ART ISSUE - The Vacuum PART 2

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OLD MUSEUM ARTS CENTRE U

Open Door Day Since opening its doors in 1989 the Old Museum Arts Centre has sold over 250,000 tickets for over 4000 shows; it’s had 157 exhibitions and has delivered 411 projects to more than 200,000 participants.

OMAC will open its doors to the public for the last time on Wednesday 27 January 2010 from 10am until 8pm.

You are invited to pop in and have a look around the unique and charming venue that has been the home to some of the best shows that Northern Ireland has had to offer.

Get out of breath walking up the many stairs to the room at the top of the building, where the first mummy in Ireland, Takabuti, was unveiled 175 years earlier. Leave a video message about your OMAC memories and experiences in the video booth set up on the OMAC stage or simply just have a coffee and enjoy a reminder of all past OMAC shows with memorabilia from the past 20 years on display.

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the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

December 2009

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

the vacuum published by Factotum. Made available Free

ASK ORME O’BAKERY Your problems solved by our very own art doctor.

A TALENT OF NO IMPORTANCE Help! I’m so confused! This time last year I was a happy believer in the existence of artistic genius, and that all our most celebrated artists have got to where they are through towering creative talent. But now, as my new job has led me to becoming cosy and intimate with the Belfast art scene, I realise artistic talent is of NO importance. An individual’s dynamic networking and social-skills gets an artist infinitely further than does artistic talent. Project spaces at various galleries across Northern Ireland appear to be filled up by friends, and sometimes even relatives of, people on the gallery’s board/ staff. And when it comes to galleries mounting group shows who put out a call to the general public for submissions, is there any point in the budding artist in applying, no matter how gifted and hard-working they may be, if they do not know any one involved in that particular gallery? Because from what I can see, these group exhibitions, like project spaces, are filled only with artists who are on intimate terms with curators and gallery staff, in other words, people who move in the right circles.

Is this only over-the-top conspiracytheorizing on my part, or has artistic genius been replaced by marketing and networking genius? If so, what will happen to those artists out there somewhere right now, who are introverted and socially inept, but with radical artistic ideas that could change the world? What will happen to those artists who refuse to sacrifice time spent on art creation cosying-up to different figures in the local art scene?

Yours most sincerely David Davidson

Dear David, Whoa there tiger..

First of all, are you the same David Davidson who’s regional operations manager for Sainsbury’s in Northern Ireland? If so, well done on the bilingual branch in Andytown, it’s nice to know that all that time on the blanket wasn’t wasted after all.

Back to your queries – shall we try

R LE

T TER and get that trouwithin their control – reaOF THE blesome old notion sons that are often supposed MONTH of ‘artistic genius’ off to have something to do with the table first of all – it’s that most mystifying term, ‘taste’: clearly just going to get in the a word used to lend some veneer way otherwise. I wonder, is your expeof objectivity to what are ultimately rience of art mostly based on watchthoroughly subjective or instrumental ing The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust choices, viz. ‘I want to give this artist a for Life? If so, I have to disappoint you show because their work will look a bit and let you know that real artists don’t like some of that other stuff that’s been spend all their time running around doing well, and that will make me look clutching their hair, rolling their eyes cool;’ ‘I want to fund this artist because and generally being all tortured because they are going to dignify the pisspoor the Pope / Gauguin won’t let them paint social projects that my party are supthe ceiling / have another absinthe. I porting, by putting a really patronisdo speak from experience too – I lead ing community art project together in a sad, cosseted life, and have very few a postal district that I have never been friends who aren’t artists; mostly what to and have no intention of ever going they do is read books, watch TV, teach, to;’ and so on. sit in their studios looking at Facebook Now, art is certainly quite an incesand working out ideas using mostly tuous old game, and there are indeed rational processes. They try ideas out, a very large number of particularly they discover that they don’t work first lazy, particularly dull, and particularly time, so they attempt to come up with fashion-obsessed curators and gallery formal resolutions to their problems directors out there. But the ‘nepotism’ that don’t compromise the orginal idea. argument is often overstated. The galSee? It’s really pretty dull. Artists don’t lery’s giving a show to someone who’s get to be successful because of ‘towering friendly with people who work there? creative talent’ – please! They get where Well, that’s not really so surprising, they are the same way that anyone else is it? Northern Ireland is a very small does, through a combination of good place with an even smaller art comfortune, being in the right place at the munity, concentrated for the most part right time, being able to exploit opporaround its two main cities. If you work tunities properly, and, of course, having in visual art, as a professional artist, some ideas that nobody else is having, you’re going to get to know everyone at least not in the same way. And, since in the trade pretty quickly – if you you mention it, a great number of artdon’t, you’re not really doing your job ists are introverted and socially inept, properly. If you want an exhibition in and of them, there are some who are a gallery, of course you have to try and very successful and some who aren’t. cultivate some sort of relationship with But I sense that this isn’t really the gist the people who work there: you have to of your question. talk to them about your work, tell them Art is an activity that is very much what it’s about, why you make it, why concerned both with genuine ideas, they should show it. Sometimes these insights and interrogations, and with relationships are developed over the the exchange of what we might as well course of many years. Let’s face it, if call (since someone else already has) you were opening a gallery and pour‘cultural capital’. That’s to say, it’s about ing a lot of your own money into it (or what the artist wants to do or say, and working your arse off to raise public about what other people – curators, funds for it), would you give shows to gallery directors, funders, collectors people who you respected, whose work and dealers – are interested in seeing you had observed over several years, or hearing (sometimes this is disguised and who you knew you could work as a pretence to know what it is that with and rely on, or to someone you ‘the public’ are supposed to want to didn’t know from Adam, but who had see or hear). Artists can find their work sent you a few crappy photos of their becoming successful for a whole range paintings that they’d got done down at of reasons that are not particularly Snappy Snaps?

Is being an artist like being Charlton Heston or Kirk Douglas?

No, it isn’t.

No. 44

That’s not to say that curators aren’t going to programme the work of people they don’t know personally, but their judgement of the work, and of whether the artist is capable of delivering a good show, is going to be very much connected with their judgement of the artist as an individual.

Yes, very often, truly excellent work gets overlooked for the crassest reasons.

But the situation really is a lot more complicated than you make out, and particularly in Belfast a very independent arts ecology has developed that embraces a lot of very vital, self-organised activity, through which young talented artists are able to present their ideas and experiments in a supportive environment.

If an artist is thinking of putting work in to one of the big open submission exhibitions of which you speak (for instance, EV+A), the chances are that their work will be looked at in a ‘blind’ selection process, usually by a curator who’s not from Ireland. So the selection or non-selection of the work will be entirely down to the ability of the artist to communicate their proposed idea, and the degree to which that idea resonates with the existing interests of the curator. It really is as basic as that.

This is why tutors at art colleges spend so much time trying to persuade their students of the importance of good communication skills – like writing an intelligent, interesting artist’s statement, for instance.

If you want a show, have you tried asking for one?

BUOY OH BUOY I would like a convincing explanation of the sculptures outside Belfast Art College. Do they represent trees?

Inverted buoys representing a nautical past?

Thanks, Neil Clavin

Find art hard to navigate?

Read the label.

Dear Neil, I have to ask how hard you’ve looked for the ‘convincing’ explanation that you crave? You could, for instance, have taken the trouble to glance at the plaques that were installed at the base of the three sculptures when they were first officially unveiled.

