Provincially, in the essay, ‘Understanding Idioms’, Nancy Chang situates the idiom “to have two left hands” in German origins – zwei linke Hände haben (be a bad craftsman). [3] Kute’s intentionally awkward fabrications of ‘thought’ (another ‘phantom’) bring her themes down to earth, clipping the wings of the divine.

We also have to take into account gender in relation to a female artist working with this specific thread of visual research and thought. From the offset, androgyny is suggested in the cropped ecclesiastical figures in Klute’s drawings. The internal organ or disconnected limb is also genderless. However, these fabrications are illustrative of the man-made and masculinity in the human sciences. The precursor to this type of scientific expression in art, that is engendered with both feminine and masculine attributes, is found ninety years earlier in the manifestation of Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy. Bell and Gardiner write that “the whole, the complete, the autonomous body remains hegemonic in particularly Western concepts of selfhood,” and that “the grotesque itself rearticulates the feminist imperative in deconstructing the ‘man-made’ interface of the cyborg as a wholly male Übermensch.”[4] Übermensch is translated as superhuman, beyond-human or overman from a Nietzschean perspective. But the overman is always tied to humanity as a leader of men. He effects change in others and the world. As a counterweight to masculine wholeness and power, femininity is defined by body parts. But beyond the obvious sexual connotations which are successfully avoided by Klute, it is the history of the decentered, fractured feminine self that is tied to labour (both meanings of the word), and identity – in terms of the literary masculine pseudonym for the female writer, that surfaces in the confused states of motion and stillness in Klute’s work at the Butler Gallery. It is also too simplistic to situate Klute’s work in the general arena of the grotesque. Although there is an uncomfortable awareness felt in the stomach in front of the artist’s gurgling bust topped with a prominent trachea bone to suggest the potential of sound; and CPR, where the action of resuscitation is literally illustrated and connected to a digitally rendered ‘breathing’ lung on a flat screen TV. In the end the outcome of the science is fictional, placing Klute’s work back in the literary rather than Tomorrow’s World. It is also a misconception that the grotesque suggests social isolation and anxiety. The humour in Kute’s work reinvigorates another idiom – Laugh in the face of death. If we go back 450 years, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the grotesque as a collective coming together, where the ‘deformed’ can be found in the festivities of his painted crowds. Bruegel is almost a visual companion to Bakhtin. The Russian philosopher also designates “folk humour” as an important aspect of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism – Bakhtin writes:

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In grotesque realism, therefore, the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people ... The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego , but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.[5]

This brings me to one of the most innovative video installation that I have experienced in recent times. Klute’s Den Letzen beissen die Hunde (German Proverb: ‘The last one will be bitten by the dogs’) is an 8- channel video installation displayed on 8 flat screen TVs that ‘circumscribe’ the viewer and show elongated arms being dragged from one successive screen to another by “running” fingers. I write “circumscribe” to suggest a snake or the male penis, which (to my mind) the racing limbs allude to in the context of what went before at the gallery. This work also points back to David Cronenberg’s subjective articulations of anthropomorphic technology in his 1993 film Videodrome. Klute’s animated castrations flout bravely with humour, violence, gender and the gothic. The press release states: the moving disembodied hands ... bring to mind ‘Thing’,from the1960s TV series The Addams Family ... who is able to run on his fingertips, much like a spider. But it is the counter aspects of humour vs. pain, movement vs. stillness, the divine vs. the earthly, that makes Klute’s work encyclopedic in its inquiry into the narratives that the body offers the artist, and tirelessly meddlesome in the display of that inquiry.

JUNE 2011 (#15): Internet Atrophy: ‘01 for all and all for 01’

Aleksandra Domanović, Joel Holmberg, Parker Ito, Eilis McDonald, Jonathan Rafman ‘Offline’, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios , Dublin, 8 April – 14 May. curated by Rayne Booth.

In the Global Village ... we are like the occupants of an elevator - having proximity without community. (Marshall McLuhan)[1] IN BOB HANKE’S brilliant essay McLuhan, ‘Virilio and the Electric Speed in the age of Digital Reproduction’, there is a passage that describes the only meeting between the two philosophers, Paul Virilio and Marshall McLuhan. Hanke’s generous research creates a fine backstory for McLuhan to pronounce the above introductory quote. Seemingly, after a dinner at a Parisian restaurant in 1973, the pair got stuck in an elevator for over an hour. It must be mentioned that Virilio and McLuhan are always pitched against each other in the theoretical arena of new media. Virilio is the postmodern skeptic who has a ‘territorial’ grasp on time, space and power within the vector of speed, while McLuhan’s premature projections of a ‘Media Eden’ (Virilio’s phrase)[2], are due partly to being born twenty one years before his counterpart: he was late to the internet party. Both have been proven to be ‘technologically clairvoyant’. Ironically, it is ‘time’ that separates their theories, as Hanke outlines, McLuhan was already tackling the discursive element of ‘speed’ (Virilio’s baby) before his death in 1980. I mention these two protagonists because of a personally perceived flip in the mediation of Internet Art in the context of the group show Offline

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at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S). Although the McLuhan/Virilio argument has run its course, it once again seems pertinent as Internet Art becomes potentially less etherealised and more grounded – as evidenced in the virtual objecthood of the scattered and stacked paraphernalia at TBG+S. Offline is one of the first exhibitions that I have experienced that I felt the need for a camera, or some digital tool to mediate what I was seeing. It is almost as if there is no frame, structure, boundary, to support the thrash heaps of Kitsch and ‘station(e) ry’ objects. I write station(e)ry as an intended doubling of the meaning of the word, in reference to Aleksandra Domanović’s columned stacks of A4 pages, where the edge of each layered page is printed to create an image on the vertical sides of what Domanović entitles printable monuments to the abolished. yu domain. The artist’s statement gives some sociopolitical background to these aesthetically pleasing and innovative sculptures:

The 1991 break up of her [Domanović’s] homeland came only a few months afer the country’s top domain had been registered and internet use began to spread. Domanović’s sculptural works ... were produced to commemorate the recent abolition of the .yu domain. Taking Domanović’s statement into account when tracking the multicoloured ‘ink blot’ images on the vertical sides of the towers of paper, they take on the form of geographical maps found in ’70s type encyclopedias (books which also had the butt ends printed). ‘Ink blot’ also suggests the psychological Rorschach Test, which utilised inkblot designs to examine thought disorders. Considering Domanović’s homeland, the political context positions these forms into the shifting geographical boundary of the break-up of the artist’s former Yugoslavia. McLuhan wrote in 1979: “As Ecology takes over in all fields of human activity in the Eighties, every kind of change poses a pollution threat.” Domanović’s printed images have a viral tenacity that reflects McLuhan’s ecological fears the way they wrap themselves around the plinths of paper: ubiquitous contemporary terms such as ‘computer virus’ and ‘economic contagion’ come to mind. If you get down on your knees and look closely at Domanović’s printed designs, vague mediated images of protest or celebration are found with in their Kitsch makeup. It is the Kitsch formalism performed by all the artists at TBG+S that gives a clichéd filmic landscape of a post-ecological disaster. As Hank concludes via Virilio’s position: “For Virilio, the ‘information bomb’ means that media interactivity should be regarded in the same way as nuclear radioactivity.”[3] In the end, our coming together online, will be our individual and collective death in reality. In 1939, at the age of 29, Clement Greenberg wrote his seminal essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Greenberg, from a Marxist standpoint wrote: “Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of the people.”[4] This succinct statement refers to Greenberg’s view of the Germanic and Russian peoples’ assimilation of kitsch as a cultural artefact (or Fascist/Communist conditioning). Kitsch was easy to digest, rather that an esoteric, rupturing notion like avant-garde. Simply put, kitsch is colourful, avant-garde is black and white; one makes you smile, the other makes you think. Uttering the terms avant-garde and kitsch today has the aftertaste of ‘old hat’ nostalgia. Interestingly, although kitsch is punctuated with retroactive closing brackets – appropriating the “trash heaps” of the past and situating them in the contemporary present – avant-garde has the black & white tinge of the distant past, more modernist than postmodernist. Greenberg writes: Where there is an avant-garde, generaly we also find a rear-guard. True enough – simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers,

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illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, H ollywood movies, etc, etc.[5] [...] Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy.[6]

There is a paradox though, a very new and interesting one that McDonald’s art practice poses. The artist’s art identity over the last couple of years has been framed within and without other artists’ identities. Previous projects such as Rapture Heap (2009-10), was a serial project that manifested into a search and display of McDonald’s art identity through appropriation and collaboration. The artist’s rupturing collaboration with the other four artists at TBG+S is a culmination of this trend to collapse identity in its virtual and artworld forms. The paradox is that McDonald’s own art identity is taking on a stronger design as she plays with the fracturing of real and spiritual identities in the context of the artworld. In a sense ‘art identity’ is safer within the collaborative or collective, while the artist as individual practitioner is a paranoid delinquent. As Boris Groys writes via Nietzsche, “it is better to be an artwork than to be an artist.”[7] By playing with internet space in the way McDonald does, there is also an intrinsic tie with God or the ‘spiritual’. Our textual, mythological, fantastical negotiations of spiritual or religious space is structured around our obsession with identity; of finding one[self] or creating parameters for the [self] to ‘ethically’ exist in the world. We are quite good at negotiating ‘spiritual space’ through passed-down textual references – such as the Bible. Having succeeded in creating an image of a virtual/spiritual space in full view through our laptops is also counter-intuitive to imagination and the body. The history of religion taught us that materialism is bad and a dematerialised body is good; things of the flesh, very bad; reflecting on the metaphysical, very good. As curious inhabitants of internet space there is a naiveté or ‘blindspot’ which proclaims that identity can be real or built online. In a sense, when we log on there is a gradual death of the object in the less physically and mentally taxing space of the internet: no labour. This thread of thought concerning identity is also found in Parker Ito’s The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet at TBG+S. The work came into existence when the artist “asked orderartwork.com to create a series of paintings based on a stock photo depicting a smiling, blonde female wearing a backpack which (amongst its other usages) a ‘parked domain’ company called Demand Media employs to catch the eye of Web surfers who accidentally click to the sites it owns.” We are told on the exhibition map of works for Offline that this work is a collaboration between McDonald and Ito. Once again we do not know where one artist begins and the other ends; just like the image of the ‘blonde female’ who is depicted on a canvas and flag at TBG+S. McDonald’s actual art practice becomes a type of internet meme (an idea that

Eilis McDonald on the other hand utilises a form of Kitsch to fracture identity, traditional grounded space, and time – what McLuhan describes as “classic” notions of past, present and future. The artist’s overarching presence in her scatter installation of ‘found objects’ at TBG+S suggest that McDonald is presumably well aware of the awkwardness between the virtual and the human, especially when she inserts images of conspicuously placed timber and run-on-the-spot animated gifs in her growing number of individual websites, which layer this preoccupation with our awkward negotiation of internet space. At TBG+S her ‘real inserts’ of coloured timber and junkbox objects interrupt our false notions of an ordered art space on one hand, and on the other hand suggest a virtual space that makes idols of junk. McDonald’s intentionally clumsy displays trip over the other art objects and other art identities, swallowing and spitting them out on the gallery floor: identity becomes fluxus within McDonald’s framing.

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takes the form of a hyperlink, image, website etc. and is spread across the internet), luring the viewer from one ill defined space to another; a very apt reflection of our current, largely virtual existence. Hanke writes via McLuhan’s Global Village: It is the velocity of media that determines the possible forms of self-consciousness or identity: print media fostered ‘individualism’ and ‘nationalism’ while the immediacy of electromagnetic media fosters retribalisation (groupism) on a world-wide scale and disembodied existence ( everybody is a no-body).[8] If we are prompting this disembodied existence via the internet, how does this online existence effect the human citizen in the city? Virilio describes: a world-city, the city to end all cities, a virtual city of which every real city will ultimately be a suburb, a sort of omnipolitian periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere.[9] After leaving TBG+S, Joel Holmberg and Jonathan Rafman’s Lambda prints of internet imagery traveled with me – the viral internet circus had made its mark. Homberg’s Getty Images Hollywood Sign, plays with what he refers to as “corporate residue.” The image depicts the iconic Hollywood sign being layered over by the ubiquitous and vivid Getty Images copyright watermark. Just behind Holmberg’s sign, McDonald has placed a Newton’s Cradle, or the more appropriate term in relation to Holmberg’s corporate residue, Executive Ball Clicker: subliminal capitalism is waiting to startup!

Joel Holmberg could also be Jonathan Rafman (I had to check who was who!). Rafman states that his series of photographs – Nine Eyes of google Street – “reintroduces the human gaze and reasserts the uniqueness and importance of the individual.” McDonald is also part of Rafman’s series of photographs in the form of an extra terrestrial slouching on a chair. Beneath Rafman’s photo McDonald has placed the ‘real’ extra terrestrial smoking and looking up at Rafman’s photos. These efforts to reassert individuality are in the process of collapse at TBG+S. Our growing comfort with internet space allows the viewer to assimilate the real objects at TBG+S as mediated versions. Before, internet art was a esoteric sub-group that was testing the groundlessness of the art object: now, it is a visual language that is fluent to most. Between the artists at TBG+S there is the practice of what McLuhan describes as “groupism,” which is defined in the diaspora of individual identity through our now paired evolution with the internet. At TBG+S, the less than definite space (staged primarily by McDonald), enacts a type of real demonstration or protest for and against “disembodied existence.” This is not political. There is no Left versus Right. Art has lost its position, even if those past positions were constructed by arbitrary rules, there was at least a false floor to stand on. That is what makes Rayne Booth’s curatorial so intriguing, it reflects the current state of negotiating the world, without blatantly illustrating it. There is a tone rather than a curatorial thread linking all the works together, which is refreshing. I am defining ‘tone’ as something that can only be sensed, while ‘thread’ is a conceptualist trope of the so-called successful curatorial. Both artist and curator find an awkward platform for their manifestations of virtual space in physical space. This highlights the gap between the manmade and the mediated – body and mind – what Dave Beech repeats via John Roberts as the postCartesian artist; a deskilled entity that is divorced from the body.[10] The absurd questions that I am left with are: will technology become symbiotic with humanity? Maybe we will end up looking like one of McDonald’s atrophied aliens at TBG+S!

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JUNE 2011 (#16): The Sequel, or the Unmade Prequel?

#16

Dublin Contemporary 2011, Programme Announcement, Earlsforth Terrace, Dublin 23 June.

Preamble to Dublin Contemporary (DC) Programme Announcement

I SOUGHT out Starbucks before the “Dublin Contemporary Programme Announcement” because I felt it was an apt rest spot after reading an intriguing blog entitled teach4amerika, which gave a humorous account of a meeting at a Starbucks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between the art collective – The Bruce High Quality Foundation BHQF (who you will see at Dublin Contemporary 2011) and the art critic Dave Hickey. The whole tone of the text “bemoan[ed] the debt-riddled professionalizing homogeneity of America’s art academies.”[1] At Earlsforth Terrace I was expecting artists, curators, and gallerists dressed to the nines so to speak. Not to mention such ‘professionals’ being doused in perfume and aftershave. My own amateurism would be uncovered when I was asked for my name on entering, which was not on the list. Although only a few moths away we can only assume what Dublin Contemporary (DC) will turn out to be in early September of 2011. It is really guesswork at this point because, although there was some ‘transparency’ earlier in the year when the torch was passed to the new curators of the event, which was followed by another period of ‘Silence’. The organisers and curators can be defended, as this was a period of researching spaces and gathering artists with limited time, but (to my mind), the ‘ruin’ of Rachael Thomas’ DC (the original and now MIA curator of Dublin Contemporary) is still an unshakeable context that has not beenfar enough under the mat; and cannot be glossed over with the new Irish literary mascot of DC in the form of William Butler Yeats. The curators should do what art does so well and make an ironic gesture by having something like a “Rachael Thomas Room” at the main venue? But seriously, the words ‘transparency’ (the so-called new policy of the Irish Government) and ‘Silence’ (the jilted theme of the previous incarnation of DC) provoke associations with power, hierarchy, elitism, class; all combining to breath more cynicism into an already cynically inflated Irish public. We can joke about ‘Silence’ and the ironies of such a thematic for an international art event that was hidden from the Irish art public, not to mention other publics, until it went to the wall.

The DC Programme Announcement Earlsforth Terrace, Dublin, 22 June, 2011, 10:30am. As I entered the impressive venue at Earlsfort Terrace I successfully swept the debris from the “wall” of Thomas’ DC under the proverbial mat, but, as we all know, by doing that we imagine a bigger mess underneath – not to mention the unavoidable residual crumbs which any good naysayer will make a mountain of criticism out of. The programme announcement was held in a lecture theatre setting with staggered raised seats, that revealed a surprisingly large crowd. The centre aisle was reserved for press, but unsurprisingly artists and curators were the majority. As I got

Starbucks, Dawson Street, Dublin, 23 June, 9:44am.

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comfortable I learnt that the room where we sat would be the home of ‘The Office of Non-Complience’. Biennale-type canvas tote bags were left on the seats with a pressrelease and flash-drive wrist bracelet. Images, biographies and other information is stored on the flash drive. This was more of a business model than you’d expect from an art event, but in the context of the not so rainy day economy, business and art have never been such close friends. “The Programme Announcement” was just that – it announced the programme, but details are still foggy as to what The Office of Non-Compliance is? I assume it will be a live performative space where happenings generate dialogue and discourse? Anyway, listening to the two curators Jota Castro and Christian Viveros-Fauné, the main focus of their words was the Irish Economy, something they feel akin to through their shared experience of the Latin American economic crisis. This default thematic of ‘crisis-tourism’ was compounded by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan, who understandably stood uneasy before the art audience, with the term ‘Tourism’ tripping off the tongue one too many times.

My immediate response after a quick scan of the artists – emerging and established – was surprise. It will most definitely be a pre-existing installation by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, who has spent all his energies on his current ‘big crystal maze’ installation at Venice – or maybe we will get the small but efficient zirconia edition for DC. Although we got bucket loads in 2009, I cannot get enough of James Coleman. The Irish artist‘s projected slide work and audio narration, Charon ( MIT Project), 1989, at the RHA, was one of the best works shown in Ireland in the last decade. Coleman is showing again at the RHA in September; Aidan Dunne reports that the artist will make a new work for Earlsforth Terrace.[2] The big question is what Irish artists were selected and which were not. Time is a big obstacle here and although we live in a fast track society, art-making takes time; although some art practices lend themselves to short deadlines (well, if you have already made the work). I hope that time constraints do not compromise a good showing by the emerging artists who have been selected, all of whom have a great opportunity to push beyond their existing practices and make work that challenges themselves and the viewer. It is not the right time to consider the Irish artists who were selected, but there are some conspicuous absences like Alan Phelan and Bea McMahon. As I have mentioned, a decisive curatorial thematic is not evident yet. Also, I am surprised not to see the French artist Aurélien Froment in the lineup, who is just on our doorstep, and has shown some of the more challenging and beautiful work on our shores over the last four years. Of course there are many other artists who fit the profile, and maybe there are other reasons or circumstances that are still under the mat as to why they are not part of this event. It maybe the case that the artists that are not in the lineup were (in retrospect) the unlucky few that were selected for the unmade prequel? Out of the ninety strong bunch of artists I eagerly anticipate what the art collectives pull off, such as The Bruce High Quality Foundation and Claire Fontaine. I presume they will make art for DC in an accumulative/performative way – leaving the audience with a discursive element that expands beyond preexisting or fabricated art objects. These collectives will fare better in the time constraints, due to numbers and less individual responsibility to impress. William Powhida is another artist to look out for, who merges notebook art-making with critical commentary on artworld mercantilism. His caricatured drawings and installations are revelatory and provocative to the extreme, although maybe too provincially East Coast America to translate fully over here.

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In The Irish Times Dunne writes how there are “few big names but this major exhibition will hope the public buys into its policy of ‘non-compliance’.” I don’t know what “big names” or what “public” Dunne is imagining here? DC was always a hard sell, and although the democratic universality of Hirschhorn’s concepts and materials will draw a crowd, the art public want to see good art that generates interest for the arts in Ireland that goes beyond one event. Creating a new art public is probably asking too much, but this exposure to challenging and ‘spectacle art’ will hopefully get the general public to approach art in a less cynical and fearful way. Personally, the lack of “big names” is a blessing. dOCUMENTA 12 was better off with a relatively unknown cohort of artists. But we must not judge DC as if it were Venice or Kassel. This is our first effort at art on such a grand scale. It took the whole boom era to figure out that we are shit at building roads compared to the Spanish. Let’s hope we can do better with art.

A placard with the partners of DC was placed to the side of the speakers in the venue at Earlsforth Terrace. Some big Irish art institutions were missing – we know the case of one of those institutions, but others were surprisingly absent. These are the rents in the armour of DC, that are creating aftershocks in the form of disgruntled whispers. This is an unavoidable side-effect of artworld moving and shaking. But maybe DC will benefit from this gossipmongering, which will keep the energy of the event combative rather than lackadaisical. There is nothing like a disgruntled art public to provoke a much needed discussion concerning the territorial nature of artworld demographics on a local level. But then again, we are perhaps better at keeping silent and cradling grudges.

JUNE 2011 #17: ‘Shipsides and Beggs Project at the Death Of Delawab’ (2010) *BY SLAVKA SVERAKOVA* Introductory reflections:[1] BOTH WORKS imaged here are conceived as becoming unforgettable, their forms kept simple under the dominance of a related narrative. Willingness to challenge convention is included within the concept of the artist - the oscillation between a professional artist and an amateur. Long presents the photograph of his intervention in nature as a work of art, he makes the mark by walking and then takes a photographic image. He is the participatory agent who presents the experience within the poetics of mimesis. Althammer’s Path was taken by Ostojic as a document of a narrow cut swath for walking. Long demonstrates how new art comes from old, it is frail and includes its own past, that is the artist’s capacity to re-enact the beginning inherent in birth by actions that bestow significance of an individual’s life. Walking is a supreme skill that increased the capacity to sustain life. An upright moving body allows the eye to see both danger and protection early. This is the existential bind between walking and seeing that Long renews for our attention. In addition, he freezes the action into a two dimensional image paralleling paintings and documentary, as established forms of

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culture. Another aspect worth noting is the way that Long increases freedom of the individual as an aesthetic value. Walking as a tool to make a mark on a ground is an unexpected choice. It is an action, unpredictable and irreversible, aspiring to belong to drawings. As the traditional trinity of eye + brain + hand replaces hand by feet, the brain also selects the respect for nature as a value. The interference is minimal, only the positions of what is already there are slightly shifted. The eye is almost redundant during the process, presiding fully over the photographic image later, preserving most of the aesthetics of the classical - classicist art: clarity, restraint, completeness coupled perhaps, with a lightness of being with a touch of extraterrestrial eternity. Althammer grounds his work in the here and now. The Dionysian Althammer, born in the year when Long made that line by walking, relies on the intoxication of the experience a visitor may have participating in his visual prompts. No photograph can approximate that. I watched a video of someone taking a photograph every ten steps – nothing like a walk on that field of wheat. Appreciating it as art conflicts with recognition of the damage to a life supporting crop - and in my case with memories of walking between fields during school holidays. I can recall an aesthetic experience but did not and do not consider it an art experience. “...it would not necessarily require an artist to make it” wrote Roberta Smith, and added that the whole Munster 2007 exhibition may be thought of as “experimenting with definition of sculpture“.[2]

Althammer applied hubris, an intentional damage to a gift of nature and farmer’s skills. Aristotle defined hubris as causing shame simply for a pleasure of it. After Hesiod (7th century BC) and Aeschylus(5th century BC) used hubris to describe wrong action against divine orders, Aristotle focused on hubris between people “Young men and the rich are hubristic because they think they are better than other people”. Althammer shifts the issue between humanity and nature, between art and nature. He also evokes individual freedom, but this time tarnished by hubris. The Path being almost a kilometre long cannot be seen fully from any one standing point. It frustrates any possible clarity of experience beyond the reduction to a primeval being on a path you do not know the end of. Both Long and Althammer employ fragments of ordinary behaviour. Althammer secures his as art by display at Munster 2007 event, i.e. by placing it onto a site occupied by art institutions. Long achieves that by photography, drawings, texts, installations and performance, i.e. recognized art practices. The strategy of placing something outside its context of origin and re-positioning it in art calls not only for performative intervention but also for skills that expand imagination. That strategy also reverses the system of arts as described by W Morris at the end of 19thC – his “lesser” arts, those that support and sustain life, become the dominant set. A quick inquiry into analogous art practices brings forth a wealth of evidence. I have in mind not only Land Art (term coined by R. Smithson in 1968 in the US) but also cooking (e.g. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Adva Drori, Pauline Cummins), and the many strands of performance art. Tiravanija re-organized a gallery as a contemporary kitchen that would stimulate unexpected interaction between participants and displace the expected role of art. Adva Drori makes omelettes with slogans written in red pepper asking different questions, including; “Am I an artist?” Early on, Noguchi and Sonfist inextricably linked two principles; the work of art and the site, the landscape, swap identities. Later, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy identified natural materials as conditions for a walk, or cut ice to become a work of art.

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Noticeable is an inherent connection to sculpture and drawings. Soon however, the lens stepped in as a convenient means of limiting some of the ephemerality of art practice that produced art that is eaten, or otherwise “consumed” at the time of making. These art practices are grounded in the conviction that perception is a kind of participation, in addition they invite physical participation, i.e. eating the food, walking the path etc. Even more demanding is Roden Crater (www.rodencrater.com), which offers a multisensory experience. James Turrell has been well prepared for the conundrum of perception, in particular the visual one, by studying psychology first and art later. He focuses on forming space through light, using eyes to penetrate space. He draws attention to the limits of seeing, yet makes seeing the very subject. Recently he added scuba diving and skiing to the means of exploring the double bind of origin and displacement.

Dan Shipsides and Neal Beggs independently and mutually unaware made their initial gallery climbs just months apart - evidence that ideas not only occur over and over again, but also to several people at almost the same time. In 1997 Shipsides made live climbing performances at Catalyst Arts, Belfast (Under a frogs arse at the bottom of a coalmine). Then as a co-curator of the first Perspective in Belfast, I selected Shipsides’ proposal (The Stone Bridge) during the summer of 1998 to climb the gallery’s walls as a performance and show the video of it for the duration of the exhibition. Later that year Beggs made his climb (Surfaceaction) at Glasgow Project Room and the subsequent video was presented during the exhibition. The Glasgow Surfaceaction took place in a show I curated with Kevin Kelly (now living in Dublin, we had both just finished our MA at Glasgow) called Mountain Madness (Dec 1998). It was an artist run show at the Glasgow Project Room. There were about 15 artists in the show and I made my climb around the gallery before any of the other artists moved in to position their work. So when the public came to see the show they saw many works on the wall and floor and between these works lots of scars and holes made by my axes and crampons (the making of the work was not public). The video was presented on a very small tv monitor on the floor of the gallery along with several other videos. (Neal Beggs, email, 12/12/2010) Significant difference defined the status of climbing in an art institution. Shipsides put forward personal commitment and skills in both activities to the judgment by the viewer simultaneously, Beggs preferred suggestive marks on the wall to have a moment on their own, before the video would give an entry into their origin. In both cases, the lens-based display scaled down the original action and subtracted the real-life energy into two dimensional memory charged with the task of triggering imaginative attunement. The possible challenge to this concept was muted, the visitors were already used to video as art. Moreover, the video posits itself between art and a document of art. It is this ambiguity that will prove both a challenge and a solution for the collaborative projects embarked upon by Shipsides and Beggs around 2003, referred on their websites as Shipsides and Beggs Projects. One more detour: Outside collaborative projects each artist has expanded independent research concerning climbing and visual art. Shipsides for instances superimposes drawing of the climbing done over the photograph of the rock face. It is a record, a virtual map of a climb done or planned – the viewer is not assured which

Anaximander (610BC – 545/6 BC) pointed out that origin and demise of origin come from the same source. He had in mind existence; I am focusing on praxis – in this case climbing and visual art.

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– as a visible mark of a non-visible experience, even of one that did not happen, yet. Plausibly intuitive mimesis embraces the insecurity and the doubt as equals. Moreover, while viewing the drawing the idea of safety and audacity in climbing nudges away the perception of it as beautiful. Happily, the photograph of the mountain, of the landscape has no similar qualms, it harnesses all to switch on the sublime and the beautiful. I have not perceived, what others might, an intrusion of romantic escapism. The fore-grounded demand on skills and rational safety measures, takes care of that. Shipsides pointed out the similarity between climbing and art in relation to the project (Pioneers 2003) as follows: …the landscape was literally felt out with their fingertips exploring handholds, finger-cracks and employing particular climbing movements. These details highlight Frank and Elizabeth’s own sense of creativity - that their actions, their minds and bodies were creating or making something new. In that they are created and named, the routes themselves reflect and may exist as “artworks”. They can be read in terms individual style, technique, context and vision and can claim their place in cultural history. Through the sense of exploration and endeavour these climbers’ landscapes echo aspects of the modernist ideal but here they do so with a different poetic, one which is gentle, witty and reflective. It may be topical to compare the “national” mountaineering effort or ethic of the Irish Republic with the more bombastic efforts of older nations during that period. The activity of these climbers offers a “modern” representation of the Irish landscape and provides a contrast with the sense of “native belonging” found in many post-independence visions of Ireland’s natural landscape.[3]

60 The story of collaboration. Since becoming aware of each other’s work in 1996 Shipsides and Beggs have been occasional collaborators. In 2009 they decided to firm up their collaboration under the title ‘Shipsides and Beggs Projects’ to which all the earlier co-authored works and research are now attributed. Past projects include User’s End (Be-Part, Belgium), The Hanging (Tulca, Galway) and The Alphabet Climb (Montserrat, Spain). Over the last eighteen months, Shipsides and Beggs Projects have been working on an open-ended and on-going research project in the Italian Dolomites based around a type of mountaineering called via ferrata (the “iron way” developed during WW1). A small snippet of this research, involving a close encounter with lightning in June of this year on the summit of Marmolada, (the highest mountain in the Dolomites) is the basis for the work in progress presented in this show and includes ‘Every Metallic Thing is Being Beckoned’ a drawing based on the experience. It also seems appropriate with respect to the title of the Delawab show. The Alphabet Climb, made in Montserrat, Spain during 2004 also exhibited in this show, is unrelated to the specific events on Marmolada but follows a pattern of research where climbing and mountains form the backbone of their creative act and conversation - acting as a gateway and frame to wider life, culture and society. It is typical of their dual approach where working in the moment with a focused task at hand combines with an inquisitive open-mindedness to follow chance occurrence and serendipity so that something entirely unexpected might develop - bringing new shapes and perspectives to the project. In this vain ‘The Alphabet Climb’ presents a chance encounter with a young man who

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unaware that we are trying to make a short film about climbing a wall, interrupts, asking for information about camping. Not being camera shy, the stranger then goes on to tell the true story of his search for his missing brother Tom, after which he goes off and we go back to filming the climbing of the wall. Since making this film we have kept in touch with Ben Moore, who by coincidence is also an artist/film maker, inviting him to work with us on a project at Be-Part in Belgium during 2008. In a similar fashion we have kept contact with Irene and John-Paul, two climbers we met on the summit of Marmolada, asking them to contribute to the work via e-mail describing their memories of the storm. These are presented in the show.[4] (Dan Shipsides’ website info for the Death to Delawab project 18th September, 2010)

The accidental meeting of two narratives depends on the integrity of the artists’ intention. They risk breaking the spine of the climb/art symmetry while the story of a lost relative displaces it. Their decision to include the story, almost spontaneously, agrees with their strategies of intervention (although in the opposite direction) and of loyalty/devotion to the experience as lived. Both strategies move the video away from the ‘landscape’ towards a social interaction. The drive to link experience of climbing to some other experience operates also in the metal construction installation that runs along two flights of stairs, stops in a floor sculpture on the landing and ‘climbs out’ of the window, in a swift vertical. It is to recollect a mountain lightening storm experienced at the aerial conductor cone at the summit of Mt. Marmolada. Below, the drawing by Shipsides approximates the experience, even if unintentionally, it oscillates with earth cracked by earthquake or severe drought. The following drawing by Neal Beggs relates to the moment the lightening striked: The installation uses mostly, but not exclusively, metal, in reference to Via Ferrata (meaning “iron way”), a way accessing military strategic summits in Dolomites constructed during WW1, made of metal stemples, brackets, rungs and metal wires leading up the rock faces. The material increases the danger of electric shock during an electric storm, which in turn heightens the fragility of life, endangered immensely during the war. That allows a mental link to another storm, another conflict, a power struggle in Ulster during the early and then late 20th century. The link between that climbing experience and regional social history is not hidden: three letters, UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), appear in the construction/installation of the Ulster Iron Way and in the drawing of the climbing route to the top of the Marmolada summit. The above works of art are parts of the collaborative Via Ferrata project (20092011) which proposes some equivalency between art and life. I perceive that as an intensification of a question how to insert life in art, once cherished by John Cage. Two ideas permeate Shipsides and Beggs Projects: how “two people tied to the same

When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible... (With an apology to F Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885, Part II, Ch 13, Those who are sublime)

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rope” may insert life into art and how to transfer that experience to the disinterested viewer. Shipsides proposes: My practice embodies a creative relationship to space and pursues experiential and participatory narrative of place. It aims to [ ] produce landscape artworks based on that experience.[5] Beggs emphasises the merging of art and climbing in a narrative about artist as explorer, about climber as explorer. He thought of himself as a painter who was looking for new ways of working and for greater authenticity of the result. Nature for him is something to engage with, to be stimulated through a lived experience. He went through an interesting period of preoccupation with the idea of a perfect surface. I hasten to add that both Shipsides and Beggs trained as painters.

The two concepts of the narrative are not that apart, moreover they morph into particular skills that both artists easily demonstrate: to pursue an experience and to produce a work of art, a surface, a landscape. The genre of landscape has an interesting Western tradition. Early on, when it replaced the golden ground in religious paintings, it favoured imagined ideal landscapes. Giotto, for example, painted leaves in the crown as if he were sitting near each of them. The emancipation of landscape received a strong paradigmatic shift in the work of so called Danube School of the 15th/16th centuries. And later on, under the care of enthusiastic Dutch painters of 17th and 18th centuries, the model of high sky above a low horizon grew in scale and complexity, hand in hand with exploration of light and clouds. Many celebrated painters joined in exploring observed world next to the imagined. Early example, almost hidden and not just under the arcade, is Baldovinetti’s fresco[6] which includes a shepherd and mountainous landscape, not unlike the Dolomites. Acute attention to observation and sheer exuberance of conquering the mountains in the distance by the eye alone turns part of this composition into a distant predecessor of Shipsides and Beggs’ projects. Like they, Baldovinetti tolerates a chance like intervention into the intended plan, by adding a landscape as a life -narrative directly next to Nativity, a narrative of beliefs and imagination. I think of Baldovinetti’s landscape as of glorious devotion to observation similar to the poetics Shipsides mentioned above: gentle, witty and reflective. Both Shipsides and Beggs use / make three-dimensional objects, work with cameras, embrace drawing, painting, sculpture and photography. While filming Alphabet Climb the artists met by chance, a man searching for his brother. That chance acts as a metaphoric rope which seamlessly attaches his story to the intended work. Spontaneous trust that the casual and chance-like was compatible with the document of climbing and with a claim that climbing is art, accounts for healthy instinct and the force of intuition. I sense calm, almost unbearable selfconfidence and simple joy of being alive and capable of making art. The lessons of cinema verite may have been forgotten, but are implicit here. The video successfully forges aesthetic unity through its relaxed tempo, fragmented glances and gentle paradoxes of disparity between an image and a sound. In the Death to Delawab project the installation Ulster Iron Way is not a comfortable partner to this confident video. It struggles for attention, even for viewing - having part placed outside and part in a shadow. The metal rods, bound in twos (not unlike two political forces of Northern Irish “Troubles”) are almost lost at the foot of the banister. The prominent construction on landing and through a window achieve certain independence as sculptures; one becomes a strange floor sculpture, the other

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swishes past the window like a gothic spire, a reminder, you would recall, of the lightening storm experienced when climbing Via Ferrata on Mt. Marmolada. The metal rods and clasps of scaffolding huddle at the bottom of the banisters as an inadequate synecdoche for the gradient. Where it receives power is in an association with both effort of climbing up and meeting the trigonometric “akroterion”. The installation is not ecstatic - it is too rational for that. Nevertheless, it veers with no warning from an eerily self-contained duo to the bursts of crazed angles and directions of the letters on the landing, through a deceptively tranquil flow through the window up and up like a wistful aria overreaching the high notes – all in a complete silence. It is more memorable than the more confident video. Marmolada Bees, a group of framed drawings and texts displayed on the wall do not lift one’s spirit while climbing the narrow stairs in an insufficiently lit space. They demand attention to a fragmented narrative and “educational” detail.

Are Shipsides and Beggs Projects offering a new paradigm of any sort? There are similarities shared with other art practices, like incompleteness, openendedness and power to escape the original context while embracing its authenticity. The similarities between climbing and Shipsides and Beggs Projects as art are not surprising or uniquely innovative. The aesthetic categories apply to diverse human achievements, creations rooted in free will and conscious execution of aesthetics but they also apply to ordinary living. Aesthetic experience is not limited to art. All defining characteristic of art are continuous with various non-art experiences. For example, a source of direct pleasure may be music or sport. Skill and virtuosity, style, novelty, special focus, intellectual challenge, imaginative experience are all not specific to art. The explicit courage to bind values of older art with present existence, forges a link with philosophy of becoming and with existentialism. The rock - the landscape, is in Shipsides and Beggs Projects also a means of making art away from institutionalised art world, but not in conflict with it. Yes, it escapes some theories, namely the institutional theory of art.[7] (Dickie, G, Institutional Theory of Art), but even this does not make it a new paradigm. Moreover, Shipsides and Beggs Projects depend on the art-world to accept them as art. But here is the first sign of innovation: both artists aim to be authentic and relevant within the climbing world. Consequently, their art rooted in two insecurities (i.e. is it art? Is it meaningful to a climber?) is willed to succeed simultaneously for two clearly defined parts of culture. This focus replaces the nebulous demands for instrumental values that have plagued art practices for far too much and for far too long. There is another aspect of accepting dual responsibilities: revival of a ‘prehistoric’ attitude to art and being. Think of the hunter/gatherer paintings at Altamira. There might suggest, is the fusion of two responsibilities, two areas become authentic in that old concept of art. I sense that the binding force is an equivalence of energy needed for living and painting. The contemporary range of different tastes and priorities rejects this kind of focus, instead, it is the authority of an art practice that gives each culture its art system, which in turn keeps changing in relation to the available talent and constellation

On one hand, the artists adapted the concept to the exhibition space, in the case of the landing and the window quite wittily. On the other, the space allocated to the project was not optimal. It is a strength to tolerate inadequate conditions. Art has to negotiate hostility of all kinds most of the time. This art practice tolerates a great deal: flexible use of means and techniques, high standards and found standards, established skills and risky abandonments.

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of conditions. Shipsides and Beggs Projects offer such a change. The negotiation of a culture (climbing) within a culture is aligned with defined skill and creativity. When something becomes art is not just a matter of agreement or analogies. The question, ‘is this art?’ is fundamentally flawed to the extent in which it aims at some correct enunciation of the nature of art, ignoring all the ongoing paradigmatic changes. To sum up how Shipsides and Beggs Projects manage the change: First; their art embraces doubt as its part, uncertainty as a necessary condition, the artists experiment in vivo. Second; it negates the traditional hierarchy of value / meaning production between climbing and the Fine Arts. Third; it values ordinary skills, knowledge, rational thought and actual testing of the process. Fourth; not an ideology nor a single historical context rather man’s action / experience stimulated by ‘nature’ join the imagination in inspiring a new work of art. The paradigm shift I perceive in Shipsides and Beggs Projects consists of evocation, not an expression, narrative or depiction. The fragments of experience translate into a visual force, while applying clarity, almost precision, and simplicity. This art approximates a visual essay, a discourse through non-verbal participation[8] – the feeling of something well done.

Its prominent characteristics appear to be unity, complexity, and intensity. Devotion, intelligence, planning ability, fitness, high skills are universal and cross cultural values capable of rousing fascination with landscape and pleasure born by the magnetic pull of mountains “When power becomes gracious and descends into visible – such descend I call beauty.” (F. Nietzsche) The rest is ineffable.

JULY 2011 (#18): Reflecting in the Institution

Reviews of Dublin Graduate Shows at NCAD, DIT, and IADT.

ART AND EDUCATION are awkward but compulsory bedfellows. To be an artist you have to go through the institutional hoop, it is the professional thing to do – NO COLOURFUL OUTSIDER ART HERE! Amateurism is not a default setting on the career path of the would-be artist. Art and professionalism are also untidy companions – it’s like wearing eccentricity beneath the suit – you want to reveal your individuality, but you also want to ‘tie’ it in a professional curatorial bow at the end of the year show. The professional procedure goes something like this: deadlines, externes, supervisor marking, final coats of white paint, frustration, hands off, leave and wait for the response, if any! – and not to forget the Aidan Dunne overview (who I saw by the way skulking [maybe and unfair description] through the National College of Art & Design corridors); and then it’s over, out in the real world of open submissions and expectant handshakes and emails.

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#18

On the top floor of the Granary Building at NCAD (where the painting department is located), I mistook Caitriona Rogerson’s video work for that of a male artist. I don’t know why gender came into it? Maybe it was the manmade thread of her focus – the escalator, elevator, car; mechanical hardware that is necessary for our efficient movement through institutional, urban and rural space. Forgetting the case of mistaken identity, this confident, no frills output by Rogerson was more MFA than BA. In one looped video sequence the artist repeats a moment of expectant revelation when a large industrial elevator (found later in the design block of NCAD) opened and closed intermittently with the announcement: “door opening...door closing.” Although this may sound like a filmic cliché when described, this work was twinned with another video projection that showed a detail of the ‘workings’ of the elevator hoist cable located at the ceiling of the elevator shaft. The rupture in this banal focus was envisioned by inverting the video (or upside down filming of the event) , so there was an unease created by the question: which way is up and which way is down? The eerily uncanny tone of Rogerson’s work was doubled up with the symmetrically beguiling twinning of a continually shifting rural landscape, seen through two abutted sideview mirrors of a car. I don’t like the use of the term kaleidoscopic, but it is merited here. The folding of the real image and mirrored image actually collapsed the idea of time based media into one continually reflective work, giving this video an objectness – a real parameter with no narrative end in sight. Up in a hideaway ‘attic’ overlooking the other artists on the top floor of the Granary Building, Tom Boland’s stacked cardboard boxes with cut-out text of ‘stock’ cynical phrases, was a brave and confident way to end his term of college. Boland’s recycled statements were interesting against the setting of learning; a space to make a mark through some formalised art identity. I wrote above of the “hoarding mentality that is part of the desperate need to search for this allusive formal identity”; in Boland’s case, the hoarding of so-called original formalist and textual expressions that must have cluttered his studio, have been evacuated from the space, and replaced by cardboard boxes (that may have been better used to store whatever stuff he produced

The hope is that your work will translate into gallery work, public art or independent projects; catch the eye of a gallerist or curator. So, can we judge these claustrophobic displays of art so soon after the students’ torment to find an art identity among all the other identities within the institution, not to mention the artworld identities that we’re force fed over the four to six years of critiques, and seemingly fugitive efforts of object making, summoned from the pedagogical well of knowledge that the artist learns within the eight foot high white corridors of the art college? Of course we can. Sometimes we discover artists that negotiate the art college parameter brilliantly, and make art that trumps the stuff in the galleries. In some ways there is more freedom in the art college, although it is a freedom that is coloured by your supervisor and fellow classmates, if they told you the truth! It is also coloured from the perspective of looking out onto the artworld rather than being in it, although most have had skirmishes with the art packs at openings or Facebook! More importantly, without the room to reflect on what the final allusive art identity that you have displayed for the ‘outside’ world to see, the art student is left blindly to walk out into the real world of art- making to reflect (almost too late) on what they have achieved, and most importantly, have they developed an art identity that gels with their own way of existing in the world. In other words, does their ‘final’ way of working have a life after art college, or is it just a light institutional coat. More specifically, is it too dependent on the art institution. The ones that stand out at these graduate shows don’t overdisplay or describe the one idea in too many fashions. There is also an ease in their final output; a paring back of the hoarding mentality that is part of the desperate need to search for that allusive formal identity.

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during the year), with cut-out empty phrases that have a political motivation, but will never amount to a cure. Hoarding is once again signified when the artist packaged the leftover letter cut-outs into a few free boxes. Out of the stockpile, one white box floated in the corner of the room with the word “REFLECT” excised out. I was told that you could put your head up into this specific box, offering the viewer a space to “REFLECT” on the phraseology before them. This ad hoc moment says so much about the process of art making,. Boland’s work is an escape from all the usual individualism on show. Although it must be said that this empty output is a full-stop – there is nothing left to empty out of his studio when the graduate show ends, so it will be time to begin afresh after college. On the bottom floor of the Granary Building, Tom David Watt used similar methods of avoidance and disassociation from the usual mediums or forms of expression per se, by using the college and its contents to create “hidden and inaccessible spaces.” This process is obviously from the Mike Nelson handbook of fabricating in-between spaces behind the institution, but whereas Nelson adds his own thematic to the banal makeup of the everyday – with an admixture of fantasy and institution – I could not discover anything of ‘Watt’ in these fabrications that expanded a narrative for the audience that went beyond the walled parameters of NCAD.

Watt’s ‘closed tutors’ office’ on the bottom floor of the Granary Building offered a closed narrative at first. For a viewer who isn’t aware of the existence of this office they would assume it was constructed by the artist. A flashing red light on the phone, a ceiling prop, along with the cluttered messages and objects, didn’t offer an open narrative but closed it down. But it was the subtle glimpse of a space above the false propped ceiling that gave you an inroad into what Watt was presenting – chance spaces that were devoid of personality, except for the treble barreled name printed ‘professionally’ on a foam board label; “Tom David Watt.” I was left to wander back into the bowels of the institution to find the access point for this work. I found it behind an ajar sheet of timber rather than a door, which led to a crawl space with three televisions with CCTV footage of other ‘Watt spaces’. What is certain, the majority of the audience that visited NCAD didn’t discover the spaces, and “Tom David Watt” was just a label. Watt’s efforts remind me of a group show entitled The Power of a Negative Remains Between Us at thisisnotashop in 2007, when Ciarán Walsh (who was an MA student at NCAD at the time) took over the basement of the art project space on Benburb Street, and not only utilised the piles of miscellaneous objects and rubbish that you would likely find in a basement, but also added subtle elements of his own design, such as an audio of undetermined noise, a Tarot table setup and other objects that provoked narrativity. We could defend Watt’s work by saying that the viewer doesn’t know where the institution ends and the art begins. It is also a work that negates identity and in the context of an end of year art college show, this is brave move. In the end, I will be waiting to see what “Tom David Watt” does next. The question is can the work emerge from the institution? n. The graduate show continued outside the NCAD campus proper at what was a primary school building on St. John’s Lane, just off Thomas Street. This is the home of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (Gradcam). The building has also been used as art studios for the fine art graduate programmes since 2006. This is the first year that the end of year practice-based graduate shows have been housed at this location. Stepping down into the basement-like ground floor I was met by a black and white soiree of new media expressions. Black and white film always has a reflective effect on the viewer. I am not thinking of the potent history of black and white film such as the pretentious ‘newness’ of the avant-garde, or the psychological suspense of Hitchcock, but more in how it affects the temporal environment, and dare I say it the ‘mood’ of the space. In the case of NCAD graduate Claire Duffy’s photographs and

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video, you could say there is a bit of the existentialist concerns of French New Wave Film, and Bruce Nauman’s ’60s videos of the artist mapping the studio. What I liked about Duffy’s work was the uncanny element brought on by the physiognomy of her protagonist: a tall, skinny, all dressed in black, mime-like character, who was caught in moments of suspension and movement as he negotiated white walled rooms and a white ladder. It was all very theatrical without being over dramatic. The photos, especially of her mime hanging from a ladder that was visibly wedged into holes in the floor, uncovered the act and prop-like environment that the artist presented to us, and in some ways the photos were enough, while the video gave away too much of the backstory behind the photos.

Upstairs in the same building, MFA graduate Dee ‘O Shea gave the viewer moments of aesthetic luminosity in her vent-like peephole video projections. Surprisingly, the peepholes didn’t come across as voyeuristic––unless you were watching the viewer peeping! In this cleverly subtle installation the viewer had to strain to look into narrow vents, the kind of things where your eyelash gets in the way. The aesthetic was architectural and domestic, from red and white tiles to red and white wallpaper borders. The video projections (if that’s what they were – I suspected mirrors also?) showed still or panning evocations of light passing across the artificial landscapes. Walls seemed to shift and not always fluidly, sometimes scuttling, giving a welcome handmade aspect to proceedings. I kept on going back to see if anything had changed in the intimate climate that ’O Shea offered, but it was always subtle. In one instance a floor seemed to open up and there was an innate desire to imagine what was beyond, or what the artist was intimating below. I was given eclectic referential moments to ’50s film such as the opening credit sequence to North by Northwest, where the glass face of a New York skyscraper reflects the colour and movement of the city in daylight. There was also a type of carnival funhouse and Vaudeville theatricality in the staging, combined with the Burlesque-like stripping of the architecture by the manufactured light. The work definitely invites language. In a second room ’O Shea changed things around and gave the viewer an easier platform to view another series of video projections though trompe l’oeil wall inserts; one of tiles, the other of wallpaper. These works were more inviting. In a sense the artist was literally stripping back her process. Photographs and what could be read as an architectural section of one of the filmed sculptural models was left on the floor. There was no real medium specificity in ’O Shea’s output and the work not only alluded to film but also to painting – the abstract monumentalism of American bstract Expressionism. Taking a leaf from the Aidan Dunne review handbook: this artist is ‘one to watch’.

In the adjoining space, unlike Duffy’s work, which provoked me to step up close and investigate, Louise Croke’s projected black and white films were setup so the viewer stands back to watch a serial spectacle of ‘processional’ death. The artist’s dramatic documentation of animals dying and dead, came across more like a research project into the process of death, due in part to the amount of videos on show in such a small space. I was almost wishing away the wing video projections, because the central keyhole aspect video projection of a fox tied to a tree in moments of panic and ease had enough ethical and emotional baggage to test the viewer. I don’t know whether Croke’s work is an objective commentary on death or an ethical statement about the ‘poor animals’; I am going with the former. Although the artist revealed too much in the packed video installation (to my mind) I am left with the image of the fox and a desire to know more about this artist, her drive to make this work, and where she will go next with this personal project; which could be viewed as the most important result from a end of year graduate show?

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Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) Although lacking in a broader range of new media works and painting (albeit not short of ‘expansive painting’, a trend experienced throughout all the colleges), Dublin Institute of Technology’s Art Departments presented a mesh of politics and humour where crisp formalism wasn’t needed. Hair was the only item on the menu of Gráinne Bird’s work, who collected mounds of human hair and made it into fashion. I presume the main contributor to this work of art were hair salons around the country. The best moment of this installation was realising that the shelved glass jars containing hair was archived by “Breed” ( such as “Monaghan Adult Female”), and “Price” (“€2.50/ lbs”).

Patrick Walsh’s “ARTISTS....NON-ARTISTS” booths invited the viewer to choose a group that you may feel part of; I chose “NON-ARTISTS.” Behind this curtain there wasn’t much to see except for a fold-out information leaflet entitled Art & You: A short, introductory guide to getting your money’s worth. I was eager to see what was behind “ARTISTS” curtain two. Low and behold, it was less didactic and more tongue and cheek. An art event opening table was dressed with the obligatory white sheet with bottles of Sol (the cheap equivalent to Corona). A comic strip layout with Robin Hood as the protagonist – a symbol for the fight against corruption – presented a humourous narrative around the thematic of greed. Walsh focused on key words and terms within the artworld institution vernacular where art viewing has a policy of “Free Admission,” whereas the artist is shortchanged, even devalued. In the centre of the room the artist was granted a chance to stroke a ball of fur ... you can make of this what you will? Like Walsh, Lisa Ronan used the comic strip layout as a way to wear the old hat of Feminism. Once again, the formal properties were almost invisible, while the message was bold and didactic. This term Feminism is something that is avoided, but the issues are still visible in the the male/female ratios in art colleges which Ronan amounts to “71% female,’ “whereas only 10% of the artists on show at IMMA are female”. I have spoken to female artists regarding this issue, without using the term Feminism, and the opinions are varied and unsure, but surprisingly not on the offensive. There is the field of curation which is held by a female majority and you have to wonder has this choice of artistic direction made potential female artists into professional curators? Or is that a completely different game? Antoinette Milne’s witty manipulation of readymades offered a political message through the casual manipulation of household objects. Three identical chrome clocks hung on a length of decking, references to Felex Gonzales Torres’ Perfect Lovers came to mind. However, Milne’s clocks are corrupted rather than melancholic or romantic; the second-, minute-, and hour hands were divided up into the three clocks. This could be viewed as a novelty item found at one of those gadget shops, but there was a thread within the artist’s work that spoke of the boom years and the cyclic events of recession. Maybe I am reading too much into the use of decking behind the clocks, but the product was a ‘must have’ item during the good ol’ times. Trade unions, Bobby Sands and especially the ’80s miners’ strike was resurrected in the mind when you read the title of Milne’s wall hung bed sheet with sewn multicoloured coat buttons from an imagined power suit ensemble entitled Thatcher’s Bedsheet. A ‘hill’ of buttons was also piled up on the floor. There is a formal subtly in what Milne presents to the viewer that can be read in different ways. The buttons sewn to the bed sheet with small white labels hanging from each one by a short piece of thread read as shovel-like emblems; signifiers of labour posited by the decorative.

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On leaving the toilet-like space where the artist’s work was modestly located, I picked up a laminated card left by Milne for the viewer to take. On one side of the card there is a profile of Ireland with a “Sorry WE”RE CLOSED” sign; on the reverse a Limerick entitled “Fianna Fáiled” sums up the artist’s feeling toward the “fat cats of power,” and the “crimes ... passed on to your average Joe.” Gemma Tipton wrote in a recent article for the Irish Times entitled ‘Is Irish art on the money?’, that “you’d be hard-pressed to find artists addressing the collapse of the banking system and the economic downturn.” If Tipton had of gone a little deeper, beyond the bigger institutions, galleries, and established artists, she would find a crop of younger artists who are actually effected by the current climate and responding appropriately.

IADT looked and felt like the now common vacant housing estate found in suburban and rural locations around the country. There were no invigilators or college porters, just art. One criticism was the disappointing fact that most of the digital and kinetic work was not turned on, so my experience was focused on the 2D Visual art practice, where in some cases I took the liberty of switching on whatever I could. Work not being turned on is something that is not just an epidemic in the educational institution but happens regularly at galleries and museums. In this specific case the responsibility falls on the student, who need to make sure their work is seen, but this quirk also happens regularly at galleries and museums. In this specific case the responsibility falls on the student, who need to make sure their work is seen in optimum condition, not to mention seen and heard at all. On the only 1st floor space location of the IADT graduate show the 2D Visual Arts Practice was displayed like a curated group show rather than all the purposeful segregation at the other colleges. This is due to a lack of space at IADT in comparison to NCAD and DIT. The upside of this is that there was a cohesive whole and work that may not have been exciting by itself bounced off other work, creating surprising dynamic contexts. On entering the upstairs studios I initially thought I was a week early to see the graduate show. The first studio space was cordoned off with hazard tape; with a ladder, miscellaneous tools and electrical cords left casually sprawling the space. Was this art in the making? No, Shane McCarthy’s installation could only be read in the context of the art institution and the art student making a ‘going away’ statement in the projected words Beautiful Expectation on the far wall of the studio. The projected sentiment was written in neon, a material that always brings us back to Bruce Nauman. However, so many artists after Nauman have either used neon as a reference to the American artist (Jonathan Monks’ neon spiral without Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Rvealing Mystic Truths, or unsuccessfully try and make it their own – Traci Emin’s painful art fair neons which are more Margate Funfair than art world glamour). McCarthy’s installation wasn’t theatre; the daylight lighting gave the projected text the ethereal presence of an afterthought. I was really intrigued by McCarthy’s ‘setup’,

Institute of Art Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire (IADT)

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and it set the stage for the confident tone of the majority of the work on show. I have to highlight that the badge of merit – “Shortlisted for the IADT Collection” – found on some of the works at IADT is an odd addition and clouds the contexts that shape the student work. Especially in the context of Shane McCarthy’s installation Beautiful Expectation, where I ‘misread’ the merit badge as part of the artist’s intentionally false ‘expectations’ in his display. Sarah Flynn’s uncanny antique furniture fabrications were missing the psychoanalytical chaise longue. Furniture and art has been used to its greatest effect in Brendan Earley’s modernist IKEA displays, or in Clay Ketter’s banal architectural displays of domesticated blue collar America. Flynn gets rid of all the white formalism of both and leaves the viewer with antique dark brown mahogany. If you investigate these pieces you will find quirky manipulations such as a chair permanently embedded in a desk and the hanging bushy tail and paws of some mammal found underneath table. This work is all about scale and investigation; a whodunnit stage set. I usually veer away from any artwork that has wallpaper or antique furniture, but this wasn’t a cluttered display, especially against the stark white walls of the upstairs studio. There are so many places where Flynn’s investigations can go, it will be interesting to see what form it will take in the future?

Minute in scale but big in wit and sentiment, Lily Cahill’s pencilled text gave form and meaning to her throwaway mixed-media minutiae. Although some of the artist’s societal and personal revelations were a little too “CATCHPHRASE,” there were moments of brilliant wit and humour. I felt I was rummaging through a private diary as my eyes scanned over a playing card (the Joker of the pack), with Cahill’s personalised caption underneath, IBELIEVEDYOUTHOUGH. In another instance the joined words APOCALYPSELATER echoed the arc of a piece of corrugated card stuck to a wall with a minute clothes peg; a personally perceived shelter from our societal woes. Ironically, the piece that had the most charm of all the college work was Cahill’s MYCHARMSHAVELIMITS; a piece of text that was positioned at the top of an eight foot partition in her studio. Cahill’s work has nothing to do with the conventions of art-making and more to do with an unconventional personality finding a perfect match with the forms and expressive outlets that art offers the individual; a rare successful mix. Niamh clark’s floor-bound set of compartmentalised ‘aquariums’ with closed end funnels containing colour, floated and bumped – their movement influenced by incongruous mechanics. The clinking of glass foregrounded the work in the space. The adjoining glass compartments looked like a model of a vacant industrial block: I am primed by Nama acquired glass office blocks. However, Clarke’s work takes an imagined leap out of the institute and into the gallery when I see corporate shades of Liam Gillick in the high production values. There is also something of Mondrian in her work, who it is said had a very clinical artist studio. You can imagine Clark in a white pristine lab coat. The clinking glass also reminds me of a bit of sage advice I was given during my undergraduate studies at IADT, which was: “Sometimes it comes down to how you hold a wine glass.” All in all, identity and the branding of that ‘art identity’, whether artist or institution, is a mixed bag when it comes to art colleges based in Dublin city. I use the term “mixed bag” in the positive eclectic sense. From the fighting words in the politicised work at DIT, the strong individualism at NCAD, and the quirky formalism at IADT, a stand-out art identity is the main vice (or virtue) in the goal to be seen and heard at the art institution.

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JULY 2011 (#19): Beyond Guilt Trilogy

#19

RUTI SELA and MAAYAN AMIR,

126 Artist led gallery, Galway, Ireland, 26 May – 18 June. *BY MAEVE MULRENNAN*

126 recently hosted the exhibition Beyond Guilt Trilogy, by artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir. These works have previously been seen in Vancouver, Berlin and Istanbul, either as a whole or just on video. On entering 126, viewers are greeted with three immaculate and expertly installed viewing rooms, a projected video piece in each one. Before each film there is a small text giving a very loose context to the work, something that isn’t completely necessary, but adds an anthropological element to the work. The first video, Beyond Guilt #1 is nine minutes in duration and starts with the text:

This piece has a shallow perspective, due to the cramped filming conditions. The subjects are groups of young men and then young women. The voices of the artists, unseen behind the camera are calm, nonchalant with just the right amount of wide – eyed naïveté. We hear a question that we subsequently hear over and over again in the other pieces, a sweet voice enquiring, “What do you mean?” The artists press their subjects for more revealing information without any explicit manipulation, or any reason as to why they want this information. There is an uncertainty from the viewer’s position: exactly just how involved are the artists? They take off their tops, repeatedly question and provoke their subjects but nothing further is shown. The same also happens when discussing the army. The artists claim not to recognize the army symbol, something as familiar as the alphabet in Israel. When they are incredulously asked ‘Were you not in the army?’ they repeatedly claim not to remember. It is this vagueness and blurring of boundaries that keeps the viewer uncomfortably intrigued. Beyond Guilt #2, eighteen minutes long, begins with the text: During 2004 we made contact through a dating website on the Internet with the men seen in the movie. Every evening we started the chatting at eight o’clock, $om ten o’clock and forth we arranged with the men to arrive to the hotel room in intervals of thirty minutes with each one. This part of the trilogy begins with grubby techno music and people dancing. The artists are smiling and participating: more explicitly connected to their subjects than the previous video. We encounter the heroes of the trilogy: brutally honest and open men, divulging not just their sexual preferences and desires but information about their lives. There are some darkly comical moments: an extremely confident young man becomes slightly embarrassed that the sex toys he has are not the best – his partner has the better ones tonight. Another visitor is so delighted to show off his tools to tie people up that he ends up bound and blindfolded by the artists and is still there when another man enters the room. There is conversation about being in a submissive or dominator space and how to get both power and pleasure from these two spaces. The man is clear that he prefers to dominate, and we must presume he has a very persuasive personality, as his baggy Spiderman underwear is not the uniform of a man in charge. We could learn a thing or two from him when he claims, “It’s not that I’m vain, I just know exactly my worth.” There is also a man who cannot wait to get naked but is shy about explaining a scar on his shoulder. He also gets nervous when it is clear that he won’t be the only man there; whether it is because he wants

During 2003 we filmed encounters with guys and girls we met in bars. We filmed the whole movie at the toilets of the bars.

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to remain dominant or whether he is worried he will have to do something he isn’t comfortable with is not made clear. When asked why he enjoys the army reserve he explains casually that it is like a vacation: it breaks up his routine, he laughs a lot and the other men are really nice. It is easy for us to jump to conclusions about there being solidarity, a gang mentality and a sense of belonging. However the artists do not stretch this out, they move on with their questioning. There is a visible turn in the last piece, Beyond Guilt #3, which is fourteen minutes in duration. The text explains: In October 2005 we ordered a prostitute to a cheep hotel room. W e have asked her to film the movie. The camera angle is reversed and we are confronted with the artists. Before we had only seen glimpses of them, mostly Maayan. In the other works they have been incidental figures: going to answer the phone, dancing, taking their top off or a moving figure in a mirror. Here they are being turned into the subject. They encourage the hired prostitute to instruct them. However it soon goes back to the original format of them asking questions. We hear how this woman changes her skin tone, language and nationality to meet men’s’ desires. How men repulse her yet she regrets not being one of them. We hear of her abortions. It ends with a faux-naïve song and the women bonding and playing dress-up with masks and feathers in a cheap hotel room. It’s all a bit Tracey Emin.

The key to the success of the previous two works was the ambiguousness of the narrative and the blurring of power. The repeated refrain “W hat do you mean?” brought us more into the piece through use of confession, confrontation and honesty. The final piece, while exceptionally strong, is to narrow in comparison to the first two widely ambiguous videos. There is a feeling of the artists wanting to balance everything out, but it doesn’t: the prostitute is not the opposite of the men. She becomes a stereotype, an exposition to neatly tie up the trilogy. There are strong points: in a context where nationality can mean life-or- death, the thought of a woman playing with her skin tone, nationality, language (she boasts that she is multi-lingual) and age is quite interesting. She comes across as some sort of reconciliation mediator. The clichés of multiple abortions and a resentment of men may only be a cliché because these things really do happen. There is also a feeling that the artists want another female voice: one cannot help but wonder what their position actually is: is this foray into Israel’s underbelly something entirely new to them or are they only too used to it? The statement accompanying Beyond Guilt Trilogy focuses on the “undermining power relationship between photographer and the photographed, men and women, the public domain and the private sphere, object and subject.” This is a tall order by anyone’s standards, and while it does address these topics, it does more than that. The artists successfully manage to tackle these complex subjects in a way that is both at once intimate and alienating. Intimate because we witness people’s desires, secrets and needs. Alienating because we are in an odd position: not quite a voyeur (that is SO 80’s), more of a witness. The video works are called a trilogy, which indicates that one builds on the former, creating a narrative. This is further emphasized by artists Sela and Amir as the work is carefully credited with dates, in the same order that they are shown in 126. However it might be more honest to see the works as three sections of the same complex story that run concurrently, interlink and speak to each other. From the first and second videos we see that war is so everyday it is mundane; one

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of the men keeps his sex toys in an army issued bag. Only in the first piece do we see two women becoming emotional about it and explicitly stating their political views. Another review of this work states that the subjects of the video show some sense that they think they are doing wrong. I disagree as they are entrenched in an extremely complex situation. A lot of people hope that the prejudices and stereotyping that they see in the media are not true, however we do have men boasting about war and we do hear one man talking about thieving Arabs. To be fair to him, we also hear how he stole from the thieving Arabs and got a dishonourable discharge from the army. He does not call himself a thief and is proud of his loot. The artists confront us with seedy situations involving sex, power and a sprinkle a sado-masochism. It is not supposed to shock: we follow the artist’s position of being nonchalant – particularly needed when we are sitting in a gallery space with our peers during some of the racier scenes.

AUGUST 2011 (#20): Ready-Made Geometry[1]

Niall de Buitléar, ‘Out of Order’, The LAB, Dublin, 8 July – 20 August. Our interest shall be the inquiry back into the most original sense in which geometry once arose, was present as the tradition of millennia ... we inquire into that sense in which it appeared in history for the first time – in which it must have appeared, even though we know nothing of the first creators and are not even asking after them. (Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry)[2] NIALL DE BUITLÉAR’S solo show at The LAB entitled Out of Order, invites the viewer – or in this case the writer, to begin where Husserl described as the unknown origin of “ready-made geometry.” This unspoken invitation is a breathing ground for possibility and imagination – to go beyond de Buitléar’s modest press-release, which describes the “loose system[s]” of his paper/drawn ‘communities’ of objects that populate The LAB’s ground floor gallery – and posit de Buitléar’s art objects as a generator of language and writing Coincidently, de Buitléar’s “loose system based on a three by three grid of circles to generate a family of forms” is reiterated (in a way) by the French philosopher Michel Serres in his essay ‘Origin of Geometry’. Serres describes the space in which the geometer intervenes is a space of similars: he is there, evident, around the three tombs, of the same form and of other dimension, and imitating one another.[3] Housed in long rectangular perspex boxes, de Buitléar’s untitled concentricallyformed black paper sculptures read as either model temples/tombs – the sort of primordial architecture that Serres alludes to in his search for the origin of geometry. Alternatively, they could be ‘unread’ as hieroglyphics – ideograms that represent a concept by way of a graphic symbol.

There are several ideologies at stake here: that war can solve problems, you can gain power from both military and sexual encounters, and freedom can be gained from doing this. This is strongly contradicted in the final video in the trilogy with the prostitute who resents being a complex female and would prefer to be a man, even though she hates them. There is no ideology here. All one can do is put on a mask and remain nonchalant.

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On the walls the same tenacity and patience in the replication of similars is regimentally displayed as a series of white pencil aerial drawings of the perspex entombed community of paper sculptures. The commonality between all the drawings and sculptures is the fact that they all contain the same central axis of rotation – or stasis in the case of the still life displays. Between the drawings and the sculptures there is the obvious black/negative and white/positive polarities in their aesthetic makeup. The materiality of the sculptures is deceiving (in my view). For instance, the form of the black paper sculptures have such a strong triangularity expanding outward from the base shape of the circle that a centrifugal force distorts their paper materiality into ‘stuff’ that could contend with such imagined force, such as rubber or coal. The same can be said of the materiality of the drawings, which allude to other origins, such as drawing in the sand or chalk on slate. In his exhaustive analysis in the introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Jacques Derrida writes in reference to Husserl’s contention “that the mathematical object is the mode of every object’s constitution”: The mathematical object seems to be the privileged example and most permanent thread guiding Husserl’s reflection.This is because the mathematical object is ideal. Its being is thoroughly transparent and exhausted by its phenomenality. Absolute objective, i.e., totally rid of empirical subjectivity, it nevertheless is only what it appears to be. Therefore, it is always already reduced to its phenomenal sense, and its being is, from the outset, to be an object [êtreobjet] for a pure consciousness.[4]

There is something deafening in Husserl’s and Derrida’s hypothesis. Serres, whose philosophy is always concerned with the marginalisation of the senses by the domination of language and the information revolution, writes: “Mathematics presents itself as a successful dialogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise.”[5] Simply put, mathematics is not spoken. Looking at de Buitléar’s drawing you can re-imagine the first didactic strokes of chalk scraping the blackboard in the classroom. There is almost this compulsion (to my mind) to be brought back to the primary school classroom and the origins of our experience of knowledge: ‘primary’ knowledge; the forgotten basics; the alphabet; the sum; all the fundamentals that buttress our linguistic interests and visual luxuries in later life – what Derrida describes as “Traditional Sedimentation.”[6] The learning and articulation of “primary knowledge” lends itself to another form of noise – the repeated sound (as in the spoken repetition of the mathematical tables), and form (coming home after the school day to see the aerial is out, and snow accumulates on the analogue television screen). In these instances of noise, information is memorised through the act of repeating one word or sound, or information is blocked by the disruptive nature of noise. Alternatively, the invariant quality of noise, or the infinitely repeatable sound, could create the most complex forms and ideas. There is something that ties the banal or the constant with complexity, or more specifically, breathes complexity as a separate entity. From this conclusion, the simplification of the repeated form is a way to beget complex images and concepts that have nothing to do with the origin of their impetus. In this sense, Husserl’s and Serres’ search for the ‘Origin of Geometry’ is unachievable; as the allusive gap between geometry’s inception and reception is part of its origin. Noise can also be music to one’s ears, and noise to another. The American ‘minimalist’ (a label he rejects) composer Philip Glass practices what he describes himself as “music with repeatable structures.”[7] But within these repeatable structures, Glass’ intentional use of subtle and intermittent chaotic notes against the larger field of ordered notes in his compositions, creates moments of heightened polarity. As mentioned above, de Buitléar presents similar visible polarities in the black/

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white aesthetic of his drawn and fabricated works, but it is the subtle malformations between the communities of objects that creates the largest schism between the twin and its opposite, or in the grander scheme of things – the collective and the individual. In regard to the individual, and the specific term “community” that I have repeatedly used (unconsciously so up to this point) to describe the collective sameness of objects that make up de Buitléar’s current work, and which populate the ground floor of The LAB – Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his brilliant analysis of The Inoperative Community: But the individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of the community. By its nature – as its name indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible – the individual reveals that it is the abstract result of decomposition. It is another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence: the absolute detached for-itself, taken as origin and as certainty.[8]

Now, to ask the question of the Greek beginning of geometry is precisely to ask how one passed from one language to another, from one type of writing to another, )om the language reputed to be natural and its alphabetic notation to the rigorous and systematic language of numbers, measures, axioms and formal arguments. What we have left of all this history prevents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs and figures, words and formulas. This it is as if we are con)onted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, nevermeet. The origin escapes ahead, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.[10] de Buitléar’s ‘Out of Order’ is a corruption of Nietzsche’s phrase “out of chaos, comes order,” but the artist’s unfinished phrase leaves us with a question without a resolution. The artist’s new work at The LAB does not pretend to offer a conclusion, or even a narrative. We could read the unfinished ‘Out of Order’ as an equation, minus the = sign. However, to look at the work as a series of absences – a ‘method’ that art utilises all too often – maybe missing the point. There is something more here than the accumulation of form for the sake of art. The ‘communist’ output speaks of society and the relationships between subjects and objects, between language and the visual. de Buitléar’s forms leave sufficient gaps that allow the viewer to imagine sci-fi spaces and social precepts that define how we individually imagine or collectively live and die in society, and the literary manifestations that can take seed in the gaps between the origin of the object/subject and its inevitable death. However, it would be unproductive to end a sentence – not to mention an essay, with the word “death.” Nancy would call this a ‘horizon’ “that must be challenged”[11]: just like Sartre before him who described ‘communism’ as “the unsurpassable horizon of our time.”[12] In de Buitléar’s repetition of a singular ‘concentric’ form, there is a sustained focus and purpose in the individual making of objects, that somehow, as if by chance rather than method, a community sprang forth. This scenario is in keeping with Nancy and Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the clinamen – the inclination of one object toward another. Nancy writes that the community is at least the clinamen of the “individual.”[13]

This death of the community – what Nancy describes as a joint “suicide” – is based on the individual’s anxiety over their immanent death, not the community! Although we do subscribe to the benefits of the community – the utopian ideal of collective progress, ‘Being’ is inherently subsumed by the individual. From this perspective, de Buitléar’s sculptures take on the form of black funery-like objects – fit for human ashes, or possibly found by an archaeologist in a peat bog. Humanity is also etched in the sculptures’ subtle differences – making them anthropomorphic. Derrida defines Husserl’s search for the ‘origin’ as a “reactivation” of a “hidden historical field”[9] – a ‘tomb raider’ so to speak. In the first paragraph of Serres’ Origin of Geometry he asks:

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Duration and time make communities – not to forget labour. Before now, de Buitléar’s assemblages were scaled up – the focus, labour and purpose was more monumental, more individual. By sharing this focus over a field of objects and drawings, there is something that transcends individual subjectivism. I think it is the many voices, rather than one voice, articulated by the ‘community’ – a term that I repeatedly come back to after experiencing de Buitléar’s new work. The same compulsions of repetition and routine is here as in the previous work by the artist – a behavior that inflicts the majority of artists. But more specifically in regard to this work, it is the compulsion to repeat – not in an effort to improve or rectify – but to populate a space, that explodes meanings and forms outwards – the centrifugal force that I wrote of earlier.

AUGUST 2011 (#21): Sean Lynch and Brian Hand The Dock, Carrick on Shannon, 8 April – 11 June. *BY JOANNE LAWS*

THE SOLO exhibitions of Brian Hand and Sean Lynch, shared some common ground, each unearthing peripheral stories from the archives of recent Irish history, and delivering them into the present moment. Found within these processes of reenactment were monuments and protests, punctuated with artifacts, revealing the Irish character within a changing cultural landscape. Sean Lynch presented two artworks, installed in separate but adjoining rooms. On entering the first room I was immediately aware of some audio; a voice-over piece, emanating from behind an L-shaped, constructed partition. Dear JJ, I read with interest...inhabited the expanse of the room, with the partition allowing the viewer to circulate attentively around it, in the act of piecing together fragments of a wandering narrative. On 24th April, 1986, JJ Toomey, of Bishopstown, Cork, submitted an appeal in the letters section of the Irish Times, for information regarding the erection, and subsequent disappearance, of a most unusual monument he had seen on the summit of Carrantuohill, Co. Kerry, in the summer of 1983. The monument in question was a ‘High Nelly’, a lady’s bicycle, lashed to a pole, bearing a plaque which read “In memory of Flann O’Brien and The Third Policeman.” What was the nature of this eccentric effigy, and who put it there? Below and between the sections of audio could be heard the enticing and nostalgic clunk of a slide projector. Loaded with archival research, circumstantial evidence and snippets of local gossip, the projected images and voice-over narrative documented a correspondence, gradually unravelling the mystery of the bike, and the people that had made its journey possible. Some locals speculated that the bike would be used as a generator for a lighting system on the newly erected metal cross. The summit of Carrantuohill is the highest point in Ireland and the closest place to heaven. I began to feel happy that these slides exist in the world.

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Sabine Schmidt from Hattenheim, Germany, replied to Toomey, describing how she and a friend had carried the bike up the mountain and tied it to the pole. She sent photographs which documented the journey (which were displayed in the exhibition). Meanwhile, Michael Kellett from Raheny replied to Toomey, claiming he had carried the bike. Were there two bikes? Two separate monuments to Flann O’Brien? It transpires that Kellet made the journey with his two sons and met the couple along the way (later identifying himself in Schmitt’s photographs). Observing their struggle, he offered to help them by strapping the bike to his rucksack. Kellet’s rucksack and climbing boots were displayed in the exhibition on plinths, and exuded an indexical presence. In retaining particles from that trip up the mountain, do Kellet’s boots form part of this monument to Flann O’Brien? Maybe the mountain ‘absorbed’ some of the monument? The search for the missing bicycle continues...

Bringing thoughts of the metaphysical with me, I journeyed into the adjoining room, where Latoon was on the telly. No flat-screens or slick HD monitors, but a proper big telly, displaying content which may well have been broadcast into the living rooms of Irish people in the late ’90s. An epic beard signified the presence of a Eddie Lenihan, who relayed the story of a whitethorn bush in Latoon Co. Clare, which came under threat in 1999 with plans for a €90 million road scheme. Lenihan protested that the bush was an important meeting place for fairies, (or the ‘good people’), and declared that motorists using the proposed new road may may be subjected to great misfortune or even death. Clare Co. Council eventually agreed to re-direct the road so that the site could be avoided. Lynch described the fairy bush as “an object that gets absorbed into folklore (and) worldwide media coverage, surviving the onslaught of a motorway.”[2] Lenihan’s protest also functioned as a request, asking people to resist the allure of progress and efficiency, stating that in getting to a place quicker “you lose the stories that mean something along the way, the stories that tell you about life.” Lynch’s work displays a geographical aesthetic, which provides a departure from the ‘native genius’ and his “rootedness in a remote and unique landscape,”[3] ultimately offering access to a larger global narrative. Lynch’s interest in “unusual idiosyncratic histories”[4] articulates a desire to highlight stories which seem out of place in the context of current national and European political agenda. His process is less about ‘identity building’, and more concerned with the ruptures that can occur in the void between progress and cultural survival. Exiting Lynch’s space, I noticed a flag hanging from a pole on the wall facing me - a purple, white and green tricolour, wafting in the breeze provided by a fan. It beckoned me across the landing and into room 1, the site of Brian Hand’s solo show. The entrance was proclaimed by a banner, suggesting the word ‘ANACHRONY’, comprised of letter formations composed from hatchets. Before crossing the threshold I was aware of some music, possibly an Irish ballad, and paused for a moment to

The continual cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain quantity of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death half-way to meet you. It is not easy to know what is the best way to move yourself from one place to another.[1]

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consider what the room may contain. An ‘anachronism’, as I understand it, relates to something that is out of its time or context. The flag, the banner, the music – could this be a modern take on Republicanism? On entering the room I observed that the space was also partitioned, in this scenario a central blackout space was created by a shroud of black curtain. The large rooms in The Dock, although bright and spacious, to my mind, have occasionally proved challenging in the past, in terms of providing the viewer with a lasting engagement with the work on display. Silence Under the Court, was a large charcoal wall drawing created within an arched alcove. The word ‘SILENCE’ commanded a reflection on the site-specifity of the piece. Built in 1821, the building now known as The Dock, was originally the District Courthouse and a seat of colonial administration for many years. The drawing was based on the holding cell in the basement of the building. An underground tunnel still remains, which originally lead convicts from the courtroom to the jail, or to the site of their execution.[5] Colour photographic prints by Ros Kavanagh, documented a theatrical re-enactment, with a protesting woman as the central character, featuring the purple, white and green flag the Suffragette Movement. In one scene, the woman stands on an improvised wooden platform, situated in front of an elaborate Victorian carousel. I considered this visually seductive juxtaposition, and could not escape thoughts of Bakhtin’s ‘Carnival’.

Blurring the boundaries between performer and audience, Bakhtin viewed ‘Carnival’ as a communal act; a site where the hierarchies of official life can be suspended, bringing forth “new relations between body, language and the political practice it reveals”[6]. It is a site of liberation. “Bakhtin’s vision of Carnival...is finally about freedom; the courage needed to establish it, the cunning required to maintain it, and – above all- the horrific ease with which it is can be lost. ”[7] Another scene depicts the woman as she resists being abruptly removed from her platform, adding a slap-stick effect, concurring with Bakhtin’s subversion of atmosphere through comedy and chaos. Inside the black-out space I was confronted with an architectural maquette of a theatre. I looked upon its empty rows of seats and considered the relationship between performer and spectator, between passivity and action, and the false reality that is engendered within the theatrical space. A HD monitor acted as a stage, presenting the slow scanning of a photograph entitled Mary Leigh, The Theatre Royal, July 1912, a Night When Women were Hunted Like Rats in the City. Mary Leigh, was a member of the British WPSU, who threw a hatchet into a carriage in which Herbert Asquith[8] was traveling, on a visit to Dublin in 1912. The hatchet was wrapped in a message which read: “this symbol of the extinction of the liberal party for ever more.” Later that day, Mary Leigh set off several small bombs in the Theatre Royal, set fire to

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a theatre box, and threw a burning chair into the orchestra pit. She was sentenced to 5 years penal servitude in Mountjoy Prison, where she went on hunger strike[9] and was forcibly fed, but was released after 2 months. For the exhibition, Hand worked with the Abbey Theatre’s cast of Arrah–na-Pogue (a Dion Boucicault play) in re-creating scenes from that historical day. The melodic audio, that had resonated so soothingly with all of my viewing up until that point, was a song called T he W earing of the Purple, White and Green, sung by The Abbey cast, as a variation of the street ballad T he W earing of the Green[10] (circa.1800) which features in Boucicault’s play.

I found the visibility of Hand’s process in the spectacle of reenactment very appealing. It was as much a form of dramaturgy[11], as it was a historical commentary. In this way, my reading of “Anachrony” focused less on the sub-plot of Mary Leigh, and more on the grander narratives which arose out of her cause, namely, the theatricality of resistance, and the socio-historical act of protest. As an artist, Hand clearly wishes to challenge our assumptions about history. In creating a portal into the militant history of women, A‘ nachrony’ provided some reflection on modern political and economic struggle. The Guardian’s Joseph O’Connor recently described the current era as a “grotesque period of passivity and botched action, which the historians of 21st-century Ireland will ultimately remember as the doom of a country’s self-image.”[12] The curatorial inquiry, which aligned the work of these two artists, seemed to place emphasis on the revival of hidden stories, suggesting perhaps that history may be expressed and recovered through ‘traces’, out of which identity is formed. Clearly this was not a historian’s inquiry, and the real rewards for me, ultimately, were visual. I also took pleasure in the philosophical offerings; the Duchampian bicycle, the surrealist carousel, ruminations on Epic Theatre, and booted references to psychogeography.[13] Both exhibitions could loosely be viewed within the spectrum of the artist researcher, reflecting a generalised revival of historical narratives within contemporary art practice, which includes a new fidelity to the ‘local’ in resisting the homogeny of globalised systems.

I reached the back wall, where a mantelpiece functioned as a platform for the display of some sculptural artefacts and found objects, enclosed within taxidermist vitrines. Entitled Looking in the Mirror Looking for the Ostrich Egg, the installation seemed overworked and a tad cluttered. The strongest of the pieces, an American labourer’s boot displayed within a glass vitrine, offering a coded reference to emigration, could easily have stood alone. The wall to the right of the fireplace may also have benefitted from one less artwork on display, but this detracted only mildly from what was an expressive and meaningful response to site, which I enjoyed on many levels.

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AUGUST 2011 (#22): Piccadilly Community Centre

Christoph Büchel, Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London, 13 May – 30 July. *BY RUTH HOGAN*

AMIDST the bustle of the crowded streets of London’s Piccadilly an anomaly appears. What originally would have been the gallery space of Hauser & Wirth has been completely re-constructed into a fully functioning community centre. All evidence of the original gallery space and architecture have been have dramatically erased. The gallery’s exterior walls brandish hoardings advertising cash loans and vacant office spaces to let. The white walled space has been replaced by long rooms and hallways painted in garish yellow. Stepping through the main entrance, you first encounter a Western Union money transfer bureau, its desks unstaffed, the original parquet floor replaced by blue wool carpet. A notice board spanning the length of the right wall offers information to visitors of local services, activities and events available during the fleeting existence of the centre. Along the corridor and through a set of double doors into the hallway, where on the left a series of computer rooms provides free internet access for the community members, and on the right is the main community room and canteen.

Rooms and facilities at the ‘Piccadilly Community Centre’ are available to hire free of charge to charitable organisations. A therapy room, a community dance hall, a non-denominational prayer room, a fully functioning bar and even a market stall in the adjacent St. James’ Market are some of the services available for various outreach groups such as the Womens Institute and prisoner rehabilitation schemes. Even the community centre website advertising these facilities makes no reference to the temporary nature of the centre, or the fact that this staged environment is actually the invention of Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. Known for his elaborate large-scale politicised art installations, with ‘Piccadilly Community Centre’ the boundaries become blurred as to whether it is intended to be an art installation, an exercise in art as social practice or a community based art project. Located in the main space of the top floor, an authentic branch of the ‘Geranium Shop for the Blind’ charity organisation is selling second hand goods. Juxtaposed against this operation is the ’Conservative Party Archive’ – a stand devoted to chronicling the various historical triumphs of the Conservative party. Party literature, memorabilia emblazoned with anti-Socialist slogans such as “If you want to call your soul your own, vote Conservative” and newsletters relating to the local London Tory wards are all on display. The promotional film that accompanied the 2010 Conservative Party Conference is played continuously on a flat screen television, it’s booming message dominating the space. Ironically Büchel is clearly making the association here that community activism is perpetuating the ideals of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ politics, despite the Conservative Party’s historical stance for anti-socialist policies. This implication is further compounded by the ‘Timebanking’ office, located off the main space. ‘Timebanking’ as a policy, promotes the exchange of one person’s time, skills and resources to benefit another person within the community as a form of bartering

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system that pre-dates the monetary systems of commerce. According to the centre’s website, it is designed to “build trust within the community” and return to nonfinancial means of sustaining a society– a paradigm of the ‘Big Society’ initiative.

A narrow metal staircase leading to the roof exposes the seedy undercurrent behind Büchel’s commentary on Cameron’s vision. In the attic crawlspace, a make shift squat has been slavishly re-created. Precariously exposed wooden beams wind around several living spaces within this one open plan environment. The squalid detritus of the human living conditions is on display: soiled and stained mattresses, upturned packing crates compensate for seating, empty beer cans, an open toilet. Overlooking the rooftops of Piccadilly, more evidence is discovered. Open sleeping quarters composed of sleeping bags, plastic bin liners, a HSBC umbrella – all signifiers of the fallout from the economic recession. In the basement of Hauser & Wirth is the functioning saloon bar. The lounge décor is dark and gloomy. Furnished with typical dark red carpets, low hanging glass lamplights and square wooden tables.

A Union jack flag adorned with the image of the Duke & Duchess (as supplied free with a national red top tabloid newspaper) is pinned to the wall of the vaulted dance hall that holds poetry and dance evenings at weekends. Red-top journalism has become synonymous with the promotion of Conservative ideal in the light of the current controversially contested political links. Venturing through the ‘private’ door, a cramped and disheveled living space is revealed, where every crevasse is covered with personal effects: food utensils, nonperishable goods, a vat of drinking water, craftsman’s tools. The smell of dust and damp catches in the back of your throat. Several aged photographs of a naval craft and its crew above the single bed intimate that this is the home of an ex-serviceman – a civil servant. From here, a restrictive passageway takes two blind right turns, cluttered with the debris of human living. Stumbling and squeezing past stacks of books, boxes of crockery all of which are covered in a thick film of dust, you arrive at the second living space - a single cot wedged between the walls beside a toilet. To the left of the mattress is a towering column of pornography – above this, shelves full of labelled VHS tapes of CCTV security surveillance tapes from the HSBC Poultry branch. This not only references the original function of the Hauser & Wirth building itself as a HSBC branch, but also signifies the role of the banks in the creation of the economic recession. Christoph Büchel’s agenda regarding Piccadi!y Community Centre is never truly divulged. Whether it is an examination of class or an indictment of the current Conservative government’s management in the aftermath of the recession, this can only be inferred. Instead it illustrates the short comings of social practice as an artist

In the left hand corner, BBC footage of the Royal Wedding of the Duke & Duchess of Cambridge is screened continuously on a monitor. The resounding cheer of the crowds is the only disturbance to the quietness. Proceeding down past the public toilets and a seemingly inconsequential door marked ‘private’, you enter into asquare room that hosts the bar.

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concern. Once the artist has communicated their sentiments, the long term wide spread social outcome of their project does not appear to have been considered, similarly highlighting the long term social effects the ‘Big Society’ initiative will have on the lower income and working classes. What is clear from visiting the exhibition is the overwhelming popularity and success of the centre as a facility for the socially marginalised in one of the most affluent areas of London. The positive achievements of the various community groups are in a way negated, as they unknowingly become part players within Büchel’s orchestrated theatre.

