TWELVE YEARS AGO I was part of a group show in Gallery 2 and 3 of the RHA Dublin. When installing, Nevan Lahart was also installing his solo A lively start to the year in Gallery 1. I was a big fan of Nevan Lahart’s work at the time; he brought energy and irreverence to his art and the role of being an artist.

An opportunity for a sneak peek of the artist’s work in progress was granted and I took it with both feet and eyes. The large wooden expanse of floor in Gallery 1 was covered from end to end in a bricolage of paintings and other roughly constructed things. There was no centre, like L.A. It was exciting. Was this it? If it was, it was enough. It was more than enough. It was better than anything I could imagine it becoming. This would turn out to be true.

On the opening night I was met by a wave of consensus re how good Nevan’s installation was before I made it to the 1st floor summit of the RHA. I wondered what he could have done beyond what I had experienced during the mid-installation days earlier. I was more excited about seeing the result of his work than secretly invigilating the response to my work across the way.

NEVAN LAHART, A LIVELY START TO THE NEW YEAR, 2010, RHA DUBLIN

The RHA was packed. I climbed the stairs, took a left and entered Gallery 1. Everything had been corralled into one quadrant of the space with stray sculptures activating pockets of space in the ever-expanding universe that is Gallery 1. Even with the crowd it felt lonely (or maybe that was just me — packed art openings can make artists feel lonely). It wasn’t what I had experienced a few days earlier. It had become something, something that would remain the way it was, then and there, until the end. Its potential stripped, its energy, its synergy with the space, its dissent in respect to its disruptive and disobedient grammar, punctuated, proper. I was disappointed that I had managed to gain access on that fateful day to experience the process of the exhibition in the midst of becoming. I wanted to experience what everyone else was experiencing that opening night, to be on the same hymn sheet, to not feel so alone. Twelve years ago I confronted what I know today, but didn’t know then, in its transformation from object of desire to process of desire, as the fetish.

I have been interested in art process and its transposition into the gallery space since art school. There is always the suspicion, in the beginning, which turns to belief later on, that the gallery space robs art of its lively process. Artists try to offset this robbery by inviting processes into the gallery during their art’s wake through performance, incremental rejigging or transformations, workshops, press releases, or simply the artist talk. The existence of such resuscitative processes explicitly exhibits the lack (or death) the artists and art administrators feel the exhibition possesses and hence poses under the apathy of the public. Things should seem alive when they are deemed dead, even if it is a resuscitated kind of alive, an undead kind of living.

Nevan Lahart’s work was a local model of permissibility to deploy the raw into the cooked gallery in the early days of my artworld education. My work across the way from his in the RHA in 2010 employed a similar raw repertoire, constructed from materials bought in B&Q not the art supplies store. A hardware aesthetic was in the air at the time. Experiences such as Thomas Hirshhorn’s cardboard abjection installed in a mid-tier commercial gallery off Oxford Street London was massively influential, and so were the theories expounded by Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Radicant” or Gilles Deluzes and Felix Guattari’s “Rhizome”. Art was something unrepressed in their anti-arboreal theories, which freed me as an artist from an anthropological or commodity fetishism, to one that was relational and processional (a necessary neologism).

AUSTIN HEARNE, LOVE LETTERS TO CARDINAL RAYMO, 2021, Periphery Space, Gorey School of Art, 📸 LOUIS HAUGH

The fetish, in all its material and psychic processes, has become, ironically so, a fetish in my ongoing analysis of cultural production and the artist behind it all. Due to its complexity as both object of desire and process of desire, it can help explain what Jacques Lacan theoretically diagnosed as our inability to confront reality without a filter, fantasy, object or process. And even with those filters, objects and processes, we still cannot afford to touch reality. The same way our fingertips, when pressed together, don’t touch in reality due to the sliver of gravitational space that separates them.

