Visual Arts: Eamon O'Kane's The Mobile Museum is the second of a projected series of four exhibitions at the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown under the collective heading Inverting Conventions, writes Aidan Dunne
The first, by Dermot Seymour, took a skewed look at contemporary Ireland, North and South. In a sense, what O'Kane does is to turn the process of artistic production and consumption inside out. The subjects of the exhibition are the familiar art world categories of the gallery, the studio and the work of art.
The first thing we encounter is the "studio", which resembles a huge packing crate deposited in the middle of the floor. As noted in the show's explanatory leaflet, it looks almost as if this is the crate that the rest of the exhibition came in. But go inside and you find that it is indeed equipped to resemble a functioning studio. The walls are densely lined with images of various kinds, including original drawings plus photographs and photocopies, many of buildings, some of O'Kane's Sign series.
Some of his signs, featuring quotations relating to aspects of culture, are sited around Craigavon. Elaborate architectural models are laid out on tables, and e-mails, a casually placed book and other material surround a computer. All of which creates something like a Marie Celeste atmosphere: a sense that the space has been vacated suddenly.
Outside, in the gallery proper, a group of large, monochrome paintings line the walls. They are sketchy views of well-known gallery buildings, all architectural statements and landmarks. O'Kane has abstracted them from their various urban settings and depicts them as glimpsed through screens of foliage, surrounded by trees. Here he is developing an idea he explored previously in Ideal Studio, in which modernist architectural buildings are envisaged as idyllic studio spaces in natural settings, ivory towers far from the madding crowd.
The paintings have a cursory, hurried look about them, as though blocked out from projected images. Given the artist's considerable technical skills, we can take it that their offhand appearance is calculated. They're like working drawings writ large.
Two projected videos, in an adjoining space, complete the show. Retrospective mischievously inserts O'Kane's work into various high-profile institutional settings and Mobile Museum, echoing the black-and-white paintings, digitally sites museums in incongruous settings, building to a frenetic conglomeration of museums, a kind of visual arts Disney World.
There's a lot there, but what to make of it all? The Ideal Studio proposed a view of the artist as utopian dreamer, away from society. O'Kane seemed to be exploring this idea without taking any particular moral stance himself, though one could infer a critique of Modernism per se, and perhaps a subtext concerning nature and culture. Add in the work in The Mobile Museum and another theme begins to emerge. That is the idea of an autonomous, self-contained art world. This is bolstered by the absent artist, and the galleries removed from urban settings, devoid of visitors.
Certainly the Millennium Court show suggests a self-contained, even self-consuming circularity. The wittiest and probably the best part of the project are the videos. It's as if O'Kane by-passes years of career-building by virtually inserting himself into the most hallowed preserves of contemporary art in a cheeky piece of wish-fulfilment. Even better is the non-stop pan across an endless succession of museums, including Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, all deposited in a nondescript landscape.
The image of cultural palaces presiding over wastelands is strong and contentious. We recognise the buildings O'Kane refers to because they are landmarks that have made an impact on public consciousness. There is debate over the validity and the success of such galleries, but they are rarely follies; they attract visitors, even if they are based on a business model in terms of promoting a corporate identity: Guggenheim Inc.
The unmistakable implication of O'Kane's video sequence featuring an impossible collection of galleries, all with their trademark individual architectural identities, jumbled together in one museum-opolis, is that the art world is a theme park. There is some validity to such a view. In this context his quotation signs, dispersed throughout the environment, are perhaps indicative of a desire to restore cultural debate to the wider social context.
To get back to the artist: although he has just turned 30, O'Kane already has a formidable track record of travel, study, work and exhibitions. From the first, he has evidenced tremendous ambition, exceptional energy, technical facility and familiarity with theory. His technical facility applies equally to traditional and new media, to manual technique and new technology. His projects bristle with ideas. In fact, if anything, there is a surfeit of ideas, a surfeit of production. It has often seemed that fewer works, more critically focused, would serve him better. Yet, temperamentally, he seems to live in his work as a fish lives in water. More and more his various projects have become complementary aspects of one overall, investigative project. You could say that The Mobile Museum generates a huge volume of material to make its ambiguous points. Or, conversely, you could say it emerges, with all its ambiguities, from a huge volume of material, that the generative impulse is dominant and throws up various thematic by-products.
There is a great deal to The Mobile Museum. It's an impressive, highly competent installation with much of interest in all its several components. So why complain? Perhaps because, for all its virtues, it still leaves one with the feeling that O'Kane hasn't yet lived up to his exceptional potential as an artist.
