Current issue

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

Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist
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.

 

Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist
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.

Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist
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.

Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist
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.

Séamus Nolan: Hotel Ballymun, installation shot; courtesy the artist
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.

 

Reprinted from Circa 120, Summer 2007, pp. 80 - 82

Back to top of page

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
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


Art-college life: two new Circa surveys




Discounted Circa subscription rates



Please notify me about Circa-related acitvities; my e-mail address is:

It would also help us if you indicate your country of residence:

 
Sponsors (see Circa 'Friends'):
Major Supporters:   Partners:

  


art ireland irish
© Copyright 1999-2008
Circa Art Magazine
43/44 Temple Bar
Dublin 2, Ireland
Tel / Fax: +353 1 6797388
e-mail: info@recirca.com
  Our principal funders: