In Context 3 Essays

ArtIsts Andreas Kopp Cleary & Connolly Jackie sumell Jennifer Walshe Bik Van der Pol
InContext 3
WrIters Cliodhna shaffrey Chris Fite-Wassilak Frank McDonald sarah searson Kurt Mathers Maeve Connolly
http://arts.southdublin.ie/
IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey
Contents
Festina lente by Cliodhna Shaffrey Marker Tree AndreAs K opp (Background) Natural Desires by Chris Fite-Wassilak Moving Dublin CleAry & Connolly (Background) Foreword to Moving Dublin by Frank McDonald A=AGHT JACKie sumell (Background) Either/Or..., a polemic by Sarah Searson Grpat Jennifer W Alshe (Background) Provoking Sound: Notation in the work of the Grpat artists by Kurt Mathers Public Arena BiK V An der pol (Background) The Chorus and the Contemporary Ruin: Bik Van der Pols p uBliC ArenA by Maeve Connolly
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37 56
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Festina lente
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Cliodhna Shaffrey
In 2005, when sarah Finlay and I were asked to come up with a direction for South Dublin County Councils public art programme, we took Italo Calvinos series Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a starting point for our thinking. the Memos were given by Calvino as a series of lectures, prepared for Harvard University, on the qualities that he wished literature to convey to the next millennium. These qualities are: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Of these, it was Quickness that first caught our attention. Quickness, for Calvinos has nothing to do with hurry but rather signifies an economy of means of expression, the use of simple components to achieve a rich content, the adaptation of rhythm to the passing of time, in such a way that every new part arouses expectation of a continuation. His motto was festina lente make haste slowly.1 What conditions might we set up for artists here to support this type of pace? And, what other values in Calvinos Memos might inspire us? Lightness he understood as a resistance of heaviness that the world is not fixed or rigid, but in a state
These essays were commissioned by South Dublin County Councils InContext 3 Public Art Programme in 2010 as part of the InContext 3 Mediation Programme. For information about public art in South Dublin visit www.southdublin.ie/artsworks/index.aspx Frank Mc Donalds text was first published in Moving Dublin and is reproduced by kind permission of Gandon Editions, Kinsale, and the author.
of flow. Exactitude is explained as the idea that everything unnecessary must be removed in order for the essential to emerge. Multiplicity is the idea that the universe takes shape as a whole in which everything affects everything else. Calvino demanded a visual quality of literature bringing other senses to bear on this discipline, and by Consistency he understood the potential of places or process to allow a world of ideas to ripen into forms and shapes a code,
we might say, that links art with reality.2 How would south Dublin inspire our thinking further and how might we pitch our ambitions for a different type of public art programme to align with the exceptional ideas Calvinos Memos had inspired in us? South Dublin a nascent county presents a suburban landscape where the urban and rural visually collide. Ten miles from Dublin city centre is its chief town, Tallaght, where a new town centre has been built a long time after the major housing schemes relocated inner-city dwellers in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Today Tallaght emerges as edge city, sustained at the heart by the new technology-led economy, where a dense network of roads intersects its industrial hinterland and sprawling landscape. Its easy to lose your way out
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an official self-consciousness and desire to present a certain image of itself to the world. For South Dublin was west of City more than south of City. It might have been called West Dublin. But it could never have been called West Dublin; South has an altogether different ring about it. What role could public art play within this context for the artist, the people and the place? How can the artist tune into the myriad rhythms of the physical, social, economic, psychological and continually changing dynamic present here? How might the artists, as Calvino suggests, draw on the rich content and adapt to the rhythms of the passing time, in such a way as to arouse, in every new part, expectations of a continuum? How might the artists ensure that all things unnecessary in their ideas be removed in order for the essential to emerge? How might they exploit and use what they already know or understand, or carry with them from elsewhere and be supported in making connections here? To be fair, the ground was already broken. In 20002004, Artworking Ltd (led by Jenny Haughton) had been involved here in a radical approach to procuring art under the Per Cent for Art scheme. Under the title InContext, this programme supported a shift from commissioning permanent public sculptures to temporal and engaged artworks, involving participation and people and an engagement with place. Our approach aimed to build on this work and inform a continuum under InContext 3. South Dublin County Council and its Arts Office were an open and progressive environment, interested in pursuing different models of public art. We were also aware of the shift in contemporary arts practice and the different ways artists were making art. Jrg Heiser describes this in his book Things that Matter in Contemporary Art as the shift in emphasis from biography and medium to method
here. On foot, it can be difficult to cross roads. The Luas is up and running, providing a significant public transport route connecting into the city. The population is young with those under 25 years making up 34 per cent of its population and, over recent years, there has been an increase in the numbers of new residents and a growing multicultural sector. The Celtic Tiger was in full swing, back then in 2005, when Sarah and myself were investigating possibilities for South Dublins public art programme. There was an attitude of speculative risk-taking, fuelled by excessive resources, so all places could be transformed into the commercial and planned the spaces of organised quantity. For South Dublin, issues of identity emerged as the major concern for the local authority and community. Accepting that identity is not fixed, but fluid and complex, one might ask how can South Dublin County stake a claim for itself, make itself legible, differentiate itself from Dublin City, the rest of the country? Even its name South Dublin seemed reflective of
and situation.4 Claire Dorothy suggests that situation is the key concept in 21 -century art and her writings explore the
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Office. Expertise in curating and mediation was integral and a separate commissioned residency. The daily management and administration of the programme was to be run by a specialist public art manager. An evaluator was to provide critical feedback throughout. The true issue, writes Raymond Ledrut, is not to make beautiful cities or well-managed cities; it is to make a work of life. The rest is a by-product.6 Our proposal aimed to set up conditions that might allow artists to draw on the prevailing qualities and aspects of this context South Dublin to support interaction and integration with people and place, so that over time (and slowly) they might make interesting, challenging (even beautiful) art in collaboration with others or autonomously. In this sense, the art that was made might be understood as a by-product of these interactions and of the artists time. This book of essays, compiled and edited by Sarah Searson (mediator, InContext 3) presents an occasion to reflect on the work made by the five resident artists over a period of two years. It also considers how the artists work may have impacted on or involved the community and place. While the set-up was good and the conditions considered, there were also high expectations for the artists. For those artists who gave a lot, certainly it seems to have proved beneficial.
ways in which contemporary artists respond to, produce and destabilise place and locality. South Dublin could be good
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territory for contemporary artists to explore, respond to and create art in. the single most important element that we sought for InContext 3 was time for the artist. We understood this to be a complex place, a challenging context, but with much potential to appeal to contemporary artists (of all disciplines). We modelled our proposal on the residency programme, wishing to frame the commissioning programme within a supportive environment, where artists would have time to develop ideas with back-up support and funds to realise them. We proposed a two-year residency programme with a fee for artists time and a separate budget for production, materials and equipment. We also included a commission for a permanent artwork one which would respond to the context of a motorway site on the Kingswood Interchange on the N7. We did not seek pre-ordained proposals from artists who applied to participate through an open call but sought sketches of ideas, early thoughts or entry-points that might give an indication of what was of interest to them and the ways they might be interested in working. We did not expect artists to live here, but we did expect that they would immerse themselves in the situations that South Dublin might throw up. It was hoped that the residency would allow for deeper experience and connection (to place and people) than is usually possible in such commissions and that this might lead to more sincere, meaningful and worthwhile outcomes. The plan included a support structure around the residencies and these were to be managed by the Arts
Marker Tree AndreAs Kopp Background

through the InContext 3 roads commission Andreas is creating a large scale light-sculpture, entitled Marker Tree, for the Kingswood Interchange, South Dublin County. The form of the Marker Tree is based on the outlines of a tree but reflecting an approach to the nowadays artificial, designed understanding of nature, combining the natural form of a tree with shapes and surfaces associated with industrial processes and production. It will be a 10-metres high aluminium trunk-shaped structure with simplified branches. Large cushion-like shapes made from coloured metal will rest upon the branches, alluding to clusters of leaves. The cushion shapes, in pale fluorescent colours of yellow, red, pink, green, and blue, will be soflty illuminated. the Marker tree will change appearance from day to night, as the playful colours seen in daytime give way to soft lights scattered throughout the tree at night. As a
_______________________ 1 italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next Millennium; The Charles eliot norton lectures, 1985-1986, Harvard University Press, 1988. 2 Notes here are from Marja-Riitta Norri, Hildi Hawkins, Six Journeys into architectural reality: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/ is_n1190_v199/ai_18347617/ 3 The countys physical boundary also includes Clondalkin, Lucan, Palmerstown, Rathfarnham, Terenure and Templeogue; the rural villages of Brittas, Newcastle, Rathcoole and Saggart and a new town in Adamstown, near Lucan. 4 Jrg Heiser, Things that Matter in Contemporary art, Sternberg Press, 2008, p. 9. 5 Claire Dorothy, Situation, documents of Contemporary art, Whitechapel Gallery, London; MiT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009. 6 Raymond Ledrut, Speech and the Silence of the City. Ledruts definition of the city is as the product of social practice. The city is not a spatial framework external to its users but is produced by them its users make decisions about the spaces they use.
commonly shared signpost this sculpture will mark the daily journeys of commuters and residents, becoming a landmark with personal associations and memories for each person who passes.
Marker tree andreaS Kopp (Background) 7
Natural Desires Chris Fite-Wassilak

