Reviews
Formative Experiences
Helen Sharp
Ian Sansom
Ask Orme O’Bakery
Stephen Mullan
Jason Mills
Tim Loane
Colin Graham
Newton Emerson
Iain Davidson
Mark Cousins
Paddy Bloomer
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Gaffer Taper: F Friend of the Arts Wild Cinema An Interview: Poachers & Gamekeepers The Art Dosh Difficult Art Arts Funding The Houses that Art Built Nelson’s Night Thoughts Your Art Questions Answered What is Art? NI Art Collections Carlo Gebler, Mary McIntyre, Brian Carson Philip Hammond, Brian Henry Martin John Duncan, Glenn Patterson
rt Art
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the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
gaffer tape: friend of the arts Paddy Bloomer Hardware holds the world together. We all know this is true. But artists can be a bit slow off the mark when it comes to embracing new adhesives and fabrication techniques. Rabbit size and horse glue remain ever popular in the world of arts and crafts but these days many projects are lashed together with gaffer tape and zip ties. Proponents of this new scene may fall into several different groups: 1. The adhesive product fanatic. These individuals will discuss the chemical make-up of polyurethane hybrids, thermosetting epoxy and methyl cellulose-modified phenolic formaldehyde with the enthusiasm of a chemistry teacher on Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Often heard evangelising at trade counters and bearing witness as to the usefulness of various cutting edge products. 2. Believers in a carefree, high-speed low-fi approach to creating art: may produce pieces that have a short shelf life and may stray dangerously close to the realm of performance. 3. Those with a complete inability to fabricate things properly or use simple tools (other than a jigsaw to create meandering cuts in chipboard that aren’t straight enough to be straight or curved enough to be curved.) Those whose practice falls in to this category may go on to produce stainless steel public art with the ever popular toddler-with-an-angle-grinder finish, examples of which can be seen throughout Belfast.
Some stainless steel
4. Exponents of new-type folk tape art. Gaffer-based media in particular, is now competing with traditional fire-side crafts such as cross stitch, flint knapping, egg decorating and wattle and daub. Duct tape fashions – wallets
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
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No. 44
Í belts and underwear – have become the trappings of the neo-DIY scene.
DIY underwear may sound like fun but can be very uncomfortable.
antcy. Speciality tapes are available specificly for the purpose of sealing ducts. Confusingly, if unsurprisingly, these tapes are often refered to as Duct tape. Antipodean Duct tape is completely different. It is 48mm wide silver PVC tape with no cloth and inferior stickyness. Beware! Unscrupulous retailers in Belfast have been known to sell this type of tape to the unsuspecting artist. You may be surprised to know that Gaffer tape is not just used by artists. It was used extensively by Macgyver and enjoyed moments of glory during Apollo moon missions when NASA used Duct tape to bodge oxygen scrubbers and lunar rovers and the like.
gaffer tape: what is it? Though referred to by many names and available in several flavours there are two main types, Gaffer/Gaffa tape and duct/ duck tape. Both are fabric reinforced pressure sensitive adhesive tape. Duct tape generally has a glossy outer vinyl surface and is silver or black in colour with a standard width of 1⅞ inches (48mm). Gaffer gets its name from the head of the lighting department on a film set. It is used mainly in the entertainment industry; the backing material is cotton and is usually finished matt black which makes it less visible to the camera. Gaffer tape has a slightly different adhesive composition which when removed does not leave a sticky residue, Gaffer also costs a lot more and may be 50mm wide. While the terms are often interchanged Gaffer or Gaffs tape seems to be more often used this side of the Atlantic, Duct and Duck tape being more popular in the US. I have long held the opinion that the term ‘Duck’ tape was was simply a misspronouncation of ‘Duct’ tape and that the product was developed to seal joints in air ducting. The notion that someone would develop a tape for use on ducks seemed improbable to me. But I was wrong. As early as 1887 Johnston and Johnston were producing ZONAS® adhesive plasters for repairing punctures and external mechanical failures on human beings. The usefulness of this product had not gone unnoticed and adhesive plasters were being used to affect repairs on shoes, girdles, cricket bats and the like. Johnston and Johnston introduced Duck tape during World War II as a waterproof sealing tape for ammunition cases. Duck Tape is now a trademarked brand owned by Henkel consumer adhesives. Originally the tape was olive green but after the war became available to the general public in silver and was known under many names: Gaffer’s tape, Gaff tape, Gun-tape, Rigger’s tape, 100mph tape, Hurricane tape, High speed tape, Racer’s tape, Tank tape, Gorilla tape, Power tape, Spike tape.
Miguel Martin demonstrates University of Ulster’s new tape-based anti-gravity art facility.
In Germany the tape is most commonly known as ‘Panzertape’ and one hardware retailer in Belfast advertises ‘hostage tape £3.00 a roll’ at the trade counter. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Environmental Energy Technologies Division defined tape as ‘any fabricbased tape with rubber adhesive’. The conclusion of their research was that one should not use Duct tape to seal ducts on grounds of longevity and fire retard-
MOVING ON MUSIC PRESENTS
& BRASS UNBOUND
with Mats Gustafsson, Roy Paci, Ken Vandermark & Wolter Wierbos
+ ZUN ZUN EGUI
Legendary band The Ex unleash a new wild and combustible show in collaboration with four of the worldʼs most powerful horn players. Expect fireworks.
