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Giovani Anselmo: An Artist for all Seasons

I had a dream the other night about being third up to pitch for a major art commission and the group before us used artists to act out their proposal. My team in contrast consisted of curators and a lighting designer – we looked at each other terrified and wished to pull out immediately. A common curator’s nightmare perhaps, wary one should be of ignoring artists in favour of a curatorial concept. Ignoring artists could never be an accusation aimed at the various ROSC committees. However the same committees could be accused of ignoring the growing trend of thematic exhibitions.

Opening of Rosc '84. Image Courtesy of Irish Photographic Archive.
Opening of Rosc ’84. Image Courtesy of Irish Photographic Archive.

The evidence for this failing can be exposed by contrasting some of the contemporaneous exhibitions spanning ROSC’s two decades between 1967 and 1988. In Bruce Altshuler’s book Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that made Art History: 1962-2002, ROSC is absent. Two notable international exhibitions that bookend ROSC are listed however, namely “When Attitudes Become Form”, Bern, 1969 and “Magiciens de la Terre”, Paris, 1989. While ROSC ’77 included eleven artists previously shown in documenta 5 (which took place in 1972 and is also listed as an exhibition that made art history) there was no overarching theme or concept introduced by ROSC other than the notion that these artists were of interest and a la mode. Biennials and Beyond highlights the trend of the thematic exhibition during the lifetime of ROSC,

“The most important curatorial development of the post-war period was the thematic exhibition, and documenta 5 established that paradigm. In response to a contemporary art explosion of perplexing form and variety, exhibition- makers sought not only to introduce the new but to provide interpretive concepts for its understanding.”
– Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond-Exhibitions that made Art History 1962-2002 (London: Phaidon, 2013) p. 157. 

While Rosc’s disconnect with current trends is alluded to in a review by Bernard Denvir for Art International,

“The cultural neophyte who visits Rosc is not likely to come away with a realisation that participation rather than observation, processes rather than products, concepts rather than conclusions are the preferential concerns of a good deal of modern art.”
– Bernard Denvir, Art International, 1972 which was displayed on the IMMA ROSC timeline. 

Denvir is making an obvious comparison between ROSC and the two Harold Szeemann seminal exhibitions “When Attitudes Become Form” and documenta 5.

Fetishising of Seminal Exhibitions

The fetishizing of seminal exhibitions (of which IMMA’s ROSC 50 is guilty to a degree) is best exemplified by several diverse attempts to restage Szeemann’s “Live in your head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts- Processes-Situations-Information” originally conceived for the Kunsthalle Bern. This fetishisation reached its peak in 2013 when the Prada Foundation in Venice restaged the exhibition down to the pattern of the floor to the placement of the radiators. Where possible, all the original works displayed in 1969 were gathered and hung in the exact spatial configuration as before. If a work was unavailable their absence was represented by displaying silhouettes on the walls and floors alongside a photograph of the correspondent works. The restaging was curated by Germano Celant (incidentally one of the international advisors of ROSC ‘80) in dialogue with artist Thomas Demand and architect Rem Koolhaas. A star-packed line up for the most referenced exhibition in contemporary art discourse.

Another star curator Jens Hoffman had previously attempted his own restaging of the same exhibition but this time he invoked the spirit and ethos of the exhibition concept itself. His exhibition in 2012 for the CCA San Francisco, “When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes” (I know somewhat confusing!) is treated like a sequel to the original exhibition. Contemporary artists who would have been of a similar age as the original 1969 artists were invited to exhibit in the spirit of the original show. Hoffmann refers to the enthusiasm young artists still show for the ideals expressed in the original exhibition and nostalgia for a time before the art market was so central, a time to quote Hoffmann,“Where artists were still investigating really radical questions, and the concepts were pushed to their limits and its boundaries.” Daniel Buren had recognized this trend in his 1972 essay “Exhibition of an exhibition” wherein he notes, “More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not to be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art”. Little did he know how far that idea would go!