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built only in 2008, is the earlier, infamous cousin of outer Dublin planned towns, Tallaght. It is here we find a small triangle of new grass set between the junction created by the N7 and the R136, a patch of land which no pedestrian wanderer will ever set foot on. Here, on the outskirts of the urban sprawl of Dublin and just at the foot of the Dublin Mountains. It is here Andreas Kopps Marker Tree has taken root. The seed: Genealogy of a Marker To look at, the Marker Tree holds the few, high branches of the Pinus pinea, or Italian Umbrella Pine. Its smooth, silvery trunk bears no small resemblance to that of the Fagus lucida, or Shining Beech tree. The bulbous islands of growth leading from its trunk suggest the manicured training of the practice of bonsai. Perhaps closer in relation, though, is the classic streetlamp or lightpost that also waits by the sides of the road. But driving down the M50 towards the Kingswood junction, we might also spot a curious entity that sits similarly between the tree and the streetlamp. On a bank at the side of the road, an unusually tall and straight tree shoots out of the terrain, possibly a variant of cypress of some sort. A few short shrubs cluster around it. Further along, an extremely symmetrical pine tree sits slightly back from a few other pines, a bit taller, a bit more rigid. Mobile phone masts currently can be found dressed up as palm trees, firs, cactuses. As of 2008, there were 4,500 masts in Ireland; thats six masts for every square mile in the Republic. With mobile user numbers and phone usage in general on the rise, new masts are being built regularly, and more extreme measures are being taken to keep them from
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The soil: At the Crossroads It is fertile territory, for a certain kind of growth. This spot of terrain, an ellipse of grass, sits inert between the exit ramps of the motorway just south of Dublin. It has only come about through a set of circumstances that have less to do with geology and more involve the shady and circuitous paper lanes of city planning and the ministries of Transport. This section of the Naas Road, originally a single-carriage road linking Dublin to Limerick, finds itself the bearer of a set of overlaying tattoos that mark out the recent history of Ireland. It has only been in the past twenty years that roads in the country have been expanded and incorporated into a network of motorways; this site bears the commuting history precedents of Irelands first stretch of dual carriageway 16 miles running from Dublin to Naas in 1968 as well as its first section of motorway 5 miles built to bypass Naas town in 1983. The N7s second junction is the Kingswood interchange, where the outer ring road of the R136 flies over. This road was built in 2006 to accompany the construction of Irelands newest planned town, Adamstown, a settlement on the expanding suburban outskirts of Dublin north of the N7 just near Lucan, and not far from the industrial estates of Intel and Hewlett Packard. Connected by the R136, on the other side south of the N7 in a new section of road
natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 8
being noticed. German photographer Robert Voits New Trees (2003 ongoing) project has gone a long way in providing a visual catalogue of these entities, but only recently has a more comprehensive history been made available. Excerpts and Highlights from An Illustrated History of the Mobile Phone Tree Mast (2009) The first recorded mobile phone mast tree to be erected was in Norscot Sandton, South Africa, built by communications engineers Envirocom. A private golf club intervened in the building of the mast, locating it within the adjacent residential area and campaigning against visual pollution. The resulting design put forward by the company was described as somewhere between a birch and a pine. Guildford Cathedral, Surrey: The 4.6m golden angel weathervane atop the Western faade of the church was placed there in 1961, designed by William Rickford. In exchange for the use of its support beam to hold antennae and for the antennae to be hidden beneath the angels skirt T-Mobile and 3 paid for the statue to be regilded in 2007. Bristol-based firm the Undetectables began their work as model makers and set designers for Aardman Productions, producing model buildings and fixtures as the backgrounds and settings for the Wallace and
Gromit series. Since 2002, their work has involved more visual integration into largely urban landscapes, dealing with what spokeswoman Sue Lipscombe calls visual atrocities. In one award winning solution for a Grade 2 listed building in Jarrow, South Tyneside, they created a shroud to replicate the buildings original chimney, to then disguise a set of antennae being placed on the roof. Painted brickwork and visual touches such as the appearance of mould and algae ensured the shroud blended in with the original heritage architecture. Blake End Roundabout, Great Sailing, Essex: Installed in August 1993. Involved in the rebranding of the Sailing Oak Pub to Thai Royal, six luminescent imitation palm trees were placed in the roundabout in front of the premises, lit from 7pm to 3am each night. Decommissioned three months later due to a lack of planning permission from Essex County Council. Included in this study for more notoriety than relevance, according to Engineering Historian Derek Hill, English rock band Radioheads 1995 single Fake Plastic Trees arose from the bands tour bus passing this site during its active stage. In Clare, Suffolk, residents notably moved in the opposite direction from disguising the phone masts, though remarkably using the same eyesore arguments to different ends. A mast in the dead tree style was to be erected in 2003. Citing the nearby town of Hundons similar model, they scrapped plans on the basis that the tree was not convincing. Resident Anthony Lucas said
at the time, It doesnt look a bit like a tree; its made of plastic and we originally thought it would be hidden down in a valley. Solicitor Richard Howe: Its an ugly blot on the landscape. It would look a lot better if it was painted white. Biomimicry: Imitation of Life Both Kopps tree and the phone masts are, on surface level, a facet of the area of science and engineering known as bionics, biomimetics, or biomimicry. Just as Da Vinci and the Wright brothers looked to birds in their attempts to invent flying machines, biomimicry looks to nature as model, measure and mentor. this has led to
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and what they decide to take from it. Technology taking on the basic form or shape of a tree betrays an obvious urge to mingle with nature, but in its apparently wilful refusal or deliberate failure to do that being an easily spottable difference it also discloses other desires and ambivalences. Though writing about the post-colonial experience, its worth noting Homi K. Bhabhas writing on mimicry here: The discourse of mimicry is constituted around ambivalence; in order to be effective mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of the difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation. 2 Much earlier, but even more relevant to the sculptural objects being discussed here, Roger Caillois similarly found an unnerving space within the act of mimicry. Looking both at animals who used mimicry, and also at humans with schizophrenia, Caillois concluded that mimicry isnt a defence but a disorder of spatial perception, crucially locating spatiality at heart of subjectivity. 3 Space is a double dihedron continuously changing its size and location: it is a dihedron of action, with a horizontal plane determined by the person who is walking and thus pulling the dihedron along at the same time; and it is also a dihedron of representation, shaped by the same horizontal plane as before (which is represented,
all kinds of insights, from the small hooks of burrs leading to the invention of Velcro, or architectural designs based on the self-cooling mounds built by termites. While these are more structural and integrated derivations of inspiration from nature, the mobile phone mast tree, it seems, is a particular technological development that responds to accusations of visual pollution and potential radiation health risks by taking on the garb of nature. Not convincingly, or effectively enough to the point of invisibility or actual blending in with surroundings. Its camouflage operates more simply on first appearance, where a quick look would not betray it. Kopps tree, on the other hand, is hiding in plain sight; its mimicry is more that of a stylised shape of a tree, making no attempt to disguise its presence, rather the opposite, with its colouring and lighting. Both the disguised phone masts and Kopps Marker Tree as a more recent evolutionary example from the same family are revealing in how they borrow from nature,
though rather than perceived) and cut by a vertical plane just where the object appears in the distance. [In mimicry] matters become critical with represented space because the living creature, the organism, is no longer located at the origin of the coordinate system but is simply one point among many. Dispossessed of its privilege, it quite literally no longer knows what to do with itself... Ones sense of personality is quickly, seriously undermined.
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What does that suggest about these man-made objects, through which we are literally communicating? their act of mimicry is a ready metaphor, even a direct stand-in, for our own misplaced ambivalences about our relationship to our environment. It is not simply our desire to not appear to be disrupting nature; as highlighted in the practice of the Undetectables above, there is also a further sense of dislocation in attempting to make cinemas illusions real. In her discussion of the cinematic representation of genetics, Jackie stacy has noted: Insofar as mimicry might be a strategic form of parodic playback (or even pastiche), exposing the specular wish that the other reflect gratifyingly upon the ego of the original, perhaps the figure of the clone threatens to expose the sexual desires of techno-scientific cultures. In this sense, the production of a copy does more than just duplicate, it also transforms the original by facing it with its own desires and presenting it with an image of its own (diminished) embodiment. 5 The mobile phone mast trees that line our landscape provide us with just such a mirroring. In this light then, they reveal themselves with two distinct qualities: of being highly cinematic, and stubbornly adolescent. these non-trees stand as our investment in drawing out the momentary, not-to-be-noticed backgrounds of the cinematic screen, and placing them within our physical world. Thus the two-dimensional house fronts, styrofoam rocks and stuffed animals that are meant to be quickly panned over by the camera are placed in
For both Bhabha and Caillois, the act of mimicking is an actively back and forth moment of disavowal and disappearance, a being and not-being that leads to an out-of-body like state. For Caillois more particularly, it is an entity almost merging with a landscape, its visual adaptation triggering a more profound immersion and confusion of self and environment. Space chases, entraps and digests them [the schizophrenic] in a huge process of phagocytosis. Then, it ultimately takes their place. The body and the mind thereupon become disassociated; the subject crosses the boundary of his own skin and stands outside of his senses... He feels that he is turning into space himself dark space into which things cannot be put. He is similar; not similar to anything in particular, but simply similar. And he dreams up places that spasmodically possess him. These expressions all bring to light one process: depersonalization through assimilation into space Life withdraws to a lesser state.
spaces where we, apparently, are meant only to see them from the corner of our eye, to similarly pass over them unnoticed. Their attempts to place cinema at heart of the real, however, is also shaded by that same half-made quality. Theirs is simply wanting to make a visible attempt to fit in with nature, like a teenager reluctantly wearing a school uniform. Their camouflaging is done defiantly badly, and with minimal effort. In using our mobiles, we implicitly endorse the construction of this surface reality and cinematic pleasure of pure appearance, where we just have to be seen trying to get along with nature, to be seen wanting to get along with nature, without actually doing so. Kopps Marker Tree, then, stands out among its brethren. Visible only from a man-made road while being propelled by a man-made machine, is this blatant not-tree, a loud and obnoxious contrast to the rolling hills behind it. If it comes from a film set, it would be Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927), a faded vision of the future fashioned entirely in metal. Kopps tree has shed its uniform, and is honest enough to admit that its relationship with nature is not a good one. The desires revealed by the Marker Tree still express that yearning lean towards organic growth, the dark wish to merge again with our environment. But its hard form, rooted and swirled by tarmac, speaks more of our incessant inability to do so. Sprung from the ground at this junction, the Marker Tree bears the fruit of a constantly frustrated wish.
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1 Janine Benyus, Biomimicry (New York: William Morrow and Co, 1997). 2 Homi K. Bhabha, the location of Culture, 2005, p. 85. 3 Jackie Stacey, the Cinematic life of the Gene (London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 108. 4 Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, 1938, in the edge of Surrealism, 2003. 5 Stacey, p. 104.
Moving Dublin CleAry & Connolly Background

Moving Dublin is at once a filmic essay about contemporary Dublin, and a collection of photographs, essays and video works produced in a hard-cover volume by Gandon Editions in April 2009. The artists spent two years meeting, talking and filming with Dubliners from many social backgrounds, from schoolchildren and teachers to writers and architects finding out about their daily journeys through a city suffocated by modern urban problems. Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. It looks at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering rocks chapter of Ulysses. In the artists words: For two years we moved around Dublin in every way possible: by car, taxi, bus, train, tram, bicycle and on foot. We met scores of Dubliners, and recorded dozens of personal accounts of moving through the city. We amassed a treasure trove of documents video, photographs, interviews, sounds, stories. The result is Moving Dublin; a road movie, a picture book, and many other things. The project also resulted in a collection of shorter video installations, including Luas Carol, The Life of Saint Mary, and The Observer Effect, all of which examine journeys of different scales through Dublin City.
MovIng duBlIn Cleary & Connolly (Background) 18
Throughout the project Cleary and Connolly worked closely with local arts officers, schools and other community groups and the resulting works demonstrate a high level of community participation, reflecting Cleary and Connollys strategy of observer-participation as a means of producing work with meaning. An important element of Moving Dublin is Cleary and Connollys series of moving photographs, some of which appear in the book. Numbering several thousand, these photographs were all taken while travelling through the city using various means of transport. Conceived to examine the aesthetic aspects of urban mobility, these momentary shots taken in passing provide a powerful commentary on social and urban practices today.
MovIng duBlIn Cleary & Connolly (Background) 19
Foreword to Moving Dublin

