The idea of a 'real interaction' between art and society had traditionally been treated with real suspicion by some of the Irish art establishment, for whom it came dangerously close to propaganda or sociology. This was a curious attitude, given the battering Irish mores continually received from Irish writers over the entire twentieth century. Even while CIRCA's editors were penning their lament to Beuys, collaborations such as Field Day Theatre company were cresting a wave of self-inquiry that brought contemporary audiences to their feet - in standing ovations or disgusted walk-outs.

CIRCA 19 cover: Arja Kajermo, 1984

That changed. By the millennium, the interaction CIRCA's early editors hoped for became a reality, although not, perhaps, exactly as anticipated or to the desired degree. But way back when CIRCA began its mission, defining the terms of relations between 'art' and 'society' mirrored Prince Charles's exasperated answer when he introduced his fiancée Lady Diana Spencer to the international media: "Love? Yes - whatever that means."

What art and society meant, separately or together, was definitely tricky in the 1980s. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had famously - infamously - declared there was no more society, only individuals. Such statements underwrote the concerns in CIRCA's obituary to Beuys, because the political establishments did move further 'Right', provoking levels of consumerism and exclusion that impacted widely on art markets as well as art practice.

As well as aesthetic and relational flashpoints developing globally and impacting locally, the very condition of being a) Irish; b) an artist or c) alive in this place and time screeched for attention.

Teasing out the visual, critical and political veins invoked a range of projects, some practical, some cultural. Infrastructural underdevelopment provoked a very specific activism that sought better facilities and resources, from studio spaces and galleries to grants and educational access. Political tensions arose round questions of gender, disability, borders, nationality and religion - and much else.

Aesthetic pulses raced at questions of painting versus the rest of the world, while running to catch up with the opening up of new media in many forms and parallel developments in popular culture.

Listing the projects as economic, political, public or aesthetic gives a rough summary, which is only partly true, of how and where interactions happened. The economic project, for example, can be said to have sought to mainstream the status of the artist and art without mainstreaming the practice. Certainly by the mid-1990s, this project had yielded better resources for individuals and communities, with major new galleries such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, countless more exhibition and studio spaces in new arts centres, improved technical facilities and a more mature commercial and international network.

CIRCA 26, p. 45, Beuys obituary, 1986

 

The older Beuysian sense embraced by early CIRCAs suggests, however, that the status of the artist should be measured not by the number of international biennales in which they participated but by the breadth and extent to which artists were looked at and listened to in the wider society. Economics might help artists collectively, might enhance some as individuals, but did society shift in return?

Core tensions between the idea of art as self-enclosed or open-ended persisted through that epoch. Were all artists activists or, indeed, were all activists artists? Traditional gallery space was no longer the sole site of artistic interest or display: sites and communities mediated by or with artists included schools, hospitals and prisons; streets, estates and cities; land and sea. Meanwhile, the markets' flirtation with New Expressionism opened doors locally for some edgy, hard-hitting work in a directly political vein.

As this 'museum without walls' ethic grew, questions arose about the nature of the dialogue involved and how it fed back into individual practice. The cultural politics of reaction or resistance to dominant artistic and social models gradually became a loose phrase: true for some, it was not for all.

In the Republic, the Prime Minister Charles J.Haughey spun a myth of himself as a latter-day De Medici, frequently advocating the place of art in society but restricting the money and resources needed to deliver it. The social benefits of art seemed either medical or cosmetic: art might make you feel better, and anyway, being associated with it did your public image no harm.

Translating the public relations model into a social relations model pre-occupied many. The first, with its associations of connoisseurship and good taste, seemed too close to commerce and the marketplace for those who supported the second. Yet within the terms of aesthetic debate, discourse about values and standards was often polarised.

 

CIRCA 44 cover, 1989

 

The aesthetic project itself was contested vigorously over the 21 years of CIRCA's existence. CIRCA was born into an art world keen on notions of the cosmopolitan or the parochial, with the tag 'Irish' or 'Ireland' signalling outsider status in a negative, backward sense. Over the 21 years, CIRCA witnessed a transformation of such poles into changed, inherently more positive attributes that gave peripherality a positive edge.

The wider Western art world conducted contests between Modernism and Post-Modernism as various orthodoxies wrestled in different rings. Echoes persisted in Ireland with the struggle for dominance between the Rosc-type model, emphasising internationalism, and old-style quests inspired by a kind of cultural nationalism. The would-be Rosc vision was imbued with the spirit of Clement Greenberg, who staged a visit to Ireland in the early 1980s, a few years after Pope John Paul II. Greenberg's insistence that art "evacuate content" was the last hurrah, in a way, of the Modernist movement and its desire for aesthetic purity.

Although rather out of date by then, late Modernism still looked squeaky clean compared to some of the local alternatives. As long as content remained so fatally contentious in the immediate society, evacuating it entirely was a way of resisting the Celtic Twilight option, even if practices were "tantalisingly indirect," as Lucy Lippard described them.

For over 10 years, CIRCA published debate in and round the would-be 'poetic' monopoly that some saw as uncomfortably close to cultural nationalism. The Irish-based critic Frances Ruane was an occasional object of scorn for those intent on blinding this officially-named "delighted eye," having written a catalogue essay for the two Arts Councils in which she argued the existence of a specifically 'Irish' genre ennobled by its lyrical, indirect and poetic qualities.

CIRCA readers were having none of it, but the 'issue-based art' advocated instead took time to find its feet. The magazine's editorial board sponsored features on topics such as gender, disability and religion, as well, of course, the political conflict undermining Northern Ireland. US critic Lucy Lippard wrote in Issue 17 of her surprise at finding so few artists who investigated live issues in the culture and society when she made a whistle-stop tour to sell a touring show. She proposed political murals, community arts and photography as alternative frames. The rise and rise of popular culture offered another.

