C106 review

Rome: Think Over at Rialto Santambrogio

Perhaps the eye of an antipodean traveller isn't always drawn to an exhibition of contemporary Irish art amongst the ruins and restaurants of Rome, but the explanatory verve and simian handshake of curator Brian Kennedy - himself a transitional figure between entrepreneurial Celtic chic and the craggy charm of a Roman river god - not only turned my steps to these lively exhibits but confirmed my sense that taste for blue denim may be fading less than the glories of the eternal city itself.

Ian Charlesworth: Candle drawing, 2003, 500 x 500 cm; courtesy the artist

The upper floor of a dilapidated hostel, whose corridors were poorly fenestrated against the damp and cold of an interior courtyard overgrown with darkly luscious greenery, provided the evocative setting for installations which generally took one of two approaches to the challenge of Irish art in Rome. One was to respond to the location thoughtfully, the other to enhance contrast by virtually forgetting it. Peter Richard's photo in the street outside of Protestant tracts on the Shore Road revealed the problem of the first approach. Compared to the apparatus of Catholic conversion everywhere in Rome, who but the Irish will understand these images of alternative salvation? For me the subtlest instance of contextual response was Ian Charlesworth's tracing of sooty snail trails by four days' holding up a candle to the ceiling of a single room. In a city rich with so many decorated ceilings occasionally restored from centuries of smoky grime, this modest addition entailed a curious elision between the original efforts of artists uncomfortably skyed aloft and the obscurity that usage confers upon their arduous imagery. Particularly good to see amongst the first lights of a gloomy evening, these punctuated, intestinal convolutions prompted thought about the thoughts of a thousand distracted artists toiling away where feet will never tread. But they also look like furrows.

Peter Richards: Shore Road, installation shot; 2003, courtesy the artist

Sheila Mangan's album photos of young Irish priests in Rome during the 1950s was perhaps the most direct approach to the Irish-Roman theme, highlighting the economic opportunity that allowed the clergy but few others to travel there. Smoking in cheerful company behind pebble glasses, one chap emits a diabolical laugh perhaps occasioned by false excitement far away from home. Such work scours our memory for analogies. Mine was a photo from the previous decade of my father-in-law, not blending in with other locals of the cloth, but posing with allied sailors as gladiator conquerors in the Colloseum.

Shane Cullen's setting of a plastic, golden Éire sign above an Italian translation of a declaration by leading Israeli soldiers rejecting involvement in anti-Palestinian recriminations seems to fight against a specifically Roman setting, but then we recollect we're in the Jewish ghetto near Portico di Ottavia, where up until the late nineteenth century the Jewish community was obliged to assemble for weekly sermons of conversion to the True Faith.

I'd say this artist's own commitment to the propaganda of group commitment is decidedly noncommittal. Though it chimed in with the nearby garden, Susan MacWilliam's video of a girl in blue repeatedly fainting in a garden seemed less to do with Rome than a video I saw in the Whitechapel of a desert-island castaway continually knocked out by a falling coconut that might have revived him. Perhaps this version came first or is a strategic permutation. Viewed along the dingy corridor from the artist's bar, it could have been a community warning against youth alcohol abuse. It would certainly change its meaning wherever it was seen.

Susan MacWilliam: Faint, video still; 2003, installation shot; courtesy the artist

Fighting against all urban viewing conditions, Dan Shipsides' video of birds wheeling around a beautiful rocky outcrop took one out of oneself in sympathy with the instinctual habits and freedoms of these creatures, not withstanding the skilful dance of the camera work. Wherever one is one wants to be there - the Orkney Islands rather than Ireland, as it happens - but isn't he standing on their nest?

The most explicit denial of specific place was Aisling O'Beirn and Marjetica Potrc's collaborative interactive multiplication of hyperlinked images which continually led elsewhere, absorbingly enough, but it was too much at home in the nomadic pieties of the international art circuit to be greatly detaining.

Seán Taylor's sound piece of falling rain performed by the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Dan Shipsides' bamboo-ladder feat, both on the opening night, were dim rumours by the time I arrived, and must await another opportunity to impinge upon Australian critical consciousness of Irishness in Rome.

Richard Read is author of Art and its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Ashgate, 2002) and lectures in Art History at the University of Western Australia.

Thinking Over,(Rialto Santambrogio Rome, October 2003