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C110 review
Dublin: Joyce
in Art at the RHA
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| Dieter Roth: P.o.t.A.a.Vfb
(Portrait of the artist as Vogelfutterbüste), 1968-70;
courtesy RHA |
Anyone with a serious intent to make ambitious
art in the 1920s had to engage with Ulysses and then, if
they were still with it, had to try and get their heads around
Finnegans Wake.
Why was this? How did that happen?
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| Julião Sarmento: Something
obscene (Dublin - Cornell 1909), 1996/6; courtesy RHA |
It was not just that Joyce was a genius writer,
he was also a genius at promoting his work. And the times were
auspicious; in Trieste Joyce had known the go-for-broke Futurists;
in Paris the reality-as-dream Surrealists; the progressive trajectory
of an avant-garde art was
tangible at this time and Joyce, who never doubted his
artistic mission, was situated at the centre of this big-bang
moment. No writer was more talented, pace-setting, experimental
or funny (that he was funny was a later take), and so he positioned
the magic elixir of his life's work as a key avant-garde signifier
- the dinkum oil of Modernism.
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| Michael Craig-Martin: Wall
drawing 111-B, 1990; courtesy RHA |
And so it was. To say of works as complex
as Ulysses or as obtuse as The Wake that those were
steadier times is something that Mia Lerm Hayes touches on in
her excellent publication that went with the exhibition Joyce
in Art at the RHA Gallery last June. 'Steadier' in that
anyone engaged in Modernism in any artform at that time sensed
what was reciprocal, authentic and faithful about other significant
arts. Lerm Hayes takes some four hundred closely argued pages
to tease out Joyce's synaesthetic effect. She doesn't mention
'faithful', but I believe that that quality was also radical to
Modernism. Visual art now is sometimes referred to as 'a new religion',
but that's the buildings, then it was the artwork and 'faithful'
was part of the agenda and to some extent it was this communal
aspiration for myths and heroic emblems that allowed the Joyce
meme to travel.
That Joyce was 'advanced' in the '20s, 'smart' in the '30s,
'essential' in the '40s, 'cool' in the '50s. 'far-out' in the
'60s, 'conceptual' in the '70s, 'postmodern' in the '80s and again
'cool' in the '90s (teems of times and happy returns) is the curatorial
premise for which this exhibition was the evidence. To walk into
the RHA space was to feel the art scene in Dublin moving up several
gears. That it looked so well is down to the co-curator Patrick
Murphy and his staff.
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| Ladislav Galeta: Water pulu
1869 1896, 1988, still; courtesy RHA |
As The Wake is about everything and
everybody, past, present and future, arguably any artwork could
be accommodated within its range. This 'Here Comes Everybody'
effect was a good thing - plenty of variety and surprises, and
if you needed a rationale it was in the meticulous catalogue Some
of the art looked marginal; Sean Scully shows a Sean Scully from
his illustrations for Poems Penyeach, a project his gallerist
initiated, not Scully (Joyce is not Sean's favourite writer).
Such stuff happens - and why not? (Joyce sanctioned a prestigious
edition of Ulysses which Matisse illustrated though Joyce
didn't 'get' Matisse and Matisse claimed never to have read Ulysses!
Who cares - we have wonderful Matisse drawings and we'll always
have Ulysses, that Casablanca of literature.)
That Joyce was central to Modernism is well established and, although I found the link to postmodernist theory dense - or was it me was? - the catalogue quote from Derrida put me to rest: "Everything that happened to me, including the narrative that I would attempt to make of it, was already pre-dicted and pre-narrated, in its dated singularity...within Ulysses, to say nothing of Finnegans Wake." 'Nuff said.
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| Patrick Ireland: Study for purgatory,
1985; courtesy RHA |
Many of the face cards of contemporary art -
Beuys, Cage, Kosuth, Weiner, Motherwell and The Smiths (Tony and
David) - came to this party; fine installations by Patrick Ireland
and James Coleman graced the occasion. Some unknown (to me ) Europeans
made really interesting work (Goreon Inge's painstaking transcription
of a section of The Wake in the shape of the coastline
from Sandycove to Howth Head was a stand-out work), but to just
list names and works of a show that's now gone seems pointless.
The point of writing on art is to get someone to go and see it.
But the catalogue is still available and that's worth having.
(Since much of the work is text-based or conceptual it registers
in reproduction O.K.)
Check out Ad Rheinhardt's A portend of
the artist as a yhung mandala, as full of fun as The Wake
itself, and David Smith's The letter, which was a work
I'd always hoped to see and there it was - stunning.
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| Jess: Boob #3;courtesy
RHA |
A big find in the catalogue is Joyce's Fluviana:
small found objects of driftwood which Joyce had photographed
for the magazine transition under his name. The younger
Joyce thought intentionality was crucial to something's being
an artwork. His example was of a woodsman hacking away at a block
of wood and producing 'by accident' a cow, This was not art because
the woodsman did not have the intention to make an artwork. That
was in 1903. But by the 1929 Joyce had befriended Brancusi, some
of whose columns might just look like the work of some distracted
woodsman, and Joyce would certainly have known of Duchamp and
the ready-mades and with the Fluviana he redressed his
mistake. But by then he was the crazed woodsman in reverse, making
art with intent, the problem being what was it?
One thing it was, as this exhibition shows, was inspirational.
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| Above (two images):
Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadwquate descriptive
systems, 1974; courtesy RHA |
Noel Sheridan is an artist working
in various media.
Joyce in Art, RHA Gallery, Dublin, June - August 2004; curated
by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
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