MADDER LAKE ED. #4 : 'Crimson Wave' tale of art and menstruation

EDITIONS

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Fargo, S3/E2, 2017.

Period sex, period sex/ Put down a towel, party till it's dry/ With some period sex/ Period sex/ Think of it as just Mother Nature's juice cleanse/ Period/ Sex/ Period sex...

(Extract from song 'Period Sex' performed in the Netflix series 'My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend', Season 2 / Episode 3, 2016.)

Sorcha Peyton, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Waterford City, July 2017. Image: James Merrigan.

An 'egg cup' sits under a glass dome on a plinth in a gallery. On closer inspection the 'egg cup' has a short stem, ribbed like a trachea, that stands on a black base that neatly slots into the glass dome. Everything is snug and safe. In the cup there is a dark red liquid that turns bright red where the liquid touches the inside of the 'egg cup' like wine against glass. The 'egg cup' is not an egg cup, it's a Mooncup, or Menstrual Cup between you and me. The red liquid is period blood. This 40ml cup of blood is surrounded by four other artists' work in the group show 'Sisters of the Moon' in the newly named non-profit gallery GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art – formerly SOMA), which is a half hour walk from my house in Waterford City. This cup of blood makes distant metaphors of everything else in the show.

I'll tell you why.

Either en route to GOMA or on the return walk home (a bit of both) I reflected on my obsessive viewing of Vernissage TV (VTV), a kind of art-voyeur porn found online. Based in Switzerland, VTV covers art exhibitions around the globe in the style of verité documentary. What's creepy and fun about VTV in comparison to our own chaste Culture Fox is there's no talking or explaining. All you get is a confused cameraman following around equally confused gallery goers as they try to navigate the vagaries of contemporary art and avoid the camera. Watching the awkward bedfellows of human and art in the gallery you realise that, one, art is a good thing for the socially awkward to hang with because art makes everyone look socially awkward; and two, art makes an idiot out of all of us no matter how cooly detached or on-the-pulse you think you are.

[Colour-altered] still from Vernissage TV: Paul McCarthy, Life Casts, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 10 May – 26 July 2013.

A recent edition of VTV documents an opening night of a New York exhibition by an artist who does visceral better than anyone else in the artworld, Paul McCarthy. People are caught on camera practising cool detachment; one guy is carrying a coffee and another is munching on some hors d'oeuvre. But what I look out for most in VTV is what art critic Roberta Smith has diagnosed as a "hardening of the veins". This happens in every walk of life. We settle into, become familiar with, acclimatise and become accustomed to whatever walk we walk and talk we talk; art too. Over time the artist, the regular gallery goer, even art grows a skin. We become cynical; worse, apathetic. It's going to happen to you if it hasn't already, like man-munching-canapé. Sounds like I have given up on the good fight, that I have grown one skin too many? Fuck, I'm a snake at this point but I still feel the need to pump my veins with art.

So. En route to GOMA I was intrigued to come across the use of the word "visceral" by the curator Eamonn Maxwell in his description of Sorcha Peyton's work (which includes the cup of 'crimson wave') at GOMA. A big claim I thought  – 'visceral' in an art gallery. I read it in Eamonn's blog curatoronabike, which is a kind of travelogue of the Irish art scene. But Eamonn's use of the word visceral didn't really measure up to his description of Peyton's cyanotypes of tampons, and with no mention of the cup of 'tomato soup on the boil' I was lost in translation. Tampons? Cyanotypes? Visceral? "These works feel quite visceral" was followed by "as they deal with subjects that remain taboo and seldom highlighted in contemporary art". Although Peyton's cyanotypes are interesting as metaphors or manifestoes against ad agencies using clean blue not dirty red to illustrate menstruation in their commercials they do the art thing of making cerebral metaphors of the visceral world, and in this case a metaphor out of a metaphor. As I made my way to GOMA and stumbled over Eamonn's "visceral" I became suspicious that something was being unsaid; unless Eamonn's definition of visceral was more digestible than mine. It's possible, veins hardened vs veins pulsing with blood and all. 

Pioneers, Oregon Trail.

I get it. A man discussing menstruation is as welcome as a man discussing pain around a woman who has went through childbirth. It's worse. After experiencing Peyton's cup of 'red wedding' I have since tried to bring up the subject of menstruation in the context of the art gallery with my wife at the breakfast table and friends in a restaurant (don't ask me why around food). From both genders I was met by scrunched-up faces first, and then the brain kicks in before an efficient change of subject. It's an ironical natural reaction to a natural process. Forget Freud, the uterus (hysteria in Greek) has had a bad name all the way back to Pliny the Elder, who describes the onset of natural world pestilence if a menstruating woman strips naked in the vicinity of hives of bees and ears of corn. One of the saddest facts I researched was: "Such was the taboo against the subject, that the historian Laura Klosterman Kidd of Iowa State University found not a single direct reference to menstruation in the nineteenth century diaries, letters or inventories of wagon trains of North American pioneer women." To be honest, I didn't know that Peyton's 'egg cup' was a Mooncup until I joined the dots and the blood in the gallery.  

My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, S2/ E3, 2016.

The one place where you will find menstruation fearlessly explored is contemporary television where the theme of Period Sex has played out in song in the comedy-musical series My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and in the wacky aftermath of sex in the girl-wrestling-1980s-'period'-comedy series Glow. There has also been plenty of nodding to menstruation in Orange is the New Black, where in one scene a prisoner smears her face in menstrual blood to fake an injury. And not to forget the latest season of Fargo in which the female protagonist smears menstrual blood on a picture of a donkey with the sugary and spicy and all things nicey rejoinder: “Who’s the ass now?"

The word visceral brought me here and it is where I will sign off. I'm obsessively weary of words that inflate the experience of art, which, for me, is a flatline experience with peaks and troughs of brain teasing and intestinal tugging. I read somewhere that the bowel was once thought of as the seat of emotion – the meaning of 'visceral' comes from that same belief system, that same intestinal tugging. Over the years of reviewing art I have used the word visceral (rarely) as a way to describe bodily feelings and desires that play out in the gallery in a more explicit and literal way. In these instances the art is less suggestive, the feelings and meaning rubbed in your face. Sometimes visceral pops up in degree shows, a case of yellow fledgling artists being once-removed from the white mother goose art scene (it's important to mention that Peyton is a recent LSAD graduate). Having a glass of wine around visceral art is just plain silly and insulting. But for artists and curators and writers the visceral world is cerebrally cleaner to digest as metaphor, even when the metaphor gets stripped down to a cup of blood, in a health and safety glass dome, in an artist-run gallery in Waterford City.

Sisters of The Moon through 30 July 2017. 

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Madder Lake Editions

MADDER LAKE ED. #3 : Thicker-than-Blood-and-Technique: Nan Goldin

EDITIONS

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“Well I’m just people watching the other people watching me / We’re all people watching the other people watching we”

— (Jack Johnson, People Watching, from ‘Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George’, 2006)

Sometimes in the gallery I find myself imagining what life lives behind the illusion of the art object before me. Does the artist have 2.3 children and a mortgage, or is it a life of the Fear and Loathing kind? Moreover, ought the artist's life behind the art object be a normal or extraordinary one? With Nan Goldin's photography the illusion of art (and life) is excoriated to reveal unadulterated humanity and sexuality that helplessly and hopelessly and lovingly retains the scab of experience as a single image. This is big.

If you think about it contemporary big-budget TV dramas like Fargo and House of Cards brilliantly and believably portray the filth and floss of human nature with visceral and visual aplomb. But moving images breathe familiarity through continuity whereas the photograph is the sniper's held breath before the pull of the trigger.

Goldin shoots herself, among friends, lovers, men, women, kids, couples, sexuality, mirrors, dressing up, fessing up, dressing down, drive ins, drag queens, front bums, back bums, willies, cocks, caesareans, baby bumps, granny with a gun, black guy licking his gun, white guy jacking up, bride snorting coke, hugging, kissing, fucking, pissing, peeing, posturing, sashaying, smoking, crying, smiling, before sex, during sex, after sex, love, lost...beaten up.

Nan Goldin, 'Nan one month after being battered' (1984) New York

Unlike the torture of getting snug with Granny and the family album on the jungle-florid couch, Goldin's photos unclench gritted teeth and forced smiles. They are less provincial, looking inward and outward at the same time. I smiled. I laughed; relief or release. I felt a palpable sense of loss when AIDS becomes an insatiable demon under Goldin's warm but obsessive scrutiny of her world during the 1980s.

Goldin's ability to capture human experience and human relationships (bad and good) in a single image is diabolical not saintly, but blessed she is all the same, as we are as witnesses. And when you transform one of Goldin's diaristic mugshots into a quick-fire procession of 700+ images and add an era-emotive soundtrack you get her seminal and sexy and sensual and sad The Ballad of Sexual Dependency currently showing at IMMA. But before we figure out the emotional fallout from the orchestration and compression of photographed experience on such an emotively rich but subculturally intimate scale—New York's Lower East Side bohemia at the turn of the 1980s and onwards—I want to share why Goldin's photographs continue to be important to me as an exemplar of art's redemptive power.

From the art books I've read, the art documentaries I've watched and the art I’ve experienced, New York's art scene of the late 1970s and early '80s seemed to be one big experiment without a speculative future; meaning, experimental visual art went hand in hand with experimental sex, music with drugs, photography with friends, life with art, and all without a thought of tomorrow. I like to imagine and believe that this small art scene that Nan Goldin and Irish artist Vivienne Dick (her solo compadre at IMMA) hung out in for a short-lived moment was one big melting pot where divisions between class and gender, sexuality and identity were ground down into a rock of Kryptonite that had the raw energy to defeat Superman[1].

I realise I’m romanticising here: I only have the art to go by. Goldin and Dick may tell you an alternative story beset by financial and emotional hardships as artists who comprised this ball of creative but cruel Kryptonite. Because the lived reality by all accounts was that New York was dripping with Fear and Loathing. But out of New York's societal dereliction the art that was made then and there had a nihilistic nerve and pulse that proclaimed with a middle finger and a blowed kiss: 'Fuck it, who cares? We care? That's all that matters!'

Like every generation of artists before and after there is always a need to expel something when the resources are scarce and the environment is harsh. Artists coming together is a pragmatic solution; and if big artist egos and temperaments are conducive to atomising creativity and authorship, the resulting art can be a game-changer (the early years of Basic Space Dublin was an example of crisis being good for good art).

In the exhibition literature for Goldin's and Dick's double matinée at IMMA their relationship emerges and bonds at the turn of the 1980s in the nihilistic heart of New York’s No-Wave art scene. Unlike Pop Art, No-Wave was less critically reflective of commercial America and more of a counter-culture in defiance of it with its punk connotations. And although Andy Warhol was an inspiration for these artists, especially in his depiction of women on film, what was put in place of Warhol’s comatose copying was frenetic imagery and noise: pure fucking energy.

