re-workings of unrealised art projects
commissioned by no respect
curated by Alan Phelan and Jane Speller
June 26 – August 22 2004
NO RESPECT asked artists to respond to projects by international artists in Ireland which were never successfully realised. Projects referenced include Jean-Claude and Christo’s attempt at wrapping the pathways of St Stephen’s Green, James Turrell’s Sky Garden land art project in Cork, or Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures.
The resulting exhibition is located in a number of Dublin city locations and comprises of a series of temporary public art works including sculpture, video and sound works. The six artists selected for the project have created a new work based on a failed project.
NO RESPECT aims to revisit public art projects by famous artists which have failed to win approval by the authorities and/or the general public. Working in the public realm has never been easy for artists, both practically and politically. Public authorities and audiences often rightly question the assumed right of the artist to impose art on people because it is perceived as being ‘good for them’.
NO RESPECT is interested in the possibility of failure viewed as the opportunity for an aesthetic of invisibility, of the elusive and ephemeral. The curatorial concept is to present a series of perplexing situations that disturb the familiar and comfortable conventions of presentation and interaction between a work of art and its public.
As Cherry Smyth writes in the catalogue essay “Failure drives the engine of this NO RESPECT exhibition: each artist has been invited to respond to a public artwork that failed to fully materialise in Ireland and propose one of their own that plays with ideas of elusiveness and temporality. Public art remains provisional until it is installed.”
There are a variety of functional ambivalences built into this exhibition as we want to exhibit work that is temporary or moreover provisional in its objecthood. These are intended to create hybrid situations that merge forms, contents and contexts through engaging the history in the present, forcing provocative and marginal positions between audience, artist and sites.
The artists are: Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt (England), Ronan McCrea (Ireland), Alan Phelan and Jane Speller (Ireland), Oreet Ashery (Israel), Vanessa O’Reilly (Ireland), Karen Henderson (Scotland).
An information area with site map is installed in the lobby of Project, East Essex Street.
NO RESPECT is an artist-led group based in Dublin which organises exhibitions and publications.
Contacts: Alan Phelan
Funded by The Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
We are also grateful for the assistance and support of the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland, the Arts Council of England, Project Arts Centre, Fire Station Artists’ Studios and the Arts Projects Network.
Associated text
Who Can Fail by Cherry Smyth
At the recent Artivism Conference organised by the London University of the Arts, artist David Cross (of Cornford and Cross) included in his slide show of works two proposals that were refused funding and never produced. Both were public art projects, one of which proposed to hoist three national flags from countries with whom Britain had severed diplomatic relations, on the roof of a public building in Liverpool. As the audience viewed ‘The Ambassadors’ slide showing the imposing façade of the building and the three bare flagpoles against the sky, the unmade project came alive in that room. It no longer depended on being realised to exist.
Cross’s performative appropriation of failure released tremendous energy in the audience. What artist present had not invested a huge part of their identity in an artwork only to experience its rejection as a personal rejection and shamefully bury the idea? For Louise Bourgeois, this is where to begin: ‘First you have to conceptualise what you want to do; you have to have an idea. The idea… comes from a failure somewhere, a failure of power.’ (1)
In many ways, public art itself continues to fail the public it addresses, and yet continues to question art’s function and responsibility beyond the white cube. Any art offered to the non-gallery public is exposed to the multiple, conflicting interests of cash, location, space, access, permission, property, ownership, heritage, function, aesthetics, politics, liability, durability, ephemerality, identification, distrust, vulnerability and love. Its delight springs from its ability to catch the spectator unawares, netting them in a surprise relationship. Therein also lurks the paradox. While public art strives to be non-elitist and inclusive, it risks reiterating elitism through public hostility and indifference.
Artists make something out of nothing until they need funding, and then more often than not, make proposals towards something that remains nothing. As Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested: ‘Propositions represent the existence and the non-existence of states of affairs.'(2) Funding proposals become their own entities, developing a personality and direction to fit the funder’s remit. For public art, these remits intensify considerably.
