Convergence

I recently attended the opening of the Oliver Cornet Gallery in Temple Bar, at the invite of a friend who is working there. A tiny space, it was nowhere near large enough to contain the people that spilled out onto the street blocking the ocassional passing car, and mingling with the crowds from the pub across the street. despite the cheap wine, the art itself was surprisingly rich. For another small independent fine art gallery I wasn't expecting much, but several of the artists showcased in the group show 'Convergence' were strikingly original. Maybe its after spending several months working in a conservative private gallery, where the art mainly consists of biscuit tin landscapes and the buyers were mostly bankers and big business men in designer suits, but I had developed rather low expectations of the contemporary Irish art scene. It probably helps that Oliver Cornet himself is a spry little Frenchman, with an evident taste for the delicate and whimsical. Most of the work was small, delicate studies in abstract lines and organic forms, from the ceramic shells and vessels of Annika Berglund, to the planescapes and prints of Hanneke van Ryswyk. One standout though was Mark Doherty's colourful manga-inspired drawings. Definitely cool enough to appeal to a younger generation of art makers and lovers, his work is also skillfully executed and with enough contemporary cultural and artistic references to pack a theoretical punch.
"He seeks to create alternate worlds in which to satirize our own, allowing us to look at our foibles exaggerated and thus challenge them by laughing at ourselves. Through this framework, he builds narratives which address such diverse issues as body image, our view of the 'other' in society, urban social isolation, man's conflicted relationship with nature, and  society's newfound adoration of science, celebrity and material wealth, among other things."  http://www.olliart.com/

The comic strip like appearance encourages a narrative reading of his works, which often resemble posters or advertisements in Japanese fashion magazines. The images upon close inpection are all slightly warped or grotesque, with figures resembling robots or animals and the colourful patterns and designs make the pictures not so much joyful and appealing, as bad acid trip nightmare.

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other

I recently went to see Rivane Neuenschwander's exhibition at IMMA.  A mid-career survey, it contained a number of distinctly different works many of which encourage visitor participation. I wish your wish was the highlight, a single room with the walls punctured with small holes, each one containing a coloured ribbon printed with the wishes of visitors to the exhibitions previous location. Based on a local tradition in a church in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where the faithful tie silk ribbons around their wrists believing that their wishes will come true when the ribbons wear away and fall off. Neuenschwander carries this religious superstition into the realm of the contemporary art gallery, crossing cultural and geographical divides through a kind of pay it forward intention. The wishes themselves were a little repetitive with quite a few "I wish there was no recession/ I had more money/ I could get a job". Amongst the more amusing ones was "I wish for world peace and that I had a turtle". Choosing one became an interesting choice between the people you felt sorry for "I wish it was benign", whose wishes you wanted to grant, and those you identified most with "I wish my college degree meant I could get a job". Having read the wishes of others on display also made me self conscious about my own wish, which you wrote on a scrap of paper and deposited in the hole in exchange for your ribbon of choice. I became all too aware of who might be reading my wish in the next city, and trying to make it sound funny or sympathetic so that someone would choose it and make it come true.
Even though the whole point of the project was to promote selflessness and a kind of international helping each other across time and space mentality, it actually had the opposite affect. My self and my friend spent ages trying to wittily compose our own wishes and then when we had chosen our ribbons, we both felt disappointed when they fell off later that day, as we had spent so long choosing the right wish in the right colour.

