Showing posts with label Futures 12. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Futures 12. Show all posts

14/03/2014

A Tour of Dublin Galleries 2013



We went into town to doing a mini tour of the galleries. First we went to the RHA Gallery were we saw an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Seán Keating an artist for whom I had long harboured a dislike because of his obnoxious mix of Irish nationalism/provincialism, reactionary aesthetics and dictatorial approach in the National College of Art. Keating was industrious and possessed above average skills, yet his work utterly lacked humanity or imagination and addressed the viewer with the kind of pompousness typical of nationalist propaganda. Yet, even I had to grudgingly admire some of his watercolours and oils of ESB engineering constructions at Ardnacrusha and Poulaphouca, even if they reminded me of far more daring, original and heartfelt work by the likes of Kokoschka.        
                       
An instillation of Michael Warren consisting of eight wooden folding chairs hung flat and vertically on the wall, each with minor alterations to the angle of the back slats, was cleaver but pointless and the comparison with the work of Piero della Francesca an utter cheek. A series of pretentious technical drawings, by Julie Merriman was worse still for its cleaver conceit of a sheet of paper with one drawing and tracing paper with another drawing laid on top. So what, as an idea it was not brought very far and as technical drawings they were crude and adolescent looking to me.                                              

Upstairs we saw the Futures 12 exhibition, which had two painters of quality, one painterly imposter and three ‘sculptors’ without a shred of talent between them. Peter Burn’s crumby paintings left me baffled as yet another manifestation of pseudo-naïve painting in Ireland. When I wondered had it become the ambition of so many young painters in Ireland to paint the most archly dumb paintings possible? Perhaps if Burns had proved himself as a craftsman and artist of significance and then like Philip Guston turned to black humour his rank efforts might have had some meaning.                                    

Jim Ricks’ inflatable Dolman sculpture (a mocking comment on the commercialism of Irish heritage) I found irritating for other reasons. It lacked any subtlety and while a great deal of industry had gone into this gag – I loathed joke art even if it put me out of step with virtually everything presented as iconic art since 1955. Peter Burns and Jim Ricks continued the tradition of joke art that had begun with the Dada artist of the 1920s and since the 1960s had achieved success in an art world sadly aware of its own insignificance in the modern world. Personally I loathed joke art; I thought it was an easy knee-jerk response to the impossible demands of creativity. The artists I truly admired where those who had avoided such defeatist strategies to find new expressive possibilities. Humour becomes dated notoriously fast, and there perhaps is humour to be found in the way naïve art students now revere the feckless urinal of Duchamp or the supposed can of shit of Manzoni. Joke art just doesn’t have the sustained meaning of tragic art. The only humorous art I had ever actually laughed out along with was Martin Kippenberger.      

Lucy Andrews ‘sculptures’ that looked like the most shoddy and incompetent science experiments in a high school left me equally baffled by their lack of technical quality and their cryptic meaning which I could not care less to decipher. Caoimhe Kilfeather’s sculptural installation was even worse than Lucy Andrews’ collection of woe begotten science experiments and I could barely waste a second look on her sculptural shambles.   Later I read that Kilfeather’s lump of lead was supposed to represent a waterfall, though at the time I recognized none of the fury and beauty of such a thing - in that shroud of clumsy lead.                                                                                                                          

On the other hand Stephanie Rowe’s miniature oil paintings on wooden boards of actresses caught in a freeze frame millisecond were technical and luminous masterpieces on a small scale. Though their subjects were modern silver screen actresses and their colours bright and lush – their miniature scale, smooth surfaces and minute sable brushed details were reminiscent of Dutch Golden Age painters like Metsu and Vermeer. Rowe’s use of screen-grabs from movies, illustrated again, how reproductions of reality had come to dominate more and more of our lives and take on part of our dreamscape. They were beautiful, patiently rendered, evocative memorials to screen goddess - many of us had daydreamt about. Rowe’s work proved what modesty, craft and real intensity could achieve.                                                   

Ed Miliano’s vast collection of smaller than A4 paintings on paper laid out on long shelves, initially did not impress me. However the closer and longer I looked the more I became sucked into their visual delight. The paintings of gardens, varied from a kind of early Expressionism to abstraction to a kind of contemporary realism. It was fascinating to observe the daily changes in Ed Miliano’s mood and vision and the different intensities. Seen close up each painting hummed beside its companions, yet looked at en mass a whole new rhythm revealed itself. Although Ed Miliano’s technique was not as stunning as Stephanie Rowe I found his paintings had more gravitas.                                                      

On our way out we briefly stepped in to Gavin Murphy’s twenty minute video On Seeing Only Totally New Things. We caught the video as the camera was fixed on a trendy chair and a male voice over waffled on about design. I had already given this piece a minute of my life and I wasn’t about to waste another nineteen so I walked out. Apparently it was about a modernist building called the IMCO which was built in 1939 and demolished in 1979.                                                                                          

Next we went to the Taylor galleries to view a new exhibition by Pauline Bewick one of the most commercially successful Irish artists due to the popularity of her Celtic brand of illustration which pillaged the images of far greater artists like Picasso and feminized them into mush. Personally I had never given a dam about her work, though I thought it might be fun to see her work in the flesh. They were not worth the trip, Bewick’s works was in fact worse in reality than in reproduction, her drawing flaccid and awkward and her colours utterly uninteresting and forgettable. Even Carol could only praise the ultra expensive handmade paper she used. Yet, Bewick’s show was thronged with school kids, minor celebrities and the prices of her works was truly eye watering. Bewick was yet more proof that nothing succeeds in the short term like charming mediocrity.                                                                                            

Next we went to the Rubicon gallery to see an exhibition of new oil paintings my Nick Miller, whose retrospective in the RHA in 2004 had been one of my favourites. I found these new paintings, which were again landscapes painted from his van a dreadful disappointment. They were under drawn and over painted, with none of the energy of his previous work. He seemed to be going over old ground for no particular reason.                                                                                                                  

Finally we went to the Kerlin gallery to see a new exhibition of oil paintings by Callum Innes. I was no particular fan of geometric abstraction, though when done well by the likes of Innes I found it strangely compelling, even if it went against my own instincts. Started as stained black canvases, Innes then worked them up to colour. Seen from the front their vertical bands were reminiscent of Barnett Newman, yet looking at the exposed sides of the canvases revealed something of the subtle build up of colour. They were a strong reaffirmation of pure intellectual abstraction and the power of minimalist paint to still carry ideas and emotion. With my faith in art restored we went onto Grafton Street and Carol and I went into the Disney store where she happily looked around in a childlike trance. Finally we had a meal in McDonald’s and looked around at the art books in Hodges Figgis before getting the DART home.