Summer 2005 - Dublin: Madeleine Moore at Pallas Heights
CIRCA 112 review  | | Madeleine Moore: Ghost station , oil on linen, 42 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist | Sean Tracy House is a haunted place; and the spirits are communing on the top floor, just beyond the washing. One's entry is by appointment only, so already we suspect the spirits might not speak to all . Once inside, we are presented with an austere modern interior, newly decorated in white: a suitable place from which to begin again on the other side, so to speak, of what has gone before. "By law, all buildings should be white"; so said an earlier avatar of l'esprit nouveau , but, looking about, one soon notices the encroaching dereliction which belies this 'rhetoric of purity'. If it is purity we desire, we might only find it in the ideal geometries, architectural dream images and absent populations redoubled in Moore's cool paintings. The first takes its departure from Le Corbusier's Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau of 1925. In monochrome it traces an L-shaped structure, set along the essentialist horizontal / vertical axis. But the white-spirited features of this new 'moral landscape' hardly have the strength to support themselves, and hang loosely and enigmatically in a void, isolated from each other and divided by the blankness of what should unite them. The second, Ghost station , remembers those deserted U-bahn stations of East Berlin that one might occasionally travel through between West Berlin stations. Here, behind the curtain, dimly lit and heavily guarded, disembodied spirits jostle each other gently along a corridor. That these bodies might have transcended themselves and become full of rational light was once the hope, but in the 'stations at which the trains do not stop' one saw only shadows. An open-plan, uniform interior is laid out in Office . As a place of work, it was to be simple but elegant and practical, developing 'organically' in connection with its site and its occupants' needs. Here again, disembodied spirits move about, but this time they meet with monumental structures beyond their authority. Although the notion of organic movement might hold great potential for architectural development, combining the latter with nature, here that development 'takes flight' without those who built it. Moving upstairs into the thickest darkness requires a leap of faith, as the breadth of vision downstairs turns inward to the isolation of a black hut, like those bothies in the wilderness providing refuge from storms. A single spotlight draws us to the painting like moths, playing out that reflex of private withdrawal so antithetical to the modernist vision.  | | Madeleine Moore: Black hut , oil on linen, 45 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist | It is rather uncanny, then, that also within these wildernesses the most deleterious form of exclusion and uneven accumulation, the private ownership of land, reaches its margins: and where, by virtue of basic necessity and the nearness of death some vestigial community continues. What have we lost that makes us wander around the wilderness like ghosts, full of 'infinite longing'? From the modernist project of a community to come there emerges the same spectre as from the renovation of a once-whole community in the past: a community can equally be 'lost' in the future. But how could we lose something which never took place? And if nothing is lost, nothing is to be regained: so, perhaps we should look for community amidst the present ruins. But still, something is being gained: building continues, boldly facing a future in which it sees its present triumph repeated. One need only look out the downstairs window south to the Wicklow Mountains across a skyline of cranes to notice a quite different 'new spirit'; a neo-liberal project made up in equal parts of 'modernisation' and historical amnesia. Against this background, the need not simply to maintain an alternative modern spirit but to give body again to its revolutionary moments seems ever more acute. Tim Stott is a critic based in Dublin. Madeleine Moore, The New Spirit , January - February, 2005, Pallas Heights, Dublin
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