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Contemporary 

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visual culture in 

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Circa is concerned with visual 

____________________________ culture. We welcome comment, 

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the editor for more details, 

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expressed in this magazine 

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____________________________ necessarily those of the Board. 

Contributing editors 

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Alannah Hopkin (Cork), Luke employer. Copyright © Circa 

Gibbons (Dublin), Brian 

2005 

Kennedy (Belfast), Shirley 

MacWilliam (England) 

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c.

CIRCA 114 WINTER 2005 

Editorial 18 | Update 20 | Letters 21 | Features 22 | Reviews 60 | Project 105 | 

(front cover) 

Sandra Johnston 

performance still 

Istituto Provinciale per 

l’Infanzia, Venice, 2005 

courtesy the artist 

3

phil kelly 

Hillsboro Fine Art 

3 Anne’s Lane 

South Anne Street 

Dublin 2 

Ireland 

Telephone: 00 353 1 677 7905 

http://www.hillsborofineart.com

Jeanette Doyle 

and then I place my face 

against the glass 

Broadstone Gallery and Studios 

Hendrons Building, Dominick Street, Dublin 7 

10-22 December 2005 and 3-14 January 2006 

11am-6pm (closed Sunday/ Monday) 

For details please contact 087 626 8187 / 

055 25339 / 01 830 1428 

Jeanette Doyle with the women of the STAR project 

Portrayals 

Axis 

Main Street, Ballymun, Dublin 9 

12 January – 24 February 2006 

A Breaking Ground 2 commission. 

Breaking Ground, the Ballymun art commissioning programme. 

www.breakingground.ie 

Both exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue. 

For details contact bungalow@eircom.net

context galleries 

Dec 10 – Jan 21 Gallery One 

‘New Irish Painting’ 

A Survey of emerging Irish painting curated by Marianne O’Kane 

Dec 10 – Jan 21 Gallery Two 

Katie Blue 

A Playhouse Education Project 

Jan 28 – Feb 18 Gallery One 

Norma Lowney 

New publications: 

New Irish Painting – Abridged: 

Damaged Collateral – Aileen Kelly: 

Laundry – Robert O’Connor (contact gallery for details) 

context galleries, the playhouse, 5-7 artillery st, derry BT486R t +44 287 137 3538 f +44 287 126 1884 e contextgallery@yahoo.co.uk 

http://contextgalleries.blogspot.com/

national irish 

visual arts library 

Public Research Library 

of 20th Century and 

Contemporary Irish Art 

& Design 

National College of Art & Design 

100 Thomas Street 

Dublin 8 

T: 01 636 4347 

romanod@ncad.ie 

www.ncad.ie/nival

18 

c 

Editorial

c. 

Peter FitzGerald 

Do we look good in this? Certainly hope so. The redesign 

of the magazine has been a long time in the planning, 

and I believe Peter Maybury’s overhaul has been worth 

the wait. See what you think. 

We promised to bring you more on the Venice Biennale. 

This year, for the first time, Northern Ireland has a 

representation all of its own, and this fact has prompted 

a response by Declan Sheehan of Derry’s Context 

Gallery. As a prelude to his article, Declan designed a 

questionnaire, which has been on our website, to garner 

the views of a more general readership. The results are 

given here. As Declan points out in his article, an 

interrogation of the Northern Ireland presence in Venice 

throws up lots of questions which are “in error,” and 

it is what feels wrong about them which needs to be 

explored. Declan also invited other contributors to 

respond to the topic. Rachael Thomas of IMMA, who 

curated the first, unofficial Welsh representation at 

Venice in 2001, and Colin Darke, artist and Co-director of 

Void Gallery, Derry, share their thoughts here, in accompanying 

articles. We carry reviews of the two ‘pavilions’ 

from Ireland as well, of course. In fact, given the nature 

of the Northern Ireland contribution, it gets two reviews 

of its own. For one of these we were very lucky to get the 

services of Valerie Connor, who was Commissioner for 

the Republic of Ireland representation at Venice in 2003. 

‘Relational aethetics’ and ‘relational art’ have been 

kicking around in various forms for a while now. In some 

ways, they are attempts to circumvent the realisation 

that art, despite the bombast of one avant garde after 

another, is unlikely to change the world – though some 

of the works that come under the ‘relational’ banner 

do seem, perversely, to harbour just that hidden wish, 

perhaps in a more interpersonal, interactive form. 

Claire Bishop’s article in October in 2004, which took as 

its starting point Nicolas Bourriaud’s highly influential 

Relational aesthetics, is ‘reprinted’ here in abridged form: 

actually, it is the text of a paper read in London in the 

same year. Grant Watson in turn responds to her text. 

Given the importance of teasing out the nature of 

relational art, the next issue of Circa will carry further 

responses on the theme. 

Two artists are given considerable individual attention 

in this issue. Jaki Irvine’s oeuvre is assessed by Cherry 

Smyth. It is very satisfying to get an overview, in one 

text, of both the consistency and diversity in Irvine’s 

output. The article is occasioned by the showing at IMMA 

of Irvine’s The silver bridge from 13 December 2005 to 

7 May 2006. Also showing at IMMA is a season of films 

by Isaac Julien, and we carry here an interview with him 

by Áine O’Brien. Julien’s work mines the very fertile 

intersection of identity politics, queer culture, migration, 

multiple realities, and the opposition of cinematic and 

fine-art contexts. 

One of the great bugbears of artists is the requirement 

imposed on them from time to time to justify what they 

do, to provide some sort of extrinsic explanation of the 

value of their work. Needless to say, though, artists often 

pose this question to themselves anyway, especially 

in those passing moments of feeling privileged. Most 

artists want to be of use, but they’re not so happy being 

used. Governments and their servants, except in the 

case where they are handing out truly massive amounts 

of money, tend to see things the other way round: they 

don’t like being used either, and they want to know what 

the value is of what they are getting. It’s a recipe for 

considerable misunderstanding and ill-feeling. Pauline 

Hadaway writes here about the issues involved, taking 

as her starting point the ongoing Review of Public 

Administration in Northern Ireland, an offspring of the 

Good Friday Agreement. This Review threatens to tear 

apart the established ‘understandings’ among artists, 

arts practitioners, civil servants and politicians. “Good,” 

some may say, but it’s not going to be as simple as that. 

As an organisation part-funded by the Arts Council of 

Northern Ireland, Circa input its tuppenceworth to the 

Review. “Decisions on which organisations and projects 

to fund must be at arm’s length from government; 

otherwise, brave, publicly funded art is not possible” 

was just one of our pithy arguments. It’s a worrying time 

for the future of the arts in Northern Ireland; what the 

sector is undergoing is of relevance everywhere. 

What else is there in this issue? Oodles. Enjoy! 

19

c. 

20 

Update 

NCAD to UCD? 

The National College of 

Art and Design, Dublin, 

is to enter into detailed 

negotiations with 

University College Dublin 

(UCD) about becoming a 

part of UCD. If satisfactory, 

NCAD would move to a 

green-field site in Belfield, 

potentially trading in its 

inner-city cred for a bit of 

suburban plush. Students 

at NCAD are apparently not 

too enamoured of the idea. 

There is talk of loss of 

identity, and loss of ease 

of access to the city and its 

cultural offerings. 

New name for SSI 

Following an extraordinary 

general meeting on 22 

September, the Sculptors’ 

Society of Ireland Ltd has 

adopted the business name 

‘Visual Artists Ireland’. 

The move had been 

prompted by the expansion 

of the SSI’s remit beyond 

sculpture, which has in 

turn been prompted of 

the demise of the Artists’ 

Association of Ireland. 

To see VAI’s excellent 

website, surf over to 

www.visualartists.ie 

Factotum gets Paul Hamlyn 

Award 

Richard West and Stephen Hackett, 

collectively also known as 

Factotum, have jointly been named 

as one of five recipients of this 

year’s Paul Hamlyn Foundation 

Awards for Visual Arts. The cool 

£30,000 they receive will doubtless 

help with the court case West is 

taking against Belfast City Council 

for alleged breach of the European 

Convention of Human Rights, 

following its withdrawal of a £5,000 

grant to Factotum. Some members 

of the Council were offended by 

the content of Factotum’s excellent 

publication, The Vacuum. 

Apparently inexhaustible, West is 

also co-editor of Source magazine. 

Another Award winner, Ian 

Breakwell, is well known on these 

shores, particularly at the National 

College of Art and Design, Dublin, 

where he frequently tutored. 

Alas, in his case the Award is 

posthumous. 

Circa subscription-prize winner 

On 31 August 2005, the name of 

the winner of our subscription prize 

was drawn from a hat by Bea 

Kelleher, Executive Producer of the 

Dublin Fringe Festival. The winner 

is Ceri Hand, Director of Exhibitions 

at FACT, Liverpool. She wins an 

original, Circa-commissioned oil 

painting by Geraldine O’Neill. 

Our congratulations to her, and 

our thanks to the hundreds who 

participated, to Geraldine O’Neill, 

Bea Kelleher and the Kevin 

Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. 

Let’s be having it! 

In line with recent content 

changes to the magazine, 

we are open to the 

submission of articles on 

visual art and culture. 

You can send in a finished 

text, a draft, or an outline 

of an idea – we’d love to 

hear from you. Contact 

editor@recirca.com 

Or if something we have 

published seems to demand 

a response on your part, 

please do so: we are also 

open to letters. 

Meanwhile, if you’re 

wondering how we decide 

what gets published, our 

procedures are available 

to read online, at 

recirca.com/about 

Central to the process is 

our Editorial Advisory 

Panel, whose members 

each serve for approximately 

one year; the Panel 

currently consists of Orla 

Ryan, Isabel Nolan, 

Georgina Jackson, Declan 

Sheehan, Alan Phelan, 

Suzanna Chan and Peter 

FitzGerald.

c. 

Letters 

Dear Editor, 

I am very much impressed 

by the depth of research, 

general cultural and 

political interest and – 

why not? – intellectual 

honesty of the feature 

article ‘Disciplining the 

avant garde’ by Gregory 

Sholette in the summer 

issue of CIRCA. It is very 

rare to find this kind of 

article in international art 

magazines, which are more 

and more keen to ‘analyze’ 

– if we can spoil this 

respectable word – the 

outcome of the latest art 

fairs, or to print these 

depressing group photos 

of the beautiful and 

powerful people of the art 

world, half-drunken but 

still keen for the spotlight, 

at some opening: how sad! 

Life is too short to favour 

stupidity. Thank you and 

please, if this is not done by 

chance, continue this way! 

Vittorio Urbani 

Director of Nuova Icona, 

Venezia 

Dear Editor, 

I am writing to you regarding 

some factual errors in Tim 

Stott’s ‘Fiat ars’ article in 

Circa 113. Specifically, 

I am seeking clarity as to why 

images which uniquely relate 

to Jochen Gerz’s Amaptocare 

commission in Ballymun 

were reproduced in an article 

which focuses exclusively on 

a different work: The national 

memory grove? 

Put simply, Jochen is doing 

two works in Ballymun, 

Amaptocare and The national 

memory grove. The fact that 

the two projects share some 

formal and conceptual 

elements such as tree 

planting, lecterns, public 

authorship, anti-monuments 

etc may be a little confusing, 

but they have a different 

genesis and motivation. 

I understand that the article 

follows on from a press 

conference that we held in 

Project last Spring, to launch 

The National memory grove. 

Subsequent to that Tim came 

to Ballymun to interview 

Jochen about his work here, 

and was made aware of 

the other commission, 

Amaptocare, through his 

discussions with Jochen. 

I feel that this confusion 

could have been very easily 

avoided, had Tim briefly 

referred to Amaptocare in the 

article. Then the decision to 

use images from Amaptocare 

would have been understandable 

for the readership. As it 

is, the images don’t relate to 

the article and the captions 

are totally incorrect and 

misleading, for example: 

“Jochen Gerz: Amaptocare, 

dedication for one of the 

trees, National Memory 

Grove, courtesy Axis 

Ballymun.” Axis is not 

involved in either commission; 

Breaking Ground, the 

commissioning body, is 

merely a tenant of the axis 

building. 

I have checked with our 

office, and see that on 9 

August, Felicity Williams sent 

you two visuals with detailed 

captions of the NMG press 

conference for reproduction 

in the article. She also sent 

some images (without 

captions) relating to 

Amaptocare, just for your 

further information. I fully 

appreciate that as editor, you 

decide what visuals are 

reproduced and that, in this 

instance, you may have felt 

that the ‘people shots’ at the 

conference were not visually 

interesting. But the The 

national memory gove is in its 

very nascent stages and 

therefore there are no real 

images available of any work 

as such. 

As I said, I can understand 

the potential for confusion, 

but feel that had Tim 

researched the article more 

thoroughly he would have 

fully understood and made 

clear the fact that there are 

two discrete projects by 

Jochen unfolding in 

Ballymun, that Ballymun is 

in Dublin 9, and not in 

County Dublin (this is of 

some significance locally as 

Ballymun is part of the city, 

and it is has been the longheld 

perception of its being 

beyond the city that has 

contributed to its abandonment 

and neglect by the city 

– however that is another 

matter entirely!). Finally, 

all images are courtesy of 

Breaking Ground. 

I’m sorry to have to bring this 

to your attention and I’m sure 

the situation can be easily 

redressed as it is very 

important for the public to 

read the difference between 

the two works. 

I look forward to hearing 

from you, 

With all best wishes, 

Aisling Prior 

Director, Breaking Ground 

____________________________ 

Dear Aisling, 

In response to your letter 

regarding some ‘factual 

errors’ in my article in Circa 

113, I should like offer my 

own clarifications. Whilst I 

understand your concern at 

the misleading use and 

attribution of images in the 

‘Fiat Ars’ article, in accusing 

me of not distinguishing 

between Amaptocare and The 

national memory grove (NMG) 

you risk conflating two 

things which are, regrettably, 

discrete. 

Neither the selection of 

images nor the introductory 

text to ‘Fiat Ars’ were made 

in consultation with me. 

My sole responsibility was for 

the main text, and nowhere in 

that text are Amaptocare and 

NMG presented or discussed 

as one and the same project. 

From the very beginning, it 

was clear that my proposed 

text would take as its point of 

departure nothing other than 

NMG. This was clear in my 

discussions with Jochen 

Gerz, in my correspondence 

with Sheena Barrett of Axis, 

and in my request for images. 

I failed to mention Amaptocare 

not because I was unaware 

of it or because I thought it 

indistinguishable from NMG, 

but precisely because I knew 

the two to be distinct: any 

mention of Amaptocare would 

have only confused matters 

and distracted from the main 

body of the argument. 

At no point, I might add, did 

I suggest that Ballymun was 

in County Dublin. 

The contradiction between 

the images and the text is not 

a contradiction inherent to 

the text itself, and, moreover, 

it is not the result of lessthan-thorough 

research or a 

lack of understanding on my 

part: had you engaged in a 

more thorough reading of the 

text this might well have 

become apparent. 

I understand that some of 

the misleading use of 

imagery for this article might 

have resulted from a lack of 

communication between 

Breaking Ground, Peter 

FitzGerald and me, and for 

my part in that I can only 

apologise; but I do not believe 

that this mistake gives you 

grounds to draw attention 

to other shortcomings 

which, upon closer scrutiny, 

are simply not there. 

Best wishes 

Tim Stott 

21

22 

c. 

Features 

What is my nation? Who talks of my nation? Declan Sheehan 24 | Venice 

Colin Darke 28 | Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi… When the dragon wakes… 

Rachael Thomas 30 | Art of the encounter: Antagonism and Relational 

Aesthetics Claire Bishop 32 | Response to Claire Bishop’s paper on 

Relational Aesthetics Grant Watson 36 | Jaki Irvine: A retrospective 

Cherry Smyth 40 | Suturing the aesthetic and the political – multiple 

screens, multiple realities: An interview with Isaac Julien Áine O’Brien 46 

| Soul-searching and soul-selling: the new accountability in the arts 

Pauline Hadaway 54 | 

c. 

Jaki Irvine 

The silver bridge, 2005 

DVD still 

courtesy the artist

112

c. 

24 

Declan Sheehan 

Declan Sheehan is 

Director of Context 

Galleries, Derry 

What is my nation? 

Who talks of my 

nation? 

Aisling O'Beirn 

Stories for Venetians 

and tourists, 2005 

installation shot, café, 

Giudecca, Venice 

courtesy the artist

This started with an error. There was in fact no pavillion 

representing Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale 

2005. 1 To avoid further confusion, let’s revise events: 

there was a separate and distinct Northern Ireland 

presentation of artists at the Biennale, for the first time 

ever. Previously, the representation at Venice from the 

island of Ireland was selected and presented as a single 

Irish pavilion. My understanding is that there was a 

certain dissatisfaction with this state of affairs as there 

was a continuing sense that the commissioners for 

Ireland at the Biennale would always be selected from 

those active in the Republic of Ireland. And that there 

was also an attendant sense that artistic practice from 

Northern Ireland would suffer – in terms of international 

exposure – as a result. So a separate presentation of 

artists based in Northern Ireland was established at 

Venice – but distinctly not intended as a ‘national 

pavilion’. 2 Here is, however, some indicative evidence 

of what has actually happened, regardless of stated 

intentions – and this is manifest from personal 

experience, anecdotal evidence, and responses to the 

What is my nation? poll. This year for the first time, 

audiences at the Venice Biennale have returned making 

one of the following statements: “The Northern Irish 

artists/ pavilion/ exhibition was better that the Republic,” 

or “The Republic’s artists/ pavilion/ exhibition was better 

than those of Northern Ireland.” 

It is obvious that these new structures of the selection, 

the presentation and the reception of the artworks 

from this island at Venice have now embodied elements 

involving all participants in a process of ‘defining territories’. 

3 It is the case that such distinction represents a 

whole new state of affairs: there exists no reasonable 

argument that can be made against that fact. It is a 

major paradigm shift in the national and international 

presentation and reception of artists from this island. 

And it is the case that there was massively insufficient 

debate, critique, or discussion prior to this state of 

affairs changing on the ground: thus only leaving an 

opportunity for debate lying in the wake of the event, 

rather that in advance; and thus denying any potential 

for open contributions to finding an adequate form of 

solution to the problems and concerns highlighted in 

the opening paragraph above. 

If the questions asked are in error, then the answers will 

be in error. Here is a question in error, which this whole 

new state of affairs puts to artists from this island: 

“Should your practice be represented in a separate and 

distinct Northern Ireland presentation of artists at the 

Venice Biennale or in the Irish pavilion at the Venice 

Biennale?” 

Here is a question not in error: “How do we, artists and 

curators, establish an adequate response to a sense that 

the commissioners for Ireland at the Biennale always 

select from those active in the Republic of Ireland and 

the attendant sense that artistic practice from Northern 

Ireland suffers – in terms of international exposure – as 

a result?” 

The poll, Research towards ‘What is my nation?’ : Part 

one, is a conscious elaboration of questions in error 

and not in error: of questions which inevitably lead to 

answers in error; of answers in error each with the other; 

in short, an elaboration of complexities. It is a conscious 

riposte to any solutions that are elaborated by a simple 

rather than a complex nature; to any solutions 

elaborated by a simple rather than a complex sense of 

identification with a community, or a national or a 

political identity. There is no reasonable dispute over the 

fact that identification with a community, or a national 

or a political identity, has been and continues to be a 

hugely complex, multiple and often dangerous concern 

in the island of Ireland. A statement or event that states 

or aims at a disregard for these concerns does not in 

effect constitute an act that disregards these concerns. 

The concerns haven’t gone away. Peter Gay, writing of 

his complexities regarding identification as a German 

Jew, writes that “If these ruminations, these sudden 

shifts in mood, sound inconsistent, they were…” 4 

This is a realm of inconsistency, of ruminations and 

shifts in mood, of ambiguity. 5 

There was a concern that artists based in Northern 

Ireland were missing a platform at Venice. But to 

attempt to remedy this by presenting artists from 

Northern Ireland as simply ‘separate’ and ‘apart’ from 

artists from the Republic of Ireland, and to not expect 

this act to be obliged to recognize complexities regarding 

identification, is funnily enough simply another ‘Irish 

solution to an Irish problem’. 

The title is from Shakespeare, HENRY V - ACT III SCENE I 

(see poll overleaf) 

1 In my defence, I must point out that this error I made in drawing up 

my poll and using the word ‘pavilion’ within it, is an error also made 

even in the foreword of the Northern Ireland Venice exhibition 

catalogue: “… 14 of Northern Ireland’s finest contemporary artists 

to create the first pavilion in Venice…”: The Nature of things – artists 

from Northern Ireland, 2005 (p.9) 

2 See again footnote 1. Also note that many ‘new’ national pavilions 

have only been established after nonofficial, nonnational representation 

at Venice: eg Rachael Thomas curating Cerith Wynn Evans as an 

intervention in the British pavilion. 2001, an act ultimately leading 

towards the development of the first separate Welsh pavilion. 

3 See points raised by Shane Cullen at a discussion in Temple Bar 

between the Venice Biennale Commissioners from the Republic of 

Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 24 February, 2005, 

printed in Printed project: “… [the situation that] exists at the moment 

seems to be defining territories”; from ‘One closer to the other’, 

Printed project, issue 05, May 2005, p.84. 

4 Peter Gay, My German question, New Haven, Yale University Press, 

1998, p.13 

5 Shane Cullen, ibid: “… I actually think I preferred the situation where 

an artist from this part of Ireland and Northern Ireland worked 

together in a kind of ambiguous presentation without anything being 

so explicitly laid down.” 

25

c. 

26 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Poll 

Research Towards What is my nation?: Part One 

Fluellen: Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your 

correction, there is not many of your nation – 

MacMorris : Of my nation! What is my nation? Is a villain, 

and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. 

What is my nation? Who talks of my nation? 

Shakespeare, HENRY V – ACT III SCENE I 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Please answer the following (for ease of reading here, 

the results are presented along with the questions; on the 

website the reader had a simple ‘YES/ NO’ choice; to see 

the poll, with a click-through to the results which include 

comments by readers, go to www.recirca.com/poll/venice). 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Question % YES % NO 

1. Are you an artist from Ireland? 84 16 

2. Are you an artist from Northern Ireland? 26 74 

3. Are you an artist from the Republic of Ireland? 72 28 

4. Are you an artist based in Ireland? 75 25 

5. Are you an artist based in Northern Ireland? 20 80 

6. Are you an artist based in the Republic of Ireland? 60 40 

7. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from Ireland? 92 8 

8. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from Northern Ireland? 45 55 

9. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of art from the Republic of Ireland? 79 21 

10. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of Irish art? 93 7 

11. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of Northern Irish art? 46 54 

12. Would your artwork be applicable in a survey of ‘Republic of Irish’ art? 66 34 

13. Would an answer YES to question 1 rule out an answer YES to question 2? 21 79 

14. Would an answer YES to question 1 force an answer NO to question 2? 19 81 

15. Would an answer YES to question 2 force an answer YES to question 1? 30 70 




19. Would an answer NO to question 4 rule out an answer YES to question 5? 30 70 










Please consider the classifications above and answer the following: 

29. Were such classifications as distinct or as relevant previous to the creation 

in 2005 of the first ever Northern Ireland Pavillion at the Venice Biennale? 51 49 

30. Would you be interested in continuing this research further within an art project? 62 38 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Peter Richards 

camera obscura 

installation shot 

Piazza San Marco, Venice 

2005 


27

c. 

28 

Colin Darke 

Venice

When I first heard there would be an exhibition of 

northern artists at this year’s Venice Biennale, my 

immediate response was one of ambivalence, and the 

initial doubts remain. 

I was delighted that the decision would provide an 

additional platform for artists in Ireland, especially for 

those who might otherwise have been neglected as 

a result of their geographical location – so delighted, 

in fact, that I submitted, with a colleague, an application 

to curate the show. 

Hugh Mullholland made his selection with the 

intelligence and foresight we’ve come to expect and 

(having myself missed the opportunity to see the show 

and going by reports from trusted friends) the resultant 

show has proved to be a big success. 

Such a move, however, is inevitably going to produce 

a political impact. Even in what is for the most part a 

self-consciously apolitical Irish art world, the question 

of the border arises from time to time and if there was 

any surprise at the response to the announcement of 

the northern show, it was at the comparative silence 

regarding the partitionist result of the decision. 

Perhaps the south would prefer to retain its 32-county 

remit, but for the northern show to include the work of an 

artist outside the six northern counties is highly unlikely. 

This in turn complicates matters for the south. Such is 

the nature of the island’s partition – separatist activity 

in the north forces southern bodies to rethink their all- 

Ireland mindsets. And this at a time when we should be 

expecting Agreement-inspired cross-border cooperation. 

As the questions in Declan Sheehan’s survey show, the 

complications go beyond this. Which exhibition shows 

an artist from the north but living in the south, and vice 

versa? And what of the border towns whereby, for 

example, a “Derry artist” might live ten minutes’ drive 

from his or her city centre-studio, crossing the border 

during the journey? Will artists and curators who don’t 

recognise the border be forced to exclude themselves, 

because of their political beliefs? 

Similar questions arose for me in 2000, at Manifesta 3 

in Ljubljana. It came about in relation to those artists 

“representing Northern Ireland”, when it was realised 

that of the four selected, three were English and one 

Scottish. The issue snowballed throughout the show, 

with artists and the exhibition’s four curators questioning 

the notion of representation. The show included work 

by artists from eastern Europe who were displaced from 

their countries of origin, artists who had shifted location 

for political reasons, for economic reasons, for artistic 

reasons and, I guess, just because they wanted to. 

The confusion was ironic, considering that the theme 

of the itinerant biennale that year was the paradoxical 

confirmation and blurring of national boundaries in 

relation to the globalisation of economies and cultural 

practice. While this was a conceptual determinant in 

the selection procedure, the practical outcomes of that 

procedure only became apparent when the artists 

arrived in Ljubljana en masse. 

So, not only were the four “Northern Ireland representatives” 

not indigenous Irish (but in the end, of course, 

deemed to be OK because we were UK citizens), 

the selection was based on the concept that work 

which raised questions about the north/south border 

necessitated only representation from its northern side. 

