2

Contemporary
visual culture in
Ireland
____________________________
Editor
Peter FitzGerald

International editorial
assistant
Elizabeth Aders

____________________________
Board
Peter Monaghan (Chair), Tara
Byrne, Mark Garry, Graham
Gosling, Darragh Hogan, Isabel
Nolan, John Nolan, Orla Ryan

____________________________
Contributing editors
Alannah Hopkin (Cork), Luke
Gibbons (Dublin), Brian
Kennedy (Belfast), Shirley
MacWilliam (England)

____________________________
Editorial advisory panel
(this issue) Suzanna Chan,
Peter FitzGerald, Georgina
Jackson, Isabel Nolan,
Alan Phelan, Orla Ryan,
Declan Sheehan.
The rules and procedures of
the panel can be accessed
at recirca.com/about

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c . ISSN 0263-9475
 CIRCA 115 SPRING 2006

3
Editorial 20 | Update 22 | Letters 23 | Features 26 | Reviews 54 | Project 103 |

(front cover)
J. Tobias Anderson
879 & 879
colour, 2' 49"
see Peripheral visions,
page 56
national irish
visual arts library

Public Research Library

of 20th Century and
Contemporary Irish Art
& Design

National College of Art & Design

100 Thomas Street
Dublin 8
T: 01 636 4347
romanod@ncad.ie
www.ncad.ie/nival
20

c
Editorial
c Peter FitzGerald
.

A similar mental versatility seems to be one reason that

so many artists find themselves drawn towards music
and sound. It’s easy to imagine one trajectory in the
music/ sound direction: art college leading to video-making
leading to sound-track dilemma leading to an increasing
fascination with sound per se. What is striking, and
this is brought out in Mark Garry’s article in this issue,
is the strength and dynamism of ‘art music’ output here.
The article looks specifically at Dublin, but in the future
we will be taking other perspectives and looking at
other cities.

While touching on music and sound art, an opportunity

presented itself that was too good to miss. We ran a
‘vox pop’ to find out if, and in what ways, artists and
You can’t beat a bit of careful planning. We had
curators felt influenced by such aural stimulation. We 21
planned in this issue to carry a number of articles on
got a great response, and it makes fascinating reading
Relational Aesthetics. These were to address Claire
here. Heartfelt thanks to all who took part – and to
Bishop’s contribution in the last issue and Grant
Mark Garry in particular. One aspect left me a little
Watson’s response. Plans schmans. However, we do
baffled: there is a very noticeable male bias in the number
carry a response, in letter form, by artist and lecturer
of respondents, one that was far less pronounced
Brian Curtin to Bishop’s article. We’re leaving open
when the invitations went out to participate. Is this a
the possibility of revisiting the whole area in coming
male-dominated domain; are female artists less likely
issues, without, of course, planning anything.
to draw on music for inspiration; or is it just my quirky
Having skirted round Relational Aesthetics, this issue database of e-mail addresses? I’d love to know.
forges ahead in other directions. We take another of
What else? Lots – enjoy!
our periodic looks at the art scene in Scotland. It is
very easy to assume/ presume that things there must
be similar to the situation in Ireland – on the periphery
(where everone alledgedly is, these days), dynamic,
Celtic, similar population, big neighbour next door,
etc. Alan Phelan’s pulse-taking suggests important
differences, however. Could it be fair to say that
Scotland simultaneously boasts a more mature (or more
commercially attuned?) visual-arts environment and
greater self-doubt, or at least greater self-questioning?

I can’t remember where I once read that lawyers are

favourably disposed to having artists on juries, given
their practical mind-set. At the time it struck me as
odd: artists equated for me then with head-in-the-clouds
idealists who could never rewire a plug. The opposite is
closer to the truth. Through a mix of imagination and
necessity, artists have a tendency to try their hands at
anything, both in order to get by and in order to make art.
I don’t know where Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland)
stands in relation to wiring plugs, but he is a true
polymath: a medic turned artist turned editor turned
theorist turned novelist turned… Without any of these
twists excluding the other activities, he has been and
continues to be a major figure on the international art
scene. Roscommon’s own, Gemma Tipton inteviews
him here on the eve of a major showing of his work in
the expanded, reopened Dublin Municipal Gallery the
Hugh Lane.
c Update
.
22 Aosdána – bumper crop
of visual artists
A new round of accessions
to Aosdána was announced
on 8 February. Aosdána is
the body, supported by the
Republic of Ireland's Arts
Council, to which new
members are co-opted by
those already elected. The
members are considered,
by some at least, the most
worthy practioners in their
field – largely composers,
visual artists and writers.
The visual-arts-related
newbies are: Veronica
Bolay (visual artist);
Sean Fingleton (visual
artist); Jaki Irvine (visual
artist); Amelia Stein
(photographer); Donald
Teskey (visual artist).
For the first time, an
architect was also elected:
Shelley McNamara. A total
of twelve new members
were co-opted.
Artists' relief retained but
capped
The Republic’s tax
exemption for income from
artistic activity is to be
capped at 250,000. Above
that amount, half of any
artistic income is taxable.
There is relief that the
scheme was not scrapped
altogether, but concern
that even this generous
cap does not take into
account the cyclical nature
of artists' incomes, where
an artist may have no
income for many years.
The retention-with-cap
was part of the government
budget for 2006.
Tony O'Malley Travel
Award
On 25 November, Chloé
Morrison was announced
as the winner of the Tony
O'Malley Travel Award for
Irish Painters at a reception
in Kilkenny Castle. The
twenty-six-year-old artist,
originally from Coleraine,
lives and works in Belfast.
Having been graduated
from the Sandberg
Instituut, Amsterdam in
2004, she has exhibited in
group exhibitions in the
Netherlands but, despite
her roots, is new to the
exhibition scene here.
Circa news
After many years of
excellent service to the
magazine, three Board
members have rotated off
the magazine’s Board:
James Kerr, Ken Langan
and John Lindsay. Our
heartfelt thanks to them.
Coming soon to a screen
near you: the Circa online
store. We will be selling
art catalogues produced
in Ireland and, hopefully
with time, much more. For
more information, please
contact us.
Circa has also developed
tailored e-mailshots. If you
are advertising a job in the
visual arts, a commission,
or an exhibition/ event,
this new service could be
just for you. Again, please
contact us for more details.
Correction
On page 67 of the last
issue of Circa, winter 2005,
the photo credit should
have read ‘Sarah Pierce:
Monk's garden, installation
shot, Scuola di San
Pasquale, Ireland at Venice
2005’. Apologies.
c Letters
.
Dear Editor,
We are writing in regard
to the article Site-ations
international 2005-6 sense
in place Ireland by Sarah
Browne in your winter 2005
edition. When referring to
Majek Kurak's The crying
game, Ms. Browne stated
that Mr Kurak had brought
his homeless-man sculpture
around Sligo and videoed it.
Unfortunately Mr Kurak
was unable to obtain a visa
and so could not come to
Ireland for the event. Myself
and another artist assistant
were enlisted to bring the
scuplture around, video it
and edit together a video
for the exhibition, in keeping
with Kurak's original
concept. While of course
Kurak has full credit for the
concept of the sculpture
and its placement aound
Sligo, the means by which
it was documented and
how that documentation
was edited was left in
our hands. In the gallery
the video is labelled
‘Documentation of Majek
Kurak's ‘Crying game’ by
Rachel Kiernan and Emily
Boylan’.
We were a little confused
as to whether Ms. Browne
has missed this fact or
chosen to ignore it, as we
are not mentioned in her
article.
We are not entirely certain
whether, in the terms we
describe above, we are
entitled to credit for the
piece, but wished to query
the matter with you.
Yours Sincerely,
Rachel Kiernan and Emily
Boylan
23
____________________________
Dear Rachel and Emily,
Yes, of course I read the
label on the work.
However, I don’t think that
at the time I was fully
aware of all the conditions
surrounding it, ie. that you
both were fully responsible
not only for its editing/
production but also its
direction in the absence
of the artist. In any case
I assumed that a video still
would be printed and you
would both be duly credited,
as is standard for the
documentation of a
performative work. Please
note I have no personal
control or responsibility for
what images are printed
and how they are credited.
Given the nature of your
involvement perhaps it
would have been appropriate
for you to have been
credited in the main body
of the text, though to be
honest it’s unclear to me
what your rights are in this
position. Perhaps you
should take this up with
the artist/ Site-ations?
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Browne
 4/100 Phahonyothin 33
Chatujak
Bangkok 10900
December 2005
Dear Editor,
I am writing in critical
response to Claire Bishop’s
evaluation of Rirkrit
Tiravanija’s practice for
her article on relational
aesthetics in Circa 114.
Grant Watson’s response
to her article, in the same
issue, compounded this
representation by taking
Bishop’s analysis of
24
Tiravanija at face value.
The focus of Bishop’s text
is a critique of Nicholas
Bourriaud’s book on
relational aesthetics in
terms of his failure to
address questions of the
quality of relationships
generated by relevant art
practices. Furthermore,
Bishop suggests that
notions of subjectivity,
democracy and community
remain under-theorized for
discourses on relational,
and related, art. Citing
Tiravanija’s cooking pieces
– but his work is otherwise
generalized – as exemplary
of these “problems” she
claims this artist creates a
“microtopian” situation,
with none of the “inherent
friction” of subjectivity and
community.
To arrive at this claim,
the following misrepresen-
tations were produced1:
Bishop writes, “Every piece
of writing on Tiravanija’s
work refers back to the
author’s own experience of
the piece.” This statement
ignores the plethora of
perspectives available from
a survey of, for example,
the web-based writing on
Tiravanija’s project The land
in Northern Thailand, his
co-authored pieces with
Hans Ulrich Obrist and
Liam Gillick, Laura
Hoptman’s catalogue essay
for Tiravanija’s Supermarket
piece in Zurich in 1998
and Mary Jane Jacob’s
contribution to Buddha
mind in contemporary art.
In fact, Hoptman’s essay
recalls an incident where
Tiravanija was invited to
speak on a panel. After
he had initially sat in
silence and then walked
through the audience with
a microphone, people
became furious and started
to storm out shouting
obscenities. How does this
fit with Bishop’s notions
of friction or what she
otherwise calls antagonism?
Bishop’s use of an article
by Jerry Saltz on Tiravanija
is worryingly partial.
Contrary to her claim that
Saltz suggested Tiravanija’s
303 Gallery show was
“good,” because it allowed
art-world networking, Saltz
raised a number of critical
points. He referred to the
scene in the art gallery
during Tiravanija’s show
as “un-American” because
of the sense of community
it encouraged, and he
questioned his experience
among art-world types by
asking what would happen
if homeless people turned
up. His text ultimately
made the point that
Tiravanija’s work opens up
possibilities for breaking
down boundaries between
the artworld and “every-
thing else.” This directly
contradicts Bishop’s
rendition of Saltz’s view.
Bishop builds her point of
view on the insight that
terminology needs to be
more rigorously examined,
but then employs an acul-
tural and/ or universalising
account of subjectivity and
a comparably Euro-centric,
uncritical, notion of
‘utopia’. In the first case,
Tiravanija has emerged
from a multi-cultural back- However, this is of less
ground and acknowledges interest to me than to
that his understanding of critically draw attention
kinship is indebted to Thai to the type of scholarship
models of communal living. that subsumes the
He is quoted as saying, complexities and subtleties
“the other is someone who of an artist’s work to a
is always in your world.” narrow theoretical agenda.
This may not categorically
undermine the relevance Yours etc,
of Lacan, but it does Brian Curtin
problematise Bishop’s 1 The following points were largely
use of Tiravanija for the derived from my reading of
argument proposed. Lawrence Chua’s unpublished
paper, All tomorrow’s parties:
Secondly, Bishop ultimately Rirkrit Tiravanija’s parallel
makes the claim that structures and peripheral orbits’
(History of Architecture and
relationships produced Urbanism, Cornell University,
by Tiravanija’s practice
May 2005).
are based on ‘immanent
togetherness’ and she
characterises this as
“microtopian.” Tiravanija
has written that his under-
standing of utopia is about
chaos, against what he
proposes as a Western
understanding of utopia as
about structure. His Utopia
station at the 2003 Venice
Biennale suggested, to
quote Lawrence Chua,
“[that] the idea of utopia
be radicalized in a moment
where utopia is being a
rehearsed cliché used to
sell tropical vacations.”
Chua also pointed out that
a version of Utopia station
took place in Frankfurt
when American troops
were marching on
Baghdad and this usefully
contextualised Tiravanija’s
concern with the relevance
of utopia to contemporary
conditions. As with other
points, it is not at all clear
why Bishop chose to resist
a substantial engagement
with Tiravanija’s oeuvre.
The points I raise here
necessarily call into
question Bishop’s thesis
that Tiravanija is not
concerned with the quality
of relationships generated
by his works, to be set
against her proposal that
merely the fact of
interaction is at issue.
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c Features
.
26
Some sonic activity Mark Garry 28 | Vox pop: Does music influence
your practice? 32 | Self-confident but self-questioning: A quick look at
the Scottish art scene Alan Phelan 42 | Without you there isn’t anything:
Patrick Ireland in an interview with Gemma Tipton 48 |

Peter Monaghan
Transformation 3
2005
acrylic on watercolour paper
courtesy the artist

c .
c Mark Garry
.

28

so m e

sonic
activ
ity
Over the past number of years Dublin has been privy
to an astonishing rise in electronic, experimental and
improvised sonic cultural activity. This activity has
been various in both scale and form and is possibly the
most consistently vibrant of cultural activities in Dublin.
What I feel is most notable about this activity is the
easy relationship it has had with contemporary art in the
city, with a genuine crossover in interest and intention
that is not as apparent in other cultural models.
The boundaries between sound artists and the practice
of certain contemporary musicians have blurred
significantly over the past fifteen years. It is increasingly
difficult to differentiate between what one hears in
certain types of musical practices and the sonic activity
that occurs in contemporary art contexts. Both in terms
of the processes employed and the outcomes achieved.
It is virtually impossible to make a distinction between
sound art and music in the current creative environment,
where “music” has been as deconstructed as it can
possibly be, and “sound art” is often more carefully
crafted than many musical compositions. I think one of
the simplest and most easily definable distinctions is
the context in which the work is presented. A non-
performance-space presentation of a sonic work is
likely to be labeled “sound art” while a presentation of
the same work activated by physical performers will
certainly be called musical.1
Dublin has developed a mutually beneficial reciprocal
relationship between its electronic and experimental
music and contemporary art scenes, with many Dublin
based practitioners crossing platforms comfortably.
Many people play in bands practice as composers and
are active as contemporary artists, artists such as
Barbara Ellison, Nina Hynes, Daniel Figgis, Karl Burke,
Robin Watkins and Nina Canell, Slavek Kwi, Paul
Murnaghan, Diarmuid MacDiarmada, Steven Rennicks,
Jürgen Simpson, Paul Smith, Northstation, Schroder
Sound and Peter Maybury.
Contemporary technological developments have
significantly expanded the scope for the manipulation
of sound by musicians and artist working with sound.
Developments in sampler and sequencing technology
have opened new possibilities for contemporary
musicians, in terms of the scope, scale and type of sonic
output that can be achieved by marrying traditional
instrumentation and contemporary technology. Computer
programs allow one to generate and manipulate sound
without the use of traditional instrumentation or any
knowledge of the practice of scoring notes and rhythms.
The affordability and possibilities offered by this
technology have allowed artists to record produce and
distribute their material independently.
These developments have led to an enormous rise in
the production of electronic based music around the
world. This type of activity has been particularly
marked in Ireland, with a number of its exponents
receiving international critical acclaim – acts such as
Ambulance, Americhord, Anodyne, Jimmy Behan,
Donnacha Costello, Chequerboard, David Cleary/
The Fear/ Deasy, Mooneye, Decal, David Donohoe,
Formica, Herv, Karl Him, Somadrone, Troublepenetrator
and Hardsleeper. Significantly, a number of these also
practice in contemporary-art contexts.
This importance of technology in contemporary music
was recognized by Trinity College Dublin in its decision
to run a postgraduate diploma and M.Phil in Music
and Media Technologies. A number of the individuals
mentioned in this article, working in a range of formats, 29
have studied on these courses and much of the sonic
activity that happens around the city has been developed
and supported by pupils and past-pupils of this
department. That said, the vast majority of this activity
has been brought about by a number of enthusiastic
individuals working independently. Beginning in the late
’90s, the Funnel Bar was the venue where much of
current activity in electronic music began, with club
nights such as Phunk City [Ultramack], The Fear,
Bassbin, and Model One. This activity has continued in
a number of formats: gigs such as Vibrator, a monthly
night organized by New Zealander Dan Watson first held
at the Thomas House, now residing at the Globe; MOR
music, organized by Michael McDermott, which takes
the form of one-off gigs in various venues and a two-day
festival that was held at Charleville Castle in County
Offaly during the summers of 2003 and 2004; Lazybird,
a long-running Sunday-night event that happens upstairs
at the International Bar and which has championed
experimental music in various formats consistently for
a number of years. Also in this vein is the Skinny Wolves
Club, a new regular club night, which takes place in
the Hub on Eustace Street in Temple Bar. DEAF (Dublin
Electronic Arts Festival), now entering its fifth year, was
established to provide a platform for Irish artists working
in the electronic media to showcase their work in the
company of their international peers. This festival took
place at the Guinness Storehouse as part of the 5th
Gallery’s artistic program and now takes place in various
venues throughout the city.
 The now sadly defunct 5th Gallery programme, curated
by Paul Murnaghan, held a number of other musical
events, most notably the Wonky Nights, organized by
the curator and Leagues O’Toole, and a performance
by The Warlords of Pez as part of the visual-arts
program at the Dublin Fringe Festival. The Dublin Fringe
Festival has also been an avid supporter of electronic,
experimental and improvised music in its Speigeltent
programming. It has released work by Sanso xtra, Secret
Society, Karl Him and Chequerboard, and presented a
sound installation in a shipping container by New York-
based artist Jody Elff as part of its visual-arts program
Sited in 2003.
A great number of Dublin’s galleries have hosted
some form of sonic activity. The Douglas Hyde Gallery
30 has held a number of gigs as part of its programme,
such as Sufjan Stevens and Cat Power. Gallery 4 has
live performances at each of its openings and has held
performances by Nina Hynes and Karl Him. Dublin
City Gallery The Hugh Lane presented two nights of
music and performance as part of its offsite show in
2005. The Kerlin Gallery has hosted serverproject, a
site-specific networked electronic performance by four
people, Donnacha Costello, David Donohoe, Dennis
McNulty and Peter Maybury, each working with a laptop
computer and various software applications connected
over a network to a server computer. Since April 2003,
David Lacey and McNulty have also been organizing
a series of concerts at the Printing House in Trinity
College Dublin, called i-and-e, to promote improvised
and electronic music in Ireland. McNulty and Lacey also
participated in Volume, a week-long series of sonic
events that Temple Bar Gallery and Studios have held
over the last two years. Other participants have included
Max Eastley, Fergus Kelly, Paul Vogel, Karl Burke, Mark
Orange, Michael McLoughlin, Giordaí Ó Laoghaire, Peter
Maybury, Danny McCarthy, Gavin Prior, Mick O’Shea,
Bryan O’Connell and soun.Din.
The Project Arts Centre has two performance spaces
in addition to its gallery space and has consistently
supported electronic and experimental music, including
Poisonhats, curated by Daniel Figgis, Nothing, curated
by Karl Burke and Simon Doyle, and Here comes the
night, programmed by Donal Dineen. Also at Project,
the Whispering Gallery, a collective established in
the summer of 1999 by a group of young Dublin-based
artists, has held a number of important events.
Their aim is to present concerts catering for the
ever-growing interest in experimental sound art and
improvised music in Ireland. At Project they have
presented Whispering Gallery artists in collaboration
with musicians such as Derek Bailey (UK), Charles Gayle
(US), Barry Guy (UK/ IRL) and Keiji Haino (JAP), and
concerts by long-standing improvising trio AMM, and
laptop experimentalist Kaffe Matthews and Chie Muka.
The visual-arts programme at Project has also supported
sonic activity, most recently the input of Nina Canell
and Robin Watkins as part of Here comes everybody;
its programme has also included sonic installations by
Guy Baramotz and the work of Slavek Kwi in the 2003
group exhibition Permaculture.
In addition to being a world-renowned sound artist, Kwi
has been instrumental in organising and participating
in a number of important sonic projects that have
taken place in Dublin. He and Sean McCrum organised
Soun.Din, a collaborative project that enacts the
possibility of an indefinite number of artists sharing
a specific space and time. The other members include
Fergus Byrne, Seoidín O’Sullivan, Karl Burke, Paul
Murnaghan, Hugh O’Neill and Diarmuid MacDiarmada.
Soun.Din has performed at the National Concert Hall,
in prisons and psychiatric units, and has built installa-
tions and performed in a number of contemporary-art
contexts in Dublin. Kwi also organised a project at
Arthouse in 2002 entitled Din, a show of 753 different
artistic personas who use CDs as an artistic medium.
It was the most wide-ranging exposition of contemporary
electronic music ever mounted in Ireland. During this
period Arthouse also hosted MP3 (abode), a project
organized by another Soun.din member, Paul Murnaghan,
where he re-appropriated a traditional piano to randomly
play hundreds of MP3 files that had been sent to him
over the web.
I also want to note some more covert methods of
communicating and circulating sonic activity. Since 1994
Garrett Phelan and Mark McLoughlin have undertaken a
number of radio-based projects such as A.A.R.T.-RADIO
at IMMA and Phelan’s Periphery for G.F. Fitzgerald at
the Douglas Hyde Gallery. Phelan has continued this
practice in a solo capacity with his Black Brain radio
project being hosted this year by Temple Bar Gallery
and IMMA. Praxis, the New York-based art collaborative,
also hosted a radio station in Dublin in as part of
Transit visual art at Dublin Fringe Festival 2004. Another
quite interesting method of distributing sound is an
aspect of the practice of Steven Rennicks, aka Secret
Society, who records compositions that he transfers
onto audiotapes and distributes anonymously in charity
shops throughout the city.
Less clandestine methods of distribution have also
been developed, and a number of independent record
labels specific to this genre have been set up in Dublin,
such as Fortress, Frontend Synthetics, Kin Recordings,
Psychonavigation, Spitroast, D1, Ultramack, U: Mack,
Lazybird, Minimise [Ggleep], Bassbin, C Four, Risc
[compactrisc], Go Home Records, Slow Loris, Deserted
Village, SeedyR and Vibrator.
 some cross platform John Butcher Paul Vogel some magazines
artists Roy Carroll Mark Orange Homage
Barbara Ellisson Mercedes Carroll Michael McLoughlin Foggy notions
Nina Hynes Rebecca Collins Giordaí ó Laoghaire
As already suggested, Dublin contemporary-art venues Daniel Figgis Alfredo Costa Peter Maybury some exhibitions
Karl Burke Monteiro Danny McCarthy Pockets
have embraced and supported a wide variety of sonic Robin Watkins and Angharad Davies Gavin Prior Offsite
activities, and a number of its personnel engage in sonic Nina Canell Rhodri Davies Mick O’Shea Volume
Slavek Kwi Phil Durrant Bryan O’Connell Volume 2
activity in contemporary-art and non-contemporary-art Paul Murnaghan John Edwards Soun.Din Living in a Cloud
contexts without making any deterministic distinction Diarmuid Kate Ellis David Lacey Marks of Omission
MacDiarmada Stan Erraught Dennis McNulty 26th São Paulo Bienal
between these contexts. Peter Maybury has performed Peter Maybury Ferran Fages Ambulance The Dance Machine
and released music in a number of projects, such as Steven Rennicks Mathias Forge Americhord Here comes everybody
Jürgen Simpson Greg Kelley Anodyne Permaculture
Hard Sleeper, Serverproject, Gregor57 and Thread Paul Smyth Fergus Kelly Jimmy Behan Din
Northstation Annette Krebs Donnacha Costello Requiem for a fly
Pulls, performing in contemporary-art and musical Schroeder Sound David Lacey Frank Bretschneider MP3
contexts.2 Thread Pulls were invited to take part in the Rafael Lain Richard Chartier Mend
some venues/ Goh lee Kwang Carsten Nicolai Tripswitch
All tomorrow’s parties music festival, curated by actor, nights/ clubs /events Sean Meehan Mark Clarke
musician and filmmaker Vincent Gallo. This is also the /festivals Tatsuya Nakatani David Donohoe
The Funnel Jérôme Noetinger Chequerboard
case for Nina Hynes, who has received national and The Globe Keith O'Brien David Cleary/The
international recognition as a musician and composer The International Bryan O'Connell Fear/Deasy Mooneye
Phunk City Sean Óg Decal
and makes installations and performances in galleries Ultramack Mick O'Shea Jody Elff
under her own name, as Plastic Staros and as part of The Fear Pita Max Eastley
A=apple. Robin Watkins and Nina Canell, despite being
Bassbin Gavin Prior Somadrone 31
Model One Bhob Rainey Troublepenetrator
quite young, have released a number of recordings and Vibrator Paul Roe Gregor57
Skinny Wolves club Keith Rowe Barbara Ellisson
played in many of the venues and nights mentioned in Lazybird Jürgen Simpson Nina Hynes
this article; Canell has made installations at Temple MOR Paul Smyth Daniel Figgis
DEAF Birgit Ulher Slavek Kwi
Bar Gallery and Studios, Project, and IMMA, and she is Speigeltent/ The Nikos Veliotis Diarmuid
currently showing at mother’s tankstation.3 Dublin Fringe Festival Paul Vogel MacDiarmada
Wonky Mark Wastell Steven Rennicks
i-and-e Veryan Weston Northstation
The most transparent crossover is the practice of Nothing Ingar Zach Fergus Byrne
Poisonhats The New Heat/ Seoidín O’Sullivan
Dennis McNulty who combines site-specific performances Here comes the night Obscured By Light Hugh O’Neill
and installations with improvisation, composition and Boxes Sean McCrum
some galleries Agitaged Radio Pilot Derek Bailey
programming. From 1993 to 2003 he was one half of Irish Arthouse Trails Charles Gayle
electronic-music pioneers Decal, releasing three albums Project Arts Centre Minus The Bear Barry Guy
Kerlin Gallery We Are Knives Keiji Haino
and almost thirty other releases on labels such as Planet- The Douglas Hyde Tera Tora AMM
Mu, Warp, Rotters Golf Club and D1.4 Valerie Connor Gallery Blood Red Shoes Kaffe Matthews
RHA Cap Pas Cap Chie Muka
selected McNulty as one of the Irish representatives at IMMA Park Attack Nina Katchadourian
the 26th São Paulo Bienal of Contemporary Art. I feel 4 E+S=B Plastic Staros
5th Guinness Somadrome A=apple
Connor’s decision to include McNulty in this show was Storehouse (Retards) Guy Baramotz
the most formal acknowledgment of the intersection of mother’s tankstation Dry County Garrett Phelan and
Rollers/Sparkers Mark McLoughlin
contemporary art and sonic activity in Dublin today. some promoters Wormholes Garrett Phelan
Leagues O’Toole Deputy Fuzz/Life After Artificial Memory
Whispering gallery Modelling Trace (AMT)
1 Jody Elff, ‘A survey of four contemporary
i-and-e Betamax Format Spectral Territories Pt
sound artists’, Vibrofiles, Paris, 2005 Skinny Wolves Truom 2 Brian Conley
2 Peter Maybury is also the designer of John Butcher Slavek Kwi and Conor
this magazine. some artists (Irish and Formika McGarrigle
3 See the review of Canell’s show on pages international, that Jimmy Behan some labels
84-85 of this issue. have played in dublin) NeoSuperVital Fortress
Minit Ann Scott Frontend Synthetics
4 Alan O’Boyle, McNulty’s one-time
Karl Him Papercop Kin Recordings
collaborator, continues to release music Ambulance Dennis McNulty Psychonavigation
under the Decal moniker to widespread Boxes Daemien Frost Spitroast
acclaim. Thread Pulls Estel D1
Schroedersound Holy Ghost Fathers Ultramack
Somadrone Herv U:Mack
Mark Garry is an artist, curator, Lilienthal The Last Sound Lazybird
writer and occasional musician based large mound The Alphabet Set Minimise
in Dublin. Hair France Chuzzle Ggleep
Tarentel Paul Murnaghan Bassbin
The mighty avon jnr. The Warlords of Pez C Four
Hard Sleeper Sufjan Stevens Risc [compactrisc]
Paper Cop Cat Power Ninepoint
Dan Barry Laura Viers Go Home Records
Herve Boghossian serverproject Slow Loris
Alessandro Bossetti Sanso Xtro Deserted Village
Karl Burke Secret Society SeedyR
Vibrator
c
32
.

