Circa 120: Review
This page is from issue 120 of Circa, summer 2007; we have uploaded it early, to allow discussion of the Hotel Ballymun project.
Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, Ballymun, Dublin, March - April 2007
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
Why can’t I simply say that this was
a fine and timely concept, realised
with great care – not to mention an
enjoyable experience? It was all of
these things, but that didn’t seem to
be enough.
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
I woke in the bright, spare space of
a converted top-floor flat of the
Clarke Tower and found myself
admiring the inventiveness of a
recycled chair, a single object made
from an interlocking pair of remains.
It was novel and perfectly functional,
both eccentric and Amish, and I
found it difficult to take my eyes off
it. Then again, I could spend as long
as I liked enjoying it: this was, after
all, my bedroom. Nearby, a weedy
flower in a glass vase caught the
sunshine in its intricate threadwork
of roots. Then up from the perfectly
comfortable, mainly recycled bed,
and I was able to sample the view
from the balcony. Spread out like a
socialist model, on either side of
an avenue of Central European
proportions, New Ballymun was
taking shape among the condemned
remains of sixties planning. Out
there, it was a matter of wiping it out
and starting again – bigger, glossier,
more desirable to the monied. In here
was a radically different economy,
one that recycled, incorporated
fragments of the past, kept matters
simple. It was a quiet and effective
critique. Add to that the continual
programme of satellite projects (on
the previous day, apart from an art/
not art ‘Clinic’ in the Towers Bar in
which I was involved, Janice
Feighery, originally from Ballymun,
had conducted an event in which
public participants had been led by
instruction to local houses, to enjoy
tea and conversation with the
occupants), and Hotel Ballymun took on the extra dimension of being
an artist-run exhibition/ event space,
one growing invertedly downwards
from its sunny, towertop flower to a
filigree of local connections below.
All well and good, within its bounds.
But the space enclosed, an iconic,
ideologically and humanly charged
space, was never going to rest easily
within such bounds. Clarke Tower
juts as much into the public realm,
into our understanding of public
mismanagement and its
consequences of hardship and
misery, as it does into the sky above
North Dublin. It was never going to
be possible, within that space, to
simply reflect upon the wastefulness
and lack of imagination of the
dominant economy, no matter how
well such a reflection was linked into
local circuits of exchange. From
conversation with Séamus Nolan,
I was given the impression that to
some extent such ‘dirtying’ of the
terms of the Hotel had been included
in his thinking. ‘Hotel Ballymun’ was
also an oxymoron, an uneasy concept,
and there was a quiet joke being
made at the expense of the guests,
unwittingly taking on the discomforts
of their situation with the comforts
of the artspace. That jokiness is
probably sufficient to keep at bay the
cascade of news and opinion that
accompanied the project (even the
British Observer covered the story –
was there a PR company involved?).
No, it wasn’t about bourgeois artists
enjoying the exotica of a workingclass
district; no, it doesn’t intend
to be a permanent ‘interpretation
centre’ of towerblock life. But there
were other alignments less easy to
keep at bay.
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
‘Community art’ often involves a deal
of duplicity. Funding is drawn and
projects are conducted under
public-policy slogans that are often
at odds with the spirit of the project
itself. To undertake community art –
and the best, edgiest community art
is undertaken by artists at odds with
current social values – the artist
must often bite their lip and compromise
in the face of perfectly pleasant,
‘neutral’ in their own minds,
representatives of managerialism.
Neither the purity of Nolan’s project
(a ‘purity’ I’d noticed before in his
‘bike workshop’ for the Communism show in Project in 2005), nor the
trickiness of the concept, was
sufficient to extricate its terms from
the ideology of the ‘Breaking
Ground’, Ballymun Regeneration
agenda. In other circumstances,
their patronage of the project and
their imprints on the catalogue might
not have mattered. But because of
the nature of the space, its strategic
importance, Nolan’s project became,
despite itself, something of a platform
for their agenda. Hotel Ballymun
was on the site of a contested
ground, and in its perfectly normal
collaboration with a funding body it
decisively ignored a major dimension
of that contest. It is an ‘ethical’
project, which is as much as it can
be within a managed space, yet it
needs to be something more.
