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| Fiona Mulholland: For every action…, 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
Fiona Mulholland is an artist whose sculptures explore the fragility of the human condition. An earlier public art commission, Commemorative tower to the hobblers, 2002, sited in Dún Laoghaire Harbour, expressed through the use of stacked life-jackets, cast in bronze, the vulnerability of the human body in the face of the power of the forces of nature and the sea.
Her recent solo exhibition, For every action …, rather than dealing directly with the body, considered the mind, examining contemporary issues such as stress, mental health and social expectations, through the use of sound work and sculpture. The work was made largely in response to an article in The Economist magazine – The Economist Intelligence Unit’s quality of life index – which placed Ireland first in a list of the best places in the world to live. Mulholland set about testing this hypothesis by interviewing thirty Dubliners and posing three questions: What would you do if you won the Lotto? What is success? What causes you stress? The resulting responses were edited into three forty-minute sound works, which were accessible from three listening points placed at different points around the gallery, while throughout the space the loud beating of a metronome, counting time, could be heard. The sound works were accompanied by two large sculptures. The first of these was an industrial reel of newsprint, spooled onto the floor, on which was printed the entire text from the Quality of life index. The second sculpture was a giant Newton’s cradle, constructed from stainless steel, which dominated the gallery space.
The sheer size and shininess of Mulholland’s cradle gave it a Koonsian, post-Pop quality, and these same features allowed it to successfully command the notoriously difficult space of Dún Laoghaire Concourse. Newton’s cradle demonstrates his third law of motion: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Mulholland borrows the title of her exhibition from Newton and for these works applies scientific formulae to her artistic process – quantifying the quality of life of her peers through their responses to her questionnaire. Many artists make use of questionnaires in their practice, notably Richard Humann and Tobias Rehberger, but while Rehberger uses them as clues to future production, Mulholland presented the responses directly to her audience – the results make for compelling listening. Many of the responses were disappointingly pedantic, some were pure fantasy, but somewhere in between, deeply held frustrations and worries were revealed: health, debt, stress, work, love, relationships, pregnancy (or lack of), weight, panic attacks… the list goes on. The answers were surprisingly frank, having a quality akin to a Big brother confessional, and were similarly engaging. Newton’s cradle is also known as an ‘executive pacifier’, and unsurprisingly the majority of respondents were stressed by their working lives. While our GDP (per person) is now ranked fourth in the world, the equal and opposite reaction, revealed by Mulholland, is that people are increasingly losing time to their careers to the detriment of their personal lives – in the words of one of her respondents, “Money is time, and time is all we’ve got.”
Mulholland’s enquiries were gentle and nondirective. Her own opinions were not available to her audience – but the presence of the giant Newton’s cradle – that executive toy beloved of Gordon Gekko types everywhere, perhaps indicated her position on the matter. The size of the sculpture and its relation to the other objects in the installation (dwarfing them) suggests a positing by the artist that our insistence on economic success has been, and continues to be, detrimental to our well-being. During the run of Mulholland’s exhibition, Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly described contemporary Ireland in the following terms: “We drink too much, we are loutish, we’ve forgotten the joy of delayed gratification and we have abandoned the church. What Has Happened to Us?”1
Mulholland’s exhibition proposes two theoretical frameworks – a quantitative survey of happiness or a qualitative survey of economic success – which is a more troubling scenario? This seems to be the question posed by Mulholland – can you write an economic formula for happiness or can we quote the inimitable Gordon Gekko, “Greed is good”2?
1 Emily O’Reilly, The Irish Times, 9 November 2005
2 Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 20th Century Fox, 1987
Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
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