JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO JOHN HUTCHINSON ABOUT HIS 25-YEAR DIRECTORSHIP OF THE DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY.

Joanne Laws: Your vast contribution to the Irish visual arts is fondly conveyed in a series of thoughts, reflections and tributes by artists, colleagues and friends. How do you feel about these comments?

John Hutchinson: I found it a very strange experience. It felt a bit like reading my own obituary. But by and large they were lovely and very generous. Michael [Hill] and Rachel[McIntyre] put them together with a lot of work and I’m very touched and grateful for all their efforts.

JL: Among these comments, Alice Maher described her 1994 solo exhibition, ‘Familiar’, as pivotal, not only in launching her career, but in starting to see herself as a “full-time practicing artist – no going back”. How important is it for you to champion emerging artists?

JH: The funny thing was that at the time I wasn’t long there either. I was learning my trade while Alice was learning hers. She said that I gave her another six months to develop extra work and I only vaguely recollect this – I’m sure it was just an instinctive or natural response. However, I rarely champion anyone. Besides, I always made an effort to have a balance between emerging and established, Irish, non-Irish, women, men, minorities and so on – a basic structure to avoid opening myself up to criticism for having too much of this or too little of that.

The other thing I had to bear in mind was a spread of different mediums. Nonetheless, if you look back, you’ll find a sustained interest in painting and photography. There was an emphasis on installation in the early 1990s, when it was very fashionable, but as other galleries began doing more installation or conceptual work, I backed away from it. I tried to work with a sense of necessity, of need, with something I wanted to see happen. I increasingly gambled on the belief that if I found it interesting there would be other people out there who would too.

JL: In your curatorial approach, the philosophy of dualism seems to allow binary opposites to coexist, emphasising the thresholds between the expansive and the intimate, familiar or strange, even the venerated art object and the discarded artefact or relic. Can you say something about dualism? 

JH: Actually dualism in itself interests me not at all. I’m much more interested in – to use a metaphysical term – ‘oneness’. The question is, how does one experience, explore, manifest or share that sense of oneness? There are a number of ways to do this. For example – and of course I’m simplifying – in Hegelian dialectic you put opposites together and the result is something which combines the two. That’s one way, and this is the way of contrast that you describe. Another is the idea that you begin with oneness and end with it. If you do that, relationships are established like networks, in a kind of unfoldment, which is less a set of binary oppositions of contrast than an investigation or exploration of connections – between big and small, outside and inside, absence and presence. It’s this richness of interrelationships that interests me.

JL: Your curatorial approach seems rooted in questions of identity and spirituality. Perhaps you could discuss some of your influences?

JH: When I first started at the gallery in 1991, I wrote a short piece for Circa in which I said that the programme would be based on themes of identity and absence. These ideas served a purpose initially, but my approach gradually became more intuitive than rational. The pragmatics of curating are pretty straightforward; the rest is down to the depth and breadth of your experience, the people you hang out with, the books you read, the music you listen to and so on. The question of what a curator is and does is a thorny one, particularly as there are so many approaches one can follow. It’s a bit like writing: almost anyone can write a book, but the question is, can you write an interesting one?

JL: With a shake-up of directors and curators happening across many Irish arts organisations at the moment, we are confronted with the (often anxious) realisation that, to varying degrees, the curator is actually the institution. Do you have any thoughts on this?

JH: Sometimes, when radical shifts happen, the contrast with what went before is very evident. I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic changes at the Douglas Hyde, and many people may well prefer them. Others might miss my approach – but that’s life. In general the art system is very antipathetic to people staying a long time in one place. Curatorial careers are increasingly globalised and ruthless – a curator will often come into an institution already thinking about moving on to another job within a year or two.

I worked for 25 years in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where I probably put on around 250 exhibitions. One of the best-attended shows I was involved in was the Kalachakra Sand Mandala with the Tibetan monks. We had phenomenal numbers for that. On the final day, we collected donations for the monastery and they came in so fast that the money boxes were overflowing. That all happened through word of mouth. If an exhibition touches people and they’re interested, then that’s fantastic, but it often won’t happen. That seems OK to me.

JL: Have you programmed a few things at the Douglas Hyde for 2017?

JH: I have bequeathed three solo exhibitions: Sean Lynch (17 February – 5 April) and Isobel Nolan (June – August), that I felt were appropriate to the gallery and with which any incoming director would feel comfortable. The current exhibition by Dennis Dineen (21 April 21 – 27 May) is a bit of a wild card. Dineen was an amateur photographer who ran a pub outside Cork. He took photographs of locals in the back room for passports, first communions and other events throughout the 1950s and 60s. Now, not every curator will like these photographs, because they’re odd things, but I think they are wonderful. I didn’t want to programme shows that I wouldn’t do myself, but by the same token I didn’t want to leave shows that were too obviously ‘me’. Perhaps the Dineen show is the exception.

JL: Under your directorship, the Douglas Hyde also became renowned for its commitment to publishing. When and how did this practice unfold?