I’m not sure why you think the buoys are inverted: how would their distinct shapes be discernible in the water, if they were all the other way up? Also I understand that Capt Robert McCabe, of the Commissioners of Irish Lights (who maintain the navigational lights

the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

December 2009

around the coast of Ireland) is not very happy at the colours that the buoys were painted (they were given a fresh coat only this year). The conical buoy would apparently originally have been black, and the truncated cone should have been red. Both are now different shades of blue. The point, surely, is that this is artistic licence: they are no longer navigational buoys, they are art.

The maritime pedant could presumably also point out that positioning the three buoys so close to one another, when their respective shapes and colours would all have been intended to communicate different things, would result in a terribly confusing situation for the potential seafarer; or that having them perched several feet in the air, above dry land, is not the most convenient place for a navigational aid. These are all quite vacuous observations, not in the least bit relevant to their function as public sculpture.

A buoy of similar vintage is visible, also mounted as a piece of public art, along the quays in Drogheda (near the social welfare office on Custom House Quay, if you must know).

ZERO INTEREST For your ‘Art’ paper I would like to know why art galleries in Belfast never put on types of work like graffitti art and tattoo art? Most people I know have zero interest in paintings and sculptures.

Jediboy

Dear Jediboy, What a coincidence. Most people I know have zero interest in graffiti or tattoo ‘art’. I suppose if anyone wants to see graffiti, they can go and look at a wall (we have a lot of them, and they’re free, and if they get bored of all the inane teenage scrawl, they could go and look at one of our lovely new government-approved murals of George Best or C.S. Lewis or happy people holding hands across the divide or some such other nonsense). And if I want to look at tattoos, I suppose I can go and sit in the Sandy Row Rangers Supporters’ Club. Or how about looking at the photos in a tattoo parlour?

More seriously, if you really have zero interest in paintings and sculpture, why would you want to go to an art gallery at all? Your complaint is a little like asking why Waterstone’s don’t sell battered sausages, because you don’t find books very tasty. Galleries are for the display of art: that is the use that they

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

the vacuum published by Factotum. Made available Free

have evolved over many decades. This is not to say that an artist couldn’t make art either about or with graffiti or tattoos, but then the art would be in the gallery because it was art, not because it was graffiti or tattoos.

One last thing: isn’t the point of graffiti that it is a type of ‘painting’?

really a first year thing??

On a broader scale, I don’t agree with the art world as how it being made out to be and how I see it. Galleries distance normal folk. There plainly not accessable. It appears to me that artists make work for other artists. My dad is very creative and is always making wooden sculptures of anything he feels is visualy interesting. As a kid he was the one to show me how important it is to express myself.

He is an natural artist. However he would never go to a gallery. And if he did, he wouldn’t understand anything in it. What’s with all this conceptualism. If you have it, I feel it’s the artist duty to justify it. A plague on wall with this... is far more interesting than the dimentions.

I would want my art to be as accesible as film and music. But is not.

Any help you can give me will be really appreciated. It’s important what I study, and at the moment I’m seriously questioning if how art is taught today is where I want to be.

Thank you steff mcGarrity, Dublin

SHOPPING ART What is ‘Public art’?

Fishhoopwoman

Dear Fishhoopwoman, The thing called ‘public art’ is often neither public nor art. It is usually used by city councils or private developers in an attempt to legitimise or naturalise decisions that have been taken about the future development of so-called ‘public’ space. But what is meant by this adjective ‘public’? Merely that the public are to have it inflicted on them every time they come within three miles of the space that it has been chosen to adorn? Particularly in Northern Ireland, we have very little grasp what ‘the public’ really is, or could be. When we think of ‘public’ space, we usually mean recently-privatised space – Victoria Square, for instance.

I can do no more in this limited space than refer to the words of the artists Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan: ‘The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property. The social function of public art is to subject us to civic behaviour. The aesthetic function of public art is to codify social distinctions as natural ones.’

WHAT ART IS ABOUT Dear Vacuum, I just started college this year, studying visuals arts. I’m having alot of agony in this course. I feel disconected from what I’m being brought into. I’m passonate about all art forms at the moment, be it installation or paint, sculpture or film. I want to dapple in it all. I picked visual arts because it allows me to do this. However... I feel lost. What I’m being asked to do at the moment, and how my course is structured, along with the tutors. I want to drop out. I’ve been advised this is first year, its always shit, you never get to do what you want and the tutors lack interest. Its all too true! But is it

Is Victoria Square public? No, it’s not.

Dear steff mcGarrity, I am doing my best to understand this rather imprecisely aimed cri de coeur coeur, but please forgive me if I miss the point, whatever it might be, of your letter. We in this office have made a decision to communicate primarily through the English language, though God knows that that may one day come back to haunt us; failing that, smoke signals can sometimes be effective, but in the absence of a clear grasp of either, we can only make do with what we are given, and in this instance, whilst we have some recognisable words and even a few discernible sentences, we’re still a long way off a cogent course of enquiry.

How do you know that your father would not understand anything in a gallery, were he somehow to find himself in one? (Let us suppose that a wily outreach and education officer has crept up behind him, slipped a chlorophorm-soaked handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and bundled his suddenly limp frame into the back of an old Morris Minor; he comes round, his head pounding, his eyes struggling to focus, in a darkened space, with just a couple of video projections visible in the gloom…) Why would he not be able to comprehend what he would find?

Can’t you credit your father with some intelligence? Has he not read books?

No. 44

Has he grappled with complex ideas? Is he interested in the course of humanity, in the turmoil of history? Has he not lived longer than you have, seen things you haven’t? Does he have any interests at all beyond his lathe, his bandsaw, his dusty workshop? Does he not push his half-moons down his nose, look over their rims, and, focusing on nothing in particular, wonder whether there might not be a world of questions and answers beyond the novelty clothes peg that his horny hands are instinctively honing to realisation?

Do you get the point? Probably eighty per cent of art students go off and do something else other than become professional artists. They nearly all get something out of it though. If you feel you’re at a crap college, don’t blame ‘art’ or ‘conceptualism’ or some other vaguely-conceived target; ask what you’re putting into it yourself. You get nothing for nothing.

Who says that film and music are ‘accesible’? Why would that even be a good thing, necessarily? What about difficulty? What about using your intellect, exercising the fleshy grey lobes bouncing around in your cranium?

If everything was ‘accessible’, can you imagine how boring, how inane, how utterly, indescribably awful the world would be? If galleries were all somehow based on regurgitating a reassuringly accessible art based on some Blue Peter idea of ‘creativity’, would that make them better, or would we not all find a way to smuggle a razor blade into our room after lights out? Why have you even gone to art college? To express yourself? If you learn nothing else about art, you must remember one thing – art is not about self-expression; it is about communication, and this is very different. No one need be interested in you simply ‘expressing’ yourself, by which I mean indulging yourself, telling us that you are sad or that the cat makes you happy. If you have something more engaging, more complex, more potentially rewarding to ask or to pose or to offer, you’ll find me all ears. In the meantime I’m going off to read a book by someone who’s got something absolutely arresting and intricate and beautiful that they want me to be able to understand, and I’m going to see if I can.

Orme O’Bakery

the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

December 2009

the difficulty of difficult art Colin Graham Is there such a thing as easy art, or something as intimidating as difficult art?

There are ways of looking at art, or reading literature, which make the easy difficult and the difficult transparently easy.

