QUINN LATIMER CONSIDERS FILMMAKER, WRITER, AND THEORIST, TRINH T. MINH-HA’S LATEST ARTIST BOOK, THE TWOFOLD COMMITMENT.  

Twofold, we might say, from a stage and from a screen, from a text and from the street. We might mean that the meaning or reasoning lies not in a set of oppositions but in both. The paradigm that we are avoiding – you know it – is constructed out of hierarchal binaries at once false and familiar. Male or female, north or south, memory or oblivion, this against that. But this is not our way. Instead, our duos of fold and feeling find relief in one matrixial surface, one irradiating body. Is this the other side of the coin of the demeaning double bind, in which one is ever trapped, always wrong? (And by one, we mean her.) And yet the bound implicitly suggests the fold; it does. Indeed, twofold makes me think of skin and paper, body and book, and again of some screen for both reflection and projection. Images, at once psychic and aesthetic, cross it, charting a continuum of movements – corporeal, political, theoretical, technological, musical, feminist – and their effects and affects. Sound waves or waves of love score these images. After all, it is only the most ardent self, critically interested and absolutely implicated, that readily accepts the idea of holding room for both – whatever those two might be – thereby bringing them into her life, her thought, her texts, her sounds, her images.

By her, I mean Trinh T. Minh-ha (and perhaps the possibility of everyone else). But it is Trinh whose film Forgetting Vietnam (2015) opens by noting: “It all begins with two.” Stills from the film – all smeary digital colour, reds and greens and peachy pinks, both Hi-8 and HDV – also strobe the opening pages of The Twofold Commitment (Primary Information, 2023), Trinh’s new book of collected conversations from the past decade that limn and elucidate her filmic practice. A practice manifold yet lens-based in every sense, even when it is producing writing or sound, theory or poetry. If Trinh’s oeuvre famously encompasses postcolonial feminist theory, poetics and ethnomusicology, it is her moving images – at once documentary and fictive, experimental and ethnographic, ecological and mythosymbolic, self-reflexive and ludically collective – that are both means and subject of her work. As is visuality and its technologies, both ancient and nascent.

Trinh’s style is – what – unmistakable. In her assiduous production of cross-genre work across almost four decades, Trinh has established her own genre: we call it postcolonial feminist documentary poetics, or we call it experimental ethnographic essay films, or we call it Trinh T. Minh-ha. ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’, as her remarkable early essay from 1990 goes, perhaps suggesting where our desire for naming has gone wrong. And yet, despite this, in each of the seven interviews that constitute her new book, Trinh’s interlocutors attempt, in various ways, to locate the meaning of her regular transgression of borders and difference – of medium, discipline, geography, genre, language, culture – and the frisson she finds in their mutability. Meaning in the sense of naming, in the sense of explication and definition. And yet. Despite each interviewer’s best aims, Trinh manages to return each conversation to the titular ‘two’, to her idea of the nonbinary and its commitments, of holding, that is, both. Whatever they might be.

If we have been taught to think, and thus live, in the paradigm of opposition, that colonial ethos and its patriarchal binary, Trinh understands this more than most. She left Vietnam in 1970; she was a teenager, and the US was at war in her country. She immigrated to the US, where she studied ethnomusicology and French literature in Illinois. She then completed her PhD at the Sorbonne and moved to Dakar to teach. It was in Senegal that she made her first major work, the 16 mm film Reassemblage (1982). Focusing on the lives of rural women and their daily rhythms, utilising the sounds and movements of their everyday life in a non-linear, hypnotic and dreamlike structure, the film suggested her work to come, in which the spectral and collective find their place within frames of cultural difference and quotidian likeness. The work played with the aesthetic signifiers and formulas of more experimental ethnographic film – shades of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch – while emphasising the falsity of objectivity and neutrality, that is, of the anthropological gaze. The film understood that it was forging memory in its making, its images, while simultaneously enacting their oblivion.

The double-sided coins of memory and forgetfulness, colonial amnesia and political resistance, all our doubles, also mark Forgetting Vietnam (2016), whose title and images speak, paradoxically, of the memorial. Vietnam’s origin story – which is also Trinh’s origin story – invokes two entwined dragons, and this repeated figure of the ‘two’ structures the film. As Trinh notes in the interview in the book with Patricia Alvarez Astacio and Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, here her ‘two’ designates “mountain and river; solid and liquid; stillness and movement; masculine and feminine; dwelling and travelling; leaving and returning; North and South; low and high technology.” Her film employs song, speech, poetry, struggle, dreams, the small and large moves of daily life. Later in The Twofold Commitment, in a further conversation with Erika Balsom, Trinh emphasises that such ‘nonbinary twos’ of multiplicity and commitment, like those figured in her film, are often those upheld in feminist and trans struggles and writings; they are that on which democracy relies and relates.

“There are always at least two ways to enter my films,” Trinh notes to Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier in another dialogue. And: “land records, water dissolves.” Reading her recent words across recent years, her reconsiderations of the same films and issues again and again, I noted how often Trinh uses the language of moving-image technology to describe the larger forces of preservation and oblivion. Indeed, she has long attended to both. And her lens is often the lens itself, which means all that it has been constituted by: the colonial systems that produced the fields of anthropology and ethnographic film, the free market system that controls the film industry, the powers of Western hegemony and patriarchal capitalism that control nearly everything. Affective, ethical, politically and technologically positioned, her work remains remarkably focused on the act of looking, with a reflexivity that breaks the immersive illusion of whatever genre and medium she is working in. Frames are highlighted. Mediums are transposed, if not translated. Narrative traditions of cinematic and literary structure are destabilised for a camera that thinks – and shows its thinking.

Her writing, meanwhile, has also long engaged in such cinematic reflexivity, merging theory, poetry, storytelling and criticism, from the classic Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989) – strobing every syllabus – to the more recent Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016). Her cross-genre writings, at once cinematic and theoretical and self-staging, seem to have predicted the abundant autos of the current moment – autoethnography, autotheory, autofiction – in myriad ways, including how they freely employ both cinematic and literary imaginaries for their intertextual work.

And yet. How do my complicated feelings about Trinh’s films sit with my fierce attraction to her writing and speaking about their processes of production? Well. Perhaps it is in keeping with her own modalities that I sometimes like reading about film more than I like watching it. In a PhD class recently, surrounded by students engaged in artistic research (shades of Trinh’s own career of departments and appointments), I was asked what the lens was of some work, and to name the main methods. And I thought, thinking of a younger artist, Na Mira, and of her filmmaking and writing, that Na’s lens might be literally the lens. That is, the lens of light – filmic and autoethnographic, of enlightenment and its extant imperialisms, its coloniality and feminisms, its ancestors and apparatuses – so as to explore darkness and its enigmas. The lens of authorship or ancestry, images of polyphony that are flickering and ungraspable, spectral and spirit. Here, as elsewhere, I felt, that is, I saw, Trinh’s enormous influence.

I saw it again, the following week, as I had my art students in Basel read Trinh’s essay, ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’ (October, Vol. 52, 1990), which begins, twofold, with a set of negations. That is, two no’s. The epigraph, by Walter Benjamin, goes: “Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought.” Trinh’s own opening lines follow in the same spirit of negative capability: “There is no such thing as documentary – whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques. This assertion – as old and as fundamental as the antagonism between names and reality – needs incessantly to be restated, despite the very visible existence of a documentary tradition.”

As I listened to my students continue to read her words out loud, I thought about the psychic transfer of screens, and the antagonism between names and reality. I considered our need for names and traditions – documentary, for example – and about our desire for images that reflect our reality. For words to define it. What about our current cultural obsession – across mediums and genres, across cultures and borders – with the aesthetic signature of the real, of realism’s affects and “the reality effect,” as Trinh has called it, and of the documentary? That none of these things are exactly the same thing is to be understood. Yet our hunger to see a picture of our current conditions and realities remains true and real (whatever that word might mean). And yet: “To use an image is to enter fiction,” as Trinh writes, further down in her essay. The laconicism of her line, a kind of fluorescent equation, seems to speak across fields and forms, across students and centuries, as she does.

In Athens last winter, I saw Trinh’s most recent film What About China (2022) at the closing of Ethnofest (terribly named, wonderfully programmed). Afterwards, she spoke briefly about her work, surprising me by repeating some favourite lines from that same essay from the 1990s. “What is known as documentary may simply refer to an outside-in movement whereby one lets the world come to oneself with every move,” she recited, as if for the first time. “And what is known as fiction may refer to an inside-out movement whereby one reaches out from the world to the inside. These two interdependent movements always overlap.” These lines from ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’ are also repeated in her many interviews in the new book. In their odd repetition, at once compulsive and soothing, they seem to take on the form of refrains, both familiar and foreign.

But the rhythmic truth of her statement about this twofold movement, and about how we live and how we work, in our twofold commitment, as aesthetic strategies and techniques of living, also evoked, for me, another reflection from her recent book, one about her editing process. Reconsidering her first film in Senegal, and the long take as an ethnographic signature versus the fast edits of what may be considered fiction film, Trinh replies: “As an art of relations – at intervals of strong, weak, syncopated beats – rhythm is powerfully social when it’s at its creative best. And what ultimately comes with the sense of rhythm is the feeling of freedom.” I am usually nonplussed by that latter word – it has echoes of the tinny imperialism of my American childhood – but Trinh’s voice conjured images of trance and ritual, of poiesis and the art of the social, of all their rhythms. An art of relations – I can think of nothing better to describe the poetics of Trinh’s larger project, nor her illumined approach to the moving image and to the real, coaxing co-existence out of nonexistence. That is, both.

Quinn Latimer is the author of Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017) and other books.

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ORLANDO WHITFIELD ON HOW NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE ART WORLD.

I came of age as an art dealer in the boom years for art fairs. The contemporary art world had always been international, a realm of indistinguishable, tax-haven accents and non-commercial flights, but the advent of art fairs in the early 2000s turned the market’s stately merry-go-round into an unstable whirligig, spinning ever faster. 

When I started going to art fairs around 2008, I had no notion of how vital they would become to the contemporary art market and in turn to my own life. Within a few years, I began to delineate my mental calendar according to Frieze New York (May) and Frieze London (October). I travelled to countries and cities I would never otherwise have visited and when I arrived, I was always convinced that the whole of my flight must also be in town for the same reason as me. This was almost certainly never true, though a dealer friend recently told me of the collective groan that sounded when a delay was announced on an early morning flight BA from London to Switzerland on the first day of Art Basel: they would all miss the opening of the fair. 

Despite readily available evidence to the contrary, I passed many years labouring under the misapprehension that normal people – civilians – had a basic level of interest in and knowledge of the art world. I thought people cared when a new world record was set (yet again) for the highest price achieved at auction by a living artist; that people understood the difference between the primary and secondary markets; and that people know Banksy was no more of an artist than Donald Trump is a politician. I assumed not only that art mattered to people, but that the goings on of the industry – there, I said it – that surrounds art making and art selling and art appreciating was of interest to the wider public as well. I was wrong. 

I worked in and around London’s contemporary art world for over a decade and learned two things: first, very few people ever go art galleries, and those who do are generally the same array of die-hards hoovering up the free beer at openings. Second, people’s understanding of what galleries do is often inaccurate. The most frequent question I was asked was: “Ah, you have a gallery. Is it mostly your own art that you show there?” I was always puzzled by these conversations, but it wasn’t until I stopped working in the art world and spent the ensuing three years writing a book about it that I asked myself why. 

Television is partly to blame. In show after show, contemporary art has become a lazily inserted on-screen signifier for extreme wealth. TV writers have needed something to separate the mere haves from the have-yachts. Onscreen, art collecting is used to signify urbanity and worldly sophistication. Mainly, however, it is synonymous with money. 