In this way, then, an exhibition that aimed at revealing 

the dissolution of borders resulted in a ratification of 

Ireland’s partition. 

Hence my ambivalence regarding the northern exhibition 

in Venice. A modest proposal: a five-way show, with the 

involvement of both arts councils, consisting of work 

by artists from Dublin and each of the four provinces. 

This would scatter representation across the island and 

create whole new arguments which at least sidestep the 

border issue and give opportunities to artists who might 

otherwise have been overlooked. 

Colin Darke is an artist. 

Mary McIntyre 

The Italian room, 2005 

lightjet print 

74 x 89cm 


29

c. 

30 

Rachael Thomas 

The Venice Biennale 

2001 

Plateau of Humankind 

Pryd maer Ddraig Pryd mae 

r Dd raig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig 

di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr codi 

yn codi… 

Pry d m aer Ddraig yn codi Pr 

When 

yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer 

the 

Ddraig yn co di Pry 

d m aer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr aig yn c 

odi Pry d maer D draig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd mae r Ddraig y 

n codi Pryd m aer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pryd maer 

yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd 

maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co 

Ddraig yn c odi Pr yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn c 

odi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer D draig yn co 

di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai 

g yn codi P ryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd ma 

er Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn co di Pry d ma 

er D draig yn c odi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd 

maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddr aig yn codi Pr 

dragon wakes… 

yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn 

codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pr 

yd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer 

Ddraig yn co di Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd 

maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd 

maer Ddrai g yn codi P ryd maer 

Ddraig y n codi Pr yd mae 

r Dd raig yn codi Pryd m aer Dd 

raig yn co di Pryd mae r Ddraig yn codi Pryd m 

aer Ddraig yn codi Pry d maer Ddraig yn cod i Pryd maer Ddraig yn 

codi Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi Pryd maer Ddrai g yn codi Pryd maer D 

draig yn codi Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi Pry d maer Ddraig yn cod 

i Pryd ma er Ddraig yn codi P 

ry d maer D dra

The 2001 Venice Biennale was marked by a substantial 

expansion of countries and artists in attendance. The 

scale and magnetism of the event challenged readings 

of it as being a “charming anachronism” 1 or merely a 

“trade fair” 2 . In reality it became a succession of 

exhibitions, interventions and manifestations that 

contributed to an ever-changing dynamic of displays, 

propositions, opportunities and exposures. 

Six months prior I realised that my own country, Wales, 

did not even have its own pavilion, nor a system or funds 

to set up an intervention. I felt this was the moment to 

take action, and with guerilla tactics of pushing forward 

for support, and with no funds to speak of, I approached 

the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans to see if we could set 

up the first-ever intervention at the Venice Biennale and 

actually interrogate government and Arts Council of 

Wales policy towards establishing an independent Welsh 

Pavilion. Wyn Evans graduated from the Royal College 

of Art in 1984 and began his career as a video and filmmaker 

working as assistant to Derek Jarman. In the 

early 1990s Wyn Evans started making sculptures and 

installations. His work deals with the phenomenology 

of time, language and perception and employs a variety 

of media including firework texts, horticulture, film, 

photography and sculpture. He has exhibited extensively 

in Europe and America, including the Hayward Gallery, 

London (1995) and the British School in Rome (1998), 

while other solo exhibitions have included Deitch 

Projects in New York (1997), Tate Britain (2000) and the 

touring exhibition The British Art Show (2000). 

The challenge was duly accepted by Wyn Evans, and 

support was offered from the British Pavilion, The Art 

Newspaper, white cube and the editor of Art in America. 

Wyn Evans and I then had to come up with a concept. 

We decided the work would take on a political aspect. 

The work was entitled ‘Pryd maer Ddraig yn codi.. (When 

the dragon wakes)’. 

Acknowledging the conceptual tradition of Marcel 

Broodthaers and Dan Graham on the discursive nature 

of art, the project Pryd Ddraig yn codi was inserted in 

The Art newspaper. It replicated in translation an entire 

page from a previous issue. Wyn Evans questioned the 

use of language – what is lost and gained by the act of 

translation, how it informs and transforms meaning. 

This appropriation of the original article (‘When the 

dragon wakes’) re-inscribes national boundaries divided 

by identity and history. The article reports on the insecurities 

facing the West’s leading auction houses as China 

enters the World Trade Organisation and the financial 

and ideological threat this poses to them. The intervention 

seeks to expose how the language of symbols determines 

cultural identity and how they proscribe multiple 

interpretations. The symbol of the dragon is significant in 

the text as both China and Wales have a rich and very 

different legacy associated with this emotive, mythological 

creature. The Welsh word for dragon is ‘draig’ in the 

sense of ‘warrior’ or ‘leader’; the dragon is seen as a 

symbol of national independence. From ancient times, 

it was the Chinese emblem of the Imperial family and 

represented a beneficent creature. Until the founding 

of the republic in 1911, it adorned the national flag. In 

Wales, the symbol represents spiritual energy and is a 

bringer of good fortune. 

The project exposed the seemingly arbitrary yet concrete 

relationship between two cultures. It also raised the 

issue of cultural capital through the references to global 

economies. The project was housed at the British 

Pavilion and distributed by The Art newspaper. After 

Venice I then had talks with members of the Arts Council 

who were working towards setting up a fixed site for the 

Welsh Pavilion. This has gone from success to success 

and it’s great to see Welsh artists established as part of 

an international dialogue. 

1 Charles Esche, Audio arts magazine, 

Vol.20, Nos 1 & 2, 2001 

2 Jon Thompson, International Round 

Table Conference, Venice Biennale, 

2001. 

Rachael Thomas is Head of 

Exhibitions at the Irish Museum 

of Modern Art. 

31

c. 

32 

Claire Bishop 

Art of the 

encounter: 

Antagonism 

and Relational 

Aesthetics

In this paper I present a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s 

Relational aesthetics from an art-historical and 

theoretical perspective. By this I don’t mean locating it 

historically in art of the 1960s and ’70s – in social sculpture, 

installation, performance and ‘service’ art by artists 

as diverse as the Fluxus Group, Joseph Beuys, Daniel 

Spoerri, Allen Ruppersberg, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 

Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic and others – although 

this history certainly needs to be written. Nor do I wish 

to locate Bourriaud’s collection of essays in relation to 

significant theoretical precursors – such as Roland 

Barthes’ ‘Death of the author’, or Umberto Eco’s The 

Open work. Rather, I wish to discuss relational aesthetics 

in terms of two connected problems that persistently 

intrude upon discussions of ‘relational’ art: firstly, the 

problematic status that this work holds as an object of 

critical and historical judgment, and secondly, the 

assumption underpinning Bourriaud’s book (and a great 

deal of other writing on contemporary art) that art 

encouraging dialogue between viewers is unequivocally 

a ‘good thing’, and moreover democratic. 

For the purposes of economy and clarity, I will take one 

artist as paradigmatic of relational art – Rirkrit Tiravanija 

– since his art seems to me the clearest expression of 

Bourriaud’s argument that relational art privileges 

inter-subjective relations over detached opticality: 

Tiravanija insists that the viewer is physically present 

in a particular situation at a particular time – in this 

case, eating the food that he cooks, alongside other 

visitors in a communal situation, usually within the 

gallery. As some readers will already know, Tiravanija 

often includes the phrase ‘lots of people’ in his lists of 

materials – and it is noticeable that the criticism about 

his work is extremely subjective, reflecting the importance 

of the viewer’s first-hand experience in the work. 

Every piece of writing on Tiravanija’s work refers back to 

the author’s own experience of the piece – which raises 

the following critical and historiographical problem: how 

can we judge Tiravanija’s work – or indeed any work that 

relies for its meaning on the direct participation of the 

viewer – if we didn’t experience it for ourselves? 

To be fair, this problem also accompanies the history 

of installation and performance art, but with relational 

art this situation is exacerbated, since the artist often 

has a hands-off approach that delegates the meaning 

of the work to the viewer-participant. Photographic 

documentation of relational work reveal little to us of 

the social dynamic that emerged, and written accounts 

offer only partial assistance. By way of example, the only 

substantial account that I can find of Tiravanija’s first 

solo exhibition at 303 Gallery is by Jerry Saltz in Art in 

America, and it runs as follows: 

At 303 Gallery I regularly sat with or was joined by 

strangers, and it was nice. The gallery became a place 

for sharing, jocularity and frank talk. I had an amazing 

run of meals with art dealers. Once I ate with Paula 

Cooper who recounted a long, complicated bit of 

professional gossip. Another day, Lisa Spellman related 

in hilarious detail a story of intrigue about a fellow dealer 

trying, unsuccessfully, to woo one of her artists. About a 

week later I ate with David Zwirner. I bumped into him on 

the street, and he said, “nothing’s going right today, let’s 

go to Rirkrit’s.” We did, and he talked about a lack of 

excitement in the New York art world. Another time I ate 

with Gavin Brown, the artist and dealer… who talked 

about the collapse of SoHo – only he welcomed it, felt it 

was about time, that the galleries had been showing too 

much mediocre art. Later in the show’s run, I was joined 

by an unidentified woman and a curious flirtation filled 

the air. Another time I chatted with a young artist who 

lived in Brooklyn who had real insights about the shows 

he’d just seen. 

The informal chattiness of this account clearly indicates 

what kind of problems face those who wish to know more 

about such work: the review only tells us that Tiravanija’s 

intervention is considered good because it permits 

networking amongst a group of like-minded art lovers, 

and because it evokes the atmosphere of a late-night bar. 

In the glossary at the back of Relational aesthetics, 

Bourriaud proposes some criteria that we should level 

at open-ended, participatory artworks in order to 

overcome such problems. He suggests that the criteria 

we should engage are not simply aesthetic, but political: 

we must judge the ‘relations’ that are produced by 

relational artworks. When confronted by a relational 

artwork, Bourriaud suggests that we ask the following 

questions: “does this work permit me to enter into 

dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?” 

(p109). He refers to these questions, which we should 

ask in front of any aesthetic production, as “criteria of 

co-existence” (p.109). Theoretically, in front of any work 

of art, we can ask what kind of social model the piece 

produces: could I live in a world structured by the organising 

principles of a Mondrian painting? What ‘social 

form’, for example, is produced by a Surrealist object? 

So far so good. But in putting this idea into practice, 

it is difficult to determine what constitutes the ‘relations’ 

we are assessing. For example, what Tiravanija cooks, 

how and for whom, is less important than the fact that 

he gives away the results of his cooking for free. 

In other words, although his works claim to defer 

meaning to their context, they do not question their 

imbrication within it. We need to ask, as Group Material 

did in the 1980s, “Who is the public? How is a culture 

made, and who is it for?” 

33

34 

I am not suggesting that relational artworks like 

Tiravanija’s need to develop a greater social conscience 

– by giving free curries to refugees, or using organic 

ingredients. I am simply wondering what it means to 

equate aesthetic judgment with an ethico-political 

judgment on the relationships produced by a work of art. 

The social sciences have innumerable methodologies for 

measuring and evaluating such relationships, but 

contemporary art criticism remains wilfully immune to 

such complexities. The quality of the relationships in 

relational art is never examined or put into question by 

its critics and curators, nor is the issue of how we might 

arrive at this assessment. When Bourriaud argues that 

“encounters are more important than the individuals who 

compose them” (Postproduction, p.43), I sense that this 

question is (for him) perhaps unnecessary. But Bourriaud 

is not alone in this: the problem I am outlining readily 

extends into the bulk of contemporary art criticism about 

interactive and socially engaged works: all relations 

that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be 

democratic and therefore good. But what does 

‘democracy’ really mean in this context? If relational art 

produces human relations, then the next logical question 

to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for 

whom, and why? 

I propose that one way to begin addressing this problem 

is to examine its terminology more rigorously, and 

‘democracy’ is a good place to start. In their seminal 

book Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical 

Democratic Politics (1985) the political philosophers 

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that a fully 

functioning democratic society is not one in which all 

antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new 

political frontiers are constantly being drawn and 

brought into debate – in other words, a democratic society 

is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not 

erased. Without antagonism there is only the imposed 

consensus of authoritarian order – a total suppression of 

debate and discussion which is inimical to democracy. 

Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of antagonism is 

founded in a Lacanian theory of subjectivity. They argue 

that subjectivity is not a self-transparent and rational 

pure presence, but is irremediably decentred and 

incomplete; we have a failed structural identity, and are 

therefore dependent on identification in order to proceed. 

Because subjectivity is this process of identification, 

we are necessarily incomplete entities. Antagonism, 

therefore, is the type of relationship that emerges 

between such incomplete entities. Laclau contrasts this 

to the types of relationship that emerge between complete 

entities, such as contradiction (for example, we can 

be materialists and read horoscopes, or be in analysis 

and send Christmas cards); antagonism also differs from 

what mathematicians call ‘real difference’ (a collision 

between full identities, such as a car crash, or the war 

against terrorism). In the case of antagonism, argue 

Laclau and Mouffe, “we are confronted with a different 

situation: the presence of the “Other” prevents me from 

being totally myself.” 

I dwell on this theory in order to suggest that the 

relations set up by relational art works such as those of 

Tiravanija are not intrinsically democratic, since they 

rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as 

whole, and community as immanent togetherness. 

There is debate and dialogue in one of his cooking 

pieces, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since 

the situation is ‘microtopian’: it produces a community 

whose members identify with each other, because they 

have something in common (the art world). 

By contrast, I wish to argue that an understanding of 

democracy as a relationship of antagonism can be seen 

in the work of two artists who are not discussed in 

Relational aesthetics: Santiago Sierra and Thomas 

Hirschhorn. These artists set up ‘relationships’ of quite 

a different order to that of Tiravanija: while they 

emphasise the role of dialogue and negotiation in their 

art, the work is not reducible to these relationships. 

Rather, the relations produced by their performances 

and installations are marked by unease and discomfort 

rather than belonging, because the work sustains a 

tension between viewers, participants and context. 

To give two examples: Sierra’s contribution to the 

Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, which 

involved sealing off the pavilion’s interior with concrete 

blocks from floor to ceiling. On entering the building, 

viewers were confronted by a hastily constructed yet 

impregnable wall that rendered the galleries 

inaccessible. Visitors carrying a Spanish passport, 

however, were invited to enter the space via the back of 

the building, where two immigration officers inspected 

passports. All non-Spanish nationals were denied entry 

to the gallery, whose interior apparently contained 

nothing but grey paint peeling from the walls, left over 

from the exhibition two years back. The work was 

‘relational’ in Bourriaud’s sense, but problematised any 

idea of these relations being fluid, harmonious and 

unconstrained; the work exposed how all our social 

interactions are, like public space, riven with social and 

legal exclusions.

A second example: Hirschhorn’s Bataille monument at 

Documenta XI. The Bataille monument is a more complex 

work, comprising three installations in makeshift shacks 

outside a housing estate in the suburbs of Kassel; it also 

featured a sculpture of a tree, and a functioning bar. 

To reach the Bataille monument, visitors had to 

participate in a further component of the work: securing 

a lift from a Turkish cab company who were contracted 

to ferry Documenta visitors to and from the site. 

Viewers were then stranded at the Monument until a 

return cab became available, during which time they 

would inevitably make use of the bar. The three 

installations included a library of books and videos on 

Bataillean themes, a functioning TV studio, and an 

installation about Bataille’s life and work. 

In locating the Monument in the middle of a community 

whose ethnic and economic status implied that it was 

not a target audience for Documenta, Hirschhorn 

contrived a curious rapprochement between the influx 

of art tourists and the area’s residents. The result was 

a reversed ‘zoo effect’, in which visitors feel like 

hapless intruders. Even more disruptively, in light of 

the international art world’s intellectual pretentions, 

Hirschhorn’s Monument took the local inhabitants 

seriously as potential Bataille readers. This gesture 

induced a range of emotive responses amongst visitors, 

including accusations that Hirschhorn’s gesture was 

inappropriate and patronising. This unease revealed the 

fragile conditioning of the art world’s self-constructed 

identity. The complicated play of identificatory and 

dis-identificatory mechanisms at work in the content, 

construction and location of the Bataille Monument were 

radically and disruptively thought-provoking: the ‘zoo 

effect’ worked two ways. Rather than offering, as the 

Documenta handbook claims, a reflection on ‘communal 

commitment’, the Bataille Monument served to 

destabilise (and therefore potentially liberate) any sense 

of what community identity might be, or what it means 

to be a ‘fan’ of art and philosophy. In other words, the 

relations established by this work were marked by 

unease and ambivalence, rather than comfortable 

togetherness and identification. Significantly, in the two 

works I have discussed, the viewer is no longer required 

to fulfil a literal participatory role (to eat noodles, or to 

play the drums), but is asked only to be a thoughtful and 

reflective visitor. As Hirschhorn says, 

I do not want to do an interactive work. I want to do an 

active work. To me, the most important activity that an 

artwork can provoke is the activity of thinking. Andy 

Warhol’s Big electric chair, 1967, makes me think, but it 

is a painting on a museum wall. An active work requires 

that I first give of myself. 1 

It is with this appeal to an art of encounter as activated 

thinking that I wish to end this paper. Rather than being 

coerced into fulfilling the artist’s interactive requirements, 

perhaps it is more political – and provocative – 

to presuppose the viewer as a subject of independent 

thought, which is after all the essential prerequisite for 

political action. It is no longer enough to say that 

activating the viewer tout court is democratic, for every 

artwork – even the most ‘open-ended’ – always 

prescribes in advance what participation may and may 

not take place within it Such pretences to emancipation 

should no longer be necessary: all art – whether 

immersive or not – can be a critical force that 

appropriates and reassigns value, decentralising our 

thoughts from the predominant and pre-existing 

consensus. The task facing us today is to analyse how 

contemporary art addresses the viewer, and to assess 

the quality of the audience relations it produces. 

If relational art seeks a unified subject as a prerequisite 

for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and 

Sierra provide a mode of artistic encounter more 

adequate to the split, divided and incomplete subject 

of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated 

not on social harmony, but on exposure of that which 

is repressed in contriving the semblance of this harmony, 

and thereby would provide a more concrete and 

polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the 

world and to each other. 

1 Thomas Hirschhorn, in Jessica Morgan 

(ed.), Common wealth, Tate Modern, 

p.63 

35 

Claire Bishop is currently 

Leverhulme Research Fellow in 

the department of Curating 

Contemporary Art, Royal College 

of Art, London. 

This article was read as a paper 

for the Art of the Encounter 

conference, Whitechapel Art 

Gallery, London, May 2004. A full 

version can be found in October, 

no.110, Fall 2004.

c. 

36 

Grant Watson 

Response to 

Claire 

Bishop’s paper 

on Relational 

Aesthetics

In her paper Claire Bishop critiques the easy 

assumptions and loose talk that goes on around so called 

interactive art. In particular she takes to task ‘Relational 

Aesthetics’, which has progressed from being the title to 

a collection of essays (referring to a particular group of 

closely knit practitioners operating at a particular 

moment), to become a term that gets bandied about in 

all sorts of contexts. Quite rightly Bishop is sceptical 

about the line put forward by some proponents of this 

genre – that it is intrinsically good to talk, that dialogue 

and interactivity is healthy and that this dialogue automatically 

leads to a sense of community. One has to ask, 

as Bishop does, what are the effects of the interactions 

which take place within certain art practices? Whom do 

they privilege, what do they challenge and what do they 

leave unchallenged? These questions are pertinent 

because one would assume that any practice of this kind 

would gesture towards new social models, ones that are 

perhaps more collective, democratic, discursive, critical 

or liberatory. 

It is unfortunate (but strategic) that Bishop’s only 

example of a relational artwork at first hand is so far 

removed from any of the above. Jerry Saltz, describing 

his experience of a work by Rirkrit Tiravanija for Art in 

America, gives us an exercise in namedropping and 

nepotism that demonstrates how familiar types of social 

practice based on networks of influence and exclusivity 

can surface anywhere. But as Bishop points out, this 

actually tells us little, because if we were to base our 

judgement on individual testimony then every participant 

in the work would have to be taken into account 

(suggesting a wildly democratic if untenable form of art 

criticism). However Bishop’s paper does not wager its 

argument on personal experience but instead responds 

to Relational aesthetics from an “art historic and 

theoretical perspective.” In this process Bishop produces 

(using a sort of theoretical shorthand along with 

examples of current practice) an equation in which the 

different elements become units that, “for the sake of 

economy and clarity” compete with one another within 

her text. And looking to the democratic potential of an 

engaged art practice, Bishop draws upon the ideas of 

Chantal Mouffe. In her development of the democratic 

idea, Mouffe argues against a deliberative or third-way 

politics, in which citizens arrive through rational 

discourse and ‘deliberation’ at a consensus, where 

conflict is overcome and the private exists largely outside 

of the political arena. In its place she proposes an 

‘agonistic’ model which refuses to iron out conflict but 

that also goes beyond the old antagonisms between 

embedded enemies such as the traditional left/right, or 

the moral majority versus the rights of sexual minorities. 

Instead Mouffe presents a dynamic of rivalry between 

adversaries, who compete across the social field in 

order to construct aggregate structures and precarious 

solutions within which society’s tensions can become 

productive. The trick for Mouffe is to include as many 

social actors in the equation as possible. So, for example, 

she welcomes the anti-globalization movement into the 

fold, on the grounds that it participates to a certain 

extent within the current order of existing institutions 

and so becomes a part of these institutions’ renewal. 

In this Mouffe is an outspoken critic of Antonio Negri, 

whom she characterises as unrealistic and even dangerous 

- going the way of earlier revolutionaries who risk the 

emergence of nondemocratic forms in the wake of the 

existing order, which they seek to overthrow. In her 

paper, Bishop (who draws on Mouffe’s use of Lacanian 

psychoanalytic theory) explains that the agonistic model 

is based on an understanding of the individual as 

fractured and contradictory. And so agonistic democracy 

becomes not a dialogue between wholly rational 

partners, or the frontal encounter of two complete 

entities at total war with one another, but instead a 

multifarious negotiation of partial and often unstable 

subject positions. 

Bishop uses Mouffe’s argument as a point of entry into 

the work of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, 

citing in particular Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, 

which formed a part of Documenta 11, in 2002. While the 

practice of applying a singular theory to an artwork is 

liable to produce distortions, there is some mileage in 

reading Hirschhorn’s gargantuan and rambling public art 

project through an investigation of radical democracy. 

Yes, this was a strangely disruptive work on many 

registers and yes, the “zoo effect” she describes, in 

which differences and social tensions were made visible, 

was present. Personally I spent my time analysing the 

other people, both the Documenta visitors (hawk-eyed 

to see if I could detect partially concealed signs of class 

snobbery) and the inhabitants of the estate who 

performed the role of paid workers. 

Moving on from Hirschhorn, Bishop turns her attention 

to the work of Tiravanija, who for her comes to stand in 

for the whole Relational Aesthetics project. And placing 

the practice of these two artists side by side, she finds 

one to be easy, uncritical, producing of uniformity and 

theoretically and politically naïve, while the other is 

revealing of tensions, agonistic, consciousness-raising 

and productive of multiple responses. The reason for the 

success of one and the failure of the other goes back 

(I would guess) to the difference between the 

deliberative and the agonistic model – back to the 

different types of individual subject that the two artists 

wish to address. In a somewhat reductive passage she 

states that while “Relational Aesthetics seeks a unified 

subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, 

Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic 

encounter more adequate to the split, divided and 

37

c. 

38 

incomplete subject of today.” It is as if Bourriaud has 

failed to cotton on to the “divided and incomplete 

subject of today” and has thus overlooked the 

developments taking place in the intellectual culture 

that surrounds him. 

But rereading Relational aesthetics, and in particular 

the chapter dealing with the work of Felix Guattari, a 

different picture emerges. Using a tortuous snip-up 

effect of quotations and by paraphrasing the original, 

Bourriaud makes something of a mentor of Guattari and 

in this the question of subjectivity is given centre stage. 

Guattari was a student of Lacan but critical of psychoanalysis, 

which he saw as seeking to regulate desire into 

certain configurations. For Guattari, the individual is 

fragmented into multiple relationships with a changing 

environment (technological, biological, cultural and so 

on), forming alliances and couplings, which are motored 

by the energy of a desire that refuses to be curtailed. 

In this way subjectivity is described not as unified and 

inevitable but instead (to use Guattari’s colourful 

terminology) it is seen as the mobile constellation of 

points, moving along lines of flight that transverse the 

human and the nonhuman world. In other words, this is 

a fragmentation of individual identity, a subjectivity that 

is in permanent mutation, that is constantly being 

produced and taking on new forms in different historical 

periods. Importantly for him, these ideas are not simply 

abstractions but have immediate political effects – 

namely the need for a production of subjectivity which 

is not in thrall to (or defined by) oppressive regimes such 

as capitalism – and finally, to return to art, he describes 

the aesthetic paradigm as one in which this subjectivity 

can be performed and tested. 

These ideas may sound like so much utopian, fuzzy and 

pretentious jargon. It may be difficult to relate them 

directly to the artworks in question or even to think 

about them in a practical way in terms of current 

political debates. Mouffe would certainly say so, judging 

by the manner in which she attacked the ideas of 

Deleuze and Guattari, as they appear in Empire, at a 

recent conference. But if we are to assess Relational 

Aesthetics in the round, then it seems only fair to take 

Guattari’s ideas on the individual subject and its relation 

to the political into account, particularly as Bourriaud 

cites them as important for his practice. Perhaps this is 

a minor point but rather this than to produce a straw 

man. Bishop’s paper was written a while back and maybe 

now the real problem is that, like the YBA movement 

before it, Relational Aesthetics is suffering the fate of all 

things that are passing out of fashion. They produce a 

discussion, which is too late to seem current and too 

early to bring with it the benefits of hindsight or the 

pleasure of rediscovery. 

Grant Watson is the Curator of 

Visual Arts at Project in Dublin.

Jaki Irvine 

The silver bridge, 2005 

DVD still 


39

c. 

