Paper Visual Art Journal, Dublin Edition

paper visual art journal: dublin

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paper visual art journal: dublin

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paper visual art journal email: papervisualart@gmail.com website: www.papervisualart.com

Dublin Edition Three | 06.13 Editor: Niamh Dunphy Co-Editor: Adrian Duncan Design: an Atelier Project.

Printed in Dublin by Impress Printing Works ISBN 978-0-9573350-2-8 Copyright Š Paper Visual Art Journal and individual contributors, 2013. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmissions, in whole or in part, may be made without written permission.

Paper Visual Art Journal is an online website that publishes art writing, essays, and reviews. This hard copy edition is the second of a three-part, city-specific project. The editions will focus on Limerick, Cork, and Dublin.

Paper Visual Art Journal is a Dublin-based art journal that began in November 2009.

Paper wishes to all of our contributing writers over the last four years for their ongoing support and generosity. We would like to thank all of the contributors to this edition. Thank you also to Greg Baxter, Miranda Driscoll, Feargal Ward, The Joinery, David, Sarah & Oran at Atelier, Joan Fowler, Peter Archer at the ERC, and Gypsy.

This project was made possible with the kind support of the Arts Council.

contents

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Editor's Note: Niamh Dunphy

Education Supplement

15 16 24

Introduction: Adrian Duncan

Marconigram: Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty Focus: flat_pack Gallery & Studios Rob Murphy

What is a degree in art worth? Joan Fowler Why do we presume art education is for the production of artists? Sinéad Hogan

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The Need for Close Looking Tim Stott

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A Relational Aesthetic Outside of Art Adrian Duncan

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Alice Rekab — Vector / Attractor: Paul Ennis

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Ben Rivers — Ah, Liberty!: Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll

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Aleana Egan — The Sensitive Plant: Rebecca O’Dwyer

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Philomene Pirecki — Frame, Fold, Fracture: Seán O'Sullivan

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Tino Sehgal — This Situation: Alissa Kleist

The Knowing of Knowledge | The Knowledge of Knowing Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick

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This is the third of Paper Visual Art Journal’s three-part, city-specific project (Limerick, Cork, Dublin). This edition focuses on Dublin.

Included in this edition is an education supplement, edited and commissioned by Adrian Duncan, with essays by four individuals who are involved in art education in Dublin. We hope to continue with this topic in future publications.

Many thanks to Stephen McGlynn, to all of the contributors to this edition, The Joinery, David and Oran from Atelier, and to Sarah Fox who has put so much effort and time into the design of the three publications to date.

We are very grateful that this project was made possible with the kind assistance of the Arts Council.

Niamh Dunphy, Editor _ June 2013

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Mr. G. Marconi Red Rock Beach Sutton The Irish Sea 26/04 Dear Mr. Marconi, Thank you for your kind words. I am glad to respond to each and every correspondence I receive with reciprocal enthusiasm. I hope this finds you well and I was pleased to read about what you are getting up to.

In answer to your questions: The Moon is actually a poor reflector of light. I seem brighter to you because during the night time your pupils open up very wide and are more affected by faint light than they are during the day. This sensitivity makes up for my poor reflectivity, which is why I appear to be a bright object instead of a dark grey one.

Yes, you would be able to see the Earth from most locations on the side of the Moon facing the Earth. The details depend on your exact lunar latitude and the time of the month.

And finally, the approximate distance between the Earth's centre and the Moon is between 356,400 to 406,700 kilometres, and varies cyclically every 27 days. The average distance is 394,401 kilometres.

I hope this satisfies your curiosity. Thank you very much for your interest.

Good night and best wishes, (M)

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previous page top Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty Pink Moon (2013) photograph Image courtesy the artists.

previous page bottom Richard Proffitt Kindling for the Master (2013) photograph Image courtesy the artist.

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FOCUS: FLAT_PACK GALLERY & STUDIOS Rob Murphy

top flat_pack gallery and studios, interior gallery space folloiwng page flat_pack gallery and studios, front door Images courtesy flat_pack

Isolation is usually the advent for remarkable things to happen. flat_pack is an artist-led studio and gallery space. There are currently ten members, all of whom graduated in 2011 from IADT, Dún Laoghaire.

Upon leaving college the initial trepidation we felt — from the lack of critical dialogue to limited work spaces — helped to consolidate our need for a fully immersive, creative environment, and as a way to reject the isolation we felt awaited us after our degree. We opened our studios in March of 2012, and had our first show in September 2012.

Once this collective desire was realised and we got our space in Stoneybatter, we had to make some crucial decisions such as: how should the space operate? and what could we collectively agree on in relation to specifics like desks, access, and use of wall and floor space? We decided that we needed particular conditions to function as a contemporary art studio: freedom of space, 24-hour access (to make, discuss, and party), and a transient context to develop our practices. This 'open studio' policy is something that we experienced while working with Sinéad Hogan and Adrian O'Connell during our undergraduate degree course.

We wished to continue with this arrangement, a situation that could be described as having all and none of the studio space at once.

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Without cubicles to hide behind or to halt interaction, we are left with two things to do: make and talk. The discussion, encouragement, and criticism that takes place in flat_pack is beneficial to all members.

The floor is free for risk-taking; this is both a relief and a motivator.

Everything we do is based on scale, time, and the need for specific and individual projects. This strategy is structured on professional understanding, co-operation, and courtesy. We see each other's work constantly and can notice any crucial developments — this helps with things like selecting pieces for a show, and for offering an opinion or brutally honest critique. Working for each other in such a loose and exciting way is enjoyable, and an indispensable aspect in the production of our shows as individuals and collaborators.

Meetings are vital to running the space, and oddly, they have become less frequent as the process becomes more fluid and efficient. All studio members have equal voting to determine what is best for the space and for our development as practitioners.

There are sacrifices for sure. For example, if you don't work in a large format you may find a sprawling sculptural work overrunning your space. There are days when the walls are different colours for some reason, or you can't find your tools for half an hour, or something not considered art at that very moment has been used as a prop or doorstop. And no matter how perfect any group of individuals think they are at organising fairly, there are always going to be occasions of selfishness and inconvenience. But having creative use of our space always seems to surpass any personal grievance.

What we hope to achieve at flat_pack is the promotion of this mode of working together as artists and friends in dynamic spaces. Where the needs of the individual's practice is accommodated by the internal politics, the space, and members, this in turn, is utilised by the individual to its maximum potential to constantly create exciting dialogues, thoughts, and work. flat_pack gallery & studios members include: Lily Cahill, Niamh Clarke, Paul Doherty, Hugh Harte, Rob Murphy, Shane McCarthy, Niamh McCooey, Ailbhe O'Connor, Mark O'Toole, and Matthew Slack. www.flatpackgalleryandst.wix.com/flatpack

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Art Education in Dublin Five years ago I returned to education, studying firstly at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire (Visual Arts Practice), and then at the National College of Art and Design (M.A. Art in the Contemporary World). During this time, not only was my mind at once decimated and blown open by this experience of ‘art’, but what became of some interest to me was: the language used in talking about it, and more lately, the many ways in which I experienced it being taught.

The following four essays are from people who are involved in art education at third level. They have different positions in each of the institutions, and I have asked them to write essays to tell us what they, on a personal level, think is important in trying to teach art now. These contributors have not been asked to represent the institution that they work in (DIT, GradCAM, IADT, NCAD), but via their personal opinions and thoughts the reader might still get some sense of the institution.

This set of essays has also revealed not only the importance but also the enormity of trying to talk about art education in Dublin. There are any number of contexts and levels to approach this subject, and any number of methods that could be employed within each approach.

The form of the next approach, and its attendant method(s) is as yet undecided.

For now, I would like to thank Joan Fowler, Sinéad Hogan, Tim Stott, and Noel Fitzpatrick for their contributions.

— Adrian Duncan

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WHAT IS AN ART DEGREE WORTH?: JOAN FOWLER

At stake is ‘reform’ of thirdlevel education. Reform in this context may be restricted to an implicit or explicit understanding that there has to be a closer relation between the costs of degree provision and the contribution of such towards the economy, specifically, the potential for gainful employment of graduates.

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WHAT IS A DEGREE IN ART WORTH? Joan Fowler

Intensive study in art, embodied in the specialist degree qualification, is long regarded as necessary to the skills and understandings required by the artist. Alternatively, an art degree which appears more functionalist and connected to the market economy is currently floated as response to government pressure for rationalisation and reduction in duplication of courses in the greater Dublin area. These conflicting approaches towards art education raise an old question: is art autonomous or is it instrumental to economic forces? Should art be one or other; is it both? What is not in doubt is that this moment is critical for art education: a transformation away from the specialist art degree to a more functionalist degree is effectively a seismic shift in how art will be produced and consumed within Ireland, and how Irish art will be perceived internationally.

With the prospect of departmental closures or mergers within third-level institutions, degree courses in visual art in the Republic of Ireland face their first major crisis since their introduction a generation ago. Today, the once familiar mantra on the intrinsic value of art in education for the individual and / or society is rarely heard. In this model, art is identified as something that is good in ultimately either a spiritual or egalitarian sense. However, the extent to which visual art within the professionalised sector of higher education is being recalibrated from a singular, worthy endeavour to, potentially, serving as an adjunct of design or the social sciences is truly remarkable. It is all the more striking that it is apparently taking place within the space of a few years. That the fall from grace is occurring without so much as a whimper much less a bang from staff and students in visual art education says something about the stealthy, shadowy advance of neoliberal ideology. A reduction in the old version of visual art specialisation is part of what could be a transformation across 19

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third-level, yet there has been no specific government announcement; nothing that has tangible presence in the public domain. Similarly, the outward silence from within art education exposes both weariness and a survival instinct, perhaps partly reflecting the absence of a single, straightforward issue to protest against. But also at this moment of crisis some inherent conflicts as to the function and purpose of degrees in visual art are in sharp relief. For decades multiple, latent views of what art is and what it is for have co-existed in a broad arc from art for art’s sake to art’s economic contribution within the so-called cultural industries sector. However, as art degree courses are overtly and covertly pressured into less of the old form of specialisation towards more quantifiable, market-oriented objectives, so the accommodation of all the various views on art’s purpose becomes less feasible.

While the absence of a polemic for art courses — which will maintain and sustain the reflexion, reflexivity, and criticality involved in in-depth and open-ended enquiry as features of what should be central to third-level education — remains at issue, this brief article will raise one of the long-standing contradictions in how visual art perceives itself in its social context and how this is being contorted into seemingly fresh objectives in the drive towards ‘reform’. I will refer to the notion that art is an oppositional practice, or, a form of critique against the establishment whether socially, politically, or artistically. Here, I will view visual art, arts and humanities together as a shorthand way of referring to a particular variety of practice and theory that runs through the arts. I should also make clear from the outset that my experience is most specific to the National College of Art and Design which outweighs my knowledge of other Dublin or national institutions. However, I am confident that much of what follows has resonances nationally and internationally.

At stake is ‘reform’ of third-level education. Reform in this context may be restricted to an implicit or explicit understanding that there has to be a closer relation between the costs of degree provision and the contribution of such towards the economy, specifically, the potential for gainful employment of graduates. Such reform currently entails institutional and departmental mergers or minimally a sharing of resources on an as yet unidentified level, and this is felt most dramatically in arts and humanities courses. With a more concerted attempt than previously to increase proportionately the number or size of courses deemed to be geared towards employment, it is inevitably at a cost to the arts and humanities. There is also the introduction of requirements in student work and in research that suggest a conformity that transfers

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across subjects and institutions. While the simple view is that this reform is as a direct consequence of the ‘great recession’ which began in 2007, reform of third-level education by government through its agencies — the various boards — was already present at the height of Ireland’s economic boom. Back then, little more than tinkering occurred due to uncoordinated management, bureaucratic inertia, and the protracted negotiation entailed in bringing about change to work practices. The latter is now largely brushed aside, ostensibly because of the imperatives accruing from the depth of recession and Ireland’s debt problem. Reform is now an imperative rather than an objective.

The current incarnation of ‘reform’ may be traced back to the 1970s, though it is most identified with the 1980s and the monetarist policies epitomised by Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the UK. In education, these policies included the attempt to place greater emphasis on skills training for the future workforce as well as the development of courses that could contribute to what is now referred to as the knowledge economy. One immediate, localised effect was to advance design education over fine art. Perversely, this proved to be in conflict with the on-going, post-war expansion of higher education.

Demand ensured that in this expansion, courses in the arts and humanities fared just as well as the favoured STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and market-oriented, applied subjects. During the 1990s expansion and relatively low student fees created a supply and demand cycle which meant that by the millennium there were more visual art degree courses than ever throughout the UK and in Ireland.

