C100
Review: Appropriation
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Mary
McIntyre: Untitled (after Caspar David Friedrich),
2002, C-type photographic print on Dibond, 100cm
x 83.5cm; courtesy Ormeau Baths Gallery
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Belfast:
Appropriation at the Ormeau Baths Gallery
Arriving
late at the Ormeau Baths Gallery - a security alert on the
line from Newry - two sources echo in my mind, both art critical,
both relevant - Carol Becker's recent writings on the difficulty
of making viable art in a post postmodernist world1, and an
insightful comment by Liam Kelly regarding the series of "landmining
strategies" currently employed by Irish artists as an approach
to the 'constructed reality' of the Irish landscape. He writes
of the need for an art practice that is "an open-ended interrogation
of dialogue," a concept pertinent to this exhibition, entitled
Appropriation and purportedly reflecting the diversity
of current visual practice in Ireland as it relates to landscape,
politics, science and popular culture as well as how it appropriates
art-historical and contemporary cultural referents.
The best review of this exhibition is Richard West's catalogue
essay which is informative, intriguing and inspiring. All
the 'i's in fact, or should that be 'eyes', in that an understanding
of the function of the human eye as applied to visual space
à la Gleizes would be useful here, particularly in relation
to Susan MacWilliam's video explorations of retained retinal
images at the moment of death. Slick and arresting, they left
me cold, but perhaps that was the intention.
Warmer rather are Mary McIntyre's landscapes, spaces that
can never be gathered into places. Effaced urban traces ghost
her surfaces, images that become images because they pretend
to be nothing else, because they are both what they resist
and what they have always been. They have a spare beauty,
but then her work has always evoked the unspoken, the intertextual,
intimating created spaces for meaning.
Similarly, Martin Healy's photographs are about how an image
resounds visually as well as how 'it may take our hearts'.
They rocket us to the weird and distorted smallworlds of peripheral
America, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver territory where nothing
is what it appears to be. Like Crewdson, Healy is busy seeking
elusive details which encapsulate the spirit of his subject
matter. His strange, yet familiar Amityville has universal
resonance, as have his Little Devils, ghosts of everyman,
fragile things.
Aesthetically,
while the photography is the strongest medium in the exhibition,
mention must be made of Niamh McCann's series of painted camouflage
patterns. Quirky and clever, her Dazzle intimates perhaps
the ongoing expense of spirit inherent in self and communal
concealment. Allan Hughes' wall drawing of 'the cigarette
smoking man' similarly evokes disparate narratives, although
I think it is time for the seemingly endless variations on
the Rorschach test to be finally abandoned as viable artistic
strategy.
It is not enough that the sources for John Paul McAree and
Ian Charlesworth's images reveal themselves as site-specific
of troubled histories - such explorations of Irish myths and
mythmakers have been done before and done better. Recreating
root metaphors at source, the positing of alternative cultural
appropriations requires less repetition and more risk within
the preferred painterly discourse, although Charlesworth's
teasing titles Some of my friends are... draw one into
his narrative quite succinctly.
Dan Shipsides' arresting Gecko Roof installation cleverly
emulates the Clocks climbing route in Sydney, Australia, suggesting
ways in which spatial problems may be negotiated, and possibly
interrogating behavioural patterns as response to space. It
would have been interesting to see his 'experiment' transposed
to, for example, the Giant's Causeway - now that would be
an interesting landmining strategy!
Overall, and Becker would approve, the artists here are 'appropriately'
engaged in a series of active and open-ended negotiatory strategies
in face of the instability of all representative norms. The
aesthetic variations on the theme, though not always successful,
are valuable in terms of making sense of spectacle in our
smallworld, not so small after all.
Go see the exhibition. Go read Richard West's essay. Go figure.
Suzanne
O'Shea writes and lectures in Fine Art.
1Carol Becker, Surpassing the Spectacle,
2002
2Liam
Kelly, The Art of Interrogations, Poetic Land, Political
Territory, 1997
Appropriation,
Ormeau Baths Gallery, April/May 2002
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 100, Summer
2002, pp. 82-83
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