40 

Cherry Smyth 

Jaki Irvine: 

A retrospective 

Jaki Irvine 

Towards a polar sea: 

the sound of your wings 

2005 

DVD still 

courtesy the artist

Rejecting I chose, there’s no other way, 

but what I do reject more numerous is, 

and denser and more than ever insistent. 

Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Big numbers’ 1 

Polish poet Szymborska describes the gap between her 

empty inner world and the over-populated outer world 

with surprise: “My imagination is as it was… like a torch 

or a beam… it’s still moved by singularity.” Watching the 

impressive body of Jaki Irvine’s short films gives you the 

sense that what she hasn’t focused on, as she tries to 

distinguish the important from the unimportant, the 

extraordinary from the everyday, hovers at the edge of 

the frame, and is perhaps the unseen core of the film. 

Having participated in two Venice Biennales and several 

landmark exhibitions, Irvine is celebrating four solo 

shows this year at Frith Street Gallery, London, the Irish 

Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Henry Moore 

Institute, Leeds and the Paradise project space at the 

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Through split narration 

and ellipsis, carefully chosen scores and constructed 

characters, Irvine shapes beautiful, compelling stories 

about intimacy, about losing our instincts, about how we 

are tamed by love, by waiting. Her narratives are often 

submerged, like fish underwater, and her metaphors 

discreet. The mood, while melancholic, never slips into 

bathos or sentimentality. Her special confluence of 

sound and image remains both subtle and distinctive. 

Towards a polar sea at Frith Street develops Irvine’s 

concerns with beauty, loss and artistic endeavour, using 

characters that inhabit a story, or fragment of a story, 

that may or may not be their own. This five-part video 

installation was triggered by the diaries of nineteenthcentury 

explorer John Franklin, who failed in his attempts 

to find the Northwest Passage and once lived where the 

gallery is housed. In a moving and sparse invocation, 

Irvine blends extracts from his diaries with her own text, 

spoken in voice-over by gallery staff and filmed in situ, 

so that the house itself emerges as a character in the 

work. The voices, at the halting pace common to Irvine’s 

work, and the mournful musical soundtrack, ghost the 

rooms. In one sequence, rain falls behind the broken 

surface of a blacked-out windowpane, recalling the 

texture of Fireflies at 3am from 1999 2 . “Showers of snow 

fell through the night. Everything hurts – the trees, the 

sky, the air and you’re not here.” The elegiac tone recalls 

the exquisitely rendered pain of separation in The takeoff, 

1999 3 , in which the runway is filmed from a plane, 

perhaps leaving the beloved behind, to the soaring, 

searing torch song Io vivrò senza te (‘I’ll live without 

you’), by seventies diva, Mina: “What’s going to happen 

to me from tomorrow onwards? I will live without you… 

I will cry. Yes, I will cry…” 

In another sequence, Towards a polar sea: if the Earth…, 

a member of staff sorts and repacks Irvine’s archive 

and views a strip of film from Portrait of Daniela, 1999 4 , 

the companion piece to The take-off. Played to the same 

Mina song, this black-and-white love poem showed the 

beloved sitting in a lounger in the sun, smoking, looking 

with love into the camera, blowing kisses, teasing, 

looking up, as if at the plane in the sky. The pieces ran 

simultaneously, telling a tale of heartache: the love that 

hurts with the fear of losing it and the separation that 

makes the love object sweeter, fixed in the memory like 

a home movie on a hot afternoon. Irvine’s and Franklin’s 

relationship to the past’s painful lessons merge in the 

narration of Towards a polar sea: “If the earth moves and 

swallows me up, this doesn’t prove that my trust in it 

was misplaced. What better place for my trust could 

there be?” 

In sifting through Franklin’s diary – “Drank tea… 

between hope and fear… we went silently forward” – 

Irvine finds self-evidence, evoking conversations at 

kitchen tables in Eyelashes, 1996, and Ivana’s answers, 

2001, and recalling questions the artist asks herself 

about how stories work, and how to define questions 

themselves. 

The sequence Towards a polar sea: whenever the ice 

shifts is the most eloquent and profound of the 

installation. As one member of staff tells how “the 

party is reduced to four persons,” all four sit on the floor 

of the empty gallery, backs to the wall, each voice 

recounting a tale of exhaustion, persistence and failure. 

“F. could go no further, overwhelmed with grief. The 

whole party shed tears.” The piece binds the gallery 

staff into a team facing challenges on a life-and-death 

level, heroic in the face of blank expanses of whiteness – 

the start to every art. 

The sorrowfulness, exacerbated by The Eels’ soundtrack, 

is tempered by the resolute attempt to find a way 

through: “There was not one single passage, rather the 

intricate maze… provided a number of potential 

passages whenever the ice shifted to open the door.” In 

the slow dissolves from one close up face to another, the 

piece is a testimony to the commitment and dedication 

that keeps art galleries themselves open and delicately 

conjures the artist as explorer of the uncharted. 

41

42 

Towards a polar sea delivers the sensation of walking in 

on yourself doing something else, in a space you’ve 

already encountered, shown around by living guides you 

imagined were already dead. It’s similar to experiences 

that Irvine’s earlier characters describe, such as Marco 

one afternoon 5 , who tells of travelling to an unknown city 

to live for a day, “to see who knows what.” There, in 

Borgesian fashion, he spies a more elegant self, fifteen 

years older, and has to turn away. A character who 

presses a fortune-teller for clues in Ivana’s answers, 2001, 

feels “like someone else is living my life,” that if she’s 

“distracted for a second, things fall apart.” 

Unlike many of Irvine’s peers in the ’90s who examined 

dislocation and displacement in a geographical and 

cultural context, Irvine, despite living in London, Rome 

and Tuscany, is fuelled by a more ontological attempt to 

locate having once been, being and coming to life, in 

relation to the self, to others and to the romantic tropes 

we’ve inherited. Star, 2001, opens with the big brass 

section of an orchestra, the sound of a black-and-white 

weepie, the camera sweeping over a black crystal 

chandelier. A woman relates a story about a man and a 

woman in a bar and too much vodka. The woman gets 

drunk and falls over, language failing to describe the 

precise way she falls. Irvine is interested in why romance 

falters and the feelings we project onto things, such as 

hundreds of tiny lights glittering through pieces of polished 

glass or a beam of light through celluloid itself. 

A fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute produced 

Plans for forgotten works, 2004, which includes 

Nightingale, one of Irvine’s few unpeopled pieces. 

Here a classical temple (the Villa Borghese in Rome) is 

filmed at night, but is played obscured by a veil of blackness. 

Each time the nightingale, whose song is most 

noticeable at night, sings, a flickering hole of light reveals 

parts of the hidden building. This irregular flame pulses 

to the birdsong and disappears as each cascade of notes 

ends. It’s as though the sound is painting the image itself, 

conjuring the Romantic poets, classical architecture, 

western tropes of beauty, the dream of elsewhere. If you 

couldn’t hear, this film shows how birdsong could look – 

insistent, transient, dappling. As in all of Irvine’s work, 

she sees with sound. She allows the materiality of light 

and dark that cause film’s magic to comment about time 

and history. The film is an exquisite evocation of the 

Romantic ideal of the poet as nightingale producing 

beauty to defy mortality. “Like stars to their appointed 

height they climb/ And death is a low mist which cannot 

blot/ The brightness it may veil.” 6 Nightingale also recalls 

Fireflies at 3am 7 . In this brief film, the ‘fireflies’ could be 

blots of light, scratches on the celluloid. We make their 

meaning as Irvine honours how we signal to lovers, how 

we create, love and live for illusions – the biggest one of 

all being romance, told most passionately by cinema and 

music and so crucially intertwined in her practice. 

Throughout her oeuvre, Irvine is drawn to how one 

fragment can stand for a whole; how one aspect of the 

lover’s body can determine or overdetermine the rest, 

as in Eyelashes, 1996, where a lover is mesmerised and 

perplexed by his lover’s eyelashes; or in Holding it all 

together, 2002, where a button on a soaked jacket on a 

man in a downpour is the eidetic image that remains: 

“It’s raining heavy wet stuff, but that’s all lost on him. 

He’s forgotten it even before it hits him.” 

While Nightingale demonstrates a gorgeous synaesthesia 

of sight and sound, there is usually a dissonance 

between Irvine’s sound and image, as if the artist is used 

to being slightly misunderstood, experiencing one story, 

while remembering another, like sliding from the first 

to the third person in your own life. The slippery sense 

of not belonging, being unknown, is indirect, subtle, 

accumulative, enquiring, like a short story in Joyce’s 

Dubliners. You voyage into the character’s psyche, 

undergo a small epiphany and have almost lost it before 

the film ends. 

The impossibility of capturing the essence of a story is 

central to Irvine’s work. In Another difficult sunset, 1997, 

a character tells how tigers ate his parents when he was 

a child and then settled down to ask, “What kind of story 

would you like to hear?” as if all was all right with the 

world. Headlines announcing that a tiger has mauled its 

keeper provide a visual and textual thread throughout the 

piece, as if to warn of the danger of imaginary beasts in 

stories becoming real enough to destroy us. In Losing 

Doris, 1996, what appears to be a still of a woman in a 

’30s sitting room is projected with a voice-over telling of 

a meeting between a young man and woman during 

which the tiny shift of two ice cubes in a glass absorbs 

the man’s attention. When he looks up, the woman has 

vanished. “In ice-cube terms, it was a very accomplished 

and beautiful kind of movement, a kind of non-movement 

movement.” It changes the direction of their lives, of any 

story thereafter. The non-movement is the crux of their 

conversation, their inability to communicate. The nondoing 

is the undoing. In the image itself, the woman’s 

head seems to tilt a fraction, her eyes blink, so that the 

certainty that this was a photograph shifts too, causing 

time and perception itself to become as unstable as 

the lovers and switching her position from subject to 

onlooker to narrator all at once.

In Eyelashes, the lover can’t disentangle himself from 

the meaning of his lover’s eyelashes, as though love has 

merged them so utterly that he cannot bear to see her 

separateness. It brings to mind all the small 

imperfections that attraction thrives on at the beginning 

of love, which grow to monumental proportions if desire 

founders. The man’s story, told by a heavily accented 

female narrator, as if reading a language in translation, 

is ever more removed from him. “The eyelashes hold him 

hostage. The rest of the story is gone. He doesn’t know it 

yet but it might not be coming back.” For Irvine, the man 

“is trying to imagine a woman… He is literally stuck in 

his own imagination.” 8 

The film is shot in an offhand way, like casual footage 

of friends in a shared kitchen. It makes us keep looking, 

thinking about our own eyelashes, our eyelid’s movements, 

the way the artist uses the eye. The violins tell 

their own withheld melodrama, the movement of the bow 

like the movement of the lashes, leading the artist, the 

experimenter, “to something obscure but beautiful.” 

The spectator walks away with a new knowing about the 

way stories spin out beyond the teller, beyond the 

images they conjure, like the set of unwanted false teeth 

that haunt the sculpture’s yard of marble statues and 

gargoyles in Sweet tooth, 1993, one of Irvine’s first films. 

The silver bridge at IMMA is a seven-screen installation 

that develops issues that have driven Irvine’s work, 

particularly our relationship to other species. In Ivana’s 

answers, falcons provide the questions we ought to ask, 

while it’s tigers in Another difficult sunset, and birds, bats 

and deer in The silver bridge. In each there is a sense 

that we have lost the perfect communing of creatures 

in the wild. We have curtailed their freedom, spoiled 

their habitats, catalogued and caged them in an effort to 

learn about, rather than from them. Another difficult 

sunset ends with shots of a dog in a park and a woman’s 

voice saying: “And we have to talk to dogs about biting 

if we are going to talk to them at all.” In Dani and Diego 9 , 

Irvine’s loving portrait of the sensual relationship 

between a woman and her dog, she glories in their 

uncomplicated, unspoken oneness: the woman whistles 

and sings to the dog while it pants noisily, licks her neck, 

her mouth. The film leaves us longing for this easy, 

erotic companionship with another human. 

The silver bridge opens with birds patterning a dusk sky. 

They multiply, break up in flight, become black ash in the 

wind, or letters that have lost their form, their sequence 

in written language, or pixels scattering meaninglessly. 

What appears to be blind, squawking panic is a form of 

instinct we can’t know. Another section shows deer 

grazing in a sunlit glade. Here Irvine erects four white 

panelled doors, like a caution for the development that 

might occur here or as portals to the mythical deer world 

we cannot enter. Footage from the bat-house in a zoo 

plays on another screen. We observe them hang, clean 

their webbed wings, wrap themselves up as if in black 

shawls, attempt to mate, to fly. Their cage is decorated 

with a painted mural of a primordial landscape complete 

with a robust sun and craggy rocks, as if bats like art. 

The mural is there to appease us for all the wilderness 

the bats have lost, just as Caspar David Friedrich’s 

paintings have returned to vogue with their fantasy of 

sublime, untouched nature. Another screen shows a 

woman, slowly blinking at the sight of the display cases 

and stuffed animal head in a natural history museum, 

as if the blink of an eye is all the time we have left. Our 

inability to know how to exist in our native landscape is 

shown by a man, aimlessly circling in a field, touching 

the bark of a gnarled wind-bent tree that will probably 

outlive him. He sits under the tree, gets up. The image 

dissolves. He walks about again like a character who has 

lost his place in another story, the one about rural Ireland 

and making do from the land. The two final sections are 

shot on a disused footbridge that crosses the Liffey at 

Strawberry Beds to the west of Dublin, near where the 

artist grew up. On one screen, a prone figure in black, 

feet bare, crawls along the overgrown rungs of the 

bridge towards an arched gateway, in a slow escape. 

It is unclear what time or place she has crept out of. 

The image lingers, disturbs. 

In the final sequence, two women in black hang upside 

down from the bridge, bonded, batlike, as instinctual 

and non-verbal as siblings, as lovers. They reflect one 

another, move to support and embrace each other, 

merging and emerging from each other’s bodies in the 

dance of rescue and poise of a profound relationship, in 

which we always sense the danger to its existence in the 

drop below. The bridge, surrounded by a tinted silver 

forest, is the fixed point, their natural habitat. They are 

not going anywhere; they have arrived. They cling, 

suspended by their hands, until one woman falls out of 

sight, leaving the other alone. The insects’ drone, the 

birdcalls and batcalls on the soundtrack lament a lost 

paradise, the inevitability of endings. 

The theme of journeys leaving the lover behind recurs in 

Irvine’s work. In Another difficult sunset, the assumed-tobe 

lovers ride tube trains, wait at stations, at park 

benches and at the zoo, but never meet. Ivana’s answers 

opens with a train pulling out of a station, a woman 

hugging a steel column on the platform, as if to steady 

herself from a parting or the failure of someone to arrive. 

Towards a polar sea also recounts the corrosive pain of 

abandoning dying friends: “Now that you’re gone, I walk 

through this dead land watching the skies for the sound 

of your wings.” 

43

44 

Cooler in tone than the love affair expressed through 

The hottest sun, the darkest hour, a romance, the batlike 

lovers in The silver bridge have found mutual accommodation, 

a physical harmony that is interdependent and 

powerful. The silver bridge dispels text and music, 

preferring the quieter drama of an older time, more in 

tune with a submerged inner rhythm. While The hottest 

sun carries the influence of European cinema, especially 

the Nouvelle Vague, The silver bridge borrows language 

from scientific and anthropological sources, warning of 

the dangers of domestication and romancing the 

unknown, the unknowable, hovering and swirling in the 

sky. Once again, Irvine has teased and tweaked our 

interpretative strategies, bringing together themes of 

love and loss, of our longing to recover a oneness with 

nature and a gentler co-existence, using strong visual 

poetry and the right aural intensity. 

(below) 

Jaki Irvine 

Ivana’s answers, 2000 

DVD still 


(right) 

Jaki Irvine 

The take-off, 2000 

film still 


1 Wislawa Szymborska, from People on 

a bridge, Forest Books, London, 1990 

2 From The hottest sun, the darkest hour, 

a romance, 1999 

3 Ibid. 

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid. 

6 Percy Shelley, The Adonais, lines 390-393, 

1821 



8 Jaki Irvine in conversation with Edwina 

Ashton, Untitled, Autumn / Winter, 2000 



Cherry Smyth is an Irish critic and 

poet; she lives in London. 

Jaki Irvine’s The silver bridge, a recent 

acquisition by the Irish Museum of 

Modern Art, Dublin, will be shown 

there 13 December 2005 – 7 May 2006. 

Nightingale (2004) and Clever smile 

(2005) were shown at the Douglas Hyde 

Gallery, Dublin, 15 October – 30 

November 2005, as The Paradise [22].

(above) 

Nightingale, 2004 

DVD still 


(above right) 

Jaki Irvine 

For all the lives we’ll 

never live, 2000 

DVD still 


(below right) 

Losing Doris, 1996 

DVD still 

courtesy the artist

c. 

Áine O’Brien 

Suturing the 

aesthetic and 

the political – 

46 

multiple 

screens, 

multiple 

realities: An 

interview with 

Isaac Julien

Isaac Julien 

The long road to Mazatlán, 1999 

triple-screen rear projection 

16mm sepia/colour film 

video transfer, sound 

duration 20', edition of 4 

Installation view ArtPace 

San Antoino, Texas 

Collaboration Isaac Julien 

& Javier de Frutos. 

Director: Isaac Julien 

Choreography: Movement 

material Javier de Frutos 

courtesy the artist and Victoria 

Miro Gallery 

47

48 

ÁO’B Isaac, you began as a painter and then migrated 

to photography and film, but in recent years you have 

moved away from the single-screen to the multiplescreen 

format. You use an interesting term, the ‘metacinematic’, 

in an interview with B. Ruby Rich (2002) to 

describe the impact of this move from the theatre into 

the gallery. Could you elaborate on this? David Frankel 

(Art Forum, 2003) describes this transition somewhat 

differently by referring to how you are now working in a 

“segmented [aesthetic] format,” where there is often a 

slippage between a continuity and rupture of the image 

in your work. Could you begin by tracing the history and 

context for these conceptual and political transitions, 

indeed aesthetic migrations? 

IJ I think it stemmed from working in film as an artist and 

being interested in questions that moved beyond the 

normative, narrative expectations that the cinema-going 

audience usually wants to receive. In a gallery context 

one was able to shift attention away from those narrative 

concerns to concerns which involved the questioning of 

spectatorship or the viewer. The viewer embodies a 

certain autonomy in a gallery context which is not 

necessarily one circumscribed by the kind of framing 

apparatus of cinema proper. 

In a gallery context there is a shift in terms of audience 

and address. I see my work as being able to occupy 

several positions at any one time. I would say that my 

interest, which spanned from painting originally in a 

gallery context, became overshadowed by the development 

in media taking place up to the mid-’80s, with the 

inauguration of Channel 4 Television. 

When one began to really push formal questions in that 

context it was something that was questioned in the 

original moment of Channel 4. What they wanted were 

rather politically expedient expectations – for example, 

you were a ‘black’ film-maker, you were expected to 

produce something that was going to be in a documentary 

realist mode - and these aspirations were projected 

onto the independent film makers working at that time, 

who came from certain communities, which fulfilled a 

middle-class desire for the informative. There were social 

problems taking place in mainland Britain and somehow 

they had to be explained to a general white bourgeois 

audience. It was not necessarily the interest of audiences 

who were working class; they were interested in 

receiving a certain way of looking and reading images, 

which moved beyond just information. Now we live in a 

time of disinformation – everything has changed 

because we don’t receive the necessary information that 

we need to analyse a political situation. My practice has 

been shifting and migrating from one way of making an 

intervention, which was, first of all, in broadcasting, and 

then cinema. In a cinema space a number of imperatives 

are projected onto you. You have to report from the ‘field’ 

about what is happening in the street. Those positions 

are important and necessary, but what was really 

important was for you to articulate them in a way that 

could be assimilated. The question that was always 

posed was ‘Who is your audience?’ If you produced 

anything that was vaguely experimental or involved in a 

metacinematic discourse, it was considered inauthentic 

and problematic. There were institutional expectations of 

the kinds of works you would make, if you were black. 

Those things became quite claustrophobic, since I was 

interested in pursuing certain cultural or political 

questions twinned with an aesthetic approach. The move 

into a gallery context was also a reaction to both the 

political nature and the change in cultural climate that 

took place when the independent film sector had been 

completely disenfranchised after the shutting down of 

experimental film spaces, such as the schools located 

at St Martins School of Art and the Royal College, where 

filmmakers like Cerith Wyn Evans, John Maybury and 

Peter Greenaway all went. The interdisciplinary 

approaches were the raisons d’être of experimental film 

practice in these schools before the early ’90s. You began 

to see the development of video art in a British context, 

which was very interesting in its reaction against 

television, as a response to Thatcherism, a development 

within a generation that had been drawn to VCR 

technologies, like Douglas Gordon, and later to digital 

technology. This dovetailed with the cultural artistic 

revolution that took place in the mid ’90s, dubbed the 

‘Young British Artists’ (YBA), when a younger generation 

of artists began to make film and video works. This video 

art was completely disconnected from that history and 

connected to a market place, in a gallery context. 

You then have encapsulated in these two political 

moments a shift in my own practice, which comes about 

in the mid-’90s because I sensed a possibility for 

exploring aesthetic questions influenced by the new 

digital technology. Because video projection allowed the 

possibility to show works with an almost filmic, visceral 

quality. Also in the mid-’90s several artists, such as 

Doug Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon, Steven 

McQueen, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Willie Doherty 

come to the fore. Hence there are so many artists working 

in this arena that it becomes quite dynamic, some 

may even say an orthodoxy, and in a way problematically 

supplants some of the original developments that took 

place in the ’80s experimental-film and video scene. 

But perhaps not with the same kind of political radicality 

of an independent film culture that existed before.

ÁO’B Yes, it is interesting when you talk about those two 

historical and political moments, because there is a 

noted shift between your early Sankofa material in 

addition to perhaps Looking for Langston (1989) or even 

Young soul rebels (1991) and your more current work. 

In the earlier work there is a deliberate, in fact strategic 

attempt to deconstruct stereotype, born out of a desire 

and urgency to generate a new discourse on race and 

representation – an alternative discourse which was, as 

you say, part of a broader pedagogical and collective 

project. Whereas in the later work, and I am thinking of 

The long road to Mazatlán (2000), there is an equally 

deliberate foregrounding and negotiation of the very 

grain of the stereotype. This is twinned with a complex 

negotiation of multi-channels and a three-camera set-up, 

symptomatic of the move from the theatre into the art 

gallery. You are clearly exploring a different (though not 

entirely unrelated) set of questions with a different set 

of audiences in mind. What motivated this narrative and 

thematic shift - to working with the seductive quality of 

the stereotype as both a site of fantasy and desire for 

the spectator? 

IJ I have been concerned with this question for some 

time. Even with Looking for Langston (1989), an initial 

response to that film was ‘why does it look so beautiful’? 

Why does an artist like you who is dealing with these 

subjects make a work which is quite formal, aesthetically 

developed and fairly stylised? This question is typical of 

how one is expected in certain circles to deliberately 

unsuture aesthetics and the representation of pleasure 

and politics. Somehow those two projects are considered 

separate. My interest is in trying to relocate questions 

of pleasure and politics within the same frame, which I 

have been involved with for some time. I call it the 

reparation of aesthetics’. I try to, at least in an ethical 

sense, rearticulate the wounding projected by the 

dominant regime of images that one is bombarded with 

and which indeed can be stereotypical. But I don’t think 

I am interested in just undoing the stereotype. 

It has been very productive to be involved in work which 

is connected to the notion of the developing phantasmatic 

aesthetic, where I utilise politics and fantasy together. 

Within Thatcherism, both her agenda and certain rightwing 

ideologies were fused together. This is tied to 

something we spoke about a lot in the mid-’80s: how 

could one think through such a dynamic, how could one 

get to grips with something which was developing at a 

much more deep-seated level. These concerns are 

continued and developed in my gallery films such as The 

long road to Mazatlán (1999) and Baltimore (2003), which 

appropriate popular cultural motifs both from black and 

queer cultures. By that time, in the late ’90s and early 

2000, you begin to witness a global spectacularization in 

relation to these representations, and I started to think 

perhaps the only way you can rearticulate them is 

through a more ironic strategy. I did this by reviewing 

those modes of representation within the language in 

which those images get constructed, including my work 

for Baadasssss cinema (2002). 

While my argument at the beginning was concerned 

with repudiating stereotypical representations (Looking 

for Langston), I realised that audiences are much more 

sophisticated than that. Some of this idea is born out 

of reading Judith Butler’s essay Gender is burning. It is 

about the idea of the performative, of subjects re-performing 

an injury, foregrounding the wounding aspect 

and exploring how people who don’t have the same 

recourse to the dominant culture are able to replay things 

in much more sophisticated ways. We have a more 

complicated relationship to those visual influences, since 

it is also about ‘bad pleasure’. In Baltimore it is the bad 

pleasure you receive from those kinds of images, 

deemed inappropriate and irredeemable, such as ’70s 

Blaxploitation films, which were the antithesis of my 

earlier films I made as an independent filmmaker. I was 

also drawing on Stuart Hall, and Ernesto Laclau and 

Chantal Mouffe’s work on hegemony. 

ÁO’B A metaphor that runs throughout much of your 

work is that of a ‘haunting’, eliciting a preoccupation 

with questions of history, memory, the phantasmatic and 

the cinematic – we see this also in the early Sankofa 

work. Yet all of these narrative elements seem to come 

together in Paradise omeros (2002). For me, this is a 

fascinating and timely piece, given the current discourse 

and debates surrounding migration. It is also a very 

sophisticated piece in the way in which it weaves fairly 

contested and contentious issues. On the one hand, 

Paradise omeros explores migration as both a narrative 

of physical and cultural displacement, a history of transposition 

in terms of the transatlantic passage through 

slavery, simultaneously dramatising the dated, nevertheless 

remembered, politics and practices of assimilation. 

Yet it also explores the wider implications of migration 

through a dramatisation of history, which takes the form 

of ‘embodied memory’, for example migrant histories 

as read through the sensual and the somatic. Could you 

imagine creating a work like this in a single-screen 

format or could you only create a work like this in a 

multi-screen format? 

