A terrible beauty

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What is happening in the contemporary Irish art scene?

Mo White follows Jenny Kingsley’s November article on Irish modern art with a look at current activity

Over the past three years news reports emerging from the island of Ireland have once again a sorry tale to tell.  Where once the UK news media were littered with reports of the conflict in Northern Ireland and later its continuing and troubled path towards peaceful resolution, recent reports have alluded to the effects of the failing euro on the Republic of Ireland. As elsewhere across Europe, a dire economic situation emerged in Ireland in 2008.  It is in this economic – and still somewhat urgent – context that Dublin Contemporary 2011, Ireland’s recent International Art Exhibition, can be seen to have had an effect that reaches far beyond its own cultural capital.

Dublin Contemporary 2011, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune and Jota Castro, was held throughout the city in a series of major gallery venues including the Douglas Hyde; Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane; the National Gallery of Ireland; and the Royal Hibernian Academy, in addition to spaces in the public realm.  Alongside these exhibition venues was a vast space at Earlsfort Terrace – formerly part of University College Dublin – that exhibited the work of 83 established and emerging European and Irish artists, presenting the ‘edge’ of contemporary International art practice.

The curators chose well the small quotation from W.B. Yeats’ poem (‘Easter 1916’) whose ‘terrible beauty’ described the events of the Easter Rising of that year when an insurrection was staged in the streets of Dublin, against the rule of the British government.  The Easter Rising was notoriously unsuccessful in establishing a government of the Irish Republic, and resulted in the execution of those Irish Republican leaders involved.   The curatorial hands of Viveros-Faune and Castro – and their allusion to this earlier historical moment in the title of the event (Dublin Contemporary 2011: Art, Crisis, Change & the Office of Non-Compliance) – is one that resonates with a now present, and not unconnected, further moment of crisis.   This sleight of the curators' hands connected these two events together in a Republic still young, where living memories can recall those earlier events, and where history itself has a long memory.

Walking through the three exhibitions floors of Earlsfort Terrace, its slightly down-at-heel corridors echoing, one could see a vast and illuminating array of work shown by younger and emerging artists, familiarly using materials that are at-hand or free.  This work largely took up what has clearly emerged in recent years, at least Europe-wide; the use of ‘junk’ or ‘recycling’ – something usual in art schools: to students the skip has always been a ‘best friend’. 

The work of more mature artists provided some balance and this was best exemplified by Jaki Irvine’s film work of 2009, 56 Inch Fantasy, a film shot inside the lift of one of Dublin’s tourist sights, the Guinness Hop Store.  The filmed ascent and descent of the lift, shown in a small space not unlike a lift shaft, with a soundtrack of music and a voiceover, permeated the second floor rather as Liam O’Callaghan’s dramatically lit sculpture, Force Fit (2009) illuminated the first floor. These artists’ works engage their geographical location, in Irvine’s the city of Dublin itself and in O’Callaghan’s an Ireland further afield, one of the peat bogs and the rural landscape.  They had both understood their own locations, and their dubious and awkward inheritance, and this quality then resonated through both these powerful pieces of work.

On the same side of the city as the Earlsfort Terrace venue are two of the major galleries that collaborated in the Dublin Contemporary: the Royal Hibernian Academy showed James Coleman’s A Work in Progress (2004–2011) and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, situated within Trinity College Dublin, showed Alice Neel’s collection of paintings, Family.  Family depicts Neel’s extended ‘family’ tree from 1945 until the 1980s; this ‘family’ included her lovers, some of whom fathered her children. 

In this immediate context in Dublin the work was singularly poignant, if only because it provided a source of reflection on the issue of ‘family’; an issue that has been central to Irish life for some time and one which recently has divided opinion in Church and State.  This quiet but haunting series of works would also seem to describe a traditionally gendered approach, one that prioritizes ‘family’ for a woman.  Neel, however, scrutinizes her sitters, their relationship to each other and to her and in so doing her approach cannot be easily dismissed.  Rather, Neel’s concern is with a wider human condition, both her sitters’ and her own.

James Coleman, an Irish artist better known outside Ireland than in it, with an international reputation acquired since the late 1960s, exhibited a new piece of video work at the Royal Hibernian Academy. A Work in Progress, subtitled Orpheus and Eurydice, encapsulated – even if in progress – a further stage in this artist’s career.  On entering this new work the viewer is assaulted by a babble of voices coming from four loudspeakers – voices speaking in French and English simultaneously.  The visual story is told on a screen divided into four smaller screens, in which the actions appear to have no relation to each other – much as the voices on the soundtracks do not seem to respond to one another. 

A Work in Progress is an interpretation of the Greek myth – a narrative that that has informed many works of art and culture – but here Coleman’s interpretation of the underworld that Orpheus occupies is a derelict underground car park.  The unfolding drama, ‘told’ in a 21st-century setting, uses the latest technologies and keeps some faith with its source, in that it portrays a dystopia.  Formerly Coleman’s work has used high production values and high-end specifications to achieve a rigour and depth that he has pursued in previous work, such as Background (1991–4), seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2008. 

This new work is a radical departure for Coleman – its embrace of digital technologies, not for their ability to mimic traditional media but for their use in exploring their own material properties.  Films made using a hand-held, sometimes out-of-focus camera that zooms too quickly toward its subject confront the viewer.  This is both alarming and delightful and the curators of Dublin’s Contemporary exhibitions must have anticipated that this work would further enhance Coleman’s already exceptional reputation.

This collection of exhibitions – which was intended to be neither an art fair nor a biennial, but contain elements of both – was no mean undertaking by a country in financial crisis.   In these circumstances it was a brave and courageous initiative that took Dublin Contemporary forward, and attracted vast amounts of funding from numerous Irish and international commercial partners and an array of international Arts Councils and embassies.  It must be logged as a success; one that should be acknowledged both in Ireland itself and beyond, and one that must be built on. In the short term it has been a showcase of art, intended to generate tourism for Ireland’s rich cultural heritage, but it has also shown Ireland’s art in relation to wider European concerns, whilst recognizing its geographical location at the edge of Western Europe.