But let's not get too romantic here. A lot of No-Wave film is pretty awful. Most of the time it's a case of artists coming together with fuck all to offer except energy and that always undervalued thing called naiveté. But amidst all this energy, naiveté and counter-culture bitchiness and bastardizing are moments in the Super 8 films of Jim Jarmusch and Vivenne Dick that electrify the soul. You could call this aesthetic tingle relative sobriety against all the drunken technique and improvisation but I was spellbound at times watching Lydia Lunch (a No-Wave and Cinema of Transgression regular) spilling her guts with self-harming razor sharpness in Dick’s Beauty becomes the Beast (1979) at IMMA. And it's big characters like the beautifully visceral writers Cookie Mueller and Rene Ricard brimming with energy and we-are-all-in-this-together fellowship, where friendship is thicker than blood and technique and more romantically violent, that Dick, and especially Goldin, capture on camera.

Goldin's early life story is a tortured but all too familiar affair which saw friendship become a surrogate for family. From straight and white America’s perspective Goldin’s new family of friends would have been typecast as marginal deviants; but you can imagine looking from the outside, in that this was the womb of the world to them and one you could happily get lost in. And Golden did, in love and war and drugs. In a sense Goldin’s world was a private affair to the point that the artists propagandised privacy. The notions of private and public wasn't the same as the one we live today as image traffickers of identity. I suppose there was the feeling of, 'Who'd be interested in this stuff anyway? Only us I guess, so let's make this stuff for us.'

What you get through Goldin's eyes is intimacy not a fling with a cultural theory. There's life in these images; beating hearts. There's personal need in these images too; the audience is secondary. Like Diane Arbus before her making friends with the sex-for-favours winos and prostitutes and 'freaks' of New York's Washington Square Park in the 1960s, Goldin's camera was also an icebreaker. So technique is superfluous to Goldin's attachment need to connect intimately from very early on, unconsciously or not.

Innocence and maturity play out in the Ballad too, and underscore how being young and full of cum sometimes trumps the notion that the artist becomes a better artist with age. Maybe the artist becomes more self aware and self critical and self conscious with maturity, but there is something lost in growing up, there is less dependency, sexual or otherwise. When you read the analyses of prodigious teenage photographer Francesca Woodman and her mature photographic vision you might say she was either a visual savant or mature beyond her years or some trauma had catapulted her into a future self-reflexive self. But perhaps it has nothing to do with those things; perhaps innocence and naiveté play a bigger part in creativity than we would like to think.

But it’s Goldin’s portrayal of men that personally struck me most watching the Ballad at IMMA. There something so vital and immature and innocent about her men, straight and gay. They are closer to kids, to babies, to honesty, as they arch their backs and cling to their willies like young boys in silly and playful defiance. Goldin once recounted on camera something I can't match in its nihilistic finality:

“...the four-year-old said to the baby  “Do you remember God? Because I'm beginning to forget.” So I felt that babies come from somewhere else / they're closer to whatever IT IS / where we come from and where we go / they're a lot closer in those years, and no more. And then they're taught to forget.”[2]

Nan Goldin’s Weekend Plans through 15 October, 2017.

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Notes

1. Superman appeared on American TV screens for the first time in 1978. 

2. From Tate Shots: Nan Goldin, 2014. 

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Madder Lake Editions

MADDER LAKE ED. #2 : 'Booth-Girl' review of the 57th Venice Biennale 💀

EDITIONS

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Booth Girl

A wealthy family arrive on the scene; their privilege marked by posture over fashion. Two teenage boys shrug under floppy hair and sunglasses while Mam and Dad try to figure out the queue—what is the least amount of steps and time to enter one of the main venues of the Venice Biennale, the Giardini. 

Mam and Dad get frustrated quick. Seconds quick. Dad returns from the ticket booth with the knowledge that he has to pick up a queue ticket in order to buy a real ticket to enter the Biennale. (I watched this take place because I was number 181 in a queue that had just turned 140 on the digital counter above the booth). 

Dad reluctantly goes to get a ticket in order to queue for a ticket. (Admittedly this was a confusing system that was universally tripping people over.) Ironically Dad finds that a queue has formed in the queue ticket booth. After 30 seconds he storms out of the queue ticket booth, pushes through the hoi polloi and starts saying something to the girl in the ticket booth proper; by the look of his gestures he is not a happy camper and neither is Booth Girl. Booth Girl shrugs as Dad's sons have been shrugging since they arrived on the scene, but there is resignation in Booth Girl's eyes as if this situation has happened before and has a predictable outcome every time. 

Dad marches away while vehemently gesturing to one of his sons to queue in the queue ticket booth in his place. Meanwhile. I’m feeling sorry for the sons even though they look like they have just hopped off one of those super yachts on the pier, so I start to construct a history for the sons that involves a detached father who places money above love. Midway through my made-for-TV drama plot the son queuing for the queue ticket returns with a queue number and hands it to Dad. Dad responds with a rictus and throws his hands up in the air. No words are spoken, not one, just flaying T-Rex arms and cool shrugs. I look to Mam for some humility; I get none. 

I realise Mam has been hovering around the ticket booth proper while Dad was huffing and puffing but the house was made of bricks. Mam steps up the game and says something short and inaudible to Booth Girl. Mam turns, delicately smirks and gestures to Dad who pauses in split-second resignation that Mam rules the roost when it comes to getting one over on him and the plebs. Dad moves in with his wallet, buys the tickets and walks into the biennale with his family in tow. There is no celebration, just purple privilege, as they super-fuck-you sashay away. The digital counter turns 160. Another 20 minutes should do it for us as I look disappointingly at Booth Girl. The art has a hard act to follow. Viva Arte Viva.

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Cody Choi's Venetian Rhapsody in the Korean Pavilion at the Giardini.

Hold on tight

Spain's National Pavilion is the first act to follow and immediately feels like it's in touchy feely touch with social collective art commentary but out of touch with the big bad world until you get to the last of a series of big screens propped upon the type of timber bleachers usually found pleating the edges of college sports fields in Hollywood movies where the teenage dejected sit or a jock takes advantage of a cheerleader under.    But.   But,   on the back of a very American Ford Ranchero rolling down a very American street an American accented woman dressed all in black orates to a passerby populace and you the observer clearly and enigmatically and persuasively like a magpie stealing away distraction. "Dickocracy" and "Cockocracy" give you the gist of the orator's political sentiment but the longer you listen her headline neologisms wrinkle as they bleat the same message over and over and over and over again until the clarity and enigma of the first message becomes as Trump toxic as 'great' and 'amazing',   all the while the realisation comes knock-knock-knocking on your door that propagandising from the back of a pickup is not meant for sustained listening but for the passerby voter who might pick out a ‘dickocracy’ here and ‘cockocracy’ there and continue merrily on their way to the voting booth, no harm done.

The Finish Pavilion with its cuddly irreverent muppetry was fun until the granular giggles slipped minutes quick through the hourglass. Long lasting enigmatic fascination is in short supply at the Biennale all round with the 30 minute lock-in in the Danish Pavilion where a bearable mindfulness soundscape in full darkness is quickly polluted by a trio of horribly insincere and self-righteous voices that sound like a Yoda wizened Whoopi Goldberg,   a blithering twit Emma Thompson and a Lord of the Rings elf Cate Blanchett with the white hair and howling voice and so forth. Denmark is every sensual and aesthetic abuse imaginable and you are told in no uncertain terms that if you feel yourself resisting the artist's message about replacing the bad chaotic distracting dependency on light filled progress with the wonderfully woolly wet dark womb of inner presentiment you are unenlightened and resistant and capitalist and wrong and man. And even though Denmark wasn't to blame I blame Denmark for making me miss the two hour window for the German Pavilion performance that same day which I had to return to the following day to experience in all its trendy and unique and dangerous and dramatic and dazzlingly masturbatory wallowness in a soulless and songless and colourless Emerald City fortress of glass and metal and fashion and posturing and voyeuristic consumerism by an audience who are the ones doing all the consuming without really realising it. So there, Denmark. 

(Where was Booth Girl when I needed her?)

From good Spain to bad Denmark it got a bit good and a bit bad in other National Pavilions with Japan playing playfully with Japaneseness through a quirky ceiling peephole where your head ends up on the floor of an exhibition space with people wandering around looking at your head set amidst deliciously delicate architectures that sprout from everyday detritus,   while,   just across the way from Japan Korea is sending up America with Pepto-Bismal toilet roll sculptures and arses spaying diarrhoea geysers and other visceral and volatile shit that parodies Western culture from an Eastern vantage point of dumb but fun depravity.

Speaking of America the US Pavilion looks a little unkept on the surface with dust and garbage and a poem engraved on concrete plaques that front the building with the opening lines   Hephaestus   I mean nobody likes to admit it    Somebody threw me out of my house   But inside America is still big,   still bold,    still swollen,   still confidently sashing away like Booth Family through the waste and rubble of its own making. While in the Swiss Pavilion an 80 years old man reflects tearfully and movingly on his happenstance discovery in a book that his mother was Giacometti's lover and that ultimately she was another victim of the Artist's Life of financial and familial ruin,   but I was left wondering that her son as a baby,   a boy,   a young man and now,   Now,   was the real victim in this familiar story of familial abandonment and embrace in the relationships between the people we love and are responsible for and the things we individually and selfishly dream of being. 

The South African Pavilion systematically skewers your empathy with a 3-pronged attack that starts with an arty black and white period scene with a black woman bobbing in a boat and water from which you exit to enter a further dark space and get up close but not personal with the green screen glamour of Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore ventriloquizing refugee stories of oppression,   refugees whom you find in the next room in a suite of films against sumptuous green screens and a tinted windowed Venice telling their stories which end up emotionally toppling the arty metaphor and celebrity glamour of the previous film setups. 
 
What I will say is that sometimes National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale go full Eurovision on things but oftentimes it is modesty that you take home with you like say the simply endearing The Mondrian Fan Club displayed in the easy to miss library in the Giardini that scrapbooks the decades' long global art adventures of two nomadic artists who made art so fleeting and in-the-moment that their art happenings weren't always recorded or documented. While in the Nordic Countries Pavilion there's a gorgeous and playful series of super-short and simple Super 8 films that bring together the ghostly film stock with the artist's unique take on and upending of everyday reality so completely and so lovely that I fell in love and took them home in my memory for forever safekeeping. Then pull back the curtain in the Arsenale and you'll find up high on a TV screen an artist dressed as Alien alter ego jumping on a bed in a lonely hotel room while weird but good paintings are placed on a book display that you might find in the kid section of a library which all adds up to the palpable sense that the end of the world is nigh but the temporal treadmill is a Möbius strip that leads you back to a post-future that has no beginning or middle or 💀

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Madder Lake Editions

MADDER LAKE ED. #1 : 'Water-based' review of the 57th Venice Biennale 💀

EDITIONS

MADDER LAKE EDITION #1

ALAN PHELAN's with his water-based review of the 57th Venice Biennale.💀

By ALAN PHELAN | June 8, 2017

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PAGE 1. – (CLICK ON IMAGE) – Pauline Curnier Jardin, 'Grotta Profunda, Approfundita', 2011-17, two channel video installation and mixed media at Arsenale // Carole Feuerman, 'The Midpoint', hand patinated resin, 2017, at Giardino Della Marinaressa // Nancy Shaver, 'Standardization, Variation and the Idiosyncratic', mixed media installation, 2017 at Arsenale // Francis Upritchard, 'Men with Octopus', bronze, 2017 at Arsenale // Shimbauku, 'Sea and Flowers', 2013 text and HD video at Arsenale // The Play, photograph of the1972 performance in which the Japanese art group sailed and lived for five days in a floating house at Arsenale // Juan Javier Salazar, 'Old plastic seeking musician', paint on fibreboard, 2004 at Peru Pavilion // Zai Kuning, 'Dapunta Hyang: Transmission of Knowledge', bamboo boat installation, 2017 at Singapore Pavilion.