The contemporary art world may seem as if it’s about money and glamour and art but really it’s about access, the kind that mere money can’t buy. It’s an arena of engorged snobbery and outsized egos. This much is understood by Jesse Armstrong in Succession (2018), when a coked-up Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) attempts to invest in an art fund called Dust run by two vertiginously hip young women. Like almost everyone who’s ever bought, framed and hung a print in their home, Kendall assumes that the art market is a wickedly easy arena in which to turn a buck: “Basically, you buy a painting from some art student in a basement, jack up the price, sell it to some Morgan Stanley sex pest, and you, me, and the student all get rich. Right? … I’m the asshole who can be your Warhol.” 

The women of Dust, of course, see straight through his dish-plate pupils and deep into his corporate lack-of-a-soul. They reject his overtures, explain they are “interested in increasing the reach of young artists… and the democratisation of art.” Even princeling Kendall, with all his daddy’s billions, is rejected by the gravitational snobbery of the art world. Real wealth, after all, isn’t quantified in actual money; it’s the ability to refuse more money.

* * *

In the Before Times – before ‘contemporary art’ became a distinct category not just in marketing terms but also as a new asset class promising fast returns – the fashion world was where the rich and frivolous did their partying. From the YBAs onwards, however, the social side of the art world has ensured a constant supply of fresh capital into the market. It became the reason to take your boat to Hydra in the summer or Miami in December; the reason you ski in St Moritz and visit London in October. But you won’t keep getting invited unless you keep buying and a collector is only as good as their last acquisition. And you’ll only keep buying if you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. 

I’m aware that I sound cynical – and with good reason, I am – but let me explain. Art matters, of course it does, but all art can’t matter in the way that the art world insists upon as its raison d’être. Especially for those selling it – but also, obviously, for those buying it – the market necessitates a willing suspension of common sense. For years, Rob Pruitt’s glittery panda paintings were hot property and people climbed over each other to buy Dan Colen’s bubble gum paintings (literally gum stuck onto blank canvases) for high-six-figures. This tulipomaniacal behaviour was not rational; it wasn’t even funny. 

The art world isn’t meant to make sense. It’s not even meant to be fun. And sometimes it’s there to be endured. Take, for example, the moment of hysterical terror when a schoolboy catches a funny friend’s eye during a minute’s silence. Now crossbreed that with the sensation of catching your parents having sex in the kitchen and you will still not come close to the feeling of being in the audience for a bad work of performance art. This is, I am envious to say, something that few civilians have experienced, but in Paolo Sorrentino’s film La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013), we see a parody of this which comes brilliantly close to accuracy. 

We are in a garden, un giardino. Nearby, a woman in a negligee and wearing a cast on her leg writhes about on a chaise longue as she sings along to tepid house music. Before long, the camera cuts to a young girl, a child of about ten. Around her and around a wide rectangular expanse of white canvas are assembled an array of Roman aristocracy and haute-coutured art lovers. The girl picks up cans of paint, one after another, and in a flailing fit of tantrum, hurls it onto the canvas until she and it are an indiscernible swampy mess. Po-faced, the aristos and Serious Art People stand around, gazing earnestly at what they are sure must be a meaningful moment as the pre-pubescent child rages indiscriminately in the paint. This is art as self-improvement, like a green juice or a deep-tissue massage; it’s not fun, but you’re sure it’s doing you good, improving you somehow. Because frankly, why else would you sit through it? 

This sending up of performance art may seem the stuff of fantasy, as it does in The Square (2017) when a hulking, shirtless man imitates an ape in the midst of a museum’s gala dinner, but it hits far closer to home than many viewers would imagine. (To name names here would be cruel, but I assure you I have ground my teeth to a paste standing – for some reason you always have to stand – in the audience of such performances.) And here we come to the crux of the matter: because the art world is so insular, so you-can’t-sit-here cool, the attempts by filmmakers and showrunners and script writers to depict the art world by means of imitation almost always fall flat. Knowingly or not, the only way that the contemporary art world can be depicted with any degree of accuracy is by means of parody. 

The scene that made me realise this for the first time came from an unlikely source: Beverly Hills Cop. In the 1993 film, Los Angeles Police Department detective Axel Foley (played with sumptuous comedic ease by Eddie Murphy in his pre-fat-suit heyday) visits an art gallery in order to see Jenny Summers, an old flame. Foley briefly examines the gallery installation – a nightmarish array of Koons-manqué mannequins, severed heads on rotating plates and, in the background, a rip-off of a Nam June Paik video tower – and soon starts to chortle softly to himself. He is approached by Serge (Bronson Pinchot), a diminutive art dealer with an indistinct European accent who seems to be simultaneously summoned and affronted by Foley’s laughter. 

“How you are doing today?” he asks with coquettish aplomb. 

“Hi,” Foley replies, clearly still reeling from his encounter with the installation. 

“I’m fine, my name is Serge and how can I help you?” 

When Foley tells Serge who he’s there to see, the dealer looks him quickly up and down, saying mock-apologetically, “She’s very busy today. … And what it’s pertaining?” 

After a gallery assistant is called for and curtly dispatched to look for Foley’s ex, Serge goes in for the kill: “I see you look at this piece,” he says leadingly. 

“Yeah, I was wondering,” Foley asks, “how much something like this went for.” 

“130,000 dollars,” comes the reply. 

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Noooo I cannot,” Serge wails, “I cannot. It’s serious because it’s very important piece.” 

“Have you ever sold one of these?” 

“I sold it yesterday to a collector,” Serge snaps back seriously before Foley is rescued by the appearance of the woman he’d come to see. 

This may seem like the purest comedy, a farce concocted by someone with only the most risible notion of art galleries, but Serge’s softly dealt solecisms and his conviction of the installation’s importance strike a truer chord than almost any other depiction of the art world I have ever encountered. It perfectly captures the art world’s unencumbered vanity and its self-regard. I assume that the accuracy was unintended, but it might just be the best cinematic mistake ever made. 

Geoff Dyer really gets to the root of the matter in his novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Vintage, 2009). I read it around the time I had just started working in the art world. I knew it was meant to be funny (and it is), but I was struck too by how Dyer perfectly skewered the art world’s particular, peculiar absurdity. Journalist Jeff Altman is sent to Venice to write about the Venice Biennale but he does very little art-ing and instead gets smashed on free Bellinis, eats as many free arancini as he can and has a lot of sex with Laura, an art dealer from Los Angeles. On a vaporetto on his way to the Guggenheim Collection, he has a chance encounter: As Jeff makes his way to the front of the boat, he passes Richard Wentworth, wearing a Panama hat and a striped blue shirt, looking like he is starring in a TV adaptation of a novel about an artist who was also one of the Cambridge spies.

“Thought for the week,” Wentworth says as Jeff squeezes by. “Art world, music business. What does that tell us?”

To my mind, it tells us just about all we need to know. 

Orlando Whitfield is a failed art dealer. He has written for the Sunday Times, the Paris Review and the White Review. His art world memoir, All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art, will be published by Profile Books in May 2024.  

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MEADHBH MCNUTT PRESENTS HER WINNING ESSAY FOR THE DCC/VAI ART WRITING AWARD 2020.

Towards the end of the first COVID-19 lockdown, the term ‘digital fatigue’ began to circulate. I did not critically assess this term as I came upon it; I simply agreed with all who mentioned it in passing, a tiredness rising up from stiff knees to strained eyes. Digital fatigue is a specific sensation brought on by navigating an increasingly complicated social space, while sitting like an inanimate object in a chair. The internet is the place where I, as a freelancer, go to seek information, find perpetual new work and to socialise – the lines frequently blurring. The way that I watch content on portable devices has also changed. Muscle memory kicks in. Attention is a scarcity online and under current circumstances, my eyes have grown tired of sifting through competing content. I instinctively search for the synopsis, skipping everything peripheral.

Under COVID-19 restrictions, digital consumption has reached new levels. Art institutions have had to find ways to adapt their activities by migrating online, programming everything from podcasts to virtual exhibitions. Referencing Marshall McLuhan, writer Nicholas Carr recently said in an interview with Ezra Klein, “In the long run, a medium’s content matters less in influencing how we think and act… Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”¹ Carr argues that a world defined by the written word is individualistic, disciplined and hyper-visual, while a world defined by scrolling and social feedback is addicted to stimulus – waves of information and affirmations of identity. The internet is bursting with information and creativity, but it is also the hub of the ‘attention economy’ – a term coined by psychologist, economist and Nobel Laureate, Herbert A. Simon, to describe the state in which “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  In pursuit of this attention, digital marketing takes into account the embodied experience of online interaction. Algorithms either provoke or affirm, leaving little space for the kind of ‘contemplative ambiguity’ demanded by the artistic encounter. Though visual art broke away from the church in the 1800s, traces of the sacred linger in the embodied artistic encounter. We grant artistic spaces a nominal separateness from social value and utility – an ambiguity drastically at odds with the algorithm. How does this ambiguity hold up online? And what kind of mischief does it work on the material world?

Viewing Rooms, Film Screenings & Digital Platforms

Since the COVID-19 cluster at Tefaf’s Maastricht fair, commercial galleries and art fairs have rushed to digitise. For fair goers, the accessibility of the online viewing room is attractive – no flights, accommodation or queuing. Not unlike a browse through Artsy, Frieze Viewing Rooms are a uniform catalogue of faithful reproductions. The sight of a bench at Art Basel creates at least some sense of architecture. Commercial galleries like David Zwirner deviate slightly, settling on a scroll-through of images and contextual information. However accessible and educational, I would struggle to call this sort of documentation an exhibition.

Film screenings are another obvious choice, as a digital format already familiar in the gallery setting. This includes the curation and online presentation of artists’ moving image work, as well as the circulation of film documentation to supplement or extend physical presentations that have been curtailed, due to public health restrictions. Notable examples of the former include ‘Isolation TV’, developed and curated by Vaari Claffey; The Glucksman’s exhibition and online screening programme, ‘1,2,3,4 – Dance in contemporary artists’ films’, curated by Chris Clarke; and ‘IMMA Screen’, an online screening series, showcasing film and video works from the IMMA Collection. Kari Kola’s Savage Beauty – the world’s largest site-specific light installation, set in Connemara – was one of the first post-COVID casualties for Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture. With public interaction not possible, a beautifully shot video was uploaded in time for St Patrick’s Day. EVA International took a phased approach for its 39th edition, with a blended programme of venue-based, offsite and online presentations, as well as a dedicated website, animated with elements of physical interaction, including printable posters, designed by Ciara Phillips, as well as a free neon publication by Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie (which arrived through my letterbox yesterday), focusing on the cultural significance of milk.

There are many digital platforms, such as flatness.eu or seiren.org, which challenge the viewer, but in ways that evoke wonder. Marie Brett’s Day of The Straws also comes to mind as an interface with a sprawling, organic feel. Designed as a ‘cyber vault’, the timely work researches fading Irish cultural lore and its changing role, with regard to modern perspectives on health. Digging through audio files and dipping into portals, the experience is one of curiosity and intimacy. Of course, such a format can hardly cater to the neutrality expected of big institutions. And not every artist can, nor should, create digitally-specific work.

Gamification & Virtual Tours

An artwork is encountered through its curation and circulation, as well as its production. Architecture and navigation are just as important within online space. The virtual tour is one way to facilitate texture, while experimenting with navigation. Museums across the globe have opted for the Google Arts and Culture platform (basically, indoor Google Maps with better resolution). The thought of Google extending its influence in the cultural workplace is unsettling, and while it is exciting to stroll through a 3D rendered museum in Korea, the navigation can be jarring – I can’t zoom in close enough to see the artists’ names.

