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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
Column
ROUNDUP
Jason Oakley
Not Life / Necessarily
around ideas of the sea “as a connecting force between disparate geographies either through travels in the form of immigration, vacation, and commerce, or through the circulation of stories and memories”.
Let’s Be Modern About It In 2009 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker established the webzine www. metamodernism.com, and in 2010 co-authored the essay ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ for the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.1 The duo and their associates describe ‘metamodernity’ as an “ongoing research project documenting developments in aesthetics and culture that can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern”.2 Pedants might grumble. Meta ordinarily means ‘beyond’ or ‘after’ doesn’t it? Not so different from ‘post’. Curmudgeons might roll their eyes at the idea of a crisply branded website dedicated to a trendy academic buzz-concept dreamed up by some hip Dutch academics. But bear with it. The prefix also means ‘about’. Meta-fiction is fiction about fiction; meta-data is data about data etc. So what’s really at stake is the rather arresting and only slightly irritatingly idea of ‘modern modernism’. Vermeulen and Akker suggest that a transition has taken place from the prevalence of pessimistic post-modern irony to new kind of sincerity and optimism, albeit of a very knowing kind. It encompasses a belief in imagining better futures – ie ‘modern’ times – as opposed to a perpetual replay of capitalist realist conditions of the ‘contemporary’ from which we can only expect more of the same: boom and bust economics, erosion of the socio-political realm. Metamodernism fully acknowledges the volatile nature of the present. As Vermeulen and Akker have put it “…the ecosystem is severely disrupted; the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable; and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven. This triple crisis infuses doubt and inspires reflection about our basic assumptions, as much as inflaming cultural debates and provoking dogmatic entrenchments. History it seems is moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end”.3 At the VAI Get Together in May the AICA / VAI discussion Art in a Time of Transition explored these same three coordinates. A landmark moment for metamodernism took place on 25 September this year, when the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, hosted the Metamodernism Marathon. Running from 11am – 11 pm the event featured Francis Fukuyama, Michel Bauwens, Hassnae Bouazza, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Bojana Kunst, Nina Power, Cally Spooner, Adam Thirlwell and Camille de Toledo reflecting on how those “promised a life of peace and plenty, of consensus and comfort – the generations born in the 1980s and 1990s – are now confronted with an increasingly uncertain existence. Confident and confused, assertive and anxious, isolated and connected, pampered and poor, they try to come to terms with this rather unforeseen reality and the not-so-foreseeable future”.4 A full report on this event can be found on page 15. The Metamodernism Marathon event was framed in terms of Vermeulen and Akker’s theorisation of Metamodernism as “a structure of feeling that emerged around the turn of the millennium,” typified by new forms of artistic production such as the “New Engagement in the arts and the New Aesthetic in design, the New Sincerity in literature and the New Weird in music, Quirky Cinema and Quality Television”. There isn’t space in this column to properly unpack these snappy terms, but some common-sense meanings should be immediately apparent. In essence there seems to be a hopeful desire afoot for change; this is apparent in the recent transition towards socially engaged art, music, literature, film and TV that doesn’t treat is audiences like imbeciles or cynical know-it-alls. The new aesthetic in design is a more particular and peculiar idea. It is tied up with the rather self-effacing idea of a ‘post-human’ aesthetics. Its focus is on the look, feel and consequences of the networked digital realm. There’s links to the philosophical theory of object-orientated ontology, which perceives inanimate objects (natural or of human manufacture) as existing on a kind of level playing field of relevance. It stresses geological time in contrast to the relative brevity of human history. For example, the architectural expression of metamodernism is in a tendency to make buildings that resemble monumental geological outcrops or sprawling landforms. Elements of this might ring alarm bells for some. Isn’t it all a bit happy-clappy and simplistic in the face of horrendous current events? Can the ‘quirky’ cinema of Wes Anderson really betoken a counter-position to globalised capitalism and Isis terrorism? Or help solve plight of Palestine? Doesn’t the whole post-humanist ‘networked digital culture is changing human consciousness / we’re all just objects like the world around us’ shtick play into the hands of the neo-liberal consensus that humanity is a dumb herd, motivated by predictable avaricious self-interest? These are tough but fair questions, but it would be wilfully simplistic and narrow minded not to tolerate contradiction, complexity and nuance within an ambitious body of theory and analysis that’s neither embarrassed nor afraid to venture towards identifying a new paradigm. The concept of metamodernism is really just a sign-post, intended to direct the curious and intelligent to consider a varying terrain of new viewpoints and analyses. Perhaps it’s time to modernise the modern? Notes 1. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol 2, October 2010, www.aestheticsandculture.net 2. metamodernism.com 3. e-flux.com/announcements/metamodernism-the-return-of-history 4. Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, editorial, metamodernism.com
siriusartscentre.ie
The Cutting Rooms
November – December 2014
work makes direct visual and conceptual reference to educational play objects devised by educator and inventor of Kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel. For the artist, the press release stated, “parenthood acted as the catalyst for this enquiry into methods of merging real life with his art practice, where his ongoing concerns are the interplay of art, architecture design and education”. roscommonartscentre.ie
Exhibition images by Walsh and Brenan
The National College of Art and Design Gallery held an exhibition of work by Chloe Brenan and Chanelle Walshe titled ‘Not Like / Necessarily’ (19 Sept – 24 Oct). Brenan and Walshe undertook a residency in Dresden, Germany to explore the points of confluence in their respective practices in development the exhibition, which included painting, photography and installed sound and sculptural work. The title was borrowed from the closing lines of Samuel Beckett’s poem Something There (trans. 1974). In reference to the poem, the press release stated, “both artists’ practices consider and reflects on the subject of the unknowable, poetically pointing to moments likened to an oscillating point on a fulcrum”.
