GENERATION PAINTING
“IS [‘PAINTING’] A WORK OF CIVILISATION OR A WORK OF CULTURE? IF IT IS A WORK OF CIVILISATION, COPING AND ADAPTING SHOULD BE THE AIMS OF THE WORK. IF IT IS A WORK OF CULTURE, WE HAVE SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT... CULTURE IS MORE SPONTANEOUS AND…..UNRULY. ”
THE IMAGE of a large rock hitting the surface of a lake in slow motion. The splash and arc of the water that follows, forming a glass bouquet — transparent, still, something from nothing displaced. Suspended in mid-air, released from its liquid democracy to become visible and naked at its gush crest, a flower that drinks itself… and then everything is as it was: FLAT. This is my best effort at verbally visualising the abrupt and temporal efflorescence of culture in words, or more specifically, the artist’s emergence, visibility and inevitable disappearance. The questions posited after the splash come like a flood. What does it mean to be part of a Generation of artists: the old, the new, the forgotten or the legacy artists (those artists who are reputationally and institutionally embedded into an art scene, artworld or even civilisation without question)?
This question of Generation resurfaced first when watching the Netflix limited series The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022); and second on the occasion of the group-painting exhibition currently running at the Butler Gallery Kilkenny entitled “Generation” (more on that later). In the first instance, Generation is a question that lies in the stellar space between the shrinking stardom of Andy Warhol (a star that still shines) and the protostardom of Jean-Michel Basquiat, where the practices of sexuality, identity, fame, money, artworld and love all play out. So why this question of Generation and not the other more pertinent questions?
Generation is a question that comes with experience and age, a question that can be diagnosed as an effort to look back in order to move forward. As the past gets bigger and the future gets smaller, we often nostalgia-trip to a place where idealisation threatens to swallow us whole, as we take both eyes off the present. The longer we live in the idealised past the more alien the present becomes. We literally end up missing a beat, then another, then another, until the heart and veins harden to the present culture that is not our own anymore. We are removed.
We can believe that the past was better than the present, but we have to question that belief. Was it really better? Was our art better? Was the art scene better? Was naïveté the thing that made us into artists in the first place, and experience the thing that unmade us? Did we just grow up, become disconnected from the heartbeat of culture, when the social informed our art, and our art informed the social, and somewhere between we managed to exist as artists in absentia. Art was everything back then… wasn’t it? Or was it? It seemed to be? Nostalgia tells us so, right?
This question of Generation has another source too, in the figure of James Hillman, a Jungian analyst, who had very interesting and insightful things to say about the human psyche in relation to the archetypal images in Greek Mythology that possessed their culture and society for (to his mind) the better. Hillman made an offhand remark in a lecture theatre in Santa Barbara California in 2005 concerning the difference between culture and civilisation that twisted my idea of Generation. In the Q&A a member of the audience observed how the culture of 1968, from Paris to Chicago, was an active culture, one that effloresced in both art and protest, but one now lost to a passive and therapeutically determined culture. Hillman immediately picked up on the nostalgia of the person’s critical observation, the same nostalgia we place on the innocent and creative child. He elucidated that culture, as opposed to civilisation, is not forever. The minute the artist thinks about their legacy — a construct of civilisation — they are done. According to Hillman, culture erupts and blossoms at particular moments in time, but then withers, perhaps the reason for the person’s nostalgia for something now lost in the image of 1968, substituted for something seemingly less in the image of the politically apathetic and distracted youth culture of the present. A mourning takes hold. It must be noted that the person from the audience who made the 1968 observation was not of the 1968 generation, but was activating his nostalgia and idealisation of 1968 second-hand, transforming the remark from idealisation into fantasy.
A recent precursor to “Generation” at Butler Gallery occurred late last year when Pallas Projects directors Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy were invited by an artist-run institution in Croatia to select and curate a group of Irish painters for the Biennale of Painting in Zagreb. The curatorial and conceptual device for the Biennale was “the city”. At the time I critiqued its arbitrariness, and viewed it as a way to pragmatically “define and demarcate painting practice within a given national art scene.” It doesn’t need to be said that the curatorial edit has to start somewhere, no matter how strong the feeling of critical exclusion that follows afterward in this inclusive age. There are so many painters and communities of painters out there as opposed to other artists that the edit does have to start somewhere. But so does a critical commitment, no matter how absurd or John Hutchinson arcane (which I miss btw because of his esoteric specificity in terms of painting) that commitment may be. Painting is already an arbitrary and polymorphic field of process and content. Those who wield the white cubes need to take dumb and absurd curatorial positions in terms of the edit of painting practice. Especially positions counter to the commercial gallery tastemakers in Dublin, the centre position from which influence spreads out into the Dublin art schools and trickles into the broader and more confused national art scene, best exemplified in the RHA Annual Open Submission, where painting holds court.