‘An artist is the one who can fail and fail and still go on,’ wrote Agnes Martin (3), the American painter, who spent most of her life withstanding disappointment. Failure drives the engine of this ‘No Respect’ exhibition: each artist has been invited to respond to a public artwork that failed to fully materialise in Ireland and propose one of their own that plays with ideas of elusiveness and temporality. Public art remains provisional until it is installed. Provisionality is the heartbeat of my essay, since, until now, only the artist’s propositions exist.
The work of English artists, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, interrogates the function of art in the public realm. Former projects have traced how commercial culture has been repackaged as public art: for example the decorative iron gates we’ve all seen securing high income housing apartments, designed by a ‘local artist’. Their interventions problematise the way public art has been co-opted as a marketing windfall in the rush to regenerate post-industrial cities. A billboard installed in a rebranded area of Sheffield read: ‘The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property.’
In 1977, ‘Wrap-Stars’, Jeanne-Claude and Christo, proposed wrapping a section of the path through St Stephen’s Green in yellow tarpaulin (pictured left). ‘Walk Ways’ failed to win approval of the Office of Public Works, but the preparatory drawings and list of materials were displayed recently at IMMA. In researching the ‘Walk Ways’ proposal, Hewitt and Jordan unearthed the hidden negotiations between the public bodies and the artists. They were astonished to discover that Jeanne-Claude and Christo didn’t seem concerned that the folded fabric may have been hazardous to the elderly using the park and simply assured the OPW officials that they had worldwide public indemnity. This apparent disregard for the function of ‘Walk Ways’ is the nub of Hewitt and Jordan’s proposal, which they conceived as an integral social activity rather than something imposed for the spiritual betterment of the user/spectator.
Situated on a section of path intended for Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s project, Hewitt and Jordan propose a reconstructed ‘Bench’ which will carry engraved texts detailing the clash of public art and private use. Hewitt and Jordan’s memorialising bench will invoke the ‘deceased’ ‘Walk Ways’ project, while providing a practical place for contemplation and inverting the spectacle of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s large gestural work. Since the bench will still be utilised, Hewitt and Jordan will not force the public to engage and will make the failed ‘Walk Ways’ re-inhabit the space differently, more critically.
(Ironically, New York City has just approved the installation of ‘The Gates’, Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s proposal for Central Park in February 2005, estimating that the spectacle will generate $72-136 million in economic output and boost the city’s damaged profile.)
Karen Henderson is a Scottish artist whose previous work suggests her concerns with space, entry and boundaries with titles such as: ‘Shed Folly’, ‘Stable Door’, ‘Fence’, ‘Lap Pool’ and ‘Driveway’. Her sculptural pieces intervene in an already determined space – an office atrium, a gallery in a house, a garden. Architectural motifs like doors, shutters, mirrors invite the viewer to re-view a particular space or view and thus become actively integrated into it and its mode of display. Permission to touch, to alter perspectives is built into much of her practice, highlighting terms of negotiation and interaction. The spectator is encouraged to rearrange the visual codes and thus question their role and inclusion in everyday urban architecture.
Henderson has been invited to respond to Richard Serra’s embedded steel artwork situated outside the Guinness Brewery Hopstore (pictured above). Mimicking the disused tramlines on the street, Serra’s work is a straight line of steel that bends sharply in on itself making an open-ended triangular form. Installed in the early 1980s, Serra subsequently disowned the piece, claiming that it failed to meet his requirements. Later, his ‘Tilted Arc’, (pictured right) commissioned for the Federal Plaza outside New York’s FBI building, became synonymous with debates about public art after eight years of massive public disapproval won its removal in 1989. Serra was accused of elitist disregard of a public who argued that the 120 foot wall of self-rusting steel prevented them using the Plaza.
