Cassandra Voices

Category: Arts

  • Political Art – from Banksy to Weimar

    A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary events.

    Many of the atrocities of our time are today hidden from view, as computer game technology permits de-humanised genocide. War reporters are often banned from reporting on the ground, or if they do they are generally ’embedded,’ as tools of propaganda. There is no Robert Capa or Don McCullen visible in this age. As a result, death and barbarism are remote, with disinformation omnipresent. Thus we rely on an artist such as Banksy to redress the imbalance, and provoke a moral response.

    Today we can, at best, only partially bear witness to our reality. The news media offers up a version akin to a flame throwing shadows on the wall of a cave. Previously art engaged more closely with politics, but today few artists speak to our time.

    Many great artists throughout history have of course remained non-political and focused on the human condition. Moreover, political art often veers into dogmatism – recall socialist realism or Italian fascist art. One must carefully distinguish art from propaganda. Satire and caricature walk an uneasy path in this respect.

    The origins of European art lie in the depiction of mainly Biblical scenes, which yielded little of an overtly political nature, although the proton-surrealist work of Hieronymus Bosch especially ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490) speak of a world of chaos and brutality. This is not dissimilar to our present universe. Depictions of hell provide a commentary on social entropy and evil.

    Among the pioneers in depicting ordinary human life was the Flemish master Peter Breughal the Elder. Scenes of social gatherings and festivities contain subtle and unobtrusive political messages. So, for example in the ‘Census at Bethlehem’ (1566) you have to look very closely to find Jesus and Mary arriving in on a donkey and trap amid representations of peasant life. His paintings provide hints into the nature of the institutions and practices of the time, and the plight of poor folk.

    In Renaissance Italy Titian and Raphael’s Cardinals often show cruelty or majestic temporal power. In those hardened faces one often gets a sense of that time. The demonic religious paintings of Caravaggio are almost a textbook exercise in conspiracy, murder and intrigue. How much fun would he have hid with the Jeffrey Epstein revelations!?

    Mary and Joseph are registered in the census at Bethlehem.

    Durer and Beyond

    The only Renaissance giant who is markedly different, and often avowedly political by way of mysterious and hidden social commentaries, is the great German painter Albrecht Dürer. It is the woodcuts and the lithographs where the apocalyptic commentary is most evident. The fourth woodcut of his Apocalypse cycle ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, (1497) depicts the first four of seven seals that must be opened for the Apocalypse to begin, These are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. All are now evident internationally.

    In the famous engraving ‘Knight Death and Devil’ (1513) the knight seems resigned, and his facial features are downcast with the devil enveloping him. It is believed the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, celebration of the knight’s Christian faith, and of the ideals of humanism threatened or protected by the fox.

    The engraving Melancholia (1514) is a magus of ideas, clearly influenced by paganism, alchemy, and astrology – the dark demonological arts. It is also a cold mathematical work and exercise in numerology. It contains a brooding central figure, best represented as an allegory of the limits of reason, and a personal or collective descent into madness when reason no longer makes sense. To anyone scrolling through Twitter on a daily basis this may sound all-too-familiar.

    William Hogarth’s tremendous political engravings are also worth mentioning in respect of contemporary afflictions. His most famous print, Gin Lane (1751) graphically depicts infanticide, drunken oblivion, disinterment of corpses, starvation, beggary, poverty, impalement, suicide, debt, debauchery and the collapsing buildings of society. Also notable are his anti-corruption election cartoons such as An Election Entertainment (1757).

    Hogarth’s only contemporary competitor was James Gilroy and his famous ‘Plum Pudding in Danger’ (1805), which seems most apt for our present world, dividing into competing trading blocks. In this Napoleon and Pitt divide the world up and gorge themselves. Napoleon is cutting away a slice of land to the east of the British Isles marked ‘Europe’, but his piece of land is much smaller than Pitt’s portion of sea. The inscription reads: ‘state gourmets taking a little supper’. Greenland, Ukraine take your pick.

    Goya is the greatest political artist of them all in my view. In his oeuvre we encounter a treasure trove of commentary for our time. First and foremost, there is the incredible execution painting ‘The Third of May’ (1808), revisited by Manet, as well as lithographs of torture and brutality. His work curiously presages contemporary debauchery and cannibalism, societal and solipsistic that is.

    French Revolution

    In the same period there is the great portrait painter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era Jacque-Louis David. Some might consider his Neo-Classicisal style a little austere, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile visiting the main gallery in Bruges just to see The Death of Marat (1793).

    David was a propagandist for the Jacobins. Marat, the Montagnard faction, was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who supported the opposing Girondins. She blamed Marat for his involvement in numerous executions that had taken place during the Terror quite correctly, but the painting strengthened support for the Montagnards as David successfully presented him as a tireless revolutionary betrayed by conniving forces. A martyr covered in a holy glow, taking his last breaths, with revolutionary pen in hand.

    Indeed, the Reign of Terror only heightened after this painting’s release and after the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David shifted allegiance to the Emperor Napoleon, for whom he produced fawning political art including The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). Admirers of the Marat painting should read Albert Camus’s The Rebel (1951) as to the true Marat and the extremist terror.

    A near contemporary of David, Delacroix of course creates the famous painting of the flag and revolution Liberty Leading the People (1830), but we should be cautious about that French notion in its unrestrained form, certainly at this juncture, although the argument for protest and change are greater than ever.

    Death of Marat by David

    Greatest Epoch

    The greatest epoch in my view for political art was just after World War I. Many artists experienced the devastation of the trenches, and used this to condemn bellicose militarism. In the Weimar Republic we find the apogee of political art and social commentary through caricaturists such as George Grosz, and Otto Dix. No wonder the Nazis considered this degenerate art.

    If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926) – with the superior subtitle Shit for Brains – you will see one of the paragons of virtue, with, well, shit for brains. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapses, while the Nazi judges and commissars worked hand-in-glove with their jackboot associates.

    The etchings and paintings of Otto Dix also perfectly capture the collapse, most obviously The Match Seller (1920), The War Triptych or the engraving Stormtroopers Advance Under Gas (1924). These are among the greatest anti-war works. He survived the Somme and intellectual pretentiousness to produce paintings of the calibre of Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).

    Close to the Prada hangs the most monumental work of political art. To see it in the flesh is extraordinary. That is Picasso’s fatal depiction of the massacre of the innocents during the Spanish Civil War Guernica (1937). It now hangs symbolically now over Gaza or The Ukraine as a rebuke, as is the core symbol the dove of peace.

    The Spanish Civil War produced many other great works of art particularly the photography of Robert Capa, which is disturbing in its brutality, as are the later pictures of Cartier Bresson after the liberation of Paris where collaborators were made examples of. Likewise, the extremism of our time cuts in all sorts of ways, as does the demonisation of those we disagree with.

    Other great war photographs show the aftermath of Hiroshima and the liberation of the Concentration Camps, documented in Resnais documentary Night and Fog (1945). Unforgettable also is the photography of the bullet to the head of the Viet Kong activist. Even in this de-sensitised social media age that still has the capacity to shock.

    Picasso’s Guernica.

    Animation and Cartoons

    Animation substantively begins with Walt Disney, and his films are at times wonderful and at other times an expression of crass American values. The figure of Cruella de Ville from The Dalmatians appears crucial to our time, conveying the theme of the murder of the innocent for personal self-aggrandisement. A few contemporary figures would appear well equipped for the role, Ghislaine Maxwell in particular.

    The greatest cartoonist of all was the Belgian Hergé (George Prosper Remi), who has been accused, unfairly, of fascism for writing for Le Soir during wartime. This is an accusation almost as absurd as that levelled against P.G. Wodehouse, which is not to say that the character of the creator of the immortal Tintin is unimpeachable.

    Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès identifies the character of Tintin as representing a personification of the ‘New Youth’ concept promoted by the European far-right. Indeed, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) was a work of anti-socialist propaganda, but then, in fairness, Tintin in America was designed as a work of anti-Americanism, highly critical of capitalism, commercialism, and industrialisation.

    Many would counter that Hergé was far from right-wing, as exemplified by his condemnation of racism in the United States in the introduction to Tintin in America (1932), and that the wonderful The Blue Lotus (1936) took a distinctly anti-imperialist stance, unlike Tintin in The Congo (1931), which has shades of Colonel Kurz. During the fascist era he did not join the far-right Rexist Party, later asserting that he ‘had always had an aversion to it’ and that ‘to throw my heart and soul into an ideology is the opposite of who I am.’

    From his earliest years, Hergé was openly critical of racism. He lambasted the pervasive racism of U.S. society in the prelude to Tintin in America published in Le Petit Vingtième on 20 August 1931, and ridiculed racist attitudes toward the Chinese in The Blue Lotus.

    Whatever the ambiguity, the art is riveting as Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed: ‘Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.’

    Of moralism and cartoons Roald Dahls illustrated by Quentin Blakes books are less ambiguous and more unsettling as portrayals of human evil and the macabre. not least the character of Willie Wonka. His character anticipates the soma-induced greed of our age.

    Animation has of course transmogrified into manga and anime, where the master is Miyzaki. In My Neighbour Totora (1988) the forest is warding off the evil spirits. Gai regenerating as when the industrial demons are confronted and beaten in his ecological masterpiece Princess Mononoke (1997). A little spring blossoms.

    Preserve his Anonymity!

    The important role of art as a form of political commentary should be re-asserted, and the forthcoming prosecution (if my source is to be believed) of Banksy sets a very dangerous precedent. It sends out a clear message to other artists, and will have a chilling effect in all likelihood. At the very least Banksy’s anonymity should be preserved in the event of him being prosecuted. Very few comment in a visual form so presciently on our times. He is the greatest political muralist since Diego Riveria, and the world needs more, not less, political art as a way of vitalising people and as an antidote to propaganda.

    Feature Image: The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray

  • Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist

    Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. The film is to be screened at the Cork Film Festival on November 10.

    Bernard, like Shane MacGowan, is an artist who speaks, through his lived experience, for what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’

    “Disembarkation”

    There is an added ingredient here. Bernard Canavan was born in Ireland in 1944, but that wasn’t his birth name. As a newborn, he was cruelly removed from the care of his young parents and placed in an orphanage. That his mother and her then-boyfriend had decided to marry didn’t matter. An infant born out of wedlock was viewed as the personification of sin.

    This was an all-too-familiar experience under what can accurately be described as a theocracy governing Ireland after independence. This was a fusion of devout Catholicism with a set of post-colonial Victorian values that emerged in the wake of the Great Famine. This made Ireland a dark place for many decades. Indeed, Ronan Sheehan refers to a ‘theology of incarceration’ governing most aspects of life at that time, realising W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save.’

    ‘Gods love for mothers and their infants’

    In the orphanage, punishment of sin formed only a part of what was also a business enterprise. Children were commodified, offered for adoption or experimented on by pharmaceutical companies.

    Fortunately, as a young child Bernard was rescued by a woman called Margaret Canavan, who was born into an Irish family living in Argentina. After her father’s death, she retuned to Ireland and settled in Edgworthstown, County Longford. This midlands town is the scene of some of Bernard’s most captivating work.

    There, he grew up under a nurturing mother who protected him from the brutality of the education system, and instilled a lifelong love of reading. This autodidact earned a scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, later studying politics, philosophy and economics at Worcester College.

    The film includes a memorable visit to the midlands town, where Bernard confronts memories of the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of the cattle boat and a new life in England. The men would face the harshness of the building sites and lodging houses, the world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’.

    Whatever you say, say Nothing’

    Bernard’s has long campaigned against the injustices that thousands of children suffered in Irish orphanages. In an emotive scene, Bernard visits Hampstead Heath where a man called Peter Tyrell set himself alight in 1967. As a young lad Peter endured rape and abuse in Letterfrack Industrial School and eventually succumbed to the trauma. The only clue as to his identity was a torn postcard addressed to the Irish civil rights activist and Senator, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had corresponded – and who had made efforts to bring his case to light.

    A highlight of the film is where Bernard makes an emotional return to the place of his incarceration, Saint Patrick’s Guild, ‘The House of Shame.’ There, he bears witness to what happened to him, speaking for other unfortunates who suffered a similar fate, most of whom have not had an opportunity to tell their tales.

    ‘In the Free State’

    Eventually, Bernard emigrated to England, returning briefly to Ireland in the 1960s to work as a marketing executive in Dublin. After two years, however, he returned to England, taking up residence in London, where he still lives. There, he worked on a freelance basis for a variety of underground papers and magazines, producing illustrations, cartoon strips and political satire for the likes of OZ, Peace News and International Times.

    Great credit is due to Sé Merry Doyle for making this film on a shoestring budget. It makes one wonder why so much of Ireland’s interesting cultural output is still occurring on the margins or abroad, unaided and underfunded. Our theocratic model appears to have been replaced by a neoliberal logic of profit and loss, where the work of an artist such as Bernard Canavan becomes a slightly awkward memory.

    Feature Image: “The Innocent”

  • At the Colònia Güell

    ‘There are only so many times you can be expected to look at the Sagrada Família,’ said my uncle. He was visiting me in Barcelona, where I had returned for a few weeks. He said he wanted to take me to see the Colònia Güell, a lesser-known Gaudí site. ‘You mean the Park Güell?’ I said, thinking he was after sweeping views and stone lizards with mosaic skin. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the Colònia Güell.’ I had never heard of it, despite having grown up in the city. We agreed to go early the next morning.

    We took the tram, sitting in sleepy silence. The grey landscape unfolded. Low walls covered in graffiti, dark tunnels with snaking pipes, tower blocks, warehouses, farmlands, greenhouses with shattered panes. Raindrops made diagonal rivulets on the windows. They squiggled wildly whenever the tram picked up speed. On the chain link fences the occasional yellow ribbon flew by, leftover tokens of solidarity with political prisoners of the Independence referendum.

    When we got out the rain had stopped. The sky was very pale. Light filtered through evenly, making the landscape look strangely bright and shadowless. There were no signs past the ticket barriers, just one long road bordered by pine trees. At the bend, a cluster of brick houses came into view, built on a slope. There was nobody around. No traffic on the road. No place to get a coffee. Leaves collected at the curb, turning to mulch. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and wasn’t used to being awake before noon. Besides, my lighter had run out of fuel so I couldn’t even have a cigarette. ‘Maybe we got out at the wrong stop,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should turn back.’ My uncle took out his phone to check the blue dot on the map. ‘No, we’re in the right place.’

    Barcelona. Image: Enrico Perini.

    We walked towards a large, clay-coloured house, with small windows cut irregularly into the sides and a big chimney of bricks that had been arranged in patterns. The bricks continued at the front of the building, where they were organised into elaborate latticework around the entrance. The walls around were made of rough rock, the surface oddly pocked so that it looked porous. It was the colour of gingerbread. If a nice lady had invited us in I felt sure we would be cooked in an oven.

    We stood looking up at the house for a while. I said nothing because my uncle is an architect, and for all I knew this building was some great masterpiece.

    ‘What an eyesore,’ he said, to my relief. ‘Look what they’ve done. Taking idioms and juxtaposing them in totally inappropriate ways.’

    ‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘What’s with the crazy zig zags?’

    ‘So faux naif.’

    ‘And the chimney?’

    He shook his head sadly. ‘A disaster.’

    We carried on looking.

    He waved his hands in front of him. ‘That texture.’