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This is a monkey mermaid, a woman in a cave with golden wing fins. She is narrated by a tannoy voice in French, detailing some sort of observation on human existence, ritual and evolution, perhaps. It was difficult to know but the experience was fascinating. You enter through a giant hand, sit on a rubber-chipped mound and stare at an armless, human-sized finger puppet figure navigate quizzically through the antics of various clad and semi-clad actors (including a rather sweaty and sexual reclining Jesus; turns out the finger puppet is Saint Bernadette, so Jesus makes sense suddenly). Monkey mermaid was surrounded by drips and raucous ritual, a tad more wet and sticky than the array of swim suited sculptures that filled a park opposite the giant billionaire yachts parked adjacent to the Giardini. They were part of a five venue show by a famous hyperrealist sculptor I have never heard of before, the froth and bauble that this place attracts. 

I went with a brief of searching out water-based art and turns out there was buckets of it everywhere. As an organising method for viewing it was no more daft as the nonsense Pavilions that Christine Macel had come up with to structure the non-national areas of the Biennale. These were fluid leaky barrier free zones anyway and ideas trickled between spaces or sometimes repeated too much to spoil each other, canceling out difference because of sameness.

But I was there to navigate water based art not discuss book based art. Tucked here and there and almost everywhere were little seascapes, sea creature sculptures, blossoms floating on the sea, floating houses, seascapes with words and bamboo boats dripping with wax and good intentions. Unlike most reviews of Venice I am not competing in the game of hierarchies, best of, longest queue equalling success reviews. That stuff is out there if you want it. I am following the sequence of the photo layout, snapshots thrown together after a persistent five day hunt for water. 

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PAGE 2. – (CLICK ON IMAGE) – Bas Jan Ader, 'Broken Fall', film, 1971 at Arsenale sheds // Tang Nannan, 'Phonixalis – Bird of Wonder', video, 2013, China Pavilion // Phyllida Barlow, 'Folly', installation, 2017, British Pavilion // The Play, 'Current of Contemporary Art', photograph, 1969 // Giorgio Andretta Calò, 'Untitled (The End of the World)', scaffolding and water installation, 2017, Italian Pavilion // Anne Imhof, 'Faust', performance, 2017, German Pavilion // Takahiro Iwasaki, 'Out of Order (Offshore Model)', plastic sheet, disposable bento box, straw, rubber band, plastic bottle, table, 2017, Japan Pavilion // Shezad Dawood, 'Where do we go now?', resin and polychromatic paint, 2017, Leviathan at Palazzina Canonica.

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So at the end of the Arsenale we have a dead artist falling from a tree into a river and a human skeleton morphed with a snake vertebrae gushing over with water and surrounding watery clutter (not photographed). Between the start (arrow boat) and end (scaffold holding up a giant roof reflecting pool) there is water. It all eventually reminded me of how Pompidou shows tend to look, not just those floor to wall platforms but the institutional imperative to explain. The Love show at IMMA curated by Macel in 2015 packed the small galleries with tons of work, showing off all the cool stuff the Pompidou had but also an inability to edit or unwillingness to not include all that could be. That show had lots of great photography never seen before. This one did too. More on that later. 

For now the photo sequence leads me from a gushing cardboard box in Little Britain to the staring vegan millennial cult in Germania (boy in hoodie is standing in a sink). Both shows broke hearts and minds, the sentimental love story of an artist in late career opposed to a young sprite wrecking everyone’s heads with five hours of incongruous actions with fascist and romantic overtones. Epic.

Next door a Japanese artist who built an oil rig on a bin liner seascape out of a food carton and little 3D printer boom cranes which actually turned out to be straws. Then he put them on everything and trying to do lots of different things wrecked the original notion of water reflections of buildings becoming sculptures. This happened in lots of other places too. Outside the Giardini was a private show about whales with literary connections, a shiny table top boat battle was made from the same material as the billionaire boats outside the window. Not sure if this was intentional. The intro video seemed to locate the work in personal and historical points but the financial excess of the presentation was in sync with the tubs outside. It is an epic project that starts in Venice, tours and accumulates until 2020, so there is a lot more to happen there.

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PAGE 3. – (CLICK ON IMAGE) –James Lee Byars, 'The Golden Tower', 1976, Michael Werner Gallery // Ekin Onat or Michal Cole, video projection in bathroom, at The Pavilion of Humanity // Antonio Miralda/Joan Rabascall/Dorothée Selz/Jaume Xifra, 'Rituel en quatre couleurs', performance documentation, 1971 at Arsenale // Kishio Suga, 'Law of Situation', stones, water, wood, 1971/2017 at Arsenale // 'Bad tourist menu seafood' // Nicolás García Uriburu, 'Green Venice', pastel on photograph, 1968 // Shezad Dawood, '[whale]', 2017, Leviathan at Palazzina Canonica // Takesada Matsutani, 'Venice Stream', acrylic, graphite and adhesive on canvas, zinc basin, Sumi ink, water, 2016-17 at Arsenale // Michelle Stuart, 'Dream Collector Carpinteria', wood, paint, metal, beeswax, etc, 2003-12 at Arsenale.

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Hilariously there is a big shiny gold pole which has historical merit that escapes me but it was by the canal. Better still was the Pavilion of Humanity (not a Macel one) at Academia bridge which, like the best DIY apartment based shows, had work in the bathroom and bedrooms making weak concepts flush faster. But that is a bidet in the photo; I know. One of the funniest reviews I have read described someone using the loo in the Estonian bathroom art installation. It did have a sea serpent or snake in ice in the bath but I forgot to take a picture. The rest of the show just confused and disappointed me too much. I had wanted to see the giant photo cut outs and wired domestic combo machines that the artist makes but the rooms were just too claustrophobic and she needed a kunsthalle really, not an apartment to show the work in. 

Back in the Arsenale the curator was showing off her vast knowledge and had found some really dreadful painted photos of Venice canals doing a Paddy’s Day greening as art not tourism, but really, is there a difference? Lots of the work had watery connections. There was a strange encyclopedic joke going on all through the anointed themes. Bad sea food, stones in water, filling bottles and inky drippy globes did not make it better. Back and forth, whale meets boat between different shows. This water-based theme of mine connected all the wrong stuff and sometimes made the good stuff bad, not vice versa. 

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PAGE 4. – (CLICK ON IMAGE) – Geoffrey Farmer, 'A way out of the mirror', pond fountain installation, 2017 Canada Pavilion //Takahiro Iwasaki, 'Out of Disorder...', photograph, 2017, Japan Pavilion // Michelle Stuart, 'Flight of Time', photographs at Arsenale // Vajiko Chachkhiani, 'Living dog among dead lions', house with interior water circulation system, 2017, Georgia Pavilion // Michel Blazy, 'Acqua Alta',  colour photocopies from Instragram, dribbled water, 2017 at Arsenale // Lisa Reihana, 'In Pursuit of Venus [infected]', single channel ultra HD video, 2017, New Zealand Pavilion // Liliana Porter, 'Man With Axe – Venice', 2017, mixed media installation, 2017 at Arsenale // Kananginak Pootoogook, 'Whale Hunt', ink and coloured pencil on paper, 2009.

Page 4

The most spectacular water feature was just that, at Canada, with the building stripped, ponds, clocks, and planks spurting water everywhere. The statement about the work was by the artist not curator, a long thorough thought piece connecting public and personal histories brilliantly. This was a playful spectacle missing in so many other places that have similar mixes of ingredients but fail to deliver. Brings me back to the Japanese cranes and more whales elsewhere but more so the wooden building from Georgia that was raining inside, a sad nationalistic statement of fact, neither fun nor fiction. 

That kind of dynamic came up a lot in the wall panel text and press releases, excruciatingly soft concepts hammered apart by tedious binaries and rambling waffle that overstated the obvious. Speed reading and extracting four pertinent words sufficed as an entertaining interpretative strategy for me and my companion. Water drips in the middle of the Arsenale bore holes in the stacks of coloured photos—how long this took or if it was staged was not very relevant as it was a mid floor counterpoint. Again at building extremities the epic projection of watery histories of New Zealand proved popular as tech spec over indigenous rights, a toy town naval disaster scene proved a narrative is always necessary when you throw stuff into a space and the naive Inuit whale hunt drawings proved that outsiders are in and the same as everyone else, especially when everyone gets the same framer (looks like the show got a good job lot done with the same beech frames on several different works). 

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PAGE 5. – (CLICK ON IMAGE) – Carole Feuerman, 'Bibi on the Ball', hand patinated resin or painted bronze, 2017, at Giardino Della Marinaressa // Nadine Hattom, 'Until the River Winds Ninety Degrees West', vitrine installation with water bottle, etc, 2017 Iraq Pavilion // Charles Atlas, 'The Tyranny of Consciousness', five channel video installation, 2015 at Arsenale // Gustav Courbet, 'La vague', 1872-73, oil on canvas at Fortuny // Francis Upritchard, 'Octopus with Fish', bronze, 2016 at Arsenale // Pierre Huyghe, 'A Journey that wasn't', video,2015 at Fondation Louis Vuitton // Hale Tenger, 'Ballons on the Sea', seven channel video installation, 2011 at Arsenale // Jana Zelibska, 'Swan Song Now', installation, 2017 Czech Republic and Slovak Republic Pavilion // 'The Boat is Leaking The Captain Lied', Fondazione Prada.

Page 5

Again somehow the lady on the beach ball was also equivalent to the bottled water from Iraq, despite good intentions the works there failed to move past grad show standard display, despite a famous name being involved. What stood out all over was queer art, Lady Bunny ranted and sang to great effect mid Arsenale with sunsets on seascapes decrying our neoliberal present. She joined a dozen other queer twists dotted around that provided an edge to the content that so many were sharing. I am probably biased. 