Saturday 6th February Black Box, Belfast Doors 8pm
Tickets: £12/£8 available from www.movingonmusic.co.uk and Belfast Welcome Centre (028 9024 6609)
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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how to dole out the dosh Newton Emerson All public-sector decision making can be understood as the quest to avoid personal responsibility. This is certainly the best way to understand the Assembly Committee for Culture, Arts and Leisure’s inquiry into funding of the arts. The Committee, chaired by Sinn Fein MLA Barry McElduff, has 11 members from all four main parties. Its job is to scrutinise the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL), run by DUP minister Nelson McCausland. The structure of DCAL is itself a good example of passing the buck. Rather than fund the arts directly, DCAL hands £11 million a year to a quango, the Arts Council, which spends £2 million deciding who gets the remaining £9 million. For its £2 million administration fee the Arts Council handles policy, compliance, research, auditing, law and consultancy, which does raise the question of what the 290 staff at DCAL do all day. Yes, they are also responsible for libraries, museums, sport and inland waterways, but closer inspection reveals that they have farmed those out to quangos as well. When it first wandered into this maze in January 2009 the Committee had questions to ask DCAL officials directly, concerning arts funding by
formative experiences In the Name of God had an effect on me that was wholly unexpected. I went along to a screening by documentary filmmaker Robin Wylie, anticipating a portrait of Belfast in the 1970s consistent with the media depiction of the city with which I thought I was conversant. What I experienced instead was a
other departments, local government and the private sector. But mostly it had to look to the Arts Council to ask how funding decisions are made. As the whole point of the Arts Council is to stop people asking DCAL how funding decisions are made, this caused something of a bureaucratic brain-lock. The determination to avoid personal responsibility can be gauged from the trivial sums involved. By Stormont’s standards £9 million is peanuts and most of it is doled out in grants of under £5,000. On this scale, perhaps staff at an arms-length quango should simply be trusted to use their own judgement, experience and initiative. Instead, for the protection of its operators, there must at all times be a system, or the appearance of a system, defined in terms that are allegedly objective, quantifiable and measurable. The Committee, DCAL, the Arts Council and the 70-plus ‘key stakeholders’ who made submissions to the inquiry all approached it on this basis. They began with comparisons of arts funding per head between Northern Ireland and other regions and countries, and within Northern Ireland between council districts and census areas. Most participants agreed that this was largely meaningless, not least because there are no accurate overall
piece of experimental filmmaking that held an image up to me of the Belfast I actually knew, when as a child I had visited it on shopping trips with my parents. We were amongst the few in our family who regularly ventured to that city when others avoided it due to the fear of violence. So I became used to the ‘bombed out’ at a very early age. This film presented a visceral document of the city at a time of turmoil, far more realistically than any piece of ‘documentary realism’ could ever hope to achieve. Its non-narrative, fragmentary structure, married with its innovative use of sound recordings made in the wake of a bomb blast, brought back a knowledge of a place that I hadn’t realised I’d buried. It conjured up a familiarity that sat uncomfortably between incomprehensible nostalgia and dread.
J figures for arts funding in Northern Ireland. But it got things off to a reassuringly statistical and mechanistical start. Next up, the inquiry tried to quantify the economic and social benefits of arts funding through its impact on employment, income, community cohesion, education, reduction in crime and social inclusion. Once again, participants could see no way to posit a credible system around such broad targets and nebulous concepts. They discussed the potential of categorising art into ‘professional’ and ‘community’, in case it might be easier and more intellectually acceptable to measure the impact of finger-painting in leisure centres. But nobody could think of a way to categorise art that would not involve judging art, and that would never do. The inquiry also spoke to consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), who wrote a report for DCAL in 2007 on the impact of all departmental spending. Using private consultants for tasks that civil servants should be able to perform themselves is another way the public sector avoids personal responsibility. Unfortunately, PWC’s report found ‘a lack of sufficient data to carry out a meaningful assessment of the economic and social benefit of
No. 44
investment’. Finally, the Committee heard statements from people who had applied for funding and been turned down, or who wished to apply but were not sure how, or who did not even realise they could apply in the first place. All pleaded for a transparent and consistent decision-making process at the Arts Council, which brought the whole inquiry back to square one. With an objective system as elusive as ever, the Committee produced 14 recommendations, of which two involved collecting more accurate statistics, three involved civil servants talking to each other more often and eight involved politicians praising ‘community art’ in eight slightly different ways. Only the 14th and final recommendation dared address the mystery of how funding decisions are made by suggesting that the Arts Council set up a ‘feedback process’ for unsuccessful applicants. The fact is that there can be no objective decision-making system for arts funding. But although the inquiry came close to openly admitting this, the awkward implications were longfingered by the usual approach of calling for better information for the next inquiry. That should give the Arts Council plenty of time to set up a sub-quango, constituted as a charity or perhaps a non-profit company, to hand out the £9 million on its behalf. ArtGrantNI, anyone?
As I watched, I felt physically overwhelmed, embarrassingly on the brink of tears or nausea. I realised that for years, as both a child and adult, this had been my normality. Only after a decade of so-called ‘peace’ did I encounter the repression with which this film confronted me. Mary McIntyre
Stills from in the name of god Robin Wylie (1972)
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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No. 44
the taste of wild cinema Mark Cousins When I fell in love with movies, in Belfast in the 70s, film was a supply economy. There were no DVDs or videos. If I wanted to see Psycho, I had to wait until BBC did a Hitchcock season. I saw Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil on bbc2, and had to wait another decade to see it again. Maybe such movies were on at the Queen’s Film Theatre but, to be honest, I don’t think I even knew about it until I was about 16. So, on the whole, I had had to be patient for each hit of my drug of choice, cinema. My suppliers, I now know, were people in programme acquisitions departments in the bbc or Channel 4, who bought the rights to screen films because they cared about Hitchcock, or Fellini, and who felt that people across these islands should have a chance to see their movies. I was at the mercy, the caprice, of these people, and subject to their knowledge enthusiasms, canon and blind spots. I recall no African films on TV in those days, for example. A supply economy, as I say. I was passive and needy. I heard about Citizen Kane when I was 11 but didn’t see it until I was 18. Seven long years of waiting. What waiting does to desire and appetite. Then things started to shift, in the nature of the economy and my role within it. Video had come along and Belfast’s pirate video economy started to respond to demand. You want to see ET before it’s in the cinema? Why not. We have it in the back room behind our video shop. I saw Friday 13th th when I wanted to, rather than when some movie buff in London put in on TV – which, of course, they probably didn’t because it was sordid and kitsch and un-Reithian. Just what I wanted. Then, in 1983, I went to uni. I saw Citizen Kane there. I graduated. I became director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I started to have a say in what was shown, in how the canon was formed. I became a curator. I saw more at film festivals – wholesale, so to speak – thus expanding my knowledge, then I showed what I liked, and what I could get of what I liked, to the Edinburgh audiences. I had become, in a small way, a taste-maker. I’m sure the supply of videos improved in these years but I had so much access to cinema – African