v0x
Does music influence your practice? If so, in what way does it influence your

p0p
practice? Does this music come from a particular genre or time period, or is it a specific piece of music?
(In your answer, please differentiate if you wish between music and sound art, but feel free to reference
either or both.)

Peter Monaghan
Fandango, 2005
acrylic and ping pong balls
on card
courtesy the artist
 33

Music is a constant source of inspiration and relaxation. I listen to it all the time, from new, jazz, rock through to classical.
When I listen to a piece of music, as well as enjoying it for its own sake I’m also translating the rhythm, timing, shape, colour and
texture into a painting; I would love to convey emotion and feeling the way music can. I know I’m doomed to failure but I just keep
trying anyway!
Peter Monaghan
 While music (of several varieties) is
important to me personally, it’s use-
value as a kind of subcultural binding
agent has never concerned me much.
Call me old-fashioned, but my work
as a critic and occasional curator
has tended to be more informed by
literature, history and philosophy.
I just hope the contemporary art world
will continue to tolerate my attempt
to combine the roles of critic-curator
and non-DJ.
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
Working with video, I have always
added sound or music on as an after-
thought but recently Melissa wrote a
piece of music for a show I am making
34
work on for April. It is a piece for a
piano and banjo; we thought that this
would be an interesting mix and would
complement the work I am doing which
mixes the vernacular with Modernism’s
high ideals. This is the first time I have
started with music as the primary
source for my work; after all, Goethe,
when looking for a comparison with
music, claimed architecture was frozen
music.
Brendan Earley
I listen to music on and off while
I work, usually when the conceptual
part of my work is done and I am at
the rendering stage where I can more
or less chill. Yes, I feel music influences
what I do; it takes me into a mood and
keeps me there while I work. I can’t say
for sure how it actually influences the
particular piece, but it helps me to
get it out. When I look back on work,
however, I don’t remember the exact
music I was listening to but the mood
remains in the piece. I sometimes
listen to the same CD over and over to
keep me in a grove. My musical taste
can run the gambit from Johnny Cash,
Classical, Jazz, to Cuban big-band
music from the ‘40s and ‘50s. My CD
of choice this week is Carlos Molina
hits from 1932 – 1946 on the Harlequin
label.
Brian Cronin
Other than a time, years ago as a Loud music has always attracted me
student, when I made some attempts and certainly at times encouraged
at sound art, music hasn’t featured or influenced my decision to do stuff.
in my work at all. But recently this has Within various genres I enjoy the
changed and I find myself considering relationship of loud music to physical
ways in which the construction of dance/ action. When I was younger
temporal, sound-based work relates to I held a peer record for the number
the development of images. This began of stage dives during a gig. It was
a short while ago when pondering on during a Nuclear Assault (socially
how to depict transparency, which aware, hardcore thrash) gig (c. 1988)
coincided with my discovery of a link and I dove off the stage eleven times.
on the Museum of Modern Art’s website Some years later I used the action,
which plays John Cage’s 4’33”, with if not the music, in a simple video work
the problem of visual equivalent to called Leaps into the abyss (1996).
silence solved by accompanying it with Dan Shipsides
a clean white screen. Since recently
embarking on painting for the first
time, I’ve been wondering about how
one can develop a dialectical approach
to image-making, and an important
part of the thinking came from hearing
the changeover from BBC Radio 4
to the World Service on Sunday nights.
This is always marked by playing a
recording of church bells – from a
different church or cathedral each
week. Bell ringing is an inaccurate
method, never quite the same twice.
The structure of the short musical
phrase, repeated continually throughout
the refrain, is understood only through
mentally identifying an ‘average’,
finding the pattern which lies under
the cacophony. This brought to mind
the percussion music of Xenakis and
reminded me of The otherwise very
beautiful Blue Danube Waltz, a piece
made in 1976 by a then little-known
Michael Nyman, which consisted of
five pianists playing the first bar of
the waltz, going back to the beginning,
playing the first two bars, going back
to the beginning, playing the first three
bars etc, etc.
Despite Andy Warhol, the application
of these kinds of process to the
construction of images, through
repetition and not-quite-rightness, can
provoke a dialectical process in both
the making and reception of painting. Dan Shipsides
Leaps into the Abyss, 1996
Colin Darke
courtesy the artist
Everyone wants to be a DJ…
The parallels between the practice
of curating and musical practice
are enticing. Do the curator and
conductor/ DJ/ record producer share
the same function: to manipulate,
interpret and master the presentation
of a given cultural artefact (a song,
a score, an artist’s work…)? Nicolas
Bourriaud’s concept of artist as DJ,
remixing pre-existing cultural elements
into a new form, is eminently as
applicable to curatorial practice as
it is to artistic practice. Musicians
and audiences seek out the work of
a specific producer or conductor:
specific ‘name’ curators increasingly
have the same cachet in the realm of
visual arts. For myself, curating the
project Rhythm-A-Ning in 2005, in
Waltons New School of Music in
Dublin, dealt with some of this head
on: the three selected artists (Ciara
Finnegan, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard,
Fintan Friel) explored elements of
musical interpretation and influence,
cultural choice, and the cut & paste/
remix musical aesthetic. The site and
its function – a location where people
learnt music, which, with much
consideration, seemed increasingly
the most mystifying of procedures
– were an initial motivation for the
project. This was developed later
through a fascination with a track
by Theolonius Monk, Rhythm-A-Ning.
The title of the track itself seemed
to function as an acting out of the
mystifying procedures of musical
learning: the word itself being an act
of reinvention, by grammatically
making a noun a verb, and by, in effect,
designating a wholly new activity –
”we’re rhythm-a-ning…” And beyond
that, there was of course an apprecia-
tion of the track itself, which features
an interior conversation between
instruments as its major element,
foregrounding mimicry, repetition,
variation and communication between
different instruments and musicians.
It was an ideal reference point, not just
for this project, but perhaps for all acts
of curating. It’s about being in a band.
Maybe everyone wants to be in a band…
Declan Sheehan
Music and art: I’ve always thought
of both as ways of dealing with
structures, surfaces, processes and
flows, with ideas about how things
move and change, fit together and
break apart. But maybe that’s just
because of my training as an engineer.
Growing up in the suburbs, music was
very, very important to me: a lifeline to
a wider world. A few years ago, I made
the mistake of opening my ears to the
world, as John Cage suggested, and
now everything is music: I can’t switch
it off.
I’m not too worried about naming
what I do, although I frequently have to.
Naming and categorisation facilitate
ownership and administration. In the
end, what I do gets categorised as
a result of the context it is positioned
in, the listener and their attitude,
institutions, etc., and a lot of this stuff
is outside my control.
Is it music or art?
Is that the important question?
Dennis McNulty
Any influence is, I think, filtered through
an early intoduction to John Cage’s
compositions and ideas; particularily
the complexity of Roaratorio (1979)
with its arbitary rules and layers of
sound either spoken, sung, whispered
or played. A revelation then and the
memory of which still provides me with
the courage to relinquish restrictive
concerns.
Frances Hegarty
Sometimes, sometimes not… I made
Black Brain Radio listening to a Neil
Young, digitally remastered greatest-
hits album and Madonna’s latest which
was very upbeat and dancy. I broke into
sporadic dancing in my kitchen after
every recording of Black Brain because
it was weighty to make and I needed
to inject myself with energy. It was
great fun. I could never listen to music
concrete or experimental sounds to
influence me…
Garrett Phelan
Yes, music and art are baked in the
same oven for me.
Music is art to me and art is music,
siamese twins and lovers. I don’t see
a separation between my own music
and my own art. Other people’s music
sends me to a creative place sometimes
and also sparks a fire or enthusiasm
in me to create and release something
of myself. The music that influences
me or my creativity does not come
from any specific genre/ time period/
musical piece. It is constantly changing
and the atmospheric sounds of
everyday all around me are as much
of an influence as music that sends me
away in to the creative space. When I
hear something that sounds unique or
35
new, it tends to awaken my senses and
urge to create something for every new
mood, every new feeling or experience
that I or someone may be likely to
encounter. I have not come close to
achieving this yet, which is a positive
thing as it keeps me motivated.
PS Films, visuals, books, sounds and
people are as much, if not more, of an
influence than music on my art.
Nina Hynes
‘The first time I used a piece of music
in my practice was as part of a work
commissioned by Jacob Fabricius in
Denmark for retur, a project ongoing
since 2002, where I used the meter
from Catch a falling star as the basis
for a text piece. More recently I’ve
used snatches of lyrics in the Four
notebooks. I haven’t used music so far
in video work as I’ve wanted to avoid
its directive properties; however,
earlier last year I swapped a painting
for a piece of music yet to be written
and I’m excited about where that might
lead as a project.
Jeanette Doyle
 I wouldn’t say that music influences
my work; I feel that it is inseparable
from it. It’s taken me a while to make
this clear to the art world, but in
recent times it must have become very
obvious. Just to give a few examples:
our Huts exhibition was partly based
on a musical analogy, and in recent
months we’ve had performances in the
gallery by Laura Veirs, Sufjan Stevens,
and Cat Power. This is an area of
activity we’re going to pursue. Why?
Because I find that many musicians
get closer to the heart of things – to
real feeling – than most visual artists
are able to do. And it’s important to
me, as a curator, to draw attention to
what I consider to be the real purpose
36
of art – the expression and articulation
of what it’s like to be alive, sensitive,
and aware in this overwhelmingly
complex world.
John Hutchinson
Music plays a subtle role within my
practice, functioning as a layer in
which it may or may not be seen;
however, it is an active part within the
process of making. It has three forms,
the first being as a way of creating a
pace for the work. If I am developing
the work I like jazz; it reflects my train
of thought and complements that
process. At the point of making, it is
about flowing, so I prefer Hip Hop or
something like Devo. The second is to
generate a mood for the work. If the
work is of a darker, passionate content
I listen to Malcolm McLaren. The final
form music holds is part of the work
itself. This has mainly been in conjunc-
tion with video and could be seen as
Sound Art. I am currently expanding
this with installation by manipulating
sound/ music to further heighten the
experience for the viewer.
Lee Welch
Music does influence what I do
– perhaps most of all hip-hop. Upon
discovering rap music around 1987
I was blown away by how innovative
the medium was, especially in
comparison to what the radio played
(this being a time when Bruce Willis
had a successful recording career).
More than anything, I was impressed
by just how much one could fit into a
rap song. Just looking at the lengthy
lyric notes it was obvious that a band
like Public Enemy squeezed in four
times the amount of other artists.
The more I listened the more it became
evident that not only were the lyrics
expansive, witty, and intelligent but
also each track was richly layered with
lots of bits of other songs. Since then
I’ve been interested in what can be
accomplished by recycling old
material and perverting its intended
significance – from DJ Shadow’s
sublime masterpiece Entroducing…
to the endless number of anonymous
mash-ups available from mix-CDs
and as downloads. In a way I think this
method of working helped to tackle
those difficult questions of what to
paint and where to begin. When it’s
good (and it frequently isn’t, of course),
hip-hop offers ways to be inventive
with acquired material. It taught me
to steal.
Paul McDevitt
I use music as a mnemonic device,
an effective means of access to the
listeners’ (viewers’) personal archive.
To slightly modify a sentence from
the Talmud, “We hear things not as
they are but as we are.” In this context,
music, sound and sound art function
in similar ways. The form, place and
frequency of a sound can evoke the
same constituents of a memory.
In recent work, I find it necessary to
compose these pieces rather than
sample any particular genre or time
period. This process often persuades
the visual or tactile elements of a
work. Ah sure, ya can’t beat a good
sing-along.
Paul Murnaghan
Obviously, I love music. Music and art
are reciprocal and both feed off each
other, in a way a parenthesis, an
exchange, collaboration. Recently I
was interviewing Michael Craig-Martin
who told me he was more inspired by
John Cage’s lecture on silence than
anything else, and that he felt it is far
more influential to visual artists than
musicians. Personally music for me is
part of everything in our daily lives and
loops into the artists’ lives. I was last
listening to ‘80s trash cocktail music,
so not sure what that says about my
practice and I have currently been
exchanging music compilations with
Philippe Parreno and Doug Aitken as
I’m working on a group show with them
at IMMA and we hope to record and
commission a CD as an integral part
of this – we are trying to experience
the physicality of sound. I was also
interested in gallerists Alan Vega and
Martin Rev who formed the nasty punk
band called Suicide. There has always
been a affinity between music and
art; prime examples are with Velvet
Underground/ Warhol, Rammelzee 12
inch vs. K-Rob/ Basquiat. Some of my
friends are musicians – Katell Keineg
and Cherrystones, the latter of
whom has turned record collecting
into an art form; he’s got a museum
construction of vinyl. At the moment
I’m going through a NICO and Scott
Walker phase…
Rachael Thomas
Listening to music suggested a
rationale to build the kind of painting
I make which is not narrative. As music
exists as sequences of sounds which
do not necessarily illustrate a specific
idea or verbal narrative, so the
application of areas of colour can exist
in its own right. I have been touched
by many kinds of music, but specially
by the Baroque, when the music seems
to circle and repeat in such a self-
contained way, and be at the same
time oddly contemporary.
Richard Gorman
the sound and any other media_art are
in perpetual inter_shift as appropriate
in any given moment within time_like
_ space and according to perception.
the idea of ‘influence’ seems irrelevant.
Slavek Kwi
Time spent in the studio is filled with
music and silence. For practical work,
the usual popular melodies are good
company. For creative and academic
work, there is Johann Sebastian Bach
– an entire universe.
Michael Dempsey
While music is biggish for me, I can’t
say that I have directly referenced
or used a piece of music as a source of
ideas for a project or in work I have
done. That said, I have had the chance
to work with composers and musicians
over the years and hopefully will
continue to do so. One project that
I am working on at the moment
involves composer Stephen Gardner
collaborating with artist Gary Coyle
on a film piece of the Wexford sea –
a percent-for-art commission. I suppose,
then, this kind of thing might count as
music influencing my practice.
Cliodhna Shaffrey
I suppose I’ve been fascinated
enough by the idea that people believe
music has the power, subliminally or
otherwise, to influence people. These
are the people who believe art can
fundamentally change the way people
think about their lives and the world
around them but it’s a shame they only
ever think it’s a change for the worse.
Do I think music has influenced my
art? I know it’s been one of my greatest
pleasures in life, but I’m unaware of
any one record that has directly or
consciously affected any thinking or
decision making in my work. Then
again, maybe i shouldn’t have played
some of them backwards…
Allan Hughes
As a student artist I was as influenced
by musicians as performers, as much
as by their music. I knew almost no
female visual artists in the ‘70s, so
found my influence from Annie Lennox,
Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry.
I wanted to have as much control,
energy, precision of movement and
individuality as them. From the begin-
ning I constructed my performances
like song lyrics, with verses and
choruses that repeat in sequence.
(I was also lead singer and songwriter
with a short-lived band in the ‘80s
called Houseparty, sort of Bow Wow
Wow-style for clubs). Since 1990 I have
devised all my own soundscores,
essentially to provide structure,
rhythm, tension and atmosphere to
the finished presentations. During this
process I like to think especially of a
quote from Brian Eno, about how his
compositions are about “creating other
worlds for people to lose themselves
within.” Without a doubt music is an
essential and integral part of my art.
Anne Seagrave
I am certainly interested in the thinking
process used by certain composers
and how they link with visual art. At
present I am working on an installation
involving islands and a boat. I have
looked at Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the
dead and listened to Rachmaninoff’s
37
Isle of the dead, which he composed
after seeing Böcklin’s painting. I have
also looked at the grays used by Philip
Guston in his almost abstract period
as a possible colour for the islands.
There is a sense that his gray shapes
hover between presence and absence.
He was friends with the composers
Cage and Morton Feldman, who also
dealt with this issue. In fact Feldman
talked about that “delicate space
between sound and music.” In my own
work I tend to return to the original
sounds that influenced the composers
while retaining an interest in the
abstract way they thought about them.
Brian Kennedy
It almost happens the other way
around in that I almost ‘see’ the music
before I hear it. My music-making and
art-making are, at this point, indivisible
and site-responsive. The music that
interests me is texturally motile and
inconstant. My next project (Daniel
Figgis’ THE BANQUET) takes place
22 July 2006 in the National Basketball
Arena, and is concerned with issues of
scale and information dissemination,
and not labouring under the yoke of any
specific exterior influence.
Daniel Figgis
Daniel Figgis
Tamper, 2004
performance shot
courtesy the artist
 This a complicated question for me
to answer as l will outline, but in short:
no, not at all.
As a teenager l spent virtually all my
time in my bedroom listening to
records. l took this business extremely
seriously, as teenagers are often wont
to do. Having no interest in making
music of my own, l was content to
closely scrutinise that of others. This
in some way influenced my decision
to go to art college, and central to my
practice still is a focused scrutiny,
which l’m sure was developed, in part,
by endlessly listening to some 12” or
other in my parents’ house. The band
which really kicked off my musical
38 interest – The Smiths, who are still
a band of great importance to me now
– were introduced to me by my sister,
who also introduced me to art college.
(I recently digressed for twenty
minutes during a meeting with a
curator as we compared notes about
our respective Smiths passions after
someone mentioned Phil Collins’
latest work.)
While at art college, after developing
a keen interest in country music,
l abandoned music altogether; not that
the two occurrences are related. l am
still unsure what the reason for this
was, but l didn’t listen to any music for
about six years. l slowly found myself
listening to music again through an
interest in American hip-hop, and a
resumption of my love affair with
American rock n’ roll – in particular
the output of Sun Studios and one Mr
Elvis Presley.
Also at this time l was sharing a studio
and working closely with the artist
Paul McDevitt – with whom l still
co-curate. He found my taste in music
– hip-hop aside – hideous, l believe
he referred to it as “dad rock”|and
“kitsch.” He introduced me to numerous
musicians such as The Handsome
Family, Gift of the Gab, Jim O’Rourke,
Trans Am, who then prompted further
additions of my own – usually frowned
upon by my newly acquired music
mentor. This was augmented further
by a habit l developed of staying up
through the night listening to records
in Mark Garry’s studio, while he
generously, and without complaint,
attempted to sleep nearby. This l
mention in such detail as, while not
central to my practice, these dialogues
about music became a focal point
during my dialogues with both these
artists, and by extension numerous
others.
This renewed interest has other direct
links with my work. Firstly the discovery
of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 love songs
first introduced to me by Mark
Wallinger in 2000, but l only got around
to getting it in 2003. An amazing and
mesmerically brilliant album, it has
prompted numerous dialogues with
artists, two in particular being Annika
Strøm and Susan Phillipsz – both of
whom l believe to be among the best
artists currently working in Europe.
Interestingly, music features heavily in
both their work.
Whether my tendency towards the
appreciation of meloncoly in works
– be they films, paintings or pop
songs – was inspired by the Smiths or,
as l believe, is something that l have
always been drawn to, l can’t really
say. However, all the works l have
made over the past few years have
maintained an air of sadness. This is
something l find of great significance
at present, and I find myself constantly
trying to introduce the idea of sadness,
or things which may be associated
with it, into all my works. l somehow
don’t trust that which overlooks it at
present. I don’t mean sadness in a
teenage “l’m unhappy” way – but as an
articulation that in everything, in any
instance, there must be present a
sense of loss or failure of some kind.
Of late, l have been listening almost
exclusively to soul music, in particular
Dave Godin’s Deep soul treasures
– taken from the vaults, volumes 1-4.
These amazing compilations, full of
passion and hurt, do not feature in any
of the work l am making. Nor do they
inspire any work-related ideas, but
l can’t accurately say to what extent
they are separate from my practice
Declan Clarke
I would consider myself to be influenced
by music but only obliquely: it is evident
that there are underlying structural
properties within the formation of
images which are akin (or perhaps,
more specifically, analogous) to those
within music, eg harmony/ discord,
rhythm, tempo, pitch (or, in painting
terms, hue), tone, accent among others.
The composition of these properties
obviously governs, often in quite a
primal (ie ‘pre’, or is that ‘non’-
linguistic) way, the audience reaction(s)
to a work. It is this ‘outside of language’
quality in music that interests me
– this ‘thing-in-itselfness’. People
will listen to music without seeking
words, narrative or even explanation
(generally not the case with looking at
art). This isn’t to say that those things
aren’t there, or important – it’s just
that they aren’t central or even strictly
necessary. Sometimes they’re even
an impediment. To a degree I think this
is also true of visual stimuli.
My method of working has been
compared by others with that of jazz
music. The comparison is reasonable
in that in both cases the work is formed
by a chronological, largely intuitive,
improvised set of actions and responses;
a range of discrete, abstract parts
coalesce to form a hopefully sophisti-
cated ‘whole’. I realise though, and
welcome, that this description could
also apply to the formation of a termite
mound, a galaxy, an archipelago or a
public-transport system. A contrivance
which allows a collision of nature, fate
and circumstance to take its course.
While jazz is something I certainly
listen to, I take just as much pleasure
or visual inspiration from a wide range
of musical sources. I don’t believe
music is translatable per se; however,
I think one can, with effort and luck,
find visual equivalents for certain
moods or amalgams of feeling which
music may induce. If you want to, that
is! I personally wouldn’t try to find
specific visual equivalents for musical
forms, but sometimes I have found them
and left them there! I think music and
art are both essentially an organising
of matter for expressive purposes.
Incidentally I can only make artwork
in silence.
Ronnie Hughes
Music is my lifeblood. I’ve been
passionate about it from an early age.
Punk came along and changed all
the rules. In many ways postpunk was
musically far more interesting and
long-lasting. The whole DIY approach
and spirit of experimentation had a
profound effect on my visual and
sound work and pretty much continues
to inform how I work today. The late
‘70s/ early ‘80s was the key period,
with bands like Wire, Gang of Four,
Joy Division, Magazine, Pere Ubu,
The Minutemen (to name a few)
reflecting the immediate cultural
climate and personal/ psychological
zones it created with a raw, barbed,
and utterly uncompromising intensity
that really connected. Part of music’s
power is its ability to initially bypass
the intellect and connect directly to the
emotions. Hence its universal appeal.
This latter part of this period dove-
tailed with my entry into art school
and introduction to more obscure areas
of sonic exploration – the ‘industrial’
scene protagonists like Einstürzende
Neubauten, Test Dept., Z’ev, Bow
Gamelan, Dome. This ignited my own
explorations into sound and related
visual experiments. Sound as sculptural
element. Nonmusical sound sources.
Exploratory music was creating
strange new mental spaces to inhabit
which really inspired me. Outer limits.
Imaginary soundtracks. Nameless
zones. This fed into my visual work
at the time with an exploration of the
suspended time zones of derelict
spaces that Dublin was once so full
of. All hoovered up now of course, in
a squeaky-clean future of “chequebook
modernism” (Iain Sinclair: Downriver
[Granta 1991]) and Euro ennui.
Fergus Kelly
My first thought was to reply that I didn’t
consider my work to be influenced by
music much; however, after chewing
over it a while, I realise that from time
to time I take an impulsive cue from
listening to something (no particular
genre), and this has resulted in note-
taking, scribblings, drawings, and
occasionally revision of rhythm in the
editing process. Recently, I have used
Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage in a piece
of work, Tesco opera; however this was
chosen in response to the work and
not the other way around, though
considering the title there is an element
of the chicken and the egg…
Fiona Larkin
It’s a really old film and I’m glued to
it… looking at a woman looking at a
door… that’s it… there’s nothing else
to see – a woman and a door… and
there’s the sound of a violin… the
notes run faster and faster and higher
and higher scratching backwards and
forwards as they climb and the tension
rises with them, even if I know it’s not
a very good film and I’ve seen it before
and… “Don’t open the door you fool!”…
it’s the violin, just the violin, ignore the
violin – it’s setting the tone, agreeing
and disagreeing frantically as her hand
reaches out… twists the knob… The
room is empty. The violin has stopped.
Jaki Irvine
The influence of music on my art is
undeniable, but to specify which
particular genre would be impossible.
I view the process of creating sound
art as (among other things) a means
of recontextualizing the presentation
of sound, and before the appearance
of ‘sound art’ as a unique forum for
artistic expression, music was the
only context within which sound was
presented in an organized way. The two
processes are closely aligned, even
though the results might be radically
different.
specific ways and intended to be
reproduced by players on particular
instruments. The difference between
music and sound art lies primarily
in the execution and context within
which the sounds resulting from either
process are presented.
My sound-art works have had a strong
tendency toward specifically ‘musical’
structures – borrowing rules and
relationships from musical harmony
and rhythm as a means of organizing
the occurrence of sounds within an
installation. I believe that these
relationships have grounded my works,
giving the observer/ listener something
familiar to relate to within what might
otherwise be a very abstract sonic 39
experience.
I have always enjoyed listening to a
wide variety of music from different
styles and historical periods, and
continue to do so. I like to seek out
music that I am completely unfamiliar
with, and I enjoy finding new sonic
relationships that I can borrow, explore
and learn from within my own work.
Musical composition has allowed
people to explore sonic relationships
for centuries, and the results of that
exploration provide a treasure trove of
sonic possibilities.
When I say ‘borrow’ I’m referring
not to the process of sampling and
sound-file manipulation, but rather to
the understanding and implementation
of specific sonic relationships – every
composer from J.S. Bach to Trent
Reznor or anyone working today has
a unique sonic ‘signature’ and anything
we do as sound artists follows
(one hopes) in that tradition of sonic
organization.
Jody Elff

