C92 Reviews
Coming with the spring has been much to-do about marketing. In early February the launch of the Corporation’s Art Plan 2000 - 2005 presented us with a glossy and, at 72 pages, weighty booklet, with plenty of back-slapping over past achievements and talk of marketing the arts. There are also some helpful intentions–e.g. better dissemination of information and centralised booking for cultural events, a few individual bursaries–but no definite policy statements, or details of implementation. Official recognition of the vitality and commercial potential of the various art communities is certainly welcome, but it will be interesting to see how the repeated emphasis on marketing (rather than fostering, for instance) will manifest itself on the ground. The distinct emphasis of the visual-arts section was the Wandesford Quay gallery, the corpo’s venture into art capitalism, now set to open in June with Nuala Fenton as director. Although physically part of the Backwater Artists’ Studios and Printmaking Workshop, it will operate independently from them and, most emphatically, be commercially viable.
Meanwhile, John Quinlan has relocated his enviously successful Vangard Gallery from Macroom to the heart of the city, and astonishing all by selling out the first show, Bridget Flannery’s Listening to Silence, at record prices.
Not that there haven’t been commercial galleries operating already, but both Lavits and Gallery 44 are privately subsidised, by membership fees from its associated arts society and by an antique-pine shop/framers respectively, usually with work and prices appropriately moderate.
Of late, however, Lavits is looking notably more up-market. The new director, Avril Daly, has brought a cleaner, sparer look and more shows from ‘adventurous’ artists. The Tom Climent, Brian Smyth, Martin Finnin exhibition looked smart and trendy, well suited to the gallery’s new image and with surprisingly smart prices for such (relatively) young fellas. Climent’s few painterly dashes onto photographs of early-nineteench-century paintings and Smyth’s tastefully hued paintings of photographs of a pretty woman resting were slick and pleasing to the eye. But they seemed to have little to say beyond their cool, ironic stance. Only the small offerings by Finnin gave the show some substance; and even then, they were overly modest for the bold Finnin. Overall, the show looked right in tune with the new Conran-style restaurant, Milanos, plonked at the end of Oliver Plunkett Street; and with only two sales, to have likewise overstepped the mark.
Decidedly more elegant were the paintings of Bridget Flannery within the equally elegant new Vangard. Patiently crafted with layers of coloured tissue and translucent paint, large overlapping areas of colour build into subtle shifts of texture and tone. The fields of space and light in Listening to Silence are luminous and evocative, gently subdued through timely manipulation into their present state.
All of which makes it easy to see why it sold so well; the skilful yet decisively nonconfrontational content and moderate scale means this work could sit comfortably on any wall, business or residential. Continuing to utilise this Allen criteria for commercial viability (moderate scale, tasteful and well made, quiet/nonconfrontational) two recent Triskel shows, Siobán Piercy’s Palimpsest1 and Anita Groener’s Heartlands, should have been great sellers. But no, again only two red dots each. The latter was one of the few shows I’ve seen in the new Gallery Two not undermined by the space. Despite being open for some time now, it retains a cold, misbegotten, old cement atmosphere which felt quite appropriate for Heartland’s misty shrouds of retreating experience. In contrast to the accumulated yet allusive weight and depth in Flannery’s layers, Groener uses layering and repetition to distance and erase. The calendar-like graph formed by torn pages from an old book, their text hidden by long bands of white except for the odd word or two barely visible stopped here or standing in isolation; with severel overlays of hand-written text rendering them barely legible and series of diagrammatic bowls and eyes, the composit image pays homage to that which is forgotten and lost, as much as to what is retained. Excepting the heavy handedness of much of the work on canvas, the show evoked a calm acceptance of the shifting and shrouding of memory over time. Nonetheless, there was little evidence it was much viewed, much less sold, as there seem to be fewer people than ever, staff and public in the Triskel these days. As Cork’s most heavily subsidised gallery (with the new, improved Crawford Municipal not scheduled to open again ‘til June) are strong shows going unnoticed because there’s no push for income generated through sales?
