JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO BRIAN MAGUIRE ABOUT HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION, ‘WAR CHANGES ITS ADDRESS: THE ALEPPO PAINTINGS’.

Joanne Laws: ‘The Aleppo Paintings’ depict the crumbling buildings of the war-torn Syrian city. Can you describe your motivation for this work?

Brian Maguire: I was very interested in the Syrian Civil War. I was reading texts by Patrick Cockburn, which made me think about how the Irish Civil Rights Movement was militarised and sectarianised. It became about Catholics and Protestants and was taken over by the military, yet it began as a civil rights movement, just as the rebellion in Syria began as a peaceful movement and very quickly became militarised by armed gangs. It also became sectarianised, meaning that people of different faiths could only live within certain areas. With these paintings, I’m not making any statement about who did what to whom, because I don’t know. This series evolved from a painting I did for the Kerlin show in 2016, of a destroyed apartment block in Aleppo. The motivation was to finish the argument.

JL: At such a large scale, the paintings feel very immersive – was that your intention?

BM: Yes, that’s necessary. The Paris painting studio I’ve used since 2010 is big enough to make work of this scale. You collect the information and you come back. What is the information? Well first of all, your memory – I always think that memory is the best editor. I took hundreds of photographs that were slowly whittled down to just a few, to be blown up and printed. This system seems to work for me.

JL: In contrast to your previous series – which focused on the refugee crisis – these scenes are bereft of people. Why is that?

BM: It’s because the place is bereft of people. There’s a war there, with not just two sides – more like 22 sides. People are being bombed out of their homes, so that’s why the refugees are coming across the Mediterranean Sea. When I finished the 2016 series, I realised that if I wanted to do more, I had to go there and immerse myself in the place, if only for a short period of time. I painted the bodies of three Mexicans who had been shot by criminal traffickers while attempting to cross into the US. What was interesting about that painting is that when people looked at it, they said it reminded them of the image of the Syrian child washed up on the beach, but the painting had actually been made six months earlier.

JL: With the title of this show, ‘War Changes Its Address’, are you implying that the narratives of global warfare are very much transferable?

BM: I have years of experience in civil war conflict – I was involved in the one in Northern Ireland, with the Tamils in Sri Lanka, in Brazil I observed an undeclared civil war between rich and poor and Mexico was similar. In these circumstances, I don’t feel free. Really what I wanted to show was the effects of war – full stop. I was horrified by that piece with the ceramic poppies to commemorate WWI, because it excluded the German and Austrian dead. That artwork was still fighting the war, suggesting that only our dead counted. I fail to understand WWI in nationalist terms; for me, it was working class men on both sides. If you look at these paintings, you wouldn’t know who did the attack or who placed the explosives into each building. This is purposeful because I just wanted to stand back, in the same way that I can stand back from WWI and just see it as an unmitigated disaster. In 20 years time, if I’m still alive, I guarantee you I’ll be reading about some other city, bombed to a fucking tinder box.

JL: It’s horrifying to observe responses from certain western countries, who profit from the sale of arms to these regions yet are the first countries to close their borders to refugees. Does this kind of geopolitics influence your research?

BM: There are two major arms fairs in Paris and London each year. My attention was drawn to them because the Irish Quakers who demonstrate outside these fairs often sleep in my Paris studio while they’re visiting. They brought me back the arms catalogues and one in particular struck me – a top-of-the-range personnel carrier. The text was terribly revealing, stating that this personnel carrier could carry nine “units”. We’d call them people – maybe soldiers – but the production people who are selling this machine describe them as “units”. Now, if they can do that with their own, what chance do civilians have? This is the language of war and the people who sell into war. There are no victims because there are no people in this world, just cash. So that was very illuminating for me.

JL: Is it true that in Mexico, you saw rifles similar to those used in the north in the 1970s?

BM: Oh yes that’s true, but it was more than that – it was the whole military infrastructure. The first night I drove over the border, I stayed in the Ramada Hotel in Juarez. The NGO I was working with advised me that this was the safest place, because there were no cops staying there. The cartels have since taken over that hotel. The first thing I saw was an open-backed truck full of soldiers. There were also black Land Rover pickups, with police in black uniforms in the back, and machine guns mounted above the cabins. In Belfast, in the 1970s, that’s how the British Army arrived, and when the RUC fired on the Shankill or Falls Road, it was from those kinds of vehicles. I said: “I know this kind of place – I’ve been here before!” So it was familiar – I almost felt safe!

JL: For me, Police Graduation (Juarez) (2014) remains one of the most important Irish paintings of the twenty-first century. Where did the image come from? 

BM: I got the image while doing a residency in a newsroom in Juarez. I asked the editor if I could go through his archives and I found photographs documenting the graduation ceremony of the protective police. I recovered the image from my own archive years later, around the time that 43 students were disappeared and killed in Mexico. It’s incredible, because they were just trainee teachers demonstrating about the law being changed. I saw many demonstrations while I was in Mexico – they are normally very banal and cheerful, like fucking carnivals. But it became very violent for them that day, and I knew this painting explained why. It’s unbelievable that a fascist salute would be used by cops.

