paper visual art journal –

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/

Brendan Earley and Kevin Cosgrove’s Nor for Nought, at mother’s tankstation, is a show in which very little happens: directly counteracting the desire for action or stimulation, the work explicates a space wherein such properties are stopped dead in their tracks. The two very different kinds of work – Cosgrove’s modestly sized, figurative oils, and Earley’s sculptural assemblages, which act almost like thwarted readymades – exist in a relationship jointly informed by the language of making both in and of itself. The objects in Cosgrove’s paintings – a car, a tractor, a small dumper truck – are both created from something, by people or other machines, and furthermore are proponents of creation; they are created for the purpose of further creation. Here, however, they lie dormant, and oddly so. The paintings appear almost as portraits of these objects, studying them in unproductive cessation. Adjacent to Cosgrove’s studies of the things and places of making, Earley’s sculptural forms thwart traditional expectations of productivity or usefulness. The materials used – aluminium, plasterboard, fibreglass, a reassembled IKEA kitchen, workbenches, and so forth – all point to an interest in making as process. There is a sense of incompletion, however; the workbench, typically used as a prop for the creation of something, becomes the final resting site for that which it creates (Pieces of the City are Forming like Islands (2010), and Workbench (2011)). Function breaks down as the work ceases to be passed on to another locale, and thus put to use. Instead, it gathers the site of production – the workbench – to itself, and realigns itself as useless, aesthetic. In both bodies of work, the site of non-creation, where function or purpose breaks down, is viewed productively, and enacted upon to make something new.

Brendan Earley: They Bedded Down for the Night, woolen blanket, foam, plastic ties, melamine, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The title of the exhibition, Nor for Nought, also gives some shading to the pairing of these two artists. The title cites a passage from the Bible, a tract in which Paul puts forward to the Thessalonians the value of earning, and working for sustenance; it is a reward in itself, once it has been earned. Recompense exists in such a scenario, regardless of what form it takes. There is value, he suggests, in the simple process of work. As previously mentioned, both Cosgrove and Earley appear to share in this view. Both, through their varied depictions in the breakdown of function or usability, negate a dominant demand for an end result that is finalised, or useful. In such a way, they glean a view of working that accepts the half-done, the static or abandoned, as befitting the labour that precedes its formation. The pleasure in working is its own reward; it does not stipulate a clear and defined outcome or product. That is not to say that the artworks contained in the exhibition are neither finished nor complete – they are – but rather that they use a breakdown in function or activity as a starting point in productively giving rise to a product that diverges from both.

Kevin Cosgrove: Workshop (with cardboad), oil on linen, 2011; Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artist.

The exhibition itself contains paintings by Cosgrove and a collection of sculptural forms by Earley, which quietly intersperse the painterly depictions of the things and places of making. An unoccupied yellow workshop, emitting that too-bright fluoro-hue common to offices everywhere, hangs above Earley’s The Lights Are On (2011). This floor-based assemblage combines a thwarted IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, and fluorescent tubes. The exchange between object and image on traversing the gallery is intriguing; one might imagine the objects being made in such spaces as Cosgrove’s, but the question of function creeps interminably in – just what kind of space would this be if given over to the creation of objects such as these? Do such spaces make any sense once the prerequisite condition of function has been abandoned? There is an almost belligerent celebration in the subversion of the object’s expected uses and narratives in Earley’s work, for example in his alternative, counter-intuitive usage of flat-pack constructions. Furthermore, another piece, Don’t Look Back (2010), uses mahogany – generally seen as an almost precious wood – in such a way as to render it virtually invisible. This wall piece comprises an aluminium form perching above a sheet of mahogany affixed to the wall, over which a sheet of black glutinous perspex is overlaid. It is infuriating both formally and ergonomically. And yet it is here that the work is interesting: to hide away that which is most valued is to run counter to economic expectations. Function does not come into the equation, but rather a dominant expectation founded on the consumerist predicate; in any case, to use mahogany here simply seems wholly function-less – MDF would have done the job just as well. It is not dissimilar to the approach taken by Cosgrove in his paintings, as he meticulously paints, pointedly in oils, spaces in which nothing is happening, or machines which at the moment he paints them, have ceased to function. A prevailing disinclination towards light and contrast – most of the works are of a similar breed tonally – further iterates the humdrum quality of these spaces and things. And yet he works towards representation of these scenes, running counter to an expectation of what, really, a painting should be. This is still life in the truest sense, empty of people, devoid of activity, and thus still yet a site of possible creation or epiphany. Another work, Workshop (with cardboard) (2011), shows a grimy workshop, all gnarled shapes and forms seeping out from a soot-black darkness. Sheets of cardboard are haphazardly thrown onto these surfaces, and out of the darkness jumps a luminous gold shade; so extravagant it appears as almost baroque. There’s an excessiveness present here that seems out of place, and it is this that holds the viewer. In other works, a swath of light serves the same purpose, pointing to a resonance which supersedes that which is represented in the work. As with Earley’s work, these paintings present us with a moment of resistance or intransigence.

