C90 Article
There were a lot of 'Irish' shows in New York this year. Were they worth it? Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith examines the issues.
The aim of L'Imaginaire Irlandais is to ensure that Irish art enters into the bloodstream of French culture.
This striking metaphor was persistently invoked in public pronouncements introducing the series of exhibitions of contemporary Irish art mounted in various French venues throughout 1996. In reaching for this metaphor the organisers of L'Imaginaire Irlandais , the then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, and the Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, all on various occasions implicitly acknowledged the inherent limitations of the traditional model of showcasing part of the nation's cultural capital abroad in blockbuster exhibitions whose impact on the host country is at best temporary. Rather than mounting an attention-grabbing frontal assault as of old, a more effective approach, it was suggested, was to be quietly insinuating and subtly invasive. A prime purpose of L'Imaginaire Irlandais was to facilitate the forging of enduring links and substantial relationships between Ireland and France in the realm of visual culture at a variety of levels: personal and popular, private and public, commercial and institutional. Three years later it would be worth assessing precisely the degree to which the ambitions of L'Imaginaire Irlandais have since been realised, that is to say to what extent, if any, the French art world and public proved lastingly susceptible to the Irish pathogen.
More recently, in CIRCA 88, the current Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallery, Patrick Murphy, newly returned after a decade spent as a curator in the US, expressed his own reservations about large-scale group exhibitions as a means of familiarising foreign audiences--specifically the American art public--with contemporary Irish art. It was hardly coincidental that he should do so in a year of unprecedented exposure for Irish art in the US, as no fewer than four exhibitions criss-cross America. The historical survey show When Time began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland was at the Berkeley Art Museum in early Spring before moving to the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in May. A companion show of contemporary Irish drawings, A Measured Quietude , simultaneously migrated from Berkeley's Matrix Gallery to the Drawing Center in New York. 0044, an exhibition of work by contemporary Irish artists living in London, was at PS. 1, New York, from June to September, before travelling to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Finally, From the Poetic to the Political: A Reading of Irish Art of the 1990s , a travelling exhibition drawn from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, began its US tour at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in September. 1 (The first three of these shows were reviewed by Anna Hammond in CIRCA 89.)
One of Murphy's caveats to Irish cultural commissars keen on promoting Irish art in the US went as follows: 'Do not support anything flying under an Irish flag unless you want to fulfil existing preconceptions.' 2 As it happens, the most high-profile and hard-hitting initial critical response to the current Irish invasion would seem to bear his reservations out. This was a half-page spread in the Weekend section of The New York Times by staff critic Roberta Smith titled 'The Irish Struggle for a Visual Poetry To Call Their Own' 3 . The space allotted this review was considerably more generous than the spirit in which it was written. Smith's limited enthusiasm for the Drawing Center and PS. 1 shows is largely reserved for artists hitherto unfamiliar to her and to the American art world (Frances Hegarty, Liadin Cooke), while known quantities are damned with faint praise (Kathy Prendergast) or straightforward dispraise (Siobhán Hapaska). Her most withering comments, however, concern the survey show at the Grey Gallery in a passage which makes two basic points: first that much of twentieth-century Irish art is derivative and/or parochial, and, second, that Ireland's contribution to the visual arts over the past hundred years continues to be greatly overshadowed by the country's achievements in the literary field. These are hardly novel arguments and there is a certain laziness and predictability in comparing the nineteenth-century literary fin-de-siecle with Irish visual culture on the cusp of the millennium. (Elsewhere Smith exhibits a comparable carelessness, not to mention a novel conception of Irish geography and history, in a gloss on the work of Colin Darke in which she refers to "A sardonic sign once seen all over Belfast that reads 'You are now entering Free Derry'"). Smith's journalistic gambit is, however, at least understandable, if unenlightening, given that both the Grey Gallery and Drawing Center shows draw their titles from W. B. Yeats's turn-of-century manifesto 'To Ireland in the Coming Times', and that these shows coincided with an exhibition on the poet's life and work at the New York Public Library, which Smith also mentions in passing.