There are artworks which are simple on the surface and deeply confusing once you breathe in. And there are some works of art and literature which seem to make no sense whatsoever. But if you think the world is a sensible place, that it’s logical, that it couldn’t really be any other way, then there’s a fair chance that you will find a large proportion of art difficult and a lot of literature unreadable. And if you think in that way maybe you’d be better doing something other than circling an installation or opening Finnegans Wake.

Even what seems a straightforward text can suddenly become all difficult and tricksy. Mark Twain, for example, is hardly the most punishing of reads.

Apart from adjusting the reading ear to his myriad twangs and accents, there is nothing too complex in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. They are just stories told with a bit of pizzazz. Yet Huckleberry Finn is prefaced by the following author’s note: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Take these words at face value and the novel suddenly becomes something other than its apparently homely and amusing story. Apart from being a threat to the reader’s life, it is a kind of taunt to find difficulty here if you dare. Because Huckleberry Finn does have a narrative, a moral and a plot. What do we do then?

Is Twain just being humorous? And if he is, is it funny? The humour is serious, and this is a plea to be read seriously, of course. It’s also an insistence that there is a reason to think as you read. Twain, a simple author, becomes Twain the ludic writer, and the reader becomes self-conscious about what they are doing as they read.

Heightened self-awareness is often the key to ‘difficult’ art, and even more often the explanation for the (apparent) complexity of modern art and writing.

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

the vacuum published by Factotum. Made available Free

It’s not a new phenomenon though. At the end of the nineteenth century The Browning Society was established for ‘the study and discussion’ of Robert Browning’s poetry. Browning was still alive at the time, and would occasionally turn up at Society meetings to give unhelpfully long and obscure explanations of his even longer and more obscure poems. (Indeed the poems he wrote after the founding of The Browning Society got increasingly bizarre, as if to make sure the Society had something to keep it busy). Yet Browning had always given the key to some kind of understanding of his poems in the poems. If you read Browning’s poems as sincere, you read naively. If you read them as stories with a ‘moral’ you will look for a moral you already knew, and it won’t be there. Browning speaks through personas who think with a twisted (often psychotic) logic. That’s only difficult if you expect that a poem will be made from a mixture of lyrical honesty and a lesson in how to be a better person.

Browning’s language is complex, though it is not meaningless, and not even ungrammatical. He stands in a line which runs through to later ‘difficult’ poets, such as John Ashbery. At first read Ashbery is incomprehensibly difficult and very frustrating. But Ashbery is similarly not beyond giving clues, inside his poems, on how they might be inhabited by their reader. Ashbery’s poem Summer Summer, for example, talks about summer (assuming that is actually germane to the poem) as being made of ‘this iron comfort, these reasonable taboos’.

This could mean anything. It’s too difficult. Can comfort be iron? Isn’t that just a smart paradox? ‘Reasonable taboos’?

He doesn’t mean it, really. As with much of Ashbery’s work, the poem has already offered us a way to understand it. Here’s the first stanza: There is that sound like the wind Forgetting in the branches that means something / Nobody can translate. And there is a sobering ‘later on’, / When you consider what a thing meant, and put it down.

So there is a dual level of meaning; the sound which has a meaning, then its

failed translation – the failure is not just any failure, it is a failure to mean something, even though we expected that it would mean something. The wind and the poem were about to mean something.

They kind of promised to mean something, then they gave up (and because they gave up the word ‘Forgotten’ has lost its proper place in the sentence).

And then there is a third level, later on, another attempt to understand (‘consider’). Maybe this time it worked and was understood, but then maybe not – it depends on what happened when you ‘put it down’ (Tired of it? Finished with it? Frustrated? Finally got it?). The point is in the layers of failed meaning, in the successive attempts to remember and comprehend, and in the final ambiguous ‘putting down’. Summer says ‘this is how you’ll read me best’ – as a series of failures and forgettings, just like the way we all want to understand and then can’t. The difficulty is that the language is condensed – the ideas, however, are purely simple, but since they are about not understanding rather than ‘eurekas’, they take a shape and a form which is full of not understandings. If you find the

No. 44

idea of not understanding something annoying or unsatisfactory, then that’s what the poem will be to you.

The most curious thing about ‘difficult’ art is that it often comes out of a crisis of complexity solved by simplicity.

John Cage wrote of his turn to ‘experimental’ music: ‘I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh. I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication.’ For the artist Martin Creed, on the other hand, painting failed to communicate, so he has invented new ways to get to people, often with an art that is about little beyond that desire to communicate. For Cage his purpose was to write music ‘ to sober and quiet the mind’. So his music moved towards pure silence, just as Creed’s art tends, in the opposite direction, towards pure communication.

The end results are extremely difficult if you are not expecting them. But really they are no more difficult or simple than talking, reading, running or breathing.

PROGRAMMES 2010 RESIDENCIES

EQUIPMENT

The DAS Residency Programme for artists based in Ireland & the UK provides professional multi-media facilities for artists working in new media. 12 residencies are programmed annually, each lasting for four months.

DAS provides each participant with 24 hour access to a personal workstation including latest Apple Mac installed with relevant software. Residents have free use of DAS equipment and free access to the training programme.

DAS are now taking applications to the UK & Ireland Digital Residency for the period February - May 2010 Please have your applications returned by post or email by Tuesday 22nd December 2009 Application forms and additional information on the progrmme are available at: www.digitalartsstudios. com/residencies/

TRAINING DAS programmes over thirty workshops each year, training artists, �������������������������� new media technology. � � � � � � � � � � �

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Digital Arts Studios 37-39 Queen Street Belfast BT1 6EA

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the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

December 2009

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

the houses that art built a drama in three acts

old mack: a purveyor of pies lurach: another purveyor of pies art scincella: a bureaucrat dee cal: another bureaucrat van morris: a fish & chip van owner ACT ONE scene 1 A small paved public park in the shadow of a cathedral in Belfast city centre. old mack is sitting on a bench, staring ahead at some car parks and derelict buildings, lost in contemplation. art scincella and dee cal enter from stage right. art scincella: What of this barren land? Its factories have crumbled, its workers long scattered and turned to dust (Makes Makes a sweeping gesture over M city). Here we are on the cusp of a new millennium – like The Five Year Plan says, we need to spend some money! dee cal: Quite true, quite true. (art scincella is about to continue but cuts himself short as he spots old mack on the bench)…

the vacuum published by Factotum. Made available Free

G

Jason Mills The characters in this play are fictitious.

Any resemblance to local theatre companies, funding bodies or musicians is purely coincidental.

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

makers, as well as the best foreign imports, and the variety is second to none. art scincella: And how have your Lottery tickets been working out for you? old mack: (Looking away) Oh, you know... I win a bit here and there – enough to stave off my visitors’ hunger, but my house is old and cramped. If only I could afford a new house. (He He takes a Lottery ticket out H of his pocket and looks at it forlornly) But the numbers just never add up to anything substantial. art scincella: Pass it over here a second. (old mack passes him the ticket. Turning to dee cal). Do you have a pen? dee cal: Most certainly. (He produces one from his pocket and hands it over. art scincella writes the numbers on the back of his hand) art scincella: (Handing old mack back his ticket) Just keep picking those same numbers my friend, and some day the gods might smile upon you. scene 2

art scincella: Mack, I’d like you to meet my new colleague Dee Cal… he’s new to the country. (Quietly, to old mack). He’s the lovechild of Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam. They gave him a lot of money and sent him over here to keep him quiet. dee cal: Pleased to meet you. old mack: Meat to please you! (dee cal looks momentarily bewildered) art scincella: (Turning to dee cal) Ah yes, I should have mentioned, he’s a pie-man. old mack: There’s nothing I enjoy more than having people round to my house to eat pies. They’re definately the most delicious pies in all of Belfast.