Working in direct antithesis to Serra, Henderson will erect a transient, prop-like stud wall inside the windows of the Civic Offices of Dublin City Council titled ‘Shutters’. The wall will be hinged with fluorescent orange shutters faced with mirrored acrylic that will allow the passer-by or employee to reposition the shutters and thereby alter the view in and out of the building. By highlighting notions of accountability in the Council itself through what is revealed and concealed, Henderson aims to politicise the formal aesthetic of minimalism. Unlike the imposing durability of Serra’s works, Henderson’s embraces temporality and a confused functionality. Henderson hopes that the interaction of the local people who use the entrance as an unofficial bus shelter will question the Council’s transparency and the accessibility of the building itself. Given the power to become integral to the work, what will the active participant do?
Irish artist Vanessa O’Reilly’s work often consists of a series of proposals that adapt strategically to the public site she chooses. She draws with graphite direct on gallery walls and uses video, sound installation and sculpture to challenge ideals of public art in civic space. O’Reilly is concerned with how we observe any given object and its representation. In ‘Premises’, she drew two ‘identical’ drawings of stills from cult classics like ‘Stalker’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ to highlight their theatricality and composition in space and time and the failure of the filmic gaze to address the emotion of viewing space.
Fittingly, O’Reilly has been asked to respond to Ludwig Wittgenstein (pictured left, house designed by Wittgenstein in Vienna below). One of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Wittgenstein spent three years in Dublin, Wicklow and Galway from 1947. In her installation ‘record/release’ in a book store, O’Reilly will use sound recording and a video, filmed in the style of CCTV, to echo Wittgenstein’s pioneering thinking. She hopes to relate the idea of harmonious space and proportion to the notion that everything is subject to a mathematical definable logic.
In ‘Philosophical Investigations’, completed in Ireland, and published posthumously, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘Observing does not produce what is observed.’ (4) ‘His work is open and empty,’ says Vanessa. ‘You can apply anything to it – like my work which is variable and re-worked and extended through different media. I once tried to discover why I drew still life and it ended up being much more about the object than the drawing, so now my work is more sculptural.’ Dogged by failure in his lifetime, Wittgenstein only published one work. In the introduction to ‘Philosophical Investigations’, he lamented that ‘after several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into a… whole, I realised that I should never succeed…. the philosophical remarks… are… a number of sketches of landscapes… made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.’ Naming his book ‘an album’ suits the conceptual processes that O’Reilly undergoes to produce what is seen and the representation of the seen.
In 1989, American artist James Turrell was commissioned to create an elaborate series of outdoor rooms and networked passageways (called ‘Sky Spaces’ by the artist) in the gardens of Liss Ard, a County Cork estate. Inspired by the landscape and its Neolithic sites, construction of The Irish Sky Garden (pictured below) started in 1992, but was later abandoned, and the project eventually disowned by Turrell. Irish artist Ronan McCrea has based his sound installation ‘Voice over’ on the text by German critic, Oliver Wick, written for a book celebrating the Irish Sky Garden that never (fully) was. (5)
Promising ‘an inner adventure’ in language that is grandiose, sentimental and aspirational, Wick goes where Turrell’s work conscientiously avoids. Regardless of the rigours of the meteorological real, Wick’s sky is envisioned as ‘the vault of heaven so perfect’, ‘crystal clear and of flawless beauty’ as Ireland is mythologised into a paradise, which no-one could leave without a painful melancholy. In Wick’s romantic didacticism, there is no room for the fractured spectator, the alienated urban visitor, the participant who is hostile to what Wick calls Turrell’s ‘natural’ interaction with landscape in all its ‘naturalness’. Those who ‘do not find the Absolute within reach’, will have failed to experience the garden, and Ireland itself, as they should. Ireland becomes an enormous piece of land art, conceptualised and sold as a unifying, majestic experience for the perfect spectator.
