SARAH DEVEREUX WAS INVITED TO CONTRIBUTE AN ARTWORK COMPOSED OF TEXT AND DRAWING FOR ONLINE VIEWING. THIS CONVERSATION BETWEEN JAMES MERRIGAN AND THE ARTIST AIMS TO DRAW OUT A CONTEXT FOR THIS ARTWORK, WHILE ALSO BROACHING THE SUBJECT OF SEX AND ART.

James Merrigan: After experiencing your BFA Degree show in the basement of a building on John’s Lane, Dublin, I was smitten. You disappeared off my radar for a couple of years until sometime in 2014 I caught the tail end of a thread of your perverted commentary on Facebook. There was an uncensored precision to it all that I equated to art, even though it was being displayed on something as fugitive as social media. To my mind you were a cross between American poet Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter ‘sexts’ and Raymond Pettibon’s hyper-dialectic drawings. I questioned why I didn’t get to see more of this kind of stuff, sex stuff, in Irish galleries. Do you know why sex and art don’t tag team as much as they could in the Irish arts scene?
Sarah Devereux: Well James, is this “tag team” a case of art slapping sex in the hand as its partner to tag in against the world, or is it a question of art vs. sex? You have to be more specific when it comes to tag teams. Who is against whom? Is there consent? Is there equal involvement? Is there mud involved? These are the things everyone must ask before partaking in a tag team between sex and art. Is the sex willingly becoming art or is it trying to just remain sex? Are we too afraid to tag in? Or do we think we are better than having sex in the gallery. Of course I mean sex as a subject matter. As a matter of interest, have you?

JM: As an artist I never tagged sex in the gallery; well, not that I am aware of. What I mean by that is, as an art critic I have noticed that sex is everywhere in the Irish gallery in its outright denial. So base objects that look like cocks and vaginas are intellectually denied as sex objects, or dressed up in theory that removes the artist from the subject of sex. ‘You are the one seeing the dirty pictures’ is the response by the invisible artist. I do respond to what you say about the fear and the attitude towards sex – that we think we are above and beyond sex in the gallery, or are ‘in control’ of our primal instincts. For you, is there a pressure to conform to the status quo?
SD: Without sounding like a sappity Ann, I automatically and instinctively go against ye old status quo. When putting together my degree show (*shudder* three years ago) one of my tutors said, “it’s like you don’t realise that this is an important event”. This, for me, was the greatest compliment. Because it was exactly what I was attempting to convey: my ‘clusterfuck’ of a haphazard show shoved in a corridor behind a student whose space kept growing and growing and growing (I think her show was about capitalism).

JM: So you are aware and maybe reveling in or frustrated by the fact that your way of making things and expressing things lies somewhere outside of what is considered art?
SD: Well, I sort of took a bit of a side step and a jump away from ye old gallery art, creating work in formats such as ‘zines’, and displaying and performing these at somewhat casual events. Are we back to that question, what is art? SHIT… How much am I getting paid per word, let’s do this! Wait, am I getting paid for this?

JM: Going back to what I said earlier about equating your Facebook commentary to art, which may seem sacrilegious and not ‘serious’ to the art cognoscenti, how do you see your verbal dalliances online? Is it art, research or just tipping your toe in the public consciousness about what is possible to verbally express?
SD: So you were basically Facebook stalking me is what you are trying to say? In the time we have been Facebook ‘friends’ (I checked: December 2012) you have never once liked, commented or shared anything on my page. You’ve pretty much just been an observer of my dalliances – a dalliance if you will! I do enjoy writing, whether they are rambles, rants or recounting tales of wit or wine. Maybe it’s a racket on your feed or maybe I’m a raconteur feeding you. I do treat it as a platform though, a dirty digital soapbox.

JM: Artist statements invariably promote and proclaim intellectualism above instinct and subjectivity. For me your “textual sexuality” (Dodie Bellamy) includes the street and the library, life and theory, night and day. You know how they say to models ‘don’t over think it’… well, what’s your process? Is it reactionary or carefully thought through?
SD: I’m definitely more of a reactionary-vomiter (get it out of my system and compile a pile of bile and just go with it, and trust that the yellow glow will be enough to impress even an impressionist). By the way, are you trying to call me a model? OMG thank you! I’m flattered, that’s so sweet xoxo.

JM: If it is true that the subject of sex doesn’t pop up in Irish galleries as much as I think it should, who are your idols? Are your idols in books, online or abroad? You are probably a Liam Gillick fan, right? Not to suggest Liam isn’t sexy or doesn’t make sexy art? He is; he does.
SD: So I just Googled Liam Gillick, he is very good at ‘smising’ (Tyra Bank’s term for ‘smile with your eyes’, created for the 13th cycle of her hit reality show America’s Next Top Model.) However, my idols are far less slick than Liam. I get inspiration from people and things that are more tacky or cheesy, basically, the mundane daily norms (they’ll be put through my conveyor belt into my noggin’ and come out tampered).

JM: Speaking of me “stalking” you online, for your Facebook cover photo you have a picture of yourself and American filmmaker John Waters shoulder-to-shoulder and smiling. A fan?
SD: The god in my life is most definitely John Waters, who I got to meet in 2014. I was interning in a reality TV company in NYC at the time and was showing a colleague some clips from a John Waters film, as he had yet to watch any of his work. I went into a hazy daydream with sunshine and lollipops, and rambled about what I would say and do if I ever got to meet him – I had so much to say. Not even an hour later, after I had done my daily stash bag with as much free food from the kitchen as possible, I picked up the weekly magazine that was always floating about the office for the subway ride home. Flicking through the magazine on the train with eyes glazed over, I turned the page and there it was, a half-page advert: “Meet John Waters”. He was promoting his new book and was doing a reading and signing the very next day. I burst out crying, the HEAVING sort, and then hysterically laughing at how much I was crying. Finally, a right of passage. I was that crazy person for the commute home. I put together a collection of my most filthy and depraved drawings as an offering and spent $26 (out of my last $33 for the week) on the book in order to guarantee meeting him. It was like a religious experience. He is my glory hole. But all I could do was cry and mumble something about my clammy hands. A dream!