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the most shocking is Killenard, near Portarlington, in Co Laois, where a Portlaoise-based developer managed to get planning permission for a huge hotel, a golf course, villas and suburban housing on land that had never been zoned for development. A small village of 27 bungalows, a church, school and pub is now completely overwhelmed. In Trim, Co Meath, a brash four-storey hotel stands less than twenty metres from the ramparts of trim Castle, the most important Anglo-Norman fortification in Ireland. Thats thanks to Martin Cullen, who had become known among planners as the Minister for no Environment for filleting the National Monuments Act to make it easier to get rid of troublesome relics that stood in the way of road schemes, and for eviscerating the idealistic social housing provisions of the 2000 Planning Act. It was also Cullen who declined to use his power under the same Act to direct Wexford County Council to review its local area plan for Gorey (100 km from Dublin), even though local councillors had zoned enough land around the town to cater for five times its population. When asked to intervene, Cullen said he would not get involved in issues of detail. Where people live and how they get around are fundamental issues. But the councillors were allowed to get away with rezoning vast tracts of land around this planned 17th-century market town for residential development aimed at long-distance commuters. As a result, Goreys population soared by 44% between 1996 and 2002, and its outskirts recorded an even larger increase (53%) between 2002 and 2006. At least 40%, and possibly even as much as 70%, of the new residents commute to Dublin daily, mostly by car on the newly improved N11, as the local area plan itself conceded.
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Frank McDonald
Everyone experiences architecture, whether we think consciously about it or not, and the quality of our built environment profoundly affects the quality of our lives... Good architecture contributes to our sense of wellbeing. Conversely, poor standards of design and construction represent a waste of effort, energy, materials and opportunity. They debase our quality of life. Thats what the Irish Governments Action on Architecture programme said in April 2002, when we were told that architectural quality was to become one of the key criteria for publicly funded construction projects. In view of its special responsibility in setting an example for the community at large, it said, the Government must present itself as an exemplary client committed to quality in areas of building procurement and property development. Would that it were true! Unfortunately, the Department of Finance which always calls the shots is only interested in design-and-build packages and PPP projects, where architecture always comes second. In the Governments daft decentralisation programme, almost all of the new buildings were design-and-build packages. After the boom, we are left with a legacy of rip-roaring unsustainable development all over the country. Among
Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 20
In the midst of the white heat it generated, Ahern told a group of transition year students from north and south that sustainable development and a clean environment were fundamental to his vision of Ireland. But when I put it to his former special adviser, Paddy Duffy, that Ahern understood sustainable development to mean development that has to be sustained, he replied, Exactly! Politicians spent a decade congratulating themselves on the year-by-year record output of new housing, forgetting the fact that at least a third, and
Photo from a train (wasteland). Dublin metropolitain area. 24/04/2008.
possibly as much as 40% of new homes are one-off houses in the countryside. Indeed, an ESRI study found that up to a third of all new homes built since the late 1990s are out of reach of basic services such as shops, schools and sports facilities except by car. And theyre no longer modest bungalows MacMansions have become the new vernacular. At the same time, nearly every town in Ireland has its share of derelict buildings and sites crying out for rehabilitation. The doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers who were once quite content to live in towns began moving out in the 1960s as homes in rural areas became more fashionable, even de rigueur, and left a trail of decay behind them. The upper floors of many urban buildings, once alive with families, have been turned over to storage or simply not used at all, as James Nix and myself wrote in Chaos at the Crossroads. 1 Meanwhile, Ireland is on the way to becoming a citystate, with Dublin dominating everywhere else. The capital has become an alarming example of the 21stcentury phenomenon of the meta-city, with tentacles stretching out all over the province of Leinster via the
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Melville Dunbar, a British specialist in residential design, observed a few years ago that Irelands recently built housing areas generally lack any sense of place or regional identity, and tend to be characterised by anywhere architecture, though, of course, many of them were not designed by architects at all. What we built, he said, were car-dominant, serried ranks of dwellings with a similar plan form set at uniform distances apart, no spatial variety or contrast, and little regard to human scale and convenience. Most politicians hardly noticed, let alone cared about what was happening; they tended to have a short attention span. Nearly everything of importance was sidelined by short-termism, and, in any case, development was seen as a good thing. The main reason for this glaring myopia is that Irelands political system is in deep decay, dominated by parish-pump clientelism thats a by-product of multi-seat constituencies where every tD is minding their own patch, with an eye to the next election. It was Bertie Ahern, the king of clientelist politics, who presided over the boom as Taoiseach from 1997 to 2008.
spokes of a Dublin-centred motorway network, with pieces of the city popping up on the outskirts of towns and villages within a radius of 100 kilometres. The increasingly european-style city centre, with its new apartment buildings, smart shops and cappuccino bars, is surrounded by a vast, sprawling North American-style edge city. As a result, the nightmare scenario painted by American sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone 2 of community and even family life being eroded by longdistance commuting has become a grim reality for many Irish people. Greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector went up by 178% between 1990 and 2007, making our Kyoto target even more difficult to meet. And with the Government still investing millions of euro per week in motorways and other major roads, we are being locked into a US-style reliance on imported oil. The Governments failure to recognise Irelands need for a real counterweight to Dublins dominance is its most grievous error. It could have embraced Dr Edward Walshs concept of an Atlantic technology Corridor linking Galway, Limerick/Shannon and Cork, but shamelessly shirked that challenge. Instead, everything was left to the market to decide, leading to the explosive growth of new suburbs and the pockmarking of rural landscapes by housing. If this were to continue, the country would be well and truly ruined. What is to be done? Well, some of us were nave enough to think that everything was on the way to being sorted after the Dublin Crisis Conference in 1986. At the time, practically every element of public policy was pointing
in the wrong direction. Most appallingly, the inner city was being evacuated and carved up for roads, and the prospect of it accommodating even an extra 10,000 people was written off by the planners. But the conferences agenda of repopulating the urban core and improving public transport, rather than merely roads, soon became part of public policy. Most heartening of all, the number of inner-city dwellers rose by more than 53% between 1991 and 2006. Now that the recession has arrived, perhaps we will have time to reflect on where weve come from, what weve done and what we could do to make Dublin a more environmentally sustainable city for the 21st century. We have time to think, like we did in the 1980s.
This essay was first published in Moving Dublin among a collection of essays responding to the contexts and including the work of Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly. With thanks to the publisher Gandon Editions, Kinsale, and Frank McDonald. The book is available from bookshops or direct from Gandon Editions, ISBN 978 0948037 696, (incl DVD) T: 021-4770830 / F: 021-4770755 / E:gandon@eircom.net
_______________________ 1 Frank McDonald and James Nix, Chaos at the Crossroads (Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 2005). 2 Robert D Putnam, Bowling alone The Collapse and revival of american Community (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000).
A=AGHT JACKie s umell Background

