Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun
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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.
Comment 1 on 2007-06-01 19:05:33
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
Comment 2 on 2007-08-20 08:42:33
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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