paper visual art journal –

“The unified quality of the thing is not noise at all, but is the sensual object itself…[T]he existence of a unified quality of things means that the sensual realm is already home to a certain ‘I do not know what’ that makes the marble a steady focus of my attention…we do not say je ne sais quoi in a spirit of gentle mockery, but as a true statement about sensual objects.”[1]

I recently joined art.sy. I had read about the site a few months back in Artforum and duly signed up to receive an invite when they were being sent out, forgetting all about it until a few days ago.[2] For those yet to learn about it, art.sy presents a new online facility for the viewing and buying of art. The intriguing thing about the site is not that it heralds a new way of appreciating art, or even interacting with it. The Internet has changed the way the world is apprehended, art notwithstanding: to point this out seems oxymoronic almost. Rather, what interests me is the manner in which the art presented on the site is sorted and categorised, in so doing being inserted into unforeseen contexts and arrangements: that is, by means of what art.sy calls ‘The Art Genome Project™’.[3] This system allows for the categorisation of some fifteen thousand works of art by three thousand artists on the website, according to the application of roughly eight hundred “genes”. Most artworks exist as a melange of some thirty to forty genes. These genes, in art.sy’s estimation, rest on the conceptual, art-historical or formal data that is deduced from the artwork itself, by a team of art historians and other professionals. So, presumably there is a “collage” gene and a “Fauvism” gene; but also, in all likelihood, a “green” or even a “cat” gene.

Screen shot from art.sy in a search for artworks related to “cat”, 07/02/2013; Website: art.sy.com

The categorisation of a work of art can thus be enacted not only by virtue of it belonging to a certain school or era, but also, somewhat arbitrarily, by whether or not a cat resides within the frame. Indeed, on entering the word “cat” into the search box at the top left of the screen and pressing enter, I get forty-one results, which can then be sub-divided into twelve further categories; flatness, primary mark, geometry, contemporary graphic realism, etc. Clicking on “flatness” to get, presumably, some flat pictorial felines, I am faced with a motley crew of six results, Manet’s Olympia sitting in a grid formation alongside works by Romare Bearden and Leland Bell, amongst others. The cat truly does appear as the sole unifying factor here. In this way, art.sy really is the place for collectors with unusually specific tastes: “A contemporary hard-edged colour field painting, predominantly magenta and with dimensions of at least nine by nine? No problem!” And while there are advantages to this specificity of approach, the Art Genome Project™’s system does seem to work hard to break down the actual specificity – better still, singularity – of the individual artwork. The work of art is reduced to a relation – between you, the viewer, your wishes and desires, and furthermore, between the artwork and the sum of other artworks that encroach upon this primary relation. Olympia becomes just one picture with a cat in it, rather than a singular aesthetic representation irreducible to genes. In other words, the ‘in-itself’ becomes the ‘in-itself-as-it-relates-to others’: the artwork becomes a code to be cracked.

Recently I had a conversation with an artist about the prospect of getting her work wrong. A child of post-modernism, prone to harbouring a kind of wistful, Adorno-esque residua modernism, I was quietly delighted to hear her say, yes, you definitely could. Not all readings are correct, she said, the work is not a space for projection; rather, there is a wrong and a right way to read the work, the right way following that of the artist’s intent. Now, I am not quite sure I agree fully with this position, but I do hold a great deal of sympathy towards it. All too often, a viewer or critic (myself included) approaches the work of art with already too much in mind, too many expectations, hopes or desires. Thus the work becomes the place where such tendencies are acted out, a catalyst if you will. The result is that the work of art becomes just one factor in a broad field of relations, its singularity utterly broken. However subscribing totally to the artist’s intent is not possible for me; the truth of the artwork is not reducible to the artist-artwork relation, either. If this were the case, an artwork would be seen once, the artist’s statement read, and the work immediately assimilated; there would be nothing to gain from the second, fifth or twelfth encounter. Going even further than that, arguably the artwork wouldn’t have to be experienced at all: depending on how articulate the artist was, his or her textual or spoken explanation might well be enough.

The question lingered on, and so shortly after the above conversation I asked an artist friend the same question: is it possible to get your work wrong? Her reply was in a manner completely divergent from the first, emphasising the open-endedness of her work, and indeed even welcoming this potential multiplicity of interpretation. But I cannot, after consideration, subscribe fully to this view, either. For me, then, the artwork is shaded by a relation, but does not exist solely as a product of one: something else subsists outside of any relational binary.

Edouard Manet: Olympia (detail), 1863, oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm (51.4 in × 74.8 inches, Collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Art.sy, like the first artist, views the artwork as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked. More than this, both put forward a notion of this code as (a.) solvable, and (b.) stable. Once an artwork has been assigned a specific make-up it remains this way: both artist and website imbue the work with an ‘inner’ intransigence of taxonomy that no person or context can engender. However, art.sy does not share this code; the essential qualities or traits that make up an artwork are pointedly not divulged. The artwork may well change in relation to other contexts and artworks, but the “essential” qualities (to which other things bear a relation to) remain fixed, and secret. The first artist, on the other hand, forcefully articulates and transmits this code, “only this is what it means!” no longer unnamed, yet cordoned off from the dual influence of interpretation and context. And so it appears both positions hijack the artworks’ supposedly essential qualities or ‘in-itself’; the only difference being their respective positions on these qualities’ disclosure or transmission.

Now to the second artist: where is she situated within this horizon? For her, the code is constantly in a state of remodelling or flux, her interpretation of the artwork far from sovereign, even as its creator. If the work of art’s essential quality is sketched at all, it is as aporia: interminably slipping from comprehensive understanding, it eludes even its creator’s grasp. In such a way, even the denial of an ‘in-itself’ permits a fetishisation, albeit of a relation. Although the work exists ‘in-itself’, it appears as though this is constantly being altered and remade as it pertains to a relation, not only the ‘artist-artwork’ relation but also the ‘artist-artwork-receiver’ (critic/viewer) triad. This positioning, although diametrically opposed to that of the first artist, paradoxically holds much in common with that of art.sy, also. Both share a ‘correlationist’ perspective of the work of art, in that the work of art’s essential quality is fundamentally that of a relation (between the viewer and the artwork; between the artwork and others on the computer screen, etc.). The ‘in-itself’ of the work of art, if there is one, is a product of this relation; it is neither fixed nor essential, but constantly in flux, a product of overlapping entities and contexts.

This viewpoint, of course, will be a familiar one to anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary philosophical thought, particularly that of French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, and the speculative realism school more broadly.[4] Meillassoux’s Après la finitude [5] (2006) acts as a riposte to the legacy of phenomenology, which Meillassoux predominantly blames for the contemporary dominance of what he terms ‘correlationist’ thought. This mode of thinking emphasises the pre-eminence of the subject-object correlation, and as such negates the possibility of the ‘in-itself’ of any object. Contra this position, Meillassoux and speculative realism broadly put forward the notion of an ‘in-itself’ independent of the subject-object relation; that is, indifferent to language, consciousness, etc. This Meillassoux does by using the example of the ancestral fossil (‘arche-fossil’): dating from a time anterior to human ‘givenness’, this fossil proves an irrefutable challenge to the correlationist: how can she think of this object as existing only by virtue of a relation, even though it exists as remnant of an era prior to all (human) relatedness? This object, in short, has qualities that subsist – and indeed have done so – outside of the subject-object correlation. These qualities, for all intents and purposes, are actually indifferent to that relation.

Meillassoux argues that such properties are those given only by mathematics, which alone can be thought in absolute terms by being able to function outside the remit of human relatedness. Thus speculative realism in effect absolutises mathematics, for it alone remains unaltered (and humanly unalterable) in the absence of human givenness. Which, in a strange roundabout way, brings me back to art.sy. Through its idiosyncratic classification, the artwork is reduced to a code: more than that, a secret, absolute code – one that remains intransigently static irrespective of context.[6] However, art.sy’s is an absolutely correlationist code, born only of an impartial and finite human relation. What art.sy effectively achieves is the formulation of a pseudo mathematics, the illusion of infinity where there are only the short-term gains of economy and reputation. After all, who are the individuals responsible for the assignation of genes? Where do their allegiances lie if not with profit?[7] Tangentially, and taking a wild example: say the cat population of the world becomes infected with a deadly and wholly unaesthetic virus, the net result being a universal and irrevocable aversion to felines. In every other regard, remarkably enough, the world is virtually unchanged. Now, would the value of imbuing a work of art with a “cat” gene be a constructive thing to do in such a scenario, hypothetical though it is? No it would not: no one would want to look at, let alone buy, a depiction of a cat, and so the feline gene would become inevitably debased. Similarly, in the wake of 9/11 any depiction of a skyscraper would necessarily suggest a plane crashing into it – that would have been a morbid, but wholly natural, thought progression. Now with this any depiction of shiny metropolis, skyscrapers gleaming in the sunlight, would have been unsavourable to the point of insensitivity; in short, the ‘skyscraper’ gene would slip drastically down the scale of desirable genes, most likely dragging other related ones down with it. Thus two structural hierarchies of genes exist with regard to art.sy’s system; one that makes artworks less or more desirable by virtue of their most defining genes; and another, which pertains to the genes’ specific arrangement within a certain artwork, which is dependent on how relevant each one is with regard to it. Both hierarchies are neither stable nor neutral, but instead always in a kind of relationary flux: imagining a stock exchange of genes comes close.

Aleana Egan: Room after room (2012), Steel 170 x 140 x 2cm; Image held here.

This may all seem a bit obvious, like it almost doesn’t need to be said. For me though, the art.sy conundrum neatly articulates a paradoxical desire accompanying any consideration of the art object: a petulantly divergent two-pronged desire, that is, furthermore, absolutely crucial. Two incompatible breeds of expectation are at work here, the art object thus becoming the site of a virtual tug of war. For the thought of art.sy being an apt vehicle for the systematic treatment of art remains an aberration; “‘Olympia’ cannot be reduced to a configuration of so-called genes!” Indeed there is a real vehemence present when the art object is couched in such reductively comprehensive terms. But curiously this intensity can also be matched when art is described by virtue of its ineffability or elusiveness: “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a painting – a configuration of line and shape in pigment on canvas – with a cat in it!” This dual nature is why the thought of speculative realism heralds not only a kind of ecstatic, nihilistic freedom (from relativism, from anthropocentrism, etc.), but also a kind of ontological dread: the object is indifferent to me; to language, and human mastery: that a certain something else simply doesn’t need me. This applies to all objects; dead, inert and separate, not only those described as ‘art’. A Moebius strip in-itself, the object forbears any attempt to exhaustively subdue it. For if I had full mastery over it, it would no longer fascinate; at the same time, if the potential of mastery was not present, neither would it hold me there. In it there must be present a promise, but one whose deferral is neither relational nor symbolic, but structural.

In conclusion, I wish to say that I had previously considered writing another essay, much different from this one. That essay would have served as a guide to the one you read now, if it had been written, and it may be yet. Using the form of a paragraph, the essay would comprise perhaps five or six of these condensed essay forms, and each would deal with the same work of art; the intention being to practically elucidate questions begged by speculative realism and, in a different way, art.sy. Both appear to take up the artwork’s challenge, or at least attempt some semblance of a re-evaluation. But to spend time with the work or art is always a question of its continued re-evaluation. Truly engaged consideration inevitably enters the same endgame as speculative realism, whilst at the same time negating any claims made by art.sy as to the essential, intransigent – but ultimately graspable – properties of the work of art. The work of art I was to write about is by Aleana Egan, that recently rested, slender and calm, on the walls of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.[8] Its title is Room after room, and it has stayed with me, somewhat inexplicably, from the first time I saw it.[9] It is complete in that it dictates nothing: about it, or me, or how that relation should be performed. It provides the open place for a thought, but a thought that attempts to think it through materially, as an object. For although it means something, the artist’s intent being most likely the strongest guide for figuring that out, even that is not enough: “I hear you say what it means, but…” This openness of the work is that of an ill-defined promise, but a promise that always remains a promise of something. And though the artwork’s promise might be deferred, necessarily and structurally, its fulfillment is always tangible, necessarily and structurally, too.

Rebecca O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher currently based in Dublin.  She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin.  In 2012 she commenced a doctorial research at NCAD, focusing on the figure of transcendentalism in contemporary art.