A cultural investment A=AGHT is designed by Jackie Sumell, artist in residence on South Dublin Countys InContext 3 Per Cent for Art Scheme 200609. It is a semiutopic virtual space/town whose rules, population and culture are generated by a facilitated exchange between youth from New Orleans and Tallaght. Artists and cultural workers from both cities developed projects that encourage youth participants to explore historic moments, social grievances, ethnic and racial disparities in order to invent a place of creative resolve. The two week joint workshop programme for five Tallaght and five New Orleans Youth was provided by Cow House Studios and Residency and Temple Bar Studio & Gallery. A=AGHT is a concept based on creating the same sound from two entirely different spellings. This serves as the conceptual catalyst for the process of identifying and extracting commonness in seemingly different communities, NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) and Tallaght (South County Dublin). A=AGHT was initiated in March 2008, and was developed through a number of processes including: creative workshops for youth in both Tallaght and New Orleans, facilitated by artists; an online facilitated forum for youth to explore issues such as differences and commonness; the development of the A=AGHT website; the development of 3D models representing the virtual
world of A=AGHT; and youth travel exchange, facilitated by additional fundraising and awards. An exhibition of the 3D models of A=AGHT, and images from Frank Abruzzeses A=AGHT photography/identity project, were exhibited at RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre in December 2008. Also a corresponding publication, A Travel Guide to A=AGHT, was published in Spring 2009. Exhibitions of the A=AGHT projects also took place in New Orleans during 2009. A=AGHT hopes to inspire other educators to develop programmes that are compelling, challenging and constructive. The complex poetics of inventing a place that exploits commonalities, instead of people, is inherent to the projects concept. The overall objective is to encourage young people to construct an imaginary place where the trajectories of these principles will influence the real-life decisions of generations to come.
a=agHt JaCKie SuMell (Background) 26
a=agHt JaCKie SuMell (Background) 27
Either/Or... , a polemic
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to us as places to share and communicate, to engage with leisure, gossip and creative activities. Even relatively benign technologies have been programmed to be presumptive of our desires, compound fantasy rather than imagination. Our engagement supports directional apparatuses within these technologies designed to engrain and attribute us with habits. We are stereotyped through the analysis of our activities. think here of that old American chestnut, the story of a straight man who is incorrectly outed by his TiVo1 presuming him to be queer because his TV viewing habits indicated that he liked travel, house and garden, and antiques shows. We sublimate our knowledge that engagement with such things is filtered by highly invasive commercial drives. At its extreme, fantasy works from the realm of introversion. Iris Murdoch refers to fantasy as a consolation of the private self, a reference she makes when discussing the pivots between the realms of art and philosophy. Being a considerable practitioner of both, Murdoch names philosophys role as one of clarification and arts as one of mystification. Murdoch understands the role of art as being to create illusion, and the work of philosophy as an attempt to dispel it; to liberate our minds from illusion. She considers that in the liberation from illusion we defeat the formlessness of the world and that in the making of art we are creating consolations for it. Much of contemporary art-making and particularly several of the projects that emerged out of InContext 3 attempts to offer solutions to the illusory nature of our lives, or at least to offer some suggestions for alternative navigation. This polarisation is perhaps a little old-fashioned when addressing the complexity of some contemporary practices. There is little doubt that literal approaches in art-making veer into production, and that dispelling illusion can remove dimension, making art flat.
eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 29
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Sarah Searson
i. Imagination or fantasy Its a game of either/or, and the question is: imagination or fantasy? The answer, imagination wins hands down. It offers something universally appealing and attractive. There is romanticism in the human power of imagination. Although not always a good, at its best the imaginary holds vitality and develops the potential to unlock and find unknown solutions, nonsenses or ways of being, even commonalities. the freedom to imagine thrives in tandem with energy and confidence. Imagination opens, whereas fantasy is enclosed and limited. The hope with fantasy is that at its best it elucidates imagination. We live intensely fantastic lives, and experience collective order and control through contemporary systems of learning, leisure and entertainment, systems which offer the fantasy of imaginative potential. Popular online entertainment and communications systems imply imaginary freedoms which can be problematic. Many commercial systems Bebo, MySpace, Facebook have used discourses of empowerment or freedom to engage and populate worlds, emerging as covert in their desire for power and control. These technologies are designed and re-designed to enclose our imaginative scope within their architecture. Central to critical discourses of such apparatuses are issues of control and the erosion of boundaries between the public and private self. These technical architectures appeal
Drawing on Murdochs discourse, the truth is that our worlds are compounding in formlessness, fluidity and uncertainty, and that, as she said in an interview with Bryan Magee, it is from this rubble that one is always trying to make forms . It
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pedagogically driven, described by the artist as a form of tutoring. Participants engaged with a sphere of work that was orchestrated for them: workshops, classes and tours created by associated artists, who worked under the direction of Sumell. Open creative resolution was not embedded within the projects contract of engagement. A criticism here might be that individual imaginative power is obfuscated. But the questions are framed by the artist and her understanding of the participants world sphere. Claire Bishop writes critically of similar practices as a platonic regime where art is valued for its truthfulness and educational efficacy not for inviting us to confront the more complicated considerations of our predicament.4 ii. Obliqueness or visibility Kierkegaards great book Either/Or asks that Aristotelian question, how we should live? Either/Or is an artwork which explores two fundamentally different ways of being in the world. Kierkegaard makes his philosophical explorations at a remove by answering questions obliquely and pseudonymously; presenting his investigation through the work of the protagonist/editor, Victor eremita, who finds the writings of two characters, A and B. These writings Eremita edits, re-orders and publishes. Taking the train of argument through the aesthetic, represented by A, and the ethical, represented by B, he positions them as antithetical. This approach is a form of indirect communication or a selfconscious attempt to describe a position as author. Kierkegaard has distanced himself from the responsibility of the direct voice of authorship, but instead he develops the form of his argument through the work of his characters. He invokes the two individuals and applies experiences and realities which create a context for his questions.
from this perspective, that of sense-making, which the artist Jackie Sumell works, describing A=AGHT as follows: A=AGHT is a semi-utopic virtual space/town whose rules, population and culture are generated by a facilitated exchange between youth from New Orleans and Tallaght. Adult artists and cultural workers from both cities developed projects that encourage youth participants to explore historic moments, social grievances, ethnic and racial disparities in order to invent a place of creative resolve, the project was developed through creative workshops for youth in both Tallaght and New Orleans, facilitated by artists. 3 A critique of some contemporary art-making is that it has become excessively participatory and residential. I would argue that these are works that embody principles akin to popular technologies, in that the terms of engagement are applied to participants who are often unclear as to the deeper rationales and drives for participatory engagement. Many participatory projects are fronted by a call for an expression of wide imaginative impulse; they present themselves as collective processes which seem to override a deeper critical review. Artists often make niches for participants within their work by devising methods which challenge or illustrate participants perceptions. This type of investigation underpins the overarching interests of the artist. In A=AGHT participants were involved through a process of questioning which was
A way of regarding Sumells processes is that she too investigates through her participants. She is not so interested in the individual response as in a cast of characters who offer her material to shape and develop her authorial position, out of which she develops art. So the creation of a utopic world is the work of A=AGHT but it is also a performance of the democratic conventions of world-making, which is worked out through questioning and seeking responses. A singular imagination, centred on Sumells leadership, is mining the fantasies of others to create a utopia. Many of the questions posed to participants are made public; the answers are not, until they are further extruded, edited or developed by the artist or other artists supporting the project. This becomes apparent in how the responses are later represented in a gallery context. As ideas develop into art objects the visual language of the project shifts to that of Sumell and her associated artists. What emerges are highly resolved, attractive and intricate works of sculpture with an aesthetic like that of architectural models. The models are set on plinths, made of archival quality packing cases, denoting the preciousness of these worlds, and conforming to the conventions of an artworld. The creation of these objects was tightly directed and produced by professional makers. The artwork is a representation the participants answers, addressing the pseudonymous concerns of the artist. These objects address this world, and make solutions for it, from a middle ground, and are hybrids of the existing conventions of city and civic life; for example, one model is fusion of a School and a Zoo. These are hyper-bred structures; slightly surreal, engaging and intriguing in their intimacy, and
very beautifully made. As objects addressing the scope of world-making they express little of the tension of youth. iii. tension or consensus The unfurling of the future through a dream is a definition of apocalypse. The surrealist Georges Bataillle sees tension as crucial to the success of art. He considered art was interesting if it addressed anguish, that anguish frees art from being boring; that the embedded anguish within an art project should be based on questioning beyond the scope of the permissive. It is at this extreme point that we are enabled to imagine future worlds as balanced between dystopic and utopic. By our nature, we understand the symmetry of polarisation and division as a binary approach or explanation. As if through extremes we find ways to explain universality. We rationalise through allocation. The potential for tension, dissent and democratic engagement was integral to the project of A=AHGT, but was quelled as the apparatuses and sub-structures of it were covert. Sumells project of utopia is an exercise in indirect storytelling. I think it very much relates to art which is an exercise in truth seeking. So perhaps condemning art for being fantastical is in many ways condemning art for being untrue. Problematic issues arise where processes are too closely mimetic, as this aspect of making somehow expresses the limits of its own world context. The removal of the artist-self as the key protagonist of the artwork and the development of a community of communication and exchange was the genuine motivation for the work in A=AGHT. What is missing is creative dissent, or an expression of tension. This might have been expected to emerge as participants evolved their utopias, rejecting or challenging a status quo. What actually emerged within the
project is a focus on work-making and collecting, activities which reflect the technologies of the world familiar to the participants. The online aspects of the project work from a familiar private space. The forum is private and highly mediated; it mimics but does not critique similar commercial spaces which are also socially motivated, and doesnt challenge such platforms even in the form of satire. The artist has been the initiator of a private fantasy world, which collects opinions about how they (the young people) might live in the actual world. the method is akin to that of the controllers of commercial networks and their content. In observing the nuances of the artists direction, the form and ambition of the overall project, what is interesting and remains open is her ultimate question, of how to be in the world.
Grpat Jennifer WAlshe Background

Jennifer Walshe performed the role of commissioner, performer and curator in her work with the Grpat sound art collective. The project provided specific contexts for Jennifer Walshe to continue to develop her commitment to non-traditional musical notation and her exploration of place. Her connections to the particular terrains, histories and memories encountered during research and exploration of the South Dublin context were reflected in her collaborations with Grpat members. Grpat consists of nine individuals, each of whose projects combine a specific aspect of the local context with their well developed experimental artistic practice: Turf Boons silent music video, made from objects sourced in Tallaght shopping centre, Bulletin Ms songtags using field recordings, The Dowager Marchyloves sound poetry walks from Tallaght to the Hellfire Club, Flor Hartigans experimental piano compositions, Violetta Mahons sonic reliquaries installed at Holy Wells across South Dublin, OBrien Industrys immersive environments, Ukeoirn OConnors vocal scores incorporating the South Dublin skyline, The Parks Services mythology-soaked world of the Fornar Resistance game played in the Glenasmole valley and Detleva Verenss music scores based on
_______________________ 1 US television viewer/recording system similar to Skybox 2 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=m47A0AmqxQE 3 Texts supplied by the artist to South Dublin County Council. 4 Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, artforum international, 2006. Sourced: www.publicart.ie/main/ criticalcontexts/writing/archive/writing/view//5c009439ae/?tx_pawritings_ uid=4
satellite images from the South Dublin hills. Grpat was a two-year project in which Walshe assumed nine different alter egos all members of art collective Grpat and created compositions, installations, graphic scores, films, photography, sculptures and fashion
grpat Jennifer WalShe (Background) 35
under these alter egos. Pieces by Grpat members have been performed and exhibited all over the world, most notably at the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival; Kilkenny Arts Festival; the Museum of Arts & Design, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; New Langton Arts, san Francisco; Ultrasound Festival, tel Aviv and Festival rmlingen, switzerland. In February 2009 Grpat were the subject of a retrospective at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, which coincided with the launch of the book Grpat by Project Press and the release of two CDs featuring Jennifers music written under her Grpat alter egos.
Provoking Sound: Notation in the work of the Grpat artists

