Irish Arts Review

Constant SpiritAuthor(s): Grant WatsonSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 24, No. 3 (Autumn, 2007), pp. 96-97Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493234 .

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K CONSTANT SPIRIT THE ARTS IN LOUTH

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Constant

Constance Short keeps faith with the

principle that views art as an integral part of

everyday life - not just the preserve of the

few, argues GRANT WATSON

In 2003 I invited Constance Short to exhibit her work

'The Whole Nine Yards' at Project Art Centre in Dublin.

I had seen some of her lino cuts at a fundraiser that we

held for the Artist Association of Ireland and was

intrigued by their directness of approach in terms of format and

use of language. Every breath I take is a Political gesture (Fig 1) said

one Free Child Art another. I saw them then and still see them as

a wonderfully effective and self-sufficient system for Short to articulate and distribute her ideas - give free reign to her opin

ions, the causes that she champions, her emotional or reflective response to events and her philosophy on art, life, politics and

the rest - all of which get contracted into a punchy graphic

image using a lino cut printing process that she developed at

home in Dundalk on her kitchen table.

Constance Short's show at Project involved the many differ

ent aspects of her practice, which cohere around her dynamic

and hyper-productive personality - I am a Verb I Do. We had

the lino cuts arranged along one wall (27-feet-long by 3-feet

wide and made up from eighty-one individual works each, 12

inches square) we had workshops with the artist demonstrating her technique and letting the public 'have a go', we had a talk,

and we had Constance selling her work in the gallery (by the

square foot) off the wall at prices that most people could

afford. This unabashed marketing and selling of the work

direct by the artist comes from another of Short's convictions.

For her the mysterious etiquette that accompanies the sale of

art from commercial galleries (let alone public institutions) is just another symptom of how disconnected it has become from

the usual processes of labour and exchange, as an inflated com

modity unavailable to ordinary people, that produces extreme

disparities between artists in relation to their market value.

Short herself insists on the straightforward and endlessly repro

ducible lino cut - Affordability Achieves Accessibility runs one of

her statements (Fig 2).

This was very much the spirit in which Constance, amongst

others, set up the first physical manifestation of Project in 1967

over Tuck and Company's premises on Ablbey Street, which

(after training as a commercial artist with the McConnell's

advertising agency) she describes as the real start of her artistic

career. The group of artists and actors mainly from working-class

backgrounds who were amongst Project's founding members,

saw this initiative as a socialist alternative to the arts establish

ment from which they felt excluded and as a way of controlling

their own working conditions - the production, promotion and

sale of their work. Short says of Project's beginnings: 'we want

ed to earn our own living at art. It was important that the artist be accepted in society on par with every other worker but with out compromising their vision.' To this end, she worked in the gallery and was known to run out into the street afrer someone if she thought there was a possible sale in it. She also exhibited

works at Project herself, notably participating in the exhibition curated by Rhoda McManus in 1975 - in which six women pre sented male nudes - 'our irreverent idea was to give men a bit of exposure during International Women's Year'.

In 1981 Short moved to Dundalk and away from the Dublin

96 |IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2007

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ACESSELIT

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art-world and (no longer having access to an etching press)

began to develop her use of the linocut printing process.

Inevitably living not far from the border between North and

South, Short found herself immersed in border related issues, both as an artist, as an activist and as an organiser. Living outside

the capital close to a fault line between the two states (an area

which in her opinion was neglected by the National

Government) was for her an experience of marginalisation, a

condition with which she identified - I Belong on the Border runs

another of her statements (Fig 4). 'I Belong on the Border' was

also the title of a fairly recent show at Dundalk's Basement

Gallery in 2004 that included works in diverse media including

an eight-room installation in print, wood sculpture, sound and

light, live performance and archival material. Her community

work across the border has involved straightforward exchanges, a North-South women's exchange programme and a cross-bor

der poetry camp. For Short making artworks, book cover illus

trations, executing public commissions, working with community groups, lobbying for the arts at a government policy

level, getting involved as an arts organiser and in direct political

activism all converge and simply reflect her desire to be an 'ordi

nary member' of the community. The list of her output in all of

these areas is too long to relate here but anyone who wants to

see the range of these activities should take a look at her web

site. A year or so after we exhibited 'The Whole Nine Yards' in the

gallery at Project, we had an exhibition with Martha Rosler, and

Short came along and was an active participant in the discussion

1 CONSTANCE SHORT

Every Breath / Take

is a Political Gesture

2002 lino cut

18 x 22cm

2 Affordability

Achieves

Accessibility

lino cut 30 x 30cm

3 Only the Dead are

A-Political 2003

lino cut 30 x 30cm

4 I Belong on the

Border 2003 lino cut

30 x 30cm

5 Dancing at the

Crossroads 1995

lino cut 20 x 15cm

Inevitably living not far from the border between North and South, Short found herself immersed in border related issues that accompanied this. It struck me at

the time, how in very different ways and

in very different circumstances, these two artists from roughly the same gener

ation, had doggedly stuck to their agen

das. Keeping faith with what I suppose is

the feminist principle that art is firmly

situated within a lived reality - a reality

that can't be kept out of the picture. For

Short in particular, the link between her

art and her politics is a direct one

because for her - All Art is Political. For

example, Short has said in relation to

the ten years she spent fighting a legal

battle with the Irish state, the Attorney

General and British Nuclear Fuels to

have the Thorp Plant at Sellafield closed

down: 'suing BNFL is the most signifi- \\ ' cant thing I have done in my life as

an artist.' * 3- -, ,.

AUTUMN 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 9 7

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