Bran New Brains has been on show since the middle of July, but has been continually added to ever since, a DIY display of how we buy into the manufacture of art and of fantasy
SONIA SHIEL has spent the past few weeks populating Temple Bar Gallery with an offbeat collection of pictures and objects. There’s a computer monitor on a table, a water tap in the middle of the floor, an assemblage of floorboards on which about half a dozen paintings are placed. Virtually everything is roughhewn and transparently bogus. It is, Shiel says: “All about trying to recreate the background to art rather than art as we usually see it. It’s about the making of art. That is to say, everything is obviously stuck together and false.”
Not only that, she’s made the work during the course of the exhibition. “I was thinking about the way an artist makes a body of work and by the time it’s exhibited the artist is no longer there.” So she has been there, labouring away in her studio upstairs every day since July 16th, continually adding to and progressing what’s on view.
While the show’s been open all along, it will be completed only on August 19th and will then stand as a finished product until August 28th.
It's called Bran New Brains, a reference to the Scarecrow's proud announcement of his new hardware in The Wizard of Oz. The film is a prime example of something obviously put together in the studio, a DIY fantasy, yet we are more than happy to buy into the manufactured fantasy. Just as, Shiel says, we buy into the art fantasy.
“The starting point was the way people would ask me what my show was going to be about. That got me thinking about the superficiality of research.” Research is a buzzword in art colleges and art practice right now. “You can’t just say, well, I want to make a painting. There’s got to be lots of research involved in it. But how real is that? Does it make it more real?” She looked, of course, to the internet. “You can research anything on the internet. It’s full of byte-sized expertise” Is it true or false? She set out to find out how to make a lie-detector.
“There are endless demonstrations about how to do it.” She settled on instructions provided by a Minnesota father and son. Her computer monitor piece is about that: the father and son are there on the screen, and the makings of the detector, pliers, circuit board, leads, batteries, are scattered about the table surface.
They are all unreal, though, cartoon-like, painted 3D-models of those things, from monitor to batteries. Did she actually make a lie-detector? “I certainly did, it’s surprisingly easy. But I have to admit that the one I made didn’t work. It just says everything is true.” Her next research subject was happiness. “That produced a lot of romantic stories, surprisingly enough. Usually romances in colourful, dramatic settings.” Her paintings feature scenes from some of these stories. Heroines usually find themselves in distress, threatened by lions, falling from precarious rope- bridges, that sort of thing, but luckily saved in the nick of time by granite-jawed heroes.
As the paintings have progressed they’ve all been invaded by flocks of lovebirds. “Because,” Shiel explains, “the thematic conventions overwhelm everything in the end. It’s all too much, it’s overkill.” Which is the way it can be with art, she adds. “Artists often think in grandiose terms. They’re going to start a revolution or save the world. The reality is they go and make things in their studios.”
Still, being an artist does give one at least imaginative freedom and authority. “I decided I’d flood the floor of the gallery.” Hence the “tap” that emerges from the ground. Her idea is that it prompts us to think of the glossy grey-painted floor as a sheet of water, water surrounding an island of painted floorboards on which the paintings are arranged. “It’s an island of romantic fantasy.”
The show abounds with such layers of symbolism and metaphor. So is art condemned to being at one remove, incapable of influencing the real world? Actually that isn’t what she means to imply. One of the smaller pieces consists of “a fake hammer and a real egg”. The fake hammer has broken the real egg. It’s clear that Shiel’s work delights in its own inventive energy. The strength of art, for her, lies in that sometimes desperate inventiveness. “I like the feeling that, if you don’t have stuff, you have to figure out a way of making it. The idea is the why, but the work is always the how.”
Bran New Brainsis at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, until August 28.
A publication on Sonia Shiel’s work, published by the Royal Hibernian Academy, with texts by Mark Hutchinson and Chris Fite-Wassilik, will be launched on Thursday. At 4pm in the gallery, there will be a public conversation between the two writers.
