CIRCA 85: News bits
 Our man Daan
Taking over as Administrator in our Belfast office is an artist and designer of impressive experience. Daan Bruijel will surely be a loss to Letterkenny Institute of Technology, where he has recently been, in his own words, "a cynical, hardened Graphic Design tutor." He also brings to CIRCA experience as an exhibition supervisor and photographer. He is a member of the Seacourt Print Workshop. His job in the Belfast office will include (for starters) sales, subscriptions and advertising. You’ll find him there from the start of October.
Silk Purse at Hugh Lane
Bringing home the Bacon, a slice of Bacon, and so on: the puns were inevitable, but the extent of the coverage is a sure indicator of how impressed the media have been by the Hugh Lane Gallery's coup in securing the studio of the late Francis Bacon. Of course the inherent theatrics help - the idea of moving everything, from spent paint-tube to bockety, kicked-in door, is a sure challenge to the imagination. Especially as the plan is to make it seem as though nothing has been moved, a mind-boggling exercise in modern archaeology. The panorama above gives an impression of just what a task the Hugh Lane faces.
Photos Perry Ogden courtesy Hugh Lane Gallery
Together with the studio, the Gallery inherits Bacon's last, unfinished self-portrait, left on the easel when he died.
One gap remains to be plugged in this scenario: how the studio is to be viewed by the public. It seems the studio may be split in two, with a passageway running through. No doubt a few other considerations will also be necessary, if the studio is not to become a source of paint for impoverished artists tempted beyond reason.
Déjà vu
"Essentially I am interested in art that comments on our human condition in as poetic and accessible a metaphor as possible. I want the Gallery to be a gymnasium for the eye, the intellect, and the soul, a place where the public can be touched by the intimacy of art and enjoy the play of opinion." Thus Patrick T. Murphy, just-appointed Director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin. He sports an convincing CV: former Visual Arts Officer at the Arts Council in Dublin, then Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, latterly Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia where he oversaw a major expansion of its remit. He says of the RHA Gallery that it "has the most excellent space and location in the city." It's hard not towonder if that word 'gymnasium' will come back to haunt him.
Up...
- The 1998 Random Access Video Training Symposium, at the Sculptors' Society of Ireland, has been awarded to two pairs of artists: Abigail O'Brien and Mary Kelly, Karl Burke and Augustine O'Donoghue. The Symposium gives these artists intensive access and training in the use of video.
- The first annual open exhibition at the Ormeau Baths, Belfast, called Perspective 98, offers the chance to win a cash prize of £6,000 stg or one of three additional awards of £1,000 stg. The exhibition opens on October 8. Selected artists are as follows: Joanne Berry, Alexa Brunet, Mark Dale, Blaise Drummond, Russell Hart, Ruth Jones, Mary Kelly, Conor McFeely, Mary McIntyre, Éamon O'Kane, Susan Philipsz, Anne Ryan, Dermont Seymour, Dan Shipsides, Theo Sims, Andrew Vickery, and Fiona Larkin.
- Corban Walker has been awarded the 1998/99 Studio Award for an Artist with a Disability, hosted by the Fire Station Artists' Studios, Dublin.
- The inaugural Fellowship in Sculpture, sponsored by First Active, has been awarded to Carol Kavanagh. She will be given twelve months' free workspace in the National Sculpture Factory and a materials bursary of IR£2,000.
...and down
Fotofeis, Scotland's "Biennial Festival of International Photo-based Arts," has bitten the dust, having had its funding from the Scottish Arts Council withdrawn. Given that the Biennial had received so many awards, the frustration of its Chairman, John Waddell, is understandable "It is sad that in 1998, the UK's year of Photography and the Electronic image, Fotofeish and English Venues Camerawork and Zone Gallery have all been lost."
Your move
- Jenny Siung, currently researching for an M. Litt. in UCD on the influence of Japanese art on Irish contemporary artists, has sent us the following request: "I would be very interested to hear from artists in Ireland who have gone to Japan to study and work as well as those who work and live here in Ireland - and further still from Japanese artists living in Ireland." If you can help, the contact address is 15 Charleston Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.
- 'Multiples' is the name of an organisation, just set up by Paul O'Neill, Ronan McCrea and LANGUAGE Design. It will "commission, curate, produce and facilitate the sale of" artworks made as multiples, a term which they intend to embrace far more than just limited-edition prints. They promise a bi-annual brochure of works for sale and a website gallery.
- The two Arts Councils have commissioned the development of an arts-and-disability resource pack. If you have information relevant to this project, the team involved would like to hear from you. In particular from the following: artists with disabilities; arts-and-disability organisations; disability organisations with an involvement in the arts; arts workers working in the arts and disability field; trainers working in the same field. Contact Liz Lennon in Dublin (087 460 182 or sdaunt@iol.ie )or Sharon or Avril in Belfast (minicom 325744, fax 247770, or adf.dforum@dnet.co.uk ). Please do so before October 9.
Yours for the asking (maybe)
You're an artist, you sent CIRCA visual documentation, and that's the last you've ever seen of your slides, trannies print...? A good hundred or so artists could make this claim - we knoe because we've got the visuals but we don't have the return adresses. If you feel we have something of yours, please get in touch.
