paper visual art journal –

Curated by Michael Dempsey.

Karl Burke’s work at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin was part of Into the Light: The Arts Council – 60 Years of Supporting the Arts. There were similar large scale exhibitions in Cork, Limerick and Sligo, where pieces from the collection were shown alongside newly commissioned work from three other emerging / established artists: Mark Clare (The Crawford in Cork), Emmet Kierans (LCGA in Limerick), and Seán Lynch (The Model in Sligo). Also, an extensive catalogue documenting this period of The Arts Council’s history was published to coincide with the opening of these exhibitions.

My focus here is on Karl Burke’s Arrangements in the Hugh Lane, which comprised a series of modular ‘minimalist’ objects arranged in three of the four first floor gallery rooms. His work rested among and framed the other works being shown from the collection. I visited the show a number of times and made sketches and drawings while and after I was there, and took some photos too, not of the work itself, but of things that seemed ‘right’ to photo after viewing the work – despite the photos being merely taken with the camera on my phone. I have decided to put some of these with this text, as they were, in a sense, generated by the work and I see them as belonging to and perhaps even aiding this review / response.

The first arrangement comprised two, slim, black, 8ft tall, rectangular steel frames about 1:2 in ratio. They stood on their long sides, hinging off from the sides of two of the doorways of the largest gallery room. These frames in plan view would approximately indicate two parallel, diagonal line segments cutting across the room. They framed the other works in the room, they framed space, they framed oneself, they framed time – personal, historical, cultural, etc. One could walk through them and around them, but one could not take both of them in at the same time. Either your eyes had to move over and back, refocussing between each object, or you had to change position in the room, only to find yourself denied there too. Eventually you realised that you could not even apprehend one of these frames at once, in a truly complete sense – you were left with just black line fragments in space.

In the second room a small black steel sculpture leaned against the far wall to the right of the doorway that led to the third room. This sculpture was of a seemingly similar material to the rectangular frames in the previous room. It was about 5ft tall and looked like a right hand square bracket. As I walked past it, and through the door frame, and then into the third room, there, leaning against the corresponding wall of this third room, was a reversed version of the square bracket sculpture I had just left behind leaning against the wall in the previous room.

Also, to the front of this third room, extending perpendicularly from the top third of the vertical part of the architrave around the window was a white-timber sculpture comprised of three square frames, of equal size (about 4ft square) arranged, like steps, from wall to floor. When you stood back from this piece, the inside faces of these three modular squares (which were painted an impenetrable matte black) started to fling perspective lines and vanishing points out southward and skyward.

Returning to the second room I stood in a position to the back left of it, where both of the small, black, steel bracket pieces were visible at once. Standing still, and again moving my eyes, refocussing from one to the other, over and back, my experience of time started to collapse into space – a space where an absence was held up.

These things then started to become objects that emerged into this absence, this gap, left behind by language – body language, descriptive, verbal, written language, the visual language of colour, scale, texture, etc.

Within this gap the objects then started to settle somewhere between being separate and having been put apart.

Coincidences between the sculptural pieces, the building itself, the building’s architectural details, and the other artworks sharing that space and time started to become coordinates of memory – a series of fleeting constructions that gathered elucidations of themselves to a place that was itself unreachable, and that I was unable to draw upon.

I then stood at the doorway between the first and second rooms and looked back down through the space that opened up between the two large offset rectangular frames.

Adrian Duncan is a Dublin-based artist, writer and engineer.

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.

*

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.

*

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.

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.

_______

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.

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.

_________________________________________________

[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.

Curated by Pádraic E. Moore & The Black Mariah

Spectrum of Activity was a group exhibition on show at the Black Mariah gallery from mid August to mid September of this year. A version of this review was first published in Paper Visual Art’s hard copy Cork Edition, which was released in early September culminating a two week residency at The Guesthouse in Shandon, in Cork City.*

The Black Mariah gallery having moved from its temporary lodgings at the ESB Substation, is now located on the 2nd floor of the Triskel Arts Center in Cork City. Next door is the impressively re-furbished Christchurch which operates now as a cinema and music venue.

Spectrum of Activity originated from an open submission call out made by Pádraic E. Moore on the invitation of The Black Mariah; the closing date for which was the 4th of August, eleven days before the opening.

Spectrum of Activity, The Triskel Arts Centre, installation view, 2011; image courtesy Triskel Arts.

