Brendan Earley:
Arrival, Pallas Heights Gallery, Dublin, October
- December 2003
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| Brendan Earley: Arrival
installation shot, 2003; courtesy Pallas Studios |
Mankind's vision of itself, seen from
beyond the earth, exists in an empty place, surrounded by
forgotten planets and fading stars. The Russian and American
vision of lunar living is suspended in silence, lost and
left behind. But traces of utopian ideals from the 1960s
litter the world like the scratched surfaces of abandoned
ships in the rubble of outer space.
Although dated and displaced, the fragments
of modernist architecture, philosophy, art and science remain
tangible in contemporary society. They are constructed from
the desire to create a perfect future happiness for mankind.
Arrival by Brendan Earley
at Pallas Heights evaluates the relevance of high-Modernist
ideals in the twenty-first century. Using the model of a
monolith from Stanley Kubrick's celebrated film 2001:
a space odyssey, he addresses the institutionalisation
of paradise and demonstrates that the realisation of a single,
static utopian ideal can only exist as a fictional construct.
The desire to create a utopia is not exclusive
to the latter half of the twentieth century. In an essay
for Art in America Tom McDonough discusses an exhibition
at the New York Public Library, which explores the variety
of systems employed throughout Western history to shape
a perfect society. Pointing to early manuscripts by theologians,
philosophers, social radicals and commercial developers
from the fifteenth century, he concedes that the West's
preoccupation with utopian ideals stems from the wish to
solve specific problems of the real world with imaginary
constructs. Many of these dreams and ideologies are, in
fact, the refracted images of specific moments in time.
Inspired by nostalgia, the desire is to recapture these
suspended moments and elevate "all humankind to the
level of the gods."1
Utopia as an isolated construct is
best described by Thomas Moore in his seminal work Utopia;
his island of perfection was located in the New World, providing
Europeans with the perfect 'empty' space on which to project
their fantasies.
Kubrick's images of the Earth, seen from
space, unmarked by political boundaries, offered mankind
a utopian vision of hope. They provided viewers with an
escape from the horrors of the Vietnam War and the violence
of the human-rights riots on the streets of America. The
film explored mankind's creation, fall and redemption.
The contrast between the ordered, clean,
white spaces of Kubrick's 2001 and the frenetic street
protests of the 1960s exposes two different philosophical
proposals for an ideal society: utopia as a closed structure
and utopia as an open, fluid entity.
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| Block of flats where Arrival
was housed; courtesy Pallas Studios |
In the bedroom of a block of semi-derelict
apartments awaiting demolition, Earley's monolith
stands on an illuminated floor. The Pallas Heights Gallery
space was once an isolated utopia. It now acts as a suitable
site-specific venue for the issues raised and addressed
in Earley's work. The municipal housing development, designed
in the latter half of the 1960s, has all the abandoned hope
of "conjoining the transience of humanity with the
eternal celestial realm."2
Earley increases the tension between actual
and imagined, dream and reality using light and sound. The
soundtrack of the last scenes of the film, combined with
the theatrical presence of the monolith, offers the viewer
a unique and surreal experience of Dublin's inner city.
It exposes the disconnection, disillusionment and subsequent
sense of failure experienced by those who designed these
structures, and those who lived in them.
As society evolves, invents and reinvents
itself in an unpredictable way, notions of fixed ideologies
appear impractical. This is because utopias fail as immutable
entities. The needs of a society are fluid and interchangeable.
Arrival demonstrates why fixed utopian ideals inevitably
become unsuitable environments for change. Left with the
task of living and working in an inappropriate, static structure,
a community becomes fractured and displaced. Arrival
is a stimulating reflection on the experience of this failure.
Ciara Healy is an artist and writer
based at Pallas Studios, Dublin.
Brendan Earley:
Arrival, Pallas Heights Gallery, Dublin, October
- December 2003