Admittedly the art centre has been through an extended period of seemingly endless administration reshuffling, but for far too long there has been far too little energy or buzz about the place to justify its resources, with artists increasingly disgruntled. And yet, are subsidised art centres in any position to promote sales or should they be concentrating on obviously unmarketable art (such as their Intermedia show in May)?
Quite markedly, in Berlin, as, no doubt, is the case in many cities, commercial and public-funded galleries exist within totally separate spheres. The latter operate as a community amenity, with any sales incidental and one is given the impression there is little interest or crossover with their commercial cousins. Certainly from the artists’ point of view, one needs both; the freedom to produce outside of commercial criteria and the income to continue working. For even within ‘traditional’ practice, artists continue to make and want to show unmarketable work. For example, oversized drawings have cropped up in 3 unrelated exhibitions just within the last month or so. Vivienne Roche’s Tidal Erotics installation, incorporating music composed by John Buckley, was perfectly suited to the Sirius Centre as the theme represented the 2 rooms as a small maritime museum. Bathed in Cobh harbour light from the Georgian windows, the high ceilinged room comfortably accommodated her greatly magnified, observational drawings of seaweed. Against expectations, the bronzes were intimate, warmly tactile, and immediate, while the drawings were almost overwhelming in their monumentality, relieved only by their light-hearted sexual innuendo.
With drawings of the same scale (up to 6’ in height) and similar format (closely observed, and detailed single, natural object against a flat white ground) Gail Ritchie’s solo exhibition Albert (Tig Filí Gallery) couldn’t be more opposite in tone. Influenced by her interest in archaeology, these works focus on the effects of disintegration and decay. Most striking are a trio of immense charcoal studies of ‘Albert’, a long-dead crow, intricately reconstructed through a sensuous exploration of the changes in texture and structure in organic decay, as well as a scientific emphasis on accuracy. As in an encounter with the actual object(s), their initial yuck-factor soon softens to investigation of just what’s going on, to an appreciation of its own peculiar beauty. They’re fascinating but as to their marketability, give me a break.
It would seem that creativity and commodifiability make for uneasy bedfellows. And yet there are those who manage to find a workable compromise; most recently and colourfully illustrated by the Ship of Fools. Having sailed into town for last autumn’s Jazz festival, this motley crew have wintered in Cork harbour preparing their next world tour. The lighting-electric’s-video Fool, Chilean Herbert Snieder, presented a video/performance piece in the National Sculpture Factory on the 3rd of April. The monitors (3 small and one large) were scattered and illogically sequenced across the Factory, accompanied by live performances by one or two of the other Fools, creating the atmosphere, distraction and unpredictability of a three-ring circus. There were some segments when the gelling between screen and live presentation was breathtaking. By not echoing, but rather relaying a related action to the improvised love act, there was endless scope for compare and contrast in the relative merits of both media. Offering no obvious narrative or theme and a bombardment of the senses from both recorded and live performance, it was exhilarating; not least because it glided so skilfully over a stream of ambiguities: between script and improvisation, logic and erratic behaviour, chaos and direction, drama and art performance.
If being a one-off, singularly generated, site specific, free event isn’t enough to qualify it as an art event, its lack of financial viability definitely does. Either way it was a great advertisement for their dramatically cohesive, if equally anarchic show touring in May. With a minimal subsidy from the Dutch government, admission, festival fees, as well as odd jobs during slack periods, The Ship of Fools manage to traverse an unreliable tightrope between commerce and art. But their hand-to-mouth existence, while amusingly colourful and romantic, would be unfeasible for most to even consider.
So just how will this new thrust from the corpo and business to market Cork art affect the artists themselves? With funding bodies sliding into the commercial arena, does what gets shown become dependent upon commercial viability? Or do we all need to learn to walk the tightrope of Fools?
Jo Allen is an artist based in Cork and a CIRCA Contributing Editor.
Review reproduced from CIRCA
