Circa Art Magazine

We posted online a bit earlier today a news item based around the Guardian’s list of the 1,000 artworks to see before you die. Bit of fun, most of it. The most striking result, though, is probably the low representation of women among the artists - a mere 3.3%.

Rather than going over why this result may have come about, it reminded me of a related issue, which is age limits for art prizes. There is the occasional art prize in Ireland which has an age limit attached - eg, the artist must be under 40 to enter. It strikes me that this requirement is not just ageist but also sexist. It is a very common pattern that women get tied up with family matters and only start to reclaim their careers around the age of 40, too late for some of these prizes.

Much better to target ‘emerging artists’, regardless of age, with these prizes.

Wish I were writing more blogs. Totally swamped though.

Had a bit of a debate yesterday about what the likes of Circa can offer in these changed times. Among other conclusions we noted that consumption is out, ‘being’ in. Art is excellent for anyone who wants to explore being. You can take it at your own pace, there’s no longer the rush of needing to consume. By being with art you can enrich the quality of being for you, and it needn’t cost anything.

It’s tempting to conclude, then, with ‘Be!’, but that would be so three months ago. How about:

Be.

be.

be

b

Have you seen the latest issue of Circa, just out? Whoa! Self-praise is no praise, but we feel we’ve finally made some significant progress with the quality of image reproduction. It’s been a sore point with the magazine over many years. Partly it has been a technical issue, partly an ideological one.

Should an art magazine be an art object, as well as trying to depict art objects? If an art object, then design is obviously going to be important, but so too will the overall feel - what it’s like to pick it up, the bulk of it, the quality of the paper, etc, even how it smells. Paper quality seems to be where ‘art object’ versus ‘art reproduction’ diverge the most: paper that is interesting to the fingers and the eyes is often not much good at holding images. And paper that is good with images - a prime example being Hello, a paper whose name is possibly derived from Hello! magazine - may just be thin, flimsy, shiny and unpleasant.

Then there’s the added question of whether the paper is ecologically friendly. And the quality of the printing - printing presses and processes vary.

What did we do? Changed our paper and our printer, and put a spot coating over the images. We’re very pleased with the results. We probably pushed more towards ‘art reproduction’ than ‘art object’, but I think it’s OK on both measures. I had been worried that good printing would just reveal deficiencies in the quality of the photographic images - how artists take photos of their work is a whole other topic - but no, it all seems to have turned out well. See for yourself.

Want to be a Circa member? ‘Member’ is apparently the new term for ‘friend’, when you’re talking about support schemes in arts organisations. Anyway, become a Circa benefactor-member, and you get to come to our issue launch parties, you get to join me on a trip to a major biennale or art fair, you get a personalised copy of each issue, featuring comments on selected texts, and you get your name or your company logo put into the magazine and onto the website. All for a mere €250 per annum. Become an individual-member, and you get invited to the launch parties. In either case you get the warm of glow of knowing that you are helping Circa make it through the tough times ahead; the glow may be augmented by the knowledge that the launch parties will be exclusive (name-on-the-door type of thing).

For more, click here.

The Arts Council in Dublin did very well yesterday in organising a one-day conference devoted, pretty much exclusively, to the advantages and challenges of the web for arts organisations.

It’s all too easy with the web to get excited about the potential and then to get lost in the details of implementation, without pausing to figure out what the implications are. Andrew Keen and Charles Leadbeater brought us up short, right at the start of proceedings, with their opposing views of the value of the web in relation to the provision and consumption of culture. For Leadbeater, the web provides extraordinary potential to circumvent the traditional means of accessing a mass audience; you no longer need to get the permission of monolithic organisations - TV companies, record companies, etc - to make it big, you can just post your video, etc, on YouTube, tell your pals, and see what happens. Democracy in action.

For Keen, the downsides are dramatic. According to him, “the digital economy lowers the value of content to zero.” ‘Value’ here is meant primarily in monetary terms. The key point is that the web, especially ‘web 2.0′ which is supposed to be all about connecting people, gives away the vast majority of its content for free. And how is a culture-producer supposed to survive in such a scenario? If culture-producers cannot survive, quality is at great risk. If someone plucking on a guitar in a video on YouTube, viewed by 50 million people, is to be the new pinnacle of culture, we’re in trouble.