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Kurt Mathers
In the opening paragraph of Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte states: The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland? 1 this is the situation of much music notation, and one which the work of the South Dublin art collective Grpat addresses. Through an extended study of the potential forms music notation might take, they consider ways in which images and objects may provoke sound-making. Folded paper octahedrons; shrubbery; stones with written-on ukulele chord charts; a faux-fur box containing handwritten texts; and woven detritus: in an extension of Tuftes advocacy of dimensional illusion as a means to find greater depth on the page, work by the Grpat artists considers the expansion of notation in space, and how it might negotiate the exchange of information from composer to performer. Central to this exchange is the means by which notation is mapped to thought, action or sound when realising a score. Musical notation can take many forms, but each is characterised by the conventions and rules that determine the way a particular score should, or could, be interpreted. Symbolic notations such as those used
grpat Jennifer WalShe (Background) 36
provokIng sound: notatIon In tHe work oF tHe grpat artIsts, Kurt MatherS 37
in stave, graphic or kinetic scores require meaning to be attached to each symbol or movement; verbal scores require understanding of the language systems through which they are articulated. Without these points of reference, scores are images, not potential conveyors of directions for action. Sometimes these mappings are provided by the scorer, and in other cases they are not, leaving those realising the score to determine a personal response. In many pieces by the Grpat artists, a key principle is the lack of specific information regarding the way in which ideas about sound are mapped to actions and sounding results via notation. Such ambiguity is a deliberate strategy and has a long history, from Cornelius Cardews instructionless 193-page graphic score Treatise (1967) to Manfred Werders lists of unexplained nouns in his 2009 series. By not stating the way to use the notation, such scores rely on their internal logic, suggestive possibilities, and potential to open up associations and resonances with other situations. Elsewhere in Grpats work, however, great precision can be found. Whilst the scores may be unusual in appearance, they share with stave notation a reliance on prescribed rules to shape certain actions by performers. Gaps are still apparent, however; even where many of the parameters appear to be fixed, through employing detailed and clearly specified notation, other elements remain open, creating a strange mix of direction and openness. Perhaps the most ambiguous scores of the Grpat artists are those by Violetta Mahon. Her series of clamours are drawn from imagery generated by her dreams. Mahon has kept dream diaries since 1988, and extracts pertinent sonic references as starting points for making graphic
Figure 1: Violetta Mahon, The King, Poto and Deauville (2008)
scores in the form of watercolour collages. In The King, Poto and Deauville (2008), a photograph of a grazing horse wearing a stuck-on vastly oversized crown is surrounded by short handwritten texts on small cards and fragments of music notation (see figure1). The combined image is then dotted with splashed watercolour paint. There are no instructions for these scores, although there are multiple points of reference: the horse may represent the importance of Deauville as a breeding area in France it is also twinned with County Kildare; Poto may be one of the identical American twins who by the age of eight in the late 1970s had developed a private language. In realisations of the piece by the German ensemble ascolta, titled Dream Diaries: 19882008, miniature toy horses are used to act out dressage choreography, performers chant text related to Second Life subcultures and sail paper planes across the audience. The ensemble unpack this from the clamour by decoding Mahons use of Solresol another invented language which uses permutations of seven unique syllables that can be articulated through,
amongst other things, words, pitches and colours as a means of mapping colour to instructions. This is only one possible solution however. There are many ways to approach the scores, with each interpretation prioritising the constituent information in a personal way. This is reinforced by the dual role of clamours as contemplative icons where the sounds described and images depicted reverberate through the imagination of the observer.
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imagined. Given the entirely visual domain of the work, sounds implicit in the situation depicted can only be imagined, whether the sources are apparent or not. These pieces function as scores in this respect. They attempt to engage the viewer in a consideration of the world beyond the boundaries of the frame. There is a corresponding invitation to realise the missing components, but this is not a requirement, simply an offer.
Although similar in their absence of instructions, in scores by The Dowager Marchylove, the alter ego of performance artist Niall Quinlan, words are a starting point. Some of her recent work uses a mix of sound poetry and photography to create pieces that invite the viewerlistener to reflect upon the sonic traces of remembered locations. This is rooted in her practice as a flneur, evident in earlier photographic works such as Its Not YouIts Me (1997) which comprises a series of photographs of locations where individuals had been unceremoniously dumped, 3 displayed alongside texts which provide further context. In her work since 2002, sound has been an increasingly important component, however. The series Flneur du Klang (2003 ) comprises polaroid photographs captioned with short texts reminiscent of haiku and often displayed as a framed grid (see figure 2). Here the texts suggest both the sound environment that envelops the pictured location, and ways of reading the image. For example, a close-up photograph of cut flowers is labelled flowers gleam and pulse under a choir of humming wires, whilst a country path sheltered by small leafless trees is marked tears of wool stand sentinel over a fairy path. Both texts contain references to what can be seen, and what might be
Figure 2: The Dowager Marchylove, Flneur du Klang (2003 )
In contrast, The Dowagers recent series of sound poems, The Wasistas of Thereswhere and Lets all Wake Brickfaced (2008) reduce the use of imagery in favour of typographic layouts that suggest ways of reading the words. Although there are a few hand-drawn and photographic images, here most of the information is carried by the texts. They recall the Futurist 4 Filippo Marinettis sound poems, such as Dune, parole in libert (1914), with its use of multiple fonts, onomatopoeic words, and a complication of narrative structure through overlaying and interpenetrating sections of the text. When working through the text of The Dowagers Lets all Wake Brickfaced (see figure 3), readers need to find
a way to negotiate the many possible routes it suggests. Although their form is very different, her sound poetry shares with Mahons clamours the use of text and image to create an open situation, one in which the performer needs to determine a method for realising each piece through interaction with the score.
idiom that must be deduced by the reader (see figure 5). Examples include warm dust wing, slow ooze close and egg yolk glass. This reliance on the readers lexicon to establish meaning, and therefore inform a realisation, is also found in some Fluxus event scores, such as George Brechts Bach (1963), which comprises the word Brazil. The potential for multiple readings created by the juxtaposition of the two words in the Brecht is extended in The Kennels, both through presenting groups of words on each face and the possibility of simultaneously reading the many faces that result from a throw of the dice. As such, a more complex set of interrelationships results.
Figure 3: The Dowager Marchylove, Lets all Wake Brickfaced (2008)
As is common amongst Grpat members, The Dowager is a regular collaborator with her fellow artists. Her installation The Kennels (2008) with Bulletin M involved creating a geocache5 containing dice scores that could be collected by those seeking its location deep in the Dublin mountains (see figure 4). The dice themselves also use text as a scoring medium, with the faces presenting an
figure 4: The Dowager Marchylove and Bulletin M, geocache location for The Kennels (2008)
triangulating the contour of the wires, pseudo-stave markings, and subjective responses to the images to create sequences of pitches. These were then renotated as a series of stave notation panels, which were performed in sequences suggested by the relative position of the photos to each other in the original exhibition. Reference was also made to the similarity between the wires and the layout of the piano strings, with score markings being transferred to carefully measured positions on each string and used as locations for inserting metal
Figure 5: The Dowager Marchylove and Bulletin M, dice scores for The Kennels (2008)
and wood preparations. A chain of events initiated by Hartigans original proposal therefore establishes the final relationship between score and sounding result.
Such collaborative approaches to score-making are also apparent in work by both Flor Hartigan and Turf Boon. By opening up aspects of the creation of a piece to others, the multiple perspectives of other personalities seep in, allowing from the composers perspective a more objective and moderated result. But this is not composing by committee: it creates the possibility of extremes, idiosyncrasies and abuse. Hartigans collaborative approach to score-making is evident in her piece Telegraph (2008), part of the series re(Cycling) (2003 ), which was installed during the Grpat exhibition at Project Arts Centre, Dublin in February 2009. The work comprises a series of photographs of telegraph wires arranged in a mosaic-like manner on the gallery wall (see figure 6). Visitors were invited to add notations to the photographs; such annotations included musical notes, the anarchist circle-A, drawings of cakes and monsters, geometric doodling, scribbles, and stickers. The score was subsequently realised by the Wechsler-Ishikara piano duo with vocalist and regular Grpat collaborator Jennifer Walshe in Barcelona, with the performers
Figure 6: Flor Hartigan, installation of collaborative score for Telegraph (2008) at Project Arts Centre, Dublin
collaborators who have made versions of the piece. In this way, his work draws on the experience of others, mediated through the use of recycled materials. The photos are found not taken; the associations of others leave traces of personal histories. His embracing of freeganism, which espouses minimising the consumption of resources, is central to this aesthetic. He comments I dont buy materials if I can avoid it. When I do buy materials they come from charity shops or jumble sales, places where my money will
Figure 7: Turf Boon, Community Choir Drawing: 8291 BUSTER leanb (2006)
be recycled into the system in a humane way. I want to use whats there The every-day, the detritus, the debris, old buttons, harmonicas, slideshows and mix-tapes these are emotional and textural fingerprints we leave behind. They give us the possibility to be archaeologists in and of the present. 6 While Boons recycling of found objects is the focus of much of his instrument making 7, he also uses found materials to make scores. When preparing The Sacred Geometries (2007), Boon spent the periods of Ordinary time 8 in 2007 sourcing sheet music from church jumble sales in Tallaght. Pages of these scores were then cut down and folded into octahedra 9 (see figure 8). The origami pattern used required four separate pieces of paper to be folded together, resulting in a collage-like distribution of the images across the eight faces of the solid. This creates many discontinuities in the way the original scores intersect with each other; when the octahedra are placed together, the flow is further complicated. Boon does not provide instructions for realising these scores, however, simply making them available for use by performers.
In Turf Boons ongoing Community Choir series (2002 ), an expanding collection of drawing scores are produced collaboratively with each performer. The scores comprise found photographs and handwritten solfge notation arranged in discrete blocks on a large sheet of paper (see figure 7). This material is initially sourced and selected by Boon, but arrangements are made with the performer, who may add additional words and images as required. Performers may also select which of a set of interpretative descriptors symbols that suggest particular ways of reading the score are embedded amongst the text and images. For example, in Community Choir Drawing: 7212 ceann, developed with New York vocalist Dieter Aherne, the juxtaposition of the number 64 with a grid of three clock faces was chosen to determine the points at which the repeating sequence fa-re-mi may be used, and the number of times this may happen in a performance. This negotiated approach to scoring reduces Boons sense of authorship in his work, marginalising him as the works creator and subsuming him in the loose collective of
Realisations by Grpat member The Parks Service have used the solids as eight-sided dice, cast afresh for each iteration of the piece, whilst the Belgium-based Next Ensemble made precise measurements of each face and used the data to determine a time structure for controlling the duration of each reading. In both cases, the fragmentary nature of the composite images resulted in a filmic cutting between sounds.
map onto South Dublin County via matrix transposition equations, and arranged the objects within the cabinets into tableaux according to geometries derived from these equations. 10 their arrangement is therefore not arbitrary, and the requirements for realising the scores are correspondingly precise. The equations are also used to determine very short time windows in which the players act, sometimes requiring complex sequences of foot movements prescribed by the dance notation 11 to be placed within, for example, the space of 0.23 seconds. equally, the variations in colour of the foliage placed in the glass receptacles governs the density of noise tones. Colour charts, similar to those used for choosing household paint colours, are provided to enable accurate mapping of leaf colour to bowing techniques so as to help the players produce the correct sound; recordings with sonogram analyses are appended to the score in order to further clarify what is required.
Figure 8: Turf Boon, The Sacred Geometries (2007)
Found materials can also be seen in the work of Detleva Verens. In The Cabinet of Dr. OMahony (2006) for string quartet, the players are presented with three cabinets, each containing miniature artificial plants, music notation (including stave fragments and chord charts), representations of dance steps and images from Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island (see figure 9). Whilst there is a relatively free association between the original materials and the resultant score in both Boon and Hartigans work, Verens background in cybernetics, phonetics and speech technology infuses her more rigorously empirical approach to scoring. When preparing the cabinets, Verens traced Stevensons
Figure 9: Detleva Verens, one of the cabinets from The Cabinet of Dr. OMahony (2006)
Other found materials can be seen in Verenss Scintillia (2007) for solo voice, which comprise three wicker and bamboo constructions (see figure 10). These are based on satellite photographs of a forest in South Dublin County as well as constellation positions and satellite orbits in the sky over Tallaght on 15 March 2007. Verens notes the influence of the stick charts of the Marshall Islanders in both the method of construction and interpretation of the scores. The Marshallese use their charts as a means to map the wave patterns around their island group. The two principal types of chart, the rebbelib and wappepe, were used to relate the movement of waves to specific islands, with the orientation of a chart being altered dependent upon location. The charts are used to show relationships: they are not maps in the sense that they depict absolute positions of fixed objects. 12 Although Verenss scores have a different purpose and bear only superficial resemblance to the stick charts (they could not be used for navigation), they share this characteristic, allowing the reader to make relationships between the elements they represent. Verens explains that The stick charts fascinate me because they are a completely different way of thinking about mapping, being concerned with patterns and flows or energy and how these flows are affected by objects that exist within them. This mapping methodology seemed perfectly suited to sound. 13 Her reference to Hermann Hesses Das Glasperlenspiel is apposite in this respect. As the game players in Hesses novel make relationships between multidisciplinary ideas in order to create everdeepening associations between them, so must the performers who realise Scintillia highlight connections
between constellations, geography, sound and energy, and promot[e] a very unique type of musical harmony. 14
Figure 10: Detleva Verens, one of the three scores for Scintillia (2007)
two other aspects of the Marshallese charts are of direct relevance to Verenss scores for Scintillia. Firstly, the charts were not used on voyages but served as memory aids when preparing for a trip. Although not explicitly stated in the instructions for Scintillia, the possibility of memorising the scores in advance, a common practice in musical performance, reinforces the analogy with their source. Secondly, the charts were generally only able to be read by the chart maker. Their uniqueness may be seen therefore as a barrier to widespread use, but as Verens explains, in her piece the performers must develop their own strategy for mapping the score-objects to sound structures:
Mappings are open, interpretable according to each persons perspective in time and space; they can be interpreted from any direction, any dimension. What is important is flows of energy, systems of tendencies which the performer must internalize so that the score is just a reminder of a physical experience of frequency in space. The dimensions of the score become represented as a unique geology within the performers brain, as synapses form replicating a neural version of the score structure.15 In reading the score then, all that exists is a set of relationships which are contextualised by the performer and the situation of performance.
one time. In his Three Songs (2007) for voice and ukulele there are five discernible streams of information. 16 In addition to a melody on a stave, there are a series of vocal sounds notated using the International Phonetic Alphabet, ukulele chord symbols, diagrams showing cross sections of the vocal tract to indicate specific tongue-positions, and photographs of the landscape around South Dublin County (see figure 11). Whilst the stave may form only one layer of notation in the score, it is the principal way in which time is delineated. The rhythmic notation and metric segmentation of the vocal line controls the placing of the other elements. The chord symbols are placed at points of harmonic change as might be expected, but they are matched by the vocal tract diagrams and landscape photographs. These too are placed at points of change, determining the timbre of the voice in the same way that the chords define the harmony. Their size relative to the other elements on the page makes their temporal location less clear though. Whilst the smaller chord symbols can be related directly to individual points in the bar, the larger photographs have a more general placement. This has a considerable impact on their role in the music, relegating them to a slower rate of change given the horizontal space they occupy. the precision of the notation in Three Songs is perhaps
Figure 11: Ukeoirn OConnor, excerpt from Three Songs (2007)
unusual amongst Grpat scores, constraining mappings between image and sound rather than opening them up. OConnors use of International Phonetic Alphabet symbols is significant. The symbols have fixed meanings and as such may be easily replicated despite their distribution across a wide variety of languages, reference
At the other extreme, Ukeoirn OConnors scores contain the clearest references to conventional stave notation amongst the Grpat artists. In OConnors work, staves generally form only one element of the notation at any
to which he makes in sourcing particular vocal sounds for the piece. The use of phonetics in Three Songs is modified by the other streams of diagrammatic information, however. The tongue positions may contradict the means of producing the required sound indicated by the phonetic symbol, and the landscape photographs less explicit meaning opens up a degree of interpretative openness. the examples presented here only give a flavour of the variety of approaches to notation taken by the Grpat artists. The mix of graphic and verbal notation, photographs, objects and carefully crafted assemblages, as well as instances of stave notation, point to the rich diversity found in their work. By seeking to extend the expressive and instructive potential of notation as a means to suggest an inherent performance practice, their scores attempt to embody the conceptual basis for the work. The range of freedoms given to interpreters also points to a genuinely investigative and collaborative attitude to making.
_______________________ 1 Edward R. Tufte, envisioning information (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 1990), p.9. 2 Violetta Mahon, in Grpat (Dublin: Project Press, 2009). 3 The Dowager Marchylove, in Grpat. 4 it is worth stating the link between Marinetti and fellow Futurist Luigi Russolo, another noted flneur whose art of noises manifesto (1913) proclaims Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto, The art of noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), p. 26. 5 Geocaching is the practice of hiding containers outdoors and posting their GPS co-ordinates online so that others might find them. Caches typically contain objects which may be taken by those that find them, with an implicit expectation that something is left in their place. For more information, see www.geocaching.com 6 Turf Boon, Creative Freeganism in Michael Sand (ed.), frozen (Berlin: Galerie Fleisch Verlag, 2008), p. 81. 7 Examples include the soft-toy marimba of Kuscheltiermarimbaphon (2006) and Shoepipes (2005). 8 Ordinary Time is the period in the Christian calendar that falls outside of the main seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. 9 An octahedron is one of the five Platonic solids, and was associated with the element air. Plato related each of the solids to one of the four elements, with the fifth the icosahedron being reserved for god. The solids later formed the basis of Johannes Keplers Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), which used them as a way to describe astronomical proportions in relation to the positioning of planets. 10 Detleva Verens, in Grpat. 11 All four string players, including the cellist, must stand throughout the performance. 12 For a full discussion of the role of stick charts in establishing methods of communication in the Marshall islands, see Dirk HR Spennemann, Traditional and Nineteenth Century Communication Patterns in the Marshall islands, Micronesian Journal of the humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 4, no. 1, Dry Season issue (June 2005): 25-52. 13 Detleva Verens, Pattern Mapping, The Journal of relational Cartography, vol 4, #6 (Winter 2009): 36. 14 Detleva Verens, in Grpat. 15 Detleva Verens, Kurt Mathers, email correspondence, 10.11.10. 16 For a detailed discussion of OConnors notation, see Erwin Schwender, Crossing Streams: parametric dissonance in the recent music of Ukeoirn OConnor, complexitynoW, vol. 13, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 35-62.
Public Arena BiK VAn der pol Background