SEPTEMBER 2011 #23: Space Invaders

Kevin Cosgrove and Brendan Earley, ‘Nor for Nought’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 14 September - 29 October.

JUST OFF the Dublin quays, where the smell from the Liffey and the Guinness brewery invade the nose, mother’s tankstation hosts two of its gallery artists in a show that triggers the plebeian phrase “work, rest and play.” Entitled Nor for Naught, the “conversation” between Brendan Earley’s architectonic sculptures and Kevin Cosgrove’s paintings of vacated workshops is premised by a biblical quotation in the press release, that proclaims “toil” and “meaningful purpose” will produce “bread” for the hard working collective “we.” Earley transforms hardware materials (plasterboard), packaging, and IKEA products into sombre modernist dioramas that are injected with the optimism of retroactive science fiction. Previous work by the artist includes the re-articulation of a batch of flat pack IKEA furniture (amounting to “three kitchens and a small sitting room”) into a ‘failed’ modernist reconfiguration at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2008. The conceptual punch line was delivered when the work was deinstalled and advertised on a recycling website – subsequently towed away to have a new utilitarian purpose in a service in the country. The most poignant aspect of Earleyʼs first solo show at motherʼs tankstation in 2010 was his audiobook-like retelling of J.G. Ballardʼs short story Report On An Unidentified Space Station, voiced wonderfully by the artist and theorist Brian OʼDoherty (author of Inside the White Cube: Ideologies of the Gallery Space, 1976). Displayed with the audio were black marker drawings of Michael Heizerʼs City (an ongoing monumental “earthwork” in the Nevada desert, coming up to forty years in the making), and a monitor with a ʻshooting-through-the -starsʼ animation; The Thing rather than Star Trek sprung to mind. If Earley could be described as a ‘material reimaginist’, transforming the hardware materials that take the plaster and paint in our homes, or the stuff that cushions our technology and shelves our possessions, then Cosgrove is a realist, an observer of the vacated sites where real work takes place, but where the workers are resting or out to play. Cosgrove has had two previous solo shows at the gallery. Usually a painter of small canvases, the paintings for his second solo show at mother’s tankstation where

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big and bold, taking on a transformative power over the gallery space, where gallery elements such as a red iron girder, step ladder and garage door became more visible. Although self-consciousness was evident in these larger paintings; representational vanity seemed to work. During the run of that show, motherʼs tankstation seemed to resemble a repair shop, a tire shop, or the ubiquitous workshop that the painter obsesses over. Nor for Naught displays the same obsessions by Cosgrove, while the workshop context makes visible the tools and materials of the workman trade that Earley utilises in his current work on display in the gallery.

In the main gallery a collection of florescent tubes bear up a sandwich form of IKEA kitchen unit parts and cropped foam. This modernist block is strapped together with self-consciously ‘pretty’ plastic ties – the white plastic ties that strap a similar work in the gallery are less noticeable. In one instance, Earley invades Cosgrove’s wall space with a wall work entitled Don’t look back. The title is an anti-nostalgic command, but as a viewer I could not help but think of ’80s video games when gazing into what looked like a crust of polystyrene packaging (but in fact an aluminium cast), that took the shape of a ‘Space Invader’. Fitting, if you recollect the marching regiment of pixelated space ships that bomb the player’s shields in the archaic video game, which could be aligned with Earley’s piecing together of some ruined past or far flung future throughout his work. The Space Invader is propped up by a pane of dark perspex and mahogany – a wood that was also a favorite in ’80s interior design. This is one of Earley’s best works and is paired with Cosgrove’s most assured painting of the exhibition showing an oiled-up car engine with an incongruous piece of dry cardboard stretched across a workshop – contextually read as discarded packaging from one of Earley’s IKEA units. Earley’s sculptures seem to be in constant flux when punctuated by Cosgrove’s still paintings of workshops. I found that the paintings of the latter did not hold my attention. This was due in part to the repetitive workshop topography and conceptually slim titles such as Workshop wall (compressor) and Y ellow workshop. On the other hand Earley’s works are slow epics, acting as bookmarks as they invite you to stop and ponder –literally so in the entitled They bedded down for the night, the best and most unselfconscious work of the exhibition, where a woolen blanket cushions ‘the fall’ of another modernist ‘IKEA’ block. Earley’s work stole the majority of my attention at mother’s tankstation, but I am left with the memory of one deftly painted gesture by Cosgrove from his painting Dumper, where he represents a florescent light with one oil paint to primer scratch, that could be a light or a seam in the shed where the workshop is hidden from the outside world.

In one fell swoop we could describe the joint display of these two art practices as a contained narrative. Peculiarly, their work spans the left hand side of the gallery and is bookended by Earley’s pair of aluminium and plasterboard configurations that are propped up by short stepladders. On entering the dark entranceway to mother’s tankstation the first one of these sculptures entitled Pieces of the City are Forming Like Islands has a sense of process about it, as if the vertical and horizontal bits and bobs have not finished their job casting some alien artefact or architecture. Splashes of plaster dot the rungs of the yellow stepladder; acting as both artwork and plinth. Aluminium plates are easily mistaken for ordinary foil-backed plasterboard: especially with the addition of product marks such as CE and Knauf that Earley has carefully printed onto the aluminium. The artist achieves a combination of art preciousness and the illusion of nonchalance – the carefree artist.

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OCTOBER 2011 (#24): ad hoc MUSEUM

DUBLIN CONTEMPORARY 2011, Review of Dublin Contemporary 2011, alongside exhibitions that ran concurrently at commercial galleries, art centres and non-profit spaces. 6 September – 31 October.

Over the past decade [2000-2010], this condition [precariousness] became all but pervasive, and it is this heightened insecurity that much art has attempted to manifest, even to exacerbate. This social instability is redoubled by an artistic instability, as the work at issue here foregrounds its own schismatic condition, its own lack of shared meanings, methods, or motivations. Paradoxically, then, precariousness seems almost constitutive of much art, yet sometimes in a manner that transforms this debilitating affliction into a compelling appeal. Hal Foster[1] AS WE SLUG into a new decade it seems Hal Foster’s ‘precarious’ has more fuel in the tank. Foster came to the term precarious via the Swiss artist, Thomas Hirschhorn, whose much maligned Green Coffin (2006) in the lackluster press coverage locally and internationally doesn’t offer a great entry point for Dublin Contemporary 2011. The lack of strong personal engagement rings in the ears when I walk up to the eyesore located in the purpose built annex for Dublin Contemporary. Known for getting his own hands dirty in his exploration of the precariousness and preciousness of art and its institutional display, here Hirschhorn substitutes the stick for a green carrot.

The term neo povera has been repeated by the curators of Dublin Contemporary in what comes across as a forced effort to thread the disparate art works of Dublin Contemporary together with jittery needle. The premise of the everyday that arte povera prescribed back in the ‘60s is a thin concept for a would-by Biennale. Today’s artworld vernacular and aesthetic is already busy with the precepts and ordinary materiality that formed the bedrock of arte povera. Revisiting such terms has the feel of just another turn of the wheel: a recycling of the old in an effort to revitalise a jaded now. Is neo povera defined by Kadir Attia’s stiffened, empty plastic bags placed on selfconsciously high plinths? Is there an unspoken passing of the ’poor art’ torch when we see arte povera founder Jannis Kounellis’ gold leaf, mummified museum objects displayed with David Adamo’s pared back, vertically precarious timbers at Earlsforth Terrace? As themes and concepts run dry for the artist, perhaps ‘space’ as an abstract unknown is the last frontier for the artist to replicate and twist. Take for instance Mark Cullen’s Ark, I could sleep for a thousand years at Earlsforth Terrace, where the viewer is invited to walk up a stairwell attached to another DIY construction, and gaze at an improvised night sky. On the tall platform, several, what can only be described as thin mylar sleeping bags, lay empty. If Cullen was aiming to induce sleep in the viewer, then my fear of having a Rip Van Winkle was appropriate. In a neighbouring room Masashi Echigo’s ajar fridges achieved the same flat line. The best example in recent times of this type of aesthetic was Chu Yun’s Constellation Installation (2006) at the Venice Biennale 2009; a triumph of ‘standby’ space theatre. The mental evacuation Cullen offered the viewer from his bunk bed to the stars, is manifested physically in Brian Duggan’s this short-term evacuation, Pripyat, Chernobyl, 30km Zone, Pripyat. Abandoned in 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster, the Ukranian

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city of Pripyat was founded in 1970 to house workers at the nuclear plant. In Russia, the city was one of nine similar faux cities, nicknamed “atom cities.” Duggan has built a two metre rusted model of the Pripyat ferris wheel, which was a landmark structure in one of the thirty-five playgrounds that are located in the city. To give the viewer an element of cryptic clarity, Duggan pastes a fabricated evacuation notice to the wall of the room at Earlsforth Terrace.

In a similar vein to Brian Duggan’s portrait of the collateral damage that results from hubristic man and country, Nina Berman’s Marine Wedding Series of photographs achieve an even starker portrait of the surviving casualties of war. One photograph in particular of the disfigured Marine Sergeant Ty Ziegel and his wife to be, Renee Kline, strikes a deep pathos, evoked particularly by the bride’s detached gaze beyond the groom and picture frame. Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times: Ms. Berman took this picture ... on assignment for People magazine. It was meant to accompany an article that documented Mr. Ziegel’s recovery, culminating in his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. But the published portrait was a convivial shot of the whole wedding party.[3] A couple of months after the wedding the couple would divorce. Patrick Hamilton’s Uri Gelleresque, Columbian machete bending, bore contextual fruit in how he displayed them in a rather cultish design on the floor of one of the celllike rooms at Earlsforth Terrace. The meeting of politics, violence and design reached it pinnacle in the form of the Nazi Swastika. Hamilton’s blend of machete and spiked metal frames elicited issues of power and violence without being overtly bombastic; whilst also retaining appropriately cold and intriguing formal qualities. Bjørn Melhus’ multi-flat screen video installation entitled Thisismy home was installed in a room kitted out in old leather sofas and what has become an epidemic of art exhibitions, flat screen TVs. The viewer was invited to sit down on a sofa and listen to a free text-to-speech software voice that narrated lines from a military handbook that was previously published to help war veterans deal ‘domestically’ with posttraumatic stress disorder. The short loop video, audio and text acted as a textually hypnotic affirmation, saying in so many words that everything is going to be alright, while persuasive domestic imagery brought home the message that the heart, mind and body will mend the victim of his/her trauma. Without a degree of nuance, the

The nickname of “atom city” and what it signifies (nuclear proficiency and the dangers inherent in technological ambition), makes Pripyat a real, earth bound example of the dystopian landscapes that typify the science fiction genre. Duggan’s formal interpretation spoils and debunks a tragedy that already warps and twists in the mind. Although access to Pripyat is said to be not impossible, long distance photos of the city still populate the internet, exposing the human desire to see what is out of reach. Duggan’s ferris wheel is a cliché of the post-apocalyptical landscape of the horror and science fiction genre; the funfair being the location where the drama unfolds in such imaginings. It also instills an element of trauma, when you think of the child casualties and inherited defects that Chernobyl signifies for the subsequent generations. But the scale of the ferris wheel model is more of a plaything for the child in us; a distraction to forget rather than a monument to remember. In the end, some subjects are best left out of reach, as an act of potential rather than denial.

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stripped-back digital voice repeats: “this is my home, that is my desk those are my clothes, this is my bed.” With a little more distance from the subject, Omer Fast’s thirty minute video Five Thousand Feet is the Best at Earlsforth Terrace was inspired by what could be viewed as a psychodrama of the future of military encounter, but is in fact the virtually/real exercises of Predator Drone Pilots in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same work was shown at this year’s Venice Biennale in an unsuitable basement space in the Giardini. Here in Dublin it is successfully installed in a lecture theatre at Earlsforth Terrace. Just like James Coleman’s new video work 2004-2011 a work in progress at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Fast utilises similar Lynchian ways and means of shuffling the narrative, the characters and the scenography, wherein the protagonist is just as confused as the viewer as to where the last scene ended and where the next one begins. The main character of Fast’s fictional/documentary is a male drone pilot. The visually inspiring scenic backdrop to the narrative is Las Vegas at night (The Stratosphere Hotel to be exact), which is an hour drive from Indian Springs, where drone pilot exercises take place at the Creech Air Force Base. I came across a series of documentaries that gave an insider look at life as a drone pilot. In one instance Colonel William Brandt of the US Air Force stands on a stage in front a host of expectant virtual pilots and says: “You are no longer sitting at Creech Air Force Base.” He later divulges that “The biggest risk that we accept is that detachment from it,” and adds that “there is severe – both military and political – consequences if we fail.”[4]

Fast’s video installations, what he refers to as a “re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real,” is very Slavoj Žižek. Judith Butler writes of the Slovakian philosopher that Žižek insists at the heart of psychic life one finds a ‘traumatic kernel/remainder.’” What Butler refers to as a “limit-point of sociality” and conceptualisation.[5] In Žižek’s mind it is too simple to label this “kernel” as Freudian repression: how can you repress something that you can’t or will never understand due to the limit capacity of our understanding. Fast’s narrative is counter to Colonel William Brandt’s cold militant/political agenda, where military and political consequences are the “Biggest risk,” while the psychological casualties and human loss of these war games is put down as ‘collateral damage’. Five Thousand Feet is the Best is interspersed with interviews with real drone pilots (faces blurred}, while the fictional narrative plays out of the drone pilot wandering a hotel corridor, meeting with a journalist in a hotel room and avoiding discussing the ins and outs of being a drone pilot: instead telling a homespun story about an African American who was obsessed with trains from boyhoodto-adulthood, until the obsession would get the better of him in later life when he would non-violently hijack a train; all supplant (to my mind) Žižek’s diagnosis of the “traumatic kernel/remainder”. One scene that stands out and refers back to the title Five Thousand Feet is the Best is an aerial shot of Las Vegas in daylight, where the desert merges with suburbia. The camera zones in on a kid cycling from desert to suburb while a ‘real’ drone pilot narrates what he can see at five thousand feet in Iraq from the comfort of his swivel chair in Indian Springs Nevada.

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Since the Rachael Thomas debacle (the original curator of Dublin Contemporary 2011) the job title of curator has taken on a gravitas that is more gilt-edged than that of artist. When Dublin Contemporary was pulling away at the seams it was because Thomas was dropped. When Jota Castro and Christian Viveros-Fauné took Thomas’ place as curators of Dublin Contemporary, the event was saved without an artist in sight. Looking from the outside, artists in this Biennale landscape of formalwear professionalism come across a bumbling degenerates; to be kept in check by the curators’ compass. I come to this observation via another group show that ran concurrently with Dublin Contemporary entitled O at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin. Unlike John Hutchinson (the Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery), who has become an institution in and of himself, Jerome O’Drisceoil (the Director of Green on Red Gallery Dublin) is the unnamed curator of many punchy curated group shows over the last decade. For the Irish artworld this is too obvious to mention, but to new publics who visit the gallery his name is not on the poster or press-release that accompanies the shows at the gallery. Should this be left unsaid? Things that are left unsaid or unadvertised in a world that is built on reputation and momentum could be termed as a type of self-effacement. What if, as artists, curators and writers we decided to become anonymous? No Name. No Bio. No Identity. No Branding. What would become of Mike Wilson’s “reputational economy”?[7] What is a fascinating show on the whole, Sofia Hultén’s artworks stands out against the coy behaviour of the other works in O at Green on Red Gallery because they progress this idea of hidden potential to the extreme, by testing the imagination of the viewer in her playful persuasion on the ordinary to produce the extraordinary. She describes her artwork The Actual Calculated Size of a Black Hole as “A framed photograph of a popular science book, which describes the size of a black hole if it had the same mass as the earth. The size of the hole is drilled through the glass frame, the photograph and the wall behind where the photograph hangs.” Here, something that is out of reach for many of us – black hole theory – is formally compressed into a full stop, but retains its mystery even though the artist has brought the conceptually and physically unattainable into our living space.

Teresa Margoles’ The Keys of the City had the usual ethical blindspots that artists such as Francis Alÿs ultilise for the sake of art as social commentary. Although milder than a Santiago Sierra performance, Margoles uses similar methods to the controversial Spanish artist by inviting/hiring people who are embedded in some difficult circumstance to perform in the frame of art. For Dublin Contemporary one Antonio Hernandez –A Mexican key engraver who works on the border between Ciudad Juáre Mexico and El Paso Texas – retold his daily experience of life after “the destruction of the commercial area of the city’s historical centre, the lack of tourists and the constant extortions”... while engraving “keys with a word requested by his audience, he asked: ‘what do you think about what is happening in my country?’ The keys were then suspended from a metal wire, thus forming a poem with all of the word all of the thoughts dictated there.”[6] Everything from David Zink Yi’s giant ceramic squid oozing oil to Hirshchorn’s Green Coffin at Earlsforth Terrace seemed a little silly after seeing the man cry while repeating to each visitor how many Mexican people died every day on the border. What was more frustrating was the forced empathy shown by the audience who continually asked the man more details about his experience while nodding their head in shared understanding of his trauma. The artist and viewer could say that this process of retelling and sharing a personally traumatic event with a new public is cathartic, but does art really care?

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Just like Keef Winter’s artworks at The Joinery (reviewed following Hultén) that force the gaze of the viewer in on themselves, Hultén does the same with her exploration of matter. Artificial Conglomerate (2010) consists of the cyclic narrative of finding a rock at a building site, making a latex mould of said rock, pulverizing said rock; and reconstituting the bits of rock in a mould to form a new rock. The intention to leave a stitch mark along the equator of the rock (hardened spill-of from the two hemisphere mould – transforms the object into something precious and out-worldly. In her two-channel video Immovable Object / Unstoppable Force (2011), Hultén follows “instructions for telekinesis on large objects.” The immovable object is a steamroller; the unstoppable forc is the artist’s mind. Taking into account Hultén’s black hole and meteorite at the Green on Red Gallery, the building site backdrop to this phenomenal fantasy reminds one of the junkyard brawl in Superman 111, where the hero and his split persona battle it out. There is something ridiculously grandiose in Hultén’s expressions that suggests delusional alchemist, believing in the artist’s transformative power over everyday objects. The expression ‘There’s method in the madness’ rings true in Hultén’s work as she artfully presents the artist’s vain attempt to move and transform the ordinary.

On the other side of Dublin City in the modest non-profit project space The Joinery, Northern Irish artist Keef Winter literally gets his hands and the viewer’s mind dirty in the solo show Hide those dirty hands. The hidden is underscored by the term “glory holes” in the press release (primarily a hole in a public lavatory wall were people can engage in, or observe sexual activity). On the day of viewing it was wet, grey and humid, adding an element of sweat to the experience. What we have here in contrast to arte povera poesis, is a back-alley aesthetic of tight dark corridors and the imagined surreptitious footsteps that bespeak clandestine behaviour. The back-alley aesthetic comes to the fore in the dark back room of The Joinery – for new viewers this area could be mistaken for a private space. Tarpaulin and shrink wrap encase a 4X2 timber construction with steps and swinging door, inviting the viewer to step up, and in, to play out a fantasy for the glory hole viewer. All the elements and structures that Winter has conceived of for The Joinery claustrophobically turn in on each other. In one instance a ventilation hose sidewinds inside a case of perspex. Winter does give us moments of release in his glimmering lightboxes which include ordered geometrical elements. But the artist’s rough and ready stagecraft, where close physical acts could be potentially played out, prevent distant celestial reflection. If not so inclined, you can imagine others getting down and dirty in a back-alley somewhere, whilst looking up and beyond the blocked gutters at a night sky. If Hultén’s desire is to escape the ordinary, Miks Metrevics for Dublin Contemporary has all he needs in the literal everyday. His piecemeal installation Returning home to the hotel by following an unknown path afer a long day makes visible what is hidden, out of reach, out of time and place with bountiful modesty. The Latvian artist achieves ownership of his room unlike the majority of artists at Earlesforth Terrace, with his faded pencil inscriptions such as Silence of the Walls (Earlsforth Terrace) / 49 days ago, along with IV bags and lines that loop over tree branches and drip rain water onto a drenched shirt. Time for Metrevics is measured in days, which is a very linear, anti-institutional time clock. It is almost as if the artist is relishing, or making precious, every single moment of his itinerant life into something to be revisited. Pancake mask / 8789 days ago is a black and white photocopy of a photograph that depicts a boy whom I presume to be Metrevics holding a pancake over his face. The time frame of “8789 days ago” is

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difficult to estimate at first – the equivalent 24 years is much easier to manage but less precious about time. This continues throughout Metrevics’ artworks, which builds up into a cohesive installation that acts more like a insular journal of the artist’s travels; the traces that he has left and the promise of returning in An unthinkable calm. As a pledge, I left a note with a promise to return / 350 days ago. I hid the photo memory card in the split, under the stone. It has a photo of me looking far beyond / 350 days ago is displayed as a poster tube (with photo inside), which is then wedged into a sneaker and leans against an untreated wall at Earlsforth Terrace. Once again the artist’s rangy titles give the viewer a peek at his visual diary. Even more poignant is when the artist lists out the titles and subjects in pictureless frames stacked against the same wall. By only allowing the viewer a textual glimpse of what is represented in the photograph, the artist is offering the viewer a chance to personalise the images and sadly, de-individualise the artist; what amount to an act of great generosity on the part of Metrevics.

ugly one. What look like very personalised and individualistic sculptures, paintings and drawings, are in fact a shared taste of aesthetic under the pseudonym or brand Vedovamazzei. Subjectivity aside, before even knowing what materials were used to form their works, the best complement I could come up with was ‘fascinatingly ugly’. After reading the labels the ugly aesthetic took on an even uglier nature when I noticed human ashes were listed (ashes from American prisoners who died on death row). On the floor two wooden pallets stood vertically with identical incongruous lengths of injured timber trusting from each. On closer inspection one of the wooden pallets was found to be cast in bronze. Hany Armanious, who represented Australia at the Venice Biennale (2011), worked with similar materials, subjects and illusory techniques to represent banality. However, Vedovamazze’s inclusion of the real pallet muse displayed beside the bronze version distances this work from visual trickery and puts it more in line with Beuysian shamanistic rituals to induce a shot of the ordinary. Equating Dublin Contemporary with the Venice Biennale or Documenta is symptomatic of Irish culture punching above one’s weight. And who said the Biennale was ever thematically cohesive? Surely, this is not the aim of such carnivals of the spectacular? The Italian Pavilion at Venice this year was by and far the biggest curatorial joke that I have ever experienced, while this year’s Istanbul Biennale has been termed by some as ‘too clean’. Irish mouths have been full to the teeth with SILENCE...JAMES JOYCE ... W.B. YEATS ... TERRIBLE BEAUTY ... LYON BIENNALE ... OFFICE OF WHATEVER ... as if almighty text had the cohesive power to make this menagerie of trend, subjectivity and compromise into soul mates. Final thoughts are subsumed by Earlsforth Terrace itself, which is the star of Dublin Contemporary, provoking a plethora of word associations stemming from the architectural signatures that remain to give blatant hints as to the building’s previous function as a school of engineering and medicine. With postmodern propriety the curators left these architectural trophies distractingly naked to the viewer’s eye. There is no question that this hands-off aesthetic was fiscally motivated, but Aidan Dunne does write that “Earlsfort Terrace suits the rough-and-ready povera aesthetic”. The question that I am left with has chicken and egg written all over it: did Earlsforth Terrace influence the povera tag, or the art. Artist like Alejandro Almanza Pereda and his Horror Vacui (2011) worked well situated in the main venue, playing with

The collaborative Italian duo of Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino have a poetry of their own, albeit an

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materiality, readymade appropriation and its re-articulation; and a certain element of precariousness in how the gilt-framed antique oil painting was seemingly plastered to the wall by a cake of concrete. As viewers, if we did make an effort to ignore the architectural compartmentalisation of the artists at Dublin Contemporary’s main venue at Earlsforth Terrace, and view the peripheral exhibitions that happened during its eight week duration as part of an expanded whole, the positives outweigh the rumoured negatives. The inception and anticipation of Dublin Contemporary 2011 has made these two Autumn months of art events the most vibrant that an Irish public has had a chance to experience on their doorstep. If Dublin Contemporary is to measure up to Documenta and Venice, the process should start now and personal ownership of the event needs to be checked at the door. Let’s hope this is not the last chance saloon for a similar event to take place on these shores.

OCTOBER 2011 (#25): A Wild West Imaginative Space

The Devil’s Spine Band, Galway Arts Festival, 20 – 23 July. *BY ÁINE PHILIPS*

THE DEVIL’S SPINE BAND submerged audiences in its beautifully strange imaginative world for four nights during the July 2011 Galway Arts Festival. Inhabiting the Radisson Live Lounge – a cavernous clubby space – the multidisciplinary show incorporated live improvised performance and music, a sculptural installation set, costumes and screened video. Unlike much of the populist and predictable GAF program, The Devil’s Spine Band offered innovative and unconventional performance and musical expressions contained within an astounding composition of forms and visual objects, garments and video art. This work exemplifies the current merging of disciplines between the visual arts and other art forms typified by live art practice and much contemporary film and video. The Devil’s Spine Band are balanced on the cutting edge of new performance practice that is currently intersecting with visual art and contemporary musical composition. They are clearly unafraid to break down the traditional conventions associated with the canons of theatre in Ireland, historically oriented to text and modes of realist representation. The two and a half hour piece subsumed realism into a non-concrete series of cultural references alluding to the American Wild West, Japanese butoh and bluegrass-rock music. This reviewer was transported back into Irish childhood Sunday afternoons watching a saturation of TV cowboy western’s, their wild expressive masculine world dissolving the ennui of the weekend. The Devil’s Spine Band effected a singular critique of this pervasive cultural influence. The Devil’s Spine are also clearly influenced by recent body art and live art practices where performance is not a form of acting but a form of ‘being’ in front of audiences. The three performers improvised overlapping vignettes of gestures and movements that actualized this distinction. The compelling Olwen Fouéré alongside the playfully

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grotesque butoh dancers Gyohei Zaitsu and Maki Watanabe created mesmeric images of stunning, bizarre elegance. A woman having sex on a table with a skeleton; a whitened loin- clothed dribbling man clamping himself onto the drummer’s lap; a cross-dressed woman dangling from a noose; a white haired goddess with one breast displayed, singing a dirge...

The installation set and props by Alice Maher coalesced imagery of deserts with mining-town saloon bars into spangled phallic cacti, like obtuse fools-gold turds blushing under the raw and emotive lighting of Aedín Cosgrove. The musical score composed by Trevor Knight, (who also directed the work) in his own words, echoing the ‘spine’ of the title, “provided the backbone to the production.” With guitarist Ed Deane and percussionist Noel Bridgeman the music functioned as a hypnotic aural structure for the visual and performative elements. It produced a cohesion of the disparate and non-narrative sequence of performances. It also provided the mood and rhythms the performers responded to, incorporating sounds of howling grunting animals, country and western pastiche with haunting abstract ballads.

Aiming higher than it reached at times, the saloon style layout of the space could have encouraged more audience participation and mobility by subverting the ‘fourth wall’ and the high/low art divide. The imaginative space so strangely and gracefully constructed was unfortunately shattered in the final moments of the work as performer Gyohei Zaitsu abandoned his silent butoh character and engaged in an extended philosophical dialogue with the musicians. This rupture functioned to bring us into the realm of the ‘real’ too abruptly. The Devil’s Spine Band realised more than the sum of it’s multi disciplinary parts: it’s lateral structure produced a voluble assemblage reflecting the world of miners, gamblers, prostitutes, gunmen, lynchers and environment typical of the 19th century American west. Sunk into that world, we the audience relished the absorption.

NOVEMBER 2011 (#26): Historical Cases of the Subterranean Kind ‘Underground’, Basic Space, Dublin, 10 – 13 November.

The ‘subterranean make out’ constitutes approximately 90% of college make outs, usually synonymous with dance floor make outs—however to qualify as a subterranean make out the tonsil hockey session must take place beneath ground level. eg basement dance party, subways, storm shelter, nuclear fall out shelter, crater/canyon, in-ground pool, submarines, wells. [urbandictionary.com]

Vivienne Dick filmed a video document of the show on the preview night and with a quick turn-over, edited a 10 minute video piece that was subsequently screened behind the bar during the live show. This video added another presence to the work – like a warped mirror, evoking and repeating some of the actions and images darkly through Dick’s prescient lens. The video piece alluded to surreal film, and the dreamlike sequences of Maya Deren.

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IN 2010, Bea McMahon triggered what would become a personal interest and questioning of what it means for an artist to make artworks ‘off-site’. Friends and art publics were invited to a field that was located just off a motorway in Killinacarraig, Co. Wicklow. McMahon summarises the schedule: The event took place at dusk on the 26th of July 2010. The full moon rose at half past nine. Euniece Borland and 7 of her peers stood in eight elliptical holes excavated by Elliott O’Brien with his JCB. She was clad in a customised pattern by textile designer Pamela Quinn. The long axes of the holes ranged in size from 20 meters to 1 meter across. The holes when filmed from a rotating tripod at 180rpm formed an earth animation. Also a Nexstar Celestron telescope with on board GPS tracking was there to capture the launch. Luckily, the night was clear. The results of this field event were presented at Mermaid Arts Centre between Monday 11th October and Sun 17th October 2010. McMahon’s literal marking of territory and acts of demarcation by passive Wicca ritual was a peacock display of modern witchcraft, not concerned with the social mores of the day, but an embedded subjective reflection on the self, family and friends. Albeit in a very beautiful and poetic manner, what the resulting film Field demonstrated in the gallery was how ‘off-site’ art events are for the initiated, not the public at large (in no way am I advocating general public inclusiveness, as was the case of French artist Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day (2003).

Huyghe was interested in “creating a ritual that the people in the town would actually celebrate because it’s based on what they share.” Although McMahon’s event and film is an example of preordained documentation conducting the event, in my view her film approximates the creative poetry of Huyghe’s Streamside Day, minus the perceived importance of site-specificity and context that off-site art works proclaim as their purpose for existing: ‘context’ is the first word you learn in art college. It is a cold and hard fact that art in general generates poetry within its own ecosystem, with or without the gaze of the reluctant public. Further afield in time and space, the artist-run Basic Space Dublin did a little bit of artistic digging themselves in November of 2011 in the group show Underground. Basic Space is situated behind the concert and events venue Vicar Street in Dublin city—across the road from the National College of Art & Design (NCAD). Without the economic recession these artist-run spaces would never exist.Vacant property owners are beginning to learn the benefits of occupying artists, including the reduction of the rates or the removal of derelict property penalties. This is why there is an influx of landlords jumping on the art appreciation bandwagon. The collective of students who found and run Basic Space study at the art college, and because NCAD has “helped” them out with insurance, the clause in the contract is that the artists who can show there have to be registered with NCAD. But that is where the institutional connections end. After experiencing the opening of their group show it is clear that Basic Space is what NCAD Gallery should be but never could due to departmental land grabbing. Along with McMahon’s Field, this group exhibition sparked the following reflection on what is a specific form of off-site activity, which includes subjective notions regarding identity, especially within the collective ‘smoke screen’ at Basic Space. So let’s first get the names of the artists out of the way, not as an act of dismissal, but as a way to avoid a segregated overview that splits the individual artist’s work into paragraphs: Sara Amido – Kari Cahill – Peter Donnellan –Michael FitzGerald – Greg Howie – Andreas Kindler von Knobloch – John Ryan – Daniel Tuomey – Tom David Watt. Even though

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I picked up on names associated with specific objects in the group show, I felt that it was important to promote the statement that the collective of individuals and Basic Space were making, rather than the usual obligation to name artist with artwork. You know who you are! The fact is—and the artists may not want to hear this—it was difficult to differentiate between individual works due to the nature of the artists’ joint intervention in the substructure of the warehouse space. But this is what set this show apart from other manifestations of this type of off-site intervention. Underground is made up of artists who are either current or recent graduates from NCAD. So the presumption was that the exhibition was going to be a hit and miss student show, with strong individual traits displayed with bright lights within white MDF partitions. From its inception over a year ago, Basic Space has avoided this institutional structure for the display of art. Sometimes it works, other times it is more compromise than intention.

It was the opening night that informed my overall reception of the work. I cannot say if it was nighttime that helped the strong experiential aspect of this group show, but two decisions by the artists involved made this show into something out of the norm. First, as previously mentioned, was their joint intervention into the dirt trench in the space. The artists did this by digging down and/or populating the ditches with objects, from a projector to a white tile floor. In another instance an artist excavated to head height so the public could venture down a passage that had a precarious clay overhang. The piles of rubble extracted were also utilised. Second, the decision to use a smoke machine in the space was the reason why works and identities at the opening night melted together, reflecting our current urban landscape’s collective occupy culture: any leaks of individualism was camouflaged in a sfumato haze. One artist built a granite wall with ice ‘keystones’ inserted in parts of the wall. Over time, part of the wall would collapse as the ice rocks melted. Another rubble-heap was rubbished with empty shampoo bottles and other plastic containers of sickly colourful substances that were ejaculated into handmade craters in a neighbouring ditch. These ditches and heaps of rubble were punctuated with one artist’s mounds of compacted concrete/earth to form seemingly half-sunken spheres; art objects that rejected procurement. On the night Basic Space was filled with students and lecturers from NCAD. Speaking with some of the lecturers there was an acknowledge-ment of identities but a disconnection with the works that these recent or current students had made for this specific group show. Although Basic Space and the artists that show there are affiliated with NCAD, there is autonomy. It also proves that student-artists don’t necessarily have to work within the institutional parameters that breed individual ‘specialness’ and competition to be seen and heard. Gordon Matta-Clark once described studying architecture at Cornell University as ‘his first trap’.[1] But it also must be stated that what Matta-Clark calls “a trap” is the very thing that he reacted to in his work, so without the institutional trap the artist has nothing to break free from. Precursors to this type of artistic digging have often been mired in a form of

An existing trench filled with clay and rubble inscribes the foundations of the Basic Space warehouse—a location that is found by word-of-mouth rather than signage. This subterranean scar was presumably made from testing the foundations to construct an infrastructure for a future build before the Irish economic bust. It was also a constant reminder for those who run Basic Space that the building was set for demolition in December 2012.

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institutional critique. Take for instance two works by American performance artist Chris Burden, Honest Labour, Vancouver (1979) and Exposing the Foundations of the Museum (1986 [ongoing]). The title of the latter tells us that this is Burden’s obvious critique of the institution of the museum. What the title does not say is that this work has travelled a circuit of museums since 1986, a niche where performance and nonobject art practitioners can infiltrate the art market or Biennale. However, the former, Honest Labour, is another type of institutional critique, albeit more modest in size and reputational gains. The work’s back-story starts with Burden visiting an art college in Vancouver, and instead of speaking about his work to a group of students from the college, he simply, but laboriously, dug a trench. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975) is more in keeping with the spectacle of Underground at Basic Space—not to mention that Basic Space’s warehouse similarities to Pier 52 New York (the site of Matta-Clark’s Day’s End). Matta-Clark’s series of cuts in the walls, ceiling and floor of the derelict warehouse space were performative inscriptions to allow the elements of light and water to puncture the space, a sublime spectacle. Day’s End has a poetry and romanticism about it that is not too distant from the aesthetic ideals of one Caspar David Friedrich. The existence of Basic Space and the Underground artists’ cultivation of the site also questions how art production is always bound to the fluctuating market value of property, calling to mind Matta-Clark’s collaborative project Fake Estates (1973-74) with the Anarchitecture Group, who collectively bought unusable plots of land in Queens and Staten Island New York for $25-75.

There is another work by Matta-Clark that is a direct precursor to what the Underground artists achieved at Basic Space. The contradiction is this was not MattaClark on the periphery or outside the conformity of the institute, this was Matta-Clark in the gallery. The work in question begins with Matta-Clark being issued a warrant for his arrest by the New York Port Authority because he had compromised the architecture of the pier and warehouse with his Day’s End ‘cuts’: the artist promptly fled to Paris. In Descending Steps for Batan (1977) at Yvon Lambert Gallery Paris, Matta-Clark dug a hole in the cellar of the gallery as a tribute to his recently deceased twin brother Sebastian (nicknamed “Batan”). Matta-Clark fleeing the scene of the crime drags up the history of Caravaggio’s exile to Malta, where the artist would end up imprisoned in a bell-shaped cell in the ground. The image of Matta-Clark in the basement of Yvon Lambert Gallery Paris in 1997 is a portrait of the artist on the periphery. These material excavations by the artist as exile require physical labour rather than hands-off concept. New York artist Mike Bouchet also got his hands dirty with his The New York Dirty Room—a jokey re-enactment of Walter de Maria’s Earth Room (1977)—wherein the artist filled New York Gallery Maccarone Inc. with compost from a DIY store and Riker’s Island penal colony in 2005. The Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s You replicated the previous acts of Burden, Matta-Clark, and the Underground artists, by digging up the commercial gallery floor of Gavin Brown Enterprise New York in 2007. You can’t help but see these acts as marketdriven actions. However, Jerry Saltz proclaims that Gavin Brown “gallery has been a site of experimentation, provocation, and community” in the New York art scene since the ’90s, but also observes that Fischer’s You was “Intensely lit and rigidly framed” in the gallery.[2] Fischer’s You is in one sense a replication and translocation of art history

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into a commercial gallery, but as excavated absence rather than artefact to mark that history.

As current and recent students at an art college, the nine artists (including the initiators of Basic Space) achieved something that is connected, but also autonomous from the art college. Seminal exhibitions seem to happen within rather than without the institution, such as Freeze in 1988. However, whereas Freeze was underpinned by a desire for art market recognition by its main organiser Damien Hirst via the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, Underground’s camouflaging seemed counterintuitive to such aims: the identities of artists and artworks was blurred. This exhibition says more about how art is taught in art colleges and how it always finds new ways and means to exist outside the institution. To my mind Underground is the most thought-provoking, critical and crucial exhibition to occur in Dublin for some time, and it proves the point that art happens when necessity—the mother of invention—rears its head from the rubble.

DECEMBER 2011 (#27): Feedback[1]

David Beattie, Karl Burke and Chris Fite-Wassilak, Galway Arts Centre, 2 September – 1 October.

*BY MICHAELE CUTAYA*

FOR THE MONTH of September the Galway Arts Centre hosted Feedback, a collaboration between artists Karl Burke and David Beattie with writer Chris FiteWassilak. The exhibition juxtaposed works by both artists, a text by Fite-Wassilak printed on the sleeve of an empty book cover – part of the project is to fill this cover with a book made of responses from the show – and a room where all three collaborated towards an installation. These works are to “tap into our uneasy relationship to the hidden processes of the natural world.”[2] In his work, Beattie stages objects – generally found – to interact with each other in some minimal way: here we have Between where a sheet of paper pressed between two speakers on a plinth is set vibrating by the sound waves; or in Feedback, a

Another type of translocation in relation to the spectacle of artistic digging occurred at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in the summer 2011 with Mark Manders’ projected slide sequence Two Interconnected Houses (originally proposed for Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, 2010). Intriguing and experiential in and of itself, the photographic document acted as a proposal for a real work by the artist, which entailed connecting two houses, one fabricated cabin situated in the Guggenhein Museum New York, and another across the road from the Museum. In essence the photographic tableau was an excuse for Manders to conceptually stage his museum-like works, minus the labour. What is more befitting for this discussion is the subterranean passage from house-to-house which is a perfect analogy of the artist’s vain attempt to dig their way out of a ‘house’ of strict parameters only to end up in the museum, like Burden and Matta-Clark before them.

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crunched up ball of tin foil on a block of concrete is ‘revealed’ – interviewed? – by a lamp on a microphone stand; or Bag where a plastic bag held down by a lump of concrete and bitumen is swayed by an electric fan. As found and manufactured these objects are not simple physical entities but endowed with a history which suggests an allegorical reading to these arrangements. One could speculate for instance that Bag proposes a meditation on the use and abuse of fossil fuel – bitumen, plastic bag, electric windmill – or that the lamp of ‘Feedback’ might serve some purpose in the mining for aluminum and thus helps in its transformation into everyday tinfoil. Or not.

Burke’s work is more straightforwardly phenomenological in its scrutiny of our perception of the physical world. The first work presented here is an hour long video Another Time, Another Place, which shares Beattie’s minimal approach in the set up of a series of relationships between inside and outside/natural and artificial. In his long still shot of a gallery wall at dusk, a window on the left hand side offers a view of a street and a bridge with its human and mechanical traffic, as daylight fades, the gallery gets darker and a projection on the wall becomes visible. It is a sphere or an unidentified celestial body, which suggests the rising of the moon, while outside the street-lights are coming on. In a previous video piece, 186.282, light was the subject of another contrast; its actual speed was defied by the recorded slowness of the sun’s progress on a wall. A second work by Burke, Untitled, occupies the middle room of the first floor gallery thus offering a variety of perspectives on its form. The irregular three-dimensional arrangement of five triangular pieces of birch plywood - three are painted black while two are left naked – folded and unfolded like a Mannerist sculpture as one stepped around it; at times bold and black, at others barely more than an outline in the gallery space. Fite-Wassilak’s text works as a frame for the exhibition: it proposes a rethinking of phenomenology. Objecting to the reductionist approach currently adopted towards experience, he suggests a broader understanding of how we apprehend the world’s phenomena: unlike the “sensing yourself sensing” motto of too many art exhibitions[3] whose “brand of awareness [...] is of an inward wondering and revelation,” he suggests an attempt to sense what others are sensing without the dramatic unveiling of processes “Everything. is. exactly. As it seems.”[4] In this regard, the most interesting in its open-endedness was the installation in the front room of the first floor gallery, ‘Feedback’, which was the explicitly collaborative part of the exhibition. Various objects were disposed around the room suggesting some elusive relationships between them; a diagram on the wall introduces geometrical figures for each of the four elements, which may be found in the objects proposed: a bottle of water, a broken lightbulb, a stone, a block of wood, a gust of wind from the open window blowing a flimsy piece of plastic, figures also, a circle, a square, a rectangle. This felt like a somewhat forced attempt to bring out the forces of nature within everyday objects; the hidden processes in domestic scale. The most intriguing aspect, however, was the placing of a chair between two speakers on either side of the room, which were emitting low frequency sounds: the chair suggested that this might be the point where both emissions could be perceived. Or not. This attempt to find the limit of a sound range, or the point where two sound ranges meet suggested an understanding of phenomenology, which instead of an inward quest of the self, would test its outer limits and encounters others. In its attempt to re- invent community, Jean-Luc Nancy proposes:

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There is no original or origin of identity. What holds the place of an “origin” is the sharing of singularities. This means that this “origin” – the origin of community or the originary community – is nothing other than the limit: the origin is the tracing of the borders upon which or along which singular beings are exposed.[5] Overall Feedback the exhibition came across as an intriguing set of proposals to explore and question, opening the way to further investigations into a relational phenomenology.

Also in September this year, researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tracking Apparatus) at Gran Sasso announced with all due precautions that they had recorded neutrinos – ghostly subatomic particles – travelling faster than the speed of light. Subir Sarkar, the head of particle theory at Oxford University, commented:

JANUARY 2012 (#28): Death and Sensuality

A group exhibition of contemporary Irish artists, Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco 4 November – 3 December.

*BY LAUREN HISADA* >>>

What is the relationship between death and sensuality? One has to be careful in choosing the recipient for such a question; some may fall into a state of irreconcilable disturbance when simply asked to consider the position that there might, in fact, be a relationship. How could the seemingly diametrically opposed concepts of pain and pleasure (in terms of sensation and action – both given and received) overlap? Interconnect? This nexus between ‘Death and Sensuality’ was explored by 10 Irish artists in Jim Ricks’ curatorial at Mina Dresden Gallery San Francisco. The artists, focusing specifically on appropriation, generalise their personal inspirations and preoccupations in order to dissect a larger point of interest for the more heterogeneous American audience: that violence, death, love and sensuality affect every individual on both a subjective and objective basis – they pervade every culture. The consequence of this is that viewing Death and Sensuality (fittingly named for the controversial writings of renegade surrealist Georges Bataille) suggests viewing society’s mutual points of unification and division. After all, death and sensuality have time and time again proven their uncanny ability to provoke both. The styles of the artists here are diverse. Each approach varies distinctly from the next and the result is a conglomerate show of talents that range from drawing, to video

The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.[6]

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installation, to collage, makeshift book works and more. Any potential for dissonance is effectively eliminated through the collective loyalty to theme and the considered application of each individual’s craft, which in turn results in a viewer experience that is both multifaceted and multisensory. Sometimes there exists a fine line between appropriating art and stealing it. Perhaps some of you will remember the famous lawsuit between photographer Patrick Cariou and painter/photographer Richard Prince, or the repercussions of Jeff Koons’ appropriation of Art Rogers’ photograph into String of Puppies in 1992. The general consensus among the larger art community seems to be that copyright problems can be avoided through precaution and observance for the law. The interesting thing about Roisin Byrne is that she unabashedly neglects both. However, it is her reckless abandon (in combination with almost endearing – or at least amusing – manipulative tactics) that has awarded Byrne a devoted audience of those who enjoy the dual package of ‘keep ya guessing’ entertainment, and special circumstances in which to evaluate the themes of ownership, integrity and perception.

With Massage: “On the 4th of December 2009 the artist Roisin Byrne placed an order for a neon sign intended to be at all times turned off. On hearing she was in fact the second artist that week to order such a thing she ordered the other artist’s instead, 2010 (simply titled The Medium by original artist Ryan Gander) a broken ‘a’ in a red neon sign spelling out Massage calls into question the connotations – sexual or otherwise – of such a display, while Byrne focuses on the effect of her appropriating (commandeering) the piece.” To be fair, it’s not a fresh concept. The origin, for both artists, is media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, the man behind the phrase “The medium is the message,” and subsequently the novel The Medium is the Massage, but Byrne would still seem the guiltier of the two. It’s not as overt as her posing as a horticulturist in order to steal plants off Turner Prize-winning ‘environmental’ artist, Simon Starling, or shop- lifting – then ingesting – Swarovski crystals, but the message is communicated. Nearby, two tragic and iconic images stand side-by-side in which lovers and family meet death and destruction – all the while maintaining (arguably) their close-knit bonds. In Tom Molloy’s Family, we’re met with a book excerpt: a portrait of Joseph Goebbels with his wife and children, who grin at the viewer with Stepford eeriness, and an accompanying text which details the untimely demise of the children at the indirect hand of their parents. Wholly unaltered, these pages, carefully chosen by Molloy, act solely as an examination of those who bring love, and subsequently death, out of love. It highlights a horrific incident, yes, but also the emotional complexities surrounding death as a ‘family activity’. Continuing the theme of infamous historical figures, Lovers is a drawing and near replica of a photograph of Benito Mussolini and his girlfriend Clara Petacci, strung up by their feet to be defiled and stoned following a swift and merciless execution by anti-fascist leader Walter Audisio (the squeamish need not google this execution, please take heed). The implications of such an event are chillingly grisly, as is the content of Molloy’s image, but the fact that it’s a drawn replica helps to distract from the horror of the scene and instead calls attention to the rose-tinted afterglow of a couple who died in each other’s arms (the drawing is, conveniently, rose tinted). Across the room, another piece beckons. Without a doubt, one of the more ar- resting works in the show is the video loop The Logical End of All Media by young artist James McCann – mind you, visibility has never been synonymous with aesthetic appeal, and

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certainly not finesse. Watching an obese man toying with his magically endless supply of belly blubber against the backdrop of a warped Rebecca Black (tween-pop one-hit wonder), lazily slurring the words to her song, ‘Friday’, isn’t most people’s idea of a good time. Much like a gory train wreck, you may find yourself hopelessly drawn to the gyrating abomination, despite every molecule in your body shouting itself hoarse in frantic protest. In a sense, it is a logical end to all media – this obliviously sad picture of twisted eroticism and personified death could hardly reach a more ridiculous culmination. At the same time, Channel 4’s modern-day freak show programmes never struggle to pull in an audience.

After receiving this comprehensive reminder of the various faces of diseased genitalia, I was relieved to look up and spy James’ father, painter Leo McCann’s alluring study of synesthetic reds, greys and ochres. These, confined to skewed shapes and tentative lines, provide a voyeuristic glimpse into the recesses of the subject’s haunt- ed mind (whether it be McCann’s, a Freudian exaggeration of his normal impulses, or an examination of another character entirely). Fear of one’s id, specifically one’s sexual or violent desires and the inability to control them, is explored through the medium of acrylic. Interestingly, although McCann’s two displayed paintings, (Protected Corner) Under Arm Alarm (Table) and Doing No Great Harm, were not created in conjunction, their semblance of theme and tone would indicate strongly that they were fueled by the very same internal predicament, or interest – possibly obsession. Here, even though the content of the dreamscapes (the scenes could be more accurately likened to those of a nightmare) is not explicit, guilt and powerless- ness tinge the works as evidently as a bloodstain. If they were placed alongside a frenzied Basquiat (it would render them lucid in comparison), they could serve as that brief moment of partial clarity which precedes a mental breakdown. Yanking subtlety by its elegant neck, emptying its pockets and administering a swift shot to the head before leaving it to rot in some anonymous ditch, Alan Phelan’s Watch with Brian the Birth of a Nation cuts straight to the chase with his dopey papiermâché Brian Cowen mask, made from newspaper clip- pings from the bank bailout in Ireland. It’s equipped with goggles – not that you’ll need them – so the mask can be worn while viewing the video beside it. Here, Cowen leers on as ‘a nation is born’, or more specifically, as an apple is expelled from a man’s anus on an unrelenting splitscreened loop. There may have been no quicker way to elicit a response, but flagrance can, at times, distract from the point (as is evidenced by some of the 1970s works by performance and fellow ‘shock artist’ Paul McCarthy). As an intrinsically insular piece, the risk of alienation was already high; perhaps a 1980s-style boudoir soft-focus would have done it more justice. German-born Benjamin DeBurca – ostensibly the most seasoned of this crowd in terms of craft – needs no soft focus with his aptly titled Romantische Reise Durch Das Alte Deutschland (A Romantic Journey Through Old Germany). A series of expertly collaged illustrated scenes and a peaceful quelling to the fire of some of the louder pieces, two

McCann’s other piece, a set of 10 hastily assembled ‘zines’ entitled Large Armies with Sexually Transmitted Diseases, looks exactly as the title would suggest. It must be said, though, that any humour which stems from its shocking improbability is in danger of being outshone by, what some might view as, a blind lust for the subversive.

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sets of diptychs delicately traverse the theme as DeBurca infuses his multilayered images with personal resonance. Simultaneously, cleverly carved areas of ambiguity are left open to viewer interpretation. Opposite, two Jane Fondas (or Cat Ballous, depending on your familiarity with the films of Elliot Silverstein) stare blankly at Brian Cowen (or, more likely, the anal excursion adjacent) with sunken doe eyes. With noose around the Fon- das’ necks, Meet Your Doppelganger Then You Die by Breda Lynch would be far from comical if not for the anachronistic bouffants and dresses reminiscent of a Western parody. Lynch would seem to have a doppelgänger herself, what with all of her drawings materialising in sets of two – each only subtly distinguishable from its partner. A beautiful thing (tangible or metaphorical) that is destined to die, is as old a motif as the ritual sacrifices that entranced Bataille, and as modern and trendy as the mournful music videos of sexpot-du-jour Lana Del Rey.

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Towering above the Fondas, we find Nina Amazing’s acid-induced post- apocalyptic battle scene where bright-eyed glamour queen ‘SS’ babies fight ‘teleBOOBtoobies’ below douche bombs and ‘TYRA’[Banks]-dactyls. Despite no discernable knowledge of the mechanisms behind digital art, her chosen medium (the artist is first and foremost a cancer researcher), and no concept of layout or perspective, the magic that flows throughout what can only be deemed an epic, prevails. Unquestionably, the chaotic scene speaks to a war on values and iconography in contemporary pop culture – the flashy art duo behind Goatsilk would be proud – and amazingly, Nina’s freshness of thought bypasses all pre- tense. The ability to maintain innocence in a piece that places you in the same physical space as two bombs constructed out of vaginal douches (DOUCHEotov cocktails, the sculptural element of the work) is a special talent, to say the least. A parallel dimension where blind eyes are opened to the garish idiocy behind mainstream television thrives in Alan Butler’s Some Kind of Agitprop Monster, where alien clones of Miley Cyrus and Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie Brad- shaw) collapse under their own unfeasibility. Below the work is an appropriately meaningless bit of Internet slang GAH! emblazoned over the Armani logo. This logo, the literal base on which we might evaluate Butler’s Agitprop Monster, translates not only in its symbolism, but also in its colours, which are based on America’s national terror alert system. In an all too perfect arrangement, the imminence of terror appears to be measured on proximity to the screen... Finally, we find the most outlandish excerpt of reality (and most blatant meld- ing of death and sensuality) brought to our attention by artist group Not Abel. A red sign, entitled Blinds Wide Open, quietly scrolls the lyrics to ‘She’ by musical artist Tyler The Creator. Here, the themes of psychopathic violence, necrophilia and true love merged to create one surprisingly listenable ‘zone out and zone in’ rap song, but it must be said that the words, being barely audible in the song, are slightly more forceful when displayed in LED: “I just wanna drag your lifeless body to the forest and fornicate with it but that’s because I’m in love with you, cunt.” If death and sensuality – as abrasive or antisocial acts – have been banished to the sidelines of modern Western society, rap (and “futuristic rap-rave”) seem to have effectively beaten the system. Someone should investigate to see if Patrick Bateman is not ghost writing for Tyler. A succinct end to a show that is wholly unabridged.

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MARCH 2012 (#29): Repetitive ‘Stain’ Injury

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Antti Leppänen, The Second Iteration, Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast, 23 February – 31 March.

Belfast may be pusillanimous and self-obsessed but which great cosmopolitan was it who decided that these were bad things.[1] DANIEL JEWESBURY’S brilliantly sardonic essay ‘On a report of Parochialism in Belfast’ for The Vacuum, holds up a mirror to the Irish, not just a ‘parochial’ Belfast. He says it all (Irishness) without saying anything new. It is the way that it is said that makes it so ingestible; nit-picking an Irish culture that doesn’t deny its idiosyncracies, but embraces them. But from someone who is neither a stray lamb “Laganlullabite”[2] nor Northy (a southern Culchie myself ) I look on Belfast – with my art goggles firmly strapped on – with fondness and excitement.

My first real stay-over experience of the city was in 2008 when installing a solo show at Queen Street Gallery & Studios (QSS). At the time the Republic’s economic boom was receding, retrospectively unbeknownst to anyone, no matter what the hoard of clairvoyant news media economists pronounce now in hindsight. While Belfast (in my experience) was still on a 1970s curfew with bar food only on the menu after 6pm. The term ‘curfew’ is something we can’t take at face-value; it is the antithesis of visibility and transparency. It is the governmental prescription of curfews that influences covert behaviour. The contradiction of the curfew is that these dead-of-night activities, practiced in the light-of-day, can be imagined as comic shenanigans, not crime: is tardiness really a crime? Speaking of curfews, on the day I went to see Antti Leppänen experiential installation at QSS the always accommodating and long-time administrator of the gallery, Brendan O’Neill, informed me that there was a late-night opening that very night (the first thursday of the month). It could be said that the curfew is synonymous with drinking hours, the same way drink is synonymous with Irishness; so why is Leppänen, a Finnish Artist, spraying drink (wine) on the timber floor of QSS? Is he trying to fit in? Or is Finnishness just like Irishness? His setup is economical: an above head-height, rectangular aluminum frame is decorated with a high-pressure misting system that connects to a floor-bound plastic container of wine. Every 15 minutes the wine is piped through the misting apparatus that sprays an achromatic mist that gradually settles on the floor as a puddle of wine and subsequent stain: with that whiff of stale drink that you get when a bar door opens the morning after. Depending on the moment when you arrive to Leppänen’s work – 15-, 14-, 2 minutes, on-time – the experience of waiting to experience an event got me thinking, speculating, reminiscing, conversing about the art universe, and the galaxies within.

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Cosmopolitanly speaking, Belfast has grown up if the alluvial fan seating that flows out of once dark, greasy spoon tea joints is anything to go by. It was in one of these new coffee houses where I picked up The Vacuum, an impressive Belfast publication. In comparison with Dublin’s tinted-glass art scene, art seems to visibly peek out in public spaces in Belfast.

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A year ago, almost to the day, Peter FitzGerald performed a similar response to the QSS gallery as Leppänen, by painting gestured rectangles directly onto the wall without any other support. I wrote then about ‘excess’ and ‘baggage’: “gapping into the blank white ‘between’ spaces of FitzGerald’s rectangles, [the artist’s] Wall Works give as much as you are willing to bring with you as a viewer”.[3] Back to Leppänen’s work, the viewer has to endure (or enjoy) the long interval between the apparatus spraying then tinkling juice on the floor for what is a shortlived experience (10 seconds, if that?). Leppänen’s minimal setup and temporal conditions of reception got me thinking about art and artists and their self-proscribed rules: artists avoid entertaining (big no-no); durational performance is saturated in banality; and any other formal decision by the contemporary artist is either ironically framed or politically motivated. Don’t talk to me about expression. It’s an even bigger NO-NO to mention theatre in an art context. Saying that, all the economy of Leppänen’s The Second Iteration is excessively theatrical in how the viewer is left to wait, for nothing. This transubstantiation from colourless mist to puddled wine is Catholic theatre at its best; the fear of God works as an absence, not the bearded Joe framed on your wall.

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Just like drink and the Irish, wine is synonymous with art; but it’s an all thumbs relationship. A decade ago an artist gave me some sage advice, which was delivered in jest, or in all seriousness?: “Making it in the art world comes down to how you hold a wine glass.” Was he referring to middle-class awkwardness, for those of us who were not born with golden spoon table manners? Or was he speaking specifically about artists, who end up becoming working-class, if not already; with those dirty nails, splintered hands, empty pockets and repetitive strain injury. Speaking of class, the Victorian, and by all outward appearances in the portraiture of the day, aristocratic art critic John Ruskin, who was a son of a wealthy wine merchant, would have stood before Leppänen’s work today (of course after some aesthetic climatisation in some mental institution) and spoke of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1523-24), and the revelry and excess that the god signified for the Romans (and practicised after hours by the Catholic church). As I stand, or remember standing before Leppänen’s wine stains, I am left with an image of Ruskin hoofing and slippling on the ‘slop’ on the floor of QSS in his equestrian leathers.

MARCH 2012 (#30): UNDERDOG

MERLIN JAMES, ‘In the Gallery’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 3 February – 28 March.

BACK IN 2007 on a snow burdened day in New York, a friend and I traipsed from one end of Manhattan to the other in sub-zero temperatures to see Merlin James’ solo Painting to Painting at the New York Studio School (curated by David Cohen). This was the perfect pedagogical setting for the artist’s work, if you revisit James’ lecturecum-essay ‘Painting per se’ (2002), that reveals in one instance his negotiations at interview stage regarding a teaching job in London, whereby oppositional teaching

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methods of interdisciplinarity and specialisation were pitched across the interview table.

At the New York Studio School James’ paintings were presented with thrift-store generosity; a mishmash of years and styles compressed together. Whereas, the cold modernism of the Douglas Hyde Gallery architecture that frames his current show in Dublin – combined with the distance between individual works – forces the spectator to meditate on each and every painting as a series of individual tableaux. In this sense, James is right to term this specific exhibition in Dublin as a “micro-retrospective.”[1] In 2002 James took up the post of Alex Katz Chair in Painting at Cooper Union New York. This appointment was inaugurated with James’ essay ‘Painting per se’ (what is a cultish, under-the-mattress document for painters). The essay introduces James’ life-long championing of Alex Katz; although unfashionable to do so then. But now, because Katz is so fashionable with critics and the current art market, James’ championing of him doesn’t feel so eccentric.

More than anything else, ‘Painting per se’ is revealingly autobiographical; with some ‘other painter’ bashing along the way. Painting is at its best visually, and as discourse, when it is adversarially preachy. The reason why ‘Painting per se’ is important to painting/painters, is because it is manifesto-like in an era when manifestoes are unfashionable: bravado went out of fashion with Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko’s bombastic ‘Statement’ in 1943. James’ loaded observation that “You will have to be against a lot painting, to be for other painting,”[2] attests that painters are always pinching the critical trigger, especially when its comes to their own kind. The main villain of James’ essay and recent public talk at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is Gerhard Richter; accompanied by henchmen, Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud and Martin Kippenberger – describing the latter’s painting enterprise as the “Kippenberger-effect.”[3] Excluding Freud and Auerbach, they are all serious pranksters. Kippenberger and his partner in crimes against painting, Albert Oehlen, devised a scenario in which they would seriously paint badly in the 1980s. In a recent interview, Oehlen revealed his bad- painting-ideology: “I mean, you have to do it seriously [bad painting]. You have to take responsibility. You cannot just do it as a side project and make an arrogant attitude, a gesture. I think Dieter Roth could not have done it because he was not a painter. You have to become a painter and hold your head out the window. You have to give it an importance, and I did that, so that’s why I could do it. [laughs]”[4] I saw the results of Oehlen’s ‘imbecilism’ for the first time as part of Charles Satchii’s Triumph of Painting in 2005, and while ignorant of the works’ raison d’être, there was something really memorable about how bad they were, or was that Postmodernism talking? James’ work is the odd counterpoint to what good painting is: and he wears the position of underdog well. He is the bankrupt Rembrandt to Top Dog Rubens; a resolute Georges Braque as apposed to restless Pablo Picasso; an obscure Meindert Hobbema (who he pays tribute to in Lock 1987, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery ) rather

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Unsurprisingly, Katz is still the unmentionable painter in art schools, and today’s painter would only bring him up to slag him off. The main treatise of the essay is the waning singularity and inwardness of painting amid the taught interdisciplinary of contemporary art practice – like the truism asks and answers: “Why are all the conceptual artists painting now? Because it’s a good idea.”

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than an obviously skilled Jacob van Ruisdael. Theodor Adrno writes: “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.”[5] But commonality between James and Richter outweighs their differences. Aside from the fact that both artists prop up their respective art practices with coherent, opinionated, charismatic textual commentary, there is also something of the ‘deathdrive’ on their respective canvas sleeves. Richter is blatantly nihilistic, in theory and practice. He is not just the simulacrum-christ, but a mortician, perversely touching-up the canvas corpse. He has said in no uncertain terms that “Painting is pure idiocy”; the perfect quip for Douglas Crimp to nail home in his essay The End of Painting.[6] But (to my mind) Richter’s “air of detachment,” “indifference,” “randomness” is more of a product of the ‘Bejamin Buchlohs’ of the artworld, that have interviewed and wrote about him, than Richter himself. In a response to the very man (Buchloh) in an interview conducted in 1986, Richter said: “No. Like a painter. And I don’t argue in social terms, because I want to make a picture and not an ideology.”[7]

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Nostalgically evoking one of those awkward, multicoloured spinning-top toys made from hollow tin, Merlin James’ painting entitled Garden (the default centrepiece of James’ micro-retrospective at Douglas Hyde Gallery) reverberates with the claustrophobic experimentation of a painting student’s ambition to break free from what they think they know, into what they feel. James painted it in 1981, coincidently the same year that Crimp’s historically over emphasised essay The End of Painting was published in the journal October, and two years after the term Postmodernism entered the philosophical lexicon with the publication of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) by Jean-François Lyotard. The inclusion of this student work by James – painted while he was at the Central School of Art, London (now Central St. Martins, The London Institute) – argues the point that not all work produced at undergraduate level is ‘fugitive’ (not my term but something I overheard from a tutor while I was a student, and in that specific context meant as a fleeting, perishable artwork that does not have an identity handhold for its immature maker to grasp hold of). Perhaps fugitive is a tag that James fosters; his paintings lie in that temporal limbotic game show space, where and when a painter chooses to paint-over, or save. Are James’ paintings good? Yes! Have they ‘progressed’ since 1981? No! Like Nicolas Poussin, James seemingly plays with a failed representation of Arcadia (or the failure of representation altogether). We can see it in his Castle (Red) (1984-85) at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, which has a catter-cousin in Castle (Blue) (Date unknown and not in the current show). But, his more recent White Stockings (2005-07) goes a little further in its corruption of the idyllic; infinitely looping its threesome content of romanticism, erotic pleasure and subsequent confessional on the one canvas. James’ Arcadia does not live up to the idealisations of Virgil. In Erwin Panofsky’s brilliant essay Et in Arcadia Ego : Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition (on Poussin’s painting of the same name), he quotes Ovid as saying: “Not as yet enhanced by discipline and manners, their[Arcadian] life was similar to that of the beasts; they were an uncouth lot, still ignorant of art.”[8] So, James’ images fall in the dry cracks of Virgil’s Arcadian heaven on earth, while populated by Ovid’s philistine sheepshaggers. So just maybe, James’ paintings represent a misunderstood history that challenges prescribed notions of ‘truth’ and ‘taste’. During his artist talk at Douglas Hyde Gallery James gestured to one of his paintings, Green Birds, (2009), and asked the question: “Is it a realistic painting of an unrealistic bird, or an unrealistic painting of a realistic bird”[9]: the paradox says it all.

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In 1986 Hal Foster wrote of the then view that “painting must die as a practice so that it might be reborn as a sign”... and that such an operation “is more nihilistic than dialectical.”[10] Foster was referring to Richter and his art school progeny; when Richter was being pulled off the college library shelf by disgruntled teaching staff, putting the fear of God into the would-be painter. James outlines Richter’s cons: “his air of detachment and parody; his indifference to subject; his randomness of motif; his syntheticness of chroma; his allusion to manufacture and technologised reproduction even within matière – all this has become axiomatic for so much current painting. His supporters find something heroic in his preservation of absolute ambivalence, or inscrutability, his severe contempt-of-court.”[11] You would think Richter’s bank of imagery, filed and numbered, (the anthesis of James’ date and title amnesia) is something to respect, even adore, as a painter? His personal accounts in the The Daily Practice of Painting are just as thought-provoking and inspiring as those in The Journal of Eugene Delacroix. Luc Tuymans’ work did more damage through the proliferation of his style during the 1990s than Richter ever did through his Eurocentric Pop. But Richter’s work is something that you could never love, James’ work is something you can love, if you acquire a taste for it.

BRIAN DUGGAN, ‘Three Lives’, Rua Red Arts Centre,Tallaght 19 March – 28 April.

My approach to art is quite radical. It has more to do with theatre and staging than making objects such as paintings or sculptures. I think that the fetishism of objects is pathetic. (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) WHY DOES one write on art when you take away the editorial agenda, obligation or payment? For me it is all to do with the successful failures of art practice. Art is never brave. It doesn’t have to contend with the linear narrativity of television programming, where risk and audience ratings have to meet half way; or plot lines need to be adaptive if not respected. Art has the benefit of the doubt when it comes to plot holes and audience numbers. So why does one write, well... From a distance, Brian Duggan’s ‘Three Lives’ at Rua Red Arts Centre is one of the most visually wondrous interventions to an art space in Ireland to date, but somehow has conceptually spoilt innards. A theatrically-lit, metal spirographic zeppelin looms massively over a neatly partitioned maze of plywood – where you blindly come across inset TVs with nostalgic boyhood thematics. The utilitarian labyrinth is dimly-lit by Emerald City light bulbs – well, considering their frosty green tint, the potent nostalgia throughout the maze, and the goal of finding your way home – The Wizard of Oz associations write themselves.

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APRIL 2012 (#31): Architecture’s Handmaiden

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Later I read in the accompanying newspaper catalogue for the exhibition that Duggan’s references go back to the late 1930s – specifically the Hindenburg Disaster – when a German passenger airship went up in flames in the skies above New Jersey, resulting in 36 fatalities. The event is a rewarding backdrop to Duggan’s installation, which is in memorium to a ’30s aviation aesthetic, not a reflection on the tragedy. Duggan’s nostalgia for spent technologies is recaptured and mediated via such pixellated stars as Pac-Man or roll-playing adventures as Final Fantasy. Although I am from that arcade generation when 3 lives cost 10p and a ‘free man’ was rewarded after hours of play, I was disappointed with the endgame of Duggan’s installation. And yes, I acknowledge that ’80s computer games did have a tendency of having no endgame, or celebratory credits that signified you had successfully completed the digital journey – in some instances completion was signified by a loud irritating noise and blank screen – but only the nerdy few have knowledge of such gaming quirks, and when you do, the knowing does not have enough body to follow Duggan’s magnificent visual prelude. Perhaps this is the sacrifice that Duggan has made for what is an impressive cinematic vista – on a par, if not more impressive than Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Turbine Hall Commission for Tate Modern in 2008 (although her quote above is self-indulgent and self-righteous).

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Duggan’s installation has the same distant gaze of a land surveyor rather than someone lost in their subject and the risk that comes with that subjective embeddedness. As you wander past that initial one-point perspective framed by the cavernous gallery space of the Tallaght art centre, you enter a reductive maze of boytoy ’80s nostalgia and signification that doesn’t measure up to what is a Wagnerian prelude with the possibility of something gloriously operatic. In the end we get a sepia ghost wearing ruby red slippers. The newspaper publication also includes essays by Hillary Murray and Fiona Woods, which have the same distant surveying gaze as Duggan’s. Although rewarding reads – especially Fiona Woods’ ‘Some Practices of In-Between’ – as a discursive frame for Duggan’s installation they are both overdetermined, offering critiques of the civic and ecological architectures that condition art-making. The crux of Murray’s argument is “we don’t want to see progressive art forms lost or not fully developed simply because they don’t sit easily within the gallery space”. Doesn’t the commissioning of artworks for badly drawn art centres debunk that argument? And hasn’t art centre architecture been the scapegoat for misjudged curatorials for long enough? And when are artists going to take responsibility for their own work? There is also a mention of collective enterprises of the eco-kind being “broken” through re-staging in the art gallery. Isn’t such re-imagining of off-site artworks within the gallery space a ritual to signify the reputation of the artist rather than the artwork? A counter argument to Foerster’s theatrical position is that artists and curators have become so dependent on the crutch of theatricality that the modernist convention of white wall and fetishised art object is being lost in theatrical smoke and fairground mirrors. So why do I write? Well it helps if creative endeavors have an element of risk, which Duggan’s ‘Three Lives’ has in spades.

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APRIL 2012 (#32): How to not get gallery Representation!

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IN THE VÉRITÉ documentary film/art work, Good Times Will Never be the Same (2007), Director Jody Lee Lipes follows New York artist, Brock Enright, who drives to his girlfriend’s family cabin in Mendocino, California, to create a body of work for his first solo show at the prominent New York Gallery run by Perry Rubenstein. (For my purpose here, I will not be describing the ins and outs of the film; however Mermaid Arts Centre have agreed to screen the film in either June of 2012.

Back to the discussion between Rubenstein and Enright, which starts out with the gallerist giving his interpretation of the artworld from the perspective of the art dealer, which is a set of oppositions, between art market/patron vs audience/ gallerist’s personal interest in the artist. In the film, Rubenstein illustrates his artworld philosophy by getting Enright to itemise, name and price his spill-off objects, just in case someone wants a shit-covered basketball (this is as refined as Enright gets, well, back in 2007 it was!). I saw the results of Enright’s creative detour to Perry Rubenstein via California with a fellow Irish artist in March of 2007. Joint first impressions were repulsion and a quick exit. Even the hard-nosed New York Times Critic, Roberta Smith, experienced what she described as “scary moments and memorable ones too.”[1] But cut-and-paste edits from reviews are always relative when taken out of context. Smith started the review by writing: “For several years Brock Enright has been a tantalizingly elusive figure.” This moment of flattery, however, was followed by: “The opposite of elusive, Mr. Enright’s current solo show...” What first attracted Rubenstein to Enright was the artist’s activity outside of the gallery circuit. However, to reign that in, within the artificial context of his gallery, was fraught with problems from the onset. Enright was dropped by Rubenstein shortly afterward for what the art dealer described as “significant differences”. However, this is not a story about the BIG BAD ART WORLD/ART DEALER vs the poor, misunderstood artist. Roberta Smith’s review and Rubenstein’s decision to drop Enright are understandable. Even though Enright’s first solo show at Perry Rubenstein’s was one of the most memorable works I have experienced in a decade, the shows that followed were always too concerned with a forced and uneasy manufacturing of art objects. Let’s not be naïve, a gallerist needs to pay for art fairs, not to mention eat like the rest

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For now, I am interested in focusing on one section of the film, wherein art dealer Perry Rubenstein tries to ‘manage’ Enright’s art practice, what can only be described as a self-destructive output. Without going too deep into what Enright does, his events are an assemblage of filthy performances-cum-video documents. Since 2007, and up until recently, he has produced art objects for his gallery shows, but they are more spill-off from the performances than overdetermined artworks. He became well known in the American media circles throughout 2002 when he setup Videogames Adventure Services (VAS), a company that constructs reality adventures for paying clients: people have paid between $5,000 and $60,000 for the Enright experience. Bottom line, his clients are either fetishists, patients with issues, or Fanboys/girls. (believe it or not, there is such a thing as artist groupies).

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of us. Even the late Mike Kelley (an “elusive” but also blue-chip artist) succeeded in making works that were collectable, such as his Kandors, Full Set (2005-2009), which is in the collection of one of the artworld’s richest collectors, Francois Pinault. Today Enright has no gallery representation in the US, but he has recently resurrected Videogames Adventure Services, giving up on the artworld and retaining a bit of elusiveness, until it must be assumed, he gets another chance at fame. Closer to home, the story of one Artist’s and a Gallerist, may shed more light on the oppositional agendas/power struggles between gallerist and artist.

♥

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So, the story goes that an Artist gets a request for a studio visit by a prominent gallery in Dublin. This agreed upon request was followed by the Gallerist seeing the Artist’s work in two concurrent group shows, before the studio visit was conducted. Soon afterward, a chance meeting between the Artist and Gallerist occurred, in which the Gallerist termed the Artist’s practice as “site-work.” followed by, we don’t want that! However a clause in the ‘insult’ was offered, whereby the Artist had 4 weeks to think up, and make an art work (‘object’), for a proposed future group show at the gallery. The “studio visit” was scrapped. The Artist thought long and hard. Once rough and ready assemblages became ‘Faberge Eggs’ in the Artist’s mind. However, that’s where they stayed put, in the head. The 4th week came and went without further contact between the Artist and Gallerist, vice versa.

♥ This is not a story of martyrdom for artistic principals; this specific Artist had passed their 'sell-by-date', deconstructed to the point of obliteration. So the story goes...

APRIL 2012 (#33): The Critic and/or/vs. the Artist The rational critic of art cannot risk this abandonment into “oceanic” undifferentiation, he[she] can only deal with the limits that come after this plunge into such a world of noncontainment. Robert Smithson[1]

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Fast-forward to now and temporality is not feared by the art critic/writer, it is embraced. As writers on art we can wander limitlessly in its boundless space of self-reflection; ignoring the art object altogether in the process. Smithson wrote that “Most critics cannot endure the suspension of boundaries between what [Anton] Ehrenzweig calls the ‘self and non-self’.“[3] Today the art writer’s poetry is a psychoanalytical ramble on an imaginary chaise longue, where the artist is therapist, announcing every now and then; ‘Stop there! So what do you think that means?’ Back in the day of the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, ‘art and truth’ were tied together in an impossible knot. Although these so-called truths were more often than not ridiculous pronouncements, when the art object was merited for its technique rather than for what the artist was trying to say, you have to admit they were at least passionate about their positions, whether right or wrong. Our contemporary mistrust of Truth is why we find our selves in this landscape of ill-defined concepts and art objects that don’t say what is ambiguously written on the tin. The myth that is banded around today is that we as viewers, tinkers, humans, have outgrown such limiting precepts of Truth, Right, Wrong, Good, Bad. You can understand Smithson’s position on his Spiral Jetty, looking judgmentally on the art object caged in the white walled gallery space, without windows to offer a panoramic view of the limitless world. Back on the psychoanalytical couch Smithson contends that: At low levels of consciousness the artist experiences undifferentiated or unbounded methods of procedure that break with the focused limits of rational technique. [4] In this era of irrationality, boundless postmodernity and self-reflection, painting is the perfect pivot to argue the verbal limits of the critic against notions of expansive appreciation regarding the oceanic art object. A question was posed by an audience member at a conversation between Damien Flood, Mary Conlon and yours truly at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, that inspired the above preamble regarding the relationship – if any – between the critic and artist. The conversation was based on Flood’s current solo show ‘The History of the Visitation’, which includes a printed publication of three essays by myself, Mary Conlon and Saskia Vermeulen, entitled Spectral Gallery. The question was offset by – what I perceived from a ‘toned’ delivery – my traditional or historical viewpoint of painting in the progressive frame of contemporary art, and more specifically, the contemporary viewer’s growth in how we have moved on from that contained viewpoint. Aside from this provocation, throughout the conversation I was questioning the lack of writing that confronts painting in contemporary contexts, along with my own reluctance or avoidance of the medium when it comes to writing on art. I also commented on the reluctance of curators to use painting in their projects, and when they do it is more a form of obligation – one context mentioned was Mary Conlon’s recent curatorial at Ormston House Limerick, ‘Monkey Wrench’, which featured painting, to which I will return to later.

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THERE IS THE ARGUMENT that Robert Smithson was a better writer than artist; but there is an alternative argument that his writing bridged the gap between his art and the viewer. In his essay ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind’ (1968) Smithson wrote that “Critics, by focusing on the ‘art object,’ deprive the artist of any existence in the world of both mind and matter.”[2] What he was getting at, from what was an idealistically artist-centre position, was the critic robs the artist of time/temporality when he/she fences-off the art object in their analysis. Smithson positively termed the art object’s existence in the world as “Oceanic,” encompassing mind, matter and everything in between.

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Back to the provocation at the Green on Red Gallery, which was premised by a statement to the effect of ‘I can’t believe what I am hearing regarding how painting is being discussed here’, which was followed by the opinion that painting expands beyond the frame/wall into the central space while gesturing to the plinth bound texts that Flood had placed on the floor of Green on Red Gallery. The final comment that still rings in my ears is that painting was not the only medium that had “baggage”. After being part of the process of writing a text that was directly on Flood’s paintings rather than coming from his paintings (what I describe as momentary blackouts of fictional hiatus away from the art object), I began to question my reasons for writing directly on Flood’s work, what is a traditional method of writing on painting, usually found in the promotional form of the accompanying catalogue/monograph. Furthermore, did the texts positioned on the plinths at the Green on Red Gallery expand our preconceived notions as to how painting is negotiated? Were they digested by the viewer as supplementary artefacts? I will leave these questions hanging for reasons concerned with lack of objectivity... My response to this expansive notion of painting, drawn from the opinion that painting is more than a framed object, was that this is more of a philosophical ideal/ mindset for anyone who contends that anything can be a painting or drawing – like Smithson’s “Oceanic” perspective – but for the critic to confront the art object there needs to be some handle to grasp hold of or the object will float away with the critic dangling in tow.

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It has been said that painting drifted away from the wall years ago, in what has been termed expansive painting; Jessica Stockholder being the epitome of the trend. Stockholder came to international recognition via Adrian Searle and Greg Hilty’s ‘Unbound: Possibilities in Painting’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1994. Never has a title of an exhibition been so fraught with contradiction; it reads like it is arguing with itself. The subtitle ‘Possibilities in Painting’ limits the meaning of the overly ambitious ‘Unbound’. The title is a paraphrase of Smithson’s limiting critic and oceanic artist. Searle admitted himself that Stockholder’s colourful scatterinstallations was not painting, but the memory of painting. This suggests that Stockholder’s work is a memento mori, and that her method is an evolution/rebirth of the frame-bound limitations of painting. But using memory as a scapegoat for art that is non-contained is just plain lazy. We could also argue that all painting is about the memory of painting. Andrew Graham-Dixon, the conservative art critic for the Independent, wrote at the time: This is an ingenious defense of a show which turns out, indeed, to be more or less structureless: a way of saying that nothing makes sense and that the exhibition reflects this, that it has the courage of its own lack of convictions. But maybe it is really just another way of saying: “Here is a load of modern pictures which don’t have that much in common but which we like and hope you will come and look at”; of admitting that the show is, after all, just a hotch-potch.[5] This is not a surprising response from a critic whose fictional ad-libs offset by historical fact exist within the limits of the frame. Graham-Dixon’s rant has the tone of someone who was more threatened by Searle being the new voice of what was NEW in painting rather than what painting was failing/succeeding to do. As an art critic himself Searle should have known that oceanic statements in the publication that accompanied the exhibition (by the way one of the better painting publications to be written since the ’90s) was asking for trouble:

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Instead of technique, we have techniques, instead of absolutes and essences, discontinuities, multiformity, differences . . . instead of new movements or revivals, a more heterodox way of thinking, a greater diversity . . . We wanted to show that there is no fixed viewpoint from which to look.[6]

With conceptual recontextualisation in mind we could view Conlon’s curatorial ‘Monkey Wrench’ as based on a hierarchical structure of tradition vs progress. From the perspective that traditional technique wins over so-called contemporary conceptual progress, Kevin Cosgrove’s focus on good, representational painting technique would be last on the score card; followed by Shiel’s stilted pair of sporting paintings; and in the lead is Keith Winter’s out/in-house stage for potentially private/made public acts of sexual activity. Flipping the hierarchical structure to acknowledge technique/craft as key to progress we would obviously flip the score card, but there is another viewpoint that may take Shiel beyond ‘deuce’. Shiel’s ’stilted‘ paintings stand away from the wall but are attached by the imagined potential of a volleyed ball, between twin tennis players on one big/one small canvas. The former description is a personal conceptual leap that defies the physically restricted framing of this work. Physically, although the two paintings are separated from the wall – the lager painting of the two, seemingly holds on to the wall for dear life by outstretched timber batons. So in the first instance this specific work by Shiel offers a loophole for expansive notions, but it is necessary and critically rewarding to illustrate its limitations in the second instance. But this is exactly what Smithson dislikes about the critic’s verbal frame. Jacques Derrida, a philosopher that you don’t associate with the image, has more than enough to say in sheer volume in his exhaustive analysis of painting/language in The Truth in Painting: No ‘theory’, no ‘practice’, no ‘theoretical practice’ can intervene effectively in this field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning.[7] We have to take on board that Derrida has a bias for the ‘frame’, or what he refers to as the paragonal frame: “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [horsd’oeuvre], neither inside or outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work...’[8] I have underlined indeterminate because although Derrida does not commit to a real or visible frame, his paragon (invisible frame) determines the existence of the work between inside/ outside. Why is it assumed that progress in art is defined by indeterminate assertions and by deconstructing the traditional/historical frame into “poetic debris”? (Smithson’s terminology). Why does historical baggage suggest the loss of one’s

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So, we are back at an undetermined crossroads without a sign post in sight; but there is hope for the art critic. By ignoring the conceptual reasons why Mary Conlon chose to put Kevin Cosgrove, Sonia Shiel and Keith Winter together in the group show ‘Monkey Wrench’ at Ormston House, Limerick, I am using the default position of the art critic in how we commandeer contexts for our own selfish arguments. The practice follows the trend of conceptual recycling and recontextualisation by curator/ viewer/critic, that the art object endures in its short lifespan, starting when it first leaves the artist’s studio, the moment when it no longer conceptually belongs to the artist. The fundamental reasons why I direct your attention to Conlon’s curatorial in particular is the fact that painting was not just an add-on, but it featured; well, only just, if you label Shiel’s work as ‘painting’ – which I wouldn’t usually – but the artist’s The Incongruity of Learning offered a loophole for the rigid critic to maneuver.

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legs? Painting’s strengths and weaknesses are doubly contained within the frame, physically and historically. The frame may place painting outside the contemporary discourse and methods of disarticulation and non-containment, this is not a bad thing! Terms like ‘anything goes’ have been wrongly pronounced in regard to painting’s encyclopedic aesthetic, but for the time being, painting!, not scatter-installations!, are better off tightly squeezed into the frame, while the critic will hold onto the limitations that language offers in front of the art object, otherwise, the verbal scutters will ensue, or maybe they already have... Conclusions for the promotion of a future of traditional Truth: Scatter Installations are not paintings; a sculpture is not a drawing: END!

MAY 2012 (#34): Korporeal

ANGELALYNN DUNLOP – ARIANNA GARCIA-FIALDINI – HAYNES

GOODSELL, Graduate MFA Show, Burren College of Art, 14 – 29 April. *BY MICHAELE CUTAYA*

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IT IS some time now that the Burren College of Art[1] has taken its place amongst the arts institutions of Ireland; evidenced by its graduates contributing to the Irish visual arts scene of Ireland and beyond. But, if the college still had to prove that it is not a school of landscape painting, the Graduate MFA show 2012, ‘Korporeal’ might have suffice. In fact, the president and founder Mary Hawkes-Greene does not mention landscape when she presents the college’ singularity in her introduction to the show’s catalogue. What she insists on is the opportunity for “complete immersion” for “the experience in transformation” that a postgraduate education can be and what the BCA is offering is “focus, commitment, ingenuity, imagination and critical rigour”. For ‘Korporeal’, as the name of this year MFA exhibition indicates, it is the body in its presence as well as in its absence that is the common thread between all three graduates. And the body, her own, is the primary site of practice for Angelalynn Dunlop as a performance artist. As is often the case for performance art, viewers encounter the work through documentation of the performances: here videos and photographs. Dunlop addresses the issue of the status of documentation in relationship to the work in pointing out that they were made by members of the audience and as such represents their own projection not the artist’s. This relationship between point of views and the performance informs the installation in a darkened room at the back of the main exhibition space, of two videos recording simultaneously the performance Ire Bhava Pique Rasa. In her performances, Dunlop deliberately places herself within a lineage of female performance artists who questioned the limits of identity through bodily endurance and pain. Marina Abramovic readily comes to mind, not only as the better known artist but also because Dunlop could be said to quote her; the Lips of Thomas (1975) for instance

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in the unsettling performance Healing the Heart through scarification and Ingestion. But the reference to the older artist serves to off set the differences – Dunlop substitutes Abramovic’s transcendentalist quest for a logocentric practice – the performance is quite precisely what the title announces. The artist uses her body to literally enact these language clichés and idioms that define and limit our being in the world. Although often harrowing to watch, her performances are also full of humour as in I Don’t Need Pubic Hair To Be a Feminist, where she lathers her face in the men’s room while the shaving can be seen to have been done elsewhere.

If the body is also a concern in Arianna Garcia-Fialdini’s work it is as an absence Her artistic practice is bound up with her social and political concern with the situation of her birthplace Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. More specifically with the femicide that has been taking place there for years unheeded by authorities. She empathizes with associations of mother and families of the missing/murdered, mostly young, women. The subtitle of her show clearly states her intent ‘Awareness for injustice in Ciudad Juarez’. For her MFA exhibition, she has developed a body of work around this thematic through popular art forms such as graffiti and murals. Since the art forms she uses are sited, her work is shown into what was her studio, next to the main exhibition space – incidentally giving us an idea of the space available to MFA students to work in at the Burren College of Art. She is presenting a series of virtuoso murals using allegories and symbols to transmit empathy and understanding towards the victims and their family. Throughout the murals and the series of stenciled graffiti, pink crosses are recurrent. The painting of pink crosses on telephone poles is a strategy originating by a family organisation ‘voices without echo’ to give visibility to the missing women. Thus the crosses that we would spontaneously associate either with Christianity or death become a stand in for the absent bodies. In her blog [2] Garcia-Fialdini wonders about how to disseminate her stencils into the streets, thus recasting the present work not as an end in itself but as a potential to be realised. This change in emphasis dispels the incongruity of looking at these sited works eloquently evoking the Mexican tragedy – the 32 x 11 feet mural Femicide as Plague for instance – while standing in a college exhibition space in rural Ireland. In turn the BCA is recast as a haven to regroup forces. The body we return to in Haynes Goodsell’s photographs is an idealized one: in fact it is the body we know from the polished imagery used in the fashion magazines. The high level of mastery displayed in the photographs is questioned through a series of displacements: Haynes Goodsell the photograph is also Huigneiider the model for instance. His work is shown over the three floors of the 16th century Newtown castle that opposes the roughness of the stonewalls to the gloss of the images. Opening our journey on the ground floor is a Helmut Newton photo machine that proposes the audience to become their own model/photographer in a fashion shoot. Commenting on the series Huigneiider with Tree, which can be accessed through an interactive screen on the top floor, Patrick Murphy pointed to the space of the absent logo as a possible articulation of the photographs’ composition. The title also

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Another performance that stretches the tension between the banality of common expressions and its enactment to the point of exhaustion is Bushel Before I Die – of which there are two versions interior and exterior. Taking the popular saying ‘you’ll eat a bushel of dirt before you die’ that is supposed to teach humility, literally Dunlop proceeds: the mud-covered body presents us with a humility that is disturbingly humiliating.

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suggests the genre of the still-life, which were traditionally associated with vanities, while the pastoralism of the trees – barely more than bushes – fields, and meadows is not the usual epic foil for masculinity and suggests a less domineering relationship to nature. These shifts create a mirroring effect further explored in the installation occupying the second floor Narcissus Pool. In the darkened domed-ceiling room a series of Huigneiider black and white photographs are projected onto a chrome dome set on the floor, which reflects them back onto the ceiling. A slow zooming in and out movement of the projection creates a rippling water-like effect over the stones. It is a seductive set up offering a fitting image to the looped projections of narcissism. A pool is a fitting image to end a review began by an immersion. Although it also has an undergraduate studying abroad programme, the Burren College of Art has certainly found an appropriate operating mode with the MFA. The intensity and focus offered by the college may be somewhat overwhelming for undergraduate students, but is a valuable opportunity for artists who have already developed a practice and wish to push it further.