Big budgets and big timelines were more effectively staged at the Fortuny, Louis Vuitton and Prada spaces. Odd that these three fashion houses proved more thoughtful. The intuitive excess at Fortuny was magical in the way it was supposed to be, years of research connecting so much, drawing on so many resources, then hung in chaos that should have been haut-pretentious but just was not. The Antarctic albino penguin translated into animatronic ceiling-bot, the iceberg island translated into orchestra and ice rink surrounded by emergency poncho’d audiences was maybe a has-been but I had not seen it before. The misty trans-disciplined scale of the project is astounding. Compare to fairy light swans or coloured balloons of oppression and all is forgiven for the lift not working and having to suffer walking through a shop. The dying octopus did save someone’s day however. No such problems at Prada where the most complex, well produced show sparkled in the murky canals of art. The mix of photographer, film maker and set designer produced a mind tingling array of crossed purposes. All those fact fiction real imaginary binaries were made non binary. This curatorial queering fluidly fluxed and fucked around with the artists who were all part of this orgy of trans-purposed ideas. There was even a little boat between all the stuff I am not allowing myself write about. The boat was leaking and the captain lied, as the show was called which encapsulated so much of everything, incredibly.💀

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Madder Lake Editions 

I am Not a Painter

JAMES MERRIGAN REFLECTS ON TWO YEARS SPENT MAKING (AND UNMAKING) A FILM ABOUT PAINTING.

*First published in the September – October 2017 'Painting' issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. Edited by Joanne Laws and Lily Power.*

Production still from All or Nothing; Sheila Rennick: courtesy of Saskia Vermeulen & Gareth Nolan.

I am in blood, stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth: Act 3

THIS year’s National College of Art & Design (NCAD) undergraduate degree show had too much painting in it. There was nothing to offset the excess. This criticism is not really rational. It’s based on an expectation that I have formed over the last seven years reviewing the Dublin degree shows as an art critic. Until this year, I had become accustomed to seeing a lack of painting offset by an abundance of ‘everything else’. But whether dead or denied, painting’s rubber duck buoyancy keeps it forever bobbing on the horizon, waiting for the storm of commerce and technology to release its hold on the fickle art scene. Two years ago, a painter friend and I noticed a plastic duck cresting a new wave.

In May 2015, Damien Flood and I headed to Belfast for two reasons: to see Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s solo exhibition at The MAC and (between you and me) to have a last social hurrah in anticipation of my second child, who arrived on 20 July 2015. After Ghenie, we headed to a Belfast pub, early. We drank. We talked. We drank some more – our ambitions and opinions glowing amber through the craft beer, the price of which we unfortunately forgot to ask until much later.

But in 2015, things were looking up. The financial storm was calming and craft beer and flat whites were the froth and bubble of an emerging commercial optimism that would signal, like never before, the gradual gentrification of artist-run spaces and artist studios. The previous five years of recession, of squatter art (of good art!) was giving way to a new art environment where the plywood of institutional critique and social engagement was OUT and the capitalist excess of the art object was IN. I admit to drooling a little bit over those million-dollar ‘Ghenies’ in The MAC. So, if objects were back in, then painting was back in. And painting was back in, especially on the glossy covers of international art magazines and on Instagram.

With objects on our minds and alcohol in our cheeks, our conversation turned to film, painting and then back to film again. See, film was in the air too, especially documentary film, due in part to the rising popularity of platforms like Netflix. So, in that Belfast bar in 2015, Damien and I positively speculated (for the first time since jointly graduating from NCAD in 2008, just before the Lehman Brothers financial hurricane blew in): “what about a documentary on Irish painting?” We proceeded to test that speculation through the doubly speculative process of a funding proposal that didn’t pan out (one of many during this two-year period). But by that stage, we were already committed to the idea.

One good thing about failed funding proposals is that you critically evaluate your idea through the lens of financial pragmatism. Furthermore, through the process of writing down something with a specific readership in mind, the vagaries of art making become more grounded, for better or worse. We discovered that we needed to hand over the idea to filmmakers who had the necessary skills and an objective vision of painting, something Damien and I clearly didn’t possess, as we slid around in our own drool at The MAC.

Luckily for us, the filmmakers Saskia Vermeulen and Gareth Nolan were interested in the idea. Saskia had an art background and Gareth originally came from journalism, so they approached the idea from cinematic and narrative perspectives. In our first meeting, I divulged that I was a lapsed painter, giving up on my love of painting during my MFA at NCAD in 2007, followed by giving up on art making altogether in anticipation of the birth of my first child in 2012. For Saskia and Gareth, my personal story became the narrative hook for the film, which would be offset by the critical reflections of Irish painters who, unlike me, stayed the course.

Here's filmmakers Saskia Vermeulen and Gareth Nolan and art critic James Merrigan reflecting on two years of making and unmaking a film on painting at Gorey School of Art as part Peripheries 2017 : SOUL—BEATING: PAINTING TOLD THROUGH THE LENS OF FILM. Filmed by Michael Byrne on the 4 August 2017.

Saskia and Gareth’s first task was to interview me on camera for three hours against a black backdrop – a choice that became significant later. During the interview, a lot of biographical detail was shared – hard stuff I hadn’t thought about for years, like the death of my mother when I was 13 and my father 10 years later, and how painting played a part in expelling those traumas. But what I learned most from the interview was that reading about the lives of artists, especially painters, was a natural obsession of mine from very early on, forming a belief that life was inextricable from art, no matter how much art was theorised, politicised and professionalised.

The film project was now moving away from a hierarchical overview of ‘painting now’ (a ‘zombie narrative’ on painting’s perennial death and resurrection), to a critical reflection on the ‘nature and nurture’ of painting. The main script-driver became my four-year old son Noah. Watching his own playful development with crayon and paint brush, I began to examine the expressive qualities of painting when removed from education, careers and the gallery space.

Over the course of the next year, one filmed interview followed another; one redacted script replaced another, until we were shortlisted for the very competitive Reel Art Film Award in December 2016, which meant potentially big funding. Although we failed to secure this funding, the panel feedback shored up valuable criticism that influenced our decision to scale down the project, revealing the essence of what this film was really about. This meant reevaluating a year’s worth of filming, of scriptwriting and of life. The rolling title of the film, All or Nothing, became an ironic ultimatum.

We set two dates in the Spring of 2017 to interview six Irish painters – Diana Copperwhite, Damien Flood, Mark Joyce, Mark Swords, Shelia Rennick and Emma Roche – in a dark, prop free film studio in Dublin. Gone were the beautiful location shots of the previous interviews; we had returned to the black backdrop of the first interview from a year earlier, when I had spilled my own guts on camera. Likewise, we wanted our six painters to spill their guts too. And they did. Not wishing to divulge too much – as the film is still in production and decisions still have to made regarding which footage will make the final cut during those two days in Dublin, the artists revealed rich lives bound up in an addiction to painting. They discussed doubt as a painter, the emotional aftermath of exhibiting and the uppers, downers, pleasures and frustrations of the addiction. I posited Francis Bacon’s ‘all or nothing’ notion of ‘emptying out’ on the canvas. They shared details of their childhoods and first memories, discussing how validation from parents, teachers and friends was enough to ‘wade on’ and to make a life out of painting. We argued about how being a painter can only tolerate monogamy – that the responsibilities of life will inevitably get in the way of the pursuit of painting.

Sitting face-to-face with six artists over a 48-hour period in a blacked-out film studio, projecting opinions and feelings about the lifelong motivations behind becoming a painter, was testing but invigorating. It really felt like we were doing something different, tackling human creativity at its kernel. During these interviews, I was accused of being too personal and psychological in my questioning; occasionally I felt I was poking at things that were strictly out of bounds. But we achieved what we set out to capture: the nature and nurture of painting, relayed through the critical reflections of six Irish painters in response to the biographically-intimate self-questioning of a lapsed painter (yours truly).

All or Nothing is presently in the edit room. Saskia and Gareth presented raw interview footage, offering a work-in-progress presentation of the film as part of a painting exhibition I curated entitled ‘Peripheries 2017: Soul-beating’, which ran from 28 July to 5 August at Gorey School of Art.

*On Wed 4 October 2017 (19.00 - 20.00) at Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, I will be reflecting on painting's primacy within my curated, textual and film projects*

Note

1. Other artists that were interviewed on camera or along the way include: Robert Armstrong, Susan Connolly, Colin Crotty, Ramon Kassam, Mairead O’hEocha, Mark O’Kelly, Eoin Mc Hugh, Kevin Mooney, Aileen Murphy, Ciaran Murphy, Alison Pilkington and Kathy Tynan.

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Madder Lake Editions

Under the Rose

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sub rosa (adv.)

privately, secretly, Latin, literally 'under the rose', as a symbol of secrecy.

Email subject lines are odd creatures. Their nature changes depending on your relationship with the recipient. Family and friends put little thought into the subject line, while industry will be explicit or abstract in their messaging or manipulation. 

Your correspondent (me) received an email last week from another aspiring art critic (whom we will refer to as X from now on) with the subject line:

attempting to be a critic hashtag bricking it (this is not spam)

Art criticism is something you usually keep to yourself, like gambling or grief. But rolling the dice and feeling out loud is what art criticism is all about. So your correspondent – after reading your email subject line and following letter – is honoured to be your confession box; all devilishly knowing and angelically understanding of your critical vice.

Thing is we are all clandestine critics most of the time, wearing wings for horns and horns for wings. You've overheard your peers being critical of their peers' work. You've done the deed yourself under the rose. Even your artist-friends have received your snicker-snack tongue. Most of the time the tip is dripping with envy. But in rare moments the sub rosa criticism has a redness and sharpness to it that is calling for nib and paper. Eavesdropping under the rose you believe that there's redemption in words, in criticism, in art. 

But under the rose criticism withers to take root and spread underfoot our tiptoe natures. Because criticism is always personal, subjective and messy we store our thoughts and feelings in the attic of the art scene, where they end up scuttling around with two faces. So it's no surprise that you were met by "funny looks" when you admitted to your friends that you wanted to write art criticism. To be fair you had just dropped down from the attic wearing one face. 

Your email's subject line – attempting to be a critic hashtag bricking it – implies that you are experiencing anxiety in anticipation of the act of art criticism. But hold on to that, that is exactly where art criticism starts, and ought to start, between anxiety and excitement. And if you are not feeling the former then you are just out to offend, nothing more. So you are on the right track, feeling the normal feelings as you swerve toward where the gravel collects to lever over the cliff face and look down at the whooping Lemmings backing into each other in the valley below. 

You also admit to experiencing rejection in your email. You will learn that rejection is par for the course; from editors, artists, especially from your art writing peers, most of whom will practise criticism on you but not out there where it belongs, above the petals and thorns. More's the pity because their words are never as energetic and interesting and passionate when they are taking a swipe at you. 

Unfortunately, criticism starts where most adoptive love starts, at the moment of validation – like when your Mammy melted when she saw a drawing you made at seven years of age. Your correspondent's critical beginnings were fostered and nurtured by, of all professions, editors, who offered the second chances needed when yours truly was just an anagrammatic platypus.

