ROBERT ARMSTRONG - [Invited Artist] SIMONE OSTHOFF - [TITLE Award 'A sky on the floor: utopia, alterity and the violence of history'] ISABEL NOLAN - [Invited Artist] HEIDI POLLARD - [Invited Artist] JOAN SUGRUE - [TITLE Award 'Sculpting a Female Aesthetic - How Can Public Sculpture Inform a Feminist Discourse?'] ARTStap Online TOP 5 - [Rated by You] SARAWUT CHUTIWONGPETI - [Open Submission Award Recipient] RICHARD CARR - [A Reliable Meeting Place...Notes of a Soundmaker] ARTStap Online TOP ART SPACE VALERIE BRENNAN - [MAKERS Award Recipient] FRED L'EPEE - [MAKERS Award Recipient] MARK HAUGHTON - [MAKERS Award Recipient] LIAM CAMPBELL - [MAKERS Award Recipient] SALOME VOEGELIN - [Ethics of Listening] ARTStap FRANCHISE Programme
Journal for Contemporary Visual & Sonic Art Vol.2 Issue 3
ARTS tap
ABOUT ARTStap was founded to readdress the current lack of representation focusing primarily on the development of emerging and under represented artists within their creative and research practices and is dedicated to create a platform for discussion and collaboration for the emerging artist. Most work is seen from the perspective of the artist or practitioners themselves alongside critical texts focusing on contemporary art and its relation to a wider artistic, theoretical and social context. By taking this approach ARTStap aims to be at the forefront of art criticism and theory and to engage and represent the work of committed emerging practitioners. The ARTStap Journal is published 3 times yearly while the online Network acts as a central platform for international Artists, Curators, Collectives, Galleries etc. to create their Professional Profiles. Post & search through the upcoming events & opportunities, search the funding microsite or enter the research library.
SUBMISSION ARTStap are accepting submissions on an ongoing basis please visit http://www.artstap.com/submissions for full submission guidelines. Also create your account at the network to be in with the opportunity of being the next recipient of the MAKERS Award or TITLE Award.
SUBSCRIBE To subscribe to ARTStap please create your FREE account at www.artstap.com
CONTRIBUTORS ROBERT ARMSTRONG - [Invited Artist] SIMONE OSTHOFF - [TITLE Award 'A sky on the floor: utopia, alterity and the violence of history'] ISABEL NOLAN - [Invited Artist] HEIDI POLLARD - [Invited Artist] JOAN SUGRUE - [TITLE Award 'Sculpting a Female Aesthetic - How Can Public Sculpture Inform a Feminist Discourse?'] ARTStap Online TOP 5 - [Rated by You] SARAWUT CHUTIWONGPETI - [Open Submission Award Recipient] RICHARD CARR - [A Reliable Meeting Place...Notes of a Soundmaker] ARTStap Online TOP ART SPACE VALERIE BRENNAN - [MAKERS Award Recipient] FRED L'EPEE - [MAKERS Award Recipient] MARK HAUGHTON - [MAKERS Award Recipient] LIAM CAMPBELL - [MAKERS Award Recipient] SALOME VOEGELIN - [Ethics of Listening] ARTStap FRANCHISE Programme
LIST OF INTERESTED DISTRIBUTORS FOR FUTURE PRINTED ISSUES Ireland, Scotland, UK, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, USA NIVAL, NationalI rish Visual Arts Library, (NCAD, Dublin, Ireland) Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, (Barcelona, Spain) RUA RED, (Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland) The Burren College of Art, (co. Clare, Ireland) Basement project space, (cork, Ireland) Arttrail YMCA, (cork, Ireland) GSA, Gorey School of Art, (co. Wexford, Ireland) Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre (co. Wicklow, Ireland) The Little Ghost Gallery (co. Kilkenny, Ireland) SOMA Contemporary Art Box, (co. Waterford, Ireland) Basement Project Space, (co Cork, Ireland) NenaghArtsCentre, (co. Tipperary, Ireland) Number OneGallery, (co.Dublin, Ireland) Mothers Tankstation, (co. Dublin, Ireland) Exchange Gallery, (co. Dublin, Ireland) EnnistymonCourthouse Gallery & Studios, (co. Clare, Ireland) Tallaght Community Arts, (co. Dublin, Ireland) Pitzer Art Galleries, (Claremont, CA, USA) Academy of Fine Arts, (Prague, Czeck Republic) CollectiveGallery, (Edinburgh, Scotland) Soundfjord Gallery & ResearchUnit, (London, UK) Trailer project space, (Rotterdam.Netherlands) Arteria Art Gallery, (Montreal,Canada) 221 A, (Vancouver, Canada) Draiocht, (Blanchardstown, Ireland) CIT, Crawford School of Art, (Cork, Ireland) Catalyst Arts, (Belfast, Northern Ireland) Filmbase, (Temple Bar, Ireland) Cake Contemporary Arts, (co. Kildare, Ireland) ICPA, Colgate University, (NY, USA) 1 26 (Galway, Ireland) West Cork Arts Centre (cork, Ireland) Galway Arts Center, (Galway, Ireland) Darc Space, (Dublin, Ireland) The White Lady, (Dublin, Ireland)
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR So, as we come to an end of a Volume and of a another successful year we would first of all like to thank all of you who have made ARTStap as successful as it is today; Our readers, our contributors and of course all the thousands of you at ARTStap Online. 201 2 is our second year up and running and we have quickly made an impact as a credible, critical, engaging and influential platform for the Contemporary Visual and Sonic Arts, not only in our home country of Ireland where we are the leading online Resource, Journal and Professional network making the shortlist for the Irish Web Awards under 2 categories; Best Arts Website and Best Online Publication, but also on the international stage. ARTStap prides itself on providing a place for the practitioners voice throughout our Journal and of course the open network at ARTStap Online. Since our foundation we at ARTStap have worked continually on a voluntary basis and are continually aiming to improve our website, Journal and our exposure on an international scale. We have introduced some interesting features at ARTStap Online from a new photo viewer, your very own profile LIKE Box that you can embed into your own website / blog, the ability to place your event on the ARTStap MAP [The ATM of Art Events] to our very new and impressive free monthly E-bulletin service. So, watch this space into 201 3 as we at ARTStap will continue to provide space for what you might have to say about your own work, and to continue to develop further opportunites for all of you ARTStap users. Thank you Richard Carr
R O B E R T A R M S T R O N G
Robert Armstrong lives and works in Dublin. His practice often refer to Renaissance paintings. By focusing on apparently insignificant background details, Armstrong seeks to undermine the narrative meaning of those classical works and focus instead on a new painting language connected to an older tradition. His paintings indulge skepticism about representation and meaning but ‘slip and glimpse’ between the two. Often the materiality of the paint plays with revealing or obliterating the image. Elemental forces are set against extreme physical landscape or post-industrial scenes where an apocalyptic scene emerges, but elsewhere a Renaissance saint flies about unperturbed. “Armstrong’s paintings re-order the fragments of a disorientated image culture. They attempt to penetrate through multiple layers of appearence, offering an incidental practice of looking in which, as T.J. Clark proposes in relation to Poussin, the image, “breaks up, recystallizes, fragments again, persists like an afterimage”. ” - Declan Long, Robert Armstrong: Afterimages (2007) Robert Armstrong is Head of Painting at the National College of Art & Design since 2002 and is a Founder Member of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. He is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.
Mountain Mist, oil on canvas, 201 2, 40x50cm
Flying Saint, oil on cancas,201 2,30x35cm
Untitled,2011 ,oil on canvas,40x50cm
Peruzzi, 2009,oil on linen,25x30cm
Banderole -Say It Best,201 0, oil,50x60cm
Blue Sky Framing, 201 0, oil, 35x45cm
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM TITLE Award
Simone Osthoff - Recipient of the ARTStap TITLE Award
A sky on the floor: utopia, alterity and the violence of history; Simone Osthoff If the Utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’ temporal end. Theodor Adorno There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. Walter Benjamin
The concept of utopia, so out of fashion in the postmodern era despite having inhabited the limbo of the living dead over the past three decades, is, perhaps because of that, a privileged topos to think of issues that are central to contemporary art – from the issues of form and processes to political-ideological issues, including among these alterity and the historical events that are at the root of current postcolonial concerns. According to David Harvey, author of Spaces of Hope, the lack of interest for the utopian tradition in recent times points to the suspicion that there really exists a strict relationship between utopia and totalitarianism. It is not by chance, for example, that Brasilia became the capital of military dictatorship, which, in principle, it would have been created to overcome. But it is precisely utopia, understood in a paradoxical way and never fulfilled, that Adorno privileges in art. For him the aesthetic experience is at the center of a critical theory that questions the Enlightenment and the violence of Western rationality, based on its fascist limit of intolerance toward difference, which led, in the Germany of the 1 930s, to genocide and to the holocaust.
In Adorno’s aesthetic theory, the materiality that is peculiar to the rationality of artistic forms and constructions articulates the alterity in a permanent formal tension, but without violating the other, without letting the other seem entirely present or totally translatable by our conceptual framework. Aporetic, antinomic, and paradoxical, the truth of art is in the formal tension that it articulates with all its elements – form, material, content, process, meaning, language, style, concept. This ethic of difference is not only verbal and process based, it is also spatial and topographical. And this spatial-process based articulation is labored in a privileged way by both architecture and the plastic arts. In Gê Orthof’s work the issue of alterity passes necessarily through formal issues – in the specificity of materials and processes, in the production of space, and in the relationship with the location. Alterity is also present in the original way in which he condenses all the work’s elements, producing the sedimentation and the decantation of contents from unequal elements, experiences with diverging natures, which, combined by the artist in an extraordinary way, produces both an estrangement and a bringing together of the everyday experience and history. Over the last few years Orthof has been practicing atelier abstinence, denying the grandiose notion of the artist as a virtuoso and of the studio as a privileged space for knowledge and creation. He chooses to imbue all life with an ethic and an aesthetic meaning, whose conceptual strictness is very far from postmodern cynicism and disillusion. For Orthof, life and work mix in an increasingly radical way, and the work of the artist contaminates the work of the curator, of the collaborator, and of the professor in the art circuit and institutions. Traveling daily through Brasilia’s road axes, Orthof undoes with
nomadic wisdom the supposed rigidity of this urban geometry, a product of modernist utopias that, if they did not trigger the new social processes imagined by its creators, still hold in their beauty the undeniable visionary force that generated them. This daily non-linear path that the artist draws throughout the city emerges in his installations and, among others, into the spaces of Encapsulada: A caixa do sono [Encapsulated: The
Sleep Box] , O Gentil Homen e o D(eu)s Imperfeito [The Gentleman and The (I)mperfect God] , and Sobretudo Transporte [Transport Above All]. The three different versions
of the installation Transport Above All emphasize “traveling with luggage” in the sense of the coherence of a trajectory in the way Lygia Clark has used the expression. In these installations objects of diverse origins – some are found, others built and sown with a simple and visible structure – are lined up in suspended ropes that cross the entire installation space. This entangled constellation of objects and shapes that are at the same time familiar and strange dance in space as if the Relevos Espaciais [Spatial Reliefs] by Hélio Oiticica were mixed with the Droguinhas [Little Nothings] by Mira Schendel, or as if the Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters incorporated the colored clothes and objects that hang from the improvised strings made from barbed wire that the homeless that are found throughout Brasilia use. Orthof frequently subverts the scale of space with the use of miniscule objects, miniatures that have the power of transforming the gallery’s scale into a human size, as Bachelard observed in The Poetics of Space, “the miniature knows how to store size. It is vast in its own way.”
(inspired on the similar carts found in garages), emphasizing horizontality and electing the gallery ceiling as a backdrop. This point of view from beneath belongs mainly to childhood and to the memory of the several spaces that have been lived through and that are contained in the imagination. At the same time, horizontality is the axis of rest, of the delirium of dreams and of death. But it is also Deleuze’s rhizomic space, from the space of the entangled and centerless paintings by Jackson Pollock to the Internet, which extends itself through nodes, infinitely. Transport Above All could belong to the alternative worlds Alan Lightman describes in his small and magnificent book Einstein’s Dreams . In the thirty short stories that make up the book, life and space change according to time: in a determined world time is circular, in a second one it has three dimensions. In yet a third world time moves backwards, in a fourth one it inverts the relationship between cause and effect.
Further on, we could add, it is Transport Above All, articulating time and space as in other times and cultures in which spatial, social, and spiritual relationships converged. The modern era has separated the realm of knowledge and technique from that of ethics and aesthetics. Space for us is constituted by several knowledges in a partial and fragmentary way: the space of Euclidean mathematics, the space of nature and of physic’s and astrology’s cosmos, the epistemological-philosophical one, that of literature, of psychology, of disease and of madness, of architecture, of geography, economics, demography and sociology, ecology, politics, of computer science, etc. Orthof’s installations produce spatial narratives in which the world is present in a sedimented way, resized, sublimated. These are installations-intersections of knowledges, of desire and memory, In the landscape of Transport Above All the spectator is invited objects, personal and social history, in which fiction and fact are to travel through the installation lying on one of the three mixed. Sentences written in context contaminate the object withsimple four-wheeled vehicles that slide across the floor the-text, mixing languages that are as much verbal as they are
non-discursive and that multiply that which is image and sound in the word, and what is thought and verb in the images, producing unfinished translations, contingent between the word and the image that will acquire new and surprising shapes in the bibliotecadostripper [stripper’slibrary].
The bibliotecadostripper [stripper’slibrary] and other performances of the word-image relationship: the writer artist, curator artist, the artist in the university. In their muteness and their silence the nine books that make up the stripper’slibrary communicate pre-established contents. They are not linguistic signifiers as semiotics would indicate. In their unsolvable enigma they do not say almost anything besides establishing a singular and concrete relationship between subject and object, spectator and work. They are made of varied materials – synthetic skins taken from toy animals sown with nylon cable ties (those used to seal suitcases at airports), pompons, and wiggley eyes. They are a mixture between stuffed animals, gloves and puppets with suggestive and mysterious names. For Orthof, who early on was an illustrator for children’s stories, the images and words are signs that maintain complex relationships between each other and with the concepts and images that they represent. Words and images have their stories and a relationship that is sometimes natural, sometimes arbitrary with what they represent – words with phonetic bases are also images in their graphic dimension; the images are types of writing, glossaries of figures.
