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Autumn 2001 - review: West C97
Is it a lazy complaint to make that Sligo is hard to get to? Not for the people who live there, it is true, but even the locals must find it difficult to make connections when all trains seem to run like arteries from Dublin. The programme of exhibitions from the likes of the Model Arts Centre, Sligo Art Gallery, Linenhall Castlebar and the Galway Arts Centre (among others) are reasons enough to wish to make connections across the west without feeling the need to make them via Connolly and Heuston Stations. It's brilliant to see that the Arts Council have a working plan to support the arts outside the capital city, it's just a shame that Iarnród Éireann don't seem to have one too. I left at six in the morning to see Camille Souter at the Model, and arrived via bus connection from Boyle, bleary-eyed, to enjoy the pace and beauty of Souter's vision. I remember seeing her retrospective at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1980, and her work does not seem to date. With subject matter as diverse as flesh wounds, aeroplanes, boxers, dancers, freshly hanging meat and the landscapes of the Irish countryside, the sense of continuity is to be found within the atmosphere of the paintings themselves, located in the mind's eye rather than in the specifics of place. Cormac O'Leary at the Sligo Art Gallery showed paintings which seemed far more vigorously connected to their sites. O'Leary keenly observes the atmospherics of a place, the qualities of heat and light, of water, sun and earth. Split between images of the West of Ireland and the islands of Malta and Gozo, there was a tension in the balance between the vivid yellows and indigos of the Mediterranean and the silvery greens and blues of the Irish countryside. O'Leary works to a fairly strict geometrical structure, using a strong horizontal cross-sectioning technique, and while I was seduced by the evocative beauty of the Irish works, the Maltese pieces seemed to somehow miss some of the nature of Malta, an uniquely elusive place to try to understand. Cormac O'Leary (along with Edwina McDonagh) also won the painting award at Íontas at the Sligo Art Gallery in July. The Garden at the Model explored the ways in which artists respond to the idea of contained nature. It was good to see Finola Jones' Crazy on the Outside again. The enormous pink elephant is reminiscent of Jeff Koons' Puppy (now sited outside the equally unbelievable Guggenheim Bilbao). It was first seen at the Green on Red, when it was in Fitzwilliam Square, in 1998. Daphne Wright's tinfoil groves are always beautiful, and in this context of artificiality, Amelia Stein's photographic prints of the Botanic Gardens worked better than they had as a simple evocation of place when at the Rubicon earlier this year. Still investigating nature, Rita Wobbe at the Linenhall Castlebar, constructs strict grids to contain ranks of painted circles and squares. Inspired initially by the sight of the agricultural flower fields seen by the artist during a summer in Holland, the strict uniformity of the panels became more abstracted as they built up to a larger installation piece. Here the palette of reds, ochres and fleshy tones made me think of nipples; of bodily growths and the scientific cultivation of bacteria rather than tulips, crocuses or roses. Half an Hour of Silence , new paintings by David Quinn, had been shown at the Sligo Art Gallery in June, but (due to trains and the lack of them) I didn't get to see it until it travelled to the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin in July. Quinn's paintings have some of that silence and enigmatic quality of unexpected perspectives of de Chirico, but with Quinn's work, the perspective that is altered is that of light. Shadows fall across silent landscapes, barns seem abandoned in the late afternoon sunshine. The landscapes have been pared down from the work shown in Quinn's 1999 Kevin Kavanagh show, Munnadesha , and even Red Cardigan , the only image to depict a figure, retains a fragile loneliness. Michael Kieran's landscapes, Horizons , at the Linenhall in July abstracted nature in yet another way with a linear geography of earth and sky. Vast spaces opened up in paint to take the mind to places unobstructed by man or mountains. And yet despite the lack of physical shape, the landscapes were possessed of less frightening absence than those of David Quinn. Quinn's works are perhaps more powerful, but if I had to close my eyes and inhabit one of these created worlds, I would walk towards the skies of Michael Kieran, and dream dreams of the silvered forests of Daphne Wright. It is a criticism often levelled at arts festival that the visual arts can be sidelined in favour of the performance programming. This is certainly true of Edinburgh, and has been the case in Galway in the past. This year, however, thanks especially to an intervention that cleverly crossed the art/performance lines, the visual-arts elements made Galway well worth a visit, even if you didn't catch a single theatrical show. To begin with the least convincing, Jean Baudrillard seems to be philosophe du jour at the moment, the thinking man's thinking man. Having read him quoted in articles ranging from