paper visual art journal –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.garycoyle.ie

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Curated by Rowan Sexton.

Set in a small area of a contemporary design shop, Rupture is a show of recent work by Jennifer Hickey and Magnhild Opdøl. The works are softly lit from a centrally hanging light fixture. The caramel hue of the tightly-woven straw flooring and the dove grey walls harmonises the tawny creams and greys in the five works on show.

Pierced (2010) comprises a long swathe of layered white tulle suspended from the ceiling; small discs of porcelain have been sewn into a large circular form at its centre which is lit from behind creating a halo of light. There is an unexpected, enigmatic aspect to this dawning as the bottom edge of the circular form is broken and its sum parts cascade towards the floor.

Jennifer Hickey: Pierced, white tulle, porcelain, 2010. Photo credit: Trish McAdam.

Diagonal to Pierced, Hickey’s Untitled 2 (2011) has been installed in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. This piece reminded me of a mermaid’s fantastical bridal veil – the ‘veil’ is suspended from the ceiling where, at the apex, a cluster of porcelain and mother of pearl lustre pieces shimmer. The tulle trails along the straw floor as the studded white discs become larger and more dispersed in a flowing movement towards the end of the laced netting.

Opdøl’s work focuses on the animal kingdom and brings into sharp focus the beauty of death. In Narcissus (2011) a taxidermy life-size deer head is positioned diagonally on a square mirror in the small bay window. One glossy eye and a moist-looking nose point towards the centre of the room; upon closer inspection, the other eye is closed and reflected in the mirror beneath creating an interesting spatial play: the reflection representing both the eternally sleeping deer and the winking one full of life. Due to Natural Causes (2011) is an exquisite pencil drawing of a dead thrush. The bird hangs upside down, somehow suspended in the pristine white of the background and the shading creates a realistic representation of the thrush’s speckled breast and coloring of its feathers.

Magnhild Opdøl: Narcissus (2011), taxidermied deer head, mirror; Image courtesy the artist. Photo credit: Trish McAdam.

The tactile raw materials of both artists in this show are brought together in a kind of orbit by the lighting design which, although an item for sale in the shop, functions as a central axis around which the finished pieces are displayed. In “The Art of Light and Space”, American artist James Turrell uses light to carve space and time in one particular collaborative effort [1] and the use of light by both artist and curator in this exhibition also serves to sculpt space and time. The interplay between light and surfaces, both reflective and matt, and light and the artworks suggests an intimacy between the notions of rupture and fusion. The artists’ shared rigour, and sensibility for their raw materials is very much in evidence whether it is in the deft working of delicate porcelain and pearl or the sculpting of skin and fibers, particularly so in Narcissus.

These five works are complementary to the design aesthetic of the shop as many of the items for sale are chosen for their high quality, handcrafted features. One of the most salient parts of the curatorial strategy relates to the decision to exhibit in such an alternative space, one in which the works enter the realm of mass culture and shake hands with its ally conspicuous consumption.

Jennifer Hickey: Untitled 1 (2011); Image courtesy the artist. Photo: Trish McAdam.

The relationship between object, subject and space takes on new meaning in this retail setting and Brian O’Doherty’s seminal essay Inside the White Cube is particularly noteworthy in this regard. Kevin Hetherington, in his review article The Empty gallery?, offers a comprehensive explanation of one of the essay’s central arguments:

The white-cube gallery ideal, he (O’Doherty) suggests, establishes a space constituted outside of time in which we, as visiting subjects, can relate to art objects on display as pure forms outside of their everyday context.…Such a gallery type has this effect, O’Doherty believes, because the relationship between art (object) and viewer (subject) is one in which the eye of the viewer becomes detached from the embodied experience, leaving behind an empty form of spectatorship and spectatorial experience.[2]

The objective lies not in a quest to find alternative gallery spaces that would attempt to address any perceived shortcomings in the traditional gallery ideal but to explore the latent potentialities of “spatial elasticity”. In the case of Rupture one could argue that we are merely moving from one spectatorial experience to another; the store is brimming with contemporary design pieces all vying for customers’ attention and the artworks take their place alongside the art-like objects in this alternative ‘temple of art’. More interestingly this exhibition shows how context and not content becomes the catalysing force in the relationship between object and subject.

Caroline Usher lives in Dublin.

