C90 Article:

HORSEHEAD PERSPECTIVE

Two important art events in Belfast recently, one gallery-based, the other city-wide. Daniel Jewesbury spoke with the selectors.

Belfast hosted two large group exhibitions this summer, the open-submission Perspective 99 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, and the Horsehead International Sculpture Project, a show of temporary public art across the city. Perspective is now in its second year, and it has been streamlined since 1998: the three prizes have been replaced with one, the three selectors displaced by Philip Dodd, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (shortly to be Director of the new Tate Gallery on Bankside). Joint-organiser for Horsehead was Matt Lennon, who oversaw the project from Seattle and Belfast.

Writing about last year's inaugural Perspective in Circa 86, Derval FitzGerald notes that two of the three selectors had been 'flown in' (from London and Canada), and expresses concern that the exhibition may have attempted to impose an 'international' agenda at the expense of local contexts, reaching for a lowest-common denominator through which art is standardised, hollowed-out, made to represent only itself. FitzGerald argues that Belfast isn't notable simply for its extraordinary political conditions, but also for the various strategies that artists have developed to approach those conditions: alongside an overtly political approach, "framed within a traditional conception of 'art'", there has grown up an 'alternative' practice, in which a group of artists collectively envisage "a different set of social structures and relations".

The morning after Perspective 99 opened, three weeks before the opening of the Horsehead Project, I spoke to Philip Dodd and Matt Lennon at the Ormeau Baths about their respective exhibitions. Has either curator had difficulty integrating the local and international contexts this time round, I ask. Matt Lennon, whose project included a primary 'exchange' leg with Belfast artists visiting Seattle, points out that the two cities have many similarities, both being considered provincial: "I begin by looking to see who's speaking beyond their area. In Belfast I found a large group of artists who had already been travelling the world and integrating their own changing perspective in their work here. It was very easy to layer that into a joint-city show."

Philip Dodd expands this theme: "I think the model you use is predicated on the idea that there are settled centres. There certainly were once, but in a year when Chinese artists suddenly feature quite heavily at the Venice Biennale, the notion of what constitutes centre, and what periphery, is itself very fluid . I've made a lot recently of arguing, post-Rushdie, that we're all now 'routed', rather than 'rooted'. I had 250 submissions and I didn't look at where anybody had come from, or at their CVs. As an outsider, if I'd done anything else I would have found myself co-erced by expectations that people's histories would have brought with them. What's interested other people, and not interested me, is that I found I'd chosen a lot of artists who were Irish or were bound to Belfast through a complex set of routes."

But surely Belfast has unusual circumstances, given that both the production of art and its social reproduction have had to develop along very idiosyncratic 'routes'? There's been plenty of criticism of the manner in which this perceived globalisation has been taking place, particularly with reference to the Biennale. "But I think everywhere is unusual," Dodd argues. "Of course there are specificities, but to imply that everywhere else is the same and only Belfast is different, is to convict yourself of the same problem."

Lennon agrees: "If you get too locked into it you become insular. I think that a lot of the artists here have been pushing at the idea of the 'border', long before the politicians were talking about it. They're using the technical facilities very much to their advantage, probably quicker than the broader society is."

Dodd mentions that very few of the works submitted to Perspective were traditionally 'political' pieces. "There's Mark Dale's play on 'h', but that's the exception that proves the rule. A lot of the art now, insofar as it is political, shares what Hamlet famously said: you have, by indirection, to find direction out. I think there are connections that this work makes both to the more general history of art and to things going on in LA, or London. That doesn't mean there isn't something specific, but there's a family resemblance now in contemporary art."

Dodd re-iterates the ubiquitous idea of 'cultural mixture', and whilst this may help to fend off the generalised essentialisms that art was prone to in the past, particularly in Northern Ireland, it also conceals the material differences, the structural factors, which determine our identities. Somehow the politics of identity have turned, overnight, into a game of 'elective affinities', as if each of us were simply free to choose from a conveyor-belt of commodified attributes and affects. Where does this model leave those whose power to choose may be severely limited by their circumstances? Where do specificities of place belong in this new context of perpetual generality?

