WILL THE REAL GERHARD RICHTER PLEASE STAND UP

Yesterday, a weird thing happened. I was presenting paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter to a group of Printmaking & Art Appreciation students (not painters, so no harm!). We ended up questioning Richter in respect to his claim that painting is a “stupid” activity.

Calling painting stupid is nothing new, but this coming from a painter like Richter is dripping with irony, Richter being the most prolific, subject/style-varied & consistent painter on planet Earth in the last 100 years, in a death spiral of production, including Capitalist Realism, squeegee abstraction, colour charts, photorealism, blurred realism, portrait, landscape, still life, toilet roll & so on.

Then one student asked what I thought about the Zurich Portrait Prize 2023, its photographic winner just announced this week, & the conversation & energy in the class somehow dipped & dropped off a cliff into its own death spiral. 

Looking at the winners & losers online, there was nothing really to say, question, get heated by or critical about in the classroom. It's quite a conservative survey of portraiture — reflecting the conservative tastes of the judging panel — except for one or two technical or conceptual outliers.

It seems all quite academic & traditional, the only talking points being the old masochistic chestnuts of skill & labour. And yes, it’s unfair & stupid to compare an individual artist, like Richter, with a portrait award. But in terms of contrast not comparison, I know what Richter does to my mind & nervous system, but I don’t know what the Zurich Portrait Award is for, or for whom: recognition, public acknowledgment, the showcasing of that most deceptive of categories or values: TALENT? 

Speaking of Gerhard Richter & portraiture, there’s this idea of “the Real” (capital R) that Jacques Lacan formulated within a triad of ideological destinations, including the Imaginary & the Symbolic. The Real is the most difficult to define symbolically as it, in crude terms, avoids symbolisation, Yet, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, nothing avoids symbolisation. So straight away there is a tautology inherent in defining the Real. Žižek says something else however when pushed to elaborate, that the Real is not some traumatic or horrific something that we cannot confront. The Real is its own “distortion”. 

Example: Let’s take a photographic image from Gerhard Richter’s family album of black & white images, & look closely at the distorted & damaged way Richter paints photographs from his family life. The Real is both the distortion & what is behind the distortion. It is the-thing-itself plus its distortion. If the distortion is removed, what is behind will not exist.

There is also the complicated backstory to Richter’s family album, a family history frozen in time, in which he himself escaped to the West from East Germany as a young man, but his parents didn’t, “trapped in ice” forevermore (his words). So there is a traumatic kernel to his photographic references which complicates & colours Žižek’s definition of the Real as NOT traumatic or horrific (even though we know Žižek is removing trauma & horror as a contrarian, like Lacan before him).

The strangest of all of Richter’s self-portraits, which connects Lacan’s Real with Freud’s Uncanny, & which looks like one of his paintings from the same period, but is in fact a Polaroid twin of his paintings, is titled “Gustave Flaubert sieht seine Geliebte” (Gustave Flaubert sees his beloved), a reference to French writer Flaubert identifying with his own fictional & delusional character, Madame Bovary.  

Traumatised with hairline scratches, finger prints & the mannequin blurs of Richter centre-stage with friends peekabooing behind in the forced contrivance of being captured having fun in a freeze frame, the Real, for an instant, is happy, albeit ironically happy, maybe...

📸Gerhard Richter, Gustave Flaubert sieht seine Geliebte (Gustave Flaubert sees his beloved), Gelatin silver print, 8.8 x 11.2 cm, 1966.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED (A response to Dougal McKenzie's response)

Dougal McKenzie’s impassioned defence of the paintings of Callum Innes (link here) in response to my so-called criticism of them — posted yesterday (link here) — is something I should make butter from, because responses to my art criticism happens so rarely in the milky metaverse of social media. It is also good to see someone caring enough to write publicly with such urgency & heart.

Dougal could have DM’d me privately to discuss the issues he has with my review. But I understand his going public. Maybe he’s trying to make butter too. The pretence of the public enemy is better than the private friend in terms of generative dialogue when criticism enters the fray. So in the spirit of reactionary & subjective responses to art in the midst of personal, emotional, historical, memorial & political correctness & allegiances to culture & being, I think it is best to keep this brief & buttery.

I spent time on the said review of Callum Innes’ paintings at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin. I even sat on it for a month, unsure whether or where to publish it. If you read the review carefully there is nuance, & to reiterate: Callum Innes’ paintings are criticised in the contexts of the RHA abstract painting show from last year, & against Walther Robinson’s “Zombie Formalism” that coined the smooth alignment of formalist abstract painting with the art market at a particular moment in time. Further, the review was critically formalised against the context of a Psychoanalysis & Art module gallery visit. And by the way, Žižek & Freud may not teach us how to resolve a painting, as Dougal puts it, but I believe they can get us to question subjective experience in our intimate & embroiled interaction with it, i.e., Dougal’s repeated emphasis on a second visit to the Innes exhibition on the same day as a reason to defend the exhibition against criticism…

That said, I am not making excuses for my criticisms of Callum Innes’ paintings, which, I venture, aren’t really criticisms at all. Dougal calls my criticism “churlish” (mean-spirited) in a response he penned last night on his just yesterday resurrected blog “Courbet’s Tent”, which, speaking of “zombies”, is kinda ironically funny. What’s worse, Dougal calls me an “art writer” which I cannot forgive. I don’t want to be “churlish”, but Innes’ passive abstract formalism didn’t provoke criticism in me, it provoked a “limit”, the end of the tether.

There is a fine line between being mean-spirited & being provocative in art criticism. The same way there is a fine line between defending your personal experience of an exhibition & defending an exhibition on its own merits. Dougal digs deep into a repository of words in both his Instagram commentary & blog to describe his experience (coloured by a previous experience 10 years earlier) of Innes’ work: “sublime”, “captivating”, “love”. These words are not in my vocabulary when it comes to art appreciation, the same way the greats & amazings of Instagram are not in my vocabulary. For me art experience is always a kind of apprehension, an apprehension I value deeply when the artist provides it in their work. Art experience is not the Romantic sublime, or a form of contemporary mindful meditation.

On Dougal’s point (to paraphrase in my terms to make a further point) that painting is just an additive process of building upon previous revolutions in painting from the last century, I have to vehemently disagree. I have to believe that the new generation of painters also believe that painting can still be revolutionary beyond an additive or backward glance at its own history. That the reboot is not the regime. If this is the case we only have kitsch & pastiche to play with as painters & artists, which the mainstream has commandeered for capitalist not radically creative pursuits. Contemporary painting is not its corpse.

In the 1980s/90s/2000s painting had to resist its theoretical death; today it has to resist its outright mediation & commodification. Enough words!

📽️Edit of Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 1971.

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FOR CULTURE, NOT CIVILISATION: AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN

Personally, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s first solo exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin is a surprise. I expected the artist’s computer generated slow-moving photomontages, that wallow and shift in a liquid modernity. I admit here that I was never seduced by Ní Bhriain’s filmic works, works that made the artist’s reputation. I always found them formally directed and subjugated by a didactic redescription of colonialism located within the museum and empire. They seemed almost too oriented towards a politics of representation than the possibility of an imaginary and reflective materiality and lability. They ruminated on their own construction, technically and conceptually.

This, I feel, is not the case with Ní Bhriain’s current exhibition Interval Two (Dream Pool). No backlit screen in sight; everything is heavy with its own dull materiality and ontology. Thud! The tapestries buckle and warp at the edges. The fear that the gallery spotlights are too bright, is a fleeting fear that light might give away the ghost of their dark method. A method  I don’t care to know, just experience. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval V, 2023, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex, edition of 3 + 2AP, 294.5 x 454 cm

The tapestries are reminiscent of Eoin Mc Hugh’s reconstructed Persian and Turkish carpets presented in the same gallery in 2014. They have the same material presence and scale that rises up before you and collapses in on itself. They are operatic arias in baroque tones, and, dare I say it, they invoke the West’s imperial construction of the orient and Eugene Delacroix’s painted flirtations with Morocco.

Yet it is post-war surrealism, from Man Ray’s and John Stezaker’s surrealist photography to Picasso’s Guernica that comes to mind. Perhaps it is the times we live in, that these images are invoked. A time when territories are being contested, and culture becomes a frosted lens or mirror through which we both distract and reterritorialise our conceptual and emotional relationship to war at a distance. 

Ní Bhriain’s eidolic mise-en-scene is one that dreams without need for over-breakfast translation or interpretation. It speaks the zeitgeist, while paradoxically using the language of civilisation (“archival”) to distance itself from the present, a present that is unavoidably present and distant all at once. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, [detail] Untitled (seal) 2023, found photograph, acrylic, stained walnut frame with museum glass, unique, framed, 56 x 47 x 4 cm, Image: author

In Sigmund Freud’s terminology, “Civilisation” will forevermore be followed by “its Discontents”. Yet it is my word “followed”, interpolated within this badly paraphrased cultural formulation, where we find civilisation trailing in the rear-view mirror of culture. 

Culture, in another psychoanalyst’s terminology (James Hillman’s) is something very different to civilisation. Contra civilisation, which is the coping, adapting and ossification of the institutional bedrock of society, culture is more spontaneous and unruly. 

Culture is always collecting beneath our feet, forming a bricolage of subjective events that are continually trying to break through the institutional concrete with lively efflorescence. Culture is alive and abject yet temporary; culture, in another Freudian term, is uncanny. It is the spectre of civilisation, a corporeal ghost that disappears as soon as it appears, to leave ongoing civilisation in its wake: dead. Simply put: civilisation is an object; culture is a subject. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval VI, 2023, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex, edition of 3 + 2AP, 294.5 x 408 cm

The press release advertises Ní Bhriain’s “Jacquard tapestries” as forming “the centre of this exhibition”. It continues: “fragments of archival portraits merge with images of underground caves and architectural ruins… resulting in scenes of threshold and collapse,  inhabited by thylacines, birds of prey and other unlikely creatures, threading an imagined line between contemporary threats of extinction and ancient narratives of the underworld.” 

