Page 5 – IMMA

Posted on 24/04/2020 24/04/2020

IMMA Collection and Our Place in Space

The idea of the IMMA Collection #WakeupwithArt posts on our social channels is to ease you into your day with some of our observations or passing thoughts around aspects of the IMMA Collection that connect certain works thematically, that sometimes may be topical or current in everyday life and that you may find of interest.

Each week we explore a theme and draw your attention to 7 works, one per day, with links to those works and artists for more information. With some of the artists involved the theme may concern a deep and enduring area of interest while for others it may just be a motif or nuance.

This week our daily #IMMACollection posts explored the theme ‘Our Place in Space’. Our Head of Collections, Christina Kennedy, selected 7 works, one a day, here she introduces the theme and explores the works that connect with it.

………………………………………………………………………

I’m sure we’ve all noticed how bright the stars and how limpid the night skies appear in recent times since the ban on industry and personal travel around the globe. One upside of the COVID-19 crisis is to learn how quickly our earth is positively responding to being left alone, borne out by scientists on the International Space Station who report how much clearer the earth’s atmosphere is looking.

While we are all in Lockdown, advancing scientific knowledge and testing of new technologies continue above us in the outer reaches of the earth’s atmosphere.

Recently broadcaster and space expert Leo Enright, invited us to look out for the International space station and Elon Musk’s 60 Starlink satellites SpaceX, (like a string of pearls), as all traversed the skies 400km above Ireland. Unfortunately dense cloud cover that evening, at least over Dublin, put paid to catching a glimpse.

Since time immemorial, the vastness of the earth’s night skies have been a reminder of our human scale and the limits of our looking. We’ve watched the stars to help us find our way, to mark seasonal change, inspire spiritual contemplation, provoke scientific enquiry and influence the production of great works of art and architecture.

Our Neolithic ancestors combined all of these in their production of one of the greatest monuments of the pre-historic world, Ireland’s 5400 year old New Grange passage tomb, a place of astrological, spiritual and ceremonial importance, famously aligned so that the rays of the winter solstice sunrise shine deep into its chamber.

Fast forwarding to the last millennium: from Albrecht Durer’s woodcut celebrating the renowned 10th century Persian astronomer, Al Sufi, to Andy Warhol’s Moonwalk Portfolio commemorating the first man on the moon, artists have been fascinated by our place in the cosmos.

The past 25 years in particular have seen a real burgeoning of artworks that magnify the connections between aesthetics, science and astronomy. Science fiction in particular holds a lot of fascination for certain artists, in terms of space exploration and new ecologies, ideas about extra-terrestrial life, simulacra, parallel universes, virtual worlds and much more.

Here are the IMMA Collection works we’ve shared this week:

Sultry Moon (2008) by Janaina Tschäpe

This limited edition print was created on the occasion of Tschäpe’s solo exhibition Chimera at IMMA in 2008. Like many of her paintings, films and photographic works it embodies a sense of the extraordinary, where the everyday world becomes a magical if sometimes melancholy place.

Janaina Tschäpe, Sultry Moon, 2008 — Janaina Tschäpe, *Sultry Moon,* 2008, Giclée print, 28 x 40 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA Editions, Donated by the artist, 2008.

Dust Defying Gravity (2003) by Grace Weir

Grace Weir’s films, photographs, installations, drawings and performances reflect on discoveries in astro-physics as well as ruminating on the history of discovery itself and the lives of pioneering individuals. Her film Dust Defying Gravity is set in the observatory at Dunsink where panning shots trace the atmosphere and air, the particles of dust, which stream and swirl, echoing the stellar activity as seen through the Observatory’s telescope.

Other works by Weir have focused on conversations with astrophysicists, explorations of the spatial theories of Einstein, 3D simulations of clouds and the study of black holes. Her films propose ideas that telescope into the distant past and future and materialise in some way the time-feel of space.

Grace Weir, Dust Defying Gravity, 2003 — Grace Weir, *Dust Defying Gravity*, 2003, 16 mm Film transferred to DVD, Dimensions variable, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2004.

The Weakening Eye of Day (2014) by Isabel Nolan

This spiral-shaped, sculptural work, of steel wadding, wool and thread, provided the title of Isabel Nolan’s solo exhibition at IMMA in 2014, in which the artist tasked herself with compressing the past, present and future of the universe into just four intimately scaled rooms.

This key work, along with the other constituent artworks of various media in the show, collectively explored a material account of the strangeness of the world from the formation of the planet’s crust to the death of the sun, with the enduring preoccupation with light as a metaphor for truth.

Isabel Nolan, The weakening eye of day, 2014 — Isabel Nolan, *The weakening eye of day,* 2014, Mild steel wadding, wood, thread, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2017.

L-2 (2013) by Ciaran Murphy

This enigmatic painting is a dream-like image, perhaps a planet, that fills the composition, created through a series of overlapping washes in cool blues and dark petrol tones. The spherical form hovers between figuration and abstraction, seeming familiar and alien at the same time. It is only through spending time looking at this work that the work begins to unfold. As you continue to watch it almost appears to pulsate and track you as you move around.

As with all of Murphy’s works the painting’s starting point is from a vast archive of imagery, like an unseen spine or backbone, which he has assembled over the years from various sources.

Ciarán Murphy, L-2, 2013 — Ciarán Murphy, *L-2*, 2013, Oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, Hennessy Art Fund for IMMA Collection, 2017.

Time Split Supernova (1992) by Michael Ashur

Irish artist Michael Ashur cites the contemplation of synchronicity between human and cosmic time as inspiration for his largescale paintings. One of the 300 artworks donated to IMMA by Gordon Lambert in 1992, Time Split Supernova’s grid like, mirrored composition and explosions of light draw on both the logic of science and the surreal beauty of celestial light.

Michael Ashur studied at the National College of Art and Design. Influenced by scientific research and discovery, his paintings are dynamic, hard edged and executed with precision.

Michael Ashur, Time Split Supernova — Michael Ashur, *Time Split Supernova,* Acrylic on hardboard, 71.3 x 102 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Gordon Lambert Trust, 1992.

The Navigator (1982) by Michael Mulcahy

The solitary navigator in this painting by Michael Mulcahy expresses a deep restlessness which has led the artist to travel extensively and seek a world where man and nature are more closely entwined. A period spent with the Dogon people of Mali led to a series of intense paintings incorporating symbolic forms based on their understanding of the constellations, and the religious beliefs associated with them. These paintings give the sense of a world coming alive at night and man’s connection to the cosmos giving meaning to our existence.

Michael Mulcahy, The Navigator, 1982 — Michael Mulcahy, *The Navigator,* 1982, Oil on canvas, 157.5 x 165 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation, Vincent & Noeleen Ferguson, 1996

Boy From Mars (2003) by Philippe Parreno

This film by Algerian/French artist Philippe Parreno is a chain of dream-like images of mountains, stars, clouds and water buffalo and is a paean to nature. While the title references Mars, this is a science fiction pastoral, an ode to light and extra terestrial visitation. There is no Martian boy but an orange glow subtlely alludes to the Red Planet and radiates a warm orange light which flickers and intensifies bringing certain elements to the fore especially as dusk becomes night.

Hybrid Muscle, the title of the eco-designed shelter featured in the film, suggests an otherworldly pavilion both primordial and surreal, like a UFO, which has landed in an unknown tropical landscape. It is a hybrid of a science fiction film-set and an eco-designed shelter with flapping plastic walls which work in the same way as temporary shelters made of teak leaves. The slow ambulations of an albino water buffalo, harnessed to a pulley system for an hour a day, provide all the building’s power needs.

Philippe Parreno, The Boy from Mars, 2003. Featuring, The Game. A building by François Roche / Hybrid Muscle 2002-2003. 35mm transferred to high-definition video, Dolby Digital 5.0 stereo with musical score by Devendra Banhart, Edition 3/4. 11min.40 sec. Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art. Purchase, 2007.

ADDENDUM:

The Hubble Space Telescope and the tale of Tim Robinson’s ‘Washer’

In 2020 the Hubble Space Telescope achieves its 30^th year in orbit. Hubble has fundamentally changed our understanding of the cosmos. It has brought the universe home to Earth on social media, with new images, videos, documents etc. However, it’s earliest endeavor after its launch into space 30 years ago met with a problem. Its first communications once in orbit and sending astronomical images back to earth, revealed its lense to be fractionally out of sync and therefore out of focus. This turned out to be due to the omission of a tiny washer when the telescope was being built. It was subsequently successfully repaired in a highly delicate procedure by astronauts in space.

In one of his remarkable essays “Backwards and Digressive” (2015), Tim Robinson revisits his early artworks and reconsiders his thought processes and philosophy and how these latterly revealed themselves to him as the foundations for his later explorations as a writer and map-maker.

One such object was ‘Washer’ 1972, a small circular disc which Robinson spotted on one his walks across London in the early ‘70’s. The act of writing the essay helped him “to work out what role this little disc plays in my own explorations of time and space..”:

“.. Gleaming on the pavement before me was a washer mislaid by someone servicing a motorbike or a car. I began to collect these ‘points’ as I came to term them, trying to commit to memory whatever vague ramblings my mind had reported in that moment of recall, so that by the time I had brought them home they already represented a bygone instant, a ‘now’ foregone.

“..In my imaginary gallery of points pride of place goes to the washer lost in the building of the Hubble telescope. It stands for the first of all moments, separating not past from future but nothing from something; it is the grain from which the Universe burst into existence and begat all that is and ever will be. All things stand at ground zero of that explosion; it links us all in a universal cousinage. It is the All-Thing lying in the palm of the mystic, bereft perhaps of maker and sustainer, but not of love.”

Tim Robinson “My Time in Space’, The Lilliput Press, Dublin, 2001. Tim Robinson, Washer, 1972, found object: metal washer, 20mm in diameter.

Posted on 24/04/2020 28/05/2020

Growing Wild at IMMA

We are delighted to present a new series exploring the biodiversity of the IMMA site. Although the grounds of IMMA are currently closed Sandra Murphy from our Visitor Engagement Team, would like to share with us the wild nature of the grounds of IMMA and how they are thriving during this summer season. This first article looks at the Wildflower meadow, and will be followed by articles exploring the birds and the butterflies found at IMMA.

The Grounds and Formal Gardens at the RHK are managed and maintained by the Office of Public Works.

…………………………………………………………….

Growing Wild at IMMA

Over the next few weeks we will have the opportunity to learn a little more about IMMA and the particular biodiversity associated within the grounds of IMMA. Dog walkers and early morning strollers may be aware of the beautiful ornamental gardens, meadow and hedgerows, which are tended daily by our team of hardworking gardeners, headed by Chargehand Craft Gardener, Mary Condon from the OPW.