JL: Did the strong social conscience that underpins your practice come from your work in prisons?

BM: I was always involved in communist ideology as a young person. I got teaching in prisons on behalf of NCAD, so ended up mostly dealing with incarcerated working-class men, sometimes women. For me, Ireland was very simple – if you were from a particular place, the chances were high that you’d end up in jail, but if you were from another area, chances were, you’d go to university. These were the major institutions of the state; one for the lower classes and one for the middle classes. I began to see society in this way, based on what I learned from the Marxists, in terms of class structure. I didn’t go to prisons in Damascus and I wouldn’t say I’ve completed my research until I have.

JL: You have previously described painting as a “gesture of solidarity” or as “an act of revenge” for some form of injustice. Can you explain this?

BM: Remember we talked about memory being an editor? Well, for a long time, the feelings that returned to me were feelings of anger, so this became the source of the work. I get very fucking angry when I see something like this. How did those people manage to get here? Why did they kill this girl? It’s a separate question as to who the anger is for, but that’s what I meant when I said that most art comes from a spirit of revenge; sometimes love, but mostly revenge.

JL: Perhaps you’re not just documenting the aftermath of war, but recording atrocities in the public memory?

BM: There is an archival and forensic nature to this work. Justice failed the Jews in Europe and every text I’ve read emphasises that their story be told in the future. And who does the telling? Artists. When asked why Ireland had so many writers, Becket said: “when you are in the last ditch, there’s nothing left to do but sing.” The only thing left is to ensure that the story is told. I see myself as a storyteller, as a contemporary history painter. The logic of the work rests in the telling of these stories.

Brian Maguire lives and works in Dublin and Paris. His exhibition, ‘War Changes its Address: The Aleppo Paintings’, continues at IMMA until 6 May. Accompanying seminars will take place on 1 March and 27 April. exploring the role of photojournalism and activism in regions of conflict.

imma.ie

Image credits:
Brian Maguire, Police Graduation (Juarez), 2014, acrylic on linen, 300 x 400 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Brian Maguire, Aleppo 3, 2017, acrylic on linen, 210 x 170 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Brian Maguire, Apartments Aleppo, 2016, acrylic on linen, 290 x 270 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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KIAN BENSON BAILES DISCUSSES HIS SCULPTURAL AND DIGITAL FABRICATION METHODS.

I became interested in identity politics in second year of my Visual Arts Practice degree at IADT Dún Laoghaire. Terms like ‘appropriation’ had begun to penetrate the pop culture sphere, which caused me to evaluate the work I was making in terms of my own cultural perspective. My practice has become an extension of the types of socio-political commentary that have become increasingly prevalent throughout the internet via social media and the public sphere. The internet is a particularly pertinent platform because it offers itself as a vehicle for research, while also providing its own kind of spatial interventions.

Historical art movements such as Arte Povera encapsulated ideologies regarding art and the everyday, defined by Italian art historian, Germano Celant, in terms of people against systems. The system he speaks of falls in line with many concerns regarding present and future assimilation and commodification of queer bodies. When Celant states (with regards to art production) that “each of his gestures has to be absolutely consistent with his behaviour in the past and has to foreshadow his future”, he highlights a tendency towards defining intangible ideas, people and gestures relative to historical contexts – a concern widely shared by queer theorists.¹ Such concepts resonate with my own interest in making and are particularly relevant to postmodern notions of the everyday, whereby computers and digital spaces have become primary models of communicating and recording, generating vast archives of personal data – uploaded to clouds and easily accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection.

For me, the repositioning of these historical narratives inside a queer framework has become interesting, based on a capacity to subvert and to create new narratives. Where queer theory practices see understandings of the term as relative to history, it is constantly being defined and redefined as that narrative progresses. The type of assemblage techniques that underpin my two-dimensional research and digital collages, echo the same process interests found within my sculptural assemblages. Compounding the two approaches has expanded my ideas about image deconstruction and reconstruction. Judy Chicago’s installation, The Dinner Party (1979), is a pointed reference for my work, based on how the piece wrote a new historical narrative by placing a certain value on kitsch over the aesthetic object. Documenting the process of making a physical sculpture and deconstructing it through collage techniques; reconstructing and printing this form as another physical object – this amounts to an aesthetic investigation of how we read images and objects. It also questions whether the documentation of process embodies the transience of queer culture more apparently than a finished artwork.

New sculptural works (including An Urban Phenomenon and Clobber Verses) developed for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2017: ‘They Call Us the Screamers’ allowed me to engage in the types of community politics that ran concurrent with the contextualisation of the exhibition. Across my practice, building sculptural installations has always been typified by methodologies that feel queer, through the use of found materials and ready-made objects. Incorporating large-scale prints into my sculptural installations for the first time allowed an engagement with pictorial space that felt authentic to my background in painting. The installations for TULCA’s Connacht Tribune Print Works venue were built from a range of materials including plastic, wood, plaster, papier-mâché and cardboard. These material associations allowed me to erect spaces that fostered associations with historical art movements (such as Minimalism and Pop Art), as well as capitalist mot

ifs that intersect with queer theory, engaging the viewer’s relational co-presence with objects in space.