In recent years, governments have made more concerted efforts at directing the nature of courses by encouraging privatisation of research and more incentives for courses in STEM subjects, which is clearly at odds with their free market principles and their heralding of greater choice and mobility for students. The adoption of greater governmental control in the development of third-level now operates at an international level: one only has to observe the introduction of standardisation, rationalisation, and the greater focus on non-humanities areas of higher education across Europe. A similar shift towards economic rationalisation is taking place in the United States. In the European context it is important to note that emphasis has shifted from the mid-twentieth century principle that education benefits society-at-large to a position, as pre-figured in England, in which the individual who materially benefits through higher education is asked to remunerate the state or taxpayer who funded it in the first place. With the individual as

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base unit, the price can be measured accordingly. Where mid-twentieth century thinking was, for example, that expansion of higher education was as much social as economic, i.e. education can open up opportunity for social mobility, now a managerial class in third-level institutions operates on a business model within which there is implicit acceptance that the ends justify the means rather than the other way round.

A feature of the new neoliberal, educational system is the simultaneous exercise of de-regulation and regulation. There is a de-regulation in staffing where the old lines of demarcation between grades and duties are seen as hindrance to progress. Since job demarcations prohibit initiative and enterprise, the latter are now seen as the qualities for promotion which can be utilised as the means to break down demarcations. Worst of all is the attempt to regiment courses under a single theme, method, or ideology in which non-leading staff are supposed to subject themselves to projects set by others. Where the objective may be the imposition of teamwork, the servile nature of the exercise is antagonistic to established visual art practice. What is ignored is that, by-and-large, the pre-existing demarcation lines in which everyone had a defined role were precisely the glue that kept departments and institutions together. Where de-regulated entrepreneurship replaces institutional structures, the result is a free-for-all with some winners, many losers, and aggravated tensions. On the other hand, demands on students are ever more regulated. In course documentation, aims, as expression of a philosophy, are now replaced by outputs, measurable goals expressed in mechanistic or reductive terms. As if that weren’t bad enough, art students are expected to adopt academic methodologies. Theses or dissertations now mimic bibliometric methods and so forth; there is a template for production which runs close to theses by rote.

Until now, education has been closely associated with the betterment of the individual, community, or society in an ethical sense. A defence of this philosophy of education will stress that many forms of learning involve other or more than economic goals and, while knowledge may be pursued for its own sake, we are improved citizens by it and through it. If this belief seems somewhat abstract, indeed monastic in its acknowledgement of the origins of formal education, it is worth remembering that there is still a popular belief that education involves the formation of future citizens, and in turn this will involve consideration of what kind of society we desire. The ethical dimension of education as the development of ‘good character’ runs deeper than is usually acknowledged, and for as long as this is the case there has to be the hope that education is not merely preparation for business

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‘enterprise’ in which success is measured as criteria in performance and in results regardless of other factors or considerations.

While the history and philosophy of education may be concerned with the good society, avant-garde art is its flip-side. In its rejection of the conformism of established practices, avant-garde art set itself against the imperatives of social, political, or aesthetic norms. Because the better society could not yet be articulated in the meantime the status quo had to be criticised: art is therefore expressed as a negative rather than as a positive. This is the posture of an avant-gardism which remains to the fore in the third level art education system as it has evolved since the 1970s.

While the avant-garde model of art practice could thrive in the old educational setup, it comes into conflict with the demands of the new, neoliberal institution. The problem comes down to an incompatibility between the artist as visionary and the artist as mere worker amongst others within the general scheme of things. Even where the management class has bought into neoliberal ideology, there remains an attachment to the sense of self-importance of the artist.

It seems that management in art education is not planning to reduce the number of students taking art, a course of action which would threaten status and ultimately jobs. Rather, institutional alliances and the re-formulation of art courses appear to be the objective, and generally in Western Europe, the social sciences are the targeted destination for arts and humanities subjects. In this, the example of Will Self is indicative.

In 2012, Self was appointed a Professor to The School of Arts at Brunel University, London with the brief to crossover to the School of Social Sciences.[1] Self is a celebrity literary author but as former enfant terrible, his appointment may be perceived as a figurehead who might attract potential students. In his commentary on his appointment, Self was critical of the burgeoning of ‘creative writing’ courses and the absence of theoretical rigour in recent protests against higher student fees as well as protest by the Occupy Movement.[2] In these, Self identified a dearth of theoretical awareness which might substantiate the protests. However, Self’s comments are seriously misplaced if his hint that theoretical awareness can emerge through the social sciences, rather than through the arts. A cursory examination of social science textbooks reveals the methodological reductionism, a tick-the-boxes approach to learning which has transferred from social science to the arts and which preempts the more open, more interesting approaches that characterised the old system.

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Belgian educator, Rudi Laermans, has laid the blame for the expansion of reductive, means-ends courses squarely at the doorstep of the Bologna Process, the 1999 agreement by European Ministers on the standardisation of education modules across the ‘Higher Education Area’, which extends across Europe. Laermans teaches sociology theory within a university faculty, and also teaches at a dance school. At the time of writing his essay, [3] the former institution had adopted Bologna while the latter had not. In his account of the two institutes there is no doubt where Laermans’s sympathies lie: one is geared for programmed learning, the other in promoting open-ended enquiry. But, his observation on education in the university sounds as familiar as his description of the dance course. In the former, according to Laermans, the student no longer can be seen as an intellectually curious individual but as a ‘self-capitalist’: “The student is presumed to act as a ‘Me, Inc.’, as individual entrepreneurs who make rational, future-oriented decisions on the educational market.” Laermans then makes a distinction between neoliberal thinking in which education is seen as future investment, and the student as product of this thinking who, contrarily, thinks in terms of immediate, not long-term, benefit.

The neoliberal regime of education is indeed characterized by a profound tension. Whereas this dispositive or setup officially premises the existence of a self−enlightened, at once rational and entrepreneurial subject that values long−term profits higher than immediate gains, it in fact produces en masse consumers who balance their accounts on a narrow day−to−day basis. Assumed long−term calculations turn out to be short term assessments of costs and gains — and it is up to the teacher examiner to deal with the notable gap.[4]

Laermans’s summation is that the difference between student goals and policy goals matters little since both serve to block teaching in a situation where a ‘dialogical activity of radical questioning’ can occur.

Leaving aside Laermans’s diplomatic reference to the teacher-examiner who is left to deal with a gap (it is a condition which might invite more cynical responses), his point is well taken. The European adaption of the modular system through Bologna was introduced for the instrumental purpose of identifying inputs and outputs in the name of transferability and mobility across national borders. When both student and management have a pre-determined notion of what they want to get out of the module or the course the more indeterminate aspects tend to be squeezed out, and with these the production of other forms of awareness within the structure as were accommodated within the old system of art education.

I have raised two figures of the student. One engages in the vestiges of twentieth century avant-gardism: who may be associated with forms of protest as identified in Self’s projection but who isn’t adequately formed

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in social critique. The other figure is ‘Me, Inc.’, as someone who calculates how much the education course is worth to them as immediate gain.

These caricatures are extreme and others may be posited. If art in higher education is worth saving that worth will emerge through a re-thinking of what the late twentieth century form embodied, and it will be in spite of the economic and political forces pitched against it. This is because the pervasive image of the contemporary artist is very much shaped by the global art market which has emerged from the historical avant-garde.

This is a figure of the artist who is on some level engaged with ideas and issues, not in an academic way, and not as employee in the workforce.

In brief, art education needs to maintain as much autonomy as it can.

If that means reducing student numbers or introducing combined studies which include art, it is preferable to attempting to make art into something it is not.

[1] See: www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/news-items/ne_161686 [2] See: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/23/professor-self-university-knowledgevalue [3]

R. Laermans (2012) ‘Disciplining Thought Vs. Nimble Thinking,’ in P. Gielen and P. De Bruyne (eds.), Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm, Valiz, p. 145 – 162.

[4]

Ibid. p. 153 – 54.

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WHY DO WE PRESUME ART EDUCATION …?: SINÉAD HOGAN

Engagement with art teaching requires the critical questioning and vigilance around anything that is passed off, or over, as natural and instinctual (therefore as something considered beyond question as ‘just there’ or beyond transformation as ‘just the way it is’).

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WHY DO WE PRESUME ART EDUCATION IS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF ARTISTS?[1] Sinéad Hogan

In a text titled ‘Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends’, Jacques Derrida proposes that “naturalising always, very nearly at any rate, amounts to neutralising.”[2] How may this apply to the situation of teaching art?

In art discourse, ‘talent’ is often considered as ‘being naturally gifted’.[3] Naturalising in this context involves complex methods of intentional and perhaps unintentional concealment. It may also operate when opinions develop around what characteristics are considered to make someone potentially ‘artistic’. Many different forms of naturalising or concealment take place in art teaching situations. We construct structures around these naturalised aspects, allowing them to appear to be something innately suited to the institutions of art and the identity of ‘being creative’. A different, yet related and instructive example of naturalising, is when a well-learned skill that owes its quality to practice and sensitivity, begins to appear with the subtle ‘natural ease of finesse’.

In this way the ‘artful’ then appears to be ‘gifted’. Naturalising often happens through this apparent ‘casual’ positing of an acquired or learned capacity as a ‘gift’.

It is hard to find a more ambiguous and historically contested distinction than that between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, or a more ambiguous classification than ‘art’, or a more ambiguous and speculated on notion than ‘talent’. These are the tensions that we work with. These ambiguities extend to and affect our ideas on teaching, whether we consider this as an exchange of knowledge, or as a space that facilitates learning.

Engagement with art teaching requires the critical questioning and vigilance around anything that is passed off, or over, as natural and instinctual (therefore as something considered beyond question as ‘just there’ or beyond transformation as ‘just the way it is’).

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It has become a paradoxical norm since the 1960s to consider the art student as the subject of what art teachers consider can’t be taught, as famously stated by John Baldessari. In teaching art, I find it necessary to both affirm and propose a respectful distance and differentiation from our current exemplary teaching model in art school, as encapsulated in the famous conversation between Michael Craig-Martin and Baldessari: Michael Craig-Martin: It seems to me the most important thing about an art school is that it’s the creation of a sympathetic ambience in which people feel comfortable and free to act according to their own instincts.

You have to make a place where people feel at ease to be who they are and bring what they have, naturally, in themselves to bear.

I think that’s true of the people teaching: the more students are put into a similar situation where they’re at ease, the more successful the experience can be […]

John Baldessari: I totally agree. You have to set up a situation. You can’t teach art, that’s my premise […] [4]

It is necessary to deconstruct and unpack almost every element of those iconic statements. Encapsulated in them are those fascinating historically contested notions that can consistently be seen to gravitate around that magnetic point of concern that we currently call art. Key to this is the relation of art, not only to our concepts of nature and culture, but also to ‘freedom’. Whatever teaching structure is in place, forces and interests, without the slightest neutrality, will of course always be seen to operate in different ways. These structures offer examples of mastery in all the positive, negative, and ambiguous senses of the term ‘master’, whether these are caricatured as ‘restrictive and formal’, or ‘flexible and informal’, of mastery as a valued discipline and power, or as an oppressive disciplining power.

Some questions that are thrown up by the conversation around the teaching of contemporary art are as follows: What does it mean to produce a place or situation? What may be reproduced there? And who is free or enfranchised enough from determining practices to make a place where others feel at ease to be who they are? Is freedom a property or a ‘natural’ right of an individual, or a capacity or a condition? Can it be given? Is freedom a way of responding, and if so is that capability something that operates regardless of whether the situation is itself a constrained or unconstrained space? What is the relation between freedom and talent — can we have a talent for being free or for the activity of ‘freeing’? What does it mean to make a place where people feel ‘at ease’? What style of being towards the world is it to be at ease? Why is or should ‘ease’ and ‘feeling at ease’ in a situation be prioritised? Who or what might be left out of a situation where being at ease is considered a positive or necessary requirement?

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Which situations of ease may be generated by a style of open hospitality towards the other? Which situations are sets of stylistic behaviours modeled in ways that are neither neutral nor natural? What restrictions to the freedom of ‘being who we are’ are produced by insisting that we should be at ease? What requirements of initiation, into a set of rules of conduct, shape our sense of ease and what effects are produced when we decree these sets of styles of behaviour to be ‘just natural’ and treat them as innate? What are the logics in the rules of different forms of hospitality? What do these rules produce when applied, imposed, obeyed, disobeyed, or ignored, in terms of inclusion and exclusion? If the contemporary art school currently aspires to be a sympathetic ambiance where people are expected to feel at ease, and that situation also agrees that ‘you can’t teach art’, then what kind of atmosphere is being constructed and what is being taught?

