occupy issue 6

TITLE(basenine)

OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 6 AA

issue 6

in-fluxsheenagh geoghan

julie merrimanerica eyres

emmet kieransvideogram limerick

six memosstate of the union

millepideluke fowler

nov-apr 2010/2011

OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 61

editorial

It’s all change at Occupy Space. Welcome to the new look Occupy Paper. Both the paper and gallery have recently gotten a redesign and new logos courtesy of our lovely resident designer Sheena Flynn. Occupy Space would like to welcome our new board members Jessica Kelly, Noelle Collins, Eoin Francis McCormack and John Galvin and we also have exciting news of the launch of our artist-led art fair hosted by Occupy Space in May on page [1].As usual, this issue also contains a round-up of recent exhibitions and events in the gallery as well as reviews from around the country. Featured articles include our event nights Videogram[35]and Millepide[39] and articles from Six Memos by Shinnors Scholar and curator Mary Conlon[19], artists Helen Horgan[27] and James Merrigan[21] and a review of Trompe le Monde by David Brancaleone[31]. We also have a review of Luke Fowler’s show in TBG&S by Curt Riegelnegg[41], an art writer from Pittsburgh currently on the MAVIS programme with IADT. Enjoy! -Ed

Occupy Space located on Thomas Street, Limerick was set up in 2009 to facilitate an ever expanding need for artistic exhibition spaces in Limerick. It is an artist-led project, run by a revolving board of members on a voluntary basis. Occupy Space is committed to delivering a relentlessly energetic programme of exhibitions and events.

Our intention is that the space will be a central axis for a wide variety of creative people to experiment and present their work. The organization encourages openness and accessibility to artists and the visiting public alike, and aims to provide an open solid platform for the visual arts. Our program involves hosting exhibitions of emerging and established artists, with a strong emphasis on exhibiting those based in Limerick. Occupy Space also hosts other artist-led projects such as artists talks, seminars and collaborative events with other creative practitioners and organizations.

This visual art journal is intended to expand on the exhibitions and events happening in the gallery as well as provide a platform for critique and dialogue between emerging and established artists in Limerick and beyond. Artists, critical writers and other art practitioners are invited to submit to the journal and engage with it as a means of testing, experimenting, developing and expanding on new ideas and concepts.

OCCUPY PAPER ISSUE 6 2

contents

luke fowler pilgrimage from scattered points temple bar gallery and studios18 feb -26 mar 2011

julie merriman measured fall11-27 nov 2010

sheenagh geoghan dweller 2-18 dec 2010 erica eyres compulsory touchingemmet kierans make.believe.13-29 jan 2011

six memos: trompe le monde3 feb- 4 mar 2011

videogram limerickalan o’keeffe and joanna hopkinsstate of the union 16 mar-1 apr 2011

millepide1 apr 2011

in_flux artist-led art fair 26-29 may 2011 3

59

13

193537

41

39


In_flux

In_flux is an exciting event happening this May in Limerick City. Occupy Space will be hosting an art fair/exhibition that will gather together 10 artist-led project spaces from Ireland and Europe. This temporary exhibition hub will bring over 30 practitioners together for one weekend of art-presenting, viewing and networking.

Occupy Space has invited artist-led spaces from all over Europe that offer an alternative framework for art practices, and presenting a community where ‘doing-it-yourself’ and experimentation are key activities. Artist-led spaces are vital, energetic elements of the visual art fabric of many cities. Collectives of like-minded emergent practitioners working collaboratively toward the aim of platforming interesting exhibitions and contributing to a larger cultural discourse. This exhibition, consisting of pop-up galleries from each artist-led space, makes reference to an non-

traditional Art-Fair format in which non-profit artist-led spaces present exhibitions rather than commercial galleries striving to sell work.

In_flux aims to encourage collaboration between spaces of similar orientations, to create new opportunities for artists locally, nationally and internationally and endeavours to promote the strength of visual culture in Limerick.

In_flux will be launched on Thursday 26th May in Occupy Space. A series of events will accompany the exhibition programme including Pecha Kucha, Network Forums, artist talks and visits to local studios.In_flux is partnering with Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) and e v+ a to present Double Act, a series of conversations, screenings and some reflections on the collaborative process with guest appearances by a number of interesting artists, curators and other creative types. The Double Act Programme will happen at Occupy Space from May 26th to 28th. Full details to be announced on the LCGA website www.gallery.limerick.ie LCGA has also extended the run of How Capital Moves a new body or work by artist duo Kennedy Browne, to coincide with the In_flux event. Originally commissioned for the Lodz biennale Poland (2010) the work is partly a response to a computer factory relocating to Łódź in Poland from Limerick, Ireland.How Capital Moves is curated by Annette Moloney. Open at Istabraq Hall, Merchant’s Quay, Limerick from 9.30 to 5.30 throughout the duration of In_flux.For more details on this see www.gallery.limerick.ie and www.eva.ie


artist-led art fairParticipating Artist-led Spaces include:

1646 The Hague Basement Project Space Cork Block T Dublin Catalyst Arts Belfast126 Galway Monster Truck DublinTransmission GlasgowSOMA Contemporary WaterfordTransition LondonWolf Art Rotterdam

The project offers participating spaces the opportunity to tour a recent or upcoming exhibition to Limerick; to represent as a gallery in an artist-led art fair; to utilise large exhibition area as a pop-up gallery; to network with visiting and local artists; to contribute to a symposium and to network with high-profile international curators.

For more information visitwww.occupy-space.blogspot.comLaunches Thursday 26 May 7pmOccupy Space,Thomas St Centre, Limerick Art fair runs 27-29 May 10-6

in_flux@Thomas St Centre, Limerick


julie merriman

curated by annette moloney

Measured Fall, Disruption Rowlandwerft IV & V(2010), Installation shot, All photos courtesy of the artist. Photography by Dermot Lynch and Deirdre Power


measured fall

Julie Merriman lives and works in Dublin. She studied Fine Art in Falmouth School of Art and recently completed an MA in Visual Arts Practices at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology. She has exhibited in Ireland and England, including solo shows at the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire (2008) and West Cork Arts Centre (2006). Group shows include Inscape, Galway Arts Centre (2010); Public Gesture, The LAB (2009); 178th Exhibition RHA, and 127th Exhibition, RUA (2008); Let’go, Monster Truck (2008); As Built - Drawings, Wicklow County Council (2008); Eigse, Carlow (2008/ 2006); Eurojet Futures, The Anthology (2005) and Eurojet Futures RHA (2004); and EV+A, Limerick (winning an Open Award in (2003). In this exhibition Merriman explored her interest in naval architecture and engineering through the medium of drawing. As a new body of work Measured Fall was a direct continuation of previous research and drawing explorations which investigated harbour architecture and its relationship with the shifting motion of the sea.

At times the surface detail and delicacy of Merriman’s drawings belies the range of complex issues being addressed including the history of Irish harbours, ports and piers and their social, political and psychological links to emigration.