ROSC 2020 Vision

To imagine where ROSC would be today if it had continued you could compare similar periodic exhibitions that have survived from the 70s. Many of these exhibitions are constantly debating their format and frequency. For example, I attended the press launch of Skulptur Projekte Münster (SPM) 2017 held in the Old Theatre Münster. Chaired by the indomitable artistic director Kasper König, this is the fifth edition of this decennial exhibition. Founded in 1977 it has fought off a push to change the frequency of the exhibition to a quinquennial to match nearby documenta. Though there seems some sense in the proposal, as you could poach the art crowd from the more popular documenta, it goes against the very founding ethos of SPM. At the press conference König made several references to the virtues of leaving ten years between exhibitions. He said it takes 5 or 6 years to properly judge a show and he is proud they didn’t become something stupid like the Rocky series.

IMMA’s ROSC 50- 1967-2017 judges ROSC with a distance of 50 years and 29 years in the case of the final ROSC in 1988. With the advantage of time we can appraise the selection of artists according to how their careers developed. Would the visitor to ROSC ‘88 have guessed that a Basquiat painting would become one of the most expensive artworks ever sold or that Anthony Gormley would become so ubiquitous? Here I was about to list the artists whose careers took a nose dive such as Gunter Brus, Luciano Fabro and Gilberto Zorio all from ROSC ’88. However here is a lesson to any would be art historian, Brus and Fabro were included in documenta 5, and Zorio featured in “When Attitudes Become Form” the very exhibitions I am holding up as exemplary and a foil to the more conservative ROSC. But the more significant lesson is to note that the ROSC ‘88 catalogue does not deem it important to list either documenta 5 or “When Attitudes Become Form” as part of the artists selected exhibitions.

It is revealing to recall this very discursive press conference while thinking about ROSC and its legacy. Many of the on-going debates about the structure, frequency, financing, gender balance, local participation, and general raison d’être as well as the precarious nature of the political situation are of course not dissimilar to the debates one can read in the minutes of the ROSC committee meetings and especially at the ROSC Reconsidered symposium held at NCAD in 1984.

Art should never be a settled thing- that is the key and the contradiction for IMMA’s celebration of ROSC. Arguably ROSC should never have imagined an end game that was the setting up of IMMA. To stop in 1988 was to stop just as everything was starting – with the Havana Biennial founded in 1984 and the Istanbul Biennial in 1987 you have the beginning of the biennalisation of the artworld and of course the increase in art fairs.

Adrian Searle commented on the second Frieze Art Fair in 2005;
“Fairs are fashionable events, in much the same way as international biennales appear to be taking over calendars worldwide. This has been termed the “biennalisation” of the art world.”

The Frieze Art Fair continues to be housed in a giant white tent. The background of white cloth reminds us of early ROSCs in the RDS and the clever draping of the walls in white muslin. Richard Wallace writing about the first documenta has a great sense of the impact of the innovative installation of Arnold Bode (who used white plastic curtains to filter the natural light coming into the exhibition space) for the still ruined Fridericianum in 1955.

“This engineering of visual spectatorship certainly contributed to the unique success of the exhibition…spectatorship as a public act of judgement sharing, a public form of consensus via a public display of individual judgement”
– Ian Wallace, The First documenta, 1955 (a lecture presented on the occasion of a symposium on early post-war art titled “The triumph of pessimism,” University of British Columbia, Department of Fine Arts, 1987) in The Book of Books documenta 13, (Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2013) p.68.

This engineering of visual spectatorship is exactly what ROSC achieved, as well as providing visual memories of an ephemeral communal experience of art. In 2020 on what would have been the occasion of the 14th ROSC exhibition (and with a budget of €45 million to rival documenta) Galway will be European Capital of Culture. Perhaps a good opportunity for some judgement sharing.