If we accept the use of art as a term to be differentiated from technique — this was not always historically the case — then techniques of method, practice, craft, and style can be taught whether these relate to acquired skills such as the different techniques of installation, image making, object making, performance, use of software or equipment etc., or of the techniques of decision-making, judgment and critical thinking.

So if ‘art is what can’t be taught’ then what is this differentiation between art and technics based on? Knowledge of the logics, history, and traditions that are embedded in a technology or practice can be shared in any teaching situation. The separation of art as ‘what can’t be taught’ from technics then suggests that the application of acquired skills in a work of art differs from technical know-how.

There is no neutral or natural place in teaching. When we are at home in a situation, when we are at ease, as for example in the various modes of ‘casualness’ that operate in the art school style of teaching, both teacher and student are naturalised to the situation. We live under an expectation and practice of non-formality (in the same way as in other situations there are specific expectations and practices of formalities).

The culture of negotiating these ‘eases’ and familiarities have their own constructed histories - cultural, institutional, political etc. — and their ‘casualness’ are often as ‘policed’ as any notion of ‘authoritarian’ formal structure. Learned behaviours, attitudes, and codes of etiquette apply which can often proscribe a particular style. Standardisation of opinion can also occur, or are often presumed. The critical point is that none of these practices come naturally, and all have to be learned whether by active observation or through the osmosis of habits.

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Naturalising any of these elements is an act of neutralisation.

Naturalising is also therefore a de-criticalisation and a de-politicisation of any situation, thus masking the forces and interests managing the inclusions and exclusions within a situation, and appearing to neutralise hierarchies. This includes situations that suggest transgressions of the institutional apparatus. In some sense an approach that selfidentifies (in an oppositional sense) with being alternative (and / or transgressive, and / or liberal, and / or democratic) is in more danger of naturalising and neutralising than an approach with overt hierarchical spaces that avow and value ‘inequalities’ in their explicit structure.

While it is necessary to call these premises into question, on the other hand, I agree that you have to make a place where people feel at ease to bring, whatever they have to bring, to an engagement with the experience and experiment of art practice, and to bring what must remain an ‘un-anticipatable’ aspect to the situation where we gather uneasily around something that we can’t teach.

The kind of dynamic juggling required in art teaching between these tensions produces a fascinating economy. If we agree that ‘art can’t be taught’ then what is the non-neutral ‘nature’ of this impasse from which we are all benefitting — particularly those who teach, or those who have validated art qualifications from institutions where the premise may be that art can’t be taught?

We could then also ask what modus operandi would do justice to the un-teachable and un-learnable of art within an art education situation?

Many anxieties about the role of the art school as producer are concerned with its relation to the model of ‘producing’ as determined by the ‘art market’. The art market is a concentrated locus for the operations of late capitalism. It is so in a potent and condensed form because the expanded possibilities of what an art object may be is now the preeminent place for speculative values. These operate around both the material and immaterial aspects of the object of art and its ‘innovative originality’.

As cultural, symbolic, and ‘creative’ capital is of such high premium, an art school is obviously embedded in the same economic structures as the society it belongs to. Capitalism however, is not so much a system, but an historical systemic belief and practice. Its symptoms show themselves in specific modus operandi that operate as a belief, implicitly or explicitly, in the principle that everything and every relation is reducible to a resource, to the calculable and useful, which can and should be capitalised on.

These beliefs have been naturalised, and are normative, i.e. they are a

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set of beliefs that affirm in their incorporation how we ‘ought’ to operate, to the literal extent that when speaking or writing we use biological metaphors such as growth, consumption, flows, porosity, generation, birth (of a new movement) and death (of art) and in particular ‘fluid creativity’ … This is also reflected in the language we use when we teach, such as: grasping an idea or making it easy to digest, or ruminating on a concept, incorporating aspects of an argument as food for thought, etc.

Capitalism shows itself to be systemic whenever it is believed that everything can be incorporated and assimilated, and this becomes an everyday practice. To be systemic means that all structures are shown to be porous and symptoms can appear at many different sites. This could be considered to operate as the most contemporary form of totalitarianism, one that operates systemically at all levels including the level of our person in relation to others.

Intellectual property and copyright are two eminent examples of how this has developed around immaterial capital and of how it has become absolutely naturalised to the extent that we believe and defend the principle that each one of us can authorially claim that: ‘I own and originate my ideas.’ Art appears to consistently find new ways of proving that we can transform anything into the useful, into capital. This we know from our experience of art and of teaching art where everything, material and immaterial, can be considered as a resource, and anything can potentially be transformed into art. By such an approach, we produce the most perfectly restricted economy that offers those who invest in such an activity very high returns, such as the enclosed feedback system of identity where: ‘I make art because I am an artist because I make art.’

Derrida describes deconstruction as operating under the logic of the aporia, which is an experience of “not knowing where to go … the experience of the nonpassage … of what happens and is fascinating in this nonpassage, paralyzing us in this separation in a way that is not necessarily negative.”[5] Could we read this as akin to a description of teaching art?

If we say we can’t teach art then it may be interesting to ask why can’t we teach it? Is there, in that place (where we are saying we can’t offer access as teachers), some central governing idea that resists appropriation, that we are debarred from translating into a teaching formula?

Is this an obfuscation of our responsibilities, of what we know and can teach? Or, is the ‘what can’t be taught of art’ in some way an experience of the aporetic?

When we say that art can’t be taught, that teaching art is impracticable, then are we talking about the experience of an aporetic

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economy, ie. one where we encounter no porosity or free movement?

An aporia creates an impasse where we are exposed to what we cannot know or approach in a ‘knowing’ way? There is an inflexibility and non-porous nature in this ‘being at a loss’ which may counter the totalising systemic belief that would aspire to assimilate this situation into one of usability, in-corporation, and ‘knowingness’.

What kind of teaching practice would respect in art that which cannot be assimilated within the teaching of art, or into the institutions of art, or into the translations of experience into art?

So … if we agree that we can’t teach art, then why do we still consider that we can know or judge what art is, and who will be an artist and what conditions will be conducive for art?

Why do we still operate a production model for art schools?

Could the application of aesthetic thinking be brought to areas that do not necessarily produce art? Is this only to be validated if this is then assuredly reincorporated into art discourses, institutions, or the art market? Why do we feel it is important to develop artists rather than to engage students in art processes where some may make art while intending to, some may not make art while intending to, some may make art while not intending to, and others may not make art while not intending to, yet we necessarily must not know what will occur when we teach? Could future art and thereby artists perhaps not be the art school’s intended product, but rather a potential byproduct or side-effect of studying art, disrupting our assured identities of what it means to ‘be a creative artist’? This aporetic economy is, I propose, a logical and responsible proposition if we all agree to agree, and to celebrate the premise that you can’t teach art.

[1]

A version of this article was presented at the seminar ‘The Art Academy and Knowing’ at IMMA, 19th April 2013.

[2]

Derrida, Jacques, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy, Right to Philosophy 1, (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 69.

[3]

The word ‘talent’ has an interesting etymological history. In various ancient societies a talent was a unit of measure, weight or containment. The greek term tálanton (τάλαντον), indicating scale or balance, is related to tlênai, meaning to bear, suffer, support.

The term got extended over time and various cultures as a metaphor indicting a standard unit of currency. Our current notion operating since the Middle Ages, as an adaptation from Old French and Medieval Latin talentum, (meaning inclination, leaning, will, desire), took on the sense of an intrinsic ability and natural endowment. See, Chamber’s Dictionary of Etymology, (ed. Robert K. Barnhart), p. 1112.

[4]

Steven Henry Madoff (Ed.), Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, MIT Press, 2009, p. 42.

[5]

Derrida, Jacques, Aporias, (California: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 12.

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THE NEED FOR CLOSE LOOKING Tim Stott

I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I spent long hours in the church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim Museum, coaxing a picture into life. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture I was looking at.[1] [One] kind of corrective to dogma is looking itself, pursued long enough.[2]

How might we teach this type of looking, which Richard Wollheim describes above as a necessary, if somewhat leisurely approach to visual art, to “coaxing a picture into life”, and which is variously called ‘close’, ‘deep’, or even ‘slow’, looking? It requires a discipline, that much seems uncontroversial. It is more difficult to identify of what this discipline consists and how it might be taught.

It is possible that the demand or, at least, support for such looking is widespread among those who teach the history and criticism of the visual arts. The demand for close looking appears to derive from at least two sources. i. A concern for a general loss of visual attention and visual skills that are assumed to be essential to study the complex richness of visual artefacts. ii. A distrust of hastily, clumsily, or over-confidently applied theoretical or interpretative methodologies.

The strong claim that follows from i. is that certain visual artefacts (and, of course, the next question is “which ones and why?”) require attention and skills that cannot be transferred from other areas of visual attention and other disciplines. I will return to this below.

As for ii., it is important to remember that this is not distrust of theory per se. This is not a demand for naive looking. Rather, if we accept 33

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Wollheim’s claim that “the term ‘theory’ is in place only when some distinction is respected between description and explanation,”[3] then this distrust concerns more the apparent exhaustion of description by explanation. This exhaustion occurs when every further description of an artefact falls under an explanatory framework that itself allows for no further amendment. In such cases, whatever can be described can be explained. By contrast, the distrust of theory consists primarily of a demand for description to reciprocate fully and equally with explanation.

What is more, it is to acknowledge that saying or writing what we see — the work of ekphrasis — is by no means straightforward and should not be simply placed in the service of explanation. This is how Thomas Crow argues for the specificity of art-historical method against the borrowing of interpretative methods from other disciplines, such as film studies and literary criticism. The basic ekphrastic work of paraphrase, substitution and translation when faced with a mute work of art must be returned to, he argues, without the help of preferred terms of paraphrase (his particular targets are psychoanalysis and deconstruction; but he criticises “highly technical theories of language and signification” in general). His problem with these latter preferences, as I have already suggested, is that they do not seem to allow for reciprocity in the work of analysis.

[This] particular vocabulary of paraphrase cannot be remade by the art historian’s particular use of it — which is another way of saying that the work of art itself has no independent claim or comeback against the mode of explanation made of it.[4]

Again, lest we forget, it is ekphrasis that allows for generalisation and argument, and that also encourages the viewer to see more in the visual artefact than they would otherwise.[5] T. J. Clark’s 2006 book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing provides us with what is perhaps the strongest, recent argument that the study of certain, internally complex visual artefacts, such as paintings, might correct a widespread loss or impoverishment of visual attention. The Sight of Death is by now well known for its record of “deep looking” at two paintings by Poussin exhibited together at the Getty Museum. Clark’s diaristic account explicitly counters hasty theorisation.

I want to write a reaction to my two paintings, not a theory of them. … I’d like to show how a theory of painting comes into being — how a painting as opposed to a proposition or a narrative or a geometric figure, instigates and directs an enquiry into ‘what it is saying.’

A painting “comes into being” through slow, repeated viewing: Coming to terms with [these paintings] is slow work. But astonishing things happen if one gives oneself over to seeing again and again.[6]

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Moreover, Clark understands this slow, “deep looking” to be a form of political action, or, at the very least, a necessary corrective to other, dominant types of attention. His argument is worth quoting in full: We are living, I reckon, through a terrible moment in the politics of imaging, envisioning, visualising; and the more a regime of visual flow, displacement, disembodiment, endless available revisability of the image, endless ostensible transparency and multi-dimensionality and sewing together of everything in nets and webs — the more this pseudo-utopia presents itself as the very form of self-knowledge, self-production, self-control — the more necessary it becomes to recapture what imaging can be: to suggest what is involved in truly getting to know something by making a picture of it: to state the grounds for believing that some depictions are worth returning to, and that this returning (this focusing, this staying still, this allowing oneself to respond to the picture’s stillness — everything hidden and travestied, in short, by the current word “gaze”) is a form of politics in itself, meeting other forms head on.[7]

This is a return to looking without looking for, without, that is, the looking that comes so easily to a generation of students skilled in instant messaging, tweeting, Googling, and so on, where looking becomes a method of scanning for consumable quantities of information. As well as scanning, another type of looking in opposition to close or deep looking would be sloppy or casual looking, a kind of thematic interpretation that allows for generic paraphrase. This is a type of looking compatible with a certain type of reductive journalistic (in the worst sense of the term) discourse widespread across the art world, which prepares the work of art for consumption: “this work (of art) is about …” “this work deals with issues of …” and so on.

