Eoin McHugh At The Douglas Hyde Gallery

On Monday 19^th August 2013, Carol and I went into town so I could get some art supplies. Having not had much new to read for a while - I felt the need to buy some new art books. So I had a look around the National Gallery bookshop and then Hodges Figgis and bought books on Modigliani and Egon Schiele’s landscapes. Then we walked through St. Stephens Green and up to Kennedy’s art shop where I bought 12 sticks of Schmincke soft pastels (my favourite chalk pastels) and a six tube box of Winsor & Newton Alkyd paints. On our way back we had Mochas, sandwiches and cakes in Starbucks.                 

Before heading home we dropped into the Douglas Hyde gallery. I stomach clenched as we approached the entrance, expecting yet another pretentious exhibition appealing only to those with PHD’s in philosophy or conceptual art. So often exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde were like cynical brain teasers designed to make you look like an idiot and the artist an unfathomable genius, and I had grown sick and tired of such dances of the seven veils. However, I was delighted to discover the work of Eoin McHugh (who I had never heard of) was masterful, bewitching and engagingly conceptual. The first work on the first floor was a pond lined with branches and populated by a beakless duck, another with a motorboat for a body and a clutch of chicks. It was superbly made and very convincing and its craftsmanship and surreal play reminded me of the Chapman brothers. I could not remember the last time I had seen work of this quality and broad appeal in the Douglas Hyde. Born in 1977, McHugh was an ex pupil of NCAD and exhibited with the Kerlin gallery - the premier commercial Dublin art gallery. McHugh was a skilled painter in oils and watercolour, a surreal sculptor of real talent and a conceptual collector of objects that he really made speak to the viewer. There were obviously many layers to McHugh’s work and the overall technical quality of the work made me want to unravel some of them. McHugh’s images at first glance appeared normal even illustrative, however one was quickly made uneasy by the sight of birds without eyes or frightening melanges of bird’s wings than reminded me of things I had seen during bad acid trips. His sculptures took this biomorphic distortion further, so that parts of his sculptures reminded me of human torsos, other parts bones, animal limbs and yet others branches and yet others insect legs. Yet the overall execution was so seamless that all these elements flowed freely between each other. Also interspersed in the exhibition were found objects; a wooden model destroyer covered in barnacles, a wooden tall ship with its sail burnt, a book with parts of it cut out to hold bones, a headless hedgehog and many other evocative things that actually did rhyme with the forms and ideas in the paintings, watercolours and sculptures in a genuinely interesting way. Carol said McHugh was depressingly brilliant, and I knew she meant it as a compliment. However, though he was six years younger than me, I did not find McHugh’s talent depressing or anger inducing like mediocre art so often was – I found his work inspiring. It was clear from the number of visitors to the exhibition, the time they spent looking at the art works and their giddy buzz that we were not alone in rating McHugh’s work.              

Also in the Douglas Hyde was a small exhibition of oil on paper and cardboard paintings by the folk artist Frank Walter whose work could hardly be more different from McHugh’s but was just as good in its own way. Walter’s work had a naïve simplicity, directness and unintentional humour that was refreshing. Walter’s drawing was naïve and he seemed to have a simple technique for different visual phenomena - like sponging for the effect of leaves on a tree or use of a scrapper for the effect of waves. Some of his work - like an image of a man being swallowed by a whale - made me laugh in a good hearted way with its childlike conception. When I read that Walter had written a 25,000 page autobiography, I joked to Carol that I had better get writing! I thanked Carol for suggesting we visit the Douglas Hyde!  


In the days, and months that passed, I thought again and again about Eoin McHugh and Frank Walter’s exhibitions. While I could still vividly recall many of Walter’s paintings on paper, McHugh’s work left only a vague impression. I recalled something similar had happened when I had seen many of the nineteenth century academic Salon painters in the Met in New York. While I had marvelled at the labour and skill that had gone into the likes of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings – they had left no lasting impression on me. With Salon painting like Gérôme’s you spend more time being impressed by the technical skill and labour put into the work - than actually feeling anything about what is being conveyed. It’s the kind of skill that never lets you forget it is skilful - to such an extent you feel nothing. This left me musing about that certain something which we call soul or spirit or character in art that is essential to a true masterpiece - no matter how much work and dazzling skill was deployed. Conversely, often works of little apparent skill or labour like Frank Walter’s can sweep us off our feet through their intensity, soulfulness or visual catchiness.

Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist at IMMA

On a murky Friday 24^th January 2014, I went with Carol and our friend Rob to IMMA. My main interest was in the Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist exhibition. At its best, Surrealism had provided art history with a few dozen images of such visceral power - they were a shock to the nervous system - and a number of those images were by women. Like most teenagers, I had briefly been fascinated by Surrealism, but I had quickly grown tired of it, save for the early works of Ernst and Dalí and eventually only Miró maintained my interest as a painter. Too many Surrealist paintings were illustrative (admittedly of an eccentric and often very original kind) and thus not very interesting as paintings per say. Moreover, surrealism was a victim of its own success, copied and parodied by everyone from advertisers, illustrators, comedians and eventually earnest teenage posers. The original freshness of its irrational world of dreams and nightmares quickly turned into clichés and a desperate scavenging of cult imagery to manufacture new hallucinations that actually did not mean much.                                                                                                                       

For the past few years, I had seen countless articles on Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), lauding her as the last great Surrealist painter, with an English father and Irish mother she also had interest to the culture industry in Ireland, and as a lover of Max Ernst one of Modernisms greatest innovators with a complicated love life on a par with Picasso’s, there was plenty of juicy gossip too. Add to that Carrington’s wild child personality, mental breakdown and final years living as a virtual recluse in Mexico and her story had all the ingredients for greatness. A cynic might have thought that just living longer than far more talented and important painters was no real achievement, that just sleeping with a genius did not make you one, that being rediscovered by Feminist art historians was faint praise, and the hunting down of ‘important’ foreigners with any vague connection with Ireland just a marketing ploy of Irish tourism and the culture industry. For me all that mattered was whether her art lived up to the late hype of it by an art market gone insane with indiscriminate speculation and greed.                           

                         

Carrington was fourteen when the first Surrealist manifesto was published and by the time she was twenty, the likes of Dali had already made their most important work. Carrington added nothing new to Surrealism except turgid symbolic confusion and the novelty of a token female painter. For me, this retrospect of around fifty paintings, eight sculptures, eight tapestries and twenty works on paper by Carrington proved to be quite the worst exhibition by a supposedly important painter I had seen in a very long time. As a female painter, Carrington was not only no Frida Kahlo, she was even a poor second to Max Ernst’s fourth wife Dorothea Tanning. In fact, technically Carrington’s work was some of the worst I had ever seen. Her drawings were the most lifeless and uninteresting by a supposed major artist I had ever seen and reminded me more of the work of an arty teenage girl. Even as an illustrator she was hopeless. As a painter Carrington did little other than colour-in-lines in a poor parody of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel The Elder. As for her imagery, it was nothing but a shameless and eccentric pilfering from Bosch, Breughel, Max Ernst, Egyptian mythology, Celtic mythology, alchemy, the occult, fairy tales, children’s illustrations and God knows what else. This visual tower of Babel may have made some sense to the unhinged Carrington - but I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to decipher her gibberish. Had Carrington made more of a direct revelation of her own insecurities like Frida Kahlo or Dorothea Tanning, maybe her work would had had more interest. Instead she liked to play a grandiose dance of the seven veils with the viewer. Only in some of her sculptures did I see any distilled elegance and talent, but then that could have been as much to do with the talent of her assistants.                                

For those interested in the symbolism and life of Carrington there was a blizzard of explanatory wall plaques, opened notebooks in vitrine’s and countless catalogues. Personally I regarded the plague of explanation in museums odious. For me museums were places to look not read.                            