JH: There were three stages. I inherited a budget of £17,000 for a simple A4 catalogue when I started at the gallery in 1991. Massive amounts of money were spent on catalogues in those days. I started off working with a couple of designers and eventually with Peter Maybury, with whom I had a very interesting and productive relationship. At this time, every catalogue was designed according to individual needs, budgets and aesthetic requirements. The second stage was to find a format that could be applied to all artists, that was affordable, democratic and could provide an identity for the gallery. I came up with the idea of small, bound A5 volumes and we began to print abroad. The artist was given the outside format and told they could do more or less whatever they wanted within it. It worked like a dream. That lasted up until the economic crash, and then we couldn’t even afford those, so I came up with a different format, printing digitally and designing in-house. Generally, I wrote the texts for the small books, and they were incredibly efficient financially. We were able to sell them for €5. In the last few years we were typically printing 250 or 300 copies; often they would sell out and we would make a modest profit.

Joanne: Do you feel that printed matter does more than its digital counterpart?

JH: Oh yes, much more. It looks and feels different when you have an object in your hand. One of the ideas behind the scale of the small publications was that they were meant to be, subconsciously, a bit like a little prayer book – something intimate that you could stick in your pocket. There was something slightly precious about them, but on the other hand if someone spent €5 and didn’t like it, they could toss it away. I like those ambiguities and contradictions. But that normally only comes across with a physical object.

JL: In foreword of the 2009 publication Questions of Travel, you reflect on art as being founded on “stillness and familiarity”. To what extent does art feature in your future plans? Will you still go to openings? Are you someone that likes to travel? What will you miss?

JH: No, I disliked openings, even when I had to host them. I don’t want to set foot in the gallery again for a while, so the new director has time and space to settle down and I can develop a new persona. But I do enjoy keeping in touch with artists, colleagues and friends. It’s interesting to see, though, how transient your influence is. You’re left with the people you want to see and who want to see you.

In some respects, it’s taking longer to settle than I thought. What I will miss are the dialogues with artists and hanging shows. They are things I wouldn’t like to do without, but how they can be sustained I don’t know. I won’t miss the increasing bureaucracy or the politics of the art world, but I will miss standing with an artist in the Douglas Hyde’s big concrete room, or even in the little one, and thinking “right, okay, where do we put this?” I loved that. I travel mentally; I don’t travel physically much anymore. I’m a big reader. My house is full of stuff. I collect things. I’ll probably have to stop now that I’ll have less money, but I accumulate books, CDs, films and objects from all over the world. They feed me. I garden, I walk, I listen to music, and I stare at the sky – and that does me, you see.

John Hutchinson was director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, from 1991 to 2016.

Images: Alfred Jensen, installation view, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Gallery 1, March 2010; ‘Turkmen and Uzbek Children’s Clothes’, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Gallery 2, May 2016.

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MATT PACKER AND ALISSA KLEIST DISCUSS ‘SCISSORS CUT PAPER WRAP STONE’, A TOURING EXHIBITION BY CCA DERRY-LONDONDERRY.

LIKE many curators (and indeed, artists) we often develop ideas by thinking through references or historical incidences that have little to do with contemporary art from the outset. ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ is a case in point: an exhibition that developed from our discovery of a science fiction novel written in 1994 by author Ian McDonald. The novel led us to understand a rich history of sci-fi produced in Northern Ireland, of which Ian McDonald is a part. He is one in a long line of authors dating back to the late nineteenth century that obviously coincided with considerable political, industrial and cultural change over the intervening years. Given the region’s difficult past (and equally uncertain future), it makes sense that a history of science fiction literature exists in Northern Ireland. With its characteristic conjuring of alternative worlds, new life-forms and imaginative re-workings of everyday life, science fiction might be described as an act of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that allows us to re-approach the conditions of our society.

McDonald’s novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone tells the story of a young student, Ethan Ring, who develops the ability to produce images that bypass rational thought and control the mind of the viewer. The book alternates between scenes of Ethan’s pilgrimage through Japan as he tries to reconcile the responsibilities of his unique brand of power, and scenes of Ethan’s earlier life as an art college student in “some rainy-day city in the North”. As the book proceeds through Ethan’s time in college, it details his encounters with other students that share an interest in artificial intelligence, including his girlfriend Luka, who introduces him to a virtual reality visualiser that is channelled through the work of Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. Stimulated by conversation and experimentation, Ethan develops a technology of “fracters” – mind-controlling images that have the power to heal, cause pain and induce tears or ecstasy. The utopian promise of the image technology is short lived as Ethan finds himself blackmailed into employment by the public relations department of the “European Common Security Secretariat”, who demand that he uses these fracters for the purposes of interrogation and assassination.

It’s a complex story that is difficult to summarise. The book is packed with ideas, allusions and observations that are typical of the cyber punk sub-genre of science fiction. What struck us about the novel was the central idea of an image technology that could go beyond mediation, interpretation and criticality – the very things that comprise our modern framework of cultural experience and understanding of contemporary art. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote that “art harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its reception and production”. In other words, something antithetical to theory that makes the experience of art different from the experience of other kinds of objects. McDonald’s story provides an expansion of similar ideas.

