CIRCA 92: News bits

There we are, gone

CIRCA is delighted to announce that its Dublin, editorial office is now to be found in Arthouse, Temple Bar. The full address is CIRCA, Arthouse, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2; tel/fax: (+353 1) 6797 388; e-mail: editor@recirca.com. (Our heartfelt gratitude to our former, long-put-upon office provider.) CIRCA’s Belfast, administrative office is unaffected.
Speaking of CIRCA, some comings and goings. David Brett has gracefully retired as a Contributing Editor, after many years of service to the magazine, including as Chair of CIRCA’s Board. The current Board has expressed its deep appreciation. The Board is also very pleased to welcome two new members—John Lindsay, based in Dublin, and Daniel Jewesbury, based in Belfast.

Four for Rosa

Former curator of the Istanbul and Santa Fe Biennials, and this year’s curator of EV+A in Limerick, Barcelona-based Rosa Martínez has made her selection of the four winners of open-submission prizes. They are Caroline McCarthy, Ruth Rogers, Deirdre Morgan and Maria Doyle. Each receives a cheque for IR£1000, and McCarthy and Rogers both get a solo show in the Limerick City Gallery. See also EV+A review, pages 48-49.

 
Dan Shipsides: simulation of bamboo-clad
Carlton cinema; courtesy IMMA

Tiger swallows Nissan

It’s something of a Chinese takeaway in reverse. Pity the bewildered visitor from the Far East to Dublin’s O’Connell Street this autumn: they’ll be confronted by a building clad in bamboo scaffolding, that ubiquitous, flimsy-looking coating that snakes up so many skyscrapers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. The bulding is the old Carlton cinema, the idea that of Belfast-based Dan Shipsides, winner of the IR£100,000 Nissan Art Project for the Millennium, organised in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Construction is from September to December this year. In this play on the Celtic Tiger and Dublin’s rapid redevelopment, workers and bamboo are to come from Hong Kong.

Oops!

We must learn to differentiate better, it seems, between Down Under and upside-down. In the last edition we printed the paintings below, by Auckland-based Nuala Gregory, in the wrong orientation. They are shown correctly here. Our apologies to the artist and the reviewer.

Nuala Gregory: Julia I & Julia II,1998,
acrylic and gouache on canvas,
40 X 80 cm each; photo and courtesy the artist

Belfast goes mega

In preparation, apparently, for Belfast’s bid to be European City of Culture in 2008, a purpose-built “landmark building” is to arise in the centre of Belfast. The £150-million-sterling project was announced on May 18 by Michael Houlihan, chief executive of the Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland. The building will be a “Museum of Creative Arts.” It seems the Ulster Museum is to be devoted to the history of Ireland including—brave folk—the history of the Troubles.

Not disabled, artists

The two Arts Councils in Ireland have joined forces with the Arts and Disability Forum to announce a new set of awards for “creative artists with disabilities throughout Ireland.” “The awards,” they say, “are competitive and open to all individual artists with disabilities, or groups of artists with disabilities, living anywhere in Ireland. Creativity is key. Only projects which show genuine creativity and imagination will be selected for an award.” Behind these words can be read an affirmative sentiment, increasingly prevalent among artists sometimes referred to as disabled, that they must be treated as equals and that they want to compete as equals.
The value of each award is set at a minimum of £1000stg and competition for awards is expected to be intense. An application pack is available, if you hurry, from the Arts and Disability Forum. The closing date for receipt of completed applications is Friday, June 16. Contact Michael Morgan, Arts and Disability Forum, Albany House, 73-75 Great Victoria Street, Belfast BT2 7AF; tel: 239450.

Watch this industrial space

Former Exhibition Officer at the Crawford Gallery, Nuala Fenton has opened an important new commercial undertaking in Cork City. Located at Wandesford Quay, behind Washington Street, the Fenton Gallery is a converted industrial space with over 2000 square feet. The gallery is in the same complex as Cork Printmakers and Backwater Studios, and it features a courtyard café/wine bar.
An opening show of Dorothy Cross and Charles Tyrell kicks off an exhibition programme which aims to show the best of Irish and international art. The future includes a print show (selected by Catherine Marshall of IMMA), with later exhibitions by Brian Kennedy, Tony O’Malley and Michael Quane. For further information contact Nuala Fenton, 5 Wandesford Quay, Cork; tel. 021 431 5294.