Without former editor of Circa Magazine Peter FitzGerald's guiding hand and support at the very beginning, a decade ago now – when he was met in an email by an avalanche of opinion, will and words – he was there patiently waiting with the snow plough in the wings. Then there was the editor of Visual Artists' News Sheet, the late Jason Oakley, who softened my tone with a 'perhaps' here and a 'maybe' there, showing me there's value in lower case when you critique exclusively in CAPITALS. But don't make editors into your mammy or daddy forevermore. They'll just temper and guilt and validate you the way parents do, and we know how that ends up.

So, you're right, a personal blog is a good place to start. You can play there without your parents looking over your shoulder. You can love there, rage there, allow personal experience to colour and enrich your words. There you can sacrifice the rose; there you can source words that self repression and self protection obstruct. 

You are going to make mistakes. The bonus is you will find a voice that hasn't been conditioned too much by some art magazine's house style. Art critics should free climb to a self-made temperament that is mostly made of muscle memory. Temperament is something you have in you if you are contemplating being an art critic – it's in your email's verbs and verse. But to be honest, it's more in your email than your published piece. That's good. You can be both, do both. You need to be both if you want to sustain the other critic's temperament, a temperament that can grow sour without validation. 

There's also something about the timeliness of art criticism. Newspaper art critic Roberta Smith disclosed in a presentation that she felt depressed when she wasn't writing art criticism by the seat of her pants, and especially when her words were not part of the conversation due to being published long after the exhibition she reviewed was over. Criticism dies a death when it's late to the party.

Potential art critics are always falling by the wayside, getting caught up in notions of acceptance or career, or drifting into a 'way' of writing. Bottom line, the art critic is the mongrel you pick up from the pound, doe-eyed and drooling lips; eyes and lips that can grow sharper, depending on the rose garden that you have dragged her in to. But being a mongrel allows you to try everything out, every tone and every territory, prose and poetry. Play. 

Please don't ask yourself why you want to write criticism. Don't try to define criticism in the grand scheme of things. It's personal to you; fuck the critical gap! Don't even call it criticism; it's writing on art without limits. Artists most of the time don't know why they want to express themselves in the medium of their choice, so why should critics know why words need to be forged in the act of criticism.

But you need to build a fellowship, and it's never in plain sight. Sometimes you will receive an email filled with petals or thorns; other times you fall back on the critical writers you admire. Christopher Hitchens was one of my go to critics in the beginning: he shared this in an interview:

"...it's not for everybody, not everyone wants to always be an awkward cuss or out of step or against the stream, but if you do feel the consensus doesn't speak for you, if there's something about you that makes you feel that it would be worth being unpopular or marginal for the chance to lead your own life and have a life instead of a career or job then, I can promise you, it is worthwhile, yeah."

So. If you feel the consensus doesn't speak for you, that words become a little flat when your truth isn't being expressed, do what Sol Lewitt advised in the last line of an avalanche of words he scribed to his friend and fellow artist Eva Hesse in 1965.

Stop it and just

DO

Safe Passage through the Artworld X.

James

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Madder Lake Editions

Long-Form : in conversation with Mark Swords

Joaquin Phoenix reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in sex shop; from Joel Schumacker’s 8mm (1999).

Context : Mark Swords

Every now and then Mark Swords and I meet for a coffee to discuss art-making and the Irish art scene in a small coffee shop in Gorey Town: we both tutor at Gorey School of Art (GSA). We usually end up talking about painting because Mark Swords paints and I'm into talking to painters about the stubborn nature and nurture of painting.

Recently I brought up a painting that Mark painted in 2012 titled Forgery (pictured below); a painting I fell in love with when I co-selected it as part of the group exhibition 'Making Familiar' at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin.

The painting in question wasn't the type of Mark Swords painting I had come to know and accept as a 'Mark Swords' painting at the time. Sure, the hallmarks were there—a collage of shapes somehow falling together and falling apart like a teenage summer romance. But this one-off painting felt like it had escaped the studio prematurely, looking more like a working palette for a more resolved painting that was already out in the world somewhere. But unlike some painters not noticing their palettes performing better than their paintings, Mark saw enough value in this thing to pack it into the car and put it out there in the 'maybe bunch' for the exhibition.

What attracted me to this painting first was... it was active, a work-in-progress. Primary colours were unmixed in parts while blue, yellow and red became the under-crust of shitty browns elsewhere. There was an erotic slit down the middle of the primed slab of wood on which these colours sulked and played together. It was a painting by a man who wanted to be a child, or a child who wanted to be a man, or a little of both: it was a transworld of thresholds. It could have went either way but we would never know because Mark stopped at the wrong moment. It was a maybe. It was an almost... it was almost a Mark Swords.

Five years on that painting still drops in on my brain. My first memory of the painting is of it propped up against the gallery wall among a lineup of certainties but I picked this wife beater. It jarred the whole exhibition, even with Paul Doran's paintings alongside; but it gave me joy and it formed a stubborn memory that I will probably never shift.

Mark's current solo show at TBG&S has a whole lot of the stuff that made Forgery so obstinate and verbose and good. As promo for a talk that he was giving on the show at TBG&S Mark posted an in-profile selfie on Instagram in which he is performing a 'silent' shout or scream or yawn against a shelf of books. It made me laugh and balk much the same way his paintings make me laugh and balk.

In the coffee shop I brought up the question of 'response' to Mark's work at TBG&S. He had got some; during the opening and during the talk. He was relatively happy, considering what he had said to me before about the "100% experience" of process versus the 'eh' (my exclamation) of everything afterwards.

So I shared my experience of the exhibition with him—no questions just my experience because it's less evasive. First, it reminded me of Forgery. Then it made me laugh inwardly, like an in-joke for one. I brought up comedy, he brought up Stewart Lee; he brought up carnival, I thought Mikhail Bakhtin; he brought up notions of coyness and discovery and necessary ambiguity; I brought up exhibiting explicit self-awareness and sincerity; we brought up a whole lot of 'what ifs' and I said his show was a criticism of painting. He was about to respond but lunch was over.

After lunch we walked back to GSA and I suggested we make this into an interview that started mid-sentence without all the introductory niceties.

Here it is.

Mark Swords, 'The Living and The Dead', Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 15 April - 17 June 2017: photo: Peter Rowan

James Merrigan: Before I get to the question of your show at TBG&S being a criticism of painting... no, forget that, is your show a criticism of painting? Maybe you could describe what you have done in the gallery?

Mark Swords: The show is a collection of work (some 30 pieces) made over the last three years, but, more than that, it is an experiment in terms of installation that has been developing in my head for the last couple of years. Nearly all the work in the show has been hung against various patterned and painted wall coverings. The paintings are quite close together and so there's not a lot of space in the show; it looks very dense and complex.

The answer to your question is: no. This show is probably many things before it is a criticism of painting although I would acknowledge that I make work as much informed by my criticisms of other artworks as it is by what I value. So, for example there are a lot of approaches and techniques which are absent from my work because I feel that they are not part of what is exciting and interesting about painting. I think many artist's work can be seen as putting forward a case for their position and so, by implication a case against what they do not value.

Maybe painting more than other mediums has all this space around it. Space that focuses our attention on the artwork which reflects some aspect of the world (depending on the artist's intentions). And that is great. I have enjoyed that in the past and probably will again in the future. But for some time I have been interested in experimenting with this and wanting to deny all that space. I  was curious to try to mimic the world and the way we experience it—everything together, unedited, unpredictable, exciting, contradictory.

But I am interested in how it could be viewed as a criticism of painting? Is that because of the paintings themselves or the installation. Or, more appropriately maybe, both; and the ways in which the installation gets in the way of viewing the pieces in a more conventional way?

JM: Perhaps my question about your current work at TBG&S being a criticism of painting should be rephrased with the help of your response about the denial and replacement of the negative space that usually surrounds painting in the gallery with your use of this carnival backdrop of colour and texture. This is a big twist in the tale of what I have come to accept as a 'Mark Swords' exhibition, and can't be waved away as merely an experiment, especially in terms of a painter who has developed a recognisable and established identity over a good many years and is also represented by a gallery that deals not just in objects but the luxurious white wall that isolates painting and gives it its object value.

However, the notion that you're denying the conventional breathing space to experience and judge the objet d'art that is painting as a criticism of painting could be transferred to the notion that this display is a criticism of Mark Swords the Earlier, the Previous, the Younger, Lol? Further, you have placed one painting in the gallery that performs in splendid isolation. Is this a lonely signpost to the past?

Mark Swords, 'The Living and The Dead', Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 15 April - 17 June 2017: photo: Peter Rowan

MS: Yes, there are criticisms of my previous work in 'The living and the dead' but not condemnation. That is probably natural for an artist and is certainly true of any new body of work I have made.

The most significant criticism of "Mark Swords the Earlier" as you put it is not the use of the gallery walls per se, it's more the inexperience and naivety of not questioning the conventions of exhibitions. I am starting to think that an artist can hide behind the conventions of the gallery; that, and ambiguity.

I remember listening to someone who had been present at early peace talks between The Provisional IRA and British representatives and they used the term 'constructive ambiguity' in relation to language. I thought it useful to re-appropriate that term to art-making—to create space and room for different interpretations. I think I have done this a lot in past exhibitions without consciously doing so. In my current show there are a number of different things I am doing to address my self-criticisms and my attempts to be more up front about how and what I am doing in my work: writing directly onto the paintings, an openness to subject matter, and the installation itself to name a few.

Mark Swords, 'The Living and The Dead', Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 15 April - 17 June 2017: photo: Peter Rowan

But I think you may be underestimating the importance of experimentation for me. I don't mean to diminish the installation of 'The living and the dead' by describing it as an experiment ("merely an experiment”), but it began as an experiment in the studio and progressed into something more substantial as it became an abstract depiction of a place. This is the same thought process (of trying and testing) and the same artist who made Forgery, the painting you discussed in your intro. Most of the reasons I made that piece were to do with the things (I thought then) one should not do as an artist: so, appropriating another person's decisions about form and colour; celebrating crudeness in terms of execution and allowing myself to make a piece of work that did not 'fit' with its peers—a hiccup. And I should admit to an attitude of testing rules, poking at my own assumptions or, as other people may see it, being mischievous; a miscreant perhaps.

I am immediately anxious about the tone of self promotion in what I am saying here, maybe because it is written instead of spoken. I am not operating under the assumption that what I am doing is significantly ground breaking or challenging or that these things have not been explored more succinctly by better artists many years ago. Sometimes art history can excite and embarrass us and make me feel very conservative.

JM: Okay. Let’s take all this from another angle by discussing something less cerebral and critical—pleasure.

In previous conversations we have discussed the pleasure in the process of making paintings. When I was with your work in TBG&S I got the same giddy feeling that I get sometimes when I visit an artist’s studio. I can only call it surprise mixed with pleasure. I don’t get this feeling often in the gallery space. I got it from Mary Heilmann’s paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery London last year. When I don’t get it I put it down to the studio experience vs. the gallery experience: the studio being a place of play and risk, experimentation and excess; the gallery being an endpoint to that play and risk, experimentation and excess. The exhibition is of course a necessity because all that play and risk, experimentation and excess can only end up destructive if it doesn’t have an endpoint where the process is framed and isolated by the white walls of the gallery to be appreciated as a cerebral and emotive event and so forth. But I have to admit that sometimes the artist’s studio reflects all the excess of the “unedited” world that you speak of better than the exhibition ever could.