Mary Theresa Keown’s exhibition ‘The Cutting Room II’ ran at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (5 – 25 Sept). Keown’s work explores the use of collage in painting and the idea of “crossbreeding languages,” the press release noted. For this exhibition she divided the space into different collections of recent work: the Mimetic room, the Diptych room, the Narrative room, the Liquin room and the Post-Mortem room.
ncad.com/about/gallery
leitrimsculpturecentre.ie
Temporary Sights
Exhibition images from ‘Temporary Sights’
Multimedia exhibition ‘Temporary Sights’ ran at MART, Dublin (18 – 19 Sept) as part of an ongoing project curated by Siobhán Mooney. The exhibition featured work by Aaron Stapleton, Jane Fogarty and Eve Woods based around the concept of time. Each piece, the press release noted, “will touch on or abound with Time… the work interacting with this vast subject in a durational sense, a thematic sense or both”. mart.ie
All obstructing walls...
Mary Theresa Keown, The Cutting Room
Concentrate on Your Breathing Marie-Claire Keogh’s exhibition of new print works, ‘Concentrate on Your Breathing,” ran at Draiocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown (19 Sept – 22 Nov). In the press release, Keogh described the work as an “investigation of suppressed emotion and thought rediscovery, using printmaking (collographs, drypoints, monoprints) as a form of self-expression”. Draoicht also presented an exhibition of paintings by Bernie Masterson titled ‘Weather’, which explored the landscape as untamed nature. In these new works, Masterson stated, her “response to the landscape (both the beauty and the terrors of nature) [was] to ‘poeticise’ it, just like early nineteenth century artists did. Weather changes landscape, it shapes it, and subsequently our relationship and response to it”.
We All Live On The Same Sea
Exhibition poster from ‘All obstructing walls...’
Catalyst Arts, Belfast held an exhibition of work by Amanda Beech titled ‘All obstructing walls have been broken down’ (17 Oct – 21 Nov). The exhibition featured a new series of works on paper (2014) alongside the large-scale video installation Sanity Assassin (2010). Both works, the press release noted, take the “freeways, the retreats, and the housing tracts of Los Angeles” (where the artist lives) as their primary reference, and “traversing the landscape of alienated systems of life, both installations interrogate the hopes, possibilities and consequences of new forms of constructing life in lived space… together the works produce a certain narrative on the condition of reality and its architectures”. catalystarts.org.uk
This Way to Enchantment
draiocht.ie
A History of Play
Exhibition poster from ‘This Way to enchantment’
‘We All Live on the Same Sea’ exhibition image
Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh presented the group exhibition ‘We All Live On The Same Sea’, curated by Rana Öztürk and featuring Cliona Harmey, David Farrell, Deniz Üster, Fiona Marron, Gülsün Karamustafa, Margaret Fitzgibbon, Mark Garry, Paid Murphy, Sean Carpio and Tayfun Sertta. The multidisciplinary work, the press release stated, focused
Eamonn O’Kane, ‘History of Play’, 2014
Eamonn O’Kane transformed the gallery at Roscommon Arts Centre into an interactive installation for the exhibition ‘A History of Play’ (4 Oct – 14 Nov). The
‘This Way to Enchantment’ was an exhibition by Rory Tangney at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh (18 Oct – 16 Nov). Tangney used a combination of found and new materials and sounds in this new body of work, which questions whether science can provide us everything we need in a post-religious world. “This is essentially a search for the ‘spirit’ in the machine’,” the press release stated, “ideas about obsolescence – of technol-