films, and the eye boggling head movies of Jodorowsky, that were still not on VHS – that I didn’t much notice. Then I got the job of presenting Moviedrome on bbc2 and started my own TV show, Scene by Scene. Talk about having landed! People didn’t much like me on Moviedrome, but I had a clear sense of being part of the push to expand knowledge of, and passion for, cult cinema. I asked for melodramas and the films of Nic Roeg to be added to the westerns and more male stuff that my (superior) predecessor Alex Cox had selected. I introduced an Atom Egoyan film and Lawrence of Arabia, but said onscreen that I liked neither. I put La Haine on, and Bad Timing Timing, and The Hitchhiker Hitchhiker. My TV series finished as, with the internet and the arrival of DVD, the supply economy completed its volte face to become a demand economy. In recent years, almost everything has become available, even that that’s not, in a way: In the last five years, I’ve re-watched the great Imamura films on illegal websites, bought the Singing Ringing Tree, which I’ve wanted to see again since boyhood, on DVD, and, frequently, read film books at my PC so that when a scene is described, I can watch it on Youtube. Such a turnaround in the nature of film supply and availability is, surely good news. The waiting is over. Most things are available. The cherries are there to pick. Hmmm. Does it feel this good? Yes and no. We are in a time of movie plenitude, yet I have caveats and concerns which relate to the fact that, in the end, supply or demand economies are still economies. My first beef is a biggie and we might as well slap it out on the table. For all the super abundance of films available, our local cinemas and multiplexes provide a shite diet. Want to see Twilight: New Moon every 15 minutes? You got it. Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre? Once in a blue moon, if that. And the bus shelters and billboards are full of Avatar or 2012. This smells of narrowing of choice to me, and bullying. We might have a great choice of films these days, but are we really free to choose? My second thought is about how appetites and desires build in an era of plenitude. When I finally bought The
Still from The Pornographers (1966), Shohei Imamura
Singing Ringing Tree, I didn’t watch it for a month. When I had it in my hands, that was enough, in a way – my ardour drooped. Maybe I’d been snacking too much that week on other films? Unlike my concern in the last paragraph, which was broadly about capitalism, this one is about libido and longing and cannot be changed, I believe. What certainly can be changed is my third thought about film now. With so much on DVD and the internet, TV stations are showing a narrowing range of films. They reckon that niche audiences can sniff out their own niches more. They have a kind of gaydar for good movies and spot them a mile away. There’s something in this but it fails to address the far bigger question of how demand is informed. How do you know that Santa Sangre might change your life? Who’s going to tell you? Film blogs, movie magazines, Quentin Tarantino, Mark Kermode, friends, fan sites, Google, newspaper critics, film books, Facebook and, perhaps, even me, that’s who. What have all these things in common? We are signposters. We point somewhere and say ‘look over there and you’ll find cherries.’ Like good DJs, we are envoys from the unknown, explorers. Curation is no longer just a part of film culture, now that supply isn’t really an issue, it is central to film culture. It creates the menu, the awareness, the need, the desire, the appetite. To do so, its raw material, is knowledge. If you think the best films made in the 70s were American, then that’s what you’ll show in your 70s season. If you don’t know that Ethiopia has made great films, then you won’t show them. If all you know about Kazakhstan comes from Borat, Borat then you won’t show any of the brilliant Kazakh movies. If you haven’t heard of Kira Muratova, or Farough Farrokhzad or Astrid Henning Jensen, then you
aren’t going to show some of the best movies ever made by women. Recently I was chuffed to be asked to select a season on films at the National Film Theatre in London to tie in with my new book. One of my programmes was kids cinema (The The Boot from Iran and Palle Alone in the World). I was amazed to hear that never before at the NFT had a critic who’d been asked to curate a general season, included cinema for children. Why? Because of the canon, because they are mostly male, perhaps, and because, I’d argue, they hadn’t seen films as wonderful as The Boot Boot. It’s easy to rant about these things, and sound sanctimonious, but I have an image in my head of a lush garden, blossoming with movie delights, with us in the middle, drowsy on the perfume perhaps, or just too lethargic or slothful, to get up and explore. Maybe the demand economy is making us slothful? Are we just picking up what’s close to us, what’s readily available? I think so. There’s a season of Jean Eustache movies on at the moment in Edinburgh, where I live. I’ve only seen La mamam et la putain before, but have a huge poster of it on my wall. I love it. The fact that his films are now showable – supertitled by a computer – shows that, filmwise, we are in arcadia. But I haven’t been to all the screenings in the season. I’ve been working non-stop, so that’s most of the reason. But is part of it the fact that, now they’re available, I can see them some other time? I think so. But I know, too, that I’ve raved about La maman et la putain over the years and, at the first Eustache screening, two people told me that they were there because of my raves. My sign-posting. I was moved. Such things are the currency of modern film culture.
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
The following is an extract from the diary of the Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure, Nelson McCausland (DUP). The prominent Orangeman’s book, Full Nelson: The Stormont Grappler, will be published in March by LOL Press. Press It is translated from the Ulster Scots by your eyes and brain. Dear Diary, I wake up in bed with a hard one, a rawdogging hairy stumper. And a horror of great darkness falls upon me. Here’s the goof: what is art? It’s the gruesome sheugh of a monster’s mouth. I used to teach science in North Belfast. Science teaches us we’re meaningless, beautyless human flukes, floating in the void. So does North Belfast. And the only way out is lovely death forever. But I just can’t live with that. I must go on forever, or I can’t go on at all. I must go on, interminably. That’s where art saves my life. In art, hunger is bread; drouth is whiskey; wishing for certainty makes it so. Art is certainty, so it must be. If you aren’t sure, it isn’t art. That’s why modern art isn’t art at all: it stirs such horrid feelings of vast swirling doubt, of finitude, of humble incertitude. Real art tells us we were right all along, mammy and daddy were right all along. And these four things am I sure of, for good mammy art told me so: • The love of a lovely lamb, Lord Jesus Christ, shall save us for eternity. • By the Wood of Suicides, on the hot sands of Hell, sodomites shall aimlessly hobble, their tears the source of the oceans. Gay pride is nothing to be proud of of. • I shall never ever go to a Roman Catholic ‘mass,’ even should the duties of office oblige me. There’s no theological prohibition on such attendance – I’d be merely a spectator of blasphemies – but I’m just too scared of transubstantiation. My whine might turn to blood. Byy similar logic, I don’t watch Westerns, in case I get shot, nor wank to porn, in case I catch clap, or wear boxer shorts, lest some dwarf punch me. • I believe in a diverse, tolerant, and inclusive society, ‘a shared and better future for all.’ I believe in a better future because I believe a better future is better than a worse one. This prophetic visionary vision is neither tautologous, so vague
