It oftens seems 'unpatriotic' to criticise new art gallery buildings - butfew of the Republic's visual art spaces are without problems.Gemma Tipton looks at the good, the bad and the 'could-be-better'.
One of the problems with looking at architecture is that we often don't. Particularly in cities, the built environment is so much a factor of our daily routine that we often neglect to actually see the shape of the walls and windows which mark off inside from outside, delineate our streets, and define the spaces and places where we spend our working and living days.
One of the problems with criticising architecture is that once it's up and open, the building is pretty much a fait accompli.
Designs have been agreed and approved, millions of Euro have gone in, the screens and hoardings are off, and there's little to do on opening night other than praise. Architects' models and plans give little sense of how the building will actually feel when it's finished, how the sweep of the walls, the arc of a façade will affect you once it's done.
When the National Gallery's Millennium Wing (by Benson and Forsyth) opened in January this year, people were more or less unanimous in its praise. Critics waxed lyrical about its "brilliance" and "greatness" (and at the time, so did I), and it would have seemed churlish to mention that the stairs seemed a little steep; that some of the detailing cut into the stone seemed a little fussy; that the drama and scale of the atrium made the galleries appear somewhat of an afterthought; that the layout (with its forbidding fire doors) was confusing; and that the lines moulded into the concrete hanging walls interfered with the display of some of the larger works (there's a Mainie Jellet downstairs the complex geometries of which are all disrupted); and that in its modernity, it entirely ignores the original Merrion Square building.
At the time, proper, considered, criticism seemed stifled by twin constraints. On the one hand, it was like when your seven-year-old presents a cake she's spent all afternoon baking, covered with carefully placed jelly tots set on lurid green icing. What can you say other than "it's lovely, darling"? On the other hand was the lurking nervousness that to knock something new and different could place you in the same intellectual category as the 19th-century critics who didn't "get" Van Gogh. It's not that the Millennium Wing is a "bad" building - it's not. It has many elements which are "great" and "brilliant", and I love how it works with the rest of Clare Street. It's more that to criticise any part of it is taken as a rejection of the whole - which given our rush to praise this stunning commitment to contemporary architecture and the arts, almost seems unpatriotic.
But does our general practice of colluding in nothing but praise of our new art galleries mean we are joining a conspiracy of mediocrity, ensuring that we may never get the art spaces we (ought to) deserve? The Irish Museum of Modern Art should be our "flagship" contemporary art museum, and yet it is a small-roomed, off-white elephant in a hard-to-get-to part of town. The Irish Museum of Modern Art's (IMMA) New Galleries, a conversion of the Deputy Master's House, completed in 2001 by Shay Cleary architects, are the only part of IMMA which comply with international lending criteria for galleries (these are assessed in terms of security, temperature, light, humidity and so on). And yet, set across the driveway, and sort of wedged into the building which houses them, their main function seems to be to make the main galleries look big.
IMMA is actually quite nice. If you have the time, it's a day out - and the café downstairs, while being a bit "basement-ey" has great food. Yet I always leave feeling angry and depressed at the missed opportunity it represents. The best thing that could be done for IMMA is to move it. The second best thing would be to run a metro up there, but all the additional money poured into the Kilmainham site is basically only a bandage on a bad decision.
Converting existing buildings for contemporary art spaces is an oft-used trick. In some cases there's a perfect symbiosis between space and art. The SoHo artists of the 1960s and 1970s in Manhattan made their work in colonised loft and industrial-space studios. Industrial-space galleries, such as DIA in Chelsea (and shortly to be in New Jersey too) work particularly well in showing that same genre of art.
But too often, the conversion is used to supply the perfect alibi for the new art space's failings. Yes, the rooms at IMMA are small, but haven't they done well with the space they had to work with? And yes, the progression of rooms is (difficult feat this) both overly prescriptive of route through the exhibition, and confusing, but once again it was the existing building which caused the problems - and not the choice to use it in the first place.
In Ireland, the spaces which work best in colonised buildings are the smaller galleries. The Butler in Kilkenny, the Wexford Arts Centre, the old Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar, and the old Temple Bar Gallery for that matter, all shaped their identities around the buildings they took over, and the spaces worked. But in the case of Temple Bar, things began to go wrong when the money began to come in. Buildings are not at their most successful when designed by committee. And while the needs and requirements of artists and curators need to be taken into account, the input of boards of directors, steering committees and sponsors can lead to architectural dog's dinners where you end up with a bit of everything, and a lot of nothing.
The various galleries and art buildings in Temple Bar have all won awards (as a visit to the reception of the Temple Bar Properties' office at 18 Eustace Street will testify), but how can the mutual prize-giving fiestas that are the annual architectural awards here count for much when ArtHouse (also by Shay Cleary Architects) received an award? Now in receivership and awaiting a new tenant, ArtHouse was Ireland's digital and multimedia centre for the arts. So how come it was blessed with a plate-glass frontage? Anyone who has ever tried to watch the television in summer with the sun streaming in through the living-room windows would never have made that basic mistake. The idea of all that plate glass - and it's all over Temple Bar - is as an architectural shorthand for "transparency". It says: "come on in, we've nothing to hide" and "roll up, roll up, everyone's welcome". The trouble is, it doesn't work too well when it comes to actually displaying art, digital or otherwise, and what generally happens is that either the windows are blanked out, or the space has to be given over to a café, or bookshop and reception area.
To give credit where it's due, in terms of conversions, it's worth going to see Belfast's Ormeau Baths Gallery (in a converted Victorian swimming pool, by architectural firm, twenty two over seven), and the Model Arts Centre in Sligo (conversion by McCullough Mulvin). The Model has a bit of over-blown-atrium-syndrome going on, but that is, as usual, a temptation too far for most architects when offered the opportunity of designing a gallery.
As far as purpose-built spaces go, Koralek resisted the particular atrium-temptation when designing the Douglas Hyde - although an international architect of his stature wasn't going to let a little thing like the mechanism for actually getting the artworks into the gallery interfere with his vision for the space. Consequently, one of Dublin's largest art spaces is almost impossible to get really large works into.
While, in both conversions and purpose-built galleries, the art spaces increasingly have to fight for their share of square footage with the space given over to atrium,foyer, bookshop and café, in multi-use arts centres around the country, the areas designated for visual art are, often as not, a couple of white walls beside the bar, or an opened-out corridor on the way to the toilets. Pictures displayed here function primarily as decoration. And while in the context of a regional space which is there to serve all elements of the creative community, there may be few other solutions, what it does mean is that carefully considered spaces, dedicated to viewing visual art are becoming rarer and rarer. And if your visual arts space is part of the café, your exhibition programme is immediately constrained by what it is appropriate to show in such a public area.
In 1956, when Frank Lloyd Wright's new Guggenheim Museum in New York was attacked in an open letter to the Museum's trustees by artists including Milton Avery, William de Kooning, Philip Guston and Robert Motherwell, who said the new spaces were "not suitable for a sympathetic display of painting and sculpture", Wright responded by sending a telegram telling the artists that "the incubus of habit \ beset their minds", and that all artists would now "try to do better" to show work in his museum. While the museum or gallery is not the primary source of stimulation for artists, there has to be an element of inspiration in the architecture of our art spaces, some encouragement to dream - but who's going to dream big in the art spaces we have in Ireland?
Gemma Tipton is an art and architectural critic. Last year she received the Arts Council's Bursary in Contemporary Architectural Criticism for a series of articles currently appearing in CIRCA magazine