    ‘What’s that word for the phobia of porous surfaces?’

    Neither of us could remember so I looked it up.

    ‘Trypophobia.’

    ‘Ah.’

    Next to the definition there was a helpful illustration of a hand with some kind of disease spread over the skin in a pattern of small, symmetrical holes surrounded by raised edges.

    ‘Disgusting,’ I said, holding the phone out to my uncle.

    He leaned closer to the screen. ‘Christ,’ he breathed.

    I scrolled down and saw a similar image, this time of the side of a face, the skin of the cheek all eaten away.

    ‘Ugh! Look at this one!’ I held out the screen.

    ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Please.’

    We finally came to a tourist information centre, where a young woman behind a perspex screen charged us twenty euros for two entries. After taking the payment she explained in a mellifluous Catalan accent that because it was a Monday, the exhibits were closed, and it would not be possible to go into any of the buildings, though we were more than welcome to walk around the streets and look at their exteriors. She asked if we would like some audio guides, adding that they were free. This struck me as a perverse way to frame the situation but I accepted them anyway. She handed us two devices like old Nokia brick phones, along with a glossy brochure containing a fold-out map with numbered stops.

    Outside, I pressed 0 and the guide thanked me in a smooth, robotic voice for choosing to visit the Colònia Güell. Then came a potted history of the place. Founded in 1890 by Eusebi Güell as an industrial colony, the workers’ houses were arranged around the textiles factory that was fitted with the most modern technology of the time. The factory employed 1,000 workers in 1908. There were 24,000 spinning wheels and 760 weaving looms, all operated by a 1000 horsepower steam engine. It was conceived as an urban centre with its own character and its own social and religious life, and it was Güell’s mission to improve the conditions for the workers, the voice said, before the introduction abruptly ended. My interest was piqued. It sounded like a truly terrible idea.

    A visit to Colònia Güell in 1910 by the Bishops of Barcelona, Tarragona, Lleida, Vic and Valencia accompanied by Count Güell.

    We continued along the numbered stops: the former consumption cooperative, the storage cellars, the secretary’s house, the convent, the union, the library, the school, and the doctor’s house. The audio guide informed me that the buildings had been designed by Francesc Berenguer i Mestres and Joan Joan Rubió i Bellver in the Catalan Modernist style, that their influences were Gothic and Arabic, and that the brick they used was typical of this region. I learnt about how the factory used brick latticework for ventilation, and to provide areas for the textiles to dry without being exposed to direct sunlight, which would bleach them.

    The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wanted to know. It described these houses only as structures that let air circulate in certain directions, that let sunlight fall across them at different angles throughout the day, shadows rotating and lengthening. But hadn’t people lived inside them? There was something creepy about this obvious omission.

    The feeling of unease crested outside the doctor’s house, a simple two-storey square building with pillars at the corners. After a detailed description of the cornice where the airing holes of the attic were disguised by a zigzag pattern of more bricks, the guide uttered this staggeringly creepy sentence, in the same smooth monotone: The doctor made house calls to visit patients not only to cure them, but to make sure they really were as ill as they claimed.

    I remembered the free therapy sessions I received during my time working as a content moderator one hideous summer after university. My therapist was a kindly gay Chilean man who I lied to week after week, inventing dying family members and killing them off in increasingly unlikely and tragic ways, all in an attempt to get more time off work. The office was in a long glass building with a gym in the basement and a rooftop cafe where I would go along with my colleagues to play ping pong and get abjectly drunk on sugary sangría at the end of each day before stumbling home. I remembered reading about offices with built-in sleep pods and Silicon Valley work campuses so convenient that nobody ever leaves. I remembered my elation the morning that I decided that I would not go into work that day or ever again, that if I spent a single moment longer in that place it would permanently damage my capacity to see beauty in the world. This is what it finally came down to: an instinct to protect beauty, which is really an instinct towards survival. I remembered the faces of my colleagues like a deserter remembers the faces of the ones he left to die.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Something vast and inchoate was rising to the surface. I tried to articulate it to my uncle: that I found the premise of this colony, and the notion of paternalistic capitalism itself, to be false and condescending. It mimicked a utopian vision of communal work and life, but the people in it never saw the fruits of their labour, so it took on a dystopian quality, made crueller by its benevolent pretence. Even if this model town, inspired by the experiments of the English industrialists, represented a considerable improvement on the working conditions of the time, it was still depressing, particularly because it was a cruder and therefore more starkly visible expression of the kind of logic we are still living under, of the kind of existence we have learnt to accept as fair.

    I don’t think any of this made much sense. My uncle just said: ‘Let’s get lunch.’

    The day improved enormously. The restaurant was on a small plaza, a typically Catalan interior; unpretentious and stylish. High ceilings run with beams, glass lamps, star-patterned marble floor, carved mahogany chairs. Two old men sat by the entrance playing chess, and a large dog lounged at their feet. A whole family was gathered on a long table at the back, filling the place with cheerful chatter. The waitress came with a bottle of red wine and a basket of bread. We had asparagus pasta and fish soup for starters, followed by lemon sole. We gossipped about different family members. We finished the wine. Dessert was mel i mato and dark coffee with a shot of cognac.

    Maybe it’s not so bad, I thought to myself as we made our way back out. You go to work, you earn some money, you squander it on a long, boozy lunch, and you do the same thing the next day.

    Image: Colònia Güell, Renato Rocca.

  • Bunker Mentality

    I was en route to Leitrim for a second time in a month when ‘Zooropa,’ the U2 song from the album of the same name, came on the stereo (a consequence of Spotify’s predictive algorithm). I hadn’t heard the song in thirty years, the year the album came out and I was a student working in Bavaria for a long hot summer. Suddenly, I was back in the apartment room in Straubing, listening and thinking about the Europeanisation of U2 that had come on the back of Achtung Baby and now Zooropa. The previous summer I worked on an old Soviet style pig farm about a hundred kilometres from Berlin. As U2 hung old Trabants from the stage, I considered driving home to start university in one of these relics of the old world: the former Soviet Bloc that bewitched my younger self. The two U2 albums shouldered my journey into Old Europe, experiencing the stark contrast between the former DDR and the richer region of the Bavarian West.

    It was only as I set out for Leitrim the second time and the song played that I thought of its significance as a harbinger of the future: the lurch into Capitalist Realism and the End of History. Zooropa is steeped in contradiction as a song, marking the creative energy that pulsated across Europe at the time and the strange perpetual present that would define the new age. ‘No particular place names, no particular song,’ Bono sings, an incendiary criticism of the new Europe’s neoliberal squashing of tradition and place.

    Before this Bono implores us to ‘skip the underground…go to the overground’ in a raucous anthemic lament predictive of the exploitation and extortion of the underground music scene in the decades to come. Perhaps it is this very exploitation that led Mark Fisher to coin the term Capitalist Realism in his book of the same name in the first place (ironically, Bono has been at the forefront in legitimising neoliberalism as a social and economic force).

    Fisher defines capitalist realism as the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ This contractual entrenchment in a singular ideology brings with a fatigue culture. In response to a lengthy quotation from The Communist Manifesto, Fisher would offer the retort ‘capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.’

    For Fisher, who took his life in 2017, neoliberal consumerism is defined by an orgy of the recycled without the commitment that defines the properly political. We watch The Truman Show, all the while laughing at the naivety and innocence, unaware that the media is owned by similarly large corporations, and much of the news curated for the masses.

    It is not that, therefore, that we skip the underground, as Zooropa suggests. We move up to an overground feeding on an ever-dwindling underground that becomes a proxy for it. Most of today’s ‘alt’ music would not sound out of place in the 1990s. Ruins, relics are everywhere, fodder for commodity production, without ritual and symbolic currency.

