Printed Project 5 - 'another monumental metaphor' - Alan Phelan - Special Venice Edition

Welcome to Printed Project the journal published by the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland. Printed Project can be seen as an ongoing collaboration amongst artists, critics and curators, writers and readers devoted to making sense of contemporary art and culture. Printed Project is published 2 times a year and is edited on a rotating basis by invited curatorial editors. It gathers and presents thought and opinion on issues and arguments that enliven dialogue and debate on art and wider culture of our present day. With Printed Project the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland sets out to meet the need felt within an expanding art industry for a not-for-entertainment art publication. Simple and modest in design and production the journal brings the best of comprehensive thought to bear on the art practice of the present and on the shared consequences artists and audiences face as our culture backs into the future. Printed Project is published in Dublin by the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland. Issue 5 published May 2005 Curator/Editor: Administrative Editor: Proof Readers: Editorial Panel: Alan Phelan Jason Oakley Sarah Finlay Siún Hanrahan Toby Dennett, SSI Director Anya von Gösseln Siún Hanrahan Finola Jones Kerry McCall Sarah Pierce Paul O’Reilly Therry Rudin Jason Oakley Valerie Earley Bennis Design, Dublin Graham & Heslip, Belfast The views expressed in Printed Project are not necessarily those of the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland, the Editors or Editorial Panel. ©2005 Sculptors’ Society of Ireland & the artists and authors. All rights reserved. The Sculptors’ Society of Ireland is a not-for-profit organisation and is core funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Printed Project Sculptors’ Society of Ireland Cnr. Halston Street / Mary’s Lane Dublin 7 T: 00353 (0)1 8722296 F: 00353 (0)1 8722364 info@sculptors-society.ie www.sculptors-society.ie www.printedproject.ie Cover image: Peru 04, Ruins for the Future Alice Maher, Snail Drawings, 2005 Courtesy of the artist Advertising & Distribution: Subscriptions: Design: Printers: Published twice a year. For subscriptions information please visit www.printedproject.ie ISSN 1649 4075 Cover price: e7.50/STG£5/$10 Photo credits: P.5-6 Niamh O’Malley P.41-47 Alan Phelan P.77-79 Liam O’Callaghan P.86 David Monaghan Contents Printed Project ISSUE 5 Another Monumental Metaphor Curator/Editor Alan Phelan Introduction 3 Niamh O’Malley Georgina Jackson Mark O’Kelly Steven Duval René Zechlin Susan MacWilliam Anna Colin Tim Davies John Langan Ann Mulrooney Deirdre O’Mahony Shane Cullen Nevan Lahart Gavin Delahunty Gavin Murphy Tim Stott Vanessa O’Reilly Ciarán Bennett Niamh McCann Jason E Bowman Sarah Glennie Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Karen MacKinnon Hugh Mulholland Katie Holten Montréal 04 Shanghai 04 Taipei 05 Lyon 05 Berlin 04 Perifeic 03 Cetinje 04 Agora: The Public Domain Techniques of the Visible Do You Believe in Reality? Art/Time/Context “hubs” other cinemas Prophetic Corners Love it or Leave it 4 8 12 18 24 29 34 Prague 03 Sydney 03 Perth 04 Balticum 04 Moscow 05 Tirana 03 Santa Fe 05 Havana 03 Peripheries Become the Center On Reason and Emotion Same Difference Talking to Me? Dialectics of Hope U-Topos Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque One Closer to the Other 41 48 55 63 68 72 77 80 Werkleitz 04 Common Property 86 Contributors 90 Another Monumental Metaphor Alan Phelan 3 The curatorial rhetoric of the biennial is always large, expansive and more recently global. The way these ambitions get expressed though a theme or title rarely offers insight into the actual content of the exhibition – the range of practice and art on show is just too vast. Looking at a variety of biennial themes, even over the past three years, however, presents the possibility for a parallel discussion within biennial discourse. This issue of Printed Project is being published as part of the Irish participation or pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. The journal was invited by the Irish Commissioner Sarah Glennie to be part of the Irish representation, not to document or record the event in any way, but to add another voice or several more voices to the event. As a journal, Printed Project has generally looked outside of Ireland for editors and contributors, but the context of a large exhibition outside of Ireland offers different opportunities, and so, this process has been somewhat reversed. The issue looks across a range of recent and upcoming activities, histories, artworks and practices which untangle some of the complexities associated with contemporary art in Ireland and beyond. Looking at the particular context, the question arises as to whether it is possible to make a productive statement about biennial culture? Given that the structure of the large international exhibition has become so predictable and debate about how to change this has become so circular? Exciting new models and approaches are presented at every biennial press launch but instead what tends to be revealed is a fairly closed community of artists, an inescapable political economy of choice and selection, and a false inclusiveness under the banner of a monumentally vague metaphor. For this issue a selection of biennial themes serve as titles for contributions. Contributors were asked not to respond to the specific exhibitions or locations, but to work around a title that might be at odds with what they are presenting, pushing it conceptually in a different way. The range of topics assigned to these themes follows a similar logic to that of the curated megaexhibition – new and old art, politics, architecture, etc. This mirrors and traces, however, histories and patterns of contemporary practice which can hopefully relay some of the complexities of thought around art production in Ireland today. The selection is by no means inclusive, as the artists representing Ireland in the Venice Biennale have even been omitted, but it certainly represents some of the activity that they are a part of. It’s difficult to imagine oppositional strategies or points of resistance to the overarching flattening power of the biennial. Big shows tend to suck the life out of specifics, leaving a generalised malaise, offering entertainment over confrontation, or consumption instead of reflection. Yet participation must offer some reward for artist and audience no matter how marginal or peripheral. This selection of texts and artworks presents a place grappling with several complex levels of engagement, obsession and history – one that has much to offer outside of and within the grand spectacle of the mega-exhibition. I am grateful to all who contributed and appreciate greatly their time and support for this project. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Alan Phelan Agora: The Public Domain Niamh O’Malley 4 Referring originally to a public square or market place in ancient Greece, the term agora conjures an arena of intellectual and social exchange. Whether this agora is a physical space defined by grand colonnades or a focus group bound by shared interests, it implies a gathering; a collective and public event. A timely allusion, the word agora, when applied to the world of art fairs, biennales and other extravagant cultural events, suggests an interest in “inclusivity” and perhaps , calls for a reinvigoration of methods of participation and positioning within these frameworks. There is, of course, a historical dream of art at the heart of a society, a confidence in its educational merit and a compulsion to convey this approved taste to the wider public. The space where this occurs has most typically been that of the museum. The museum and other houses of culture were seen as embracing the possibility of transformative vision. As institutions they had, and perhaps still have, a concept of plenitude at their core. As far back as the 18th century, however, there is also mention of “nature” playing this transformative and educative role. Landscapes, alongside art, have long been designed for interpretation and instruction as well as visual enjoyment. What is it about both nature and art that furnishes our psychological cravings for beauty, for comfort and even for moral truth? Is natural imagery, both within art and as natural appreciation in areas such as tourism, particularly suitable for a “redemptive” or even a moral logic? What of the belief that natural appreciation is a virtuous occupation and that our judgements about it as aesthetically pleasing are equally commendable?1 In 1780, the Danish landscape theorist CCL Hirshfield thought of the garden as a place where one could strew useful lessons in the public’s path. His opponent, Tieck, cynically dismissed this ideology saying derisively: “It is possible and indeed a pleasing notion that mankind will in future rise so high that one need only push some criminal or godless doubter gently though the garden gate and then after two or three hours, let him out the other side as a convinced believer and a man of virtue.”2 Since the very first Biennale in 1895, the Gardens in the east of Venice have been the traditional venue for the Venice Biennale; the International Exhibition of the Visual Arts. These gardens house the original Palazzo dell’Esposizione, built in 1895 (and now the Italian Pavilion) alongside a total of twenty-nine other national pavilions, built at various periods by the exhibiting nations themselves. Although the event has long outgrown the Gardens, and now extends to diverse venues throughout Venice, the Gardens are where it all began. Despite the fact that there is little greenery in evidence on a hot summer’s day at the Biennale, could this prove a valuable amalgamation? Could we imagine Il Giardino in Venice as the consummate space for redemption, with its fusion of the concept of the garden and its presentation of the contemporary production of cultural knowledge? If so, could we learn from and even employ techniques from the history of landscape appreciation in order to comprehend the vast panorama and intimate details of the Venice Biennale? If we take “appreciation” to refer to the deliberate adoption of a visual awareness, then is it possible for us as viewers to contrive a beneficial “natural attitude”? PRINTED PROJECT 05: Niamh O’Malley Il Giardini, The Prospect; for the passionate observer Some theories suggest that aesthetic satisfaction and interest in natural imagery simply correlates to the fulfilment or trigger of physical/biological needs. For example, according to “habitat theory”, aesthetic pleasure experienced by the landscape viewer stems from “the spontaneous perception of landscape features which, in their shapes, colour, spatial arrangements and visible attributes, act as stimuli indicative of environmental conditions favourable to survival, whether they really are favourable or not.”3 The contention that such appraisals are no longer essential can easily be countered. The argument proposes that because we do not need to verify the suitability of the perceived environment in terms of survival, we are therefore able to gain simple pleasure through the gratification of recognition. Although we may have secured sufficient control over our environment to make these considerations less essential, these primitive mechanisms continue to contribute to our overall judgement of nature. Within “habitat theory” an interesting sub-theory called “prospect-refuge” , postulates that, because the ability to see without being seen is an intermediate step in the satisfaction of many of those needs, the capacity of an environment to ensure the achievement of this becomes a more immediate source of aesthetic satisfaction.4 Where one has an opportunity to see and therefore feel safe and in control, it is a prospect, an opportunity to hide, a refuge. What if we take this theory and apply it to the viewing persona attending the grandiose art event? Can he or she reinvigorate their experience by acceding to a primary physical compulsion in the act of appreciation? This may not in fact require much of a leap. The design of our cities and our broader road networks means that we continue to position ourselves, in both urban and rural environments, to achieve vistas that recount a landscape tradition. Particularly prevalent is the panoramic prospect. In Dublin, for example, two popular tourist destinations are the Guinness Storehouse and the Chimney in Smithfield Village. Both the existing 56 metre tall Jameson Distillery Chimney and the Guinness Storehouse have been revitalised as contemporary tourist attractions simply by being topped with enclosed glass viewing platforms that provide 360˚ panoramic views of the city. Assuming the position of viewer of a “prospect” seems like the deliberate act of a passionate observer, towers or heights provoke self-consciousness, offering a bird’s-eye inspection of a common domain that can trigger a sudden spurt of collective energy and ambition. Inspection from above limits, but contains, the field of enquiry. One of the meanings attached to this panoramic view could be a notion of the wider society; an ability to produce abstract ideas out of raw experience. Its appreciation necessitates a viewing position from which a vast prospect is visible. The prospect provides the viewer with an impression of the essential character of the landscape where one can understand the relationships of its varying elements, its many gardens. Such appreciation involves an understanding of the whole; the composition and simplification of the complicated reality and could conceivably relate to our use of terms such as broad-minded (tolerant or liberal), or phrases like “to broaden or widen your horizons” . For example, a man walks into a municipal park. The “utmost liberty of admission is permitted there; the inhabitants […] may at all times amuse themselves with an agreeable walk,” and there is a sense of shared purpose and ownership.5 This is no agora, no centre of commerce; it is a space untainted by the industry of the marketplace and unused to mass gatherings. This is the space for an individual; communality is of course encouraged, but rarely the crowd. The area is left unwalled but the well of containedness, compromised and privatised, is vast. Despite that fact that the gardens of the biennale occupy a far more convoluted space than that of the park, as they periodically house a fusion of artistic matter and commercial enterprise, they market the idealised notion of the cultural wander. Is the agora the idealised marketplace, based on the procurement of knowledge as well as the fulfilment of wares? The refuge is experienced from a lower viewpoint; it necessitates being in the midst of. In contrast to the prospect, which is elevated in order to gain a mass of information, the refuge has little ambition towards completeness, power or quantity. The garden, park or even the marketplace provides the materials and scenarios for its visitors to complete by partaking in the action of viewing. There is an emphasis on the physical relativity of the viewer here as well as beauty in eye of beholder, a focus on the positioning and movement in time of the viewing subject. Nature offers no complete compositions; its very relativity makes it the subject of a multitude of artistic practices. Art, however, also allows for unfinishedness. It can deal with, allow for and even indulge in the interplay or disparity between practices and concepts. Not many other spheres of knowledge match or allow for such open-endedness. The non-event of the garden is perhaps the ultimate triumph for those seeking “refuge” in their act of appreciation; expectation leading instinctively, perhaps even physiologically, to a perpetual repositioning. 6 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Niamh O’Malley 7 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Niamh O’Malley Il Giardino, The Refuge; the idler? If we think about the act of appreciation as one in search of a “refuge” we could, however, envisage a corresponding observer. In contrast to the prospect, the refuge or the occluded view alludes to the secluded, private, and even base. To the perceptive prospect observer it is simply a small part of the wider landscape; but to those physically and metaphorically confined within it, the immediate surroundings are all they see. 1 Such belief was envisioned in the philosophy and literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in the works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) 2 Warnke, Martin, Political landscape; The Art History of Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp.82 3 Appleton, Jay, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp.69 4 Ibid., pp.73 5 In 1783, a contemporary of Lord Charlemont reported on his generosity in leaving his demesne, “Marino Estate” Dublin, , unwalled and open to the public, a feature unique in Ireland at the time. The Casino at Marino (Dublin: The Office of Public Works, Government of Ireland, 1991), pp.7 Techniques of the Visible Georgina Jackson 8 9 Michel Foucault argued that classical culture did not “lie in essentially what they made possible to see, but in what they hide and in what, by this process of obliteration, they allow to emerge.”1 In a similar statement, Mary Anne Staniszewski articulates in the opening lines of her study of exhibition installation at MoMA, New York, The Power of Display, “What is omitted from the past reveals as much about culture as what is recorded as history and circulates as memory.”2 The relevance of these two statements has been the subject of much discourse within the realm of current curatorial practice and the amnesia towards past exhibition design and practice. Yet the professionalisation of curatorial practice has eschewed anonymity and if anything the notion of curator as author is more prominent than ever. With the increased visibility of the curator there lies a recognition of the role of the curator, something which Foucault would agree with, yet does such prominence in some way dislodge the visibility of the artist? In a series of commissioned artworks curated by artist Garrett Phelan in Waterford between 1995 and 1999, this notion of visibility was called into question. The curatorial aims for this project were multi-faceted: to rekindle a visual arts programme in Garter Lane Arts Centre; to generate debate and exposure around contemporary art practice; to broaden the criteria for unconditional funding from the Arts Council; to attempt a neutral introduction of contemporary art into the framework of Garter Lane Arts Centre and the associated communities; and to create a situation where response to works of art are not pre-determined and not directly influenced by pre-defined curatorial criteria and exhibition design.3 It is this breaking down and interrogation of the framing of artwork within the projects that prompts this debate. Five artists, Tom Molloy, Maurice O’Connell, Hermione Wiltshire, Theo Simms, Paul Gregg and Lindsay Seers, were commissioned as part of the project. It is important to point out that each artist was given complete control of his or her own project. All five artists selected some kind of anonymity for their projects and all proposed works were temporary in nature, proposing memory as continuance. For the purposes of this essay, I will discuss three of the projects in detail. Waterford born artist Tom Molloy purchased one thousand lottery scratch cards across Munster and placed them in randomly selected books in the local Lady Lane Library. Before placement, each card was photocopied and a library index card was also completed with the locations of each of the lottery tickets and the filed book was placed in the reference section of the library. The work was entirely unmediated and anonymous. In fact, it was essential to the project that very few people would be aware of the project’s existence as an artwork. This raised notions of opportunity, privilege and luck; creating an unlikely dynamic between the library and the lottery. That the work was unmediated was intentional, as such an audience was prompted to create their own understanding of the action and come to their own conclusions. The work remained in the library for a period of two months until it was discovered. The windfall of a local woman attracted media attention, and there was huge debate within both local and national media about the nature of the intervention, attempting to decipher both meaning and intent. At one point, a private investigator was even hired in attempts to reveal the identity of the person or group responsible for the act. Theo Simms’ Oh when the saints go marchin was realised for the period between August 1998 and May 1999. For the duration of this period the local football team wore a football strip with a logo ART on the front of it for each game. As part of the project, Simms also designed a new St Joseph’s FC crest. Again, no reference was made to the involvement of the artist, or acknowledgement of the piece as an artwork. Simms stated the success of the work to be “having eleven people who are agreeable to having the word Art on their shirts every time they play, at different sites around Waterford and beyond.”4 At the end of the season the strip was retained by the team but no longer used. The resonance of these projects is multi-faceted within the boundaries between art and the public, and between art and the everyday, where it is further pushed and interrogated. The lack of mediation with each commission propositioned an unmediated response from the audience, and the lack of recognition of the works as artworks and as art. In fact, the use of anonymity as a technique by the artists was integral to the successes of their work. A subsequent commission by Paul Gregg prompted further media attention. The work entitled Reconnaisance and Delivery, went through a variety of different stages, including collecting second-hand information on Waterford, and culminated in the placing of eight sculptures, comprising of parachutes, test tubes and documents, at designated places in the city. The arrival of the sculptures was marked by a huge media response. Headlines such as “Gardaí baffled as eight mysterious objects drop in out of the blue” appeared in The Irish Times,5 and reports were made on CNN, BBC, and through Reuters. The involvement of various government agencies along with theories of UFOs and a terrorist threat required that this event be acknowledged as an artwork and press statements were issued. As result of a subsequent official enquiry, all of the commissioned projects were also acknowledged. The media interest in this project did affect the commission by Hermione Wiltshire, in which she purchased and created the centrefold pages of The Munster Express. The image comprised of a profile view of a pregnant belly mirrored on opposing pages, producing something reminiscent of the head of an alien form. However, the newspaper would not agree to the work being unmediated and published a small note on the front page. Subsequently, the newspaper commissioned a journalist and four marketing students from Waterford Institute of Technology to do a public survey on responses to the work, and created a forum for responses. The use of anonymity within this project and other such projects is strategic. This, in a manner, subverts the reality that is constructed through “the practices of everyday life,”6 to quote Michel De Certeau. Indeed, the commission without visible product subverts the notion of PRINTED PROJECT 05: Georgina Jackson PRINTED PROJECT 05: Georgina Jackson 10 11 commissions. Charles Esche states that “I’m most interested in art in the sense of a tool – a tool to imagine the world otherwise. I’m not so interested in aesthetic values for themselves, and I’m certainly not interested in art for art’s sake. It’s more how art engages and changes conditions around itself, how it operates on the imagination.”7 The anonymity of such projects permits the