Critique

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique

Edition 56: July – August 2021

A.K. Burns, The Dispossessed, 2018, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts, 2021.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Sheila Rennick ‘Screaming on Mute’ Kevin Kavanagh Gallery 6 May – 5 June 2021

Sheila Rennick, Bye Bye Bar, 2020, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 cm; image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Sheila Rennick, Summer 2020, 2020, oil on canvas, 140 x 140cm, (SR029), ; image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Sheila Rennick, Monkey Magic, 2019, Oil on canvas, 70 x 65 cm (SR010); image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

THE BRITISH LABOUR Leader Keir Starmer’s recent admission that the traditional left had lost touch by failing to listen and engage with the societal grassroots that they claim to represent, their inability to parse and solve the discontents that led to Brexit and the subsequent vacuum that the conservative right have shamelessly and ruthlessly exploited for political gain, feeding on bias and unsubstantiated narratives and fuelled by editorially free digital spaces, has been well documented in the UK and elsewhere. This space between unheard inchoate articulations of coping class needs and the absence of shame as a regulating and moderating force within the political class came to mind as the context for considering the practice of UK-based Irish painter Sheila Rennick and her recent solo exhibition, ‘Screaming on Mute’ at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Rennick’s paintings sit comfortably within a painting lineage that contextualises the macro socio-political in the micro machinations and absurdities of a specific social milieu that ranges from Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress to Weimar Expressionism and more recently to painters such as Genieve Figgis’s grizzled aristocracy. Although, unlike Figgis, as Rennick goes native in the post-Brexit jungle, her characters are more likely to be clad in trainers than tiaras. In tone, Rennick’s worldview resists punching down; however, they are not overly infused with empathy, sentiment or compassion either. Rennick’s gaze comes closer to a deadpan bemusement at where we find ourselves.

Many painters have experienced the challenge of negotiating a field that has the weight of a long historical tail, so while there are some classical allusions in her use of tondo supports and Rubenesque figures, in their material construction Rennick’s paintings do not seem overly hidebound by traditional formal constraints around colour, drawing accuracy or composition. There are no rules to be learned and then broken here, perhaps because they never existed to begin with. The paint application builds layers from brisk thin under painting to thick fresh impasto. As a colourist, her palette tends toward pastel powder blues, tinted oranges and unmodulated pinks that are iced on as the painting progresses, like an ABBA song in which the melodic sugar rush can sweeten the lyrical toothache that lurks below the surface. These instinctual and unfiltered production values feel entirely integrated

with the meaning and tone of the narratives.

Where Hogarth’s eighteenth-century narratives are characterised by their moral and redemptive tone, the protagonists in Rennick’s soap operatic dramas are defiantly twenty-first century in their boundless non-judgemental world and there are no obvious moral arcs or heroic journeying. The connective tissue for the actors in this theatre of the absurd is the digital age of blended work arrangements, Tinder hook ups and Instagram self-regard. In Working from Home (2020), the proverbial ‘pram in the hallway’ is crawling on the floor of a kitchen-cum-dining space, where pandemic work practice and domesticity merge into an overwhelming cocktail, fuelled by wine and fast-food takeaways. In Zero Perks (2020), a sterile open plan office, two male employees engage in horseplay as they gesture toward an isolated female with overtones of a toxic male dominated work culture. In Summer 2020 (2020), a plane plummets into the sea, witnessed by beach goers astride an inflatable unicorn and beside Guinness towels, only to emerge comedically on the other side of the composition.

Placed in and amongst these psychodramas are a menagerie of animals both domestic and exotic – foxes, flamingos, monkeys, dogs, whales and ponies – all of whom bear witness dispassionately to the foibles and absurdities at play and are conceivably wiser and more knowing than their human counterparts. Emojis abound as a preferred option of emotional shorthand. Taken at face value, this could sound like grim kitchen-sink realism but the paintings are delivered with a buoyant sense of fun and humour. Each painting has a clear narrative proposition yet leaves enough lateral space for viewers to draw their own conclusions.