Public Arena is a triptych using three distinct mediums which explore, animate and celebrate the socio-political journey of Tallaght Stadium. These include: A video film (33 minutes), made in collaboration with students of Tallaght Community School and produced by Ali Curran. The script for this work was compiled from verbatim interviews with people from all sides of the negotiations of the Tallaght Stadium initiative. The video work is accompanied by a publication designed by David Bennewith that includes the script for the work. A neon public art work based on the Thomas Davis club motto: Nascann Dshln Daoine (Challenge Unites People). A live installation and photo shoot with an enormous ball in tallaght stadium Other events to mark the project included: The Ball Event at Tallaght Stadium on 27 June, 2009. This involved an introductory talk by Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, a screening of the Public Arena video and a live Installation and photoshoot on the pitch at tallaght Stadium. Public screenings of Public Arena video at rua red south Dublin Arts Centre on 29 June 4 July, 2009.
The Project Arts Centre continuously screened the film on a monitor from 13 July 1 August, 2009. Finally, a live installation and photo shoot took place at the stadium.
puBlIc arena BiK Van der pol (Background) 56
puBlIc arena BiK Van der pol (Background) 57
The Chorus and the Contemporary Ruin: Bik Van der Pols puBliC ArenA
by
Composed of archived tV news footage since 1945, Pasolinis film included a voiceover commentary delivered by two unidentified speakers according to Berger, one voice sounds like an urgent commentator while the other is half-historian and half-poet, a soothsayers voice. For Berger, these voices function like a Greek chorus. They cannot affect the outcome of what is being shown but can articulate what the viewer might be feeling. Crucially, the Greek chorus was not made up of actors instead male citizens were chosen to represent the city, drawn from the agora (marketplace, or place of assembly) and the forum. Their role was to speak for past and future generations of the city; When they spoke of what the public had already recognised, they were grandparents. When they gave voice to what the public felt but had been unable to articulate, they were the unborn. 2 Bik Van der Pols video also incorporates audio commentary, scripted from interviews (conducted by Barbara Nealon) with residents, sports fans and others affected by the dispute over the designation of tallaght stadium as a soccer-only facility. As in the case of La Rabbia, this commentary is delivered by more than one voice. While Pasolini was ostensibly concerned with war, however, Bik Van der Pol seem interested in the problems, and possibilities, of transposing the classical chorus into the present. The scene shifts to a stage, or perhaps a TV studio. The woman with the air of authority waits as the young people take up their places, seated in rows under bright stage lights. As technicians move around and adjust cables, she begins a roll-call. At this point, sound and image begin to diverge. The image track consists mainly of close-ups and two-shots; candid scenes of teenagers
__________________________________________________
Maeve Connolly
Introduction: The Chorus in Our Heads The scene is a dressing room, backstage. Young people wearing everyday clothes peer into illuminated mirrors and adjust their hair. They are aware of the camera but try to ignore it. Are they actors or maybe participants in a reality TV contest, amateurs about to perform in front of an audience? A woman with an air of authority appears at the door. Yeah, thats fine, she says, inspecting the scene. Cut to a white text on a black screen the first in a series of ambiguous statements: The first voice informs us and the second reminds us. Of what? Not exactly of the forgotten, but rather of what we have chosen to forget. these statements continue, alluding to a process in which voices listen, observe and articulate a response. Later, at the close of the video, the source is revealed. The text is adapted from a section of John Bergers The Chorus In Our Heads, a response to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and particularly to his film about fear of war, entitled La Rabbia (Rage), which was commissioned for Italian television in 1962 but never shown in public.
1
tHe cHorus and tHe conteMporary ruIn, MaeVe Connolly 58
laughing, waiting or staring into space, punctuated by the occasional insertion of a clapperboard indicating the date and details of the shot. Meanwhile, voices are heard on the soundtrack and although youthful, they are dislocated in time and space. The voices speak in neutral tones, expressing the views of others without judgement. So a young man relates the experience of a female soccer fan who might be in her twenties, thirties, or forties. In this way, Public Arena evokes but also questions the representative role of the Chorus, revealing representation itself as a problematic point of intersection between the spheres of politics, the political, and media production. 3 At the time the interviews were conducted, the construction of Tallaght Stadium had been halted for several years, with the structure left half-finished. The dispute centred partly on the pitch size. A multi-purpose pitch large enough for senior level Gaelic Athletic Association games such as football and hurling would mean a reduction in the size of the stands, and in ticket sales. Several legal challenges had been mounted by the local GAA club, Thomas Davis, against South Dublin County Council but the eventual outcome was not yet certain. The script highlights the extent to which the stadium became a focus for competing understandings of tallaght, as a community, a former village, a new city, a potential tourist destination and a home to people from various parts of the world. Initially, the commentary focuses on competing claims to the stadium as a home ground. So supporters of thomas Davis cite its long association with tallaght, its concern with tradition and its status as one of
oldest GAA clubs in Ireland. Fans of Shamrock Rovers soccer club also emphasise the values of commitment and loyalty, highlighting the clubs once glorious (and glamorous) past, its need to establish a permanent base and aspirations to work with young people in Tallaght. Gradually, however, other themes come to the fore. These include the negative but also potentially lucrative associations between soccer and celebrity culture, the different forms of violence associated with players and supporters in both camps, and the disparate experiences of female fans in GAA and soccer culture. Proximity and Partiality Public Arena is just one of a number of recent artists video works in which theatrical settings or strategies form part of an exploration of representation in the public sphere. examples include Maya schweizer and Clemens Von Wedemeyers Rien du Tout, 2006, which deals partly with public perceptions of the French banlieue. the opening section features a group of young performers auditioning for roles in a medieval play, observed by an imposing and vaguely aristocratic directrice who comments on their clothes and gestures. As the action unfolds, however, the scene shifts from the theatre to the car park, suggesting a reversal of power relations. Artur mijewskis Them, 2007, is also relevant marked by a convergence of the theatrical and the televisual evident in the use of production and post-production techniques employed in reality TV. Under mijewskis direction, representatives of four distinct groups (characterised by ethnic, religious or political affiliations) participate in a workshop involving the creation of a visual symbol communicating their image of Poland. They are then encouraged to comment
upon the symbols produced by others, in an exercise that ends in outright conflict. Unlike these two works, however, Bik Van der Pols Public Arena is composed of multiple elements. The video is accompanied by a publication (designed by David Bennewith), featuring the script, a neon public art work based on the Thomas Davis club motto: Nascann Dshln Daoine (Challenge Unites People), and a live installation and photo shoot with an enormous white ball in Tallaght Stadium. Structurally, there are parallels with Jeremy Dellers The Battle Of Orgreave, a work that encompasses a staged reenactment of a notorious confrontation between police and striking miners in the village of Orgreave, a film of the reenactment directed by Mike Figgis and an installation of ephemera entitled The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All), 2004. Like Dellers Archive, which aims to highlight the ongoing production of history, Bik Van der Pols works resist closure. Even though I participated in the live installation, saw the neon sign in situ, watched the video and read the book, my own experience of Public Arena still feels somehow partial. By this term I mean both a sense of incompleteness and a sense of complicity. This position might be a side-effect of current modes of art production, whereby works sometimes unfold in stages, so that exhibition is an attenuated process requiring engagement over time, both from curators and critics. Associated modes of reception can be distinctly participatory, even performative, most obviously when discursive events, such as talks, workshops and presentations, constitute part of the means of
production. In some instances, such as with site-specific or site-responsive practices, it may even be necessary to track the physical movements of the artist as various iterations of the work unfold. At this point it is useful to turn to the critique of mobility and locationality articulated in Miwon Kwons One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. According to Kwon, site-specific art is often characterised by a renewed insistence on the artist as the progenitor of meaning, even where authorship is deferred to others through processes of collaboration. She emphasises that: the thematization of discursive sites, which engenders a misrecognition of [these sites] as a natural extension of the artists identity so that the legitimacy of the works critique [of site, institution or context] is measured by the proximity of the artists personal association (converted to expertise) with a particular place, history, discourse or identity, etc (converted to content). 4 For Kwon, the signifying chain of site-oriented art is integrally linked to the movement of the artist from one place to another, continually generating other sites in the form of their exhibition history. In the case of Public Arena, however, there is little assertion by Bik Van der Pol of any personal association or expertise with regard to local history and context. Even though their project is described by the commissioners as a residency, the artists do not claim the role of residents and often involve intermediaries in their interactions
with the local context. They produce a script that is based on interviews conducted by their collaborator Barbara Nealon, they observe from a distance while the roll-call for the video shoot is conducted, and they take photographs from the stands and sidelines as the participants in the live installation are led around the pitch. Yet Bik Van der Pol clearly do not disavow authorship instead they publicly and visibly engage in a process of choreography, particularly in the live installation and photo shoot. Models, Ruins, (Re)Activations For Bik Van der Pol, sites are both spatially and temporally charged. They are particularly interested in the productive potential of memory and the archive, understood as an archive of experiences 5, open to (re) activation In 2007 we noticed a half finished site. A nice green pitch, a half built concrete stand, with fences all around. Nothing seemed to happen there, even though it was located in the very heart of Tallaght, where new construction developments hotels, shops, housing and office facilities rapidly arose and surrounded this silent site. This site was Tallaght Stadium, a contemporary ruin where time seemed to have frozen.6 since Bik Van der Pol first noticed the contemporary ruin of the stadium, the structure itself has been completed. But some of the new hotels, office buildings and apartment blocks around the stadium (and around the country) remain half-built or unoccupied, perhaps
destined for ruin. Importantly, the video does not incorporate images of the stadium or its surroundings, differentiating it from a range of moving image works that invoke theme of the ruin through images of decaying or abandoned structures, often examples of modernist architecture. 7 Architectural reference points are certainly evident in other works by Bik Van der Pol several of their projects involve the use of architectural models. Yet these models tend to be understood as tools for thinking, or research, rather than as representations. So the scale replica of Cit des Ingenieurs in Dunkerque, entitled Model City (2002), is in fact a proposition exploring the possibility that a housing complex built next to the BP oil refineries and now abandoned due to pollution, might still function as a critical model because it has been preserved in a representable state. 8 Another work, Skinners Box (2005), draws upon the theories and practices of a scientist, whose research is open to dispute, in order to produce a museum within the museum, with a ceiling height more suited to ten-year-old children than adults. elsewhere, I have argued that the prominence of the moving image within museums and galleries since the mid-1990s can be understood partly as a staging of publicness, sometimes articulated through the direct or indirect evocation of the cinema as social space. 9 Exploring similar territory, Sven Ltticken notes that while some artists present their social practice as an alternative for an art world that is complicit with the culture industry, they are in fact using the art world and its media to create images of social participation. 10 He suggests that while the work of Bik Van der Pol may
involve the display of users, such as those who enter into Skinners Box, it is also characterised by the pragmatic use of institutions (exhibitions, museums, magazines). In addition, Ltticken highlights a recurrent interest in periods and processes of incubation, hence the focus on sleep in certain projects. From this perspective it is possible to understand the ruin, in terms of its function within the work of Bik Van der Pol, as dormant instead of derelict. Modest Proposals and Alien Powers: Bik Van der Pol in Ireland Charles Esche has also highlighted the propositional quality of Bik Van der Pols practice, suggesting that their work operates not as a finished entity but as thought process. 11 In this respect it is emblematic of an approach he has theorised through reference to the term Modest Proposal. Esche sees modesty and the propositional as connected, perhaps interdependent. Noting that modesty is a great difference in the face of hyperbole, he states, I find a wonderful discipline in the way that [Bik Van der Pol] always keep to the modest scale in terms of their proposals while allowing space on the imaginative level for their viewers to project what might be from what is. Interestingly, although Esches
12
selling their children as food for the landed gentry to reveal the truth of what is (the dire situation faced by the starving poor in Ireland). Public Arena is not the first project undertaken by Bik Van der Pol in Ireland. In 2005 they were invited by a curatorial team that included esche and Annie Fletcher to produce a new work as part of the Cork Caucus project. 14 they undertook a process of research, resulting in the publication of a special insert in the Cork Evening Echo newspaper, featuring images and texts exploring the repurposing of timber packing crates originally used for transporting car parts, which were shipped to Fords Cork factory between the 1950s and 1980s. 15 As in other projects, Bik Van der Pol conspicuously foreground the work of intermediaries and collaborators such as Katherine McClatchie, an architectural historian engaged in a survey for the Department of the Environment. She describes attending a presentation the artists delivered at the Crawford gallery, featuring images of a mobile studio, prompting her to mention the small holiday homes near various Cork beaches, known locally as Ford boxes. the Evening Echo insert is also notable for a text entitled Ford Boxes and Urban Space in Ireland, by Owen ODoherty and Lisa Godson. 16 the authors use the Ford Boxes as a lens through which to examine the relationship between assembly line production, shipping and suburbanisation in Ireland and, like Bik Van der Pol, they focus on processes of appropriation through which forms, artefacts and materials associated with one era are repurposed in another. The boxes were gradually superseded by weatherproof shipping containers, which no longer needed to be stored in warehouses typical
position was developed partly through reference to projects undertaken in Ireland, he does not acknowledge infamous Jonathan Swifts satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, published anonymously in 1729.
13
Not unlike
propositional artworks, Swifts text operates at the imaginative level. But rather than envisioning a future from the present, or from the remnants of the past, swift uses an imagined scenario the possibility of Irish people
of dockland areas. As ships grew in size, in response to containerisation, many ports moved further out of cities to deeper water and urban Docklands areas were abandoned. ODoherty and Godson also note that many Irish cities and towns were developed during what came to be known, in the post-Independence era, as a time of occupation and control by a foreign invader. Larger cities like Dublin were perceived as particularly foreign or alien by virtue of their function as administrative centres and power bases for the occupying force. As such, they constituted a problem for the new ascendancy: How does a new incoming political and social hierarchy treat the spaces that they will occupy but which have been created by alien powers? 17 Unlike various science fiction narratives in which the remnants of some lost or alien civilisation are discovered on Earth or elsewhere, the alien powers were not wholly displaced by the incoming hierarchy, and the ensuing power struggle had significant consequences for the development of Dublin. even in the 1960s, decades after the achievement of political independence, private developers (often with strong political links with the new administration, particularly Fianna Fil) came into conflict with conservationists, who were perceived to be aligned to the old Anglo-Irish ascendancy through organisations such as the Irish Georgian Society. ODoherty and Godson note that at one point Kevin Boland Minister for the Environment actually defended the demolition of architecturally important Georgian buildings by accusing the conservationists of trying to eliminate the most fundamental component of our heritage which is the national language. Bolands understanding of heritage
as embodied in immaterial rather than material form contributed to the pronounced neglect of historic city centres, which had to be abandoned in a wave of suburbanisation before their old associations with political power became sufficiently distant to allow reoccupation by the new demands of a booming economy. 18 This wave of suburbanisation, in the 1960s and 1970s, gave rise to a new campus for University College Dublin, and shaped the transposition of whole communities from the city centre to the village of Tallaght. Conclusion: Economies of Attachment By the 1990s, the historic city centre had been re-occupied and repurposed as part of a convergence of culture, enterprise and heritage. Fifteen years later, however, the property bubble has burst, market values are uncertain, and politicians are again espousing the importance of an immaterial cultural heritage. No longer restricted to the Irish language, culture is now a term used expansively as the basis for the tourism industry, rather than as the source or guarantee of national identity. Given this political context, and the prominence of the GAA as a cultural institution, the eventual designation of tallaght Stadium as a soccer facility might seem surprising at first. to fully understand the outcome of the dispute it is useful to consider the different economies of participation and place associated with GAA and soccer. Like the majority of players, all of whom are amateurs, the typical GAA fan is allied to a specific county on the basis of birth, family tradition or adopted residence. Amateur structures can also be found within Irish soccer, but the sport is characterised by its associations with
professionalisation, and by association, commercialism. The majority of soccer fans in Ireland follow professional football leagues in Europe and the UK, in which players are bought and transferred without much regard for the ties of birth, family tradition or adopted residence. this does not mean, however, that supporters lack these attachments. In fact specialist agents promoting Father and Son travel and ticket packages to matches in the UK often structure their advertising around the appeal of a particularly famous home ground (Old Trafford, Anfield, etc). The GAA seems to espouse a very different relation to place, but it is not adverse to the commercial exploitation of these attachments by corporate sponsors, including AIB one of several from the banking sector. For example, the AIB television advertising campaign Supporting Clubs, Supporting Communities openly trades upon the reputation and history of the GAA by depicting a small town where everyone plays their part in supporting the team. tallaght stadium was eventually designated a soccer-only facility, apparently because of the requirement for large stands to maximise revenue from high profile matches. 19 While never envisaged as an architectural landmark, the stadium now seems to function partly as a means of branding Tallaght, presumably in the hope of attracting visitors and generating business for nearby hotels and shopping malls. Crucially, there is no attempt in Public Arena to pass judgement on the dispute or its resolution. Instead, the successive acts of producing the script from interview transcripts, casting young performers in roles of all ages, and separating sound from image, create a useful sense of detachment. The situation of the half-
built stadium gradually acquires an abstracted quality, becoming productively dislocated in space and time. In the process, claims and positions regarding the past (understood in terms of struggle, heritage and tradition) and the future (understood in terms of aspiration, speculation and optimism) are acknowledged but are no longer fixed or certain. Through this process, an imaginative and propositional space is produced. In this space it is possible to view the half-built stadium as an emblem of a contested public sphere that, even when at appears to lie in ruin, might simply be dormant, waiting for some future moment of reactivation.
_______________________ 1 Bik Van der Pol cite John Berger, The Chorus in Our Heads, hold everything dear: dispatches on Survival and resistance, Vintage Books, 2007. Another version of this text can also be found in Vertigo magazine, Autumn 2006: www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=1&id=594 Pasolinis television work from this period also included Comizi di amore (1965), featuring interviews about sex and love, conducted with young people and others. This work is referenced by Francesco Vezzoli in Comizi di non amore, 2007, a work that appropriates the form of the reality TV show with a celebrity cast that includes Catherine Deneuve and Marianne Faithfull. 2 Berger: www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=1&id= 3 For a useful exploration of the relationship between politics, the political and the public sphere, see Chantal Mouffe, Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices?, Cork Caucus: on art, possibility & democracy, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, c.2006, pp. 149-171. 4 Miwon Kwon, one place after another: Site-Specific art and locational identity (Cambridge, Mass: MiT Press, 2004), p. 51. For an exploration of site-specificity and the local in relation to the work of Bik Van der Pol see Maria Lind, De sculptuur als gesprekspartner. The Discursive Sculpture in Collect/recollect. a dialogue between local art and an internationally oriented museum (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 1999), pp.109118. 5 Bik Van der Pol, Ways to Read This Book, With love from The Kitchen (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), p. 7. 6 Bik Van der Pol, public arena press release. See www.publicart.ie/en/main/ critical-contexts/library/book/view//418ab80e60/?tx_pawreadingroom_ uid=43 7 For a recent exploration of the theme of ruin in contemporary art see Brian Dillon, Decline and Fall, frieze, issue 130, April 2010. See also Dillons screening programme for the Whitstable Biennale 2010: www. whitstablebiennale.com/biennale-2010/section/performance/briandillonetal.html 8 Bik Van der Pol, With love from the Kitchen, p. 207. 9 See Maeve Connolly, The place of artists Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, (Bristol: intellect, 2009). 10 Sven Ltticken, Bik Van der Pols Repetitions, Secret publicity: essays on Contemporary art, (Rotterdam and Amsterdam: NAi Publishers and Fonds BKVB, 2005), pp. 155-6. in the case of Bik Van der Pol, however, participation is not always aligned with cohesion or consensus, as they have been drawn at times towards forms counter-publics that are not necessarily good, and he cites their loopanics project, which involves the display of works associated with a now-defunct publisher of ambiguously subversive books, Secret publicity: essays on Contemporary art, p. 203. 11 Charles Esche, Beyond institutional Critique: Modest Proposals Made in the Spirit of Necessity is the Mother of invention, in Bik Van der Pol, With love from The Kitchen, p. 25. 12 Esche, p. 23. Emphasis added. 13 The full title of Swifts essay is a Modest proposal, for preventing the
Children of poor people in ireland from Being a Burden to Their parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the public. 14 The full curatorial team included Tara Byrne and Sean Kelly (then director and programme manager of the National Sculpture Factory) and the artists group Art/not art (David OBrien/Dobz and Fergal Gaynor). 15 The insert was republished in Cork Caucus: on art, possibility & democracy, as visual essay 3, unpaginated section. 16 The text is also available on Bik Van der Pols website. Owen ODoherty and Lisa Godson, Ford Boxes and Urban Space in ireland: www. bikvanderpol.net/DOCFord%20boxes%20and%20urban%20space.pdf 17 ODoherty and Godson. 18 ODoherty and Godson. 19 For an overview of the dispute with various links to newspaper articles and documentation of court rulings see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallaght_ Stadium
Contributers & Thanks