work not to be seen as artwork and therefore to exist unmediated and unclouded by associations with artistic intention and result. It permits possibilities, and destabilises our own stabilities. Within this structure is the question of documentation of work. Vito Acconci, in a recent talk,8 remarked that the documentation of his earlier conceptual work was a mistake. At a period which saw an insertion of the everyday within artistic practice, the documentation of such work and subsequent insertion into the gallery system contrasted the aspirations of such works. Indeed, as Grant Kester states of the alternative space of the 1960s and 70s, “If the alternative space movement represented an avant-garde, it was a singularly institutionalised avant-garde.”9 Is the everyday an alternative space? If the aspiration of early conceptual art was to import the everyday into art, what if art is imported into the everyday? The gallery space or museum space acts as a site of reflection, a pause within the construct of everyday life, a heterotopic site, one where several incompatible sites co-exist, as a site for relational work. Nicolas Bourriaud would argue that this functions as “operational realism”, “as the artwork wavering between its traditional function as an object of contemplation, and its more or less virtual inclusion within the social arena.”10 Yet the virtual inclusion is not the inclusion. One has to question what is gained or lost through inclusion. In 1996, Adam Chodzko commenced an ongoing series of works in which he would rent out films from local video stores and insert clips of footage filmed of the light from a single distress signal flare. These illuminations were inserted onto the black sequence after the film credits and the videos returned to the store without comment, embedding this artistic act into an everyday ritual. What appeared to be the end of the tape actually now ushered in a new beginning. In a recent discussion11 the artist remarked that only one person has ever mentioned that they have seen the work and were aware that it was a work made by Chodzko. This remark also raises questions about the author function of the artist, and of art. Yet does the lack of integration into the gallery or museum space of works such as Molloy’s or Chodzko’s mean that their existence is confined to memory. Does this detract from or enable the work? Does such work operate as a kind of urban myth or folklore? Obviously the role of the media within the Waterford projects played a part in the dissemination of the works locally, nationally and internationally, but this was not entirely premeditated. However, the works played out within an increasingly aware public realm, notably with The Munster Express querying public responses, attitudes and engagement with Hermione Wiltshire’s Alien. Interestingly, there was little mention of the projects within the realm of art press. As Tom Molloy remarked on the reasoning behind this anonymity “The people who find the scratch cards will be forced to examine the piece on its own merits and come to their own conclusions about the issues involved, rather than trying to view it through the artist’s eyes and attempting to second guess what the intentions of the artist were.”12 Hence, if work is categorised and therefore interpreted as art, does that diminish possibility? In the same manner that the increased visibility of the curator can be considered strategic, the anonymity and invisibility of such art practices can be seen to contest and interrogate the separation and boundaries between art and the everyday, and the framing therein, leading to other possibilities. In 1929, El Lissitsky’s design for the Soviet Section at Der Internationalen Presse-Austellung initiated exhibition design as a discipline within the field of visual communication and was intended to reject idealist aesthetics and cultural autonomy. He stated that space “which is not looked at through a keyhole, not through an open door […] does not exist for the eye only. It is not a picture; one wants to live in it.”13 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Georgina Jackson PRINTED PROJECT 05: Georgina Jackson 1 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human science (London and New York: Routledge, 2002, Orig. 1967), pp.150 2 Staniszewski, Mary, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998), pp.xxi 3 See Garter Lane Arts Centre Artists’ Commissions Report submitted by Garrett Phelan to The Arts Council, 1999 4 Ibid. 5 The Irish Times, Wednesday 7 October, 1998 6 De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (London; University of California Press, 1988) 7 www.hart.hr/pdf/zu69/zerovc.pdf (16 March 2005) 8 Lecture and public conversation held at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 19 March, 2005 9 Kester, Grant, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public” in Grant Kester, ed., Art, Activism, and , Oppositionality: Essays From Afterimage (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp.111 10 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002), pp.68 11 Discussion with students of MA in Visual Arts Practices, Studio 6, Temple Bar Galleries and Studios, 17 December 2004 12 See Garter Lane Arts Centre Artists’ Commissions Report 13 Greenberg, Reesa and Bruce W Ferguson, Sandy Nairne, ed., Thinking About Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.307 Do You Believe in Reality? Mark O’Kelly Art/Time/Context Steven Duval and René Zechlin 18 19 Steven Duval, artist and member of Protoacademy and René Zechlin, curator at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork, Ireland, describe and compare Protoacademy and Cork Caucus and discuss the possibilities of these concepts in an international context. works, the collaborations were always problematic. Many of the projects we made within the locale were about exploring practice through activity and discursiveness. Some of these were with students but I think that we viewed all of our activity as educational. It is important to say that much of the work done by the group was project-based because of the discursive nature of the project and what could be called “relational” a term that is used by , many in the art world similar to the way “liberal” is used by the Republican Party in the US.That is to say that the work made by most members of Protoacademy had more in common on a conceptual level than the devices used to achieve a concept. We were also fortunate enough to be able to work for three years with a Doctor of cultural theory, Shep Steiner, who opened up many currents of debate for us. Numerous projects done by the group used the different bases of knowledge in the city and are something that is carried through to our individual practices. We were also inclined towards a certain political thread that is also seen in the Caucus outline. I think that if you look at the writing Charles did during his involvement with Protoacademy it uses the language of a committed city councillor or activist. This is also carried out in the Cork Caucus lecture he did in December 2004. I don’t think that this is a negative thing and in the current climate where a good portion of the art world is retreating back into the elitist realm of the private art gallery it is important that someone carries on the debate. For me the question of sustainability and resonance is important in a project like Protoacademy and Cork Caucus. It is good to be at the table of debate but how long the artists in Cork will stay there is up to them and the institutions in that city. Although Edinburgh is a capital city with money to spend on culture, artist-run spaces were the only ones which embraced the project, which came down to the conservative nature of the city’s institutions. I hope that this will not be the case for Cork Caucus in the years to come. The success of a “city of culture” is to be able to change the culture of a city from one that invests little into the local art community into one that fosters an interesting local and internationally relevant art community. That is a tall order and one that cannot rest on Cork Caucus alone. The great thing about a project like Cork Caucus is that it will energise local artists in a way that can only happen when you get a group of diverse, pro-active, intelligent people together. RZ: The problem of talking about Cork Caucus is that it hasn’t happened yet. At the time of our conversation it is in its preliminary stage and will develop in 2005 as part of the Capital of Culture programme in Cork. I’m personally not directly involved in the Caucus project as organiser or pro-activist. I’m a constituent in the way Cork Caucus term it, or a participant of the events, and belong probably to a supportive sphere. The fact that Cork is the European Capital of Culture in 2005 was certainly the initial point of the Caucus project. The idea was driven by the same concerns you mentioned at the beginning. It is great being the Capital of Culture, but how do you get a long-term effort out of the event? Is it possible to develop the discursive culture within the artistic community of Cork? PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin Steven Duval: I suppose, for the sake of the reader, I should give a little background to my involvement here. Protoacademy was a project that was funded by the Edinburgh College of Art and conceived of by Charles Esche as a research fellow there. Activity started as simply as having drinks in a pub after an artist’s talk. The people at these meetings were all MFA students at ECA. I was fortunately one of them. After a few of these it was easy for Charles to figure out that our knowledge of contemporary art and its models was limited, and so that summer of 1998 he educated us over two weeks in what we called “summer sessions” A lot of interesting, . pro-active, emerging and established people were invited to stimulate and educate us. It worked. We all had the energy and excitement to start our collective experience. After this session we did more of them, first in Edinburgh again then in Stuttgart and then in Malmo. Each session was different and had a different agenda but the thing that held them together was that they were a gathering of young artists mingling with more established ones who were learning from each other and, of course, creating networks. In between these events and over the course of time we moved our activities out of the art college and from apartment shows to doing biennales. We eventually got our own space and created projects, parties, theoretical discussions and workshops there. We also created exchanges with artist groups in Frankfurt and the Art Academy in Malmo. We were very proactive and we did a lot of projects. I think most of the participants have gone on to have careers in the arts. Many of the opportunities that came our way individually were because of our involvement within the collective. The group’s relationship lasted for six years with the art school. Most of the members have gone their own way and when Protoacademy is invited to do a project like before, the people interested will do the projects. René Zechlin: Following your description, Protoacademy moved from an attempt to develop alternative ways of education into the field of “exhibition making” What are the reasons for that . development? Has it something to do with the participants of Protoacademy having finished college in the meantime? Or would you trace it back to the kind of invitations Protoacademy offered for participation or collaboration in the first place? SD: I would say that most of the members did leave college around 1999 but we all had our practices and some of them were progressing well. The chance to work in a reputable space is enticing for most artists and unfortunately, some of our members thought they had been personally invited rather than collectively involved. I don’t think group exhibitions were our strong suit as we were joined together collectively and though there is some similarity in our 20 21 A big difference between Cork Caucus and Protoacademy is their origin and aim. Protoacademy came out of the context of an academy and tries to open the static model of “normal” academies. Cork Caucus did not arise out of the context of the college. It is directed toward to the artistic community of which the local art college is part of, but only one part. The reason for that lies, I think, in the minor role that the art college plays within the Cork cultural scene. This wider focus makes the project in Cork even more difficult, as it already is in a context of an academy. The project is developing itself on three parallel levels (Cork Caucus is not using the word “level” but I think it is quite helpful). One level is the grassroots activity, which started at the end of 2004. In different information events the idea of Cork Caucus was spread out and ideas for artistic projects were collected. Integrating the community from the beginning and making the project accessible for everyone at any stage of the project is another important point. Information events were also held in Limerick and Dublin to integrate a wider public. Activities at the moment, in spring 2005, include reading groups discussing texts in cultural theory and the development of the proposed projects by the selected artists. In parallel to the grassroots activity, internationally known artists and important thinkers were invited to come to Cork to hold lectures, develop new projects or even stay for a longer time period to accompany the whole project. The variety of these so-called “candidates” is quite wide which promises an interesting discussion and a lot of different possibilities of intersections between candidates and delegates, as the “local” artists participating with projects on grassroots level are called. This international level has already started in February with lectures by Bik van der Pol and then Vito Acconci for example. At least in a three-week “summer academy” the two levels - the international and the local - will come together and create a new connection and create the third level, which hopefully continues in different ways after 2005. Interestingly enough, the different levels are also presented by the curators and institutions that initiated the Cork Caucus. Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher are bringing in international artists and representing the outer view on Cork, while Fergal Gaynor and Dobz O’Brien (Art/Not Art) are developing the grassroots level. Tara Byrne and Sean Kelly from the National Sculpture Factory are the institutional hinge between both. I think if you would ask them separately on their opinions about Cork Caucus all of them would stress very different aims. This seems to create a very good framework for discussion and participation within Cork Caucus. Furthermore, the program of the NSF in the last few years also built a kind of base for the project. They invited international artists and theorists to Cork and put their ideas up for discussion. I think that Cork Caucus has the right preconditions to be not only one of a thousand events in year of the Capital of Culture. Having said that there’s no connection between the art college in Cork and Cork Caucus, I realised that the participants of Cork Caucus are not coming out of the sphere of the colleges at all so far. You named Protoacademy as an artist group. Do you think that this point is important for the practice of Protoacademy? Is there, in your personal opinion, a difference between the early practice of Protoacademy and other curatorial or educational projects? SD: Most of the participants were artists but there were also curators and writers involved. I would say that we were using a model that has been used before. What was different was that we were learning by doing and we were making projects with people who have more experience in contemporary art practice. We were talking with people who had practices we admired but we were also working with other art students from different countries that were dealing with similar issues. It wasn’t reinventing the wheel but everyone’s practice improved, which is why we were eventually invited to make collective exhibitions. RZ: So how did the practice of Protoacademy work out at an event like the Gwangju Biennial in 2002? SD: Gwangju was a very interesting model for how a biennale could be run and there were many good things and questionable things about being a part of it. Internally it is also a good project to show the internal workings of the group. The structure that was presented to us was that we as an artist group were invited to recreate our physical exhibition space, with other artist-run spaces or collectives, within the framework of the larger exhibition space. We were also invited to participate in a week-long discussion with other artist groups. This gathering would happen a month before the opening of the biennale, not in Gwangju but Seoul. We had many meetings to discuss what we were going to propose. In the end, we settled on small teams of people to create and control different parts of the project. A group of two people were going to make the presentation for the gathering in Seoul and we split the exhibition into two groups: one to make a pavilion structure and one to create the works within it. By chopping up the project, each group was made up of a different faction and some members of the group were busy with another project in Vienna. This was probably when we had our largest active group of people and for a project that tried to maintain a democratic, decision-making policy it wasn’t easy to keep everyone happy. We wanted the project to maintain a thread throughout the process, and the way we did that was to use theoretical discourses we were investigating at the time around ideas of hospitality, ecology and dwelling. These themes seemed highly appropriate as a western group addressing a mostly Korean audience. We wanted to create a project that would open up our group dynamics as a metaphor for a larger group dynamic. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin 22 23 The workshop in Seoul was brought about by a group there called Forum-A with whom we had contact before this project. Most of the groups there were Asian, except for us and two other European groups (Superflex and Foksal Gallery). We presented a walk through Edinburgh that described the institutions and places that were important to us as well as a series of interviews by members of the group not present. Verbal and artistic language issues hindered the discursive nature of our presentation but it started a dialogue. The pavilion structure was a collaboration we initiated with some students from the architecture department at the art college. The idea was to create a platform for Pause (the official theme of the show), contemplation and conversation. This structure was designed over four months in Edinburgh. We felt that this was more representative than our exhibition space. It housed a video work by Laura Quarmby that played out different collaborative scenarios and another by Nina Toft that explored the contemplation of waiting. I also had three vinyl works that dealt with issues of mental, environmental and social ecologies. This venture into exhibition making was quite successful, though there was a lot of residue afterwards. Did we just umbrella into another cultural discourse? Was our foray into the international biennale circuit compromising our local idealisms? Were we the smaller cultural producer being subsumed by the bigger? I suppose the answer is ‘yes’ to all of those questions but a qualified ‘yes’. I’m not so sure I see these things as negative because one the most effective ways of critiquing the institution or system is to be within. It is good to have a voice. I think these questions can also be asked within the context of a city of culture. RZ: I don’t think “critiquing the institution” is the right expression. If we understand critique in a productive sense, as a progression and development, I would probably agree. Interpreting your descriptions, I think Protoacademy and projects like Cork Caucus are not changing institutions and don’t intend to do so. All the mentioned projects are based on institutions. It doesn’t matter if the institution was the Art College in Edinburgh, in the case of Protoacademy, or a mixture of institutions like the National Sculpture Factory or Cork 2005 (the title of the Capital of Culture in Cork in an institutional sense) in the case of Cork Caucus. The great possibility of these projects is to open institutions and to develop alternative and additional forms of learning and the creation of knowledge; of education, so to say. As you already described, Protoacademy created an environment in which young artists were put on one level with more established ones and theoreticians to learn from each other. These projects are trying to eliminate the borders between “knowledge” and “non-knowledge”. The term “knowledge” is replaced by terms like “experience” and “experiment” In this point participants, the local student . and the global theoretician all can meet. Global theory needs the local background as the local student needs the global long-sight. The one-directional relation between “teacher” and “student” is replaced by a multi-directional open process based on pro-activity and discussion. But, to come back to my earlier point, these examples won’t change institutions and I strongly question if they should replace more classical forms of education. I think both forms support each other as much as they need each other. SD: It is funny that you would mention the relationship between the teacher and student and our attempt to break this down. This philosophy carried over into the work in Gwangju, which came out of Guattari’s notion of transversality as opposed to transference, proposes the teacher/pupil relationship; not unlike the doctor/patient one or, more importantly for us, the artist/viewer relationship. A Kingsley Hall of Art. In terms of our relationship to the academy, I think we acted more like an antibody to the larger organism. I think that that is all an individual or group can do with the hope of making things better. There was a diverse group of people in Gwangju from different parts of the world. There was a serious effort to not umbrella in contemporary art from the west but in the end, it was an international biennale and it is hard to say what was successful with the local audience. There were a lot of other western grassroots organisations there and through interaction with similar Asian groups a dialogue began that was continued in Indonesia the year afterwards. For me this continued activity is a sign that the biennale was a catalyst in fostering relationships between various groups and that, like Cork Caucus, is a worthy endeavour. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin PRINTED PROJECT 05: Steven Duval and René Zechlin “hubs” other cinemas Susan MacWilliam Kuda Bux 1906-1981 The New York mystic Kuda Bux was made famous during the 1930s and 40s by his dramatic demonstrations of x-ray vision. Kuda Bux specialised in performing such feats as reading a newspaper or writing on a blackboard while blindfolded. He took his eyeless sight act to music halls and variety shows and made appearances at Radio City Music Hall, New York. Prophetic Corners Unsolicited art for the public space: two studies Anna Colin Rosa Kuleshova 1942-unknown Rosa Kuleshova was a young Russian woman whose ability to read with her fingertips made her the subject of intense scientific observation in Russia in the 1960s. Blacked out goggles covered her eyes; large paper collars were placed around her neck and screens with holes for her hands to pass through ensured that it was Rosa’s fingers that were doing the “seeing” . 