Postscript

Giovanni Anselmo by the way – is the one artist who was in all the exhibitions I have mentioned above. “When Attitudes Become Form”, documenta 5, ROSC ’88, “Magiciens de la Terre” and of course Skulptur Projekte Münster. Intriguing. To be continued……

About the Author

Jonathan Carroll is the curator and founder of Art-Lot Dublin a public art project. He has curated the visual arts strand for St. Patrick’s Festival and is on the panel of curators for the Goethe-Institut. He was the assistant curator of the Project Arts Centre (2006-2009) and is a regular columnist for the Visual Artists’ News Sheet. Jonathan is a graduate of Art History UCD, Cultural Management, Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset, Madrid and Curating Contemporary art at the RCA, London.

This post alongside a new text by Sarah Glennie is included in EDITION #001 of the IMMA EDIT. Subscribe to the IMMA Mailing List and select ‘IMMA EDIT’ to receive the future quarterly editions of the EDIT.

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Visual Art, Audiences & Ireland. 50 years on, what can we learn from Rosc?

Marta Minajin Joyces's Tower, Rosc '80. photo Dorothy Walker

By Sarah Glennie – Director, IMMA (2012 – 2017)

When the 50th anniversary of the first Rosc came onto the radar of the programming team at IMMA we sent a long time discussing what our response would be. It seemed that instead of taking an art-historical survey of the work included in Rosc, and instead taking a broader consideration of the context in which these ambitious and daring exhibitions took place would deliver the potential to open up new histories that could inform our thinking about the potential and place of visual art in Ireland today. As curators working in a visual arts institution we were interested to find out how they had happened? Who paid for them? What else was happening at the time both locally and internationally and crucially what did people think of these exhibitions?
Continue reading Visual Art, Audiences & Ireland. 50 years on, what can we learn from Rosc?

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Paint Skin? – a blog by Irish Artist Susan Connolly

 

When the Ceiling Meets the Floor, Acrylic paint, 900x450cm approx., The Lab, Dublin, 2015
When the Ceiling Meets the Floor, Acrylic paint, 900x450cm approx., The Lab, Dublin, 2015

 

We invited Irish Artist Susan Connolly to respond to the work of Lucian Freud at IMMA. A key aspect to the IMMA Collection: Freud Project is the response of contemporary artists to his work, and what it means to artists today. This began with 29 artist responses in the Freud Book, and continues with the Freud residencies and artist responses on our blog.

‘…when an artist sits down to write about another artist, he (she) is also writing about himself (herself).’
– D. Salle, How to See, W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 2016, p.8.

The area of investigation within my own work explores the ‘extendable paint surface’ and the provisionality this causes within traditional views of painting. Through extensive research followed by the setting of boundaries to work within (for example using only 3 colours, Magenta/Cyan/Lemon, and 3 Shapes, Square/Circle/Triangle) I find possibilities to make painting for now. Consequently, the visual outcomes found in my work are often biomorphic in appearance; playfully teasing some form of beauty out of a self- conscious awareness of the paint and its own material hybridity.
Continue reading Paint Skin? – a blog by Irish Artist Susan Connolly

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The Underbelly of New York / Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, Weekend Plans, Installation view IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2017. Photo: Denis Mortell
Nan Goldin, Weekend Plans, Installation view IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2017. Photo: Denis Mortell

In our Gallery Voices series Ciara Magee, from our Visitor Engagement Team, explores the subject matter in American photographer Nan Goldin’s exhibition Weekend Plans. The exhibition is now in its final week ending this Sunday 15 October 2017. Admission is free.