Your work at TBG&S (in my experience of it) had the feeling of the artist’s studio about it. The play and risk, experimentation and excess wasn’t as distilled as it could have been if you hadn’t denied so much white-walled gallery space and substituted it with this carnival of colour. There are paintings in that big mattress of paintings at TBG&S that wouldn’t have made the cut of a Mark Swords The Earlier exhibition. That’s why when you mentioned “carnival” the other day as defined as the collapsing of hierarchies and societal norms I thought immediately of Mikhail Bakhtin. I wrote an art college thesis on Bakhtin’s carnival in relation to painting and other stuff back in 2004. What I took from Bakhtin’s theory of carnival (aside from the political upending of society) was the pleasure one gets when the playing field is levelled and the rules are broken.

Stewart Lee on stage.

So in short what I am wondering is, by experimenting in this way at TBG&S and breaking a few of your own rules in the gallery space, did you experience pleasure doing it? And if so, how can you go back to giving the white wall more territory in the gallery when you have ‘danced with the devil’—a reference to a line that Joaquin Phoenix delivers to Nicholas Cage in the Joel Schumacher film 8mm (1999): “If you dance with the devil, the devil don’t change. The devil changes you.”

MS: In an artist interview I enjoyed recently the interviewer was talking about meeting an ex-girlfriend whom he had once loved but when they had met 20 years later they hardly recognised each other. He surmised that deeply intimate things change one’s character forever. This was also said in the context of discussing how it is possible to draw or paint something so often that it can lose its meaning and become just a shape to be used or arranged.

You are asking (I assume) if I can make an exhibition in the future which would be like one of my previous exhibitions, and the answer is, no, I cannot. And I am wondering (as I write this) whether I would want to…?

Everything we do probably changes us. I have worked very hard for a couple of years on this show and through reading, thinking and reflecting it has become significant for me and has, no doubt, changed the way I will approach being an artist. But I would have to say the same of previous bodies of work.

I am very pleased by your suggestion that there is a sense of the studio about my show. This was certainly something I wanted to achieve. For a while now it has bothered me the way an exhibition can so alter an artwork that some of the life is taken out of work when it goes on show; paintings that once excited can deflate in a different context. This is not to say that I wish to exhibit my studio (I did that kind of a few years ago at Wexford Arts Centre). It’s more that I want to achieve the feeling of play that occurs in the studio in the exhibition.

Mary Heilmann, ‘Looking at Pictures’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2016

I wonder was it the ‘playing’ that you responded to in the Mary Heilmann show? I think that kind of testing and questioning is in her work and so I wonder how much of this is about the execution of the work and how much is about the staging of the exhibition? It’s worth saying that there was a lot of white wall in that show. I think the studio (play, risk, experimentation and excess) is in that work; those paintings are about that stuff and that’s how the studio is in that show as it were.

I don’t know Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on Carnival but I found it coincidental to read that Bakhtin’s “… carnivalesque is tied to the body and the public exhibition of its private functions.” ( This is from Theodore F. Sheckels Maryland Politics and Political Communication 1950-2005 which I have NOT read). I admit to using this out of context but, isn’t there something in this description of the carnivalesque—the public exhibition of its more private functions—that is similar to the relationship between the studio (private) and the exhibition (public)?

I don’t know what my next exhibition will look like until I have made the work, but I would acknowledge that the experience of this show will be assimilated. I take hope in what I was saying about Mary Heilmann’s work containing all that stuff from the studio, especially if it doesn’t get polished out; and that what we are talking about is not white walls or coloured patterns. It is about intent and priorities.

JM: It was the ‘playing’ that I responded to in the Mary Heilmann show. It happened to another guy when I was there too: he was just standing there with the work and every now and then he would nod and smile and laugh to himself. I assume he was experiencing the same thing I was, the brain getting won over by the heart.

Heilmann’s paintings are so simple that you would never think them up, because we think we are so clever in our own heads but most of the time we are really dumb in our own heads. So I admire artists who can transcend their own intent and priorities and make something that has heart.

Your Forgery painting has an equal measure of head and heart, not to mention the title is powerfully tautological. Why would you copy such an ugly and awkward painting by poplar standards of beauty and skill (for the art audience I suppose). And isn’t all painting made yesterday, today and tomorrow a forgery—everything been done and all that. Forgery was also the odd one out in what you were doing at the time; it signalled a paradigm shift which I always get excited about in an artist’s work and which I think has manifested absolutely in ‘The Living and the Dead’.

‘Making Familiar’ (2012), Mark Swords and Paul Doran in conversation; Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin.

But Forgery is contained execution of all that stuff we have been talking about here; ‘The Living and the Dead’ is a mushroom cloud. And I wonder what’s the difference, between what you describe as the execution and the staging of painting? You are sacrificing a lot of good execution to the whole in the staging at TBG&S. There’s vulnerability being exhibited there too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting artists should be continually destructive—Mary Heilmann achieves absolute optimism in a practice that keeps on testing the vulnerability and risk intrinsic to simple forms. Personally I want to experience the energy of the studio and the essence of the artist and the artist’s life in the work displayed in the gallery.

Since we have been having these conversations you have had a baby whilst also making art. But you have not just been ticking away, your intent and priorities have come to the surface of your new work, especially this new focus on painting at the expense of your previous sculptural tidbits. This thankfully proves me completely wrong that good and risky and playful art can be even made, and especially made if tethered to a life full of bigger and more important responsibilities than just art. That’s optimism, it’s even overly romantic, something that I know you are suspicious of with regards to the painter.

So your next show, if it is to live up to the head and heart of ‘The Living and Dead’ will either tease out or collapse what you have done here. You are in deep waters now. No pressure.

MS: In relation to the ‘execution and staging of paintings’: I only meant the making and finishing of individual works v.s. the staging—how those works come together in an exhibition. They can be (usually are) very different things. You have said that some of my paintings in ‘The living and the dead’ may not have made-the-cut in one of my previous exhibitions, and maybe you’re right, but I never really thought of them that way. As well as being individual works I was always conscious of what they were adding to the overall collection of pieces—a different noise, scale or imagery for example.

I took out Forgery today and spent some time looking at it just because your bringing it up got me wondering about its significance to what I am doing now, five years later. I still find it exciting (I was a bit surprised) and am still confused by its formal arrangement of shapes and dirty colours. I also feel that it comes very close to failing as it flirts with notions of badness/wrongness? Maybe most of all I think it has a vibrancy about it, as if it might start moving. It feels like a paused frame from an admittedly unlikely cartoon. I have a habit of describing it (and other works I have made) as “nasty”, which is a little disingenuous because that’s just a shorthand description for something I feel is beautiful despite its initial appearance. Lots of elements come together in Forgery: form, scale, intent, title and others to produce something richer, more challenging and more open for a viewer to experience.

You mentioned our conversation including Stewart Lee and his interest in pueblo clowns and the anarchism of carnival, but he is also interested in questioning his own work while performing it; playing with the form as it were. He talks about returning to stand up after a four-year break and how a contingent of his audience were giving him the benefit of the doubt because he had written a critically acclaimed musical in the interim period. It was, for him a case of well, he can’t be an idiot so he must be choosing to do his standup in this weird and monotonous way.

CHRIS MARTIN’S TAZ (2007-2015) portrays virtuoso Jazz musician Myles Davis amid palm trees and glitter and paint. The painting was on show in 2015 in the Chris Martin solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.

I’ve also heard Lee speak apologetically about jazz musicians on a number of occasions to demonstrate a similar point. I think he says that in a jazz set there may be moments of clear melody or a demonstration of the musicians’ skill which, as much as anything else, serves to say to the audience: ‘It’s ok, we CAN play, we know how to do this but we are choosing to do it another way on purpose.’ I wouldn’t say this is what I am doing in my work explicitly but I do like these ideas and they have played a role in my decision-making. Strangely, Lee usually apologises for the Jazz analogy and for seeming pretentious (I don’t think he really means it). I don’t find it pretentious at all which might make me pretentious, but in a way I’m ok with that.

Mark Swords, ‘The Living and The Dead’, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 15 April – 17 June 2017: photo: Peter Rowan

Thank you to Mark Swords.

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Madder Lake Editions

1986

Frank Horvat, Le Sphinx, Paris, 1956

Meanwhile in 1986 an art critic is sharing his opinion of another art critic with another art critic…

“…..The other thing I think is important about Rene Ricard is that he represents a kind of sordidness that it’s important for the art world to believe that it is still capable of. The art world is supposed to be alienated, to be on the periphery—and it’s not. In fact, it’s very much integrated into the mainstream of culture. It’s not that most people like art; rather, it’s that the art world has found a secure place in ordinary life—which goes against all the avant-garde’s claims to being adventurous and in opposition. At a time when artists bring in architects to design their lofts, a flaky character like Ricard is very important. He makes it more believable that art is odd and weird and challenging.” (Carter Ratcliff in Janet Malcolm’s A GIRL OF THE ZEITGEIST—II, The New Yorker, 1986)

This is 2017; just saying.

Now… in all the years writing art criticism I have never once used the word ‘seedy’: believe me I’ve checked. From childhood to adulthood I remember coming across seedy situations without the vocabulary or experience to name them; situations when you cross the threshold of quotidian cleanliness to dirty diabolical, innocence to experience.

For instance.

In the village I grew up in there was this back-alley video store that I hung out at, day in, day out. In hindsight the video store was super seedy on the spectrum of childhood innocence. You could spend hours there reading the film synopses on greasy-backed VHS video cassettes with their tacky images and tackier textures; those sheepish customers that you never heard asking for the under-the-counter-porn but were edging in the aisles building up the seeds and courage to ask: desire beats denial every time. Then there was the video man who was a god among men because he had delivered a resource and ‘release’ to the villagers that wasn’t drink or GAA-related.

My research into the question as to why seedy hasn’t ever entered my writing until now has brought me dangerously close to queer theory and thus Judith Butler et al. But I decided I wouldn’t get any pleasure splitting the phallus to cockfight academic theories of male heterosexual and homosexual ‘seedy’ against new-age feminist ‘safe’ even if I signposted them HORN DOG SEX SHOP and FRESH FOREST VALLEY OF ANN SUMMERS. Instead I am going to fall into the undergrowth and find my way through the thorns and muck and hopefully get some scratches on my kneecaps and war paint on my face.