29 Kathleen Goligher 1898-unknown Belfast born medium Kathleen Goligher specialised in the levitation of tables by means of ectoplasmic rods that emerged from between her legs. Between 1914 and 1920 Goligher was the subject of investigation by Dr. William Jackson Crawford, lecturer in mechanical engineering at the Queens University of Belfast. The kind of practice suggested in this title involves spontaneous urban interventions happening with or without the support of an art institution. The artists whose work this article focuses on share a desire to engage with urban environments, to touch upon the problematic disappearance of public space and freedom of movements, yet not in an activist fashion. Creating improbable and eventful situations, Belfast-based duo Paddy Bloomer and Nicky Keogh bring attention to the unwanted, the so-called failures of the public sphere. Austrian artist Leopold Kessler repairs little defects that have been neglected and makes almost unnoticeable and absurd alterations that challenge our expectations of everyday cityscape. Although far from the concept of community art, they still provoke the creation of a temporary community (in the case of Bloomer and Keogh) and of an invisible network (through Kessler’s work). Braving restrictions and government authorisations, these artists accomplish unofficial missions to be found in the fissures of what is otherwise ever-controlled public space. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Anna Colin Helen Duncan 1898-1956 Helen Duncan, a materialisation medium from Portsmouth was the last person to be tried and prosecuted under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735. Following her 1944 trial at the Old Bailey Duncan was imprisoned in Holloway Prison for 9 months. It is believed amongst spiritualists that Duncan was imprisoned in order to prevent her from revealing war time secrets. In 1951 the British Witchcraft Act was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. I. Paddy Bloomer and Nicky Keogh: adventure and investigation Bloomer and Keogh started to collaborate in 1999, “conducting scientific research and sharing an ongoing interest in subterranean exploration. We have worked underground, overground, in toilet bowls, on top of cliffs, in cliffs, in sewers, drains, culverts and holes of all descriptions. We are drawn to uninviting, ignored or inaccessible places barely able to support human life. […] All landscapes are unique and interesting in their own way.”1 Their attraction for unpleasant settings should not be seen as random scatological provocation but rather as a motive to celebrate the ugly and the socially unacceptable, what’s more in a conscientious manner. Indeed, Bloomer and Keogh realise their interventions as one would fulfil a duty, taking them very seriously, as an absolute necessity to entertain people, and to bring light to bits of society traditionally rejected by the norm. Some of their recent work has taken the form of outdoor disco parties in dirty alleyways, around a bin or a sewer. The process of organising a get-together can start from the artists’ initiative as well as from an art organisations’ invitation. It involves time and research to find the right site, talking to locals and getting familiar with the surroundings, including the electricity supplies they will be using. Wearing a worker’s fluorescent yellow jacket to avoid suspicion and equipped with professional tools, Bloomer and Keogh do various site visits in the daytime and at night, during which they identify and map the context of the city where the action is to happen. Bin Disco, 2004, was activated in the derelict harbour of Pasajes, a district neighbouring San Sebastián in Spain during the opening weekend of Manifesta 5. A Belfast wheelie bin shipped for the occasion had been totally redesigned by the artists. The lower part contained a sophisticated sound system while the upper part was decorated with padded carpet and lit by an oriental lamp in wrought iron. Three portholes revealed the oddly lavish interior of the bin. Mollie Fancher 1848-1916 Following two major falls at the age of 16 Mollie Fancher was bedridden in her Brooklyn home for 50 years. Throughout this time Mollie went into trance and multiple personalities exhibited themselves. Although medically blind her vision persisted and she was able to see clairvoyantly. Dubbed the “Brooklyn Enigma” Mollie became the subject of great interest, attracting large crowds of visitors to her bedside. Susan MacWilliam 1969-living Susan MacWilliam, creator of Feelers has brought together diverse experts in paranormal vision and conjuration. Never before have all these eminent figures occupied the same room at the same time. The popular parlour game Blind Man’s Buff employs eyeless sight and fingertip vision. The Blind Man puts out feelers as he attempts to locate the other players. Bux, Kuleshova, Goligher, Duncan and Fancher have been gathered in a 1960s living room from the Hoover Book of Home Management, Hutchinson, 1963. Other Images include: Rockettes from 1953 Radio City Music Hall Program; French tinted postcard c1910; Living Pictures Studio postcard c1907. Susan MacWilliam 2005 II. Leopold Kessler: dissident DIY Vienna-based artist Leopold Kessler uses similar strategies to Bloomer and Keogh’s to side-step officials’ attention while intervening in the public realm without permission. Dressed in an electrician’s blue coat and carrying a toolbox, Kessler installs “devices that seem to follow the logic of municipal authorities.”2 This attitude is motivated by his determination to make gestures that do not come across as art. As he puts it, “if you introduce a strange object into public space, most people will think ‘this is art’ and stop wondering about it because they have an explanation for it.” Consequently, Kessler’s acts of interference are never performances to be watched by an audience “as this would destroy the inconspicuousness” Misleading the viewer . is one method the artist uses to cause him or her to cast doubt on increasingly privatised and constrained public domain. His non-commissioned, hardly visible urban operations range from changing the light bulb of a subway sign and pruning a bush that covers a road sign, to giving inhabitants the choice to regulate the lighting system in their street with the help of remote controls.3 Besides performing utilitarian civic duties, Kessler also executes unnecessary gestures such as equipping a street clock with an alarm function or raising a trash can far above floor level, transforming it into a potential basketball net. Predictably, if lots of people stumble upon Kessler’s alterations, only the observant passer-by becomes aware of them. Accordingly, their existence stretches in the long-term, failing to be reported to or by the establishment. This is notably the case of the intercom on the public address system installed in a train station in Vienna over a year ago. Because of its assimilative look, very few people have realised this object exists for them to communicate anything they want, and to be heard all over the train station. Giving individuals “a power you know you shouldn’t have” is another stratagem made to encourage them to reflect upon systems of power, and citizenry’s responsibilities and rights within public space. Finally, a nearby lamp-post provided the electricity. Disguised as Manifesta employees with the official t-shirt and a press pass, Bloomer and Keogh had no problem reassuring two policemen who had stopped to check them that everything was under control. Parasiting the project, yet without attracting its audience, Bin Disco became for one evening this intriguing “Irish” attraction that got amused as well as grouchy people out of their flats to come and look at it more closely. Their interventions are often one-off festive events, which seem to derive from delirium, like materialisations of what one could imagine, wandering in the last location where anything exciting could possibly happen under the effect of hallucinogens. Sewer, 2003, was a very simple, surreal gesture. The artists just placed a horticultural light in a Belfast city centre sewer. A ray of intense white light emanated from underground, evoking the premise of an apparition. In this way, Bloomer and Keogh turn unappealing places and objects into the stage and actors of mesmerising and often humorous experiences, which consider the socius at their base. If carefully planned, their actions are never formally advertised and listed. Undemanding and uncalculated, people’s participation is effectively organic; the chosen site for the happening becomes an accidental gathering place, spawning curiosity amongst locals and passers-by. Because Bloomer and Keogh’s work rarely makes its way to the gallery, seeing it relies on chance, rumour or being affiliated to the artists. As a consequence, only one audience, a random and temporary, mainly non-art community, witness these performances. Understandably, whether useful or absurd, his clandestine actions are by no means designed to improve or harm people’s life, neither to stand as a template of tactics to apply widely. Instead, they are meant to examine what the artist identifies as “this tension between individual freedom, egoism and the interests of the authorities who have to maintain public order.” Interestingly, Kessler rarely goes back to the site of his alterations to document and construe the possible physical responses made by its witnesses. The beholder is given little importance; whether or not he or she comes into contact with Kessler’s changes and responds to them, does not complete the work. The relationship between the spectator and the work is one-sided and invisible, while the relationship between the artist and the viewer is deliberately made inexistent by the former, who chose in the first place to conceal the artistic aim of the intervention. Further complication and paradox appear in the fact that the visibility of Kessler’s work, unlike that of Bloomer and Keogh’s disco parties, does not only hinge on chance encounters. We learn that, in reality, his work is ultimately made to be situated into an art context, allowing a second audience - this of gallery-goers - to view his actions through video documentation and photographs. Kessler sees this mediation as “the final manifestation of the work”; “here [in the gallery] you may ask yourself about all the different ways in which you as a passer-by (depending on your personal inhibitions) might have been tempted to interact.” Paddy Bloomer and Nicky Keogh, Sewer, 2003. Courtesy of the artists. 31 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Anna Colin III. Somewhere in between private and public “There is no real distinction between public and private space because any space can be made public, as much as any space can be privatised”, said cultural critic Rosalyn Deutsche recently at a symposium entitled Making Public4 and held at Tate Modern. It is around that very topic that the artists discussed above operate. Infiltrating rigid public structures by way of humorous bricolage, these new Situationists position their experiments at the intersection between public and private. While Kessler renders sections of public space private – street lamps or phone booths by placing locks in them – the duo Bloomer/Keogh configure structures for public gatherings in places that are presently discarded by municipalities and soon to be gentrified and commercialised. When these shifts apply to urban environments, they are also valid for art institutions, some of which have become, in recent years, places for public encounters, participation and discussions, amongst other activities. As curators Maria Lind and Nicolas Bourriaud (among various others) stress, institutions can sometimes be a more public, unrestricted space than the actual communal zones known as public space. On that matter, although this goes beyond the scope of this article, in her recent essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” art historian Claire Bishop discusses, as the title suggests, the paradoxes and gaps contained in Bourriaud’s original concept. One claim that democratic art works are defined by their propensity to involve the participant in a convivial and collective experience is furthermore situated in a laboratory-type space (most commonly the art institution). Bishop highlights that the community formed through this shared experience is homogeneous in as much as its members have in common their presence in the gallery (most certainly motivated by an interest in contemporary art). Paraphrasing philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s take on democratic politics, she further notes that “a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.”5 Therefore, an artistic act only experienced by a community without tensions cannot be purely democratic. The public space in which Kessler, Bloomer and Keogh act is defined by Rosalyn Deutsche as “given rise by democracy.”6 As for the audience they address within that space, it is a haphazard, hence heterogeneous, conflicting community. Be they made for the gallery context, Bloomer and Keogh’s participatory works could be qualified as relational. Yet, through their removal from the art world in process as much as in presentation, temporary relations between members of a mixed audience are made possible. This is not the case with Kessler’s interventions, which are individually experienced, whether located outdoors or in the gallery. Furthermore, once situated in the gallery, the experience of the work becomes passive and contemplative. Could that mean that Bloomer and Keogh’s work is more democratic than Leopold Kessler, Trashbins, 2004. Intervention in Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. 32 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Anna Colin Kessler’s because the social aims exist independently from the art institution? Or, should the two experiences Kessler offers be judged separately? Perhaps these questions will turn out to be irrelevant when the art institution becomes the ultimate accommodating corner for socially-driven artistic interventions, once there is no more uncontrolled space left. 1 From an interview made in Belfast in August 2003 2 Leopold Kessler in conversation with Aaron Moulton in the catalogue Do not interrupt your activities (London: Royal College of Art, 2005), pp. 58-62. All quotes in this section are Leopold Kessler’s words 3 A very similar idea “suggesting that street lights should have switches on them so that local residents could control them” was expressed in the 23rd issue of the Situationist International’s magazine Potlatch in 1955. In Ford, Simon, The Situationist International – A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), pp.33 4 Making Public took place on 4 March 2005 at Tate Modern, London 5 Bishop, C, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” October Issue 110, Fall 2004, pp.66 6 Quoted from her presentation for Making Public Love it or Leave it Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony 34 The following discussion was initiated through various questions put to artists involved with rural art projects in Ireland and Wales. They were asked about how their projects began, their relationships and concerns for rural audiences, and the different exhibition structures and strategies being used and developed. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony Ground Up is a public arts project funded by Clare County Council and the Arts Council. John Langan and Deirdre O’Mahony were commissioned along with Aileen Lambert, Maria Kerin and Vincent Wall for Ground Up 2, the second phase of the project. The brief for this project was to use a period of paid research time to come up with a proposal for a temporary public artwork which would engage with rural audiences in the region. The artists chose to work collectively and to stage public interventions in this research phase. The final group proposal, titled Field, identified a conceptual framework and delivery mechanism considered necessary to the successful outcome of the project. Artists submitted separate individual proposals to come under the Field umbrella, and these were adjudicated in November 2004 with the commissions to be realised in the following year. It is not yet certain if the whole Field project will receive funding as yet. The response to the brief by the selected artists initiated a process titled In Under Over Out. This research strategy created a series of lo-fi interventions at agricultural shows in north county Clare, the aim of which was to develop a process that used artistic intervention as a methodology in conducting a socio-cultural assessment of this territory which offered the selected artists a sense of the real issues that affect rural communities/audiences. Strata is a site-responsive exhibition taking place in Ireland and Wales in 2005 as part of a wider, two-year cross-border EU-funded INTERREG project, also funded by Arts Council Ireland and Wales Arts International. The project is the result of rural community initiatives and is organised and administered by the communities themselves, with the aid of “contracted” professionals. It has evolved from a highly successful annual exhibition administered and run by the community of Kells, Co Kilkenny since 1998, working with artist Ann Mulrooney. One of the central aims of the project is for the Irish community to assist the Welsh community of Pontrhydfendigaid in developing the structures, resources and skills to successfully initiate and produce events of this nature. The exhibition is curated by Tim Davies and Ann Mulrooney and features early-to-mid- career artists, many of whom in some way draw on cultural identity or heritage in their work, albeit in a global rather than local context. The artists are: Laura Ford, Bedwyr Williams, Cecile Johnson-Soliz, Christine Mills, David Garner, Tim Davies, Daphne Wright, Liadin Cooke, Keith Wilson, Alan Phelan, Niamh McCann and Philip Napier. A seminar based on the project and exhibition is being planned for 2006, in conjunction with the University of Wales, Lampeter. Keith Wilson, Bull Ring with shepherds Patrick Brookes and Jim Yarrow. Compton Verney, 2003. Courtesy the artist. 36 37 Deirdre O’Mahony: I moved back to Ireland twelve years ago, having lived in London for many years. On returning, I had to reconsider my practice in the new rural location and context in which I was now living. In 1992 when I returned to live in Kilnaboy on the edge of the Burren region, the area had become a contested space. EU funding was available for the construction of “interpretative centres” in national parks, including one in the heart of the Burren by a mountain called Mullaghmore. A ten-year environmental battle ensued, and the community was bitterly divided. This conflict has left a legacy of silence around any discussion of issues of ownership and ethics, particularly in relation to ecology. This silence is what I wanted to specifically address through my involvement in Ground Up 2. John Langan: I am concerned with socio-cultural change and divergence in contemporary Ireland between and around issues related to Europe and the urban/rural divide. My cultural inheritance is similar to many in Ireland. Parents from small farms in the West; children brought up on outskirts of a large town with frequent trips back to the home place; long seventies summers spent with grandparents in the country; Heaney-like memories of milking cows; dosing, foddering and herding livestock; wagon wheels at the mart; ham sandwiches and a bottle of tea in the bog; saving hay; picking potatoes; gathering apples, mushrooms and blackberries with yanks home from America. The tranquillity and contentment of rural childhood experiences in a changing era has been influential in shaping my artistic practice. An empathy and awareness of inherited memory and a fascination with people, place and the social, cultural and political history of Ireland has led me to work on a variety of artistic projects and interventions which involved rural communities. In a sense, the Ground Up process was an opportunity to unearth a language and imagery that reflects our contested landscape and to continue a discourse that investigates past and present identity. Having recently moved from north inner city Dublin to a small village in rural east Galway, I continue to act as a conduit for artistic divergence in my new place. I am committed to being an artist in this community for the foreseeable future. Ann Mulrooney: Four years ago, I moved from a rural area where my family had lived for generations, to London. My experience of my difference there has resulted in a working practice concerned with the psychology of cultural identity and the subjectivity of history. In my experience of both, urban and rural operate differently, hold different world views and different priorities. Western urban centres are based primarily on modernist paradigms of progress and development as logical, linear, forward moving. The bias towards these paradigms runs particularly deeply in post-colonial states, possibly as a sort of “repressed” desire to be Other. The urban/rural divide signifies very different ways of apprehending the world. And, of course, difference itself is fine. What is problematic is that generally, decisions governing both areas are made in urban centres by urban dwellers who either don’t realise or have forgotten that there are other ways of doing things, or who mistake the modernist paradigm for an absolute reality and can’t understand why the rednecks won’t get with the programme. Tim Davies: After fifteen years of being away – in Norwich and also in London – I returned to Wales and now live in the lively city of Swansea. I grew up however in a village in Pembrokeshire amongst the paraphernalia of rural life. My memories of such geography were one of a “make, do and mend” scenario, because there wasn’t necessarily the easy access to urban conveniences. By contrast, it was more of a hands on and practical existence. And in many ways this INTERREG scheme allows, or at least encourages, members of the community to pitch in to make it all happen. Such flexibility I see as a positive approach and one that the strictures and conformity of urbanity don’t easily allow. And visual art audiences themselves can be generous as well as critical away from the urban centres. For instance, the Eisteddfod tradition in Wales means that rural audiences are used to seeing all types of art on their doorsteps, whether in the local Eisteddfodau that are arranged by individual villages and towns, or the national Eisteddfod which moves around Wales to a different venue each year and is often held in a field hired from a farmer for the duration of the festival. Whilst the emphasis has formerly been on music and poetry, the visual arts has had an increasingly high profile on the Eisteddfod maes (literally “field” in Welsh) in recent years, with the last few exhibitions, particularly, being professionally presented and containing several interesting contemporary art works. So rural audiences in Wales are quite sophisticated when it comes to looking at contemporary art within a gallery context; albeit a muddy and nomadic one. This experience lends itself to a much more inclusive context for both the artist and audience, being less about assumptions and more about engagement; creating a dynamic rarely seen in an urban environment where peer approval sometimes seems the main goal. I don’t speak Welsh, and the language is an important aspect of life in Pontrhydfendigaid and a focus for local political activism and consciousness. I see my job as artist and curator to be sensitive without being patronising to the different dynamics of a rural setting whilst at the same time being strong enough to assert my right as an artist to interpret from my viewpoint. JL: An important question is whether our agricultural policy is more concerned with the recreational needs of the urban population than rural communities? As John Marsh has noted, “the redirection of significant areas of land to forestry and manmade wilderness might prove more appropriate for the needs of the late twentieth century.”1 This leads to the considering the countryside as diversified space but in essence a contested landscape. DOM: What really drives my interest in making art of and about rural