Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Kilkenny - (Dispatch from) Kilkenny Arts Festival - August 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | Tina O’Connell: Cube descending staircase , installation shot, Kilkenny Castle; courtesy Mike Fitzpatrick | Kilkenny has a particular strength as a setting for art: it takes art, especially contemporary art, out of its usual context and presents it in an environment that is defined by historical change. Even craftaware work, responsive to the slower, less artificial life of the countryside, camouflaging itself in premodern materials, finds itself jolted out into the landscape of severe incongruities that is Economic Boom rural Ireland (a zone of embarrassment that provides Nevan Lahart with his playground). Slick cosmopolitan pieces, on the other hand, have to vie for attention with ads for mastitis cures and Bunny Carr catchphrases. There is no simple now in which the artwork can make its claim, which is to say that the ‘contemporary’ of ‘contemporary art’ comes under scrutiny. The effect extends as well to the inhabitants of the artworld. After pub closing on Thursday night, I found myself at a confluence of cultural streams in the ‘Home Rule Club’. There were national and international arts players slopping about, along with the local movers and shakers, but the surrounds were genuinely those of a ‘Home Rule Club’ – there was a palpable sense of continuity with the values of the nineteenth century about the sparsely furnished rooms. Suddenly current interests were in a different perspective. Of course, the historical continuum generated by Kilkenny goes back considerably further than the age of Parnell. If you arrive in the city through the train station, you are granted an interesting vista from the slightly raised ground. Only ecclesiastical and medieval perpendiculars break the low skyline of rooftops: there are no midrise Victorian commercial and institutional blocks, the glass and concrete quick-grow towers of global capitalism have yet to sprout. It struck me forcibly that this must have been what the great European cities all looked like in the era before industrialisation. In a country with a unique continuity of contact with the middle ages, Kilkenny is particularly close to the world of scholasticism and Christendom. Which is not as great a boon to the tourist trade as it might sound: the main effect of this sense of continuity is not one of romance and the charm of bygone days, but of strange cross-historical resonances. Up until recently we might have thought of such resonances in terms of ‘historical irony’, especially if we viewed matters from the perspective of a Francis Fukuyama. But history in the new century has proved itself all too real, too close and too much alive for us to maintain the position of ironists (or for Fukuyama to remain confident about the triumphal march of global capitalism). A good example was provided by the Aynur Dogan concert, also on Thursday night. History crackled as a powerful voice out of an Islamic tradition issued from the high altar of the crusading Normans’ Christian cathedral. I began to wonder whether here was an authentic testament to an all-inclusive culture of secularism. Then it dawned on me that the music, and the instruments of the minstrel-like Istanbul-based musicians, amplified as they were, were probably closer to medieval styles than to anything that had developed in European modernity. And any simple notion of harmonious secular absorption was completely swept away as a number of youths carrying a national flag (I am guessing that they were Kurdish) made their way to the front of the all-seated affair (drawing anxious glances from some in the audience, and probing looks from the musicians) and, after attempts at making contact with the band, organised a group dance in one of the aisles. There was nothing really sinister about the whole affair, but it jarred nonetheless. History, which had seemed so well managed, so neatly in the background, hadmanaged to take centre-stage. So what happens when a canonical figure of contemporary art like Vito Acconci is brought into such a context? This is what Mike Fitzpatrick, director of the Limerick City Gallery and commissioner of Ireland’s next entry for the Venice Biennale , had done as part of his Failure show. In general, I was far from sure that the word ‘failure’ could be credibly associated with his offering of lo-fi American and internationally savvy Irish artists (and the celebrated poetic loser Bas Jan Ader). Something along the lines of ‘slacker’ or ‘slackness’ would have been more accurate. But Acconci’s work was a different matter. Ever since I’d heard him in Cork in 2005 describe the trajectory of his work, from the extremely interesting text pieces of the late sixties (eg the almost Beckett- or Geoffrey Squires-like RE : [1969]), to the famous performative Following piece (1969) and Seedbed (1972), through his installations and their increasing concern with architectural space, to the establishment of an actual architectural practice, Acconci Studios in 1988, I’d had the feeling that something had gone wrong somewhere along the way. The fact that the pieces presented at Kilkenny were text and aural performances of entries to architectural competitions that hadn't even made the model stage, sharpened the issue. There was real tension in the battle between Acconci’s charismatic, forceful gravel-pit of a voice and the airy impossibility of the constructions described, a tension somehow lacking in his finished or more finished buildings. As Acconci’s recent work approached the issue of failure, it grew in strength. The direction which my puzzling out of this conundrum took, and the idea that posessed me that Acconci could be viewed as a kind of patron saint of a ‘masculinist art’, was certainly influenced by my surroundings on Friday: the Norman fortifications and priory in which the Sculpture @ Kells exhibition was situated. Most of the work here, the result of a Welsh – Irish exchange, was informal, inconsequential, ephemeral – it nestled weed-like among the monumental walls, and prided itself on its marginality. Craig Wood’s three small glass domes, of the kind that usually contain funerary wreaths, but here holding memorials to failed modern empires, set the tone: this was art legitimising itself in terms of its posthumous character, art after the grand nomoi , the socially constructive ideals, not quite resisting anything, but politically beyond suspicion. Tina O’Connell’s work, represented at Kells and as part of the Failure show, pointed to the formal issues at stake: subversive, opening up the gestalt forms of a Minimalist aesthetic to temporal and perceptual processes (a black geometrical form slowly melted down the steps of Kilkenny Castle). Thrown into relief, the buildings begun by Strongbow’s right-hand man Geoffrey FitzRobert, confidently set their nomoi , formal and ideological, into the landscape, establishing an order that can be still felt in the Ormonde territories. Serenely impressive, it was still possible to be reminded of the scenes in the background of Maclise’s Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife , the Victorian’s counterpointing of the harmonious birth of a new order with scenes of the wanton destruction of the old. Like Tina O’Connell’s objects, Acconci’s work is phenomenologically aware, and his most famous pieces are directly related to Minimalism. The latter movement was in itself an answer to an inherited set of values, some“objectionable relics of European art” as Donald Judd put it, and put in their place a ne plus ultra of spatial aesthetics. Going beyond Greenberg’s models for an international Modernism, delocalised and referenceless and thus translatable globally (from a New York base), they established the gallery space itself as the last artistic value. For Acconci this was all too impersonal, and in Seedbed he inserted his own smelly, demanding body into the same space, already aestheticised by Minimalism. The recognition of this act as ‘masculinist’ is unavoidable: quite apart from the sense that this a gesture in the tradition of Jackson Pollock’s machismo self-projection, there is the concrete reality of Acconci’s body to deal with. Once this convulsive bond with the public was achieved, however, he became more and more concerned with the manipulation of this interpersonal space, eventually ending up in an architecture conceived in terms of phenomenological navigations of bodily space. Or, to look at it from another angle, he ended up with Autocad and an endlessly proliferating set of spatial navigators – ‘inside/outside’, ‘curved’, ‘twisted’, ‘perforated’, ‘above/ below’, etc – by which he conceives his structures. As successful buildings they possess all the ‘now’ of Greenbergian Modernism, but in their inhabitation of the post-Minimalist world of purely spatial values, a success facilitated by the use of engineering software, they are curiously lacking in real tension or interest. But as failures they are something else. The hollow forms become inflated, lift briefly and shift and shimmer on the artist’s breath. A last remnant of embodiment, Acconci’s deep insistent voice conveys through Hemingwaylike staccato sentences a male desire to construct and order, but in an environment already ordered out of reach of the old, dangerous nomoi . Acconci is back again masturbating under the gallery floor: a frustrated Le Corbusier with the body of Picasso. Which is not to say that the managed society is firmly in place. From the perspective of Kilkenny and its intrusive histories, ‘now’ is something both established and unresolved. Fergal Gaynor is a writer, independent scholar and member of the art-group art/ not art. Kilkenny - (Dispatch from) Kilkenny Arts Festival -
|
|