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
This final paragraph is going to deal
with politics, because this is what
I felt was missing from Nolan’s
otherwise fine project: the political.
At no time did I feel when in
Ballymun that the ceiling of planners
and governance was broached –
by the Hotel, by its satellite projects
(including art/ not art’s), by the
visiting artists, or by the participating
locals, and yet this is the very
essence of what Ballymun means as
a public site of discourse. Ballymun
is all about a class of people, the
tenement occupants of inner-city
Dublin, being dislocated and radically
reorganized from above. What is
happening now in Ballymun is little
different – the organization may be
more sensitive, and there may be
considerably more public relations,
‘dialogues’ with the locals, press
releases to the greater public – but
it is still about one body organizing
another. By ‘politics’ I mean the
participation in power above the
locality, by the locals or their
representatives, the broaching of
the ceiling. Without this, the people
must remain ultimately disenfranchised,
their civic efforts continuing
to maintain the character of therapy,
image-production or consolatory
religion – that is, their activities will
always be a matter of adapting to
social circumstances, as if such
circumstances were in some way
‘natural’. Of course, others will find
ways to exploit the situation and
others again will fall prey to the
politics of frustration and anger
(the forthcoming election will see a
lot of support for Sinn Féin, for
instance, in such areas). Either way,
its civic life remains removed from
the sources of agency, and Ballymun
remains Ballymun, in the old, troubled
sense of the name, no matter what
its inner economy.
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
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| Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist |
Fergal Gaynor is an
independent scholar,
writer, and member of
art intervention group art/
not art.
Do
you have an opinion on this article? If so, please click here for our comments form.
| Responses so far |
| Comment 1 |
Im glad the reading of the piece includes a reading of the
context of its presentation.
One of the main objectives of the project has been to
broaden or make public the debate which surrounds the
situation of Ballymun, and although the project gained a
huge amount of media and public attention I dont think I
have publicly heard an informed criticism of the agenda of
the regeneration or the city. So i am glad that this review
makes an attempt at a political reading of the area. I do
consider this art work as containing the ability to
activate and question the inplicit relational structure of
its context, I do not consider it as containing the ability
to effect directly the general class or political structure
of Ballymun. Hotel Ballymun was the celebration of a
community and a place as I think it is important to
recognise not just the anti-social or deviant conotations
which have been heaped on to the area but also the huge
community activism and involvement which it has supported,
and if this envolves the local in a negative reading of the
project and the context of its production then this is
exactly the spirit which is being celebrated.
Hotel Ballymun the actual space, referenced the external
structure in which it was situated and intertwined, and in
this way, if there was a joke being made it was not at the
expense of those who interacted with the project but on
those whoes preconceptions of this imagined place dictated
their response.
Being part of the regeneration company, Breaking Ground
occupies a very tenious position between what has been
called the 'managerial' agenda and what is a well informed
cultural practice. I dont see how it is possible to
acknowledge one without the other, but do think it is
necessary to acknowledge both and in fact Hotel Ballymun
offers a conjective point of reference for such an agenda
to be questioned. Perhaps this might be seen as the ability
of the Rregeneration company to comfortably offer a
critique of itself but it does bring to the fore the
questions which surround such policy. As an artist not from
Ballymun i dont think I have the right to offer a polemic
which might incorporates the activity and perception of
that entire community but what I have tried to do is
broaden the debate which surrounds it and in that way the
review is perfect, apart from the idea that the project is
purely ethical when the discourse which it initiates is
actually political, as is obvious from the contents of the
review.
Seamus Nolan
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| Comment 2 |
I'm not exactly eager to return to my review: as Séamus'
response attests, 'Hotel Ballymun' was coherent and well
executed, and I had to deal with some subtle distinctions
in order to critique the project (it was a critique rather
than a criticism, that is, to do with limits and horizons
rather than inner illogicalities), Not only that, but my
prediction for the election was well wide of the mark (I've
probably got a lot to learn about voting behaviour)!