Exposed over glass panes only a few centimeters from the floor, these books ask us to handle them, to care for them, they ask us for secrets and for us to tell them stories, while, in exchange, they offer themselves to be used by our fantasy. Seated on small wooden cubes that are slightly taller than the book that faces him or her, the spectator undresses the literary process, which is then made not only by the gaze and imagination, but also involves an intimate experience of the book with the body, in all senses. Here the duality between body and mind is undone, as is the antinomy between verbal and pictorial signs. All is performance inside the books’ skin and inside our own. Image and word forget their semiotic alterity, they pay homage to other books, they challenge memory, they instigate desires and carry with them the scars of suffering. Enigma-books, guide, recipe, confessionary, utopia, homage, game, clothing, shelter, house, that involve us in their interior space and are at the same time a reminder of the world’s complexity.
The artist’s trajectory with and through books does not only pass through pleasurable and playful experience. It includes a long academic career – from his graduation in industrial design in the formalism of Rio de Janeiro’s ESDI [College of Industrial Design], at the end of the 70s, to the masters and doctoral degrees in visual arts in the academic strictness of Columbia University in New York between 1 982 and 92, to the challenge of forming new artists as a professor at the University of Brasilia from 1 993 until the present – as well as other trajectories that are no less important, generated by the constant changes in the childhood that was divided between Petropolis, Brasilia, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro; changes motivated by the revolutionary idealism of his parents, who were among the pioneering In the stripper’s library the books invite us deliciously to play professionals in the construction of Brasilia and of UnB, and with the intimate process of reading between reading, seeing, who, like so many others, including Juscelino Kubitschek and hearing, and touching.
Oscar Niemeyer, were exiled during part of the military To teach is to keep “the tent open,” in the words of his friend Jailton Moreira. Or to keep the utopia alive, as a way of thinking dictatorship. about the relationship between theory and artistic practices in Orthof inherited the interest for the convergence between life the bazaar of postmodern cultural frameworks with careless and art, word and image, from his grandparents (who were translations and pedagogical performances that are frequently visual artists and designers) and from his parents (specially superficial, in which critical theory functions only as one more from the lesson learnt from his mother, the actress Sylvia glamorous consumption item. More than the compilation of Orthof, who, despite adversity, created a set of literary works knowledge, teaching is a constant challenge of producing critical for “children,” writing over one hundred thirty books). These thinking, while at the same time deconstructing academic stories and histories partly explain why collaboration and canons, and contributing to the renovation in the Humanities, dialogue have fundamental importance for Orthof. It is from the reaffirming the importance of this space for the production of dialogue between other artists from Brasilia that the Gentil research and knowledge – the autonomous University, public Reversão [Gentle Reversion] group was born. And it is with and free of charge. these artists that the stripper’slibrary established a dialogue at first: with work by Ana Miguel (and, at the horizon, with the In order to maintain this autonomy today, the Humanities need, relational objects by Lygia Clark), as well as with work by according to Jacques Derrida,“not only a principle of resistance Chico Amaral, Elder Rocha, Ralph Gehre and Marília Panitz. but also a force of resistance – and of dissidence.” And Orthof Other activities by the artist as a curator and consultant have weaves this dissidence through a Gentle Reversion, an contributed to the programmes of the main cultural institutions expression he coined, and which, besides naming a group of in Brasilia. His latest curatorial work, in partnership with artists, is a way, based on the here and now, of reverting the Marília Panitz, named CentroEXcêntrico [Center|Ex|centric], inhumane values of capitalism and of the militaristic and constructs an entire network of meanings between artists in patriarchal authoritarianism that has left deep scars on the Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Fortaleza, around country. To think of autonomy inside the University today still the multiple meanings of the idea of a center (in relationship to implies, according to Derrida, to examine the frontiers of the the subject, to geography, to cultural production, and to inside and of the outside of the academic space, the impact of information technology and of globalization, and the growing contemporary poetics). contradictions between a corporative model guided by the ethics His teaching activities are yet another realm of contamination of competition and profit, a model that is found mainly in between the artist and the circuit, the making of art and the American universities but that today extends itself to the whole thought about art, inserting the University in the discussions world; and the model of academic autonomy and of the complete about contemporary art. For Orthof, to work at the University of separation between research and the private sector, which Brasilia today is to profess faith in the utopia that is at the defended traditionally by European and Latin American universities. Campus Musa, a research project that Orthof has origin of both the city and the University. developed in collaboration with others artists, students, and
institutions, inside and outside of the university, explores, in an experimental way, the university as a theme, place and artistic medium, valuing new models of collaboration, production, and publication.
Social content and the violence of history: Os Judescos [The Jewdesques], Oxford-Brazil, and the Debret. Several minuscule toy eyes look at us from the gallery floor, incrusted into small objects made with modeling dough, or glued to black, red, and pink pompons that are lined up in a curvilinear drawing across the floor. Near them, and connected to them at a few spots, are thin ball chains that fall from the ceiling and group themselves in rolls and circles of varied sizes, creating solid figures with linear elements. Further on, still on the floor, a map that is magnetized with an inverted polarity moves a nervous and uncertain pendulum over Afghanistan. The Jewdesques —a Jew’s arabesques—were created by Orthof in Boston, while still under the impact of the September 11 th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. As part of the exhibition Gentle Reversion, along with the stripper’slibrary, these drawings on the gallery floor formed strange, beautiful, and well-humored constellations, whose title denies the logic of the reductionist fusion of terrorism=barbarism=Islam. The continuity of materials between these two exhibitions suggests, beyond stylistic coherence, a possible contamination between the stories of the stripper’slibrary and the recent historic facts in the developments that followed the September 11 th tragedy. Between these two installations with permeable borders history can be thought of as fiction, literature and rhetoric, while literature can be treated as a material phenomenon.
The formal simplicity of The Jewdesques echoes another 1 998 installation— Encapsulated: The Sleep Box—held at the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (MAM), and which was part of the exhibition Vista Assim Mais Parece um Céu no Chão [Seen From Here It Looks Like A Sky on The Floor] , curated by Agnaldo Farias. In this installation, by bringing the sky to the floor, Orthof revisits the issue of the transcendental sublime that was dealt with by philosophy and art, and is present, for example, in Turner’s marine landscapes, in Monet’s water lilies, in Rodin’s Gates of Hell, or in James Turell’s Roden Crater. These arabesques, which The Jewdesques draw on the floor, are a kind of manifesto that bases itself on the innocence of its materials, on the “feminine” and pop aesthetic of its pompons, and on the abstract and playful shapes of its small agglomerations of objects in order to question insistently an economical-political war, which, with the grandiose form of a religious war, abuses the archaic rhetoric of a cosmic dualism in the fight between good and evil, between West and East, between a Christian “truth” and an Islamic “ideology.” The Jewdesques in their poetic simplicity, contrast in shape and content with the ideological fascist-chauvinist discourse that continues to justify violence and war as solutions for conflicts. But it is not only to the violence of political-ideological discourses that The Jewdesques oppose themselves. They also deal with the issue of the representation of the sublime and of transcendence, approaching the theme with the intuition that it is Faustian—knowledge and power are inseparable. In Orthof’s work, the issue of transcendence acquires the meaning of a search and resistance based on the immanence of things, of objects and of the everyday experience. From a non-special place in the world comes the refusal to approach the universe’s cosmic transcendence as a totality.
Both The Jewdesques and the books from the stripper’slibrary construct the world as permanent enigma, instead of thinking about art as a book that opens itself to the secrets of creation. Images of transcendence as a totality appear synthesized in Western culture, for example, in Ptolemy’s “world machine.” This diagram with ten concentric spheres that represent degrees of transcendence in the world view of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages, is present in the travel narratives of Dante’s Divine Comedy and in Camões’ Lusíadas, as well as in Drummond’s poetry and Borges’ short stories, in which the theme is reconstructed based on immanence. The denial of transcendence by the modern and centerless subject, a product, in part, of the thinking of Newton, Marx, Nietzche and Freud, starts from the observation that the earth is not the center of the universe; man was not created in God’s image; and consciousness is not synonymous with truth. In the modern world the cosmic transcendence of the “world machine” confuses itself with the materialism of the machine world. In Drummond’s poem A Máquina do Mundo [The Machine of the World], the poet refuses the unveiling of the secret of creation, which is offered to him unexpectedly, by falling one afternoon on a Minas Gerais road on which he walked. This metaphysical relinquishment of knowledge by Drummond, which is also present in a few of Borges’ short stories, deals with the issue of the impossibility of representing transcendence, because at its limit it is like the world. This totalizing transcendence that is lost in modernity is found anew, however, in the immanence of things. And it is this sense of the sublime, based on the immanence of everyday objects that Drummond and Borges tell us of, that Orthof’s installations articulate in spatial-temporal ways in which the ethic dimension is contained in the poetics and the aesthetics.
The non-representational and non-discursive aesthetics of the Jewdesques, which is also present in the mosaic and Islamic interdiction of representation, emphasizes once more the theme of the sublime and of the impossibility of its representation. Made with small objects, which, as in other installations by the artist, are drawn on the floor, The Jewdesques are an offer, an offering, a magic drawing that is reminiscent of other ritualdrawings that are also made on the floor, with salt, with flowers, with pigments or spices, or even with paint on canvas or paper. These playful and simple little “macumbas” that Orthof draws conjure the critical powers caused by the sense of oddness brought about by the title itself—The Jewdesques—and which extends through the commercial materials that form these sacred fetish-images, at the same time spells and merchandises, that point from the floor to the complex relationships of power that hover above them. The preference for the horizontality of the floor appears for the first time in the artist’s work in 1 994, in the radical, dry and disconcerting formalism of Oxford-Brazil. In this installation pairs of white dishes, perforated and locked with padlocks, were tied with wire and exposed on the concrete floor of the gallery over rectangles of black rubber that fit together to form a grid. The set was illuminated by two weak lamps. The installation contained also a numbering that reminded the viewer of the markings at an archaeological site, apparently random numberings, but which were, for the artist, life-marking-dates (the date of the artist’s return to Brazil, after having lived for ten years in New York, divided infinitely in half, indicating an approximation that is never fulfilled). The dates were inscribed on small round and black canvases that reinforced the octagonal structure of the ensemble. In Oxford-Brazil, the formal experiences with painting of the previous phase added up with the critique of the social
violence of hunger, both in the physical sense as in the cultural one, preserving the sense of oddness caused by the recontextualization of these everyday objects: padlocked and sealed plates, circular forms on rectangles, white objects on black backgrounds. The political violence of Oxford-Brazil, created seven years before the Jewdesques, also questions the violence exercised by Western rationalism on the other, be it nature or a social, ethnic, sexual, or cultural other, over which, through contrast, we have become used to affirming our identity since the beginning of history. Already in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus, the father of history, represented, in the mirror of the Greek identity based on the polis, the nomad people of Cita, which were pure barbarians to Greek eyes. The description of the Citas in Herodotus’ work presents, however, historiographical difficulties that are very contemporary in what regards the representation of facts, their interpretation, translation, betrayal, their content of truth and fiction. It is with the intention of controlling the other and nature that the Western subject submits the object to the violence of the instrumentalized reason and concept. Science and technology have been producing the opposite of what humanism expected from human progress: an extraordinary transformation of the surface of the planet, in which the geographic, social, and environmental inequalities are aggravated everywhere. This reference to historical violence over the other that we find in the Jewdesques and in Oxford-Brazil, is also present in the lunch boxes piled up between bricks and with rubber bands in the installation Águas Emendadas [Mingling Waters] (1 994) , as well as in the extraordinary Debret (2000). The Debret are soft sculptures that remind us of the loads carried by slaves
and native Brazilians that are recorded in the images painted by Debret in the 1 6th century, and that are transformed in backpack-bodies carried by the artist, who carries our history of slavery in these works. These abstract and extraordinary packages are made of black leather and sown with white nylon cable ties (the same used to seal suitcases at airports and that appear in the books of the stripper’slibrary). Covered with miniatures of men walking almost like flies over a deformed carrion, they let us have a glimpse, through their handcrafted making, of the white content/filling/muscle inside the black bag. Wearing the Debret, Orthof gives new dimensions to a long history of the exoticizing and objectifying European gaze that, in the name of civilization, of commerce and of Christianism, has justified colonialism and slavery. The social contents that are sedimented in Orthof’s work, as well as in that of a few contemporary artists such as Cildo Meireles and Rosângela Rennó, deal, with unique poetic subtleness, with social issues that are charged with historical violence. It is based on this critical engagement with the present that the artist gives new dimensions to both the past and the future, creating visual narratives in which stories and histories mix and operate a Gentle Reversion. In this process, Adorno reminds us that art, as well as theory, is not in a condition to fulfill utopia, not even negatively. The utopia of art does not present positive alternatives for the creation of a fairer world, as many modernist and anti-modernist avant-gardes in the 20th century wished. The utopia of art, as well as its authenticity, is essentially negative in relationship to the social environment. Art is not suitable as a means to communicate contents, or to propose directions. And this autonomy from social life gives it, at the same time, critical strength in regards to reality, in regards to instrumentalized, technical and scientific reason, as well as in regards to consumption in the cultural industry.