JM: Is this verbal dialect you perform an alter ego? What I am asking is, although I have never spoken to you in person, I have talked to you on the phone. Are there two different ‘Sarah Devereuxs’?
SD: I don’t think anyone shows all aspects of their personality to every person they meet/talk to. I wouldn’t say it’s an alter ego… but that being said my default voice bounces from a melodic Derry accent to a sassy 1940s New York news reporter.

JM: For me, the way you perform desire in writing and drawing is balanced between nuanced and visceral moments. Is humour the only way that sex can be expressed in art? Or does humour and sex and filthy language exist in the same carnival, a notion that Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin celebrated.
SD: I’d take a ride on the ferris wheel at that carnival and I fucking hate heights – sounds great. There mightn’t be any intentional humour but it’s our reaction to the artwork that brings it out. A release. Think of an artist who wants to create a giant hairy ballsack hanging from the ceiling on a sensory mechanism that dips the sculpture onto the viewers face. In their (the artist’s) mind it is highly erotic and oh so super serious. But it instantly becomes a cheap laugh. Like why can’t giant hairy balls dipping into your face in a gallery be erotic and sensual?! (Any galleries out there want me to make this just holler at me.)

JM: When we first discussed your contribution to VAN, I said something about the subject sex in relation to art being always subsumed by the politics of gender and feminism and that raw sex doesn’t get a mention in criticism or in the gallery. As a female artist who makes art about sex, are you interested in the gender and feminist question? In other words, is your work an instinctual or academic protest?
SD: Please refer to what I wrote in the online artwork for VAN, the bit about Mel Gibson will hopefully explain my answer to this because I am weary and this interview is way past due!

Sarah Devereux made a website that hasn’t been released or updated in about two years. It’s www.cargocollective.com/sarahdevereux if you would like to offer her opportunities that she could later add to this site don’t hesitate to contact her. No prank calls please.

Images: Sarah Devereux, BFA degree show work, NCAD, 2012.

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Victoria J. Dean, Niamh O’Doherty and Laura Smith
Galway Arts Centre, 22 January – 26 February 2016

Boundaries and partitions are staple themes in Irish cultural production. Over the last 100 years the Irish have struggled with the realities of a physical border, alongside metaphysical, social and political divisions. In this centenary year, such themes convey the complexities of our national identity. The three artists in this exhibition all explore aspects of what borders mean in relation to the passage of time.

On the ground floor of Galway Arts Centre (GAC), Niamh O’Doherty interrogates the experience of time. Her video work The Enlightenment (2016) compares our measurement of time with the passage of time in nature. It was shot on Hrísey Island in Iceland and filmed during two research trips, once during 24 hours of daylight and again in 24 hours of darkness. In this intriguing 12-minute piece, film of a fixed-viewpoint seascape is imposed onto a drawn background, which follows the contours of the panorama but often slips ‘out of register’. We see the video image on screen for a few seconds before, staccato-like, the image flashes to a white background inscribed with errant contour lines, disrupting our expectations.

O’Doherty travelled to Hrísey Island on residency after obtaining Rehab funding. Set in a narrow fjord just south of the Arctic Circle, the island has 24 hours of daylight in summer, and only two in mid-winter. This flux in the manifestation of time is reflected in Fragments of Landscape (2015), a photographic montage of Hrísey Island from the sea. It is fractured, deconstructed into interlacing segments, but merges together with cubist grace. There is a sense of historical moments intermingling with the present as images proceed unexpectedly from black and white to saturated colour.

Victoria J. Dean’s series of sophisticated photographic works meticulously document familiar structures erected by local authorities along the Irish coastline. Her images reveal a human compulsion to rationalise space and to control the environment. Dean records various examples of seaside architecture – from public lavatories to bus shelters, promenades to leisure areas – highlighting the tensions between nature and encroaching human development. A contested borderline is revealed between nature and human time – a loss of innocence in our engagement with the environment.

According to Dean, “the various fortifications, including urban furniture, encourage us to survey the natural environment from the safety of the manmade, be it from behind a wall, or from a bench”. She provides a contemporary iconography of coastal spaces as borderlands between the elemental and the artificial. Sometimes referencing soviet or military architectural structures, these photographs also recall Willie Doherty’s disquieting images of Derry-Londonderry in the 1980s. In the series Lifeguard Station I – VI (2012), a forbidding metal container appears as a dominating fortification, existing to defend and command nature. In Signs I – VII (2012) public signage mediates the liminal border between the land and sea, seeming to restrain the inevitabilities of both time and loss.

Laura Smith’s HD video work When All is Said and Done explores time as represented through human memory, traces of past conflicts through personal stories and boundary-making through environment. A local man somewhere on the Ulster border tells of the overnight disappearance of surveillance equipment at a key moment in the peace process. In another sequence, a young woman runs through an immemorial landscape, expressing absolute freedom and fearful escape in her fervent physical action. The video format shifts from full screen to circular frames with poetic nuance as the narrative slides enigmatically from fact to fiction.