The notion of Ethan Ring’s powerful image-technology also allowed us to think about how art is often instrumentalised and laden with promises of ‘impacting’ audiences. As a result of the funding language around the public benefits of artistic presentation, we have become used to the rationale, but McDonald’s story accelerates the basic question: what if art actually did impact people so directly that encountering an image could cause viewers to change their mindset or improve their wellbeing? It prompts further questions about the responsibilities and corruption potential of developing such an effective (and affective) form of artistic power, while also suggesting what is necessary and important in the failure of art to manifest these kinds of results for audiences, viewers and publics.

The ideas and evocations that we drew from McDonald’s novel provided a way of framing questions of technology, authority and the physical body that were in evidence in many of the artistic practices we were encountering at the time. It was on this basis that we began to approach Alan Butler (Ireland), Clawson and Ward (UK), Eva Fàbregas (Spain/UK), Pakui Hardware (Germany/Lithuania), Joey Holder (UK), Jennifer Mehigan (Ireland), John Russell (UK) and Andrew Norman Wilson (US), with a view to developing an exhibition that responds to this science fiction story of mind-controlling images. All of the artists demonstrate a commitment to these shared concerns in various ways, for example in the sculptures by artist duo Pakui Hardware (Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda), which use fleshy imagery from NASA archives, and in the work of Clawson and Ward (Anna Clawson and Nicole Ward) that references Josef Stalin and the censorship of his own portrait.

The body appears throughout the exhibition in various guises and is subject to forms of control and imposition. In John Russell’s large-scale, backlit prints, he presents scenarios where a motley crew of hybrid creatures seem to be playing out the mysterious social rituals of a fledgling multi-species society that has been glitched with technology. The evocative titles of these works (Diagonal Slaughter Optimisation, Parallel Domination Facility, Adjacent Bureaucracy Enhancement) add the suggestion of a threatening and administrative condition to each of these scenes. In Eva Fàbregas’s work, The role of unintended consequences (Sofa Compact), we see the animated character of self-assembly furniture, as though encouraging the furniture’s autonomous life and liberating it from the burden of human labours. In this work there’s a sense that animism (the attribution of life to inanimate objects) has come to replace the primacy of the human body. A similar sense of attribution relates to Andrew Norman Wilson’s discombobulated ego puppet in Reality Models, and extends to Fàbregas’s Self-Organising Systems, a series of robotic artworks made of recycled product packaging that appear to navigate the gallery through their own self-determining movement. These examples are not exhaustive, but they do indicate the ways in which the exhibition ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ offers room for different propositions of art’s relation to the human body, accelerated by technologies of affective power and domination.

We used the opportunity of touring the exhibition to Uillinn: West Cork Art Centre, Skibbereen, and Ormston House, Limerick, to include other artists (Jennifer Mehigan and Joey Holder respectively) whose practices are similarly engaged in imagining the physical future. The tour also enabled us to develop a presentation that was responsive to the architecture and scale of each space. The spilt level spaces at Uillinn meant that the encounter with the individual works in the exhibition was organised in a more narrative way, requiring audiences to navigate through certain artworks in order to access others. In its current iteration at Ormston House, the exhibition has the opposite effect, with many of the works visibly and physically encroaching on each other within the same space, disrupting any clear sense of linearity in the audience’s encounter.

Having produced three versions of the exhibition at this stage, we realise that there is no definitive version. Each exhibition behaves differently, and we try and keep ourselves open and learn from the process.

‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ continues at Ormston House until 27 May 2017. Alissa Kleist is Curator (Exhibitions) at CCA Derry-Londonderry. Matt Packer is currently Director at CCA. He will commence a new role in June 2017 as Director of EVA International. He is also Curator of this year’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (3 – 19 November 2017).

Images: Alan Butler, Orphan Transposition (Albert Bierstadt, Merced River Yosemite Valley, ii.), 2016, installation view, Ormston House, Limerick; photo by Jed Niezgoda; Pakui Hardware, Transactions, 2016; photo by Dervla Baker; image courtesy of the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry/Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; Eva Fabregas, Object for sitting (foreground) 2016; Alan Butler, Orphan Transposition (Albert Bierstadt, Merced River Yosemite Valley, ii.) (suspended), 2016; Jennifer Mehigan, theseus warcraft virocannibal diabla (sterna) 333, 2017 and Pakui Hardware, Transactions, 2016 (background and floor); image courtesy of CCA Derry-Londonderry/Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; photo by Dervla Baker.

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Richard Forrest, Kevin Gaffney, Ann Maria Healy, Elaine Hoey, Ali Kirby, Jane Locke, Jane Rainey, RHA, Dublin, 17 March – 23 April

‘FUTURES’ is a series of exhibitions at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) that shows the work of emerging artists. ‘Futures, Series 3, Episode 1’ is one of the most engaging exhibitions in recent years. The show takes us on a journey from the past to the present and far into the future.

Jane Rainey is a painter whose subjects are abstract, yet vaguely familiar. From afar, her paintings look like distorted digital landscapes. Up close, they are thick with paint. Colours are mixed together on the canvas, resembling a damaged digital image with streaks running through it. But unlike digital images, they are handmade. They show the physical process of painting. These are paintings that want to be touched.