The word ‘seedy’ came into my sights recently when I was trying to organise a location for the forthcoming book launch of Madder Lake. One of the artists involved suggested a nightclub or sex club, in keeping with the tone of the DEEP-SEATED series of public and private conversations that took place in 2016 at Limerick’s Ormston House, Cork’s Crawford Art College, and Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. (Long story short psychoanalysis was the base theory of the conversations which led us into all matter of things sexually and critically abject). Anyway, the art scene seemed a world apart from the undergrowth and muck we thrashed through in the conversations.[1]

There was something else too.

I recently read an article in The New Yorker—circa Down and Out in Beverly Hills(1986)—that primarily follows the trail of artist and writer, Rene Ricard. Ricard was a mover and shaker in the New York art scene after emerging from the Warhol Factory fabulously scathed. He was also a maker—through his writing as well as cavorting— of such bluechip artists as the One whom everyone loves to hate, Julian Schnabel, and the One whom everyone seems to love, Basquiat. Beside all that, Ricard was blessed with a Wildean wit and equipped with Cupid’s bow to deliver a line that kissed the mind and bit the lip. The author of The New Yorker piece gives us an image of the 1980s New York scene along with Ricard:

“On this night, the Palladium has been turned over to a party for Keith Haring, and it is filled with beautifully and/or weirdly dressed people from the art world and its periphery. I come upon Ricard in a room that is apart from the discothèque proper, called the Mike Todd Room, which has a large bar, small marble-topped tables, and wire-back chairs, and is where the celebrities of the art world like to congregate. Ricard, resplendent in a white sharkskin suit, is sitting at one of the tables, in a state of high, almost incandescent excitement.”

When you go a little deeper into the world of Ricard his exploits have a dirty romanticism to them when contrasted with the wholesomeness of, for lack of a better known quantity, our art scene. Saying that sounds like I’m placing some value on seediness for its own sake, and that the art scene is a big Ivory boner always auto-polishing itself to appear publicly toothy but privately decayed… Maybe…

…..I’ll get back to you on that if and when the undergrowth thins out and the war paint is less messy…

The only time the art world is branded seedy is when, in the global news media, there is a corrupt gallery director or art thief involved in some shady dealings. “That, sadly, is a market at work, and suppressing it would only bestow the seedy glamour of the underground.” (anonymous) In more general terms, seedy in the online world is situated on the event horizon of the deep web: seedy is dirty rather than dangerous. In the real world—if I can call it that now—seedy is decorated in sex tapes and pornstars… continuing… an Xmas tinsel boa around the neck of a hooker giving head to a homeless guy on a toilet that won’t flush. Or is that just #gross.

Taking into account that the meaning of words change over time, especially at a time of #meanings, ‘seedy’, even when #seedy is used on Instagram as the personification of being #dirty/#sexy, the word still retains the essence of those handed-down meanings; from originally defining a flower that has lost its vibrancy after shedding its seeds, to being the adjective that loiters around sex shops and back entrances to nightclubs. The city has a lot to answer for.

Personally I’ve never personified the word seedy in casual speech; the word has always been embedded in a setting rather than a person, like the word ‘uncanny’, i.e., David Lynch’s mise en scène. Sure, a guy wearing a stiff rain mack and greasy hair can activate seediness but the blinking pink LEDs from the sex shop also need to be in the frame. TV taught me everything.

Emerging from the undergrowth with kneecaps and war paint in tact I am still not certain why I have decided to side with seediness here. Perhaps it stems from it not fitting in; that it is the one non-site that art rejects. Strange thing is, I would call a lot of Bruce Nauman’s art seedy, but Paul McCarthy’s less so. And Bruce and Paul (sounds better Paul and Bruce) get me thinking about how art students sometimes embrace seediness but they never graduate into the art scene where expression is a little less raw and derelict because of the big Ivory boner polisher.

In my case it could be a case of being around too many white walls and artist statements that begin with the public announcement “My practice….” The Deep-Seated discussions opened up a discourse that was less concerned with discipline and impressing on the public a notion about art being public and wanting to be public. In a sense it was about reigning it all in; not shedding the seeds so the vibrancy and potency remain. There’s something intimate and close quartered about seediness that can’t go beyond the width of a video store in some back-alley in some backwater village.

I think what Glenn Frey of The Eagles said about Hotel California says a lot about continuums of experience and exposure: “It was a journey from innocence into experience.” It’s also like what pornstar Puma Swede says in her memoir My Life as a Pornstar: “Then, while the rest of the [porn] staff was eating dinner, we went over to US Video, a notoriously seedy porn shop…”.

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Madder Lake Editions

Frank & Betsy

{I’m standing watching Jonathan Mayhew’s video work in Wexford Arts Centre and a man walks out of the adjoining cafe and drags a screeching chair across the gallery floor to plonk right down beside me—footsy-close—crosses his legs before shouting into his phone something about his daughter’s dress being the wrong size and having it returned.}*

{I’m sitting in a dark filmset about to ask a painter ‘What is his first memory?’ He is the sixth painter I have put this same question to over the course of two days. I’m not sure what but I know we are doing something important, here. NOW is something you feel rather than KNOW.}

{I’m pissing into a public toilet filled with ice cubes. Social anxiety heats the pure gold.}

In the last week I have interviewed six Irish painters on film, attended an art-scene social, reviewed an exhibition and written this. What I’ve learnt from all this is: being social is hard work and we tailor ourselves for other people, even tailor our identities through the objects we make and promote as artists. No one is socially consistent, whether in life, social media or art.

How we act and portray ourselves around others and online has partly to do with how our big brothers treated us or the type of imaginary friends we had as kids. We are our deepest and oldest insecurities. As artists we laugh along with the social banalities with our heads in the crooks of our arms thinking of that Frankenstein’s monster in the studio and why it won’t come together.

{As the ice melts I remember a painter’s response to my question about the monogamous nature of painting, “Painting doesn’t tolerate mistresses!”}

Scary…..even Mary Shelley’s monster wanted a bride. As artists—now, I’m just putting this out there—we’re never really alive, always waiting for that stormy night and that green bolt of lightning to come crackling into the laboratory.

In a real sense the Internet has become the artist’s Dr. Frankenstein. Fabricating oneself, one’s art, through the lens of social media is the defining condition of what it means to be an artist today. And even though we have never had more access to the lives of artists, their studios, their homes, their interests, their loves, their social lives, their affiliations, their cats, dogs, these online editions of ourselves are bloodless and grey, sewn together with detached imagery and ironic sentiment that are never complete and cannot possibly replace flesh and blood. But we let them, these cold and fluid avatars. Assumption is the clown of humanity.

{I’m looking across at a flesh and blood painter who is under the gaze of 10 lenses, machine and human. She speaks like humans do. Nothing’s drafted; everything is second-guessed. It’s wonderful. Flesh and blood and sweat.]

Some Minotaur once said that ‘death mythologises’. I’ve come to learn that enigma is delivered in silence, and a mask if you casual a cape. But first-hand experience tells me that’s not really how I define and value enigma in someone else.

The people I am drawn to are enigmatic because they question things out loud. These rough diamonds tell me what they think of me in person and they are open to the vice versa. It’s their own version of the truth but at least they are committed to the lie. And I’m not waving the criticism flag here; it’s more a tuned-in-self-acknowledged-vulnerability that I’m talking about. There’s probably something socially wrong with them, this syndrome or that disorder, but at least they’re consistent and I know where I stand; that is, when I’m not being shell-shocked by their candour.

Myself: some days I want to be Frank, other days Betsy, but I’m never James Merrigan online—the guy pissing in the toilet right now willing the gold stream to never stop and the ice to never melt. I feel inconsistent most of the time online. I blame my big brother whose music taste defined inclusiveness but not in an ethical way. The 1980s was his excuse.

So seven days ago I found myself on a filmset, up close and personal with six Irish painters questioning them on the nature and nurture of painting. Aside from the practicalities of making a documentary I wanted to dig behind the paint we see and the painter we don’t. The nature and nurture of it all. Wishing for a green lighting bolt I wanted to discover if the painter was alive, flesh and blood:

“It’s Alive! It’s Alive!”

Something happens however when we are being photographed or filmed, when the lens is put onto us. We call it self-consciousness but it’s not that at all. We are anything but self-conscious under the lens. It’s more a body thing, an energy thing. We bounce. We curl. We tick. We speed. We gape. We imagine the image being recorded reveals something about us. We become all at once the child looking through the microscope for the first time and the amoeba being watched by the child. An inverse staring match takes place: ‘How do I look?’

{After pissing I realised I hadn’t looked in the mirror.}

The camera lies like everything else, though. It’s all surface stuff. We can’t capture ourselves so what hope is there for a lens. Five years down the line we might gain some insight into how some trauma or little earthquake affected us but other than those rare moments of sobriety that uncannily burst into the present from the past and shake us with dusty Mummy arms, we get through the present by merely getting by. We are always eating our own dust.

My hope in these filmed interviews with painters is to unwrap the Mummy, mine own and theirs. It was put to me on the filmset that this type of questioning, self-analysis, psychology, is not helpful. I asked “am I being destructive?”. It wasn’t elaborated further as to whom was being destroyed, them or me.

Henry Miller talks about these cadenzas when writing that, no matter how fast he could type he was chasing a thought that was faster than him. What a drug, to tap into this source, in the gut, or soul, or whatever and allow the Alien to burst through the armature and gnaw the mask off; or at the very least start bashing the typewriter with its maw. On film, in person, consensually toe-to-toe (unlike screeching-chair-man at Wexford Arts Centre), I feel I caught the tail of a cadenza or two and I assume (being a fool) the interviewees did too.

So here I am on a filmset, at a social, in the jacks, asking, listening, drinking, writing, questioning what is to be social all the while searching for what it is to really know someone, flesh and blood, and their art, flesh and blood.

———————–

*My review of Jonathan Mayhew’s solo at Wexford Arts Centre can be read in the forthcoming March/April issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

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Madder Lake Editions

Junction

The sun was a headlight.

I was driving the other morning to work. I decided the night before that I would listen to David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech en route to the art school where I tutor one day a week, in order to judge whether it was relevant to the lesson I was delivering and appropriate for the students I was tutoring. After showing it I’m still not certain about either.

On the YouTube video you are given just a still image of Wallace while you listen to his recorded voice. He stands at a podium set against a milky-tea backdrop. He wears long hair, short-sleeves, glasses and a beard. His arms are spread, sermon-like. But beneath this Jesus Christ posture his brow seems to buckle a little under the weight of some inner burden that would be found out three years later when Wallace would take his own life at age 46.

While listening to his voice in the car I begin to imagine the audience of graduates at the American College where this speech took place in 2005. They are gazing up with theoretical appreciation at the wiser and older Wallace while clapping and laughing out of beat with his message. “Wise old fish” among younger fish is something Wallace professes he is not to the student cohort on that day, with that type of self-criticism that bespeaks a thinker and writer who was relentlessly self-critical underneath his lexical command of the world. A tortured narcissist, terribly alone.