Let’s sit with that description for a moment, one that dutifully taxonomizes the contents of the tapestries, photographs and  sculptures in anthropological detail. This description is civilization not culture. This list of “thylacines [extinct dogs], birds of prey and other unlikely creatures” demonstrates the significance of such cultural signifiers in the legitimisation of the artwork as a political and social product, not just a bourgeois or economic one. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Interval VI, 2023, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, wool, silk, Lurex, edition of 3 + 2AP, 294.5 x 408 cm

This tension between the seduction of the work as an object versus its latent political meaning is what artists like Ní Bhriain struggle to neutralise in their inchoate democracies of form and content. Such binaries are limiting and unnecessarily polemical. Thing is, we are always unconsciously taking things in – politics and form – unbeknownst to consciousness. Especially the artist, whose parasitic gaze is always unblinking. The neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms has made claims of a brain phenomenon, whereby a person looking at a page of text, but not consciously reading, is unconsciously already reading, and that such unconscious reading is enough to influence memory and behaviour later. 

Neutrality is at stake for art when the artist stakes a territory of either/or of politics and form. Art, at its best, is already political. Art is not this or that. Art is! Explicit sign-posting towards the political is what Jacques Lacan calls being caught in the “symbolic”, the order through which we determine cultural codes and signifiers, and live by them. This is civilisation! I’ll say it again. This is civilisation!

Artists are the present, even though they are dedicated to the exhumation of the past. They are both too distant and too close to the objects of their obsessions, so there is a constant oscillation between object and subject, hence the formal and political tension in Ní Bhriain’s work. There is always detournement at play, the subversion and spoliation of pre-existing cultural elements that are redistributed as the sensible in the present. 

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Untitled (cage) 2023, diptych, pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, wool, brass frame with museum glass, edition of 3, 15.3 x 22.6 x 2.5 cm

Ní Bhriain explicitly plays with such binaries of now and then, presence and absence, hide and seek in small pairings of photographic prints that, behind a veil of formalised damage and reversals (turning the back of previous photographic works towards the viewer) we are proffered a challenge to both see and imagine. 

The question is, does the blind spot in these sibling pairings reveal more in their ignorance? The colour and grain of the photograph that turns its back on us is read in relation to the photograph on show. Further, the photograph on show feels like it is almost looking back at me, as both objects are anthropomorphised through the bind of being looked at and not looking. The art object’s job is to look at us so we can become objects under its subjective gaze. Once again, culture is a subject; civilisation is an object.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Untitled (mountain) 2023, diptych, pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, wool, brass frame with museum glass, edition of 3, 20.5 x 20.5 x 2.5 cm

What registers in the mind’s eye when confronted with the back of a photograph? I personally don’t have an itch to see what is hidden behind. I know the gallery workers have seen what is behind, and they continue on typing away on their iMACs with the secret knowledge, none the wiser or powerful. And yet there is still a desire to take hold of the object and turn to reveal the disappointment, the negative of what you couldn't have imagined. 

The competition myth between fourth-century painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius shows us that the thing that veils the object or image of desire is desire itself. That desire is formulated through its suppression or repression. Being human is to be enticed by what may lay behind the obstacle or object-cause of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls the objet petit a. We desire objects that are absent with all our imaginary heft and might.

So I am left with one other desire, one that cannot be reversed. Ní Bhriain was shortlisted to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale by two consecutive panels (2022/2024). I thought the artist would get the nod for 2024, due more to her reputational economy than some subjective love for her work, which didn’t exist at the time. But that has all changed. This current exhibition not only implicitly points to a politics via the semipermeable membrane of its formalist tones and textures, permitting the world to flow in and out without forcing an issue, but it also has a material presence. The archive may be mentioned, but the archive is not what is present. What is present will be deemed civilisation in the future, but for now we can experience it as culture.—James Merrigan

WHEN THE REVOLUTION BECOMES A REGIME: CALLUM INNES

ZOMBIE FORMALISM was coined by the artist and critic Walther Robinson in 2014: “With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.”

Unlike Robinson, I find “zombie” exciting as a metaphor for art. Yet Robinson’s use of zombie — who is a figurative painter by the way — is for a particular moment, when the economy was rising from the grave, following the global financial crisis circa 2011–2015.

Zombie formalism named the excesses in production and sales of abstract paintings in the art market. No aesthetic questions were being asked or answered. These were paintings that did not think or feel; or failed to make one think or feel beyond their formalist and hence descriptive qualities.

Following on from the survey of abstract painting at the RHA Dublin in 2022 entitled “In and of Itself — Abstraction in the Age of Images”, Callum Innes’s solo exhibition of abstract paintings at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin, the most market-reputable commercial gallery in Ireland, are difficult to appreciate beyond their formalist attributes, where paint is thin on application, and the alternating square and circle supports don’t live up to the idiom a square peg in a round hole.

My critical issue with paintings like this is, they sit in the anachronistic moment and movement of the avant-garde. “Make it new” the modernists said, until postmodernism said “make it new by recycling the old as new”. Postmodernism was the end of the manifesto and the notion of originality, manifested in the mainstream as the eternal return and reboot of Spider-Man.

The purpose for my visit to experience Innes’ paintings at the Kerlin Gallery was to expose a group of Psychoanalysis and Art students from Trinity College Dublin to artworks that resist interpretation with every formalist fibre of their material marrow.

I disagree with Robinson’s quip that “this kind of [abstract] painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.” I find no meaning here, either interpretative or influential. Agreed, there is what Robinson describes as the “ontology” of paint being exercised or exorcised here in terms of form, scale, gravity, and material heft. Yet I wonder why this type of painting still has a foothold in the market (does it?) if not the contemporary imagination. It could be its decorative neutrality: circles and squares can’t offend the shareholders. As someone who has been around the art block for a generation or two, I can’t imagine the new generation of artists being influenced by a painting methodology that is so repetitive and imprisoned by its own formalist quietism and acquiescence to a hermetic process that fails to look outwards beyond itself. We need artists to challenge the status quo of the bond they have formed with their chosen material. We need to be surprised by the breaking of such material bonds, not its market consistency.

It is interesting that the promotional image for the exhibition portrays Callum Innes in his studio with his back turned to the viewer, the splatter of painterly process less hesitant and more vital than the work chalk-outlined in the gallery. Here abstract painting is promoted as representational painting, the vitality of the artist pictured in the act of process over finish. The cynic or romantic might say that the death of painting is the moment when it is reified in the gallery as a luxury object worth its weight in market momentum.

Painted abstraction in its heyday, from Malevich to Mondrian, could be described as the avant-garde’s last stand before the leggy and promiscuous advent of other modes of speculative cultural production, from Pop to postmodernism. Abstraction, in its most image and content repressed states, was indeed revolutionary (in an artworld sense), the same way Impressionism was before Monet’s Waterlilies became the most popular kitsch postcard gift at museums.

That said, it must be noted that figurative painting in both traditional application (American Jenna Gribbon) and more abstract process (Irish painter Genieve Figgis) are at an all time market high, fetching 250k on estimates under 100k. So we could view, with rose in our tints, Innis’ commitment to abstraction as either radical or obsolete or indifferent to the status quo. Further, I want to make it clear that Innis represents a limit rather than a singular target in my personal criticism of abstract painting of the zombie kind.

Primed by my Psychoanalysis and Art students in tow, Slavoj Žižek tells us that Freud came up with a clever but paradoxical idea about form and content in relation to the dream. He said that the parts that the dreamer cannot fully recollect are part of the form of the dream. That we cannot separate form from content, no matter how opaque and defensive the form is.

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had a similar insight to Freud when he said “The Medium is the Message”. This is a very agreeable perspective for the visual artist, where form becomes content and vice versa. American philosopher Graham Harmen says that artists don’t reduce objects to their mere function or form, but perceive objects, like a table, as a conjunction of the table’s materiality and its effects on humans. What effect does Innes’ paintings have on humans?

For me Innes’ paintings somehow erase the dream or the dreamer to present a tabula rasa of what he calls MATERIAL PRESENCE: “Full of humanity and fallibility, his art strives for a balance between precision and imperfection, opacity and luminosity, contemplation and material presence.” My struggle with this ideological list of method and experience is, they are too broad in their binary and oppositional continuum of experience.

My experience, albeit jaded by trying and failing to enter such abstraction after successive tries over successive years, is based in kitsch or pastiche rather than what is proclaimed in the press release as a “completely individual approach to painting that explores all these myriad possibilities”. This is the dinosaur avant-garde speaking from the extinction crater. Is this the selling point, a paradoxically consistent originality spread thinly over 35 years of making paintings?

Zombie Formalism brings up the problem of postmodernism itself, as a slippery moment that regurgitates the past in the present with kitsch results. It begs the question: is art the manifestation of a psychological process (art therapy for the artist) or a product to flip on the market? Or are such binaries unhelpful when it comes to questioning the purpose of art beyond its therapeutic or market value? Like big money, is art real, or just the waste product of a psychological process?

Here in the gallery, among these seven paintings, alternating between square and circle format without a spanner in their engineered formalism, I am left with the question proffered by artist Andrea Fraser: “What do I, as an artist, provide?” If we go back to Walther Robinson’s zombie formalism, we can locate value (if not meaning) in the collector and the art market, the very thing we (and perhaps the artist exhibiting) disavow when we freely enter the commercial gallery.

