"WHY?" seems like a good place to start. How did Alanna Heiss, founder director of one of Manhattan's most celebrated experimental art spaces, PS1, wind up at the Crawford Gallery as curator of Volume, a multi art show by (mostly) little known Cork artists writers and musicians often working within traditional, even unfashionable styles?
"I don't remember," Heiss laughs in the gallery's cafe the morning after the poetry, music and performance "happening" that launched Volume. When she reflects on the questions a little more, she recalls that her initial introduction to the Crawford came when two good friends of hers, James Turrell and Patrick Ireland, produced work there.
Although she had visited Cork several times and had been very attracted to the city, it was, she suggests, out of character to accept the job of curator of Volume. "Normally, I would never accept an invitation to do a show like this," she says. "I've been asked to curate some quite prominent events, but I've never found it that intriguing beyond the initial response of vanity. It's like windows I won't wash windows and I won't do large invitation group shows for local artists. That is a very young curator's job. But I just found that I wanted to do this and it was an opportunity to root around a bit, like an overweight curator in the pig pen of art."
Heiss's normal pig pen, PS1 (housed in a building which was once a Public School) is perhaps best known for its international studio programme, which sees artists from around the world being given studio space at the centre. (Finola Jones and John Kindness are among the Irish artists who have taken the opportunity to work there in the past.)
"It is a very confusing programme, because for many people that's the only thing we do. They do see us as a museum, and then the museum people don't see why there are artists' studios there and the audiences think it's an art colony. A lot of people think it's an art school," says Heiss.
In reality, PS1 is a bit of all these things, and, according to Heiss, when the main building reopens next year it will also be the largest art centre in the world. "That is if Kunstwerk in Berlin doesn't add a few square meters just to beat us. And if they do we'll just expand too," Heiss adds.
HEISS'S interests are every bit as expansive as her organisation. In the course of an evening watching the bands from the Volume CD (it was Heiss who insisted that the show should include music and writing as well as visual art) her conversation moves through the audience for New Music in New York; John Cage's dislike of rock and roll; whether Karl Lagerfeld is as strange as he seems; the performance aspect of catwalk modelling; Stella Tennant; the decline of the Ramones; Joey Ramone's trousers; the semiotics of heavy metal; Jerry Harrison's role in the Modern Lovers; Ingrid Sischy; an Avedon photo session; the staleness of British pop art; as well as the connection between Douglas Gordan and the rave scene. "I have all of my best ideas in night clubs," she declares over the languorous trip hop of local band, Starchild.
Which is all a lot of fun, if you're in the right mood. Whatever sort of mood you are in, however, it would be hard (not to mention ungracious) not to notice that Heiss schmoozes like a champion. The frenetic power of her conversation is irresistible, but it is what she talks about - the fact that she discusses artists perhaps five times as much as she does their work - that seems to explain the kind of event Volume has turned out to be.
The show, the CD, the poetry and prose, the catalogue, the performances, the whole cacophony of the cultural production that makes up Volume, has no intention of offering a "best of Cork arts. Perhaps any artist left out might feel that this tribal gathering was an exclusive one, but a quick look around tells you that fashion was not a central criterion here. Rather than revealing how plugged in Cork is to the global art scene, or any other such fatuous objective, the point here seems to have been to display a certain moment of ferment, a certain gathering of personalities.
"I just wanted to find the spirit of what was going on," says Heiss. "I didn't want to have to worry about the international profile of the show, or about establishing an art movement in Ireland. None of that was of the slightest concern to me when I did the show." Even if eclectic is, as Heiss says, "a bad word" it is almost the first one that comes to mind when faced with Volume. The catalogue contains artists' pages rather than reproductions of the work on show, and also houses the written section of the show, a mixed bag of poetry and prose selected by Greg Delanty.
The music sweeps from the mutant country of (Son of) Manhole's Jestetner Jim, to the hypnotic muzak of Tony Sheehan's 50 second contribution, Telephone Music for Hold. The visual art section of the show has the same kind of catholic tastes, and includes retiefs by inmates from Cork, Prison, landscape painting, minimalist sculpture and a hydraulic video installation. (The artist behind the last of these, Declan Kennedy, seems to have been just a little bit too eclectic for somebody at the Crawford, since his "artist page in the Volume catalogue/anthology, a photograph of two penises, has been pasted over with a white sticker)
IT WAS Heiss's idea to broaden the range of the event to include writers and musicians, not just as adjuncts to her art show, but as essential components of her broader plan. "It is easy in museums for curators and administrators to forget that artists are alive, that they have to make art. It is so much more convenient to look at art without the artist and order it from the dealer and install it in the show and only meet the artist at the dinner party. It makes it very easy to forget the grottiness of an artist's life."
At the Crawford, it seems Heiss has attempted to create, for a brief time, a similar situation in which it is impossible to separate work and worker. I wanted all the artists involved, not just the visual artists, to come into the gallery while the show was up, to wander round and meet each other, which is why the work is hung in the restaurant as well. Look, this is it: this show is a kind of club. A club like a social club, but also a club where you hear music, and I wanted that club to exist for as long as the show is up. And then everyone can say afterwards `oh, I was a member of that club'."