* This essay was originally published in Paper Visual Art Journal’s Limerick hard copy edition last August. We will be shortly making the PDF of the hard copy available on the site.

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[1] Graham Harman (2007) On Vicarious Causation in Collapse Vol. II Speculative Realism. London: Urbanomic, pg. 214

[2] The article where I first learned about the project was Michael Sanchez Pandora’s Black Box, Artforum, March 2012. Available at: http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=30331 (Accessed June 2012)

[3] Presumably, that ™ is there to supplement the system with even more gravitas.

[4] Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, London in April 2007. The conference featured presentations by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, and was chaired by Alberto Toscano.

[5] This then appeared in English translation as After Finitude (2008), trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum)

[6] The choice of the word gene, also, is very interesting. For me there is a kind of odd religiosity present in the equivalence between the biological and the aesthetic domain. The artwork, like the person, is formed and bound by this configuration of genes, but the primary aesthetician/biologist remains absolutely out of the frame.

[7] Although art.sy claims pedagogy as a crucial motivation of the venture, a quick look at some of its main investors makes it difficult not be cynical: they include Dasha Zhukova, founder of Moscow’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture; Wendi Murdoch, film producer; Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, board of Facebook; Josh Kushner, managing partner of Thrive Capital; and Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter.

[8] Egan’s solo exhibition day wears at the Douglas Hyde Gallery ran from June 1 – July 18, 2012.

[9] Room after room (2012), Steel 170 x 140 x 2cm.  An image of the work available here: http://www.marymarygallery.co.uk/index.php/gallery/category/C2/aleana_egan/P3/ (Accessed: 4 July, 2012)

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The empty corralling of theory and over-use of jargon that pervades an increasingly marginalised visual art discourse in Ireland is affiliative to the point of being conservative and unwelcoming. This manifests itself in the over-usage of lifeless words that operate sluggishly in the vague but precise-sounding recesses of an increasingly sciencified system of art discourse, and art/art theory education. The words that occupy these rarefied recesses lack amplitude. It is the amplitude of the range of their meaning that give words their life.

In this short essay, my intention is to consider what compassion can do to art criticism, and by extension how visual art might be written about. Here, by compassion I do not mean solely that one recognises the Other and treats this other in a sympathetic way, forgiving all faults and excesses. I mean to take this instinct and consider it in another way. Humane, complex, and relevant criticism in art comes from a place of compassion that is fundamental, and it opens up a number of further levels of interaction between artwork, artist, writer, and reading public.

Photo: Tony Compagno (2011)

Compassion in art criticism stems from a rigorous interaction with the artwork or artist you are engaging with – almost to the extent that your life depends on it. This sort of engagement creates a place whereby the critic honestly applies the same intensity of critical engagement to him or herself as he or she has done to the artist/artwork being engaged with. This creates an ever-deepening cycle of questioning and self-questioning, appraisal and self-appraisal, judgement and self-judgement. This instinct and private gesture of shared doubt and appraisal happens as one engages with and writes about the artist/artwork, and after these activities. This also goes toward changing the nature of the gaps between the public gesture of an artwork and the forming of an opinion about the artwork, this opinion being expressed publicly, and in turn the relationship with the reader of this opinion. This cycle of questioning reduces the chances of a critic being dismissive and/or negative – and I mean negative in three senses here: not just an absence of encouragement, or the lack of anything offered in place of a denigration, but also by only recognising as innovative something they recognise for already having once been innovative. From this we get the application of ‘taste’ to artworks, a situation whereby artworks can almost never affect the critic’s taste.

The sort of compassion that I am talking about here creates a situation in the critic’s practice whereby it is as important, or dangerous, to say something critically positive as it is to say something critically negative. The intention is not to create a stultified form of criticism, but quite the opposite. By the critic being as critical of him or herself as he or she is of the artwork or artist being appraised, there emerges a cyclical, fluid sympathy in their thinking, judging, and writing. It involves a measure of the writer’s ability to judge in sympathy with a measure of the artwork being judged. The writer becomes immersed in, and writes from the situation of the artwork, thus offering a history-from-below of it, which over time will contribute to its official history.

When relaying one’s opinion of an artwork, this cycle of judgement and self-judgement should be allowed to extend from what you say into why you say it, and how you say it, i.e. is the language you employ to talk about the artist/artwork compassionate? This engagement with language is done on at least two levels: one, through a meaning you hope to communicate and, two, through the nature of the words you use to relay this potential meaning. Writing about art can be done from the simple to the complex, at word, sentence, paragraph, published text, and oeuvre levels. If you wish to be understood you are writing to the reader’s curiosity. If you feel you ought to be understood, you are writing to the reader’s education. These two situations create different uses of language. I think when one is writing about art, one should be aware of these situations, and question one’s interaction with them.

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People external to the discourse of art can contribute to the discourse in a meaningful way, thus widening and deepening it, and making it still more complex. It is within this complex, unstable, and growing tissue of art discourse that people can navigate based upon appeals to their curiosity, not solely to their education and tastes. Writing about visual art and discussion about visual art can be done using a language and style sympathetic and invitational to those people who do not discuss or think about visual art on a regular basis, thus making a gesture outward from the discourse, while still not doing a disservice to the complexity of the artwork being discussed. The extraordinary difficulty inherent in attempting this is the responsibility, now, of those within the discourse of art, i.e. the artist, the art-writer, the critic, the editor, the curator, the educator, the student, etc. This should be an ambition in their practices. The belief in and the use of the astounding instability of words is where this effort can begin. A reader, any reader, should be invited to lie on one’s back upon the possibility of a sentence all the while facing outward at a universe of multiplicities suggested by it.

*

Creating writing and discussion about art in a way that is compassionate will change the manner with which the ideas in it are communicated too. Quantitatively less might be said, but I believe the language that stems from this shift in emphasis will also force the writer/the thinker about art to say something new, and ask new questions that stem not from fear of a need to legitimate the asking of the question. Writing here will cease to be an exercise in the dressing of the absence of thought. This shift in emphasis will trigger a curiosity in oneself as writer, a curiosity in one’s interaction with the world of art, and a curiosity in one’s expression of this interaction. When the articulation of ideas becomes important, these barriers of language will naturally eddy into insignificance. Words here will have moments – like musical notes – of appearance, reverberation and decay, leaving the reader with an experience of a text that is a version of the writer’s ideas only.

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In most visual art writing in Ireland the affectation of ‘writing’ has been adopted without any of the attendant rigour or artistry or magic. Visual art is ‘covered’ in a brutal pseudo-journalistic way and essayed about in a straightforward manner. And this elucidates a suffocating sub-ordination of the written to the visual that seems to be accepted, perpetuated, and at times lauded. Art can be written about greatly. Art-writing can be something that can be read by, and open up places of interest and perhaps even joy for all – simply through the writing itself. And from this kind of writing we may also be given some other unspeakable clue as to the fascination evoked by the artwork that initially compelled the writer to write about it – thus somehow offering a further unforeseen sense of the artwork, and an unforeseen sense of the relationship of the artwork to the writer.

Adrian Duncan is a writer, artist, and engineer who is currently based in Dublin.

* This is the second part of a two-part essay.  The first essay titled A Proposal for Activation in Visual Art Writing was published in the Paper Visual Art Dublin edition and can be read online here.  Compassion in art criticism was recently published in our Limerick hard copy edition last August, 2012.

Artists can be temperamental creatures, so we took things slowly at first. I started with Image 0737 and began by asking him to tell me how it came about — where and when it was taken.

I was wandering around the city one night when I came across this small alcove closed off by a set of bars. I hadn’t taken any images in a while — I’d become disillusioned with the image making process — and this alcove seemed to sum up how I was feeling at the time.

Image 0737

I asked him what the connection was between this image and the next image, 0674.

The mood is certainly lighter, almost celebratory in nature.

I asked him if it he could confirm it was sunlight, and if it was, what purpose it served in relation to the general lack of sunlight in Image 0737.

Image 0674

It appears to be sunlight all right, filtering through what looks like the branches of a tree.

He seemed reluctant to take ownership of the image so I asked him to tell me a little about the thinking behind it, to set the record straight, as it were. I asked him if we were in a park or a public space, or a garden of some sort. I did not say waste ground, though it was what was on my mind.

Actually, I don’t recognise the location.

He said he didn’t recognise where it was and had no memory of having taken the image. I reminded him that it had been found on his device.

Are you sure, because I have no recollection of having taken it? I may very well have taken it, of course, but as I say, I have no memory of taking it. I may have triggered my device accidentally. To me it could be anywhere. It’s during the day obviously, and the numerical sequence would seem to indicate that it was taken before the first image.

I asked him again if he recognised the location.

It might be St. Stephen’s Green or Herbert Park.

I wondered why he had mentioned these two parks in particular. There was a long silence before he answered.

I used to spend a lot of time in St. Stephen’s Green and in Herbert Park.

I told him that the image reminded me of the Garden of Remembrance. There was something about it—the discarded butts, the moss infested tarmac bleeding into the dusty ground. I put it to him that he might have triggered his device accidentally in the Garden of Remembrance.

I’m not ruling out the Garden of Remembrance — in fact it’s a favourite haunt of mine—but I don’t remember having visited it during this period.

We talked for a while about the Garden of Remembrance. He admired the design: the Children of Lir rising into the sky; the sunken cruciform with its trove of discarded weaponry. We agreed the facility was well maintained and attracted a large number of visitors. He said he thought the new entrance on its northern periphery had been a welcome addition.

We moved on to the next image and I asked him if we were dealing with something similar. Maybe I was on the wrong track, but it seemed to me that there were a number of similarities between this image and the one he may have taken accidentally in the Garden of Remembrance. I pointed these similarities out to him — the scattered leaves, the blue and orange bottle tops, the desiccated earth studded with shards and fragments. He agreed that the leaves in Image 0676 were like a withered wreath. But then there was that ominous band of shadow, reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting, across the bottom of the image, what was that all about?

Image 0676

I asked him if he might shed some light on this image. It was then I realised there was an image missing, Image 0675. I wondered if he had by chance deleted it. He ignored my enquiry and spoke instead about the differences between Image 0674 and Image 0676.

In Image 0674 one of the bottle tops is fractured.

I pictured its blue carapace being twisted free and trampled into the earth.

It’s split down the middle and the central bottle top in Image 0674 is red, not orange.

I looked again at Image 0674. He was right, the bottle top — slightly left of centre — wasn’t orange, it was a washed-out red, its once pristine brilliance abraded through prolonged exposure to the elements to the colour of a pink carnation. There were scraps of something beneath it, scattered like fragments of an exploded balloon.

And there’s something written on it. Did you notice the upended black bottle top in the top right hand corner?

I looked at the image again. There was something written in blue on the faded pink bottle top but it was impossible to make out what it was. And how could I have missed the upended black bottle top in the top right hand corner? The yellow leaf to its left must have distracted me, along with the dusty root to the leaf’s left, making its way out of and back into the earth. Re-examining the image I noticed that, about midway between the black and blue tops, was an unassuming looking little top — like a spent bullet casing. One side of it was completely crushed. I didn’t mention this to him, but instead asked if he could make out what was written on the washed-out bottle top. He reply was illuminating.

Probably a logo of some sort.

When he said this, the phrases “Now do you see?” and ‘Now do you understand?’ came to mind. He became agitated when I mentioned this to him, and denied again having taken either of the images.

What has coloured bottle tops got to do with seeing and understanding?

I felt it had everything to do with them but for some reason I could not bring myself to say this to him. Instead, I asked him if he would care to speculate as to what happened to the missing image — 0765.

I must have deleted it.

I asked him if it was perhaps an image taken in the Garden of Remembrance. He said he didn’t think so — of course he couldn’t rule out the possibility. I said maybe the next image would help jog his memory. It was Image 073-001, or Straw Pool, as it’s now known.

Image 073-001 (Straw Pool)

I wasn’t sure if he would recognise it. When I first mentioned the name Straw Pool to him he said, somewhat disdainfully, that he wasn’t in the habit of referring to the images by name.

To me they’re just images.

I asked him if he had a problem with it being calling Straw Pool. It was, after all, an image of a pool with straws in it.

There are other possibilities in terms of a title and the title’s relationship to the content.

