26
The Visual Artists’News Sheet
September – October 2014
project profile
Swansong for theLifeworld JAMES MERRIGAN REPORTS ON CATCH THE HE(ART)’ A TRAVELLING RESIDENCY PRESENTED AS PART OF BEALTAINE FESTIVAL 2014, WHICH SHOWCASED THE TALENTS AND CREATIVITY OF OLDER ARTISTS.
Therry Rudin and Patricia Hurl, still from ‘Stone Series’, photo by Therry Rudin
Therry Rudin and Patricia Hurl, still from ‘Stone Series’, photo by Therry Rudin
James Galway, live performance
Being young and restless are the defining quiddities of the marketable contemporary artist. ‘Mid-career’ retrospectives at the age of 40 and surveys of artists younger than Jesus come to mind, as do jet-setter superstar artists who produce work on plane rides or between stops en route to London, Berlin or New York.1 The Catch the He(art) travelling residency, curated by artist Michelle Browne, offered a moment’s pause from the g-forces of contemporaneity. The project was devised as part of Bealtaine festival 2014, showcasing the talents and creativity of both first-time and professional older artists.2 Unlike the majority of current art projects, the young and emergent, the now and the new, the fast and the ahistorical were nowhere to be found in Browne’s proposal. Rather, Catch the He(art) focused on four Irish artists that have continued to make work in later life. Patricia Hurl, Mary Kelly, James King and Therry Rudin were bravely named and ‘shamed’ by Browne as ‘retirement age’ artists. ‘Catch the He(art)’ was composed of three stopover public dialogues throughout May: at the Parade Tower, Kilkenny, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, and a last stop exhibition and discussion at Galway Art Centre. The residency’s intended function was to give the group of artists the time and space to reflect, debate and present on their attitudes to, and ways of making art in older age. Hurl and Rudin’s 30-odd-year collaboration combines mutual dependency and wishful self-reliance. At Mermaid Arts Centre Hurl admonished Rudin for taking the role of ‘artist’ while she is invariably relegated to ‘model’. The reality is, however, that Hurl is foregrounded time and again as the visible performer, whereas Rudin is the invisible artist behind the camera shutter. Hurl and Rudin disclosed to the audience in Kilkenny that their recent work was certainly a personal confrontation with age, and that the mirror played its part in the face-off. During a residency in Iceland Rudin composed photographs of Hurl in front of a mirror. Hurl stands naked before the bust of her reflection, decorated with a necklace composed of “impossible to ignore” black rocks that she collected in the area. Hurl shared with the audience that her sister had recently died before undertaking the residency, and added that her mother loved necklaces. Spoken aloud, these autobiographical nuggets were redolent with self-realisation in the face of her loved one’s mortality and brought to mind Simon Critchely’s observation that “we only come to truly know death through our love of others”.3 The resulting photographs are as far from youthful vanity that you can get. The necklace – a black yoke of shapeless geology – hangs heavy upon Hurl’s boney sternum. The image feels physically and emotionally uncomfortable. Rock touching skin that has lost its spring. Eyes scanning for flaws. Hurl recogising her sister and mother in her own features. Rudin points and clicks. Deceived into deceiving himself, Narcissus wasn’t all masturbatory ego, but was cursed by the torture of self-awareness. Hurl was quick to amend a comment which implied that artists are ‘egotistical’ in their
compulsion to make work, be the subject of their work, and to live forever through the legacy of their work. In one of the most natural observations that took place over the course of the three Catch the He(art) dialogues Hurl said: “Every work we make we leave a piece of ourselves behind.” Leave could easily be substituted for lose, giving credence to the idea that art making is a double-bind process of filling and creating lacunae in the psyche of the artist. In an intimate first screening of a collaborative film work by Hurl and Rudin during the Parade Tower discussion – a piece they made while on residency at Saint Finbarr’s Hospital, Cork – Hurl was unveiled once again as the muse for Rudin’s camera. Responding specifically to the laundry in the hospital and their shared observations of the gradual de-individuation of geriatric patients during the residency, the resulting artwork is a swansong that injects realism into metaphorical expression. Hurl, 70 years old, straddles floorboards while wrapped in white sheets that she tears into strips towards her crotch. The ugly, repetitive tearing is dampened when the ethereal voice of Hurl’s sister singing The Lark in the Clear Air, softens the rough textures of the film. The Lark, a love song by nineteenth century Irish poet Samuel Ferguson, is turned into a lament, then a eulogy, after we learn that Hurl’s sister and Rudin’s very close