REBECCA O’DWYER DISCUSSES HER ONE-YEAR PUBLISHING PROJECT, RESPONSE TO A REQUEST.

Response to a Request ¹ was an online publication I started in July 2016, and which came to an end, for the most part, in June 2017. Over the course of its brief run, I somehow managed to convince the following people to write for it: Kathy Tynan, Kevin Breathnach, Niamh McCooey, Nathan O’Donnell, Lizzie Lloyd, Adrian Duncan, Joanna Walsh, Ian Maleney, Susan Connolly, Jonathan Mayhew, Darragh McCausland, Emma Dwyer, Sam Keogh, Sue Rainsford, Michael Naghten Shanks, Suzanne Walsh, Ingrid Lyons, Sabina McMahon, Eimear Walshe, Dennis McNulty, Fergus Feehily and Niamh O’Malley. However, as I prepared for the belated closing event that took place on the 2 of February at the Douglas Hyde Gallery – presenting three final responses from the artist Isabel Nolan, writer Mike McCormack and poet Stephen Sexton – I was faced with the task of articulating why I started Response to a Request at all. What, exactly, was its aim?

I’m not sure there really was any distinct aim with the project, but let’s assume that Response to a Request was set up to address a modest need or even a perceived lack within Irish art writing. Was it successful in this aim? One way of traditionally gauging success is, of course, through a growing or at least stable readership; and, more typically now, through a sustained and visible currency on social media. But the problem is that Response to a Request vanished just as quickly as it appeared. The website is dead and the texts are not available to read anymore. Granted, I knew this would be the case when I first conceived the idea, but this material dearth makes its assessment – as success, or indeed failure – much less clear-cut. On a personal level, there’s also something distinctly self-sabotaging about editing a publication that leaves little trace but whispers.

Thinking back, I realise now that Response to a Request was, rather unfashionably, the result of a dream. At the time, I was reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), and there was a line in it that struck me: “why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object?”² On waking, my somewhat reductive dreaming brain then converted this question into the idea of Response, which I hoped would create a space for new kinds of writing about art, with each edition responding to an individual image. Invariably, at this point I also returned to T. J. Clark’s seminal A Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), in which Clark returns and returns again to two paintings by Nicholas Poussin: “Maybe,” he muses, “we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once… Maybe the actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing at least when set out in sentences”. These, then, were my main coordinates. Response to a Request would be simply a place for looking at, and thinking about, images.

Having a very clear idea of the website in my mind – a simple page split down the middle; image to one side, text to the other, with the image remaining visible at all times as you read – I put out a request for a website designer on Twitter in May 2016. With the help of Fallow Media’s Ian Maleney (who not only built the site, but later contributed a beautiful essay on Agnes Martin’s Friendship) it came together very quickly. Admittedly as much an economic as aesthetic decision, I decided at this point that Response to a Request would only run for a limited time, one year; that there would be no archive; and that, as a result, I would commission through invitation, rather than open call. Happily, from working in Ireland, looking at art and reading a lot of art writing, I had acquired a collection of likely unrequited ‘crushes’ – I borrow the usage from Brian Dillon’s 2017 book, Essayism³ – and now, it seemed, was the time to make the move. I drafted an odd blurb and sent invitations out, a lot of them to people I barely knew, hoping, again unfashionably, to get to know them better. To my surprise, the vast majority accepted the invitation, and the first response, from Kathy Tynan, went online in August 2016. Every two weeks, a new writer would then respond to an image of their choice; this included a painting by Peter Doig (Lizzie Lloyd), a photograph by Josef Koudelka (Suzanne Walsh), and another photo from the scene of Gianni Versace’s murder (Sam Keogh). Enfolded into the project, in contrast with most online reading, was the idea of urgency: once the text disappeared, it would not come back.

Given its somewhat feverish beginnings, I did not apply for arts council funding. It was also unlikely that I would be able to generate advertising revenue from a website that essentially deleted itself every fortnight. Both of these factors meant that Response to a Request was entirely self-funded, and, even more problematically, that I was unable to pay any of its contributors. I thought this was a dreadful concession to make, to be honest, and still do; but I justified this bad situation by giving each text a considerable amount of attention (likely too much, considering I was also writing a PhD at the time) – most went through at least three rounds of edits – and by doing my best to ensure that each would receive enough traction via social media, mail-outs, and so forth. This doesn’t completely allay the fact of their unpaid labour, not by a long shot, but at the same time I think this situation is preferable to writing something for peanuts only for it not to be edited at all. I do hope Response to a Request’s contributors agree.