McCrea has rewritten Wick’s text in two versions: the past and future tense. A recording was made of Fiona Richardson reading both new versions in a authoritative ‘inter-pretative centre voice-over’ style. Both recordings were then carefully synchronised on the left and right speakers of the final audio track, creating an echoing stereo effect whereby the flow of two voices is disrupted by grammatical tense changes. Standing between the left and right speakers, one is left standing between past and future, creating sim-ultaneously an elegiac review and a wistful promise, of an event that never happened. The dissonance between the dingy setting of Tangier Lane, leading appropriately to the stage door of the Gaiety Theatre, will emphasise the gap between the imagined experience and the problematic status of the failed project.
Oreet Ashery is an interdisciplinary artist who disrupts gender and cultural dichotomies in powerful work that relies on social contact. Through street interventions as alter ego Marcus Fisher, Ashery adopts the cultural drag of an orthodox, Hassidic man, taking him into secular and religious spaces and so giving herself rare access to male-only sites. This theme of exclusion/inclusion threads through her practice. In her video, ‘Why Do You Think I Left?’‚ 2001, she asks members of her family in Israel to frame answers to her emigration to London. Loss, cross-generational attitudes to Israel and unsaid conflicts reside at the centre of the piece.
Ashery’s video, ‘It’s Been a Long Time’‚ has been conceived in response to Belgian artist Chantal Ackerman’s (pictured right) film ‘News From Home’‚ 1976, in which a daughter living in New York City reads out letters from her mother in Europe. The letters are never answered. Imagining what Ackerman might address if re-making this video in Dublin in 2004, Ashery’s initial proposal was to place herself in a travel agent and ask visitors to write letters to those who left Dublin. However, after a visit to Dublin she decided to explore the disjunction between home and exile in a more personal or individualistic way. Her film centres around a world expert on clematis flowers and plants, Dr Mary Toomey, who immigrated to Dublin from Sri-Lanka in the 1960’s. Ashery discovered her through an article in a national newspaper on her first visit to Dublin. The article describes how in 1999 her daughter left to live in America, as she had become increasingly tired of racial slurs. Ashery became engrossed by this contemporary story in relation to Ackerman’s film and tracked Dr Toomey down asking her to write a letter to her daughter. Documenting aspects of Dublin’s changing ethnic demography, Ashery hopes to offer this and other stories of the city, of loss and displacement. The resulting video will be played in the travel agency.
Joseph Beuys’ expanded view of art and creativity which he termed Social Sculpture was a bid to reach an alternate politics within the context of the Cold War world. As a way of exploding the rubrics of performance into a discursive zone with broad social implications he developed the concept for a Free International University. Ireland was briefly considered as a site for this project which was never fully realised. However during Documenta 6 in 1977 there were a series of workshops under this title over the 100 days of the exhibition. The events included trade unionists, lawyers, economists, politicians, journalists, community workers, educationalists, women’s groups and sociologists who joined actors, musicians and young artists in various workshops.
The ‘One Hundred Days of the Free International University’ incorporated Beuys’ (pictured right) own unself-conscious mode of curating in which discursive explorations were facilitated to those in attendance. Ultimately though, it is questionable whether Beuys’ expanded notion of the artist – ‘everyone is an artist’, inadvertently validates the very structures of power and administration which he saw as problematic. Furthermore, Beuys’ object-work is utterly curatable and collectable in conventional terms, a factor which obfuscates his political potential. His use of myth and pan-celticism adds a veneer of exoticism and universalism to the situation, the potency of which offers the dealer, collector and the curator a value-added imperative to proceed unaffected by any politics.
Alan Phelan and Jane Speller, the curators for this exhibition who also work as artists, have proposed to explore this troubled legacy of Beuys by re-staging elements of the FIU around Trinity College via leaflets, posters and flyers. These ‘Lessons’ will be distributed in an around the college campus notice boards, offering free advice on a variety of cultural, social and political issues referencing the original range of participants and concerns.
