PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS VIVIENNE DICK ABOUT HER FRIENDSHIP WITH NAN GOLDIN AND THEIR CURRENT EXHIBITIONS AT IMMA.

Pádraic E. Moore: Your exhibition ‘93% STARDUST’ runs concurrently with Nan Goldin’s ‘Weekend Plans’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Perhaps we can discuss the milieu yourself and Nan once shared and the parallels between your work?

Vivienne Dick: I met Nan just after she arrived in New York. We hung out together throughout my time in the city and shared several interests, particularly music. There are parallels in our early work – we were always aware of that, even at the time. We were tuned into each other’s aesthetic from the beginning. There’s a documentary feel to our early work and several of the individuals that one might see in my films also frequently feature in Nan’s images. After the New York period, we met sporadically in different places and Nan travelled to Ireland, visiting Galway, Donegal and Tory Island. The IMMA show features images taken during those trips she made to the west of Ireland.

PM: In a previous interview, you mentioned that your earlier works (such as Guerillere Talks) emerged via an organic undirected process. Perhaps this approach is another aspect of your work that connects it with Goldin’s?

VD: My early works were directed, but not in the usual way. I’m quite loose in my method: I try and approach it in a collaborative way and invite those who I am working with to bring or suggest something. I have never worked with a script, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t rigorously plan the process or have clear ideas that I wanted to explore. I am interested in the different ways people present themselves to the camera and how this can shift within the shot: a vulnerability exposed; an internal focus; a kind of inscrutability or a performing of what someone wants to project.

PM: When you began making work, were you already aware of the experimental films that had been made in America in the late 1950s and early ‘60s?

VD: Even before I started making films, I spent a great deal of time at Anthology Film Archives in New York, looking at all the American avant garde work. That really inspired me to make films. It was the first time I’d ever seen what one could describe as ‘homemade’ films. I’m talking about the work of individuals such as Ken Jacobs, Maya Deren and Jack Smith (whom I knew and worked with), as well as Bruce Baillie, Storm de Hirsch and Marie Menken.

PM: Did the experiences of growing up in what was ultimately a repressive and restrictive patriarchal Ireland inform the sexual politics of your early work?

VD: I felt ill at ease in the Ireland of the late 1960s. Women were not taken seriously in mixed company in bars etc. – one was on the outside looking in. That’s just how it was then. I lived in France and Germany and travelled through India – all experiences that really opened my eyes. In France, I was exposed to a completely different countercultural scene. It was also there that I was exposed to contemporary art. I was lucky to end up in New York, which turned out to be the best place to be for me at the time. New York was a place where I was free to speak with films, free to express myself; a place where there was support from all sorts of people. New York was like a university of the world for me. I met so many interesting people and was exposed to many new ideas, and music and art. It was an eye-opener to say the least. I really do not think I would have begun making films had I remained in London or Dublin. Years later in London, I became interested in psychoanalysis and the history of ideas and this began shaping my work. I had more of a theoretical understanding of what I had been doing. The sense of what it means to be a woman in a world shaped from a male perspective was always an important preoccupation for me. This, of course, is the same for anyone who is not heterosexual or white. Having taught at third level in Ireland for 14 years, it is clear that secondary education would benefit from gender studies being part of the curriculum – why this is not so, poses interesting questions about where we are right now in our awareness of ourselves.

PM: Moving back to Ireland in 1982 heralded a shift in your work. Certain aspects of the country found their way into your films. Moreover, an explicitly political tone enters your films at this point.

 VD: I met people in New York who were from Ireland and who had been directly involved in The Troubles. When I returned to Ireland, I encountered a whole raft of movements. It was fascinating how many different groups there were, at least 15 factions, and each were in competition. In Dublin, I hung out with a bunch of anarchists and this informed Visibility: Moderate (1981), which was made just before moving back.

PM: Your work in the early 1980s also demonstrates an interest in the Irish landscape: it seems to possess a pagan and arcane power.

 VD: I studied archaeology and also prehistory, but later I was seeing it through a feminist lens. God was, and could only be, male in the world I grew up in. On reading Luce Irigaray, I realised how damaging this was for the female half of the population. It is not necessarily about believing or not believing in god. God is an ideal; something you reach towards; the creative impulse – while the female is always ‘othered’ in the monotheistic traditions. So, the idea that there was another time period in which the supreme being or creator was female held a great fascination for me. I became interested in where the traces of belief in goddess culture remained in Ireland: on the land in the names of the mountains, for example. There are numerous mountains in Connemara which have been named locally as the Devil’s Mother. Lough Derg was an ancient pagan site renowned all over the world – like Glastonbury. You can always tell, when you read about the difficulty Saint Patrick had in banishing the serpents there, that a powerful female entity once resided in that location. Even Croagh Patrick was a fertility mountain that women once climbed during the festival of Lughnasadh as a kind of fertility rite, so yes, this was certainly something that intrigued me about the Irish landscape. There’s a three-screen work I made called Excluded by the Nature of things (2002) about the traces of the goddess within Ireland.