This mixed habitat within the grounds of IMMA is home to many wildlife secrets. There are approximately 27 species of birds, 9 species of butterflies, at least 3 species of dragonfly and even the humming-bird hawkmoth was spotted by Jason, from our technical crew, feeding on flowers in the courtyard. Two years ago nest boxes were installed on the main avenue and the gardeners keep a keen eye on the comings and goings of our feathered neighbours and their young, from spring onwards. During the colder winter months, feeding stations with peanut feeders, suet balls and seeds have been set up around the grounds.

Pensioners’ Graveyard

The Pensioners’ Graveyard is a military cemetery which contains the graves of pensioners who lived in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. In 2018, the Pensioners’ Graveyard was transformed into a wildflower meadow for pollinators. This was achieved by introducing Hay Rattle, a flowering plant which disables the heavy growth of grass, providing space for wildflowers to thrive. The entrance gate to the meadow proudly displays the pollinator’s symbol from Biodiversity Ireland.

Below are some photos of wildflower which can be seen in the meadow during the summer period.

1. Pyramidal Orchid
2. Common Spotted Orchid

Ox-eye Daisy, Pyramidal Orchid, Common Knapweed, Hay Rattle

Hay Rattle seedhead suppresses the production of grass growth, and allows for a better growth and display of plants in a wildflower meadow. The seeds are formed inside dry capsules which, when ripe, rattle (hence, the name Hay Rattle) and eventually release the seeds to the wind.

Bully’s Acre

Bully’s Acre is one of Dublin’s oldest cemeteries and located in the grounds of IMMA close to the Richmond Gate and encompasses approximately 3.7 acres. In this area a variety of wildflowers, shrubs, native and non-native tree species can be found, providing a great source of rich nectar and pollen and seeds for bumblebees, butterflies and birds.

The photograph shows Common Red Poppy, Common Sow Thistle and the beautiful Red Campion, which is actually pink in colour. Teasel, which is a great source of food for the goldfinch (one of 27 species of birds which can be seen at IMMA), is a long narrow plant which can be seen in the background on the left.

Goldfinch feeding on Teasel seedheads in Autumn

White-tailed bumblebee (one of our important pollinating insects) collecting nectar from Common Sow Thistle.

On the right the Common Red Poppy – everybody’s favourite – in all its glory. In late Autumn the dried flower capsules contain black poppy seeds which make a wonderful rattling sound.

Campion, Ox-eye Daisy, Buttercup. Note on the left, the Common Nettle, an important plant in gardens for egg-laying butterflies such as Red Admiral and Small Tortoiseshell, all of which can be seen at IMMA on a sunny summer’s day.

The Officers’ Graveyard

Across the main avenue, a few yards from Bully’s Acre, we find the Officers’ Graveyard, where the higher ranking officers were buried.

Over the last few years, Mary and her team, have planted an abundance of Phacelia, Foxglove and Echiums. Red Valerian makes a wonderful backdrop on the old stone graveyard walls.

1. White-tailed Bumblebee on Phacelia 2. Foxglove with creeping cleavers

Many insects feed on cleavers (two ladybirds can be seen on top right of the plant). In Folk medicine, cleavers plant was used to relieve poisonous bites and stings.

Thank you to Mary Condon and Therese Thynne for access to the Wildflower meadow and to Mary in particular for her expertise in helping to identify some of the lesser known plants.

Posted on 22/04/2020 14/05/2020

IMMA Collection. Summer days

Here comes the sun… As we have now changed our clocks to daylight saving time and the evenings finally begin to stretch, a sense of warmer, brighter days around the corner may be helping to keep spirits up in uncertain times. The evolving seasons and cycles of the natural world and how we respond to them have always provided material for artists. The particular blend of possibility and nostalgia which our warmest season evokes makes it an injuring inspiration.

In this Magazine article, Ciara Ball from our Visitor Engagement Team, invite us to have a look at selected artworks from the IMMA Collection that help us recall summers past and think of pleasures on the way.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Children, Masterson’s Lane (1952) and Old Men Sitting, St Stephen’s Green (1952) by Nevill Johnson

Though black and white, Nevill Johnson’s photographic depictions of Dublin in the 1950’s are flooded with sharp summer light, the freshness of browning limbs and laundry flapping, and the relief of a city bench on a hot day.

A Picnic (1940) by Louis le Brocquy

Like many youthful summer romances, this early painting by Louis le Brocquy combines a sense of idle leisure and underlying tension which belies the innocence of its title, ‘The Picnic’ (1940).

Louis le Brocquy, A Picnic, 1940, Wax-resin medium on canvas mounted on board, 40 x 40 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Loan, the Beecher Collection, 2002.

County Kerry (1988) by Harry Gruyaer

Harry Gruyaert’s glowing image of sunbathers basking catlike in County Kerry takes us back to a world where tan lines were still the acceptable outcome of a blazing bank holiday.

Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert began his ‘TV Shots’ series when living in London in the late 1960s. He was awarded the Kodak Prize in 1976 and joined Magnum Photos in 1981. Gruyaert has photographed worldwide and exhibited extensively since 1974. He has published ten photographic books and his work can be found in numerous collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum Tokyo, Japan and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Children Showering after Swim in Porchester Pool (1989) and Swimmers, Porchester Pool, London (1988) by Elinor Wiltshire

Elinor Wiltshire’s graphic needlepoint works document life in London and summer in the crowded city. As her swimmers’ bob and shower in close proximity we can almost smell the chlorine and fabric softener from waiting towels.

Elinor Wiltshire (nee O’Brien) and her husband Reginald founded the Green Studios on St Stephen’s Green in 1951. Following Reginald’s death in 1968, Elinor sold the studio and moved to London where she worked as a botanist and researcher at the Natural History Museum. Wiltshire later donated her collection of photographic negatives and prints to the National Library of Ireland. The bulk of the work features Dublin, providing a view of life in the capital during the 1950s and 60s. Between 1982 and 1989, Wiltshire created over 50 needlepoint pieces based on life in London. She donated 12 of these pieces to IMMA in 2013.

Haycock by a Bank (1975) by Charles Brady

Charles Brady’s understated depiction of everyday objects is the perfect medium for illustrating the simple beauty of colour and shape in sunlight which has drawn so many artists into the open air.

Painter Charles Brady was born in New York and studied at the Art Students League there. He first visited Ireland in 1956 and settled here permanently in 1959. Brady was best known as a painter of everyday objects in an understated manner, usually on a modest scale. He exhibited extensively in Ireland and the United States and was the subject of a major retrospective at the RHA in 2001.

Charles Brady, Haycock by a Bank, 1975, Oil on canvas, 65 x 76 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation 2010, Bank of Ireland Art Collection, 2010.

52-12-31-02 Dear B & B -Happy days in ’03 (2003) and Oakland (1983) by Sol LeWitt

Even if we don’t get far from home this summer we could follow the example of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and send some postcards.

A founding figure of both Minimal and Conceptual art, Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Conneticut. He completed a BFA at Syracuse University in 1949 then served in the United States Army in Korea and Japan. He moved to New York in 1953 where he took classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and worked as a draughtsman. LeWitt had his first solo exhibition in 1965 and during the late 1960s and early 1970s participated in several significant group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art. ‘Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings’ was shown at IMMA in 2001.

Brian O’Doherty on Sol LeWitt:
‘Sol’s early work is particularly wonderful – when he evolved the notion that the idea makes the work and the execution can be carried out by others. He pioneered many things – others carrying through his ideas, keeping prices on his work down so that it was accessible to those who weren’t wealthy, devising infinite applications of lines (he was always a line-man), using language to describe, locate, invent, exactly fitting the work to the site, and writing some of the key texts of conceptualism. He was particularly fond of Barbara and sent her many of those famous little cards with drawings on them’.
Brian O’Doherty, ‘Post War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection’ (IMMA: 2011), p. 105.

Seabird on the Shore (1962) by Elizabeth Rivers

This beautiful work titled ‘Seabird on the Shore, 1962’ is a 1962 work by British artist Elizabeth Rivers (1903-1964). Hopefully River’s stoical seagull can inspire us to embrace the elements when we once again get the chance to turn blue and shivery on an Irish beach this summer.

Rivers attended Goldsmith’s College, London, and the Royal Academy Schools before going on to study under André Lhote at the École de Fresque, Paris. She travelled to the Aran Islands in 1935, intending to visit for three months; she remained there for over seven years. In 1946 her book ‘Stranger in Aran’ was the last work to be published by the Cuala Press. Rivers assisted stained glass artist Evie Hone between 1946 and 1955 and was a founding member of the Graphic Studio Dublin. A memorial exhibition of her work was held at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, in 1966.

Elizabeth Rivers, Seabird on the Shore, 1962, Oil on board, 65 x 75 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Heritage Gift from the McClelland Collection by Noel and Anne Marie Smyth, 2003.

Posted on 12/04/2020 13/07/2020

Ideas of Queer Use by Sara Ahmed

Challenging times also bring moments for critical pause and re-invention. There was an extraordinary interest in the lecture by influential scholar within race and gender studies, feminist icon and a self-proclaimed killjoy Sara Ahmed – which unfortunately IMMA had to postpone. We thank you for all for your engagement and support.

Ticket holders might be glad to hear we look forward to hosting Sara Ahmed in February 2021. In the meantime we invite Ahmed to connect with IMMA’s online community with a short text that introduces the research threads that are so synonymous with her intersectional writing, thinking and latest book What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (2019). Whether you are a new or an avid follower of Ahmed’s diversity work, IMMA’s magazine gives you the chance to be familiarised with the roots of her game changing ideas on ‘queer use’, that she applies to an interrogation of what is ‘useful’ knowledge, and the evolving ‘functionality’ of space.

The historical turns and twists of institutional critique continue to unfold traditional binaries and absolutes of the inclusions and exclusions of art, culture and everyday life. In a new world order of a global emergency, questions of access, use, knowledge, solidarity, communal care, and reclamation are ever more present. Building on feminist of colour scholarship, Ahmed’s activist complaint and survival project Living A Feminist Life along with her work on ‘queer phenomenology’, gives tools for building new models of being, inhabiting and speaking out. To truly transform societal power relations of which structures of our institutions are implicit, she claims ‘’requires a world-dismantling effort’’.

In this quite period off isolation, we hope Ahmed’s meditation on ‘queer use’ offers a brief solace, in a world that may seem more estranged, though equally opens a new window to gain a fresh perspective. We also recommend you read Ahmed’s powerful blog series ‘feministkilljoys’, to complement this text. Sophie Byrne, Talks and Public Programme, IMMA.

