10
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
March – April 2009
FAF SHOWCASE REPORT
Suzanne Mooney. Sceneography for Dance Theatre Ireland's Parallel Horizons
Ivan Twohig – work presented at 'Doyourown thing'
It's Your Thing Rayne Booth reports on ‘DoUrOwnThing’ The 6th FAF showcase evening, held at the Lab, Dublin 16 Oct 2008. Artists will always do their own thing. That’s what artists do. And yet the issue of autonomy – the actual doing of your own thing; is still a favoured topic for discussion in artistic circles. Complete autonomy is something all artists strive towards, but doing exactly what you want to do, when you want to do it, can be difficult. Pressures apply – economic, social and political; the most common being a lack of income or funding. For me, as an administrator and curator of an artist-run gallery and studio space, the idea of artistic autonomy is synonymous with artist-led projects. The alternative space movement began as long ago as the 1970s when New York exploded with new exhibition spaces like the Kitchen, PS1, 112 Green St and Franklyn Furnace. There was a similar surge of artist-initiated activities in the 1990’s London of the YBAs, when galleries such as City Racing, and artist group Bank were added to the city’s art scene. But here in Dublin and the rest of the country – despite the anomalies of The Project Arts Centre in the 1970s and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios in the 1980s, and more recently Pallas Heights (now evolved into Pallas contemporary Projects) – it took much longer for any semblance of an artist-led gallery and exhibition space network to develop. In recent years, it seems we have enjoyed a marked increase in artists groups and artist run organisations taking hold of the idea of ‘DIY culture’. Galleries such as This is Not a Shop, Four Gallery, Monster Truck and G126 in Galway all appeared to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago, and more studios and artists spaces soon followed. The Market studios, Commonplace studios, the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (IMOCA), The Good Hatchery, The Joinery and Joy gallery have all emerged within the last year, leading me to suppose that Irish artists have begun to give themselves permission to start their own ‘thing’ rather than hang around waiting for opportunities to present themselves. Of course this does not always involve setting up exhibition spaces or studios, but the fact that these spaces exist enables more artists to develop and exhibit their work at earlier stages of their careers, which in turn leads to greater confidence and a willingness to ‘give it a go’ amongst a younger generation of artists. For me, this has been a very important and exciting development in the intellectual topology of Irish Art and I was very interested to see how it would manifest itself at FAF’s most recent showcase evening ‘DoUrOwnThing’ held at the Lab on 16 October 2008. FAF is the name chosen by four artists as an umbrella term for their collective project; and it operates separately from each of their individual arts practices (www.fafartists.com). FAF are Ian-John Coughlan, Barbara Vasic, Linda O’Keefe and Suzanne Mooney, and they have been working together for the past four years. FAF formed as a group to support and encourage each other (rather than simply make artwork together) and – most importantly – to present events such as studio seminars and an ongoing series of showcase evenings for artists. The LAB on Foley Street, and the City Arts Office, has played a very important role in supporting each of the showcase evenings to date. The Showcase evenings are advertised on the Visual Artists Ireland e-bulletin service, and invite artists to submit a three minute show-reel of images to FAF, who then select a manageable number of artists, and organise a venue in which to host the event. The artists show up and get to speak about their work in front of an audience of their peers. It’s a free forum for critique, which can sometimes work better than other times, depending on attendance and the personality
of those attending. In a city such as Dublin, where, it seems, each member of our tiny artistic community / clique knows each other in some way, it can be difficult to engage in meaningful group critique, either positive or negative. The FAF showcase evenings are no exception to this, but they are, to my knowledge, providing the only free forum in Dublin where artists can have the opportunity to discuss their work with interested parties and curators can learn more about emerging artists. The ‘DoUrOwnThing’ (16 Oct 2008) showcase evening began with a talk by Ciaran McBride, who spoke from personal experience about the various rules and conventions pertaining to different areas of artistic and creative production; film, television and theatre and visual art. He discussed diverse attitudes and aspects to artistic autonomy, and spoke of the art world as a game with its own strategic rules. This is something all artists can relate to, and it can take recent college graduates some time to learn exactly how this game is played. McBride referenced the idea of artistic autonomy as the most important energy behind the development of modern, postmodern and contemporary art. FAF invited Anne Marie Barry to open the artists’ showcases with a longer presentation on her current work in progress. Barry combines filmmaking and photography with fine art in a practice that has in recent times become more concerned with social issues. Barry explained how, after winning best short at the 2006 Darklight Film Festival, she began to show her work in the context of Film festivals. This is a forum where audience expectations are very different than in a gallery setting, and this has had an according affect on her work. Barry began her talk by showing the audience two videos