Whether it's striking statues or impressive constructions, outdoor art installations offer an entirely different experience to the gallery-bound equivalent, writes GEMMA TIPTON.
IS PUBLIC ART something pretty on a plinth? Something monumental on a boulevard? A concrete thing on a roundabout? Or could it be a sound, rustling with the leaves through the trees? All this month at Blackrock Park, three artists, Alan Phelan, Aoife Desmond and Mark Garry, are displaying work that breaks many of the rules about public art in an exhibition called Concourse Offsite.
Mark Garry, known for his gorgeous gallery installations, has turned his attention to the trees. Four aeolian harps sit among the branches, waiting for the winds that come in from the sea to sweep in and make music. According to Garry, these instruments, were invented by the Greeks in the fifth century.
"Because they are high up," he says, "they will at some times become quite symphonic, but at others be barely audible." In fact, people passing through the park might think they are imagining the sounds. In the wind, the aeolian sounds are a little unearthly, echo-ey, haunting.
They sit well with the themes of the exhibition, which are all to do with memory, time, change and impermanence. These were set by the exhibition curators, Carolyn Brown and Claire Power, as a response to changes planned by Dún Laoghaire County Council for the park. The idea of change, especially in a well-loved park, sets alarm bells ringing, with thoughts of tracts of tarmac, glass bricks and architectural "interventions". But at Blackrock, the plans are the result of a long consultation, and will include a boardwalk from Booterstown to Blackrock, tea rooms, water gardens and ornamental gardens. Meanwhile, some features of this Victorian park have become a little tired and tarnished.
Alan Phelan investigates this, and also takes a look at the park's past and present with each of his three pieces. Phelan is against what he describes as "plunk art" (ie it's just plunked down somewhere). Instead, he spends time getting to know a place before he makes his work. In the old aviary, you can now see a sort of monstrous bird hanging down, swooping onto a pile of beer cans. There's no pretending young people don't come here late at night to drink, and the papier-mache guardian seems to be half nesting, half hovering over what they have left behind.
Further down the hill is another papier-mache piece, and this time it's hard to work out what you're seeing. For lovers of Ireland's rock history it might be a little easier, for the hanging sculpture is actually a bird feeder, made to resemble the fish-eye lens view of the Vauxhall Super F car that graces the cover of Thin Lizzy's 1971 album, Thin Lizzy. The band played a free concert in the park that year. Do you need to know this to appreciate what you're seeing? There are leaflets available in public buildings around the area to give you all the information, but one can also suspend that "yes, but what does it mean?" sense that we've been taught to bring to art.
"The best public art," says Phelan, "tends to be the same as indoor or gallery work, just outside. This is a tough call to make, but you have to try." Phelan's final piece involves graffiti on the old bandstand, and is perhaps a harder one to come to terms with. Graffiti has always operated outside "official" channels, and yet so many projects aimed at disaffected youth try to use graffiti, to make it safe, condoned, mainstream - which is exactly what the impulse to graffiti goes against.
One could scratch one's head and wonder why one artist is allowed to graffiti the bandstand (with Thin Lizzy lyrics), and the local kids are not, but this is the very question Phelan is asking in his work, rather than seeking to solve. "It's recognising," he says, "the kind of social, anti-social and sanctioned behaviours that function throughout the park."
The third artist is Aoife Desmond. Her film and slide projections, made over three months in the park, will be shown in the park's aviary over four evenings towards the end of the exhibition. Tracing the changing patterns of light, the turn of the seasons, and the movement of the park's geographies; it makes you see the ordinary as something rather special. It presents, according to the artist, "what I see as the essential life-force of the park, which needs to be protected and preserved". It's less fantastical than Phelan's mad mix of a finch and a bald eagle, but compelling and beautiful. "The fact that it is being shown in the setting where it has been made," says Desmond, "allows for overlaps between recorded material from the park and the real setting. On the opening night a train went by at the exact moment that a train passed both in film and slide. The swans on the lake, also present within the film, made their appearances throughout the screening."
If singing trees, Thin Lizzy-inspired bird feeders and enigmatic film pieces aren't what you had in mind when it comes to outdoor art, the Secret Garden, organised by the Solomon Gallery at Dublin's Iveagh Gardens, might be for you.
With more than 100 works by artists including Henry Moore, Barry Flanagan, Janet Mullarney, Michael Warren, Alice Maher and Laurent Mellet, and an indoor area in a glass pavilion, Secret Garden ranges from the traditional to the challenging, from the wild to the wonderful. The Iveagh Gardens will be, for the two weeks of the exhibition, suddenly populated with figures, horses, hares, tortoises, even a giant prawn.
There's something about art in the open air that leaves you feeling freer to enjoy it (or even to actively dislike it). Released from the constraints of the gallery, you can take it on its own terms. When I asked Carolyn Brown and Claire Power why they had put the Blackrock Park exhibition together, they gave me a number of reasons to do with public programmes, access and the like. "But most of all," they said, "it's because it's fun."
Concourse Offsite at Blackrock Park runs until June 1st. Aoife Desmond's film will be screened at 9pm from May 29th to June 1st. More information on 01-2719508.
Secret Garden at the Iveagh Gardens is open from May 15th to May 27th, 10am to 6pm. See www.solomongallery.com