Exhibition production has become an important extension of my studio practice. If artworks already exist, or are made for a specific purpose or setting, they are often repurposed or recycled afterwards. Exhibition-making exists as a platform for my ideas to be realised in a space outside of the studio. Whether a success or failure, this process allows making to be tangential and revaluated once art objects return to the studio. This treatment of materials is in direct conversation with the ‘precious culture’ surrounding artworks – and indeed the preciousness and perceived hierarchies of art materials themselves – and is only further compounded by my own interest in the ephemeral vernacular of queer culture.

I am currently interested in expanding my use of digital collage – a process that, for me, denotes a fundamental compositional principle, but also the origins of symbols, motifs and visual representation. Moving the rhetoric into a digital sphere only furthers this conversation about how images are consumed, based on contemporary audiences’ participation in internet culture. When Hito Steyerl suggested that the ‘poor image’ mocks the promises of digital technology, it reminds us of our expectations regarding systems and the kinds of representation we readily and intimately consume.² Digital art seems to be more expedient, because it addresses a viewer’s concerns more directly, but the medium interests me because it proposes many of the same concerns as sculpture. The dimensional concerns of the medium are investigated through my use of AutoCAD softwares, where virtual spatial interventions are possible and scale is implied through screens and projections (as opposed to physical objects), which requires a different set of demands from viewers in this regard. Building images using software like Photoshop, interests me because of the self-documenting processes that the software undertakes on its own. Using the preset software moulds and templates available is like having access to a digital ready-made, which comes with its own set of rules and limitations specific to the medium.

I am interested in notions of sculpture as architecture or public artwork, based on expectations of audience participation, as proposed by Swiss artist and architect, Max Bill. Bill questioned whether, at a time when “sculpture had become closely identified with the object, with something seen rather than experienced as a presence, a sculpture could still constitute a monument”.³ In this way, the work becomes more performative and has direct concerns with the body politic – habitually a very queer space. Arguably, successful queer art practices have become even more engaging when interpreted through the lens of socially-engaged critical frameworks, like Relational Aesthetics. Addressing the audience is a more practical concern that has emerged in a recent body of work, currently showing as a part of ‘Like Me’ with Eleanor McCaughey and in The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, until 31 March. This work is entirely framed by digital processes and plays with expectations regarding the origins of these processes. Images built inside a resolution usually encountered on a screen have been enlarged to the scale of a billboard. Similarly, images encountered amid fleeting online conditions are materialised in a more formal and traditional sizing in the exhibition context.

Kian Benson Bailes is an artist based in Sligo.

Notes
¹Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War’, Flash Art International No 5, 1967.
²Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux Journal #10, November 2009.
³Andrew Causey, Sculpture since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press: 1998).

Image credit:
Kian Benson Bailes, Clobber Verses, 2017, mixed media installation; Connacht Tribune Print Works, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2017; image courtesy the artist

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CHRIS HAYES DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF ‘PERIODICAL REVIEW’ – A LONG-RUNNING CURATORIAL PROJECT BY PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS.

To write about the Periodical Review – an annual exhibition, now in its seventh iteration – is to repeat and confront the curatorial project’s own questions and provocations. Hosted, organised and partially curated by the not-for-profit artist-run space, Pallas Projects/Studios in Dublin, Periodical Review aims to enliven the practice of contemporary exhibition-making by reimaging the gallery space as a magazine. The exhibition title, in itself, echoes this publishing endeavour, suggesting something occurring at regular intervals. Periodical Review offers a unique opportunity to look back on the preceding year in Irish art, by showcasing artworks that have previously been exhibited nationally. Holding an annual survey of contemporary art is certainly a provocative proposition. A list of selected artworks immediately queries what isn’t present, what has been left out and by what authority?

The format has remained largely intact from the beginning. Working alongside Pallas Projects’ directors, Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy, invited artists, writers or curators put together a selection of significant artworks exhibited on the island of Ireland during the previous 12 months. This review format calls to mind the Turner Prize – an annual survey of timely and significant moments or practices in contemporary art, within the geographical boundary of the UK. There are key distinctions, of course. At a basic level, the Turner Prize is framed around an individual award, while Periodical Review is a ‘review-styled’ group exhibition. More significant is the fundamental question of institutional weight. The Turner Prize was originally founded by a group of collectors in association with the Tate. Today, it is a monumental event, receiving major corporate sponsorship, celebrity endorsement and widespread coverage in the mainstream media. In contrast, Periodical Review is a grassroots and artist-led initiative, but they share an archival ambition, to remember to reflect on what came before. In an art world captivated by the next up-and-coming artist, commercial gallery trends, or ever-expanding auction records, the desire to reflect upon what mattered and why, during a given timeframe, is both critically challenging and wildly nourishing.