In discussing the starting point for Measured Fall Merriman recalls:

While watching the demolition of St. Michael’s Estate, Inchicore in 2004 (Building to be Demolished, drawing

series 2002-2006), I photographed a small picture still attached to a section of interior wall; it was an image of a ship in full sail. I photographed the sequence of the picture falling from the tenth floor and this formed the beginnings of an idea that lead to an investigations into what might happen to a ship as it sinks, as it goes beneath the surface of the water. In 2009, as part of Carlisle Pier Project (2006-2010) I became interested in the area of naval architecture and engineering. The drawings in Measured Fall, for the most part, derive from these two sources.

The artist was in conversation with curator Annette Moloney on Thursday 11th November 2010This event aimed to discuss Measured Fall as a new body of work; the artist’s concentration on drawing in her practice; her broader research interests and previous projects including her long-term residency with Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council which resulted in the Carlisle Pier Project (2006-2010).


Julie Merriman, Disruption Rowlandwerft IV(2010), Mixed Media

Julie Merriman, Disruption Rowlandwerft VI(2010) and Strengthened for Navigation(2010), Installation Shot


Julie Merriman,Strengthened for Navigation(2010), Mixed Media

Julie Merriman, Ship X(2010), Installation Shot


sheenagh geoghegan

Tell us a bit about your academic background.

sg I graduated in 2003 from Crawford College of Art and Design, I received a 1st class honours degree in Fine Art, BA (painting).

What kind of themes and concerns are explored in your practice? I noticed a kind of collecting aspect and a sort of anachronistic style to some of the work with the patterns and keepsakes, would you agree with this? Where does your imagery originate from? Where does the influence of pattern come from?

sg Everything and anything really although I’m not particularly interested in

being political or ‘current’. I recently read an interview with John Banville where he said ‘it’s not the job of the artist to be political”. I am interested in the small details that can display a multitude. I grew up within a community of makers, I spend my early years between my two grandparents houses as both of my parents had full time jobs, my earliest memories are of my Grandmothers who were both highly skilled craftspeople, sewing and knitting and my mother crocheting. The first drawings I saw were architectural drawings that Dad would have had strewn across the work-top. I have always been surrounded by this really rich and diverse range of materials and textures, from building materials to textiles and even food; my grandmother made her own bread and jam, and was innately holistic in everything she applied herself to....but I can’t remember a time when I

Sheenagh Geoghegan, Installation Detail(2010)


dweller

haven’t been fascinated with the process of making....in this sense my work is more akin to the nature of sculpture. However, to answer your question, no the work is not deliberately anachronistic nor do I seek to show a pattern, if anything I try to unravel, undo or even interrupt the pattern.

What can you tell us about your process in general? Is there a collecting process? Give us some insight into how you work.

sg The reason I specifically applied for a show at Occupy Space was because it provides artists with a wonderful space in which to experiment. For me this opportunity really tempted the vestigial in the sense that I had been working with three dimensions for a long, long time...in the sense of rearranging already

existing objects and manipulating them so they can dispel a new narrative for each individual viewer. This exhibition allowed me to explore and realize ideas, the opportunity to curate the show myself was really important because I did not know or even plan what way the work should be hung. I just kept changing the arrangement until some how like a rubiks cube I finally discovered a coherent narrative. I had known I was going to hang the paintings beside the drawings using the diptych/triptych format but each piece was created and titled separately. I found it hard at the opening because of the tentative nature of this approach. Ultimately this exhibition, this way of showing works has revealed many new ways of seeing my own work and most of all a new way of making that combines figuration with abstraction.


Sheenagh Geoghegan, Reception Fatigue(2010), pencil, acrylic and collage on paper, 30cm x 45cm


Are there any artists out there that you really admire and maybe influence you?

sg Influence-wise that’s a really big question, there are so many artists I admire, so instead of giving you the full massive list I’m going to say Matthew Ritchie and Norbert Schwontkowski but like everything else, that’s always in flux too. I also have an amazingly talented bunch of ‘make and do-ers’, that are my friends; Brian Harte, Patrick Hogan, Sarah O’Brien and Glenn Fitzgerald.

Any upcoming exhibitions? What are your plans for the future?

sg I’m off to Montreal on a residency program for March and April. I like these shorter residencies because they allow me to gather and mine new ideas and find new things for my collage/appropriation/assemblage way of working, I love the word drawing because that’s exactly what I do with everything, draw information out of-- and then draw on to something else.

Sheenagh Geoghegan, Éire 55 cent (2010), ink, corrective fluid and collage, 18cm x 25cm x 2.5cm


erica eyres

mary conlon How was the experience of exhibiting in Limerick?

erica eyres It was great, everyone was very friendly. I arrived the day of the opening and everything was already set up so all I had to do was show up which was nice.

mc Can you talk about the works you chose to present at Occupy Space?

ee The works I showed at Occupy Space were The Male Epidemic (back space), and Cuddle Group (front space). The Male Epidemic (2009) is a news broadcast that follows the progress of a fatal disease that is wiping out the world’s male population. The video features interviews with ‘experts’ and one of the last living men. Cuddle Group (2010) documents the work ofDr. Gerry Winecott, founder of touch-based therapy Cuddle Group. The revolutionary therapy is used to treat catatonics, agoraphobics, and those suffering from fears of intimacy, slowly introducing touch by use of small animals, and eventually Dr. Winecott’s own body. The video features footage from one of his inspirational seminars, where he offers a live demonstration on the benefits of Cuddle Therapy. Cuddle Group also includes interviews with two of his former patients.

mc Your video work seems to fit somewhere between documented performance and surreal reportage. How

much of the material is inspired by real events/experiences?

ee I often get ideas from something I see in a film, a book or sometimes real life, maybe a character or a line that I find really funny. I think a lot of my work has connections to my life that I don’t realise when I’m making it- I usually realise that it has some reflection on my personal lifewhen I stand back and look at it much later.

mc There is dark humour throughout your practice; do you want to challenge the notion of ‘political-correctness’?

ee I do, but only on issues that I feel I have a connection to. I mean, I would never try and make work about racial issues (although there was a character named Tina Mills in the video Commercials, where I put on a lot of fake tan to achieve a darker look, and I got a bit nervous about how that would be received). I’m not sure that I consciously set out to challenge politicalcorrectness, it’s not that I have an issue against political correctness itself. But I am interested in issues around it, and I think some of the characters in my work display a degree of ignorance at times.

mc You tackle some sensitive topics with a comedic lightness; are there any taboos left?

ee I find humour to be necessary to hold people’s interest, as if taboos or difficult subjects are too much to take


compulsory touching

.

without comedy. I use humour as a way to draw people in, maybe even trick them, then deliver the really disturbing scenes somewhere along the way. I don’t consciously try and think of taboos to tackle in my work, but I have always been interested in psychology and I suppose mental illness still makes people nervous and may be seen as a kind of taboo.

mc Your characters’ dialogue always appears natural, appropriate; how do you research your scripts?