Simultaneously, it is this autonomy that limits and neutralizes the critical power of art. And it is this paradox, made both from critical strength and from aesthetic autonomy, as a witness to truth and utopia, that Gê Orthof’s work places on the ground, between the desire and the event, stories and histories, between the images that we project in the sky and what happens to us on earth
Footnotes
1 Theodor Adorno, Teoria estética [Aesthetic Theory], trans. Artur Morão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1 990. 2 Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs Collector and Historian” in One-way Street and Other Writings, London: 1 979, p. 359. 3 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 4 Installation with mixed materials at the MAM in Rio de Janeiro, 1 998. 5 Installation with mixed materials at the Gallery of the University of Brasilia, 1 999. 6 This installation has had three versions. In Brasilia: Sobretudo Transporte [Transport Above All] , Rubem Valentim Gallery, 1 999; in Porto Alegre: Sobretudo Transporte: Destino Torreão [Transport Above All: Destination Torreão], Torreão, Porto Alegre, 1 999; and in Madrid: Sobretudo Transporte: Destino Madrid [Transport Above All: Destination Madrid], CRUCE, Madrid, Spain, 2000. 7 Gaston Bachelard, A Poética do Espaço [The Poetics of Space], São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1 989, p. 21 9. 8 Alan Lightman, Sonhos de Einstein [Einstein’s Dreams], São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1 993 9 Orthof received the prize for Best Book Illustrator from the São Paulo Association of Art Critics, in 1 983; and in 1 984, the prize O Melhor Para Crianças [The Best For Children], from the Fundação Nacional do Livro Infantil e Juvenil, Rio de Janeiro. 1 0 Created in Boston in 2001 , the books in the stripper’library were exhibited with the installation Os Judescos [The Jewdesques] as part of the group exhibition Gentle Reversion, CCBB Brasilia, 2001 /2002. 11 The first group exhibition of the Gentle Reversion group, integrated by Ana Miguel, Chico Amaral, Elder Rocha, Gê Orthof, Ralph Gehre and the curator Marília Panitz, took place at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Brasilia, December 7, 2001 to February 8, 2002, with the production of a well done catalogue-book that documents, besides the exhibition, the process of collaboration and the group’s formation. The second exhibition of the Gentle Reversion took place at the Castelinho do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, from July 1 6 to August 30, 2003. 1 2 He has worked as an independent curator and as a member of selection commissions for the following institutions: University of Brasilia, Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Cultural Foundation of Brasilia, Central Bank - Brasilia, Caixa Cultural Center, National Arts Foundation, and Itaú Cultural Institute - São Paulo. 1 3 CentroEXcêntrico, Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, Brasilia, July 1 to August 3 2003. The exhibition is a result of the collaboration between artists and curators. Artists participating from Brasilia: Walter Menon, Andrea Campos de Sá and Milton Marques; from Fortaleza: Eduardo Frota; from Rio de Janeiro: Regina de Paula; and from Porto Alegre: Jailton Moreira. Curatorship and catalogue texts by Gê Orthof and Marília Panitz.
1 4 “Nossa função é manter a tenda aberta.” [“Our function is to keep the tent open.”] An expression by Jailton Moreira, used while commenting on his work at the Torreão in an interview with the author on October 1 8, 2002. Torreão is an independent space for production and thought about contemporary art created by Jailton Moreira and Elida Tessler in 1 993. It has been in activity in Porto Alegre for ten years without any kind of institutional support, producing extraordinary and autonomous work with minimal financial resources. 1 5 Jacques Derrida, The University without Condition. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2003. Derrida refers here to the ambiguous meaning of the expression “without condition” that appears in the title: on the negative pole, it is the unconditional surrender that is made without resistance, because of lack of power, weakness, vulnerability and impotence. On the affirmative sense of freedom, the expression refers to the university that is independent of any condition or injunction, a space for the pursuit of truth that is guaranteed by the unconditional academic autonomy. 1 6 Gê Orthof has distributed on the Internet, through the information network Canal Contemporâneo, a series of humorous critical post cards under the title “O Poder Não Pode” [“The Powers That Be Don't Have The Power”] that question attitudes and positions of the Lula government in regards to culture and other polemic issues such as the production of genetically modified soy beans in Brazil. 1 7 Since 2001 Orthof has collaborated and organized exchanges between the campi of the University of Brasilia (Campus Musa Project), and Penn State University (Universidade como Meio [The University as a Medium]) project and the site www.Emitto.net), and of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Perdidos no Espaço [Lost in Space] project and the site www.ufrgs.br/artes/escultura). 1 8 The title for the exhibition chosen by Agnaldo Farias was inspired by the song by Paulinho da Viola and Hermínio Bello de Carvalho (Sei Lá, Mangueira). 1 998 National Salon, Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art. 1 9 An analogy woven by José Miguel Wisnik in the lecture about Carlos Drummond de Andrade presented at the cycle of conferences “Poetas que Pensaram o Mundo” [“Poets That Thought of the World”] at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center on October 1 5, 2003. 20 Oxford-Brazil is the factory brand that is stamped in a bas-relief under the 26 pairs of white dishes in the installation. The pairs of perforated and padlocked plates were exposed on black rubber. The installations dimensions were approximately 3m x 7.5m. Sérgio Porto Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, 1 995; and São Paulo Contemporary Art Museum, 1 996. 21 François Hartog, O Espelho de Heródoto [Herodotus’ Mirror] , Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 1 999. (A copy of the book was part of the installation O gentil homem e o D(eu)s imperfeito [The Gentleman and The (I)mperfect God]. UnB Gallery, 1 999.) 22 Águas Emendadas [Mingling Waters], a collaborative multimedia installation by Gê Orthof, Regina de Paula and Simone Osthoff. 5th Brasilia Arts Forum. Athos Bulcão Foundation. Parangolé Gallery, Brasilia, 1 995. Fronteiras [Frontiers], a collaborative multimedia installation by Gê Orthof, Regina de Paula and Simone Osthoff. Museum of Brazilian Art FAAP, SP, 1 995. Both exhibitions are the product between a long-distance collaboration in which a Brazilian river basin is taken as a metaphor—as a basin of images—connecting the three artists and their respective cities: Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, and Chicago. 23 Os Debret, 2000. Mixed materials make up Os Ossos, O Sangue, e Os Músculos [The Bones, The Blood, and The Muscles]
I S A B E L N O L A N
Isabel Nolan Broadstone Studios 22 Harcourt Terrace Dublin 2. 30th Nov 201 2 Dear Richard, Predominantly I make objects: sculptures, paintings, drawings and fabric wall hangings. I have also worked in film, animation, with live events and temporary installations. One way to describe the work is that it is an aesthetic inquiry that elaborates, problematises, (and makes beautiful) our contingent experience of things. The works are a means to consciously encountering stuff in the world. The nature of the encounter is both foregrounded and reflected upon. The interplay of form, colour and language (in titles, and with longer texts) is always at the fore of my mind when installing an exhibition. Relationships between pieces need to be dynamic, and the disparate works need to both complement and complicate each other. Detail is very important too, from the specific colour and texture of the hand-stitched fabrics that encase the steel forms; to the layering of watercolour and oil paint to make the paintings intense yet deliquescent; and even, to identifying precisely the right word to employ in a sentence. The work reflects upon the conditions whereby we know real things. The manner in which things present certain qualities but simultaneously withdraw from our understanding is key And so, I believe the weirdness of reality, and our difficulty in successfully making observations, and communicating them, might be disclosed. Many of the works may remind you of other things, even other artworks, but they defy straightforward formal or metaphorical readings or narrative interpretation. I am an advocate of the idea that as things in the world, artworks are first encountered as events that shape our experience of space and time, and not simply as inert objects. Artworks present certain aspects to us but they are not completed or fully exhausted by their relationships to other things or people. They maintain a sense of being explicable only on their own impenetrable terms. They are works that quietly perform their own reality in relation to each other, their titles and necessarily a viewer. They solicit attention and can call on us to reflect upon the experience inscrutability. In so doing they may mirror a fundamental dimension of human life, the impossibility of knowing that we have actually known. With best wishes, Isabel.
Isabel Nolan’s current exhibition ‘Unmade’ is at The Goethe Institut Dublin until the 21st of December. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘A hole into the future’ at The Model, Sligo (2011-12), which travelled to the Museé d’Art Moderne de Saint -Etienne (2012). Other solo shows include Gallery Side 2, Tokyo (2010), Artspace, Auckland (2008), Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, (2009 & 2007), Gallery 2, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2008); The Studio, Glasgow International, (2006), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2005). Nolan was one of seven artists who represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale, she has previously exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Stroom Den Haag, Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City, De Appel and SMART, in Amsterdam. Her work is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and by Gallery Side 2, Tokyo.
Isabel Nolan, Solo exhibition – A hole into the future, Musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, France, Installation view, February 201 2
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan, Soft Stillness and the Night, 2011 , steel, wool, cotton, foam, thread, dimensions variable, Presented at ‘A hole into the Future’, The Model, Sligo, Dec 2011
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Isabel Nolan
Images courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan Soft Stillness and the Night, 2011 [Close up] steel, wool, cotton, foam, thread dimensions variable Presented at ‘A hole into the Future’, The Model, Sligo, Dec 2011
Isabel Nolan In this time, 201 2 steel, wool, cotton, foam, thread 208 x 90 x 21 0 cm 81 .9 x 35.4 x 82.7 in
Isabel Nolan A still unknown and distant star, 201 2 watercolour and waterbased oil on canvas 35 x 45 cm 1 3.8 x 1 7.7 in
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Isabel Nolan
Isabel Nolan Holding it in, 2011 steel, paint, MDF object 26 x 55 x 42 cm object 1 0.2 x 21 .7 x 1 6.5 in base 78 x 48 x 48 cm base 30.7 x 1 8.9 x 1 8.9 in
Image courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Isabel Nolan
H E I D I P O L L A R D
Heidi Pollard is a painter and sculptor working in New Mexico. She has received grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; she has attended artist residencies including Headlands Center for the Arts, California; the CUE Art Foundation in New York; and from 201 0 to 2011 the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Roswell, NM. Pollard has exhibited widely in the US, at venues including Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY, Transvagrant@Warschaw Gallery, Los Angeles; the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; PS 1 22, New York; Zane Bennett Contemporary, Santa Fe; CUE Art Foundation at NEXT art fair, Chicago; Horse Trader Curatorial Projects at Aqua Art Fair, Miami. Her work has been reviewed in Art New England and by Peter Plagens in Newsweek on line. Further information and images of her work can be seen at www.heidipollard.com.
Making images is my way of negotiating irreconcilables. I draw, paint and sculpt in a contemplative process, which involves much improvisation. Some of the resulting emblems and forms are like familiar symbols. At the same time they have the specificity of the new & nameless. A powerful ghost-thing, a metaphor, can arise when sounds, smells, colors & definitions are rubbed together in surprising ways. This apparition hovers over its embracing parents, present as an overtone: jarring or delicate, funny or something else entirely, depending on the ingredients. One favorite way to improvise, most especially with sculptural form, is to gather discarded items over time, often at the intersection where humans and garbage meet - i.e. out at the dump; up on the west mesa of Albuquerque where people use abandoned televisions, baby car seats and spray paint cans for targets on which to train their shotguns; around parking lots where people, waiting, generate interesting trash; and around the house after a party. Eventually things like corks, bottle caps, tin cans, and old cholla bones will jump up during naps or meandering drives, and suggest aggregate forms. As for painting, one could say that I gather glinting fragments from the refuse of my own mind, allowing everything, from a hand tremor to palette scraps, a place in its proper constellation. The painting titled Milarepa refers to the great Tibetan poet and yogi, who is said to have turned green from years of subsisting on a diet of nettles whilst meditating in his cave. Among his accomplishments were tummo, a practice of meditation best known for its alleged ability to produce body heat; and an esoteric skill known as wind meditation, which allows a practitioner to run at an extraordinary speed for days without stopping. In answer to a question about his mastery of meditation, the master is said to have shown disciples his calloused backside. The sculpture entitled Planktonette is a simple form made of modest materials and relates to the world of shapes and figures in my paintings. It is also partially inspired by the beautiful images of over 3,000 species of plankton discovered and lovingly rendered by Ernst Haekel, the German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist celebrated in David Lebrun’s 2004 documentary film Proteus.
Land Buoys 2011 Papier machĂŠ, corks, spray paint 1 7 x 47 x 1 7 inches, install dims variable
Planktonette 201 2 Tin cans, bottle caps, steel hanger strap, zip ties 35 x 24 x 24 inches
Milarepa 201 2 oil on canvas 1 6 x 1 6 inches
Machine for Brenda Goodman 201 2 oil on canvas 8 x 1 0 inches
Little Pond (Red Heaven) 2011 gouache on rag board, wood, automotive and spray paint 34 x 1 2 x 28 inches
Moving Image 201 2 oil & casein on canvas 8 x 1 4 3/4 inches
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM TITLE Award
Joan Sugrue - Recipient of the ARTStap TITLE Award
SCULPTING A FEMALE AESTHETIC - HOW CAN PUBLIC SCULPTURE INFORM A FEMINIST DISCOURSE? GMIT Cluain Mhuire 2011 INTRODUCTION CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST ART AND DISCOURSE In 1 989 the planning offices of Belfast City Council were broken into and a maquette of a sculpture of two fully clothed female figures by Louise Walsh was smashed. What reason could have warranted such a strong and aggressive reaction to a public art proposal made by a female artist modelling the female form? Was the reaction to it based on aesthetic judgements or was it politically motivated, and how can the work and the public reaction to it be read in terms of women’s contemporary position in society? These are questions that are relevant to modern feminist discourse which seeks to understand the mechanisms by which women are positioned within culture. Historically, feminism in the field of the arts emerged from the activities of the women’s movement in the early 1 970’s. This generation of artists changed the way in which they made art, grounding it in their politicised and socialised experience as women (1 ). The early feminist analyses focused new critical attention on the work of women artists and on domestic utilitarian production by women, and in doing so exposed the ways in which women’s production is often defined in opposition to creativity and high culture.
