ART SPACE:What's going to happen to all the empty office buildings around the country? Aoife Tunney has filled a vacant cavern with art, writes GEMMA TIPTON
ON THE FLOORS above and below, it’s another day at the office. People are working at their desks, having meetings, making notes, taking calls. To get here, we have signed in at the front desk and taken the lift to the first floor. Anglo Irish has its Private Banking offices here. The carpet is thick and there is art on the walls. Then we open a pair of inlaid wooden doors, and take an unexpected step down, to find a surprise.
We’re in a huge, exciting space that extends off towards distant windows, giving views onto the tops of trees. There are no desks here, no carpets, and the walls aren’t quite finished. But placed around the empty shell there are pieces of art: installations, films, special constructions. As an office space, this floor is on the market and has been for some time. Once let, I’m sure it will make a perfectly fine divisional office, or even a headquarters for some company – but as a contemporary art gallery it’s absolutely phenomenal. I’m here with Aoife Tunney, who has made this place (temporarily) a gallery, and whose exhibition work.in.space runs here until June 18th.
Tunney, a graduate of the MA in visual arts practices at the Institute of Art, Design Technology in Dún Laoghaire, had already curated an exhibition at the Back Loft in Dublin, and had worked at Four Gallery. “I was looking around for spaces to put on a show,” she explains, “and not having much luck. That was before the downturn. I had decided not to approach established galleries because I didn’t feel I was on that level yet, but I also wanted to do something different.”
But as 2008 became 2009 things changed, and a walk around the city with a friend who knows the construction industry revealed this place, Connaught House, on Burlington Road in Dublin 4. “As soon as I saw it, I thought ‘this is it’. From the outside it’s an impressive modern building; inside it’s an empty shell. It isn’t anything yet – it feels as if it’s waiting for a purpose, so it offered so many alternatives for stories, for art.” The building is owned by Treasury Holdings, and Johnny Ronan “was open to me using it”. In fact, it had been used last year for an A|wear fashion show.
Tunney, a former model, has taken a roundabout route to working with artists. She realised her talent for organisation when she decided to drive an ambulance to Chernobyl in 2006. “I had to raise €30,000 to do it, so I organised two concerts . . . so while that experience wasn’t a direct link to art, it was a direct experience of making something happen, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
The first artist Tunney approached was Declan Clarke. “His work often comes from a political perspective, and I wanted an element in the exhibition that addressed the politics of why this space existed at all, and why it is empty. It’s almost as if this space is representative of the bubble we’ve gone through. So Declan came to see the space, saw its potential, and has made a film about it.”
This office-as-art-space phenomenon is not a first: in the empty CA department store on London’s Oxford Street in 2001, Michael Landy famously destroyed (crushed and shredded) his own belongings – including art works, his birth certificate and a coat his father had given him. In the UK, the government is discussing making grants available to people to use vacant retail space for cultural or community purposes. It’s also something that has been happening in an informal way in Ireland, with organisations such as Pallas, G126 and Thisisnotashop operating in otherwise “unwanted” buildings. The origins of Temple Bar were also in abandoned factories – a shirt factory, in the case of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.
The problems, when encouraging businesses to let artists and performers use their empty premises, relate to tenure, and also relationships. While many landlords and corporations may well be happy to allow short-term events, no one wants to be faced with the negative publicity of “evicting artists” when things improve.
Equally, not all landlords feel comfortable working with artists, who they may feel are a different breed. In New York, Swing Space and Workspace are two initiatives of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) that provide a model we could adopt here. They take advantage of commercial space that is vacant for a variety of reasons, as the LMCC’s residency director, Erin Donnelly, explains: “Many commercial buildings have vacant space locked between tenants with long-term leases that is not really marketable on its own.”
Space donors give space for anywhere from three to 12 months, and the LMCC manages selecting the artists and dealing with issues such as insurance and leases and maintaining good relationships with those who run the buildings – “diplomacy is key to our success,” says Donnelly.
Back in Connaught House, Tunney hopes the audience for her exhibition won’t just be those who regularly attend contemporary exhibitions, even though some of the art is quite “difficult”. “I’m hoping there will be something wider. The fact it’s in a space that isn’t a gallery or an institution I hope will open it up and entice a different audience.”
She’s also keen to take the exhibition abroad, and is looking for something similar to Connaught House in London. With the way things are at the moment, that shouldn’t too difficult to find. What would be really amazing is if we could find a way, like the LMCC’s, of making events like these more common, and use some of that space that is currently a victim of the recession to let artists, performers and writers make some of their own particular sort of work.
work.in.space is at Connaught House until June 18th. See www.workinspace.org. It includes work by artists Rhona Byrne, Karl Burke, Declan Clarke, Ra di Martino, Aleana Egan, Miguel Mitlag, Linda Quinlan and Lee Welch