Richard Forrest also explores the ways in which digitally-generated images relate to real physical artworks. In From the Mouth of Chrysippus, the artist uses digital imaging technology to recreate ancient Greek sculptures from the Crawford Art Gallery collection. The Crawford sculptures are plaster casts of original statues. As the ‘camera’ moves around them, we can see that they are, in fact, hollow. Some are digitally modelled in a shiny material, like liquid metal. They resemble the shape-shifting robot in Terminator 2 – the first film to use a partially computer-generated main character.

Forrest looks at how we understand real objects in a virtual world. These days, we often look at artworks on computer screens. What is the difference between a digital version and the original artwork? Like Rainey, Forrest asks: what is the role of handmade objects in the digital age?

Elaine Hoey’s video work, The Weight of Water, uses virtual reality (VR) technology to show us a different version of the present. The animation brings us into the lives of refugees who are trying to reach Europe by sea. As you sit in a cage with a VR headset on, you are transported onto a boat at night.

You are with a group of ghostly figures. A woman stares blankly into the distance and sometimes looks directly at you. The boat moves slowly in the water through strange structures with walls that are constantly moving. It is a haunting experience. This moving artwork brings us right into the refugees’ present reality and helps us to understand their terrifying journey.

Ali Kirby’s sculptural installation, Landing, is quite different. The artist recreates an old staircase that used to lead up to the gallery where the exhibition takes place. The work sits awkwardly close to a false wall in the middle of the space. It shows us an historical object and forces us to walk around it, bringing the past into our present.

On the other side of the wall, Kevin Gaffney uses history to imagine a situation that is set in the near future. The artist’s film, A Numbness in the Mouth, is staged in the old Shackleton Mill on the banks of the River Liffey. The mill produced flour for nearly 200 years until it closed in 1998.

In the film, a woman tells the people of Ireland to eat five pounds of flour every day because too much has been produced. We have to do this to save the country’s economy, otherwise we’d be making “a direct attack on our sovereignty”. It reminds us of the huge sacrifices that Irish people made in the past and are still making today, to help the economy recover. Gaffney’s film is both absurd and chilling. It makes us think about what we are currently stomaching in the name of recovery.

Ann Maria Healy’s digitally-generated video work, How to be Other, is shown on a monitor nearby. The video’s narrator tells us a story about a fictional world. This is a world “in turmoil” with “many attacks”. The people there use a well. In Ireland, people believed that traditional holy wells could cure different conditions, but the well in the video has traces of chemicals that are used to bring on abortions. This links to the present day, as Irish women still don’t have access to abortion. The artwork makes us think about this issue.

Healy uses a cistern tank, a children’s paddling pool and copper piping to make the holy well, which is also presented in the gallery. By setting the story in the future, this artwork asks us to think about how change can happen. What stories will be told about us in the future?

Around the corner, you find Jane Locke’s Tales from a Green Post Box, a ghostly drawing of a post-box in a forest. It makes us question why the green, cast-iron post-boxes are disappearing from our streets. A table displays a research notebook on the history of the postal service in Ireland.

Locke brought this information to life through a series of lecture performances during the exhibition. These lectures asked: what is fact and what is fiction? We are in an age of ‘fake news’. Locke’s lectures make us feel uneasy about how history is presented and what kinds of stories we like to tell about ourselves.

In this year’s ‘Futures’ there is much shapeshifting and blending of worlds. It is a very rewarding exhibition that deserves multiple visits.

Michelle Browne is an artist and curator based in Dublin.

This review was written using the principles of Plain English. Arts & Disability Ireland worked with Visual Artists Ireland to commission a text that is easy to read and accessible to a wide range of readers.

Images: Elaine Hoey, The Weight of Water, 2016; VR installation,metal mesh grid, barbed wire, wood, sensor lights, seniors fan, Oculus Rift, controller, headphones, swivel stool; photo by Justyna Kielbowicz; Forrest, From the Mouth of Chrysippus installation view, 2017, RHA; photo by Katie Bowe O’ Brien.

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Katherine Nolan, MART, Dublin, 2 – 31 March 2017

KATHERINE Nolan is a performance artist whose work focuses on her body and her image as sites of investigation into the representation and construction of femininity. Her recent series of performances, The Mistress of the Mantle, held at MART, Rathmines, were based on the artist’s experience of returning to Ireland after 10 years in London. She found that the reality of moving ‘home’ was not quite the return to the fold that she had anticipated. Unexpectedly, this transition marked her symbolic arrival at the precipice of adulthood. Time away and dislocation from Ireland imposed a disruption of the rites of passage between childhood and maturity that are normally cushioned by the stability of family, community and place. Nolan had to grapple with expectations – both her own and other people’s – about how she should fulfil this new responsibility, triggering a re-evaluation of her identity, memory, nostalgia and complex attachment to Ireland.

The Mistress of the Mantle distilled what is intuitive but not easily articulated in a series of performances to camera, shot in iconic urban and rural locations around Ireland: the Cliffs of Moher, Sandymount Strand, the Phoenix Park Wellington Monument and the Guinness Storehouse. Mimicking examples of uniquely Irish popular culture – including early pop videos and RTE’s Nationwide – she cast herself in a leading role, “performing a private act of listening to music, whilst very publicly letting it all out”.

