Circa 115: Article

Patrick Ireland, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, lead 1 (slow heartbeat) 1966 wood, glass, liquitex, motor 43x43x10cm

Based in the US since the 1950s, artist Patrick Ireland was in Dublin recently to install a retrospective exhibition of his work. This will be the inaugural show when the Hugh Lane gallery reopens this April. While making art as Patrick Ireland, the artist is also known as Brian O’Doherty, writer and author of the influential Inside the White Cube essays. When first published in Artforum, the essays both coined the term ‘white cube’ and defined subsequent discussions about the architecture, aesthetics and politics of the gallery space.

GT:: The Hugh Lane has a series of new galleries (designed by architect Des McMahon of Gilroy McMahon). You’re creating a Rope drawing for one of these. What do you think of the spaces?

PI:: They are wonderful. Dublin finally has some splendid museum galleries. Des McMahon’s spaces court both the art and the spectator. I believe that people go mad in bad buildings, and in good buildings people behave well. Buildings inflect behaviour.

GT:: Many know your work from the White Cube texts, I think the Rope drawings can be read as visual essays on the subject. The White Cube is an incredible book to read, not least because its arguments and ideas, while complex, are presented in an unexpectedly ‘non-academic’ way.

PI:: It’s not a scholar’s work. Here’s this thing – the gallery – nobody looks at, and you realise that it is laden with content. Far from neutral, the walls speak in various howls and choruses. If I were an academic I would have done the thing with footnotes and whatnot, and nobody would have paid the slightest attention, but I did a kind of ironic, provocative thing.

GT:: One of the reasons I think it is so brilliant is because it runs counter to that idea of having to work harder for an insight or a piece of information. The theory goes that if you have to think about something more, you value it more. By that argument, you would have to make your writing highly complex.

PI:: I think life’s hard enough already without complicating it more.

Looking at O’Doherty/ Ireland’s body of work as a totality is quite complicated, however. Brian O’Doherty’s writing does not only encompass art criticism. He is a novelist, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, with The Deposition of Father McGreevy. Since 1972 he has made art as Patrick Ireland and, for a time, art criticism and art work under the persona of Sigmund Bode (other aliases have included Mary Josephson and William Maginn). Ireland’s work is in collections at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges PomPI::dou in Paris, and Dublin’s Hugh Lane. O’Doherty also qualified as a medical doctor and studied Experimental Psychology. While he has drawn attention to the idea of different personas by his use of different names, O’Doherty / Ireland’s discussions and ideas overlap.

GT:: It would seem from this distance as if you have a facility for taking up different disciplines and excelling at them with little apparent effort.

PI:: You’re implying I approach things with a facile, liquid insouciance, when in fact I’m more like a PI::g on a track, determinedly truffling my way up a hill.

GT:: The different disciplines do intersect, however. In the Rope drawings and the Ogham drawings and sculptures, there’s an attention to ideas of architecture, and an understanding of how the mind works.

PI:: I wouldn’t be so brave as to say I understand that. But I did work in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge while I was there on a ‘phoney’ scholarship – phoney in that it was arranged by a friend, no virtue of mine.

GT:: And later, there was another scholarship?

PI:: That was Harvard. I was recommended by Professor E. F. O’Doherty (no relation) at University College Dublin, Tom McGreevy, and Jack Yeats. I used to visit Jack Yeats; I did a portrait of him. He had the most beautiful lines and this great dome of a forehead. I had twenty minutes to get it right, and I’m not good at likenesses, but I got that one, the force was with me… There is an awful lot of early drawing. I was a good draftsman. But it won’t be in this exhibition, it wouldn’t fit.

GT::: While the early drawings may not fit, there are different strands that do coalesce in your work. There is you as the person who has investigated the way the mind works, who is interested in the processes; there’s the writer who has unravelled art as a critic (and also as former Editor of Art in America) in terms of colour, form, line, aesthetics; then there is the author who has explored the ideologies of the gallery. Approaching your work, initially it seems incredibly disperse and disconnected, but I don’t think it is.