Presented in the context of IMMA’s CHROMA programme.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

The idea of “queer use” has a long history.[1] An article from 1899 entitled, “Queer Use for Cloisters,” notes that “the cloisters of the Church of St. Ethelreda, Ely palace, Holborn, London, are now being used for a purpose very different from that for which they were originally intended. Father Jarvis…has placed them at the disposal of any cyclist who may wish to store his machine while attending divine services.”[2] A queer use for something is when you use it for a purpose “very different” from that which was “originally intended.”

Uses are not always determined by intended function – this not is an opening. Howard Risatti notes in A Theory of Craft:

Use need not correspond to intended function. Most if not all objects can have a use, or, more accurately be made useable by being put to use. A sledgehammer can pound or it can be used as a paperweight or lever. A handsaw can cut a board and be used as straight-edge or to make music. A chair can be sat in and used to prop open a door. These uses make them “useful objects” but since they are unrelated to the intended purpose and function for which these objects were made, knowing these uses doesn’t necessarily reveal much about these objects (2007, 26).

I am not so sure if uses are quite as unrevealing about things as Risatti implies here (“knowing these uses doesn’t necessarily reveal much about these objects”). I am being told something about the qualities of a sledgehammer that it can used to be a paperweight. That a sledgehammer can be used as a paperweight tells me about the heaviness of the sledgehammer. Something cannot be used for anything, which means that use is a restriction of possibility that is material. Nevertheless, there is something queer about use; intentions do not exhaust possibilities.

We can be queering use, or showing the queer potential of use, when we enter spaces not intended for us.

Take this image:

Intended functionality can mean who something is for, not just what something is for. The post box has become a home for nesting birds. Of course, the post-box could only become a nest if it stops being used as a post-box – hence the sign “please don’t use” addressed to would-be posters of letters. Sometimes a change of function does not require a change of form. The birds use the small opening intended for letters as a door, a way of getting in and out of the box.

I am aware this is a rather happy or hopeful image. To queer use, to open up spaces to other users and uses usually requires more than just turning up and turning a post-box into a nest or a room into a shelter.

We can turn up to find a space already occupied. I think of Audre Lorde in 1978 turning up at an event to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. She agreed to speak; she does speak, on a panel, “The Personal is Political.” But she finds that the panel on which she is speaking is the only panel where black feminists and lesbians are represented. Lorde takes a stand; she makes a stand. She uses the time and the space she has been given to make a critique, perhaps a complaint, about the time and space Black feminism and lesbianism has been given. The work of critique often involves pointing out the structures that are not noticed by those who are enabled by them. That critique was to become one of her best-known essays, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984). In that essay Audre Lorde asks a question: “What does it mean when the tools of racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde tells us what it means by showing us what it does. When a feminist house is built, using the tools of “racist patriarchy,” the same house is being built, using the same doors; doors can be the master’s tools, how only some are allowed to enter; how others become trespassers, or if they are allowed in how they end up in a little room at the back of the building.

Doors can be teachers; they can tell us who a space is built for. Aimi Hamraie describes in Building Access: “Examine any doorway, window, toilet, chair or desk…and you will find the outline of the body meant to use it” (2017, 19). Those who are not meant to use doorways tend to notice doors; we notice what stops our progression. A disabled academic has to keep pointing out that rooms are inaccessible because they keep booking rooms that are inaccessible: “I worry about drawing attention to myself. But this is what happens when you hire a person in a wheelchair. There have been major access issues at the university.” She spoke of “the drain, the exhaustion, the sense of why should I have to be the one who speaks out.” You have to speak out because others do not; and because you speak out, others can justify their own silence. They hear you, so it becomes about you; “major access issues” become your issues.

For some, to be accommodated requires modifying an existing structure or arrangement. Those who are not accommodated are often required to do this work – even if what they are asking for is compliance with existing polices. We can call this work diversity work: the work we have to do in order to be accommodated; the work we have to do because we are not accommodated. Queer use is another way of thinking about diversity work, which is to say, queer use can be understood as the ordinary and painstaking work of challenging existing structures or modifying existing arrangements.

Diversity work often means working against official uses of diversity. There could be another sign on the post-box:

Diversity is this sign: bird welcome, or more typically, minorities welcome! Come in, come in! That sign would be empty of force if the post-box was still in use as the birds would be dislodged by the letters, the nest destroyed before it could be created.

Just because they welcome you, it doesn’t mean they expect you to turn up. Those deemed strangers can be welcomed as way of not modifying an existing arrangement. You might turn up, only to be questioned whether you are supposed to be there. Who are you, what are you, where are you from, where are you really from; are you in the right room? Questions can be hammering: for some to be is to be in question. You can be thrown out by the words thrown at you. I suggested earlier that use is a restriction of possibility that is material. Restrictions can become material through use. The letters in the box, words that are thrown out: they are materials; they pile up. What is material to some—leaving you with no room to breathe, to nest, to be—can be what does not matter to others because it does not get in the way of their occupation of space; it might even enable that occupation.

This is why it is not enough to affirm the queerness of use. To bring out the queerness of use often requires a world dismantling effort. You have to stop what usually happens from happening. Queer use is the work we have to do to queer use.

References

Hamraie, Aimi. 2017. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House‘ in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press.

Risatti, Howard. 2007. A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

[1] The idea of “queer use” is explored in the conclusion of my new book What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (https://www.dukeupress.edu/whats-the-use). In my current work I am considering more closely the relationship between queer use and the work of complaint.

[2] “Queer Use for Cloisters,” Los Angeles Herald, August 28, 1899, available at California Digital Newspaper Collection, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH18990828.2.165.

Posted on 09/04/2020 20/04/2020

Two artists – Janet Mullarney and Tim Robinson

Here we reflect on two remarkable artists and people, Janet Mullarney and Tim Robinson, who we had the pleasure to work with and get to know over many years. Our thoughts are with their families and many friends.

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Janet Mullarney

We were deeply saddened to hear about the recent passing of Janet Mullarney, an artist who touched the lives of IMMA’s team both on a personal and professional level.

IMMA enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Janet, her sculpture Straight and Narrow purchased in 1991, was one of the Museum’s earliest acquisitions and her works from the Collection have been widely exhibited at IMMA and through exhibition loans.

We will be forever grateful for Janet’s dedication and commitment to her recent Then and Now exhibition, at a time when her illness seemed like an inconvenience rather than an endurance. Janet’s rigour, generosity and humour during an extensive installation was humbling and inspirational. Inventive, creative and wonderfully irreverent, she will be sorely missed and fondly remembered by IMMA’s staff, past and present. We send our heartfelt condolences to Janet’s family and wide circle of friends.

Claire Walsh from our Collections Team, who worked with Janet on her ‘Then and Now’ exhibition, reflects on that time;

What a woman! – the phrase appeared in several condolence messages exchanged on the day we all heard the sad news of Janet’s passing. It didn’t seem like enough but it also said everything that needed to be said – she was amazing. I was lucky to spend time with Janet installing her exhibition ‘Then and Now, Janet Mullarney’, at IMMA last year and so I got to experience her magic in action. The way she spoke about her work was so precise and unusual that secretly I noted down many words and phrases during that time, rereading them in an attempt to get closer to what and how she was thinking. There are no quick clues. The vast body of artwork she leaves behind are an extension of her enigma, delighting in the wonders of mystery and the ambiguity of our intentions and self-knowledge. IMMA is the honoured caretaker of a number of these works which will be looked after and shared with visitors far into the future. Two beautiful poems by Sarah Clancy, written in response to Janet’s exhibition, are available to read here.

Helen O’Donoghue, Head of Engagement & Learning at IMMA reflects on her relationship with Janet;

Growing up not far from Janet, in Rathfarnham, I recall her as quite a mythical creature. Her talent was well known locally as she was one of the children who won a Caltex award (former name for the Texaco Children’s Art Competition) and then she disappeared and went to live in Italy. She remerged in Ireland in the late 1980s, with her exhibition of powerful wooden carved figurative sculptures in the Project Arts Centre (curated by Jobst Graeve) and it then toured to the Orchard Gallery (curated by Declan McGonagle). Janet first came to IMMA in the early 1990s as an artist in residence and later was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex award. It was in these years that I got to know her. My admiration of her as a tenacious individual grew the more time I spent with her. She powerfully mined her upbringing in a very ‘closed’ Ireland as the subject of her work and created beautifully crafted artwork that always surprised and moved the viewer. Janet contributed so much to IMMA over the years, along with the aforementioned, she was one of the first artists to participate in our National Programme bringing her work and facilitating a talk about her practice in Mountshannon Church, Co Clare. She has donated important work to the Collection and her public talks are part of our archive. She touched so many with her work and her personality. She will be missed by the wider arts community and especially her family and close friends.

A personal note from Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA:

It’s only when we lose certain people that the enormity of what they occupy in our mind if not always in our day to day, really crystalises. Janet was such a person.

I first got to know Janet when I curated her Hugh Lane show in 1998 and from then was privileged to build up a friendship over time. Even if our paths didn’t cross frequently, it always felt that we picked up where we left off. Through her work Janet has given us an incredible repertoire of ‘selves’ to draw on depending on how we are feeling in relation to the world.

I recently received a moving email from Janet about her IMMA Collection: Janet Mullarney, ‘Then and Now’ show, which I now share:

“.. I would like to add the following, it was such a treat, such a lovely group of people to work with, all the way across the board. So much easy help to gain what I desired.
Thank you so much for trusting me, giving me the full length of the corridor, and allowing lovely things to happen, like Helen O’Leary, and Sarah Clancy. It was really a wonderful experience, and you were the fabricator.”

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Catherine Marshall, former Head of Collections, IMMA and long-time champion of Janet’s work and Mary Ryder, a dear friend of Janet’s. Both created the record of all of Janet’s work in a catalogue raisonne produced with Janet’s help, published last year.

TIM ROBINSON

Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections reflects on working with Tim Robinson;

“Risk and proof, maths and the imagination, structure and freedom – somewhere near here is buried the binary opposition that has informed my creative life”

The passing of Tim Robinson, preceded two weeks before by his wonderful wife and partner in all his life’s work, Mairead or ‘M’, is a piercing loss, in Tim’s case accelerated by the Coronavirus.

We convey our affection and deepest sympathies to their family and friends.

So many of the tributes to Tim Robinson deservedly centre on his wonderful writing and map-making of Connemara over the past 40 years. Less widely known is his achievement as artist. Born in Yorkshire in 1935, Timothy Robinson studied mathematics at Cambridge and taught for three years in Istanbul. Assuming the moniker Timothy Drever (his mother’s maiden name), he began to work full-time as an artist from 1962. He exhibited at the Galerie Fuchs, Vienna, where he and M lived for two years, returning to London in 1964 where he subsequently showed at Signals Gallery and the Lisson Gallery London.