Perhaps these characters are ciphers for a western capitalist society that theoretically is structured to satisfy all human desire. What happens when nothing is denied or inaccessible? The characters in Rennick’s paintings seemingly populate a world of capitalist abundance consisting of sun holidays, instant digital gratification and flexible supported work culture. Yet there persists a pervasive sense of vacuity and lack of nourishment that, like Starmer’s ignored and unheard classes, are worth unmuting for.

Colin Martin is an artist and Head of the RHA School.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Critique

Fiona Hackett ‘The Long Disease: LA Stories’ RHA Ashford Gallery 10 May – 6 June 2021

Fiona Hackett, Untitled, from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 63 m x 44 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.

PHOTOGRAPHS ACHIEVE THEIR poignancy by freezing their subjects within a moment of time. “Time stood still”, we often say, when something stops us in our tracks. But time doesn’t stop. Time, as photographs remind us, is always running out. Eventually staged in May of this year, Fiona Hackett’s exhibition was deferred from September 2020, and this unscheduled hiatus seems to play into the meaning of the exhibition itself. What happened in those intervening months; the accretion of time on those sunny streets, the fixed smiles of her human subjects, already dead, drawn out beyond initial expectations.

Hackett presents an unusual coupling here: a set of framed photographs of Los Angeles streetscapes, and a series of obituary columns, enlarged and printed out from the pages of the Los Angeles Times. The buildings depicted also carry their own depictions, their walls painted with murals suggesting a glamour beyond their ordinary façades. The human subjects memorialised in LA’s historic newspaper are glamorised too, less in their grainy headshots, than in the words of the anonymous staff writers responsible for summing up their lives. “All photographs are memento mori”, Susan Sontag wrote.1 Photography, memory and death seem naturally intertwined. Perhaps this unusual coupling is not so unusual, after all.

A large photograph, Untitled 4 (2020), shows a painting of Gary Cooper – though it could be someone else, since all the works are untitled – a giant figure holding a flight helmet and goggles, the orb of the moon framing him like an ancient halo. A pair of concrete kickers at the base of the painted wall suggest the mooring stations of a car park. But Gary won’t be stopping long; there are too many brave new worlds for him to conquer. Hackett’s photographs are relatively flat, her focus on façades resulting in the plane of interest being largely horizontal – the flatness of the prints themselves corresponding to the flatness of her scenes. This lack of photographed depth is complicated by the illusionistic depth in the painted murals, the photographer and the anonymous painters entangled within the illusionistic and the real.

Like American photographer Stephen Shore, Hackett likes to use street signs or telegraph poles as framing devices, her shallow depths of field punctuated by these vertical elements. This can also have the effect of making the scene appear like a passing frame. The largest photograph, Untitled 2 (2020), shows the façade of a

white, single storey building, its roughly plastered wall hosting a black and white image of Sophia Loren. A former Miss Italy and Oscar winning actress, Loren combines the glamour and gravitas of an old-school star. Smouldering and chic, a no-parking sign frames her on the right, while on the verge in front, two real cactus plants anchor her image to terra firma, making gentle play with the painted textures of her unseasonable furs.

The show is arranged so the printed obituary columns and accompanying headshots are shown together in an irregular grid. There is no direct correspondence between the individual obituaries and the variously sized, framed streetscapes occupying the other walls. Instead, we get to think about them separately – the connections develop in our minds. Like the figures in the murals, all of these faithfully departed saw their manifest destinies in the Golden State. But Eden, to paraphrase Robert Frost, will always sink into grief.2

Timothy Howe died peacefully at home in 2014. Tim had been a surfer. He raised pigs. He loved cooking and Jazz. His obituary ends with how “his dark humour and insatiable love of women will be greatly missed.” Who provided these extraordinary details? Who believed his “insatiable love of women” is what counted? Or is that an example of his humour, a parting shot in the manner of Spike Milligan’s, “I told you I was sick”. Julie Payne ‘came of age’ in the company of Humphry Bogart and Doris Day. Later, she married the famous screenwriter, Robert Towne, before reconnecting with her high school sweetheart – a first love renewed for the end of time. In her portrait, Julie is breezily glamorous, her floppy fedora framing a pretty face with panda eyes. It could be a publicity still for a modern movie-star, but all it is now is the saddest kind of promotion.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin. A book on his recent drawing practice, 20 Drawings, designed by Peter Maybury and with a text by Brian Fay, was published in June.