PI:: I favour dispersal in life, I don’t like synthesis. But given that there is an innate and deep human desire to synthesise, I’m sure somebody someday will put together a convincing portrait of my selves that I will buy, becoming that person’s fantasy for the rest of my life. In the meantime I exist in a state of happy dislocation.

GT:: You commented of Stuart Davis that “he searched disorder for its unifying principle.” Are you saying the same about yourself?

PI:: Not me. The whole idea of identity was such a number in the fifties. It still is, I suppose. I remember the phrase when I was a kid, “ah well, he must find himself.” I never was impressed by the psychological bric-à-brac of the fifties, of “finding yourself.” If you found it, it probably wouldn’t be worth much anyway. I feel deeply that society eternally tries to limit you. People limit each another in order to perceive each other clearly. If they go out of focus it’s socially disruptive.

GT:: Taking that idea of re-understanding a work through our personal knowledge of its author, it’s interesting that it was your Aspen 5+6 [a ‘magazine in a box’, edited by O’Doherty in 1967] in which Barthes chose to publish his essay, The death of the author. Did that come out of discussions that you had with him?

PI:: Yes. He came out to the house, the dog barked at him (he didn’t like the dog). We discussed what I was after. I was very clearly into rejecting that ‘self’ notion, and this chimed with him perfectly. He said “I think I may have something for you.” It came a few weeks later, and I thought “this is going to be a bloody revolution…” And it was, it was an enormously influential essay. I also got Susan Sontag to write on the aesthetics of silence, that was an influential one too. I got the right essays, I feel, including George Kubler’s, Style and the representation of historical time.

Born in Roscommon in 1928, O’Doherty exhibited in the Oireachtas, the RHA and Living Art, before leaving Ireland. Arriving in New York in 1961, he was at the beginning of what he describes as the “great paradigm shift” of the sixties. He also facilitated and influenced a second paradigm shift in his role at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the seventies, where he supported artist-run spaces, and noninstitutional practice. O’Doherty became friends with Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper and Marcel Duchamp. He went on to make what has been called the last portrait of Marcel Duchamp, a long, elegant grey box through which light moves past a series of small round windows, illuminating the pulses of a heartbeat in slowly mesmerising motion. In the sixties his colleagues were Eva Hesse, Dorothea Rockbourne, Mel Bochner, Peter Hutchinson, Robert Smithson and Sol LeWitt.

PI:: Having been defined by the culture, by the Ireland of the forties and fifties, I had to get out. Arriving in New York I felt I was in the Promised Land. I was very fortunate, because you can end up in despair and fury, like James Barry in London, with whom I have a great sympathy. I was lucky to be working as an artist in New York in the sixties, and I pushed hard for the alternative spaces as a part time bureaucrat in the seventies. This was needed because the commercial people were not able to, or didn’t want to, show what the artists were making.

GT:: I get a sense that you have either intellectual or ethical difficulties with the commercial gallery system?

PI:: Well, I rejected it, I didn’t want to be beholden to it. There are various forms of slavery and I suspect the middle men, the gatekeepers, the taste makers, the powerful. Among the group I ran with in New York, Eva Hesse was the most original artist that I ever met, intense as a hummingbird. I wanted to meet a couple of people there. I knew them from Time magazine, one of the cultural avatars of my youth. Stuart Davis was one, I admired him enormously. And Hopper, he caught something that no other realist painter had caught.

GT:: And you made a film about him?

PI:: Hopper’s silence. It premièred at the New York Film Festival; I was fortunate that they accepted it. Duchamp, Hopper and Davis were kind of heroes of mine, and Duchamp was a wonderful guy. I think a heartbeat was the right thing for him. I asked him if I could make his portrait and he said yes. He came to dinner and I brought him into the bedroom and I said would you lie down, take off your shoes, take off your socks, and he did everything without a question. Very cool. I attached the electrodes, and when I was looking at his cardiogram as it printed out he said, “How am I?” and I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten how to read these.” “Well,” he said, “thank you, from the bottom of my heart, anyway.”