The quest for aesthetic nativism floundered critically and was more or less abandoned once post-colonial discourses entered the culture. Before that, being an 'Irish' artist, or an artist from 'Ireland' could involve searches for 'lost' traditions and some nostalgia for a Celtic paradise from which visual culture had been (rudely) displaced. But as the notion of peripherality became current in the wider world, the personal and professional disadvantages of coming from a small place on the edge of Europe - or a minority group in that place - grew more interesting.

Economic recovery in the South coincided with a surge in cultural confidence and assertion, and with the rise of leftist aspirations such as Beuys espoused. Younger generations less concerned with ideologies of race and nation, right or left, were more interested and able to develop practice in a global frame where attitudes could be played with and transformed.

Community arts and public art were the most visible expressions of making new connections between art and society, but the freeing up of practice from the painting-or-sculpture hegemony let other ways of seeing breathe too. Photography, performance and new media offered tools with which to unlock ideas about art and its role in cultural practice. Slowly, slowly, some of the ideas touched the mainstream.

One of many examples was the 1994 Diaspora Project (issue 69, and others), commissioned by the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. The zeitgeist matched ideas advocated by the Republic's new President, Mary Robinson, who had been elected in 1990. It broke moulds by profiling multi-media work developed under the overall question of looking at identity through the Irish diaspora - reframing Irish identity away from the narrowness of people living in the same place at the same time, as Leopold Bloom might have had it, towards an open-endedness that spanned continents and territorial borders.

What was remarkable was how emigration, a negative feature of Irish history, and particularly of the cash-starved 1980s, turned into an opportunity for cultural growth and exchange. Many of the participating artists were themselves emigrants or from emigrant communities and worked with media outside the traditional axis. In the future, 'Irish' artists selected for local and other projects were as likely to be Scots living in Belfast, Donegallians from Sheffield, Americans from West Cork or Dubs from London as 'old-style' Irish living at 'home'.

Old and new Left, as well as women, Travellers and people with disabilities, believed for the first time that their society could evolve into a more inclusive, pluralist place. The optimism showed as the 1990s went on, with visual culture, as it was increasingly termed, thriving on cross-pollination of ideas, people and practices between the 'homeland' and various countries in which artists who identified themselves as Irish lived and worked.

That reframing also enabled what had been minority practices about landscape, gender, the body, home or nation, to escape the moral monopoly nativist art prescribed. This was immediately visible in the kind of practices coming to national and international attention. Willie Doherty's running commentary on political conflict and media representation was exercised through photography and video, which meant those previously marginal forms within previously suspect 'issue-based art' stood as witness when Doherty was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The work of Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross and others in that turning- thirty-something generation spoke across the barriers of art and society because its syntax grew from new media, often quirkily incorporated with old.

CIRCA 82, p. 20, 1997; Dermot Seymour, Blackfaced malignancy, 1997

 

Old leftist attitudes were shattered by the collapse of ideology in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yet some of their long-term assumptions persisted in areas of community and public arts. Writers such as Tom Duddy took on the inconsistencies: in CIRCA 67 and later, he queried community-arts assumptions about class and the role of the artist, arguing that many interventions actually imposed a context on communities and artists, a charge the community-arts activist Jude Bowles rejected out of hand.

Sensitivity to identity issues in some quarters was such that one writer wanted to deconstruct the place of galleries within the 'system', arguing they too had cultural and political identities informed by their exhibition programme, funding sources, personnel and geographic location. It sounded like a quest for utopia. The tacit message was that artists and galleries ought watch out lest they be compromised, even contaminated, by the realpolitik of the everyday world, which in turn implied a growing theology of the artist as a priest-like superhuman arbitrating the messes of the real world from a lofty perch beyond.

Interaction meant dialogue, not monologue. That had implications in both directions. Public interventions grew, marketed by the two Arts Councils' focus on increasing what they called 'access' and 'participation'. Educational, architectural and community projects helped persuade politicians and bureaucrats that the arts had some useful role to play in society, and became a small but interesting source of income assistance for artists. The Republic's Rainbow Coalition Government published a White Paper on education, speaking of art as a means of helping children to develop critical judgement about the world they lived in.

But old ideologies hadn't gone away, despite the Belfast Agreement (1998), an age of tribunals in the Republic and the presence of voices no one listened to before - speaking of abuses, denials and shame. Equality legislation north and south attempted to manage the tensions of nationalism, sectarianism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, yet deep structural inequities persisted, along with the negative attitudes they generated. At the same time, unprecedented economic prosperity delivered more funds for the arts, along with the risk that rising levels of comfort would convert into complacency. Exclusions persist.

We speak now of the wider world of 'visual culture' with an ease that masks 21 years' robust debate. Such terms weren't available until fire and brimstones rained down on fierce artistic arguments, which suggests in turn that some progress took place. Yet in a society that absorbs the language of pluralism and diversity faster than it integrates them, the Beuysian manifesto's implicit assumptions about progress are troublesome. The status of the artist was less ambivalent in his day, and arguably more romantic.

21 years on, robust debate is just as necessary. Is art a lifestyle accessory for the Celtic Tiger's new rich? Are artists' interrogations of myth and dogma speaking to the viewers who need see them? And now that society is inhaling the symbols and work of art, where can art and artists best site themselves - imaginatively, creatively, professionally? The only sure conclusion is a ?

Medb Ruane