There is an artwork that I love, a performance by the German artist, Joseph Beuys.
On November 26th, 1965, the artist spent three hours roving the Schelma Gallery in Düsseldorf whispering intently to the carcass of a hare cradled in the crook of his arm. The walls of the gallery were hung with paintings and drawings; the title of the performance was How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Though there were many different symbolic elements at play – honey, gold leaf, iron and felt – for me, the piece is most essentially about the futility of talking about visual art. For me, it was Beuys’ way of asserting that paintings and drawings should be allowed to simply be; unadorned, untainted by language.
Toward the end of 2014, I received an email from the programme curator of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Rayne Booth. She began by telling me a little about the schedule of exhibitions for 2015/2016 and the theme for the year: “expanding the space”. As a way of reaching out “conceptually”, of “challenging or rethinking the paradigms around how we write about art”, the curatorial team had decided to invite a fiction writer to contribute some form of text in response to each of the five exhibitions over the year’s course.
It felt strange, at first, to be considered to be someone at an appropriate remove from the art world. The first piece of writing I ever published was an article in the Visual Artist’s Newsheet. Though it wasn’t precisely about art – it was about an experience; that of my internship in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2008 – it brought about opportunities to write exhibition reviews, and I seized upon the chance to have my sentences placed down in print. Though I had set out to become an artist, it was through these critical pieces, these descriptions and attempts at decipherment, that I first explored the possibility of becoming a writer. After a couple of years, I started to experiment with fiction, partly because novels and short stories are what I’ve always loved to read, but also because, perhaps, I had grown weary of attempting to explain the visual. I wanted, simply, to make things up.
The invitation from TBG&S came as a surprise, and yet, without thinking too carefully, I jumped at the opportunity.
Along with the gallery’s director, Cliodhna Shaffrey, Rayne and I discussed different forms the texts might take. In keeping with the theme, I wanted to stretch beyond the page somehow. We talked about the possibility of playing with labelling or clearing some kind of a space online. Finally I approached Nuala O’ Neill, the producer of Arena on RTÉ Radio 1, and she agreed to broadcast a series of radio essays. Each short text would still be printed on paper and appear in the gallery about half way through the exhibition’s run. I liked the idea that, as with the radio essays which came and went in the space of a couple of minutes, the texts would be similarly transient, unobtrusive.
When I received the programme at the beginning of the project, I researched artists, works and practices, but it was impossible to predict the final shape that each exhibition would take. The year opened with an emerging Irish artist, Aoibheann Greenan, and closed with an internationally renowned American artist, Amie Siegel. Two of the shows in between were to be determined by guest curators; the other happened to be by one of my favourite contemporary practitioners, Rhona Byrne.
At the beginning, I worried about being confronted by work I instinctively disliked, but it soon dawned on me that this didn’t matter either way; my role was not a critical one. I don’t regard myself as being qualified to pass judgement on other people’s art; the only honest option was to approach the project from my habitual state of uncertainty, to write about each exhibition solely in terms of my experience of it.
Reading back through the series as a whole, I see how the radio format inevitably defined each essay. The fixed time-slot imposed a word-count, and because I knew the Arena listeners would most likely be unfamiliar with the exhibitions, it was necessary to start the slots by supplying context. From there, I built each text around my personal encounter with the exhibition; I girded it with associations. Other artworks, artefacts, quotes, histories; a documentary I saw about the puppeteer inside Sesame Street’s Big Bird, a memory of my sister’s wetsuit suspended above my parents’ stove. Irresistibly, I considered my sentences in terms of sound, occasionally opting for assonance over meaning. With some shows, it felt as if the artist was welcoming me to form impressions; with others, it felt as if I was cementing ideas onto work already densely layered. Reading back, I was struck by how susceptible I am to the ineffable quality of visual art. Over and over again, I grappled for that which was impossible to describe, or to explain.
During the project’s course, I happened to read a book called Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art by the British critic, Ossian Ward. In it, he encourages people to linger longer while visiting galleries; to stand still and study each artwork for the amount of time it takes to draw five breaths. We live in an impatient age; an overstuffed world. Temple Bar, as locations go, is perhaps the most monstrous example of meaningless bustle, and in this context, five breaths is a bewilderingly significant pause.
Over the course of the year, I spent more time in Temple Bar Gallery than I ever normally would, in any gallery. The obligation to write a text forced me to give each exhibition my time and attention, to inquire, to ponder, and as the project drew to a close, I was deeply grateful to have been so obliged. Of course there were pieces that, on first glance, I didn’t like. But in each case, we reached an understanding, the artworks and I.
And, in the future, I will make a point of going first to the pieces I used to pass by.
Sara Baume is author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither and was recipient of the 2015/16 TBG&S Writer Commission. The recipient of the 2016/17 TBG&S Writer Commission is Claire-Louise Bennett