    Image: Darn Thorn

    Monumental Failure

    It is perhaps for this reason the Sligo-born artist Darn Thorn’s solo exhibition Monumental Failure at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, my second reason for travelling to Leitrim in the space of a month, leaves such a mark, the photographic document resistance to the consumer-spectator fix. Thorn’s show consists of old and new work, the main body of which is a video projected slide show containing haunting photographs of the destroyed bunkers along Europe’s northern coastline.

    High in the hills of Leitrim, a reservoir of natural colour and landscape, is the Centre itself. As one drives into New Line, Manorhamilton, in my case on a sunny summer evening, the blue and white colours of the centre are a dalliance with sun-soaked hills that lie all around. Thorn seems aware of this, given the curation of the show and the placement of work within the labyrinth spaces of the gallery.

    On entering the space, itself, a series of older framed photographic works, two of which are in colour – all directly or indirectly concerned with the process of ruination as it transforms natural and manmade habitats – are hung. The two works in colour, titled Unknown Zone #8 and Unknown Zone #10 respectively, are images that seem to hang some way between the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ as landscape erupts in a sea of colour, and the ‘index’ is less a known quantity in comparison to the black and white images. These are sumptuous, and often mystifying photographs that seduce the senses in a far different capacity to drier, more contemplative and ‘index’ directed black and white photos.

    Produced over a decade, and part of prior exhibitions in Thorn’s catalogue of work, the prints in the first space are primers for the meat of the exhibition projected by video in the main gallery space. In the first area black and white photographs produced between 2010 and 2016 are hung, one of which is ‘Oakhampton Castle in Ruins (after Turner).’ This is a giclee print, aligning photographic process with present day content, both of which the viewer is invited to connect in one. Thorn’s use of technical equipment is important, part of a broader aim to make time palatable as a process that exists as a continuum. Working against the desire to simply appropriate and recycle the past in objects of rebuilt ‘time’, a mainstay of capitalist realism, one finds here a measured engagement with the history of art via a ruined building that carries through Turner’s career as artist, used to define a graduating romantic sensibility.

    Thorn is obviously familiar with the romantic preoccupation with ruins. His stark black and white rendering of the great castle (in its (post-)modern iteration) is that of an object to be approached cautiously. It is a kind of wry commentary on the genius of Turner in rendering landscape both ‘beautiful and ‘sublime.’ It is also, in this regard, something of an austere commentary on the site of exhibition: deep in the West of Ireland, the Leitrim hills. How do we make sense of this landscape? In the post-Covid, climate change era, is it even possible to look at landscape as anything other than commodity? Because, in my estimation, Thorn can do beautiful and sublime if that is what is needed. But his concern with landscape as a genre of art is to help connect with the past in a way that is primal and other to that of commodity culture.

    Image: Darn Thorn

    Perfect Location

    Perhaps this is why Leitrim, with its traces of an older, less atomised Ireland, is the perfect location for this exhibition. Ruins lie everywhere, in the built environment or the landscape, as the Old and New Ireland face off against one another. It is difficult not to think of the coastline near Manorhamilton on entering the exhibition space and confronting the mainstay of Monumental Failure: austere analogue and monochrome images of the destroyed bunkers that litter Europe’s beaches like ghosts in the machine.

    As mentioned in the short text accompanying the exhibition, French architect and theorist Paul Virilio began a career documenting these bunkers in the 70s, traces of an historical war machine that had become spatial and unmoored from time: bombs could fall at any moment, in night or day. Virilio, like Thorn, approaches the bunkers as monuments to a regime of power, whether the Atlantic Wall Hitler dreamed of becoming a ruination to rival Greek Civilisation, or a nation’s resistance to the Soviet March towards a future that is dialectically driven by Progress itself.

    The destroyed bunkers that Thorn fixates on in three separate series, whether in Denmark or Lativa, are upended, torn apart, existing as traces of totalitarianism to which Europe’s past is intrinsically bound. Unlike the real landscape around the Sculpture Centre, these often-melancholic images present regimes of power best understood as evil.

    They can be read in an implicit socio-historical or moral context, an art historical context as periodic movements, or as primers for an imagination that has no context other than a subject reckoning with time. It is the latter position that implored me to respond to the austere force of the imagery. Maybe Ireland’s recent Covid past was a trigger, but the ruins seemed more than mere historical indexes of a long-lost history, depictions of time that preceded the critic and artist. The idea of retreating to a bunker and hiding away in hope that the war would pass spoke to me of the pandemic lockdowns, the society-wide shutdowns ordered in lockstep across Europe during the Covid 19 pandemic. By looking at Europe’s past Ireland’s past began to stare back at me.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    The War on Covid

    ‘The War on Covid,’ as Michael Casey referenced it in a timely article, (as really a ‘war on people’) is not a glitch in the smooth functioning of the West, but the continuation of social atomisation that accelerated in the previous decade. As capitalist realism bears its ugly teeth, the masses emerge as the ultimate consumers in every facet of life. Stay in, shut up, consume. The lockdown is the bunker mentality of global capitalism, delivering ‘goods’ while ‘keeping you safe’ becomes the key mantra spluttering from the mouths of bureaucrats high on the capital involved in controlling movement of people in space.

    Is it mere coincidence that Thorn completed the series titled Monumental Failure, presented in four parts (there is an architectural drawing for an Atlantic Wall bunker by the Lodt organisation projected onto the floor in addition to the photographs of ruins projected on screen) as lockdown ended and the war in the Ukraine usurped it as a media focus? The ruins depicted in these haunting, exquisite, ‘failures’ are symptoms of totalitarianism that persists in our wake. They are signifiers of a bunker mentality that atomises and reduces human beings to bodies in hiding.

    A certain symmetry therefore exists in knowing that these images document the beaches of Europe as of today, comment on Europe’s historical war machine, and pay homage to the medium of photography as practiced at the time the bunkers were constructed. Thorn spent considerable time in Lativa, a country that was invaded by the Soviets and Nazis in quick succession, the ruins acting as monuments to liberation and signs of an imminent fascist return.

    The complex history of the region, as one regime of power succumbs to another, becomes manifest as haunting blots on landscape, the ruins left uncared for like remains of alien life. Recently, I stumbled upon an online debate concerning the Memorial Museum at Auschwitz, that morally debated the transformation of the death camps into a visiting centre (we see the museum at the end of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest) to remind us of genocidal horror. The thrust of the debate concerned the morality of memorialising something as horrific as the camps that killed so many. Why, the argument went, build a monument to genocide? As I drove home from Leitrim thinking of the ruined bunkers whose various parts lay scattered on the beaches of Europe, meticulously rendered in Thorn’s monochrome images, I thought of a bunker mentality born less of a credo to murder than to ‘keep us safe.’

    If the Memorial Museum is intended to engender memory of an event, what, we might ask, is the purpose of the ruined bunkers? Once intended to hide away from terror, the bunkers soon became the object of terror. Would destroying the bunkers trigger a mass forgetting, or do the ruins simply invoke the credo that one person’s idea of safety is another’s idea of terror? If there’s an ethical purpose to Thorn’s Monumental Failure it is to help see both positions as one.

    Feature Image: Image: Darn Thorn

    Darn Thorn’s exhibition ‘Monumental Failures’ runs until June 22nd in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre.

  • Featured Artist: Caleb Butterly

    As a child I was drawn to draw figures. I watched my mother paint and listened to my father tell stories. As my study and practice of art and anatomy have progressed in depth and complexity so too has my choice of models.

    As we all grow, live, love and age we acquire scars, stretchmarks, mum tums, cellulite, lines, fat and much more. All of these surface details for me have come to be the most precious parts of humanity’s patina.

    Grey Morning.

    When nude we show much of our lived story in our skin and form and my art strives to take the time to pause and explore these lives and celebrate their beauty. Paintings for me are a one frame play using light, line, value and colour that can draw out the best parts of not just the model’s unique story but in a way that most of us can relate to and admire.