culture is the depth and intensity of the debate about land. It is the contested zone, imbued with so much more than the actual space owned. The intrinsic belief that ownership confers the absolute right to use (or abuse) as one sees fit is a core issue in rural culture. This assumption was challenged when Ireland joined the EU and farming practice diverged from “tradition” and became linked to subsidy. Subsidies bought a temporary postponement of the demise of the small farmer but PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony 38 39 the end of the CAP payments will leave few options for the small farmer in the postagricultural landscape of rural Ireland. Loss of respect for a way of life, memory, culture and the anger and resentment stirred up by what is perceived as outsider interference in planning disputes all figure in this local equation. What happens at this local level is also repeated in communities world-wide: the kind of issues faced by people in rural Ireland are no different from those in other parts of the world. What does not seem to happen though, is the same discourse around changes in rural culture as there are with urban cultures, particularly in relation to contemporary art practice, and this marginalisation is a real problem. John’s comments on land use and leisure are just as valid for a Slovenian whose house has been bought as a holiday home as for the farmer in Ballyvaughan whose cottage has been in his family for generations but who is being offered millions for the view. The same issues surface globally as food production moves to cheaper supply bases and land use changes from food production to leisure site. TD: The issues of land ownership and farms changing from working land to holiday homes are also felt strongly in Wales, and from my own familial experience, I am acutely aware of the implications and realities of the contested landscape. I like Deirdre’s notion of the “view”. I’ve recently made a work called Distant Views that directly refers to these experiences and confronts the idea of view as commodity. Frustratingly, in Wales it’s become one of the issues that dares not speak its name. The political parties are unable, or unwilling, to articulate an argument that clearly illustrates the serious threat that the second home and related holidaylet industry places not just on rural communities, but across the cultural landscape in general. It’s a local and universal issue, which clearly highlights the impact of global capitalism on disempowered communities, wherever they may be. AM: Working with a community development organisation has made me very aware of issues of land use and regeneration. The decline in farming is forcing rural communities to view not just the land, but also culture and heritage as commodities, which results in a highly artificial framing of our past for consumption by tourists – medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle, anyone? This is a weird development from the Victorian attitudes of landscape being gazed on as ‘scenic’ views for the enjoyment of tourists rather than as the means of sustenance for its inhabitants. These days, the conversion to ‘scenic views’ is the means of sustenance! DOM: I see myself as part of this community by choice, somewhat outside the day-to-day stuff, but nonetheless, engaged with the rural life and culture around me. I have a family and I want them to continue to enjoy this place. I think what this project has done is bring my attention from a more introspective focus on my own practice to the community. It forced me to address the issues I have been trying to deal with in a gallery or museum context, into this local public arena. I am making it for myself, as a way of thinking aloud, as an aspect of the dialogue I think should be taking place between the interests and demands of community, economics, and policy. AM: The Kells community is running all aspects of this project; I just provide the artistic direction and the “artspeak”. My role is as a “facilitator” or translator, rather than having an involvement in the production of artworks, although I see this as being as much a part of my practice as an artist as more product-oriented work. To me, this process is one which answers different needs for the different individuals and groups involved, and that includes audience. We are all involved because the process serves us all in some way. JL: I suppose, although I get tremendous enjoyment from the creative process, as maker, mediator and consumer, to elaborate on the concept of a conduit, I am interested in articulating something that is too complex to express in words or language which might be part of a larger cultural discourse. TD: Part of the reason I agreed to take on the curatorship with Ann is to continue my interest in site-specific practice, which often explores the contested and negotiated nature of spaces. In 2000 and 2002 I co-curated Locws International where artists were invited to make responses to the city of Swansea. That is an urban site with different dynamics. I think a rural, site-specific project is potentially more difficult if an artist is to avoid some of the clichés of land art or just ‘plonking’ an object. My interest is in the site-specific or at least site-responsive nature of the project. The two abbey ruins have inspired a wide range of responses from the artists involved. In the two Locws events in Swansea, all the artworks were site-specific. We’ve got a couple of “phone-in” works this time, for Kells and Strata Florida, which I regret, but by and large the artists have made an effort to produce something especially for the sites. I wouldn’t say they were all drawing on or commenting on cultural identity, however, except in the sense that one’s cultural identity or make-up is arguably present in everything one does. To my mind, the artworks are more about place, the semantics of particular spaces which will culminate as the exhibitions and, further to this, looking to the future, will potentially become part of the narratives or maybe mythologies of those places. DOM: My proposal was not shaped by constraints of funding. However, the actual process of collating information and collaborating on the group proposal did affect the art process, in that it diverted time and attention into the logistics of providing a delivery structure that could address our needs. It remains to be seen whether this collective Field proposal will be funded. It looks as though there is no budget for this at present and that it will have to be fund-raised separately to the individual proposals. This raises serious issues for the visibility of the project. The final group proposal was an attempt to embed this effective management and delivery PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony Peripheries Become the Center mechanism into what is an ambitious project. The local Arts Office have taken a real risk in investing limited resources in this project, and the working out of the process has been invaluable in showing what rural arts projects can aspire to: but it also showed how constrained the structures and resources are in actually delivering on such aspirations. AM: All funding imposes limits of some sort. It becomes very difficult to take risks or to concentrate on, for example, a developmental process for the artists or the community, when specific funding body targets to do with product or audience figures have to be met. The overemphasis on high standards of artistic professionalism by funding bodies, whilst understandable, inevitably leads to more “conservative” programming. This policy cuts out the artists who haven’t quite got there yet. It would be great to have funding which allowed for risks and untried artists and for failure. Also, the way in which a rural community operates is very different from the way in which a bureaucratic funding organisation works. They speak different languages and have such different objectives and world-views. In my experience, it is the community who ends up learning the language of funding, rather than the other way around. Learning a new language is always empowering as long as it’s not at the expense of one’s existing language. It would be a real development for the rural ways of operating to be recognised as “different but equal” as opposed to “backward”. This is part of a much larger debate regarding local/global and nonmodern/modern. I think funding bodies, having realised the need to involve rural areas, need to become more aware of, and responsible for, the manner in which they deal with them. JL: In general, I think artist-led or artist-curated projects are the way to go. Maybe that’s just to do with a fear that too many cooks will spoil the broth. If there was more trust and appropriate support for such strategies, we might not get so bogged down in red tape and could make more work. Funding or the lack of it does in some way interfere with artistic concepts and may dilute the ideas or impose limits, as Ann terms it. The notion of allowing artists to take risks is beginning to take root amongst commissioners as we move away from archaic methods of creating and commissioning public art. With regard to the changing face of contemporary art practice, professional practitioners are more than aware of accountability and transparency when it comes to public funding and, if trusted, will deliver. Artists as researchers should be supported in a process which, given time, will yield significant results. When it comes to bureaucratic funding organisations and officialdom, there is also a need to be more flexible. With regard to such organisations, artists and communities should begin to generate partnerships that place them in dominant independent positions when it comes to developing and funding projects. In the spirit of Meitheal, rural communities are successful in supporting a variety of diverse local and international initiatives. In a widening, cultural field and providing there is consultation with all stakeholders - we can be successful in doing so in the future. Shane Cullen 40 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Davies, John Langan, Ann Mulrooney and Deirdre O’Mahony 1 Marsh, John, “Options for Policies” in John Marsh et al. (eds.), The Changing Role of the Common Agricultural Policy: The Future of Farming in Europe (London: Belhaven Press, 1991) Shane Cullen, The Green Book (extract), Dymo tape on acetate,1997 On Reason and Emotion WE are THEM - Blockbuster Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty 48 Artist Nevan Lahart and curator Gavin Delahunty discuss the exhibition Dionysiac, which opened at the Centre Pompidou Paris in February 2005. The texts began as two separate pieces, which have been merged into a kind of conversation or correspondence. Gavin Delahunty: My immediate response after agreeing to chaperone Irish artist Nevan Lahart to look at the exhibition Dionysiac at Centre Pompidou Paris was wonder. Wonder at Lahart’s response, considering his distrust of practically all exhibitions; especially thematic, survey or theory heavy formats. Nevan Lahart: You know how it is, artists get asked to do something and they find it hard to say ‘no’. Opportunities are few and far between in this game for the enthusiast, underdog artist. Artists who are typically contrary uncharacteristically find the word “no” difficult to say when opportunities arise. I said a big “oui” flattered that the Phelan fella felt , that my own work had a similar attitude to the ‘messy practice’ at the Pomp Pee Doo’s blockbuster show, Dionysiac. With fourteen contemporary artists and a title derived from the adjective dionysiaque, used by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Birth of Tragedy, 1871, Dionysiac is an example of what Lahart would normally ridicule, representing the capacity institutions have to consume avantgarde practices, and so guilty of some kind of crime against authenticity. As can be expected in France, we (Gavin & wee me) hit a few bureaucratic speed bumps trying to wrangle our way into the hanging of the show. The speed wobbles were inevitable, as we only existed in the editor’s vague e-mail correspondence. At the Pompidou, a press release was distributed by museum staff. As it explained, the neologism Dionysiac was inspired by the Greek God Dionysus, the god of both explosion and enthusiasm. Although denying a thematic structure, the press release described it as a “reflection” exhibition; Dionysiac as a state of mind that is “against resignation, which is expressed as much through anger as it is through pleasure received through destruction, through excitement of life in flux, and through joy to the point of excess.”1 The list of participating artists included John Bock, Christoph Büchel, Maurizio Cattelan, Malachi Farrell, Gelatin, Kendell Geers, Thomas Hirschhorn, Fabrice Hyber, Richard Jackson, Martin Kersels, Paul McCarthy, Jonathan Meese, Jason Rhoades and Keith Tyson. The curator Christine Macel informed us that the show had a budget of 500,000. The artist received the minimum rate fee of a wee 10,000. Those commissioned to make new work received more. A neighbour of mine suggested that the artists’ galleries would also top-up the funds available in the production kitty. We also talked about the historical lineage of the work on show being more rooted to daDa than Duchamp and the missing presence of godfather Kippenberger. All in all, quite a pleasant chat, where we both seemed to read from the same hymn book. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty Kendal Geers, La Sainte-Vierge (the Holy Virgin), wall drawing and performance, 2005. photo: Nevan Lahart. Opposite page, clockwise from top; Thomas Hirschhorn, Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, installation, 2000. Gelatin, Untitled, photographs, colour plasticine on wood panels, 2004. Malachi Farrell, O’Black (Clandestine Workshop), installation, 2004-2005. Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy, Sheep Plug, installation and performance, 2004. photos: Nevan Lahart. 51 Kendel Geers’ contribution was in two parts: La Sainte-Vierge ( The Holy Virgin) and Cocktail, both 2005. La Sainte-Vierge was a private performance that took place before the opening of the exhibition. Typical of Geers’ practice, once the performance is completed it is left to the viewer to decode the events. The material evidence that was left behind included a mixture of ink, glass shards and condoms, all of which were distributed in a haphazard fashion across the floor of his designated space. A metal barrier approximately one foot high protected the viewer from this dangerous combination of materials. The ink had also stained the walls to form four large sketches of a woman with her legs spread feverishly masturbating. Cocktail echoed Tom Marioni’s seminal happening The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970, as both it and Cocktail contained a distinctly playful edge. Geers invited the audience on the opening night to sip champagne from crystal flutes cast from his penis, much to the amusement of the artist and interest of Nevan. I was impressed by Kendell Geers’ talk of rejecting pacifism and his good-humoured venomous distaste for most of the wallpaper that is pedalled as art. I enjoyed sipping champagne from the base of his Brazilian waxed cock and regret my pragmatism (= chicken shit) at failing to rob one (excuse = presumption it would break on the plane). We also hit upon the topic of the restrictions imposed on the artists’ working methods by institutions. Geers’ idea that it’s the artist’s job to work to arouse and engage those very restrictions hit a chord. Finding out what is possible and what is not, is always a good indicator of where we stand. Openly political and for that reason perhaps disempowering, Malachi Farrell’s O’Black (Clandestine Workshop), 2004-05, reconstructed what the artist imagined as a generic and prevalent example of a sweat-shop. Pulling across the curtain to enter, a line of sewing machines were assembled diagonally across the room. The space was filled with bundles of cloth and garments. Adding to the theatricality, complicated hydraulic and pneumatic equipment operated machines created an aggressive soundtrack, while a selection of shirts on hangers flew right and left across the back wall in unison with a blast of dry ice from the corner. “It becomes a common thing, people living in the shit and we don’t give a shit about them, for me it was an opportunity to relocate the idea of what is art, what is the museum.”2 Malachi Farrell’s work had its heart in the right place with his amusement park/sweatshop/ghost train installation. It was a tad heavy on the spectacle, and for that the kids will love it. For my part, I felt it only illustrated and reconfirmed the surface. The most a sweatshop slave could get from it (if they could afford the entrance fee into the museum) was a charitable sense that somebody out there cared in an arty farty fashion for their plight. There must be more radical and effective methods to confront, rather than highlight, this essential topic in the Capital of Fashion. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty Ambitious as the work was, as a means to draw attention to a problem within society, it was ineffective due to its close relationship to entertainment. In his 1962 essay Commitment, Theodor Adorno criticises all directly political art: “Works of art merely assimilate themselves sedulously to the brute existence against which they protest.”3 If one were to agree with Adorno, the artistic intentions of Farrell and his revision of reality are, on the contrary, adapted by its viewer as an indirect way of engaging with such practices, therefore having the opposite effect to what the artist intends. “My work questions the system – those who are working illegally in all these sweat shops, nobody cares about them, it’s like everybody has totally accepted it.”4 It could be argued that Farrell is representative of artists with a superficial layer of political consciousness. Not least the weakness of debate created by his installation but also its failure to understand the effect produced by works whose own aesthetic and theoretical laws pay no attention to the contrary results produced. For all Keith Tyson’s written talk of “trying to resist a modernist heritage that is still prevalent, and which seeks to find a form or style that is meaningful and reproducible,”5 through the creation of spontaneous systems of mutations and chance, it came across as little more than conventional modernist wallpaper. You still control the boundaries of a system by editing the parameters of the inputs. Its slot machine mutations are mere formal fluxuating follies, continuing the great modernist traditions of hanging paintings and pedastalling sculptures. John (new kid on the big bucks) Bock made a quirky, dreamy video with a cool, Klaus Kinsky finger puppet. I’m not too fond of hearing other people’s dreams (particularly when I’m absent). I find it nauseatingly similar to the forced viewing of other people’s wedding or holiday photos. One of the artists in Dionysiac who initiated many questions was Jonathan Meese. Eight bronze busts, a five-panelled oil on canvas backdrop and two drawings on paper completed this installation. The dominant element, the bronze sculptures, at some point may have been accurately rendered to represent their titles, such as Mother, Son, Soldier of fortune ‘Jean’ (Honey), Friedrich Nietzsche, Dr. Fu Manchu, but their appearance now is hardly recognisable, save some familiar motifs. Apart from the Iron Cross, in the case of the soldiers, or the characteristic facial hair of Dr Fu Manchu, they have been beaten into near anonymity in a fit of rage or a comparable expressive outburst. Reminiscent of craniodiaphyseal dysplasia (lionitis), the disease that causes calcium deposits to build up on the skull and force the face to bend out of shape, the results are a selection of disturbing post-apocalyptic mutations. Distanced, thoughtful and experimental, they are the reverse of Farrell’s illusory empathy and identification. Using extreme abstraction, Jonathon Meese has translated the true hideousness of society rather than creating a theatrical spectacle. McCarthy and Rhoades were up to their usual neck tricks in shit at this show. There was a performance which I missed as I was sipping from Kendell Geers’ cock. I don’t know how I could have seen it in the overflowing space of the restricted room, which must have been like a rugby scrum. Paul got out his sketchpad and scaled up a shit plug (stocked in all good sex shops). For this show, it mutated into sheep plugs made from lard. It was all gungho California style, men in monkey suits making soapy lard casts and banging holes in walls. The place was trashed by Rhoades and his merry band of loud helpers. Do the organisers not realise that lard smells bad and will have a tendency to turn rancid over time, especially in environmentally controlled spaces? If they did, fair dues to their famous French noses. Gelatin showed some playful photographs of their friends with protruding plastercine extensions. It was all in good jest, but reeked of ‘we are wild and have lots of disrespectful fun with our crazy friends. Look! We stuck cocks everywhere.’ You guys are wild but harmless. I reckon they throw a good party though. Thomas Hirschorn’s work overflowed with video, photos, socio-political books and an assortment of tools and implements with the overflow dripping into buckets all stuck together with his trademark everyman’s tape. Vast references, a mass of production made inedible for consumption. Maybe this is the way forward, but I’m highly capable in the art of boring myself already. Maybe I’m just jealous. After looking at Farrell’s and Meese’s contribution to Dionysiac, my attention returned to Nevan to consider his practice. In his work the recurrent use of the television motif (for example in James Cameron titanic struggle to rescue the Dame-sells in distress at the bottom of the sea, 2004, and The Triple Ditch Stubbs Butts, 2004), like much of the work in Dionysiac, may romanticise art’s ability to encourage a social conscious regulating them to vain pastiche, but the strong satirical humour in Lahart’s paintings resuscitates them from ideological rants. In the triptych The Triple Ditch Stubbs Butts, Lahart paints Shergar puts up a fight, The cock-up the size of Gibraltar and My favourite horse, three horses from recent national, imaginary and animated history. Shergar, the 1981 Derby wining Horse questionably kidnapped by the Irish Republican Army in 1983; “The Rock” a play on words joining slang for an erection and the Rock of Gibraltar, , depicts a cartoon horse staring unintelligently on all fours at the viewer, complete with extended pink phallus and completing the triptych El Kabong a.k.a Quick Draw McGraw, the popular Hanna-Barbara animation character from the 1960’s recognised as a klutzy Zorro type. Understanding the absurdity in the selection of his subjects and titles with a post-modernist cynicism, and promoting this value with at times exceptional aesthetic quality is what separates Lahart’s paintings from some of the mind-numbing standardisation that was found at work in Dionysiac. It’s not that I disliked the work on show, quite a bit of it appealed to my attitude. Most of it, however, made me shrug my shoulders with indifference. To pigeonhole it for you in twenty words, it tended towards: formalistically harmless Nietzschian angst - allied to dada swagger, motherfucking edgy (bevelled) friendly punk ethics from the street, dripping in fanzine cool. All in all, my present cup of brew, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it reeked of the touring mimed pop rock gig, à la the Monte Carlo Music Awards, supplied with an edge by the addition of designer dirt and rips, where artists take to the stage with their tried (tired) and tested sure fire, safe bet set. Dionysiac proclaimed a celebration of excess, and its goal was to document a style that initially resisted institutions, to look at its developments, to assemble its producers rather than explain its current re-occurrence. With this in mind, the exhibition brought aspects of contemporary art historical concerns to the public in an informative manner. If the term “blockbuster” is defined as inordinate popularity, and success is measured in these terms, Dionysiac succeeded with the 52 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty 53 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty Same Difference Surrealism and Irish Art Gavin Murphy 54 55 opening evening attended by several hundred people and with an estimated overall attendance of over 200,000. Then you must appreciate the impact such an exhibition can have on the broader cultural sphere or that of my travelling companion. This show brought up a lot of my own personal concerns regarding the practice of art, its production and consumption. One of the fundamental problems with the production of art that engages society along socio-politico cultural lines, as I see it, is the dilemma of how to fight the good fight and avoid the pitfalls of being co-opted by the very cultural society one is engaging with critically. The silly, naïve notion that it’s still possible to have a good hand and play a decent game of art, like keeping my hands clean whilst getting them dirty. That is if you’re an artist who wants to play fight. What is the goal of the artist as a revolutionary? Is this role merely the dregs of modernism? Is it merely to continue their safe, contrary practice and become accepted into the fold of rich, grazing pastures of cultural capital and tour their work and increase their worth around the digitally decreasing globe? Is this what they set out to do when they gunghoed it in their youth and kicked some bourgeoisie butt with their punk boot? Where does it go right or wrong? Is the comfort of the carrot too overwhelming when compared to the struggle of wielding the stick? It’s not that artists should ostracise themselves beyond the pale; they have financial needs to continue working and to put bread on their tables. The question ‘what is art?’ bores me. What the fuck are we and what can we do interests me more! I don’t want to be an interior decorator for the well to do, nor do I want to be a social worker (as Sid Vicious said, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt”). The story of modern art in Ireland is one coloured by parochialism and a self-congratulatory nationalist pride. Suspicions arise with such a comfortable tone. For it appears to stand in denial of the deeply contested nature of the aims, themes and merits of modern art within wider art historical accounts. To examine surrealism as an international phenomenon and assess how it has arisen historically in an Irish context offers a means to explore a culture of complacency that characterises accounts of modern art in Ireland. A useful starting point for this endeavour is to consider the notion of realism as it emerged within avant-garde thought. Realism, as a philosophical issue, has often differentiated between true reality and mere appearance. For writers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht or André Breton, the real did not coincide with surface appearance. Instead, the search for truth necessitated a tricky journey through aesthetic and ethical realms. Within emerging avantgarde circles, aesthetic convention would increasingly be seen to establish and maintain a discursive consistency in what art should and could be. For an art confronting the unquestioned experiences of everyday life, aesthetic innovation was one way in which to suspend or challenge accepted belief. This is a central tenet of avant-garde thought. And if such activities were often underpinned by the desire not just to understand but to confront existing social relations, it was also necessary to uncover the underlying social structures governing them. In other words, the realms of knowledge, aesthetics and ethics are haplessly entwined, and the question of realism as an avant-garde concern has led to an increasing self-consciousness about the means and ends of art as well as to consideration of the place of art itself. Surrealism can be read in relation to the dynamics of avant-garde practice. It emerged in Europe in the 1920s and can be defined by three key concerns. First, there is the interest in redefining ideas of reality through the investigation of the unconscious. André Breton openly proclaimed his debt to Freud in the First Manifesto of Surrealism. The jarring of image and text in the work of René Magritte, the abstract dreamscapes of Joan Miró, or experiments in automatism and improvisational techniques in works of André Masson and Max Ernst, attest to the variety of methods by which to expose the unconscious impulses driving life. Secondly, there is a distinct tension between calls for complete creative autonomy and an allegiance to Marxist revolutionary principles. Breton resolves this supposed contradiction in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism by adhering to the idea of relative autonomy – an independent creative process allied to a wider revolutionary commitment. Hannah Hoch’s montages or Ernst’s explorations of the fraught geographical and political condition of Europe can be seen to reveal such tension. Of course, there was much dispute in defining and achieving surrealist aims; but nonetheless, surrealism is characterised by close ties between its libertarian impulse and the revolutionary politics of the day. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Nevan Lahart and Gavin Delahunty PRINTED PROJECT 05: Gavin Murphy 1 Dionysiac press release, Centre Pompidou Paris, 2005, pp.2 2 Interview with Malachi Farrell, Paris, February 2005 3 Adorno, Theodor, "Commitment", trans. Francis McDonagh in Aesthetics and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1980), pp.177 4 Interview with Malachi Farrell, Paris February 2005 5 Taken from Keith Tyson’s artist statement from Dionysiac exhibition. seen to be responsible for introducing aspects of surrealism and an interest in psychoanalytic techniques into an Irish visual art context. The general consensus is that the establishment of modern art in Ireland in this period represents a critical triumph; and surrealism, as it arose in an Irish context, was to play some part in this.1 However, a closer look at the grounds upon which this victory is celebrated reveals certain shortfalls. By far the most extensive account is SB Kennedy’s Irish Art and Modernism. Kennedy contrasts a conservative academic tradition in constant search for an Irish school of art with a Modern Movement that sought inspiration “from innovative trends elsewhere.”2 Despite Kennedy’s criticism of a “fetish for tradition coloured by a search for a distinct Irish school” he , asserts that such a school did exist – in the form of an Irish Modernism.3 Modernism is characterised as “international in character” an “abrupt break with tradition” and, , , “forging a new set of values and critical criteria.”4 It is seen as a progressive shift of styles in constant reaction with each other but sharing a mutual concern with the specific qualities of the medium in which each artist works.5 With regard to Modernism in Ireland, Kennedy claims that Irish painters “adopted the new ideas, they did not question them” Yet he continues, “unlike . their contemporaries elsewhere, Irish artists never saw Modernism as an expression of a socialist utopia.” In the end, Modernism, for Kennedy, “can be judged as a historical style free from polemics.”6 There are a number of confusions built into Kennedy’s account, not least in his search for a “distinct Irish school” despite his critique of such an endeavour. These may be resolved upon , closer scrutiny of how surrealist ideas are seen to emerge in an Irish context. The activities of the White Stag Group are central to this. This was founded in London in 1935 by Basil Rakoczi and Kenneth Hall for the “advancement of subjectivity in psychological analysis and art.”7 Rakoczi and Herbrand Ingouville-Williams also set up the Society for Creative Psychology. These three figures maintained these activities when, as pacifists, they moved to Ireland in 1939 to escape the oncoming war. In 1944, the White Stag Group was instrumental in setting up the Exhibition of Subjective Art. Kennedy’s account of this exhibition divides the work into three categories: “those tending towards Surrealism; those either abstract or formalised; those semi-representational or Symbolist.”8 The works of those falling into the first category – Rakoczi, Hall, Nick Nicholls, Bobby Dawson and Brian Boydell – are described in terms of their idealised and symbolic subject matter, with particular emphasis given to the formal attributes of the work. While Dawson’s work is repeatedly described as adopting a surrealist approach, there is no elaboration on what is actually meant by this. At best, surrealism is inferred as a vague style characterised by its abstract, dreamlike quality and an interest in animal symbolism. To some extent, Kennedy’s approach falls in line with Ingouville-Williams’s definition of Subjective art at the time. It differs only in its emphasis on the surrealist link. For IngouvilleWilliams, the interest in formal concerns rather than in ideas of the subconscious differentiates the Subjective artist from the surrealist. The surrealist artist was seen to dispense with such concerns, preferring to shock the viewer with an incongruous placement of objects.9 There was little in the works on show in the Exhibition of Subjective Art which rally against such readings. Dawson’s Composition, reproduced in the catalogue, reveals an interest in line and mark-making that recalls the allusive symbolism of Miró or Klee. Nicholls’s Lovers (c.1943) also 57 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Gavin Murphy Basil Rakoczi, Child Flying, 1943, Oil on canvas, 53.5 x 74 cm, Private collection. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The third feature of surrealist thought lies in its adherence to the principles of the avant-garde. There is a distinct sense that surrealism experimented with new radical techniques as a means to challenge the prevailing social order. The sinister juxtaposition of ideas of sophistication with fetishistic and oral pleasures in Meret Oppenheim’s Ma Gouvernante (My Nurse), for example, raises questions around gender, sexuality and power. The various features of surrealist art – its ambiguous imagery, its psychoanalytic framework, its candid exploration of sexuality and acts of subversion and liberation – are closely bound to the defamiliarising techniques evolved in order to challenge, if not shock, the viewer. Such confrontation is a familiar avant-garde tactic. Accordingly, an understanding of surrealism must take account of its critical role in producing new insights amidst contested ideas of realism. This was as much an aesthetic as it was a politicised cultural project. Accounts of surrealism in Ireland, as elements emerged in the 1940s, make for an interesting comparison with surrealism as a European phenomenon. The White Stag Group is commonly has a strong linear quality to produce an image of embracing animal-like forms whose heads co-join in an idealized union. Hall’s Two Fish, like Nicholls’s work, explores visual ambiguity and symbolism. Other works, such as Rakoczi’s Child Flying (1943), maintain these themes. In this case, the child’s head can also be viewed as two faces in intimate union as she floats over a simplified townscape. The background also contains child like drawings that connect the imaginative freedom of a child with adult artistic desire for elemental simplicity. Rakoczi’s Lost in a Forest (1945) transposes his primitive caricature into an abstracted vision of nature. Certainly, the use of ambiguous and metaphorical imagery owes some debt to the surrealist tradition. Likewise, the use of bold colour and outline, primitivist motifs, and, taking nature as a source of spiritual renewal can also find its echo in expressionist concerns of the 1920s and 30s. Either way, viewers are encouraged to partake in imaginative flights of fancy, albeit at the level of idealized sentiment. Ingouville-Williams’ cautious distancing is understandable in the light of vicious criticism within Dublin art circles for European avant-garde movements. For one critic, these movements had been “laughed away in every capital of the world” and work in the Exhibition of Subjective Art should be treated likewise.10 Significant figures such as Sean Keating and Patrick Kavanagh were also scathing about the new modern trends in art. However, the exhibition, in the main, did receive favourable treatment. More importantly, criticism of the Exhibition of Subjective Art was not neatly divided into academic and modern camps. Charles Sidney’s writing is illuminating in this respect. Writing in The Bell, Sidney believed the “polite cautiousness” of the Dublin critics towards the exhibition was due to the heavy-weight critic, Herbert Read, backing the show. Undaunted by Read’s introduction in the catalogue, Sidney asked: But what was all this sober exegesis intended to introduce and to praise? Some very obvious imitations of Gleizes, of Paul Klee and of Max Ernst, with reminiscences of the more oldfashioned of the Surrealists. There was not a critic to point out and to expose publicly the purely derivative nature of this exhibition of third rate work, which should have been so clear to anybody with an experience of Continental painting … Is it due to a lack of knowledge of modern painting or to a deliberate attempt to impose some national artistic glory that critics in Dublin fail to distinguish between original work and that of mere disciples?11 Sidney touches a raw nerve here. The work on show was produced some twenty years after the initial impact of surrealism in Europe and is viewed in terms of a pale imitation. Furthermore, he suggests that those promoting modern Irish art must necessarily downplay this aspect. Kennedy, by contrast, promotes Subjective Art “with its strong Surrealist overtones” as “the most advanced art yet seen on these shores” for that time.12 He boosts the contributions of Hall and Rakoczi by reminding readers of their travels in Europe where they “absorbed the latest avantgarde developments, including Surrealism.” Clearly, Kennedy’s account falls in line with traditional attempts to “impose some national artistic glory” that Sidney appears so wary of. It is in this light that Kennedy’s initial confusions may be understood. Kennedy is haunted by the peripheral status of modern art in Ireland when compared to its European counterparts. In order to celebrate its achievements, he reduces Modernism to a “style free from polemics.” Surrealism, in turn, is seen as a stylistic attribute that coloured the Exhibition of Subjective Art. Such a reduction does a significant disservice to the ideas and disputes at the heart of Modernism and the central role avant-garde movements played within these. Style was antithetical to the aims of the avant-garde. It represented clotted thought and staid convention. Moreover, it provided the impetus for artists to develop new techniques as a 58 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Gavin Murphy Robert Dawson, Bad Girl, 1950, Oil on paper, 36 x 32.5 cm, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. means to explore uncharted terrain and to confront bourgeois complacency. In other words, what made surrealism significant was its action against the place of art itself in society and the means (technical, aesthetic, etc.) deemed appropriate for this. It is along these lines that Patrick Kavanagh’s critique of the kind of modern art on show in Dublin in 1944 makes sense: “…a collection of works very safe, very pretty, and with just exactly the right amount of harmless shock to please the conventional middle-class mind.” 13 Again, there is little to be found in art shown or produced in Ireland in this period to counter such a claim.14 It was not as if artists had no precedent to follow. Consider, for example, the more explicit and challenging passages of Joyce’s Ulysses. This is not to say that artists were under obligation to shock. What it does recognise is that the work under consideration fell safely within the repressive confines of Irish culture at the time.15 While a fresh wave of critical appraisal of the White Stag Group can highlight the sexual and liberal lifestyles of those involved (and this is indeed an interesting aspect of their legacy), it nonetheless fails to dispel the spectre of mediocrity that haunts the works themselves. Terence Brown’s assessment of the period places further in perspective the “challenging” nature of work produced and, indeed, Kennedy’s celebration of a de-politicised Irish Modernism: … the cultural effects of this socialist eclipse in twentieth century Ireland are not far to seek. The socialist ideas and preoccupations of much of modern Europe have had curious little currency in a country where ideology has meant protracted, repetitive debate on the national question with, up to very recently, little attention directed to class and social conditions. Indeed, one of the obvious weaknesses of Irish intellectual life in much of the period has been the absence of a coherent, scientific study of society of the kind that in many European countries has its roots in a socialist concern to comprehend the ills of a manifestly unjust social order.16 It is clear that an assessment of the initial impact of surrealism on art in Ireland must address openly the relationship between appropriate artworks and the legacy of surrealism they supposedly absorbed. It is significant that there is considerable distance between the two in terms of aesthetic innovation and radical cultural intervention. It is also significant that when a later generation of artists in Ireland returned to explore surrealist techniques and tactics, they turned to the vibrant productions of early twentieth century European achievements as opposed to more formulaic achievements of mid-twentieth century Ireland. The works of Dorothy Cross and Kathy Prendergast are a good case in point. This suggests that wider European art has had much more of an influence on contemporary art practice than advocates of earlier twentieth century art in Ireland would allow. The fact that these aspects are elided in the interests of national sentiment is a major cause for concern. The celebration of the White Stag Group on the terms we have witnessed maintains a provincial and conservative status for modern art in Ireland. Indeed, to uphold the myth of an autonomous art style “free from polemic” is to limit the possibility of a wider interpretation of how Hall and Rakoczi could subtly negotiate and enrich Irish cultural life through their wider activities, lifestyles and practice. 61 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Gavin Murphy Basil Rakoczi, Lost in a Forrest, 1945, Oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm, Private collection. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Talking to Me? But more importantly, to take heed of the forms of criticism existing in the 1940s that appear to grasp the grander historical dynamic of which Irish art is part helps undercut these complacent narratives that envelop the art in question. Consider once more the comments of Charles Sidney. For therein can be found that very tension between international and local art production that have marked this essay. Same difference, then as now, in the need for a critical art history untainted by institutional and market demand for an Irish canon of art. By these means it is possible to expose how a provincial mindset can seek to market a local art on the coattails of the European avant-garde only by doing a significant disservice to the legacy of the avant-garde. Perhaps now, on the eve of a major retrospective of the White Stag Group, it is time to acknowledge what is at stake should we fail to hold the standard of the European avant-garde, and the wealth of debate therein, as the measure for modern art in Ireland. Are You Talking to Me? Tim Stott 62 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Gavin Murphy 63 Broadly speaking, attempts are being made to reconstruct through relational art practices the rudiments of a democratic public discourse that has elsewhere either been administered to death or simply sold off. To provide a setting in which people can be brought together and provided with a sociable experience is at the core of these attempts. As such they negotiate between the possibility of an emancipated consensus community and the antagonistic relations and unstable exchanges of language as it is lived. Such a situation demands that art practices be pragmatic, i.e., that they signify without difficulty, are intelligible, exchangeable, and hence do not deter any potential audience: its principle logic is one of accessible provision, inclusion and consensual dialogue. But, contrary to this, perhaps it is from the inevitable moments where communication falters, stutters and breaks – where its currency is devalued, so to speak – or from the gap that opens when two parties are unintelligible to each other, that things might be made anew. These gaps and misunderstandings are constantly bridged so that communication does not stall. Or more precisely, if language is not to chase its tail trying to catch definitive meaning, it requires its speakers to make a “leap of faith”, acting as if they all understand each other and mean the same thing, even if they do not. Rather than being an inherent, normative of language, this presupposition is a fiction, and this is how it has a positive effect: by allowing communication to run along smoothly and circumventing the apparent deadlock of antagonism. But, most importantly, and regardless of whether or not the situation could (or indeed, should) be achieved where this fiction ceases to be one, this “leap of faith” is not necessarily progressive: if we can act as if smooth and frictionless agreement has already been achieved, what is the need of further development?1 Equally, when the communicative situation finds its end in itself by finding itself already arrived, it becomes an aesthetic experience, and in a society where this experience is the preserve of a few, such communication remains intolerably privileged. As the communications networks that enable discourse continue their expansion, differences are pushed outside: whilst the distance between points in the network is reduced towards nothing, there emerges an “infinite” distance between the network and that which remains external to it, or which has no proper place within it.2 It is not another point in the network but these exclusions that dialogue must make contact with if it is to be democratic in the original, and more radical sense: i.e., the “rule of the demos”; those who in Ancient Athens were “addressed as equals – participating in the community of logos – in order to be informed that they were excluded from this community.”3 Communication characterised by negotiation, consensus, and a general conviviality between participants is not correlative to this democracy, as it would simply ignore the always-present antagonism, hierarchy and division in discourse. Or to put it differently, agreement gives the present a false identity and a definite location, denying a present that is always “out of joint” never identical with itself, always dislocated.4 , PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Stott 1 Terence Brown characterises the visual arts in this period in terms of its ‘vital diversity and experiment’. Brian Fallon cites the establishment of the Living Art exhibitions as the ‘coming of age of Irish art’ in previewing art that was ‘recognisably Irish and recognisably modern’. Dorothy Walker also marks the period in terms of tensions between ‘moderns’ and ‘traditionalists’ played out against a conservative and repressive cultural backdrop. The RHA is characterised as ‘uncongenial to [artistic] independence and innovation’, whereas the Irish Exhibition of Living Art is seen in terms of being fresh, modern, openminded and cosmopolitan. See Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 – 1985 (London: Fontana Press), pp.207-208; Fallon, Brian, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930 – 1960 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), pp.240, and Walker, Dorothy, Modern Art in Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), pp.17-33 2 Kennedy, SB, Irish Art and Modernism (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1991), pp.1 3 Ibid., pp.205 4 Ibid., pp.3 5 “In essence, Modernism was pluralistic and was the antithesis of nineteenth century Naturalism and, by acknowledging the inherent properties of their materials – the flatness of the picture plane, properties of pigments, media, shape and support – and by ceasing to use them descriptively after nature, the artists who embraced it greatly enriched our understanding of the process.” It is obvious from such a description of modernism that Kennedy leans heavily on accounts such as Clement Greenberg’s. Ibid., pp.3 6 Ibid., pp.2 7 Ibid., pp.91 8 Ibid., pp.104 9 See, Herbrand Ingouville-Williams’s introduction to, Herbert Read, Three Painters: Basil Rakoczi, Kenneth Hall and Patrick Scott (Dublin: Three Candles Press, 1944) 10 Irish Independent, 5 January 1944, pp.16 11 Sidney, Charles, “Art Criticism in Dublin,” The Bell, vol.9, no.2, Nov. 1944, pp.105–107 12 Kennedy, Brian, Kenneth Hall, 1913 – 1946, A Retrospective Exhibition, European Modern Art, Clare Street, Dublin, March 1991, catalogue essay, pp.6 13 Kavanagh, Patrick, “The New Art Patronage,” Irish Times, 18 August 1944. 