Notes:

1Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin Books, 1979) p 15. 2Robert Frost, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, first published in the collection New Hampshire (Henry Holt, 1923).

Fiona Hackett, Untitled (Cropped to square format), from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 12.9 x 110 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.

Fiona Hackett, Untitled, from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 42 x 29.7 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

‘Light and Language’ Lismore Castle Arts 28 March – 10 October 2021

LISA LE FEUVRE is the executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation1. She has foregrounded Nancy Holt’s work in this exhibition, with her opening remarks stressing the importance of thinking and of asking questions through the experience of art.

Holt’s Electrical System (1982) is a site-responsive piece2. A network of more than 70 lightbulbs is connected via conduit pipework to the electrical system of Lismore Castle. It is designed to externalise hidden networks that connect the architecture to the landscape. We may wander through this maze of lightbulbs.

Are the matrix of pipes and wires comparable to the roots and branches in the gardens? Could these systems fail?

There are ‘thought prompts’; inscriptions carved by micro waterjet in sterling silver, displayed at intervals throughout the gallery. These are works by Katie Paterson in response to Holt’s conceptualisations and they whisper to you as you drift.

“Objects soaked in moonlight for over one million years” (2016)

“The Universe’s lights switched off one by one” (2015)

Light and language were entangled concepts for Holt. She expressed her most pressing concerns in her concrete poetry3; Sun, moon, water,

sky, earth, star – the cosmos contained by the frames and reflections of the human eye, by a pool of water, or by the lens. American artist, Matthew Day Jackson’s work, Commissioned Family Photo (2013), comprises 82 photographs of the artist and his family taken by a military camera, designed to record the extreme light waves and shock reverberations of nuclear detonations. This is chilling work; more evocative for being placed in the intimate setting of the upper gallery, surrounded by Holt’s concrete poetry and other writings. “The world focuses And spins out again, seen.” A.K Burns’ 13-minute 16mm film (transferred to HD video), Untitled (Eclipse) (2019), shows a total solar eclipse in 2017, through footage from a field in Nebraska.

What will the world be like when the sun dies – or with a different solar pattern – like on Mars?

The film is projected onto an angled screen – the film grain is thus amplified. The colour looks washed out – jaded, from another time. There are flares and bokeh, refraction and reflection, wildly ranging focus – ominous and unsettling.

Using her locators4 or ‘seeing devices’, Holt was always focusing and extending the limits of vision and perceptual significance. AK Burns does this with The Dispossessed. Located in the

lower gardens, the function of the barriers is dissolved by glamourising and contorting them into shapes that invite their transgression.

In Boundary Conditions (2021), Irish artist Dennis McNulty creates a geolocated audio walk via The Echoes App. This evokes The Trails series, where Holt and associates experienced the landscape through sound words and image – an idea that is extended by McNulty’s use of geolocation5. The theme of an accelerating dystopia is continued in McNulty’s Maybe everything dies… (2013), where the lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song, Atlantic City, are spelt out in haunting, digital time, on a minimalist structure – an apotropaic eye? Does ‘the digital’ frame the limits of our being? Interested in the sculptural relationship to experience, Charlotte Moth has created Blue reflecting the greens (2021) – a 90 cm blue mirror disc, mounted against a wall in the castle grounds, designed to reflect sunlight and foliage of the gardens in a blue-green cast.

Is the reflection (this reality) real, or is it an illusion?