The uncertainty and risk of failure of this group exhibition present its most exciting challenge. Gallery art has largely a self-selecting audience. Public art is more vulnerable to unpredictability, ridicule, neglect. By framing the venture with the rubric of failure and ephemerality, the curators have focused on aspects of public art that have often been ignored or downplayed. The permission to fail releases a forgiving optimism, famously celebrated by Walter Benjamin in ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’: ‘ To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty, one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure….’ (6)
(1) Louise Bourgeois, ‘Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father’, Violette Editions, 2000, p.131
(2) Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Tractatus Logico-philosophicus’, 4.1
(3) Agnes Martin, ‘Writings’, Cantz, 1992, p.93
(4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Blackwell, 1953, ix. p.187e
(5) Oliver Wick, ‘Gardening the Sky/Am Himmel Gärtnern’, (translation: Dr. Hilary Heltay) in James Turrell, ‘The Irish Sky Garden’, Turske Hue-Williams Ltd, in collaboration with the Liss Ard Foundation, 1992
(6) Walter Benjamin, ‘Illuminations’, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968
STAND FAST DICK AND JANE, 2001
Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin
Artists
Nayland Blake, Zoe Leonard, Virgil Marti, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer
Catalogue Essays
Tom Keogh and Alan Phelan, “Introduction”
Nayland Blake, “How Did We Get Here?”
Curators
Tom Keogh and Alan Phelan
Associated text
Introduction
Over the past few years the OutArt brief has become wider, initially exhibiting Irish gay and lesbian artists, expanding to international artists and non-gay artists with curatorial themes and decisions becoming more focused each year. The group open submission show has evolved into an invited format where works were selected through discussions with individual artists, galleries and institutions.
OutArt has never sought to prescribe. A curated show, however, does give a false sense of commonality, flawed maybe but hopefully discursive. We have tried to build on previous exhibitions this year by exploring a different terrain of queer art, that being a selection of American artists who came to prominence over the past twenty years through the era of identity politics. Now firmly established, they are dealing with a world where difference doesn’t seem to matter any more, identity is not enough of a motive and politics in art is generally more archaic than anarchic.
Through discussions we asked if there was any merit in promulgating a particular aspect of the work of artists, queer or otherwise. Last summer we met artist Donald Moffett in Dublin at Richard Torchia and Patrick Murphy’s show at the RHA. From this initial encounter the concept developed further through several meetings with artists in the US for an exhibition looking at the legacy of the gay activist period in the late 1980’s. The minority politics which had come to the forefront through the AIDS crisis had created a new kind of queer identity and art. This is discussed later in the essay by Nayland Blake, one of the contributing artists to the show. He discusses from his own experience of the time how queer art has developed and changed over the years.
While approaching Project for the venue we came across ‘Stand Fast Dick’, the name of the rock formation on which Dublin’s City Hall or Royal Exchange is build on. It runs under the River Liffey and down Essex Street where the Project building is located and was once visible as it rose out of the river providing an obstacle for ships which often proved fatal. This seemed like an interesting metaphor for what we were attempting to do – examine a striking historical moment which has been gradually embedded into the cultural matrix, once posing a threat but now acting as a foundation.
Once we started looking at artist’s work another theme emerged. Many were looking to childhood and adolescence, exploring that period of awkwardness and uncertainty from an adult perspective, one that is able to cut through sentimentality and embrace the trauma, anxiety and violence of that time. ‘Dick and Jane’ the beloved and now controversial American children’s book characters made an entry here. Their characters had changed each decade from the 1940’s mirroring the social and cultural changes of the times but still upholding wholesome family values. They are loved for their instructional innocence and hated for their promotion of stereotypes and this combined with ‘Stand Fast Dick’ produced the metaphor which seemed appropriate.