Innes’ paintings have moments that a fellow painter might find valuable in terms of technique, such as the painted slippages on the edges of the birch plywood and canvas supports they cling to. Yet the paintings’ language is minimal and not minimal enough, echoing the words of painter William de Kooning, who, cited by Susan Sontag in “Against Interpretation” said: “Content is the glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.”

But for those not intimate or sympathetic to the material swashbuckling of the painter, they will be confronted with a door, not unlike the Kerlin Gallery’s own covert gallery door on Anne’s Lane, without a handle or peephole to see beyond the surface of Innes’ thinglyness. A long time ago this attunement to paint as material was revolutionary, a reactionary necessity in the face of emergent technologies. Yet revolution always becomes the regime until the next revolution. I’m still waiting for the revolution. I want a revolution!—James Merrigan

AN ART CRITIC WALKS INTO AN OPERA

“I keep a tiny “Opera Journal” in which I list every opera performance I attend. (I rarely include recitals.) I list the opera, the house, the principal singers, the date. But there’s no room for evaluation or criticism. The purpose of a list is not to refine or browbeat, but to include, and to move toward a future moment when accumulation stops and the list-keeper can cull, recollect, and rest on the prior amplitude. ”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. 1993

My first opera was a rehearsal: Rossini’s L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) at the National Opera House Wexford.

Theatre, recitals, musicals, punk, death metal, and mostly contemporary art I have done, but never opera. Not sure why this is the case. Sure, I have had mediated experiences of opera music: I own a recording of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach; Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde soundtrack to Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia; and Wayne Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. (I recommend them all.)

Yet the absence of physical opera in my long and winding repository of cultural experiences is not based on a presupposition as to what I suspected opera was culturally or socially. Not to say that opera is not for everyone, but it is a cultural phenomenon acquired through certain hereditary or environmental circumstances or opportunities. I say this as an art critic, who has become more bourgeois than my working-class origins would forgive. And yet opera still evaded. Until now. 

Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo in 1983 production of La Bohème (the same year as the film Trading Places)

Social class and elitist attitudes is what clamours first when opera is brought up in conversation. I remember as a teenager Puccini’s opera La Bohème being mentioned by the privileged and pretentious Dan Aykroyd character (Louis Winthorpe III) in Trading Places (1983). In this filmic context, the experience of heredity vs environment is the binary that determines the economic fate of two characters from different sides of the capitalist and racial fence. In one scene, opera is underscored as an experience that is hereditary when a cop mispronounces La bohème ("La boh-EM”)  as “La boh-EEM”, which Winthorpe quickly corrects, followed by the classist and unsolicited quip, “It’s an OP-ER-A!

The word OP-ER-A is rife with classist baggage; even more so than contemporary visual art, which is saying something. Unlike contemporary art, which obscures if not outright resists entertainment, opera embraces entertainment. When you juxtapose opera and contemporary art as the difference between a commodified experience (ticket sales) versus a commodified object (art market), you start to get a little closer to what the commodified status of each is in culture. And it is not just down to the high price of opera tickets; or the secondary art market, where art objects remain in shipping crates to be flipped and never experienced. 

My first experience of opera was helped or hindered – how is a virgin to know? – by context. It was a rehearsal, before lunch, with no tux. Further, the audience was a clatter of secondary school and Gorey School of Art (GSA) students, the latter whom I was chaperoning among my GSA colleagues. That said, all those coloured caveats dropped away as soon as the conductor entered the orchestra pit, where a skeleton crew of musicians awaited, and whom we had a full intimate view from front row seats. 

The conductor (Giuseppe Montesano), holding a baton in unison with a smile, silently gestures to the musicians to awaken their strings and breath, for, what I learned later, is an overture. Rossini’s music creeps and leaps in the ears. The orchestra tiptoes then races towards the drawing of the curtains, while we imagine – always wrongly – what is behind them…

Such as a hotel interior, replete with reception desk, white furniture, ceiling fans, and a necklace of lights joining two tall partitions against an ultramarine sky. It is a set that barely alters throughout the opera’s two-hour duration. Titled descriptively L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), the stage-setting for this comedic opera is not period or strictly contemporary. It is more post-war modern-minimal: think Beckett on the beach.

L'italiana in Algeri, The Metropolitan Opera

The anachronistic setting of L'italiana in Algeri is jarring and culturally complex. The period pomp and exoticism of other versions of this opera (see above) is efficiently but effectively dressed down to Hawaiian hotel. Wayne Koestenbaum, an opera fetishist, and an art writer who has become my guiding voice through this new (for me) cultural territory, conflates opera and hotels in his book Hotel Theory, when he writes of the  “opera of hotel consciousness”.

The hotel is not home; it is always a place away from home, an uncanny interlude between home and its sickness. Hotels are places of dreamt-up erotics and fantasies premeditated with excitement and apprehension. They are the scene of the crime and the escape; places of isolation and anonymity, where crime becomes pleasure, versa becomes vice. People, couples, strangers gather in hotels, alone. 

The complex setting of the hotel is further reduced and restricted in L'italiana in Algeri to the non-places of the reception or communal areas of the hotel, where no community or home exists or can exist. It is a transitional space – public to private – where people bump but don’t grind. In fact, the chief protagonists of the opera do everything they can, in the name of love, desire, power and honour, to stop community forming through misdirection and disguise. They are all in it for themselves. 

If the anachronistic setting is complex, the plot is too, in a Faulty Towers kind of way. Italian woman Isabella arrives in Algiers to find her lost lover Lindoro in the employment of local and married ruler Muṣṭafā, whose advances she fends off through obfuscation to form a ménage à trois of suitors, who massage each others’ egos, all the while vieing for Isabella’s attention through further obfuscation. 

National Opera House staff introduce L'italiana in Algeri

We were told before the rehearsal, in a brilliant introduction to the invention and what-to-expect conventions of opera, with the memorable phrase the “corpse of opera” ringing in our ears, that L'italiana in Algeri was first performed in 1883 at the Teatro San Benedetto, Venice. Further, in so many words, it is proto-feminist. 

Obviously we are primed and retroactively forced into a feminist reading like this. However the stereotypes of male gaze and the female object of desire, who flirts and manipulates the desire-jaded and power-hungry, to bring harmony to the matriarchal hotel, facilitating the patriarchal world outside, is never absent.

L'italiana in Algeri, National Opera House Wexford, October 2023: IMAGE © Padraig Grant.

That said, the plot and its politics, then and now, is beside the point. The cast of singers project their voices above and beyond words into the seats that encircle the opera house in a competition of decibels and bass, that pummels and breaks the fourth wall over and over again, to leave the debris of illusion in the lap of the audience. Yet I cannot evaluate opera via the vocal acrobatics of soprano, baritone, mezzo, bass and so on. Sure, there are big and vulnerable voices on show here. But it is the collective whole and diverse vocal registers, the gestalt, that makes opera is its own diverse organism.

Just days ago Alan Nielson wrote a review of L'italiana in Algeri for operawire.com. It reads like a report card; paragraph by paragraph evaluating the vocal technique and speed in which the singers enter and exit the stalls like racehorses. Forgive me if this is how opera critics evaluate opera, but I find it strange, alienating and contradictory to what I will tentatively call my experience – as a first-timer – Gesamtkunstwerk. 

“The artist of the future is not the individual poet, actor, musician or sculptor, but the work itself. ”

— Richard Wagner

I know Gesamtkunstwerk is a big term, one that Richard Wagner appropriated and defined in the nineteenth century as the ideal of subordinating individual works of art via the theatre to one unifying whole. But my experience of what more seasoned opera-goers might call Gesamtkunstwerk-lite, is coloured by a visual art context.

An 1876 etching of the Festival House in Bayreuth. Wagner built this theatre with Gesamtkunstwerk in mind

During the interval, a n artist colleague and I ventured out into Wexford Town to take a shortcut via what was once a shopping centre or arcade, now inhabited with visual artist studios. Against the first-act experience of L'italiana in Algeri, this space promised a communion of artists and a synthesis of aesthetics. But what it portrayed (to my mind) was how visual art, broken down into various mediums (painting, sculpture etc.) within the ex-retail units, is a very competitive and segregated community. This was ironically compounded by the setting, the ex-shopping arcade, which points towards individuality and the commodification of art as an object to be consumed over a totalised experience. 

I am making this all sound very serious, and in a strange way, on reflection anyway, it is. What L'italiana in Algeri provided me was a relational frame and lens through which to look at visual art, my primary cultural love. It’s like what Wayne Koestenbaum writes in relation to the experience of opera as a becoming and a reversing of the  “Object/“Subject” relationship of cultural experience:

“How loudly do you play your opera? Loud enough to hurt the car? In the opera house, I distinguish between two kinds of sound: the baritone, mezzo, and bass, in whose presence I remain Subject, knowing the heard voice as Object, and the soprano and tenor, which, as they ascend in volume and pitch, become Subject, incapable of remaining the distant Object. Thus opera interrupts and reverses our ground. ”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. 1993

It is the inference of Gesamtkunstwerk that has converted me, head and heart, to opera. Opera dissolves the division between object and subject. For instance, in one memorable episode, the singers collectively descend into an entropy of ridiculous noises. Form breaks down to let subjectivity burst open. In visual art circles we would call this absurd flight into nonsense ‘Dadaesque’. And yes, ignorance is bliss. And the veins will harden with every physical experience I hope to have of opera in the coming years. But, for now, there is the shock of the new and the desire for more.—James Merrigan

DIANE ARBUS: THE CALCULATED PARABLE

“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough. ”

— DIANE ARBUS

“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was... ”

— DIANE ARBUS

“the parable is calculated… ”

— ADAM PHILLIPS, ARBUS' FREAKS

Diane Arbus was a photographer, who died by suicide in 1971, aged 48. Much ink has been spilt on Arbus, from serial monographs to biography. Several books have been penned and manufactured by her surviving daughter, Doon (aged 78 in 2023). The primary source for this post-mortem literature has been her mother’s letters over her mother’s photographs.

