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Back Issues
C90 Reviews Images above from Project Mongrel website (link may not work) Within the time allotted for this review, the four visual-art venues of the bigger and broader than ever Beara Arts Festival set a lively pace at the start, and the expected intervention in Patrick Street by Project Mongrel should have brought it to an intriguing close. In between there has been a plethora of one-person and small group shows; many more-than-worthy, a few which disappointed, better in expectation then actuality. Noteworthy of the former was Aoife Desmond's Lavit Gallery show Pages of Silence. Some worked during, others as a result of her travels in India and Nepal, they are literally removed pages from sketchbooks, loosely bound and in the format of Tibetan prayer books. Long, narrow, and fragile as scrolls, their box frames encouraged the sense of preciousness and distance of a museum display and evoked an air of quiet contemplative other-worldliness. In the best of them, the vivid, straightforward blocks of pure pigment, incidental notes and texts, and rhythmic use of small found objects worked as sites for meditation, singing with the silence of the absorption of natural spaces. Back in Beara, through the commendable perseverance and hard work of artist organisers Sarah Walker and Marc van Zanten, the visual-arts contribution to the community festival covered an ambitious range of artistic endeavour from recreational workshops and artists to many well established practitioners. There were, as well, two invited artists, Daisy Richardson and Corban Walker, the latter with his own venue in a dilapidated handball alley. The quirkiest and hence most entertaining of the four exhibitions was that in the BIM Fisheries Centre. The small yet airy room was filled with appropriately themed works drawn from the full gamut of participating artists, with odd and often humorous jumps. From the decidedly naïve to the highly sophisticated, the show successfully encapsulated the ethos and energy of community-art events everywhere. My expectations about Corban Walker's featured installation, however, were disappointed. Its location in a purpose-built, but for many years now abandoned handball alley, was already full of its own aesthetic appeal and smell, redolent of a rich history, and consequently, overwhelmed Walker's work within it. This was possibly the point, as there were the characteristic markers drawing attention to the artist's 'inappropriate' height for the building's intended use. Viewed in the day's dim light and from the remote vantage point of the observers' balcony, string-defined trajectories from the suspended yellow balls and perspex and tape markers scattered across the floor were difficult to make out and they looked lost and insignificant. It was frustrating not to be given access to a floor-level view, or better yet been able to interact within the space, which might have made it more effective. As it was, it felt overall too slight an intervention to have the impact of past Walker installations. Ironically enough, the most intriguing and exciting art project to hit the Cork city for some time was the one prevented from completion. It started with an ambitious brief, questioning the function and hidden agendas in public art, put forward by artist organisers John Reardon and Declan Kennedy. Hoping to choose from a range of professional disciplines and locales, the resultant six participants hailed from Dublin, Wales, Germany, Poland and Texas and were two architects, two artists, one artist/architect and a writer. As a collaborative venture they were expected to engage in rigorous research and discussion on the critical issues surrounding public art, i.e. public art as a corporate strategy for controlling public spaces and behaviour, as imposition of a global model for ideal communal living, as commercial gentrification and aestheticisation of public space. Their four-week residency was then to culminate in raising public awareness of these issues through an intervention on Patrick's Street for November. Patrick's Street was chosen not only as the major commercial thoroughfare of the city, but also because of its present state of chaos which is due to the installation of the new drainage system and consequent repaving, one percent of the cost of which funded Project Mongrel. Three weeks into the project an introduction and interview with all involved left me confused and annoyed. With all the conscientious gathering of information and endless discussion, Mongrel appeared to be no more than another talk-shop/think tank/ quango whose intentions are honourable but practical results, negligible. However, a major turnaround from this initial impression came with the open public debate held in the Oyster Bar the following week. As testament to the difficulty of the whole process, one of the participants had dropped out. The remaining seven (including the two co-ordinators) gave a thoroughly engaging presentation, explaining the process, thinking and preparation which had concluded with their proposed intervention. This would entail looping razor barbwire over the existing cables which span Patrick's Street and which are used each year to support the city's Christmas lights. From the mock-ups and documented trial run from the roof of the National Sculpture Factory it looked to be an elegant and highly provocative work. However, the general resistance and incomprehension of much of the debate's audience towards the proposal generated a controversy which would extend from the bar to front-page headlines. As far as I'm aware, never before has an artwork, its meaning, efficacy and public value, made the front page of the Echo and so effectively raised the punters' curiosity. Hence Project Mongrel has been a great success in fulfilling its brief (1) to bring the issues surrounding the commissioning and use of public art into a wider public arena, and (2) to offer an exciting and legitimate alternative to commissioning attitudes of the past. The severe case of cold feet which disallowed the actualisation of the proposed visualisation of the participants' four weeks' hard labour would appear to render the project a failure. Already rumours abound regarding a retreat to safer projects in the future. And yet the innovation and courage of the commissioning bodies to take on the project and their subsequent lack of faith to see it through has pointedly and publicity drawn attention to the disparity, confusion and lack of clear policy, despite increased funding, for an ever-expanding cultural life in Cork. Congratulations to all those involved and may the debate continue. Aoife Desmond, Pages of Silence, The Lavit Gallery, August/September 1999 Beara Arts Festival, July/August 1999 Project Mongrel , Cork City, August/September 1999 (link may not work) Jo Allen is an artist and a CIRCA contributing editor. Review reproduced from CIRCA 90, Winter 1999, pp. 46-47 |
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