C102 Article

Vox Pop:

Jean Brennan

Arts Development Officer, Omagh District Council

Mary Kelly: from series Sovereign silver plated, 2001, lambdachrome onaluminium, 56 x 70 cm,shown at the opening of The Mermaid, 2002; courtesy the artist

Arts centres are designed to show art. Almost every county on this island now has a centre that is dedicated to showing art. Fantastic! Buildings will always involve some level of compromise - this is true whether the building is a shopping mall or an arts centre. Any new build or rebuild project I have worked on (three so far...) has involved making compromises for various reasons - because of the footprint of the site or the needs of other users of the building. But compromise allows things to happen. Would any of us prefer to go back to the situation twenty years ago when there was very little in the way of appropriate venues for any kind of arts activity outside of cities (beyond school and church halls) on this island? Outside of cities, arts centres are usually the only venues where art can be shown without apology, and with some, if usually limited and wholly inadequate, funding to do this. I will still argue that not enough is invested in the arts, in terms of buildings, but more importantly in terms of revenue funding that allows decent funding to those who make art. I can, however, see a vast difference in the arts infrastructure across the island of Ireland from fifteen years ago when I started working in the sector.

However, I would have to agree that most arts centres that have been built recently have focused more on the needs of the performing arts over visual arts. It is easier to get agreement from local and central government to provide for the performing arts, than for contemporary visual artists - as a communal activity people, can relate to the performing arts - and there is a history of amateur drama performance across the island. Most people over a year will attend at least the cinema, and often a concert, a play or a performance of some kind.

But contemporary visual-arts practice - that is a different thing. Visual-arts practice can be frightening, inaccessible, mystifying. The Turner Prize shortlisted artists were recently pilloried by a minister of state in the Department of Culture, Arts and Media, for example. What chance do we have of convincing government for further funding when the people who make those decisions are so far removed from understanding the work?

For most people (not artists, but those involved in the funding of arts centres), if they think of exhibition space they think of walls to hang things on (maybe with decent lighting). I worked on a project in Dublin recently, where the building had been designed before I was involved. axis, Ballymun's Arts and Community Resource Centre, is a great building - there is a fantastic theatre space, a lovely dance studios, and two good, well lit workshop spaces, a fully equipped recording studio and two music-rehearsal rooms, as well as offices housing a variety of voluntary and community groups. But there is no dedicated exhibition space - there is wall space in the downstairs bar and café, and a mezzanine that is needed for access to other areas of the building. Yet visual artists spearheaded the development. Artists such as Stewart Dowie, Celia Moore and Paddy Kavanagh were involved from the very beginning. A dedicated gallery space had originally been planned, but was dropped as other needs took precedence. Artists themselves need to be more demanding, particularly at local level, where most buildings are being developed.

I strongly believe that arts centres are one way to bring people to an understanding of and appreciation for visual-arts work. Even galleries that are multifunctional (mezzanines, bars, cafés) allow for more people to see work than might otherwise do. Celia Moore was invited to make the first exhibition to be shown in axis - she has lived in Ballymun for many years. A huge audience of other artists, young people, and people living in her community got to see the exhibition. The direct relevance of that work to Ballymun made it so right for the space. If the centre had not been there she might not have created that body of work (some of which I saw in an opening group exhibition at another new arts centre, The Mermaid).

Arts centres, particularly those outside a city-centre base, serve the communities they are based in. The managers and programmers working in these centres are usually deeply committed - not only to art, and artists, but also to providing an interface between artists and their communities. Artists are "the engineers of our imagination" (Welfare State, 1992). Arts centres give them environments to work in that, while not perfect (as nothing in life is), at least are there.