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Art Review Dublin Feature

Published May 1, 2008

Art Review produced a profile of the Dublin art scene for their May 2008 issue including thisisnotashop. Text, by Tim Stott & Luke Clancy, is included below.

Drawing upon the camaraderie proper to a small city and buoyed by the fruits of recent improvements in postgraduate art education, visual arts practice in Dublin is growing in confidence and quality suggesting that the city’s artists are rising to the considerable challenges of living in a globalised urban environment.

The Background

words by Tim Stott.

The ‘creative cities’ ethos widely adopted by arts funding bodies and the Dublin city council alike is both facilitator and enemy to some artists, who seek to make use of this interest in creativity and collaboration to investigate models of living together and to force an uneasy cohabitation of art and politics.

Foremost among these is artists is Jesse Jones, a filmmaker whose rare combination of anger and generosity drives her commitment to the possibility of film as collaboration and protest. In late 2006 she staged 12 Angry Films in a temporary drive-in cinema in Dublin’s Docklands. This year she has been working with the Artane Boys Band, pursuing a belief that as a form of cultural resistance the circus might be in permanent decline but the marching band remains disciplined, versatile and historically astute.

A similar commitment, developed through constructivist-inspired intercessions in the organisation of labour and education, has led Glenn Loughran to set up a series of ‘hedge schools’ (2006–). Drawing parallels between the historical suppression of the Irish language and contemporary Brazilian landless movements, the results are nonetheless unexpected: a school made of hay bales in a Co. Carlow field, a literacy/massage bar on a Dublin construction site. Also working collaboratively within local systems of production and exchange is Seamus Nolan, best known for Hotel Ballymun (March–April 2007), a temporary short-stay hotel in one of the last remaining of Ballymun’s muchmaligned tower blocks. Having staged the complexities of regeneration without the aching earnestness that plagues many in this area, Nolan’s taste for the anomalous continues to shape a means of diverting urban identity construction away from a straightforward return of policy initiatives.

Within the gallery circuit, owners and collectors have recently shown a willingness to nurture the experiments of emerging talent. Space allows me to name only a few of an outstanding group of young artists. Bea McMahon, just recently showing with Brendan Earley at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, combines her training in mathematics with a movingimage aesthetic attuned to the murmur of proto-linguistic logics and the invisible structures of a given situation. Dave Beattie takes the home as the locus of experimentation, the kitchen as a cutting-edge laboratory, currently testing out the sonic properties of everyday materials in elaborate contraptions. Swedish-born Nina Canell is becoming known for the eloquence and eccentricity of her gurgling, singing and buzzing installations, and for the effortless oddity of her sculptures. She continues to demonstrate a rare ability to surprise without melodrama or heavy-handed quirkiness. Exemplary of the quiet sophistication that can develop away from rapacious collectors and their acolytes, Ciarán Murphy’s small-scale paintings take an oblique and denaturalised approach to zoological classification and its discontents. Long a key member of Dublin’s thriving sound and experimental music scene, Dennis McNulty has expanded his practice to the construction of broadly cinematic environments that map out topographical studies of simultaneous but incompatible temporalities.

Encouraged by the success of artist-run space Pallas Heights (now relocated and renamed Pallas Contemporary Projects) many small-scale initiatives have developed during the past couple of years. The rapid turnover and open brief of the exhibitions programme at Monster Truck Gallery & Studios makes it an ideal place for unrepresented artists and recent art graduates to continue their investigations temporarily free from extraneous pressures. This Is Not A Shop, set up as a not-for-profit art space in 2006, occupies the ground floor of a small terraced house in a soon-to-be developed area of old Dublin. Like Monster Truck, its exhibitions are short-term, usually no more than a week. But it also has regular film screenings, and writing workshops run by cofounder Jessamyn Fiore and Jessie Foley, the latter one of Dublin’s most exciting critical talents. A couple of months ago, TINAS laid claim to a prestigious lineage and declared it aspirations by restaging Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food (1971). Lastly, there is Gallery for One. The ambitions of curator Vaari Claffey having finally outgrown the cubicle-sized space at the back of a Temple Bar boutique, her programme now looks set to continue in her flat, where over the coming year a series of exhibitions will ask of the Dublin art scene: ‘Who are we?’. It is a timely question, as the cosy proximity of friends and associates does not always allow for critical assessment.