ee I read a lot and watch a lot of film and television, but so far I don’t especially research the scripts. In the past, I would start by building the character, getting dressed and inhabiting them, then practice speaking as them in front of a mirror until

I had the personality figured out. Then the script would develop out of that dialogue, and would evolve from there. Over the past year I’ve been changing the way I work and involving other people in the videos, so I’ve had to change things by actually sitting down and writing scripts for the actors. I think I’m still trying to develop a new script-writing process for myself, so that may involve more research.

mc What are your plans for the future?

ee I am currently based in Glasgow. At the moment I’m working on starting new videos, just in the process of writing the scripts so I can’t say that much just yet. My website is www.ericaeyres.com

Via email interview

Erica Eyres, The Male Epidemic, video


emmet kierans

mary conlon How did you find showing Make.Believe, a suburban portrait, in the city centre location of Occupy Space?

emmet kierans In a way I think the themes in the show relate to people regardless of where they live, or theirbackground. The main premise of the show is, as the title suggests, that we make a reality and then decide to believe in it. Although the suburbs were the most appropriate setting to explore this, I feel it relates to all sections of society.

mc “Painting constructs. Photography discloses.” (Sontag) Why painting?

ek I find that when I look at a painting, particularly in the flesh, the type of mark-making used to build up the painting adds another element to think about when attempting to understand the artist’s intention. So there is the image and there is the process and both aspects are readsimultaneously. It’s this visual complexity that draws me to painting. I suppose the Sontag reference is particularly apt for the process and subject matter of a lot of my paintings, though I would like for the overall show to uncover some truths.

mc What/Where is the inspiration for the constructed locations in your painting?

ek The locations are in part inspired by my home town of Shannon, which was designed and built in the late 50s and early

60s with the lifestyle of suburban America in mind. I’ve also collected images from the most commonly named towns in America such as Centreville, Midway and Lumberton. By combining these elements a community is created that is both everywhere and nowhere, familiar and strange.

mc The fragmented portraits in the show are unnerving, how are they a result of thehomogenous, somewhat innocuous environment?

ek I’m not sure if the fragmented characters are a result of their environments or if the environments are simply not suited to the fragmented characters that inhabit them. We accept our surroundings and the reality we are presented with as somehow being a natural progression, the way things are meant to be, rather than the implementation of ideology. The characters I paint are disconnected from this contrived environment, their attempts to accept it as natural results in a state of constant flux.

mc When Ireland adopted the American model of suburban planning it significantly changed how we used our cities. In Limerick, suburban living seems to be thriving; do you think the city is dying? Or do you think Limerick city is being reclaimed as a non-commercial centre?

ek Limerick city is thriving as a non-commercial centre, which is great for artists and creatives, but it’s not sustainable. The city is, if not dying, taking a bit of a beating recently. It looks like I remember it in the


make.believe.

80s with large parts of the centre boarded up and falling into disrepair. The type of living that is thriving is also unsustainable, everyone living in oversized houses with an over reliance of driving everywhere they need to go. I do feel that things will swing back in favour of the city centre in the coming years.

mc How much do you think suburban planning is a form of social control?

ek I feel that suburban planning often reinforces hierarchical structures within societies. Even if it is not the government trying to directly exert control over the population, our surroundings undoubtedly affect our behaviour. I’m interested in

how there is a mentality that goes with a place, there are modes of behaviour and conventions associated with suburban living that I found interesting to examine, in particular the act of gardening. I wanted to make the notion of keeping lawns tidy and tending and arranging plants seem absurd rather than ordinary.

mc You clearly find these constructed realities a negative phenomenon; what are the alternatives?

ek It’s not that I think they are completely negative but they do seem to foster repression and conformity. I don’t really have an alternative to propose, my intention is to question the implications of our

Emmet Kierans, Gardening (2010), oil on canvas, 163x159cm

Emmet Kierans, Glitch (2010), oil on canvas, 60x73cm


environment. I do think that acknowledging the psychology and nature of people should be considered when designing communities. By that I mean to take into account the volatile, animalistic side of humanity as well as the logical and controlled.

mc I am interested in how you correlate your paintings with a virtual reality; can you talk a bit more about this?

ek The estates in my paintings exist somewhere between the proposed project and the reality of the completed estate. I like the virtual mock-ups that are made to give an impression of how the place will operate when it’s lived in. Usually these consist of young families walking their dogs and having picnics on beautiful sunny days, which is not how life in suburbia is in reality.I tried to incorporate some of that CG style in the palette used and in the application of paint. I was thinking of the other meaning of the word virtual, in the non-computerised sense, as a dreamlike place, an illusion.

mc You rarely find artists’ studios, exhibition spaces or arts organisations located in the suburbs of a city; why do you think that is?

ek The suburbs have a pretence that they are a place for families, as if there were a separation between people with children and those without. There is also a notion that a suitable place for children to grow up consists of nothing more than houses and a park. They definitely aren’t places that inspire creativity and divergent thinking. Parenting these days seems to be about sheltering children from new and potentially frightening imagery and ideas, so I don’t imagine you would be very warmly welcomed.

mc What are your plans for the future?

ek I’m making some sculptural work at the moment, I’m getting more interested in the notion of perception and reality, which is leading me towards philosophers like Daniel Dennett and huge questions about what consciousness is. I never really know where my ideas are going so I just take it one step at a time and see where my inquiry leads. I’ll be showing new work at the Watertower Art Festival in Sofia in June. Details about upcoming projects will be posted on my website.www.emmetkierans.com.

Via email interview


Emmet Kierans,Aspiration Lane (2010), oil on canvas, 100x135cm

Emmet Kierans, Day Dreams(2010), oil on canvas, 135x148cm


six memos

feedbackIn remembrance of Italo Calvino, his translator William Weaver recalled conversations with the writer during their 20-year working relationship:

“With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottomline, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.”1

Calvino had a life-long love affair with language and words. He often had many

projects on the go at any one time. While writing the Harvard lectures, he was also working on a series of texts on the senses. Having difficulty with the sense of ‘sight’, herealised that he had been writing about ‘visibility’ his whole life. Of his creative process he said: “I start with a small, single image and then I enlarge it.”2 The visual image always came first.

In the context of Occupy Paper, feedback is a crucial ‘insertion’ into the gallery’s programme. As the compound structuresuggests, written responses literally feed back into the exhibitions, talks and events that take place at Occupy Space, inLimerick but also into the wider context of current art practices in Ireland. The art event does not finish with the end date butlingers in the mind to be recalled, revised, reconsidered; As Calvino says:

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, aninventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.”3

I would like to thank Aoife Flynn, editor of Occupy Paper, for agreeing to my request to submit not one, but three texts for the current issue. In keeping with the spirit of Calvino’s lecture and the curatorial premise, we are presented here with multiple responses to the exhibition, “Trompe Le Monde”: the work, the ideas, the experience. I would like to thank Dr. DavidBrancaleone for agreeing to publish his review here and, of course, to James

Dana Gentile, Tree House (2004), C-Print, 20”x20”


trompe le monde

Merrigan and Helen Horgan, who I put in a most awkward position: to write about an exhibition in which they had participated. Developed independently, the texts, to my mind, are in conversation.