Kevin Cosgrove & Brendan Earley: Nor for Nought, installation view, 2011(Foreground: Brendan Earley: All the Lights are On, reassembled IKEA kitchen, plastic ties, foam, florescent tubes, 2011); Image courtesy mother’s tankstation and the artists.

It is not for nothing that this exhibition appears to say little, or to deny a sense of finality. It is in this repudiation of a normative cycle – work, progress, completion – that both artists celebrate the process of making as an activity in itself. In offering an alternative finality, dependent on moments of inactivity or subversion, both Cosgrove and Earley put forward an alternative notion of finality. This is something that exists in a symbiotic relation to incompletion, and finds its own resting place – in time and space – through the simple acts of making, and of working.

Rebecca O’ Dwyer is a writer currently based in Sydney. She holds a BA Fine Art Sculpture (2008) and MA Art in the Contemporary World (2010), both from NCAD, Dublin. She plans to commence doctoral studies at NCAD next year, focusing on the role of transcendentalism in contemporary art. O’Dwyer is also co-editor of the publication Not Drowning but Waving,and compiles a personal blog at:

www.rebeccaodwyer.wordpress.com.

Curated by David Mabb and Mary-Ruth Walsh, Utopia Ltd. is currently on show in the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda until the 3rd August. The show, previously exhibited at the Wexford Arts Centre earlier this year, is a visitation to Utopian discourse, drawing largely on the ideological context of late-nineteenth-century pastoral Utopianism, as well as Modernist and corporate models. The title is taken from George Bernard Shaw’s favorite Gilbert and Sullivan musical Utopia Limited. Shaw preferred the opera because it had no plot. The exhibition too struggles with an unwieldy plot unified by a strong theme: that of interference. Each art work seeks to usurp presumption and strongly questions the aesthetics of utopian visions, hence nothing is quite as it seems. The curatorial collaboration by artists to present an exhibition inclusive of their own work demonstrates an agenda to contextualise their own work with the work of others. It could be greeted as opportunist, but in fact demonstrates a sensibility to the accumulate a body of work reflective of their own concerns.

David Mabb: Two Squares (Morris Fruit Relief), paint on fabric on mounted canvas, 2009; image held here.

David Mabb’s paintings demonstrate a control of surface, the thick, undulating texture of paint mimicks the tonal qualities of a William Morris fabric. Two squares (Morris fruit relief, 2009) marries the minimal colour of Kazimir Malevich’s white-and-black squares paintings, and Morris’s ornate renderings of nature. In Black square (Brer Rabbit) (2010), Mabb includes the selvedge fabric as a material clue – a source of provenance – that frames the black square in blue and white printed fabric. An aesthetic of design and pattern emerge from the symmetrical and thickly painted surface. Traces of colour peak through; a dim pink flower in Two squares (Morris fruit relief) softens the plane of white.

Mabb’s reworking of Morris’s fabrics, the subtle obliteration and reinvention of pattern, allows for Morris to be considered alongside the work of Malevich. The work of both men engaged with a unique sense of Utopianism. Morris’s idyll is seemingly bound up in agriculturalism and craft, however he also used this to describe the alienation of labour in industrial society. Malevich’s early influences included peasant embroidery. At the Second Modern Decorative Arts Exhibition in Moscow in the winter of 1917, he exhibited embroidered work. Charlotte Douglas describes Suprematist handwork in an essay titled “Suprematist Embroidered Ornament”:

“Just as in the paintings, the colored rectangles were meant to indicate an advanced  consciousness of the universe or to be emblematic of an unseen world. Not only did the Suprematists aspire to make completely objectless painting, but they also immediately decided to remake the entire visual world in the Suprematist mode, an idea that after the Bolshevik revolution would acquire political significance.”[2]

Blaise Drummond: La façade libre (Live forever in perfect health and happiness), oil, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2009; Image held here.

