|
C102
Article
New Critical Centres for
Art in Ireland?
What should an arts centre be?
Ian Hunter suggests that there are many ways to skin a
cat.
|
|
|
Dorothy Cross:
Ghost Ship, 1999, Nissan/Irish Museum of
Modern Art
Art Project; photo Kate Horgan; courtesy IMMA
|
In CIRCA 100, Aidan Dunne
has effectively mapped the critical terrain in Ireland
regarding the role of conventional art spaces, arts centres
and international curatorial projects. There is nothing
really new I can add here, other than maybe to respond
to Medb Ruane's ühallenge (also CIRCA 100) on what the
future for arts practice might hold - "where can artists
best site themselves - imaginatively, creatively ...?"
- and to take this opportunity to reflect on some historical
precedents and recent examples of socially and critically
engaged art in Ireland, alongside some international examples
which could offer a complementary discourse to mainstream
proposals for arts centres and curatorial programmes in
the future. I also want to use the temporary license from
CIRCA to widen the debate a little, to reflect on what
is likely to be included in any new critical agenda for
art which could begin to address the key issues facing
Irish culture and society today.
Given the nature of the institutional
hierarchies and values operating in the artworld in Ireland,
I think that for the time being at least it is unlikely
that the new agenda will come from within the established
art spaces or the Fine Art departments in the art schools,
nor is it likely to emerge through Irish participation
in prestige-orientated international exhibitions, or from
the so-called independent artist-run spaces and curatorial
initiatives. For this discussion, therefore, I prefer
to take a wider view of 'arts centres' in Ireland, seeing
them as a critical archipelago or constellation based
on interactions between individual artists, group initiatives,
the audience, and outside constituencies and institutions.
So what are the 'wonderful' new
ideas and projects for art centres that will somehow revolutionise
and transform Irish society and art? Well, let's take
it step by step. Point number one: we have a good record
of initiating powerful critical impulses in art in Ireland,
so that we don't really need to import models and celebrity
curators from elsewhere (i.e., EV+A), or to seek
validation in someone else's artworld games (such as the
Turner Prize) in order to prove our cultural and
international credibility. It is of course essential that,
as an arts community, we engage with the issues, take
part in exchanges, and operate internationally at all
levels, and that we invite artists and curators from elsewhere
to work with us - chauvinism and xenophobia are too well
known in Ireland. But we also need to have the confidence
and vision to recognise, embrace and invest in the creative
and critical traditions that we already have in the country.
I despair when I read in CIRCA
that Willie Doherty or Dorothy Cross are once again being
féted as representing Ireland at some fly-blown
Biennale in Venice or Havana. Don't get me wrong: Willie
and Dorothy are savvy, highly professional artists - and
good luck to them. But biennales? These represent a cultural
model inherited from the late 19th century, and are decidedly
past their sell-by date. Having witnessed the birth, life
and slow death of the Sydney Biennale, and the proliferation
of its clonesı - Tyne International (remember that one?),
Johannesburg, Havana, Liverpool, etc. - I see them evolving
into the artworld equivalent of grand-prix-competition
racing, crossed with the catwalk narcissism and circus
mentality of the fashion industry. So what have we got?
The Nissan art prize, EV+A, and Grassy Knoll capers -
and what else? These, despite the rhetoric of public engagement
on which they rest (interventions, I believe they are
called) have, with one or two exceptions, degenerated
into run-of-the-mill career spectacles, or into a form
of 'live' entertainment intended solely for the art world.
Yet, there are other potential curatorial models, agendas
and issues to be adopted by the arts in Ireland that are
being left out of the picture.
Art schools as the centre for
new developments in art in Ireland - well what can I say?
The system we currently have (Fine Arts teaching, I mean
here) is based on the atelier model, inherited form the
19th century, and in its present form is an embarrassment,
and a waste of public funds. A good start would be to
close down most of the Fine Art departments, or at least
to reduce the student intake (but with greater support
and provision for students from less privileged backgrounds).
Full-time staff aged over forty-five (including all those
washed-up performance gurus left over from the 1970s)
could be encouraged to take early retirement and leave
with their pension plans intact. Most of them would take
the money and run, believe me! The savings on the public
purse would be welcome, and the improvement in Irish art
would be measurable and dramatic. OK, so we keep one or
two schools going as centres for research, and as a specialist
practice resource, in combination with summer schools
for advanced practitioners (remember Black Mountain College?).