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to both believe something and, in a nontrivial way, not believe it at the same time. Caitríona Ruane says Socrates says ‘it’s plain that the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing’ (Republic Republic 436b). But Socrates hadn’t two as to be meaningless, nor (considering brains. In addition to the law of nonmy vision of the postmortem future) contradiction, being a double-jobbing completely contradictory. I always wrap Pooh Bah allows me to warp the other my mantra – ‘a shared and better future laws of logic: everything is the same as for all’ – in nice scare quotes, but not itself, except me, cause I’m different to because pesky legal obligations regardme; and, completely true things or coming diversity and equality require me to pletely false things are either completely parrot it sarcastically. true or completely false, except in my case (pardon me, law of the excluded Nor do I have t things can be both ‘human rights’ (except when expedient completely true AND completely false at Dear Reader, to me) or for that spat druid mucus, the one and the same time: up is down; black Irish language. Nor do I much like the is white; day is night; green is orange This page was supposed to contain an article describing GAA, the bouncy ball wing of the IRA. (but not conversely); rights are wrong; a day in the life of Nelson McCausland. Unfortunately, The politically-correct-gone-mad olitically-correct-gone-mad say if . But it’s not all our legal advisors have told us that we can’t publish it you add the wets, the gays, the Gaels, the gravy. I put myself in an embarrassing without the likelihood of being sued. Taigs and the fungus tongues together, position when I, as Councillor, have to then I offend the cultural identity of the ask myself, the Minister, for money for Rather than join the queue of scientists, novelists, majority of ‘people’ of Northern Iremyself from him who’s also me, too. doctors and academics at the doors of the libel courts land, even if you don’t count the phlegSometimes I blush, stall and fall out with we have decided instead to direct you to mish-speaking homopapists thrice. That me. I call myself ‘Maybe Face Nelson,’ the Mr. McCausland’s own writings. We believe that in makes my positio many ways they cannot be improved upon crookfor who never gives anyone a straight comedy, untenable, they hey say. But we Ulster Scots answer, himself included. Except that’s an effect only enhanced by the knowledge that they don’t have a word for ‘untenable.’ Nor so (un)true. And, sometimes, I just give were not intended as a joke and were written by our are we sure what ‘ridiculous’ is. it to myself. I call this ‘fiduciary onanism’ Minister of Culture. MAYBE I JUST NEED TO GET MY DICK WET. ‘Dick’ In is particular what I call I go up to Stormont and sit on the blog we my enjoy reading: beard. I get in the bath with my thinkfor the rest of the day. Don’t tell anyone. ing thong on. Dick hides my head’s red ability to work forWe’re not allowed to use the internet at About the Minister’s the Assembly comedy. I have a thinking pig’s face, work. My blog* is full of errors: the ubsject and Belfast City Council at the same time: and eyes like tiny bluehttp://minutes.belfastcity.gov.uk/ieListMeetings. fists made of fear. right ot hightligh hightlight; t; exampels t; Inside this mess roam my two brains. I bradcasting; footbally; bradcasting footbally aspx?CId=115&Year=2009 keep one brain for my Arts and Culture . But these are just typos: it About his attitude to homosexuality: ministry, the other for(see my Belfast job as aTelegraph Belfast 1/9/09) wouldn’t do to have a Culture Minister City Councillor. AndAnd eachbest never speaks who not only looks like, but is as literof all, Nelson’s Blog: to the other, otherwise there might be http://theministerspen.blogspot.com ate and demented as, Maggie Thatcher’s what spoilsports call ‘a conflict of intersalty snatch in glasses. But some aren’t est.’ I foam and wet myself. typos, when I refer to ‘[t]he building We hope to return to the subject of libel in a as future As Arts and Culture Minister, I’m , which we will commemo‘Law’ issue of The Vacuum. obliged to serve the cultural needs of all 19,100th 19,100 th anniverthe people of Northern Ireland, but my sary of the ship’s building will be special, The Editors position on Belfast City Council’s Develsince it coincides with the revised, postopment Committee obliges me to fight credit-crunch completion date of the for the cultural needs and interests of Titanic Quarter redevelopment. Belfast ahead of other cultural centres: Just joking. The he real aim is to have Lisburn, Larne and Knockloughrim. the Titanic Quarter finished when the My Council Brain tells me the proposed gravitational pull of a finitely expandNational Gallery for Northern Ireland ing universe causes it to collapse onto must be in Belfast; m my Ministry Brain itself before crunching, banging and tells me I should at least consider other bouncing round again to another 1912 places: Æ’s Lurgan; Sloane’s Dunganin several trillion years. Our monitornon; the Yeats homeland in Down; Greable, sustainable, financially viable, pergory Campbell’s Londonderry. In the formance objective, going forward: we’re end, which makes no sense, I disagree after some of that Ground Zero money. with myself entirely. And I tell logic: fuck Only 1,517 people died the first time you, logic. Fuck ck you, cement of the uniTitanic sank. Next time it sinks we’ll fill verse. the ship, beside lovely bland flats, to its Self-disagreement is tricky: you have 3,547 capacity. If they all die, we’ll kick
nelson’s night thoughts Stephen Mullan
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
Y
No. 44
9/11’s ass, and the Troubles’s. Kerching! Hubris, heartbreak, spaces in the universe where people used to be: there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t prostitute ourselves in this zoo of human misery. Sucking anguish from Satan’s hind tit is part of our cultural tourism project: to protect, nurture and grow Northern Ireland’s embodied, institutional and objective cultural capital. ‘Cultural capital’: I think whoever wrote that piece of non-oxymoronic, corporate poetry into my department’s mission statement should be knighted, rather than kicked in the shins with a chainsaw and fingered in the ass. With my leg. Until they die. I blog about my appearance at my alma mater mater, Carr’s Glen Primary School: ‘I was delighted to be there and equipped with passport, hat and walking stick I was Phineas Fogg, a character from the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days.’ Or do I mean ‘Phileas Fogg,’ rather than the ‘Phineas’ of various adaptations? I’m not sure. Maybe I mean ‘Willy Fog,’ who now moonlights as the lion on the DUP logo. In the book, Mr Fogg’s wealth is a mystery to all (no one knows what he actually does for a living), and he is a prejudicial, xenophobic, sexist, imperious, miserly, globetrotting, crusty, conservative, Victorian throwback, suspected crook and Daily Telegraph reader who is exceptionally cruel to his legion of underlings. Nothing like me at all then: it was quite the disguise. I talked to the teachers there. I told them what I told my party conference: the biggest cultural change I want to effect is in the field of education. Rather than encouraging integrated education, I want controlled, ‘unionist’ schools to teach orange instruments, like the Lambeg drum and the fife flute: ‘why should Ulster children not have access to Ulster culture?’ I want these schools to teach Ulster Scots language, dancing and history, as Roman Catholic schools teach their Irish opposites. I want our children to see the world through orange peepers, just as them over there see through green. And my department has already given almost £1 million to charmingsounding bands like ‘Upper Falls Protestant Boys,’ ‘Crumlin Young Loyalist Flute Band,’ ‘Pride of Ardoyne,’ ‘Holy Cross Accordion Band,’ ‘Hounds of Ulster,’ ‘Ballymaconnelly Sons of Conquerors’ and ‘Ulster Volunteer Flute Band.’ I think the greatest art peddles the certainties of sectarian agendas. And I intend to throw much more of your money that way. I turn to the reading pupils: ‘Don’t worry,’ I say; ‘there’s no need, childer, no need at all to be sad and terrified.’
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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what is art?
‘
Ian Sansom Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral begins with possibly the most unpromising sentence in English literary history, more unpromising even than the beginning of a Dan Brown. (Angels and Demons, remember, begins, ‘Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.’ This, my linguistics friends assure me, is an example of an occupational term used with no determiner as a bare role NP premodifier of a proper name. It’s awful, in other words.) Roth begins American Pastoral with two unpromising words: ‘The Swede.’ Or, rather, in my English paperback edition, ‘THE SWEDE’, which makes it look like it’s going to be a book about a giant vegetable. It’s not a book about a giant vegetable; Americans call a swede a rutabaga, and American Pastoral has no more to do with vegetables than A Clockwork Orange has to do with wind-up fruit. American Pastoral is a book about a man, Seymour Irving Levov, who looks Swedish. But he’s not Swedish. He’s Jewish. He’s not what he seems. Which is what the book is about – Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov, ‘a human platitude’ – slowly waking up to the way the world is, and what he is.
