Empireland - Mark O'Kelly at Project Arts Centre - GALLERY GUIDE

Gallery guide EMPIRELAND MARK O’Kelly PROJECT ARTS CENTRE 1 APRIL – 28 MAY 2016

Mark O’Kelly Empireland, 2016 (Front) Oil on oil primed metal plates, 280cm x 900cm (Reverse) Powder coated metal plates, metal rail and bracket assemblage system Installed on motorway sign support scaffold for Project Arts Centre

Floorplan

Introduction

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A newly commissioned painting of monumental scale, Empireland grapples with Ireland’s history as a State.

With images, icons, symbols and figures relating to Ireland’s religious, medicinal, corporeal and cultural histories, Mark O’Kelly’s ambitious history painting is interwoven with elements of Conceptual and Renaissance art history. Produced on the structure of a motorway gantry sign, the depicted engines of culture and democracy churn up a complex and layered image – an abstract roadmap of Ireland’s evolution born of rebellion.

Depictions of Dunnes Stores protestors, the Crystal Palace, Lorenzetti’s ‘Allegory of Good and Bad Government’ and Panadol are all overlayed with symbols, reduced language, icons, and other recognisable images to provide the structure of the painting. The dynamism of movement, force and direction are contained within the composition itself – boiling, rotating, Mark O’Kelly’s Empireland is like a coil in a machine, ready to launch.

Mark O’Kelly is an artist based in Dublin who has exhibited widely throughout Ireland, including the recent group exhibitions Conversations, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2015, Agitationism, EVA International, 2014, and Modern Families, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 2013. His solo exhibitions in recent years include Figure of 8, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 2011, Leaders and Followers, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2010, Unconscious, The Black Mariah, Cork, 2009. Empireland is his single most ambitious work, and it has been a privilege to work towards this commission with Mark and Project Arts Centre over the last year. Mark joins me in extending sincere thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, which has generously supported the production of this work through a Project Award, and to Isobel Harbison, whose insightful essay opens a myriad of ways to think about Empireland, and follows in this gallery guide.

Curated by Tessa Giblin

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Empireland: Painting as Polis Isobel Harbison

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The ‘polis’ is an Ancient Greek word which means ‘city’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘civic body’. These three meanings were interchangeable. Athens, for example, was often simply referred to as ‘Athenians’, the body of self-governing citizens being the defining feature of the polis. Citizens were responsible for designing and maintaining government, religious activity, defence strategy and economic welfare. The system was not all-inclusive – ‘noncitizens’ included women, immigrants and slaves – but it did represent a system of positive spatial identification, where residents constituted civic space. Cue Mark O’Kelly’s Empireland, an epically-scaled painting of oil on oil-primed metal, marking Project Arts Centre’s commitment to the theme of ‘Rebellion’ for the Easter Rising’s centenary year. Empireland is a bustling polis of a painting. Depictions of citizens, or rather, active citizenship, overlap and dissolve onto icons and symbols of the contemporary city – its zoning, demarcations, directives and processes of ongoing political identification continually redefining its own limits.

Installed within the gallery, Empireland is a painting across ten evenly-sized steel units that fit together in a rail and bracket system.

This unusual support refers to gantry signs, those large road-signs affixed to bridges that cross highways, and that guide us in our cars through and around cities. The decision to create such a painting comes from the artist’s ongoing interest in the possibilities and shortcomings of a city’s limits and the passages through which people and goods might flow uninterrupted. It also evolves from more recent questions about the concept or possibility of a public painting: something destined for something bigger (in scale and political ambition), than the living room of a bourgeois collector. The political ambition and possible instrumentalisation of painting is something O’Kelly touched upon in his earlier painting ‘Party’ (2010). An oil on linen, ‘Party’ depicts a temporary wall primed for an upcoming election. Covered with brightly coloured campaign posters, O’Kelly painted a smartly-dressed woman standing before it, contemplating the bold, attention-grabbing signage. We see her from behind, and there is something significant in her posturing. ‘Party’ sets up a series of questions for us as viewers not only about the possible power or didacticism of painting but about ourselves as viewers reading the signage. How are our activities, our focal points, connected? What does the painting share with the city wall? And can painting, like a papered wall, allow for a diversity of perspectives or voices?