The study of literature faces comparable problems following from a similar deterioration of attentive, close reading, both outside and inside the institution. Outside, the threats to close reading are similar to those to close looking: reading as scanning highly abbreviated forms of textual information or as looking to find what you already know. Inside the institution, especially in the US, close reading has been found guilty by association with the elitist canonical prejudices of the criticism that first introduced it either side of the Second World War. (Canonical works were treated as autonomous texts, whose value was ahistorical, beyond the contingencies of history and politics, and beyond the educational privileges of white, middle-class, heterosexual men.) As the canon of literature has been, quite rightly, diversified, close reading has been superseded by contextualist and historicist methods of interpretation that seek to move from text to context. As Jane Gallop suggests, this might be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and thereby

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abandoning the ethics of close reading. The latter, which consists of looking at what is there on the page rather than what ought to be there, allows a student to encounter what she does not know and what she does not anticipate. This in itself is an ethical gain, Gallop argues, if we admit that students can take this level of attention to other texts and even to other persons. Gallop perhaps overstates her case here, but she reminds us also that close reading was introduced at a time when the established hierarchies of the university system were eroded by the arrival of lower class and non-white students. It was a practice that required from students only “patience and perspicacity,” rather than prep school and other private advantages.[8] In a more recent essay, Gallop develops her claim that close reading performed a populist function in education. It “made possible active learning” and eroded the model of teaching whereby tutors pass on quantifiable units of knowledge to students who “receive, repeat, and apply that knowledge.”[9] The fact that this debate about close reading currently takes place in the study of literature indicates that the study of visual culture might find, despite Crow’s reservations, some pointers in the teaching of close looking.

A core example of this teaching in literature is provided by the Hum 6 course at Harvard taught by Reuben Brower in the 1950s. Brower was an advocate of ‘reading in slow motion’, as his eponymous essay shows.[10] His ambition was to introduce a student to a “lifetime reading habit.”

This is evidently a laudable ambition. In his ‘The Return to Philology’, literary critic and former student of the Hum 6 course Paul De Man describes Brower’s teaching method: Students, as they began to write, were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.

De Man implies that this was a disciplining process: “[Students] no longer felt free to indulge in any thought that came into their head or to paraphrase any idea they happened to encounter.”[11]

Yet he does not expand upon how this discipline is to be taught.

As Jonathan Culler argues, there is little that would lead a reader naturally or necessarily to such reading. Here we encounter a problem for Gallop’s populist, anti-elitist ambition for close reading. If it requires training in a discipline, then how is this to be done? Is it to be taught by example rather

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than by systematic method? Gallop lists five sorts of things that close reading might attend to: i. unusual vocabulary, ii. redundant words or phrases, iii. surprising images or metaphors, iv. italics or parentheses, and v. overlong footnotes.[12] These are elements that a student of literature would be trained to overlook or dismiss as trivial as she searched for the main ideas of a text. Yet they are conspicuous or emphatic elements, as much part of the text as those that support the main ideas. Gallop likens attention to these otherwise marginal elements to the annoying habit of children to point out some minor detail in a story that interrupts the “straight and narrow” path of the well-trained adult reader. In pointing out these details, the child indicates her lack of training.

Could we do something similar for close looking? Certainly, our teaching involves attention to anomalies, redundancies, surprises, and to details that might thwart certain visual habits and easy projections. Do we do this enough? Probably not. I get annoyed at the ‘interruptive child’ in class who points out the detail that does not fit with the standard reading of canonical works. Sometimes that child is just wrong. Sometimes she is right, but does not yet know why. Or she is right, but for the wrong reasons.

I rarely doubt that I am the one to correct her or to integrate the detail that she has noticed into the standard account. Yet I also encourage students to slow down their looking and try to estrange them from certain expectations and certain paraphrases. I have made students sit Wollheimlike in front of paintings for at least an hour and a half, simply describing what they see. I would prefer to have them sit there longer, but timetabling does not allow. However, I mistakenly asked the students to make their own choices of painting to study. This meant that some students chose paintings that were arguably lacking in the complexity and richness that a close looking would reward. So close reading again appears to rely upon some construction of a canon, even if we anticipate, as Gallop does, that such reading will expand to artefacts beyond this canon, even beyond literature, so that students begin close reading adverts, legal documents, till receipts, and so on. It also relies upon a charismatic tutor, one who possesses the rhetorical techniques to help students to see more, and one that students must trust as they embark upon what is quite an unpredictable endeavour and which does not display easily quantifiable stages of development.

Close looking does not sit easily with standardisation. The learning involved does not derive from a set of prescriptive tools that allows the teacher to quantify the value acquired by students in their learning, and to then teach to those quantities. Standardisation does not deny such uncertainty, of course. It simply does not ascribe value to it. So, if we are

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in support of close looking, we require some strong account of its value even as we admit that we might necessarily struggle to quantify just what this is.

I have tried briefly to indicate how such an evaluation might begin and I would suggest that we need a debate on this issue comparable to that which has taken place in the study of literature.

In the spirit of debate, therefore, I want to end with two quite different questions, the answers to which might be obvious to those with more pedagogical know-how and teaching experience than I. Firstly, does an emphasis upon slowness, closeness, and upon “contaminating” (the word is Gallop’s) the habits of looking acquired by students prior to their education, put students at a disadvantage by denying them competence in the professional currency of ideas, methodologies, and interpretative schemata?

Secondly, in our teaching, can we allow for an understanding of competence based upon the “passionate state of wonder” from which a search for understanding begains, as difficult to quantify or to readily apply as this competence might be?[13]

[1]

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), p. 8.

[2]

T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 12.

[3]

Ibid. p. 10.

[4]

Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 5.

[5]

Jaś Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33, vol. 1, February (2010): p. 10 – 27.

[6]

T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 83, 5.

[7]

Ibid. p. 121 – 122.

[8]

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorising 16, no. 3, Fall (2000), p. 13.

[9]

Jane Gallop, “The Historicisation of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,” Profession (2007), p. 184-185.

[10]

Reuben Brower, “Reading in Slow Motion,” In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, edited by R. Brower and R. Poirier (Dutton, 1962)

[11]

Paul De Man, “The Return to Philology,” The Resistance to Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 23 – 24.

[12]

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorising 16, no. 3, Fall (2000), p. 7.

[13]

Dennis Atkinson, “Looking Awry at the Notion of Core Competences in Visual Art Education,” undated <www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/CLT/pdf/ fpdennisatkinson106.pdf>

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THE KNOWING OF KNOWLEDGE | THE KNOWLEDGE OF KNOWING Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick

The positioning of the art academy in relation to third-level education seems to be on the agenda in Ireland across diverse forums at the moment. Recently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) there was a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Art Academy + Knowing’ in the context of the I knOW yoU exhibition, and in a more official forum there was the publication by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) that reported on the provision of arts education in the Dublin region. Additionally, in the wider Irish sector, there has been a sequence of alliances between traditional art academies and third-level institutes: Crawford with CIT, NCAD with UCD, to name but two. The movement towards more integration of the stand-alone art colleges and third-level institutions is nothing new within the European context, but has become high on the agenda of the Irish HEA. There is, nonetheless, an inherent tension between the provision of arts education and the third-level sector.

With the push towards integration, the relationship between the types of knowledge being pursued is becoming more and more problematic.

As a member of the panel discussion at IMMA, this short piece will take the opportunity to develop a point in the discussion that remained, to my mind, implicit, but one that requires further elucidation. In part of the discussion, the ‘inconsistency’ and ‘contingency’ knowing in artistic practice was referred to, however this must not be taken as an excuse to return to outmoded pedagogical practices of master and apprentice model which surely saw its last days in the 1970s and 1980s in the art academy. The alternative modes of teaching in the art school outside of higher education, such as in the Städelschule in Frankfurt, carry a risk of a reactionary revisionism where the success of the artists and the reputational capital of the institute seem to outweigh the constraints imposed on the construction of knowledge within higher education.

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The relationship between exhibition and education is closely tied in the Städelschule, and the success of various artists and exhibitions has led to the development of a specific ‘reputational’ economy that the school maintains and promotes.

The proposal is, therefore, that ‘knowing’ in the title of the panel discussion at IMMA needs to be attended to more directly. The knowledge that is tacit, tactile, inconsistent, contingent, and specific to arts practice has been sedimented within the discourse of the art academy for quite some time now. However, if the art academy wishes to be taken seriously by higher education authorities, there is a pressing need to revisit the question of the construction of knowledge within. This necessity is not simply a question of epistemology (knowing what knowledge is), but also a question of the ontological status of art (what is art). The art academy is challenged to move from modes of ‘inconsistency’ to modes of ‘consistency’.

The ‘knowing’ prompted in the title allows for an exploration of something which is linguistically ‘inconsistent’: the grammatical form of the gerund (the ‘ing’) in English allows this to come to the fore, where the ‘ing’ form acts as placeholder between the verbal and the nominal, between process and stability, between to know and knowledge. The verb points towards the activity itself, the process in play. The nominal form ‘knowledge’ points towards the stability, positing the object of knowing as something stable and fixed. To a certain extent this is the crux of the matter: moving from knowing to knowledge. The knowing, which is ‘inconsistent’, ‘contingent’, always unfinished, is in the middle of the process, acting as a reminder for where the construction of knowledge is held within the art school.

The opposition of ‘knowing’ with ‘knowledge’ often presented through a contradiction with ‘positive sciences’ does not take into account that there are other forms of knowledge which are not from the positive sciences and not from the praxis of art making, but are in other forms such as the metaphysical in philosophy. Terry Eagleton has synthesised the historical imposition of positivism in relation to art as a choice of either trying to beat the positive sciences at their own game, or to accept the role of art as strictly related to affective fuzzy bits: At some point in the 19th century, the natural sciences became more or less synonymous with knowledge as such, and the arts were faced with a choice. On the one hand, they could simply refuse to compete with the laboratories, disowning any claim to be cognitive. Their business was not knowledge but the affections; and since the affections are of vital concern to political power, which needs to scrutinize the hearts of its underlings quite as much as their conscious beliefs, this lent art an enviable status… .

The work of art could be seen as a new the paradigm of a new kind of rationality, one in which the sensory and the spiritual, the individual and the universal, were harmoniously blended. [1]

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Rather than the affective ‘as if’ — the poetic, to use Paul Ricoeur’s ‘poetics of the possible’ — the ability to imagine things differently needs to be re-posited at the core of any construction of any epistemological stance for art. There is a need to establish consistency.

The construction of knowing and knowledge, the knowing of knowledge, which is our bread and butter in third-level education, has itself attempted become ‘consistent’. The emergence of knowing, as a format of knowledge, did not and does not happen in a vacuum.

The process of the standardisation of third-level education across the wider European community has been ongoing for more than a decade (via the 1999 Bologna Process), and is to be welcomed, even though one could argue that the constraints imposed by the movement towards a more modularised system based on learning outcomes has been highly problematic. Before the attempts by the Bologna Process at the standardisation of ‘knowing knowledge’, there were issues related to the equity and equivalence within the teaching, learning, and assessment processes at third-level institutes. The implementation of standardisation has lead to greater and greater transparency about these processes. But the implementation has led to the development of a more fragmented learning experience, where modules are short and fragmented, from the overall aims and objectives of the programme.

The integration and alignment of art and design education within this process has been more difficult than for other disciplines, as the nature of the ‘knowing’ has been placed in supposedly transparent mechanisms of assessment and learning outcomes. If we consider philosophy as another discipline which argues for ‘inconsistency’ of its knowing, philosophy has had the advantage of being placed within the humanities where there are long-standing traditions in the construction of knowledge, and where the model of the PhD has been prevalent for centuries. Within philosophy, the format for a standard PhD is written according to conventions within the humanities and, according to Oxbridge rules, 100,000 words plus or minus 10%. In a practice-based PhD, there is still much debate around its format and the relationship between the practice element and the written component. The undisciplined nature of the ‘inconsistent’ knowing promoted by the art college is confronted by the constraints imposed by national and international frameworks — qualifications where the ‘knowing’ has to be described, verbalised, assessed, and accounted for. It is this challenge to art and design education that has yet to be fully apprehended and realised within the Irish context. This is not to say the Bologna Process is something to be embraced uncritically but to note that if the alliances between the

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art academy and third-level universities are to function coherently, there is a need to recognise the constraints.