The work of Nan Goldin is a site to behold. Her early work documents New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s at a time when artists took over the Lower East Side due to the low rents during the economic recession. Goldin moved to New York in 1978 following her graduation and almost immediately immersed herself in the ‘No Wave’ scene in which she has since become a key figure. The ‘No Wave’ movement was a short-lived scene that emerged in the late ‘70s in downtown New York that influenced a new underground art, film and music scene based on the rejection of commercial ‘new wave’ music at the time.
Continue reading The Underbelly of New York / Nan Goldin

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The Primordial Other, Gender and Power. Vivienne Dick

Continuing our Gallery Voices series Paola Catizone from our Visitor Engagement Team, explores audience responses to the current solo exhibition from Irish artist Vivienne Dick.  The exhibition ends on Sunday 15 October. Admission is free.

“The web of meaning unravels, and a new one is spun in its place”

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
-Yuval Noah Harari

93% STARDUST, by internationally celebrated film maker and artist Vivienne Dick is a solo exhibition currently showing at IMMA and presented alongside Weekend Plans, by her life long friend and collaborator photographer Nan Goldin. As a member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team, I am in an interesting “fly on the wall” situation which allows me to notice visitor’s responses to the work. With Nan Golden and Vivienne Dick’s exhibitions VET members are experimenting with a new “roaming” approach which allows us to move freely through the gallery and to engage with the public as it seems appropriate. Nan’s show running smoothly into Vivienne’s, with Goldin’s last two rooms dedicated to portraits of a young Vivienne and her son, reflects the merging of individualities and the interest in friendship that was central to both artist’s work. Visitors are at times unsure as to where one artist’s show ends and the other’s begin.

Vivienne Dick, Augenblick (2017)
Vivienne Dick, Augenblick (2017)

Even though the the thematic in the two artist’s work has much in common, as they have influenced each other through their lives, once they enter the darkened, carpeted, cinematic spaces of Dick’s exhibition, viewers seem to relax into a quieter mood. There is a subtlety of ideas woven into the often raw images and sounds which allows for a reflective atmosphere.
Continue reading The Primordial Other, Gender and Power. Vivienne Dick

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Understanding Hilma. A life dedicated to spirituality in art

Hilma af Klint, Altarpiece, No 1, Group X, Series Altarpieces, 1915 , Oil and metal leaf on canvas, Photo: Albin Dahlström / Moderna Museet

By Leda Scully, Visitor Engagement Team, IMMA.

‘But no, she’s abstract, is a
bird
Of sound in the air of air
soaring,
And her soul sings
unencumbered
Because the song’s what
makes her sing.’

Fernando Pessoa

At the time of her death, the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) left behind a body of work comprising 1,200 paintings, numerous sketchbooks and 26,000 pages of journals. She stipulated in her will that the work should not be seen for twenty years after her death, but in fact it was forty-two years before it was exhibited for the first time, in the 1986 show The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985, curated by Maurice Tuchman in L.A . Record numbers attended that show and audiences were reportedly stunned by this unheard-of Swedish painter whose work had remained unseen for so long, and who, it transpired, may have painted the first ever abstract paintings in Western art – quite a few years before Kandinsky.

This is the second time Hilma af Klint’s work has been shown in IMMA . The first was in the landmark travelling show ‘3x Abstraction,’ which drew parallels between her and two other key female abstract artists – Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin . In 2005, John Hutchinson also curated a show of her work in Dublin for the Douglas Hyde Gallery, in which the image above (titled ‘The Swan, no 17’, 1914/15) was shown. So who was Hilma af Klint, and how did she discover her style? Born in Stockholm in 1862, her family naval-officer family had a long history of map making, mathematics and science. Fascinated by Spiritualism from an early age, she was thought by her family to have the gift of prophecy. Unusually for a woman of the time, she attended university and received an academic training in painting, even maintaining her own studio for more than a decade in the centre of Stockholm (in the same building that housed the gallery Edvard Munch showed in).