In May, I exhibited a pixelated reconstruction of my own photographic work, as part of ‘The Minecraft Gallery’ – a virtual exhibition space launched near the start of lockdown. In collaboration with the Regional Cultural Centre, designer-curator Joe Fahy built the exhibition space and reproductions of featured artworks using building blocks of the sandbox video game, Minecraft. The exhibition launch was one of my more memorable online social interactions during the initial lockdown. A relatively simple download process allowed me to explore the space as an avatar and chat with other visitors via the text box. My work, an image of an iconographic hand gesture, entitled ICXC, looked eerily anthropological, when upscaled and presented to (handless) pixelated avatars. The choices we make in video games can provoke all kinds of self-introspection. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Black trans archival project, titled WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, is another recent digital platform which operates on choice and confrontation. In Brathwaite-Shirley’s sacred portal, Black trans ancestors are honoured, while hypnotic guardian characters evaluate the intentions behind your participation.

While something is definitely lost in the digital reproduction of artworks, a captivating sense of the uncanny is added. I found this true of Artlink’s ‘Drawn from Borders’, an exhibition reflecting on the centenary of the partition of Ireland. ‘Drawn from Borders’ was made by animator Mark Cullen from a ‘first-person-shooter’ perspective (without weapons) using Unity – the software responsible for powering 50% of the world’s games in 2019. This exhibition was a particularly emotional one, when we consider how the lack of joined-up thinking, in response to the health crisis across the island of Ireland, has created difficulties in cross-border relationships. Artlink’s Saldanha Gallery is located near the border at the gorgeously moody Fort Dunree in rural Inishowen. Given its location, inadvertent visitors make up most of the audience. Participating and resident studio artist, Martha McCulloch, tells me that the virtual exhibition has attracted a completely new, international audience. I notice an extra room in the digital replica, and I pause to question the integrity of my memory. Large-scale paintings appear pleasantly alien in their new digital home. Details, like the sound of my avatar’s footsteps, outdoor views and floating video booths, hold my attention.

Opaque Surveillance

Like the border, the internet is an abstract experiment with material consequences. If the art world is to continue migrating online, questions of health and sustainability come to the fore. Online space can be an ethical minefield. On the one hand, social media provides indispensable tools for Black Lives Matter activists and pivotal uprisings like The Arab Spring. On the other hand, we are constantly trading our personal information for access. The neutral appearance of artificial intelligence can obscure the subjective interests from which training sets stem. We use algorithms for convenience and they (read: their designers and corporate stakeholders) use us for our receptiveness to micro-persuasions – gradual yet global shifts in behaviour. By opting in, we come to embody data-based projections. Then there is the carbon footprint, generated by endless streaming and data processing. With tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft siting their data centres here, Ireland has faced fines of more than €250 million for missing 2020 targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Such consequences are obscured by the appearance of infinite, online ‘immateriality’.

Contemporary artists like Trevor Paglen have been working to make visible the human judgments built into technical systems. Paglen’s interactive live-stream work, Octopus (2020), gives a bird’s-eye view in real-time of his ‘Bloom’ exhibition at Pace, London (10 September – 10 November 2020). A tapestry of videos occupies the screen – in-situ webcams, image-recognition processes, and snapshots of flowers in classical vanitas paintings. The physical space is a showcase in image-harvesting: photographs of flowers interpreted by artificial intelligence, image recognition webcams and skull sculptures; The Model (Personality) is inspired by 19th-century phrenology, while The Standard Head is based on Woody Bledsoe’s automated facial recognition model.

Visitors to the physical exhibition at Pace are warned of the online surveillance, but there is no real alternative viewing option. You must be seen, in order to see. In one clever move, Paglen has appropriated every ‘agree’ button we’ve ever clicked on. Online viewers have the privilege of viewing the exhibition anonymously, though they can choose to stream their webcam and have their face appear in the upper corner of the room. A power imbalance is implicit. One morning, I joined to find cleaners mopping the gallery floor. Here, the subject of surveillance had a face, and I was complicit. Such voyeurism brings me back to the early days of Chatroulette, a website created by a Russian teenager called Andrey Ternovskiy for pairing strangers across the globe through chat and webcam, oddly revived during lockdown. Those early chat rooms were the wild west of the attention economy – boring, thrilling and disturbing, from one minute to the next. The value and exchange of one’s information changes in a more professionalised internet, less intimidating but more opaque. Octopus stirs up those old feelings of intrusion.

My inclination towards these voyeuristic, interactive and game-like experiences is partly down to a longing for social participation whilst in physical isolation. While it is inevitable that technology will play a larger role in our lives after COVID, psychological dependency and material sustainability are issues that cannot be swept away in the rush to digitise. Artists will find new ways to circumvent the dominance of the algorithm, just as early internet artists capitalised on new technology to subvert the dominance of the traditional gallery system. When the internet was in its early stages of development, these artists created work centring on their relationships with the internet’s intrinsic features – namely its interactive interfaces, multimedia capabilities, social networking and microcultures. My hope is that art institutions take note of this critical legacy, as they work to innovate online experiences. As culture continues to migrate online under successive lockdowns, we may reconsider how it feels to be surveyed, as a condition of participation, and ask ourselves: how should participation feel?

Meadhbh McNutt is an Irish art writer whose work traverses criticism, creative writing and critical theory. She holds an MA in Aesthetics & Art Theory from Kingston University, London, and has previously contributed to a range of Irish and international art publications.

Notes
¹ Nicholas Carr (2019), ‘The Ezra Klein Show: Nicholas Carr on deep reading and digital thinking’, producer/editor Jeff Geld, research Roge Karma, Vox Media. https://tinyurl.com/y6oy6v4x
² Rory Carroll, ‘Why Ireland’s data centre boom is complicating climate efforts’, The Irish Times, 6 January 2020.

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JUSTIN CARVILLE CONSIDERS THE SHIFTING SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘PLACE’ WITHIN 21ST-CENTURY IRISH PHOTOGRAPHY.

The presentation of ‘New Irish Works 2019’ at the Museum of Contemporary Photography – a pop-up space located in Dublin Castle, as part of this year’s PhotoIreland Festival – provides a brief snapshot of the variegated practices of contemporary Irish photography. The diverse projects exhibited in ‘New Irish Works’ range from the personal and the political, to the investigative, formal and conceptual. Phelim Hoey’s ‘La Machine’, for example, explores his diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis through diaries, sculptural forms and motion studies that reference the anatomising and visual abstraction of technology, modernism and the body in the work of the French scientist and photographer, Étienne-Jules Marey. Dorje de Burgh’s ‘Dream the End’ – a work of mourning, loss, and memory – interrogates his own familial archive as a sort of imaginative, open-ended and unresolved link between the past and the present. Rósín White draws on found photographs and archival materials to explore the legacy of psychiatry through Silas Weir Mitchell’s late nineteenth-century ‘Rest Cure’ therapy, as a treatment for hysteria and nervous illnesses in women; while Sarah Flynn’s ‘Uinse’ combines still life, landscape images and detailed studies of human hands to explore nature-society dualism, through the fungal disease affecting Ash tree forestation in Ireland.

The range and scope of projects in this timely survey also reflect the transnationalism of Irish photography, both in terms of photographers living and working in the UK and Europe, and Irish photographers pursuing projects that resonate outside of the island of Ireland. Zoe Hamill’s ‘A Map Without Words’, draws together still life images of archaeological objects, portraits and photographs of specific locations to investigate her homeland and the place where she now finds herself located, in a series exploring the psychic relations between image and place that resonates with Victorian folklore and antiquity. Aisling McCoy’s series, ‘and live the space of a door’, explores the historical and political legacy of Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport, now repurposed as a refugee shelter through its banal spatial and architectural configurations; while Robert Ellis’s ongoing project, ‘Proverbs’, focuses on the people and landscapes of the former British protectorate of Uganda. 

As a microcosm of contemporary Irish photography, ‘New Irish Works’ evidences a broad spectrum of investigative and conceptual strategies, forms of display and technical inscriptions of photography as a medium and form of representation. The identification of an overarching theme, subject, aesthetic or visual strategy is thus difficult to discern. However, McCoy’s and Ellis’s works both gesture toward the centrality of place, belonging and the everyday bodily interactions with natural and built environments, which has featured prominently in Irish photography for the last decade. This turn to ‘place’ is not something that should be taken frivolously. Place is not simply about fixed geographic location, or the abstract contours of physical spaces; it is also about the material environments of social relations, amongst and between individuals and communities. For the last decade, much of Irish photography has not so much focused on the representation or the objective appearance of physical locations, but on conveying subjective interactions and attachments to place. It has focused on transmitting the quotidian bodily interactions with and within emotionally, culturally and socially resonate places.

The concern with place in distinction to space in recent Irish photography, and the routine interactions of communities within everyday environments, has marked a social and ideological shift – particularly within prominent work made during the two decades either side of the millennium. In what might be termed the ‘topographical turn’ of Celtic Tiger and post Celtic-Tiger Irish photography, the emphasis became the spatial reconfiguration of urban and suburban Irish landscapes. In series such as Dara McGrath’s ‘By the Way’ (2003) and Martin Cregg’s ‘Midlands’ (2009), the boom-era landscapes of speculative property developments and partially-built ghost estates (the most immediate material ruins of financial collapse) refracted back to the viewer the accelerated transformation of the Celtic Tiger period, through its visible spatial forms. In this work – and that of numerous other photographers of this period – the transformation of Ireland through global capitalism was measured in the spatial transformation of cities and towns as degrees of what Marc Augé defined as ‘non-places’. Emphasising the rectilinear forms and muted hues of the newly-built environments of business and retail parks, motorways and housing estates, the detached topographical gaze of photography from this period depicted the emerging boom-time landscapes as a peopleless spaces. Devoid of human presence, configurations of the Irish landscape through property development were represented as hollowed out, indistinct, transient spaces. They forged a perception that emphasised the inauthenticity and anonymity of social relations with what the phenomenological geographer, Edward Relph, described in the late 1970s as ‘placelessness’ – the distinctive eradication and standardisation of landscapes.  

Amid the global financial collapse of 2008, projects such as Simon Burch’s ‘Under a Grey Sky’, Eoin O’Connaill’s ‘Common Place’ and Jakie Nickerson’s ‘Ten Miles Round’ emerged, which demonstrated a shift in Irish photography from the ‘absence of presence’ to the ‘presence of absence’. Empty landscapes, devoid of people, were a consistent aspect to this work; however, these landscapes were portrayed as imbued with the signs of human presence, marked in the traces of everyday use of landscapes, temporarily suspended in anticipation of the return of human interactions with built or natural environments. These photographs were also accompanied by portraits – some formal in spaces seemingly distinct from the landscapes, others more informal in their depiction of individuals or groups, either in domestic settings or interacting with the everyday social landscapes depicted in the photographs.

Burch’s series, ‘Under a Grey Sky’, for example, focused on the hinterlands of industrial peat harvesting. Photographs of the sometimes dark, brooding peat-scape are accompanied by a series of portraits taken mostly in workspaces or domestic interiors. There is no formal regularity to Burch’s portraits. Some are positioned directly in the centre of the frame, while other subjects are decentred from their domestic environments, shown with pensive expressions. Mandy O’Neill’s 2016 project, ‘Promise’, uses a similar approach. O’Neill carried out ‘Promise’ during a four-year period in Gaelscoil Bharra, in Dublin’s northside, as the school waited for its dilapidated pre-fabs to be replaced by a purpose-built new building. The project combines photographs of the school’s eroding interiors and temporary facades with portraits of schoolchildren. However, unlike Burch’s portraits, O’Neill’s photographs of the pupils have a regularity in the formal organisation of the pictorial space of the portrait, with the subject’s bodies positioned in front of a neutral background – the only exception being the portrait of a young female student in a conformation outfit. As with Burch’s project, O’Neill’s portraits seemingly detach the subjects from the environments that are the focus of the project. However, this strategy avoids place becoming a mere backdrop to the portraits, a sort of scenography against which the body is represented. Instead, the combination of portraits and empty environments – around Irish bog lands, in the case of Burch, or the decrepit, temporary architecture of school buildings documented by O’Neill – requires the viewer to work harder, to look deeper into the relationship between subject and place. This combination of environmental photographs and portraits works contrapuntally – as independent but related counterpoints to one another – asserting the relations of bodies and the sense of place projected in these artworks.