Johannes Itten’s work in colour theory is the theme for the artists’ responses. Itten, a founding figure of the Bauhaus, spent his career analysing colour from theoretical and spiritual standpoints, the latter position contributing to him being dismissed as a mystic. The works in this show respond, fittingly, in pseudo-scientific, literal and abstract ways. Tim Acheson and Meadhbh O’Connor’s fit into the former, both making sculptural works that split white light into its constituent colours, using lens and a prism. O’Connor’s sculptural installation comprises a series of test-tube holders arranged in a circle on the gallery floor, with some small plants sprouting from within them, and a series of clear, rubber tubes curling out. Suspended over this arrangement is a length of prism through which a white light is refracted into its constituent spectrum. This small rainbow of colour falls across the network of tubes that crisscross the center of the arrangement.

On a table made from two small white plinths and a plane of plywood sits Acheson’s projection, a print from Adam Fearon, and Andrew Manson’s strange Items to control colour tints for colour field theory. Like the title, Manson’s is a knowingly clumsy piece, comprised of a blocky swatch of colours painted onto small sheets of plywood, and held together with a steel loop. They splay out of the small timber case that is designed to hold them.

On the wall to the right of this collection of objects is Blaine O’Donnell’s All things are Pigment. It is here that it struck me that the loft window lights throughout the space have been covered over, allowing no, or at least very little natural light into the space. This painting shows four figures emerging from a small vitrine, running toward a sea of colour, at the center of which sits a large fragmented circular spectrum sun. All of the ‘refracted light’ that diffuses around the picture is labelled according to its colour title, i.e. ochre, lemon, yellow, umber, etc. It is twee and naff and knowingly so, but it does suggest certain colours as representative of style, or belonging to a certain era. An idea that is extended with some subtlety in Vicky Smith’s Berliners in car. In the context of this exhibition, Smith’s piece stands out and hauls the show into an entirely different direction. Her photographic print (which is fitted directly onto the gallery wall) is of another photograph that featured in a National Geographic magazine in 1982. The saturation of tone and colour of this re-representation places it into a specific era. It asks cultural questions of colour, what colour, when, for who and for what use?

Vicky Smith: Berliners in a car, archival National Geographic photo, 2011; image courtesy the artist.

To one side of this is Eoin Mac Lochlainn’s On reflections no. 4, and to the other, in the corner of the room, on the ground sit a playful collection of small, coloured, plastic moulds from John Gayer, and four glass tanks from Niamh Clarke. These tanks sit on foam tubing and each have submersible pumps in them and what looks like cocktail glasses filled with some coloured liquids. These glasses float about in the water bumping into the walls of the tanks making small, random, pinging noises.

Along the right hand side, proud of the gallery are two bare plywood walls which hold a series of re-worked posters from Donough McNamara and two more spectrum wheels in water colour from Niall Moore. Below these watercolours sits The aesthetics of dejection, a collage on vinyl sleeve. The plywood walls hide some electrical wires and some speakers from which emanates the looping and hypnotic soundtrack of Adham Faramawy’s Violet likes honey, which is a heavily doctored video piece showing scenes comprised of lurid swirls of colour which inhibit its full apprehension. The suggested narrative of the piece becomes subsumed, or collapses into the manipulation of the medium that is relaying it. This video piece is shown on a very large flat screen television that sits on the ground and leans at a slight angle against the gallery wall. The sound from this dominates the space, and instead of being a cohesive glue between the other pieces in the show, it becomes hegemonically suggestive.

The modes of visual presentation in the show suit the disparity of its content, moving as it does from the scientific, to retro twee, to child-like, to minimalist, aligning itself with none of these aesthetics fully. The works on paper in the show, perhaps by virtue of the temperature and humidity of the room, all curl up away from the walls that they are fitted upon, which creates distracting shadows behind and around them. The negation of the natural white light from this show seems counter intuitive and the interaction with the architecture of the room is at times very limp and at other times clever and attentive, no more so than with Miranda Blennerhasset’s Wall Paintings. These were made along the top stairway and in the foyer into the gallery. They are blocky, diagonal patterns with pastel colours, outlined in gold. These artworks navigate around the corners, the curves in the walls, the fuse box, and around the light switches, elucidating the space and fittings in a gentle manner.

Adrian Duncan works in Dublin.

*Thanks to Stephen McGlynn.

Other works made during this residency in The Guesthouse were shown by Barbara Knezevic, Marta Fernández Calvo and Adrian Duncan.

I first came across Graham Harman a few months back reading a collection of his short stories titled Circus Philosophicus. The stories are mostly pretty poor in that they operate solely as long-winded examples that illustrate his philosophy – a philosophy, which is itself strange and utterly compelling. When Harman writes in a more formal style, he is riveting to read.

