'The sculpture appears to be a giant paper light shade'

DISCOMFORT ZONE:Sportswriter Mary Hannigan turns art critic for a day

‘HOW ARE you with modern art?” they ask. “Love it,” you gush. “Lionel Messi’s left foot. Serena Williams’s forehand. Muttiah Muralitharan’s googlies. Joe Canning’s sideline pucks. Giovanni Trapattoni’s press conferences . . . ”

“No, no,” they say, “things like . . . sculptural installations.” “What, like Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid?” “No. Like an art exhibit. You know, in a gallery.” Discomfort zone? There’s discomfort and there’s being strapped to a medieval rack and stretched until you pop.

It was the American writer Dave Barry who said “like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.” Cheez-Its, incidentally, are delicious, as all heavily processed cheesy snacks tend to be, and ever since reading Barry’s words, we’ve always had a longing for them whenever we’ve been confronted with modern art.

The chief problem with modern art for boorish low-brows is that it makes us feel stupid. We gaze upon it for a while and at the end our review amounts to one word: “Eh?” Others feel stimulated, enriched even, and see things the rest of us couldn’t see even if we put on 3D glasses.

They can look, for example, at a sliced cow in formaldehyde and understand that the artist is a puritanical moralist excoriating contemporary society for its materialism and vanity (with thanks to the New York Times). We just think he’s mad.

They can study a tent with the names of dozens of the artist’s former lovers scrawled all over it and deem it profound. We just think “cripes, that Tracey Emin is a right floozy”.

“It is not hard to understand modern art,” said Tom Stoppard, “if it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it, it’s a sculpture.” So Tom, like us, is a philistine. “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like,” is our catchphrase, which puts us on the defensive the minute we walk through the gallery door. And then we feel intimidated, so we say things like “my dog could paint that”.

So Dublin artist John O’Connell deserved better than for us to be sent to see his Big Pink exhibition at Dublin’s Goethe Institute. He really did.

The first challenge was to be sure no one we knew saw us going in. That is not being disrespectful; that is just letting you know about the uncultured company we keep. The next was not to look too frightened when saying hello to the very helpful and friendly woman at reception, in the hope of giving the impression we do this kind of thing all the time.

Our biggest fear was that someone would ask us for our opinion. We were ready, though. We’d say “well, the artist is clearly a puritanical moralist excoriating contemporary society for its materialism and vanity”, at which point we’d be told the piece we were reviewing wasn’t actually part of the exhibition, it was just the gallery’s fire extinguisher. Happily, the friendly woman steered us towards the exhibition and away from any unconnected miscellaneous items.

Big Pink includes a sculptural installation, upstairs in the Return gallery, a video work downstairs in the auditorium, and a drawing (Island), which is positioned between the two. The drawing, we were told, provides a visual link, highlighting the intention of the artist for all the works to be experienced as one complete installation.

The architecture of the Return, with its columns and Latin inscriptions, inspired the exhibition’s Roman theme. To the uncouth, the sculptural installation, which almost fills the Return, appears to be a giant pink paper light shade with a hole in the middle. It is, though, a floating sculptural form that invites the viewer to peer into its interior. We did that. But we were already struggling. Especially when we read this interpretation of what we were viewing in the little book we bought: “There is something almost monumental about O’Connell’s seizing of this space that is reminiscent in a strange way of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s (1728-99) stupendous designs for a cenotaph for Isaac Newton.” The longing for Cheez-Its was becoming overwhelming.

Then we looked at the drawing, which was very nice, before going into the darkened auditorium to see the video installation. What Now My Love is shown on two small screens, one featuring a group of live models who, it is suggested, are posing for an ancient Roman mural. The other is a gently moving journey through the underwater ruins of an ancient amphitheatre.

Somebody with the name anonymous once said that “trying to understand modern art is like trying to follow the plot in a bowl of alphabet soup”. By now we were drowning in that soup. That wasn’t John O’Connell’s fault; it was ours alone. We left, feeling significantly more vacuous than when we’d arrived. Back to Lionel Messi’s left foot and Cheez-Its, our comfort zone.