The aesthetics of Tim’s paintings are underpinned by his mathematical training, his love of geometry, astronomy and physics as they relate to the natural phenomena of gravity, geology, patterns of weather, tidal and lunar activity. Arcs and circles, magic squares and forms from fractal geometry are reflected in his paintings and environmental installations of the London period. They situate among conceptual frameworks that were emerging at the time, seen also in the work of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Art & Language and others.

As the decade wore on Drever’s artwork became increasingly ideas-based, conveyed through photographs, texts, prints and discrete objects, and more ‘invisible’- so he too, despite certain success, made the decision, quite abruptly, to extract himself from the London scene. In 1972 he and M moved to the Aran Islands, where he reverted to his original identity: Tim Robinson.

On Aran he learned Irish and began his visual and textual interpretation of the Western landscape through walking, hand-drawn maps and writing, in works that explore the language, landscape history and mythology of the Western seaboard. Many of the same preoccupations reverberate through his work, as artist, topographer and writer, to do with rhythms of walking and his concept of “the good step”.

Tim’s essay, Backwards and Digressive’ weaves together the connections between his work as an artist, a chartographer and a writer.

In 2015, IMMA became the beneficiary of a major donation by Tim and M of all of Tim’s artistic works including paintings, drawings and installations as well as their extensive art archive. The gift consists of early “juvenilia”, works from Vienna and paintings, drawings and constructions from 1964-1972 in London. It includes the rods installation first shown at IMMA as part of the exhibition ‘The Event Horizon’, 1997, curated by Michael Tarantino. More recently this work formed the exhibition “The Decision”in the Hugh Lane in 2011.

Also donated is the 22ft long, much-walked-upon ‘Distressed Map of the Aran Islands’ , shown first in Cork 2005 Capital of Culture and later in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Serpentine Gallery ‘map-festival’ in 2010, a map of ancient features, lore, place-names and their meanings, as well as an urgent call on behalf of the islands’ unique environment (and Connemara in general) and vulnerability to the erosive effects of environmental change accelerated by the subversion of planning regulations. A key aspect of the map was that that viewers were encouraged to step on it, and even leave written notes.

IMMA first showed a selection of Tim’s paintings in 2016 in the exhibition IMMA Collection: A Decade and later in Coastlines 2017 which included an iteration of his ‘Distressed Map of the Aran Islands’.

Tim’s significance as an artist in the London Art world of the 1960s was evidenced in 2018 when his work was sought for Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow, organized in London by Mexican Gallery Kurimanzutto, in celebration of the innovative but short-lived gallery Signals London (1964-66). The exhibition reconnected the works of many now celebrated artists, who showed at Signals and who worked across Latin America, USA and Europe, including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clarke, Mira Schendel, Liliane Lijn and Mary Martin.

When discussing the donation at Tim’s studio and home in Roundstone in 2014, Tim touchingly described the task as “..a step towards our leaving Folding Landscapes in the not-just-yet..”…

Tim walked every inch of the Aran Islands and of Connemara’s involuted shorelines, stepping across jagged outcrops, flags, crevices and bog. Out of this daily practice he developed “the concept of the good step” which informed his entire philosophy, creativity and being:

The step, so mobile, so labile, so nimbly coupling place and person, mood and matter, occasion and purpose, begins to emerge as a metaphor of a certain way of living on this earth. It is a momentary proposition put by the individual to the non-individual, a not-quite infallible catching of oneself in the act of falling… (15^th Oct 2014 Unrealized Projects)

Posted on 09/04/2020 28/04/2020

Exploring Bharti Kher’s Virus Series

Installation view of A Consummate Joy by Bharti Kher. Photos Ros Kavanagh

The exhibition A Consummate Joy by Bharti Kher was due to open at IMMA on Friday 13 March 2020. This was the day after schools, colleges and all public buildings were closed due to rising concerns about the spread of COVID-19.

This magazine article is about one of the artworks in the exhibition titled Virus XI (2020). It consists of 10,000 pink-toned felt bindis (dots) applied to the gallery wall in a spiral shape. A time-based work, this is the latest in the artist’s ongoing 30 year project, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2039. The Virus series involves the creation of a bindi painting each year, accompanied by a pre-dated text written by the artist with observations on life and predictions on human developments.

In the exhibition, the following text is printed for the visitor to read and take home. This article introduces the artwork followed by the predictions for each of the 30 years. The texts includes personal updates, historical events, diary entries and predictions. Kher forecasts that in 2020 (Virus XI) texting will be made possible through ‘thought power alone’; and in 2029 (Virus XX) ‘artificial intelligence in a computer will pass the Turing Test’.

………………………………………………………………………………………

During the installation of the exhibition A Consummate Joy, the irony of the title of one of the main artworks in the exhibition was not lost on us, Virus XI (2020) consisting of 10,000 pink-toned felt bindis applied to the gallery wall. When you encounter Virus XI (2020) you are greeted by a vortex, inviting you into a free fall towards a hypnotic swirl of bindis applied directly to the wall. Kher describes the piece “It’s a vortex. It’s a peephole. It’s an entrance. It’s an exit. It’s a womb”. This is a time-based work and the latest in the artist’s ongoing 30 year project, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2039, that the artist describes as her entry into time and space. The Virus series involves the creation of a bindi painting each year “accompanied by a pre-dated description of our predicted human encounters and observations on life”.

The artist installs beside the bindi spiral, a curation of texts that describe the journey of the work and its potential over 30 years. This text includes personal updates, historical events, diary entries and predictions. Journalist Harriet Lloyd-Smith in a recent article for Wallpaper magazine revealed “At times, this is a terrifying, dystopian commentary that ranges from plausible to absurd. She forecasts that next year (Virus XI) texting will be made possible through ‘thought power alone’; in 2029 (Virus XX) ‘artificial intelligence in a computer will pass the Turing Test’ and in 2035 (Virus XXVI), ‘holographic recreations of dead people will become a possibility’. Much of this is informed speculation; the only thing Kher knows for certain is that with each Virus, her age will increase by one.”

In A Consummate Joy, Virus XI is accompanied by the following text written by Kher, printed for the viewer to read and take home.

Virus (2010–2039)

BHARTI KHER

An artwork that is conceived as a 30-year project, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2039. This text combines prediction (in italics) and chronology. One Virus will be released a year to mark an entry into space somewhere. Like a time-tunnel that you can climb into, or a vortex, or a womb or a safe hole. A mutation of color and pattern so light, a virus so subtle, that no one will notice its slow and transformative essence.

Except you.

You have chosen to be a part of this project that will culminate when our children have grown older and have left home. You and I may or may not be alive. Our lives will have changed in ways we cannot imagine now. Wars may have been waged or natural disasters that wreak havoc on civilizations will push humanity to rethink its relationships with other living beings and our planet. Cities may never sleep again. People who live longer than before can roam spaces of changing realities that have been mapped digitally and created in the mind.

This text will continue to change as I meet time and add narratives.

VIRUS I 2010 The first artificial life-form, Mycoplasma laboratorium, is created. It is a new series of bacterium, with a man-made genetic code, originating on a computer and placed on a synthetic chromosome inside an empty cell. Using its new “software”, the cell can generate proteins and produce new cells. Wikileaks, an online publisher of anonymous and classified material, leaks to the public over 90,000 internal reports about the United States-led involvement in the war against Afghanistan from 2004–10. More follow. I am 41.

VIRUS II 2011 Japan is hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster becomes the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. The world’s first synthetic organ transplant is carried out. The Arab Spring marks the beginning of the war in Syria. Osama Bin Laden is killed. My daughter starts a new school. I am 42.

VIRUS III 2012 The Mayan Long Count calendar completes its cycle, prompting some to believe that the end of the world is near. Voyager I crosses the heliopause, already travelling 19 billion kilometres. It is expected to enter the Oort Cloud in another 300 years, crossing that region after a period of 30,000 years, then passing the red dwarf AC +79 3888 in the year 42,000 AD. I am 43.

VIRUS IV 2013 The first human embryonic stem cells are created by cloning. This transformative development has pushed research into treating several diseases and conditions with no current treatments. Social movements against mass surveillance gain ground after leaked documents about surveillance on citizens surface. Gene therapy, for the first time in the Western world, is made commercially available for a particular rare, inherited disease. I am 44.

VIRUS V 2014 Google glasses are launched, making augmented reality a possibility using voice command and eye-tracking technology. It doesn’t work very well. The Orion spacecraft made for explorations to Moon, Mars and beyond is test-launched without a crew. Belgium becomes the first country to legalize euthanasia for terminally-ill patients of any age. I am 45.

VIRUS VI 2015 Solar Impulse is circumnavigating the globe; personal genome sequences change the way the body is medically treated. Concerns are being raised over privacy of information and the potential for “genetic discrimination”, as well as the psychological impact of test results. Religion is fast becoming a game plan for political power and division. The world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, The Large Hadron Collider, reaches its maximum operating power. This was aimed to recreate the conditions immediately after the birth of the universe. I am 46.

VIRUS VII 2016 NASA’s Juno aircraft enters Jupiter’s orbit and begins survey. USA and China, responsible for 40% of world’s carbon emissions, ratify the Paris global climate agreement. Refugees move across international borders. The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide surpassed a record 60 million—the most since the end of World War II. Twenty million of those displaced, half of which are children, are refugees fleeing wars, conflict and persecution. David Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen die. My son starts university. Delhi air pollution reaches hazardous levels. I am 47.

VIRUS VIII 2017 China establishes its largest megacity in the world with a population of 42 million. Electronic papers are now in widespread use. The first full human transplant will be carried out. JFK files are released yet President Trump withholds certain details, citing national security. 8.2 billion internet-connected video devices are now installed worldwide, exceeding the population of the planet. I am 48.

VIRUS IX 2018 A universal flu vaccine will be made available to the public, and polio will be eradicated from the world. A drug is developed to prevent obesity and lets people eat whatever they want without gaining weight. Robotic surgeons are now operating on humans. Ireland legalizes abortion. I am 49.

VIRUS X 2019 Cannabis is legalized in many countries, bringing in tax revenues for governments. Japan sends spacecraft using solar sail propulsion for the first time, a technology that uses no fuel but taps into the Sun’s energy in the form of high-speed gas particles and protons. Pinhead-sized cameras are changing the potential of photography. Devices that deliver sensations to the skin surface of their users (e.g., tight body suits and gloves) are now used in VR to complete the experience. Virtual sex becomes a reality—two people are able to have sex with each other virtually, or a human can have sex with a “simulated” partner. I am 50.