However this strategy was not without its problems; the very qualities that the work focused on such as the decorative, crafts and handiwork were also employed to denigrate their art. It seemed that their methodologies were based more on the fact that they were united as females rather than divided by specific issues such as class, race, religious and historical influences. As the deficiencies of this strategy were uncovered, many feminists began to look at other theoretical models on which to base their practices. Whitney Chadwick outlines some of the many strands that feminism in the arts has grown into including structuralism, psychoanalysis and semiology, indicating that within this sphere of study there is a huge amount of debate, opinion and opposing views (2). One of the most influential perspectives that was offered to feminism was in the field of psychoanalysis, and in particular the theories of Jacques Lacan. Freud’s theories had always privileged the male body as phallic, virile and strong and regarded the body of the female as castrated. Lacan abandoned the biological explanations and used social, unconscious and linguistic methodologies to explain human behaviour. He rejected the idea that the sexual drive of an individual matures gradually in tandem with genital identity, because of the way it suggests a biological sequence to the development of sexual identity (3). He insisted on the resistance of the sexual drive to any biological definition. In effect he separated the problematic penis from the phallus (the object of desire). In Lacan’s model the mother is reduced from her position as the object of desire, not because the child sees a physical lack in the mother, but because the child perceives their own lack of power in terms the mother’s subordination/desire for the father. Elizabeth Grotsz looks at how and why Lacan’s writings have been embraced by some feminist theorists, despite the fact that she believes that
Lacan is complicit with Freud in his privileging of the male body as phallic (4). She in particular looks at the writing of French psychoanalysts Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who both have studied Lacan, and place an emphasis on unconscious feelings and desires in an attempt to uncover a language to define the feminine, but who as feminists are diametrically opposed in their treatment of his theories (5). Kristeva offers a series of internal adjustments to Lacan’s theories, relating psychic development to the structures of language, and the play of bodily rhythms and pre-linguistic communications between the child (infant) and the mother. Grotsz outlines where Kristeva differs from Lacan, for example in her insistence of the historical and social specificity of subjectivity and signification (as in artistic practice), in her identification with all sensory registers (touch, taste, smell, sight, sound) instead of just the visual, and in her work on the pre-oedipal stage, maternal dependencies, and her notions of abjection, desire and the semiotic. But Grotsz remains highly critical of Kristeva as one who takes Lacans' concepts and reading techniques as starting points for her own methodologies of investigation. Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic are tied to sexual differentiation within each sex, not divided between the biological categories of men and women, and so her theories are concerned with elements internal to all subjects. Grotsz maintains that because Kristeva positions men as representatives of the struggle for sexual identity through her analysis of male authored avant garde texts, she is able to ignore the contribution of women to the setting up of new methods of sexual signification. Kristeva’s speaker is always neutral, and in doing this Grotsz argues that she disembodies femininity from women.
Kristeva uses the avant garde (those who risk their position in the symbolic), to explore femininity without realising that the men who wrote these texts cannot ever adequately speak for women’s femininity. As a result she accuses that Kristeva, “..remains the dutiful daughter in so far as she enacts for herself and reproduces for other women the roles of passivity and subordination dictated to women by patriarchal culture and affirmed by psychoanalysis” (6).
Grotsz’ problems with Kristeva seem to be founded on the fact that both Lacan and Kristeva do not have any means of taking into account women’s historical psycho-social status within our culture. It may be understandably difficult for some theorists to leap to a neutral non sexed subject without consideration of women’s historical position which has already been mapped out by earlier psychoanalytic theory. It may be that the transformation of woman from a spoken-for object to a neutral sexless subject is too great a leap and doesn’t acknowledge the position within which women have been placed and which cannot be wiped from our collective memory. Grotsz asks how is defiance possible from this theoretical viewpoint and how can a non-phallic yet speaking sexuality be granted to women? It could be asked does it need to be, does woman need to speak now as a woman or can a neutral position be the way forward? It must be acknowledged that Kristevas’ theories have proved a useful tool in the critical analysis of many feminist artistic practices. Representation of the feminine body in the feminist canon is a problematic and politicised subject as Joan Key points out in her essay entitled “Models for Painting Practice” (7). Kristeva’s writings on abjection in Powers of Horror show how images of women become the very image of horror, if they are not seen without distancing devices, scientific detachment or displacement.
This strategy is a useful device in the reading of some feminist work, even if the author Joan Key herself disagrees with the notion of distancing devices, which she feels is a practice based on exclusion (of the feminine body).
Using Klein also allows the literalist idea of the body to be removed from the work as Malvern suggests that Whitereads work avoids the inside and the outside of the body, its framework and its supports.
However, other authors such as Sue Malvern use a psychoanalytic model based on Melanie Klein’s work to imagine a feminist practice that also displaces and decentres the body, thus allowing gender to be radically rethought. This is particularly evident in Malvern’s critical essay on Rachel Whiteread’s public sculpture Water Tower, where she refers to Klein’s revision of Freud’s theories on infantile fantasy to describe readings of feminist work (8). Klein’s model finds the (female) infant in an irresolvable aggressive relationship with the mother. The mother is perceived as an all-powerful and retaliatory being, which causes the daughter to develop a fear of having her own internal organs eaten and destroyed by the mother. Thus feelings of aggression, pain, hate and envy are directed by the child towards the mother. Malvern suggests that this relationship happens in a place where time is more like space “here, there and gone rather than present, future and past” (9). The daughter then has anxiety and remorse about its hostile feelings towards the mother, and a sense of mourning ensues, as the child fears it has destroyed and lost the very object of its desire. Malvern’s essay refers to the writings of Mignon Nixon who first applied Klein’s theories to feminist artistic work. Nixon suggests the change in direction for feminist art of the 1 990’s towards a practise focused on aggression, pain and human drives can be paralleled to Melanie Klein’s theories on the shift from neurosis to psychosis, from the sex to the death drive. She argues that such work functions as a critique of the Lacan influenced feminist practices of the 1 970’s and 80’s where pleasure and desire were deconstructed.
In opposition to Kristeva’s theories that call for a distancing of the body from the work, are those of Irigaray which Grotsz details as posing questions about the outside, the silences and the voids of psychoanalysis and importantly includes the body in the work. Irigaray is interested in a discourse which positions the woman as a speaking subject and in particular the motherdaughter dyad. Grotsz points out that Irigaray’s project is one of enunciation, where woman doesn’t confirm to one logic of similar identity, sexuality or desire. Irigaray uses psychoanalysis as a critical and deconstructive device rather than a truthful or descriptive model to analyse other knowledges and representations (1 0). These models have proved influential to other authors such as Hilary Robinson in the analysis of contemporary art works, like that of Louise Walsh in Belfast (11 ). Robinson applies an Irigaryan reading on Irish culture, through looking at the works of several female Irish artists. Her analyses serves to highlight how some artworks by Irish artists try to displace or disrupt the traditional representation of women within our culture which has usually been to ultimately reduce all females to mothers. As Robinson states, “Patriarchy has disrupted mother-daughter relationships through an act of matricide” (12).
Her argument posits certain artworks such as Walsh's as enunciating female subjectivity so that woman can find her identity and develop an appropriate language
in the symbolic. This can be done as Irigaray suggests by the and behaviour of the public to specific works. This will be establishment and display of mutually respectful and loving examined in an attempt to decode the politics of representation relationships between women. in the case of two public sculptures in Galway, Equality Emerging near the Salmon Weir Bridge and Final Journey on the Contemporary public sculpture, which has replaced the junction of Forster Street/Bothar Ui hEithir. Critical to these historical monument, has a different purpose today than it did readings is the essay by Ailbhe Smyth “^The Problematics of in earlier centuries. It can raise fundamental questions about Culture and Identity for an Irish Woman” (1 6). In this essay the nature of public art and its perception within society. This Smyth examines the public sculpture Anna Livia Plurabelle, subject is explored by Chris Townsend with regard to erected by the Smurfit Corporation in Dublin’s O’Connell Street Whiteread's temporary public sculpture Monument (1 3). In it in 1 988 for the city’s millennium celebrations. Through he examines how her work questions what is represented and examination of its formal qualities, analysis of public comment, how it is represented, and how it is bound up with the ideology and drawing on texts from other Irish authors and poets, Smyth of representation and also the very (long) history of interrogates the historical, social and cultural space which monuments themselves. He illustrates that in her sculpture, women are perceived to occupy within the island of Ireland. whilst one is seeing what is obvious, one sees nothing at all, and this opens up a reading in ideological, philosophical and Smyth’s observations can be applied to one of the Galway psychoanalytical terms, which can be examined from a sculptures which was erected nearly 1 5 years after the placing of feminist perspective. Judith Hill also examines the role of the Anna Livia Sculpture, indicating perhaps that perceptions of public sculpture in her book Irish Public Sculpture, because as the status of women in society has remain unchanged even she point out, the conditions under which public sculpture through the prosperous years of the celtic tiger. materializes are the same today as they were through history (1 4). It is still commissioned, funded and placed by a small powerful group “the politics of the public space” (1 5), for the public’s consideration and opinion (the specific and projected meaning of the piece). She resists formulating theories around public sculpture, instead concentrating on the facts of specific works themselves – who commissioned them, what form they took, and how they were received by the public. This provides an insight into the perceived intentions of the artist, the commissioning body and ultimately the reactions
1 RACHAEL WHITEREAD A SENSE OF FORMLESSNESS Between June and November 2001 , Trafalgar Square in London was home to Rachael Whiteread’s public sculpture Monument (Photo 1 ). It was positioned on the empty (fourth) plinth, left by William IV (1 765-1 837) as a tribute to his reign, but which was never delivered following his death due to insufficient funds (1 7). Trafalgar Square was initially planned by John Nash in the 1 820’s and 30’s as a foreground to the new National Gallery. It is a site of national monuments, where successive lines of monarchy and military are remembered, celebrated and eulogised. It is also favoured as a site of public protest and popular celebration, providing a focal point and the space for temporary gatherings. It was into this space, framed by sculpture of imperial achievement, architecture of an historically cohesive state and a place of public assemblage of a sometimes spontaneous, sometimes organised nature, that the work Monument was inserted. The sculpture cast from clear resin, replicated exactly the external dimensions and decoration of the empty granite plinth onto which it stands. It mirrored like a calm body of water the solid plinth below, everything seemed as though it was in reverse, the object been below its reflection, as if one was standing on ones head. And like a calm body of water, the visual stability of the image was never constant. On a sunny day, the sunlight passed through the translucent resin and it appeared to dissolve into the fumes of the traffic around the square. Photo 1, Monument, Rachael Whiteread - [Images removed for copyright reasons]
On other days, and with varying degrees and angles of light, the piece appeared to shimmer. It was quite unlike any of the sculptures Whiteread had made before (1 8). Most of her sculptural works in the past had relied on the casting of the interior spaces of the object, necessitating the removal or destruction of the original object from which the piece was cast. Whiteread says of Monument that she was trying to create something that would provide a pause in the city, and place something very quiet in Trafalgar Square (1 9). Chris Townsend on the other hand, sees Monument as a profoundly political gesture (20). He draws on Foucault’s account of the displacement of the economy of power, as moving away from monumental expression. This is due to the state no longer needing to enforce its power, because it becomes invisible and all permeating as the disciplining of the subjects is largely carried out by the subjects themselves within a democratic society. He argues that Whiteread’s sculpture is a critique of this disappearance of institutional power into something that portrays itself as a neutral ideology free system, but what in reality is a “sophisticated form of organising subjectivity” (21 ). The transparent Monument, sat on a tangible solid historical plinth, that cannot itself bear any visible concrete manifestation of power, but which now has become a space for a work of art. The piece could be said to be a critique of itself (monument to the plinth), of space and of art itself as a sign of a certain type of power. Indeed it could also be seen as a metaphor for transparency within power institutions, an ideology rather than a reality. Townsend also relates Monument to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias which is
“Ithose singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others” (22).
It is interesting that Foucault classes these places as everywhere and nowhere, and includes cemeteries (monuments to the dead), brothels, and also menstruating and pregnant woman in primitive cultures in his concept of states of heterotopia. He goes on to describe these places as “Idisturbing, probably because they secretly undermine languageI.shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax in advanceI.desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (23)
This concept seems very close to what Kristeva defines as the semiotic, (Freud’s pre-oedipal and Lacan’s Imaginary), - the unspeakable and unrepresentable maternal/feminine state of the mother/infant child before language and sign. It is the rhythmic, tonal, bodily series of forces that proliferate the feelings of pleasure or movements felt within the child’s body. This state is capable of representation by indirect, displacement or oblique forms of expression or evocation (24). By the disruption of the symbolic order, the avant garde artists that Kristeva studies may create ruptures which can enable what is unspeakable to be articulated. However, as Grotsz points out, Kristeva assumes that all artists are male, and states that woman in so far as she is a mother, is unable to speak her femininity or maternity. It is interesting to note that at the time Monument was made Whiteread was on the cusp of motherhood herself, having been through a prolonged period
of fertility treatment (25). Clearly maternal matters did not hinder Whitereads ability to create the work. Irigaray also talks about an alternative to the singular hierarchical patriarchal language. She calls for a feminine language that would “undo the unique meaning, the proper meaning of words; of nouns” (26). She does not speculate on what this language could be, but rather states what it cannot be; singular derivations, polar opposites and hierarchical organisations of privileged distanced masculinity. In my opinion Monument seemed to speak without a language, or before language. Its image was felt inside the body of the viewer as a rhythm in tune with the variations of light and weather. In effect its modus operandi was in the semiotic. Joan Key points out that Kristeva recounts in her book Powers of Horror, how images of women without distance become the very embodiment of horror and disgust (27). She tells the story of puerperal fever, which was found to be transmitted to women during childbirth from the hands of doctors who had touchedcorpses without washing their hands beforehand. The remedy as Kristeva suggests, is to use hygienic measures, washing and purification, in effect distancing devices. This means that the body is absent literally from the work, but is always implied. Allied to this concept is the Kleinian model of the sex to death drive where the body is also displaced, to which Malvern ties Whiteread’s work (28). Klein says that the desire to rob the mothers body of its insides is particular to girls, and the feelings of associated remorse and reparation are one of the most important factors in the development of the creative impulse and the need for cultural achievement in women. In a sense, Monument can be seen as mourning the object it fears it has lost and destroyed by both its simultaneous presence
and absence. As Malvern writes
This was done by the inclusion and the embedment of statistics, text and symbolic objects of the work women do in the surface of “As in infantile fantasy, Whiteread’s work elides the the figures. For example, the older woman has the objects of inside and the outside, the body and its supports. It unpaid work in the home, baby pacifiers as earrings, a baby’s decentres the bodyI” (29) bottle over her breast, a rolling pin on her arm, a colander on her This she argues allows us to envisage a feminist practice that belly, and clothes pegs for fingers, and the younger woman has is not caught up in regurgitated patriarchal theories. It allows the ten lowest paid jobs; telephone dial on her chest, a the body to be displaced and distanced. Whiteread’s sculpture telephone receiver on her arm, and a typewriter at her belly. collapses the language of the sign, it is complete and Photo 2, Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, incomplete at the same time, it reflects an object that voids Louise Walsh - [Images removed for copyright reasons] itself, and in doing so offers an alternative to traditional discourse.