1.http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/calvino/calweaver.html2.From a video-interview directed by Damien Pettigrew and Gaspard di Caro, laterpurchased and published by The Paris Review to appear in Italo Calvino, the Art of Fiction, N.1303 Italo Calvino, Multiplicity, Six Memos of the Next Millennium (1988), Harvard University Press

Mary Conlon, Limerick, april 2011.

James Merrigan, Before the Cut (2008), Night-time video projection, 2.6 seconds, looped


james merriganJames Merrigan is a video/ installation artist and art writer. He is the creator of +BILLION-, a bi-weekly online art journal. Future art projects include ‘So Long Roger Fenton...’ at Monster Truck, curated by Claire Feeley, ‘Futures 11’ at the RHA, and a solo show at the LAB in 2012. He is the recipient of the 2010/11 Irish Residential Studios Award at the Red Stables.

The following text needed to be conducted in an orderly fashion. The reasoning behind this effort to create ‘order’ will become clear when you discover, through reading the following text––the predicament of an artist writing on a group show that he is also a part of...James Merrigan 1

This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself.Italo Calvino 2

I, I!...the filthiest of all the pronouns!...The Pronouns! They are the lice of thought. When a thought has lice it scratches, like everyone with lice...and in your fingernails, then...you find pronouns: the personal pronouns.Carlo Emilio Gadda 3

An ‘orderly’ prefaceItalo Calvino diagnoses Gadda’s irritation with his own ‘self’ in the above quotation when he writes: “The passion for knowledge therefore carries Gadda from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity.”4 Taken from Calvino’s proposed lectures for Harvard University in 1985 under the optimistic banner of SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM––to cut a short story even shorter, the lectures never took place and the sixth chapter on “consistency” was never finished due to

Calvino’s sudden death in 1985. Calvino’s “Six Memos,” like the art object, is a meditation on “Potential” and the ‘figuring out’ of the objective arbitrary rules that the writer sets for him- herself in the process of writing and thinking.

Shinnors Scholar Mary Conlon is a curator based at Limerick City Gallery of Art. Calvino’s existing ‘Five Memos’ underpin her curatorial project so far, which were published in 1988. Trompe Le Monde, translated as ‘Fool the World’, is the title of Conlon’s third installment of her “Six Memos” project, and was played out at Occupy Space, Limerick, in 2011. The group show included five artists: Juan Fontanive, Dana Gentile, Helen Horgan, Michael Murphy and myself or ‘I’; the subjective personal pronoun that Gadda would rather have ‘deleted’ from existence.

‘I’ with Two ApostrophesThe irony of this text is that it is near to impossible to avoid the ‘I’––that subjective self, ego, id, thinking substance, that gets in the way of our view of the world, especially in the case of my participation as an artist in Trompe Le Monde. Paradoxically, what makes Gadda’s prose so compulsive is his effort to get rid of ‘himself’. Using Calvino as a point of entrance rather than departure, ‘I’ will start with four of the five artist that made up Trompe Le Monde, and see what I can do with ‘I’.

To grasp this concept of ‘I’ with both hands let’s start with ‘identity’ in the context of Dana Gentile’s art practice and photography in general. Because photography can exist outside the tight parameters of the art world, there is a


apostrophes everywhere

fundamental split between its position in art and popular culture. In an article for Frieze Magazine titled “Snap Shot”, Christy Lange writes how Isabelle Graw’s 2009 book, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, claims the commercial success of Andreas Gursky’s photographs has been “confused with artistic achievement.”5 There is also the case of the narcissistic discourse that has been triggered by Jeff Wall’s photography, which has prevented any other artist who utilises photography solely, or as part of their art practice, to be separated from his godlike presence. Identity as Slavoj Žižek describes via Jacques Lacan is a complex issue; he

writes: ‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexual’ implies, among other things, that balanced co-ordination is missing, that nature, within the realm of human existence, is anything but a harmonious and whole ‘One––All’. As Lacan expresses it...nature does not ‘copulate’ in order to generate the fictitious, perfected unity of a spherical totality. Lacan is great on anything to do with the ‘fractured self’. His analysis of identity is further split with Žižek’s usual tinkering with the paradoxical. ‘Fracturing’ is an important aspect of postmodernism and contemporary art. Although this is nothing new, the image has been fractured since Cubism, but what makes art today more difficult to piece

James Merrigan, My Mother is a Fish (2010), 1min 38sec audio, 2 chairs, William Faulkner’s novel ‘As I Lay Dying’, plywood, corrugated plastic, Gorilla Tape, led lights

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together is the teaming of the fractured image with the fractured identity; combining to create a perpetually fracturing narrative that is always missing a piece of the jigsaw. Artists who use photography as one aspect of their art practice, such as Shannon Ebner, are particularly good at revealing both an identity and hiding behind some signifier that spells out FRACTURE. Dana Gentile, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, is also one of those artists.

In an earlier work, Plate Tectonics, 2008, Gentile literalised this idea of ‘fracture’ or ‘shift’ in the display of found porcelain plates that were ‘repaired’ with inserts of maple. This specific work sets up a premise for Gentile’s photographic images at Occupy Space. Personally, the photographs offer much more because of the artist’s consistent control and deliberate articulation of the formal construction of the image, against the shattered narratives of the broken landscape and the staged human elements within the image.

During a conversation with Gentile, the artist described that the three colour photographs that inhabited the first room of Occupy Space were “humourous” efforts to control the environment. Birdbath, 2005, shows Gentile standing in her family’s upstate New York home, dressed in a bathing suit with a glass bowl full of water in hand. Her pose is expectant. Her eyes look toward a hanging bird-house ‘feeder’. All the lines drag your eye to the hole in the feeder. The hole is also placed where the traditional nail for hanging ‘framed’ photographs is found on the back. The composition is all about balance and expectation. A view from back to front, or the “potential” for expanding beyond the frame of representation, or one point of view is also offered in Tree House, 2004. A tree is positioned awkwardly before a timber house in either a failed attempt at elegant landscaping, a “humorous” effort to “control the environment,” or just laziness on the part of the house owners. The

Dana Gentile,Birdbath (2005), C-Print, 20”x20”, Scarf Head (2006), C-Print, 20”x20” Tree House (2004), C-Print, 20”x20”


Colorado sun flattens all the objects before the artist’s lens. Although, from Gentile’s camera view the tree blocks our full view of the house, the sun sneaks through easily to light up the wooden gable of the house. The tree is a failed sunshade. Again, like Bird Bath, we can imagine Gentile waiting for the sun to reveal some failure, and then point and shoot. A chance element within the picture frame is a glimpse of a concrete rim of a road that cuts the picture diagonally in half. The rim reads as a series of dashes, semiotic openings that offer the viewer an escape from the frame; in the sense of talking or writing oneself out of a closed space.