friend passed away a year later. James King was the only male artist invited by Browne, and his jocular performances are bound within the rules of Action Theatre, which can be oxymoronically defined as precise improvisation. King has performed in the urban lifeworld of Northern Ireland for over 35 years. He is a street performer, a poet and a teacher, whose expansive activity during those years exhibits a way of life that counters careerism. In the final discussion in Galway he spoke of how performance was a weekly activity, suggesting that all you needed was yourself, a prop, a tag along friend and a casual audience. During the first discussion in Kilkenny King introduced himself by way of a vocal response to his street performance moments earlier in and around the grounds of Kilkenny castle. Verging on Klingon, King’s gibberish account of his experiences was lyrically communicated through intonation rather than relying on semantic comprehension. In one instance the vocalisations became animalistic as King described an episode when he was confronted by aggressive officialdom on his performative route via the castle grounds. Dressed in a green garden sack and his mother’s green chiffon scarf like some eco-nihilist, King harmlessly scored the pavements with chalk and played the pan-pipes. His garb not only disguised his age but created suspicion in the eyes of ‘don’t step on the grass’ officialdom, who called the guards. The guards’ unenlightened response to King’s shenanigans was communicated viscerally by a flurry of rabid snarls, intermingled with guttural, staccato verse. The physical argy-bargy at Kilkenny Castle ended up reifying King’s potentially evanescent performance. At Mermaid Arts Centre, the artist gave a critical nod to the powers that be by becoming officialdom itself, taking on the role of a court magistrate before Dave
Madigan and Méadhbh O’Connor’s scaffolded artwork in the gallery. Dressed in the black and white of Justice, a wig, gown and prominent nose gave King the appearance of a vulture, circling, posturing, and poking with his sharp, unrelenting tongue. Mary Kelly, the youngest of the ‘Catch the He(art)’ troop (a former student of Rudin’s), is primarily concerned with ‘attachment’ in the lifeworld. Kelly’s particular lifeworld is made up of psychological landmarks that investigate our attachment to death and birth in equal measure. I Believe – Help My Unbelief (2010), for example, is a compelling meditation on the decorative rituals in a children’s graveyard. Kelly’s photographic and filmic series ‘Father and Child’ convey what the artist repeated in the discussions as the “enormity of human experience” – something that she seemed inspired by but also suspicious of expressing in her art. A father is filmed in a skinto-skin embrace with his child. A series of photographs portray fathers tattooed with their child’s name on their bodies as a bonding or birth-marking exercise. Kelly’s male protagonists are riddled with the psychological lacunae caused by the experiential detachment from the child’s birth. They still are trying to catch up to the mother’s prophetic and fulfilling bump. Each artwork title takes the name of a different father featured in the works, suggesting that Kelly has an intimate relationship with her subjects. Visually, however, the closely cropped, tattooed body parts feel like those of a cadaver taken by the cold eye of a pathologist: postmortems. In Kelly’s art birth and death walk hand-in-hand. From death to birth and back again, the Catch the He(art) residency proved for me that being an artist liberates you from society’s temporal constructs: we’re born, we work, we retire, we die. As the wheel of time turns for the artist, those wants and ambitions never fade. In the presence of artists who have stayed the creative course into older age you cannot but question the source of their sustained creativity. Is this marriage by proxy a case of “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth)? Are Hurl, Kelly, King and Rudin the lucky few to have realised enough amateur dreams and professional ambitions to keep them bobbing above cynicism and defeat? Or is hope the creative buoy? What became clear in the four artists’ espousals of the artistic life is that careers are short-lived, while being an artist lasts as long as the life given. The persistent creativity of these artists – with over 100 years of art-making between them – testifies to that. James Merrigan is an artist and art critic at billionjounal.com.
Notes 1. Massimiliano Gioni,Laura Hoptman,Lauren Cornel,Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory, Phaidon Press, 2009 2. www.bealtaine.com 3. For an insightful and entertaining analysis on the subject of philosophy and death read Sim Critchley’s Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (2004) and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009); also his lecturePhilosophy ‘ and the Art of Dying’, given at the EMPAC Arts Center, New York, 2013, is a must see (www.vimeo.com/63258718)