VIRUS XI 2020 Generation X shapes politics more actively across the world. There will be a world oil crisis. Drones will patrol the skies. Texting will be made possible by thought power alone, using headsets that detect and convert brain signals to digital signals. A pill for curing malaria will be available, and major experiments in longevity will yield promising results. Right wing ideologies find voice in leaderships across the world. Climate crisis caused by changes in the weather, becomes a major threat to the earth and its ecosystems. I am 51.

VIRUS XII 2021 A first crewed mission will take place to gain new insights into the economic value of asteroids. Brood X, the biggest swarm of insects in the world, will re-emerge in New York destroying crops. Male birth control pills will be made available, making this the most significant contraceptive for men since the condom. New hybrid fully-autonomous flying cars will be seen in the skies, avoiding traffic congestions on the roads. I am 52.

VIRUS XIII 2022 Water will be the new weapon of war, with worsening climate changes affecting fresh water reservoirs. Upstream countries will have leverage over downstream neighbouring ones and use this to forward political and economic agendas. Nanotechnology will be used in producing everyday as well as specialized garments for the military and the police. Unreleased letters of Sigmund Freud become open source, changing opinions of his processes and theories. Lola finishes high school. I am 53.

VIRUS XIV 2023 NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will undertake manned missions to Mars, will conduct its first crewed test flight. Brain implants will make it possible to restore lost memory, giving hope to people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and trauma. I am 54.

VIRUS XV 2024 Bangladesh will see the biggest refugee crisis to date, with torrential flooding affecting its high-density population. Conflicts will start erupting along the borders with India and Myanmar as refugees attempt to cross. Sweatshops in developing countries will become obsolete with 3D printing making possible the production of very low cost clothing. Artists now include creative computers, capable of making their own art and music. I am 55.

VIRUS XVI 2025 3D-printed human organs will be developed in the field of medicine. This printing will no longer be limited to inorganic materials like artificial jawbones, replacement skull parts. Vertical farming will become common in cities as crops can be stacked on top of each other like floors in a building, and grown using hydroponics and aeroponics, bringing down usage of space, soil, water and fertilizer. Phone calls are three-dimensional holographic images of both people. I am 56.

VIRUS XVII 2026 Dark matter will be fully understood and Earth will be mapped as a dot in an infinitely growing cosmos that changes how we define time. 3D-printed electronic membranes that can be attached to the exterior of the heart will be used to monitor, diagnose and treat heart diseases, and prevent heart attacks. Restoring damaged and aging hearts will become a normal procedure for doctors. Due to rising sea levels, a mass evacuation plan in Maldives will be underway, with the nation’s citizens resettling in India, Sri Lanka and Australia. I am 57.

VIRUS XVIII 2027 The BRIC nations will overtake the combined GDP of G7 nations. This year will see the release of Elvis Presley’s autopsy report that was sealed for 50 years. Human-robot relationships develop further, as simulated personalities become more convincing to the living. I am 58.

VIRUS XIX 2028 Britain’s national newspapers will be taken out of circulation as digital formats take over. By 2028, a number of extinct species, including the woolly mammoth and dodo, are resurrected using cloning, selective breeding and genetic engineering. This process will be vital towards restoring Earth’s biosphere, which has been pushed to its environmental limits. Other extinct species are ignored as water, land use and viability are debated. I am 59.

VIRUS XX 2029 Artificial Intelligence in a computer will pass the Turing Test wherein a human can no longer distinguish the machine from a human being. Intelligent advertising in ads, billboards and posters will be able to identify the interests and lifestyle of specific people passing by. Direct brain implants allow users to enter full- immersion virtual reality, with complete sensory stimulation and without any external equipment. People can have their minds in different places at any given time. I am 60.

VIRUS XXI 2030 Another 2 billion people will be living in the world, with food, energy and water supplies reaching a crisis point. Depression will become the leading disease burden in the world, though progress is made to de-stigmatize mental illnesses. USA declines as a world power as its economy and industrial might plummets. China and India gain hegemony over the world. Crime scene analysis becomes hyper-fast with cases being solved in a matter of seconds using an array of DNA technologies. Jails reach breaking point. I am 61.

VIRUS XXII 2031 Virtual telepathy becomes a reality. Human organs will be grown easily for transplant. Stem cell pharmacies will be commonplace with walk-in diagnosis, stem cell collection and banking services possible. Chocolate will be as expensive as caviar due to diminishing harvests of cocoa in Africa. Rising sea levels will send much of the city of Bangkok, south-east England and Dubai underwater. I am 62.

VIRUS XXIII 2032 Ukrainian astronomers predict that a giant asteroid will destroy the world. Half the world is desperately short of water. India’s capital, Delhi, is now completely waterless and the city empties. I am 63.

VIRUS XXIV 2033 Man will finally land on the surface of Mars. Asteroid mining will be pushed towards the asteroid belts between Mars and Jupiter. Hypersonic airplanes will make human air travel faster at speeds of Mach 5. China and India will lose more than 80 million people due to smoking and pollution. I am 64.

VIRUS XXV 2034 Rising sea levels and storms will destroy large areas of the UK coastline, affecting housing, farmland, nature reserves and nuclear power plants. The last of Switzerland’s nuclear reactors will be closed. Ectogenesis transforms reproductive systems in humans by creating artificial wombs, giving men and transgenders possibilities of carrying a child. I am 65.

VIRUS XXVI 2035 The European Union finally collapses with several splits and formations of new fragile alliances. Russia will become the world food superpower. There will be an economic decline in the Middle East, with crude oil production taking a sharp dip. Holographic recreations of dead people will become a possibility. Wars will be fought by autonomous fighting factions, machines and mercenaries, pushing further debates of ethics, morality and democracy. I am 66.

VIRUS XXVII 2036 Bionic eyes will soon begin to offer more than just ordinary sight. They will be capable of providing infrared vision, for improved health and safety in night-time situations and for surveillance. They will include video recording capabilities, serving as the ultimate portable webcams. I am 67.

VIRUS XXVIII 2037 Quantum computers will become more accessible, increasing computing speeds to previously unseen scales. Nanotechnology creates food, objects and body parts. We travel to planets in our vicinities for spans of 100 days. There will be a single world government. I am 68.

VIRUS XXIX 2038 Complex organic molecules like DNA and proteins can be teleported. This is to follow on from experiments conducted in the 2000s when scientists transferred zero mass particles of light over short distances. Humans begin tests on themselves. No one knows whether it works or not yet since they never come back. I am 69.

VIRUS XXX 2039 I am 70 now. See you then.

Posted on 21/01/2020 23/04/2020

Karol Radziszewski: Queering the Archive in Eastern Europe

Putting Queer Archives to Creative and Public Use

It can be said that archives act as repositories of collective memory and sites of knowledge production. They propose how we account for the past and provide a framework for understanding and defining contemporary life.

In association with IMMA’s CHROMA programme, on Saturday 1 February 2020, we will present a special series of events, titled Queering the Archive, to look closer at the private and public nature of queer archives and how these can be put to creative and public use. On the day we will uncover the methodologies of archive reclamation, disruption, interrogation and care, that foreground the interpretative work of Irish and international artists and activists.

While certain progress has been made with the legislation of LGBTQ + civil rights in Ireland, structural inequality, the invisibility of certain narratives, and the exercise of political power continues to interfere with the inheritance of our culture and the mediation of our history and identity. In the face of increasing polarised debate surrounding civil rights and liberties of LGBTQ + communities in Eastern Europe and beyond, we invite Nathan O’ Donnell, Research Fellow, IMMA/TCD to introduce the important work of Polish artist Karol Radziszewski. Radziszewski continues to forefront the public use of queer archives in Poland, despite gays, trans and other forms of queer lives and identities are now being highly contested and censored.

Artists can offer us current day reflections on the importance for us all to build international solidarity for a queer future of a global reach, and as O’Donnell’s text explains Radziszewski’s activist project ‘Queer Archive Institute’, demonstrates how archives resonant far beyond the primary function as records of the distant past.

O’Donnell’s article prefaces Karol Radziszewski’s talk at IMMA on 1 February 2020. More programme details here >>>

Sophie Byrne, Talks and Public Programme, IMMA.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Karol Radziszewski: Queering the Archive in Eastern Europe

I arrived at BWA Gallery in Warsaw on a rainy afternoon in Spring. I was here to meet the artist Karol Radziszewski, who greeted me on the doorstep, under the colonnade on Marszałkowska Street, and showed me inside. The gallery was closed, deinstalling, but a number of his works were still hanging on the walls, from a group exhibition that had just finished (one of a series of city-wide exhibitions as part of a gallery-sharing initiative, Friend of a Friend).

Karol Radziszewski, from the series 1989, 2019, acrylic on canvas

These works, a set of acrylic paintings from his recent series 1989, feature simple line figures that have been copied (and magnified) from his own scribbled childhood drawings, mapping aspects of his own life and memory out onto histories of protest and queerness, the fall of communism, and the emergence of the modern Polish Republic. There are figures in drag, princesses; one canvas features the symbol for Solidarność, the great protest movement that originated in the Gdańsk shipyards in the early 1980s. There is also a figure resembling the leader and ‘hero’ of the protests (and later President of the new Republic), Lech Wałęsa, transfigured, queered – a deeply subversive gesture in contemporary Poland.

These paintings, like other of Radziszewski’s works, draw what are considered ‘dissident’ sexual identities into the conventional domestic sphere. His ‘fag fighters’, for instance, are a fictional band of violent queer guerrilla activists in pink balaclavas, the subject of several films and interventions; in Fag Fighters: Prologue (2007), however, we see the balaclavas being knitted by his grandmother. In his work, Radziszewski brings aspects of queer subculture into the sacrosanct realm of the Polish family. This is not, as it could be, a normative gesture. Radziszewski does not advocate assimilation; the subversive antagonism of queerness is not rendered tasteful or easy to consume. The viewer is simply invited to sit with this disparity.

At the time of my visit, Radziszewski was preparing for a solo exhibition (currently showing) at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. On his laptop he showed me documentation of some of the work he planned to exhibit, and we discussed his practice, particularly the serial publication (or ‘fagazine’) he has been producing since 2005, Dik. Originally a serial publication focused on contemporary queer art practices and masculinity, Dik has, over the past few years, evolved to focus more strictly on queer archives across Eastern Europe.

