CIRCA 113 review

Cork: Superbia 2 at St. Columba's National School

Linda Quinlan: Nuclear plant, 2003, installation shot; photo / courtesy the author

Following on from Superbia in Ballymun in 2003, Superbia 2 is the second in what is conceived of as an ongoing project of site-based installations in specifically suburban contexts. The very successful Superbia invited artists to create work in a semi - detached house in the controversial Ballymun development in Dublin; successful because it allowed artists to address what was a highly contested and much vilified social housing project without indulging in the often patronising, artistically limp and socially therapeutic engagements which usually typify what we conveniently label 'community' art. Ballymun is now a memory but, as that show partly proved, one which raises interesting issues beyond its contemporary classification as an urban planning mistake to be eradicated and consigned to the sad back story of architectural social-design disasters.

The site selected for Superbia 2 is not in the least contested or controversial. Set in the comfortable suburb of Douglas in Cork, St Columba's Boys National School is a model of middle class confidence and values; tidy, airy, cheery, bright and shiny. One can easily imagine gales of happy infants rushing through the main doors and settling politely into the well-oiled routine of a day in the care of teachers with whom we could confidently be sure of the trust inherent in in loco parentis.

This demographic flip could perhaps have mitigated against the production of an exhibition of consequence, particularly if we subscribe to the notion and mythos that an art of consequence proceeds most usually from situations of adversity. There are fifteen artists in Superbia 2; Tonico Lemos Auad, Rhona Byrne, Peter Callesen, Clodagh Emoe, Brian Griffiths, Finola Jones, David Kavanagh, Kevin Kelly, Lorna Macintyre, Isabel Nolan, Linda Quinlan, Jay Roche and Anthony Kelly, Antonio Scarponi, and Bernard Smyth, between them representing a broad cross section of mainly Irish, with UK and European or Europe-based artists. All appear to have engaged with the site in a predominantly playful manner, as if the return to school has itself triggered the reification of the infant within, relishing the opportunity to be just a bit naughty while the teacher is out of the room. Thankfully the lightness of tone of this show in no way implies any lack of substance or intellectual stimulation.

The tone of the installations and interventions may be indicative as much of the personalities of the artists selected, as of a generally more benign regard of suburbia than that which has dominated the discourse since the sixties. One of the definitive bodies of work about the subject is Suburbia, the highly influential series of photographs by Bill Owens from 1972 (and still being shown regularly today). This series celebrates the subject as much as it invites critique of it, but it does invoke the sense of the suburbs as being out on the periphery, as they were when they first butted up to the rural and spread rapidly out into the city's margins. The very newness and blandness of suburbias implied that they were devoid of history and the accretion of human activity that constructs culture. Henry James claimed, "the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep." What hope then for culture which had only the imported loam of the topsoil lawn as its seedbed?

Coupled with this sense of ubiquity, artificiality and marginality was the modernist conditioning principle that contemporary art is an essentially urban construct and is practised in a more intensely urban environment. The dreams which led to the migration of the baby boomers to the 'tabula rasa' of the suburbs became a nightmare of isolation for many of its progeny. But as the suburbs have undergone decay and differentiation they have also been supplanted as the margin, the contingent and uncertain ground of the frontier edge, and have developed their own cultural histories and mores. They are, after all, where most of us came from and where most of us now live. As Diogo Lopes and Nuno Cera stated in the notes to Cimêncio "...it is quite clear that the historic cores of our cities increasingly claim for themselves a growing symbolic role, museum stages...where one can meander and consume, scenic spaces manifesting a consolidated regimen. Life however seems to be unfolding elsewhere"

Left: Bernard Smyth: World record 1999, 1999, installation shot; photo / courtesy the author Right: Isabel Nolan: Chairs: All white from Ms M O'Flynn's room; all yellow (inc tables) from Ms R Kelleher's room; four orange from Mrs P Doyle's room; rest of orange from Ms K Power's room; the chairs in Ms O'Flynn's room are from Ms S Hetgarty's room. All purple from here., 2005, installation shot; photo / courtesy the author

This air of uncritical familiarity and positivity pervades Superbia 2. The site of this show is as much the 'burbs as it is the school itself with the school as the immediate site of response and the 'suburban' the inevitable sub text. The suburb has evolved into a space of nostalgia, with all the attendant allusions and illusions memory contains.

