Irish Arts Review

Irish Museum of Modern Art: The CollectionReview by: Brian McAveraIrish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 148, 150Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503271 .

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GO

l Y r %

BOOKS

conversion to a hotel in the 1960s. A

restoration programme has already begun.

In his pioneering essay on Irish sport

ing lodges Patrick Bowe charts the loca

tion, design and decoration of a neglected

and overlooked building type.

Colum O'Riordan provides a history of

The Dublin Artisans' Dwellings Company founded in 1876, drawing on the huge

body of company records now preserved

in the Irish Archive Architectural Archive.

Demonstrating that the Irish Georgian

Society and the Irish Architectural

Archive have an interest in Irish buildings of all types and periods, the article con

cludes with a most useful list of the com

pany developments by location, date,

architects and contractors.

Other essays include Donald Cameron's

examination of Scagliola inlay work in

Ireland and Ann Wilson's essay on the

building of St Colman's Cathedral, Cobh,

the most intact of the great Roman

Cathedrals in Ireland.

The final article by Michael McCarthy,

discussing a memorial tablet to

Alessandro Galilei, the 18th-century archi

tect of Castletown, Co Kildare, displays the same quality seen throughout this

excellent volume.

David J Griffin is the Director of the Irish

Architectural Archive.

Irish Museum of Modern Art: The Collection_

IMMA, Dublin, 2005_

pp 220 ills col 180 p/b 45.00 ISBN: 1-903811-48-1

Brian McAvera

There have been two previous publica

tions in relation to IMMA's collec

tion. The first Inheritance & Transformation,

published in 1991, was a kind of stocktak

ing of the limited riches that the fledgling museum had to work with. The current

director claims, that the second, IMMA:

Celebrating a Decade, was intended as a ref

erence catalogue only, but of the book's

ninety-four pages, eighty-three of them con

sisted of generalised essays on various

aspects of IMMA, and the rest, in the form

of appendices, were simple listings, and

thus of very limited reference use.

The current volume is a substantial

improvement on several levels. It is bigger,

illustrated in colour throughout, hand

somely designed and printed, and clearly

shaped to bolster a particular image of the

museum, that of the institution as trendy,

lively and alert to contemporary fashions.

In this it succeeds perfectly, and accommo

dates its subvention from the Department

of Arts, Sport and Tourism to a T.

The heart of the book is a selection of

about 180 works (chosen from well over

4,300 artworks), many given full-page

reproductions, and all getting short elu

cidatory comment. There are forewords by

the Minister (distinctly hopeful 'a well

established and carefully planned collec

tion') by the Director (acknowledging 'substantial gaps' but still claiming, that it

now has a consistent representation of

Irish art from the 1940s onwards').

One must be reasonable here. All direc

tors, and indeed ministers, are under polit

ical pressure and have to put the best foot

forward, so to speak. And the current

director has been particularly successful in

increasing his budget allocation for the

buying of work, whilst the government has

been very helpful, not only through the

Heritage Fund, but also through its tax

relief scheme in relation to donations.

But any notion of a 'consistent repre

sentation' from 1940s onwards is unfor

tunately wide of the mark. In terms of

sculpture, the collection is random.

Sculptors, who have been going for the

best part of a quarter of a century such as

Gerry Cox, Cathy Carman, Colm

Brennan, Michael Bulfin, Vivienne Roche

and Eilis O'Connell (to name but a few) are either not represented at all, or are rep

resented by the odd insignificant and non

representative work.

Exactly the same is true for Irish print

makers, Irish photographers and Irish

Performance artists: where are the likes of

Diarmuid Delargy, Alistair McLennan,

Danny McCarthy, and so forth?

In relation to Northern Ireland, the rep

resentation is poor. If you look at socio

political art, none of the following key

figures, all of whom have been producing for a quarter of a century, and all of whom

have exhibited internationally, are in the

collection: Jack Pakenham, Victor Sloan,

Gerry Gleason, Una Walker, Marie

Barrett, Dermot Seymour, Fergus Delargy,

Colin McGookin, Tom Bevan -

and even

Graham Gingles is only represented by work between 1979 and 1981.

Again, to focus only on artists who

have been going for at least twenty years

re the North, there is no representation

of Tom Carr, Bob Sloan, Carolyn

Mulholland, Jim Manley, and Catherine

Harper, to name only a few.