I use the word “manufactured” as a provocation. Biography, and its more reputable sister, autobiography, is always an invention. Through the various machinery of the reproducible self and speculative other, biography—not to mention post-mortem biography—becomes a formal process of sanctification. “Knowing yourself is not going to teach you anything... It’ll leave you with a kind of blank.” (Diane Arbus)

Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965.

Susan Sontag was one such post-mortem ‘biographer’, but of a different kind and context. Especially in her unwillingness to sanctify Arbus, dead or alive, saint or sinner.

Sontag never pulled punches when it came to her criticism, which, she admitted herself, came from a position of “dissenting opinion”. In her 1974 article ‘Freak Show’ for the London Review of Books, Sontag criticises Arbus—three years after her suicide—for what she provocatively stated was the photographer’s exploitation of the “freaks” she seeked out and photographed.

Sontag opines that Arbus’ freaks were not in a position of power or self-awareness to “give” their image, as Arbus put it, rather than “take” their image as Sontag put it. Sontag’s criticism is biblical in both its self-righteousness and moralising tone. To her mind, Arbus’ freaks know not what they do, or whom they are…

“Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus’ photographs is not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the photographer’s consciousness: the sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. ”

— Susan Sontag

Sontag’s use of the word “voluntary” hits home here. She continues: “The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.”

Here Sontag is portraying the artist as an agent of the perverted gaze, a claim that is often repeated elsewhere in psychoanalytic literature. The psychoanalyst focuses on a perversion that somehow unlocks the psychology and thus the pathology of the artist. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel goes as far as to suggest that “perverts [artists] tend toward aestheticism”.

Yet the power and imperfect perversion of Arbus’ photography is not bound in the oppressor (photographer) and oppressed (“freaks” whom Arbus “collected”) relationship. It is unwound in the artist’s cold neutrality behind the camera, not between the lens and her subject. Except for one documented photograph, wherein Arbus inadvertently caught her reflection in a double exposure with images of Times Square in 1956 (below).

“Like Brassaï, Arbus wanted her subjects to be as fully conscious as possible, aware of the act in which they were participating. Instead of trying to coax her subjects into a natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward—that is, to pose. (Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew.) Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves. ”

— Susan Sontag

Even though Sontag is one of the reasons I became a cultural critic, I feel she misses the point of Arbus’ work, and for that matter, the artist’s objective to make visible (without spectacle or moralising) what most of us will only notice in its most extreme manifestations. Art is not activism, or a democracy. It’s radicality is to present the world without taking sides. Here you are; what do you think?

Agreed, there is definitely something artificial or posed about Arbus’ freaks, who don’t measure up to the freakishness portrayed in what could be described as her fantasy fiction. That said, Sontag is a moralist in her critique of Arbus. She sees oppressors and oppressed everywhere: “And there was always daily life, with its endless supply of oddities—if one has the eye to see them.” (My italics)

Strange thing is, we all see them. We don’t need a singular “eye” to see them. Sontag, in a manner of speaking, is seeking out the aberrant in Arbus, the same way Arbus is seeking out the aberrant in society. What is the difference here between Sontag’s seeking eye and Arbus’s seeking eye: to seek or destroy?

See, and by extension see(k), is when the artist reaches beyond the preserve of the self into a territory that is not their own. The current Israel-Hamas and by extension Palestine conflict, and the colonisation of the latter by the former comes to mind, especially Frantz Fanon’s words: “colonisation is a thinking entity.”

Arbus is a thinker, not a feeler. But is she a colonist? Her motives are not so explicit in her cloud-bound words or visceral images. Adam Phillips, whom we will get to later, picks up on this tendency in his line: “...the explicit is always misleading”.

So instead of being explicit, Arbus utilises the parable, a backhanded way of smoothing over the cracks of this or that way of behaving morally or ethically with metaphor. Meaning, there is no moral compass to her penned letters and notation and especially photography. There is just an impasse. One that propagandises acceptance over moral judgement or confoundment.

“...One summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park... The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. And there were young hippie junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough amazingly hardcore lesbians. And in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies... I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot. They were a lot like sculptures in a funny way. I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them. You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.”

— Diane Arbus

Arbus’ photographs of the transient twisted—“winos”, “hardcore lesbians”, “hippy junkies”—are portrayals of people with no idea of what personal space is, or this is how Arbus posed and photographed them. Up close and personal, these strange actors are caught agape in the murky middle of their own subjectivity. A subjectivity unavailable to them in the opinion of Sontag. They barter for sex, drugs and power in a wilderness seen but not sought out by the distracted mainstream masses, who hurtle past to their place of work and institutional servitude. The same way Irish artist Alan Butler appropriated the computer-generated degenerates that form the wandering-maul backdrop to the game Grand Theft Auto, Arbus too flips the switch on vision and the visible, what Jacques Rancière calls “the sensible”, by looking behind the billboards to find a sentient presence entirely substantial. Arbus is a panopticon unto herself.

“People are strange
When you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you’re alone”

— People are strange, The Doors, 1967

“...it is reassuring to be reminded not only that we are not all freaks, but also that we know a freak when we see one…”

— Adam Phillips. Arbus' Freaks

An author who brings us closer to Arbus, albeit a thwarted one, is Adam Phillips, whose article ‘Thwarted Closeness’ (2006), also for the London Review of Books, and named Arbus’ Freaks in a later essay collection, is the primary source and inspiration for this text.

Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and brilliant essayist. He is less explicit in his critical technique than Susan Sontag, who seems to enjoy defining culture against the grain. While Sontag was demonised for her criticism of the sanctified Arbus, Phillips is difficult to critique, due in part to his seductive writing style. The epigraph for Phillips’ essay on Arbus is a line from The Invisible Dragon by the late Dave Hickey that ironically describes the seduction inherent in his writing: “…but we have the right to be seduced”.

On contemporary art you will find Phillips’ words spread thinly in artist monographs, most memorably in relation to the work of American artist Matthew Barney in essay and interview form. His words even made an appearance in our Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin in 2011 for an Alice Neel catalogue.

Over the years I have found myself scavenging for texts that locate Phillips’ prose within an art context, for the simple reason that it is difficult to find good psychoanalytical writing on art. When the prose and insights are good, something mutually sympathetic occurs between art and psychoanalysis that reveals both their parasitic natures.

Generally speaking there’s too much investment on the part of the psychoanalytic writer to seek internal pathology over the external factors of capitalist desire and social trauma in the formation of the artist in culture. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are good on the latter in their Anti-Oedipus posturing, locating desire not just in the groin, but within the flows of capitalism.

After years of reading and thinking about Phillips’ writing, the word calculated came to mind when re-reading Arbus’ Freaks. Phillips hones in on what Arbus became infamous for: the making visible of people who are more visible than most, but whom we make invisible in our anti-social interactions with them and non-acknowledgement.

“It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats. ”

— Diane Arbus

Washington Square Park New York was the billboard behind which Arbus found a cast of characters, who, on the surface, seem down and out and ugly by nature or neglect. They are “aristocrats” according to Arbus. It is the adoption of this peculiar language-game—“aristocrats”—against her adoption of this peculiar community of freaks, that Phillips critically targets in what is, on the surface, a seemingly uncritical take on the photographer.

Yet in Phillips’ overuse of the qualifier “too”—before “famous”, “elegant” and “ eloquent”—in respect to Arbus’ use of words to describe the philosophy behind her subject, that his criticism latently seeps in. Jean Baudrillard did the same thing to Michel Foucault in his essay ‘Forget Foucault’, wherein he described the latter’s philosophical project as “too perfect”.

Phillips repeats the words of American poet John Ashbery, who said: “The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about”. This is a strange line for Phillips to use to make a point about Arbus’ gift of words. Is he criticising Arbus’ photography, which he avoids discussing, or celebrating her words? I am of two minds: Arbus’ words are either a struggle to decode, or a brilliant evasion that supplements not subjugates her photographs’ power. To see(k) but not destroy, as Sontag would have it.

Phillips says in his introduction to the translation of Freud’s writings that psychoanalysis redescribes “the way we treat each other with words”. This is a very lucid observation by Phillips, one I have to bring up in respect to Phillips’ own treatment of Arbus’ words, which have a high degree of self-reflexivity and fantasy. In one sense (or two sentences) we fall between Freud and Jacques Lacan if we think of each respective psychoanalyst as an inverse of the other. Freud is engaged in a deep-dive into the ever-elusive libidinal drives of the forbidding forbidden id.; whereas Lacan’s forever linguistic chain is where the unconscious is found structured like a language.

However, Freud, especially in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, starts with language in a long and laborious definition of das unheimlich (the uncanny…) before taking the fork in the road less travelled. Psychoanalysis tout court is indebted to language, and the games it plays, unconsciously or not. So it is unsurprising that Phillips uses Arbus’ words, not her images—purviews are always biased towards needs—to get closer to her as an artist and a person. And Arbus is good with words, even though she overreaches with them into fantasy, leaving the real—if that is what Arbus’ freaks represent—to vanish back behind the billboard.

In this sense Arbus and Phillips are two of a kind. They give and take in one fell swoop. Arbus presents an image of the world that we invariably disavow—the homeless, the weird, the mentally ill or handicapped—all the while disavowing in her words the facility and capacity of the photographic image to capture that world, referring to her photographic project as a secret about a secret. Phillips, who proffers words that burn after reading, is sympathetic to Arbus’ articulations, transposing the unconscious onto Arbus’ secret about a secret: “is there a better definition of the unconscious?”