This in between, or triangulation of relationships between object and process, is the gap I perceive as the fetish, a phenomenon that is dressed in different metaphysical and clinical clothes, from Donald Winnicott’s “transitional object”, a healthy object that helps the infant to transition from the mother’s embrace to the world’s embrace, to Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a, the object cause of desire that impels desire proper to take form in reality. Simply put: we seem dependent on another object or process outside the relationship between things in the world, to cope with experience or make experiences and relationships happen, or not happen as it were.

For instance: Instagram. Our experience of art on Instagram is one that perpetuates a fantasy, but not the reality of cultural production. The Instagram phenomenon of the #wip (work in progress) places value on process over product, even though the capturing of process as an image is just another form of objectification. It’s what I mentioned earlier in relation to how process makes the object more desired in fantasy but less in reality. Process becomes a fetish, and imbues the fantastic art object with more, like the artist’s biography does, without having the artist at hand or the object in hand. It is what Slavoj Žižek defines as “surplus enjoyment”, whereby processes, outside the holding of the object or real experience, are inflated beyond anything they can achieve in reality. The social media trope “Looking forward to this” is a symptom of this. Overly colourful anticipation forecasts a grey day for reality.

MAKING OF 'BÜRO' (BY THOMAS DEMAND, 1995), 2020, Digital C-type print, mounted, wooden frame with museum glass, 72 x 107 cm, edition of 6 plus 1 artist's proof (#2/6).

Recently I learnt of the existence of a series of standalone prints that reveal the photographic process of Thomas Demand’s cardboard and paper simulacrums of reality. His process was already fetishistic, but doubly so by way of the dismantling of his illusory photographs into uncropped portraits of process. The degrees of separation between object or experience are necessary. We cannot confront reality, and when we do, freely or forcibly, we experience trauma, which is when fingertips do break science to touch, for emotion and subjectivity to take rule.

Trauma is something that Austin’s Hearne’s work exhibits in spades. And yet it is a trauma that is not so close that it rules, it is trauma fetishistic in its disavowal of the very thing it confronts: the Catholic Church. For Periphery Space in 2021, Austin Hearne presented his first manifestation of, or manifesto to, a figure who embodies the Church in all its rituals in the name of sacrifice and faith (believing in an object that can only exist in its absence) — Love Letters to Cardinal Raymo. Of course the artist’s letter never did arrive on the lap of the Cardinal, but the mere proffering of a letter is enough of a foil, or fetish, to set events in motion, as was the stolen letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter.

On entering Periphery Space, after a three-week installation, we were overwhelmed by the sheer ambition of the transformation of the main gallery space, and the two smaller adjoining spaces that make up Periphery Space. Walls, floors and smell, everything was awash with a sensory simulacrum of the church. It was too much. The eyes, eager to rest on expected white walls, were met by an environment eviscerated, so that the contents seemed to spill out from the walls, not hang upon them. This was not a representation of the church. It wasn’t a stand in, or a placeholder, but the thing in itself.

However, in fetishistic fashion, it is not the whole that haunts my memory of Austin Hearne’s Love Letters to Cardinal Raymo, it is one part, one act, in one corner of one of the adjoining spaces. Before the installation began, we asked the artist if the grubby paint-splattered sink and cabinet situated in a corner of one of the spaces, would be a problem for him. He replied “no”, and the space became the place in which he would mix and make, paste and paint the materials that would create the skin for the space. It became his process room, and would remain the process room during the exhibition run, filled with the tools and empty paint buckets of his process. Against this backdrop of process, the artist decided to scrub the sink and gloss the cabinet to what we thought was an impossible clean. It was the strangest inversion. Everything except the sink and cabinets was an abject mess. Even the ceiling was splattered with process. Sink as God.

