Forms of Imagining – The Queen still falls to you (Project Press)

FORMS OF IMAGINING 26.09–11.10.14 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE

Hadley+Maxwell Curated by Tessa Giblin

One blots out another Biographies

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No political structure of any size can dispense with order, and one of the fundamental applications of order is to time, for no communal human activity can take place without it. One might say that the regulation of time is the primary attribute of all government. A new power which wants to assert itself must also enforce a new chronology; it must make it seem as though time had begun with it. Even more important to such a power is that it should endure.1 Four years after Queen Victoria’s controversial tour of Ireland in 19002, Irish sculptor John Hughes began work on his commission of a 4.5m high, seated figure of Victoria to be positioned in front of Dublin’s parliament building Leinster House.3 His cast bronze sculpture depicted a stoic Victoria in the later years of her life: weighted with accoutrements, three stone cherubs sat protectively at her feet.4 Three bronze allegorical figures within the carved stone base illustrated Fame, Hibernia at War, and Hibernia at Peace, beside which the inscription read, ‘Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, erected by her Irish subjects’. The monument was unveiled ceremoniously on 17th February 1908 to hundreds of military personnel and invited guests, as well as hordes of onlookers who gathered outside the official gates.

The Queen Victoria monument survived Ireland’s revolutionary period perfectly intact. In the decades following the establishment of the Irish Free State, tensions arose within Dáil Éireann regarding the inept royal presence on the front lawn. Politicians such as George A. Lyons called for this “imperial monstrosity” to be replaced by memorials to founders of the state – to Arthur Griffith or to Michael Collins. The Queen Victoria statue eventually experienced an unglamorous dethronement in 1948, the year preceding the signing of the Republic of Ireland Act which ended all ties with the British monarchy. Hoisted by crane to a waiting truck, she was too tall to pass beneath the gates in her seated pose and had to be positioned on her back in order to leave the premises. The bronze figure was brought to The

THE QUEEN STILL FALLS TO YOU

One blots out another

Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen still falls to you, 2014, Cinefoil, steel, magnets, 6-channel sound, LED light-programming, dimensions variable.

Installation view, Project Arts Centre

Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and placed in the main courtyard accompanied by various state carriages. Sections of the monument’s carved stone base were discarded at Bully’s Acre Cemetery at the gates of the hospital, and remain there today concealed by wild overgrowth. The three symbolic cherubs are now courteously positioned within the formal gardens of these former hospital grounds – now the home of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Over three decades later, an answer to Ireland’s problem of Victoria revealed itself. In 1983, Australia’s Sydney City Council undertook an extensive search to locate the ideal monument to mark the entrance of the city’s Queen Victoria Building. Following a request from the Lord Mayor of Sydney, a decision was reached to ship this bronze Irish sculpture to Australia on the basis of a ‘permanent loan’, and Victoria was officially unveiled for the second time on 20th December 1987.

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All the lot. Their spunk’s gone dead – motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck the last bit out of them...every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with indiarubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people!..just killing off the human thing, and worshiping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money!8

THE QUEEN STILL FALLS TO YOU

At the centre of Project Arts Centre’s white cube, artist duo Hadley+Maxwell sculpturally re-published this monument of Queen Victoria. Three further compositions – Stretcher, Pallbearers and Grave – underscored the milieu of the original statue, with each assuming a stance, either at floor level or upright. The space between the four figurative works was bridged by a twenty-one minute score of lights and sound, inviting six standing speakers, low-lying LED units and cabling to the scene. The exhibition narrative was experienced via three acts: The Discharge, The Goading Crowd, and The Lamentation. Each was revealed through patchworked, multilayered snippets of contemporary audio recordings and a sometimes explosive backdrop of shifting lights which saturated the gallery walls in splashes and floods of unfixed colour. Braced to play a role in the sensory score, all of the physical things in the room were black. These still silhouettes embodied Baudrillard’s theory on the absence of colour: “the elimination of appearances in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing.”5 Hadley+Maxwell’s Victoria formed an upside-down triangle suspended from the ceiling, from which poked her accoutrements – sceptre, orb, crown; the construct of a monarchy that used symbols and emblematic ceremonies to presume power.