Rather than badly retell what Wallace posited on that “dry and lovely morning” at Kenyon College Ohio, I will get to the heart or at least a chamber of his speech’s sentiment: each and everyone of us is a hardwired narcissist, stuck most of the time in what Wallace refers to as our “default-setting” of self-centredness. We battle this self-centredness every time we are met by that ubiquitous obstacle and annoyance, other people, what Sartre too famously called “Hell”. To paraphrase Wallace: ‘I am the centre of the Universe and the world orbits me. I am gravity.’

But we have a choice in all of this according to Wallace. We can choose how to think, how to construct meaning from quotidian experience. We can choose to be aware of ourselves and other people. (Sometimes I want to crack my skull open, so maybe, just maybe, I could get a peek at the multitude blind spots – I think Wallace found a way to do so that granted him both beautiful insight and ugly self-injury.)

Narcissism isn’t what we are made to think it is in popular culture. The narcissist is not what Gore Vidal playfully diagnosed as being “better looking” than you or me. It’s more deep-seated than mere surface. Let’s not forget Narcissus was vengefully led to the pool where he found himself locked into his own reflection. Caravaggio’s painted image of Narcissus is not a glorious metaphor for self-fulfilment. The self is an obsession that obsesses us all, that consumes us when allowed. And when you look too hard at something you begin to see the cracks; or if none visible you start to invent them.

Wallace talks about the traits of narcissism in his speech but he doesn’t use the word narcissism, even though he suffered the self more than most. What Wallace does talk about is worship, and how the worship of gods or idols or whomever is a way of saving ourselves from ourselves. Whereas money-worship, image-worship, intellect-worship is a still pool in waiting.

In a sense we are always circling the pool, crestfallen, so looking up into the infinite heavens is all we can do to keep ourselves from falling into that deep sinkhole of self. That reflection shimmering in the pool beneath us at the perfect angle can be upset by the slightest perspective shift. So we don’t naturally shift perspectives because our psyches are riddled with protective blind spots. Fresh trauma is the only cure for psychic propulsion.

It’s why Caravaggio’s 400 year-old Narcissus in paint is so compelling; his gaze is literally set in paint forever without hope of escape because of the painting’s cultural value and historical significance. In essence we can’t let him escape his self because we adore him so much.

I turn the radio off and the sun becomes a sun again. I am on this long bridge and rush-hour traffic is a mercury stream that catches the colours of the rising sun. At the end of the bridge is a junction where cars are packed just as tight as the cars on the bridge. But no one on the bridge is letting the little fish out; they are trapped and wanting, pleadingly looking upstream.

After just listening to Wallace the meaning of irony was never as clear as it was on that day, and it was a good day. Here I am at this junction, a crossroads if you will, and choices are being made and given every second that a car on the bridge chooses not to let one of the little fish out at the little junction. Those little fish are pleading with their eyes, everything agape. But the drivers on the bridge don’t make eye contact lest they’d have to submit to self-compromise or guilt. The drivers on the side road are the bystanders, while those on the bridge Superman punch their way across the bridge with the will and purpose that comes with saving the world, their worlds: Clark Kents caught in the revolving door.

The thing is, and it’s obvious to you and me and even them but here it goes anyway: most of the drivers on this bridge will find themselves on the return journey as the little fish on that same little road looking upstream at the bullying bridge traffic. And they will be making the same pleading faces, the roles reversed, the perspectives forcefully shifted. 

One day a week I face this junction. I am always anxious about what it represents, how it ticks my cynicism about the world. It’s a small junction among hundreds of thousands of junctions around the country, but this one in particular feels like a testing ground.

It’s a game of percentages in the end. The majority of days when en route back home and stuck at the head of the traffic, willing the cars to let me out, I count them like steel sheep… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…10…15… before someone stutters and stammers with their lights and hands to go, go! Somedays the driver behind me gets out too.

When you let someone out it’s like you have shot them. It’s funny. Then they compose themselves, wave and put their foot down to get on with their default-setting. But for a split second they are gracious, most of the time.

I return to Wallace’s commencement speech, wondering if it’s a little deep and dangerous for my students. I then return into the fold of one of his many analogies in the speech, in which he describes a workaday day, what he calls the “day in, day out” of adulthood.

His protagonist is a busy and tired worker with a Liberal Arts Degree like his audience in Ohio, who remembers at work that there’s no food at home. So after a long day’s work this worker has to travel through rush-hour traffic, rush-hour shopping, rush-hour ennui, annoyance, inconsideration with a bockety trolley for his troubles.

The moral of the story – even though Wallace says there is none – is that perhaps all those people in rush-hour traffic, rush-hour shopping, experiencing rush-hour ennui, annoyance, inconsideration with bockety trollies are having as bad or a much worse day than you are. That may be your life is, relative to theirs, fucking fabulous. 

Returning to the junction, every work morning I let out at least one car. Perhaps if the percentages weren’t so stark I wouldn’t. Who knows. So this day of days I let this driver out and once again I have shot them. Hands up. Agape. Peddle. Metal. Default-setting.

But also on this day of days, with Wallace’s commencement speech ringing in my ears, the car behind me blows the horn. Let’s be clear, I have only gestured one little fish to go at this point. Like being shot in the back of the head I lose brain and motor function and make dumb gestures with my hand, half the middle finger, half a thumbs up, half a wave – hand gibberish. The horn blows again, again, again. 

BARK!! BARK!! BARK!! BOLLOX!!!

A BIG BMW (which made it somehow worse). MAN. FAT. BALD. JOWLED. A scalped bulldog spitting and pawing climbs into my rearview mirror. My heart pumps. My pits fill with fear. I stop the car. I let a second car through; the little fish’s face isn’t shot this time because they see what’s going on, a superhero face-off. I want to get out of the car. And that’s there, underneath…violence. I imagine American History X. But what I most want is for him to hear David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech and his “default settings” ringing in my ears.

3, 4, 5… 10 cars escape the pen until I release the brake and the red behind me and inside me subsides.

I move on and think, maybe I’m the asshole. Perhaps that bollox was rushing to the sick, the dying, the dead. That giving away his daughter, his son, was his excuse.

Love was his excuse.

You choose.

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Madder Lake Editions

Painting's Primacy

Calling it an ‘art project’ now sounds a little… lacking, as it was 7 years in the making.

The project in question emerged out of an uncontrollable urge to write art criticism while on a year-long art residency in Dublin, and in the run-up to an important group exhibition I was selected for at Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy called The Futures.

It probably was a case of what Mel Bochner diagnosed in friend and artist Donald Judd, that Judd “wrote [art criticism] in order to get out of his studio and into the trenches”.

I always knew it was tricky, messy and a little perverse writing criticism set within the local art scene while existing as an artist among artist-peers, but it was an urge that I couldn’t dispel or deny.

So I did it.

For 7 years.

The urge to stop, however, was just as great.

I refer to billionjournal.com as a ‘project’ because that’s what it started out as, a project among other art projects I was working on at the time. It was supplementary; a vitamin at first, then a drug. I didn’t foresee the addiction lasting 7 years, however, and I certainly didn’t see it replacing making art when, two years into +billion- I would stop making and thinking about making art… until now, 5 years on.

(Contrary to what other artists have shared with me personally about +billion– becoming my art practice, I have always felt that it never managed to attain that status, even though I probably sought art through criticism.)

Last month, immediately after writing my farewell post on +billion-, I started to think about the possibility of being a painter again. It wasn’t as out-of-the-blue as it sounds. I have been conducting filmed interviews with Irish painters over the course of the last two years with the filmmakers Saskia Vermeulen and Gareth Nolan. This research and content will go towards a future documentary/essay film/exploded biography on the deep-seated natures of painting.

From those filmed conversations I have been eager to distill why painters choose to paint, continue to paint, and sustain being painters when I found it so difficult to do so.

See. I started out as a painter like most artists. And it wasn’t a casual fling – I was obsessed. But like most artists I got side-tracked into other things. The fact was, back then I only knew what it was to be a painter yesterday, and knew nothing about what it was to be a painter today.

As a teenager painting became a kind of religion for me at the very moment I lost my Religion to tragic circumstance. Raphael, Rembrandt and Goya were my Holy Trinity during those days of disassociation. Ironically, these painters painted the religion that I had wilfully disavowed. It got me thinking that perhaps we never really give up our obsessions and addictions, we just transform them into something else.

My appreciation of painting and the painter’s life in my formative years was always once removed from reality. My art books were a provincial lens, in which bad reproductions and colourful biographical accounts were disconnected from the real contexts that shaped the painters’ lives and their paintings. Books were my only compass to become, in essence, like them.

The painter’s life – as told by the historian – became inextricable from the images they painted. The ebb and flow of the painter’s life, if you looked close enough, and read deep enough, could be uncovered in the actual paint.

But it wasn’t the images of sinners and saints I was drawn to, or comforted by, or whatever it was, it was the painter’s life told ever so convincingly by historians in books that suggested a painter’s life was a good life to live, a good life to take on.

(I remember talking to an art history professor in Trinity College Dublin about the prospect of undertaking a PhD in some aspect of painting history, Italian or Spanish, anywhere would do. He convinced me that theorising and fictionalising painting history will never measure up to doing the real thing.)

The painter in these fictionalised histories was portrayed as an ambitious outsider trying to discover the inside track to status and legacy. In hindsight, painting was a perfect route to immortality: we remember the painters but not the portrayed.

There was also a sense of rivalry among painters in the stories I held on to. At the beginnings of the pulped celebrity artist, most painters had access to Vasari’s Lives. Annabale Carracci wrote in the marginella of his copy that Vasari was a “fuck face” for some slight. That’s the stuff I related to, remembered, not the glossy sermons to the artist-genius on high.

You can imagine today what rivalry would be waged among painters if there was a chance to have their work displayed in a permanent architecture of worship for an audience of worshippers attuned to the representational symbolism of their art and their message.

On the face of it, however, there wasn’t really much separating what a painter painted and how a painter painted it in those days; after all, the painted stories were variations of the same theme, the same characters within the same religious or secular contexts, and generally, with the same painting techniques, give or take a flair for composition or with the paint brush. But it was those difficult to describe, painted idiosyncrasies, nuances if you will, that separated the forgotten from the remembered, those with a legacy and those without, those that made you want to paint and those that didn’t.

I also imagined as a teenager that painters who became directors of their own fate and the religious faith that they portrayed in paint had a god-given or Natural talent that went beyond the sustained practice of their craft. Parents – biased and blind towards anything their child achieves in life – refer to this little extra something as a ‘gift’. Whatever it is, the remembered few painters in the history books all seemed to possess it according to the authors of these histories, as if not possessing it meant you couldn’t possibly conquer history or time. Baudelaire called it ‘temperament’ – in his love for Delacroix.

But beyond outdated notions of immortality and legacy, I have come to learn through looking rather than doing that being a painter of worth is built on the responsibility and burden of going far beyond mere image-making to somehow tap into the pleasures and anxieties of humanity that are lost in other forms of image-making, but possible in painting. I believe there is something to painting and being a painter that cannot be imitated, or perhaps even shared.

Let’s see…

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Madder Lake Editions