Irish Arts Review changes hands

The Irish Arts Review, that yearly report on what’s been happening on the Irish visuals-arts scene, has a new owner: Honan Potterton is alreay its editor, since 1994, but now Anne Reihell, publisher of the Review, has transferred the entire share capital of the publishing comany to him.
Talking of publications, spare a thought for poor Leonardo, the much-repsected magazine of art and technology. First, heard about etoy? Last year the inventive, anarchic artists’ group etoy ran foul of American online-toy-company giant, Etoys. Although etoy.com existed long before eytoys. com, Etoys sued etoy off the web. Eventually Etoys were forced into an embarrassing climbdown by worldwide, online outrage.
The news, it seems, may not have reached all parts of France. This time the target is Leonardo. According to a circular sent out by same, “The legal suit against Association Leonardo [publishers of the magazine] has been filed in Nanterre, France, by Transasia Corporation and co-complainants. Transasia claims to have recently trademarked in France the names Leonardo, Leonardo Finance, Leonardo Partners, Leonardo Invest, and Leonardo Experts. Transasia is claiming over a million dollars in damages based on their claim that a search engine request using the word ‘Leonardo’ brings up not only their web sites but also those of the Leonardo arts organization.”
A defence fund has been set up to combat this daftness.

New Sligo Woods

The Model Arts Centre, Sligo—currently undergoing refurbishment and promising to be a major cultural resource in the Northwest on its re-opening this summer—has a new Head of Visual Arts. Her responsibilities will include the important Niland Collection, as well as the overseeing of the programme of temporary exhibitions. For the past four years Suzanne Woods has been curator of contemporary-art exhibitions at the Carlsten Art Gallery, University of Wisconsin, as well as being a lecturer in Art History and contemporary art practice. She hails from Derry.

Murky Bacon

Did Francis Bacon do preparatory sketches or not? Do you care? Certainly the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, and the Bacon estate care a good deal. A show of sketches on photographs, possibly by Bacon, opened to the public at IMMA on March 30. According to a report in the Sunday Times, however, leading Bacon expert David Sylvester has “described the drawings as ‘crummy’…and said they were ‘almost certainly not Bacon.’” The sketches owner, Barry Joule, “has promised to donate 90% of his entire collection to the [Hugh Lane] gallery if the works are authenticated.”
There was much discussion on just this topic at the opening of IMMA’s new galleries, in the former Deputy Master’s House. If the praise of the new galleries' setting, and Jim Buckley’s complementing outdoor fibre-optic artworks were universal, doubts about the authenticity of the Bacon works on show was not uncommon. The pieces, painstakingly displayed, are painted-on, scribbled-on, scrached-over, generally abused images from books and the popular press. A few thoughts cast by viewers in their direction included: why did he always seem to be using the same colour of paint on so many of the images?; why no fingerprints?; why no sign of skill? Others, including some experts on Bacon, and IMMA itself, seem a bit surer of their provenance. IMMA’s press release says that “The use of news and sports images, as well as art images and the annotation of books, demonstrates not only Bacon’s knowledge of art of the period (late 1950s and early ‘60s) and of art history in general but also his awareness of and involvement with popular culture and the mass media.” Not, of course, if Bacon didn’t do them.
IMMA’s Director, Declan McGonagle, hedges somewhat, but he is quoted in the presss release as saying that “Both exhibitions [there is also a Picasso works-on-paper show] represent a transformation of the ordinary and commonplace into the extraordinary, revealing something of each artist’s thinking and decision-making process.” Again, not if Bacon didn’t do them.
Meanwhile, we have two important Bacon-related articles in this issue: Mary McGrath describes the ‘archaeology’ of moving Bacon’s studio to Dublin, and Mick Wilson comments on the logic of the exercise. See pages 20-26.