Helen Horgan’s The Horse’s Mouths (2011) is like a big brain; a contained and protected island of absurdity. A perspex triangular ‘bath’ filled with water

and floating islands that look like brain matter, are straddled by model boats with stilt-legged lanterns and motorised rotating lights. But like Gentile’s semiotic opening in the decorative substructure of the road, Horgan’s giant fabricated ‘apostrophe’ punctuated the contained sculpture to offer ‘potential’. Calvino writes “We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.”6 Horgan’s sculpture for Trompe Le Monde was both diaristic and encyclopedic. Calvino also discusses how the encyclopedia “etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle.”7 Horgan’s work literally illustrated this point, but it is the “diaristic” form of her art practice that torments the ordering of her centrally focused structures. But, from someone who experienced Horgan installing her own

Helen Horgan, The Horse’s Mouths (2009-2011), mixed media installation, dimensions variable

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work, she is an artist who has her own rule book, nothing is arbitrary––just like Georg Perec, who Calvino describes as creating his own arbitrary rules to produce “inexhaustible freedom.”8 Gadda is also in Horgan’s sculpture, but he , as was mentioned above, didn’t realise the ‘I’ was a ‘rupture’ rather than a prison.

Why is it that the ‘art-object’ can always get away with being unfinished, and if questioned about this fact the ‘critic’ is rebuked with the philosophical objection––nothing is ever finished. If the art object is framed properly and the context is right, whether that context is shaped by looking backward for some precursor in the history of the art object, or indulging in the hubris of looking forward for something new or original, the art work in essence has to appear unfinished or unresolved to offer potential for expanded narratives. These considerations came to the fore during the installation of Michael Murphy’s large

‘potential’ dance floor structure. Before the opening night, the installation of the work was partnered by a conversation about whether to leave the ‘I’ out, or leave it in? The ‘I’ in Murphy’s case was a stack of Shoot football magazines that he collected as a young lad. The strong formalism of the artist’s work at Occupy Space also referenced the past, but not Murphy’s past: the art of the past in the minimalist purity of Donald Judd’s sculpture. Judd himself defined this mode of art object as a “simple expression of complex thought.” Would the addition of the Shoot Magazines have acted as an ‘apostrophe’ in the same way as Horgan’s? The title of Murphy’s work–– We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues, offered (to my mind), a more rewarding ‘apostrophe’.

Juan Fontanive’s kinetic wall work seemed modest at first glance. My immediate presumption that a rectangular white box housed a moving image was soon enough

Michael Murphy: We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues (2011), Mixed media sculpture, 2.5m x 2m x 30cm


debunked as ‘I’ moved closer to the object. Instead of a LED screen, a series of motors acted like pulleys, threading a ‘dashed’ black and white cord up and down in an aesthetically pleasing but also workman-like movement (echoing the concrete road rim of Gentile’s Tree house). This is what Bridget Reilly would make if she could work motors. The title of the work, Illuminated, also pointed back to an Op art fascination with the shifting light. But what saved this work from being overly indulgent in optics and aesthetics was the profile of a head that framed the moving cords. You can imagine Fontanive’s object as something that a psychoanalyst would have as a desk ornament in their Manhattan office, like the clichéd ‘Newton’s Cradle’. Fontanive’s art object seemed to be enacting a thread that connected all the works under Calvino’s view of the world as a “system of systems.”9 One question that ‘I’ am left with relating to the New York artist’s work (but which is best left unanswered), was the profile of the head that framed the shifting cords the artist’s own profile?

And finally my own work, but in keeping with Calvino’s unfinished ‘Five’ of ‘Six Memos’, an ‘apostrophe’ will do.

’

Juan Fontanive: Illuminated (2011), Mixed media sculpture, 32h x 26w cm

1. James Merrigan, ‘Apostophes Everywhere’, April 20112. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Modern Classics, 1998, p.513. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.1084. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.1085. Christy Lange, ‘Snap shot’, Frieze Magazine, Issue 131, May 20106. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.1117. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.1168. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.1229. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.105-6


helen horgan

The founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl believed our individual perceptions of things could be broken down in a way that revealed something simple and universal. As part of his phenomenological project of stripping away the veil of our ‘natural attitude’ he required our intuitions to take a marked change in focus, away from the vagaries of the subjectively perceived instance and towards “the essence that the instance exemplifies1”. This is what he termed a process of ‘eidetic reduction’. The word ‘eidetic’ at its etymological basis relates on equal terms to both images and ideas, stemming from the Greek

‘eidos’ meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’.Eidetic imagery however, although having on some level congruence with the things of the world, for Husserl is a product of consciousness. It is the mind’s direct intuition of something universal emanating from an instance of perception2. Because eidetic imagery is a product of our intuition perceiving something universal, that is, performing some sort of categorial analysis, it is taken by Husserl to be evidence of the reliable workings of consciousness reducing the complexities of experience to an ‘ultimate simple.’ Since phenomenology is a science of ‘phenomena’ and not ‘things’ it brings

Helen Horgan is an artist and writer based in Dublin. She is currently enrolled in a Masters in Contemporary European Philosophy at UCD researching form and meaning in the work of Derrida and Wittgenstein. She is a member of The Writing Workshop and is co-founder of The Legs Foundation for the Translation of Things (LFTT) with writer and artist Danyel M. Ferrari (NY).



“From ‘I’ to ‘You’”

to light the debate regarding the relation between our perceptions and ‘reality’, and to what extent our mind might be constructing a vision of the world for itself. The question could be posed whether these perceived universals are merely a matter of things ‘fitting in’ with our capacities for experience, or whether they are (as Husserl believes) a cognitive capability for receiving phenomena which emanate from the ‘things themselves’. A problem we are here made aware of is that there is forever a work of translation occurring between the mind and the world. We are moved to suspect (although we often don’t reflect upon it) that our perceptions and ideas are of a wholly other substance to the matter of existence. The founding role of any language is to perform this work of translation and help bridge the gap between ‘thoughts’ and ‘things’.

When as children we first begin to learn our language we start by pointing at the objects that surround us, and are subsequently supplied with a corresponding name; suchas ‘ball’, ‘cup’, ‘spoon’ etc...but also ‘hot!’, ‘hug’ and ‘bedtime’. In this way we start byperceiving singular instances and build up over time a memory bank of correlationsbetween words and objects (objects in this sense also understood to be concepts, material qualities, or reoccurring events). Thus we can learn to expect the word ‘bedtime’ to regularly refer to an event involving ‘going-to-bed.’ At the same time with the help of the work of translation that language performs we don’t further require having the object to hand (such as a ball) to understand the meaning of the word ‘ball’. (One of Wittgenstein’s curious examples

is the notion of carrying samples of colour around in our pockets to be able to point to what ‘red’ is.) We have moved from pointing things out in the room to recalling what that is in our mind. What ‘that’ is, once it is removed from its originally learnt context is a tricky thing to ultimately define, and it is something that philosophers sometimes spend their lives toiling over. What famously divides various schools of philosophy is their subsequent alignment with either one of two branches of thinking; those that believe that all ‘words’ can be said to point to something singular and universal, and those that believe a word will always mean more than one thing, that is the ‘objects’ it refers to are irreducibly multiple and complex.