Bottom line, Arbus and Phillips are neutrals. They both land on the territory of epoché — the suspension of belief, or withholding of assent. Their work is neither political nor partisan. They don’t take sides. For Phillips, although privately political, psychoanalysis has no place in politics. For Arbus, who both adores and abhors her subjects, writes in her diary that she could never be like them. Yet there is something parabolic, hence moralistic, about both their world views; how people treat each other up close and at a distance with a bartering system of communication, of words, tit for tat.

But in Phillips’ words, which always have a slight of hand in their delivery, the same way Arbus’ images of freaks are more than their freakishness can give away, “the parable is calculated”. This is my biggest take away from reading Phillips and Arbus against the backdrop of the latter’s photography. Especially if we swap “parable” for “unconscious” in Phillips’ line “the parable is calculated”.

The unconscious takes many forms in psychoanalysis. In his predilection for doubling, Freud called the unconscious a “double inscription”. Sometimes the unconscious is conflated with the subterranean subconscious, forming an architectonic hierarchy of sub, un and consciousness proper, like the basement id, ground-floor ego and penthouse super-ego, the convenient building blocks of our greater metaphysical selves. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, an acolyte of Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned into two stations to describe the unconscious. I personally like the image of the transceiver, a device that can both transmit and receive communications.

The unconscious breathes in and out to permeate inside and outside, to project and introject. It's not imprisoned, escaping into the light of day in Freudian slips of the tongue and other bodily and verbal gestures, taking us for a joyride now and then when our guard is down. No, it is always there. It is a calculated entity. Borne upon our desires to give and take with pleasure and unpleasure towards a ground of neutrality, without which we would fall into a delirium of anti- and asymmetrical resistance, whether political, sexual or social.

Which leaves me with the apprehension that the unconscious is calculated in its agency over us rather than our perceived part-censorship over it. That, like Adam Phillips’ and Diane Arbus’ words and images, it teases us into thinking that we are masters over its secrets, secrets that are ours and not ours. That behind consciousness, or the symptoms of our behaviours, there resides not the truth, but a split-off entity, whose design is better off left secret. For we may not like what we find in its telling. So let’s keep it so. Secret.—James Merrigan

*Thank you to Lorraine and Althea, who gifted me a beautiful Diane Arbus monograph, a pleasurable and valuable resource for my ongoing reflections on the artist.

SEXTING: INTERVIEW WITH SARAH DEVEREUX: 2016

THIS INTERVIEW WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE VAN IN 2016 WHEN I, JAMES MERRIGAN, WAS MADE EDITOR FOR TWO ISSUES WHICH BROACHED THE SUBJECTS OF SEX AND DEATH WITHOUT MUCH ATTENTION. FOR THE ISSUE SARAH DEVEREUX WAS INVITED TO CONTRIBUTE AN ARTWORK COMPOSED OF TEXT AND DRAWING FOR ONLINE VIEWING. THIS CONVERSATION BETWEEN JAMES MERRIGAN AND THE ARTIST AIMED TO DRAW OUT A CONTEXT FOR THIS ARTWORK, WHILE ALSO BROACHING THE SUBJECT OF SEX AND ART.

James Merrigan: After experiencing your BFA Degree show in the basement of a building on John’s Lane, Dublin, I was smitten. You disappeared off my radar for a couple of years until sometime in 2014 I caught the tail end of a thread of your perverted commentary on Facebook. There was an uncensored precision to it all that I equated to art, even though it was being displayed on something as fugitive as social media. To my mind you were a cross between American poet Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter ‘sexts’ and Raymond Pettibon’s hyper-dialectic drawings. I questioned why I didn’t get to see more of this kind of stuff, sex stuff, in Irish galleries. Do you know why sex and art don’t tag team as much as they could in the Irish arts scene?

Sarah Devereux: Well James, is this “tag team” a case of art slapping sex in the hand as its partner to tag in against the world, or is it a question of art vs. sex? You have to be more specific when it comes to tag teams. Who is against whom? Is there consent? Is there equal involvement? Is there mud involved? These are the things everyone must ask before partaking in a tag team between sex and art. Is the sex willingly becoming art or is it trying to just remain sex? Are we too afraid to tag in? Or do we think we are better than having sex in the gallery. Of course I mean sex as a subject matter. As a matter of interest, have you?

JM: As an artist I never tagged sex in the gallery; well, not that I am aware of. What I mean by that is, as an art critic I have noticed that sex is everywhere in the Irish gallery in its outright denial. So base objects that look like cocks and vaginas are intellectually denied as sex objects, or dressed up in theory that removes the artist from the subject of sex. ‘You are the one seeing the dirty pictures’ is the response by the invisible artist. I do respond to what you say about the fear and the attitude towards sex – that we think we are above and beyond sex in the gallery, or are ‘in control’ of our primal instincts. For you, is there a pressure to conform to the status quo?

SD: Without sounding like a sappity Ann, I automatically and instinctively go against ye old status quo. When putting together my degree show (*shudder* three years ago) one of my tutors said, “it’s like you don’t realise that this is an important event”. This, for me, was the greatest compliment. Because it was exactly what I was attempting to convey: my ‘clusterfuck’ of a haphazard show shoved in a corridor behind a student whose space kept growing and growing and growing (I think her show was about capitalism).

JM: So you are aware and maybe revealing in or frustrated by the fact that your way of making things and expressing things lies somewhere outside of what is considered art?

SD: Well, I sort of took a bit of a side step and a jump away from ye old gallery art, creating work in formats such as ‘zines’, and displaying and performing these at somewhat casual events. Are we back to that question, what is art? SHIT… How much am I getting paid per word, let’s do this! Wait, am I getting paid for this?

JM: Going back to what I said earlier about equating your Facebook commentary to art, which may seem sacrilegious and not ‘serious’ to the art cognoscenti, how do you see your verbal dalliances online? Is it art, research or just tipping your toe in the public consciousness about what is possible to verbally express?

SD: So you were basically Facebook stalking me is what you are trying to say? In the time we have been Facebook ‘friends’ (I checked: December 2012) you have never once liked, commented or shared anything on my page. You’ve pretty much just been an observer of my dalliances – a dalliance if you will! I do enjoy writing, whether they are rambles, rants or recounting tales of wit or wine. Maybe it’s a racket on your feed or maybe I’m a raconteur feeding you. I do treat it as a platform though, a dirty digital soapbox.

JM: Artist statements invariably promote and proclaim intellectualism above instinct and subjectivity. For me your “textual sexuality” (Dodie Bellamy) includes the street and the library, life and theory, night and day. You know how they say to models ‘don’t over think it’… well, what’s your process? Is it reactionary or carefully thought through?

SD: I’m definitely more of a reactionary-vomiter (get it out of my system and compile a pile of bile and just go with it, and trust that the yellow glow will be enough to impress even an impressionist). By the way, are you trying to call me a model? OMG thank you! I’m flattered, that’s so sweet xoxo.

JM: If it is true that the subject of sex doesn’t pop up in Irish galleries as much as I think it should, who are your idols? Are your idols in books, online or abroad? You are probably a Liam Gillick fan, right? Not to suggest Liam isn’t sexy or doesn’t make sexy art? He is; he does.

SD: So I just Googled Liam Gillick, he is very good at ‘smising’ (Tyra Bank’s term for ‘smile with your eyes’, created for the 13th cycle of her hit reality show America’s Next Top Model.) However, my idols are far less slick than Liam. I get inspiration from people and things that are more tacky or cheesy, basically, the mundane daily norms (they’ll be put through my conveyor belt into my noggin’ and come out tampered).

JM: Speaking of me “stalking” you online, for your Facebook cover photo you have a picture of yourself and American filmmaker John Waters shoulder-to-shoulder and smiling. A fan?

SD: The god in my life is most definitely John Waters, who I got to meet in 2014. I was interning in a reality TV company in NYC at the time and was showing a colleague some clips from a John Waters film, as he had yet to watch any of his work. I went into a hazy daydream with sunshine and lollipops, and rambled about what I would say and do if I ever got to meet him – I had so much to say. Not even an hour later, after I had done my daily stash bag with as much free food from the kitchen as possible, I picked up the weekly magazine that was always floating about the office for the subway ride home. Flicking through the magazine on the train with eyes glazed over, I turned the page and there it was, a half-page advert: “Meet John Waters”. He was promoting his new book and was doing a reading and signing the very next day. I burst out crying, the HEAVING sort, and then hysterically laughing at how much I was crying. Finally, a right of passage. I was that crazy person for the commute home. I put together a collection of my most filthy and depraved drawings as an offering and spent $26 (out of my last $33 for the week) on the book in order to guarantee meeting him. It was like a religious experience. He is my glory hole. But all I could do was cry and mumble something about my clammy hands. A dream!

JM: Is this verbal dialect you perform an alter ego? What I am asking is, although I have never spoken to you in person, I have talked to you on the phone. Are there two different ‘Sarah Devereuxs’?

SD: I don’t think anyone shows all aspects of their personality to every person they meet/talk to. I wouldn’t say it’s an alter ego… but that being said my default voice bounces from a melodic Derry accent to a sassy 1940s New York news reporter.

JM: For me, the way you perform desire in writing and drawing is balanced between nuanced and visceral moments. Is humour the only way that sex can be expressed in art? Or does humour and sex and filthy language exist in the same carnival, a notion that Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin celebrated.