IJ Actually, there is a single-screen version of Paradise 

omeros which has been shown in film-festival contexts. 

The single screen enables it to connect to a cinema 

audience, which has been built around my film work. 

The multi-screen works begin to interrogate and inhabit 

the multi-temporalities which the gallery offers by the 

multi-screen aesthetic approach I have developed in my 

practice. At the same time it meditates on the questions 

49

50 

of vision. This digital technology continued my interest 

in cinematic techniques, thus enabling different ways of 

looking at the moving image, which draws attention to a 

multi-valiant viewing situation and also enables the 

transgression of time that can occur in and between 

frames side by side, in relation to each other. It is also a 

reflection on the processes of digitalisation, twinned 

with how you can experiment with the aesthetic in a way 

in which vision itself is questioned, for example: Why 

three screens? Why this mode of presentation? Of course 

it could be seen as a modern form of history painting – 

the triptych has a long art-historical legacy. You are able 

to have a different set of relationships to how you are 

viewing gallery films, in contrast to a normative narrative 

linear progression in the cinema. In multi-screen work 

you are utilising ideas of ‘parallel montage’, 5.1 surroundsound, 

not usually something you have in single-screen 

works. There is a more disjunctive and creative relationship 

that you can develop and explore around ‘time’ and 

‘memory’ that cannot be experienced in single-screen 

work in quite the same way. 

ÁO’B Yet there is often a desire, at least in dominant 

debates on migration, to pin the migrant subject down, 

in fact to pin down migrant histories – to trace, map and 

control the trajectories of departure and destination. 

This desire to navigate and document migrant journeys 

can be interpreted as a form of violence in the form of 

surveillance. In Paradise omeros, however, migration is 

depicted within a much more complex global landscape. 

It engages with the politics and lived effects of globalisation 

but also challenges these global / local trajectories 

in very provocative ways. 

IJ In Paradise omeros you have the representation of the 

football which is meant to be a metaphor of the globe as 

an object and which travels in tandem along with the 

protagonist’s geographical displacements. The football is 

gestured with and kicked around on the English football 

pitch. This inanimate object takes on a certain positionality 

connected to the Hansel Jules’ character, who is the 

main protagonist in Paradise omeros. His migratory 

subjectivity is in constant motion in the piece, he and the 

ball shifting and moving across the different territories 

and geographical spaces. In the gallery context we witness 

these from different perspectives simultaneously 

and it is my hope that the viewer is able to view the piece 

more than once, through repeated viewings. The dialectic 

occurs when there is an ongoing relationship through the 

looping of the narrative. The thing that is important is not 

so much the debates around tracing the trajectory of 

where certain people are coming from and where they 

are going, but what kind of way does migration and 

travelling change a subject’s subjectivity or a person’s 

way of viewing or experiencing the world? The more we 

debate migrancy, the more we sensationalise the event 

but lose the migrant’s voice, it seems to me. This is the 

dilemma that Derek Walcott’s poem expresses within the 

piece – but the important point is that the protagonist is 

also able to find a language to describe the current 

experience that he is inhabiting, which questions his 

relationship to his sense of being. It is this kind of 

philosophical question that gets continually marginalised 

in the ideologies of subjecthood or nationhood in debates 

‘about national belonging’. What are the psychic 

transitions? I am interested in the notion of ‘affect’ in 

my earlier works where there is a much more ideological, 

perhaps political expediency at work. I was always 

interested in the ‘interiority’ of what was being said, 

and perhaps in these gallery works there is a possibility 

for this re-articulation to be more subtle but not less 

political. 

ÁO’B The concept of ‘créolité’ is a term used quite a bit 

when critics engage with Paradise omeros but it is also 

rehearsed by artists and critics engaging with 

philosophies, politics and practices of globalisation and 

the legacy and transcendence of still entrenched 

postcolonial and imperial narratives of imperialism, in 

contrast to what is described as “accelerated processes 

of cultural syncretism” (Documenta 11_ Platform 3, 2003). 

And you’ve pointed to some of these complex 

configurations of identity with regard to the various 

transitions evident in your most recent work. Do you 

think that your future work will draw from and contribute 

to ongoing debates about créolité, since ‘accelerated 

processes of cultural syncretism’ are performed in 

unpredictable ways and cannot be easily documented? 

I raise this issue because it provides a marked contrast 

to a question asked of you a while ago, a question which 

highlights a certain type of prescriptive orthodoxy and 

desire on the part of certain audiences to have you 

clarify your position or describe how subject positions 

are inscribed in your work. The question was whether or 

not you work as a black, gay filmmaker and the answer 

you gave was, “I speak from that positionality, not for it.” 

But if you were asked that question again today, how 

would you respond to it? Indeed, would you even want to 

answer it? 

IJ It would reveal more to me about the person who 

poses the question rather than how I see myself now as 

a film maker and artist. ‘Time’ changes positionality and 

the kind of questions that you may find interesting to 

answer; take, for example, our current imperial war, 

where we have Condoleeza Rice – a black Republican 

woman who’s rumoured to be a lesbian in queer circles – 

at the forefront of marshalling the war in Iraq. The 

promise of radicality through one’s identity – to be gay 

and black - would be a nonsense nowadays. If someone 

wants to trace the trajectories to the kind of things I was 

involved in, well that position was very important and it

was an empowering position in the same way that 

feminism was for women, and of course these questions 

never disappear. For example, the riots in Paradise 

omeros are not from the ’80s. They are from the riots that 

took place in Northern England in 2001, in the very 

locations in England where the bombers who took their 

sad vengeance on the streets of London on 7 July 2005, 

came from; identity seems far more slippery now, and of 

course has come back to haunt the imperial centres. 

ÁO’B Paradise omeros is also a timely piece, because 

one of the critiques that has been directed at Labour’s 

‘multicultural’ policies in the UK, while obviously having 

moved on from the discourse and practice of assimilation, 

is that these policies have created a form of ethnic 

ghettoisation, where you now have a deep sense of 

disaffection amongst young minority subjects, in 

particular those who do not feel part of any civic society 

structure in any real or meaningful way. A very complex 

cultural and political malaise is emerging, and yet the 

response to it is quite simplistic and one-dimensional. 

IJ Very. If I were to link a work back to Paradise omeros, 

it would be Territories made in 1984. I think Territories 

poses a question about political discontent and it is a 

film I made over twenty years ago. It is a single-screen 

piece which has a multi-layered aesthetic approach and 

polyvalent in the way that it is trying to rearticulate 

political questions, which felt very urgent at that 

particular time. It is interesting to think about that film as 

one that had riot footage in it and then in 2002 there is 

yet another glimmer of it in Paradise omeros. 

ÁO’B Though there is a very different security apparatus 

in place now. 

IJ Absolutely. 

ÁO’B What are you working on at the moment? 

IJ I have just finished a four-screen piece called 

Fantôme créole for the Pompidou, which opened in May 

2005. It will be shown in a three-screen version at the 

Victoria Miro Gallery in October 2005. The Pompidou 

combined True north, which re-frames a historical question 

around the possibility that Matthew Henson, an 

African-American explorer, supposedly the helper and 

partner of Robert E. Perry during his polar trek in 1909, 

perhaps got to the North Pole before him. Thirty years 

after Perry’s death, he confessed to the danger and violence 

he experienced when he had made it known to 

Perry that maybe he got there first. My interest in this 

historical interpretation is also connected to the politics 

of the sublime and its relation to the trauma or the slave 

sublime, developed by Paul Gilroy, and this story in the 

four-screen piece is then linked to the other location of 

Fantôme créole, which is West Africa. In the work, I trace 

the possibility of thinking about an imaginary political 

landscape. The place that I journey through is Burkina 

Faso, and I chose it because it is the country of Africa’s 

most important film festival called ‘Fespaco’, a pan- 

African film event. I explore the different locations and 

different architectural sites and spaces as a way of 

allowing us to move through these ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ 

geographical locations and spaces, and the juxtaposition 

gets played out in Fantome créole across the four screens. 

ÁO’B Is this your first four-screen piece? 

IJ Yes. It is quite a visually complex work illustrating an 

aesthetic shift. A shift that is also in Paradise omeros in 

that there are different locations being portrayed, but 

it is only at the end of Paradise omeros that you get this 

juxtaposition happening simultaneously when the two 

protagonists are walking backwards surrounded by 

concrete architecture, and you have this image of the 

bird of paradise flower from St. Lucia that blooms in the 

centre of the triptych. In Fantome créole one makes that 

mélange a prominent aesthetic quest. 

ÁO’B Did you coin the term ‘post-cinematic video art’? 

IJ Yes. 

Áine O’Brien is Director 

of the Centre for 

Transcultural Research 

and Media Practice, 

School of Media, Dublin 

Institute of Technology. 

With thanks to Elizabeth 

Bowley. 

A season of Isaac Julien’s 

films takes place at the 

Irish Museum of Modern 

Art, Dublin, 21 September 

2005 – 15 January 2006. 

51

(left) 

Isaac Julien 

Paradise Omeros, 2002 

triple DVD projection, 

16mm film transferred 

to DVD, 20' 29" 

installation: Documenta 

11_Platform5: 

Ausstellung/Exhibition 

Binding Building, Kassel 

Germany, courtesy the 

artist and Victoria Miro 

Gallery 

(right) 

Isaac Julien 

Baltimore, 2003 

triple-screen projection, 

16mm b&w/colour film, 

DVD transfer, sound, 

11' 36" 

courtesy the artist and 

Victoria Miro Gallery 

(below) 

Isaac Julien 

True North series, 2004 

triptych of digital prints 

on Epson premium photo 

glossy, edition of 6 

image: 100 x 100cm each 

frame: 114 x 114cm 

courtesy the artist and 

Victoria Miro Gallery

c. 

Pauline Hadaway 

54Soul-searching 

and soul-selling: 

the new 

accountability 

in the arts

Within the subsidized arts, important conversations 

around arts practice, the social value of art and the 

relationship between art and the public rarely occur 

except at moments of crisis and then merely as subtext. 

The ongoing reorganisation of Northern Ireland’s public 

administration has provided the latest field of battle, 

where, inevitably in an environment where resources 

are scarce and competition fierce, unresolved ideological 

and aesthetic concerns have tended once again to 

become externally – which is to say politically directed – 

focused on the prize of official recognition in the form 

of funding. 

Organized around the contingencies of conflict management, 

and bearing an historic legacy of corruption and 

misrule, Northern Ireland’s public sector is currently 

governed, or, perhaps more accurately, over-governed, 

through a diffusion of centralized power across an often 

confusing array of local authorities, voluntary agencies, 

politically appointed and executive public bodies. Four 

years on from the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern 

Ireland Executive launched “a comprehensive and 

strategic review of all aspects of the public sector” 

(Review of Public Administration or RPA) in the interests 

of improving efficiency and cost effectiveness in publicservice 

delivery and enhancing political and financial 

accountability. 1 As part of a consultation process, a 

government review team has been inviting responses 

from interested parties to proposed structural changes. 

These proposals are chiefly informed by the idea of a 

simplified model of public administration, made up of a 

regional tier, incorporating the assembly, government 

departments and district authorities, and a second tier 

comprising local councils, health agencies and other 

subregional bodies. The proposals also envisage local 

government as the “bedrock of a reformed and streamlined 

public administration,” where councils would take 

on new powers and responsibilities transferred from 

central government and politically appointed agencies or 

‘quangos’. Within these new arrangements, the position 

of independent and executive public bodies remains open 

to question, with arguments currently ranging from 

rationalisation and reform to abolition with the transfer 

of their functions to local or regional government. 

The latest round of consultation, focusing on the future 

role of executive public bodies, such as the Arts Council 

of Northern Ireland (ACNI), has generated much debate 

throughout the subsidized arts sector, disclosing once 

again the complex interplay of motives and concerns, 

which underpin so much contemporary discussion 

around arts policy. For beyond an apparent consensus 

expressed around the need to effect more efficient and 

rational administrative systems, divert resources away 

from bureaucracy towards arts practice, and retain 

arm’s length approaches to state subsidy, ACNI has once 

again come under fire from sections of the arts 

community for its perceived failure to act as a voice for 

the arts in Northern Ireland. While there is certainly 

considerable room for improvement, not least in ACNI’s 

record of resisting political interference and winning 

financial support for the sector, this criticism surely begs 

the question, does the arts community, in all its current 

diversity, have a single, collective voice, and if so, what 

is it saying? 

From the earliest days of formal government intervention, 

official approaches to the arts have exhibited a 

fundamental consistency, not only in the privileged 

status they confer upon art’s incidental benefits, but 

in preferences shown to art forms and practice which 

appear to uphold official points of view. Public investment 

in the arts, no less than any other form of 

patronage, demands successful delivery of specific 

outcomes and benefits, and in favouring product over 

process tends to underacknowledge the value and 

purpose of arts practice in and of itself. Meanwhile, 

outside the celebrity spotlight, artists generally find 

themselves at the margins of political interest. 

Not to say that political values placed on arts and 

cultural activities are intrinsically hostile to claims for 

‘artistic excellence’. On the contrary, in the immediate 

post war era, national prestige aside, the role of art as an 

integral element and driver of intellectual or knowledge 

based culture was understood as justification enough for 

state subsidy. Indeed, given the failure of the market to 

deliver these prized public benefits, financial assistance 

was often, quite logically, channelled towards less 

popular, even abstruse arts practices, where veneration 

for the selfless pursuit of excellence chimed with a 

democratising mission to make the best of the arts 

available outside of a cultivated and well-heeled clique. 

The political landscape has since undergone a radical 

transformation, where cultural policies based on ‘value 

for money’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘accountability’ reflect 

wider political intentions to scale down and reorganize 

public provision under quasi-market disciplines, an 

environment in which the ambition for human centred 

progress that established Britain’s post war welfare 

state now seems hopelessly utopian. Disorientated by 

an increasingly morbid preoccupation with human 

failure, all sections of political life appear to have 

rejected the project of social progress in favour of pennypinching 

control, where, in the words of a recent Arts 

Council chairman, any sentiment or “vague hope that one 

day enlightenment might descend” upon the masses, 

now expresses “an attitude that simply won’t do.” 2 

55

56 

From the mid-1990s, in the context of wider government 

anxieties around growing levels of political disengagement 

and social exclusion, official interest has focussed 

on art forms and practices which claim, as their primary 

purpose, a desire to involve or connect with the broadest 

possible public. Following the 1997 UK General Election, 

the new Secretary of State at the Department for 

Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) explicitly defined one 

of the key values of art and culture as “their ability to 

provide ways for the people to come together to express 

their belief in participation in society.” In Northern 

Ireland, in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, 

remarkably similar views have been expressed, often 

disclosing unanimity between otherwise implacable 

political enemies. In 2002, DUP councillor Nelson 

McCausland, former Chair of the Development (Arts) 

subcommittee at Belfast City Hall, listed “the promotion 

of cultural diversity, and further exploration of positive 

images of Belfast” as two key benefits of localized 

cultural and community activity, 3 a view echoed by his 

successor, Sinn Féin’s Eoin O’Broin. Commenting on 

Belfast City Council’s 2003 Culture and Arts Plan, 

The Spirit of the City, O’Broin welcomed the proposed 

shift of “culture to a more central position on the urban 

regeneration agenda.” 4 

Nor has the Arts Council of Northern Ireland been averse 

to embracing explicitly political agendas, notwithstanding 

its formal commitment to political independence. 

In its response to the RPA consultation process, while 

acknowledging that art is “not always about consumption 

and audiences,” ACNI placed the promotion of “joined up 

government” at the head of its “vision,” while asserting 

its support for the arts as a contributor to “peace 

building” and a vehicle for “non threatening” cultural 

expression. 

Fluctuating according to the political preoccupations of 

the day, official approaches to the subsidized arts, 

whether militantly instrumental or liberally egalitarian, 

remain pivotal to the formation of cultural policy. 

Conversely, in a sector where the space between arts 

practice and official policy has always been contested, 

artists have generally recognized and occasionally 

resisted official requirements to demonstrate the 

external benefits of their work, over and above freedom 

to make art. It therefore comes as no surprise that during 

the latest round of RPA consultation, opposition to political 

interference was expressed as a key area of shared 

concern, where even those who opposed each other on 

the question of abolishing the Arts Council agreed on the 

need to retain some kind of ‘arm’s length’ agency. Yet, 

while resistance to external political interference 

appears to offer the sector the opportunity of organising 

around a shared position, does this apparent unanimity 

simply draw attention to an underlying and possibly fatal 

fracture? For, historically at least, the business of 

keeping political interests at arm’s length has always 

relied on a defence of artistic freedom, defined through 

the imposition of aesthetic criteria equal to, if not over 

and above, questions of social or political relevance. 

In other words, defending artistic autonomy as the 

expression and manifestation of individual (or indeed 

collective) freedom appears by implication to demand a 

defence of privilege. 

Throughout the postwar period, the so called ‘arm’s 

length’ relationship between the state and state 

sponsored art evolved as a kind of balancing act, where 

a self-confident Arts Council appealed to an educative 

and civilizing mission, entirely dependent on its position 

as the sole arbiter of cultural excellence within a unified 

and exclusive sector. Although co-operating with the 

Treasury, the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), 

supported by the prestige of a membership which 

included such artistic ‘luminaries’ as Jacob Epstein, 

Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud, remained both 

unashamedly patrician and doggedly committed to the 

preservation of “artistic freedom” and “self government 

for the arts.” Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, under the 

influence of what critic Ian Hill calls a “distinctly tweedy, 

west-Brit establishment” within the Arts Council NI, 

government and the arts were enjoying a relationship 

which was perhaps, not so much ‘arm’s length’, more 

‘out of sight out of mind’, an approach which was to 

define official arts policy in ‘the Province’ for much of 

the following six decades. 5 

In this context, ‘arm’s length’ was sustained not only 

within a progressive or, in the case of NI, disinterested 

political climate, but by a widely held, though far from 

uncontested, belief in the unique quality of great art to 

transcend the limitations and divisions of everyday life. 

In 1953, although struggling to define the relationship of 

art to “the controversies that agitate the market place,” 6 

Clement Greenberg unequivocally lauded the avantgarde 

movement for being “about itself”: “interested 

above all in solutions to (formal) problems of surface and 

perspective in painting, of tonality and dissonance in 

music, of language and depth psychology in literature” 7 . 

Yet, in the United States in the era of McCarthyism and 

Cold War imperialism, is it possible that this apparently 

conservative identification of art as a “separable sphere 

of human activity” 8 not only remained consistent with 

support for radical social and political movements, but, 

for many on the Left, seemed to provide one of “the last 

defensible enclaves of political activity and dissent” 

in an otherwise conformist society? 9 . As late as 1978, 

in spite of prevailing postmodernist challenges around 

questions of relevance, cultural elitism and even 

authorship itself, radical playwright David Hare defended 

artistic autonomy against political interference from both

Left and Right with an appeal to the grand narrative of 

human emancipation. For Hare the function of art was 

not to proselytise, but to “refresh” our lives “with images, 

which are not official, not approved; that break what 

George Orwell called ‘the Geneva Conventions of the 

mind.’” 10 

Of course, beyond public attachments to the principle 

of artistic freedom, the actual business of keeping 

government interest at arm’s length has always required 

extraordinary levels of pragmatism. At the height of 

Margaret Thatcher’s commitment to the promotion of 

‘enterprise culture’, the ACGB freely appealed for 

government subsidy in the language of economic development, 

or as one contemporary commentator called it, 

“arts as industry talk.” 11 Today, where so much of 

contemporary art is community orientated, concerned 

with extending the terms of public engagement and the 

development of a ‘democratic aesthetic’, a skilful 

administrator can readily discover innate and authentic 

coincidences between arts practice and the ambitions of 

public policy, through which funding opportunities may 

be realised. In other words, even in the subsidized sector, 

always constrained by the imperative of political favour, 

where art for art’s sake has never really been an option, 

recognition of external policy objectives need not imply 

an extension of political partnership let alone abject 

submission to the deadening embrace of official 

endorsement. Yet somehow pragmatic approaches to 

policy guidelines appear to have given way to an 

unprecedented enthusiasm for political partnerships 

within the subsidized arts in Britain and Northern 

Ireland. So much so that sections of the arts community 

in Northern Ireland lobby long and hard to promote their 

status as political movers and shakers, bringers of 

peace, prosperity and progress, while arts initiatives 

which promote ‘culture’ as a force to cohere and rebuild 

civil society often seem so closely in line with the 

political objectives of the Northern Ireland Act that they 

could easily be mistaken for operational models. So, 

when precisely did ‘being accountable’ shift its meaning 

from accountability for the allocation of government 

money to accountability to government itself? 

In 2002, ‘One Belfast’, the city’s bid to become European 

capital of culture, loudly proclaimed the value of public 

engagement in cultural activities as an essential element 

in the process of building a shared society. Not content 

with merely “replacing the peace lines with peace” the 

bid further promised to “develop bold policies and 

projects” that would “provide opportunities for dialogue 

and expression,” build “understanding and trust,” and 

“make Belfast a centre for investment as a global cultural 

destination.” 12 The bid was unsuccessful, although its 

failure may have had more to do with weaknesses within 

local arts structures than any objection to an excess of 

political intentions. Meanwhile July 2003 saw the unveiling 

of “another landmark public art work” in Belfast, the 

latest in a thirty-piece sculpture trail “connecting people, 

places and art” and “celebrating the changing face” of 

the city 13 ‘The Calling’, standing fifteen metres above the 

traffic at the gateway to the city’s newly designated 

‘Cultural Quarter’, claims to represent, “positive 

communication between people and their environment” 

in the form of two brightly coloured human figures 

standing on chairs, calling to each other through cupped 

hands. 14 According to Laganside Corporation, the 

development agency, which commissioned the work, this 

“eye catching” structure, designed to glow at night, is 

“unique, innovative and inspirational” and will “generate 

a sense of pride and place and encourage further 

revitalisation of this city centre location.” 

Whatever its value as a contributor to economic recovery 

and civic pride, the “unique and innovative” quality of 

this kind of work is open to question, given the proliferation 

of ‘public art’ as an identikit feature of almost every 

urban renewal programme across the British Isles. 

From Tyneside to Laganside, from Southwark to Salford 

Quays, form and quality may vary, but typically each 

bridge, statue and signature building derives from a set 

of interchangeable meanings, informed by local political 

concerns, usually expressed through the new language 

of connection, reconnection, transformation and 

renewal. For many critics, the derivative quality of much 

contemporary public art is a product of the current mania 

to incorporate commissioning within strategies for social 

inclusion and economic regeneration, demonstrating 

once again the increasingly destructive tendency to 

impose political dogma onto contemporary arts practice. 

With their assimilation of political language, and concern 

to deliver social and economic benefits, documents like 

One Belfast and art work like the Laganside sculpture trail 

can be read as simply the latest expression of a new kind 

of partnership between the subsidized arts and political 

institutions in Northern Ireland, in which relationships 

have become more closely defined, contractual and 

formally stated. Yet given such apparent unanimity 

between political and artistic interests, it is interesting 

that controversies over issues of funding allocation, 

consultation and respect for artistic freedom should 

continue to afflict relationships within the sector. 

While the Arts Council of Northern Ireland finds itself 

at the eye of the current political storm, many of the arts 

organisations now calling for its abolition, alongside 

transfer of its powers to “strong local authorities 

supporting the arts throughout the region,” 15 were only 

recently and very noisily taking Belfast City Council to 

task. In March 2002, following internal reorganisation and 

amidst a consultation process which lasted nearly two 

57

58 

years, Belfast City Council’s ‘Culture and Arts Unit’ 

controversially switched 20% away from core funding 

for arts and community arts organisations (principally 

city-centre based), into a new ‘outreach initiative’ which 

would channel direct funding to inner city ‘community 

partners’ in designated areas of the city (specifically 

underresourced wards in the north). This sudden and 

immediate loss of direct funding at once “plunged the 

entire (arts) sector into crisis and public protest.” 16 

North Belfast councillor Eoin O’Broin defended the 

council’s initiative in the name of “democratising the 

arts,” countering sectoral protests with charges of 

“cultural elitism.” 

The timing, within days of Imagine Belfast submitting its 

bid, was disastrous, and yet City Council’s position had 

been made perfectly clear in a draft consultative 

document published six months earlier. Culture and Arts, 

the Spirit of the City (2001) had explicitly stated City 

Council’s view of ‘culture’ as “an expression of identity… 

and a force for personal and social development.” 

Having redefined ‘culture’ in terms of its ability to 

“generate employment and develop the economic infrastructure,” 

“strengthen community networks,” “improve 

general educational levels and provide a pathway to 

knowledge based institutions,” it was surely not unreasonable 

for local councillors representing deprived inner 

city wards to demand redistribution of these cultural/ 

political benefits from the centre to the periphery. 17 

Overlooking the potentially contentious nature of local 

authority relationships to the arts or appealing for the 

retention of arm’s length approaches to funding while 

simultaneously demanding greater “political involvement 

in a partnership-working model,” suggests a sector 

afflicted with either a serious case of memory loss or a 

dangerous detachment from principle. Or perhaps the 

confusion is simply indicative of an environment in which 

artists, arts organisations and policy makers increasingly 

find themselves uncomfortably close, yet somehow 

engaged in a form of mutually incomprehensible dialogue. 

