`What is not art, is also art'

RECENT walk through the white washed corridors of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin offered a instructive glimpse of the world of contemporary art. This impression came not from the exhibits, but from the small sample of people wandering there.

Around the West wing, which houses the Felim Egan exhibition, New Paintings and Sculpture, there was no more than a handful of visitors. Of that number, at least one this writer had a professional interest in the show. Along the corridor, at the museum's Recent Acquisitions show, one room was being visited by the Irish artist responsible for a work installed there. The other people in the room were companions of the artist. This sample is small and random. But for a quiet, weekday afternoon, it provided a nagging image of contemporary art as a closed circuit.

After the announcement of the IMMA Glen Dimplex short list, some enduring questions reappeared. Is there really a wide margin between the general public even those who consider themselves to have an interest in art and contemporary practice? If such a gap exists, is it the duty of public museums and galleries to close it? Should these institutions concern themselves with catering to public expectations of art? Do these institutions attempt to hand down sets of values? If not, what is the nature of the work they do, and how happy are we for them to keep on doing it?

"The museum is really quite a quaint device. If you were planning the thing from scratch in terms of communicating ideas, this would be quite a curious way to do it ... The original view of a museum was that it was a place where you would find fixed values, and which indeed was an agency involved in fixing values," says Declan McGonagle, director of IMMA and chairman of the Glen Dimplex Award panel.

"My argument would be that those fixed positions no longer exist. They need to be looked at in the context of unfixed positions ... We have a period of massive instability at the moment, and that's why you have the uncertainty and the provocation and the testing of boundaries and what looks like in yer face art making, which the public has not been given a vocabulary to deal with What should be possible, then, is to connect people's reality out there to artists ideas and preoccupations in here.

ALTHOUGH Ciaran MacGonigal, who is a member of the Visual Arts Committee of the Arts Council, as well as director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Dublin, has a different rem it from that of Declan McGonagle (the RHA does not have a permanent collection) and programming policy (among other things, and the RHA hosts the Watercolour Society's annual show), they do have similar takes on the reasons for the uncertainty that the public feels when faced with contemporary art.

"Since the days of the Impressionists all the perceptions about art as it was then known and believed in, have changed so much. Nobody seems to have settled down and faced the facts about contemporary art practice," he says. "It is intellectually an impoverished argument to say A child smearing his face with chocolate. Is that art? Under certain circumstances it might well be, because the whole thesis and antithesis that happened after the Impressionists was that what is not art, also is art. Once the critics had got it wrong, nobody was in a position to state absolutely unequivocally what is it that art is. It becomes a matter of shifting perceptions."

In his approach to curatorship, MacGonigal is, at least on the surface, less troubled by the instability of values in art. He must, however, operate in the same climate of public mistrust.

There are areas in contemporary art where people feel degrees of exclusion. They feel that because something is visual, many people feel that should be able to understand it immediately. They equate simplicity of form with simplicity of experience. Up until recently people could see and therefore believe. Frequently now, you go to exhibitions of contemporary practice where you have to believe in advance of seeing While both MacGonigal and McGonagle seem to agree that there is a gap between the public and a large swathe of contemporary art practice, they would choose very different ways of dealing with it.

MacGonigal's might be termed the spirit guide approach. "I'm here to run the gallery according to my biases ... My aesthetic varies according to my enthusiasms. I am here to run and programme a gallery in a particular way. The way I want to do it. I choose the things that move me." That being said, the current exhibition at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, a show of new work by Pauline Bewick, is not one of the more challenging shows of the year. To be led by personal taste is not necessarily, it seems, to highlight public mistrust of contemporary practice.

For MacGonigal, public alienation is closely related to the lack of exposure of contemporary art practice in the mass media. "Information is put out constantly about some player in some rugby team in Limerick who's twisted his ankle so won't be on the team tomorrow .. . It doesn't take a big leap to say, what if you replaced the names of all those people with the names of artists who were doing something so and so has agreed an exhibition with 50 and so and here we have him on the phone for 30 seconds then I think contemporary art would become part of the bloodstream I'm not saying that people would like the work any better, but it would be part of the bloodstream."

In the end, however, MacGonigal seems to suggest, there are some messages, some forms of communication, which are destined to have a limited audience. This need not be an elitist view, he suggests, simply one that takes into account the realities of mass communication.

"The thing about a TV show like, for example, Baywatch is that if you are catering to an audience of 60 million people, then what you are communicating has to be very watered down. Watered down to the extent that you can't really say anything, you can only deliver consumers to advertisers. That, in the end, is all that Baywatch can do. If you try to talk to 60 million people, then you have to ignore their differences, to ignore the fact that they are individuals. We are trying to do something different."