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C104
review
Limerick:
ev+a 2003
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Christine
Mackey: Provisional, 2002, mixed-media drawing
installation, dimensions variable; photo/courtesy the
author
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In his early
writings, German theorist Walter Benjamin proposed a form
of universality capable of accommodating a particular entity
without reducing its diversity. This logical form, which he
termed 'constellation', would allow each of its constituent
elements to preserve its unique identity. In elaborating the
constellation Benjamin discovered that the uniqueness of the
particular was only ever truly preserved when raised up within
a configuration composed of similar particulars.1 Paradoxically
the tendency toward universality is actually born of the opposite
motivation: to respect without reservation the singularity
of the individual particular.
Traversing Limerick
city, pausing at the various sites of ev+a - the annual exhibition
of international art (sited in Limerick since 1977) - is to
come to truly appreciate the modality of the Benjaminian constellation.
On the passage through ev+a-scape, the unexpected oneness
of something by nature fragmentary and diverse begins, by
increments, to emerge. And this emergence constitutes the
exhibition as such. For ev+a is not a gathering of artworks
but rather a single phenomenon, a phenomenon that gradually
develops and changes as it moves through its urban conduit.
Tracking the quiet curve of this development brings to mind
the developing variation in music. For just as slight alterations
modify the musical motif each time it is repeated until eventually
it seems unrelated to its initial shape, the character and
texture of each landmark of ev+a-scape mutates in harmony
with the urban host it temporarily inhabits.
Thus the tawdry
kitsch of the City Gallery ground floor undergoes an almost
imperceptible transformation into the stochastic urban scrawls
on the walls of one upstairs room. Toys and diminutive figurines
slowly metamorphose into a weird environment of innocuous
yet sinister gnome-painters upstairs. In a cognate way, the
hanging luggage in Colbert Station actually becomes the wishbone
robe hanging in St. Mary's cathedral; and one should watch
out for the way the red ballerina shoes in the City Gallery
develop into that bedroom archipelago of glad-rag, Imelda
Marcos, so-much-to-choose-so-little-time high-heels paroled
from the wardrobe in one photograph in the City Hall. However,
this is not to suggest that each individual artist's contribution
is subordinate to Virginia Perez-Ratton's curatorial strategy
(as outlined in the exhibition brochure). The logical form
of the constellation ensures that while ev+a cannot be reduced
to the sum of its parts it nevertheless remains a multiplicity.
No matter how completely entrenched in the overall exhibition-concept
each individual artwork may appear it nevertheless retains
its unique identity in opposition to the whole.
Although space
prevents a full illustration it is possible to select some
individual works for analysis.
Inscribed directly
on the wall, the individual marks that make up Christine Mackey's
Scotch-tape and graphite installation do not crystallise into
a coherent drawing. Rather it is as if the wall itself has
been disturbed by something. The memory of a form fragmented
by radio-static hiss and crackle. As the fragments cluster
and disperse, a strange pathology of chaos and order passes
through the squall of marks like a pulse. Provisional (a title
that compounds the meaning of Gillian Kenny's Belfast street-scene
adjacent to it) reads like the symptoms of an undiagnosed
syndrome of communicative breakdown. For an interference of
marks and scratches cannot communicate any content in itself
but rather signals the collapse of communication as such.
Metastasising into more irregular patterns, the continuity
of the wall suffers a schizoid fraying by the stigmata irrupting
over its blank surface. A shriek stuns the transparent clarity
of its whiteness.
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Derek
O'Sullivan: from 3:4 / 26:7-8 / 12:9-17 / 19:14, silkscreen/
lithographs books, 40 x 40 cm each - set of four books;
photo/courtesy the
author
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Derek O'Sullivan's
dark series of prints explores a similar theme. Bound in book
form, lying open on double-page spreads, the pages are crammed
with swarming crowds of scrawled bodies. Legions of zombies,
their faces pallid and distorted by a desperate desire, clamber
and crawl all over a yielding architecture.
Clearly, the
reference is to the Tower of Babel, a story of hubris that
ends in the linguistic confusion of tongues and the 'scattering
on the earth' that becomes the essence of confusion in general.
O'Sullivan's treatment of this theme is genuinely frightening.
Something about the vacuity of the facial expressions and
the sentences written over the images has a prophetic tone
that seems inspired by apocalyptic scripture. However, O'Sullivan's
visual exegesis of the Old Testament is only one aspect of
an otherwise sui generis project that draws on film and video
for its visual effects as well as politics and theology for
its polemical impact; his testimonies are sutured together
by a montage of sketches spliced with photographic elements
in a CCTV-style overlay of different colour densities.
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Kate
Byrne: Familiar series: images 1-4, 2002, lambdachrome
photo prints,
122 x 122 cm / 122 x 100 cm; courtesy Limerick City
Gallery
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If O'Sullivan's
work brings to mind the Beckettian grotesque, Kate Byrne's
four visceral photographs in the City Hall positively explicate
Beckett's narrative analysis of bodily decline. Each panel
shows a variation on the single motif of aged hands and feet
posited against a completely black environment. Nothing more
of the body is shown. Signs of age are evident. Hoary nails,
yellowed and ridged, seem almost to wind around finger and
toe. In the first panel, one of the toes is horribly distended.
Repulsive: the brittle skin, revealing more than it hides,
has become translucent with age. The hands, which either obtrude
into the picture plane or grasp the feet with a terrible grip,
are gnarled and rheumatic; knotted veins abut through their
thin membrane of skin. Considered purely aesthetically, or
from the 'disinterested' perspective, these photographs become
perversely delectable, even seductive images. The technique
that Byrne uses (they are Lambdachrome prints) results in
incredibly rich reproductions; every detail picked up dispassionately
by the lens is rendered in crystalline clarity. Threads of
turquoise varicose veins can be seen under the marbled skin,
which has, in turn, tiny white flakes adhering to its scaly
surface. The cruel mixture of darkness and fascination these
images evoke is reminiscent of de Man's reading of Blanchot:
"the fascination we experience," he writes "is accompanied
by a feeling of resistance, by a refusal to be led to a confrontation
with something opaque on which our consciousness can find
no hold."2 This sums up the emotional impact of Byrne's photographs.
Perhaps it is
not difficult to criticise the aspirations of ev+a. For the
exhibition has tended to aim for the universal in a cultural
atmosphere that increasingly venerates the specific and the
singular. Its claim to internationality may thus seem over-ambitious,
extravagant, and at times eclectic. However, such a critique
is unfounded for the simple reason that its claim to universality,
something that puts ev+a in direct conflict with current 'post-modern'
orthodoxy, constitutes its principal contribution to contemporary
aesthetics. As claimed above, rather than considering the
exhibition organisers to be in conscious command of a concept
of universality, it would be more fruitful to see the contribution
ev+a makes to contemporary art discourse in terms of the Benjaminian
constellation.
Dr Kieran
Cashell is a part-time lecturer at the Limerick School
of Art and Design, Limerick Institute of Technology.
ev+a,
various sites around Limerick, March -ÊJune 2003
1
2
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 104, Summer
2003, pp. 69-71.
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