Back to the question of its aim: I think, at its most basic, the idea behind Response was to foster a kind of community. And I mean this, first and foremost, in a very selfish way: being a fan of these artists and writers meant I wanted to engineer some means of working with them. Having a lot of faith in these people, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be the only one who would be interested in reading what they wrote. Simply put, I think artists develop singular attachments to images, and I wanted these teased out and committed to paper so that I could read them; those that listened, rapt, to Isabel Nolan at the recent closing event, will surely share in this sense. While always looking to art, though, I was also coming across a lot of new Irish writers in journals like Gorse, Paper Visual Art Journal, The Dublin Review, Fallow Media, The Tangerine and elsewhere, and was excited by what they were doing too. I wanted to see how all of these artists and writers approached the task of writing about images; as a person who had only ever written about art, I also wanted to learn from them. And even though Response to a Request is now definitely concluded, my small hope is that it will be a catalyst for other collaborative projects in the future. If the closing event at the Douglas Hyde Gallery demonstrated anything, it is that there is an appetite for even more conversations between art and writing. There are just as many ways of writing about images as there are images. To borrow something of Sexton’s response from the closing event, indeed it seems entire worlds can spill out from them, “undamaged, undented, and whole”.⁴

Rebecca O’ Dwyer is an Irish art writer based in Berlin.

Notes:
¹I was reading a lot by the Swiss author Robert Walser at the time, and so I borrowed the project’s title from one of his short stories.

²Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000) p. 8.

³Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) p. 40.

⁴Stephen Sexton, Donut Plains (2018), the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2 February 2018.

Image credit:
Stephen Sexton speaking at the Response to a Request closing event in on 2 February in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; image courtesy of Rebecca O’Dwyer

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BEN WEIR OUTLINES HIS RECENT BOOK, PUBLISHED IN RESPONSE TO URBAN REDEVELOPMENT IN BELFAST CITY CENTRE.

“The Claw is the blind performer
It cannot speculate, judge
Nor wince

     Steadfast
     Choreographed
     Dull acts
     Mechanised
     Strength Hastening
     Iconoclastic
     Labour

Blunt-cleft
Buildings open
Exposing truths
The Claw can’t read

     Crimes in plain sight
     An austere vandal.”

Architecture is a discipline. In this sense, verbal and written discourse, criticism, research and art production are all potential methods of practicing architecture, while contributing to the collective knowledge that shapes it as a discipline. Working both as a graduate architect and as a practicing artist, I use contemporary urban redevelopment as subject matter within my work, to cast light on the underlying conditions of the city – its constant struggles and reinventions. In my view, the city is a debate, a project, a living organism.

The death of Modernism as an international architectural experiment, coincided with the rise of neoliberalism as the prevailing economic model in the West. As such, this was effectively the end of radical social missions in architecture.  This era gave rise to buildings that do not generally respond to their loci, to history, culture, theory or technology, to the individual human experience nor the needs of a community. Instead, they are only assigned value as capital. This method of redevelopment eradicates the vernacular and tends toward an architecture of bland uniformity – something architect and writer Paul Shepheard calls a “flat sameness”. One of the main culprits of this tragedy is a method called ‘land assembly’. Land assembly procures large swathes of building plots from many different businesses and land owners, and combines them into one homogenous zone with a single owner. This is often disastrous for the historic urban grain of a city and even more detrimental for local and independent businesses. As well-known architect Adam Caruso states, “these developments constitute a serious erosion of democracy and of the public realm.”¹

Land assembly in Belfast has happened most significantly with the construction of Castlecourt in the late 80s and with Victoria Square in the mid-2000s. These projects strike me as having nothing to do with architecture. They are, in my view, anti-placemaking, anti-contextual, anti-sustainable and anti-architecture. Any ‘architecture’ here is simply a tool for cloaking a department store in a steel and black glass facade (as is the case for Castlecourt), or a fancy glazed roof and dome to cover pseudo-public streets (as is the case for Victoria Square). All too often, it seems that Belfast has no problem tearing down what is left of its historic fabric in favour of any kind of investment. The City Council seems to push tourism so hard, yet soon there may not be anything of worth left for tourists to visit. Architecture does not need to simply be a vessel for the profiteer, inclined towards private developers’ single-tracked minds. As a result, architecture either becomes complicit within this framework, or turns to something more introspective and self-critical.

I self-published my book EVERYTHINGGETSTREATEDTHESAME/ as a call to arms and as a reactionary protest against the current situation of urban redevelopment in Belfast. The fact that my actions manifested themselves in the format of a book was purely consequential of my methodology. I did not set out to make a book, per se, but it became clear that a book format would be the most fitting way to collate a series of photographs and subsequent writings that I had been making over several months. The physical landscape of Belfast (as well as my daily routines within the city) was changing rapidly. Streets were slowly being pulled open, allowing light to grace surfaces it had never previously touched, while others were closed up like caverns. Opportunistically, I spotted an excavator (later to be dubbed ‘The Claw’) pulling down the remnants of a concrete frame. I climbed into demolition sites to photograph the rubble before it was dutifully cleared away. Most of the photographs – which were captured on an Ilford HP5 black and white disposable camera – did not have much individual merit. However, as my collection grew, I began to notice themes and avenues worth expanding upon. It was at that stage that I started writing and taking more photographs, with the specific intention of making the book.