148 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2005

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I CO

B O OKS In terms of the ^^^^^^ BBbPI

Republic, if you hap- ^^^^^HHRKG pen to be Paul Funge, ^^^^H|HH| Charles Cullen, Charles ^^^HraBBfE Harper, Alice Hanratty, Sean ^HIh@?| McSweeney

- I could go on, but ]H you get the idea - none of whom are 3BL in the collection, one has ^^^^^^^H thus to conclude that the w^^^^^^^^M 'gaps' are massive.

^^^^^^^^H However, even if there's not

^^^^^^^H much in this book that sug- ^^^^^^^| gests the specifics of being ^^^^^H Irish, it is at least a very wel- ^^^^^H come improvement on what has ^^^^H gone before, and a clear step ^^^H towards greater transparency. ^^H

Brian McAvera is a playwright and an ^H

art critic._

V

Mourne: words by Paul Yates, images by Basil Blackshaw

Tom Caldwell Gallery, 2005._

?25/ 36.00p/b Ltd. ed.h/b with tipped in lithograph

?350.00/ 505.00 ISBN: 0-900903-70-8

Brian McAvera

Apart from the Bell Gallery, The Tom

Caldwell Gallery is probably the

only commercial gallery in Northern

Ireland to have had a continuous run

from the 1960s onwards. Until the death

of Caldwell Senior the gallery could be

found in Bradbury Place, close to the uni

versity area, but now, under the aegis of

Tom's son Chris, it has relocated to the

highly fashionable Lisburn Road area.

This is the first time that the gallery has been involved in book production

and, gratifyingly, it has been done in style.

The paperback version is a substantial

tome of 176 large format pages, of good

quality sized paper, which contains thir

teen full-page images by Blackshaw, the

rest of the space being taken up by the

poetry of Paul Yates.

Thankfully, unlike so many gallery pub

lications, this is a designed book. Colin

Davidson has alternated crisp white and

stone gray paper, changing the intervals

^^^^^^^^^^^^ throughout to

^?^^^^^ achieve a 'running

rhythm' which is highly effec

tive. He also makes considerable but

subtle play in relation to the placement on

the page of both the poems themselves, as

well as their titles.

As well as the paperback edition, there

is a limited edition hardback, bound in

cloth, and in slipcase (395 copies) which

contains further images and poetry, these

volumes being individualised with a line

of poetry from the poet, signed by Yates,

and a lithograph by Blackshaw.

Both Blackshaw and Yates (who is a doc

umentary film-maker who also paints and

writes poetry) have a long association with

the gallery and the putative subject matter

- The Mournes

- makes sense as Blackshaw

himself has spent much of his life in

County Down, and much of his work has

been generated by that countryside and con

text. In the Foreword, Jack Pakenham, him

self a painter and poet, informs us that the

poetry stems from bus journeys to the

Mournes as a child, whilst acutely noting

that this Mourne 'in many ways only exists

in the mind of the poet'.

Blackshaw is not noted for his printmak

ing, or for collaborations with writers,

though he did do a Poster Poem commis

sion, with the poet Derek Mahon, for the

Arts Council of Northern Ireland as

well as collaborating previously

with Yates on a limited edition

<^ \. project of poetry and

prints for UNICEF.

This particular

collaboration

works, though the

balance is skewed. Put

at its simplest, there is

far too much text and not

nearly enough Blackshaw, so

that the effect, as opposed to

the intention, is that of an illus

trated book.

Yates' poems, though shot through

with intriguing observations and

metaphoric richness, are really prose

poetry, and rhythmically, as with much

American poetry of the 1960s, it is line

placement that creates an effect of

rhythm, rather than an embodiment of it.

What Blackshaw seems to have done -

and the plates are marvellously faithful

reproductions of his oil-on-paper sketches -

is to use bits of the poem as springboards.

Daffodils arranged against their will, for

example, takes the title from a cut-down ver

sion of a line in The Three Shamans, and

then proceeds to give us a classic formula

tion of his late style (see for example the

interview and images in IAR Winter 2002).

Misty washes are hemmed in by an outlined

'frame' upon which is a partial outline of a

vase (the part doing duty for the whole) and

above which - but reading closest to us -

are the marks doing duty for the daffodils.

Spatial recession and special manipulation

give us an interplay between two and three

dimensionality and present us with the

Blackshaw essentials of the image.

With Winter Tractor Blackshaw hones in

on the opening phrase 'creaking Massey

Ferguson tractor', ignores the mythological

aspect of the poem itself, and presents us

with another signature Blackshaw compo

sition. But irrespective of the balance

between the two collaborators, this is a

beautiful production and, for a first attempt

in the field, really quite astonishing.

Brian McAvera is a playwright and an art critic.

150 I IRISH ARTS REVIEW AUTUMN 2005

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