PM: Perhaps we can discuss how working with a team of people changes the making process?

VD: I still approach things the same way. With Red Moon Rising (2015), I travelled around the country in an attempt to shoot at dawn or dusk. When I make films, I am looking for something that I may or may not find. I shot a lot of material and sometimes I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, but I found incredibly special moments. I always try to leave enough space and time to ensure that something unexpected can enter – something unanticipated needs to enter. When working on a larger-scale project, it’s ideal to be able to work with a crew who understand your working methods – who respect the process. If you can have a crew that get involved with what you are doing, it can be wonderful. At some point in the making of the last two films, that really did happen. We had sound technicians working with sound artists and really getting into the process, going into the forest to make experiments with sound and so on.

PM: With reference to the notion that 93% of the mass of the human body is ‘stardust’, I’m guessing that the title also refers to music associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s? Perhaps you could give some insights into what the title of the IMMA show reveals about your more recent work?

VD: The title of the show ‘93% STARDUST’ refers to what we are actually made of apparently! It also refers to the 1960s and 70s, and the awe about ourselves in relation to the universe expressed in songs by Joni Mitchell and also Bowie. During the enlightenment, man was considered to be at the centre of the universe dominating everything. We are now entering a new age – a digital age. I think just as we are becoming colonised by the internet, we are simultaneously becoming more aware of our mental fragility: things like PTSD are now accepted as real. We are slowly realising that we do not dominate the earth, but that we are dependent upon it. We are all part of the earth, all of us are embodied, fragile and vulnerable, and that’s okay. My most recent film, Augenblick (2017), which has just received its Irish premiere at IMMA, deals with the idea that we are moving into a new age, which is an internet-led digital age. I practice Iyengar yoga and that helps me get connected to my body on lots of levels. That’s an idea that I wanted to emphasise with ‘93% STARDUST’ – that we as organisms are changing all the time. The whole body changes all the time; every aspect of us is changing all the time; every part of us. The skin, the bone, everything. We are all interconnected.

This interview was conducted via Skype in May 2017. Vivienne Dick’s ‘93% STARDUST’ and Nan Goldin’s ‘Weekend Plans’ run until 15 October 2017 at IMMA.

Vivienne Dick is a feminist experimental and documentary filmmaker whose early films helped define New York’s No Wave scene of the late 1970s. Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin (padraicmoore.com).

Images: Vivienne Dick, Augenblick, 2017; production still; HD video, 14 min. Vivienne Dick, Olwen Fouere, production still from The Irreducible Difference of the Other, 2013; SD video, 27 mins; images courtesy of Vivienne Dick.

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Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 21 April – 17 June 2017

‘Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’ sounds like nonsense, and it is – a phrase coined by Noam Chomsky to be grammatically correct but semantically all over the place. In this ambitious exhibition curated by David Upton, five geographically diverse art practices explore ideas of transient or un-locatable meaning via their own un-locatable objects, objects rendered by impressions and residues, and images deviating between fact and fiction, movement and stasis. A story in the exhibition booklet describes the fate of Byzantine icons bought at a Turkish Bazaar in the 1920’s. Eventually ending up in the National Gallery of Ireland, the icons, separated from their original place and function (and unable to return to a home that no longer exists), have been opened up to new kinds of meaning and attachment. The exhibition booklet usefully outlines some aspirations, among them, “To open discussion around ideas of dissolution and dispossession, loss, of cultures in crisis and futures altered, of cataclysm – and [ask] what happens after all of this?” That’s a lot to ask of a single exhibition, but the fate of the icons becomes a unifying concept, a paradoxically fugitive underpinning.

In a relatively cerebral show, works by Swedish artist Ida Lennartsson convey a powerful sense of materiality and touch. Modest in size, the floor-standing, irregularly-shaped tablets of Ruins (2013) have, like a mini Stonehenge, a sense of mystical presence. Impressed with rope patterns, the clay and wax forms also suggest fossils, body casts or flayed skin. Allusions to the sacred and profane also come together in Lennartsson’s drawing series, Tsuri (2013). In chalk rubbings of knotted rope patterns, her creased, black paper sheets reveal the intricate bindings of a Japanese form of bondage. Untied from these connotations, the rope patterns emerge from their stygian ground like illuminated relics.

Relics of a different kind are conjured in the graphic works of Erik Bulatov. Featuring text superimposed over images of urban landscapes (I was reminded of Ed Ruscha), these detailed drawings hark back to Russian Constructivism, and the didactic role the arts in Soviet Russia often conformed to. Despite a connection to the emblematic icons as conveyors of orthodox pieties (though challenging orthodoxies seems to be part of Bulatov’s brief), in the six small works presented here, his imagery and Cyrillic typography remain stubbornly opaque.

Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm (2011) by the Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, in collaboration with Media Farzin, is more accessible, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the early days of Talking Heads TV. Reworked from original American broadcasts, the video collage shows expert speakers offering polite analysis of the global economy. They talk about the Middle East, and the Iranian oil industry in particular. Bow-ties and old-fashioned cordiality seem like the only things out of place in conversations that might otherwise be happening today.

While Balteo-Yazbeck’s work is unambiguously concerned with the dynamics of power, the mood elsewhere is more cryptic, the exhibition’s miscellanea of artefacts like pieces in a puzzle. None more so than Lourde et dure comme de l’acier (2013), a piece by two Dutch artists, collectively named Gerlach en Koop. In an apparently casual floor arrangement, a dumbbell of polished steel, components of antique dumbbells, metal discs and steel cones appear like the remnants of some gnomic board game. Translating the French title into ‘Heavy and hard as steel’ didn’t leave me any wiser. A second work by the pair is called Untitled (Scatter Piece) (2013) and comprises a string of pearls without pearls. Presented in the manner of a priceless museum artefact, the fine, periodically knotted string made me think of the 1953 Max Ophüls film The Earrings of Madame de …  about a set of gifted jewels that become a clandestine currency between characters. That film’s cyclical conceit felt somehow connected to the absence of the signified in Gerlach en Koop’s piece. An entirely fanciful connection, but in the duo’s enigmatic work, the relationship of language to things seen or unseen leaves everything up for grabs.

Projected onto a free-standing wall angled at the centre of the room, Re-run (2013) was made by the India-based Raqs Media Collective. Feeling pivotal to the show overall, the grey and blue-toned image shows a group of people, seemingly a section of a larger crowd, pressed together in a sort of anxious-looking conga line. The work is based on a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph taken in Shanghai in 1948. Queuing to exchange their rapidly devaluing cash for gold, Cartier-Bresson’s original photograph captures the citizens of pre-Communist China reacting to another cycle of boom and bust. In this restaging – a transposition of contemporary figures into the look and choreography of the original –  the photographic image has become subtly animated. Not immediately apparent, an extremely slow, pulsing rhythm gradually asserts itself. The image is breathing. The slow repetition suggests the convergence of intimate and historical forces, the cyclical nature of global and individual fates entwined.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Image: Ida Lennartsson, Ruins, 2013; clay, wax and graphite, dimensions variable; image courtesy of the artist.

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Clare Strand, Belfast Exposed, 28 April – 17 June

In ‘Snake’ the image is an interloper. At first unwelcome, it is nonetheless invited into the artist’s life for the long term. Clare Strand’s repulsion with the animal has compelled her to collect snake imagery since childhood, from scrapbooking serpentine forms in the loosest sense, to collecting more specific images – half glamour, half family-album-style photographs – of women who hold and love them.

The project initially took form as a small photobook, bound in a tactile scale-patterned cover. As an exhibition, ‘Snake’ again employs these uncanny resemblances, with the repulsive object of the image given a dissonance. Seven photographs of women with snakes are blown up many times beyond life-size and cropped close, abstracting these two living forms into a disturbing symbiosis of glamour. Faces are cut across the middle, showing only the women’s joyous or fond smiles, and emphasising the point of contact where scales meet flesh. The animals are deftly handled or draped around limbs, fingers merging with the tones of the snakes’ tails. In one grainy, pocked image in particular, the snake is easily mistaken for costume jewellery at first glance. In another, scales echo the polka dots of a blouse, something that’s in itself echoed in broad strokes – perhaps ink – on top of the original image. It exaggerates the pattern and nullifies the animal.

The texts applied to these images have the same obliterating effect. Formed via online poetry generators using the words on the back of these found images, they read like suggestive song lyrics, nursery rhymes or disjointed, obsessive statements – “7 FOOT PYTHON/ ON HER HEAD/ SNAKES ARE MY THING/ SHE SAID”. Despite being graphically imposing, the screen-printed colour is slightly translucent, assimilating into the image and assuaging its impact. It’s an effect not dissimilar to looking at an Ed Ruscha painting, where landscape is intercut with slogans: in the same way, it’s hard to have a primordial reaction to an image when engaging with the demands of language.

At the entrance to the exhibition is an ongoing projection of this poetry generation. It is more disjointed and nonsensical than the text in the photographs, mimicking a live stream of half-formed thought. A fraction of this is printed out on till roll opposite the projection and captioned “A poem not by Clare Strand”, ostensibly for the viewer to tear off and take away.