An alternative approach is evident in Linda Brownlee’s 2010 photographic series, ‘Achill’. Brownlee had a long childhood association with Achill Island. For the series, she worked with adolescents on the island, to identify their favourite places and how they wished to be represented in the landscape. In addition to photographs of the Achill landscape, Brownlee photographed subjects from a variety of perspectives that yoke between intimate formal portraits – in which the subjects dominate the pictorial space of the photograph – to images in which the young people are enveloped by the natural environment, or appear as diminutive bodies amidst the vast expanse of horizon that stretches into the distance. Bodily deportment is a significant aspect of Brownlee’s photographs; sometimes all that is visible is the back of someone’s head or a mop of hair blowing in the wind. In other images, the subjects look towards the horizon that is visible to the viewer, or they gaze out to the unseen landscape, beyond the pictorial frame of the photograph. The oscillation between forms of portraiture and bodily poses in the landscape, envision the dynamic relations between body and place; it projects a sense of the landscape, not as a mere backdrop to the formation of adolescent identity, but as a way of showing how their identity is given expression in and through place. 

The continuation of the attention to place in Irish photography – as a dynamic arena of social interaction imbued with presence that shapes everyday identity and experience – is not only evident in recent projects, such as those exhibited in ‘New Irish Works’, but also in more subtle projects, such as Gerry Blake’s ‘Into the Sea’ on the bathing spots along the south Dublin coast, and more politically salient projects, such as Kate Nolan’s ‘Lacuna’ on the border town of Pettigo, County Donegal. As with the aforementioned projects, the concern is not the representation of geographic locations or discrete places, but the social interactions and everyday bodily relations that make place meaningful. All of these projects have involved long-term negotiations and relationships with communities and environments, to envision the deep, subjective entanglements between people and place. They require a more considered analysis on the part of the viewer, to allow the unfolding dynamics of body and place to emerge. This, in turn, reveals how photography can imaginatively envision emotional attachments with the most ordinary commonplaces, in which communities go about everyday life. 

Justin Carville is a lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography at IADT Dún Laoghaire, where he is also Programme Chair of the BA (Hons.) Photography Programme.

Feature Image: Dara McGrath, N25 Douglas, 2003, from the series ‘By The Way’; image © Dara McGrath, courtesy the artist.

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ALICE BUTLER PROVIDES A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY IRISH MOVING IMAGE PRACTICE.

It is difficult to appreciate the volume and diversity of contemporary practice in artist moving image and experimental film in Ireland without taking stock of its comparatively short history and modest origins. When artists and filmmakers in Europe, the UK and America – such as Germaine Dulac, Len Lye and Maya Deren – began experimenting with new possibilities for cinema as an artform in the early part of the twentieth century, they were also laying the groundwork for the foundation in the 1960s and ‘70s of the cooperatives and distributors (including the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York and Canyon Cinema in San Francisco) that would build indigenous collections and, in most cases, continue to disseminate artist moving image and experimental film material right up to the present day.

Without the formation of a robust native film culture until later than these international counterparts, Ireland did not follow the same trajectory. It was not until the 1970s and ‘80s that Irish artists and filmmakers began jointly to make moving image work for the gallery and cinema that challenged norms, both formally and politically, and much of this compelling early material –  by artists like James Coleman, Vivienne Dick and ‘First Wave’ filmmakers Thaddeus O’Sullivan and Pat Murphy – was at least initially produced abroad. As a direct consequence of this new approach to filmmaking however, lasting infrastructural change – both for artist and commercial cinema – did come about in Ireland at this time. In 1973, the Arts Council of Ireland added film to the list of artforms that it supported, and in 1981 the Irish Film Board was established, becoming the country’s first state funding agency for cinema.

In the years since, there have been clear indications of the increasingly prominent role played by the moving image in Irish visual culture. As Maeve Connolly has pointed out, Irish artist moving image work has gained greater “visibility and legitimacy” since the 1990s, a fact illustrated, she highlights, by its recurring presence at the São Paulo Biennial (Alanna O’Kelly in 1996, Clare Langan in 2002, Desperate Optimists in 2004) and the Venice Biennale (Jaki Irvine in 1997, Anne Tallentire in 1999, Grace Weir and Siobhán Hapaska in 2001, Gerard Byrne in 2007, Kennedy Browne in 2009 and Jesse Jones in 2017).¹ This same period has also seen a surge in the presentation of artist and experimental film material in Ireland in a cinema context, through a range of platforms including Darklight Festival, the Experimental Film Club and, more recently, the Experimental Film Society, PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image and aemi. These diverse initiatives have emerged at least partly in response to the marked rise in production of this material in Ireland in the last twenty or thirty years, a development that mirrors international trends but is all the more striking in an Irish context, given how quickly the scene has evolved.

Because of the pace with which work of this nature has been produced here in a short amount of time, it is all the more pressing to underpin these practices with the resources afforded to artists, students, curators and researchers elsewhere, through organisations like LUX and REWIND in the UK, Lightcone and Collectif Jeune Cinéma in France, Arsenal in Germany, Auguste Orts in Belgium, CFMDC in Canada and many others. In an effort to address at least some of these needs in the first instance, Daniel Fitzpatrick and I founded aemi at the beginning of 2016, an organisation now funded by the Arts Council that supports, advocates for and regularly exhibits moving image work by artists and experimental filmmakers, primarily in a cinema context.

Aemi is one facet of a dynamic, shared ecology of artist and experimental moving image culture in Ireland. Through partnerships and collaborations (with festivals, artists, programmers and other arts organisations) we are keen to strengthen and contribute to a wider, broader infrastructure that is interconnected and mutually enriching. We also recognise that there is a thriving international network and circuit of activity around artist and experimental moving image practice that Ireland-based moving image artists and experimental filmmakers have not historically been in a strong position to engage with. This is not only because we are an island on the periphery of Europe but also because advocates or agents for Irish practice have been in shorter supply. In an effort to upend this frustrating trend, we frequently think about programming as an innate part of our role as a resource organisation. At our screening events, we regularly situate international work alongside films by Irish artists including Vivienne Dick, Sarah Browne, Susan MacWilliam, Saoirse Wall, Moira Tierney, Julie Murray, Aisling McCoy, Tamsin Snow, Alice Rekab, Vanessa Daws and Cliona Harmey. We also invite international curators, programmers and artists to Dublin to present their work in person, while giving them first-hand experience of the busy and diverse scene here. Guests we have previously welcomed include curators Herb Shellenberger, Benjamin Cook and Peter Taylor and artists Mark Leckey, Soda_Jerk, Anne-Marie Copestake, William Raban, Peggy Ahwesh, Lewis Klahr, Tamara Henderson and Sven Augustijnen.

Because it is relatively difficult for Irish artists to gain the same exposure as artists based in the main cultural hubs of Europe or the UK (by virtue of being en route for the stream of arts professionals constantly passing through), we have made a priority of touring aemi programmes abroad, so that we’re not just seeing some of the excellent work that’s being made here ourselves, but also sharing it as much as possible with international audiences. Thanks to funding we have been able to tour aemi programmes abroad for the first time this year, something which forms part of a larger initiative through which we have commissioned two screening programmes, curated and including work by Irish artists Sarah Browne and Vivienne Dick, that we are currently bringing to arts centres and cinemas around Ireland. Aemi is increasing audiences for and critical engagement with this material, through the collective experience of the cinema event, not just in Dublin (where until this year almost all of our screening events had taken place) but around the country more broadly.

The desire to foster a sense of community around this work also informs how we approach the aemi newsletter, which we send out by email to our subscribers every month, highlighting not only events that we are presenting but also festival submission dates, exhibitions and screenings taking place across the country. Signing up for the newsletter is the first step in our aemi affiliate programme which provides Ireland-based moving image artists with access to our free one-to-one advisory sessions, through which we offer feedback or advice around work-in-progress, new work or exhibition strategy. The affiliate programme will develop further in 2020, with the introduction of a regular series of aemi ‘Rough Cut’ events, where artists will also have the opportunity to present newly finished work or work-in-progress to a small group of peers as well as an invited producer, critic, curator or academic who will moderate the event.

Working on aemi has meant that I have had the privilege of viewing a wide range of artist and experimental moving image work produced in Ireland in recent years and this has informed a number of projects and screenings that I have curated in an independent capacity. While the artists I’ve worked with represent just a fraction of what is being made here at present, to some extent they offer insights into the varied landscape of contemporary Irish artist and experimental moving image practice. In autumn 2018, I curated ‘The L-Shape’, an exhibition featuring a new presentation of Going to the Mountain (2015) by Jenny Brady and The Invisible Limb (2014) by Sarah Browne – two moving image works that offered portraits of radically different subjects. In Going to Mountain, Brady’s study of three pre-verbal babies, the viewer is given a perspective divested of sentimentality that provides instead the opportunity to tune into the infants’ physical gestures and movements, often reflected in mirrored surfaces and made to appear unfamiliar through the use of slow motion and syncopated editing. An equally absorbing process of defamiliarisation is also at work in Browne’s elegiac, The Invisible Limb, a film letter addressed to deceased German artist Charlotte Posenenske that considers her work and enigmatic withdrawal from practice as a sculptor in 1968, in relation to Irish stone carver Cynthia Moran, an artist with a very different trajectory whom, it transpires, was born the same year as Posenenske.

The uniquely challenging existence of the artist is also a concern in Laura Fitzgerald’s tragicomic Portrait of a Stone (2018). This was one of the films included in ‘Between Structure and Agency’, a screening of Irish work I curated last year for the Irish Film Institute and Culture Ireland, that will tour the UK with LUX. Fitzgerald’s split screen video piece contrasts footage of her father shot in his native Kerry, obligingly taking direction from his daughter behind the camera, with a steady flow of often humorous on-screen text in which the viewer is addressed as a presumed artist and presented with a multiple choice questionnaire in which every option spelt out is more ludicrous and desperate than the last. Also featured in the ‘Between Structure and Agency’ programme was Doireann O’Malley’s A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision, a film that reveals a similar level of intimacy and vulnerability as explored in Fitzgerald’s video work, albeit in an altogether different tone. Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film, and drawing on material from the artist’s personal archive, the title references the anatomy of the box jellyfish and expresses, as O’Malley recently described in an interview for Vdrome, “the faint hope or dream of transcending the limits of human embodiment and perception”.² Likewise Bea McMahon’s sublime silent 8mm Film of Octopuses (2013) – which featured in a screening I presented at the IFI in 2017, entitled ‘As We May Think’ – uses the camera to offer or imagine a vision not of an octopus, but instead an impression of what an octopus might perceive. These contemporary Irish film works then each demonstrate an impressive culture of practice that is experimental, both technically and conceptually – a culture that is deeply rewarding to engage with, as a programmer and film curator, and deserving of wider attention.

Alice Butler is a film curator, writer and co-director of aemi, a Dublin-based, Arts Council-funded organisation that supports and regularly exhibits moving image work by artists and experimental filmmakers.