I followed up by asking him if he felt uncomfortable with the name Straw Pool. Most of the straws are completely submerged in the liquid’s opacity. I stressed this point a number of times, without being too obvious. When he didn’t reply, I said that they being completely submerged wasn’t a good enough reason to find the name disturbing. I added that I hadn’t considered that he might find such a title disturbing, but that I didn’t see any useful alternative, considering the image was now known by that name. I told him any confusion regarding the image could have been easily cleared up by his simply accepting the title, Straw Pool. In the silence that followed, the thought of this image being stripped of its title left me with an unbearable feeling of sadness.

First of all I don’t find this title — Straw Pool — disturbing.

I said nothing for a few moments, then nodded and repeated the title by which the image was now known.

Straw Pool, yes, I don’t find it disturbing in the slightest. Quite the reverse, the straws are in a pool: suspended, submerged, immersed.  So to answer your question, while I would prefer to keep the numerical reference, I’m happy to go along with this title, in fact I’m flattered that anyone would go to the trouble of titling one of these images. I’m equally flattered that the title has caught on.

Buoyed by this reply, I asked if he was surprised the title had caught on.

Not surprised, no.

I then told him that after examining the image in detail I felt that a majority of the straws were in fact not keeping their heads above water.

That the world exists entirely without hope — is that what you’re saying?

This answer threw me a bit. I lowered my voice and told him we were in this together. He ignored me and carried on with his extrapolation.

Within the image’s limited remit you could say a substantial number of the straws are remaining afloat. But there is no telling how many straws, outside the pool’s frame of reference, are partially or indeed wholly immersed. Let’s assume that there are straws that are not visible. So who knows the extent of their immersion, the depths to which they have sunk?

As he spoke, a trove of memories floated to the surface.

Equally, such a sunken state might represent a state of liberation. The assumption is that the straws exist in some sort of abject state, but it’s entirely possible that they will emerge unscathed and find themselves floating freely upon the pool’s opacity.

Encouraged by this display I steered him round to the question of what he had been attempting to achieve. Although unsure of whether or not I should encourage his interpretative flights of fancy, I recognised the necessity of pressing on towards a conclusion. But there was a belligerence in his voice that disturbed me, a defiance that seemed out of place.

With regard to my intention the question of accountability is neither here nor there. It is not my intention for you to come to any specific conclusions, beyond the fact that you must face up to the fact that you must —

I interrupted him here. His voice had become shrill. I wondered if it would ever be possible to fathom his intentions, to plumb the depths of what had consumed him. Once more an unbearable feeling of sadness washed over me.

In the course of my work I accumulate a large quantity of images, some of which are meaningful, some of which are not. The majority of these images have to be discarded, but a small minority emerge to define themselves outside of the process of exclusion and inclusion, images that seem to embody the possibility of bridging the gap between futility and utility, between what is intentional and what is not.

I was only half listening now — half remembering, half dreaming. It was beginning to dawn on me that Image 073-001 had been a turning point. The floating straws represented something he had been trying desperately to suppress, to keep beneath the surface. I wondered why he had chosen not to say anything about this to me, why he’d ignored the fact that a majority of the straws were not keeping their heads above water, but were, in fact, being forcibly held beneath the surface.

I think it was the opacity that attracted me. I can’t remember really. As I said I used to take hundreds of images in the course of my work.

Perhaps that’s why I was here, searching the wreckage, sifting shadows.

You have asked me a series of questions and I’ve tried to answer them as honestly as I can. I’ve told you that I may have been drawn to a certain image in order to make a connection of some sort. Beyond that I don’t know what more can I say.

We had arrived at the first set of sequences — Image 0746 to 0748. I knew now that there was no turning back, that I could never escape him. Wherever I looked one way or another, he’d always be there, hovering just out of reach.

Image 0746, 0747, 0748

In the first sequence, the shadow of a linear structure diverges at right angles through a random scattering of leaves. The location in each frame is proximately similar. We are dealing with movements, with seasonal variation and the dynamics of light and shade as a way of saying something like: “Now do you see? Now do you understand?” The shadows are aligned in a herringbone pattern.

In relation to the overall design the railings function as a broken net. The net takes the form of a fish’s skeleton and configures the leaves as an indiscriminate scattering of scales. The light has a sunken feel to it, as if the sunlight were being sucked through the tarmac down into the earth.

I took the difference in numerical reference points — the four digit 0000 series and the binary six digit structure of the marginalised Straw Pool — as marking some form of transition, from bars to straws to the shadows of railings, shadows submerging straws, railings and bars returned to shadowy invisibility. There were a lot of dead leaves.  The sequence is suffused with foreboding which indicates there might be a tree, or trees, overhead. I did not rule out the possibility that the leaves had been gathered elsewhere, transported to the site and placed randomly on the ground to give the impression of their having fallen above the dappled tarmac, from a tree, or trees.

The profusion of fish scales and the ruptures in the netting suggests a struggle of some sort.

We moved on quickly to the next sequence, this time involving a breaking wave. Its numerical reference — 0685 to 0687 — placed this sequence before Image 0737 and the preceding sequence 0746 to 0748, but after Image 0674 and 0676. The railings in the sequence have emerged from the shadows and take the form of handrails running either side of a series of stone steps down into the sea. The railings terminate somewhere beneath the waves.

The initial image [0737] posited the idea of something behind bars. In this sequence the bars have been beaten, not into ploughshares and pruning hooks, but handrails.

Image 0685, 0686, 0687

He said he took the images, one after the other, in quick succession — like gasping for breath.

There was no intention at the time to connect the images, to place them in a sequence – in and out and in again. Neither did I time the taking of the images to coincide with the advancement and recession of the water.

I knew now that there had been a purpose to his choices, that he had not simply been selecting images at random and scattering them like leaves before my emaciated gaze.

There was an intention, a desire on my part that existed outside of my control, to capture this convergence, these violent convulsions.

I agreed that the sequence represented a form of undelineated desire. There is a roughness inherent in such acts of capture; an aggressive taking away. It was there in the weathered steps and the handrails running into the sea.

I suppose there might be some correlation, yes, but I have no memory of wanting to place these images in a sequence. It was the back and forth, the painstaking erosion of the stone, that drew me in.

I thought of the handrails, terminating under the waves as he gasped for breath.

The handrails enter the waves as they break. They are seen and then unseen, covered and then uncovered, like a revelation. I was taken in and pulled towards it. Any intention I had was secondary to my helplessness before that act of annihilation.

I wanted to ask him about this helplessness because it seemed we were back where we’d started, with Image 0737, and all the things that can only be seen in the dead of night, things that reveal themselves dimly and when we least expect it.

Benjamin Robinson is a writer and visual artist. His work has been published most recently in ART From ART – A Collection of Short Stories Inspired by Art (Modernist Press); on-line at 3:am Magazine, Puerto Del Bloga, and recirca.com. He lives in Dublin.

A Q&A between Pádraic E. Moore and Gary Coyle following Hello Darkness which took place at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery from 31 May – 30 June, 2012.

P: Your current exhibition makes manifest preoccupations and obsessions that were present in previous bodies of work. However, there have been some significant developments. In particular, you seem to make many references to digitally manipulated imagery and there has also been a shift into making pieces that include areas of abstract patterns. Both these developments are apparent in a work such as Algae Bloom (Fleur de Mal).  So, in many cases figurative works that seem to suggest narrative are punctuated by formal interruptions. Can you discuss this?

Gary Coyle: Fleurs du Mal, 2012, 125x 156cm; Image courtesy the artist.

G: As you have mentioned, my work has always betrayed an interest in the common place and the everyday.  An exploration of this is – I believe – one of the key characteristics of Modernism, stretching back to Manet, who often referenced classical artworks through depicting his own immediate milieu. I use my everyday environment as a basic building block or element through which I filter other concerns and interests. The references to digital imagery I suppose reflect the fact that so much of our everyday experiences are mediated through screens and lenses. I’m also interested in the collision between the man-made and the natural – culture versus nature.

P: There are aspects of works in this exhibition in which the quotidian is elevated to something sacred or archetypal. I suppose we have touched upon this in terms of your appreciation of an artist like Manet.  Equally, you often emphasise the sinister character of suburbia. Is it the case that you believe that there is a necessity to focus upon that which lies before you, on your own doorstep so to speak?

G: I have always wondered why some artists feel the need to explore what might be considered the ‘exotic’ or the ‘far flung’. Most of the artists I really admire, Picasso, Beuys, Wentworth, Bonnard,  De Chirico, and Kounellis to name but a few, made art which reflected directly on their everyday existence and  used whatever it was that was close to hand. So, yes I do feel the necessity to focus on what lies before me. As regards the sinister character of suburbia, I have come to see suburbia as a place of extremes in which malevolence is often concealed beneath deceptive surfaces.

P: The presence of the drawn line in these works is obviously important. Moreover, your approach is clearly meticulous and at times academic. This is in my opinion integral to the power of the drawings – the confluence of traditional technical approaches with contemporary and at times disturbing subject matter. So, is ‘process’ important to you? Do you conceive of the completed image or does the act of making sometimes guide you?

Gary Coyle: Moran Park, charcoal on paper, 113 x 144, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

G: I begin a drawing with a basic idea – “I will use this element here and combine it with this background” – but then as the drawing starts to evolve, I hope that it will take on a life and a direction of its own. I know some artists who have a very definite idea of how they want their finished work to look and they strive to implement this mental picture. My response to that has always been if it doesn’t change and evolve in the course of making, then why bother?  As regards the actual making, I try to make things as well as I possibly can. At the same time I work by erasing and rubbing out, so that chance and accident play an important role in the process, so I try and balance those two elements, one controlled and the other its exact opposite. The word academic for various reasons is not a word I would like applied to my work. One reason being is that its use is almost always pejorative, and the other is that I am for “better or worst” a member of an Academy. However, if in using that word you mean skillfully made and part of a long tradition of art making and drawing that stretches back over several hundred years, I would plead guilty as charged.

P: In several of the pieces in this exhibition you have produced works that relate to very real occurrences and factual narratives. Clearly the works can operate without one making recourse to the events. However, is it of any importance to you whether or not the viewer is aware of these events?

Gary Coyle: Haunted, charcoal on paper, 125 x 86cm, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

G: I was at the Willie Doherty show in the Kerlin Gallery recently and I noted several of the works -  the ones that were the most atmospheric and which I particularly liked – were accompanied by information regarding what had occurred there; a kneecapping, the murder of an alleged informer for example. In a sense I felt that they were tying the image too closely to a specific event and also dissipating its power. Certainly over the course of my career – such as it is – I have dealt with some pretty dark, bleak, and sensational subject matter: Sharon Tate’s living room, Fred West’s bedroom, porn sets, and images of murderers, etc. However, I have always  – maybe foolishly – removed the specifics of the what, where, and when.  I suppose because in part I think it’s too easy to drum up interest, to sensationalise by divulging what has occurred.  Also, I have always wanted my images to take on a life of their own that was independent of the source.  The only time I have coupled image to story was my spoken word piece Death in Dún Laoghaire, and that was designed as a performance in front of an audience.

P: There is a reference to David Berkowitz in your press release for this exhibition. I believe that he is a figure who exemplifies the way in which society constructs narratives around and depictions of what might be termed ‘acts of evil’. The suggestion is that society will always construct archetypes to satisfy certain beliefs and instincts. Is it the case that some of your work is a response to this?

G: I used the Berkowitz quote, as I actually believe it is rather poetic and not at all what one might expect from a mass murderer. Apparently, Jimmy Breslin, the famous New York journalist to whom Berkowitz addressed several letters, described him as the only serial killer with a sense of punctuation. I also thought it described my own relationship with my subject matter rather well. As regards archetypes, I think these are indispensable both in  art and in life.

Gary Coyle: Arrrgh, charcoal, 22×62cm, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

P: There are aspects to this exhibition that are clearly polemical. In particular, your reference to the obsession with Modernist architecture, which has of course become ubiquitous subject matter in contemporary art.  Perhaps in some ways your practice refutes certain codes and approaches that have become de rigueur?