Music is a form of sound art, essentially.

What we think of today when we talk
about ‘sound art’ is really nothing
more than a further abstraction of the
compositional process. If you had to
define ‘music’ – taking into account
twentieth-century composers such as
John Cage – the best we could do is to
say that it is “organized sound”; albeit
sounds that are organized in very
 Yes, music does influence my art. Its
direct influence is not something easily
explained or indeed verified, but I feel
music can have the same effect as a
beautiful day might have on motivating
the creative impulses to produce art.
There are, however, a number of pieces
of music that bring to mind some of my
particular art practices, for instance,
tempo can call to mind my particular
interests in the modular.
As both a visual artist and a musician,
one key interest in my work is the
colliding of these two worlds. Taking
the form of sound art, I am very
interested in our perceptions of sound,
sound as object. With this in mind,
40 I am drawn to music that is progressive
in terms of moving away from some
of the strict traditional practices
within music. Music that uses sound
like a colour to create a particular
atmosphere. It would be this genre
of art practice, sound art, that would
influence me the most.
Karl Burke
Yes, as much as anything else that’s
going on around me. I’ve made sound
pieces, radio broadcasts, worked with
musicians and participated in all kinds
of various sound events. When I’m
working I listen to the radio (NPR);
during the day it’s interviews, current
affairs, music, and at night it’s only
classical music. In a way music is more
connected to ‘reality’ (than art is) in
that the radio discusses current events
while simultaneously playing music
and interviewing musicians (all kinds).
I think music has always seemed to me
to be more in tune (ha ha) with what’s
going on outside the studio as it’s
always been taken for granted to be
part of the mainstream consciousness.
Art is a little bit removed and more
specialised. Although I work within the
visual arts (because that’s the term for
the pigeon hole that fits my peg), i’ve
always felt that music is just another
medium.
By the way, I’m not musical at all.
Katie Holten
I make music, graphic design, video
and photographic works and various
self-published projects, and these all
share things in terms of process, ideas,
source materials and form-giving.
For instance, found elements, systems,
grids, issues of context and lifespan,
memory and memory-building,
randomness and chance, noise and
silence all recur throughout my work.
I used to listen to music very loud
while I was working visually and this
enabled me to focus intently on what
I was doing. Now it’s not so loud,
but it still helps to create a mental
workspace. Sometimes I might use
some low-key textural electronic music
as a background, while other times I
might listen to Sun Ra; the outcome of
the work is certainly different for this!
Peter Maybury
Music is a constant source of
inspiration and relaxation. I listen to
it all the time, from new, jazz, rock
through to classical. When I listen to
a piece of music, as well as enjoying
it for its own sake I’m also translating
the rhythm, timing, shape, colour and
texture into a painting; I would love
to convey emotion and feeling the way
music can. I know I’m doomed to
failure but I just keep trying anyway!
Peter Monaghan
Music has always been at the center
of my work as an artist. I am a trained
composer, and early on I became
interested in the idea that compositional
technique could be applied to any
media or discipline, not just music.
As a result of my interest in such
composers as Richard Wagner, Arnold
Schoenberg, John Cage, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, etc, all of whom moved
freely across the disciplines, I became
interested in the idea of composing
with media. Such techniques as
indeterminacy, the remix, recombinatory
practice, participatory and interactive
forms, even more traditional musical
techniques such as polyphony, counter-
point, harmony, etc, could be applied
to visual and performance genres such
as video, theater, dance, painting, etc.
The composers I have listed above
span the mid-nineteenth century to the
present. All of them are wedded to
what is called the Gesamtkunstwerk or
total artwork, which is concerned with
the synthesis of the arts into a single
hybrid medium (such as opera, music
theater, happenings, etc). In today’s
media art, artists have truly blurred
the boundaries between art and music;
they are working with digital processes
that allow the two formerly disparate
media to be translated and integrated
with one another. Sound can be
translated into imagery and visuals
can be converted to music. Such
software programs as Max/ MSP/
Jitter, which I use extensively in my
own work, support this new paradigm
and have redefined today’s artist, who
is essentially a composer of media.
Randall Packer
Everything I experience has an influence
on my work and the music I listen to is
a big part of that. I listen to music for
different reasons. The music that I feel
has an important influence on what
I do does so because there is a shared
vision contained therein. At other times
I will listen to music to conjour up
specific times, places and memories
– and these then become pictorial.
My music collection is very varied
– there is everything from old ska to
Thomas Tallis’ choral work and northern
soul to Motorhead. There is, however,
a disproportionate amount of stuff by
The Fall – a band I savour for their
humour (in both lyrics and music),
their surrealism, which is particular to
Northern England, and their ability
after twenty-five years to still produce
moments of utter genius.
Stephen Brandes
 41

Music is an amazing thing. From something

you put on in the studio to allow you space
to think, to the impulse to make new work.
My taste is eclectic. I will listen to anything
from Sonic Youth to Rachmaninov, Nina
Simone to Damien Dempsey. I get a
particular kick out of making photographs
with a private sound track for the viewer
(if they know the songs); Mississippi
goddamn, Oops, I did it again, 50 ways
to lose your love handles. In exhibitions
I love juxtaposing music within earshot of
each other: a video playing Beethoven
beside one playing Kylie or Gil Scott Heron.
Seeing music played live is a totally
other experience, Classical music is never
loud enough and gigs hit you physically;
the sheer intensity of being in a crowd of
people with pulsating sounds, exhilarating.
At the moment I’m working with the
Benedictus from Mozart’s Requiem and
loving becoming familiar with every note;
the piece involves adoring a Chloe handbag, Amanda Coogan
a difficult job but must be done! Adoration, 2006
Amanda Coogan courtes the artist
c Alan Phelan
.

42

Self-confident but
self-questioning:
A quick look at the
Scottish art scene
Cathy Wilkes
Most women never experience
(detail), 2005
courtesy Scottish National Gallery
of Modern Art
Early January is probably not the
best time to visit anywhere. This
tail-end of the holiday season can
lead to an uneven visitor experience
as many venues are still closed
or in the middle of changing shows.
My brief trip to Scotland was
primarily to see the exhibition
Selected memory: Scotland and
Venice Biennale, a revised and
expanded version of the earlier
summer show now housed primarily
at the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art in Edinburgh (SNGMA)
showing the work of Joanne Tatham
& Tom O’Sullivan, Cathy Wilkes and
Alex Pollard.
Despite the return of the Ireland
at Venice exhibition to the Cork’s
Glucksman in February, 2006, there
are more differences than similari-
ties between the two shows and
scenes that they chose to represent.
Both group shows did select artists
from single cities – Dublin and
Glasgow – with artists who had
contributed much to their respective
local scenes and actively eschewed
the traditional confines and limits of
nationalism. The devolved Scotland
practically assumes sovereign
status in Biennale geography after
all, where nations become pavilions
and art citizenship only requires
that you are ‘based’ somewhere to
be from there.
This type of postnationalist world
suits the global market well as ideas
of nationalism, while sometimes
actively questioned in certain forms
of critical practice, are generally
confused within the art world, being
both superficially celebrated and/or
selectively avoided. This is not the
nationalism of sectarian violence,
politics or even history, but one that
needs to be peripatetic, fluid and
modest, and generally fuelled by
low-cost airlines. There is a more
nonnational feel to this international
flow, one that is nonterritorial but
also located somewhere.
Still, both Ireland and Scotland are
obsessed with traditional
nationalism and both are equally
muddled, as we struggle to
understand our post-colonial or
post-other identity. Some of the
literature I picked up on my visit
helped me understand a rather
bombastic New Year’s column in
the Sunday Telegraph by Niall
Ferguson1. In this he calls for the
liquidation of the Scottish nation,
with its new parliament building
sold off as a multiplex or shopping
mall, to reflect the reality, as he
sees it, of a failed nation in North
Britain which has thought too much
of its minor achievements for far
too long. A few years, back Richard
J. Finlay claimed that the Scots,
after devolution, had “recovered
their long lost ability to blow their
own trumpet.”2 This goes in some
part to explain the dysfunctional
superiority complex that Ferguson
now fears, but one which is then
complicated elsewhere.
Gerry Hassan, Head of the Demos
Scotland 2020 programme, and
writing in the CCA news sheet
Process, says in a report about his
report on Scotland’s future, that
“one of the main factors holding
Scotland back is its ‘social
democratic culture’.”3 This seems
to be at odds with the Scotland
associated with the self-starter
‘Glasgow Miracle’ which produced
artists such as Douglas Gordon,
Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland,
Roderick Buchanan, Lucy McKenzie
and many others over the past
twenty years. These artists were
certainly not the victims of
“linear optimism,” becoming filled
with “pessimism, resignation and
fatalism.”4
The Demos report recategorises
the future into something to do
with “story-telling” and group hugs.
This has maybe more to do with
the larger politics of a burgeoning
cultural bureaucracy and thankfully
there is Variant and Alex Law’s
explanation of what’s going on with
this “think-tankery,”5 as he calls it.
As he explains, “since ideology and
class interests are too depressingly
backward-looking the vacuum in
ideas is filled eclectically by com-
mercial thinkers for hire. If Scotland
is a culture obsessed with self-
loathing and depressing urban
realism, then the Demos ‘critique’,
according to Law, has more to do
with a “self-interested revanchism,”
one where the power elite feel left
out of any cultural success stories
and are attempting to find a way to
subvert any achievements into their
own mediocrity. 43
In Ireland we are all too familiar
with the championing of mediocrity
and we are not unfamiliar with
consultancy reports that cost a lot
of time and money with no tangible
outcomes, other than generating
even more reports. For the moment,
it is worth looking at the artists
chosen to, possibly, represent this
culture at odds with itself (if that is
the case at all).
The exhibition in Edinburgh was
the second of three incarnations
of the Selected memory programme
over a two-year period. Further
venues have not as yet been
announced but are most likely to
be not in a metropolitan or single
site. The reasoning behind this is to
overcome the limited possibilities
of the biennale experience and
support the chosen artists and their
practice in a more sustainable and
unusually committed way. As Jason
E Bowman, co-curator with Rachel
Bradley of Selected memory, said,
“we wanted to take people who had
invested beyond the production of
art works and who had expanded
forms of practice.”6 This is maybe
impossible to represent in the
gallery or in one single show, so
through several different configura-
tions of the exhibition this practice
can develop or be nourished in
alternative way.
c .
The exhibition in Venice was
therefore never intended to be the
same as the one in Edinburgh,
which was spread between SNGMA
and another show titled echo echo
at the Collective Gallery. All artists
share a particularly mature practice,
where their object-making functions
as a meta-language or, as Bowman
described it, as a “set of fascinations
and behaviours.”7 This involves the
reoccurrence of certain symbols,
icons, tropes, and ideas which are
recycled and repeated in different
formats or subtly reconfigured into
new installations, particularly suited
44 then to the different stages of the
exhibition programme.
On entering SNGMA one is
confronted by a large installation
by the collaborative team Joanne
Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan. This has
reached the limit conditions of a
routine sequence of external actions,
2005, is typical of their long-winded,
reflexive titles. As is often the case,
the installation was a compendium
of several of their key tropes. These
included the three dimensional
words ‘Heroin Kills’; a sculpture
of a stick figure wearing a top hat;
large gloss-painted wedges with
painted faces and painted strata;
pink neon tubes; and a squared-off
‘O’ shape. Some of these elements
were part of the Venice show, but
the gallery space at Campo San
Rocco only had room for two big
wedges and some wall pieces,
with a giant stick-figure sculpture
being placed in the park behind the
Giardini (which was vandalised
after a few days). At the Collective
Gallery their iconography is more
graphically represented through a
series of drawings, which the artists
hired illustrator Simon Manifield
to undertake. In these, a couple of
top-hated Victorian gents engage
with various absurd activities
around similar icons, also including
this time the Thingamajig, which is
a black cube containing a diamond
white shape.
None of these works ever really Venice piece, She’s pregnant again,
reveal themselves, with the play of 2005, references to this elusive
motifs and iconography creating figure were even more indirect, as
an enigmatic and circular narrative the installation spread fragments
that is intentionally obtuse. Through of a domestic dystopia and
the repetition of what might be motherhood throughout the room.
described as mock-signifiers, what With the Edinburgh installation the
becomes clear eventually is that it figure returned with a vengeance
is interpretation itself that is being by using two female mannequins,
questioned and tested. This was each half dressed with small
made even more apparent in abstract paintings attached to their
comparison to another exhibition foreheads. Various elements from
upstairs at SNGMA of the Italian the Venice show surrounded these
Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis. glamorous ‘art mothers’, with a
With a selection of works from baby buggy placed in front of one
1958 – 2005, there was a similar and the base of a bathroom sink
recycling or repetition of symbols adjacent to the other. These were
and signature styles. These, joined by a wide-screen television
however, were made of more macho and stand, bowls, saucers, bits
materials like steel I-beams, thick of thread, and a large metal tray
rope, church bells, coal, or lumps filled with an oily yellow liquid with
of glass. The integrity of these semi-submerged objects like a
humble materials implies a weight bathroom mat and remote control.
of cultural meaning, with a larger
interpretative scheme, and one that
is mocked by Tatham & O’Sullivan.
Their humble materiality of roughly
constructed, large scale gloss
painted sculptures scoffs at such
belief systems and defies broad
cultural histories in favour of
closed, self-absorbed, private
narratives. It’s a healthy and
contemporary disrespect for the
signature style, while still having
one, located maybe somewhere
between pomposity and irony.
The literature for the exhibition
asked us to enjoy a possibly
unconscious. dream-like state,
drifting around the works, not
expecting the answers that
sometimes result from ideas turning
into objects. The showmanship
and theatricality across the entire
exhibition was given a more openly
personal touch with the Cathy
Wilkes installation Non-verbal, 2005.
The figure has been central to
Wilkes’ practice over the past few
years, appearing as fragmented bits
and pieces of armatures nestled
between and around found and
painted objects in psychologically
intense arrangements. With the
These arrangements of the detritus
of everyday life provoke quite strong
reactions with audiences as the
installation was visually alienating,
or moreover, raw and direct, which
can be strangely disconcerting.
I spoke with one of the invigilators
from the Venice show (Kirsten Lloyd
from the EmergeD artist collective),
who recounted that most people
entering the installation reacted
quite strongly, many finding huge
offence with the baby buggy in
the room. This use of ordinary
objects is again – as with Tatham
& O’Sullivan – constrained
within a private narrative, but
here the domestic context and its
implications are easier to read.
A new video also on display does
help locate the installation in a
not-so-tortured domesticity, within
rather banal everyday activities.
Most women never experience, 2005,
shows two naked women, one of
whom is pregnant, wandering about
their homes engaged in mundane
activities like drinking a glass of
water, lying in a bed, carrying a
child, switching on a TV or walking
between rooms. This work removes
a certain amount of the mystique
behind the main installation,
where we see how recording the
ordinary has been reconfigured
into a complex visual conundrum.
Wilkes tests our tolerance for
appropriation in these works,
creating an uncomfortable
engagement that is psychologically
rich. In contrast, Alex Pollard plays
with the notion of appropriation
by presenting a range of faux
found-object constructions that
offer immediate visual pleasure.
His pieces use the tools of the trade
– pencils, brushes, rulers, packing
tape – rendered in Jesmonite
plaster, which are then put together
as small toy-like dinosaurs, beasts,
hands, faces or, as with Figures,
2005, two assemblages of faux
pencils fighting it out in the middle
of a large table. Other wall works
show hands made from brushes,
pencils and erasers drawing and
rubbing out large lines of arcs and
angles, each stopping and starting
this mark-making. The work is
reminiscent of those curious
anthropomorphic oddities that you
see in animation and as such
while it’s easy to read more into
them; the trompe l‘oeil effect does
not necessarily conceal a hidden
narrative.
The construction of the art object
is highlighted with all these
works, but also the way in which
the expectation of meaning is
constructed and manipulated.
These works seem to reject any
totalising or essentialist ideologies,
preferring a murky nether world
that is neither nihilist, self-loathing
or fatalistic, but engaged in an
active questioning.
This attitude was interestingly
shared in other exhibitions in
Edinburgh and Glasgow at
Fruitmarket and the Centre for
Contemporary Arts (CCA). Both
these public spaces had curated
shows that questioned ideas
around fictional and documentary
narratives in a more direct way.
The artists were drawn from the
international arena, not local, and
were accompanied by equally
strong curatorial language coupled
with a flurry of interpretative
material, surveys and videos that
can be sometimes overbearing in
these types of venues.
The Fruitmarket show, At the
same time somewhere else, was
comprised of work by Melik
Ohanian, Pia Rönicke and Sean
Snyder. There were several pieces
from each artist and their practice
was well presented through these
works. Snyder displayed images and
texts related to the conflict in Iraq,
downloaded from amateur image
archives and servers or purchased
from press agencies. These were by
no means sensational and instead
reveal the banal details that now
come as part of the glut of digital
images that gave us Abu Ghraib.
This populist, or even participatory
image era, still warrants close
analysis in order to understand the
cultural and political codes at work
that contribute to the construction
of meaning and news in the press
and wider media.
Ohanian leaves interpretation
more open with a series of
unnamed photographs of various
places, implying narrative where
there may or may not be one.
A video projection of a film projector
screens a film out of view but 45
with the soundtrack still audible.
The film depicts the struggles of
some detained activists, originally
shot in 1971 but mirroring the
brutality of detainees from ‘the war
on terror’ today. Rönicke’s work
on architectural and urbanist
ideologies ponders these issues
through a Situational-type cartoon
strip conversation with Le Corbusier
and then, in a video, with some
architects wandering through
a ‘development zone’ outside of a
Danish city. As a counterpoint to
Selected memory, these artists offer
a more direct critical engagement
with media representations but lack
a more poetic distrust of meaning.
c .
At CCA in Glasgow, the exhibition
In the poem about love you don’t
write the word love (a title almost
inspired by Tatham & O’Sullivan but
actually by Jean Genet) had a more
museum-like feel to it. There was a
substantial film-screening, talk and
performance schedule where half
of the show was presented over the
duration of the exhibition run. With
over thirty-five artists participating,
the range of work was vast and
included some nuggets from the
early 70’s like the Nancy Holt and
Robert Smithson 1971 film Swamp,
John Smith’s Girl chewing gum,
46 1976, and the more recent Walid
Raad/ Atlas Group’s I only wish
that I could weep, 2001. These, like
many other works questioned the
construction of reality and cultural
forms, as well as the implications of
signification. The surprisingly small
gallery spaces (for such a large
building complex) and durational
nature of the exhibition programme
meant that many works were either
crowded or remain unseen from
a single visit. The diversity and
scholarship of its curator, Tanya
Leighton, is however, worth
commending as it is rare to see
such a range of work outside of a
major museum.
The final connecting exhibition on
my journey through lost signifiers
and reworked urban realism was
at Inverleith House in the Royal
Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, which
showed works by Keith Farquhar
and Mark Leckey. Farquhar, originally
from Edinburgh, has made a name
for himself internationally with his
signature ‘hoodie’ sculptures, made
by pinning hooded tops and folded
denim jeans to the wall, which in
this case became seated figures
perched on the skirting boards
around the galleries along with other
configurations of denim fabric and
jeans. The demonised ‘hoodie’, with
all its ASBO malice, is somewhat
sanitised in the gallery despite
the accompanying audio football
chat of “Nice pair of trainers, shoes,
jeans and top…”The works were, be local grumblings, and there
however, wonderfully complemented has been criticism of how the rise
upstairs by three Mark Lecky films of market possibilities is affecting
and a giant Soundsystem speaker the very production of work,
stack with two 1,600 watt amps. endangering more critically
Lecky’s nostalgia for 70’s subcultures engaged practices. But there are
reverberates to pounding tracks by still many smaller artist-run
his band Jack Too Jack, with images initiatives and many artists outside
sampled, layered and synthesized of these groups. Neil Mulholland,
from glam rock fashion, a 70s who teaches at Edinburgh College
remake of a postwar teenage urban of Art, listed Cell 77, Aurora,
drama, and documentation of One Zero, Wuthering Heights,
‘modernist’ public sculptures in Magnifitat, Total Kunst, and
London. This immersion in sub, EmergeD as local spaces and
club and public cultures exemplifies collectives which function in
the socially constructed subject, tandem to the more established
albeit in a more celebratory than spaces in Edinburgh alone.
critical manner. The recent Glasgow international
and the Edinburgh art festival also
It was disappointing that none provided a cohesive marketing glue
of the artist-run spaces like which offered more opportunities
Transmission and Tramway in and exposure for other groups
Glasgow or Embassy in Edinburgh and individuals. It is these kinds
were open during my short visit. of sustained approaches that have
The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) continued to propel the ‘miracle’
is certainly not worth mentioning; that should not have happened
it had a very dull collections show beyond the city limits of a large
punctuated, not by the current art capital.
Turner Prize winner Simon Starling,
but by the 2003 winner Grayson
Perry. Instead I spoke mainly to
gallerists who represent the artists
from Selected memory. Both Toby
Patterson of The Modern Institute
and Sorcha Dallas of Sorcha Dallas
Gallery connect unapologetically
to different generations of artists,
having built their businesses initially
around friends and college mates.
With little public funding earmarked
for individual artists8, these galleries
and others like the emerging
Mary Mary Gallery have developed
through artist-run or artist-led
initiatives. This is, however, more
than just a logical commodification
of a maturing art scene, as even
Transmission now attends art fairs9
and local art fairs cater for artist-
run spaces. These all function as
support structures for groups or
cliques that have professionalised
their networks beyond the local,
building on the success of previous,
or more recent waves of artists
based in Scotland. There will always
Alan Phelan is an artist 1 Niall Ferguson, ‘Happy
from Dublin. Hogmanay – and to celebrate,
let’s put Scotland into
liquidation’, Sunday Telegraph,
1 January, 2006, p.19
2 Richard J Finlay, ‘New Britain,
new Scotland, new history?
The impact of devolution on
the development of Scottish
historiography’, Journal of
Contemporary History, Vol. 36,
No. 2, April, 2001, p.383
3 Gerry Hassan, ‘What does
Scotland’s future look like?’,
Process, published by the
Centre for Contemporary Art,
Glasgow, issue 3, October,
2005. The report, published
by Demos, was titled ‘Scotland
2020: hopeful stories for a
northern nation’.
4 To quote the Hassan Process
text: “This is a vision which
professes to be optimistic –
what we have called linear
optimism – by which we mean
Simon Manfield it poses that tomorrow should
You have forgotten why you asked us be a better version of today
here; we cannot remember why we came with just more about: more
(Heroin Kills), 2005 growth, goods, consumption.
drawing on plywood, gloss paint, glass However, this optimism really
60.5cm x 72.5cm x 6.5cm including frame feeds onto and adds a sense
courtesy the artist/ The Modern of pessimism, resignation and
Institute/ Collective Gallery fatalism; it says we don’t need
to think about the future as it
has already been decided. It
offers a view of the world that
fills most people with a sense
of anxiety, fear and insecurity.”
5 Alex Law, ‘The conformist
imagination: think-tankery
versus utopian Scotland’,
Variant, issue 23, 2005
6 Jason E Bowman, Sarah
Glennie, Hugh Mulholland,
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith and
Karen MacKinnon, ‘One closer
to the other’, Printed Project,
issue 05, 2005, p.81
7 Ibid.
8 “Rather than investing in the
research and development of
artistic practice or in the
47
grassroots organisations
that do the most to support
this practice, the visual art
department of the Scottish
Arts Council cites the
maintenance of core
institutions as its main priority
within its remit to increase
participation and pours the
majority of its funding (more
than 93% of voted funds)
into an infrastructure of
galleries and museums under
the misapprehension that
some of it will trickle down to
artists through nominal fees.
Only a tiny percentage of
visual arts funding reaches
artists directly…” Rebecca
Gordon Nesbitt, ‘Don’t look
back in anger: cultural policy
in 2015’, commissioned by
the European Institute for
Progressive Cultural Policy/
International Artists’ Studio
Programme in Sweden,
‘European cultural policies
2015’, published to coincide
with Frieze Art Fair, October,
2005. www.eipcp.net/2015
9 Transmission Gallery
participated in the Frieze Art
Fair, London, 2004; NADA
Art Fair, Miami, 2005, and will
be at the forthcoming Armory
Show, New York, 2006.
c Gemma Tipton
.