SD: I’d take a ride on the ferris wheel at that carnival and I fucking hate heights – sounds great. There mightn’t be any intentional humour but it’s our reaction to the artwork that brings it out. A release. Think of an artist who wants to create a giant hairy ballsack hanging from the ceiling on a sensory mechanism that dips the sculpture onto the viewers face. In their (the artist’s) mind it is highly erotic and oh so super serious. But it instantly becomes a cheap laugh. Like why can’t giant hairy balls dipping into your face in a gallery be erotic and sensual?! (Any galleries out there want me to make this just holler at me.)

JM: When we first discussed your contribution to VAN, I said something about the subject sex in relation to art being always subsumed by the politics of gender and feminism and that raw sex doesn’t get a mention in criticism or in the gallery. As a female artist who makes art about sex, are you interested in the gender and feminist question? In other words, is your work an instinctual or academic protest?

SD: Please refer to what I wrote in the online artwork for VAN, the bit about Mel Gibson will hopefully explain my answer to this because I am weary and this interview is way past due!

Sarah Devereux made a website that hasn’t been released or updated in about two years. It’s www.cargocollective.com/sarahdevereux if you would like to offer her opportunities that she could later add to this site don’t hesitate to contact her. No prank calls please.

Image: Sarah Devereux, BFA degree show work, NCAD, 2012.

SITUATIONAL EROTICS

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE VAN: JAMES MERRIGAN ASKS WHY SEX AND ART DON’T ‘SWING’ IN THE IRISH ART SCENE.

I have been thinking a lot about sex recently and its relationship to art. One reason is artist Emma Haugh’s question “How do we imagine a space dedicated to the manifestation of feminine desire?” proposed in her recent solo exhibition ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’ at Dublin’s NCAD Gallery (an edited version of the script performed during the exhibition is included in the March/April VAN).

Another reason is the forthcoming documentary on the artist Robert Mapplethorpe by American television network channel HBO. Mapplethorpe’s ‘smut art’ (artist’s own words) caused a political and cultural storm in the American cities of Washington D.C. and Cincinnati in the late 1980s/early 1990s when a grand jury issued criminal indictments against one art institution and its director for exhibiting Mapplethorpe’s touring retrospective of ‘sex pictures’. Art won out in the end, but the trial and the exhibition did question and challenge perspectives on the vices and virtues of contemporary art in the eyes of the public.

Anyone who has had a Mapplethorpe experience usually has a Mapplethorpe story to tell that involves some public discomfort. My Mapplethorpe story begins with art critic Dave Hickey, whose book The Invisible Dragon I posted to a printing company as an example of what I wanted to achieve for a publication I was working on at the time. In the book there are several explicit examples from Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. I didn’t think that the images were pornographic in private, but releasing them into the public ether and removing them from the context of contemporary art, with my name on the envelope that sealed them in, made me feel uneasy.

The question of obscenity and censorship drags up Banbridge District Council’s treatment of artist Ursula Burke’s portrayal of gay sex in one of her Arcadian landscape paintings for an exhibition hosted by F.E. McWilliam Gallery, in 2014. There is no point in comparing Mapplethorpe’s flinch-provoking images of the BDSM scene in New York City with Burke’s impolite costume drama – all they have in common is that they caused public unease. What I want to highlight (if you haven’t already noticed) is that the aestheticisation of homosexuality threads its ways through the examples that I have supplied here. But this unconscious intent or fluke coincidence does help to pose provocative questions about sexuality and the contexts that inspire, legitimise and allow expression of sex as art.

If we are willing to admit it, all our art biographies are interrupted by embarrassing or uneasy moments in which sex, or some related taboo, is the author of our discomfort. Sigmund Freud refers to the original situation érotique as the ‘primal scene’, when the child walks in on their parents having sex, or when we remove lust and desire for the sake of mental preservation, making love.

I remember being seated comfortably in a dark lecture theatre, 16 years ago today, whilst a fidgeting lecturer projected Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven (1989 – 1991) series of hyperrealist paintings and sculptures. The series portrays the Italian porn-star La Cicciolina copulating with Koons amidst a sickeningly tacky rococo neverland.

The in flagrante delicto of the whole situation caught me off guard as a young man among a female majority, especially how La Cicciolina’s spread-eagled crotch swallowed up my gaze. But the bubbling laughter of my female counterparts gave me permission to dispel the Catholic guilt of looking at this particular ‘top shelf’. Staring into Koons’s imagination in that dark lecture theatre 16 years ago we all became giddy kids who ordered the pink cocktail without really knowing what was in it, or the effect the alcohol would have on us afterwards.

When sex does enter the gallery, less naïve and more mature artists have a tendency to disavow it, which results in fetishised and ‘serious’ art objects that look like cocks and vaginas but are intellectually removed and emotionally concealed within a formalised shell. As mature artists we tend to violate rather than play with the idea of sex, or we express sex as a violation. For the young and naïve, sex is indistinguishable from love, romance indistinguishable from lust. The duality between the underground and the acceptable, private and public, cocks and flowers, plays out in the photographs of Mapplethorpe without prejudice.

Artists like Mapplethorpe also incite the phrase ‘in bad taste’. In a review from 2013 I called out artist Alan Phelan (a contributor in this very issue) for being verbally brazen and explicit for the use of the word ‘HANDJOB’ for the title of his solo exhibition at Dublin’s Oonagh Young Gallery. The general tendency in the art world is to place value in being discreet and ambivalent in your expression. As Susan Sontag writes: “Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment.”

Sontag is referring here to the language of art, concealment being the epitome of good taste. The language of art always manages to transform art objects into something high, or ironises them in the dialect of the low in an effort to raise them even higher. These are the lessons that we learn in art college as young art students: to conceal and preserve our modesty in order to affect a sophisticated response from the knowing audience who like things to register on the level of implicit rather than explicit.

To my mind sex doesn’t inhabit the gallery as much as it should because we simply grow up. Yes, we have those eternal teenager artists, the Young British Artists, who continue to fetishise sex well into their 40s. And there are the American artists Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley, who look like the 50-something ‘metaller’ with the Black Sabbath T-shirt and scraggy-grey-dog hair that, sometimes, I envy. Generally, however, as we discover and experience more of the world and its hidden vices we become more secretive about those experiences and discoveries. Maturity and reputation is the great censor, whereas naïveté can be foul-mouthed because it’s oblivious to itself and the people around it.

When referring to Renaissance artists and the development stages of their creative identity, Ernst Gombrich calculated that 23 was the age when personal hubris was at its most frenzied sate. The confused 18 to ambitious 20-something year old college student is split between what Freudian psychologist Eric Erikson refers to as Ego Identity vs. Role Confusion and Intimacy vs. Isolation. It’s a mouthful, but what this simply means for the art student is the potential for a whole lot of psychosocial and psychosexual instability, the best ingredients, I think, for making art that is sticky and aromatic and all-round messy. Young art students, and the mature ones that never grew up, are at that fork in the road between occupational promiscuity as would-be artists and the hope of sexual fidelity in their forming relationships with the weird world and its things.

In a sense we are just a cocktail of naïveté as young art students, poking fun and poking fingers at art objects out of blissful ignorance. At a primal level we are just hands and saliva at that age, fumbling in the dark without a care, just an all-consuming need for discovery and desire. As an adult I look back on that naïveté, the anxiety of not knowing and just poking, as a powerful asset to being an artist, rather than the fugitive notion that we are only learning to become artists in art college.

Last year the whole hullabaloo over the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) student Shane Berkery, whose painted naked-portrait of then NCAD director Professor Declan McGonigle, was (to my mind) viscerally and politically limp. While upstairs, hidden away in the attic of the same NCAD degree show, and under the stairs at Dublin Institute of Technology, we got the ‘pink cocktail’ that I have been discussing here in the sexed-up and viscerally undressed installations of Luke Byrne (aka Luek Brungis) and Catherine Cullen respectively. For the reasons outlined above, this type of art never really graduates as a form of legitimate art-making in the Irish art scene.

As an art critic who has reviewed the Irish art scene inside and out over the last seven years, after repair after rupture after repair, I find the annual art degree exhibitions an antidote to the growing up, professionalism and conservatism that permeates the public and private gallery circuit. There is something to be said, then, about the importance of art colleges in this regard. With more and more artist-run spaces being trampled by yet another burgeoning era of gentrification in Dublin, the spaces where art is allowed to be a little messier and visceral will now be the responsibility of the art colleges to safeguard. More importantly, however, it is the responsibility of teaching staff in those colleges to foster and value the subversive, the visceral and the messy, rather than dismissing it as just teenage kicks.

LOREM IPSUM DOLAR FOR THE YOUNG POSTMODERN

MONDAY 4 SEPTEMBER: 🏴From a cultural newspaper that never existed, & an art critic who only exists in name, here is Lorem Ipsum Dolor’s first review for THE YOUNG POSTMODERN📚 You can pick up the screen-printed edition nowhere, for free. There may be more, or never.

🏴MONDAY 2 OCTOBER: From a cultural newspaper that never existed, & an art critic who only exists in name, here is Lorem Ipsum Dolor on “AGAINST SPEED CURATING; FOR GENEROSITY”. You can pick up the screen-printed edition nowhere, for free. There may be more, or never.

CLOSURE: HANG TOUGH CONTEMPORARY

*FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT VILLAGE MAGAZINE (OCT-NOV 2023) LINK

The recent closure of the Dublin City commercial galler y Hang Tough Contemporary on Exchequer St in Dublin 2, through the forced or voluntary process of liquidation, provoked me to question what constitutes ‘contemporary art’ in Ireland today. Especially when we frame the same question against the late Sinéad O’Connor’s words: “I come from a country where there were riots in the streets over plays. That’s what art is for... Artists are agitators”.

Hang Tough Contemporary opened its doors in 2021 to a public under the masks and regulations of the pandemic. The director, Michael ‘Rubio’ Hennigan, described the gallery as the “natural evolution from his Hang Tough Fine Art printing and framing studios”. The announcement of the closure of Hennigan’s printing and framing studios, which were in business for over a decade, preceded the announcement on social media of the gallery’s closure.