I've thought about it in the meantime and reckon that Séamus
was rather unfortunate in his experience with the press:
not only did he have to deal with tabloid outrage, but
'Hotel Ballymun' could easily have been treated in Circa
under a theoretical rubric - 'relational aesthetics' might
have suited - and received a very favourable review. I
suspect in fact that the main strut of my critique – the
distinction between 'politics' and 'ethics' – applies also
to much successful contemporary art, and is my main source
of suspicion concerning the whole 'relational' category. It
is interesting that Séamus' rejoinder on the subject of
politics (while he does "not consider [the project] as
containing the ability to affect directly the general class
or political structure of Ballymun" he still considers it
to be a political project) is echoed by Nicholas
Bourriaud's "nowadays, modernity extends into the practices
of cultural do-it-yourself and recycling, into the
invention of the everyday and the development of time
lived, which are objects not less deserving of attention
and examination than Messianistic utopias . . . there is
nothing more absurd . . . than the assertion that
contemporary art does not involve any political project"
(Relational Aesthetics 14).
Naïve or ironic references to old radical politics will
certainly get us nowhere, and it was telling that in the
context of the 'Communism' exhibition in the Project in
2005, Séamus' bike project stood out for its quiet
effectiveness. But the context of 'Hotel Ballymun' brought
in a whole new dimension – this was not a gallery space
evoking political traditions, but a living space already
radically politicized. The top-down radical displacement of
the Dublin inner-city population that created Ballymun was
an action of huge political disenfranchisement, and the
tower remained as a mark of that disempowerment of a local
people – public space as political vacuum. It was clear
from the managerialist structure of Ballymun's
regeneration, not to mention its commercial dimension
(Hotel Ballymun had its mainstream doppelgänger in the
Ballymun Plaza Hotel across the road, or boulevard), that
this depoliticisation was not going to be undone, but that
an apparatus of PR and administrative dialogue - an
apparatus typical of current governmental activity - was to
take the place of political agency. My critique of the
project, and of relational work in general (if I may be
allowed to blur the two together) is that it can find a
place within that agenda (on the other hand, it is hard to
know how art, if it is to be funded, cannot but fit in with
the same agenda) because it is not concerned with breaking
the ceiling of apoliticality, but concentrates instead on a
micropolitics (what I'm calling an 'ethics', Bourriaud's
"ways of living and models of action in the existing real")
that has little effect on the political (and technological
and commercial by extension) conditions or structure that
delineate the possibilities of the real (I was about to say
'outside of art' but it reaches back through the audience
into the art itself). The Deleuzian "grass grows from the
middle" is far too quietistic in a situation when the
constriction of the middle continues to be effected by the
relation of top to bottom (it is not the end of history)
and when that political relation itself cries out for
renewal. The problem with micropolitics is that it is in
danger, as the decades advance since the announcement of
the Spectacle in the sixties, of becoming yearly more
microscopic, and of even enjoying the rigour and subtlety
required to survive in that narrowing space. The 'micro'
comes to the fore as the possibility of any politics
evaporates; gallery systems, art markets, funding agencies
all continue without check on their way as the art they
support initiates utopian relations.
So, what is to be done? as the artworld habitually puts it
these days, echoing Lenin across a safe distance. This is a
far from easy question to answer, but it is a vital
question to raise. It may indeed be the case that we are at
the occasion of that question, of the time of 'politics',
when the growing emptiness of that term brings the ground
of the political to sight. I don't know if Laclau and
Mouffe's notion of 'agonism' grants any answers, but at
least it acknowledges the question. Relational art, I
suspect, often doesn't. It grew out of a discourse heavily
influenced by 1960s and '70s French philosophy and the
horizon of that philosophy was formed by the collapse of
belief in 'real existing socialism', by the recognition,
with Stalin's death, that what was regarded as 'the
rational' by French intellectuals had all along been
another apparatus of oppression. Politics was both
seductive and compromising. That context has passed away
and with it, as far as I'm concerned, the legitimate claims
of the micropolitical. It suits a lot of interesting art to
remain on that ground, these conditions in fact have
generated a deal of successful work since the early
nineties. What this has meant politically is another
matter, and it is impossible not to think in such terms in
a place like Ballymun.
Fergal Gaynor
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