The Art
Scene Today
Medbh Ruane
In May 2000, a collector paid £1.158m sterling for Louis
le Brocquy’s Travelling Woman with Newspaper. The price made le Brocquy the
fourth artist only in these islands to break the £1m barrier in their lifetime,
joining Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. The painting was made in
the years 1947/48, lean times for artists from Ireland and for art within it. By
the date of that millennium auction, Irish art was becoming a best-selling
brand.
No one set out overtly to build this challenging new brand
– nor believed that value was measured by a price tag. But the
headline-grabbing breakthrough confirmed another strand of the interest in Irish
art that had grown steadily over the last few decades. Art was no longer the
cultural poor relation of literature, financially or imaginatively. Things had
changed and art with them. International curators were paying attention to the
work of artists from Ireland; younger artists saw that attention as their due.
Some 30 years previously, the critic Brian O’Doherty had
pinpointed the challenge in raising the status of art within the wider culture.
Irish art was, as he saw it, the gate lodge beside the Big House of Irish
writing. The culture had opened up a little, driven by Sean Lemass’s economic
strategy as much as by the wider opening up taking place across the western
world. But although the public appetite for risk-taking writing was growing, t
art was still expected to present pictures rather than challenge ways of seeing.
People preferred art to be comfortable: pleasant landscapes, nice nudes,
familiar skies.
The first Rosc exhibition in 1967 was a bolt from the blue.
Suddenly, Ireland had ‘modern art’ on a huge scale. Outraged letters filled
newspaper columns but the die was cast. The context for Irish art was now
determinedly international, whatever might come.
Rosc gave contemporary art a major public profile in Ireland,
but its four-yearly format exposed the massive underdevelopment of anything
approaching an arts infrastructure. Annual exhibitions such as the Irish
Exhibition of Living Art and Independent Artists had given artists the chance to
show their work, yet few were able to develop their practices further.
Key institutions such as the Hugh Lane Gallery faced
opposition even from their own committees: that one refused to accept some
potentially controversial gifts, including a Rouault, a Bacon and a le Brocquy.
Later, its curator would be pilloried for acquiring a work by Bridget Riley,
which is now one of the most important paintings in the modern collection.
By 1969, students at the National College of Art and Design
had revolted against the way art was taught and presented to them and artist-led
ventures such as the Project Arts Centre (1967) were starting to create new
opportunities for contemporary art: the scene was set for change.
Tensions underlying what would happen over the next three
decades were informed by radically different aesthetic approaches among artists
and between critics and patrons. Some derived from wider debates happening
across Europe and North America, but others were local and all the more bitter
for it. The international standard, as laid down by modernist critic Clement
Greenberg in the wake of abstract expressionism, urged artists to ‘evacuate
content’, to remove narrative from their work and focus on the abstract ideal.
But social and technological changes were attracting more and
more young practitioners. Artist/advocates such as Joseph Beuys encouraged their
followers to use any means to hand to bring art to the people, and include the
people in their art. Art was about interaction, he believed, whether that took
place through the medium of performance, photography, painting drawing
sculpture; whether it was located in or out of a gallery space, on or off the
walls of an important collector, in a green field or on top of a high-rise
block. Beuys made a number of visits to Ireland, and seriously considered
establishing his Free University at the disused Royal Hospital Kilmainham, now
the Irish Museum of Modern art.
Such trends collided in the Irish art world with a growing
debate about what ‘Irish’ art was and how it was constituted. Some elements
in the debate reworked old nationalist ideas that Irish art should pursue ‘Irish’
subjects; others picked up on the traditional exclusion of local practices from
dominant metropolitan ways. From a distance, it is clearer now that both sides
of the debate focussed variously on identity issues – who are we, what are we,
is there something, anything, that is essentially ‘us’?
Patrick Collins was one of a number of talented artists who
left Ireland in the 1950’s, to return in the late 1970’s. His words deftly
catch the tension in play then.
"What’s lacking in Irish art now is, in my opinion –
Jesus, I shouldn’t say things like this – [is that] everybody wants to look
out instead of looking in," he told Aidan Dunne. "They haven’t
realised that we have a Celtic identity that’s endured for 5,000 years and
that nobody has painted just what that means. Why should we be a colony? We have
something here to say."
The decade Collins spoke of had seen the collapse of
political culture in Northern Ireland and the significant decision to start ‘looking
out’ from the Republic when the Irish electorate voted to join the E.E.C.
Early in the decade, Micheal (sic) Farrell and Gerard Dillon, with others, had
decided not to allow their work be shown in Belfast in protest against the
authorities there. Dillon was by then an established painter, but Farrell
belonged to a younger generation who had no problem integrating internationally
relevant styles with a sense of Irishness. His Miss O’Murphy series pilloried
the political classes using historical resonances from the French revolution.