14 Certainly, artists from Northern Ireland such as FE McWilliams and Colin Middleton can be seen to have a sharper edge to their work, but it was work, nonetheless, adopting the surrealist idiom and very much produced in the wake of previous achievements of their European predecessors. 15 “We now have, here, a Literary Censorship, a Film Censorship, the Censorship of the Common Law, the Censorship of the secret reports of the Librarians’ Association, and the private censorship which any citizen irrespective of class, education, age, or sanity may exercise over any book in a public library merely by objecting to it.” Opening comments on “Censorship: Comments by Readers,” The Bell, vol.9, no.5, Feb 1945, pp.395 16 Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 – 1985 (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp.105 Many thanks to the team at the National Irish Visual Arts Library, Dublin, for their assistance in this research. Without conflict, then, communication becomes oligarchic, as its consensual status depends upon the repeated exclusion of what would disturb it. Such would not be dialogue but an extended monologue, which only addresses the excluded rhetorically, and thereby encloses the latter’s contradiction, its foreignness, within the present hegemonic framework. Under such conditions, artworks would not be sites for meeting the gazes of others but for recognising others as mirrors in which to see oneself. The analogy has been made between relational forms and the random encounters of atoms. When atoms deviate from their parallel trajectories and collide with each other they begin to ‘set’ and new forms come into being. Art’s traditional advantage is its capacity to bind these disparate encounters and hold them together in a composition. The “bonding agent” is empathy between atoms, which cements aggregations of persons brought together around a common image or sign. But when this “collision” is nothing more than stage-managed cosiness, it forecloses the possible rebellion of those outside the tribe who cannot be policed.6 The properly political moment is traumatic, a negativity which ruptures the positive orders of hegemony and identity. To conceive of communications within a homogenous, organic social space closes the gaps from which this trauma emerges. The test for relational art practices is at what level, and to what degree are they open to conflict. If they already predicate consensus they suspend politics proper. How then are they to sustain the fractures between reified social relations from which other forms develop? Not all random encounters between atoms cause them to cohere; and artworks can denaturalise and break with the ideology of empathetic relations as much as they bind it together. Displacements and deformations show the distance between work and audience, not their homology. By its very strangeness and uncanniness, by turning the audience’s alienation back upon them, such artwork demands that this audience makes critical decisions which would not ordinarily be theirs to make. Upon these decisions the strata of social life are set, and they carry a responsibility – decisions have to be made. But more than this, the decision made in excess of current political horizons is unmanageable, because it aligns itself with the point of inherent exclusion. This would not then lead to a dispute amongst “friendly enemies” who share a common symbolic space, but to the taut juxtaposition of incompatible symbolic spaces whose difference cannot be reduced to the same. It is, of course, easy to get romantic about others, the margins, and their alleged authenticity. An art practice of these margins is a constant deferral, always indebted to the future; the other is always elsewhere, always “to come,” and thus, a distraction from the hic et nunc. And the straightforward opposition of others to their exclusion from decision-making is also, to some degree, a function of their oppression, because it presupposes a fully formed identity-inopposition which is simply repressed. But the properly political demand is not just one of recognition of what one is already but of an equal part in deciding what one might become. Rather than romantically opposed, there is an “outside” which is immanent: indeed, one cannot speak of an “outside” without it being immanent. There must be a common co-ordinate system within which “difference” or “outside” has meaning and against which it can be measured; otherwise neither can even be recognised for what they are – “we cannot make sense of total failure [of meaning].”7 The important point is that difference is immanent but hidden and excluded: it is what frames meaning and identity, the gap over which the “leap of faith” is made. 64 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Stott Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of community8 asserts that a community based upon intersubjectivity between “atomic” subjects that are thought to be self-identical is impossible for two reasons: firstly, because identity is a point of origin and certainly to be defended against others, absorbing or destroying what is “outside” it; and secondly, because the subject’s isolation is based upon a metaphysics of “being without relation” (similar to Thomas Hobbes’ selfmoving, endlessly acquisitive system9) which is untenable, and a compensatory abstract notion of a social bond, which is merely hypothetical – another “leap of faith” In such a community, my . freedom always ends where that of another starts. In contrast, it might be the case that community is precisely, and only, the exposure of the “atom” to others, which would eradicate self-identity. From this exposure there would come into view the contours of a community “beside itself, so to speak, one which is exposed between different positive identities. In more poetic terms: amidst the dissonance of conflict “it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that music or silence that underlines All.”10 Perhaps this is where we should look for community, rather than seeing it as synonymous with rational, voluntary communication. The latter often does little more than make others into objects for a subject’s representation. However, we might consider a community that is not a possession, “an experience that we have, but an experience that makes us be.”11 Difference per se is not the end point, then. Identity collapsed by difference might come out the other side in the paradox of identity-in-difference. Consequently, in order not to smooth out this paradox, perhaps the radically political, and artistic, position is not in opposition, which simply confirms the identity of both what is opposed and what is opposing, but in the “irreducible gap between the positions – the purely structural interstice between them.”12 This in-between is inherent to aesthetics. In order to stand as an example, the propositional spaces of relational aesthetics must be framed apart from the “vulgar” interests and antagonisms of life as we typically find it. Decisions must be made over what is an intrinsic constituent, a “proper object” or ergon (Kant), and what is simply an extrinsic addition or parergon. The frame that separates between ergon and parergon has been shown to be inherently unstable,13 because there is a constant reciprocation of the two, and aesthetic judgement about intrinsic beauty or “correctness” is bound to this reciprocation. However, what constitutes the frame itself is something of a blind spot. It is an external limit, and as such it has a certain “thickness”: standing out “both from the ergon and from the milieu, it stands out first of all like a figure against a ground.”14 But, when standing out from one ground it merges with the other: i.e. the frame disappears, effaces itself, at the moment that it is most determinant, so that, although it has “thickness,” it cannot be delimited or isolated. The clearest and most literal example of this frame is, of course, that which surrounds paintings, but there are others such as certain attitudes, competences and psychological “institutions”. With the latter, the frame is something of a “vanishing mediator”, a purely structural function without any substantial identity. The political and artistic importance of these blind spots consists in their paradoxical position of being both indispensable and excluded – of being a “living contradiction.” Without them, aesthetic attention could not “see” or comprehend what it was looking at, just as an eye cannot see without the optic nerve to which it is blind. If a relational space were to propose the “rule of the demos”, it would have to present the differences and exclusions, the blind spots that support this space. This would no doubt be difficult; something like bending over backwards, but it would enable relational aesthetics to 65 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Stott engage in a reflexive politics that forestalls the “leaps of faith” which sustain “atomic” identity and consensual communication. Furthermore, without this difficulty, and “without some source of paradox and anomaly,” expansion of the field of art into social relations “does not increase the realm of meaning; what it has tended to increase is the power the institution wields to make of its self-description the demand of the epoch.”15 This frame, which affects an a priori exclusion indispensable for the perception of a given formation as open, can also function at the level of the national border. In the case of Ireland, the deeply embedded national myth has recently come up against the imperatives of a neoliberal labour market that requires cheap, skilled and unskilled labour from outside the nation’s geographical and symbolic boundaries. The founding myth of Irish identity, based upon the precedent of nationalist and Catholic mobilisation, makes national, racial and doctrinal boundaries the measure of difference and division, situating “common enemies” beyond these limits, whilst ignoring, repressing or coercing internal class division and sectional interests.16 The “harsh realities” of the market – their de-territorialising movement17 – now threaten any such insular identities and bring divisions much closer to home. And it is in connection with this divisive movement that relational art practices become possible and relevant in Ireland, as the alleged openness and fluidity of new social forms developed from relational encounters – the capacity to casually gather and disperse “communities” – correlates to the present flow of capital. In response, of course, there is an opposite, recuperative movement to frame what is proper and exclude what is not. This movement shows itself, not least, in the promotion of “multicultural” communications, which are posited as some quasi-transcendental unifying function. The multicultural “vision” is one based on consensus, where “people communicate rather than condemn, where arguments end in conversation rather than conflict, and where information builds bridges rather than biases.”18 Here, diverse cultures are made equivalent within an idealised vision of globalised technology and a homogenous, universal discourse which pre-empts the political by disavowing the uneven development of capitalism and the stratification of its mechanisms. Similarly, in the case of the nation-state committed to the placid pursuit of neo-liberal economics, some imaginary equivalence of cultural identities, some nebulous idea that social inclusion is simply a matter of symbolic representation or cultural “visibility,”effaces the differentiated material realities correlative to these economics. Cultural equivalence comes under strain when one’s “economic relevance” is doubted, as with those “black” (i.e. non-national) mothers who were said to be “overwhelming” the maternity wards of Ireland.19 But more to the point, in this case, what comes under threat is the “territory” defining Irish identity. Of course, this identity is never stable or monolithic: it is differential, but when it feels threatened it must seek to exercise an absolute power over its borders, placing the “common enemy” once again “outside” . Insofar as an oppositional structure is upheld, the cultural centre still holds, because discourse runs at a tangent to it - not parallel – and the identity of the centre retains its integrity. So, to align oneself to this “outside” is not the radically political gesture it appears to be. But what appears in-between these antagonistic positions, as the differential elements that are immanent, are those who are not addressed as others but who are addressed as equals at the same time that they are excluded; i.e. the migrant, “homeless” workforce. As the relational space is inescapably fictive, it is weak in the face of these material concerns. But still, perhaps its status as fiction allows it the flexibility to bend over backwards, to see what enables it to see, and to hold together, without any attempt at synthesis, the antinomic character of real experience. This latter experience consists of numerous “leaps of faith” which maintain, not least, the ideological unity of power. When it demonstrates the fictional structures of identity that appear elsewhere as Truth, “when it demasks [sic] and sees through the fiction on which the social linking of the existing structure of power is based,”20 and which it is itself a vital part of, art becomes dangerous. It can demonstrate this because as a fictional structure par excellence it is symptomatic of social conflict as the current state of affairs: but in such a state it cannot remedy this conflict. 1 This passage is indebted to Slavoj Zizek’s discussion in “The Parallax View” New Left Review 25, Jan-Feb 2004, pp.126-7 , 2 Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp.501 3 Zizek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (London: Verso, 1999), pp.225 4 See Laclau, Ernesto, “The Time is Out of Joint” Diacritics 25.2, summer 1995 , 5 Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics, trans. S Pleasance and F Woods (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), pp.23 6 See Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 7 Davidson, Donald, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Schema” (1974), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon ^ ^ ^ Press, 1984), pp.184 8 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community, trans. P Connor, L Garbus, M Holland and S Sawhney, ed. P Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) 9 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (London: Penguin, 1968) 10 Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta, ed. R. Cohn (London: Calder, 1982), pp.173 11 Nancy, Jean-Luc, op.cit. pp.26 12 Zizek, “The Parallax View” op. cit., pp.121 , 13 Derrida, J, ‘Parergon’, The Truth in Painting, trans. G Bennington and I McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ^ ^ 1987), pp. 37-82 14 Ibid., pp.61 15 Art & Language, On Painting, www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/onPainting_paper.htm (21 July 2004) 16 That these boundaries are still maintained rigorously is shown by the barely-veiled racism of the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act of 2004 which replaced the right to Irish citizenship according to place of birth (jus soli) with one determined by bloodline (jus sanguinis): a change to the Irish constitution supported by a staggering 79% of the population. Fears were encouraged concerning a migratory, foreign influence threatening a stable, national genealogy. We also see here how easily the ‘blackness’ of a former anti-colonial opposition is reconstructed as the dominant political identity of ‘whiteness’: they are two sides of the same coin. See Suzanna Chan, ‘Some notes on deconstructing Ireland’s Whiteness: Immigrants, emigrants and the perils of jazz’, Variant, Vol. 2, No. 22, spring 2005, pp. 20-21 17 See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Thousand Plateaus, trans. B Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988), chapter 13 18 AT&T 2001-2 Citizenship Report, www.att.com/ir/pdf/citizenship.pdf (26 August 2004) 19 This was the reason given by the Irish government for the above-mentioned Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, 2004. 20 Suvakovic, Misko , “NSK Symptom” Art and Politics: the Imagination of Opposition in Europe, ed. N Kelly (Dublin: R4 Publishing, , ^ ^ ^ 2004), p. 57 ^ 66 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Stott 67 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Tim Stott Dialectics of Hope Station 1 Vanessa O’Reilly THE FOLLOWING ARE THE BASIC RULES OF CONDUCT THAT GOVERN PLAYER INTERACTION AND ACTIVITY WITHIN EVERQUEST AND IN THE OFFICIAL EVERQUEST FORUMS. FAILURE TO ACT RESPONSIBLY AND COMPLY WITH THESE RULES WITHIN EVERQUEST AND THE OFFICIAL EVERQUEST FORUMS MAY RESULT IN THE TERMINATION OF YOUR ACCOUNT WITHOUT ANY REFUND OF ANY KIND. 1. You may not harass or threaten other players. 2. You may not use any sexually explicit, harmful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, obscene, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive language. 3. You may not impersonate any Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment America, or Verant Interactive employee, past or present, including any Customer Support personnel. 4. You may not violate any local, state, national or international law or regulation. 5. You may not modify any part of the EverQuest Client, Server or any part of the EverQuest Web Page located at www.everquest.com 6. You may not arrange for the exchange or transfer of any pirated or illegal software while on EverQuest or the EverQuest Web site. 7. You will follow the instructions of authorized personnel while in EverQuest or on the Official EverQuest Forums. 8. You may not organize nor be a member of any guilds or groups within EverQuest that are based on, or espouse, any racist, sexist, anti-religious, anti-ethnic, anti-gay, or other hate-mongering philosophy. 9. You may not give false information or intentionally hide any information when registering for your EverQuest account. 10. You will not upload or transmit on EverQuest, or on the EverQuest Web Site any copyrighted content that you do not own all rights to, unless you have the express written permission of the author or copyright holder. 11. You will not attempt to interfere with, hack into, or decipher any transmissions to or from the servers running EverQuest. 12. You will not exploit any bug in EverQuest and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits in game), either directly or through public posting, to any other user of EverQuest. You will promptly report any such bug via the in-game "/bug" command. 13. You will not attempt to play EverQuest on any server that is not controlled or authorized by Sony Computer Entertainment America, or its designees. 14. You will not create, use or provide any server emulator or other site where EverQuest may be played, and you will not post or distribute any utilities, emulators or other software tools related to EverQuest without the express written permission of Sony Computer Entertainment America. 1.1 Play Nice Policies - Activity within EverQuest In addition to the general guidelines listed in section 1.0, players are also subject to these supplementary rules while playing EverQuest. While by no means an allinclusive list of the do's and don'ts in EverQuest, it provides a suitable foundation by which the player can determine what activities are appropriate: 1. You may not steal kills. Kill Stealing is defined as the killing of an NPC for any reason that is already fighting or pursuing another player or group that is prepared to engage that same NPC without that group's specific permission. The intent of this rule is discourage and make note of habitual Kill Stealers, not to punish those who honestly try to work together or those who make an honest mistake. Its enforcement by the EverQuest Customer Service Staff will reflect this philosophy. 2. You may not ninjaloot. Ninjalooting is defined as taking special equipment from a fallen creature without the express permission of those who killed the creature if they are in attendance. The purpose of this rule is to stop those who stand near creatures that carry special items and attempt to loot that equipment prior to it being looted by the rightful owner. There are cases where two or more groups wish to kill the same NPC or hunt in the same area. In these cases, the groups are required to compromise. If an equitable compromise cannot be reached between the players prior to EverQuest Customer Service Staff involvement, the EQCSR will mandate a compromise. Any such compromise is final and not open to debate. Refusing to abide by these terms will be considered disruption and may result in disciplinary action. It is therefore strongly suggested that the groups make every attempt to reach a compromise that they can live with prior to involving an EQCSR, who may mandate a compromise that does not suit you to the extent that a player-devised compromise would. Note: A "group" in this case is defined as a party of one or more characters that are united in a common belief or goal and are capable of completing that goal. 4. Foul language is not permitted, in any language. Excessive use of foul language in an inappropriate context, including swear words, real-world racial slurs, and other language that is not consistent with the fantasy environment and designed to hurt, will be considered a disruption. The existence of the filter (/filter) is not a license to be profane. 5. You may not harass others. Harassment is defined as specifically targeting another player or group of players to harm or inconvenience them. As harassment can take many forms, the EQCSR involved will make a determination as to whether or not a "reasonable person" would feel harassed and act accordingly. 6. You may not disrupt the normal playability of a zone or area. Zone/Area Disruption is defined as any activity designed to harm or inconvenience a number of groups rather than a specific player or group of players. This includes, but is not limited to:: • Monopolizing most or all of the kills in an area. • Deliberately blocking a doorway or narrow area so other players cannot get past. • Refusing to cooperate with the other parties at a contested spawn site after having been instructed to do so by an EQCSR. • Making excessive and inappropriate use of public channels of communications (/shout, /ooc, etc.). • Intentionally causing excessive zone latency (creating excessive corpses, abusing spell effects, etc.). • Causing intentional experience loss to other players (deliberately impeding fleeing players by blocking their escape route, intentionally training NPCs on other players, etc.). 