Programme Director: Arts Officer, Orla Scannell. Produced for InContext 3 by Sarah Searson. editor and proof reader, Simon Coury. Contact: simoncoury@gmail.com Graphic design, Eliane Pearce. Contact: elianepearce@gmail.com With thanks to project managers Rachel McAree and Caroline Orr, to the artists, writers and communities involved.
74
InContext 3
South Dublin County Council has been one of the most
South Dublin County Council has been one of the most
prolific local authority commissioners of public art
prolific local authority commissioners of public art
since it began its InContext Programmes in 1997. Over
since it began its In Context Programmes in 1997. Over
25 commissions have been awarded, some delivering 25 commissions have been awarded, some delivering multiple artworks, through the Per Cent for Art schemes multiple artworks, through the Per Cent for Art Scheme is administered by Irish government departments for Art Scheme is administered by Irish government with capital with capital construction budgets, departments construction budgets, in particular the
and Area and Area Regeneration Plans. The Per Cent Schemes Regeneration Plans. The Per Cent for Art
Department the Environment, the environment, in particularofthe Department of Heritage and Local Government. Heritage and Local Government. principle component South Dublin Countys The principle component of South Dublin Countys
most recent public art programme InContext 3 was to most recent public art programme In Context 3 was to create time the artistsartists to engage with the create time for for the to engage with the context. context. It involved 8 commissions,artists, curators, It involved 8 commissions, 8 lead 8 lead artists, curators, mediators, events, exhibitions, exhibitions, mediators, numerous numerous events, sited work, sited work, andwith communitieswith communities and involvements involvements around the county. around thealso producedartists also produced a wide The artists county. The a wide range of publications range of publications rangingto DVDs. These, as scripts ranging from books and scripts from books and well as to DVDs. These, as well as In Context programmes, are publications from previous publications from previous South Dublin County Library Service. Service. In Context programmes, are available to County Library available to view from the South Dublin view from the
http://www.southdublin.ie/artsworks/index.aspx
http://www.southdublin.ie/artsworks/index.aspx
http://arts.southdublin.ie/ http://arts.southdublin.ie/ http://incontext.southdublin.ie/