Periodical Review began on 19 September in 2011. From the outset, the core idea of reimaging the gallery space as a magazine was present, with subsequent exhibitions rarely deviating from this original format. Explaining how the process works, Gavin Murphy stated: “We have an initial meeting with selectors early in the year to discuss the parameters and structure, and again around September for the editorial meeting. Generally, each selector suggests approximately seven possible artists who are discussed and decided upon. Often there are instances where an artist is proposed by more than one selector.”

In terms of the rationale for what gets selected, and the motivations and limitations surrounding an end-of-year review, Murphy added: “the space provided [in magazines] is always too brief to allow for anything meaningful; you might get one image per writer, so they always fall short. That fed into the structure of Periodical Review – multiple selectors choosing a number of artists or projects, writing a short accompanying text, but also showing the actual work. That’s partly why it’s described as ‘not a group exhibition per se’. Selectors talk about works as much as showing them, with the works intended to act as ‘texts’ as much as artworks. In that sense, documentation or publications have been included alongside artworks in the exhibition, as opposed to being auxiliary elements.”

Periodical Review #1 and PR#2 took place in the Pallas gallery space, while an offsite project was developed at John Fallon’s bar for PR#3. It wasn’t until PR#4 that the exhibition expanded beyond Dublin, initially taking place in Pallas, before being reshaped for a second iteration in Ormston House, Limerick. For the fifth edition in 2015, the exhibition expanded across multiple spaces, occupying both Pallas and the NCAD gallery. The funding behind the project has had a similarly varied history, receiving support from the Arts Council and Dublin City Council at times, as well as self-funding, crowdfunding and an auction, with proceeds from the sale of artworks helping to support both Pallas and the artists involved.

It was during the sixth iteration in 2016 that Periodical Review truly began to flex the weight of its ambition. Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Pallas Projects/Studios, the PR#6 survey extended beyond the usual 12 months to encompass the previous 20 years. Pallas co-directors Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy weren’t as directly involved with the selection as they had been previously. Instead, Brian Duggan, Sarah Glennie, Jenny Haughton and Declan Long took the lead. Explaining the reasoning behind this, Gavin Murphy said: “In that instance we decided that our input would be to invite four selectors who we thought had made important contributions within different fields of the Irish visual arts over the previous 20-year-period, concurring with the timespan of Pallas.” Discussing the line-up for PR#6, Aidan Dunne wrote that the selection “encompasses a broad range of projects and history with some ingenuity”.¹ Both PR#6 and PR#7 were covered in Frieze magazine, suggesting that the project’s dynamism continues to draw considerable critical attention.

Periodical Review is clearly growing each year, in terms of venues, critical reach and reception. PR#7 was selected by the collaborative duo RGKSKSRG (Rachel Gilbourne and Kate Strain) – the first occasion that a curatorial collective has contributed to Periodical Review. This recent history lends momentum to the project, while also highlighting a demand for upcoming iterations to continue to expand upon and evolve the format.

Periodical Review is difficult to separate from the history of Pallas itself, or from some of their other major projects to date. Founded in 1996, Pallas Projects/Studios is like so many other independent artist-led spaces across Ireland – perpetually shaped by ‘crisis’ and perceived gaps in the cultural infrastructure. A recent project from Pallas is their major publication, Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, which looks at the conditions, organisational models, and role of artist-led practice within contemporary art and society. Murphy articulates a recent history of artist-led practice in Dublin, beginning with a wave of activity in the late 60s, a recognition of the need for greater infrastructure in the 80s, followed by a surge in activity in the 90s and 2000s, by artists who chose to remain in the country, due to improving economic conditions. Periodical Review is deeply embedded in the trajectory of artistic practice and in the fluctuating infrastructure of recent decades. Just as independent projects and artist-led activity filled in the infrastructural gaps, Periodical Review established something of a rival critical platform, as a counter to other institutional frameworks. By reflecting upon the Irish arts ecosystem, Periodical Review, like Artist-Run Europe, probes the legacy and the archival contributions of Irish art practice.

During the seven years to date of Periodical Review, the selectors and artists involved have offered vibrant insights into contemporary practice, both emerging and established. Looking back over previous exhibitions, many of the names will be familiar, as these artists have since developedtheir practice substantially over the years. The exhibitions where artworks were originally shown, also provide another archive of contemporary Irish practice, bringing numerous galleries, curators and periods into this conversation. Establishing this expansive network is a noble legacy, but it is also daring and audacious due to the necessity of its partisanship. Crucially, Murphy explains, “Periodical Review was never intended to be a ‘best of’ yearly honour roll, or some kind of resolution of things, but a collaborative dialogue, an active discussion of where things stand now”. Faced with the enormity of 12 months of activity across the entire island, each selection committee is forced to make choices based on the practical limitations of the gallery. In doing so, each iteration of Periodical Review has a charged and dynamic energy that continues to elaborate upon its growing legacy.

Chris Hayes is an art critic based in London and Assistant Editor at CIRCA Art Magazine.