(Looking earnestly from one to the other) The ingredients are provided by local farmers, delicatessens and pastry-

old mack is sitting alone in his small living room watching the television with a blanket wrapped around him to ward off the cold. His hair is longer and greyer than before and he has a substantial beard. He is clutching a Lottery ticket in one hand. We can hear the TV announcer call out different numbers. Every time this happens old mack looks down at his ticket and then up again at the screen. He becomes more and more excited, leaning forward in his seat and then standing up in front of the television. old mack: (As the announcer calls out the last number) Yes!! I’ve won! At last… a whole four and a quarter million pounds towards a new house!

(He He runs around the room whooping H and cheering, holding his ticket aloft) Good old Art! And maybe that chap Dee Cal will help too.

ACT TWO scene 1 lurach’s house in the Stranmillis area of Belfast. lurach and art scincella are seated in the living room area. On a table sit a selection of various sized pastry items and two steaming cups of tea. lurach: (Offering a plate to his guest) Would you like another slice? art scincella: Hmm, no thanks I’m quite full. (Pause) Er, I don’t mean to be rude but you haven’t had a very consistent record of high standards in recent years… this one doesn’t taste as good as some you’ve given me in the past – are you sure the ingredients aren’t a bit out of date? lurach: (Leaning forward, visibly agitated) Well what do you expect! I farm all the ingredients myself but my chickens are depressed and my pigs are poorly because of the conditions I’m forced to keep them in. No wonder they don’t taste as good as they could.

A sad chicken makes a substandard pie! art scincella: I see your predicament. lurach: (Suddenly looking forlorn) My friend Grimey McKee is out the back at this very minute snapping the necks of pissed-off poultry and writhing around in bovine innards so that I can provide the very best in homemade produce. My house is too small. My roof is leaking. And people still call me bourgeoise! (He puts his head in his hands and emits an involuntary sob) art scincella: Steady on old chap.

Wouldn’t you consider moving house?

I say, there’s going to be a fine new development down by the cathedral soon. You’d have the best pie-making facilities in the country! lurach: No, this is my home! I want to stay here and build a grand new house on my own land. I’ve been here since 1968! (He He reaches into his back pocket H and pulls out a Lottery ticket). If only I had the means to improve my lot!

That woman Abbey down in Dublin is able to create 30 brand new pie recipes every year and I struggle to afford the ingredients to develop even one! art scincella: (Reaching for the Lottery ticket) Here, let me see that. ( (lurach hands him the ticket and as art scincella studies it lurach gets

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up and walks over to the window) lurach: (Looking out towards the river) With the right facilities I could eventually fulfill my dream of exporting my pies to Europe and America. People stuffing their smiling faces every night with gravy dribbling down their chins (While While he is talking W art scincella is busy copying down the numbers from the Lottery ticket onto his napkin) art scincella: I hear you. (Getting up from his seat) Anyway, I have to go. (He opens the door, pausing on the threshold to say) In the meantime just stick to the same numbers every time you buy a ticket. And don’t give up hope… scene 2 lurach is alone in the hallway of his house. He has aged since the last scene and his hair is flecked with grey. It is early morning. He is wearing a dressing gown and is wiping sleep from his eyes.

He walks towards the door where a few letters lie on the carpet. He picks them up and shuffles through them before coming to a white A4 envelope. lurach: Ah! From the Lottery! (He H He tears open the envelope eagerly and scans the page inside) We are pleased to inform you… numbers in Saturdays draw… two million pounds… (He drops the letter on the floor and stands motionless for a moment) Yes!! At last I can start thinking seriously about my dreams of a new pie facility! (He opens the door and runs offstage from where we can hear him shouting) Art be praised!

ACT THREE scene 1 The same car park in which the play opened is now a construction site. Cranes move heavy concrete blocks into place and there is a sound of lorry engines and hammering. old mack sits on his bench observing this. His hair and beard are much longer now. lurach, whose hair has also thinned considerably, enters from stage left and stops by the bench when he sees old mack. old mack: Nothing to be done. lurach: What are you waiting for? old mack: I’m waiting for Dee Cal.

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December 2009

lurach: You’re sure it was here? old mack: What?

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

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exchange is cut short by van morris, who enters from stage right, approaches the bench and stands facing the two pie purveyors)

about increasing pie provision in the city by at least 100%. Surely there’s going to be some competition for customers?

lurach: That you were to wait. old mack: He said by the cathedral.

(Agitated). I’m closing up my old house at the end of December to concentrate on my plans for getting the new one up and running by the end of 2011. It was meant to be being constructed right now but Dee Cal hasn’t showed up with the money yet. lurach: (Sadly) My house has been demolished. I slept in the porch of the Elmwood Hall last night. I won’t have a new one until 2011 either. (Suddenly becoming animated) But when it happens it will be the most exciting thing ever to happen to pie-making in this country! old mack: Well no offense, but I think that my new house will be even more exciting! (lurach is about to reply but their

van morris: Excuse me but I was manning my chip van over there and couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I guess you could say we’re cut from the same cloth. But you got me thinking, is it necessary to have two new 17 million pound houses providing the same service? Especially since you also have to compete with that pompous old pie-meister Oprah Haas with her bungled facelift and new baby. (lurach and old mack exchange looks) old mack: But it’s not the same service… our pies reach the table in totally different ways. I buy the best ingredients from local farmers and he (nodding towards lurach) farms all his own. lurach: The city needs both of us! van morris: Yes but you’re talking

old mack: That’s why we need to work to increase the number of people interested in pies, so that we aren’t fighting over customers. It’s about doing things like trying to get pies into school dinners to give kids a taste for it at a young age. lurach: (Enthusiastically) And offering a free one to people who don’t normally eat them, then a halfprice one if they bring someone else along with them next time. Our fight isn’t against each other, it’s against supermarkets and manufacturers of microwave pies!

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lurach: But just because a lot of people like eating chicken pies doesn’t mean they aren’t tasty! It’s about having a balanced menu. In my new house I’ll have an underground pie laboratory where I can experiment with ingredients in test tubes and if they give positive results I can make more and serve them in the main dining area. van morris: Wouldn’t it be great if life was like this all the time. But I have to get back to the van. (Sighs) Been all round the world in that van. (van morris exits stage left) lurach: Strange chap. old mack: Quite. lurach: Shall we go?

van morris: Isn’t there a danger that someone will have to compromise their recipes and end up serving populist Oprah Haas-style pies? Like plain old steak or chicken rather than something more exotic, like (pauses for thought) peppered zebra?

old mack: Yes, let’s go.

(They do not move.)

OUT TO LUNCH ARTS FESTIVAL 6 - 31 JANUARY 2010

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Many involved in the arts complain that they do not understand the Arts Council’s decision making process.