Collecting imagery dispels Strand’s passivity in her reaction to snakes, yet automation reinstates it. The proffered text at first seems like a tangential or even flippant gesture – a diminution of poetry that’s somewhat re-pedestaled when made into a physical object. In practice, however, it becomes a subversion of rationality and audience participation. When uptake is low, the amassed ream of text has the same redolence as the scrapbooked film reels, hosepipes, rubber bands and vacuum cleaners, safely encased in the display case, to the snakes in their vitrine-like box frames. As the end of a process the texts themselves are meaningless, digitally-aped streams of consciousness. The invitation to take is present, but isn’t attractive, in an odd way echoing – both directly and inversely – the artist’s own compulsion to collect what she hates.

The poems are a sample of re-sampled information, a scrambled response that stands in isolation to any emotion or reason. The ongoing presence of this automatic poetry generation is like an over-compensation for the artist’s long-held lack of reason in relation to her subject matter.

Both snake and image are simultaneous tokens of affection and loathing. The antagonism of the artist’s responses – one to squirrel away in personal scrapbooks, another to publish on walls and pages – emphasises the unavoidable degree of inscrutability in found imagery, and toys with its enticing nature.

The cultural symbolism of the snake and its gendered connotations are of course present in this exhibition, and referenced in the exhibition text, yet they seem to be secondary to the work when it is translated from book into installation. The processes and remnants of collection on display seems to be more engaged in the immersion and separation of such a working process, and the visceral effect of visual information over any cultural connotations. At this scale, the second-hand punctum of these photographs seems to prevail over any studium. As viewers, we aren’t necessarily meant to share in Strand’s revulsion, nor are we encouraged to – we just witness different aspects of control and unpredictability as subject, object and viewer.

There is a nihilistic approach, or active negation, to ‘Snake’. The poems appear a word at a time, each one obviously irrelevant to the one before it. They then disappear, suitably forgotten in their own authorless position. The advertisement-sized women are de-humanised, the snakes de-sensitised, to become objects within inscrutable, mediated layers.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast.

Image: Clare Strand, Snake, 2017; image courtesy of Belfast Exposed

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Janine Davidson, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, 9 June – 8 July 2017

Janine Davidson’s ‘Into the gravelly ground’ centres on an unusual site at Turlough Hill, County Wicklow. Here, embedded amidst scenic walks, is Ireland’s only pumped hydro-electricity plant. The film work 53012762459 features this structure, its interior and exterior, its machinery and technology. Also depicted is another reservoir at this same location: Lough Nahanagan, which was formed during the Ice Age. Designed to impinge as little as possible upon the environment, the plant’s main station is buried out of sight behind the mountain. In Davidson’s 22-minute film, the structure is so sleek and streamlined that it appears almost tentative, partaking in the muted tones of the naturally-formed lough. The camera, replete with slight shudder, moves between various viewpoints: we are on a bridge, we catch glimpse of an open door, we are looking at a stunted, top-heavy tower emerging from the water. Importantly, the film makes no distinction between the two formations, and the lens portrays the machines and their inferred functionality with the same quiet, detached observation as it does the rock face and the water.

The structure, indeed, is so pared back and the terrain, for the most part, is so nondescript, that we might be moving through a depopulated dystopia. In this distant or proximate future, the geological and manmade structures seamlessly coexist in formal and even aesthetic terms, entwined on several levels by their shared intent of containment and their mutual relationship with water. Slowly, however, we come to be affected by the stark angles and the constant thrum of electricity. The shots are long and hypnotic, the viewpoints and angles are repeated, and the longer we watch, the more sinister the plant becomes. The effect is purely accumulative, and sees the plant glean a material sentience, perhaps more subversive than we first suspected. Its convergence with the landscape, we understand, is still unfolding.

The exhibition’s title, of course, suggests excavation, and the final location is a vast, subterranean chamber. Lit by artificial light, the textures here seem rougher, and this change in register is marked by a shift in the camera’s treatment: it begins a backward track through a long tunnel, the continuous movement giving us a sense of depth and scale. The film ends with our exit into daylight, and the viewer is left to consider the disconnect between the plant’s public existence as an unobtrusive assembly of cable and steel, and the crudely formed space beneath – a space that can only have been made by burrowing and blasting. The reverberations of its construction cannot help, it seems, but manifest somewhere, and the architectural innovation of the power station comes at the cost of this vast, inelegant intrusion concealed below ground.

This notion of convergence and its repercussions is meted out across the rest of the exhibition, with photographic prints appearing to ask: what are the effects of such structures, long-term and immediate, seen or unseen? How can their more pervasive, insidious aspects be captured? Davidson suggests that the resulting documents will be equipped with a degree of obscurity and distortion, manifesting in material form as well as in the gaze itself.

Taken in the vicinity of Turlough Hill, Davidson’s photographs formally expand on the concealment evidenced in the film. Their surfaces are predominantly shadow, and we see only a blurred and unspectacular segment of landscape, the shape of which conjures the aperture of an outdated optical device – perhaps real, perhaps invented. This sense of alternative technology and collected ‘data’ is compounded in Natura I and Natura II, suspended digital prints that seem to map the range of an unknown intensity, radiating from an epicentre that is black with energy or interference.