Another work in the exhibition with a similar ethos was first love where visitors can make an appointment with a sketch artist to describe their first love, and have a portrait drawn. The pictures on the walls were from previous exhibitions, but the cartoonish goofy quality of the drawings made the sincere and emotional intention of the work lose its punch. What was particularly disturbing were the portraits of people who were obviously still children, maybe a childhood friend, but in the context of first loves, it made the clownish grinning portraits take on a slightly sinister edge.
One theme that kept cropping up for me was that of the micro within the macro, the individuals wish amongst the hundreds of ribbons, one love within many, and the final room in the exhibition which contained a wall covered in numerous frames of what at first appears to be photographs of the night sky. upon closer inspection they are actually thousands of the pieces of paper made by a hole punch, which are actually called chad according to a quick google search. It was an astute take on how the miniscule everyday can take on metaphysical proportions in a different context. They reminded me of those microscopic photographs of germs and amoebas in science magazines that are indistinguishable constellations.  I couldnt help thinking they would also make really cool wallpaper.
This was the problem with most of the exhibition, the initial grand themes promised in works such as I wish your wish were let down in the execution, they just didnt  quite come to the greater conclusions and profound revelations promised in the themes and titles. This disappointment was embodied perfectly in the video the fall where the camera is a substitute for the eyes of a person running an egg in spoon race through a   blurred forest. the heavy breathing and jerky movements of the camera, along with the title, continually suggested the egg would eventually topple, a climax that was eternally thwarted by the continual loop of the video.

Up from Eden

i've just finished reading Ken Wilber's Up from Eden, given to me by my dad. Despite being essentially an academic book about psychological anthropology, its still pretty accessible to the average reader.
Wilber is attempting to give a very general and wide-sweeping account of the psychological development of mankind, from the earliest society to the present day. Its not just a historical account though, throughout he is promoting his idea of the Atman Project, the spiritual eternity or God-consciousness to which we all aspire. He proposes that while humankind continually attempts to attain a unity with this grater eternity/consciousness it also paradoxically seeks it in all the wrong places, and so continually fails to reach it. Early human sacrifices, war and patriarchy are all used as examples of how humans have tried to stave off death and attain immortality, instead promoting their own sense of self, and so failing to achieve that which they most seek.
Wilber compares the evolution of humanity to the personal psychological evolution of an individual,  which seems to contradict his rejection of the individual in his attempt to promote a higher spiritual unity with eternity. His talk of eternity and atman and transpersonal human development leans a little too much towards hippie Buddhist-inpired spirituality for my liking but he takes an interesting stance on the nature of humanity, rather than people being intrinsically good or evil, he understands them to be something else entirely. He rejects the liberal political view of humanistic psychology and philosophy that proposes that we are all born free and good but that the objective social and political world perpetuates oppression and inequality and that all we need too to become free is to alter the objective world, to abolish political and economic structures and the repressive family. However, the conservative worldview in which we are unfree because of something intrinsically evil in our very nature is also rejected. Wilber adds a third viewpoint to the familiar two, that of the mystics, who suggest we are unfree because we believe in a true self (be it good or evil) at all. Rather than a need to repress or unrepress the self, they suggest we undermine such a duality in the first place, and attempt to transcend it. This appears to me to be exactly what Wilber's Atman Project is proposing, but he goes on to attempt a merging of the three views, in order to cross the boundaries of the idea of a separate self altogether.
While I do have my own problems with present day societies cult of the individual and the emphasis on each persons individual worth and right, I would also be sceptical of this attempt to let go of the self entirely and transcend to some kind of unified consciousness with God or Atmans or whatever it is Wilber is getting at. I understand that he is not talking about a return to previous social structures in which large groups of people existed solely for the benefit of their rulers, kings or leaders, but rather a more spiritual/religious unified consciousness. Where we do not identify with each other, but the great blue yonder. The biggest problem is he never really explains what that yonder is, and why we should want to achieve it. While he continually suggests that this striving is precisely what all our bloody history has been about, he never makes it a concrete possibility, or outlines what it is or why we want it. While a few select individual, most of them Buddhist eastern prophets and wise men, have already achieved this higher level, for the rest of us mere mortals we must continue to struggle on in the society we have made for ourselves, always seeking out eternity in bloody oppressive rites inflicted on each other.