I’m Frightened as Much as You was installed in the second space but connected to the first installation, where three of the dresses worn by Nolan in the videos were hung reverently in tricolour formation. Somehow they appeared as outsized robes in a ritualistic colour palette of emerald green, bright orange and pristine white. The style of these garments was typical of the 1970s but also somewhat reminiscent of priestly vestments. This simple installation touched on nationalism, Catholicism and popular culture, while also alluding to the pinioned position of Irish women living under those powerful doctrines.

Breathless comprised a single-screen video in the second gallery. This time wearing a shoulder-padded black dress, Nolan moved away from the twee John Hinde era of the 1970s to the edgy 1980s. Shot in the cobbled streets beneath the Guinness Storehouse, Nolan sings with wistful melancholy, but her voice is muted and the only audio is the static of wind and traffic. Despite time having moved forward, the 1980s represented a dark period for Irish women and one that continues to directly impact Nolan’s generation today. Her performative practice has for several years foregrounded the flesh and blood of femininity in the face of powerful forces. She unmasks the seemingly unpalatable truths of female biology that are hidden behind idealised and illusory notions pertaining to the status of women in Ireland.

A series of still photographs were also included in the exhibition that took a closer look at the contradictions of Nolan’s modernday interpretations of the past. In the most striking image, Nolan stands emotionless beside a dull Christmas tree in front of dreary brown curtains, as though hostage to convention. Wearing another classic 1980s dress in blue satin damask, she captures this period perfectly. Another image depicts her looking straight to camera, holding a tea cloth in her hands with fatigue, disappointment and bewilderment perceptible in her drained expression. Both images manage to imprison her in a timeless loop of history repeating itself. Another pair of still images observe her engaged in ‘innapropriate’ behaviour, crawling over a dining table and using a dinner plate as a pillow. The gallery text notes that, while contemplating becoming “the models of womanhood that she observed as a child”, Nolan experienced a range of emotions from catharsis to narcissism. In my view it is no wonder, given the sheer weight of expectation surrounding this subject and the complexity of these encounters.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Images: Katherine Nolan, The Mistress of the Mantle, 2017; photo by Seamus Travers.

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Jonathan Mayhew, Wexford Arts Centre, 27 February – 25 March 2017

[Infinite Jest] can’t be read at a crowded cafe, or with a child on one’s lap.

Dave Eggers

WINNER of the 2015 Emerging Visual Artist Award, Jonathan Mayhew is one of those artists whose work requires a space where you can hear a pin drop. Wexford Art Centre (WAC) is not that space. Perhaps Mayhew’s exhibition of new work would have fared better in the attention stakes during the recession, when such regional art centres were empty saloons in ghostly Westworlds. During my visit, the endless stream of visitors to the cafe and the hoofing of piano peddles with woohooing children upstairs was a sign of the times. But, there is a big BUT to all of this, which I will get to later.

Floor-bound ceramic vases with silver tags catch my eye due to the overall sparseness of the exhibition. Up close these silver tags become USB sticks attached to the inside lips of the vases. There’s a video work on a flat-screen TV that presents constellations of blinking and revolving white text against a black backdrop. One cartwheel of text reads something like “silence is the only communication”. This work’s big sister is projected in the gallery upstairs and dishes out sentiment over statement, poetry over authority.

Further along there’s paper that has been exposed to moonlight in one instance and sunlight in the other. With the subject of time so prevalent throughout, Mayhew has perversely displayed a clock without hands or digits above the titanic hull of the reception desk: most will miss this temporal black hole. But there’s a lot ‘missing’ here: a musical score by Gustav Mahler is played on a standing speaker when the gallery is closed; readings are performed there and everywhere but never here; and there are no flowers for the vases, which turns them into bed pans, no?

Parts of faces are missing too in the folded photographic portraits of dystopian mid-twentieth-century authors, from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley. The integrity of these photographs, these references, is respected due to Mayhew’s minimal folding for maximal effect, which leaves Orwell mouthless and Huxley eyeless.

On another wall we have vinyl text with questions lifted from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock (1934). The extracts question if life, wisdom, knowledge and information are being lost to one another in the dash of late modernity. Mayhew has added one or two sentiments about data and metadata that are adaptations of Eliot’s choruses for our times. There is no ironic stalemate to ‘get’ or new insight to take home; the artist is just innocently asking.

So what does it all mean? Mayhew wants us to make up our own minds. But I always think that stance is a con. For me the artist offers up a wealth of references that ping-pong between existential loss and redemptive love: philosopher Emile Cioran and writer David Foster Wallace are definitely here in spirit.

From this defining spirit there is a sense that Mayhew is tapping into the cynicism that still pours through the veins of people who grew up watching Seinfeld. However, there are efforts on the part of the artist to embrace and project something sincere, although Mayhew is not offering a happy ending or indeed any ending at all.