The ongoing dispute between Factotum and Belfast City 

Council is symptomatic of both the limitations inherent 

within close political / cultural partnerships and their 

potential to generate confusion. Last year, Belfast City 

Council arts subcommittee passed a vote of censure 

against Factotum, publishers of The Vacuum, the artsand-cultural 

review, after upholding a complaint from a 

single member of the public concerning ‘God’- and 

‘Satan’-themed issues published in June 2004. The basis 

of the complaint was that the issues contained material 

which was offensive and in bad taste. Factotum has 

challenged the Council’s position under Human Rights 

legislation and the case is currently before the courts in 

Belfast. Less about blasphemy, pornography or artists 

kicking against conformity, and more about what 

happens when political and cultural partnerships break 

down, one of the most striking aspects of the dispute is 

the sheer inoffensiveness of the contested material, 

particularly in a cultural context of mainstream TV where 

‘ordinary couples’ have sex on camera, or even compared 

to the average content of teenage lifestyle magazines 

and tabloid newspapers. The misunderstanding appears 

to arise from a widespread acquiescence to cultural 

policies that reflect an entirely instrumental view of 

the arts, in which there is an expectation that publicly 

funded arts and cultural activity, lacking their own 

internal dynamic or agency, will always reflect 

community interests and produce specified social 

benefits. In such a climate, where artists, arts 

institutions and policymakers appear to talk the same 

language, being even slightly ‘off message’ can be 

enough to get you into hot water. You failed to deliver a 

‘positive image of the city’? You published material that 

an individual or community found offensive? These are 

narrow boundaries, but unfortunately in a prevailing 

culture of complaint and claims making, the ground is 

further narrowing, as definitions of what is offensive are 

stretched to include hurt feelings, being upset, or just 

feeling uncomfortable. 

Why does the arts sector appear so defensive in its relationship 

to the public? By linking arts practice so closely 

to external agendas, are artists cutting the ground away 

beneath their own ambition and purpose? Endlessly 

claiming public benefit in the face of official incredulity, 

yet claiming no moral or political agency of their own, do 

artists become ghostwriters to an increasingly skeptical 

public? A public who must be courted and flattered but 

never seriously challenged? In Northern Ireland, where 

artistic freedoms are increasingly being called into 

question by the spread of bureaucratic rule-making, the 

effect has been to further encourage an orientation away 

from supporting art on its own terms towards the 

political imperatives of inclusion and participation. 

Consequently many arts institutions find their core work 

subordinated to external agendas which value footfall 

and the pulling in of new audiences, above aspirations to 

artistic excellence; the most prized of all new audiences 

being the category known as “traditional non attenders 

at arts events.” In seeking to connect with this imagined 

constituency, audience development becomes less about 

promoting the work artists and arts organisations do, 

and more about creating new approaches to arts practice 

that will supposedly make the experience of art more 

accessible. And yet, if the arts or indeed politics serve no 

higher purpose than simply to ‘connect’ with the public, 

how soon before they are emptied of any intrinsic 

object or meaning? What’s more, if ‘relevance’ and 

‘participation’ were ever to become dominant features of 

programming policy, would any arts practice, which the

public did not spontaneously embrace, simply be placed 

out of bounds? 

It has, for example, become an orthodoxy among cultural 

policy makers that “traditional non attenders at arts 

events,” preferring activities, which offer opportunities 

for participation and social interaction, feel fed up and 

awkward in art galleries, which offer nothing more than 

silent space, white walls and endless gazing at inanimate 

objects. Many go further, accusing galleries of making 

their audiences feel ‘uncomfortable’ or even ‘threatened’ 

by showing work that lacks relevance to lived experience. 

Where art might once have been valued in terms of 

its ability to unsettle and dislocate audiences from the 

immediacy of here and now, galleries are currently 

more likely to find themselves under fire for showing 

‘difficult’ work. 

Truth is, most speculation on the desires and anxieties 

of this anonymous mass of people simply reflects the 

prejudices of very small cultural and political elites. 

While most in the public sector share a genuine aspiration 

to open up the arts to wider audiences, the myth of 

the hostile, disinterested public and the pressure to ‘give 

audiences what they want’ simply encourages a lazy, 

patronising style, which underestimates the intelligence 

of real individuals and their capacity to enjoy the discovery 

of new and surprising experiences. Denigration of the 

audience is perhaps the ugliest expression of contemporary 

cultural elitism, for any genuine commitment to 

cultural democracy presupposes belief in an enquiring, 

conscious and judgemental audience, worthy of respect. 

Many of the arts sector’s problems around agreeing a 

direction and purpose for public policy ultimately revolve 

around unresolved questions of how art should be 

practiced and its relationship to the public. While the 

arts community in Northern Ireland is yet to find a single 

voice, by arguing that the public benefits of art, whatever 

they may be, are no more than the fruits of arts practice, 

mightn’t it be possible, whatever our differences of 

approach, to logically defend the practice of art on its 

own terms? 

It is imperative to continue the search for shared 

positions based on collective interests and secured 

upon principle, and somehow to pull the ongoing 

conversation around art’s social value and relationship 

to the public out of the maze of cultural theory, away 

from the narrow interests of policy makers and off the 

divisive battleground of competitive public funding. 

For until artists and arts organisations have begun to 

seriously address their internal tensions – in a spirit of 

open enquiry and through clear argument and debate – 

they should be wary of opening the sector up to further 

external intervention. 

1 http://www.rpani.gov.uk/ 

2 Gerry Robinson, quoted in Julian 

Stallabrass, High art lite, Verso, 1999, 

p.289 

3 Belfast City Council seeks to empower local 

communities with new culture and arts 

funding, press release, 22 July 2002 

4 Quoted Irish Times, Saturday 3 August 

2003 

5 Ian Hill, ‘Arts administration’, in M. 

Carruthers and S. Douds (eds.), Stepping 

stones, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2002 

6 Quoted in High Art Lite, op. cit., p.238 

7 Jacob Epstein, ‘What to do about the arts’, 

in K. Washburn and J. Thornton (eds.), 

Dumbing down, essays on the strip-mining 

of American culture, New York, 1995 

8 F. Frascina, Art, politics and dissent. 

Aspects of the art left in sixties America, 

Manchester University Press, 1999, p.108 

9 ibid., p.109 

10 David Hare, Obedience, struggle and 

revolt, Faber and Faber, 2005, p.125 

11 Public Funding for the Arts; the Arts in a 

State, Adam Smith Institute, 1988 

12 One Belfast: imagine Belfast, bid for 

European City of Culture 2008, published 

2002 

13 Laganside Corporation spokesperson 

quoted in the South Belfast News, 11 July 

2003 

14 South Belfast News, 11 July 2003 

15 Arts sector response to the Review of 

Public Administration, September 2005 

16 J. Gray, Variant, Vol.2, No.16, winter 2002 

17 Adopting a ‘cultural power sharing’ 

approach to arts funding may prove 

problematic, given Belfast’s deep sectarian 

divisions. Artist Daniel Jewesbury recently 

addressed the issue of communities 

appealing to culture as a means of gaining 

political advantage – “one of the few 

weapons that doesn’t have to be 

decommissioned.” Where political positions 

are increasingly backed up with appeals 

to cultural tradition, and where existing 

political arrangements may encourage an 

understanding of identity as something 

culturally, rather than consciously or 

socially determined, artists are right to 

raise difficult questions in defence of their 

independence. 

Pauline Hadaway is Director of 

Belfast Exposed, Belfast. 

59

60 

c. 

Reviews 

Belfast Perspective 2005 Tim Stott 94 | Prepossession Brian Kennedy 97 | 

Carlow Cornelia Hesse-Honnegger: Heteroptera: images of a mutating world 

Martin McCabe 78 | Cobh Julie Bacon: A hymn for travellers and the absent 

Alannah Hopkin 92 | Derry Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh: Musicpula T2, MO, NO 

Damien Duffy 88 | Dublin was du brauchst Noel Kelly 75 | Alice Maher: 

Rood Sheila Dickinson 86 | Heather Allen and NS Harsha: Mural Colin 

Graham 100 | Galway Ronnie Hughes, Formacopia Gavin Murphy 70 | 

Kells/ Wales Strata Anne Price-Owen 72 | Linz Ars Electronica Paul O’Brien 

83 | Sligo Site-ations International 2005/6: Sense in place, Ireland Sarah 

Browne 80 | Venice Venice: The long weekend Valerie Connor 62 | Northern 

Ireland at the 51st Venice Biennale Francesca Bonetta 64 | Venice: Pavilion 

of the Republic of Ireland Alenka Gregoricˇ 67 | Brian Wilson: An art book 

Maria Fusco 102 | 

c. 

Tomasz Domanski 

Home sweet home 

performance still 

Model Arts and Niland 

Gallery, Sligo, 2005 

courtesy Model:Niland

c. 

Valerie Connor 

Venice: 

The 

long 

62 

weekend Patrick 

Venice Biennale 6-11 October 2005 

Bloomer 

and Nicholas Keogh 

BinBoat, 2005 

performance shot, Venice 

courtesy the artists

Interviewed by Suzanna Chan in 

The Nature of things, the eponymous 

catalogue for Northern Ireland’s 

participation in the fifty-first Venice 

Biennale, Hugh Mulholland 

describes what motivated him to 

put together the events that 

happened around the city over 

The long weekend, by explaining 

that he wanted to leave some things 

to chance. This intentional pursuit 

of the unpredictable is resonant of 

the curator’s expressed wish to also 

foster elements of surprise as part 

of the curatorial project. With all 

that happened over the days and 

nights of The long weekend it was 

apparent that those most surprised 

of all were the tourists, police, 

gondoliers, and the people of Venice 

in whose field of vision the artists’ 

actions materialised as if out of the 

blue. 

Moored at Campo San Barnaba, 

late at night, Nicky Keogh and 

Paddy Bloomer’s boat made of 

Belfast detritus attracted small 

crowds of local passers-by who 

stopped, smiled, and laughing with 

pleasure, wondered at the spectacle 

of the thing. From time to time the 

boat was boarded from the shore by 

onlookers. The BinBoat, a phantasmagoria 

of sounds and images, 

proved irresistible to even the most 

territorial users of the waterways. 

Stories circulated of gondoliers 

laying down their oars to applaud 

the vessel on the Grand Canal and 

of policemen taking photos as 

mementos. The latter was all the 

more poignant as Peter Richards, 

having several locations under his 

belt prior to setting up his portable 

camera obscura on St. Mark’s 

Square, found his progress halted 

through the intervention of the 

police. A good-humoured 

encounter, by all accounts; 

nonetheless the presence of the box 

proved to be perplexing enough to 

render it a Rumsfeldian ‘unknown 

unknown’ and needing removal. 

Meanwhile, in the same square, the 

hoards fed the multitudes, as 

tourists acquired sachets of birdfeed 

to attract the pigeons. The 

little packets were adorned with 

anecdotes of urban folk and civilian 

life in Belfast, part of Aisling 

O’Beirn’s project, which also 

included the addition of decals of 

voice patterns to cups in a lagoonfront 

café on Giudecca, the island 

opposite but closest to Venice itself. 

Elsewhere, walking the streets of 

Venice were Richard West and 

Stephen Hackett, aka Factotum, the 

publisher of The fair. The freesheet 

featured reports, commentary, and 

histories on fairs big and small, 

past and present, of guns, cars, 

livestock, leprechauns, and tugs o’ 

war, with contributions by Leontia 

Flynn, Gillian McIntosh, Paul Young, 

Colin Graham, Vanessa Toulmin, 

Paul Moore, Daniel Jewesbury, 

Rok Stupar, Tony Swift, Jason Mills, 

Eamonn Hughes, John Morrow, 

Ruth Graham, Brian O’Kane, and 

Gerald Dawe. 

The start of the The long weekend 

was heralded by Sandra Johnston’s 

performance, in the late evening, 

at the Istituto Provinciale per 

l’Infanzia. Johnston, who was also 

showing a video work in the longterm 

exhibition of Northern Irish 

artists at the same place, allowed 

a crowd to gather and find their 

feet in a small garden otherwise 

hidden by a high wall from the 

adjacent street, or calle. Listening, 

as Johnston spoke, the need to 

watch her movements came and 

went. The audience was led by her 

fragments of apparently remembered 

scenes from another place 

and recollections of her passage 

through the city in the days prior to 

the performance. An array of 

sounds mingled in the highly 

acoustic environment, where 

minutiae are especially amplified. 

As the performer and the 

assembled moved through their 

paces, of course a mobile phone 

rang and a small blue window 

opened up in a woman’s hand, 

bringing Johnston closer to the 

people around her and vice versa as 

the transgression was assimilated 

by Johnston into the unfolding oral 

narrative. The lady vanished and the 

gathering moved from an area with 

few paths to a paved courtyard, 

Johnston all the while motioning 

the imagination of the listeners, 

challenging the group to lead or 

to follow. 

Alistair Wilson’s installation Turning 

the tide opened the following 

evening, appropriately during a 

Venetian downpour. The installation 

of four fountains produced in a 

industrial block foam replicated the 

central fountain in the historic 

courtyard of the Locanda ai Santi 

Apostoli. The courtyard opened 

onto the Grand Canal, the ambient 

sound of the busy waterway adding 

to the sound and projected images 

of Wilson’s installation. 

For five days in October the artists 

and curator had an audience with 

Venice and the Biennale. Misgiving 

about the invisibility of the event 

due to its being unconnected to 

some other similar Biennale-centred 

activity betrays a myopic view of 

what is possible within otherwise 

conventional frameworks and is 

blithely ignorant of the value of 

happenstance in the everyday 

experiences of the chance witness, 

the backward glance, the snap, and 

the souvenir for all the people – and 

the artist – who were part of The 

long weekend, whether by accident 

or design. 

63

c. 

64 

Francesca Bonetta 

Venice Biennale June – November 2005 

Northern Ireland 

at the 51st Venice 

The 51st International Venice 

Biennale 

Biennale of Visual Arts, in the year 

2005. The first participation by 

Northern Ireland in a space 

separate from the national pavilion 

of Ireland. That decision, taken by 

the commissioner and curator Hugh 

Mulholland, is not a separation from 

the Republic of Ireland for political 

or historical reasons, but rather the 

fitting context in which to give 

voice and relevance to panorama of 

artistic activity in Northern Ireland. 

Ulster is not a very extensive region, 

but it is one that is original and 

interesting in terms of its artistic 

development. Art often succeeds, 

despite a world which often 

devotes itself unconditionally to 

globalisation, in focusing on and 

making stand out the experiences 

of diverse territories, preserving 

their identity and uniqueness. 

Michael Hogg 

Pivot, 2005 

installation shot, Venice 

courtesy the artist

Fourteen artists, eight ‘permanent’ 

and six invited to participate with 

performances during the Long 

weekend from 6 to 10 October, 

exhibited in the ample and bright 

spaces of the Istituto provinciale 

per l’Infanzia Santa Maria della 

Pietà, in the Castello district, a 

stone’s throw from Piazza San 

Marco. Despite the notable number 

of artists whose works the commissioner 

wished to present, the path 

through the exhibition did not 

present any particular difficulty in 

terms of finding a connecting 

thread in the various artistic 

experiences: there is in fact a 

common point of view, a look turned 

to the future with hope, detached 

from the Troubles of the past. 

There is generally no strong reference 

to the political, nor to religious 

complexity; no politicisation of 

culture, no veiled propaganda 

message: the artists of the latest 

generation, fortified by having lived 

in a substantially peaceful period, 

create works in which the aesthetic 

and purely poetic are to the fore, 

but in a practical sense, with an eye 

on the international artistic scene. 

The leitmotif of the show, The 

Nature of things, indicates an 

investigation of the reality of things 

at different levels of reading and 

interpretation: above all, it is a 

taking stock of how the world is, a 

serene look at the mechanisms that 

dominate reality, a way of looking 

which is simultaneously detached 

but not disillusioned, rather one of 

acceptance and consensus. 

But there are other paraphrases: 

the nature of things, understood 

as the link with surrounding nature; 

the nature of things, understood 

symbolically as the political and 

historical reality in which one lives. 

Each artist chose the interpretation 

which most closely approached his 

or her form of expression. The oil 

canvases of Darren Murray, Wailma 

Falls, Brassocattleya clifontii ‘magnifica’, 

Cattleya, shown along the 

central corridor, are natural, stereo- 

typical landscapes, with trees, 

waterfalls and hills whose contours 

are barely sketched. The backgrounds, 

in contrast, are monochromatic 

and of deep blue or bright 

red; and Murray plays with small 

highlighted elements rendered in a 

more naturalistic manner, such as 

flowers, orchids, birds and leaves. 

The effect is fairytale-like and 

surreal, visionary: a reinterpreted 

nature which takes on images from 

traditional figurative art only in their 

contours, to arrive at scenes freed 

of all formal convention. 

Taking the viewer back to reality, 

at the end of the corridor, On or 

about December 1981 by Katrina 

Moorhead is a sculpture of wood 

and plywood which returns to a 

relatively recent period of history in 

Northern Ireland: the year in which 

the De Lorean Factory, a sports-car 

industry, opened its doors in 

Belfast, creating the utopia of new 

jobs for Catholics and Protestants 

at a time when unemployment was 

touching very high levels. The 

winged doors of the car, the truly 

innovative aspect of the design, are 

the symbols of this dream of 

progress; in the symbolic language 

of the artist, however, they 

represent already the failure of the 

factory – shut after a few years; two 

broken wings, no longer able to fly. 

On the left side of the corridor other 

rooms opened up like little niches; 

caskets. Ian Charlesworth 

presented the very original work 

From dark passages, a charcoal and 

gesso drawing on the ceiling of the 

room: traces of a continuous, 

circular, harmonious passage, at the 

same time mysterious, originating 

in a sense of solitude. 

Mary McIntyre brings the viewer 

back to photographic realism with 

her prints in which architectural 

images based on chiaroscuro 

effects (That afternoon I – II), the 

subtle presence of humanity in a 

city park in autumn (Reverie), and 

the sacrality of the penumbra inside 

the Louvre follow one after the 

other. The artist is playing on two 

levels: on the one hand, there is a 

look at nature and its elements, on 

the other there is a presentiment, 

perhaps a warning, which can be 

breathed in the air which is heavy 

with the tension and pathos of the 

images, inclining the spectator 

towards an interpretation which 

goes below the surface. 

Sandra Johnston’s video, Conduct 

best calculated for obtaining victory, 

is a celebration of the resistance of 

the citizens of Northern Ireland 

against the forces of order in 1869. 

The artist skilfully relives the event, 

through witness testimonies, while 

documentary-style images slip by 

accompanied by the musical track. 

There are images of processions 

and bonfires which mark, with 

detachment but also with awareness 

of the popular, nationalist 

force behind them, episodes of 

guerrilla warfare against the army. 

And there is nature once again. 

Hidden and intimate, the niche 

created to accommodate the pencil 

drawings by William McKeown, 

Nest, The bravery of birds, was a 

window on a world through which 

the visitor could grasp and 

appreciate its beauty and the 

works’ aesthetic pleasure – the 

soft, pale subject matter, the lines 

and the flowers sketched and 

rendered almost as though to 

suggest the sacrality of the natural 

world which surrounds us. 

Michael Hogg also played on 

various levels of interpretation in 

his Pilot installation, in which the 

principles of physics function as 

pivot and balance as a means of 

exploring a political theme, the 

elections in Northern Ireland. 

65

66 

Finally, one entered the space 

dedicated to Seamus Harahan’s 

video Holylands: the poetic quality 

of the images is evident in the 

continuous attempt to sublimate 

the quotidian activities of workers 

ready for their shift in the factory, 

the scenes of marginal and marginalised 

life in this residential district 

of Belfast, the zoomed images 

which capture dandelion seeds in 

flight, a can lifted by the wind 

which rolls down the street. Here 

also nature and culture meet each 

other, in a work of social character, 

though not one of judgment but of 

taking stock; with a melancholy, 

absorbed glance at real problems, 

ones that are often too close for us 

to notice them. 

Following the same curatorial line 

of the exhibition, the short week 

dedicated to performances 

represented an opportunity to 

create a stronger connection 

between Northern Ireland and 

Venice. Apart from the involvement 

of the occasional tourist, it proved 

the most natural way of making 

contact with lagoon-side life, 

observed in its habitual activities 

and in the images of the city known 

throughout the world. 

Peter Richards’s work attempted to 

observe Venice, using a camera 

obscura to capture its most famous 

views, taken from paintings by 

Canaletto, Guardi, Bellini and 

Carpaccio. This installation, 

mounted each day in a different 

location between Piazza San 

Marco, Rialto and the Ponte 

dell’Accademia, played with the 

spectators by involving them, and 

created a direct link back to past 

figurative art in Venice. Paddy 

Bloomer and Nicky Keogh in 

contrast played on the Canal 

Grande, constructing a boat from a 

rubbish bin and letting it slip round 

on the lagoon waters: privileging 

the recycling of old objects, the 

artist couple gave the objects a new 

identity, and the boat let itself sway 

in the near-dreamlike dimension of 

the voyage and the unknown, 

looking trustingly towards a future 

on the open sea. 

The other artists invited to 

participate in the event chose to 

distribute to Venetians and tourists 

information related to Belfast, with 

the aim of letting emerge an image 

of Northern Ireland capable of 

dismantling the political and civil 

images which all the world knows. 

Thus Factotum created a special 

edition of The Vacuum for the 

occasion; the publication is 

important within the panorama 

of Northern Ireland, because it 

represents a medium of communication, 

critique and cultural discussion 

for Belfast and its environs. 

Aisling O’Beirn posed herself the 

task of investigating the diverse 

ways in which representations of a 

place are transmitted. Her chosen 

media were coffee/ cappuccino 

cups and bags of pigeon feed sold 

on the stalls of Piazza San Marco: 

these objects became the supports 

for myths, legends, stories and 

curiosities about Belfast, casually 

bringing the locals and visitors 

closer to the Northern Ireland 

imaginary. 

Thus was The nature of things. 

A comprehensive review of the 

artistic horizons of Northern 

Ireland, presented in a direct, 

guileless, involving manner. 

A contribution to an international 

Biennale, capable of taking and 

expressing the best of 

contemporary art, in all its cultural 

and historical diversity. 

Translated by Peter FitzGerald 

Francesca Bonetta holds 

an MA in History of Art 

and Conservation of 

Artistic Goods from the 

Università Cà Foscari, 

Venice; in 2004 worked 

at the Irish Museum of 

Modern Art on a Leonardo 

fellowship, and during 

the 2005 Biennale she 

collaborated with 

Commissioner Sarah 

Glennie as Project 

Coordinator for the Irish 

Pavilion. 

Aisling O'Beirn 

Stories for Venetians 

and tourists, 2005 

installation at stall, 

Piazza San Marco, Venice 

courtesy the artist

c. 

Alenka Gregorič 

Scuola di San Pasquale 

San Francesco della 

Vigna, Castello, Venice 

Venice: Pavilion 

June – October 2005 

of the Republic of 

Ireland 

Venice, being one of the most 

prestigious of the international 

art biennials, always was ‘the’ 

event on the art calendar 

(although nobody is questioning 

whether this is due to quantity or 

quality). Being appointed as the 

commissioner of a country that 

one is supposed to represent is a 

big responsibility and cannot be 

an easy task, especially because 

as one is faced with high 

expectations. The majority of the 

national pavilions present just 

one or two artists from their 

country and only a few try to 

give us (at least a small) 

overview of a national art scene. 

Sarah Pierce 

The forgotten zine library 

installation shot, Scuola di San 

Pasquale, 2005 

photograph: Ronan McCrea 

67

68 

The commissioner of the Republic 

of Ireland’s pavilion, Sarah Glennie, 

presents seven artists mostly 

coming from Dublin, which makes 

it, as said in the press material, the 

largest presentation of Irish artists 

in the history of Ireland’s 

participation in Venice. Only the 

curator him/herself can really know 

how difficult it is to make a group 

show work as one heterogeneous 

unit, and, on the other hand to give 

all of the artists equal presentation. 

This is often the due to the 

limitations of the exhibition space 

and the demands of the artworks. 

Entering the Scuola San Pasquale 

(where the pavilion is being housed 

for the third time) one is surprised 

to find the artworks displayed 

alongside the contents of a Chapel. 

At first glance the visitor might be 

pleased by the way these ‘art 

intruders’ almost blend in with the 

surroundings. In fact, they blend in 

so well that it becomes quite hard 

to distinguish between individual 

works (some artists are presented 

with more than one work in more 

than one medium), which is not 

helped by the fact that works’ titles 

are scattered around. The presented 

pieces appear to work as a 

continuous whole, the drawings, 

videos, animations and installations 

surround us, as if trying to invoke 

some sort of ethereal world. 

Stephen Brandes’ drawings are on 

a surface that is made out of a 

material that resembles the fake 

marble that one can sometimes find 

adorning old tabletops. This reminiscence 

of old furniture that once 

graced our grandparent’s houses 

makes a nice introduction to the 

story – one based on the life story 

of the artist’s grandmother who 

escaped from the pogroms in 

Romania. His thoughtful and 

precise drawing style – a combination 

of comic-book shapes and 

medieval look-a-like fictional maps – 

gives the original story the resonance 

of a fairy tale. 

Brandes is not the only artist to 

refer to the personal in this way; 

in fact all the work on show in this 

first room had the same sense of 

individual stories being treated in 

a rather whimsical manner. The 

drawings, paintings and animation 

by Isabel Nolan create calm and 

nonpretentious atmospheres that 

seem to suggest some kind dream 

state. Mark Garry uses a range of 

materials for his installation which, 

based on the surroundings could be 

read as an (ironic) interpretation of 

Christian medieval iconography 

that often depicts the Virgin Mary 

being impregnated by the Holy 

Ghost as a ray of light coming 

through the window. In Garry’s 

installation a rainbow comes from 

the window towards altar and lands 

on three blindfolded rabbits. Behind 

them is a painting – otherwise a 

part of the Scuola the San Pasquale 

inventory – that shows Mother 

Mary. The fact that it is a sitespecific 

work makes it stand out 

from the typical white-cube-style 

presentations of artworks, thus 

making it readable in different ways 

such as the one here. 

The room upstairs gives us a 

slightly different story. Again three 

artists are presented – two of them 

working together under the name 

Walker and Walker who showed 

Nightfall, a video projection which 

creates a subtle transition from the 

lower to upper part of the pavilion. 

Set in beautiful surroundings 

beside a lake, Nightfall is imbued 

with an atmosphere similar to that 

of the ground floor. However, Walker 

and Walker steer away from 

personal narratives. Instead their 

work is full of symbolism (the 

double, repetition, echo), which 

creates a narrative that positions 

the individual against nature and its 

invaluable greatness.

