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At
times it can be hard to remember, but the landscape for
the visual arts and the arts in general has been transformed
over the last thirty years or so, mostly for the
better. Here Colm Ó Briain traces the winding route.
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Dunamaise
Arts Centre, interior view;
courtesy Dunamaise
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The two rooms on the second floor
were used for storage. In Dublin's Lower Abbey Street,
a few doors away from the Abbey Theatre, Tuck's, an engineering
supply company, used the rooms for storing hosepipes.
In early 1967 when three visual artists saw the rooms,
they thought there were possibilities for exhibiting paintings,
lithographs and maybe even sculpture, in the space. They
had been part of a three-week season of plays, readings,
music sessions, seminars in the Gate Theatre the previous
autumn: their paintings had been hung throughout the foyer.
Those involved in Project 67 (as it was called) were hoping
to find an office space from which to organise further
collaborations. The engineering company was willing to
give these rooms rent-free for a two year period. Project
Gallery was born.
When the
two-year period was up, a short-term lease of the basement
in the YMCA hall across the road was negotiated. This
was named Project Arts Centre, as the space was large
enough to host small performances of plays and music as
well as providing the largest private exhibition space
in the city. The Arts Centre was run as a collective.
One of
the painters who had joined the Project group was from
Gorey in Co. Wexford. Using premises in the town owned
by his family he organised art exhibitions. With these
exhibitions as a central focus, the Gorey Arts Festival
was to develop in the early 1970s.
Inspired
by this activity in their county, some of those people
in the town of Wexford, who were involved with Wexford
Festival Opera decided that a major visual-arts exhibition
held in conjunction with the festival would be a great
development for Wexford. The refurbished Assembly Rooms
were made available at a peppercorn rent by the local
authority and Wexford Arts Centre came into being.
Meanwhile,
on the upper floors of business premises in Paul Street,
Cork Street and Mary Street, Dublin, small art galleries
were organising a series of changing exhibitions. These
were the first manifestations of Triskel Arts Centre and
Grapevine Arts Centre (later to become the City Arts Centre).
Visual-arts
activists have been to the fore in the development of
both the ethos and the infrastructure of arts centres
in the Republic of Ireland. The initial impetus was to
provide exhibition opportunities for painters, sculptors
and printmakers who had no outlets available to them,
and to accommodate readings and performances where possible.
Collaboration and cross-fertilisation were key concepts,
although there were many different views about how these
might be achieved. Joint efforts to build audiences and
promote a wider awareness of the work of contemporary
art practitioners in the local community were the driving
force. Maximum utilisation for daytime and nighttime use
of scarce facilities was also a motivation. Influenced
by the emergence of 'art labs' in Britain, there was a
strong belief amongst the activists involved that multi-arts
initiatives would stimulate experimentation and innovation.
At the very least, these initiatives encouraged dialogue
between practitioners in the different art forms.
Following
the publication in 1975 of the Richard's Report commissioned
by the Gulbenkian Foundation to examine provision for
the arts in Ireland, the recommendation that regional
arts officers be appointed was taken up by the Arts Council
and some of the regional development organisations (RDOs)
which existed at that time. These appointments were to
evolve into the countrywide network of Local Authority
Arts Officers which we have today. The first Regional
Arts Officer was in the mid-west, serving Limerick City
and County, and counties Clare and North Tipperary. An
arts centre for the region was an early priority, so an
old cinema and meeting hall in Limerick was converted
into the Belltable Arts Centre in 1981. The renovation
provided a spacious exhibition area leading to an auditorium
for performances of theatre and music, as well as the
projection of films. This was the first arts centre in
the Republic to receive a capital injection from public
funds at the outset. Apart from its forerunner in Wexford,
which had its principal exhibition gallery restored to
a high standard, all other surviving arts centres were
in makeshift industrial premises, usually on short-term
leases.
The Belltable
inaugurated the idea of the arts centre as an arm of regional
arts policy development. It was followed in 1982 by Galway
Arts Centre on Nun's Island in a converted church hall.
Later came Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford, also
in a converted church hall. This grew out of Waterford
City's art collection and incorporated two dedicated spaces,
one for exhibitions and the other for performances.
The first
purpose-built regional arts facility of recent times -
other than the Cork Opera House - was the Hawks Well in
Sligo. This was a joint venture between the Regional Tourism
Organisation, Bord Fáilte and the Arts Council in 1983.
It was planned to have a performance space, an exhibition
space and also a tourism information office and regional
headquarters; it was hoped to develop a sculpture park
on a site alongside the building.
The budget
for the project was extremely restricted, so many of the
features of the performance space were compromised from
the outset, in the hope that these could be rectified
in a later building phase. The entrance foyer doubled
as the exhibition facility. Over fifteen years later funding
was sourced through the Inter-Regional Programme of the
European Regional Development Fund to enable the Hawks
Well building to be fully realised. The European money
was matched by North-West Tourism/The Arts Council/Local
Authority. Unfortunately, the adjoining site for the sculpture
park never became available but by 1991 the Model Arts
Centre had come into being through a local visual-arts
initiative.
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Mullingar
Arts Centre, interior view;
courtesy Mullingar Arts Centre
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An earlier
cultural project which was to be successfully resourced
through linkage with a tourism objective in the south-west
was Siamsa Tíre - The National Folk Theatre of Ireland.
It had been originally funded in the early seventies by
Bord Fáilte for its summer-season performances. This funding
role transferred to the Arts Council in 1979.
