VISUAL ARTS SOUTH

Aidan Dunne

Shocking art

It is still possible for art to shock the bourgeoisie, even now, after three series of Big Brother , the global availability of internet porn and the general dumbing down of cultural forms. That, at least, would seem to be the message that emerges from the brief flurry of controversy over the Paul McCarthy show at the Butler Gallery. A common reaction to his work is to treat it with a certain disdain rather than outright moral condemnation, because disdain is a more acceptable response, whereas outrage implies that it has reached and disturbed you on some fundamental level. Like much performance and performance-video work, it makes - and is supposed to make - for uncomfortable viewing because it pushes you into an ambiguous, voyeuristic relationship with what is going on. In McCarthy's case, usually something farcically and messily transgressive. But in a way, usually the most uncomfortable thing about such work is that you can watch it from a position of detachment, can remain uninvolved. As Tom Waits observed in an interview with Mick Brown, people like artists to do their suffering, to live on the edge, for them. "They send you off to hell in gasoline drawers and then say: Hey, while you're there, could you bring me back a chicken chow mein?"

For artists, the problem of short-circuiting that cultural consumerist pattern is a perennial one, because the boundaries are always shifting. The radical departure into conceptual and performance art in the late sixties was in part a notable attempt to do so, and McCarthy's work is rooted in that initiative. For all its use of props and icons associated with American popular culture, at the work's heart is a concern for the basic conditions of existence which are usually viewed in bleak, Beckettian terms.

German photographic artist Thomas Ruff's photographs based on porn images captured on the internet, some of which are incorporated in his retrospective exhibition at IMMA, represent another, related strategy. They are an attempt to deal with a vast, ubiquitous but widely unacknowledged area of visual experience without becoming effectively subsumed into it. What he tries to do is to short-circuit our immediate, instinctive response by borrowing and perhaps developing Gerhard Richter's optical methods of problematising the veracity of the image, particularly the photographic image. In place of Richter's painterly blur, Ruff employs photographic technology against itself. Usually computerised digital techniques are used to enhance or clarify images. But Ruff explodes the constituent pixels to produce uncomfortably blurred images. Something that is out of focus keeps your eyes working with the expectation that it will come into focus, but Ruff's pornographic images are terminally blurred. You can see roughly what the image represents but you can't really appropriate the content. The idea is that the perceptual process is slowed down, and then placed at one remove. We look at looking rather than at the images.

Are people likely to find Ruff's images shocking or disturbing? Certainly in terms of content they could be regarded as disturbing in the same way that McCarthy's might be, except that they are of course much neater and cleaner, and much more cerebral in their impact. They have also proved to be extremely popular with collectors, and one can see why. Not only is porn more socially acceptable than it used to be, there is also an element of chic in Ruff's distanced, spruced-up images, which are really quite painterly in form. Their dispassion extends to Ruff's whole approach, which is consciously remote. By contrast, you are probably unlikely to feel a comparable sense of ironic detachment in relation to McCarthy's performance videos, which are relentlessly visceral and emotional in their appeal to your attention. He may indeed have been to hell in gasoline drawers, but if you ask him to pick up a chicken chow mein, you better like it with a gallon of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard mixed up and served in a plastic bucket.

Living in Rome this year has really made me appreciate CIRCA 's interactive website. Sadly not a lot of it was good news for artists with the resources at AAI and Arthouse disappearing. With blindness at home closing things down, it is time once again to see if the emigrant ship can sail us in the direction of opportunities.

Collège Irlandais is opening in Paris in October and the School of Art and Design at the University of Ulster, under the guidance of its new head Hilary Robinson, has begun a series of artists' residencies at the Galleria Nuova Icona in Venice. The comments posted on www.recirca.com responding to the announcement of the first Venice residency were certainly amusing - and demonstrated the importance of that feature of the site. I even phoned the Dublin office to see if they were genuine and was assured they were. It is true that they had that negative northern ring to them.

Having recently returned from a brief visit to wet and cold Ireland I know how lucky I am to be sitting in the sun in the leafy courtyard of the British School at Rome with the fountain splashing in the background. It is good that more opportunities to visit this great country are being created. Hilary is to be congratulated for organising the Venice residencies. The only danger is that the university is too used to being governed by its own internal procedures. This opportunity is open to the wider artistic community and so the application procedures and selection criteria need to be transparent.

