Noel Sheridan,
Director of The National College of Art and Design, Dublin, is about
to retire. A balance sheet is in order, and fellow artist Brian
O'Doherty talks him through from the '60s to the present.
Brian O'Doherty:
You've lived in a variety of countries, Noel. Which had the most
effect on you?
Noel Sheridan:
New York, I suppose. I was there at an amazing time of change; the
Sixties. Big changes for painting. I considered myself a professional
painter. I had a dealer; I'd exhibited at the Paris Biennale, etc.
I even got it together enough to write 'artist' on my passport -
so I was committed, very passionate about painting. I arrived in
1963. When I got to New York I thought "I know what this is." Maybe
because I'd seen so many movies; listened to so much jazz. It was
just like entering a movie. That's the way I handled it. I pretended
I was in a movie. Everything about Dublin in the '50s got challenged.
No matter how much I travel there's always this conflict for me.
I was very deeply marked by the '50s in Dublin and seem to spend
half my life trying to deal with it.
BO'D:
Did you arrive close to 22nd November 1963?
NS:
I arrived early that November. The show, a two-man revue with John
Molloy called Tête at Eight, tried out in Newport, Rhode
Island. A wonderful theatre there, very Andrew Wyeth, and I remember
I was in this diner where you could have pancakes for breakfast
- not just Shrove Tuesday - and when I was paying the check I remember
the guy on the register was calculating my bill and someone called
from the end of the café, "Kennedy's shot - he's dead" and the guy
- just took a beat and said - "That's $1.65." Something about that
transaction stayed with me. It's life, I suppose, but it struck
me as very American. I came to admire that directness. It felt like
'growing up'. By the time we got to New York a real sense of sadness
and mourning pervaded everything - since so much of the material
in the show was about Kennedy and I had to rewrite all of that and
it just didn't work.
BO'D:
I think there is general feeling that the '60s began on November
22nd 1963. After that there was a huge shift; a sort of emotional
landslide . The minimalists had a big show in '65, Primary Structures
at the Jewish Museum, proclaiming, among other things, the death
of painting. You came to a city that said painting is not the future.
How did you deal with that?
NS: Slowly,
painfully. One of the first places I made for was the Cedar Bar
to see the painters I admired only to find everyone had left. De
Kooning was now a rumour. Somewhere on Long Island. Then Pop Art
blew everything away. I think you're right about '63. No one wanted
the hassle, the complexity - Europe - any more. I felt Pop Art was
essentially American; it was their childhoods, their culture; comic
books, supermarkets, neon signs. bill boards. I got it, but I couldn't
own it or use it easily.
It was a radical
break with Europe which the earlier generation had sustained and
transformed. And Minimalism - which had a European link through
Beckett and Robbe Grillet - was so anti painting. For a painter
it was like taking shots to the head. I got into a lot of underground
movies. That is where painting went at that time. They were made,
for the most part, by painters who were working through essentially
painterly problems. I had real difficulty saying "painting is over."
What I did was to go back to Cézanne. I was in the hippest city
in the world, trying to work out the 19th century. Then I sensed,
late '60s, that what I was thinking about, painting two chairs for
a couple of years, was in synch with some early moves in Conceptual
Art having to do with problems of 'representation'.
BO'D:
You were at the crossroads of a culture with many vectors crossing
in your own mind. You were coming from a country that had no history
of conceptual art. When I was in Dublin, I was quite unhappy with
its second- and third-generation Cubism and it was (still is, I
think) a painterly culture So it must have been confusing when you
came over - since you were equipped to pursue several disciplines
- you were an actor/performer, you were on Broadway - not many people
can say that . At the same time you were exposed as a artist to
something that you hadn't experienced before.
One of the
things that fascinates me about you is that you are at this console
of talents and the question is 'how do you play it?' You have theatre
and set design, you are a writer, your foreword for the drawing
catalogue for the NCAD is absolutely brilliant you are a natural
born painter, then there's your conceptual side, all adding up to
an original angle of seeing and thinking. One of the marvellous
things about you is your response to good work wherever you see
it. You respond totally. Very un-Irish, may I say. Looking at this
console, it's interesting how you have played across it. No matter
how conceptual you became you, and at the same time, preserved a
kind of subterranean, illicit relationship with painting.