Here, exclusively for The Vacuum, Iain Davidson demonstrates some customary methods employed to adjudicate funding applications.

poachers and gamekeepers An interview with Iain Davidson Iain Davidson worked at the Arts Council for nine years, specialising in craft and applied arts, visual arts and, briefly, literature. He also worked on the 2002 Imagine Belfast bid for the city of culture. He left the Arts Council this year and is now the Director of Down Arts Centre. He spoke to Richard West from The Vacuum.

we know what we are doing has any benefit at all to anyone?’ You can make a case in economic and social terms, saying that there is a return on your pounds spent in the arts. Every place or region is trying to make itself unique, trying to sell itself, trying to make itself look culturally vibrant. The arts are obviously a key driver within that.

Richard West: could you describe what the Arts Council is for?

Were you suggesting that we once funded the arts because they were good good?

Iain Davidson: The Arts Council is the body with responsibility for the development of the arts in Northern Ireland. It is what’s called a nondepartmental public body; a quango or, more charitably, an ‘arm’s length body’, independent from government administration. It’s a translator between the organisations and individuals that deliver art product and government.

The key role of the Arts Council is to ease that interface. It receives what’s called ‘voted funds’ every year from the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure and administers them, mostly through grant aid to arts organisations.

The other stream of funding the Arts Council receives is Lottery.

W don’t we start with fundamentals.

Why Why give money to the arts?

That’s a huge question. As an individual do I think we should subsidise the arts?

Yes, I think we probably should. They are an essential part of the cultural and social life of a region. A system has developed over the last 150 years based on the idea of the importance of the arts. I don’t think anyone says anymore we subsidise the arts because the arts are good, we say the arts give us social, economic and cultural returns.

Y You’re saying that we value them because of the quantifiable returns we get from them…

I didn’t say ‘quantifiable’, I should have maybe said ‘measurable returns’ because that’s how government’s changed in the last 25 years. There’s now an idea of indicators and benefits and measurements and metrics. And it all begins with the question, ‘How do

I’m not sure we ever funded or subsidised anything because we thought it was just a good idea. I don’t think in the 20 years that I’ve worked in the arts and the nine years I worked for the Arts Council, there has been a perceivable shift to a more instrumental idea of the arts.

What is an instrumental justification for funding the arts?

From the government perspective, the arts are competing with things as diverse as healthcare and education for what is, essentially, a limited pot of money. Even within the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure we’ve got museums and sport, so a case has to be made. This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing it’s just an obvious thing; a case has to be made using the language of government and the priorities and targets of government.

The question you would be interested in is, ‘How does that manifest itself in grant allocation?’

W can imagine a project that was We specifically targeted at fulfilling the funding criteria but actually, from the opinion of anyone seeing it in the round, would be of very low quality and of low value.

OK, well there are broad policy agendas in the public sphere, there are Arts Council priorities, policy priorities, strategy, but at the end of the day the Arts Council is the statutory body for the development and driving forward for the arts, and what the Arts Council has achieved fairly well is walking a line between supporting high quality and innovative, challenging projects

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and being able to make the case for supporting that sort of project to government. It’s translating what, in the public eye, can look bizarre, left field and irrelevant into terms that government can embrace, that is the vital function. So, it is almost a question about integrity and vision, and I think that officers certainly were aware when I was there that there was a necessity to have a quality standard but also to keep an eye on those ideals of innovation and challenge. Do the criteria used for assessment fully describe all the nuances of making art? No, probably not. But then I don’t know anything that would.

They select certain key aspects of the funding of the arts – so in that sense it could be viewed as reductive – but the purpose of assessment is to describe priorities and to have those priorities fit some kind of grander vision, which we call strategy.

stage one: a coin toss to determine if an application will receive funding.

More than one toss may be required.

Do you think being a good bureaucrat would mean you would stand a better chance at making a career as an artist?

Hopefully not, no.

Hopefully innovation, quality and challenge will always shine through. But then you also might ask if being personable will give you a chance at making a career as an artist, possibly the answer to that is yes.

Is it? I don’t know.

How did you think the arts organisations saw the Arts Council and public funding. Do you think they have a realistic idea of what the Arts Council does?

Northern Ireland is a small place and career artists are generally aware of what’s available and the processes. And I don’t know whether they are happy with the way that the process works or not, whether they are happy with the amount of money that’s offered. I think, on this one, it generally depends on whether you get a result or not, doesn’t it? And it’s very hard, it is hard to put in an application form and be judged and have your work judged. Everyone who receives or wants funding is competing for a finite resource and I think the argument we should all be making is that the cake is too small.

stage two: weighing an application to decide its funding band. Funding bands are traditionally drawn in crayon.

stage three: roll the dice and multiply by the number you first thought of. Like this number? You have just worked out next year’s funding allocation!

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December 2009

A more tricky question is whether the arm’s length principle of the Arts Council will work given the nature of local politics.

The question you are asking is ‘What is the likelihood of direct political interference in funding in arts and culture in Northern Ireland now there is a devolved administration?’ The whole environment is changing and the Arts Council will have to adapt to a changing environment. There will be the need to develop relationships with local politics which hasn’t always been so.

Is there going to be a greater chance of political interference?

One would like to say no. Though local politicians will obviously be the key in shaping and influencing public administration in Northern Ireland.

I would doubt there would be direct interference in individual grants.

That wouldn’t seem to be the best use of anyone’s energies would it? Until Northern Ireland is politically mature enough, no politician will be in post

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long enough to do any damage. They’ve got too many things to worry about across a range of areas. It’s a roundabout, they’re not there long enough, they’re on, then they’re off again.

You’ve had experience working with the Arts Council in Dublin and also some dealings with the other Arts Councils. How did they compare to Northern Ireland?

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, for its size, has a relatively big client list, but the organisations are quite small and that allows diversity. The challenge is to try and be small but not local. There are lots of things that are more difficult and challenging in Northern Ireland than in any other regions. I remember talking to a colleague from the Arts Council of Wales about national pride and having a Welsh opera and, of course, when you start talking about having that kind of pride in identity it becomes much more problematic and complex in Northern Ireland. That in itself is interesting isn’t it? The arts unpicking ideas about cultural identity could be much more

fruitful in Northern Ireland because of the tensions that exist, because of the difficulties in those conversations.

I’ve spent ages filling in applications and there is always some part of me that, when I’m filling these in, is saying ‘My objective here is to fill in the best form to get the most income to allow me to do the thing that I want to do, that’s exclusively my concern and I’m not interested in whether or not I’m actually fulfilling the priorities in this document.’ But is there is something corrupt about the pragmatic approach I’m taking?

Well, it’s got to be pragmatic. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, I always thought in terms of poachers and gamekeepers and I don’t think these are particularly healthy ways to think about it. The world is complex and we all have to find a way to make a case for the arts. That’s about working in concert rather than being instructed to do it, isn’t it? In fairness to Factotum you realise there is a need to act collegiately sometimes. There is a need for organisations to quiz and

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question the Arts Council actively, but there is also need for the Arts Council to be given the information to make the case to government in terms that government can embrace. And that’s the significant thing isn’t it, it’s making a case in the terms and the language and the objectives that fit immediately with government’s view.

Would you encourage The Vacuum to criticise the Arts Council?

I wouldn’t say you should have a quota of Arts Council criticisms, no. But there is a point in scrutinising any public body, it depends in the spirit in which that criticism is offered. Nobody likes having snowballs thrown at them pointlessly.

www.crescentarts.org

The Crescent Arts Centre is Belfast’s leading community arts venue.

The Crescent is centrally located and offers access and opportunity for participation in a variety of classes and workshops in dance, drama, visual art, music, photography, creative writing, and much more...