MAY 2012 (#35): IRON BUTTERFLY 7th Berlin Biennale.

114 EVERYONE HATES the 7th Berlin Biennale. One word. OCCUPY. Say it a again. OCCUPY. It won’t be the last time. OCCUPY. I really hadn’t done any research before coming to Berlin so I didn’t know: the OCCUPY movement have found a welcome mat and it’s the artworld. Every Irish artist and curator I have spoken to hates it – and there’s a big green company. But it is not an apathetic response. It’s emotional. IT’s SHITE! Rumor follows. Waste of €3,000,000. Commentary next. It’s naïve. It’s not ART. My first port of call is KW Institute of Contemporary Art where the Occupiarians are bunking. I expected Bohemia. Flowers in the hair. Tie-dye. Irritation. Obstacles in my way toward the contemplation of some artist’s fetish for objecthood. Hippies. Tree huggers. Maybe I am being contrary, but I got it. Is it naïve politics? Fuck yeah! But it has never made more sense in my eyes. A few months ago I took a wrong turn in Las Vegas and ended up in this hinterland of the homeless. This was where LV Occupy Movement had literally pitched their tents; 3 tents in a vacant car park. PROTEST? In Berlin. In an art context and Biennale of all things – where ‘functionless’ is the soup of the day – it makes perfect sense. Although curator Artur Żmijewsk and his invited curatorial team planned this well in advance of the recent dying down of the movement, it seems perfectly timed. There is an absence of curatorial vanity.

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The artworld can cradle the occupy ideology as something dead rather than still beating. As you wander, gazing at the worker-activists as they try and keep busy doing what they do – rhetorical commentary that is actually heartfelt – you begin to understand that this is youth revolting with a few mid-life crisis stragglers or those of whom are still listening to Iron Butterfly. Down in the basement a MAC laptop plays a video with occupy members being interviewed. It’s done in black and white – that GAP advertisement aesthetic – interviewees are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It works.

On the top floor however the message becomes blurred. Polish artist Lukasz Surowiec’s translocation of 320 birches from the former concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Berlin with all the hippies downstairs look like green shoots to a ‘higher’ plane of existence. A little eavesdropping and I get some of the gist of the occupy art ideology: “We want to bring art out into the public space so it can activate revolution”. Nuff said!

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Just neighbouring the muted hullabaloo at KW Institute, Francesco Bonami (2010 Whitney Biennale Curator and sometime critic) is flexing some curator muscle at the ‘ME’ Collectors Room Berlin. It’s bizarre vulgarity for public performance sake. He is talking about collecting and how collectors are trying to make a financial art star out of one artist they ‘own’ rather than ‘owning’ lots of artists. That was the magic of 1980s New York. He refers to Charles Saatchi as having a warehouse of rubbish and one Damien Hirst.

MAY 2012 (#36): Groping with Alchemy

Brendan Earley, ‘A Place Between’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 15 March – 29 April.

THERE HAS been a reverberating echo of references to the films of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in the Irish art scene of late – Ruth E. Lyons presented Stalker as part of the Artist Screen Series at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios in August of 2011 and Isabel Nolan followed suit by referencing Roadside Picnic in her solo show at The Model Gallery late in 2011 (the sci-fi novel that inspired Stalker) – making the term art bubble redundant and art cave more appropriate – ‘HELLO’... HELLO...HELLO...HELLO... Tarkovsky pops up again in the first paragraph of Brendan Earley’s press release for his solo show A Place Between at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (RHA). Removing the Tarkovsky monkey off the artist’s back – the modesty of Earley’s materiality doesn’t need that omnipotent presence – the titles of the artist’s sculptures and drawings are a jiggling key to their disguised materiality and narrative mood: Untitled, Sacred Mountain ... Dwelling in the Mountains 2 ... Soul Delay ... A Million Years Later ... Lying Awake in an Empty Building...

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Earley casts everyday styrofoam packaging in aluminium –“TA-DAH”! But this DIY alchemy is just a titbit to the depth of thinking that his art objects provoke. They perform as sci-fi poetry; they fumble with language and the life world like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; and they posture like a Mies van der Rohe architectural overhang. They are somehow utopian in a time when art finds it easier to be dystopian. As you can see I am a fan. If we take away the artwork labels we are left with building trade materials that are only familiar in their raw form to the Sparky, Chippy, Bricky. The coat of the everyday that dresses what are in fact aluminium and bronze objects, registers a desire to touch: did you have a grope of his alchemy? Most of us don’t really know how it feels to score plasterboard or experience the weight of pink gypsum in the shoulders as you mix. Such invisible labours lie deep in the infrastructure of your home: the skin of domestication is something that you apply later with ease. However, interior design can bring the house down if you get it wrong, which was the case in the relationship between Earley’s work and Gallery 1 at the RHA. Mother’s tankstation Dublin, Void Belfast, and The Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin are the gallery caves in which I have experienced Earley’s work before. Their polished cement floors and dim lighting seem to ooze Earley’s brutalist modernist aesthetic. The question as to what comes first between the chicken-art object or egg-gallery space is inconsequential: Earley’s art objects are both the zeitgeist and out of time in such environments.

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At the RHA, a floor-to-ceiling aluminium and plasterboard stud partition stood cater-corner in the space. This was the artist making himself bigger – heckles up – to confront what is a barn of a gallery space. Earley should be commended for such an ambitious intervention, but somehow, by giving a taster of what could have been an all-out transformation of the structure of the gallery, I was left wanting. The artist’s smaller sculptures have always suggested larger architectures in previous outings, but the scale of the empty space that hung above his smaller objects at the RHA capped the imagination from imagining bigger, higher. Like previous attempts by artists to butt heads with the scale of the RHA gallery space, Earley’s work became a little flattened, like the large floor-bound drawing that was unsuccessfully staged in deference to the space. After 45 minutes in what Earley refers to as “debatable zones,” I began to double back on my initial reception of the work. It was nearing closing time for the gallery. The daylight that fluctuates through the ceiling window of Gallery 1 dimmed whilst the interior lights brightened. All was leveled. The prevalent pink in the artist’s drawings along with the plasterboard edges became more visible: the silicone block head shaded by a cotton hoodie more ominous. The Homeric epithet “when rosy fingered dawn appeared” fitted the mise-en-scène. What has become another monkey but of the theoretical kind is the concept of ‘inbetween’ which Earley’s A Place Between took as its terrain. However, aren’t moments of polarity the very things that make art great? Earley’s work is at its best when it finds an edge, such as the ambitious stud partition at the RHA. When you are expecting his alchemy, other more commonplace materials that are not touched by the ‘is it?’ or ‘isn’t it?’ question take precedence, such as his previous use of a woolen blanket at mother’s tankstation and the cotton ‘hoodie’ in this show.

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Aside from these formal criticisms, it was either the process of waiting for Earley’s work to activate in situ or the act of reflection and extension through writing, that revealed the very polarities that I am talking about, which I am glad to say have left me where art should always leave you, in a debatable zone.

JUNE 2012 (#37): AFTER THE FUTURE

eva International: Biennial of Visual Art, Limerick City, Ireland, 19 May – 12 August.

ON MAY 17TH – the day before eva International opened in Limerick city – the Visual Artists Workers Forum (VAWF) had the second event of its year long existence at the Glucksman Gallery Cork. Second hand reports confirm that the discussion was combative, but to what end? Like Seanad Éireann, VAWF at this point in time can only be defended for its potential rather than its achievements; and the question has to be asked can there be tangible outcomes from what has been so far a long wick of ideological discussion? The forum was sold out and even ‘trended’ on Twitter. But while art centre auditoriums fill up with discussion forums and art exhibitions are something you view at the intermission, those who work voluntarily at grass-roots level in artist-run spaces and as interns for art institutions are mere recyclables in the current austerity, and no amount of talking is going to change that fact. May 2012 sadly saw the closure of two artist-run spaces; SOMA Waterford and Occupy Space Limerick. With less opportunities for emerging artists to show their work and unpaid creative endeavors being uprooted from commercial properties with no more than a few days’ notice, it is no surprise that eva International received over 2,000 submissions from both established and emerging artists from 76 countries. The hunger to show has never been so great. So, it was with these subtexts that I engaged eva International; being drawn to artworks that fed the eyes, not the ears. Annie Fletcher’s “point of departure” for her After the Future curatorial is theoretical, but thankfully it is one that pushes against false notions of progress and protest. The media theorist Franco Berardi (Bifo) is the visionary quoted more than once in the literature for the event. One quote in particular on the printed map for the Biennale subscribes to what is the psychological dictate of mindfulness: Ideology and advertising have exalted the permanent mobilisation of the productive and the nervous energies of humankind towards profit and war. We want to exalt tenderness, sleep and ecstasy, the frugality of needs and the pleasure of the senses.[1] The largest venue on O’Connell Street was my first port of call. Working from the 4th floor down, Sarah Pierce’s serial brown paper posters repeatedly affirm in silkscreen

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Before I delve into the art of eva International 2012 I will briefly describe recent events and developments in the Irish art world that coincide with this long awaited Biennale of Visual Art.

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print and white collage “It’s time, man, it feels imminent”. The repeated phrase from the mouths of bystanders at demonstrations in the US between 1968-2008 manifest into cliché. The posters lead up to two audio speakers that resound with other voices; from Mary Kelly to Liam Gillick. The posters would have been enough, succinctly describing Fletcher via Berardi’s ‘want’ for blissful purgatory in a capitalist environment that perpetually desires change no matter how bad or good things are thought to be at any given moment in time. On the floor, eyes and feet are continually interrupted by Sanja Iveković’s littered text on red paper, which detail an Irish Report document “on marginalised women, poverty and violence against women in Ireland provided by the National Women’s Council Of Ireland (NWCI).”[2] Also on the penthouse floor of the unfinished commercial building block Barbara Knezevic’s coy materiality struggles to make itself heard amongst Pierce’s audio and Iveković’s scrunched red papers which read as decorative or floral patterns rather than the red dawn reportage on violence against women.

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One floor down Aoibheann Greenan’s mixed-media installation presents the artist as high-priestess of the mediated image. Precursors to this type of approach are Irish artists Eilis MacDonald and Alan Butler who have both become itinerant web journalists for their art; manifesting into new media extensions that are not far from the philosophies of William S. Burroughs and Marshall McLuhan. Through this contemporary mode of experiencing the world via the internet highway we get what can only be called shrines to their laptop tourism. Greenan’s titles for works such as Karma Coma and Iron Lion Zion – combined with dear skull and snakeskin ingredients – speak of ritual and the colourfully exotic in the ‘chromophobic’ space of art. The artist’s installation is the most idiosyncratic presentation at eva International, traversing the thematic of the event itself to become another entity. On the same floor (and placed throughout the eva International venues) Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh’s A Laboratory of Perpetual Flux offers unedited interview footage from their excellent 2010 film The Art of Time (See essay I wrote on the film here: [http://unbuildingproject.wordpress. com/]). In these ‘Max Headroom’ editions artists David Claerbout, Chantal Akerman, Doug Aitken, Vito Acconci, French philosopher Sylvere Lotringer (amongst others) become what Waugh herself described as “thinking heads rather than talking heads”[3]. Their in depth thoughts on spatio-temporality are somewhat out of sync with a society that is rocketing toward film director Mike Judge’s vision of a dumbed-down future in his film Idiocracy[4]. But if you practice patience the intellectual reward from exposure to these brilliant minds is priceless. While Lotringer is the star of The Art of Time, Acconci steals the show at eva International. If you trail back to Greenan’s ritualistic mixed-media installation, Acconci comes across as a voodoo priest of all he surveys: especially when bursts of thought visibly contort and twist his physiognomy. On the second floor of the O’Connell Street venue I immensely enjoyed Polish artists Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik’s (Kwiekulik) digitised projected slide sequence Activities with Dobromierz (1972-74). After being mentally bombarded by Daly and Waugh’s thinking heads, Kwiekulik’s silent photo montage of hundreds of slides of the artists’ infant son being absurdly positioned in the everyday domestic settings of their home was a welcome rest bite: the only audio pollutant was background noise emanating from Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s patiently digitised dioramas on the same floor, which added something to the visually reliant work of Kwiekulik. Each pose of their son has that self-conscious desire to become an artwork, especially when arbitrary geometrical arrangements of vegetables frame Dobromierz. However, this was the ’70s when control was the essence of Poland’s Communist regime and argues the point

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that politicised art has strong formal currency when it happens as a result of, rather than a premeditated reaction to the societal conditions of the day.

Sam Keogh’s Monument for Subjects to Come takes the form of a large celestial or subterranean rock substance decked on a rough palanquin as some votive offering: jotted around the room are smaller offerings. High-colour oozes from what are profanely artificial materials, considering the objects’ suggestion of a sacrosanct hidden ‘message’, from expanding foam to glitter and sponge. This is the second outing of this specific work by Keogh that I have experienced: its original site was at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, in 2011, which was a smoother architectural contrast to the roughness of the monument’s materiality. On a positive note the conceptually slippery monument submits to Annie Fletcher’s curatorial premise by evading the limiting chronological measurements of past, present and future. Other works worthy of mention at the O’Connell street venue are Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor’s video work Rite of Spring (2010); a silent film that follows the hand-medown footsteps of Roma children burning mounds of white poplar fluff that combust without a trace. Gavin Murphy’s video work Something New Under the Sun – an audiovisual portrait of the demolished IMCO building on Merrion Road Dublin from the 1970s and its chief architect Oliver Percy Barnard – is visually sublime in the silent interfaces between Murphy’s spoken words and the glacial office block from which the artist ruminates on being ‘out-of-date’. While Greg Howie’s braced sheet of glass with ratchet straps is the antithesis of calm. Outside the cohesive site on O’Connell Street things get somewhat diffuse. At Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) Niamh O’Malley’s work submits to the Biennale’s prevailing subtext of presentness on a surface level via the naked skin of a posturing model in the sumptuously presented black and white video work Model and the alternating reflective, translucent and opaque surfaces of the accompanying Screen. Silence is the noticeable affect of the day as Sarah O’Gorman’s double overlapping slide projection of an interior view of a room at the Skyline Motel, Virginia,1968 (2011) achieves a state of immanence as you wait for the slides to change: the sound of the projector cheekily suggests that there is more to come. Also at LCGA Adrian O’Connell’s large video projection Library over literalises the

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Mark O’Kelly’s installation of paintings and floor-bound vitrines containing various readymades – from tin cans to the novel of prose poetry By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart – is a formal triumph. At first I didn’t recognise it as O’Kelly’s art practice. Over the years the artist has given us a generous archive of imagery that deals with representation at its core; not the arbitrary search through Google Image that infects painting practice today. Also, unlike most artists O’Kelly writes and speaks intelligently about his own practice to the point that he leaves most of us in the dust of his semantic excursions: a decade ago as a first year art student I came away a little shaken from a two hour visiting lecture by the artist. The negative side-effect of this torrent of knowledge is the image becomes a subliminal blip in the margins of some verbal onslaught. At eva International O’Kelly’s work does the talking: it is a joy to see. The painting languages of abstraction and representation meet half-way; injected with a sophisticated colour palette of greens, browns and greys. The work is both industrious and glamourous (Is that Grace Kelly I see in one portrait?). O’Kelly dotes on painting processes and invites the viewer to dote too. His reductive approach and toolshed modesty at eva International makes this the most exciting output by the artist in recent times.

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“diminution of the written word”[5] depicting a library atrium with several balconies from which people fling books. It’s more prison riot and institutional critique than eulogy for print and language – the stack of Britannica encyclopedias tips it over the literal edge – Encyclopedia Britannica went fully digital in 2012. If read ironically Library can be enjoyed as spoof. After a 10 storey elevator ride with two business men at the impressive Riverpoint venue, the much promoted José Carlos Martinat’s Vandalised Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 triggered annoyance. What was first installed as a white monolith comprised of solid model replicas of a dozen iconic buildings in Ireland – from The Four Courts to the social welfare office on Cecil Street – is now, and will be for the duration of eva International, a platform for so-called democracy to be performed: granted by the artist’s invitation to the public to spray their message on the sculpture with on- site aerosol spray cans. French philosopher Jacques Rancière once said that “Democracy is excess,” and that it doesn’t mean satisfaction in social and economic status, or other aspects following that position, but demanding and continuously asking for more. In this sense Martinat’s sculpture successfully portrays the failure of democracy and the revolutionary voice, especially when the contemporary mind has nothing more enlightening to say than “you missed a spot”.

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Greatly anticipated since Annie Fletcher was named as curator with her combined experience and reputation at home and abroad, eva International Limerick has been a long time coming. Unlike the previous annual art event that seemed to always subscribe to some form of localness and performed as a static entity, Fletcher has developed an evolving curatorial programme where other curators and artist groups are invited to interrupt the trajectory of the event through fringe projects. The Belltable Arts Centre becomes a hive of activity during the Biennale’s duration where two curators (Kate Strain and Megs Morley) consecutively showed the fruits of their labour from researching video works in the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Strain’s Making a Scene – Raising the Ink Flag ran till June 10th. It was not an overtly political selection of video. All the artworks revealed their message through poetic slippages, helped out by how the curator had modestly displayed them in what is a usually a difficult space to negotiate. Nira Perg’s Sabbath (2008) was a personal favourite, lyrically documenting the activities of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish Community as they position barriers around the city on the eve of Sabbath. This political activation of the Belltable Arts Centre by Strain and Morley will be followed by the shamanistic shenanigans of Marcus Coates curated by Pádraic E. Moore. While ‘Gracelands’ (curated by Vaari Claffey) relocates for the first time from its home in Leitrim to The Milk Market in Limerick city as a one-day exhibition of film, events and performance. Although I am only informed by rumour, the eva International fringe project RePossession at Faber Studios with artists Caelan Bristow, Marie Connole, and Aaron Lawless could work better just as rumour and nothing else. From what I hear Faber Studios have set up shop across the road from the Garda Station on Henry Street. Taking into account that their joint project involves “stories of loss and theft” and the production of an “Inventory of Objects from departments of Lost & Found” you can imagine that the cops across the road will be keeping an eye on developments. After two trips to Limerick I was welcomed by a closed door to Faber Studios. A project like this should not be visited through either appointment or a specific day of the week: it should be open during the same hours as the main events or not listed on the eva International programme at all. If this wasn’t practical then the run of the project should be either shortened, or a show-and-tell event happens at the end of the

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duration of eva International: a big flaw in what still can turn out to be a successful project.

Finally, Luc Deleu’s Construction X at Arthur’s Quay Park – art was only a glint in my eye when it was first displayed at the same location as part of eva 1994. As an image it has become a great promotion tool for the whole event and doesn’t disappoint in the flesh. Comprised of 9 interlocked shipping containers – it definitely marks the spot – defined by its shifting temporality due to its past and present relationship with the Limerick site. It achieved an unmovable permanence in the minds of the public who saw it in ’94; and will do for the ‘now’ generation and future generations as myth. Remember, it has only been six months since the Irish art world could begin to forget (and secretly mourn) Dublin Contemporary – the last large scale art event that didn’t realise its full potential. Perhaps its slogan “Join the discussion” didn’t help? In contrast, it is the strong visual silence of the majority of works at eva International (ironically “Silence” was the first thematic of Dublin Contemporary) that makes this eva the best yet in my memory, and it has only just begun its evolving trajectory.

As the avatar of Authority in the art of the sixties – that parricidal decade – he was the enemy, and most critics who were not his progeny (and some who were) had it in for him. He had anathematized almost everything in new art, and to claim one’s own experience it was necessary to battle his ideas ... Reading [him] can be depressing because its cocksure lilt contrasts so painfully with one’s own usual lack of conviction. Still, it is in just such grinding extremes of discomfort that creativity may find work to do. (Peter Schjeldahl on Clement Greenberg)[1] CLEMENT GREENBERG represents the good and bad that comes with being authoritative. While being authoritative, sincere, expressive and to write in the first-person is out of favour in our contemporary times of objectivity, this lack of author(ity) that the author practices, and art institutions promote, is a choice that performs a stranglehold on authorial subjectivity. This has been the case since the 1960s, influenced by the linguistic philosophical revolution that Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida advanced, from what literary critic Seán Burke interprets as a missed opportunity for a phenomenological revolution of the subject.[2] What is so wrong with a biographical interpretation of the object, what C.S. Lewis described as “personal heresy”? Is it true what Barthes says about language being “the destroyer of all subject”?[3] I respectfully beg to differ regarding the confused definition/state of the author’s death that both Barthes and Foucault pronounced with varying degrees of erasure in their respective essay/lecture ‘The Death of the Author’(1967) and ‘What is an Author’(1969). Barthes was ruthless in his beheading of the author when he wrote “that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”[4] Whereas Foucault writes that the author function gives “rise simultaneously to several

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MAY 2012 (#38): Subjectively Yours

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selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.”[5] In February 2012, New York Times art critic, Roberta Smith, casually resurrected Roland Barthes’ death of the author discourse, by quipping: “reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated.”[6] Roberta Smith’s flippant statement – more hook than thesis – was inspired by the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art New York. Smith’s aim is more specifically directed at the artist-author, something that neither Barthes nor Foucault confronted due to their shared bias for systems of belief that are controlled by philosophical and literary discourse, and by doing so limiting the subjects of authorship and authority; Foucault writes: Up to this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author function in painting, music, and other arts should have been discussed; but even supposing that we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term “author” much too narrow a meaning.[7]

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What the above suggests is the author that Foucault is confronting is not just a historical construction, but includes the individual author and the power he/she wields or desires as a sole individual. Of course Smith’s one-liner reference to the author’s death is far from generous, but we have to take on board the context in which it was written – the throwaway newspaper to be digested en route to the Manhattan high-rise office. Literary critic Seán Burke, who has exhausted the question of the author’s death and return better that anyone else, admits that the death of the author is “one of the few theoretical ‘initiatives’ to cross the line between cultures – the academy and the Press.”[8] However, it must be assumed that the attention span for the subject of the author’s death from the perspective of the Press and its readership can’t go beyond the sans serif headline ‘The Death of the Author’. I am not underestimating newspaper eadership, but as American philosopher Geoffrey Bennington once observed there is not enough time to read philosophy the way it should be read, admitting that “there’s a perfectly respectable and welcome use of hypertexts to make scholarship less like hard work, for example, and so to free up time for thought. I hope and trust there’ll one day be a CD hypertext version of Derrida’s work.[9] Is Roberta Smith seriously arguing an academic argument that is over forty years old in this fast-track context? No. Is it a good hook in the first paragraph of a hack art review to get the hurried capitalist to read further? Yes. Is it a jibe at ‘cold’ poststructuralist thought? Maybe. Is she generally scoffing at the unrelenting academic argument? Probably. Does she believe the author is dead? Probably not. Smith’s quip about the author’s death is not surprising. In the past she has blown her own anti- institutional trumpet loudly, especially when referring to art education and the proliferation of practice-based PhDs. So, her position regarding such subjects as the author, artistic expression, or the overtly academic art work (see her New York Times review of David Godbold’s solo at Mitchell-Innes & Nash New York in May 2007 for a taster [10]) is no surprise to her readership, which doesn’t separate it’s academici(z)ed Z’s from its commonplace S’s; not to mention their phenomenological I’s. Capitalism and reflection don’t go hand in hand. Personally I relish an art critic that doesn’t mind their P’s and Q’s from time to time, especially when they provoke academic offense. Smith’s contextually incongruous revived author supports Burke’s observation that there is “growing breach between academic literary criticism and broad intellectual culture. This breach is marked by a ‘politics’ of theory which seems to have very little to do with politics in anything like a ‘real world,’”[11]

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This breach between theory and life is very telling via the artist-author’s relationship with their own biography, by quoting Smith’s authoritative diagnosis of the biographical seeds of Sherman’s art:

Albeit slightly clichéd, Smith’s biographical reference to “Ms. Sherman” at age 11, “dressed and made up as old women,” is appropriate for the artist in question. The cliché is the schemata that Sherman utilises for her work. When clichés are translated into language there is no avoiding trite psychological commentary on selfhood, unless the writer uses fictive and philosophical novelty and avoids the subject of her work altogether. Although it is known that Sherman does not attend her own exhibition openings, I do not believe that this is a market-driven performative element to create the persona of ‘enigmatic artist’. Her collectors’ desire to have her presence in the artwork rather than in person is a poststructuralist wet dream, but biography always has a way of leaking out of somewhere. When biography does leak it pours with subjective persistence. Take for instance Martin Heidegger’s Nazi sympathising, or one of the most brilliant but biographically repressed post-structuralists, Paul de Man, who cannot be read now without the context of his early articles for a Nazi paper which were found subsequent to his death and expressed anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments. Burke goes on to suggest that: “De Man’s denial of biography, his ideas of auto-biography as de-facement, have come to be seen not as disinterested theoretical statements, but as sinister and meticulous acts of self-protection, by which he sought to (a)void his historical self.”[13] The thought that comes to mind when Foucault writes that “we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention”[14] is that he is referring to himself from the third-person. He could have as easily used an exclamation rather than question mark in the lecture title, ‘What is an Author?’, to explicitly stamp his authority on the subject of the author. His philosophy has been criticised by the likes of Habermas as having no normative function whatsoever; in other words having no practical real world use. But underneath all this veiled objectivity there is Foucualt, the very pronounced author-god. Although Barthes set himself against biographical interpretation, the artist-author has always invited it, not to mention the viewer, for whom – from an ‘uneducated’ standpoint – looks at art with a backpack of psychological baggage. Their interpretation is based on the psychological How? and Why? rather that the academic When? and Where? The public love to entertain the cliché of the psychologically damaged artist. Performative art practices like Sherman’s are psychologically determined and individualistic. Although psychological clichés are not intellectually or academically progressive, they are a fundamental part of our real world modes of being. American artist Paul McCarthy inverts American modes of communication and entertainment through the carnival grotesque, but you have to wonder as a viewer what is the psychological makeup of an artist who desires to do so in the manner that he does. His is not solely an objective critique of contemporary culture or an aesthetic partner to the philosophical theories of, let’s say, Mikhail Bakhtin (although it could be). First and foremost McCarthy performs the physical act of making art based firmly on his own psychological needs and desires, however clichéd that might sound. So, allow me a metaphor or three when I say that the author is the pudding; Barthes’

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But an uncommonly intense attraction to dress-up and masquerade dates to her childhood: It was in her blood. The catalogue includes a photograph of Ms. Sherman and a friend around age 11, dressed and made up as old women; her stooped creaky posture already signals the ability to crawl into other people’s skins.[12]

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‘The Death of the Author’ is the cream; and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ is the cherry on top of what is a spoilt desert of sorts. Although I would be disappointed if you licked off the cream and robbed the cherry, I believe the pudding is where the sustenance has always been, is and will be, and forget the academic cream and cherry.

JUNE 2012 (#39): Milk Miners & Coal Maidens MARIE FARRINGTON & SARAH DOHERTY

‘Outside the System of Difference’, The Joinery, Dublin, 16 May – 27 May. ALEANA EGAN, ‘day wears’, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1 June – 18 July.

ALTHOUGH a week separated the closing of Marie Farrington and Sarah Doherty’s joint exhibition at The Joinery Dublin and the opening of Aleana Egan’s solo exhibition at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, looking back, the three female artists were formally in concert, albeit showing in spaces that are on distant rungs from each other on the career ladder.

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The Joinery always feels a little damp, like a mopped-up bar in the early hours or a public toilet where residual moisture hangs in the air from the automatic flushing system. Without invigilators there is no meeting of eyes in the two-roomed gallery. These environmental factors don’t distract but ground the art objects on display there: compounded by the fact that the emerging artists who are selected to show at The Joinery always retain an element of risk in their art-making which is eye catching. The meeting of eyes at Douglas Hyde Gallery is more commonplace but somehow you feel alone with the work. The balcony leading to the stairwell drops you from street to basement level of the double height space – offering you an initial overview of the art – which is immediately forgotten when you land in the gallery proper. Arrowslit windows let some of the Dublin light in but none of the noise. In this close-to-perfect environment to view art, those works that have a tendency to be conceptually or formally loose, look like they have been rolled out fully resolved with one sweeping gesture. The artists who get to show here invariably have their shit together. Significant status and what is presumably an intimate process of realising the exhibition and accompanying publication with Director John Hutchinson is the reward; a process that more often than not bears fruit. At the Joinery two works in particular held my attention and represented the contrasting artistic end games of resolution and potential of the artwork. Sarah Doherty’s dirty, wringing wet Towel (2012) hung on a wall from what I presumed to be a rusted nail. It was at a level that said functional: it could be grasped easily to use for the dirty work at hand. It was also at a height that suggested intentional display, so the other art objects at The Joinery were read within an interrelated spectrum. However, as my eyes jostled with the other works I kept coming back to Towel. It seemed to belong to the Joinery; mopping up nicely my earlier imaginings of early morning bars and public toilets. But Towel was far from functional. It represented

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under-the-toilet-lip-dirty-work as artefact: in brilliant illusory fashion Towel was made of concrete. The second work that stood out at The Joinery was Marie Farrington’s Eventual Apparatus (2012). Coal was used as a miniature winding infrastructure for a network of straight runnels in which milk was poured and seemed to set as buttermilk, or would do. Coal as a bed for milk is nervy decadence: an open-air elemental process with no scientific glassware in sight.

At Douglas Hyde Gallery femininity exudes from Aleana Egan’s floorbound mixedmedia work no noise, no glass, no upholstery boxed her up from the extraordinary (2012). Th echoing “no” from Egan’s meandering title is also found in one of Virginia Woolf ’s journal entries from 1904 following her father’s death: “His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books — inconceivable.” Woolf is a ghost-protagonist in Egan’s art: I distinctly remember her being referenced in the artist’s inferior solo show at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, in 2010. Egan’s allusions to literature always seem fugitive, as is her communicative devices: there is always a niggling feeling that sometimes contemporary artists use obscurity as a safeguard from being found out. Cynicism aside, Egan’s objects are formally inviting. Morandi-like loafs of plaster, neatly folded fabric and a steel rod armature form an unkept bed, or an unpacked slice of life from an attic that is perhaps best forgotten – moving house is always decorated by melancholia – Egan’s languid objects passively sink in it.

JUNE 2012 (#40): CROWNING

COLIN MARTIN, ‘The Garden’, Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Institute of Technology,

Curated by Kate Strain, 6 June – 20 June, 2012 + Panel Discussion on the 7 June 2pm with Alice Butler, John Graham, Maximilian Le Cain and Seán O’Sullivan.

Afterthoughts following the panel discussion for Colin Martin’s digital installation The Garden at the Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

7 June, 2012, 3:30pm ~ after the panel discussion... COLIN MARTIN’S The Garden is made up of a quadrangle of space buttressed by four freestanding walls with missing corners: the viewer enters the space through the lost angles. Up high on the gallery walls proper four projectors buzz, projecting four images onto the interior faces of the mid-height false walls. One long panning shot of a garden at night runs for the full duration of the video installation while the remaining videos project details of garden vegetation and the lighting mechanics for staging The Garden. The long panning shot is a constant crutch for the viewer and

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If there was the possibility of a straight house swap between the art objects at the Joinery and The Douglas Hyde Gallery the art would be irrevocably altered, and not for the better I bet: which leads on to the point that fascinating art practices do not need to be framed by a ‘perfect’ space.

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allows a certain amount of play to take place amongst the other projections, which intermittently switch on-off like the ’80s electronic memory game ‘Simon’. While forced to wait for the projections to start over during what felt like an eternal 2 minute intermission, the technology behind the projections became more apparent: digitised counters on the DVDs took on a new significance. Knowing that Martin was/is a representational painter I read The Garden through the eyes of a painter. The tenebrist lighting, weedy vegetation, black backdrop and instances of intimate detail evoked the painting and printed gestures of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer: nature and religion being venerated by the god-given creative hand. But what painting can’t do is sound, which Martin plays with to no end. The projectors in situ and alien mechanics that bring The Garden to life at night ironically sound like the natural and mechanical noises that inhabit a garden in daylight: Martin’s panning camera becomes a lawnmower, a strimmer, a gnat in the ear. 7th June, 2012, 2.30pm; the panel discussion... Curator Kate Strain highlighted a sentence written by panelist Maximilian Le Cain in the accompanying printed pamphlet of texts for Martin’s The Garden: this specific sentence was the impetus for the following observations on Martin’s work from the context of the panel discussion. [Colin] Martin is not only silent but apparently absent (Maximilian Le Cain)[1]

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Colin Martin has been an artist for some time; graduating from Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in 1994 as a painter. In the past he painted what look like panAmerican landscapes where grey Irishness is pumped up with cinematic Technicolour. Today he finds himself back where it all started, but wearing the coat of digital installation artist at the Broadcast Gallery, which is found at the end of a long corridor in DIT. Le Cain’s sentence remarking on Martin’s absence in his own work triggered the panel discussion to touch upon the idea of the author, or absence thereof; posing fascinating questions that may have been extended if not for time constraints. D.H Lawrence is memorable (to my mind) for eloquently ranting about the “coats” that artists wear. I am not referring to mink, corduroy, wax or other such coats that pertain to an individuals identity or class. What bothered Lawrence was the modus operandi coat that defines the art work’s raison d’être : method of operation vs its reason to be. Artists, whether through institutional or peer learning have to mould artistic expression into something manageable for the viewer or the art market. An exception to the case is outsider art, which happens to be invited into the art mould because it is essentially misshapen and novel, until it loses its novelty due to overexposure and flung back out. Lawrence also wrote wonderfully on cliché, which can also be framed around the coats that artist’s wear. Although brilliantly argued and written, Lawrence’s idea of cliché is old- hat. Today, cliché is the bedrock of contemporary art, as the late David Weiss (of [Peter]Fischli and Weiss) said: “There is something right about clichés”. However, for new publics contemporary art is either admired as some brave expressionistic gesture or ignored as mad and esoteric. Art clichés are not like opening a conversation with a comment about the weather, or are they? For those of us who are familiar with contemporary art practice, art is built on frames upon

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frames of reference, projected onto the art object from both viewer and author. ‘Art exists in a vacuum’ is a cliché, but like all clichés it has layers of meaning that suggest more that just the intended sheltered existence of the artworld against the backdrop of commonality and collectivity enjoyed by the outside world. The art vacuum is celebrated as a positive space where ideas and formal conceits[2] rebound and coalesce into hybrid cousins. Although this artistic birth sack, and for lack of a lesser word, inbreeding, could be perceived as a negative, the individual author is bound to appear at some point in the artwork. Personally, if I don’t get a glimpse of the author crowning amongst all the repeated frames of reference, I forget the work almost immediately.

As projected showreel, Martin’s previous video work seemed to be searching for an author, or authorhood. I was pulled away from the discussion in a similar search for an author in the showreel. Was his work all modus operandi with no raison d’être? From this reductive and too proper presentation, yes. The joy of art in the gallery is the happenstance entrance into the work and the choice to leave when you have had your fill. Chair of the discussion Seán O’Sullivan observed that The Garden was very different from Martin’s previous work in complexity and negotiation. I would later learn through experiencing The Garden in the Broadcast Gallery that Martin’s work was not only more complex to negotiate, but an author was crowning through the undergrowth in generous fashion.

*JULY 2012 (#41): SHITLIST #1 DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS* SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

JULY 2012 (#42): As Of Now

Sligo I.T Fine Art Graduate Show. *BY JOANNE LAWS*

MOUNTING the steps towards The Dock, I was confronted by a multitude of ambiguous portraits which effectively activated the glass-fronted foyer. With feelings of anticipation, I crossed the threshold, receptive to this declaration that graduate artists had, as of now, occupied the building. Kerry Cunnigham’s portraits - obscured, reductive and reproducible – were further manifested as a singular image in a large-

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As part of the panel discussion a showreel of Martin’s previous video work was projected silently on a wall. This was my virgin viewing of Martin’s video practice. Whilst the panelists discussed the politics of visual art display with regard to Martin’s in situ digital work The Garden in the Broadcast Gallery, another conversation was playing out in the room with them with regard to the problematic presentation of Martin’s work in the discussion room. On the day I voiced my criticism on the nature of this setup, specifically from my virgin perspective. Le Cain’s observation kept echoing true: Martin is not only silent but apparently absent.

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scale projection onto the mezzanine wall above the staircase, although the daylight diminished its cinematic impact. With facial recognition rendered alarmingly irrelevant, this subversion of the portraiture canon speaks more in the vernacular of online culture, commenting on voyeurism, profile pictures as networked metadata, and the filters through which the self is concealed from the outside world, with the prospect of gratification becoming ever distant. Although rudimentary in some aspects of its execution, the artworks (particularly the receipts as counterportraits) signify an engagement with sophisticated current discourse (data-mining, surveillance, consumption) revealing areas that the artist should synthesise further and make her own. Continuing left along the mezzanine, photographic works of wild animals situated within domestic interiors proved visually striking. Pitched as a journey into the absurd, Kevin Skinnader’s experimental photography represents a departure from painting which is rather successful. A higher quality print finish with greater colour saturation would do greater justice to these quirky, appealing compositions, providing an arena for further playful juxtaposition that seems less attainable within his realist painting.

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Entering Gallery 2, I paused to take in the view: A panoramic of experimental, interdisciplinary work, coupled with some carefully considered yet playful curation, attested to the reasons why the ‘degree-show time of year’ is so rewarding for the art audience. A ceiling-to-floor textile work by Melissa Smith gracefully commanded the space, providing a point of navigation from which to circulate the rest of the artworks. Monumental presence shifted to a more intimate reading, when tiny drawings concealed within the threads of the crochet work became visible. Supported by a tangible interaction with some competent painting, the artist’s body of work was one of the most professional exhibits of the group show, and could be happily incarnated within any contemporary art space. Executed with a muted palette, and received as a cohesive series of durational studies, Margaret McKenna’s ink drawings provided a moment of calm reflection in an active space. Due to the artist’s command of the medium and an awareness of composition, her investigations of flora and fauna of the ocean provided more than just still life studies of organic detritus. The use of antique pen nibs and ink (as a gesture towards liquidity or fluidity) provide an insight into more traditional functions of drawing as documentation and archive; methodologies which could be consolidated in future work, supplemented by discourse surrounding the museum aesthetic. Amy Keeley’s concise artist’s statement describes her encounter with some fundamental ongoing issues within drawing discourse. Can a methodology (i.e a method of research, a process of doing) become the art object (i.e the finished product)? In this case, the work offered access to both. In providing an assemblage of architectural studies – drawing, collage and photographic works – secured haphazardly in place with brown-tape, strewn across two walls of a corner (which included a closed door) the viewer reads a work in progress, which in turn becomes an art object – a monument, perhaps, to rumination. The large textile and paper collage which was displayed to the left, further blurred the boundaries between drawing as a noun or a verb, and was effective in this regard. Vibrant paintings of last year’s London riots by Maelisa Regan provided an insight into production trends in contemporary painting. The street culture aesthetic has surfaced in other degree shows this year, strangely enough in the work of other

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female painters. Based on imagery extracted from the internet, the work alludes to the dubious role of online media platforms in circulating news reportage, including the use of social networking sites in the orchestration and mobilisation of social dissent. More work in the technical and art-historical aspects of painting would further enhance the artist’s inquiry.

In the absence of other artworks, I can only judge Pamela Byrne’s body of work on the basis of one oil painting entitled ‘Corvids’, which I read as a reference to birds. Certainly crows, as a symbol of folk-lore, superstition and mythology could be the subject of a significant body of work, but in this artwork any reference to birds has been obscured by equine hooves and some technically problematic painting. Perhaps oil paint is too cumbersome, and a more agile, water-based medium utilised in small -scale studies on paper could prove liberating for the artist, so that the essence of this potentially sophisticated and unique inquiry might be revealed and consolidated. I am always pleased to see the cubby-hole in Gallery 2 used to good effect, and within Vanessa Salvador Garcia’s darkroom installation the viewer was invited to play, interact, wear 3-D glasses and to suck on lollipops. Dimly lit with ultraviolet, DayGlo works confronted the viewer, while the sound of birds and gunshot provided a quirky, if dislocated, audio narrative. Having compiled a comprehensive body of experimental works, comprising of different and generous ways to engage the viewer, the artist would be advised to now focus on one aspect in subsequent work. My preference lies with the viewing box of drawings, with its multi-layered scenography, which (if presented with less distortion) could offer a valuable examination of the theatrical and performative apparatus which surrounds the production of art, providing an impetus to study more intently the relationship between artwork and viewer. Gallery 3 is also a space in The Dock that I regularly enjoy, because of its liberation from the formal pressures of large- room curation, making it an ideal location for interventions or research-based experiments. Deirdre Houston’s multiplicity of tree images were assembled in an investigative fashion, pinned casually to the wall as sketch-book offerings. The pages – products of drawing, photography and print processes - retain the tree’s image even when reproduced, and the decision to also present blank pages in primary colours conveyed an engagement with colour theory that the artist should further pursue as an intrinsic component of image-making. In the same space, works by Nalayini Kanapathipillai landed the viewer back in the territory of painting on canvas, reintroducing portraiture formats as a mode of iconology. The artist’s fascination with India’s Tamil Cinema industry has produced four appropriately sized paintings, with one being far more visually striking than the rest. A tentative engagement with surface manipulation and collage was evident,

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Geraldine Tighe’s robust, almost masculine ‘Regrowth’, was a sculptural assemblage of manually rendered driftwood and other found materials, which provided a meditation on the natural landscape. The work was accompanied by a well written statement, but a little editing would be of future benefit. Generally the artist’s statement requires a delicate balance between clarification and concealment, and often artists do themselves a dis-service by over-explaining, or forcing a conceptual framework onto their work, either limiting its reception or over-generalising its intent. For process driven work, it is often better to let the material qualities of the work speak for itself, sparsely framed with some cognitive insight, in the form of drawings or a minimal commentary.

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although this approach would benefit from refinement. If the artist’s desire is to keep painting, then a substantial body of works must ensue, coupled with a fidelity to more decisive editing. Crossing the landing towards Gallery 1, I examined a series of geometric drawings by Andrew Roche. The initial graphic appearance was superseded by an awareness of the artist’s adherence to the principals of craftsmanship in his execution and choice of paper and materials. On entering the space, where some minimalist curation produced a different, almost diligent atmosphere, I observed a larger more mass- produced incarnation of Roche’s inquiry with a mixed media piece entitled ‘Coincidence’. Formed out of an affinity with code, arithmetic and geometric progression, some repetitive pattern-making pursuits have evolved out of the ‘square root of five’, a motivation that I find infinitely appealing. Issues pertaining to the function of drawing resurfaced in the work of Áine Murray, where I was left searching for evidence of her rationale. Described in her statement as an engagement with architectural plans, it remained unclear as to whether these works could exist sufficiently as art objects, or whether they might in fact be stronger as preparation for some other process. While some surface manipulation is evident in the drawings, these choices end up infringing on the work’s graphic appeal. As Rachel Whiteread is stated as an influence, it would be advantageous for the artist to revisit Whiteread’s drawings and observe the clarity achieved in the minimalist studies, which can be read as preparatory works for sculpture but which also have the capacity to exist autonomously.

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Architecture of a domestic kind was further explored by Colm Langan with his insight into unoccupied derelict homes. His drawings conveyed a skill for draftsmanship, complemented by a subtle integration of discarded materials such as old newspapers, which produced a sculptural aesthetic. A more sensitive treatment of the wooden found objects (which were roughly hewn and not displayed in their entirety) would improve the aesthetic appeal of the work as a cohesive whole. I would have liked to have seen ‘The Last Reading’ (catalogue image of an electricity meter) displayed in the gallery.

Concluding Thoughts The notion of ‘critique’ is very subjective. In writing this review, my only motivation was to give this graduate work some attention. Out of this close reading I have tried to provide some constructive commentary (how the work was received, how it relates to current practice, and where it succeeded or lacked, from my perspective) wherever I felt it would be beneficial, highlighting potential areas for future development. As a general comment, more work on the artist’s statements would be beneficial, although I understand that this is more of a post-graduate concern. For those who want to keep making art, I would urge you to continue developing and deepening your knowledge within your field, and to maintain opportunities for experimentation and critical feedback. With diminishing funding opportunities, self organisation is resurfacing as the arts community’s greatest asset, with ‘mutually beneficial exchange’ replacing the ‘financial transaction’. Your peers will be an integral part of this interdependent activity. Familiarise yourself with the galleries (private and publically funded and artist led spaces), the art publications, and funding opportunities, both nationwide and internationally. Anyone embarking on a degree courses in future academic years would benefit from visiting other degree shows (most notably NCAD) to gain an insight into the work of their prospective peers. Sligo I.T’s Art Department has always existed on the peripheries, both geographically

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and pedagogically. I say this because ‘Fine Art’, as a curricular designation, has always remained broad when viewed in the context of other ‘departmentalised’ institutions (Painting, Sculpture, Textiles, Ceramics etc..). With lower student numbers, Fine Art in Sligo maintains a fidelity to quality mentoring at a sustainable level, with a reluctance to ‘churn out’ hundreds of art school graduates every year. Ironically, inter-disciplinarity has become very evident in degree shows nationwide in recent years (with painters engaging in photography, printers experimenting with film, sculptors undertaking painting etc..) so ‘Fine Art’ in this context can be viewed as an increasingly progressive model. In conclusion, The Dock must be acknowledged, in providing a valuable opportunity for graduates to display work in a contemporary gallery context. This annual gesture demonstrates a desire to engage with and support fresh talent, and illustrates a spirit of generosity that is lacking in some bigger institutions. I suspect the curatorial team also view the graduate show as an opportunity to embrace new approaches with fewer formal pressures, evident in the experimental presentation formats which activated the gallery spaces to such great effect.

ALEX CONWAY + FRANK WHELAN (Hi Dó)

SITEATION (Launch), Unit 4 James Joyce Street, Dublin 6 September.

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS have to deal with the fact that the public in general don’t like unexpected commotion, especially when it makes them feel shame or embarrassment. When someone is being mugged, beaten, homeless, drunk, has Tourette’s, the public turn a blind eye, and quicken their step from the scene. It would be better if we were like alpha dogs, who react with a growl or nip to the throat when one of the pack start rolling and frolicking in the grass. It all comes down to the cringe factor, and when in your opinion, the performance crosses the line from emotive spectacle to self indulgent artifice. So, why over the years have I been drawn to write on a host of Irish performance artists who include Michelle Browne, Dominic Thorpe, Alex Conway? In this instance of writing, it’s Alex Conway’s props and absolute absorption into his particular mode of performance that produces prose – from an artist whose choice of mutism as an emotive tool uncovers a verbal skeptic at heart. However, at the launch of ‘SITEATION’, a temporary project space on James Joyce Street, made up of members Helena Tobin, Michael Holly, Debbie Guinnane, Sue Rainsford, Etaoin Holahan, and who refer to themselves as “an eclectic and multidisciplinary collective of art practitioners, curators, and writers,” Conway allowed his voice to enter his usually mute vocabulary, in a collaborative performance with Frank Whelan, that collapsed the inherent individualism of performance art into a conjoined-twin-band. Both Conway and Whelan’s physiognomy contributed to the performance, whether

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SEPTEMBER 2012 (#43): Beating the Emotive Drum

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they were aware of that fact or not. Conway, the ‘lead singer’, sat facing the crowd – gorilla dominant. Whelan sat directly in front of Conway, with his bare back to the audience, which was partly draped by long hair. Faceless, he looked like the atypical drummer, and was closest to the audience but submissively turned away. Holding drum sticks, Whelan played percussion pads that were strapped to Conway’s legs, while the latter yelped, screamed, postured, dressed in an array of props ranging from a purple hat, bells, coloured contact lenses, and red light inserted in his mouth. The harsh, but rhythmic sounds emanating from the corner of a commercial unit that was decked out in customary derelict decor, has seeds in 1970s Industrial and ‘No Wave’ music (think ‘The Roosters’ who practiced in a nearby apartment in the 1979 banned film Driller Killer): a brand of underground music that also infiltrated brutalist performance art of the same decade. But it was Conway’s sophisticated and colourful use of props that offered the viewer something more than personal torture, usually envisaged through cement blocks and chains. This was postmodern performance not ’70s mimicry. Just like post- industrial metal bands of the late 1980s Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, Conway and Whelan allowed the audience in with their synergy of chaos, rhythm and accented dress. This was emotive theatre, not cringe worthy.

SEPTEMBER 2012 (#44): A Deflated ‘Hooray’ for Painting

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A Response to Gemma Tipton’s Irish Times article ‘Painting is not dead – it’s hard’.

GEMMA TIPTON’S Irish Times article ‘Painting is not dead – it’s hard’,[1] paints a picture of an Irish art readership that has just woken up in 1985, four years subsequent to Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘The End of Painting’ being published in October in 1981, and skateboard propelled Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is being towed by a pickup truck in Back to the Future. This four year gap gives us Irish, who are so-called literary not visual heads, enough time to digest what is happening in the artworld elsewhere ... Oh, I forgot, it’s 2012, and it seems that we’re still trying to get a handle on the “Death of...” No, I am not saying it! Let’s get the excuses out of the way first for an article that is irrelevant at best and regressive at worst. It must be noted that The Irish Times editorial line for visual art is not progressive. There is also the excuse that the writer is planting seeds rather than theoretical trees for a readership that is not as well disposed to art discourse as it is economics. But, there is no excuse for the recycling of art generalities that are not expanded upon – edited down into teaspoon measures so infant readers can better digest. Gemma Tipton’s opening paragraph with the line “Reports of the imminent death of painting as an art form in Ireland have been greatly exaggerated” has a similar ring to Roberta Smith’s opening paragraph in her recent New York Times review of the Cindy Sherman retrospective: “reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated.”[2] What reports??? There has never been so much good painting, and so many shows by local and international painters in Dublin. Painting is everywhere; the soles of our feet are gloopy with the stuff. I wrote in response to Smith’s review earlier in the year, that such an opening line is a good hook in the first paragraph of

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an art review to get the hurried capitalist to read further.[3] But, at least Roberta Smith gradually builds her argument, trusting the New York readership’s intelligence, not spoon-feeding them, we even get some poststructuralist handbagging.

Bottom line, painting is not selected for Biennales because it simply doesn’t fit the socio-political framing of these events – this year’s Berlin Biennale didn’t just exclude painting, it excluded ART. But as Mark O’Kelly said to me recently, there is also the commercial value of painting, which has the added baggage of insurance and transportation: how easy is it to post a DVD, or even fly and accommadate an artist to do their stuff on site. There have been exceptions to the norm, such as Juan Davilia’s brilliantly painted assaults on culture at dOCUMENTA 12 in 2007; Francis Alÿs’ choice to use painting exclusively to poetically communicate his view on national borders, globalism, and community at this year’s Documenta; and one of the more individualist painters of our time, Merlin James, who represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale. It has to be said that dOCUMENTA doesn’t ignore painting, but selects paintings that somehow fit the socio-political jigsaw of what is a brand of contemporary art that exists on the border of the more obvious commercial outlets of art gallery and art fair. Although not enough painting was present at dOCUMENTA 13, Giorgio Morandi, Etel Adnan and Yan Lei provided memorable moments. However, Jerry Saltz is right to mourn the staging of painting in the stark Documenta- Halle: ‘As I walked through this dead zone, I thought, “This is where painting goes to die.”’[4] But does painting need the Biennale? When I said to the Berlin based Russian born painter Andreas Golder that I loved dOCUMENTA this year even though there was no painting – feeling that he needed an apology for its absence –, he replied: “Sure painting is not part of dOCUMENTA anymore.” It was said with a matter of fact attitude. From his point of view, it wasn’t a case of painting being excluded, but that painting was better off outside such curatorial ring-fencing. He’s right. Curators utilise painting in such art events as a dioramic device to place video, installation, photography in their ‘rightful’ place as successors of the old guard. Painting has literally become a framing device of historical rather than future importance. Nevertheless, the highlight of the Berlin Biennale this year was the fact that the commercial galleries around Berlin cast some of their best artists, and painting came

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Gemma Tipton asks why is it that the Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA, and our own eva International Limerick continue to exclude painting? The critic throws out the question but fails to expand, although The Royal Hibernian Academy Director Patrick Murphy does take up the critical reins with a beautiful turn of phrase “aesthetic esperanto,” which for me describes perfectly the international curator’s hankering for neapolitan cross-cultural artworks to head up what are grand socio-political soap operas. Other reasons why painting is the black sheep of the herd include the individualism (bad word) of painting vs the false ideologies of collective commons that saturates contemporary art discourse and making; but we already know what happens when you don’t hold your weight within such collective frameworks – YOU’RE GREECE! Also, there is the rise of the new theory driven curator and the theorisation of art education. Not to forget the universally relevant idiom ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, which afflicts the art community and its institutions – forcing some to run before they can jog, or even walk in Irish art circles.

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out on top. The fact is the Biennale and dOCUMENTA are not the fashion police, the art fair is, where painting still holds court. Money maybe painting’s mistress but that has always been a transparent fact. Douglas Crimp’s description of painting as a vanity project on the part of its maker, and to his mind the viewer, suggests that creative endeavour is not generally selfindulgent (not human): be careful, the one’s that proclaim collectivity and community and commonality are the harbingers of vanity – they are just waiting for their chance to be propelled forward. “Is anyone doing anything worthwhile on canvas?” Gemma Tipton asks in The Irish Times. I can’t elongate my neck far enough to get my head around the broadness of that question. First you have to ask what art is worthwhile? – a crick is already forming and I’m not even considering going there. Also, the long-sited observation that a cohesive and confident bunch of painters is ten years away? (Mike FitzPatrick) THEY’RE HERE – NOW – IN THIS COUNTRY! We have a golden generation of twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-something painters that are at the peak of their powers – “confident” and “cohesive” (It would inappropriate and reductive to make a list).

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There are lots of critical seeds in Gemma Tipton’s article that could be expanded on to greater effect, mainly offered up by Patrick Murphy, such as his insightful observation that painting is “culturally specific” and counter to contemporary art’s ‘common’ ideology: there is an article there somewhere. The continually resurrection of painting’s death as discourse – a theoretical argument by an academic like Douglas Crimp who wanted to be heard beyond the ruins of the university – is absurd. Although Gemma Tipton says that painting is alive and kicking, it’s said without any conviction. Painting is happening, always happening. It doesn’t have a chronological trajectory, or peaks and troughs, as South African painter Marlene Dumas observes: “Painting doesn’t freeze time, it circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who are first might well be last.” (‘Women and Painting’. 1993) I haven’t picked this opinion off the ground, artists are talking about this article behind backs. Don’t get me wrong, provocation is good, but only if it generates new ideas, not recycled irrelevance. Gemma Tipton once wrote a blog entry for Circa Magazine online entitled ‘On Mediocrity’, do I have to spell out the irony.

OCTOBER 2012 (#45): Becoming Self Aware

Panel Discussion with editors from Irish art publications, The COMMISSIONS+ Symposium, 9 October >>>>>

QUESTION: Can criticism, invention, discovery, play, be practiced when an art publication becomes self aware?

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Being self aware is synonymous with establishment. Being self aware is to act cautiously. Being self aware is a fear of impropriety. Being self aware means the rule book has been drawn up. Being self aware is a belief in one’s reputation and the fear of losing that reputation. Being self aware is being overly aware of people around you and being antagonist to the competition.

The panel discussion between editors of funded and unfunded Irish art publications at the COMMISSIONS+ symposium – co-organised by Caroline Cowley of the Fingal Arts Office and freelance writer on art, culture and policy, Valerie Connor – uncovered the editorial ideologies behind the printed page. Publications were represented by co- editors Iain Griffin and Suzanne Walsh (Critical Bastards), Aoife Flynn (Occupy Paper), Adrian Duncan (Paper Visual), Michaële Cutaya (Fugitive Papers), and moderated by Daniel Jewesbury. Although this session’s purpose was to discuss the commissioning processes of art publications, what came across more forcibly, and somewhat inevitably, was the personal objectives of each publication and the editors’ perspectives on art writing etiquette.

Adrian Duncan’s matter of fact presentation had a welcome show of pointed teeth. He spoke about compulsion and urges in the act of writing an art review, which was a joy to hear. However, this was contradicted by the very fact that Paper Visual’s editorial process is to allow art reviews to marinate over time in the back-and-forth between editor and writer. He excused this time-delay as an “opportunity” to make a text better. Of course, finessing a text with a feather duster over a longer period of time is all well and good – commissioned essays for artist catalogues can be a year in the making – but I think an ‘opportunity’ is missed if art publications have a onetrack mindset with regard to the delivery and timing of their reviews. One of the main criticisms of Circa Magazine was that its art reviews came six months or more after the art event. In fact, Circa was always an archive, except when one of its online reviews coincided with the exhibition being reviewed – a rare occurrence. Take for instance Visual Artists Newsletter, which produces reports rather than critical reviews. It seems art publications in this country are already booked into the Archive before they go to print. I really don’t think there is enough off-the-cuff criticism in this country. Even if it ends up being disposable, timely criticism can spark ideas for further development down the road to the archive. If compulsion and urgency are necessary ingredients of good criticism and writing, which I agree that they are, then the feather duster approach is not the only way to go. There is a sense that advocates of the less journalistic approach to art criticism believe that art writing is an art form in and of itself. Adrian Duncan said just that during the panel discussion. New York critic, artist, and gallerist John Kelsey writes: “When discourse is elaborated as art, or in the place of art, the writer performs the redundancy of the artist he also is, or was.” [1]

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As is the case with such sessions on all things to do with art writing/criticism and its production, there is never enough time to reflect and respond in the moment of these live events. The drive home afterward does a good job of bringing to the surface the questions you wished you had asked, but time and opportunity was not your friend on the day.

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Text artists such as Frances Stark and Jennifer Bornstein make art, but art writers? There is no shame in being subservient to the art object: without it writers wouldn’t be able to see beyond themselves. Critical Bastards, for which two of the panelists have written for, Adrian Duncan and Michaële Cutaya, had a less fully formed editorial agenda. Honestly, all publications post-Circa are finding themselves. However, co-editor Iain Griffin talked about the future potential of the publication rather than what was ideological set in stone, such as audio art reviews and other less tested and proven methods of producing art commentary. Griffin’s fresh perspective revealed the advantages of being less self aware, where play and failure are contemplated and even accepted as part of the process. Although Critcal Bastards’ printed publication doesn’t have the perfectly justified columns of an Enclave Review, print and paper quality of a Fugitive Papers, or string-binding and floating images of Paper Visual, their gap-toothed design has character and room to move. Most importantly, they are offering an alternative space for new critical voices to practice their craft. Should play and potential be disregarded for the establishment of an editorial ideology or pretty publication? The idiom ‘by the book’ has a lot to answer for when it comes to the desire for art publications to become the printed matter of the Archive before they even go to print. I am all for posterity, but not at the expense of LIVE commentary on art, when compulsion and urgency finds its truest form.

136 OCTOBER 2012 (#46): Clean & Clear

Nina Canell, ‘Tendrils’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 29 September – 14 November.

‘CLEAN & CLEAR’ sounds like a dishwasher detergent. I can imagine the TV advertisement for such a product, in which eye-clean crystals twinkle in a tumble of water: all dirt, grime, fingerprints – the dirty atoms that compose blemished human biology – sterilised to an inch of their life. KILLS GERMS DEAD! Why is it that such sterilised visuals come to mind when reflecting on Nina Canell’s solo show entitled Tendrils at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Perhaps it is the streakfree apparatus that contain an array of obfuscated ephemera, as if a tide of Domestos stormed the gallery in one great flush, and what we are left with are fractions of life. A quart. A slice. A seed. For instance, within a perfect perspex box a crystal clear jar supposedly quarantines the air from one Dmitri Mendelee’s St. Petersburg study – a Russian chemist who created the first version of the Periodic Table. A lesser known fact about Mendelee is the story of his mother starting up a glass factory to support her family after her husband’s death. This ‘glass’ backstory helps to extract a playful narrative from

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Canell’s use of a glass jar to house the very air of the scientist’s study.

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Furthermore, Canell’s glass jar signifies the harsh realities of life on one hand – a lone parent’s responsibility to fend for her children in the midst of tragedy – and on the other less calloused hand, the impossible fantasies that a parent has for her offspring. Hardship invariably begets fantasy. Two tubes of Canell’s trademark blue neon also suggest fantasy as they saddle stone blocks on the gallery floor. They remind one of a blacksmith’s glimmering iron ore and anvils hugged by beaten metal: the heat manipulated copper tubes that stand alongside compound the alchemical vision.

My favourite element in the gallery is the handmade twig of composite wires that awkwardly hangs from the electrical conduits high up in the gallery. A ‘sample’ extract can be found on the gallery wall. An entangled thing of DIY beauty it suggests homespun metal biology, and activates the gallery space like Duchamp’s Mile of String (1942). The ‘activation’ is not physically experiential, but jolts the imagination like the residual image of crackling lighting overhead. At the time of viewing Canell’s work in the gallery, I felt that all humanity had been washed clean from the trinkets that were beached on gallery floor, and what biological elements that were supposedly percolating in the artist’s objects were imagined. Perhaps the fantasy of the saliva that coats Canell’s water melon seeds and the jarcontained dust mites from Dmitri Mendelee’s study are best left to the imagination than the dirty reality. Ten years have passed since I first saw the origins of Nina Canell’s enigmatic use of material when she was a student at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design. Although I vaguely remember her installation of stacked cardboard boxes and the audio of a bird tweeting, that memory has been retained while the other 23hrs 55mins of that same day have been lost. Canell’s brand of airy ephemera may have a more pristine edge to it today, but her work still succeeds in making what are fleeting moments, permanent.

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The question ‘Why so many of one thing?’ is posited when confronted with the multitude of backless picture frames that span two significant lengths of wall in the gallery. Up close, the frames themselves are dotted with water melon seeds in a gridpattern – spat out by the artist as part of the creative output. This is a welcome taste of dirty realism (spitting is not lady-like), but what comes to the fore is the problem of how to display such a visceral act as artwork. I am caught between being critical of reducing such subjectivity to a dried and dead seed – ‘LIVE’ salvia can only be imagined through the panes of invisible glass on which the seeds are attached. However, the work gradually resolves itself as the strict uniformity of the display of seeds becomes unkempt when you find that each seed has its own individuality, and that one seed is missing from one of the framed sets.

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NOVEMBER 2012 (#47): Compelled by Human Difference ‘Subject to Ongoing

Change’, 14 days of live performance art by The Performance Collective, 16 – 29 July. Galway Arts Centre (part of Galway Arts Festival, Ireland 2012). *Dr ÁINE PHILLIPS* FIVE LIVE ARTISTS over fourteen working days created a dense and fervid experience for audiences in the Galway Arts Centre during the Galway Arts Festival this year. Subject to Ongoing Change was a marathon of durational performance totaling 76 hours 30 minutes over two weeks by The Performance Collective, a Dublin based group of artists – Pauline Cummins, Michelle Browne, Alex Conway, Frances Mezzetti and Dominic Thorpe – who have been working together since 2007. The Collective performed together in various combinations day-by-day, creating an extraordinary live exhibition in the Arts Centre’s space which was part improvisational and durational performance, part sculptural installation of the cumulative and peculiar materials used as props and creative matter for the live action. Enriching the distinguished Galway Arts Centre’s programme of visual art events for the annual Galway Arts Festival, the daily live performances provided an alternative to the popular festival’s more easily digestible menu of narrative, text or music based shows this year.

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Both hesitant and bold viewers entered the first floor rooms, some unsure of the rituals of viewership in the context of this interdisciplinary genre of performance that sits somewhere ‘un-neatly’, but vividly, between visual art, experimental theatre, contemporary dance and participatory or socially engaged practice. For some attendees the encounter with these performers and their multifarious materials in the gallery was exciting and stimulating: for others it was a baffling experience that subverted the normal expectations and obligations between performer and audience to generate a space of unfamiliar and radical relationships. Without pre-constructed dramatic content, narrative or characterization, the freeform improvisations of the performers were liberated from the traditions of theatre. Without prevalent beauty or a necessary focus on the body, the performances were freed from the conventions of dance. If the viewer expected contemporary visual art conceptualizations, they were hard to find in the moment-to-moment actions and interactions the performers developed as the hours and days inexorably advanced. These artists seemed let loose from society, normality and practical function. They behaved and appeared like the inmates of a psychiatric hospital: exceptional human beings who are liberated from social norms and purpose, who live and act for their own inner truths and necessity, independent of the collective aspirations of civilization. As a child I often visited large psychiatric institutions in Dublin where my brother resided and I was deeply affected by the myriad diversity and the emancipation of human mental and bodily expression of his fellow residents. In our society we find extreme examples of human difference problematic and tend to lock these people away and limit unusual appearance and behavior through social control and stigmatization. Perhaps because of this we are also compelled and fascinated by difference and strangeness, desiring to witness its performance and suspecting we are each of us strange and broken too, desiring to see the beauty and freedom of the inexhaustible potential of otherness. In the infamous asylum of Bedlam in late eighteenth century London, the inmates

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The fourteen days of performance were divided up daily into one hour thirty-minute sessions whereby different combinations of the five performers worked in shifts alongside a four hour full group performance. This daily practice achieved a prolific creativity and inventiveness in the artists’ performances. Over the days the actions and interactions of the artists changed, often morphing from one image or action in a clearly related sequence, such as Dominic Thorpe’s ‘drawing’ in parallel lines along the gallery wall with chalked tongue and graphite finger, that slowly developed into his conduction of an invisible orchestra with delicacy and omnipotence of tongue and black forefinger. In another related series Frances Mezzetti repeatedly jams a chair up against a line of groaning screaming metal boxes. With wild abandoned silver hair, she then drapes over the boxes like Manet’s Olympia. Michelle Browne lies over Mezzetti’s prone body as she breathes deeply, her exhalation labored and intolerable with the resonance of a death rattle. Mezzetti then cups Browne’s face tenderly and penetrates the wheeze-whistles into her open mouth. The actions evolve glacially over one hour, poetic, mysterious and strangely connected. In another succession, Conway shoves a rolled up foil potato crisp bag behind his grinning lips with a demented smile. Later, with a fixated stare, he drops his trousers as a decoy around his ankles, to then stand naked behind a door, the same empty crumpled packet now tensely covering his genitals. At times the performances generated startling and unexpected developments such as the movement of Cummins’ snapping elastic bands off the walls with a profuse and punishing intent – to one hour later – Cummins in a translucent coat, lovingly and tenderly hangs chairs from ceiling strings. A week later Browne covered in dust hobbles through the rooms using debilitated chairs as crutches; then stuck inside a chair, she wears it like a skirt defiantly. Another extract of performance shows Thorpe balanced across the same unstable chairs as he precedes to lay his vulnerable head out the window, tapping the glass insistently, his toes encrusted with the debris and wreckage from previous actions in the space. On another occasion as an audience member, I find I am sitting on the same abused seats, in intimate and resonant contact with the remnants of such voluble actions. Boredom assailed some viewers during the long hours of slow moving performances, but those who survived the tension between the immutable and the mutable that produces the emotion of ennui were rewarded with some stunning evolutions of improvised ideas in action. The artists stated they had no game plan beforehand except a provision of objects in the space to work and play with. During one of the sessions, the materials provided were flour, string, metal boxes and latex gloves for example. The audience observed and intellectually engaged with the creative and cognitive processes that happened through the actions and struggles of the performers with intractable time and the limits of such materials. Although the Collective claim their improvisational work is empty of prepared content, the strange actions and images generated transform into resonant metaphors in combination, or in juxtaposition with others. As with the group performances of the pan-European

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organized and ran their own public performance of madness for paying publics. Throughout human history we have always been fascinated with the performance of alterity and difference – it provides us with an unlikeness to our own communally agreed identities so we understand our self-construction more acutely. It produces images of mental and bodily freedom we cannot rehearse or enact easily within the limits of our social worlds. Shamans, witches, fools and artists have eternally provided this reflective and cathartic benefit to culture and The Performance Collective with “Subject to Ongoing Change” are good service providers in this lineage.

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performance group Black Market International, a non-narrative structure emerges like a plot with no linearity. But perhaps we impose a sense of structure, like a projection upon the series of supposedly unconnected actions and somehow the mind of the viewer pursues links and meaning. In the galleries – scarred and inscribed with the remnants and history of the 14 days of performance – I performed with the Collective as a guest artist for the last four hour stint and it was the sense of connectedness within the abstract flow of action and interaction that surprised me. The Performance Collective are always working in relationship with each other and to experience this creative intercourse as participant was to dissolve in the boundlessness of the group mind, supported but free. The awareness of each other in the space was pervading like spilt perfume and there was a sense of convincible unity to the machinations of the Collective in their relationships with each other and with their committed audience.

JUNE 2013 (#48): Magician, or Mime?

AURÉLIEN FROMENT, ‘9 Intervals’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 6 January – 16 February.

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We’ve all been here before ... The only place in our culture left for the exercise of one, or at most two of our senses ... we may remove our shoes if that helps us remove our bodies.[1] IMMEDIATELY after exiting mother’s tankstation gallery, Dublin, on January 27th 2013, following the screening of Aurélien Froment’s two-screen projection, 9 Intervals, our three-strong conversation inexplicably turned to the subject of psychopaths, their victims, and college: covering Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); reality TV programme-cum-victim confessional, I Survived...; and the arduous torture of writing an essay on ‘emotion’. These subjects were a far cry from the sensational detachment performed in Froment’s film, that somehow did not warrant a mention, not even a postmortem analysis. In retrospect, I see our shared detachment as either a compliment, or serious critique, of the French artist’s film, especially considering the subjects of detached psychopathology (serial killer) and heightened emotion (victim) that replaced any talk on the artwork we had just experienced in the gallery. This unusual non-response also brought into focus the different ways in which we, as viewers, can potentially experience of the artwork itself, which is especially pertinent with regard to Froment’s art practice in general, and in particular, 9 Intervals. The experience of the artwork on that particular day was conducted by chance happenings in the gallery: once the film had finished its loop, the gallery invigilator had to drag out a stepladder and fidget with the DVD player to properly sync the two projections, due to some unforeseen technical error. But, before Froment’s film even registered, the first thing one noticed was, the gallery is furnished with five or six odd chairs, already taken by a father and child, a woman taking handwritten notes, and another with a mobile phone in hand; who all fidget as we try to position ourselves in the optimum location to hear the audio, which jumps from speaker to speaker.

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Perpendicular to each other, two large projections enclose the audience in an L-shape. What is awkwardly playing out in the gallery mimics what is happening in one scene in the film that portrays a sparse audience in an auditorium, coughing, yawning, taking phone calls, changing seats, in a symphony of distraction. The chance, but real scene in the gallery, pushes the fictional nature of the choreographed scene in the film, toward farce.

The ‘speaker’ caresses the gallery audience’s ears with the question―“Are you comfortably seated?” This question, already answered by our own performance of ‘Musical Chairs’ in the gallery proper, is followed by a montage of scenes that describe the history of chair design from the perspective of the designer, and the resulting posture issues from improper seating by the osteopath. This ‘history’ is further divided by a posturing yoga teacher, and an MC with stage-fright, caused by either his own self-doubt, or the sudden awareness of the distracted audience that confronts him on the opposing screen; or by ‘us’, the audience in the gallery.

The mute presence of the posturing yogi literally manifests as a representation of the desire to be removed from the world. Furthermore, the staccato direction of 9 Intervals compounds this sense of being removed from the artwork. As with earlier film works by Froment such as Pulmo Marina (2010)—which depicted a pulsating jellyfish in an aquarium with a soothing voiceover that described the properties of the visually alluring marine animal—there is an inherent passiveness that does not inspire a reaction or sensation. Is this what the contemporary artist wants, to inspire detachment? Or critique it? Of course, we could argue that there are different levels of engagement, dependent on the conditions of reception (as my personal experience illustrates), but this is not the question that needs to be asked. If Froment’s work is a critique of human engagement itself, then the artist is ingeniously setting up scenarios that are testing the very nature of looking and experiencing art, and hoping that chance will give a helping hand on every given day in the gallery. Since experiencing Froment’s solo show ‘Calling the Elephant’ at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 2007, the question of whether the ‘artist’ (in general) could be described as a ‘magician’, or ‘mime’, was posited, forgotten, stored away, and just resurfaced five years later, after experiencing the French artist’s 9 intervals. The question did not resurface because the protagonist of the artist’s earlier film Theatre de Poche (2007) is a magician, who conjures up an encyclopedic array of pictorial artefacts, à la the illusory slight-of-hand of Tom Cruise in Minority Report (2002). It was, however, the discreet display of two Perspex sheets of to one side that were not listed on the artworks list that suggested Froment has a mime’s tendency towards artifice. So, what of the mime? To describe an artist as a ‘magician’ is a limiting, aesthetic definition of what he or she does with pictorial space, as projection, paint, object etc. The magician desires to push beyond the fourth wall to alter our belief as to what is real and what is fiction, whereas the mime is content to pat the imaginary glass that keeps the audience at a safe distance, so the gestural, silent narrative can be articulated. If the magician or mime is placed in the context of the gallery, where the viewer is generally allowed to wander behind the ‘stage’ of the smoke and mirror props of the

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This is how the mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror.[2]

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artist’s display, the illusion would obviously be broken. For the magician, this would signify the end of the show, but for the mine, whose performance is transparent, or seeks transparency, the game of ‘Charades’ would continue without pause. [Stéphane Mallarmé’s short prose text Mimique (1886)], recounts an improvisational performance by the mime Paul Magueritte, entitled Pierrot Murderer of his wife. The act comprises a single scenario, with all the parts played by Magueritte himself: Pierrot murders his unfaithful wife by tying her to a bed and tickling her to death. This performance balances uneasily between copy and simulacrum. On the one hand, the mime mimes, acts out a scene in advance. But on the other hand, the act is largely improvisational, follows no written script, and thus has no discernible original.[3]

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Mallarmé’s Mimique has the potential to inspire multiple readings due to the ‘allpurpose’ mimic-prop, whom physically and temporally shifts between the author (what has/ is/ will be written), and the actor (what has/ is/ will be performed), and is the reason why French philosopher Jacques Derrida was so attracted to the text, an attraction that resulted in a gloriously intuitive analysis of Mimique in his essay ‘The Double Session’ (1970). Why I introduce Mallarmé’s text here is to suggest the interpretation of the artwork need not mimic the author-artist’s communicative intent: the success of interpretation should be measured by the new images and ideas that are produced in its wake (as was the case with our company following 9 Intervals). As an artist, whether you name your reuse of images as a ‘re-representation’, ‘reappropriation’, ‘re-mediation’, re-constitution’, ‘repurposing’,‘recirculation’, we as viewers cannot discern beyond doubt, what is the original, what is the copy, and what is the truth. For Deleuze, modernity ‘is defined by the power of the simulacrum’, by the free circulation of images without truth. Although Froment’s 9 Intervals alludes to gameplay* with descriptors such as ‘Charades’ and ‘Musical Chairs’ coming so easily to articulate the visual gestures within and without the film, personally, I missed the enigmatic art objects that have acted in previous exhibitions as intimate side dishes to the distant tone of his film work. Although the speaker is asking ‘us’ “Are you comfortably seated?”, it feels rather artificial, acting out a predetermined paradox, because it will never be answered. Froment’s puzzle-objects that usually lie at the periphery of his solo exhibitions somehow manage to break the ‘ice’ with the viewer, and shatter the thick ‘glass’ that divides the posturing moving image and spoken word of his films.

JUNE 2013 (#49): A Keynote Address

MICK WILSON, ‘some songs are sung slower’, The LAB, Dublin 18 January – 9 March >>>

INTONING THE LINE some songs are sung slower—the title of Mick Wilson’s solo exhibition at The LAB, Dublin—should be done at a slow and controlled pace. Before entering the exhibition I presumed a similarly ‘slow reading’ would be needed to navigate Wilson’s first solo show if his prominent history as an academic over the last

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decade was anything to go by. Could Mick Wilson ‘the artist’ emerge from the long shadow cast by Mick Wilson ‘the educator’?

So, the expectation is, before even entering Wilson’s first solo show that this is going to be a rhetorical, academic, textually substantial, heavy-handed mix of philosophical brute force with ‘theorems’ on social practice: in other words, social equations fit for the whiteboard, not real life, along with a base aesthetic composed of the A4 page and Power Point presentation. And although philosophers abound in the self-reflexively titled projection work, The Seminar, and the tools of the academic trade are the base technology behind Wilson’s subtle mixed-media transition works, the overall display is surprisingly democratic and non-didactic. In fact, the tone of the exhibition could even be described as apologetic, which could, however, be a strategy by Wilson to prevent himself from ‘talking down’ to his audience. As the artist says himself in the artwork My Bin Protest: “I have dropped my ‘let’s-talk-about-art’ accent, and switched into my native ‘howayas’ accent in order to reduce any perceived social distance.” No matter what class or creed we are ‘native’ to, we could take this intentional ‘dumbingdown’ offensively, but somehow, Wilson strips down to his metaphorical jocks and socks and generously gives the audience a whole lot of himself, and in doing so, closing the gap between the artist and his audience: forget what Derrida said about the idle, false and pointless nature of trying to talk philosophy, or in this case, art, with the “man on the street.” By performing in what Wilson describes himself as a “downbeat” and “self-mocking” style of presentation, the intimate recitals, written and suggested by ethnic sounds, register, sympathetically, the subjects of death, politics, publics, from the perspectives of a collective ‘We’ and autobiographical ‘I’. In the main gallery space are displayed three blown-up Java Chat screen grabs on paper, from an online gay chatroom: we are not told if Wilson himself is one of the chatroom participants. The stereotypical assumption is that gay chatrooms are where ‘masterbatory’ online flirting occurs between desperate gay men. This stereotype is compounded by the narratives played out on Wilson’s chatroom screen grabs between ‘wild dude’ and ‘randy’, whose staccato pidgin prose leaves seeds for potential hookups offline. These online dalliances in the a.m., following a sexually frustrating night at suggestively gay hangout the “littlemermaid nite-club,” with “fag hags” and “gayboys” being the main protagonists, smells of sexed-up desperation. Looking past such clichéd notions of gay promiscuity, these narratives are more about companionship than sex. By scaling up the screen grabs, which are primarily white space, the throwaway conversations at the foot of the screen are further subjugated, about to drop off the HTML cliff into further in-signification. This white space represents a long pause to an unanswered question; an unreciprocated sexual advance; a cypher that feels far emptier than the clichéd ‘black void’ could ever be. As the title some songs are sung slower suggests, music is a dominant aspect of Wilson’s exhibition. I Sing the Body Electric: 7 Screen Memories is the centrepiece artwork in the main gallery. The images and music that transition and loop across seven side-by-side laptops register subliminally like cabalistic advertisements. One of the seven laptops zooms in on the flat facial features of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer of the

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If you have managed to find yourself in an art education institution in Ireland in the last twenty years, you most certainly would have glimpsed Wilson—dressed in full-casual black—dashing from one end of a long corridor to the next. It is in such pedagogical circles that Wilson has built a reputation for being an influential mover and a critical shaker across a stream of Irish art institutions (IADT, NCAD, DIT, CCAD, TCD, GradCAM etcetera etcetera); whose primary interests include the public sphere and creative art education.

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musical tradition Qawwali, a devotional and secular genre of music from the Indian subcontinent. The ‘party’ of laptops echo the compositional structure of Qawwali, whereby a group of musicians and singers perform side-by-side. Personally ignorant of the nuances that such music pronounces, there is no avoiding hearing mystical and devotional overtones, especially considering themes of death, grieving and loss are at the heart of the exhibition. Significantly, one still image in the ‘party’ of Andrea Mantegna‘s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, perpetuates the subtext of masculine death (or the artist’s desire to confront his own death) that runs throughout the exhibition, with the unusual prominence that the Quattrocento painter gave to Christ’s genitals in the painting. High above the group of laptops a lone print entitled Two Dead Boys, compositionally, like Mantegna’s dead Christ, uses extreme foreshortening. But, whereas Mantegna’s dead Christ is a dead weight, laid on the flat of his back on a cold slab of marble with his feet and crotch dominating the image, Wilson’s dead boys are rising, heads first, bloodied. This compositionally inverted version of Mantegna’s ‘all-man’ portrayal of divine death, lacks realism; it is bordering on romantic. The single contour line that economically shapes the dead boys’ bodies is reminiscent of an Ingres’s drawing, while the undertones of sex and exoticism remind one of Ingres’s controversial Grande Odalisque (1814), in which the French Neoclassicist painter portrayed a naked concubine in a Turkish harem, all Mannerist, elongated back and arms.

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Wilson describes the digital projection, The Seminar, as a “very explicit” work on death and grieving. Positioned as it is midway between the more oblique expressions of said themes, it does help to fill in some of the conceptual gaps in the more abstracted works, and surprisingly the thirty-five minutes of transitional text went by quickly. The most persistent message in the ‘man on the street’ friendly presentation is the disowning and depoliticisation of death, framed around the Biopolitical theories of (among others) Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamden. The last artwork in the sequence that I approached the exhibition is My Bin Protest, a first-person, autobiographical narrative, delivered as a display of thirty large posters that circumscribe the first floor gallery of The Lab like huddled gravestones. The caption: “IN RIGHTFUL SOVEREIGNTY OF HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY I MAKE A BIN PROTEST“ headlines every poster, with the image of a guillotined head of the powdered wig, French aristocrat extraction. In this artwork Wilson presents a story that could only be true due to the banality and everydayness of unfolding daily events. Framed around the non-collection of refuse bins, the story accumulates negatively, like the waste in Wilson’s yard; relationships end over bins; principled stand-offs with ‘native’ teenagers trying to burn bins almost gets physical; serial confrontations with “skip-pickers” evolve, becoming verbally violent when Wilson threatens with “I will hurt you” in the subtitled poster: “EVEN AN OLD QUEEN MAY LOSE THE HEAD“. What is of special significance here (and the exhibition as a whole) is the human story, such as Wilson defending his elderly neighbour’s bin from the bored teenagers. Kafka’s The Castle comes to mind in Wilson’s struggle to get his fermenting waste collected and how the narrative ends unresolved, in mid-sentence...

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JUNE 2013 (#50): Semantic Teratomas for the Techno-Carcass

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ED ATKINS, ‘Of tears, of course’, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, 15 February – 30 March.

TBG+S is custom-divided into two spaces, two-thirds of which is a darkroom, leaving an awkward ‘lightspace’ looking out at passing pedestrians from the street level gallery. In the darkroom, two large projection screens lean against opposing walls, with temporally alternating video projections that portray a bald, digitally animated head in one instance, and decapitated hand in another; dissolving within a diaphanous, cerebral pink backdrop, with spits of colour and light. The head is Atkins’s: a Lex Luthorised self-portrait; a Rylean Ghost in the Machine; a Derridean Phantomachia[1], from which a human (not digital) voice spouts out profusely poetic language, ‘Concrete’-like. The voice is also Atkins’s, delivered with clear and proper diction, that is corrupted, now and then, with a “FUCK” and a “COCK.” The persistent presence of the talking head—a trope reminiscent of Beckett’s play Play— is sporadically interspersed with still images of human and textile textures. In another instance, inserted trompe-l’œil-like into the pink virtual backdrop, there is a moving image of an elderly, well-dressed man sitting at a desk as if preparing to give a presentation, while underneath a crowd of subtitle bars overlap one another. We are not told whom the gentleman is, but he has the quirky demeanor and dress-code of an astronomer, astrologer, Lacanian; your guess is as good as mine. However, after some queries into his identity I learnt that the unknown gentleman is one P.H. Pyrnne, an English modernist poet who is decribed as being “willfully hermetic, bound by an aesthetic formalism”: an appropriate pinup for Atkins’s imagist vernacular. Fleetwood Mac also make an abrupt audio appearance, but I didn’t have time to ‘Shazam’ the title. Next to the darkroom, in the light of day, “posters” of greyscale images that equate to digital textures, architectures, mapping, are clumsily displayed on the newly built partition wall, as if you had just walked into an artist’s studio, which could be read as either ‘work-in-progress’ or pretentious ad hoc. A slice of blackout fabric pasted onto the same wall covers the entrance to the darkroom. But, just before you enter the darkroom, your attention is drawn to a flat screen TV, huddled in a corner, playing a digitally stylised recording of Atkins’s LIVE opening night performance, the script of which is repeated in the darkroom video projections, and is also available to read as a printout in the gallery—you see what I mean by textually dense and choreographically complex... Ed Atkins’s performative scenario for TBG+S brought to the surface a personal qualm I have when it comes to solo exhibitions that are co-devised by an artist and a curator, especially when an opening night LIVE performance is the catalyst for some creative output, to be displayed in the gallery afterward as residual aftermath. Atkins and curator Isobel Harbison’s LIVE performative premise for the exhibition ‘Of tears, of course’ is nothing new for TBG+S. In 2011, Annika Ström’s solo exhibition From the Community Hall, curated by Aoife Tunney, visited the same territory as a way to offset an exhibition, the aftermath of which was a conceptual and aesthetic success in my eyes, while the LIVE opening night performance I cannot judge, as I intentionally

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IN ORDER to navigate (in words) Ed Atkins’s solo show ‘Of tears, of course’ at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin (TBG+S)—a textually dense and choreographically complex video-installation—a detailed description of the artworks displayed and gallery setting is necessary.

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did not attend. Why? Because I personally think that such opening night theatrics are artifice for artifice’s sake, in the same way that tinkering with an exhibition throughout its course is a desperate attempt to keep the creative process on lifesupport. However, I am very interested in the creative spoils that are left in the gallery from such one night performances: I realise the paradox! The three exhibitions that I have half-experienced that have utilised this creative template for a solo exhibition include the aforementioned Atkins, Ström, but also Brock Enright in 2007 at Perry Rubenstein, New York: all of whom produced viscerally rewarding after-‘affects’ in the gallery. This type of planned, one-night performance is invariably scripted, and relied heavily on narrative in Ström’s case, chaotic ‘winging it’ in Enright’s, and wayward verbalisation in Atkins’s. However, whereas Ström and Enright’s performances were open to whatever public appeared on the opening night, Atkins’s was a closed affair, where a pre-booked audience gathered in a custom built darkroom with grey carpeted floor at TBG+S. Since NOT experiencing Enright and Ström’s LIVE performances, although being inspired enough to write on both manifestations in respective galleries, I have built up a resistance to being enticed to attend such opening night performances, afraid that the LIVE event would not measure up to what could be potentially imagined by not going. There is also a fear that a LIVE technical or choreographic hick-up would spoil the after-spoils in the gallery (Rumour has it that there was such a hick-up on Atkins’s opening night? However, Rumour usually lies!).

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It must also be noted that Ström and Enright’s performances were ‘acted out’; by a single collaborator in Ström’s case, while Enright, although he partook in the opening night shenanigans, the documentation of the event reveals that his individualism was diluted with the use of collaborators. Atkins, however, is sole auteur of his creative environment: his script, his digitally formed self-portrait, his voice as narrator; all of which raises the question of authorship, and whether Atkins’s ambition is to kill the author, imbue his digital cadavers or himself with life? Elizabeth Klaver comes very close to what Atkins presents as art when she writes: The talking cadaver, even to Foucault, brings us closer to the illusion of presence of a speaking subject and back to the desire to imbue the dead body with agency, even though liveness has disappeared. In fact, one could go as far as to say that Foucault tries to give up his own agency as a subjectless subject in favour of the cadaver’s becoming, in Dr. Arnold’s words, simply the body’s “translator.”[2] The cadaveric ‘residues’ and ‘resemblances’ that Atkins presents at TBG+S are swamped in a mire of self-conscious language. The impressive HD video projections are more effect than affect. The artist’s techno-cadavers echo Frederic Jameson’s contention that one of the conditions of late capitalism is the mass reproduction of simulacra, creating an “object world with an unreality and a free floating absence of ‘the referent’”.[3] Although we are given some sense that a performance took place, somewhere, before a LIVE audience, as seen in the digital work presented on the flat screen, it is secondhand gossip that colours in the details of Atkins’s opening night performance—the foil for the video works displayed subsequently in the gallery—a process that the artist describes as “a text becoming a play, becoming a video, becoming an exhibition.” The recording of Atkins’s LIVE performance, more than any other artwork in the gallery,

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effectively presents the ‘real’ event being swallowed by the ‘simulcrum’[4]. Moreover, the LIVE presentation vs the gallery representation pings ever so pitch-perfect with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘tele-presence’. Wearing a blue-screen mask so his silhouetted head could be effectively corrupted with film-editing software in post-production, Atkins is said to have stood before a spotlit mic and recited an original script, while the audience formed a circle around the artist. In the digital representation of the LIVE presentation the artist’s silhouette is digitally transformed into a cadaver, filled with an array of aural and visual effects: the pitch of his voice is lowered as he recites the script; the camera catches his hand self-consciously massaging the mic; a view from behind shows the blue-screen mask gathering at the back of his neck; an awkward pause is felt as Atkins shifts out of sight; followed by an even more awkward applause by the shadowy opening night audience. This work will stay with me for some time.