Robert Ballagh developed social realism further than any to
date, starting with his People Looking at an Exhibition series and later
including work in protest against the Miami murders, where members of a
show-band were executed by loyalist paramilitaries. The artist-critic Brian O’Doherty,
who was based in the U.S., announced that he was changing his name to Patrick
Ireland in protest after Bloody Sunday in 1972. O’Doherty/Ireland’s work
began to explore ideas of translation and re-writing with series around the old
Ogham alphabet later transforming into performance and installation pieces
mapping the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses.
The 1970’s were not socialist, as someone had
optimistically forecast, but they witnessed a growing community of artists in
Ireland – and of artists from Ireland living elsewhere. James Coleman was
among the most exciting, already noticed outside Ireland and spanning media from
film, performance, theatre, sculpture to sound. Coleman worked conceptually, and
is in that sense the forerunner and frontrunner of the current generation of
artists, as well as among the most consistently challenging. It is a sign of the
times, then and now, that his work was better known outside Ireland than within.
Different painting practices were pursued by senior artists,
including William Scott, Nano Reid, Cecil King, Norah McGuinness, Anne Madden,
Barrie Cooke, Camille Souter, Basil Blackshaw, Patrick Scott, Maria Simonds-Gooding,
Charles Brady, Michael Coleman, Tony O’Malley, Brian Bourke, Noel Sheridan,
Collins and Michael Kane, Charles Tyrrell, among others, with promise emerging
from Felim Egan, John Aiken, Patrick Graham, Michael Cullen, Mary Fitzgerald and
Michael Mulcahy.
Sculpture had lost two of its brightest stars: Gerda Fromel,
whose major work outside the Carroll’s Factory in Dundalk remains a highlight
of Irish modernist sculpture; and Hilary Heron, who made a narrative sculpture
full of technical innovation and wit. Opportunities for what was then called ‘outdoor’
sculpture began to increase, as economic improvement encouraged businesspeople
to aspire to an art-in-architecture such as they saw on travels abroad.
Alexandra Wejchert and Oisin Kelly pursued two sides of the
sculptural coin, with Kelly’s big, nationalist inspirations becoming
increasingly popular after his works at the Garden of Remembrance, the Irish
Life Centre and Cork County Hall, while Wejchert’s cool abstraction was
favoured by such clients as AIB Bank centre and University College Dublin.
Outdoor work by John Burke, Michael Bulfin, Imogen Stuart and Conor Fallon
prefigured the growth in public art that would happen during the following
decade. Younger sculptors such as Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche and Michael
Warren would go on to create memorable public works, while developing their
studio practice.
The Sense of Ireland Festival held in London in 1980 placed
the Irishness debate in sharp relief. The two Arts Councils in Ireland mounted
an exhibition called The Delighted Eye, its title taken from a line by Seamus
Heaney. The catalogue included an essay by US-born and Irish-based critic
Frances Ruane in which she argued for the existence of a specifically Irish way
of looking at things, which was ‘indirect, lyrical and poetic.’ The works
illustrating the thesis included most of Ireland’s best-known painters and
sculptors, some using abstract expressionist methods, others in a
semi-representational style. Elsewhere in London, the critic Dorothy Walker
staged a counter-exhibition Without the Walls, including Alanna O’Kelly, Nigel
Rolfe, Coleman and others whose work drew on a wide range of media. The
imaginary ‘walls’ it spoke of suggested boundaries of identity, place and
practice, of structures too intent on locking people and ideas in.
Looking out or looking in, as Collins put it, were the poles
around which debate developed in the 1980’s, but it was more complicated. The
wider western art world was rife with rows between the new post-modernism and
the purist ethics of the Modernist canon. Cultural politics teased out the
distinction between strategies of resistance or reaction to economics and
society, with a burgeoning art market promising to make celebrities of artists
who played the game.
New Expressionism showed how a combination of expanding
markets and growing numbers of new museums could manufacture ‘new’ movements
almost overnight. Within Ireland, some artists labelled under that brand went
beyond style to present issues of social or political import. This amorphous
group loosely came from the Independent Artists wing of the spectrum, including
Patrick Graham, Brian Maguire, Eithne Jordan and others. Jordan’s practice was
also part of an emerging trend among women artists, who quickly came to artistic
attention. Painters like Cecily Brennan and Gwen O’Dowd were also instrumental
in developing better studio facilities, starting with the Visual Arts Centre in
Dublin.