In Context 3 Essays

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In Context 3 Essays

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ArtIsts Andreas Kopp Cleary & Connolly Jackie sumell Jennifer Walshe Bik Van der Pol

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

Marker Tree AndreAs Kopp Background

IntroductIon, Cliodhna Shaffrey

Marker tree andreaS Kopp (Background) 7

Natural Desires Chris Fite-Wassilak

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 8

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 9

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 10

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 11

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 12

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 13

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 14

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 15

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 16

natural desIres, ChriS fite-WaSSilaK 17

Moving Dublin CleAry & Connolly Background

MovIng duBlIn Cleary & Connolly (Background) 19

Foreword to Moving Dublin

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 20

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 21

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 22

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 23

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 24

Forward to MovIng duBlIn, franK MCdonald 25

A=AGHT JACKie s umell Background

a=agHt JaCKie SuMell (Background) 26

a=agHt JaCKie SuMell (Background) 27

eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 28

eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 30

eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 32

eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 33

Grpat Jennifer WAlshe Background

eItHer/or... , a poleMIc, Sarah SearSon 34

grpat Jennifer WalShe (Background) 35

Provoking Sound: Notation in the work of the Grpat artists

grpat Jennifer WalShe (Background) 36

Figure 3: The Dowager Marchylove, Lets all Wake Brickfaced (2008)

Figure 8: Turf Boon, The Sacred Geometries (2007)

Figure 11: Ukeoirn OConnor, excerpt from Three Songs (2007)

Public Arena BiK VAn der pol Background

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