C96
Review: Dublin II
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Margaret
Corcoran: Flora's abundance, 2001, oil
on linen, 61 x 46 cm; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery
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Mark
O'Kelly: Table and Chair2000, oil on linen, 21 x 25
inches; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery
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Two
recent exhibitions of paintings at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery direct
attention
to the research practices of both artists involved and its significance
to their work. Both Margaret Corcoran and Mark O'Kelly presented
work which emphasized research. Here the paintings functioned as
articulations of the methodologies employed in the artists' process.
Through a diverse range of material and conceptual frameworks both
exhibitions posed interesting critical questions in terms of the
frameworks employed to discuss contemporary art practices.
Margaret Corcoran's exhibition of 12 paintings entitled La Primerva
elaborates a research path which enthusiastically negotiates
fragmentation, the incidental and chance encounters. What becomes
central to Corcoran is the seemingly irrelevant details of 'old
masters.' In this encounter Corcoran not only enters into a conversation
with these works but creates a conversation between disparate works
which seemingly, on first appearances, have little in common. The
in-between space this opens up is intriguing for the viewer, posing
questions on the history and the erotics of looking while implicating
Corcoran's own subjective look (as female artist) in this representational
process. Rather than an imposed look outwards, here the subjectivity
of the female artist works as a central component of this mediation,
offering many poetic and nuanced paintings.
Corcoran uses Botticelli's Primavera as a starting point.
This depiction of the mythological character Chloris/Flora and her
speech of 'vernal roses' becomes entwined in Corcoran's visual play
of detail which she overlays on different portraits. In Corcoran's
La Primavera, which interprets an Ingres portrait of the
Duc d'OrlŽans, she overlays what appears like patterned ribbons
flowing down his face. Rather than tearful they appear as imagined
threads leading his gaze out of the painting and across to some
imagined feminine space. Interpreted through this trajectory, the
ribbons connect what is not made visible, suggesting a haptic response
to the play of looks presented in this exhibition. The ribbons act
as an exit from Corcoran's pictorial space. In nearly all the paintings
she allows points of entrance and exit from these pictorial spaces
which are suggestive of counterparts or imagined propositions of
the fictional beyond her paintings.
Corcoran in 'copying' the painting seems to accentuate what was
always available for interpretation. Her work enters into a dialogue
with Ingres's concerns, posing questions to particularities which
may never have been discussed in any textual critique of the work
but which become exposed in her reinterpretations.
The content of Mark O'Kelly's paintings in his exhibition Looking
at Pictures are composed of images taken randomly from an archive
of newspapers stored in his studio. The editing of these newspaper
images to construct each painting shares a structural relationship
to his previous work exhibited in 1998, Abstract Paintings. The
paintings are all executed to expose their compositional trajectory,
offering themselves as 'instructional diagrams' which chart O'Kelly's
process of working. As an example of this diagrammatic quality,
in nearly all the paintings O'Kelly employs the unpainted surface
of the ground as a means of entering or exiting the work. Another
is the colour range he uses which is restricted to that of digital
printing used in newspapers.
Specifically in dialogue with Dutch landscape painting this work,
while engaging on numerous levels with the history of painting,
also negotiates photography, film and digital technology. This is
most immediately apparent in the film-still quality of the paintings,
many appearing like 'location' stills, tapping into the viewer's
cinematic memory. Here very often a similarity to a particular film
is noted while remaining unspecific.
The distance separating painting from technological reproduction,
while obviously acknowledged by O'Kelly, also allows him a critically
discursive space to negotiate current debates on what the film theorist
Paul Willemen refers to as "regimes of subjectivity and looking."
O'Kelly emphatically charts point of view in these paintings
- concentrating in many instances on difficult point of view
shots, from the omniscient helicopter or CCTV shot to the more debilitating
view upwards of a table and chair. O'Kelly points to a paranoid
mode of looking which seems to evacuate the subject. It is within
this context of paranoid looking and the current discussions on
the loss of the indexical through digital technology that O'Kelly
creates an interesting dialogue: between the impossibility of painting
to remove the indexical link to a body in space and time and the
wider shifts in representation occurring in society. O'Kelly has
already gained considerable recognition as an extremely proficient
painter; however, this exhibition articulates clearly the conceptual
and theoretical underpinnings of his work.
Both Margaret Corcoran and Mark O'Kelly participated in 147's first
exhibition/event, Visual Art is Disposable, which was held in the
Social Hall, Liberty Hall. Here, research was also central. The
question posed by the title was concerned not only with the work
exhibited and the research this involved but also the concept of
researching new ways of bringing artworks together. Thirty-eight
artists exhibited their work. The emphasis, while being about the
way different artists responded to the idea of disposable art, was
also about researching the art-audience experience of the exhibition.
The three-hour event, which included a DJ, Dennis McNulty, was incredibly
well attended. Unlike the usual opening where very often people
only manage a cursory glance at the art, here all work was engaged
with, the audience aware that they could not return to the space
to view it again. As one of the organizer's of this event, the obvious
success of the exhibition was not only the very positive response
of the audience but also realizing the extent to which artists desire
a more diverse range of exhibition models. Both Margaret Corcoran
and Mark O'Kelly exhibited work which was very different from their
gallery work. This was evident in work by many of the artists, where
the ephemeral aspect of the exhibition seemed to liberate many artists
from the expectations of perceived audiences. Visual Art is Disposable
suggested that more fluid and nomadic structures offer artists the
potential means of reclaiming and expanding art and exhibition practices
away from the institutionally defined norms administered so rigorously
in the contemporary Dublin art scene.
Margaret Corcoran: La Primavera, Kevin Kavanagh
Gallery, March 2001
Mark
O'Kelly: Looking at Pictures, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, April
2001
Visual Art is Disposable, 147 at Social
Hall, Liberty Hall, 6-9pm 29th March. (For documentation of this
exhibition and information of future events visit the web site which
is temporarily at www.recirca.com/147.
Orla
Ryan is an artist based in Dublin.
News item on
147 here.