G: Over the last few decades I think the art has been become quite homogenised. With more and more power concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and as a result certain styles and concerns become all conquering for a few years.  Then suddenly without warning they become passé and some new imperative has taken its place; Expressionism in the 80s, the body in the late 80s early 90s, Relational Aesthetics in the late 90s and early noughties, Modernism redux ad absurdum in mid-noughties,  not forgetting the everyday, the archive, etc. I don’t think  it’s  always been  that way, if you look at what was going on in  let’s say in Paris in the 20s, there was a very diverse range of work which received critical recognition: Pierre Kossolowiski’s wierd figuration, De Chirico’s Neo-Classicism, Giacometti’s Surrealism, Picasso’s multiple styles and investigations, Man Ray, Matisse, Brancusi, etc., I know it was a golden age and doubtless styles and theories inexplicably fell in and out of favour then too. I know it’s a pretty sweeping statement, but I think the art world now has a bad case of group think, with shoals of people swimming in the same direction. So yes, I suppose there is a rather polemical edge to the piece in the exhibition entitled  Arrgh, though I must say it really is quite tongue in cheek.

www.garycoyle.ie

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A Q&A between Brendan Earley & Pádraic E. Moore following A Place Between at the RHA Gallery Dublin, 5 March – 29 April, 2012.

Brendan Earley: A Place Between (2011-12), felt tipped pen on paper, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q1: The title of this exhibition evokes hinterlands, and perhaps even the abandoned building sites that characterise Dublin and other urbanised locations throughout Ireland at present. Does this preoccupation with transitional landscapes emerge from a desire to explore the possibility within uncertainty – and I don’t refer only to the current climate of economic uncertainty.

A: Well, from what I remember the title came out of a conversation with Pat Murphy (the Director of the R.H.A. Gallery, Dublin) early on in our discussions about what the show was going to look like. In the beginning there was going to be a lot more walls built, with a heavy emphasis on wandering around the gallery, but then I felt this was a little too contrived.

Apart from the obvious attraction one might have for ‘out of bounds’ areas found in places like the hinterlands of a city, the real interest I find is in their liminality. These are in-between spaces which naturally appear in cities and would happen anyway regardless of our obvious economic crisis. They lie idle and overgrown and in a semi-bucolic state, seeming to wait for something.  These places invite me in, not like a trespasser, but more like a visitor.  I think these places have a quality which stems from the fact that the labels ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ with which we normally find our bearings in a landscape do not apply.  It’s not the fields of farms but the Grand Canal beside my studio in Inchicore that are thick with wild flowers every year, for me this points to the ability of wildlife to survive in these waste lands. I really find this remarkable, nature’s persistence in the face of ceaseless change in urban areas. This gives me great hope too because I find it a bleak view to see the story of man/nature as nothing more then one of survival, with nature irrevocably opposed to man, forever just holding on. So looking at it in a more hopeful way, it is a story of co-existence, of how it is possible for the natural world to live alongside man, even in places destroyed because of our excess and greed. So for these reasons I have taken a more active interest in the possibility found in a built environment under a slow change, one that accepts uncertainty in order to develop organically.

Brendan Earley: Hunky Dory (2010), pen on photocopy and coloured paper, 29.5×20cm; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q2: This exhibition evinces a shift in your practice in several ways.  In particular, some of the drawings include figures and you have begun to use colour in an almost expressive manner. I was interested to note that you had given these works names that referred – quite specifically – to song titles. There is also clearly a reference to Tarkovsky’s films. Can you give some insights into this?

A: I think finding fragments of things on my way to or from work and reuniting them in some way has always been a central preoccupation in my work. Lines from songs that one would hear have a similar feel to the detritus I use to begin a sculpture and they (the songs) would finish them. Indeed with this show, collage became important as it provided a handy antidote to my fear of the blank page (the large marker drawings are another way out) and they also allowed me to use colour in a looser way. As well as all sorts of other bits of ephemera which I find in those large DIY stores found on the periphery of cities.

Figures have begun to appear in the drawings mostly because I decided to make my interest in certain histories more explicit, such as land art, science fiction and the Romantic tradition. This can be seen as a way of mourning the devaluation of these histories (and in particular the latter), ways of seeing that I can never have. Artists who once, with fresh eyes, discovered sublime nature as a mirror of their soul and whose discovery is now obsolete. Hunky Dory is taken from an image of Robert Morris standing in front of one of his steam sculpture/environments. So the figures, although masked or half hidden belong to the past, but inhabit the present with me as ‘ghosts’. A bit like the shadows found in the reflections of the big wall.

This large structure was built for a number of reasons, as a screen hiding the large blue drawing (A Place Between) as you came into the main space. It also confronted you as a barrier would giving as little as possible away. But one of the great things with the silver foil faced on the far side was that it disappeared into the fabric of the building once you walked around to view it from the other side. Thereby turning the wall from something which kept you out to something which let you in. In some way I think you entered the gallery twice as your reflection in the mirrored surface of the wall actually placed you in the landscape of the exhibition. This inclusion marks a change in my practice, from drawings and objects and their potential relationship to debates in architecture and history, to a deeper need to understand the cost of progress in our built environment.

These concerns are beautifully voiced in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a glacial slow, almost event free film about landscape and longing. This is a film which lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry encapsulating Tarkovsky’s interest in dereliction and decay, imbuing these broken landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realise the alien properties of artifacts found in the book the film is based on, Tarkovsky projected the danger into architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way actors explore their surroundings.

Brendan Earley: Wall (2012), silver backed plaster board and aluminium, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q3: In many ways you might be considered a landscape artist and you have referred to yourself as this in the past.  This exhibition might itself be read as a kind of sprawling landscape that occupies the gallery space.  You obscure a view of the gallery so one must explore and investigate. You are surely interested in the idea that a viewer or visitor to the space has to negotiate the space and indeed, discover facets of the show for themselves?

A: I suppose the main paradigm I was taught was installation art – so all my work is considered in terms of the viewer’s role in relation to meaning found in the work, being an observer who ratifies the contract to allow meaning to appear. However this comes with certain conditions; it is not a passive role. Indeed this position runs parallel to me wondering what a contemporary landscape artist entails, if there is such a thing. I do feel we can no longer be the figure in a red coat resting on the stile as in 18th and 19th century Irish landscapes. As we pass through this land we most be more conscious, “to wander with purpose” as John Hutchinson (director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin) would put it. This sort of consciousness involves merger, or identification with one’s surroundings. Its antithesis, rational consciousness – the sort that produces Styrofoam and IKEA flat packs – requires a total separation from any sort of merger with nature. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and so not really a part of the world around me. I am afraid the logical point of this world view is a feeling of total reification as Marx would point out: everything is an object, alien, not-me; an alienated thing in a world of other, equally meaningless things. Depressing, but I suspect it to be true, in some sort of way, of this rational ideology.

Q4: Your work evinces an interest with introducing abandoned detritus from the outside world into the studio and eventually the gallery. This process involves navigating the landscape near your home and studio in order to discover the rejectementa of society. Found components become integral to finished works. In many case, it seems that there is an almost alchemical process involved in your work. The found object is merely a starting point.

A: Yes, there is definitely a very real transformation in the objects, nothing is what it seems. The light Styrofoam becomes incredibly heavy once it’s cast into aluminum or bronze in the foundry, for instance A Million Years Later is well over 100 kg. For me the great thing about sculpture as I understand it is its power to reclaim objects for purpose. Not necessarily for a purpose but to give them an integrity, a weight if you pardon the pun. I don’t really see it as recycling, I am far too selective for that and I think for recycling to work one can’t be selective, but because I am driven by a desire to find purpose for the most trivial things I feel my wanderings are not in vain. Perhaps this is why I am driven to take even the most abject things such as a burnt bin I found outside my studio – it became the sculpture Solaris in the end. Again, like the Romantics of the nineteenth century, I would favour an open process and the fragmentary over systematic and concise, in order to be able to adjust the mind to a contradictory reality, rather then the other way around.

The only danger is this approach could be construed as some sort of romance with entropy. The places I visit are in no way a substitute for the official countryside and not to be cherished in their own right necessarily. I don’t want my work to be an excuse for the dereliction, the shoddiness and terrible wastefulness of much of our contemporary landscape. Discovering that the natural world is indifferent to the clutter and ugliness of our urban environment does not mean that we should be also. We should instead be trying to make our built-up areas more fruitful and life-giving for all inhabitants.

Brendan Earley: A Million Years Later (2011), bronze and silicon, 20×105x30; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q5: There is a melancholic tone to much of your work but equally, there are optimistic aspects also and you have used the word redemptive in terms of your motivations for producing work. So, there is a balance between these two things.

A: Melancholic, perhaps but closer to redemption I hope. I tend to see such drawings as A Place Between as being more about investing energy then finding entropy. I am sure it’s all the drawings of Smithson that give people that impression but those large drawings are more life affirming than sapping.

With titles like Red Sky at Night giving a certain delight, I wanted this show to be sure and confident even if some of the sculptures appear anything but that. In some ways the very fact they hug the ground gives them the look of a collapsed object, but the transformation is closer to a sense of growth and possibility. Using such materials as Styrofoam, plaster board, plywood and foam, mixing up consumer goods and DIY materials points to a shared, global culture (Lying Awake in an Empty Building) but this does not mean it should be viewed as embracing homogeneity but more an acceptance of using what one has at hand and allowing for contradictions to emerge. Finding oneself in a place of in-between, finding form to accommodate the mess, to paraphrase Beckett.

http://brendanearley.com/

A long forgotten city in the sky

I was asked to write, in February of this year, about Tracy Hanna’s work at the Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. I visited twice during this time. Since then two very forgettable memories from over a decade ago, when I was working as a young engineer, have re-appeared to me.

One of my first jobs after graduating in 1999 was as a junior design engineer with Banagher Concrete in Co. Offaly. I spent three months there before getting another job with the Irish Rail engineer’s section in Pearse Station, Dublin. At the time Banagher Concrete were casting, among many other things, two very large reinforced concrete fins. When you walked into their workshop / factory floor, it looked as if two huge shoulder blades from some extraordinary beast had been deposited there, amid the roar and dust. You can see these fins now if you look underneath either end of the Millenium Bridge, supporting it quietly as it spans between ‘The Italian Quarter’ and Temple Bar in Dublin.

For the brief period I spent in Banagher I rented a room in the house of one of the factory operatives. His wife would make me breakfast every day – cereal, toast, rashers, egg. The egg was always boiled and always grossly underdone, but I was far too gormless and polite to say anything, and would spoon a cursory few dollops of it into my mouth each morning, wince, and leave for work. In the evenings, I would go to the pub in town and read – then walk home, the mile or so out the dark, hedge-lined road to my temporary lodgings.

When I worked with Irish Rail, I was involved in maintenance, which in terms of engineering means constantly measuring the tracks (the ‘permanent way’) – to see if they were shifting. One particular job I was given during my time with Irish Rail was to oversee the marking out of the sides of the underground tunnel that links a section of the Dublin Connolly – Heuston line. The luminous arrows used as markings were fixed onto the side of the tunnel and were supposed to indicate the location of the nearest safety alcove in the tunnel wall – for those working on the track. One day when I was working in this dingy tunnel, a large diesel engine came through, passed us by, and, after a few moments a large, ponderous cloud of dark smoke billowed slowly up upon me. When I eventually opened my eyes I could see what I think one could describe as almost nothing. Then I coughed for many minutes.

Hanna was the first artist to avail of the new Bullock Lane residency in Cavan town. The residency is the initiative of and is run by The Arts Council with Cavan town and county councils. It is a brave and welcome addition to the growing number of visual art residency opportunities appearing in rural Ireland. And their assistance in Hanna’s work here was committed and crucial.

The Bullock Lane residency building was supposed to be a semi-detached pair of two-storey dwellings. The road directly in front of the residency building, Bullock Lane, is extremely steep. It runs down to a very narrow lane (barely wide enough for a car) where it joins Main St., across from an Eason’s.

I made one visit during the residency, then I returned a couple of weeks later for the experimental final exhibition / event of the residency – Do nothing till you hear from me. It featured a number of videos, video projections and sculptures that considered the building itself in an attentive manner. At one stage I spent some time upstairs looking out the front window at some apartments across the way. The top section of the window was ajar. Out of this section dangled a chunky sculpture made from screwed together pieces of timber. The shape was almost a decagon. There were ten sides, but it didn’t complete its loop; a sort of open decagon, or a decagon that doesn’t want to be one. It swayed clumsily over and back beside my head, softly knocking on the glass.