Jennifer Redmond is an artist, writer and editor at mink.run and at The Unbound,

an online platform for moving image and hybrid writing collaborations theunbound.info

Notes:

1The Holt/Smithson Foundation was set up in 2014 to develop the distinctive creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. It will end in 2038. Holt and Smithson recalibrated the limits of art, changing what art can be and where art can be found. Their art, writings, and ideas were the fertile foundation from which contemporary art has grown. 2The term ‘non-site’ was used by Land Artists to signify work that was situated within an exhibition space. A work was ‘site’ if situated on the land. 3Nancy Holt, ca. 1970, typewriter ink on paper 11 x 8 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. 4Two of these ‘locators’ are in this exhibition; one in the riding house and one in Carthage Hall. They are made from steel pipes, drawing medium and black paint, in variable dimensions, according to the site. 5This work will be available globally from 3-6 September 2021 on lismorecastlearts.ie

Nancy Holt, Electrical System, 1982, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts, 2021; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, © Holt/ Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York.

Charlotte Moth, Blue reflecting the greens, 2021, installation view at Lismore Castle Arts, 2021.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Critique

HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland The Glucksman, University College Cork 11 May – 31 October 2021

THINKING OF ‘HOME’ today, it is hard not to attach its suffix ‘less’, while ‘housing’ is stuck with its roommate ‘crisis’. The group exhibition, ‘HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland’ at The Glucksman, turns its glance towards a more general sense of home, one tied to notions of ‘belonging’ and ‘national identity’. This show is the third in a series connected to the gallery’s programming for the decade of centenaries. It also arises more obliquely from a unique moment in history, when people were largely confined to their homes during the global coronavirus pandemic.

The first work encountered in the show alludes to the refugee crisis. Martin Boyle’s Somewhere Else (2017) – thirty-six pieces of crinkled, reflective golden material, derived from torn-up survival blankets rotating on the wall – contains connotations of shelter, while making reference to that displaced and distant ‘other’ of home, ‘somewhere else’. On tables across from this are placed a series of eight 3D-printed black MDF models of buildings with accompanying text, one of which is the fascist era Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, re-framed as the City Hall of a re-imagined capital of Ireland. The text utilised in Doireann Ní Ghrioghair’s Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara (2019) is from the early 1940s and written by the architect of the Garden of Remembrance while he was a member of an extreme right-wing group that fantasised about Ireland as a Catholic Fascist hinterland. The work probes an absurd and sinister imaginary that has only recently been forcefully contested in Irish society.

Three artists respond to the theme through painting. Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s work, Teorainn No.6 (2019), uses a layering of large brushstrokes to depict what looks to be a shack on wheels. Viewing the large horizontal brush strokes representing the planks of the ‘shack’, one tries to make sense of another internal structure that seems to be hidden within this ‘limit/boundary’. Kathy Tynan and Ciara Roche’s paintings are similar in style, each depicting ‘unremarkable’ interior and exterior scenes, respectively. Where Roche depicts shopfronts, most interesting at the level of signage and text displayed on these buildings, Tynan’s interiors play with notions of empty spaces and ‘paintings within paintings’.

Sara Baume’s Talisman (2018) assembles 100 little houses, made up of combinations of basic 3D shapes – pyramids, cones, cubes and cuboids. It is simple but very effective. The serial use of shapes nods to LeWitt, while the constructions just looked strange. Somehow this display has reduced architecture to an absurdity: “Is that all houses are… a few shapes stuck together?” Opposite is James L. Hayes work, consisting of plaster casts of the back of a canvas, repeated 63 times. With the canvas supports and interior on display, we are looking at the ‘architecture’ that allows the canvas to transmit images. A second work, Homegrown (2017), consists of a unique bronze cast of three stalks of asparagus, tied together by a loop of string, wound numerous times around their width.

Kerry Guinan’s Landscapes (2018) consists of two photographs. One depicts a field with reeds blowing in the wind, while in the other, a building developers’ hoarding abruptly curtails our view, an allusion to the ‘cutting off ’ by private developments of swathes of our cities.

Julia Pallone Gate Keepers (2012-19) consists of snapshots of the ubiquitous plastered walls that defend the lawns and bungalows of rural

Ireland. Amanda Rice’s photographs play with making-strange remnants of older architectural endeavors, while in her video, Site Where a Future Never Took Place (2015), the camera moves slowly through a disused building, the soundtrack an ominous hum.

