Francesca Woodman: Providence, Rhode Island , 1976-77; courtesy Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris/Douglas Hyde Gallery; © Estate of Francesca Woodman, New York

This summer, in a house on Pearse Street, the Ireland Institute opened its HQ at number 27. Pádraig Pearse spent his first five childhood years in the house. The building had regressed into near-undifferentiated building materials (a distressed state akin to Francesca Woodman's favoured interiors). However, after extensive restoration, the house was opened by An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, with an inaugural exhibition by Robert Ballagh. Ballagh is a committee member. On the night, Ahern celebrated inspirational republicanism "as we tackle problems of homelessness, lack of educational opportunity and the welfare of the migrant population," adding that he had a "fine portrait" of Pearse above his desk, ensuring Pearse was filmed every time he was.

On its website, Aengus Ó Snodaigh of the Ireland Institute describes the purpose of the organisation as to "support history writing," which "explores Irish nationhood and the republican idea," and "offer the people a full but critical account of the story of their nation, bonding them as a community and inspiring them to creativity." Declan Kiberd, meanwhile, in Ballagh's catalogue writes about the artist's use of text - proverbs in Irish - to "repair the ancestral language," and "supply the missing dimension of guidance and care."

Robert Ballagh: Cuan , 2000/2001, oil on canvas, sand on panel, 61 x 121 cm; courtesy the artist

The exhibition, Land and Language , was dominated by polyptych paintings with discrete horizontal areas where land, land and sea and, sometimes, monochrome panels are set above deep panels (the predella ) containing real stones, leaves and sand. The paintings were made, says Ballagh, as a response to the "vacuum" of landscapes in his work - the legacy of his youthful lack of identification with the "rural Gaelic tradition": "Oh! The certainty of youth," he exclaims. In 1971, for The Irish Imagination , Brian O'Doherty wrote of Bulfin, Ballagh and Brians Henderson and King as a "second generation [that] gives to painting in Dublin a diversity and energy it did not have before and most of them show an acute political awareness." (The artists in this summer's Eurojet Futures at the RHA Gallagher Gallery were also promoted as a new generation. Using the language of venture capital, the show exploited the pun in the meaning of 'futures' to suggest more than prospects in time, but also commodities that are priced, fixed, traded, delivered and paid for at a later date.)

Ballagh cites the civil rights actions by Northern Irish nationalists in 1968, and Bloody Sunday, as the political grounding for his disassociation with modernisers in the Republic who rubbished The Past. He charts his departure from "playpen radicalism," but instead of a self-enquiry about his work for Riverdance (as an example of where he departed to) he buries the moment in a technical explanation of the alla prima technique learnt through his set-design work for Riverdance. He has used the same technique to make his first real landscape paintings.

In his essay, Ballagh talks about "the pebbles that you pick up and cast upon the water." These past months, your pebble is likely to have hit a number of other summer 'launches'. In June, the Aurora berthed on the River Liffey. The ship carried a container designed by the Atelier Van Lieshout. A copy is on show at the Venice Biennale. The Women on Waves Foundation that owns Aurora commissioned a portable surgery from Atelier Van Lieshout equipped to perform abortions. The intention is that the ship can anchor in international waters and not be subject to national laws on abortion and that this will liberate women from prohibitions that restrict their reproductive choices. News items did not note that the architect of the controversial container is now famed for art or that Ireland was represented at an international art event that included the exhibition of the container. The response in the art press was conspicuous by its general absence despite Aurora having hosted an event by artists Louise Walsh, Mick O'Kelly and Pauline Cummins.

The Jeanie Johnston, replica famine ship, has just been completed. But another boat, the Asgard, which holds a special position in Ireland's struggle for national self-determination, remains in stasis amid a controversy about conservation and restoration practices. There is further debate about whether it is a private yacht or a public monument. After being moved from Kilmainham Gaol and its longtime carers, the Asgard lingered under a blue tarpaulin outside the Point Depot, event venue owned by Harry Crosbie and venue for the Riverdance homecoming. Crosbie is providing private finance for the proposed restoration of the Asgard, to a degree that gives him considerable authority over its fate. Not since he had to eat his words, having alleged that the people of East Wall eat their babies, has he been in such hot water.

The conservation-versus-restoration debate with regard to the Asgard comes to an argument about how much of the vessel is original. Two of the retrospective art exhibitions on show this summer conspicuously involve questions of cultural value, economic revenue and the authenticity of the artist's place in an international marketplace: Francesca Woodman at the Douglas Hyde Gallery and Francis Bacon at the Hugh Lane.

Outside the Douglas Hyde Gallery, a small painting easel displayed an advertisement for the show of Francesca Woodman's photographs inside. The easel supported a reproduced photograph of hers (reproduced many times the size of the real one inside) showing an intimate group of naked young women holding a multiple image of one face in front of their own.