Félix González-Torres succeeded in marrying Duchamp’s anaesthetic readymade with feeling at a time when this wasn’t such an obvious act. However, the artist wasn’t motivated or conditioned by technology; love and death were both his muse and burden at a time when the two became tragically entangled in the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Mayhew’s work also runs parallel to current romantic conceptualists like Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros; however, where Boutros’s work is haunted by the shadow of his war-torn homeland, Mayhew doesn’t carry – or at least doesn’t advertise – such a burden.

I ended up asking what Mayhew’s motivation was. I also questioned what the differences are between artists that draw from a deep personal well (like the 2014 award recipient Dragana Jurisic whose work explores the concept of exile) and those that skim the surface through word games and design, á la Liam Gillick.

Due to the wealth of Mayhew’s literary, technological and art historical references I sometimes got dragged down at the expense of connecting with Mayhew the artist (maybe those USB sticks contain Mayhew’s digital DNA?). There’s a sense of dissociative tourism in his work that lacks a deeper connection with a subject, connections that make artists such as Miroslaw Balka so compelling. There is no anchor here; the context is everything rather than something.

But that’s the point. Mayhew is not taking ownership of a specific context to define him and his art like everyone else; everything is his context. With life breezing in and out, WAC is the pitch-perfect space to experience Mayhew reflecting back this ‘everything’ rather than just himself or some claimed subject or inherited trauma. An artist of our time.

James Merrigan is an artist based in Waterford.

Images: Jonathan Mayhew, ‘I Wanted to Write a Poem’ installation view, 2017.

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Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 13 February – 11 June 2017

SARI: Subject. Aspect. Restrictions. Instructions. This useful acronym, which I recommend students to use when analysing an essay title or exam question, came to mind when reflecting on the exhibition currently on display in the Hugh Lane, the title of which is ‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’. [1]

Applying the first part of this analysis (S and A) to the title of the exhibition, we find that the subject – what it is about – is ‘Artistic Migration’, and the aspect – the narrower theme, the particulars of what it is about – is ‘Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’. If this were the title of an essay, I would expect initially to be provided with a definition and discussion of artistic migration in which the following questions might be explored. What is meant by migration? Does it imply living abroad, or merely travelling overseas for extended periods? Does artistic migration mean the movement of artists in one direction only, or is there also a suggestion of exchange?

Another question emerges from the juxtaposition of Frank O’Meara and other Irish artists. Why is O’Meara singled out? What particular contribution has he to make to the concept of artistic migration? Who are the other Irish artists? What do they have in common that O’Meara perhaps doesn’t share?

As this analysis demonstrates, the title of an exhibition is replete with suggestion of what the visitor can expect to see, experience and learn. There is a promise being made, which must be met if it is to be considered successful. This is particularly the case where the works on show are not for sale (which could be considered a criterion for success) and have already been entered into the canon of minor masterpieces, as here in the Hugh Lane.

‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ occupies two rooms, one devoted to O’Meara (alongside a work by William Stott of Oldham) and the other to, well, other artists. O’Meara’s work consists of one drawing and five paintings, including a self-portrait. O’Meara died at the age of 35 and the six pieces here constitute a major part of his oeuvre. Indeed, the gallery states that this is the “largest number of [his] works in a public collection”.

The paucity of available works means that the coherence of this room lies not so much in subject matter or technique, but in the artist’s life, with a certain poignancy in the fact that his fiancée, Belle, features as a model in some pieces. There are two thematically connected works, Study of an Old Woman and October. The former is clearly a preliminary version of the latter, which makes it puzzling that they are not presented side by side.

Even with a very limited body of work, O’Meara’s draughtsmanship is evident, and he shows great command in his depiction of movement: the leaves in Toward Night and Winter, the smoke in October, the veil in The Widow. The pale tones of his palette create a sense of melancholy, an intimation of decline and decay.

Moving on to the second room, the mood is brighter and lighter. Unlike O’Meara’s works, which have a figure at their centre, the focus here is the environment rather than episode. The locations of these plein air paintings range from seascapes and landscapes to urban settings, such as Roderic O’Conor’s Boulevard Raspail and John Lavery’s Sutton Courtenay. The palettes of the collective works include the light greens of William Leech and bright reds of Mary Swanzy.

However, the viewer is confronted with another conundrum: what is meant by Irish artist? Given that all the artists displayed were born in the nineteenth century, the conclusion has to be someone born on the island of Ireland. Yet this is not true for Philip Wilson Steer, Moffat Peter Lindner and George Clausen, all of whom were born in England.

An obvious connection between the artists, both Irish and English, is, as the overview states, that they were “influenced by innovative new developments in en plein air painting on the Continent [and] travelled abroad to develop their art practice”. But the time span of the exhibition makes it difficult to refine this further. Of the 12 artists represented, the oldest, chronologically, is Peter Moffat Lindner, born in 1852, and the youngest Mary Swanzy, born in 1882. This gap of 30 years is considerable and begs the question: what does the exhibition demonstrate with regard to general artistic development and personal evolution of the individual artists over such a long period?

An overview text and wall labels support the exhibition, but these generally lack coherence. The viewer may well find the individual works of interest, but they will struggle to understand quite why they have been brought together. To return to the essay analogy, it is clear that a lot of research has gone into this exhibition, but the organisation doesn’t sufficiently fulfil the promise of its title. At present, ‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ presents the viewer with more of a first draft than a final submission.