7. You may not defraud other players. Fraud is defined as falsely representing one's intentions to make a gain at another's expense. Examples of this activity include, but are not limited to, using deception to deprive another player of items, slandering another player or impersonating them with the intention of causing harm to that player's reputation, or falsely representing one's identity in order to gain access to another player's account or account information. Fraud in all transactions between players may result in disciplinary action when confirmed by an EQCSR. 8. You may not abuse other players or Customer Service Representatives. The following actions would be considered abuse: • Hate Mongering - participation in or propagation of Hate literature, behavior, or propaganda related to real -world characteristics. • Sexual Abuse or Harassment - untoward and/or unwelcome advances of a graphic and sexual nature. This includes, but is not limited to, virtual rape, overt sexual overtures, and stalking of a sexual nature. • Attempting to Defraud a CS Representative - Petitioning with false information with the intent of receiving benefits as a result. This includes reporting bug deaths, experience or item loss, or accusing other players of wrongdoing without basis for it. • Impersonating a Customer Service Representative - falsely representing yourself to another player as a Guide or a Verant Interactive employee. • CS Personnel Abuse - This includes, but is not limited to, sending excessive /petitions (as an individual or group), sending excessive /tells to a CS 3. You must comply with arbitration for contested spawns. Representative, excessively using say or other channels to communicate to a CS Representative, making physical threats, or using abusive language against a CS Representative. • Implying Favoritism by EQCSRs - Stating that employees of SOE or members of the Guide program will show favor towards one or more parties involved in any given situation. This includes, but is not limited to, using threats of retribution or inferring that you will not be held accountable for your actions due to special consideration. Note: This list is not all-inclusive. Other actions may be determined as abuse at the discretion of the EQCSR. 9. "Role-playing" does not grant license to violate these rules. Though EverQuest is a Role-playing game, the claim of "Role-play" will not be accepted in defense of any of the anti-social behaviors mentioned above. We strongly encourage role-playing, but cannot allow it to be done at the expense of others. 10. You may not operate a guild that habitually violates these rules. Disciplinary issues involving guilds may be addressed with the entire guild. Guilds whose members habitually violate these rules may be issued guild warnings, and can even be permanently disbanded. Guild Leaders and/or officers may be held accountable for any actions of their guild members, in addition to any other actions that may be taken. It is therefore the responsibility of the guild leadership to ensure that all guild members abide by these rules. Source: Courtesy of Sony Online Entertainment Note: Everquest is a shared virtual reality space, with a collective population well into the millions. Virtual worlds exhibit most of the traits we associate with the Earth world: economic transactions, interpersonal relationships, organic political institutions, and so on. “A human being experiences these worlds through an avatar, which is the representation of the self in a given physical medium. Most worlds allow an agent to choose what kind of avatar she or he will inhabit, allowing a person with any kind of Earth body to inhabit a completely different body in the virtual world.” Analysis of choice models suggests that the “emergence of avatar-mediated life may increase aggregate human well being, while decreasing its cross-sectional variance. These efficiency and equity effects are contingent on the maintenance and protection of certain rights, however, including the right of agents to free movement, unbiased information, and political participation.” Castronova, Edward, “Theory of the Avatar,” CESifo Working Paper Series No. 86, (Munich: Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research, 2003) http://ssrn.com/abstract=385103 (25 April, 2005) 1 www.voreilly.com/station.html Station is a web based project of collaborative relations envisioned by Vanessa O’Reilly to, quite literally, follow a definition of an establishment equipped for observation and study. Vanessa O’Reilly’s premise is the developments in communication and circulation which have been expanding our ability to inhabit territory thereby evolving our spatiality. We live in a post colonial anxiety about place(ment) which affects our geographical imagination, we share a shifting place on a moving map. Arising from this is an uncertainty about location and about being located. Spatial connectors (phones, satellite, internet, etc.) continue to make their mark on our culture, constantly crossing between high theory and low culture changing the form and the measure of our habitation. The language of contemporary technology is obsessed with the virtual mapping of space. Cyberspace is an actual space with (web)sites, home(pages) and (chat)rooms. Even virtually the moving site must be habitable and inhabited. This desire for inhabitation accompanies the expansion of our geography and Station as a project engages this haptic site(seeing) and (dis)location. U-Topos The Shamrock Pavilion Ciarán Bennett 72 “Constructing a building in the shape of a shamrock (or a hamburger or a pickle) would seem the best possible start for a bad ending. Ireland’s pavilion is the exception to the rule. A smart design in glass, it boasts a spectacular spiral stairs of reinforced concrete. The rigidly directed circulation leads to congestion all through the building, however, and the displays are few and uninspired.”1 This is an interesting period in the history of the new Irish state, or as it was described at the time The Free State. The internecine warfare of the civil war in the 1920s had eventually led to the political success of the losing side in the 1930s, and with this a form of extreme nationalism which had been previously suppressed became the template for a more Irish sense of identity. A new identity of pure Irishness excluded the former grandeur of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for a curious new ideal of peasant inspired utopias, with dancing at crossroads and other folkloric elements from Gaelic culture, untarnished by the perceived influences of our colonial past. In this new era, the architectural manifestations and visual arts of the past were considered to be relics of an alien culture, which had conquered and defiled the native sensibility. Thus the whole artistic achievement of the country since the eighth century was contaminated. This outlook obviously coloured the State’s response to academic visual arts, unless of course like Sean Keating, where a form of social realism could glorify the State. The institutions such as the National Gallery, and other cultural appendages of the former regime, could almost be considered centres of counter revolutionary bourgeois society, and as such, dangerous to the new identity of the State. These places were full of eighteenth century portraits and other imperialist art work, which, like the statues of Queen Victoria, should be removed from sight as offensive to true Gaelic Irish taste. This period also coincided with a renewed sense of Roman Catholicism as the natural religious partner for reclaiming the ideals of the Island of Saints and Scholars. This figment of an imaginary past, particularly seductive to the progenitors of what might be considered a political movement, had many unhappy parallels to the return to Year Zero by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It was a cleansing of the old in favour of a new, and often illogical, sense of what it was to be Irish. The social changes, which were manifest at this time, also included the government-funded movement of whole populations from the remnant of Gaelic speaking enclaves on the West Coast to the centre and east of the country. It was felt that this infusion of true Irish culture and language would facilitate the dissolution of entrenched areas of colonial occupation. This disavowal of a whole period of civilisation, in retrospect, appears almost fascist. It had other similarities: the new state of the 1930s also espoused the radical Bauhaus-informed rigours of modernism, the international style in architecture, not as a utopian urban ideal from Weimar, but as a distinct break from the neo-classical vestiges of imperial civic traditions. The new PRINTED PROJECT 05: Ciarán Bennett Michael Scott, Irish Pavilion at the World Trade Fair, New York, 1939. Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive. architecture seemed pure and idealistic, virtues the state considered central to its own aspirations. The belief that the British Empire should consider Georgian architecture an essential element of urban and civic grandeur, obviously implied that the diametric opposite should be the preferred model for the New Ireland. It is in this context that Michael Scott was considered the architect who could modernise the image of Ireland. He had worked with the Dun Emer Guild, with the Yeats sisters - one of the important remnants of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland - and was considered a nationalist. Their production of carpets, fabrics and books in the neo-Celtic style, included the early hand printed editions of William Butler Yeats’ poetry, and prints by Jack B Yeats, which are excellent examples of their kind. While acting in the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, Scott also trained as an architect. Amongst the more interesting buildings of the time that he designed, were two superb designs for cinemas, in Athlone and Clonmel, which were unfortunately only partly constructed to his original specifications. The design for the Central Bus Station in Dublin, Busárus, is considered one of the finest buildings of its kind in the city. Scott received a telephone call from Freddy Boland, the then personal private secretary of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, to say that he had been appointed to design and build the Irish Pavilion at the World Trade Fair of 1939 in New York.2 When he was informed of this appointment, it was considered that it should have something the twenty-five million Irish Americans could connect with. He suggested it could be “a couple of Round Towers and the Rock of Cashel.”3 The theme of the exhibition was A New World for a Tomorrow. In keeping with this theme, Scott decided that aeroplane travel was significant. He believed that it was important to be able to see the plan from the air. “And then the terrible thought came into my head: could I do a shamrock?”4 It was generally agreed that Scott had solved the problem of nationalism, and made it modern at the same time, by using the shamrock as the plan structure. The outside of the building was to be very light with glass and steel, off-white walls and silver awnings. The total construction cost was $55,000, a considerable amount for a government in financial recession. The total architectural and consultancy fees for the project were $5,000. Several increases to the total costs were accrued through the addition of air conditioning, and other architectural adjustments. There were other problems, as Michael Scott wrote: “I was very distressed to find that a large and ugly bridge was erected so close to our building, which unfortunately tends to kill the scale of our building from its south east view.”5 However there was a very positive press response to such a popular pavilion, such as “Come and see the famous Shamrock Building.”6 The title used on Michael Scott’s drawings for the project was The Irish Pavilion (Promotion of Trade).7 The exhibition space contained stands and booths representing the many facets of Irish Industry: there were pigs and bacon, silver, pottery, books, distilling, brewing, the Irish horse, woollens, riding and polo kits,8 shooting, golf, tropical kit, women’s sports outfits, pieces of material - especially tweed, embroidery, lace and gloves. The shamrock floor design on two floors was divided into specific stalls for each attribute. So, on the ground floor, the right hand of the shamrock was designated for Jameson and Power’s whiskey; the central leaf for Guinness and horses; and the left-hand leaf for pigs and bacon. The pigs and bacon stand was to have a cut-out of the Irish pig, with diagrammatic statistics and a pictorial display of the pig industry. This was next to display cases for the Irish book, with examples of binding and printing. Scott thought the Guinness exhibit crudely designed and out of keeping with the design of the building.9 The first floor contained the remainder of the exhibits, with displays of furniture, rugs and woollens. The central core of the shamrock contained action photos of the Irish army jumping team. The long stem of the shamrock was decorated with a mural by the aforementioned socialist realist painter Sean Keating entitled The Shannon Basin, which commemorated the heroic achievements of the new State. Also included was a stained glass window by Evie Hone, which was illuminated at night. On the exterior south elevation was the quite horrendous piece of figurative sculpture, Thy Holy Mother of Eire. Scott had commissioned a young sculptor Fredrick Herkner to make the statue, based on the lines from a poem by W B Yeats “Your Mother Eire is Always Young.”10 The interior walls were constructed of flexwood knotty pine and ebonised veneer with doors of solid flush veneer to match the counters. The display cases, while excellent in themselves, were made of glass and chrome, but overcrowded the space available. One correspondent considered that this element of the pavilion was “was carried out backwards,”11 the building having been subsequently found too small for the many display cases being forced into it. It was thought that the interior space and use might have been considered first, and that the building was then built to accommodate the contents. As this was a showcase for the Rebirth of the Irish Nation, there appeared to be too many displays, some of which were considered unsuitable. In the tweed stand, the clothes were of such a low design and tailoring quality, that they were removed, and a local New York tailor made a number of suits in Irish tweed as replacements. The religious vestments exhibition was considered particularly unattractive. An exotic element of the related correspondence was the inclusion of the High Commissioner for Ireland, as the State was still at that time a member of the British Commonwealth. There were many letters between the Department of Industry and Commerce, the Consul General of Ireland, Leo P McCauley in New York and the architects as to the exact colour of the awnings, which did not appear to be as originally chosen. The silver was too dark a grey for the bureaucrats. One letter from the department stated:“In regard to the colour and material of the awnings, it is to say the least of it, unfortunate that the finished article was not in accordance with the pattern selected by you.”12 The cost of painting these awnings was considered prohibitive, and the architects seemed to accept that the swatches, from which they had chosen, were more or less what was made. The building materials from Ireland were also found to be of an uneven quality. The thickness of the Connemara and other marble slabs were irregular; some being one inch, others being nearly two, which caused additional construction costs.13 There were concerns that the floor covering did not integrate with the overall design. It was also felt that many of the other exhibitors had included cinema to great affect in their pavilions, but “in order to use cinema effectively, it is necessary to have good films”14 – obviously a small problem for Ireland as there was little or no film industry at that time. The lettering for the pavilion was designed by the famous English religious artist, Eric Gill, who originally conceived of the text as being carved in wood. Michael Scott had intended the letters to be in stressed steel. In compromise they were eventually made in wood and then gilded.15 He designed the letters for EIRE, and then the Taoiseach , Mr De Valera, decided it should be Ireland. “I suppose he felt people wouldn’t know where the hell Eire was.”16 The country was sometimes described as Eire. Samuel Beckett once remarked that he was often unsure of what State to address letters from Paris at the time, as it seemed to be constantly changing. 74 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Ciarán Bennett 75 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Ciarán Bennett Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque Niamh McCann 76 Nationalism and identity were framed as a shamrock, a remarkable achievement of design, humour and political ingenuity by the country’s foremost architect. It is somewhat unusual to think of the Ireland at the time as being radical, but 1939 also saw the design and building of the new Dublin airport terminal by Desmond Fitzgerald and Associates, constructed in the same year. The plans were also conceived by Scott in that year for the Central Bus Station, but were deferred because of the Second World War. The Pavilion in New York is the beginnings of Ireland’s response to modernism, a significant movement within the country, which might have initiated an earlier rapprochement with the rest of Europe if the Second World War had not re-immersed the country in a peculiar form of neutrality and isolationism. The seeds of this project would later germinate in the post war period, when Michael Scott was at the centre of a cultural and artistic period of innovation, culminating in the International art exhibitions held in Dublin from the 1960s, entitled ROSC. The North American connection, with James Johnson Sweeney as Director of MOMA, was diametrically different to those of the late thirties. The vision that could appropriate the symbol of kitsch Irishness, the shamrock, and remake it as a totem of a new dynamic, would later bring the icons of late modernism to electrify the practice of visual art on the island. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Ciarán Bennett 1 The Architectural Forum, World Fairs, June 1939, special edition 2 Scott, Michael, Michael Scott architect: In (casual) conversation with Dorothy Walker (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1995), pp.95 3 Ibid., pp.95 4 Ibid., pp.96 5 Michael Scott letter, Scott Tallon Walker Architects Archive, Dublin, ref: MS 2/5/39 6 This was a headline in Time Magazine, see Scott, op.cit., pp.102 7 Michael Scott drawings and blueprints, Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin 8 This is interesting, as the government was about to plough up the polo field at The Phoenix Park into a garden for turnips. 9 Michael Scott letters, Scott Tallon Walker Architects Archive, Dublin 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Letter from Department Industry and Commerce 9/9/1939 to Michael Scott, Scott Tallon Walker Architects Archive, Dublin 13 Michael Scott letters, Scott Tallon Walker Architects Archive, Dublin 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Michael Scott correspondence with Eric Gill, Scott Tallon Walker Architects Archive, Dublin One Closer to the Other Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland a sort of double act, I didn’t have that responsibility. I was also very keen that the project wasn’t a single event just happening in Venice. A lot of public money goes into it but it happens abroad and no one ever sees it; and there’s a slight disconnection with it, back here. While it is ultimately about Venice and the representation in Venice, I also wanted very much to make this connection back here; so the project will return to Ireland in a different form and go to the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork . They will curate their own version of the show, working the artists in their own way. 81 80 On February 24, 2005 a panel discussion took place at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin organised by Noel Kelly, curator at TBG&S, which brought together the Venice Biennale Commissioners from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Below is an edited version of the discussion, which begins here after various introductory remarks by the host and chair. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (Chair): How does one present the contemporary art, or an emblematic selection of the contemporary art, of a nation? How do you, as curators, approach the question of national identity, as it will inevitably be perceived by the international art world and by the wider world of visitors who might choose to visit Venice? How have each of you imagined, in choosing to accept the role of commissioner and putting together some form of exhibition, a set of practices that you are going to present, or represent? Jason E Bowman (Scotland): For us representation wasn’t the primary factor. I think that what we chose to do was to design a broader project of which Venice is only one element. When myself and Rachel Bradley agreed to commission and curate, we said we would curate the same artists over a two year-long period across a series of contexts of which the Venice Biennale would solely be one. The selection was made by us prior to interview even; we already knew which artists we wanted to work with, so we approached it very much from a curatorial conceptual basis really as opposed to a form of representation. However, that obviously inevitably comes into play at some point. Karen MacKinnon (Wales): I selected the artists to represent Wales. One of them is from North Wales and is Welsh speaking; one of them is from South Wales and is Welsh speaking; one of them is French; and the other one is South Walean and lives in London. So you know immediately that whole concept of identity and nationality is very difficult, if not impossible, to frame. Ultimately the selection is based on what the curator feels is the right selection of work from a specific place and within an extremely complex context of the Venice Biennale, and not on whether the selection is politically correct in terms of nationality. Sarah Glennie (Republic of Ireland): It’s a complex thing being asked to be a commissioner, but inevitably it is personal. I am not Irish, but I have been working here for ten years. What struck me about my time in Ireland during that period has been what I consider a real growth in a very developed arts community here that has gained a lot of confidence, and has become a much more engaged, vibrant community. That informed my decision to work with a number of artists rather than a single artist or two artists, as has happened in the past. So, I am working with seven artists with six practices. I was also very conscious that this time it is very different because there is a Northern Ireland Pavilion. So, whereas with Ireland in the past there has been Hugh Mulholland (Northern Ireland): Well, I guess I was coming from an even more difficult position: I was introducing the idea of Northern Irish representation when there had always been a history of or the possibility of an all-Ireland representation through the Irish pavilion. I had wanted to be commissioner for a very long time and I had been involved in the process of nomination for the Irish representation prior to appointment of a commissioner. While there was always the opportunity for artists from Northern Ireland to be selected in this process representing the 32 counties, I realised after a period of time that this might not be extended to the role of commissioner. Scotland’s and Wales’ participation in Venice held out the opportunity for me, that Northern Ireland might have separate presentation. Having visited the last Venice Biennale, I went to the British Council and the Arts Council and they were clearly receptive to this idea. But ultimately it was my desire to showcase work that I felt needed to have that profile, that platform which Venice offers, which has motivated me. CMGL: How important is the notion of presenting to an international audience a vibrant community of artists in a particular location, one with which they may be unfamiliar? Or, on the other hand, the desire to redress misconceptions that might be based on historical national stereotypes? Did either of these concerns inform your thinking? JEB: I think for us, because Glasgow has become in some ways internationally more than necessarily parochially defined in terms of a neo-conceptual movement, one of the things that we wanted to do was to select practices that had been working in tandem with that, as opposed to necessarily being identified as being neo-conceptual artists. Part of the reason around that was placing them into a peer context in an international framework. But I think the practices we selected had made very consolidated commitments to the cultural ecology of Scotland overall, even though they may be based in Glasgow. We wanted to take people who had invested beyond the production of art works and who had expanded forms of practice. KMK: I think all of the artists involved in selection for Wales are fairly well known artists in Wales. There is a lot of humour in all of the work, a lot of laughter and also a sense of being the outsider, of taking that parochial thing and turning it on its head. But I think back to what the other speakers have said as well, it is about thinking about Venice and what Venice is and what the Biennale is, and about the artists being selected at a particular moment in their practice where they need to be promoted and they need to be put on that kind of international stage. CMGL: I’m wondering about the selection process. Apart from constraints that might be imposed upon you because, obviously, you are spending public money, I’m wondering if you are willing to acknowledge that there are certain things expected of you by your constituency, that is to say the community of practising artists you are, in effect, representing to the world? PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland SG: I don’t think actually you can take on those issues. I think if you do, you just end up with something that’s really watered down. I set myself one small constraint at the beginning, I wanted to represent Ireland now, and I only really considered working with artists who were living and working here. And some of the artists aren’t actually Irish. Sarah Pierce is American, Stephen Brandes is English, but they are very much engaged here and they have all in different ways played a very big part in what I think is this development in the arts community. That’s not to say that Irish artists living abroad should not be included in the future; it is just an approach that I considered appropriate for now. JEB: I think that’s strange because I know very few artistic practices that consider themselves to be that parochial. Most practices that I am aware of wouldn’t relate themselves solely to parochial geographical discourse. And I find it very strange that these questions are actually coming up necessarily as issues. I think the issue is to do with why we frame issues of parochialism and nationalism together because I think they are very different. HM: My reasons for selecting are on the basis of the work and the type of exhibition I was interested in presenting. I didn’t have any criteria other than the work. I made the selection of artists who in my view have made a significant contribution to artistic practice in Northern Ireland. Apart from the fact that they all make interesting work, many of the artists have also involved themselves in a number of initiatives which have supported other artists’ practices, so you have somebody like Ian Charlesworth who was the Director and founder of Proposition Gallery which was for a period of time in Belfast a significant space, or Peter Richards, Director of The Golden Thread Gallery. We also have Richard West and Stephen Hackett who are involved in a number of different initiatives from the Vacuum, Factotum, Cine Lingus and Source Magazine. While acknowledging their own practice, this occasion allows a form of pay back for the contribution these people have made to support artistic debate in Northern Ireland. CMGL: What was the ideology of selection and representation, of putting a package together, to use a very commodity-based term? How did you approach the question of actually making an impact, either on the crucial press days or over the full run of the Biennale? KMK: It’s our job, as curators, to set up the right conditions to show the work of the artists we have selected. I really like where we are, not just because its an excellent gallery space but also because we are away from the centre; we are on Guidecca, we are not competing with so many other voices. CMGL: Geographic location is important, but certain artists make a splash because it’s inherent in their practice, and certain other artists somehow have to find a way of working against the cacophony of attracting attention in ways that are less obvious. It’s interesting that that will somehow inform your choices. KMK: And also within their specific practices the artists and curators have to think about works that they show at Venice, or work that they choose to make in response to the specific context which is Venice. How to deal with questions of identity, global politics – but ultimately I think artists just need to make their work. SG: I was involved in a project in the last Venice, with the Henry Moore Foundation, and I have been through that weird experience where you put your all into something and then you have this hideous opening week where people storm around, very bad-tempered. They give things five minutes and they make these terrible snap judgements. The worst thing about Venice is you get this kind of hideous grapevine thing, where it’s like: “oh don’t bother seeing that, it’s crap,” and it’s really disheartening. It’s really the worst possible place to show art in lots of ways. None of us are operating on big budgets; so we can’t follow the traditional way of getting attention of Venice, which is to throw these enormous parties. CMGL: Scotland did that last time around and, in pure PR terms, it certainly was very effective to throw a very large and really enjoyable party the night before everything kicked in. I enjoyed the party. SG: The parties are given too much attention. Ultimately it’s about the quality of the project and it’s got to be a good experience for the artist as well. I think if artists are only motivated by what can happen to their career internationally, it’s the wrong reason. If you get too caught up with what impact you are making, what people are saying about you, you can lose sight of why you are doing the project. JEB: Can I ask a question whether the job at hand really is to be a “crowd pleaser” anyway? I think it’s to identify what you think is the most significant aspect you can support within the parameters of an artistic practice. What we very much wanted to look at was how do you curate practice, not a series of artefacts. And therefore you are talking about Cathy’s work, which obviously is a very contemplative work to stand amidst, and can be actually very distressing to be amidst, in some ways. So, for us, one of the issues is how to crowd control as opposed to how to get people in there. CMGL: To what extent would you all, in your different ways, exercise curatorial control over which aspect of a given artist’s work you choose to foreground? Do you feel a curatorial responsibility to perhaps push an artist in one direction rather than another? KMK: These artists are selected because you really have a lot of faith in their work. It’s important to give them as much background information as you can about the Biennale itself, the other artists exhibiting and anything else you think is relevant about the gallery space itself. Obviously there are long discussions but ultimately you are there really to support them and their work. SG: Most artists have a very good sense of their own practice. I think my role has been more of support, giving advice on decisions that are made. And I have actually pulled back from asking the artists to make new work because of the time frame and budget we are working with. A lot of this work we are showing hasn’t been seen outside Ireland. Venice is a big pressure for an artist : you’ve got four months and not very much money to pull off the work of your career. So, I have been pulling back from creating that sort of pressure for the artists. HM: Yes, I think I’d agree. I have a very particular idea of what I would like the show to achieve collectively in respect of perceptions of Northern Ireland, and there is something which underpins each of the artists’ practice. Recognising that represents my involvement in the exhibition. However, the venue we have also allows for the viewing of works quite independently of each other. Sometimes, as curator, you are in the position of reassuring an artist that you are happy to include a recent work without the requirement to produce new work, so as to relieve the pressure on them, but knowing that really all of them are busy working away making new work. 82 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland 83 PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland 84 85 CMGL: We have talked a little bit about the various ways these presentations might have an afterlife, but one of the most obvious ways is a publication. What positions have you taken on this? JEB: It’s still slightly up for discussion on our side. We have chosen not to publish a catalogue at Venice. What we are looking at doing is ideally publishing small publications on each individual practice over the two years of the project. For Venice, I think we are most likely to publish something in tabloid format that can be both ephemeral and archival. KMK: I think ideally we would do both, but I feel it’s more important for us to produce a book to continue to promote the artists’ work after the Biennale. SG: I haven’t got any money to do a book, simple answer. I am also going to print a leaflet for Venice and I have got support to produce a web site on the project. So there will be a source of information on the artists, and they can also use it as a resource for their work. HM: We will do a catalogue, because so few of the artists are actually represented in the form of publications. Also Richard West and Stephen Hackett, through Factotum, will produce a special edition of The Vacuum during our live events/interventions programmed during October. Shane Cullen (audience): I think that there is a difference between the people who are on the panel in terms of their responsibility and representation. When you say Scotland, Wales, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, in fact three of those countries are still embraced within Great Britain, whereas the Republic of Ireland is an autonomous political entity. When I was represented in the Biennale in 1995, I was invited to represent Ireland; Ireland as a 32 county entity given that the territorial claim to Northern Ireland was within the constitution of the time. That has changed, and now artists who are representing Ireland actually are representing 26 counties of the island. I actually think I preferred the situation where an artist from this part of Ireland and Northern Ireland worked together in a kind of ambiguous presentation without anything being so explicitly laid down. I think that was a healthier situation than the one that exists at the moment which seems to be defining territories. HM: I didn’t really think about the politicisation of the Biennale. I just thought it was an opportunity to do something for artists and curators in Northern Ireland. Much of the work that we are showing is very specifically about Northern Ireland, clearly locating it in the now rather than when a particular action might have happened. This, I think, represents a change. I am looking at the Biennale as a big art fair really, so I am not getting hung up on the notion of national representation which, coming from Northern Ireland, is difficult. SG: The idea of moving away from the fixed idea of nationality representing those countries has come out in our discussions. It is actually communities that are being represented. The artists representing Ireland this year, as I have said, aren’t all Irish but they are part of the Irish community. All your artists aren’t necessarily Northern Irish but are a part of that community. I think that’s the reading that is happening. SC: I just thought there are these decisions that actually are important to people, I’m sure the Palestinians would have been extremely proud to have had their own pavilion at the last Biennale but it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because certain people compromised too much with larger political interests. Aisling Prior (audience): I was just interested in when, Jason, you were talking about your criteria for selecting the artists that you were interested in, and the fact that they were working in an expanded practice - not in the mere production of artworks - and I was wondering how that could be done in the context of Venice? JEB: The practices we have selected, you could really describe as behavioural, in many ways. Those artists are primarily in their studio every day producing work consistently. If you look at them as a set of fascinations and behaviours, as opposed to people who solely issue product, then you are moving into a whole different realm of how you enter discussions with them. There was no significant commercial space in Scotland for a period of time. We were absolutely delighted to be able to support a gallery that has decided to set itself up as a commercial space, in a small regional British city and say ‘actually we can operate an internationally successful commercial space from this small regional city.’ And I think that’s also part of the cultural ecology that we are talking about. We are not talking about it solely outside of commerce. I think for Rachel and myself, we don’t have a specific interest in retaining the artist as the educated unemployed. PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland PRINTED PROJECT 05: Jason E Bowman, Sarah Glennie, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and Karen MacKinnon, and Hugh Mulholland Printed Project would like to thank Temple Bar Gallery & Studios for allowing the recording of this panel discussion. Common Property Katie Holten Harriet Phelan: Arrangement with peppers, 2005 Candy Holten: Arrangement with cabbage and roses, 2005 Contributors Ciarán Bennett attended a very small art school, where the teaching staff espoused the Bauhaus system as a radical response to the rather archaic methods still prevalent in the country. After initially choosing painting, he noticed that many of the concerns of his work reverberated with the memory of the landscape and mythological history of the Irish midlands. He started to explore this theme, which eventually led to installations and performances in the manner of Land Art. He has travelled extensively in Europe and Asia, returning to Ireland in 1994, where he started to write about contemporary art. He was subsequently elected a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and has curated exhibitions in Dublin and New York. Anna Colin has just completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2002, in collaboration with Tobi Maier, she has been programming and presenting a fortnightly radio show on visual arts on Resonance 104.4fm, the London arts radio station. She is the London correspondent for the French contemporary art magazine Art Press, and contributes regularly to the French art magazine Particules. She is currently involved in research based around socially engaged practices and institutions, and is cocurating a sound art project across six sites in London (July 2005). Tim Davies was born in Haverfordwest in 1960 and currently lives and works in Swansea. He studied at Norwich and Canterbury art schools. Recent exhibitions include Still Life at Leicester City Gallery in 2004, Drumming at the National Museum & Gallery of Wales, Cardiff in 2003, Contemporary Art from Wales at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 1998, Alice Maher/Tim Davies in Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and Triskel Arts Centre, Cork in 1999, the Artes Mundi prize short-listed artists exhibition in Cardiff in 2004 and Over and Over at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius in 2005. He has also exhibited in Hong Kong, Mexico, Estonia, Poland, Belize and Croatia. He won the Mostyn Open in 1997, and the Gold Medal in Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2003. His work is represented in the British Arts Council Collection at the Hayward Gallery, London, the NMGW, Cardiff, and the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea. Steven Duval is an artist currently living in Edinburgh. He is one of the original members of the Protoacademy and has been it’s coordinator since 2002. The group has recently worked with Olaf Nicolai and the Henry Moore Foundation’s Contemporary Projects. He has shown work in the Turin Biennale of Young Artists, Presence at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and most recently at KHOJ in New Delhi. His work deals with issues of food politics, mental ecology and the psychology of the built environment. He will be working with the residents of Aberdeen at the Peacock Gallery in April and Nuit Blanche in Paris in October. Katie Holten is a compulsive wanderer and adventurer. She is currently living in New York on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2003 she represented Ireland in La Biennale di Venezia. She has been commissioned to make new works for museums and galleries worldwide including: LMAKprojects, New York, 2005; Sanskriti Kendra Foundation, New Delhi, 2004; Hall of Fame, New York, 2004; Akademie der Künst, Berlin, 2004; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, 2004; 1st Prague Biennale, 2003; W139, Amsterdam, 2003; Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 2003; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, 2003; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2002; Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam, 2000; and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 1999. John Langan was born in 1967 in co. Clare. His artistic work tends to be a series of collaborative, interventionist and infiltrationist investigations of time, place and culture that often involve activities in the social sense. Through his actions and projects he advocates the concept of a participatory arts practice where the concept of learning is a means of problematising social and cultural destines. He has no favoured media but instead selects materials that are best suited to the task at hand. He lives in Galway and lecturers in Sculpture at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. Jason E Bowman is a London based artist and curator/consultant. With his long-term collaborator Rachel Bradley he is co-curator for Scotland at the Venice Biennale. For this context Bowman and Bradley designed a concept-driven project entitled, Selective Memory that focuses on the practices of Alex Pollard, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan and Cathy Wilkes. Bowman and Bradley’s collaborative projects include commissioning in the public sector with a specific interest in the development of value systems that increase artistic and public recognition of the role of intimacy as a response to the behavioural elements of artistic practice. Shane Cullen was born in Longford in 1957 and is currently living and working in Dublin. His work has been widely exhibited in Europe, the United States and Canada. In 1995 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and most recently at the inaugural Lodz Biennale in Poland 2004. He has spent periods of residency in Hungary and France and in 1998 was awarded the P.S.1 Fellowship at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. In 1992 he founded the Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Martyrdom and Resistance and is an active member of the Culture and Conflict Group. In 2002 he presented a vast sculptural work The Agreement (www.agreement.org) based on the complete transcription of what is more commonly known as the Good Friday Agreement. Gavin Delahunty was born in 1977. He is a curator who lives and works in Ireland. Having studied fine rrt he completed the MA in Visual Arts Practices (criticism) at Dun Laoghaire’s Institute of Art Design and Technology. Delahunty has worked for over five years in numerous art institutions and has curated several exhibitions. He is currently employed as program assistant at the Project Art Centre and is project co-ordinator for Ireland at Venice ’05. Sarah Glennie has been working as a curator both in Ireland and internationally for over 10 years. She moved to Ireland in 1995 to work as Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) where she curated a series of exhibitions of important younger generation international artists that included Olafur Eliasson, Callum Innes and Shirin Neshat. In 2001, she moved to The Henry Moore Foundation Contemporary Projects where she curated Paul McCarthy at Tate Modern, and Stopover - Graham Gussin, Hilary Lloyd and Richard Woods at the Venice Biennale 2003. She is currently Commissioner for Ireland’s participation at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005 and is working with Tacita Dean for a major new commission for Cork 2005. Georgina Jackson was born in Dublin in 1977. She has a BA in History of Art and French from Trinity College, Dublin. Since 2001 she has worked as gallery administrator in Green On Red Gallery. She has recently completed an MA in Visual Arts Practices (curating) in the Institute of Art Design and Technology, Dun Laoighaire. She has curated exhibitions such as Room 106, La Stampa Hotel, Dublin, 2004 and Press Play, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, 2005 and is curator of the visual arts programme for Dublin Fringe Festival 2005. Nevan Lahart is a red(ish) neck attempting to living the life of Riley in the big smoke Dublin. He’s full of shite and false humility. He dabbles in the art. He likes to think of himself as a hard worker, his father would scoff at such a fancy notion and would most definitely apply the tag of spoofer to his son. When he was small he wanted to be a jockey and when he dies he dreams of being beatified. He reckons this’ll look good on his CV. You can get the full rundown on what he does at www.nevanlahart.com. Alice Maher studied fine art in the late eighties at Cork and Belfast and was a Fulbright scholar at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987. She represented Ireland in the 22nd Sao Paolo Biennale. She has had solo shows at the Centre d’Art d’Ivry in Paris in 1996, the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin , 1997, the Nolan Eckman Gallery, New York, 2000 and the Purdy Hicks Gallery, London, 2003. Maher’s work can be seen in the public collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, the British Museum and the Arts Councils of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as private collections in Ireland, England, France and America. Niamh McCann is an Irish artist living and working in Dublin and London. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, McCann has exhibited extensively in Europe, Ireland and in the USA employing a variety of working methods from drawing to sculpture. Solo projects include: <