Last night and today, a rather traumatised Irish Museum of Modern Art celebrates its 10th birthday. Early this afternoon, the distinguished Irish artist, Louis le Brocquy is due to deliver an address to an invited audience in the newly paved courtyard at the Royal Hospital. A major exhibition by the renowned German multi-media artist, Rebecca Horn, will open, and a series of colour wall-drawings by the American artist, Sol LeWitt, will be unveiled. In addition, another show, The First Ten Years, offers selected works from IMMA's own collections, which have grown exponentially within a decade from double figures to more than 2,000 works, chiefly thanks to generous donations by Gordon Lambert and others, but also by virtue of regular purchases. And the museum's access programmes are documented in Points of Entry.
At the gala opening of the museum 10 years ago, during Dublin's year as Europe's culture capital, the speech was delivered by then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, who had personally thrown his weight behind the establishment of a national modern art museum. IMMA opened with Declan McGonagle at the helm as director and within a few years, he had become virtually synonymous with the museum.
The preamble to his recent departure, a bitter dispute with the board that exploded in an unprecedented blaze of publicity, put IMMA in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. By all accounts, it also generated some stark differences of opinion within the board itself.
Unhappily, the dispute had the effect of concluding Declan McGonagle's tenure on a distinctly sour note. He decided to go after being offered what, he said, he was entitled to: the offer of a further five year contract. While there are differing views of his stewardship of IMMA, there is no question that successfully launching a major institution on, by international standards, limited funding and resources stands as a major achievement. His commitment of time, energy and accumulated experience to the project was widely recognised and appreciated.
In the debate surrounding the location of the museum (an alternative site in Dublin's dockland, the so-called Stack A, was also mooted) he made no secret of his enthusiasm for the Royal Hospital Kilmainham as a location. The complex of buildings, dominated by the square of four wings around a central courtyard, together with substantial grounds, posed specific problems in terms of functioning as a modern art museum. Among these were - and perhaps are - its location in the city and the pattern of its physical fabric, which consists of long corridors opening on to rooms of domestic scale, and the lack of a comprehensive collection.
However, at a time when museological convention was coming in for radical reappraisal, McGonagle saw the Royal Hospital's singular characteristics as an opportunity to shape a different kind of museum, one not tied to a fixed canonical collection and preconceptions of art forms. He argued that the building's variety of spaces could accommodate the growing variety of contemporary art practice. Certainly, this philosophy decided the character of events during IMMA's first decade.
The 10th anniversary should be a logical point to assess IMMA's progress and look to its future, but presumably we shall have to wait for the appointment of the new director for a statement on the museum's future policies and direction. The institution has been enormously important in the Irish cultural fabric, not least in serving as a focal point for projects designed to raise the profile of modern art in Ireland, and to raise the profile and standards of contemporary Irish art. The Glen Dimplex Artists Award and the Nissan Art Project are two exceptional examples of enlightened sponsorships centred on IMMA.
One of the most popular shows was, predictably enough, the Andy Warhol. Of Irish shows, a retrospective of Louis le Brocquy's paintings did very well, and Mainie Jellett was the subject of a thorough, scholarly retrospective. As against that, certain others, such as the William Scott, must count as opportunities if not quite lost then diminished. And, despite individual acquisitions (always important), and some levels of extremely useful exposure, particularly that afforded by the Glen Dimplex, rather disappointingly we did not really see a concerted push for the work of Irish artists of the younger to middle generation.
This is hard to quantify, and doubtless IMMA curators would be quick to itemise various individual exhibitions they regard as significant (the Nick Miller and the Alanna O'Kelly, both a long time ago, come immediately to mind). It would be invidious, in this context, to name names, but if you call to mind an informal check-list of the best known of those younger to middle generation artists, is it possible to think of a substantial solo show at IMMA devoted to one of them that became a career landmark, a must-see event? The nearest thing is probably Dorothy Cross's Nissan Art Project winner, The Ghost Ship.
It is almost as if, in its desire to continually do the less obvious thing, IMMA left the obvious but necessary things undone, something that led, at times, to a certain air of dutiful austerity at the Royal Hospital.
And arguably, what IMMA needs, not in the next decade, but well within the next five years, is shows that are must-sees, shows that will be widely talked about, that will engage the public imagination.
In a way, the choice of Rebecca Horn as a centre-piece anniversary show is typical of IMMA's slightly off-centre approach. The reclusive Horn, though well-known within the art world, is not exactly an art celebrity. She is best known for her elaborate kinetic installationss, including her painting machines, characterised by an unsettling, nervy energy and explosive, unpredictable bursts of movement.
Her work has its roots in conceptual and performance art, centred on the body, of the late 1960s and 1970s. At that time, while enduring a long illness and confinement in a sanatorium, she set about making body sculptures that were extensions or embellishments of the body, including feathered wings, huge unicorn horns and Edward Scissorhand-like fingers, all held in place by straps and bands that come across as half medical, half fetishistic.
Fans fashioned from feathers and various kinds of musical instruments and apparatus are staples for her in the way that felt and fat were Joseph Beuys' trademark materials. Beuys and, strikingly, the painting and self-destructive machines of the Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely, were important influences, but Buster Keaton?
In fact, Horn identifies strongly, almost intensely with Keaton, with his talent for engineering and then surviving mechanical calamity, with the dangerous edge and unbearable tension of his physical comedy, from which laughter is a necessary release.
While there is humour of sorts in her work, as in a sense of the ridiculous in the anthropomorphism of her literally highly-strung machines, it has to be said that she is not really about humour. In fact, a very European, self-conscious, high-art seriousness is more her thing. She has on occasion referred to the almost unbearable demands her art makes on her, and she operates at a level of intensity very close to that conveyed in her pieces, in which things are stretched to breaking point and sometimes a bit beyond.
The American, Sol LeWitt, comes from the same conceptual era. He established himself in the late 1960s not so much with drawings but with texts on conceptual art. The wall drawings are more commonly wall paintings, designed and specified by LeWitt and executed by practised assistants who are familiar with his exceptionally demanding requirements. In embarking on the wall drawings that have occupied him over the past 40 years, he wanted to do away with the canvas or paper support, to place the work directly on to the wall.
In a sense, the concept is the work, in that it can be materialised at will. Usually the designs are bold, geometric compositions, utilising a tight range of flat colours. "All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair," as he wrote in one of his seminal conceptualist texts. Well, not quite perfunctory.
Every detail of design, materials, support and execution is specified and the meticulous process of installation is invariably overseen if not by LeWitt himself then by one of his trusted studio artists.
Whatever its recent tribulations, IMMA's 10th birthday is well worth celebrating. It is an institution the country can, and should, be proud of.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10a.m.-5p.m.; Sundays and bank holidays: noon-5.30p.m. (Tel: 01-6129900)