Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Editorial.
Circa 118: The ‘work’ performed by Art History and Art Criticism differs. Criticism, very broadly defined to include Visual Studies, Cultural Studies and the like, is for now; it is active, and for artists it can point the theoretical way forward and impact directly on the art that gets made. Art History is more reflective. It is telling, though perhaps near-inevitable, that many undergraduate Art History courses do not cover anything approaching
contemporary art; a gap is left for time to do its work. It isn’t that simple, though: the forces that turn present art into the future past art of the Art History books are not passive or necessarily benign. This is a truism amongst most cultural theorists, but sometimes less so amongst art historians. In this issue we revisit an essay by James Elkins printed in the summer issue of this year. It was titled The state of Art History in Ireland , revisited . It looked at the problems Elkins diagnosed in Art History teaching here, and it suggested possible solutions. We are very lucky to be able to have in this issue eight responses to Elkins’ text, along with Elkins’ own response to those responses. It is easy to see enormous potential for dialogue and synergy. The stakes are high: if what is taught and researched at third level is appropriate to the matter in hand, the benefits can be enormous; if not, then art here will suffer. Broad cultural criticism, with a Belfast accent, has been the seam mined for a number of years now by The Vacuum , a freesheet in which the serious analysis and the tongue-in-cheek happily coexist. When The Vacuum strayed into religious territory in 2004, it ran foul of one of its co-funders, Belfast City Council. Concerned as they are with very different ways of viewing the world and human potential, when art falls under the scrutiny of politics the result is seldom edifying and sometimes farcical. In this issue, Colin Graham analyses the ‘Vacuum case’, tracing how the freesheet has countered with wit and savvy the official commodification of Belfast. There is a lot of wit also in the work of Caroline McCarthy, whose output is analysed in this issue by Chris Townsend. Townsend detects in her art a ‘modernist’ attraction to consumer goods, but with little high-art seriousness. McCarthy has earned great respect over the last decade or so for the way in which ‘simple’ interventions on everyday goods can turn them into signifiers of much greater import, causing 'throw-away’ objects to reflect back on their consumers. If McCarthy’s is a could-be world, Susan MacWilliam’s is more a could-it-be? one. Noel Kelly writes about her in this issue. He describes the coming-together in her work of the vaudvillean, the paranormal and the scientific, all reflected in the looking glass of aesthetic analysis. MacWilliam’s work muddles how things ‘should be’; in particular, science is supposed to be the objective arbitor, with art a softer, possibly more decorative, adjunct. MacWilliam so mixes the ‘metanarratives’ of science, art and the occult that primacy is neatly handed over to the viewer; it’s quite an act of prestidigitation. What else? There’s the ‘25th’ cover. We felt it was worth signalling again that Circa is twenty-five years old this year; the first issue was dated November/ December 1981. Then there are the fine ads from fine advertisers, the news, reviews and a project by Mary Healy that – echoing the Art History/ Art Criticism distinction mentioned above – interprets classic images in a contemporary mode. Enjoy! by Peter FitzGerald
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