Tunnel, a second film work installed in darkness, more explicitly refracts the gaze. Filmed inside Túnel de La Engaña in Northern Spain, the piece consists of a seven-minute loop projected onto a diverging mirror. Throughout is the monotonous sound of footfall crunching on terrain, and this grating repetition, combined with the wilful obstruction of the mirror, creates a sense of endless entrapment and stunted progression (this railway tunnel, in fact, was never completed). Here, it is the convexity of the mirror, with its instant reflection and reversal, that disallows clarity. By circumventing the gaze at this early stage, the work suggests that there is no clear view to uncover; the distortion is both material and ontological.

It seems pertinent that this fruitless footfall is the sole sensory reference to human activity. Across the exhibition, bodies are notably absent. To emphasise so keenly the attempted passage of a body through space seems to suggest that such topographies require alternative methods of encounter. Where environmental distortion manifests as refraction and occlusion, we must reassess the tools at our disposal, at the level of the senses, as well as technological device.

Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin. She was recently announced as recipient of the 2016 VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award 2017. suerainsford.com

Image: Janine Davidson, still from 53012762459.

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Orla de Brí, Eileen Mac Donagh, Cathy Carman, Catherine Greene, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 1 June – 2 September

As the title suggests, ‘Forged Carved Cast’ is an exhibition about the act of making. It is about an intense relationship with materials and processes. The exhibition’s premise is arguably against the run of current practice in that it foregrounds the individual hand of the artist working on discrete objects. This quietly subversive idea is coupled with another: the messy business of life and emotions. Many of the works explore deeply personal narratives, and are rich in metaphor and allusion. On entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters the work of Orla de Brí and Eileen Mac Donagh, installed side by side in the sunlit main gallery space. The works have been sensitively installed and given sufficient room to breathe.

At first glance, Mac Donagh’s work appears to employ a minimalist language which is distinct from the other works in the show. Her stone sculptures present geometric configurations, with evidence of the carving processes fully on display. This dialogue between form and materiality is crucial to reading these works. For example, the corrugated surface of Jackstone 1 is like a rock face marked over thousands of years by rivulets of water, while Jackstone 5, fabricated in distinctive orange marble, appears both as a sculpted and natural object. Jackstones is an ancient game which involves throwing five small stones up into the air and catching them. Mac Donagh’s five sculpted jackstones would take quite a bit of catching! This friction between the implied function of an object and its total unsuitability for that purpose gives these sculptures their power. They also convey interesting ideas about time, not least because jackstones is a game involving split-second reflexes. The sculptures’ symmetry and high quality of finish indicate many hours of labour. The inherent qualities of the stone itself speak to us about the enormity of time.

Orla de Brí’s nearby sculptures have very different qualities. They are assemblages in bronze made from casting found natural forms and combining them with carved and modelled figures. The delicate constructions play with scale; casts of twigs become giant trees when presented alongside tiny figures. The use of bronze patination, highly-polished surfaces and small brightly-coloured elements dramatise the relationship between the figures and the organic elements they are intertwined with. Sculptures like Copse and Outer Scape 2 feature trees growing from the human body, invoking the myth of Daphne and Apollo as poetically recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. In this myth, the terrified Daphne transforms herself into a laurel tree to escape capture by Apollo. De Brí’s sculptures update this mythological imagery, asking us to consider recurrent patterns of human behaviour across history. The idea of transformation – of figures sprouting forth trees or being encased by them – is emotive. Such expressive narratives stand in contrast to the passivity of the figures, who appear like mannequins.

In the next room, there is a cluster of four sculptures and two sets of wall-mounted drawings by Catherine Greene. The works Remnant 1 & 2 and Wolf Remnant depict the animal with skin flayed from its body, yet still retaining its musculature in fragmentary form. Elsewhere, another work in bronze, entitled Angel, depicts a figure who is neither wholly male nor female. Its perforated wings don’t feel like they would lift the figure off the ground, yet the angel’s body appears to be delicately touching down after flight. These ambiguities and inconsistencies make the sculpture work, as do the deliberate references to the small Roman bronzes one might find in museums of antiquities. By appropriating the look and feel of such devotional objects, Greene seems to imbue her sculptures with a magical potential.

Cathy Carman’s six sculptures are the final works in the exhibition. The Burden of Joy and The Burden of Fear are placed directly on the floor and are the largest works in the show. They depict isolated figures on platforms, bent over with their backs pierced violently at the spine with large planes of metal. In Carman’s smaller works, she explores a series of archetypes. Healing features a figure peering over a ledge to observe an identical figure looking upwards, suggesting a reflection on water. The myth of Narcissus is also implied; however, the precarious stilt construction upon which this vignette takes place, and the expressionistic contortions of the figures, make this a very contemporary interpretation of the theme. In Carman’s wall-based bronze Rachel, a figure hangs desperately from the bottom of a ladder at the feet of someone who seems unwilling to help. The complex meaning is left for the viewer to decode. Rich reds, blues and gold are used – colours reminiscent of sacred objects from different eras. Carman’s works combine complex symbolism with formal inventiveness, and, like all the artists featured in this exhibition, she uses the richness of sculptural language to explore spiritual and existential themes.

Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artist Books.

Image: Eileen Mac Donagh, Jackstone; image courtesy of the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo.

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Highlanes Gallery and Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, 24 April – 21 June 2017

For Vitruvius, [1] successful architecture combined “firmness” (structural integrity), “commodity” (function) and “delight” (aesthetic pleasure). While these remain core requirements, contemporary conceptions of the discipline tend to be more fluid. ‘This is Not Architecture’, a two-site group exhibition in Drogheda, animates thinking around the nature of its subject, probing its conventions through considerations of similarity and difference. Curated by Highlanes director Aoife Ruane, the exercise is enhanced by the contextualising environment of the gallery, located in a repurposed Franciscan church. Built in 1829, it combines stained-glass windows, gothic arches, cast-iron columns, a marble altar with late Celtic Revival tabernacle door, and new, unobtrusive glass balustrades. The exhibition sensitises visitors to this blend of features, which activate connections across the works.

Mansion II (2012), by Eithne Jordan, is situated on its own in cloistered half-light, which compounds its depiction of a desolate Dublin streetscape. The eponymous mansion, with blind, unlit windows, is portrayed from a low angle with a slightly skewed perspective. There are no parked cars along the roadway, and the lights in a nearby building are cool and uninviting. If architecture is for human use, this is scarcely evident here. (Indeed humans are absent from all the featured works; although at times their presence is evoked.)

The mood brightens downstairs, where, despite minimalist décor, inherited features inform the visitor experience. While surveying the drawings in Elaine Leader’s Untitled (2016), a roaming reflection from a stained-glass window boosts her effort to “de-stabilise our preconceptions of space and how we move through it”. [2]  These framed works feature an eclectic mix of structures, each adrift against an over-generous ground of workaday paper. Their lack of coherence is replicated in two floor-based groupings of balsa-wood models, fragmentary presentations that highlight the unity of the surrounding milieu. They emulate architectural mock-ups, but appearances deceive; what look like enclosures do not close, while a would-be staircase lies recumbent.

Gerard Byrne’s C-prints, NYCW0335, NYCW1036 and NYCW2530 (1996 – 1999), feature interior spaces in disarray, shot through windows and layered with reflections captured from neon adverts. Like the real-time reflections in Leader’s works, they demonstrate the presence of glass, which sets up tensions between inside and outside, aspirational and actual. There is a sense of choreography across these images. The first is a rundown industrial space, in which a foregrounded stepladder shares taut linearity with the architectural ideal – except that it lies flat (like Leader’s balsa-wood stair), reading as a metaphor for decrepitude. The second shows an unfinished build, with a snake-like formation of electrical cables coiling towards the viewer, while the third features an upright ladder, more stable than the space in which it stands.

Maggie Madden’s Overgrowth (2011) is displayed within Perspex, another transparent medium. A blue optical-fibre construction just 23 centimetres high, it engages a dialogue about geometry, proportion and colour. Its spindly ‘legs’ support an expanding network that thrusts upward and outward, defying plausible architectural translation, while its scribbly reflections on a foam-board base evoke a sense of the organic. Winnie Pun’s similarly small-scale Untitled (Line) (2012) is a C-print of a pastoral, if unremarkable, landscape upon which scarcely perceptible lines are drawn. A closer look reveals faint indications of distant industrial structures that sully the rural archetype. Are these real or trompe l’oeil interventions, and, if real, what might they be?

The questioning continues with the monumental April 22nd (2013) by Stephen Brandes. A visual account of the diary of the fictional Albert Sitzfleisch, [3]  the piece is executed in marker and acrylic on wood-effect lino. The systematic draughtsmanship is that of a proficient technician, but while buildings abound in the composite scene, what is constructed is less bricks and mortar than a fanciful history with textual elements. The juxtaposition of a graphic sunburst (under the radial leading of a stained-glass window) doubly enacts the trope of validating prevailing order by invoking the divine. Elsewhere, its group of gravity-defying wooden planks recalls Maggie Madden’s impossible form, and the smooth-hewn plinth of an equestrian statue bulges with outcrops of rock, its order undermined by nature which – as in Byrne’s images – always fights back.