Julie Merriman and Tinka Bechert engage notions of ‘home’ at the level of style – the former with prints employing repeated images of housing estates to form off-kilter grid designs; and the latter, in New Flags (2020), by repurposing patterned fabrics to create textile assemblages attached to canvases.

The rural aspect of Irish identity is touched upon in two videos – Mieke Vanmechelen’s atmospheric Residual Minority (2019) and Treasa O’Brien’s The Blow-In (2016). Vanmechelen documents the birth of a calf to a drone soundscape that includes an organ-like motif, surprisingly adding a mild celebratory tone to the video. O’Brien’s film portrays some inhabitants of the community of Gort, County Galway – a mix of locals and ‘blow-ins’ from Brazil, Romania and the village down the road – through the eyes of a main character, who interestingly has a sense of liking her own mode of ‘not belonging’.

Eileen Hutton’s video, Becoming (2020), is a short two-minute loop depicting a swallow snuggling into its nest. This display of the simple pathos of animal existence works nicely with the theme to shift our thoughts into the fundamentality of some form of home or stable habitat for the flourishing of all species. Similarly, Brian Duggan’s more conceptual piece, Breath I Mean Something More Than Air (2020), displays documents and filters from measurements of air quality. It makes us think of the natural environment and technological innovation as integral contributions to what we call home.

The show contains interesting approaches to the theme of home yet fails to fully engage with some of the most current topics connected to this key socio-political issue, such as the continued failure of government to invest in a comprehensive social housing policy, the sweetheart land deals for developers, and the bulk-buying of Irish real estate by investment funds, which has resulted in escalating homelessness, precarious rental situations and individuals being priced out of cities, due to the core issues of supply and affordability. Not that an exhibition focusing on the housing crisis would change anything, but it would serve to bolster the exhibition by offering insights into the contemporary material conditions necessary for a sense of home to be built.

John Thompson is an artist, writer on art and philosophy and researcher whose interests are conceptual art, politics and materialist philosophy.

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara, 2019, and Martin Boyle, somewhere else, 2017; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artists and The Glucksman.

Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Teorainn no.6, 2019, oil on canvas, 183 x 183cm; image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Richard Mosse, ‘Incoming and Grid (Moria)’ Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 11 June – 29 August 2021

THE BUTLER GALLERY welcomes visitors to the Irish premiere of two highly acclaimed screenbased works by Kilkenny-born artist, Richard Mosse. This is one of the first main exhibitions since the gallery relocated from Butler Castle to its newly renovated site by the river. Both works detail the often-fatal journey of refugees and migrants into the European Union and the infrastructure that’s employed along its Mediterranean borders. Grid (Moria) (2017) focuses on one particular camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. A fire in 2020 has since destroyed the camp but four years ago, Mosse undertook to document the facility and its inhabitants, producing a six-minute, 16-channel video work, whose scanning motion provides a brief survey of this open-air site and its surrounding area. Presented as part of the Arts Council’s ‘Brightening Air/Coiscéim Coiligh’ – a ten-day season of arts experiences in outdoor places – the work was displayed on one large screen, erected outside of the gallery building. The mechanical operations of each divided section work in tandem to illustrate a picture of captives awaiting their release.

Incoming (2014-17), which has a running time of 52 minutes, is presented indoors as a large three-channel projection. The video starts with one central screen of the triptych active, and two black screens on either side. In a darkened room, the sound and controlled climate makes for a hospitable but nervy environment. There is just one long bench from which to observe this

work but seeing is simply the act of confirming and allowing to register what you have heard. The tearing open of fabric. Cutting. Breathing. The left screen comes on as the full extent of the visual continues to be drawn with sounds. Skeletal remains are revealed before the screen goes black and our attention is placed again on the central screen. A bone is sliced through with an electrical saw until there is an unmistakably real spray of black fluid shorn from the marrow of the deceased. It is fair to say that the only way one might stomach this sort of visual content is through the almost metaphoric quality of the technical equipment, used here by Mosse to convey what is sadly a routine occurrence that we are both aware of and blind to.

