ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Active Archive – Slow Institution

Active Archive – Slow Institution is a major research project that delves into Project Art Centre’s rich 50+ year history, uncovering the history (or rather histories) of one of Ireland’s oldest public art institutions.

Over the past six months, recent ACW graduate, Dorothy Hunter and current ACW MFA student, Hannah Tiernan have been undertaking independent lines of enquiry within the centre’s archive. The Long Goodbye exhibition, which opens on Thursday 31st January, is the culmination of this project and will feature highlights from their research.

Dorothy has been researching the disparate threads connected to the “eventualisation” of the Project fires, such as the tension between symbol-making and destruction, how protection and aftermath are dealt with, art that was destroyed and made, and the layered proxy existences within the archive.

Hannah’s research into the LGBTQ+ theatre of Project speaks to the Art Centre’s importance as an artist-led organisation. Having been at the forefront of presenting cutting edge, contemporary and often controversial work, this research looks at the legacy of such an institution and how this reflects in today’s practices.

Review: Furtive Tears by Niamh McCann at The Hugh Lane Gallery by Brendan Fox (ACW)

A New Occult and Encounters with the Invisible Man

A review of Furtive Tears, 4 October 2018 – 6 January 2019 by Niamh McCann at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 2018.

Rodin's The Age of Bronze AKA The Awakening Man AKA The Vanquished One (masked) - Box Steel Frame, Walnut Burl Veneer Panel, Painted Panel, nuts and bolts, The Age of Bronze by Auguste Rodin from Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane’s collection - 2018.Photo Credit: Ruarí Conaty.

Occultation; n. (Astronomy); The passage of a celestial object across the line of sight between an observer and another celestial object; as when the moon moves between the Earth and the sun in a solar eclipse.

Beckoning us through ghostly operatic echoes as we ascend the stoic neoclassical staircase of the Hugh Lane Gallery, McCann’s video work Furtive Tears, Salomé’s Lament eventually drenches us in
an opulent fusion of Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Donizetti’s Una Furtiva Lagrima from here the hybridism of language and landscape becomes only more strange.

An imposing screen seduces us. Boris, a suited man, appears to await our arrival and scales the grandiose marble staircase of Belfast City Hall in a pair of red high heels. In a duo of impassioned tableau vivant’s he mimics the stance of Sir Edward Carson’s statue, situated at Stormont Castle, Belfast, followed by the Jim Larkin monument on O’Connell Street, just meters away. Both prominent twentieth century political figures immortalised in a state of dramatic public address. Outside the gallery they tower over contemporary cities fraught with new political uncertainties, their power redundant, their bodies now relics cast in silence. McCann breathes a last breath into their predominance and within it gives us space to reassess our own position in relation to both historic and contemporary power structures.
In the following scene we follow Boris’s continued ascension as he scales the Ridge View of Black Mountain leaving Belfast city behind having swapped his suit for a panda costume. Still wearing his red shoes, we witness him meandering through dewy grass, climbing fences and encountering mildly inconvenienced cows. He again mimics these political ghosts but this time the man is hidden, masked, he has become a cartoon. The dramatic inhabitance of these two iconic statues becomes a pathetic historical indistinct echo falling on deaf ears. We see his physical intentions without the details of expression, he is present but not apparent, something has passed between us and him obscuring our perspective, our reality.

This notion of occultation is pushed further in the adjoining gallery as we encounter our third immortalised male figure in a work wryly entitled The Age of Bronze AKA The Awakening Man AKA The Vanquished One (masked) pertaining to Rodin’s multi named bronze cast male figure (1876-77), a piece from the Hugh Lane Collection. McCann encases the gallery’s own Age of Bronze in a sharp green box frame, his head and upper body obscured with two panels, one blue the other a walnut burl veneer. This is a mongrel of the opposing sides of modernism but beyond its formal and art historical loft dwells a new space for interpretation. Through McCann’s geometric addition the figure of the naked bronze solider appears vulnerable, even caged. As the linear mechanism contrasts with the details and curvatures of his lower anatomy a palpable intimacy develops, yet he cannot “see” us, he is a pawn in a statement, to be looked at but not fully engaged with.