NS:
I think all the work I do is somehow grounded in painting. And the
other point, it's true, conceptual art wasn't understood here, but
we had Flann O'Brien and we had Laurence Sterne, not to mention
Berkeley. So we had conceptual people before anyone decided what
conceptual art was. And I got that - the permission was there and
it wasn't strange to me. I think too that I really like to be in
the vicinity of art. I don't know who said that "sometimes I think
I like artists more than I like art." I like anyone who is trying
to do this extraordinary, worthless and absurd thing. I just think
that it is such a good thing to do with your life. I do enjoy seeing
something new come into the world. I like to be around it. We are
jumping ahead, but there was a critical moment in the '70s when
I bought the whole menu, the ideology, the politics, the possibility
of paradigm shifts; social, formal, cultural. None of it happened,
it didn't work - it couldn't, I can see that now - but I still carry
that freight.
There was a
brief time of flux, in fact Fluxus typified the anarchy of that
time, and I enjoyed that. I made a big decision in '63 to give up
performing and then here comes "Performance Art'; I wanted to paint,
not to write, and then language is in the frame and artists often
had to write criticism to oppose the power of formalist commentary;
so everything was shifting all the time. And I was into it. Then
it changed and got sorted. Even more contradictory was my becoming
Director of an art institution. It went against the grain of everything
I was about. But I believe there's great talent here; it just needed
some support, some sense of itself as OK. So you, as Patrick Ireland,
and Seán Scully and Tim Mara agreeing to act as external examiners
were all part of that. And I became 'a suit'. Maybe because I didn't
get to go to art school in Dublin and I wasn't here during the upheavals
of the '60s - and so didn't have 'a history' - I could be a believer.
And I do believe something as remarkable as what we have in literature
and drama will happen here in the future in the visual arts. But
if there's no platform it can't. There needs to be the habit - the
custom - what Kavanagh calls "lumber to burn."
BO'D:
Waiting for the artist Godot. I don't know who or what or how he/she/it
is going to appear but I do feel that in my many years as extern
here I saw wonderful talent as good as anywhere. There is something
enormously gifted about the Irish, I don't know what it is. Is it
because our background has been so messed up, dislocated or that
we were a subject race in post-colonial double focus or that our
wits are sharpened because we're not high and mighty and live by
the vernacular? There's something very special about the Irish giftedness
(of which you are an example) and it goes across the board very
often. You are a great enabler in the best sense and you get pleasure
out of enabling people; to ease the birth pangs of talent when it's
reaching. Was that continually a pleasure and joy to you here and
in Australia?
NS:
I got to Australia in '71. I got caught up in the energy generated
by the Labour (Whitlam) Government . Very 'progressive' (remember
when that was a word?) and I directed an artists' space, The Experimental
Art Foundation in Adelaide. There was a great 'feel' about Australia;
up-beat, post colonial and part of an international network of avant-garde
practices. It's easy to direct an artists' space, if you are an
artist. You know that all an artist wants to hear is "yes, this
can happen." What the artist doesn't need is 'help' to 'improve'
the work; an account of exactly how hard it is to be an administrator;
views about other art or artists. You've got to know what is bullshit
and there's always plenty of that, but if it's the real deal, then
you just listen and try to help it happen. Imagine it's yourself.
It's the same
with the College. If you were a student, what would you like to
happen? What can help students do well, what can help good staff
do better? This is the heart of it, but it often lies beneath tons
of shit that has to be dug out, and you can't always deliver. But
you must try not to be distracted within the labyrinth. And there's
usually enough sightings, as you say: some end-of-year work, to
make it a pleasure. Art and education are becoming very industrialised,
very corporate and you've got to deal with that without becoming
that.
BO'D:
Let's get back to New York in the '60s - It's the good times, things
were happening, it was exhilarating, confusing - sex and drugs and
rock and roll and art and craziness and protests and Vietnam It
was some mix and there was a great paradigm shift, there's no question.
Going from the '50s to the '60s was like entering another dimension
of existence altogether. Now you were there, you met all kinds of
people and you had a great gift for establishing friendships with
people. You left very good traces in N.Y. as indeed you did in Australia
where you have a legendary name. But why did you leave this simmering
'60s pot in New York?
NS:
I suppose the back-story to the work Everybody Should get Stones
is an account of that time. Everything did come apart for me - for
the reasons you list. Everything just broke down - including me.
So Stones starts by trying to list what can be established
as 'true'. Very minimalist, if you like, pragmatic. A sound footing
which then gets pushed to exhaustion through a computer program
that thrashes the premise through permutations that are perhaps
true as language but beyond the mind's capacity to know as fact.
The only fact is the stone. So begin again. Up the ante on the fancies
of language to exhaustion again. To the stone again. And as the
fancies take flight, the stones beneath the feet sound and ground
reality. That's that work as 'sculpture', or whatever, but conceptually
it's 'a trip'; an account of a mind trying to heal itself in the
form of an art work. Classic. I should say that the work is meant
to be amusing, so maybe this account is more than anyone needs to
know to 'get off' on it.