In an earlier project set in Africa’s Congo Basin, the artist used saturated reds, pinks and purples to bring warring militia and the lands over which they fight into to a sort of hyper life. Where the locations and people of The Enclave (2013) acquired the characteristics of a colourful if troubled community, Incoming offers a haunting black and white portrait, again using military-grade camera and lens technology to show us what we cannot ordinarily see. If the armed Congolese tribes of that widely successful series appeared far from everyday life here in Europe, Incoming is about bringing the story nearer by showing us how close to it we really are. In that sense, it follows a simple narrative structure, but that depends on how much of the film you watch. From the autopsy we move into

the open air of holding facilities, where children and adults are observed day and night as they make the best of the conditions and what few freedoms they offer.

The camera used to deliver these black and white images illustrates not light but heat and at times we are watching all three screens, something that isn’t really possible given their size and proximity. At other stages, just one screen focuses our attention, and this too is not always easy, as night-time sea rescue is followed by loss of life and the harshness of survival that predominates any aesthetic or moral consideration. Dappled light warms whatever it touches, and the moments of magical transcendence appear at times to shimmer as light and heat fuse, bringing into focus the nature and culture of human existence. As a viewer, what lifts you also keeps you seated; but as the film’s composer Ben Frost has said elsewhere of his often tensely sonic output, you will be waiting a long time for the base to drop. In that sense and others, this work’s sympathies provide the basis for an excoriation of the leading causes of mass migration and the containment of people, outlining simply another accepted feature of the military-industrial complex, from which we all await release.

Darren Caffrey is an artist and art writer currently based in the Southeast.

Richard Mosse, Grid (Moria), 2017; image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Critique – Book Review

What Artists Wear Charlie Porter Penguin, 2021, 376 pp.

THERE IS A glossy exuberance to how people dress in Dublin right now, markedly different from how we all looked a few weeks or months earlier, shuffling between home and the supermarket. Emerging from a pandemic – back to studios and exhibition openings – means a change in how we present to the world and how we dress for work, even if we are only re-describing our work selves to ourselves. We are all changed, and we may choose to signal those changes, and the possibilities they open up, through what we wear.

A graphic designer friend often wears a pencil in his top pocket. He doesn’t really use it, but the pencil reminds him and his clients that his work is based in craft. Another friend, an artist who works mainly in video, describes how she cuts her nails before a big project, a residual ritual from her training in ceramics.

In Charlie Porter’s new book, What Artists Wear, a number of artists describe an attachment to a particular item of clothing worn in the studio; others, Frida Kahlo or Picasso for example, are identifiable by a particular clothing item or style. The studio wear is often an old garment that used to be worn ‘out’, or workwear from another making or fixing based profession, adapted so that it is fit-for-purpose. Sometimes it involves wearing the same garment repeatedly until it takes on a role, similar to but not exactly like Winnicott’s description of a transitional object, a ‘blankey’ or comfort item that has accumulated smells and patinas from previous work.1

How is what artists wear different enough from what other people wear to merit special attention? How artists wear clothes is often imagined as stemming either from a desire for flamboyance or unconcern (or accidentally flamboyant unconcern), close to the common portrayal of a preoccupied professor as ‘nutty’. Porter’s book undoes this with careful concern, both for the clothing and the wearer. Where he doesn’t know the artist and what they tended to wear, he visits their clothing and picks over it for us or elicits a reliable testimony from someone observant and close. This is how we discover that Joseph Beuys’s (often emulated) hat functioned as a way to cover over a metal plate in his head, which used to get cold.

Early on, Porter identifies a ‘defiance’ in relation to how artists wear clothes, but it could also be considered ‘taking liberties’ with materials, etiquette, and status. There are

descriptions of crusty patches on cashmere, paint splattered overalls under Comme des Garçons suits, and Agnes Martin’s fittingly quilted Sears and Roebuck work jacket, all of which demonstrate a particular approach to suitability or appropriateness.