These historic male statues and monuments bare a contemporary vulnerability. McCann is redistributing notions of power and how we perceive it. She confidently harnesses these icons like a child might put batteries in an old toy and asks us to look again. Paradoxically there is a sense of the prophetic here, these historic regurgitations feel immediate and succeed through McCann’s ubiquitous intentions, her place amid the current socio-political zeitgeist and our own conception of the dawning of a new order.

In another gallery a taxidermied fawn towers above us, its head suffocated with a zipped black balloon, its fore limbs extended to its rear with black curved rods as it precariously sits, like a rocking horse, atop a box frame plinth, containing a dangling umbilical-esque blue neon tube light. From a height a pair of white voile drapes partially veil the rich blue walls before theatrically pouring to the floor surrounding an offering of fresh lilies, their fragrance inhabiting the space in a sharp organic sweetness as if Salomé herself was present, seducing us, dancing the Seven Veils amid this mise-en- scène tempered with sacrifice, vulnerability and power. These works lean on us as viewers to decipher what we do not see, or what McCann chooses to occult; they deftly summon forth the invisible. In the same room a large bronze nose cast from Seamus Murphy’s marble bust of Michael Collins (1949), another work from the Hugh Lane Collection, sits on a faux classical plinth, faceless, ironically pointing at a second green pedestal with a pair of destroyed aviator sunglasses. The monumental male is almost invisible now, surviving only by a nose, snorting contemporary air, like a man drowning in history or to quote Salomé in “black lakes troubled by fantastic moons.”

Art critic Rosalind Krauss writes of the logic of sculpture as being inseparable from the logic of the monument, “It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place”. McCann’s landscape of artefacts is profoundly routed in the space it inhabits; it is of the institution and rebels tangibly and intellectually within that frame. It is quite literally a Trojan horse, it is a series interventional contraptions concealing rebels and soldiers.

Here Salomé no longer dances alone under the gaze of men McCann’s ideas head bang alongside her, amid the Hugh Lane collection, like their parents have gone out of town. Furtive Tears is a spiky romantic affair it confronts us with fact and fiction, real and faux. Like Parrhasius’s curtain the perceived occultation is the work. As McCann’s objects pass between us and the past they momentarily eclipse history and in that darkness dwells a new constellation offering us portals into the alternative, interrogating socio-political shifts and arguing the legitimacy of the relics of politics and art, placing us at the centre of our own truths and preconceived ideas of our idiosyncratic place in story that is history.

Brendan Fox is an artist, curator, film maker and writer living in Dublin, he is currently studying MA Art in the Contemporary World, NCAD

www.brendanfoxart.com

Open Evening – Postgraduate Opportunities in the School of Visual Culture

Come to NCAD on 12 March to hear about our MA / MFA programmes

Running for more than a decade, our MA Design History and Material Culture and MA / MFA Art in the Contemporary World programmes give students exceptional opportunities to develop skills as writers, researchers and thinkers. Both are located in the School of Visual Culture in the National College of Art and Design, a unique vantage point from which to develop and extend an interest in contemporary art or the history and current practice of design. And based in the centre of Dublin, both programmes enjoy close working relations with major institutions like IMMA and the Irish Architecture Foundation, as well as the vibrant art and design communities in the city.

To learn more about postgraduate opportunities in the School of Visual Culture, we are hosting a postgraduate study evening on Monday 12th March 2018. This event will be a chance to meet staff from our MA Design History and Material Culture or our MA / MFA Art in the Contemporary World, to hear about new classes and projects planned for 2018-19, to meet current students, and to hear about funding opportunities.