Gossip surrounding the gallery’s closure was shared and discussed privately in my Instagram DMs and WhatsApp groups weeks before the official announcement on social media. “Sad” was the common adjective used in the artists’ reactions, voiced in respect of the staff and the artists who would experience the financial and emotional fallout from the closure. Was the gallery an act of blind ambition? Heart over head? A badly timed business move?

It was undeniably an ambitious enterprise, rolling out successive solo exhibitions on a three-week turnaround basis. The societal context from which the gallery emerged painted it as a pandemic art gallery fling. Yet it could also be judged as a labour of love, as all art affairs are, or an act of business bravery or foolhardiness on the part of its director. However the current liquidation of Hennigan’s business triumvirate does relegate the gallery to the straw that broke the horse’s back, even if it didn’t.

Opinions vary regarding the gallery’s critical value to the Irish art scene. It was definitely a much-needed new gallery space, for painters primarily, to support and exhibit their work in an urban environment of extortionate rents and a city culture devoid of gallery and studio spaces. That said, I know artists who turned down exhibition offers due mainly to a critical perception they had of the gallery.

It’s difficult to describe what that critical perception might be without getting deep in the weeds. To my mind the gallery lacked, or didn’t get the opportunity to consummate a vision beyond its “sleek, well designed purpose fitted exhibition space... With large arresting windows”, which sounds a lot like an estate agent’s pitch.

From the perspective of an art critic rather than an artist, the gallery’s “natural evolution” from the printing and framing studios lacked something meaningful or critical beyond the sale and framing of art objects for those who can afford them. But was Hang Tough Contemporary any different from more established and critically recognised commercial galleries in Dublin or in any other cosmopolitan metropolis?

The difference is perceptual, not structural. The commercial gallery will always be what it is, a business at the centre of consumer capitalism. If you ever visit New York City, head down to Rockefeller Plaza to check out the scale and bling of Christie’s Auction House. Art is big business. During the global financial crisis of 2008, the art market boomed at the same time as the housing market crashed. The top-tier commercial gallery is the ever-flowing and starlit tributary towards Christie’s and the 1%.

If I were to distinguish Hang Tough Contemporary from another commercial gallery in Dublin, like Mother’s Tankstation Limited, located down by the quays and the smell of Guinness (some might say a case of apples and oranges), I would say the mercantile wizard is fully hidden behind the curtain at the latter. Sure, it is a cover story, but it is a sophisticated one.

Whereas the bright and airy Hang Tough Contemporary brought to mind the galleries that populate Walter Benjamin’s arcades of consumer capitalism at its most diamantine; the place where you procure the seasonal art gift that comes with a bespoke frame, or a mirror that refects the room not the person.

Bottom line, all commercial galleries are places where people of money and power consume and collect objects to decorate their homes or flip on the secondary market for more money. As one New York artist says in the infamous essay by Graig Owns entitled The Problem with Puerilism, written in 1984, at a time when the bohemian East Village of New York was being flooded by new art market forces: “Paintings are doorways to collectors’ homes.” The artist is a pawn in this elitist empire.

Art with a capital A — what was once called the ‘avant garde’ — has never been immune to becoming the status quo, especially in a world that increasingly deals in pretty and happily framed pictures. The avant-garde artist is a contradictory figure, working both sides of the divide of subcultural and economic allegiances, and smiling with their mouth if not their eyes.

Such facial gymnastics remind me of what Theodor Adorno once wrote about art’s purpose being to make us unhappy, so we can sober up to our drunken production and consumption of culture. According to the early philosophy of the Frankfurt School, the only hope for society was culture’s opposition to the economy. Culture’s mission was to critically question society, not to passively merge with the image-drunk society we unavoidably guzzle down today.

The fact is the commercial gallery is a gloved claw in respect to the artist who wants to critique the societal status quo, not massage it. We have to turn a blind eye, artist and audience, in our experience of contemporary art in a commercial setting. The commercial gallery represents acceptance and affirmation for the artist, but also a compromise in the artist’s critical engagement with the world. If we view contemporary art as more than its exchangeability, and envisage its critical purpose in opposition to a passive and a affirmative alignment with the status quo, then culture can come before money. However, we need more art spaces that are not so integrated with a commercial agenda.

But that’s all well and good for the artist who has been born into money, or acquired it through the lottery of life. You have to pay to be an artist in this world. For those artists who do not have financial backing, the commercial gallery represents hope where hope is in short supply. From the ever-dwindling hope of the artist’s parents, to the self-inflicted hope that is always tainted with hopelessness in the artist’s psyche.

Hang Tough Contemporary opened at the moment when hope was on its last legs culturally. The gallery made its presence felt on the local art scene. It’s petty, but the name was a put off, an obvious pun and brand extension of the framing studios. I was indifferent to the gallery until I recognised artists whom I would categorise as ‘critical’ appearing on the gallery’s exhibition roster. Then I noticed, in my role as art lecturer, younger students listing Hang Tough Contemporary as a gallery they recognised, ahead of the more established Dublin galleries, such as Kevin Kavanagh, Green on Red or Kerlin Gallery, which they didn’t list at all.

Commercial galleries are a mainstay of cultural production. My main fear is that the only alternative and template for artists in Ireland today is the commodification of their art via social media and the commercial gallery space. Karl Marx called commodity a fetish, an object not valued in and of itself, but in its exchangeability. The image of the artwork on Instagram is a commodity fetish that artists now deal in promotionally, and deal with psychologically.

For someone without the means or predilection to collect art, which was an explicit focus in the mainstream newspaper coverage of Hang Tough Contemporary, galleries can become places, free places, where people (including artists) can critically reflect on their own natures and complicity with a consumer capitalist society that rewards the rich and devours the poor. Art can be affirmative, but it can also be critical of itself and society at large.

In an interview with the novelist Martin Amis on the occasion of the publication of his novel Money, the author says to Germaine Greer: “Money — in short-hand — is the opposite of culture”. That was 1984. That said, artists have to survive if not live in a consumer capitalist society. It’s up to the artist, however, how far they lean into such a society without bearing their critical teeth●

Anne Collier: The beautiful oddness of crying to symbolise trauma’s vestige and refuge

*FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT VILLAGE MAGAZINE (OCT-NOV 2023) LINK

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WE ARE ALL TOURISTS HERE. Contemporary art makes us so. Castles too...art and castle, antiquity and money keep a spring-through-autumn tryst every year in the village of Lismore, Waterford. Here, the international artworld vacations at Lismore Castle Arts (LCA), castle-camouflaged from the village where people go about their workaday lives. It’s a classic juxtaposition.

Setting out on a road trip to LCA always feels like a false pilgrimage, due in part to the disbelief that bluechip artworks — under a sophisticatedly curated art programme — await you beyond old trees and older stone walls. But there art lies, incubated in the familiar white shoebox of contemporary art, and, for the most part, elegantly shielded from the period-drama setting that encroaches on all sides with Downton Abbey verisimilitude.

Currently on view in the main gallery at LCA are chromogenic prints by the New York-based artist, Anne Collier. And in the dusty light of a dark round tower at the rear of the gallery, a solitary carousel slide-projection noisily crunches images of a lens-forward and paparazzi-close handheld camera.

At first glance this is a simple and minimal exhibition, one that is secure in its formal consistency and obsessional gaze. Collier’s c-prints, like obsolescent technologies, transformed and orphaned from their previous purpose, are imbued with a particular sense of time and memory that keeps nostalgia at bay and the future in the mind’s eye. And the EYE is what persists here, both in the exhibition title and the ocular locus of the artist’s attention.

The clarity, precision and cut is so surgical in these c-prints that I find myself desiring the off-cuts imagined discarded on the artist’s studio floor. They are aloof and technical artworks, like artists themselves in social gatherings. Collier herself says she’s “interested in creating a sense of emotional or psychological uncertainty” in her work. I’m not sure what emotional or psychological uncertainty Collier is directing us towards at LCA. Is it mixed feelings, or any feeling at all?

Such a statement about emotional ambiguity is textbook Andy Warhol (who has a big show coming this autumn to the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin). Warhol, when the eyes of the media beamed down on his sunglasses-wearing celebrity, transmuted into a seemingly insensate entity: he became his own work, as if he needed to under the glare of too many eyes.

Like Warhol’s screen-printed appropriations, you have to meet Collier’s c-print appropriations BEYOND half-way. If you don’t, you will pass by these images without pause or reflection (as two tourists did on my visit, as they tunnelled their way towards the next-listed castle attraction). Collier’s images don’t show-off. They are introverts, nerdy about the internal mechanics of an effective image that plays with AFFECT.

I always feel that contemporary art has to leak for it to overcome its cold stare. Collier’s work leaks, but as representation, or more distant still, analogy. Perhaps the artist and the curator have picked up on this consistent subjectivity in the work, by singling out what Roland Barthes coined the photographic PUNCTUM — “the incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph which ‘pierces’ or ‘pricks’ a particular viewer, constituting a private meaning unrelated to any cultural code”.

Collier’s PUNCTUM at LCA is not the eye per se, but the crying or leaking tear duct, depending on the spectrum of your detached or empathetic gaze. You could argue that to focus on crying subjects, the detached voyeurism of Collier’s appropriations — from comics to magazines to album covers — is made vulnerable and thus emotive through a leaky tear duct. Admittedly, there is something beautiful and sympathetic about the crying female subject beyond a feminist reading. Collier’s feminist politics is evident but not forceful. Her subjects don’t protest; they languish in the ambiguity of emotion and social messaging.