48

Without you
there isn’t
anything:
Patrick Ireland
in an interview
with Gemma Patrick Ireland
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, lead 1
(slow heartbeat)
1966
wood, glass, liquitex, motor
43 x 43 x 10cm

Tipton
Based in the US since the 1950s, artist Patrick Ireland
was in Dublin recently to install a retrospective exhibition
of his work. This will be the inaugural show when the
Hugh Lane gallery reopens this April. While making art
as Patrick Ireland, the artist is also known as Brian
O’Doherty, writer and author of the influential Inside the
White Cube essays. When first published in Artforum,
the essays both coined the term ‘white cube’ and
defined subsequent discussions about the architecture,
aesthetics and politics of the gallery space.
GT The Hugh Lane has a series of new galleries
(designed by architect Des McMahon of Gilroy
McMahon). You’re creating a Rope drawing for one of
these. What do you think of the spaces?
PI They are wonderful. Dublin finally has some splendid
museum galleries. Des McMahon’s spaces court both
the art and the spectator. I believe that people go mad in
bad buildings, and in good buildings people behave well.
Buildings inflect behaviour.
GT Many know your work from the White Cube
texts, I think the Rope drawings can be read as visual
essays on the subject. The White Cube is an incredible
book to read, not least because its arguments and
ideas, while complex, are presented in an unexpectedly
‘non-academic’ way.
PI It’s not a scholar’s work. Here’s this thing – the gallery
– nobody looks at, and you realise that it is laden with
content. Far from neutral, the walls speak in various
howls and choruses. If I were an academic I would have
done the thing with footnotes and whatnot, and nobody
would have paid the slightest attention, but I did a kind
of ironic, provocative thing.
GT One of the reasons I think it is so brilliant is because
it runs counter to that idea of having to work harder for
an insight or a piece of information. The theory goes that
if you have to think about something more, you value it
more. By that argument, you would have to make your
writing highly complex.
PI I think life’s hard enough already without complicating
it more.
Looking at O’Doherty/ Ireland’s body of work as a totality
is quite complicated, however. Brian O’Doherty’s
writing does not only encompass art criticism. He is
a novelist, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in
2001, with The Deposition of Father McGreevy. Since 1972
he has made art as Patrick Ireland and, for a time, art
criticism and art work under the persona of Sigmund
Bode (other aliases have included Mary Josephson
and William Maginn). Ireland’s work is in collections
at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris,
and Dublin’s Hugh Lane. O’Doherty also qualified as
a medical doctor and studied Experimental Psychology.
While he has drawn attention to the idea of different
personas by his use of different names, O’Doherty /
Ireland’s discussions and ideas overlap.
49
GT It would seem from this distance as if you have a
facility for taking up different disciplines and excelling
at them with little apparent effort.
PI You’re implying I approach things with a facile, liquid
insouciance, when in fact I’m more like a pig on a track,
determinedly truffling my way up a hill.
GT The different disciplines do intersect, however. In the
Rope drawings and the Ogham drawings and sculptures,
there’s an attention to ideas of architecture, and an
understanding of how the mind works.
PI I wouldn’t be so brave as to say I understand that.
But I did work in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge
while I was there on a ‘phoney’ scholarship – phoney in
that it was arranged by a friend, no virtue of mine.
GT And later, there was another scholarship?
PI That was Harvard. I was recommended by Professor
E. F. O’Doherty (no relation) at University College Dublin,
Tom McGreevy, and Jack Yeats. I used to visit Jack Yeats;
I did a portrait of him. He had the most beautiful lines
and this great dome of a forehead. I had twenty minutes
to get it right, and I’m not good at likenesses, but I got
that one, the force was with me… There is an awful lot
of early drawing. I was a good draftsman. But it won’t be
in this exhibition, it wouldn’t fit.
GT While the early drawings may not fit, there are different
strands that do coalesce in your work. There is you as
the person who has investigated the way the mind works,
who is interested in the processes; there’s the writer who
has unravelled art as a critic (and also as former Editor
of Art in America) in terms of colour, form, line, aesthetics;
then there is the author who has explored the ideologies
of the gallery. Approaching your work, initially it seems
incredibly disperse and disconnected, but I don’t think it is.
 PI I favour dispersal in life, I don’t like synthesis.
But given that there is an innate and deep human desire
to synthesise, I’m sure somebody someday will put
together a convincing portrait of my selves that I will buy,
becoming that person’s fantasy for the rest of my life.
In the meantime I exist in a state of happy dislocation.
GT You commented of Stuart Davis that “he searched
disorder for its unifying principle.” Are you saying the
same about yourself?
PI Not me. The whole idea of identity was such a number
in the fifties. It still is, I suppose. I remember the phrase
when I was a kid, “ah well, he must find himself.” I never
was impressed by the psychological bric-à-brac of the
fifties, of “finding yourself.” If you found it, it probably
50 wouldn’t be worth much anyway. I feel deeply that society
eternally tries to limit you. People limit each another in
order to perceive each other clearly. If they go out of
focus it’s socially disruptive.
GT Taking that idea of re-understanding a work through
our personal knowledge of its author, it’s interesting that
it was your Aspen 5+6 [a ‘magazine in a box’, edited by
O’Doherty in 1967] in which Barthes chose to publish
his essay, The death of the author. Did that come out of
discussions that you had with him?
PI Yes. He came out to the house, the dog barked at him
(he didn’t like the dog). We discussed what I was after.
I was very clearly into rejecting that ‘self’ notion, and
this chimed with him perfectly. He said “I think I may
have something for you.” It came a few weeks later, and
I thought “this is going to be a bloody revolution…” And
it was, it was an enormously influential essay. I also got
Susan Sontag to write on the aesthetics of silence, that
was an influential one too. I got the right essays, I feel,
including George Kubler’s, Style and the representation
of historical time.
Born in Roscommon in 1928, O’Doherty exhibited in
the Oireachtas, the RHA and Living Art, before leaving
Ireland. Arriving in New York in 1961, he was at the
beginning of what he describes as the “great paradigm
shift” of the sixties. He also facilitated and influenced
a second paradigm shift in his role at the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the seventies, where
he supported artist-run spaces, and noninstitutional
practice. O’Doherty became friends with Mark Rothko,
Edward Hopper and Marcel Duchamp. He went on to
make what has been called the last portrait of Marcel
Duchamp, a long, elegant grey box through which light
moves past a series of small round windows, illuminating
the pulses of a heartbeat in slowly mesmerising motion.
In the sixties his colleagues were Eva Hesse, Dorothea
Rockbourne, Mel Bochner, Peter Hutchinson, Robert
Smithson and Sol LeWitt.
PI Having been defined by the culture, by the Ireland of
the forties and fifties, I had to get out. Arriving in New
York I felt I was in the Promised Land. I was very fortunate,
because you can end up in despair and fury, like James
Barry in London, with whom I have a great sympathy.
I was lucky to be working as an artist in New York in the
sixties, and I pushed hard for the alternative spaces as
a part time bureaucrat in the seventies. This was needed
because the commercial people were not able to, or didn’t
want to, show what the artists were making.
GT I get a sense that you have either intellectual or
ethical difficulties with the commercial gallery system?
PI Well, I rejected it, I didn’t want to be beholden to it.
There are various forms of slavery and I suspect the middle
men, the gatekeepers, the taste makers, the powerful.
Among the group I ran with in New York, Eva Hesse was
the most original artist that I ever met, intense as a
hummingbird. I wanted to meet a couple of people there.
I knew them from Time magazine, one of the cultural
avatars of my youth. Stuart Davis was one, I admired him
enormously. And Hopper, he caught something that no
other realist painter had caught.
GT And you made a film about him?
PI Hopper’s silence. It premièred at the New York Film
Festival; I was fortunate that they accepted it. Duchamp,
Hopper and Davis were kind of heroes of mine, and
Duchamp was a wonderful guy. I think a heartbeat was
the right thing for him. I asked him if I could make his
portrait and he said yes. He came to dinner and I brought
him into the bedroom and I said would you lie down, take
off your shoes, take off your socks, and he did everything
without a question. Very cool. I attached the electrodes,
and when I was looking at his cardiogram as it printed out
he said, “How am I?” and I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten
how to read these.” “Well,” he said, “thank you, from the
bottom of my heart, anyway.”
GT Barbara [Novak, whom O’Doherty married in 1960]
tells the story of bumping into Duchamp on the street
some time later, and him asking her “Am I still working?
Is my heart still beating?” But looking at Duchamp’s
Mile of string [1927], could you see it as a sort of a sketch
for what you were doing later on with the Rope drawings?
PI I hate when people say that, because it certainly was
far from my mind. What he was doing was harassing the
exhibition. The other artists let him do it and they were
crazy to let him. He webbed off their work, and hired
two kids (Sidney Janis’ children) to run up and down the
gallery and annoy people, it was a witty anti-art Dada
gesture. I was thinking of how to draw in space. The first
Rope drawings had no painted walls, they were in space,
and they were full of make-and-break connections. I put
up a rope in my studio and attached a piece of nylon to
the end of it, so it looked like an Indian rope trick, and
I studied it for months. Duchamp was far from my mind.
My gesture was anti-Duchamp. Duchamp said, “you put
it up on the museum wall and it dies.” I said “what if I put
your heartbeat up on the wall? That would contradict
you.” Anti-Duchamp.
GT Except that Duchamp would adore that dialogue and
would have kept it going; he’s about creating questions,
getting you going to the next bit.
PI One of the thrills in my life was watching Duchamp
looking at his heartbeat. He’s looking at it and I’m looking
at him looking at it.
GT How long before he died did you make that piece?
PI About a year.
In 1972 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Brian O’Doherty
staged a performance, Name change, assisted by
Robert Ballagh and Brian King, a response to the
killings in Derry on Bloody Sunday. The artist’s body
was painted orange from the head down and green
from the feet up, until the colours merged to become
indecipherable and indistinguishable in murky brown.
Thomas McEvilly quotes the artist as saying he
looked like “an atrocity victim.”1 He then signed a legal
document, witnessed by Gordon Lambert, Dorothy
Walker and Colm Ó Briain (among others), declaring
that he would sign his artworks with the name Patrick
Ireland “until such time as the British military presence
is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are
granted their civil rights.”
GT Back to that idea of fracturing of identity to explore
different strands, different ways of seeing and looking
at things: there’s a line in your novel, The Deposition
of Father McGreevy, where you say that English isn’t a
language to use to describe terrible things like storms
and mountains, that as a language it’s too flat. Do you
think that the same is true of aesthetics in Ireland?
In an introduction to The Irish imagination (1971), you
wrote about how Irish art was perceived as being in an
“atmospheric mode,” and with “a restless fix on the
unimportant,” describing a sense of Irish art as coming
from a more fluid, emotional place.
PI It’s quite different now. Back then you would have been
an Irish artist, now you’re an artist in Ireland. You have to
remember that that was postwar Ireland. There was this
anomie, everyone was mad at us, the English were mad 51
at us and so were the Americans. Our neutrality had
meant that Roosevelt’s ships had to go around Scotland
and get attacked by U Boats. We were loved by nobody.
GT And possibly not by ourselves.
PI Postcolonial is a very harsh status. The fractured
national identity was reproduced in my own family.
Two of my uncles, both doctors, joined the British army;
then there were the Brennan Boys, and one of them was
my Uncle Paddy. He told me hair-raising stories, because
war is so barbarous. I always think that the social layer
over us is paper thin, I wonder how we can stagger
through the day without killing each other. So there was
a fracture within the family psyche and national psyche.
I experienced that fully.
One of my responses to that as a young medical student,
at seventeen or eighteen, was that I went devotedly
around Dublin looking for some tradition that would be
meaningful to me. I went all over, thinking there must
be something that gives me a sense of selfhood, of pride
and past. I loved my city; back then it was a city you
could love, it was parochial, it was small and it was full
of brilliant people, like Tony Cronin, Neil Montgomery,
Brendan Behan. It’s just like the rest of the world here now.
 GT Do you think you will be retaining the name Patrick
Ireland indefinitely?
PI Until the British Army gets out of Northern Ireland.
Then there will be a formal burial of Patrick Ireland.
I wanted him buried in consecrated ground, by a
sympathetic priest. George Segal was to make the burial
mask. Lee Krasner said “you’re never going to get your
name back.” I’m not an astute politician, but healings
have taken place in divided countries, and I do believe
that the North has a lot to offer.
GT Away from the politics of the situation, you were using
aliases already, with your creation of Sigmund Bode.
PI I was unhappy with most of the art I saw. I wanted
52 to create somebody who would make art that was not
like the generally post-Cubist art that was in Ireland.
Fortunately all Sigmund’s Klee-like drawings are long
gone, but it was a liberation. My eyes were on Bauhaus
and Moscow.
Described as a Conceptual artist, Patrick Ireland has
made work often concerned with acknowledging, and
then opening up, structures. From the Ogham sculptures
and drawings to meditations and performances based
on the grid, there’s a balance to be found between an
expression of repression and an idea of infinite potential.
You cannot escape the frame of the grid; nonetheless
it is a frame which encapsulates everything possible.
PI I think we’re all trying to escape the grid. The grid
is a cliché, but I wanted to say something new about it.
Ros Krauss talks about the rigidity of the grid, and
I talk about its mobility. It’s supposed to be an index of
everything that’s rational, but it’s as mad as many logical
things prove to be.
GT How closely do those ideas follow someone like
Beckett, with his play, Quad, for example?
PI Well mine are mine, and his are his. I think his are
absolutely brilliant – great numerical footwork.
GT And as a Conceptual artist, how do you feel about
that idea of giving the viewer quite a lot of intellectual
work to do?
PI I don’t know that I am one. The galleries always hated
conceptual work because they couldn’t sell it. And then
again it’s just ideas. There was a great reaction against
the ‘hand’, a whole anti-canvas, anti-painting thing in the
sixties, painting is dead…Periodically painting is dead,
and then it struggles up from the grave and starts beating
on canvasses. What the hell is conceptual? Duchamp
said that “dumb as an artist” was a phrase in his youth,
and he wanted to make an art that had some thinking
in it. My art is as much about thinking as looking. If you
make something beautiful or fascinating along the way,
then you get lucky.
GT Like your Ogham sculptures, your aluminium Ogham
pillar The rake’s progress draws you in, seduces you by
its beauty; meanwhile another part of your mind is working
on the rational side of what you are looking at.
PI So I was never a pure Conceptual artist at all, because
pure Conceptual artists need a sheet of paper, a camera
and a magazine, not a gallery.
GT Perhaps then it’s not a great understanding of
architecture, of architectural history, of theories of
aesthetics that you need to bring to a Rope drawing,
just a bit of time to move through it and look?
PI A bit of time, and don’t forget to bring your own self.
It’s the direct unmediated experience. A Rope drawing
enables you to do something that people don’t do, to pay
attention to yourself. Most people go through life, in my
view, semi-anaesthetised, swaddled in media.
GT Well, it can be more comfortable. One of the thrills,
walking through the Rope drawing downstairs [in the
Hugh Lane], is the way you get a physical sensation of
the way the space is changing and altering. The way
the colours move, the way the purples and yellows come
forward and recede in ways you didn’t expect purples
and yellows to do.
PI Whatever the Rope drawings are, they’re not geometry,
they’re changing every minute.
GT And there’s this idea, for example, with your Big A
drawing [1984], that the lines extending from the ‘A’
underline that sense that everything you say or do has
consequences, resonances. Infinite lines of cause and
effect spread from them. You never have an isolated
action or an isolated figure in space, you always have
the ramifications of its presence.
PI Yes, because the points of attachment describe
the container.
GT But it’s you that creates that by seeing it.
PI That is correct, without you it isn’t anything.
1 Thomas McEvilly, ‘An artist & his aliases –
Brian O’Doherty/ Patrick Ireland’, Art in
America, May, 1999
Gemma Tipton is a writer and critic
on art and architecture based in
Dublin. She is the editor of Circa’s
book on art and architecture, Space:
Architecture for art.

Patrick Irel
an
Golden roor d
(rope draw
2006 ing no.110
)
installation
view Dublin
The Hugh City Gallery
Lane
photo John
Ke
courtesy th llett
e artist/ D
Gallery the ublin City
Hugh Lane

Beyond the
White Cube,
Brian O’Doh
erty/ Patrick
Retrospectiv Ireland
e is
at the Dublin C
Gallery The ity
May 2006 Hugh Lane from early
c .
54
Reviews

Belfast Ian Charlesworth: The subjects Siobhán Mullen 86 | Carrick-on-

Shannon Trade David Dobz O’Brien 88 | Cork Peripheral visions Seán Kelly
56 | Cork/Kilkenny Designing ireland: A retrospective of kilkenny design
workshops, 1963-1988 Linda King 94 | Derry Anne Tallentire: Drift: diagram
VII Declan Sheehan 66 | Damaged collateral: Inner city gothic and the
suburban sublime Slavka Sverakova 68 | Simon Starling: C.A.M. Damien Duffy
76 | Dublin Moore Street lending library Sarah Pierce 61 | Fiona Mulholland:
For every action… Seán Kissane 72 | Paul Seawright: Invisible cities
Anthony Downey 74 | Paul Doran: Gislebertus told me Eimear McKeith 78 |
Liam O’Callaghan: Chaos and dreams yet to come Gemma Tipton 80 | Nina
Canell: We woke up with energy Declan Long 84 | Galway Alan Phelan: GB
and the western world Gavin Murphy 64 | Limerick Breda Lynch: Dark
brides and silent twins Fergal Gaynor 91 | Lyon Lyon biennale 2005:
Experiencing duration Jason McCaffrey 58 | New York Marina Abramovic
Seven easy pieces Will Pollard 70 | Dorothy Cross: Foxglove, digitalis
purpurea Tim Maul 82 | Publications Margaret Dikovitskaya: Visual culture:
The study of visual culture after the visual turn Joan Fowler 96 | Third Text
Ireland special issue Tim Stott 98 |

c . Ann Veronica Janssens

LEE 121
installation view, Lyon
photograph: Blaise Adilon
courtesy Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer, Anvers
c Seán Kelly
. Cork Film Centre April – December 2005
Cork

Peripheral visions
56

J. Tobias Anderson
879 & 879
colour, 2' 49"
Peripheral visions consists of thirty-
nine works of Video Art presented
over thirty-nine weeks at the
Cork Film Centre with a two-day
symposium in November.
The project is an initiative of the
Cork Film Centre’s Director,
Chris Hurley, and the work was
selected by curators Nigel Rolfe
and Cliodhna Shaffrey. Artists
from Europe and the Middle East
were selected alongside thirteen
Irish artists, eleven of whom were
presenting new pieces, mentored
by Rolfe and utilising the resources
of the Cork Film Centre.
Most pieces in the project are quite
short and no work exceeds thirty
minutes in length. The work was not
presented in a gallery context and
its modest presentation in a small,
dedicated space is appropriate
to the generally humble and often
intimate aspirations of most of the
work. Only three are animations,
one a montage, one a construction
and one utilises superimposition
over a backdrop (very clumsily).
As one might expect of a show
which emerges from the context of
training and development, there are
none of the cinematic qualities or
grand gestures we associate with
artists like Stan Douglas, Bill Viola,
Shirin Neshat or Bill Seaman,
which is not to say that the magna
opera of such artists don’t at times
inflect the visions of these emergent
practitioners. Video Art in a gallery
context can be a very difficult form
to display and to appreciate, unless
the space is totally appropriated
and specifically constructed as
an environment in which the viewer
is immersed in the (usually) large
scale of the experience, visual and
aural. That’s one kind of intimacy,
like cinema, a sensory appropriation
that is defined by its totality.
The difficulty of presenting smaller,
singular ideas in video within a
familiar gallery context, and often
alongside other static work, is
essentially that it is time-based and
a dynamic experience. Its aural
component is often reduced to
presentation through headphones
and often the work is poorly
monitored. Works of longer than
a few minutes duration are rarely
accorded more than a minute or
two of consideration and often not
seen in their entirety. The sequential
treatment of this project, as a
programme, over a longer time span
affords each its moment in a far
more satisfactory manner than
could have been achieved as a
one-off experience within a gallery,
if that were even possible.
Most of these works are centred
on specifics and rely on the most
rudimentary of methods. It could be
argued that the simplicity of means
(hand-held, minimal editing and
raw video quality), is appropriate
to small ideas and limited visions.
At this point a conundrum arises.
Is it fair to regard the small
aspiration and achievement as
inconsequential, or does it have the
critical refuge of remaining at the
level of a sketch? Some work within
this series really just rambled along
without doing anything, such as
Martine Mullaney’s Killing time –
Cork, montage. Nine boring shots
together is just a boredom factor
of nine, instead of one. Is the title
meant to be disingenuous? If so,
it doesn’t save the work. Harold
Offeh’s Smile, at just three minutes,
still manages to be longer than
needed to make its point, tied as
it is to the length of the song, and
Aissa Lopez’ Antithesis, in which a
beautiful girl wanders in the jungle
attracting butterflies, is undercut
by all the evidence of whatever
sticky goo was applied to her to
attract the butterflies, making it all
seem rather contrived and pointless
and anything but magical. Small
ideas writ small, if a little long. Ciara
Moore’s Bound was aesthetically
competent but the hoop-skirt frame
bespeaking the bondage of woman
/ spirit through the bird trapped
within its ‘cage’ was conceptually
clumsy and literalist.
Nonetheless the range of work was
very broad and sometimes small
was certainly better, such as the
odd green-lighted head reciting
a kind of Estonian-inflected Uhr
Sonata in Külli Kaats’ Avifauna,
and Niamh Lawlor’s Blind man’s buff
a well conceived image of futility
in just over six minutes, in which
a man in a blindfold attempts to
bite an apple suspended in front of
him to a background of subtle
mocking voices. The simple, direct
verité of Mathieu Copeland’s Burn 57
the heretics was truly chilling, made
more so by the choice of black and
white. Among the non ‘point and
shoot’ works, Rose Eken’s Inner
speed presented a raw-constructed
rock practice room which bristled
with naïve charm, and J Tobias
Anderson’s 879 was a very assured
piece of animation, cramming a
complete narrative into two minutes.
Such a cursory skim of the project
does not reflect the diversity of
cultural spaces explored and the
distinct political usages of the
medium shown by many artists.
The intent of Peripheral visions was
never to assume that these works
were other than that of artists at
various stages of emergence into
a medium, representing a variety of
approaches and voices. This it does
admirably; its moments of lack of
assurance and raw engagement
are all the more honestly reflective
of these visions forming and the
voices emerging in what seems to
be an inevitably still-growing (and
expanding) mode of practice most
appropriate to the tenor of our time.
Seán Kelly is an artist, writer
and arts administrator currently
employed as Programme
Coordinator at the National
Sculpture Factory in Cork.
 c Jason McCaffrey
. Lyon September – December
2005