Death and remembering is something 

that Ronan McCrea deals with 

in his on-going project Sequences, 

scenarios and locations. A series of 

slide projections present three 

photographic stories in which he 

examines the past (drawings of his 

late father), the future (artist’s 

daughter), memories (found 

personal photographs) and traces 

(reference to the tale of Hansel and 

Gretel) we leave behind. The playfulness 

of the installation, which in a 

way resembles a movie sequence, 

allows these separate stories also 

to be viewed as a single one. It 

softly takes us through the intimate 

experience that interweaves his 

personal and fictional story. 

The exhibition continues into the 

garden situated next to the pavilion. 

Sarah’s Pierce project is based on 

the phenomena of urban structures 

(physical and social) and the way 

they are determined by government 

policy. Pierce takes The forgotten 

zine library (an archive of fanzines 

made by various authors) and 

places it in the garden where we are 

invited to sit and browse the 

collection. Through this intervention 

Pierce proposes alternative uses 

of space by taking one cultural 

phenomenon from its original 

environment and placing it into a 

new one where both gain a different 

value and take on new meaning. 

Texts for the magazine Printed 

project, an issue made especially for 

the occasion of Venice Biennale, 

edited by Alan Phelan, give an 

overall presentation of the pavilion 

and much more. Text, interviews 

and artist’s pages give us an 

overview of Irish contemporary art. 

In this reviewer’s opinion, Printed 

project should not be seen as a 

supplement to the exhibition but as 

an integral part. 

Alenka Gregoric ˇ 

is Artistic Director 

of Skuc ˇ 

Gallery, 

Ljubljana. 

(left to right) 

installation view, Scuola di San 

Pasquale, Ireland at Venice 

2005 

Ronan McCrea 

Sequences, scenarios & 

locations 



2005 

Walker and Walker 

Nightfall, 2004 

16 mm film, duration 7' 



2005 



2005 

photographs: Ronan McCrea 

69

c. 

70 

Gavin Murphy 

Ronnie Hughes 

Formacopia 

Galway Arts Centre July – August 2005

It is common practice to find value 

in irresolution when viewing 

contemporary art. The exhibition of 

Ronnie Hughes’ most recent 

paintings, Formacopia, is no exception. 

The title and accompanying 

written material suggest this work 

overflows with potential meanings 

and visual pleasures that result 

from the sheer abundance of formal 

elements, techniques and materials. 

System (2005), one of the key 

paintings in the show, would seem 

to confirm this. It consists of 

numerous filaments interconnected 

by orange and lilac circles. Spatial 

ambiguity is developed by working 

the conventions of atmospheric 

perspective and drawing a fresh 

colour over a layer still in the 

process of drying. The rhythm and 

trajectory of the grander curves and 

arches retain an organic looseness. 

These, like the gestural swirls 

within the larger lilac spots, focus 

attention on the act of application. 

Various connotations emerge in the 

act of viewing – from microscopic 

images of deep sea life to molecular 

models that inspired visual art and 

design in the 1950s. Indeed, Hughes 

exploits the range of potential 

meanings through enigmatic titling 

of works. Cathedral (2004), for 

example, associates the array of 

interconnecting arcs to the act of 

observing a Gothic vault, to the 

major work by Jackson Pollock, 

or to the short story by Raymond 

Carver for that matter. 

While wider associations can 

further stimulate the viewer, it is 

the visual trickery that is 

consistently striking. Bump and 

hollow (2005) is one example where 

a perceptual circuit is set up. It is 

dominated by the push and pull 

between the sky-blue form of the 

upper section and the turquoise 

slab of the lower. Various perceptual 

games lie at the heart of many of 

the works; some more successful 

than others. The subtle interplay 

of texture, layered colour and asym- 

metrical forms of Cokabana (2005), 

for example, is blunted by an excess 

of glaze. In fact, this is what is most 

intriguing about the exhibition. 

It appears to tread a thin line 

between accepted technique and 

awkwardness as a means of 

exploring a commitment to paint. 

In Copernicus (2005), the diluted 

circles are overlaid upon the 

gestural capillary-like forms so that 

the latter are never erased when 

convention demands that they 

should. Initially this appears as 

lumpen neo-expressionist abandon, 

but when viewed in relation to the 

consistent and methodical attempt 

to extend the range of accepted 

painterly techniques, it is at 

once disconcerting and strangely 

successful. 

It is said that conviction and doubt 

govern the artistic journey, 

particularly when sensing the edge 

of tradition. It is no different for 

viewing art. Art-critical rhetoric is 

too often an act of suppressing 

doubt. So it can be said that the 

merit of this work is that it keeps 

this reviewer on edge on a whole 

number of fronts. Technique is one 

such front. Another is where the 

spectrum of colours used in the 

show parallels the buzz colours 

of upmarket interior design 

magazines. This raises the question 

of the relationship between design 

culture and the ambitions of 

painting. Certainly, foregrounding 

the act of painting as an exploration 

and play with visual tradition 

cannot create a distance between 

the two alone. However, that 

painting can and should perform a 

weightier role is suggested when 

this latter point is joined with the 

sense of the work being born from 

action, reflection and the dynamics 

of conviction and doubt. 

In the end, Formacopia further 

strengthens Galway Arts Centre’s 

reputation as providing a platform 

for the more engaging forms of 

contemporary visual art in Ireland. 

And to think that this summer was 

marred by the short-sightedness of 

those in power who have threatened 

this achievement in the name of 

God-knows-what. Can they not see 

value in the preservation of doubt 

and an art of questioning? 

(opposite) Ronnie Hughes 

System, 2005 

acrylic co-polymer on linen 

183 x 214cm 


Gavin Murphy is a lecturer 

in Art History and Critical 

Theory in Galway-Mayo 


71

c. 

72 

Anne Price-Owen 

Strata 

Pontrhydfendigaid 

and Kells 

June – August 2005 

Tim Davies 

Rag field, 2005 

installation shot, Strata Florida 

photograph/ courtesy the artist

Two villages, Kells in Ireland, and 

Pontrhydfendigaid in Wales, have 

more in common than simply their 

Celtic ancestry and the fact that 

they hosted a remarkable installation 

of artworks by twelve artists. 

It is to the credit of both Ann 

Mulrooney and Tim Davies, the 

curators, that they each selected 

six artists of considerable repute 

from their respective homelands. 

The villages, being off the beaten 

track, are easily overlooked, yet 

both deserve investigation. This is 

the conviction held by the villagers 

in both countries, and the success 

of the exhibition is due to their team 

spirit, resourcefulness and in 

embracing the Strata concept. 

Since 1998, largely owing to their 

annual Sculpture at Kells exhibition, 

the fortunes of Kells are encouraging, 

and regeneration is in progress. 

Moreover, the eleventh-century 

Cistercian Priory, site of the art 

installations, is currently undergoing 

extensive restoration. Last year, 

the community successfully applied 

for EU Interreg Funding which 

afforded them the opportunity of 

instigating a joint project with the 

inhabitants of Pontrhydfendgaid, 

who were equally enthusiastic 

about the scheme. Being on the 

outskirts of this remote village, the 

eleventh-century Strata Florida 

Abbey was the ideal site, the Abbey 

sharing its medieval origins with 

the Priory at Kells. 

Both curators are artists who work 

within a conceptual framework, so 

it is unsurprising that the majority 

of installations are in the 

conceptualist vein. The brief was 

to install works which would relate 

to, and transform, the religious 

sites, in addition to appealing to a 

diverse range of visitors, some 

perhaps coming to view the synergetic 

relationship between 

medieval ecclesiastical architecture 

and contemporary visual art. 

The process entailed the artists’ 

visiting the sites in order to gain 

familiarity with them, so as to 

create pieces which would not only 

reflect and illuminate the spirit of 

the places – their holy and otherworldly 

ethos – but serve also as a 

lynchpin between the medieval and 

postmodern eras. With the latter in 

mind, Philip Napier’s bold textual 

pieces, where messages are flashed 

on motorway screens, document 

statistics relating to consumerism 

and material values. Alien though 

they might appear in these tranquil 

settings, they inform the public of a 

twenty-first-century lifestyle that is 

as removed from the medieval 

inhabitants as are the methods of 

presenting them. Similarly, Keith 

Wilson’s steel, machine-made 

Bull-ring and Calf ring are common 

utilitarian enclosures on farms, but 

seen in the romantic context of 

ecclesiastical ruins they become 

incongruous structures, while suggesting 

a safe enclave, or alternatively, 

dominance and control. The 

latter feature in both countries’ 

histories. Ambiguity is also associated 

with Bird, Daphne Wright’s 

suspended crow. But being cast in 

white marble dust, the black omen 

of evil is transformed into an iridescent 

dove symbolizing spirituality. 

Although not overtly expressed, 

Christine Mills uses the bridges’ 

handrails at both sites as 

conductors of a spiritual presence. 

By cladding them with velvet, we 

are invited to touch them and to 

consider the journey of life as we 

gaze at the flowing millrace 

beneath. Touch gives way to 

hearing in Cecile Johnson Solitz’s 

musical score for an epic poem 

which was performed at both sites. 

The monastic equivalent of words 

and music was reinterpreted by the 

random tinkling of bells which 

Solitz cast for the collars placed 

on the ubiquitous sheep grazing 

around both sites. Thus, both 

humans and animals, and their 

mutual interdependence, are 

praised. Such sounds can be heard 

from Niamh McCann’s Hut of 

contemplation, a brightly coloured 

timber structure positioned on a 

height, where the spectator can 

contemplate the architecture and 

its reverential implications from 

inside a hut designed, perhaps, 

from a Zen aesthetic. 

Commensurate with the medieval 

era is Armour boy, Laura Ford’s 

knight in armour. However, his size 

and prostrate position suggest he 

is asleep, or dead, so that while he 

evokes the past, the figure signifies 

our present disregard for heritage. 

Ford’s work compares with Bedwyr 

Williams’, which is tinged with 

humorous irony, as seen in his 

packs of playing cards bearing 

photographs of the villagers in both 

Kells and Strata Florida. In these, 

memorial in implicit, whereas it is 

explicit in curator Tim Davies’ Rag 

field. It consists of hundreds of 

stakes pushed into the ground, 

with a fragment of cloth impaled 

on each stake, so that the grassy 

areas resemble fields of bog cotton. 

Situated next to the graveyard at 

the Abbey, these coloured flags 

(and their incumbent associations 

with identity) are metaphors for 

tombstones, where the torn 

garments recall those who once 

wore them. This is familiar territory 

for the Irish, whose ancestral 

émigrés attached bits of clothing 

to thorn bushes in the hope of 

eventually reuniting with their loved 

ones. ‘Raggy trees’ exist all over 

Ireland, and it was Davies’s 

encounter with the one near Kells 

that inspired this piece. 

73

74 

Memorial is also the theme of Alan 

Phelan’s Playboy riot protection 

structure. The title references J.M. 

Synge’s famous play and the riots 

that ensued following its first night 

at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. His 

semi-circular screen, daubed in 

gaudy primary colours bearing the 

play’s title, hangs above the 

entrance to the Priory, with two 

ancillary screens, like sentries on 

either side of it, decorated with red 

and blue patterns, respectively. The 

designs mimic those of the windows 

in the existing Dublin theatre. 

From the inside of the building, 

the designs beyond the window 

openings simulate stained glass, so 

that postmodern pastiche is allied 

to medieval church decoration, 

and the theatricality of the Church 

echoes the spectacle of theatre, 

and vice versa. Less ceremonial are 

the ornamental motifs, albeit in the 

Celtic mode, which feature in Liadin 

Cooke’s sculpture, enigmatically 

entitled Folly 2005. 

Seizing on religion and politics for 

his theme, David Garner’s 

Everything should be doubted 

consists of a tin bath clad in sheep- 

skin with the word ‘pobl’ (‘people’) 

and an ‘X’ sprayed in red 

referencing Christ. This is 

compounded by the large iron cross 

inside the bath with its Marxian 

quotation ‘opium of the people’ 

welded to its surface. Being 

installed on the altar, the piece 

prompts speculation on religion’s 

role in our history and politics. 

Overall, this speculation is what the 

entire concept engenders. The sites 

are part of the specificity of the 

artworks, and these have been 

installed by artists conscious of 

the religious nature of the medieval 

legacy surrounding them. Yet 

despite the layers of meaning and 

years of history permeating these 

hallowed sites, the artists have not 

compromised their individual 

artistic practises. Rather, they have 

created works that articulate 

postmodern concepts concerning 

global issues at venues that are as 

valuable to their communities today 

as they were in the eleventh 

century – sites that are worthy of 

resurrecting. 

Anne Price-Owen is a 

Senior Lecturer in the 

Department of Research 

and Postgraduate Studies, 

Faculty of Art and Design, 

Swansea Institute of 

Higher Education; 

originally from Ireland, 

she has written extensively 

on artists and writers 

practising in Wales and 

Ireland. 

Alan Phelan 

Playboy riot protection 

structure, 2005 

installation shot, Kells 

photograph: Ann Mulrooney 

courtesy the artist

c. 

Noel Kelly 

The Kevin Kavanagh Gallery 

offered up an interesting departure 

from its usual programming with 

the exhibition was du brauchst 

(‘what you need’), a concise group 

exhibition featuring five young 

German artists. The exhibition did 

not display any particular curatorial 

construct, but instead contained 

each artist’s individual work and 

practice as a standalone and yet 

mutual occupation of the gallery. 

What each artist did share was an 

intensive year of “art and art perception” 

in New York, sponsored by 

a German Academic Exchange 

Service (DAAD) grant in 2003/ 2004. 

Although there was nothing 

specifically new about the type of 

works in this exhibition, it did 

show an interesting level of 

experimentation by each artist in 

forms and media that are familiar in 

contemporary visual culture. 

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery 

Dublin 

was du brauchst 

August 2005 

Notburga Karl 

Blindgaenger (dud), 2005 

installation shot (fluorescent 

tubes) 

courtesy Kevin Kavanagh 

Gallery 

75

76 

With perhaps more than a nodding 

reference to Glasgow based Clara 

Ursitti, performance artist Stefanie 

Trojan greeted all visitors to the 

private view by sniffing their armpit 

and reporting to them on her 

reaction to the smell with a short 

pithy comment. A significant number 

of artists have looked to explore 

and produce works that go beyond 

the visual. Ursitti in particular has 

explored the olfactory sense in a 

study of the “animalistic side of 

human nature, and what is 

considered taboo or uncivilized.” 

Trojan’s performance added to this 

and in doing so challenged the 

discomfort and invasion of personal 

space as she sought to identify 

and negotiate people’s personal 

signatures. Also dealing with 

perceptions, and in this case 

making an interesting reference to 

Ceal Floyer’s Light switch, Ulrich 

Vogl’s Der letzte macht das Licht aus 

(‘the last person may turn off the 

light’) brought it a stage further. 

Rather than a projection, Vogl 

realized the work in a permanentmarker 

wall drawing, presenting a 

faux light switch that continued 

with an electrical wire across the 

ceiling and down to an ornate 

chandelier drawing on the opposite 

wall. In the work, Vogl questions 

the relationship that exists 

between the literal, material and 

representational presence of things. 

The very literal notion of the 

chandelier as a romantic symbol created 

a metaphorical play on the 

idea of the work as being German 

romantic. By its very nature wall 

drawing is both impermanent and 

provisional. However, an additional 

installation by Vogl offered an interesting 

foil to the delicacy of his wall 

drawing. Using industrial wallmounted 

halogen light fixtures as 

light boxes, Vogl compared and 

contrasted method of representation 

in a way that was both obvious 

and uncontrived. This also added 

an amusing notion of the image 

of the chandelier lit and yet not 

providing light. 

Continuing with the lighting theme, 

Notburga Karl provided a sitespecific, 

oversized, architectonic 

construction of florescent lights 

suspended from the walls and 

ceiling in the corner of the gallery. 

Entitled Blindgaenger (‘dud’), the 

work resembled a confused 

confluence of viral strands, and 

whilst there may be too obvious a 

reference in terms of material to 

Dan Flavin, the work appeared to be 

more redolent of the aesthetic in 

the works of Martin Boyce and 

Björn Dahlem. The subtle difference 

lies at the core of Karl’s work. 

Instead of causing the audience to 

address the space through a 

negotiation of light sculptures, Karl 

does not challenge her audience to 

negotiate space or any perceived 

path in the gallery. Instead, the 

title may provide a clear and playful 

response to the illusory simplicity 

of the work and undoes the 

iconographical meaning behind the 

materials she works with. 

Also working with light, this time 

in the form of attempted 

communications, Klara Hobza’s 

Morse code communication provided 

video documentation of her 

performance in the clerestory of the 

Sculpture Center in Long Island 

City, NYC. Rather than the definite 

message systems of artists such as 

Cerith Wyn Evans, Hobza played 

with the idea of Samuel Morse 

(creator of Morse code) as an artist. 

By placing over a hundred light 

bulbs in the clerestory, she turned 

the building into a Morse code 

apparatus. Hobza’s video, shown 

in this exhibition, documents her 

desperate attempt, over two days, 

to communicate with the neighbourhood 

and people in the passing 

trains and cars in Morse code. 

In a similar manner, Stefanie Trojan 

provided a second work for the 

exhibition. On a monitor buried 

under Notburga Karl’s lighting 

installation, Trojan continued to 

question human habits and social 

patterns, and direct interaction 

with the observer in a video 

document of the work Lächeln/ 

smile. In this video Trojan captured 

her tactics of confrontation and 

objectification in a simple yet 

complicated situation. By challenging 

people, once again with a 

physical intervention that took 

place in a German city, Trojan 

straightforwardly and bodily 

reshaped peoples’ mouths into 

the shape of a smile. 

The videos on display in the gallery 

occupy the space of documentation 

as art. Both Hobza and Trojan 

reincarnate the trauma of their 

physical performances through 

video and photography as a kind of 

fixed account. It then becomes 

one of the roles of the viewer to 

actualize the participatory aspect 

of the performance, and confirm or 

deny the underlying energies and 

notions of the moment. For Trojan 

the simplicity of the record worked 

in manifesting at least some of the 

energies of the moment of the 

performance. This was not the 

case with Hobza’s work. The brevity 

of the editing process failed to 

bring across the scale of the 

project, and unfortunately appeared 

to have credits that were the same 

length as the film piece.

Finally, Thomas Trinkl’s Lange Anna 

(Long Anna) was a direct challenge 

to the physical space of the gallery. 

Lange Anna, a large rock pillar in 

Helgoland in Germany and symbol 

of that region, was recreated and 

given central position. All of the 

works in the exhibition surrounded 

this pillar of painted carbonate, 

paper and wire construction. Its 

apparent metallic solidity appeared 

at once to echo the monumental 

late nineteenth century sculptures 

of aggrandizement, and yet the 

nature of the materials used 

created a real distortion of any 

notions of these symbols, and by 

its very physical presence it 

challenged the audience to 

negotiate a path around its 

apparent solidity. 

was du brauchst was most definitely 

a welcome addition to the Kevin 

Kavanagh Gallery programme. 

The exhibition provided both a 

psychological and material space 

for reflection and adjusted our 

ideas of the potential for this gallery 

space. 

Noel Kelly is Deputy 

Director and Curator for 

Temple Bar Gallery and 

Studios, Dublin, and a 

Senior Partner with the 

Art Projects Network. 

Ulrich Vogl 

Der letzte macht das Licht 

aus (The last person may turn 

off the light), 2005 

wall drawing, permanent 

marker, wall 

courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery 

77

c. 

78 

Martin McCabe 

Martin McCabe is the 

Programme Chair of the 

BA Photography in the 

School of Media, Dublin 


Carlow Library August 2005 

Cornelia Hesse- 

Honnegger: 

Heteroptera: 

Images of a 

mutating world

As this review is being written, the 

ex-prime minister of Australia, Bob 

Hawke, is publicly arguing for the 

promotion of central and northwestern 

Australia as the ‘repository’ for 

all global nuclear by-products and 

waste. At a cost, of course. Hawke 

intends to charge the international 

community of nuclear-energy 

nations to allow them this ‘secure 

facility’. However, what might be 

the other, more profound cost of 

this move? Cornelia Hesse- 

Honnegger’s timely exhibition 

points to this overlooked or less 

visible cost at a time when with the 

rocketing cost of fossil-fuel energy 

sources is effecting a review of 

nuclear as an alternative. In some 

ways, the timeliness is worth highlighting 

as much of this work has 

been in circulation before throughout 

the early 1990s, if not in Ireland 

then certainly in the international 

art press and beyond. This takes 

nothing away from what was here. 

Housed in the Carlow Library, this 

modest show comprised a number 

of painted illustrations mounted 

behind glass and accompanied by 

texts. One would forgive any casual 

viewer for taking these images 

as beautiful, exquisitely painted 

entomological illustrations. 

Focusing specifically on insects, 

these creatures were scaled up and 

illustrated using watercolours with 

levels of detail rarely seen, certainly 

in art contexts. Whilst none of them 

were readily recognizable as 

commonplace insects, the body of 

work was instantly recognizable as 

a genre and visual practice with a 

long history from the early modern 

periods through the Enlightenment 

to their popularization in scientific 

magazines, posters, educational 

materials, etc. The text, however, 

most significantly alerted the 

reader to two key pieces of 

information. Firstly, that these 

images represent specimens that 

were collected in the environs of 

nuclear power facilities in 

Sellafield, Chernobyl, Three Mile 

Island, Switzerland and Northern 

Europe. Secondly, that there are 

particular and insidious ‘disturbances’ 

in what seems to be the 

normative scientific gaze of the 

genre. Without the text, the changes 

may remain almost imperceptible 

but these insects are mutating. 

A former zoological illustrator who 

had practised for many years in 

the field servicing the scientificresearch 

publishing industries, 

Hesse-Honnegger worked on documenting 

laboratory-induced insect 

mutations in studies of insecticides. 

However, over a number of years, 

she became interested in mutations 

occurring outside of the lab. She 

brings what is a powerful, resolute 

tool of visualizing difference and 

knowledge to bear on what she now 

sees as a blind-spot or cover-up by 

the scientific community and the 

nuclear industry. 

In the collection of illustrations, 

the insects are incidental almost, 

as they are commonplace in their 

particular region, not rare but 

overlooked. But they are very 

significant inasmuch as they 

function as bio-indicators of the 

type of low-level fall-out emanating 

from these facilities. Further 

and more importantly, Hesse- 

Honnegger’s field work demonstrates 

that it is not only sites with 

histories of officially recognized 

‘accidents’ but also others working 

without reportable ‘incident’ where 

such mutations occur. 

There is a kind of subversion at 

work here. The aesthetic of scientific 

illustration, which attracts and 

seduces the viewer with the detail 

and workmanship, is compounded 

and complicated by the intrusion of 

visual disturbances, markedly in the 

form of asymmetry of leg, wing 

shield, etc. This genre of illustration, 

with its own codes and conventions, 

still maintains within scientific 

discourse a verisimilitude and 

positivist weight that gives it a 

status and power as visual 

knowledge. Hesse-Honnegger uses 

the scientistic and objectivist power 

of illustration to question and 

critique not so much the institution 

itself but its complicity with the 

nuclear industries’ ideological hegemony, 

its poor scientific practices 

and its lack of public accountability. 

There is something of Mary 

Shelley’s Frankenstein about this 

project too that forces us to 

confront what we are doing to 

support our economic well-being 

and what the real cost of this is. 

Nuclear power is producing 

‘monsters’ by cutting and splicing 

their DNA, and their future we are 

unable to predict. By making visible 

signatures of this haphazard 

reengineering of nature’s blueprints, 

by subverting a form in which 

scientism is invested, Hesse- 

Honnegger’s field work represents 

a critical practice that is both subtle, 

complex and, to use the 

curator Catherine Fitzgerald’s 

phrase, ‘humble’. 

There is no doubt that Hesse- 

Honnegger brings to this singleissue 

longitudinal study a rigour 

and passion not seen too often. 

Her work remains an early-warning 

system for a slow-motion 

catastrophe. Her stance and 

indictment is clear, but its reception 

and effect less so in a geo-political 

climate becoming more explicitly 

determined by wars over dwindling 

resources. 

79

c. 

80 

Sarah Browne 

Model Arts and Niland 

Gallery, Sligo 

August – September 

2005 

Site-ations 

International 

2005/6 

Sense in place, 

Ireland 

(above) Erling T.V Klingenberg 

Reserved for Erling T.V 

Klingenberg, 2005 

installation, mixed media 

interior installation view 

photo courtesy the artist 

(below) Maciej Kurak 

Crying Game, 2005 

documentary video still 

video still courtesy Artist 

Exchange

The Site-ations programme is a 

series of artist exchanges and 

exhibitions, accompanied by 

conferences and an education 

programme, to take place in six 

countries across Europe in 2005/ 

2006. The overall theme is ‘Sense in 

place’, aiming to engage with 

artists and audiences in European 

art centres outside the mainstream, 

evoking a peripheral politics and 

attempting to set up some kind of 

alternative to the kind of biennial 

culture we have been hearing so 

much about lately. 1 

The exhibition in Sligo is the first 

in the series and eight artists 

participated: Maciej Kurak and 

Tomasz Domanski from Poland; 

Xavi Munos and Mabi Revuelta from 

Spain; Erling T.V. Klingenberg and 

Olga Bergmann from Iceland; Helen 

Ann Jones from Wales, and Aigars 

Bikse from Latvia. ‘Contested 

spaces’, ‘Mapping memory’, 

‘Margins and inclusion’ were the 

contexts within which invited 

artists were asked to respond. 