    In a time where scrolling airbrushed myriad images and rapid videos is the unhealthy and unsatisfying trend, take the time to stop and look at just one image for a while and enjoy the anti-scrolling that is visual art and the cure for many of western humanities current maladies.

    Many of my models are amateur first-timers and model for me upon hearing of a friend or acquaintance of theirs having already enjoyed modelling for me. I’ve spoken to all about their motivations, and none have felt their body or story typically celebrated in mass media.

    Red Thread No. 9.

    Rather than erase the signs of aging to look like the fictional 1% that is sold to us, my art utilises the marks of aging from a genuine love and appreciation of greater complexity in forms that only comes as people age and mature. For me, the human form is the greatest narrative device and I love using it to explore and celebrate the bittersweet lives we all live through our bodies.

    I have always been driven to make things and learn through my broad range of interests, which has seen me live a somewhat fractured life professionally and educationally. I went from studying engineering to completing degrees in both sport science and psychology. My father was a fisherman, and I went from working for him to labourer, bin-man, barman, office worker, assistant psychologist in a prison, fine art metal worker in a bronze foundry and now a welder for over a decade.

    It was working in the bronze foundry with other artists that showed me making art was the one thing that united and made sense of the fractured parts of myself.

    Metal Men No.1.

    Eleven years ago after a divorce I set about researching and teaching myself the methods of realist drawing and painting in the traditional fashion.

    After building my skill set I then set about working with models to make the art I wanted to see made. I’ve exhibited and sold numerous works at art shows and events while working fulltime and been rejected by near every gallery I’ve approached.

    Nudes, even ones as good as I make, are a hard sell in Ireland. Most of the younger, less conservative people who love my work have neither the spare income to buy art, let alone a house with walls to hang.

    Eventually Giovanni from GalleryX saw my work at Artsource and offered me a solo show. This show represents over ten years of study, work, practice, rejection, small wins and unwavering passion for the human form and the importance of visual art in our lives – now more than ever.

    My Red Thread series explores a common but diverse element that to me seemed present in all of my work with female models and expressed through their connection to fabric and objects of a deep red colour.

    Red Thread No.3.

    I don’t have the words for this exploration. Hence I have nine paintings that do what words or music or film cannot. The paintings themselves, like all of my work, are only ever completed when viewed and experienced.

    The possible similarities and diversity in the experiences of these myriad completions in the mind’s eye of the viewer, and the range and overlap with the experiences of the models themselves, are what this series of works explores.

    Making a living as an artist is a challenge, but living as an artist and art lover is something that makes every living day a feast for the eyes.

    Metal Men No. 6.

    I have worked as metalworker for over a decade and two dominant colours I get to enjoy as an artist in great variety of hue and form are that of sand-blasted grey steel and orange- brown oxide rust. I have incorporated these colours into my Metal Men series which seeks to explore themes around modern fragile masculinity, violence and depression and surrender to the grind of life and one’s own demons. This series is additionally personal to me as for many of these first pieces I have used myself as model and actor.

    Both of these series of paintings, along with sixteen other figurative works will be available to view and buy as part of my first solo exhibition in Gallery X, Hume Street in the heart of Dublin from May 3rd to 18th.

    Follow Caleb Butterly on Instagram.

    Featured Image: Red Thread no.7.

  • Featured Artist: Dorje de Burgh

    My relationship with making art began aged twenty-one as a means to bolster my ego and be cool. I chose photography, mainly because I can’t draw. Also my mum and her brothers were into photography in their twenties, so there were a few nice old cameras around my house when I was growing up. 

    Maybe the ego thing is an obvious thing to say as there’s always so much ego involved in becoming an artist I think, particularly if you’re not rich. Probably if you are rich too.

    Either way, I’m quite suspicious of my reasons for choosing a really hard thing to do that most likely will provide only precarity and emotional insecurity regardless of how good you might be at it. What am I trying to prove?

    BIT ROT BULLY SHOT (2022) 9.08 mins single channel h-8/digital video w/ audio by Frank Lohmeyer & Dorje de Burgh.

    Having said that, sticking with making pictures has been the source of pretty much all the valuable learning I’ve done outside of various mistakes and some major moral failures in my personal life.

    Throughout art school and after my thinking was primarily influenced by the writing of JG Ballard. Mainly his recurring theme of any given personal or social reality existing simply as a stage set that can be swept aside at any moment.

    When that actually happened to me I didn’t handle it well. My mum’s death changed everything. We were very close and her dying was the thing I was always most afraid of, so when she was diagnosed as terminal I completely unravelled.

    But I did keep making pictures, and Dream the End, the work that formed a few years later from a combination of those pictures and her own, would be the first thing I’ve made that I feel actually had a real resonance with people. It taught me that if you try to tell the truth you have a real chance at communication and connection.

    Brain Scan (St Luke’s), archival pigment print, (2017), 820mm x 1000mm – Courtesy of PhotoMuseum Ireland collection.

    And as we move further into a mediatized landscape that seems designed to atomise and alienate us from each other, as the death machine rumbles on, any form of human connection seems vital.

    I know in some ways I’ll never move past this part of my life, I still carry many grudges and various medium to low level addiction issues that I’m only beginning to deal with, but I’m glad the last thing me and my mum did together was make something.

    Soon afterwards I learned that my father had returned from the cult they’d been living with since I was three and now lived as a woman, so inviting her to make a work together seemed like the obvious thing to do, and also a useful way of side-stepping my own fear of meeting after a lifetime apart.

    Sadly she’s pretty unwell, suffering with quite severe psychosis susceptibility syndrome, so collaboration or even direct contact wasn’t possible. But as we figured this out I began to make a film imagining what a work about our relationship might look like without her presence.

    The Sting of Love, from How to Kill Something That Doesn’t Exist, 7.07 mins single channel hi-8/super 16mm projected onto unprocessed Fuji Crystal Archive c-type paper, text adapted from Rollenspiele: Frauen über Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1992, Thomas Honickel) mit Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla und Rosel Zech. Courtesy of The Arts Council of Ireland collection.

    Then the pandemic hit and I decided to move on from trying to understand my two families.

    Following the summer of 2020 I moved to a small town called Carrick-on-Suir in south Tipperary that was both uncannily familiar and totally alien. The work that resulted from living there was in part an attempt to remove myself from the equation, and confront the world in more purely formal photographic terms.

    Untitled, Carrick, silver gelatin hand print, (2021), 250mm x 310mm.

    In addition to being an attempt to somehow subvert the representations of the Irish landscape that I was familiar with, Under the Same Sky is about proximity and distance, and alienation from ourselves and each other. It is also very much concerned with my own conception of home — what home means, what constitutes it and what are the conditions of belonging.

    The best part of making this work was getting to show it in South Tipperary Arts Centre in Clonmel, the town next to Carrick. Often these kinds of loosely documentary style photographic works are made and then disappear to be shown elsewhere, and are never seen by the people local to the place the work is about. The first comment in the visitor’s book described it as ‘an excellent documentation of misery’.

    This line of thought (home not misery) continued as my life became less tethered to a particular place, and during a spell living on a small island off the west coast of Ireland and then mainland Europe I made BIT ROT BULLY SHOT.

    Bit rot is naturally occurring digital decay. A bully shot is old slang for a good shot. The film is about de-materialisation and the natural world as a home that we spend less and less time in, forgoing what can be a beautiful reality for some bullshit virtual escape. How close we are to paradise and how much we’re fucking it up.

    There’s also an element of petty revenge involved, as I was told that I wasn’t allowed to make work featuring the island I was living on by the artist friend I was then living with.

    I’ve always made work in an analogue way. This was a decision born of aesthetic taste but as our world becomes more digital I feel that this mode of working is increasingly the point.

    In terms of who ultimately controls memory, meaning and history we are in a dangerous position, and this would suggest that personal histories and counter narratives are more important and hold more radical potential than ever before.

    BORING PHOTOGRAPHS, made in collaboration with Chris Dreier of the OJAI, is a playful toe in the water as regards subversion of the de-materialised attention economy. It’s a riso publication of forty photographs accompanied by an essay on collaborative vernacular photography written by A.I..

    Convent Wall, silver gelatin hand print, (2023), 127mm x 178mm.

    We launched this work and the publication in two pedestrian tunnels in Berlin. This is very much Chris and her OJAI co-director Gary Farrelly’s longstanding m.o., but for me it was a definite light bulb moment.

    In light of the current levels of hypocrisy and moral compromise apparent across the art world superstructure in regard to the genocide in Palestine, it feels apparent that we have moved past the moment of institutional critique to one of stark institutional irrelevance.

    Steal as much as you can to survive and make the work, but forget career ladders and gatekeeping. Make it DIY.

    Still from TIMEFUCKER multi-channel hi-8 video.

    TIMEFUCKER, my new film and book about the poetics of dystopia should be finished by summer 2024.

    www.forget.rip

    https://www.instagram.com/dum_studio/

    Feature Image: the coombe (i), c-type, (2021), 260x340mm

  • Shane MacGowan’s Madonna

    So, it’s Thursday night in Dublin, I’ve found some Poitin, and am thinking of Shane MacGowan. How very sad it is that he’s gone. ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ playing on the radio.

    I had a funny connection with Shane.

    His wife Victoria gave me a photo of her and Shane for an auction, to raise money for a battle against a semi-state body spraying pesticides.

    I had to get it signed. ‘Come on over!’ Victoria said. Next thing I’m in their  house, Victoria has scarpered, and I’m alone with Shane.

    I’ve had the photo of them blown up and printed on canvas. Shane loves it,  grabs it, asks me what it’s for, takes a green marker and scrawls, ‘Fuck Those F—  Hypocrites! Love Shaney XXX’.

    Wow.

    Business completed, joints are rolled. Blue gin poured.

    My head is melting.

    My heart is too.

    Shane talks poetry. Seamus Heaney. James Clarence Mangan. The Famine. The Rising. Have I ever been ‘strung out’?. Where do I live? With whom? I explain I’m with my children and their partners. ‘A commune!’.

    Would I like some music? Absolutely I would. Shane leans over the arm of the sofa where he’s sitting to rummage through a box of CD’s.

    ‘I used to play with this band’ he says, shyly, ‘the Pogues’.

    I want to jump up and hug him. I want to say everyone in the whole world knows the Pogues and your incredible music Shane!

    ‘That would be lovely’ I say. ‘I’d love to hear you and the Pogues’.

    Shane slides in ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’.

    Victoria re-appears.

    Shane looks around. ‘Hey Vic, give ‘er that’, he says, pointing to a floor tile on which he’s drawn the Virgin Mary.

    In brightest greens and blues, Mary is standing, holding one arm up. ‘What’s she doing?’  ‘Calming her people’ says Shane. ‘And the little guy with a Kalsnikov?’. ‘He’s minding her’.

    I’m unsure if I should take it. Victoria, who’s probably seen hundreds of items given away, is graciousness itself: ‘He’s delighted to give you something’.

    I finally leave, my head ringing, thinking when I’d asked Paul McCartney if he’d sign a rare Beatles EP, a frosty PR company replied: ‘Sir Paul does not sign memorabilia’

    Thinking how CRAZY it is that notorious hellraiser Shane MacGowan has just given me a picture of the Virgin Mary. On a floor tile.

    And also, this thought: it’s the middle of the recession. I can’t keep asking artist friends for help. I’ll collect Virgin Mary’s instead. And sell them.

    The Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA made a beautiful print of Shane’s original, ‘Gra agus Beannacht’ added in Shane’s hand.

    I was on my way.

    I had to visit Shane and Victoria again to get the prints signed. Exhausted after a UK trip, Shane lined up something for himself and said: ‘Okay give me those fukken things’ then, gent that he is, signed them all.

    He and Victoria were guests of honour at our first exhibition of Virgins in the local Arts Centre. He the first to buy. A beautiful print of his beloved Sinead O’Connor as Mary by Aga Szot (who previously featured as an artist on Cassandra Voices). Nobody else moved. ‘Fukken tight fist fukken cunts’ Shane growled.

    Sinead O’Connor as Mary by Aga Szot.

    O Lord.

    Truth be told, a Catholic boarding school girl, I’d never much liked Mary. She seemed cold. Distant. Pastel. Shane turned me on to a different one. A powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’.

    With everything he cut to the chase.

    ‘I just wanted to shove music that had roots, and is just generally stronger and has more real anger and emotion, down the throats of a completely pap-orientated pop audience.’

    He sure succeeded. He sure was loved for it.

    He was beautiful. Impossible. Sensationally gifted. Honest. Punk. Sensationally sensitive. Spiritual. Political. Wild.

    ‘Gra agus Beannacht’ in the fullest measure.

    He will be sorely missed in this ‘pap-orientated’ world.

  • Recalling World Sculpture Park Changchun

    I spent four years teaching English in Changchun, a city of six million people in Jilin Province in the far north-east of China, about nine hundred kilometres south of China’s border with southern Siberia. Changchun literally means ‘long spring’, a misnomer. The months from November to April are a long cold winter, when daytime temperatures fall to -17 degrees Celsius if midday skies are blue, with midnight temperatures often plunging to -25.

    Trudging along foot paths in freezing snow is an endurance test; an invitation too to slip on hardened ice and break a leg. I acclimatised, managing to avoid slipping, dressed in appropriate padded clothing and footwear.

    During free days on the weekend, when not teaching TEFL classes in the university campus, I sometimes earned extra money by giving private tuition. Foreign TEFL teachers earn modest salaries, live in small free apartments and have their return airfares paid on satisfactory completion of a twelve-month contract.

    Nanchang wedding bike, 2007.

    One lady, referred to me by the Foreign Students office, came once a week for English-speaking sessions at my centrally heated apartment. I spoke about life in Ireland, Irish attitudes towards marriage and children, traditional music festivals, the arts, horse racing, football and the like.

    It was either May, when early summer temperatures arrive, or October, when late autumn glows moderately before winter descends that she invited me in her small car to visit the World Sculpture Park about an hour away.

    It seemed a grandiose name for a park in a provincial city, but when I got there I realized that the name was no exaggeration. Parking the car on a nearby street, we walked in through the main gate and proceeded along paved footpaths that went sometimes in straight lines and alternately in rambling directions around patches of planted trees and shrubs. The area,  covering ninety-two hectares, contains 441 works of 397 sculptors from 212 countries and regions.

    Changung Sculpture Park, 2013.

    Along these paths were sculptures in stone, bronze, sheet metal and chemically treated wood. The works were by sculptors from around China and other parts of the world, notably Africa, the Caribbean and countries like Brazil. American, British, European and other sculptors had also contributed to the park display. A lake fed by a small stream stretches along centrally.

    World Sculpture Park was officially opened in 2003, but since the mid-1970s there had been a simpler version, with less trees, of works by Chinese sculptors.

    In a central raised area stood a tall monument dedicated to world peace – the kind of state-approved monument one might expect to find in a Communist country. I am, however, happy to relate that since the early 2000s the park has evolved in an eclectic and generally non-propagandist manner.

    Changchun World Sculpture Park adopts both Chinese and foreign gardening styles. It now teems with individual sculptures in multiple styles and shapes. The long lake is a central focal feature, with green areas dotted around. In the background, outside the park railings, loom tall functional buildings of the expanding modern city. Within the park creative diversity seems to contend with the city’s high-rise architectural functionality.