Smith creates compelling visual and performative images in her investigations of political and social restrictions, specific to Northern Ireland but still universally relevant. Through a combination of scripted acts, a stunning sequence of fleeting, swirling texts, documentary and found-footage, the video focuses on histories of forced division and deportation of communities. The meaning of the Troubles in Ireland and its intimate aftermaths become the subtext to this work. Historical and present-day border conflicts are explored, provoking themes of social disruption and transformation.

At the nucleus of the video is a beautifully presented account of the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait: two islands situated on either side of the International Date Line, 3.8 km apart, with one island belonging to Russia and the other to the USA. Travel between them is illegal despite the ice bridge that unites them during the winter months. The story of these islands is one of division and conflict caused, and the loss of the islanders’ familial connections and heritage. The Diomede archipelago becomes a metaphor for the fragmentation and rupture that artificial borders can produce. Responding to this, the works in this exhibition convincingly provide a healing process for these momentous injuries.

Áine Phillips is an artist and writer based in Clare. Her current project is a speaking tour of the USA with her new book Performance Art in Ireland: A History, published by Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency, London (2015).

Images left to right: Niamh O’Doherty, The Enlightenment, 2016; Victoria J. Dean, installation view, Galway Arts Centre.

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JAMES MERRIGAN ASKS WHY SEX AND ART DON’T ‘SWING’ IN THE IRISH ART SCENE.

I have been thinking a lot about sex recently and its relationship to art. One reason is artist Emma Haugh’s question “How do we imagine a space dedicated to the manifestation of feminine desire?” proposed in her recent solo exhibition ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’ at Dublin’s NCAD Gallery (an edited version of the script performed during the exhibition is included in the March/April VAN).

Another reason is the forthcoming documentary on the artist Robert Mapplethorpe by American television network channel HBO. Mapplethorpe’s ‘smut art’ (artist’s own words) caused a political and cultural storm in the American cities of Washington D.C. and Cincinnati in the late 1980s/early 1990s when a grand jury issued criminal indictments against one art institution and its director for exhibiting Mapplethorpe’s touring retrospective of ‘sex pictures’. Art won out in the end, but the trial and the exhibition did question and challenge perspectives on the vices and virtues of contemporary art in the eyes of the public.

Anyone who has had a Mapplethorpe experience usually has a Mapplethorpe story to tell that involves some public discomfort. My Mapplethorpe story begins with art critic Dave Hickey, whose book The Invisible Dragon I posted to a printing company as an example of what I wanted to achieve for a publication I was working on at the time. In the book there are several explicit examples from Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. I didn’t think that the images were pornographic in private, but releasing them into the public ether and removing them from the context of contemporary art, with my name on the envelope that sealed them in, made me feel uneasy.

The question of obscenity and censorship drags up Banbridge District Council’s treatment of artist Ursula Burke’s portrayal of gay sex in one of her Arcadian landscape paintings for an exhibition hosted by F.E. McWilliam Gallery, in 2014. There is no point in comparing Mapplethorpe’s flinch-provoking images of the BDSM scene in New York City with Burke’s impolite costume drama – all they have in common is that they caused public unease. What I want to highlight (if you haven’t already noticed) is that the aestheticisation of homosexuality threads its ways through the examples that I have supplied here. But this unconscious intent or fluke coincidence does help to pose provocative questions about sexuality and the contexts that inspire, legitimise and allow expression of sex as art.

If we are willing to admit it, all our art biographies are interrupted by embarrassing or uneasy moments in which sex, or some related taboo, is the author of our discomfort. Sigmund Freud refers to the original situation érotique as the ‘primal scene’, when the child walks in on their parents having sex, or when we remove lust and desire for the sake of mental preservation, making love.

I remember being seated comfortably in a dark lecture theatre, 16 years ago today, whilst a fidgeting lecturer projected Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven (1989 – 1991) series of hyperrealist paintings and sculptures. The series portrays the Italian porn-star La Cicciolina copulating with Koons amidst a sickeningly tacky rococo neverland.

The in flagrante delicto of the whole situation caught me off guard as a young man among a female majority, especially how La Cicciolina’s spread-eagled crotch swallowed up my gaze. But the bubbling laughter of my female counterparts gave me permission to dispel the Catholic guilt of looking at this particular ‘top shelf’. Staring into Koons’s imagination in that dark lecture theatre 16 years ago we all became giddy kids who ordered the pink cocktail without really knowing what was in it, or the effect the alcohol would have on us afterwards.

When sex does enter the gallery, less naïve and more mature artists have a tendency to disavow it, which results in fetishised and ‘serious’ art objects that look like cocks and vaginas but are intellectually removed and emotionally concealed within a formalised shell. As mature artists we tend to violate rather than play with the idea of sex, or we express sex as a violation. For the young and naïve, sex is indistinguishable from love, romance indistinguishable from lust. The duality between the underground and the acceptable, private and public, cocks and flowers, plays out in the photographs of Mapplethorpe without prejudice.

Artists like Mapplethorpe also incite the phrase ‘in bad taste’. In a review from 2013 I called out artist Alan Phelan (a contributor in this very issue) for being verbally brazen and explicit for the use of the word ‘HANDJOB’ for the title of his solo exhibition at Dublin’s Oonagh Young Gallery. The general tendency in the art world is to place value in being discreet and ambivalent in your expression. As Susan Sontag writes: “Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment.”

Sontag is referring here to the language of art, concealment being the epitome of good taste. The language of art always manages to transform art objects into something high, or ironises them in the dialect of the low in an effort to raise them even higher. These are the lessons that we learn in art college as young art students: to conceal and preserve our modesty in order to affect a sophisticated response from the knowing audience who like things to register on the level of implicit rather than explicit.