In the other upstairs room, earlier in the night, everyone who came – there were about thirty to forty people at the event – spent a very curious ten minutes in near darkness discussing this near darkness. Shiva Linga paintings, portals, space-time, sensation, etc. were also brought up, followed by silences. The room had been transformed into a sort of cave. The only light came from a series – two on one side, two on the other – of barely perceptible, egg-shaped slivers of light. The light from these slivers was that orange/yellow hew of the street lights outside. There was a smell of plywood in the room, and for a moment or two the world seemed smaller, or larger. I couldn’t say for sure.

Earlier again that night, Kate Strain (a curator) and Hanna in conversation, walked us around all of the other works on show, pausing to talk about them. At times Hanna would give responses from a scripted Q & A session that Strain had written. Sometimes, in this scripted session, her answers were simply “yes.” Other times they spoke naturally, and briefly about the works. One of the pieces on show was a projection of a mound of building rubble. The mound, in the video piece, had now been flipped around the horizontal, and it took on a sort of approximate oval shape – it seemed to hover forlornly, like a long forgotten city in the sky, trying to tell me things about its own re-making.

I had come across some of Hanna’s work before meeting her at this residency, her sculptural projection piece Hillwalker in the old Broadstone studio gallery, and again in the Douglas Hyde gallery in Dublin. More recently I saw her solo show A Day is a Room at The Dock in Carrick on Shannon. I called in late last year with my father, who is not a regular gallery goer. We navigated quietly around all of the sculptural / projection pieces, peering at the work and how it was presented in the darkened gallery space. He told me afterward, as we drove back to Longford, that he enjoyed the show. I am drawn toward work that people who are not in the business of art can enjoy, and can say so comfortably. I think it is because work like this wishes the viewer into it. The viewer is offered a space to extend into and play with the work, and this open-ness comes from generosity, and a sort of unspeakable precision that appeals directly to one’s movements and curiosity – a starting point that, for the viewer, is at once straightforward, fertile and exciting.

*

Ballyhaise House is about four kilometers outside Cavan Town. Hanna visited it during her residency, accompanied by a local historian called Michael Swords. She gave those who came to Do nothing till you hear from me a ‘goodie bag’ (envelope) holding a lovely collection of small photographs with exterior and interior shots of Ballyhaise House, and a short, clear text which had been written by her. The text relayed that the house was designed by an architect called Cassels. Apparently he designed Leinster House too, and that Cassels, according to Swords, had mentored the Irish architect who eventually designed the Oval Office in The White House in Washington D.C. Swords also brought Hanna on a tour of the Cavan town, where she learned:

- that the windows on the top of the Georgian front doorways were also used to throw light out onto the top steps leading up to the entrance.

- that the freemason’s hall on Farnham Street has been active since 1855, and that long before this a river had flowed where Farnham Street is now.

- that the old Cavan town center is where the Eason’s is now, and that there once was a bullring on the Main Street, where the butcher would bring out a beast before it was slaughtered and let dogs attack it so as to tenderise the meat.

The works on show during this end of residency evening showed a moment in a process. There was a short looping video piece of a torch-lit tree projected in the front room of the residency building. Alongside the projection was a small forest made from curved strips of plywood. These strips were wedged vertically between the floor and the suspended ceiling causing some of the ceiling tiles to pop up and out of their railings, revealing a furtive non-space between the tiles and the first floor. Another sculptural piece upstairs comprised a tube of thin white polythene spanning between two radiators, the hot air from the radiators inflating, and gathering the polythene into an uncertain, shallow arch. It split the room, and people had to navigate awkwardly under or over it.

There was another small video piece projected onto the reveals of one of the ground floor windows. It showed a hedge-lined road leading out of Cavan town, again, flipped on the horizontal like the mound piece, only here an absence was created giving us a sort of tunnel to a strangely recognisable world, or offering a route to another place of forgotten memory. The movement from sculpture to thwarted documentation to a mixture of the two spoke of the building itself, the steep lane outside, the apartment complex across they way, the enveloping town and its histories from below, the ruptures outward to the suburbs, and further to Ballyhaise House. All of these fragments were collected with a gentle curiosity and re-presented in an affecting way that offered brief moments of mystery to re-imagine into.

Adrian Duncan is a writer based in Dublin.

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All images courtesy of Tracy Hanna.

List of images:

1. Test 1 (Mound), installation shot, 2012

2. Test 9 (Oval), installation shot, 2012

3. Test 3 (Plastic Haircut), Test 4 (Plastic Tube), Test 5 (Undecagon) –detail, installation shot, 2012

4. Test 5 (Undecagon, with missing piece), installation shot, 2012

5. Test 1 & 2, installation shot, 2012

6. Ballyhaise House interior ( photograph from goodie bag), 2012

7. Test 6 (Polygon Tunnel), film still, 2012

8. Test 10 (plywood intervention) – 5, installation shot, 2012

Many thanks to Tracy Hanna, and Catriona O’Reilly of Cavan County Council.

www.tracy-hanna.com

Cavan County Council’s arts programme is supported by the Arts Council.

TRADE is an annual Visual Arts Programme supported by Leitrim and Roscommon County Councils, and the Arts Council of Ireland. The initiative consists of a residency phase, where four local artists work under the mentorship of an invited artist, and a seminar event – which has historically displayed a substantial engagement with current critical discourse. In providing a platform for ‘local artists to engage internationally as well as for international artists to participate locally’, an interesting legacy has evolved out of contributions from an array of national and international participating artists, curators and thinkers.

The 2011 TRADE Seminar took place on Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd December. Keynote speakers for the weekend were artists Philip Napier and Audrey Reynolds, current artist-in-residence David Michalek, and invited European curators Rafael López Borrego, (Director of Programming of DA2 Centre of Contemporary Art, Salamanca, Spain) and Dobrila Denegri (Director of Centre of Contemporary Art, Torún, Poland). The weekend was facilitated by Declan McGonagle, Belinda McKeon, Sarah Searson and Eilís Lavelle, and coordinated by Alice Lyons and Philip Delamere. Linda Shevlin coordinated a Resource Room.

Audrey Reynolds: Of 3, oil on canvas, metal button, 92 x 61 cm, 2008 ; Image held here.

The Friday morning session began with contributions from the three invited artists, who each provided an insight into the evolution of their respective practices. Audrey Reynolds, in discussion with Eilís Lavelle, offered an illuminating insight into her ways of thinking and making, which in turn, extended the parameters of reception for her exhibition ‘Bayard Eade’, which was on show in The Dock at that time. The exhibition involved the formal elements of painting, sculpture and installation. The recent introduction of audio into her work (which Eilís described as a generous provision of a third space) produced a monologue of her own voice, which, for me, functioned as the conceptual epicentre from which all other floating elements could plot their co-ordinates. It was suggested that the audio presence may function as a title or para-text for the artwork. Stating that she is a self-taught writer, Audrey’s attentive and descriptive use of vocabulary felt quite unique, and, strangely, her words seamed to resonate with the same frequency as her artwork, embodying the ‘shimmering relationship’ between language and art. Discussing her term ‘insignification’, which has developed out of her on-going practice-based PhD, she spoke about the space in which theory and work collide, or sculpture and picture come to exist together. “This is not a brutish, crude mixture” she explains – “Subtlety comes from an intensive investment in each element”.

In conversation with Declan McGonagle, New York based artist David Michalek outlined his own transition from fashion photography into the visual arts, reflecting on some of the pivotal moments in his career. He spoke eloquently about his task of reconciling these two conflicting worlds, while negotiating involvement in community arts projects and work as an educator. He identified the prickly issue of ‘beauty’ as a concept he found the art world to be particularly resistant to. It is hard to imagine an art term more laden with baggage. The reactionary ‘anti-aesthetic’ was cultivated in art to fundamentally ‘deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm,’ carving out a politically engaged, interdisciplinary position for art. Rooted in the modern vernacular, this stance rejected enlightenment concepts pertaining to art and beauty, and advocated the idea that art is communally or culturally produced. Personally, any resistance does not occur in the experience of beauty itself, but in the rhetoric that often surrounds it.

Phillip Napier, in the presence of Sarah Searson, performed a monologue which used his current body of work Unpacking the Terror (exhibited in The Dock, July/August 2011) as a point of departure. Responding with agility to Phillip Napier’s reluctance to converse, Sarah adopted instead the role of pitcher, occasionally throwing images in the air for Phillip Napier to snatch and weave into his unfolding performative inquiry. His dialogue was substantial, active, and full of potent imagery. Using the M1 motorway (which connects Dublin and Belfast) as a metaphor for notions of a ‘borderless world’ promoted by ‘industrial logic’ and globalisation theories, Phillip Napier employed tangential descriptions to map out connections between things;- national outlooks and global perspectives; the everyday act and implications within the wider political domain; the historical event or forgotten monument crystallised in the present through the constant re-inscription of its loss. “How does geography shape new realities? What might we do now? Is it still possible to posit ‘frontier discovery’ over established routes? To connect with whom? Art is a good site for questions like these.” His presentation concluded with a performance involving a polar bear hide and some traffic lights, simulating a temporary monument marking a site at the convergence of disparate routes.

Phillip Napier: Expecting the Terror, The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, 2011. Image held here.

The afternoon session commenced with a group discussion between the three artists, mediated by Belinda McKeon, who made her position clear quite early on, adopting the role of devil’s advocate, delivering incisive observations, moderated with sincerity and humour. Debate of any kind needs some oppositional presence in order to move thinking forward, and artistic thought acknowledges the value of suitable adversaries. The challenge? To penetrate the veneer of ‘art-talk’, with the purpose of identifying how ‘live’ these terms actually are, in the hope of creating something substantial and enduring; “What will be the legacy of this weekend?”

Bizarrely, the first opportunity for conflict arose in a disagreement about grammar; whether ‘art’ is a noun or a verb; a ‘thing’ or a process of doing. Now, I’m all for conceptual free-association and tangential departure, but art as a doing word? Surely thou art mistaken? After this, I was vigilant towards any further grammatical extrapolation. I subsequently became increasingly aware of Phillip Napier’s tendency to speak in the present continuous tense. I am noticing this, and I am wondering whether this (coupled with the fact that he is inclined to pace while talking) is in fact a grammatical portal into the present moment – an active, unfolding moment – where I am in the process of considering, but I have the capacity to change my direction at any time.

In the late afternoon, invited international curators Dobrila Denegri and Rafael López Borrego provided an insight into art and exhibition-making in their respective European institutional contexts, with reference to socio-economic infrastructures and shifting notions of public. Dobrila is an art historian and curator, and currently lives and works between Rome, Belgrade (Serbia) and Torún (Poland). Her presentation centred on her involvement in an independent cultural project for young artists in Belgrade, ‘Real Presence’, which ran annually for ten years. Originally intended as a one-day workshop, the call out attracted 300 art students, who stayed for two weeks, transforming the city into a 24-hour art space. Executed on a tiny budget of €2500, the unfolding project required imagination and resourcefulness; hospitality merged with concepts of sharing – thoughts, time, food, life itself. This sense of exchange was the legacy of the project, marked by subsequent future collaborations in other European institutional contexts. There was a sense of isolation at the time in Belgrade amidst the socio-economic and cultural crisis created by ten years of war under Miloševi?’s rule. In contrast, Dobrila’s current position in Torún exists amidst an economic boom for Poland, with investments in culture, infrastructure and resources opening up an opportunity for the museum to create an international perspective. Conversely, the economic crisis in Rome is deep.

Concurring with the theme of European economic instability, Rafael López Borrego outlined his involvement as director of programming at DA2 in Salamanca, Spain. He spoke of consistent work done over the last number of years in creating important inter-relationships with other provincial museums, while also establishing an international profile. There was always a commitment to support emerging local artists, while also show-casing established international artists, with the intention of attracting visitors and supporting tourism – Salamanca’s main industry. With the economic recession in Spain, funding and resources are now extremely limited.

On Friday evening there was an opening of an exhibition by the artists who participated in this year’s TRADE residency, located in two adjacent, dis-used commercial premises in the town centre. David Pierce, David Spence, Stephen Rennicks and Brigitta Varadi worked for 9 months under the mentorship of artist David Michalek, establishing the ‘Engage Artist Collective’, with the intention of filtering their individual practices through this group format. Out of this collaboration grew a campaign ‘Talk About Fracking’, which aims to raise awareness about the very current issue of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a ‘fracking’) for gas in Ireland. Proposed site maps, and archival material presented at the exhibition, coupled with a presentation by Dr Aedín McLoughlin of Glenwood Research, illustrated the impact of such heavy industrialisation for the local area and its residents, amidst broader national implications.