Lyon biennale
yon2005: Experiencing
58

biennale
duration
005: Experiencing
uration
Josephine Meckseper
The complete history of
postcontemporary art
installation shot
photo Blaise Adilon
courtesy the artist/ Elisabeth
Dee Gallery/ Galerie Reinhard
Hauff © Biennales de Lyon 2005
A young girl having her hair cut;
a man slices a loaf of bread; on
the screen a camera points back
– the man filming has a scissors
in one hand; a young boy walks
through woodland bathed in
mottled sunlight; the camera zooms
in on a TV screen to focus our
attention on a news programme;
a car journey on a snow-covered
road; a woman holding a newly born
child in a hospital bed. There is no
clear narrative, only fragments of
recorded moments seemingly
important to someone’s life. All of
these shaky, amateur films are
incidental slices of imagery of
everyday life, cuts in time spliced
together to form a muddled and
incoherent view using familiar and
unremarkable scenes. This is the
twelve-screen, twenty-four-hour
video installation Homage à Fernand
Léger, by Jonas Mekas, which
greets visitors at the ground floor
to La Sucrière, the main venue for
the 8th biennial of contemporary art
in Lyon. Due to the encircling layout
and the abundance of recorded
material, the viewer is put in a
position of constructing their own
film; the point in time at which the
viewer enters the installation, and
where they position themselves in
it, are the factors that contribute to
the editing process.
The scene is thus set for an
exploratory meandering through
works which investigae temporality
and implicate the viewer in the
construction of their meanings.
Titled Experiencing duration, the
Biennale is deliberately authorial in
conception, as the curators Nicolas
Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans of the
Palais de Tokyo in Paris, seem to have
relished fabricating an experiential
exhibition predicated on sensory
stimulation and activated specta-
torship. The biennale features
largely newly commissioned works,
and encompasses some sixty
artists over five sites across the
city. Exploring the legacies and
influences of conceptualism, fluxus,
and the hippie movement on some
of today’s artists is one of the aims
of this intergenerational selection
of works. Detached, intellectual
contemplation has been jettisoned
in favour of the immediacy of
visual pleasure, tactile and aural
encounters. The accessibility and
fun nature of a lot of the work here
are underscored by the large groups
of schoolchildren and teenagers in
attendance. In some cases the theme
of temporality has been stretched
to the point where it suffocates
from banality, as in Henrik
Hakansson’s video installation
24hour flower (cirsium acaule)
August 5/ 6, documenting twenty-
four hours in the life of a plant.
The strategy of attempting to shed
light on the present by reference
to the energies and patterns of art
conceived in the post-1968 era is on
the whole coherent, so that we can
detect a certain lineage. This was
most apparent, for instance, in the
case of James Turrell’s The wait,
with Ann Veronica Janssens’ fog
piece LEE 121. Turrell’s work
involved standing in a dark space for
fifteen minutes before a pink shape
became vaguely visible. Janssens
immersed the viewer in a saturated
green fog; in this environment
there was the sensation of one’s
dissolution and invisibility, and a
curiosity as to the size of the space.
Traversing it became fraught with
the possibility of colliding with the
walls or with another person; an
unfathomable space, dense with
possibilities.
John Bock contributed two works.
The first, Turning in space/ May 59
2005, is a sculptural assemblage
resembling a human-size hamster
wheel; a rather Spartan room with
furniture bolted to the ceiling,
walls and floor, this came with an
accompanying looped sample of
a Blur song. Bock’s second piece,
Skipholt, is a video performance
filmed in Iceland which documents
a two-day journey across unforgiving
terrain. The artist carries on his back
a cumbersome box of mysterious
objects which he uses to enact
bizarre and beautiful ritualistic
encounters in the landscape; this
load takes its toll on Bock as he
stumbles and falls, doing damage
to his degenerating body. Yet during
brief pauses he stops to smoke a
cigarette; displaying effortless skill,
he pulls a hair from one of his
nostrils with a tweezers and places
it upon a compass with extreme
precision. These actions are those
of a conditioned modern man,
absorbed by routine and ritual yet
unable to cope with the simplicity
of negotiating a landscape that is
foreign to him. Echoes were to be
found in the extreme sensation of
claustrophobia and discomfort
experienced upon entering Martin
Creed’s room filled with pink
balloons, Work no. 329, half the air
in a given space. The somewhat
innocuous and playful nature of
the balloon is rendered sinister
when you are plunged into an all-
encompassing tactile environment.
 The artworks here are put forward to us in a fragment of a cracked
as experiences before being mirror is a photograph of an Asian
products or objects, as something sweatshop worker. General Idea
that exists for another, that which showed their famous AIDS wallpaper
is only completed by human ImageVirus, a legacy of the sexual
interaction, not as sacred and revolution and free love. These are
reified examples of cultural the only overt acknowledgements
production. The artwork, according of the harsh realities experienced
to the guest curators, is “first and by those of the world forced to
foremost, an event before becoming undergo long periods of duration as
a monument or a simple testimony”; suffering, as Experiencing duration
for them, “aesthetics are also a is sold as a positive thing.
matter of energy.”1 This contention
is foregrounded in a series of
disparate temporal encounters,
which include installations where 1 Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme
60 music plays a big part. La Monte Sans, Experiencing duration,
Young and Marian Zazeela show www.biennale-de-
lyon.org/bac2005/angl/pdf/
Dream house, while Brian Eno
dossUK.pdf
shows Quiet club. These are spaces
for contemplation and relaxation Jason McCaffrey is an
in which the body’s positioning artist who has begun to
changes our aural and visual practice critical writing.
perceptions. Equally dependent
upon our physical interaction and
married to temporality – in having
a section removed each day of
the biennale – is Daniel Buren’s
Le temps d’une oeuvre, which takes
over an entire floor of the Musée
d’art contemporain. A beautiful
intervention in the museum’s archi-
tecture is enacted, with scaffold
poles holding large coloured sheets
of transparent Perspex.

Time is demanded of us, in order

to be completely absorbed and
immersed in these situations
and encounters. In a world of
consumerist pressures, where time
quite literally means money, our
patience and personal involvement
with art can too often be just the
cursory glance. To afford time is to
use a precious commodity, for those
of us lucky and educated enough
to be able to devote our economic
attention towards the fruits of
cultural production. Josephine
Meckseper, with The complete history
of post-contemporary art, reminds
us of failed dreams, by displaying
hippie ephemera reconstituted as
consumer items in a department-
store window, where reflected back
c Sarah Pierce
. 55 Moore Street September – October
second floor 2005
Dublin

In September 2005, the Moore

Street Lending Library (MSLL),
curated by Sandra Grozdanic,
Declan Sheehan, and Sally
Timmons, set up shop in a
second floor office on the corner
of Moore Street and Sampson’s
Lane, Dublin. Negotiated short-
term and assembled seemingly
overnight, its doors opened daily
to anyone curious enough to
climb the narrow stairs up to the 61
library’s makeshift headquarters.
Inside, a modest disposal of
equipment, file boxes, and second-
hand furniture found temporary
home adjacent to other
businesses along the street.
In these unassuming quarters,
people gathered for various
reasons over a three-week
period until the library packed
its belongings and moved out.

Moore Street lending

library

View of interior, Moore Street Lending

Library; courtesy MSLL
 MSLL arose out of an initiative that
began in 2004 by artist Katherine
Sankey in connection with Fire
Station Artists’ Studios. In 2005,
Fire Station handed the project to
Grozdanic, Sheehan, and Timmons
for curation, specifically to work
with Sankey and two other artists
by then associated with the project:
Sarah Kenny and Louisa Sloan.
Rather than simply carrying out a
process that had already begun,
the team significantly expanded
their curatorial input to position
the artists within a larger context
of projects developed through the
62 organisational framework of a
lending library. Taking into account
the ‘off-site’ nature of the remit,
the curators initiated research into
Moore Street, collecting cultural
references (from folklore to
published travelogues to theatre
and literature), as well as looking
into documents and materials
related to the district’s historical/
political past. In a relatively short
period of time, they channelled
these findings into an alternative
structure that served as a base for
commissioning individual projects.
The premise for MSLL’s commis-
sioning strand was not to invite
artists who share a thematic or
procedural basis, but whose
practices could feed into a network
of research that, while inconclusive,
is relevant to a particular place.
In this approach, MSLL advocated
processes that are not necessarily
limited to discrete methods of
production and dissemination,
such as making and exhibiting art.
In laying out this framework, the
curators invited five practitioners
to use the library within their own
practices (John Beattie, Mark Clare,
Susan Gogan, Amanda Healy, and
myself), and along with Kenny,
Sankey, and Sloan to explore
changes happening around the
Moore Street district. The work that
developed included site-specific
installations, performance-based
interventions, collaborations with
local traders, daily broadcasts,
screenings, and various open and
closed discussions. Two more
artists, Glenn Loughran and
Daniel Jewesbury, took on special
assignments as shop manager and
archivist, respectively. Loughran,
with Emer O’Boyle, also developed
a research group which met in the
library. A wider call for participation
led locally based artists and groups
to use the library’s resources and
work via the office.
Socio-economically, Moore Street
has evolved in recent years into
one of Dublin’s most conspicuous
markers of cultural integration.
In plainly economic terms, it is
fairly clear the area is undergoing
redevelopment; cranes loom over
the market, which is surrounded on
all sides by high-end chains – Lidl,
Jury’s Inn and H&M have all arrived
in the last eighteen months. What is
more subtly apparent is that Moore
Street’s cross-cultural interests are
not enough to save it. Its foreseeable
closure as a street market has
already shifted capital away from
small businesses, and inevitably
this will affect the population drawn
to the street.
So why a lending library? What is at
stake in the terms set out by MSLL?
On one level, the library provided
the curators with an alternative
strategy to commission artwork in
a community context. In considering
the basis of their job, all three were
fairly aware of the limitations
(and implications) of parachuting
artists into a ‘non-art’ community,
rounding up participants, and
then inviting the ‘art’ audience
along to experience the finished
work. This mode of operating, while
prevalent, is also tendentious in that
it validates work from ‘outside’. As
a result an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dialectic
runs through many community- and
public-art projects that elevates the
artist/ stranger whose work will
enhance, improve, cultivate, etc.
– all values that are highly suspect
when used to stake a claim.
On another level, MSLL’s backbone
of participants enacted various,
miscellaneous collectivities within
the physical space of the library
itself. These were often arbitrary
in nature and in number, depending
on who was there and who was
dropping in. As unmediated
exchanges, these changeable
networks operated through a range
of negotiations, some discursive
and others intuitive, that tapped
into impulses already at play along
Moore Street. Depending on the
day, one of several ‘members’ held
fort, greeting visitors, cataloguing
the library’s holdings, managing
screenings, workshops and
discussions, and assisting in
individual research. As the archive
evolved, its contents grew to
include everything from personal
memorabilia to family photographs
and other ‘unofficial’ records, to
various documentation related to
MSLL itself. This all-embracing and
unrestricted collection reflected
relationships borne out of the
library. Although a local community
preceded the library’s presence
on Moore Street, the curators did
not present ‘the community’ to
authenticate its activities. Like the
artists involved, the shop owners
and traders who frequented the
library came on their own, not as
representatives nor as recruits or
alibis. Some associations were
fleeting, others were fully immersed
– participation was not about
accessibility or inclusion, but about
unpredictable, less regulated bonds
between people.
With this in mind, prescriptive
notions of ‘community’ faltered
in light of a ‘local’ that was both
specific and tangential. Never quite
announced as an exhibition, MSLL
hovered between the sociability of
an event and the pragmatics of a
reading room. As such, its visibility
fluctuated during its tenure on
Moore Street, from a highly
conspicuous opening to a more
covert everyday existence. Its value
as a resource, although partly
formed through performances,
openings and other formalised
gatherings, was intrinsically tied to
the incidental, chance encounters
that filtered through its activities.
It is through these random, difficult-
to-locate involvements that MSLL
proposes an alternative. Shifting
the dynamics of ‘community’
altogether by discarding it as a
requisite for participation, the
experiences and representations of
Moore Street that arose through the
library were not easily reconcilable
or even recognisable within the
terms set out by ‘community-art’.
Furthermore, the multiple inputs
into the library’s programming,
much of which was self-directed,
opened up to interpretations of
Moore Street that were not
particularised in terms of ‘context’.
As a shopping street, it is not
confined to ‘the commercial’, and
this is where it models a kind of
resistance that can apply to other
contexts. The locations along Moore
Street where people buy and sell
are also where people meet, share
information, organise and connect –
interactions that occur beyond the
transfer of goods or services. The
library situated itself in anticipation
of this ‘surplus’ activity and its
imagined political potential.
Infused by common interests and
shared points of reference, MSLL
established patterns of ‘trade’ that,
like relational modes of presentation,
favour informality and rely upon
a certain sociality that, while not
exactly communal, affirms shared
experiences. But before subsuming
MSLL into a discourse of relational
aesthetics, it is important to
recognise that it did not conflate
‘art space’ and ‘social space’, nor
did it serve up a metaphor (the
library as social system). In more
accurate terms, MSLL describes
an approach, at times experimental
and at others straightforward, to
carry out work that involves the
analysis and interpretation of ‘site’.
In this way, the lending library
organises more along the lines of
institutional critique. Within the
confines of a curatorial endeavour,
MSLL questions systems that
determine how artistic output
circulates. For work that gains its
meaning through what is elusive or
transitory in the public realm, this is
crucial, especially as predominant
methods of commissioning continue
to base their selections on what is
tangible or ‘deliverable’ through
these practices.
An important issue arises here
concerning the relationship
between for-profit and non-profit
work, and paid and unpaid labour. In
establishing the library, the curators
asserted its status as a place
where noncommercial transactions
would take place. With an acute
understanding of the conditions
that inscribe MSLL in a context of
‘art’, Grozdanic, Sheehan, and
Timmons located the library as a
resource, a tactical move curatorially.
As a library, its role is more akin to
advocacy and less easily read
through transferable goods or
quantifiable labour. However, it is
nonetheless implicated by very real
economics. For as much as the
library was built on cooperative
action, solidarity, and shared
ownership, it risks mythologizing
these values at the expense of
a disenfranchised workforce. If
institutional critique has taught us
anything, it is that our services,
while often unpaid (and consistently
underpaid), are not free.
MSLL’s transience leaves it
somewhat precarious. Where it will
go, who will look after it, and what
will endure of its relationships is
up in the air. But these difficulties
are perhaps what make it a radical
practice. Without promising
answers, MSLL tries a solution. It
exacts meaning through contingent,
shifting combinations of people,
and exists strategically through
its own institution and critical
intervention. While writing this
review, it has occurred to me that
my proximity risks objectivity and
that this is where MSLL emerges.
Everything is situated. We enter at 63
a particular juncture, closer to what
Irit Rogoff terms ‘criticality’:
It seems to me that within the
space of a relatively short period
we have been able to move from
criticism to critique to what I am
calling at present criticality. That is
that we have moved from criticism,
which is a form of exercising
judgment according to a consensus
of values, to critique which is
examining the underlying assump-
tions that might allow something
to appear as a convincing logic, to
criticality which is operating from
an uncertain ground of actual
embededness.1
The only way to really know
MSLL is by giving up our status
on the outside and becoming part
of a conditional we who are of
a particular moment. Here, the
divisions, imagined or not, that
elevate art and reify our participation
come down to earth. People come
and go, conversations take place,
business happens...
1 In a talk at Project, Dublin 2002
Sarah Pierce lives in Dublin where
she organises the Metropolitan
Complex; she is currently a Research
Associate in Curating and
Documentation at Interface, Belfast.
c Gavin Murphy
. Galway Arts Centre September – October
Galway 2005

64

alan phelan
gb and the
western world
Del Boy and Rodney’s exasperated
call of “Gordon Bennett!” has taken
the name into popular parlance.
Yet few are aware of James Gordon-
Bennett Junior’s contribution to our
modern world. His notoriety as a
flamboyant playboy on the New York
scene was sealed when he arrived
late and very drunk to a party hosted
by his prospective in-laws, only
to urinate in their fireplace before
shocked guests. His management
of the New York tribune also
revealed his nose for a sensational
scoop. He funded various sporting
competitions and expeditions so
as to set up inside stories and
exclusives for the newspaper.
These included Stanley’s search for
Dr Livingstone, De Long’s ill-fated
Arctic journey (they all starved),
and the Gordon-Bennett Motor
Car Racing Trails. There are still
yachting and ballooning competi-
tions named after him. Indeed, in
terms of his legacy, few people in
this world can claim to have islands
in Siberia named after them.
Alan Phelan’s exhibition centres
on Gordon-Bennett’s legacy. Many
pieces draw on various aspects
of Gordon-Bennett’s activities.
Fireplace, for example, is a mock-up
of a grand fireplace made from wood
and photocopied paper complete
with a central reproduction of a
urine stain on paper. The Headline
drawings replicate newspaper
headlines between 1871 and 1903
that refer both to major world
events and to those sponsored by
Gordon-Bennett.
With such a colourful figure, there
is always the risk that the story
will overwhelm anything that can
be made of it. This appears to be
the point on which the work is to
be evaluated, in the sense that it is
necessary to discern how Phelan
works Gordon-Bennett’s legacy as
a matter of making art.
Certainly, a humour and irony mark of many of these pieces shrouds the
Fireplace. The mock-up recalls fact that they ride the waves of a
miniature model kits of architectural serious art game. And like Gordon-
structures that can be bought in Bennett, Phelan knows how to play
museum shops. The walls of the the game well for all its worth.
gallery space have various cartoon
characters peeing, as if acknowl-
edging how Gordon-Bennett’s
irreverent transgression of social
etiquette can be accepted if not
admired for its boyish audacity.
The video installation, Gordon
Bennett show & shine sound off,
is also marked by a curious
distancing, as it records a gathering
of modified-car enthusiasts for
Gavin Murphy is a lecturer in 65
an organized awards ceremony. Art History and Critical Theory
The crowd partakes in the peculiarly at Galway-Mayo Institute of
male activity of gazing into car Technology
engines and admiring the sounds
(opposite)
of gigantic subwoofers filling the Alan Phelan
boots of the Honda Civics. The Headline drawing, 2004
miniature five-way speakers used ink on tracing paper
to relay the accompanying dance 20 x 29cm
courtesy mother’s tankstation
soundtrack throughout the exhibition
space echo their preoccupations.
If it is common to smirk at such
activities, smugness is tempered
by the obvious parallels with the
boy-racer Gordon-Bennett, and by
Phelan’s involvement in organizing
the awards ceremony. From this it
can be acknowledged how such
activities are only one symptom of
a society fuelled by the love of
speed, technology, competition and
sensation. Moreover, the fact that
these preoccupations are often as
much a feature of contemporary art
as of other areas of cultural activity
should not be lost on the gallery
viewers.
The parallel between Phelan’s work
and Gordon-Bennett’s legacy is
grounded in an admiration of the
playboy in his pursuit of pleasure.
The show is constantly underscored
by the playful quality of its making
and takes delight in an ironic
engagement with boyish stuff. It is
also coloured by the notion that
Gordon-Bennett’s gung-ho spirit
managed to get things done despite
his destructive hedonistic drive.
In this sense, the apparent flippancy
c Declan Sheehan
. Void October – November
Derry 2005

66

Anne Tallentire
Drift: Diagram VII Anne Tallentire
Drift: Diagram VII, 2005
DVD stills
courtesy Void
Anne Tallentire’s Drift: Diagram
VII prompted a very particular,
yet informal association of ideas
– centred initially around
consideration of the historic place
and function of the Gastarbeiter1,
that most invisible of workers in the
capitals of the West. Drift: Diagram
VII, in its representation of the
intangible workers (office cleaners,
street-sweepers, etc) in London’s
financial district, makes legible
the relation, the surreptitious chain
of cause and effect, that exists
between work and visibility in the
world’s financial centres. The
sequences in the piece’s seven
projected DVDs each feature short
instances of workers ‘making a
living’: the sequences feature only
basic actions: workers sitting,
wiping a cloth, moving, sweeping.
With the work’s absence of
noteworthy events, or visual
evidence of any importance, it is
a continuation of Tallentire’s
persistent imperative to lessness.
Drift: Diagram VII features instances
that are the least marked, the least
evident: small anonymous actions,
markedly devoid of any significance.
The nondescript functions as
the over-arching sign within Drift:
Diagram VII, acting as an all-
pervasive aura uniting the seven
projections of instances of ‘making
a living’.
Strangely, we now live in a world
where the Gastarbeiter is officially
deemed not to exist. In the official
words of German national policy,
outlined on the websites of its
embassies, “the term (‘Gastarbeiter’)
is now considered outdated. Many
foreign workers remain in Germany
for years, even generations; they
are no longer ‘guests’ but long-term
residents.”2 One could imagine that
this new official depiction of cultural
and economic realities would be
indicative of an improved presence
for the place of the migrant worker
in Western capitals such as Berlin,
Paris, or London. But one need only
to move one’s thoughts away from
the 1970s situation of the young
Moroccan Gastarbeiter Ali in
Fassbinder’s Fear eats the soul,
to the contemporary works of
documentarist Sorious Samura3, to
learn that the function and position
of migrant workers is as highly
wrought as ever. The real-world
effacement of these intangible
workers (office cleaners, street-
sweepers, etc) in London’s financial
district is aimed at occluding the
highly politicised revelations
(of issues of history, colonialism,
and identity that have been implicit
in previous work by Tallentire) that
consideration of their personal
histories would raise. The installation
of Drift: Diagram VII at Void, with
three relatively low projected
sequences butted at corners of one
gallery space, and three projected
sequences partially occluded by
gallery pillars in the other gallery
space, prompted considerations of
relations within urban space, of
issues of visibility and recognition.
London’s financial district is a
spectacular site, in Debord’s sense
of the term: a site where capital has
become a spectacle of architecture
and authority, where finance enacts
absolute control over production
and perception: choosing and
designating elements within it as
visible or invisible. Drift: Diagram VII
is, amongst many other things, a
resonant examination of that process.
1 The German term for foreign
workers
67
2 From: www.germany-
info.org/relaunch/
info/facts/facts/questions_en
/economicsystem/working8.
html
What are “Gastarbeiter”?
“Gastarbeiter” are guest
workers or foreign workers.
The term is now considered
outdated. Many foreign work-
ers remain in Germany for
years, even generations; they
are no longer “guests” but
long-term residents. Foreign
workers, mostly from
Mediterranean countries,
were actively recruited by the
Federal Republic during the
1960s and 70s in response to
labor shortages. At the end of
1994, about 2.1 million for-
eigners were employed in
western Germany. Turks, citi-
zens of the republics of for-
mer Yugoslavia, Greeks and
Italians make up the largest
individual groups in the for-
eign work force. There are far
fewer foreign workers in
eastern Germany, about
12,000 in 1992. Most foreign
workers in the east are
Vietnamese.
3 See works such as Exodus,
2000.
Declan Sheehan is Director
of Context Galleries, Derry.
c Slavka Sverakova
. Context Galleries October – November
Derry 2005