Atelier Van Lieshout: Gynaecological Clinic , portable commission on board the Aurora; photo Gemma Tipton

In Paradis , 1975, Phillippe Sollers was writing about no-one in particular when he wrote about why their only choice is to pose her as virgin otherwise the foundation's displaced time space geometry biochemistry face it discovering the disgrace leaves them all unemployed naked out in the streets nothing to follow [sic]. In his essay for Francesca Woodman's catalogue, Sollers presents the real Woodman as an apparition carried along by events and compelled to document the beautiful wreckage: her photographs. The once-upon-a-time '68 radical anti-establishment leftwing founding editor of Tel Quel and, more recently, author of the novel Studio , Sollers is quoted in the Fondation Cartier promotional literature, saying: "I don't like Francesca Woodman, I admire her."

The Paradise (Part 1) , was also on show at the Douglas Hyde, Gallery 2, with Annelies Strba and Bernhard Schobinger. The diamond-encrusted bracelet exhibited by Schobinger invited a second glance at Fondation Cartier de l'art contemporain's endorsement of Francesca Woodman and Phillippe Sollers' sentimental memorial to his own melancholy for "a time when experimentation and play were frequent, dangerous, exciting." The Cartier company's chronically compromised public-relations task has been rallied around the sponsorship of contemporary art. In the 1986 installation, Les Must de Rembrandt , Hans Haacke raised critical awareness of Cartier's role in The Rembrandt Group (the logo is a self-portrait by the eponymous artist), a conglomerate including venture capital, tobacco, oil, coal and diamond-mining companies. Sollers, meanwhile, is not opposed to underwriting Woodman's cultural capital to Cartier's benefit.

"Brought up in a family of artists," Francesca Woodman killed herself in a New York minute by jumping out a Manhattan window in 1981. Her book Disordered Interior Geometries was published the same year. She once said: "Me and Francis Bacon and those Baroques are all concerned with making something soft wiggle and snake around hard architectural outline."

Robert Ballagh: Highfield , 1983/84, oil on canvas; courtesy the artist

At the Hugh Lane's Bacon Studio exhibit, an interview with Bacon is showing on a loop as you arrive. The edges of the screening wall are lined in steel to protect it against the rub and flow of the public. The interview, with Melvyn Bragg, took place at the artist's studio in London. Bacon, excited, yields to the interview. Throughout the screening the video DVD showing the footage intermittently drops sound and freezes frames. At one point while trying to articulate what it is that is the most important thing in his painting, Bacon repeatedly circles and stalls in his thoughts. The pathos caused by this coincidence produces the most moving moment in the exhibit and emotionally surpasses the experience of the conserved Studio. Bacon recovers, asks permission to read what he is trying to remember (written down earlier), takes paper from his pocket and explains that painting is fundamentally a "concentration of the image."

You can look at the Studio through two spy-holes, two windows and the glazed-over doorway. Neither window was used for light for painting. The large dark-wood easel, standing centrally in the studio, is directed at a skylight. It has been emptied of the painting found on it after Bacon's death. It, aka Unfinished Portrait , was removed and hangs in the adjacent special exhibition room.

In Highfield , painted in 1984 by Robert Ballagh, the artist looks "out from the studio...yet the interior canvas remains blank." This is an important illustration in his Land and Language catalogue. The blank canvas in Highfield is set on a medium-sized easel. On the immaculate floor a torn-up Picasso poster symbolises a warning against "slavishly following international cultural fashions." The excavation of Bacon's Studio revealed a dog-eared page of photos and text from a history book depicting scenes from the Irish Civil War. The multimedia element of the exhibit concentrates on this fragment as evidence of some remaining interest in Ireland on Bacon's part after his teenage flight from the country. Although there was no love lost between Bacon and his Irish adolescence, here is his empty reliquary, naturalised as a jewel in our cultural crown.

Perry Ogden: photograph of Francis Bacon studio, London, prior to its move to Dublin; courtesy Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art

The supplementary audio-visual information places an arch emphasis on the rope rail that runs along "the extremely steep staircase'" from the street and the big easel which was found "extended to its maximum height." These details are comparatively flamboyant, Baroque, arabesques in the flat, conformist spectacle.

Robert Ballagh: Land and Language , Ireland Institute, June 2001
Atelier Van Lieshout, Gynaecological Clinic, portable commission on board the Aurora, Women on Waves Foundation
Francesca Woodman, Douglas Hyde Gallery, May/June 2001
Annelies Strba and Bernhard Schobinger: Paradise (Part 1) , Douglas Hyde Gallery, May/June 2001
Francis Bacon Studio, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, opened May 2001


Valerie Connor is an artist; forthcoming curatorial projects include TV Project, with Maeve Connolly and Orla Ryan and temporary public art projects for Carlow and Dublin, with Fiach Mac Conghail.