To my mind sex doesn’t inhabit the gallery as much as it should because we simply grow up. Yes, we have those eternal teenager artists, the Young British Artists, who continue to fetishise sex well into their 40s. And there are the American artists Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley, who look like the 50-something ‘metaller’ with the Black Sabbath T-shirt and scraggy-grey-dog hair that, sometimes, I envy. Generally, however, as we discover and experience more of the world and its hidden vices we become more secretive about those experiences and discoveries. Maturity and reputation is the great censor, whereas naïveté can be foul-mouthed because it’s oblivious to itself and the people around it.

When referring to Renaissance artists and the development stages of their creative identity, Ernst Gombrich calculated that 23 was the age when personal hubris was at its most frenzied sate. The confused 18 to ambitious 20-something year old college student is split between what Freudian psychologist Eric Erikson refers to as Ego Identity vs. Role Confusion and Intimacy vs. Isolation. It’s a mouthful, but what this simply means for the art student is the potential for a whole lot of psychosocial and psychosexual instability, the best ingredients, I think, for making art that is sticky and aromatic and all-round messy. Young art students, and the mature ones that never grew up, are at that fork in the road between occupational promiscuity as would-be artists and the hope of sexual fidelity in their forming relationships with the weird world and its things.

In a sense we are just a cocktail of naïveté as young art students, poking fun and poking fingers at art objects out of blissful ignorance. At a primal level we are just hands and saliva at that age, fumbling in the dark without a care, just an all-consuming need for discovery and desire. As an adult I look back on that naïveté, the anxiety of not knowing and just poking, as a powerful asset to being an artist, rather than the fugitive notion that we are only learning to become artists in art college.

Last year the whole hullabaloo over the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) student Shane Berkery, whose painted naked-portrait of then NCAD director Professor Declan McGonigle, was (to my mind) viscerally and politically limp. While upstairs, hidden away in the attic of the same NCAD degree show, and under the stairs at Dublin Institute of Technology, we got the ‘pink cocktail’ that I have been discussing here in the sexed-up and viscerally undressed installations of Luke Byrne (aka Luek Brungis) and Catherine Cullen respectively. For the reasons outlined above, this type of art never really graduates as a form of legitimate art-making in the Irish art scene.

As an art critic who has reviewed the Irish art scene inside and out over the last seven years, after repair after rupture after repair, I find the annual art degree exhibitions an antidote to the growing up, professionalism and conservatism that permeates the public and private gallery circuit. There is something to be said, then, about the importance of art colleges in this regard. With more and more artist-run spaces being trampled by yet another burgeoning era of gentrification in Dublin, the spaces where art is allowed to be a little messier and visceral will now be the responsibility of the art colleges to safeguard. More importantly,however, it is the responsibility of teaching staff in those colleges to foster and value the subversive, the visceral and the messy,
rather than dismissing it as just teenage kicks.

James Merrigan is an art critic at billionjournal.com.

Image: Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon.

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BELFAST-BASED ARTISTS DOUGAL MCKENZIE, SUSAN CONNOLLY AND MARK MCGREEVY DISCUSS THEIR PERSPECTIVES ON PAINTING IN THE CITY.

Dougal McKenzie: From my experience, so much of what has happened for painters in Belfast coalesces around the MFA. When I discovered that Alastair MacLennan – who was the MFA course leader in my time – had been a painting student at Dundee (although I was coming from Aberdeen), I was interested in how he thought about painting in relation to performance. I wonder how much the MFA affected, and continues to affect, how we see painting in the North, and whether it truly does have any more of an influence than the undergraduate painting course in Belfast?

As an undergraduate student in Scotland I only knew about the MFA in Belfast, outside of the London options, and it seemed like an exciting choice. I very quickly discovered that painters who had come out of the MFA in the late 1980s and early 1990s had remained in the city, in what was an active arts scene. The interesting painters for me at that time were (and still are) Paddy McCann, Ronnie Hughes, Michael Minnis and Áine Nic Giolla Coda, so they seemed like one good reason to stay. (Interestingly, these artists are all still teaching painting, at Belfast, Sligo, Galway and Limerick.)

There were also other artists during the 1990s who had gone through the BA or MFA in Belfast, or had studied somewhere else and then returned, like Susan MacWilliam, Darren Murray, Cian Donnelly, Gary Shaw and of course Willie McKeown. There was always a ‘painting scene’ in Belfast, even if the art school seemed to be better known, and maybe still is, for artists who use performance and video. I have to say that, from an older generation, David Crone, who taught at the art school, was, and remains, the top painter in the North, maybe even in Ireland. During my early years in Belfast this vibrant art scene kept me very much connected to painting and its potential.

Susan Connolly: It’s funny really because, for me, having come through an undergraduate course in Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD), at a time when it was very much an end of era for ‘medium-specificity’ discipline distinction at undergraduate level, the MFA in Belfast offered me the opportunity to explore, experiment and move away from painting. I had very much been doing it in Limerick, but I decided to return to painting once I arrived here in Belfast. I have often wondered why I did this and, now, with some distance, I think it had to do with stubbornly holding onto ‘painting’ and the challenges it offered.

My decision to come to Belfast was influenced by Áine Nic Giolla Coda and yourself, Dougal, when you taught in LSAD. I remember fondly all the visiting artists (most if not all from Belfast: Susan MacWilliam, Michael Minnis, Lorraine Burrell, Mark Pepper) that both you and Áine invited down to give artist talks. I know that this was very influential in helping my peers and I to understand that it was possible to be an artist outside of the college/academic environment – that there was a professional life beyond Limerick. When it came to applying for a Masters course there never really was any other option for me than Belfast.