A large proportion of the demolition to date has been of noteworthy historic buildings, including three from the 1890s on North Street, and Commonwealth House on Castle Street. Meanwhile, Swanston’s Warehouse on Queen Street was being gutted for façade retention and extension. These demolition projects were happening alongside the construction of student housing and large hotels. With the resurfaced and reprehensible plans for a new retail centre in the cultural hub of the Cathedral Quarter, the historic fabric of Belfast is about to be irreversibly changed.² As a result, the book does have polemic and political intention and hints at some conclusions, but moreover these urban development projects form a context for the book to become something much more experiential.

EVERYTHINGGETSTREATEDTHESAME/ imagines buildings as inhabitants of the city. It features buildings that have been destroyed, manipulated, exploited and left to rot, either intentionally or otherwise. The photographs presented in the book are not intended as documentation. They do not seek to aestheticise or fetishise construction sites, dereliction, ruin or ‘urban decay’. The book speculates – through personification – that if buildings had the capacity to dream or think self-reflexively, what sense would they make of their situation? It could be argued that the book centres thematically on the ‘death of buildings’, intended in both a metaphorical and literal sense, to address: what happens to the material of the city once deconstructed; and the politics and meaning of ‘reusing’ the urban artefact. I attempted to bring together these seemingly disparate narratives in order to find new meanings or understandings of the situation.

In terms of the book’s objecthood, I intended to maintain an aesthetic in keeping with the content, while paying attention to the pace of information and images. The book suggests a sketchbook-style approach, with varying image sizes, drawings seemingly pasted-on, text running over images and images running off the page. Rather than presenting the writing and images in a specific sequence, I produced a digital ‘sketch’ version that was subject to various stages of refinement, as I began to structure the content using chapters and headings. The final layout was informed by discussions with a graphic designer friend who works at Two Digs (an independent design studio in Belfast). At this point, we established a compositional grid and a set of formal rules to use – or consciously break – on each page. The use of perfect binding fulfilled my own ideas about how the finished book should look and feel. The decision to use digital print over lithograph was purely an economic one.

I see the book as an artwork in itself. It was launched at Framewerk in Belfast, alongside a corresponding exhibition that contained fragments from the book. A public talk offered the opportunity to discuss the book’s themes and aimed to increase awareness about the bureaucracy that defines our built environment, while so heavily impacting on our lives within the city. Overall, my aspirations for the book are that people will value our cities and buildings as cultural artefacts, rather than as passive backdrops or profitable assets.

Ben Weir is an artist and Architecture graduate (RIBA Part II). He is currently based in Belfast, having completed his studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
benweir.co.uk

Notes
¹Adam Caruso, Quaderns (Barcelona, Spain: January 2001) Issue 228, p. 9.
²Formerly known as the Royal Exchange development.

Image credits: 
Ben Weir, The Claw, 2017; 35mm black and white photograph.
Ben Weir, Nothing is Sacred, Nothing is Safe from EVERYTHINGGETSTREATEDTHESAME/, 2017; p. 28 –31. 

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STEPHEN BRANDES DISCUSSES THE FOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY – A NEW PUBLICATION BY THE DOMESTIC GODLESS.

This year, the gastronomic art collective the Domestic Godless celebrate 15 years of working together and exploring food – its taste, its appearance, its history and cultural values – as material for subversive experimentation. The occasion will be marked with a three-week-long residency at Crawford Art Gallery in Cork in November, and will be followed next year with a national tour to several arts centres around the country. Over those 15 years, we have repeatedly been asked questions relating to our research interests and practice, such as: “What exactly do you do?” (by those who don’t know what we do), “Are you the guys who do roadkill?” (from people who think we do roadkill, but are wrong) and “Would you ever think about making a book?” (from those who do know what we do and, thankfully, find it amusing). So, this year seemed an opportune time to finally make that book and to lay those questions to rest (while possibly igniting many more).

As artists, it was inevitable that we would approach this project as an artwork, in that we would shape the material at our disposal into something that willfully avoided easy categorisation. The food, the bad & the ugly is not a history, a biography, a work of fiction or a recipe book, yet it contains all of these elements. It is also conventionally a book, though its content is far from conventional. Aside from our own archival documentation, we have been lucky to include contributions from a food critic (writing under a pseudonym, for the sake of protecting their professional reputation), a prominent writer on art who has considerable knowledge of cheese and a TV chef who has been dead for 20 years and whose additions to the book have been transcribed by séance.