Notes:
¹Aidan Dunne ‘Building a Pallas: 20 years of modern art in Ireland’, Irish Times, 13 December 2016.

Image credits:
Installation view, Periodical Review #7, 2017, selected by Gavin Murphy, Mark Cullen, Rachael Gilbourne & Kate Strain; image courtesy Pallas Projects/Studios.

Installation view, Periodical Review #5 (2015) selected by Anne Kelly, Daniel Jewesbury, Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen. L-R works by Kevin Lindsay, Liam Crichton; image by Louis Haugh, courtesy Pallas Projects/Studios and NCAD Gallery.

Installation view, Periodical Review #5 (2015) selected by Anne Kelly, Daniel Jewesbury, Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen.L-R works by Rachael Campbell-Palmer, Eilis McDonald, Lucy McKenna, Eva Roth; image by Louis Haugh, courtesy Pallas Projects/Studios and NCAD Gallery.

Dennis McNulty, A cloud of soft equations, 2014. Series of performances staged in the former Pathology Department of UCD, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in association with the Irish Architecture Foundation. Part of Periodical Review #3 (2013) selected by Michele Horrigan, Matt Packer, Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy; image courtesy Dennis McNulty.

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RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin, 19 January – 11 February 2018

In a TED talk entitled ‘How architecture helped music evolve’, the musician David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) suggested that the relationship between architecture and music is directly formative. Byrne argued that the spatial and architectural features of a venue specifically influence the sonic and acoustic characters of the music performed there. In other words, American punk band, Black Flag, are to the small hardcore club what AC/DC are to the open-air area. If we imagine visual art to be engaged in a similarly formative relationship with its venues of display, it is interesting to consider whether Niall de Buitléar’s exhibition, ‘Push and Pull’, is specifically informed by the spatial particulars of its host venue, the RHA Ashford Gallery. According to the press release, Byrne’s attempts to “create [musical] compositions that were multi-layered and non-hierarchal” influenced de Buitléar’s work. Comprising 14 paintings and a small sculpture, the exhibition celebrates, with a calm but persistent rigour, the formative logic of interior worlds and the differences that emerge through formal repetition.

Moving from painting to painting, the eye instinctively traces grey and white dancing lines, synced like spinning vinyl to the tune of the circle. Over tar-black lacquered canvas boards, spools of lines seem drawn to various axes of convergence. At times these spools appear like illustrative X-rays of some physical mechanism, yet their stillness is undermined by a persistent sense of fragile flux. The formal logic of mark-making is inseparable from the human hand that intuitively executes it and these wonderful spooling forms, though measured, seem to bloat and burst into the unoccupied territories of the black canvas void. At its most abstract, the work suggests inorganic permanence. There is a sense that these geometric abstractions are to remain repeatable and eternal. But a quiet dichotomy keeps reverberating, and somehow the charming variations that emerge seem at odds with any real sense of historicity.

In his 1966 essay, Entropy and the New Monuments, Robert Smithson pointed to artworks that he felt might cause us to forego linear conceptions of the future.¹ In the works cited, perishable materials often took precedence over those that might invoke a sense of canonical permanence. As a result, these ‘new monuments’ demonstrated for Smithson the material principles of entropy, and like his own Spiral Jetty (1970), they were built against time. In a diagrammatic sense, de Buitléar’s handling of materials echoes the “backward looking futures” of Smithson’s new monuments. The consistencies of de Buitléar’s marks staccato with interruptions in the paint’s distribution. In instances where the paint is drawn too thin, the unforgiving black void peers through, placing this humble and measured chiaroscuro into a state of dynamic and entropic precariousness.

Moving away from the flatness of the canvas, we are confronted with a sculptural iteration of these recurring pictorial forms – a small, geometric sculpture, 3D-printed in incremental layers of white acrylic. It isn’t long before the imagination adds scale and dimension. With ease we can conceive this sculpture as an architectural model for some much larger intervention in the landscape, something like Will Insley’s utopian architectural project ONECITY – one of the new monuments cited by Smithson in 1966. With Insley’s structure in mind, subterranean and hidden expansions of these forms suddenly seem conceivable beneath plinths and behind walls. It’s as if the sculpture generates a renewed viewing of the paintings: with some new-found topographical character, they seem to map seismic trenches scarred deep into the surface of encounter. This sequence of engagement seems to be imposed through a practical necessity though, rather than direct artistic intention. The exhibition’s cohesive thrust, overall, remains formally lateral, rather than sequential. Understated but monumentally resolute, ‘Push and Pull’ ensures – much like the spooling marks contently dancing the circle – that the emphasis returns, over and over again, to the form.

Philip Kavanagh is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

Notes:
¹Robert Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, Artforum, June 1966.