Notes
¹ Maeve Connolly, ‘Archiving Irish and British Artists’ Video: A Conversation between Maeve Connolly and REWIND researchers Stephen Partridge and Adam Lockhart’, MIRAJ 5.1&2, 2016, p.208. See: maeveconnolly.net 
² Doireann O’Malley in conversation about A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision for the online exhibition platform, Vdrome. See: vdrome.org/doireann-omalley

Feature Image: Doireann O’Malley, A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision, 2013, Super 8 and 16mm transferred to video, stereo sound; video still courtesy of the artist.

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CHRISTOPHER STEENSON DISCUSSES SOME OF THE MAIN CHALLENGES FOR ARTISTS IN SECURING STUDIO SPACES.

The words “artist” and “studio” seem to go hand-in-hand. If you are one, you need one. Workspaces can sometimes be as revered as the artists themselves. Just look at Francis Bacon – his studio was deemed so significant that conservators at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane painstakingly moved its entire contents from its original location in 7 Reece Mews in London. An extreme example, but, as outlined in other articles featured in this issue, studios are an important – if not essential – part of an artist’s practice.

Studios aren’t just a place for making work. They are also a space for community, networking and learning – important aspects of an artist’s practice after leaving art college. Being part of a studio group means that you can stay connected with your peers, learn from one another and collaborate on projects. Reading groups are a common activity and often studio members will band together to put on group exhibitions and other DIY events. More established studios will often have a website where members’ work is profiled, offering online visibility. Studio spaces can also be valuable for arranging visits with curators, allowing them to view your making processes and understand how your art will work in a space. However, with current and ongoing challenges in the Irish context – such as funding cuts, rising property prices, a volatile rental market and the negative consequences of urban regeneration – you will more-than-likely encounter a range of obstacles in finding a studio, before you ever set foot inside one.

Space/Time Paradox

If you’re a recent graduate, it’s quite likely that you’re living in rental accommodation. With this comes a distinct set of challenges when trying to make art. Rent is expensive and, at present, is continually rising. In Dublin, people spend an average of 55% of their take-home pay on rent. Renting a studio on top of paying for accommodation can be a major additional expense.

‘Option One’ is to try and work from home. If you have the luxury of a spare room (or a bedroom bigger than a shoebox), this might be a perfectly sensible solution – especially if your work is small-scale and doesn’t require too much space. However, if you work in sculpture, ceramics or some other art form that requires the use of tools, machinery or a lot of floor space, you will need to seek out a dedicated studio. So now you’re onto ‘Option Two’ – renting a studio. Unless your parents invested well in shares – or you’ve struck gold selling your work – you will probably need a part-time or full-time job, in order to afford a studio. Herein lies a predicament. Whilst spending all your time working to pay for your studio, you may not have a lot of time to actually use it. In this case, it will be important to have a studio with 24-hour access, so that you can fit studio time around your work schedule.

In order to reduce studio costs, you may also consider sharing your space with another artist. It will be important to find someone who works in a way that is sympathetic to your own practice and work schedule. For example, if you’re a performance artist, you don’t want to suffocate from your studio mate’s oil painting fumes, whilst rehearsing your durational performance. You will also have to consider how sharing your studio will reduce the space you have to work with. This factor will become increasingly important as you make and accumulate artworks. Slowly but surely, your studio will become swamped with works from exhibitions past – material ghosts, if you will.

Now you have another predicament – storage. Do you rent a storage space somewhere (which can cost you an extra around €200 a year, depending on your needs and the location) or bite the bullet and donate/destroy/recycle old artworks? Some artists I’ve talked to have a general rule that unless they can sell an artwork (or reuse it) within a three-year period, they destroy it. Others depend on the generosity of relatives to store older works indefinitely, in spare rooms or garden sheds.

Health and Safety

Beyond the aforementioned issues, it is best practice to find out about the health and safety situation in any prospective studio spaces. A serious problem with artist studios is a lack of central heating or air conditioning. Amidst the unfolding realities of global warming, Ireland’s recent weather patterns have become increasingly volatile, with all-year-round dreary conditions shifting towards blisteringly hot summers and bitingly cold winters. You will want a studio that has proper ventilation and some way of regulating the temperature, otherwise it could be unbearable (and technically unsafe) to work in.

Studios with workshops have an obligation to look after their equipment and to train studio members in how to use the equipment safely to avoid injury. Unfortunately, with the financial challenges facing many studios, this can often be a difficult obligation to fulfill. Fire safety is another important factor to bear in mind when viewing different studio spaces. You should try to find out whether buildings conform to regulations. The risk of fire needs little explication. Glasgow School of Art’s historic Mackintosh building was engulfed in flames for the second time in four years last June. The first fire was caused by gases emitted from a foam canister used in a student’s art project. Closer to home, Outpost Studios in Bray suffered a devastating fire in February, which resulted in the total destruction of their building and the eight studios it housed. A fundraiser for Outpost is planned on 8 September at Mermaid Arts Centre, to help recover the cost of tools and artworks lost in the blaze.

What follows is a brief overview of studio provision in Belfast and Dublin – capital cities facing distinct yet similar problems, in terms of affordable workspaces for artists.

Belfast

Between funding cuts and building insecurity, 2018 has been a tumultuous year for studios in Belfast. The city’s oldest studio group, QSS, had their Arts Council of Northern Ireland funding cut completely, threatening the loss of space for 38 artists. However, after an appeal, QSS reported that their funding has been reinstated. QSS have opened a new satellite space in Norwich Union House, which has eight new studios, priced between £60 to £105 per month. However, the lease on their Bedford Street building is nearly up, meaning their main studio and gallery space needs to find a new home by the end of March 2019.

Another studio provider to have their ACNI funding cut was Paragon Studios/Project Space (PS²), threatening the loss of seven studios. A significant grant from the Freelands Foundation allowed the group to survive this blow, and PS² have since relocated to Spencer House on Royal Avenue, with studios currently under construction.

Other studios in the area include Platform Arts, who have 12 studios spaces ranging from £75–85 per month, with one larger studio costing £140. Platform do not receive ACNI funding, with revenue from their studios being funneled back into the gallery space and exhibition programme. Their building is also rent-free, but with recent trends towards redevelopment of buildings in the city centre, there is the ongoing threat that their building may be repurposed or sold. Other notable studios in the city centre are Flax Art/Orchid Studios, the fourth-floor studios on Queen’s Street and the artist-run Lombard Studios.

East Belfast is brimming with studios at present. A significant addition to the studio ecosystem is Vault Artist Studios. Formerly known as the Belfast Bankers (previously situated in a disused Ulster Bank building on the Newtonards Road), this studio group has recently acquired the use of the old Belfast Metropolitan College building on Tower Street. The capacity of this new premises means that the studio group has grown from 30 members to 88, providing space for a range of creatives including visual artists, musicians and writers. Membership with Vault Artist Studios is £20 plus the cost of studio, which varies depending on size and how many people are sharing.

Another studio group, Creative Exchange, provides 12 modern studios. Prices are around £30 per month for a desk space. Despite the promising number of new studios, East Belfast has the fastest growing property prices in Northern Ireland, which could potentially lead to many artists being forced out in the future. Property prices are not rising as quickly in the north or west of the city, so more studios (such as Artists at the Mill) are being  established in these areas. However, with the uncertainties surrounding Brexit, there is a chance that UK property prices could plummet in the coming months and years. Outside of the Northern Ireland capital, Clarendon Studios in Derry and Shore Collective in Lurgan are other significant artist-led studios operating regionally.

Dublin

According to a recent survey by the Economist, it’s now more expensive to live in Dublin than it is to live in London. This is attributable to a continuing housing shortage and rising property prices, all of which spells bad news for affordable artist studio in Dublin city centre. Competition is fierce, and you will need to search. MART continues to be the major provider in Dublin, with over 170 studios across the city. Studio rental ranges from €150 to €600 per month, with studio sizes ranging from five to 25 m². Access hours for all of MART’s studios are 7am to 11pm. Even as a relatively successful business, MART are feeling the effects of the property crisis in the city. Their Creative Hub, located on Portobello Harbour, was opened in mid-2017 but will be forced to close in December 2018 because of a planned hotel development in the area. Commenting on the current situation, MART have said that the continuing rise in property prices is making it increasingly difficult for them to maintain a sustainable business model.

Other longstanding studio providers include Pallas Projects/Studios, who have operated studios in 14 premises across the city over the last twenty years, in order to stay one step ahead of the developers. Pallas currently provide studio spaces to 20 artists, with rent starting at €200 per month. Independent Studio Artists Ltd are supported by the Temple Bar Cultural Trust and offer 10 purpose-built studios at €160 a month. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios have 30 spaces. Around 12 new studios are offered each annually. There is also Graduate Studio Award available, with applications in January each year.

In the north of the city, A4 Sounds are another affordable option, offering  ‘modular’ studio memberships. Membership is €75 per month plus options for a private studio desk (€100 per month), private workshop desk (€130 per month) and personal storage (€10–30 per month). Membership also gives access to a discount scheme with a number of businesses in the city, as well as access to studio facilities, including a workshop, darkroom and screen-printing equipment. Ormond Studios, an artist-run studio space on Ormond Quay, currently offers studio membership to eight artists.

As well as the general workspaces mentioned above, there are a few temporary studio spaces that artists can avail of in the city. Since 2012, DIT’s ‘Summer Studio Initiative’ has let artists use their studios from 21 June until 1 September free of charge, along with access to the DIT Library. The only requirement is that artists should be completing a body of work for exhibition, with an open-call usually going out in April each year. Other open calls include Fingal County Council’s Loughshinny Boathouse Artists’ Studio. This restored boathouse space, located at the edge of Loughshinny Harbour, is a subsidised day studio for artists, that is available for three months to one year. Applications are currently open, with a deadline of Friday 28 September at 4pm. Information for applications can be found via the Fingal Arts Office website (fingalarts.ie).

To save on rent for a studio and accommodation, it is also worth applying for residential studios like Fire Station Artists’ Studios. Located on Lower Buckingham Street, FSAS provides access to live/work studios (which cost €411 to €628 per month), sculpture workshops and innovative digital technology such as 3D modelling. Fire Station’s International Curators programme means that residents can meet up to ten curators per year. Other residential artists’ studios include Residential Spaces, which consist of two properties at Albert Cottages, Hampstead Park, and St Patrick’s Lodge, located beside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin City Centre. Rent for each property is €700, with WiFi, TV and phone included. Other studios of note in Dublin include Block T, Talbot Gallery and Studios, Tara Building and Steambox (the studio group for the Independent Museum of Contemporary Arts).

Christopher Steenson is Production Editor of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Image Credits:
Creative Exchange Studios, Belfast; photograph by Malachy McCrudden
Vault Artist Studios, Belfast;. photograph by Cambell Photography
Tara Building, Dublin; image courtesy of  Zak Milofsky

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SUZANNE WALSH PROVIDES A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF PROMINENT IRISH RESIDENCIES.