His philosophy is object-orientated and comes under the umbrella term of ‘Speculative Realism,’ which emerged from a conference held in Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007. It is not a philosophy of access to objects, i.e. it does not privilege the human being over other entities. It is as if Harman and co. have gone one step beyond Heidegger’s ‘tool analysis,’ to a sort of ‘tool being.’* In any case, his writings feature as a point of reference for the works in Tool-use, an exhibition on show currently at the Oonagh Young Gallery in Dublin 1.

Tool-use, installation view, 2011; image courtesy David Beattie and The Oonagh Young Gallery.

The show is curated by the Dublin-based artist David Beattie. At first glance there seems to be a similarity between his recent work and some of the works in this show, by which I mean that there is a conversation about the materials being employed, that takes place on at least two registers. One register being in relation to the strength of the materials, i.e. their ‘materiality,’ or what they need to do, or how they need to be placed so as they can resist forces. While on the other register we are asked to view the materials as legible objects of everyday use. Neither register is satisfactorily apprehended here, which is a good thing.

There are two wall-mounted pieces (or maybe three, more of which later) – one is Adam Thompson’s reclaimed signboard, placed within a large aluminium picture frame. It is, relative to the other pieces in the show, by far the most physically dominant. It is hung portrait style and seems to gaze across the gallery space at Sam Keogh’s Shroud. There is a weird, almost B-movie-special-effects-sumptuousness to the objects Keogh makes. Shroud is, at first, a rough rectangular piece of tin foil taped to the wall with some mylar applied to its centre. Is it a subtle piece of sculpture, or a painting? I heard him recently describe one of his sculptures as “godless,” and appropriately this unstable piece seems at first to profane the art object as commodity, but then you realise that you are in a gallery and that this is for sale. The piece then seems to profane the belief that a shroud is decrepit, ancient and thereby of worth. It also seems to profane the fact that this is just a piece of tin foil that had once been folded over and perhaps even used for something else outside of this art context. The creases from this folding creates a small, haphazard tectonic grid that manifests itself as squared facets on the surface. One could look at this piece for an age and not fully apprehend it, which I suspect is exactly the point, but then of course I could, or almost should be wrong.

Sam Keogh: Shroud, tin foil, tape, mylar, 2011; Image courtesy David Beattie and the Oonagh Young Gallery.

Behind it, I mean physically behind it, is the false wall of the Oonagh Young  Gallery, and behind that is a cold, structural, reinforced concrete wall, and if we continue in this direction through the neighbouring beauty salon and on for about fifteen meters, we would find ourselves in The LAB amidst another set of handmade geometries. Niall de Buitléar’s Out of order is an obsessive analysis of 2-d and 3-d shapes, drawing, building and process. On the ground floor of The LAB gallery sit three large, white vitrines housing small, organically evolving and morphing sculptures made from layers of black paper. On the walls, laid out in grids, is what looks like a series of plan view blue-prints of the sculptures, or, these could be plan view blue prints of some strange un-built, ancient burial chambers. Perhaps “blue-print” is a misleading word, as the framed drawings are made with white pencil on black paper, inverting the colours of the sculptural work.

These sculptures appear to be a development of the large, mysterious and memorable cardboard sculptures he showed at the RHA Futures in 2010. Each shape in this instance starts as a circular absence, or a number of circular absences, over which is wrapped this black paper which emanates concentrically outward until it meets the concentric emanations of another neighbouring circle, which then affects and creates the eventual form. The external outline of the base of these small, delicate sculptures is a function of the number and thickness of the layers of wrapped paper, and the positioning and number of the circles relative to each other. The work sits somewhere between intuition and analysis, and one gets the impression that the adding of the layers of paper was stopped just before the object started to lose its individuality. There are fifty-four of these sculptures, these relics of process, and each one has a personality and no doubt some logic or pattern to its placement.

Niall de Buitlear: Untitled, paper sculptures, installation(detail), 2011; image courtesy the artist.

The logic of placement in Amy Yao’s Not all it’s cracked up to be only became apparent to me on a second visit to the Oonagh Young Gallery. The piece is made of two upright pieces of glass, which form a ninety-degree corner. The pieces of glass are of a slightly different size. Resting at an angle, against one of the ‘walls,’ is a length of dowel, but with the shop tag still on it. Some black paint covers the middle third of the dowel and it holds, against the wall, a scrap from an Irish newspaper, from which, and through the glass wall one can read the words:

People

Services

On the ground beside this sits Sean Edwards’ ‘unfinished’ Painting of a photocopy for a dolls house paper (with spill). It is like an interrupted piece of Op-art. The skewering of scale inherent in it being laid on the ground of the gallery is playful and it seems coherent, if that’s the right word, with the wonky rectilinear grids, or parts of grids that appear over again in this exhibition.