The research and postgraduate culture present within the thirdlevel sector is a priority that is driving the internal agendas, where the relationship between research and the curriculum, research and the so-called knowledge economy is to the foremost in the discourses of university presidents and government. The accountability for the provision of third-level education is framed within discourses promoting the economic benefit of third-level education to the growth of the economy; this is to be expected within recessionary times. There is little room for discussion on the more profound interrogations about the role of education rather than training, education for life rather than for jobs, education for the good of society rather than for the benefit of enterprise. The pressures at the moment on senior and middle management in institutions are clearly related to the sustained provision of high quality education in a context of constant cutbacks and lack of resources. Nonetheless, it could be argued that the responsibility for the current economic collapse could be laid also at the door of third-level education, an education system through which the economists, accounts, financial experts, and bankers spent their formative years. The lessons from this avowal seem to be difficult to learn as in the Irish and European funding context the applied research agenda takes precedence.

Within art education, there has been also a movement towards PhD provision, a tendency that the HEA has also backed through the development of frameworks for structured PhD programmes and national platforms such as the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM). This inter-institutional model of provision of doctoral education in the creative arts and media sector has attracted attention throughout the wider European context. One of the key tenets of the GradCAM models is the construction of an epistemic framework for research undertaken by the PhD student, whether this research is practicebased or not. Along with the increase of student numbers at postgraduate level, the nature of the research and knowledge construction undertaken confronts the art academy with the challenges of justification: knowing as a form of knowledge. The art academies need to ensure that they are willing to take on this challenge without reverting to reactionary modes of pedagogy and assessment.

[1]

Eagleton, T. ‘Darwin Won't Help', London Review of Books 31, no. 18, 24th September 2009, p. 20 – 21.

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top Adrian Duncan Honeycomb Boreholes (2010) Video still Image courtesy the artist.

following page left Greg Baxter Translation of Architectonika press release, German to English (2012)

following page right Greg Baxter Pettenkorferstrasse, Sindyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (2012) Digital photograph

pg. 44 & 45 Stephen Rennicks How Strange it is to be Anything at All (2012) Digital photo print Image courtesy the artist

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TRANSLATION STUDY (L1) Grammatical study using art writing From the catalogue: Architektonika (Sep 2011 – Feb 2012), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin [Source] Die Skulpturen, Bildräume und Raumkonstruktionen der bildenden Kunst greifen architechtonische Formen auf, und sie reflektieren und kommentieren gängige Praktiken in der Gestaltung von Gebäuden und urbanen Räumen. In der Vordergrund treten die plastischen und bildhaften Qualitäten von architektonischen Strukturen, ohne dass soziale and ökonomische Implikationen der gebauten Welt aus dem Blick geraten. Es werden imaginäre Räume eröffnet oder Erinnerungen an bekannte Bauten und inzwischen historisch gewordene Zukunftsvisionen geweckt.

[Target Basic] The sculptures, visual spaces and spatial constructions of the visual arts continue from architechtonic forms, and they reflect and comment on common practices in the shaping of buildings and urban spaces. In the foreground are the plastic and visual qualities of architectural structures, without losing sight of the social and economic implications of the constructed world. Imaginary spaces will be opened, or memories of familiar buildings – and now-outdated visions of the future – will be awoken.

[Target Revised] The sculptures, visual spaces and spatial constructions of the work presented here borrow from architechtonic forms, and they reflect and comment on common practices in the design of buildings and urban spaces. The works focus primarily on the plastic and pictorial qualities of architectural structures, but they do not lose sight of the social and economic implications of the constructed world. Imaginary spaces will be opened, and memories of familiar buildings, as well as visions of the future that have since become outdated, will be revived.

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A RELATIONAL AESTHETIC OUTSIDE OF ART Adrian Duncan

This short essay has three sections over the course of which I will present a three-part relation, at first linking particular instances in the spheres of Science, Art, and Philosophy. In section one I will do some ground work to describe some features of the first part of this relation (a fluid dynamics problem) which comes from the sphere of Science. These features are fleshed out with a note at the end of the essay. Then I will introduce the other two parts of the greater relation. In section two I will analyse and discuss this whole relation. In section three I will open out some of the implications a relation like this might have generally.

—1—

Yves Klein Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void) (1960) Photomontage by Harry Skunk and Janos Kender, taken at Rue GentilBernard, Fontenayaux-Roses, Paris, France Photo: Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

A couple of years ago, I attended a series of evening courses in creative writing in Dublin. One of the exercises I was given during it was to write about, and explain in layman’s terms, an obscure scientific fact or problem. I chose the Navier Stokes Existence and Smoothness problems.

They are a group of unsolved problems within fluid dynamics / mathematics that I first came upon when studying engineering in Aberdeen over fifteen years ago. Despite all of the practical uses of these equations in the world of engineering design (pipe design, aircraft design, bio-mechanics, etc.) the mathematics at their heart remain elusive. There is an inconsistency between the coordinate systems / geometries these equations employ. This inconsistency in language has debarred mathematicians for over one hundred and fifty years, from being able to claim that these formulae exist in mathematical terms, under the parameters of their own making — these parameters having emerged from scientific experimentation. They are one of the seven “Millenium Problems” and if you solve these Navier Stokes equations the Clay Mathematics Institute (Rhode Island, U.S.A.) will pay you a million dollars.* 49

A RELATIONAL AESTHETIC OUTSIDE OF ART: ADRIAN DUNCAN

However, and this is the point of issue in this essay, over the course of my initial attempt to explain something of these problems, two other compatible instances from different fields of practice emerged to me. These instances were at first used to try to shed light, from a different angle, on the explanation I was pursuing. These compatible instances were: 1.

Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. Where Klein superimposed two photographs to create the effect of him leaping into the air. The first photo was of the empty street with a high stone wall to the left. The second of him leaping off that same wall, but with a crash mat of sorts beneath him, so as he would break his actual fall. The final (combined) photo shows him leaping, but the mat has been edited out with the bottom half of the first photo, thus holding him forever in the air. and

2.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s point 6.54, the penultimate point in his Tractatus.

“My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”[1] —2—

So, if we put aside the initial task: trying to explain the nature of the Navier Stokes problems in layman’s terms, and focus now on what makes the emergent other moments of compatibility compatible, we see that: not only do all three of these instances (in science, art, and philosophy) share a description of something in suspension, but that the modes by which the description is made, i.e. geometry, photography, and (written / verbal) language, are being subverted and exposed as not being up to the job of holding the concept they are trying to describe. These moments hold a point of double suspension, of content and form.

Now, there are of course other instances of this kind that exist in the world of objective knowledge[2] but these are the ones that emerged to me at the time, through writing and thinking — a period of writing and thinking that had not set out to create the new relation that I have just now presented. I accidentally came upon this new three-part relation.

These particular moments of compatibility can of course be added to by others, declaimed by others, or be written off as nothing but subjective babble, but these moments are from different spheres of practice (science, art, philosophy)[3] and I have decided that their relation is bound by the nature of their compatibility, and this decision is aesthetic.[4] The finding of these cross-discipline moments of compatibility within these separate spheres of knowledge is in itself not solely important. What is also important is the way in which the moments of compatibility are linked, then described and re-given. The description

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of these moments of compatibility and why they are compatible creates a new relation between them. The bearing, or colour of this relation, is where the individual (who is doing the relating) appears.

The choice of manner through which this linking is offered is a function of the individual too, i.e. one can use drawing, painting, singing, dancing, talking, acting, cooking, etc., or any mix of acts, whatever one deems as suitable — and this decision is an aesthetic one. What comprises the relation and how the relation is given come together in making this aesthetic decision.

To relay this compatibility you need to generate a viewpoint that might be shared in some way with others. This viewpoint offers a view of a world between worlds. These viewpoints should form like mountains beneath the feet of another gathering them up to a view that is heady, distinct, and multitudinous.[5] —3—

Moving from my specific version to a more general version of this relational aesthetic, we find that an activity of this kind is antagonistic to the spheres that produce it. When you relate cross-discipline moments of compatibility you are transgressing, penetrating, and rupturing the general spheres of Art, Science, and Politics.

This is done by entering into these spheres of activity, learning their nature and how to operate their language, before throwing yourself in exorbitance to them with this language. Or put another way, you match the direction of progress within these spheres with a rigour that is of them, then at the right moment, you decide to leave — and the moment that you choose to leave is also an aesthetic decision.

One is not trying to operate as an individual within the constraints of a sphere, instead, one is outside, using the spheres — and the tumbling, evolving disciplines within them — as a means to reveal oneself. Each individual here is toying with worlds, at once aware of, and completely indifferent to their weight and purpose.

The play in creating this relation is subversive, because there is no intention to arrive at an end-point. The play is useless to any of the spheres that are being used in the description of the links between them.

The criteria for judging these relations must too move into a dynamics that is of the relation being judged. He or she who judges the relation must visit and share the space of the relation on offer.

In the expression of the judgement that has been generated from this visit, another fleeting aesthetic relation is offered outward again, and again, and again, etc. Also, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are ideas with increasingly elusive meanings in this form of judging.[6]

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A RELATIONAL AESTHETIC OUTSIDE OF ART: ADRIAN DUNCAN

This relation between the spheres offers an individual view of the fragmented consciousness[7] of society. This fragmented consciousness is in turn made further chaotic by each new individual relation that is created in it. These new relations gather to form a structure that perpetually and incrementally alters its aspect around you into new forms, shapes, spaces, and atmospheres.

This activity of linking perceived cross-discipline moments of compatibility is not harmonious. It is cacophonous, as its direction of attempt is of an individual’s accidental and failed apprehension of society and its public constructs as a whole. The attempt-to-find-harmony itself creates a rupturing dissonance that makes irrelvant the harmony being accidentally ‘sought’. Once this cacophony becomes accepted as of the activity, the activity itself — to come upon and harmonise subjective moments within society as a whole — becomes moot. Thus a suspended space of effort and play is created that is unattributable, useless, and thereby antagonistic to any sphere, or in the describing of any harmony between them — you must suspend any deduction in your thoughts, i.e. you are somewhere between being at once focussed and dreaming.[8] I have placed this proposal for movement across the public spheres within the ‘lifeworld’ that has been dominated by science and scientific thought.[9] This dominance leads to a Modernity filled with systems.

Transgressing across an ever expanding and deepening field of Science to the similarly expanding fields (in depth and nature) of Art and Politics, and vice versa, is virtually impossible in a practical sense today.

The level of education required to make a meaningful transgression between spheres is difficult. The systems of economics and education do not like it. The individual willing to re-educate in the spheres of Art, Science, and Politics and thus learn the language and archaeology of the spheres is met with obstacles to these worlds of an extremely rigid and bureaucratic kind.

To have the opportunity to pursue a practice to the depths of its development, and to do so is important, and useful, but to pursue it to the utter exclusion of other practices is tragic in its subservience.

Any managerial coupling of humanities courses (in the system of education) with the scientific and technical is not transgressive, it is brute suppression. This coupling-from-above has the effect of crushing the distinguishing, and relatively ‘useless’ features of the humanities and arts, by drawing them off into a direction of thought that is of the scientific and technical — to a strange new place of progress where the criteria for existence are based upon relevant and quantifiable justifications.

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The alienation of the individual in the sphere or spheres of influence that they find themselves in (via the specialised education that they have received) is such that a rupturing transgression happens at the level of re-education, i.e. the language and nature of each sphere (Art, Science, Politics) must be learnt earnestly and rigorously, before you personally rupture them with the free, blind play of an accidental and useless re-linking of them.

Many artists today appear to do this as a matter of course, to greater and lesser degrees of intensity, depth, earnestness, invention, and creativity — through interdisciplinary, cross discipline, or researchbased arts practices. But ultimately all of this movement and information is re-aligned and coralled back into the creation of an artwork that re-enters the sphere of Art, the art market, the market of reputation, and all of the other attendant economies in the ‘art world’. The relational aesthetic I describe above remains between worlds, and so must remain outside of the sphere of Art too, if it is to retain any of its qualities.

—Notes—

[*]

The Navier Stokes equations were proposed in their initial form in 1822 by Claude Navier, a French hydrologist, but were re-written fifty years later in a fluid-dynamics context by Gabriel Stokes, an Irishman who contributed experimental work to fluids and sound, but is best known for his work in fluid dynamics, particularly in measuring the viscosity of liquids.

He did this by dropping a smooth steel ball bearing into a closed jar, filled with a thick, viscous liquid and measured the ball bearing’s velocity as it fell through the liquid. Knowing the size, density and velocity of the sphere, coupled with the density of the liquid it fell through, he could derive the viscosity of the liquid, using what became Stoke’s Law.

The Navier Stokes equations are mathematical models [10] that try to describe how an incompressible viscous fluid flows — incompressible here means that the temperature and pressure on the liquid are taken as constant, and viscous, is the ease or unease with which a fluid flows, its internal friction, or ‘stickiness’.