Ballinglen Arts Foundation
Ballinglen is set in the village of Ballycastle in County Mayo and has been running since 1994. This residency seeks to support artists in an inspiring setting. Artists are encouraged to interact with the local community during their stay by carrying out talks, workshops, exhibitions and school visits. Successful applicants are offered a cottage to live in free of charge as well as a studio. No formal outcomes are specified. Residents are expected to have professional standing in their field, or be an emerging artist of recognised ability. Mayo residents are not eligible. The residency runs for between four and eight weeks, with facilities including printmaking, purpose-built studios and an art library. There is no bursary offered. Applications can be made throughout the year with details on their website.
ballinglenartsfoundation.org/fellowship

Cill Rialaig
Situated in the remote Gaeltacht village of Dungeagan in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Cill Rialaig residency is open to artists of ‘national and international repute’. It was built in 1995 and resources include seven studios, a meeting house and library. Residents stay free of charge in a self-catering cottage, paying a minimal utility fee. The residency aims to provide artists with a peaceful retreat to focus on their work in a quiet environment without specified outcomes. Interested artists can apply for an application pack. Note: there is a charge for applying for this residency.
cillrialaigartscentre.com/residencies

Cowhouse studios
Located in the farmlands of County Wexford near Rathnure, Cowhouse Studios are a “progressive artist-run school and residency” running since 2008. Residencies are offered either as one to four week blocks all year round (costing €360 per week) or themed residencies which sometimes offer a stipend. Themed residencies take place once a year, usually in autumn. Accommodation is in a private or shared room, with 24-hour access to facilities which include an open-plan studio, woodworking equipment, darkroom and computer lab. Cowhouse studios also form partnerships which offer opportunities for exhibition and publications, public talks, workshops and facilitated discussions. As the residencies are ever-evolving, it’s best to keep an eye on their website for callouts.
cowhousestudios.com

Digital Artists Studios
This residency in the centre of Belfast concentrates on programmes for digital artists. DAS offers 12 studio residencies to local artists and three to international artists. Residents pay £60 per month for facilities, which include a personal iMac workstation with software (such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe C86). No accommodation is included. Artists have 24-hour access to a shared studio space and digital equipment (DSLRs and recording equipment), as well as technical support and advice. After a four-month residency working on a specific project, artists can apply for the ‘Annual Review’ exhibition and other opportunities.
digitalartsstudios.com

Fire Station Artist Studios
Fire Station Artist Studios offers large residential studios with workshops on Buckingham street in Dublin City Centre. Run by Dublin City council, FSAS has been active since 1993. Facilities include a sculpture workshop, digital media resource centre, project space, a visiting curator programme, as well as skill training programmes. The combined living/working studios are subsidised and let between a period of one year and two years nine months. Residencies are open to professional artists who are non-students only, with call-outs approximately every ten months. Residencies are self-directed, but give access to facilities and support, with applicants proposing a project to work on for the duration of their stay. Non-accommodation residencies include graduate awards, for both sculpture and digital media. These run for three months and offer a stipend as well as mentoring from curators. A similar residential award for more established artists working in sculpture and digital media runs from two to four months and also offers a stipend. Both awards offer access to digital equipment and are mainly opportunities for artists to develop their practice. The application deadline this year is 14 October at 5pm – check the FSAS website for details.
firestation.ie

Guesthouse Project
Situated in the Shandon area of Cork City, this artist-led initiative provides a social hub for eating, meeting, performing and creative production. The Guesthouse Project began offering ‘time and space’ residencies in 2007 free of charge. Accommodation is available for two-month residencies, with artists selected through invitation and regular call-outs. Resident artists are expected to host a lunch and give a presentation, workshop or exhibition during their stay. In return, they have access to a workspace, digital equipment, facilities and opportunities to meet other artists. Project-based residencies (without accommodation) are allocated on an ongoing basis. The next open-call is in late September. Interested applicants are encouraged to sign up to the mailing list.
theguesthouse.ie

Heinrich Böll Residency
This cottage on Achill Island, County Mayo, once belonged to the German writer, Heinrich Böll, and was left as a residence to The Heinrich Böll Foundation. Open to artists and writers, submissions are taken before September each year. The residency has been running since 2003 and offers time and space to those who need quietness and escape. Artists are encouraged to visit schools or community organisations or to give a public talk during their stay. No bursary is provided. During two-week residencies, artists stay in the cottage which comprises two writing rooms and a studio, with a phoneline but no internet. Application details available on the website.
heinrichboellcottage.com

Interface
This residency is set in Recess, County Galway and explores the intersections between science and art. Artists of all disciplines are encouraged to apply in spring or autumn of each year. The residencies are between two and six weeks. Facilities include a private studio, as well as access to a larger studio space, which includes lighting, heat and basic tools. The programme proposes to introduce artists to local community through artist talks. The residency also offers accommodation in a self-contained apartment, but no stipend. Residents are advised to bring their own transport. More information on the Interface website.
interfaceinagh.com

Irish Museum of Modern Art
This residency takes place in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin, which has extensive gardens as well as galleries, educational programmes and events. The residency has been running since 1994, with various options offered to both national and international artists. Bursaries are offered for IMMA’s themed residencies, the amount offered depending on the duration of stay. Artists are expected to engage with the museum programme through talks and open studios. The length of stay for themed residencies are usually maximum 6 months, with accommodation and studio provided. Residents stay either in one of three self-catering coach houses (which also include studios) or else in the larger Flanker house. Each studio comes with phone-line, internet and basic tool-kits. There are regular open-calls, so it is recommended to sign up to residency mailing list.
imma.ie

Leitrim Sculpture Centre
Leitrim sculpture centre is situated in Manorhamilton, a small town in north County Leitrim. LSC was established in 1997 and currently hosts an extensive residency programme. The centre’s facilities include a 1300-metre industrial premises and a four-storey Georgian building, with equipment for working with stone, glass, metal, ceramics and digital media, amongst others. LSC offers two types of residencies: Exhibition Residencies include accommodation, studio space (with broadband), access to all facilities and an artist’s stipend of €2400. These residencies last eight weeks and conclude with a one-person exhibition in the gallery. LSC also offers Professional Development Residencies that provide time and space for researching new work. These residencies come with a stipend of €1000, a private studio and accommodation for a minimum of four weeks. Call-outs for residencies are usually made in December of each year and interested artists are encouraged to sign up to the LSC mailing list for further information.
leitrimsculpturecentre.ie

Resort Residency
Run by Fingal County Council, ‘Resort Residency’ takes place annually in Portrane, North County Dublin. Invited artists and writers spend a week in a mobile home in Lynders Caravan park gathering, processing and engaging with the local area. A year later, they return to present work as part of ‘Resort Revelations’, which coincides with the Bleeding Pig Festival. Assistance and a stipend are offered and introductions to local groups are also provided. This residency seems to fluctuate between open-calls and invitation only, so it’s worth keeping an eye on website for opportunities.
fingalarts.ie

The Model
The Model was built in Sligo in 1862 as a Model school and was renovated in 2000 and 2010, with additions including the current day studios and one apartment/studio at the very top of the building. The Model also houses expansive gallery spaces, restaurant, bookshop and performance space with a busy programme of events. The day studios residencies have a rental fee of €225 per month and are currently available on a one to two-year basis, supporting both established and emerging local artists who can also avail of open days, events, talks and screenings. The residential studio is currently available by invitation only to Irish artists, for two to four weeks without a stipend. Call-outs are periodically announced on the website.
themodel.ie

Tyrone Guthrie Centre
The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is situated in the house and grounds of an estate in County Monaghan, left to the Irish State as an artist’s retreat by theatre director Sir William Tyrone Guthrie. The residency is dedicated to providing peace and quiet for work in the daytime, with conversational dinners taking place every evening. Facilities in Tyrone Guthrie Centre include eight studio spaces along with a performance/dance space and a print studio. Applications are welcome all year-round from practitioners of any artform with a proven record of success. Artists stay a maximum of one month in the big house (€350 per week for full -board), or two months in one of the self-catering cottages (€200 per week) with no formal outcomes expected. Bursaries are awarded annually to individual artists by local authorities. Interested artists should contact their local arts office for further information.
tyroneguthrie.ie

UCD Parity Studios
This studio-only residency takes place in University College Dublin. The university offers year-long residencies to professional artists looking to develop collaborative projects in a university environment. The programme began in 2012 as an Art and Science initiative and has now expanded to include Arts and Humanities, Business, Engineering and Architecture, Social Sciences and Law. The programme offers a stipend and 24-hour access to the artist studios but does not offer accommodation. Resident artists work in close proximity to UCD academics, researchers and students, and can access talks, lectures, symposia and the university’s libraries. Artists are expected to use studio space regularly and to take part in a public engagement programme of talks, exhibition and performances. Applications are made online to individual departments in spring of each year following a call-out on the website.
ucdartinscience.com

Image Credits:
Laura Fitzgerald, Brian Rock, video research still from video Portrait of a Stone, 2018; image courtesy of the artist. Fitzgerald is currently in residence at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
Siobhan Ferguson, Water Border, 2018; photograph courtesy the artist. Ferguson is currently artist-in-residence at Digital Arts Studios, Belfast.
Laura McMorrow, Sugidama, 2018; image courtesy of the artist. McMorrow is due to undertake a residency at Cill Rialaig in 2019.
Jasmin Märker, My Immortals, silk wall hanging. Märker has recently been awarded a Professional Development Residency 2018 at Leitrim Sculpture Centre.
Lar O’Toole, The Unfurled Ruled Non-Surface, 2018, acrylic paint and monofilament nylon, 244 x 120 x 60 cm; image courtesy of the artist. O’Toole was recipient of the Student Residency Award at IMMA.

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BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN OUTLINES THE EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS TAKING PLACE NATIONWIDE TO CELEBRATE THE DIVERSE ARTISTIC CAREER OF BRIAN O’DOHERTY.

Few would disagree that Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland is one of the most distinguished and significant artists of his generation to come out of Ireland onto the international stage in the last fifty years. Born in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, his influence is felt on both sides of the Atlantic since his (voluntary) exile to New York in 1957. His extraordinary career, which spans many disciplines and uses different heteronyms¹, has been puzzling to some and inspirational to others. As a pioneering conceptual artist, he produced such seminal works as the first conceptual portrait, Portrait of Duchamp (1966), as well as a double issue of the ground-breaking experimental magazine, Aspen 5+6 (1967), often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art to dispense with the gallery. O’Doherty’s highly-influential series of critical essays, ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ – first published in Artforum in 1976 – have been widely translated, forming an essential part of every art college library for decades. These essays were pivotal to the late twentieth century’s institutional critique for their exposure of the heretofore hidden economic, sociological and ideological factors underlying the exhibition and spectatorship of modernist art.

In November 1972, as an emigrant’s response to Bloody Sunday in Derry the previous January, O’Doherty changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland at the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ in Dublin. Declaring he would hold the name until the British military presence was removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens restored their human rights, this became, chronologically, the first work of performance art in Ireland. After thirty-six years and with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, an effigy of Patrick Ireland (bearing a mask of O’Doherty’s face) was ritualistically buried following a three-day wake, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2008. The headstone reads: “Patrick Ireland 1972–2008” with the words “ONE, HERE, NOW” beneath, transcribed into the archaic Celtic language of Ogham.

This Ogham language, which he learned as a schoolboy in Ireland, was introduced to the world of conceptual art by O’Doherty in 1967 in a unique formulation that juxtaposed conceptualism, serialism and language. Remarkably, the structure of Ogham coincided with a growing interest in serialism at the time among conceptual artists like O’Doherty, Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt. In Ogham, vowels and consonants are reduced to lines at intervals above, below and across a horizontal or vertical, similar to the arrangement of sets of notes in serial music. This was O’Doherty’s Rosetta Stone, which, over six decades, has produced an extraordinary array of Ogham drawings, sculptures, wall paintings, easel paintings and plays called ‘Structural Plays’. The artist George Segal once referred to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work as “the greatest oeuvre of drawings by any post-war American artist.” In these works, his verbal culture was reduced to single words with ontological undertones – ONE, HERE, NOW or, even further, to the vowels alone.

As Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty’s linear drawings based on the language of Ogham, were taken into three-dimensional space with his signature series of ‘Rope Drawing’ installations, of which there have been 127 to date. Using space, colour and line, the Rope Drawings deftly overcame many of the criticisms so cogently outlined in Inside the White Cube. Crossing yet another boundary within the arts, O’Doherty became a novelist, his first novel, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P, winning the Sagittarius Prize in 1993 and his second, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000.