Queen Victoria ruled the British Empire for a sixty-three year span which overlapped with the final decades of the industrial revolution, and marked the beginning of our commodity-obsessed world. It was a trailblazing era which depended on steam – and steam depended on coal, with the number of active coalfields doubling between 1851 and 1881.6 In the middle of Victoria’s reign, English inventor Henry Bessemer concocted a method for quickly converting iron into steel.7 Ships, bridges, buildings (and monuments) became larger. Global trade burgeoned. Via the Suez Canal, Britain imported tea, jute and rubber from India, and the empire became an economic powerhouse. The revolution’s affect on the human psyche was not felt immediately during Victoria’s era but became apparent in the generations to follow, and underpins our modern condition:

Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen still falls to you (detail), 2014, Project Arts Centre

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Hadley+Maxwell first materialised their sculpture of the queen in Australia as part of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, where they encountered the original Irish monument (now one of two bronze Victoria figures in Sydney).

Taking its place within an expansive body of work ongoing since 2011 and entitled Received Ideas, these artworks (including Graces and Exemplars, 2013, Schiller Vorhänge, 2013 and How to Kill a Buddha, 2012) are aesthetically linked by the presence of Cinefoil. A malleable material purchased by the roll from theatre lighting suppliers, the foil is employed by the artists in a performative printing process. On-site in Sydney at the location of the original monument, the artists used their fingers to shape squares of it around chosen sections of the statue. Slightly more robust than domestic tinfoil, pinhole spots of the aluminium core glint through the coal-like black matt surface when the material is moulded, more and more silver revealing itself the more the material is worked.

The three outlying figures in the exhibition at Project Arts Centre are also composed of Cinefoil, moulded directly from the three Dublin-based bronze figures which represented Erin and which originally sat at the base of the complete monument.9 The bits of printed foil were all collected: elbows and toes sitting inside more elbows and toes in stacks and piles of bits of bodies. These pieces of cast material were not reassembled into groups resembling each bronze figure, but united by type and aesthetically pinned in place in the gallery creating beguiling compositions. The figurative works were built from minimalist steel armatures which demarcated gestures.

Using rare earth magnets, Hadley+Maxwell gravitated toward coupling one piece of moulded body part with another of the same detail; mouths and lips tacked together built up layer upon layer. Large boots, little boots and bare feet churned in stationary motion across the scene. The Cinefoil contained a material memory of the monument that was, and the one it became as it moved across the city and the world, as well as of the girth-to-the-mill motion of industry that created it.

When historical works are brought into the art institution, the works themselves can become de-contextualised. As Denis Hollier observes: “instead of being the man who looks at a vase, the spectator must enter into its space and place himself in the position of the man who drinks.”10 In The Queen still falls to you, the Queen was reassembled by the artists to occupy the same volume of space as the seated bronze original, immediately – but unknowingly to the visitor – placing them on an equal footing with that authentic monument. What was physically missing from the gallery was as noticeable as what was present (as Hollier would put it: “next to the vase, is the ghost of the man who drinks”11). The void where once, “large

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Emer Lynch

THE QUEEN STILL FALLS TO YOU

crowds assembled inside and outside...detachments from all the troops… his Excellency…massed bands”12 occupied space, made the exhibition all the richer. A deliberate absence was maintained in relation to our senses of smell, taste and especially touch. What was missing was the heat generated by the crowds – the people-shoving, elbows jolting, eye contact, smiles, contagious feelings of contempt. The physiological effects of being in a crowd can’t be felt but can be imagined in the gallery where the mind can traverse reigns of power and eras of time. Because the artists attended to our aural and visual senses so deliberately, our self awareness is heightened and the mind fills gaps. Our attention is thus drawn to the other thing that’s missing: her. But she was never present in the first place. Only a symbolic representation of her attended the unveiling ceremonies, a sculpture of her self. In the gallery, Hadley+Maxwell’s re-appropriation of the 1908 study of her strikes an affect, with moments of restraint in the exhibition’s score underpinning this ebb and flow of absence and presence.

The entire scenography established by Hadley+Maxwell used the gallery environs to add circumstance that spanned the historical and contemporary legacy of Victoria, obliquely questioning who constituted/s the Queen’s audience. Hadley+Maxwell’s treatment of the Queen Victoria monument – as physical object as well as conceptual subject – generously proffered an immersive insight into the dormant life of a monument diplomatically loaned to Sydney by Dublin and subsequently shipped across the world. This monument outlived its welcome in the Republic of Ireland but was readily accepted elsewhere. En route, she cast off the brand ‘Famine Queen’ to embrace her new post outside the QVB in Sydney. The Queen still falls to you played on history, boldly spinning the triangle of power so that the intelligent organ of the figure – the brain – is directed toward the gallery’s floor. The artists aided a slippage in time in which a shadow of the Queen Victoria monument is briefly re-installed in Ireland’s capital. This return is so much softer now than the original unveiling, or indeed the monument-toppling decommission sixty-seven years ago. Only her ghost is allowed to return. She arrived here in an aeroplane formed of a light aluminium skin and, no longer made of the stuff of monuments, she holds new 21st century values as a contemporary artwork.