Mary Catherine Nolan is a Dublin-based artist with a background in linguistics.

1. R. Barrass, Students Must Write, 1995, Routledge, London.

Image: ‘Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ installation view; image courtesy of the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane.

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SUSAN MACWILLIAM DISCUSSES HER TOURING SURVEY EXHIBITION ‘MODERN EXPERIMENTS’, WHICH WILL HAVE SHOWN AT F.E. MCWILLIAM GALLERY, THE HIGHLANES GALLERY, UILLIN: WEST CORK ARTS CENTRE AND THE BUTLER GALLERY BY THE END OF 2017.

It’s a strange experience when works come back after an absence, materialising from their coffin-like crates or emerging into the light after a decade or more in darkness and obscurity.

A survey show feels like a form of mediumship. Past worlds collide in the present. These worlds are made by me, fabricated in the studio by different versions of myself at different stages of my life. Some works ‘know’ other works, while others meet for the first time – converging like a gathering of relatives, mapping their family tree with regurgitated connectedness. The ancestors are here, having paved the way for descendants and works born of others. Having multiplied, they gather: siblings, cousins, great grandparents, aunts and uncles. Some are more assertive and demanding, while others lurk quietly in corners. Some take longer to get to know yet persist and linger.

As the maker of these worlds, I feel as though I’m in the presence of ghosts: ghosts from the past; ghosts from the future. There’s a falling in love, a sense of haunting that occurs when I work with my subjects. There’s an intensity of knowing: of wanting to know, of wanting to know intimately, of observing, of watching, of looking closer, of getting under the skin, of wanting more.

Spending time with them, here, now, I fall in love again with these first loves, with Helen, Kathleen, Kuda…

The works in ‘Modern Experiments’ are knitted together through entangled connections and the overlaps of subjects and lives. In making them, I’ve become investigator, participant and collaborator. Spanning 18 years, these works have taken me back and forth across the globe, to libraries and archives, and to places and histories unfamiliar and little-known. Shifting my position from behind the camera to the subject of its gaze, I’ve become both the observer and the observed.

In 2005, in pursuit of knowledge of ‘eyeless sight’, I enter the underground Parisian laboratory of Madame Duplessis. I stand amongst dermo-optic boxes and coloured cards; plastic cups and measuring devices; fingers feeling through paroptic vision; voices overlapping, contradicting and concurring. I sense friendship, trust and camaraderie. “When I have finished my experience with Madame Duplessis, I feel much better,” Edith says. [1] A year later, I’m in New York with the family of Irish medium Eileen Garrett. From Manhattan to Long Island and back, swept in and under their wing, engulfed in a whirlwind of histories and anecdotes.

Back now to ‘Modern Experiments’, amongst this family of objects, images and moving pictures. I’m sitting in a 1930s armchair, bathed in the glow of the multi-bulbed vaudeville sign that spells out the name “Kuda Bux”. [2] Himself here now in front of me, his dough-balled eyes and turban-bound face incased in a 1950s television that endlessly loops. An inter-title informs that Kuda Bux “was made famous during the 1930s and ‘40s by his dramatic demonstrations of eyeless sight”. The detritus of ‘me’ becoming ‘he’ hovers: the reconstructed blackboard to my side, the lumpen rags at my feet. This theatrical installation sits within ‘Modern Experiments’, amongst its laboratories of propositions, its anthologies and analogies, and its curiosity of personalities.

Elevated on a wooden stand, a monitor emits a gentle hum; from its cathode ray tube, the dark spaces of the Eileen J. Garrett Library open up. [3] Elsewhere, the writer Kathleen Coyle transmits her inner thoughts through intimate earphones. [4] ‘Modern Experiments’ is littered with the literary, and books abound: The Eternity of Time, Between Heaven and Earth, Unknown but Known, Extra-Sensory Perception. [5] Kathleen’s daughter tells her: “Once you are there in that ESP atmosphere, the writing of your book should get on well”. Kathleen had hoped to get to Duke University to participate in the ESP experiments of J.B. Rhine. Her scribbled thoughts on a manuscript willing it to be: “going to get, going to get to Duke soon; going to get, going to get to Duke soon”. I’d already gotten to Duke before encountering Coyle and her desires to “get there”. In 2011 – amongst the folders, files and photographs of that ESP environment at Duke – my fingers find a telegram from 1934. Sent to Rhine on behalf of Garrett, its sticker declares: “AN ANSWER IS EXPECTED”. ^[6] Answers can be found in books: shelved books, closed books, open books. In ‘Modern Experiments’ books become orbs, Garrett travels from Southampton to New York ^[7] and Kuda Bux performs.

