Declan McGonagle, who quit his post as director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) last April, is to take up a new position with the City Arts Centre in Dublin from December 1st. Though he has as yet no job title, he will head the centre as it begins a two-year process of redefinition and revitalisation. The process could well see the centre move to a new home, though the current executive director, Sandy Fitzgerald, says a final decision in this regard has not yet been taken. "We expect to make an announcement within the next two months." Fitzgerald will bow out of his involvement with the centre in December.
"The centre as it is now will cease by the end of December," he says. "We will run the programme until the end of the year, but we cannot programme next year in any conventional sense." He recognises that this is likely to have implications for the dozen or so staff who work there. Last year, against a background of a perceived decline in the level of activity at the centre, managers protested to the board that Fitzgerald "was out of touch with the needs of the staff and the centre". A board member, the playwright and director Declan Gorman, said in March this year that the disagreement had been settled amicably, and they had since commissioned and implemented a report on the management and aims of the centre from CMC Consultants. The board of the City Arts Centre comprises eight members, including Henry Mountcharles and chairman Niall ╙ Baoill.
Fitzgerald says the decision to redefine and reorganise the centre - as well as his departure and McGonagle's appointment - represent the culmination of three years' discussions on planning for the future. During this time, he acknowledges, the centre has not been operating at full capacity.
"I would say that this process started modestly and built gradually over the last three years. Early on we commissioned a report on the centre and the building from a Scottish consultant, Alan Tweedie. He pointed out that the building represented a major asset."
While Fitzgerald says a final decision on the future of the Moss Street building is still pending, the implication is that the building will be used in some way to fund a revitalisation programme. "When we decided to move to Moss Street in 1987," Fitzgerald recalls, "we decided to buy the building. People thought we were crazy. It meant raising a lot of money, about £200,000" from a variety of sources. Eventually the Arts Council stepped in to help clear the debt over a number of years. "So we are in the position, perhaps uniquely for an arts organisation, of not having major debts, of owning our building."
Now the docklands environment near the City Arts Centre has changed unrecognisably, in both cultural and concrete terms. Today the centre is in the middle of a huge wave of development, and the building and the ground it stands on are worth a great deal of money.
When the City Arts Centre opened in Moss Street in 1988, it was a flagship of community arts, with a varied and energetic programme of exhibitions and other activities and events. "At the time there was very little activity in the whole field of community arts. We were identified as the national centre for community arts, which we were not, and which we resisted." But things have changed. "There have been enormous developments in the cultural landscape - in the Arts Council, for example, and in community arts itself."
Fitzgerald has been director, first of Grapevine, the precursor of the present centre, and latterly of the City Arts Centre, for 28 years. "I never envisaged it as a career for life, and it seems like a natural time to make the break."
Since McGonagle's resignation from IMMA, there has been speculation as to what he might do next. Rumours of potential jobs have ranged from the directorship of the Tate Modern to the directorship of the National College of Art and Design, but it is fair to say that an involvement with the City Arts Centre had not been mentioned until now, and is likely to come as a surprise to many observers.
When the project is put in context, however, its appeal for him becomes clear. There is the fact that he has been vocal in his commitment to community arts - albeit with certain reservations. But the crucial point for him is likely to be the fact that he will be building the institution from scratch, and with significant resources at his disposal.
"I think it's a very exciting prospect," McGonagle says. "We had discussions on what needed to be done and structurally the organisation is in the unusual position of seeing the need for a root-and-branch change and also having the means to make it happen. And whatever happens, it is important to emphasise that it is not seen as just a change of location with some organisational changes tacked on. It's not that Sandy is leaving and I'm slotting into his position."
His role, he says, is to come up with a new vision for the centre and for community arts. "I've always been uncomfortable with the term 'community arts' for a number of reasons, but now change is due. The world has changed, Ireland is at a moment of huge change. But the questions of what art is for and who it is for never go away."
As he sees it, the project allows him to go back to the drawing board. "We're looking forward to new models of practise, without being bound by previous thinking. It will take a couple of years to work it through. So for the next two years City Arts will become a learning organisation. I would say, though, that whatever we come up with must operate in the world as well as in the Dublin and the Irish context."
The need for a re-think, Fitzgerald says, arises partly from the fact that "community arts has become bogged down".
The community arts programme at IMMA, under the guidance of Helen O'Donoghue, is widely regarded as being highly successful. A key to that success, McGonagle argues, is facilitating community access to the full diversity of art practice. "Despite the best intentions, community arts became a ghetto, with the implication that real art was happening somewhere else. Whereas I feel that real art is an experience people can always deal with if they are allowed access."
As he sees it, the emphasis in community arts has traditionally been to allow people access to the means of production. In a globalised capitalist world, in which we are all cast as consumers, power resides in the means of distribution. "The consumerist model is disabling; you have to engage with the processes of distribution. And if we approach it correctly I believe that an involvement with culture can offer a way for people to be producers of meaning in their own lives.
"I've had an opportunity recently to clarify what my own priorities are, and they have to do with the belief that art is social, not socialist, as I'm sometimes quoted as saying. What I mean is that because art involves the self and the other, it doesn't exist until it's encountered.
"What I'm interested in is nurturing that process, whether you call it high art, low art, popular art, community art or whatever doesn't really come into it."