In our time it is easier to get a sense of what is happening in painting in Ireland on Instagram than it is in the physical world. With few commercial galleries and fewer and fewer artist-run spaces, the landscape of painting in Ireland has become more virtually visible and democratic online, and seemingly more elitist and conservative in the real world. The white cube, specific to painting practice, has lost its white veil (no matter how lace and white that veil always was), a veil that concealed the business of selling individual objects orphaned from the curated body and exhibition of art, a body of work orchestrated by the artist as a gestalt not a window display of singular objects. Galleries today do not reflect the art scene in toto, but reflect and propagate a particular elite of tastemakers who are tied to the business of meeting the demands of the art market and the whims of the dinner-party rich, where artists are invited from time to time for truffle-infused flattery.
“Generation” is curated by the Director of the Butler Gallery, Anna O’Sullivan, who curated (among other contemporary art slaps to the face) the brilliant Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley 'In the Body of the Sturgeon' in 2017. It is a survey that “is not… a survey” (in her words) of contemporary painting in Ireland today. In the press release there is no mention of any curatorial positing behind the exhibition. In fact there is a distancing from any objective intention. O’Sullivan writes: “My intention when curating this exhibition was not to mount a survey of painting but to reflect a personal observation of the quality of painting I saw happening around the country. The works are hung salon-style, embracing the height of our Main Gallery while providing space to view the work of the twenty-six artists on show.” “Personal” perhaps, but as Jung diagnosed, the personal is a measure of the collective. It’s a strange curatorial position to take, especially in a time when there is a curatorial arbitrariness and excess to painting practice. Postmodernism may be anything goes, but we need something to talk about, and believe in. And believe me, local painters are talking about this exhibition, and the question on their minds is: “Why them and not me?”
Emma Roche, Essential Worker, 2021, Acrylic paint on rug canvas, 40 x 70cm
Sinéad Lucey, In the Garden at Le Pont de Moeurs, 2021, Oil on canvas, 70 x50cm
Salvatore of Lucan, Maya, 2022, Oil on canvas, 50 x 60cm
Susan Connolly, over+over, 2020, Acrylic paint, canvas supports, sterling board, steel supports, 180 x 223 x 80cm
Sheila Rennick, Zero Perks, 2020, Oil on canvas, 100 × 76cm
Twenty-six Irish painters presented in one room. A sizable posse, if curatorially cut and paste. Absence of painters not here is palpable due to no theoretical framework or red lines to limit the sprawl. Paintings go up; paintings go across. Two free-standing partitions shoulder-in on the space and the paintings. It’s crowded, salon, tossed-salad Instagram, or no. There’s an industrial hum in the rafters. A drippy-trippy forest by Cecilia Danell leans against a wall, waiting to be not hung— a metaphorical lean-to for the paintings that float above, on high. A Brian Harte landscape reverts to a neo-expression argo of jotted notations of paint as illustration as Basquiat as Paddy Graham. Emma Roche’s racing greyhound of threadbare viridian, ochre and greys is a pure meditation of knitted paint without the mediation of the brush. Susan Connolly’s violent cuts á la Lucio Fontana lived in a house that Gordon Matta-Clark built. Sinéad Lucey’s lush enclosed and tonal woodlands utilise open and wet brushwork lavishly. Ciara Roche mediates moodily Hollywood film stills from Haddonfield to Mulholland — her Halloween is an internalised Ed Hopper for our estranged Netflix age. Mollie Douthit’s outsider perspectives levitate above dreamscapes that a child would recognise but an adult might dismiss as childish. Salvatore of Lucan’s splitting into two painting genres and geographies, from sixteenth-century Mediterranean to Alice Neel’s Harlem, gives permission to those young artists to paint from where and when they like — his scratched MacDonald’s pillar in an otherwise varnish-smothered painting, smells of fries and urinals. And Sheila Rennick! Say it again — Sheila Rennick’s grey, empty office, an administrational nightmare of Kafka-cum-Working Girl-cum-Bacon yawning architecture proportions, makes you smile and awe all at once. Fab.
Looking at the stats, this is an exhibition that speaks broadly not specifically, but is still a representation of the central art scene I know and recognise. Surprisingly, Molesworth comes out on top with five gallery artists represented here, Kevin Kavanagh second with four, and others, like Kerlin, Taylor and Oliver Sears with one artist a piece. Gender — a word that has lost all emphasis due to its over-emphasis in culture — leans heavily towards female artists, while gallery and non-represented artists are evenly matched. The age bracket is broad too, and — ignoring the philosophical painter’s adage that all painting is abstract — figuration tops abstraction. Canvas is the preferred support, and any expansive trends are limited to the walls. And not to forget, Instagram followers goes to Brian Harte at 36.5k.
