What does Irish culture look like? Are we best reflected in the writings of Yeats, Beckett, O’Casey and Synge; or by Kevin Barry and Marian Keyes? By rebel songs or Riverdance, The Quiet Man or What Richard Did? As Ireland takes over the presidency of the Council of the European Union, a €3 million cultural programme will be launched on Monday, promoting not only the work of Irish artists, writers and performers, but also a sense of what it means to be Irish.
The programme is presented under the banner, Culture Connects; and while that may sound like one of those snappy lip-service titles, it does underline that getting people together can make things happen.
Culture Ireland, the agency responsible for promoting Irish arts abroad, has distributed about €1.5 million for more than 200 events taking place across all the EU member states, other European countries, and into Russia, China and Australia. The Arts Council and the Department of Arts have shared out the rest for more than 100 projects in Ireland.
Hand on heart, however, can anyone really say they know more today about the cultures of Hungary, Poland, Denmark and Cyprus than they did two years ago, before the respective presidencies of those countries? Have Hungarian, Polish, Danish and Cypriot artists and writers have experienced an upsurge of interest in their work? So how much does it matter?
Battle for arts and minds
Cultural diplomacy is serious business. After all, the CIA covertly, and notoriously, promoted the work of Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists in the US in order to reshape how America was viewed in the aftermath of the second World War. The battle for the centre of the art world has been waged ever since.
Arms-length organisations, such as the Arts Council and Culture Ireland, are vital to getting the job done more appropriately. In Ireland, we have a running start at this kind of thing, given the legacy of the diaspora in spreading connections with our culture around the world. So what can we expect from Ireland’s latest foray into cultural diplomacy, and will it work?
First stop: Brussels. Every presidency country gets a crack at redecorating Floor 50, the presidential floor, of the Justus Lipsius, the headquarters of the Council of the EU. The building was designed by a team of architects and engineers from several EU member states, which gives you an idea of how ghastly it is. It has 24km of corridors, and you can turn an articulated lorry around in the atrium. The Crafts Council has curated a selection of work for the foyer, and for Floor 50, with the addition of works of Irish literature in translation from the Ireland Literature Exchange. The work of Gallery of Photography award winning artist Patrick Hogan will feature on the walls.
Perhaps the toughest commission is the work for the atrium. It is absolutely massive, and a whole catalogue of restrictions applies to mounting an exhibition there. An open call for ideas resulted in Andrew Kearney’s Skylum being commissioned. A 15-metre inflated zeppelin-lookalike, Skylum pulsates with light picked up from motion sensors at ground level, and comes with a changing soundscape. It’s a cheap, but irresistible, shot to point out that the metaphor of a ball of hot air in a committee-designed building dealing with European Union administration feels a little too apt.
Mediating a programme that meets audience expectations of what Irish culture is, while also developing a sense of contemporary developments, is a balancing act. It gets off to a strong start with a concert by the Gloaming on Tuesday in Brussels. The Gloaming rescue trad from the latter day excesses of Riverdance, and are hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck-raisingly brilliant. Similarly, Rian from Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, with music arranged by Liam Ó Maonlaí, together with dancers from around the world, travels to venues in France and Austria (January-April), proving that when trad fuses with contemporary, something very exciting emerges.
Those working with Irish artists abroad know you can only go so far by insisting on “Irishness” as a draw. Despite the diaspora, there’s a limited audience for that agenda – the rest come because they want to see good art. From March until the close of the EU presidency, supported by Culture Ireland, Josephine Kelleher is opening a branch of her Rubicon Gallery in Brussels.
The contemporary art market is pretty flat in this country at the moment, but Brussels is still the home of many active collectors, so bringing Irish artists to her new site in the Ixelles gallery area of the city makes sense. As Kelleher points out, “London, Paris, Cologne and Amsterdam are all less than two hours’ travelling distance from Brussels, with high speed train connections, so it can be a more meaningful way of engaging with an international audience than periodic pop ups at art fairs”.
Online, the Poetry Project (which I am involved in, along with Gerard Smyth, poetry editor of The Irish Times) pairs the work of contemporary Irish poets with videos by Irish artists, and is free to subscribe to at thepoetryproject.ie.
A new poem and video combination is emailed to your inbox every Monday for the duration of the presidency. The idea came from a chance meeting in France, in which a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a German and I (it sounds like the start of one of those jokes) were discussing how to make more people realise how brilliant art and poetry can be; the EU presidency became the ideal time to make it happen.
A number of events in the programmes were always going to happen anyway, including the annual Turner watercolour exhibit at the National Gallery in Dublin in January, and Gerard Byrne’s mid-term retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery from January to March.
However, the presidency provides scope for these to be presented to a wider audience, and to showcase other projects alongside them.
Legacy
With 2013 also being the year of the Gathering, plus Derry as City of Culture, this does seem to be the ideal time to focus attention on our arts.
Still, how realistic is it to expect people around the world to suddenly “get” Ireland? Previous presidencies have left infrastructural legacies: the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, now home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was renovated for the 1984 presidency, but acting chief executive of Culture Ireland, Christine Sisk, thinks the rewards from this presidency will come with the contacts made.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris is holding a major exhibition on the work of Eileen Gray (February-May). This coincides with a Zelouf + Bell contemporary furniture exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, which the Pompidou will be jointly promoting. Crucially, with funding for the arts in ever shorter supply, Sisk also points to the opportunities Europe offers.
Creative Europe, a major funding stream, should be ratified during Ireland’s presidency, with a budget of about €1.8 billion over seven years: connecting with potential European project partners will be key to unlocking it for arts in this country.
In 2012, Culture Ireland was depicted as fighting for its existence, but the breadth and scope of the Culture Connects programme shows there’s life and a great deal of purpose in the organisation yet. So if, during the next six months, you find yourself sitting in a bar or cafe with a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a German, or any other mix of nationalities, maybe this is the time to start thinking European. It feels like the way of the future.