Image credit:
Niall de Buitléar, Push and Pull, 2016, acrylic on canvas boards, 20 cm diameter; image courtesy the artist

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Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 13 January – 25 February 2018

Does a ‘feminine aesthetic’ exist? It’s a divisive hypothesis (and a possibly unanswerable question) that came to mind upon viewing Jane O’Malley’s exhibition, ‘Black & White’, at the Butler Gallery. The fifty pieces shown included several etchings and aquatint prints, as well as sketches in an array of media, including chalk, Conté crayon, pastel, oil, pen and ink. As the title implies, this body of work is monochromatic, although a couple of pieces display slight intrusions of yellow. O’Malley’s ease with her wide range of media is immediately apparent. Lines are loose, fluid and used sparingly but effectively. There is a pleasing juxtaposition of sparse details – a simple outline suffices to suggest a jug, a straw, a bowl of cherries – with repetition used to add substance and pattern, as in the fields and flora of her Chinese brush drawings. O’Malley also has numerous techniques in her repertoire; these include uninterrupted fine line, scratching and removing marks. In At Michael Joe’s with Bob Quinn the Dog, 1984, she achieves an extraordinary luminosity in her rendering of the pots, bottles and jugs, through a combination of such techniques.

Landscape provides the subject matter for some of the works, which presents something of a conundrum. The lack of colour makes it difficult to identify aspects we tend to associate with landscapes – the season, the time of day, the weather – although, in Isla Graciosa, 1996, O’Malley effectively manages to create the impression of wind and movement through the use of angular lines. However, it is hard to perceive what these pieces are ‘about’. Is this due to a failure on the part of the artist, or a result of the viewer’s preconceived notions? A further disappointment in these pieces is the cartoonish rendering of sheep, an instance where O’Malley’s sureness of line seems to falter. On the other hand, her more narrative works demonstrate a confident, even cavalier, treatment of perspective. Only someone who has honed their drawing technique over many years can break the rules as joyfully as she does.

A number of pieces tenderly feature her late husband (the artist Tony O’Malley) as subject: at work, rest, or engaged in household chores. Others depict domestic interiors, rendered very simply, often with doors or windows opening onto a lush world of vegetation, with birds being a regular feature. The contrast between the pared-back interiors and the detailed exteriors is intriguing and poses questions about the artist’s perception of her world. Does she feel herself to be constrained within a sparse domestic environment, compelled to look out onto a richer, more substantive world? Or is this what it is to be female? O’Malley’s work is not thematically or theoretically challenging. The subject matter is domestic, comprising depictions of her husband, home and environment. For the most part, the artist evades the viewer, visible in only one self-portrait, as she draws the image she sees in the mirror. But even here she presents herself at a remove from the viewer, choosing to be described just as “self”.

‘Black & White’ is not presented as a body of finished work, but as a series of drawings taken from O’Malley’s sketchbooks and notebooks over nearly forty years. It is therefore not reasonable to ask of them what they were never intended to provide. These pieces ably demonstrate the importance of drawing and of drawing regularly as part of art practice. They offer a comprehensive checklist of media and technique, without a dependence on colour. But by being placed on public view, they are contextualised as artworks. In this context, I wonder what they are telling us about women and art. Is it still possible, desirable or acceptable to talk about a ‘feminine aesthetic’? O’Malley’s work is not about these issues and therefore cannot address them. But provoking them – well, that’s another matter.

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

Image credit:
Jane O’Malley, Summer Evening Seal Cottage – 9th June ’74, 1974, pen and ink on paper, 20 x 28 cm; © Jane O’Malley, photograph by Ignatius O’Neill, courtesy Butler Gallery.

Jane O’Malley, Christmas Eve, 1989. Conté, pen and pastel on paper, 56.5 x 76 cm; © Jane O’Malley, photograph by Ignatius O’Neill, courtesy Butler Gallery.

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Ards Arts Centre, Newtownards, 1 – 24 February 2018

A series of black and white digital photographs by Belfast-based artist, Mariusz Smiejek, was presented in the Georgian Gallery in Ards Arts Centre. The small-scale photographs depicted women within the natural and domestic landscapes of the Ards Peninsula. Strong tonal contrasts played a part in some of these images, whereas others had a softer tonal range. The depth of field also varied; sometimes Smiejek concentrated solely on the subject, while at other times the background was also depicted in detail. The artist explained: “I focus on the person rather than their surroundings, capturing the person rather than things”. That said, the objects surrounding the women also seemed to have life resonance. Most of the photographs intimately narrated the women’s facial expressions but a few also conveyed their physicality, stance and their attitudes towards the camera, with some seeming more self-conscious than others. Yet my favourite photographs captured a sense of energy, such as wind tugging at women’s hair. Somehow, this elemental force brought a youthfulness and honesty to the women’s smiles. Smiejek stated that “it takes time to become part of the person’s life… I like to spend as many hours or days as possible”, suggesting that, ideally, projects need to be quite durational.