There were some very useful (parallel) sessions and workshops. Damien Mulley talked on how to run a successful web 2.0 mission, with particular reference to blogging. In the final session of the day, he was also keen to wrest copies of RTÉ’s broadcast content from RTÉ itself, so that we can all play with it (which seemed to him fair, since we’d paid for it). David McKenna of RTÉ suggested the broadcaster would be very keen to monetise whatever content it had in any way it could, so giving it away was unlikely to be on the menu.

Earlier, Conn Ó Muíneacháin walked us very quickly through making a podcast.

The big question, of course, is where to now? Mary Cloake of the Arts Council indicated that the current climate hardly favours the creation of a new funding scheme; but perhaps, as she said herself, the current tighter times may encourage more experimentation with the online possibilities. What would seem most important is that the Arts Council decide quickly how it wants to act; not easy, given how fast things are changing.

It’s hard to ignore Andrew Keen’s admonition, finally, that we may just be machine-gunning ourselves in the foot. Coming shortly, as we rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the first in a new series of podcasts on recirca.com…

A few years back, in an online news item, we unwisely took sides online in a controversy outside Ireland about which we were not well informed. Thought we’d bring in a bit of edgy journalism. We suggested that one of the protagonists in a dispute was profiting from the ensuing publicity. We were quickly showered with feedback, most of it supporting our position, but expanding on it in ways that suggested we would not be inviting any of these supporters round to dinner. Within a few days, if you Googled the main protagonist’s name, our news item came up first on the list. Finally the protagist wrote to us to point out what grief we were causing.

For obvious reasons, I’m not saying who the protagonist was. I was reminded just now, however, of the matter by an e-mail I received today. It’s from Nigeria, apparently, the home of tricky spam. This one read:

1)please sir i want to know how much will it cost me to have nsk passport.
2 how long will it take before it will be ready.
3)how can i bord fron nigeria to nsk
3) can couples apply for nsk passport.
4) how can i get nsk application form.
please mail me back

We’ve covered NSK a few times online, such as here. NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) issue fake passports to a fake, utopian country. Sometimes, when you fool around in a way you think is artistic, or sensible, or controversial or just interesting, you come up against things you really wish you hadn’t, when outside reality comes knocking on your door.

Haven’t a clue how I’m going to respond to the Nigerian query (and I’m even hoping it’s a spoof).

How to appear like you don’t really know what you’re doing. I closed down the art-college survey a few days back, in order do an analysis of the results (over 300 respondents, a ton of comments - it took me a solid day and a half to read them all). I had hoped to have an initial article in the winter issue of Circa, which is going to press next week. Off I set with the analysis, but by the time I was half way through describing the initial results, 3600 words were on the page, far too many for the issue and with no sensible way of reducing the count. So it’s put off to the spring.

To pick out a few choice respondents’ comments - on the final mark: “You say artist, I say waitress.” On the buidling: “Really bad facilities, eg in first year toilets upstairs were leaking and dripping faeces down the wall of the canteen.” On the Students Union: “What union?”

Perhaps this is just a sneaky way of saying, if you haven’t responded yet to the survey, please do so. It’s here.

It would be a pity not to note, very quickly, what a stunning building the reopened RHA now has in Ely Place, Dublin. The building seems to have lost its vagueness, in terms of the spaces, and it all seems to flow well. Hard to judge definitively, though - there were so many people there yesterday at the launch of the Annual Exhibition. There is an extraordinary challenge for an artist, though, in tackling the main gallery space; it is huge, and now uninterrupted by the stairwell that was once at one end. Ciarán Lennon is scheduled as first up to give it a go.

What of the work in the RHA show? There’s lots of it, and the standard feels very high. I was a bit shocked (as a painter) to see how photography stood out. Pack lots of paintings together (as they do in the current show), and you get a bit blinded by all the gesture and brushstroke. In contrast, the photographs, also packed together, had a stillness about them; they also managed to be more self-contained.

I had meant to append this to the last blog, as a sort of “Fear not, help is at hand!” comment (and some feedback also reminded me): we do publish reviews and articles as ‘online-only’, and the texts have often been excellent. It has also been a source of new writers for the magazine itself over the years.

By the end of this year I expect us to have ‘published’ up to 50 online reviews this year alone. That is almost three Circa magazines’ worth of reviews. I expect there will also be around 15 articles uploaded - again three magazines’ worth. I think they make fascinating reading. The format seems to be particularly suited to interviews, and the series Slavka Sverakova has contributed is an excellent archive of artists’ thinking about their own work.

You can see current reviews here, and articles here.

Boo! OK, enough with Halloween.