Matt Harle’s small, delicate portal frame structure is an object that appears to have been discovered rather than made. It wants to fall over. It is comprised of three n-shaped frames of plywood, painted white, which lean away from each other but are held up by sewn strips of cast paint, draped and pinned across the tops of the frames. The paint strips operate as ties for the tops of the frames, and it is this balance and mutual reliance of the materials on each other that collects this piece into its position of gentle, uncertain defiance. The light above this piece re-words and projects a confusion of shadowed structures on the gallery floor, suggesting outlines for where it might collapse.

Tool-use, Adam Thompson and Matt Harle, installation view, 2011; Image courtesy David Beattie and The Oonagh Young Gallery.

Beattie has chosen five intricate and layered pieces of work, and with these objects there is at once a subversion and a making explicit of, the ‘other lives’ of the materials being employed. The reference to Harman seems tokenistic, in that, at some level Speculative Realism can be applied to almost any object. Perhaps to stay really true to this object-orientated philosophy, a gallery space is not the best choice of site at all, it being a place where the privilege lies with the spectator’s will to access. Perhaps these pieces should be placed away from our gaze altogether. But then, that wouldn’t be much fun at all.

Adrian Duncan is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylKnb6WtYqU

__

I am writing this in the spare room of my house that I rent with my girlfriend and her dog. The table I am writing this upon was left to me by my grandmother. It is an old writing desk, dark, smooth, hardwood. The table can be taken apart, has two columns of drawers and a table top. When you sit to it, the gap for one’s legs is quite narrow. There are two rounded, ornate handles on the drawer doors, some of the handles are chipped or broken off and on the table’s surface there are many scratches and two small, hollow, circular plinths for inkwells. Sitting in one of the plinths now is a small chunk of wax that my grandfather would have melted down to stamp and seal an envelope. One end of this dark red stub of wax is smooth and looks as if it had been snapped off, the other end is charred, deformed and mottled black from the smoke that would have swirled around it.

The house that I live in is terraced and built with artisan brick.  It has a timber first floor, a pitched, trussed roof and is over a hundred years old. Two up, two down. On one side of us lives a family of between two and eight noisy Georgians, and on the other a doctor who we barely know is there except in the mornings or during the night or in the middle of the day when her electric shower roars.

Some mornings, when I walk down the narrow staircase of our house, I see intrusions from the outside world. A finger print of light reflected from a window of the apartment block across the street glows on the stairwell wall. When I see these oblongs of faded light, I complete a momentary four-point contract with the sun, that window, the wall of our stairwell and the backs of my eyes. It is a contract with sub-clauses in time, space and seemingly random, human, built decisions.

Our house is one of twelve in a small square behind Manor Street, Stoneybatter. The road that leads from Manor Street to our square is called Arbour Place (Chicken Lane) and is full of cats and horses and cars and shouting. It leads up to a corner where an old milestone stands.  Apparently Patrick Kavanagh, sozzled, would sit there and write. It connects Dublin Dublin to Viking Dublin. North west of our street there is a sprawling warren of old artisan brick cottages and two-storey terraced houses with street names like Olaf Road, Viking Street, Ivar Place, et cetera.

A friend of mine bought a book of maps a number of years ago in the Chester Beatty library. They depict Dublin at different stages over the last eight hundred years. Being aware of my interest in maps, he passed them onto me for scanning.  I carried this out on a large A0 scanner at my old work place, a consulting engineers office at the top of Prussia Street, which is a continuation north of Manor Street. [1]

The last building I carried out a structural design on before leaving this company in 2008, was a vast seven-storey office block on Church street, about three streets east of Manor street. Now it sits empty and – though I couldn’t think of a more hubristic name if I tried – is called Kings Building (no apostrophe, at the client’s request). It is a large glass, curtain-wall, brick and cladded structure that could be from anywhere. I know things about it like:

* The building has seven storeys, a basement and a commercial rental floor area of over 15,000 m2.

* The column grid is predominantly 12m x 8m.

* The bolts in the beam to column junction on the fourth floor at grid line junction K/4 are 4no. M20s gr8.8.

