The ‘Rocky Road’ exhibition outlines some of the attacks on contemporary art in this country and asks why it often makes us feel so uncomfortable
WE'RE PROUD of our writers in this country, we've just elected a poet as President, but how cultured are we really? To judge by the stories presented in A Rocky Road, the answer is: not very.
Curated by the artist Seán Lynch, the exhibition consists of a series of moments showing and telling the story of how contemporary art has been received in this country. Lynch worked with artists, including Eilís O’Connell, Nigel Rolfe, Danny McCarthy and Gerard Byrne, to bring some of the less edifying moments of our recent cultural history out of the archives.
At first the exhibition looks like hard work – there are texts on the wall, videos to watch, documents and newspaper clippings to peruse – but give it a chance and it more than rewards the time spent.
The table of documents comes with a slideshow, and deals with O'Connell's Great Wall of Kinsale. Erected in 1988, the work was then the largest piece of public art in Ireland or the UK. Headlines at the time talked of "disgrace", and a series of alterations were carried out as an alternative to destroying the sculpture.
The velvety red Cor-ten steel was sandblasted and painted grey, rails appeared to impede (though they actually enable) climbing children, and for a time it even did service as a water feature. The sculpture still stands, at this point probably equidistant from O’Connell’s original vision and from what visitors to this pretty harbour town expect to see.
Many pieces of now-loved public art had ignominious beginnings. In Gateshead a stop-the-statue campaign targeted Antony Gormley's now iconic Angel of the North, so it's not a specifically Irish phenomenon, but the question remains: why are we so antagonistic to visual art?
Cataloguing controversies, vandalism and newspaper column inches, the picture that emerges from A Rocky Roadis of an innate mistrust of art, exacerbated by artists seeking to push the boundaries of accepted taste and thought.
Sometimes the art world can be its own worst enemy, putting off newcomers with its use of language and ideas.
This is played out in a filmed exchange between Colm O’Briain and Seán Keating at Rosc 1971. It is tempting to see the dialogue between the young and urbane O’Briain and the 82-year-old painter Keating as a debate about the changing values of art, with Keating firmly entrenched in the past.
In fact, O’Briain often belabours his arguments, trying to get a rise out of Keating, and only occasionally succeeding. “It’s done something to you that it hasn’t done to me,” observes Keating at one point, and when asked “who defines the rules of art?”, answers: “I do for my opinions and you do for yours.”
Faced with Eva Aeppli's version of The Last Supper, Keating is strong in his rejection, but adds "supposing it is the Last Supper, but it may not be . . . I can't answer that question, because I don't know enough". It takes considerable strength of character to admit to cultural ignorance these days.
Still, it is difficult to put your finger on exactly why some contemporary art annoys some people so much. Books and music both have their outrageous moments, and some truly dreadful things are perpetrated in the name of architecture. Yet the vilification saved for art seems completely out of proportion to its impact.
Lynch shows a series of photographs, taken at Limerick City Gallery in 1984, of a local man attempting to destroy David Lilburn's prize-winning drawing Towards from the Forceps to the Chains of Office. The drawing is of the artist, naked, with an erection. The would-be vandal had alerted the Limerick Leaderin advance, so the paper dispatched a photographer to record the unfolding drama, prompting the exhibition committee to complain that "if information on a different kind of crime came to the Leader'snotice, would the same strategy, of set up, watch and photograph, be employed?"
Lilburn’s drawing seems (relatively) tame to today’s art audiences, making another of Lynch’s points: that time and context alter how we see art.
Posters from a 1977 installation by Nigel Rolfe, at the Funge Arts Centre in Gorey, Co Wexford, show freestanding wooden structures that now seem to relate, presciently, to the collapsing certainties of the building boom. At the time the exhibition was attacked and the vandals left a note behind, saying: “Take this rubbish out of Gorey – we don’t want it.”
Into the Mire, 2011, a new video work by Rolfe, sees the artist falling, of his own volition, into a boggy pool, scrambling for a foothold and then, with some dignity, pulling himself out again. It seems such an apt metaphor, and potential message of hope for our times, that I found myself wondering how it will be viewed in 10, 20, or even 100 years.
People mark the invention of photography as the moment art changed. Not having to depict actual things, it could start to paint (or sculpt, or assemble things) around ideas. But this development goes further back, to mass literacy. Before everyone could read, art had to tell stories about the people it presented: who they were, how important they were, what they did for a living, how they came by their wealth. It had to be, literally, literal. Now it gets to do something else entirely, and in addition to being aesthetic or decorative, a gallery can also become a sort of a safety zone for experiments, ideas and questions.
This certainly isn’t hurting anyone, so why do some people reject abstract art so strongly? This is not to suggest that one has to love it all – I definitely don’t – but the hatred expressed by some is surprising.
Perhaps there’s a bit of resistance to this idea of pure thought, pure freedom. In the same way as we shy away from sentimental drunks or tell jokes to lighten a serious mood, perhaps we prefer not to confront some of the spaces in our minds that abstract art can lead us to. It always feels safer to be told a proper story that, comfortingly, has a beginning, middle and end. Or to know what we’re meant to do and think when we’re faced with something.
This may be one of the reasons that art can be so provocative: not the deliberate provocations of nakedness, erections, piles of bricks, but the provocation of a form that asks questions, opens avenues of thought, and sometimes leads to feelings beyond words. At its best, art never provides a definite answer or solution. That’s why the best contemporary art makes us so uncomfortable. The best response to it, though, is not to protest but instead to accept the invitation to think some more.
A Rocky Road
, curated by Seán Lynch, is at Crawford Gallery, Cork, until January 14th. See crawfordartgallery.ie