Damaged collateral:
68

Inner city gothic and

the suburban sublime

Sean Lynch
Social sculpture, 2004
photographic print
Greg McCartney selected the
‘gothic’ and the ‘sublime’ for their
correspondences to contemporary
urban cultures. The morbid, dark
‘gothic’ has nothing to do with his
reference in the press release to
Vasari, who aimed at a distinction
between those who did and did
not know antiquity. Instead, it has
everything to do with the eighteenth-
century novel and the gothic
elements in the baroque style.
The maze-like path for the display
of the exhibits on the partitioning
stud walls, one carrying a CCTV
camera, forged an atmosphere
of entrapment, of metaphorical
imprisonment, and not just because
of the curatorial control.
The sublime comes in different
modes and kinds. It is one of
the four ubiquitous aesthetic
categories; it is multifarious and
centrally tied to emotions. Where
Edmund Burke speaks of pain being
stronger than pleasure, and death
stronger than pain, in order to
explain the power of the sublime,
he also emphasises the necessary
delight obtained by a “certain
distance.” Immanuel Kant also
thinks of a distance; the delight in
his view is obtained because of the
inadequacy of imagination, aiming
at presenting the unpresentable,
in relation to reason. The sublime
is a result of a subjective encounter
with either an absolute greatness,
or an absolute menace. Jean-
François Lyotard ponders how it is
possible to make visible that which
is impossible to see. He postulates
that the arts should devote
themselves to combinations which
are astonishing, unusual, shocking
even.
The daylight life of Derry is
dislocated by night in long
exposures of streets that appear
depopulated. Anyone walking past
Denzil Browne’s camera was
moving too fast to be recorded:
“They are there; it’s just that you
can’t see them.” Even the pretty
green and orange colours exhale
the dangers of a ‘2am weekend
scenario’. Danger of another kind,
of watching violent video games,
permeates the five images of
Conditioned, 2003, by George
Bolster. The uncanny use of a game
console as part of the face, covering
the eyes, was inspired by looking
for a Christmas present for a boy
whose desire was to watch a
particular video game – a re-enacted
massacre. The paradox between
the ‘angelic’ and ‘satanic’
connects the image to the sublime,
particularly as we read over the
boy’s shoulder an SMS: “u r dead
aftr skool u bstrd.”
Gabbling can be regarded as a way
of achieving the sublime in literature.
I find a parallel in the fast spin of
fragments of a city environment in
Theresa Nanigian’s Threshold, 2004.
In Peripherie,1997 – 2004, animated
photographs taken during her
residency in Weimar by Amanda
Dunsmore represent a slow decay
of a site used, in turn, by the Nazis,
the Soviet Army, and the communist
regime. The power base is literary
littered with litter.
The comic sublime sounds to
me like a contradiction in terms;
however, it has appeared in
literature, before Ruth Rogers
introduced it here. Humour
permeates a set of advertisements
for fruit, food and furniture with
white Tippex drawings of eyes
and mouths. The correcting fluid
changes the meaning – the
photographed objects look like
humans caught in the dramatic
events, eg in Rush hour bomb
pomegranates become human
faces piled up high. Politics,
control, and the rituals of a city take
on an apocalyptic air in all three
photographs, Social sculpture, 2005,
by Sean Lynch. The crowd-control
barriers are stacked up for
potential use. The people ignore the
silent threat.
Departing from the expected,
Fiona Larkin placed a gift-wrapped
parcel on the pavements of Belfast.
The resulting photographs,
The kindness of strangers, 2005,
recorded the ensuing encounters.
After printing, the parcel in the
image was covered by a larger
cut-out of wrapping paper. The
handmade addition to a lens-based
medium unsettles the norm. The
mismatch between the gaze of the
persons and the now-larger object
successfully forges the existential
sublime.
Another powerful take on the 69
uncanny I find in the paintings by
James Lumsden. Two hues in
subtle tonal changes present little
circles, like lights in the darkness,
in the polyptych Fascination.
He explains that they are fascia.
These were the bundles of –
originally – flogging rods, later
torches, symbols of Italian fascism.
The oscillation between background
knowledge and perception supports
both Burke and Lyotard, on the
relationship of the verbal and
the visual, and the sublime and
abstraction. Nevertheless, Revelation,
an abstract ode to light and
imagination, is more mesmerising.
Slavka Sverakova is a freelance
writer on visual art.
c Will Pollard
. Solomon R. Guggenheim November 2005
Museum
New York

Marina Abramovic
70

Seven easy pieces

Abramovic has always used written
directions as ‘manuscripts’ for her
own performances. Seven easy
pieces problematized this notion,
as five of the pieces were renditions
of performances by other artists,
using their own directions and
documentation of the work. In the
example of Bruce Nauman’s Body
pressure, 1974, she used a large
sheet of thick glass on which to
press her body. In the original,
sheets of paper were placed in the
gallery with a set of instructions for
the viewer to carry out. Abramovic
recorded the original directions
and played them while she carried
out the actions. While becoming a
profound and moving performance
on the relationship between self
and other, and how desire functions
as the locus of communion between
the two, the piece could have
functioned more effectively. I felt
the need to carry out the actions
myself, though this was frustrated
by the fact that Abramovic had
made the piece into a solo
performance work, in contrast to
the original.
In her performance of Vito Acconci’s
Seedbed, 1972, the architect-
designed round stage, had been
transformed into a platform with
high sides and a small staircase
for the audience to ascend. The
platform accentuated the formal
characteristics of the Guggenheim
Museum; from the top of the
museum’s rotunda, the stage
looked like a cross-section of a
shell, or an egg with the sperm’s
tail protruding. This piece centred
on the connective capacity of
desire and how our fantasies of the
other are driven and fuelled by the
imagination. Abramovic talked of
her fantasies about the audience
above while masturbating. Initially,
her voice was near inaudible until
the speaker that was situated on
the stage was replaced. In obvious
contrast to the original, semen was
not produced, but rather the seed
became the intimacy, the power
and vulnerability of the relationship
between the visible and the invisible.
In VALIE EXPORT’S ACTION
PANTS: genital panic, 1969, the
stage contained two wooden chairs.
Abramovic wore a black leather
biker jacket and black jeans with
the crotch section cut out. In her
hands she held an M16 rifle. She
sat on one chair with her right leg
turned out and her left foot on the
slat of the other chair. She pointed
the rifle at the space in the empty
chair, holding the invisible presence
implicated by the chair to ransom.
Abramovic embodied in this piece
both power and fragility; the image
was made all the more potent
and complex by the fact that it was
performed on Veterans Day.
The next night Abramovic
performed Gina Pane’s piece
The conditioning, first of three
phases in self-portrait(s), 1973.
Abramovic lay face to the ceiling,
about ten inches over fifteen
burning candles, only getting off her
roughly welded steel rectangular
frame to replenish the candles.
She wore a grey flame-resistant
boiler suit. Abramovic was in visible
discomfort while renewing the
candles, but while lying on the
frame, a profound serenity was
visible on her face. The image was
intensely moving; we as an audience
became implicated in the action;
it was if we bore some of her pain
and responsibility for that pain. It
appeared as though the heat or light
was holding Abramovic aloft; or
that she was levitating above the
candles, even with the immediate
solidity and weightiness of the steel
frame. The frame became a
coffin-like object containing the life
that bore Abramovic’s body. While
getting back onto the frame the
third time a small section of her
hair caught fire and was quickly
extinguished by herself.
For Joseph Beuys’ How to explain
pictures to a dead hare, 1965, the
stage contained three blackboards
on easels and four different-sized
blackboards on the stage floor.
Abramovic climbed onto the stage
and changed her black boots, which
she wore for all the performances,
for a pair of old brown boots.
While the other performances were
renditions of others frameworks
and parameters, this piece had a
much looser structure, and you
could see Abramovic playing with
and developing the relationships
between the objects in the moment;
this felt like it was as refreshing
for her as it was for the audience.
The piece was characterised by 71
a certain humour; at one stage,
Abramovic put the hare’s ears
into her mouth and moved the
hare’s legs as she crawled around
the stage.
The performances provided a
multifaceted view of Abramovic’s
practice. The performances became
studies, not just in the canon of
performance history, but also into
the Guggenheim as both a site and
context. Through the performances,
whilst continuing her investigation
into self and other, Abramovic
subtly but successfully interrogated
the museum as establishment,
addressing the complex and ongoing
relationship between performance
and fine art.
Will Pollard is an artist and writer
based in Belfast.
(opposite)
Marina Abramovic performing Joseph
Beuys’ How to explain pictures to a
dead hare, 1965
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
on November 13, 2005
photo Kathryn Carr; © and courtesy
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York
c Seán Kissane
. The Concourse November 2005
Dún Laoghaire

72
Fiona Mulholland
For every action…

Fiona Mulholland
For every action…, 2005
installation shot
courtesy the artist
Fiona Mulholland is an artist
whose sculptures explore the
fragility of the human condition.
An earlier public art commission,
Commemorative tower to the
hobblers, 2002, sited in Dún
Laoghaire Harbour, expressed
through the use of stacked
life-jackets, cast in bronze, the
vulnerability of the human body
in the face of the power of the
forces of nature and the sea.
Her recent solo exhibition, For
every action …, rather than dealing
directly with the body, considered
the mind, examining contemporary
issues such as stress, mental
health and social expectations,
through the use of sound work and
sculpture. The work was made
largely in response to an article in
The Economist magazine – The
Economist Intelligence Unit’s quality
of life index – which placed Ireland
first in a list of the best places in
the world to live. Mulholland set
about testing this hypothesis by
interviewing thirty Dubliners and
posing three questions: What
would you do if you won the Lotto?
What is success? What causes you
stress? The resulting responses
were edited into three forty-minute
sound works, which were accessible
from three listening points placed
at different points around the
gallery, while throughout the space
the loud beating of a metronome,
counting time, could be heard.
The sound works were accompanied
by two large sculptures. The first
of these was an industrial reel of
newsprint, spooled onto the floor,
on which was printed the entire
text from the Quality of life index.
The second sculpture was a giant
Newton’s cradle, constructed from
stainless steel, which dominated
the gallery space.
The sheer size and shininess of
Mulholland’s cradle gave it a
Koonsian, post-Pop quality, and
these same features allowed it
to successfully command the
notoriously difficult space of Dún (dwarfing them) suggests a
Laoghaire Concourse. Newton’s positing by the artist that our
cradle demonstrates his third law insistence on economic success
of motion: “for every action, there has been, and continues to be,
is an equal and opposite reaction.” detrimental to our well-being.
Mulholland borrows the title of During the run of Mulholland’s
her exhibition from Newton and exhibition, Ombudsman Emily
for these works applies scientific O’Reilly described contemporary
formulae to her artistic process Ireland in the following terms:
– quantifying the quality of life of “We drink too much, we are loutish,
her peers through their responses we’ve forgotten the joy of delayed
to her questionnaire. Many artists gratification and we have abandoned
make use of questionnaires in their the church. What Has Happened
practice, notably Richard Humann to Us?”1
and Tobias Rehberger, but while
Rehberger uses them as clues to Mulholland’s exhibition proposes
future production, Mulholland two theoretical frameworks – 73
presented the responses directly a quantitative survey of happiness
to her audience – the results make or a qualitative survey of economic
for compelling listening. Many of success – which is a more troubling
the responses were disappointingly scenario? This seems to be the
pedantic, some were pure fantasy, question posed by Mulholland –
but somewhere in between, deeply can you write an economic formula
held frustrations and worries were for happiness or can we quote the
revealed: health, debt, stress, work, inimitable Gordon Gekko, “Greed
love, relationships, pregnancy is good”2?
(or lack of), weight, panic attacks…
the list goes on. The answers were 1 Emily O’Reilly, The Irish Times,
9 November 2005
surprisingly frank, having a quality
2 Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 20th Century
akin to a Big brother confessional, Fox, 1987
and were similarly engaging.
Newton’s cradle is also known as Seán Kissane is Curator of
an ‘executive pacifier’, and Exhibitions at the Irish Museum
unsurprisingly the majority of of Modern Art, Dublin.
respondents were stressed by their
working lives. While our GDP
(per person) is now ranked fourth
in the world, the equal and opposite
reaction, revealed by Mulholland,
is that people are increasingly
losing time to their careers to the
detriment of their personal lives
– in the words of one of her
respondents, “Money is time, and
time is all we’ve got.”
Mulholland’s enquiries were gentle
and nondirective. Her own opinions
were not available to her audience
– but the presence of the giant
Newton’s cradle – that executive toy
beloved of Gordon Gekko types
everywhere, perhaps indicated her
position on the matter. The size of
the sculpture and its relation to the
other objects in the installation
c Anthony Downey
. Kerlin Gallery November – December
Dublin 2005

74

Paul Seawright
Invisible cities
Better known for his stark images
of the peripheral, urban landscape
of Northern Ireland, Paul Seawright
has recently turned his forensic
gaze towards Africa and the
sprawling ‘invisible’ cities that exist
outside of Lagos, Johannesburg,
Lusaka and Addis Ababa – the
latter being amongst the fastest
growing metropolises in the world.
Although the geographical focus
of Seawright’s images may have
shifted, the broader subject has
not: these locations are also the
proverbial periphery to that which
has often been peripheral to
Western imaginations in the first
place, namely Africa. Seawright,
moreover, chooses to show not just
peripheral ‘invisible’ cities but the
actual periphery of these borderline
spaces. In Dolphin Estate, 2005, a
motorway cuts across the outskirts
of a city and delineates not only
the city’s edge but the veritable
no-man’s-land that occupies those
edges. In Untitled (pylon), 2005, an
electricity mast rises up from what
would appear to be the absolute
rim of an already fringe settlement,
its presence incongruous (and yet
encouraging) against the low-lying,
makeshift huts that nestle in its lee.
outside history and therefore
condemned to exist beyond the
spaces of modernity. I would want,
on the strength of the images
presented here, to suggest the
former and propose that Seawright
is effectively documenting a series
of interstitial places and their
inhabitants. However, to argue as
much largely depends upon how we
read our own relationship to these
photographs: is our anxiety at
seeing images of relative bleakness
and atrophied austerity just another
indication of our (ultimately
detached) liberal anxiety about
Anthony Downey is a PhD 75
Africa and its poor? And if so, has candidate at Goldsmiths
Seawright managed to replicate College, London and the
precisely the nebulous sense of Programme Director of
that anxiety in these photographs? the M.A. in Contemporary
The obdurate refusal to confront Art at Sothebys Insitute
the condition of Africa is here London.
interwoven with the scopic drive (opposite)
that compels us, voyeuristically, to Paul Seawright
do precisely that: to look at that Untitled (woman), 2005
lightjet print on Fuji crystal paper
which is consistently over-looked, reverse mounted on diasec,
so to speak, and that which exists framed, edition of six
on the periphery of our (highly 127 x 152.4cm
courtesy Kerlin Gallery
selective) vision.

These resolutely ‘outside’ spaces

are juxtaposed with sombre interiors
where individuals go about their
business in a seemingly lethargic
manner; and these large-scale
photographs – whether they be of
the verge of a motorway or of a
mother and child waiting in what
appears to be a doctor’s waiting
room – consistently evoke an abiding
sense of ennui and listlessness.
Nothing in these images appears
to be moving – nor does anything
seem to be developing. And herein
lies an immanent conceptual snare
that needs to be addressed: is
Seawright documenting the limbo-
like existence of these ‘invisible’
cities or is he resuscitating the old
colonial libels about the indolent
African who remains forever
c Damien Duffy
. Void November – December
Derry 2005

Simon Starling
76

C.A.M.
Curatorial foresight or sheer luck,
Void clearly staged a coup in
hosting C. A. M. by Simon Starling.
The exhibition coincided with his
nomination and subsequent winning
of the 2005 Turner Prize. A new
work, C. A. M. Crassulacaen Acid
Metabolism, names the process
where by cacti reduce water loss
by taking in CO2 at night, enabling
their survival in the harsher daytime
desert climate.
The exhibition consists of several
verdigris bronze cacti sculptures
that are in fact radiators. They are
arranged in a cluster in Gallery
One, and neatly negotiated by
copper piping which leads to a
central-heating unit in Gallery Two.
This Spartan arrangement suitably
evokes the desert, warmed by the
cacti, albeit to not quite desert
aridity. A darkened Gallery Two
holds all the elements of production.
A large screen displays a film of
the casting and colouring of the
radiators; as the film ends a single
spotlight illuminates the heating
unit in a corner of the gallery,
thus succinctly closing the circuit of
production and display.
The work was inspired by two
accounts of marketable exchange
out of nothing. One account is
from the self-explanatory title of
a previous photographic work:
The Swiss by night buy cheap rate
electricity from their neighbours
which they use to pump water into
holding reservoirs. By day they
use the stored water to generate
hydroelectric power which they sell
back to their neighbours at peak
rate prices.
Similarly the artist cites a story of
South African cable thieves, who
steal miles of copper overhead
cables. Recasting the stolen metal
as pots, they sell these as scrap
in neighbouring countries. Large
quantities of the scrap are purchased
by the cable companies only to be
made into cables.
Both are ironic accounts of interna-
tional exchange, one more legal supplanted the now-closed Orchard
yet no more perverse than the other. Gallery, shut down by the city
The documented manufacture council’s cutting capital expenditure.
screened in Gallery Two is an The Orchard was the one gallery in
oblique nod to Starling’s interest the ‘UK’ whose director, Declan
in the Arts and Crafts movement, McGonagle, was nominated for the
in its demonstration of the acquired Turner Prize. The nomination was
skills called for in the casting and for staging seminal exhibitions,
colouring of the sculptures. It is such as one in the mid-eighties
these finely researched narratives on Conceptual Art working with
and specific skill-acquisition that landscape and journey, hosting the
are distinctive features of Starling’s likes Richard Long and Lawrence
work. The inverted mimetic of the Weiner…
heat exchange extends to grander
eccentricities which are on display Congratulations to Simon Starling
at Tate Britain – for example, and all at Void.
Tabernas desert run, 2004, comprises 77
an improvised electric bicycle and
an accompanying watercolour of
a cactus made with the aid of the
Damien Duffy is an artist.
bicycle’s only waste product, H2O;
or Shed boat shed, 2005, which does (opposite)
what it says on the tin, so to speak. Simon Starling
(It is a perfect double inversion, C. A. M. Crassulacaen Acid Metabolism
2005
the work making what disappears installation shot, courtesy Void
into the object: shed into boat,
journey down river, boat into shed.
It mimics a kind of ergonomic
efficiency, mercurial in its poetics.
The lineage of these landscape
traversals could be traced back to
earlier English conceptualists such
as Richard Long and Andy
Goldsworthy. However, the play of
inversions of productivity and
redundancies that shape Starling’s
work marks the paradigm shift
from Long et al to a focus which is
more sensitive to ecologies and
economies, and the imprint of
capital. Starling’s elliptical circuits
and reconfigurations of technologies
and nature deliberately counter
the velocities and trajectories of
Modernity.)
Starling says he is enchanted by
Lawrence Weiner’s idea that an
artist is someone who, unhappy
with the relationship between
people and things, seeks to change
that relationship.
It is somewhat ironic that Void
had the curatorial vision to show
Starling. The artist-run space has
c Eimear McKeith
. Green on Red Gallery November – December
Dublin 2005

Paul Doran
78

Gislebertus told
me
Gislebertus told me marks a
definitive development in Paul
Doran’s artistic practice, revealing
a conceptually rigorous exploration
of the act, meaning and history of
painting. The exhibition comprises
pared-down, demanding works
that are a notable departure from
the luscious colours and bravado
flourishes of paint which he had
become associated with.
This new series of paintings
creates a dialogue between form
and content, between surface
pattern and spatial articulation,
between complex, unresolved
figurative elements and the vibrancy
and variety of the brushstrokes.
The title of the exhibition,
Gislebertus told me, is a bold
invocation of a twelfth-century
sculptor, acknowledging Doran’s
debt to the emotive and spatial
qualities of Gislebertus’ carvings
on Autun Cathedral and referring
to his investigation of the origins
of painting. Gislebertus’ legacy
infuses these works, as does the
influence of fourteenth-century
Sienese painting. This is evident in
the new, figurative elements in his
work, and in his use of fleshy pinks,
muddy browns and stony greys.
It is also reflected in the sparse
hang of the exhibition, which gives
it a taut balance. From a body of
work of fourteen paintings, only
seven are on display. The paintings
are isolated on the walls, giving
them a precious, almost devotional
quality. But while they have enough
space to be contemplated on their
own, the manner in which they
are displayed also encourages the
discovery of relationships between
the works, particularly as some are
busy and complex, while others are
drastically simplified and distilled.
Doran’s previous works, although
non-representational, had titles
with strong associative qualities.
These paintings, however, are
untitled; thus they can be seen as
a group, and the evocative title mind which, in many ways,
of the exhibition is constantly to encapsulates what Doran is
the fore. attempting to achieve: “To find
form that accommodates the mess,
The paintings are complex and that is the task of the artist.”
contradictory on a number of levels,
with the representational elements
forming a dialogue with the
materiality of the surface. Basic
architectural structures establish
a sense of recession, but they
are unresolved and incomplete.
They are juxtaposed with organic,
amoeboid shapes that, in some
cases, have been sliced from another
location and placed onto the
Eimear McKeith is visual 79
surface of the paintings – a process
arts critic for the Sunday
which involves both violence and Tribune.
delicacy. Shapes have also been cut
out of the surface, revealing layers (opposite)
of paint underneath. Untitled, 2005
oil on linen over board
36 x 41cm
There is deliberate incongruity in courtesy Green on Red Gallery
the articulation of space, where
forms seem to flatten into pattern
and the recessional aspects vie
with the surface qualities of the
paint. Although the build-up of paint
may seem sparse in comparison
with the heavy encrustations of his
previous work, the use of collaged
elements and the variety of the
brushstrokes create rich, sculptural
surfaces that compete with the
figurative aspects of the works.
These paintings reveal a striking
departure for Doran; they are
almost an act of exorcism, with
a new, stark quality that seems
to reject the visually attractive,
seductive excesses of his earlier
paintings. But there is also a sense
that this is only one stepping stone
in a continuing exploration, and
that other significant developments
can be expected from Doran in
the future.
Doran may have returned to the
origins of Western painting for this
body of work, but a hint of anxiety
and a pervasive sense of violence,
confusion and disjuncture express
a distinctly contemporary condition.
A quote from Beckett comes to
c Gemma Tipton
. Royal Hibernian Academy November 2005 –
Dublin January 2006