David Michalek: Slow Dancing at Trafalgar Square, 2010. Dancer: Shantala Shivalingappa, image held here. (photo by David Michalek)

Benefitting from the influence and expertise of David Michalek, the group produced a series of posters and postcards, consisting of photographic portraits of local people alongside statements such as ‘My health is at risk’, my land/ my farm/ my family/my town/my future.. Employing a format and vocabulary reminiscent of other national campaigns, this approach articulates a commercial awareness that becomes something other than art, yet resonating at the heart of the project is the important role the artist plays in advocating active citizenship.

Opening the exhibition, Declan McGonagle spoke candidly about the responsibility of the artist in this regard, verbalising a stimulating inquiry into the social function of art itself – is it a form of ‘entertainment’? A distraction, an anecdote? The image of the artist existing outside of society has persisted for over a century and remains the dominant model, because most of our current critical apparatus supports ‘art as entertainment’, therefore defining art as a servant of the economy. Conversely, art, when viewed as a form of knowledge, can ask ‘what kind of society do we want? How can economy support this?’ Identifying their place in the world, artists can cultivate a new fidelity to the ‘local’, resisting the homogeny of globalised systems, by focusing on those micro issues (e.g. fracking) that question the broader body politic (e.g. how the land is monetised, how life is measured in the context of money, what a nation means to its citizens).

Out of this revival of collectivism, he suggested with enthusiasm, new forms of knowledge can emerge, redefining art as a participatory, reciprocal, collaborative mode of exchange between the artist and non-artist. This process is less about the economic functionality of the art object and more about the purpose – the quality of interaction: “Art should not be an anecdote to reality, rather a way for non-art public to negotiate knowledge. By default, in a period of economic collapse, new propositions can emerge.”

Engage Collective: Talk About Fracking, Carrick-on-Shannon, 2011. Image held here.

This inquiry was continued the following morning, in a discussion between the Engage Collective artists, Davis Michalek and Eilís Lavelle. Brigitte Varadi spoke about her desire to negotiate her art practice with her community-based work. With the project ‘Talk About Fracking’, she experienced some ‘special, remarkable meetings’ with neighbours in the community, and began to look on these conversations as ‘the art itself’, while also commenting on a tangible shift in the community’s perception of the artist as a potential vehicle towards something. Alluding to a Duchampian ‘extended definition of Art’, David Michalek considered whether the campaign may be a step towards ‘social sculpture’, which claims a participatory role in shaping society. In response to Eilís Lavelle’s query regarding how an artist may negotiate ‘issue tourism’ with regard to ethics and the appropriation of knowledge, Stephen Rennicks emphasised the importance of consultation with experts, whose responsiveness was usually determined by how they were initially approached – an ethos of inclusivity produces a relationship based on trust.

The general merits of TRADE as a working model for mentorship and artistic development, was expanded upon when four artists from previous residencies (Anna McLeod, Anna Spearman, Róisín Loughrey and Angie Duignan) reflected on their experiences, outlining how their own artistic practices have evolved. Anna Spearman spoke of the open-ended nature of the TRADE residency, with no pressure for end results, and the role of the mentor as a generous sounding board, which contribute to the main function of TRADE – to provide a critical and discursive space for the interrogation of practice. Co-incidentally, they have all since gone on to study on M.A programmes, highlighting, perhaps, a desire for critical input and mentorship that education provides.

TRADE is always accompanied by a resource room, which provides access to resources, advice and practical information, re-affirming the functional ethos of the initiative. This year, the information point was coordinated by Linda Shevlin, who sourced an abundance of publications and reading material, detailing national and international opportunities, and residencies for artists. She collated this information into a concise, user-friendly document (published with support from Cultural Contact Point Ireland), prioritising funded residencies where artists are generally required to make a non-monetary contribution towards a project in the form of skills, research or community intervention.

The penultimate session of the weekend was executed in a room-hopping frenzy between ten minute sessions on suggested key topics for discussion – a kind of speed dating for criticality. The three sessions I attended offered up some interesting reflections on how artists may navigate a position within this socio-economic ‘crisis moment’, finding ways of operating outside of economic models. Does an uncommodifiable ‘sacred space’ exist? Is it outside or within society? A desirable position, it was suggested, would be to be ‘in it’, but ‘aware’ in it. In facilitating a summary of the weekend, Alice Lyons proposed a poetic use of the term ‘fracking’, as a way of identifying the main issues that deserve to be drilled and extracted through the fracturing process. Declan McGonagle supported this symbolic use of fracking as a metaphor for energy production – seminar discussions like TRADE are valuable as they propel us closer towards uncovering the ‘something else’ that will be delivered, the substance that may fill the economic void.

Reporting on her observations of the group discussions, Belinda McKeon identified the issue of ownership within collaborative work – ‘the middle ground between mine and yours’- as an urgent, unresolved concern for the Engage Artist Collective. One artist in particular voiced his dissatisfaction with the issue of copyright, and clearly felt his contribution to the project was overshadowed by the working model of group ownership. The other members defended the group, concerned that this interjection may serve to undermine the integrity of the project. The atmosphere was tense. Bearing witness to this level of confrontation, an audience may feel discomfort, or compassion towards those involved, but on later reflection I feel this was a defining moment within the dialogue of the weekend. Firstly, it succeeded in highlighting the dichotomy between ‘collectivism’ as a fashionable buzz-word, and the real-world implementation of collaborative activity. In exposing the internal mechanisms of collectivism (the problems and practical implications) we can get a more tangible grasp of what it means to work together. The experiences of the Engage Artist Collective are indicative of core issues for collectivism as a working model, both historically and in contemporary revivals of the form: – How functional is this ‘communal understanding’ that the ownership of the process resides within the group as a unified entity? To what extent does the individual relinquish their own identity in favour of the group status?

Secondly, this inquiry has obvious resonance within a wider spectrum of political discourse. In a year defined by a wave of collective resistance, Arab Spring and global Occupy movements, it becomes unavoidable to a least acknowledge that different political models organise their society based on their configuration of the individual . Collectivism, although often formed out of practical necessity for sharing and pooling resources, defining itself via self-organisation and self-sufficiency, pitches itself in opposition to the competitive and increasingly exploitable individual, existing under capitalism. It is hard to identify a more urgent inquiry.

“There is no manual to negotiation or collaboration,” stated Declan McGonagle. [Paraphrasing] “This conference is not an instruction manual, being a victim is not an option. This weekend has served to highlight the artist’s own responsibility to name possibilities for themselves – to make transparent their own position. It is not good enough to complain, requiring that something be provided – rain is wet, get an umbrella.” Reflecting on the notion of ‘artist as active citizen’ as a dominant theme of the seminar, he spoke with authority about the current political and socio-economic situation in which we must continue to negotiate a role for art. The concept of the artist as a figure outside society is an outmoded construct of Romanticism. The ‘sacred space’ for art is, in fact, embedded within the fabric of society, to mediate, construct and disseminate new models of knowledge. “Now”, he concluded with optimism, “is a remarkable time to be an artist.”

Joanne Laws is a writer based in Leitrim.

[i] Hal Foster, “The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture” (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983)

[ii]  Enlightenment concepts:

• Great art was the product of the imaginative or intellectual powers of an individual genius (an imaginary figure, isolated from society).
• Beauty or aesthetic value in art could only be appreciated by those cultured enough to recognise it. Judgement on art was not culturally embedded, but derived from the individual’s taste and/or education.

[iii]  “Man is really not freeing many aspects. He is dependent on his social circumstances, but he is free    in his thinking, and here is the point of origin of sculpture. For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture. The thought is sculpture.”

– Joseph Beuys

Carin Kuoni ed., Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America’ (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993) p.90

[iv]  Individualists believe in the power of the individual and their capacity to assess their own needs.  Liberalism offers an alternative to monarchy or religion and claims to value the individual’s freedom.  Anarchists believe the state is unnecessary or harmful, whereas Statists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believe that hierarchical structures, such as the state, are necessary to maintain order and morality, which in turn benefits the individual.  Based on the theories of Hegel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx developed a collectivist approach to social structure, with emphasis on the group over the individual.  Generally speaking, Collectivist political structures describe how the state ensures that the individual serve society.  Totalitarianism is an extreme form of Collectivism.

http://joannelaws.wordpress.com/

image: Adrian Duncan

I live in Chapelstown Gate but nearly everything I can see from my front door belongs to Riverside Close. Outside my house there are concrete steps with black, iron banisters on either side that descend toward five parking spaces designated to each house. Two of the spaces are occupied. My black car faces me and a red, dilapidated Mercedes points toward the road that leads out of the estate.

On the road there are three boys who kick a football high into the air. Then they jostle as it plummets. On either side of the road that leads out of the estate identical houses face each other with bay windows that jut outward toward the road. Low, red brick walls extend to the end of small driveways. I can see dark patches of tarmac for the occupants to park cars. Further down the line of houses the low walls appear stacked on top of each other as they recede away from me. At the end of each tiny driveway stand red brick pillars with grey, pointed slabs on top. A small perimeter of grass runs parallel to the footpaths in front of the houses on either side of the road. The house fronts farthest away from me are darkened by shadow while those opposite are lit up with sunshine. My field of vision is split horizontally by the road outside the estate. A ditch runs along the main road. I can see over the ditch into a field. The grass looks to have been faded by the winter. In the distance near the horizon line sits a yellow mechanical digger beside a barn with a zinc roof. Around the JCB, black and white milking cows seem to constantly graze with their heads bent low.

Dan Campion is a teacher in Goatstown, Dublin.

In this year’s March edition of Texte zur Kunst they printed the contributions from their “Where do you stand, colleague?” seminar of December 2010. It was an international symposium set up to address “the fundamental question of the relationship between art criticism and social critique.”[1] The symposium celebrated twenty years of TZK, and there were contributions from such heavyweights as Luc Boltanski, Diedrich Diedrichson, Isabelle Graw (editor of TZK), etc. Some of the ideas presented in this issue were difficult but made accessible by the writing, some ideas were potentially more accessible but made difficult to access by the writing. It is the latter that is a problem, and further, within art writing discourse, poor writing which relays potentially simple ideas as difficult is being presented as being on an equal footing to clear writing about difficult or complex ideas. Benjamin Buchloch’s contribution, for instance, elucidates the difficult in language that was mostly cogent and clear. Yet alongside Buchloch’s piece is one that is virtually incomprehensible. The artist Andrea Fraser, writes:

Increasingly, I see art discourse, like art itself, as dominated by a set of strategies that are inseparably social, psychological and artistic or intellectual and that the aim to maintain a steady distance between art’s symbolic systems and it’s [sic] material conditions, be these economic in the political or psychological sense, located in a social or corporal body; that serves to isolate the manifest interests of art from the immediate, intimate and consequent interests that motivate participation in the field, organize investments of energy and resources,and that are linked to specific benefits and satisfactions, as well as to the constant specter of loss, privation, frustration, guilt, shame, and their attendant anxiety.[2]

George Orwell, author of “Politics and the English Language”, that was published in 1946; image held here.

It might seem unfair to extract this sentence out of the context of the printed contribution, and it is necessary to say that this was originally a prepared speech, for a ‘public’ seminar. These issues aside, the fault lies with TZK publishing this sentence in this form. Someone on the editorial team of TZK should have asked, or should have been given the time to ask, what does this sentence mean? None of the meanings in this warren-like sentence can contribute in any meaningful way to what Fraser’s argument might be, and in turn elucidate what she might stand for.

If we look at the first sentence segment:

Increasingly, I see art discourse, like art itself, as dominated by a set of strategies that are inseparably social, psychological and artistic or intellectual …

From this we are being told that art discourse and art itself are separate, but similar in that they are dominated by a set of strategies that are social, psychological and artistic or intellectual. In what way are they dominated? And how are these disparate strategic practices inseparable? Are they inseparable in their dominance of art and art discourse or inseparable outside of this situation of dominance, or both? Does social mean here, external to art discourse, or inclusive of? At what level are we talking about psychological? Social psychology or personal? Does the grouping of the artistic strategies and intellectual strategies at the end of this sentence segment – by using the conjunction “or” – suggest that the artistic and intellectual are somehow inherent in each other? Is this inherence all pervading and if not, to what degree? Also what are intellectual strategies? What kind of intellectual strategies is Fraser relating to? Etc. At the end of this sentence segment, I am in no position to enter the next segment, never mind apprehending the sentence as a whole.

