Ireland’s statues often have a hard time – from their silly nicknames to vandalism, playful or otherwise, they are rarely left in peace. But isn’t engaging the public what monuments are all about?
PEOPLE JUST can’t keep their hands off Joe Dolan. A bronze statue of the singer in Mullingar has proven so popular that it came loose last week and had to be reinforced for greater durability.
Having sung Nelson’s Farewell about the fate of Nelson’s Pillar on O’Connell Street, Dolan would be familiar with our a habit of treating monuments as outlets for public opinion – whether it’s unofficially renaming statues or letting the inevitable repairs speak for themselves.
When the installation Bowl of Light, “a symbol of Ireland’s progress and aspirations”, was unceremoniously dumped into the Liffey in 1953, it’s said the culprits were congratulated. When a hoax plaque commemorating the fictitious Fr Pat Noise was erected on O’Connell Bridge in 2004, Dublin City Council bowed to a campaign to keep it.
John McPartlan not only remembers these incidents, but wearily recites them as if nothing could surprise him anymore. In fact, if there is any opportunity for hijinks with a statue, McPartlan is likely to be the first to hear about it. As public domain officer for Dublin City Council, the vomit that fills Molly Malone’s barrow every week is his responsibility.
“I wouldn’t imagine the artist would have been thinking of some fella at four o’clock in the morning with one too many under the belt,” he says. “But that’s what you’re dealing with.”
Anna Livia (nicknamed “the Floozie in the Jacuzzi”), formerly on O’Connell St, also posed a logistical nightmare for McPartlan when people began treating it as an interactive art piece, regularly pouring washing-up liquid and food colouring into the water or dunking newlyweds under the fountain.
“The cost associated with cleaning it was unreal,” says McPartlan. “It would be pink one day, green the next. It wasn’t practical to keep it there.” Though it is to be relocated to Wolf Tone Quay, the rituals associated with Anna Livia were always part of the plan, says its sculptor Eamonn O’Doherty, who also created Galway Hookers in Eyre Square and Crann an Oir, the golden sphere at Central Bank Plaza.
“Visual artists are no different from writers or actors: they depend on an audience,” O’Doherty says. “If the audience reacts by throwing soap suds, it’s a bit of fun.” If there are boundaries, he says, it’s when people take away from the piece rather than add to it – like the dislocation of one of the stars above his sculpture of James Connolly in Dublin’s Beresford Place.
“If art is in the public domain, you must expect people to interact with it,” he says. “One of the great failures of the Spire in O’Connell Street is that there’s no interaction whatsoever with the public. It may as well be a radio mast.”
Street artists such as Will St Ledger find inspiration in that line between interaction and destruction, calling it “temporary augmentation”.
As a child, St Ledger would climb onto the statue of St Peter outside his school and squeeze a Coke can into its outstretched hand, transforming it into what he thought was a hilarious advertisement.
Today he considers it his “first street art intervention”.
Two days before Bertie Ahern stepped down from office as taoiseach in 2008, St Ledger loaded Molly Malone’s statue with €50,000 worth of “Bertie Bills” as a comment both on the corruption of Irish politicians and the cheapening of Irish culture.
“Statues are ignored on a daily basis because we become over familiar with them,” says St Ledger. “Once a person adds their own personal touch to a piece of public art, they open up a dialogue with not only the work itself but the public at large. That’s why I call my work ‘mindful’ vandalism.”