80
liam o’callaghan
chaos and dreams yet to
come
The idea of “chaos and dreams yet
to come” describes the space
between the ugliness that can give
rise to beauty, and the perception of
beauty itself. This interval is hectic
with possibilities, pregnant with
potential for the marvellous, and yet
it is also a fragile space, held with
a delicate balance from slipping
back to disorder and losing beauty’s
possibility altogether. Liam
O’Callaghan’s exhibition at the RHA
turns on this moment of balance,
and adds an edge to the enquiry
that lifts the exhibition beyond a
simple essay in pop philosophy.
One of five works in the exhibition,
Chaos and dreams yet to come is
a massive wall projection of a
gorgeous crystalline world; glittering
diamonds, silver shards, fractured
slivers of icy blue. That this beauty
is not only predicated on ugliness
and disorder, but is also illusory,
transitory, is underlined by the
physical nature of the apparatus
that creates it. Beneath the beautiful
vista lies a bed of broken wing
mirrors, the piled up wreckage of
crashed, destroyed cars, shattered
in accidents or wrenched from
useless rusting vehicles. Projectors,
jerry-rigged with string and balanced
on old, half-broken stools pile up,
shine light on the waste-heap which
reflects into the beauty above. It is
Plato’s cave in reverse, the reflection
coming not from an object more
perfect, more beautiful, but one
wrought from chaos. Looking down
again, however, you start to wonder
whether there is beauty too in the
broken mirrors, something beyond
their initial repulsion.
This theme is drawn out too in Time
finds you a good place to fall. Two
board-walls are looped with wires,
plug boards, extension cables.
Venturing to the other side, the pay
off is a mesmerising haze of tiny
lights, diffused with gauze, softly
shining like hundreds of little gentle
suns. (Comparisons with Andrew
Kearney’s works here rest on
shared media, rather than the thesis
of the works.) Why do we connect
beauty and ugliness so powerfully?
Why is it that we sometimes cannot
tell which it is we are looking at?
The age-old pairing of the two, and
the confluence of both (the mess
of wiring behind the beauty of the
lights, the guts and intestines behind
a beautiful body, the imperfection
that counterpoints perfection), may
in fact come from psychological
rather than religious or philosophical
origins. The same area of the brain
(the orbitofrontal cortex) responds
to both the beautiful and the
ugly. Exactly the same cells fire in
response, but fire more strongly
at the beautiful. Both beauty and
ugliness also stimulate the motor
cortex, creating that well-known
physical response to each. This
implies that those drawn to ugliness
are responding pathopsychologically,
rather than through moral or
aesthetic aberration.
Whatever its origins, beauty invites
and provokes contemplation, and
yet it is often a hidden and private
thing. Sometimes you have to know
how to look, and look closely and
well, in order to find it.
O’Callaghan’s contribution to last
year’s The Institute of Potential,
Art and Failure at Carlow RTC
(Reviewed Circa112) showed
the minute and often unpleasant
detritus of life (scrapings of skin,
food scraps, dust) turned into
glowing jewels when viewed through
the magical eye of the artist’s
carefully placed slide viewers.
At the RHA Gallery, beauty is a
secretive moment of joy in an
otherwise ordinary day. Another day
with song (3.25 pm) has another
‘Scrapheap Challenge’ of a projector
rigged up to show a grainy film
on which a middle-aged woman in
a typical suburban house dances
with the happy abandon usually
shown only by those who consider
themselves to be unobserved
(or who are drunk). Sensor activated,
and depending on when you went
to view the exhibition, sometimes
the woman is an exhibitionist,
beginning her routine as you enter
the gallery, but more poignantly she
is sometimes shy, the flickering of
the screen and movement of the
looped film coming to a halt as you
move around to see the screen,
leaving only an unsatisfying
glimpse of a moment destroyed by
one’s own desire to witness it.
Other works in the exhibition seem
like marginalia, discursive commen-
tary on the larger themes in the two 81
main events (Chaos and dreams yet
to come, and Time finds you a good
place to fall). The delicate balance
between the states of order and
chaos is physically referenced in
needs lean to each other, wooden
planks leaning like lurching,
staggering skyscrapers, and held up
by just two strategically placed
glass jars. Meanwhile, See change
adumbrates the projection in
Chaos… with the shape of a pile of
boxes (cardboard sketches for
Rachel Whiteread’s ongoing
Embankment perhaps) becoming a
city skyline when outlined by the
artist, enlarged on the wall beyond.
Following the bombast of Tristin
Lowe, and the deliberately chic
obscurantism of Robert Gober in
the RHA’s accompanying exhibitions,
Liam O’Callaghan’s work provides
moments of intensely welcome,
thought-provoking beauty.
Gemma Tipton is a writer and
critic on art and architecture
based in Dublin.
(opposite) Liam O’Callaghan
Chaos and dreams yet to come
2005
installation shot
courtesy the artist
c Tim Maul
. Dia Art Foundation launched December
New York 2005
www.diacenter.org/cross

Dorothy Cross
82

Foxglove,
digitalis purpurea
Dorothy Cross
Foxglove, digitalis purpurea
2005
screengrab from
www.diacenter.org/cross
Beautiful to the eye, but dangerous
to the touch, the flower known
as the foxglove grows throughout
western Europe and out the front
door of artist Dorothy Cross’s Co.
Galway studio. While poisonous, the
plant when properly administered
can alleviate a number of symptoms,
including delirium, a condition that
lurks closely beneath the surface
of this, Cross’s first web project.
Entitled Foxglove, digitalis purpurea,
it was commissioned by the Dia Art
Foundation and is hosted on their
website www.diacenter.org/cross.
Unlike some artist’s web projects,
that can be peripheral curiosities,
Foxglove makes a strong contribution
to a body of work of such breadth,
that one wonders if Cross doesn’t
have a team of art-world elves
locked away somewhere in constant
production.
Refreshingly low-tech, Foxglove,
is constructed with what the artist
has immediately at hand; in this
case, local flora and a neighbor’s
daughter. Stepping out of a period
postcard, she is the star of the
show, narrating an audio track and
appearing in the circularly cropped
photographs playing, and not always
safely, with the purple, bell-shaped
flowers. After an introductory
sequence including the girl, the
flower, and enlarged details of the
plant, we may move the cursor over
two centered images with various
consequences. Our mouse-pad
‘play’ may dissolve one image or
enlarge another; or introduce brief,
randomly programmed film loops
of either the girl or the flower. Every
image brought up on the screen
eventually dissolves into a dark
blue tint, for ‘seeing blue’ is a side
effect of ingesting these beautiful
blossoms. While interacting with
the piece, one ‘blue’ that surfaced
from my memory was Derek
Jarman’s elegiac 1993 film, Blue.
The unsettling hold Foxglove has
on us issues from a generic, sunny
garden and the seemingly innocent
actions of a little girl. In the past, this
space has allowed for encounters
with timepiece-carrying rabbits or
the participation in hoaxes that
purport to prove the existence
of faeries. The circular images
themselves are the cold peepholes
of science (the microscope), as
opposed to the warm, locket shaped
ovals of memory. The audio track
is impossible to resist. Written by
Maud Grieve and published in 1931,
an earnest, little Irish voice recites
the foxgloves’ other sinister folkloric
names along with medical details
and a final, mesmerizing account
of its reproductive process. The
buzzing, ambient background
sounds are so lush you’d wish you
were there. Using the most basic Tim Maul is an artist and critic
means, Cross achieves that elusive 83
who lives in New York City.
‘sense of place’, but not of time.
In 2001, curators Melissa E.
Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner put
forward the intriguing proposal
that many of “today’s” artists were
“Secret Victorians.” Their primary
examples employ crafts, design,
and pattern to camouflage darker
themes. While tempting to consider
both Foxglove, digitalis purpurea and
Cross’s entire oeuvre in this light,
her origins remain in a localized
surrealism. Reacquainting myself
with her art through the recent
IMMA monograph, I come across
numerous animals-as-garments
(foxgloves) but also a steady parade
of holes, dots (holes pictured?) and
bodily orifices. They’re everywhere;
drilled through bibles, hanging
from ceilings, peppering doors, and
held open, waiting to receive the
sacrament. Our bodies’ orifices,
I reflect, are governed by a degree
of control, and an awareness of
what is potentially dangerous to
insert in them. Like poison-tinged
fingers, among other things.
Surprisingly, the nostalgia that
Cross’s giddy, flip-book of a piece
invokes in me is for the ’70s –
when publications like Avalanche
included “artists’ projects.”
Intimate and fleeting, those pages
are as important to me as anything
those artists produced, as is
Cross’s nineteenth-century puzzle
for twenty-first-century children.
c Declan Long
. mother’s tankstation November 2005 –
Dublin January 2006

Nina Canell
84
We woke up with
energy

Nina Canell
Title, 2005
medium
photo Godbold/ Jones
courtesy mother’s tankstation
Given the time of year, one could
be forgiven for sensing in the title
of Nina Canell’s exhibition a note
of world-weary sarcasm – the very
idea that we might ‘wake up with
energy’ on one of these unfeasibly
dark mornings seems, perhaps, too
absurd to be wholly genuine. Yet the
work of this Dublin-based Swedish
artist is indeed enthusiastically
committed to seeking forms of
refreshed renewal. In recent times,
she has demonstrated a curious
and already distinctive capacity
for creating startling combinations
of everyday objects and ostensibly
obsolete electronic odds-and-ends
– and it is a strategy that suggests
(among other things) a wish to
imagine possibilities for regenerating,
or at least re-arranging, the clutter
of the recent past.
It is apt then, that this, Canell’s
first solo outing, was presented as
the inaugural exhibition at mother’s
tankstation, an elegant new
contemporary-art space located in
the home of artists David Godbold
and Finola Jones. Both Canell and
her new Dublin gallerists obviously
share, at this point in time,
an excitement about ‘energetic
awakening’. But the transforming
of a domestic environment (which
is itself a converted warehouse)
into a gallery space makes mother’s
tankstation seem doubly fitting as a
setting for Canell’s peculiar objects
and intricate installations, insofar
as her work displays a very striking
ability to reorganize and recycle, to
re-make and re-model, the bits and
pieces of quotidian reality. Among
the raw materials she draws on, for
instance, are some quite mundane
domestic items – buckets, funnels,
an electric whisk, a hairdryer –
unremarkable objects that here
have their function and place in the
world altered through the forging of
unlikely couplings (a re-imagining of
humdrum things that calls to mind
Derek Mahon’s bizarre query in
The mute phenomena: “What do you
know of… the sex life of cutlery?”).
And while constructing unusual
arrangements of found materials
is hardly on its own a fresh idea,
there is an uncommon vitality to
Canell’s juxtapositions, an ‘energy’,
which often is produced through
the pairing of ‘dumb things’ with
audio and audio-visual equipment.
So, in a low-key work such as
Half the pace of a given place, we
discover that the tape from a
grubby, outdated and broken-open
reel-to-reel player is snaking its
way around a strategically placed
collection of plastic bottles; as
the tape returns to meet the tape-
heads, the enervated mechanisms
of the machine emit a series of
analogue groans and gurgles. On
its extended journey this long
strand of audio-tape picks up dust
and static, and so the strange
sounds slowly, subtly change; are
these, then, the last gasps from an
old, redundant piece of technology,
or the sounds of re-awakening?
The latter possibility is directly
referenced in Dawn chorus, a
collaborative work with Robin
Watkins, which connects a number
of small neon lights to an elaborate
mini-orchestra of old cassette
players and dictaphones; weird,
manipulated voices filter through
these re-invented machines in a
manner that (following the title’s
prompt) seems designed to add
a gently rhythmic, electrical ‘bird-
song’ to the sonic landscape of
the exhibition.
There is, perhaps, something of the
Surrealists’ interest in ‘outmoded’
things here. The techno-junk and
domestic detritus employed by
Canell could in this sense be
understood as “wish symbols of
the previous century… residues
of a dream world” (to borrow two
well-worn phrases from Walter
Benjamin) and, as in Surrealism,
such recouped ‘outmoded’ material
can offer uncanny potential for
psychic and social re-awakening
(“we want here to find the
constellation of waking,” as
Benjamin says). In a related way,
it seems reasonable to register not
only joyous waking energy in the
‘experience’ of Canell’s work, but
also a kind of ‘Hauntology’ – a
ghostliness in the use of recorded
voices maybe, something spectral
in the way these sounds and objects
appear to hover between different
forms of being. The graphic image
that we see endlessly moving on the
television monitor in Accumulus, for
instance, is echoed across the room
by a much larger, self-consciously
awkward, hand-made version of
this ‘perfect’ computer-drawn form. 85
Moreover, the TV screen showing
the spinning shape is hooked up to
an ‘electro-physical instrument’ of
some kind, a once-advanced piece
of medical technology which has
apparently lost its ability to function
normally (hence its obvious interest
to the artist) and so it shows a
constant flickering back and forth
between two numbers on its
enigmatic digital counter. A space
emerges therefore between the
perfect and the imperfect, the
imagined and the real, and between
development and decay (the made-
up word ‘accumulus’ is also, of
course, somewhere between
‘accumulate’ and ‘cumulus’,
between a collection of things
and a cloud).
The returns and re-awakenings
of this exhibition – ‘the ghosts of
futures past’ – hint that Canell’s
work could be as freakishly
other-worldly and unsettling as it is
frequently exhilarating. Either way,
We woke up with energy reveals in
fragile, forgotten things, surprising
signs of life.
Declan Long is a lecturer at
the National College of Art and
Design, Dublin.
c Siobhán Mullen
. Golden Thread Gallery December 2005 –
Belfast January 2006

Ian Charlesworth
86

The subjects

Ian Charlesworth
from The subjects
courtesy the artist
In 1921 Luigi Pirendello gave us Six
characters in search of an author, a
meta-theatrical work demonstrating
the fine line between reality and
fiction. Six characters wander in
from the street to a rehearsal of a
play, usurping the fictionalised
actors’ narrative and themselves
becoming the subject of the work.
Representation and its authenticity
become central to the work,
questioning agency by how we
attempt to read these works.
Ian Charlesworth in his latest
show, The Subjects, highlights
the complexity of rethinking
representation/ documentation
through the medium of the ‘Belfast
hood’. Like Pirendello, Charlesworth
seems to be giving us Six characters
in search of an act (all the youths
were chosen from an agency who
employ these individuals for film
and television work). Six large-scale
photographic works dominate
the gallery space, the individual
characters staged in artificial
poses, dressed in typical urban
sportswear and adorned with an
excess of gold jewellery. The lighting
is soft-focus and somehow the
characters just don’t seem tough
enough. Charlesworth cleverly
unsettles the spectator vis à vis what
she/ he is looking at. Codification
of material worn by the youths,
the location – a night-time park –
the uncertainty of the characters
themselves, all add to the ambiguity
of these contemporary portraits.
In attempting to find the authentic
in these works I found myself drawn
to the gaze of the individuals; they
ranged from suspicious to confused
to the devoid, as if the authenticity
of these works somehow lay in their
staging.
In the same gallery space, a small
television screen presents us with
three video works in succession:
John, Michael and Maurice.
The characters stand on a dark
spotlighted stage with an off
camera director voicing scenarios
from domestic abuse to sectarian
violence. The characters are directed
to enact a role reacting to these
situations. What becomes unclear
through these enactments is the
origin of the character’s response.
Phrases such as “Are you talking to
me?” recall De Niro in Taxi driver,
mirroring back a filmic portrayal of
a character on the edge, or “I’ll kick
yer bollocks in,” a phrase regularly
voiced after kicking-out time from
the local pub. The line between
media reflection and personal
experience becomes blurred in these There is a publication with this
acts. In Maurice the director probes exhibition, From dark passages,
87
with more personal questions and with an essay by Gavin Murphy,
a conversation emerges on the published by Golden Thread
Gallery, 2005.
Hunger Strikers. Maurice reveals
a lack of knowledge of the events, Siobhán Mullen is an
having been born into the time artist and researcher
but being too young to remember. based in Belfast.
Violent clashes with the police
and the use of plastic bullets,
though, are part of his personal
experience and here briefly we have
a moment of engagement with the
character. Of interest is the artist’s
position as passive: the author
of the construction of the work,
Charlesworth, has removed
himself from the work, allowing the
characters create themselves.
To the rear of the gallery are three
lightboxes, From the dark passages
of a public toilet, to the ethereal
wonder of the industrial lightbox.
The acronym for the Ulster Volunteer
Force (UVF) has been drawn
repeatedly with a lighter, subtly
undermining its potency while also
separating the act and its signifier.
This is the first time in the exhibition
where the artist physically asserts
his presence. The ‘gestures’ are
replicas of marks made by youths
in public toilets, thus bringing the
private cultural act to the public
space. The lightboxes themselves
return us to the visual nature of the
work, referring back to capital and
the production of a work within it.
c David Dobz O’Brien
. The Dock November – December
Carrick on Shannon 2005

88
trade
There has been a lot spoken and
written about in the recent past
regarding the nomadic artist,
networks, the transnationality of
production and the return to the
periphery. Leitrim, Carrick on
Shannon to be more exact, doesn’t
even figure on this roadmap but
it has now opened its cultural bor-
ders. It has put down its roots and
forged ahead, bypassed the Pale
and other regional centres and
launched itself onto the internation-
al Art Market for consumption.
Carrick on Shannon, once a small
market town where the lakes were
more productive than the land, now
has a leading art centre, the Dock
(a renovated courthouse), with
grand ambitions above its station.
Confidence brought on, no doubt,
by the economic whirlwind that
imports foreign multinationals to
pay the average wage, confidence
that has turned the farmers’ market
into a craftsy tourist trap, confi-
dence that has exchanged clothes
shops for boutiques, pubs for bars,
introduced a leisureplex, and of
course the ubiquitous Tesco has
just opened a significant new store.
Prosperity indeed.
Trade, 2005
courtesy the author
Economically, the Law of
Diminishing Returns tells us that
building a few roads in a poor
country can cause considerable
development while in a rich country
they may only relieve a little
congestion; a greater education in a
poor economy can open many new
possibilities while in a wealthy one
people with degrees often cannot
even find jobs. On the other hand
telephones are useful if people have
phones, roads are good if everybody
has cars and technology is easier
to invent if you have done it before;
increasing returns. Neither of these
explain why China and India are the
fastest growing economies and
why countries like Cameroon and
North Korea linger miles behind,
but according to economist Tim
Hartford the reason is simple:
Trade. Open, International, Global,
Trans-national, Free, Trade. The true
balance of imports and exports –
Perfect Markets.
Trade is a concurrent communal
project between the arts officers
from both Leitrim and neighbouring
Roscommon combined with Visual
Leitrim and overseen, directed and
curated by Cliodhna Shaffery, while
on a curatorial residency. It is a
stepping stone, born out of an
integrated strategy, shaped by the
aforementioned individuals with a
very precise vision and development
plan, combining serious constructive
dialogue, practice and opportunities
for the young and ever-increasing
numbers of artistic refugees,
hiding from our over-inflated urban
centres, gathering to escape
financial servitude and to continue
their creative endeavours. Trunk
show1, held in Boyle, Roscommon,
is the antecedent to Trade, a
cocktail mixed by the same crew
of cultural investors. This year, a
new spin: the introduction to wider
international networks with a twist
of educative models for collectivity,
weapons for survival on the fringes.
The approach was simple.
Conversation. Networks. And
conversation again. Applied in two
distinct forms. Firstly, through
One to one sessions, a space for
exchange, where one could caucus
around the group stalls secreted
throughout the gallery, manned by
each invited art group or agency.
The thematic structure, described
loosely in the press material as that
of a ‘trade fair’, a misnomer maybe,
with possibly derogatory connota-
tions, more closely resembled an
age-old farmers’ market. (Ironic
considering that the actual farmers’
market, just outside the door, has
been globalised – traded up –
obliterated.) From here each agency
could ply their stock and trade, to
illustrate their consciousness of
practice, context, locality and
approach. The second form was
shaped through a series of brief
introductions by each agency
followed by minor debate and carried
out intermittently throughout the
weekend in the Dock’s adjoining
mini-theater. One such forum was
chaired by willful Brian Hand on the
Sunday, which transformed into an
outdoor intervention.
Each stall and what was offered
here differed greatly. 16 Beaver
Group who have created a platform
for socio-political debate, activism
and practice from on the fifth-floor
space in the financial district of
lower Manhattan, used a collection
of books, articles and maps, to
articulate themselves, while
myvillages.org, generated by three
artists from three different
countries, used the unfolding of
their Bibliobox, a well crafted valise
containing their books, posters,
photographs, audio CDs, films and
even a portable DVD player for per-
sonal viewing. Their presentations
and projects redressed the balance
away from the Urban Artistic
Centres and back to the diversity of
the village and that of rural cultural
development. The only for-profit
organization in attendance, G.P.A.
(General Public Agency), set
themselves apart instantly from the
rest through their terminological
language: “consultancy,” “policy,”
“place making” and “broad
approach to what counts as culture
and as environment.” (Hmm!)
While their stall resembled a well
designed wall-based art installation,
as an illustrative map-cum-matrix
of recent clients and collaborators
from the English Arts Council to
the Wellcome Trust and including
architects, city planners, and artists
alike, my distrust and dis-ease grew
not from the notion that MONEY
could be earned through “best 89
practice,” an alien concept in my
impoverished world, but to the
establishment of more bureaucracy,
a further agency to bureaucratize
art and art practice, less a path of
resistance and more the party line
in disguise. The inclusion of the
local artists in the exhibition, while
being well intentioned, left them in
the precarious position of neither
being an artist group nor directly
connected to the cultural issues
of these organizations. Sally
Maidment’s encyclopedic Resource
room exemplifies the standard
of educative and illustrative
information that can be gathered
to profit the existence here on
the peripheries.
 The nature of the Art Group is no
doubt born from a resistance to a
certain climate or environment, out
of a reaction or rebellion to certain
norms within a social setting,
whether urban or rural, and from
varying differences in ideological
approaches and practices. None
of this was borne out in depth
during formal discussions. The
non-vicarious strategy adopted by
Trade was profitable, but it relied
completely on the possessiveness
of its participants that could often
have been smothered by hospitality
alone. A surface reading of the
90 groups’ ideologies and approaches
was as close as the debates got.
And an occasion missed. A greater
understanding of the particularity of
each group, based on their location,
politics, forms, interventions and
techniques for opposition would
have been most welcomed. A con-
structed weighing up of, say, the
activities of Puerto Rican M&M
Proyectos (a sleeping group of
activists, antagonists and
policitically oriented artists and
curators) with that of the
Copenhagen-based N55, the well
renowned Danish arts group that
allowed its self-consumption into
the fabric of their city, could have
contributed greatly to our under-
standing of their particular relation-
ships and existence with their own
direct situation. How does N55’s
direct approach to social politics,
the redesigning of personal and
public spaces, environments, urban
and rural, mix with the ideological
path taken by myvillages.org? How
does Catalyst Arts survive now,
under-funded and possibly no longer
fulfilling the role it once did in
Belfast? Some of these questions
may be related directly back to
characteristics of world economic
trade. Distance, time and place
have all changed radically. Speed of
travel, internet access, learning and
experience, and greatly reduced
cost are a factor too. Even Leitrim is
not untouched by the world.
The high aspirations for the
weekend were reached through
Rene Gabri’s simple but effective
Walk with 16 beaver, a walk with
thirty to thirty-five participants
throughout Carrick on Shannon.
From a homeless shelter to our
ubiquitous housing estate to the
Asian Antique Store, up the main
street, visiting a fashionable
boutique, to a family-owned
fruit-and-veg shop (which was
ironically closing the very next day
due to rise in competition). Along
the way proprietors and staff were
openly challenged on the changing 1 Reviewed in Circa 111, spring
face of Carrick on Shannon and 2005
Ireland, the pros and cons of our
voracious economy, the fear of David Dobz O’Brien is an
artist and founding member
and spread of European immigrants
of art/ not art.
with foreign languages and
appearances, and finally to what
defines progress. The dichotomous
struggle between the urban and the
rural were not in evidence here.
Ultimately Trade worked, its
openness and fluidity and its desire
never to demand an outcome kept
it moving at its own natural pace.
Here it’s worth remembering Tim
Hartford’s words, that in the search
for ‘Perfect Markets’ there needs to
be an equivalence between exports
and imports, and for this to happen
Trade and its organizers need to
find their comparative advantage,
to stay focused and to progress in
their own deliberate manner.
c Fergal Gaynor
. Limerick City Gallery of January – February
Art 2006
Limerick

So, is there such a thing as the

‘Neo-Gothic’? The question first
presented itself to me at the René
Zechlin-curated show Blake and
Sons at the Glucksman, which
staged an inquiry into what is
widely accepted to be a new wave

Breda Lynch in contemporary art (at least in

Northern Europe and North
America): a turn away from the
socially conscious, ‘relational aes-
thetic’ dominated art of the nineties
91

Dark brides
and early thousands. I thought I had
it safely buried, but in the best
Gothic tradition it uncannily
returned among Breda Lynch’s
Brides in the City Gallery, Limerick.