GT: Barbara [Novak, whom O’Doherty married in 1960] tells the story of bumPI:ng into Duchamp on the street some time later, and him asking her “Am I still working? Is my heart still beating?” But looking at Duchamp’s Mile of string [1927], could you see it as a sort of a sketch for what you were doing later on with the Rope drawings?

PI: I hate when people say that, because it certainly was far from my mind. What he was doing was harassing the exhibition. The other artists let him do it and they were crazy to let him. He webbed off their work, and hired two kids (Sidney Janis’ children) to run up and down the gallery and annoy people, it was a witty anti-art Dada gesture. I was thinking of how to draw in space. The first Rope drawings had no painted walls, they were in space, and they were full of make-and-break connections. I put up a rope in my studio and attached a PI:ece of nylon to the end of it, so it looked like an Indian rope trick, and I studied it for months. Duchamp was far from my mind. My gesture was anti-Duchamp. Duchamp said, “you put it up on the museum wall and it dies.” I said “what if I put your heartbeat up on the wall? That would contradict you.” Anti-Duchamp.

GT: Except that Duchamp would adore that dialogue and would have kept it going; he’s about creating questions, getting you going to the next bit.

PI: One of the thrills in my life was watching Duchamp looking at his heartbeat. He’s looking at it and I’m looking at him looking at it.

GT: How long before he died did you make that piece?

PI: About a year.

In 1972 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Brian O’Doherty staged a performance, Name change, assisted by Robert Ballagh and Brian King, a response to the killings in Derry on Bloody Sunday. The artist’s body was painted orange from the head down and green from the feet up, until the colours merged to become indecipherable and indistinguishable in murky brown. Thomas McEvilly quotes the artist as saying he looked like “an atrocity victim.”¹ He then signed a legal document, witnessed by Gordon Lambert, Dorothy Walker and Colm Ó Briain (among others), declaring that he would sign his artworks with the name Patrick Ireland “until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.”

GT: Back to that idea of fracturing of identity to explore different strands, different ways of seeing and looking at things: there’s a line in your novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, where you say that English isn’t a language to use to describe terrible things like storms and mountains, that as a language it’s too flat. Do you think that the same is true of aesthetics in Ireland? In an introduction to The Irish imagination (1971), you wrote about how Irish art was perceived as being in an “atmospheric mode,” and with “a restless fix on the unimportant,” describing a sense of Irish art as coming from a more fluid, emotional place.

PI: It’s quite different now. Back then you would have been an Irish artist, now you’re an artist in Ireland. You have to remember that that was postwar Ireland. There was this anomie, everyone was mad at us, the English were mad at us and so were the Americans. Our neutrality had meant that Roosevelt’s ships had to go around Scotland and get attacked by U Boats. We were loved by nobody.

GT: And possibly not by ourselves.

PI: Postcolonial is a very harsh status. The fractured national identity was reproduced in my own family. Two of my uncles, both doctors, joined the British army; then there were the Brennan Boys, and one of them was my Uncle Paddy. He told me hair-raising stories, because war is so barbarous. I always think that the social layer over us is paper thin, I wonder how we can stagger through the day without killing each other. So there was a fracture within the family psyche and national psyche. I experienced that fully. One of my responses to that as a young medical student, at seventeen or eighteen, was that I went devotedly around Dublin looking for some tradition that would be meaningful to me. I went all over, thinking there must be something that gives me a sense of selfhood, of pride and past. I loved my city; back then it was a city you could love, it was parochial, it was small and it was full of brilliant people, like Tony Cronin, Neil Montgomery, Brendan Behan. It’s just like the rest of the world here now.

GT:: Do you think you will be retaining the name Patrick Ireland indefinitely?

PI:: Until the British Army gets out of Northern Ireland. Then there will be a formal burial of Patrick Ireland. I wanted him buried in consecrated ground, by a sympathetic priest. George Segal was to make the burial mask. Lee Krasner said “you’re never going to get your name back.” I’m not an astute politician, but healings have taken place in divided countries, and I do believe that the North has a lot to offer.