There’s a slippery cliché that artists are class-migrators. Porter addresses this by looking at some of artists’ clothing as workwear, clothing for making, often borrowed or hacked from other labours. Porter notes Andy Warhol’s switch from the chinos he always wore, to black jeans and then to blue jeans which were a more legible link to his working-class, middle American roots, as well as ubiquitous city wear.

Bill Cunningham, the photographer and chronicler of fashion in New York, dressed unfailingly in a blue workers’ jacket from the French department store, BHV. Described as ‘bleu de travail’, it was picked up for about 10 euro in a DIY shop in Paris and functioned as a personal uniform – specific but unremarkable – which afforded Cunningham the possibility of gliding from streets to runway shows as he documented what other people wore, the jacket’s handy pockets filled with film and lenses. After Cunningham died in 2016, photographers gathered at New York Fashion week wearing versions of the blue jacket (now known as ‘The Bill’) as a tribute. Cunningham must have known that this might happen.

In What Artists Wear, Porter often writes in a long ellipsis, gently returning us to an item of clothing in a way that defines how its symbolism has altered. Yves Klein wears a tuxedo while a group of women, employed by him, performatively imprint their body shape in his patented Blue onto canvas or a wall. General Idea had parodied this in Shut the Fuck Up (1985), where we see a rather abject stuffed poodle covered in blue paint spinning in front of a large painted X. Porter takes the menace in the distance and power-signalling of Klein’s tuxedo seriously – “Tailoring is not neutral”, he notes. Much later, after having described the queering/ querying of the male power suit by Georgia O’Keefe and Gilbert and George, he remarks on how David Hammons oils his own clothed body, leaving the bluish imprint of his jeans on the paper.

Mark Leckey spoke about ‘casuals’ in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios a few years ago and his film, Fiorucci Made

Me Hardcore (1999), documents this form of dress, as worn at Northern Soul events. For Leckey and his peers, casual clothing was something that could only be worn by the ‘welloff ’ and so labels like Fiorucci became desirable as a way to overturn this. Charlotte Prodger worries on the possibility of appearing queer in a rural setting, where the nuances of what she is wearing may not be read. David Hockney describes how his father wore a suit decorated with cut-out paper dots. “He taught me not to care what the neighbours think”, Hockney tells Porter, but if the neighbours hadn’t noticed, his father may not have done it, and Hockney’s subsequent experiments with dress could be read as a rehearsal in audience, as well as aesthetic, development.

There is a devastating moment when Porter, by his own admission, assumes that a paint-covered pair of loafers belong to Jackson Pollock. They are Lee Krasner’s; Pollock’s are pristine. Earlier Porter has told us that her career suffered because of his alcoholism and mental illness. In this light, Pollock’s clean shoes seem as troubling as Yves Klein’s tuxedo.

Porter leaves out, probably rightly, some kinds of specific performance wear and wearable sculpture, such as Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé Capes, or Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric performance-forcing works. VALIE EXPORT’s chaps and Lynda Benglis’s dildo don’t get a mention either. But these categories are different: they are costumes or actual artworks in themselves. This project covers everyday dress practice for artists, from workwear to awards ceremonies; all part of the job, but not the job itself.

Vaari Claffey is a curator based in Dublin.

Note:

1Donald Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1953, 34 (2), pp 89-97.

Richard Hamilton; photograph by Tony Evans / Getty Images. (Artwork: Kent State, 1970 © Richard Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021)

Barbara Hepworth, 1948; photograph courtesy Bowness.

Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, C-print; photograph © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Critique – Book Review

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021

Midfield Dynamo Adrian Duncan The Lilliput Press, 2021, 152 pp.

I AM SITTING alone in the chapel of Kings College Hospital in London, where I am being treated for a long-term condition. I have been in hospital for 70 days. I came to write this review, for the quiet. The pew is hard, and my back is arched so that the entirety of my vision is spent on the blank white ceiling. Slowly a damp patch appears, and I begin to look for meaning from its form, its undeniable beauty. I am favouring the aesthetic over the pragmatic, choosing to ignore the impetus of its creation. This choice I am confronted with resembles the conceit which bounces at the centre of Prosinečki, one of the short stories in Adrian Duncan’s first collection, Midfield Dynamo.

