ART:Artist Gary Coyle's relationship with the sea, and the Forty Foot in particular, forms the basis of a project that encompasses photography and performance art, writes Gemma Tipton
WHEN I MEET Gary Coyle for coffee in Dún Laoghaire, he has just completed his 2,783rd swim at the Forty Foot bathing place (so named for the British Army regiment who once frequented it). Notorious in former years as that “men- only-place-where-they-swim-in-the-nip”, today the Forty Foot is fairly unisex and costumed, though there is an area to the side where hard-core enthusiasts still swim the cold seas in the altogether. Coyle knows exactly how many times he has been in the water here, since he began to record it for an art project that began in the summer of June 1999.
Then, as he puts it in his performance piece, At Sea, he had his Eureka moment. He had bought a waterproof camera, at first simply to document what he saw as he swam each day, and then, out of the blue (or grey, knowing the skies and seas of Dún Laoghaire), “the thought entered my head, if Richard Long’s walks are art, why aren’t my swims?” The first result of this project was a series of large (more than a metre wide) photographs, each entitled Lovely Water, with the date of the swim on which it was taken below.
One of the marvellous things about art is the way it can make the familiar seem strange, and even though it doesn’t always have to be beautiful (though Coyle’s photographs are, extremely so), it can reveal the beauty of the mundane. For those who commute along the coast, perhaps take the Dart into Dublin, or are lucky enough to have a home or office with a view of the sea, familiarity can lead to our taking it for granted. Through Coyle’s photographs, you can see the opposite occurring.
“The more I’m out here,” he says, “the more I see, not less. You think you’d run out of possibilities, but in fact more seem to arrive.” Grey and bleak, rising and menacing, or with stretches of turquoise meeting a blushing dawn sky, the moods of the sea are shown as endless. “I don’t understand why some artists feel they need to go away for inspiration from different landscapes,” he asks. “When it’s all here, on our doorstep.”
As the project grew, Coyle included more elements – charcoal drawings; the notebooks in which he writes the details of his daily swims (there are now more than 50 of them); red biros with every single drop of ink used up in writing these diaries; a growing collection of bottles of sea water – one filled at every swim; maps detailing the different routes Coyle takes on his bicycle to get to the sea; and then the performance. This is a spoken word piece in which the artist talks about his swims, the people he meets, and what it means to him.
If the words “conceptual art” can ring alarm bells in some quarters, the idea of performance art is often a total anathema. This is hardly surprising, when you think of some of the things performance audiences have endured since its heyday in the 1960s, especially when its champions tended to deal with criticism by emphasising the ignorance of those who simply didn’t relate to what they were doing (Chris Burden having himself nailed to a Volkswagen, Vito Acconci masturbating under a gallery floor, and that’s just for starters).
Coyle understands this difficulty entirely, and in his performance At Sea, which is being performed at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, he describes how he began the whole project with a cynical view of what these artists were trying to do. He also describes how a great deal of the performance art he had been exposed to as a student in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in the 1980s put him off the genre entirely. “Every generation,” he says, “reacts to the one before, and I left art school hating performance art.”
He was also reacting to the generations in his own family, too, as his father, John Coyle, is a painter. Both Coyles, father and son, are members of the RHA, and Gary has, this year, been elected to Aosdána.
“Dad also paints pictures of Dún Laoghaire, so we do the same subject matter,” says Coyle, adding, “mine’s a lot bleaker.” He and his father have long arguments about art, he tells me, but they are very close. In fact, a portrait in charcoal of John Coyle won Gary a prize at last year’s Davy Portrait Awards.
Perhaps it was a reaction against his father, but Coyle almost didn’t become an artist, initially studying history and art history at UCD, before switching to the NCAD and then attending London’s Royal College of Art (RCA). Another interlude nearly side-tracked him again, when he was asked to model for a Paul Smith fashion shoot in 1996.
“I was photographed by David Bailey,” he remembers. “They were looking for ‘ordinary people’, and they chose me. I was in French Vogue, on subway posters, everywhere. And then I was offered a big modelling job . . . Only it was pre-mobile phones, and somebody called the house, wanting to fly me to New York, but my flatmate didn’t give me the message.”
That was when he’d just finished at the RCA. “I was back, broke and on the dole,” he pauses to consider how different his life might have been. “I hope that wasn’t my 15 minutes of fame,” he muses. Then, three years later, he started taking photographs of the sea.
We talk about Coyle’s love of his hometown of Dún Laoghaire, how it feels real, and how its lingering “grottiness” in some quarters is part of its charm. He describes how his daily swims have affected how he sees both land and sea, and also how making a performance about it has changed his mind about performance art. “I started off as a sceptic and I’m now a fan – of certain types,” he adds.
At Sea is actually full of art references, although you can enjoy it just as much without getting them all. It’s just that Coyle is, as he puts it, such “a big art fan”. It’s also full of human life: he describes meeting drunken women, Bloomsday tourists, and being asked by gardaí where he was going. He was tempted, he says, to tell them the truth, to tell them that he was mapping his route to a daily swim that would become a spoken-word performance. Instead, he mumbled something about “thinking about buying a house in the area”.
He also describes an encounter with an old man, who never seemed to have washed his clothes, and his horror when he discovered these clothes discarded on top of his own carefully folded ones while both were swimming. Dismay turns to an emotional insight, when the man tells him how glorious it is to feel his “old body” in the wide clean waters of the Irish Sea.
Watching At Sea has changed my mind, too, about performance art. It has made me realise that we don’t have to travel to find the exotic. Coyle agrees. “I’ve got this everyday activity, this thing that happens at the bottom of my road and I’ve put it through an art mincer to see what comes out of it,” he explains. With his art, what comes out of it can be different, intriguing, thought provoking and, often, very beautiful indeed.
Gary Coyle's performance and photographs are on show as part of Something Else, a group exhibition curated by Aisling Prior for Kilkenny Arts Festival. At Seawill be performed at Rothe House on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, August 7th-9th, from 7-9pm. See www.kilkennyarts.ie. Gary Coyle's work is available from the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, www.kevinkavanaghgallery.ie. Coyle will also have a solo show at Dublin's RHA Gallery in March 2010