Next door to Falling out of Standing (2017), an atmospheric and sometimes chilling video installation by Owen Boss, Elaine Hoey’s Blueprint for a Virtual Nomad (2017) provides a virtual reality escape route out of and beyond the prevailing architecture. Physically swapping the Highlanes for a smaller related showing at Droichead Arts Centre builds on this sense of immersion. Its doors and windows are blackened to create a womb-like experience, in which visually connected works by Leader and Jordan – and Colin Martin’s video work Basic Spaces (2010 – 2017) – further explore conceptual and material aspects of place and space. Across the two venues, ‘This is Not Architecture’ exploits the reverberating strengths of a group show to re-present architectural qualities in a productive crosstalk that fosters visitor engagement.

Susan Campbell is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

1. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a first-century AD Roman architect and engineer and author of De Architectura.

2. elaineleader.com.

3. Translation: ‘sitting-flesh’, implying the ability to sit still for long periods.

Image: Installation view including work by Stephen Brandes, Winnie Pun and Elaine Leader at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda.

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ANNE MULLEE REPORTS ON THE CONTRIBUTION OF IRISH ARTISTS AND CURATORS AT THE 57^TH VENICE BIENNALE.

Many of the reviews of curator Christine Macel’s ambitious handling of her two huge, artist-centered ‘Viva Arte Viva!’ exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia have drawn less than fulsome praise, with critics variously citing too many weak works, not enough diversity and flabby contextualisation, among other criticisms. Of course, the 57^th Biennale is far more than a sum of these parts. Perhaps reflecting the increasingly globalised art world, this year sees the inclusion of new pavilions from first-time participants Antigua and Barbuda, Kiribati and Nigeria. As more countries are invited to participate in the event, reflections on nationhood are becoming an increasingly common trope. Virtual utopian state NSK hosts Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt, who has worked with young refugees to run a live passport office, where I secured an NSK State Passport (nskstate.com). In contrast, the southern part of the globe is represented in Venice by the Antarctic Pavilion, which is not so much an imagined state as a state of enquiry. Instigated by Russian artist and biennale stalwart Alexander Pononmarev, the pavilion provides a platform to showcase artworks and projects by various invited artists who participated in the first Antarctic Biennale – a 12-day artistic research expedition undertaken in March 2017 with 100 participants aboard the research vessel Akademik Ioffe.

Irish artist Méadhbh O’Connor, who is currently UCD artist-in-residence at Parity Studios, is among the 15 international artists selected to exhibit at the Antarctic Pavilion. Working in collaboration with UCD’s science department, O’Connor devised an experiment and offered it as an open-source work. Presented as a film work, the piece explores climate change, demonstrating atmospheric reactions on a micro level by mixing milk with different densities of water. Filmed in close-up and displayed on two wall-mounted tablets, the result is magical. Climate-Simulator Phase I and II are tiny worlds evoking the gaseous clouds around the earth, swirling and eddying at the whim of their creator. The film is disseminated via YouTube and social media throughout the biennale, inviting viewers to recreate the experiment at home.

Another cross-state collateral pavilion is the exhibition from the European Cultural Centre. Presented across three venues – Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and the Giardini Marinaressa – more than 250 artists from all over the world respond to the concepts of “time, space and existence” under the title ‘PERSONAL STRUCTURES – open borders’. Irish artist Patricia McKenna has created an installation ….and the world goes on (2017) in the eaves of the Palazzo Mora, where slender trees reach towards its centuries-old rafters, met by others reaching downwards. Illuminated by a neon sign proclaiming “Goes”, this make-shift forest is mounted on neat metal stands (painted in blue, red and black) and is broken up with straight rods. Here and there, small clay human figures seem to leap from tree to tree, while fake foil leaves indicate possible signs of life. It’s oddly dystopian, with the sodium-like glare of neon casting a kind of post-apocalyptic yellowish tinge.

At the Giardini, the Swiss Pavilion is curated by Philip Kaiser, who has somewhat perplexingly given this year’s exhibition the title ‘Women of Venice’, drawing on the pavilion’s own history. Kaiser stated that he aims to “reflect on the history of the pavilion and Switzerland’s contributions to the Venice Biennale from a contemporary perspective, and to initiate new work, specific to this context.” However, one of the works is then framed through the history of the Giacometti brothers: Bruno, the architect who originally designed the pavilion, and Alberto, the acclaimed artist who repeatedly declined invitations to represent Switzerland in that pavilion.

Flora (2017) by Swiss artist Alexander Birchler and Irish artist Teresa Hubbard, is one of the most arresting works at the biennale. The pair made a synchronised, double-sided film installation about the life of Flora Mayo, a former muse of Alberto Giacometti and an artist in her own right. While it seems that every female artist working before 1980 is doomed to be ‘little-known’, ‘undiscovered’ or ‘under-recognised’, Mayo truly did fade into obscurity. This happened by her own hand, as she destroyed much of her work. Born into a wealthy US family, her first marriage ended after she bore her first child. She absconded to Paris and later became friends with Giacometti, who sculpted her. Flora was cut off from her family and forbidden from seeing her daughter ever again. In the 1930s she moved to California, working menial jobs and bringing up her son, David Mayo, born two years after Flora’s return to the USA. Flora’s story is told in the style of a drama-documentary filmed in black and white, which recounts an imagined view of her life in Paris as an artist. In the second film, now in colour, David recalls his mother’s life while we watch sequences of Flora’s lost works being reconstructed and reunited with the bust Giacometti made of her. A quietly powerful and moving work, Flora is a melancholy tribute to its namesake.