Attending an artist’s talk in the 

gallery, my first encounter was with 

a man sitting on the floor, head 

between his legs, with a broken 

stereo beside him. A handwritten 

sign propped at his feet read “HELP 

ME I NEED SOME MONEY.” What a 

relief when I realised it was actually 

a body cast with a very convincing 

wig and I had no obligation to 

address either a performance artist 

in a gallery imitating a beggar or a 

real person on the streets in the 

same situation. However Maciej 

Kurak had actually placed this 

‘man’ out on the streets of Sligo, in 

various locations, and videoed the 

results. With a soundtrack of ‘Walk 

on By’, this sharply observed piece 

made for uncomfortable, shameful 

viewing. Except for a little girl who 

gave him some coppers outside a 

bank, or the occasional brief glance, 

this figure of despair was ignored by 

almost all. I recognised my own 

reaction in these people, who 

included men of the cloth and a 

passing nun, before he was 

eventually taken away by the 

gardaí. The artist described the 

piece as “referring to the condition 

of the nomad in twenty-first century 

Europe, the invisible transient 

population of our towns in cities,” 

which recalled the many signs I 

have seen taped up in the area in 

Slavic (I think) languages. This was 

a standout work. It was a shame 

that the video documentation was 

so poorly shown on a monitor in the 

gallery’s foyer space, making it far 

too easy for the viewer to walk on 

by yet again. Perhaps this was a 

deliberate choice but it felt like a 

decision more based on PR and 

unwillingness to offend. 

Erling T.V. Klingenberg also generated 

a degree of controversy. His 

elaborately staged work was composed 

of a number of elements, 

most conspicuously a navy-blue 

Hiace outside the gallery that a 

huge boulder had fallen on from the 

sky. This had crushed the van’s contents 

– crates of the artist’s work – 

resulting in the allocated space in 

the gallery being left vacant. The 

only exceptions were a few white 

plinths with labels reading 

Reserved for Erling T.V. Klingenberg 

and one crate containing a 

damaged plaster sculpture and a 

functioning smoke machine. The 

number plate on the Hiace read 

“IRELAND,” with the second letter 

scratched out. A very witty take on 

myth and authenticity, and the 

bleeding of the artworld into the 

culture /tourist industry, it was an 

alternative megalithic monument to 

cute hoorism. This piece both celebrated 

and denied artistic spectacle, 

not to mention becoming something 

of a talking point in the town, 

acquiring the status of myth in its 

own right (several people witnessed 

outside the gallery looking curiously 

up into the sky). Interestingly this 

event occurred on the same night 

another vehicle crashed into the 

Yeats statue in Sligo… 

Unfortunately, the van had to be 

removed, supposedly on the 

grounds of safety. With an added 

dollop of irony, this slyly pointed up 

the ‘contested space’ of the 

project’s curatorial theme being the 

actual gallery itself. Documentation 

of the project was installed both in 

the ‘empty’ room with the plinths – 

which kind of made that aspect of 

the piece redundant since the room 

was obviously no longer empty – 

and in the gallery foyer, with the 

letter from the gallery to the artist. 

(This rendered the documentation 

in the gallery space supersuperfluous). 

All that remained of 

the Hiace were a pair of rear view 

mirrors… a nice touch. 

Klingenberg’s other work was a 

video titled Create, where the artist 

repeats this word vocally, to the 

image of a moving bodily orifice… 

let’s just say the work explores 

ideas and myths of ‘male creation’ 

in every sense and leave its 

identification unnamed… 

Olga Bergmann’s work displayed 

a very particular aesthetic set of 

concerns. Two ‘visitor centres’ were 

constructed and installed in a 

woodland and a cattle field. These 

modest huts became centres for 

observation of the animals in the 

area, drawing on a rich tradition of 

observatory image-making, from 

landscape painting to scientific 

drawing, plein air sketching to video 

surveillance. Elements of the huts 

were reinstalled in the gallery 

space, alongside the photographs, 

drawings and videos that were the 

result of these Field studies. The 

‘bovine art pavilion’ was a particularly 

charming work, where opera 

(Il Trovatore) plays, and the cows 

explore the interior and exterior of 

the structure, scratching against it, 

licking the walls (adorned with 

paintings of cows) or pissing 

outside. This work humorously and 

sensitively explored a number of 

seeming oppositions such as people 

/ animals, ‘nature’ / ‘culture’, 

81

82 

function / decoration, and the wild 

and the domestic. The play between 

inside and out was quietly pointed 

at within the gallery setting itself, 

with a window framing a view of a 

tree, the visitors passing around the 

installation in the space not unlike 

the way the cows did (obviously no 

urinating in the gallery). I did check 

for surveillance cameras, wondering 

if as a gallerygoer I was being 

surveyed in another controlled 

environment, a field study within a 

field study… 

The challenge with this kind of 

project is always how to balance 

the artist’s own voice, authority and 

concerns with a receptiveness to 

the place (audience and issues) 

where the work is made. The ‘Sense 

in place’ brief recognises this 

necessity to extend the work 

beyond stereotypical representations 

of a place, to seek out the 

local and the particular. Such 

projects are always hit-and-miss. 

Misses are usually the result of 

references to the new location that 

are err either on the side of the 

obvious or the obscure. Certain 

works in the show fell prey to this. 

In general, it was the works that 

took on the challenge of the climate 

outside the gallery that were 

successful. Aigars Bikse’s work 

practically negated the gallery 

setting altogether, by staging a 

performance in a field. 

Documentation was presented in 

the gallery/café space but the work 

was essentially absent, really only 

experienced by the witnesses to the 

performance. 

At their best, this sort of initiative 

offers the artist the opportunity to 

develop a project in a new, exciting 

location, while building on their 

existing body of work in a way that 

makes sense both for them and the 

audience. The artists discussed 

above made works that seemed to 

achieve this. This kind of project 

owe something to the idea of the 

artist as an ethnographer, 2 whose 

outsider eye can make incisions and 

observations otherwise invisible or 

over-familiar to the person who lives 

in the actual place of the visitation. 

Such ambitions are challenging 

indeed and difficult to live up to. 

1 See, for example, the edition of Printed 

project produced as part of Ireland’s 2005 

representation in the Venice Biennale, 

edited by Alan Phelan. 

2 Hal Foster, ‘The artist as ethnographer’, 

in The Return of the real, Cambridge, MIT 

Press, 1996, pp.171–203. See also Miwon 

Kwon, One Place after another: site-specific 

art and locational identity, MIT Press, 

Massachusetts, 2004 

Sarah Browne is an artist currently 

working in northwest Ireland; in 2006 

she will participate in the Icelandic 

Site-ations event. 

www.site-ations.org/senseinplace 

(left) Aigars Bikse 

Resistance of Kilmactigue, 2005 

image from performance at 

Kilmactigue, introduction by 

curator Anna Macleod 

digital photograph, 100 x 75cm 

courtesy Site-Ations 

(right) Olga Bergmann 

Field studies 

installation view. 2005 

photograph courtesy the artist

c. 

Paul O’Brien 

Ars 

Ars Electronica Center 

Linz 

September 2005 

electro- Ars Electronica Center and the 

nica 

This year’s Ars Electronica festival 

took place during a week of 

sunshine in the Danube-side 

Austrian city of Linz. In striking 

contrast to the ongoing debacle of 

digital media in Ireland – the 

collapse of Arthouse and Media Lab 

Europe, the inexplicable failure to 

plug into the billion-dollar gaming 

industry – Linz, with its showcase 

global forum of the Festival, shows 

what can be done in this sphere by a 

combination of artistic vision, 

shrewd business sponsorship and 

enlightened political support. 

John Gerrard 

The ladder, 2005 

courtesy Ars Electronica 

83

84 

Appropriate to the weather, the 

Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s 

wonderful Strand beasts stole the 

show. Consisting of vast windpowered, 

computer-designed 

skeletons constructed from electrical 

tubes by the Dutch artist, these 

gentle, lumbering creatures evoke 

similar feelings of amused affection 

as the more high-tech robot-dogs 

on display in the Ars Electronica 

Center, and bring up questions of 

evolution and design – the artist as 

substitute creator. (One wonders, 

though, how long the sand animals 

– devoid of anti-vandal defence 

mechanisms – would last, say, on 

the beaches of north Dublin...) 

A special award was given to 

Jansen, as there was a question 

whether the work fitted comfortably 

into the Interactive art category. 

The clear, though somewhat 

unlikely, winner in this category was 

MILKproject by Esther Polak and 

Ieva Auzina, which used a GPS 

navigation system and documentation 

to analyse the cross-Europe 

production of cheese, from Latvia to 

the Netherlands. The work was rich 

in sociological implications – 

deconstructing the complicated 

but usually hidden relations of 

production and distribution within 

the agricultural economy, and 

giving ordinary people the 

opportunity to reflect on and communicate 

details of their lives 

which usually remain hidden – a 

de-fetishisation of the commodity, 

one might say. The work was 

socially informative, but perhaps 

questionable in terms of aesthetic 

content. (‘Is it art?’) Also striking in 

this category was Run motherfucker 

run by Dutch artist Marnix de Nijs, 

an interactive installation involving 

a treadmill and a display of empty 

city streets through which the 

participant runs. (Shades of artist 

Jeffrey Shaw, who offered in one of 

his works the opportunity to cycle 

through a virtual city, and perhaps 

also of a recent video piece by 

Ireland’s Willie Doherty.) Clearly, 

there was a strong Dutch presence 

at this year’s Festival, perhaps 

reflecting generous support of the 

arts in the Netherlands. 

The winner in the Computer 

animation/ visual effects section 

was Fallen art by Tomek Baginski 

of Poland, a striking piece of 

grotesquerie with a strong anti-war 

flavour (an element which was, 

however, downplayed by the artist 

himself). The film effectively 

brought together computer 

animation and traditional handpainting, 

giving a painterly effect 

to the piece. Also outstanding in 

this category was Man OS 1 / 

extraordinateur, which amusingly 

brings a Mac interface alive and 

literalises the metaphors (for 

example, the Norton Disk Doctor is 

a real physician and the CD burner 

catches fire). 

Tomek Baginski / Platige Image 

Fallen Art 

courtesy Ars Electronica 

Theo Jansen 

Strandbeest 

courtesy Ars Electronica

The winner in the Digital communities 

category was Akshaya, a worthy 

– if less than riveting – project 

involving networked information 

centres in the South Indian state of 

Kerala. The first prize (or Golden 

Nica) in the Net Vision section was 

won by Processing, an open-source 

programming language created to 

impart the basics of computer 

programming from a visual point of 

view. Freely available and especially 

suited to those who think visually 

and spatially (like most artists) 

Processing expands the boundaries 

of the gift economy in an era where 

corporate control of the computer 

industry is an ongoing spectre. In 

a spin on the relationship between 

capitalism and democracy, [V]oteauction 

by Hans Berhard and Lizvlx 

offered, tongue-in-cheek, the opportunity 

for American citizens to sell 

their votes. The predictable legal 

difficulties that ensued were no 

doubt due to the failure of the US 

authorities to understand the aesthetic-political 

logic of pushing the 

capitalist system, and the corporate 

control of media, to its logical conclusion. 

Whether such a project 

could have any serious impact on 

the dire state of democracy in the 

US is another question (but perhaps 

it’s just art.) 

The Digital musics category is 

always a little separate from the 

main visually oriented events. 

An exception this year was Paul 

DeMarinis’ intriguing Firebirds – 

exploiting the relationship between 

fire, sound, totalitarian politics and 

concepts of the afterlife. The winner 

in this category was Maryanne 

Amacher’s TEO! a sonic sculpture, 

based on recordings of muons 

(charged particles) made under the 

Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan 

in Mexico. 

A multitude of events and exhibitions 

was scattered around Linz as 

part of this year’s Ars Electronica. 

John Gerrard, a rising figure from 

Ireland in the international newmedia 

world, displayed an impressive 

mixed-reality piece entitled The 

ladder, which attracted a steady 

stream of visitors. Also memorable 

was Barbara Siegel’s evocative 

derelictedATMOSPHERES, a 360degree 

black-and-white video installation 

consisting of a projection of 

French chateaux, reminiscent of the 

panoramas that preceded film as an 

audience spectacle (and also of Last 

year in Marienbad, arguably the 

finest film ever made). 

Apart from the prize-winners and 

runners-up with their persistent – 

and laudable – references to 

political freedom and empowerment, 

there were the usual fun 

things at this year’s Ars Electronica: 

electronic creatures inhabiting 

vegetation, and a mobile machine 

operated by a captive live 

cockroach (happily, the Insect 

Liberation Front stayed away). 

Reflecting the title of this year’s 

Ars Electronica (Hybrid: living in 

paradox) and the associated 

intellectual debate – the main 

intellectual reference in this area 

being the work of Donna Haraway – 

these installations played with the 

ideas of crossover between human, 

animal, plant and machine. An 

invisible skipping rope operated by 

video characters was greatly 

enjoyed by younger visitors to the 

Ars Electronica Center, while elsewhere, 

in the downtown OK Center 

which hosted the bulk of the interactive 

art pieces, one could play a 

game of virtual tennis with mobile 

computer screens instead of tennis 

racquets. The prevailing dystopian 

nightmare – of developing human 

inertia contrasted with the 

growing vitality of the machine – is 

addressed by such developments. 

Kids (and their elders) can now get 

fit on a dance mat or through 

physically demanding computer 

games, rather than sitting for hours 

putting on weight at a computer 

screen. Through the Ars Electronica 

Festival and Center, Linz has 

reinvented itself as a venue for 

twenty-first-century culture, hugely 

increased its tourist intake, and put 

itself on the global map in terms of 

digital media. The lessons for 

Ireland, and Dublin in particular, 

hardly need to be laboured. 

Paul O’Brien 

(obrienp@ncad.ie) 

teaches at the National 

College of Art and Design, 

Dublin. 

85

c. 

86 

Sheila Dickinson 

Alice Maher 

Rood Alice 

Green on Red Gallery 

Dublin 

August – September 

2005 

Maher 

Rood 

installation view, Green on Red 

Gallery, 2005 

courtesy Green on Red Gallery

‘Rood’, a word unfamiliar to most, 

is a medieval word for the screen 

that separates the sacred space of 

the alter from the common 

congregation in churches. By using 

the word rood, Maher instantly 

reactivates consistent concerns in 

her art: medieval, pre-modern 

representations; passage and 

transformation from everyday and 

common into sacred and myth; and 

the merging of folk and high art. 

She recreates a rood, still made of 

wood, because it consists of a row 

of upside-down trees hanging from 

the rafters of the gallery, but with 

intricate carving replaced by 

nature. One needs to overlook the 

lack of originality, since Siobhán 

Hapaska similarly hung pine trees 

from the rafters of Scuola San 

Pasquale in the 2001 Venice 

Biennale, although Hapaska hung 

the trees like a dense forest and the 

needles carpeted the floor, 

drenching the space in their smell. 

One needs instead to look at the 

relation of Maher’s hanging trees to 

their installation in this gallery 

setting. Rood divides the gallery in 

half, but does not cut each side off 

from the other, leaving room to pass 

at the far end of the gallery by the 

windows and, for the adventurous, 

a foot of space left open underneath 

the branches (in which the 

children played at the exhibition 

opening). This seems poignant, the 

children interacting with the art 

piece, and recalls her previous work 

constructed from materials culled 

from the hedges around her childhood 

home in Tipperary. 

In fact, Rood revisits her 1997 

piece The hedge of experience, 

a miniature replica of a hedge 

sprouting from the floorboards of 

the gallery. This was a threshold 

piece in the trajectory of Maher’s 

art practice. It came at the tail 

end of her ‘hedge’ works where she 

plucked, gathered, and collected 

elements of the hedge and the 

garden for her work. The hedge of 

experience, in contrast to the other 

hedge works, summed up this overwhelming 

mass of many details and 

unconventional artistic materials 

into a small organism that appears 

to be receding in the distance of a 

backward glance. After The 

hedge…, Maher’s work moved away 

from using natural materials to 

incorporate other media like bronze, 

crystal, silver, refrigerator coils. 

Her inclusion of beech trees in 

Rood returns her to this earlier type 

of practice and likewise resumes 

her positioning on the margins of 

art practice where nature and the 

things she finds around herself (the 

definition of ‘folk’ provided by 

Louise Bourgeois when she first 

encountered Maher’s work 1 ) 

propels and guides the art practice. 

This method is clearly spelled out 

in the snail tracks (snails are 

everywhere, in rural and urban 

Ireland alike) in blue and green that 

glide over transparent film which 

cover the gallery windows. The snail 

markings look like abstract 

paintings and the four globes 

covered in snail shells look like 

formal modernist sculptures, each 

in their own distilled space, on 

individual pedestals. The fact that 

snails made this abstract art 

pushes the work outside the remit 

of modern art, beyond Pollock and 

his drippings, to encounter snails 

and their slow creepings. 

Snails in the garden get into 

everything and likewise in this 

gallery-cum-garden snails take over 

the space. This includes the one 

piece of artistically created 

sculpture, Double Venus, in which 

two classical bronze busts of Venus 

are bound by a swerving brown 

snake-like form that could be read 

as a snail’s body escaped from its 

shell. Multiple women’s heads, hair 

that grows wild and covers everything 

or twists and turns around 

itself on the drawn page, frequently 

surface is Maher’s work. But here 

the hair turns animal and the twin 

heads turn away from each other, 

despite being forever bound, which 

could signify sisterhood or 

entrapment. Therefore, the piece 

speaks the paradox of feminism, 

empowered by solidarity with 

women but often left hanging in 

the margins of cultural and social 

forces. Although the Venus figures 

look away from each other, they are 

each other’s mirror image. Double 

Venus and the exhibition as a whole, 

therefore, are also about reflection. 

Not just the reflection of the mirror 

or lake or window, but also the type 

of reflection that ponders the past 

and specifically here Maher’s own 

past art practices that venture 

outside art to allow what is below, 

outside on the margins – snails 

in this instance – to surface and 

propel the work. 

1 Alice Maher, Lecture and tour 

of Louise Bourgeois: Stitches 

in Time at the Irish Museum of 

Modern Art, 21 February, 

2004 

Sheila Dickinson is a PhD 

candidate in the History of 

Art Department at 

University College Dublin 

and lectures at the 

National College of Art 

and Design. 

87

c. 

88 

Damien Duffy 

An Gaeláras 

Derry 

August – October 2005 

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh 

Musicpula T2, MO, NO

www.plundercore.net/ealaion 

Damien Duffy is an artist. 

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh 

Musicpula T2, MO, NO, 2005 

installation views, An Gaeláras 

Derry 

photographs courtesy Lorcan 

Doherty 

In an urban garden at the rear of 

An Gaeláras in Derry, a small 

plexi-glass greenhouse sits on a 

platform of sandbags; innocuous, 

suburban, common garden 

architecture. Inside, the waistheight 

trestles are clotted in soil, 

planted with an array of tropical 

plants, insectivores, venus fly-traps. 

Tubular nectar-filled bulbs hang 

from the ceiling; an array of carnivorous 

plants on the floor. Amongst 

this, tangles of amp-wires tease the 

hair-trigger plants and traps. 

Four speakers play a recorded loop 

of voices, refrains, gasps, sighs, 

starts and ends of sentences, all 

edited from spoken fairytales and 

political speeches, promises and 

warnings. The meaning removed, 

words lost, these abrupt silences 

are occasionally filled with an 

electrical buzz. The wired amp’s 

tendrils make connections from 

the organic to the inorganic, as 

the (venus) trap shuts. Its electric 

impulse joins the chorus of ‘shut 

traps’ in the loop of silences and 

refrains. 

Plants supposedly grow better if 

the gardener talks to them. In this 

artwork the cacophony of abrupt 

ends refrains from speech. There is 

something of the crazed botanist in 

this. The piece has an ambience of 

wrong science, misguided study. 

However, the title Musicpula T2, 

MO, NO is the key. The artist 

reveals that his father has recently 

suffered a cancerous illness – he is 

since recovering. The piece was 

made during the height of his illness 

and takes its name from the status 

of the cancer cells. This personal 

narrative enlarges the project to a 

kind of Beuysian intervention, using 

objects, plants, etc., as coded 

objects in transformational action. 

The piece itself is inelegant, a 

shanty of plants and wires, lights, 

jerry-built. Yet this tunnel vision and 

skewed botany is an attempt at 

comprehending that organic carnivore 

– Musicpula T2, MO, NO, using 

these tropical plants as models, 

interacting with the chorus of 

speechlessness and incomprehensible 

utterance, as both countermeasure 

and a record of that very 

wordless fear in the face of possible 

impending loss. 

Ó Dochartaigh’s previous project, 

at the Context Gallery, Derry, was 

Mercury contact, in which he built 

instruments and apparatus out of 

rotating Leslie speaker drums. 

He staged a chaotic, experimental 

‘music’ performance. It too had a 

quasi-scientific, action element. 

Like Fluxus events, this installation, 

however, is more alchemical; a 

greater willingness to restore a 

belief inhabits it. The small jungle 

of exotic plants lends it a moribund 

life force. 

The artwork needs to be seen as 

a ritual, not just as an installation. 

These are performative attempts 

at transformational acts, albeit 

closed and ‘off stage’ until the 

crazed alchemy is revealed in the 

remaining apparatus; like Beuys or 

Balka, the acts are applied to a 

very personal narrative (family 

relationships), working through the 

helplessness of the situation in a 

cathartic project. 

The project is refreshing, driven 

by the reality of personal narration. 

The workmanlike construction 

makes little attempt at formal 

elegance but its single-minded, 

misguided alchemy is charged with 

a desperate ‘play’; it is obsessive, 

compulsive, indicating a need for 

this to work, harnessing the life 

force of these vegetal carnivores to 

interrupt and interact with the 

silenced flow of stories. 

Musicpula T2, MO, NO stands like 

a folly – in the name of catharsis, 

of the artist’s struggle with 

therapeutic alchemy, a frenzied 

staging in a loop of sympathetic 

belief in art’s capacity to effect real 

change in raw reality. 

89

Patrick Ward 

Bankley House Gallery 

Manchester 

September 2005 

02890 

90 

c. 

Doireann O’Malley 

Untitled dockland, 2004 

C-type print, 60 x 80cm 

courtesy the artist

All of the artists in 02890 are 

recent graduates of the Master of 

Fine Art course at the University of 

Ulster in Belfast. All were students 

under Alastair MacLennan and 

some more recently under Willie 

Doherty, both artists engaging 

directly with political issues. 

However, there is no Politics here. 

02890 sidesteps the stereotyped 

expectations of Northern Irish art 

and artists. None of the traditional 

big issues are confronted or even 

alluded to. Even the title of the 

exhibition evades its politically 

burdened geography. Choosing 

code over name: with what do these 

new artists choose to engage? 

Paul Coffey takes as his subject a 

mass-produced wood-veneer table. 

Pursuit of perfection documents the 

obsessive exploration of the table’s 

surface in search of flaws and 

imperfections. The photographs 

as colour printouts in cheap 

plastic sleeves are annotated in 

blue biro with comments such as 

“looks like it was stuck on.” Pursuit 

of perfection seems to explore 

the futile search for meaning in 

consumer items. 

This concern with value and 

meaning continues in Jane 

Anderson’s work You fat bastards. 

The gulf between commercial 

sports fantasy and consumer reality 

is exposed through Anderson’s 

recasting of Subbuteo football 

figures as middle-aged or beerbellied 

men. The players stand 

around the pitch inert in their 

sports/ leisure wear. Consumption 

precluding participation. 

The photography of Doireann 

O’Malley withholds rather than 

reveals. In none of her three 

photographs can we catch the eye 

of the subject. Their eyes are closed 

or they turn away from the lens. 

The cold walls and landscapes that 

form the backgrounds provide only 

a sense of displacement. The lack 

of human communication forces us 

to search the edges for something 

from which meaning could be 

extracted. 

The edges seem to interest Lorraine 

Burrell also. In the Hubba bubba 

photos she plays games with her 

friends and family. The participants 

blow bubblegum bubbles that 

obscure their faces. The features 

are masked by the fleshy pink that 

dominates the frame. The camera 

flash bounces back from the 

surface. The slightly drab domestic 

backgrounds of living rooms and 

bathrooms are visible around the 

edges of the bubble head. We don’t 

know if Burrell’s fun is being shared 

by participant. The obscured face 

leaves a coldness. 

In the video work Tape reconstruction 

for Nixon and Halderman Allan 

Hughes deals with the search for 

something that is not there. 

Delving into the world of the 

conspiracy, Tape reconstruction… 

takes as its subject the infamous 

eighteen minutes of tape erased 

from Whitehouse logs. The missing 

evidence becomes Hughes’ subject. 

The camera pans over a reel-to-reel 

tape player, searching. The erased 

tape provides only an electronic 

hum. 

Fiona Larkin’s Tail is similarly not 

there. The works on show record 

Larkin’s travels through Belfast on 

an Ash Wednesday wearing a tail. 

The drawings made of people in the 

street have had tails scalpeled out. 

Tails that are animal, that stick out, 

that protrude The void becomes the 

focus. An other that could be but is 

not. Larkin’s incised drawings alter 

the nature of her unwitting subjects. 

She has made her subjects 

like her, other. 

Childhood narratives are explored 

in Amy Russell’s constructed 

photography. A small gnome like 

object dominates the photograph 

with vague toy-like objects 

surrounding in an apparent garden 

setting. The title “Lost Forever” 

lends a melancholy air but provides 

little to assist understanding. 

The viewer is drawn in to Brendan 

O’Neill’s piece to peer through a 

viewfinder in a backlit, white picket 

fence. The cold glow of the fluorescent 

striplight illuminates a slide 

image of a old fishing port. The 

sunlit warmth of the image remains 

trapped behind the white painted 

wood. 

John Beattie explores the city with 

his paintbrush. His paintbrush is, 

however, attached to the end of a 

floor-brush shaft that also holds a 

camcorder. The camera records the 

dry brush’s journey over the street 

surface, brushing over cracks and 

detritus. The viewer is invited to 

take the brush for a walk around the 

gallery while watching on the camcorder’s 

screen the brush’s previous 

journeys. The jangling urban noise 

contrasts with the quiet gallery 

space. 

So where does all this leave the 

land of 02890? Just another 

telephone code? Just another 

geographical location to reach or 

to be? The artists of 02890 counter 

expectation. They do not produce 

work about the region’s politics. 

Instead their work explores 

absences. Voids that were perhaps 

easily overlooked in the glare of a 

greater trauma can now become 

the focus. 

Patrick Ward is an artist 

based in Manchester. 

91

c. 