Seeing Four Gallery relaunched last night in a new space at 119 Capel Street, Dublin, for some reason had me fretting about space in Circa itself (the magazine). Space is one thing Circa does not have a lot of - a few feature articles and 15 to 20 reviews per issue, once every three months. Considering the amount of artistic activity around the island, that’s poor coverage. But more space implies printing more pages, more writers’s fees, higher postage fees, etc - basically, pages cost. We’ve explained repeatedly to both Arts Council’s in Ireland that we’re not able to cover all we would like to cover, because we can’t afford more pages; they understand, but their budgets are very tight as well. That said, Circa has steadily increased the number of pages it does print - through our own income but also helped by the two Councils when they could.

That’s not the full story, though. For example, we could play with various parameters relating to the magazine: have shorter reviews, print on grungier paper, pay writers even less… What we have at the moment is a balance among a whole lot of possibilities; it seems to work, but change is inevitable.

Another part of the story, in terms of coverage, has to do with availability. If there are two shows of equal merit, but one is in a city and the other a day’s journey away for most reviewers, the city show is likely to win out; we do pay travel expenses, but that doesn’t mean we can find a good reviewer who will travel… Or if there are two shows of equal merit, but one is in a location that has received a lot of coverage in Circa and the other hasn’t, the less-covered location may win out, out of fairness to the location but hardly to the artist. These are the frustrating choices I’m faced with every day. What does actually make it into the magazine is there, I believe, on merit; what isn’t in the magazine is often, unfortunately, of equal merit, but that’s just how the chips have fallen this time round.

Surveys - who needs ‘em? It’s easy enough to see them as trivial, and a lot of them are. But some help a lot in planning, and some tell us a lot about what’s going on. Circa is involved in two online surveys at the moment; both are very worthwhile.

The first has to do with studios in Dublin city; it’s here; please add your experience, whether you’re hoping to find a studio or already have one.

The second poll has been up on the Circa website for a  while now but it will be coming down shortly. It has attracted over 300 useful sets of responses. It’s about the art-college experience in Ireland; if you’ve been to art college anywhere on the island, please wander over and share your thoughts.

If you’re still here, you’re not there; hmm.

Belfast on Friday; a pleasure as usual.

Entrance to RUA Annual Exhibition

First to the RUA Annual Exhibition in the former Harland and Wolff Drawing Offices. It threw up for me a series of dichotomies I’m finding it hard to resolve. All the traditional work is there - there are a  lot of people who handle paint very well, a large part of it in the service of landscape, though with a fair smattering of grimmer cityscapes. Less emphasis on the figure, though, especially on the figure captured in convincing 3D on 2D canvas, the traditional pinnacle of any Academy. Does that matter? I don’t know.

Interior shot, RUA Annual Exhibition

The prize-winning works did tend to stand out from the crowd, with Emma Kelly’s ceramic dildos particularly striking. The star of the show, though, is the building itself - see images (from a mobile-phone camera). So much was this the case that one of my favourite pieces there doesn’t seem to have been an artwork at all, but rather a spontaneous installation - a self-generated artwork:

A self-made ‘artwork’, RUA Annual Exhibition

Where the white cube is abandoned, art best suited to a white-cube environment may suffer. Perhaps more importantly, though, we stray into the murky territory of the ‘experience economy’ - the idea that we are increasingly drawn to and paying for ‘experiences’, such that art and institutions increasingly find themselves trying to furnish just that. The Drawing Offices are an experience. Against that background, how do works fare whose currency is concept or contemplation?

It is tempting to see the RUA’s temporary venue as turning into a wonderful new space for contemporary art. It has echoes of Venice’s Arsenale, so thoughts rise up of a Belfast Biennale. But nah, the developers move in this week.

Interior of one of the smaller rooms, RUA, with work by Susan MacWilliam

Back in central Belfast, to the Golden Thread Gallery. Declan McGonagle has curated A Shout in the Street, another in the GTG’s historical series on art in Northern Ireland. I think I liked every piece in it. When I read Declan McGonagle’s explanation, Locky Morris’ Twist, 1989 - a suitcase with playing-card-sized pieces cut out of it, suddenly carried an extraordinary surfeit of meanings. Sandra Johnston’s video pieces enthralled - they are very simple, but what they record - goings-on related to ‘the marching season’ - seems totally exotic. I like Aisling O’Beirn’s Sputnik a lot. John Byrne’s Border Interpretative Centre video is amusing, as are all the artefacts it records. His Would you die for Ireland? video is probably one of the funniest artworks ever made. I particularly liked the guy who answered “Yes and no” to that question.

