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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Legacy
Brian O’Doherty, Burial of Patrick Ireland, 2008, Irish Museum of Modern Art; photograph © Fionn McCann Photography
Archaic Language BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN OUTLINES THE EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS TAKING PLACE NATIONWIDE TO CELEBRATE THE DIVERSE ARTISTIC CAREER OF BRIAN O’DOHERTY.
FEW WOULD DISAGREE that Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland is
one of the most distinguished and significant artists of his generation to come out of Ireland onto the international stage in the last fifty years. Born in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, his influence is felt on both sides of the Atlantic since his (voluntary) exile to New York in 1957. His extraordinary career, which spans many disciplines and uses different heteronyms1, has been puzzling to some and inspirational to others. As a pioneering conceptual artist, he produced such seminal works as the first conceptual portrait, Portrait of Duchamp (1966), as well as a double issue of the ground-breaking experimental magazine, Aspen 5+6 (1967), often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art to dispense with the gallery. O’Doherty’s highly-influential series of critical essays, ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ – first published in Artforum in 1976 – have been widely translated, forming an essential part of every art college library for decades. These essays were pivotal to the late twentieth century’s institutional critique for their exposure of the heretofore hidden economic, sociological and ideological factors underlying the exhibition and spectatorship of modernist art. In November 1972, as an emigrant’s response to Bloody Sunday in Derry the previous January, O’Doherty changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland at the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ in Dublin. Declaring he would hold the name until the British military presence was removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens restored their human rights, this became, chronologically, the first work of performance art in Ireland. After thirty-six years and with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, an effigy of Patrick Ireland (bearing a mask of O’Doherty’s face) was ritualistically buried following a three-day wake, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2008. The headstone reads: “Patrick Ireland 1972– 2008” with the words “ONE, HERE, NOW” beneath, transcribed into the archaic Celtic language of Ogham.
This Ogham language, which he learned as a schoolboy in Ireland, was introduced to the world of conceptual art by O’Doherty in 1967 in a unique formulation that juxtaposed conceptualism, serialism and language. Remarkably, the structure of Ogham coincided with a growing interest in serialism at the time among conceptual artists like O’Doherty, Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt. In Ogham, vowels and consonants are reduced to lines at intervals above, below and across a horizontal or vertical, similar to the arrangement of sets of notes in serial music. This was O’Doherty’s Rosetta Stone, which, over six decades, has produced an extraordinary array of Ogham drawings, sculptures, wall paintings, easel paintings and plays called ‘Structural Plays’. The artist George Segal once referred to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work as “the greatest oeuvre of drawings by any post-war American artist.” In these works, his verbal culture was reduced to single words with ontological undertones – ONE, HERE, NOW or, even further, to the vowels alone. As Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty’s linear drawings based on the language of Ogham, were taken into three-dimensional space with his signature series of ‘Rope Drawing’ installations, of which there have been 127 to date. Using space, colour and line, the Rope Drawings deftly overcame many of the criticisms so cogently outlined in Inside the White Cube. Crossing yet another boundary within the arts, O’Doherty became a novelist, his first novel, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P, winning the Sagittarius Prize in 1993 and his second, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000. This year will be a significant one for this polymath artist, critic, medical doctor, writer, teacher, arts administrator and filmmaker as he reaches his ninetieth year, with long-overdue celebrations of his distinguished career taking place across Ireland. Events began in April at the Sirius Art Centre in the port town of Cobh in Cork, when a series of recently-restored wall paintings, titled ‘One, Here,