This necessitates a vast amount of dedicated research on his part. In a country like Poland, where gay, bi, trans, and other forms of queer identity are highly contested, such archives are generally unofficial, private, informal collections, assembled by activists and others. They are not open public resources. Where historic publications existed, they tended to be subterranean, circulated through underground networks; likewise clubs and other social centres would have operated clandestinely; questions of personal safety, privacy, discretion are key considerations. Radziszewski’s research in this field places him alongside other queer artists working internationally in this field, such as Sharon Hayes, Ted Kerr, Ulrike Müller, Padraig Robinson, Patrick Staff, Chris E. Vargas, Ed Webb-Ingal, and Emma Wolf-Haugh. In many cases, such artists find themselves generating archives, interacting with older activists, artists, and other participants in the queer subculture of previous decades. The task then is to manage this material sensitively and responsibly, given the duty both to the privacy of the individuals involved and to the wider social context, in which the visibility of these histories is of pressing importance. (Sam Lefebvre has written interestingly on the difficulties involved in archiving and digitising materials originally intended to circulate within these kinds of subterranean queer networks.).

In 2015, Radziszewski formed the Queer Archives Institute (QAI) as a formal mechanism to develop this aspect of his practice. For the tenth issue of Dik, he documented a month-long residency of the QAI at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, where he was commissioned to queer the museum’s collection. (Kevin Brazil has recently written a thoroughgoing reflective essay on this imperative to queer art institutions. In Zagreb, Radziszewski set up a temporary office of the QAI in an unused public corridor of the gallery, operating his research in full drag and exploring queer histories he was able to uncover and recount in the publication. He has undertaken related projects elsewhere; the QAI is an ongoing initiative.

Radziszewski has set himself a formidable but important challenge, given how sexual orientation and gender identities have been strategically demonised in parts of post-communist Eastern Europe, as of course in Russia, in recent years. In these places, queerness – in particular male homosexuality – is cast as a western phenomenon, an ‘infectious’ force, threatening to move eastward. This hysterical narrative is reflected both in social attitudes and in legislative developments. The governing Law and Justice Party have blocked all moves to introduce marriage equality; homosexuality is spoken of as a ‘plague’. Across a number of Polish cities, LGBT-free zones have been declared. The government have moved to ban sex education for minors altogether. In Poland, homophobic propaganda has been grafted onto a strain of virulent patriotic nationalism.

DIK Fagazine, No. 9, internal page spread, 2014

This has engendered a new regime of official censorship. Only a few weeks before my visit, in April 2019, the National Museum in Warsaw removed works by feminist contemporary artists deemed too explicit; in particular, the removal of a film work by the major Polish avant-garde feminist artist Natalia LL, Consumer Art (1975), caused an international outcry. Ujazdowski Castle (where Radziszewski is currently showing) has been at the centre of its own controversy in recent months. In Autumn 2019, it was announced that Małgorzata Ludwisiak – who has been director since 2014, establishing a significant international reputation for the institution – was to be replaced by a government appointee, Piotr Bernatowicz, known for his far-right political views. Bernatowicz began earlier this month; Radziszewski’s is the last exhibition programmed by the previous director. The incongruity of this situation – an exhibition of radical queer art overlapping with an institution’s shift to the right – is not lost on Radziszewski, who has been prominent in protesting the appointment. It follows several such ominous personnel changes in the city in recent years. The artists and curators I met in Warsaw seemed wary, but resilient. The official institutions and museums have always been subject to government pressures, and the Polish art world has, in turn, a long history of politicised action and resistance. Still, the scale and nature of the current regime’s hostility seems different, amplified.

In the west, it is customary to view the situation in Poland as a sort of throwback, an example of a nation-state in an ‘earlier’ stage of development; this kind of account posits recent ‘progress’ in parts of the west as a sort of universal arc. Radziszewski rightly resists this idea that the ‘east’ is somehow ‘behind’ the west. In America is Not Ready for This (2011–14), he explored the record of Natalia LL’s visit to New York in 1977, where her work was considered too advanced for contemporary American art audience. Likewise, the resurgence of homophobia and prejudice is not simply a sign of some innate regional retrogression. On his laptop at BWA he showed me images of Hlas sexuální menšiny (Voice of the Sexual Minority) and Nový hlas (New Voice), early Czech magazines about homosexuality from the 1930s.

For Radziszewski it is important to explore the underground queer cultures that preceded the end of the Soviet Union, to disentangle the conflation of homosexuality with the ‘west’. This was the subject of the eighth volume of Dik, published in 2011 with the sub-header: ‘Before 89’. Through his work on this publication, he met Ryszard Kisiel, the creater of Filo, the first known queer zine in socialist-era Central Europe, and owner of a vast private archive of photos, mostly of gay men, his friends and acquaintances in the underground queer scene in 1980s Gdańsk, at a time when homosexuality was under intensive official surveillance. Kisiel’s work has been the subject of several of Radziszewski’s projects since, exploring how Gdańsk – the centre of Solidarność – was at the same time a place of progressive attitudes and relative sexual freedoms. A port city, open to the flow of ideas, as well as the flow of promiscuous bodies and desires, Gdańsk was home to a set of interlocking queer and industrial protest histories, a confluence since obscured by the ascendance to power of certain of the original dockyard protesters, many of them now members of the Law and Justice Party, instrumental in Poland’s lurch to the right.

Radziszewski’s work is a clear demonstration that these archives have resonances far beyond their function as records of the past, speaking clearly into and from the present moment. They also speak across national boundaries. Russian art critic Andrey Shental has recently written on the ways in which the ‘east’ – conventionally understood to be peripheral, lagging, ‘behind’ – might in fact be viewed as the genuine ‘avant-garde’. Witness how the superpowers in the west (Trump’s America, Brexit Britain) are adopting the xenophobic tactics and rhetoric of the ‘East’.[1] If the right is learning from these strategies of power, we should surely be paying attention to how they’ve been – are being – resisted.

[1] Andrey Shental, ‘Under Western Eyes’, Paper Visual Art Journal, Vol. 10 (Spring 2019), 11–18.

………………………………………………………………………………

Nathan O’Donnell is a writer, researcher, and one of the co-editors of an Irish journal of contemporary art criticism, Paper Visual Art. He is currently Research Fellow at IMMA in relation to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project. His writing has appeared in The Dublin Review, gorse journal, Apollo Magazine, 3: AM, minor literature[s], The Manchester Review, Southword, Architecture Ireland, and The Tangerine, amongst others, and his first book is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. He has been awarded bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council, as well as artist’s commissions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin City Council, the Arts Council of Ireland, and South Dublin County Council. He lectures on contemporary art at Trinity College Dublin and on the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD, Dublin.

Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) lives and works in Warsaw (Poland) where he received his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. He works with film, photography, installations and creates interdisciplinary projects. His archive-based methodology, crosses multiple cultural, historical, religious, social and gender references. Since 2005 he is publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. Founder of the Queer Archives Institute.

His work has been presented in institutions such as the National Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; New Museum, New York; VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo; Cobra Museum, Amsterdam; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. He has participated in several international biennales including PERFORMA 13, New York; 7th Göteborg Biennial; 4th Prague Biennial and 15th WRO Media Art Biennale.

Posted on 17/01/2020 17/01/2020

Mark Granier responds to Life Above Everything

Jack B. Yeats, The Flapping Meeting, 1926, © Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London / IVARO Dublin, 2019. Private Collection. Photo: Denis Mortell.

Published poet and award–winning photographer, Wicklow-based Mark Granier was first introduced to the Freud Project by friend and fellow poet Annie Freud (eldest daughter of Lucian Freud). Invited by IMMA to respond to the exhibition, Life Above Everything, Granier has written an essay, ‘Two Horses’, 2019 and a poem, ‘Two Painters’, 2019, which respond through “thoughts, sensations and images” to the “contrasts and synchronicities” of both painters and their shared love of subjects including horses, horse-racing and the human character.

……………………………………………………………….

Two Horses

[Yeats] …brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door. –– Samuel Beckett

Nobody creates. The artist assembles memories. –– Jack B. Yeats

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. –– Lucian Freud

Other depictive artists should look at Freud and either despair or get inspired. –– Robert Hughes

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress –– W.B. Yeats

I have been to the Life above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats show at IMMA four times now, and on each subsequent visit I’ve been struck by something new, and also by how my memory had reworked some of the paintings, concentrating on or enlarging certain details while excluding others. Each time I’ve left with different thoughts, sensations and images shimmering in my head. Great paintings are life forms; you cannot hold one (let alone an entire houseful) entirely in your mind. I am not an art critic. What I want to set down here is largely subjective, a series of observations amounting to a personal response.

As others have remarked, the pairing of Lucian Freud and Jack Yeats is a far from obvious match, although Freud admired Yeats and advised a friend in the purchasing of several of his works (seven of these are on display in the exhibition). Freud also bought one of Yeats’s early works, The Dancing Stevedores (1900), and hung it in his bedroom. Luck then, happenstance; such relatively small gestures might have been lost in the footnotes if Freud’s friend and assistant, David Dawson, hadn’t recalled them and worked with IMMA’s Christina Kennedy to put together such a marvelous and unforgettable show.

Installation view of 'Life Above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats'. IMMA, Dublin. Photo by Ros Kavanagh — Installation view of ‘Life Above Everything: Lucian Freud and Jack B. Yeats’. IMMA, Dublin. Photo by Ros Kavanagh

Life Above Everything is an exhibition of both contrasts and synchronicities. The very different works of these two artists spark off each other and create some magical juxtapositions, such as Yeats’s The Sleeping Drover, Ballinasloe (1921) being placed next to Freud’s Double Portrait (1985-86). The former depicts a drover in a dark blue coat, curled up, sleeping against a tree in the foreground while a horseman gallops past behind him, at the edge of a busy country fair (crowds, a marquee, a carousel). Yeats has shrunk the perspective so that the man on the horse almost appears above the drover, as if he is dreaming it. Freud’s tender Double Portrait (1985-86) also depicts sleepers: one of Freud’s whippets, with its head and forepaws resting on a sleeping girl’s outstretched arm. Her other arm covers her eyes, with the dog’s muzzle pillowed in the open palm; it is, I think, one of Freud’s tenderest portraits.

If I remember correctly, these paintings are in a room on the ground floor, but a visitor could start by descending to the basement of the gallery, where the earliest works are hung.

Yeats initially worked as an illustrator: sketches in ink or watercolour of rural and urban life: Sligo, London, Dublin… workers and athletes at circuses, fairs, boxing matches, horse races, etc. The work I mentioned earlier, a large ink drawing Freud bought, The Dancing Stevedores, is an excellent example of these. It is packed with movement and humour, and has the energy-surge of Yeats’s best work, such as his later The Liffey Swim, for which he was awarded the silver Olympic Medal for Painting in 1924.