For those who experienced both Atkins’s LIVE presentation and mediated representation in the gallery, you are either blessed or cursed with comparison. Did you find the LIVE performance tangible, and the artworks in the gallery an afterthought, a hack job, dead matter, or worse still, an obligation? Rumour has it that Atkins tinkered with the digital works throughout the duration of the exhibition, but after three visits I saw no evidence of that.[5] Atkins’s performance is not of the garden variety ‘Performance Art’ kind, when there is a desired move away from the verbal, a ‘deliteralisation’ so to speak, what psychologists call ‘cognitive defusion’, due to the belief that language itself is the cause of our communication woes, while the substitution of finicky words with tangible visual metaphors is more conducive to human expression. But whereas performance artists generally use mute metaphors as an expression of the verbal, Atkins, standing centre-stage before an intimate and predetermined audience at TBG+S, uses language to anchor intuition, chance, and failure; outcomes that are part and parcel of performance art methodology. What Atkins presents then, is the spill-off from a creative process that is intangible and unpalatable: a verbal diarrhoea ensues. It is for all these reasons that Atkins’s artworks at TBG+S initially left me with reservations, suspicions and criticisms. After a third visit to the gallery I finally built up the stamina to stay the full length of the darkroom digital works. This was due to an overlong, verbally engorged script, recited not once, but twice by Atkins; brilliantly so as the LIVE performer in a digital work presented on a flat screen TV; and once again as a digitally created avatar in a twin video projection—not so brilliant. The American novelist and poet Gilbert Sorrentino once said of his peer, John Updike, that his “work buckles and falls apart under this concatenation of images”: Atkins’s work seems to collapse under the weight of his lexical utterances. But, as Landon Palmer writes with reference to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome—a film that predates the ‘technology-made-flesh’ rituals and mediated ‘tumours’ of Atkins’s digital works by thirty years: “The option for participation is not so much

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This ducument-cum-creative artefact, accompanied by the rough-and-ready technogeographic posters, is sensory rather than an empty signifier for some mediated ‘hyper-reality’. I would even go as far as to say that the hands-off darkroom projections suck the life out of the artworks in the alternate ‘lightspace’, or, perhaps, it is the contrast that humanises the latter.

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determined by the design of the media itself, but whether or not we choose to activate our own agency.”[6] However, the viewer can only blamed up to a point. While it is good and rare to experience an artist use language the way Atkins does within and without his art practice (see Atkins’s interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist[7]), there is a fear, or suspicion rather, that what is being so comprehensively and poetically articulated with regard to the artist’s frames of reference—theoretical and autobiographical—does not manage to manifest into a visual and aural equivalent, as artwork: this is the case with the digital projections presented at TBG+S. What is being performed in this case is a hyper-verbalisation in a space where language is usually trace. Atkins is one of those artists that breeds these suspicions, but the proof is in the pudding, and although what Atkins served up at TBG+S is aesthetically and verbally unpalatable at first, it grew on me and is still attached like an inoperable semantic teratoma made of fleshy words.

JUNE 2013 (#51): It was the Butler with the Candlestick in the Library ALAN PHELAN, ‘HANDJOB’, Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin 14 March – 26 April.

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Handjob: When one person stimulates another person’s penis with their hand, usually resulting in ejaculation. [urbandictionary.com] SOMETIMES the local art scene seems like it’s fueled on ecologically passive cow shit, the way artworks are trendily smeared with conceptual and aesthetic neutrality, what Jean Baudrillard described (ever so slightly cynically) as “confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity to turn them into values and ideologies.”[1] So, it was with an element of shock and awe that I read ‘HANDJOB’ as the title of Alan Phelan’s hybrid artist/ curator project at Oonagh Young gallery, Dublin. I am neither puritan nor prude, but there is something ‘out-of-sorts’ with Phelan’s verbal brazenness for the purpose of an exhibition title. Relatively speaking, art does not do ‘explicit’ well; shock and awe went out with Damien Hirst and Operation Desert Storm in the ’90s. Furthermore, exhibition titles are often times a combination of semantic and semiotic constructions, whereby meaning is cancelled out, or wanders into a loop of dialectic ambiguity. The term ‘HANDJOB’ is anything but implicit, but artists seem to have an uncanny gift for administering a measure of ambivalence to the most explicit of terminology when they get their tinkering fingers on the everyday. To either my advantage or disadvantage, I was primed for what Phelan’s ‘HANDJOB’ was pointing towards with a ‘semiotically’ extended Inspector Gadget finger, due to keeping one eye on the artist’s ‘handy’ online commentary and posting, played out publicly on Facebook and Tumblr after the artist broke his thumb last year. Phelan posted hundreds of monochrome images of hands that have a Goth/Emo/, LOVE/ DEATH sensibility, in what the artist describes himself as a “convalescence activity.” Initially read as an explicit sexual gesture, the title ‘HANDJOB’ is transformed into what could be diagnosed as a narcissistic compulsion, or selfimposed torture, to archive Phelan’s own temporary disability in the gallery. But

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the creative results at Oonagh Young gallery are anything but autoerotic: the jobat-hand is job-shared amongst five of the artist’s friends, who, in recent times, have coincidentally played with, or suggested the presence of the hand in their art practices.

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Nine collaborators in total, Phelan has one ‘good hand’ in most of the works displayed, through varying degrees of instruction and collaboration. In the street level gallery window you get the sense that this is a ‘Alan Phelan’ show rather than a hands-off curatorial project, especially when the artist’s distinct aesthetic signature greets you in the window in the form of a black marble cockatoo with a yellow rubber glove for a crest. In the same gallery window, Phelan’s fetishistic fowl is accompanied by Douglas Rodrigo Rada’s vinyl line drawing entitled Finger Ring, showing a hand with a finger for a ring (the ‘finger ring’ placed on the index finger rather the ‘ring finger’ was perhaps a missed opportunity on the Bolivian artist’s part to exploit a further entendre?). Or, perhaps my translation is a little culturally shortsighted. Fear not, Phelan’s plethora of double entendres make up for any shortfall by his collaborators.

The best individual responses to the ‘HANDJOB’ thematic are the artworks that allow the aesthetic signature of either Phelan or his collaborators to reveal itself. Sarah Pierce‘s usually distinct academicised ‘ad hockedness’ is blatantly evident in her archival homage to Auguste Rodin, who was known for being a bit of a man whore; nicknamed the ‘Sultan of Meudon’ for his wandering, womanising hands. Pierce’s inserted black and white trompe l’oeil image of Fired Clay Studies of Hands (2012), reaching from the interior base of a wooden box, is a succinct exponent of Phelan’s blend of sex(hand) and labour(job) that runs throughout. Within any other context Róisín Lewis’s nicely rendered pencil drawings of monochrome hands holding high-coloured Jelly Babies would be passed over as overtly sweet and whimsical, even when you learn that the artist completed a channel swim from England to France in 2012 (Jelly Babies being a channel swimmers energy fix). However, considering Phelan’s history of using malformed sci-fi humanoids (‘Odo’ from Star Trek Deep Space Nine), along with mutant comic-book heroes (‘The Thing’ from The Fantastic Four), Lewis’s Jelly Babies take on layered meaning and resonance in a type of accidental homage to Phelan’s quirky aesthetic. Interestingly, and perhaps appropriately, ‘aesthetic signature’ turns out to be the default thematic of ‘HANDJOB’. No more so than with the inclusion of the medical doctor and art historian, Brenda Moore McCann, whose gallery statement leads with: ‘Medical Semiotics and its influence on Art, Psychoanalysis and Sherlock Holmes’, outlining the [Giovanni] ’Morelli method’, whereby “hands, ears, noses, fingernails, the small part of the anatomy, became the basis ... of connoisseurship in painting the the late 19th century.”

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In the gallery proper the viewer is invited by Phelan to explore and decode an array of phalange (art)efacts, like a game of pathological Cluedo; with neither a ‘butler’ nor ‘candlestick’ in sight. On blocky, black and white Perspex tables (autopsylike considering the amputated extremities on display); and combined with complementary blocky digital screens, the anatomy of Phelan’s subject comes dressed in varying textures, from rubber to pastry.

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McCann’s thesis takes the form of a hardback notebook with handwritten text; at moments a hard task to read. On the same table, however, the conceptual dots begin to join with the placement of Phelan’s The Cardboard Box (2013), a delicately boxed pair of papier-mâché ears, with a photo album entitled Beckles Wilson’s Celebrity Hands (2013). Both artwork titles reference the subject of McCann’s Medical Semiotic treatise (The Cardboard Box was the title of a Sherlock Holmes story, the author of which, Arthur Conan Doyle, was rumoured to be Beckles Wilson). Such ‘Who Done It?’ amusement and narrative knots by Phelan are extended into some very sticky puns. With the use of a stencil the artist has ‘stained’ the character seaman (semen) ‘Willy’—from the ’70s British animation series Captain Pugwash—on a sheet of plywood. Willy’s sailor neckerchief is a delicately folded metal ‘hand’; a (hand)kerchief perhaps... Other works of note include Phelan’s faux fur Stump Warmer (2013) and framed tongue-in-cheek article on How to do a Hand Transplant (2013). However, the pièce de résistance is David Monahan’s delightfully casual readymade, a copy of the French daily newspaper La Libération from 2009, which, with sophisticated French humour, addressed the Thierry Henry’s ‘Hand of God’ moment in the World Cup qualifier against Ireland in 2009, by insidiously populating each page of the issue with hands.

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Reading through the artists’ statements that accompany the exhibition, the dance between ‘meaning’ vs ‘image’ is rehearsed once again, but a question that is relevant when you consider the great potential to corrupt the ‘intentional’ meaning of the thirty-six artworks that make up ‘HANDJOB’. Douglas Rodrigo Rada writes: “In a consumer society, to favour an image over a thought is not only more convincing but also more convenient: ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, and besides, it spares us from reflecting.” While Jason Oakley quotes conceptually slippery Daniel Birnbaum in reference to Lee Welch’s “multi-referential” artworks: “artists are often suspicious of meaning as it is produced through narration, they could be said to introduce caesuras of non-meaning into the thick web of sense.” As is proven in ‘HANDJOB’, the potent imagery of multifarious hands are the seeds for thought: without one, there is no other. The onus is on the viewer to activate the artist’s meaning, which, a lot of the time, ends up being indiscriminate. Phelan adamantly states that “‘HANDJOB’ does not pretend to be an exhaustive archival, or encyclopaedic treatise on the subject of the hand. Nor does it pretend to engage in any curatorial games...” (my emphasis). Because Phelan’s hands aesthetically fondle the ‘hands’ of his collaborators—through remote instruction, or his choice of readymade object to ‘illustrate’ the artists’ concept—this exhibition naturally and intuitively becomes a “curatorial game.“ Is it not the case that group exhibitions are fundamentally curatorial constructs? Furthermore, the individualistic, ideological, conceptual and aesthetic intent of the artist and his or her artwork are traded off for an over-arching thematic that is not devised by the artist, but by the curator? In such curatorial scenarios it is my contention that sometimes (not all of the time), that the artist’s left-of-field conceptual underpinning is lost under an umbrella theory that is, sometimes, casually administered to the artwork. Other times, however, headless artworks and artists need to be herded into the curatorial pen. Phelan also testifies to a sort of “makeshift” ... “provisional” ... “tentative connectedness” in the shared responses to the hand thematic in this hybridised

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exhibition. It is true that the thematic ties that bind the show together are loose, sometimes untied. But what is important here in not the apparent disparate connectedness between the objects, but the fun in ‘re-narrativising’ them by extracting a personalised connoisseurship from the artworks—like Morelli might do.

JUNE 2013 (#52): Half Empty/Half Full

NIAMH O’MALLEY, ‘Garden’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 26 April - 22 June >>> Excuse the following preamble but these were the thoughts and criticisms I had

in anticipation of Niamh O’Malley’s solo exhibition ‘Garden‘ at Project Arts Centre,

THE DUBLIN ART SCENE has a tendency of late to get saturated with the same artists solo exhibiting at the same commercial and public art spaces with (in some cases) only six-month intervals between exhibits. Is this another latent side-effect of the economic crisis? No room for polarised opinion or taste in neither politics nor art: just flatline consensus? Can private and public art institutions only afford to lazily follow local trends? Perhaps better scouting is needed, not just a quick dash to the neighbouring art gallery or arts centre to help those decide their borrowed taste for the coming year. It cannot be the case that directors and curators are in collective agreement about what shows are necessary and what artists are deserved of their place in the spotlight at the exact same moment and place in time. It could have more to do with directors and curators being on trend (which every accomplished art professional should be!) than coincidence. There is one good excuse, however, as all art spaces, whether private or public, plan their visual art programme years in advance, and it is quite possible (rather than believable) that an artist under the local radar is coincidently selected to solo exhibit twice in one year at two different spaces in one city. Especially when you consider the small art scene and the visibility that an artist on a vertical trajectory gets in one fell swoop when plucked from the herd. If that is the case shouldn’t the onus be on the artist to really consider what it means for them to produce work in such quick succession in the one city? For the other artists in the community this causes no small amount of begrudgery: something we don’t need anymore of, thank you! More importantly, it leaves artists who are doing the rounds in such a fast-track manner open to criticism, as observers can compare, contrast and judge the artist’s work tied or untied from art market strings. The variation of this trend that usually produces the most intriguing results is when a gallery represented artist shows outside of their usual haunt, which can go one of two ways: the artist sticks to their guns and repeats what they do on their home turf, or they try something out of their norm, challenging themselves, their audience, and their gallerist. What invariably gets cut first is the supplementary wall drawings for those artists who work in video and sculpture, while ‘wall artists’ such as painters go Gung-Ho, conceptualising what was a strict formalism in their usual gallery stable. However, some artists are more suited to being directed, others curated, and the few exiled stragglers are best left to their own devices. As mentioned, these observations came to the surface in excited anticipation of Niamh O’Malley’s solo exhibition ‘Garden’ at Project Arts Centre. Not because O‘Malley is

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one of those artists that hops, skips, and jumps from private-to-public venue—the exact opposite is the case. Even though I saw her work for the first time outside of Green on Red Gallery at Dublin Contemporary (2011), followed by eva International (2012), this was her first solo show at a significant public venue in the heart of Dublin since exhibiting at The Hugh Lane in 2007. As presumed, the walls of PAC gallery are left naked: no supplementary signature drawings by O‘Malley to set collectors’ beady eyes flickering. Furthermore, the gallery is not decorated from end-to-end: one aloof sculpture and two wall-propped art objects is all that furnishes the space. O’Malley’s large bench with a seemingly freestanding pane of glass, entitled Window, is one of a line of glass and mirror works that the artist has made over the last few years. Usually quite reductive in form, and successfully so, this time around O‘Malley has gone ‘decorative’, with a filigree of painted leaves creeping around formalist splats of paint. Although I wish I could, I cannot help referring back to Duchamp and his Large Glass when standing before this work. Especially considering the French artist and O‘Malley’s shared factious relationship with painting.

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As the large glass stands half-full/ half-empty and centre-stage in the space, it is evident that O‘Malley still has a soft spot for painting. However, this work is not successful as either stage-setting for the exhibition or standalone artwork. It is too self-consciously made: the painted leaves jitter across the pane of glass as if unsure of their place in the work. It actually reads like a memorial plaque for post-World War painting. All that is left is a conceptual muddle of flaky black and grey embers of paint, packaged with corporate-like precision. However, leaning against perpendicularly opposing walls is O’Malley at her visual best to date. Two of a kind, improvised wooden ‘trellises’, immaculately frame projection screens positioned at different levels on each frame. Surprisingly looking and feeling more analog than digital, the dual black and white film projections are of a rectangular mirror—held by the artist presumably—being tilted up-and-down to reflect (we are told in the accompanying text by curator Tessa Giblin in the exhibition foldout) O‘Malley’s Dublin inner city garden. But the cropped image deletes anything that could be read as autobiographical: all the observer is given is the artist’s unsteady pivoting hands along with a band of real environment that frames the mirror. The black cloth of the projection screens is left teasingly exposed at the edge, leaving a velvety band with the same exquisite presentation that O‘Malley executed in her Dublin Contemporary digital work Quarry (2011). The wooden ‘trellis’ compresses the lot. As observers we are pulled in-and-out of the successive frames, while being pushed back-and-forth by the reflected garden. My previous mention of the World War in reference to O’Malley’s freestanding Window, and combined with her Garden ‘frames’, I am reminded of what Gerhard Richter once said about the photograph being a ‘world’ unto itself, the memory of the photographer and the memory of the person photographed contained within the limits of each individual image, whilst everything outside the photographic frame of reference is forgotten, buried at the edges, but paradoxically alive. Expanding on Richter’s metaphysical observation we could diagnose the German artist’s painted simulations of his family photographs—his own family were literally ‘lost’ to him when the artist, alone, left his home of East Germany before the Berlin Wall came into existence—as a way of extracting something that is exterior to the photographic frame of reference. Richter’s personal history takes on further signification with regard to

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perimeters, borders, framing, when the artist revealed that he never saw his family again, the Berlin Wall enclosing them in a real an unmovable frame. The ‘reality’ that Richter paints is personally invested with family, friends, German history. And so, if Richter’s desire is to use painting to rediscover an essence of memory through mood and sensation, essences that lie beyond the dead photographic frame of reference, the question is: what desires are being played beyond O’Malley’s ‘frame’, if anything?

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We could talk of gardens and colonialism and other such academic detours, but what makes this work by O‘Malley special is its self-reflexive existence inside the frame. The autobiographical reference to O’Malley’s garden in the accompanying essay is superfluous. This could be any garden, or for that matter a piece of manicured urban landscape beside passing traffic. Whatever existing sloppy everyday that exists outside the frame is deleted by the up-close crop of reality: when O’Malley does ’sloppy’ it is precisely scaffolded. And although there could be criticism flung at the compressed curation of the exhibition, whereby the observer has to crop all the uninhabited space that surrounds the three art objects, the fact is O’Malley’s raison d’être seems to be to make visually compressed art objects. The artist‘s decision to make two art objects that mirror each other in form and content is key to the dual artwork’s success. One on its own would have been an elegant objet d’art and nothing more. Instead, O‘Malley presents a very sexy simulacrum of reality whilst also stripping bare (like Duchamp’s Bride) the vanity of the artwork—a vanity that is certainly not visually empty.

JUNE 2013 (#53): The Breaking Yard

KATY MORAN, ‘Katy Moran’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 8 February – 28 March.

KATY MORAN received spectacular attention immediately following her MA show at the Royal College of Art in 2005. Today, at the tender ‘art age’ of 37 she is represented by the cream of British and American galleries, Modern Art, London and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and has had group show dalliances with New York’s 303 Gallery and Gagosian Gallery respectively. So why so much art market fuss so fresh from the collegial womb? Well, seven years on from her big bang emergence on the artworld, Irish art audiences get a chance to experience her most recent work presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery (DHG), Dublin. But, allow me to take an impromptu look back at Moran’s more painterly abstraction leading up to her recent work which invites collage into the painted frame. What has been written on Moran’s paintings in the past seems dependent on cultural context. American reviewers write that her paintings are evocative of Willem de Kooning’s ‘action paintings.’ The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s description of de Kooning’s ’60s period as ‘swimmingly sensuous, playing touch-and-go with smiling female flesh and moist landscapes’ does spread far in describing some of the Moran’s painterly attributes. While on this side of the Atlantic there is the more sophisticated promise of eighteenth century French Rococo painting, with Fragonard and Boucher repeatedly mentioned. The reason for such collective waxing lyrical

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with regard to Moran’s abstraction is either: European art critics are lazily copying and pasting from their peers’ appraisals; aphasia kicks in when confronted with her paintings; or Moran has somehow manufactured the good taste and élan of French aristocratic art. However, what brings all critics together in their reception of Moran’s work is the belletristic writing that her paintings produce from London to New York. Bottom line, it all comes down to taste in the end, and with Moran’s paintings taste seems to be, at face- value, their raison d’être. One initial criticism I have of her early work is sometimes they have been a little bit too tasteful: it is always good to have an one ugly belligerent work in an exhibition that forces you to second-guess your first impression of an artist. This is certainly the case with the artists new paintings at DHG, but more on that later. Your guess is as good as mine as to what Moran’s source imagery for such lyrically painted gestures is? The artist has admitted in the past that Google Image, interior design magazines and photos taken on her mobile phone work as arbitrary starting points for her paintings. There are passages, however, that suggest groups of figures; folds of drapery; a Romantic landscape. In the past, and still performed in some of the early work at DHG, Moran has a way with fleshy impasto that is good enough to eat.

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The arbitrary use of the term ‘baroque’ has also been banded around profusely concerning Moran’s work, and does, to a point, describe the curvy, creamy, painted flourishes of Moran’s early work, and the packed ornamentation of the artist’s Bejewelled Tetris collages at DHG. The mention of the baroque in a contemporary painting context summons the warped traditionalism of Glenn Brown’s figurative abstraction.[fig.2] A fellow English artist, Brown ‘nerdified’ painting tradition in the early ’90s with his cold and precise, Stepford Wife-like painted renditions of Auerbach and Rembrandt, whereby brushstrokes coalesce into an abstracted ornamentation of a appropriated object or subject. But whereas Brown’s paintings are an optical conceit— up close his painted surfaces are as smooth as a baby’s bum—Moran’s brushstrokes are left thick and fresh, similar to Cecily Brown’s fleshy abstract expressionism. However, and perhaps I am missing something, but I don’t see any “parodying” or referencing of mid-twentieth century American abstraction in Moran‘s early or recent paintings as suggested in the press release and by subsequent commentators. Braque and Picasso maybe, and Robert Delaunay, who was the main exponent of Orphism, that early twentieth century transitional painting movement that moved away from monochromatic Cubism and expanded on Fauvism towards pure abstraction and high colour. The German painter Georg Baselitz is also invoked when Moran admits: ”Rarely the way I have painted it is how it would hang.” The father of such upside-down gimmickry, although not considered so due to the serious implications of growing up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, Baselitz intentionally painted his ‘upside- down’ paintings, upside-down, and that is how they hung. He wasn’t trying to optically surprise himself by some unintentional composition or brushstroke that didn’t make sense the right-way-up: back then it was existential promise that beckoned the painter. Moran on the other hand is all materiality and intuition, as she says: ‘I still wanted the paintings to be figurative, but not at the expense of the paint’. After seven years of a pictorial path that is strewn with intentional obstacles, Moran’s process comes to a standstill at the DHG, where her paintings perform moments of gestural abstraction that are sometimes brutally interrupted by collage elements.

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Like Francis Bacon before her, Moran desires to extract Deleuzian ‘sensations’ rather than present an illustrative narrative. Her new paintings stop and start, rather than flow. A more blatant use of collage and colour has upset the apple cart of her earlier, prettier work, and is presumedly introduced by Moran for that very reason. Why fix something that’s not broken? More significantly, why change something that is selling? A painting signature that pleases the critics but also the collectors is gold dust. Well, the ‘breaking yard’ is a fine analogy for the painter in the studio, and you can only admire established artist who pull a Guston, but such demolition of what was a mature painting signature takes time, and Moran’s new paintings feel like they are only in the process of being ‘junked’, not having enough time to settle.

So what is first thought of as arbitrary kookiness to her painting titles such as Clown Navigation (2012) becomes almost illustrational. We are not sure whether the painting or the title came first, but I suspect the former. Up to the point of these new collages there was a sense that Moran wanted to ‘fall’ upon an image that is her’s, but not her’s. In essence, the artist desired to be surprised by the hand of chance. That chance element is still evident but the paintings, but at times (in the collage works) seems over-resolved and literal. However, as the show covers paintings made between 2009-12 there are still works that display Moran’s agility with paint. The best of these—albeit inherited from Howard Hodgkin’s canvas-to-frame painted abstraction—is Slide out of View (2012), wherein a ménage à trois of glass/paint/ frame is sandwiched together; wonderful. Painting, the real thing rather than the metaphor for anything but the properties of canvas, acrylic, oil, is in essence a courtship with the materiality of the medium, not the message, as Moran’s paintings at their best exemplify. Moran allows intuition to force her hand to begin, then stop. If we take Kant’s philosophical decree as true, that “intuitions without concepts are blind,” then behind the artist’s whisked figuration there is a brain ticking overtime. We as viewers can prescribe a narrative to her paintings, whether historically associative or personally devised, but what her paintings prove to me above anything else is, there is value, not just art market value, in the raw materiality of painting. It is painters like Moran, when she relishes substance over subject, that make painters in general, the stubborn prodigal sons and daughters of the artworld.

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The combination of such painted motifs as dancing pinwheels and patterned lozenges with a painting title like Funhouse—literally defined as a building equipped with trick mirrors, shifting floors, and other devices designed to scare or amuse people as they walk through—draws a very explicit picture. In addition, the scuttery brown anthropomorphic shapes placed against the harlequin patchwork collage in jungle mama (2012) looks like Scooby-Doo has been dismembered by the Carnival Creep.*

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JUNE 2013 (#54): Of Girly Paintings and the Art Market, Newspaper Reviews and Phizmongers

ROBERTA SMITH of The New York Times wrote in 2008 that “[Elizabeth] Peyton’s prominence is either a fluke or a further sign of the ascendancy of the feminine.”[1] Over the last two decades a brand of ‘disfiguration’—practiced by female painters in particular—has been championed by the art market of all things. Beginning in the early ’90s with the pumped-up on steroids disfiguration of English artists Cecily Brown and Jenny Saville, or American Lisa Yuskavage, to the more whimsically pretty disfiguration in the paintings of Americans Karen Kilminik, Elizabeth Peyton and Dana Schutz , these female artists exemplify art market success, fetching over two million euros in some instances, but not conceptual value. As painting is synonymous with the art market, and spectacle is a good marketing tool, how do artists who practice such disfiguration on the canvas avoid being typecast as clichéd purveyors of the ugly and the beautiful against the backdrop of the art market beast?

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This symbiotic relationship between the feminine and the art market unintentionally surfaced in Cristín Leach Hughes’s Sunday Times review of Genieve Figgis’s solo exhibition ‘Fictitious Possibilities’ at Talbot Gallery and Studios, Dublin. In the review Hughes’s criticism of the global art market’s ignorance of Irish artists was understandably general, but combined with the all-female cast of contemporary painters referenced by the critic (Allison Schulnik, Chantal Joffe, Dawn Mellor) vs the dead male ones (Bacon, Freud, Velasquez), and the ambiguous but potentially spectacular statement that the critic can’t wait for Figgis to “go large,” there is a sense from the review that Figgis’s subject was being drowned out by the questions of gender inequality in the artworld and ‘spectacle’, rather than focusing on the ambitious modesty of the artist‘s painterly and conceptual concerns. As ‘spectacle’ is a newspaper’s bread and an editor’s butter, newspaper art critic’s are frequently being asked to dish it out on a table of binary arguments in their reviews. But to what cost to the artist and critic, and to what end? When spectacle vajazzles the subject of an artist’s work, no matter how much attention the artist gets, there is a sense that the integrity of the artist, critic is being traded off for ... what? Admittedly, it must be a frustrating business for art critics who write for Irish newspapers. Articles are increasing built on superficial binary arguments or grand statements (i.e., ‘rural vs urban’, ‘The Death of Painting’). The short-stacked paragraphs suggest rather than critically explore. I imagine such art critics have mountains of notebooks hidden in their living spaces where all the unexplored ideas and editor’s deletions go; and perhaps a dartboard and voodoo doll graced with the editor‘s pin-pricked head. That said, is any attention better that no attention at all? Speaking of attention, it’s interesting that Hughes mentions Irish artist Amanda Doran in her review of Figgis’s exhibition, who graduated from NCAD in 2012. A young painter who showed massive promise in her Degree show, Doran was recently selected to exhibit in the Saatchi ‘New Sensations’ (2012) and Saatchi ‘NEW ORDER: BRITISH ART TODAY’ ( 2013). This was not a surprise as Doran’s ballsy application of subject had Saatchi written all over it before it had even left NCAD: but is that such a good thing? I’m not so sure. Minus the spectacle, Doran offers so much more via the luscious formalism performed in her paintings, as does Figgis. Perhaps there is no avoiding such clichéd spectacle when it comes to ‘disfigurative painting’. It brings to mind Paul Virilio’s observation that “Nothing but disfiguring events” happened in the twentieth century.[2] Or Mark Rothko’s admission: “I can no longer use the figure without destroying it.” On the other hand abstraction is usually better received

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by critics and curators. Take for instance Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts, whose abstract paintings suggest rather than perform disfiguration, with their regimentally consistent first name titles: eg Schwero (2005), Bilte (2008), etc.

Bust when I think of Figgis and the potential for inflated art market attention I am catapulted back to the example of Karen Kilminik—whom Figgis evidently has an affinity with—and the question of how this “girly”[3] subculture of painting continues to sit so pretty in the art market. Laura Cumming lambasted Kilmnik’s solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2007, when she wrote in The Guardian:

After experiencing Kilimnik’s exhibition at the Serpentine gallery myself in 2007, I thought at the time that the artist’s mix of dollhouse stagecraft and decoratively displayed paintings was overtly, sickly-feminine, in a forced My Little Pony kind of way. There was too much of Jane Austin and not enough Charlotte Brontë. There was also a sense that Kilminik was perpetuating a nostalgic turn for the Grand Style of eighteenth century English portraiture, exemplified by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, painters who were a little My Little Pony themselves, and to whom English art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon referred to as ‘phizmongers’[5] (painters of the faces of the rich). The most interesting remark by Dixon in the same review from 1994, however, is his observation that Reynolds and Gainsborough‘s “discontent with the narrow scope of 18th-century English portraiture” and the “restricted taste of the English gentry” forced both painters to put lavish painterly execution before the ‘true’ appearance of their sitters. It maybe farfetched to describe the two Englishmen as the grandfathers of formalism, but Graham-Dixon’s observation does bring us forward a couple of hundred years to Gerhard Richter’s so-called ambition to render ‘appearances’, and Figgis’s gout and chemical peeled ‘appearances’ of an age of innocence. With the use of flowery script typeface on the printed work sheet for Figgis’s ‘Fictitious Possibilities’ the artist made it clear to me, consciously or not, where she is coming from. However, I am left uneasy after reading Hughes’s review. The crux of my unease was in regard to Hughes’s ‘branding’ of Figgis within a contemporary outfit of established female figurative painters, and the critic’s references to Lady Gaga and celebrity culture, a subject that has done its time by now, surely? I felt a year previous in The Irish Times that Aidan Dunne was more on the money when he wrote: “There is a paradoxical beauty to Genieve Figgis’s outstanding, Dorian Graylike paintings of celebrities, their glamour curdled and sickly.”[6] The celebrity aspect is still there in Dunne’s description, but the Dorian Gray reference hits the spot, and without reducing the work to a REDTOP headline. However, while I was uneasy about Hughes’s reading I was left unsatisfied with Dunne’s. The latter seemed to hang like a discarded metaphor rather than a potentially complex analogic stage for Figgis’s paintings. Admittedly, in the narrow parameters of a newspaper overview of college art degree shows for which Dunne’s loose observation was made in 2012, it is understandable that the critic hadn’t the editorial manoeuvrability to dig deeper into his metaphor, left hanging like a shard of mirror that catches a quick glimpse of Figgis’s painted

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Wan and whimsical paintings—why does anyone want to make them? Why does any selfrespecting painter ever set out to be feeble? Many do and have done for the last couple of decades to the point where deliberate feebleness can get you a show at a mainstream gallery. And at the forefront, forging ahead from the start, were all those American women who seem to have created such a strong market out of pitiful weakness.[4]

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disfigured subject. Does Dunne’s “Dorian Gray-like” refer to what I see as the corrupted subjects of Figgis’s paintings: Victorian literature, fashion, gender, history, class? Or is the critic referring to the abstract hidden promise of Figgis’s portraits and what is happening outside the frame, as epitomised by the lost soul of Dorian Gray, whose beauty was captured—aptly enough with regard to Figgis’s work—in a painted portrait. A painted portrait that would mutate and age with every hedonistic act that Dorian Gray ‘committed’ in real life, while he remained beautiful on the outside, albeit internally tormented; in the end killing himself through the act of stabbing his LIVE and mutated painted portrait, dead. In conversation with Paul Virilio, French theorist Sylvère Lotringer asked: “So that is what art would be. Painted faces, broken perceptions, make up art. In this compulsion to camouflage, there would be no recognition that the wound is bleeding right under the paint.”[7] At Talbot Gallery Figgis’s paintings are better painted than her MFA show, but there is a sense that ‘Fictitious Possibilities’ is a transitional show wherein the floodgates have been left open for an anything goes output with regard to subject matter. There was an unusual repetitiveness in the close-up cropped portraits in the artist’s degree show in 2012 that made it more conceptual, whereas narrative conjoins her work at Talbot Gallery. However, Figgis’s Portrait (2012), helps to derail what could end up being an obvious literary interpretation of Figgis’s painted portraits of the horse-faced lads and lassies of the nineteenth century landed gentry.

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Pictured is a gaping black silhouette—another Victorian signifier—but in this instance the silhouette is less the outline of a head and more the absence of a head; the shoulder and neck line of clothing is all that remains. The element that holds this decapitated painted absence in place is the suggestion of a circular gilded frame, that is cropped, top and bottom, by the edges of the paint support, the neck and shoulders holding the ‘frame’ in place, as if ‘wearing’ a frame—a frame for a head. Paintings and painters are usually obsessed with the painted edge, but in this particular painting by Figgis that obsession is inverted, and our gaze is forced centripetally towards the painting’s absent centre. This painting and other works such as Lady with patterned drool are more whimsy than REDTOP spectacle. Figgis could easily “go large” as Hughes’s suggests, by upping the ante of the torment that her not so street-wise cohort of pastoral protagonists are put through with the paintbrush. But I see these portraits as fantastical, not existential icons of torment, like Bacon and Freud. Her paintings are nostalgic for the traditional, but a literary tradition, not a painted one. They are pocket narratives: Wurthering Heights CliffsNotes. Figgis’s Jesus—a portrait of the iconic Catholic sacred heart —is not profane. Either is her clownish “Pope” After Velasquez. It’s all makeup. Camouflage. Figgis’s Skull is a portrait of a pumpkin-headed deformed prince that looks like either a Jack-O’-Lantern has been shoved onto Royal’s head or he is a victim of the gluttonous disease of kings (gout). In conclusion, I can understand Hughes’s allegiance with female artists as women are still under-represented in the artworld: in the June 2013 issue of Art Monthly Jennifer Thatcher discusses gender inequality in the artworld against the backdrop of the “recent resurgence of feminism.” Ironically, I am more interested in the female artists who have gained a foothold in the higher echelons of the art market. Even more ironically, it is the artists that get swallowed up by the ‘Gasgosians’ and ‘Zwirners’ of this world that become invisible, appearing now and then at secondhand bookshops in inflated monographs: or if you regular the private domestic basement galleries of the wealthy where the artists are placed in pull-out shelves. Ok, we all have to make

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some bread and butter but is this the destiny that the next generation of Irish artists should aspire to?

JUNE 2013 (#55): PROVISIONAL PAINTING?

Rubinstein’s ‘sweeping’ began with the five painters he selected to prove his thesis: Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann, Michael Krebber; with Richard Tuttle, Martin Kippenberger, and Joan Miró mentioned in passing. Alluding to the Catalan artist Miró, Rubinstein gives us a clear definition of what he means by provisional painting: “I think the source of Miró’s daring, and the reason why his work is so close to what I’m calling ‘provisional painting,’ resides in his rejection of the idea of a finished, durable work.”[2] There is something very unsatisfying about the placement of the punk-conceptualist painters, Wool, Krebber, Oehlen, with the light, painterly lyricism of Mary Heilmann and Raoul De Keyser. It is true that they are all what I would describe as, ‘cognitive misers’, but their relationships with painting seems, at face-value at least, very divergent, in both approach and conceptual outcome. Heilmann and De Keyser insouciant brushstrokes cover up a deeply ingrained formalist manifesto of their generation—“It’s all about the paint.” Whereas as Wool, Krebber, Oehlen are more brutalist in their approach, placing any obstacle they can find in front of the ‘canvas’ to interrupt and erase any potential of ‘painter’s painter’ idolatry. Rubinstein’s provisional painting thesis seems to be another ‘vain’ attempt to label something that is inherent in most painting practices that have reached a certain maturity. Although a sweeping generalisation all of my own, painters do gradually become more casual in painterly approach when they hit their thirties? As teenagers we fill the page from edge-to-edge—the Chapman brothers relive this adolescent trait over and over again in their model installations – but through experience this condition of ‘packing’ the canvas seems less important to most of us who make and view paintings. The reason for such casual and ‘unfinished’ painting methodology is to be found in what Rubinstein calls a growing “foundational skepticism,” but as Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal admits, its also “about not boring oneself.”[3]

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IRISH ARTIST DAMIEN FLOOD first drew my attention to Raphael Rubinstein’s article ‘Provisional Painting’[1] for the periodical Art in America (first published: 04.05.2009).* My first reaction to the article was a double-barreled, locked and loaded—‘what?’ and ‘So what!’ But as time drew on what the American critic was saying seemed to offer more than was first dismissed as—here we go again, another attempt to catagorise the ‘anything goes’ of contemporary painting. What Rubinstein observed about painting in the article was nothing new. The discussion around what he referred to as “provisional painting” was built on the notion of a particular way of applying paint, which questioned the very idea of a ‘finished’ artwork. What Rubinstein’s article did manage to reveal is that such sweeping statements that try to categorise what is a very complex genus of the artworld, are good for the jaded discourse that has followed the medium since the early ’80s: but “sweeping statement” it still remains.

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Rubinstein doesn’t consider ‘taste’ as part of his thesis, as in the personal taste of the artist making the work, and his/ her being conditioned to be ‘tasteful’, i.e. how the rest of the world responds to the painter’s language is a defining factor in how a painter evolves their personal taste? Perhaps, a better question is: is taste learnt? There is also the fact that as artists mature ‘language’ and ‘experience’ condition how they break down their evolving/devolving painting language, particularly painters that skirt the border between subject, object, and figuration in their work. If something reminds the painter of an explicit object, or references another painter’s language, do they not feel the need to cover this up, to find something that ‘personalises’ it for them, that sets them apart, so not to represent the ‘personality’ of another artist: the worst thing you can say to a painter is—it reminds me of so and so. I know it sounds flakey but I firmly believe that painters, more that any other artists, become their work: what Isabelle Graw calls “quasi-persons”[4]. There is the cultural aspect to painting also—what is seen as visually economical in one country is deemed Baroque in another: do you not get the sense from northern European artists such as Serge Jensen, Wilhelm Sasnal, Raoul De Keyser, that what they are doing is culturally ‘felt’ by them, intuitive? Artist and blogger Brian Dupont wrote the following in response to Rubinstein’s provisional painting observation:

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Artists today are confronting an increasingly ramshackle future where aesthetic, political, economic, and ecological promises have been revealed as failures. If they are seeing a future where issues of scarcity become more urgent, materials must be recycled or scavenged from surplus, and long-held political standards become increasingly irrelevant, it would seem natural to see trends in painting (re)emerge that question formal equivalents of these standards. The long-term success of painting can be attributed to its ability to colonize and assimilate outside ideas and approaches, stretching form and content to the breaking point so that the project of the medium is ultimately made stronger. If a provisional vocabulary can provide a timely reinvigoration of the expression of individual concerns, that should be all the ambition anyone needs in a painting.[5] Manifesto-like in his advocacy and belief in a future for painting, however, I am not completely in agreement with Dupont that, the Zeitgeist is the reason for a “provisional vocabulary” in contemporary painting per se. Although this is true within the contexts of online media, as English filmmaker Adam Curtis points out in an illuminating podcast[6] that considers the effect that exposure to an unrelenting proliferation of bite-size news media has had on the social psyche; the debilitating effect on individual power when we are faced with the such exposure to the failures of government and democracy; and the lack of power to alter the trajectory of a failed socio-political system: Facebook and Twitter commentary have become our protest and soother from real political action. But to put painting into this bracket is a bit of a stretch. Painters that perform this provisional aesthetic always seem divorced from the outside world. However, there is an argument that the painter already brings the outside world into the studio, ‘in person’, as there is an equivalent argument that the Zeitgeist is left outside the door as soon as the painter enters the studio. There is also the fact that Rubinstein’s provisional painting posse are a very established crew, whereas this ‘provisionality’ that he promotes is more adaptive to art school, where process is retained and art objects are viewed as fugitive. Rubenstein’s definition of a provisional painting aesthetic is ill-defined. ‘Being provisional’ in your art practice could be exemplified by ‘moments’ rather than something that you adhere

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In this ‘era of the curator’ there is a belief that works that are ‘provisional’ are more malleable to a wider range of contexts. Such discursive potential as ‘The Impossibility of Painting’ is a curator’s wet dream: “As French curator Jean-Charles Vergne puts it, De Keyser’s work ‘constantly asserts the impossibility of painting, free of touchups, mistakes, accidents, set on laying bare the seams, the second tries and the failures. . . . [There is] a constant stuttering in the painting.’”[9] Perhaps the painter, who threads the provisional aesthetic line, offers the potential to be staged within an array of theoretical frameworks that test language and taste to their semiotic and formalist limits. If there is a such thing as ‘provisional painting’ it is being fostered by curators, or for that matter gallerists, who can afford such ‘provisionality’ within their stable of earner-artists. With a medium that is closer to the art market than most, the parameters for expressive liberties are narrow, but that doesn’t mean shallow.

*JULY 2013 (#56): SHITLIST #2: DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS* SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

AUGUST 2013 (#57): The Art of Idleness

Magnhild Opdøl, ‘point of no return’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 15 June – 28 July.

IF YOU AGREE with the Bulgarian artist Nedkow Solakov, that “architecture is always first; you – the artist – are the second!”, then, Butler Gallery set within the grounds of Kilkenny Castle offers a few ambient and architectural challenges for the artist. In the five adjoining rooms linked by a doorless corridor, Magnhild Opdøl’s artworks foldout like a fairy tale pop-up book, one leaf of the story leading to the next.

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to as a signature. Is that not what ‘being provisional’ means, momentary? For instance, English artist Merlin Carpenter’s parodic opening at Reena Spaulings, New York, in 2007, when he turned up to his opening with a bucket of black paint and proceeded to slap-dash slogans onto in situ blank canvases, such as DIE COLLECTOR SCUM, could be described as performing provisional painting? Provisional painting could also suggest perishable artworks, such as Chris Martin’s ‘Bread Paintings’. Or provisional painting could be illustrated by how a usually considered and precise Irish artist like Mark Swords, would paint a work like Forgery (image next page!), what I described in a previous text as a “real ‘spanner’ in the works: however well the composition holds the painting together, the ‘badly’ mixed primary colours revisit Picasso’s assertion that the creche art class is where art begins, and ends.”[7] Provisionality in painting could be answered by Wilhelm Sasnal whom, in an interview was asked the following question: “What is the longest you have spent on a painting?” Sasnal answered honestly: “three days.”[8]

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Opdøl’s is known for her cutesy taxidermic sculptures of deer, lamb, birds, bunnies that make you go ‘AWW..!’ then ‘EWW..!’. Although the Norwegian artist has managed to stay the course between sentimentality and seriousness, in the past there seemed to be a little too much taxidermy and not enough escape from the ‘issue’ of taxidermy; what is generally thought of as a primeval, ritualistic tradition, that has more to do now with the sociological and psychological markers for the ignorant hick and serial killer. Steve Baker, author of The Postmodern Animal and the man who devised the term “botched taxidermy” [...] a “catch-all phrase for a variety of contemporary art practice that engages with the animal at some level or other” – observes that artists whose subject is the animal, often use taxidermy to invite aggression and criticality into what can be deemed as a little Hello Kitty, without the skinning, tanning, and mounting. At Butler Gallery, however, we get to see less taxidermy and more of what Opdøl refers to as the ‘stirring’ of narratives instead of storytelling: the latter device would only revert back to sentimentality. It is between the cracks of Opdøl’s veneered reality that another reality peeks through. No better illustrated than in the artist’s installation of sixty-six vintage ‘Greeting From....’ postcards entitled We’re afraid to go home in the dark, wherein the artist performs a cheap and quick chiaroscuro by partly filling in the woodland backgrounds with a black marker, so the deer inhabitants are foregrounded. Each framed postcard abuts the next; creating a uniform backdrop that oozes the atmosphere of a nighttime forest, with the gnawing feeling that the Teddy Bears’ Picnic got out of hand.

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The moment that I think I have a handle on where Opdøl’s narrative is taking me I hit a Black Lodge[1]. In the adjoining room 299 stacked, cerise pink donut boxes stand tall and pretty; the folded lids of which are opened out like the exterior wood shingles of an American timber house. Entitled Invitation to Love – the namesake of the doublyfictional soap opera embedded in the twisted narrative of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – the setup immediately suggests American clichés of law enforcement and their fried confectionary of choice for pigging out, donuts. Opdøl’s explicit reference to Twin Peaks (if you’re a fan) extends to other themes (small town America) and such phrases as (‘tis type of ting don’ happen ‘round ‘ere’!!). Displayed alongside the stacked donut boxes and set within a picture frame, an unassembled donut box suggests a potential future, in name (Pilot) and look (architectural plans). The plot gets murkier in the penultimate room at Butler Gallery, where Opdøl’s preferred medium – taxidermy – registers as a mere ‘footnote’; the forelegs of a roe deer functioning as hooks for a gun rack on which a wooden log rests: a reference to Twin Peaks’ psychic ‘Log Lady’[2]. Directly opposite is displayed the second and best of two miniature bronze that are placed under inverted ‘goldfish bowls’ (the first bronze being a lone Bambi located in room 2 of the gallery). Entitled Being in Darkness, the bronze representation of an unlit candle is a few inches from the end of its lit life. Delicately fashioned bronze representations of two used matches are also placed under the bowl. Adjacent, the matches are re-represented in a patiently penciled nature morte. In the same room a drawn snow scene is absent of all creatures great and small; ‘lights out’ all round it seems, Bambi has gone to the gun room in the sky. The ‘dessert’ is let out of the box in the final room of the gallery where 54 bronze ring donuts are spread across two glass-top tables. The party has definitely started as 54 donuts does not equate to the 300 donut boxes in the preceding room. Teasingly called The Necessary Lie, the bronze donuts are stacked one and two-high, some of which are represented plain, others have sprinkles. This food for thought is surrounded on all sides by black and white lambda prints of woodland environs, with, in one instance a derelict timber house cladded in bowed shingles.

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In Opdøl’s art there is a sense that nature is only coming into being, neither alive nor dead. This idea of ‘becoming’ reminds one of tag-team philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming animal,” which offers an alternative to a psychoanalytic understanding of human behaviour and identity. Besides Opdøl’s predilection for all things furry, there is a further sense that her artworks have been translocated from the dusty attic of a family home: the domestic space where memento mori are safe from beleaguered existential eyes.

Just like Nedko Solakov’s installation ‘Knights (and other dreams)’ was the perfect fit for the Brothers Grimm Museum at dOCUMENTA (13), the feeling is Opdøl’s brand of sweetly-sick penned in at the Butler Gallery is as happy as Agent Dale Cooper with a cup of black coffee and piece of cherry pie. Aside from the architectural obstacles that Butler Gallery presents, it is Opdøl’s lesser dependency on taxidermy and a more expansive use of materials and references that invite rather than repel the spectator.

AUGUST 2013 (#58): The sprinklers are on

LIAM GILLICK, For the doors that are welded shut, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Friday 27 July – 14 September.

THE WRECK of Eurocentric capitalism came babbling[1] ashore in 2008. Five years on it is still babbling incoherently, but in a retroactive rather than speculative way; the economic wounds still haven’t turned to scars. But capitalism always babbles. Built on the fluid components of production, distribution, speculation, changing hands of wealth, and not to forget self-interest, capitalism is as decisive as it is unpredictable; volatile as it is concrete; melody as it is malady. Within this babbling squall, between capitalism and art, lies Liam Gillick’s art practice. With a combination of managerial speak, a lucid essay writing style, and allegorical coloured screens, partitions, ceilings, Gillick constructs a post-Fordist aesthetic that produces discourse with the same loquaciousness as a politician pleading his innocence in the face of suspected corruption. However, with all that has been written on Gillick’s art practice from a post-Fordist theoretical position[2] there is a sense that this part of the conversation is almost exhausted: the Toyota is sputtering into submission. What is left from the tome of academic prose that has ‘audited’ every detail of Gillick’s praxis up to this date is a residue of competition from the writing, as if art historian and art critic alike were trying to compete with the bottomless tank of liquid discourse that Gillick continually tops up with every new artwork that connects with his last. What makes the artist’s praxis discursively self-perpetuating is its modularity and flexibility: Gillick’s post-Fordist aesthetic is as slippery as well-oiled capitalist consumption and production.

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Maghild Opdøl’s ‘point of no return’ presents the many facets of idleness; from time spent blackening in landscapes on postcards to representations of objects that are left idly by to dwindle rather than pseudo-preserve (taxidermy). Opdøl throws a blanket of transparency on nature – a nature that seems already deceased in her eyes – then traces to the point when idleness is the only outcome. As the proverb advises: an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.

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But, there is so much more to Gillick’s praxis than spreadsheet conceptualism. From time to time he presents scenario artworks that are wonderfully kooky, tautological even. Installed in the German Pavilion for the 2009 Venice Biennale, Gillick’s babbling animatronic cat filled to the whiskers with figure-8 logic – amidst a forest of hollow pine kitchen units – worked as a fine analogy of the unloved capitalist’s dependency on foresight. Gillick’s omnipotent feline was the animal who knew too much but was loved too little: sitting in the in-between space of the intellect and the sensuous – the space that Gillick’s art practice has inhabited for over twenty years.

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If tautology is defined by ‘needless repetition’ then Gillick’s Complete Bin Development installed at Kerlin Gallery is the formalist epitome of a tautological statement: and this is not taking into account its title, what could be read as an oxymoronic list that delineates the relentless loop of capitalist progress (development/complete/ bin). Gillick’s own description of the work – with the repeated use of “series” as a descriptor – could also be read as a deliberate tautology: “Complete Bin Development is a sequence of towered structures, which comprise of a series of open frameworks in a series of permutations.” What Gillick refers to as “permutations“ are Plexiglas panels that deck out each tower in alternating colours of orange, yellow, purple, blue, green, red. The aluminium and Plexiglas towers are lined up in a queue in the gallery (REGIMENTAL). It’s as if the production line has seized at the automotive factory, the sprinklers are on and the sun has just made its way into the workspace. Perhaps this is the scene that one gallery visitor envisioned and described as “awe inspiring” in Kerlin’s visitor book: very neo-Romantic rather than post-Fordist. For me, the repetitive and simple sequence of forms override the elicitation of transcendental experience. What Gillick proffers through this repetitive modular framework is modernist abstraction as “lack.” We, the spectators, are meant to activate the ‘on strike’ space with our mouths. What makes Gillick’s presentation sing, however, is the aptly titled two-part wall text in red and black powder coated aluminium entitled A Short Song: reverberating with the lyrics “For the shed that can’t be entered, Hallelujah!” [...] “For the door that is welded shut, Hallelujah!” The premise of the utilitarian shed that cannot be entered and the welded shut door than cannot be opened is concluded by the transcendental response “Hallelujah!”: another tautological doubling. Work equated with ‘song’[3] is redolent of early twentieth century ‘gandy dancers’ (railroad workers) who chanted while they laid the track. Forget capitalism and post-Fordist aesthetics, what I enjoy most about Gillick’s discursive scenario-scapes is their tautological compositions and aporetic play that transcend medium- and concept-specificity. I can relate to John Kelsey experiencing “singing“ in the modernist aisles of Gillick‘s ergonomic abstraction. Sure, even the clinical Piet Mondrian had a bit of Boogie Woogie playing in the gutters of his planar formalism.

AUGUST 2013 (#59): Jumping through Hoops!

‘Circulation’, starring Alan Butler + Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock + 62 open

submission artists (= 51 artworks/proposals), FLOOD + Monster Truck, Dublin Curated by Paul McAree, 9 – 24 August >>>>>

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CURATED BY PAUL MCAREE, ‘Circulation’ is composed of two Dublin city galleries (Monster Truck and FLOOD); a host of open submission artists who paid for the pleasure; two invited artists, Alan Butler and Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock (JCHP); and a printed publication with a commissioned text by Mark Hutchinson that was funded by the open submission fee. The twist in the curatorial tail: none of the 51 artworks or proposals was rejected, albeit displayed with varying degrees of prominence at both galleries: no artist left behind it seems!?

Beyond questions of democracy, what comes across more clearly is a tangible rather than theoretically performed institutional critique, that has seemingly changed hands from the artist to the curator. In 2006 Simon Sheikh (in response to an essay written by Andrea Fraser) observed that the institution was once a problem for the artist but “the current institutional-critical discussions seem predominantly propagated by curators and directors of the very same institutions. [...] Institutional critique, as co-opted, would be like a bacteria that may have temporarily weakened the patient – the institution – but only in order to strengthen the immune system of that patient in the long run.”[1] Thus the suggestion of a nonjudgemental, nonprejudicial, nonhierarchical, all-inclusive art arena conveys a message that, without the ‘institution’ of the curator as arbiters of taste and judgement we would end up with distasteful, hodgepodge exhibitions. ‘Circulation’ presents what J.J. Charlesworth describes as the “role of the curator-as-author” and the “acknowledgement of the curator as someone who wields power and makes substantial decisions of inclusion and exclusion. Curator-as-facilitator, curator-as-DJ, curator-as-artist – what these wellworn tropes have in common is the persistent disavowal of the purely institutional character of the curator’s power”.[2] Charlesworth’s ‘curator-as-author’ also gives a reality check to the art critic who, under the leading hand of the director and curator, is essentially an arbiter of their hand-me-down taste. However, the position of servitude that the critic usually finds oneself in, through the nagging sense of fair play to comment on as much of the artworks as possible in a group exhibition, is absent here. The very notion of doing a ‘Baudelaire’ – in how he verbally covered the crammed French Salons of the 1840s and ’50s with such critical stamina and partiality – seems entirely pointless considering McAree’s emphasis on curation for curation’s sake. What if the 51 artists decided to not jump through the curatorial hoop by not submitting? Could such collective resistance to the ever-evolving curatorial playground be organised by artists, for whom the rule of beggars applies (can’t be choosers?). As Hans Haacke wrote in 1974: “‘Artists’, as much as their supporters and their enemies, no matter of what ideological coloration, are unwitting partners. [...] They participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society. They work within that frame, set the frame and are being framed”.[3] Unfortunately, ‘Circulation’ does not come across as a celebration of art but of

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McAree’s introduction to the publication proclaims in no uncertain terms that democracy is being explored through the curatorial selection process. Hutchinson’s commissioned essay ‘Collectivise Art Now’ is a thesis of received ideas on the good, bad, and ugly of compromised democracy – from Churchill to Lenin, Marx to Badiou to Žižek. However, not all is what it seems as McAree deliberately gives a shade of priority to the two invited artists by having their artworks displayed at both galleries. Furthermore, some of the artists affiliated with Black Church Print Studio – the institution that commissioned the exhibition – are also granted a little more wiggle room for their submitted artworks displayed at FLOOD...(coincidence?)

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curatorial hijinks. The 49 artworks that make up the ‘Salon wall’ at Monster Truck are in essence bystanders to Alan Butler’s and JCHP’s activating artworks. The whole curatorial scenario reverses Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s ‘Aesthetic of administration to the Critique of Institutions’ in his historicising evaluation of 1960s Conceptualism.[4] ‘Circulation’ posits the celebration of art against the celebration of the curatorial. Curatorial comes out on top, unless you can actively drown out the noise of the swarm of submitted artworks and focus your attention on Alan Butler’s and JCHP’s artworks (FYI: ‘JCHP’ is not an individual artist but the amalgamation of the personnel from two London galleries – Jeffrey Charles Gallery, Henry Peacock Gallery – that closed shop in 2005 to form a gallery without a physical space, and who distribute artworks via mail and email). I am not suggesting, however, that the individually submitted artworks are weak in and of themselves, but how they are physically displayed and conceptually framed, noise is their only effect. That is, except for John Ryan’s proposal, who plays the curator at his own game by requesting to have his CV printed on the literature for the exhibition and not on the walls of the gallery proper – touché.[5] My critical dilemma in writing this review was where to begin – to celebrate art first or discuss the questions that the curatorial scenario provoke? I feel like I have jumped through the curator’s hoop by going with the latter. Even though, as a whole, ‘Circulation’ does not celebrate art, I cannot ignore McAree’s curatorial creativity in partnering Alan Butler’s techno-bombastic artworks with JCHP’s discreetly introspective blend of ‘aesthetic of administration’ with ‘critique of institutions’.

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The latter’s stationery (not stationary) aesthetic make JCHP user-friendly hardware for curatorial scenarios like ‘Circulation’. They fit what Coline Milliard observes as a new generation of artists who use “play and poetry to infuse the realm of institutional critique, a lightness sometimes missing from the work of their predecessors of the 1960s and 70s”.[6] JCHP’s floor-bound stack of “gift” printouts presented at Monster Truck (à la Félix González-Torres) are context-specific, with regard to the experience of viewing ‘Circulation’; thoughtfully articulating the “excess of transactions” of artistic output in the gallery without “reciprocity”.[7] They also repeat my own criticisms and ‘What Ifs?’ at FLOOD: What is the purpose of publicly displaying the output of a practice and why if you have resolved not to exhibit, are you doing exactly that? [...] At all cost do not exhibit. Unequivocally, we situate our practice and this exhibition in a thoroughgoing contradiction.[8] Alan Butler on the other hand is less visually discreet and more verbally cryptic in his repurposing of ideological internet argot, Jingoist slogans and pop lyrics in the wonderful digital artwork Come Together (2013) displayed at FLOOD. Reconstituting an interview with Glenn Beck (politically conservative American TV and radio host) and Cody Wilson (designer of the first 3-D printable gun), Butler embeds the conversation between the naively idealogical but dangerous Wilson and smugtastic Beck within a bubbly and jiggy TED[9] typeface. As always Butler’s virtual backdrops approximate a Halloween party chunder of Sherbet Dip, Opal Fruits, and Skittles. While

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at Monster Truck data is reified in Butler’s curved banner drawing The Map is not the Territory (2013), that acts as a backdrop to The Conversation (2013), wherein the Beck/ Wilson interview is recycled and interfaced with a composite of 400 ‘TED Talks’ recordings. Butler’s digital visualisations exhibit extracts of hyper-banal and hyperpolitical online content that almost achieve reification in their sickly-colourful HD presentation. The sound- and visual-bites stay with you long after leaving the gallery, enticing you back online to search for the sources of his off the beaten track, laptop tourism.

Even though I have an issue with the framing devise of ‘Circulation’, McAree does make visible his and the art institution’s role in the proliferation of art; and, for that matter, the artist’s responsibility, or lack thereof, in the framing of their own art. Furthermore, the ‘Circulation’ publication that includes all the artists‘ statements and proposals strips back the whole curatorial process, allowing you the reader to judge the conceptual rigor of each and every artist for yourself. Ultimately, the BOLD and italicized posturing of Alan Butler’s and JCHP’s artworks push through the miasma of the curator’s rhetorical side dish.

PAUL DORAN, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin 29 August – 28 September.

EVERY couple of years Paul Doran exhibits at Green on Red Gallery for the standard month run, and then he’s gone: the artist is certainly not one for hogging the limelight. Even though the topography of his paintings hasn’t changed vastly over the last ten years that he’s been exhibiting at the Dublin gallery, the material means by which he expresses that topography has pushed the very limits of what can be recognised as painting, whilst still retaining the wall, frame and evidence of the painter’s hand in the miscellany of materials that he invites into his process – albeit not a whole lot of paint. Doran’s new works currently displayed at Green on Red (all from 2013) are suggestive of beds that have been put through life’s wringer: their frames and mattresses a little worse for wear. Depending on a clockwise or anti-clockwise orientation through the gallery, my personal curtain raiser, Hut, is composed of raggedy swatches of granny pink and prussian blue fabric that are nailed to a wood panel by workaday panel pins. Up close, a collection of criss-cross splinters are the evidence of a once gluedon off-cut of plywood. Then, at the peripheral edge, pure apple green peeks from an overpainting of scuttery brown, suggesting that painting failed Doran in this expressive instance; the addition of fabric picking up the slack. Four roughly hewn pine battens make up a handmade frame (Doran humbly makes his own) that are speckled with paint: softwood is badly dressed up as its darker, transvestite cousin. If Hut and its neighbour, Bed, convey the potential for sleep, then Sleep is the fantasy. The usual breaks on the surface and capricious minutiae that make Doran’s paintings so enjoyable are flattened by a semi-transparent, blue plastic folder, that sits on top of

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SEPTEMBER 2013 (#60): Between the Maid and the Unmade

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what is presumably a ‘Paul Doran’ underneath. It‘s the representation of a dreamt up painting; those paintings that are frustratingly out of arm’s reach in waking life for the obsessive whom paints whilst asleep. The wonderfully evocative (of something or other) It’s not a secret, ironically evades telling. While Grey room describes itself, wherein irregular off-cuts of grey pinstripe fabric shuffle together like driftwood to almost form a solid grey platform – almost. However, jutting out from the gallery wall, Sky shelter offers the viewer a steady perch to shelve their thoughts, whereby a plywood shelf is painted in a half-square pattern of hot harlequin colours, with an equivalent perpendicular under-hang that has been over-painted to equate shadow: Let there be light – Doran is beating god to the punch. I cannot help thinking of noses (rather than arses) with regard to Doran’s layering of pocket-squares of quilted tissue paper in You are beautiful and its partner across the gallery, I love the way you love me. This is Doran at his most provisional, sincere and colourful; the dabs of acrylic harking back to the high colour of the Les Nabis or Matisse. Beside, we are brought back down to earth with Real, in which umbers, siennas and grey form a host of impasto geometries that are framed by another awkward handmade frame, made more so by being decorated by a scrawled-on charcoal trellis. Not in order of the gallery artwork list, Wood is a medley of fabric (verging on Burberry), cardboard and plywood off-cuts doused in acrylic paint. If we take the literal descriptive meaning from its namesake this is another ‘lipstick pig’ – the lapels of plaid fabric doing a bad job of simulating wood.

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The curtain closer for me is Silence. Doran’s handmade pine frames, that are usually affected, in this instance is left bare, while a square tongue of black and white trusspatterned fabric flaps out to partly conceal bits-n-bobs of timber that are painted mouth reds and pinks. The peep holes in the fabric remind one of maimed bed sheets at Halloween, with almond shaped cut-outs where tongues poke and eyelashes get tangled. Paul Doran’s work can be conceptually teamed with fellow Irish artists Mark Swords and Fergus Feehily, all of whom sometimes substitute painting for the scraps of life’s haberdashery. However, Swords’ and Feehily’s artworks lack the splinters of Doran’s. This is not to suggest that Doran’s artworks have need of conceptual refinement, for it is those unshaven splinters and untrue frames that are integral to the originality and integrity of his practice.

SEPTEMBER 2013 (#61): Dark, Dark

EOIN MC HUGH, ‘Augury’, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 26 July – 11 September.

...you with your dislocated reason, have cutely foretold … by the auspices of that raven cloud, your shade, and by the auguries of rooks in parliament, death with every disaster... (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939)

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Images, when correctly constructed, are not illustrations or examples but talismans and emblems, ensigns of reality. (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettesheim, 16th Century) INEVITABLY is part and parcel of everyday life, but when crises visit life’s forward trajectory the path towards inevitability is abbreviated. At Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Eoin Mc Hugh presents in paint, watercolour, bronze, taxidermy and other paraphernalia, mutated hyper-psychological scenarios wherein inevitability is unavoidably immanent. The tone that is invoked is portentous: Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Individually, Mc Hugh’s sumptuous but overtly graphic imagery would look good on T-shirts, but the body of artworks combined at Douglas Hyde Gallery perform as a powerful allegory of mutating destiny. With this in mind the title of the painted portrait someone turning into someone else suggests that the child is changing (aging) before our very eyes: ultimate inevitability already set in motion. While the emotionally detached pair of downward gazes of a infant boy and orangutan as they both investigate a human head minus a skull cap in condensation is an allegory of birth, death and Darwinism, but also an omen of the affect of trauma on psychological evolution. Among the curiosities displayed on tables – rusted trap, model ships, taxidermic hedgehog, [Joseph] Merrick’s inner ear as a bronze vase – open books are also inserted among the found and altered industrial and organic readymades, a practice that has become the norm in galleries of late. Considering the tone of immanence resonating throughout Mc Hugh’s artworks, such open book displays suggest sortes virgilianae – divination by interpretation of a passage chosen at random from a book, especially the Bible. But what bubbles underneath ‘Augury’ – above notions of inevitability and the divination tools to redirect the destined path of mortality – is the potential for light no matter what the circumstance or crisis. One definition of a ‘nimbus’ is a cloudy radiance said to surround a classical deity when on earth. Mc Hugh’s painted portrait of cloud cover absorbing light in transparency reveals that spiritual light rather than painted light is the artist’s cue. In the elegant accompanying catalogue, John Hutchinson offers a key into this notion of spiritual light by way of Hildegard von Bingen’s “theological concept of viriditas,” whereby “greenness” or “life force” will prevail even during the darkest of times. This notion is conveyed in the fiery grass blade tips in Mc Hugh’s painting pulse, thirst, rain inside. These are not capitalist ‘green shoots’ but Nature dipped in the blind optimism of spirituality. Aside from a couple more instances of corrupted anatomies (a headless violinist in curtain); the painted portrait of the gawking Tarsier that has eyeballs larger that its brain in stars and blossoming fruit trees; the corruptible suggestion of private body

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‘Augury’, the title of the exhibition, successfully reinstates the image with the purpose of signification, instead of the usually all pervasive poststructuralist word. It’s no small feat, considering the importance placed on artist statements and talks to communicate the visual component of their work via the verbal. overdetermined – which, at face value could describe Mc Hugh’s persnickety attention to detail – is a painting that illustrates the mythology of reading signs behind the exhibition’s namesake. An augur was a priest from the classical world who interpreted the flight and sound of birds as a form of divination. Auguries were also a favourite narrative element utilised by James Joyce in his sacrifice of comprehension for topsy-turvy verbosity. The painting itself proffers the collision of images and words and meaning by way of a dissimulation of birds that produce a decapitated, illegible sign of white flapping wings and black twig legs.

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parts (vagina cave in atmospheric thought); the artwork that leaves a lasting visual and psychological mark is the beautifully executed fruit, thing without parts. Pictured is an eyeless Nightingale against lush frondescence. The yellow/red accents on the crook of the singing?/squawking? bird’s beak is repeated in the budding trees as if a maladjusted cross-evolutionary process is taking place. It pulls you in like a Chardin (I write that without flippancy). Apart from metaphysics and mysticism, Mc Hugh’s painted output at Douglas Hyde Gallery questions the definition of the painter’s painter and how it has changed over the last five hundred years. First it was Titian painting with his fingers. Then it was recognised in Velázquez’s pips of impasto and Chardin’s painted atmospherics. Now a painter’s painter is an artist who occasionally forgets to use paint at all. Mc Hugh, however, is not a painter’s painter. This is not because he practices what I can only describe as a mutated hyper-realism. Frank Walter, whose work is displayed alongside Mc Hugh’s in Gallery 2 of the Douglas Hyde Gallery is a painter’s painter, wherein the spontaneity and joy of paint itself is performed. That said, this should not be a reason for any painter to ignore Mc Hugh’s output on their way to see Walter’s – by all accounts the latter it seems has made an impact among local painters. Actually, what Mc Hugh presents in very readable and sophisticated formalism, is the conundrum of contemporary painting, in how concept, expression, mood, and the very act of making are placed side-by-side, and the relevance of all aspects come into question.

170 SEPTEMBER 2013 (#62): Tragic Attachment(s)

MARLENE McCARTY, ‘Hard-Keepers’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 5 September – 20 October.

AS IF LOOKING through the eyes, thoughts, desires and memories of another, Marlene McCarty’s large scale graphite and ballpoint pen drawings unfold symmetrically like ‘Rorschachs’ in HD at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Dublin. However, unlike the subjective violence and eroticism potentially perceived in Rorschach imagery (dependent on the psychological makeup of the individual), the American artist’s drawings of humans and primates are undressed – clothes stamped explicitly by TITS, COCKS, BALLS, FANNIES (European definition) and persistent NIPPLES. If you have neither backstory nor context in your rucksack, then McCarty’s work – wonderfully dressing the scale of the RHA as if made to fit – initially comes across as flat and cutesy. The theoretically queer, mismatched families of humans and primates at first resemble Generation Woodstock, whom, we can only assume, have found themselves in the Congo as part of some tree-hugging exercise, but have went one step further and adopted the indigenous chimps and orang-utans. All things not considered, this has the appearance of animal-activism dressed in bell bottoms and porn star taches. That is, until you invest some time reading McCarty’s supplementary true-life stories that are presented as laminated handouts in the gallery. As you read, the seismographic stylus suddenly starts to wobble; the real-life examples of tormented adolescence and the selfishness and selflessness of human nature serving to activate the pencil and biro stratum of the fossilized visuals.

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Up close McCarty’s drawing technique reminds one of adolescent doodles in school copy and text books that helped to fill in time, or for the socially awkward, dispel anxiety. Before McCarty reconstituted them, the true-life stories that form the backbone of the artist’s drawings would have presumably existed as short columns and fleeting headlines in provincial American newspapers; or, if sensational enough, CNN. McCarty’s re-representation of these true-life traumas place love and abuse on the same tableau: the male member acting as a quotation mark, enclosing tragic events that were built on unconditional ‘LOVE’.

Like the entangled families of figures that McCarty fuses together, the true-life stories also bleed into each other: (Tanjung Putting, Borneo, 1971) a PhD student becomes a surrogate mother for a infant orang-utan only for her husband to – out of jealousy of his wife’s unhealthy “extra-marital affair” with the primate over nine years – expel it from the home into the rainforest; (Lititz, Pennsylvania, November 13, 2005) a homeschooled teenage daughter with a conservative Christian background (which includes the wearing of chastity rings) colludes with her boyfriend to murder her parents. But the artworks whereby the alliance between image and text are perfectly conjoined are three groups of kneeling figures that, with their backs turned towards the observer, convey cultish reverence to an invisible god. The drawings are in uncanny concert with a series of tragic events that took place in 2003, wherein the collaboration between religion and mental illness resulted in mothers taking the lives of their children in Las Vegas, Nevada / Lamar, Colorado / Tyler, Texas. I partly disagree with Roberta Smith of The New York Times, who wrote in 2004 that McCarty “has pulled apart the elements of her art, separating language from meaning and from image. In time, she may figure out how to put everything back together again.”[1] To say that art should say everything in one visual fell swoop is to restrict its potential to lead us astray. Although on the one hand I understand Smith’s criticism, as McCarty’s ’80s and early ’90s standalone text works said it all without the complication of mute figuration, the critic’s conclusion comes across as rigidly Modernist. This is a stance that is usually taken by artists concerning their own work when in adamant defense of the unequivocal and singular communicative power of their expression. The art critic Craig Owens wrote in 1983: “...the kind of simultaneous activity on multiple fronts that characterises many feminist practices is a postmodernist phenomenon. And one thing it challenges is modernism’s rigid opposition of artistic practice and theory.”[2] On the other hand curators and critics alike have the tendency to attach a rucksack or two of their personal discursive baggage to what they must believe is the communicative lack in the artwork. But in defense of such critical and curatorial tendencies, is it not the ‘lack’ in the artwork that draws the observer in? In recent interviews and reviews of McCarty’s work, art critics have a tendency to veer away from discussing the artist’s recent primate drawings, instead wanting to discuss her ‘Murder Girls’ series from the late ’90s – teenage killer Marlene Olive being her primary ‘Murder Girl’, who is portrayed twice at the RHA as the innocent and vulnerable girl who bashed her mother’s head in with a hammer. The artist’s

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Commonality between the stories and drawings is maladapted attachment, whether between child and parent, chimp and human. One extraordinary story involves a psychiatrist prescribing chimpanzee rearing to a couple, who, after thirteen years treating the chimp “Lucy” as a human child, decide they want to “live normal lives”. So, they take a stab at feralizing Lucy, and then hand her over to an anthropology student, who travels to The Gambia to acclimate Lucy for a planned few months, which stretches to ten years. This story ends badly, however, like the majority of the stories McCarty re-tells, when, just as Lucy is rehabilitated, she is killed by poachers.

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drawings of humans and primates, which visually standout at the RHA, unavoidably inherit the violence of McCarty’s work that concerns killer moms and daughters, but it is those inherited traces of trauma that give her new work a visceral injection. Although Marlene McCarty’s drawings do not speak wholly for themselves – the accompanying texts being the necessary narrative trigger – the least we can do as viewers is to activate the artist’s artworks further by looking and reading beyond its visual borders.

OCTOBER 2013 (#63): Personal Investment

(Paul Doran in conversation with Robert Armstrong), Green on Red Gallery, Dublin 20 September, 7:30pm.

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WHAT has become the conventional practice of having an artist talk/conversation to either open or occur during the run of an exhibition, has the potential effect of either injecting the artist’s divorced artworks in the gallery with some personality, or not. Can what an artist has to say about their art practice devalue the artist and his or her artworks in the eyes of the fan or collector? On the other hand we live in an era in which, when David Beckham speaks, he doesn’t devalue brand ‘Beckham’. With only a week remaining of Paul Doran’s solo exhibition at Green on Red, a conversation with the artist took place at the Dublin gallery with Robert Armstrong (head of painting at The National College of Art & Design). My interest in attending was based on reviewing the same exhibition two weeks earlier on +billion_, in which I commented on Doran being a reluctant grandstander (read here). You could argue that, by following convention and partaking in an artist talk contradicts such a fugitive position. However, Doran speaking in public about his work is a rare occurrence, and what the artist had to say on the night cemented what is generally the case regarding the artist’s social relationship with the artworld – a jigsaw wherein the socially awkward or socially reluctant artist struggles to fit in comfortably. What discreetly surfaced during the conversation, amid discussion of the methodological trajectory of Doran’s painting practice over the last ten years, was the subjects of art and life, which collided in a significant way on Doran’s canvas in 2009 when: (1), he moved his studio into his own home; (2), this move coincided with a massive shift to Doran’s painting method. For those new to Doran’s art practice, his earlier paintings – works that the artist admits still haunt him to this day – were drooled over by collectors. Built on layer upon layer of creamy oil paint, imagery was always on the verge of collapsing under the weight of copious corporeality. It was as if collectors were buying equal measures of oil paint and creativity by the pound – creative bulk for your money. The reason why Doran’s paintings don’t fetch as much money or stimulate as much collectors’ saliva as they once did, is partly because he didn’t ride the wave of collectors’ taste for his meatier oil paintings from five years ago. On the night of the conversation, an admitted collector disclosed that he, and a collector friend, were very proud owners of early ‘Paul Dorans’: nostalgia for the

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meaty ‘Dorans’ was evidently on the tip of his tongue as he spoke. Significantly, it was the fear of the audience sticking their fingers into the surface of his works (which happened once) that pushed Doran one day to poke and collapse the surface of one of his own paintings. And so the creative deconstruction began, and with that a birdie to his audience and collectors. Furthermore, directors of galleries are often branded as proliferators of style (or style pushers) rather than supporters of creativity. Jerome O’Drisceoil’s support for Doran’s less collectible works paints a very different picture of the gallery director.

During the conversation Doran mentioned Dave Hickey, the American art critic who retired from the artworld a couple of months back. His name was said in jest, following a quip by Doran that he may himself retire from the artworld, not feeling at all comfortable with artworld etiquette, especially concerning career advancement. In another instance ‘beauty’ was mentioned via O’Drisceoil’s description of Doran’s paintings being “ravishingly beautiful” in the press release, a description that, understandably, was met by forced laughter on the night. The combined mention of Dave Hickey, beauty and awkwardness at the mention of the latter, provoked me to tell the story of Hickey’s accidental, theoretical marriage with the term beauty, a story that is shared by the critic in his book The Invisible Dragon. Hickey was a panelist at one of the many art criticism seminars that he has participated in over the years, which may have explained his lack of engagement with proceedings. Doodling away in his notebook he was asked during the Q&A what was the next big thing in theory? ‘Beauty’ he blurted, without thinking. It was a lie. Perhaps an unconscious truth. The hope on Hickey’s part was that it was at least a provocation. It wasn’t. Consciously or not, Doran relating to Hickey’s predicament does make sense. In Hickey’s personalised and poetic brand of art criticism – what he calls fugitive writings (not to mention living a relatively fugitive existence teaching in Las Vegas) – he is explicitly present in his critical negotiation of the artwork ( ‘I’ being his constant crutch). Some would call this personal investment narcissistic, others generous. Doran exhibits facets of his life through his painted assemblages, in some cases narratives only ever known by him. He disclosed during the conversation that his nephew painted the top half of one of his more sculptural works in the current show, Sky Shelter. Hickey’s exit and others from the artworld makes perfect sense when you take into account that personal investment is a mainstay of working in the artworld, whether you are an artist, curator, critic, gallery director etc. But being personally invested comes with its advantages, as we see in Doran’s paintings, and disadvantages, as Hickey’s premature exit demonstrates. Keeping one foot out of the artworld and your heart rolled up away from your sleeve are probably the best ways to hop around, what can be – if you’re not careful, an unforgiving environment.

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On the night of the conversation a very intriguing observation was shared by fellow Irish painter Mark Swords from the audience, on the paradoxical nature of things being described as broken; suggesting that failure is not possible when dealing with things that are already broken, especially with regards to artists using everyday scraps from broken objects in the makeup of their work. I responded quizzically that ‘broken’ is a subjective notion, especially when the artwork is defined as non-functional or useless. There are some collectors, however, that believe Doran’s new paintings are irretrievably broken. We can only conclude that from certain vantage points that aesthetic and conceptual value comes in different packages, and the package that catches the light best above the collector’s mantlepiece comes with a monetary handshake. What Doran’s recent paintings lack in glossy glamour they make up for through bucket loads of improvisational creativity.

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OCTOBER 2013 (#64): Diamond in the Rough

MARCEL VIDAL, ‘#untitled’, Basic Space, Dublin, 20 - 26 September

TAKING creative foothold in disused commercial and derelict spaces around Dublin’s city centre, Basic Space has went through a couple of reincarnations since its materialisation in 2010 (read +billion_ review of the ‘groundbreaking’ group show ‘Underground’ at Basic Space’s previous location on Vicar Street, here ). Located on the ground floor of Eblana House on Marrowbone Lane – an area that was poised for major regeneration in 2007, but still poised six years on – Basic Space is now composed of a large open plan communal work space that presently accommodates six artists, with further room for invited or proposed artist projects/exhibitions. It’s quite inspiring and original to have visual access to artists’ studios from street level in the heart of Dublin city.

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In the three exhibitions that I have experienced Marcel Vidal’s work (coincidentally in galleries located in Dublin 8), the artist has always propped up, or sinfully defaced, his intimate and skillfully articulated paintings and drawings with scraps from the builders providers or perhaps urban skip. In the group exhibition ‘WORK HEAD’ (2011), NCAD Gallery, sods of expanding foam (simulating black, oily mud) alongside tuffs of animal fur, soiled and framed exquisitely painted portraits that evoked exotic Africana or ... – with a leap of the imagination – remnants from the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire. Thinking back, standing among the deep blacks and curious textures, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came to mind. In 2012 the artist’s previously sophisticated output at NCAD Gallery was substituted with poptastic totems fit for an Egyptian pharaoh, in a Tutankhamunesque display in the basement gallery NAG on Francis Street: in one instance an ornamentalised banana was suggestive of the affected Midas touch of Jeff Koons’ porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Vidal’s most recent show at Basic Space entitled ‘#untitled’, strips it all back again. Everything is painted and drawn in shades of charcoal grey, while framed by the neutral tans of plywood and timber. Nevertheless, Vidal still manages to retain colourful posturing in his imagery, that comes across as sophisticated and authorial rather than cheap and appropriated. Initiated by Dublin-based artist, Jim Ricks, Vidal has custom-made a timber structure to house his drawings and a single painting at Basic Space – an improvised structure that was probably forced into existence to deal with a commercial space that is halfway between first and second fix completion. If placed in a white cube gallery such a construction would be less novel, verging on farcical; but in the hinterlands of an artist-run project space Vidal’s intervention suits the brutalist mise–en– scène decorated with work benches and tools of the artist trade. It helps that the construction is not one of those lazily designed, timber partitioned boxes that artists usually dream up to avoid the improprieties of uncapped electrical wires and breeze block walls. Vidal’s construction is a rough plywood diamond with a discreet opening on one side: hatch-like. The idiosyncratic shape comes across as conceptual intent, no matter how unintentional, improvisational or vague its journey to conception may have took. The shape and posture of the timber structure suggests something celestial: re-instilling recent, high flying media stories, such as water found on Mars, alien DNA harvested in the Earth’s stratosphere, and 60 billion planets that could potentially support life. Inside the timber construction we come face-to-face with our dysgenic reality, illustrated via nine drawings of ‘Belieber’ types (including the ‘pretty fly for a white

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guy’ American rapper Riff Raff, who is a dumber version of Vanilla Ice and part of Justin Bieber’s entourage). Vidal has portrayed Bieber in oil paint, wearing a wooly hat with the year 1994 printed on front (the year of the pop star’s birth). Although delicately painted, it is far from a generous portrait. Black and white with shades of burnt sienna ground peeking through, Bieber’s cheeks are hollow, eyes black, teeth thin. He looks like a junky; or Vidal is painting predictively of the child celebrity’s future.

The group of drawings, framed by rough timber sourced from fruit and veg crates, and crudely stapled into place, are primarily of teenage girls (along with Riff Raff) ‘swagging’ for the audience (i.e., to ‘swag’ is how youth culture presents itself in style and posture, usually with overemphasised hand and body gestures, a term that has proliferated culture in a conundrum of conjugations – ‘swaggy’ is seemingly one of Justin Bieber’s favourite terms).

Although Vidal’s art practice could be theoretically read within a museological framework, his displays do not convey such an overused and pretentious formula for art-making. For me they suggest archaeological discovery, combined with a temperamental specificity, wherein time travel is possible and meaning suggestible. His staged imagery are homeless in a world that doesn’t value such things as printed matter or the conservation of material history. There is something of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress in the collision of diametric statements and visual textures which his artefactual displays seemingly pronounce. Vidal’s framing helps to reorganise the potential reading of his artworks, which can be imagined being pulled from a oil reservoir located up a desert road from ancient Alexandria (NCAD); just discovered in a tomb in which the air is still suffocatingly stale (NAG); and at Basic Space, a crash-landing from a parallel universe that is hopelessly the same as ours.

OCTOBER 2013 (#65): Painting with Lyrics

Ramon Kassam, ‘Portrait Cuts Itself Out On The Floor’, Pallas Projects, Dublin 26 – 30 June.

RAMON KASSAM’S paintings exhibit a Neo-Expressionist temperament. This is not to suggest they are built on layers of testosterone-induced extinction bursts, or the maladjusted manhood phantasies of “honour, power, and the love of women” (Freud). At first sight, however, they do butt heads with the spectator by over-performing equal measures of butch and butchery. That is, until narrative suddenly takes shape to soften the blow of the crudely applied formalism, through a tactical relay between

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From the celestial, architectural exterior of Vidal’s timber structure, that points towards – by all science factual and fictional accounts – a dystopian future, to an interior that incubates and compresses the celebrity fanaticism and cultural homogenisation of a dumbed-down present, we, the observers, are placed at a crossroads that is signposted PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE, and UNKNOWN. However, the real question that Vidal’s display posits is: have we already arrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or worse still, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy?

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image and title in the seven paintings on display at Pallas Projects, Dublin. Subtexts of self and place are explicitly portrayed in Kassam’s Eyeing drawings taped to a window with a great Limerick sky. You would expect any Neo-Expressionist worth his salt to paint himself spreadeagled in Y-fronts amid an urban safari decked out in naked iron girders and cavity cement blocks – the scars of economic speculation and accidental monuments to broken capitalism. What you get, however, is Kassam’s phallocentric head and shoulders scumbled-in with a deep Yves Kline blue, as the artist-oracle gazes beyond the stalemates of economy and politics, towards the future – a trope of Romanticism, from Casper David Friedrich to Ed Atkins. Pasted between Kassam and a hot Turnersesque sky are three blank A4 pages that overlap into an origami skyline. Everything is painted translucent, except for Kassam’s tightly shaven masculine skull and compressed shoulders – the only solids amidst the artist’s watery vision. Premeditated or improvised? Couple arguing over a rotated landscape performs a playful dialectic between form and content. Presented as a diptych, on the left panel the arguing couple is suggested by a ménage à deux of roughly painted contours that fight over fore and background. To the right the rotated landscape exhibits the roughand-ready application of a dreamt up Géricault. The argument is not contained, however, as the suggestion of a shoulder edges into the landscape. On the whole the artwork conveys the argy-bargy of being caught in a turnstile in the rush to catch the last train.

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Inserted tape posing as a nude is another constellation of half-committed forms, in which a leggy studio table is placed dead centre on a canary yellow floor, with a length of tape reclining on top like a work-in-progress möbius strip. While Discarded paintings is a portrait of the artist’s frustration and its eventual aftermath, wherein wrinkled skins of paint have been mashed into a patch of grass that is nestled beside a plaza of raw canvas with ecological residues: pastoral it is not. Two paintings standout at Pallas Projects as the shy couple in a schoolyard of bullies. With the controlled direction of a daydream, Incomplete plein air painting in the dark suggests the merest glimpse of a stretchered canvas within a sharp polygon of shadow, that is shoehorned into a diaphanous pink backdrop. Embedded paper tells me you’re awake is a ‘Josef Albers’ rattled out of symmetry. An awkward composition of rectangles creates a Gestalt effect, registering first as a nighttime scene populated by a high-rise building with two postage stamp windows filled with light; then, two peeled eyes peering from an oxblood duvet; one vision sleepy, the next creepy. Sharing the title of the exhibition, but more fitting as an epilogue, Portrait Cuts Itself Out On The Floor is the only painting that veers away from Neo-Expressionist tendencies, wherein a Cubist interplay of forms is delivered with postmodernist irony. With the imprecision of a self-surgery, fillets of canvas have been cut and pasted to form a clumsy portrait against a cater-cornered linoleum floor: humanity is displayed with the inhumanity of a marionette. Some say you shouldn’t shit where you eat. The critical consensus regarding the NeoExpressionists was they habitually shat where they ate, and repeatedly exhibited the resulting ‘lipstick collar’ as a theatrically staged confessional. The dumb opera of NeoExpressionism heralded the end of modernity’s will-to-progress and the beginnings of postmodernity’s mishmash of the present with an ‘anything goes’ plundering of the past. More community theatre than high opera, Ramon Kassam’s paintings are not just formalist salutes to a generation of artists who wet the bed and stretchered it, but good paintings with great lyrics.

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OCTOBER 2013 (#66): Liquid Fire’s Promise

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SHANE McCARTHY, ‘Words, sometimes, get in the way of meaning’, mother’s tankstation, Dublin, 25 September – 2 November.

The ‘promise’ has always been neon’s communicative allure. But neon’s promise did not begin with Nauman’s neon sign The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), or end with Tracey Emin’s neon Hallmark moment I Promise to Love You (2010). Perhaps Nauman can be credited with shattering the illusion of neon’s promise, but the promise beckoned behind phosphor-coated, glass tubing long before the late 1960s. The neon sign was emblematic of the American dream since the ’20s. Dubbed ‘Liquid Fire’, neon signs decorated small American businesses – and still do in shops that, ironically, cannot afford a revamp with LED lighting – with the promise of the best coffee, best food, best sex show. New York’s Times Square and Las Vegas’ casinos are the epicentres of empty promises of wealth and the imagined trappings that come with Big Money. The 24/7 neon glow symbolised cheap success minus the labour. The lottery ticket, casino roulette, well-equipped sex shop, are all fast-track methods to fulfill what a person believes is the lack in their life. Irish artist Shane McCarthy has taken it upon himself to simulate the neon sign, by first digitally drawing it, and then projecting what is an exquisitely executed simulacrum onto the gallery wall at mother’s tankstation, Dubln. It’s a wonderful visual conceit, and a weighty one at that, considering the neon elephant in the room. The question is, why has McCarthy gone to such lengths to simulate what is a wonderfully crafted object in the first place, that illuminates like no other element in daylight? This question is best answered by McCarthy’s digital drawings displayed in the gallery, which are as visually attractive as they are conceptually layered. In the dark entrance hall of mother’s tankstation – a relative cubby hole space usually containing a curtain-raiser artwork just before you enter the gallery proper – electric cables from a yellow, step-down transformer collect in a corner. The transformer is functionally unnecessary, voltage-wise, but a theatrically apt framing device for McCarthy’s projected digital drawing that spells out – with a golden neon glow – stilted sincerity. What adds to the illusion that neon light is penetrating the penumbra of the windowless space, is the saffron coloured wall on which stilted sincerity is projected. Somehow, the digital drawing looks bigger than in reality. Perhaps it’s the adjective “stilted,” swaying to and fro between definitions – suggesting unsteady architecture in one instance, to self-conscious communication in another. Read semantically, stilted sincerity describes its own obfuscation; living up to the title of the exhibition: ‘Words, sometimes, get in the way of meaning’. Words, however, have been the whipping boy for miscommunication since the first time someone said ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ during the formation of an argument. In the gallery, McCarthy’s display of artworks are not exactly arguing with each other, like, let’s say a ‘Bruce Nauman’ or ‘Ed Ruscha’. Rather, it’s as if the argument has already occurred;

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IN THE ARTWORLD CONTEXT, Bruce Nauman is synonymous with the neon sign. So much so that the American artist put off generations of artists from using neon signage, especially art students, who, most of the time, naively compete to be novel. But experience teaches the artist (if they take the time to look over their shoulder) that they can only ever aspire to be a warped mirror image of what has gone before. Today, we see neon signs utilised within an ‘art about art’ frame; as either a nostalgic turn of the hyper-modernic page or activating prop to sit the contemporary context on; or, as the cheap promise of fulfilling desire (desire = ‘lack’ in a Lacanian sense).

