'C2' shows the work of more than 150 artists, giving visitors a flavour of visual arts in Europe's cultural capital, writes Aidan Dunne
Among the exhibitions that have been on show in Cork since the city officially became European Capital of Culture for 2005, just over a week ago, is C2: Contemporary Art From Cork, a bulging compendium of work by 160 artists, at Crawford Municipal Art Gallery. That number, explains Peter Murray, the gallery's director, was whittled down from a longlist of about 400. The longlist was intended to be comprehensive, including pretty much every artist from, working in or with particular links to Cork, but the show could not be similarly comprehensive.
Murphy acknowledges that people are bound to carp about inclusions and exclusions. I could immediately think of a few notable absences. But large as C2 is - it begins on the ground floor and meanders through the building's upper corridors - any more participants would have made it simply unworkable: 160 already sounds like an upwardly negotiated 150.
In any event, it is broadly representative of contemporary art in the Cork region, which is its point. It is a taster menu for the first visitors to Cork 2005 events, a fast means of taking the measure of visual arts in the city. Inevitably, most of the work is modest in scale, but there are a few exceptions.
Maud Cotter's startling, modular sculpture, which colonises the upper gallery of the new wing, is one of them. It is vast, but then the way it sets out to evoke self-regulating, proliferating systems means it could effectively occupy any space. It is cleverly ambiguous, in that it invites us to relate it to various phenomena, from viral to vegetative to imperial.
Mark Kent has made a site-specific wall painting in the generous space given over to temporary projects. A brief statement mentions that he is addressing the architectural space by making us look at it anew. He certainly does that. Drawing motifs from high and popular culture, he encodes them in a language of highly stylised representation and lets them take flight across the walls. There is the sense of something hidden, something subliminal, in the way the patterns soar and twist through the space, which is transformed or even subverted.
It may seem unfair to give large spaces to some artists, but for the sake of the show as a whole some disparity is necessary. Elsewhere it's clear that the exhibition could easily become a uniform parade of comparable pieces. Some of them, with no great advantage in terms of scale of position, still shine.
Charles Tyrrell's painting in the format of two stacked squares, dated 2004, is so crisp and rigorously made, so closely argued, that it may stop you in your tracks. Tyrrell uses a precisely defined pictorial language with skill and ingenuity, but what sets the painting apart is its vitality and edginess.
Margaret Fitzgibbon's Poison Berries Cabinet is beautiful. Not that it is overtly, visually beautiful. In fact it has an appropriate roughness and discomfort. A group of tagged bronze casts of various poisonous plants, including foxglove and fly agaric, are laid out in a painted display cabinet, its sides unglazed but lined with chicken wire. It looks like a good candidate for some public collection.
Eilís O'Connell's teardrop-shaped transparent resin, Pellucid, is beautiful. It sounds hackneyed to say that O'Connell has an exquisite sense of form, but she does - and that is rare even among sculptors. Pellucid is pellucid in its simplicity and transparency, but in terms of meaning it is enigmatic and suggestive. Incidentally, John Burke's maquette-like painted-steel pieces amply demonstrate that he too still has a terrific sense of form, structure and movement.
It has been widely shown, but Dorothy Cross's Jellyfish Lake, its dreaminess edged with unease, even menace, is a very good piece of video. The qualities are closely echoed in her accompanying prints, Jellyfish Pillows.
There is a dreaminess to Collette Nolan's slow, hallucinatory composite as well, with its layers of imagery and marks. Dara McGrath's photographs of working and worked bogs have a precise, analytical clarity.
An expatriate, Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, shows two paintings, abstracts with a teasing, playful air, works that harness chance and design in order to meditate on the possibilities of pictorial language. His way of painting is conventionally termed hard edged, in contrast to the organic fluency of gastrula painting. Katherine Boucher Beug is a capable exponent of the measured gesture, of knowing when to leave a mark unamended and a picture in a state of openness. If you want more abandon, more working through a set process, it's there in Billy Foley's work. And CiaráCronin's two large drawings, bold and forceful, are convincing pieces.
Elaine Coakley's simple bisection of a canvas with a horizon line is very effective, and her treatment of surface is subtle and well judged. Sarah Iremonger's The Hunting Box Party is a substantial installation based on documentation of European hunting boxes: stark, portable wooden structures set in flat, open wintry landscapes. Arranged in a display case, the images are clearly laced with all sorts of dark associations, but these are never forced; the implications are just allowed to hang there.
Performance has not been overlooked, in the form of the work of the pioneering artist Danny McCarthy. His video documentation of a gruelling performance gradually wins your attention, and his slow ritualistic actions have echoes of the self-mortification practised by members of some religious organisations.
Understated and accomplished, Jim Savage's drawing Errisbeg is built up on the basis of rhythms that seem implicit in the landscape. He just coaxes them into visibility. Humour is central to Paul La Rocque's concise, diagrammatic images and becomes whimsy in Tom Campbell's playful paintings.
Jim Cummins, Pauline Agnew, Peter Morgan, Fergus Martin, Debbie Godsell, Ita Freeney, Rachel Parry, Bernadette Cotter, Jill Dennis, Sibyl Montague, Catherina Hearne, Niamh Lawlor, Lillian O'Sullivan, Half/Angel, Robert Ballagh, Cormac Boydell, Julian Campbell, William Crozier, Sarah Durcan, Megan Eustace, Tim Goulding, Carol Hodder, Róisín McGuigan, Blaise Smith and Helle Kvamme all merit close attention.
You could distil C2 down to a much more compact exhibition of exceptional quality while retaining its essential Cork identity, but it would be at the cost of any representative ambitions. One could argue that it would have made sense to do just that, but it is a worthwhile exercise.
More than one observer has noted that a great deal of contemporary art activity simply doesn't register on the art-world radar. It's invisible because it doesn't conform to convention. Of course, people can and probably will complain about omissions and inclusions, but C2 is a good attempt at a representative survey, and in that it tells us the way things are rather than how we'd prefer they were.