The sepia-toned “Crying (Painting)”, the only c-print named after the act of crying rather than the subject (“Woman Crying”), focuses on a single, runny “face egg” leaking a milky tear. An image that would make French philosopher of the erotic and the abject George Bataille happy, but Lady Caroline — of HBO series Succession — disgusted: “There’s just something about eyes. They just kind of, ugh, revolt me... I don’t like to think of all these blobs of jelly rolling around in your head, just, face eggs”. Lady Caroline as the artist par excellence, an observer that looks hard but feels less. Sometimes I wonder if contemporary art can elicit feelings; that is the question posited when I come eye-to-eye with Collier’s work.

Contemporary art institutions try their very best to humanise contemporary art with their artist biographies, smiling administrators and ART IS FOR EVERYONE propaganda. And yet there is something really cold about contemporary art’s stare. Art looks back at you, gimlet-eyed, without protest or self-awareness, like AI. And yet it is contemporary art’s unwillingness to be up front in its abstractions of the world around us that makes it so enigmatic.

Formally, the ghosts of Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are here in colour, repetition and sequencing. Whereas Christopher Williams, an American photographic generation ahead of Collier, is here in the analytic precision and meta-conversation with the framing techniques of conceptual versus commercial photography.

This is most explicitly adumbrated in the centrepiece photographic sequence of six colourful c-prints under the series name “Filter”. The use of a framing device (“Kodak Colour Print Viewing Filter”) doubles down on the commercial framing. But this pictorial abstraction helps eliminate the latter, so the artwork can be released from its determined fate as an object to be bought, over one to be experienced, albeit in a detached immediacy.

So perhaps Collier’s focus on lachrymose subjects is the punctum at its most psychologically potent. There are lots of contradictions when it comes to a clear definition of the punctum. But if we relate it to the fetish, manifested here as a cropped image of an eye in the sequential process of crying, there is something moving about that interrelationship, where trauma is represented but not felt.

Anne Collier’s work at LCA proffers the moment when the traumatic event has been processed, like the analogue photograph bathing in chemicals in the wine-drunk darkroom after the fact of its capture. You don’t come away wanting to know more about the artist to enrich your experience of the images. The artist is a greyed-out shadow behind the opacity of big, direct and colourful works, which come dressed in serious black and white conceptual and puerile Technicolor comicstrip.

These artworks are more about the culture we live in than the artist making them. You can take them, or leave them; and leaving them doesn’t force a tear. The representation of trauma may be impossible in art, but at least we have the beautiful oddness of crying to symbolise trauma’s vestige and refuge●

Vagabond, kaleidoscopic Trojan Horse: Alan Butler at RHA

*FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT EDITION OF VILLAGE MAGAZINE (OCT-NOV 2023) LINK

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Directly outside the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) Gallery Dublin, charity workers are talking to a homeless person, who peeks out from one of two tents snugly cradled in a concrete elbow.

This is nothing new in a big city. Yet, it is a strange epilogue to Alan Butler’s solo exhibition We are now in the mountains, and they are in us which, with a feverish funfair of colour, light, sound, AI, and not to mention, tents, is currently igniting the inner con nes of the RHA proper with ironic glee.

Sometimes in their work current socio-political issues are intentionally addressed by artists, or accidentally merge with the socio-political motorway from some narcissistic backwater source. Butler, as long as I have known him and his art, has been one of the local artists to take the path less ventured, materially manifesting the internet as both art and socio-political commentary in the public space of the gallery.

In Butler’s words: “The exhibition surveys the history of image-making devices over the last 200 years and how they have contributed to an objectified conception of what Nature is”. This has the tone of tradition, but don’t let that deceive you. It is all being done in an art institution where painting has been primary for 200 years, and in the same year the RHA celebrates and retains — in some of its institutional rituals — 200 years of cultish tradition.

Butler is not a traditionalist; he is a surplus ironist. But if you approach this exhibition with just irony in your eyes and smile, it’s going to be an empty experience. Like the Greeks’ ironically fated heroes on the road to tragedy, cultural producers throughout time have used irony to map the route to what they have already accepted as same shit, different day.

On entering the main gallery space through a heavy black curtain, a projection of the moon darts here and there across the gallery walls and ceiling. Then comes the kitchen sink, including but not exhaustively: a rotating totem of TVs with trope screensavers; AI generated and 3-D printed gilt frames and corn-on-the-cob; an automated window blind printed with an image of a painted pastoral landscape that opens and closes to images of oil rigs; and not to forget, the tents – far fancier than the tents outside – with rotating mirrors backed with encyclopaedic plates of ora, or something like that. It’s all too much and too fast to capture as a description. This is not tradition. This is not nature. This is history being propelled forward at break-neck speed.

15 years ago Butler’s grafting of the internet onto the art scene was received by most curators as plastic surgery gone wrong. No one knew where to place him. He was homeless and transient; in the world and not in the world. Especially in the non-existent reception from commercial galleries.

Crucially however Butler’s work was viewed by his peers as a tour de force and influence. In a way his art was too present, or not dependent enough on tradition. Like when young Andy Warhol’s screen-printed Campbell Soup cans were made for consumption in the gallery, not the supermarket. For example, in 2010 Butler blatantly appropriated and exhibited a souped-up version of the trailer of Sex and the City 2 and took it for a joyride in a Dublin gallery.

The lack of commercial gallery eyes on Butler — until he gained representation from Green on Red Gallery Dublin after years of challenging the status quo of painting — was due in part to the artist’s then inability to make or package quality art objects for an art market that values quality over radical aesthetic gestures. He has since resolved this issue, as evidenced at the RHA in the framed and materially sensitive wall and frame bound paintings and prints.

That said, I have never viewed Butler as a commercial artist, even though you can purchase his works in galleries and art fairs around the world. Yet Butler’s craft is less about basket weaving and homebakes, and more about conceptual craftiness, and an awareness of the tradition of art as something to appropriate, torment and upturn.

At the RHA Butler’s work is more vagabond and ranging than a local commercial setting could tolerate, as it visually and noisily hurtles across the warehouse expanse of the RHA and tradition. The concentric circles that emanate outward from his stone throwing into the past produce dangerous currents underneath.

In stark contrast, Enda Bowe’s photographs in the adjacent gallery feels like you just crashed an afternoon tea party with the good delph and cutlery, but minus the mad hatter, who is next door, where we are all Alice in his presence. I can imagine some of the RHA artist members whispering: Kids will be kids... we need to let them riot from time to time.

Against this context of whispering tradition and history, Butler resurrects the landscape painting, that most horizontally passive of artistic genres, to then bury it with digital and robotic verticals that raise two fingers to tradition. In this sense Butler’s work is a Trojan horse that stays sleeping on its haunches, bringing forth digital daydreams of revolution, with a warning if not warring hand.

Like Warhol’s supermarket America, Butler’s art is a kaleidoscope through which we can view the world around us. In this sense the artist is an indifferent and robust receptacle, who can digest all this information, recycle it, and spit it back out as a glitchy representation. This is no different than a nineteenth-century impressionist painting, or a late 1960s photorealist one for that matter. It’s just that the contemporary landscape is a little more complicated or just weirder than Monet’s Water Lilies, or John Muir’s Yosemite (a central reference in this exhibition), who wrote: “I was tormented with soul hunger... I was on the world. But was I in it?”

The world that Butler reflects back is a world not much different from the soul-searching one that John Muir expressed in 1869. And yet it is a world increasingly generated and experienced by virtual, and now AI, means. Again, Butler is not a traditionalist. In this exhibition he utilises the very same AI technology that the world is fearful will take our jobs, or, worse still, subjugate our natures.

In retrospect, Warhol’s world seems provincial relative to the world that Butler holds a mirror to today. It’s unsettling that the artist uses the word “poignant” to describe his own mirror in the press release, as if the future is already filled with sadness and regret.

Over a decade ago, Butler pasted a giant text-based work that read: BETTER LIVING UNDER CRYPTO-FASCISM. Today, in the same part of the gallery, the artist has installed a large TV on high that screens a key video work, in which we are presented with what Butler labels as a “Live simulation of an audiobook reading by an Al performer”. Simply put, an on-the-scene roving reporter, dressed in a bright yellow raincoat, narrates Muir-like poetic descriptions of a landscape from the frontline of a storm that threatens to envelop the reporter and her words. While she battles the weather, a feed of online commentary invades the screen. One commentator with the handle @ArtisticSoul87 sums up the choir of apathetic reactions to the spectacle: “in fact, can’t help but feel indifferent towards them”.

The one thing I get from Butler’s work is, there is no hope. There’s fun, yes, but no hope. The spool of the world’s predetermined destiny towards fossil-fuelled and technological obliteration is unwinding, and all we can do is dumbly look into screens and watch it take place. There is no redemption from indifference. As David Foster Wallace foretold in Infinite Jest, we cannot help but be entertained by our own demise. So this exhibition (to my mind) is about and for the public. Its funfair antics and amusements give the public enough surface glitter to sprinkle on its more ominous undertones.

In Germany in 1867, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Volume I was published, expounding his theories on the destructive forces of capitalism. A year later “John Muir hopped on the boat in San Francisco and asked a carpenter on the street the quickest way out of the chaotic city. Where do you want to go? the carpenter replied. Muir responded, Anywhere that is wild”.

The difference between John Muir — “the gilded age flower child” of Yosemite — and Butler himself, is that Muir, as a young man, without the responsibilities of family or finding shelter, withdrew into Nature to seed his forcefully sincere descriptions far away from the windy city of capitalism, which he could no longer bear. Butler, on the other hand, remains in the city, embedding himself into the codes of culture, capitalism, technology — within the eye of the virtual storm — with a poignant and cracked mirror held firmly in his hand●