Unlike a scientific model, a mathematical model does not necessarily mirror reality, but it must be internally consistent. It is this lack of internal consistency that forms the crux of the Navier Stokes problems.

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A RELATIONAL AESTHETIC OUTSIDE OF ART: ADRIAN DUNCAN

Or put another way, there is a problem in trying to find a consistency between the kinds of analyses within the equation itself, because these analyses use two incompatible types of coordinate systems: Lagrangian and Eulerian.

Broadly, Lagrangian coordinates deal with the separate particles of a flow, as they flow.

It is as if tiny sensors have been attached to each particle and the main elements of information about that particle as it travels are being related to you, the observer.

(Information like mass, speed, direction, acceleration, force, et cetera.)

However, Eulerian coordinates are position orientated, and involve the “stilling” of a flow. It is as if you, the observer, are looking at a specific point in space and are measuring the instantaneous properties of the particles as they go past that point. This is an accurate if static means of measuring; it is like taking a snap shot of something in motion, with a camera — but, what exactly happens after the shutter goes “click”?

[**]

A version of this essay was written while studying for my M.A. (Art in the Contemporary World) at NCAD.

Also some ideas in this essay found their way into another essay titled “Chicken Lane, A walk through Stoneybatter” which was published in 2011 by Some Blind Alleys, and I’d like to note (SBA’s then editor) Greg Baxter’s input.

[1]

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1921. Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus. Routledge (2009), pp 89.

[2]

Magee, Bryan. 1973. Popper. Fontana Modern Masters.

Karl Popper’s Third World of objective knowledge, i.e. the institiutions of knowledge that exist and are possible to access and criticise.

[3]

This model is taken directly from Jurgen Habermas’s ‘Lifeword spheres of Art Science and Politics’ — which is the basic model I will return to in section three of this essay.

[4]

Features of Dr. Francis Halsall’s essay ‘Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and the production of art historical knowledge’ (published in December 2012 in The Journal or Art Histiograpy) informed this moment in the essay. <www.arthistoriography.wordpress. com/2012/12/10/just-published-number-7-december-2012/>

[5]

This is not to be confused with the generation of a ‘new public’ or indeed ‘a new audience’. The implications of this are quite the opposite — an issue that will be returned to at a later date.

[6]

I would direct the interested reader to a Q & A I carried out with Marta Fernández Calvo in Seán O’Sullivan’s The Wheel publication of 2011.

[7]

Cooke, Maeve. 2006. Change for the Better. Re-presenting the Good Society. MIT Press, pg. 12

[8]

This is very difficult to word, because I am not talking about the sub-conscious necessarily, more like: how does one describe ‘being distracted’?

[9]

Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Modernity versus Postmodernity lecture at New York University.

Jürgen Habermas’s version of the project of Modernity describes the decisive confinement of science, morality and art to autonomous spheres as separated from the lifeworld and administered by experts…

[10] A mathematical model is another language — a generality, however seemingly objective — for describing something. They have their roots in Newtonian Mechanics and this NavierStokes problem specifically has its roots in Newton’s Second Law of Motion, F=ma, (i.e. the ‘a,’ acceleration of a body, of mass ‘m’ is in direct proportion and in the same direction as the net force ‘F’ being applied to the body).

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ALICE REKAB: VECTOR / ATTRACTOR The Return Gallery Goethe-Institut, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 25 January – 28 March, 2013 Curated by Georgina Jackson

Review by Paul Ennis

Not all art needs theory. That being said, blending theory and art need not be some terrible misdeed. Nor does theory need to be cynically viewed as blurb-filler. It can also be motivation; in the case of Alice Rekab this is explicit. It is a heart on sleeve desire that aims to think and aims to do, and then mixes — always mixes. Her show Vector / Attractor ran at the Goethe-Institut early in 2013 and it has stayed with me for numerous reasons.

Rekab’s interest in theory does not merely supplement the show as an appendage. It belongs to the show as a material part. It is not, however, essential for the viewer to think the show ‘correctly’. This may seem counterintuitive, but it makes more sense when one realises Rekab is influenced, primarily, by the pluralist thinker par excellance François Laruelle. Laruelle has undergone a revival in Continental Philosophy in recent years.

His obscurity is not based on any particularly contentious philosophical idea. Rather, it hinges on the mind-bending difficulty of his works. This is the thinker that Jacques Derrida considered confusing.

However, I’ve always believed that behind the complexities of his system lies a simple reminder: once you affirm a position or orientation you risk an illusory security.

The true philosophical standpoint is to keep moving.[1] In order to do this, sometimes we are forced to feel it in our very bones.

This means that we have to allow for a little bit of being-human. And how does the human see? Not only with eyes, but with heart. In the world of non-philosophy the heart still matters.

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This is difficult for me to see since I am a committed nihilist / bleak theorist. At best, I consider us neural washing-machines; at worst meatsacks; at absolute worst aimless machinic death-flecks. Hence, non-philosophy comes saddled for me with the possibility of sentimentality. This dignity of the human is almost unrecognisable to me at this point.

And yet, it is only the words of those inspired

by Laruelle that makes me feel unsettled in my misanthropy. I place Vector / Attractor in this category: hopeful, but not sentimental.

Thinking according to the category of hope tends to manifest as a taste for singularity.

Like the theory that permeates it, Vector / Attractor acts out the paradox of crystallising a zone of influence and allowing it to be consistently disturbed.

In effect, it zeroes in on the theme that what is singular is worth a second look. And what is singular is precisely everything. Even the glance. Each exhibition is an invitation to take this idea sincerely. The artworld names all of the shortcuts we use to defuse that encounter. Non-art sets itself the task of undermining the artworld’s desire to make everything explainable according to any standardised account.

Rekab seems conscious of the danger of standardisation. The exhibition is split across various locations in the GoetheInstitut. This allows for the materialisation of the idea that distinct vectors attract one another across space. We encounter, at first, an image of a tower that is a real meetingplace in Sierra Leone and it also acts, in this instance, as the place we are invited to gather in the gallery. I am struck by the scale of this image printed on what appears to be a semi-transparent, but nonetheless heavy cloth. There is delicateness to it but, paradoxically it does not quite invite me around to see what lies behind. The depicted tower itself is not simply a structure unknown to me, but the structural depths of unknowing that I embody. I do not know this world and would never have known this world other than having glimpsed it here. What other worlds do I not know?

I was not quite aware, at first, that behind the tower-image a large plastic diamond dangled.

The gathering-place, precious in a communal sense, is tested by that other sense of preciousness. The one that brings out the inhuman in the human. It is this realism that eviscerates any potential sentimentality clinging to the exhibition. The diamond itself is certainly plastic, but not quite industrial.

It is speckled, Pollock-like, and this extracts

ALICE LUCY REKAB: VECTOR / ATTRACTOR

top Alice Rekab Vector / Attractor (Jan 2013) 4m × 8m Installation shot The Return Gallery, Goethe Institut Photograph courtesy of Ronan McRea

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middle & bottom Alice Rekab Interpret / Attractor (Jan 2013) Still Image from two-channel film installation Courtesy of the artist and Stars Combine

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it, materially, from any failure to recognise it as desirable.

At the top of the stairs, and in the adjoining library, we find two film excerpts from a Sierra Leonean comedy group called Stars Combine (with whom Rekab has a long-standing connection).

It took me a little while to realise that the diamond dangling downstairs had, at some point, been transposed to Sierra Leone, and its presence within the film is jarring. It is situated in one scene sitting precariously on a fence. In another, it is being discussed by the filmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s protagonists, two members of Stars Combine hawking a diamond, in what looked to me like a rather suspicious business meeting with a Western middle-man.

This theme only becomes clear when we include the manner in which phenomenal experience always intrudes on the objects it touches.

The observer is an ineliminable part of the exhibition and cannot help but bring their humanity with them. They bring with them depths that will destabilise any easy answer to what the show might mean. In a fully humane vision we see precariousness everywhere.

Everything is so delicate. Most delicate of all is what goes unsaid because it can never be quite articulated; those insights that trip away somewhere on the edge of your visual field. What is represented depends on what is unrepresentable and what is not representable can only be alluded to. It cannot be brought before our eyes. And yet we know it when we see it; in delicate bones.

The characters wear white marks on their eyebrows and moustaches. My eyes cannot quite make sense of the meeting room where the diamond is being sold. The Westerner, solemnly acting as some kind of broker, looks like a friend down the pub. He is transported into a role so loaded with cultural baggage it seems to be crushing his shoulders. And I sigh, a little, as I see little geometrical lines of Western intrication into Africa in my mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye. An entire continent abstractly cut, ever so precisely, according to what can be extracted from it.

This geometrical flowering is my rather literal reaction to the words vector and attractor.

And another comes to mind now; superimposition as it is used by Laruelle. The other vector/ attractors are the bipedal ones observing and taking the measure of the exhibition. This is of immense importance for non-art since the basic thrust of non-philosophy is to insist on the irreducible, finite, and singular human.

For me, Rekabâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theoretical leaning toward Laruelle nonetheless has a hint of heresy to it; the kind of heresy Laruelle tends to encourage. We are dealing with, I suspect, singularity as not just precious, but precarious.

[1]

To my eyes, Laruelle is the purest distillation of the core lessons of continental thinking: context cannot be forfeited (Dilthey), what is objective depends on unobjectivisable conditions (Husserl, Heidegger), all standpoints auto-deconstruct (Derrida), and to keep vital you must consistently deterritorialise (Deleuze).

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BEN RIVERS: AH, LIBERTY!

top Ben Rivers Hut (2013) Made for the Ben Rivers — Ah, Liberty! exhibition,The Douglas Hyde Gallery

bottom Ben Rivers Ah, Liberty! (2013) Installation view The Douglas Hyde Gallery

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Images courtesy of the artist and the Douglas Hyde Gallery

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BEN RIVERS: AH, LIBERTY!

no longer correspond with the footage; jumbled, juxtaposed and distorted. Each of the elements act on their own, liberated from established functions, they open up to a contingency of multiple readings.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin 2.

12 April – 22 May, 2013

There is an intriguing dichotomy inscribed in the film: a sense of nostalgia evoked by childhood frolics versus the uneasy recognition of entropy and danger, of a world on the brink of collapse and anarchy. In the opening scene of Ah, Liberty!, wide panoramic views of the gently undulating Scottish countryside stretch out, recapturing the sort of tranquillity experienced in nature (which is itself historically conditioned). A narrator begins to recite: “A young world … A world early in the morning of time …” — a poetic statement that further alludes to the purity and beauty of the world. But soon, the voiceover rejects this vision, uttering with utmost precision and emphasis that it is “a hard and unfriendly world”.

Review by Marysia WieckiewiczCarroll

An ode to freedom or looking at the past from some point in the future.

The work of Ben Rivers doesn’t easily fit into one category. Shown at both film festivals and in gallery spaces, it teeters between experimental film and documentary. This can largely be attributed to Rivers’s working method that blends aspects of fiction and reality in a subversive and poetic manner.

Like an ethnographer, he immerses himself in the natural habitat of his protagonists and closely observes them through a camera lens, only to re-interpret the recorded material in the editing room until the borders between veracity and imagination dissolve. Through his intervention, the teleological chain of narration corrodes, allowing space for more associative and sensual readings, visually enhanced by Rivers’s use of retro technology (16mm film shot on a Bolex camera which he then hand-develops). This produces timeless, usually black-and-white images of grainy and flickering textures which unfold, inharmoniously, to the humming rhythm of the projector. The end result feels like a visual manifestation of an afterthought, prompted by a fleeting and manipulated memory.

Rivers’s 2008 twenty minute film Ah, Liberty! recently shown in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, is an example of such an afterthought on the lives of a group of young boys growing up somewhere in a forgotten corner of the Scottish Highlands. Snippets of their everyday life are recorded in a sequence of frames which do not form a clear line of narration, but rather a chaotic set of imaginary scenarios with no apparent beginning, middle, or end. Rivers reinforces this lack of linearity by creating tension / dissonance between what is seen and the accompanying soundtrack: voices and dialogues

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The boys’ immediate surroundings and consequently, their lives, are governed by chaos. What should be a family garden resembles a hazardous playground made up of piles of corrugated iron, wrecked cars, and rubbish. Unsupervised, the boys dig for treasures and play or rummage among the toxic debris, hopping precariously from one stack of rubble to another. In contemporary terms their upbringing could be politely described as unconventional, although most likely words such as ‘alarming’ and ‘negligent’ might be preferred. But ultimately, there is an undeniably joyful and light-hearted element to their behaviour. It’s here, in this simple manifestation of carefreeness and freedom that we can reflect on our own liberty, and on the lost capacity to believe in infinite potential.