There are many art historical references within O’Kelly’s new work and several pictorial quotations that underpin the idea of painting

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as polis. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘The Allegory of Good and Bad Government’ (1338–1339) is a series of three fresco panels painted in the Sala Dei Nove of Siena’s town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico. The frescos depict the city and surrounding farmland as a city-state run by its citizens, a group of which are positioned in the central fresco’s left foreground as they hold hands and rejoice. O’Kelly adopts this celebratory group in his own painting’s central foreground, alongside Lorenzetti’s other figures (a horseman, a farmer, a woman carrying water), in similar layout and scale to Lorenzetti’s original. O’Kelly has omitted most of the architectural details of Lorenzetti’s Siena, except for the receding diagonals that delineate the city walls, creating the same sense of enclosure, perspective lines, and compositional dividers as the Renaissance original.

Instead of Siena, O’Kelly has transposed Lorenzetti’s jubilant party into the foreground of a city more local to him: Dublin. More specifically, the Irish capital is evoked through another visual citation, Sigmar Polke’s painting ‘Dublin’ (1968). Feint details of O’Connell Street and Nelson’s Pillar surface through O’Kelly’s turquoise background, executed in Polke’s trademark technique using half-tone dots to isolate or elevate popular or well-known images to the status of aesthetic signs. Polke’s painted Dublin ‘sign’ thus materialises on O’Kelly’s painted road-sign, an apt tribute to the German artist who constantly borrowed images, techniques and materials from other artists, testing the parameters between the mass reproduction of images and the subjective production of art. Aptly too, O’Kelly has populated this discrete imagery of Dublin city with Lorenzetti’s allegorical figures of governance. By splicing together these diverse European art historical images, O’Kelly’s work begins to open up the historically charged relationship between Irish citizens, its capital city and distinct moments of good and bad governance.

Empireland recognises the populous of a city and the infrastructures that facilitate its din. The focus is not only on the signage and fortifications that direct us in, but also the valves that permit internal circulation. In her analysis of O’Kelly’s practice in 2002, Yvonne Scott writes: Paintings such as ‘Tube’ and ‘Metro’ anticipate the more recent ‘Terminal’ in their subject matter, and their implication of a social critique in the recognition of the processed nature of modern travel.

Yet these works remain curiously impartial, acknowledging that mass production can be the resolution as much as the cause of

deprivation, that what exploits may also satisfy, that solutions are not simple.1 O’Kelly’s interest in the processed nature of modern travel, the circulation it affords some people, resonates again in this new work.

Giant grey rounds appear through Empireland’s right middle ground like cogs in a larger mechanism, doing circuits within the pictorial space. They are positioned with the same evenly-paced architectonic symmetry as the closed circuit of Duchamp’s bachelors that rotate in his ‘Large Glass’ (1915–23), another conscious historical reference point. O’Kelly’s rounds adopt the shape and graphic notations of the circular floorplans of Charles de Gaulle airport’s 8-level Terminal 1 building, constructed in the early 1970s when regular global business travel (the basis of globalisation itself) was in its infancy. Then, the Parisian airport represented efficiency, modernity and technological advancement, a new kind of factory for the global worker (the corporate bachelor, even) to regularly pass through. Here, the floorplans are turned on their side, possibly to appear more dynamic, almost as if these borrowed and reduced abstractions might actually help shunt some of O’Kelly’s figures around his vast oil on metal painting.

It creates a sense of movement that’s picked up by the lateral arc moving through the left of the composition, an arc based on the logo of a Paracetamol packet. This drug, somewhat like the airport, is designed to ensure the regulation or regularity of bodies, their constant movement through space, of managing to mask the pain that might hamper productivity and profitability. In the workings of global capitalism, this kind of routine circulation is widely encouraged, with diversion, or breakdown, prohibited. There seems a discrete allusion here to Michel Foucault’s theory of ‘biopower’, a theory about how the state exerts politico-economic power not only through the electoral system but also through the regulation, medicalisation and vaccination of bodies in the open provision or limited availability of pharmaceuticals (‘Society Must Be Defended’, Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76). In turn, the pharmaceuticals industry has since become a form of supranational governance unto itself, another evolution or transformation of governance symbolised within O’Kelly’s oeuvre. What control does the Irish state continue to exert on the bodies of its citizens, one might justly ask, and does this exemplify good or bad governance?