Ireland, at this moment, also stands at an important point in its social and economic development. Many would argue that the greatest threat to social inclusion and integrity comes, not from traditional Conservatism, but from placing economic success over the sense of community. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ has within it the ‘Pink Pound’ which, at worst, presents us with an amoral, selfish generation and at best, the potential of an unpredictable and unstable future. The fortunes of the liberal agenda have always been closely tied to economic affluence. This will inevitably suffer when our cyclical boom proves to be short lived. But this is not what ‘Stand fast Dick and Jane’ seeks to resolve. The work in this exhibition is as engaging as many of the people who have influenced the changes within queer culture over the last thirty years on both sides of the Atlantic. These now allow us to take an open and critical overview of what has happened, where we stand now, and what possibilities exist in front of us, ‘although past performance does not guarantee future success’.
Tom Keogh and Alan Phelan
How did we get here?
The world has been made strange again. I’m listening to music; Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage. It’s a curious feeling, nostalgia for a past I never had. The set was recorded in 1979, at a time when I had barely set foot in a disco and would have died rather than done so. Having barely been able to fashion a viably hip identity in the final years of adolescence via punk and an obsessive relationship with art world prankiness, I was loath to put it at risk. Dance music, emerging as the lingua franca of the gay male world was to be mocked and held at arms length. As I listen now what strikes my ear is how unbelievably gentle and optimistic all this music sounds. Cher is singing “I’m in Heaven, seems like Heaven, so much Heaven” wrapped in airy strings. Even her desire sounds unforced, reflective and luxurious. So much seems possible – or is that just the present, always reconfiguring the past?
I’m looking at a catalogue from 1993. It’s for a show called “Sick Joke: Bitterness, Sarcasm and Irony in the Second AIDS Decade”. The show happened at Kiki, a miniscule gallery in San Francisco, owned and operated by Rick Jacobson. After working in ACT-UP, and organizing events and charity auctions, Rick had what seemed to be the whimsical idea of opening a gallery. He ran Kiki for a couple of years, curating shows about Yoko Ono, skate culture and shit among other things. Four years later Rick was dead, having left San Francisco to finish out his life with his family. “Sick Joke” was one of his finest ideas, a much needed corrective to the teary piety that had begun to replace disgust as the official American response to AIDS. It was one of the few art shows I have seen that was genuinely funny, as well as infuriating. I remember seeing it and feeling like I was part of something and getting away with something as well – reclaiming the full range of my experience from a culture that was already trying to muffle and edit it.
Where are those emotions now? Our lives are dotted with important moments – glimpses of possibility, explosions of freedom, shivery frissons of insight. They exist for individuals and also communities. Fleeting and crucial, they are the targets that art aims for, that we struggle to remember for ourselves and evoke in others.
If we date from Stonewall, the gay liberation movement is thirty-two years old. For two thirds of that time it has been shadowed and shaped by AIDS. It’s now twenty years into the epidemic. AIDS has passed being a disease of gay men to one of the many afflictions of the world’s poor. What seems to be happening is a apartheid of affluence as AIDS becomes a manageable long term condition for those with the financial wherewithal, and a short and brutish death sentence for those without it.
And in an American society that has become obsessed with abrupt and increasingly arbitrary decisions our country thinks – haven’t we solved that epidemic thing? In one way we have – by letting those folks who were making the most noise die off and then throwing an expensive product at those left around. It’s a solution we’ve used through out our history. Culturally, AIDS became a rallying point: a generation found their voice and their platform through confronting the many cultural issues surrounding the disease. For many young artists it was the first time that their work was connected to any real world concern.