which influenced her: Modernist filmmaker Len Lye’s 1937 experimental film Trade Tattoo and Jay Will’s 2007 Music Video for M.I.A’s single Boyz. Barry’s interest in the gender specific Jamaican dance steps used in this video is reflected in her own subject matter: the Rialto Twirlers. Barry came across this Majorette group in her local area of Dublin 8, and began working with them on a documentary film project, using her own distinct style and unconventional ‘fine art’ methods. This is a style that she calls ‘Filmic Art’. Ivan Twohig was recently awarded a residency, consisting of a free studio for a year, at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, a new and highly ambitious artist run museum based at Moxie Studios Inchicore. A free studio for a year would be a huge benefit to the career of any artist, and IMOCA must be congratulated for taking such a bold step for a fledgling organisation. Twohig showed us a complex work entitled Clone then Heal, which involves an online gallery he founded called the Quarantine Gallery. Artists can contact Twohig who will then exhibit their work online in a virtual space that can be modified to resemble any gallery in the world. This project has the potential to annoy galleries and museums when they find unknown and non-famous artists exhibiting online in virtual facsimiles of their spaces, but somehow I don’t think Twohig is too concerned with this possibility. Next Esperanza Collado presented her project, the Experimental Film Club. Inspired by a talk by Jonas Makas in March 2008, Collado, Alan Lambert, Donal Foreman, Katie Lincoln and Aoife Desmond began to organise screenings in the upstairs room of the Ha’penny Bridge Inn. The group believe that it is important that the club takes place in this venue rather than a traditional cinema or gallery setting, as it allows the formal atmosphere and the boundary
Louise Cherry – work presented at 'Doyourown thing'
between audience and screen that is present in more traditional film presentations to be broken down. The Club takes place on the last Sunday of every month, and more information can be obtained at www.experimentalfilmclub.blogspot.com. Aoife Flynn recently completed her degree in painting and presented work from her degree show. She paints from films that she makes of her family and friends, giving her paintings an ethereal quality, which she likens to the quality of a memory. Louise Cherry showed images of a recent installation, which marks a drastic change in her style of work due to a change in personal circumstances. Now working from home, Cherry had to rethink her methods and processes. The installation – exhibited as part of the MAVIS exhibition programme at Studio 6 in Temple Bar Gallery & Studios - was an amalgamation of materials that can be found in the home, arranged in a precarious balance. Suzanne Mooney, one of the members of FAF, presented work she has made separately to her own art practice. Since 2005 she has been working closely with Dance Theatre Company on productions of contemporary dance. Her brief in working with the dance company was to produce video imagery in parallel with the choreography that would become part of the performance rather than complement or illustrate. Mooney spoke about the challenge, successes and failures of working with an artistic director in a theatrical setting. Working on these projects has influenced her to begin working with performance and she is now collaborating with a dancer on a selfinitiated project. Paul Harris’s beautifully sensitive photographs of Cuba were taken just before Fidel Castro stepped down as leader of the country. His presentation concentrated very much on the technical aspects of taking these photographs, which were made using only available light and without any fixed aim or itinerary. This work is perhaps akin to street photography yet is instilled with a love for the processes involved, and demonstrates the artist’s skill as an imagemaker and his enthusiasm for his subject matter. Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the artists run space Thisisnotashop made a short presentation on the work of her organisation. Situated on Benburb Street beside the Luas line, this tiny gallery has both a voluntary and a captive audience; those that come into the gallery from the street on their own initiative and commuters on board the Luas which stops directly outside the gallery windows every five minutes. The staff of this voluntary gallery are highly committed to the project, and there is no doubt that the gallery is an asset to the Dublin art scene, giving artists a space in which they can experiment and present work not necessarily aimed at a commercial market. By virtue of its name, this gallery wears its non-commercial agenda on its sleeve, and, by Fiore’s own admission, the directors want to stay as far removed from any commercial agenda as possible. This type of autonomy, a lack of concern for and independence from the all encompassing monster that is the art market, is admirable, and, given the recent Arts Council funding cuts, very brave and rather risky. But it is entirely the choice of the artists who run the gallery. They can do what they want, show whichever artists they like and align themselves with whichever project they think merits interest. These are some of the benefits of running an entirely autonomous artistic project. There are no agendas but your own. Unfortunately, due to time constraints there was not enough time for the participants to engage with any in-depth discussion on the topic, but new connections were made and the theme further discussed after reconvening over drinks in Graingers. Perhaps this was the informal and familiar setting that was needed for the remaining participants to let their guard down and informally discuss the evening’s events in a truly honest manner. Rayne Booth