Freud’s slow, painstaking technique is evident in his early work. His Girl with Roses (1947-48) is academically brilliant, the technique restrained and highly polished, the brushwork fine and delicate, with an almost hyper-real sheen (he initially worked with sable brushes and experimented with enamel paints). Both Van Eyck and German Expressionism have been mentioned as possible influences; Freud denied the latter. There is a suggestion of psychological symbolism, or even religious martyrdom, in the girl, whose eyes are exaggeratedly large; also of course in the dying rose she appears to be gripping so anxiously. Other early works are on display. I was particularly fascinated by a pen and ink drawing from the same decade, Loch Ness from Drumnadrochit (1943). This shadowless, surreal little landscape is rendered in fine detail, each grass blade distinct, each pebble, tree, field and cloud quite different, like a cross between needlework and elaborate doodling.

Yeats’s later works are like visions glimpsed through a downpour. They are full of their own wild weather. Facial features are often painted wet-on-wet, like ephemeral flotsam carried on a flood of movement and colour. The Bus By The River (1927) is an early example of this: the eyes, nose and mouth on the sunlit woman’s face are conveyed by the slightest of marks, yet her mood seems evident; she appears to glow, and smile, from within. In contrast, the man in the cap she is speaking to, because he is in shadow, is almost as dark as mahogany. Behind them, in the large bus-window, the river is alive with light. In a later urban scene, People in a Street (1936), the features of nearly everybody in the crowd, apart from one man in the foreground, are only barely suggested. Many of Yeats’s figures seem to be partly composed of the city, land or seascapes they stroll or sing or gallop across, scraped deftly together in ribbons of buttercup yellow, stone-grey, fuchsia-red, turf-brown…

Freud’s weather is much stiller, and quieter. His paintings are imbued with concentrated time, a sensation of overlaid moments, physically and, I think, psychologically dense. Freud has said that ‘as far as I am concerned, the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.’ While working as a visiting lecturer at The Slade he was introduced to a new paint, Cremnitz White, a paint so dense it appeared to have a sculptural plasticity. Freud decided this would be good to paint flesh tones, so lead-whites became a mainstay of his palette. Freud’s aphoristic remark on flesh/paint reminded me of Philip Larkin’s lines: ‘our flesh / Surrounds us with its own decisions.’ Freud’s paintings are a layering of decisions and impulses: in the placing of sitters, their relationships between objects in the room and windows, crumpled bed sheets or carefully placed props, like art books or photographs. The use of colour is mostly muted: a palette ranging from occasional ruddy flesh-tones (those middle-aged Irish faces for example) to variations on olive-drab and the earth pigments such as sienna and burnt umber.

Yeats’s palette is broader, from burgundy and plum-dark interiors to land and skyscapes that tumble and scamper from white to cadmium yellow to sap-green, ultramarine, and so on (and all of these, or similar extraordinary contrasts, might be found in one painting). Yeats painted a number of self-portraits, but the people portrayed in his paintings, especially in the later work, are almost always involved in the larger world, whether it is an interior or landscape: leaning on a bridge, sitting at a table, stopping to talk on a city bus or country road, riding, walking, singing, watching a race… By contrast, Freud’s predominant obsession is with the human face and body, and recreating these through a complex anatomy of marks. The intensity can seem merciless, especially with some of his many nudes, though others can be kinder, such as the portrait of his young daughter, Annie, in Naked Child Laughing (1963), and the late portraits of his mother.

I don’t know what Jack Yeats’s father, John, would have made of Freud’s work, but I imagine he would have approved of Freud’s ongoing engagement with the self-portrait, something he kept urging his son to work on in his letters. Freud’s self-portraits are amongst his strongest work, meeting places where that unforgiving, critical gaze can confront itself eye to eye. Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985, is a perfect example. Step close, and the complex layering of marks becomes apparent, as do the instinctive decisions involved. Inside the first two pages of IMMA’s 2016 book Lucian Freud, there’s a marvelous reproduction of a detail of this painting: the eyes and part of the forehead and nose. The variety of marks and colours is a revelation: from lead-whites to terracotta to dark olive-black… Freud abandoned sable for hog’s hair brushes later in his career. Looking at it, I can hear the bristly stab of those brushes, the scrape of a palette knife, all that fierce, concentrated energy. It reminds me of a close-up I saw of a human eye lit in such a way as to reveal the tight-woven sphincter of the iris, its purse-string web of tendons and ligaments; we forget that our eyes are also flesh, musculature, and Freud’s work is mimetic in bringing this to light.

While Yeats’s paintings are highly theatrical, in treatment and often subject matter, Freud’s are, I think, more influenced by those mechanical media that Yeats distrusted: cinema and photography. Although he never worked from photographs, Freud plays with perspective like a photographer using different lenses. He often favours a slightly convex effect: the sitters in some of his portraits noticeably bulge outwards, either in their faces or bellies (especially the hands), depending on which angle or features Freud wishes to accentuate. In his aptly titled large portrait, Two Irishmen In W 11, 1984-85, our gaze is directed, as in a tracking shot, over the head of the father sitting in the armchair, with his son standing behind (both men in formal dark suits and ties), towards part of the small studio window that frames a beautifully detailed slice of a Notting Hill suburb: narrow Georgian houses, viewed at an angle, presumably part of Peel Street, flowing towards Camden Hill Road. Above the array of roofs and chimney pots in the near distance, London sprawls in all its oceanic anonymity, under a low, grey, cloud ceiling. Windows are a more persistent motif in Yeats’s work. In Yeats’s paintings, though, they appear less like transparent walls that separate inside from outside and more like dramatic thresholds by which a landscape enters, as in The Mountain Window (1946), in which the yellow-white panes of glass framing Ben Bulben are so rudimentary and insubstantial that the mountain is effectively in the room.

Above all, both Freud and Yeats were devoted to the stuff of paint and painterliness, the process of mark-making preserved in the afterlife of oil on canvas. The Dutch biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719), believed that Rembrandt didn’t wish his paintings to be examined too closely, lest people detect a certain roughness in the technique. He claimed that Rembrandt attempted to discourage visitors from peering too closely by warning them that ‘the smell of colour’ would disturb them. A powerful ‘smell of colour’ applies to the later works of both Freud and Yeats.

Lucian Freud. Skewbald Mare, 2004. Oil on canvas. 102 x 122.2 cm. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. Installation view photo by Ros Kavanagh

Both artists shared an interest in horses and horse racing. Freud was fond of placing a bet, and he painted a number of portraits of horses, such as A Filly (1970). Horses and horse-riders are everywhere in Yeats’s work. In The Flapping Meeting (1926) a rider gallops past what appears to be a cluster of people at an ice cream stall, presumably part of a fair or race. Horse and rider are whipped together out of a bundle of quick strokes, mostly of dark oil paint, but also of the yellow-green of the grass they are thundering over, and parts of sky-colour too. This is a lovely example of what Freud achieved in his later paintings; horses embody the energy of the technique itself.

Hung in the same room as The Flapping Meeting is a large, late painting by Freud, Skewbald Mare (2004). Skewbald means a combination of white and any other markings (chestnut, bay, etc.) besides black; black and white horses are piebald. The horse in Freud’s is in its stable and viewed from the side, so the eye can travel from the grey waterfall of its tail across its muscular haunch, along the croup and loin of its back up to the withers, just before the shoulder.

Hoofs, mane and head are out of the picture, so what is left is the main bulk of the horse’s muscular, powerful body: gorgeous colours and abstract shapes: burnt umber, cream, ermine, with two flashes of grey-white near the rump, like stalagmite and stalactite… It’s as if a stable door swung open; one can almost smell the hay and horseshit (Berger once wrote that the smell of horse or cattle dung is not unpleasant because ‘over the hill’ from that smell are the fields where they graze and pasture, whereas most humans are meat-eaters, so over the hill from our crap is death).

Jack Butler Yeats. Confidence, 1949. Oil on canvas. 46 x 61 cm. Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art.Loan, the Beecher Collection, 2002. Installation view photo by Ros Kavanagh — Jack Butler Yeats. *Confidence,* 1949. Oil on canvas. 46 x 61 cm. Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art.Loan, the Beecher Collection, 2002. Installation view photo by Ros Kavanagh

Facing this painting, across the gallery floor on the opposite wall, is another late work, Yeats’s Confidence (1949). This depicts two figures in a landscape, a dismounted, pale-faced rider leading a white horse along what might be a causeway across a stretch of water, or possibly a bog. In the background is a row of very roughly painted blue-white mountains that almost seem to crest and collapse, giant waves. The horse is all there, clearly delineated in a few quick strokes, surprisingly slim and graceful. The rider is slightly harder to make out, dressed in something almost the same blue as the water they’re crossing. The path or causeway is mainly unpainted, the grey of the primed canvas. The effect is one of lightness and delicacy, the palette, apart from streaks of yellow, ranging from dark red and blue in the foreground to the white and lilac of the mountains (which remind me of the Twelve Bens). The confidence is presumably that of the rider leading the horse, though it might apply to Yeats himself, and also of course to Freud. The two works complement each other perfectly: the visionary translucence of Yeats’s Confidence set opposite the grounded, rich density of Freud’s Skewbald Mare, its animal hinterland, the vision up close, reeking of oils, linseed, turps, horseshit, straw: two horses in the same stable, conversing with each other. The show would have been worth going to see, if only for this.

……………………………………….

Two Painters

What are we made and unmade of but wind and space
streaming its cities its bogs its rivers in spate,

windows in wine-dark rooms shimmering
like lakes, like Benbulben singing –– All painting

is cave painting –– made and unmade of the divine*
weightiness of flesh, floorboards –– time

slowed and scumbled and reworked over years to magnify
the vein in the hand, the suits, the ties

of businessmen and bookies, sitters who came and stayed
concentrated in that gaze

because what are we made and unmade of if not luck,
to return from a flutter

at Hy-Brasil, to the stable, the almost life-sized flank
of a skewbald mare wrapped and mapped

in warm continents of chestnut and grey-dappled ermine,
remodeled in paint and canvas as if pressed hard

into the bulging contour of the stone

*Quote from Jeanette Winterson

Posted on 27/12/2019 19/12/2019

IMMA After’s accomplishments 2018-2019

Diana Bamimeke is a writer, independent curator and student from Dublin. They were a part of the coordinating team for IMMA After, an IMMA initiative for 18-30 year olds that delivered impactful events reflecting the museum’s programming. Here they outline IMMA After’s accomplishments 2018-2019.

……………………………………………………..

