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.                

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.