C100 Columns

Visual Arts South
Visual Arts North
Film and Television
Slave to the Machine
Fifth Column

VISUAL ARTS SOUTH

Aidan Dunne

Heterogeneity now

"The visual arts in Ireland have grown in scale and importance over the past fifteen years." So begins the section specifically addressing the visual arts - headed Cultivate the audience for visual arts - in the Third Arts Plan. And it is absolutely true. While, inevitably, not everything in the garden is rosy (and one would have to say that the visual arts are to a large extent, and perhaps surprisingly, peripheral in the overall cultural context), if growth per se is your criterion of progress, then the visual arts have progressed exponentially.

In terms of numbers of practising artists, diversity of practice, art education, numbers of galleries and other exhibition facilities and opportunities for exhibition, and the level of documentation and dissemination of information, the art scene in Ireland has been transformed over the last twenty years, a process that continues at a cumulatively accelerating rate.

In many respects, the Arts Plan goes on to advocate more of the same with the aim of, as the heading of the section indicates, cultivating "the audience for visual arts." The dominant model of artistic production in Ireland is still that of the object made in the studio, exhibited in a commercial gallery and, with luck, sold to an individual or institutional purchaser. And, without explicitly endorsing it, the plan seems to have that model in mind.

Thanks to the imaginative application of the percent for art scheme and other initiatives including open-submission exhibitions (many of them, it should be emphasised, significantly encouraged and supported by the Arts Council), we have also seen the growth of alternative models, that is of temporary or time-based projects, or of artists moving flexibly between divergent forms and contexts. If, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, we are now in a post-media age, that is the way to go.

Yet it is a funny time in the art world, a time when trends mushroom with incredible rapidity but tend not to consolidate into decisive or irreversible paradigms - unless, that is, heterogeneity and diversity, often of apparently mutually exclusive elements, qualify as a paradigm in themselves. There is usually an abrasive edge to the avant garde because it is perpetually in that borderline area of contentious renegotiation. But the more things change utterly, the more they also manage to stay the same.

Perhaps, just as varieties of practice seem to coexist, not exactly peacefully, but with occasional frictions and unexpected correspondences, varieties of audience might coexist. There is, for example, an audience that cuts straight to the no longer 'new' media work because it grew up with MTV and computer games. Cue anecdotal evidence: I've seen someone who is extremely sceptical and wary of the whole business of modern art respond instantly and positively to Bruce Nauman's video work, because they knew the language to begin with. The visual arts do not form a harmonious continuum from Giotto to Emin, and it's not a question of easing the audience for one into an acceptance of the other. There are faults and fissures and discontinuities. One person's art is another's manifestation of cultural élitism, or perhaps bad taste, but that is not to say that they have to be won over. Let art evolve around the barriers. Match the art to the audience. If the visual arts are to be in some way central to the culture, something more than a marginal pursuit, the plan is right in pointing out that they must win their audience, but it is definitely a question of audiences, plural.

VISUAL ARTS NORTH

Brian Kennedy

Bet on Belfast?

Having been away from Ireland for all of this year I thought things back home looked good. The Arts Council in Dublin, after a shaky start, had its five-year plan endorsed. A great achievement as by 2006 funding will have increased by two-thirds. In Belfast the bid to be European Capital of Culture in 2008 was on course and backed by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In fact the bookmaker William Hill had Belfast the 10/3 favourite ahead of the other front-runners Liverpool and Newcastle-Gateshead. Then the good old Belfast City Council cut the arts budget from £700,000 to £600,000. How could a City Council with a bid in to become the European Capital of Culture even contemplate such a move? It simply defies belief. They of course made the decision without any consultation with the art community.

My faith in the art world at home has been destroyed. No longer can I proudly go to other countries and talk about the positive situation back home in Belfast. In one stroke Belfast City Council had made a decision Berlusconi, Le Pen or Heider would have been proud of.