There seem to be no dark undertones within the cheeky irreverence of Superbia 2, but the note of irreverence is indeed pervasive. Jones and Smyth chose to include earlier work, but in both cases this is done in revamped formats, and in both cases it is particularly apposite to the context. Jones' The pleasure of compulsive deconstruction gently subverts the high-cultural tone of the children's choir with a lyrical content based around low-brow popular culture, while Smyth's agonising chair-balancing act in World record 1999 raises an act which would invite the teacher's constant admonition to "sit properly" to the level of an event of global and transcendent significance.

The dental surgery's pristine horror is similarly undermined in Quinlan's re-installation of Nuclear Plant from 2003. Even the alienating and forbidding aspect of this environment was forgotten or ignored by the many children I witnessed who were engrossed in the engaging detail of Quinlan's fastidious fantasy world.

Fantasy fuels Byrne's eloquent and spare Tree house in which the intervention of a tiny door at the base of a gnarled eucalyptus is enough to evoke a sense of wonder and anticipation. It is true of much of the work in Superbia 2 that in reaching back to the touchstone of childhood as a source, the artists invoke it as well in the viewer.

Kavanagh's Where have all the little people gone? also sets up a fantastic scenario in which we willingly surrender the detachment of adult disbelief to the charm of his fictional narrative. Emoe's exquisite pencil drawings through the corridors explore, with the most economical of means, the concept of vastness beyond comprehension and portray a faux-naïve attempt to grapple with such big questions as the nature of the universe with contingent explanations that an immature mind, grappling with the imponderable, may develop in order to give life shape and meaning. Her Blackboard - a notice board covered painstakingly with graphite - takes this group of works into the sublime realm where all potential meaning is suspended and the search for understanding is subsumed by a condition of awe in the face of the ultimately unknowable.

Rhona Byrne: Tree house, 2005; photo / courtesy the author

The Lilliputian references of Quinlan, Kavanagh and Byrne, and implied in Emoe's work, are resonant throughout the school environment. Regarding the tiny chairs so fabulously exploited by Nolan in Chairs, one is reminded of just how little infants actually are. Most of the furniture and fittings of the school are almost too small to be considered as anything other than mere toys. Nolan's sculptural construction using chairs and tables from six classrooms, which rise from an ordered entry-point arrangement to a progressively more anarchic and aspirational form approaching the windows, is a sheer delight. It manages to subvert the often bombastic nature of sculptural installation while existing as a highly dynamic sweep of formal arrangement. The fact that the formal arrangement suggested the Raft of the Medusa to me is probably so tangential and idiosyncratic as to mean nothing.

Griffiths' installation makes such subtle but pervasive use of both introduced and existing elements that the space is enlivened in its entirety, no element seems unconsidered and the whole is tightly welded together formally, to the point where no item in the room seemed able to be detached from the whole. It is worth noting that all the artists addressed these specifics of spatial and environmental aspects with a considered and intelligent relation of objects, many which were derived from the situation itself.

Auad, Callesen and Macintyre display the confidence of restraint and simplicity in quiet, wry works while conversely, Kevin Kelly's Monkey Palace is a rambunctious and colourful home for a consideration of the cultural placement of the monkey in a human world. Its soundtrack rattles through the corridors, adding to the air of surreality suffusing the environment.

Scarponi engaged directly and successfully with the students to investigate demographic and urban issues and values from the perspective of the child and Anthony Kelly and Roche's Superbia banner, with its apparent 'glue spilt on floor, whoops, sorry' stylistic schema, was a fitting coda (and welcome) to Superbia 2.