As The Swede’s brother puts it, in one of those surfy riffs which are what make Philip Roth one of the greats, ‘You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything.’ Seymour Levov is THE SWEDE, but he might almost be a swede. Or at least a turnip-head. I’ll be honest, when it comes to art, I’m a lot like Levov. I have no idea what art is. Kurt Schwitters thought he knew. ‘What art is, you know as well as I do: it is nothing more than rhythm. And if that’s true, I don’t have to burden myself with imitation or with soul, but can modestly and simply give you rhythm, in any material whatsoever: bus tickets, oil paints, building blocks, that’s right, you heard me, building blocks, or words in poetry, or sounds in music, or you just name it. That’s why you mustn’t look too hard at the material; because that isn’t what it’s all about. Don’t look for some hidden imitation of nature, don’t ask about expressions of the soul, but try, in spite of the unusual materials, to catch
formative experiences
into a room with a canvas by René Magritte hanging on the wall. The painting was called Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières). The bottom half of the painting showed a house (a Parisian villa perhaps?) at night surrounded by trees. The top half of the painting showed lots of Magritte’s signature clouds bobbing around in an azure blue sky on a summer’s day. Empire of Light stopped me in my tracks. I remember staring at it for several seconds and not being able to work out what it was and whether it was a night scene or a day scene because for those seconds of confusion what I was seeing was a depiction of a night and a day scene in the same frame. Eventually, my brain re-calibrated itself and I saw Empire of Light was a cunning blend of night and day. After that came a great rush of excitement. It was the combination – putting night and day together in the way Magritte had – that was brilliant. Then there was the way the conceit had been executed – the
When I was twelve or thirteen, I was taken on holiday to Venice. Besides St Mark’s Square and several churches (all now forgotten) I was also taken to see the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The works were housed, as far as I remember, in a great crumbling palace (was it crumbling? – my memory has probably made that bit up). I do distinctly remember wondering through several small rooms (the building made a huge impression) and in particular I remember the moment when I stepped
the rhythm of the forms and the colors. This has about as much to do with bolshevism as a flapper’s hairdo. It is, however, the essence of all art, i.e., that every artwork throughout history has had to fulfil this primary requirement to be rhythm, or else it isn’t art’ (Schwitters ‘What Art Is, You Know …’, 1926, trans. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg). It’s nice, of course, to have a brisk, no-nonsense definition of art – what else are German avant-garde artists for? But … Surely art is more than rhythm, Kurt? Otherwise, wouldn’t the sound of my tip-tappy-typing these words be art? Wouldn’t it? Would it? One could appeal to many authorities – to other German avant-garde artists, perhaps, or to Kant, to Hume, to Professors of Aesthetics and of Art – until the cows came home, or you smelt your own flesh burning, and you would still have no agreed answer as to what art is and what it isn’t. One might do better to trace the history of the concept of art, as the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut does in his book La Défaite ééfaite de la pensée (1987). Finkielkraut believes that culture has ended up in its sorry state precisely because we have been unwilling
empire mpire of light (l’e (l’empire des lumières) res res) rené magritte 1953-54. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
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to distinguish between art and non-art. We have become victims, he argues, of ‘la non-pensée’ (non-thinking). In order to distinguish between those things that are art and those that aren’t, Finkielkraut suggests that we need to appeal to a set of ideal norms. He doesn’t specify exactly what are these ideal norms, alas, though one assumes they are the good old-fashioned ideal norms of providing moral uplift and emotional catharsis, and maybe delivering some sort of wisdom and profundity of thought. Which is why a nice hand-knit sweater is not art, say, and a symphony is. Finkielkraut may well be right. But I’m not a philosopher, so it’s hard for me to judge. Let me return instead to American Pastoral. The Swede’s brother, Jerry, decides to make a coat out of hamster skins. He’s not nuts, he’s trying to impress a girl and he can’t afford to buy her a fur coat. So he dries out the hamster skins, sews them together, and finishes it off with a silk lining made from an old white parachute. This is what Roth writes about the coat: ‘He was going to send it to the girl in a Bamberger’s coat box of his mother’s, wrapped in lavender tissue paper and tied with velvet ribbon. But when the coat was finished, it was so stiff – because of the idiotic way he’d dried the skins, his father would later explain – that he couldn’t get it to fold up in the box.’ Is Jerry’s coat a work of art? Is Philip Roth writing about Jerry’s coat a work of art? Think about it. Seriously. What are you, a swede?
way the two had been so blended that for a while it had seemed that the painting was a representation of two things that were never naturally together (and that was so exciting too). Finally, there was the feeling that came off the canvas – Empire of Light gave me the feeling that a house seen in the dark gave me, and that a summer’s sky gave me, but it gave me these feelings at the same time with the result that my reaction was infinitely more powerful than if I’d seen either a night or a day scene on its own. Over forty years later I still remember the moment I saw Empire of Light. I think that must say something about Magritte’s powers. I also often find myself thinking about the painting as an emblem of what, as an artist, copying Magritte’s technique, I might myself do. We can all put one idea across but how much better if we can put two contradictory ones into the viewer (or in my case the readers’) mind at the same time. Now that’s an achievement worth aspiring to. Carlo Gebler
activities which are artistic
A small selection of illustrations from the encyclopaedia Taxonomie des Activité Artistique et Non-artistique du Monde, the ongoing work of Fergus Mackerel, North East Education and Library Board’s Assistant Director of Technical Services. The Taxonomie aims to be a comprehensive list of art-producing and non-art-producing activities classified by region of the world; time of day; animal, mineral and vegetable matter; flippered, cloven and webbed feet and many other equally apposite categories, all helpfully illustrated. The manuscript and notes currently fill 72 cornflakes boxes. The project will be completed by the year 2018. Mr. Mackerel is currently in negotiation with Cullybacky Council concerning the publication of the finished work.