* The large movement joint across the middle of the building allows for 40mm of thermal expansion and contraction. (In effect, the building is like a set of vast, slowly moving lungs.)

* The fifty meter trusses that span over an informal famine time graveyard theoretically deflect 50mm at mid-span, when fully loaded.

* The water table is approximately 4 meters below the underside of the basement slab.

* That John, the cockney caretaker, who pads around these floors alone each night, wants to retire at 60 and move to Benidorm.

Beside it is St. Michan’s Church and to the rear of it runs a wall that is over four hundred years old. It is a patchwork of material from different eras and wants to fall down.[2] In the basement of the church there are some open tombs with perfectly preserved cadavers in them. If you take part in the church tour, you are permitted to touch one of the dead – a large crusader whose legs were snapped so as to fit him into the coffin. Thirty feet away from him, and more importantly on the other side of that old wall, are the informal graves of hundreds of famine time victims.

When we were clearing the site at the start of this job in 2006, there was a full archeological dig carried out revealing small graves, foundations, walls, bones, pots, utensils, et cetera. These were unearthed, documented painstakingly, removed and dumped. Two years later, when the building was almost complete, I stood up on the roof of the seventh floor and gazed across the city. The roof-scape of the city is a liar. The road up past Kings Inns is long and steep and if you were to trace a horizontal line from the road level at the top of Constitution Hill across to the sea you would meet the top of Liberty Hall. But there is no way you could know this from the road. This sort of objective knowledge is not available and is not of interest as one noses one’s way around the contours of the streets. From this elevated position, the city unfolds to you in falsity after falsity, the shape of the land can be no more determined than its history. This re-writing of the land to city reduces the city to an over-worked and crossed out sentence of garble. All one gets is an approximated generality, the specifics of the spoken street is lost.

As I continued walking around that near completed building, I thought of the flat floor plans the architects and I had pored over in their offices for months before we started to build. I went to the places in those plans that had thrown up specific spatial problems and stood in the new material elucidation of those spaces. I thought of the gleaming walls, the slabs, the beams, the pinging columns, the foundation pads, the piles, the water, the earth.

My great grandparents ran the famine work house in Longford until it burnt down in the early 1900s. Then they built and moved to Ivy Villa, a house on a large farm with a forest on one side and fields that run down and ripple into Lough Ree on the other. My grandfather (my mother’s father), who was brought up in this house, met my grandmother in London during the Second World War. They married in Oxford and after the war moved back to Ivy Villa where my mother and my uncle were born and raised.

The photograph in the frame above was taken in and around 1910. My grandfather, James Farrell, is furthest to the right. The house behind is Ivy Villa. The picket fence is gone and where they are standing is now a yard where my grandmother once kept chickens. It is, obviously, a family portrait and has an eerie, almost Victorian love-less-ness to it – my family and my home. I don’t know who took the photograph or who designed the house, however, I do know it was one of the first houses in Longford to have electricity and running water. The ladder on the right hand side of the picture leads up to the water tank that was used to collect rainwater for drinking and washing. When my sisters and brother and I as children, would visit my grandmother, the water, we decided, tasted strange.

In February 2004, after I had just moved to Edinburgh, my grandmother died. On the night of the removal her coffin was brought downstairs, along the hall, past the sitting room where this desk then sat and into the dining room where she was passed through a window to some men outside. The windows, as you can see in this photograph, slide up and down. Only recently have I been back in that house, and when I did revisit, despite there being a few lights left on, the place felt utterly empty. It only struck me at the time the strangeness of her being passed out through the window and I concluded that whoever it was that designed this house, designed it only for the living.

My father is (also) an engineer. He designed and built my/our home house in Ballymahon, south county Longford. Our house is a bastardized mixture of a Bungalow Bliss design and his imagination. It has two very large front windows, a wide set of concrete steps and it has been added to considerably over the years as our family enlarged. Bungalow Bliss was a book devised and self-published in the early 1970s by an architect called Jack Fitzsimons, who then worked for Meath County Council. The book became a bestseller and has been amended and re-published over and over again through the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, however, it is now out of print. The book worked for a number of reasons, it was straightforward and easy to read, the information in the book gave you a number of designs which you could choose from, and vague siting contexts for these designs. The full size drawings of these designs were sent to you then you carried out the planning permission with your local County Council via the guidelines provided in the book. At the time, there was a lot of space in rural Ireland and a generation of young couples with some money and a need for a home. There are thousands of these houses all over Ireland. The construction was cheap and simple and drainage was of little complication. As designs, some can be depressing, even kitsch and they are generally looked upon sniffily, but for me, they have a sort of humility; they represent and express an unspoken form of non-canonical, rural Irish Modernism. [3]