Crucially, the book is self-designed and self-published. Work began in early 2017, as we accumulated the material, texts, recipes and images and learned InDesign from scratch. We were lucky to receive funding from Crawford Art Gallery and Cork City Council, which gave us the time to consolidate this material, to research fresh content and to design the book. Early on in the process, we needed to make practical decisions regarding the size and look of the publication and this was partly achieved by looking at examples of other books that we thought might work. We also had to consider working to a tight budget, which had not yet been raised.

Pricing the book became a balancing act. We decided on a figure for the number of pages we thought we would fill, the type of paper we wanted to use and the rough size – something that would comfortably fit in an envelope. We considered what might be a reasonable selling price and a sensible production run. We finally needed to consider the feasibility of the project, but optimistically assumed that if one third of the people who had befriended us on our Facebook page bought a book in advance, then we would achieve our target.

We then did a lot of research regarding printers to get several quotes. We were aware of many printers whose reputation for value and professionalism are assured, but for us as novices it was essential that we found a printer that had the patience to deal with our lack of experience without becoming exasperated. From past experience, the English language – no matter how well it is deployed – has the potential to be misinterpreted, so we were very happy to find a local printer that we could talk to face-to-face. If any problems transpired, discussions and solutions could be arrived at after a short drive, as opposed to numerous emails or telephone calls. Eventually, I went to visit Watermans on Little Island in Cork, with a tasty Polish publication my colleagues had picked up in Gdansk as a reference. My confidence in the printer was significantly enhanced by him knowing exactly what type of paper had been used just by looking at it. He was able to advise on sensible solutions to adjust the size and format to fit our budget. With the composure and humility of a very good primary school teacher, he settled my mind-numbing anxieties.

The next stage was to raise the money. Crowdfunding seemed the obvious choice. We used Fundit, an Ireland-based crowdfunding platform run by Business to Arts, who offer meticulous planning advice for preparing a project and a step-by-step guide to creating a successful campaign. We set ourselves a time limit of 40 days to achieve our goal. Fundit works by offering rewards in return for financial support. In our case, we were offering advance sales of the book, with an invitation to the launch or free postage within the island of Ireland to those who couldn’t attend or collect the books themselves.

Most projects seeking funding offer several reward options in increasing increments. We decided to keep ours as simple as possible, not forgetting that the resources for delivering these rewards would need to be factored in  to the overall target. The rewards consisted of one signed book for €25, two signed books for €50, two books with the funder’s name printed inside for €100. Our top reward to funders willing to pay above and beyond the price of the book was to offer an additional exclusive evening of tastings, a take-home goody bag and a specially procured bottle of sea-lettuce vodka. The eventual target not only included the printing costs, but also an educated estimate for postage and packing and funds to deliver our top reward (having set an available limit of twelve).

What followed was a crash-course in marketing. We built a short animated introductory video and embarked on a carpet-bombing campaign of social media with news and images from a project commissioned by the Athens Biennale team, to coincide with the arrival of Documenta in Greece. The Fundit campaign was subsequently launched immediately on our return.

As Fundit accurately predicted, the public response over the first two weeks was healthy – and then it tailed off worryingly. We were conscious that, if we failed to reach our target, it would mean the death of the project and any funders would have their lodgments returned. So, with two weeks before our deadline, we embarked on a daily social media campaign. Being painfully aware of the desensitisation that repeated advertising can induce, we designed a completely new reminder every day, each one infused with humorous, but acutely visible, signs of panic and distress. And it worked. The book has since gone to press and will be launched at the Crawford Gallery on 4 November.

While the Domestic Godless pride ourselves on a measured but irreverent disregard for professionalism when it comes to our presentations with food, we played it fairly safe with the presentation of this book. In this instance, it seemed a step too far to either furnish it with an anarchic mélange of styles or over-design it with cleverness, when the content within already displays enough disregard for convention. We had considered using different papers – including edible rice starch or elements that could be scratched and sniffed – but in the end, we opted to publish something both accessible and feasible. At the time of writing, The food, the bad & the ugly has not yet entered the public realm, so there may be some surprises yet to be found amongst the pages. Moreover, this book may not be our last…

The Domestic Godless was originally founded in 2003 by artists Stephen Brandes, Irene Murphy and Mick O’Shea under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition ‘Artists/Groups’ at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Images: Documentation from The Domestic Godless in Athens, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Athens Biennale, 2017; photograph by Linda Curtin. The Domestic Godless at O’Herlihy’s, Kinsale Arts Festival, 2015; image courtesy The Domestic Godless.

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