To Belfast Exposed, where Factotum start seriously in their exposé of the workings of propaganda imagery. There’s a hint of eyebrow-raising as they move closer to home, with the Northern Ireland-related fare becoming steadily more ironic. We see montages of lord mayors and fashion models, which are mildly mental. The final piece is about a potato-based cure for erectile dysfunction and is in very strange territory indeed.

Last stop but one is in PS2 across the road. Artist Garrett Carr has mapped the border in various personal ways, with photos, anecdotes, sketches, partial maps, and more. It is another take on the fact that the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland is simultaneously extremely significant and, when you wander it by bicycle or foot, almost nebulous. It is hard not to recall the words of Kevin McAleer in John Byrne’s Border Interpretative Centre video: that the border is what unites us.

Last stop is at the third space gallery, where Willie Doherty has a selection of powerful black-and-white images ; well worth seeing.

What’s the relationship between art and literature? ‘Troubled’ is probably a fair assessment: both appear to have the same aims, and in the best examples in both fields, there is a convergence of what seem like the necessary conditions upon what seems like the necessary response, be it in a haiku, a novel, a brushstroke, a performance, etc. Such is perhaps the romanticised ideal of how works of art and literature are made, but when they attempt to describe each other - prose about a painting, for example, or vice versa - things often fall apart.

Probably the best art about writing, and the best writing about art, can only be made when each side approaches the other obliquely. Something or some aspect of a poem may connect with something or some aspect in a drawing, and the result is works in both mediums that can stand on their own. I am thinking around this topic because of a launch we have tomorrow. Being launched is Marks, a publication in which six artist-writer pairings have each taken over four pages of the publication, to do with what they wished. I find the results very exciting. If you can make the launch, it’s from 6 to 8 pm in Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. You should be able to buy it online here from Thursday; more info on the publication here.

It’s a learning curve. WordpPress shut me out entirely for a few days. Had to reload the lot (all two blogs). Still don’t know why some of the links go nowhere.

A frequent criticism we field at Circa is that the website is, well, shite. A more occasional comment is that it’s brilliant. Skipping past the excuses (time; funds; funds=time), it is odd the things that have or have not worked on the site. I thought, for example, that ‘Young Circa’ would be a fantastic resource on the site. The idea was to upload portfolios of A-grade work by Junior Cert and Leaving Cert students, plus successful college-entry portfolios (plus their Northern Ireland equivalents). Result: one portfolio over the course of three or four years, despite promoting the idea all around the place. (You can see it here.) Pity - surely it would be of use to students and teachers to have examples readily available of what works, in terms of exams and college entry; in the end we gave up and took ‘Young Circa’ off our navbar.

More about the site another time. It’s worth noting in passing, though, that for a few years the website was ranked #1 in the world for a search on ‘art magazine’; we’ve slipped a bit since then - time, funds, time=funds excuse again - but still register an average of over 2,500 visitors to the site per day.

I worry that I am going the wrong way about Culture Ireland, for a lot of reasons (see the most recirca.com news item here). I have been complaining, not so much that the amount Culture Ireland gives to the visual arts is relatively small, compared to other artforms; my complaint is more that we don’t know why it is relatively small. Over the time of existence of Culture Ireland, the visual arts have taken 13% of the total disbursed. Is this fair? We don’t know, because we don’t know how the visual arts are performing in relation to other artforms, in terms of amounts requested and amounts granted; ie, there is no transparency. Had the visual arts been fortunate enough to receive the same amount of funding over the lifetime of Culture Ireland as have Theatre + Dance (Culture Ireland lumps them together), the visual arts would have received an extra €3.5 million. That’s a lot of profile, promotion, careers. More anon.

A blog. It’s come to this. Thank you, WordPress, webworld.ie and Feedburner.

Where to begin? It’s nice to see Theo Sims is back on the island. If you want wry art, he’s your man. I hope his own practice will continue, though he’s bound to be busy as the new Director of the Context Galleries in Derry. More on Theo here.

There’s an undoubted shiver running through the visual arts at the moment. Blame the bankers, naturally. They aren’t yet throwing themselves off skyscrapers here, but that could be down to a lack of skyscrapers. The Arts Councils are likely to take a hit, and downstream then all the organisations they support. That reminds me of a bugbear, but that’s for another day.