During her university years she met and formed a group of four other women called ‘De Fem’ (the five) who were interested in Spiritualism and and Theosophy. They met once a week to experiment with mediumship and automatic writing (examples of which are included in this show), pre-dating the Surrealist practice by decades. To put this in context, it was much more common – even respectable – for people to experiment with the occult at the turn of the 19th Century. New religions such as Theosophy and Anthroposophy , which blended new Scientific discoveries with a belief in ‘Higher powers,’ arose to fill the place of organised religion, and proved very influential in artistic circles. Yeats, Mondrian and Kandinsky were well-known proponents of these movements. Stockholm too would have seen the leading neo-spiritual figures such as Annie Besant and Rudolph Steiner give lectures which Hilma Af Klint attended. (Later in her career Rudolph Steiner famously snubbed Mondrian to visit Hilmas studio rather than his, where he told her that no one should see her work for fifty years).

Hilma herself was a strong-willed, formidable character with an inquiring mind. Interested in science, mathematics and the natural world, she was vegetarian and a physically small woman of 5 ft (significant when we look at how large some of her paintings are) with piercing blue eyes. In 1904, during a meeting with De Fem, Hilma af Klint received an order from a spiritual entity that she was to create paintings on the astral plane. ‘I was to place myself under the direction of the Guru who produced symmetrical, spontaneous, astral pictures through me. It was not the case that I was to blindly obey the High Lords of the Mysteries but that I was to imagine that they were always by my side.’ She began this work into uncharted spiritual and artistic territory finally in 1906, making thirty-seven paintings.

Then, in 1907 she began ‘The paintings for the Temple’, some of her best-known work. Comprising 193 works, these were series within series, numbered and in sequence. 111 of them were painted within a year and a half, which meant she finished one every three days. These were made under total mediumship, whereby she was unaware of what she was doing, working ‘with great force’ and without any corrections. She collapsed from exhaustion at the end of the last one. Following this there was a break of four years where she cared for her dying mother. Then in 1912 she took up the mantle again to complete the series, painting three more huge 11-foot paintings titled ‘Altar paintings’ (pictured above, ‘Altarpiece, no. 1, 1915’, currently on view in IMMA).

For the rest of her life, Hilma Af Klint was to continue working as a conduit for the spiritual in painting. From her work and meticulous notes we can discern a distinct iconography: pink for spiritual love, red for physical love, blue for female and yellow for the male. Green symbolised perfect harmony while overlapping discs were unity. The letters ‘Wu’ symbolised the dual relationship between matter and spirit and ‘ao’ signified spiritual evolution: “The idea is to present a core from which evolution starts in rain and storm, lightning and tempest. ao can also stand for Alpha and Omega: ao the beginning and the end of a day’s journey, ie. a period of development in both climbing down into matter and rising up to fully clear consciousness of life’s content” (Hilma af Klint).

Her ultimate goal was unity for mankind, but in creating this work she sacrificed a career as a professional artist, and a ‘normal’ family life. Aside from the esoteric content of her work the problem of her gender too made the idea of being accepted by her contemporaries impossible. Regardless of a woman’s artistic talent, whatever they produced was regarded in Sweden as ‘mere women’s work’, and so she worked in secret. In doing so she was able to build up this abstract iconography without coming under fire from her contemporaries, and without them being at all aware of her artistic breakthroughs. In a strange quirk of fate that plays out to this day over a hundred years later, Hilma actually exhibited alongside Kandinsky in 1914 in the Baltic Exhibition in Malmo. Here marked her last foray as a professional academic painter, a woman showing figurative work in public, but painting abstracts in private. Kandinsky, the self-proclaimed first abstract artist, had no idea of the existence of this woman who ended up usurping him in his endeavours to be the first abstract painter in history. And now here they are exhibited together again, in ‘As Above, So Below’, on view till August 27th 2017.

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Ellen Altfest. The Relationship between Artist and Model

Looking at the return to figuration in contemporary art practice, Altfest is one of several artists invited to respond on the affinities, methodologies and potential influences that contemporary artists continue to share with Freud. In conjunction with Altfest’s memorable Artist’s Talk at IMMA in June, we invite the artist to write a blog on her distinctive approach to working with life models, the rhythms and intensity of studio life and reflect on the interchanges between desire and detachment, in striking a balanced when working with her subjects.