The white surface of Blaise Drummond’s La façade libre (Live forever in perfect health and happiness, 2009), interrupted by texture interspersed upon the primed canvas, speaks instantly of sparseness, separation, the found and unfound. A solitary cowboy moves across a landscape with a modernist building made of graph paper. The graphic-style fruit at the bottom seem to mock our appropriation of its wares. The splodges and splashes, the delicate moments of this painting, reflect upon nature’s strengths and weaknesses.

The artificial nature of our constructed space, in particular our communal space, is the subject of Lizi Sánchez’s sculptures. The drenching of faux marble and laminate surfaces with pompoms, gold ribbon and plastic pearls create whimsical structures that reflect upon artifice. The aesthetic construction of space is central to civil society and the flimsy nature of her construction is a calculated reflection upon the tacit nature of our civility. While the individual in Drummond’s La façade libre travels through a utopian dream, Sánchez’s work describes the infrastructure of civil space through the adornment of that space, drawing attention to the construction of artificial environments that we live and work in.

Mary-Ruth Walsh’s photographs reflect upon the design practice of Eileen Gray as well as the dynamics of objecthood. They imply the ideal of modern domesticity – the clean, uncluttered lines and moulded shapes from sleek materials. The fact that these delicately constructed images are made with found packaging materials offers a reminder that designs are bought and sold, a commodity of our own desire for modern living. Gray paid particular attention to the public and private spheres in her architecture designs, while Walsh’s photographs seem to emphasise the edges of structures. Such attention to the boundaries of living implies that these boundaries might affect the way we live.

Similarly Brendan Earley’s drawings appear to take the nature of encroachment as a source. The hovering felt tip marks that redraw an invisible and unseen boundary are perhaps a manifestation of formal elements. This sense of formal design in making is clear in Workbench (2009). The aluminum cast polystyrene acquires the new weight of metal while still mimicking its own featherweight appearance. The aluminum cast and plasterboard are placed on the workbench in a cruciform arrangement. At once there is weight and substance, a formal plan but nothing is realised; it is all under construction but the art work is finished. Echoing Walsh’s interest in the way in which objects exist in a gallery or museum context, Workbench is placed on the alter. The Highlanes being a deconsecrated church has the added task of utilizing its inherited architecture.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv. Co-operative explanatory capabilities in organizational design and personnel management, still, DVD, 2010; Image held here.

Co-operative explanatory capabilities in organizational design and personnel management (2010) is a slideshow presentation made by the Pil and Galia Kollectiv. It presents a fictional and bizarrely convincing account of a company whose sole operation is to place its employees under surveillance. The impact and relationship between output and creative labour, division of labour and collective labour were observed and recorded in statistical reports. The accompanying commentary describes the introduction of religious and ritual movements as a response to rumor and suspicion of surveillance which began to undermine the project. The still images, taken from documentation of an early computer company, are strung together and accompanied by an apparently reliable and trustworthy narrative, leaves you chilled by its believable nature.

The series of films made by the Pil and Galia Kollectiv titled The future series imagines a future that evolves from an incident in Ikea in Edmonton, North London in 2005 where six thousand people turned up to avail of a limited special offer that resulted in a riot. The trilogy looks at the potential for a society to be born from such an event and seems reminiscent of the Wat Tyler Rebellion. The future for less (2006) imagines the birth of a totalitarian state as a result of a similar incident. In Better future, wolf-shaped (2008), we see the ritualistic cultish worship at the hands of hooded figures, and in the Future is now, a choreographed reenactment of the riot in Edmonton, sees the beginning of a popular uprising. The slightly neo-dadaist performance, the black-and-white costume, and allusion of social strata through caps and sleeve ruffles make the reenactment become like an orchestration of shapes on the gridded lines of the Ikea car park.

Utopia Ltd emphasises the notion of Utopia is that of inversion and transformation. That social constructs, political dialogues and ideologies can be turned inside out from what they seem to be, to what they potentially might be. Appropriation is a fundamental part of this show, serving to describe the impact of Utopian thought upon the actual material world.

Kitty Rogers is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.

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[1] John Bushe Jones. Theatre in Review. “Utopia, Limited.” Educational Theatre Journal. Vol.28. No. 1. March 1976.

[2] Charlotte Douglas. Suprematist embroidered ornament. Art Journal, Spring 1995 v54 n1 p42(4)

http://arsnova.artinfo.ru/malevich/douglas.htm