Besides these dutiful and dumb demographics, the Irish art scene represented here in paintings is one that is colourful, diverse, popular and object-resolved. There are few explicit enfant terribles present — painters that covet real mess over contrivance, politically or aesthetically. Marcel Vidal’s fluorescent orange sunburst wedged in one corner with two paintings of blown-up and blown-out teeth, find an uncanny realist resolution compressed as they are in the thumbnail images on the gallery handout. Whereas Helen Blake’s pure geometric repetitions have their laces untied in the moments when paint, due to successive layers, pleats like a folded napkin. Yum.
For the most part the painters presented already have a visibility that has been presumably hard-earned through protracted art education and other networks, online and off. I recognise the majority, especially those who are represented by galleries, or those who have at least exhibited in Ireland in the last decade. No other painters should be here if we take the press release at its word. However the title “Generation” is one of those big words, like ‘contemporary’, that the public will read as a defining statement in terms of exclusion over inclusivity. And the public should read this exhibition that way. This is an exhibition conceived and curated by a respected high-profile curator at an illustrious public art institution – any painter would covet a solo exhibition at Butler, and there are three or four painters that I can visualise solo here. The nature of curating a group exhibition exclusively dedicated to the medium painting, the most popular contemporary visual art medium in the galleries and online, will always haunted by those painters that are absent from the edit. And yet, the diversity and populism displayed here is perhaps the perfect reflection of our age, and to critique such diversity and populism is a symptom of being part of another Generation. This is very likely, and this exhibition may stir the Generation of painters to come, but in what direction?
If absence pervades in this crowded room in Kilkenny, then revelation fills the gap. For lack of a better description, there is too much framing, framing that somehow — forget commodifies, as that is intrinsic to our capitalist and Instagram mode of consuming painting as an object — objectifies and limits the possibility of painting as something more than its fenced-in object. It’s the sameness of the framing that compounds things, and separates those paintings with and without frames. At least in the seventeenth-century salon they framed with the bonkers of the baroque. Perhaps that is what Marcel Vidal is riffing on with his raw meant maws set against a toxic cheddar sunburst. For me the frameless evince liveliness, whereas the framed intimate its burial. The helpful paper handout that details the particulars of each painting, including price, also distracts from experience to one of object and commodity. Can painting be more than its object? And what is the “more” that I am getting at here?
It must be noted that a group painting exhibition that broadly represents a moment in time — as the title “Generation” intimates here — is a curatorial absurdity. It’s understandable why O’Sullivan has not posited anything beyond the “personal”. Without any curatorial posturing the viewer is left to formulate their own ideas, which can be fun, and also tick the democratic box. On my watch as an art critic, artists have come, gone or hung on, one generation substituted for the next, for the new. If I had hung on as an exhibiting artist I would have certainly felt the full force of that relegation and resignation years ago. Nevertheless, I have felt that relegation and resignation bi-proxy artists that, at one point in time, crested the wave of attention for three to four years. Andy Warhol’s “15-Minutes” is not a slogan but a relative truism.
The word blossoming, as in beauty and its fleeting nature, may be helpful in confronting the nature of art in all respects, as a temporal and transient expression or expulsion in time, making it potentially anti-civilisation in respect to ideas of progress, history and the continuity of civilisation. The archive (and the frame) is the death of culture and the birth of civilisation. If you are cultural you will have deleted all your Instagram posts at one time or another. Culture comes and goes, erupts and recedes, lives and dies; civilisation lives on, even when dead. But art can resurface from time to time when the time is right. So, in some respects, art is eternal, even though it's immortality — what some refer to as its legacy — is primarily a sleeping one. The word “Generation” in an immortal context becomes irrelevant.
More than ever it is the job of public art spaces (and curators with a vested interest in the critical place of painting in contemporary art) to make critical, not just personal commitments to painting, before painting gets devoured completely by the market as both object and image. What can painting say about culture today beyond a culture of collecting? Is painting merely cannibalistic? I believe it is important for curators (and painters) to make strong statements about painting today in Ireland, no matter how absurd or performative those positions may be. I want to experience group-painting exhibitions by painters; perhaps curators are the wrong people for the job. The curated exhibition of 2009 Artists Younger than Jesus (with our own Jesse Jones) was criticised mainly for its absurd agism. But for me its absurdity defined the absurdity and necessity of focusing on a particular trait in culture at a particular time. Although the “personal” is a reflection of objective and collective society, painting needs the collective more than the personal today for it to be valued more than an image on Instagram, more than a commercial pawn among conceptual knights in the commercial gallery, more than a pretty picture, more than a view above the mantelpiece, more than a norm to the exception: more. Painters need to stake positions so that the generations of painters to follow have the precedents and permission to make bold and experimental moves in painting in the future.—James Merrigan