and silent twins

Breda Lynch
Untitled, 2006
digital print on diaboard, 114 x 91cm
courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art
c .
It took me by surprise: I have known
Lynch’s work since her diploma
show in the Cork Crawford and,
although I had seen a few examples
of the most recent, ‘darker’ work,
I had not expected them to play so
dominant a role in her first solo
show. In fact the small group of
Silent twins drawings, produced just
after her return to Ireland after
study at Wolverhampton and
Chelsea, and familiar from ev+a and
elsewhere, and the even earlier
Heavenly twins, the only older works
in the show, seemed to become
drawn in and subtly redefined by
92 the atmosphere of the new pieces.
Looking at the images of these
British black children, their family
and home, I couldn’t help thinking
of the Southern States of America,
of Faulkner, of American Gothic.
In the two main rooms of Lynch’s
exhibition, all black and lilac, metallic
greens and blues, a potent argument
for rethinking the question was
hoisted on me. The key to the affair
was suggested by a split-screen
video work which played two scenes
from Hitchcock’s Rebecca in tandem:
one side showing the first view of
Max De Winter’s gothic mansion
Mandelay, seen looming out of
the woods through the rain and
window-wiper blurred windscreen
of a car; the other, the new Mrs.
De Winter’s hand approaching a
sinister, ornate door, about to open
it onto what promises to be a replica
of Bluebeard’s fifth chamber. Each
image approaches the moment of
truth with mounting suspense,
stopping just on the edge of attain-
ment of the dark, but wished-for
discovery, before, by a reversal of
the footage, the viewpoint is
withdrawn from the point of tension
in a systole-diastole of fearful
desire. Desire, it seemed to me, was
the hidden ingredient that explained
the move into the new, unnerving
territory, desire that brought with
it a sense of taboo and the mon-
strous.The two main rooms were
laid out environmentally, with the
two main series of drawings – the
fourteen Bride heads and eight larger
Mechanical brides – supplemented
by a wall of rich, black-dominated
wallpaper, with old-fashioned floral
patterns enclosing dainty eighteenth
-century erotic prints, the video
piece, and a digital print with Art
Nouveau overtones (which I’m not
sure would survive removal from its
context). The two Brides series were
the result of digital manipulation of
found wedding images, with either
a lone, full-length figure, or an
isolated, veiled head, being inverted
tonally, before being meticulously
drawn with pencil in a manner
familiar from the Twins series: the
image being painstakingly built up
out of small, uniform strokes.To my
mind, this process contained one
major source of danger: conceptually
it had been very specific to the
Twins series, so it might not be
transferable to the new project.
Lynch is an artist for whom drawing
is a serious medium in its own right.
Interestingly, her engagement with
the medium has always gone hand
in hand with a mastery of print and
other mechanical-reproductive
techniques. What this has meant is
that her approach to drawing has
not been developed in isolation –
it has always included a conscious-
ness of the more dominant forms of
image-production, and through this,
a sense of the image industry and
its relation to the social formation
of identity. Heavenly twins is typical
of her earlier drawing style, with the
names Helen and Caleb (her mother
and her mother’s twin brother who
died at birth) in informal lettering
displayed among the stars in a
reference to Castor and Pollux. On
close examination it turns out that
what looks like a large print has
been drawn entirely in felt-tip pen.
The use of the modern, largely
unvalued marker recalls Lynch’s
affection for the light touch of the
conceptual heavyweight Alghiero
Boetti, whose self-portrait as twin
brothers has surely had some
influence on her thinking. But if any
artist has informed her approach
to drawing, it has been Duchamp,
on whom she wrote a thesis during
her postgraduate tenure in England.
Emma Dexter, in her essay for
Phaidon’s Vitamin D, delineates two
areas of contemporary drawing
practice – the conceptual and the
mark-making expressive.
Duchamp’s work points to a third
possible area which Lynch exploits:
drawing as a human touch on
the border between the two. The
carefully hand-tinted replicas of
‘original’ paintings for his Boîte-en-
valise and for various collectors are
examples of mark-making, but of
a quite impersonal kind, and of
conceptual play with the phenome-
non of reproducibility, but inclusive
of hidden, intimate meanings.
Lynch’s Twins drawings returned
the trace of the hand to
mass-reproduced photographic
images of famous twins, and,
without any sense of personal
disclosure, brought out intimate
resonances between the idea of the
copy and the twin, between identity
and the double, that passed subtly
between questions of formal
medium and human personality.
But would the same drawing idiom
make sense in the context of the
Brides? It did, but only because
these dark images of the ends of
desire brought with them an innate
sense of translation into alien
experience, of the occupation of
an unnatural space, for which the
attempt at housing the ‘handicraft’
in the zone of digital imagery
seemed appropriate. The movement
between drawing and digital
imaging, however, seemed to be
reversed: these weren’t mass
images restored to (impersonal)
humanity, but a human art
trespassing in the world of
mechanical imagery.
It didn’t always work. As with two-dimensionality of the Olson
some of the borrowings from mass twins, for instance – here the
culture in the Glucksman exhibition, disturbing world of excluded desires
some of the overt, gothy ‘darkness’ managed to find a human face.
failed to get beyond the level of
kitsch, as with Bride head 6, which
bore too much resemblance to
a Marvel graphic, or the first
Mechanical bride which failed to
get beyond the terms of fashion
imagery. But elsewhere, especially
among the Bride heads, the result
was arresting and complex. In Bride
heads 2 and 4 the various dynamics
of the Gothic environment powerfully
converged. If there is such a thing
Fergal Gaynor is an 93
as the Neo-Gothic, in other words, independent scholar,
and it amounts to something more writer and member
than the exploitation of the easy of the art-intervention
viscerality of fantastic art and group art / not art.
horror, it is to be found here: in the
return of subjectivity after an objec-
tivity in art that often verged on the
bureaucratic, and in the attempt
genuinely to face that abstraction
beloved of theory and theory-led
criticism: the other. Breda Lynch’s
exhibition achieves this without
sacrificing delicacy or control. If the
Twins series had often hinted at
the menacing proximity of cloning
– finding a hint of inhuman danger
Breda Lynch
in the innocuous, accepted Wallpaper installation, 2006
laminated digital print
dimensions variable
courtesy Limerick City Gallery
of Art
c Linda King
. Lavitt’s Quay November – December
Linda King is a lecturer in Cork 2005
Design History and Theory - -
at IADT, Dún Laoghaire. National Craft Gallery February – April 2006
Kilkenny

94
designing ireland:
a retrospective of kilkenny
design workshops,
1963 — 1988 (background)
Damien Harrington,
Department of Posts and
Telegraphs: P+T logo, 1968
courtesy Crafts Council of
Ireland
Since its closure in 1988, the
Kilkenny Design Workshops (KDW)
have been a constant presence
within the discourses that inform
Irish design historiography.
Established in 1963 by WH Walsh
of Córas Tráchtála – the Irish
Export Board – its remit was as
a “missionary centre of influence”;
a state-sponsored design agency
focused on nurturing design for
industry in the wake of a growing
realisation that Ireland’s future
economic success was largely
dependent on the strategic develop-
ment of this sector.1 Until its
closure in 1988, KDW significantly
altered and shaped the national
visual landscape, assisting
indigenous industries and Irish-
based international manufactures
in the provision of material objects
for homes, offices, factories,
city streets and state-sponsored
organisations. It is a selection of
these items, including housewares,
furniture, technological equipment,
posters and corporate-identity
systems, that comprise the
current KDW retrospective
Designing Ireland.
Although design consultancy for
industry was its primary focus, the
legacy of KDW was far greater than
its influence on Irish manufacturing.
Internationally it promoted and
challenged preconceptions of Irish
design, while nationally it raised
public awareness of design issues
through exhibitions, competitions
and the products on sale in its
stores.2 Additionally, in the wake of
the publication of the infamous
report Design in Ireland (1962) and
its stark criticism of Irish design
education, KDW made significant
contributions with regard to the
provision of training for Irish
designers.3 The extent of the deficit
in this area was highlighted by the
organisation’s initial dependence on
the expertise of designers imported
from the industrialised centres of
Britain and Northern Europe. While
this decision was pragmatic, it also
reflected contemporary design
discourse which promoted Northern
European – specifically Nordic –
design as ‘good’, due to its emphasis
on functionality, aesthetic simplicity
and the use of indigenous natural
materials.
Designing Ireland constructs a
distinct narrative by organising the
objects into a timeline, a device
which effectively demonstrates the
changing priorities of the KDW
project as it matured from the cre-
ation of prototypes that indigenous
craft-based industries could put
into limited industrial production,
through an emphasis on Irish indus-
trial design as a distinct discipline,
to the promotion of indigenous
design and the establishment of
awards for design excellence.
The exhibition largely consists of
domestic objects, many of which
encapsulate the Nordic modernism
of KDW’s early years. Notable
inclusions are the IQ pendant lights
of Holger Strøm, the wooden dining
utensils of Gerald Tyler and the
reinterpretation of traditional súgán
chairs by Peter Hiort Lorenzen. The
measured simplicity of these items
provide a marked contrast to other
objects – notably the wall plaques
and textiles of Oisín Kelly and the
Beleek pottery of Jim Kirkwood –
which suggest a clear awareness of
Ireland’s developing tourist industry.4
By comparison to the domestic
objects displayed, there are many
reminders of KDW’s ubiquity within
the wider environment. Damien
Harrington’s modernist Post and
Telegraphs logo and Peter Dabinett’s
uncial inspired Telecom Éireann
logo are just two examples from the
many semi-state corporate identity
systems that emerged from the
graphic design workshop, while the
inclusion of computers and audio-
visual and telecommunications
equipment demonstrates a greater
concern with technology and
industrial manufacturing in the
latter years of the organisation.
While there has been a sincere
attempt to capture the breadth
of work produced by KDW, the
result of the exhibition is uneven,
particularly if examined in relation
to the accompanying catalogue.
Cumulatively there is too great
an emphasis on craft-based produc-
tion, a misconception of KDW’s
remit which may have ultimately
contributed to its demise. The
exhibition is illuminating on many
levels but should not be mistaken
for a definitive retrospective; the
resources required for which would
be far greater than were available 95
for this project. However, the show
is a timely reminder of KDW’s
contribution to the relatively new
phenomena of professionalized
design practice in Ireland and a
testimony to how much the national
design landscape has changed in a
relatively short period of time.
1 Much is made of the fact that KDW was
the world’s first state-sponsored design
agency and as such this expertise was
eventually sought by other developing
countries including the Philippines,
Sri Lanka and Barbados. However this
development needs to be contextualised.
The establishment of KDW was reflective
of the Republic’s post-colonial status
as an agrarian country without a large
manufacturing base where state
intervention was required to address
deficiency. In many respects the
organisation followed a pattern that
had been established with the founding
of the State in that where good design
existed, it was often state-led. This is
apparent in analysis of the design output
of the national semi-state companies
of which Aer Lingus – specifically in the
area of graphic design – and ESB –
specifically with regard to architectural
engineering – are the most salient
examples.
2 The international retail outlets that
sold KDW designs included Heals and
Habitat in Britain and Neiman Marcus
and Bloomingdales in the U.S.
3 Design in Ireland – more commonly
known as The Scandinavian Report
was instigated by WH Walsh and
authored by five leading Nordic
designers, who surveyed Irish design
in 1961.
4 Kelly was one of several fine artists
involved in designing for KDW. Others
included Louis le Brocquy (design of
KDW logo, 1965) and Patrick Scott
(designs for V’soske Joyce rugs, 1979).
c Joan Fowler
. Mass: MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-04224-X
(hardback)

96

Margaret
Dikovitskaya
Visual culture:
The study of
visual culture
after the visual
turn
“What does art do?” The question is
asked – twice in fact – but there is
no answer. Instead, this latest book
on Visual Culture restricts itself
to the ‘new field’ within academe.
The ‘study’ of the title means
academic study and, Visual Culture
as a ‘new field,’ is either supplanting
or expanding the older ‘discipline’ of
Art History.
Should we engage with Visual
Studies? This volume is an offshoot
of the author’s PhD thesis and,
as such, it falls foul of too much
synthesis and a pedantically
employed methodology. Incredibly,
over half the book consists of an
appendix and therein lies much
of the interest. It is a series of
interviews with academics working
mostly in the United States. The
interviewees are familiar names
in art-related discourse: Crimp,
Joselit, Mitchell, and Wolff, to name
but a few.
The core concept throughout the
book is ‘vision’ or ‘visuality’. While
these terms are not viewed as
either the same or as stable, I have
to admit scepticism. As David
Joselit will be well aware it was
Duchamp who, almost a century
ago, pointed out that vision was a
somewhat overrated faculty in
respect to both the production
and consumption of visual art.
And, while the interviewees for this
volume are not so silly as to essen-
tialise vision, it is not at all clear
that vision can be sustained as the
distinguishing property or quality
for the ‘new field’. It makes little
sense to privilege vision when it is
neither the object of study nor even
a process that can be distinguished
from other processes (thinking,
drawing, etc.).
But it is elsewhere that my real
problems with Visual Culture arise.
Dikovitskaya’s interviews highlight
the rejection of Art History’s elitist
concentration on high art. Visual
Culture involves a shift away from
Art History’s exclusion of other
visual aspects of culture. While it
might seem right and proper that at
long last study of art should follow
art itself with an embrace of the
contemporary world beyond the
museum it does so, according to the
author, with the same constraints
of discipline and methodology.
It is perceived to sit alongside the
university disciplines, and as such,
there is a denial of the open-ended-
ness of what in theory remains
necessary to the field: art. ‘Art’
involves studio practice.
Joan Fowler teaches at 97
“What does art do?” Dikovitskaya’s
the National College of
single attempt to identify art is Art and Design, Dublin.
that it is a “category.” It is at least
recognition that to reduce art to
something like a discipline is not
acceptable. If art can be conceived
as a category, it is possible to envis-
age art as a category in process.
The study of art, and even Visual
Culture, should be satellites in such
a constellation. For decades, the
development of relevant study of art
for art students, that is to say,
study that works with and through
art practices, has been shamefully
neglected by those involved.
However, the desire for disciplinary
hegemony may be already a thing
of the past within the arts and
humanities. This book is (inadver-
tently) a testament to the way in
which Visual Culture started out
as interdisciplinary, and how this
was appropriated by university
technocrats as a way of downsizing
departments. The ‘broadening’ of
degree courses is in reality the
flattening out of education. This is
indeed the egalitarianism of a
technocratic age. The early signs
are that the current ‘rationalisation’
of the universities in the Republic
of Ireland is even worse than the
experience in the United States
and the United Kingdom. Any
introduction of Visual Studies in
Ireland must come with a health
warning.
c Tim Stott
. Third Text
Volume 19
Number 5
September 2005

Third Text
98

Ireland special
issue
Given the ongoing efforts by
the Irish political and cultural
establishment to trade ‘Irishness’
on the global art market and to
convert Irish cultural practice into
a ‘culture of enterprise’, the recent
special issue of Third Text devoted
to Ireland is timely in the extreme.
The Guest Editor, Lucy Cotter, is to
be commended for her marshalling
of a diverse and sometimes contra-
dictory set of critical positions.
Lack of space makes it impossible
to respond to all that was addressed
in the Third Text issue and the
NCAD seminar which followed it.
Instead, I wish to grapple with some
of the spectres which occasionally
returned to haunt the discussion,
and perhaps venture some thoughts
of my own.
In her opening speech to the semi-
nar, Cotter made the point that in
the midst of the apparent progress
of Ireland’s rapid modernisation,
the “catastrophe” at the core of
Irish society is its continuing
endorsement of the status quo. To
work a way out of this catastrophe,
Cotter claims, we must return to
original partitions and to what has
been disavowed, to reopen these
partitions and to find new, positive
elements amidst redundant signs.
Thus far, Cotter endorses the
differential projects of postcolonial
critique. As forms of historical
enquiry, these critiques, as Eóin
Flannery describes them in his
essay, “do not merely track the
onslaught of Ireland’s accelerated
modernity: of more theoretical
urgency is their location of forms
of indigenous radical memory,
resistant nostalgia and counter-
modern agency within the social
fabric of colonial Ireland.” Such
recovery is done not for comfort’s
sake but as a moment of political
enunciation, liberating “a submerged
chorus of alternative futures in the
past” (Flannery): and, one might
add, to put these past-futures to
work not simply in order to explain
away the given present, but to
surprise it, to rupture its continuity
and its appearance of permanence.
Needless to say perhaps, but neither
‘indigenous radical memory’,
‘resistant nostalgia’ nor ‘counter-
modern agency’ are ipso facto
desirable as a focus of resistance.
The resistance inherent to
‘nostalgia’, for instance, is just as
likely to manifest itself as an act
of conservative bad faith as a
revitalisation of that or those made
obsolete by the history of the
victors. Moreover, there is nothing
inherently progressive to what has
become obsolete: the question
that must accompany this historical
recovery is, “how are these
‘unrealised dreams’ and ‘visions
of the future’ to be configured in
the present?” Cultural resistance,
although it has a darkly subversive,
militant ring to it, only goes so far:
without what Walter Benjamin
called a “vanishing point” to act
“as a lodestar for the assembly of
its fragments” (Susan Buck-Morss),
resistance splinters into the
endless, anarchic play of novelty
withoutdirection, without arrest.
Plus ça change, … If it cannot ally
itself with a broader project of
transformation, then its interrup-
tions in the current system of power
are more like inoculations than the
onset of a terminal disease.
Perhaps just such a ‘vanishing point’
is being proposed when Cotter
articulates the need for a “national
cultural agenda” developed from
the alignment of artistic and critical
practice with the institutions of the
state. However, at this point an
all-too-familiar spectre returns.
This is the spectre of (Irish) cultural
nationalism, which advocates the
“luminous expression” of culture
through politics, and in doing so
reduces politics from a constitutive
role to that of representing a prior
cultural identity. Thus, the contested
terrain of both, which Cotter
rightly advocates as fertile terrain
for artistic production, is levelled
and confined. Having returned
to the ‘original partitions’ and
interrogated the current self-image
of state nationalism, it would be
unhelpful to paper over the cracks
again with institutionalised critical
debate. Does Cotter really hope
that state institutions will sustain
a radical critique of their own
legitimacy? Such ‘wallpapering’
looks suspiciously like pre-emptive
risk management. In such situa-
tions, perhaps a return to the
impracticalities and insecurities of
Günther Feuerstein’s “accidental
architecture” would be preferable 99
to a Changing rooms-style domestic
makeover.
It is a familiar criticism of the
postcolonial ‘turn’ that it is “merely
an alibi for the rehabilitation of
narrow-gauge nationalism”
(Flannery). Whilst one should be
wary of such caricatures, with
postcolonial critique at best being
an interrogation of and movement
away from the stifling hegemony
of nationalism (David Lloyd), still
much of the discussion in both the
journal and the seminar provides
evidence that allegedly critical
analysis of a specifically Irish
culture “can have the effect of
uncritically reproducing the primary
constructs ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ as
master terms of analysis,” of
anchoring these constructs even
as it seeks to interrogate them
(Mick Wilson). The national is not a
holistic boundary, even where this
boundary is yet to be realised.
Nor, one might add, is this boundary
either primary or natural for
contemporary artistic practice
(a point made clearly in Daniel
Jewesbury’s essay on ‘Northern
Irish Art’). To demand of artists
some engagement with such
‘primary constructs’ is to introduce
another phantom into the studio,
and to have them forever
“looking over their shoulders”
(Nevan Lahart).
 I do not mean by this to protect
artists from what is behind them, or
otherwise to endorse the sovereignty
of authorial intention: it is by now
almost a truism to state that there
will always be an infinite excess of
meaning to what an author produces
(yet, strangely enough, modes of
production which do not implicitly
privilege individual authorship are
only engaged with in two essays in
this issue of Third Text). My point is
that this should not grant licence
for the expanded field of meaning
to be corralled by the political
fantasies of ‘Ireland’ or ‘Irish’ any
100 more than by those of the ‘Genius’,
the ‘Inner Life’ or the ‘Expressive
Gesture’.
Culture develops not from a national
basis but from a specific, shared
locale which, under the conditions
of globalisation, refracts both
national and international
discourses, yet which cannot be
reduced to these. Most importantly,
the local situation must be
reclaimed from the state which
seeks to upgrade it according to
its own agenda (Lloyd). Insofar as
this reclamation remains opaque at
both a national and international
level, it will be productive of
difference to the hegemonic
centres and perhaps force upon
them the choice of redefinition or
redundancy. If we can overcome
certain received ideas about locality,
especially those tinged with
Romantic notions of authenticity
and immediacy (and, with the
advent of internet technology,
perhaps also those which privilege
physical proximity), then we might
find that our local experience
opens out into complex patterns of
mediation and provides ample
scope for experimentation.
In a similar vein, both Luke Gibbons
and Gavin Murphy stress that
the local “disaggregates” those
universal, representational forms
from which history has been evicted,
thereby creating productive
disjunctures between these
universals and local particulars.
Around these disjunctures,
parochial constituencies with spe-
cific aesthetics and epistemologies
develop, creating unconventional
forms which remain opaque and
alien to the international scene.
This all sounds rather similar to the
(originally architectural) project of
‘critical regionalism’ that was
advocated from the late 1970s
onwards in order to “mediate the
impact of universal civilisation with
elements derived indirectly from the
peculiarities of a particular place”
(Kenneth Frampton). If we are
witnessing here a variant of critical
regionalism, then it is not enough
to base this project around the
question of “how can universal
civilisation be resisted by historical
recovery and local peculiarities?”
Rather, the question must be, “how
can the impact of this civilisation
be indirectly mediated?” Paul
Ricoeur states clearly the paradox
confronting every culture grappling
with the shock of modernity:
“how to become modern and return
to sources; how to revive an old,
dormant civilisation and take part
in universal civilisation.” If this
potentially fertile paradox is not to
be left fallow, the primary question
to ask is, “how can these parochial
constituencies avoid their inherent
and integrative contraction and
actually exceed themselves?”
Pace Luke Gibbons, this is not just
a question of solidarity with others
nurtured by a shared experience
of adversity, of “knowing their
plight well.”
Although the power of such
solidarity should not be overlooked,
it still seems a rather impoverished
gesture, which might well fetishise
adversity and defer the question of
how it might be overcome. More
than openness to encounters with
others, these constituencies must
extend their horizons towards the
global: horizons which are much
too important to be left to the
imperatives of transnational capital,
as they often are at present.
Despite the fears of some, there is
as yet no sufficient reason why this
“internationalisation of the local”
(Wilson) should simply conform to
the neo-imperialist designs of the
global market. Non-conformity is
directly proportional to the degree
to which an integrated and
transnational network of local
constituencies corrodes the
smooth circulation of signs which
accompanies that of capital; in
other words, the degree to which it
sticks in the throat of the populist
advocacy of the easily consumed,
the instrumental, and of cosy dis-
course between ‘friendly enemies’.
Murphy’s analysis of James
Coleman’s work tells us much
about the workings of power and
the centralisation of the knowledge
economy within critical discourse,
as the alleged centre (in this case,
the postconceptual discourse
propagated by Rosalind Kraus and
Benjamin Buchloch) seeks to draw
its peripheries inward. But for these
peripheries to contest the power of
the hegemon they cannot simply
appeal to the fullness of their own
specificity: they must claim as
a universal dimension their
contradictory position as both
border and centre, their own less
than full particularity. This would be
the properly counter-hegemonic
position which derives from those
gaps between discourses that
Murphy works to expose.
Perhaps the work of Irish decoloni-
sation is unfinished. Vic Merriman
claims that the “neo-colonial domi-
nation” of Irish elites results from
their power to dominate discourse
with the familiar refrain “there is no
alternative,” all the while relying on
deference or indifference from the
nonelite (what one might call the
“he might be a rogue but he’s our
rogue” syndrome). This domination
is consolidated by the remarkable
capacity of most Irish politicians
to speak out of both sides of their
mouths at once. These Irish elites
have turned away from the possibility
of “local participatory democracy,”
and embraced instead “neoliberalism
with a local accent” (Merriman).
During the seminar, the point was
also made that the unusually high
percentage of Foreign Direct
Investment in today’s Ireland
constitutes a continuation of
colonial rule by other means. This is
right, but not because domestic
investment is somehow preferable
to foreign. The current relationship
between global capital and the
nation-state is one of ‘auto-
colonisation’, where there is no
longer the standard opposition
between metropolis and colony, but
instead, a multinational company
“as it were, cuts its umbilical chord
with its mother-nation and treats its
country of origin as simply another
territory to be colonised” (?i?ek).
Colonisation, then, is not simply a
violation of national sovereignty but
a correlate of economic exploitation.
In light of the above, the call that
Merriman and others make for
building a civil society that is
“integrated fully with the state and
the market in a vigorous democratic
experimentalism” (P Kirby) seems
less than convincing. As Valerie
Connor notes in her essay, such
civic republicanism has a tendency
to homogenise group identities and
thus provides little space for the
dissent necessary to public life.
One need only look to recent events
in France to see what can result.
I would argue that the political and inherit his father’s kingdom, but
artistic space which opens up was usurped by a bystander,
under the above conditions is one Fortinbras). In light of this and other
mediated by other forms of solidarity unanswered questions, one hopes
and association, such as those that in the coming months Cotter's
based on camaraderie and the attempt to 'inaugurate a more
temporary provisions of a shared radical critical inquiry in the Irish
aesthetic: forms which obviate the art world' bears fruit.
need to appeal to authority at a
national or international level, and
which, one suspects, resonate much
more with artists’ daily practice.
Such cellular forms constitute a
collage of disparate and heteroge-
neous elements, tentatively held
together by “the fraternity of a
Tim Stott is a critic based 101
metaphor,” a “mystery of
in Dublin.
co-presence” (J Rancière), or
perhaps, by economic necessity
and the simple threat of the group’s
collapse. Such fraternity does not
ground itself on any pre-given,
explicit agreement or the notion of
sympathy between participants, but
simply on their common willingness
to lend themselves fully, on the
basis of their difference to one
another, to the emergence of some-
thing which momentarily exceeds
them, and the meaning of which
may not be fully transparent even
to those who produce it. Moreover,
it is precisely their displacement
and hybridity – the condition of
being ‘out of joint’, both a part and
not a part – in relation to those
authorities which seek to represent
them that binds the cultural worker
and migrant worker in solidarity,
that keeps them “apart together”
(J Huizinga).
Yet, if we are not just to settle
for postcolonial orthodoxies of
‘particularity’, ‘displaced subjects’,
and ‘hybridity’, this binding together
can only be the beginning: there
remains the question of unity at
a level beyond these seemingly
infinite subdivisions. There remains,
in fact, the question of the
‘vanishing point’. (As Aijaz Ahmad
recommends, it is worth bearing in
mind the fate of that other character
for whom the world was famously
‘out of joint’, Hamlet, who did not
c .

Manhole covers

a project for Circa

by Chen Jiale 103
 Photography
by Stephen
Sheridan.
An exhibition will
take place in October
in Dublin City
Council.