The evening will start with a brief introduction to NCAD and the School at 6pm followed by two separate sessions with the teams from both programmes. Participants will also have a chance to talk one-to-one about the opportunities that the two programmes offer students both during their studies and in their future careers.

If you would like to participate in this event, please email visualculture@staff.ncad.ie indicating whether you have an interest in MA Design History and Material Culture or in MA / MFA Art in the Contemporary World.

http://www.ncad.ie/news/view/open-evening-postgraduate-opportunities-in-the-school-of-visual-culture

State of Play

State of Play – Review by Deirdre Kearney

EXHIBITION of Postgraduate Masters- Fine Art – Painting, Sculpture, Fine Print, Digital Media.
National College of Art and Design

5th – 11th December 2014
Emmet House, Thomas Street.
Continue reading…

Openhere 2014

​Openhere 14.11-16.11 2014

3D printed goods, cryptocurrencies, digital sharing – just some of the disruptive online practices and technologies that are transforming and reshaping our economy. These innovative technologies have impacted the market, enabling new business models, evolving market conditions and transforming economic and social landscapes. However, the commodification and commercial adoption of these disruptive technologies has also raised concerns and questions in terms of access, control and sustainability. How can we develop these practices to not only support a digital commons, but also to support more equitable and sustainable worlds?

Openhere is a 3-day international festival and conference where online practices such as sharing, peer-production and open source meet real world material economies. The program brings together researchers, artists, engineers and activists to critically engage alternative economic models and digital currencies, open source hardware and ecology, and new forms of peer production and sharing happening at the intersection of digital and real world spaces. Sessions include talks, panel discussions, workshops and screenings.

Participants include: Benjamin Tincq, Brett Scott, Cathal Garvey, Chelsea Rustrum, Denisa Kera, Duncan McCann, Eli Gothill, Gawin Dapper, Geraldine Juárez, Graham Barnes Kevin Flanagan, Lana Swartz, Linda Doyle, Lúí Smyth, Nigel Dodd, Nora O’ Murchú, Peter Hanappe, Rachel O’Dwyer, The Robin Hood Cooperative, Sean Cubitt, Vasilis Kostakis and more.

Topics include: Alternative Currencies | Open Sourcing Finance | Open Hardware | Distributed Manufacturing | Open Source Ecology | Peer Production | Sharing Economies

For more information, program details and to book a place www.openhere.data.ie

Openhere is a joint initiative of (CTVR) The Telecommunications Research Centre in collaboration with the Dublin Art and Technology Association (D.A.T.A) and is supported by the Science Gallery Dublin, Trinity College Dublin.

19 September 2014
Eva Rothschild and Declan Long in conversation, begins at 5:00pm on Friday the 19th (Culture Night) and is followed by the launch of the exhibition catalogue published by Ridinghouse.

Admission free; early arrival is recommended as places are limited.

www.hughlane.ie/lectures

Karen

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present Karen, an exhibition of new film, sculptural, photographic and print works by Mark Garry.

As a dialogue between the personal, the historical and the political, Karen marks a subtle, yet significant departure within Mark Garry’s practice. Central to the exhibition are three large- scale silkscreened prints that depict a repeated image of Karen Dalton, the tragic Cherokee folk singer from the 60s. Dalton’s delicate figure has her back turned to us, face obscured, her arm outstretched as if pointing to something that remains unspecified and out of our sight.

This physical reach for the unattainable is echoed in Garry’s new film, Bridges Burned and Backs Turned. Against an impenetrable darkness a tiny white feather begins to fall repeatedly. Being caught and held for the briefest of moments. Elsewhere in a series of new photographs the darkness is violently interrupted by the irrepressible vigour of the brief magnolia blossom.