Paradoxically, this hostile environment, which appears to be free from adults’ control and intervention, constitutes the epitome of a children’s paradise. It beckons and engages because it manages to awake certain phantasmal memories of, and longings for, a freedom we can all relate to. However, at the moment of realisation that the world we are watching is possibly devoid of grown-ups, this impression of a bucolic reality is overturned. Curious sounds heard earlier on can now be interpreted as gun shots. A boy aims at an animal and pulls the trigger. Later, the camera focuses on a little skinned animal corpse thrown into a wheelbarrow. What are we seeing — is it really kids at play? Or is this a record of another post-nuclear scenario in which a self-governed group of young boys regress into a primitive state of society, as suggested by the primeval

BEN RIVERS: AH, LIBERTY!

Ben Rivers Still from Ah, Liberty! (2008) Black & white anamorphic 16mm 20 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry Gallery, London

animal masks worn by them in the film?

Unsurprisingly, Rivers chose Peter Brook’s black-and-white Lord of the Flies (1963) as one of the film screenings to accompany the exhibition.s Animal masks worn by the boys introduce an unexpected tension. They lack the highly abstract form and material asceticism typical of their tribal equivalents and as such, their symbolic function is removed. It is the transposition of childish props into this chaotic world that is unnerving. As soon as the boys’ faces are hidden under the masks (made of soft fabrics), traces of their childhood innocence seem to disappear.

They transform into ritualistic shamans who dance as if possessed by altered states of consciousness, or resemble adults flexing their arms as a show of strength.

The permeating entropy throughout the film is punctuated by flashing white frames reminiscent of apocalyptic explosions, and is framed by the bonfire leitmotif that bridges the beginning and end of the film. We, as viewers, observe it from the safety of a makeshift

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hut that occupies the centre of the gallery and allows for a more immersive experience.

The wooden hut, with its corrugated iron roof and debris scattered around it, is almost an exact copy of the onscreen abode and its surroundings, and feels both like a shelter and a bunker. The installation allows for a more authentic viewing experience, as opposed to a purely cinematic one, by placing the spectator in the heart of the events. At the same time, the hut is here for practical reasons – it constitutes an impromptu projection room. As noted by John Hutchinson in the accompanying catalogue: “Rivers’s huts suggest vernacular practicality and rough pragmatism, even though they are essentially theatrical installations.” As such, the hut constructs a natural barrier between us and the world we are viewing. As the onscreen voices urge us to “get off the world … get off the world”, we always remain resistant, outside, simply witnesses to Rivers’s oneiric tribute to an unusual way of life.

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ALEANA EGAN: THE SENSITIVE PLANT Kerlin Gallery Anne’s Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2 19 April – 25 May, 2013

Review by Rebecca O’Dwyer

There is a plant commonly known as ‘the sensitive plant’: all plants are sensitive of course, but this one, the Mimosa pudica or ‘touch-me-not’, is explicitly and tangibly so.

Following any contact with its leaves, they droop in turn; only reasserting themselves once the threat is perceived to have passed.

It is a plain herb, yet what it lacks in colour and vibrancy, it makes up for through this curious trait. Humble by nature, it shirks back towards itself, very much a passive entity within the botanical realm.

The sensitive plant also lends its name to a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.[1] In this lengthy anthropomorphic study, Shelley recounts the fable of a wondrous garden in which the sensitive plant inhabits a lowly secondary role, at least aesthetically. It observes the vitality and exuberance of the roses, narcissi, and hyacinths, and never ceases to want what they have: For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the Beautiful! (74 – 77)[2]

The sensitive plant clings to this possibility of beauty even in the seasonal demise of the others: it subsists, in the death throes of winter, awaiting their return.

Aleana Egan’s exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery takes the same title as the aforementioned poem. This cannot be a coincidence: Egan’s titles are invariably drawn from the sphere of literature, acting out a kind of imagined translation between word and object. Egan knowingly alludes to Shelley, and seeks to translate his work into another corpus, much removed and finally unrecognisable. What remains for the critic is to read both versions alongside one another in an effort to gain traction on the work. Some titles of the individual works allude to a commonality between the poem and the overall thrust of the exhibition (the garden walls, the mossy roofs), and yet others (life group a, the sky looks down on almost as many things as the ceiling) disrupt any sense of continuity; they prevent reconciliation between the work and text. The work may indeed allude to Shelley’s poem, but it exists at a diagonal to it, using it as a starting point for a poetic formulation of its own.

The exhibition comprises a mixture of two and three-dimensional work, of varying scale. The overall sense, though, is of a kind of overstatement: the works’ scale and use of colour appear almost like an amplification of

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ALEANA EGAN: THE SENSITIVE PLANT

Aleana Egan the sky looks down on almost as many things as the ceiling (2013) Card, tape, filler, varnish, steel 204 × 152 × 25cm

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Aleana Egan Meanwhile (2013) Steel, fabric 300 × 350 × 150cm

Images courtesy of Aleana Egan and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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her previous work. Meanwhile (2013), by some length the largest work in the exhibition, is almost totemic in form: comprising a large steel frame on top of which a length of fabric haphazardly rests, the work functions like a kind of monumental absence. The harbour is good company (2013) accedes also to this sense of amplification: this steel work, roughly human in height, has a sense of denseness that I do not normally attribute to Egan’s work. The upper section, a steel container atop four mild steel legs, features a window through which folds of fabric are perceptible. The impression is one of straining: it speaks to the language of Egan’s corpus, but is somehow colder and more difficult to empathise with.

A substantial part of the exhibition comprises two-dimensional works: these involve a series of archival prints and a pair of found photographs, their source unknown. The series, pips t-shirt 1 – 4 (2013) and the diptych clothes real sad here now world (2013) point to familiar clues of an interior, lived life, at once nostalgic and wistful.

The framing of the prints, through which the scale of the objects and the surrounding context are foreclosed to the viewer, leads to a kind of myopic understanding: the images become painterly, abstracted somehow. So too with the pairing of found photographs 13/1 Sunnypark, Ballygunge, Calcutta, India. Circa 1957, and Untitled (both 2013). These vivid black-and-white images are abstracted to the point of imperceptibility by the disclosure of subject alone; without context, they amount to little more than a visual non sequitur.

This is both the gain and the loss of Egan’s exhibition as a whole. On previous occasions wherein I have spent time with her work, most notably her thoughtful and illuminating exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery last year, the work slowly gained a poetry of its own the more time was spent with it. It was not simply done, but over time the objects and texts came to speak in synchrony: there was a natural sympathy present that gave the work sense and meaning. This current exhibition appears to want the same thing, but fails: indeed, this failure might be perceived as thematically apt. The Sensitive Plant demands too much of its viewers; it asks them to fill in gaps between reference points too disparate and obscure. It retreats back towards itself, curling itself up unintelligibly like the plant it alludes to, precluding the viewer from gaining purchase on the work. The more time one spends here, the more perceptible the gaps between reference points become. It wants too much: desirous of sense and beauty and yet never quite accomplishing it.

[1]

Composed in 1820, “The Sensitive Plant” was published that same year in the collection titled Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems.

[2]

Poem available at: <www.kalliope.org/en/digt.pl?longdid=shelley2003060601> (Accessed 28/04/13)

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ALEANA EGAN: THE SENSITIVE PLANT

Aleana Egan 13/1 Sunnypark, Ballygunge, Calcutta, India.

Circa 1957 (2013) Found photograph 6 × 5.7cm Aleana Egan Untitled (2013) Found photograph 6 × 5.7cm Images courtesy of Aleana Egan and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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PHILOMENE PIRECKI: FRAME, FOLD, FRACTURE Green on Red Gallery 26 – 28 Lombard Street East Dublin 2 18 April – 25 May, 2013

Review by séan o'sullivan

Philomene Pirecki’s Frame, Fold, Fracture is a collection of ten works positioned over and amongst one another in the Green on Red Gallery. Each of her images contains multiple views and they are applied directly to the wall, or raised a small distance away from its surface. Her largest composition is entitled White Wall, Green on Red Gallery (11:05, daylight, 26–3–13 / 18:39, fluorescent light, 22–3–13). In this, Pirecki used two photographs of the gallery wall, one taken in a balmy morning light, and another in the bruise-coloured blue of evening. There are more than fifty reproductions of these two scenes glued to the gallery wall — the same space that is captured in the photographs. Each image is neatly cropped and set into a grid with its sister reproductions.

Interspersed among this photographic grid are a sequence of pages that reproduce half an image of the wall before trailing off into misprinted streaks of bright red and purple, as if the paper were ripped away from its printer head a half-second before being made whole. Instead of the familiar printed depiction of space, we see a progressively less-real version of the wall that begins to have its molecules strewn apart, until all that’s left are a few brightly coloured pixels.

The photographic grid is enclosed on both sides by paint that’s applied to the wall in quick, vigorous clouds of dusty khaki and slate blue — colours that are drawn from the printed scenes. This paint is so strong it obfuscates the viewer’s recognition that the photographs actually depict a space, their subject matter has been made so demure that they barely seem like images at all. Pirecki disguises them as a soft, unintense colour. And standing at a distance, her entire composition seems to fold its way out of reality and into some kaleidoscopic pixelation of views.

A third of the way through the gallery is a thick wall dividing the room. It creates a slightly dark corridor where Pirecki neatly installed three slide projections to run in a recurrent sequence. Their light obstructs the space, and keeps the viewer from facing the scene head on. The projections, named Working Title (Drawing Pins / Fine Point Pen / Magic Tape), are created from stills that show a pair of fingertips holding and papering over the brightly-coloured packaging of the title’s objects. The fingers are carefully controlled; they point in the same direction and hold their objects to highlight a single word printed on each product box. The three scenes cycle at an independent pace, causing a rotation of discordant sentences: “A / System / France”, “Pins / System / France”, “Approx / & / France”.

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PHILOMENE PIRECKI: FRAME, FOLD, FRACTURE

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PHILOMENE PIRECKI: FRAME, FOLD, FRACTURE

The arrangement imitates the exquisite corpse technique of arbitrarily aligning unrelated images to spark a useful juxtaposition. But here, the arbitrariness is replaced with three iterating scenes, each alike in character, and made distinct only in the fine print. The scenes don’t make themselves into meaningful phrases; instead they conform to Pirecki’s erasure of spatial distinctiveness in favour of an accumulation of views — in favour of a contest between similar and same.

There is a distinct eloquence in how Pirecki approaches these simple, devoted exercises in place, mark, and sign. Agent substantiates the difference between its natural and engineered surfaces, but it also captures its own past and displays that together with its present. In a similar way to both White Wall, Green on Red Gallery and Working Title, the marks that form Agent are plotted somewhere on a sliding scale between those moments that are in the instant, and those that are perennially delayed.

On the wall by the gallery’s entrance, there are five almost-white pages of paper that hang from their corners. Each white page is taped at its lower edge to hold up a thick black carbon sheet, the kind used to replicate documents in an era before the digital scanner. These black sheets protrude horizontally for an inch before bending down under their own weight.

The pages are entitled Agent (Mailed from Cambridge and London to Dublin, Weeks 1 – 7), and as their name suggests, Pirecki posted the sheets to the gallery in preparation for her exhibition. The journey caused each white page to carry dirty imprints from its carbon counterpart, a combination of crushing, handling, and bending are discretely visible; one page carries a curiously spirited stamp mark from the postal sorting office.

Pirecki treats her physical space softly, but tears away at approximations and hints of space that lie within images. In that way, Frame, Fold, Fracture reveals a gulf of intensity between what is seen and what is made. There are careful distinctions between image types: those captured by the eye have been flattened, rehearsed and repeated, whereas those touched by the hand are overlain with lightning-fast streaks of coloured paint.

The viewer’s attention travels back and forth between what is in the moment and what is not.

It is this competition of views that makes Frame, Fold, Fracture simultaneously busy and clear, and that synchronous effect is made real by its sharp, deep deviations from the remoteness of seeing into the intimacy of touching.

pg. 64 Philomene Pirecki Agent (mailed from Cambridge and London to Dublin, 2012, Week 1)(mailed between Dublin and London, twice, April – May 2013) (2012 – ongoing) Carbon copy paper, paper, linen tape, pins 59 × 21cm

pg. 65 bottom Philomene Pirecki White Wall, Green on Red gallery (11:05, daylight, 26 – 3 – 13 / 18:39, fluorescent light, 22 – 3 – 13) (2013) 2 × colour c-type prints on Dibond, posters, custom mixed emulsion paints on white wall. Approximate overall dimensions 300 × 400cm

Courtesy of the artist and Green On Red Gallery.