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Enrolment begins at our Open Night Monday 11th January 2010 from 6.00pm-9.00pm For further details about our programme contact: 165 Ormeau Road, Belfast BT7 1SQ Tel: 028 9024 2338 Fax: 028 9024 6748 Email: info@crescentarts.org Web: www.crescentarts.org

A RANGE OF CONCESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE

the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

December 2009

formative experiences I remember when I was 17 a school art class trip to Dublin. The visit took in ROSC at the Guinness Hop Store, which was a large exhibition of contemporary international art that included Gilbert and George’s photo panels. Second stop was David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photographs at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. I had been doing photography at school but this was one of the first times I had seen photographs in an exhibition. I don’t really remember much about the work, but to me, I was a photographer, they where photographers, it was all making sense. I bought catalogues for both shows which I still have, they were my first art books and my record collecting

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substitute. Two other photography books, on Dorothea Lange and August Sander (presents from my dad), inspired me at that point; especially Sander’s portraits because the reproductions were so good compared to my own attic-based attempts at black and white printing. This led to two terms of photographing people on the Ormeau Road near my school, in homage to Sander.

It was the start of me walking the streets of Belfast to take photographs which I have now been doing for over twenty years.

John Duncan

Ormeau Road, Belfast, April 1986

MAJELLA CLANCY

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formative experiences In late 1970, having escaped the shackles of the east Antrim countryside and the boiling tensions of the North, I was in my first term at university in Geordieland, and sitting in the night gloom of the halls of residence common room. There was a bar with cheap ale to be had and a communal Dansette record player. At that time I only owned one LP: On the Boards by Taste, but I was mixing with the sons and daughters of miners who had shed loads of vinyl, so the education had already begun! Anyway, on that night in walked Simon; he was one of the ‘heads’, a fine art student. Under the arm of his dyed waiters jacket (de de rigueur for the time, mine was lilac) he held a strange

looking LP which he placed on the Dansette turntable and turned it up. I was startled by what I was hearing, I’d certainly not heard anything like this before, it was Hot Rats by Frank Zappa and it utterly blew me away.

In so many ways this recording opened the doors to a deep interest and love of music; it’s not his greatest work or of the era when you think of Trout Mask Replica, Blue, or Astral Weeks, for example, but it was my primer and has had a more fundamental affect than the degree I was awarded 3 years later. So I salute FZ for his doo wop, blues, musique concrete, The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbeque, free improvisation, surrealism, general wackiness, independent spirit and liberation.

Brian Carson

queen street studios gallery Kevin Mooney

ALTERED REALITY

14 January – 20 February

13.1 – 21.2.2010 queen street studios gallery 3rd Floor, 37 - 39 Queen Street Belfast BT1 6EA [t] 028 9024 3145 [e] gallery@queenstreetstudios.net [w] www.queenstreetstudios.net

The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s [t] 02890 973580 [e] art@qub.ac.ik [w] www.naughtongallery.org

Open Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 4pm

gallery opening times Mon - Wed 10am -5pm Alternatively you can arrange for an appointment outside gallery opening hours. For more details contact the qss Gallery.

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December 2009

reviews howl!

The Lyric at the Elmwood Hall 17 November – 2 January Directed by John Hoggarth Conor Grimes, Alan Mckee Maria Connolly, Ciaran Nolan Doireann McKenna Tickets £17, £15

an evening with james ellroy Waterfront Hall 7 November

summer detention Kreative Konnectionz Black Box 2 – 5 November

ultimate ulster UTV (sponsored by Irwin’s Bread) 10 episodes 25 September – 27 November 8pm Friday

white christmas The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s 17 November – 20 December

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

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Howl!

The Lyric at the Elmwood Hall 17 November – 2 January

For those of you who suffer from mild Christmas schizophrenia, caught between good will to all and bah humbug, Howl! offers a humorous and often smutty distraction from both weather and joviality, replete with unnecessary punctuation.

A pantomime within a pantomime, Howl, the latest Grimes and McKee festive annual, has a simple plot – Patrick a lecherous and egotistical director (Conor Grimes), takes a break from his twelve-step programme to recruit a cast of flawed but comedic players for his comeback Christmas show.

Featuring in the ensemble are: the director’s ex-wife and ex-TV-weather girl Siobhan (Maria Connelly), whose fading fame is as apparent as her raging libido and affected North Down accent; Johnny (Alan McKee) a name-dropping TV doctor, full of bravado on making a triumphant return to the stage; naive beauty Jackie (Doireann McKenna) who – making her fictional and Lyric Theatre debut – is the unwilling subject of Patrick’s increasingly base affections; and Dex (Ciarán Nolan), a permastoned, gangsta-talking musical director come reluctant actor.

The show opens with a pastiche of Thriller, which manages to dispose of Thriller the obligatory Michael Jackson joke and the house rules in a single song and dance routine. In Act One cast and crew – the latter consisting solely of Patrick – piece together an absurdist production of Little Red Riding Hood.

The Lyric’s temporary home in the ramshackle Elmwood Hall gives an intensely odd feel to proceedings: effectively, watching the actors act as if they’re rehearsing. There’s an eerie realism at work here which, intentionally or not, strikes a cringe-worthy note. That’s cringe-worthy in a good way mind, like listening to two strangers copulate in the room above only for their bed to collapse.

Act Two takes us to the pantomime proper, which degenerates to chaos as Patrick, now the wood cutter, succumbs to his demons, Johnny, the big bad wolf, succumbs to incontinence, and Jackie, in the guise of Little Red Riding Hood, tries her best not to succumb to Patrick’s drunken advances.

Some of the comedy on display here is familiar: there’s an anarchic homage to Young Frankenstein, in which the fictional cast stumble through a ludi-

crously complicated version of Mel Brook’s Werewolf/Where-wolf routine.

At other times the humour can be a little obvious. The thing is though, it doesn’t matter. Grimes and McKee know their audience well and work at them relentlessly with a mixture of word play, slap-stick and good old music-hall. At all times it is unashamedly Northern Irish.

The audience lap it up. And they’re part of the action too, encouraged to enter into the spirit of things in true ‘he’s behind you’ style. This is Howl’s greatest asset. The actors seem to revel in behaving like cheeky school children and they fully expect the audience to do the same. It allows Grimes and McKee to break down the wall between actor and spectator, to get comfy with their audience and to strike up a rapport.

Praise shouldn’t be confined to the show’s stars. Each cast member adds something unique to the experience – Maria Connelly gets plenty of comedy mileage out of her wonderful character acting and bottomless pit of accents, Ciarán Nolan’s gangly frame lends it self to some great physical comedy, and Doireann McKenna does sweetness and light with hidden bite splendidly.

Howl isn’t Dickens – you won’t leave the theatre carrying any profound insights into man’s inhumanity to man or the true meaning of tinsel. It is ruthlessly silly and in being so manages to be everything a festive comedy revue should be without having to resort to pummelling the audience with a giftwrapped breeze block.

Aidan Stennett

An evening with James Ellroy Waterfront Hall, Belfast 7 November

No matter how much you love books, readings by authors can often be a disappointment. A number of poets, for instance, are surprisingly bad at reading their own work, while the inevitable audience question and answer session, which serves as an epilogue to most events, is often the cue for the obsessive or the deranged to make long rambling statements rather than actually ask anything.