Through each of these works and a series of new freestanding sculptures entitled History Windows, Garry weaves together ideas of loss and estrangement, and a muted sense of sorrow, resonating from the subjective, to a wider reflection upon civic care. Here is the suggestion that as individuals and again collectively as a nation, modern Ireland has repeatedly failed itself on many levels, through a lack of consideration, patience and co-operation. These human values are physically embodied by Garry’s artworks themselves, be it within the processes of their making, or in their inherent structure. His works are measured and quiet, often requiring meticulous systems of construction and collaborative practices. They combine physical, visual, sensory and empathetic analogues, creating arrangements of elements that intersect spaces, forming relationships between a given room and each other.

Mark Garry
Karen
Kerlin Gallery
23rd May- 28th June

Mark Garry’s practice is research-based and often embedded in music and musicology. Characteristics of this cultural field act as means for the artist to observe how certain historical, geographical and sociological forces have combined, shaping the contemporary psyche over time. With a lightness of touch, this line of research permeates the exhibition Karen. As the critic Declan Long has noted, “Mark Garry’s art thrives on a potential for connectibility: his is a hugely hospitable manner of practice, open to new collaborations and new translations between forms and ideas…These are tentative, tender realistions of evolving ideas: fragile forms based on unorthodox affiliations.”

Current and forthcoming exhibitions include City Gallery, Charleston South Carolina, USA (2014); Lafayette Projects, Marseille, France (2014) and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2015). Recent exhibitions include The Model, Sligo (2014); Sommer & Kohl, Berlin (2013); ENart Taichung, Taiwan (2013); Galleria Civica di Moderna, Milan (2013); a permanent commission for The MAC, Belfast, (2012); White Box, New York (2012); The Model, Sligo (2012); Cave, Detroit (2011); Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2011); Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2009); Dublin City Gallery Hugh Lane, Dublin (2009); Tai Turin Art International, CRAA Centro Ricerca Arte Attuale, Torino, Italy (2009); IMMA, Dublin (2008); The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania (2008); Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown, Sydney (2008); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2006). Garry represented Ireland at Venice at Venice Biennial (2005), which traveled to Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2006).

Eva Rothschild in Coversation

Eva Rothschild and Michael Dempsey in conversation on Friday 23rd May at 1pm in The Hugh Lane. Admission free.

Queer Pagan Punk: Derek Jarman part one: Jarman and the Occult

alt=”" title=”T.G- Psychic Rally in Heaven” width=”688″ height=”512″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-4569″ />Friend of ACW, Darius Lerup is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge where he researches, broadly, the relationship between philosophy–particularly Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva–and film.

Derek Jarman began his career in the 1970s by making experimental shorts on Super 8 film, as well as working as a set designer, most notably on Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and Savage Messiah (1972). By the 1980s, he numbered among a group of queer British experimental film artists (including the likes of John Maybury) that were closely connected to seminal post-punk musical groups like Throbbing Gristle, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Deeply influenced by DIY punk ethos, this scene scorned commercial filmmaking conventions in lieu of transgressive and a self-proclaimed “amateur” approach (see Maybury’s manifesto published in ZG magazine). Although Jarman eventually went on to direct “overground” productions like the eponymous biopic of Michelangelo Caravaggio, it goes without saying that his early works left a permanent mark on his approach to film. In turn, this is precisely what makes the BFI’s “Queer Pagan Punk”—the largest season of Jarman’s work ever mounted in the UK—essential viewing in order to better understand the role and influence of 80s British experimental film in the modern context. “Queer Pagan Punk” presents an extremely important chronicle in the development of underground experimental film in Britain as well as its ultimate diffusion into the “overground” in the forms of both music videos and motion pictures.