making potato men
activities which are artistic when sponsored by a city council training a crow to recite the good friday agreement
frolicking with a pig
blasphemy
when made with a cement mixer
made from berries grown in freud’s garden
types of jam making which are artistic when made from radioactive berries
activities which are artistic when conducted in an art gallery cohabiting with a coyote
plumbing
running
being shot in the arm
bricklaying
activities which were artistic in the nineteenth century murder
tuberculosis
photographing naked children
drug-taking
activities which are not artistic face painting
pet portraiture
hairdressing
mayoral portraiture
juggling
tourist board advertising
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
December 2009
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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filling the arts hole Tim Loane Is public funding of the arts a good idea? Of course it is in an ideal world, but with what we have right here and now? In Northern Ireland in 2009 we have not only an Arts Council but a plague of local council arts officers and unlike any other part of the UK our very own bespoke government Department of Culture Arts and Leisure. That’s an expensive infrastructure like never before; one we could only have dreamed of twenty years ago, so how come there’s so much less art? (count the theatres in Belfast) There’s much more hard-earned public cash spent on the arts than before so why is most of the art so shite? (check the local stuff in this year’s Belfast Festival) In my view, the answer’s simple – because firstly, not enough of that cash actually gets through to the professional artists (the few left living here) and secondly, the infrastructure itself has devised its very own institutional corruption. Not that anyone’s getting rich or pulling a fast one here; but everyone from DCAL down to the lowly part-time admin assistant is colluding in a bureaucratic sleight of hand that keeps them all in a job (plus pension and expenses) while ensuring that professional artistic enterprise is kept to a minimum. Or perhaps all those nice warm admin offices have been rented simply to ensure that money is spent equally on catholics and protestants? In previous years the little there was went simply on art. (Imagine that: public pennies spent on art and no one ever knew if it was for prods or taigs!) Or maybe it’s just another excruciating over-compensation as we come to terms with having our own government? It could be this orgy of form-filling and box-ticking portrays our pathological parity of esteem, the fear of our sectarian soul being laid bare. But I doubt it. It took long enough to get our politicians to engage with the arts but soon as we showed them there were votes in it their beady eyes lit up at a whole new arena to play in (with the added chance of meeting someone famous) and a way to grab more cash for their constituents (that’s their constituents now, not anybody else’s!). This becomes even more obvious when you bring languages into it (baise-moi puce!) making arts and cultural funding just another part of the
sectarian carve-up that we all voted for back then in our sweet naïveté. We were reminded recently how lucky we are with the £17 million renovation of the Ulster Museum, and I was grateful; until I heard about the £61 million spent on the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford. Now that’s how you cherish art and culture. But then we’re well used to having the lowest per capita spend compared to… (yawn, fart, yawn again)… that now we have devolved administration we can only conclude there’s nothing accidental about this paucity of public funds. It has to be Stormont/Arts Council policy to fund the professional arts just enough to keep them on the breadline and afraid to rock the boat but not nearly enough to flourish. To drag them through hoops in a process that stifles imagination and crushes creativity, blunting the teeth of the artist while force-feeding them soup that they can only keep coming back for.
i purse-string-pullers will always favour community ‘art’ that segregates our population and spoon-feeds us in the safety of our own ghettoes, at the expense of professional art which can draw people out of their comfort zones and into a shared civic space to be challenged and entertained alongside other citizens in a truly democratic arena. To maintain this policy, the Arts Admin/Managements have evolved into a coven of PR-driven civil servants so that we have for instance, the current literature for the planned Mac arts centre proudly declaiming that it ‘will be like no other venue in Europe in terms of its balance between community-based engagement and the performing and visual arts’. (Because we know so much better than them’ns in Paris, Rome, Barcelona and London obviously) And we must all be proud that it aspires to ‘make a contribution to Belfast’s tourism targets’. High on the list of every
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istrators) to print lovely brochures and organise lovely receptions about it. In my experience patrons patronise; there’s no such thing as free money, it’s about bending over so the CEO can show his wife how good he is at getting people to bend over. I’ve touched my toes for arts sponsors when it’s meant the difference between a theatre show happening or not, but invariably private sponsorship only works for larger institutions like a festival, orchestra or cinema, or a commercial entertainment venue like the Grand Opera House (which for some bizarre reason is still Arts Council funded unlike any other comparable theatre in the UK). Time was a theatre company produced plays. Now they’ve to spend so much time and money on (employing more admin people to do) outreach, audience development, targeting social need, market research, the poor things have no energy left to do plays. And certainly no desire left to change the world. I recently got an e-mail inviting me to a fundraising workshop costing over a hundred Euros (they’re always a step ahead with the cash down there!). How long till we have workshops on how to run fundraising workshops? Or to produce brochures? Or to hold consulta-
f
Renovation of museum in medium-sized English town, the Ashmolean: £61 million
p
Renovation of Ulster museum: £17 million
You’ve got to admit, keeping our artists hungry is one sure way to turn them into teachers and social workers, bringing us to the ultimate ‘c’ word – community art – that subtle strategy of social engineering that solves all inner city problems by tossing them a few potato-print classes, dance lessons and (the real proof there is no God) creative writing workshops. But as our local (democratically elected) politicians tell us, the man (and woman) on the street love their face-painting and their fireworks, and the publicly-funded Patrick’s Day events are a healthy celebration of our ancient culture just like the Twelfth of July, with both festivals exploring our unique complex identities in a spirit of self-expression and inclusivity. It’s entirely accidental that most of those involved are drunk and wear love-bites to match their Celtic/Rangers shirts (del. as app). So long as there are local elections the
good sculptors’ dreams and playwrights’ ambitions, don’t you think? The Lottery, as predicted all along has been the biggest comedy of all. It may have been great for the construction industry and its very own sub-group of administrators, but it’s done precisely what we were promised it wouldn’t by in effect replacing so much central government funding. But at least now every town has its own lovely new arts centre (with its own lovely new admin team) so that although there’s no money to pay for the art to go in it, at least every community in Northern Ireland has equal access to Your Uncle Hugo. How’s that for targeting social need? Then of course there’s the challenge of commercial sponsorship. Private money’s even harder to come by so they came up with ‘Arts and Business’ (yes, another team of publicly-paid admin-
tions? Any day now they’ll announce a consultation on the consultations done by local government and publicly funded bodies on the arts, and every one of them in search of that elusive ‘Arts strategy’. What about simply ‘To have more art, and for it to be better’? Between the economic crisis and the up-coming Olympics, arts funding as we know it is bound to collapse, and that just might be for the best, while civil servants and politicians see the arts as simply a party-political toy or a threat. At least then we could start again properly with a sincere belief in why the arts should be funded publicly. In a place crippled by religion, ironically it’s that faith that’s missing: the simple understanding that real art is vital to any living culture and can only benefit the beating heart of a mature society.
