The importance of being IMMA

IT IS only to be expected that a museum of modern art will attract criticism from time to time. It would not be doing its job if it did not. Considered criticism and debate are essential components in a living culture.

In some ways, therefore, Gerald Davis's piece in The Irish Times (July 2nd) is no surprise. However, the unhealthy undercurrent of denial which it represents needs to be addressed, particularly as it is compounded by a refusal to acknowledge the wider success which younger Irish artists are consistently beginning to achieve.

Such denial is not unknown in Ireland and certainly pre dates IMMA, but at a time when the world is in flux, sticking your head in the sand and wishing change away simply won't do. That approach will not serve the Irish art context even if it were possible to create the cultural fortress he seems to wish IMMA to be.

How can Davis attack IMMA for not representing the founders of modern art in Ireland when IMMA has shown retrospectives of Mainie Jellett, Patrick Swift and will show, later in 1996, Louis le Brocquy, in the context of current work? We have also shown non Irish retrospectives like the Giacometti, Hamilton, Heartfield, Ernst and Albers exhibitions. In fact IMMA has substantial representation of a wide variety of Irish artists in its exhibition programmes and a majority of its collection is made up of works by Irish artists including those in the Gordon Lambert Collection.

Historically, of course, there are undoubted gaps in provision for works of a certain period which mostly went into private collections and are still there. But could it be true that this coincided with the period when Gerald Davis and those of like mind would have been fuller participants in the Irish art context than now? Could it be that, far from this present generation of curators/organisers failing the Irish art context, it is actually his own generation which failed to create a network of public or private institutions which were capable of nourishing artists examining their art and giving it a place in the world?

It is a self serving untruth to lay the blame for this historical gap in provision at the doors of contemporary institutions and curators who are actually trying to remedy those previous failures.

We should be absolutely clear that the real target of this criticism is change. It is IMMA's approach which Davis is attacking - an approach which does not claim an exclusive zone for Irish art but places it in a dynamic field of activity. Gerald Davis sees but does not recognise what is going on and so misrepresents these programmes and the long term strategies of the museum.

Davis writes on the faulty premise that he knows what a museum of modern art is - as if there is still a functioning generic model for a museum of visual art. Such institutions have to be individual inventions now and this actually provides one of our key advantages in present circumstances.

We know what it is in Ireland to have second hand experiences, institutional mimicry and to be in the slipstream of visual culture. IMMA makes no apology therefore for trying to create a new, distinctive, confident context for contemporary and historical Irish and non Irish art to be experienced by as wide a range of people as possible.

Anyone in touch with real discussion in our society or among artists and curators would understand this and perhaps would make their contribution to the conversation about the place of art in the world and not only in Ireland - for we live in the world these days. I believe that most Irish artists are confident about their own contribution to this conversation. It is a pity that Gerald Davis is not.

TO PRETEND that Irish artists somehow need protection from the world flies in the face of the experience of the very artists he is recommending as touchstones. From Mainie Jellet to James Coleman, very many artists, starved of first hand contact with international contemporary art of their day, had to leave Ireland to gain that experience. How many artists have we lost, and how many more would we lose, if we were to defer to Davis's denial of the importance of first hand experience of contemporary art?

Had Gerald Davis been writing in the 1940s he would have been attacking the Exhibition of Living Art and what it stood for then, as he attacks IMMA and the Douglas Hyde Gallery now.

Contemporary artists are doing what artists have always done; they are exploring the nature and meaning of human experience. IMMA sets out to present that process and to include the viewer as participant, whether it is cast in contemporary or historical terms. People may accept or reject individual manifestations, but we believe that this total process, which has to tested over time, is right for this period and this context. It reflects a living tradition and energises our reading of the past as well as the present. To support a denial of this would be to kill art - to kill culture. IMMA's real failure would be to assist Gerald Davis in what he is recommending, which is nothing less than artistic taxidermy.