I only have to look at what is happening here in Italy to see the real dangers of this autocratic style of government. Take the Venice Biennale for example. Vittorio Sgarbi, Italy's Undersecretary for Culture toadied to Prime Minister Berlusconi by bypassing the Biennale's board and inviting Robert Hughes to be Visual Arts Director. It did not matter that Hughes has never curated as much as the 'under fives' category of paintings in his local school. No, Hughes was the man simply because his conservative tastes appeal to the present right-wing government. The rather amusing outcome of all this is that Hughes is supposed to have asked for a small fortune to 'ideate' (in which lexical gutter did you find that word, Robert?) the Biennale.

The trouble with allowing governments, both local and national, to make these highhanded decisions is that the art world loses out. Italy is left with no-one in place for next year's Biennale in Venice. This year's film Biennale cannot find a director; a series of Italian directors have tuned down the job, as has Martin Scorsese. Dr. Mario Fortunato, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, is not having his contract renewed. It is acknowledged that he is one of the most creative and successful directors the Institute has ever had, but he is not a Berlusconi (or Pinocchio as he is referred to here) man. Other directors around the world look as if they will suffer similar fates.

Is there hope? If there is, it comes in a form easily recognisable to Belfast artists and art organisers. Do it yourself. In Sicily in the small town of Castel di Tusa there is an unusual hotel. Every room is the creation of one artist. The only limits the owner put on the artists were that there be a place to wash and a place to hang clothes. It is not the hotel that is important; it is the attitude of the owner and the artists he works with. Over the years they have battled with local authorities and the mafia to place art outdoors in that part of Sicily. The owner put his family's fortune into the creation of art against the odds. The artists worked in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. The mafia bombed the hotel in 1992 but no-one bowed to intimidation. In spite of these obstacles exciting art has been created, and art is seen as a means of society asserting itself against forces it disagrees with.

I had thought that Belfast had moved on from its old, right-wing reactionary viewpoint. For a time there seemed to be an official recognition of art and its benefits in the community. That the hard work which the art community had put into artist-led initiatives was going to be rewarded. There seemed to be a recognition that artists should be paid for their work. That has changed because, make no mistake, when budgets get cut it is not the administrators who stop getting paid, it is the artist who loses out. Perhaps I am unfair; perhaps the City Council saw William Hill's odds and decided to lengthen them, allowing us all to back Belfast just before they increase the arts budget and Belfast becomes the favorite again. If the odds lengthen should we have faith in the Council and back Belfast against the other cities? I fear not.

FILM AND TELEVISION

Stephanie McBride

Five go mad on Boffin Island...

Although 'reality TV' was well-established by the end of the 20th century, as an umbrella term embracing a wide range of forms and genres within its spectrum, Endemol's Big Brother (with its other replicants) and 'reality TV' became almost synonymous for audiences. Since then, each season sees attempts to capitalise on past successes and generate ratings through hybrids and reinvigorated formats. In line with other countries, Irish television has had its own mutant 'reality TV' including RTÉ's Treasure Island and TV3's Haunted House. And the BBC's overblown and loftily-titled The Experiment invites viewers to observe a so-called psychological experiment. Like Big Brother and many other 'reality TV' shows, it purports to offer some kind of access into scientific or psychological knowledge.

Yet a far more scientific example of the genre is BBC2's Rough Science. It takes place on a Caribbean island. Its participants, each with their own discipline such as botany or physics, spend the programme exploring, foraging and carrying out different tasks. So far, so Survivor/Big Brother. Yet, the different approaches to knowledge are revealing. While Big Brother housemates were up until now allowed a limited number of books, the current run sees books banished from the house. Books are bad - or a privilege. Big Brother sets tasks which are ritual displays - in memory games or obstacle courses - merely updated versions of parlour games and endurance tests. The rough scientists, by contrast, are shown flexing their previously acquired knowledge in practical ways. We view them in the process of applying their skills and knowledge and managing the tasks. So viewers see them attempting to make ink from specific plants and produce paper from pulp using 'first principles'. Their cartography skills come into play as they harness an old wheelbarrow to map their island's coastline. In the same programme, two of them work on manufacturing a wax-recording apparatus.