1 Elias Canetti, ‘Crowds and Power’, 1978, The Continuum Publishing Corporation, New York, p.397 2 Queen Victoria was given the brand ‘The Famine Queen’ by many Irish nationalists. Further, her visit to Dublin in 1900 was largely in honour of Irish soldiers who had fought in the Boer War, and with a view to further recruitment. www.centerforbritishart.org/Victoriamonuments/220/monument-to-queen-victoria [accessed 31 January 2016] 3 Yvonne Whelan, ‘Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and Politics of Identity’, 2003, University College Dublin Press, p. 88 Support for the commission of the monument was largely driven by the Anglo-Irish Ascendency, and The Lord Chief Justice who proposed the commission overlooked the fact that Queen Victoria was referred to as ‘The Famine Queen’ by many Irish nationalists.

4 Yvonne Whelan, ‘Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and Politics of Identity’, 2003, University College Dublin Press, p. 91.

John Hughes was commissioned as the sculptor of the bronze figure of Queen Victoria, but the stonework of the monument’s base was designed by a French architect and was quarried and carved in Vienne, France.

5 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Objects’, Verso, 2005, p. 31 6 Gregory Clark and David Jacks, ‘Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1869’, University of California, Davis, p.14 7 ‘The white book of steel’, World Steel Association, 2012, p. 16 8 D.H. Lawrence, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, 2012, Penguin Group, London, p. 215 9 Yvonne Whelan, ‘Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and Politics of Identity’, 2003, University College Dublin Press, p. 89.

The bronze figure of Erin presenting a wreath to a wounded Irish soldier is stored in the private grounds of Dublin Castle. The other two bronze figures representing peace and fame are displayed inside the government building Leinster House.

10 Denis Hollier, ‘The Use-Value of the Impossible’, October, Vol. 60 (Spring, 1992), p. 8 11 Ibid. p. 9 12 Yvonne Whelan, ‘Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and Politics of Identity’, 2003, University College Dublin Press, p. 88

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Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen still falls to you, 2014, Cinefoil, steel, magnets, 6-channel sound, LED light-programming, dimensions variable.

Installation view, Project Arts Centre

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Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen still falls to you, 2014, Cinefoil, steel, magnets, 6-channel sound, LED light-programming, dimensions variable.

Installation view, Project Arts Centre

Biographies Hadley+Maxwell live and work in Berlin, Germany. Their installations, performances and writings, employ diverse media to rework iconic images and traditional forms as they are expressed in pop-cultural, artistic and political movements. They cut into reified narratives via direct touch, transposition and refiguration, putting into play the absences cast in relief.

Hadley+Maxwell have been collaborating since they met in Vancouver, Canada, in 1997. Public presentations of their work have include solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Kunstverein Göttingen (Germany), Smart Project Space (Amsterdam), and Project Arts Centre, (Dublin), and group exhibitions at galleries and festivals including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunstraum München, the Power Plant (Toronto), the National Gallery of Canada, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France), Witte de With (Rotterdam), the 4th Marrakech Biennale and the 19th Biennale of Sydney.

They are currently working on a major public art commission for Waterfront, Toronto.

Emer Lynch is an independent curator based in Dublin. Recent projects include Foaming at the Mouth, visual art spoken word project cocurated with Tracy Hanna, 2014 – ongoing; Fathom and Span, solo exhibition by Mary-Jo Gilligan with performative lecture Layout for Broadcast Gallery by Achim Lengerer, 2014; These Liquid Brinks, solo exhibition

by Caroline Doolin, The Guesthouse, Cork, 2013. She is Artist Liaison at mother’s tankstation, Dublin, and a member of the seminar group The Enquiry.

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The Queen still falls to you Hadley+Maxwell Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published

by Project Press based on the exhibitions programme of Project Arts Centre.

Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-56-5 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artists, Writer and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers.

Text: Emer Lynch Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan Series Editor: Emer Lynch The Queen still falls to you Hadley+Maxwell 26 September – 11 October 2014 Project Arts Centre, Dublin Curator: Tessa Giblin Acting Curator (2014): Kate Strain Assistant Curator (2014): Emer Lynch Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager: Claire O’Neill Artistic Director: Cian O’Brien

Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported

by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Hadley+Maxwell, Emer Lynch, Juliana Engberg and 19th Biennale of Sydney 2014, Dublin Theatre Festival, Canada Council for the Arts, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the National College of Art and Design.