Installed on the top (L to R):

pg. 65 top Philomene Pirecki Working Title (Drawing Pins / Fine Point Pen / Magic Tape) (2010 – ongoing) 3 × digital slide-shows, each on a continuous randomised loop, projected. Dimensions variable Images courtesy of the artist and Green On Red Gallery.

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Reflecting White (2nd Generation) (2013) colour c-type print, 50.8 × 40.5cm; Reflecting 1 (8th Generation) (2012) colour c-type print, 50.8 × 40.5cm; Agents (mailed from Cambridge and London to Dublin, 2012)(mailed between Dublin and London, twice, April – May 2013) weeks 1-7 (2012 – ongoing) Carbon copy paper, paper, linen tape, pins, 59 × 21cm each Installed on the right: White Wall, artist's studio (12:08, daylight, 28-3-13) Metallic colour c-type print on Dibond, acrylic paint on canvas, posters, custom mixed emulsion paint. Approximate overall dimensions 200 × 300cm

PAPER VISUAL ART: DUBLIN

TINO SEHGAL: THIS SITUATION Irish Museum of Modern Art, Earlsfort Terrace, 12 April – 19 May, 2013

Review by Alissa Kleist

How do you review a show that is in flux, an intricate mix of script and improvisation?

A piece of writing can perhaps do justice to what was said, allude to how it was said — the facial expressions, the gestures — but it can never truly replicate the exact conditions of that particular place in time, on that particular day, with those particular interpreters and visitors, that were experienced at Tino Sehgal’s This Situation.

Sehgal focuses on the direct, unmediated experience of his works rather than on the product they may represent. This Situation is not accompanied by supporting documentation, a gallery press release, or handouts etc.

As with all of his ‘situations’, no cameras or recording devices are allowed, addressing an ongoing wider debate surrounding the documentation of performances. The work is experienced in a twofold way: in the moment itself and in the memory of the viewer. Its being ‘becomes itself through disappearance’.[1] Though his works in many ways initially appear to resist the conformity of a sellable, tangible product, Sehgal does not operate ‘outside’ of the art market. The work is sold to (i.e. he sells the right to perform the work), or is commissioned by, museums and galleries.

To quote one of his interpreters: “You have to have capital to live outside capitalism.”[2] This Situation plays out in a stark white, high-ceilinged upstairs room with smoothly worn dark wooden floors in IMMA at Earlsfort Terrace.

Six ‘interpreters’ — four men, two women, with a variety of different accents — pose, lean, stroll, sit, stand, and speak. Seagulls land on the skylight and clouds stream by, creating a dynamic, ever-changing light in the room, accentuated by the constant movement of the interpreters’ bodies. Their limbs, perpetually in motion, steadily shift from one position

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to the next in a hypnotically rhythmic pace. The conversation is measured; each person is given room to express their view.

This continuous movement is a reminder that, although this sometimes simply seems like an everyday discussion between six people (and at times the audience), we are also part of something out of kilter, outside the remits of normality.

During my visit, groups of bewildered, uniformed schoolgirls sporadically enter the room accompanied by their teachers. They are met with the interpreters’ stares and the united greeting: “Welcome … to … This … Situation”, followed by an action that can only be described as a ‘rewind’. The interpreters communally exhale, move backwards to settle into another pose or position, and commence with a different part of the script. A rehearsed sentence — one of around 100 quotations selected by Sehgal by academics and philosophers since 1588[3] – begins another seemingly free-flowing conversation, meandering between an analysis of market economy and statements about changing consumption throughout the centuries, the interpreters’ personal anecdotes, stories, musings and ponderings, and impromptu interactions with the audience. The conversation is at times profound, at times funny, and at times vacuous and contrived.

At times an interpreter may turn directly towards a visitor and ask: “What do you think?”

This direct address collapses the boundary between spectator and participant, ruptures the pattern of conversation, and conjures, for a moment, that ‘potential horror within the threat of participating in an unpromising situation’.[4] The schoolgirls, finally settled in, start to engage with this existential conversation in a refreshingly natural manner. Spurred on by the interpreters’ questions, they speak about their perception of the world and about being teenagers. Their initial awkwardness seems overcome by a desire to participate and they relax, confident now. Sehgal is keenly aware of an audiences’ expectation of certain ‘rules’ of conduct, and subtly bends, pushes or breaks these rules, creating new formal parameters for a volatile experience. Fact and fiction; reality and the staged experience; personal space; boundaries; ‘normal’ behaviour; frameworks of conversation and movement, are identified and questioned. Interpreters sometimes stand uncomfortably close to each other and to visitors; movements are occasionally reversed or don’t match speech. The conversation is dotted with (forced, unsettling) laughter, musings and then, its predictable natural flow

TINO SEHGAL: THIS SITUATION

Irish Museum of Modern Art Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin Second floor, skylight (2013) Detail Permission and courtesy of IMMA, This Situation Photo: Niamh Dunphy

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PAPER VISUAL ART: DUBLIN

is again interrupted by a long exhale — the ‘rewind’.

Trying to decipher the construct and the way the situation has been directed (unsurprisingly kept under tight wraps by Sehgal) becomes a fascinating preoccupation. To discover a flaw, when an interpreter does not remember their quote or appears to lose their train of thought, is strangely satisfying. Yet it is never really clear whether these flaws are ‘real’, or just convincingly acted.

Regardless of the surreal and ambiguous nature of This Situation, the invitation to be part of an experience, rather than remaining a passive viewer, slowly erodes barriers to participation.

Listening to them for two and a half hours, these ‘characters’ begin to become believable as they share, confess, discuss, debate, and question a seemingly endless stream of often very interesting recollections, facts, and anecdotes. A tentative connection is created between interpreters and audience, as if we are all in this together, united in this strange space to share this special moment.

Surely not all of this can be scripted?

This Situation has left me feeling elated, confused, ruminative, and strangely touched.

Outside, every person I pass becomes an object of study. The seemingly simple exercise of walking down the street has become intense and a question mark hovers over everything.

Later that day something dawns on me: perhaps I have been seduced and tricked by Sehgal’s This Situation. I was truly convinced that this seemingly personal, tailor-made experience between the interpreter and I was special and for me alone. More than likely it was entirely scripted, applying what I imagine was subjective validation — a method used in horoscopes and fortune telling whereby an illusion of reality, or ‘truth’, is constructed by a participant because they want to believe in it.

Sehgal, through his refusal to fully reveal the work’s mechanisms of production — and by constantly questioning the very nature of this art event via interpreters and audience — has ensured that the validity of my experience remains forever unconfirmed.

At the end of my visit a deeply (and deceptively) alluring, personal moment occurs.

One of the interpreters, who had looked at me as I entered the room initially, and intermittently throughout my time in the space, turned to me and exclaimed: “When you came in you looked at me… that look did something to me. I’m not sure I can explain what it was and I have thought about it all this time while you have been quietly sitting here … that look was powerful.” A pause, followed by the interpreters’ words “Tino … Sehgal …

This … Situation … 2007”, for me marks this as a moment to exit, a symbolic end.

[1]

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993, pg. 146

[2]

Quotation noted during This Situation, Thursday 18 April 2013, IMMA

[3]

See: <www.jehsmith.com/1/2013/04/interpreting-tino-sehgal.html> (Accessed 05/2013)

[4]

Dave Beech, “Include Me Out! Dave Beech on Participation in Art,” Art Monthly, 04/01/2008

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CONTRIBUTORS

SEÁN O SULLIVAN is a writer and curator

FLAT_PACK GALLERY & STUDIOS is an

whose research focuses on the politics and the preservation of localities. He holds an MA in Curation and a BA in Fine Art from IADT, Dún Laoghaire. He is currently co-curating the Red Stables Summer School 2013, which will take place in both Bull Island and St Anne’s Park, Dublin. He is part of the board of directors for the Black Church Print Studio, Dublin. www.seanosullivan.ie

artist-run gallery and studio space located at 32 Brunswick Street North, Unit 3a, Dublin 7.

Members include: Lily Cahill, Niamh Clarke, Paul Doherty, Hugh Harte, Rob Murphy, Shane McCarthy, Niamh McCooey, Ailbhe O’Connor, Mark O’Toole, and Matthew Slack. www.flatpackgalleryandst.wix.com/ flatpack

REBECCA O’ DWYER is a writer and researcher

based in Dublin. She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin. In 2012 she commenced doctoral research at NCAD, focusing on the figure of transcendentalism in contemporary art. O’ Dwyer compiles a personal blog at: www.rebeccaodwyer.wordpress.com ADRIAN DUNCAN is a Dublin-based artist,

writer, and engineer. He has exhibited in Ireland, Europe, South Africa, and the U.S. He is co-editor of Paper Visual Art. He guest lectures at UCD School of Architecture, and NCAD, Dublin. He has been published by Sculpture, Enclave Review, and The Dublin Review (forthcoming). www.adrianduncan.eu

MARYSIA WIECKIEWICZ-CARROLL is an independent curator and writer currently based in Dublin. She has been involved in a number of exhibitions and projects in Ireland, most recently as a co-curator of Sleepwalkers, Production as Process at the Hugh Lane Gallery and participant of the Former West Congress in Berlin.

GREG BAXTER is the author of The Apartment,

a novel, and A Preparation for Death. Born in Texas, he currently lives in Berlin. From 2003 to 2011 he lived in Dublin. www.someblindalleys.tumblr.com STEPHEN RENNICKS is an artist based in Co.

Leitrim. His work is multi-layered but has often ultimately been about bringing people into the moment. He has used the everyday, time and myth to do this. Details of his process and projects can be found at: www.stephenrennicks.webs.com JOAN FOWLER was for many years the co-

ordinator between the Faculties of Fine Art and History of Art at the National College of Art and Design Dublin. She has written extensively on contemporary art and on occasion she has been prompted to write on the state of college art education in Ireland.

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PAPER VISUAL ART: DUBLIN

ALISSA KLEIST, born in Amsterdam in 1986, is a

TIM STOTT is Assistant Lecturer in Art History

curator, artist, and writer currently living and working in Belfast. She graduated from University of Ulster with a Master of Fine Art degree with distinction in 2011 and is now co-director and Chair at Catalyst Arts. She works for Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery, the Forum for Alternative Belfast, and is a founding member of artist collective PRIME. She is one of the co-ordinators / curators involved in Household Belfast — a Belfast-based curatorial collective — and is on the current board of Source Magazine. www.alissakleist.com

and Theory at Dublin Institute of Technology and an Associate Researcher at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin. He has a BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting (2003) and an MSc in Contemporary Art Theory (2004), both from Edinburgh College of Art, and a PhD in contemporary art criticism from the Department of Visual Culture at NCAD. He has published and lectured widely on contemporary art and is currently preparing a book on the use of play and games in contemporary art.

SINÉAD HOGAN lectures in visual arts

PAUL J. ENNIS completed his PhD in Philosophy

at University College Dublin. He is the author of Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011) and is an associate editor of the journal Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism.

DR. NOEL FITZPATRICK is Dean of the Graduate

School of Creative Arts and Media and Assistant Head of School Art, Design and Printing at Dublin Institute of Technology. He is head of Critical Theory and Head of Research at the School of Art, Design, and Printing, and programme Chair for the Creative Arts Masters Platform at DIT. Fitzpatrick also teaches on the undergraduate BA in Visual and Critical Studies programme. His research interests include Aesthetics, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and the relationship between contemporary philosophy and cultural production. www.gradcam.ie

practice at IADT. She completed a PhD in philosophy at UCD with the title Aesthetic Thinking Uncanny Rhetoric.

RUTH CLINTON & NIAMH MORIARTY have

been working collaboratively since completing a BA in Fine Art at NCAD in 2010. Their practice encompasses performance, filmmaking, sound production, installation, and storytelling.

They employ a detailed research process to convey visions of temporality and eternity.

They are currently resident artists at Pallas Projects / Studios. www.cargocollective.com/ruthandniamh

Overleaf Adrian Duncan: Educational Research Centre Library (2010) digital photograph Image courtesy the artist.

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paper visual art journal: dublin Š2013

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ISBN 978-0-9573350-2-8 / €8 / €5 Concession

CONTRIBUTORS Seán O Sullivan / Rebecca O’ DwyeR / aDRian Duncan flat _ pack galleRy & StuDiOS / DR. nOel fitzpatRick MaRySia wieckiewicz-caRROll / gReg baxteR SinéaD HOgan / StepHen RennickS / aliSSa kleiSt JOan fOwleR / tiM StOtt / paul J. enniS RutH clintOn & niaMH MORiaRty

www.papervisualart.com 76