Above: Ellen Altfest, Composition, 2014 – 2015, Oil on canvas
Above: Ellen Altfest, Composition, 2014 – 2015, Oil on canvas

The relationship between the artist and the model is a delicate balance between professional and personal. I hire the model, pay him, set the hours, etc. I try to be fair and respectful. However, being a model is unlike many jobs. It’s not normal to be asked to come in and disrobe. I sit closer to the model than most people would find comfortable. In turn, I am doing something really private in front of the model, painting, which I wouldn’t do in front of most people. The model is not separate; he’s an extension of that process. I need to feel that both of us are relaxed in order to concentrate. It’s a wavelength that we enter, we are united in working towards the same end.

One of my paintings can take up to a year or more, and the model and I will work up to 40 hours a week. (I probably hold the time record in painting a model in a single pose.) We listen to music and podcasts; we talk about our lives. He and I can spend more time together than with our respective partners. I now have friends who once sat for me. My first model, TM, said that his then-boyfriend, now husband, noted that I’d looked at his penis longer than he had. He found that unsettling.

Our sessions are generally 25 minutes with 6 or 7 minute break in between. I make a mark on the model’s skin with a thin sharpie pen and a corresponding mark on the painting so I don’t lose my place. The paintings are one-to-one scale, and I measure the body with a skewer; Then put that measurement onto the canvas. I have three relationships: one with the model, one with the part of his body that I’m painting, and then one with my painting. During the painting process I often feel the strongest connection with the part of the body I’m observing.

It’s not uncommon for a model to want to quit about the six-months through. Being in the same position over a long period of time puts a lot of stress on the body.  People don’t know how they will feel physically in the future, months after they start, or where they will be in their lives. Another job offer can arise, for example, or they might want to move to another part of the country.

I find my models through ads on an arts website, or through a referral. I make it clear how long the painting will take, and ask for a commitment. I look for people in stable, long-term relationships, or in programs that will keep them in New York. But that doesn’t always work. I have tried different bonus incentives and considered contracts. It might seem like the artist has all the power in the artist model relationship, but the model has a real power, and that is the power to leave.

When I began working with models, and was single, people would invariably ask, in studio visits, at parties, if I had ever slept with one. I got the sense that they were hoping I would say “yes”.  Having sex with your model seems to be a common tradition among men. And because of the intimacy of the relationship between artist and model, I can see why. When I think about Lucian Freud, I do think about how many of his models he slept with and how many children he had with them. Also, whether or not an artist has slept with their model could change the interpretation of the work—if it’s perceived as sexual. To my mind, there are many good reasons not to get romantically involved with a model. Personally, I work too long on a painting to jeopardize its completion with a romantic relationship. Maybe affairs are better for people whose paintings take less time.

Working with a model is, ultimately, impractical. Trying to get the body, which moves and changes over time, to stay still for months on end, is unnatural. It’s also expensive. I’ve been asked, “Why not work from photographs?“ Photographs would be more efficient, and easier, the thinking goes. But, my creativity comes not only from what I select to paint, but also in interpreting what I see. In the end, my job isn’t to make the painting more efficiently: it’s is to make the painting what it’s meant to be.

A funny thing is, I am getting married to someone who looks like one of my models. He has pale skin and dark body hair. I didn’t think my choice of model was about my personal preferences. I wanted to paint body hair because it gendered the subject. But maybe, after looking at them for so long, my models became my preference. And I do like being close to my source of inspiration.