Unlike Big Brother and its ilk, where there's always only one winner, the programme really is about teamwork and co-operation. And it's fun. The tenacious stereotype of the scientist as eccentric, nutty and nerdy may still hold. But popular genres such as Rough Science go some way in overturning the clichés.

Many of the popular science programmes, including the Royal Society Christmas Lectures and Time Team, recognise the potential of popular television. They harness television's need for spectacle so that the demonstrations and experiments seem suited and fun to do on the screen and in the field - beyond the boundaries of the laboratory. In a curious way, the spectacle of ordinary people jumping through hoops/nets in the Big Brother-type programmes appears much less engaging - the overall aimlessness further emphasised by our round-the-clock observations. While Rough Science may not be the core strategy for the public understanding of science, its very 'roughness' is its appeal as well as the way it revitalises hidden memories of school science-lab lessons. Its provenance in the Open University marks its educational drive, yet it also manages to infiltrate popular TV subtly and successfully. Its approach to knowledge and process reveals more about science than The Experiment could ever achieve.

SLAVE TO THE MACHINE

Michael Cunningham

The Digital Dig

The Fourth Annual Digital Archaeology Conference will take place at Dublin's National Personal Computing Museum from June 5 to 12, 2016. New media ecosystems are rich with different species, but technology is not always 'new, improved and state-of-the-art'. It has a definite life-cycle, so this year's theme is The Life And Death Of Postdigital Media. The conference will examine how media adapt, mutate or die, and how today's digital archaeologists trace that evolution. Sessions include...

Curators and Emulators: Many digital artworks were made in the 1990s, on long-defunct operating systems and software applications. Emulators were heralded as the solution, but some curators argue that the emulation process has intrinsic "translation dilemmas."

Room 404 Not Found: Over 98% of Irish web pages disappeared in the past decade, mainly due to data corruption, environmental incidents and 'dot-org' or ISP failures. But our National Archive has now preserved over 1,000 terabytes of data on five modified organic servers. Communications paleontologists will discuss the 2004-05 fossil records, as well as efforts to reconstruct San Francisco's Internet Archive after the April 3rd attacks.

Abandonware Today: Now 19 years old, the Abandonware International movement has stepped in to save many endangered software subspecies abandoned by their publishers for various reasons (death of the hardware platform or the company, marketing factors, volatility of the sector, etc.).

Media taxonomies: Most digital archaeology fieldwork now follows Raymond Kurzweil's 'seven layers' (the stages in a technology's life-cycle: i.e., precursor; invention; development; maturity; false pretenders; obsolescence; antiquity). Is it time for a rethink?

Colour Stories: Most 20th-century Irish newspapers were archived on black-and-white microfilm - including their colour pages. Using media forensics, the National Print Museum has begun to reconstruct the original DOP ('day-of-print') condition of these colour pages, even where original printing plates and cromalins are missing.

Martyred Media: How some digital species are rendered obsolete, but others are deliberately and systematically killed off, from viruses to bots, webcrawlers and, most famously, the Web interface in 2011.

Retro Machine Art - Fad Or Fetish?: Roundtable in which several artists from Dublin's Digital Farm will talk about their work with 'dead' computers such as the Sinclair ZX-81, Atari, Apricot, various IBMs and mainframes.

Cinematic Dodos: Some less successful 'evolutionary niches' in cinema history, such as the Magic Lantern, Kinetoscope, Animatograph, Phenakistiscope, Phantasmagoria, Praxinoscope, Synchronoscope, Vitaphone, Zoetrope, Fantascope, Cinerama, Odorama, Cu-SeeMe, Quicktime, celluloid and the movie projector.

When Andy Met Debbie: A dramatic reconstruction of the historic meeting between Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry for the Amiga's launch in 1985. A separate session will discuss the recent restoration of Warhol's subsequent digital oeuvre after severe data degradation.

Digital Archaeology '16 will also include workshops on extracting data from dead formats such as 5 1/4-inch and 3 1/2-inch floppy disks, IBM PC Jr ROM cartridges, quadraphonic records, laserdiscs, DCC cassettes, CD-Roms and DVDs.

FIFTH COLUMN

Samuel Walsh