Also presented within the gallery was a series of small digital colour photographs taken by these women, as part of the ‘Back to the Future’ programme organised by the Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast. Jane McComb, an artist and resident of Ards Peninsula, worked with the group over two days. Initially, the group explored the writings of Irish poet, Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963). MacNeice was born in Belfast, educated at Merton College, Oxford, and taught for a time at Bedford College, London – the UK’s first higher education college for women. He is buried alongside his mother in Christ Church, Carrowdore, on the Ards Peninsula. The women used McComb’s camera to capture a range of scenes including sea-washed rocks, a soaring black-headed gull, quiet country lanes, a derelict school in Portaferry, smiling people, and a number of graveyards with awkwardly titling headstones. Snippets of MacNeice’s poetry were placed next to these colourful photographs.

A physical distinction was made between Smiejek’s work and the women’s own visual exploration of their landscape. For instance, Nuala McKnight was depicted by Smiejek in front of her elaborate doll’s house. However, the photograph she took (of a knitted teddy bear, sitting on a stonewall in Portaferry) seemed rather disconnected, in terms of placement within the gallery, as did her selected quote: “I cannot deny my past to which myself is wed, the woven figure cannot undo its thread”. Similarly, Mary Mageean was depicted in Smiejek’s documentation hugging her grandchild, yet her own photograph documents Strangford Lough, thematically supported by her chosen MacNeice quote: “Round the corner was always the sea. Our childhood”. The two bodies of work – Smiejek’s portraits and the women’s own photographs – were further distinguished through the creation of two separate catalogues and the use of different titles: ‘Women of the Peninsula’ and ‘A Sense of Place’ respectively. In my view, the two bodies of photography enhanced each other, as the viewer gradually gleaned a sense of the women. Nevertheless, it required time to connect the disparate elements of portraiture, text and photographic self-reflection.

Mairead McCormack’s concurrent exhibition, ‘Fragmented Realities’, was showing in the Sunburst Gallery. McCormack is a textile artist who juxtaposes artefacts from the past within a collage format. In the gallery, eight small-scale works were pinned to two facing walls, comprising four paper collage works and four textile pieces incorporating print and embroidery on linen. The textile works were meticulously hand embroidered but had raw, fraying edges, creating a sense of incompleteness. The works had the quality of pages from a sketchbook – imperfect, but with suggestions of interconnectedness lurking beneath their flimsy façades. McCormack stated that, as an artist, she aims to revive and sustain the labour-intensive processes of the textile tradition. With ‘Fragmented Realities’, she attempted to explore the effects of modern society on shifting notions of craft and the handmade.

Kathryn Nelson is an artist based in County Tyrone.

Image credit:
Mariusz Smiejek, Abigail Dunn, Cloughey, 2017; photograph © Mariusz Smiejek

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Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, 8 February – 1 April 2018

‘Sustainable Futures’ is an ambitious exhibition currently showing at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, County Cork. The show acts as a focal point for a multifaceted collaborative project bringing contemporary art practice into dialogue with scientific research on sustainability, through a series of talks and events involving artists, the scientific community and local youth groups.

Upon entering the East Gallery, the first thing we encounter is David Thomas Smith’s large-scale aerial photographs of the Chrysler factory and Silicon Valley, taken between 2009 and 2010. These are Google Map composites, developed using a meticulous process that works against the low quality of the source material. Smith has photographed tiny sections of the Google Map images, reconstructing them like a jigsaw, so that the images stay sharp as the scale is increased. With a background in documentary photography, the artist shows us detail that wouldn’t normally be visible. The photographs deal with the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ – referring to the geological age of mankind who, in one hundred years, have affected the natural world more drastically than natural processes have in 1,000 years.

Continuing the theme of protracted and accelerated time, are new works by Sarah Lincoln including Skin Contact (2017), a series of eight wall-mounted pottery plates. Some of the surfaces incorporate spiral patterns, which makes them look like fossils or archaeological remnants. Despite having the appearance of relics from the past, these objects are spray-painted in futuristic silvers and golds, causing them to oscillate between the past and the future. Interestingly, these forms are actually cast from the plates used to spin pottery and therefore point towards the origins of craft, as well as to the ground from which future clay will emerge.

Upon entering the West Gallery, we are met by the vibrant pinks and vivid greens, which punctuate the earthy tones of Méadhbh O’Connor’s Biosystem (2018) – a sculptural installation of hanging globes comprising preserved and living moss and various air plants. The installation references the Gaia hypothesis, initiated by British environmentalist, James Lovelock, in 1965. Lovelock’s theory posits that the earth is one large superorganism capable of regulating itself and that human beings are connected to everything else within this living system. O’Connor’s installation suitably demonstrates this hypothesis, given that the art objects are actually living organisms and will only survive the duration of the exhibition if they are cared for.

O’Connor’s hanging globes lead the eye down towards Fiona Kelly’s The Distillation of Detritus (2015 – 17), a pile of reconstituted blocks, sitting atop a wooden platform. Kelly has reappropriated waste from demolition sites in order to create a perfectly formed stack communicating ideas of both destruction and waste, but also renewal and life, based on the cosmological premise that all matter comes from and returns to dust. On the adjacent wall is the word Dustsceawung written in limestone dust. This Old English word denotes the transience of all things and the contemplation of what has been lost, literally meaning a ‘consideration of the dust’. It offers a poignant final reflection on the exhibition and a subtle warning of the precariousness of our own position if we do not find ways to live more sustainably.