Questions of gender came forefront through the work of Kathy
Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, Alanna O’Kelly, Louise Walsh and Alice Maher in
particular, with their work maturing in the 1990’s. Prendergast’s series of
body maps used traditional means of watercolour, drawing and representation to
scrutinise myths about the place of woman in art and society. Mother Ireland had
been a leading icon of the nationalist revival, yet her daughters had not been
accorded a leading role in the society she emblematised. Rita Duffy transformed
the icon into a pictorial parable of Northern Ireland when she made Mother
Ireland, Mother Ulster, showing each in terms of a sacrificial social order that
hardly let her breathe.
The quest for a specifically ‘Irish’ art floundered
critically abandoned once post-colonial discourses entered the culture. Before
that, being an ‘Irish’ artist, or an artist from ‘Ireland’, could
involve searches for ‘lost’ traditions and nostalgia for a Celtic paradise
whose visual culture had been (rudely) displaced. Whereas earlier generations
had happily presented land and landscape in a romantic, unquestioning way, the
present generation was more interested in interrogating it the better to see
what if anything lay within.
As the notion of peripherality became current in the wider
world, the personal and professional disadvantages of coming from a small place
on the edge of Europe – or a minority group in that place - grew more
interesting. The hierarchy of taste, style and cultural pedigrees that limited
the progress of any outsider reconjugated itself into a looser set of
assumptions where being different or using new media gave artists an edge.
The new media in question had in fact been round for quite
some time – photography and film were old enough to be great-grandparents.
Together with video, they gave new opportunities to people who found more
traditional methods of painting or sculpting too hidebound and loaded with
expectations to say or show what they meant.
This released ways of seeing that had not been possible
before, or not in that way. Willie Doherty’s photo-work engaged with mass
culture and communications, simultaneously looking at them while using their
tools to re-examine how they worked. Images of conflict in Northern Ireland as
seen by popular media were transformed into meditations on media and place.
Doherty was among the first to touch on the local/global axis increasingly
engaging people in general and artists in particular. By this stage, notions of
a specific, essential Irish art were virtually obsolete.
Elsewhere in the culture, notions of Irishness were
undergoing their own transformation. Negative experiences of emigration began to
shift into positive apprehensions of what the Diaspora entailed. Being an Irish
artist didn’t necessarily mean belonging to the same people in the same place
at the same time, to paraphrase Leopold Bloom. You could be Irish and Scottish,
or British, Australian, American or whatever, and live without having to exclude
any of those identities. You could at the same time be male or female, old or
young, able-bodied or disabled without being set apart on those grounds.
Painters such as Elizabeth Magill, Ciaran Lennon, Mark
Francis, Sean Shanahan and others wove traditional styles of landscape,
representation or abstraction into works that celebrated painterly values
without being restricted by them. The conceptual, sometimes surreal wit of
artists such as Cross took ancient icons such as the role of cattle in Irish
history and turned them into biting examinations of nature and culture.
Photographers such as Paul Seawright, Abigail O’Brien and Mick O’Kelly
variously examined social mores North and South, with video, sound and film work
by Jaki Irvine, Anne Tallentire, Fran Hegarty, Grace Weir, Caroline McCarthy,
Mary Kelly, Garrett Phelan and Susan McWilliams showing pungent humour alongside
careful scrutiny of art’s history and traditions themselves.
The post-Modern penchant for parody and irony was well
exemplified by David Godbold’s painting, which literally drew parallels from
formerly incompatible elements of human experience. There remained a strain of
history, land and landscape exemplified by Hughie O’Donoghue’s painterly
values, as well as that best illustrated by Sean Scully concerned with a
world beyond content, where different painterly and spiritual values came into
play. Scully’s uncompromising urban grids managed to be abstract yet
passionate, and his critical and commercial success reflected his ability to
meld intellect with powerful feeling.
That broadly abstract mode engaged younger artists such as
Corban Walker, with installations by Katie Holten and Dan Shipsides differently
using that lens to revisit ideas of land and urban living. Some young artists
reclaimed literature’s monopoly on the use of words by writing them into
paintings, drawings, sculptures and sound works. Others oversaw the gradual
re-introduction of narrative to their art.
Few of the new narratives were simple, or linear. Daphne
Wright told stories through sound and installation of the rural Protestant
community in Sligo into which she had been born. She wrapped forms in silver
foil and aluminium, showing something glittering but remote. Finola Jones’s
narratives showed emblems of popular culture lined up in rows and, later, mined
a child’s love of animals to query stories of the natural world; Siobhan
Hapaska’s tales spoke to the schisms between science and religion.
The simple poles of looking in or out had changed utterly:
artists were looking up, down and all around. Such a diversity of style might
have shocked previous generations, for nothing was sacred now, either what could
be seen or what might be imagined. There was no Big House, nor did anyone want
to build one. Instead, the gate lodges reach from west of Clare to here.
Medb Ruane is a columnist with the Irish Times
and Art Critic with the Sunday Times.