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
formative experiences In the winter of 1994, I was a would-befilmmaker from Belfast with a few homemade movies behind me but with little chance of fulfilling my artistic ambitions. In a bid to get closer to real filmmakers, I started working as a film reviewer, which give me the opportunity to see all the latest movies and interview film stars and directors. For me, the breakthrough came with a unforgettable encounter at a London press conference. I was there to meet the cast and crew of a stylish new thriller titled Leon. The film’s French director Luc Besson swaggered into the room with supreme nonchalance smoking a ciga-
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
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rette and wearing a white fur collared jacket. His complete apathy towards the press pack was impressive as most of the other interviewees had been desperate to please. Besson had previously directed La Femme Nikita, which had just been remade by Hollywood into a far inferior film. When pointedly asked what he thought about his work being crass copied by the Americans he memorably replied ‘If I was a painter and I was painting an apple and someone came along and asked can I paint your apple too, I would say... sure’. A confused silence simmered throughout the room. I then had to interview Besson in a one to one session where we sat facing each other. He looked at me through his designer sunglasses and almost sighed ‘What’s your question kid?’ Watching my dictaphone turn in silence I thought to myself, ‘I don’t actually want to ask you anything Luc – certainly not how you do what you do; I want to do what you do!’ I came home with a blank tape, quit my job as a film reviewer and nonchalantly threw myself full-time into the world of professional film-making. Brian Henry Martin
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THE VACU CUUUM ISSUE 44 DECEMBER 2009
Published by Factotum The art of the Baskervilles
formative experiences I am one of those people who, weddings and funerals aside, will not set foot in places of worship at home but will spend hours admiring them when abroad. About fifteen years ago I was in Magdeburg Cathedral, when I found myself face to face with the First World War memorial by Ernst Barlach. Antiwar memorial would be more accurate: a huddle of soldiers – one German, one French, one Russian – in outsized greatcoats at whose feet, and seeming to sink into the earth, are the heads and shoulders of the dead and the driven-mad-bybattle. It would not quite be true to say I had never seen anything like it, for in fact the figures called to mind the Sad
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Sack comics I read when I was a kid, but I had certainly never seen a more human monument. The Nazis called the sculpture degenerate and had it removed, hounding Barlach until his death in 1938. It was restored to the cathedral at the war’s end and became a rallying point for opponents of the East German regime. I keep a photograph of it on the wall of my study. The quality is crap, its power, fifteen years on, undiminished. Glenn Patterson
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the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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don’t hide your love away collecting and collections in northern ireland
Helen Sharp In the last few months the Royal Bank of Scotland (now owned 70% by the taxpayer) has been receiving much poking and prodding about it’s huge collection of art. It owns one of the most significant collections of art in the UK and now that we own 70% of it, we are demanding to know where it is? What’s in it? Who looks after it and where we can see it? Following this lead I am having a little look at some of Northern Ireland’s art collections and asking some similar questions. I have had varied responses from varied folk via telephone and email in my search to find the workings of our cultural pack rats*. Many did not have time to answer my questions regarding the collections and some PR mouthpieces didn’t have the inclination. The resulting text therefore is really an overview of what the average Joe (moi) can find out about Northern Irish Art collections; with the addition of some specific facts and figures peppered amongst it thanks to the more helpful Cerberus type creatures guarding the dusty world of ‘collections’. As I started with The Royal Bank of Scotland’s collection, I might as well give you a bit of an overview of their situation. The chairman of Arts and Business, Colin Tweedy, has recently accused RBS of having hidden away its collection in its corporate offices and vaults. The difficulty is that the collection seemed to have disappeared. I was worried it had been thrown away and damaged. The Guardian 11/10/09 The collection is made up of both the RBS’s original collection and also the 1,400 pieces collected by Natwest when the banks merged. The collection is valued into the millions and is some 2,200 pieces strong. The collection includes work by the likes of Frank Auerbach, Samuel Peploe, Callum Innes, David Hockney and LS Lowry but none of the work has been on show publically for at least six years. * A lovely term I heard meaning someone who collects or hoards things.
The Guardian newspaper have made their own investigation into the mysteries of the collection and were recently told by the RBS spokesperson that there was no longer an Art Curator on the staff. They also confirmed that the bank had recently sold works from the Natwest collection of post-war paintings. The Guardian went on to discover that despite the bank’s claim to regularly lend artworks to galleries and museums, in fact it has 300 pieces in storage and only one on loan (to the Ulster Bank in Dublin as it happens). There exists a charity called the Public Catalogue Foundation whose ambition it is to photograph and list 200,000 paintings in publically owned collections. Its director Andrew Ellis has invited RBS to join the foundation’s programme. The programme is also involved in a joint venture with the bbc in an aim to put its paintings onto an online gallery for all to see. Royal Bank of Scotland recently issued this statement: We are determined to fulfill the responsibilities that come with the support we have been privileged to receive [that wee £20bn bailout from the Treasury] and that come with our wider position in society. To that end we are actively engaged in discussions around the art collection and considering options for sharing this more widely than we have in the past. The Guardian 11/10/09 Hmmm. Focusing on home and some of the Northern Irish collections, we may start with an example of a Northern Irish collection held outside the country. The Wolverhampton Art Gallery in England has a collection of works that are both Northern Irish Art and also 100% art reflective of The Troubles. In the introduction to the work it states that the collection was started in the 1980s and is apparently the only collection of its kind in a regional gallery. It’s an interesting collection and includes work by over 30 artists including Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy and John Keane. Though this collection is curated specifically for a reflection on conflict, there is space here (but not
time) for a much bigger debate on what art works are generally chosen to ‘represent’ Northern Ireland. I have seen it first hand amongst visiting curators to Belfast – some seem to seek to ignore any work that does not have the mark of war upon it. Contentious as this may seem to some, war and suffering sells. This is not an indictment on any artist or artwork whose work is involved with the conflict here, and indeed any of its resonances, but it is my opinion that often visiting curators and collectors want the work that will evoke the biggest reaction or the brashest representation of suffering. This to me does not equal the best artwork, the best reflection of the complexities of conflict, or take into consideration any of the work inspired by the voluptuous delights of a country, war-aside… And so to another selection of artworks, one that describes itself as Ulster Art: The Ulster Television collection is some 235 works strong and includes sculpture, painting, print and photography. The UTV collection has its beginnings in interior decoration. The initial artworks were bought when the firm was founded in 1959 to fill the bare walls of Havelock House on the Ormeau Road. The Chairman’s wife, the Countess of Antrim, was an artist and buying art was, according to the current UTV Art Curator Theo Snoddy, simply a means to brighten the place up. The chronology of the collection’s expansion goes like this: for a few years the directors of UTV went out and about to things like the Royal Ulster Academy annual shows or to a local art dealer’s gallery and bought a few works, the only incentive being to add more bling to the corridors. It wasn’t until about twenty years ago that Theo Snoddy was brought in to make an inventory of the pictures in the building in Belfast and also in the London office. An exhibition was held in Barnett Demesne and was received to such acclaim that it was decided the collection must be developed and strengthened. Subsequently works by artists such as George Campbell, Gerard Dillon and William Conor were purchased and the works have been exhibited widely especially in Ireland where Snoddy comments: This has meant that many hundreds of people living in the Republic have seen works by Ulster artists whom they knew little about, and certainly if they had heard about them they would never have seen these pictures before.
