MANCHÁN MAGAN'stales of a travel addict
WHEN JOYCE REFERRED to Guinness in Finnegans Wake as, “My brandold Dublin lindub, the free, the froh, the frothy freshener”, he captured a feeling I shared myself until I visited the Guinness Storehouse recently. Its brashness took me aback. Any vestige of romance about the black stuff wilts under the mega-watt intensity of corporate manipulation and the sad realisation that our national drink is little more than a profit-making consumable of a multinational conglomerate.
With four million people visiting Guinness in the past decade, one can hardly expect them to offer brewery tours of the sort that used to be available until 1972, but still, as a sacerdotal site of pilgrimage for many, St. James’s Gate deserves more than this €16 huckster trip around vacuous audio-visual displays and trade-show gimmicks, followed by a “free” pint in the Gravity Bar.
Guinness Storehouse is Ireland’s number one foreign visitor attraction; the Louvre is France’s and the British Museum is Britain’s. Such is the legacy of being colonised rather than the coloniser – one’s primary cultural asset is the merchandising gift shop of an international drinks company.
It might seem pollyannaish to suggest creating a visitor attraction that we could be proud of, but, in fact, such a thing almost exists. What about using The Moderns exhibition that ran last year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art? It was wildly successful, the most stimulating art exhibition in decades: over 250 works by 180 artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, designers and composers offering an expansive, in-depth understanding of what it means to be Irish today in a way that was engaging even to those with the most marginal interest in culture.
People returned again and again to get to grips with some of the revelatory displays – items and outlooks that questioned one’s preconceptions of Irishness, expanding one’s understanding and suggesting new perspectives. For many, it was their first encounter with entire new dimensions of Ireland – Beckett as film-maker, JM Synge and Roger Casement as photographers, Eileen Gray as designer of the sublime. The show offered insights into our struggle with the legacy of colonial poverty as seen through our architecture, our search for identity through graphic design, the development of our music and film-making, and the quirky little Irish identity factory of the Yeatses — brothers and sisters — in literature, painting and graphic design.
It was certainly far removed from the turgid corporate videos on show down the hill in the Storehouse. But it needn’t be either/or. Could we combine them to create a show as popular as the Storehouse and as profound as The Moderns?
How about dusting off Ceol, the traditional music exhibition that was in the old Jameson Distillery in Smithfield? It was a stylish, quirky exploration of the roots and development of Irish music that had the potential to be a long-running success if it hadn’t been so poorly located. It used interactive multimedia to bring step-dancing, traditional instruments and a wealth of songs and music alive with ghostly apparition of long-dead musicians and voices from the grave on gramophone and 78-rpm vinyl. And while the technology was cutting-edge at the time, it could be done so much better now – literally making people feel part of a Riverdance show, or an ancient céilí or a late-night, lock-in session.
If Ceol is still available, packed up in containers in a warehouse somewhere, could we not dust it down and place it in a nicely central Nama building? Maybe with a slimmed down permanent version of The Moderns next door, and by all means charge an entrance fee and give people a free pint of frothy freshner and maybe even some samples of our finest foods too. And what about a taste of our language? If we want people to regard us as more than just inebriated, literature-prize winning leprechauns, we need to start showing them more.