In Italo Calvino’s lecture series Six Memos for the New Millenium3 he suggests that apenchant for one way of thinking over the other might be a matter of personal disposition. The subject of the fifth lecture, Multiplicity, concerns writers who possess an ‘encyclopedic’ nature; those that have a desire to systematize the world through language, to understand and pay homage to the subtleties of our everyday experiences. He introduces us to the writer Carlo Emilio Gadda who, he says wished “to represent the world as a knot”; to represent it without reducing its complexity.4 An engineer with an undisclosed love of philosophy he developed a style to affirm his elaborate style of thinking. Calvino tells us that Gadda’s writing was “determined by [a] tension between rational exactitude andfrenetic distortion as [being the] basic components of every cognitive process”At the same time another writer of technical-

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scientific training, Robert Musil, was also caught between these two polarities, although employed a markedly different aesthetic approach. For him beauty lay in the mathematical world of harmony which he felt was frequently distorted by the “imprecision of human affairs.” Writing for Musil was a process of depositing all his thoughts into an ever expanding volume; his aim was ultimate order and classification, although the demands of his project were forever expanding beyond his reach. Both writers were made aware of the move between thinking and representing and the extent to which their deliberation could be causing a distortion. Whereas “the passion for knowledge carries Gadda from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity” Musil manages to “give the impression of always understanding everything in (its) multiplicity without ever allowing himself to become involved.”

Gadda knew that: “to know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality. From this ariseshis invariably distorting way of representing things, and the tension he always establishes between himself and the thing represented”5.

Husserl’s method of analyzing the conflation between consciousness and reality may have helped to highlight the link between thoughts and things but his phenomenological method curiously abstracted the first-person pronoun “I”; the pronoun for which Gadda “explodes into a furious invective“I, I!...the filthiest of all pronouns!...The pronouns! They are the lice of thought. When a thought has lice it scratches, like everyone with lice...and in your fingernails, then...you find pronouns: the personal pronouns” Descartes ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am) in the

James Merrigan, GOTH-HEAD (in 2 parts) (2011) 2 part film, Part 1: 3mins 7secs, Part 2: 3mins, video, audio, subtitled text in Collegiate Font


hands of Husserl became ‘I think therefore there is thought’. In an analogous way Heidegger’s ‘da-sein’ as ‘there-being’ is a move to find a way of standing beyond the first person pronoun: to translate a discourse born from personal experience into something more open and universal. But the doubling relationship between the singular and the multiple means that any move to encompass a totality is also a move towards self-annihilating abstraction.

Calvino tells us how Flaubert declared in a letter to Louise Colet in 1852 “What I’d like to do is a book about nothing”, and then went on to devote the last ten years of his life to the most encyclopedic novel ever written.”6 Bouvard and Pécuchet, a novel about an epic voyage across “the seas of universal knowledge” in a quest to collate and catalogue everything, finally ends where they find themselves at the limits of translation, with an endless inventory of visions of worlds so contradictory that all hope of objective clarity is lost. Instead they resolve to end their days as scriveners copying out the words of all the books in the universal library. “Should we conclude that in the experience of Bouvard and Pécuchet “encyclopedia” and “nothingness” fuse together?”7 It certainly seems to suggest that the further our conceptions open to multiplication the more we erase the possibilities of arriving at a cohesive singular perspective.

The famous explorer Jules Verne, Roland Barthes tells us, over the course of his travels constructed for himself a “kind of self-sufficient cosmogony, which [had] its own categories, its own time, space, fulfillment and even existential principle.” Barthes describes Verne’s inclination towards ships and adventure as revealing a “common delight in the finite, which one also finds in children’s passion for huts and tents: to enclose oneself and to settle, such is the existential dream of childhood and of Verne.” 8 The image of ship here is that of a perfectly mobile finite space, where all the objects

of our thoughts desire could be arranged within ease of reach. The greater the scope in circumnavigation the more we feel the embrace of its all-encompassing enclosure.

In our quest to adequately capture our every experience and find a way of bridging the gap between ‘words’ and ‘things’ maybe the most daring adventurer would be one that follows the apostrophe in pointing to the land that lies beyond words, the space of silence, where the work of translation is forced to confront its impenetrable limit. Or maybe what in reality we would be doing in this instance is sending the words on ahead, beyond cognition, beyond adequation and beyond our desire to hold our own thoughts in our minds. As Barthes tells us;

“In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on the ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own...The object that is the true opposite of Verne’sNautilus is Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, the boat which says ‘I’ and, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration.”9

1 The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu, Wiley Blackwell, West Sussex, UK 2009, pg 2012 Husserl makes a marked distinction between the terms ‘perception’ and ‘intuition’ but for the sake of ease of demonstration I have here conflated both terms.3 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for The Next Millenium (Vintage Classics London 1996)4 Ibid p1065 Ibid p1086 Ibid p1137 Ibid p1148 Roland Barthes, The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat in Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) pg 659 Ibid pg 67


trompe le monde

David Brancaleone is a lecturer in art history and theory, LIT. He has researched and published work on the philosophy and aesthetics of Alain Badiou, of Jean-Luc Godard as well as on the commodification of education. David is currently working on a book on Dialectical Aesthetics.

Trompe le Monde begs the question: can there be an image of the world? What would it look like? The stakes are high: the power of understanding through the imagination and, beyond that, an urge for something more; perhaps an aspiration, a gesture towards the truth. The curator seeks a model of practice based on values and Shinnors Scholar Mary Conlon finds it in ‘Multiplicity’, a lecture by Italo Calvino. The show is part of a bigger project which adopts all Calvino’s 1985 Harvard lectures later collected in Six Memos of the Next Millenium (1993). Conlon has asked five artists to interpret ‘Multiplicity’ their way. The titles framing the other five Memos and the focus of more exhibitions are equally vast: ‘Lightness’, Quickness’, ‘Exactitude’, ‘Visibility’, ‘Consistency’.

But let me try to be a purist first. I have reached the gallery, Occupy Space; I recognise the curator. Caught unawares, she is a good sport and agrees to show me round her world of multiplicity, a curator’s interpretation, and what five artists make of it. Illuminated, Juan Fontanive’s kinetic sculpture, catches my eye. Dotted lines cross the empty cut-out of a head against a dark background inside a box frame. The workings of the mind, the synapses that click when we understand? I can’t say, but I like that fact that I am not looking at a dematerialized form. His other works are also intriguing sculpture machines; they’re

not on show, but one fits the medieval notion of Ramon Llull’s combinatory logic, in its sets of twirling cards spinning on wheels. Llull used wheels too in his manuscripts, with letters signifying concepts, to help you prove God really does exist and is a Christian. I worry that the photograph of Illuminated will look stock still and fail to convey the incessant movement I see before me and its blur. But no, that’s not a problem.