In 1977, Pelé named his autobiography My Life and the Beautiful Game. The book’s acknowledgement page reads: “I dedicate this book to all the people who have made this great game the Beautiful Game.” Arguably such beauty is the fulcrum of wonder that imbues the protagonist of Prosinečki, as he dwells on his own style of play in relation to the former Croatian football player, Robert Prosinečki.

It is rare to see sport dealt with in fiction, if at all. The story first appeared in The Stinging Fly, edited by Sally Rooney, whose editorial style is detectable in the accessible intimacy and immediacy that permeates the prose. Duncan, knowing that Rooney is a football fan, submitted the story upon hearing of her being invited as a guest editor.

This is the third release from Duncan with The Lilliput Press. Midfield Dynamo follows Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020). Both draw heavily from Duncan’s training as an engineer before embarking upon an education in artmaking and writing. This is Duncan’s first collection of short stories. They are arranged in the formation of a soccer team in “the somewhat old-fashioned:

1-4-4-2.” Defence, Midfield and Upfront.

Each story is given a field position based on a perceived personality. While this might at first seem novelty (and it is, partially), it is revelatory in so far as it provokes the thought that there is an element of the autobiographical present. A story about a struggling, ‘failed’ artist named Vincent, About the Weight of a Bucket Salt takes the coach position, as the final text in the book. Vincent’s story, the only text in third person, looms over preceding texts as a cautionary tale on being too precious about ideals as a young artist, whilst being a razorsharp critique of the messiness that entangles relationships in the art world.

Oblique critique is at the core of the ‘up front’ positions. In We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas, an engineer who has emigrated to Abu Dhabi forces Duncan to come face to face with the scale of exploitation that underpins the construction of many of the city’s high-rise buildings. Having befriended his boss, the protagonist is witness to (and participant within) a drug-infused orgy with his employer, all in the same 24 hours as seeing the body of a worker splitting in half in front of him. The absurdity which Duncan displays in his writing is well nestled in the genre of horror.

Some stories seem to catch the writer realising that his characters are expendable, that they are after all most certainly fictional, they can do things that real people couldn’t possibly do, or could they? In Houses by the Sea, Finn befriends a local named Leonard. When Leonard’s life takes a dangerous boozy downward spiral, Finn stands back to let it all unfold, even when Leonard is close to death. The assumed humanity of Finn is sucked out of the character suddenly and somewhat inexplicably. A common point of connection between all these stories is a moment of violent upheaval. For

the most part, these characters are utterly detestable; their relationships seem to make spectacle of the complicated and aggressive reality of toxic masculinity.

When I return to my bed there is a football match playing on the communal television. I take out my laptop to conclude the review when I notice that many of the nurses watch on as Christian Eriksen collapses on the pitch and is resuscitated all on camera. They stand around the television in shock with their hands over their mouths. Meanwhile, in the same room, behind their backs, a man, my roommate, is slowly dying of too many illnesses to list. I think that there is something to be said about framing – how the frame might reinforce the image of a certain violence, and that this is relevant to the book, but I cannot quite figure out how, exactly.

This collection is engrossing, seductive, deeply terrifying, and an absolute must-read for artists, engineers and those of us with a love for the beautiful game; at times, a terrible beauty.

Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer who lives and works in London.

Fingal County Council’s Arts Office is delighted to present

New considerations of familiar settings Curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll

Guest

Ella de Burca Eithne Jordan Barbara Knežević Niamh McCann Helen O’Leary Niamh O’Malley Liliane Puthod Alice Rekab with Louise Meade Katie Watchorn Emma Wolf-Haugh

Niamh McCann, Not Tycho’s but Collin’s nose, 2018, bronze

Newbridge House 4 June — 19 Sept 2021

To book a ticket visit www.newbridgehouseandfarm.com For further information visit www.fingalarts.ie