Altfest and Model, Photography courtesy of artist and photographer Jason Schmidt
Altfest and Model, Photography courtesy of artist and photographer Jason Schmidt

On 24.06.017, Alftest discussed her practice at IMMA, in the context of major Collection Freud Project, 2016 – 2021. Considering a subjective response to human form, Altfest’s shares her own distinct and devoted approach to figurative and representational painting, responding to a selection of Freud works that most resonated with her. You can hear Altfest’s Talk – Figuration and Objects, here on IMMA’s Sound Cloud Channel.

About the Author / Artist

Ellen Altfest received a BFA and BA from Cornell University, an MFA from Yale University School of Art, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Altfest has had one person exhibitions at The New Museum, New York, Milton Keynes Gallery, in England, and The Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas. Her work has been included in many national and international group exhibitiions including in the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, The Royal Acadamy in London, KUNSTFORENINGEN GL STRAND in Copenhagen and Dhondt Daenens Museum in Deurle, Belgium. Altfest received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Altfest lives and works in New York, NY.

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Out of Body. Susan MacWilliam

I was invited by IMMA to respond to their exhibition, As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics, and to work with Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick of AEMI to develop a screening for the IFI in conjunction with IMMA’s Talks and Public Programmes. The resulting programme – Out of Body – features films by Maya Deren, Mairéad McClean, Jordan Baseman, Paul Sharits, and John Smith, alongside a selection of my own work. These films consider the psychic and physical spaces of body and landscape; they explore automatic, subliminal and unconscious states of mind. Multiple viewpoints, strobing, and repetition draw attention to our perceptual senses, and to the very act of looking, and of being observed.  Out of Body took place at the IFI on Tuesday 25 July 2017 and you can listen back to the introduction and discussion here. Continue reading Out of Body. Susan MacWilliam

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CVLTO DO FVTVRV. ‘Wilder Beings Command!’

Artist Stephan Doitschinoff, currently exhibiting at IMMA as part of As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics, will return to IMMA this July to present the CVLTO DO FVTVRV procession, a parade conceived in partnership with philosophical society CVLTO DO FVTVRV. The parade will be part of an exciting outdoor evening of performances at IMMA titled Wilder Beings Command! 
Continue reading CVLTO DO FVTVRV. ‘Wilder Beings Command!’

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Exploring NIVAL for the first time / ROSC 50

Storage boxes in NIVAL at NCAD, photo by Meghan Elward Duffy

An Introduction to NIVAL, the National Irish Visual Arts Library

This year IMMA and NIVAL are collaborating on ‘ROSC 50‘; a project that seeks to examine the pivotal and sometimes controversial Rosc exhibitions held in Ireland from 1967 to 1984. We asked Meghan Elward Duffy, who joined IMMA earlier this year, to take a first time trip to NIVAL to explore the archive and write this introduction to the National Irish Visual Arts Library.

Within the buzzing and somewhat quirky campus of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) on Thomas Street, Dublin lies a small yet significant library dedicated to preserving the record and memory of contemporary art in Ireland and that of Irish artists abroad. This is the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) and is an important resource for historians, artists, designers, and anyone wishing to learn about the history of contemporary art and design in Ireland – be they hobbyists or professionals.


Though I had visited the campus of NCAD many times before, this marked my first visit to NIVAL. And, aside from knowing exactly where I was going, I would have skipped over it completely had I not been looking for it.
While located within the campus of NCAD, the library is open to anyone who seeks information relating to contemporary art and design in Ireland. No student IDs or special library cards are required to visit or view the materials and the atmosphere of both NIVAL and NCAD is open, friendly and incredibly accessible.

 

The mission statement of NIVAL is as follows:

NIVAL collects, stores and makes accessible for research an unparalleled collection of documentation about Irish art in all media.  NIVAL’s collection policy includes Irish visual art from the whole island as well as Irish art abroad and non-Irish artists working in Ireland.   Information is acquired on artists, designers, galleries, arts organisations and institutions, critics and other related subjects.

NIVAL was unusual in that it was born from necessity and desire. I was surprised to learn that NIVAL wasn’t a natural or intrinsic part of the NCAD campus, but a passion turned requirement from an NCAD librarian who saw an opportunity and a calling.