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In contrast to the Wolverhampton Collection, Snoddy comments that there are no recurring themes within the works in the collection. He suggests this is because there was never anything thematic about his curation; it was just about walking into a gallery and choosing something he thought was completely different from anything already on the walls in Havelock House. Now, there are substantial collections of Northern Irish Art that exist in other places within our lands and beyond; The University of Ulster has a collection as does The Ulster Museum, IMMA, the NI Civil Service. My efforts to find out more about these were somewhat thwarted, some by time, but mainly by lack of interest in replying to my emails, returning my phone calls or returning my carrier pigeon. Nevertheless, my investigations did not prove wholly fruitless as I managed to get my hands on a copy of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Acquisition Survey Report and this gave me a good insight into the history, state and content of their substantial collection of Northern Irish art and in particular their processes of purchase for contemporary art. It’s dry so revel in the fact it is condensed here for your enjoyment†. The predecessor to the Arts Council was the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). At its inception in 1943, one of the first actions taken by the board was to purchase a number of paintings in order to support and encourage local artists. The purchased works were to form the beginning of a permanent collection for circulation within the public domain. CEMA was very vocal in its endeavours to support local artists and ‘extend some patronage’ to them also. By 1947, the purchasing policy had brought the total works in the collection to 16 but times were tough and the money for purchasing dried up. This restraint on budgets became a recurring problem and so the collection grew slowly – but it did continue to grow with selections of work being made by the Council’s art advisory committee mainly selecting work from local exhibitions. In 1956 the collection was disseminated across many hospitals and schools and a number of works were given to the collection from, among others, F.E. McWilliam who gifted a portfolio of lithographs by artists such as Henry Moore, Duncan Grant and John Piper. In 1962 the Arts Council of 3 † ACNI Acquisitions Survey Research Report Report, 2007
Art storage at Queen’s University photograph: Chris Heaney
the he art issue ‘It’s crude and it’s vulgar. There’s no question about that.’ Cllr. Jim Rogers ‘I
December 2009
3 Northern
Ireland (ACNI) was formed and with this a new painting exhibition competition was established. CEMA had previously put aside money raised from a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and with this money, the ACNI acquired 11 paintings to bolster the collection and to bring before the Northern Irish public. The regulations of the grant were set out as to ensure that the work selected for purchase, Would be representative of the more progressive contemporary work being done and that [it] would demonstrate that strong virtue of a living art, a readiness to explore and experiment. This competition was held biennially and in addition to purchases made for the collection from here, the Gulbenkian Foundation agreed that grant money could also be used to buy work from London Galleries. With advisors in place from the Tate and from the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in 1965 the ACNI’s policy was to form a collection to compliment that of the Ulster Museum and to be widely representative of contemporary art. The ACNI released the following statement: The Arts Council attaches great importance to maintaining its collection, local purchases after all gave encouragement to local artists and purchases from outside Northern Ireland can inject into the community, stimulating new trends and ideas. Unfortunately they released this statement a matter of weeks before an accidental fire destroyed most of the one hundred and eleven works. Following on from this episode, there was a new ‘partnership purchase’ scheme devised which followed a model used by the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland. In a nutshell it’s where initially, hotels (subsequently various institutions and public bodies), can buy artwork in collaboration with the Arts Council, each paying 50% of the cost of the work. This scheme was operating until the 1990’s when it was no longer deemed a suitable mode for acquisition. It is recorded in the 2007 acquisitions report that work purchased under this scheme will mainly be gifted to the public bodies within which the works are already held. In 2005 a major auction house gave a valuation of the ‘top twenty’ works in the collection but this specific sum has not been disclosed in the acquisi-
Belfast (Northern Ireland)
‘An insult to both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’ Cllr. Eric Smyth
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tions report. The collection has however, been designated a Heritage Asset and is displayed widely through a free loans policy and through travelling exhibitions such as Eye: fifty years of the Arts Council collection. As it stands, the collection is now comprised of some 1,208 works with an estimated value of £2.7million. In conclusion, it is worth noting the other public authority collections that have been assembled but not so far mentioned here. The largest of these is the North West Arts Trust that is in the charge of Derry City Council, then there is the Allied Irish Bank, the Department of the Environment and Queens University all of which have collections of note. Having said that, we tend to think of collections as something started long ago and simply added to here and there, but there is in fact a brand new collection of Northern Irish Art about to be started, right here on our luscious shores. In a nice case of serendipity (article meets life), I am going to be involved in its inception too. I have just this week been ‘officially’ invited onto the committee of the new Paintings in Hospitals Northern Ireland Branch. Paintings in Hospitals is a has a collection of work which is loaned out to hospitals, medical centres, hospices, surgeries etc. for next to nothing. There was, up until now, no Northern Irish branch and I would love to tell you a little more about the history of the charity here, but I am over word count already. The committee will be given a small pot of money to make initial purchases for the collection and we will be undertaking this task in the New Year, hopefully creating a fabulous new collection of contemporary Northern Irish art for the pleasure of as many people as possible. That’s the idea anyway. So, in conclusion of the conclusion, it is my opinion that ‘collecting’ art is pointless unless you plan on ‘showing’ art and so let’s make sure we see what’s been gathered for us. Let’s urge all the guard-dogs of all these collections to dust off their cellar doors ready to fling them open to us and divulge the delights therein!
formative experiences I’m embarrassed to admit that an inconsequential piano piece by Ludwig van Beethoven had a transformative effect on me. It’s all the more embarrassing when I reveal its name as Für Elisee – a mere bagatelle, one of those ‘hundred best tunes’ which banal people request on banal radio shows. How can someone like me, who regards himself, snootily, as a man of good taste, dredge such an admission from his dark past? Honesty is always the best policy. When I was eleven years of age, I’d been learning piano for about five years. My musicality at that stage was probably not in doubt but, despite parental coaxing
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and cajoling, I was not one of those boys who practised with any degree of regularity or with even an ounce of enthusiasm. My elderly piano teacher was patient and perceptive but she was not in a position to inspire my youthful imagination. I was more interested in smoking cigarettes in clandestine corners in company with the other mischievous members of my middleclass neighbourhood gang than discovering the emotional recesses hidden somewhere in the depths of great music. Then one afternoon I was visiting my best mate from school – who was intelligent enough to work hard at his hobbies, one of which was piano playing. He was learning this melancholically tuneful piece by this bloke Beethoven, called Für Elise. It totally intrigued me. When I got home that evening, I sat at my piano and played it by ear, over and over. My parents were so pleased that they quickly bought the music for me – realising that learning by ear was not a good idea. That piece transformed me from being an uninterested kid into becoming a committed musician. It was inexplicable but immediate. Ironically, I can’t abide Für Elise now! Dr. Philip Hammond
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