More troubling is Smith's warning that the contemporary section of When Time Began to Rant and Rage might well 'squelch any interest in contemporary Irish art' on the part of the US art world, in that this caveat incidentally points to a contingent danger of such avowedly partial survey exhibitions. The subtitle of this show (prominently displayed on the cover of its substantial accompanying catalogue) explicitly and judiciously announces its self-imposed limitation to 'twentieth-century figurative painting'. Smith happens to have little time for what she describes as the 'preponderance of mawkishly political, often Neo-Expressionsist paintings' with which the show ends. Here the fact that such work, for better or worse, is far from representative of the range of contemporary Irish practice in general, or indeed of contemporary Irish political art in particular, is unfortunately largely irrelevant. It is in the nature of the presentation and reception of survey exhibitions of art from an unfamiliar milieu that they are inevitably taken to be more comprehensive than they really are. There appears to be little than can be done about this, short of abandoning the model entirely, as Murphy suggests.
It must be said that the same does not necessarily apply to national representation at international events such as the Venice or Sao Paolo Biennial exhibitions. True, the disposition of the national pavilions in the Giardini at Venice continues to reflect an anachronistic cultural geography which harks back to the dying days of Imperialist Europe. Nevertheless, a number of countries have proven at recent Biennali that well-chosen, well-planned and well-supported interventions by individual artists exhibiting under national auspices can still avoid the dead hand of cultural stereotyping. (Irish representative Anne Tallentire's contribution this year is a case in point). Murphy mentions three artists who have by now acquired indisputably international reputations which have not "been built on an overt national identity." Two of these artists, Dorothy Cross and Willie Doherty, in fact represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Yet, interestingly, the accelerated acceptance of these two artists around this time into the international fold happened to coincide with a shift in their practice which involved a certain downplaying of local colouring. The transition between, say, Mr and Mrs Holy Joe from Cross's 1988 Douglas Hyde Gallery show to Parthenon, which was shown at the same venue in 1993, was indicative of a notable expansion of cultural boundaries. Doherty's decision in 1992 to abandon the textual overlay on his still photographs, texts which had often anchored that imagery in the specifics of their Irish context, similarly facilitated a more instant purchase on the attention of a wider public. The international reputation of the third Irish artist mentioned by Murphy, James Coleman, was established a good deal earlier. And yet it is also worth noting that two substantial recent essays on Coleman, both by editors of October, in the process of enfolding the artist within that journal's icily internationalist embrace go to some pains to distance themselves from those of his previous exegetes who stress the 'Irish aspects' of his work. 4
The upshot of all of this would appear to be that playing the green card is not the way to critical or commercial success on the other side of the Atlantic. On a final, if somewhat flippant note, Patrick Murphy's advice to Irish art promoters and practitioners alike to 'stay away from anything Irish-American' has since been tempered by Gemma Tipton's account , in CIRCA 89, of the practical assistance available from a number of Irish-American organizations. Having just spent a year living in the US I can personally testify to an enduring interest in certain aspects of Irish culture which is by no means confined to members, self-appointed or otherwise, of the Irish diaspora. The question I was most frequently asked during the past year was "What do you think of Angela's Ashes?" My invariable response--"Actually, I haven't read it yet."--was as honest as it was incomprehensible and unacceptable to my questioners. Meanwhile, the airwaves and upmarket newspapers and journals were buzzing with discussions of the Irish-American life depicted in Alice McDermott's award-winning novel Charming Billy. There appears to be an Irish-American critical apparatus that springs into gear far quicker when a American with a drop of Irish blood puts pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, than if he or she were to reach for any of the many tools of the visual artist's trade. This cannot be entirely accounted for in terms of the differences between the dominant modes of representation in contemporary literature and art, respectively. Intrigued by this discrepancy I recently asked a number of Irish and American artists, critics and curators, only half in jest, how they would respond to an 'Irish-American' group exhibition of accomplished and established young artists of disparate sensibility but from the same generation and currently working within the same socio-cultural context..... say, John Currin, Cheryl Donegan, Ellen Gallagher and Seán Landers? The difference between the American and Irish reactions (amused encouragement vs. cringes and groans) was interesting. Not unpredictable, but intriguing nonetheless. In fact, I'm still trying to work it out.