The current party line among a certain self-congratulatory class of art critics is that identity politics and the work informed by them are “over”. Acting as if methods of thought and analysis were like hemlines, moving up and down at the whims of professional talkers, these people wave their hands and express relief that artists are no longer shackled to any rigid dogma. In the same way that celebrities no longer bother with wearing red ribbons at award shows, artists are supposed to tuck away their frustration and slip into an attitude cool cynicism. This is another variety of American impatience – the desire to get it over with, to be past all the difficulty, to not look uncertain in the face of a dilemma. We have stopped asking of people that they come up with the right solution, merely that they act, and as quickly as possible. In the art world this has lead to a growing discrepancy between the time it actually takes to investigate an idea and the pace at which ideas are consumed. The resulting discrepancy leaves us bled dry, constantly casting about for the new before we’ve even come to grips with what is in front of us.
But we live in a fallow time – a time characterized by the emptiness left by many deaths, where ideas and directions are scant. It is a time where the work of most women and especially lesbians still remains inaccessible and undervalued – hard for young artists to see outside of major art centers, and often presented in ways that are decontextualized. That is what is in front of us. And what can we do with that? The artists in this show are confronting that fact. They are searching the past, both personal and cultural to find the armature of a new system of thought.
Most of the artists in this show have been involved in activism around issues of Queer empowerment and visibility. In that work the voice is urgent and in the present tense. Yet the voice they employ here is different from their usual public one. This work then deals with the consequences of our generation’s rupture, but in a way that is more subtle and pensive than previously.
Most of Queer consciousness is not formed in relation to the biological family. Instead it’s formed in relation to the cultural family, the family we find. And it is precisely that family that has been decimated in the past two decades. As the artists in this show enter their forties, they do so without the benefit of parents: artists in their fifties and sixties whose experience would provide mentoring as well as figures to push against, to argue with. So in some ways for us to look at childhood is to engage with the notion of parenthood; firstly to remember that time at which we actually had parents and then also to play with the notion of being parents. We are asking where did it all begin? And what do we want to pass down? Within today’s art world there is a lot of willed childishness. Most of that work represents a retreat from the problems of our current state into a poorly imagined past filled with inconsequential naughtiness. It is an infantilism based on a false nostalgia. The works in this show are doing something different. They are examining the moments of childhood and adolescence in order to come to an understanding of the present.
While it may be disparate in form, all of this work focuses on the way that the intimate rubs up against the social. Casual objects are given resonance as we become more aware of the social forces that lurk behind their facades. This work reminds us that childhood is the time when objects exercise the greatest power over us. It imagines adolescence as the point at which we enter a universe of signs and codes and struggle with the dissonances between them and our own inchoate, bodily experience. Several of these pieces evoke the brutality, danger and exhilaration of high school. Yet none of this is offered in the sense of escapist regression. These are the actual pasts that haunt us, that shape and shift us. And those pasts have been examined with passion and bracing, corrosive humor.
After twenty years, contemporary artists have to exist with AIDS refracting through our lives – always flickering at the edges of our consciousness, too large to vanish, and yet difficult to see head on. There was a time when it was a field that an individual could master and respond to. Now it has become too global diffusing through the intricacies of genetics and geopolitics. In the face of this vastness many have turned to the particularities of intimacy. It is a mistake to imagine that this turning means that the problem is solved or has gone away, just as it would be a mistake to imagine that history is over.
The disc buzzes to a halt. Cher doesn’t sound so simple any more. I think about Rick and how he would have deflated my maudlin tendencies, all the while imagining some new prank he could pull.
Nayland Blake
THINGS WE DO, 2000
Arthouse, Temple Bar, Dublin
Artists
Garrett Barry, Phil Collins, Pierre Yves Clouin, Nuno Alexander Ferreira, Andrew Fox, Fiona Mulholland, Deirdre A. Power, Nairn Scott, Kaye Shumack
Catalogue Essays
Patrick Murphy, “Introduction”
Dr. Suzanne O’Shea, “Difficult Beauty, towards an art of the ordinary”
Fadi Abou-Rihan, “Average”
Selector
Patrick Murphy, Director RHA
Committee
Tom Keogh, Alan Phelan, Orla Scannell, Alexander Liebert