Therefore, I approached James Ellroy’s visit to Belfast with some trepidation. He was reading in the main auditorium of the Waterfront Hall – a brave move by the estimable David Torrans

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of No Alibis – and the ground floor was fairly full. I felt like a fraud. I knew that Ellroy inspired devotion, and radiated a sleazy mystique, in a way few other authors do, and a healthy audience meant a large quotient of Ellroy groupies. Beyond a holiday read of The Black Dahlia and sitting through the film of L.A. Confidential a couple of times, my knowledge of the writer, by contrast, was sketchy. It can be bad enough sitting through an evening with an author you’re familiar with, never mind one who, literally and metaphorically, is from a different continent.

However, once Ellroy strode on to the stage and began to speak I was captivated. For a start, the man is huge.

Even though I was sitting near the back, he seemed to loom over me, a tall bald Tarantula, clad incongruously in a chunky pullover and beige chinos. He positioned himself behind the lectern, spread his legs wide, and began with a long, dynamic rant which encompassed W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and some readings from Blood’s A Rover Rover, his latest novel, among other things. His overriding message was what devious, venal, untrustworthy bastards writers tend to be. It was the most entertaining speech I’d heard in ages.

During all this, the host for the evening, local crime writer Stuart Neville, was perched ineffectually to the side of the stage. Unusually, he was equally ineffectual when interviewing Ellroy. This is not a criticism. Ineffectual is good. I remember going to hear the Leitrim genius, the greatest Irish novelist since Joyce, John McGahern, read a couple of years before his death.

The local interviewer, the very essence of an arid North Down arriviste, spent more time telling us what he thought of McGahern than letting the writer himself speak. It’s a common failing at local events, as interviewers facetiously compete to be as interesting as the person they’re talking to.

Neville doesn’t make this error. His role is to cue James Ellroy up, and he knows it. While he stuck a little too rigidly to his cue-carded questions at times, he had the good sense and manners not to initiate a conversation. Instead, he happily let Ellroy tell us what a devious, venal, untrustworthy bastard he is.

So, amongst some discussion of books and characters, we get the sectioned James Ellroy, the breakdown Ellroy, the drunk and drugged Ellroy, the philandering Ellroy, the Kennedybating, Obama sceptical Ellroy, all delivered in a booming rasp. He’s probably presented all these versions of himself

the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

December 2009

a million times before, but it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like the first time.

He also speaks openly about his mother’s murder in L.A., when he was only 11 years old, and how he turned her death into a plot, before finally embarking on a real, and frustrated, search for justice almost four decades later. And he tells us how he took the money from Hollywood and ran when they optioned The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. In contrast to his laudatory afterword about the film in the paperback version of the novel, he’s especially scathing about Brian De Palma’s version of the Dahlia.

My God, I’m enjoying things so much by this stage that even the dreaded questions from the audience sound damn good. Sure, a few too many people are keen to tell Ellroy, at length, how glad they are that he’s here, but the questioners themselves just want to hear the man speak a bit more, so they too set him up and just let him slug away.

The evening ends with Ellroy grasping Neville and Torrans in the middle of

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the stage as the audience rise. I’ve never seen anyone make an embrace look so menacing. I walk to a friend’s house to watch the heavyweight bout between David Haye and Nikolai Valuev. It’s a sorry excuse for a fight. I think James Ellroy would have eaten them both alive.

Robbie Meredith

Summer Detention Kreative Konnectionz Black Box 2 – 5 November

Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of shit in my time. I once watched a guy shove a cheese sandwich up his arse. One time I read Variant Variant. Oh yes, I’ve seen a lot of shit in my time, but this, this actually went so far as to genuinely piss me off.

Summer Detention is the hapless brain fart of Kreative Konnectionz [note to Ed, not a typo, that’s ‘K’ for Kreative – it’s young, it’s fresh, it’s a little bit out

Mon 8 – Sat 27 Feb 2010 Box Office 9038 5673 Book Online www.lyrictheatre.co.uk

there – and yes that is indeed a ‘z’ where an ‘s’ should be], a collective of amateur and professional performing artists.

The play itself is a musical adaptation of John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. Fair enough, we’ve all seen that, couple of kids stuck in detention having a barney.

Well this time, Summer Detention is set in a university, where a couple of students, at least one of whom I managed to decipher is in his final year (which by my crude calculations makes him at least twenty two years old – y’know, an adult) are being inexplicably reprimanded in a detention hall – yes, in a university.

The most startling aspect of all this is that somehow the whole thing was apparently written, produced and performed without anybody involved somewhere along the line questioning it. I sat watching, wondering to myself that surely somebody, at some stage, somewhere, surely to Christ raised their hand mid-rehearsal and said, ‘eh, guys, anyone else think this is, you know, wrong, I mean as an idea... you know, in it’s entirety?’ I bet they did. They must have, so I can only assume that writer/ director Patrick G. Hughes at that point put his fingers in his ears, spun around in little circles and replied, ‘Na na na, I can’t hear you, na na na.’

Bad theatre is everywhere. Bad poets, they’re thirteen to the dozen, same with writers, I should know, but there is something about bad theatre that actually can manage to offend and exasperate even the most sympathetic of audiences. At least when you read a shit book you can close it, chuck it in the fire, make a note of the author’s name and start a Facebook hate group against him. At least with bad poetry, even the worst rhyming ramblings seldom last more than a minute or two, but with bad theatre you have to sit there, sit through it, squirm as the impulse to get up and run crashes around you every few minutes.

With Summer Detention, I endured wave after wave of utter nonsense; of limp dialogue; of Northern Irish actors using American accents for no conceivable reason; of stupid tacked-on interpretive dance (a bandage to cover a never clotting wound of bullshit narrative and unrefined clichéd metaphor).

They threw in a bit of audience participation at the end too. This was a play that was badly in need of something – a change of pace, a new tangent on which the narrative could cling to – in the vain hope that somewhere along the line something might happen that felt suitably like a conclusion, some sort

No. 44

of pay-off so that the whole thing could end and we could all go home cursing the ten pound admission (that’s ten pounds – count them) we forked out.

Sitting through bad theatre is like, well, sitting in detention.

Wait, maybe that was the point... ....no, no it wasn’t. The point was about how university degrees aren’t worth all that much these days, and if you get one you’ll probably still end up manning the self service tills in Tesco, your only noticeable skill being an ability to type a four digit code into an electronic number pad at a speed too quick for the human eye to see.

Kreative Konnectionz endeavours as a Kompany to ‘amalgamate art forms such as film/media, art, music and scenic design’ using ‘original stage-plays from emerging writers and re-imagined versions of classic and contemporary texts’.

On their website the Kompany list their production plans (threats?) for the next three years, including a re-imagining of the Bard’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. I hope for their sake that this time they take something of a closer look at the premise before pen is put to paper otherwise the ‘star-cross’d lovers’ could well end up professing their love to the backdrop of Belsen concentration camp. Or maybe it’ll be another John Hughes movie, Home Alone perhaps, in which a thirty six year old man named Kevin sits at home furiously masturbating while two burglars attempt to break in and convert him to Christianity. It would make as much fucking sense as this.