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[1] James Turrell, The Art of Light and Space, (Craig Adcock, 1990) p 151.
[2] Kevin Hetherington, Review Article The Empty gallery? Issues of subjects, objects and spaces: HYPERLINK www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies

Ciarán Walsh’s latest exhibition at Pallas Projects consisted of a tripartite arrangement offering viewers disparate modes of experience via a collection of static visual material, a looped video, and a booklet. Presented under the rubric this brief visual pattern, its components comprised a complex and circuitous interweaving of images and text that not only provoked viewers with their unconventional narratives, but also tested their cognitive abilities.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In the gallery’s back room viewers were able to drift through the Image as it Appears (2010-11) – what amounted to a didactic presentation bereft of any labels or sheets of explanatory information – and parse the links and potential meanings posed by an assortment of old photographs, painted text, a geometrical structure, and some partially obscured watercolours. While the objects’ arrangement according to a colour coded system conferred museological underpinnings, other aspects contradicted such precepts. Visual and physical access to the artworks, for example, varied dramatically and their organisation intimated no timeline or other logical type of progression. Whereas some objects had been placed beneath glazing, others rested on top of it, and translucent white paper veiled two of the images. Pictures of an aboriginal bear costume, an ancient terracotta mask, and a diaphanous hooded figure represented diverse cultures and referenced a spectrum of practices that included primitive ritual, theatre, and investigations of paranormal phenomena. Similarly, the sole 3-dimensional component contributed to this evocation of transformative possibility and mystery. The portion of the form that should have projected laterally out into space from the edge of the table appeared to have been affected by a structural quirk. Instead, it gravitated downwards directly toward the floor.

Perusal of It’s Just a Shadow Away (2011), the work in the front room, tendered an equally enigmatic experience. This looped video projection depicts two actors performing scenes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a Russian film adaptation of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel of the same name. Set in the bleak surrounds of a production studio, the actors speak a language neither of them understands in an attempt to convey the emotional and psychological content of a story that features conversations between a man and a hallucination of his dead wife. Even for those familiar with this slow moving tale about the strange events on a space station, the work disorients. Walsh alternates performance excerpts with English translations of the Russian dialogue. While the format recalls the structure of a silent movie, viewers first stepping into its continuous pattern of play found it difficult to tell if the translations preceded or succeeded the actors’ scenes. Though ongoing observation eventually established the correct sequence and allowed me to modify my first impressions, I initially drew what I could from the sounds of the performers’ voices and their body language. Then, as the subjects’ predicament became more legible, it also assumed greater intensity. Moreover, key words and phrases stood out, particularly the brief repetition of a short clip in which Kris’ ex-wife Hari says “listen.”  In one sense the word represented an obvious contradiction as it implied listening to a language that I could not understand. But in another it functioned as an imperative that, reworded, could be understood as ‘pay attention’, a term that implied the use of more than one’s ears. Ultimately, recurrent viewings of this charged and awkward encounter failed to dispel the video’s haunting aura. I became preoccupied with all the ambiguities of the narrative. For a time I was stranded between states imaginary and real.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In essence, the publication no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future brackets the presentation. Released in the form of a pdf file in advance of the opening and a print version, it formed an introduction, became a component of the installation, and functions as a souvenir/reference that can be read and reread long after the exhibition’s closing. The content, which clearly mirrors themes evident in the gallery works, consists of edited correspondence between the artist, curator Pádraic E. Moore and Friedrich von Bose, a scientific assistant with the Department of European Ethnology. Though it is concise, the discussion touches upon a broad range of concerns. They range from the complicated position of museum objects and established conventions associated with their presentation to notions of time travel, abstract sound poetry, non-rational responses to artwork, unobservable phenomena, and the role of the audience. Of course, the gist of the discussion revolves about the ways we experience and translate works of art and other cultural artefacts. Not only do the correspondents convey a general sense of dissatisfaction with traditional modes of presentation, they also consider ways through which it may be possible to see back to the past or circumvent such conventions. In this respect Walsh’s stimulating gallery contributions offered viewers practical experience. He has reordered – or distorted – familiar structures as a means of destabilising our intellectual footing that we might discover previously unseen information and develop new elucidations from it.

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

*This review was first published in Paper Visual Art Dublin Edition 1 last November, 2011.

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.