Visualising the future at UCC

UCC's new art history degree course and planned art gallery are an attempt to enhance our visual awareness and 'question received truths' writes Mary Leland.

Sixteen years of thinking and planning will start bearing fruit this summer when work begins on University College Cork's first art gallery. It's a development which, in tandem with the college's first undergraduate degree in history of art, marks a new era in visual awareness at the university.

A purchasing and commissioning policy based on the desire to support regional and, if possible, younger artists can be laden with hazards. In adopting it in 1986, the newly established visual arts committee of UCC was guided by the advice of James White, former curator of the National Gallery of Ireland. He widened the brief to include one or two key purchases per year that would reflect the best Irish art of the preceding half-century. No one, even at UCC, is going to pretend that all the pitfalls were avoided, but neither can anyone deny that those guiding principles have produced an important collection.

Successful committees sometimes disguise their own motivating purposes and powers. At UCC, the drive has come from the college presidents, first through the influence of Michael Mortell, whose wife, Catherine, is a printmaker, and now through his successor, Gerry Wrixon, former director of the National Microelectronic Research Centre. Mortell was both a commissioning and purchasing agent for works in the modern art collection: Louis le Brocquy, Basil Blackshaw, Michael Quane, Charles Tyrrell,Morgan Doyle, Sue Cunliffe-Melling, Brian Kennedy and others feature among the purchases under his name.

Apportioning credit for such acquisitions is now frowned upon by UCC, and while the catalogue credits particular names under each item, the official preference is for corporate rather than personal attributions, and no one was willing, as a matter of policy, to indicate the acquisitions due to the current president.

No one could accuse Prof Alistair Rowan of being coy. As the inaugural head of the history of art degree course introduced last autumn, he has no doubts about the person and the purpose driving UCC's current assertion of the visual arts as a vital element of its educational agenda.

"President Wrixon has a sense of mission which is not something new to him," Rowan says. "He has had a consistent interest in art, demonstrated through his private collecting, through purchasing while director at the National Microelectronics Research Centre and through his participation in the cultural life of Cork city itself."

Cork, according to Rowan, has not won the title of European City of Culture for 2005 by accident. An awful lot has been going on over the past 10 years, from the dominance of the National Sculpture Factory; the opening of the workshop and exhibition spaces at Wandesford's Quay and the Fenton Gallery; the consistent work at the Lavit and other commercial galleries, and the extension to the Crawford Municipal Gallery. UCC itself has followed an enlightened policy of building up its contemporary collection - not all of which, Rowan admits, is of lasting significance. Wrixon, for several years chairman of the Triskel Arts Centre, is not a recent convert to that process of enlightenment.

Visual arts officer Fiona Kearney, former curator at Triskel, explains the developments that have taken place, from the initial diploma in the history of European art, directed by Hilary O'Kelly, to the two-year diploma course instituted by her husband and successor as visual arts officer, William Gallagher. These extra-mural classes were highly popular, especially with the elegant, retired and monied elements of Cork; the degree course is different, and is based on a desire to meet the needs of the student body.

The students will continue to enjoy the current ready access to art when the gallery opens. "We want to keep as much of the collection as possible spread out around the campus, as it is at the moment," says Kearney. "It has a very strong presence both indoors and out and from the first was conceived as being part of student life. That also emphasises the importance of strengthening the dialogue between the visual arts and other disciplines in the college, while the gallery itself, an integral part of the history of art degree, will also provide a physical link with the life of the city."

The gallery, designed by O'Donnell and Twomey of Dublin and located on the site of the tennis courts, will consist of five levels with a timber façade on a limestone-clad base. Currently out to tender, the €10-million building is to begin construction this month, with a completion date 18 months later. Both design and location came in for some mild criticism; even within UCC there was a feeling that building on the wooded river-side courts eliminated the possibility of redeveloping that area as the original Victorian parkland. There was a body of opinion in favour of the idea that this modern structure should have been placed instead near Jail Cross at the western end of the campus.

More significant, however, is the suggestion that UCC's collection might not merit a gallery of its own. The accumulation of contemporary Irish art demands a particular kind of foresight, and there are those at UCC who doubt if the acquisitions policy is up to the challenge.

Yet this is precisely the gap which the history of art degree is designed to fill. Alistair Rowan can hold forth on visual literacy for hours, and even a succinct few minutes are enough to convince the listener that this is an attribute which Ireland does not yet regard with any great respect, never mind reverence.

Appointed to the first professorship of history of art at UCD in 1977, Rowan left Dublin after 13 years to return as principal to Edinburgh College of Art, where he had taken his first degree. He was Slade professor of fine art at Oxford University and was also professor of art history at Heriot Watt in Edinburgh. His earlier role as architecture editor for Country Life magazine increased his sense that what was necessary was an educational institution in the style of Louis XIV's Acadèmie Royale: a place for training not just painters but craft workers, and also for encouraging their patrons.

For Rowan, the new gallery will have the vital role of educating the people who will be the customers of the artists and curators.

'Ireland has done very well with its economic boom. But if you look around the boardrooms of the country, or the houses in which company directors live - even the way they dress - you'd have to accept that the level of understanding of the visual arts in our lives is still relatively low," he says.

A teacher who is not afraid to make the politically incorrect distinction between education and training, Rowan believes that UCC's high reputation justifies the addition of an art gallery to its facilities and the introduction of an art history degree as part of its humanities programme.

"A vibrant, growing economy needs educated employees, and it is important, if unpopular, to recognise that universities are not technical institutions. Art history teaches students how to decipher interpretative patterns, how to contain tremendous presences, how to question received truths. If your mind has been put to work on Leonardo's notebooks - well, after that, writing a management strategy outline is not a problem!"