The Horse’s Mouths is a quirky installation by Helen Horgan which features the inside of her mind as she explores personal associations along the way and manifests them into three-dimensional symbols of a sort I don’t understand, unless… but there is a story somewhere, associations, maybe, as intricate as the combination of light, water, model ships floating, while a huge comma hangs on the nearby wall, a trace of the text that populates her other work.

More than just a humorous footnote, James Merrigan’s short film Goth-Head features the customary double-take of the banal: a suspended tripod hanging in the middle of the frame in a garden backdrop, punctuated by a zombie voice in synch with its subtitles (of the words cheerleaders utter in countries where they live). My Mother is a Fish is also tongue-in-cheek: a coffin size box stands on its head with the title in caps running down the corrugated lid; two chairs and a minute’s audio of William Faulkner’s novel As I lay Dying which, truth be told, I have forgotten. All I can remember is that Faulkner was fierce, almost physical, with language.


dr. david brancaleone

Michael Murphy’s The Taste of Dancing on our Tongues is a small-scale dance floor. “It’s minimalist,” says Conlon. I agree. But I can only taste the right angles with my eyes, not the exhilaration of movement, and why should I?

Dana Gentile is based in Brooklyn some of the time. More than to the larger-format colour ones, I am drawn to her row of black-and-white photographs printed on silver gelatin paper. Maybe because nowadays, for some reason, most artists print big, so it is nice that these are small icons of a lost age of half-forgotten details, time stilled in recollection, some square Rolleiflex format, maybe taken with a Rolleiflex camera.

What I find fascinating about the exhibition is not the single work, it is the text and that writing is at its inception. People often say that the work must speak for itself. I have just tried to do that. Here it speaks back to the text in some kind of visual form.

Calvino champions the multiplicity of the author. There’s traffic in that head, Fontanive. To borrow a concept from twelfth-century Platonism, his attention sweeps


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across from the microcosm of the word, the sentence, its infinite associations, to the macrocosm of the novel. Multiplicity can take the form of multiple selves, of an instability of being, of how memory and time can collapse or expand, as in one writer Calvino chooses not to mention, though his work is central to this idea. I am thinking of Umberto Eco’s Open Work written years and years earlier, in which Eco applies complexity theory to works of art,

including Robbe-Grillet’s rambling novels and Cage’s music.

All right, so there’s a dichotomy between chaos and order, between logic and imagination, and Calvino tries to recompose it into a unity of sorts where mathematics provides precision applied to the imagination. His ideal writer wanders across an imaginary space exploring inner worlds. Peering into the unknown of now, Calvino’s

Dana Gentile, Ladders, Orange, CT (2009), Silver Gelatin Fiber Print, 4"x4"


paradigm, his matrix of writing or of art, is a combination of precision, structure, method and language, so that each text could contain a model of a universe or, in philosophical terms, a Kantian transcendental, in other words, an ordering principle of reality, yes, call it ‘a world’.

Calvino’s own writing is also (after a postwar phase of literary neorealism) filtered by logical leaps of fancy that take the reader into the unknown, unmapped territory or the ten beginnings of his novel If on a Winter’s Night, or its alternative endings. By then, his neighbours in Paris, the French philosophers Calvino does not care to mention, had already published most of their work or were dead (Foucault). Deleuze had already attacked the One in the name of the Many (of multiplicity); Derrida had challenged logocentrism in everything he ever wrote (except Spectres of Marx); Foucault likewise, for whom the idea of power as One Bad Thing was nonsense, because power is everywhere. Here’s the very beginning of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1969): “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together, since each of us was several, there was quite a crowd”. These people were all fed up with structuralism and dazzled by chaos theory, by the mathematics of problematics which Porphyry’s hierarchical tree structure (for organising concepts) and mathematical axioms simplify more than they explain. They are the spectre’s spectres and haunt Calvino’s multiplicity.

Despite his heroes, Gadda, Musil, Mann, or Perec, and the (apparently) formless authorless text, however incomplete, Calvino’s paradigm of writing is all-encompassing in its reach and forms a unity. In his matrix, there is no postmodern multiplicity, because ultimately Calvino recomposes the complexity of the world into the work. Language and logic are assigned the task of weaving together the great branches of learning into a vision of the world, no matter how complex, how multi-

faceted and it is a revisited concept of the encyclopedia, however complex, not Eco’s Open Work, that serves as a model. And there’s no relativism in Calvino, there are still values.

Does Trompe le Monde cohere? Do these voices form a pattern? Is that what a group show is, a pattern? Time was, when shows were full of clever text to make a point. But here the text (over twenty pages of a lecture on multiplicity) is absent or at least invisible. But is it? Am I going to argue that there are multiple exhibitions and that if Calvino’s text is a spectral presence, not an absence, then it has a say in what is on display? Calvino was a brilliant short-story writer and an editor for most of his life. OK. Once he made one big mistake: he wrote back to Primo Levi to say, sorry, I am going to turn down your manuscript (If This is a Man). Levi survived his guilt for surviving the Shoah, got the book published in the end and went on to write the magisterial The Damned and the Saved. So words, and the spectral presence of the text I had not read yet (which lives in a large folder on the table by the door of Occupy Space) and indeed I have never seen before, are inevitably part of this visit and can easily spiral out of control. The show is a multiple response to Calvino’s idea of multiplicity. Once you have read this text, I would argue that you slowly begin to see his spectral show and his spectral writers.


videogram limerick

Tell us a bit about your backgrounds.

jh I’m currently studying for an MA in Art. I work mostly in video and photography and have always had a love of video art and film making.

ao’k Well my background is one of mostly being an admirer of film and visual arts. I’m a musician at heart and I’m studying to be a photographer/photo journalist at the moment but I love film and especially the process of script writing. I guess as a songwriter it really appeals to me.

Where did the idea for Videogram come from, do you both have a strong interest in film and filmmaking?

jh There was a lack of city centre film screenings and film forums in Limerick City Centre. With the increase in artist led spaces, there was the opportunity to set up free, not-for-profit film screening nights in these spaces, borrowing equipment of other art institutions in the city. Videogram Limerick gives people the chance to see new films for free, to talk about the films afterwards, and to meet with other filmmakers and artists.

ao’k I had always enjoyed going to film nights anytime they were on and I thought to myself that I could do this, after seeing how other nights were being run. From talking to my friends and various others, I could tell that there was an audience there if we ever got around to setting up our own film nights. Myself and Jo both love film and of the art of filmmaking and we always try to have the filmmakers there to talk about their work and help the audience understand the process behind it all.