    Changung Sculpture Park, 2013.

    Why African Sculptures?

    The city authorities have invited sculptors from Africa, North America and elsewhere to visit the city and spend a few months designing and preparing their works before having them finished in bronze casting foundries and other buildings before returning, with ample financial rewards and certificates, to their home countries.

    The visiting sculptors work during the warm periods of the year. It would be impossible to accomplish anything significant during the months of sub-zero temperatures.

    Why African sculptors especially? The answer lies inside the sculpture museum beside the main park entrance. This museum is heated in winter and cooled by air conditioners when outside temperatures soar. In one room there is a shelved display of ebony woodcarvings from coastal towns of Southern Tanzania. These were brought back to Changchun city by citizens who had worked in that country and travelled during holiday time. They donated the artifacts to the park museum.

    Having paid our modest entry fee, my female English learner escorted me around sections of the park and I took photos which I hope speak for themselves.

    African dancers in dark bronze, a calypso band from the Caribbean, (only the sunny, rhythmic steel band sound is missing), football feet kicking, yes, a football, a giant red abstract done in sheet metal, and children playing. I only took a few photos and regret not taking more.

    Changchun Sculpture Park, 2013.

    In coastal Tanzania and along the north coast of Mozambique African wood carvings, known as Makonde carvings, are generally honed from ebony wood, with a deep brown and black colour. Many such carvings are actually carved from the African blackwood tree. Known locally as mpingo, it is found widely in East Africa. Carvings are made from a single block of wood in different sizes. Large pieces are sold for export at upmarket prices.

    Today in my home I have a few woodcarvings from parts of Tanzania that are not in the expensive Makonde style. These and wood carvings from Zambia and Kenya are appropriate reminders of my African years.

    Mashona stone sculpture in Zimbabwe is also spectacular. It is traditional in families and passed on from father to son – I don’t know if interested daughters can get involved too. Works in soapstone, marble and granite are highly prized. Some pieces are abstract while others portray human figures.

    Today, commercial galleries in England, Germany, France and North America import Zimbabwean sculpture and sell them to high-end art buyers. My understanding is that Zimbabwean sculptors have worked in Changchun’s World Sculpture Park, but my few hours there did not enable me to find an example.

    I think it would be interesting if one of the smaller Irish cities such as Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo or Derry, could embark on creating a World Sculpture Park along the non-political lines pursued since the early 2000s by Changchun.

    With students and New Irish citizens from many countries and ethnic origins, Ireland has become a multicultural society. An Irish World Sculpture Park would be an inspiring tourist attraction. It might also inspire the New Irish to take an interest in the sculptural creativity of the countries from which they are descended.

  • Featured Artist: Gary Farrelly

    Over the last seven years, I have been reshaping my practice from being primarily hermetic, manual and materially fixated into a more fugitive, performative state. Around 2015, I had a rising feeling that my drawings, prints and collages no longer had the capacity to hold the kinds of storytelling and speculation that I needed to transmit. I was frustrated that my core desires: to communicate, speculate, pronounce, denounce, seduce and lead up the garden path, were being limited by what I had come to view as the chicanery of my materials.

    Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati in 2022, image Teresa Burkey.

    One of very few consistent back-channels to my material practice that stayed open during the rearrangement process was a project called Going Postal. In 2013 I had entered into an iron clad arrangement with the MSURS – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia). I had solemnly committed to sending them a flat artefact, unenveloped in the postal system at least four times annually until my projected year of death in 2077.  I have faithfully maintained this undertaking over the years and when the project concludes on 19/11/2077, 256 items will have been integrated into their collection.

    Dispatch 2015112 (2015) courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska.

    Around the time I was taking a sabbatical from the physical manufacture of artworks, I was deep in the guts of a multi-annual film project called GLUE with my dear friend Oisin Byrne. We had both left Ireland a couple of years earlier, I went to Brussels, and he relocated to London. For over half a decade, the making of GLUE was the structure that kept us embedded in each other’s everyday lives. The final shape of GLUE was a semi-fictional concoction of my experiences of the sleep disorder narcolepsy told through manic and confessional monologues. The project was the first time I positioned my verbal and physical performativity as tip of the spear of my work. The public premier of GLUE was in Salzburger Kunstverein in the summer of 2018.

    Angry letter scene from GLUE (2017) directed by Oisin Byrne

    In January 2015, I met Berlin based photographer and sound artist Chris Dreier. We were introduced to each other over dinner in the Germany city of Wuppertal. Our first conversation was about Charleroi, the mangled capital of Belgium’s post-industrial rustbelt. Our alliance was instantaneous. Since then, we have been sending each other weekly postcard briefings obsessively focused on our shared interests in corporate architecture, finance, disasters, institutions, political assassinations and magic. From the beginning, we always understood the correspondence as a receptacle for some shared knowledge we were both trying to capture. On October 3rd, 2015 we codified our relationship into an institution and established the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence O.J.A.I..

    A selection of Office for Joint Administrative postcard correspondence. Image Fabrice Scheider.

    Office for joint Administrative intelligence is configured as a DIY para-intelligence agency operating between Brussels and Berlin. I would describe our process as having some research components, in that we gather knowledge based on hyper-specific fields of enquiry – pedestrian tunnels, market shocks, plane crashes, dried up fountains, lonely office blocks, pornography staged in modernist architecture and public announcements (over Tanoy). The research component is not an end in itself. We use the information mined from economic, political and architectural sources as a departure point for uncanny speculation and highly subjective fiction making.

    This process manifests in the public space as performances, fieldtrips, audits, annual reports, office installations, audio wallpaper, vinyl records, architectural plans, psycho-cartography and our monthly radio show transmitting on Dublin Digital Radio and Cashmere Radio Berlin.

    In 2021, I enrolled at a.pass in Brussels, an artistic research environment coalesced around performativity and scenography. My project, in close cooperation with the office, departed from the work of deceased American conservative conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper. Cooper’s work was a precursor to QAnon and encountered the public through the polemical Hour Of The Time radio show which synthesized economic and political ‘research’, occult knowledge, personal grievance, and manic episodes into a paranoid tsunami designed to undermine public confidence in institutions.

    During my time at a.pass, I developed various performative versions of myself as an agent for disinformation, including: the bureaucrat, the crossdresser, the seducer, the charlatan, the guide, the joker, the devil’s advocate, the instructor and the Cassandra.

    a.pass end performance, Brussels  (2022). Image Karolien Chromiak.

    My current exhibition Proximity Papers – new works from an organisational self – is my first solo exhibition since 2015 and my first major project outside the office in as many years. On the curatorial initiative of Various Artists, the show signals a reignition of my attraction to slow and repetitive processes of hand manufacture such as stitching, stencilling, typing, folding, labelling and redacting. Channeling the same set of political and architectural imaginaries that inhabit the more bombastic performance work, the pieces in the show are encoded with systemic fictions, self-referencing data, geographical imaginaries and lots of modernist ghosts.

    Proximity Papers invitation postcard

    My starting point was a series of postcards that I made for the Project Arts Centre BAE publication a couple of years back. They depict Dublin’s most iconic modernist office blocks: Liberty Hall, the civic offices, Apollo House, the Irish Life Centre etc. These were the first buildings I ever loved.

    I have always been perversely attracted to the unequivocal, disciplinarian presence of post-war buildings in cities. Even as a kid, I knew that these erections were encoded at a genetic level with simultaneously seductive and coercive political instructions. Buildings are dangerous. I have spent my adult life pondering the question: what subliminal messages are these structures asserting into the public space? What do the buildings want?