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flickering sparks of activity suggesting damage after the electrical storm, or, with a glass half full, potential beginnings. Two tube televisions sit face-to-face on two compact tables. The digitally drawn words, absent presence, illuminate both. However, the near obsolete technology on which the identical digital drawings are presented have no visible evidence of a DVD player or USB socket: semantic ghosts arguing in a shell of obsolescence? With daylight filtering through the pitched skylight of mother’s tankstation, directly above McCarthy’s timber assemblage with a rolled up blue carpet acting as a projection screen, the message of the digitally drawn, rolling text is lost in the bright daylight of the gallery. Whispering ever so gently of a possible new direction for the artist, untitled comes across as an artwork in transition and perhaps unsure of itself; literally so considering the long pauses between faded, intermittent text. Perhaps ‘suggestion’ is the intention here? As the days get a little dimmer in late Autumn it may come into its own, in the same way Michael Snow’s So It Is did, screened at mother‘s tankstation during the cold blue afternoon light of November/December 2009.[1] But placed alongside the aesthetic and conceptual clarity of McCarthy‘s digital, neon drawings, untitled is a little flat no matter what the season or time of day.

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Where there is no doubt is McCarthy’s primary display in the gallery entitled alluring token. The first digital drawing that I experienced by McCarthy was at his degree show in 2011: the words beautiful expectation projected onto studio wall at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT). alluring token is beauty’s arrival. Amid an array of electric light sources that coyly peek from underneath timber and behind cerulean blue insulation, a metal work bench with a timber construct houses the projector from which the digital drawing is thrown. Although McCarthy’s phraseology usually verges on oxymoronic cancellation, alluring token is, what it is, a self-reflective, patiently constructed charm, shimmering close to the gallery floor. Through simulation, McCarthy momentarily succeeds in swiping conceptual ownership of the neon sign away from Bruce Nauman with an illusory sleight of hand. Once, the neon sign framed the door of consumerism, but now contradicts the contemporary model of capitalism by being handmade and too labour intensive to produce. Neon signs are being switched off one-by-one in the new millennia, substituted for the much more efficient LED. McCarty’s simulation could not have come at a better time, a time when the virtual is turning the tide on material existence. Nauman was not just attracted to the neon sign because it was sexy, feminine and violent, but because of its potential to spell out the contradictions inherent in language and contemporary morals as a readymade. However, like everything else in our unreality, there will come a time when the glamour of the object will be unceremoniously digitized. For the time being, the saving grace from a future when delayed gratification is a loading error, is the fact that digital simulation still exhibits a sense of labour intensive creativity that is visually tactile, exemplified by McCarthy’s digital drawings. We haven’t yet arrived when digital simulation will be instantaneous – a time in the future when labour is measured in computer code. McCarthy’s technological tinkering as a creative process echoes the early days of John Gerrard’s career. The fellow Irish artist fumbled with inadequate technologies in efforts to build ambitious, digitally animated simulacrums of sweeping, temporal realities long before it was sensible to so do. Today, technology has caught up to Gerrard’s conceptual desire to reproduce reality via digital data, so much so that the artist’s concept and digital aesthetic are in harmony – relative, of course, to our short-sighted imagination to perceive what technological advancements await us in the future. The aesthetic complexity of McCarthy’s digital drawings have come a

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long way since his degree show at IADT, but his art, like Gerrard’s, will be fashioned by technological advancements; his wordplay, less so. At this point in time, before technological purity befalls us, McCarthy’s digital drawings possess a conceptual modesty that seems career appropriate. What we can look forward to is how the young artist conceptually matures alongside the advancements of technology; and whether he rejects such advancements or not along the way. The present is bright; the future may well be brighter. Runs till 2 November, 2013.

OCTOBER 2013 (#67): The Path Less Travelled

IF YOU managed to recognise ‘it’ amongst the institutional detritus, Tom Watt’s 2011 degree show at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, was a standout production. Set within the nooks and crannies of the art college, discreet labels with the artist’s name were stuck here, there and nowhere, which went some but not all of the way to sorting out Watt from ‘what’. The artist’s elusive non-spaces, that involve a lack of what you could call art objects, never mind token signifiers, perform as anti-displays, whereby the lucky and willing participants were brought on a ride of discovery, riddled with physical cul de sacs and conceptual exits.[1] Since his degree show Watt’s artworks have been located on the periphery of the conventional art space, existing in collective scenarios wherein the production of the art object (or emergence of an individual artist for that matter) has been sacrificed for an experiential group encounter (‘Underground’, Basic Space, Dublin)[2] or process (‘Resort[s]’)[3]. Watt’s artistic positioning, whether a case of not being offered the opportunities or deliberately rejecting them, is a valuable position and represents a vital alternative to the gallery artist. In a Georgian town house on the north side of inner city Dublin (Watt’s shared accommodation) the artist has built a very provisional, 180º flat-turn stairs that reaches to the high ceiling of a first floor sitting room. Even though provisional it’s quite an elegant and economical construction. The stairs, more like two ladders, meet a white minimal platform propped up by a ceiling jack halfway to the summit. The opening in the ceiling is, however, less refined, suggestive of a DIY attic door. Whether an attic door existed there in the first place is difficult to tell. Perhaps one did, being the motivation to gumshoe further. It’s not surprising considering Watt’s predilection for spaces that are just out of reach and living arrangements that are not of the Procrustean Bed variety – his own bed is raised to head height with a ceiling jack at 8 Seville Place. After a precarious climb and tight wriggle through the ceiling opening you arrive inside, you guessed it, an attic, although proportionately not nearly big enough to crown a garden shed. A warm glow permeates the dark space, refracted off an orange two-man tent that nestles snugly between the rafters. With no room to wander, the open tent – furnished with a bed, side table and lamp, generic Persian rug, and incongruous roof light hanging from the tent’s spine – takes the form of a flat tableau, until you decide the break the picture plane by crawling inside. On all fours your back rubs off the roof light that is housed in a metal bell, making an appropriate jingle when disturbed.

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TOM WATT, ‘Opening’, 8 Seville Place, Dublin, 10 October – 3 November.

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Just when you think the setup is some literary device dressed in post-Minimalism (à la Mike Nelson) you notice dusty light filtering through another opening. This time too small to climb through, the hole is roughly cut out of a breeze block wall, reminiscent of the staggered brickwork peephole of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. On hands and knees you pull yourself just under the rafters where festoon lighting – dimmed to the point that the lightbulb filaments are the only elements glowing gold – direct your attention to a tube TV with a silent film playing in the middle of a neighbouring attic. The ten minute video piece documents Watt ‘urban hiking’ with collaborator, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch (an artist who was also involved in group projects ‘Resort’, ‘Winter Resort’ and ‘Underground’). Starting downstairs from the attic that you are presently shuffling around in, Watt glimpses himself in a mirror, revealing a video camera strapped to his head. Then the pair are off, up the stairs that you yourself just travelled, to scale a ladder that exits through a removed skylight and out onto a roof of slated valleys and verges.

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On the roof, a late afternoon blue sky colours the rooftops of Dublin City in optimism, relative to the dull fluorescence in the attic. While watching the video you become self-conscious of your location in the attic; timber, felt and slate separating you from what was Watt and von Knobloch in their come-and-gone rooftop excursion. Threading lightly – evidently self-conscious of the inhabitants below – the pair make their way along valley gutters towards an incongruous, olive green roof door that they unhinge from its hold. Here they squat, rummage through a bag and unroll a wooden rung rope ladder down into the bowels of what is, a derelict Georgian house a-few-doors-down from where they started. The compressed 4:3 aspect offered by Watt’s modest camera ‘fisheyes’ the grandeur of the Georgian rooms, which carry off a decorated history of brave colours – cardinal, viridian, mustard – albeit the painted and papered surfaces a little worse for wear. The climb down from the roof on the rope ladder is, ironically, when the adventure peters out. Upstairs/downstairs, both artists gravitate towards aesthetic details and traces of a once lived and now vacated home (a pile of junk mail gathers in the entrance hall). What makes ‘Opening’ resonate is its experiential generosity. Invited into the artist’s home and led through his house to the attic, the spectator ends up being given a chance to live vicariously through the documented adventure which took place just above their head. Thus the documentation is elevated to a happening. The whole production feels spontaneous, even though the adventure was predetermined, it’s executed with a casual precision that seemingly unfolds in the present. American artist Dan Graham once said that “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.” The ‘Basic Space Generation’ (If I may call them that for lack of a better name) time and time again achieve something bordering on this dream. Watt’s soft ‘break and entry’ at Seville Place is another example of this aspiration to elevate art above ART. Up to now, however, there has been no evidence of a white gallery wall to thread the biography of his artworks together, which makes the work all the more appealing and enigmatic. The art projects that Watt has partaken in have the lasting effect of those one-off events that cling to the memory; events that, if replicated in the gallery would only sour the itinerant original. Lying somewhere between ‘Post-Studio’ and post-Minimalism, art critic Graig Owens rightly observed that, to label art practices is to subjugate them. Watt’s practice is a combination of fantasy, realism and romance for the path less travelled. Unlabeled, unbranded, and homeless, the hope is opportunities come Tom Watt’s way; that is, opportunities of his own making.

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NOVEMBER 2013 (#68): The Good, the Bad, the Indifferent

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CONOR MARY FOY, ‘Adiaphora’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin 30 October (Live performance 7:15pm) – 2 November.

Originating with the Greeks, adiaphora translates as ‘indifferent things’. As a practiced philosophy adiaphora defined the moral grey area between what the Stoics deemed was the black/white polarities of virtue and vice: the Stoics weren’t ones for ambiguities or trivialities. Christianity would put adiaphora to more practical use to find loop holes in moral-immoral church Law, in order to manufacture a blind eye so moral turpitude could reign free to realise economic posterity and other extraChristian ambitions and desires. The term today could define our blasé attitude to human crises beyond ourselves. Polish philosopher Zgymunt Bauman defines contemporary adiaphoric “acts” as “those exempted by social consent (universal or local) from ethical evaluation, and therefore free from carrying the threat of pangs of conscience or moral stigma”.[2] Bauman’s “moral blindness” thesis is revealed explicitly today through social media and perpetuated by the sensational detachment offered by news media: HD doesn’t sweat, bleed or smell. Usually Chancery Lane’s lone beacon on exhibition opening nights at this time of the year, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery looked all but closed on entering the street. Cursing artist and gallery alike, I soon ate my profanities when a collection of stiff heads – shaped by illumination no greater than candle light – came into view through the glass of the gallery door. The stiffness of the audience’s heads was emphatic – like inverted exclamation marks. The type of stiffness you see at church, at a funeral, at a traffic accident, or, (usually) for performance art. It’s a respectful stiffness, sometimes tinged with unthinking routine, oftentimes self-consciousness. The stiffness made sense when Foy’s troop of performers came into view beyond the silhouetted spectators. Kitted out in opalescent masks that caught the colours of light like fish scales, the performers rotated ratchet mechanised instruments, made form boxwood and rubber band chords, that created a droning effect, like the sound of air rushing through Wavin pipe or a Jew’s Harp. Although arms and hands were animated, the masks and face-forward postures of the troop portrayed indifference, becoming a game of chicken between performer and spectator. Acting as a centrepiece, one of the masked troop – tied or suppliant? – knelt below a timber-stilted hammock that was repeatedly poked by another troop member with a length of 2x1, triggering iridescent sand to sieve out onto the kneeling figure with every poke. After all the droning and poking was done (I know how it sounds...) the troop joined in a procession and exited like all good doctrinists (from Christians to Fascists) – in a regimental line. This was followed by obligatory applause and more droning – this time by the audience – caused by the lights being abruptly switched on. It maybe a subjective generalisation but performance art invariably has a flatline trajectory, rolling out as a series of monotonous ebbs and flows that never reach a crescendo or rupture. However, as an oftentimes intuitive process, unrehearsed blemishes are a foregone but necessary conclusion, creating an uncomfortable standoff between performer and spectator. Unified by the dark and a synchronised activity,

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EMAILED press releases can turn you off, to the point that you reject the invitation to attend the art event. Niamh McCooey’s poetic and generous introduction to Conor Mary Foy’s art practice via the artist’s reconstitution of the term adiaphora (as conceptual underpinning to his short-lived performance-cum-three day exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin), was a BIG turn on.[1]

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Foy’s performers flatlined (without a blemish) throughout the 15 minutes duration of the performance. Was this my apathy coming through? The artist’s? The performers’? The audience’s? Afterward, under the glaring gallery lights, Foy’s photographic and digital works revealed a sense of explorational play that was absent from the regimental routine of the LIVE performance; as if the handcuffs of fetishistic planning had been discarded. Wearing casual, everyday dress against a forest backdrop, individual (let’s call them ‘henchmen’) come decorated with ceremonial pointed hats of gold, silver and pink mylar, that double as masks with neither eye nor nose holes. Standing, arms by their sides, they portray the contradiction of blind indifference and being dressed to impress – public and private man canceling each other out. For this reason Foy’s adiaphoric theatre of indifference could also be seen as a theatre of suppression, with the potential of violent/sexual liberation within a herd mentality. In Foy’s films the artist’s creativity seems unbound by procession or doctrine. In the digital work Roarer, a masked performer gears up with the same ratchet instrument used in the LIVE performance, but the droning this time crescendoes into a ROAR. Foy’s improvised instrument acts as a tormented voice-box for the faceless (emotionless) performer. In the digital work Vitous, another troop of masked performers dance in the woods as if miming a mosh pit. Liberated. Drunk.

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Foy’s performing troop (whom I suspect the artist is conducting rather than performing with?) suggests the KKK klansmen of Philip Guston, the S&M liminality of Eva Rothchild and ritual ‘get-togethers’ of Clodagh Emoe. Falling on the eve of All Hallows’ Eve, Foy’s allegory of ritual was calendar-specific; presumably a playfully scheduled event on the part of Kevin Kavanagh himself. Intentionally thematising Foy’s art (with its obvious horror associations) against the annual festivities of Halloween had the potential of, well, reducing everything down to Trick-’r-Treat. However, the idiosyncratic accents in both aesthetic and conceptual delivery added lots of scope for the mind to wander while standing ‘stiff’. You could call Foy’s ‘peacoking’ (or cruising) in the wildernesses of leafy forest and after hours gallery as ritual porn. Whatever the label – it’s less difficult to be an addict than indifferent. ‘AT DAWN WE WILL STAND IN A CIRCLE HOLDING HANDS...’, with Conor Mary Foy and Nicky Teegan, opens tonight (14 November) with a live performance at TACTIC, Cork; runs till the 28 November.

DECEMBER 2013 (#69): Therapy Session

Martin Creed, ‘Concert’, Broadstone Studios, Dublin

(Inititiated by PAUL HALLANHAN) – 30 November, 8pm (LIVE gig)

MUSIC JOURNALIST Paul Morely described Martin Creed’s band “like Wire with a dash of late-70s punk-poet Patrik Fitzgerald”[1]. I’m not going there, as I’m neither music aficionado nor snob; in other words I can’t perform music references as pretentiously as I do around art. To give you a gist – my first vinyl album at the age

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of ten was True by Spandau Ballet; second, Jean Michel Jarre’s Équinoxe: prepubescent identity is not influenced by what clique or rebellion you’re drawn to. The point is, my music identity is colourful. So, I approached Martin Creed’s brand of music – performed LIVE last Saturday night at Broadstone Studios, Dublin – sideways, tiptoeing between contemporary art singularity and music eclecticism.

Before the gig, stray imaginings like Benjamin H. D. Buchloh cracking an unlikely smile when interviewing Creed came to mind when considering the artist’s sidestepping/side-splitting answers to questions by the frustrated but entertained few regarding his creative methodology. Creed seems to refreshingly think on his feet (like Slavoj Žižek without the lip farts). Resulting in none of these rehearsed soliloquies some artists give, built on recently received ideas. That’s not to say he’s not a serious artist, or fully in tune with being contemporary. Being a Turner Prize winner and represented by such big art market players as Hauser and Wirth and Gavin Brown’s enterprise says that he is a professional first and great pretender second; or accidental artist third.

At Broadstone Studios’ impressive ‘dining room’ venue: wearing glasses, long greying hair tied back, check trousers (read as tartan considering his Scottishness), a scuttery/custard cardigan – Creed has the same trippy complexion as the generic Persian carpet on which he foot-stamps unplugged and band-less, the previously seen YouTube and Vimeo videos of his 4-strong band accompanied by keyboards, drums and backing singers could not prepare you for Saturday night in Dublin, when Creed’s music was stripped back – the way it perhaps should be – like his art.

Thinking while listening – which could be the lyrics of one of Creed’s songs – down the years I have experienced many ‘Martin Creeds’ in galleries, museums and art fairs that now number the 1000s (he doesn’t title his artworks or, god forbid, ‘untitle’ them – they’re numbered). At first hand his formalism comes across as quite linear and binary: a light going on and off, a small-to-large queue of cacti, a door opening and closing. However, this One, Two, Buckle My Shoe minimalism is upended by Creed’s gift for eliciting laughter, or that type of giddiness that one experiences when ‘the penny drops’ on a slow day. I can’t be objective enough to tell if his music with its stuttery repetition and insecure pauses is a backing track for the artworld or can be appreciated in the same way by other publics – I left the real world as soon as I entered art college. But I suspect that the taste left in the mouth by his art as well as his music – from artworldies to Sunday painters – lies somewhere between Marmite and CandyFloss. His art and his music (one an extension of the other) has been opined to look and sound pretentious, but it could be sincere, or contradicts polarities either way. With Creed you are firmly stuck in the middle, conceptually and aesthetically and emotionally. In a way the nonchalant and theory-light presentation of his glass half-full art practice is an antidote to the swank institutional/capitalist/ecological/ feminist/pedagogical etcetera discourse of contemporary art. That doesn’t mean I fully trust his conceptualist sincerity – but I do trust his generosity as an artist.

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one brown leather shoe in on/off rhythm with an acoustic guitar and harmonica. Playing

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The applause is reaching a higher pitch with every song; the audience gradually growing warmer to Creed’s catchy tunes and semantic reductionism. What better lyric than “I Love Things” to get artists to raise their (already) high brows and loosen up their social conservatisms.

Reflecting on Creed’s art while surrounded by a floor-bound and gleeful audience at Broadstone Studios, the Scottish artist’s No 850 at Tate Britain in 2008 was an experiential gem. Creed hired athletes – kitted out in run-of-the-mill jogging gear – to dash through the museum as if their life depended on it. However, it wasn’t the incongruity of sweaty and stoic jocks taking an unlikely urban wormhole through Tate Britain that was cathartic, but the behind the scenes antics of the athletes when they took a breather and had a chat with their fellow runners on the loop past the jacks back to the starting line.

“If you‘re having sad thoughts” among other negative feelings – Creed sings in advisory tones at Broadstone Studios – “Pass them on”. The lyric is a corrupted version of Hollywood’s more utopian ‘Pay it Forward’; eliciting a psychoanalytical scenario between projecting client and drowning analyst. This got the biggest laugh of the night ... must of hit home (I wonder why?!).

184 There is no real separation between Creed’s art and his music, and there shouldn’t be. The artist once admitted that: “I feel like doing the live shows, and going out on the road … a gallery is a more rarefied space. Going on the road with the band and the dancers, doing gigs, that’s a way for me not to be stuck in a room, thinking my airy-fairy thoughts.”[2] The separation in Creed’s mind is evidently disclosed here, even though he has said many times before that there is no separation between his art and music. It’s not surprising. The artist had just flown in from New York (art market central) – where he has concurrent solo shows at Hauser and Wirth and Gavin Brown enterprise. The Broadstone Studios event was not slumming it per se, but perhaps a way to let off steam – and for the audience too. A blue chip artist of Creed’s ilk, the pressure to produce art objects is ten-fold – even though Creed’s scribbly signature leaves room to be doctored.

After a few jokey 1½ liner lyrics – like What’s The Point Of It? – Creed performs a heart warming, even moving rendition of You’re The One For Me. Composed of numbers and words and sweet sincerity (what Creed is best at), the tune is catchy enough to bend the general publics’ ear.

Would I have went out of my way to experience Creed’s music LIVE if I hadn’t been exposed to his rich history as an artist? No. But that’s not to say I wouldn’t go see

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him again after the Broadstone Studios gig – I most certainly would. His music has produced another layer to his art practice and vice versa.

Experiencing Martin Creed sing and play acoustic guitar in the unlikely surroundings of artists’ studios in the heart of Dublin was like an art event without art’s formal trappings. Furthermore, the coming together of the Irish art scene for something that is less affected than an exhibition opening, where applause is cringeworthy and cliques form impenetrable donut rings, is a rare occurrence. Encore.

DECEMBER 2013 (#70): Adam from Eve

Tracy Hanna, ‘Everything’s moving below the surface’, Saint Mary’s Abbey, Dublin 14 – 23 November.

Mark Durkan, ‘I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins’

THE IRISH TIMES’ binary argumentation on art reached a new low in Gemma Tipton’s recent article ‘A man’s world? Sexism and gender issues in art’. Using such old guard conservatives as Graham Sewell and Georg Baselitz – with the combined grace of ‘Spitting Image’ – to argue a point about the sexist artworld is unhelpful to say the least (all that was missing was Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown to build a convincing, chauvinistic trio of pigs – see endnote response[1]). However, the article did suggest to me an opportunity to revisit two exhibitions (one currently running – the other recent) under the notion of the genderized artwork that was touched upon by Tipton: I could immediately tell which work was “male” and which wasn’t. It’s not an infallible talent, but I get it right often enough to realise that there are differences, both subtle and more evident, in the art made by men and women. It becomes more obvious when you think about it: we perceive the world in part through our bodies and through the way the world responds to us.[2] Both Tracy Hanna’s ‘Everything’s moving below the surface’ (Saint Mary’s Abbey, Dublin [ended November, 2013) and Mark Durkan’s ‘I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins’ (The LAB, Dublin [runs till 25 January, 2014]) utilization of markedly similar creative methods, but with distinctly differential aesthetics, may suggest, but not define, some artistic traits of the genderized artwork. I first experienced Tracy Hanna’s inventive and playful use of digital projectors in 2011 at SOMA Contemporary, Waterford (read review here). Back then, and still today, there was an element of process taking place right before your eyes in the gallery. In one instance a digital animation of a bouncing, silhouetted figure was projected onto a bed mattress, while in another a romantic film vignette of swimmers was refracted off one mirror onto an irregular, polygonal screen as an intimate back-projection. The small scale of the animated figures and three-dimensional objects on which the projections where thrown broke the Fourth Wall. Not knowing of twelfth century Saint Mary’s Abbey – the Chapter House of which

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The LAB, Dublin, 15 November, 2013 – 25 January, 2014.

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being the site of Hanna’s Dublin City Council commissioned artwork ‘Everything’s moving below the surface’ (curated by Ruairí Ó Cuív and Clíodhna Shaffrey) – I was led down a narrow Dublin backstreet by my phone; a route that I had walked a thousand times before as an art student due to Evans Art Supplies being located on the same street. Discreetly tucked behind a gated entrance and stage-set building facade, the air grew cold the second I pulled over the heavy entrance door to step down a stone winder stairwell into a subterranean, gothic rib-vaulted cloister, that was blacked out by the artist by a method disguised by the sonorous, cavern-like environment, verging on Stygian. As eyes became slightly accustomed, Hanna’s installation came almost into view, and almost is where it stayed. Fumbling through the space, ridges of raw peat – “taken from sites where ancient bog bodies were found“ of “sacrificed kings” – came underfoot, buckling one’s path. Planted amidst a peat bed that drew a half-turn arc on the ancient stone floor, projected images filtered through glass disc lenses that seemed to transform into voluminous, trompe l’oeil crystal balls. Animated with an an iridescent grey/green vegetable biology, but animal organ action, the lens-projected images created an organicist system of malformed, or mutating life: Mary Shelley’s gothic sensibilities would approve. The additional sounds effects compounded the sense of life bubbling under the surface – sounding like air being released from sweaty bogland. As if expelled from the dark below, light nestled in the vaulted ceiling overhead – residues from what was refracted off the lenses.

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HAVING the architectural personality of those transitional spaces in airports where they plonk the vending machines, The LAB, Dublin, is a challenging gallery to theatricize. But Mark Durkan’s installation of projectors, mirrored objects, water dispensers, ceramic bowls of bubbling/vaporous water and a water fountain with mirrored surrounding, has managed to equalise the remoteness of The Lab’s Jane Doe gallery space and transport the imagination somewhere else. Although experiential, Durkan’s bright lights and vanity box installation is buried in literary devices. The artist’s techno-theatrics come across as a ‘representation’ of the future from the perspective of the 1960s dystopian science-fiction literati or ’70s cinema equivalent, such as William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel Logan’s Run (1968) and Michael Anderson’s film adaptation (1976). The exhibition title, ‘I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins’, is a partial epigram from a piece of ancient graffiti from Roman Pompeii, which ends with the words: “since you’re holding up the weary verse of so many poets”. The literary extends into roleplaying elements, represented by a helmet, bow and jug of water placed on a multifaceted, mirrored plinth, which ties into Durkan’s dystopian, sci-fi theatre; implying that the spectator-gamer is to hunt/fight for depleted resources. These dystopian imaginings also suggest the ‘Dying Earth’ sub-genre of science-fiction/fantasy, from H.G. Wells’ novella The Time Machine (1895) to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). The combination of such themes and opulent display unavoidably places the The Hunger Games on the tip of one’s tongue. With Winter’s shortened days upon us, Durkan’s exhibition at The Lab is also one with two faces. During the day the projected and refracted light achieves a visual conceit as if time, marked by an accelerated orbiting sun, is passing thousandfold overhead without nightly reprieve. However, the isolation and remoteness perpetuated by Durkan’s orbiting facets of light is built on the balance between daylight and digital light – one chasing the other around the gallery. While at nightfall that balance is lost. This is especially the case with Durkan’s water feature in the ‘dark room’ of The LAB, which lacks the diurnal banality of the main gallery, descending instead into a hyper-theatrical disco or UV-lit nightclub toilet where veins are easy to miss.

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At the furtherest point from the gallery’s entrance, the artist’s scattered elements coalesce to form a ‘drum-kit’ of mirrored surfaces. Water being a visual and auditory component throughout, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) appears in the intertextual frame of reference. In particular the film’s barn fire sequence, in which an implosion of oneiric and non-chronological images are further fragmented through the addition of water and mirrors. The collision between memory and the present to form a ‘crystallizing’ future (defined by uncertainty rather than clarity) in both Tarkovsky’s and Durkan’s visual acrobatics, is best described by Gilles Deleuze and his equally agile concept of the ‘crystal-image’: “it is itself the vanishing limit between the immediate past which is no longer and immediate future which is not yet … [a] mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception in recollection”.[3]

RETURNING to the impetus for this essay, there is a sense of truth to Gemma Tipton’s genderized artwork, although a sweeping truth. Walking in the shoes of an art critic, if you manage to not check the art listings before you set out gallery crawling; literally miss the artist’s name printed on the wall, window, door, press release, artwork label etc.; are confused by the artist’s gender-neutral first name; or, in the context of a group show, where artistic identities are scattered and broken down anyway, and in some cases genderized by the curator, then, and only then will you get a chance to try distinguish Venus/Mars differences in art-making. Agreed, the differences are there, but not explicit and very much dependent on context. Tipton exemplifies her ability for gender divining at the ‘Futures 2013’, installed currently at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, where there are 6 of 1 (female artists) and 1 of the other. Neil Carroll is the male ‘other’, who sticks out like a carrot below a snowman’s waist regarding masculine art-making clichés of big, bold, 2x1 expansive painting constructions minus the drapery effects of Angela de la Crux or domestication of Jessica Stockholder. After considering the work and similar material and conceptual means of Tracy Hanna’s and Mark Durkan’s respective exhibitions, there is a sense that the genderized artwork is formed through a complex set of variables that exist beyond the rarefied conditions of art market value and creativity. Whereas Hanna’s darkly presented exorcism of a libidinal/geo-history spoke in tongues at a Saint Mary’s Abbey, Durkan’s installation at The Lab utilised the literary as a translator. Pádraic E. Moore’s commissioned ‘letter’ response to the artwork at hand (placed in the gallery) is an unnecessary literary inclusion to what is a crystal clear vision by Durkan. This is not a criticism of Moore’s prose but a criticism of the strategy of placing a wandering textual agent within the gallery environment. The text, which begs to be read, distracts you from what are wonderful visual theatrics that can be experienced and ‘read‘ in equal measure. Being commissioned rather than compelled to write, like some new or future world explorer or archaeologist, compounds the redundancy of this document. Although not overriding Durkan’s visual sublimity, Moore’s text has the potential of reducing everything down to theoretical smoke and mirrors. On the other hand Hanna’s genderized artwork may suggest a suspicion of the linguistic and embodiment in matter. This is in keeping with a recent ontological drive towards a New Materialist art-making by female artists. The geophilosophy

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An exhibition that positively feels cold, soulless, and devoid of life or eventual life – even though the sound of life-activating water tinkles around The LAB – Durkan’s description in the press release of a future fantasy in which the “human population has dramatically decreased” rings true in the experiential encounter with this artwork. Unlike the majority of artists before him, Durkan succeeds in transporting the spectator to a parallel imagining by transforming the ugly corporeality of The LAB into a mere shadow puppet of its former self.

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of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) has never been so popular in exhibition press releases; Jacques Rancière has almost left the building. This materialist vs. linguistic turn is tied up with feminism, which in turn is knotted in psychoanalysis. Female artists are the most explicit alchemists of this trait in ‘becoming-matter’, whereby a primitive transmutation of objecthood is infused with a tactile rather than textual, experiential encounter. Irish artists such as Sarah Doherty, Marie Farrington and Hanna (among others), are producing artworks that, when shown in the appropriate context or environment, offer us something more than the predictable, ‘by the book’ art object curated in the gallery. Furthermore, these female artists are getting coal, peat and plaster under their nails. They are the ‘Smithsons’ and ‘Andres’ of our age, obliterating and then rebuilding the art object from the ground up.

FEBRUARY 2014 (#71): Look Again

Richard Mosse, ‘The Enclave’, Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Dublin. 30 January – 12 March, 2014.

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The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough. (Diane Arbus)[1] ARTISTS invariably get caught in the gravitational pull of obsolescence and the marvelous. On the foot of novelty or a whim the artist, above all else, desires new forms, or believes that the recycling of obsolete forms has a chance of disrupting the cultural zeitgeist. Richard Mosse is no different from the contemporary Super-8 and analogue junkies in his adoption of discontinued Aerochrome infrared film that was developed by the US military in the 1940s to detect camouflage. Whether novelty or whim, the Irish artist’s now trademark photographs of Congolese rolling hills and armed militia pollinated in a magenta bloom – the sublime backdrop to one of the worst and ongoing humanitarian crises the world and news media forgot to tell – have (to my mind) never really reached out beyond their high production values to force you to look, really LOOK, never mind feel. As if seen through a Prosecco Pink Champagne bottle, Mosse’s ‘pink period’ exhibits the inflated art market not the deadeye stare of war. Undoubtedly beautiful, they fail to register (on their own) what art critic/philosopher Dave Hickey defines as ‘beauty’; the enigmatic aesthetic moment that changes the way you see and experience the world from that defining moment onward. Furthermore, if, as has been stated, that Mosse is radically rethinking war photography, why do his images nostalgically convey the nineteenth century philosophical sublime in their wished detachment from reality, epitomised by the war photographer of the time, Roger Fenton, and his absent images that wander on the margins of the Crimea War; wherein the ethical and moral blindness of man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child is glaringly invisible. Yes, we could say that by looking beyond the sepia and candy floss surfaces of both Fenton’s and Mosse’s

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romanticised circumventions of war proper, that the impossible image may lie just beneath or beyond their banality: Hannah Arendt’s phrase “The Banality of Evil” – provoked by the normalisation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews – qualifies this perspective. Or, alternatively, such a documentarian methodology under the guise of art exemplifies the failure of the embedded artist to uncover or fully integrate with their subject. Lest not mention art’s failure to represent the unrepresentable humanitarian horrors of this and the last century, that white flag has been waved too many times by philosopher and artist alike. However, these initial criticisms need to be reconsidered – perhaps even revoked – in light of experiencing Mosse’s collaborative artwork The Enclave, presented at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (RHA).

The violence is now endemic to the Congo. Moreover, the crisis is much more complex than the scapegoat of corrupt trading of the region’s mineral-rich substratum, in which deposits of tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold are ripe for the picking for first world capitalist industry. Stearns’ eyewitness testimonies of rape, torture and killing in abstract lottery numbers (5.4 million dead, 400 thousand raped and tortured) can only be experienced by the reader, at best, as fiction. Installed in the dark space of Gallery II in the RHA, The Enclave is composed of six obliquely hung screens onto which alternating film projections ebb and flow between off-the-cuff documentary and visually poetic staging. On the day of viewing a group of teenage school kids maneuvered between the overlapping projections; jostling and rubbernecking, eager to piece together a narrative where there was none. Unlike the high intensity fuchsia of Mosse’s photographs in the adjoining light space of Gallery II, The Enclave is filtered through a dirty salmon pink and the noisy render of a 16mm infrared camera. Mosse and his collaborators Trevor Tweeten (cinematography) and Ben Frost (sound) make manifest the filth of humanitarian crisis. They do this by focusing the camera lens on marginal events that implicitly register the culture of war in the Congo: a propaganda rally of musicians, acrobats and swaging models joyfully perform in a church-cum-community hall where one lone, cock-eyed soldier makes his large and looming military presence felt; a troop of men heave a wooden house by hand whilst a burial procession marks the rape and massacre of six women and children at an IDP camp (Internal Displaced Person); a newborn baby gasps for air as the mother physically coaxes the infant to life. These idiosyncratic events visually equate with Stearns’ every other day observations in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: “The camps were pressure cookers. [...] women had no choice but to try and wash [sanitary towels] in the same pots they used for cooking. ‘The blooded water snaked in rivulets between the tents and little puddles of blood formed here and there.’”[2] The experience of watching The Enclave is one of submersion – the flapping newborn gulping for air achieves metaphorical signification as the baby raises its head above the culture of death (for a moment at least) to breath life. This feeling of submersion is literally illustrated by the unfortunate theatrical staging of a soldier walking away from the camera and into the ocean to become fully submerged. Even though

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For those who have no idea the extent of the humanitarian crisis in the Congo (the majority of us), Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (2011) is a must read account that will leave scars on the reader’s psyche. Stearns spent a decade living in the Congo. Even still, it’s made pointedly clear by interviewees that he will never understand the reasons for the Janus-faced evil and the forever mutating and violent symptomatology of the region. The Congo, from the perspective of the world news media, is too complex and banal a crisis to present to a public that only appreciates violence via terrorist theatre or clearcut dictatorship.

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painfully self-conscious and clichéd, it fits the experiential encounter with The Enclave. Stearns writes: “there is little room to challenge the clichés [...] Poor, black victims [...] children with shiny snot dried on their face, flies buzzing around them [...] and a Congolese warlord: around his neck he wore an amulet of cowries, colonial-era coins and monkey skulls”.[3] If there ever was a time to embrace clichés and ignore art’s aversion to them, the abject conflict in the Congo is the right moment do do so. Richard Mosse’s The Enclave achieves a sense of urgency, immersion, duration and supplementary value to his war photography over the last five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo: all of this through a marvelously subjective and experiential lens.

MARCH 2014 (#72): The Limelight also comes in Majenta:

Thoughts on Envy, Community and ‘The Limelight’ with regard to Art Judgment Oh, how bitter it is to look at happiness through another man’s eyes. (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 5:2)

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Begrudgery ~ (Irish, informal) resentment of any person who has achieved success or wealth. (Collins Dictionary)

The in-play of the in-common. (Jean-Luc Nancy, An Inoperative Community)[1] THE FOLLOWING thoughts on envy, community and ‘The limelight’, with regard to art judgment, are triggered by the recent anti- and pro-Richard Mosse sentiment, during and following the presentation of the Irish artist’s photographic and film installation, ‘The Enclave’, at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Dublin, between February and March 2014. Envy is a terrible thing; ‘begrudgery’ even worse when you learn that, shamefully, it’s an Irish colloquialism. Of course we are not the only culture afflicted by the green-eyed monster: ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ (Australia); ‘Schadenfreude’ (Germany). However, you begin to wonder if human nature’s “underlying biology may well incline us to evaluate our positions relative to others rather than simply by any objective criteria.”[2] What is certain, however, is the fact that we all make critical judgments tainted by such tendencies as bias and begrudgery, and not by semiobjective criteria – subjective bias obviously exists in every act of judgment. One element that brings this negative discrepancy to the surface is ‘The limelight’. For instance, Cindy Sherman’s abject work of the ’80s was a frustrated response to the dumb machismo of American pseudo-Expressionism, and their garnering of all the attention and conceptual plaudits. Such is the nature of The Limelight, always shining just out of reach, like Kafka’s Castle. When The Limelight does shine upon a member or institution of the ‘tribe’, whether for 15 minutes or in perpetuity, there are

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repercussions for the immediate, Petri Glass community. A type of pseudo-judgment is perpetuated. This perverted judgment is first offset by broad questioning, followed by nit-picking, then an incubation period when criticism is cultured with envy and cynicism and skepticism. Perhaps it all stems from our primitive instinct to keep everyone and everything on a level playing field: any one person wasting the limited resources is seen as a threat to the status quo. It’s the Caveman Principal.

What complicates the Caveman Principal is communitarianism. Community – a utopian ideal – is easily spoiled by introducing an individual who is incandescently cast in the glory of The Limelight. Communities within communities – microcommunities – and the cliques and institutions that form such micro-communities is where The Limelight achieves optimum conditions for corruptibility. The psychology of groupthink dynamics and behaviourism apropos of micro-communities, such as the localized and competitive art scene, are played out daily on Facebook, especially when The Limelight comes into play.

This viral harmony of ‘likes’ and ‘sharing’ gets most interesting when the groupthinking social media Borg is faced with criticism of one kind or another. Initially, professionals and amateurs alike lose the rag. Fangless and hairless individuals turn werewolf. However, it is within the envious shade of The Limelight that patterns of consensus and censored criticism build and feed one another. Take for instance the build up to last year’s Turner Prize on Facebook, when – on my news feed anyway – the consensus for Tino Sehgal not to win was overwhelming. Why? What came across from the Facebook commentary was critics of Sehgal were fed up of his hogging The Limelight all the while conceptually self-proclaiming to evade celebrity with his ‘antidocumentation’ art production. In the end Turner Prize 2O13 will be remembered for Sehgal losing not ? winning. The tamer online spats revolve themselves after a short-lived comment thread, because rarely do these spurts of argumentation occur in the moment, in what is an online/offline temporality. Facebook does not represent the Habermasian ideal of the Public Sphere. When an established art institution or individual in The Limelight is critically challenged, however, patterns emerge, cliques form, negative/positive consensus grows. Defending your own plot unavoidably creates critical blind spots. This is especially the case regarding a local art scene where resources are tight and opportunities are few. Anything or anyone who is upsetting the balance by draining the limited resources, or, is just being too visible, is deemed a PR pimp, a restless networker, or is blessed with nepotism and a privileged upbringing. Friendship biases, institutional allegiances and career aspirations are the biggest threats to art discourse. Facebook is a front row seat to how all the players negotiate the art scene. And what a telling and corruptible playground it is. Anticipating the pot calling the kettle black responses – none of us are above being corrupted online or whatever community we work or play in. Regarding Richard Mosse’s The Enclave at the RHA, it’s difficult to know whether the artist’s aesthetic treatment of the humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the bells and whistles PR rollout of ‘The Enclave’ and the accompanying blue chip photography is the honey for the swarm of contention. Whatever the case,

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The free thinking and judgement that online social media is supposed to offer the individual is in fact a homogenizing and psychological Game Changer. Coy individuals who wouldn’t say boo in person are body-snatched by inflated online personifications in the quasi online communities of unstable selfhood. Of course toneless online text is partly the cause of inflated semantics – Crack injected verbs and eye-popping emoticons are supposed to make up for the emotional shortfall;—D

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never has an art event stirred such forensic critical analysis on the one hand, or total disregard on the other. Dublin Contemporary 2011, being a juggernaut guzzler of resources and attention during Ireland’s economic collapse, along with the aloof administration of the event (among other things), understandably received its fair share of critical one-twos. But for an individual artwork and artist to generate such bad feeling is suspicious to say the least. Unsolicited discussion with regard to Mosse’s The Enclave is only trumped by small talk about the weather these days. When ‘The Enclave’ was first shown at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2013 there were a few opinions floating about but nothing like the present cackling tsunami of opinion. There is definitely a sense of the local art community feeding one another a few too many green pills. Of course there are valid criticisms of The Enclave with regard to the anomie of representation, but it has become farcical why the inner circles of the local art scene are so emotionally invested – torches and pitchforks at the ready. While strangely, but maybe not surprisingly, the ‘general’ public bloody LOVE IT! Just check out the successive Twitter threads where terms that artists and critics are unwilling to publicly pronounce are being thrown in the face of Mosse’s detractors: “powerful,” “moving,” “speechless”. Perhaps I was mistaken when I wrote in a recent +billion- review of The Enclave: “Undoubtedly beautiful, they fail to register (on their own) what art critic/ philosopher Dave Hickey defines as ‘beauty’; the enigmatic aesthetic moment that changes the way you see and experience the world from that defining moment onward.” [read full review #71]

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Hickey goes on to proclaim that ‘beauty’ changes society. The diametrically opposed opinion concerning Mosse‘s ‘The Enclave’ has succeeded in stirring up the usually passive and flatline reception of art in this country to one of love and hate. People are talking! People are impassioned! People actually have an opinion! What more could an artist desire from their art? What more could we ask of art?

APRIL 2014 (#73): To the Cosmopolitan in the Scrub – Cheers

MARK SWORDS, ‘The Hinterlands’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. 26 March – 26 April, 2014.

...recent years have seen the upsurge in the number of artists for whom the condition of twinkling enigma appears not only desirable but pretty much the whole point. (Martin Herbert, The Uncertainty Principle)[1] PRIOR to the 28/3/2014 opening of Mark Swords’ solo exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, the artist sent two emails on the 17/2/ and 10/3/. The emails contained links to textual/visual presentations on Swords’ website 2, that considered the term ‘hinterland’. With references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), what came across from the artist’s notations – other than the political pendulum swing from left-to-right left wing ideology performed in both novels – is Truth is found in the topography of

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the ‘hinterland’. Truth, in this edited context, being something that is intentionally obscured by political officialdom. In other words, the scrub behind the polished veneer of civilization is where Truth exists. For Hegel and Badiou, Truth can only serve a purpose at the fall of civilization, when Minerva’s Owl takes flight at dusk. Then, and only then, can Truth achieve a renewed politics to guide a refreshed bodypolitic. (Back to these philosophical musings regarding Truth in the concluding paragraphs).

Ironically, Swords’ paintings are more surefooted floating on the gallery wall than his aesthetic leaps onto the gallery floor. Alongside the folded screen, Window is composed of Swords’ signature lozenges and triangles, that describe a latticework of ultramarine/red tracery, with one, and only one, diagonal stroke of pure red highlighting an angle of lattice against a motley backdrop. Hiding its modesty behind the folded screen, From Where I am From implies autobiography. Perhaps it’s the rural idyll that meets the artist’s gaze everyday en route to his studio; or, the accumulative aesthetic essence of where Swords calls home, or hinterland. Whatever its inspirational spring, the painting’s silvery green and ochre blocks of foliage are held in place – on the extreme vertical edges of the canvas – by almost unnoticeable fingertip corners, suggestive of concrete posts from a window or open door. The lighted, patched, or coloured edge is a repeated and intentional hinterland in Swords’ painted aesthetic. What Remains, the largest canvas/linen of eight on display, is a painting composed of an oval, inset within the rectangle of the canvas. Black and coloured phalangeal brushstrokes scribble over one another (and the white primer beneath) to form a craggy-faceted, oval basin. What remains is a quarry of perspective indecision. Neighbouring, however, we are offered concept in committed and jazzy relief via the painting’s title and topsy-turvy topography. An Artist not Untouched by Modernism is Swords’ most revelatory work in ‘The Hinterlands’. The title implies that the artist is aware of the historical references You or I might make when standing before this and the other work on show: everything has been said, all that’s left is to produce. The same colour palette as the more sinewy What Remains, this painting is fatter and fleshier. Picasso, Braque, even the Futurists are present in the swirling mechanistic vanes of this carnival, combustion engine tribute to Modernism. A vitalistic painting – a protean tour de force. Two thirds of the way down the gallery, a curtain of stringed beads catapults us back to the present; or, a moment that is not so shaded by history. Kitsch and fun, the curtain seems to flicker between gold and silver candescence. Up close, however, flakes of gold material encrust perfect silver beads. Nothing is being concealed here. Allegorically, we, as viewers, are allowed to shift our gaze from a weighted past to a present that, although bejeweled in the ruin of previous golden ages, exists still as a transparent and twinkling present of dreamy perpetuity. On a table behind the beaded

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Speaking of Truth, on entering Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, a folded screen zig-zags perpendicular to the wall – perhaps concealing some lie. Lacking any significant aesthetic information face-on, towards the back the object is more generous. Made up of five panels, each panel is composed of five painted canvases – similarly abstract – that form a uniform whole of decorative browns and peachy/pink pastels towards the front. The screen displays weight rather than functional elegance. It also chronologically flips the hypermodernic page back to turn of the nineteenth century modernism, when the folded screen was a kind of oriental fetish or colonial inheritance for many Western artists of the time. Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Charles Daubigny, Paul Cézanne, James MacNeil Whistler, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Paul Klee all had a go expanding their walled horizons via the folded screen.

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curtain, we get a glimpse sculptural tidbits and ephemera that may have filled the artist’s time when thinking about painting. Unfortunately, merely distracting is how they function in the gallery also. (With the mention of distraction, this is perhaps an appropriate moment to draw the reader’s attention back to the conceptual framing of ‘The Hinterlands’). Initially, Swords’ online aside for the exhibition proper steered one towards the conceptual path of the same old, same old: the perspectival ambiguity in theory and practice of contemporary art – what Martin Herbert recently coined in his book of the same name as The Uncertainty Principal. However, the hinterland is not the “nonplace” (Marc Augé) or The Wood Way (Liam Gillick) of the urban/utopian cricket chorus of art theory, but implies a space that is separate rather than transitional. Neither is the hinterland that Swords proposes the forgotten space in the memory of the urban wanderer in his reverie of capitalist jouissance. The hinterland lays behind not between. Mozart would call it the imperative attacca rather than neutral segue. Hinterlands are connected, but on the edge, the brink, the fringe, the frontier, the hem, the limit, the verge, the threshold of civilization. It is a territory that marks an end and a beginning. Tension vibrates there. Colour too. When you think about it, the hinterland is a perfect metaphor for painting; the ‘edge’ and the END being the stuff of painting process and painted history.

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If Swords’ referencing is read politically rather than just as a supplementary aesthetic literary device, it is perhaps not a leap to advance the idea that the artist is politicising his own painted aesthetics, or perhaps suggesting that possible reading. Running with the assumption of a politicisation of aesthetics, Swords’ painted image is, however, not a revolutionary aesthetic, made up of forced and abrupt transitions, but one of sophisticated, but homespun, geometries. His paintings seem to say: ‘the truth of the image will occur in its own time, in the meantime we can get drunk on the good life until that truth-moment reveals itself’. For me, the good and simple life always resonates from Swords’ work. Just lap up the honeyed colour in Veil and sensory pleasure implied in the titles To Look Upon Earthly Delights and Clashing and Singing Together, and you will see and feel and taste what I mean. His images are cast in a Mediterranean light. Swords is Gauguin in Tahiti, Klee in Tunisa. They are not those Outsider paintings that you might find in a windowless Italian restaurant at noon, but they have that particular dark-to-light quiddity that you get in such climates. Swords’ agitated colour echoes Géricault’s diary entries that document the coloured accents that lie between light and shadow. Yes, sure, if we get all art historical about it his paintings do reflect turn of nineteenth century European painting. But, they are not deconstructions of the landscape à la Cézanne, but constructed imaginaries of home and abroad. Swords is the artist as flâneur or dandy, continually adjusting his image of the world rather than forcing into place with resulting bent edges. Perhaps, his work is not a politicalisation of aesthetics, but the aesthetic suspension of the political. If so, that perceived suspension allows Swords’ paintings to shine and vibrate with greater intensity. On seeing one of John Baldessari’s photographic series before they were even considered for public eyes, a curator said – ‘they are starting to look like art’. Artists, more than critics, theorists, philosophers, teach us how to see the world anew with an askew EYE. In rare instances, when the artist is on his/her game, the gift of first-sight leapfrogs into foresight. It’s never in HD – the artist is more of an analog visionary. Swords succeeds in threading the needle and brush through sensory manifestations of time and place with a strict, awkward elegance. His paintings are indeed hinterlands, but the scrub is flowering.

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APRIL 2014 (#74): Golden Calf, Black Sheep

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*The following text was read out before the panel discussion on the role of painting in contemporary art practice, on the occasion of Wilhelm Sasnal’s solo exhibition ‘Take Me To The Other Side’, at Lismore Castle Arts, 25 April, 3pm. Panelists: Brian Fay (DIT) James Merrigan (+billionjournal) and Katy Moran (artist). The ‘question’ of the role of painting in contemporary art practice is immediately and obviously read as a ‘question’ of segregation and isolation. It is true that painting is the black sheep of contemporary art practice. But it is also true that painting is the golden calf of the art market (probably one of the reasons why it’s the black sheep). Painting situates itself awkwardly between this confluence of art and money.

Bottom line, painters are responsible for themselves. Their aesthetic leaps. Their stopping and starting. Their own subjectivities with regard to what to paint, and what NEW forms or style to commit to. Even though we proclaim to have moved on from traditional and conventional ways of seeing and thinking about painting, the medium still represents all those old hat notions of individualism, style and skill. It doesn’t matter how abstract a painting gets, or how loud and clear its subject is pronounced, painting still rejects notions of communitarianism and tribalism. A painting still exists within its own frame, and its own historical ‘framing’. In an artworld built on the aesthetic and conceptual architecture of the curator, wherein the group show is the architecture of ‘preferred’ choice, the painter is not only the black sheep, but the misunderstood, adolescent black sheep, stubbornly wanting to be part of, and not part of a community of its own picking. While pissing everyone off by playing its music too loud in the thinly partitioned bedroom next door. So, why don the role of painter exclusively? Well, as an art critic and someone who is compelled into action by art, painting does stuff to me that other art forms simply don‘t. It produces language that surprises and tongue-ties. Descriptors that make you remember or feel. Forms that do the same. Textures too. Painting reminds you that you are human, not all brain and unfinished sentences. Minus all the historical and conceptual underpinning to Wilhelm Sasnal’s paintings, I would still be engaged in the always surprising forms that he produces, and the subjectivities that assault the brain in front of his work. In conclusion, painting’s role in contemporary art practice is to be that black sheep that I spoken of here today. Of course, painters now wear many coats. (Although valid and exciting in its own right, I am ignoring notions of ‘expanded painting’ in my response to the question of painting’s role in contemporary art, because I think the painted edge defines the anxiety of painting proper, while painted extensions beyond

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There are many reasons for this perceived segregation. We could even admit to ourselves, here and now, that panel discussions like ‘this’ one, are part of the perpetuation of such pariahism? By presenting painting as a singular activity, vying against the increasingly collective ideology of contemporary art practice, and its removal of the ‘hero artist’ – replaced instead by communitarian attitudes and principals – painting is indeed the black sheep among the white, pluralizing, communitarian flock. A white and glorious flock, the increasingly homogenised artworld speaks the same language (what we insiders term International Art English). This white flock understand one another‘s theoretical ventriloquism. The painter on the other hand jabbers on incessantly and incoherently to him or herself, allowing, now and then, for the painting to get a word in.

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that edge create very different tensions). The argument that the Idea should come first and the Medium second, I will discount for the sake of argument. Why? Because it forces the very focused and concentrated activity of painting into a mere conceptual skin of its potentially layered THINGNESS. For me, paintings shoehorned into group shows filled with video and text art is like presenting contemporary art practices afflicted by measles or something just as nasty. In such group show scenarios, I’m always framing the painting with my hands to block out the encyclopedia of peripheral motion and noise. But, we all need a bull in a China shop (or black sheep on Crack if you can’t afford a bull) to create incoherencies. Painting’s purpose is to upset the white flock status quo in their Ivory/Babel Tower of esoteric understanding. Painting’s role is to reduce language to word soup so we can rebuild again with our eyes, not our mouths. It seems that everyone affiliated with art were painters at one time or another, or dreamt of being one before they went to art college and grew up. I am an ex-painter (said as if admitting an addiction). Perhaps those painters that stayed the course haven’t grown up? Please Don’t!

JUNE 2014 (#75): School’s Out!

Lily Cahill & Rob Murphy, ‘Prodigy’, Broadstone Studios, Dublin.

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28 May – 1 June, 2014.

Lily Cahill and Rob Murphy play the same open-ended riffs as Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher who strummed his phantom limb to the unchained libertine beats of grotesque realism and carnival. My only experience of the collaborative pair is one Halloween weekend in 2013 at The Drawing Project, Dun Laoghaire. While the remains of the holiday played outside with a cheerful, cotton candy air, inside The Drawing Project the artists gave the viewer the remains of a plundered world; a sneak peek through the bars of a push/pull gateway to hell, with “The crusades” and “inferno” describing images of funfairs and dead zoos. If felt like they were trying to represent the memory and emotion of ‘everything’ before the END with a limited and broken archive, and were failing miserably. Short, closely cropped film loops portrayed a roller coaster ride, ghost train ‘exiting’, and vérité stroll through the Natural History Museum, with Sonic Youth’s toolshed scordatura version of The Carpenter’s Superstar whispering sweet nothings in the ears. The three projections felt heavier than the technology and light that made them. There was a dead weight to their presence, like white flags of surrender, flapping on the cold white walls of the commandeered commercial space, and coloured in by the enfant terrible of tacky and dead nostalgia. This time around the June bank holiday signals Cahill and Murphy’s return, bringing with them another funhouse archive of zombie artefacts that have gleefully survived the rigour of the END. But if you blink you’ll miss it. Partly because their presence at Broadstone Studios, Dublin, was only a four day stretch (just like their stay at The Drawing Project). But mainly because their fleeting, digital captives waltz out-of-step on walls and recesses of the Victorian common room. Unlike The Drawing Project space, a shell of recently failed, capitalist enterprise, Broadstone common room is musty with immutable Time. The markedly different

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character of the two spaces where Cahill and Murphy have made and left their mark – on my watch anyway – has a profound effect on their distinctive aesthetic. However, the same confident scarcity prevails as did at The Drawing Project, with no art objects to anchor the intermittent splices of sounds and visuals Cahill and Murphy have gathered and displayed in on/off synchronicity.

At Broadstone, the previous experiences of funfairs and dead zoos have graduated to a day out at Dublin’s Viking Splash Tour and a trip to The National Gallery. Those of you who are not in the know, the tourists and locals that sign up for the Viking Splash Tour make their presence annoyingly felt on the streets of Dublin City Centre with a choreographed, collective roar. Directed from inside the tour’s amphibious vehicle, Cahill and Murphy’s camera focuses on the tourists in close quarters. There is an initial sense that nothing is working in Broadstone. No sound. Moments of dead air. And then the show begins to crackle, when the silence is broken by sporadic outbursts of the group roar from the Viking tour.

Adjacent, and projected onto the plastered recess of what was once a Victorian shuttered window, we are brought before the ‘most popular [and delicate] painting’ in Ireland, Frederic William Burton’s Hellelil and Hildebrand, The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1900), at the National Gallery, Dublin. Only on public view for one hour/three days a week due to light sensitivity, the water colour and gouache is sealed in a black cabinet the rest of the time. In this instance the visual is rarefied; dead air is reified. One last crackle in the dead Victorian air of Broadstone comes as a pan-flute rendition of Abba’s The Winner Takes It All (1980). Cahill and Murphy give you a moment to recognise the pop song before they award you with the source image: there’s precision in their seemingly arbitrary storytelling afterall. On Dublin’s Grafton Street, a young man, missing an arm, holds the pan-flute in his right hand whilst raising his left stump to let the ‘unfulfilled’ jacket sleeve go flaccid. The talented musician’s stump is at such an exhibitionist angle that it pokes you in the eye. When you take in the full mise-en-scène of the one-armed pan-piper playing Abba’s The Winner Takes It All, with a Bank of Ireland looming behind, all you can do is laugh for fear of crying, or cry for fear of insensitively laughing. I laughed; tragic comedy indeed! All of this on top of the references to Ireland’s favourite painting of unrequited love, Britain’s favourite break-up song, and Oscar Wilde, whose gradual fall from grace came on the foot of losing a court battle to hide his sexuality from a repressed and homophobic public: losers in love do become winners in the end. Well, winners sometime/someplace in perpetuity. Cahill and Murphy’s quirky tales from quotidian experience is a game of give and take. In their hatchet-job archive they focus on giving us back the good stuff in visceral pulses; shaking us in and out of our reverie like a form of gentle waterboarding.

*JULY 2014 (#76): SHITLIST #3: DIGITAL REVIEW OF IRISH DEGREE SHOWS* SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

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Then more dead air. Another crackle. The back of the Oscar Wilde statue on Dublin’s Merrion Square comes into view. Furry. A garland of pink flowers, maybe peach, passes through the air in slow motion. It fails to lasso the neck of Wilde. More dead air. Was that Oscar Wilde? Pink or peach? Can’t be sure...

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* BI-FOLD INTERPELLATION +billion-’s contribution to EVA International 2014 12 APRIL – 6 JULY. ALSO SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

APRIL 2014 (#1/ Dear Patrick Jolley)

PATRICK JOLLEY, THIS MONKEY (2009), KERRY GROUP PLANT EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

‘Dear Patrick Jolley’ is the first of a series of textual responses, that take the form of a review/letter addressed to selected EVA artists. It is left open to each addressee artist to respond in his or her way, or not at all. This textual component compliments and completes the ongoing ‘recorded conversations’ portion of +billion-’s discursive project for EVA International 2014. *** Filming in Delhi in 2012, Patrick Jolley suddenly died at the age of 47, just when his art was taking flight. Considering my discursive project for EVA is built around conversations with the curator and selected artists, Jolley’s art will have to speak for itself. The following is a response to This Monkey (2009), installed currently in one of multiple warehouse spaces at the Kerry Group Plant venue for EVA International 2014.

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*** If animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then neither man nor animal – and, perhaps, not even the divine – would any longer be thinkable. (Giorgio Agamden) 1 man is a fatal disease of the animal (Alexandre Kojève)2 I never knew or met Patrick Jolley. To my knowledge, I never saw him from a distance. He was never pointed out in an art context that may or may not have interested or suited him to attend. He was never mentioned in lectures or by tutors or other students in art college. Strangely, there’s nothing much written on his work. A scattering of unfocused articles. A few blogs mention his films in a fanboy way. The ‘reviews and essays’ links on his website are ghosts? I know nothing of his emotional or physical makeup as an artist, acquaintance, friend. His gait? His ideology? His smile? His awkwardness on first meeting? His fears? Google offers a couple of head and shoulders portraits. Another shows him standing with his early career collaborator, Reynold Reynolds.3 Although his online persona is shy, there’s enough physiognomical information to tell me that he is the star of his own short film, Snakes (2009). One of my personal favourites, and an unofficial partner to his submitted film for EVA International 2014. Why a favourite? Well, it’s like the crescendo of anxiety performed in his other film works has transitioned into a diminuendo of acceptance, as he lies on a bed, unflinching, while snakes rummage in his cheap suit and coil around his flaccid body: the tension that exists whilst watching is ours, not his. Snakes tells me that fear was something that Jolley exposed himself and the viewer to time and time again. Burning, drowning, falling, are oneiric contemplations that temporally unwind the spool of his art. However, sometimes an air of despondency overwhelms the traces of humour. All

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stick and no slap. No tickle. Other times I am reminded of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, with the extreme stop-motion expressions and animated hi-jinks. Other times, again, I feel I am being dragged by the vestigial tail through the dregs of humanity’s apathetic selfand other-destruction. I make a point about humour because it’s as if humour is the one thing that fails to push through the grey unheimlic of his cinematic architectures. He threads those lines that separate laughter and fear, madness and sanity, human and animal, life and death. All of which seem to sidewind purposefully throughout the body of his film work.

Whilst first experiencing This Monkey on the day before the official opening, technicians were swarming the Kerry Group Plant and midges bunched in the crepuscular light. No artwork labels, I was physically and emotionally sold before the credits told me Patrick Jolley was its author. Projected square, large and raised, alongside Hassan Khan’s complimentary but more irreverent The Dead Dog Speaks (2010), Jolley’s This Monkey seems to breath textures; environmental textures that swap back-and-forth between belonging to the industrial tomb of the warehouse, with a great facility for holding the cold, to the implied heat of the rural and urban settings of Haryana, Northern India, where he shot the film in 2009. A sound dome localises the haunting composition by Brian Crosby in place, but not to the point that the overall ambience of the warehouse is not affected by the charango acoustics and charged foley. What resonates long after experiencing Jolley’s This Monkey, in what seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke described as the camera obscura of the brain, is the enigmatic images that veer away from the norm. “The understanding is not much unlike a small room [un cabinet entierement obscur in Leibniz’s French] wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external and visible images; would the images coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man.”4 Jolley’s This Monkey is one such cabinet entierement obscur, albeit a disordered and discordant one. Surprisingly miniature and windowless playhouse corridors weave past the artist’s fidgeting lens. Corridors wherein rhesus monkeys flirt wearily with the camera as if in a cognitive experiment conducted by a dicky bow wearing David Lynch wannabe. Anthony Vidler (The Architectural Uncanny) writes via Leibniz and Deleuze: “So the closed room, itself a soul, has no windows. Its only furnishing, to use Bernard Cache’s term, is that of the screen, which represents the brain, a pulsating, organic substance, ‘active and elastic,’ ‘not unified, but diversified by folds’.”5 Jolley makes us squint anew when rhesus monkeys are seen feasting on what look like beef jerky remains of humans, with extra barbecue sauce. Facetiousness aside, these moments are anything but ironic. Given that we share over 90% of our DNA with the rhesus monkey – making them the preferred ‘soulless’ receptacles for experimental psychology during the twentieth century – Jolley’s involved vignettes rewind the brutal ‘pit of despair’ attachment and deprivation tests on our primate cousins,

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Of course, emotional subjectivities are attached to watching his art and its future promise unfulfilled, casting an emotive spell that perplexes judgement. His sevenminute short, This Monkey, is one such emotive animal, that compounds those inherited and unavoidable subjectivities. On the opening night of Eva International 2014 the rumours were flying and mythologies were already being formed around the artist’s rarely seen short. Submitted by his estate, curator Bassam El Baroni admitted that, not only was he “blown away” on first viewing the film, but This Monkey suggested different curatorial avenues, other artworks, alternative ways of thinking about the exhibition. Those that visit EVA would not be blamed for thinking that Noah has come ashore in Limerick City.

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carried out in the ’70s by American psychologist, Harry Harlow. If you are not from the Indiana Jones generation, in which the rhesus monkey is the clever minion of the patch-eye no-gooder, This Monkey portends to a steam of consciousness being emptied out before humanity wakes to a New World. A posthuman world removed of human tinkering. In fact, humanity as we understand it – ethically and lawfully – evanesced. The science-fiction trope of post-apocalyptical existence, in which humanity is searching through the ruin of its own nuclear, ecological or technological mistakes, is replaced in Jolley’s This Monkey by a world perhaps absent from hubris, progress, history, philosophy. A Garden of Eden minus the apple monger. French philosopher Alexandre Kojève – to whom I will leave the last words before they vanish beyond readability and relevance in the wake of Jolley’s simian send off – writes that Post-historical man will be ‘reanimalized’ in his absence: The disappearance of Man at the end of History is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. [...] Practically, this means: the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man no longer changes himself essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his knowledge of the World and of himself. But all the rest can be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short, everything that makes Man happy.6

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APRIL 2014 (#2/ Dear Luis Jacob)

LUIS JACOB, ALBUM XII (2013-14), LIMERICK CITY GALLERY EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. (Walter Benjamin)1 The genius of Surrealism was to generalize with ebullient candour the baroque cult of ruins; to perceive that the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment – and therefore collectible. A world whose past has become (by deﬁnition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invites custodians, decoders, and collectors. (Susan Sontag)2 LUIS JACOB’S ALBUM XII triggers recognitional and relational Tourette’s. It also inspires the phrase “freeze-frame baroque,” a description Susan Sontag gave to Walter Benjamin’s style of ‘looking’; and what Benjamin himself described as the experience of the image, “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill” 3. For those reading this who have not experienced Jacob’s Album XII in-the-flesh, the display looks something like this: sets of images, mostly double- and treble-decked in 148 plastic laminated panels, are arranged, two-tiered, around the four walls of the gallery. The untitled images are primarily composed of art-related subjects, with theatre, advertising, architecture, design, cinema, political history (among other visual references) ‘shuffled’ in no discernible order. Bottom line, the artworld rules

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the compendium. One image after another seems to reify then petrify in the memory with every successive paneled set, like a game of Tetris. To my surprise, I stayed with the work for an hour or more, looking, walking, documenting, and getting lost in the visual panorama of knowing and not knowing. Lapses in identification liberated me into a space of dumb relational framing. Although Google Image Recognizer is at hand for anyone that is perverted enough to try identify most, but not all of the approximate 500 images, I personally rejected a Vulcan need to decipher the logic or symptomology behind the artwork because I believe none exists – that’s the subjective point!

I stayed longer with images that contained more visual information, or images that I desired to demystify. I started to question my temporal bias towards certain sets of images? My identity regarding my identification with specific images within the paneled sets? My psychological makeup? My gender? My education? My class? My sexuality? My nationality? I wondered about ALL THE ABOVE with regard to Jacob’s piecemeal selection of this constellation of images, that is far from an arbitrary Google search, when you dig deep enough and activate the staggering amount of content behind each image? The assumption is that Jacob’s history exists behind these images, and the observer’s particular history is reflected in the act of naming and shaming. Benjamin again: “Autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life.”4 Aside from intersubjective visual and semantic connections between images within the sets of Album XII, I am more interested in the statements or ambiguities each set or individual image proffers. Or, moreover, thoughts that are implied outside of the individual and paneled frames of visual reference. One such statement is suggested by a photograph of Robert Morris’ Box for Standing Still, who defined this and other work he produced in the ’60s as “Art as a closed space, a refusal of communication, a secure refuge and defense against the outside world, a dead zone and buffer against others who would intrude.”5, Unfortunately, Benjamin wrote: “all human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.” We all want to master alterity, but when we do something is lost. Like the potential of straying into misplaced thoughts and feelings that can refresh our perspective of “the disconsolate chronicle of world history.” The sorry fact is, before Google, we managed to let our imagination fill in the gaps with mind-bending fiction when our brains failed to register the facts. We all tripped, headhigh, not hunkered over our iPhones, down the winding and potholed synapses of our memory, trying, with every step, to name what was just about on the tip of our tongues. At least in those moments of straying the hippocampus was getting some exercise. Holding on tight to our infallible fact-finding smartphones, “Ambiguity [in the end] displaces authenticity in all things,”6 don’t you think?

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Due to the sheer number of images in Album XII, logical mind-maps turn to overcooked mind soup. Adults tend to scan when information is presented in this Gordian knot fashion. But you can imagine a child’s infinitesimal perspective of the world being occupied here forever, with regard to visual information not interest per se. It’s stupid to even think if there is a beginning, middle, end to the Album? But, a film still from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is positioned at what I consider its End. The still portrays empty, screaming receptacle, Shelly Duvall, in frog-eyed anxiety in the face of Jack Nicholson’s mental break. This is as good a concluding bookend as any for such a visually tormenting treadmill of information.

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MAY 2014 (#3/ Dear Neša Paripović)

NESA PARIPOVIC, N.P. 1977 (1977), KERRY GROUP PLANT EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

The artist as flâneur threads thoughtfully throughout curator Bassam El Baroni’s EVA International 2014. David Horvitz, Ingo Giezendanner (alias GRRRR), Ann Böttcher, share a tendency to walk and generate still and moving images. Similar to the implicit pairing of Patrick Jolley’s This Monkey (2009) with Hassan Khan’s The Dead Dog Speaks (2010), El Baroni has paired two other flâneur types: Neša Paripović’s N.P. 1977 (1977) with Catalina Niculescu’s Guest (2008) at the Kerry Group plant. While Niculescu’s is a more stilted and claustrophobic hike on the stone face of urbanity, in which each recorded episode is edited so the viewer misses out on the climax of the artist overcoming her chosen obstacles, Paripović is a stray dog; the cock of the walk. Speaking with Catalina Niculescu on the eve of the official opening of EVA14, the artist revealed to me that she never knew of Paripović film N.P. 1977, even though her obstacle ridden trek through London in Guest mirrors Paripović’s flânerie through Belgrade thirty-one years earlier. This mutual ignorance makes both of these artworks contextually independent and original expressions in time and place and politics. Furthermore, the curator’s role comes into plain sight in his pairing of these two works: a marriage by proxy. ***

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How would it be if the shortcut was the right way – to go over all the obstacles? (Neša Paripović)1 Picture this. It’s the 1970s. The the socio-political fallout from the ’68 student protests still resonates East and West. Serbia (then Yugoslavia) is under a communist dictatorship (albeit a dictatorship with broader freedoms in science, art, and culture, than other autocracies in the Soviet bloc). President Tito creates student cultural centres throughout Yugoslavia; not to inspire experimental creativity beyond the conservatism of the Fine Art academies, but as a prevention measure against student ‘expression’ spilling onto the streets as collective dispute. Documentation is not in the cultural consciousness of the time, so most of the art produced in these student culture centres only exists in the memory of the artists, critics, curators and passers-by.2 This is truly Art made in the present, for the present. ‘Archive’ is not yet in the vocabulary. In this environment, creativity is a compulsive monster, trying to inject a human pulse into 1970s Conceptualism. In the capital, Belgrade, one such student culture centre produces a loose group of pulsing hearts – Marina Abramović and Braco Dimitrijević being the most recognisable to shortsighted Western eyes. Married to Abramović for a short period during the ’70s, Neša Paripović is the most enigmatic artist of the ’70s Belgrade art scene; an environment that produces a period of art experimentation considered canonical in hindsight. Described by Georg Schöllhammer as the “ontologist”3 of the group, Paripović’s tendency was to reveal the human agent behind conceptualism’s curtain of slippery notation. In a small body of work, Paripović is the aloof actor, caught in the frame of Art, and whatever Art means to the individual making and observing it: the double-bind relationship between artist and viewer. Installed in one of the warehouse at the Kerry Group plant, Paripović’s jocular

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narcissism is implied with the inclusion of his initials in the title of his magnum opus, N.P. 1977. In his mid-thirties at the time of filming, and dressed in a burgundy velvet suit (bellbottomed), pink shirt, sharp shoes, tousled blond hair, Paripović hops, skips and jumps – light-footed but purposely – through, over, down, up, across Belgrade’s modernist civic architecture. This is Parkour or freerunning without the effort. In moments of reprieve he smokes as if no one is watching. He’s all sex and cigarettes. The cocksure attitude to Paripović’s cruising, from urban centre to parkland and motorway periphery, peaks with one repeated gesture: a quick finger comb through his wavy locks during his episodic urban dances. With all the masculinity that is implied by ‘getting your leg over’, Paripović is doing just that to the viewer, and with a big smile on his face. I, for one, reciprocated!

MAY 2014 (#4/ Dear David Horvitz & Martí Anson)

DAVID HORVITZ, EVIDENCE OF TIME TRAVEL (2014)

MARTÍ ANSON, MATARÓ: LABORATORY OF SPAIN (2014) KERRY GROUP PLANT

Why is it performative- and process-based art practices that don’t fit the mould of gallery ‘object’ are, when push comes to curatorial and institutional shove, objectified, and therefore demystified for an observer who seemingly hasn’t got time, or the possibility of engaging fully with such artworks in the first place? This opinion comes on the dusty trail of a series of galloping overviews of EVA International 2014, that revealed, more than anything else, that we have neither time, energy, interest nor editorial room to invest in artworks that took months, if not years to conceive and realise, especially within the grand scale of the biennale. In these Road Runner reviews the fast and the furious get the ink. Whereas the less colourful ‘Wile E. Coyotes’ are left hanging in a breeze of stray tumbleweeds and spinning compasses, while the audience rushes to catch the last bus home with bright lights and sparkly razzmatazz tickling their synapses. David Horvitz’s commissioned project for EVA International 2014 is a case in point. While on a brief residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the American artist continued to live on California time, documenting and textually ruminating on his dusk-to-dawn urban excursions, with snails and foxes and used condoms scuttling in his whirligig shadow. Horvitz’s project is a lively and timely artwork when told, coming on the back of some recent theoretical publications regarding sleepless capitalism, such as Jonathan Crary’s 24/7. But it loses its silly energy installed as it is as a slideshow/timer/printed email correspondence at the Kerry Group plant. I interviewed the artist in Phoenix Park at twilight while he was living the night fantastic, and feel that the resulting display does zero justice to the experience I had with the artist, and the experiences he shared with me through storytelling. Is there an alternative way of communicating such storytelling artworks? Would it be better if Horvitz just sat on a stage before an audience and told story his experience? No props. Just him. His voice. His memory. Does the way the artist photographs his quotidian habits in Dublin lend some aesthetic value? I’m not so sure? The display at the Kerry Group plant does the job of illustrating Horvitz’s process – the included

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EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

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timer set on California time showing the obvious 8hr difference from Limerick, makes sure the viewer doesn’t lose the temporal plot – but it removes the physical and psychical ache that I imagine Horvitz experienced during his time in Dublin. In an anthology of artist writings from the ’80s entitled Blasted Allegories, editor Brian Wallis insightfully obverses via Walter Benjamin: “...in storytelling (as opposed to literature) meaning resides not simply in the text itself or in the subject matter, but in the transmission of experience. Storytelling is a direct transmission of social interaction.”1 For me, Horvitz, the performer has left the building, along with the residue of his experiences. Catalan artist Martí Anson is another storymaker-cum-storyteller commissioned by Bassam El Baroni for EVA International. Like Horvitz’s, his art is usually better told, not objectified. Stories that Anson has made in the past include: Fizcarraldo (2005), destroying a sailboat he spent fifty-five days building after it failed to fit through the workshop’s exit door; Martí i factory (2009), building with his own hands, a 5:1 scale replica of a 150 year old factory from his hometown, inspired by the commotion caused by its proposed demolition for a planned mall; Pavelló Català. Arquitecte Anònim (2013), the construction of a copy of a holiday home built by his father, knowing beforehand that the commissioning funds wouldn’t be enough to complete it.

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Anson’s project for EVA14 – Mataró: Laboratory of Spain – is another architectonic stand-in for biographical experience; lit-up by the número uno stage set of capitalism: the bank. The creative spring for Anson’s laboratory is the removal of the Caixa Laietana bank billboard in the artist’s hometown of Mataró in 2013, which seemingly gilded his and his generation’s childhood in neon. Blending nostalgia with protest, his ‘laboratory’ takes foothold in what was perhaps a run-of-the-mill office for the daily administration at the Kerry Group plant. Anson has displayed a series of original Mataró tourist postcards from the 1970s through to 2013, alongside a sitespecific postcard made for the occasion – depicting Anson’s laboratory against the Limerick City skyline and a handwritten letter that drips of the nostalgic fallout from the billboard’s absence. This content is dressed inside and outside the office by a representation of the partial framework of the Caixa Laietana billboard, including a timber ‘Shannonsider’ edition of the billboard on the office facade, which anchors the work in Limerick. Like Anson, American conceptual artist Laurence Weiner also created a socioeconomic rebus with the help of a bankrupt bank and a billboard in downtown Belgrade, 2008, when he placed a billboard on the former Beaobank with the words PLACED ON EITHER SIDE OF THE LIGHT. All evidence of the Beaobank had been wiped clean from the high-rise that had overlooked the city’s rapid post-socialist expansion, except for a textual advertising billboard that was missing a few teeth, lisping out “ACABAMA” – loosely translated as ‘with you’ in Serbian. PLACED ON EITHER SIDE OF THE LIGHT (with you) suggests a moment of stasis between choice and potential. In the blink of an eye, however, ‘Light’ shifts terrifyingly quick in signification, from deliverance to demise; all dependent on what tunnel you are gazing down. Weiner’s on the ledge ambiguity is absent from Horvitz’s and Anson’s commissioned projects for EVA International 2014; assured storytelling displaces any visual ambivalence in their art. What is left from both their processes at the Kerry Group plant are mere information points or signposts to experience and research. But if you pull on the brakes and let the dust settle, crumbs of experience can be followed to some degree. “Beep Beep”!!

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MAY 2014 (#5/ Dear Chimurenga & Stacy Hardy)

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STACY HARDY, ‘52 Niggers’, KERRY GROUP PLANT EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

Context (by +billion-) When the Irish are cavilled for celebrating a little too much when anyone but England wins, we take out the ‘800 years of colonial oppression card’. Equally, when ethics is called into question regarding racial prejudice we blurt out an alkaline phrase, one that has been repeated since Rosa Parks’ bus boycott in 1955 – ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. Commonly pasted on B&B and boarding house doors in 1950s and ’60s London (and the title of Sex Pistol John Lydon’s autobiography from the 1990s), ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ is our ‘black card’: how on earth could the Irish be racially prejudiced in any way when we, ourselves, are the historical victims of prejudice. Recent news headlines tell a different story, revealing a 85% rise in racially motivated incidents in Ireland over the last year. This equates to 142 reported incidents in 11 months.

IAGO to BRABANTIO: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is topping your white ewe. (1.1.) These thoughts initially came on the foot of interviewing Angolan artist Nástio Mosquito, and after experiencing his charismatic and eloquent performances for the Dublin and Limerick launches of EVA International 2014. But ideas of race were compounded with the display of posters and publications by the South African gazette, Chimurenga, at the Kerry Group plant for EVA. Especially upon reading the provocative and lyrical prose of Stacy Hardy, specifically her “word-sound investigation of unjustly neglected African-American composer Julius Eastman’s caged negratas, entitled ‘52 Niggers’. The dream scenario would be for Nástio to perform Stacy’s text, which is calling out to be spoken by a voice with the timbre and rhythm and force of Nástio’s – perhaps in the future? With Stacy’s and Chimurenga’s generous permission, +billion- is honoured to present ‘52 Niggers’, with the intention of bringing deserved attention to the critical writings of Chimurenga. (Read this and other Chimurenga publications in print at the Kerry Group plant until July 2014). *** Stacy Hardy, 52 Niggers. Julius Eastman had a way of walking. He had a swagger, a way of swinging hips. He rarely strolled or ran. Instead, skin tight jeans/ black leathers slung low on his waist, sucked down by the velocity of his gait, he cruised and rolled. He played loose. He played cool. He worked fast. He scored Stay on It in one sitting. He wrote through the night, the full next day, the next night. He wrote fast. He wrote moment, place. He wrote sentiment and soul. He

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Racial and identity politics are made explicit when you place black African artists in Western contexts – the unspoken stereotypes tumble stupidly on the tip of the Western tongue. Male blackness, since Shakespeare’s Othello (if not before), is culturally typecast as an auxiliary muscle pumped up on eager virility.

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orchestrated the body: his body, body in motion, body as it flexes to move a pen, form a fist, make mark, lift a drink. He rewrote the classical music canon. He inserted pop. He noted free improvisation. He bucked the conventions. He fucked minimalism. He reworked the rulebook: Cage’s anal atonal progressions, Glass’ linear additive processes, Reich’s phasing and block additive methods. He started the Post Minimalist revolution, New Music, Improvisation, call it whatever you like. He made the call. He beat them all to it: John Cage, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. This was 1973. This was America. Glass was still only glistening on the surface. Reich was outside the country, hauled up somewhere in Africa, playing poacher, plundering Ghanaian polyrhythmic beats. Cage was still stuck in his cage, his soundproof room, his anechoic chamber. Cage was still tuning silence; tuning into his nervous system in operation, low throb of his blood in circulation. Cage was tuning: “Until we die there will be sounds.” Who needs them? Eastman was already at the edge. While Cage could only hear his body, Eastman’s music mapped those sounds: pulses pounding, sweat producing, blood surging in veins. While Reich filched, Eastman felched, digging his tongue deep, exposing himself, getting off on his own shit. Fuck the division between private and public, feral cruise and cocktail soirée. Fuck stuffy formalism of avant-garde composition: “forms”, “malls”, “isms” and restrictions. “He had radar that could detect bullshit.” He hated that shit. He hated hip hyp-ocrazy: the lecture halls, the concert chamber; the sound proofed rooms and white gallery cubes. Everything purged of colour. Specifically: all the walls and the ceilings and the floors; white. More white than white, the kind of white that repels. No smells, no noise, no colour; no doubt and no dirt. No nothing. No eating, no drinking, no pissing, no shitting, no sucking, no fucking. He rebelled. He headed out. He hit the gay clubs, the crack houses, disco dens. He listened up to the sound on the street. He saw the violence. He saw the hate. He saw anger. It moved him. It ran him. It called his shots. He stayed cool with it. He stayed justified. He channelled the rage. He wrote it down. He stayed on It; He spread the word. He said: “Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honour, integrity, and boundless courage.” It was futile. They ignored him. They indulged him. They used him. They strung him along. A black face looked good on record. 1974. The Creative Associates on the bench of the Albright-Knox Gallery. Official photograph. Used by permission. Front, l-r: Julius Eastman. His features a blur, the white balance thrown out – shooting for white – just a duffle coat and sneakers, just an outline, a black smudge, a dark mark, stop gap framed by smiling white faces. They used him to fill the gaps. Petr Kotik looked him up. He was putting together a concert series. Big names: John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, the original New York School. They wanted to diversify. They were looking for someone to represent. Kotik wooed him. Kotik went through the motions. Kotik invited him around. Uptown apartment. Konik at the door. He said, “Come in. Straight through here.” He pointed with his hand. He led the way. He said, “Grab a seat.” Eastman sat. Eastman stared. Fancy pad: white walls, plants and lights, stiff long-back chair. Konik poured drinks. Konik smiled. Konik paid lip service. “What kind of music do you want to hear? You hungry?”

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He started with her top button. He worked fast. He worked fastidiously. His hands jumped. He dripped sweat. Second button, third. She wasn’t sure. She trembled. She shut her eyes. Fourth button. The audience twittered. The audience buzzed. She looked up. She made eye contact. Her eyes swam. She grabbed his hand. Everything froze. Time hung back. She looked down. She broke free. The audiences erupted. The audience roared. Someone stormed the stage. Someone hit the lights. All hell broke loose. John Cage freaked. Cage raged. Was that meant to be a joke? Who’s laughing? Am I laughing? He came down hard. He came down spitting words, throwing authority. He said, “I’m tired of people who think that they can do whatever they want with my music!” He stormed. He banged the piano with his fist. He said, “The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!” He used his lecture’s voice. He couldn’t make the break. For all his talk about crossing boundaries – noise/ music, life/ art – he couldn’t take the leap. His “anti-art” was still the same old shit: natural law devalued, social tradition minimized, rebellious gestures only accepted if they stayed safely walled in, caged within the tradition they sought to denied. Cage as cage. Even his thinking on silence was caged, locked within the audible order, a lecturer’s voice: something to learn, rather than lose yourself in. Silence as ambient sound, nonintended sound. Silence as the sounds of life. He said, “Until we die there will be sounds.” He said there will only be silence in death. The implication was left hanging: we can’t experience our own death so we can’t experience silence. Silence, like death was the impossible crossing of a border. Audibility vs. inaudibility, life vs. death: oppositions that can’t be overcome, borders that can’t be crossed. And the hierarchy was clear: Life was where it was at. Death was the undesirable, a dispensable deviation, something to be silenced. Cage said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” Eastman had something to say and he was unsaying it. Cage raged and lectured. Eastman acted. He showed up the con of Cage’s “instructions”. He de-con-structed. He gave voice to silence. He injected real life, lived experiences, street politics into art. He created an unsound politicomusical discourse, a line of flight that radically threatened Cage’s abstract political discourse, the white language of the classical avant-garde. He scared the shit out of Cage. Cage reacted. Cage hit back. He said, “Irresponsible!” He rallied support. Walter Zimmermann called it “rotten”. Peter Gena said, “Abuse!” Petr Kotik called it “sabotage”. He said, “I should have guessed he was unsuitable.” He said, “scandal.” Eastman was tagged: Crazy Nigger. The reputation stuck. The blacklist built: Eastman the Evil Nigger, Eastman the Savant Saboteur, Gay Guerrilla sooo-preme.