‘Sustainable Futures’ is an extremely promising curatorial debut from Claire Ryan, who ambitiously suggests that art can act as a conduit for raising awareness about environmental concerns. This proposition is all the more convincing given the visual seductiveness of the exhibition, with its paired back formalism, drawing the viewer in to face the most pressing issues of our time, in a way that cleverly manages not to overwhelm. Ryan demonstrates a heightened sensitivity both to her subject and to the practices of the four artists involved. Brought together through a shared interest in environmental themes, the artworks resonate with each other as separate but integrated elements of the whole, embodying the overriding message of the exhibition – that we are intimately connected to all living things and can affect the future of the natural environment, for better or for worse.

Kirstie North is an art historian and independent curator who lectures at University College Cork.

Image credit: 
‘Sustainable Futures’, installation view, West Gallery; Méadhbh O’Connor Biosystem, 2018, and Fiona Kelly, The Distillation of Detritus, 2015 – 17; image courtesy of Sirius Arts Centre

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Dunamaise Arts Centre, 19 January – 28 February 2018

Tom Climent’s exhibition, ‘Latitudes’, at Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, was described in the gallery text as “investigating the boundaries between abstraction and representation”. Climent presented twelve roughly similar landscapes featuring a central mound, peak or outcrop on a slightly higher-than-centre horizon line. While these compositions fall within the recognisable tradition of landscape painting, the artist’s synthetic colour palette, along with occasional architectural additions, serve to unsettle the familiarity that the genre normally fosters. Perhaps Climent’s expansion of this disciplinary boundary is less focused on stylistic approaches and more concerned with how the viewer rationalises personal expectations of painting. It helps that they are beautifully executed and bridge real and imaginary worlds. Climent’s disorderly arrangements of planes, vertices and edges are softened by his hand-drawn outlines, textured surfaces and luxuriant use of colour.

The pictorial format employed in Adamant (2017), brings to mind a ringfort formation. Being so familiar and numerous within the Irish landscape, ringforts are almost invisible, appearing merely as hilltops that seem oddly different from the land around them. Adamant depicts a primitive dome-shaped dwelling or similar structure. Its irregular form is painted in vivid planes of deep red, vermillion, pink and, occasionally, lime green. The sky is an expanse of opaque cerulean blue. The surrounding hill is mossy and sage-coloured, as sunlight filters down onto the foreground, suggesting the rising dawn. Energy radiates from the strange hybrid psychedelic structure, yet it seems perfectly conceivable that it might have grown from the remains of an early medieval ringfort. Climent describes his painterly approach as “largely intuitive”, with painting triggering the discovery of “unintended connections and relationships.”

Caprock (2017) resembles a burial mound located in a flat upland position, rather than on a hilltop. Climent presents a slightly flattened isometric view, allowing the front elevations and foreground to be shaded from ambient light, illustrated through blocks of violet, purple, maroon and brown. The vertices and points of intersection are more cleanly defined, while the flat areas are more textured, revealing layers of underpainting and plaster. Over these coarse areas, patches of luminous colour brighten the scene, despite a dull sky. In this way, Climent manages to avoid the risk of over-boiling his intense colour range or overreaching the narrative between his key influences of archaeology and science fiction.

The rock formation depicted in a larger work, Berg (2017) slides at glacial pace from the horizon as it’s bulk casts a deep shadow on the hillside. Conversely, in Mountain Mind (2017), liquid matter spills from a huge opening in the mound, flooding the ground around it. The relationship between the subject and this sense of continuing motion serves to widen the narrative possibilities beyond the picture plane. This interaction also reveals the technical and conceptual struggles between being faithful to intuition (without over indulging) and producing good painting.

Two works, Alfuen and Gimle, presented side-by-side in the gallery, more explicitly disclose how personally compelling the making of this work might be. Both paintings comprise sharply pointed mountain peaks whose apexes are hewn with the same distorted harlequin edifice. The downward slopes that fall away from the peaks gradually soften into a more natural appearance. The viewpoint is paradoxical, only possible by being elevated in flight. There is a sense that these mountain peaks stem from innate memory or knowledge – in the way that ringforts are involuntarily etched onto the collective Irish consciousness. Sometimes a sense of familiarity has no identifiable origin, while ideas are unbound by pure representation or abstraction. These intangible qualities permeate the materiality of Climent’s painting. His compositions are neither wholly real, nor completely fictional and most importantly, they offer no easy resolutions. His work remains open, generous and evolving, demonstrating great investment of skill and vision. By neat coincidence, the arts centre’s namesake, the Rock of Dunamaise, stands less than five miles away, surrounded by the seven hills of Stradbally, so I imagine that local audiences actually felt very at home looking at this work.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Image credit: 
Tom Climent, Corona, 2017, oil, plaster & sand on canvas, 244 x 153 cm; image courtesy the artist and Dunamaise Arts Centre. 

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