A video work showing as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival rightly leaves room for the viewer's imagination, writes Aidan Dunne
Eve Sussman's video work 89 Seconds at Alcazar, showing at the Butler Gallery, was the hit of the prestigious Whitney Biennial last year. It transformed her fortunes as an artist. It's the perennial showbiz story of becoming an overnight success after 20 years' hard work. Sussman, diminutive with a mass of thick black hair, seems pleased though by no means overawed by all the acclaim. The upside is that it allowed her to set up a company and plan her current project on larger scale.
The company, The Rufus Corporation - "a band of itinerant actors, artists, dancers, musicians" - has really been there all along. She is at pains to emphasise that she is not a solo performer. She works collaboratively, and consistently, with the same group of people. That is evident in 89 Seconds, a tremendously ambitious project that draws on a range of co-operative skills and talents.
Sussman takes Velazquez's celebrated 1656 painting, Las Meninas, and imagines the moments immediately preceding and following what we see in the composition itself. She was inspired by her first glimpse of the picture in the Prado. A work that has fascinated artists and historians through the succeeding centuries, it depicts Velazquez at work on a huge canvas in the Alcazar while various members of the Spanish royal family and their retinue loiter or come and go around him.
For Sussman, the painting has a photographic and, more, a cinema verité quality. In her recreation, shot on high definition video and staged by beautifully costumed actors (dressed by Karen Young) on a set in a huge Williamsburg garage, we take a 360-degree pan around the scene. It would be wrong to say she brings the painting to life, since what appealed to her was the fact that it is so alive, it affords us numerous points of entry, engagement and exit. Projected on a cinematic scale and produced to cinematic standard, it's a ravishing piece.
Despite the efforts of many generations of scholars, we still don't know exactly what is going on in Velazquez's painting. The dramatis personae have been identified, and there is certainly the sense that the painter is broadcasting his privileged position at the heart of life in the royal court, but apart from that, nothing much has emerged.
Almost invariably, when writers and film-makers take on the subject of paintings, they set about deciphering the story behind the image, whether it's Girl with a Pearl Earring or The Da Vinci Code. To her great credit, Sussman doesn't try to fill in the blanks in this way, realising that the blanks are the point, that they allow us space to look, dream and speculate. So while she extends the moment of the painting, while people move in and out of frame, exchange glances, conduct conversations - while life goes on in other words - nothing is pressed into the framework of a linear narrative. The camera movement, and the action, is circular.
The Butler Gallery usually schedules a strong show to coincide with the Arts Festival, and Sussman's more than lives up to its promise. This year's visual arts programme for the festival has been curated by Mike Fitzpatrick of the Limerick City Art Gallery and there is, predictably - and in the event, justifiably - a strong Limerick flavour to the proceedings. In his day job, Fitzpatrick has built up a reputation as a particularly resourceful and imaginative curator, and he brings those qualities to his Kilkenny excursion.
In Desart House, a new commercial development on New Street, he takes a large, versatile venue and stages a terrific trio of shows, starting with Andrew Kearney's installations Farther to the East and Silence. In the first, forms suggestive of funerary urns are arranged above screens in which the same forms, in fiery orange, are ghostly reminders of past horrors in specific landscapes. The second features a huge, inflatable orb that responds to sounds relayed from the street outside. They are both spectacular pieces.
Denis Connolly and Anne Cleary's outstanding three-screen video projection RVB is the second show. A hefty 73-minute production mingling three interlinked autobiographical strands (a murder story, a nature story and a children's story, as they put it), it brilliantly conveys and illuminates the complex, layered, rhythmic nature of city life.
The final show in Desart House is Gerard Byrne's intriguing filmic reconstruction of an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, a few years before his death, by a young journalist, Catherine Chaine, on the subject of his relationships with women. Homme a Femmes (Michael Debrane) is one of a series of works by Byrne based on re-staged published interviews, a kind of social archaeology. The Michael Debrane in the title refers to the actor who plays the role of Sartre.
South of Kilkenny, off the Callan road, Helena Gorey's site-specific installation of painting and video, In Memoriam, is beautifully situated in a roofless, deconsecrated church at Burnchurch. It's a quiet, well-husbanded area steeped in a sense of history and appropriate to Gorey's theme. The work arose from several visits to Lithuania, where Gorey learned the story of the sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine in 1945. More than 9,000 people, mostly German refugees, perished.
Gorey's work uses Britten's War Requiem in juxtaposition with video footage of Lithuania's coastal landscape. There is a gentle, melancholy air to the short passages of video footage. In the main space of the church, open to the elements, a series of paintings are arranged like a set of Stations. The paintings are gestural expanses, minimal in form. It is as if, in referring to a disaster almost unimaginable in scale, Gorey eschews any extraneous elements. No consolation is offered, just the challenge of remembering. In situ, it is a haunting experience.
Close to Burnchurch, Kells Priory again plays host to a sculptural invasion. Strata is the first of two collaborative ventures with Welsh venues and artists, and it's fair to say that the result, curated by Ann Mulrooney and Tim Davies, is a shift into a more overtly conceptual vernacular as artists respond to resonances of place and history, teasing out nuances of heritage and identity. Even the more conspicuously physical works distance themselves from bald presence by incorporating layers of references. The result is a show that is woven subtly into the grain of a very particular landscape, and one that rewards patient consideration.
Back in Kilkenny, in Butler House, John Shinnors is comfortably sure of what he is doing with both Line, a big triptych inspired by a Frank Bramley painting in Cork's Crawford Gallery, and a group of new works, The Red Crane, which see him include a generous amount of scarlet in a palette habitually dominated by black-and-white. Shinnors anchors his elaborate, seemingly abstract structural arrangements in closely observed everyday details. Wit, inventiveness and a hint of darkness are his hallmarks.
Sean Lynch is an artist who interrogates architecture, something many artists routinely claim to do. The difference is that he really does so, with tremendous verve and ingenuity. A set of architectonic structures arranged on the lawn of Kilkenny Castle are sculptures, buildings and items of furniture all at the same time. They were immediately and enthusiastically adopted by the public, and they draw attention to aspects of the fortified setting with mildly subversive humour. More overtly critical, perhaps, is his wonderful Ansbacher Fountain in the Festival Box Office, previously the Bank of Ireland on The Parade. He promises to open an offshore account with all donated moneys.
At the St Francis Abbey Brewery, Melanie O'Rourke looks critically at Ireland's emergent, rampantly consumerist culture. She makes graphic images using commercial gloss paint, à la Gary Hume and Ian Davenport. She does so very well.Yet in a way what she is trying to do pulls against the way she is doing it. Her best pieces are the smaller, more ambiguous ones, essentially still lifes, whether featuring traditional or novel subject matter - that is, flowers or ranks of manufactured consumer items.
This is by no means a comprehensive account of the visual strand of the festival. There are fine shows including those at Gallery One (Rachel Burke), the Berkeley Gallery, Thomastown (Helen Comerford), the National Craft Gallery, at Grennan Mill and so on. Much more than enough to confirm that, in Kilkenny, visual arts does not comprise just an adjunct to a main event. Between the main festival programme and such independent voices as the Butler Gallery and Sculpture at Kells, the visual arts events alone make a visit more than worthwhile.
All exhibitions continue until Aug 21. Strata at Kells until Aug 28; 89 Seconds at Alcazar continues until Oct 2; Fibre: A New World View at the National Craft Gallery until Oct 2