PAUL MCCARTHY, LIFE CAST, 2013, Hauser & Wirth New York

Eight years previous, and across the Atlantic, I experienced uncanny cleanliness adjoining processional abjection in the installation Life Cast by Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth New York. The juxtapositioning of hyper-real casts of naked female triplets, sat spread-eagled on glass tables in one brightly lit room, and in the next room, the video documentation of the process of casting the single female model surrounded by a gangbang of male technicians, with a wooden table scored with pencil marks describing the fragmented body of the model who once lay there, was unnerving. It was the precision of McCarthy’s aim to unnerve the senses through a deliberate juxtapositioning of uncanny objects of desire that misled, and the process and conditions in which those objects had been constructed under the desiring gazes of the male technicians and the hidden gaze of the artist. From time to time Austin Hearne’s aim is as deliberate and precise as Paul McCarthy’s. Which, with appropriate fetishistic delay and suspension, leads me to Austin Hearne’s current solo at the RHA Dublin entitled Requiem for Raymo:

“In an imaginary world, where I, Austin Hearne, a queer/gay man, has had a bad lapse of judgement and lost all reasoning, became besotted by the arch homophobe, transphobe and misogynistic hater Cardinal Burke. An act of self-loathing and extreme confusion caused this grown adult to fantasise about turning this despotic being from ogre to saviour. Finding love and lust within him, to live a life together in sexy, healthy and pure love. Our love story was never to be as he went and fucking died.”

— AUSTIN HEARNE, INSTAGRAM @austinhearne

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke is not dead, as far I know, but, like Austin Hearne’s Love Letters to Cardinal Raymo, his imaginary death acts as a foil or fetish to energetically motivate the artist to upend Gallery 2 and 3 of the RHA in a reverie of process and ritual. The setting of the RHA for such ritual and reverie, as a 200-years old institution that still periodically exhibits the trappings of ceremonial pink member gowns (excuse the pun) and stone mason open-selection processes, is fun to observe. Austin Hearne, who Lily Cahill hilariously describes as a “Superfan” of the Cardinal in the accompanying exhibition text, introjects Cardinal Raymo like every single white female before him. As a Superfan, the artist as Cardinal, is found mourning the death of the Cardinal, and the death of the love that never was.

AUSTIN HEARNE, REQUIEM FOR RAYMO, 2022-23, RHA Gallery Dublin 📸 ROS KAVANAGH

Initially felt as an understatement in Gallery 2 is the monolithic Janus-faced screens found smack dead centre in the blacked-out space. Cardinal Hearne mourns and weeps and cries, evacuating or ejaculating like no other mourner or libertine. Full frontal, red and white trappings with purple velvet gloves, the whole regalia — dress and emotion — is so over the top that it is more about willing, wishing, than mourning death. The artist embodies the live Cardinal like a Voodoo Doll effigy, that, ‘sticks pins’ in himself like some wish fulfilment. It’s all about degrees, degrees of separation, so emotion is sharpened for use. It’s what makes Austin Hearne able to embody his predicament while tearing it down. The artist is not drenched in anger or cynicism, but mockery.

If Gallery 2 is a space of negation, condensing mourning into a coffin-sized hollow, Gallery 3 is where the artist lets process rip with centrifugal force. Pulling back the black curtain, the full light blinds for an instant like a mid-summer sun, I gradually make out the shit storm. Everywhere. The grandness eviscerated. Super tall white walls and invisible ceilings give way to a tonal splatter fest that is somehow lush and elegant. It’s like standing in a deep forest the moment lightning strikes. Deep paint coils like undergrowth, a libidinal pattern that hides the alternating colours of red, yellow and pink underneath. Austin Hearne is a painter. One who is seduced by surface in both its gestural and abject qualities.

Found on the floor, centrestage, the spoils of the artist’s thank-badness-it’s-Friday performative process are left torn and repasted to the walls, and as an offering before a pulpit. No pews or congregation or privacy, a segmented screen of exaggerated proportions articulates like a long insect. This is not a church, it’s the sacristy behind the church proper, where ritual is condensed and secret. The ritual before the ritual; the will before the wish fulfilled. Metamorphosis is all around, and no one thing is the thing itself: the artist as cardinal; the gallery as church; the libertine as mourner; lie as truth hidden in plain sight. I find myself happy in the belly of some monster. And as was the case during COVID, when exhibitions lay in wait behind closed doors, I wonder what this place of lively death will feel like during the Christmas holidays, when people celebrate the birth of this thing we call faith in its glorious absence… —James Merrigan