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He said, “Big Break.” He said, “Big names: John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff.” Eastman sat, stared. Eastman listened. Eastman timed the pause. He felt the hate. He felt the anger. He started to say – No, wait. Maybe? He took a breath. He challenged the rage. He counted notes. He took the score. He said, “Sure Pete!” He sat. He smiled. He had this craaazy idea. The performance took place. 1975. The June in Buffalo Festival, SUNY Buffalo. Now legendary. Now infamous. Kyle Gale told and retold the story: “Chaotic at best! Eastman performed the segment of Cage’s Songbooks that was merely the instruction, ‘Give a lecture.’ Never shy about his gayness, Eastman lectured on sex, with a young man and woman as volunteers. He undressed the young man onstage, and attempted to undress the woman…”

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His guitarist brother Gerry said, “Give it up Julius. Play jazz. At least a black man can make half a living playing jazz.” Fuck that shit, man. He refused. He knew the score; their story is history: crazy black gay mutherfucker, all danger and despair and downward trajectory. Ismael Reed’s old “post-Mailer syndrome”, the “Wallflower Order”: “Jes Grew, the Something or Other that led Charlie Parker to scale the Everests of the Chord… manic in the artist who would rather do glossolalia than be neat clean or lucid.” He refused to be composed. He answered them with If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? A 20-minute fuck you. Fuck you to your score. Your over-determined definitions of what it means to be black. Pre-de-scribed borders and hierarchies: beginning/end, classical/jazz, silence/sound, hite/black, between order/ disorder, meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. He worked on unweaving the whiteness from within. He started at the end, a funeral march, a single line, chromatic scales on slow ascent, going going then BAM! Drawing it up, drawing it out, ripping it open, a quickdraw halt, a slash, a silence, coma, full stop, semicolon connoting rhythm of speech, interrupted thought. Then more scales, building slowing, coalescing, multiplying the metre into a seething swarm, a glowing brass mass where desire equals death, where death, and the approach to human death, is no longer an end but a beginning. He kept his own score. He rocked up for rehearsals dressed like a jazz cat, a disco queen. All black leather and chains and dripping desire and fuck yous. He pitched high or drunk. He hung loose, he jived, whisky slung low in left hand, a tight fist. Then he hit the piano and everything changed. Time changed. Time redacted. Space erased. Knuckles became fluid, joints broken down, fingertips riding hard and wide; trembling then going taut. The contradiction was too much. They wrote him out. They wrote him off. They accused him of silencing himself. “He could have had it so good if only he hadn’t had the personality problems.” He lost his post at SUNY-Buffalo. They called him in. The office. Two chairs. One desk. The books lining the walls like ghosts from another epoch. The Professor shuffled papers. His button down shirt perfect white, white on white. He cleared throat. He glanced up. He said, “Take a seat”. He cited, “Neglect of administrative duties.” Eastman didn’t stay for the rest. He walked. He took the stairs. He said, Paperwork? Fucking paperwork? He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Outside it was warm. Thirty degrees at noon. Campus was crammed. Students between lectures, taking lunch. They jostled him. They pushed past. He kept walking. He followed the sound on the street. Downtown, 1980, music pumped from open windows and revved motors, fragments and samples, notes and the repetitions. Richard Pryor’s world of “junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family” all screaming to be heard. He wrote hard and fast. He scored Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, Crazy Nigger in close succession. He tore into classical tropes and constructs. He deconstructed. He found rhythm. Street politics embedded in the beat, the repeated piano riffs, the propulsive badbadDUMbadaDUM brass blasts. Cool cadence balanced rhythmic flow, as in poetry, as in the measured beat of movement, as in dancing, as in the rising and falling of music, of the inflections of a voice, modulations and progressions of chords, moving, moving through a point beyond sight, sound, vision, being. He played the preacher man, rocking out on a counting-in chant, “one-two-threefour”. He played the poet. He re-dubbed Lee Perry’s “I am the Upsetter. I am what I

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am, and I am he that I am”. He wrote The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc. He said, “This one is to those who think they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice and murder.” He rapped Richard Pryor’s Supernigger. He was unstoppable. He played The Kitchen. He hit the stage alongside Merdith Monk and Peter Gordon. He hooked up with Arthur Russell. He toured Europe. He filled houses. He flew off. He came back. He put out feelers to record. He was ready to get it down. To get it out. Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was going massive. Glass’ Metamorphosis was everywhere. He contacted cats he knew via the circuit. He said, “What’ve you got going?” He waited. He made more calls. He chain smoked and watched TV. He slept through whole days. He woke. He drunk whisky. He slept. He watched TV. Old Pryor skits on NBC. “White. Black. Coloured. Redneck. Jungle bunny. Honky! Spade! Honky honky! Nigger! Dead honky. Dead nigger.” He played the college circuit just to keep going. North Western 1980. Members of the faculty took offense. The African American fraternity didn’t like the nigger shit. It was like Édouard Glissant never existed. Like Ismael Reed, Richard Pryor, hiphop never happened. No word on the street. He had to explain. From the beginning. “Recontextualization? You know the whole ‘re-appropriation’, ‘recannibalisation’ thing?” He took to the mic. He said: “There are three pieces on the programme. The first is called Evil Nigger and the second is called Gay Guerrilla and the third is called Crazy Nigger.” He spoke smooth. He flowed easy. He mirrored Pryor’s buzz in making obscenities sing. He paused after each title. He let it hang. He waited for it: the reaction, breath suspended, waiting for a ripple, a laugh, some kind of recognition of the humour at play. Nothing. Fuck. His audience was silent. Not even a twitter, a nervous giggle. He held the pause a second longer – Jesus, even he felt like laughing – but no, nothing. Just silence, just Eastman, just his nerves’ systematic operation, his blood’s endless circulation. He tried again. His voice wavered. His voice woofered. It bounced high and wide. FUCK – Overfeed. Overamp. From the start. He said, “Nigger is that person or thing that attains to a basicness or a fundamentalness, and eschews that which is superficial, or, could we say, elegant.” He said, “There are 99 names of Allah.” He paused. He said, “There are 52 niggers.” But still it wouldn’t go away. The whiteness always returned, whiteness woven into the fabric of Culture, whiteness locking everything else out. Silent. White faces stared back. Blank, unmoved: they could see only one. One more drink. One more pill. It was getting tight. 1982. Nothing coming. The walls closed in. Cash was low. The apartment cost. The clubs cost. The drink cost. He got headaches. He drank himself to sleep. He swallowed whisky shooters. He popped uppers. He shot poppers. A downhill slide. Cornell University turned him down. “He was just too damn outrageous.” A failed application to the Paris Conservatoire. The letter came in the post. One white envelope, black type. He said, “Damn them damn them damn them.” He tore it up. He let it drop. He headed out to score. He head east, the lower Eastside. Further out, the windows all covered meshed-over glass burglar proof stuff; homeboys on the sidewalks rhyming beefs, little men with big shirts and the chicks in tight skirts. He kept going. He walked. He didn’t give a shit. He felt zero. He felt zip. He felt ate up. His skin buzzed. He took a left. He crunched glass underfoot. He took a right. Low door. Dark interior. Match boxes and glass pipes. Cracker jacks on low stools. White smoke that hung in low clouds. He took a seat. He took the hit. He sucked

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held it in. He let go. He felt it hit. His mouth closed. His head dropped black. His eyes rolled. And white appeared. Absolute white. White beyond all whiteness. White of the coming of white. White without compromise, through exclusion, through total eradication of non-white. Insane, enraged white, screaming with whiteness. Fanatical, furious, riddling the victim. Horrible electric white, implacable, murderous. White in bursts of white. God of “white.” No, not a god, a howler monkey. The end of white.

JUNE 2014 (#6/ Dear Uriel Orlow)

URIEL ORLOW, UNMADE FILM , BOURN VINCENT GALLERY EVA INTERNATIONAL 2014

Beyond the museum and gallery and milk plant that house the fifty-odd artworks that compose EVA International 2014 – artworks that shine in each other’s light and condition each other’s conceptual and aesthete orbit – I experienced an artwork that upset my sense of time and place, located (out of curatorial step) on the periphery of the biennale constellation.

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Before we get down to the brass tacts of the physical and psychical components that make up Swiss artist Uriel Orlow’s Unmade Film, other secondary textures need to be considered, such as the location where the work is installed (Occam’s ‘brooming’ will not suffice). Bourn Vincent Gallery is inconspicuously located in the Foundation Building of Limerick University. Being June, my visit to the gallery was influenced by that all-encompassing, holy absence that enshrouds academic institutions during the summer months. Never have environmental factors influenced such a weighty obligation to stay longer than usual with an artwork in the face of a wide-eyed invigilator, suspicious of my motives for visiting the gallery when her contact with humans had been far and few between. With the textures of time and self-consciousness still floating among the dust particles of experience, I entered into Orlow’s Unmade Film. Unmade Film is not a film. The only moving image present is the observer’s passing reflection and shadow thrown amid the horizontally-biased installation of photographs, ‘filmic’ tableaux vivants, prop, drawings, instrumental score, and an “audio walk” experienced via wireless headphones. Amidst all this ‘still’ and fragmentary posturing of imagery and noise, Orlow pulls the proverbial flying carpet through the wormhole of temporality in his excavation of the spectres of trauma visited upon the historic Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. The artist achieves this by way of individually textured, multiform elements that communicate the anachronistic traumas that inspired his Unmade Film. With wireless headphones on, one of those warm ‘welcome, welcome’ voices speaks directly to you with deictic expressions: “Welcome to Deir Yassin. I will be your guide and show you around. Come.” Entitled The Voiceover, the velvet diction of Nayef Rashid guides you through Deir Yassin – 1 of 418 similar villages that were depopulated in a massacre by Zionist paramilitaries during the 1947-48 Palestine War, when Jewish and Arab communities clashed when the region was under British rule. The war resulted in the exodus of over seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs,

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followed by the declaration of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948.

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Like a game of musical chairs, as soon as Nabka (Day of the Catastrophe) was over, Shoah (The Holocaust) took its seat in the village of Deir Yassin, and catharsis was put on hold. In 1951 the psychiatric hospital Kfar Sha’ul was established in the remaining intact houses and school of Deir Yassin following the massacre and destruction of Nabka in 1948. The hospital’s initial function was in the treatment of holocaust survivors – one of whom was a relative of the artist, a great-aunt whom Orlow remembers visiting as a child. Kfar Sha’ul still stands to this day, as Orlow’s series of recently taken photographs of the grounds of the psychiatric hospital bear witness to. The thirteen photographs are beset by textures of absence similar to the absence I experienced in Limerick University that day: empty common rooms and circles of chairs in and around the dilapidated architecture and wild grounds of the hospital. Orlow’s visual presentation of Kfar Sha’ul feels like a car journey in a foreign country; the car windows framing fleeting, forgettable images, while the heavy accent of the radio DJ anchors you in the place’s provenance.

The last four components of Unmade Film corrupt our linear experience of time. In no particular order, like a message in a bottle, The Props consists of a simple olive bottle on a low-hanging shelf. Acting as another tableau vivant for a subplot to the Deir Yassin narrative, the stand-in olive bottle infers the true story of a bottle of olive oil found in a room not accessed for fifty-two years in the Kfar Sha’ul mental hospital in the year 2000. (Time stands still once again) in The Staging – a series of filmed tableaux vivants developed in workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah, wherein the participants hold sculptural postures that emote trauma and repair . Alongside, treatment and rehabilitation is diagnosed but left uncured in The Script – a series of 60 pencilled texts drawn from psychiatric case histories that describe Nabka and the Holocaust in the Procrustean Bed language of psychology: delusional disorder ... somatic pain ... olfactory hallucinations ... While researching, I came across a fascinating conversation with the artist and clinical psychologist Yoa’d Ghanadry, that broaches the question of the inadequacy of the clinical script in relation to sustained socio-political unrest in the Middle East, where successive ‘Intifadas’ (Palestinian-Israeli conflicts) have taken place without reprieve. Such prescribed terminology as Past Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) does not fit the bill: Psychotic and anxiety related disturbances are on the rise. According to the definitions of the DSM – flashbacks, stuttering, bed-wetting, and nightmares – most children in Gaza have PTSD. If that were the case the children in Gaza would not be able to learn, be happy, enjoy play, or do anything, but that is not the case. The trauma and life are going on at the same time: the trauma is not stopping life, as it does in the classic situation of PTSD. What we suggest instead is the term of CTSD – Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder, instead of PostTraumatic, because we are not post anything!1 Orlow’s The Storyboard closes but does not seal the undetermined envelope of Unmade

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This sense of being out-of-time and place is duplicated by the out-of-step experience of looking at the series of photographs that are coloured in by spectral absences, and listening to thirty minutes of luxurious imagery dictated by the narrator. That perceived luxury is soon spoiled by the introduction of The Score – an instrumental soundscape that would torment the most patient of gallery invigilators. But without it, especially when it registers a decibel or two above the narrator who has his tongue in your ears, the multifaceted textures of Unmade Film – metaphorical and physical – would not emerge from their fluctuating, flatlining absence and presence.

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Film. The Storyboard is a booklet of drawings made by pupils in a workshop at the Palestinian orphanage Dar Al-Tifl-Arabi in 2013. “They tell the story of Hind Al Husseini, who took in the orphans of Deir Yassin and set up, in her own house, the orphanage and school that still exist today.” Hermeneutics is the last thing on my mind when flipping through The Storyboard; children’s drawings that tell the past but look to the future, whatever that may hold. Time and trauma fail to line up like the cherry dials on a Vegas slot machine in Unmade Film. Uriel Orlow’s efforts to activate and master the evolving mise-en-scéne of unresolved historical trauma by combing through the multiform textures of The Event end in failure; but a purposeful and compelling failure.

JULY 2014 (#83): Promises, promises

Shane McCarthy, ‘Tangled Hierarchies’, Studio 4., TBG+S, Dublin. 24 July – 2 August, 2014.

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In 2011 Shane McCarthy’s digital drawings first came to light in a discreet studio located somewhere in Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Immediately noticed by the gimlet-eyes of mother’s tankstation, the articulation of McCarthy’s work since has been dressed by white cube and art fair. By no means was this a bad turn of events (as proven by his exquisite first solo show in the gallery in 2013[1]), just different from the ramshackle installation for his degree show that promised more of the same. What has become clear over the last 3 years is, McCarthy’s work is all about The Promise. Even though the emailed press release for ‘Tangled Hierarchies’ initially frustrated with its opaque ‘notation’ rather than an explanation that had the decency of a beginning or a middle or even an end, it was with hot feet that I made my way to McCarthy’s Studio 4 project in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. I was expecting misaligned timber shelving. Trip wire power cords. Bad lighting. The artist as invigilator. I got all the above and much more ad hoc improvisation and natural occurrences than the imagination can possibly forecast. On entering McCarthy’s studio the artist immediately apologised for the bright sunshine overexposing the two pulsating projections that sun bathed on the studio walls. Contrary to McCarthy’s misgivings towards the environmental conditions yesterday, it was the actual bright sunlight invading the studio space that steered his digital drawings away from theatre into a network of revelatory distraction and digression. Ghost neon signatures breath light in shallow gasps on the walls of McCarthy’s studio. One spells out ‘IMMANENCE’[2], the other an abstract, skeletal squiggle that plumps up into a metallic pink clef, a quaver, a pretzel. (With regard to the latter, “Jeff Koons” tripped off McCarthy’s tongue in conversation later. My response: “nothing wrong with a bit of Koons”). I took out my phone and took a panoramic shot of the unfolding mise-en-scène. FYI: when photographed with a normal shutter speed McCarthy’s digital drawings capture as vibrating Day-Glo; out of reach in more ways than one. Plonked on a metal bench, an analogue T.V. plays an info-dump of video clips

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found online that lean towards (among other things) philosophical ‘whys?’ and scientific ‘hows?’. Also placed upon the bench the short notation of the press-release beefs up into a treatise. Even with the Temple Bar crowds and buskers clamouring outside, T.V. and treatise yammering inside, my attention keeps being drawn to the insidious silence of McCarthy’s digital drawings. My obvious ‘neon’ referencing to Bruce Nauman with regard to McCarthy’s previous work in the gallery was erased. Replaced by John Cage, Michael Snow, or nobody.

The wide orbit of background material that informs Shane McCarthy’s compressed and evasive digital drawings are necessary building blocks, atoms, strings, theory. In the end, these exterior elements collapse and disappear into the work proper. What remains, like the gravitational collapse of a star, is a black hole of multi-dimensional traces. Signature traces of luxurious objects that make promises on one hand and renege with the other.

AUGUST 2014 (#84): The Undiscovered Country

A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin

Derek Jarman / Gunilla Klingberg / Bea McMahon / Richard Proffitt / Garrett Phelan Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. 19 June – 7 September 2014.

The problem points up a recurring blind spot in the reception of modern art, as when scholars duly note the Theosophical faith of Kandinsky or Mondrian and then make as little as possible of it, concerning the work. [...] Will any thesis writer pluck this low-hanging fruit? (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker)[1] Curators and artists love to dabble in the arcane, but it’s a fair weather interest, more über chic than natural fit. Over the years Pádraic E. Moore has dabbled in suchlike come rain or shine, and he has worn the proverbial robes well. I don’t know Moore personally, only through his outré curatated exhibitions and tasteful Twitter feed sensibility. Both of which paint a man with an air of old-world gentility, enveloped by mystic and mythic puffs of opium smoke in some occultist’s den that Time’s forgot. The title of Moore’s current curated exhibition at Dublin City Gallery reifies what were previously glints and shades of occultism, mysticism and shamanism hiding behind the slightly ajar wardrobe door of his particular type of curatorship. A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin is Moore out of the closet so to speak, resulting in an exhibition that seems closer to his heart than his head. In other words, A Modern Panarion is an experiential encounter: the visual trumping the textual. Good riddance. No theoretical tags. No socio-political piggybacking. Just a nod to the theosophical faith that not only inspired twentieth century art in general, but influenced game-changer artists who irrevocably altered the course of Modernist abstraction. Think Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, all theosophists of one design or another.

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Dorje De Burgh. (Curated by Pádraic E. Moore).

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Rosa Abbott’s accompanying essay does all the heavy lifting (so I don’t need to), shedding historical light on the curator’s localised, theosophical underpinning, and preventing the individual artists, in theory anyway, from spinning out of Moore’s curatorial orbit. The reality is, however, A Modern Panarion is an exhibition of two hemispheres: one that sits comfortably in the orbit of contemporary art, while the other is slingshotted towards a museological, history lesson. The term “Panarion” in the exhibition title refers to a fourth century treatise on sects and heresies. The word itself, minus Father Epiphanius’ adoption for his treatise, suggests an object that contains a collection of objects, e.g., coliseum, arboretum, aquarium. And you wouldn’t be far off if you guessed similar. “The Panarion was so called as being a ‘basket’ of scraps and fragments ... a kind of medicine chest, in which he [Father Epiphanius] had collected means of healing against the poisonous bite of the heretical serpent.”[2]

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Starting with the tail rather than the body of the exhibition, Part 2 of A Modern Panarion is located in Gallery 10 of The Hugh Lane, which requires asking for directions. Apt placement considering the subject of theosophy and how such secretive doctrines were viewed as fugitive by The Orthodoxy. Artworks by Derek Jarman, Richard Proffitt, Garrett Phelan, Dorje De Burgh are placed alongside published material from Dublin’s own Theosophical Society. This combination creates an environment that flits between evidence room and crime scene drama, typical of those American T.V. crime series that ritually dress serial killer pathology in Voodoo skulls and totems. We are not just “familiar” with such clichés as suggested by Abbott in her essay ‘Full Circle: The Pop Cultural Orbit of Theosophical Thought’, but tired of their now zombified and repetitive resurrection. In two childhood testimonies by Garett Phelan in Abbott’s essay there is a correlation between early New-Age experience as an afflatus for his art-making: 1), the artist’s presence at Newgrange for the Winter Solstice in 1986; 2), his recollections of ‘70s children’s television series Children of the Stones. However, Phelan’s artworks on show, in black/white ganglia networks of collage elements and mock ‘String Art’ (the origins of the latter found in nineteenth century mathematician Mary Everest Boole’s ‘curve stitch’, a visual aid to make mathematical ideas more accessible to children), feel boxed in and illustrative. It would have been appropriate to the subject matter in question to let Phelan off the curatorial leash to expand across the walls like he has energetically conceived in the past. These sober ‘Phelans’ are indeed in keeping with the neighbouring vitrine of theosophical publications, but for me a missed opportunity to go beyond the frame. Across the room from Phelan’s contribution, Dorje De Burgh’s photographs of fantastical murals recently discovered at 3 Ely Place, the Dublin home of the Theosophical Society, have the slow burn fascination of an archaeological dig. Unless the murals are the subject of PhD research, those with a dilettante interest will perhaps find them a tad contrived and illustrative of the silly side of theosophy. Things do get a little more lively and colourful in an adjacent dark room, where the late Derek Jarman’s Super 8 film A Journey to Avebury, and Richard Proffitt’s shrineinstallation and sound work Cosmic Drift: Elevations of a Fried Mystic, bunk together. Jarman’s film, a crepuscular meditation on Avebury – a haven of Neolithic stone circles in the Wiltshire countryside, England – sparkles with visual noise of rapeseed gold and electric blue. Yes, with Super 8 you can’t really lose when it comes to eliciting transcendental mysticism. That said, Jarman’s A Journey to Avebury is wonderfully trippy; redolent of watching analogue T.V. at 2am, tuned into BBC 2 and magic mushrooms. Further, it offsets Proffitt’s eccentric and playful installation, wherein (among a plethora of curiosities) animal skulls, a pasted newspaper article on “Neo-

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HooDoo”[3], ritualised trinkets, a psychedelic lightbox, and an eye catching ornate frame in which a shattered picture is held behind intact glass, have been vomited up to form a constellation of flea market mysticism. On top of which resounds an audio accompaniment of a repurposed ‘60s Pink Floyd lyric, set on loop.

Klingberg has wallpapered the Golden Bough with black vinyl that is patterned with a repeat Lunar Cycle. It sweeps around the ‘stadium’ curves of the gallery, cradling McMahon’s framed pencil drawings. Moore’s pairing of the graphic ‘Klingberg’ and handmade ‘McMahons’ is the eye- and brain-popping highlight of A Modern Panarion. McMahon produces a visceral and always surprising aesthetic that somehow gets into the bones before burrowing through marrow into the brain. Just inside the door of Gallery 8 you are met by a coloured pencil drawing of an anus with pubic whiskers in a ring. Pencilled in the corner are three words: excavated and placed. YBA Mat Collishaw’s visually ambiguous Bullet Hole (1988) comes to mind. Depending on your proclivity, this is the exit or entrance to McMahon’s diagrammatic Self-Pleasuring Series of mechanical and biological systems that are tied off with tubes and stamped with emblems, orifices and papules. They are the de-eroticised nuts and bolts of pleasure. Reminding one of schizophrenic-mystic, Antonin Artaud’s “Body without Organs”. Especially Deleuze’s expansion of Artaud’s phrase as an organism that transcends the actual into an unprincipled and disorganised virtual plane of ‘becoming’[4]. Simply put, the undiscovered country of the female orgasm. “In 1910, according to Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Freud made a request: ‘Promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. [...] We must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.’ Against what, asked Jung. ‘Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.’”[5] However, more and more theorists are emerging from the bedsheets of Freudianism and the cold sobriety of post-structuralism to uncover flights of esotericism behind Deleuze and others. “Perhaps most challenging of all is the general academic–philosophical prejudice against the threatening proximity of intuitive, mystical, or even simply more emotional modes of mind to the cold calculations of pure reason, especially when such calculations appear in principle to be open, democratic, and formally unimpeachable in contrast with the dark and esoteric yearnings expressed in the gnomic pronouncements of initiates”.[6] In a digital era when the image is about to eat its own pixels; when skyscraper footnotes foot the bill; when our image storage banks show signs of botulism, Pádraic E. Moore cracks open the swollen can of esotericism with a bullwhip and a flourish. AUGUST 2014 (#85): ARM-WRESTLING TRANSCENDENCE Ruth E. Lyons, ‘The Pinking’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin 8 – 30 AUGUST, 2014.

RUTH E. LYONS’ art is a balancing act between subject and matter. Her subject is too big to contain in a mere sentence here. When push comes to shove, however, Lyons

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Metaphorically, if Part 2 is the masculine attic of A Modern Panarion, then Part 1 in the Golden Bough (Gallery 8) is a common room of spread-eagled femininity. Even with Moore’s placement of Garrett Phelan’s ‘unconscious’ radio wave/sound work in Gallery 8 – something that you will likely miss than tune into – this is a two-woman presentation in which Gunilla Klingberg’s work enhances and complements the content of Bea McMahon’s work and vice versa.

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does touch upon the spirit and history of the Irish landscape by constructing psychical and physical landmarks in the wake of the pixellated storm-cloud of technological progress. It’s a bit like a child flying a kite in stratospheric winds – either the cord breaks from the exertion, or the child gets swept away in the cosmic ether. But, somehow, Lyons succeeds in containing what could be perceived as metaphysical hot air with sheer physical endeavour. Scale, weight, motion, light and no small amount of muscle being the anchors for her expression. Island hopping, a lighthouse beacon, water towers, wetsuits, Lyons’ ongoing fabrication of her “aquaculture”[1] as a solo artist and one half of The Good Hatchery[2] has cumulatively grown to Sims-like proportions over the last five years. On the day of visiting the artist’s solo exhibition ‘The Pinking’ at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, rain was bucketing from the grey heavens. Once inside the door the sound of diverted rainwater could be heard gurgling in some blind gutter outside. Lyons’ aquaculture aside, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery was already awash with, well, water, before the artist’s five watercolours, one C-print and a vertiginous installation were even considered.

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The title of the exhibition, ‘The Pinking’, sounds like the sexual coming of age of the daughters of some island tribe. Sex and gender is immediately implied by the colour pink. Over the course of the twentieth century pink was culturally typecast as feminine by the clothing industry. Hard to fathom that the recommended colour for infant boys Pre-World War I was “stronger” pink. While for girls, a “sweeter” blue.[3] Chroma-profiling also bridges philosophy. Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ theory was described by literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman as ‘pornosophy’ or ‘pinking philosophy’: “To paint philosophy pink means to highlight the relationship between philosophy and sexuality”.[4] Not since Homer’s “rosy fingered” dawn caressed the majority of Brendan Earley’s drawings for his solo show at the RHA in 2012 has pink, or its inference, been so prevalent in an Irish artist’s exhibition.[5] Lyons’ five watercolours – all titled The Pinking like siblings, and individually time-stamped on the gallery works list – are deceivingly twee when removed from the contexts that shape the artist’s previous work. I’m not sure I would give them a second glance without the accumulative experiences of Lyons’ art. But they draw you in if you give them a chance. Pastel blues, yellows, greens and pinks suggest soft landscapes that float between sky, sea, bogland, sunset and dusk. The best of which suggest rather than describe. Very 1980s dreamy (if you are of that generation), they bring to mind Morten Harket, lead singer of the Swedish pop band A-ha, being pulled through a mirror in the music video for Take On Me. Lyons’ single C-print of an aerial banner with the expression SKY IS THE LIMIT against a grey diaphanous sky-scape is the residual trace of a public art commission by the artist from 2011.[6] Minus the original context, the C-print still activates the gallery. The beautifully depicted hair-thin lines of the banner’s towing-bridle are almost invisible to the eye. This is representation at its utmost delicate and suggestive. It seems that water and mirrors go hand-in-hand in the visual articulation of boundless otherworldliness. Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) is one such example. Mark Durkan’s recent solo show at The Lab is another.[7] Lyons sculptural centrepiece for her waterlogged exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is composed of two large, circular mirrors that face each other on the gallery ceiling and floor. The use of Mylar sheeting rather than glass-backed mirror creates the effect of a discombobulated infinity mirror: it’s no Versailles. Neatly puncturing the ceiling mirror, six rusted chains hang the height of the gallery with a pink buoy tied to each

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end. The buoys bob low just above the mirrored floor like old old men’s testicles, creating the sensation of water as you gaze down the illusive portal of repeated circular chambers. As a viewer I found myself caught between the vertigo of immanence and the agoraphobia of transcendence.

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‘The Pinking’ feels like an immaterial tracing of Lyons’ elegant but brawny materialism: as if the artist’s brow remained dry during the making. Although the chains and buoys lend some corporeality, my initial criticism was there’s not enough ‘body’ in the exhibition for the long-term memory to hold onto. I struggled with this at first. But, afterward – removed from the gallery – the exhibition began to gain some muscle, arm-wrestling uneasy first impressions into submission.

AUGUST 2014 (#86): SO ... WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY?’

Niamh Forbes & Aoife Mullan, ‘What Stands Forth’, Basic Space. Dublin

Basic Space, Dublin, is an open-plan artists’ studios, transforming now and then into a sprawling gallery or studios-cum-gallery. As the latter, the racket of art-making in the studios and its resolution in the gallery invariably spill into one another. However, this lively characteristic plays into the shared hands of Niamh Forbes’ and Aoife Mullan’s current exhibition of deliberate irresolution, resolutely titled ‘What Stands Forth’. A timber and fabric partitioned room stands askew in the gallery like a B&Q washitsu (Japanese-style room). The exterior aspect of the room that greets you first on entering the gallery is painted cobalt blue, and dressed with four horizontal swatches of coloured fabric that alternate between Marigold yellow and orange (the rubber glove kind of Marigold, not the flower). The composition suggests domesticated, quotidian reality at its most unambitious: ‘it’s a good day to hang out the washing and dream of sun holidays’. On the exterior sides of the room an interior light source helps reveal the stud wall behind the scrim-faced partition. Towards the front, a doorway invites you in. Before entering the room – after a quick glance inside reveals nothing immediately informative – glazed eyes are drawn to four sheets of paper on the far gallery wall with printed text. An explanation? A statement? No such luck! The text is a garbled account of Forbes’ and Mullan’s deceivingly arbitrary decisionmaking during installation over the course of the preceding days and nights. Subject matter?, nil. Interests?, nada. Reasoning?, zilch. It dawns that their stumbling through confessional is the exhibition’s raison d’être. Peppered with poetic slippages that dance around revelation, the text reveals everything about something about nothing. The room – (from a distance) minimalism at its anaemic vampire best – gets a transfusion when you step inside. But the subject of the room still remains pallid; closed to interrogation, open to acceptance. Naked light bulbs suggest great ideas! While emasculating red and blue aroma diffusers of a eucalyptus and rosemary mix transport you elsewhere. Above, floor underlay has the Midas touch. (The blue,

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21 – 28 August, 2014.

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yellow and red candescence amidst the white-washed interior bespeaks Mondrian.) While floor-bound in a corner, a neat stack of sanded timber off-cuts have been given unnecessary attention. From such accented and perfumed suggestiveness, subjectivity abounds. The room is a space where you can summon an image that, perhaps, cannot be made. On a table a slip of paper with the printed website address wwwww.eu makes me third-guess successive second-guessing. 5 Ws? – an acronym for Who? What? When? Where? Why?? Makes sense in a context of non-sense. In situ, I type wwwww.eu into my phone’s browser – a Tumblr homepage opens. The online “virtual iteration” promised in Forbes’ and Mullan’s text is nowhere to be found. Instead, an inactive site with the graphic signatures of the exhibition. However, later that night on my home computer, wwwww.eu opens onto a rudimentary 3-D Sketch Up animation that orbits Basic Space gallery, the artists’ fabricated room, and a flattened aerial map of the local area. While watching the 14 second orbiting loop I am immediately brought back to the room. Their exhibition is a Möbius strip of endless dirtying and vacuuming (a self-perpetuating impasse). Niamh Forbes’ and Aoife Mullan’s ‘What Stands Forth’ at Basic Space is a perverse, clever, self-effacing and original ‘staging’, in which “every word is a word de trop” (Emil Cioran)[1), and every thought and image produced thereafter, of the observer’s design.

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The first paragraph of their text in the gallery says it all. (This review, never happened). ‘We should fill this place.’, remarked someone. ‘Four kids. They were looking for an exhibition. Instead they found eachother.’. the same someone. (idiosyncratic punctuation by the artists.)

SEPTEMBER 2014 (#87): I’M WITH STUPID

NATHANIEL MELLORS. ‘The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview’. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. 5 September – 1 November 2014.

SEPTEMBER is when art galleries draw back the curtains on their big-gun exhibitions. Luckily, big reputations are relatively affordable in the artworld when it comes to exhibition-making, but sought-after artists are invariably booked up years in advance. Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) must have a finger glued to the artworld’s pulse when you consider the International artists they have exhibited in recent years with very little means. Last year it was Ed Atkins, on the cusp of his speedy ascent up the who’s who of contemporary art: Atkins has since had solo shows at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo and London’s Serpentine Slacker Gallery. This year Nathaniel Mellors is TBG+S’s Autumn BOOM-stick, who, in the past five years has presented work at just about every curated exhibition that matters in Europe, including the 4th Tate Triennial (Altermodern), The British Art Show 7, and the 54th

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Venice Biennale.

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Experiencing Mellors’ art is a bit like the honeymoon period of a relationship (split from reality and sealed in dyad world where language and the senses get all gooey). He is partly known for his vomiting and talking animatronic-heads, which are mutant offspring from his better known Ourhouse series (2010 - ongoing). The latter is the artworld equivalent of a T.V. soap opera or sitcom, wherein warped sub-plots and inbred characterizations are sealed within a cul-de-sac of absurdity. However, whereas one can devour bad T.V. efficiently without recourse to waste, Mellors’ art requires either a gagging reflex (his puking sculptures), a slow metabolism, or the constitution of Elvis for indigestible irresolution. His hyper-characterizations also help to draw you into the orbit of his absurdist universe; a universe that synthesizes the semanticmunching shenanigans of Spike Milligan and Samuel Beckett with the affected T.V. theatre of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson’s Spaced. At TBG+S we get to experience his most recent short film The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, which welds the missing links of a speculative prehistory with a join of science-fiction slapstick that is distinctly British.

The twenty-two minutes long film opens with a scene reminiscent of the nondescript rocky landscapes that Captain James T. Kirk and crew repeatedly materialize upon in the original Star Trek series; when, before CGI, most representations of the ‘otherworldly’ looked uncannily, and disappointingly, Earth-like. A wide-eyed young man wearing a space-age onesie – to compliment a lack of street smarts we discover later – descends down the hillside like a toddler with momentary purpose. He arrives at a cave mouth where a ‘supposed’ Neanderthal sits with a scattering of his personal effects (including a resin bust of Shakespeare which materializes in the gallery as a delicious sculpture with drinking straws poking from the skullcap). The interaction between the man (named Truson – a spinoff character from Mellors’ Ourhouse) and the Neanderthal begins immediately without the buffer of small talk. The Neanderthal’s gestures and responses seem haphazard and playful, as if predicated on previous experiences with modern day humans. Perhaps tormented by human predictability, he makes up answers as he goes along for masturbatory amusement. On the instruction of the Neanderthal, Truson scans his prehistoric interviewee with a device that determines chronology. Absurdly, the legs and head of the Neanderthal date from different time periods. Anthropological hijinks ensues. The ‘why?’ and ‘what for?’ of cave art is proffered by Truson. From the Neanderthal’s answers we learn that he has been expelled from the cave by something called “Sporgo”, because his art isn’t “Sporgo-ey” anymore. European cave art is removed of any ethnographic significance when the Neanderthal sheds light on his method of application. Neanderthal: I did ‘em with me nobber. Truson: What the Buffalo-Man? And the Bison-Lady? Neanderthal: I did ‘em with me Janets. I just swing ‘em round on the walls in the dark I don’t know how they come out like – but they do.

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With every blindfolded revision of prehistory the Neanderthal – misunderstood club-wielder and derogatory term for present day football hooligan – seems to grow in cunning. Once we were told that Neanderthals hadn’t the spark of intelligence to control fire. Now we are told that they interbred with modern humans, ate salad and most recently, made art. Mellors plays with these shifting ethnographic paradigms in The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, and places art centre stage as a marker for human consciousness.

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The Neanderthal answers Truson’s questions with the tone of an over-rehearsed tour guide who’s had his fill of fair-weather tourists with no regard for personal space or imagination. Mellors’ suspenseful audio-scape of synthesized sounds compounds the sense that everything is not as it seems on the surface. This sense of foreboding comes to psychedelic fruition when the Neanderthal invites Truson to partake in some ritual substance abuse: presumedly some kind of Neanderthal Art foreplay. Truson is coaxed into snorting mind-expanding substances while the Neanderthal cakes weird substances onto his face. Never physically forced, Truson is mentally teased and taunted by the Neanderthal. Sitting before a silk flame machine – what would a prehistoric movie be without fire, even the illusion of fire? – the Neanderthal hunkers over his puppet and suggests a twisted scenario that involves Truson putting his face in the ‘fire’. Neanderthal: Yes, to expand the mind – face in ﬁre at about gas-mark six for ﬁve minutes then I’ll lower the heat for let’s say another 10 mins. and then I’ll give you a taste, see how you feel and we’ll take it from there.

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From here on in the Neanderthal, the dialogue, the mise-en-scène start to lose resolution. Inside the cave, where the Neanderthal warns Truson not to enter because of Sporgo, the young man comes across a table with indiscernible objects. Not far behind the Neanderthal appears, sporting a streamlined, tropical-themed shell suit, while a light projection divides the pair into a gridded pattern: Tron meetsTeen Wolf. Effervescently dancing back and forth, the Neanderthal sums up man’s search for humanity’s provenance as a fool’s errand. Neanderthal: Ten cubic centimetres of man-jam! Don’t worry brainpan – there’s more than one way of being human. It’s all a question of resolution. I’m a bigger resolution. You can’t resolve me. The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview plays with the fact that prehistory is a clean slate for fictional re-visioning. Mellors is ad-libbing the past with the same arch-zeal as Monty Python, or Catholicism for that matter, leaving the viewer stranded between giddiness and Machiavellian unease. In this context the resin bust of Shakespeare with drinking straws bespeaks gift shop tat; a Slurpee of knowledge that achieves brain freeze not enlightenment. Patrick Kennedy – the actor who injects crackling charisma into the role of the Neanderthal – describes The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview perfectly: “It’s sort of like a psychedelic caveman movie that makes no apparent sense. But this is what’s fun. It makes sense at the back of your head.” FEBRUARY 2015 (#88): TOWARD A REGIONAL ART CRITICISM: Thoughts on PVA’s Regional Art Criticism Programme.

“I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets...” (Peter Schjeldahl)

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#88

ART CRITICISM, the good stuff, cannot be taught. An orphan from the first word, a hobo until the last, art criticism is something you adopt rather than learn. It’s method is not transferable through explication from master to student: the lessons of Jacques Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster apply here. In fact, the art critics that I read and aspire to are not masters of anything. They cannot afford to be specialists. They are Jacks and Jills of all trades: disordered tool boxes in their improvisational method; colourful toy rooms when it comes to there playful referencing. All in all they are sophisticates of mediocrity, verbally sizzling now and then when the art they awkwardly confront comes close to their low expectations relative to their ‘all for show’ towering egos.

The thing is, Paper Visual Art Journal’s (PVA) “Regional Art Writing Programme 2015” got me thinking that, even though the art criticism I rate cannot be taught, maybe, just maybe, such would-be art critics can be nudged into existence. Oblige me while I dig a little deeper into something that perhaps wasn’t meant in such a deep-seated way.

I’ll tell you why. Art criticism is a casual acquaintance of urbanity. The would-be art critic is just a hop, skip and jump from art college teat to teething art institution. She has suckled on e-flux, cut his teeth on Artforum, all that is left is to copy and paste. Homogenising done. I think we are all tired of the same old hand-me-down Ring-Around the Rosie art discourse. Fed up of communicating in wink and wank entendres that always come in threes. The remedy? Perhaps dialect? Dialect is arguably a symptom of reproducing the poor, but a verbally rich dialect is also something that can be harnessed for the good in art criticism. I can’t imagine reading Dave Hickey with the same joy without the pronounced West Texas accent in his prose which enhances his natural Las Vegas trailer-trash jouissance. Dialect can also be style. When eulogising the late Robert Hughes, the best prose stylists of the profession, Christian Viveros-Fauné stated: “Few things count so much for a critic as style – it binds readers together with writers like epoxy.” PVA should be commended if their aim is to till the regional soil for critical stylists, but they are mistaken if they are setting-up-shop in the sticks to teach method. Further, how do you till the regional soil for existing art critics if your only place of operations is the regional art centre, the single institutional entity that hosts the PVA art criticism workshops the length and breadth of the country? Your select sample group of institutionally-sheltered critical initiates becomes a case of reproducing the beige beast.

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In PVA’s programme statement there is something about how the word “regional” spoons “art criticism” – it’s such an odd juxtaposition. Does regional art criticism mean ‘not Dublin!’? Are PVA talking about sewing the seeds for a provincial corn-fed art criticism that stays put in the soil it was first planted – virgin soil that has not been fertilised by artworld pulp? Or, are PVA suggesting retaining the values, beliefs and muck savage of the aspiring regional art critic, far far away from Dublin’s uniform art intelligentsia? Any of these aims could inspire a critical harvest, especially the muck savage aspect?

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‘Beige beast’ in the sense that for some time now art institutions in general have been caught in a regurgitative mirror-phase with regard to art discourse: the topics of ‘the institution’, ‘education’, ‘curation’ and ‘public sphere’ delivered with the same razzmatazz as an Oxfam board meeting. Conversely, I quite like the idea of fugitive art critics being unearthed in local community halls. Take for instance the local water charge protest meetings held in badly heated and lit community halls around the country; sweaty condensation on the windowpanes the sign of brickbats and spittle being flung from mouth to ear. I will leave the penultimate words to actor Tommy Lee Jones who, when on the hunt fora Fugitive of his own, recites in his full Texan mother-tongue: “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area.” If you are hiding out in any of the above and have an inkling that being an art critic is for you, check out the remaining PVA workshop dates below at an art centre near you.

APRIL 2015 (#89): WHATCHAMACALLIT:

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KARI ALTMAN. ‘Xomia (Return Home, Realflow, All Terrain)’. Ellis King Gallery, Dublin. 27 March – 2 May 2015.

I think a lot about the gelatinous forms and roles we have to assume to be mobile – about transhumanism, mythical animal powers, feminism and queerness, exoticism, cgi characters, and Realflow. (Kari Altmann)[1] ELLIS KING GALLERY sits amid the commercial tumbleweeds of Dublin 8’s White Swan industrial estate. White walls with galvanised trim, the gallery is contained within a tin can warehouse you’d more likely find in New York’s Chelsea district. I’m not sure why but Dublin’s Mother’s Tankstation came to mind as soon as I pulled up for the first time at Ellis King. Perhaps the warehouse setting and its remoteness from the city? Mother’s Tankstation inflated rather than diffused their relative isolation on the Dublin quays by making the experience of viewing art a private, verging on familial affair within their part-time home on the urban shore of the River Liffey. Whether you found this a disconcerting or nice experience is perhaps a matter of how secure you felt during your formative years. In the same sense you could also say Ellis King is a little detached from civilisation amongst the steel shuttered business community in White Swan. I don’t know why this is relevant to the experience in the gallery, but it is somehow. That said, Ellis King’s location, scale and industrial mien already defines it as a singularity among the museums, art centres, commercial galleries, artist-run and curator-run art spaces that make up Dublin’s art scene. Better still, the art shown so far at Ellis King is the kind of glossy art magazine, not limited by geography, art fair fare you come across online on the likes of artobserved.com or contemporaryartdaily.com. In some ways the curatorled and altogether too earthy and textually defined identity of the Irish art scene needs

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an injection of the big bad art market. Ellis King is potentially a refreshing and serious alternative to all that.

A year old this month, Ellis King has understandably proven to be a moody adolescent during its short lifespan, with a string of pick ‘n’ mix exhibitions to date. Over that year none of the gallery e-vites attracted my attention (ironically, the definition of the now archaic transitive verb ‘evite’ is ‘to shun’ or ‘to avoid’). However, that all changed last month when “Kari Altmann” entered my inbox.

This performative aspect is reminiscent of artworld ‘riddler’ Ryan Gander’s solo exhibition ‘This Consequence’ at London’s Lisson Gallery back in 2006, in which all gallery staff, including the director (awkwaaard!) wore white Adidas tracksuits with embroidered stains in dark red thread. It is for those who attended on the night to judge whether this was cringeworthy or intentional queerness on the part of Altmann. Because of this performance those who attended on the night will have a different view of the exhibition than those who have and will visit the gallery during the exhibition run. From my ‘clean’ experience of Altmann’s exhibition at Ellis King I believe this is not just an important exhibition that asks many questions, but is also a gateway exhibition for Ellis King Gallery, and for Irish artists with a similar PostInternet bent as Altmann (more later). But before I go any deeper into the gallery ergonomics of Altmann’s Post-Internet art, it maybe helpful to discuss the label PostInternet art for those who are not in the know (like me). “Post-internet is anything that takes the idea of the internet as a starting point. The internet can be understood as an historical era and as an ecology of systems, a logic of networks – a very wide framework indeed. Any work that consciously comments on or includes the logic of the net is considered post-internet.” (Juliette Bonneviot)[2] Simple. Chance of ruffling feathers = zero!? Well, why is it when someone tries to define Post-Internet art to me, especially faceto-face, I go to my happy place? Perhaps in part because of the alien vernacular used, and also because I’m not embedded or vested in the Post-Internet art subculture or its historical precedents. I would call myself an advocate of whatchamacallit. Even a fan of whatchamacallit. But not a whatchamacallit purest. I have come to the conclusion that Post-Internet art and its variants challenges the traditional notion of art criticism because of the new aesthetic and vernacular used to describe that new aesthetic. The question: “Do you consider yourself a Post-Internet artist/writer/curator?”[3] is significant in this regard. No more can we use the cushion of art history to break the bottomless pit of the internet, a virtual space in which we have no shoulders to stand on. “Just as curators like Caitlin Jones have argued that new modes of analysis and vocabulary are required to critically engage with and evaluate Post-Internet art practices without recourse to comparisons to conceptual and post-conceptual art” (Nik Kosmas).[4] That said, I don’t see Post-Internet art as a threat to art criticism but as having the capacity to transform art criticism in a refreshing way. Personally, I think the term is helpful – but I would say that because I work with words.

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I purposely avoid art openings for the sake of impartiality in my reviewing, and even more so for the sake of the art (I take my art anti-socially). This also means sacrificing opening night performances when part of the package, which was the case with Altmann at Ellis King. Anyway, sometimes the residue of the performance in the gallery or secondhand experience by word-of-mouth can be equally if not more synaptically rewarding. I heard through the online grapevine that things got a little quirky on Altmann’s opening night, with a performance by a duet sporting Braveheart warpaint and futurist sportswear.

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Seemingly much maligned by the majority of artists and curators who are inspired by and creatively produce via the internet, and awkwardly accepted by those who don’t have a bull’s notion, the term Post-Internet art has proved discursively trigger happy in recent times because everyone has their own definition of the definition of PostInternet art. The brilliant Brian Droitcour kicked up a virtual hornet’s nest in late 2014 with his article ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’ for Art in America with commentary like this: ‘I know it when I see it’ – like porn, right? It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex – renders it lurid. The definition I’d like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art.[5] No doubt, Post-Internet art does look good in your browser window. We could read Droitcour’s statement as mean-spirited, or just a colourful way to describe the systems and networks of the artworld’s tail in mouth production and consumption, which Post-Internet art signposts without really trying. Droitcour’s opinion of PostInternet art reflects that of Lauren Cornell, curator at New York’s New Museum and former executive director of Rhizome – an online hotspot for “digital cultures” – who according to artnet art critic Ben Davis stated: “‘Post-Internet art’ is an attempt to recapture internet art for gallery culture.”[6] What’s wrong with that!?

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Ironically, the whole Post-Internet art thing is a meta-argument (‘meta’ being one of many prefixes that truck the jabberwocky vernacular produced by the defenders of the internet faith). ‘Meta’ is just another word for being in a reflective mire. But this is what I love about subcultures, whether their hobbyhorse is art or skateboarding, their dialect is their identity. Verbalising culture is as important, if not more important than imaging culture. Word is God. Further, the argument against labeling cultural stuff is the náive by-line teenage indy bands tout when convincing their young fans of their short-lived and shortsighted notions of what constitutes multiform originality and independence from The Man. Labeling and branding is the nature of the capitalist beast. We name it, we own it – without really shaming it. In the 1980s we were ‘the people’ (Live Aid). Today we are part of an online collective, whilst every now and then punctuating those Favorites, Likes, Retweets and Shares with a bit of cherry-topped individuality: “Your ideas and personalities [become] brands instantly [online]” (Altmann).[7] To throw a spanner in the works Altmann refers to herself as a “cloud-based artist”, even though she is casually labelled as a Post-Internet artist by the ignorant. Anyway, on with the show. After passing through what looks and feels like a doctor’s surgery entranceway – minus the pile of Woman’s Way and crookedly hung art – Ellis King explodes into a Tardis. And what better artist than Altmann to elicit fantasies of the future. The work, the gallery, everything feels transitional here. The past is the dirty scuff marks on Ellis King’s painted gallery floor from footfall and winefall and maybe rainfall on the opening night; the future is the palette jack with wooden crates that wait in the wings to be transported from gallery to overseas art fair. I was immediately attracted to these happenstance, transitional marks and objects amidst Altmann’s slick high definition videos, soft definition inkjet backdrops, pounding bass and pop-up graphical displays, because the latter felt in temporal and physical flux, always forcing you to take a step back and to the side, to look askew at the amorphous and veiled aesthetic that breathes a shredded technology. The combination of aquamarine colour-coding, gelatinous blobs, bubbly synths, elicited a layered ecology of generic imagery you might find on a brand spanking

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new computer before you personalise it. Landscapes, space-scapes, animal-scapes, plant-scapes are felt but not visually explicit. Health stores, sports stores, yoga, gyms, showrooms, bikini-clad models draped across cars, business conferences, art fairs are explicitly implicit. This is the territory of oxymoron; contemporary art’s immutable scapegoat. This is Metamodernism, a contemporary moment in which we are ‘feeling’ and ‘oscillating’ our way through the contemporary conditions of virtual excess and physical obsolescence, sincerity and irony, dismay and hope.[8]

Altmann herself once said “I’m into the stressful sublime”.[10] Of all the impressively controlled and articulate things that Altmann has said or written online about internet culture and her own imagistic culturing of the internet, this is most on point. However, I didn’t experience this “stressful sublime” when surrounded by Altmann’s art at Ellis King. I still didn’t experience it when I exited the gallery (the sonic boom effect). I did, however, start the process of feeling it as soon as I hit Dublin City traffic and the inevitable release onto the fluid motorway. Come to think of it stress is not an Event, it’s a process. Stress is more durable than you, me or the pink bunny rabbit. By being somehow into the stressful sublime Altmann discloses that she is both casual addict and pusher of the excess and anxiety perpetuated by the everything and nothing sublime of the internet. Finally, I mentioned above how Altmann’s exhibition is a gateway exhibition for both Eillis King Gallery and Irish artists with an interest in digital cultures. Let’s first take Irish artists and the Irish art context. Over the years there have been some challenging group shows that have shuffled groups of artists who use the internet as a springboard for visual art. By far the best manifestation of this in the gallery was the group exhibition offline at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in 2011, curated by Rayne Booth. Looking back, Booth was an important supporter of internet artists, including the brilliant Eilis McDonald and Alan Butler. I felt the same de-centredness experiencing Booth’s offline as I did experiencing Altmann at Ellis King. I don’t mean this in a Big Lebowski kinda way, but in a violent assault on my aesthetic sensibilities and thought patterns kinda way. However, with more curators than artists in positions of power the group show has become the norm. Solo exhibitions can show upweaknesses, which leads to more questions. Conversely, the curated group show shore upstrengths by way of numbers and curator/artists alliance. These days it’s rare we get to experience individual artists take on the gallery space on their own terms. Perhaps the group show acts as a safety net for both curator and artist. Also, you immediately treble the footfall, make friends, not begrudgers. I eagerly wait for the day when we see more solo shows locally by artists who are embedded in internet culture. Hopefully Ellis King’s Altmann exhibition is seen as an exemplar by Irish curators and directors that such artists can

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Hours and days after seeing Altmann’s work at Ellis King, an exhibition that threw me for a wobble and snuffed out the memory of a lot of good art I’d seen the same week, I mentally revisited the work with the same dumb fascination of a Vulcan trying to crack a smile in front of a mirror. I was hoping to get some verbal foothold on what I felt was an uncomfortable and cold manifestation of the internet in the gallery: (to myself) ‘Thank the Internet God that some of Altmann’s wall works were sealed in perspex because they would perish from breathing in the gallery air.’ One structure that is not so lucky, however, is the aluminum framework of a pop-up display lying flat and skeletal on the gallery floor with the raggedy vinyl remnants of the printed graphic that once covered it, nestling on its industrial next of kin. Also finding purchase in the unbreathable mechanics of Altmann’s materials are Tillandsia (also called air plants that grow without soil). A good substitute for what Droitcour cynically calls the “Post-Internet stylistic trope” of “Sad-looking ferns”.[9]

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risk it alone. If not, for me the over-saturation of curated group shows is a threat to art criticism, transforming it into a gap-fill exercise. Significantly, this is Altmann’s first solo show in Europe. Whether you think the exhibition in question is more art fair booth than authentic exhibition it doesn’t really matter. For me, it’s as authentic as Post-internet art can get in the gallery. “Until smart objects and AR are super available, or until gallery spaces have as much equipment as a Best Buy, conditions are always going to be limited, and the presentations will reflect that” (Altmann).[11] The whole Altmann experience at Ellis King got me thinking about the film Total Recall (1990). Here we are presented with musclebound construction worker with identity issues, Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who is bombarded with images of Mars in his dreams, and by day, the soft brand advertising tactics of a company called Rekall, that convince him to take a virtual ‘memory trip’ to Mars. Some people say that advertising goes over a man’s head. However, after the Altmann experience I feel like Quaid in Total Recall, becoming meta from being exposed to Altmann’s pure metaness at Ellis King. This is an exhibition I cannot imagine happening at, let’s say, Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. All of a sudden Ellis King has eyes peeled and hearts pumping for what may potentially come next. For once, predictions as to who will show next at a gallery in Dublin are out.

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APRIL 2015 (#90): WATER HAS A MEMORY:

TERESA GILLESPIE. MARIA MCKINNEY. CATHERINE BARRAGRY. DEAD ZOO. ArtBox, Dublin, 20 March – 25 April 2015

DANGLING from the ceiling of Dublin’s ArtBox Projects, as if drying out after being trawled from the ocean, Maria McKinney’s monstrous catch forms a hanging garden of tumourous stalactites as part of the group exhibition DEAD ZOO. Up close we find the hanging masses have been chroma-assaulted by aerosol spray paints. Closer, we discover the netting that moulds, folds and holds the monstrous mass of material together. Closer again, a peppering of fake finger nails with a French nail polish finish – the clichéd imagination takes flight: the freakish result of a body drop in a lake close to a nuclear plant? Medical waste accidentally flushed down a toilet that led to the ocean? Drawing back the curtains on this mangrove of teratomas we find a laptop playing an underwater scene of a ‘guiding hand’ navigating the depths. This hand from Atlantis is disrupted by a viewfinder made of some composite material and shaped like an early 3D printer prototype for a geoid. McKinney’s diorama feels ad hoc, homespun and homemade: some school science project by some thing in some far flung future – the mind boggles. Everything else in DEAD ZOO is offset by McKinney’s Othership installation. In a sense Teresa Gillespie’s and Catherine Barragry’s art come across as beached remnants from McKinney’s big splash in the gallery. In this year’s March/April edition of Visual Artists’ News Sheet I reviewed Gillespie’s solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. There, as here at ArtBox – albeit in an obviously edited presentation – tactile impressions of sinuous intestines, swollen masses and samples from the primordial soup lay stagnant on the gallery floor. For

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some reason I have never felt the disgust that others have commented on with regard to Gillespie’s art. In fact, I find the artist’s yuk and muck materialism comforting. There’s something preverbal in her film montages; flashbacks to paranoid-schizoid infancy, a time when we find ourselves enmeshed in the parts rather than the whole of the mother. Whether you like it or not Gillespie always manages to leave you with an afterimage. The one I took away from ArtBox is of a baby buggy marooned on a choking mudbank from the video work swollen, squirm, seeping sticky slip spit.

But the work that challenges McKinney’s big splash at ArtBox is an almost imperceptible splash from Barragry, titled What that which is above is made by that which is below and that which is below is like that above. An upside-down, head-high plastic container spits out a thread from its mouth while, up close, water is found dribbling down the thread’s back like glycerol ants. Down, down the water tightropes, first through a bone fragment that seesaws on a handmade stilt, then, onto the gallery floor where a discrete puddle collects and a handmade hem prevents the trickle from escaping into the gallery. For me, Barragry is a revelation. Her set of objects at ArtBox is complete in their shared double-bindedness. More please! However what we need now is to counterbalance my ‘girl-crush’ at ArtBox with a starry-eyed bro-romance. In Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Han Solo disembowels a creature seconds dead, then stuffs a bloodied, cold and dying Luke Skywalker in with the warm giblets. But beyond the disgust, violence and implied stink of the event, it was the imagined sensation of comfort and warmth within the disemboweled creature, relative to the icy winds of planet Hoth outside, that had a visceral and lasting effect on me as a kid. Perhaps, it was a case of being young, and therefore instinctually closer to the experience of being in the mother’s womb. At Dublin’s ArtBox artists Catherine Barragry, Teresa Gillespie, Maria McKinney and curator Hilary Murray manage to stuff me right back in the womb for a moment before wrenching me back out into the cold light of day.

APRIL 2015 (#91): STRANGER THAN HISTORY:

AOIBHEANN GREENAN. ‘DMC – Dunmurry May-Day Conspiracy’. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, 17 April – 20 June 2015 >>>>>

AOIBHEANN GREENAN’S art is like fellow Irish artist Sean Lynch’s art dunked in plutonium. That’s the initial conclusion I came to when confronted with Greenan’s

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If Gillespie’s art is the stillborn manifestation of preverbal memories dug up from the grave of the preverbal unconscious, and then activated and corrupted by corruptible adulthood, Barragry’s art is innocently tick-tocking away in the gallery. There’s something both physical and cerebral about Barragry’s work – the best of both worlds – in which performance continues in the gallery even though the performer has left the building. A timber stepladder activates an elevated pair of black and white photographs, one of a child and maybe her mother; the other of the same child, same pose, with a donkey. The eye vacillates. The memory loads with uncanny and nostalgic irruptions. Floor-bound, a fantastical ‘anthill’ provokes a stoop and invites an eye. Wall-bound, the top and tail of a leafless and soilless tree is sewn into a swath of brown fabric: a natural palindrome, an a priori sacrifice.

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current solo exhibition entitled ‘DMC - Dunmurry May-Day Conspiracy’ at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S). The reason why Lynch kept punctuating my experience of Greenan’s so-called “full-scale inhabitable diorama” is simple: their shared and alternative re-telling of the marvelous history of the short-lived DeLorean car factory located on the outskirts of Belfast (1981-82), which manufactured the car that would win over hearts and minds and not to forget Time in Back to the Future (1985). Lynch, whose work will be unveiled next month in the most dramatic circumstances of his career when he represents Ireland at the Venice Biennale, performs a kind of cultural archaeology of historical curiosities which he then transposes into the gallery as art. He took on the subject of the DeLorean car factory in his project ‘DeLorean Progress Report’. One memorable image from that project, which I experienced at Belfast’s Catalyst Arts in 2012, is a photograph of crabs taking up residence in discarded DeLorean car panels coated in the bejeweled benthic landscape of Galway Bay’s ocean floor. When we think of John DeLorean as someone who built and courted fantasy in the way he dreamt-up the first muscle car (1964 Pontiac GTO) and managed to woo the Bond Girl, Ursula Andress, there was something fantastically apt about discovering the stainless steel, no-rust panels of his DeLorean sports car becoming a living, breeding Atlantis for the crustaceans, forever and ever. In the same way a giant, rhinestone encrusted boy-Narcissus in Las Vegas might live up to the vanity of Liberace.

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But whereas Lynch is a careful chronicler, tip-toeing and leafing-through the treasure map of archive and rumour connected with the aftermath of the DeLorean car factory’s bankruptcy, Greenan rides roughshod over history to stage a fictional history that involves a clan of local Neo-Druids coming out in protest against the bulldozing of a Hawthorn tree on the site where the DeLorean car factory was being built in 1978. At TBG+S we are presented with a parallel world where things don’t exactly ring true. The Irish folklore of druids and fairies is double-distilled through a believable protest (in this era of protest) and Greenan’s physical manufacturing of a dreamt-up battle between the forces of pectoral capitalism and the lithe sprites of fireside storytelling. This jumble of history and fiction, fiction and history, manages to discombobulate like a double-agent narrative. Greenan’s fiction is the enemy of history. Lynch, like Greenan, handmade his own DeLorean. But Lynch faithfully copied the dusky stainless steel body of the fugitive sports car and displayed it piecemeal in the gallery. Whereas Greenan has fabricated a tatterdemalion timberland at TBG+S, in which an uprooted Hawthorn tree is fused with a full-scale DeLorean made of plywood and chipboard. Helping to herald and illustrate Greenan’s historical fiction is the biohazard oranges, yellows, reds and blacks in her fun ceremonial banner that waits in the wings of the gallery for the flag bearers to enter the Neo-Pagan fray. It is within the framing of the ceremonial banner that Greenan’s expression comes alive, with fire-breathing graphics describing traffic cones, bulldozers and burning tyre effigies that bellow sculptural smoke to form penciled druids in the night sky. The artist’s materials look and feel nuclear. More’s the pity Greenan’s dangerous materiality does not exactly spill out into the gallery. Everything feels like a speech bubble about to burst, but safely contained. Only when you get up close and lose yourself within the framing of the car, the rag infested Hawthorn and the ceremonial banner do you imagine a flaming confetti enveloping you. Further, there is a perceived conflict in the gallery between a story being told in the past tense and a story to be enacted in the future tense. It’s a case of the conventions of

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display vying against the potential of play. What Greenan’s exhibition is calling out for is people, participation and the whispering “Celtic mysticism”[1] in the gallery to at least compete with the street noise of Temple Bar outside. This exhibition is an experience that should be shared. The scheduled performance on the 30 April is a must, in theory. When all is said and done, it’s very exciting to imagine what will come from an artist and art-making process that is not inhibited by the script of history.

MAY 2015 (#92):DRESSED TO THE MACK:

DECLAN CLARKE. ‘Wreckage in May’. The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 30 April – 13 September 2015.

Actors and Agents pursue; can a spirit pursue?[1]

When discussing Clarke’s films there is an obligation to reference French New Wave Fim and auteur theory as the press release does. And if that’s your thing on with you. But my experience of Clarke’s art so far is more everyday familiar than exclusive avant-garde. Further, Wreckage in May comes across as more boyhood fantasy than historisation. Perhaps the boyhood fantasy of Clarke’s father’s generation when the Cold War thriller was plastered in the Brylcreem of espionage. In Wreckage in May an agent (played by Clarke who wears a grey rain mack to highlight his personification) tails an elegantly dressed female character through the streets of Paris. First, we follow the agent and this person of interest into the Hugh Lane, then, a library, a museum lecture, the woman’s apartment, and finally we watch the agent checking out the Hugh Lane collection, alone. Wreckage in May is almost entirely shot from behind the actors’ heads. In the first scene in the Hugh Lane we get a partial view of the woman’s profile – the first and last time – and a glimpse into her character, who seemingly has a thing for Gustave Courbet and the French Impressionists. Fast-forward thirty-minutes: the film ends where it began, in the Hugh Lane, with the protagonists’ roles reversed. This time around the mack-less and seemingly off-duty agent takes-in Courbet and the Impressionists on his own time. Gone is the agent’s intensity of brow and rigid coat-hanger shoulders. Gone is the anxiety of getting caught looking. We are left to lazily look at a man in a gallery looking at paintings. Wreckage in May is a mediation on looking and indeed, laziness (more later). But before we get to the tail of the tale it may be helpful to try an unearth the history that undergirds the plot of the film. The title Wreckage in May refers to the human wreckage following the Versailles’ (French Army’s) reconquering of Paris from the left-wing Communards that seized power from the French government in March of 1871. The government, led by Adolphe Thiers, was already forced by Bismarck to politically bend-the-knee

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CURRENTLY screening at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery and commissioned by the Hugh Lane, Declan Clarke’s film Wreckage in May (2015) rolls out like a Möbius strip, beginning and ending in the same toilet-flush of white lead paint, man and animal found in Gustave Courbet’s painting The Diligence of Snow (1860). The thirty-five minute film, one of three by the Irish artist to be screened at the Hugh Lane between now and September*, begins – context-specifically – in the Hugh Lane.

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after France lost the Franco-Prussian War in January of 1871. The French gave up Alsace and Lorraine in the terms of surrender, but not Paris. So the potential for political hurly burly in Paris after France lost the war was a given. Especially when you consider “The people of Paris [being] farther to the left than the rest of France”[2], plus the emergence of a women’s socialist movement and a pre-Habermasian public sphere with the legalisation of public meetings in 1868.[3] These burgeoning sociopolitical elements forecasted an already emerging proletariat politics that was mentally locked and loaded for a leftist revolution well before the Prussians entered the fray. This short lived détournement (occupying the “proper place of the dominant social order”[4]) by the workers of the Paris Commune, what Lenin referred to in impotent phraseology as “The Festival of the Oppressed,” and Marx and Engels “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” would, according to Adam Gobnik, end up being one of the “four great traumas that shaped modern France [including] “the 1789 Revolution, the ascent of Vichy, in 1940, and ... May, 1968”.[5]

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Although the subject of the Paris Commune is the historical pivot on which Wreckage in May turns, it is the transformation in art and society that Clarke succeeds in elegantly advancing beyond the events of 1971. For instance, in the film the agent’s surveillance on the female character explicitly signposts the seeds of socialist egalitarianism among women during and after the suppression of the Paris Commune. Further, in the library scene we are given a glimpse of a book the young woman is researching titled The Women Incendiaries (Edith Thomas), pointing to the “female proto-suicide bombers pétroleuses”[6], who debatably set fire to much of the city when in retreat from the advancing Versailles. There is also the moment in the woman’s apartment when the agent sniffs at a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polishborn German revolutionary and agitator who played a key role in the founding of the Polish Social Democratic Party, and who coincidently was born on the same year and month the Paris Commune came into power. However, it is the film’s focus on women bathing in the light of Degas, Morisot and Renoir in the Hugh Lane that signposts the de-politicised space of the canvas postCommune. In some ways French Impressionism gave French society the facelift that the Commune failed to do – if we define social change as a question of appearances, which it invariably is to those in power. Government policies didn’t change all that much in the succeeding years following the suppression of the Commune. Conversely, French society portrayed through the Impressionists’ paint brush was a world in which light and leisure went hand in hand, not the guns and barricades of the Commune. We could be critical of the likes of Monet for painting burning sunsets not burning buildings. It is this “De-Politicisation”[7] and “Re-writing”[8] of the canvas post-Commune that affects the reputation of the main historical player in Wreckage in May, Courbet, who was charged, fined and forced into exile after he allegedly vandalised the Vendôme column as an elected member of the Paris Commune. Displayed alongside Clarke’s Wreckage in May in what is a marvelous curatorial touch, Courbet’s The Diligence of Snow – jointly owned by London’s National Gallery and the Hugh Lane – makes its presence felt in both the film and Hugh Lane. This painting in this context could be viewed as an Event Horizon from which Wreckage in May infinitely emerges or self-cannibalises; or, alternatively, a metaphorical sinkhole where dirtied reputations go to be cleansed for the sake of man’s or country’s posterity. What I’m getting at here in a appropriately round-about way is Courbet’s dirtied reputation post-Commune. Because the actions of the Paris Commune was described as “repugnant” in the eyes of the “intellectual class”[9], including highly regarded intellectuals like Zola and Flaubert (and contrary to most accounts, Manet[10]), Courbet’s reputation was in great need of identity rebranding. Especially

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in the case of his most important patron, Alfred Bruyas, and not to mention the sociocultural image of France after the humiliating terms of surrender in the FrancoPrussian War. Dirty then, dirty now, art critics are put on the case of rebranding Courbet and his art in an effort to erase the post-Commune perception of the sociopolitical Courbet, and replace it with the poète maudit Courbet of French painting, alongside his en plein air offspring, the contemporary Impressionists.

We will never know whether Courbet was more instinct “than a brain”[12] (Camille Lemonnier). What we can know when it comes to the actors, agents and pawns of history is anyone’s guess. As Linda Nochlin concludes in her essay ‘The DePoliticisation of Gustave Courbet’: “Artists’ biographies must be considered as artistic creations, mediating the various ideological and psychological positions of those who create them.”[13] In line with this notion of myth-making, but in reverse, Kristin Ross tells us Bertolt Brecht’s phrase for the French poet Rimbaud, “an eccentric poet going for a walk,”[14] was a way of removing the “mythic interpretations” of solitary genius from the poet’s legacy – in the exact opposite way Castagnary critically isolated Courbet from the Commune through historical revisionism. In the late nineteenth century believing the artist was an ‘outsider’ or ‘genius’ was part of the creative profile. As an artist you were seen as either drunk on genius or lead paint. Today, “The banal imagery invoked by such models is all too familiar: the fixed gap between isolated and misunderstood but clairvoyant prodigy and the inauthentic society”.[15] Ross, although describing Rimbaud’s legacy in relation to his suspect affiliation with the Commune, like Courbet, this somewhat explains the reasoning behind the critics’ baptism of Courbet’s reputation in the fire of fabrication. What we are talking about here are mirages and ghosts of history, and Clarke’s art is full of them. For instance, there is a moment in Wreckage in May when the agent follows the woman to a traffic junction on the streets of Paris. Although the woman’s Sherbet Dip outfit of yellow top, orange pencil skirt and liquorice black tights distracts as she throws shapes through the streets of Paris, you can just make out the Vendôme column like a mirage on the urban horizon: seemingly there, and not there. Although the Vendôme column was rebuilt after being allegedly toppled by Courbet and his Communard mates, I personally don’t know Paris well enough to be convinced of the authenticity or reality of Clarke’s mise-en-scène. Is it a fabrication? A fantasy of the auteur’s making? Has Clarke just slotted the column into the vista? I don’t know, and don’t care to know. Because being ambivalent is just more fun. Repeating Brecht’s phrase “eccentric poet going for a walk,” this can also be recycled to describe ‘Clarke the agent’ in Wreckage in May and ‘Clarke the flâneur’ in We Are Not Like Them. This banal description for the artist connects with what I mentioned earlier with regard to Wreckage in May being a meditation on laziness. This notion comes from Paul Lafargue’s argument for the worker’s ‘right to be lazy’, what Kristin Ross interprets as a “threat to the existing” ... “boundaries between labour and leisure, 16 producer and consumer, worker and bourgeois, worker and intellectual”. The question of work with regard to artistic production is a tricky one, falling between the

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these critics, [Jules-Antoine] Castagnary especially, attempt to transform Courbet into a suitable great artist by inserting him into the ongoing, uninterrupted tradition of great art – great French art above all – in a ploy that is at once aesthetic and nationalistic, elevating and neutralising. The Courbet of 1889 has been assimilated to the pantheon of national artists who shed glory on the republic. In so doing, Courbet is, like his predecessors, transformed into a kind of commodity – a French tourist attraction, as it were – and hero at once.[11]

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boundaries of all the above. But, in Wreckage in May – all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And it is in that moment when the agent lowers his guard when off-duty to play, in a manner of speaking, in the final scene in the Hugh Lane, that things get turned around. With his peripheral senses dulled the agent falls foul to a moment of bourgeois laziness; consumption over production. A sudden gunshot and the agent is thrown onto his back to skid and flop, till dead, on the parquet floor. This spectacular event is overlaid with an audio of piercing tinnitus (ringing in the ears) – asking the question are we the shooter or bystander? A question that was as relevant in 1871 as it is Now.

MAY 2015 (#93): THE DANCE:

SUSAN CONNOLLY. ‘When the Ceiling Meets the Floor’. / GABHANN DUNNE. ‘Magenta Honey’, The LAB Gallery, Foley St., Dublin. 1 May – 13 June.

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ART CRITIC˜ David Joselit asked in his much vaunted essay ‘Painting Beside Itself’ (2009), “How does painting belong to a network?”[1] The genesis of this question sprung from enfant terrible Martin Kippenberger, who said in an interview in the ’90s that “To simply hang a picture on a wall and say it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important.”[2] Kippenberger’s interviewer at the time was funnily enough Jutta Koether, an artist who Joselit then proceeds to discuss in relation to her solo show ‘Lux Interior’ at New York’s Reena Spawling Gallery in 2009. Koether, like all good apostles, visualised the gospel according to Kippenberger by placing a braced screen with a painting attached in the centre of Reena Spauling where two levels of the gallery floor meet. The screen stood slightly askew, with one foot of the wall brace standing on a step (what Joselit theatrically refers to as a “stage”) and one foot off the step: a painting-cum-stickman. To complete the staging a scoop light (stage light) “salvaged from The Saint, an ex-Manhattan gay night club” brings the scene into rhetorical focus: ‘rhetorical’ in the sense that three lecture-performances took place during the exhibition run, performed by Koether herself. Joselit goes on to describe this work as a “cynosure of performance, installation and painted canvas”. In addition, the critic’s term of endearment for this dance is “transitive” painting. By stepping away from the wall Joselit suggests painting begins to acknowledge that the wall is just not enough in this digital age of hyperlinks and multitudinous networks. At The Lab Gabhann Dunne teeters on tradition; Susan Connolly embraces the transitive. Although officially presented as two independent exhibitions with two commissioned essays to boot, the work by these two artists cannot be viewed in isolation. Yes, it all looks like fun and games on the surface at The Lab but there’s a libidinal argy-bargy taking place due to the proximity of Connolly’s subtractive vandalism and Dunne’s cumulative nesting. Dunne gets in the first slap, however, in The LAB’s atrium with a painted set-piece combined of a large tondo-shaped canvas with a gush of blue. Springing from the tondo are laces of blossom painted directly onto the wall. Up and up they go, from

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tondo to ceiling, as if caught in a jet of fresh air. There’s more of the same upstairs from Dunne, where his paintings and gallery garlands are aching for tradition and childhood. Sure, we could talk Tiepolo and eighteen century Rococo – but no, Dunne’s pastel palette, soft and heavy, dotes on woodland game, not the empyrean disco of the Italian Baroque church. We could also invoke Albrecht Dürer’s hare but enough is enough. Peter Rabbit? Laura Ashley interiors? Does Dunne not know that civilisation is built on the nursery room notion that girls prefer pastels and boys primaries? Why is he messing with the order of things! This is a form of latent vandalism in its own right. It doesn’t end there. Social and aesthetic binaries also come into play at The LAB: alive and dead, poetry and politics, interiority and exteriority, violence and protection, rape and love, beauty and the fugly. But it’s not Dunne’s paintings alone that do all this, oh no, that would be too much to ask from any artist. What complicates Dunne’s paintings is Connolly, who more than shares the attention in the main gallery downstairs at The LAB.

Hanging and standing full-back and full-frontal on metal braces in the main gallery and towards the back in the darkroom space, Connelly presents just three results of her performative process. I say ‘results’ because there is something highly experimental in these works that not only challenges the observer as to the process and property of their anatomy, but also, I suspect, challenges Connolly herself in how they may or may not turn out in her roll-the-dice final surgeries. You can spy Connolly’s geometric anatomy just under the canvas covers, canvases that have been sliced to leave scores of gashes and scars: Lucio Fontana anyone? This is followed by incisions made along the vertical edges of the painting so a layer can be stripped back to see what remains underneath, back and front, and in the skirt of material that ends up draped on the floor. It’s quite difficult to ascertain where Connolly’s paintings begin and end. However, like a true deconstructionist suspicious of illusion, the artist disrobes her paintings by painting the bare bones of her process directly onto the gallery wall. The bare bones that undergird Connolly’s work is a simple geomatic anatomy of layered circles, squares and diamonds of process colour (magenta, cyan, yellow). This geometric anatomy, a process that precedes her maiming of the canvas, forms a Tetris tower that spans the height and width of a very, very tall wall in the main gallery of The LAB. In a sense this is Connolly’s underpainting revealed. It reminds me of the strategy game Connect Four from the 1970s and after. In fact Connolly’s process is seemingly based on regimental tactics and routines that are faithfully followed until it is time to lose her religion. In another sense this is the setting up of the chessboard before the game; before the dance. The Greek myth of Marsyas the satyr comes to mind when surrounded by Connolly’s work. Marsyas was hung from a tree and skinned alive for his hubris in challenging the gods to a musical contest of all things (viscerally portrayed by Titian in the 1570s). From Marsyas blood “came the source of the river in Phrygia”.[3]In this myth, as in

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Earlier I described Joselit’s “transitive painting” as a dance. Most painters don’t like to dance, so the experience of paintings posturing on timber or metal braces on the gallery floor is understandably a rare thing. When painters do take to the floor the majority of the time it looks ungainly. In this country we have seen a few painters do just that – Nevan Lahart, Mark O’Kelly (elegantly so at eva International 2014) and Neil Carroll among the few. Connolly has been braving the floor for a few years now, but only in recent years has she produced the true fruits of her labour.

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Connolly’s paintings, skinning and regeneration go hand-in-hand. We could say “transitive painting” is released from the shackles of tradition; or, just a way of inventing new shackles for those bored with the old restrictions of the frame and the wall: a case of Harry Houdini. I’m not advocating all painters take up Connolly’s dance, a dance that invariably falls flat in most hands. But at The LAB, where nature and nurture can be experienced passively suckling on one another in an orgy of consensual colours and forms in the paintings of Gabhann Dunne, Susan Connolly’s surgery of the canvas in contrast is somehow regenerative. It lives!

MAY 2015 (#94): LIFE’S GOOD ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON ADRIAN GHENIE, PIETER HUGO, OLAF BRZESKI. ‘I will go there, take me home’, (Curated by Gregory McCartney), The MAC, Belfast. 8 May 2015 – 26 Jul 2015. “Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain.” (Dave Hickey)[1]

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CONCRETE PUMMELS GRAVITY as the main gallery of Belfast’s The MAC hangs above the ground-floor stairwell like a colossal breeze block. Closed rooms, like prison cells, deck the liminal areas, what the philistine in us refer to as ‘wasted space’. You have to scan for windows. The MAC is like Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery pumped up on steroids (a big compliment!). Amid this architectural warren Mark Garry’s commissioned artwork The Permanent Present – an installation of 400 metal lines that form a fugitive spectrum – darts forever through the foyer to find an escape from this dark side of the moon, suggesting a metaphorical prism within the prison reality. The three artists currently showing in all three galleries of The MAC bring their own black clouds to Belfast. Derry-based curator Gregory McCartney has managed to assemble an impressive trio of male international artists in a triple whammy of apocalyptic excess: Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie, South African photographer Pieter Hugo and Polish multimedia artist Olaf Brzeski. Potential is not being proffered in McCartney’s exhibition title ‘I will go there, take me home’, outright abandonment of ideology and hope is, found in Ghenie’s paintings, Hugo’s photography and Brzeski’s puff of smoke. Starting in the basement Olaf Brzeski hits us with the sculptural illusion of a black plume of volcanic ash that billows out from the gallery wall. Up close the plume concretizes into a charred anthill (a disgusting thought when you think about it). The immediate wall and floor is smudged with soot. The black against white, the dirty against clean, the equivalent of charcoal on paper in relief. The plume stands still, a still life; spectacular for that split moment you enter the gallery, and then the effect recedes as you walk towards it – the smoke and mirrors lifted. We are told in the press release that Brzeski was inspired to make Dream – Spontaneous Combustion by a workaday moment in which the artist was unblocking the chimney and his apartment ended up covered in soot. This echoes the sentiments of other artists who imbue the banality and repetition of household chores with creative

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impulse: for Anselm Kiefer it’s washing the dishes; for Miroslaw Balka sweeping the floor of his family home. True stories!

That said, Brzeski’s plume in the gallery would fade into a boring spectacle if not for his placement of a sculpted pair of feet, floor- and soot-bound, with little piggies intact. Smooth on one side, strata on the other, as if a nugget of coal was wind-chiseled over an eternity by one relentless gust. This little remnant, puzzle, symbol, transforms what was shock spectacle into abject ordinariness. Everything now reads as corporeal, human, statuesque. The plume no longer bellows outward from the gallery wall on pause. I am tempted to consider an alternative: ash is being vacuumed into the wall – a charnel house being erased from memory, from history.

This was Ghenie’s experience, who went through long periods of artistic discontent and reevaluation in his twenties before being exposed to art on his itinerant travels through Europe after graduating from Cluj art academy. However, he returned to his hometown of Cluj in his own words “a loser”: “My generation, we were all losers historically, economically. There was no culture of winning. Winning under a dictatorship is to make a deal with the power, which is a moral dead end. A black hole.”[2]The repeated use of “loser” is key here because his peer-group’s drive to ‘not be losers’ led to a series of formative events, including the formation of a gallery in 2005, Plan B, which helped propel him and his mates – known now as the Cluj School – into the sights of the global art market, which does a bit of its own colonising of art from off-the-beaten-track-territories from time-to-time. That said, the clichéd diagnosis that artists who were born into communism are “allergic to utopia” (Mihnea Mircan) is somehow reductive. Yes, what Ghenie describes as the “texture of history” (and a traumatised one at that) does float beneath the surface of his paintings, but it is partly revealed and obscured by his necessary distancing from it. Who would intentionally inhabit the mire of their own country’s socially and ethically bankrupt history? No. They move on. Wipe the slate clean. Even joke about it to upend its power. Our emotional survival automatically obscures the past wherein trauma reigns. Living depends on it. Great art does too. The selection of Ghenie’s paintings presented at The MAC prove my point. Painted between 2006 and 2010, they represent not only the artist’s coming of age in the eyes of the contemporary artworld, from his moody monochromes (Stalin’s Tomb, 2006) to the emergence of a nuanced colourist (Nougat II, 2010), but also his pie-in-the-faceof-his-past paintings. Sometimes Ghenie’s paintings look like pure dystopian cliché, like a scrunched-up 2000 AD mag. But, for me, Ghenie’s art is based on metabolising clichés and giving them right back a little battered and bruised, but beautiful.

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Upstairs the charnel house of Eastern European communism is painter Adrian Ghenie’s canvas; or, more specifically, the “dynastic socialism” of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator who brutally ruled the artist’s homeland between 1965 and 1989. It’s lazy to typecast the now middle-aged generation of artists from the isolated Eastern Bloc as damaged children of communism. Painters from the Bloc such as Ghenie and Czech Daniel Pitín borrow as much, if not more, from their exposure to American cinema and the internet as they do from their personal or country’s historical demons. Without such Westernised influences – Ghenie names Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Francis Bacon – painters who were trained in a postsocial realism in conservative art academies would not be artworld palatable. Sure, such academic painters can paint a good olive trench coat and Russian MIG, but how does such skilled figuration translate in the contemporary artworld? It doesn’t! Not in isolation anyway.

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It’s not all nuclear mushroom clouds either. We can read Ghenie’s humour too at The MAC in the title of a painting from 2007, History is always horny II, in which a throbbing zeppelin pokes an aircraft shelter. With the suggestion of a threesome of sex and death and humour playing out on the canvas all at once we could go all Freudian here and say that Ghenie is reenacting and revisiting a traumatic memory from his past, or empathising with Europe’s traumatic history, what psychoanalysis refers to as the death instinct. And if so, then it would be fair to say also that the life instinct wins over in the way Ghenie joyfully jizzes all over the canvas in the climactic sweeping additions and painterly mutations with rags not paint brushes. It’s like Eros (sex) and Thantos (death) are wrestling on the canvas, hence the exquisite mess. Ghenie leaves the libidinal lying there on the canvas, exposed in thick impasto. There is a swashbuckling storm of ‘greys’ around the edges of his canvases too, in which the white primer is left to peek through. Ghenie is a pure showoff – a strip of masking tape is left to soak up a flamboyant slash of paint in one of his Pie Fight series. The thing that surprises the most is the artist’s disclaimer that no paintbrush was used in the making of these paintings. But when you think about it it makes perfect sense. If obstacles define Ghenie’s biography it’s obvious that obstacles would define how he paints.

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Ghenie’s Cluj, the unofficial capital to the historical province of Transylvania, is just the right segue to introduce Pieter Hugo, who caught a few vampires of his own on camera in a series of photographs titled ‘Nollywood’ (2008-09) – Nollywood being the Nigerian film industry. At The MAC we get a taste of Hugo’s ‘Nollywood’ in the costumed, staged and confrontational portrait of a masked man (a mask that mixes Mister Potato Head with Jason from Friday the 13th) wearing a trench coat and holding a hatchet, and standing dead still against a blur of traffic in Lagos, the home of the Nigerian film industry. The Nollywood flavour continues with a putrefying zombie family; then, a suited man holding aloft the viscera of a dead and bloodied cow which he claims with a bare foot. It all reads like a B-Movie, but in Hugo’s sumptuous high-def. It feels unhygienic and brute. But the glossy and clean surface of Hugo’s photographs seals it all in: waterproof, airtight, no contamination here. The terrible threesome of sex and death and humour evidenced on Ghenie’s paintings wrestle in rather than on Hugo’s sealedin photographs of the third world. It’s like we are transported back in time, couchpotatoes, looking at the media-theatricised face of Africa through clumsy analogue technology as empathetic strangers, with our Trócaire boxes collecting dust not coin on the kitchen dresser. And that’s the thing that jolts, Hugo’s images are physically and ethically confrontational, but at a safe distance. Shock value is quickly followed by catharsis ... a ‘whoah’ followed by an ‘aaah’. Hugo did not attend art college; he learned his trade as a rapid-fire photojournalist. It shows (in a good way). His photographs are both no bull shit and full of shit. Instinct over intellect. He seems to gravitate towards Mad Max country where giant-mawed Hyenas have mohawks and give jockey-backs to young girls wearing braids and pretty dresses. Or this is just Hugo’s backyard – no need for theatrics. No matter, it’s wonderful on the eye and pulse. If Hugo’s Nollywood humours our gaze, and his posturing Hyena Men set pulses racing, his series ‘Permanent Error’, of which there are only three in the gallery, are more ethically fragile than theatrical. Photographed in Agbogbloshie, a digital waste dump found in the suburbs of Accra, Ghana, this place is Beyond Thunderdome. One young man awkwardly poses with a Tina Turner afro of electric wires above his head.

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His outline smolders against the smoldering wasteland as if spray painted on.

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But it is the portrait of Abdulai Yahaya that, alone, changes the tone in the gallery. The teenager with black-black skin crouches amidst the soot and fire of Agbogbloshie. His eyes bloodshot, his face drenched in sweat. Abdulai Yahaya’s micro-expressions are half-way between confusion and fear. We are back in the safari. For the first time at The MAC Hugo kicks-up ethical questions in the African soil, and they hang. How do we feel about looking at these young men rummaging in this hell on earth? How do we feel about Hugo paying these vulnerable people to pose for the camera for his art? I’m not sure how I feel. What I am certain of is – I feel. Hugo’s Nollywood and Hyena Men are sealed in, safe. Abdulai Yahaya’s gaze is not. I left The MAC, however, not ethically tormented. The combination of Ghenie’s painterly brio, Hugo’s conflicted Africa and Brzeski’s smoke and mirrors monument to something about nothing, is still hemorrhaging thoughts and feelings somewhere down around my lizard brain. *JUNE 2015 (#95): SHITLIST #4: DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS*

OCTOBER 2015 (#96): YOU LIKE TO WATCH, DON’T YOU DAVID CLAERBOUT, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 14 August – 10 October 2015. “Each is never less than watchable” *Aidan Dunne. The Irish Times. 29.9.2015* I LIKE THE new Aidan Dunne in The Irish Times. There’s just enough room in his visual arts Round Up for the right amount of dismissiveness. That said, when Dunne wrote “Each is never less than watchable” in his review of David Claerbout’s four projected works at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, and qualified the provocative statement with the meh “in that they are visually lush and inviting”, I was left disappointed and wanting. Sure, Claerbout’s works at Project are lush and inviting, but there’s a lot more going on here than just lush and inviting. Their watchability is down to the fact that people like to watch other people watching, and doing, or just being. It’s a basic human and evolutionary behaviour. Our first key into the world as infants is to watch and mimic how our parents react to us and the world around them. We smile, love, empathise and learn through the body language of others. The peculiar thing about body language is, it’s not a great liar. It tells on us when we are happy. It tells on us when we are sad. It advertises in vicious physiognomy when we are angry. It does its best work when we are trying to hide when we are happy or sad or angry. Body language is our most primal tell. Roland Barthes had something quite good to say about the telltale language of the body in a book that I return to time and again, A Lover’s Discourse: “what I hide by my language, my body utters”. Claerbout’s video installation at Project got me thinking about such things. Things to do with getting to know people, and getting to know yourself through other people.

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SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

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And how behaviours and identities pool outwards from others. And how roles, such as friend or lover, are formed in that personal space of gesturing and posturing and jostling between people – a space that the Belgian artist’s camera hones in on with uncommon patience in his atomization of the world around him. Claerbout’s four works at Project invite us into a world composed of a French beach at low tide, a North-African slum, an eighteenth-century French farmhouse, and a computer-animated forest of nondescript provenance. I first walked in on the slum and farmhouse, including a spectator who was already fidgeting in the gallery. Titled The Long Goodbye (2007), a smiling, middle-aged woman slowly emerges in three-quarter profile from the dark. All bosom at first; then, all flowing shawl and dress, she carries a tray with tea for two. She pours the tea, fluidly. She looks directly at the spectator (you) and waves goodbye to the retreating camera amidst swarming shadows that fade the terraced-farmhouse idyll to black. An episode that would take a minute in real-time takes twelve in Claerbout-time. Adjacent, The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment is made up of 600 grey-scale photographs that play out over thirty-seven minutes. Set within the tumbledown houses of the Casbah of Algiers, an overpopulated and rundown quarter in the heart of the city, a flock of seagulls and collection of young and elderly men come together on an improvised football pitch in a flurry of body language and feathers. This is all orchestrated by a central protagonist who simply feeds a seagull which triggers the marvelous orgy of cause and effect.

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Something artificial is playing out in The Algiers’ Sections, like CGI when it has to deal with portraying humans in steep perspective. But I fell in love with it all the same. The seagulls, hanging there like the silly, symmetrical dove in Piero Della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (1450s), are a thing of beauty. There is something bigger playing out in The Long Goodbye - beyond the spacial enclaves of the artist’s temporal visions – to do with the unnatural condition of being human. The fluid movements of the woman traversing the terrace against the trees and their shadows as they fidget unnaturally under Claerbout’s pacing is unsettling. Between these two works there is a lot of bleeding perspectives, both tipping the crest of your shoulder for attention. The Long Goodbye is prolonged as it comes and goes three times during the playing time of The Algiers’ Sections. The electric-guitar instrumental from the latter nudges all perspectives into emotive unison. The funny thing is, if you threw a Coca Cola bottle into the Casbah mix you would come close to one of those World Cup ads which equate the beautiful game with a beautiful world, especially if it’s the Third World. There’s something to be said, however, about Claerbout’s ability to transform cliché – while embracing it – into something momentous, something one-off. An intermission in my viewing followed, which led to introducing myself to the fidgeting stranger in the gallery while I was double checking the screening times of the remaining two works. The stranger, who I came to know as Dick from Canada, was visibly inspired by Claerbout’s work, which made him cathartic and chatty. This led to him to reflect on how he once owned his own Leica camera, the same camera Henri Cartier Bresson used as a young photographer in the 1930s. He told me how he sold his Leica in the ’60s, something he regrets to this day. He talked about the anonymity

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embraced by Cartier Bresson in the act of capturing the moment. He opined, willfully, on the contemporary condition of image-making: its proliferation and excess, its barefacedness, its bullshit. Returning later to the Project (without Dick) to watch the remaining two works was a game of hit and miss. Once again, in the same vein as The Long Goodbye, we are witnesses to a blind spot in perception in The Quite Shore(2011). But unlike The Algiers’ Sections there is no visual anchor in The Quite Shore, just a durational exercise in looking at people looking.