In early 2018, a group of young artists and arts professionals gathered in the labyrinthine upper floors of IMMA, as part of IMMA After, an IMMA Engagement and Learning programme set up to engage 18 – 30 year-olds. Their task was to look at new approaches to Museum programming, to find the beginnings of ideas, and to develop them into workshops, talks and tours for the coming 12 months.

The first event IMMA After would realise was an Open Studio response to Brian O’Doherty’s Language and Space exhibition, by Cló Collective, a group of five Dublin-based young artists. Led by Cló Collective founder, artist and IMMA After member Mateja Šmic, Cló mediated a range of interactive creative installations encompassing various mediums – painting, photography, light projection. The interactive experiences were as enigmatic as O’Doherty himself, an artist who had lived and ‘died’ under two different names.

For the next event, IMMA After swung its gaze towards Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, the celebrated Iranian artist, whose retrospective Sunset, Sunrise was on show in the West Wing from August to November of last year. Participants gathered in one of the exhibition’s rooms, to take part in a Sunset Yoga event led by Paola Catizone, Embodied Movement facilitator, artist, and member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement team. Secluded from life’s accelerated pace, each person took time to stretch, think mindfully and reflect, quite literally, the plays of light that exist in Farmanfarmaian’s works.

Next, paralleling Andrea Geyer’s When We exhibition, came a weaving workshop facilitated by Hazel McCague of Lay of the Land. Set up by McCague and artist Kari Cahill, Lay of the Land provides collaborative, site-responsive artist residencies in the romantic, rugged environs of the west of Ireland. McCague brought this collaborative spirit to IMMA, and, similar to the effect of Geyer’s art work Collective Weave (2018), helped participants to create personal and profound meditations on fabric.

Before adjourning for the winter break, IMMA After held the last workshop of 2018, Rebuilding the Self. Inspired by Wolfgang Tillmans’ materially dense exhibition Rebuilding the Future, which opened at IMMA in October 2018, Rebuilding the Self sought to understand the digital figure through artmaking techniques like collage and photomontage. Under the guidance of artist and gamemaker Aidan Wall, attendees pieced together their works and engaged in discussions about the futures of social media and social justice.

2019 started strongly, by way of Spoken Realities, a poetry night held in association with Poetry Ireland. Against a backdrop of IMMA Collection photography by Les Levine, four diverse poets, Temper-Mental Miss Elayneous, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Maighread Medbh, and Padraig Regan, sung, shouted, keened and chanted, immersing the audience wholly in their words. Each poet performed pieces directly responding to IMMA Collection works by Janet Mullarney, Fergus Martin and Les Levine, and to the group exhibition A Fiction Close to Reality. The night was the most attended IMMA After event, reflecting the behind-the-scenes efforts of the IMMA After team.

IMMA After, Spoken realities. Photo by Ruth Medjber

The final two workshops spanned multiple mediums, but had one common thread, in that they spoke to A Vague Anxiety – not only the exhibition, but to the omnipresent feeling that exists in the cultural landscape today. First, a portrait drawing session facilitated by Paola Catizone in which attempts at accurately capturing the human likeness brought up points about the body’s uncertainty and unreliability. Second, a collage and light installation workshop facilitated by artist Jan McCullough, whose work explores how photography can construct and express individual and collective identity in today’s society.

Indeed, IMMA After has had a fantastic year. It has taught the IMMA After team lessons in organising and collaboration, and opened up avenues of artistic and curatorial practice each one of us will find invaluable. The next iteration of IMMA’s programming for 18-30 year olds will reinvent itself, of course, in many ways, but it is precisely this changing nature that will continue to produce great artistic programming for the Museum.

Posted on 30/11/2019 28/04/2020

IMMA SPEAKING STUDIOS. Artist Suzanne O’Haire

SPEAKING STUDIOS talks directly with IMMA Residents about the role of the studio, the conditions of making, researching or engaging with art and a chance to find out a bit more about what makes them tick.

Late on the evening of Thursday 11 April 2019 Suzanne O’Haire turned right to enter IMMA’s driveway, her car stuffed with a home and studio survival kit, coming from Brighton Suzanne was just off the ferry to join IMMA’s Residency for the following four months. No time was wasted in getting started as Suzanne pushed her practice to grow and expand over the coming months. Her spark was contagious with fellow residents, IMMA staff and museum visitors; always ready to explore, have a chat and get out and about to see and experience all that was on offer. Suzanne was occasionally referred to as the resident Flâneur, as a walk down the street would involve constant surveillance and discussion of her immediate surroundings accompanied by a regular swoop to the ground to yield another piece of street treasure to be admired and popped in to one of her many pockets, later it would be added to a growing collection in the studio, stuff to be ordered, sorted, tried and tested, challenging it to find its place:

“Permanent structures emerge from impermanent matter, creating arrangements of acrobatically stacked, bundled or tentatively balanced forms. Candy-coloured sherbert straws; shiny artillery-like N2O bulbs; deflated balloons; chipped glittery false nails; crushed soda cans spread out like scabby spillages; fractured wing-mirrors and bike reflectors; luminescent shards of splintered CD’s; chunks of glistening tarmac; crinkled foil confetti found strewn like metallic fallout – it’s this kind of stuff that makes me tick”.

A studio visit with Suzanne was never a brief encounter, her enthusiasm to discuss art and influences drew visitors in to her world of creativity. Towards the end of her stay Suzanne brought her studio series manic panic out to IMMA’s iconic courtyard to explore its engagement with space and scale, capturing the works conjuring capabilities, playing with placement and documenting the series in-situ. Harnessing this moment brought Suzanne full circle with her original objectives when she applied to the residency, to push her practice outside its safe parameters, to expand, absorb and respond in new contexts, and with a name like O’Haire she was finding a bit of herself along the way.

After her departure Janice Hough, Assistant Curator: Residency & Artists’ Programmes, IMMA, contacted Suzanne with the following questions.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

What is the role of a studio, is it important to your practice?

My studio is my sanctuary where I surround myself with all manner of stuff. It’s often quite a solitary space/activity and removing myself from the other/outside allows things to happen. Stepping away from my established studio (a fraction of the size of the studio at IMMA) to a neutral/different space was quite disorientating at the start (this was my first ever residency), but I was surprised by how quickly I managed to make the space my own and what these shifts enabled.

How would you describe your studio?

At IMMA…huge! I had many table tops with objects and matter laid out. Some areas were just source materials and then there were areas where I built work. To others it seems orderly, but to me it is disruptive, even chaotic. Often there are endless options, but nothing’s quite right, so I need to constantly reorder and put things away or take them out again. I have shelves of books and every day I try to read something. I panic that I’ll never have enough time in my life to read all I should, and I’m a slow reader – this doesn’t help. On my desk is my beloved iMac where I research for hours on end, at the moment I’m trying to track down a rare book that’s the basis of a piece I’m working on. On the wall, I have fragments of work that may or may not become something else, and all sorts of ephemera, postcards, things friends have sent to me, stuff I’ve picked up off the street…so much stuff!

What do you enjoy most about making art?

That I’m my own boss and never quite know what lies ahead, though it’s a thin line between these flipping from best to worst. I’ve always juggled other roles alongside my studio, but fortunately within recent years I’ve managed to focus most of my time in the studio. It’s odd considering this question as I only know being this way, doing the things I do, so it feels how it should be. I’m aware that I’m very lucky to do what I need to do – I say need because it’s not always a joyous or easy pursuit.

And what frustrates you most?

Ha, that I’m my own boss and never quite know what lies ahead! And making new work, this always feels somewhat daunting as I dread repeating the essence of previous work, I always have to feel it’s going somewhere else. Also, working with restricted finances and facilities can be limiting, but this can mean you become pretty resourceful too.

What pleases you more, the process or the product of making art?

For me it’s all about the process, something happens while I make work, a means of shifting or filtering stuff. The moment a work is finished I’m done. Saying that, I recognise that the work can open up an exchange or dialogue with others, it can activate something else, and when it does that pleases me no end. I had many studio visits at IMMA, which were so helpful – the curiosity and reflections of others are a fascination to me.

If you could select artworks from IMMA’s Collection to exhibit with your work what would it be and how would you do this?

Whoa, what a question! I’m afraid I can’t whittle it down any further than a list of seven: El Cuadrado y Su Sombra, Marcel Floris; Vulture (Dragon), Leonora Carrington; Nightglow, Adolph Gottlieb; Rotoreliefs (Optical Disks), Marcel Duchamp; Green Lines, Alexandra Wejchert; Lovers Snakes, Dorothy Cross; The Ghosts in the Morning, Emilia and Ilya Kabakov.

I’m interested in the conversations that could occur between these pieces and my work. I imagine taking them off-site, toying with a location such as Loftus House in Wexford, supposedly one of Ireland’s most haunted buildings. I’m drawn to places that hold a certain edginess, a sense of being in limbo, and Loftus Hall definitely has a liminal presence.

**Select any work on exhibition while you stayed at IMMA and tell us a bit about why you’ve chosen it?**

I caught the Walker and Walker exhibition Nowhere without no(w) at the start of my residency which was great, especially their film Mount Analogue Revisited. I’ve even started reading Rene Daumal’s book that the film takes prompt from. The interaction between the characters and the unfolding tale of their journey is just brilliant. You’re never entirely sure of the outcome of their Utopian quest, whether their voyage has been a success. I’ve since watched it again and again, it’s that good.

Installation view of ‘Walker and Wallker, Nowhere without no(w), 15 February – 03 June 2019, IMMA, Dublin. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

If you could visit any artist in their studio who would it be?

Again, hard to nail down to just one. This is more of an experience/environment, but I’d love to have been amongst all the tutors/students at the Bauhaus, imagine that, those costumes, the parties! On second thought, I’m tempted to take this out as the actual reality was somewhat limited for women, most activity directed to just weaving…grrrr. Spending time with Fluxus, Hilma af Klint, Eva Hesse, Ithell Colquhoun or Suzanne Treister, that would be mind-blowing, incredible visionaries whose works continually reveal more and more. Oh, I have a crush on Ron Nagle’s work too, he’d be fun to hook up with. I loved chatting to fellow IMMA residents in their studios and other artists in their spaces in Dublin – it’s always an honour and a joy to step into someone else’s creative mind and see where a conversation may go.

**What do you like to do when you’re not making art?**

I’m afraid nothing unusual or impressive. But it’s always in my head, it is my head. I don’t see myself as doing or not doing art, it’s not a separate part of me or my life. I really don’t want to sound pretentious, but if I go walking, visit places, see a film or hook up with friends it’s never switched off, it’s not something I can switch on and off. I don’t think any creative mind does or can. Please, say that’s not pretentious!

Follow Suzanne on Instagram @suzanneohaire

#IMMAResidency

IMMA