VISUAL ARTS:THE GLUCKSMAN Gallery at UCC has maintained a strategy of running two divergent but related exhibitions in tandem, and such is the case with their current pairing of Getting Evenand An Eye for an Eye. The latter, long anticipated, bears the helpfully explanatory subtitle Representations of Conflict in 20th Century Ireland, and is a hybrid combining fine art with apposite historical documentation.
It is also, given this huge agenda, quite a sparse show, compact and visitor-friendly, though a little advance planning might be in order if you intend to stay for the entire length of George Morrison's archival treasure trove of a documentary, Mise Éire, which is running continuously.
In Ireland, as elsewhere, there was no shortage of conflicts begging for representation in the 20th century. Interestingly, though, the first piece we encounter is a drawing made by Sir William Orpen while working as an official war artist during the first World War.
It’s a matter-of-fact study of a tired Royal Irish Fusilier, dated May 21st, 1917, and it’s here as a pointed reminder of the substantial and costly involvement of Irishmen in the conflict, an involvement that was, until quite recently, rarely or grudgingly acknowledged.
While Irishmen were fighting and dying on the Western Front, quite another west is evoked in Seán Keating's Men of the West, painted in 1915. In fact, this symbolic account of hardy West of Ireland men, armed and ready to join battle in the nationalist cause, also recalls the American Wild West with its stylised theatricality.
Thereafter we see Sir John Lavery’s formal painting of the funeral of Michael Collins, Jack B Yeats on the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration and emblematic images of the West of Ireland, before moving on to more recent strife in Northern Ireland.
The Troubles are reflected through Robert Ballagh's response to the murder of members of the Miami Showband in 1975, one of FE McWilliam's Women of Belfastbronzes, of individuals caught up in bomb blasts, and TP Flanagan's dignified memorial to a slain friend. Paul Graham's photographs subtly illustrate the way divisions and allegiances are inscribed on the landscape.
The outstanding work, though, is Victor Sloan’s tremendous quartet of images of Orange Order July 12th parades. They could almost be celebratory, but the surfaces are scarred and torn, indicative of a corrosive historical legacy.
One significant difference between the two shows is that between representation and intervention. Not intervention in a partisan, take- up-arms sense, but in terms of encouraging the audience into a critical engagement with social and political issues. Such work is generally seen in terms of the phrase coined by the curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s, “relational aesthetics”. Bourriaud, who has been hugely influential (he’s curated the current overview of contemporary art, and proposed a new term for it, Altermodern, at Tate Britain), argues that more and more contemporary art occupies a different kind of space than previous art.
This is an essentially social, public space of intersubjectivity, rather than the private space encapsulated in the idea of an individual addressing themselves to an object, the work of art, in a gallery.
RELATIONAL ART cannot be evaluated with the same criteria as non-relational art – they simply don't apply to it. Nonetheless, presumably we can evaluate it, and over the years Bourriaud has devised his own relational canon. It includes Liam Gillick, who features in Getting Evenand whose work combines architectonic constructions and installation with eloquent lectures, both positing potential restructuring of social and economic models.
A great deal of the work in Getting Evenis overtly or covertly didactic, and the didacticism of Francis Alÿs's Duett is frankly irritating. It's a video of a performance piece in Venice. Alÿs and a collaborator each took half of one tuba and set off wandering the street and canals, aiming to meet purely by chance. When they met, they joined the two parts of the tuba together and played the assembled instrument, thus conveying a profound message to us (presumably half-witted) viewers: "The fact that the instrument is only playable when its two halves come together emphasises the need for mutuality and social connection." On the other hand, it might only underline the fact that you can't play half a tuba.
Much more intriguing and fruitfully ambiguous is Carey Young's Everything You've Heard is Wrong, again a video, in which the artist, in a sober business suit, gamely jumped on a soap box among the religious and political zealots at Speakers' Corner in London and delivered a spirited discourse on the secrets of effective corporate communication, like a manager giving a pep talk. It's a piece that has gained an added edge now we've discovered that the finance industry's masters of the universe were essentially running a stupendous Ponzi scheme while awarding themselves obscenely vast bonuses.
Jens Ulrich's Plakate(placard) series consists of a large number of newspaper photographs of street protests. The images are presented without captions, and he has further abstracted each protest from its original context by erasing the text on the banners and replacing it with meaningless pieces of calligraphy. Again it's an ambiguous piece, and it could be interpreted in either a positive or a negative way. Even without any explicit clues, though, one feels that the mood of the work is emphatically positive, that he celebrates the freedom to articulate objections.
Polish film-maker Artur Zmijewski's Themsounds patronising in outline but is fascinating. He engaged groups of people with genuinely antagonistic views in workshops combining the enactment of collaboration and opposition. Part of what emerges is that, when it comes to the crunch, people tend to fall back not on argument but on the rehearsal of superficial prejudices.
Mark Clare's Ping Pong Diplomacyalludes to the symbolic significance of sport in international diplomacy. A ping pong table, fashioned from recycled wooden pallets, recalls the breakthrough in Sino-US relations signaled by a table tennis tournament. Visitors are invited to play. As part of his installation, Garrett Phelan has painted a corner of the handsome gallery black, so that it looks burnt out. It's highly effective, and overlaid by the sound of voices lecturing us interminably on aspects of life and belief. There's a lot of substance between the two shows, and the pairing is genuinely instructive.
An Eye for an Eye: Representations of Conflictin 20th Century Ireland, curated by Prof Dermot Keogh and Ruth Osborne. Getting Even: Oppositions and Dialogues in Contemporary Art, curated by Matt Packer and René Zechlin. Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork.