Mark McGreevy: Is there a culture of painting in Belfast? I don’t really know. I guess the other question would be is there a culture of painting in Ireland, North or South? Would it differ from one province to another? Why would it differ or what would constitute such a thing?

In Belfast there are certainly serious painters dedicated to their work and managing to make it into the studio whenever possible, but that’s where any sense of professionalism ends for 99% of artists in any city. This is the reason why so many people may view artists as dilettantes, weekenders and part-timers. It’s a reductive attitude that I think may be accentuated by the Calvinist perspective that runs through ALL communities and across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland. Of course this is a bigger societal issue and we’re talking about painting in Belfast at the moment.

Living as an artist day-to-day in any city has its pros and cons. In Belfast it’s relatively inexpensive to rent a space (though not as cheap as you may think). A subsidised studio in the centre of town will be around £45–£110, so, for me, most of the pros for living in Belfast are monetary. We can afford to rent a house and studio and I can manage a good work/studio balance while still living in a city environment. I could never manage this in Dublin, having to commute to the studio from rural Kildare, which I did for a number of years.

Dougal McKenzie: Yes Susan, what you say about painting being a medium-specific discipline at LSAD – although I do remember quite a few painting students doing installation, photography and so on – was no bad thing. And it’s still quite like that in Belfast at BA level. This is good because it gives new graduates something to break away from, or push in other ways, on an MFA. That’s definitely something I did when I came to Belfast to begin with.

Also, you really have to stick to your own agenda in Belfast, to dig deep when it comes to keeping your profile up as a painter, because, even though we have a special artist-run scene, you don’t see a lot of painting exhibited in these spaces.

The MAC has done an awful lot to address this, with shows ranging from Peter Doig, Adrian Ghennie, Richard Gorman, Kevin Henderson, Paddy McCann and of course yourself Susan. It’s like you say Mark, it raises the question of what ‘professionalism’ means as a painter in the North. But it’s never really bothered me. The disadvantage of there not being a big painting gallery scene in Belfast is definitely outweighed by the advantage of what the city provides in the way of studio space. It’s good that we have a vibrant studio scene here: QSS at Bedford Street, Flax, Orchid, Array, Loft Collective, Pollen, Platform, to name just a few.

I think that artists in Belfast get as much out of being part of a studio community here as they do from going out on the gallery scene – the studio is where dialogue is happening, not at the ‘private view’. There has always been a sense in Belfast that it’s more about the pursuit and practice of painting, but that also raises questions about where you put that painting practice.

Mark McGreevy: I agree with you Dougal, when you were talking about there being no ‘official’ style of painting in Belfast. This is one of the most interesting things about the painting that is made here. It’s probably because there is little to no market influence, not that market influence is a bad thing, but you just don’t get different versions of an international style in Belfast.

For a time in Europe it was sludgy greys, greens and browns painted in a physically reductive manner, which you could see taking off in Ireland but not really in Belfast. Maybe the oddball eclectic nature of painting here is seen as a type of provincialism?

Dougal, you also mentioned David Crone. I definitely feel he should be held in much higher regard in both Ireland and Britain. His work easily holds its own with painting from the two Islands in the second half of the twentieth century, but yet there have only been a few large exhibitions of his work (I think Banbridge’s F.E McWilliam Gallery and Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy will be putting something on soon).

I do think that there is an upside to the commercial sector. There is something to look at, objects and things that people have made which aren’t as visually restricted by academic research, or as impenetrable as the art found in most museums or publicly-funded art spaces.

Susan Connolly: I suppose that leads me to discuss the ‘academic research’ aspect of painting (mostly because I am currently completing a PhD looking at aspects of expanded notions of painting).

I think, overall, it’s important that the painter’s voice is heard and documented. The discipline of painting, not just the act of making paintings, but also the written and the verbal, forms part of contemporary practice as a whole.

Painting, with all of its histories, needs to participate in the growing academic research models and platforms that have evolved over the last 15 years. If artists, especially painters, don’t engage in this process then unfortunately painting gets written about and contextualised only by those who have never or can never fully understand the material process of making, producing and adding knowledge to the visual language of our culture.

I believe that this is increasingly under threat from the homogenisation of our lives and the value we give the written word over the importance of a visual language. Importantly, in Belfast there are supports for artists like myself to pursue this type of research inquiry, through Ulster University’s well established and funded programme.

Dougal McKenzie: All of those possible strands to the painter’s contexts are interesting ones Susan – the academic, the theoretical, the gallery and so on. I personally have come to the realisation, however, that the main context I am interested in is, other painters, and what I make of their work, and what they make of my work. I think painters make work for other painters. That attitude may be viewed as reductive and far too insular, but I do feel this strongly.

Dougal McKenzie is a painter based at QSS Bedford Street, Belfast, and also lectures in painting at Belfast School of Art. Susan Connolly is an artist, researcher and lecturer based in Belfast. Mark McGreevy is an artist based in Belfast.

 Images left to right: Mark McGreevey’s studio, Dougal McKenzie’s studio.

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Sean Lynch, LCGA, 21 January–24 March 2015

“Man was born naked, without claws, unable to run fast, with no shell or natural armour. But he could observe nature and imitate it. He saw how water ran down the side of a hill without sinking, and then invented a roof for his house. Soon more houses and villages appeared, and more stones were needed. Mighty tools and machines were invented. Demand increased. My chisel got harder, my hammer heavier. Villages turned into towns…towns into cities…stone…rock…next stone…next rock.”