"City centres are important as conduits," asserts Lennon, "but you don't necessarily have to live in London or in Seattle to be an artist. Borders are disappearing faster than most people ever anticipated, because of technology. We've had two decades where political art was pretty well defined, so any intelligent artist here will add ambiguity into their medium. They're doing it very successfully here."

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In two years Perspective has established itself as the largest exhibition of its kind in Northern Ireland, and one of the largest in Ireland; the Horsehead project is one of the largest public art events to be seen in Belfast for several years, even while group shows of public art become more and more common. The most 'important' moments in recent art history come from people acting in groups, whether in collaboration or competition, I venture. Furthermore, one could easily characterise Perspective as 'competitive' and Horsehead, at least to some extent, as 'collaborative'. What problems are there with either of these models; is there, perhaps, a problem in posing the question in this oppositional way?

Philip Dodd is wary of such an approach: "I'm not sure it's the case that artists have always worked in groups, anyway Perspective isn't a group show, it's an open-submission show. So the question is, what is the point of an open-submission show? In both parts of Ireland there have not been artist-run public spaces in a major way, in the way that there were in London in the late '80s. In Dublin everything's so expensive, the decaying parts have been renewed so fast by commercial developers. So the really interesting thing about an open submission is that it gives an opportunity for people to be seen who are not acceptable to the gatekeepers, when there are very few gatekeepers in Ireland, north and south. In London there are so many open-submission shows that they strike me as less useful than in a space which, temporarily, like Belfast, has very few. Perspective gives someone who's not flavour of the month with the 3 or 4 godfathers and godmothers an opportunity to be selected by somebody who doesn't read the runes in the way the locals do."

"Our show was open submission too," adds Matt Lennon, "and again I never looked at names, or CVs, I looked at 300 slides over and over again. And much like Philip's saying, it's a lot of emerging artists; there are artists in the show who have really never done sculptural installations before but wanted the chance. I liked what they submitted and I thought I'd see what they can do."

Dodd mentions his surprise that Belfast wasn't rather better connected: "It's not a criticism but an observation, I thought it was connected in a way that Dublin now is. Dublin thinks of itself as European, it's got those 'routes'. Here they look to be less well built than I expected."

I point out that perhaps the links tend to be more informal, developed for a specific project and then put to one side as the next venue comes onto the horizon. Some cities see the connections cultivated by one generation serving the next (Glasgow roughly fits this model); in Belfast it's often the case that artists use their connections to leave.

"In a lot of places the artists are waiting to see what's going to happen for them," offers Lennon. "This puts them in a very dependent situation. Horsehead is supported by the UK Lottery, through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, who are giving us money and watching to see what we're going to do. There's no theme, no grand curatorial statement; we pick the artists, pick a city and impregnate that city. None of us knows what's going to happen. I don't know what all the artists are doing and I won't know till I actually see the pieces, which I think is exciting at times."

"The media becomes absolutely critical," Dodd interjects. "The cities that matter have a discourse around their art. That may be part of Belfast's problem, that it hasn't got the kind of media industry that can provide either a critical space or a public profile." But what can artists do about a media that is determinedly uninterested, that has less arts broadcasting now than before the declaration of the ceasefires?

"It's the arts community's responsibility to find a story which can make sense, because you can only have a dialogue if both sides are interested in talking. You have to find a language in which they can be helped to make sense of it and see its value. For a city like Belfast, which like so many other provincial cities is having to renew itself because its industrial base has collapsed, culture ought to be on the civic agenda. Glasgow made itself the city of culture, there ought to be the possibilities in which that kind of spirit could be given to Belfast."

This is a generalisation, in which Belfast is seen as a typical post-industrial city negotiating the tricky shift to a consumer economy, rather than as a part of a complex, abnormal society that is trying to reconstruct its own internal links (as well as those with the outside world). But the argument is a fair one; indeed, conversely, it may be particularly applicable to Belfast. As the precarious absence of war is indefinitely extended, the scramble to buy and sell the city intensifies, coinciding happily with the cycle of developments elsewhere. Dublin's sudden lurch into the leisure economy (of which art is now a part) provides an irresistible model to civic engineers, who feel that they now have the nearest thing to a clean sheet that they may see for some time. Artists, meanwhile, fear that 'Culture in Belfast' may be invented without very much intervention on their part.