GT:: Away from the politics of the situation, you were using aliases already, with your creation of Sigmund Bode.

PI:: I was unhappy with most of the art I saw. I wanted to create somebody who would make art that was not like the generally post-Cubist art that was in Ireland. Fortunately all Sigmund’s Klee-like drawings are long gone, but it was a liberation. My eyes were on Bauhaus and Moscow.

Described as a Conceptual artist, Patrick Ireland has made work often concerned with acknowledging, and then opening up, structures. From the Ogham sculptures and drawings to meditations and performances based on the grid, there’s a balance to be found between an expression of repression and an idea of infinite potential. You cannot escape the frame of the grid; nonetheless it is a frame which encapsulates everything possible.

PI:: I think we’re all trying to escape the grid. The grid is a cliché, but I wanted to say something new about it. Ros Krauss talks about the rigidity of the grid, and I talk about its mobility. It’s supposed to be an index of everything that’s rational, but it’s as mad as many logical things prove to be.

GT:: How closely do those ideas follow someone like Beckett, with his play, Quad, for example?

PI:: Well mine are mine, and his are his. I think his are absolutely brilliant – great numerical footwork.

GT:: And as a Conceptual artist, how do you feel about that idea of giving the viewer quite a lot of intellectual work to do?

PI:: I don’t know that I am one. The galleries always hated conceptual work because they couldn’t sell it. And then again it’s just ideas. There was a great reaction against the ‘hand’, a whole anti-canvas, anti-painting thing in the sixties, painting is dead…Periodically painting is dead, and then it struggles up from the grave and starts beating on canvasses. What the hell is conceptual? Duchamp said that “dumb as an artist” was a phrase in his youth, and he wanted to make an art that had some thinking in it. My art is as much about thinking as looking. If you make something beautiful or fascinating along the way, then you get lucky.

GT:: Like your Ogham sculptures, your aluminium Ogham Pillar The rake’s progress draws you in, seduces you by its beauty; meanwhile another part of your mind is working on the rational side of what you are looking at.

PI:: So I was never a pure Conceptual artist at all, because pure Conceptual artists need a sheet of paper, a camera and a magazine, not a gallery.

GT:: Perhaps then it’s not a great understanding of architecture, of architectural history, of theories of aesthetics that you need to bring to a Rope drawing, just a bit of time to move through it and look?

PI:: A bit of time, and don’t forget to bring your own self. It’s the direct unmediated experience. A Rope drawing enables you to do something that people don’t do, to pay attention to yourself. Most people go through life, in my view, semi-anaesthetised, swaddled in media.

GT:: Well, it can be more comfortable. One of the thrills, walking through the Rope drawing downstairs [in the Hugh Lane], is the way you get a physical sensation of the way the space is changing and altering. The way the colours move, the way the purples and yellows come forward and recede in ways you didn’t expect purples and yellows to do.

PI:: Whatever the Rope drawings are, they’re not geometry, they’re changing every minute.

GT:: And there’s this idea, for example, with your Big A drawing [1984], that the lines extending from the ‘A’ underline that sense that everything you say or do has consequences, resonances. Infinite lines of cause and effect spread from them. You never have an isolated action or an isolated figure in space, you always have the ramifications of its presence.

PI:: Yes, because the points of attachment describe the container.

GT:: But it’s you that creates that by seeing it.

PI:: That is correct, without you it isn’t anything.

Gemma Tipton is a writer and critic on art and architecture based in Dublin. She is the editor of Circa's book on art and architecture, Space: architecture for art.

1 Thomas McEvilly, ‘An artist & his aliases – Brian O’Doherty/ Patrick Ireland’, Art in America, May, 1999

Patrick Ireland: Golden roor (rope drawing no. 110), installation view form Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane: photo John Kellet: courtesy the artist/ Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane

Beyond the white Cube, Brian O' Doherty/ Patrick Ireland Retrospective is at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane from early May 2006

Reprinted from Circa 115, Spring 2006, pp. 48 - 53