This year will be a significant one for this polymath artist, critic, medical doctor, writer, teacher, arts administrator and filmmaker as he reaches his ninetieth year, with long-overdue celebrations of his distinguished career taking place across Ireland. Events began in April at the Sirius Art Centre in the port town of Cobh in Cork, when a series of recently-restored wall paintings, titled ‘One, Here, Now: The Ogham Cycle’, was unveiled. Painted by Patrick Ireland when he was artist-in-residence at Sirius in 1996, they were subsequently donated by the artist to the Irish State, a gift accepted by President Mary Robinson. The paintings have lain hidden behind wallpaper in the central luminous space at Sirius until an ambitious restoration project was initiated by Sirius Director, Miranda Driscoll. Originally commissioned by Peter Murray, then Director of the Crawford Gallery, the wall paintings address Irish historical experience through language (Ogham, Irish and English). It is the richest and largest Ogham wall painting of the artist’s lengthy career, and one of the few permanent works in existence (two others are in Italy). The launch of this important restoration work coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of Sirius itself, and is accompanied by a year-long programme of talks, specially-commissioned artworks, musical compositions, dance pieces and performances responding to the work.²

A highlight at the opening was a public conversation between Brian O’Doherty and Alanna Heiss, founder of the PS1 gallery in New York (now MoMA PS1), on Saturday 21 April at the Sirius Art Centre. The same evening One, Here, Now: A Sonic Theatre – featuring newly commissioned music by Ann Cleare, developed in response to The Ogham Cycle – was performed at Sirius. The Glucksman at University College Cork is also showing work by O’Doherty/Ireland, as part of the exhibition, ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’, which opened the same weekend. In addition, the theatre company, Gare St Lazare Ireland, presented Here All Night at the Everyman Theatre on Monday 23 April, a production that includes texts, songs, music and poems appearing in Samuel Beckett’s work. Visual elements taken from O’Doherty’s installation, Hello, Sam Redux – which was originally exhibited in Dublin Contemporary at the National Gallery in 2011 – have been successfully incorporated into the work since 2016.

Other events in Cork include a celebration of the artist’s film career with a three-month screening series, titled ‘There is no thing here but much else’, that continues until 27 May at Crawford Art Gallery. Included is O’Doherty’s film Hopper’s Silence (1981), which won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art in 1982. Also showing is the film Inverted Pyramid for Cyclops, in which O’Doherty playfully critiques Patrick Ireland’s Rope Drawing #94 installation at the Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, in 1990.

Sé Merry Doyle’s film, Lament for Patrick Ireland (2008), was also screened on 6 April following a talk, titled ‘Re-Introducing Patrick Ireland: Selves, Semantics, Site-Lines’, by Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA. In tandem with the tenth anniversary of the Burial of Patrick Ireland (1972–2008) – the subject of Merry Doyle’s film – an exhibition curated by Christina Kennedy opened at IMMA on 26 April, entitled ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’. The exhibition, which continues until 16 September, was developed in partnership with Stoney Road Press, with whom O’Doherty has had a long collaboration. Prominent among the works on display are drawings and works on paper, from the Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966/2012) to the Rotating Vowels (2017) series. It is the latest evocation of a career-long interest in language, and the Ogham vowels in particular. The most recent series of Doherty’s prints with Stoney Road Press are the Structural Plays (1967–70/2018), performative language plays that were unique to the conceptual period. Also on display is video documentation of the piece, Vowel Grid (1970), performed in 1998 in An Grianán Fort, County Donegal. The aforementioned multimedia work, Aspen 5+6, put together by O’Doherty in 1967 as a “conceptual issue”, is also included in the show at IMMA.

The New Yorker magazine once described O’Doherty as “one of New York’s most treasured artist/intellectuals”. It looks as if he is about to reclaimed by his own country in what is already proving to be a fittingly broad and exciting programme of events that will extend into 2019: ‘There is no thing here but much else’, continues at Crawford Art Gallery until 27 May; ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’ runs at the Glucksman until 8 July; ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’ is showing at IMMA until 16 September; ‘ONE HERE NOW: The Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland Project’ will be on view at Sirius Arts Centre until April 2019.

Brenda Moore-McCann is the author of O’Doherty’s first monograph, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Between Categories, published in 2009. She is currently editing a book of selected letters from O’Doherty from the 1970s to the present day, which will be published by Smith and Brown, London, in September 2018.

Notes
¹A heteronym differs from a pseudonym by creating a living biography attached to the assumed name or creative persona. Sigmund Bode, Mary Josephson and William Maginn are other heteronyms of Brian O’Doherty, first revealed in 2002 in the photographic multiple portrait, Five Identities.
² siriusartcentre.ie/one-here-now

Image credits
Brian O’Doherty, Burial of Patrick Ireland, 2008, Irish Museum of Modern Art; photograph © Fionn McCann Photography
Brian O’Doherty, Rotating Vowels v, 2014, etching, 92 x 73.5 cm; edition of 40; image courtesy the artist and Stoney Road Press
Conservator Don Knox at work on the restoration of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’s One, Here, Now, Sirius Arts Centre; image by Miranda Driscoll, Sirius Arts Centre

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MARK O’KELLY DISCUSSES ASPECTS OF PORTRAIT PAINTING IN IRELAND.

Early portraiture can be viewed as an historical instrument of class identification, patriarchal gaze and institutional hegemony. It could also be argued that, over the years, important significations of portraiture have been exploited and aesthetically challenged through the deconstructive approaches of key historical and contemporary Irish artists. This complex field has huge public appeal and carries immense prestige for artist and subject at the level of national identity, recognition and status.

The historical context for contemporary Irish portraiture and the breadth of current practice have been highlighted in a range of recent events: the Freud Project at IMMA; the reopening of the National Portrait Collection; and numerous high-profile portrait commissions by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), the National Gallery and the Hennessy Portrait Prize. The specific genre of portrait painting in Ireland has been largely sustained through the work of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). Such ongoing efforts to collect, exhibit and commission portraiture attest to the importance of the genre within many of this country’s most important institutions.

Irish portraiture has, by virtue of its practice, innovated the process of commissioning: practical fulfilment of criteria generally conveys the significance of the sitter’s esteem or office as part of a strategy to celebrate national life in general. At the same time, in a parallel postmodern development, the commitment to producing a likeness of the sitter has increasingly been dispensed with. The cultural context and the historical agency of the subject (portraiture itself), as a paradigm of political and social capital, have become the artist’s main frame of reference. In contemporary visual culture, pictures and portraits flatten out hierarchies of either fame or achievement and, in so doing, undercut linear approaches to the subject. Nowadays, the criteria determining achievement and notoriety are less clear cut. These conditions not only reprioritise the motivations behind choosing the subjects of portraiture but also drive practices of painting which utilise the image of the person to ends other than veneration and commemoration.

Archival Traditions

The commissioned portrait relates to the archive according to customs governing an index registrar of state. A good example is the commissioning of a portrait of every serving Taoiseach, producing a relatively simple customary requirement for the visual record of government. Reflecting the complexity of an evolving society, more complex commissioning criteria are now commonplace regarding the election of both sitter and artist. Consequently, in the field of portraiture today, public and private interests compete to register and authorise more socially inclusive and politically diverse figures of authority for commendation.

Historically significant and accomplished portrait paintings by Irish artists continue to convey a mastery of technical detail in describing the sitter’s likeness and the context of their achievements. Many officially commissioned portraits specify the accurate depiction of vestments, symbols of office and other regal insignia. Following in this tradition, Irish artists of rigour and commitment include Carey Clarke, James Hanley and Conor Walton – true image-makers in paint and perception who persist in innovation through distinct signature styles. Similarly, Mick O’Dea is a relentless portrait artist, but, in pursuing images beyond presidents and chairs, he has developed a more personal archive of portraiture. Through many projects of his own design, O’Dea has increased the circle of social inclusion in his eclectic and ever generous practice. O’Dea’s 2013 portrait of the artist Stephen McKenna (1939 – 2017) is a notably moving example of his ability to negotiate such paradoxes of affinity and affiliation. The painting gently acknowledges McKenna’s institutional legacy but primarily foregrounds his presence as an artist in a studio. Viewed from a similar moment of contemporary hindsight, Nick Miller’s affirmative portrait of the late Barrie Cooke (1931 – 2014) also provides an important historical record, not least in terms of friendships between artists. Miller’s Last Sitting: Portrait of Barrie Cooke (2013) conveys Cooke’s presence in a direct and uninhibited encounter and was awarded the Hennessy Portrait Prize in 2014.

By contrast, following the example of painters such as Lucian Freud, sitters often remain unnamed, the paintings testament to the artist as existential observer. However, Freud’s complex painting of Queen Elizabeth II is an exceptional work which contradicts this characteristic approach, driven to an extreme image realisation in his request that she suffer the duress of wearing the weighty crown of England for the duration of the sitting. It seems significant that 2016 – a year of Irish commemoration – saw the establishment of the Freud Project at IMMA. The portraits on show emphasise an Irish legacy to Freud’s oeuvre, much in the way that the transposition of Bacon’s studio to Dublin in 1998 reasserted an Irish dimension to post-war British figurative painting. In this way, the portraits themselves will no doubt deepen the dialogue surrounding the Anglo-Irish milieu depicted in Freud’s work, including familial histories, sporting achievements and other examples of cultural exchange between our neighbouring states.

In a survey of Irish portrait painting, globally accelerated and conflicting image-agendas are influential factors, especially when one considers the all-pervading presence of photography and digital imagery. In Colin Davidson’s 2015 painting of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: In Abstentia, commissioned for the cover of Time Magazine, we can observe many complex factors at work. The influence of Freud on Davidson is evident in his equivocation of the immediacy and materiality of paint. This painting is also a significant cultural landmark and succeeds in addressing subjects wider in scope than the depiction of person and place, expanding the structural paradigm of Davidson’s practice as painter-auteur. It functions as a point of origin for widespread mediation and signifies the dividing/unifying paradox of the European project as perceived by a Northern Irish artist. The portrait manifests the gendered artistic and political identities at stake in the performance of painting. Davidson’s heroic artistic project becomes the embattled lens through which East-German-born Merkel’s stabilising presence comes to be globally visible.

Geraldine O’Neill was commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland in 2015 to paint a portrait of the Hong-Kong-born fashion designer John Rocha. Rocha has lived in Ireland since the late 1970s and was awarded a CBE in 2002. In O’Neill’s full-length portrait, he is depicted informally in an interior setting that suggests a draped studio, consistent with O’Neill’s abundant paintings of brightly-coloured studio interiors, often warmly inhabited by family members. In this painting, O’Neill’s characteristically robust structuring of space and her use of a muted colour palette is attuned to Rocha’s minimalist sensibility. This mediates a conceptual alignment between divergent aesthetic agendas – linked to craft, surface and colour, as well as implied cultural transactions – that are highlighted through the depiction of Rocha’s materials.

Recent Commissions

Beyond the significant new portrait commissions by established Irish artists, younger artists are beginning to get a crack of the whip. The Hennessey Portrait Prize recently commissioned Gerry Davis – who won the 2016 award with his intimate portrait of fellow artist Seán Guinan – to make a portrait of All-Ireland championship hurler Henry Shefflin. The portrait was installed in the National Gallery – the first time a GAA player has ever been included in the collection. Davis is a forensically accomplished painter. In the two paintings cited, his range of focus, from close-up to infinite distance, conveys the ‘airspace’ inhabited by the subjects, lending a temporal poignancy of heroic melancholy.

