VISUAL ARTS/SOUTH

"Kilkenny Cats"

This year's Kilkenny Arts Week kicked off with an artists' round table discussion at the James O'Donoghue & Co Gallery, a terrific temporary exhibition space in the erstwhile Crotty's Bakery building. The topic up for discussion - '25 Years of Progress in Art?' - was, one felt, intended to provoke. It would be hard, these days, to find many takers for Ernst Gombrich's thesis in The Story of Art, which views Western art from the pre-renaissance to the admittedly muddy waters of the 20th century as a remarkably straightforward linear progression. Or, similarly, Clement Greenberg's notion of an art form progressively defining and refining itself through the expression of its essential qualities. 

Colin Wiggins, an art historian from the National Gallery in London, was in the chair. It was pretty clear from the beginning that no-one was going to argue the case for progress, primarily because they felt art does not, in general, progress in any readily acceptable sense of the term. "No-one here is a better painter than Rembrandt," as Albert Irvin put it. 

But British sculptor Richard Wilson gamely came up with a wheels-within-wheels argument. Progress as such might be an irrelevant idea, but on the other hand, he suggested, technology has progressed and technological developments are inevitably adapted and employed by artists. Not to mention the impact such developments have on education. Where he felt there had certainly been no progress at all was in "the intersection of the media and art." Art was not well served by print and electronic media. This prompted general agreement. 

Wiggins directed the discussion into the debate over painting. Would the demise of painting be an example of progress, whether good or bad? Not only were there several painters around the table, one of them was Hughie O'Donoghue, known not only as a painter, but as a passionate advocate of painting's enduring relevance. "Its archaic nature is partly what makes it a powerful medium," O'Donoghue argued. "When you lift up a paint brush you're embarking on a dialogue with tradition." As he saw it, while the last 25 years had given artists the freedom to do more things, that didn't necessarily mean they would do good things. 

John Bellany harkened back to Richard Wilson's point about technology, suggesting that the exponential growth in computer use actually made certain properties of painting more rather than less pertinent. Computers, he said, while delivering ever more imagery, and despite their capacity for spatial simulation, continue to distance us from the tactile. They deal in exclusively flat, "frontal imagery." 

One member of the audience put the cat back among the pigeons when she said that, while virtually everyone around the table had ruled out the idea of progress in the wider context of art history, presumably they would all own up to progress in the context of their own work. Didn't artists progress? Even allowing for the common occurrence of a cyclical dynamic in an artist's work, many artists do indeed progress. 

As with evolution, however, the question is whether they progress in the direction of what might be termed improvement. The Victorian response was an unequivocal yes. But a more subtle reading of the evidence suggests otherwise. And so it is with the visual arts in the both individual and general contexts. At any given time, an enormous number of factors, on both personal and public levels, influences the trajectory of an art - and an artist's - development. There are advances and reversals and usually, as John Gibbons remarked: "You can't go forwards without going backwards." I don't know whether the development of visual culture is, strictly speaking, an evolutionary process but, as with so much else, evolutionary theory provides an interesting framework within which to consider it.

Aidan Dunne