The core teaching and management of undergraduates could
then be franchised to the artist-run spaces and studios,
because this is where most of the new artists we are producing
will end up anyway.
|
|
|
Ronan
Sharkey: Billboard, corner of O'Curry/Henry
Street,
March-June 2002; courtesy EV+A
|
And arts research programmes as
'centres' for generating new ideas? Given the enormous
changes now taking place within Irish society, culture,
economy and environments, and that over the past thirty
years in the North we have acquired one of the worst records
in Europe for endemic sectarianism, paramilitary violence,
and related community and cultural conflict, I think that
we can do better than allocate valuable AHRB funds to
rock-climbing adventures undertaken in the name of art
research. What is so 'difficult' (or unfashionable) about
promoting post-doc arts research into initiatives that
might help to improve community relations, address issues
of social exclusion, understanding of environmental change,
bio-ethics and genetic technology, and the role of the
arts in support of antisectarian practice? In any case,
the hoary mantras of the art-school-sponsored research
industry - the politics of identity, the body and sexuality,
alienation and representation, etc., - are just about
mined out these days.
One potential breakthrough area
for arts centres is located around the temporary but powerful
alignments that can occur where artist-led initiatives,
curatorial projects and groupings of practitioners find
common cause around particular issues, geographies, ideologies
and critical agendas, in Ireland or elsewhere. But there
are problems here too, deriving from the spurious nature
of the independence of artist-run art spaces and curatorial
programmes. In the main they are dependent on handouts
from the state arts-funding system and/or are complicit
in the artworld markets and gentrification programmes
from which they allegedly wish to stand apart. Grant Kester
in his essay Rhetorical questions: the alternative
arts sector and the imaginary public (AfterImage,
1992) neatly and succinctly explodes the myth of the
artist's autonomy and self-sufficiency:
There
are an enormous number of constituencies, movements and
communities ... whom artists can work with and learn from
- not as
the shock therapists of some imaginary middle class, but
as collaborators and participants in the daily struggles
of life ... But (this argument) can't be made convincingly
so long as artists' relationship to these publics remains
one of moral censure, shamanistic arrogance, or pedagogical
superiority.1
This problem is best described
in the Belfast context by reference to the evolution of
artist-run projects such as Flaxart Studios and Catalyst
Arts. It occurs where the 'arts factory' phenomenon can
be considered as an offshoot of the post-Fordist notion
of economic progress via the new cultural industries.
There is a certain irony is seeing the emptied spinning
mills, where low-paid workers once toiled at machines
in long lines of cubicles in poorly heated and ventilated
factory lofts, now replaced by low-paid artists toiling
away in equally long lines of studio cubicles in poorly
heated spaces. Cultural sociologists Franco Bianchini2
and John Urry3 both talk
about this as the process of hollowing out the old urban
producer economies, and their replacement by the consumer
society and the cultural industries. Artists in a sense
see themselves as the cultural storm troopers for the
urban cultural industries, and they certainly mean to
stay in business.
There are differences of course,
and Flaxart do host interesting artist residencies, provide
slots for visiting critics, and run outreach projects
too. However, often the first effect of artists' involvement
in the cultural industries game is a gradual displacement
of their critical and creative energies away from community
involvement and social engagement, and with this the possibility
of mounting an effective critique of the less salubrious
politics of urban regeneration is lost. This problem is
exacerbated as the 'avant garde' independent artspace
becomes unwittingly (some would argue more than willingly)
coopted to advancing the ideology of gentrification, and
the profit-making programmes of private and publicly funded
regeneration programmes (the speculative logic of capitalism
- Gavin Murphy4) - as in
Catalyst's up-market relocation to the Cathedral Quarter/Laganside
development in Belfast.
Who gets squeezed out of the
city at the beginning, the middle and the end of this
process of gentrification, and the concomitant social
consequences, is well documented by theorists such as
Barbara Zukin, Grant Kester, and Roslyn Deutsche5.
Although not part of this argument, more or less the same
criticism could be applied to the evolution of public
art in Ireland. But, it appears, as long as the money
is good nobody wants to rock the boat! See Suzanne Lacy
(1995), Mary Jane Jacob (1995) and Sara Selwood (1994)
for some interesting evaluations of public art.6
My criticism here is in no way
meant to detract from the integrity, artistic value, hard
work or professionalism of the artists who have been involved
in setting up or are currently working on these or similar
projects in Belfast or elsewhere. Nor am I unsympathetic
to the economic needs of artists. We all have to live,
after all, and jobs are not that easy to come by at any
time. But as artists seeking public support, and legibility
in the public realm, we need to be much more aware of
the wider agenda, and the contradictions inherent in the
partnerships into which we enter and the position we take
up. I am simply trying here to point to some of the overarching
issues and problems that need to be addressed and debated.
If, by implication, the arts
centres need to change in order to address future needs
in Ireland, then so must artists. We need to become less
complacent about our work, less egotistical, much more
self-critical, and politically aware.
|
|
Project, Dublin; photo Ros Kavanagh; courtesy
Project
|
We also need to have the courage
to imagine what form arts centres and arts practice might
take in a post-autonomy artworld7
in Ireland, even if this might, to come back to
Ruane's statement, eventually position some artists quite
outside the systems of state support, professional privilege,
and the dynamics of the arts market and urban regeneration
which they currently seem to enjoy. There are other models
for artists to follow. Some of these were outlined and
discussed in detail at the Critical Sites and Pedagogy
conference held in Dún Laoghaire in September 1998.8
But I don't think you will see evidence of these ideas
today in many of the arts schools in Ireland or England.
What is needed is a wider and better informed debate about
a new pedagogy for art in Ireland - one more inclusive
of community creativity, with a genuine commitment to
cultural diversity, promoting community relations and
antisectarianism, and more environmentally and socially
accountable. Henry A. Giroux, Carol Becker and David Trend
have written about this new critical and socially engaged
pedagogy for art schools.9
If we are to frame an effective
counter-discourse to the forces of conservatism, élitism
and narcissism that currently underpin the artworld both
in Ireland and in England, then we need to begin to surface
programmes that are more (self-) critical and accountable
to mainstream social, environmental, political, economic
and ethical agendas. Suzi Gablik and Lucy Lippard have
written extensively about these ideas elsewhere.10
It is not possible in the space of this article to go
into detail about what form these programmes might take,
but I can outline one possible area for further debate.
Arts and social engagement.
There is of course immediately a danger of setting up
a false and disabling dichotomy by seeming to assert that
art in the community, community creativity, or arts engagement
with social, environmental and political issues, are somehow
morally superior to mainstream-gallery art projects or
studio practices, or to imply that the mainstream artworld,
led by the galleries, artist-led initiatives, arts schools,
etc., does not also address important social, ethical,
and environmental issues. They can and do. This is not
my argument. But there is more to be done, and more to
be discussed, in this area.
New critical spaces. The
possibility of development of 'critical' and discursive
arts spaces in Ireland can be traced to the pioneering
work of Arts Research and Exchange (ARE) under Chris Coppock,
Anne Carlisle and other during the 1980s, from which CIRCA
also emerged, the work of CAFE Meitheal na Cruthaitheachta
in Dublin, and the critical programmes of artists like
James Coleman. Examples of similar projects in England
are LOCUS + and Helix Arts (Newcastle); Stephen Willats;
O+I (John Latham/Barbara Stevini); Artangel (London);
and artNucleus (in Gloucester). More recently there have
been the writings and projects of of Martin McCabe (the
Critical Access programme), Eilís Ó Baoill
and Mick Wilson, and of visitors to Ireland like Greg
Sholett, Grant Kester and Suzanne Lacy, which are in the
main temporary, ephemeral, intellectually rigorous, and
constitute a challenging, edgy, problematic and (institutionally)
unregulated zone for arts discourse in Ireland.11
Alongside this the current crop of artist-run spaces looks
clunky, self-indulgent and downright third-rate.
I am not suggesting that socially
engaged art has the answers, or provides a total alternative
to the shortcomings of conventional arts centres. As an
emerging art genre (as yet disorganised and under-theorised)
the genre has problems, deficiencies and contradictions.
The rhetoric of empowerment - 'the temptation of presuming
to speak for others', and the spectacle of empathy - are
never far away in this work. Furthermore, I am reminded
of a wonderfully revealing film clip about Joseph Beuys
in Belfast, from one of his well publicised visits during
the mid-1970s, in which Beuys and his documentary film
crew accost an anonymous-seeming woman shopper in Royal
Avenue, in search of a meaningful dialogue on camera about
peace and art. Drawing herself up she tells them that
people in Belfast are fed up of being exploited by itinerant
foreign film crews chasing for the next heartbreak story
about the Troubles, and in no uncertain terms tells them
all to 'f' off. Exit Beuys!
Well there is obviously much
more to socially engaged art practice than that. Some
international examples of this work include Wochenklausur
(Vienna), Platform (London), Ala Plastica and Grupo Escombros
(La Plata, Argentina), Nam Chewitt
(Bangkok), Arting (Jay Koh,
Cologne/Singapore), Suzanne Lacy
(San Francisco), API (Steve Durland/Linda Burnam, NC),
Artway of Thinking (Italy), and Avital Geva (Israel).
Ó Baoill, writing about such work in Ideologies
in the new zones of practice (SSI Magazine,
1995), notes the problem of the socially engaged artist's
lack of visibility, but counters:
These
separate projects and groups will continue their change
and development with or without limelight.
Consequently this may
mean that funding institutions which are reactive at heart
will never fully support them, but financial gain is not
the objective. The aim is for social intervention
and a paradigm shift.
I think that the time has come
for this shift (and debate) to begin to take place in
Irish art.
Ian Hunter is the Artist
director of LITTORAL ARTS, an Arts Trust for Social and
Environmental Change, based in Lancashire.
Do
you have an opinion on this article? If so, please click here for our comments form.
| No reader feedback so far - awaiting your input! |
Back
to top of page
|
|