Siamsa
Tíre had built two cottage-style centres in Kerry as locations
for teaching and performing traditional dance, music and
customs. After several years of producing its summer entertainment
programme in a local hall, the company acquired a local
cinema in Tralee which it converted to its purposes. Siamsa's
plans for a newly built centre in the town matured in
1992 when, with a combination of financial resources from
its own fund-raising endeavours, the government and the
European Community (ERDF), it designed and built a 355-seat
theatre and exhibition centre. In addition to its own
programme of music and dance productions, it now hosts
a variety of other music events, touring theatre productions
and exhibitions by local and visiting artists.
The building
project for Siamsa Tíre was a unique achievement. It had
been realised in spite of the complete absence of a programme
for the development of an arts infrastructure. As early
as 1978, the Arts Council had begun to lobby the government
to provide capital funding for 'housing the arts'. Inevitably,
with the public finances in crisis throughout the 1990s,
their efforts fell on stony ground. A glimmer of hope
flickered at the beginning of the 1990s with the advent
of the First Operational Programme for Tourism under the
ERDF. However, to the concern of many in the arts and
heritage sectors, this was focused on tourism priorities
with merely a nod to cultural considerations (with the
notable exception of Siamsa Tíre). With the advent of
the Temple Bar Cultural Quarter and the Cultural Development
Incentive Scheme, which operated throughout the 1990s,
this situation was to be reversed: infrastructure for
the arts was to be the main priority, with tourism as
an important, but secondary, dimension.
In the
wake of the conversion of the Meeting House in the Temple
Bar area of Dublin city into the Irish Film Centre, and
as a flagship project for the European City of Culture
1991, the entire Temple Bar area was designated a cultural
quarter. A major programme of capital investment in arts
organisations was embarked upon, with IR£22 million funding
under the urban renewal objective of the European Operational
Programme for Tourism, E32 million government grants and
commercial loans (now repaid) of E63 million. The development
programme included the Music Centre, the Ark Children's
Cultural Centre, the Black Church Print Gallery, Temple
Bar Gallery & Studios and Project Arts Centre. In
the case of the last three, which are membership organisations
involving visual artists, the members were extensively
involved in the preparation of the design brief for their
dedicated exhibition spaces and also, crucially, the decision
to adopt the final design for their building. (Arthouse,
which was also part of the Temple Bar development, has
this year gone in to liquidation.)
As the
Temple Bar project moved forward, the Minister for Arts,
Culture and the Gaeltacht launched in 1995 the Cultural
Development Incentives Scheme. This made grants of between
50% and 75% of the building cost of galleries, theatres,
museums and art centres available. The total expenditure
involved amounted to E57 million, with E25 million of
European funding under the Operational Programme for Tourism.
Arts centres completed under this scheme were An Grianán
in Letterkenny; Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise; Mullingar
Arts Centre; Westport Arts Centre, Draíocht Centre for
the Arts; Blanchardstown; and the Model Arts and Niland
Gallery in Sligo which is now a major centre for the visual
arts in the north-west. The Civic Theatre in Tallaght
also has an upper gallery area dedicated to art exhibitions.
Galway Arts Centre was also enabled to renovate its visual-arts
facility. Other facilities aided under the CDIS which
were exclusively visual-arts projects, included the Crawford
Municipal Art Gallery in Cork, the Limerick City Gallery
of Art, and the Wandsford Quay Art Complex, Cork.
Last year,
the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands
announced awards under the Arts and Culture Enhancement
Support Scheme (ACCESS). The scheme will lead to the input
of over E58 million for arts capital infrastructure over
the next four years. All of the monies involved are being
allocated by the Irish exchequer and by Irish agencies.
An indigenous 'Housing the Arts' strategy is now, finally,
in place. The mechanism for developing an arts infrastructure
throughout the regions in the Republic has matured at
last. Under the ACCESS programme seven arts centres will
be developed in Listowel, Youghal, Bray, Navan, Kenmare,
Ennistymon and Carrick-on-Shannon. In addition, a major
centre for Contemporary Visual Arts in Carlow is underway,
as is the Martin Valley Sculpture Park in Cork.
As has
already been noted, prior to the Cultural Development
Incentives Scheme there was no programme of capital investment
for the arts in the regions. The Arts Council's budget
of IR£10 million left little room for a bricks and mortar
strategy. While the Council still subscribed to the rationale
of arts centres as part of its regional policy, it began
to articulate in the late 1980s a disenchantment with
arts centres in an urban context. It made no secret of
its view that such centres were an outdated 1960s phenomenon.
In particular, it sought to prevail on Project Arts Centre
to abandon activity in the visual arts and instead, to
concentrate on theatre promotions. Developments, such
as the advent of Temple Gallery & Studios, in the
Council's perception had rendered this aspect of the Project's
work redundant. This view was not shared by the Project
which continued to mount a programme of exhibitions. It
reaffirmed its commitment to a multi-disciplinary approach
and weathered the consequent antagonism.
Project
has incorporated a dedicated visual arts space in to its
new building in Temple Bar, which opened in 2000. It remains
committed to a multi-disciplinary approach and describes
itself as "an arts centre which is artist centred." It
is equally valid for an arts centre to be community focussed,
or to serve as a centre for a particular region. An arts
centre in the regions was originally conceived as an economic
option, when few, if any, other facilities existed. After
expenditure of almost IR£100 million (E125 million) that
is neither necessary nor desirable. What is essential
however, is that an arts centre should have a clearly
defined philosophy for its multi-disciplinary approach.
Colm
Ó Briain is Director of the National College
of Art and Design; he has been Director of An Chomhairle
Ealaíon/The Arts Council (1975-1983) and Policy Adviser
to the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (1993-1997);
he is a board member of Project Arts Centre.
