If you’d never been to the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin (DHG), you might first become conscious of the encroaching presence of the architecture amidst the receding light of the outside world. Anticipation might cloud your experience in the grey well of concrete; those white sci-fi hatches that lead to a blind, windowless room in a basement aspect with a fridge aesthetic. If you’ve been to DHG numberless times (as I have & by now institutionalised by its familiarity) the architecture & light have long left the building. Today all the building solicits from me is a forever withdrawing presence in a mausoleum of traces from previous art experiences & entities that have temporally inhabited & loitered in the space over many, many years, some forgotten, others imprinted like my parents' faces. Together, but separate, as was John Cage’s, Robert Rauschenberg’s and Merce Cunningham’s ‘Happening’ in the canteen at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, the current exhibiting trio of artworks & artists (the trace of the artist is invoked via the knowledge of the happening of hidden process & change taking place for the duration of the current exhibition) snooozze. They are sleepers; lateralness if not literalness pervades. Perhaps the knowledge of a happening hidden from view & waiting in the wings gives this sense of sleep or sleeping? I don’t know. But somehow the empty space that hangs grey & high above & between these sleepy presences stresses a weight on passivity rather than action. We are awakened by a happening that takes place in our imaginings. Is this deliberate or circumstantial? Or, & this is a big R, has DHG changed, wherein the holism that was presented before, wrapped in a particular identity via esoteric leanings & wilderness tones has transformed into something else, whereby you have to do more work to activate the space rather than being solicited by the holism that came before? Perhaps art in this new DHG condition is one where you are not subsumed by either the architecture or the objects that inhabit it, but a space in which you come to experience the movement, verticality & sound of your own body as you wander without a text.

—James Merrigan

Through February 2022.