Next we went to see In the Line of Beauty, a group exhibition of supposedly important contemporary Irish artists. It was a dismal and pathetic collection of odds and ends that faintly echoed conceptualist clichés in a harmless way. I thought beauty was something overwhelming in its power of seduction but these works were hopelessly feeble, ironic and cynical. Only Oisín Byrne’s brush and ink drawings on cloth banners stood out but so did his debt to David Hockney. Having spent so many years going to NCAD exhibitions, I was left baffled that these eleven artists or these particular works by these eleven artists could be thought important. I had in my mind the work of a dozen or so artists and artworks more interesting than these. This really made me wonder again at the art world. If everyone was now an artist and everything an artist made was art - then the only real criteria was who was in the golden circle of the top curators and who could really play the system.                                                                        

By now I was fuming and regretting bothering coming out to IMMA and I had to apologise to Rob for my foul mood. We went down to the cafeteria to have a coffee and as we did I came across large carborundum etchings by Hughie O’Donoghue entitled Three Studies For A Crucifixion from his Episodes of The Passion series from 1996. “Now this is real drawing! This is real art!” I exclaimed. Yet it was fitting for IMMA that such work of power and integrity was stuck between the toilets and the cafeteria. How dare O’Donoghue have real talent! Stick him in the basement! Such is the art world these days.                                     

After a coffee and cake, we went up to the main galleries, where I was struck by Klara Lidén’s Untitled (Poster Paintings) from 2007-13. These accumulated stacks of posters covered with a blank white sheet and hung on the walls like paintings, genuinely delighted me. They had a painterly feel, as though the different coloured sheets were layers of paint finally cancelled out by the white sheet. It was a simple idea but I found it very rewarding.  I was less interested in her video The Myth of Progress (Moonwalk) from 2008, where she moonwalked slowly through Manhattan by night, or her photographs of herself appearing and disappearing in various city streets. I had no time for these kinds of amateur performance pieces when they had at least been original in the early 1970s so I could see no point in rehashing them.             

You had to pay in to see the Eileen Gray exhibition which Carol and I were not willing to do for a bunch of once fashionable but now dated furniture. So we saw One Foot in the Real World, a mixed exhibition on the theme of the real. It was a potluck show with a predictable postmodern bias. As the art became less and less interesting to look at - so the rhetoric and length of the expletory plaques grew. This was a version of reality that was purely intellectual and given to riddles. I got many of them, but was infuriated by the general feeling of being kidnapped by university quizmasters and forced to prove my Post-Modern, leftwing, feminist, multicultural and patronizing middleclass credentials. It was nice to see a lithograph of a story by Tracey Emin which had eventual wound up in her autobiography Strangeland. However, visually it was a bore. The exception to all this rubbish was a spooky pink, fake-fur head in a metal and glass case by Louise Bourgeois from 2001, which had a genuinely eerie quality that transcended mere ideas. I also liked Still Falling I, 1991 a faecal like lump of bronze hanging from the ceiling by Antony Gormley even though I preferred Schnabel’s faecal like lumps that predated them. Then there was Juan Muñoz Dublin Rain Room from 1994, a scaled down model of one of the gallery rooms, which was an interesting if rather crudely rendered sculpture which was ruined by the fact it did not rain in the scaled down room due to technical difficulties. There as another video piece that was also out of action due to technical difficulties. They called painting an outdated medium - but I had never been unable to view a painting due to technical difficulties!                                                                                              

Within the grounds of IMMA, I was briefly divorced from the dirty reality of our bankrupt existence and the bombardment of misery on TV. No mention of the Syrian civil war, the Ukrainian protests, the floods and natural disasters, our environmental catastrophe, the slaughter of endangered animals, the great recession, the epidemic of sex crimes, the random murders on the hourly news, the billion dollar debased porn industry or any other number of real world crisis that made the making of art seem like the vanity of all vanities. Contemporary art I rued could not offer any meaningful commentary on our fallen world, nor even offer a shred of feeling – all it could offer was the distraction of tangential puzzles.    