What have the Videogram nights been like? What is the format for the nights and who are your particpants?

jh The call for submissions is open, people may send in any type of film or video work, documentary, experimental, art house, etc. Of the three Videograms so far we’ve had two nights of discussion with the invited filmmakers, Peter Delaney, Mellissa Doran and Nicky Larkin. We have also seen an increase in numbers at each Videogram Limerick screening.

ao’k There has been an amazing reaction to the film nights. The attendance has been super too. Really big numbers are coming along to catch whatever is on. The format is pretty straight forward. We screen in Occupy space and Faber Studios. Its really informal and relaxed too. We have coffee, tea and snacks for everyone and at the end we have a Q&A, where we like to give everyone a chance to ask any questions they might have had. So far we’ve had short films, animated shorts, documentaries and at the last one we had a documentary style film called ‘Pyjama Girls’ which went down great with the audience. The participants have been great too. We’ve had students to professional filmmakers come along and talk about their work.

What are the plans for the future of Videogram?

jh Videogram Limerick is an experimental operation in itself. We have screened in various locations so far in Limerick city, and we do not have any set agenda or criteria for showing works, albeit that they are engaging, interesting films and videos. We are open to new ideas and suggestions,


alan o’keeffe and joanna hopkins

and people are welcome to contact us with works they have or suggestions for screenings.

ao’k I think we just want to keep it as informal as possible and have everyone who comes along to feel like they’re part of something special, a real communal feel. We just want to be a platform and give filmmakers the opportunity to be screened

Videogram screening, Faber Studios

and taken seriously too, because we know how hard it can be to get into bigger cinemas and reach a wider audience. That’s it really. Who knows maybe some day we could branch out and have a Videogram Dublin, Videogram Galway, Videogram Ireland and then we could try to take over the world! Mwahahaha ;)


state of the union

The State of the Union brought together work by MFA Students from Burren College of Art, Crawford College of Art, Limerick School of Art, National College of Art and University of Ulster.

The work was selected by Basement Project Space Cork, Exchange Dublin, Platform Arts Belfast and Occupy Space Limerick. The exhibition was collaborative curatorial project between four artist-led spaces.

The State of the Union aimed to present a moment in Irish visual art culture in which artist-led spaces are helping to shape the dialogue of current practice. The ten emergent artists selected present a diverse range of works representative of their specific research practices.

The exhibition title The State of the Union refers both to a state of evaluation and the awareness of critical context within a national forum. The premise of the exhibition was to address not only the discourse created by artist-led spaces but to simultaneously recognise the importance of research in developing critically aware visual art communities.

Young practitioners are pivotal in shaping the condition of current and future visual culture nationally and internationally. This project sought to acknowledge the potential inherent in this collaborative energy.

Burren College of Art: Simon Bayliss, Emily Kaelin, Beka Peralta: Occupy Space

Crawford College of Art: Mary Galvin, Jenna Whelan: Basement Project Space Cork

Limerick School of Art and Design: Nuala O’Sullivan: Occupy Space

National College of Art and Design: Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Francis Wasser: Exchange Dublin

University of Ulster: Becky Coffey, Laura O’Connor: Platform Arts Belfast

Beka Peralta, Burren College of Art, Selected by Occupy Space


Mary Galvin, Crawford College of Art, Selected by Basement Project Space

State of the Union, Installation Shot


millepide

Millepide was a performance night curated by Jessica Kelly that took place on 1 april in Occupy Space. Participating artists included Anastasia Artemeva, Deviant,Helena Doyle, Joan Healy, Sophie Iremonger, Claire Keating, James Leahy, Isabella Oberlander, Nora O’Murchú and Hilary Williams.

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Photos courtesy of Robin Parmar(2011)


luke fowler

Almost all of Luke Fowler’s work to date has sought to dust off and re-examine a fringe figure, someone obscured by the passage of time or the unsympathetic mechanics of culture at large. Filling his roster are the psychiatric innovator R.D. Laing and schizophrenic preservationist Bogman Palmjaguar, as well as avant-garde musicians like Cornelius Cardew, founder of the Scratch Orchestra and subject of Fowler’s 2006 film, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points. Fowler is consistently shrewd in his choice of material, and, whether in chaos or communion, the Scratch Orchestra is an effectively telegenic subject.Structurally, Fowler stands on terra firma in

his framing of the group. The footage that is culled from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 film Journey to the North Pole, while intended perhaps as a gloss, ultimately grounds Fowler’s deliberately jerky narrative.

The erratic cuts and overlaps between current verbal exposition and archival audio are stylistically engaging, but would wander without the source documentary’s recurring assertions of a visceral context. The footage, along with the reminiscences of Cardew’s old cohort, recalls an era that was furrowed by rampant polarization, and in effect became characterized by a desperate and myopic pursuit of collective identity.

Image courtesy of retitle.com


pilgrimage from scattered points

In the U.S., this was the time of the Black Panthers, Watergate, Mai Lai. While the U.K. was still processing its post-colonial trauma, it was becoming clear that earlier British division of the Middle East had spoiled any hope for peace. The Scratch Orchestra was operating in a society that considered itself irrevocably riven, and the external tensions that had at first tempered its resolve eventually crept in to widen the cracks in its idealistic foundation.As we see younger versions of the film’s interview subjects reclining on the grass of a North- East England pasture and shots of Cardew performing his own anarchic version of conducting, prosaic realizations of a rusted aesthetic idealism and the inevitable dissolution of small-scale utopias arise. The dose of fading optimism sours what might have otherwise been a charming reminiscence, and undoes any threat of sentimentality without really lapsing into cynicism.

The disappointment is in the self-evident lack of sustainability of such ventures, as attested to throughout by the aged members of Scratch. The unavoidable political baggage prevents Pilgrimage from Scattered Points from shirking all of the residual zeal and agitation of its source material. So perhaps it is not so curious that, in spite of his side-lining of sequential clarity and occasional painterly expressive outbursts, Fowler has still made what is very much a documentary. The film-maker knows how much slack to allow his own creative liberties before they might impede the understanding of the fascinating events within the frame, and you do tend to walk away thinking less about Fowler than Cardew and his orchestra.

The arrangement of re-purposed photographs in the main gallery space are probably intended to fill what would otherwise be an awkward void in the generously sized Temple Bar Gallery, but in contextualizing a single confined piece they do momentarily cloud the issue of who’s work exactly the exhibition is presenting. All the same, the reprints of photographs originally taken by Alec Hill are helpful in contemplating the somewhat muddled anarcho-Confucian-hippie vibe of the Scratch Orchestra, and, when it is concretely historicized like this, understanding why it fractured. Fowler’s own take on Cardew seems to be one of reserved admiration and respect for the composer’s role in the history of the avant-garde. (Sounding almost envious of Cardew’s indulgence in metaphysics, Fowler wrote in Frieze, “[Cardew] was at this juncture too busy with Confucius to be bothered with Mao”.)1

There is an element of wry masochism in splicing a counter-culture’s documented hopes with the gritty evidence of their having fallen short. Fowler administers this bitter pill as kindly as he can, and we end up complying with the film-maker’s melancholy salute.

Luke fowlerThe Bittersweet Melody, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios18 feb -26 mar 2011by Curt Riegelnegg

1.Luke Fowler. “Life in Film: Luke Fowler.” Frieze Magazine May 2007. Web.


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