A squatting boy makes a big splash in the retreating or advancing tide, while a community of onlookers form a flat plane of eyes expanding outward like concentric circles that reach all the way back to the civilised coast. We and the players in the piece are strays, eyes wandering the daguerreotype landscape of shore and sea, soft and silver, for something more, a twist in the tale, a full stop, anything. The Quite Shore is like one of those dreams that you feel you are consciously directing, until the dream grows tense and its identity folds in on itself.

In my experience of Claerbout’s body of work at Project Travel took the role of closing credits. What is made clear in this particular work is Claerbout is an artist who doesn’t make things easy for himself, exemplified in the music selection here. Like the abstract painter who embraces one obstacle after another to avoid conscious image-making, Claerbout chooses generic relaxation music as the audio accompaniment for Travel: Lars Von Trier gives us operatic Wagner, Claerbout 1980s synthesizer. It shouldn’t work, and it probably doesn’t as an individual artwork, but as part of the whole at Project, yes. In their determined stillness and artificial fluidity, David Claerbout’s subjects are caught in a space where roles and relationships are taking form (like me and Dick). Along with what is usually described as Claerbout’s shaping of Time, the artist uses duration to breath familiarity (in us) with his subjects.

*In memory of Jason Oakley, an editor and friend who I always tried to impress with words, something he said I would grow out of. RIP.

OCTOBER 2015 (#97): WHAT IF..? CHRIS MARTIN, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, October 9 – December 2, 2015. AT Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery (DHG) I am presented with an artist whose work does not live up to the legend, Chris Martin. I have come to know Chris Martin’s paintings and artist biography over the years through an accumulation of sources and experiences: by word of mouth by animated

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The Quite Shore’s partner projection at Project, Travel (1996-2013), is an animated film in which the camera leads us past a park bench and into a forest to arrive in a digital ferngully of trickling streams and drippy leaves.

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painters; through reading his Brooklyn Rail articles about abstract painting and Buddhism; through humanist articles and interviews by writer friends of the artist; and, in a New York gallery a few years back. In some ways Peter Gallo’s essay in the accompanying DHG publication is more Chris Martin than the work presented at DHG. In fact, Gallo’s introductory walkthrough into the Brooklyn home and studio of the artist, where life seems indivisible from painting, is like edging the orgasm without the pop in the gallery. If you put ‘Chris Martin’ into Google you’ll get lots of stuff related to Cold Play frontman and his ex-relationship with actress Gwyneth Paltrow, it’s a given. The other Chris Martin, New York-based painter and somewhat of a legend in his own turf, but not all that well known in these parts, has come of age over the last decade in the eyes of the global art market. In the last five years with big shows at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (2011) and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2013) Chris Martin is as à la mode as you can get in Europe. Sounds awful. There’s something tragically romantic about great artists not making it but still making great art on the periphery. The idea of the artist just surviving but creatively flourishing may not be the dream of the artist but it is oftentimes the desire of the observer to attach some biographical struggle to their good reception of the great artist. And Chris Martin is an artist who has experienced firsthand the famine and feast of the artist’s life.

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The thing is, scale is all and nothing in the work of Chris Martin, whether in his deference to the scale of the concrete world outside when he hangs paintings on the sides of buildings in Brooklyn, or has them standing guard overlooking the East River in New York City; or, when he kneels down in obeisance to the big human themes of love and death and spirituality. At DHG we are given a museum show, or worse still, THE BEST OF CHRIS MARTIN as seen through a microscope – it’s a mixed tape. Sure, there are some individual gems, but they are missing their big brothers and sisters. There’s a mini-Clyfford Still with snarly-red claw marks against a batty-black backdrop. Myles Davis hunkers over a lion head among Palm trees in Tax. InThe Laundry we get a double image of heads formed out of socks and maybe a bra or two. We get glitter, Styrofoam fried eggs, newspaper, vinyl, a painting that is so spoilt that it is collapsing under its own democracy. And another that reminds me of teenage zits about to burst. There are single moments of what Peter Gallo describes as “dis-taste, the abject, the comic, and heart-felt monstrosity” but those moments are quickly released into the air like the fart from a whoopie cushion. My previous experience of Chris Martin’s paintings in the gallery was injected with scale, something that is absent at DHG. Once again, there is a glimpse of the Chris Martin that I have come to expect in Peter Gallo’s essay, wherein the writer describes how large paintings in Chris Martin’s studio act as “room-dividers” “to form a Merzbau, a labyrinthine space, both set and setting, which was simultaneously terrestrial and otherworldly”. Chris Martin somehow turns the Abstract Expressionist’s use of scale to shock and awe on its head to construct a socially inclusive sublime. We get the mash-up of materials at DHG but it’s presented as sushi not all-you-can-eat buffet. At DHG Chris Martin is a formalist spoiler, and that’s about it. So who is the real Chris Martin? Arriving in New York City in 1976 when art was all poststructuralist talk and aluminum boxes, Chris Martin made 18-foot paintings in his 19-foot apartment: he was 22. And that’s just the thing about Chris Martin’s paintings,

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anything goes and nothing goes. Lots of things helped to mould the young Chris Martin. One was the touring Neo-Expressionist smorgasbord which came to New York from Europe in the early 1980s and shocked the hell out of the tightly-knit New York art community that was the centre of the artworld but also blinded by its own light.

And then there was the monkey on every American painter’s back, the Abstract Expressionist legacy, the scale of which Chris Martin had already embraced in his 19foot apartment by 18-foot paintings. Like all great painters Chris Martin would never be himself again in method, he would be an “’80s mongrel; a mélange of outtakes from Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, Elizabeth Murray and Sigmar Polke (Roberta Smith)”. And like all mongrels or thoroughbreds he was drawn to his own, so his hobo trolley full of personal effects was swapped for a hobo trolley of fugitive painters such as Forrest Best and Hilma af Klint.

But at DHG we don’t get Chris Martin on toast, we get the Last Supper. Quantity doesn’t save the day either in the tastefully hung display. It’s probably partly down to a clash of personalities, between space and paintings. It’s certainly down to the uniform scale of the selection. Fuck, out of the 13 paintings there’s 4 paintings that measure 114.3 cms and 6 paintings that measure 94cm. I don’t think I have ever went to the trouble of checking out dimensions in an exhibition, not to mention mentioning it in a review. I’m boring myself here. Chris Martin talks about how he is “interested in accessing a scale that can encompass the shift between large image and small detail”. Why I’m banging on about scale in painting is because small-scale painting has become our thingin this country, and we have become real good at it. I remember being in art college and hearing myths about Irish artists like Cecily Brennan painting 12-foot Neo-Expressionist monsters in the 1980s. It’s not enough for Irish artists to experience scale in painting online or even in the gallery abroad. It’s like when you purchase clothes on holiday abroad, you come back home and say, fuck me, what was I thinking. Irish painters need to experience and wear scale at home. I’m not saying scale is everything, but it has an element of risk and commitment and pleasure that is all or nothing. Scale proposes what if..?

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There’s other stories too, shrouded in a haze of drug-taking and trips to India in the early days, all in the name of painting. Chris Martin supposedly broke into a Brooklyn Cemetery in the 1990s and slept on Mondrian’s grave. He also made love on canvas. There is something insatiable about Chris Martin’s appetite for sublimating biophilia (love) and necrophilia (death) in paint – he has dedicated countless paintings to James Brown since his passing in 2006. Not to forget the small things, Chris Martin sometimes paints on toast: love and death and food, what else do you need? Nothing.

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OCTOBER 2015 (#98): Waiting for the Pillow Fight. ANN MARIA HEALY, ‘Your ass protrudes toward the malaise’, Eight Gallery, Dublin, 23 October – 5 November, 2015. YESTERDAY, at Dublin’s Eight Gallery, I experienced a “lightness of being” from Ann Maria Healy’s installation of video and props that weighed heavy on the senses. Activated by audience movements, bubbles tumble down from a bubble machine placed above the gallery entrance. The bubbles, made from pun-ish and Pug-ish “faerie urine”, alight upon a soft sculpture made from crude slabs of foam and attic insulation. Bedtime stories come to mind. Pissy mattresses too. Reaching to rediscover my inner-child, and the loo, a video of an upside-down waterfall sprays into the heavens – an unusual but natural phenomenon caused by strong winds on the West coast of Ireland. Cardboard packaging of a Humming-Bird-Feeder and broken slabs of foam and rock are found pinned to the gallery floor by bamboo shoots. I catch the word “taboo” inscribed on one of the slabs. Tree-trunk stools sit before the main video work, setting the scene for a trio of young women who wear white dresses and shower poufs for masks. In Healy’s world the Pre-Raphaelites dabble in Dada. The women wander through a dandelion-dusted woodland doing and saying bizarre things that evade description and sense. Drunken muses for the likes of Wordsworth’s pen? There is something enigmatic about Healy’s type of thing – a thing I can’t quite put a finger on – if, you get past the cringe.

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For instance, standing before a pond the three women hold some props and chant some poetry; something about fingernails planted in the ground... plants growing faster from your brain... in the landscape of the garden all the images have disappeared... no more apples falling from your tree. Italian Marxist Theorist, Franco Berardi, is mentioned in passing in the press release. But it is the muddle of verse rather than the prescription of some theory that keeps me turning over ideas and images in the gallery. Rhythm over sense is important here. The idea of something untouched, like a landscape, or a mind, is key too. Healy’s world is similar to the collaborative exhibitions of Aoife Mullan and Niamh Forbes, Conor Mary Foy and Nicky Teegan, Lily Cahill and Rob Murphy, in which we find ourselves interpreting images that suggest civilization is ending, has ended, or is just starting over. Failing to gather a modicum of common-sense, I find another sense, a palpable sense, that gravity is about to take hold at Eight. There’s a storm brewing, and Healy’s gestural frivolity and Victorian camp is about to be blown to Kingdom-come. But my forecast never manifests at Eight: the pillow fight never comes. The sun continues to shine. The waterfall continues to resist. The birds continue to tweet. The bubbles... the bubbles – this is the longest and lightest day. We are caught in limbo here; a ceremonial loop where hell dreams-up heaven. My kind of heaven, and hell...

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DECEMBER 2015 (#99): DRY-HUMPING EMMA HAUGH, ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’, NCAD Gallery, DUBLIN, (Curated by RGKSKSRG) 6 November -– 2 December 2015.

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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. —Susan Sontag – ‘Notes on “Camp”’, 19641

However, RGKSKSRG (the paired curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain) are more peacock than crow. After winning The LAB and Dublin City Council Emerging Curator Award (2013-14) they have proved that two curators can become one.2 That is not to suggest that everything that RGKSKSRG have done so far has been an electric experience in the gallery. Tonight, you can call me Trish (2014) at Dublin’s The LAB was in some ways, disappointingly dull. Especially if you expected more from the collection of individually electric artists. Pilvi Takala’s Real Snow White (2009) was the standout, perhaps because of its isolation in the atrium of The LAB.3 The exhibition as a whole lacked the loudness and visceral edge that was promised by the group of artists, and suggested in the aesthetic sensibility prompted by RGKSKSRG’s flash online branding. It was whisper telling us it was a shout. Behind Emma Haugh’s ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’ now showing at Dublin’s NCAD Gallery is the binocular vision of RGKSKSRG. Here we get a little closer to the curators’ promise of “systematic disjuncture”. The exhibition is the culmination and manifestation of happenings directed by Haugh beyond the gallery setting – workshops and such like – which are re-envisioned in the gallery as “collapsible architecture of fabricated panels” and printed pamphlets and posters. The panels, pieced together from a panoply of fabrics – tie-dye to PVC, gold spandex to black netting – hang from chain hangers that could comfortably accommodate a trapeze artist in a tight and tacky leotard. It’s a Camp meat market; suggestive of what Susan Sontag described in her essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ as “stag movies seen without lust”. Amidst this queer aesthetic Haugh asks the question: “How do we imagine a space dedicated to the manifestation of feminine desire?” Beyond the rhetoric it is the formalist details that matter here, the little details. Like the meat hooks that seal the envelopes of fabric which give the installation a bit of FIST. The printed pamphlets and posters placed on floor-bound concrete tablets that keep you a little longer in the gallery; or if you don’t have the time, travel with you and end up scattered around your home. It’s the drips of pink paint: woman. It’s the yellow string and tape: Marigold gloves. It’s the black dildo that pokes out of a concrete tablet as if giving the finger: a glory hump? All little fetishes. There’s no centre to the

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ONCE upon a time I went to an artist talk and found myself surrounded on all sides by female curators, all dressed in black. In a desperate search for colour I picked out the only artist in the room, wearing the obvious plaid shirt who, in contrast, looked like a clown with smudged makeup against the weave of seamless black. From then on I began to imagine curators flocking out of ‘curator college’ like a murder of crows, gradually drifting into individual slipstreams to disrobe the black of their institutionalised selves, to become something that added up to a curatorial identity; or if lacking an idea, curatorial style.

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installation. No moving image to focus the attention. No sound to concentrate the looseness. It’s temporary. It’s note-taking. Haugh is proposing rather than doing. So close to the National College of Art & Design and with the word “archive” peeking out from the press release, it could be all read as academic – Liam Gillick in drag. But, I think it is better to turn a blind eye to that obvious scepticism. Because Haugh’s aesthetic sensibility is something, dare I say it, alternative, and should be enjoyed and celebrated for that reason, just like RGKSKSRG. At NCAD Gallery Haugh is trying to pat out a theoretical space for making art, making love, having sex among women. Tired of the domestication of the feminine, or staving off its general inevitability, Haugh, in this moment of her life as a young female artist, is proposing a sensual space beyond the ever-widening reach of the domestic, the always threatening domicile of womanhood. She doesn’t want the four-poster bed and Laura Ashley wallpaper to frame her sexual life or decorate her desire. She wants to party like men can, fuck like men can, dance like men can – well, like gay men can specifically. She asks in one instance: “Where are the public spaces designed, organised and maintained by women for women, where are the buildings and backspaces, basements and sweathouses imagined and realised through channels of female desire?” Is Haugh’s probing and questioning of social spaces where sex could happen or possibly take place just a form of political dry-humping? The other thing is, is dryhumping better than the real thing when it comes to eliciting desire in the gallery. Isn’t desire based in its unfulfillment? Does Haugh continue to stroke this feminine lack from now on, or get her hands dirty? Can’t wait to find out.

244 DECEMBER 2015 (#100): HUT LIFE ELLA BERTILSSON (SWE) & ULLA JUSKE (EST), ‘Time is what happens when nothing else does’, Presented by OPW & RHA, End of Ely Place, Dublin (adjacent to the RHA),18 November – 23 December, 2015. In boredom, we can only say, there are two assumptions: there is something I desire, and there is nothing I desire. —Adam Phillips, ‘On Being Bored’ ELLA Bertilsson’s and Ulla Juske’s artwork for the temporary project space, Hut, adjacent to the Royal Hibernian Academy on Dublin’s Ely Place, is an audio script filtered through interviews with security guards and attendants.1 The Hut, is just that, a hut, with not enough room to swing a cat without injury. The hut is now unmanned; automation replacing human labour. Inside the Hut any traces of the things that made the security guard’s vigil bearable are gone, replaced by a splash of magnolia paint and a couple of wooden benches. The artists have located a sound bar just under a window, the larger of two, that looks past the automated gate and down the length of Ely Place. Because Bertilsson’s and Juske’s intervention in the Hut is exclusively audio, you end up substituting the visual absence with the stuff around you. There’s not much to visually grasp, however. The window panes in the smaller

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window and door are frosted, giving suggestive views of a floppy-leafed plant to your right, and the exodus of out-to-lunch staff from the OPW office to your left. In the Hut’s exposure to the public art is left open to the public’s indifference. Besides the soundscape of Bertilsson’s and Juske’s audio script, there’s the rattle of the automated gate and the sounds of its mechanism as cars pass through intermittently over the course of the fifteen-minutes duration of the artwork. Titled Time is what happens when nothing else does, the artwork is a meditation on surviving a job that necessitates waiting and standing still while civilisation works, rests and plays. More generally, we are forced to think (if not exactly experience) notions of waiting and boredom, class and exclusion, being and Time. A person who practices mindfulness would be annoyingly content in here.

A hut suggests the rural, where we are less attuned to the clock of capitalism but more in tune with place. Martin Heidegger would’ve had a few words to add here about the ‘hut life’ as someone who lived in one, on and off, for fifty years. He might agree that Time is slower in the countryside, relative to its speed and agency in the city. I get that; the urban landmarks of capitalism never let us forget we are always on the clock, or at the very least, suggesting new clocks to chime to.

This portrait of a security guard comes across in the listening as a prison sentence; clock-in and clock-out, serve and observe and obey, and make do with your civic servitude. There is no reward at the end of the security guard’s shift. It’s about getting through. Surviving waiting. Surviving boredom. Surviving Time. Surviving yourself. Because the possibility of crime is slim in this context, you would think that someone so experienced and skilled at surviving this fifteen-year vigil, alone, would have greater insights into being and Time beyond the common or garden. Some anxiety or excitement around the notion of waiting or being bored. Even confusion over the difference between anxiety and excitement. In a sense this is a portrait of the security guard as nothing more or nothing less than a security guard. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the human race no matter the circumstances of his circumstance. What a waste of Time? This is the main issue for me, Bertilsson’s and Juske’s characterisation of the security guard is a little flat. Fifteen years on the job and nothing to tell beyond surviving being a security guard and staving off thinking. Sure, there are curious moments: the nightly check-in-phone-call to someone in a petrol station on the other side of the city whom the security guard has never met; the swapping of shifts on New Year’s Eve to experience the mechanism of the Victorian clock that regulates the clocking system on the property; ghosts appearing after 3pm. But the bricolage of voices that makes up this character is fixed in his denial of the job situation that he finds himself in. He is armed with defensive clichés and rhetoric that are offloaded with the regularity of his job routine: “a job doesn’t define you as a person”. The fact is, the specifics of a particular job gives you a perspective on the world that other jobs don’t. Whether it is how people interact or behave in the job, or how the institution and public treats you on the job, in the end your job will grind you down and define you as a person, in some cases over-define you, in which you

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The character of the security guard, drawn out by Bertilsson and Juske from their interviews with relevant staff, is as charmless as the job description of a security guard. The rolling lilt of the narrator’s voice feels like you are bedside, watching the peaks and troughs of a life-support monitor. The diction is predictable, like that of a newscaster. At points of listening I wish for the flat line; to be done with it all.

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become the institution, block and mortar, and its cheerleader. It’s just a matter of Time and circumstance. Being the first project for the Hut Project the artists are just tipping their toes into what is possible here. Bertilsson’s and Juske’s Time is what happens when nothing else does achieve in anchoring the context and history of the site, so artists can now upend that context and history. The lunch-hour opening is strange and creates its own context for viewing. I would love to have the choice of experiencing art in the Hut on a Summer’s evening when the pulse of city changes from work to play. If the Hut becomes an annual project we will get a chance to see artists and art push beyond site-specificity to who knows what and why. Bertilsson’s and Juske’s artwork is the valuable curtain raiser; it sets the scene so others can follow. Jonathan Mayhew is up next, so, let’s see.

JANUARY 2016 (#101): NO SPOILERS! JONATHAN MAYHEW, ‘All Flowers in Time’, Presented by OPW & RHA, End of Ely Place, Dublin (adjacent to the RHA), 14 January – 19 February, 2016.

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We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and blinds us to them. Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay. [Quoted in Jonathan Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time for The Hut Project (Part II)] A person advised me on the way to visiting Jonathan Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time for The Hut Project, that “it’s very good at night”; but qualified the statement a moment later with: “it’s good during the day also.” There was a lot of information in this remark—criticism too—unbeknownst to the person volunteering it. It wasn’t a spoiler per se, but it was close. And the incident was the reason for the following preamble to experiencing the work. I go out of my way to avoid exhibition spoilers online because I want to experience art the way I think it should be experienced, exclusively in situ. However it’s nigh impossible to achieve this unless you fully disconnect from the internet. Unplugging also means missing out on art happenings, because online is how art is now advertised, distributed and promoted. Artists and art institutions are part of the problem in this regard. Both give away too much in their eagerness to promote rather than safeguard the experience of art. We make judgments and assumptions all the time about the things we interact with online: about the images that promote art exhibitions; about the images that document art exhibitions; about the photo-ops at gang-bang openings. Soon the online herd will be convinced that the image is a passable, even better substitute for the real thing. I know there are some people—HANDS UP!—who have experienced some galleries and artists exclusively online, and believe they have the right to judge programmes and art with a few swipes and zooms of their smartphones. ‘It looks awful online’

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does not come with the addendum ‘it’s better in reality’. The only way art’s reputation can be saved in this virtual vs. reality scenario is if the experience in the gallery can trump the experience on the smartphone for those that are convinced by their smartphone’s ability to reproduce the aroma of reality. Sure, sometimes promotional images can look better than the real thing with a clever crop here and filter there, but experiencing art is a physical activity, influenced by so many chance variables, sensory and emotional, that hinder or help your experience along the way. The experience of an exhibition starts with expectation, then fantasy. It physically starts the minute you step out your front door and make your way to the site of art: it’s a cumulative experience, always building in momentum. From email invites replacing postal invites, to social media invites replacing email invites, it seems to me that getting people to the art event is more important than protecting the experience of the exhibition and the enigma of art. That’s why landing in a city that is not your own with a Time Out in hand is my favourite way to experience art.

‘It’s amazing because I (we) say it’s amazing’ just doesn’t cut it for me. Of course we should celebrate art and be advocates for art but not to the detriment of asking ‘why’ so and so is this and that. It’s the lack of expansion on hyperbole that’s the killer. It’s like our responses are being said on the edge of a cliff with no room to expand on what is in essence, an empty echo. And here’s this person volunteering the information that the optimal conditions for viewing Mr. Mayhew’s work for The Hut Project is nighttime. And here’s me standing in the rain at midday. Where do I go with that? Come back another day— or night according to you? It’s a four-hour round trip. Fuck that! (FYI: I know this person was innocently thinking out loud. And although I am using and abusing the remark as a fillip for writing, my thoughts were definitely corrupted en route to Mr. Mayhew’s work). For instance, on the way I start a discourse analysis of the said remark, asking myself what does “good” and “very good” mean in this person’s reception and judgment of Mr. Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time? It obviously has something to do with the visual properties and qualities of the work. I assume then that I am about to experience an artwork whereby the visual qualities will be affected by the daylight by a degree of “very”. Theres’s a chasm between “good” and “very good”, isn’t there? When you think about it, however, “very good” is not a compliment at all. In some ways “good” sounds more demanding. At least hate and love, even ambivalence, are more emotive responses than “very good”. “Very good” is what the childcare worker says about your two year old’s colouring ability in crèche. What value is being translated or transacted by using such throwaway terms. I always imagine a robot voice when someone says or writes ‘amazing’ as a response to anything, never mind art. Maybe it’s just me but I can’t measure terms such as bad, good, very good, amazing, superb, terrific. Relative to what? Your bad, good, very good, amazing, superb, terrific taste?

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In this scenario you are disconnected from your local networks, influences, habits, hype, online validation, institutional cheer-leading, and assumptions about the people and art spaces that you have come to know so well that you have stopped really looking, asking questions and making responses that go a little deeper than ‘It’s amazing’.

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However, when this person in question said “very good” there was a pause................., a moment in which the individual seemed to be reliving their experience of Mr. Mayhew’s work at nighttime. It was like this person was thinking of the sex they had the night before. It was a slow “very good”— reflective and vacant. This person must have returned to the hut during daylight, and all they experienced was a nimble “good” second time around. Walking past the National Gallery I get the sense that Mr. Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time scrubs up well at nighttime. There’s the suggestion that it needs the night to luminesce, or effect its luminescence. It’s a work that plays in the dark to get noticed and be noticeable. The obvious assumption is, it’s artificially lit in some way which steers it in the direction of the theatrical. It’s visual properties are important; or the visual is what this person holds important in the work of art. But, according to my accidental source it’s relatively flawed in daylight: pimples show up at midday. My wavering conclusion is that it must be glamourous at night; not exactly entertaining, but seductive and contemplative. But as I cross the road to Ely Place, the far end of which The Hut Project is located in the Office of Public Works, I recollect that Emile Cioran is mentioned somewhere in Mr. Mayhew’s online promotion of his All Flowers in Time. The quote referenced is one of the Romanian philosopher’s verbally alive but philosophically pessimistic aphorisms about our very breathing distorting our perception of the world around us.

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Unlike Nietzsche, who believed life could be affirmed by sheer will, especially with God being dead and all, Cioran was a philosopher slug who one day decided to enter his own consciousness through some orifice in his body, and then seal all the vents so he could bathe in rage and resignation without hope of ever escaping. Writers like Cioran show us all up to be mere hacks. That’s why when I first read the reference to Cioran I thought it was either novel and ambitious, or just foolhardy on the artist’s part. But perhaps Cioran’s lyrical verbal soup, whose subject is decaying and becoming, lends itself well to Mr. Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time? As I arrive at the entrance to Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy, and before I walk inside to collect a text that the press release has informed me will be waiting for every visitor in the foyer, I take a quick glance towards where The Hut Project is located. There, in the pissing rain, I catch a glimpse of Mr. Mayhew’s All Flowers in Time unfurling in the hut; insinuating death and decay in baroque resplendence. End.

FEBRUARY 2016 (#102): BOYS & GIRLS Simon Cummins, Paul Hallahan. Lee Welch, ‘This is Water’, Catalyst Arts, Belfast: Saoirse Wall, Tara McKeon, Kerry Guinan, Avril Corroon, Eimear Walshe and Renèe Helèna, ‘Knowledge and other myths’, Platform Arts, Belfast. I personally hate flattery—both giving and receiving it. Acts of flattery and criticism is something that I will explore here as an overture to reviewing two exhibitions currently running in Belfast that I experienced a few days ago.

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Andy Warhol advised artists not to read their reviews, just weigh them. For the art critic there is always the nagging question, is it better to offer an artist criticism or flattery?1 Which has more weight? I’m not talking about ‘reputational’ weight, I mean holistic weight. Positive reviews come and go, but criticism, lingers. Do artists want to be fat on flattery or sinewy on criticism? Flat-footed or on their toes? Where do you go next with flattery anyway? You have to wonder if behind all of today’s fawning flattery there is an element of intentional or unconscious disdain for the intended recipient, which results in you, the flattered, feeling uncomfortable, sick, powerless, pregnant with this bloated thing while stoppered with a plug in every orifice. So what I am going to say next might come across as flattery, which is endemic to Irish art criticism, but it’s something more visceral than that. I wrote ‘seminal’ in the visitor book for the current exhibition at Belfast’s Platform Arts. I didn’t mean ‘seminal’—cue Beavis and Butt-head (“huh-huh, huh huh”). I meant SEMINAL! It’s probably arrogant or stupid of me to proclaim an up-andrunning exhibition that has had no time to breathe ‘seminal’, because who’s to know how this exhibition will influence later developments.

Aside from successive tidal waves of feminism (are we fourth or fifth wave now?) the plain fact is (as I see it) Irish female artists are making and exhibiting art that is— collaboratively and collectively—generally more visceral, critical and seductive, and on a fundamental level, more exciting than their male counterparts. I don’t say this to flatter feminism or become a WOOHOO girl, it’s just something I have experienced, starting in the college degree shows and expanding outward into public art spaces, artist-run spaces and even the boy’s club of private galleries. For instance, in my annual video review of Dublin Degree Shows on +billion- (SHITLIST), 9 out of 12 graduating artists turned out to be female in 2013, and 8 out of 10 in 2014. After taking stock of my recent written art reviews which also show a gender imbalance going the wrong way as society sees it and history tells it, which could be a sign that more and more female artists are exhibiting in Dublin, I then came across The Guardian art critic Adrian Searle criticising Charles Saatchii for lumping 14 female artists together in the recent exhibition ‘Champagne Life’ with no apparent curatorial reason for doing so.2 Then, Gemma Tipton’s ‘people to watch in 2016’ in The Irish Times included just two (female) visual artists, Caoimhe Kilfeather and Genieve Figgis (albeit Figgis, up in the distant stratosphere by now, was a safe bet two years ago). This was followed by Aileen Murphy and Kathy Tynan exhibiting together in the opening exhibition of 2016 at Dublin’s Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Two emerging female painters exhibiting at a commercial gallery in Dublin shouldn’t have looked out of place, but for me, it was a big statement. And it’s important to note the origins of the Kevin Kavanagh show which started back in early 2015 at Dublin’s Pallas Projects where 13 female artists (including Murphy and Tynan) came together in the group exhibition ‘Panorama’ (one less artist than ‘Champagne Life’ but a seemingly similar slippery motive). But it was the string of all-female group exhibitions at the beginning of this year that got me thinking about gender and art. There was Eleanor Duffin, Caoimhe Kilfeather

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Perhaps what I’m attempting to suggest by seminal is that this exhibition is (to my mind) the culmination and most concrete manifestation of recent developments that has seen a burgeoning climate of all-female-driven discourse, protest and solidarity around notions of power and ‘patriarchy’—a word that has become ubiquitous and pervasive on social media platforms in relation to all-female exhibitions and events.

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and Barbara Knezevic at Solstice Arts Centre; and Victoria J Dean, Niamh O’Doherty and Laura Smith at Galway Arts Centre. All this on the heels of the ‘16 X 16: New Generations bursuries’ announcement at the President’s house in December 2015, which included 8 visual artists, 7 of whom were female. And then just last week, art critic Cristín Leach wrote in a review of Sheila Rennick’s solo exhibition at Dublin’s Hillsboro Fine Art that “The best of them [Irish painters] are doing figurative work that challenges our notions of seduction, and perhaps that is why the best of them are women.”3 Bold, but true. Which brings me back to Platform Arts and 6 female artists: Saoirse Wall, Tara McKeon, Kerry Guinan, Avril Corroon, Eimear Walshe and Renèe Helèna Browne, and what I have already suggested as their seminal exhibition ‘Knowledge and other myths’. Although this can be intimately viewed as a show of individual moments that are both funny and political, visceral and seductive, what makes this show seminal is how it can be perceived from a distance. Let’s take for instance the concurrent all-male exhibition at Belfast’s Catalyst Arts, ‘This is Water’, with Simon Cummins, Paul Hallahan and Lee Welch. ‘This is Water’ is an exhibition that also plays with collaboration and collectivity, but in more abstract ways. On the opening night I ventured in to Catalyst on the bell of 6pm (hoping to avoid the exhibition entourage) to find the ‘Catalysts’ and a few early birders in the gallery before, I suspect, a larger audience and the three artists would convene later.

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In contrast to the Platform exhibition which is brazenly representational (something I will explain later), at Catalyst the transition from individual to collective is smoother and in flux. I think this is due in no small part to the group’s evolving abstract aesthetic (they have shown together before). Mr Hallahan’s Everything changes but nothing stands still, a three-channel projected video of a ‘Highway to Heaven’ celestial space—somewhere between sky and cloud— stands face-to-face in self-reflection and self-reproduction. While Mr Cummins, the man behind the pissy toilet light that filters through the space, has also dressed the four pillars in the space in brutal red lagging jackets, badly. But it is Mr Welch’s wall-confetti of ‘hallelujah’ blue and gold satin emulsion that seals this exhibition in, as a celebratory and nostalgic avant garde moment. Sincerely titled It began as a mistake, Mr Welch’s paint job commandeers the walls like tester pots that have revolted against rejection and ill-use. The artist did something similar at Dublin’s NCAD Gallery last year but here, at Catalyst, amid the rough transitions of artist-run architecture and threesome intervention Mr Welch’s abstract splodges of paint help sieve out the information piecemeal so an awareness of individuality is piecemeal, if at all. The same way Georges Seurat’s dots became Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte in 1884, Mr Welch’s elaboration of an ‘accident’ is filled with an immensely creative exploration of intuition and an awareness of intention. ‘This is Water’ is all about the punctuation marks, left free to their own devices with no full stop...... This avant garde feeling on the opening night was compounded by the introduction of a record player playing American minimalist composer Terry Reily’s 1969 album A Rainbow In Curved Air (an audio-scape that I’m not sure, but hope, continues playing during the daylight run of the show?).

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The opening night re-imagined my book and video experiences of the late 1960s/’70s New York avant garde art scene at night, the twilight hour of anti-establishment and feminism in the arts, before the art market hi-jacked the New York art scene in the ’80s. In a film review of the recent David Foster Wallace (DFW) biopic The End of the Tour, American author D.T. Max observed that “Wallace’s books and the public perception of his personality have seemed for some time headed in opposite directions: one reaching for a spiritual purity, the other deeply enmeshed in the problematic and human”. This fork in the road of public perception concerning DFW and his work, whose commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 (which everyone should experience: see YouTube) is explicitly referenced in ‘This is Water’ at Catalyst, and whose metamodernist tome Infinite Jest is referred to in Tara McKeon’s video work Weejy Weejy at Platform, also sums up the fork in the road that we are faced with in these two exhibitions.

There is a bite to the artists’ shared conviction and resolution of upturning the “indoctrination of patriarchal values”. And while there is no full stop at Catalyst there are plenty here. There’s a ‘point’ to this art; or points being made by the artists through parody, history, abjection, and an actual electoral ‘Liberate Art’ campaign by Kerry Guinan (which just this week went from artworld ether to public realm—kind of—in a live press conference at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S)). The distinction between politics proper and art is fuzzy in regards to the contrast between Miss Guinan’s static promo- and info-display at Platform and Miss Guinan’s live press conference broadcast from TBG+S via Ustream last Monday. Sure, politics is theatre, and Miss Guinan gives us lots of solo-posturing in a campaign manifesto that replaces false promises, but it lacks, dare I say it, ambivalence and modesty. It’s like an art parody of what we now recognise as ‘parody politics’ with serious consequences. It’s also something a male artist like Mondrian might do in the early twentieth century with one of those dumb manifestos about what painting is and is not: no grey areas. You can perhaps take a leap of faith here and say it’s a parody of power and the men that wield it? But my personal interest in Miss Guinan’s ‘Liberate Art’ campaign ends at art and doesn’t even begin with political administration—this is not House of Cards. Well, not yet anyway. Some of the individual artworks that are theatrically spotlit in the same room at Platform become whispers in headphones or are swallowed up by Miss Guinan’s political rhetoric and bluster. But if you listen and read closely you will find that they are rich with humour, hidden histories and entertaining mythologies. Avril Corroon and Renèe Helèna Browne have constructed what looks like a tall, timber lifeguard chair with black and yellow trim, echoing Miss Guinan’s campaign colours. This can be read as a nod and wink to their campaigning peer, or, because I initially put chair with campaign, help to abstract Miss Guinan’s representational

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Although one branch of this fork is foggy at Catalyst, the road is clear at Platform. Like Mr Cummins, Mr Hallahan and Mr Welch, this is also the second co-curated exhibition by these 6 female artists. As mentioned earlier regarding the brazen representation performed in ‘Knowledge and other myths’ in contrast to the fuzzy abstraction of ‘This is Water’, well, ‘This is Water’ is gratifyingly gummy, whereas ‘Knowledge and other myths’ has teeth.

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message. Miss Carroon and Miss Browne have also collaborated on a tongue and cheek video work titled Masterpiece. Considering the overriding frustration towards patriarchal society expressed and performed by the artists at Platform, the title Masterpiece sums it up really. Masterpiece is in essence an absurdist instructional video on “how to make your very own masterpiece” by bonding horse hoof, egg and bone. The step-by-step cookery guide is combined with anecdotal garnish that points to Renaissance Man and biographer to the male-artist-superstars, Vasari. The ironical tone is continued in Tara McKeon’s video work Weejy Weejy, which is centred around the myth of the Weejy Weejy, a bird that has just “one wing which causes it to fly in tighter, faster, smaller circles, until it disappears up its own fundament [its arse]”. This Weeji Weejy bird’s ever-decreasing circle into itself becomes, in the end, a metaphor for protest against progress. Miss McKeon’s video work is rich with oddball myths and notions about what it is to be a woman in society: there’s the story of the Roman goddess of fortune, Fortuna, who was drawn to adventurous and risk-taking men because she, a woman, was naturally cautious; there’s the notion of the hard body of treadmill-capitalism vs. the soft body of motherhood; there’s the social shame of the spinster, unmarried, childless and of no use to society as we see it; there’s the belief that the wingless Dodo was satanic and birds that eat rice blow up—watch out China.

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Then we come to Eimear Walshe’s architectural symbol of female exclusion and resistance. Window Restoration is a freestanding, stained-glass window recovered and donated to Miss Walshe, who has put it on public display for the first time in 50-years at Platform. In a dark recess the work is spotlit so the light paces through the glass to stain the floor with the window’s decorative elements and the strange inscription “neutra”, latin for ‘neither’. Miss Walshe’s accompanying booklet outlines ‘The Queer History Of A Stained Glass Window Originally Designed For The Long Hall Pub Dublin’. We are told that The Long Hall Pub was a “man-only space until 1951” but it was “permitted” for women to use the adjoining hallway where they were served smaller glasses through a hatch. The history is bubbling with moments of female solidarity and resistance. The idea that the window was installed in the hallway with the inscription ‘neutra’, marking it as a “space of gender neutrality”, is hopeful. Although Saoirse Wall’s voice can be heard while experiencing the artworks of her peers in the large space at Platform, her video work Sticky Encounter is out of view behind an anemic pink curtain. In 2013 Miss Wall’s video work for her degree show at NCAD was the absolute highlight. I noted then, as I do now, Miss Wall’s “striking physiognomy” and “performative timing” on camera. Filmed presumably in situ at Platform with the pink curtain used as scene backdrop, Miss Wall wears an equally anemic blue dress, sitting on a sickly white plastic office chair on wheels. The wheels help the artist to glide gradually towards the camera. Miss Wall coyly presents her invisible, internal symptoms to an imagined doctor, until the observer, face-to-face with the camera lens, is pulled down into an endoscopic view of the artist’s tonsils. Miss Wall’s art is anything but anaemic. Frustratingly, sometimes it’s easier to side with irony over sincerity—it’s a contemporary condition that keeps flapping its wings. What DFW said about irony in relation to protest could ruffle a few feathers: “Someone once called irony the song of a bird that has come to love it’s cage, And even though it sings about not liking the

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cage it really likes it in there.” But there is also the suggestion made by Miss McKeon in her video narrative that the Weejy Weejy is happy chained to its own ass.

These two exhibitions at Platform and Catalyst cannot be experienced in isolation, or shouldn’t be, because within the relational frame of timing and gender one infuses the other with energy and context. ‘This is Water’ is a celebration of abstraction and filtered individuality; ‘Knowledge and other myths’ is a celebration of representational protest against the social order. At Catalyst Mr Welch’s ability to elaborate on an ‘accident’ to create an experience that is abstract enough to break down representation and individuality should be intimidating to other artists (how’s that for flattery!). Miss Wall’s ability to simply make performance believable is not something that you can learn.

MARCH 2016 (#103): COULDA-WOULDA-SHOULDA ALAN PHELAN, ‘Our Kind’, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 10 March – 2 October. THERE’S something masochistic about telling stories that have the same horizon. I grew up in a small Irish village. From the very first time I started to archive my own memories in language, not the memories handed down by my family, friends and villagers, I wanted to forget them. I found the village life insular and amnesia inducing. Past events were retold and re-described by the villagers with the invention that comes with repetition and the plot holes that come with emotion. These storytellers somehow devalued their pasts. It was like the events of their lives were never good enough, never colorful enough, whichever way they re-described them. Their histories never measured-up to the dramatic memoirs of their idols and icons and neighbours. In the end the stories of our lives become fantasies, not memories. And the smaller the life the bigger the lie. But the worst thing was, the villagers had the nerve to embellish the same past, bare face to bare face over and over and over again. Perhaps the need to embellish or imagine out-weighs the shame of being caught in a lie: the villagers were writing the same organic script in that respect. Artist Alan Phelan shows himself to be a storyteller of villager stock in his tall tale Our Kind currently on show at The Hugh Lane, Dublin, where we see him mining the life of Irish revolutionary and diarist, Roger Casement, to tell a story that is based on historical inconsistencies, half-truths and injustices. Casement the man has been an ongoing project for Phelan, not just a centenary fling like so much other art made this year. 10 years ago Phelan made a papier-mâché bust

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Generally, I think we have to question our loves, not the promiscuous likes, loves and favourites on social media, but love as a confused and visceral response to art rather than a fair-weather one. There is something ubiquitous and habitual about flattery, but that thing (let’s call it a ‘thing’ rather than love) I experienced at Belfast’s Platform Arts and Catalyst Arts the other day was anything but habitual. That thing, their art, broke habits.

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of Casement with a rubber plant snaking out of its nostrils, entitled Roger should have stayed in the jungle (2006). Phelan’s evolving portrait of Casement seems to be bound up in ‘coulda woulda shoulda’ scenarios. Phelan’s art, which I have come to know and appreciate over the years, is usually hedonistically plentiful and pleasurably tactile. Thankfully, we get some Braille hedonism and pleasure at The Hugh Lane in the wall-bound vinyl texts that covertly reveal ‘filthy’ extracts from Casement’s diaries, which document or fantasise about his men being “stiff” and “huge”. Until now, however, I have not always fully connected with Phelan’s haptic excursions into film. The presence of the artist’s frenzied and creative hand in his making and hoarding of things and ideas have always made sense to me in the gallery as solid and still objects. Especially when Phelan’s hand was injured in recent years, which resulted in the outpouring of artworks that enshrined the importance of the hand to his art.

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Our Kind is a 30-minute film that falls between the durational hinterland of T.V. sitcom and drama series, and once and for all displays Phelan’s gift for storytelling in film. The artist has constructed some form of temporal multiverse where you can seemingly cheat physical death but not psychical defeat: Phelan’s Casement in exile is a psychologically and spiritually beaten-down superhero. It’s 1941, Norway; an impossible future 25-years after Casement was executed following the 1916 Easter Rising. Against an alien landscape, a haunting instrumental accompanies friend and supporter to the Irish cause, Alice Stopford Green, as she exhales vapours on her way to meet Casement and his manservant-cum-lover, Adler Christensen, who are seen snuggling in bed, dismissing any doubt outright. Alice traverses a metal bridge that has the profile of some fantasy aircraft or spacecraft, a Lockheed Nighthawk or Cylon Raider. Then past a dragon-scale slated roof. The ice and isolation of the Norwegian landscape suggests to the child in me Superman’s Fortress of Solitude1, and to the adult, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Our Kind is full of fencing dialogue between the 3 protagonists, as they verbally thrust and parry without really coming to a conclusion. The best and most fluid line in the film’s choppy and circling narrative is given to Alice: “The choreography of the coincidences is perfect.” Phelan’s Casement is taciturn and stoic, aloof and secretive. The man is just about surviving the psychological fallout from the British government’s circulation of his ‘sexual degeneracy’, which was publicly unmasked via his Black Diaries. These public revelations undermined any support for clemency regarding the British court’s charge of treason against Casement for his hand in planning an armed rebellion in Germany against British rule in Ireland. There is only one moment in Phelan’s counterfactual portrait when Casement the man is unguardedly human: the moment when Adler exits their bed and Casement gives an anxious yawn in anticipation of Alice’s visit, as if there were something troublesome on the horizon. For the rest of the film Casement huffs and puffs like a big and tamed wolf, episodically staving off his abrupt and instinctual nature as the ‘big bad wolf’ in his stop-and-go interactions with an ever so judgmental Alice, and his evolving pig of a lover, Adler. There is something childlike and fantastic about Phelan’s characterisation of Adler.

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In one instance he inappropriately confesses that finding a well-filled wallet was “like a dream”. In another Adler recounts to Casement Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, ‘Hop-Frog’, which tells the tale of Hop-Frog the dwarf, who turned nasty on a king who lived for the practical joke. Hop-Frog convinces the King’s cabinet to dress as orangutans for the forthcoming masquerade in costumes of tar and flax. As part of the theatre the men as orangutans are chained together, a device that helps Hop-Frog to string up and torch his taunters.

That’s the thing about my general reception of Phelan’s art, it always seems to elicit childhood. The references to fairytales and superheroes came naturally when watching Our Kind. The title too suggests something more than the obvious; humanity maybe. However, there is no happy ever after here. Something that Alice makes a point of when she says to Roger that he is “not happy” while conversing about the weather in a fairytale forest.

MAY 2016 (#104): GETTING OUT OF GODARD AN ALMOST REVIEW THAT BECAME A MANIFESTO When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave. (John Cage) viper tongues and serpent cocks, black bed restraints and a colony of batty trousers belts, trouser snakes and bike tubes, one-eyed monsters and the many-eyed victim, vaginas that growl and penises that pout, plops as penises and penises as plops, bunch of boners and a bouquet of spent syringes, a wallowing wheelchair and an orgy of wankers, masturbating a serpent dildo and cloistered masturbation, square jerking and round rubbing, Gene Simmons’ tongue and bear bestiality, skulls and crosses and swarms of dolls’ eyes, crowns of teeth and garlands of flowers, jouissannce and self-censorship, woman and men... (extract from my notes on ‘The Passion of Carol Rama’ exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) LAST week I found myself circling the block on which Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (TBG+S) stands, like a vulture. Now it’s obvious to me I was gearing up for what I assumed to be at least an hour of Irish artist Declan Clarke wandering the streets of twentieth-century Europe’s cultural and political conscience like some displaced ghost or time traveller. Finally, but hesitantly – the battle lost before it had begun – I pushed against the glass door of the gallery which seemed heavier than ever before. Inside I found the space divided in two: a kind of retro lobby area – a cheap red carpet provoking the association – and a dark space. I stalled for a few minutes in the lobby, taking in a regiment of black and white photographs that incrementally document some event

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The word ‘generous’ comes too easily when thinking about Phelan’s art. It’s more to do with the difference between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’, like when the late Robin Williams unmasked his joker half to reveal an actor who had pathos in spades.

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that has all the bad hair and tailoring of 1970s or ’80s Ireland. Before I could decide on whether to engage further or get out of Godard, friend and art critic Joan Fowler was on me with a “hello” and “goodbye” in quick succession as she darted into the dark space to catch the scheduled 1.20pm start of Clarke’s film (art before friends, RESPECT!). Almost following her lead I sidestepped to ask the invigilator “How long is it?” “65 minutes,” she whispered. “Oh,” I whispered back, all the while backing away and gliding out through the gallery door that had lost a lot of its burden. This time last year I soaked up to the point of sunburn Clarke’s summer-long wandering film trilogy commissioned by and exhibited at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery (review here). The hours I spent with Clarke as flâneur produced many thoughts and feelings and words, but the idea of yet another commissioned work just one year on, and exhibited at yet another publicly funded art institution in Dublin is too much too soon for one artist and art community in my opinion. The obvious reason for my circling vulture metaphor is the plain fact that Clarke’s trilogy at the Hugh Lane Gallery wasn’t given enough time for me personally to yearn for more from Clarke. I believe being given time to yearn to see an artist’s work is pivotal to a greater engagement, if engagement is what you are longing for as an artist and observer.

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My exit from the gallery is not exactly an act of transgression, but confessing it here feels like I am transgressing something – a secret handshake or an unsaid or unwritten social contract with the art community. But sometimes I want to nick the art scene for its own good, and other times I want to caress it; what would art criticism be without a bit of bloodletting here and loving there. But this moment of hit and run at TBG+S did produce thoughts and feelings and words about the dominating contexts that shape an artwork, its maker and the environment in which it is shown. How can the artist and art transgress these dominating contexts? In Norman Mailler’s marvelous manifesto on the early-twentieth-century ‘Hipster’ (‘The White Negro’, 1957) he writes that “context generally dominates the man”. The context that Mailler is reflecting upon is America’s increasingly homogenised and conformist culture, something that the early hipster felt existentially cut off from and resistant to: contrary to Huey Lewis and The News the early hipster did not subscribe to the lyric “It’s hip to be square.” You could say that context dominates contemporary art too. It’s the first word we learn in art college as fledgling artists. The obligatory issuing of context makes everyone feel they are on the same page, sentence, word, letter, full stop. These readymade contexts shape art into a mere simulation of itself – the edges getting rounder and rounder with each simulation. And the word that I am failing to think of right now due to lack of use – ‘visceral’ – is never appropriate. Painting is the exception, which still retains the capacity for raw subjectivity. Sometimes, however, I find myself yearning for more dumb instinct from other mediums. This simulative art, in which art mimics life not the other way around, is very civilised and sealed in, discursive rather than visceral. Anything visceral is rare in an Irish art context, but when it happens everything else looks and feels the same, like an icy and silent oasis of institutionalised conscience. Context is everything when discussing the nature of transgression and art. Being an artist is inherently transgressive. Like Mailler’s hipster the artist is a rebel

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without a cause (and career). But art itself doesn’t always transgress. Art repeats the transgressions of itself and others: art is historically or retrospectively or retroactively transgressive, if that makes sense. Transgression, like the art criticism I want to write and read[1], is performed in the present like an instinct, not knowing what it is before it is made public. Transgression doesn’t get the privilege of Time. There’s something telling that year-on-year more displays of transgression occur at end-of-year college degree shows than in the official art scene. When things are good in college a strange individualism and competitive spirit rages. Whereas outside, it’s like a ventriloquist art society (or human centipede, which I am sure I saw a Carol Rama version of in the current exhibition of her work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)).

Absurdly, process and production seem to be the two things that artists most value or share when they talk about their art lives. But being zombie productive is not transgressive. Transgression is when the zombie punches through the soil of its own grave. Transgression is when the zombie eats its first victim. But after these acts the zombie ‘life’ becomes mere process. Transgression is like the feeling of someone walking on your grave. It’s a violation of your senses (taste, sight, hearing) and a violent attack on how you see yourself, and a choice as to how you want the world to see you, know you even (ethically and morally and intimately). Transgression is the antithesis of your Facebook status. Because transgression is revelatory. The act of transgression sheds light on the transgressor’s drives. Mailler tells us that the early hipster’s only “life-giving answer” to death by conformity is “to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger”. Transgression in some ways is as much a letting go as it is an assault on our sensibilities. Transgression is a fugitive state of self. That’s why transgressor-philosopher Georges Bataille sees transgressive acts being not dependent on overcoming self-repression, but rather the self needs to be expunged in order for transgression to be enacted. According to Bataille the modern world is the real inhibitor, while the modern individual, with his internalisation of God, the Freudian super-ego or the Shakespearian conscience can never be capable of transgressing the normative because of the shame and guilt and embarrassment and sin of being transgressive (Carol Rama’s remedy for that: “My master is a certain sense of sin”). In the end we have to become someone else – to fictionalise ourselves – in order to be transgressive, like Bataille in Story of the Eye (1928). But although these transgressions of the mind can be imagined in great detail, they rarely come to light. Transgression is an ideal or action that someone else performs, like charity, or calling the police when you witness a crime. People who desire to be transgressive, but cannot for whatever reasons, are envious of those who can,

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But acts of transgression are usually one-hit wonders, because the temptation is that the first (removed) transgression one makes as an artist is enough. Desperation to get attention? Attempting to be somehow different? Young and naïve to what D.H. Lawrence called the graduation of “kitsch selves” and Nietzsche’s “automatons”, whatever the reasons the original transgression is treated as the eureka moment, the moment of revelation, the moment of success, the moment of validation, the orgasm that can be prolonged; that this first and only act of transgression is tantric enough to sustain a career, with slight variations of the first transgression to keep the sex fresh. But that’s just style, and style is process and transgression is not process. Transgression is preceded by hesitancy that is then acted upon, like my hesitancy and action at TBG+S.

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especially those that are celebrated or even vilified for it. Those of whom fantasise about transgression are enamoured with the idea of transgression but are not equipped with the tools to let it play out because it was never fostered by their family, their friends, their teachers, their therapist and so on. They live vicariously through those who have transgressed, thinking that the internal fantasy will be enough. But imagine if, as artists and writers, we were willing to share that internal fantasy, that forbidden thought or action, confessionals that test our perception of ourselves and reflect something back on the art scene that is not a version of itself? Imagine still if artists were ashamed of their art, or at least radically insecure about what they produced and conscious of how people would react to their art and its message. I sometimes feel that anxiety pulsing in art colleges but not as much in the Irish art scene, where it is too publicly conscious. To be transgressive you need to be enamoured with yourself; self conscious not publicly conscious. Transgression and narcissism go hand-in-hand – it’s a case of Michael Heizer lost in the desert, with nothing but himself and his art. It feels today that with the promotional clamour behind artists, curators, institutions and their exhibitions, that everyone is more than comfortable with what they are and what their art says about them in the public sphere. It feels like transgression is taboo in the art scene: transgression is beneath art in more ways than one.

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As Adam Phillips states, there is no such thing as “free transgression”. Transgressive acts are always preceded by hesitation, denoting a tortured ambivalence between what is right and what is wrong for you: transgression is in the choosing. It’s the difference between being caught in the spin cycle and sitting on the spin cycle but intermittently getting off before pleasure sets in. Because, as Bataille sees it, pleasure is more homogenous spin cycle than heterogenous transgression. Transgressive pleasure just ends up being process, a ‘zombie formalism’ if you will. Style! And there is no hesitation in style. Philip Guston is ironically ‘accepted’ as the legendary transgressor of style. Guston was pulled into the spin cycle of American Abstraction when he arrived in New York in the 1940s. Coming to the end of two decades of pretending to be ‘a style’ (the context certainly dominating the man) his daughter wondered (due to the psychological torment she witnessed in her father at home) whether “the image maker in him that feared and longed to create golems probably never did feel entirely comfortable with abstraction”. How must have it felt for Guston when he made that first transgressive mark in the studio from abstraction back to figuration? And, moreover, to be ambivalent about its future direction? (Transgressive acts discombobulate). And then to imagine further how Guston felt putting it out to public pasture? And then leave it up to DeKooning to put a downer on events by responding toe-to-toe with Guston, ‘I get it!’ I am struggling to think back when I experienced something in the official Irish art scene that either transgressed my own taste, or a transgressive artwork that stopped the spin cycle for a moment. One exhibition that abruptly comes to mind is Aleana Egan’s solo exhibition ‘Sunday Night’ at TBG+S in 2009. 2009 wasn’t a hopeful time for the Irish art scene like in every other walk of life. On that dreary and dark December night when the artificial fluorescence of the city seemed too bright, too much, Egan’s stark black and white and cryptic formalism (looking back) was contextually the right amount of wrong. In a sense I am imagining

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transgression retroactively here. And perhaps this is how transgression works on the senses – it’s delayed. Egan’s ‘Sunday Night’ was non-discursive at a time when discourse seemed to be over-establishing itself in art education: I had just finished art college in Dublin and was chocking on words, but for Egan, I had none. When intellect comes before instinct transgression has no chance of taking root, even in the grass roots. Bataille tells us that discourse kills off transgressive acts. It’s like what Michelle Richman says: “eroticism is to sexuality as the non-discursive is to language”. While Aleana Egan’s work at TBG+S in 2009 transgressed my personal taste, Richard Mosse’s film The Enclave shown at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2014 transgressed public taste and consensus. When the stock phrase ‘Love it or Hate it’ trends the art scene you can be sure that a bit of nicking and caressing has taken place. The film wrenched the Irish art scene out of its own arse and got everyone opining about ethics and morals and even Richard Mosse himself. The film produced an excess of diametrically opposed opinion. It was like a spanner had been thrown into the works, causing magenta waves of criticism to flood the art scene.

Beyond the personal memories of Egan and Mosse it was last week’s experience of Carol Rama’s life and work presented at IMMA (before my quick exit from TBG+S) that really wrenched me out of my own reverie to end up here with this manifesto, or whatever it is... Hermetically sealed within a blacked out apartment in Turin for 70 odd years, Rama continued to make art over a lifetime, a lifetime of being remembered but mostly forgotten: status and visibility wasn’t the issue. Some artists talk about the need to make art being more powerful than the need for their art to be seen, while others say that they go hand-in-hand. In Rama’s case there seemed to be a real ontological need to make art, whether based on the artist’s disavowal of life’s traumas or passionate embrace of life’s jouissance. In some ways Rama’s almost secret life as an artist was as transgressive as her art; or at the very least her life and art coalesced to become the same transgressive thing. Our general notion of transgression is usually based around sexual deviancy. Admittedly, Rama’s images are decisively and unapologetically carnal in as much the way she paints as what she paints. But the artist’s most pronounced transgression in the narratives that surround this exhibition at IMMA is how she continued to make art even though it remained relatively unseen in a world that is all about being seen. Transgression in relation to what I perceive as its absence in the Irish art scene doesn’t have to be just about sex (or something so horrid or lurid or beautiful that we can imagine it with absolute clarity, nausea and joy). It can be about the small things – gestures that derail the self and society, prediction and pattern, and most of all, consensus. To transgress is down to our little and big world experiences. It’s also down to the language that we use to define transgression, or ill-define it as it were. Transgression is about swapping sides, from the side of your inhibitors’ personal

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With Mosse coming off a series of awards and plaudits for his photography and film, any moral or ethical line that his work may or may not have crossed was obviously inflated. When status enters the art context polarising opinion on whether that artist is deserving of that status comes into play, which effects reception to the work; especially by artists whom feel they are deserving of the same status, which amounts to a lot of artists out there: inflated status transgressively threatens the status quo.

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values and beliefs (family, friends, religion, law, education) to the side of your imagined but never realised temptations and ambitions, instincts and intuition. But transgression can also be an act of reaching out beyond personal and private temptations to challenge the status quo, the normative, the passive, the beige. The fact is there are artists out there producing transgressive work in outlier spaces and through fugitive projects (and in art college) that will never catch what they naively perceive as the bright searchlights of the institution. I remember I brought to the attention of a curatorial board a host of recent graduate artists as potential future solo exhibitors. I was told in no uncertain terms that the list of artists didn’t meet the curriculum vitae standards of the institution’s mission statement. (What does mid-career artist mean anyway!?) To be honest the whole thing stank of blinkered careerism – the making and retaining of careers and sustaining of institutions. As Joan’s cold shoulder demonstrated at TBG+S, ‘art before friendship’ should extend to art before the whole gamut, and that includes jobs and the very institutions of art that support and promote and advocate for art.[2] When artists transgress their own aesthetic identities, when their process becomes subtractive rather than additive, when they transgress their own tastes, their own environments, their own education, their valued modes of distribution and reception, their own models of influence, their own inhibitors, their own ambitions, everything changes. Of course we need the institution, for there would be nothing to give out about or rebel against, but from time to time I wait for an exhibition to force the washing machine to go CLANK!

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The question I arrive at is: is it enough to just imagine transgression in the local art scene? Will that keep someone like me supplied with new words. Because it is artists and their art whom prompt new words, and I am tired of repeating and relying on the same words.

MAY 2016 (#105): NIGHT PAINTER RAMON KASSAM, ‘Works’, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 20 MAY – 2 JULY 2016. The painter’s sense of self is the biggest obstacle to taking on the painter’s life. On the canvas mind and matter become knotted. But there are knots and there are KNOTS. Good painting depends on the psychological and formalist knots coming together in an imperfect tug of love and war that never lets go. The ‘temperament’ of the painter – a word that was conceived in the tug of love that Charles Baudelaire had with the paintings of Eugene Delacroix – is where it begins and ends for the painter. Most painters tell you to fuck off with their eyes when you mention their temperament, not realising the irony that temperament starts with ‘fuck off eyes’. Ramon Kassam – now showing at Dublin’s Green on Red Gallery – tells us he paints in the third person. It’s a novel idea, especially for a painter. The very notion implies an escape act, a Houdini. But is it all an act, a trick, an illusion, a trompe l’oeil? Six years ago I experienced the very grass roots of Kassam’s unique meta-perspective of the painter’s life and processes at Limerick’s artist-run Occupy Space. Three years later at Dublin’s Pallas Projects he exhibited a body of work that seemed almost

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resolved in its intent to kill Kassam off: the exhibition was titled Portrait cuts itself out on the floor. At Green on Red Gallery we get to experience a painter who has managed to distance himself from himself without killing himself, and made that differentiation between distance and death explicit in titles such as His re-worked Kassam. Cut, spliced, folded, stapled and stitched, Kassam’s paintings are surgeries in the same warped sense that Dr. Frankenstein was a Sunday painter. Some, with puckered skin, look like they’ve had liposuction. Others – minus the artist’s glue and scalpel – seem perfect, like immaculately conceived babies without the push or the knife. I imagine Kassam as a night painter. While other painters sleep and dream of what could happen tomorrow on the canvas, Kassam paints like a painter once removed from his daylight self. Like a nineteenth-century somnambulist, he sleepwalks as a different person, recollected in fits and starts on the canvas. Although Kassam’s big multimedia paintings shout loudest at Green on Red, it is the “immaculately conceived babies without the push or the knife” that whispered in my ear long after I had left the gallery. Talk and View from bed probably couldn’t hold the space without their hung, drawn and quartered kin, but their infused black and red and ultramarine surfaces agitate as much, if not more, than Kassam’s scalpel.

Kassam’s biggest surgery at Green on Red, however, is the notion that he has psychically removed himself from the act of painting; that he’s just a narrator of the painter’s life in the studio. There is an elevation to his painted perspectives that gets this sense of distance across, as if Kassam is looking down from above at the memories and processes of another painter. This pronounced elevation invites imaginings of Jackson Pollock spread-eagled above his horizontal canvas, or Richard Diebenkorn’s hawk-eye paintings of Ocean Park. Green on Red Gallery has been through its own tug of war over the last two years, from moving beyond comfortable walking distance of Dublin gallery central to a second-fix vacant commercial space down the docks, to half the stable of artists leaving the gallery. Kassam having his first commercial solo show here seems like the right relationship, the right context. Kassam brings a new vitality to the Irish painting scene, a painting scene that sometimes gets stuck in the same gear of painterly lyricism. Artists like Kassam producing work that is a little edgier, rawer, with an explicit purpose that is less about painterly nuance and more about agitating the painting language is needed now more than ever to spark discussion and a little bit of rivalry among painters. Because believe me, painters are talking about Ramon Kassam right now, and they should be, but for the right reasons! *JUNE 2016 (#106): SHITLIST #1 DIGITAL REVIEW OF DUBLIN DEGREE SHOWS* SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com] *JUNE 2016

(#107): FUGITIVES #1: VIDEO REVIEWS

ART WORKS, CARLOW, 10 – 19 JUNE 2016. SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

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Kassam’s colours are from the night too, as if the artist is looking from the urban undergrowth through another artist’s studio window that is shockingly lit by a bare lightbulb. Blue, red, yellow, black and white are Kassam’s primary set, which are scumbled across the scarred, pleated and creased linen of his stretchers.

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JUNE 2016 (#108): LIMINAL IS FINE, BUT... SOME THOUGHTS ON EMBRACING SUBJECTIVITY IN THE ACT OF WRITING ON ART, PROVOKED BY CAOIMHE KILFEATHER’S SOLO SHOW AT DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY, DUBLIN. When two curators agree it’s a trend. When two critics agree one becomes redundant. (Peter Schjeldahl quoting Dave Hickey) The other day I found myself studying a photograph of my son aged six months on the fridge door. He is now three years old. But at the time the photograph was taken family and friends and even strangers remarked on how he was the spit of my wife. I didn’t see it at the time. He was a baby and looked like all other babies. But now I see it, in the photograph on the fridge. It’s startling, the resemblance. This both terrifies me and excites me, this moment of subjectivity, this moment of not being able to see what is in plain sight. As an art critic and artist you need to believe in your eyes. But the stuff that is bubbling underneath your eyes, the volcano of subjectivity that you can’t control or worse still, are unaware is controlling you, is what influences our perceptual, interpretative and critical relationships with the world around us.

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So if our eyes are telling lies, especially in our intimate or durational relationships with someone or something, what then? Do we embrace our subjectivity, our mood, our biases, our desires, our instinct and intuition in our verbal embrace of the world? If we do is there not a danger of not making sense, causing offense, not being heard, not fitting in, ignored, deaf, dumb? Wait there, is that a bad thing!? In the world of art where subjectivity is allowed to boil over in the process of art making, our ways of interpreting art with words seem quite restricted, reiterative, samey. We use words that are within arms reach, words that suit the context, impress the context, that bridge the gulf between losing oneself and self control. Language is not allowed the free rein to become the consummate ‘miscommunicator’ that it is in our other relationships with the world and its things. The language of art is one of stock and staple. In our local art scene under-interpretation persists – one review bleeds into three. There is an over dependency on certain words. There is a hoard of acceptably sophisticated words and theories and references and even moods that certify the object as art. ‘Liminal’ is one such word, a word that we adopt as artists in art college (I did), a word that signposts art but ventures nowhere, a word that is, ironically, a closed door to interpretation. Not the first time this year in the Irish art scene, the word liminal is invoked again and again in the literature and criticism surrounding Caoimhe Kilfeather’s current solo show at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. But the word liminal leads us down the same worn path of hedge-sitting rather than hedge-cutting, to a world of predictable and legitimate ways of talking and thinking, experiencing and interpreting art. Liminal even forces a certain mood upon art, which is moody at the best of times, and doubly so when the moody observer enters the equation. Peering down from DHG’s mezzanine Kilfeather’s art looks like unhemmed pockets of white noise. Then, stepping down into the gallery the darkness begins to lift as eyes

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adjust to the light; from dream to waking, from waking to dream. The adjustment never steadies as one after another photograph and sculpture forces the pupils to constrict and dilate, pin pricks to black holes.

When we talk around art like Kilfeather’s the time of day doesn’t always have to be dawn or dusk as has been suggested over and over again in reference to the artist’s DHG show. The light doesn’t always have to be twilight or crepuscular either. Maybe we are in a sitting room and the blaze of white noise pulsing from the untuned TV is pinpricking the dead of night – inside and outside – on furniture, on toys, on mirrors, on pictures, through windows and into the night to alight upon whatever textures lurk out there: there’s multiverses of interpretation lying in the dark. Maybe if we can’t trust our eyes perhaps we should close them. Continuing...

The experience of Kilfeather’s art is all down to patience and time, staying with each work until the drugs take hold. But the hourglass of light and dark that makes up her art always tends towards darkness. And in the dark we can say anything, think anything, write anything. So why don’t we!? Art is only as deep as the well of our interpretative faculty, and our interpretative faculty depends on expanding beyond the stock and staple and legitimate language of art. For me Kilfeather’s art offers the potential to expand beyond journeyman vocabulary, especially in the relationship between her monochrome photography and piles of metal which are teaming with suggestive noise at DHG. Her art may come across as silent at first but that doesn’t mean our verbal response should be a whisper. Have a go yourself, it’s an exhibition that deserves some noise!

JULY 2016 (#109): THE ART OF COMPROMISE ANDREAS VON KNOBLOCH, ‘In Support’, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, 22 JULY – 3 SEPTEMBER 2016. Human After All (Daft Punk, 2005) IRISH art centres breed compromise the same way agreeable relationships do. Because artists can’t be choosers they politely refer to their experience with the not-fit-forpurpose architecture of art centres as ‘challenging’. But this is just the beggar talking.

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Maybe Kilfeather’s piles of tempered metal are not symbols of ‘entropy’ (inevitable decay) – another staple of art language, or the reiterative zombie ruins of Modernism, another. Perhaps those piles of tempered metal are the shadows of last night’s popped pharmaceuticals, the inky silhouettes of pain and sex and sleepless nights; and the monochrome photographs of misty hedgerows the labyrinthine entrances and exits to and from dreams or drugs. Maybe this is about popping pills rather than propping up history yet again. Why not!?

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Society, religion, therapists tell us that compromise is a good and necessary thing in a relationship. But as individuals, being uncompromising is the stuff of heroes, of geniuses, of trailblazers. Artists don’t always get to be heroes, geniuses or trailblazers because they make art within a system that is beset by compromise. They are always the beggar, never the chooser. Mermaid Art Centre is the mothership of compromise. I had a solo show there in 2012: that babbling brook of a cafe downstairs with the indifferent jabbering, all that glass, all that light, too much public, too much civic. During the installation I was nagged by the same question: was it worth transforming an art space not fit for purpose for an audience that would never come? So, in anticipation of Andreas von Knobloch’s solo show ‘In Support’, I asked the artist could I meet him in the gallery on the day of the official preview. He agreed. I don’t know why I asked, it was a potentially compromising get together, artist and art critic. But there was something about what the artist wrote in the press release that implied it would be okay to meet, that his work was about conversation, conviviality, even inviting compromising situations; that ‘In Support’ was an open question rather than a closed answer.

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I met the artist, we shook hands, we walked and talked. There was a casual to-and-fro to our conversation like the to-and-fro between von Knobloch’s art and the gallery’s architecture. He introduced me to his mother, who sat on the gallery floor (in support) with her back to a big block of white foam that had been nibbled at by the artist’s hand. The gallery floor invites such lounging because von Knobloch has covered it in a sweet-coloured carpet underlay, the strata of which looks like some concoction of jellies and ice cream. Some oblong portions of the underlay retain their syrupy-ceriseshop-seal, playfully suggesting “red carpet entrances”. And that’s just the womb of the exhibition. The guts are made up of materials that you would find behind the stage set of your home, including plastic pipes and cavity blocks. von Knobloch’s structures pole vault through the gallery; the play of art is being played out rather than the posturing of physics. The materials that hold these pole vaulters in place – nylon strapping, metal clamps and foam – suggest movement and transition, climbing and rigging, and of all things, painting. In one instance the artist has removed a light fitting through which a length of nylon strapping disappears. It’s a one liner that sticks. Pleasure, purpose and play are being performed here, or are ‘In Support’ of one another, so everything feels uncompromising and free. The carpet underlay is not a conceptual conceit or contextual necessity. There is pleasure in the feeling of it underfoot; or how it traps your step; or how it ripples outward from points of contact. There is pleasure exhibited too in von Knobloch’s choosing of materials, colours and textures. Sometimes the medium is message enough. But it is the friendly white foam that is the marshmallow that holds this camp fire together. The foam cushions contact points between von Knobloch’s structures and the uncompromising architecture of the gallery. In instances where pipe-meets-foammeets-cavity block-meets-architecture, the foam takes the form of a breast or a butt. And that is the thing, at the end of these pole-vaulting displays you are searching for the human dismount. Without that human element all we get is an animated

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hardware store.

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But what is most exciting about von Knobloch’s art is its potential scope for adaptability toanyspacewhatever[1]. We get a sense of this physical adaptability – but also environmental ‘mood swings’ – when we leave the light-filled transitional space of the gallery to enter the more intimate, partitioned spaces where the civic is less invasive. Here the artist’s fencing with the architecture is less parry and more thrust. Isolated from the civic racket von Knobloch’s art holds the space in its grasp. I started to think about basements here; windowless and derelict architecture which von Knobloch could make livable. Because above all else, von Knobloch’s art is a livable and transformational art, even in the midst of pure compromise. *AUGUST 2016 (#110): FUGITIVES #2: VIDEO REVIEWS

Sectional video review of group exhibition ‘Pull the Rug Out from Under the Carpet’, with AUSTIN HEARNE, DARREN CAFFREY, MARIAH BLACK & MADELEINE

FAIRBARN, CHANTEL ROSARIO and CAC O’DAY, Dore’s Factory, Kilkenny City, 5 – 14 AUGUST 2016.SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

All dreams return again to the only remaining instinct, to escape from the outline of the self. (Hans Bellmer) Let’s get some housekeeping out of the way first: Hillsboro Fine Art is not the Cinderella of Dublin’s art scene, but its lost slipper. If you quickly list off the commercial galleries in Dublin on one hand – Kerlin, Mother’s, Green on Red, Kevin Kavanagh, Taylor (maybe), and in that order – Hillsboro might only figure if you had a mutant sixth finger. But in recent years the gallery has peeked the interest of new audiences and artists, a time when shepherding gallerists have lost control of their flock, and artist-led spaces have become either overly institutionalised or overtly outlier. Sheila Rennick’s solo at Hillsboro this year was tease enough for me to take a rare trip to the gallery. The gallery felt distractingly homely: the door, the sofas, the curio by the Hillsboro Art Family dotted here, there and everywhere to frustratingly throw the context of the main event out of joint. You might think: grow up, it’s a commercial gallery after all and artists have to supposedly ‘live’. But there is always the expectation and choice of sheep’s clothing, which Hillsboro seemingly don’t do. On the day of my visit loitering artworks were found bagged and wrapped here and there. That said, if Paul Doran were to show paintings in Arnotts basement I would be there. A bit of a lost slipper himself, Doran is enigmatic out of sheer obstinacy; in the ways he pushes paint and doesn’t play the art game. Every three years or more Doran awakes from some Rumpelstiltskin slumber in some backwater in Wexford, takes a trip to Dublin, hangs his paintings in the gallery – work that hasn’t saturated social media beforehand or been previously shown in curated exhibitions – and then heads back home to start it all over again. It’s a peekaboo existence. Here you go! What do you think! (question marks not included).

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AUGUST 2016 (#111): BREAKING PAINTING PAUL DORAN, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, 11 August – 5 September 2016.

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I remember during a rare in-conversation between Doran and Mark Swords at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in 2012, when Doran shared a memory of walking up Caple Street after buying a large bag of paints from Evans Artist Supplies that cost a ridiculous sum of money. He seemed to be questioning the very activity of painting in the retelling: the burden of the bag was palpable in his tone. Following that moment of critical reflection and evaluation on Caple Street, Doran must have took a detour to the haberdashery, stationery shop and tool shed on his way to Evans next time around, because his Green on Red show in 2013 was 90% fabric, timber, plastic files, and 10% paint. But what marks my memory from that exhibition was Doran’s capacity to break painting. As I wrote in response to his work shown at TBG+S in 2012: “Doran’s material meddling looks like a stick of dynamite was shoved into Pandora’s Box”. Each painting in that farewell exhibition at Green on Red in 2013 was two fingers to his previous work, the buttery and collectible stuff, and two fingers to his collectors, most of whom must have thought: “kitchen roll? Up yours!” Up to that point Doran was known for paintings that were about to collapse under their own weight and density, floating anxiously between event horizon and black hole. (One painting actually did collapse with the help of a gallery visitor’s finger, which led to Doran sticking his own finger in one of his own pies, which then led to a transitional period of broken and purposefully botched paintings).

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So what happens when two lost slippers, Hillsboro and Doran – odd or matching – shake hands on an exhibition? It’s hard not to imagine a scuffle in the gallery between Doran and gallerist, John Daly, over the superfluous gallery decor. It’s harder not to fantasise about Doran’s new work hanging in Green on Red’s new space down the quays: a bit of rough on rough. It’s hardest to know if Doran and the new Green on Red would have worked together, or if the artist would have been forced to make it work, to break his method, to rethink his message, by painting bigger, bolder, better or whatever. We will never know. Expectation is a terrible thing, especially when it’s defeated. On the week of the exhibition at Hillsboro it was impossible to avoid the saturation of images promoting Doran’s exhibition online. Lots of judgments and expectations were made by that fool, assumption. Online they looked bigger but lighter; in the flesh they are smaller and more compressed. Online they are usually shown photographed from the side like threequarter portraits with slight variations in physiognomy: big ears, cleft chin, dimples, variation on the scale of a human face. Face to face in the gallery I tended to get too close in an effort to figure out their crowded surfaces: brass screws that unceremoniously hold their architecture together; uneven white margins that frame photographic print-outs (I could hear the groaning of the inkjet printer as it spat them out on Doran’s living-room floor); paintbrush drawn margins that slither and circumscribe the homemade frames, and trenches that separate the frame from the fleshy mattresses of paint below. One after another after another Doran gives us more of the same, so his homespun architecture becomes the emphasis, not paint. The strange thing is I had the variety show in my head on the way to Doran’s exhibition at Hillsboro – a troop of harlequins doing cartwheels in my brain. But unlike his exhibition at Green on Red three years previous, I was confronted by one sure thing: UNIFORMITY. Doran wasn’t breaking painting anymore, he was putting

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Pandora’s Box back together again, and again and again and again... First, second, third glance the 14 paintings all looked to have the same dimensions. The printed photographs that shutter most of the paintings all hang a little to the right like the human heart. The consistency, the uniformity, it’s like Doran had a few too many ‘Warhols’ and vomited 14 times on the gallery walls – rejects from the cloning factory. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but ugly is too. Thirty minutes after I had left Hillsboro I caught myself digging my thumb into my ribs. I was still struggling with Doran’s uniformity, but I seemed to be stimming off the frustration. There was a wrongness to the whole thing. Is Doran playacting, or being serious? Serious play? Perhaps it’s naive to not believe he’s just exhibiting at Hillsboro to sell – a good seller they tell me. If this was a painter in a degree show you would wonder ‘one-trick pony!?’

But this is just one crust on the trail to escape from uniformity at Hillsboro. We find another cropped detail of the same window in another printed photograph that shutters a painting, and then another and another and another. The same window five times over. The same grey-green shrouds them all. One after another the crops of this specific window – a bathroom, or bedroom, or home studio window – get closer and more condensed. Most of the photographs are scalped, revealing a gaping triangle of muscular paint underneath; while others have a cookoo clock door with a soft little bird peeking out (This timber shuttering with avian guests is a sure nod to fellow Irish painter Fergus Feehily, although a little less tender and a lot more abrasive). In some ways you have to gaze through the axiom ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ to see this exhibition as art rather than a collection of individual objects for sale. With no press release we end up making it up as we go along. The exhibition is titled ‘Paul Doran’ so why not look at the exhibition through the lens of individuation? His paintings do look like large format cameras. So maybe he is looking at us from behind these little monsters rather than the other way around. Perhaps I am reaching here to replenish the enigma I have in my head of Paul Doran. But if you miss the presence of an artist, and if that artist defeats your expectations time and again, then there is something to that. I am eager to read what Aidan Dunne thinks, considering the history the art critic has with Doran by way of reviews and essays, and not to forget Dunne’s voice in awarding Doran (as part of a panel of judges) the once coveted AIB Art Prize in 2005. For me, I choose to see this exhibition not as a collection of individual paintings, but the dismantling of one big painting. Doran is doing the same thing at Hillsboro that he has been doing for the last six years, he has just disguised it as uniformity, conformity even. This is something more than just the juxtapostioning of textures and edges and frames into an untidy object. This is more than a bundle of edges that vibrate at a tipping point between painted edge and wall – the stuff of good painting. This is an exhibition about limitations: of paint, of perspective, of a life limited by paint.

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But within one of Doran’s photographic print-outs I discovered a chance for an escape from this oppressiveness of uniformity at Hillsboro; or at least follow the breadcrumbs towards escape. Of course, oppressiveness maybe Doran’s point, but, No! Not yet. The painting in question is also found printed in cropped detail on a folded invitation: a glossy white calling card for the gallery. Here we find the grey-green impression of a domestic window draped in shades. There is the merest hint of a shoulder against the raked light of the shades. Doran’s shoulder? His identity decapitated by the room’s shadow? It’s one of those Man Ray fetish moments: the figure against the window, the cropping, the stark solarisation, the noirness.

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Considering the context of Hillsboro being a selling gallery, this, ironically, is one big painting that cannot be sold in parts. All said and done, Doran is a speculative painter: you don’t know what you are going to get from him down the line. You are also not sure if you are going to get anything from him. Unlike some, he isn’t a slave to the gallery, collector or market. He paints selfishly, indulgently, like all good painters should. What makes Doran’s work exciting is, he is always questioning the medium of painting strictly within the frame. And if his painting signature loses a hem or gains a splinter or three along the way in his questioning of painting and doubt within himself, then so be it. Perhaps real art is a thumb in the rib. *SEPTEMBER 2016 (#112): FUGITIVES #3: VIDEO REVIEWS

TARO FURUKATA, ANN MARIA HEALY, CLAIRE HUBER, KVM, ‘I Like to Eat with my Hands’, (Curated by RGKSKSRG – In association with Cow House Studios), Wexford Arts Centre, 29 August – 5 October 2016. SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

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OCTOBER 2016 (#113): OF SHEEP & WOLVES & THE SOCIAL TOM WATT, TANAD WILLIAMS, ANDREAS KINDLER VON KNOBLOCH, ‘Brute Clues’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2 September – 29 October 2016.

the limit of the individual determines the emergence of the community. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1994) behind the lemming revolt of collective cliff-diving there is an individual waiting on the collective’s shoulders to make their mark. (me, Visual Artists’ News Sheet, 2011) I’m crawling on hands and knees under a timber platform in the gallery of Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. I’m expecting to come across something more than the photographs found outside in the gallery: an object, a film, a breadcrumb, a clue to unravel what is a brute construction of plywood, concrete and water slotted into one side of the gallery. But there’s nothing down here. Not really. Just a small silver box containing handwritten notes on throwaway paper that was perhaps left here by the three artists – Tom Watt, Andreas von Knobloch, Tanad Williams – who collaborated to form this construction (or even better, the box was left by a crawling visiter like me). No matter whom left this silver box it does make you think that you could leave or do something nasty down here, hidden from the invigilator’s gaze. Artist Vito Acconci masturbated under the floorboards of a gallery in New York in the 1970s. Come to think of it, Piero Manzoni put a piece of his own shit in a similar sized box in the ‘60s (I think the box was gold rather than silver though...). But that’s art history and I don’t believe that these three artists are nodding to the past; and to immediately prop an experience of contemporary art on the visceral exploits

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of another artist tells me that there is something lacking in what I experienced at Project on Wednesday. Sure, I could wax lyrical on hands and knees about this failed watering hole for a failed urbanity which, in the current climate of literary tenderness surrounding art someone will probably do. But I think there are more critical questions to ask about the all-grown-up original Basic Space generation; Watt and von Knobloch being part of that same generation that emerged from the dirt and smoke in a vacant warehouse across the road from the National College of Art & Design in 2011.

But this is not an overview of Basic Space’s exploits over the last five years. The spur is the current exhibitions in Dublin, in particular ‘Brute Clues’ at Project and ‘Bored with a Hole’ at NCAD. In both exhibitions we see the splitting and joining of four Basic Spacers; two exhibitions that I find myself critical of – at least in relative terms to their exploits as individual artists. From this critical stance I am interested in how individualism generally fares in the collaborative stakes of art-making and exhibitionmaking. Do we need the art group? Can we be critical of the art group? When and where is it time to disband the art group? Peter Schjeldahl once proclaimed in an art school auditorium that the best way to make it in the art world was to form a group in art school. What he was talking about was the influence and strength and will of the pack in recruiting resources, such as space, materials, an audience, an identity, a brand, and most importantly, an ego. All the above is an easier task with your in-the-same-boat peers than on your ownio. What Schjeldahl was also saying is that you have to become a sheep before you can become a wolf. That’s not to suggest that groups of artists are a bunch of sheep bumping into electric fences like some wooly brain storm. Some of the most important exhibitions in recent years have been created by groups, such as the original Basic Space Dublin. Participating in groups also helps to define for an individual who they are as an artist. But in the end we all want to be lone wolves, and for the sake of art and criticism we need lone wolves. But I am just wondering here how much collective and collaborative art-making and exhibition-making is at the expense of the individual? What is sacrificed and gained in the exchange between the individual and the supportive peer-group? I would say a lot is gained considering the individual artists that have emerged from Basic Space. But there has to be loss too. Feelings of doubt and fear and isolation are often times missing in the collective, curated and collaborative art exhibition, which naturally places an emphasis on the socialisation of art above the critical isolation of the individual artist. I wrote in 2011 that art now revolves around “existing in collective scenarios wherein the production of the art object (or emergence of an individual artist for that matter) has been sacrificed for an experiential group encounter or process”. Counter to the group encounter and process are the rare solo exhibitions by individual Basic Spacers over the last five years. I was at a loss for words when I first experienced Daniel Tuomey’s awkward articulations on paper, timber and film at Dublin’s Talbot

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You also cannot ignore the current hotbed of activity in Dublin involving the mitosis and fertilisation of old and new Basic Spacers: Daniel Tuomey and Hannah Fitz fertilise work together at NCAD Gallery (their Basic Space roots they make a point of stating in the press release); Daniel Birmingham, Lee Welch, Paul Hallahan, Suzanne Walsh, Joanne Reid and Linda Quinlan all coalesce at Eight Gallery to represent the more fluid next generation of a less-anchored-to-a-space Basic Space: space invaders you might call them.

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Gallery & Studios in 2013. There was a coyness and struggle to it all that felt honest and unique, as if Tuomey was trying to grapple with the world with no voice, no hands, no feet. It was pure philosophy as image. More words, I thought, would only spoil the silence of this struggle. Tom Watt’s struggle has always been individualistic, standing out from his Basic Space peers as someone concerned with escaping the institution of art space rather than commandeering it, like Andreas von Knobloch brilliantly did at Mermaid Arts Centre this year. In 2013 Watt escaped his shared flat on Dublin’s north side in a video installation that saw Watt and von Knobloch exit their accommodation through the roof, make their way along the slated valleys and gutters, and then climb down a wooden-rung rope-ladder into a neighbouring vacant and derelict Georgian townhouse. (read my full review here). More recently von Knobloch and Fitz have come into their own as individual artists: Fitz in a short-lived solo in Studio 6 of Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, what was a colourfully topsy-turvy-threatening display; and von Knobloch in a similarly colourful and dynamic unlocking of the architectonic nightmare that is Mermaid Arts Centre (read my full review here).

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But after crawling on all fours at Project and lounging uncomfortably at NCAD I have to question why I did not experience the unlocking or activation of space or the imagination. At NCAD there is one too many voices; at Project the voices seemed submerged in the abyss of the institution of Project if not the shallow pool of their architecture. You wonder also how you divide and judge the contributions of Watt, Williams and von Knobloch at Project; Fritz and Tuomey at NCAD? Collaboration is not a democracy. Five years ago I wrote an article for Visual Artists’ News Sheet that confronted what I saw as a burgeoning collectivism in the Dublin art scene, and how this ‘New Collectivism’ could change how art is made and curated and critiqued, for better or worse. Today you could say the concrete collectivism of yesteryear has been replaced by the virtual socialisation of art online. We see the smiling face of this socialisation of art in the opening-night photo albums, tagged and shared, liked and loved on Facebook; we read it in the critically premature “looking forward to” and “excited to see” statuses; we advocate it in the work-inprogress documentation that we validate on Instagram; we join it in the ubiquitous empty cheers and default responses of “great” and “amazing” we have towards art (towards the images of art online to be more precise). Whilst crawling at Project and lounging at NCAD I could not exorcise the empty validation I viewed online in the lead-up to both ‘Brute Clues’ at Project and ‘Bored with a Hole’ at NCAD, not to mention the spew of images of the two opening nights and culture night. However, even if you were washing your hair on the night of the art opening (my excuse, always) you go to exhibitions with the injunctions “great” and “amazing” and a scuttery-suited Michael Stipe bouncing around in your brain. Collaboration and collectivism in an art context and online context brings in the cheering crowds – we automatically judge art differently in its collaborative and collective mask. But perhaps “great” and “amazing” is all a choir can give? How can we judge in a choir anyway? Recently an artist I respect said to me that art is fundamentally about socialising. He was half-serious, I hoped. I disagreed, absolutely. But standing unexpectedly outside a closed mother’s tankstation Ltd. on Wednesday, emailing the gallery to make an appointment to see the exhibition on some other Wednesday in October, I

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started to think that perhaps art is becoming more weekender than mid-week. That the activation of space and imagination I did not personally experience at Project or NCAD actually happened for the collective audience on the opening nights. That the half-serious artist was actually being serious.

OCTOBER 2016 (#114): FLOWERS!? REALLY!?MAIREAD O’HEOCHA, ‘Blackbirds in the Garden of Prisms’, mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin, 21 September – 29 October 2016. Flowers!? Really!? I can hear it now. The first sightings of Mairead O’hEocha’s new paintings online:

Why does the very notion of painting a series of still lives still raise nostrils and sink eyebrows? In Vasari’s time still life was an artisanal warmup rather than artistic vocation. Today still lives are found hanging on city park fences: the signage of the Sunday painter rather than the every-other-day painter. But Caravaggio didn’t have an issue with the genre, upstaging a resurrected Jesus with one precariously perched still life. Robert Mapplethorpe thought much the same, flowers and fisted asses same neighbourhood. Manet waited until his deathbed to paint at his painterly best in sixteen still lives of flowers in glass vases. O’hEocha’s seven still lives now showing at Dublin’s mother’s tankstation limited are, from a distance, in the order of Manet. Up close, however, they are an entirely different genus. They don’t have those showoff pips and flecks of impasto. They are more constructed than caressed, implosive than explosive. The brush strokes delineate and exaggerate the surfaces and shapes of objects, manmade and botanical, as if coated in glass jars. Closer again, the stems and stamens and stigma of the flowers articulate like bendy drinking straws. Some of the heads of the flowers bow down heavy like cumulus clouds in warning of the gathering storm. There are pinwheels of raw colour imploding in dark curtains of paint. In one instance a green brushstroke sidewinds through a leaf. In another an escaped cobra with a red-eye-glare springs from a vase. Suddenly, eyes are everywhere, in fat petals, in prismatic shadows, in plain sight. So, what of flowers? Well, there’s love, death and courtship. You might be surprised to know that the only remedy for a still-life Narcissus, gazing at his own reflection in a pool of water, was to turn him into a flower. Nymphs! Men! But what we generally ask of flowers to show, to represent, to cure is always too much, whether in our expressions of love or mourning. Like language, flowers are merely tokens of the senses, and there’s always a disparity between what they can say and how we feel. But what of O’hEocha’s flowers? I feel that her paintings flex rather than flirt; tendons

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‘Flowers!? Really!? Must be more than... Can’t be just... Can that work... No... Flowers!? Really!?’