Across 19 monitors, my younger self, trapped in an eternal fainting loop, becomes a body observed, a body controlled. ^[8] Birds sing, scissors snip, an air conditioner hums. Then a voice from a television declares: “You won’t believe your eyes …that which you are about to see, you will never forget”. Reason is ruptured, while white neon asks: “Where are the dead?”^[9] and Mrs C. wonders: “Well where does it go?”^[10] Questions asked, answers demanded; reproduction and reconstruction; close inspection and gathered recollection. Bill first met Eileen Garrett while he was a student at Oxford; I met Bill while investigating Garrett. Together now in ‘Modern Experiments’, Bill, Mrs C., Lisette and Garrett enter my orbit, some as spectres from the other side, gone but not gone, floating in the ether, their voices resonating, their personalities pervading. Bill says of Garrett: “When she enters a room, you know it… she’s a kind of sun around whom planets rotate, you know who’s the centre – she’s the centre”.

On a screen on a shelf, Aldous Huxley’s eyes rattle and rotate. ^[11] In his 1942 book The Art of Seeing, Huxley espoused the use of a raised hand to palm the eye in order to improve eyesight. The fainting girl raises her hand to her forehead: “Test, test, test”. Her body slumps. Arla reads how Hamilton “put his hands over the face of the medium… and said he felt nothing there…”^[12] Elsewhere on a monitor, Helen Duncan’s hands are bound to a chair. ^[13] In 1920, Jules Romains described ‘eyeless sight’ in La Vision extra-rétinienne et le sens paroptique. Ciaran says: “You can see anything at all in anything at all…if that’s how you think”. In Winnipeg in 1931, teleplasmic letters emerge on a séance cabinet wall spelling out the name ‘Flammarion’.

In 2008, I cross the Atlantic once more to explore the photographs of that teleplasm. Back here, now, in a corner of the gallery, my nephew Mercer – age five and still learning language – enquires about ectoplasmic rods, experiments and fraud. ^[14] “Light leak, spool down, lens flare, split screen”. Audio overlaps and images regurgitate. “Life has a habit of coming up with repeated patterns,” Kathleen says. And Bill imagines three pictures of himself “saying the same thing slightly differently”. In ‘Modern Experiments’ patterns repeat and duplicate with doubling synchronicity. In 2008 I discover, on a ship’s manifest, that relatives of mine travelled to New York in 1934 on the same crossing as Garrett and her daughter. Kathleen observes how “life and living team with coincidences”.

‘Modern Experiments’ proliferates with relentless looking and intimate observation. A sequence of images unfolds across two monitors on the floor: an attic room wallpapered with repeated patterns; a view under a table; fleshy feet entering a wooden box. ^[15] Exploring the possibilities of table levitation, W.J. Crawford crawls on hands and knees and describes how “the flesh of ‘M’ is converted into plasma”. Reason ruptures: “psychic stuff sent in fluxes”.

Plywood platforms house scissor-wielding hands and Rosa Kuleshova is brought back to life in paper form. ^[16] In ‘Modern Experiments’ dislocated limbs construct models and fingers feel. Bodies produce images, ectoplasm finds form and feelers extend: amorphous ambiguity… audio loops and layers… silence… webs weave… cameras observe… coincidence converge… These are the worlds of Helen Duncan, Kathleen Goligher, Kuda Bux, Eileen Garrett, Yvonne Duplessis, Flammarion and Kathleen Coyle.

‘Modern Experiments’ is a séance of objects and images. The dead and the not-yet-dead manifest in electrical boxes and in planes of projected light. Viewing devices capture and freeze three-dimensional moments in time. I’m peering in at myself crouched a decade ago on the floor of the Parapsychology Foundation library – that summer in New York with the Garrett girls. ^[17] That’s me eternally frozen in a moment in the eternity of time, amongst those books, those worlds of knowledge, staring back at myself now – a viewer in the future. Here, time, space and place collide – the past is transmitted to the present, while ruby red neon flashes “NOW, NOW, NOW”. ^[18]

Susan MacWilliam is a Belfast-born artist based in Dublin and a lecturer in Fine Art at NCAD. ‘Modern Experiments’ will be presented at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, from 9 September to 18 October and at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, from 28 October to 17 December 2017. Curated by Riann Coulter, ‘Modern Experiments’ is supported by a Touring Award from Arts Council of Ireland and Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

List of Susan MacWilliams’s artworks referenced in the text:

 ^[1] Dermo Optics, 2006, video.

^[2] Kuda Bux, 2003, video installation.

^[3] Library, 2008, video.

^[4] KATHLEEN, 2014, video.

^[5] Book Spheres, 2013/14, sculpture, installation.

^[6] AN ANSWER IS EXPECTED, 2013, neon.

^[7] The Only Way to Travel, 2008, video.

^[8] Faint, 1999, 19-channel video.

^[9] Where are the dead? 2013, neon.

^[10] 13 Roland Gardens, 2007, video.

^[11] Aldous’s Eyes, 2014, video.

^[12] F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009, video.

^[13] The Last Person, 1998, video.

^[14] Explaining Magic to Mercer, 2005, video installation.

^[15] Experiment M, 1999, video, double channel.

^[16] Headbox, 2004, video installation.

^[17] Artist as Medium, 2008, stereoscope.

^[18] NOW, 2013, neon.

Images: Susan MacWilliam, Kuda Bux, 2003; installation view, F.E. McWilliam Gallery, 2017; photo by Simon Mills; Aldous’s Eyes, 2014, video still.

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