Neil krug

Neil Krug is a photographer who creates hazy psychedelic sun-soaked images inspired by the covers of 70's pulp novels. This kind of aesthetic seems to be everywhere at the moment, with new technology seeking to emulate old photography technics such as instagram, and the new resurgence of lomography. Krug uses expired polaroid film to create the hazy bleached out effects in his pictures. Many of the shots look like they are movie stills, particularly those in his book Pulp, which predominantly feature his wife, the model Joni Harbeck. He also makes music videos and is working on a feature film. While the oversexed, throwback nostalgia is a little too idealistic and uncritical for my taste, they are just so breathtakingly beautiful that I find myself wishing I could tease out such psychedelic colours from my own polaroid camera, and envying his ability to make vintage photographs that are still modern enough not to become kitsch.

       

Krug's video for Ladytron:

        

Suzy O'Mullane

Working in an art gallery in Dublin I keep hearing about Suzy O'Mullane and her scandalous-for-its-lack-of-scandal affair with Mick Mulcahy. It's strange to be eavesdropping on gossip about someone I knew growing up, as a friend of my mothers rather than as an artist, and pleasing to hear she is doing so well for herself in Ireland and abroad.
It's also made me re-evluate her as an artist rather than family friend, and address my own personal opinions of her art separate from my opinion of her as a person. Knowing more about her private life than her professional career makes that difficult, but I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to her work when it crops up in group shows or sits alongside other artists, most obviously Mick Mulcahy, whose art I never really understood what all the fuss was about. Suzy though has developed enormously since I last had contact with her work, which must have been nearly ten years ago. While she always had a flair for intense engaging portraits, her singular focus on life drawing, and the female form particularly seemed to restrain her somewhat. Then I remember going to an exhibition she held after the tragic death of her daughter Roisin, and being bowled over by the emotional intensity of the work, multiple portraits of her daughter and herself, strewn with miniature pink rosebuds to signify her daughters name, they were allegorical as well as realistic, and added an extra layer of complexity to her bold outlines and strong, confident marks. Since then her work has been rife with animal imagery, most notably wolves and while women still dominate as subjects, they are less studied portraits of individuals than metaphorical symbols of emotion. She herself makes the connection between her own personal tragedy and an unleashing of artistic growth:
"Since 2004, during a time of massive personal crisis and subsequent growth, my work began to emerge dramatically from its formal reality, and its concern with observation and architectural space.”..."Thus, the central concept of the current work is a recording, narrating and mythifying of autobiographical events and issues of personal significance. Through intensely worked charcoal drawings, sometimes using paint and oil crayon on paper, the intention of the work is to convey emotional and sometimes metaphysical connection, as well as absurd hypothetical situations. Humans and animals have interchangeable roles, and are devoid of accepted markers.”

Your Hair Veils My Eyes

Even her portraits have gained a depth of feeling and intensity, with their palimpsest quality of thickly worked up lines left un-erased, showing the physical labour invested in her work.

Roses

Cold Bride

The pointless quest of Neoism

In a Neoist view, the world is not collision of things in space, but a dissimilar row of each independent phenomena. Neoism does not conceive of the spatial as lasting in time. Since each state is irreducible, the mere act of giving it a name implies falsification. The paradox however is that epistemologies exist in Neosim, in countless numbers. There are Neoists who consider a certain pain, a green tinge of the yellow, a temperature, a certain tone the only reality. Other Neoists perceive all people having sex as the same being, and all people memorizing a line of Homer as Homer. Another group has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory. Yet another group has it that the history of the universe is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon; that the world is an emblem whose subscription is partly lost, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true. Another believes that while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that everyone is two. Books are rarely signed, and the notion of plagiarism does not exist. It has been established that all literature is the work of only one ageless and anonymous writer.
definition from website the seven by nine sqaures- an attempt to create the illustion of an art movement, or to start a movement by declaring it already exists. not very successful, but then isnt that what how most movements begin? its only when people already take them for granted, that in retrospect you can trace out roots and beginnings, that otherwise would be dismissed as unconnected and irrelevant.

