C110 columns

Slave to the machine
Visual Arts North
Visual Arts South
Film and Television
Fifth Column

VISUAL ARTS SOUTH • Aidan Dunne

Finding No 94

The purity of the White Cube has long been tainted by its association with discredited Modernist ideas - the tabula rasa of originality, or the possibility of formal autonomy. The museum itself has equally come to be perceived as a problematic space, a means of asserting and imposing cultural authority, an instrument of privilege and exclusion rather than a place genuinely open and apart. The museum, and the canons of taste and value it traditionally enshrines, are now continually contested categories.

This is partly why, as regular visitors to large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art, we can so often find ourselves puzzling over minuscule, stylised street maps, trying to figure out if, say, the venue for exhibit No 94 is the window of the travel agents or the charity shop on the opposite side of the road, and what exactly exhibit No 94 might be. That is, could it be the beaded curtain with the strange, primary-coloured emblem in the charity shop window, or the glossy poster-sized photograph in the travel agents that could well be a promotional poster except for the odd, incongruous detail of what looks like a tiny plastic gnome in the corner of an otherwise standard, exotic scene. Or could it be - yes, or course it could - something else entirely? Almost anything, in fact, anywhere.

Since early in the 1990s, the twin tendencies on the part of art to forsake the hallowed precincts of the museum and to take the form of subtle, ludic interventions in the contemporary urban landscape, have played havoc with its sheer recognisability. Any nuanced placement or alteration of the everyday constitutes a cultural comment, and once you are alerted and start to read your surroundings critically - part of the rationale of such art being to get you to do so - you become increasingly aware of small ironies, disjunctures and incongruities in the seamless background fabric.

All of this partly relates, as well, to the fact that art and artists have become more culturally knowing, more conscious of the rude mechanicals that determine and animate that background, the staged environment within which we live (that is, the densely commodified realm of the city or town), and more concerned to interact critically with them via the language of signs. Their attempts to do so are not necessarily difficult to recognise and to read, and on the other hand ambiguity can be a legitimate aspect of what they do.

You can have work that is vehemently, unmistakably art in a place where we would not normally expect to see it, and the juxtaposition can jar us sufficiently to make us think anew. Equally, though, Aisling O'Beirn's video pieces documenting the fine-grained history of local identity and placenames seem somehow more appropriately encountered by chance as you queue in Galway's County Hall (in Tulca recently) than in another form, in the Ormeau Baths Gallery (Perspective, recently). David Rennicks' strategy of siting practically invisible pieces, ordinary objects slightly amended, in Dublin charity shops to be happened upon by customers clearly depends on that context and that level of subtlety to work at all. And given the incidental, remote nature of the project, the slightness of the payoff it promises - not in a monetary sense - for the artist, it is a brave undertaking.

These qualities of remoteness, subtlety and lack of identifiable response apply to a sizeable proportion of interventionist art situated in the wider cultural landscape. The resonances are difficult, perhaps impossible to evaluate and verify, but the possibilities are there. And that has to be part of the appeal: the chance to really elude the reach of the White Cube, the museum, and reach an audience not habitually included, in fact excluded by choice, chance or whatever, from the art world's closed circuits. Often work made in the environment is reflected in some way - stylised documentation, say, in the case of some of Richard Long or Andy Goldsworthy's arrangements of natural materials in the landscape - in the gallery, validating its artistic, artworld credentials.

Work that is predicated on a critical engagement with the fabricated cultural environment, though, seems to demand a significant level of sustained edginess. We have seen large-scale events work hard to initiate and incorporate such projects, and honourably so. Limerick's ev+a has a long track record in this regard and has scored some evident successes. Yet might there be limits to the degree of incorporation permissible? There is that model, for example, of the museum exhibition in a relationship of mutual endorsement with its environmental satellites. Repeatedly, initiatives that begin on a basis antithetical to museum values are subsumed within the system. The real test might be the extent to which such work can flourish outside the system. Which is not to say that we're just fed up trying to figure out what exactly No 94 is and where it might be.