The Roundup

words Luke Clancy

Ireland’s late arrival at the big table of contemporary art accounts in some way for the nature of its gallery scene, where the low density of exhibition spaces per square mile means that cluster is a less appropriate term than scattering. Rapid development in the city centre and quays has driven artist organisations further out, and spaces now can be hilariously small, springing up in the slivers of space that, for one reason or another, have not yet been welcomed into the city’s office/apartment mix.

All the same, IMMA is a more obvious destination since the opening of Dublin’s tram system a few years ago (get off at Heuston station). Now run by Spanish curator Enrique Juncosa, the institution functions as a showhouse for international artists, as well as maintaining an ever-growing collection of modern and contemporary Irish art rotated in a series of curated shows. Ride the red Luas line back into town to Douglas Hyde Gallery (Trinity College), home of the Francis Bacon studio and, increasingly, a space for work by living Irish artists.

To catch the current generation of artists in the commercial habitat, try the Kerlin Gallery (Anne’s Lane), where a trek up the stairs ends with the surprise of architect John Pawson’s nice white box. Also upstairs, and just around the corner, is the Rubicon Gallery (St Stephen’s Green).

When it comes to giving your career the imprimatur, a show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is de rigueur for any Irish artist. The specifically designed space within the confines of Trinity College welcomes international scenesters too, of course, and also has a programme of films and gigs. Wander down the other end of Dame Street and you’ll find Project Arts Centre (Essex Street), one of the capital’s oldest artist spaces. Initiated by a group that included Neil Jordan and the brothers Peter and Jim Sheridan, the Project has since mutated into a multi-disciplinary centre, with two performance spaces, a gallery and, naturally, a bar.

Keep heading uphill, and you’re on the way to Mother’s Tankstation (Watling Steet), run by artists Finola Jones and David Godbold, who live over the shop at this scene-setting gallery for ‘difficult-to-collect’ artists. Check your day carefully, though, as Mother opens her doors from Wednesday to Saturday only. None of which stops the space from digging out the best of the younger generation of Dublin-based artists. On your way home, why not rush past the exhibits in Guinness’s frightening theme-museum and find the Gravity Bar, a porter-serving establishment with a view, plonked in a giant glass canister high above the city.

On the north side of the Liffey, behind the Four Courts, sits the rather minuscule This Is Not A Shop, an artist-run space and producing organisation where events tend to be short but rather sweet, ranging from interventions on the nearby Luas tram system to – remarkably – group shows. Also attempting to make much of little is the justo pened Oonagh Young Gallery, and the collective efforts of Monster Truck Gallery & Studios, nestled among the antiques dealers of Francis Street. Meanwhile, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery (Great Strand Street) is ploughing a slightly lonely furrow in Great Strand Street, though its shows are generally worth the detour.

Permanent artist-led spaces have taken something of a hit in recent times, with Four Gallery losing its city centre home, and Pallas Contemporary Projects getting all peripatetic before settling into its new home on Grangegorman Road Lower in Dublin’s ‘next’ art zone. Broadstone Studios, HQ of Gerard Byrne, among others, survives, as does its attached exhibition space Broadstone XL (Upper Dominic Street).

Cultural policy during the 1990s managed to kill off the thriving studio scene in the Temple Bar area, but two adjacent sites buck the trend: Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, which provides working and exhibition space for Irish and international artists; and, conveniently located across a laneway from the back door, The Ha’Penny Bridge Inn, a happily unreconstructed cathode-ray-TV dive, in which a range of Dublin artists and gallery folk can be found skulking of an evening.