What Scott saw early on as impartiality in O’Kelly’s work might also read as an acute sensitivity to the double-sided nature of politics

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(like paintings). Empireland implies that the transfer of people and goods through urban centres creates potential conflict and contradiction, and often provokes injustice and subsequent political activism.

Two images of crowds, taken from the artist’s large collection of news clippings and media photography, have been carefully painted into the composition. To the left of the painting, between the De Gaulle rounds and celebratory dancers, a group of eleven workers (nine women and two men) sit across two rows. They are the largest figures in the painting, far larger than Lorenzetti’s dancers, rendered photo-realistically in black and white against the otherwise highly-coloured composition.

The image is taken from a press shot by Irish photographer Derek Speirs. It is of Dunnes Stores’ supermarket employees in 1983 on their return from South Africa, where they had been denied access on account of their refusal, in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement, to handle South African goods. The original photograph marked the moment where their protest garnered international press attention, escalating and elevating the workers’ strike into an international diplomatic issue, and forcing the Irish government to take action.

For O’Kelly, it seems to be a moment of positive political identification across borders, where one constituency’s interventions can have significant impact on a distinct other’s. It was a civic protest that looked beyond national borders, and there seems to be some affiliation, through careful compositional positioning, between these equality-seeking workers and Lorenzetti’s joyful dancers. This is globalisation in the sense of global civic awareness as opposed to constant, transnational productivity.

The second crowd shot transposed in oil is the found photograph of a 1950s strike by Polish workers. It has been rendered in the painting’s lower right section, rendered in purple halftone dots. There is a sense, through this Polkian pixilation effect, that we are focusing in to scrutinise this unruly, predominantly male crowd. Stretching right across the bottom of the composition, a flagpole is elevated in a diagonal line that bisects Lorenzetti’s boundary wall and creates internal conflict within the composition. The only woman in this painted shot is prominent at the front line. Her position resonated with O’Kelly as resembling Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (1830). Like Delacroix’s allegorical painting, O’Kelly’s Polish crowd scene is another depiction of rebellion. And, what’s more, these rebellious crowds are ostensibly led by women. But O’Kelly seems less concerned with highlighting rebellious women as a sub-group, than spotlighting the symbolic value of positioning robust women at the

front line of uprising. There’s a shrewdness to Delacroix’s composition, the same shrewdness of the anonymous modern photographer recognising and capitalising upon the allure of the female subject to capture attention, arouse emotion and garner political support.

O’Kelly’s attention seems less concentrated on gender politics than on the potential strategies and didacticism of painting, of painting as a directive, as a carefully positioned road sign.

Empireland is an epic painting that amalgamates many visual cultural, art historical, political, social, architectural and scientific references. While the work’s title suggests the territory of Ireland as a rebellious new republic, the work itself conveys far more than the particularities or specifics of any one country, new or old. Rebellion was the spirit injected into the Easter Rising of 1916, but it’s a sensibility and strategy universally known, and one that might be applied by one constituency for the sake of the next. Empireland represents something larger than the context or aftermath of one civic uprising, but instead the messier, more complicated relationship between civic space and its people, and the points at which they divide and coalesce. The civic space, Empireland infers, is a work in progress, produced and producing revolutions and movements of all kind. Stylistically, O’Kelly’s references are neither schematised nor streamlined. They are transposed one upon one another, signs and systems of signage layered up like palimpsests and painted on a gantry. Visually, it’s as populous and noisy as the ‘polis’. Towards the top of O’Kelly’s hoarding, diagrams of free-standing voting booths are painted to appear like hieroglyphs. They’re a call to arms, or rather, to democracy. Painting, like the polis, is a product of history and a process in constant state of definition.

1. Dr. Yvonne Scott, The View From a Bridge, ex. cat., Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, 2002

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