 Potential whitewash
The IR£80,000 1798 Commemorative Commission for New Ross has been awarded to Philip Napier. The proposal is to build a wall 6m high and 40m in length. On its surface and moulded in concrete will be 1,200 shirts, displayed roughly in the manner shown above. The shirts hark back to the "nameless dead" of the Battle of New Ross "bound together like a huge choir or chorus."
Among the novel aspects of the proposal is that the wall be whitewashed, yearly; "should the wall go unpainted then the shirts will be sullied by weather staining; the maintenance of the wall becomes an act of faith in the 1798 ideal beyond mere rhetoric."
But the commissioners were also taken by a second proposal, one sent in by Jakob Gautel and Jason Karaindros, "a German and a Greek living in Paris." The hope is to find funding for the acquisition of an 'angel detector'. This is a device which lights up only when there is total silence in its vicinity.; the detector thus becomes "a magic meeting place, an island of calm and peace, a place for meditation and
reflection."
(Quotes from original proposals)
Purchase and donations policy at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
[1] Donate Yourself
The Irish Museum of Modern Art is to be congratulated for bringing out a handsome book, compiled by Catherine Marshall and Ronan McCrea, which details its collection to date. The openness IMMA has shown in producing such a book counterpoints the secrecy that plagues most institutions in the Republic. Catalogue of the Collection: May 1991-May 1998 lists the contents of IMMA's stores, usually with a photo to accomany the description of each artwork.The book gives the source of each artwork - in broad terms whether a purchase or a donation. It also lists the country of birth of each artist, though the categories overlap; there's 'Ireland' and 'Northern Ireland', for example, and 'Britain', 'Scotland' and 'England' (no 'Wales').
The graphs below are based on a rough - and - ready analysis of donations and purchases by gender, for artists listed as born in Ireland. The gender bias is pretty blatant, but largely-though not entirely-not directly of IMMA's making. That is, the gender bias is far more marked among donated works than among purchased works. The majority of donated works appear to stem from the massive Gordon Lambert Trust donation of 1992.Patriarchy afoot yet again? No doubt, but consider the following. Twenty artists are listed as having donated works of their own to the collection. Of these sixteen - 80% - are male. Thirteen donors - 65% - are listed as not being of Irish birth. And no female Irish artist has made a donation to the collection. Hard to know how to interpret these results: are male artists, particularly those from abroad, more generous or have they just got more nerve?
One hypothesis might be that the artists who donate are more famous and therefore more acceptable to IMMA (which reserves the right to turn down donantions). Against this notion are the figures from the Artists' Work Programme at IMMA for the period 1995-1997. Thirty-eight artists of presumably more or less equal status participated on the Programme during that period, 63% of them women. Four of these artists made a donation to the collection; three of them were men.
Another strange piece of data: IMMA have never purchased a work from a woman artist listed as born in Northern Ireland.
Can a message be drawn from the above statistics? If you want to ensure you place in the collection, particularly if you're a woman and even more so if you're from the North, could it be that nothing would redress the gender imbalance like a donation?
Notes: [1] 'Ireland' and 'N. Ireland' are determined by the listings of country of origin in the book. 'Overall' refers to all countries, and 'Total' to all the years listed in the graphs. [2] Values above 50% indicate a bias towards male artists. [3] The 1994 dip is attributable to there being only one relevant donation in that year, of a work by a female artist. [4] The results here and in the table below are based on 353 datapoints for donations and 152 for purchases; a given artist was counted only once per year in the donation and/or purchase category.
[2] Think Local
Perhaps it's obvious in hindsight, though it's still interesting when you see it written down: just how regional, for want of a better word, IMMA's collection of contemporary art is. In that sense, is it contemporary art, or just a bit of same? The table below lists all countries which make a contribtion of 1% or more to the 'Total' columns.
|
Donations
|
|
Purchases
|
| Country of birth |
Female |
Male |
Total |
|
Female |
Male |
Total |
| (Overall |
17.8 |
82.2 |
100.0 |
|
34.9 |
65.1 |
100.0) |
| Ireland N+S |
4.5 |
21.8 |
26.3 |
|
13.8 |
22.4 |
36.2 |
| of which 'Ireland' |
4.0 |
18.7 |
22.7 |
|
13.8 |
17.1 |
30.9 |
| 'N. Ireland' |
0.6 |
3.1 |
3.7 |
|
- |
5.3 |
5.3 |
| Britain+E+S* |
2.0 |
9.6 |
11.6 |
|
0.7 |
7.2 |
7.9 |
| of which 'Britain' |
0.3 |
3.1 |
3.4 |
|
- |
2.0 |
2.0 |
| 'England' |
1.7 |
5.7 |
7.4 |
|
0.7 |
4.6 |
5.3 |
| USA |
1.4 |
3.7 |
5.1 |
|
2.0 |
3.3 |
5.3 |
| France |
- |
2.3 |
2.3 |
|
- |
- |
- |
| Spain |
- |
- |
2.0 |
|
2.0 |
- |
- |
| Germany |
0.3 |
1.1 |
1.4 |
|
0.7 |
0.7 |
1.3 |
* 'Britain' + 'England' + 'Scotland' according to the labels in the book. |
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