C105 review

Dublin: Dan Shipsides at Temple Bar

Dan Shipsides: from Pioneers, colour photograph; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery

Photographs of landscape, especially of mountain terrain, often require that the photographer doubles as a mountaineer in order to frame and capture the optimum shot. Count Vittorio Sella, who was first to photograph many of the world's greatest peaks in the late nineteenth century, not only revealed what the likes of Ansel Adams would later describe as the "sheer majesty of the mountain" but also provided valuable documentary information for other climbers who were able to map out routes from his images. From the street, peering in the windows of Temple Bar Gallery you might be mistaken in thinking that this exhibition was a glorious homage to the mountain. Several large-scale photographs only reveal their true intent on closer inspection, as each has named climbing routes drawn in white ink, with the names of climbers, date and length of the route. Adjacent to each photograph is a small speaker relaying interviews with mountaineers who describe the climbs indicated and associated incidents. Over half a century after Sella, when Hillary was busy scaling Everest in the 1950s, Irish climbers where also attempting to discover routes up many of Ireland's most magnificent mountains. The hum of these shared memories filled the gallery, displacing the sheer visual quality of the mountain imagery, attesting to Shipsides' interest in the climbers not just the mountain or landscape.

The short audio pieces are quite challenging to listen to in the gallery space, as it requires an awkward interaction with the volume control on each speaker which forces a physical and durational relationship with the photographs. A complied CD of the interviews is alternately available in the current issue of 'Source' magazine, along with reproductions of the images. The effect, however, of both these presentations is to render the athletic achievements of the climbers quite static. The interviews are, furthermore, a relaxed series of reminiscences revealing the heroism, hardship and various scrapes encountered while climbing. The descriptions of the climbs impart a different sense of awe and respect, which edges toward the sentimental at times, as different speaker's stories merge and repeat, remembering the good old days. Despite that, the effect is to populate the mountain with personalities, side-stepping the obvious romantic visuals on display.

Justin Carville's essay accompanying the published images discusses the emergence of leisure culture in Ireland through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, charting the rise of natural history as a popular leisure activity with the urban middleýclasses. Mountaineering transpires in his argument as a embodiment of this emerging class, who, along with the amateur geologists, botanists and naturalists, engaged the land in more analytical and athletic ways. Such documentation is often hidden away in photographic albums, visually unavailable to a wider audience and it has only begun to appear in recent years as photography archives catalogue their holdings or albums arrive on the art market, albeit broken up into individual plates. Carville's discussion of the socio-political and wider cultural ramifications of mountaineering is a little heavy-handed, placing an unusual emphasis on this particular leisure-time activity in the construction of, among other things, an athletic ascription of national identity generally the preserve of mass-participation sports like the GAA.

The hand-written notations on Shipsides' photographs do reflect an amateur honesty over aesthetic invention, of information over artistic interpretation. This is despite the photograph's rather predictable large-format art size and austere hanging. Compared to previous generations of 'walking' artists like Richard Long or Hamish Fulton, his approach shies away from their luxurious photo-and-text constructions, yet he still has much in common with them. There is a shared concern to document a personal relationship to geography, distance and time, and to propose new ways of thinking about the landscape. This has developed out of private performative acts, namely walking and climbing, addressing the sculptural qualities of the landscape, extending sculpture's boundaries, treating place in the same way as material and form. Previous work by Shipsides has been more physical, using scaffolding, wood and climbing holds to recreate the spatial shapes of specific rock climbs, or even climbing across the gallery wall as a public performance. While there is a simplicity in the presentation of this current work, it lacks some of the complexity of other projects which did not have such a strong commemorative emphasis. The show probably makes more sense if approached through Shipsides' larger body of work, but his homage to these athletic pioneers is too reverent and as a result rather a tame, if not bland creative solution.

Alan Phelan is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.

Dan Shipsides: Pioneers, Temple Bar Gallery, June - July, 2003

Dan Shipsides: from Pioneers, colour photograph; courtesy Temple Bar Gallery

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