When I was young I liked going into my father’s office to look at his huge, precise drawings, the t-squares, the ink, the razors, the rolls of paper, the pencils, the cranked lamp, the smell.  I would talk very seriously with him about his work, not understanding a thing, other than that I wanted to do this. Whatever this was. He worked for a number of years for Longford Co. Council, then, bored out of his mind, he left, set up his own business, and changed his car to a small old beat up, green and embarrassingly ascetic Audi 80. By the mid-nineties he was building houses for sale all over Ballymahon town, industrial units, more houses, bungalows, two-stories. He bought The Mill, a then large, crumbling, seven-storey stone structure, down by the River Inny, that came in two blocks – in school, you’d take your girlfriend there for a lunch-time “shift.” He had plans to put apartments in it. However, he had moved altogether too quickly, having preempted the recent building boom in rural Ireland by about five years and subsequently ran out of credit. He sold everything and stopped building but continued working as an engineer for years, then he went back to university to study music.

Now he teaches piano, though he does not play very well himself, and on Tuesdays comes up to visit us in Stoneybatter. Occasionally, he helps me with jobs for people who want small extensions designed to their starter homes in the suburbs around Dublin.

FOOTNOTES

[1]  During a lunch break at work recently I had a look through the secondhand book stalls in Temple Bar and came across a book called North Dublin City and its Environs, it was written by Dillon Cosgrave and published in 1909. It was a small, green, hardback book in good condition, but cynically priced at €65. I flicked through it, took some notes and learned that the book’s previous owner was a J. Geoghan (dated 16^th March, 1919) and that Manor street was thus named in 1780 after the Manor of Grangegorman. The Manor in question was owned by a Sir Thomas Stanley (during the reign of King George III). Incidentally the bridge that links this part of the city to the old town centre was then called (amongst its many names before and since) Mecklenburg Bridge, after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, King George’s wife.  The then concurrent Prussian King was Frederick II, who was circuitously related to George III (they all seemed related), thus Prussia Street. Further north on Prussia street there now stands, across from Tescos, a shabby bar called The City Arms which, back in the 1780s, was an upmarket hotel where the Jameson’s, a family of whisk(e)y distillers from Scotland, often stayed. The Jameson distillery is still accessible from Bow street along the back of the Church street (ref. Kings Building). Much of the architecture in this part of the city is Georgian/Palladian, with particular instances on Manor street, Capel street and Henrietta street.

I learnt one other thing from the quick glance at this book, that the name Stoneybatter comes from the gaelic Bothar na gCloch and has thus been named for over seventeen hundred years. It is thought to have formed part of the old high king’s Wicklow to Tara highway and as such, according to Dillon Cosgrave, the name Stoneybatter must be granted the palm of antiquity amongst Dublin street names.

[2] An Iraqi engineer and I spent a week surveying this wall in the summer of 2006. It was a mixed photographic, condition and structural survey.

[3] I attended a lecture in January of this year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) that was given by Brian Dillon and was designed to compliment the then current The Moderns exhibition. Broadly, he spoke of Irish Modernism as being mostly literature based, Beckett, Joyce, Synge, et cetera, and as such we (the Irish) could be considered as important contributors to Modernism in general. Amongst many other things, he made the observation that a lot of postmodern and contemporary artists in Ireland make and have made work which revisited this literary Modernism, examples being Gerard Byrne revisiting Beckett, Declan Clarke revisting Heinrich Böll and John Cage revisting Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

In relation to John Cage’s revisitation of Finnegan’s Wake, Dillon described this as stemming from a commision Cage received in 1978 from the German National Radio Station. Cage decided to visit (randomly of course) the places mentioned in Finnegan’s Wake, where he would merely record the ambient sounds, snatches of conversations, doors opening, gates closing, dogs barking, et cetera. During the course of this journey, he wrote a letter to a Minna Lederman [*] describing the countryside and the B&B lodgings he was using throughout:

Ireland is poor, but full of modern bungalows …… Many of the new bungalows are designed to be B&Bs. A hallway with bedrooms, the only thing missing is a private bath…..