2 LOUISE WALSH FIGURE, FORM AND FRIGHT In 1 989, Louise Walsh was asked by the Department of the Environment, Belfast, to take part in a competition for a public art commission which was to be sited in the middle of the city. The artists nominated were asked to figuratively reflect on the social history of the area, which was narrowly outlined in the brief only in terms of it been a red light district for female prostitution. In fact Walsh recalls that the brief even contained advice on the type of sculpture which would be most appropriate, namely caricature and included a cartoon of two women laughing at a dog peeing up against a tree (30). Walsh refused to represent women’s experience only in these terms. The solution as she saw it, was to propose two female figures (one older than the other), cast in bronze 2m high and reference the low paid work of women in the labour force and the unpaid work that women do in the home (see Photo 2,3).
Photo 3, Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, (Detail), Louise Walsh - [Images removed for copyright reasons]
This was an attempt by the artist to highlight the fact that the lowest paid jobs in Northern Ireland are for the most part carried out by women (93-95%) (31 ), and drew out the fact that our society depends to an enormous degree on the fact that women receive no wages for the work and childcare that is carried out in the home. The sculptural proposal was accepted but then became the subject of a long and protracted debate in Belfast City Council. Councillors objected to what they saw as a glorification of prostitution, which the artist herself feels was a response based on an incorrect assumption by the councillors and the media that the statue, because it was Northern Ireland, had to commemorate something (32). The Parks Department and City Council refused to maintain it, so the Department of the Environment cancelled the commission despite the fact that Walsh had already started work on the figures. In 1 992 the sculpture was re-commissioned by a private developer and now
stands at the entrance to the train station on Great Victoria They do not stand on any plinth, and to read the texts one must Street, Belfast. get close to them, and get intimately acquainted with them. Although the embedment of the utilitarian objects within the It is claimed by Robinson that the sculpture was received by piece may seem to be a clumsy and even cartoon-like way of men in the Belfast art world with ambivalence, as it does not treating the figures, I think it works because the figures are aspire to the conceptual or formal readings that are common larger than life size and they are depicted as strong bodies and within the modernist/postmodernist debate. (33) In addition not idealised and stylised female forms. Robinson relates she says that it does not contain the usual political content for anecdotal stories of the women of Belfast holding the statues in a work of art sited in the middle of Belfast, reflecting the city’s high esteem, irrespective of their class, race, politics or creed. It long sectarian conflicts. Robinson’s essay offers that in is from this evidence of the women’s positive reaction to the Northern Ireland, the only issue that the two sides of the sculpture that Robinson links the power of the work back to sectarian divide seem to agree on is the need to control Irigaray’s own account of seeing a sculpture of St Anne and St women’s bodies, and keep feminist debate as a containable Mary in a church while in Venice, where she felt calmly and side issue (34). Although Robinson may believe this statement joyously returned into her own body and her own history as a to be true, it appears to me to be a very simplistic view and not woman. It was from this experience that Irigaray went on to urge a genuinely helpful addition or even observation to the wider the importance of the display of positive images of mother and feminist debate. Moreover, it masks the central issue and daughters in domestic and public places. This strategy could be concern. As Adrian Little observes, seen as an essentialist alternative which now excludes men in the same way that women were excluded in the past, but it “Rather than the critique of essentialism generating a cannot be dismissed entirely for this reason. It can be argued sophisticated politics of difference, the 'two traditions' that Irigaray’s theories attempt to traverse the Lacanian mirror, model of analyzing Northern Irish politics closes which for Lacan confirms woman as man’s specular double or political space and limits our understanding of alter ego (36). Irigaray sees the mirror as only capable of male diversity. Moreover it shrouds our understanding of reflection, and instead posits a speculum that surrounds and is difference within the two traditions and prescribes surrounded by the contours, curves and specifity of the female communal identities in a way that neglects schisms of body. It is not a self distancing device, but one of self knowing gender, class, age” (35) and self awareness, a reflection of the Other woman, not woman The sculpture of the two women, mother and daughter stand as man’s other. together in a comfortable pose, the mother slightly proud, strong with her head held upright and her arm reassuringly placed on the daughters back, and the daughter, smaller, body turned towards the mother, with the weight of her body placed on the leg closest to the mother.
3 MIKE WILKINS FINAL JOURNEY - THE MAGDALEN SCULPTURE
She is dressed in institutional garments. Her eyes are closed. The sheet which represents the endless hours spent in forced labour in the laundry, is positioned behind her back, so that from the rear one is not able to ascertain what the piece is about, as it looks like a wall of stone. Her back, was, significantly (before she was repositioned) facing the original position of the laundry building. It is as if she has emerged from a shroud. Yet she is not a victim. Her arms are held aloft and the underside of her arms are exposed as in an act of defiance (38). Her hands hold the sheet forcibly, it is not a passively gentle grasp. Her breasts and rounded belly are visible beneath the garment which tries so hard to hide her feminine body. Her feet stand firmly and solidly on the plinth and her head is held upright and proud. The surface of the limestone is sanded smooth and inviting to the touch.
On the 8th March, 2009, Patricia Burke Brogan delivered a speech at the unveiling of Final Journey, a sculpture commemorating the memory of the Magdalene women in Galway. The statue stands within the old boundary of the now demolished Magdalene laundry. The Laundry was a Roman Catholic institution where women were sent by their families or society in the 1 960’s and 70’s for various moral transgressions, from pregnancy to loose behaviour, or even if they were deemed to be in moral danger. The women served essentially, as slave labour in the laundries and in other services, and could be incarcerated for years on end. They were subjected to psychological, physical and even sexual abuse. If the women were pregnant, their babies could be removed from them sometime after birth and put up for Underneath the statue is an extract of Burke Brogans poem adoption. The Laundry was final closed and demolished in Make Visible, 1 991 , with a few women still living there as inmates, having been so institutionalised that they were unable to live outside Make visible the Tree its walls. Its branches ragged With washed out lines Galway City Council was approached by three women from Of a bleached shroud Galway city - Margaret Geraghty, Bridie Hogan and a former novitiate in the Laundry Patricia Burke Brogan with the idea of a creating a memorial for Galway’s Magdalen women. The She is not silent anymore, she visibly announces her sculpture went on to be commissioned by Galway City consciousness by her stance. She is not the dutiful daughter Council, and funded by Anglo Irish Bank, as part of “Dealbh” a paying homage to the law of the father (39). As Irigarayan partnership between Galway City Arts and Public Arts Offices, daughters we can identify with her not just as a mother but as a Galway Chamber and the Amicable Society of Dealbh, which woman and recognise our similar subjective identity (40). We is an initiative to fund public sculpture (37). The sculpture can see an image before us of a sexed feminine body who is depicts a standing woman with legs slightly apart, holding a also a site of enunciation. She is a monument to rather than a bed sheet aloft behind her back (see Photo 4). metaphor of femininity.
Photo 4, Final Journey, Mike Wilkins - [Images removed for copyright reasons]
Yet within a year of the sculptures installation it had sparked outrage and controversy, not in this case because of its presence but because there were now plans to remove it (41 ). Galway City Council announced that the piece had to be moved from its current location due to road widening for a new bus lane. Concerned members of the public argued that such an act would
4 JOHN BEHAN EQUALITY EMERGING ? The bronze sculpture Equality Emerging by John Behan, was commissioned by the SIPTU/NUI Galway Alliance to celebrate what has been achieved to date in the struggle for equality, and to applaud all who are involved in the struggle for equality in all areas of society. The commission was unveiled and presented to the people of Galway in 2007.
The piece consists of a female figure emerging from a vertical flat surface (Photo 5, 6). Her head, torso and arms are free from “bleach clean society’s complicity in the abuses meted the slab, together with her left leg, but her buttocks, right leg and out to women and young girls in these institutions” left foot are still entombed in the vertical surface. Her head and (42) torso lunges forward away from the slab, her eyes are open and In view of the media attention, the city council moved to allay her mouth is closed. Her hands are positioned as if she is fears that the sculpture would be removed altogether, and running out of the slab. There is an inscription at the base of the reassured the public that they were highly conscious of the sculpture which reads: significance of the statue and the appropriate nature of its “Above a hole in the ground location in close proximity to the site of the former laundry. The No matter what stands statue has now been repositioned only a few feet away from Measures nothing of life where it originally stood, but the orientation has been altered. Unless it touches our hearts Instead of her back turned to the Magdalene Laundry, she now And inspires out humanity to act” has her back turned to the public road and faces into the footpath and the new buildings that now stand adjacent to the former site of the laundry building. There is limited space on Photo 5, Equality Emerging, John Behan - [Images the footpath to view the sculpture and from the public road it is removed for Copyright reasons] not possible to discern what the sculpture is. The re-orientation could be viewed as an inadvertent but clumsy cloaking measure, - she appears hidden from the public road, from the Fairgreen and its modern Buildings of transparent glass and new money. Old habits die hard.
Photo 6, Equality Emerging,(Detail), John Behan - [Images removed for copyright reasons]
Equality, now takes the form of woman, emerging from a vertical wall of western white male hegemony. Equality of race, religion, culture, gender and socio-economic status now falls onto the responsibility of woman, as if she hadn’t enough to do already. She is (mis)appropriated by patriarchy as a sign and symbol, and in doing so denied the right to self-definition and self identity. Ailbhe Smyth observes that woman functions as a symbol of civic power, because under the laws of patriarchy, she never stands for who she is herself, she is an empty signifier, capable of been construed to mean whatever we want. “Essentially vacuous, receptacle without individual identity, mute receptacle, silent cipher, the symbolic female figure is capable of conferring meaning. Massive, monumental, grandiose, but powerless to ascribe any meanings other than those prescribed by cultureI..Always seen, never seer.” (43)
The surface representing the patriarchal systems of inequality is smooth bronze, inviting to the touch, asking the spectator to caress its surface. However the symbol of equality, the woman, her skin is moulded and cast into a beaten and hammered surface, rough to the touch, asking don’t touch, and don’t engage. The stylised female, whose face appears to be that of a mature woman, wears a figure hugging dress, which successfully displays her very (young) pert breasts, but disguises all other aspects of her femininity i.e. her genitalia. Not only is she a sign of something which she is not, the sign is controlled to alter the material reality of woman, she is formed for consumption by the male gaze, and still be accepted as public sculpture.
The valorisation of this type of image, the fantasy of an image created as a silent counterpart, is made possible by man’s disavowal of his position as a listener. Woman as image and man as spectator is negotiated unproblematically by the male. He has disavowed the specular image of the castrated mother, and in doing so opened up a gap between the sign and the signifier. Women however cannot disavow the mother, as they also identify with her as the same. As Luce Irigaray points out “Woman is not at all in the same type of subjective identity as man. In fact she does not have to distance herself from her motherIto discover her sex. She is faced with another problem entirely. She must become a woman like her mother and at the same time, be able to differentiate herself from her. But her mother is the same as she. She cannot reduce or manipulate her as an object in the way a little boy or a man does.” (44)
The space between the sign and signifier cannot be easily traversed by women unless they erase and suppress their own individuality as woman. Buying into this image and its symbolic value system means denial of woman’s own significance and meaning in culture, their historical, cultural, national, and ultimately for us, Irish identity.
CONCLUSION DISPLAY AND DIALOGUE Contemporary public art according to Judith Hill is concerned with a “vision of a better world” (45) and with politics no longer binding the public to the traditional monument, contemporary artists are free to explore intellectual, emotional or ideological contexts for their work. Hill says that the installation of such artworks, be they performance, video, sound, multimedia or sculpture should have a wide audience and that the artworks, been inheritantly inspirational, will inevitably benefit the place into which they are set. This statement presupposes that all public art is beneficial irrespective of form or content. Indeed she offers that when public art doesn’t work it is often because it is placed in the wrong location rather than ill-conceived or badly designed. It is perhaps unfortunate that Hill doesn’t critically analyse these artworks in her book, as this might offer a more theoretical explanation as to why some public art fails in its purpose as she defines it. Hill says that “sculpture cannot effect behaviour” (46). Sculpture or public art does not change the way in which we think or act, but what it can do is offer us a mirror which reflects societies values and ideologies and provide a snapshot of dominant beliefs. In this respect it can either empower or demoralize. This is very evident from the public reaction to the Anna Livia Plurabelle fountain in O’Connell St., Dublin. The humorous nicknames attached to the piece including “The Floozy in the Jacuzzi”, “ The Whore in the Sewer”, and “Bidet Mulligan” are explained by Hill as metaphors that draw attention to the informal character of the sculpture (rather than the more formal monuments in O’Connell St.) and the appropriateness of the supposedly suggested bathroom scene offered by the piece (47). But this explanation seems only to superficially describe the reason
behind such specific and derogatory reaction towards the sculpture. This reaction must be fundamentally bound up with the position that woman holds in Irish culture. According to Ailbhe Smyth, in the post colonial patriarchal culture of Ireland, naming strategies of this kind are employed to assert power, of those long denied ability to confer meaning (48). Woman, who is powerless in patriarchal culture, is thus maintained as the Other, and as the colonised of the ex-colonised. Hill also claims that one of the greatest problems facing contemporary public art is the realisation of an imagined community (49). Cities and towns have expanded so far out that they are now fragmented, so that public art which can no longer claim the significance of the monument, is placed in the centres of towns where she states hat the imagined community may or may not exist. This means that the work can neither signify what is not there (a community) nor be accessible to those people who are (city dwellers). She posits that those public art projects that also perform a utilitarian function work best. Her views seem to be weighted against artistic practice and more in line with city architects and planners. Is it really the role of public sculpture to be purely functional? Is it not the case that inspirational public sculpture such as Whiteread's Monument, which can empower human consciousness acts precisely in the way that it does partly due to the fact that it is not functional and therefore requires considered reading. Hill also urges that public sculpture should comprise of common interests spoken in an understandable artistic language. If an artwork uses an understandable language as Hill suggests, it must on some level leave itself open to an unconscious/subconscious interpretation, that although the public may not be aware of, or acknowledge, is based on patriarchal ideologies. This is particularly evident with contemporary art that incorporates the female form.