Origins

NIVAL’s origins are humble and small. Having been formally established in 1998, the library began in the 1970s as a personal record and archive by NCAD Librarian Edward Murphy who began organising records safely into a humble metal filing cabinet in his office. Not only was this collection of personal interest to Murphy, its beginning was also a response to a perceived demand for documentary resources for the study of Irish visual art.

Between 1995 and 1997, the collection grew from the preexisting collection of Edward Murphy and his work within the NCAD library. Additions to the small archive were made by donations by The Hugh Lane Gallery, The Arts Council as well as other cultural institutions. Additionally, many materials were donated by private individuals, artists and other visual arts practitioners, researchers and professionals. Today, the library accepts personal donations from artists, collectors, and other enthusiasts and constantly looks for ways to grow their collections; be it through subscriptions to current periodicals, personal donations of books and ephemera, or acquisitions of materials.

The library is an important part of the NCAD campus. The main room contains full floor-to-ceilling bookshelving, with publications catalogued and stored according to the dewey decimal system. In an adjacent room, rows and stacks of filing cabinets are organised alphabetically and chronologically by artist or event, making all information easily accessible to the library staff and visitors. Materials can be requested in advance and viewed in the reading room, which currently displays many of the materials associated with the Rosc exhibitions, in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Rosc in 1967.

The Rosc Exhibitions: IMMA and NIVAL in Collaboration

Information relating to the Rosc exhibitions is abundant within NIVAL through publications, ephemera and materials from the exhibitions, and the personal collection and correspondence of individuals such as Dorothy Walker.

While conducting research for his book The Poetry of Vision: The Rosc Art Exhibitions 1967 – 1988author Dr. Peter Shortt spent countless hours trawling through the records contained within NIVAL to inform and develop a narrative that would then become the first book to ever be written about the Rosc exhibitions. As said by Peter Shortt himself in the introduction:

The aim of this book is to provide, for the first time, a comprehensive art-historical, factual and analytical account of all six Rosc exhibitions of international contemporary art and associated exhibitions of ancient and other art, which took place in Dublin approximately quadrennially between 1967 and 1988.

It is with these materials and with a similar intention of evaluating the narrative of contemporary art in Ireland that NIVAL and IMMA were able to tell the story of Rosc in the current display in the Project Spaces of IMMA and through the year-long initiative that is ROSC 50 – 1967 / 2017.

When preparing for ROSC 50 – 1967 / 2017, the curators worked alongside researcher Dr. Brenda Moore McCann to review the records from NIVAL, the RTE Archives, and the Irish Photographic Archive and to prepare a revised narrative that would be entered back into NIVAL for the future. While the exhibition space is lined with a comprehensive timeline of the Rosc exhibitions, the space is also fitted with a viewing station that broadcasts archive video material from RTE, and a selection of primary source material and ephemera from the NIVAL archives.

It was important for visitors and researchers to understand how the Rosc exhibitions contributed to the formation of IMMA. IMMA was officially opened at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1991 and became the national institution for contemporary art in Ireland.

Adding to the Archive

As Rosc signalled a significant change in the nation’s approach to contemporary art, IMMA and NIVAL are encouraging visitors to tell their stories from Rosc. Within the exhibition space itself, visitors are invited to write down their memories and experiences and add to the growing and changing narrative. Those unable to share their experiences in person are invited to email stories and photographs to [email protected] or to share their experiences with us publicly on social media with the hashtag #ROSC50.

We’ve already heard from so many people. We’ve received stories of children – now grown adults – who were given a day off from school specifically to visit a Rosc exhibition. We’ve heard from artists who were inspired by the Rosc exhibitions to join the arts and become artists themselves. Do you have something to share? Let us know and don’t hesitate to add your story to the national archive and narrative of the Rosc exhibitions.