92 

Alannah Hopkin 

Julie Bacon 

Sirius Arts Centre 

Cobh 

September – October 

2005 

A hymn for travellers 

and the absent 

Julie Bacon 

A hymn for travellers and 

the absent, 2005 

installation views 

Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh 

courtesy the artist

Julie Bacon, an artist specialising 

in performance and installation 

works, currently resident in Belfast, 

was artist in residence at the Sirius 

Arts Centre in June and July, 2005. 

During that time she met a number 

of people living in Cobh and district 

who have been involved with 

maritime life. A hymn for travellers 

and the absent was the result of this 

activity. 

The installation occupied both 

galleries of this waterside space, 

a classical Palladian-style villa built 

in the early nineteenth-century, 

previously the headquarters of the 

Royal Cork Yacht Club. Gallery One, 

on the right hand side of the building, 

had both sets of windows 

blacked out. A small church bench 

was placed in front of the fireplace, 

and a film was projected onto the 

space above the mantel. The mantel 

itself was covered in a strip of lace 

cloth. Around the bench a few red 

and white feathers were scattered, 

and on it was a copy of The ancient 

mariner and other poems by Samuel 

Taylor Coleridge. 

The film had no soundtrack. The 

camera concentrated on the hands 

of the people talking, rather than 

their faces. An old woman showed 

a scrapbook and a collection of old 

cuttings. Other people featured 

included an elderly man in naval 

uniform, possibly a retired harbourmaster, 

a fisherman, a young man 

in a red and white check shirt with 

a pencil. Other hands were shown 

dealing with heavy ropes, then we 

were back to the old woman and 

her scrapbook. The loop, lasting 

maybe five minutes, repeated. 

The central room of the gallery, 

which faces south over Cork 

Harbour, was empty apart from a 

wooden platform, approached by a 

wooden staircase. The sides of the 

platform were lined by the same 

lace material (net curtain?) as the 

mantelpiece next door. One person 

at a time occupied the space, 

sitting on a hard bench, facing the 

view over the harbour. Because the 

seat was about four feet above 

ground level, you were forced to 

look at the view though the architectural 

detail of the upper level of 

the windows. Postcards and pencils 

were to be found on the floor beside 

the chair, on which you could write. 

While in the first room, I had 

resented the loss of the view from 

the windows, and felt unpleasantly 

coerced into watching the hands of 

the people filmed, while being 

denied a view of their faces, the 

soundtrack of their voices and a 

view of the surroundings in which 

they were speaking. The feathers 

and Coleridge contributed nothing. 

In the second room I was given the 

view I had been craving, but was 

again coerced into looking at it from 

a particular place, to no discernible 

purpose. 

The gallery’s hand-out claims that 

“Julie’s work questions the 

functioning of archives, such as 

museums, civic records offices or 

commercial databases and highlights 

how they influence our sense 

of presence, our interactions and 

our memories.” There was no evidence 

of this. Was the artist doing 

something so subtle and esoteric 

that I missed the point? Or was the 

show simply lacking in thought, 

coherence, energy, and creativity? 

It seemed arrogant to silence the 

interviewees. This decision turned 

what might have been an interesting 

video into a boring one, with 

only one idea behind it. The other 

room simply said “look at the view.” 

Neither seemed to relate to the 

promise of the title, nor to gain 

from the proximity of the other. 

Sometimes when you don’t get it, 

it is because there is nothing to get. 

The emperor had no clothes on. 

This was a shameful waste of 

funding and resources. 

Alannah Hopkin is a writer 

based in County Cork. 

93

c. 

94 

Tim Stott 

Ormeau Baths Gallery 

Belfast 

Perspective 2005 


2005 

Ayako Yoshimura 

Places – the city, 2005 

DVD still 

courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery

Perspective is the Ormeau Baths 

Gallery’s annual open exhibition, 

now in its eighth year. Terry 

Atkinson and Ariella Azoulay made 

this year’s selection. The limited 

space available in this review 

demands that a further selection 

must take place. 

The first work to trouble expectations 

is J. Meredith Warner’s video, 

Knitting (found). Taking the 

cinematic representation of the 

ostensibly tame practice of knitting 

as her point of departure, Warner 

composes ‘found’ film clips into a 

rich ‘galaxy of signifiers’. In cinema, 

knitting has been used as either a 

metaphor of or complement to 

scheming and manipulation, 

charged restraint, the intricacies of 

human relationships, and the 

casting of spells. In short, knitting 

is tactical. Warner’s subtle and 

precise editing allows her to reclaim 

the symbolic complexity of this 

neglected and pacified practice, 

whilst also exposing her audience to 

some of its rather mesmeric allure. 

Simon Morse’s witticisms provide 

a welcome foil to the political 

gravitas found elsewhere. A wall 

is covered with propaganda posters 

for the ‘campagne belfastique’ of 

the secretive Atelier Populaire des 

Magiciens Marxistes; a campaign 

that seeks to provoke revolution 

through a heady combination of 

cheap drink and industrialised 

magic. The forecast is for “flashes 

of MAGIC followed by widespread 

outbreaks of SOCIALISM”: through 

sustained distractions and the 

occasional sleight of hand, ‘hey 

presto!’ – maximum political impact 

is assured. An unlikely combination, 

certainly, but deceptively direct, 

nonetheless. A bit of mischief and 

a few belly laughs just might 

violate some recurrent habits, such 

as capitalism, but the Magiciens’ 

rather affected optimism also 

suggests that the ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ 

radicalism of some (though not all) 

interventionist art might come up 

with nothing more than the 

occasional white elephant. In this 

case, the ‘invisible insurrection’ 

seems just a bit too…invisible. 

More importantly, as the Magiciens 

attempt to tackle Belfast’s problems 

from a secret location in Soho, 

they also pass a wry comment on 

the “historical exercise of remote 

power” which compounds these 

problems, and the rather awkward 

nature of “artistic intervention in 

other communities outside one’s 

own’ (Morse); interventions which 

often seem untroubled by their 

‘ethnographic turn.” Playing on the 

historical evidence that revolutionary 

politics has tended to eliminate 

art except in propagandist and 

agitational terms, the Magiciens, 

with a coordinated flick of the wrist, 

re-enchant these terms without 

being reactionary. They also give 

would-be revolutionary art a muchneeded 

stiff drink. 

Some might say that it would be 

impossible to make something 

uninteresting out of a subject such 

as the Palestinian intifada, but in 

Ya’ni intifada, Richard Mosse 

handles his subject judiciously. He 

refrains from imposing too much of 

his authorship upon the piece, 

allowing the words of the documentary’s 

participants to resonate of 

their own accord. As these participants 

go through their definitions of 

the Arabic word ‘intifada’ – offering 

a range of meanings as diverse as a 

flood, throwing something out, a 

mother’s sudden concern for her 

children, a violent reaction to 

expropriation, and an invocation 

rising from death rattle, to name a 

few – the complexity of the word 

and the corresponding complexity 

of the Palestinian situation are 

articulated with profound economy. 

In between the interviews, the view 

from a car window shows us an 

unremarkable landscape, overlaid 

by a soundtrack that could be wind 

or gunfire. As a companion to the 

video, a light-box image shows in 

stark white capitals the word 

‘intifada’ above an impoverished 

West Bank landscape. This is a film 

of the most sober and considered 

kind and, given the subject, it is all 

the more compelling for it. 

Upstairs, Ursula Burke’s 

The pictorial dimensions of Irish 

Catholicism series 1: the famine 

concerns itself with the socioeconomic 

conditions behind the 

‘devotional revolution’ in nineteenth-century 

Ireland. Her 

manipulated, expressionistic 

photographic prints show a child 

of Erin experiencing what appears 

to be a series of conversions under 

the combined weight of poverty 

and a rudimentary iconography 

that reads as both pagan and 

Catholic. Not least, some rather 

unfavourable comparison seems 

to be made between the 

enchantments of Catholicism and 

the fraudulent faerie photographs 

to which Burke’s own bear more 

than a passing resemblance. 

Ayako Yoshimura’s panoramic 

cityscape composes one unbroken 

tracking shot from countless 

photographs of major urban 

skylines, from which distinct 

landmarks are then removed. 

Yoshimura exposes the fragility of 

architectural idiosyncrasies within 

an increasingly homogeneous urban 

sprawl. Her panorama becomes a 

phantasmagoria: an inert, spectral 

landscape that could be anywhere, 

disturbingly seen from nowhere in 

particular by many eyes striving 

to work as one. Perhaps here 

Yoshimura’s artifice leads us a 

little too close to the truth: 

exposing the fiction and the 

dangerous suffocation of that 

strictly utopian position (which the 

urban planner shares with the 

voyeur and God) to which detached, 

all-encompassing knowledge is 

wont to aspire. 

95

96 

In the last room, Ellie Rees enacts 

the premise of an unwritten, semiautobiographical 

story by Sylvia 

Plath, which follows a dissatisfied 

young woman’s attempt to forestall 

the decision between divorce and 

suicide by obsessively baking cakes. 

One day she bakes a cake an hour 

for twenty-four hours. Filmed in real 

time and presented simultaneously 

in three diptychs, the artist measures, 

mixes, creams and sprinkles 

her way from Battenburg to Lemon 

Drizzle. The suggestion is that baking 

and other domestic activities 

displace intellectual activity and 

the presumably uncomfortable 

decisions that come with it. This is 

true, to a degree, but there is also 

not a little ‘cleverness’ to baking, 

which would question any strict 

dichotomy between the active and 

the intellectual life. Although Rees 

does not fully mine the metaphorical 

depths of baking as J. Meredith 

Warner does with knitting, still she 

dramatises the darker undercurrents 

of Plath’s story and presents 

baking as an unlikely endurance 

test. This is laudable, not least when 

cooking seems to have infiltrated 

art as an unquestionably celebratory 

and communal affair. 

With eighteen artists selected, 

things might have been crowded, 

but the exhibition was astutely 

displayed, each work being allowed 

to command its own share of the 

space but not at the expense of 

continuity. Having said this, much 

of the work used a broadly similar 

format (video or photography) and a 

more challenging situation for both 

audience and coordinators might 

have been developed had a greater 

range of media been selected. 

Tim Stott is an art critic 

based in Dublin. 

(top left) 

Ellie Rees 

The day of the twenty four 

cakes, 2005 

DVD still 

courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery 

(top right) 

Richard Moss 

Ya'ni Intifada, 2005 

DVD still 

courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery 

(bottom left and right) 

J. Meredith Warner 

Knitting (found), 2005 

DVD still 

courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery

c. 

Brian Kennedy 

Golden Thread Gallery 

Belfast 


2005 

The project was a collaboration between the University 

of New South Wales Centre for Contemporary Art and 

Politics and the School of Art and Design, University 

of Ulster, Belfast. Both universities have a continuing 

research focus on politics and trauma in contemporary 

art. The exhibition co-curators Jill Bennett, Felicity 

Fenner and Liam Kelly, say in the catalogue, “Although 

each of the works included reflect distinct social and 

political conditions, the exhibition seeks to find a resonance 

between them, opening up a triangular dialogue, 

which we anticipate, will unfold quite differently in 

Sydney and Belfast.” 

Prepossession 

Willie Doherty 

Non-specific threat, 2004 

single channel video installation 

with sound, duration 7' 42" 

courtesy the artist, Golden 

Thread Gallery, Belfast, Matt’s 

Gallery, London and Alexander 

& Bonin, New York 

The exhibition Prepossession brought together the work 

of three artists from Australia, Destiny Deacon, Tracey 

Moffatt and Darren Siwes; two from South Africa, Jo 

Ratcliffe and William Kentridge and two from the north 

of Ireland, Willie Doherty and Frances Hegarty. From the 

title and list of artists it was obvious that the exhibition 

was going to use photography, animation and video to 

explore issues of politics, prejudice and social conditions. 

97

98 

Well unfold quite differently it most 

certainly did. The Ivan Dougherty 

Gallery in Sydney allowed for the 

kind of academic ‘resonance’ and 

discourse that one might expect of 

such a project. Using the Golden 

Thread Gallery on the Crumlin 

Road in Belfast allowed for another 

kind of ‘resonance’. The week 

before the show was due to open 

was when the loyalist violence was 

at its height and the Crumlin Road 

was a focal point. 

The Crumlin Road resonated to 

issues of politics, social conditions, 

racism, trauma and colonization. 

The issues that would soon be dealt 

with through photographs and video 

in the gallery were now happening a 

matter of feet away from the gallery 

outside on the street. The gallery 

had to evacuate its staff early each 

day as the trouble started to 

escalate. The exhibition was due to 

open on the Saturday; by Friday 

morning the work still had not 

arrived, the courier company said 

‘the Crum’ was too dangerous an 

area to enter. Things were a little 

quieter on the Friday and finally at 

three o’clock the exhibition arrived. 

The atmospheric spaces of the 

Golden Thread Gallery made for an 

intriguing venue. There was enough 

space to see each work individually 

with just some overlapping of sound 

tracks and the flickering of lights to 

remind one that it was a group 

exhibition. It was a group exhibition 

with artists from three very specific 

places, each of which has had to 

deal with questions of identity, 

place and displacement. The impact 

of living in these places can be 

seen in how the artists deal with 

issues like trauma, anxiety and fear. 

The gallery’s location and the 

earlier riots also had an impact. 

I had seen William Kentridge’s work 

in three different venues during the 

past year. The well known animated 

charcoal drawings of Kentridge’s 

alter ego Felix Teitlebaum seemed 

quite different in politically correct 

America, remote Perth in Western 

Australia and the hallowed spaces 

of the Venice Biennale than they 

did up the Crum. The dislocated 

landscape in the work seemed to be 

much the same landscape I had left 

behind to enter the gallery. 

The other South African artist, Jo 

Ratcliffe, also dealt with landscape. 

Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by 

shooting) scrolls across images of a 

simple landscape of a farm garden. 

It is only when one realises that 

Vlakplaas was a training facility for 

the South African government’s 

secret Death Squad do the images 

have any significance. This failure of 

an image to communicate that 

Ratcliffe deals with can also be 

seen on the Crumlin Road. It is only 

when we realise that the colourful 

flowers tied to lampposts signify a 

place where someone was killed do 

they have a meaning beyond the 

decorative. 

When looking at the work of the 

Australian artists, it is important to 

know about the Stolen Generations. 

This was the forced removal of 

Indigenous children from their 

families and the placing of them 

into a white, European culture. 

In 1997 the Australian Human 

Rights and Equal Opportunities 

Commission in their report went as 

far as saying, “The removal remains 

genocidal.” Despite this, the 

Australian government still have not 

said sorry. 

In her beautifully crafted short 

film Night cries: a rural tragedy, 

Tracey Moffatt shows an Aboriginal 

women nursing her dying white 

mother. The daughter’s feelings 

towards the mother wordlessly 

unfold in front of surreal sets 

somewhere in the Australian 

outback. The issues raised by the 

Stolen Generations remind me of 

issues raised by the scandals of the 

Magdellan laundries in Ireland. 

The television programme 

Neighbours is an enduring image of 

suburban life in Australia. Destiny 

Deacon takes this bland soap and 

turns it into Over d-fence that 

makes a very different comment on 

Australian life. Deacon’s backyard 

is not somewhere for a group of 

friends to share a pleasant barbie. 

Her backyard is full of dogs barking 

and people shouting. A mixture of 

people coexist, drink beer; children 

play. The editing adds to the chaotic 

feel by jumping around and 

repeating images. It conveys a real 

world where the questions of place, 

identity and ownership have not 

been resolved. 

The third Australian artist, Darren 

Siwes, places himself and his wife 

in the landscape, signifying a 

definite sense of location and place. 

The photographs he produces are 

taken at night, giving them a ghostlike 

quality further emphasized by 

the use of double exposure to make 

the two people translucent. Siwes is 

of Aboriginal/ Dutch descent and 

when the photographs are taken 

in Australia he stands in the foreground 

with his wife in the 

background. His wife is European 

so when the photographs are taken 

in Europe the positions are 

reversed. These eerie photographs 

give us a glimpse of the importance 

of landscape in defining identity, 

culture and history. 

Portraiture and the self-portrait 

have a long history in art and good 

portraiture goes beyond the visual 

and deals with the life of the 

person. Frances Hegarty’s work 

Auto portrait #2 draws on this 

history. The strobing video image 

of the artist constantly changes 

tempo, giving the work a visual 

narrative that is accentuated by 

a synchronised ticking noise. 

The artist’s voice can also just be 

heard, telling the story of her life in 

a matter of minutes. The work 

portrays a sense of displacement 

and a questioning of identity.

Non-specific threat is a new work 

by Willie Doherty which was shown 

simultaneously in this exhibition 

and in the selected section of the 

Venice Biennale. The camera simply 

but carefully goes around the 

shoulders and shaven head of a 

man. Nothing happens, the man 

never moves yet there is a real 

potential for danger. In Doherty’s 

desolate landscape there is a 

palpable feeling of fear. 

Prepossession was certainly the 

most important show to have 

come to Belfast in the past year. 

It allowed for a complex reading of 

the very issues that exist on the 

streets outside the Golden Thread 

Gallery and in similar places around 

the world. 

Brian Kennedy is a 

Contributing Editor of 

Circa and an artist based 

in Belfast who recently 

spent three months 

travelling and working in 

Australia. 

(below) 

William Kentridge 

Felix in exile, 1994 

animated film: 35mm film, 

DVD/video and laser disc 

transfer, duration 8' 43" 

drawing, photography and 

direction: William Kentridge 

editing: Angus Gibson 

sound design: Wilbert Schubel 

music: composition for string 

trio by Philip Miller (performed 

by Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan 

Vonk-Stirling, Jan Pustejovsky) 

‘Go Tlapsha Didiba’ by Motsumi 

Makhene (performed by 

Sibongile Khumalo) 

series of 40 drawings in 

charcoal, pastel and gouache on 

paper, dimensions variable 

courtesy the artist and Golden 

Thread Gallery, Belfast 

99

c. 

Colin Graham 

Project 

Dublin 

100 

Heather Allen 

and NS Harsha 

Mural 

September – November 

2005

Amidst the cacophony of imagery 

which is Mural a symmetry is 

imposed by two hands. One is 

derived from the Red Hand of 

Ulster, in its loyalist iconography; 

here, in red and black, it encloses a 

dark shamrock. It’s a foreboding, if 

stark and unsubtle, use of an easily 

recognisable visual tic of Belfast. 

The second hand is cobalt blue, 

reaching down from the heavens to 

enclose a nondescript cottage or 

house, which trails smoke from its 

chimney up and around the muscles 

of the forearm above the hand. 

This hand of God looks capable of 

being caring and protecting, or, 

just as feasibly, of carrying out the 

exigencies of fate with little regard 

for human life. But the hands, one 

pointing up, one moving down, 

clearly represent for the artists 

Heather Allen and NS Harsha the 

collaborative nature of Mural, and 

the apparent cross-fertilisation of 

ideas, cultures and near-stereotypical 

imagery which is meant to have 

been in play in the making of Mural. 

Mural is a wall painting by the two 

artists, and is the result of a 

month’s work in the Project Gallery, 

as well as visits by both artists to 

each other’s ‘homes’, in Belfast and 

in Mysore. The two hands in Mural, 

in addition to being a nice visual 

pun and a reminder of this process, 

are as close as Mural gets to a 

coherence of vision and thought. 

The possibility of an interchange of 

artistic practices and visions was 

undoubtedly contained within this 

project, but the final outcome is, 

in places, a tepid and offbeat affair. 

Allen and Harsha share an interest 

in the symbolic, the iconic, the 

surreal and at times the naïve, and 

in this at least they both recognise 

that the near-kitsch of public 

artforms (political murals, graffiti, 

illustration) can either provide a 

freedom of expression or insist on 

a stifling of thought. Harsha’s 

contribution is at its best in the 

finely detailed line drawings which 

are typical of his work, and which, 

in Mural, are variations on a sometimes 

surreal narrative of home. 

Mural links these homes together 

through a series of lines that have 

the appearance of contours on a 

map, and so there is some sense of 

an engagement with geography, 

place and belonging. The varieties 

of ‘house’ and ‘home’ that appear 

in Harsha’s part of the painting 

seem to have been altered by the 

gable-wall mural experience of 

Belfast which was presumably 

(given Allen’s previous work) one of 

the main things he saw on his trip 

there. But as one house of ‘birth’ 

spirals off and finishes with another 

house of ‘death’, there is a 

disappointing lack of invention or 

specificity to the imagery here. 

And while Harsha seems bewildered 

by the chance to engage with 

an alien geography, Allen’s brashly 

hysterical visual and verbal 

concatenation has equally little 

space for a genuine dialogue. 

Belfast and Mysore undoubtedly 

share many cultural and artistic 

commonalities – the role of the icon 

in popular visual culture, perhaps 

underwritten by sectarianism, is 

presumably one such potential 

point of cross-over. Mural seems to 

hint that the two places share a 

pervasively politicised religious 

symbolism, an always-nascent 

militarism and an aesthetic melded 

from a contentious cultural history, 

which makes the central idea of 

‘belonging’ both necessary and 

fraught. The dualities of Mural could 

have been the beginnings of a 

collaborative artistic practice that 

would consider the role of public 

art in varieties of postcolonial 

society, and indeed could have 

asked us to think about how we 

imagine ourselves belonging to that 

society. Instead Mural reminds us 

primarily of the continual difficulty 

of cultural translation, and in that, 

at least, it points to the sadness of 

colonialism’s legacies. 

(opposite and above) 

Heather Allen and NS Harsha 

Mural, 2005 

installation views, Project 

courtesy Project 

101 

Colin Graham is co-editor 

of The Irish review.

c. 

102 

Maria Fusco 

John McCracken, Flight, 1995 

polyester resin and fibreglass 

on plywood, 290 x 52 x 6cm 

courtesy the artist, LA Louver 

Gallery, Venice, California / Four 

Corner Books 

Brian Wilson: An art 

book 

Paperback, 13 x 20cm 

168pp, 48pp colour 

STG£11.95 

ISBN 0 9545025 1 5 

Four Corners, London

There’s something very touching 

about the idea of Brian Wilson as an 

organising principle of a book, or for 

that matter of anything: so chaotic, 

quixotic and neurotic in his public 

and private life is he, that his music 

is really the only trace of the Brian 

Wilson phenomenon that could be 

judged as in anyway ‘rational’. 

In spite of such an incongruity, 

Brian Wilson: An art book is a natty 

little tome, in which Alex 

Farquharson brings together the 

work of thirty-five writers and 

artists to produce a diverse reader, 

which aims to be creatively evocative 

of the big man himself. Whilst 

most of the visual contributions 

obliquely reference Wilson, the texts 

are direct responses and probes 

into his practice and outputs. 

Jennifer Higgie hangs her text, 

Guess I’m dumb, off lyrics from 

Wilson’s song of the same name, 

(penned for Glen Campbell), visually 

tracking what could be Wilson’s 

mini-autobiography – at the time of 

writing the song, twenty-two years 

of age, deaf in one year, on the 

verge of a nervous breakdown – 

while also demonstrating his textual 

gentility: 

The way I act don’t seem like me 

I’m not on top like I used to be 

Will I give in when I know I should 

be strong 

As to give in even though I know 

it’s wrong 

Outlining Wilson’s relationship with 

Glen Campbell, Higgie tracks to 

good effect the progress of a steady 

decline, unthinkable in scale, 

inevitable in action and historic in 

recent popular history producing a 

sadly empathic little story that is 

also a cautionary tale. 

John McCracken’s written 

contribution rolls in at just 127 

words, as concise, informal yet 

formally elegant as his visual 

contributions to the book. 

McCracken’s text is a simple elegy 

to Good vibrations, a personal prose 

poem of sorts: 

Brian Wilson is one of my favorite 

music people, and in particular, his 

Good vibrations is one of my all-time 

favorite pieces of music… whenever 

I hear it, I get a tingling sense… it 

suggests to me an infinite and 

almost heavenly space. 

Gate and Aumaka are McCracken’s 

two accompanying artworks in the 

book, resembling glossy planks 

propped up against white gallery 

walls, with shiny polyester resin and 

fibreglass ‘veneer’ covering their 

plywood interiors, appearing 

independent and vulnerable at the 

same time, a direct reflection of 

the alarming (and as it turned out 

illusory) buoyancy of The Beach 

Boys’ image marketing. 

Sister Corita Kent’s two silkscreen 

prints from 1967 and 1965, The sea 

queen and Sunkist are weird 

yet delightful citrus outbursts, 

featuring dismembered slogans 

floating in hand-rendered yellow 

waves. As one might expect from 

a nun once based in Los Angeles 

through the sixties, her work is 

optimistic in tone and diligent in 

social content, combining 

techniques, references and text 

from advertising and graffiti to 

produce pieces that are 

explanatory, in part, of her roles as 

an artist, teacher and social 

activist. Her work smells like 

summer, in the same way that slimy 

coconut suntan lotions or sticky 

ice-pops do: initially fresh on the 

outside, but somewhat more 

complexly constructed within. 

In Farquharson’s preface to the 

publication, speaking of his 

motivation to set upon the task, 

he states, “Finally, it is about the 

pleasure and challenge of 

responding to a thing ones loves.” 

When seen together, Brian Wilson: 

An art book could be read as a 

simple celebration of a very 

complicated cultural phantasm, 

but the comprehensive and 

intelligent range of contributions 

selected ensure that, when seen 

together as a meaningful whole, 

this book adds an invaluable 

insight into the influence of 

Brian Wilson’s work across a raft 

of cross-discplinary practice. 

Maria Fusco is a Belfastborn 

writer and lecturer 

based in London; she 

recently edited Put about: 

A critical anthology on 

independent publishing. 

103

104

c. 

Project by Andrew Dodds. 

Andrew Dodds is an artist 

from Belfast currently based 

in London. He returned to 

Ireland in 2004 to undertake 

an artist’s residency. The 

following images are from a 

body of work initiated on the 

residency and were made 

by digitally reconfiguring Irish 

landscape paintings using 

‘Fill Patterns’ from Microsoft 

Word. 

105

112

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