For example in the case of the two Galway sculptures, both present the female form in front of a flat surface. It is significant that they are presented in this way, it seems to reinforce the idea that they are statues. It is a familiar iconic display of woman reminiscent of those statues displayed in every catholic religious institution across the country. We live in a culture that has deeply internalised the codes of representation through which we read and interpret visual images of the female body. Contemporary artistic practice has been greatly influenced by post structuralist theories. All forms of poststructuralism, including the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan and the discourse and power theories of Foucault, all assume that subjectivity is formed through a range of political, social and economic practices, and that meaning is neither determined nor assured by the author or artist or creator. Language is seen as something within which subjectivity is constructed, and it becomes a tool in the analyses of social meaning and organisation. As Whitney Chadwick comments these theories have worked to “deny authenticity of individual experience by decentering both the rational autonomous subjectI and the essential female natureI� (50)
Therefore when Hill talks about an artistic language, it is quite possibly a language that is based on the traditional phallocentric system. Feminism must be aware of the theoretical models which structure and define our positioning in western culture, and find new ways of using language (or a new language) to contest and confront the dominant assumptions. Public art, if it is to be inherently inspirational, cannot inadvertently reinforce patriarchal ideologies upon which our society is based.
As outlined in previous chapters, Kristeva’s semiotic proposal of denial of the body in order that we may speak has been used as a distancing device by many artists, but it has also been critiscised as a practice based on exclusion, thus reinforcing patriarchal structures. On the other hand, Irigarays location of the feminine within the unconscious and the introduction of the body into art as a way of disrupting the phallocentric control of language has been a positive intervention for feminists artists using the female form, but has also been criticised by others as a form of essentialism and also as playing up to the very utopian images which form part of the male imaginary. It has been argued that her use of Greek myth in the description of the mother /daughter dyad forms part of the idealisation of these relations according to the male point of view (51 ). It is therefore quite evident, that for every theory or argument that one can put forward, there is always an inverse or counter argument which can be formulated against it. This however does not mean that discourse is futile, or that one theory is right and another incorrect. There is a need to be aware of the opposing viewpoints even within feminist theory itself in order that we may set ourselves free to choose, or indeed decide that there is in fact no possible choice. Any discourse which questions or indeed supplies a slightly different angle on the established dominant beliefs has merit. The point is that everything should be questioned, reasoned and thought about. In the sculpture of Whiteread and Walsh, there are two very different approaches to public art, which can offer positive disruptive techniques in feminist discourse. Through a critical analysis of local sculpture, we have also seen how images of woman can be treated either in a positive manner or, misappropriated for use as something quite different. There is no doubt in my mind that the intentions behind the commissioning of the Equality Emerging statue in Galway were wholly honourable but the outcome completely inappropriate.
One is reminded of Foucault’s economy of power theory, where the bodies commissioning the piece are at once both under the influence and in charge of exercising power relations. In order that society recognises and acknowledges the problematics of the representation of woman, particularly within Irish culture, an awareness of feminist discourse needs to appear on a national level. Public sculpture will always generate public debate as each individual person differs in his or her politics, ideologies, beliefs and sense of aesthetics. We do not always judge art solely on it aesthetic merits as it is human nature to project meaning onto works of art based on our own subjectivities and experiences. It is therefore relevant that public sculpture has a role to play in a feminist discourse which is influenced by every facet of human existence. Dialogue is always fundamental to resolution.
FOOTNOTES
1 - Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, ‘Feminism and Twentieth Century Art’, The Power of Feminist Art : The American movement of the 1 970s, history and impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (ede) ; contributors, Judith K. Brodsky ... [et al.], New York, H.N. Abrams, London, Thames and Hudson, 1 994, p.21 . 2 - Whitney Chadwick, ‘Negotiating the Female Divide’, Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1 9682000, Hilary Robinson (ed), Singapore, Blackwell Publishing, 2001 , p.523 3 - Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London and New York, Verso, 2005 (1 986), p.57 4 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London and New York, Routledge, 1 990, p.39 5 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 47 6 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p. 1 67 7 - Joan Key, ‘Models of painting practice, Too much body?’, New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies, Katy Deepwell (ed), Manchester University Press, 1 995, p. 1 39 8 - Sue Malvern, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower’, Art History, 26, 2003, pp.392–405. 9 - Sue Malvern, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower’, p.394 1 0 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 72 11 - Hilary Robinson,’ Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan Reading of Irish Visual Culture’, Irish Studies Review, 8(1 ), 2000, pp. 57 – 72
1 2 - Hilary Robinson,’Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan Reading of Irish Visual Culture’, p. 62 1 3 - Chris Townsend, ‘Lessons from Whats Poor: Monument and the Space of Power’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, London, Thames and Hudson:2004, pp. 1 73-96 1 4 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1 998, p.11 1 5 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, p.11 1 6 - Ailbhe Smyth, ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi: The Problematics of Culture and Identity for Irish Women’ (1 989) , Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1 968-2000, Hilary Robinson (ed), Singapore, Blackwell Publishing, 2001 p. 41 2-428. 1 7 - Chris Townsend, ‘Lessons from Whats Poor: Monument and the Space of Power’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p. 1 73 1 8 - Chris Townsend, ‘Lessons from Whats Poor: Monument and the Space of Power’, p.1 83 1 9 - Ina Cole, ‘Mapping Traces:A Conversation with Rachael Whiteread’, International Sculpture Center, http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/april04/WebSpecials/whiteread.shtml, [accessed 1 5 November 201 0] 20 - Chris Townsend, ‘When We Collide’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004, p.23 21 - Chris Townsend, ‘When We Collide’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, p.29 22 - Chris Townsend, ‘When We Collide’, p.29, Townsend quotes from Foulcault 23 - Michel Foulcault, The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences, trans Tavistock/Routledge, London and New York, Routledge, 2004 (1 970), p xviii 24 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 63 25 - Lynn Barber, The Observer, Sunday 1 6 October 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/1 6/art1 , [accessed 1 9 November 201 0]. This has been deduced from the dates that Monument was installed and the ages of Whiteread’s children in 2005. 26 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 78 27 - Joan Key, ‘Models of painting practice, Too much body?’, New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies, Katy Deepwell (ed), Manchester University Press, 1 995, p. 1 55 28 - Sue Malvern, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower’, p.394 29 - Sue Malvern, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower’, p.394 30 - Louise Walsh, ‘Reflecting on an Evolving Practice’, Irish Feminist Review, Women's Studies Centre, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2007, http://louisewalsh.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/LW_for_Web.3051 0434.pdf , [accessed 20th November 201 0] 31 - Katy Deepwell, Dialogues, I.B. Taurus, London and New York, 2005, p.1 85 32 - Katy Deepwell, Dialogues, I.B. Taurus, London and New York, 2005, p.1 85. Walsh also notes here that the councillors failed to see the sculpture as an exploration of the forces that may drive women into prostitution namely poverty. But I think this is a rather simplistic explanation that does not cover the many socio-economic factors that result in women turning to prostitution. 33 - Hilary Robinson, ‘Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan reading of Irish visual culture’, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 , 2000 p.66.
34 - Hilary Robinson, ‘Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan reading of Irish visual culture’, Irish Studies Review, p.67. 35 - Adrian Little, ‘Feminism and the Politics of Difference in Northern Ireland’, The Journal of Political Ideologies 7(2):,2002, pp. 1 63-1 77, http://www.informaworld.com, [accessed 20 December 201 0] 36 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 73 37 - Galway City Council Arts Strategy, Confidence in the Arts, 201 0-201 3, http://www.galwaycity.ie/TopNews/1 8021 0_05.pdf, [accessed 1 6 November 201 0] 38 - One is reminded here of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1 907), MOMA, New York 39 - Elizabeth Grotsz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p.1 50; Grotsz outlines her idea of the dutiful daughter 40 - Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference for a Peaceful Revolution, Karin Moutin (trans), New York, Routledge, 1 994 (1 989), p.64 41 - James M. Smith, Galway Advertiser, August 5 201 0, p.1 6, and John Fallon, ‘Anger as Council plans to remove Magdelene Laundry sculpture’, Irish Independent, July 28, 201 0, http://www.independent.ie, [accessed 1 6 November 201 0] 42 - James M. Smith, Galway Advertiser, August 5, 201 0, p.1 6 43 - Ailbhe Smyth, ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi: The Problematics of Culture and Identity for Irish Women’ (1 989), Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1 968-2000, Hilary Robinson (ed), Singapore, Blackwell Publishing, 201 , p.41 5. 44 - Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference for a Peaceful Revolution, p.1 8 45 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, p 245. 46 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, p 232. 47 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, p.238 48 - Ailbhe Smyth, ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi: The Problematics of Culture and Identity for Irish Women’ (1 989), p. 41 5 49 - Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture, p.246 50 - Whitney Chadwick, ‘Negotiating the Feminist Divide’, Feminism Art Theory An Anthology 1 9682000, Hilary Robinson (ed), 2001 , p.525 51 - Amber Jacobs,’ The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship’, Hypathia, Volume 22, Issue 3, August 2007, p.1 79
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Photo 1 Monument, Rachael Whiteread, Resin, 2001 , London, England Photo 2 Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, Louise Walsh, Bronze, 1 992, Belfast, Ireland Photo 3 Monument to the Unknown woman Worker (Detail), Louise Walsh, Bronze, 1 992, Belfast, Ireland Photo 4 Final Journey, Mike Wilkins, Limestone, 2009, Galway, Ireland Photo 5 Equality Emerging, John Behan, Bronze, 2007, Galway, Ireland Photo 6 Equality Emerging (Detail), John Behan, Bronze, 2007, Galway,Ireland
BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 . Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary D., ‘Feminism and Twentieth Century Art’, The Power of Feminist Art : the American movement of the 1 970s, history and impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds) ; contributors, Judith K. Brodsky ... [et al.], New York : H.N. Abrams, London, Thames and Hudson, 1 994, 2. Chadwick, Whitney, ‘Negotiating the Female Divide’, Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1 968-2000,, ed Hilary Robinson, Singapore, Blackwell Publishing, 2001 3. Deepwell, Katy, Dialogues, I.B. Taurus, London and New York, 2005 4. Foulcault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock/Routledge (trans), London and New York, Routledge, 2004 (1 970) 5. Grotsz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London and New York, Routledge, 1 990 6. Hill, Judith, Irish Public Sculpture, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1 998 7. Irigaray, Luce, Thinking the Difference for a Peaceful Revolution, Karin Moutin (trans) , New York, Routledge, 1 994 (1 989) 8. Jacobs, Amber, ‘The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship’, Hypathia, Volume 22, Issue 3, August 2007 9. Key, Joan,, ‘Models of painting practice, Too much body?’, New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies, ed by Katy Deepwell, Manchester University Press, 1 995 1 0. Malvern, Sue, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower’, Art History, 26, 2003, pp.392–405. 11 . Robinson, Hilary, ‘Disruptive Women Artists: An Irigarayan Reading of Irish Visual Culture’, Irish Studies Review, 8(1 ), 2000, pp. 57 – 72 1 2. Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London and New York, Verso, 2005 (1 986) 1 3. Townsend, Chris, ‘Lessons from Whats Poor: Monument and the Space of Power’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp.1 73-96 1 4. Townsend, Chris, ‘When We Collide’, The Art of Rachael Whiteread, London, Thames and Hudson, 2004 1 5. Smyth, Ailbhe, ‘The Floozie in the Jacuzzi: The Problematics of Culture and Identity for Irish Women’(1 989) , Feminism-Art-Theory, An Anthology 1 968-2000, ed Hilary Robinson, Singapore, Blackwell Publishing, 2001 pp. 41 2-428. 1 6. Walsh, Louise, ‘Reflecting on an Evolving Practice’, Irish Feminist Review, Women's Studies Centre, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2007 Barber, Lynn, The Observer, Sunday 1 6 October 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/1 6/art1 , [accessed 1 5 November 201 0] Cole, Ina, “Mapping Traces:A Conversation with Rachael Whiteread”, International Sculpture Center, http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/april04/WebSpecials/whiteread.shtml, [accessed 1 5 November 201 0] Little, Adrian, “Feminism and the Politics of Difference in Northern Ireland”, The Journal of Political Ideologies 7(2):,2002, pp. 1 63-1 77 http://www.informaworld.com, [accessed 20 December 201 0] Galway City Council Arts Strategy, Confidence in the Arts, 201 0-201 3, http://www.galwaycity.ie/TopNews/1 8021 0_05.pdf, [accessed 1 6 November 201 0] Fallon, John, ‘Anger as Council plans to remove Magdelene Laundry sculpture’, Irish Independent, July 28, 201 0, http://www.independent.ie/national-news/anger-ascouncil-plans-to-remove-magdalene-laundrysculpture-2274640.html, [accessed 1 6 November 201 0] Smith, James M., Galway Advertiser, August 5, 201 0
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM Online TOP 5 - Recipients Rated by You August 201 2
September 201 2
Karl Bielik Paul Sucksmith Niki Hare Alexandre Hypolito Kristina
Mark Houghton Ellen M McDermott Erin de Burca Juan Carlos Zaldivar Lucas Ross
October 201 2
November 201 2
Tamsin Bending Manfred Kielnhofer Almudena Lopez Fiona Stanbury's Jon Lanbroa
Sonny Williams Xenia Melnik James Mcloughlin Seamie Gallagher Lesley Oldaker
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM Open Submission Award
S A R A W U T C H U T I W O N G P E T I
Sarawut Chutiwongpeti has contributed to the development of the media arts through his artistic and research practices at noted international institutions including Canada, the United States of America, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Egypt, China, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nepal, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. My goal is to investigate the expressive possibilities of conceptual visual language and to develop Collaborative New Art as part of both Contemporary Art/Contemporary Global Structure and the Technological Civilization in which we live today. I am especially interested in finding out how contemporary art can enhance the distribution of information and foster a profound universality in the human nature and cross-cultural artistic and critical collaboration. The meaning of the very possibility to enrich contemporary art may also come into question. In my inquiry, I am guided by the following set of questions: Are sensations-reactions to contemporary art still significant today? In what way and how can contemporary art theory and practice address and help solve today’s global problems? And finally, Can contemporary conceptual art disclose the corrupted social values in mega polices and create a bridge between the present and the future generations?.