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    Most of the materials in the show were subjected to prolonged direct physical contact with my body. I carried the A4 drawings folded up in my pocket for prolonged periods, larger works were digested at the bottom of my tote bag or flattened under my mattress. I took the two main pieces of the show – a set of watercolour election result maps – into the shower with me every day for a month, carefully bleaching the constituency areas to simulate transitions of power. These processes were extremely destructive to the integrity of the materials and at some stage the works risked disintegration. The second set of processes consisted of repairing, restoring and devoting care to the surfaces. Bringing them back from the dead.

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    The work is characterised by a jaded bureaucratic, architectural sensibility. Some of the works consist of repetitive text piled up to look like tower blocks ‘IT IS OFFICIAL POLICY TO APPEAR UNMOVED’.

    The only human presence in the show is a screen-grab from a gay pornographic film where a young heterosexual male hustler is paid to receive oral sex from a gay protagonist. He doesn’t like it. I intervened in the image with delicate rows of my patented embroidery pattern the quasi-autonomous stitch. This work is part of straighsploitation – my ongoing ‘research’ into representations of straight male bodies in gay porn. Other works in the show include: Teri Garr International Airport, Grosser flughafen verspätung taurigkeit (Big Airport Delay Sadess), Systems Merger, Gray Parliament and Regional Conflict Map.

    The word ‘YES’ is recurring throughout the show, part act of self-encouragement/partially ironic. All the works are stamped on the rear with my name, date of birth and projected expiry date- Gary Farrelly (1983-2077). I will be ninety-six-years-old if the prediction is accurate. Specially constructed display units were designed and built by Remy vanderhaegen. The show was executed with the generous support of The Arts Council and Fingal Arts Office. Sincere thanks to Various, Phyllis, An and Loes and Remy vanderhaegen.

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    Proximity Paper is on view at Nadine/NOdine Laboratory for Contemporary Art at 105 Rue de Laeken, Brussels 1000 until December 8th: https://index.nadine.be/proximity-papers-new-works-from-an-organisational-self/

    Gary’s work is part of the group show ‘Why Be An Artist’ on show at NCAD gallery in Dublin from December 1 2022 to February 15, 2023: https://www.ncad.ie/gallery-event/view/why-be-an-artist

    The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence’s radio show No Tourists transmits regularly on Dublin Digital Radio: https://listen.dublindigitalradio.com/resident/no-tourists

    Instagram: @jointintelligence

    Featured Image: a.pass end performance, Brussels (2022). Image Karolien Chromiak.

  • Alice Rekab: Family Lines

    Just off Nassau Street, a cavernous concrete passageway leads into the modernist Arts Building at Trinity College Dublin. The Douglas Hyde Gallery tucked neatly into its side is the current site of Family Lines, a major solo exhibition by Irish/Sierra Leonean artist Alice Rekab.

    Within, they present a rich and resounding body of work that embraces many lifetimes and life forms. The artist explores and reflects on personal and cultural narratives emerging from their mixed-race identity, uncovering and transforming traces of violence, both private and historical, through multiple mediums, terrestrial and digital.

    Upon entrance a video/installation entitled Migration Sings (2020) tells the story of the movement of peoples as well as the impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Sierra Leone.

    Performed in the language of Temne (a Niger-Kordofanian language, West Atlantic group, spoken in central Sierra Leone), lilting tones accompany an animated family photograph on a vertical screen. It includes their grandmother, known as ‘Teta’, just after her evacuation from Freetown following the civil war in the 1990s.

    The importance of the family, especially the matriarch carries through the exhibition and the voice of the Khalilu Gibrill Daneil Conteh floats like a spell over the entire gallery.

    The balcony walkway offers an overview of the main ground floor, and the space generously opens on descent, presenting itself as an arena that allows relationships between artworks to emerge.

    Drawn to the installation in one corner of the gallery, a monitor displays footage of ‘Nomoli’ and prints of ritual and tribal ceremonies are grouped with talismanic figurines. The Nomoli were used to mark seams of precious minerals in the ground; deposits that have been extracted and exploited for centuries.

    The symbolic sculptures made of soft stone are the only known remains of an empire that stood hundreds of years ago. Josephine Kargbo, the curator of collections at the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown, explains that although she has never seen any of their power manifest, she does not rule out their potency.

    This work sets the pulse of the exhibition; it is difficult not to be gripped by the pain and horrors suffered by Teta – to feel that this trans-generational work is somehow healing a deep wound that has been uncovered, just as fissures marked by the Nomoli were. As stated by Bracha Ettinger, “we join in sorrow so that silenced violence will find its echo in our spirit, not by imagination but by artistic vision.”

    What is Nomoli? 2022 Archive Version, 2018-2022, Black and white video (12 mins), Sony cube monitor, stone figure, pottery tools, painted clay, tinted mirrors, black prints and enlarged iPhone photograph on vinyl (210 cm x 168 cm). Work commissioned by Kingston University of London. Image credit; Senija Topcic 2022.

    Placed along the main wall Our Common Ancestor (Five panels of enmeshed historical narrative, 2022, Paint, oil pastel, salvaged wooden boards, clay and digital prints) presents what appears as a series of scars cutting across the panels and terminating in what could be a lightning bolt, meteorite strike or even the primordial beginning of time.

    Could this represent a fissure in the Sierra Leonean earth, one that yielded the blood diamonds that have fuelled the bitter civil war? Opposite, a mirror spawns tentacles that overstep the gallery boundaries. Seen (2019 -2022, Buff and terracotta clay, salvaged wooden board and salvaged mirror) places our selfie loving imago in a precarious position. We do not go unnoticed – we are framed, enveloped, while staring into the portal of another world.

    A painting by the artist’s mother, Louise Meade, and an accompanying print by the artist, hang on an otherwise blank wall of the main level, while Samir’s Prism, (2021, Print of digital drawing, collage and family photo), Finds Mine (2021 digital print) and Analogue Mining (2020, digital print, buff and terracotta clay, plasticine and book) exemplify a long experience of being defined, classified and confined through the interpretation, oppression, and values of the colonialist system.

    Shapeshifting artifacts inhabit the gallery floor – displaying a group of tables, a distinctly anthropomorphic commode, some hot-blooded reptiles with babies and a vintage vacuum cleaner that has mutated into a snake.

    Made from unfired clay, the objects are parched and bone dry. Imprints of the artist’s fingers show an intimacy, malleability and an amount of patience that reflects drought-stricken Sierra Leonean farmers’ unrelenting belief in the spirit world and the promise of a good harvest.

    There is a strong sense of dignity, love, and resilience. A monumental print of a clay pit reminds us of our vulnerability and insignificance in an untameable place, as fantasy, memory and fact collide (Fig 3).

    Nyaguihun Gateway (clay swamp near Bo), 2022, Enlarged iPhone photo on vinyl, 335 cm x 406 cm.

    Turning towards Christmas on Cemetery Road/Hamilton (2021/2022) the video feels intimate, familiar, personal, and magical. As viewers, we are eager to accompany this exploration of interior and exterior space, discovering new sights as imagery moves on into the hot African night.

    Family Lines generates resonant energy, which ought to be observed gently, over time. This exhibition offers an opportunity to witness an encounter with ‘self’ that is deeply embedded in subconscious experience.

    The artist’s exploration of their own identity generates a form of healing. Their art-space uncovers traces of trauma which enable the rebuilding of trust in the other, which in turn adjusts their and our position in the world.

    As we observe this process, some of us may feel compassion, awe and a sense of shared responsibility. We are a part of this history and the legacy of colonialism. We might realise that the real value found in the earth is not diamonds, gold, or iron ore – but in the ground itself – and the respect required to let it be, in the hope of yielding a harvest that can nourish a family.

    Alice Rekab: Family Lines
    Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.
    1 July- 25 September 2022

    Feature Image: Isata an Ee Cat, 2018, Print of digital drawing, collage and family photo, 107.5cm x 151 cm. An edition of this work is in the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchased 2021.