FILM AND TELEVISION • Stephanie McBride

A cut above the rest!

"I get it. It's simple. 'PG' means the hero gets the girl, '15' means that the villain gets the girl and '18' means everybody gets the girl." Thus Michael Douglas described something of the flavour of film censorship in Britain. A more complex picture emerges of censorship in Ireland, as elegantly and comprehensively portrayed in the recently published Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey From Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography' by Kevin Rockett. An impressive and imposing work, it charts the history of film censorship in Ireland from 1910 to the present.

The guardians of the newly established Irish state in 1922 viewed literature and popular culture, especially film, with suspicion and hostility. To construct and sustain a particular form of Irish cultural identity, the fledgling state introduced the Censorship of Films Act as early as 1923. Rockett is alert to many of the nuances as well as the more blatant values invested in the function of censorship and the role of the Film Censors. Having examined over 18,000 of the Censors' decisions and the legislative aspects in all their minutiae, he carefully places these in a cultural and political context.

There are several intriguing cases, especially in hindsight. For example, Brief encounter (1945), directed by David Lean and very much a melodrama

of restrained English passion, was banned because of its "numerous seductive and indelicate situations." It was eventually released - with cuts - 17 years later. Michael Curtiz's

Casablanca (1942) was initially banned under wartime restrictions. It was finally released in 1945, but with serious cuts to ensure that single man Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and married woman Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) were never portrayed as lovers. But while we might view these decisions with a certain dollop of sardonic humour today, the book articulates the insidious nature of censorship for whichever reasons.

Rockett examines more recent events in Irish broadcasting history in detail, especially the impact of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. He acknowledges the liberalising influences in the office of the Film Censor initiated by Sheamus Smith and continued by Smith's successor, John Kelleher, although the clash over a planned club-screening of Natural Born Killers at the Irish Film Centre in 1995 indicates the lengths to which the state can go to assert its control over what its citizens can see and hear.

Rockett also includes over seventy film stills, from the Silent period to the present, which in themselves constitute a fascinating visual narrative. Laced with incisive comments and insights throughout, his book also examines the relatively recent development of film and media education in Ireland. Rockett argues that the critical edge and potential of media education have been subsumed and evacuated by its inclusion in much more traditional subject areas such as English literature. His analysis of ongoing debates about video and more recently electronic media is pertinently charged with an analysis of the rate and rage of moral panic. He establishes useful parameters for the debate, identifying the historical construction of childhood, as well as the regulation and commodification of sexuality in Western society. He also notes the displacement of personal and parental responsibility by conveniently using the internet and technology as scapegoats.

As a work of Herculean scholarship, this large book is compelling and engaging. It offers a valuable record of the State's devices in policing the desires of its citizens, and an invaluable insight into the shifting sands of the Irish social and cultural landscape.

SLAVE TO THE MACHINE • Michael Cunningham

Limited space

Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2016 17:15:16 +0800
Subject: Re: Limited space
From: Jill <curator@homepc-museum.eu>
To: Staff <all@homepc-museum.eu>,

on 7/09/16 12:45 pm, storage@homepc-museum.eu wrote:
 
> on 7/09/16 12:30 pm, Jack at
> director@homecomputing-museum.eu
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Sorry about how the meeting ended
>> yesterday but my decision is final.
>> Both funding and space are limited,
>> and all the machines on the attached
>> list will have to go from House #2.
>>
>> Jack
>
> im very sorry 2 - we r the only museum
> dedicated 2 the history + culture of
> home computing in ireland, + in one fell
> swoop u + the board have decided 2
> destroy half a decade of hard work
>
> btw my grandfather was in house #2 the
> the other day and asked me what
> happened the pong exhibit??? he still
> beats m @ it every time
>
> - gari

Space is limited! Talk about stating the obvious! The museum is now down to 4 terraced houses, of which 3 are dedicated to exhibition space. Of these, House #2 is by far the most important and most popular. And most problematic too, as it concentrates on late 20th c. computing, and machines by firms that usually no longer exist (unlike all the games console corporations who queue up to sponsor House #4).

