Happy to be setting up for 'failure'

Kilkenny Arts Festival's visual arts curator is uneasy with the current glorification of curators as stars in themselves, he tells Aidan Dunne

Ambling around a summery Kilkenny in trainers, cut-off khakis liberally equipped with pockets, a cerise T-shirt, and with a mobile phone that rang constantly, Mike Fitzpatrick seemed relaxed about his role as visual arts curator of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival. Certainly, as we made our way from venue to venue four days in advance of the festival's launch, everything seemed to be progressing nicely. Putting complicated contemporary arts events together must, by now, be second nature to him, given his years as director of Limerick's City Art Gallery and his involvement with the city's annual international exhibition, EV+A. But all the same, this, his second excursion to Kilkenny, was still something of a busman's holiday.

He was enjoying it, though. "I really am on my holidays. Last year was entirely new. It was challenging, but also gratifying to apply the knowledge I'd acquired in fitting artists to venues in another context. And it was nice to work with people who are essentially friends and acquaintances. It's been good to come back this year and hear people talk about seeing Amanda Coogan perform last year, and say how much they enjoyed Sean Lynch's work."

In the meantime, though, he has taken on another challenge, agreeing to curate Ireland's representation at next year's Venice Biennale.

Venice has become an increasingly important fixture for an Irish art world with its eyes on the international scene, and Fitzpatrick proposed working with artist Gerard Byrne, who has built up a significant international profile in a relatively short time. Early next week he and Byrne will be in Venice, scouting locations. Given that most other participating countries have already settled the question of venue, the time scale is relatively tight. The Biennale's bureaucracy and logistics are also said to present their own intriguing problems. But all the same there is a feeling that the pairing of Byrne and Fitzpatrick, who have worked very well together in the past, is auspicious.

It may seem surprising, then, that the theme he has chosen for the visual arts strand of the Kilkenny Arts Festival is Failure. "To be creative," he points out in his introduction to the catalogue, "is to fail, or certainly, to be prepared to fail." There is, inevitably, a certain downbeat emphasis to much of the work on view in several venues, but there is a considerable amount of humour as well. There's not much to laugh about in Damien Hirst's characteristically morbid tips on effective self-destruction, or Roman Signer's extraordinary video in which a model helicopter flies itself to smithereens in an enclosed, dusty concrete space, but Julie Henry's video, featuring a championship skittles tournament, is hilarious.

There is humour in a series of short performance films by the enigmatic Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, but it is humour of a distinctly troubling nature. Ader, who disappeared in 1975 during a reckless attempt at a solo transatlantic voyage, has the screen persona of a sad, slapstick clown. Whether cycling into a canal or trying to hang onto a tree branch high above a stream, he is ridiculous but also tragic, more an amalgam of Buster Keaton and Beckett than was the real Keaton and Beckett collaboration. He is a perfect example of Fitzpatrick's ideas. In a different way, so is Joe Duggan, whose staged photographic tableaux in the series Like Father, Like Son and Family Man are odd, unsettling explorations of idealisations that we fail to live up to. Look carefully and you'll see the hollowness at the heart of his accounts of familial relationships and domesticity.

The celebrated Vito Acconci agreed to participate with a new audio work. "I approached him with the idea of using maquettes for pieces that had never been made. But he responded by saying, they were not failures, they were resolved as far as he was concerned. Then he came back with another idea, based on his recorded notes for projects that never got beyond the pitch stage. They never got off the starting blocks, so they did, in a sense, fail."

Fitzpatrick was delighted and, more, he was touched at the fact that Acconci was willing to take on board a request out of the blue for somewhere he had likely never even heard of.

It has to be said that the choice of failure as a theme may also be a sardonic comment on the curatorial profession. In the artworld, curators have been elevated to the status of stars, with increasingly grandiose, state-of-things survey exhibitions. Coming from an artistic background, Fitzpatrick admits to being uneasy with this model of curatorial practice.

"I've always been sceptical about heavily curated shows that are intended in part to glorify the curator. As a former artist I've tended to prefer monographic shows that explore the work of one artist. I think they are usually more rewarding."

Fitzpatrick was born in Co Clare and is based there now. He grew up in Bunratty and attended the Limerick School of Art and Design, studying sculpture. Tom Fitzgerald, one of Ireland's foremost sculptors (and a participant in Kilkenny) was in charge of the sculpture department. After Limerick, Fitzpatrick went on to study in Milan for a year, "under the same professor as James Coleman," whom he duly met. He also got to know the painter Sean Shanahan, who had just settled in Milan. Back in Ireland, he taught in a secondary school and devoted himself to making his own work.

Then, in 1990, he went to Birmingham to complete an MA. "That fed me back into the world of art and literary theory. I knew I had to delve deeper, and the experience changed my practice." He had embarked on a PhD in Liverpool when he was awarded the PS1 scholarship to New York, a golden opportunity that he enthusiastically embraced. "In the event we [he and his wife Monica] stayed five years in New York."

After the PS1 year, he took part in the Whitney Programme - "an incredibly stimulating time: you were involved with an amazing group of artists and writers". He worked at art handling and transportation, and completed various residencies, to make money.

Eventually, toward the end of the 1990s, they had to decide whether they would return to settle in Ireland or not. They decided that they would. By then, his own work had changed totally, from a primary engagement with classical sculptural materials to social interaction with a conceptual basis. He taught at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology for two years. "Teaching was interesting in that it involved a lot of administration, and made me realise that I could cope with administration."

In 2000, the job of director of the Limerick City Gallery of Art came up when the then director, Paul O'Reilly, retired. In retrospect it is remarkable that an artist and teacher, rather than a curator per se, was appointed, but it was a good appointment. "It couldn't happen now," Fitzpatrick remarks, "because of the professionalising of curation." From the beginning, he applied himself with notable enthusiasm and energy. "I found it exciting. For me, working with artists to make shows is very close in feeling to making work in the studio." And he found, as have others, that there was a great deal of work to be done, curatorially, in Ireland.

Besides the annual involvement with international artists that comes with EV+A, and without any sense of special pleading, the Limerick City Gallery has been good on showcasing work by Limerick artists and Irish artists generally. There is a strong argument to be made that, for various reasons, contemporary Irish artists have not been particularly well served by public galleries. That has been changing in recent years, thanks to the efforts of Limerick, the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery and other venues. This is not a matter of celebrating Irish art because it's Irish and hence reinforcing a tendency toward complacency. It's more a question of putting Irish art into the firing line, of setting it in first-class curatorial contexts and measuring it against international standards, something that has to happen if Irish art is to move into that arena.

"It's been a good time," Fitzpatrick says of his tenure in Limerick. "It's been a moment of growth for Irish art. I think we're moving beyond a situation characterised by a lack of respect for artists, a lack of support. I think we're seeing a professionalising of the curatorial and exhibition sector that is ongoing and essential. While there are individual Irish artists who have made an impact internationally, Irish art per se has not. We need to crack that." Which is, partly, where Venice comes in.

Failure at Kilkenny Arts Festival, curated by Mike Fitzpatrick, features work by 15 artists at several venues in Kilkenny and Thomastown, until Aug 20. Details widely available in Kilkenny and at the Box Office on the corner of the Parade and Patrick Street. See www.kilkennyarts.ie