Visual Arts Aidan DunneReviewed Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, until January 31st (01-6714654) Ireland At Work, National Photographic Archive, Dublin, until February 21st (01-6030200)Tonico Lemos Auad & Willie McKeown, Project, Dublin, until January 31st (1850-260027)
A short stroll across Meeting House Square, in Temple Bar, is all that separates two fascinating photographic exhibitions of Ireland at work and at play. The National Photographic Archive's Ireland At Work comes from a trawl of its collections to find records of the country's "more traditional occupations" from the 1880s to about 1970. At the Gallery of Photography, meanwhile, Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight focuses on the extraordinary John Hinde postcard images made in the late 1960s and early 1970s of Butlins holiday camps, including the one in Mosney, Co Meath.
They make for startling viewing, and not just because of the company's trademark saturated colour. They also startle because of their extraordinary production values, fully evident when the images are printed on a large scale. Their creators, the German photographers Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele and the Englishman David Noble, used film-studio lighting and large-format cameras, with casts of hundreds, to create epic deep- focus tableaux.
Although they are visually impressive, the results could be described as stilted and artificial, but there is an innocence in the contrivance, and, oddly enough, with the perspective of the intervening years we can easily see through the artifice to the images as remarkable documents of their time.
That is, we can see the aspiration and how the reality falls short, how the veneer of glitz and sophistication doesn't quite cover the cracks and drainpipes. Yet if a vision of glamour typified by the tacky Beachcomber Bar seems touchingly naive, there is never a feeling of mockery about the exercise, for the images frame dreams and illusions that are as prevalent now as they were then.
It is sobering to set these views of people in pursuit of an idealised notion of pleasure and leisure against the class of barefoot schoolchildren in Ireland at the dawn of the 20th century, one of the exceptional documentary images in Ireland At Work. They inhabit a much harder, tougher world, a world that has already started to beat them down. There isn't much room for rose-tinged nostalgia in this show. A wealth of industry is evident in the photographs, but the people more often than not look glum and downcast. The work, mainly related to fishing, farming and textiles, is invariably labour intensive: weaving carpets and fabrics, making lace, manufacturing fishing nets, harvesting, cutting turf. There are also many images of the retail trade, from street traders in Moore Street to grocery and stationery shops. And there are incidental asides: a garda, perched in a box like Mr Punch, directs traffic on O'Connell Bridge in the 1960s.
Everything portrayed has changed utterly, though not uniformly. Most of the occupations have disappeared or been transformed. The show includes photographs of craftsmen taken during the 1960s by the German photographer Irwin Dermer. His attentive studies of James Brennan, a wheelwright, and Robert Kennedy, a farrier, could belong to an earlier era, capturing not only dying trades but a world that had even then almost disappeared. The sheer prolonged hard labour involved in the essential business of cutting and drying turf is vividly conveyed in several fine images. It is to the archive's credit that the show neither sentimentalises the past nor adopts a viewpoint of smug modernity, and it is great to see the national photographic collection being made visible and accessible in the context of this and other carefully selected exhibitions.
The Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad and Willie McKeown share the Project, the former occupying the gallery proper with Moonbeam 851, the latter placing paintings in a custom-made gallery within a gallery, a white cube in the Project's black Cube. Auad is known for making intricate work with unorthodox and unlikely materials, such as drawing on bananas. It sounds gimmicky, but he is a persuasive artist. Here he has neatly covered the entire gallery floor with plain grey carpet, then set about shaving layers of fluff off the generous pile.
It is as if the fluff has coalesced into a number of animate, animal forms, including rabbits. A bit like dust devils, they seem to emerge spontaneously from randomness, growing out of the carpet, looking as if they might disappear back into it at any moment. It's all extremely subtle and very atmospheric. Of the other, wall-mounted pieces, a skull fashioned from grape stalks, with the occasional grape still attached, is particularly ingenious and similarly mysterious. Auad's skilful creations, purposive without purpose, play around with Kantian aesthetics.
McKeown's White Cube, blasted with a light that is almost painful in its intensity, incorporates a window onto the void of the dark room that contains it. Actually there are two windows, the second one small and placed high in a wall, like those finicky design details beloved of architects. Is there an implication that the void lurks behind every painting? Very likely. The paintings themselves are suffused with light.
McKeown has made series of works with references to the dawn and to the idea of forever: generally optimistic and affirmative. There is no overt irony in his approach, but neither is it quite straightforward. His watercolours on paper are more subtle than his work on canvas. In the latter the colour is heightened to the point of stridency, inasmuch as the term can be applied to his notably understated use of painterly language. The same consciously forced note comes into his studies of wild flowers. The effect is to undercut the serenity that characterises his watercolours. Perhaps, in the longer term, the artist is edging away from the brightness towards encompassing more of the darkness beyond.