Another artist who has made remarkable contributions to the expanded field of portraiture in Ireland is Vera Klute, who won the Hennessey Portrait in 2015. One of Klute’s most tender works is her official portrait of Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, commissioned by the National Gallery in 2014 in recognition of her life’s work as a campaigner for social justice. Klute was also invited to develop four new portraits for the RIA’s  ‘Women on Walls’, a commissioning project that sought to “make women leaders visible” through a series of new portraits. Klute’s sensitively observed portraits depict eminent historical Irish female scientists – the first female members of the RIA – elected in 1949 (164 years after The RIA was first established). 

Perhaps the most outstandingly original work of portraiture to be completed in recent years in Ireland is Blaise Smith’s group portrait, Eight Scientists (2016), also developed for ‘Women on Walls’. This painting has been the subject of much commentary and celebration, both for its technical accomplishment and the way in which it imaginatively communicates the spirit and personality of its subjects. Smith’s rationale behind the portrait was to promote notable achievements among leading female scientists in Ireland today. His composition is witty, original and skilful and is significant because it reinvents the genre of academic group portraiture according to our times. Each figure depicted in the painting appears to possess special powers, their dynamic research discoveries wielded bodily like magical totems, mythologising these female scientists as superhero archetypes – the ‘X-Women’ of Irish science.

Narrative Gestures

Aside from the conventional matrix of commissioning and the depiction of notable sitters, many Irish artists paint faces and figures as important central motifs of their practice. As in Freud’s works, the sitter is often unidentified and the historical model of the genre itself evoked for narrative and dialogical effect. Genieve Figgis is another prolific Irish artist who has become internationally recognised for her paintings, which make reference to the ‘big houses’ and landed gentry of imperial history. Anglo-Irish culture and literature frame Figgis’s work, pointing to familiar narratives of identity made ubiquitous through art and costumed period drama. Her work reimagines the art historical canon of portrait painting as a nightmare of darkly comic satires, in which Rorschach-style abstraction conjures figures of colonial whimsy according to the dictates of historical cliché. Her paintings appropriate from all manner of portrait iconology, subjecting the genre itself to a systematic evacuation of its contextual historical fetishes, biases and privileges.

Sheila Rennick is another iconoclast whose work addresses questions on how the human subject is approached in contemporary terms. In Rennick’s work, idiomatic likenesses and the durational process of optical analysis are dispensed with in favour of a gestural approach and palette, not unlike the aesthetic posture of Austrian painter and perpetual self-portraitist Maria Lassnig or the neo-expressionist Philip Guston. Characterised by freewheeling compositions, feckless improvisation and the abject application of thick impasto, Rennick’s loud and bawdy paintings are concerned with eliciting empathy for the marginalised subcultures she depicts. In her double portrait The Doggers (2014) – runner-up in last year’s Marmite Prize for Painting – the masked lovers return our judgmental gaze, in a composition reminiscent of a television screen, creating a fly-on-the-wall frame for deviant, alienated identities, made only partially visible to our world via broadcast media.

Mark O’Kelly is an artist who lives and works in Dublin and Limerick. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). His work is the outcome of a practice of research that explores the space between the photographic document and the cosmetic image.

markokelly.ie

Images used: Blaise Smith, Eight Scientists, 2016, oil on gesso panel; collection of the Royal Irish Academy; commissioned as part of Accenture’s ‘Women on Walls’ Campaign;  winner of the US Council/Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award 2017; image courtesy of the artist. Nick Miller, Last Sitting Portrait of Barrie Cooke, 2013; image courtesy of the artist and the National Gallery of Ireland. Geraldine O’Neill, John Rocha (b.1953), Designer, 2015, oil on linen; commissioned for the National Portrait Collection; image courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland. Shiela Rennick, The Doggers, 2014, acrylic on paper; image courtesy of Hillsboro Fine Art.

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ALISON PILKINGTON LOOKS AT CURRENT PRACTICES IN IRISH ABSTRACT PAINTING.

“We are all at present, far more divided, less empowered and certainly far less connected to the effects of our world than we should be. It is for this reason that I am deeply involved in the texture of a medium capable of universalizing so much lost intimacy.” ¹

The term ‘abstract painting’ is historical and, over time, the parameters of the genre seem to have collapsed. It could be argued that to write about abstract painting as if it were a genre that has some significant position within contemporary art, might be a somewhat redundant inquiry. The term itself has been debated and contested throughout the history of twentieth century art, with the traditional meaning of abstraction shifting considerably. To say that ‘abstract painting is alive and well’ in current Irish painting practices also seems an outmoded way of summarising what painters do with their material and medium. As described by Briony Fer in her book, On Abstract Art: “As a label, abstract art is on the one hand too all inclusive: it covers a diversity of art and different historical movements that really hold nothing in common except a refusal to figure objects.”²

In tracing the lineage of Irish twentieth century art through the lens of abstraction, it is clear that formalism has been a central artistic concern. Manine Jellet, Patrick Scott, and more recently Sean Scully and Richard Gorman, offer good examples. The ROSC series of exhibitions also had a significant influence on abstract painting in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Whilst appearing to have roots in the formal abstraction of the late 1950s, the practice of the late William McKeown continues to adopt a range of positions in modern painting, utilising elements of installation, abstraction and figuration. McKeown’s work invites the viewer to consider boundaries, both physical and non-physical. Implicit in his work was the artist’s attention to the apparatus of the medium of painting. Suggesting that material supports are integral to viewer engagement with his paintings, McKeown stated that “I want the sense that the oil is in the linen, rather than on the surface”.³

Within the current generation of Irish painters, formal abstraction still has a place, but it is blended with other ideas – beyond pure form and colour – coming from diverse fields such as philosophy, mathematical theory, science and music. Such interdisciplinary influence is evident in the work of numerous contemporary Irish abstract painters such as Ronnie Hughes, Helen Blake and Mark Joyce. These artists have embraced a kind of ‘soft formalism’, where personal interests converge with formal concerns around composition, colour and pattern-making. Helen Blake’s paintings focus on how colour and texture can literally weave a pattern, drawing the viewer into the surface of the painting. The handmade quality of Blake’s paintings leaves space for both accident and design. Pattern-making and structure are similarly evident in the work of Ronnie Hughes, as are his concerns for human and scientific systems. Among other things, Mark Joyce’s paintings make connections between music and colour theory, testing how colour interacts with composition and form.

The intersection of formal concerns with the physical act of mark-making can be further observed in the paintings of Diana Copperwhite and Damien Flood. Though their work could not be considered purely abstract, it “supports the position of the human hand”, to paraphrase American painter John Lasker’s descriptions of his own work.⁴ For Copperwhite and Flood, the gesture of the brush as it moves across the surface and the chance elements that emerge through this action, seem paramount. Furthermore, their work points to the waning importance of a clear division between abstract and figurative painting. The idea that ‘figuration’ and ‘abstraction’ hold conflicting positions within painting appears to be outmoded. It seems that the contemporary painter is no longer restricted either by the formal concerns of abstraction, or the narrative implications of figurative painting.

A more explicit form of deconstruction in painting is evident in the practices of Irish artists Helen O’Leary and Fergus Feehily. In expanding the definition of what makes something a ‘painting’, a blurring of boundaries between ‘object’ and ‘image’ is central to their work. Such ‘bricolage’ approaches to painting can be traced back to the montage works of Kurt Schwitters and other Dada artists.⁵ Attentive to the apparatus of the medium, Helen O’Leary explicitly investigates how paintings are built and the materials involved in their making. She recently stated that her new work “delves into my own history as a painter, rooting in the ruins and failures of my own studio for both subject matter and raw material.” O’Leary frequently disassembles the “wooden structures of previous paintings – the stretchers, panels, and frames”, cutting them back to “rudimentary hand-built slabs of wood, glued and patched together” making “their history of being stapled, splashed with bits of paint, and stapled again to linen clearly evident.”⁶ In contrast to the recycling of older paintings, Fergus Feehily assembles works from found objects and materials. As described by Martin Herbert in his review of Feehily’s 2011 exhibition at Modern Art, London: “Deliberation vs. accident; hard vs. soft; fixity vs. impermanence … There are many paths to the painterly.”⁷

Among recent Irish art graduates, notions of abstraction and figuration appear to be less prominent than engagements with the virtual world. There is a growing sophistication in understandings and navigations of virtual platforms for art making and how these can relate to painting. Such inquiries are evident in the work of emerging artists like Jane Rainey, Kian Benson Bailes and Bassam Al-Sabbah whose imaginary landscapes allude to the digital realm, comprising gliches, screen savers and software imagery. It strikes me that such work could not have been made before the internet. However, it’s not just the aesthetics of digital imagery that have influenced recent painting; the impact of digital tools on the construction of painting has also become increasingly evident. A recent exhibition at The Hole Gallery, New York, titled ‘Post Analog Painting II’ examined how “digital tools have affected our way of thinking” and explored the ways in which the “logic of Photoshop or structure of pixelation shapes a painter’s approach to color, form, light or texture, even when away from their laptops.”⁸

In the early twentieth century, British art historian Clive Bell proposed form and colour as the two principles of formal abstraction, stating that “to appreciate a work of art, we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space”.⁹ Writing candidly about the tensions between representation and abstraction, New York-based painter Amy Sillman asserted that “the real, like the body, is embarrassing: your hand is too moist, your fly is open, there turns out to be something on your nostril, somebody blurts out something that I wasn’t supposed to know, your ex-partner shows up with their new lover (and your work is uncool). But you’re stuck there. That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness”.¹⁰

For me, these paired statements create a spectrum of ideas that circulate within the complex sphere of abstraction. On one hand, Bell’s description prompts the reader to imagine cool and elegant abstract shapes that are vaguely familiar and comforting, while on the other, Sillmans’s words conjure a kind of brash, dirty abstraction with images that are risky and aesthetically challenging. Perhaps there is something between these two statements that highlights what is so compelling about abstract painting: it communicates something that is so intrinsically known to us, yet is almost impossible to fully articulate. 

Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.

Notes

1. Jonathan Lasker interview in Suzanne Hudson, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.

2. Briony Fer, On Abstract Art, New Haven and London: Yale University, 1997, p.5.

3. Corinna Lotz, ‘Accepting the Blur’ in, William Mc Keown, IMMA Catalogue, 2008. p. 61.

4. Jonathan Lasker interview in Suzanne Hudson, Painting Now, Thames & Hudson, 2015.

5. Bricolage is a French term which translates roughly as ‘do-it-yourself’.  In an art context, it is applied to artists who use a diverse range of non-traditional art materials. The bricolage approach became popular in the early twentieth century when resources were scarce, with many Surrealist, Dadaist and Cubist works having a bricolage character. However, it was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement Arte Povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect. Arte Povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish, in an attempt to bypass the commercialism of the art world, effectively devaluing the art object and asserting the value of ordinary, everyday objects and materials.

6. Sharon Butler, ‘Ideas and Influences: Helen O’Leary’, twocoatsofpaint.com. October 2014.

7. Martin Herbert, ‘Fergus Feehily’, Frieze, October 2011.

8. Raymond Bulman, Post Analog Painting II, exhibition text, The Hole Gallery, New York, 2017. theholenyc.com.

9. Clive Bell, Art, London: Chatto and Windus, 1914, p.115.

10. Amy Sillman ‘Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness’, Frieze, November 2015.

Images used: William McKeown, Untitled, (2009 – 2011), oil on linen, 40.5 x 40.5 cm; Image courtesy The William McKeown Foundation and Kerlin Gallery. Fergus Feehily, Country, 2008 (left); North Star, 2008; courtesy the artist, Misako and Rosen,Tokyo and Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne.

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