One aspect of the residency in Venice that appealed to me was that "the resident artist will have the maximum freedom. He [did Hilary approve that pronoun?] can either work on his [sic] artistic research, visit museums or...just sunbathe." It is good to see artists encouraged to do something other than lock themselves away in a studio. I have been on several residencies and it never ceases to amaze me how many artists travel to interesting places only to surround themselves with four white walls. For one thing, it must be the least cost-effective way of producing new art. I could find studio space in Belfast for a lot less than what my studio in Rome must cost. No: the most important reason for being in Rome and Italy is the opportunity it affords me to look at art, architecture and archaeological remains. It also allows me to travel, both in Italy and further afield.

I don't want to rub it in to a readership back in wet, grey Ireland (yes, I do really) but I thought it would be interesting to talk about what my time here has meant to me. What I will take away from a year in Rome is not a new body of work. It will be an experience that will inform my work for the rest of my life. The galleries in Rome are unbelievable. Stuffed with great art from all periods in history. The city itself is an energetic, living museum. The museums and churches all over Italy have inspired me. If I think of space I think of Bramante's Tempietto and Borromini's Sant'Ivo. I also think of descending into one of the largest caves in the world near Trieste or the Sahara Desert, which I visited after looking at Roman sites in North Africa. If it is colour I want to remember then there are the grottos of the Amalfi coast and the Tremiti Islands, the dark brooding depths of Vesuvius which reminded me of Caravaggio's paintings. Then there is a painting by Leonardo that has strangely shaped hills in the background that I always thought were invented by the artist. That was before taking the train through the Tuscan countryside and seeing those same shapes at first hand. That trip also took me to Bologna and the Morandi museum where objects dissolved into coloured shapes, and where I could see the actual objects the artist used in his still lifes.

My experiences on different residencies makes me realise how important it is for Irish artists to get away for a time and to see and experience new things. To escape the blinkered thinking that closes artists resources down, rather than encourage them. It is also important to return with a new fervour to fight against the forces of darkness. Back soon, ciao for now.

Slave to the machine

Michael Cunningham

Breaking the code taboo

Several e-mail discussion lists I'm on have recently debated whether computer programming or 'code' is art. The writers and audiences in these discussions tend to be scientists, programmers and Web developers. The 'Code is Art?' debates are perennial in computer-science circles, and raise interesting questions such as "what's the difference between writing a musical score and writing code for a computer program?" Or "isn't code just a means to an end, like tubes of paint?" (Yes, many of these analogies are about oil painting as 'the' art form.) And every second or third contribution asks what is art in the first place?

But while computer scientists have these sporadic conversations about code as art, you'd be harder pushed to find artists discussing their art as computer code. Sure, many artists can reel off the latest features in Photoshop or Director, or can knock up some HTML for their Web projects. But 'pure' coding is still alien to most of them. They use off-the-shelf products and are unlikely to create their own meta-tools or macros or Photoshop filters, let alone write full computer programs. For all the computers and programming that goes on today, within wider society computer coding has been shrouded in an aura of alchemy and mystery for half a century.

Modern computer programming can trace many of its roots back to military circumstances. It was 'coding' in the literal sense - the code-making and code-breaking of intelligence agencies - in the likes of Bletchley Park in World War II. Then in the mainframe's golden era of the 1960s and 1970s coding remained an intensely hierarchical world. You'd bring your shoebox of punched cards to the guardians of the mainframe. These high priests would run your program, and come back with the sprocketed sheets of results: "Fatal error - Card #56 had a hole in the wrong place, please resubmit your shoebox next week." In the early 1980s there were more 'hands on' ways to learn about the spaces inside computers, in amusement arcades and pool halls where Pong was all the rage, then Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaxians...immersed in a bubble of intense concentration, leaning over the fire buttons, this was an important early 'School Of Cyberspace'. Besides being an immersive experience, at a more conscious level you needed a sneaky awareness of how the game was structured - the tasks, tricks and traps between you and the next level. Somebody had engineered all this.

Around the same time, the personal computer took off. And it was personal - not something with piles of off-the-shelf games software. It was an engine that had to be programmed. By you.