[*] Minna Lederman Daniel (1896-1995)was a music and dance editor and writer, and a major influence on 20th-century music. In 1923, she was a founding member of the League of Composers, a group of musicians and proponents of modern music. In 1924, she helped launch the League’s magazine, The League of Composers review (in 1925 the name was changed to Modern music), which was the first American journal to manifest an interest in contemporary composers. She served as the sole editor of this magazine from its inception to its demise in late 1946. During this period, she developed the journal’s distinctive literary style and was directly responsible for bringing to readers the literary efforts of significant young composers such as Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson. Following the demise of Modern music, Mrs. Daniel (who wrote under her maiden name of Lederman), continued to write on music and dance. In 1974, Minna Lederman Daniel established the Modern Music Archives at the Library of Congress.

(abstract from the Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.scdb.200033887/default.html)

NOTES ON IMAGES

1. Scan of map detail drawn by William Duncan, 1821.

2. Image of Kings Building and St. Michan’s Church, from Googlemaps.

3. Image within the notes section is a detail of a cast of a 1:200 model of a Georgian building. The cast was made by Aidan Lynam as part of his Babel project, (currently in the R.I.A.I., Merrion Square).

All other images by Adrian Duncan.

Adrian Duncan lives in Dublin.

Dennis McNulty’s The Driver and the Passenger at first seems to be a continuation of a recent installation piece titled Between motion and Static Mass. Broadly, Between motion and Static Mass was an installation piece, created for a location on the sixth floor of a multi-storey car-park (parking garage) in the centre of Kilkenny town, involving a parked courier van, with its doors open and its cargo of modular, tubular-steel notice boards assembled nearby.

Dennis McNulty: Alternative proposal for Collingwood (Moffett #1) (2010), concrete, aluminium and acrylic; image courtesy Green on Red Gallery. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

As a point of continuity, on the top steps of the stairway to the Green on Red gallery foyer sit two small black speakers from which issues a voice, in a vehicle, reading aloud the road signs as they are encountered on the way into a place called Breezewood. This audio piece Approaching Breezewood charts the route into an unincorporated town on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.[1] The utterances at first seem random, but they slowly develop a sort of linear landscape of familiar non-places like: “Best Western at second light on right, Big Fish Transport, Family House Prime rib,”  et cetera. The name of this town has the generic sound of one of those dreamt up by the marketing departments of housing development companies.

On the landing sits a modular, self-supporting, stainless steel shelf, upon which sits a projector beaming an abstract geometric animation onto a folded-over copy of The Guardian newspaper. The animation of strobe lines reveals and connects different nodes in a plumb-less black field, then disappears, reappears, speeds up, quakes – all the while shifting, elusive, re-iterating and re-framing these nodes of connection. This work titled Destination, plays out, wittily, onto a specific article in The Guardian newspaper, which reports on a cosmological finding involving an Earth-like planet called Gilese 581g, that lies squarely in the region of space where life can thrive. [2]

Conversely, Box with the sound of our own unmaking sits flush with the entrance to the main gallery space and from it emanates the sounds of a traffic jam. These sounds evoke a 1950’s science fiction radio play, a ring-road around a Ballardian High Rise, a future anterior shift. The machine creating the sounds is, as the title suggests, boxed off – in a facetted plywood structure, which is too tall to peer into. This not only introduces the viewer to the immediacy of one’s relative scale to the box, but it also forcefully thrusts the viewer into the role of listener.

Dennis McNulty: Box with the sound of our unmaking (2010),plywood and sound, edition of 3; image courtesy the Green on Red Gallery. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

The Driver and the Passenger could suggest two specific roles: the knowing, dominant driver and the ignorant, passive passenger. However, as the work unfolds it becomes clear that the passenger/spectator is asked to look, connect, be active, as anybody is, thus removing the idea of a gap between the two positions.[3]

On a flat-screen television, which sits proud of the wall, a video piece loops, it having been shot from the outside of a modernist residence in New Canann, Connecticut. The reflections of passers-by on the glazed external façade, combined with the sun beaming through the building – revealing the eerily, almost show-house domestic order within – and the short loop time of the piece, creates at once a sumptuous, shifting and disorientating effect.

Inside this building, what looks like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Chair can be seen. Van der Rohe was a long time collaborator and friend of Phillip Johnson, the architect of this seminal Glass House. [4]

Furthering this Johnson–Van der Rohe connection, the sculptural piece Alternative proposal for Collingwood (Moffett #1) at first looks like an elongated Barcelona table. (A Barcelona table was a minimalist table design by van der Rohe that comprised of a tubular steel structure holding a glass table-top). However, the scale of the sculptural piece and the height of its glass “table-top”, brings the work from the realm of furniture into the realm of the architectural model – albeit an abstract model with an indicative subsurface structure. The steel sub-structure has the appearance of a distorted hexagon through the middle of which ruptures a rhombus shaped shaft.