The Installation series of “Untitled 1 996” Mixed Media, Found Object, Lighting, Sound and Video Installation
The Installation series of “Utopia 1 997” Mixed Media, Found Object, Lighting, Sound and Video Installation
The Installation series of “Untitled 2003” (Palace of Light) Mixed Media, Found Object, Lighting, Sound and Video Installation
The installation series of " Untitled 2004 " (At the Dawn of the 21 st Century : A View Thought "The Red Window" The Critical Time of the World Civilization) Snow and Ice Sculpture, Aluminum Tubes, Lighting and Sound Installation
The Installation series of “Untitled 2007” (Primitive Cool) Mixed Media, Sculpture. Found Object, Lighting and Video Installation
The Installation series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >> Paradiso...), 2009 Mixed Media, Sculpture. Found Object and Lighting Installation
The Installation series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >>, 2008 Mixed Media, Sculpture. Found Object and Lighting Installation
The Installation series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >> I Want To Believes..!), 2009 Mixed Media, Sculpture. Found Object, Lighting and Video Installation
The Installation series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >> Tomorrow is Another Day...), 2007 Mixed Media, Sculpture. Found Object, Sculpture and Video Installation
Series of Untitled (Wishes, Lies and Dreams >> Tomorrow is Another Day...), 2011 Bronze
Richard Carr [201 2]
A RELIABLE MEETING PLACE... notes of a soundmaker I am not attempting to say, I’m saying and ask that you meet me half way. I do not have a problem with you interpreting something differently or different with the sound work, it only becomes a problem if you have a problem with your interpreting not being mine, or not including your own interpreting in your valuing of the ‘sound work’ you are listening to. This does not make less of the ‘sound work’ or mine or your intentions. The sound work has a problem being outside of ‘us’, for ‘us’. The sound is yours and mine in different timespaces, histories, memories, dreams and futures even when ‘we’ are situated within the one visually defined room, so it is ok with me, for me to say that your interpreting of the sound work is not what the sound work is [with me] and vice versa. We are equals, I retain my ‘authorship’ and you retain yours.
They try and bring it back but only momentarily succeeding, their experience in moving and changing this thing has in turn changed them simultaneously, both changing, generating and inventing each other in the one shifting timespace. Unfortunately for many this effort is too much, too exhausting and choose to not participate in constructing this formless form, and instead put their effort into building scaffolding to prop back up the fence, a reliable meeting place.
Traditionally it could be said that western philosophy, art, knowledge and logic may see the unfenced field as contradictory, paradoxical, oppositional or even antagonistic. This I believe is because the history of western philosophy and thought encourages from my experiences of it a dialectical approach of keeping things apart, at a distance and defining things ‘against’ each other or from where they might ‘meet’ rather than ‘through or as’ one another. This I feel is an extremely deductive methodology to ‘meaning/status/value making’ based on a visual aesthetic or visual engagement, that has to be said works quite well within a visual world, quite scientific in nature. You may say but isn’t it just the way we work and think? I say, well it is one way, but sound work utilizes sound as medium/material and approaching an encounter with it this way I feel denies the sound work the time to participate in I do not find problems in what might be said of this perspective as saying with you, or more importantly resists you meeting half way. being on both sides of the fence and sound definitely doesn’t. Sound This is not a call for anti-materialism or anti-realism, quite the contrary, removes the fence and asks for effort in your present perception to the Sonic unlike the Visual cannot exist purely in the digital world, participate in finding it with me, meeting at our temporal half way sound due to its 'primitiveness' can only exist as sound in the ‘real’ marks as possible “us’”, provisionally, conditionally and fully present. world in ‘real’ space as ‘real’ stuff. Although not a visual material it This position sometimes can be unsettling at first amidst the unfenced occupies real space and has the abilities to be as physical, obtrusive field open for all to enter and just as unsettling for some at the and brutally present as any visual material / object, or unobtrusive as realisation that your own position on this field is ‘only’ guaranteed the image of a painting, and even more so in its shodowless world, not subjectively. This for some is too much and first quickly attempt to of clarity or purity but of the gritty, mucky substances of being. search for visual cues to position themselves in relation too, and although what they see may be a blurry thing in the distance the comfort in this is enough to remain put within their current line of sight. Some become a little more adventurous and try to focus on the distant blurry thing by cautiously moving closer, only to realise the distant blurry thing has suddenly moved and transformed.
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM From The Network - Top Art Spaces Platform Ireland
The Best of Irish Broadcasting Live Worldwide. Platform Ireland is Ireland's exclusive online Arts and Culture Channel. Its aim is to engage, entertain, inform and educate existing and new audiences worldwide. Platformireland.ie has been established to bridge a gap in current national cultural services, and to function as a unique digital doorway or a ‘virtual venue’ to showcase and market the best of Irelands professional arts and culture community to domestic and international audiences.
Studio Nine, Wexart
A new artist led initiative set up by artists living and working in Wexford. We are a non profit organisation and the aims of the group are to establish a platform for emerging artists in the area. It is also to create a thriving and supportive enviroment for them to work in and participate in the cultural and economical development of the town and county. Our main focus is on the visual arts and we have already provided studio spaces for seven artists. We also plan to setup workshops and community based projects in the near future.
The Guesthouse
The Guesthouse was founded in 2004 by the Cork Artists Collective in partnership with Cork City Council. Its process of evolution developed from incentives among artists in the studio group to create a space in the city to accommodate a residency and project space in addition to facilitating artist practice beyond the studio that incorporate discursive, process based, crossdisciplinary and collaborative type processes.
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM MAKERS Award
V A L E R I E B R E N N A N
Valerie Brennan is a painter born in Co. Limerick, Ireland but lives and works in Madrid. Brennan is represented by the Apocalypse Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, USA and Atti Gallery, Toronto, Canada and has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions internationally. Brennan also founded and runs Studio Critical, a blog that lets the reader experience a behind the scenes approach to Contemporary Painting by presenting interviews from international practitioners about their work. Visit Valerie Brennan's Website: http://valeriebrennan.com/index.html Visit Studio Critical: http://www.studiocritical.blogspot.ie/
Tango, oil on wood, 25 x 25 cm, 201 2
Flesh carnival, oil on wood, 25 x 25 cm, 201 2
Square root, oil on wood, 25 x 25 cm, 201 2
O's woes, diptych, oil on wood, each panel 25 x 25 cm, 201 2
Anything you can do I can do better, diptych, oil on wood, each panel 25 x 25 cm, 201 2
F R E D L ' E P E E
Fred L'Epee (born in 1 976 in Switzerland) is primarily a film maker. L'Epee is Co -creator of "In- Depth Sea Films". An Independent film laboratory of cinematic visual arts curated in collaboration with Dimitra Pouliopoulou.Throughout L'Epee's career he has exhibited and screened his work extensively on an international stage. Recent screenings include The Island, Videoholica, International Video Art Festival - 5TH EDITION, August 201 2, Archeological Museum, Varna (Bulgaria) - In Exilum (201 2), Southend Film Festival, Programme of Oneiro/ 11 th may at TAP, South End on Sea (UK) and earlier this year Molecule Past and The room of franz kafka, Event Mindscapes SHOW, Saturday february 11 th 8 p.m. on Artists’ Television Access (ATA), San Fransisco (US). “In my personal path as an artist, I always see our being as an eternal procession. We belong to the process of the geometry of universe. Abstraction with forms and indefinite lines towards an ultimately unknown destination. The narrative of human being. As a post- atomic myth or pre-war blues. We always choose the sense of belonging and farewell. We belong of our movements which are expansion of our cycles. The structure of our human geometry. Time is the rotation of our existence. As well the distance is a perpetual geometry which is controlling our way of life, the perception of our cogitation. In response, we create the movement. Through this movement, we use the memory into our psycho- affective system in the purpose to imagine our freedom, our cries, our drifts, our social struggles. In exile, all we are. We belong to this path. And we use it as an ultimate form of being. The Ideal is definitely established. This movement is related to the circulation of our emotional system. Through this, here is the path of our metamorphosis. Without this, the world is nothing.”
M A R K
My work questions our relationship to architectural space, and the everyday objects utilised within such space. I look for different interpretations for a space, or object, with the idea of constructing new potential narratives. The work focuses on using found, commonplace materials and objects which are incorporated into new sculptures and groupings of items. The work center’s on the transformation of these exhausted materials, ascribing them new status by emphasising their absurdity, vacuity, or oblique social reference. The aim is to liberate them from the drudgery of service, allowing them to masquerade outside their traditional norm.
H A U G H T O N
These works are largely informed by an interest in the language of art and the boundaries that divide an art encounter from that of an everyday experience. Through enquiries into material, form and spatial arrangement, the work explores the displacement and reconfiguration of everyday objects and materials through installation and sculptural works. The working process begins with spontaneous reactions, which are informed by memory and association, as well as by art historical reference.These responses are expanded to forge new relationships and dialogues, between the space and the objects / images selected. The work attempts to decode and decipher the complexity of the environments that we inhabit. My practice highlights overlooked aspects of the everyday, in order to isolate and represent aspects of the urban environment, with the aim of forging a visual poetry of the commonplace, to elevate the irrelevance of the ordinary.
untitled - Mark Haughton
untitled - Mark Haughton
untitled - Mark Haughton
untitled - Mark Haughton
untitled - Mark Haughton
untitled - Mark Haughton
L I A M C A M P B E L L
Liam Campbell studied photography at IADT between 2001 -05 graduating with a B.A in Commercial Photography, before going on to complete his M.A in Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD Dublin between 2006-07. Since then he has been based in Belfast teaching a number of photographic workshops based around A Sense of Place. He has exhibited on a regular basis in both Ireland and Europe and has recently finished a long term project about the improvised allotment landscape in Ireland.
Hinterlands
The allotment garden is a practical and social space throughout the year. They have existed for well over 1 00 years in the British Isles. Traditionally the allotment shed acted as a retreat a home away from home for the male working class manual worker. A home away from home which was an escape for many men since the early 1 900s in Britan and Ireland. I was drawn to the improvised nature of the structures which the owners sheds had made. They had a personality about them which I found interesting and an identity which was more evident the more I photographed these structures over time and from location to location. Some of the sheds would vanish over the course of the winter and I would return in the spring to hear it had been blown down in a storm and was no more. Some of the people would die who had the allotments and their shed would be cleared and new structures developed over weeks and months which led into years. Some of the owners had given the sheds they had built pet names such as Taj Mahal 1 and The Soweto Hilton both in Annadale allotments Belfast. But I was interested in how these sheds through the process of photographing them had become identities in themselves portraits of the people who had made them. Out of a practical need for a shelter they had been made to fit a need as a tailor makes and measures material to fit a need. The improvised sheds had become these tailor made vessels of identity. “ form is a rigid container, and within is substance. Beyond their practical function, therefore objects and specifically objects or furniture have a primordial function as vessels, a function that belongs to the register of the imaginary� Jean Baudrillard : The System of Objects : Verso 1 996 : Radical Thinkers.
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Hinterlands - Liam Campbell
Salome Voegelin
ETHICS OF LISTENING Originally Published in 'The Journal of Sonic Studies' Volume 2 nr. 1 (May 2012) http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol02/nr01/a08
Recently, I was away, in another country. It looked and sounded not unlike this one, with streets, trees, houses, people and their dogs. The people had eyes, ears and mouths, just like us. They looked, listened and spoke. But since I could not recognise what I heard in the acoustic environment around me from the way they talked about it, I had to assume that they heard it all very differently. Instead of considering the source or quality of a sound, its location and distance or even its reason, they spoke in terms of action only. Theirs was not a discussion of ‘what was being done’, but was a ‘being done’, doing, always now, without defining a doing subject nor arriving at a resulting object. They did not comment on what made a specific sound, but spoke making the sound. Their words phrased the particular and focused narration of doing heard, becoming another heard doing. The understanding reached did not substantiate nor position the heard, instead it beckoned movement; sonic gestures held momentarily and precariously in my ears as an idea of the heard, whose source had by that time become irrelevant, and whose destination was my own sound, which in turn did not translate the heard but became another sonic thing altogether - the semantic substance of doing conveyed to my listener.
It was all, at least at first, greatly confusing. I was at sea in the midst of movement without form and could not anchor my thoughts in the steady container of the object but, instead, had to let them pass continually in the formless shape of sound. There was no pinning down, no transference, no hold, just the rollercoaster of changing shapes whose materiality was their contingent possibility - propositions hinted at, played with, produced and destroyed. On enquiring I found out that it was not that they were not aware of the objects around them, but that these things were not important in terms of their material form, their objectness, but only in relation to the doing they did - the possibilities through which they suggested themselves - and the people were also, just like these doing things, their own doing - fluid possibilities rather than fixed identities. This might seem at first discriminating against those who did or could not do much, but this is not so, as their notion of doing has nothing to do with doing much or doing worthy, purposeful or gainful things. It is simply doing understood as the process of being, not exclusively human being, but being in general, as the condition and process of existence in time, leaving room for manifold possible subjectivities and objectivities to emerge as contingent propositions. Being in doing is unsettling; it perverts the preconception of the object and the prejudgment of the subject as a stable identity. The being as doing foregrounds existence in general, ignoring whether the being is an object or a subject; and it comes to meaning from this non-distinct equivalence, through its process rather than as an entity. At the same time it challenges the notion of doing as inherently better than being, as it is being, but being not as object but as thing, thinging existence continually, fluidly,
in passing. The object as thing is an activity, it is to do: being a contingent activity of defining: continually drawing the thing as as the production of possibilities rather than the appearance of the fragile gesture of what it could be rather than representing totality. what it appears to be. This ‘listening drawing’ depends on one’s simultaneity with the heard; no meta-narrative can make it The material of this world, while seen and heard by me in the sound, and it makes apparent the complex demand of being in same way as that of my world back home, is clearly time as a doing thing equivalent to the thing heard doing. The appreciated in an entirely different way by the indigenous object and the subject as sonic things move past each other, population. And so it is different: its materiality, its status and simultaneously and equivalently, defining each other as one what it could do and enable in terms of understanding, contingent possibility of all they could be. In this fluid weave the imagination and purpose is very different. The resulting responsibility of perception lies in the moment of listening rather consideration of reality and value is completely different, and than in the location of the heard. so, while from the outside this world looks and sounds just like ours, the thinking that manifests the invisible layers of its From these observations I came to appreciate that their sense of processes and results in the sense of actuality and morality the world is derived from the acoustic environment heard as a lived by, is very different indeed. The notion of existence as complex equivalence of objects and subjects, as things in doing means that what is seen is the motion, the present simultaneous motion that are drawn temporarily as contingent process of being, not its material totality nor the illuminations of out-of-focus visuals by sound. These ‘sound conglomeration of past occurrences and achievements. This images’ show not what these objects and subjects are per se, as focus on process privileges and is privileged by the ear, which a priori, but propose and hint at all they could possibly be. They steers the eye away from the material onto its thinging: onto are mirrors that show one possibility as a contingent actuality the possibilities proposed by the thing as an object existing in and reflect the speaker as a sonic subject in the corner of its time. glare. Sound exposes the vague image in temporal flashes of clarity to the listeners, who themselves are part of this circle of It is difficult to imagine, harder to describe, but I came to illumination, but not necessarily at the centre of it. They are understand that what their eyes see is unfocused movement. A caught as just one other constituent in the possibility of the bit like what is produced by a photograph taken on a slow moment. shutter speed, they see indistinct motion that is given definition and meaning by sound. But this definition is not concerned It is the fleeting articulation of those possibilities in language that with size, location, outline or distance, but is the sense of its produces their contingent actuality. This is a language based on possibility: what it proposes to be at this moment in time, the coincidence of personal speech, formless and passing, producing its own contingent situation. This auditory process is rather than on the infrastructure of individual exchange, which is not concerned with sizing up, with ordering the heard into a lexical and pre-formed. The utterances produced to interpret and hierarchy of use, value and identity, nor of placing it into a pre- share such a personal sense of one’s surroundings rely heavily given space. Rather, listening rephrases definition as on verbs able to capture an existence in flow.
