Renaissance man holds the fort

Artist Brian O'Doherty might have buried his alter ego, but the rest of his work is very much alive. For Kinsale Arts Week, his work in Charles Fort is an architectural interpretation of space, writes GEMMA TIPTON.

‘NOW THAT I’VE got less permanent, I appreciate a little permanence in the work,” says Brian O’Doherty. “I’m off in, shall we say, my mature years, into something else.” Many will remember O’Doherty killing his artistic alter ego, Patrick Ireland, and burying him at Imma in May last year. Maybe it was this brush with a sort of death that got him thinking, or perhaps it’s a simple side effect of being 81, but this artist, who has always thrived on the impermanent and the ephemeral, is now making more solid structures.

The first part of our conversation had taken place sitting in the sunshine at Charles Fort, Kinsale, with O’Doherty sketching shapes with his hands, describing the project he could see in his mind, which has now become The Lookout: Fort Within a Fort. “There are three concentric squares: it’s a rather neat design, if I say so myself, and it confines a kind of madness with these plunging and rising contours, leading from viewing points to triangular entrances.”

Had he been born a few hundred years ago, O’Doherty would have been described as a Renaissance man: he’s a qualified medical doctor, Man Booker shortlisted novelist, film-maker, critic, and artist with work held in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Imma and the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Instead, born in Roscommon (though living in the US since the 1950s), the less romantic-sounding contemporary term is “polymath”. It’s also a term that can suggest a hint of the dilettante, implying superficial engagement with many things, rather than the restless intelligence, drawing resources from many contexts, that characterises the work of O’Doherty.

In the instance of The Lookout, the immediate connections are with architecture – architecture, or rather the politics of how space and shape can make you feel and act, has been a preoccupation throughout the artist's career. His book, Inside the White Cube, described and defined both how the shape of space affects what it encloses, and how introducing elements into a space irrevocably alters it.

The book set out to challenge the conceit that the “white cube” of the modern art gallery is a “neutral space”; but it was the artist’s rope drawings, sketching lines in space by means of ropes and coloured walls, that would physically demonstrate how alive an otherwise empty room can be.

“A man once said to me of the rope drawings, ‘I’ve never been inside a drawing before’,” says O’Doherty. “A rope drawing enables you to do something that people don’t do, to pay attention to yourself. Most people go through life, in my view, semi-anaesthetised, swaddled in media.”

So is this new structure, sitting in the 17th-century enclosure of Charles Fort, like a rope drawing too?

“The only thing it has in common with the rope drawings is that they are both completed by the person who is enticed, or agrees to enter. You enter into another world from the rope drawings, where I have a contained space in a gallery; but this is much more public, it’s outdoors, it’s a socialised event, though the same criteria of success apply.”

While O’Doherty is determined that this project is a departure from the rope drawings, I keep seeing, if not parallels, then at least a continuum. As the artist describes the history of Charles Fort, with its closed community of soldiers, wives, children and staff to support them, and the “ghosts of a multitude” that now inhabit it, I’m thinking of the ghostly presences that charge the gallery space, that other closed community, with its own rules and logic.

“That is one of the prime things you want art to do,” the artist agrees. “It can make everything around it look different, be experienced differently, or work to make the surroundings yield something they didn’t before.”

In the kind of coincidence Patrick Ireland would have enjoyed, Charles Fort was designed by William Robinson, who designed the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, which now houses Imma, where Ireland is laid to rest.

The Lookoutis being installed at the fort as part of Kinsale Arts Week, and will be in situ until the end of October. Mareta Doyle, chairwoman of Arts Week, and programmes the visual arts element, invited O'Doherty simply because, she says, "I have admired his work for so long".

Last year’s installation at the fort was by Turner Prize nominee Anya Gallaccio, so Doyle was looking to build on that. “Sometimes,” says Doyle, “our most successful people are seen less and less in this country. And while that can be due to commitments around the world, it’s often because there’s a diffidence about inviting them. We’re delighted O’Doherty accepted, and this project is absolutely inspiring.”

BACK AT THE FORT, O'Doherty describes how his building is "a chance to revision the experience. There's a wonderful sight line – the entrance to The Lookoutis in line with the entrance to the fort, and I love sight lines because they are very bodily, it's like your body is spread-eagled between or along the vista."

This project then, draws the human figure back into a conversation with their surroundings, in a way that a great deal of the architecture surrounding us fails to do. “Modernist art and Modernist architecture do share a lack of interest in the spectator, in the user,” says O’Doherty. “Though I would hesitate to charge all architects with that.” (In fact, the artist has nothing but praise for the architect, John Hegarty of Fourem, and builders O’Sheas, who are working with him on the project. “Not enveloped in their own citadels of ego,” is how he describes them.)

“Architects have learned from minimal sculpture, and they’ve learned a tremendous amount from artists.” Here we talk about those more “sculptural” architects, such as Frank Gehry, though I disagree that Gehry’s architecture is sympathetic to the intimacies of the human figure, or to the needs of its users, instead it is more often about spectacle.

This is an intriguing reversal, in that it is architecture that should have the practical responsibility to its users, while art is often seen as free of that, and open to being entirely “useless”.

Not for O’Doherty: “I’m very much after the intimacies of the human, of the figure, of the user of the structure. You can sit in the piece, and enact various scenarios: the success is whether it attracts a community, whether children play in it, whether it consciously or unconsciously speaks to people, who reply by moving around, viewing, resting, using . . . They will if I’m right – and if I’m wrong it will have failed.”

NOT THE MAZE, BUT A LABYRINTH

Continuing a quest for permanence, another major project by Brian O’Doherty is just about to go into planning in Belfast. Lúbran (an accidental misspelling of lúbra, the Irish word for labyrinth) will be a large installation on Falls Road, and the largest ever public art work in west Belfast. Commissioned at the instigation of newspaper publisher Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, and working with architect Ciarán Mackel and artist Robert Ballagh, O’Doherty’s Lúbran is based on the design of a St Brigid’s Cross, a symbol of peace.

“It’s constructed from stone, and that will be thrilling for me, because I’ve devoted my life to the impermanent,” says O’Doherty.

The site will be the entrance to a new Irish language quarter in Belfast, and Ó Muilleoir sees it as “a key building block” for west Belfast.

Ó Muilleoir says he has followed O’Doherty’s work since his name change to Patrick Ireland in 1972, which was enacted, as the artist says as “an expatriate’s gesture in response to Bloody Sunday in Derry”. He declared he would keep the name until human rights were restored in Northern Ireland, and the British army presence removed.

Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow, once told the artist he would never get his name back. It was a gesture viewed differently at home and abroad, and Patrick Ireland’s eventual burial in 2008 was attended by major figures from the international art world. Lúbran is due to be completed in spring 2010.

The Lookout: Fort Within a Fortis open at Charles Fort until Oct 28. kinsaleartsweek.com

- Kinsale Arts Week runs until July 19