When viewing Jarman’s 1981 collaboration with Throbbing Gristle, entitled T.G: Psychic Rally in Heaven, the viewer is confronted with blurred corporeal textures punctuated by metronomic cuts to black that make the film both pulsate organically and stutter mechanically. Immediately, it becomes clear that one must seek out the identifiable forms that are lost in a sea of textures. Every so often, faces emerge or what can vaguely be identified as landscapes. How might one begin to understand these shifting vistas, at once dark and rich, organic and mechanical, churning to the amorphous sounds of one of Britain’s most influential experimental music outfits? In the essay ‘Ellipse sur la frayeur et la séduction spéculaire’, Julia Kristeva proposes that cinematographic specularity is a force working against the visually identifiable. Manifesting through excesses of color, somatic waves, and spatial rhythms (which she calls lektonic traces), cinematographic specularity is composed of all the visual elements that exceed what is necessitated by the process of identification, which is to say the transformation of image into sign. In this way, the specular is presented to the viewing subject as always overwhelming, exceeding signification, and meaning. For Kristeva, by exceeding signification, the cinema works first and foremost to denude desire in the realm of the visual. It seems to me that T.G: Psychic Rally in Heaven, plays along these lines, vaguely recalling the surrealist André Breton’s magique circonstancielle, a category of convulsive beauty in which the viewer’s desire is laid bare. And as I search of recognizable forms within Jarman’s film, I cannot help but reflect on my own desire as viewer, wanting at once more and less than what is given. Although, Psychic Rally… is only one tiny fragment of Jarman’s oeuvre, but needless to say, it already suggests that “Queer Pagan Punk” will be of great interest.

Exhibitions Opening this Week: Interior Sun

Green on Red Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new work, Interior Sun, by Irish artist Damien Flood on Thursday, January 16, 2014 6-8pm

All Man : The Show

All Man: The Show
Nov 14th 18:00 – Nov 14th 20:00 2013

Curated by Lynda Phelan
Winner of the Talbot Gallery International Curatorial Open Call 2013


Matthew Nevin | Darren Caffrey | Terence Erraught | Sean O’Reilly | Conall McCabe | Tony Hayes | Eoin M. Lyons | PawełKleszczewski


The Talbot Gallery is delighted to announce that Lynda Phelan, winner of the Talbot Gallery International Curatorial Open Call that was launched in September 2012, will open her exhibition All Man: The Show at 6pm on Thursday 14th November 2013.



Taking the writings of Mina Loy (1882), Valentine de Saint Point (1875) and George Bataille (1897) as her conceptual points of departure, an open-call was held to unearth five more artists to show alongside the three invited artists, Matthew Nevin, Darren Caffrey and Terence Erraught.



All Man: The Show is an encounter with the male sex and the question: how does man come to know his own maleness, express his maleness, seek and conquer not Woman but the whole of Man?



And, by excluding the female artist from the open-call process and the resultant exhibition, Lynda hopes, through her absence, to draw attention to the true depth of that which underpins her professed problem.



“When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change to yin.” (I Ching)



The truth of woman begets that of man. How then can the ‘fairer sex’ be a part of the overall system, a real component on the world-stage, if she steps outside of what is to maintain the illusion of equality, in the guise of some form of feminist retort? How can Woman feed the world-order, if it is seen that she requires the safety of same-sex collation and/or competition?



Is it all that Woman wants: to be equal? She can never be by definition of being. Why is it that all she wants is what man has made for himself? Why does she not want for herself what drives her, instead of what drives the male? What does the goddess desire? What does the goddess do with that desire and do as a result of that desire?



Lynda Phelan is currently studying for her MA Art in the Contemporary World, at NCAD. Lynda graduated from IADT with a BA Honours in Visual Art Practice in 2007 and obtained a Higher Certificate in Psychology & Jungian Psychology in 2009 & 2011 respectively.



“All Man is an idea for which the time has come! A smart and provokative concept, with a great woman curator with a lot to say.”Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., Post Porn Artist and Ecosexual Activist.



Dr. Aine Phillips has written a piece of text to accompany All Man: The Show

Call for Female Actor

Call for a female actor between the ages of 18-35/40 to perform a one off 20 minute monologue by the artist Josph Noonan-Ganley.