Artist Sean Lynch's retrieval of obscure stories from Ireland's past shows that history reverberates in surprising ways, writes Aidan Dunne
Sean Lynch, a black-haired Kerryman with a slow, deliberate manner and a quizzical gaze, is the custodian of Retrieval Unit, as his exhibition in Limerick City Gallery is called. In recent years, Lynch, who is currently based in Frankfurt, has amassed a formidable collection of stories related to recondite aspects of Irish cultural history. He takes these stories and manifests them in a variety of ways, none quite predictable, none offering neat narrative closure, but all illuminating some obscure corner of the past, often the recent past.
Lynch's interest is not straightforwardly anecdotal and historical. The material he collects is still, he feels, charged with latent energy, still relevant to the unfolding present. He cites Richard Kearney's idea of "revolutionary nostalgia" and Walter Benjamin's description of the indeterminate status of yesterday's newspapers: they are no longer current, but they are not yet history either. There are nine projects in the City Gallery, and all require a slightly different approach from the audience: reading documentation, examining photographs, assessing artifacts, looking at documentary footage. In all cases, though, we are invited to draw our own conclusions.
Take the strange case of Flann O'Brien and the bicycle on the summit of Carrantuohill. One JJ Toomey wrote a letter to The Irish Times in 1986 recounting how he and his climbing companion had discovered a full-sized lady's bicycle, mounted on a pole and dedicated to the author of The Third Policeman, at the top of the mountain a few years earlier. A photograph of his companion, astride bicycle, was enclosed. Who, he wondered, had erected this singular monument? Lynch set off with a search party. A series of photographs of the desolate, mist-shrouded peak reveal the absence of any such object. The suspicion is that the bicycle ended up in the depths of the precipitous Devil's Gully, but no trace was found.
Lynch wrote to JJ Toomey to see if more information had been forthcoming, but the mystery remains unresolved. Strangely enough, Lynch points out, the anonymous transportation of unlikely objects to mountain summits is a definite, if minority, cultural pursuit. He cites the grand piano discovered at the top of Ben Nevis. It attracted competing claims as to how it got there.
Folklorist and storyteller Eddie Lenihan features in a video work exploring the history of a fairy bush adjacent to the Ennis by- pass. This story first emerged in 1999, when it was pointed out that the proposed route of the by-pass went directly through an isolated hawthorn bush. Cutting down any hawthorn is traditionally regarded as bringing bad luck, but an isolated hawthorn is a fairy thorn and the consequences of disturbing it are even more serious. Lenihan pointed out that this particular thorn was the fabled assembly point for fairies every bit as deadly as those who populate Eoin Colfer's books.
Initially, Lenihan says, the planners failed to notice the thorn, never mind its significance in folklore. But as the story gained pace, eventually making it to the New York Times, the authorities decided to circumvent the bush. It was duly fenced off and we see Lenihan beside it, relating its history and bemoaning a modern Ireland of lattes, mobile phones and motorways. He also points out that, ominously, preparatory works are underway for laying another road, purpose uncertain, and it too seems to be headed for the fairy bush.
One of the first things we see in the exhibition is a greatly enlarged black-and-white photograph of the charismatic German artist, Joseph Beuys, standing outside the City Gallery or, as it then was, the Carnegie Library. It was taken in 1974, and Lynch tried to get to the truth about Beuys's visit to Limerick. The story, as related by Caroline Tisdall, one of the artist's most fervent admirers and chroniclers, is that Beuys, having extended his Irish visit to include a couple of regional appearances, arrived in Limerick to deliver a public talk.
Such talks were part of his stock in trade. A utopian anthrosophist, he believed that human beings should try to get in touch with their original, pre-civilised selves as a prelude to decisive political change. When he arrived in Limerick, however, the first problem he encountered was the lack of a blackboard on which to draw diagrams. A black- painted table was co-opted for the purpose. But for whatever reason, the citizens of Limerick did not turn out in numbers to hear Beuys' social theories. Tisdall reported that his audience consisted solely of two nuns and a passerby persuaded inside at short notice.
Lynch asked Oliver Dowling, the person who originally invited Beuys to visit Ireland, to elaborate on the facts as he knew them, and the result is a genuinely illuminating account of the whole episode, with some new disclosures, including the detail that Beuys took to referring to Dowling as "Mr Ireland". What we get are several complementary strands of a story. They overlap and one could say that they conflict in certain respects. But it's more a question of emphasis and detail than contradiction.
Given that the Jesuits have pulled out of the Crescent in Limerick, Lynch's research into Hodkinson & Son, a Limerick-based firm of church decorators, is particularly appropriate. The firm, active throughout Ireland for more than 150 years, is still in great demand, though much of its work is undertaken outside of Limerick. Lynch was amazed at the richness of the archive it possesses, in terms of photographic documentation, pattern books, working drawings, and so on.
"They merit a large exhibition to themselves," he says. "They are important in terms of the history of the city and an entire period in the cultural history of the country."
Two pieces of bedraggled statuary salvaged from a one-time landmark public house, the Irish House, which stood on a corner of City Quay in Dublin, lie forlornly on wooden pallets in the gallery.
"It's a pub that was always regarded as being over the top," Lynch notes. "Even when it was first built it was regarded as a kitsch gin palace."
It served as a location for some of Joseph Strick's film of Ulysses. There was a plan, Lynch says, to reassemble the façade in a museum context, but nothing has worked out, and the remains of the pub now occupy 30 pallets in a warehouse that is itself facing a deadline for redevelopment.
"So it's in limbo," according to Lynch. "It's not clear what will happen to it or who will take responsibility for it. It's symptomatic of the way things are now in Ireland. The rate of turnover is accelerating." Sounds like more work for the Retrieval Unit.
• Retrieval Unit, by Sean Lynch, curated by Mike Fitzpatrick, is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art until Mar 18; 061-310633