Ronan McCrea and Paul O’Neill: The Conversation, video;
Eureka # 1, # 2, # 3, Xerox on graph paper, each 73 x 103 cm;
Nothing Special, neon 93 x 132 cm; photo by Ronan McCrea;
courtesy Temple Bar Gallery.
Is it possible for collaborative art projects to result in synergy, or must one part of the equation inevitably come to dominate the others? Two exhibitions in Dublin during February brought this inherent problem into focus. The main tactic employed by artist/curators Ronan McCrea and Paul O’Neill in In Between at Temple Bar Gallery was to stand well back and hope that no-one could tell the difference. The show consisted of an accumulation of pieces created by the artists individually and collaboratively and attributed to both, with the viewer left to decide who had really made what. The cool, post-minimal style employed in many of the works (using cibachromes, looping videos, neon) made it easy for the duo to run off and hide. Ironically, what they left behind were a series of narratives where the potentially crucial/potentially trifling ‘in between’ part was itself absent, as in Somewhere between the greatest moment of my life, two cloudscape photos taken a moment apart, and Before the event, a wall-mounted clock stuck at 5.59, along with its partner piece, After the event, an identical clock set at 6.01.
Occasionally humour filled the gap: in Bumper to bumper two dodgy-looking ice cream vans are shown first parked at their equally dodgy-looking base, then at night in a suburban street after a day doing who knows what. However, The Conversation (a video of two people in a car, filmed from far enough away for us not to hear what they’re saying) by alluding to Coppola’s eponymous film demonstrates the limits of the artists’ tactic: as Gene Hackman discovers in the movie, unless we can discover what was said, all we’re left with is another piece of tape.
In contrast to McCrea and O’Neill’s distanced approach the Hugh Lane Gallery’s survey of Brian Maguire’s output over the last ten years, Inside/Out, was fiercely hands-on. The image projected was of an artist troubled by injustice, deeply concerned with marginalised sections of the community–prisoners, the mentally ill, the poverty-stricken–and at pains to include them in his artistic process. What emerged, though, was the sense that in trying to reconcile social responsibilities with artistic responsibilities the artist’s message becomes compromised.
Maguire’s earnest neo-expressionist canvases were well in evidence, grim circumstances brutally depicted using the heavier parts of the genre’s painterly lexicon. This is effective: Jail Visiting, where flesh is painted a vivid crimson, is one of a number of paintings which are genuinely difficult to look at, but the approach also begs the question at what point does directness become a lack of subtlety? In terms of a conversation between artist and viewer, a work like American Fascist is only ever going to be one-way.
Some of Maguire’s community collaborative projects were also on show. Portraits from a Day Room, 1994, the result of a residency at the Gransha Hospital in Derry, begins with a series of portraits of patients, some of whom were next photographed in situ alongside the resulting paintings, with these photographs then displayed in large-scale lightboxes. While the portraits themselves are engagingly faux-naïf, the staging of the photographs is problematic: there seems to be an element of salesmanship at work, with the sitter depicted as a ‘satisfied customer’. When one sees in the catalogue that the lightboxes were initially displayed in the hospital waiting room for subsequent patients to see, the concept of the ‘satisfied customer’ dovetails ghoulishly with that of the ‘cured’, and as the lightbox is fundamentally a commercial artform the question becomes: who is advertising what? Is the artist advertising his skill at portraiture, or the hospital’s skill at dealing with patients? Indeed, the physical form of the lightboxes themselves deepens the problem, as the balance between artist and sitter is tipped by the former’s apparent need to come away from the exchange with a pristine art object.
This is further evidenced in the set of work made during a residency in Sao Paolo during 1998. Casa de Cultura is a set of portraits of children from the local shanty towns. The drawings were given to the children to keep, then (with the children’s permission) photographed in situ in their homes, resulting in Favela Vila Prudente, a series of large-scale photographs mounted on aluminium.
The work is rife with imbalances: the drawings are on wooden supports, while the photographs are on aluminium; the exchange results in the children receiving small drawings, while the artist and/or his gallery receives an impressive set of expensive-looking photographs. Moreover, these cherished drawings (one is even depicted as hanging alongside a child’s school certificate), have even been borrowed back for this six-month touring exhibition, presumably leaving the children empty-handed. One balks at using the word ‘exploitation’, but the artistic and financial capital in this collaboration is clearly not flowing in the direction of Brazil.
Simon Morse is an artist based in Dublin.
Review reproduced from CIRCA 92, Summer 2000, p. 53