Sean Lynch, script excerpt from ‘Adventure: Capital’

Lynch’s project ‘Adventure: Capital’ traces a journey around Ireland and Britain following the personified spirit of architecture and sculpture “from myth to modernism”. Using narratives, sites and objects, Lynch enacts a unique form of cultural anthropology and investigates art, form, function and worth. From Greek river gods to public art, via abandoned quarries and a traffic roundabout, the scale of materials and research is exhaustive.

Commissioned for Ireland at Venice 2015, ‘Adventure: Capital’ is exhibited alongside a selection of Lynch’s previous artworks. The work is an anthropomorphic archive composed of stone, clay, plastic, lithography, brick, metal, photography and video, the latter an unreliable narrator well-versed in the art of storytelling. The film presents a journey that begins, poetically, in a quarry, as a stone walks out of its burrow, inheriting the earth and reproducing fruitfully upon its surface.

“As I touched it, I felt connected, and part of a forward movement. The owners of these wonders must believe these stones have come through a special intervention of fate … Remnants dug up out of the earth are no longer covered and pitifully hidden in mud.”

The film cuts to Liverpool airport and a sculpture of John Lennon. Lynch presents an unfamiliar history of modern sculpture, which jumps from one airport to the next, and ends in a lament for an abandoned sculpture on a County Cork roundabout. An animated sequence featuring the sculpture tells of its neglect and abandonment. The piece, which started its life as a community commission, is now rusting away on the margins of that community. In stating, ambiguously, that “we exist; that is strength”, Lynch is not just exploring how the public interacts with art but how art interacts with the public. In swapping the subject and the object, he investigates how art behaves towards society.

The precarious positioning of art and society is reflected throughout the other works on show. A Church Without a Steeple examines the history of modernism in Ireland. A video piece accompanied by reproductions of newspaper cartoon from the 1950s, its title references Knockanure church, built without a steeple to the apparent bewilderment of the local population. Through a montage of sites – the gallery, church, storage area, carpet store and architecture school – the possibility of a single viewpoint is shattered. The anecdotal public reactions recorded do not reflect the canonical idea of a rational modernism, but instead portray how modernist works were caught up in the nitty-gritty of the everyday.

In Bill Clinton, Lynch explores the ways in which art adapts and interacts with everyday life, pushing this idea to its comical limits. For his 1998 presidential visit, the town of Ballybunion commissioned a bronze sculpture of Clinton mid-golf-swing, but, due to a delay with the work, a plaster cast, spray-painted bronze, was displayed instead. In the film, Clinton’s golf ball is reproduced and presented on a plinth surrounded by photographs from the tour. This act a vandalism inspired headlines like: “One of the president’s balls is missing!” (The ball has since been recovered.)

Investigation of public reaction continues in A Rocky Road, which uses the histories of existing artworks to explore the intersections of reception, protest, vandalism and the media. David Lilburn’s print Towards from the Forceps to the Chains of Office, featured in Eva 1984, depicts the artist reclining naked with an erection. On 2 November 1984, the Limerick Leader were alerted to the plans of local café owner Richard Coughlan to destroy the work. After Coughlan smashed its frame and made to spray it with paint, Hugh Murray, chairman of the exhibition committee, pushed him away and a struggle ensued. Both Lilburn’s original work and the photographs of the tussle are exhibited. The original artwork has been usurped by its subsequent afterlife.

‘Ireland at Venice’ is a multidisciplinary exhibition incorporating ethnography, history, archaeology, archiving, storytelling and satire. The extensive research at times seems divorced from the exhibition. Reading the Irish tour supplement is necessary to really understand the work. Similarly, the juvenile photo essay style doesn’t always convey the complex themes in the work. This disjunction between conception and execution is perhaps due to the fact that Lynch is ‘telling tales’ – storytelling is the modus operandi. We already know that stories are unreliable, sometimes cheeky, often abstracted. Turning away from the subject, Lynch concentrates on the object, illuminating the gaps in the verifiable. By exploring the ways in which the object acts upon the subject, sources, sites, and artefacts are given new afterlives. They each present their own narratives, whether you believe them or not.

Gemma Carroll is an art writer based in Cork.

Image: Sean Lynch, ‘Adventure: Capital’, 2015.

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Bridget O’Gorman, The LAB, Dublin, 29 January–12 March 2016

In 2015 Bridget O’Gorman was invited to respond, in collaboration with research partners and institutions, to the 1916 Rising in its centennial year. So began 12 months of site visits with historian Brenda Malone at the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks and a collaboration with writer Sue Rainsford. O’Gorman’s response is the first in a series of such exhibitions commissioned by The LAB, a gallery which regularly facilitates cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Entering the ground floor gallery, the eye is drawn to the opposite wall. Two red bands slash down the wall like slings, weighted into shape by abstract blocks of the clear substance they hold – ballistic gel, we are told. The floor is scattered with aluminium structures: strips that rise, fall or fold at various points, interspersed with blue drips and further blocks of ballistic gel. An open-topped box reveals a clay heart and fist. A sealed box and a table, topped by an arrangement of small clay objects complete the display.

The next room houses the first video piece, In the Flesh (Re-enacted), in which a museum conservator’s hands carefully clean a rifle. The gun, once an instigator of violence, appears vulnerable and in need of care. The rifle is no longer functional but instead symbolic, a tangible link to the past. This juxtaposition of hard, rusting metal with soft hands, full of life, ties into a recurring interest of O’Gorman’s: aligning materials which provoke contrasting sensations. A hypnotic droning soundscape reflects the concentration of the action and conjures a sense of the tension of the Rising.