The microcosm of this sentence gives a sense of the macrocosm of the argument, or position that Fraser doesn’t deliver. But it doesn’t matter.[3] These are just another collection of words which in this art-writing context are allowed to operate outside of any use other than to be things that appear on a printed page and bound with others pages with words on them too, and this bound object says: look at and feel the amount of text that has gone into this event and thus the rigour with which it has been covered, and by extension how important it is ……

The problem with TZK publishing writing like this is that some people will read it – people in the business of art theory, the visual arts in general, and most damagingly, students. TZK is viewed as being at or near the peak of European art critique and art writing in general, so, if a student from an undergraduate or postgraduate visual art degree reads something like this, the fact that it is impenetrable somehow gives it merit. Such merit that the style, obfuscation, and jargon that is used, is mimicked, and this mimesis in art-writing goes unchecked until it becomes normalised. In Ireland (and the UK) when studying for a visual arts undergraduate degree, the amount of original writing created by a student (i.e. formal assignments) is small, perhaps twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand words over four years. Contact from the lecturers with the students in relation to their writing specifically is also very small (there are any number of reasons for this, some of which we hope to cover in Paper - Dublin Edition 2), as such the students are left to their own devices as to how they are educated in art-writing, and by extension how they begin to write about art. Places like Sternberg Press, Texte Zur Kunst, October, Afterall, etc, become the educators – and these are the good ones. For the most part, in publications like these the writing is informative, if a little flabby, often pretentious, sometimes entertaining, but almost never activating. The writing is too dulled with jargon, too over-designed, too couched and too insulated for the meanings of the words, potentially dangerous words, to reach their edge, the edge from where the potentially activated reader could take them, onward into the readers’ practices, and into the world.

This idea of activation is want I unpack in relation to art-writing in Ireland. There appears to have been, in the last number of years (since 2008 at least) a call for the visual arts to engage more critically with itself and with the political situation in post-boom Ireland. I will focus on the former and by extension, with the analysis and method I propose, the latter will be broached.

In terms of having an effect, all that is important in writing critically about the visual arts in Ireland today is whether that person is influential or not. Reviews by the broadsheet press are generally dismissed as crude overviews, written for the non-specialised but interested masses. However, for the professional artist, art writer, or art educator this form of reviewing is insufficiently specialised and by crude extension insufficiently critical. Insufficiently specialised often means that there is not enough reference being made to current critical and art theory practices/fashionable philosophical ideas, current and past. These places of reference produce jargon which at times is utterly necessary for talking about a specific subject, but more often is mis-used, mis-interpretated, or used not for the clear futherance of an argument, but for the appearance of furtherance of an argument. It is this verisimiltude of argument that is a problem in ‘specialised’ contemporary art writing in Ireland. Although this is a reductive way of apprehending the subject, there is some use in pointing out that within this verisimiltude there lies at least three major faults:

1.     Cliché

2.     Flab (mis/over-used jargon or normalised jargon and thus further cliché)

3.     Legitimation of argument and ideas using theory/philosophy

In relation to point three, argument is based on persuasion, not legitimation based upon the arguments of others, no matter how high profile or how well received or embedded in discourse the philosophical theory being referenced may be. This meek practice has at least two other negative effects, both public: it alienates the reader, and, it creates a specious currency within the economy of reputation – an economy that is one of the cornerstones of the current visual art market. The result of which is that appearance is mistaken for and lauded as the fulfillment of an argument that has only been vaguely gestured at. Of course critical theory and philosophical thought has an important place in art-writing, but the ideas from these fields should be allowed to settle and infuse in the mind of the writer, a writer who has read, understood, and judged the relevance of the ideas at stake.

Point two is an extension from the core of one. Both stem from uncritical reading of writing. Critical reading is done by an activated reader, not a reader seeking only to be entertained. A reader is activated when the words on the page are being brought to the edge of their meaning and the reader must then imagine these words forth into their own selves. Cliché and jargon are the great insulators from this interaction. They are abound in current art-writing and masquerade as “voice”. As such art-writing that is viewed as being critical is merely comprised of giant husks of cliché and jargon noisely barked, cautiously nudged, or urbanely sneered toward the thing, or person being critiqued/humiliated. This form of criticism is a monochromatic misuse of the potential of writing. It fills pages, and creates brief and hollow sensation.

Real critical response happens long before the writing is published. I believe it happens within the interaction between the writer and another, let’s say this other is an editor. The editor can suggest changes, make elisions, remove cliché, lessen jargon, and question the motives and modes of a piece of writing in a way that the writer never could.[4] If these suggestions are (hesitantly) accepted by the writer, a space is cleared within the text. This space is where the activated writer will extend into, to think through and mine the issue already evoked by their piece, thus making it richer, more concise, more complex, and more active. A relationship develops and writing that is activated can emerge for a reader who will in turn be activated, ready, aware, politicised.

*

The Dublin Review, a literary journal, has published over the last ten years some of the best personal and journalistic essays in Ireland. It has been edited throughout this time by Brendan Barrington (also of Penguin Ireland). I will pick from it a recent essay written by Brian Dillon on the artist Gerard Byrne.[5] The essay, which was published in 2010, is titled “Future Anterior”, and it charts Dillon’s interaction with Byrne’s work since about 2007 where he first viewed Byrne’s A Country Road. A Tree. Evening. Dillon’s essay brings Byrne’s work and ideas from what could be argued as an art-writing setting to a literary setting. The editorial interaction here happens between Barrington and Dillon. It is a very successful partnership, having previously produced Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives and In the Dark Room, both non-fiction, and published by Penguin Ireland. In this essay, from The Dublin Review, there were a number of sentences that stood out. Here is one:

In part, these are the typical cultural coordinates and awakenings of anybody of Byrne’s age in Ireland at the time, but what he seems to have taken from his early visual education – as also from Beckett and Brecht, from a belated acquaintance with Peter Lennon’s documentary ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ or from the alienation effect of overdubbed Sinn Féin voices on 1980s television – is a sense of involution of history and performance, the way facts become spectacle and the way history insinuates its way into our most fantastical dreams of what we might become. [6]

Again it may seem reductive and unfair to extract one sentence out of the context of the whole piece in question. But if we were to compare this relatively long sentence from The Dublin Review with the one from Texte zur Kunst above, we can make one major conclusion – that despite the lack of context, this sentence is at least apprehended, and at most potentially activating.

The sentence has clear information, i.e. that there are, according to Dillon, a number of specific cultural instances that he sees as having an influence on Byrne’s work. Dillon could have said that the influences on the young Byrne’s visual education were: literary, theatrical, filmic, and socio-political. And this, though not wrong, is less rich, less specific, less suggestive, and certainly less activating for the reader.

There are layers that are allowed to exist in this sentence, without the basic meaning of the sentence being abandoned. This basic understanding of the sentence offers a platform from where the reader can push off and extend into the extra layers that the words offer. By simply looking critically at the verbs in this sentence, we are offered a number of sympathetically alternative and additive layers of meaning, for example:

… but what he seems to have taken from his early visual education ... ‘taken from’ suggests Byrne, even at a young age was aware and judicious, and that these formative influences still have an effect on his art making now, which also suggests that Dillon considers Byrne’s work as having a groundedness and authenticity to it (whether these are important qualities to have is beside the point).

…. the way facts become spectacle …. ‘facts become’ at once accosts and brings into focus the reader’s understanding of ‘facts’ as being something solid and inarguable, not something in flux or ‘becoming’ from one thing to another. This verb also brings to the reader’s mind the historical process of: happening, description, report, documentation, verification, storage, recollection, etc. “Become” is an extremely rich verb in this context and furthermore it doesn’t need an adverb or any other attendant word (cliché/jargon) to suffocate its effect, the effect of extension and activation on the reader.

…. the way history insinuates its way ….. ‘history insinuates’ somehow makes ‘history’ human, fluid, unstable, or not to be trusted. This second verb in this sentence  segment somehow adds colour to the fluidity evoked by Dillon’s proposal that ‘facts become.’ Not only are we being given a description of what Dillon proposes as being influences on Byrne’s work, but we are being given a bare and dangerous insight into what Dillon himself thinks of the disorganisation and perforation of the historical process. By extension we become aware with this verb that this process has an unsettling effect on him, and by extension a similarly unsettling effect on society in general.

….. fantastical dreams of what we might become. “what we might become” has a dramatic effect which leaves the reader with an open-ended situation to imagine into, and, it is mimetic of Byrne’s work. Using the verb ‘become’ twice in the sentence creates a sort of rhythm that is then brought to a halt. These words have meaning and effect, where one doesn’t negate or take precedence over the other – put another way, these words let each other breath. And there are countless other eddies of complexity that can be summoned from this sentence – complexity that stems from and is delicately placed upon simplicity and cogency – without undermining it.

This place of rigorous and creative editorial interaction that helps produce texts, and sentences like Brian Dillon’s above, does not exist in any art-writing context in Ireland. But it is the site where meaningful critical art-writing and reading can emerge. This editorial process is unglamorous, and there is little or no recognition of this shared practice in the visual arts. It is slow. But it is an alternative that should be considered. If this process is taken seriously and given time to develop, reviews, essays, and articles on the visual arts will start to emerge that are not only accessible, informative, and complex, but also full of dangerous sentences that are allowed to ping, and awaken.

Adrian Duncan studied and worked as a structural engineer in the UK and Ireland for over a decade before returning to study fine art and contemporary art theory at IADT and NCAD.  He has exhibited throughout Ireland, Europe, South Africa, and the U.S.  he is a guest lecturer at UCD School of Architecture and co-editor of Paper Visual Art Journal to which he also contributes.

www.adrianduncan.eu

*This essay was first published last November in PVA’s hardcopy Dublin edition.

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[1] Texte Zur Kunst, March 2011, p 122.

[2] Ibid, p 155.

[3] This in itself is not a new problem. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” will see similar concerns being aired, it having been written almost seventy years ago.

[4] Greg Baxter, the essayist and novelist, has written on this issue in Paper Visual Art online and Paper’s hard copy Cork Edition – A brief note on the editing process.

[5] The reason I pick Dillon is because he is a writer that operates in both art-writing and literary settings.

[6] Dillon, Brian. Future Anterior. Dublin Review, issue 38. 2010, pp 27. There is also, in this issue, an excellent journalistic essay on Ireland’s ‘looming water crisis’ by Colin Murphy. This can now be accessed on the DR website: www.thedublinreview.com.

Having agreed to “respond” to Dublin Contemporary I felt, initially, a little resentful. The call to “respond” seems to mirror the demand on the Dublin Contemporary website to “ENGAGE!”, and I, perhaps petulantly, resented such extortion. An initial idea, then, was to follow John Peel’s producer John Walters’ example of criticism: he once said that it was his life’s ambition to review a Yes album with one word: “no.”[1]

Instead of responding in such a stark way I offer two concrete examples and then the necessary judgment. I have a strong intuition that my examples are related to the task in hand, albeit tangentially. They are both underwritten by the same idea: that any claim that we should look to art for answers in times of crisis and change will always ring hollow. When politics becomes curated into an empty spectacle it loses its edge; and artworks become mere symptoms of the structural flaws in the social systems that they are supposed to ‘cure’.

Manhattan, film still, Woody Allen, dir. (1979); image held here.

My judgement is similarly underwritten by two thoughts: that we can expect a lot from art, but not so much that we have a right to be disappointed when the world doesn’t change around it; and that if you’re going to put on an empty spectacle, then at the very least you should do it well.

(1) Art, Crisis and Change?