The history of national pavilions is a habitual source of inspiration for many biennale curators. The stunning Nordic Pavilion presents ‘Mirrored’, curated by Mats Stjernstedt, which includes work from Swedish artist and IADT graduate Nina Canell. Her explorations of transmission, connection and materials underpin a concrete collection of objects, including sections of transatlantic cable (famously running from Valencia in Kerry to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland) and a delicate tower of medicinal pink gum mastic. The frayed edges of the cable and the slowly oozing gum invoke the gradual erasure of the present.

The Dutch Pavilion is overseen by Irish curator Lucy Cotter. Issues of post-colonialism and modernist social utopias are explored in a site designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1953. Here, Cotter, along with Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, has created ‘Cinema Olanda’ – a series of enquiries into the Netherlands’ perceived reputation as a progressive nation. A counter-narrative offers three video works and a pair of still images to introduce a string of observations from the ‘old Dutch’, who discuss some of the country’s new nationals, which include post-colonial Surinamese and refugees from Indonesia. The language used is frequently clumsy and, to the ‘enlightened’ ear, it borders on racist. Throughout the eponymous film, Holland’s newer population are flippantly referred to as ‘Indos’, while the language of the Surinamese is described as ‘violent’, assuming connotations of aggression and physical violence.

It’s hardly a revelation that such attitudes exist, though van Oldenborgh offers counterbalance through her exploration of social experiments and redrawn narratives instigated by artists, activists and undocumented migrants. These take place in various locations including a church in Rotterdam and architect Aldo van Eyck’s Tripolis building in Amsterdam, linking these utopian urban ideals with those of the town-planner Lotte Stam-Beese, and capturing snatches of lesser-known histories. We learn about the first black member of the US Communist Party, Otto Huiswoud, a Surinamese revolutionary who organised workers around the world and lived much of his life in the Netherlands. We also gain insights into various forms of domestic activism and squatting that took place in the Netherlands from the 1960s to the present. Van Oldenborgh resists the construction of neat parallels and chronicles, instead allowing the viewer to listen in to the recollections and recounted experiences of black, white and brown Dutch citizens.

No resolutions are offered, a sensitivity that is missing in some of the other works presented at the biennale seeking to address contemporary concerns around post-colonialism and migration. An example comes from the usually pitch-perfect Olafur Eliasson, whose ‘Green Light’ project occupies the largest space at the Giardini’s central pavilion (curated by Macel). It calls on migrants in Venice to hold workshops making geometric lamps, which can be bought for €250. There is a decidedly uncomfortable ‘human zoo’ aspect to this spectacle, which recalls distinctly capitalist social entrepreneurship rather than radical collective, especially when it emerges that the workshop facilitators are unpaid.

But perhaps even this is not quite as borderline offensive as Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar/A Sacred Place at the Arsenale. Here, a vast netted tent – recently referred to as a “chill out space” – houses actual live shamans from South America. Macel seems keen on this kind of cultural appropriation, which runs through both of her exhibitions and feels excruciatingly naive. For all the vaunting of a biennale led by artists, the curator’s hand is decidedly heavy.

Berlin-based Irish artist Mariechen Danz presents her installation Womb Tomb (2017) at the Arsenale. A previous performance in the space is evidenced on-screen, while wall-mounted footprints and a thermoactive sculpture variously depict the ‘primordial theatre’ of the human body in a stage-set fabricated from locally-sourced mud. Unstinting in its physicality, Danz’s corporeal practice recalls the visceral, second-wave feminist explorations of artists like Carolee Schneemann or Rebecca Horn. At the Irish Pavilion, Jesse Jones’s mesmerisingly powerful video and performance installation Tremble, Tremble, curated by Tessa Giblin, was widely well-received. The towering multi-screen video installation invites us to look upon Olwen Fouéré’s primordial crone and quake at her power. Elsewhere, amidst the often-overwhelming volume of work on show throughout the city, it’s gratifying to see such strong contributions from fellow Irish artists and those we claim for ourselves.

Anne Mullee is a curator, researcher and art writer. She is currently curator of The Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

Images: Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Flora, 2017; synchronized double-sided film installation with sound; 30-min, loop; Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Ugo Carmen, courtesy of the artists, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin. Nina Canell, Gum Drag and Brief Syllable, 2017; Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet. Jesse Jones, Tremble Tremble installation view, 2017; film, sculpture, moving curtain, sound and light scenography; Venice Biennale.

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