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| Liam O’Callaghan: Chaos and dreams yet to come, 2005, installation shot, courtesy the artist |
The idea of “chaos and dreams yet to come” describes the space between the ugliness that can give rise to beauty, and the perception of beauty itself. This interval is hectic with possibilities, pregnant with potential for the marvellous, and yet it is also a fragile space, held with a delicate balance from slipping back to disorder and losing beauty’s possibility altogether. Liam O’Callaghan’s exhibition at the RHA turns on this moment of balance, and adds an edge to the enquiry that lifts the exhibition beyond a simple essay in pop philosophy.
One of five works in the exhibition, Chaos and dreams yet to come is a massive wall projection of a gorgeous crystalline world; glittering diamonds, silver shards, fractured slivers of icy blue. That this beauty is not only predicated on ugliness and disorder, but is also illusory, transitory, is underlined by the physical nature of the apparatus that creates it. Beneath the beautiful vista lies a bed of broken wing mirrors, the piled up wreckage of crashed, destroyed cars, shattered in accidents or wrenched from useless rusting vehicles. Projectors, jerry-rigged with string and balanced on old, half-broken stools pile up, shine light on the waste-heap which reflects into the beauty above. It is Plato’s cave in reverse, the reflection coming not from an object more perfect, more beautiful, but one wrought from chaos. Looking down again, however, you start to wonder whether there is beauty too in the broken mirrors, something beyond their initial repulsion.
This theme is drawn out too in Time finds you a good place to fall. Two board-walls are looped with wires, plug boards, extension cables. Venturing to the other side, the pay off is a mesmerising haze of tiny lights, diffused with gauze, softly shining like hundreds of little gentle suns. (Comparisons with Andrew Kearney’s works here rest on shared media, rather than the thesis of the works.) Why do we connect beauty and ugliness so powerfully? Why is it that we sometimes cannot tell which it is we are looking at?
The age-old pairing of the two, and the confluence of both (the mess of wiring behind the beauty of the lights, the guts and intestines behind a beautiful body, the imperfection that counterpoints perfection), may in fact come from psychological rather than religious or philosophical origins. The same area of the brain (the orbitofrontal cortex) responds to both the beautiful and the ugly. Exactly the same cells fire in response, but fire more strongly at the beautiful. Both beauty and ugliness also stimulate the motor cortex, creating that well-known physical response to each. This implies that those drawn to ugliness are responding pathopsychologically, rather than through moral or aesthetic aberration.
Whatever its origins, beauty invites and provokes contemplation, and yet it is often a hidden and private thing. Sometimes you have to know how to look, and look closely and well, in order to find it. O’Callaghan’s contribution to last year’s The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure at Carlow RTC (Reviewed Circa112) showed the minute and often unpleasant detritus of life (scrapings of skin, food scraps, dust) turned into glowing jewels when viewed through the magical eye of the artist’s carefully placed slide viewers.
At the RHA Gallery, beauty is a secretive moment of joy in an otherwise ordinary day. Another day with song (3.25 pm) has another ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ of a projector rigged up to show a grainy film on which a middle-aged woman in a typical suburban house dances with the happy abandon usually shown only by those who consider themselves to be unobserved (or who are drunk). Sensor activated, and depending on when you went to view the exhibition, sometimes the woman is an exhibitionist, beginning her routine as you enter the gallery, but more poignantly she is sometimes shy, the flickering of the screen and movement of the looped film coming to a halt as you move around to see the screen, leaving only an unsatisfying glimpse of a moment destroyed by one’s own desire to witness it.
Other works in the exhibition seem like marginalia, discursive commentary on the larger themes in the two main events (Chaos and dreams yet to come, and Time finds you a good place to fall). The delicate balance between the states of order and chaos is physically referenced in needs lean to each other, wooden planks leaning like lurching, staggering skyscrapers, and held up by just two strategically placed glass jars. Meanwhile, See change adumbrates the projection in Chaos… with the shape of a pile of boxes (cardboard sketches for Rachel Whiteread’s ongoing Embankment perhaps) becoming a city skyline when outlined by the artist, enlarged on the wall beyond. Following the bombast of Tristin Lowe, and the deliberately chic obscurantism of Robert Gober in the RHA’s accompanying exhibitions, Liam O’Callaghan’s work provides moments of intensely welcome, thought-provoking beauty.
Gemma Tipton is a writer andcritic on art and architecture based in Dublin.
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