Hanging offence

Dublin has plenty of galleries, but none quite right for showing modern Irish art. What's the solution, asks Aidan Dunne.

On the face of it, Dublin is well served by public galleries. As well as the National Gallery of Ireland, the city has its much-loved Hugh Lane Gallery and, since 1991, the long-awaited Irish Museum of Modern Art. And the Gallagher Gallery, at the Royal Hibernian Academy, has quickly become an important venue for temporary exhibitions. The Douglas Hyde Gallery, at Trinity College, and the Project arts centre are also venues with distinctive identities.

The advent of IMMA meant that it and the National Gallery had to co-ordinate their areas of responsibility, although the boundary between them - prior to the mid-20th century, around 1940 - remains rightly porous: works from the same era legitimately turn up in both.

The National Gallery has long been popular with the public. Its Millennium Wing, following a long process of refurbishment and upgrading elsewhere in the building, adds considerably to its resources, particularly in terms of temporary exhibitions. IMMA, now more than a decade old, has been notably successful. Its attendance figures seem to keep rising and compare very favourably with those of similar institutions abroad.

The Hugh Lane devoted a great deal of effort to installing and displaying Francis Bacon's studio, given to the gallery by the painter's heir, the late John Edwards. The studio is now integral to the gallery's identity, incorporated in its physical fabric. In the meantime, after some uncertainty over whether it would happen, the gallery has embarked on its much-needed extension, which will allow the Hugh Lane to address a problem familiar to most galleries: the shortage of space to display its collection, the vast majority of which is in storage at any given time.

It allows it to address it but by no means solves it. And a vital strand of the extension is an exhibition space for works donated by the Irish painter Seán Scully, including a substantial group of paintings, prints and a catalogue archive (a useful research resource).

Welcome though this gift is for the Hugh Lane and for Dublin, it is also a diminished version of an earlier possible donation. Pursued over a number of years by the late Dorothy Walker, this scheme would have seen a substantial Scully component in an exciting new venue in Dublin's Docklands (one originally singled out as a potential site for IMMA and subsequently proposed as a branch of it). By all accounts, the plan came to naught because of a lack of political will.

Although this may seem prudent, a cautious response to the possibility of incurring financial responsibility, it also betrays an underlying attitude towards cultural facilities as liabilities rather than resources. A substantial Scully gallery would be a significant cultural asset for the city and for the country in general. You don't have to think Scully is the world's best painter to subscribe to this view. You don't even have to be moderately enthusiastic about his work. You do need to recognise that the wider cultural landscape can not only sustain but also benefits from heterogeneous institutions and events: the more, and the more diversity, the better for everyone. And, of course, a Scully gallery would have drawn visitors, from Ireland and elsewhere, to Docklands.

It's worth considering all this because the development of Docklands is a decisive moment in Dublin's evolution. As it is, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority might point to the advent of CHQ at the location in question. Although CHQ, with its projected mixture of functions, is intended to incorporate temporary exhibitions, they will not be art exhibitions per se. The building is not designed to meet the requirements of fine art. City Arts Centre and the Graphic Studio both have historical associations with the area and, with luck, will have a presence in the emergent landscape. One commercial premises, Lemonstreet Print Gallery, is moving to Docklands.

Yet so far there is little mention of a major fine-art venue, one that might incorporate shows, whether fixed or temporary, mounted to international conservation and curatorial standards, in the overall Docklands plan. Does that matter for the wider cultural picture, in which Dublin is, apparently, adequately served by public galleries?

There is, oddly enough, still plenty of room for initiative in terms of gallery space, and not alone in terms of such serendipitous opportunities as that presented by the Scully works - though another such example does come to mind, in the form of Hughie O'Donoghue's painting cycle The Passion.

Even before it opened, IMMA was attracting generous donations and long-term loans of art from various sources, including private collectors such as Gordon Lambert, who had amassed a substantial collection of Irish and international work since the 1950s. Vincent and Noleen Ferguson also added generously to IMMA's Irish collection. Another notable addition came in the form of the McClelland Collection, from George and Maura McClelland, some 400 works by 20th-century Irish artists, including Tony O'Malley, and a number of important Northern painters, Gerard Dillon, Daniel O'Neill, William Scott et al. All of this is important for the simple reason that it is prohibitively expensive to amass such collections in retrospect. Were IMMA to try to build comparable collections purely on its own resources, the odds would be stacked against it.

That said, it is in the nature of institutions such as IMMA to attract such collections. The museum has mounted four distinct exhibitions drawn from the McClelland Collection alone. But, despite its considerable size, IMMA is still severely limited in the amount of work it can display. Most, if not all, of the McClelland paintings will surely end up in storage when the current show of work by Northern artists completes its run.

This state of affairs is not unique to IMMA, nor indeed would it be remotely desirable that a museum exhibit everything in its collection all the time. Nevertheless, galleries operate under severe constraints. The ideal is that rotating shows should mean that more or less the entire collection finds its way to public view. If the proportion of stored to displayed work becomes too great, the chances of this happening diminish accordingly. Despite the addition of its new wing, the National Gallery is still stringently limited in its space for permanent display. The same applies to the Hugh Lane. Its new wing will have to accommodate a variety of functions, limiting additional exhibition space.

There are, in addition, limitations to the collections of both with regard to Irish art of the 20th century. This is relevant because of what has been noted by many observers as a consistent lack in what is on view in Irish galleries. Simply put, there is no consistent display of a representative collection of 20th-century Irish art. There are elements, fragments of such a representative collection, scattered between the galleries and elsewhere (the Office of Public Works, for example), but no central, cohesive display. Myriad anecdotal accounts from the Dublin art world report a demand for such a collection from visitors. In the theory of contemporary museum display, "story" has become a buzzword. Exhibitions tell stories, and the story of 20th-century Irish art is told in no Irish gallery.

One of the foremost private art collectors in Ireland, Patrick J. Murphy, made this point at the Irish Museums Association's annual conference (and, rather worryingly, added that, in his view, most Irish galleries have inadequate storage facilities). He quite rightly cited the dispersal of the collection of Basil Goulding as an opportunity lost for the State. He also touched on the issue of where a representative collection of modern Irish art might be found. He said that, before his time on the Arts Council, as whose chairman he served, he had hoped the council's collection could be incorporated into IMMA to perform precisely that function. That did not happen.

In the meantime, other ideas mooted for the works in the council's collection including selling them or exhibiting them in some new, as yet unspecified exhibition space. All of which is by way of pointing out that there is at least one clear, coherent example of acknowledged demand and unrealised potential in terms of Irish art that could, arguably, be met in the general Docklands area.

Looking at the evolving landscape of Docklands, whatever its cultural virtues, it would be a great pity if the visual arts were to fare badly. This is not to prejudge the issue, which is still largely open. And there are intriguing possibilities. Within the original enclave of the buildings that make up the International Financial Services Centre, a possible fourth block was never built. The space is still there, its function open. Equally, the long-term future of the Custom House, a superb landmark building, has yet to be decided. It is strategically positioned between the city and the new Docklands. It may well be worth considering as a gallery space. It would be an enviably attractive venue, sure to draw crowds. But, needless to say, any such initiative would necessitate a view of cultural endeavour as an asset rather than a liability.