Dennis McNulty: Alternative proposal for Collingwood (Moffett #2), (2010) Concrete, aluminium, acrylic, mild-steel and glass, unique; image courtesy the Green on Red Gallery. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

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Niamh McCann: Tiltshift, Golden Bough Room at the Hugh Lane, installation view, 2010, image courtesy Michael Dempsey.

Tiltshift is a new body of work produced by Niamh McCann for the Golden Bough series at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. This series, in general, is designed to showcase significant contemporary Irish artists – it having begun in early 2008 with Dorothy Cross’s Land Scape.

McCann, who is represented by the Green on Red Gallery in Dublin, has responded to the Golden Bough Room with a mixture of drawing, painting, collage and sculpture, with the intention of looking at “the collective memory and its bearing on the construction of visual historical narratives.”

On the wall, opposite the entrance of the oblong shaped Golden Bough room, are six cranked oars that protrude, side-by-side, overhead – churning the space. From a certain angle they suggest of a series of unravelling honeycomb cells. Looking closer, one can see that they are a boat’s tiller and oar fused together – the tiller denoting direction and the oar denoting linear thrust. From left to right, these hybrid, timber oars form a visual rhythm while also rotating a quarter turn. The first has some humming birds feeding from it, the last two support a slim, lurid length of neon.

Niamh McCann: Tiltshift, Golden Bough Room at the Hugh Lane, installation view, 2010, image courtesy Michael Dempsey.

Purlieu, McCann’s 2009 solo show in the Green on Red, illustrated the cultural no man’s land between the rural and the urban, and how this spliced seam can be transferred and applied to the systems of language and their transient nature. [1] Residues of that work re-appear here, most overtly in a Nixon/Khrushchev image where Khrushchev’s head has been replaced with a bird’s. This image is a re-working of a photo from the infamous 1959 ”kitchen debate” at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.

On the curved walls at either side of the entrance are six collaged images. Common to each is a mushroom cloud painted in watercolour directly onto the wall. Around, or slightly obscuring each of the clouds, are carefully arranged orange, sky blue and wine-coloured collages, comprised of paintings, found (or sought) Russian lifestyle magazine pages and draped strands of knitting wool. These bring the momentous and the banal into a co-existence, with re-worked images of: photographs of the Moon Landing, The Manhattan project, Ed Ruscha’s Standard, a girl picking flowers, a woman looking at a duck.

Niamh McCann: Tiltshift, Golden Bough Room at the Hugh Lane, collage, watercolour, 2010, image courtesy Michael Dempsey.

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Ella Burke: Grey, black rubber tyre tube, plastic, 2010; image held, image courtesy IMOCA.

In 1926 Alexander Chizhevsky, a Russian scientist, produced a text titled: The Physical Factors of the Historical Process. It generally posits the idea that the biosphere, and by extension human life on earth, is directly affected by the cycles of the sun. He correlated the human history – of war, migration, et cetera – with the corresponding documented solar activity.

His writing is a point of influence for Ella Burke’s new work, Silent Vibrations, recently on show at IMOCA (Irish Museum of Contemporary Art), Dublin. Burke, who is a graduate of the I.A.D.T. Visual Arts Practice degree and currently studying on the MFA program at NCAD, presents this work as a culmination of a year-long graduate programme, awarded to her by IMOCA in 2009.

IMOCA is located on Lad Lane, Dublin 2, in what was an old OPW (Office of Public Works) joinery. The building is a large, open, industrial structure, which now houses studios and a two-tier gallery space.

Ella Burke: Grey (detail), black rubber tyre tube, plastic, 2010; image held here

Burke’s work utilises the entirety of this gallery space. On the lower tier five long, large, white, amorphous sacks dangle from opes in the dust extractor pipe network that winds its way amongst the steel trusses overhead. Some of the sacks – made from plastic bags that have been glued together – are constrained by inflated rubber tyre tubes. Fans have been fitted into the overhead pipes creating a sort of closed system of pneumatics that slowly inflate and deflate the dangling, synthetic lungs. These heaving shapes, are defined by the confining rubber-tube-structures that are suspended at different heights along the dangling sacks, which alters the inflated shape; that at once avoids designation and yet, expresses the space between structure in a languid way.

These uncertain objects seem to reference, or act as a re-wording of, the Atkinson and Baldwin Air and Air Conditioning exhibitions in the late 1960s – where it was suggested, that a volume of air-conditioned air should be considered as an art object. [1]

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