Therefore, in the vocabulary of that world, things are verbs doings. The verb determines the utterance and takes centre stage. It expresses not the sound of the thing but the sound of the doing of the thing that has long changed the shape of the thing doing so. Thus, their predicate sits in the place of our noun, our substantive, and holds the power of the grammatical subject: governing the time of the sentence. In this cultural context the eye is secondary to the ear. The eye makes out the trace, the blurred outline of the motion that hearing reflects upon and unfolds in its mobile particularity.
This is exhausting, as it demands constant new orientation, constant renegotiation, and the acceptance that any understanding reached is nevertheless solidly participle. The speaking subject is itself but a passing shape with no particular hold over other autonomous things’ thinging, save the capacity to talk about them. The human subject is not central to being; it is incidental, caught up in the same fluid stream of existence, production and destruction, rather than inhabiting a privileged or fixed position. The listening “I” is not at a distance from the proceedings, and not in the middle either, but is part of it, another autonomous substance that sounds with others and in whose simultaneity it comes to its own temporal form: formless and passing. A language of verbs and adverbs, intent on conveying formless forms, rather than on the representation of objects as nouns and adjectives, captures the paradox of this autonomous intertwinement and gives the subject a means to ‘speak about’ without dominating the ‘spoken of’.[1 ]
Consequently, nouns are scarcely present in their language. The only ones I did hear while there were abstract ones, such as faith, doubt, fear, happiness, etc. There are also, as a result, no definite and indefinite articles, no “an” and “the”, and no pronouns either; even the infinitive is rarely used, as it is considered the freewheeling, unethical part of doing that neither does nor is, but is action suspended, hanging about Verbs and adverbs transform the linguistic landscape; nobody without the commitment to participate. owns the action, the sound only draws it from all there is to sound. Without nouns and infinitives nothing is in stasis, but is always what it does, different all the time. The subject too is a verb: I Forcibly, the fragility of existence as a formless thing lived out in myself am not still, but a fluent substance. My self is a shape- simultaneous-autonomy with other shape-shifting things makes shifting thing, a vague thinging that attains definition through social relations so much more dependent on our willingness to its own sound that as words seek the coincidence of the participate in the contingent encounter; to produce in language ‘sound image’ to reflect me and you in the same moment. fleeting understandings rather than assumed meanings. Thus, hierarchies of power as well as political associations and The subject and the object are registered in the circumstance identification cannot be assumed nor sustained. They are of their encounter in one ‘sound image’, autonomous but produced on the spot and abandoned again to the flow of sound. intertwined in its reflection from whose glare language draws The politics of listening blurs single visions into multiple motions its conversation, personally and tenuously. Everything and whose definition needs to be drawn and negotiated as the everybody is their own immediate shape, shaping themselves particularity of the heard, again and again. in the proposition of their temporary being.
Without nouns, rhetoric is impossible; positioning, jostling for There is no right or wrong that precedes the interaction; the right power and grasping control are precluded as they aim towards or wrong is worked out in the interaction, contingently from the thing and the subject towards their shared sphere, and it is only a solidity that cannot be heard. valid temporarily in relation to that interaction. Ethical listening in This is not anti-materialist, nor is it an anti-realist; rather it that sense describes the responsibility of participating in the suggests a temporal materialism, a sonic materialism, and a motion of the heard: to draw its meaning contingently, and to sonic realism: a materialism that acknowledges the substance pass it on in one’s own sound as personal speech. It is an ethics of objects as temporal processes, autonomous from human of the self, of subjectivity, as much as of the world, of objectivity, intervention and perception, but which become real for the as in effect the two become intertwined within its participatory subject through his/her temporal process of being substance framework, depending on each other for a definition in faint simultaneously with other substances. It is also not entirely pencil marks. anti-theological, as it does not deny the responsibility of the This demand for participation challenged my notion of self, the subject; it only cuts its privilege. absoluteness of my self, my self-certainty vis-à -vis the material While the language of my host, in its focus on the doing of the world, as well as my ideas on the manner and purpose of any verb, expresses this equivalent and simultaneous process of interaction. Our language, based on nouns, restored my clarity being, our language is a representative plane, grounded upon and identity by re-establishing the distinction between object and nouns and adjectives to produce a distinction between the subject. Theirs, based on verbs, left me drifting in momentary subject and the object that it seeks to evaluate and put in its connections and negotiations in which I remain indistinct motion, place. Consequently, our ethics aims at a putting-in-place and ill at ease, unless I accept the challenge of a participating is based upon pre-given rules and values; commandments subjectivity that exists as contingent possibilities rather than imposed on one presumed actuality, without consideration for stable actualities. possibilities. My hosts laughed at me when I talked to them of my exhaustion By contrast, drawing the heard as possibilities rather than as trying to see and hear the world their way. They mocked my one actuality, demands an ethics of participation: an ethics that desire to place myself, my fears of getting lost, my need to guides the contingent encounter of the heard and frames the dominate the object to know myself. They exclaimed how difficult proposition produced. It is an ethics that is engaged and it must be to have the eye, rather than roaming freely, captured respects equivalence at the same time as it is aware of a by the immobile object, to be thrust up against it all the time, to potentially unbreachable autonomy of each and every thing. In feel the need to position oneself against another form rather than this visually unfocused, auditorily precise simultaneity, ethics is enjoy shared formlessness. They felt it must be such a burden to not about authority and ideology but about negotiation and own things, to either have them or want them, when you could just partake in their existence with you. process and how that can be achieved.
Their mocking of my normative perception reminded me of how I am beholden to my gaze, how I am trapped in my own view. It is not the object gazed at but the gazer who is caught in the headlights of the thing he/she is staring at. Our language, the manifestation of our values, distances us from the processes of things, and of ourselves as being things, in the fixity of a moment assumed as the generality of time. Nouns and adjectives disable the motioned vision of the verb. They give the “I” a privileged position in the sentence, which allows us to dictate the thing as object, to position it, to value it, independent of its own processes and substance. As I name the material, it bends towards me and becomes anthropomorphic - a material for me, losing the possibilities its formless sound might be hinting at. Sonic materialism, by contrast, focuses on the autonomy of the thing and the negotiation of that autonomy in the contingent encounter of listening. However, it is not so much about freeing the object as it is about freeing the subject from the pressures of an a priori actuality. It invites us to ignore our belief in a visual acuity that prevents us from appreciating the possibilities hinted at in the invisible movement of the thing and the self in sound. These vague thoughts became clear to me when taking off my glasses: the world gets temporarily out of focus; blurred, it loses definition and the demand to be defined. Instead, sound can produce it as possibilities: inventing a sonic reality, a sonic possible world, in my short-sighted gaze. And now I know that there is at least one other, if not many other worlds that might look and sound the same as this one, but mean so very differently.
Note 1 . In Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum 201 0), I develop the suggestion that the perceptual impetus is the agency that generates the reality and materiality of the object and the subject perceived. With the idea, developed here, of an autonomy and simultaneity of being that entwines the subject with the object without affording the subject a privileged position over the object, I am not negating the perceptual impetus and agency developed in that earlier text, but I am clarifying the idea that it is the subject that is being generated, expanded and changed in his/her perceptual agency rather than the object or subject perceived. Thus, while the sound is a trigger for a generative perception, it is the reality and materiality of the listener, not of the heard, that is being generated in the process of listening.
About the Author Salomé Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts and course director of the MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. Other writing includes an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011, and a chapter in the forthcoming book Magic Spaces - 25 years of Kunstradio ORF. Her blog http://www.soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday. She is the curator of http://www.clickanywhere.crisap.org and some of her own work has recently been shown in 'Being Honeyed – An exhibition of Sound(in)Art' at Soma Contemporary in Ireland.
Production Company Packages | Gallery Packages | Artist & Curator Packages | Educational & Student Packages As ARTStap is a completely voluntary and non-profit operation, we are constantly working at innovative ways of keeping ourselves alive and kicking. The latest initiative to rise from the buzzing studios of ARTStap is the FRANCHISE Programme. Based on the idea of creating a Franchise, the ARTStap Franchise program has been set up to help promote your event / exhibition / symposium etc. and bring what you do to the world. We advertise your event on the home page of the ARTStap website prior to your event opening which receives over 35,000 hits a day. We e-mail your events details out to our thousands of online users and subscribers, include an article in the following Issue of the ARTStap publication about how your event / exhibition / symposium went [min. 1 7,000 readers per issue] and to top it off we inlcude the information and documentation of your event in our franchise database which remains there 'forever'. All we ask is for you to include our logo on all your promotional material.
20% OFF all Package prices for current students [student card required]. 20% OFF all Package prices for Members of the ARTStap Network, [It is FREE to join the ARTStap Network] If you would like to include your event and become part of the ARTStap Franchise please contact us here: franchise@artstap.com
YAM.ie Putting Dublin's young creative community on the map! YAM.ie (Your Arts Map) is a new listings website mapping out arts and cultural events across Dublin created for and by 1 3 – 25 year olds. It provides one central location in which an individual or organisation can literally put their event on the map. YAM is the perfect platform for arts and cultural organisations, youth groups and venues to promote and advertise events that are specifically targeted towards this age-bracket. It also allows young people to upload their own events that are of interest to their peers. YAM is completely free to use. It provides an interactive Google mapsbased online arts and cultural information service for young people all over Dublin. Not only does it provide young creatives and cultural organisations with the opportunity to promote their events, projects and activities; through a partnership established with hittheroad.ie, YAM also displays public transport information for each event. Now, young audiences will have a goto website that lets them know exactly what’s on around Dublin for them, and how to get there. The website allows users to update information easily online across different platforms. By downloading a free Facebook app all the information submitted to YAM will become available on your Facebook timeline automatically. Once the app is installed on your Facebook account, any subsequent listings added to YAM.ie will be available to all friends and fans instantly. An embeddable widget is also available so individuals can easily display their YAM listings on their own website or blog. YAM.ie has been developed through partnership between South Dublin County Council, Dublin City Council, Temple Bar Cultural Trust and the National Youth Council of Ireland. The project has been funded by support from the Arts Council’s Local Partnership Scheme 2011 and designed and developed by practice&Theory. YAM.ie was developed to answer a very real need that was expressed directly by the young creative people that the partner organisations work with. Young people were consulted throughout the development process to get their feedback on how the site looks, how user-friendly it is, and if it answers the right questions about what arts events are on and how to get to them.
OPEN GOREY INITIATIVE
Soldiers of Skate [SOS] is an annual Skate Competition that takes place at Gorey Skate Park, Gorey, Co. Wexford. Soldiers of Skate is organised and run in conjuntion with Gorey Skate Club and Wreckless Skate Shop Gorey and the event is sponsored by major international Skate board Companies including; Monster, DC, Alien Workshop and many many more. Soldiers of Skate not only supports local and national skaters but also brings leading international skaters to Gorey by running competitions for the under 1 2's, under 1 8's, under 30's and the veterans followed by lots of food from the SOS BBQ. New this year at SOS 201 2 was the photography competition, so if your are a budding photographer keep an eye out for this next year. Thank you to Grant Masterson and Joe Dixon (winner of the photographic competition) for providing us with the information and images of hoe the event went. Gorey Skate Club http://www.goreyskateclub.com Wreckless Skate Club http://www.wreckless.ie
Soldiers of Skate - Run in conjunction with the Open Gorey Initiative [OGI]
The Gorey Halloween Festival makes Gorey the place to be every Halloween. The Gorey Halloween Festival is a five day freaky halloween festival run throughout the whole of Gorey, Co. Wexford from the 27th - 31 st October every year. There are so many fantastic events that take place you have to keep an eye on the programme at the Gorey Halloween Festival Website: www.goreyhalloween.com Events include fancy dress parties and competitions, best halloween window displays, pumpkin carving, the history of halloween exhibition at the market house, ghost trains and haunted villages, 'find the ring' trails, themed pubs, meals and cocktails to the fantastic Masquerade ball at the Amber Springs Hotel. Simply the best Halloween festival making Gorey the place to be!!!
Gorey Halloween Festival - Run in conjunction with the Open Gorey Initiative [OGI]
WWW.ARTSTAP.COM THE PRACTITIONERS VOICE
ARTStap is free and makes no profit from the publication of any materials found therin. ARTStap is a publication for the distribution of work from emerging and established practitioners and will not be liable for any offense taken by individual(s) resulting from any materials contained therin. No work in the magazine may be used in any way without the permission of the copyright holder. All works are the sole property of the creaters unless otherwise stated. All works submitted to ARTStap must be the sole and original work of the contributor(s) and must not interfere with any other publication or company's publishing rights. ARTStap and ARTStap.com is founded, directed and edited by Richard Carr, Wexford, Ireland.