Marlowe Canning

Ultimate Ulster UTV 25 September – 27 November

Everybody loves a good list and lists – at 2am when slightly groggy from a bottle of red wine that should have been a glass and pinned to the sofa by the growing weight of intolerable ennui – make excellent television. However, this autumn’s return of Ultimate Ulster with Frank Mitchell, billed by UTV as ‘the most talked about TV show in Northern Ireland’ and shown in a prime time Friday evening slot, did not have quite the same effect. Ten episodes of Top Ten lists presented by the most pitifully earnest man in the country and voted for by people who actually read Northern Irish newspapers had nothing going for it. The word ‘uncreative’ peppered

the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I

December 2009

most of my rants as I mysteriously continued to tune in every week, and I’m not entirely sure if the criticism should be directed more at the programme makers or the numpties who apparently voted. The sociologist in me was writhing with frustration at the terrible choice of research methods, indistinct categories and apparently manipulated coding of responses.

Even on deciding to switch off any academic evaluation (it’s only telly after all) there were still plenty of excuses to throw random objects at the TV. The blithe ignorance of contributors, the laziness of programme makers – did they fix the results so that they only had to make one trip west of the Bann?

Have you noticed how many UTV Live outside broadcasts are conducted on the Ormeau Road? – the sugar-coated tourist friendly bullshit that comes off more delusional than aspirational, and the pure audacity of those involved in this propaganda exercise to think that anyone living in our wee provincial backwater wants to be told how great we’ve got it.

Belfast (Northern Ireland)

‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth

the vacuum published by Factotum. Made available Free

What I would love to explain to them is this: there are a very large number of us in Northern Ireland who had the chance to escape but chose to stay. Universities, jobs or new age communes beckoned us from across the seas with the promise of freedom from political and cultural stagnation, rubbish nightlife and religious grandparents. Perhaps we left for a while but found something was calling us back. For some reason we have decided to accept that this is the place we will make our lives. Whatever the driving force behind this may have been, I’m pretty sure that none of the items on Frank’s lists had anything to do with it. My own hypothesis is that we’ve stayed because somewhere deep down we love that Northern Ireland is just a bit shit. We are the people who take trips to other European capitals, look at some innovative piece of interactive public art and grin as we note that it wouldn’t last 5 minutes in Belfast before someone would have it wrecked. We’d be bitterly disappointed if a Translink vehicle ever turned up on time. We have copies of In magazine

that we shoplifted because we wanted to laugh at how shit it is but couldn’t bear to increase their revenue. The only time we’ve ever been in the Cloth Ear was to take an emergency dump. And our favourite personality is Sammy Wilson because he’s such a prize twat.

So keep your Ultimate Ulster Ulster, UTV, or use it as a tourist promo and get some more poor suckers to come visit.

We’ll be the most welcoming people they’ve ever met. As long as they feck off again.

Kellie Turtle

BEN ALLEN KATIE BLUE LESLEY CHERRY COLIN DAVIS RAY DUNCAN IAN FLEMING LAURA MCGUIRE DEIRDRE ROBB GEORDIE ROBB

CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR EXHIBITIONS Thursday 3 December 2009 until end of December and Thursday 7 January 6 – 9 pm by appointment T: 028 9045 2299 or 07963 423143 Opening Times: Mon - Fri 10.00am - 5.00pm Sat 10am - 12.30pm

Unit B5 Portview Trade Centre, 310 Newtownards Road, Belfast BT4 1HE T: 028 9045 2299

amount of what I privately call ‘pastel blah’ – indistinct and woolly visual ramblings that make you feel as though you’ve got caught in a thicket of particularly sticky candy floss and can’t escape. Actually, give me Palmolive / Stripy Soap Dish every time ahead of these offerings. At least it’s sharp, clean and definite – underwhelming considered alone, it turns out to be a useful antidote to pastel blah. I had to keep looking back at it to clear my retinas.

There’s a distinct air of whimsy to many of the pieces. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in moderation. I enjoyed Michael McCrory’s silver and ebony teapot, forged soup ladle and candle holders, which together looks like the

White Christmas The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s 17 November – 20 December

This seasonal confection is billed as a group show featuring white works by Irish artists. Not all the pieces are white, though, or even predominantly white.

But the overall impression is of pow-

Brendan Jamison Old Fireplace (2009)

CREATIVE EXCHANGE ARTIST STUDIOS

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dery lightness, a Narnia-style fantasy, with plenty of glittery bits thrown in for luck. Admittedly, it’s a rather sugarheavy show – literally, in the case of Brendan Jamison’s carved sugar-cube turret, chimney and fireplace. Like the substance itself, these structures give you a pleasant little rush when you encounter them at first, but the delight wears off after a while. (The impulse to flick them over and grind them underfoot is very strong. Probably just as well they’re safely protected in their little glass cases.)

Where colour does appear in this show, it’s a relief to the eye, especially Natalia Black’s richly textured Winter Towpath, a bright, thick slab of sinuous colours. It resembles a birthday cake gone brilliantly wrong, and what looks like a square of nailed-on white icing completes the similarity. I was less impressed by Philip Flanagan’s equally colourful Shining Stone – Winter Series.

More like Bar of Palmolive on a Stripy Soapdish, truth be told.

Unfortunately there is a certain

Rachel Dickson Worn Out (2009)

table setting for some fantastic secret wizard’s tea party, the sort of gathering which would probably end in someone being stabbed through the heart by McCrory’s incredibly pointy and lethal looking fish slice. And Rachel Dickson’s wonky white porcelain shoes, the heels of which are adorned with miserable little statements of lonely repression such as ‘I avoided arguments’ and ‘I don’t want them to say I’m not nice’, made me smile. But too much whimsy casts you adrift in Narnia, as though a talking faun or a centaur might pop out at you at any moment. And there is an excess of whimsy in this show.

Tucked away in the far corner are three pieces by Rhonda Paisley. Apparently, she studied fine art at Bob Jones University, the same private, nondenominational Protestant fundamentalist establishment in South Carolina that also gave Daddy his doctorate.

On the Tiles is an image of a jolly glittery rooster who certainly looks like he would enjoy a debauched night on the razzle, whacked out on the devil’s buttermilk. Meanwhile, Snow on Slemish has a Christmas-card feel, accentuated by the deployment of copious quantities of blue glitter. It’s a faux-naif piece.

Maybe not so much of the faux.

Hovering delicately between moneyed opulence and gentle wit, White Christmas is a safe show that won’t scare the centaurs.

Finvola O’Catháin

Exchange, noun: an act of giving one thing and receiving another (esp. of the same type or value) in return/a visit or visits in which two people �������������������������� or groups from different countries ��������������������������� stay with each other or do each other’s jobs/a short conversation; an argument/the giving of money for its equivalent in the money of another country/Mechanism, noun: a system of parts working together in a machine; a piece of machinery/a natural or established process by which something takes place or is brought/a contrivance in the plot of a literary work.

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Increasing regulation of public space, restrictions on travel, routine invasions of personal privacy - these are the starting points for an interrogation of the demands and denials of freedom alongside artists’ responsibility to actively engage with the political. Simultaneously functioning as a debating chamber, an installation of esoteric and popular media and an archive display, Exchange Mechanism seeks to challenge the absence of spontaneous political encounters from everyday life.

Over eight weeks, Belfast Exposed will operate as an alternative political space, opening up a platform for discussion, debate, campaigns, presentations, talks, speeches, performance and all forms of public engagement. If you want to take the platform as an activist, organizer or speaker send an expression of interest, setting out your ideas, alongside a short description of how your proposal relates to the Exchange Mechanism themes. ������������������

Kiri Barker (Publicity Manager) 028 9023 0965 info@belfastexposed.org

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