Upstairs, the second video piece, In the Flesh (Slow Tear), depicts the storage space that currently holds the National Museum of Ireland’s Easter Week Collection. The families of those involved in the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence donated this accumulation of items and personal effects. The film presents mundane objects – lockers, shelves and boxes – in a stark way, enriched by Rainsford’s voiceover, which brings to life the precious historical and personal artefacts hidden safely from view. One of the opening lines in the script, “I’m being ever lessened by the hurtful properties lain latent in the air”, recalls the rifle in the previous video piece and reminds us why these objects are stored away. This video piece comes in advance of an exhibition planned for March 2016 at Collins Barracks, for which a selection of these artefacts will be displayed for visitors to browse.

Multimedia shows can sometimes feel disjointed, comprising standalone elements combined by a common thematic thread but missing a narrative. In this show, the two video works and the objects in the main gallery space each attain a new meaning and depth once they are experienced as part of a whole. The materials in the ground floor space offer a static yet tangible link to elements referenced in the video pieces. The aluminium strips echo the sterility of the storage space. Supporting documentation tells us that museum professionals simulate bullet impact or other similar trauma to flesh by using modelling clay and ballistic gel. The human body and its relation to inanimate objects is a theme considered throughout the exhibition. The little objects on the gallery table, moulded from clay and displaying fingerprints, echo the careful touch of the conservator’s hands on the rifle, which itself gains new life through Rainsford’s emotive script in In the Flesh (Slow Tear). In an interview for RTE Radio 1’s Arena, O’Gorman notes that, sometimes, “experience exceeds conventional use of language”. Rainsford’s words succeed in projecting a sense of bodily trauma and violence, giving new sensation and a human connection to a past already evoked by the rifle.

These complementary works serve to highlight the place of curation and narrative in exhibitions. Artist, historian and writer join their respective expertise to create a rich and rounded exhibition linking the viewer to the past. The year ahead will see countless 1916-related events take place. This exhibition demonstrates that art can address these issues in an indirect way, leaving space for the viewer’s imagination and encouraging us to consider the links between works in order to gain a fuller experience. ‘In the Flesh’ is a fitting prelude to the ‘people’s exhibition’. It will facilitate a new way of experiencing the artefacts, while deepening our appreciation of the people who have ensured their survival.

Roisin Russell is a writer based in Dublin. Her writing has featured in Paper Visual Art Journal and Circa online.

Images left to right: Bridget O’Gorman, ‘In the Flesh’ installation view, 2016; Bridget O’Gorman, still from In the Flesh, 2015, filmed on location at the National Museum Collins Barracks. Photos courtesy of The LAB.

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David Lunney, Eight Gallery, Dublin, 29 January–7 February 2016

Eight Gallery is housed in a large room on the first floor of a Georgian mansion on Dawson Street. Natural light enters through the grimy panes of three tall sash windows overlooking the street. A redundant chandelier shines weakly from the ceiling rose. Things Made for Drawing is a small, formally cohesive show, its eight works placed sparingly around the jaded but elegant room. There are six wall works in two sets of three, their titles, Three Rock and Kilmashogue, referring to well-known locations in the Dublin Mountains. Each of these sets has a causal connection to one of the two remaining works, a pair of squat, jerrybuilt structures standing apart on the grey painted floor.

The group entitled Three Rock subdivides into Looking Down, Looking Out, and Looking Up. The individual works are similar in material and formal configuration but differ, as their titles suggest, in the perspectives that their representational elements depict. Grids of taut, variously coloured string wraps the upper and lower sections of small panels. Set between these woven matrices, smaller panels contain thinly painted views of a wooded landscape. The strung borders are a frame of sorts and, simultaneously, a sort of code, their colours and configuration in visual correspondence with the painted elements. The structure standing nearest to this set is called Traffic Mirror. A provisional-looking framework of timber off-cuts (screw-heads and clamps abound) supports an armature of thin wooden laths and variously shaped mirrors. A circular one at the head of the structure is the mirror of the title. This armature also appears within the painted sections of the wall panels, depicted as a viewing apparatus, an eccentric tool through which aspects of the landscape have been variously framed and refracted.

The group named Kilmashogue presents a similar set of relationships. Three wall panels each contain aspects of the named location. Each panel has similar borders of tightly stretched string. The second floor piece, Sliding Mirrors, is larger than the first but is similarly constructed from timber, with opposing surfaces of reflecting materials. It too appears within the painted elements of the related wall panels. This tricky play of object and image is complicated further by the nature of the depicted landscapes themselves, Three Rock and Kilmashogue being areas of ‘natural’ beauty which are synonymous with the careful management and cultivation of Ireland’s reforestation programme. The landscape is as much a construct as our depictions of it. The artist himself also appears in the work, reflected in the viewing devices integrated within and disrupting his painted settings. Artifice is everywhere, colliding in a play of endless referents.

Tilted planes, a muted palette, the collision of depicted objects with the objects themselves; for all of the post-modern playfulness in Lunney’s work it’s the modernism of Picasso and Braque, particularly the twin peaks of analytical and synthetic cubism, that his work most strongly evokes. Think of Picasso’s Still Life with Chair and Caning (1912), a tiny masterpiece effectively yoking together painted representation, collage and the frame itself into a complex little oval. The compression of pictorial space achieved by Cubism is both mimicked and contradicted in Lunney’s eclectic mash-ups of scale, texture and sharply juxtaposed points of view.