BO'D:
Stones, in my view, is one of the finest early conceptual
works of that era. I find it, in the context of the '60s conceptualism,
quite mind-blowing. You change the context, you change your mind.
There's something in our generation - we're not too far apart -
that's hard for young artists now to understand. You mention Beckett
. We can go there, as you and I know very well. There's a part of
Beckett, I don't know what you would call it - that terrible pull
of gravity into the mud. So many in our time felt that downward
suction, that in turn gave some of us the counter-energy to get
out of it, because if you stay in it, you're gone. I think that
dialectic is one that I recognised in the Stones piece and
I wonder if it's one that you recognise.
NS:
Absolutely. The trashing in the mud, that is the work, is
a drowning that tries to look like waving. And the final images
- the physical exercises - represent a 'getting out'. Although they
too are futile. A sort of keeping busy. Funny and sad. But that
was a key shift - from thinking to action - and that's what I did.
I got busy. I'm sure that's life's dialectic; moving between the
two. And when you wonder if the price of the busyness is 'the work'
then what is 'the work'? Time to go to the beach and think about
that.
BO'D:
Do you have regrets?
NS:
Only in the sense that everyone must have regrets - decisions taken
surface the possibility of decisions not taken. The Stones piece
is about that. If you consider all the possibilities, then choice
is provisional. If you don't get that, if you have regrets, then
you're missing the point of death. Period.
BO'D:
What characterises that work is something that I admire - persistence.
The work stays the course. You're over the first jump, over the
second and finally Beecher's Brook. Then you added the witty exercises
at the end. What strikes me is the terror of the thing; the unalterable
substance of 'thingness'; dissolved a bit by Berkeley. Is there
a bit of a tennis game (stone as ball) going on between Russell
and Berkeley?
NS:
Yes, all the gnomic quotes in the final section represent swings.
And Russell gets the sense of Burke terror; another force "fierce
and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness
and fearful, passionless force of non human things" which Berkeley
thinks is idea; as simply "a phenomenon, whose explanation shows
only that upon such and such an occasion we were affected with such
and such ideas." More dreadful.
BO'D:
I like the work's format. They could get it in Alaska. You don't
need any high-tech to make it happen because I think it's a perfect
work as it is. I want to ask you something else because I remember
you were getting work ready for your retrospective. Unfortunately
I didn't see it; people have spoken to me about it and one of them
was very taken with the horse - Yeats is another matter. I was curious
to know what you felt when you saw all that work which you had retrieved
as best you could. Looking at that exhibition that contained early
work, and also some of your New York work - the Chairs etc.
- Is it a version of yourself? You can't go back twenty or thirty
years, you have to look at it now in the present day. How did that
go?
NS:
In fact I ended up showing only three works; the Stones,
an installation of the studio and a video. I was going to show paintings,
past and current, but it got too complicated. And I was trying to
get the publication On Reflection together and that
took time, which had to be found while doing the work of the College.
Seeing the publication was strange. As you know I asked writers
I admire to write for it and it is strange to see yourself played
back through the eyes of others. I was very moved, actually. I was
surprised at how 'OK' some of the paintings looked.
As you know
I lost most of the painting work from the '60s. I was over that,
but I got some slides of work and it brought back memories of when
I painted them and I began thinking 'who was that person?' and what
a time that was. The attempt to get onto video a nine-projector
work from the '70s didn't work and the Stones looked, well,
benign. Different from the interrogative and confrontational attitude
of 30 years ago, but it seems to have inserted itself OK into another
frame and I found that interesting. Not mine anymore.
BO'D:
We need a full retrospective. What do you think is the best decision
you've made in your life professionally?
NS:
I think it was that I was going to be an artist. What that was -
what art is - and I don't mean institutionally, remains puzzling.
I'm less interested in something's being art or not. It's that it
be interesting in a certain way. Who wants to know if something
is art or not and why? That isn't an artist's question. And yet
you must work within the canonical forms, otherwise you're incomprehensible.
And if you get art mixed up with life, you're incomprehensible.
And that happens to me sometimes. Blame Duchamp. But I think once
you start saying "it's a job" you're in trouble. Sometimes, to avoid
that, you have to get a job.
BO'D:
What are you going to do now you have an open future and you are
reborn and you are a vital fellow with all these gifts with which
you began in a country that's now affluent, where permissions are
vastly different from when you and I were young?
, a.k.a. Patrick Ireland, is an artist and writer.