On the 17^th February 1821 the following notice appeared in Saunders’s Newsletter, a Dublin newspaper (published between 1746-1879):

Messrs Marshall respectfully beg leave again to solicit the kind patronage  of the Nobility, Gentry and the public of Dublin, and its vicinity, for their lately  finished, entirely novel Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft. Also the ceremony of crossing the line. Each view Accompanied by a full and appropriate band of music. The picture is painted on nearly 10,000 sq. feet of canvas, under the direction of one of the survivors, in a superior style of brilliancy and effect – the figures on the Raft and on the boat being the size of life and the Picture being of the Peristrephic form, give every appearance of reality….[2]

The subject matter for this spectacle was the sensational, and by this point hugely well known public scandal of the wreck of the frigate Medusa. It had been the flagship of a small French fleet of four boats carrying soldiers, officials, and slaves that set off in June 1816 to re-possess the French colony of Senegal from the British, in part to continue activities involved with slavery. The mission had been poorly planned and the commanding Captain, Hugues Deroy de Chaumareys, was incompetent and inexperienced (he had not been to sea in twenty years). The ship ran aground on a sandbank fifty kilometres off the coast of what is now Mauritania. In the resulting chaos around 250 people (mostly officers and their friends and family) made their escape in a small craft leaving the remaining crew, low-ranking soldiers, and general civilians (149 men and 1 woman) to survive on a large makeshift raft that was agreed would be towed to the shore. The officers, however, panicked and broke their vow. The raft was unhitched leaving those onboard to fend for themselves with little food or water and no navigational equipment or means of propulsion. The situation quickly descended into desperate acts of mutiny and violence. By the fourth day cannibalism was rife, and by the eighth injured and dying survivors were thrown overboard. After thirteen days just fifteen men survived.

To retell this grotesque and scandalous story, the Marshall spectacle immersed the audience in an environment that made a multi-sensory address through a rotating (peristrephic) painted panorama of six scenes accompanied by a loud soundtrack.[3] And it proved immensely popular. Scandal had become entertainment. Accounts tell of it playing three sell out shows a day and continuing by popular demand until the 9th June.

There are two reasons to think of why this spectacle would be relevant to contemporary Dublin and they hinge on the relationship between the publics that are created through display and collective forms of aesthetic experience; and moments of social crisis and change which those publics witness.

First, there is the reason that the Medusa scandal had become such a cause célèbre in France and beyond. It was taken to be a very clear manifestation of the absolute failure of the ruling establishment and existent political order in France. The system itself was in crisis, and this had lead to the terrible consequences for those who were subject to it.

As a result of Napoleon’s defeat a neo-conservative, Royalist, ruling order was established under the Bourbon-restoration monarchy of Louis XVIII. The ship’s captain, De Chaumareys, was widely regarded as a pompous, complacent relic from the ancien regime who was appointed through privilege and cronyism. The subsequent scandal was characterised by attempts by politicians and officials to cover up what had happened in order to protect those responsible, and the public were outraged at the ‘whitewash’ of the court martial of De Chaumareys when he was sentenced to a mere three years in jail.

In Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816, the sensational account of survivors Henri Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, the authors were unequivocal in directing blame for the whole incident directly at the ruling order. In the preface they write:

Here, we hear some voices ask, what right we have to make known to the government, men who are, perhaps, guilty, but whom their places, and their rank, entitle to more respect. They are ready to make it a crime in us, that we have dared to say, that officers of the marine had abandoned us. But what interest, we ask, in our turn, should cause a fatal indulgence to be claimed for those, who have failed in their duties; while the destruction of a hundred and fifty wretches, left to the most cruel fate, scarcely excited a murmur of disapprobation? Are we still in those times, when men and things were sacrificed to the caprices of favour? Are the resources and the dignities of the State, still the exclusive patrimony of a privileged class? and are there other titles to places and honours, besides merit and talents?[4]

Second, there were a number of different iterations of Medusa phenomenon. The Marshall panorama, and Savigny and Corréard’s narrative were just two such instances alongside William Thomas Moncrieff’s The Shipwreck of the Medusa: Or, The Fatal Raft!, a melodrama.[5] And, of course, Géricault’s large history painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) that was also exhibited as a public spectacle by the impresario William Bullock first at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London 1820 (12 June – 30 December) and again in the Rotunda in Dublin from 5^th February 1821.

What’s interesting about the Dublin exhibition is that it was cut short by the competition that the Marshall panorama offered despite Bullock’s attempts to generate interest by dropping the price from one shilling and eight pence to ten pence “in order that all ranks may have the opportunity of viewing”.[6] The reason why is pretty clear; and it is not because of a simplistic conflict between high and low art in which the low can be seen as meshing more neatly with a public will. It’s rather that when seen equally as forms of entertainment within a visual culture the panorama more fully captured the public’s attention and made for a better spectacle than the painting. It generated a more thrilling aesthetic experience.

The Medusa represented a moment – with obvious pertinence today – when a crisis in a political system irrupted into the social imaginary to become a visible wound in the order of things. Crucially, however, the wound became a spectacle to be enjoyed. It acted as a focus for phantasmagorical delight and shared aesthetic experience. It offered a form of sociality by generating a collective fascination in a pathological injury in the body politic.

(2) Non-Compliance?

Just last week in London, I had a strange and jarring experience. I was waiting for someone in Trafalgar Square and decided to sit on a wall just below the Fourth Plinth (where the Yinka Shonibare piece Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was on show). After a few minutes, I was approached by two men in semi-official looking jumpers and peaked hats. They asked me, politely, if I would mind getting down from where I was sitting.

“Yes I would mind,” I said.

They asked again politely, and again I, also politely, declined. I gave my reasons: that I was doing nothing illegal, or in any way offensive, and that I didn’t want to move. I then asked them who they were and was told that they were employed by GLA. (I later found out that this was the Greater London Authority who had contracted the private company Chubb Security Personnel Limited.)[7]

“So, you’re not police, you can’t arrest me then,” I said.

“Well you see sir, it’s a health and safety issue. We’re just doing our job.”

This back and forth went on for a little bit longer, during which time they remained calm, polite yet insistent whilst I became increasingly upset, irrational, and incoherent. It ended with me getting down and shouting.

“Fuck off!”

They just laughed and walked off. My miniature protest and attempt at non-compliance had been utterly inconsequential. It had been a pointless, petulant bluster of inchoate impoliteness that had no effect whatsoever.

A few moments later I saw them chatting with some adults and taking photographs for them of their kids clambering over the lions down in the square.

I had found the intervention of these ‘Heritage Wardens’ threatening and troubling and had been unsettled by the whole experience. The claim that it was a health and safety issue seems to point to what’s at stake; because it’s in the regulation of the body, specifically, to which the concerns of health and safety are directed. It was my body that was precariously balanced on the classical balustrades, and it was my body that was being challenged.

The body is important in this example because of its involvement. We are implicated in a whole system of things and meanings; we are involved in what Husserl called a “thingly nexus”[8] of objects and events. There are at least two implications of this involvement.

On the one hand when demands are made of me, or infringements, then they are directed specifically not toward my ideas or my feeling but toward the substance of my body. It is a direct physical address.

And on the other, the body is a transcendent, or at least quasi-transcendent thing. It can migrate between different places and different systems; and disrupt their operations.

Clearly this is Merleau-Ponty’s insight in The Phenomenology of Perception. But, crucially this is also what Husserl means when he says that that the body is constituted in a “double way,” as a physical thing and as an entity that participates in meaning (or “sense,” Sinn).

This doubling means that the body cannot only be acted upon, but also that it can resist. It can push back. It can refuse to comply.

The body is coiled up with a potential to disrupt the easy flow of capital and information within social systems. And hence, it forms the origin of a politics. This would mean, then, a politics that is grounded in what Husserl calls the “physical-aesthesiological unity” of the body. He says of this unity:

In the abstract, I can separate the physical and aesthesiological strata but can do so precisely only in the abstract. In the concrete perception, the Body is there as a new sort of unity of apprehension. It is constituted as an Objectivity in its own right, which fits under the formal-universal concept of reality, as a thing that preserves its identical properties over and against changing external circumstances.[9]

To make a leap – it is a critique of politics that are abstract which forms the basis of Žižek’s critique of the “lost causes” of liberal politics. In this section his focus is Simon Critchley:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill (since they also know it that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude is easily acceptable for those in power: “so wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in – unfortunately, however, we live in the real world, where we are just honestly doing what is possible”), but, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected precise, finite demands which cannot allow for the same excuse.[10]

Which when I read it recently (he is particularly critical of Critchley’s defence of humour as an ethical and political strategy) immediately reminded me of that great exchange in Manhattan:

Man: I heard you quit your job?

Isaac: Yeah, a real self-destructive impulse. You know, I want to write a book, so I, so I … Has anybody read that Nazis are going to march in New Jersey, you know? I read this in the newspaper, we should go down there, get some guys together, you know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Man: There was this devastating satirical piece on that on the op-ed
page of the Times. It is devastating.

Isaac: Well, well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

Woman: Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical
force.

Isaac: No, physical force is always better with Nazis. Cos it’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.[11]

It’s hard to satirize a guy in shiny boots. And ones in jumpers and peaked hats too. We need to think about what forms of non-compliance are most appropriate. And it’s my guess that swearing, sculptures, and large scale art shows are equally inconsequential.

(3)  A judgement

In the Autumn of 2011 a large exhibition took place in Dublin called Dublin Contemporary. The curatorial statements around the show were incoherent and so broad as to be nearly meaningless. It was as if they’d been sketched on the back of a cigarette packet on the plane over. Frustratingly this failure to define any terms made the claims slippery and hard to pin down, and engage with (what has “terrible beauty” got to do with crisis and chance?; “non-compliance” with what?). The publicity for the show was similarly lacking in coherence and included bill posters that read like parodies of advertising slogans: “see the world through different eyes.”

It seemed to be offering up a form of politics as a spectacle; but it was not very spectacular. There seemed to be some claim being made about art as a form of social commentary; but it had nothing concrete to say. Some art in the show was very good, some quite good and some very bad. Right now we need responses to contemporary crisis and change that address specific problems with precise and finite demands. In these times any shoddy spectacle, and particularly this one, is not good enough.

Francis Halsall is lecturer in the history and theory of modern/ contemporary art at National College of Art and Design, Dublin where he coordinates the MA: Art in the Contemporary World. He has research interests in aesthetics, systems theory, phenomenology and modern/contemporary art. Recent writing and ideas can be found at his blog: alittletagend.blogspot.com.

* This essay was originally published in the Paper Visual Art Dublin hard copy edition that was launched on 18th November, 2011.

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[1] My second favourite review is the one for Spinal Tap’s album that Marty DiBergi reads out in the film: “The review for Shark Sandwich was merely a two word review which simply read “Shit Sandwich.’”

[2] Quoted in Lee Johnson, ‘“Raft of the Medusa” in Great Britain,’ The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 96, No. 617, (Aug., 1954),  p 249-254.

[3] See also: Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room, 09, (Fall 2002), pp 5-25; Christine Riding, “Staging the Raft of the Medusa,” Visual Culture in Britain. Vol. 5, no.  2, (Winter 2004) pp. 1–26; Jonathan Miles, Medusa, The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece, (Jonathan Cape, 2007).

[4] J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 available at Project Gutenberg: HYPERLINK<www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11772/pg11772.html (Oct. 21, 2011).

[5] The panorama was shown in London from 1^st December 1823 at the Great Room, Spring Gardens, as ‘the French panorama of the Shipwreck of the Medusa’; Moncrieff’s play  showed at the Royal Coburg Theatre (The Old Vic) from 29 May to 28 June 1820 and played again there in 1827 after which it was adapted for a show at the Bowery and Franklin theatres in New York City in 1837.

[6] Saunders’s Newsletter quoted in Jonathan Miles, Medusa, The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece, (Jonathan Cape, 2007), p 206.

[7] “It is proposed that a tender exercise is undertaken in order to procure a new contract for Security Services at Trafalgar & Parliament Square, with an estimated start date of 1 May 2011 for a period of 4-years with the option to extend for up to 2 years in 1-year lots…The estimated cost of the proposed new contract for 4-years is £1,715,044, which equates to approximately £428,761 per annum and will have to contained within the budget provision for London Squares subject to the annual Strategic Planning & Budget Process.” “Trafalgar and Parliament Square Heritage Warden Contract Extension and Tender ” at: HYPERLINK <www.london.gov.uk/>;(accessed 17^th Oct. 2011).

[8] “We have seen that in all experience of spatio-thingly Objects, the body ‘is involved’ as the perceptual organ of the experiencing subject.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, (Springer, 1990) p 36.

[9] Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, (Springer, 1990) p 40.

[10] Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, (Verso, 2009) p 349-50.

[11] Woody Allen (Dir): Manhattan, (1979).