Spare parts for the Amigas are like gold dust, and the Apple Classic is on its last legs, but even a junior clerical officer in the Workshop should be able to synth these parts. As for the bbc machines: over 100,000 of these were sold in Ireland, and we have three of the last of them. They and the old tv set and cassette deck do take up far more room than today's computing devices, but that's part of what they were all about: space.

The machines themselves were physically very large, dominating the domestic spaces they were in. Then also look at their space in popular memory. Look at the spaces they created for their users as producers too - the games were often written by just 1 or 2 people, the same age as our key target demographic (see p5 of Development Plan 2015). And look at the memory spaces they had to contend with. Younger visitors are always amazed when we explain how programmers could squeeze entire gaming universes into 32k of mem or less.

Look at some of the main exhibits on the bbc machine that the board now wants to wheel off to the skip of history, eg the space trading game 'Elite'. This was one of the first home computing games that people played continuously over long periods - it had polygonal 3D graphics, and even came with a novella. How did they manage to cram such a huge open-ended game into the bbc machine's claustrophobic cubbyhole of a memory? THE TECHNICAL/STORAGE LIMITATIONS DEFINED IT. The memory limitations prompted some very ingenious creative solutions.

Elite's galaxies weren't stored or prewritten as such. They were generated on the fly, from a Fibonacci sequence, from "pseudo random" numbers, from simple rules applied to a single "seed" or starting number. The seeds and the numbers generated were like little wisps of DNA, encoding various properties and meanings. They could compress all the info on a particular star system into a relatively short row of digits of a particular iteration. Some digits referred to the number of planets in a system or their distances from each other, others to a planet's physical specs or even its local politics, or to the syllables that made up its name.

Sheer brilliance, and they did all this in less than 22k - smaller than this email! By comparison, the biggest space limitations in the museum at the moment seem to be in the board's collective imagination.

- J

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VISUAL ARTS NORTH • Brian Kennedy

The Normans had the right idea

So George is back for another four years, elected by evangelical Christians who support his right-wing stance on things like gay marriage and abortion. He also believes he has a mandate to continue his war with Iraq and, if anything, expand it. Rather than give considered thought to the situation he is just going to follow the straight and narrow path he was already on. Tony will be pleased. Perhaps this blinkered view is down to their Christian beliefs that say we are all on the road to the Day of Judgment. No need to look around, just keep going forward. In the words of the sandwich-board man in Belfast "the end of the world is nigh."

In many ways this attitude reminds me of a Formalist approach in art that started in the nineteenth century and lasted late into the last century. Art was seen to move forward in one progressive direction. Darwin would have loved it: an art that evolved. Thankfully the complexities of the human race started to show through. I, for one, am not heading towards a day of judgment, hopefully. I am also skeptical of an artform that excluded so much. Greenberg had taken social and political elements out of art. The latter part of the last century saw them returned to the art arena. Other influences made themselves felt, like feminism and popular culture. Artists from other continents were managing to enter a club that used to have very strict geographical borders. The postcolonial redress is not complete but it has at least begun

If art was able to throw off the straitjacket of Formalism, perhaps the politicians could be expected to widen their horizons; to stop for a moment and look at historical context, to consider the position of other cultures and peoples. Sadly it is unlikely to happen. What in fact may happen is that artists will learn from Bush.

In his campaign Bush came over heavily on traditional and family values. Traditional values are also returning to the art world. Painting, craftsmanship, drawing are all on the way back. Bush art will do away with the need to think; the fact that it is well made will be enough. Intellectual thought will give way to traditional ideas of beauty. Bring on that great conservative artworld that has been hiding in the pages of certain London evening papers for years...