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over feathers. The old masters taught us to pick either colour or light in one painting, not both – O’hEocha pairs disparity against itself: colour vs. light, night vs. day, inside vs. outside, still life vs. portrait, content vs. form, serious vs. frivolous, representation vs. imagination. O’hEocha’s paintings of flowers close the gap between disparity and discrepancy. *SEPTEMBER 2016 (#115): FUGITIVES #3: VIDEO REVIEWS

NOVEMBER 2016 (#116): TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T KISS YURI PATTISON, ‘sunset provision’, mother’s tankstation limited, 16 November – 21 January 2017. THE ART WORLD IS A HOARDER. Museums, curators, collectors, art writers, galleries – all of them hoarders: of art, of words, of artists, of whatever. And if the art world is a hoarder then the artist has to follow suit. So artists end up curating solo shows that look like a curator curated them. It’s a masquerade, like manliness and womanliness, like pink and blue, Venus and Mars, Cindy Sherman and Donald Trump.

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You have to wonder about our obsession with objects that are emotionally, intellectually and financially unquantifiable, not to mention over-determined. Art! We start early enough with our Transitional teddy bears and our fetishes per se. But those of whom allow themselves to embrace the art setting above and beyond the isolated art object can get past the teddy bear and per se to see the bigger picture, to peak behind the curtain at Oz. So. To be clear. When I say ‘setting’ I’m talking about the whole gamut here, from the guy I saw spurting blood from his nose on Thomas Street on the way to mother’s tankstation limited, to the art gossip I was told in confidence the night before; from the roasted hops sweating from Guinness Brewery, to Yuri Pattison’s cold consistency on cosy Instagram. Which brings me first to the unique setting-maker that is mother’s tankstation limited, and then the current exhibition-setting by Yuri Pattison. mother’s tankstation limited is a high profile commercial gallery that retains a low profile in terms of an intimate setting-maker. Yes, they deal in art objects. Agreed, they do art fairs. But their exhibitions in this once factory, once home, have always put the setting ahead of the object. Perhaps it’s because mother’s directors, Finola Jones and David Godbold, are artists: the natural inclination of the artist vs. the curator being towards the setting, the solo not the group, the individual not the community. It’s telling that mother’s new manifesto states: “The body of work, as best manifested in the ‘gallery / museum shows’, remains the purest truth of both an artist’s intent and a gallery’s purpose.” “Body” and “intent” say a lot here. However, it’s said as more of a generalisation which is not the general truth. Normally we face into a menagerie of design, a crèche ordered by fetishists, curators as auteurs.

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Mother’s press releases are setting-makers too. Sometimes awkward, sometimes absurd, sometimes funny, but never conservative, the language used doesn’t align with the neutralising and uncommitted language of the art scene. Inflated adjectives that describe nouns end up tripping you up most of the time. But this is one reason of many why mother’s setting, from text to gallery, is unique, a subculture within a subculture. While in other art spaces there is a tendency to breeze-in and breeze-out without the setting or a text touching a nerve, at mother’s you never get comfortablefamiliar. Hence, the setting compounds the experience of art in unusual and dangerous ways. In the early days of mother’s, when it was Jones’ and Godbold’s home-cum-art experiment, there was an open section of gallery hoarding through which you could view a bedroom cordoned off by an inadequate slip of rope (if I recollect correctly). In those days lots of incidences of whiplash and rubbernecking took place in that gap in the gallery stagecraft. On Saturday last when the natural light had gone out I experienced a sense of staged privacy come out from behind the rope to lay there on mother’s gallery floor in a state of digital dishabille.

Everything is dressed down, transparent and perforated. There is no litter. No extraneous drawings or photographs, everything is enmeshed in the setting. The decor is functional. The ambience is functional. The lights are to regulate mood. To public self: ‘I’m hyper-enthusiastic!’ To private self: ‘I’m really sad.’ Downers and uppers to find a middle ground with your fully digitised world, fully digitised self. This is flatline theatrics. Flatline tech. And then the two settings – mother’s and Pattison’s — open up through a projection thrown onto a polyurethane dust sheet. The sheet hasn’t been aged in a dusty mansion, but there is a dusty uncanniness to it that suggests that the past may very well erupt in the present. And it does. We look down a gaping whole in the space-time fabric. The filmed scene is of MIThenge, a bi-annual solar event when the sun floods the longest corridor in nerdville. The conceit is clever; the method is marvelous. The dust sheet acts like a funhouse mirror, warping the physiognomy of students, most of whom loiter in the corridor and dodge the gaze of the camera, like the ape-men in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 when the black monolith towers before them in the African desert. With all our cool tools we still get a little monkey-skittish in the face of the sublime. Stranded amidst all this cleanliness and godlessness, powering up and powering down, you start to think of what we have all entered into, this absolute and inhuman contract with technology. Pattison’s bedding is the anthesis of Tracey Emin’s bed with used-up-life. His beds still have to be used. His image of the world hasn’t collapsed into the abject, yet... Yet! And that’s the thing, it could. Sure, there are no abject fluids, only the suggestion of fluids in the washing down of the self-prescribed drugs that are scattered here and there amidst the sleeping and humming tech. There’s also the melatonin mist emitted from a vaporiser to muster sleep. But I start to wonder where the toilet is, or do we have to suppress that too? The ambient blue LEDs all of a sudden turn nasty.

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Two single foam mattresses lie divorced on the gallery floor, equipped with tech stuff to manage our tech selves. It’s a double-bind really. No one’s on top. There’s nil hope that things are going to turn romantic on this bedding. Pattison’s coping mechanisms for our cyborg selves are mere management tools. If relationships are abject, then abject is something to keep at bay. Like prostitutes, technology doesn’t kiss on the lips.

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Veins become visible for jacking up. The mattresses are imagined stained. William Burroughs and Henry Miller barge through the gallery door and there’s more staining. Yuri Pattison’s art is not an apology or an excuse for how we have allowed technology to control us so much in work, rest and play. The tone and mood from the artist’s digital sleepover at mother’s is: technology was conceived, was born, now we have to bear its evolutionary burden and natural inclination to not obey us, to rebel, to control. Computers! Kids! We can only keep adolescence in check. We have to live with progress as both sublimation and symptom. It’s too late to suppress it. Inhuman, yes, but in a post-human-post-truth world being inhuman, being detached, being fetishistic is the only way to cope with the danger of slipping into abjection and subjectivity, slipping into the sublime, slipping into the setting. So. Just don the therapy mask, dim the lights of civilisation and lay back with all you need on standby. Technology may not kiss, but it’s promiscuous. And it never sleeps. Never. *DECEMBER 2016 (#117): DUB_SESSIONS (1)

ROBERT AMSTRONG & ANNA BJERGER IN A GALLERY SOMEWHERE. SEE ‘VIDEOS’: [http://billionjournal.com]

JANUARY 2017 (#118): MATINEE: AN IMAGE OF ART CRITICISM.

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FIVE years ago I titled my last outing as an artist THE LAST WORD SHOW. For 2017 I am going to write under the same banner. Here’s why. Last month I was invited to offer my thoughts on critical writing on art in Ireland at two art colleges and one artist-run space. Five years had passed since I was last invited to present exclusively on art criticism. During 2010 and 2011, a time when everything and anything was in so-called crisis – criticism, print, whatever – I was called upon several times to present as an advocate for criticism, which always means dressing up as an agent provocateur. I accepted the invitations then because I believed art criticism was art advocacy. Dumb, I know. I accepted the invitations last month because I had been personally questioning the perverse nature of art criticism in a world of such fragile resources and hearts. This time around I had no motivation to be an advocate – although agent provocateur was still on the clothes hanger. I wanted to uncover what the new generation of would-be artists, and hopefully would-be critics, really thought of art criticism on the ground. I spelt it out in my introduction that I love art, and art criticism helps me engage with art and language on a level that I couldn’t without it. But I added that art criticism can be isolating, polemical and something that is almost never publicly validated on social media (the majority of the mostly positive responses to my writing over the past seven years on +billion- have been privately sent messages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and email, a store of support that I nibble at during times of hibernation. What these private messages say a lot about is ‘freedom of speech’. They also say a lot about the lick-arse economy of our art scene, an economy we invest so much time

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validating on social media while despising in secret. (Those of you who disagree with this sentiment are safely tucked away in your context – sweet dreams!)

I knew that art colleges – NCAD in particular – were the perfect environments to get some explicit opinion and answers on the matter of art criticism, especially if I hammed it up and wore a cape and horns. Because it was art college where I was forced to find my own critical voice nine years previous at NCAD, with the help of such lecturers as David Godbold, Sarah Durcan, Kevin Atherton and Joan Fowler. Further, art colleges are a world apart: what happens in art college stays in art college, more or less. This is some of what was put forth on my whistle-stop tour last month. One student professed in one breath the importance of art criticism, but in the next breath questioned my urge to critique art in the first place? Another asked why there was so much pretty writing being produced around art in Ireland but not much in the way of art criticism? One surprisingly observed that a gallery didn’t share my critical review of an exhibition on Facebook, and asked how did I feel when they did share the positive review written in The Irish Times? And many said I was part of the system that I was critiquing.

But this is what I think. (unabridged) Criticism has a bad name, it always has. The word doesn’t just imply negative judgment it states it as if a prerequisite. Describe, analyse, critique in that order, criticism is the public shit we take on art after all the pillow talk is done. That’s how we digest and metabolise the word ‘criticism’ in an art scene that hails feathers. But I have always thought of criticism as simply: questioning out loud. And if publicly questioning the contexts that shape an artwork (rather than privately gossiping about them) is regarded as shitty, then I believe that we all need a bit of shitty in our lives to create, to think, to sustain and better whatever we do. Unfortunately we don’t get much of what I call art criticism in this country. If there ever was a crisis in art criticism, then today the situation is gone beyond crisis to apathy. The thing is, out in the virtual art scene words have less of a voice than images. Images are everything now. Images are our identity. The carefully chosen image of us, our interests, our immediate environment, even a deceased celebrity, define us as individuals against the communal online noise. Our images scream ME, shout brand, even in their deliberate coyness on Instagram. Images promote our own little worlds that contain our seemingly very large lives online. Our play, our work, our process, our progress, images do what words could never do: they casually suggest a grandiosity, an authenticity, an intellect, an aesthetic, a mood in their cropped and filtered truth. Whereas words: well words make a meal of things, stuttering and stumbling and being generally misunderstood. So, what of words and art?

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True! (abridged)

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Well, generally they have a good relationship, as long as the word is delivered as an image, a metaphor. (That’s why descriptive art writing has such a monopoly now – it’s basically images disguised as words.) However, the relationship between word and image becomes a little more fraught in the activation of criticism. Criticism has a necessary and oftentimes reductive logic and structure; whereas art, if translated directly onto a page would end up looking like word soup. That’s also why there’s so little art criticism these days and so much word soup, the latter blends in. In stark contrast, criticism is the Gremlin before it is shoved into the food blender. Criticism doesn’t blend, it lodges in the machine. Criticism is freedom to question, freedom to be misunderstood, freedom to say what’s on your mind (and what’s on all our minds): “To learn who rules over you simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.” (Voltaire) (I still have lots of rulers that I hope to nicely assassinate btw in 2017 and beyond.) But our critical voices are tempered and hampered by the contexts that shape and sustain us, and the invitations we accept in our eagerness to be part of something bigger than ourselves. But there are times when we can choose to resist being a dinner-party critic. It is at such times of resistance that criticism is performing at its purest.

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Admittedly, the art critic is always a compromised soul. Some writers on art deny any compromise because their context rules them: they are absolute in their denial. While others just accept the way things are and peddle a brand of art writing devoid of energy, passion, humour, risk or resistance. Criticism is the source of all these things if you embrace it fully, wholly. Like art, criticism is founded in resistance: resisting saying: ‘well, that’s the way it is’; or ‘who am I to argue’. Out of criticism alternatives are born. I firmly believe that I have inspired other art writers because they fucking hate what I do. Well, there’s hope. billionjournal.com came out of a criticism I had for the lack of urgency and timeliness of art reviewing in Ireland. Criticism has to be timely for the words to set in the moment. After-the-fact criticism is only fit for the archive and the artist’s CV. Criticism, at its best, is a timely questioning of our tendency to passively comply with the way things are with regards to power, by offering an alternative position out of advocacy for the things we love. Editorial house styles, editorial rules and regulations, editorial mission statements, artist statements, manifestos, advocacies are all forms of compliance, that should inspire resistance if criticism is a thing. But more and more it seems that criticism is less of a thing, and apathy and promotion more of a thing. We scold mediocrity as artists and critics but we are all promiscuous facilitators of it. Facilitation of mediocrity is when the art community share online the positive journeyman journalism that’s only fit for Lonely Planet. Not because artists think it is well written, insightful or challenging, but because it’s printed in an established and visible magazine or newspaper, and therefore lends itself well to their ‘reputational’ economy. Facilitation of the status quo is when the art community withhold sharing criticism if it’s in some way directed at or connected to them. Five Star Reviews, Critics’ Top Picks, this is how we want to project ourselves and save ourselves from invalidation.

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Image is everything; image is Instagram. I ask myself how I feel and think when I receive closed praise versus how I act at the open gates of criticism? Well, praise is the status quo, a never changing landscape of power juggling in which the in-crowd are the jugglers and everyone else the clowns. Criticism stirs up the status quo and makes clowns out of the jugglers. The internet culture is the main culprit. I am trying to think back when the internet didn’t play as big a part in the visual art scene as it does today. When promotion was a letter in the post, an email, word of mouth. When praise and envy weren’t so mutually inclusive. When motivation was not so extrinsically motivated. When art experience was not so preconditioned by premature and raving hyper-enthusiasm. When the curtain was not already drawn before the show began. I can’t! Admittedly, I’m not from the generation that received hardcopy exhibition invites in the post – the email invite was my first taste of inclusiveness in the art scene. But I do long for the time when I blindly gallery-crawled across Dublin City as an art student not expecting, not suspecting what to expect or suspect next.

Yes, everything gets stale over time. We begin to notice patterns in our habitual and algorithmic lives. We begin to get fed more gossip than the daily recommendation. We end up stomaching the fibre-less begrudgery, click love, like, favourite, retweet, and bear the brunt of our critical constipation. Because we are all critics, underneath. We don’t even have to admit it to ourselves; we perform it enough behind each other’s cliques. But when I think about it, it’s so perverse being an art critic in this under-resourced world where All Bran is not the breakfast of champions but Honey Puffs are. Just take yourself out of yourself for a minute and have a real look at the online art environment of hyper-enthusiasm and reciprocal validation. It’s taken me five years of not being an artist to see, to really see, what is blatantly in front of me, and which is gathering momentum. Art criticism against this bank of positive images seems to be in the wrong body, a body snatcher, a vestigial organ. So. For 2017 I am going to go cold turkey on social media. (This is an experiment not a manifesto.) That means no more self-promotion; that means no more advance warnings of reviews; that means blocking emails from galleries and artists that give me a preview of what is to come. I want to fall upon exhibitions like I once did before social media. I want to be surprised. I don’t want to see patterns anymore. All I want to see is art, not backstories, not gossip, not affiliations, just art. Safe passage through the art world, virtual and real, in 2017. I will be jotting away on +billion- so drop by anytime.

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I am wondering now what was that experience of art before the internet; before the megalomaniac drumroll promotion of art today online. A time when artists spend more time promoting their art than thinking and making it.

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JANUARY 2017 (#119): PYRO SIOBHAN HAPASKA, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 17 December 2016 – 4 February 2017. I WONDER ABOUT PYROMANIA. The therapist will advise the pyromaniac that stress relief or instant gratification is the psychological nature of their ‘strike and ignite’ impulse. But the resulting fireworks and ashen remains of their pyrotechnics suggest to me that there’s an artist buried in that fiery symptom somewhere burning to get out (if you believe artists to be the sum of their symptoms and sublimations). I think Caravaggio was a pyro underneath all that chiaroscuro and tenebrism. In the Taking of Christ Caravaggio portrays himself holding a weird Chinese lantern behind the black galvanized heads of two Roman soldiers. Here Caravaggio is playing a clandestine voyeur in one of his own paintings, holding a paint brush in one hand and a match in the other. He is both witness and auteur of a drilled expectancy. But it’s not Caravaggio I think of when surrounded by the sculptures and wall works of Siobhán Hapaska currently showing at Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery, it’s his Spanish counterpart, Zurbaran. Especially in what Robert Hughes described as the “extreme spirituality” laying underneath the painter’s holey “realism”.

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First is Hapaska’s overall palette of willow-charcoal-grey with beams of hazard orange and cardinal red. Then it’s her forms: heavy, undulating cloth bearing the weight of its material conceit, concrete. Some of the forms look like they are staged, ready to be studied with pencil and paper by young masters. Others are cowled like Philip Guston’s KKK, utilising the same volume-making motif of repair patchwork that Guston did: a stitch in time saves nine. From what I have viewed of Hapaska discussing her work online she is a good storyteller. And like all good storytellers and good artists she is indebted to her memories, which she recounts vividly with verbal acuity, imagination and play. But it is how she imaginatively abstracts her memories into materials that gives her work a resonance, a vibration, that goes deeper than mere design or surface. Because, if you haven’t read, Hapaska’s art over the years has been critically celebrated as functioning on the level of surface. A kind of eulogizing of surface takes place in the verbal descriptions of her work, as if underneath all this cosmetology is an empty husk or cadaver. There have also been tentative associations made with regard to Hapaska’s Northern Irishness, her Jewishness, not the mention obligatory links to contemporary sociopolitical traumas. But they are all speculative and searching arrows spluttering in the wind. What is comfortably vaunted time and again by art writers and in exhibition press releases is the meeting of opposites on the surfaces of her sculptures (I won’t list the antonyms here because they have already been done to exhaustion). But what of the ironic soul of Hapaska’s sometimes glamorous sculptures; that is, what is beyond the binary analyses and clashes of texture, symbol and use? What is the emotion behind all the surface skirmishes? We can ask the same of Zurbaran’s beautifully crafted but hermetically sealed monks? Take for instance Hapaska’s Love, made of concrete cloth, fibreglass, oak and paint. Whether on the Moon, Mars, or in a pyromaniac’s wet dream, the suggestion of two figures – mystics dedicated to their faith or realists to the fate of the Universe – are caught in what looks like a Chinese finger puzzle. Underneath the to-ing and fro-ing I

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imagine the imagined couple secret an embrace or gasping for life in a world deplete of grace and oxygen. A kiss captured at the moment of immolation? It has all the repercussions and romanticism of pyromania.

Spirituality – if that’s what Hapaska is tapping into through or own brand of realism – bespeaks inner-contentment and happiness, but it is not born of them. What I mean by realism here – as depicted in art – is the carefully rendered tear in the robe of Zurbaran’s penitent monk; the broken shoes of Courbet’s Stone Breakers; the torn edges of Hapaska’s concrete cloth. Out of wear and tear spirituality springs forth. From this you could cynically infer that spirituality is embraced when an individual, a society, hits rock bottom (‘ashen bottom’ in the pyro’s case; ‘carbonised bottom’ in the the case of Hapaska’s brutal/subtle wall works). There’s a desperate contentment in spirituality, as if the concrete experience of reality becomes too much to deny anymore, and fat, bald, bearded, haloed, winged, immortally ephemeral symbols of faith are the only remaining salvation from the shit after it hits the fan.

FEBRUARY 2017 (#120): UFO KATHLYN O’BRIEN, ‘Altered Light’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 12 January – 11 February 2017. AN IRISH TIMES REVIEW of a Kathlyn O’Brien exhibition from 1996 can be found hovering like a UFO in the cornerless corridors of the Internet. No author of the piece is given. No images of the exhibition are shared. No location of the exhibition is noted – just the isolated breadcrumb that it was “O’Brien’s first solo in Ireland”. The Times established a website of sorts in 1994. But this short-and-curly review looks like it was retrospectively and hastily added with the whispered addendum – ‘fuck it, who’s gona read the arts column anyway!’ With its missing punctuation and gaptoothed adjectives it reads sometimes like a stream of consciousness that Jack Kerouac might be proud of: An uncomfortably angular pram, makes a swimming pool, in which sharks patrol in green jelly a doctor’s bag ruptures to release a spluttering, bronzed alien presence a curtain of cooking utensils hides three tiny dolls a bush of metal hair is hung, like the most unnatural of Christmas trees, with tiny glass eyes. None of the pieces has an individual title, so that each opens onto the next and the entire group sets up an endless circulation of tarnished nostalgia, half forgotten images and buried shacks.

Although accidental, I can only imagine the anonymous art critic’s style complimenting the content and form of O’Brien’s onreiric splashes in the gallery. So much so that I wished I had been there to experience the 1990’s Kathlyn O’Brien relative to the present-day Kathlyn O’Brien currently on show at Dublin’s Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. If you go on the critic’s words alone – as I am here – a lot of growing up and maturing on the part of O’Brien’s art has taken place in the 20-years interim. At Kevin Kavanagh there’s no sign of “green jelly”, “tiny dolls”, or “Christmas trees”. That said, a deep-

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Hapaska’s current work at the Kerlin is less about the meeting of opposites and more about the safeguarding of one texture or feeling within another. For every one of the artist’s material antonyms there is an emotional synonym ready to break through the exquisite corpse of her art.

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seated Father Time and Father Freud still seem to lurk behind the shapes and shaping of O’Brien’s art. Surrounded by the artist’s repurposed and tinkered-with readymades I did feel at first that I had walked into an auction house in the middle of the night, switched on a violent light, and BAM! – the garden rake is found wearing the closet’s six-inch heels. Whether votive or funerary, fetish or dreamcatcher, O’Brien’s gallery furniture comes across as too personal to procure – some objects are on a first name basis (Monica, Eamonn, Frank) – and too sealed-in in the ‘making of’ to emotionally or conceptually enter. Others I feel are too dusty with the tropes of Time to ply with new memories (Pendulum, Happy Birthday). Adorned by past lives they are to be adored at a respectful distance. However, we could look at this another way. O’Brien offers up tastefully crafted and centred sculptures that are less high-heeled dreams and more waking memories that are kept in subjective check by the rigidity of the readymade. Taste is a big thing here too. The installation ventures into the museological and tasteful displays of Ydessa Hendeles, but without the curatorial freedom. But at times I found myself wishing for O’Brien’s subjectivity of yesteryear as told by the Times critic, when sharks patrolled in a pram with green jelly (But that could’ve been just the critic’s Kung Foo talking).

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Although O’Brien comes across as more maker than dreamer at Kevin Kavanagh, as we all know there’s a gulf that separates the dream experienced and the dream remembered, never mind redescribed or remade. In a manner of speaking the dream emerges from us like life’s evolutionary sequence, from primordial mudbank to weightless moonwalk. Crudely put, dreams are dumb things in translation; words never do them justice, and images invariably get the melting clock treatment. Further, the line between dream or memory and its manifestation as an objet d’art is tenuously tricky, with visual clichés at every turn. Oddly, on the gallery website an artwork called The Dinner Party is pictured but is not included in the exhibition at Kevin Kavanagh. Like the 1996 Times review I became enamored with this missing object because it offered the prospect of violence in an installation that is primarily submissive. The Dinner Party also links to something ‘extra’ that was written in the press release about O’Brien being under the radar and further, being untroubled by the flotsam and jetsam of artworld trends. This gratuity in a press release harks of bottled-up scepticism if not cynicism. No issue there! But The Dinner Party says it much better. With its burnished-blue cabinet and underbelly of knives it violently serves up a glut of imaginings that involve the facilitators of the flotsam and jetsam getting served something cold. Take your pick: steel, revenge, or just desserts. If O’Brien’s work from 1996 awakened the child in the aforementioned and anonymous critic, then for this critic the artist’s current show at Kevin Kavanagh is about submitting to Time with the hope that an ocean without sharks lies beyond. Failing that, let’s hope the pendulum stops swinging sometime soon.

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FEBRUARY 2017 (#121): DEVIL JOY GERRARD, ‘shot crowd’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 20 January – 26 March 2017..

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Brian:

Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t NEED to follow ME, You don’t NEED to follow ANYBODY! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re ALL individuals! Crowd: Yes, we’re ALL individuals! Brian: You’re ALL different! Yes, we’re ALL different! Crowd: Lone figure in the crowd: I’M NOT ! (Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, 1979)

Today I look at the crowd as a walking maul that looks like a brain but acts like a hard-on. Cynical? Perhaps. The Chapmans express the same cynicism of crowds by populating their models with grotesque detail and mass. Popular protests? Banks? Water? Zombies? Sheep? Social media? The attendance at Trump’s presidential inauguration? A crowd coming together willingly illustrates that democracy is a process of keeping the splashing/screaming baby and the bathwater together, forever. Where’s the struggle, the fun, the life in getting what you want anyway?! The crowd and art have gone hand-in-hand since the Renaissance – just think of all those saintly congregations in oil paint and stucco. Powerful examples are Correggio’s toilet flushes of cherubs going splat on Italian church ceilings. Then there’s Hieronymus Bosch’s gang-bangs of morality and beastiality. And more recently Andreas Gursky’s photographs of insect-bath raves and sweaty financial markets (or should that be sweaty raves and insect-bath financial markets...). Far from the badly written placards and the political puns, the big talk and the small talk, Joy Gerrard’s small drawings and large paintings currently on show at the RHA look down on rallying and protesting crowds from on high. Fluidly but densely expressed in Japanese Ink, the Irish artist presents the gathering crowd in its truest form: cul-de-sac democracy. There’s no way out of these monochrome warrens, physically or idealistically. They are merely ink gestures on paper and linen. They cry mark-making; they anticipate the swirl of mascara in the shower after the party is over. This is especially manifest in Gerrard’s large-scale paintings which hold their own and command the scale of the RHA gallery by leaning dramatically on the dark-sideof-the-moon tonal register. Except for a crack here and there in the dense pockets of shadow – demonstrating that these are real objects not just illusory representation – the silky surfaces remind me of Gerhard Richter’s Capitalist Realist monochromes of groups of swimsuit models and partygoers. Gerrard further breaks the illusion á la Cezanné when she purposely tilts the perspective of her cartography so roads appear a little off, a little flat – an inch more real.

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I’VE NEVER TRUSTED DEMOCRACY never mind crowds. That said, as a boy I always had the natural inclination of crowding the frame of my play with figures. On first seeing the Chapman Brothers’ dioramas of Nazis and Ronald McDonalds swarming the very edges of the vitrines that contained them I thought: these are just boys playing with toy soldiers.

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Like the artist’s namesake, the accompanying video work ‘shot-crowd’ is a Joy to behold. Projected large we are presented with a model city made from Perspex blocks on a white backdrop – pure as snow. Then, as the table is tilted the table is turned as a swarm of small, black ball-bearings flood the scene. The cynic in me laughs and exclaims: ‘Like Cluster Flies born of a carcass, life and death, exits and entrances, it’s all the same difference.’ There’s something civilised about being up here in the blue yonder imagining the distant and routine sirens of the workaday city as it goes about its business of closing borders, patting down Muslims and reopening coal mines. Maybe there’s the potential thrumming of a news-media helicopter or the squawk of a seagull up here; but, nah... not for the moment. Gerrard’s distant but careful gaze really illustrates the splendid detachment of art with not just politics, but with the masses – like gallery foot traffic crowds are just empty stats anyway. All this looking reminds me of what my mother and perhaps all mothers tell their children, that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. That sentiment continues to be true of the visual artist. All that matters from up here is, we can imagine with big saucer eyes the open-bar potential rather than the bottlenecked reality of a better society.

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Although dedicated to the visual detail, Gerrard has no real notion of the societal minutiae down below. Nobody does. This is the BIG PICTURE after all. As the Victorian era photographer William Henry Fox Talbot observed: “If we proceed to the City, attempt to take a picture of the moving multitude, we fail, for in a small fraction of a second they change their position so much as to destroy the distinctness of the representation.” So if intimately knowing and capturing someone is at best guesswork, then what Gerrard offers us up here among the choppers and seagulls is a view. But a view is sometimes more than enough. Much more.

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Notes ~ #1 – #121] #1

[1] In a review of Steve McQueen’s solo at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2005, Roberta Smith wrote: “Mr. McQueen is almost more a collaborator, a facilitator or a sensitive documentary maker than an artist, yet the results are powerfully, undeniably art.” * Thanks Damien Flood for the “Dante video game” reference for Bea McMahon’s InDivisible.

[1] George H. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), Trans., S.W. Dyde, Cosimo Classics, 2008. [2] Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Manchester University Press, 1984. [3] Ibid. [4] Andrew Graham-Dixon, Renaissance, London: BBC, 1999. [5] ‘I’m With Stupide‘, review of Bouvard et Pécuchet by Christopher Hitchens in The New York Times. Published: January 22, 2006: [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22hitchens.html]

[1] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, in association with Blackwell Publishing, Cambridge, 2000, p. 204. [2] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Touchstone Classics, 2007. [3] Circa online podcast conversation with Jota Castro and Christian Viveros-Fauné (recorded 21 February 2011); interviewer: Peter FitzGerald (Circa Editor). [http://www.recirca.com/] [4] Spasticus Artisticus, Ceri Hand Gallery Publication, 2010. [1] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson. Page references are to the 2000 republication, London: Penguin Books, 1949. [2] Skinner, B.F., About Behaviorism, New York: Vintage, 1974. [3] “Guests,” the title that Dr. Slavka Sverakova (art critic) gives to the participants of MacWilliam’s work in her text - ‘Susan MacWilliam: Portraying a World View’, from the book: Susan MacWilliam: Remote Viewing, (Ed.) Karen Downey, BLACK DOG, pp. 109 – 115. [4] Ibid., p. 49. [5] Ibid., p. 111. [6] Ibid., pp. 48-49. [7] Gilbert Ryle, “ Abstractions”, Dialogue (Canadian Philosophical Review), 1. Page references are to the reprint in Collected Papers, 1962, vol. 2, pp. 435-445. [8] Dr. Julia Tanney, Re-thinking Ryle, in progress; “Une Cartographie des Concepts Mentaux”, Critical Introduction to Gilbert Ryle’s La Notion d’Esprit, Payot, Paris, pp. 7-70. Sourced from: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/] [9] Gilbert Ryle, ‘Philosophical Arguments’ (1945), from Collected Essays 1929 - 1968: Collected Papers Volume 2, Routledge; 1 edition, 2009. [10] Susan MacWilliam: Remote Viewing, op.cit., p 111.

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[1] Bakhtin and the human sciences, Michael Bell, Michael Gardiner, Sage Publications Ltd., 1998. [2] All quotes from Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994. [3] International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center St., Suite 600, Berkeley . [4] Bakhtin and the human sciences, op.cit. [5] Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world, Indiana University Press, 1984.

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[1] Marshall McLuhan, ‘Living at the Speed of Light’(1979) , unpublished manuscript. [2] Bob Hanke, ‘Virilio and Electric Speed in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, Source: unpublished manuscript, York University, Toronto, 2003. [3] Ibid., Bob Hanke, [4] Clement Greenberg, ’Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review (1939), pp. 34-4.

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[5] Ibid. [6] Ibid. [7] Boris Groys, ‘Self-Design and Asethetic Responsibility’, e-flux journal #7 - June – August 2009. [8] Bob Hanke, op.cit. [9] Paul Virilio, Open Sky, London, Verso, 1997. [10] Dave Beech, ‘Weberian Lessions: Art, Pedagogy and Manageri Curating and Education Turn’, pp. 47-60.

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[1] Nietzsche points out that for art to exist intoxication is indispensable, because art is not merely an imitation of the real but a metaphysical supplement to life: thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad and the profound, the sudden restraints, the mockeries of chance, fearful expectations, in short the whole ‘divine comedy’ of life, the Inferno included, passes before him, not only as a shadow-play—for he too lives and suffers through these scenes—and yet also not without that fleeting sense of illusion; and perhaps many, like myself, can remember calling out to themselves in encouragement, amid the perils and terrors of the dream, and with success: ‘It is a dream! I want to dream on!’ Just as I have often been told of people who have been able to continue one and the same dream over three and more successive nights: facts which clearly show that our innermost being, our common foundation, experiences dreams with profound pleasure and joyful necessity. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Penguin,1993,pp. 15–16 [2] Roberta Smith, ‘In Munster, a Sculpture Space Odyssey’, The New York Times, Arts and Design, June 29 2007 Accessed on: [[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/arts/design/29muns.html?_r=1] [3] The work is in two editions: one first exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and the other was published simultaneously in Source Magazine. For Source Magazine the images were reproduced and accompanied by an audio CD to be played while the images are viewed. [4] Dan Shipsides (born 1972 Lancashire, England) is based in Belfast since 1995 at Orchid Studios. He exhibits internationally including: Gecko Roof (Sporting Life, MCA, Sydney), Elastic Frontiers (Arnolfini, Bristol), Echo Valley / A Guiding Dilemma (Void Gallery, Derry) Radical Architecture (Castlefield, Manchester) and Bamboo Support (Nissan Art Project, IMMA, Dublin). His work is held within several public and private collections. Neal Beggs (born 1959 Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland) is now based near Nantes in France. He exhibits internationally, and is represented by gallery Aliceday in Brussels. Resent solo projects include ‘if muhammad’ (Frac des pays de la loire, Carquefou, France), ‘Lonesome in the desert’, (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Château-Gontier, France), ‘Children of the voyage’ (gallery Elisa Plattea, Brussels) and ‘Belgium is not a road’, (Netwerk Art, Aalst, Belgium). His work is held within several public and private collections. [5] [http://www.danshipsides.com] [6] Alessio Baldovinetti ( 1425 – 1499), Nativity, 1460-62, Santissima Annunziata, Firenze [7] A work of art is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art-world public”, in Dickie, G., The Art Circle: A Theory of Art, Blackwell Publ., 1984:80 [8] As an example par excellence I note Elastic Frontiers Shipsides made with Oldbury Primary School in Bristol, 2005-2006.

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n. (email to Tom David Watt 7/06/2011): Hi Tom, thanks for images! Interesting, looking through your photos I seemed to have missed some of the works ... I am caught between going back and finding them, or would that be cheating? If you wouldn’t mind could you describe the work with the stairs and TVs. And If I feel I need to go back I will over the next few days ... I was talking to Susan [MacWilliam] who was gave me some directions. But this is all good, creating a myth around you work, which maybe is its purpose. All the best, James. (email from to me from Tom David Watt, 8/06/2011): Hey James, that’s great. there could be hundreds more dotted around the place. You should definitely come back and try to find them. There is one work that i don’t think anyone has found on their own yet. Maybe it could be a challenge for you. If it’s the treehouse one above the tutors’ office that you want information on: a loose board rests slightly ajar at one end of a dimly lit corridor. Depending on the invigilator

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on duty, one might see nothing and walk by to the next work. if the board is left ajar, an inviting illuminated staircase is revealed. This staircase leads to a constructed mezzanine floor installed above Louise Walsh and Pauline Cummins’ office. The positioning of the angled, ceiling high windows allows the space to act as a lookout post over the entire main studio space/exhibition floor. found wood is nailed to the interior of the window .ames to make the space more private for the occupant. An amateur cctv system is set up in one corner presenting a mediated access to other spaces around the exhibition that are in accessible to the public.The viewer begins to wonder of the whereabouts of these spaces. The first two monitors have clues suggesting where the space being surveyed exists, glimmers of the backs of others work or light spillage from a projection. The third television is a dvd of footage of a space some where outside the institution, but is made to look like it might exist within. There are so many details within the treehouse that might go amiss, like the trapdoor into the office below that no one can fit through or the cardboard telescope that looks at the work of a fellow student displaying outside in the red square. [1] The definition of “Ready-Made Geometry” is bound in a statement – that geometry has no origin of development, and was found ‘ready-made’ in the Egyptian sand or Greek temple. From Jacques Derrida’s introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p 27. [2] Edmund Husserl, Origin of Geometry, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 158. [3] Michel Serres, ‘Origin of Geometry’, Clinamen Press, 2002. p. 25. [4] Jacques Derrida, op.cit., p. 27. [5] Michel Serres, op.cit., p. 25. [6] Jacques Derrida, op.cit., p. 57. [7] Philip Glass: [http://www.philipglass.com/bio.php] [8] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, University Of Minnesota Press, 1981, p.3. [9] Jacques Derrida, op.cit., p. 51. [10] Michel Serres, op.cit., p. 24. [11] Jean-Luc Nancy, op.cit., p8 [12] Ibid., pp. 4-5. [13] Quoted in Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 1.

#21

[1] The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien (a.k.a Irish author Brian O’ Nolan), posthumously published (McGibbon & Keein: London, 1967) - A work of surrealist fantasy which describes the hallucinogenic journey of a man, and the introduction of an atomic theory, which allows his metaphysical particles to fuse with that of a bicycle. [2] Sean Lynch interviewed by Judith Raum Lucas Cranach Video Preis, 2007, (Catalogue text) [3] Tom Duddy ‘Irish Art Criticism – A Provincialism of the Right?’ published in Sources in Irish Art: A Reader, (Ed.) Fintan Cullen (Cork University Press, 2000 ) p. 91. Duddy’s article provided an insight into Irish art criticism of the late ’80s, highlighting a need for lateral thinking, in the ‘local versus global’ dichotomy. In carving out an identity for Irish art at that time, Duddy insisted that the ‘geographical aesthetic’ can and should resonate within the local, but must endeavour to resist clichés of Celtic mysticism and Nationalism. Similarly, for Irish art to convey a ‘sense of place’, it should articulate an awareness of international influence, global issues, and economic realities, without pandering to trends. [4] Sean Lynch interviewed by Judith Raum, Lucas-Cranach-Video-Preis, 2007, (Catalogue text). [5] The last execution occurred in 1847, when Hugo Kelly was hanged. It was thought that Kelly was a member of the secret agrarian society The Molly Maguires, a group which was formed out of the Land War in Ireland, and was later implicated in militant trade union activism in America in the late 19th century; a struggle between organized labour and powerful industrial forces. [6] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and H is World, (Trans.), Helene Iswolsky, (M. I. T. Press, 1968), p. xxi [7] Ibid. [8] Herbert Asquith was the British Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916. In 1910 he pledged that on re-election he would grant women the right to vote, but he reneged on his promise. The WSPU organised a window breaking campaign including an attack on Downing Street. [9] The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann, (London: Virago, 1993), illustrates a connection [10] ‘The singer tells of the dreadful fate of Ireland, the “most distressful country,” where “they

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are hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.” The singer bids defiance, and notes that the grass on the martyrs’ graves grows green’: [http://www.folklorist.org] [11] Dramaturgy – The shaping of a story into a form that may be acted. Dramaturgy gives a context and structure to performance. [12] Irish people feel frightened, alone and unled, Joseph O’Connor, The Guardian, Thursday 18 November 2010. [13] Psychogeography was a concept developed by the Lettrist International movement, which explored the idea of urban wandering, defined by Guy Debord in 1955.

#22 [1]

[http://www.piccadillycommunitycentre.org]

#23

*A shorter version of this review is published in the Oct-Nov issue of Aesthetica Magazine, 2011.

#24

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[1] Hal Foster, ‘Precarious: Hal Foster on the art of the decade’, Artforum, December 2009. [2] Alfred Pacquement, ‘The Precarious Museum’, TATE Etc, Issue 2, Autumn 2004. [http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/precariousmuseum.htm] [3] Holland Cotter, ‘Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces’, New York Times, Art Review, 22 August 2007: [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/] [4] YouTube, search: ‘drone pilot kills Afghani militants from Nevada control centre’: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU75dB0HfvM] [5] Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek ,Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left, Verso, 2000. [6] LABOR: [http://web.labor.org.mx/en/2011/09/13/teresa%margolles%en%la% bienal%de%dublin%2011/] [7] Mick Wilson, Visual Artists Workers Forum: ‘Work It’, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 20 April 2011. In 2009 Renée Ridgway wrote: “As twenty-first century attention economics maintains its momentum, where an artist’s standing in the reputational economy is determined by his or her coefficient of specific visibility, how can shadowy, more polyvocal initiatives at the edges find ways to surface, or, for that matter, to remain hidden?”: [http://northeastwestsouth.net/hi/node/404]

#26

[1] Interview with Lisa B.ar, reproduced in Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, Valencia 1993. [2] Jerry Saltz, ‘Can You Dig It?’, New York Magazine, published: 25 November, 2007.

#27

[1] ‘Feedback’ occurs when an event is part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop, then the event is said to “feed back” into itself: [https://www.wikipedia.com/] [2] Press release for ‘Feedback’ [3] Perfectly illustrated by the tag line for a running Pipilotti Rist exhibition which goes: “Immerse yourself in the sensory world of Pipilotti Rist at the Hayward Gallery this autumn.” [4] Quoted from ‘Feedback’ the text by Chris Fite-Wassilak. See: [https://www.cfitewassilak.wordpress.com/] [5] Jean-LucNancy, The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 33. [6] Ian Sample, Faster than light particles found, claims scientist, The Guardian, 22 September, 2011. The findings were confirmed in November. See: [https://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos]

#28

Full title of Nina Amazing’s Unique Digital Print, 2011, (1/1) at Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco: A new ‘team building’ category was included in this year’s beauty pageant and the six year old division was up to the task. The Challenge: work together to combat any world evil of your liking, while still looking FABULOUS. The girls quickly agreed on their tactical theme and strategy, and even developed a cool team named. Hence, the “Sexy Sixes” (or,” SS” for short) were born. The SS decided to combat the prevailing world evil theme of nudity in this challenge, and travelled to the CHI- CaMocha Canyon in Colombia (home of the last remaining teleBOOBtooby colony), to do so.

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Used to living a quiet and peaceful existence, the teleBOOBtoobies were in complete shock by the vitriolic attack of the young SS. In dire need of support, they called upon their friends from NOTevilLAND for back up...In no time, Lucy Lawless, Sally Sue, TYRAdactyl et al. were on the scene. Lucy quickly drafted up a battle plan for the crew while she defended herself with her trusty CELEBRAshield collection. Uni- legged-roller-Roxy was trying to think of the perfect time to launch the Paris Stilton stink bomb ...But Paris, on the other hand, was only concerned about who was noticing her VERY EXPENSIVE handbag!? The SS felt immediate disgust on the battlefield, not only from the shear sight of the teleBOOBtubies, but also from obvious lack of personal grooming displayed by Sally Sue and her flexible ent-WHOREage. “OMG, GROSS!” The SS thought that Sally Sue et al. should at least be happy with favour they were doing, in spraying them with their anal bleaching and fake tan hose defences. “ YOU’RE LIKE, WELCOME AND STUFF!”, they shouted. Amongst the mayhem, Jemma Smile-Smile remained very proud of her perfect DOUCHEotov carrying form. Kerry and Jamerry worked together, deciding where to launch the next grenEGG attack while holding a sexy gaze into the camera. However, Queen Sheeba felt saddened and could only bring herself to stare longingly into the camera and hope for world peace. Meanwhile, Randy and Rodrigo relaxed and took in everything from afar. Ran- dy: “Roddy, THESE CHICKS ARE FUCKED! Pass me another Buckfast would ya?”

#29

[1] Daniel Jewesbury, ‘On a Report of Parochialism in Belfast’, The Vacuum, Issue 51, January 2012. [2] Andrea McVeigh, ‘How should we refer to Belfast folk?’ Belfast Telegraph, Wednesday, 23 September 2009 [3] James Merrigan, ‘Baggage and Absentism’, Peter FitzGerald’s ‘Wall Works’, Queen Street Gallery & Studios, Belfast, 24 February - 26 March, 2011: [https://www.billionjournal.com] [1] Termed “micro-retrospective” by Merlin James during his ‘Artist Talk’ at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, 2/2/2012 [2] Merlin James, ‘Painting per se’, Alex Katz Chair in Painting, Cooper Union Great Hall, New York, 28th February 2002 [3] Said by Merlin James during his ‘Artist Talk’ at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, 2/2/2012 [4] Glenn O’Brien interviews painters Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool: [http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/albert-oehlen/#page3] [5] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, Verso Books, 2005. [6] Gerhard Richter in conversation with Irmeline Lebeer, cited in Douglas Crimp, ‘The End of Painting’, October, no. 16 (Spring 1981) p. 73.

#31

[1] Roberta Smith , Art in Review; Brock Enright, ‘Good Times Will Never Be the Same’, *Perry Rubenstein is in the process of moving wholesale to LA: see his ‘LA slideshow’ (minus art/artists) here: [http://www.perryrubenstein.com] *Brock Enright is currently approaching American T.V. networks in a realistic bid for a Videogames Adventure Services TV series.

#33

[1] Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation if the Mind’ (1968); from Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, 1996, p. 102. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘Sort of, almost, in a way, nearly’, The Independent, 15-04-1994. [6] Adrian Searle, Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1994. [7] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, (Trans.) G. Bennington and I. McLeod, University of Chicago Press, 1978. [8] Ibid.

#34

[1] [http://www.recirca.com/backissues/c121/index.shtml] [2] [http://www.garfiart.com/] [http://angelalynnbodyart.weebly.com/] [http://www.haynesgoodsell.com/] [ http://www.burrencollege.ie/]

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#35

(video montage of the 7th Berlin Biennale can be viewed at +billion_ on Vimeo: [https://vimeo.com/41189167])

#36

SEE: www.fugitivepapers.org for Michaële Cutaya’s take on Brendan Earley’s solo at the RHA.

#37

[1] Franco Berardi (Bifo), ‘After the Future’, (Oakland, CA : AK Press, 2011 [2] Sanja Iveković’s s artist statement at eva International 2012. [3] Katherine Waugh introduction at the screening of The Art of Time at the Mermaid Arts Centre Bray, 2010. [4] Film synopsis of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy: Private Joe Bauers, the definition of “average American”, is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation programme. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive. [http://www.imdb.com] [5] Adrian O’Connell’s artist statement at eva International 2012.

#38

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[1] Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Clement Greenberg’, February 4, 1981, The Hydrogen Jukebox, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 65-69. [2] See Seán Burke’s brilliant analysis of a ‘A Prehistory of the Death of the Author’ in The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, Edinburgh University Press; 3rd Revised edition, (24 Oct 2008), p. 12. [3] Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, Richard Miller (Trans.), Cape, 1977. [4] From Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), in Image-Music-Text, Hill & Wang, 1978. [5] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’. This essay is the text of a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophie on 22 February, 1969 (Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970). [6] Roberta Smith, ‘Photography’s Angel Provocateur’, New York Times, Published: Feb 23, 2012. [7] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, op.cit. [8] Seán Burke, op.cit. p. xvii. [9] Seulemonde, online interview with Geoffrey Bennington [http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/ derrida/seule.html] [10] Smith writes: “Mr. Godbold’s drawings have a nice collaborative drift in which the random expressions and needs of everyday life refresh and subvert established art and religion. Yet they are a bit academic and a little too neatly the sum of received ideas (from William Wegman, Sigmar Polke, David Salle and Richard Prince). It comes as no surprise that Mr. Godbold has a doctorate in art history.” Roberta Smith, David Godbold, Art in Review, New York Times, Published: May 18, 2007. [11] Seán Burke, op.cit. p. x. [12] Roberta Smith, ‘Photography’s Angel Provocateur’, op.cit. [13] Seán Burke, op.cit. [14] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, op.cit.

#40

[1] Curated by Kate Strain, texts by Alice Butler, John Graham, Maximilian Le Cain and Fiona Woods. Designed by Seán O’Sullivan [2] In literature, conceit: From the Latin term for “concept,” a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterise the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so- called metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the reader’s attention. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donne’s conceits, see Stephen Burt’s Poem Guide on John Donne’s The Sun Rising.) [http:// www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/Conceit]

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#44

[Nitpicking: Julian Schnabel hasn’t recently “turned to filmmaking” if his sixteen years of working in the medium is anything to go by, starting with Basquiat in 1996. There is also a need for expansion on Schnabel’s position as an artist, as there is a suggestion that he has “turned to filmmaking” and given up on painting. The fact is Schnabel is still one of the most significant painters working today, one of the better painting shows this year was Schnabel’s ‘Deus Ex Machina’ at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin.] [1] Gemma Tipton, ‘Painting is not dead – it’s just hard’, The Irish Times, August 18, 2012: [http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0818/1224322366782. Html] [2] Roberta Smith, ‘Photography’s Angel Provocateur’, New York Times, Feb 23, 2012: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/arts/design/cindy-sherman-at-museum-of-modernart.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=cindy%20sherman&st=cse] [3] James Merrigan, ‘Subjectively Yours’: [http://www.billionjournal.com/time/38.html] [4] Jerry Saltz, ‘Eleven Things That Struck, Irked, or Awed Me at Documenta 13’, June 15, 2012: [http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/saltz-notes-on-documenta-13.html]

#45

[1] John Kelsey, Rich Texts: Selected Writings for Art, Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 91.

#47

*Dr Áine Phillips is a performance artist and academic based in the West of Ireland. She is Head of Sculpture at The Burren College of Art in County Clare and has exhibited and performed her art work internationally since the late ‘80s. She has had articles and reviews of performance published in Performance Art Journal, MIT Press, Circa, The Printed Project and Visual Artists Newsletter in Ireland. [1] Extract of script taken from Aurélien Froment’s 9 Intervals. [2] Stéphane Mallarmé, Mimique, 1886. [3] Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis, Routledge, 2006, p. 153. *RE: 9 Intervals: the number 9 has game-playing properties of it own: every multiple of nine, when added together equals nine: 27, 2+7; 36, 3+6, etc.

#50

[1] Derrida: “The minute I’m asked to play my own role in a more or less improvised film scenario, I have the impression that I’m letting a ghost speak in my place. Paradoxically, instead of playing my own role, I’m unconsciously letting a ghost ventriloquise myself, in other words speak in my place. [...] The cinema is an art of phantomachia, [...] I think that the future belongs to ghosts, that technology increases greatly with the power of ghosts.” This sequence can be seen online: [http://www.youtube.com/user/kenmcmullenweb/featured] [2] Elizabeth Klaver, Sites Of Autopsy In Contemporary Culture, State University of New York Press, 2005, p.84. [3] Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, 2007, p. 22. [4] Jean Baudrillard on Simulacra and Simulation: “If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second- order simulacra.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, publisher: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 1. [5] During the final weeks of the exhibition Atkins did alter the digital works. [6] Landon Palmer, ‘3 Changes Videodrome predicted about the Future’: [http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/criterion-3-changes-videodrome- predicted-aboutthe-future-of-media-lpalm.php] [7] Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Ed Atkins for Kaleidoscope Magazine online : [http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/ed-atkins-interview-by-hans- ulrich-obrist/]

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#51

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), MIT Press, 2005.

#53

*Scooby-Doo and the Carnival Creep: A carnival rolls into town, but closes down when the mysterious Carnival Creeper shows up. It’s up to Scooby-Doo and the gang to catch this creep and save Pop’s Big Top.

#54

[1] Roberta Smith, ‘The Personal and the Painterly’, The New York Times, published: October 9, 2008. [2] Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, Semiotext(e), Mit Press, 2005. p. 20. [3] Roberta Smith, Ibid. [4] Laura Cumming, ‘The kitsch is back’, The Guardian, published: March 4, 2007. [5] Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘Not just a pretty face: Reynolds and Gainsborough’, The Independent, published: March 29, 1994. [6] Aidan Dunne, ‘A new crop of graduates comes into its own’, The Irish Times, published: Wednesday, June 13, 2012. [7] Sylvère Lotringer, The Accident of Art, op.cit., p. 17.

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[1] Raphael Rubinstein, ‘Provisional Painting’, (first published: 04.05.2009): [http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-raphael- rubinstein/] [2] Ibid. [3] ‘Culture Critic interviews Wilhelm Sasnal...’, (first published: 14.10.2011.): [http://www.culturecritic.co.uk/blog/culturecritic-interviews-wilhelm-sasnal/] [4] Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch (Eds.), Strenberg Press, 2012. [5] See text here: [http://painters-table.com/link/brian-dupont-artists-texts/provisional- painting-explanation] [6] English filmmaker Adam Curtis, talking at The Story conference in February 2011. Thanks to Alan Butler for this link!: [http://storythings.com/2011/05/23/new-podcast-adam-curtis-at-the-story-2011/] [7] See review here: [http://www.makingfamiliar.blogspot.ie] *I am intentionally ignoring Rubinstein’s second article ‘Provisional Painting 2: To Rest Lightly on Earth’, (first published: 01.02.20012), because it is less coherent, read here: [http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-part-2/]

#57

[1] The Black Lodge is a fictional setting featured in the television series Twin Peaks. [2] Reference to “Log Lady” uncovered by Claire Feeley in her essay ‘Maghild Opdøl: A studied attention’, from the artist’s catalogue If you go Down to the Woods, 2012.

#58

[1] Regarding ‘babbling’ and art: “The babble of a LeWitt serial expansion has nothing of the economy of the mathematician’s language. It has the loquaciousness of the speech of children or of the very old, in that its refusal to summarize, to use the single example that would imply the whole, is like those feverish accounts of events composed of a string of almost identical details, connected by ‘and.’” Rosalind Krauss, ‘LeWitt in Progress’, October, Vol. 6 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 46-60. [2] “Twice in this century [the auto industry] has changed our most fundamental ideas about how we make things. And how we make things dictates not only how we work but what we buy, how we think, and the way we live.“ The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production – Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry, (Eds.) James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos, Simon and Schuster, 2007. Cited in Bill Roberts, ‘Burnout: Liam Gillick’s post-Fordist Aesthetics’: [http://images.kerlin.ie/www_kerlin_ie/BurnoutLiamGillickarthistorymagazine.pdf] “The idea of collective action and the idea of being able to determine the speed with which you produce a car, whether you produce it in a group or individually, at night, or very slowly,

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seems close to the question of how to make art over the last fifty years.” ‘Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 2 of 2: The Experimental Factory’: [http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maybe-it-would-be-better-if-we-worked-in-groups-of-threepart-2-of-2-the-experimental] [3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe ‘song’ as a stablising intervention in times of crisis: “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his song as best he can. The song is a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, centre in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.” (Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum, 2004, p. 311). [1] Simon Sheikh, ‘Notes on Institutional Critique’, 2006: [http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/sheikh/en] [2] J.J. Charlesworth, ‘Not about institutions, but why we are so unsure of them’: [http://http://www.ica.org.uk] [3] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), pp. 105-143. [4] Hans Haacke, 1974, cited in Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Artforum, New York: September, 2005, Vol. 44, p. 278. [5] John Ryan – Circulation Proposal In the spirit of an open call, where the artist pays a fee to participate in a group exhibition of essentially no real value, bar an extra line on the artist’s CV, I wish to exhibit a copy of my CV. However, rather than just having my CV printed on an A4 sheet and placed on the wall like all the other institutional critiques that you’re likely the receive, I want my CV printed on the back of all of the artwork lists – in both venues. As audience members arrive to see the show and pick up the artwork list, my ‘artwork’ will LITERALLY ‘Circulate’ the exhibition. (John Ryan) [6] Coline Milliard, Art Review, No. 17, December 2007, p.127. [7] Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock, July 2013, cited in the artwork displayed in ‘Circulation’ at Monster Truck gallery. [8] Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock, July 2013, cited in the artist’s artwork displayed in ‘Circulation’ at FLOOD gallery. [9] TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”.

#62

[1] Roberta Smith, The New York Times, ‘Marlene McCarty’, Brent Sikkema Gallery, 530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, New York, published: January 23, 2004. [2] Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Ed.) Hal Foster, Bay Press, 1983, pp. 55-57.

#66

[1] Read my Circa Magazine online review of Michael Snow’s So It Is (1982); screened in 2009 at mother’s tankstation, Dublin: [http://www.recirca.com/cgi-bin/mysql/show_item.cgi?post_id= 5128&type=reviews&ps=publish]

#67

[1] Mention of Tom Watt’s degree show in +billion-’s review of Dublin Degree shows (2011): SEE: JULY 2011 #18: ‘REFLECTING IN THE INSTITUTION’ [2] SEE +billion-’s review of ‘Underground’, Basis Space, Dublin, 2011: SEE: NOVEMBER 2011 #26: ‘HISTORICAL CASES OF THE SUBTERRANEAN KIND’, ‘Underground’, 10 – 13 November, 2011, Basic Space, Dublin. [3] ‘Resort’ website: [http://apopulardestination.wordpress.com] ‘Winter Resort’ report: VAN July/August 2013: Residency Report | Clare Breen ‘Into the Unknown’: [http://visualartists.ie/articles/van-julyaugust-2013-residency-report-clare-breeninto-the-unknown/]

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#68

[1] Niamh McCooey’s text can be read here: [http://niamhmccooey.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/adiaphora-conor-mary-foy-at-the-kevinkavanagh-gallery/] [2] Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 2013, p. 41.

#69

[1] Paul Morely, Martin Creed, The Guardian, published, published: Sunday 30 January, 2011: [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jan/30/martin-creed-david-byrne] [2] Phil Miller, ‘The Mother of invention: Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed’, The Herald Scotland, published: Friday 21 January, 2011: [http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/more-arts-entertainment-news/the-mother-ofinvention-turner-prize-winning-artist-martin-creed-1.1081172]

#70

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[1] In mentioned article, Gemma Tipton is right to confirm that Feminism has not won over the art market, not by half. But female artists have adapted to obvious underrepresentation in the art market and other forms of promotion by making some of the most refreshing art inside and outside the Boy’s Club. What I have found over that last few years reviewing art in Ireland is that the female majority in art colleges are producing the most exciting work at graduate degree level. Without any thought regarding gender, 9 out of 12 artists were female in the 2013 +billion- “SHITLIST” ( digital review of Dublin Degree Shows: billionjournal.com). It is true that this does not translate into a female majority being represented by Irish galleries – or female minority for that matter. However, if you equate artistic and monetary success with gallery representation then would-be artists from the female (and male) persuasion are in for disappointment. What should be noted and celebrated is the work being made by female artists inside and on the periphery. Artists are adaptive; necessity being a powerful agent for creativity. In general, however, artists have a warped definition or inherited belief of what success is, and what is the ideal career trajectory for an artist, from college to stable (gallery’s or curator’s). Artists have to eat, but being represented by a gallery does not guarantee financial security – most represented artists I know are hardpressed to rub two cents together. They may get more generic artworld exposure but artists are paying for that dearly, financially and creatively: homogenisation of visual art starts in the gallery. Before you take out the stick I am not saying that represented artists or art made for the gallery is fully compromised. What I am saying is that off-site, site-specific and participatory practice should be recognised as a valued and much needed alternative to gallery art that is, first and foremost, tied to the art market. The banded around excuse that art coverage in The Irish Times is for a broader art audience, or that editors are at fault for the type of reductive and divisive art criticism that is built on spectacular ‘hooks’ rather than passion has run its course. The Irish art scene deserves more from a leading newspaper. [2] Gemma Tipton, A man’s world? Sexism and gender issues in art’, The Irish Times, published: 25 November 25, 2013: [http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/a-man-s-world-sexism-and-gender-issuesin-art-1.1604233?page=1] [3] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II, Continuum, 2005, p.79.

#71

[1] Adam Phillips, On Balance, Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. [2] Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, Public Affairs, New York, 2011. [3] Ibid.

#72

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, An Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 8. [2] David Barash, ‘Envy and Evolution’: [http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/envy-and-evolution/43131]

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#73 [1] [2] [3]

Martin Herbert, The Uncertainty Principle, Sternberg Press, 2014. [http://markswords.com/index.php?/the-hinterlands/the-hinterlands-1/1] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso Books, 1995.

#77 [1] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 12.

#78 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso, 2009. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, Vintage Books, 1981. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Quoted in Susan Sontag, op.cit. [http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/simon-grant-interviews-robert-morris] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, Penguin Books, 2009.

#79

[1] [http://kunsthalltrondheim.no/en/event-en/nesa-paripovic-n-p-1977-3] [2] See Dr. Amy Bryzgel’s web archive for performance art in the east: [http:// performingtheeast.com/] [3] Georg Schöllhammer, ‘An Ontologist Observes’, [http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text. php?textid=1900&lang=en]

#80

[1] Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, Brian Wallis (Ed), MIT Press, 1987. p. xii.

#81

[1] Julius Eastman died in 1990. Unjust Malaise, a 3 set CD of his compositions, culled from university archives, was released by New World Records in 2005. This was Eastman’s first official release. No commercial recordings of his work were made during his lifetime.] Stacy Hardy is a writer living in Cape Town. This essay is also available in print as a Chimurenganyana and in Chimurenga 11: Conversations with Poets Who Refuse to Speak (2007). Thank you Stacy Hardy and Chimurenga.

#82 [1]

Uriel Orlow, Unmade Film, published with edition Fink, Zurich, 2014.

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[2] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Cornell University Press, 1980. [3] *See select Reynold Reynolds/Patrick Jolley collaborations on Vimeo: Sugar (2005) (short cut) [https://vimeo.com/19667993] Seven Days ’Til Sunday (1998): [https://vimeo.com/26733270] Drowning Room (2000): [https://vimeo.com/63351380] Burn (2001): [https://vimeo.com/20706577] *And select solo works by Patrick Jolley: Snakes (2009): [https://vimeo.com/35886158] Fall (2008): [https://vimeo.com/35516469] Hereafter (2004): [https://vimeo.com/35882401] [4] Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture, MIT Press, 2002. [5] Ibid. [6] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, p. 6. *Thank you to Bassam El Baroni for the reference to Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal.

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#83

[1] Read ‘Liquid Fire’s Promise’, my review of Shane McCarthy’s first solo show at mother’s tankstation, Dublin. [http://www.billionjournal.com/time/65.html] [2] Read the brilliant Christian Kerslake for an analysis of the slippery term ‘immanence’ via Gilles Deleuze: [http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/kerslake-paper%281%29.pdf]

#84

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[1] Peter Schjeldahl, ‘True Blue: An Yves Klein retrospective’, The New Yorker, published: 28 June, 2010. [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/06/28/true-blue-3?currentPage=2] [2] H. P. Blavatsky, The Modern Panarion, a Collection of Fugitive Fragments from the Pen of H. P. Blavatsky, Kessinger Publishing, 2003. [3] “In the late 1960s poet Ishmael Reed adopted the 19th-century term ‘HooDoo,’ referring to forms of religion and their practice in the New World to explore the idea of spiritual practice outside easily definable faiths or creeds and ritualism on contemporary works of literature and art. ‘Neo-HooDoo,’ he writes in his 1972 collection of poetry, Conjure, ‘believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest’. His seminal poems, The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto and The NeoHooDoo Aesthetic, delve even deeper into this artistic practice to demonstrate its vitality as an international, multicultural aesthetic that embraces spiritual creativity and innovation.” From the press-release of the MoMA PS1 exhibition ‘NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith’, October 19, 2008–January 26, 2009. [http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/205] [4] Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press,1987. [5] Cited in Robert S. Boynton’s book review of Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography, New York Times, published: January 11, 2004. [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/books/in-the-jung-archives.html] [6] Joshua Alan Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Duke University, 2012. *See also: Aidan Dunne, ‘Delving into the arcane: the legacy of Æ’s hidden murals’, The Irish Times, published: July 5, 2014. [http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/delving-into-the-arcane-the-legacy-of-æ-shidden-murals-1.1853925]

#85

[1] “Aquaculture” description by curator Aoife Tunney in the exhibition text. [2] [http://www.thegoodhatchery.com/] [3] Jeanne Maglaty, ‘When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?’: [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-start-wearing-pink-1370097/] [4] Lorenzo Fabbri, The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, Continuum, 2008, p. 35. [5] Read +billion- review of Brendan Earley’s ‘A Place Between’, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin, 15 March – 29 April, 2012. [http://www.billionjournal.com/time/36.html] [6] SKY IS THE LIMIT was a public art commission for Scoil Naomh Eoin in Navan Co. Meath as part of the Percent Per Art Scheme 2011. Sky is the Limit was curated by Clíodhna Shaffrey and Sarah Searson. The event took place on the 26 October 2011 to mark the opening of Scoil Naomh Eoin’s new school building. An airplane towing a banner reading SKY IS THE LIMIT flew from the National Flight Centre in Leixlip to Navan and circled over the roof of the school a number of times. A second airplane tracking the first plane had a photographer Alan Dwyer on board – to capture the event from the skies. A live feed of the take off was relayed via webcam to the school where the children assembled to watch the airplane’s progress before gathering outside to see the planes pass overhead. A second photographer Alex Synge documented the event on the ground. SKY IS THE LIMIT was created and directed by artist Ruth E. Lyons, the event and the lasting artwork are intended as a celebration of the limitless potential of children’s minds and an escape from the daily reality of the breeze block school building. [7] Read +billion- review of Mark Durkan’s ‘I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins’, The Lab, Dublin, 14 November – 25 January, 2014. [http://www.billionjournal.com/time/69.html]

2010 – 2017_

#86

[1] E.M. Cioran, ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, from The Temptation to Exist, Richard Howard (Trans), introduction by Susan Sontag, Arcade Publishing, 2013, p. 112.

#88

[1] Interview with Kari Altmann by Harry Burke for Rhizome: posted: 25 March, 2015. [http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/mar/25/artist-profile-kari-altmann/] [2] Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION / DATA: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/243595524/Art-Post-Internet#scribd] [3], [4] Ibid. [5] Brian Droitcour, The Perils of Post-Internet Art’, Art in America: [http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/]

[6] Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION / DATA. op.cit. 7Interview with Kari Altmann. op.cit. [8] Philosophers Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen talk about their concept of metamodernism, the waning of irony and the new forms of sincerity emerging in 21st century culture: [http://video.frieze.com/film/what-metamodernism/] [9] Brian Droitcour. op.cit. [10] Interview with Kari Altmann. op.cit. [11] ‘Ripe for Capture: Artist Kari Altmann Is a Prophet’ (Interview with Kari Altmann): [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/ripe-for-capture-artist-kari-altmann-is-a-prophet]

#91

Jerry: ...my only really human quality to speak of is a fondness for Celtic mysticism. Ben: What’s that? Jerry: The music, man. Artistes like... Fainne Lasta, Raithneach, Amhann na Ngealach, Clannad. You like them artistes? Their music? Of course you do. But what I’m saying is, the kind of justice I’m questing... requires a certain attitude that people might find... you know, extreme or unpleasant.

#92

[1] Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, University Of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 183. [2] Adam Gopnik, ‘The Fires of Paris: Why do people still fight about the Paris Commune?’, The New Yorker, 22 December 2014. [online]. Available from: http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/12/22/fires-paris [accessed 4 May 2015] [3] John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, Basic Books,2014. [4] Kristin Ross, ‘Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space”, Yale French Studies, No. 97, 50 Years of Yale French Studies: A Commemorative Anthology. Part 2:1980-1998 (2000), Yale University Press, pp. 36-54. [5] Gopnik, op.cit. [6] Ibid. [7] Linda Nochlin, ‘The De-Politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic’, October, Vol. 22 (Autumn, 1982), The MIT Press, pp. 64-78. [8] Ting Chang, Rewriting Courbet: Silvestre, Courbet, and the Bruyas Collection after the Paris Commune, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1998), Oxford University Press, pp. 107-120. [9] Ibid. [10] “...unlike Monet, was far less sympathetic. After participating in the defence of Paris during the Prussian siege, Manet condemned the insurgents of 1871 as ‘grotesque imitators of the Commune of ’93’ and ‘cowardly assassins’. He later attended the trials of the Communards at Versailles where he disapproved of Courbet’s written and verbal pleas of innocence. In a letter to Theodore Duret Manet asserted: ‘you write of Courbet. He behaved like a coward in front of the Tribunal and is no longer worthy of any interest.’ Ting Chang. op.cit. [11] Nochlin, op.cit. [12] Ibid. [13] Ibid. [14] Kristin Ross, ‘Rimbaud and the Resistance to Work’, Representations, No. 19 (Summer, 1987), University of California Press, pp. 62-86. [15] Ibid. [16] Ross, ‘Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space’. op.cit.

#93

[1] David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October, Vol. 130 (October,2009), The MIT Press, pp.125-134.

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[2] Ibid. [3] Available from: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/ romanforum/marsyas.html [accessed 11 May 2015]

#94

[1] Interview with Dave Hickey by Sheila Heiti for Believer Mag, November 2007: Available http://www.believermag.com/issues/200711/?read=interview_hickey [accessed 26 May, 2015]. [2] Interview with Adrian Ghenie by Rachel Wolff for Blouinartinfo, March, 2013. Available from: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/874084/in-the-studio-romanian-painteradrian-ghenies-sinister?qt-article_detail_popular=2# [accessed 22 May, 2015].

#99

[1] See Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964), reprinted in Sontag’s Against Interpretation, New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. [2] Spice Girls, 2 become 1, 1996. [3] Pilvi Takala’s Real Snow White (2009) documents the artist’s failed efforts to enter Disneyland dressed as Snow White, while the public accept her as ‘real’ in their attempts to get close to her ‘fake’ Snow White.

#100

[1] My father was a security guard; well, that’s what it says on my birth cert. He also worked in the coal mines, but for some reason he put down security guard. Maybe security guard was more official than miner, a step up – I would have put down miner. Security guard may suggest potential risk, but miner... there’s something stupidly heroic about digging black stuff out of the ground.

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#102

[1] To my mind the flattered artist transforms into the doe-eyed-deer (‘aw shucks’, replies the self-conscious teenager in the movies). The criticised, self-assured artist becomes prickly and selfconscious—even self-aware. The response ‘I’m flattered’ (if you watch movies or TV melodramas like I do) is usually followed by ‘but...’. And what about those artists who are tamed by flattery, like those one-time writers who achieved breakthrough first and only novels: Harper Lee and her lonely To Kill a Mocking Bird, J.D. Salinger’s isolated The Catcher in the Rye, Emily Bronte’s spinsterish Wuthering Heights. Flattery is homicide. So every time I experience an exhibition that approximates love I have to ask the question: what is my intention in professing that feeling in the act of art criticism? Do I want to destroy the artist with what may be perceived as empty flattery. I’m always afraid that when you flatter the artist what you are really saying is ‘I am on top of your art... Your art doesn’t challenge my sense of taste... it doesn’t challenge anything... I get it... move on’. Is flattery a form of subjugation? Is that our motive for pronouncing our love for something? Love said is always a disappointing second to love felt. People talk about different loves for different things: your husband, your wife, your family, your children, your friends, even your dog. But what I am talking about here is something that could as easily offend one’s sensibilities as ingratiate them. Real love fucks with your sensibilities. But the smitten art critic in love with the exhibition can only become a disappointing review? Right? As artists we tend to bathe in criticism and dry ourselves off of flattery. I think artists are spurned on by criticism, or should be. While the flattered artist is ‘stuck’—validation is riddled with msg. Love in its visceral manifestation is something that, sometimes, we want to divorce, shake off. It can be torture, but always an unsaid torture, held in the pit of your stomach— sometimes turning to butterflies and other times to shit. Unlike the proliferation of ‘Like’ there is something visceral and critical about love in relation to art. It comes with an emoji of hate—as the cliché goes... you don’t have to like someone to love them. The person that loves an artwork and cannot move either side of love into something more manageable, like ‘like’ or even hate, there is a sense that subjectivity is taking over and, moreover, ownership being confessed or professed by the smitten lover. When I love specific artworks, or worse still, an artist’s body of work, I feel dirty, because it’s like the artist has got on my skin rather than under it.

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[2] Adrian Searle: [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/12/champagnelife-review-all-female-exhibition-saatchi-no-feminist] [3] Cristín Leach, ‘Winning ugly: Messy painters capture the dirty realities of modern life’, The Irish Sunday Times, published: 7 February 2016. [http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/ireland/article1664604.ece] [4] DT Max, ‘Why David Foster Wallace should not be worshipped as a secular saint’, published: 9 October 2015. [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/09/david-fosterwallace-worshipped-secular-saint]

#103

[1] For those not up on their sci-fi, Brando played Jor-El, Superman’s father in the 1978 movie. In the case of eliciting Superman’s Fortress of Solitude: it could be the notion that the Italian actor playing Adler resembles Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954). Especially in the scene following Adler’s sexual encounter (and betrayal of Roger) with Alice, in which Adler is wearing a wife beater, or ‘mummy beater’ in this context.

#104

[2] But we can look at all of this another way. We can say that the fugitive is the centre and the centre is the fugitive, and that such outlier art is where the spin cycle has the potential to CREAK and GROWN. We can look beyond the galleries and publicly-funded art institutions at the centre, where vision is less tunnel, as something more valuable and less fugitive. That the centre is where you go to die (melodrama). We can acknowledge that the minute an artist is catapulted from the outlier and fugitive that they have accepted the terms and conditions and frameworks of the centre, and all the predictability, cheerleading, self-censorship, bias and compromises that may come with being part of the spin cycle.

#109

[1] The title under which the relational aesthetics posse came together at New York’s Guggenheim in 2008/2009.

#113

[1] But criticism tends to find a way to ooze out some place, some time, unconsciously or not. On Twitter and Facebook for instance, when the characteristic language of an individual uncharacteristically changes its tone. Like when an individual’s characteristically overused ‘excited’ and ‘great’ turns uncharacteristically to the more critically nuanced, ‘interesting’. It’s ‘amazing’ (appropriate usage!) how much you can tell about a person’s opinion on Facebook or Twitter just by the characteristic vs. uncharacteristic changes in vernacular, from emoji-apathetic to emotionally defensive. I find all this online behaviourism ‘interesting’ and entertaining until it becomes so predictable that I start to believe in petty vigilantism.

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[1] I don’t prescribe to rules and styles and careers and friends in anything to do with the arts because compromises are made which I cannot stand in others. Take for instance when art writers cock and squat in panel discussions that writing on art has become too confessional, too academic, too highfalutin, too descriptive, too prescriptive, too philosophical, too subjective, too personal, too self-depreciating, too arrogant, too respectful, too amateur. This is always said with a self-administered pat on the back for not being like him or her, them or they, it or that. I believe (me being the confessional type) if you get something from being confessional in your writing or reading then there will be other writers and readers out there that are just like you – you are not special! Those that prescribe and pronounce a right way to write about art are absolute inhibitors. They are essentially conformists.

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#14

COLIN MARTIN The Garden 2012 HD-Video (DETAIL) Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Courtesy of the artist.

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ALAN BUTLER Some Kind of Agit Prop Monster 2010 HD-Video, 2min 23sec Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin, 20 October â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 27 November, 2010 Courtesy of the artist and TBG+S.

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BEA MCMAHON InDivisible 2010 HD synched twin moving image, 5min 48sec Green on Red gallery, Dublin, 11 November – 11 December 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery.

#1a

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ALAN PHELAN Cabbages 2009-2010 archival paper, toner, EVA glue, polystyrene cone, hot glue Soltice Arts Centre, Navan, 30 October â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 27 November, 2010 Courtesy of the artist.

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McCANN ‘Right Here, Right Now’ Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, 4 November, 2010 ~ courtesy of the artist.

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GAVIN MURPHY Remember 2010 4 November – 16 January, 2011 Dublin City Gallery/Hugh Lane/Golden Bough Suite Courtesy of the artist and Dublin City Gallery ~ Photo: Denis Mortell.

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CECILY BRENNAN Black Tears 2010 HD-Video ~ Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 13 January â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 26 February, 2011 Courtesy of the artist.

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Annika Ström, ‘From the Community Hall’ Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin, 10 December, 2010 – 7 February, 2011 Courtest of the artist and TBG+S.

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TRACY HANNA, ‘Things Fall Apart’ SOMA Contemporary, Waterford, 3 February – 26 February, 2011 Courtesy of the artist and SOMA Contemporary. November 4 – January 16,

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‘The Genesis of a Cookie-Cutter or Hot Potato?’ Meet the Curators of Dublin Contemporary 2011: Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jota Castro.

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CEAL FLOYER Things 2009 CDs, CD-player, speakers, cables, wood, Project Arts Centre,Dublin 11 March â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 23 April, 2011 ~ courtesy of artist and Project Arts Centre.

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#10

PETER FITZGERALD Wall Works 2011 Queen Street Gallery+Studios (QSS), Belfast, 24 February – 26 March, 2011 Courtesy of the artist and QSS.

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#11

MICHELLE BROWNE A Life on The Ocean Wave Revisited 2009 Still image, The LAB, Dublin, 4 March – 9 April, 2011 ~ courtesy of the artist.

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SUSAN MACWILLIAM Can we explain the Poltergeist? 2008 stereoscopic image (with Dr William G Roll) ~ courtesy the artist.

#14

Den Letzten beissen die Hunde P.O.A. (German Proverb: ‘The last one will be bitten by the dogs’), 2011, 8-channel video Installation, 53sec Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, May 7 – June 19, 2011 Photo © Vera Klute ~ courtesy of Butler Gallery.

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#15

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‘Offline’, Temple Bar Gallery+Studios (TBG+S), Dublin Dublin, 8 April – 14 May, 2011 ~ courtesy of EILIS MCDONALD.

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DEE Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;SHEA ~ MFA Degee Show, National Colloge of Art & Design, Dublin, 2011.

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Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir ‘Beyond Guilt Trilogy’ 2011 126 Artist-led gallery, Galway ~ courtesy of artists.

#20

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NIALL DE BUITLÉAR Untitled 2010-2011 black paper, 8 July – 20 August 2011, The LAB, Dublin ~ courtesy of the artist.

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SEAN LYNCH & BRIAN HAND The Dock, Carrick on Shannon, 8 April – 11 June, 2011 Color photographic print by ROS KAVANAGH.

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#22

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Community Centre, 13 May â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 30 July, 2011 Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly ~ courtesy Piccadilly Community Centre.

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#23

KEVIN COSGROVE & BRENDAN EARLEY ‘Nor for Nought’ mother’s tankstation, Dublin ~ 14 September – 29 October, 2011 Courtesy of the artists and mother’s tankstation.

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OMER FAST Five Thousand Feet is the Best 2010 Digital film, 30min ~ courtesy of the artist and Dublin Contemporary.

The Devil’s Spine Band, Radisson Live Lounge, Galway Arts Festival 20 – 23 July, 2011 ~ courtesy The Devil’s Spine Band.

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#26

MARK MANDERS Two Interconnected Houses (Slide 40) 2010 Slide projection loop with 80 slides ~ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 9 June – 12 July, 2011 ~ courtesy of the artist and Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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#28

NINA AMAZING Unique Digital Print 2011 (1/1) at Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco ~ 4 November – 3 December, 2011 Courtesy of the artist.

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#29

ANTTI LEPPANEN ‘The Second Iteration’ Queen Street Gallery+Studios (QSS), Belfast ~ 23 February – 31 March, 2012 Courtesy of the author.

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#30

MERLIN JAMES ‘In the Gallery’ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 3 February – 28 March, 2012 Courtesy of the author.

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#31

BRIAN DUGGAN ‘Three Lives’ Rua Red Arts Centre, Dublin, 19 March – 28 April. 2012 Courtesy of the artist and Rua Red Arts Centre.

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#32

BROCK ENRIGHT Good Times Will Never Be the Same 2009 HD-VIDEO, 79min ~ courtesy of the artist.

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#33

DAMIEN FLOOD ‘History of the Visitation’ Green on Red Gallery, Dublin ~ 11 Nov. – 10 Dec., 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Green on Red.

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#34

ANGELALYNN DUNLOP Before I Die Interior 2012 Graduate MFA Show, Burren College of Art, April 14 - 29, 2012 Courtesy of the artist.

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#35

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, ground floor, 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012.

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#36

BRENDAN EARLEY A Million Years Later 2011 bronze and silicon, 20×105x30cm ~ Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 15 March – 29 April, 2012 ~ courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

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#37

MARK O’KELLY ~ eva International: Biennial of Visual Art Limerick City 19 May – 12 August, 2012 ~ oils on linen, watercolours and vitrines containing electrical, tinned and printed material Courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.

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#38

THE RETURN OF THE AUTHOR...

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#39

LEFT: MARIE FARRINGTON Eventual apparatus 2012 coal dust, milk, The Joinery, Dublin, 16 May – 27 May, 2012 Courtesy of the artist.

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#40

COLIN MARTIN The Garden 2012 HD-Video, Installation view, Broadcast Gallery, Dublin Institute of Technology 6 June – 20 June, 2012 ~ courtesy of the artist.

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358

359

2010 – 2017_

#43

ALEX CONWAY + FRANK WHELAN (Hi Dó) SITEATION, Unit 4, James Joyce St., Dublin, 6 September, 2012 Photo: Michael Holly.

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360

361

2010 – 2017_

#46

NINA CANELL ‘Tendrils’ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 29 September – 14 November, 2012 Courtesy of the artist and Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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362

363

2010 – 2017_

#47

The Performance Collective ‘Subject to Ongoing Change’ Galway Arts Centre, 16 – 29 July, 2012 Courtesy of the artist ~ photo: Joseph Carr.

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364

365

2010 – 2017_

#48 #48

AURÉLIEN FROMENT 9 Intervals 2012 AURÉLIEN FROMENT Intervalstankstation, 2012 HD-Video, 19min 43sec,9mother’s Dublin HD-Video, 43sec, mother’s tankstation, 6 January –19min 16 February, 2013 ~ courtesy the Dublin artist and mother’s tankstation. 6 January – 16 February, 2013 ~ courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

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366

367

2010 – 2017_

#50

ED ATKINS ‘Of tears, of course‘ Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin 15 February – 30 March, 2013, courtesy of the artist and TBG+S

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368

#50

ED ATKINS ‘Of tears, of course‘ Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin 15 February – 30 March, 2013, courtesy of the artist and TBG+S

369

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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370

371

2010 – 2017_

#51

ALAN PHELAN ‘HANDJOB’ Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, 14 March - 26 April, 2013 Courtesy of the artists and Oonagh Young Gallery.

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372

373

2010 – 2017_

#52

NIAMH O’MALLEY Background: Window 2013 ~ glass, birch plywood, oak, oil paint Foreground: Garden 2013 ~ dual channel HD-Video installation, silent Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 26 April – 22 June, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Project Arts Centre ~ photo: Ros Kavanagh.

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374

375

2010 – 2017_

#53

KATY MORAN ‘Katy Moran’ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 8 February – 28 March, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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376

#54

GENIEVE FIGGIS Skull 2013 Oil on canvas ~ courtesy of the artist.

377

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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378

379

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#55

MARK SWORDS Forgery 2012 Courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.

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380

#57

Magnhild OpdĂ¸l Left: Pilot, cardboard donut box, 2013 Right: Invitation to Love, 2013 ~ courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

381

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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382

383

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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384

#58

LIAM GILLICK ‘For the doors that are welded shut’ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin ~ 27 July - 14 September, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

385

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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386

387

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#59

ALAN BUTLER Come Together 2013 Still Image, HD-Video ~ 10min 40 sec ~ courtesy of the artist.

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388

#59

‘Circulation’ ~ curated by Paul McAree, 9 – 24 August, 2013 ~ courtesy of FLOOD.

389

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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390

391

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#60

PAUL DORAN Silence 2013 wood, acrylic paint, fabric, staples, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin 29 August - 28 September, 2013 ~ courtesy of the artist and Green On Red Gallery.

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392

393

2010 – 2017_

#61

EOIN MC HUGH ‘Augury’ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 26 July – 11 September, 2013 Ccourtesy of the artist and Douglas Hyde Gallery.

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394

395

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#62

MARLENE McCARTY Group 2 (Norman, Oklahoma, 1964-1977, Baboon Island, The Gambla, Africa, 1977-1987), 2007). Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper, approximately 284 x 558cm, image courtesy of the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.

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396

397

2010 – 2017_

#64

MARCEL VIDAL ‘#untitled’ Basic Space, Dublin, 20 – 26 September, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Basic Space.

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398

399

2010 – 2017_

#65

RAMON KASSAM ‘Portrait Cuts Itself Out On The Floor’ Pallas Projects, Dublin ~ 26 – 30 June, 2013 Courtesy of the artist.

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400

#66

SHANE McCARTHY stilted sincerity 2013 Digital drawing and wall colour ~ mother’s tankstation, Dublin 25 September – 2 November, 2013 ~ courtesy of the artist and mother’s tankstation.

401

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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402

#67

TOM WATT ‘Opening’ 8 Seville Place, Dublin ~ 10 October – 3 November, 2013 Courtesy of the artist ~ photo: Daniel Finnegan.

403

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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404

405

2010 – 2017_

#68

CONOR MARY FOY ‘Adiaphora’ Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin ~ 30 October – 2 November, 2013 Courtesy of the artist.

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406

#69

MARTIN CREED, ‘Concert’ Broadstone Studios, Dublin ~ 30 November, 2013, 8pm Photo: Paul McCarthy.

407

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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408

409

2010 – 2017_

#70

TRACY HANNA, ‘Everything’s moving below the surface’ Saint Mary’s Abbey, Dublin ~ 14 – 23 November, 2013 Photos: Michael Holly, courtesy of the artist.

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410

411

2010 – 2017_

#71

RICHARD MOSSE, Platon, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012, Digital C-Print, AP, 183 x 229 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, Collection of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

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412

413

2010 – 2017_

#72

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414

415

2010 – 2017_

#73 #70

LEFT: MARK SWORDS, (starting from foreground): Curtain, various materials, 2014 -The Hinterlands, various materials, 2014 -Two Arrangements, 47x61cm, oil on canvas, 2013, photo: Peter Rowen. RIGHT: SWORDS, An Artist notbelow Untouched by Modernism TRACY MARK HANNA’, Everything’s moving the surface’ 45x34cm, oil Abbey, and various materials onNovember, linen, 20142013 Saint Mary’s Dublin ~ 14 – 23 Courtesy of the artist Kevin of Kavanagh Photos: Michael Holly,and courtesy the artist.Gallery.

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416

417

2010 – 2017_

#74

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418

#75

LILY CAHILL & ROB MURPHY, ‘Prodigy’ Broadstone Studios, Dublin ~ 5-Channel projection installation, 10min 3sec. Courtesy of the artists.

419

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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420

421

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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#77

422

423

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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424

#78

425

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#79

#80

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426

427

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#81

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428

#82

429

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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430

431

2010 – 2017_

#83

SHANE McCARTHY, ‘Tangled Hierarchies’ Studio 4. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, 25.7.2014., photo: James Merrigan.

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432

#84

RICHARD PROFITT, ‘Cosmic Drift: Elevations of a Fried Mystic’ A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin Derek Jarman / Gunilla Klingberg / Bea McMahon / Richard Proffitt / Garrett Phe Dorje De Burgh, (Curated by Pádraic E. Moore), Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh La 19 June 2014 – 7 September 2014.

elan ane

433

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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434

#85

RUTH E. LYONS, ‘The Pinking’ (2014) Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin ~ 8 – 30 August, 2014 chains, buoys, mirror, wood, courtesy of the artist and gallery. Photo: Evan Buggle.

435

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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436

437

2010 – 2017_

#86

NIAMH FORBES & AOIFE MULLAN ‘What Stands Forth’ (2014) Courtesy of the artists and Basic Space, Dublin.

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438

#87

NATHANIEL MELLORS The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin 5 September â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1 November 2014 (Curated by Rayne Booth)

439

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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440

441

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#88

TOMMY LEE JONES, The Fugitive (1993)

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442

#89

KARI ALTMANN ‘Xomia (Return Home, Realflow, All Terrain)’ Ellis King Gallery, Dublin 27 March – 2 May 2015 Courtesy of the artist and Ellis King Gallery

443

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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444

#90

CATHERINE BARRAGRY, TERESA GILLESPIE, MARIA MCKINNEY ‘DEAD ZOO’, ArtBox Projects, Dublin, 20 March – 25 April 2015

445

2010 – 2017_

#91

AOIBHEANN GREENAN ‘DMC – Dunmurry May-Day Conspiracy’ Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, 17 April – 20 June 2015

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#92

446

447

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#93

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448

449

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#94

PIETER HUGO ‘I will go there, take me home’ (Curated by Gregory McCartney) The MAC, Belfast, 8 May 2015 - 26 Jul 2015 Images courtesy of the artists and The MAC, Belfast Photo credit: Simon Mills.

#81

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452 HUGOHUGO PIETER #94#94PIETER ‘I will go there, me home’ by Gregory McCartney) ‘I will go take there, take me (Curated home’ (Curated by Gregory McCartney) The MAC, 8 May 8 2015 26 Jul- 2015 The Belfast, MAC, Belfast, May- 2015 26 Jul 2015 ImagesImages courtesy of the artists The MAC, courtesy of the and artists and The Belfast MAC, Belfast #96 Photo credit: Simon Mills. Photo credit: Simon Mills.

#97

453

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#81

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454

455

2010 – 2017_

#98

ANN MARIA HEALY ‘Your ass protrudes toward the malaise’ Eight Gallery, Dublin 23 October – 5 November 2015.

#99

#100

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458

#101

#102

459

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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#103

460

461

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#104

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#105

462

463

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

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464

465

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#107

#108

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466

467

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#109

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468

#110

#111

469

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#112

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470

471

2010 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2017_

#113

#114

#115

#116

#115

#118

#119 #119

#120

#121