The northern and southern arts councils are showing some of their collections at a joint exhibition in Cork, writes Aidan Dunne
To mark Cork's year as European Capital of Culture, the arts councils of Ireland, North and South, have combined forces to produce Four Now, an exhibition at Cork University's Glucksman Gallery. Curated by Sarah Glennie, the show draws on the substantial art collections of both councils. Although exhibited piecemeal in various forms and contexts (a policy energetically pursued by both councils), the collections are not often publicly exhibited en masse, and not usually mixed. A joint show is an interesting proposition, entailing the use of that neutrally descriptive term "the island of Ireland". When it came to the question of what to choose, rather than just rounding up the usual suspects, so to speak, Glennie engaged the views of four contemporary artists.
They are Susan MacWilliam, Isabel Nolan, Dan Shipsides and Joe Walker. There was a lot for them to draw on. In the North, the council has been purchasing work since the 1940s, while the council in the Republic has been doing the same since the 1960s. Furthermore, as Glennie points out, both collections evolved in tandem with art of the time, since the motivation was largely to provide practical support for living artists. Hence the collections comprise a partial, selective, but nonetheless important, chronicle of modern Irish art, North and South, all the more so in that other public collections in the South missed a great deal of what was going on.
The collections necessarily reflect attitudes of the time as well. Glennie notes her reactions to going through the records of the collections. Apart from recognition, which you would expect, she encountered things new to her and felt "surprise at both the inclusions and the exclusions". In deciding on her method of selection she feels she is being true to the nature of the way the collections were built. Enlisting the artists, she was looking for personal responses. They should choose work that interested or engaged them, or in some way related to what they do themselves.
Each provides a commentary on their selection and there are some surprises along the way. MacWilliam, for example, who makes remarkable installation, film and video pieces based on our perceptions of occult and uncanny phenomena, goes for narrative and lyricism in such works as Sean McSweeney's Sligo Landscape, which she perceptively compares and contrasts with the controlling rigour of a William Scott abstract. That approximate duality, of control and abandon, runs through her selection, which encompasses the Tory Island painter James Dixon, a nice Gerard Dillon, The Black Lake, and a beautiful little John Luke painting which she chose "because I went to primary school with his nephews". And she selected Neil Shawcross's portrait of Derek Duggan because he "advocated an All-Ireland football team, and so is seen in my part of the city as 'kicking with the other foot'." Mary McIntyre's atmospheric photograph of a piece of municipal ground in artificial light looks strong in context. So strong, in fact, that it featured in the selection of all four artists. The only other work to do so is a painting by another Tory Island artist, Patsy Dan Rodgers (Dixon scored three out of four).
THERE ARE MANY other overlaps, including pieces by Paul Seawright, William McKeown, Corban Walker, Phelan/McLoughlin, Michael Farrell, Charles Brady, Leo Duff and more. Given the extent of the council collections, the level of consensus and overlap suggests that the selection could be seen as reflecting not only individual idiosyncrasy but also the predispositions and prejudices of our own time.
Isabel Nolan, whose own show, Everything I Said Let Me Explain, is at the Project Gallery, Dublin, is not sure she could explain the choices she made. She opted for work she views as being in some way open-ended, pieces that "may have ended up differently in either formal or conceptual terms . . I like a sense of possibility or even unfinishedness". Among her selection is Patrick Hall's muted, romantic The Kiss in which a man embraces another as they kiss. It harmonises with Basil Blackshaw's Men, Sea and Moon in which two men undress for a moonlight swim. And Charles Brady puts in one of two appearances with a nice little composition featuring a pencil.
Dan Shipsides, who you may recall as the artist who won the Nissan Art Award in the year 2000 for his project which entailed installing bamboo scaffolding in O'Connell St, moved to Belfast 10 years ago and hence casts an outsider's eye over the collections. His delight in Charles Oakely's Coastal Structure, a painting of a massive, defensive-looking form rendered as if in virtual reality, is well warranted. And in opting for architect Grainne Hassett's utopian project for the Arts Council's touring show, A Room of One's Own, he has found something quite out of the rut.
JOE WALKER, WHO has a long fascination with Romanticism, came up with a visionary Patrick Hall based on the Biblical dream of Jacob, Kathy Prendergast's subtle, conceptually rich The End and the Beginning II, which incorporates the hair of several generations of women in one family, and an amazing little piece by Deirdre O'Connell which belies its scale.
In the background, both arts councils are currently wrestling with the problem of what you do with your collection when you have it. Among other things, there is the question of the maintenance and visibility of the collections. For example, despite several diverse proposals in recent years, there is no location where people can see a representative collection of modern Irish art. The council's collection could contribute greatly to such a resource, but where might it be and how would it be financed? Meanwhile, in the North the council is still purchasing works. Down South, they've stopped, though there are other, indirect, subsidised purchases. But Glennie points out that the commercial art market in the South has greatly outstripped that of the North, so the roles of the respective councils are different.
It is good that Four Now shares the Glucksman with an intriguing and relevant exhibition Visual Practices across the University, curated by Prof James Elkins. It is an open-minded enquiry into the role of the visual in all the university's departments. That is, it challenges any assumption that the art historical or practical arts departments might exercise a proprietorial grasp of the visual as a general category. It may seem like an obvious point, but such an assumption is often made. In particular the art world can claim an authority over the visual that is not necessarily earned.
In that regard, Elkins' trawl of the campus is informative and revealing. As he points out, when it comes to the use of images - that is, real, working engagement - the science departments lead the field. It is not that images are merely documents in the sense of records with regard to the sciences, they are part and parcel of working processes. For example, rock sections microscopically photographed in polarised light are richly informative for geologists. They are also frequently beautiful images.
This leads Elkins into a consideration of the use of images. Do we discount or discard the rock section photograph once we have realised its immediate use-value? Yet much fine art imagery today is approached in terms of a comparable kind of use-value, specifically in its capacity to offer cultural insights. While the Visual Practice . . . show is heavy on text, with copious explanations throughout, it also offers a succession of memorable and fascinating images that are visually arresting but might also inform the way we look at the world around us. At the least, the implication is that our habitual relationship to visual languages is too constrained and limiting.