Let's step back from this sorry mess for a moment and do what was talked about and look to history for a more multi-cultural approach. What about the Normans in Sicily? Yes, those very same Normans who fought their way through much of Europe colonising as they went. In Sicily the Normans did things slightly differently. In 1068 they won the battle of Palermo. On conquering the Arab's beautiful city of Bal'harm, the Norman knights Robert and Roger de Hauteville took the unusual step of allowing Palermo's Moors a say in the new administration. Any mosque that had not previously been a church would be left alone and everyone, Muslim, Christian and Jew, would be judged under their own law. Papal Rome was not a happy bunny. They had wanted to Latinise Sicily as quickly as possible, eliminating all orthodox and non-Christian influences. Future Norman leaders would continue this enlightened way of governing. They resisted Rome's wishes to wage a holy war in Palestine and when Frederick II finally went on a 'crusade' he used diplomacy rather than force and was actually made King of Jerusalem.

If we compare our intolerance of today to a Sicily that was a multi-ethnic society where mosques, synagogues, Byzantine churches and Roman Catholic cathedrals existed side by side, we might realize that an unwavering way forward is not progress.

Perhaps art can have an effect by standing for a tolerant multi-cultural world that raises questions. It will do nothing if it embraces Bush's traditional values.

FIFTH COLUMN • Liz Aders

A moment of indulgence...

I had a welcome opportunity to interact with CIRCA readers and subscribers at the recent Curating Now conference at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Judging by most people I spoke to, it may come as a surprise to learn that the CIRCA office is a tiny room measuring about 5 x 7 m2. There are two full-time staff, Peter FitzGerald and myself, and a rotating posse of interns who come from across the world. And there's the Board, setting CIRCA's long-term goals. Peter is the editor of the magazine, but takes on a number of responsibilities: website editor, designer and manager, IT department and design department. I represent the advertising (online and print), marketing, accounts, subscriptions, general administration, business development (fancy word for long-term marketing), and I also help out with layouts, design, proofing, updating the online listings, managing work for the interns and occasional writing. In my 'spare time' I'm sweating and juggling over the perennially tight budgets, wondering how we can afford to buy that replacement scanner / printer / kettle. We rely heavily on our interns to contribute artnews and reviews online for our excellent and well-resourced website. Interns are also preparing a CD-ROM of back issues plus working on our book on art and architecture (edited by Gemma Tipton and due out early next year). One particularly brilliant intern, Mariam Luth, is redesigning our website in its entirety - with any luck the fruits of her labour will be evident before this article appears.

While it's hard for nearly everyone involved in the arts these days, there are several ways our jobs could be made easier. To start with, it can be extraordinarily difficult to get decent images. When going to print, we often have the choice between a few potential cover images, but then stumble on the fact that they're not available at production-quality level. For your own sake, ours and that of posterity, make sure you document your work at sufficient resolution - don't be lulled into thinking an image from a standard digital camera, just because it looks good on screen, is at anywhere near the resolution your work deserves. Good photography and transparencies are expensive but surely you're worth it?

(And then PLEASE provide captions! )

When we receive invitations to exhibitions I'm still amazed that artists and galleries alike think it's OK to photocopy a poorly presented and written press release or invitation. If you have to cut costs elsewhere, at least invest in printing a decent invitation card. Printers in Ireland are taking the micky when it comes to the cost but if you get organised you'll find excellent, inexpensive printers elsewhere in Europe. If you can't afford a designer, take a Quark course and learn how to use it yourself. It's not difficult to use design programs and it's a great skill to have for producing media releases, invitations, catalogues and advertising material. Look at some of the beautifully produced international magazines such as ARTFORUM; their advertisements are incredibly sexy, using luscious full bleeds and interesting fonts. OK, so Larry Gagosian has piles of cash but you can learn how to make an artwork look really beautiful. A little bit of research will help you no end.

The art of branding one's product is still in its infancy in the art sector in Ireland. Just like any other business, the commercial and private art gallery should seriously think about their business product and market it in a professional manner. Does your logo stand out? If not, why not?

So what do I do to get coverage, you may ask? Create good art, think through a marketing strategy and send concise information for editorial consideration.

Bribes work too: if you really want us to see an exhibition, serve cakes.