All in all, I was left more disillusioned by art than ever before. Was this what I had devoted my lifetime to become a part of – this capricious and pretentious accumulation of echoes? For even if you succeed, all you would become is a murmur in a museum to entertain or befuddle optimistic art students with unrealistic dreams and all the giddy excitement of lambs to the slaughter. As for me, I had long since given up on the delusions I had for my own art to change the world and bring an end to the phoney home decor of the bourgeoisie and the spectacle of goodness. I had become an arch cynic, despairing of the spectacle of the media and art world which only concealed the hopeless reality of existence. As I left IMMA, I remembered Julian Schnabel saying that when he needed inspiration, “I go and look at other people’s paintings and see how shitty they can be.” (Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colours: The Real Life of the Art World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 1996, P. 86.) It was the only thing I could take from such a crumby collection of exhibitions.

Patrick Graham Half Light at Hillsboro Fine Art

On Thursday 24^th October 2013, Carol and I went in to own to see the opening of Half Light a new exhibition of paintings and mixed media collages by Patrick Graham at Hillsboro Fine Art. Apart from Carol’s openings, it was the first opening we had gone to in years, and I was frankly nervous about being in public again, but I was such a fan of Graham’s work I could not miss it. Also, I was feeling at such a low about my own art I hoped to get some inspiration from the seventy year olds canvases. Before going into the exhibition we had a meal at KFC which I enjoyed more than any meal in a fancy restaurant.                

Graham’s exhibition consisted of three large diptychs in oils called Half Light and eight mixed media collages called the Lamb Series. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by them - feeling they added little to Graham’s oeuvre. There was little to grab hold of in these new works by Graham. Apparently Half Light was an attempt to capture the spirit of the sea in Co. Mayo without resorting to direct representational imagery. For example Half Light III was basically nothing more than two grey canvases scrapped down a few times and eventually finished off with fat horizontal brushstrokes in clotted and ugly oil paint, and it had taken Graham over two years to paint. That such a minimal and to my mind still unsatisfactory work could have taken Graham two years was incredible. These minimal works simply did not inspire me with the kind of confident belief in Graham that for example the late works of Rothko did.                                                                                                                                                     

On the other hand, Graham had always built up his paintings through a constant process of painting and scraping down - to arrive at a final eloquent statement - it was just that these works paired down the recognisable imagery to an extreme I had not seen before in his work. Graham’s stripping down of the expressionist excesses of his previous work - to speak of the silence of air - seemed to be appropriate after the end of the era of decadent excess of the Celtic Tiger and the new age of austerity, condemnation and puritan self-examination. In reducing his painting to its barest expression, I felt Graham had at least caught the mood of the times where all of us were left questioning what was really important and what was merely spectacle. So I found these paintings haunt my imagination more than I had thought they would.                                                                                                                           

The mixed media collages that formed The Lamb Series, I found were similarly vague and disjointed, though they did have little sparks of figurative genius. They seemed to battle again with the themes of; the temptation of the flesh, artistic pride and an absent God, which had previously cropped up in Graham’s work. However, I wondered if Graham’s famous reaction against his early facility and illustrational modes had in these works left the viewer with little to admire. Perhaps, they did avoid obvious Expressionist theatrics and left the viewer something to muse about, however I was underwhelmed. I also noticed that this doubt about the veracity of traditional representation, led Graham to mangle form in a sadomasochistic way. Seen in reproduction, these works were even more inscrutable, so I was glad to have seen them in person. Thinking again about them, I wondered if they should have been called The Dying of the Light – a series of final repudiations of the world. I spent €10 on the exhibition catalogue, which I discovered had a very revealing interview with Graham; however the quality of the reproductions was awful.                                                                                                                                


I wanted to go up to Patrick Graham and wish him all the best, but could not summon up the courage to talk to my hero - besides I was unsure what I could say about his new work. While at the opening we met up with Rob and had a few glasses of wine. Surrounded by arty and rich people, I began to feel panicked and depressed. I felt very uncomfortable at the show, and we decided to leave early. We went for a pint in Jury’s Inn, which I need to calm my nerves. Rob drove us home and had a couple of coffees at our house which I enjoyed.