rather reminds me of dada, in its anti-art stance, defining itself by what it is not, and in its political implications.
amazon: house of nine squares - the book by Florian Cramer.
I haven't read it, and to be honest don't intend to, but the idea of an invented identity, that can be adopted and used at will is probably what appeals to me most about this whole concept:

"Karen Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren't. The purpose of many different people using the same name is to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth.
Anyone can become Karen Eliot simply by adopting the name, but they are only Karen Eliot for the period in which they adopt the name. Karen Eliot was materialised, rather than born, as an open context in the summer of 1985. When one becomes Karen Eliot one's previous existence consists of the acts other people have undertaken using the name. When one becomes Karen Eliot one has non family, no parents, no birth. Karen Eliot was not born, s/he was materialised from social forces, constructed as a means of entering the shifting terrain that circumscribes the 'individual' and society."

conceptual art

A very vague definition for a very broad range of art practices, its probably what I like most about art. the fact that something so visual, physical and visceral can be made intellectual and immaterial. well not quite immaterial, although Sol Lewitt might disagree with that. He prioritizes Idea over object in his statement in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art: “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art”.He uses mathematical systems to determine the form of his work, as in his 47 3 part variations on 3 different kinds of cubes, exhibited at the dwan gallery in 1968, which is a three dimensional realization of a predetermined concept, ordered by permuting linear dimension and binary volumetric possibilities. The number of variations and arrangement of the work is governed by mathematical logic. Made up of three types of cubes, solid, cube with opposite sides removed and a cube with one side removed. The variations represent all possible different three part combinations of the types of cubes, vertical arrangements and orientations. Such pieces completely removes any aesthetic decisions of the artist from the work, allowing abstract geometrical systems to determine the form, while also showing that abstract art can also contain a high degree of visual complexity.
Whether or not this makes art a triumphant illustration of the powers of human reason, or a demonstration of the failure of any proposed system of communication is open to debate. 
In his paragraphs on conceptual art he emphasizes the communication of idea over the logic of a piece, the form it takes and even the intentions of the artist. The idea itself gains a sort of independece, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”. He says: “in terms of idea the artist is free even to surprise himself”. using pre set plans and  separating the conception of a work and its execution, in the case of the wall drawings by getting others to actually create the drawings, eliminates all subjectivity. Even the concept becomes unimportant “it doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art”. By separating each stage of creation, lewitt makes them all of equal importance. He claims that the idea itself even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product. this suggests to me that for lewitt drawing itself held no merit, but merely served as a tool of communication, as constricted by rules and system as language or mathematics. but the ideas that lewitt is attempting to communicate are not about the rational systems of logic that he employs to create the form of the work, but rather the errors that occur within these systems. in his instructions for an exhibition in nova scotia in 1969 he described it as “a work that uses the idea of error, a work that uses the idea of infinity, a work that is subversive, a work that is not original”. This idea of error is what occurs in the process of making the work, in separating out the stages of creation, into the idea, the execution and the reception, lewitt is exposing the potential for miscommunication and making evident the outside factors that become as much a part of the works making as the artist himself, as in the influence of the gallery space in his wall drawings, where the uneven surface of the wall results in broken lines that disrupt the artists intention and the logic of its execution. The work becomes subject to the space’s enviornment, and the reception of the viewer. Lewitt deliberately encourages misreadings, and invites alterations to the initial idea. This separation of idea from exection from reception reveals the failure of those systems of logic which constrain us, by communicating his ideas in verbal instruction that are then carried out according to numerical permutations example… the viewer needs to trace back these linguistic or numerical systems in order to access the idea of the work. The errors that occur en route and disrupt this communication shows both the artists powerlessness in the face of external systems of convention and the failure of these systems in transmitting ideas between artist and viewer, and the widening gap between “the objective understanding of the idea and a subjective interpretation of it”.

This breakdown of systems of communication and questioning of the authority of language is what, in my opinion, art does best. By simply offering alternative ways of interpreting ideas, sensations, or images it can challenge or supplement linguistic systems. Anything that challenges the way we think, the possible constraints on our ability to think must be a good thing.