television to surveillance to travel and tourism, it was with great anticipation and interest that I went to see the exhibition of his photographs at NUI-Galway. I don't know exactly how, but I think I wanted to find images which articulated the complexities of the man's thought, which made palpable some of the contradictions he raises in his debates. "The desire to take photographs may spring from the observation that, taken as a whole, the world is a pretty disappointing place," says Baudrillard in his publicity material, and it was this statement which most summed up the experience of seeing his images on display. Inoculated against wonder and amazement by the glossy spreads of the Sunday magazines and the National Geographic , Baudrillard's images, caught moments from his wide-ranging travels, were no more than attractively engaging. Most interesting of all was the philosopher's choice of image to advertise the exhibition in the arts-festival programme. For an intellectual engaged in an understanding of 'the economy of communication' the selection of a picture of the naked philosopher photographing himself in a mirror was a conceit about which Baudrillard himself should have much to say. Across the quad at NUI was a small show of works on paper by R. B. Kitaj. The selection was just enough to make one want a far more comprehensive display of the work of this justly famous, fascinating and yet often ignored artist, and it therefore stopped short of being fulfilling. The Galway Arts Centre showed the work of two artists, Action , by Paul M. Smith, and Erwin Olaf's Royal Blood . Both artists work in a style which borrows much from magazine, advertising and fashion photography. Downstairs, Smith had three lightboxes, composite images of the artist skydiving in a suit or seemingly leaping across the gap between two tall buildings, à la James Bond. Crisply beautiful, the same limitations which undermined Baudrillard's images were in operation here. We've seen too much of the same thing in the media for it to captivate as art. Upstairs, Erwin Olaf's images were again expertly made. Equally clear, crisp and beautiful, models were made up to look like Aryan icons of history. Princess Diana was there, a blonde Jackie Kennedy, Julius Caesar, Ludwig II. And each perfect image was disfigured with blood. Chunks of gory matter clung to Jackie's famous pill-box hat. Diana had a Mercedes symbol embedded and oozing red from her upper arm. But after an initial ugh-factor, none of the images were really shocking. The photographs were more cheap shots, easy targets for simplistic one-liners, representing an eighties-style obsession with banal fame which it seems only the advertising industry and the tabloids are anxious to bring back into fashion. Far more visceral in their implications of gore - and all achieved without a drop of blood being spilled, were Pauline Keena's forms in her exhibition A-Stray . Entrails seemed to drip, free-form from fabric sculptural pieces, suspended from the ceilings of the temporary West End Gallery space. They were fascinatingly enticing, an anatomy lesson in dun-coloured material, complemented by the delicately expert pencil sketches on the walls. And the best for last - Urban Dream Capsule was the highlight of the festival, both visual and theatrical. Urban Dream Capsule was four Australian performance artists living on display for the duration of the festival in the picture windows of Galway City Library. Far closer to Maurice O'Connell's Response System 1 , the excellent 1995 intervention which saw O'Connell living under the eye of two cameras, immured somewhere within IMMA for a month, than to the simple voyeurism-fame-money transactions at the heart of Big Brother , Urban Dream Capsule operated on levels from simple to complex, and all of them infused with a warm sense of intelligent humour. For the duration of the festival, a living environment had been constructed in the windows, complete with hammocks, camp beds, kitchen, washing facilities and a computer for the four to stay in touch with their audience in the outside world. Activating the crowd which was always present outside the windows, it was art that looked back at you as you watched, increasingly aware of your relationship with what you had come to view. Children were instantly captivated, writing messages and communicating unselfconsciously, while adults were more slowly enticed into the world of the work, where it became clear only as you turned reluctantly away to return to your daily life, your head full of thoughts, that it was the artists, those viewed, imprisoned beyond the windows who had retained real control of the transaction. I mentioned laziness at the beginning. Sometimes at exhibitions, I drift away from concentration to wonder why I'm looking at the work, why I'm waiting to find moments in paint, photographs, performance, print or whatever that repay the visit, that make me stop, wonder, smile, feel enriched in whatever way. Urban Dream Capsule repaid enough to sustain a hundred more trips by bus and train across and around the whole of Ireland. Camille Souter, Model Arts Centre, April - June and RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, July/August 2001
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