Our heads may be spinning but experiments with composition and form don’t carry the urgency they once did. The idea of progress, inherent in the roped together ascent of the cubist pair, is hardly available to contemporary artists, however unorthodox they may be. These days an artwork is more likely to stand or fall according to its own creed, its own believability; in an epoch without rules there are no more ‘isms’ to construct or deny. Lunney’s painting – his actual use of paint – is sufficient to build his prismatic compositions, but there’s no surfeit, nothing extra to hold your gaze. His use of string, the sense of the visual and the tactility this brings together is more satisfying, and is perhaps indebted to the artist’s background in printmaking.

An artist’s print can operate on one hand as merely a copy of something (a reflection of its own matrix) and on the other as a peculiarly rich mark-making system. In previous work Lunney has harnessed the medium of etching to good effect, nesting starkly black and white images within complicated wooden frameworks. His renderings with coloured pencil and acrylic are less emphatic. They lack the bite of the printed line, its distinctively embossed authority. Ripe with reflections, distortions and a kind of object-based intertextuality, in teasing out your attention these works remain fixated on the modes of attention themselves. This has its merits but I found it frustrating. I longed for something definite – a tension to match the tautness of those strings – but definition is a quality this work seems determined to sidestep.

John Graham is an artist, lecturer and writer based in Dublin.

johngraham.ie

Images left to right: David Lunney, installation view; David Lunney, Kilmashogue #1, 2016. Images courtesy of the artist.

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Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 17 December 2015–16 February 2016

In ‘She Devil’, two video projection screens fill the huge darkened warehouse space of Golden Thread’s Galleries One and Two. This doesn’t mean, however, that there are a small number of artworks on show. Between them, these two screens play a continuous loop of 15 video works. The ‘She Devil’ project has been presented, with different content but in a similar format, in Rome and Bucharest.

For the 15 artists featured there are a dizzying number of curators involved – 19 in fact – arranged in a complex hierarchy. In Gallery One, Golden Thread’s own Peter Richards has selected Northern Irish/Irish curators from an array of art institutions (Queen’s Film Theatre, Digital Arts Studios, Golden Thread, IMMA, Millennium Court and CCA Derry-Londonderry), who have each selected a work by a female video artist. In Gallery Two, Richards has selected a further 11 video works by female artists from the pool of works selected by other curators for previous editions of ‘She Devil’. Italian curator Stefania Miscetti originally set all of this in motion and the format has led to a multi-authored enquiry into gender identity, both in Ireland and internationally.

The broad scope of work includes both documentation of performance art, video art and everything in between. Furthermore, the artists selected range from the emerging to the established, both Irish and international. On the Irish side of things Isabel Nolan, Daphne Wright and Sinead O’Donnell all feature. Nolan’s Sloganeering, in which the artist writes and scores out snappy self-referencing slogans on successive t-shirts that she wears and takes off, particularly stands out. Despite being made back in 2001, its presentation of female identity asserted through a sentence of text seems particularly relevant to our current social media culture. Another work that demands the viewer’s attention is Daphne Wright’s I Know What it’s Like, in which a deadpan unblinking elderly woman delivers intimate statements, on topics such as breastfeeding her child, straight to the camera. The unflinching facial expression and equally flat tone of the presenter’s voice contrast with the statements she is delivering. The effect is wholly captivating and makes for a wonderfully strange scripted performance.

By devolving the selection of artworks to so many curators, ‘She Devil’ explores the current critical discourse surrounding gender identity as represented by female artists working in film. In addition to this, knowingly or unknowingly, the show also questions the presence and importance of the curator in relation to the exhibition of artworks. On this point, there is an interesting conversation between the curatorial format of ‘She Devil’ and ‘G R O U P S H O W’, which runs simultaneously in Golden Thread’s Project Space. Both of these exhibitions can be read as presenting the function of the artwork as secondary to that of the curator, whose selections and decisions are presented as the primary narrative. Phillip McCrilly has curated a self-aware exhibition that questions the legitimacy of a group show in which a selection of artists are presented together, often with tedious connections. In this case the artists are the graduates of Golden Thread’s Career Enhancement Programme: Stuart Calvin, Christopher Campbell, Erin Hagan, Brónach McGuiness, Sinead McKeever, Paul Moore, Sharon Murphy, John Rainey and Michael Sheppard. McCrilly’s strong curatorial style, which in this exhibition includes artworks presented on free-standing metal shelving units, fluorescent tubing, a pot plant and retro television monitors, makes him a visible presence in the show, rather than a silent decision maker operating in the background. Given (and due to) the disparate practices of the artists involved, McCrilly’s heavy curatorial touch gives the show a confident and singular narrative, which feels necessary. In contrast, due to the sheer number of varied practices (both art and curatorial) presented in ‘She Devil’ the suggested singular narrative is less convincing.

‘She Devil’ does present some strong individual works, which convey something of the national and international discourse on gender identity being formed by female producers of video art. However, the discourse presented by the exhibition itself seems more focused on ideas around the role of the curator(s) in a visual art exhibition. This, of course, is a justifiable area of focus, and in fact proves very interesting when presented next to ‘G R O U P S H O W’, which explores similar themes. The two shows when viewed in tandem present a fascinating narrative on contemporary curation. But of the 44 curators and artists on display across the Golden Thread’s galleries it is in fact the small group show of emerging artists led confidently by an emerging curator staged in the project space that steals the limelight.

Iain Griffin is a visual artist and writer based in Belfast.

Image: ‘She Devil’ installation view, 2016. Photo by Simon Mills.

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