Matt Lennon points out that "these discourses become much clearer when they're artist-initiated. When the sovereignty of the arts actually rests with the artists there's more gets done. We have an arts commission in Seattle, and they've done a great job for 25 years, but if you start seeing the same names all the time, then where are the other artists, who's talking to them?"

"There are ways of contesting that," Dodd insists. "Everywhere throughout the UK and the US, there are small cultural entrepreneurs, digital artists, fashion, film. There's a whole range of things here that could constitute part of an alternative infrastructure, against those who want to corporatise it." Isn't this just naivety, given the rapaciousness of that corporatism?

Lennon thinks not; "You have to be in the dialogue. Too many artists don't talk to each other, I've seen it here. I'm working with Laganside and the reason they got involved was because of the notion of temporary public art, as opposed to monumental art and all that goes with that. They're very curious about it: how will the public react, will the work get graffitied or destroyed in twenty-four hours? They've been intrigued by my lack of concern for those issues, and the thing I've been pushing to them is that, OK, if you have an art programme, why not make it an endowment programme, and continually fund the culture, rather than purchasing? Purchasing is a form of communication: when somebody says, 'I bought a piece for £500,000', it's telling the world how important you are, how important the artist is. When you say, 'I'm spending £500,000 amongst 50 artists and this piece is only going to be a one-hour performance piece, but we'll have a videotape!', then people look at you and ask what are we spending our money on? I think it's the responsibility of the artist to get engaged in dialogue with these people and take an instructor's role, because we do know a lot."

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The winner of the £6000 prize in Perspective 99 was Aileen Kelly, whose found-object sculpture 'Curtain Door' was a subtle, edgy piece reminiscent of Thomas Schütte's disturbed fairy-tale tableaux. It was also one of the few pieces of sculpture in a show which tended to cling to the gallery walls; had its very clear occupation of the space influenced the judging at all?

"I only made my decision very late in the day, but even when I first saw it as a slide, I thought it was a strong work. More generally, we're thinking of doing a sculpture show at the ICA, but, at least within Britain, there have been no big contemporary sculpture shows, it doesn't seem the form of practice that's got that kind of weighty presence. There's plenty of film and video, the NatWest Prize, the Turner Prize this year, but sculptural installation is a relatively rare thing. So it isn't just that this was something that was pulled out, the truth is there were not a great number of works of that kind. The other thing that has to be said is that pieces of work like this are very easy to do very badly, and there's a lot of bad work about found objects put together. I think this is a find."

"That's true in America too, there are no big sculpture shows," adds Lennon. "I came to Belfast because I thought I've got to find more artists who actually understand the language I'm using."

Dodd mentions a recent show by Steve McQueen at the ICA; McQueen trained as a sculptor, moving to work in film and video later on in his career, he points out. I add that many other artists have followed this path, and continue to think of their screen work in sculptural terms. In much work, sculpture is incorporated into other media, as with Peter Richards's 'Paper Cup & String Mobile Communications Network', where it is part of a process that also involves photography, performance and even painting. Dodd calls it "a wonderfully inchoate moment, which is both frightening and exhilarating."

That comment, and Richards's work, sum up both of these shows and the moment in which they appear: a moment in which art comments on its own unease with the city's redefinition, intervening in scruffy melées in the non-productive space, disrupting the functioning of the city-as-machine. Matt Lennon comments, "Big institutions are still talking about sculpture parks. They don't know what the artists are doing and where they're heading, and how this language is synthesising. In a decade we're going to see some forms coming out of it that are striking, and the institutions are not going to be prepared to handle it."

Interview with Philip Dodd and Matt Lennon, Ormeau Baths Gallery, August 6, 1999.

Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and a CIRCA contributing editor. His website is here, his current work with the Project Arts Centre to be found here.

Relevant links for the Horsehead project can be found here and here.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 90 Winter 1999, pp. 20-24

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