The latest raft of public art commissions in Ballymun continues to cut the ties from the area's grim past, writes Aidan Dunne.
The new Ballymun is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. In fact old and new are currently, and for some time to come, intermingled in a confusing patchwork, formed by what is in essence a vast, labyrinthine building site.
It's a 10-year plan, scheduled for completion in 2012. Main Street is lined by brave new buildings, including the sweeping curve of the Civic Centre, but turn down Shangan Road by Axis, for example, and you're quickly in the old Ballymun of squat, low-rise blocks in a brutalist style. It's a hard environment dominated by concrete, tarmac and mud, and you keep coming upon such formidable remnants.
There's a leaden grimness to them that Ballymun Regeneration aims to leave behind, and integral to the process of transformation is Breaking Ground, the art commissioning programme that has already made its presence felt in a series of temporary events and exhibitions.
But more fixed, permanent pieces are also part of the programme. There is a growing collection of individual artworks on display in the civic buildings, and a few weeks ago Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue inaugurated several major new pieces, by Andrew Clancy, Cathy Delaney, Corban Walker, and Graham Parker and Grace Weir, as well as announcing forthcoming commissions involving Cecily Brennan, Desperate Optimists, John Byrne, Mick O'Kelly, Linda Quinlan and others.
Last week, meanwhile, on a chill, damp winter day, the first of the 624 trees that are the backbone of Jochen Gerz's public art project amaptocare were planted. Each tree is accompanied by a plaque bearing a brief text by the person who sponsored it.
Gerz is a Paris-based artist who has completed many comparable projects throughout Europe. The core of his work relates to memory and community. A process of negotiation and the direct involvement of local communities are integral to what he does. The first thing that struck him about Ballymun, he said, was that it was a no-fly zone for birds. His idea was that, rather than settling for conventional municipal plantings, people should be asked to take ownership of their environment by sponsoring trees of their own choice.
The locations of the trees will be indicated by lights in a huge, ground-based glass map referred to in the project's title, back at the new Civic Plaza, next to the Civic Centre, on a site where the MacDonagh Tower once stood. Donors' names will be sandblasted into the square's paving. The symbolic public space reflects the real, dispersed space of the community.
A little further along stands a landmark Ballymun building that surely should be preserved. The tall chimney stack of the Boiler House sits atop a simple rectangular form. Bearing in mind the trend for refashioning industrial buildings as cultural resources, the Boiler House, a viable link to Ballymun's past, has to be a good candidate for such reinvention.
Parker and Weir's video work, Sight Unseen, also addresses local experience and memory. Based on the premise that the habitual view of Ballymun as a concrete enclave is not the view of the people who actually live there, Parker and Weir worked their way upward, stopping in flats in six of the 14 storeys of the Thomas Clarke tower, interviewing residents and recording their thoughts on the views from their windows.
The location and the height affords some tremendous views, but there is a play on the ambiguity of the word "view": the prospects from the tower engender ruminations on life, time, work, experience in general - views of another kind.
It's a thoughtful, revealing work, not for a minute given to nostalgia or easy sentiment, but full of feeling. The Thomas Clarke tower is marked for demolition next year, so the views enshrined in Sight Unseen will no longer be there. The video is being screened on a television in the window of a shop in Ballymun's rather forlorn shopping centre, itself due to be replaced as part of the regeneration process. (The video can also be seen at Departure Gate B in Dublin Airport until the end of December, and during January and February 2006 it will be screened at Howth Dart Station.)
The received view of public art is a piece of monumental sculpture, and the work that most closely conforms to this description is Andrew Clancy's Cathode/ Anode, sited in front of the Civic Centre. It's a big, bisected curvilinear form in bronze. The central division is a passage wide enough to walk through. Its inner, vertical sides are perforated with an illuminated grid of star-like dots. Look through it to the south and the passageway frames a view of the mountains.
The work echoes the form of Neolithic monuments and refers to their celestial connections. So it beckons to the past, but its curved shape and sleek textures also look forward, echoing the curves that are something of a motif running through much of the new architecture in Ballymun, perhaps intended as an antidote to the right-angled severity of the old blocks.
Corban Walker's Zip is a light sculpture that embellishes and animates an internal architectural space, the atrium of the Civic Centre. A spare, geometric piece, it comes across as a hi-tech descendant of the abstract light sculptures by Dan Flavin. It occupies a huge wood-walled corner site, and its kinetic zig-zag patterning in illuminated blue and green runs briskly up the wall and provides a resounding explanation for the title. It's a curiously upbeat, happy work that seems to pulse with a cheerful life of its own.
Further afield, Cathy Delaney's Fill is a subtle, outdoor piece, sited in a paved space, a public seating area adjacent to the new Poppintree Neighbourhood Centre. Here there is a sense of a new, emergent Ballymun, with streets of clean-cut, contemporary housing with signature single-pitch roofs. It is a community in the making, though. There is still the feeling of being at the edge: one foot in the mud of a building site, the other on brand new footpaths.
Fill is a shallow declivity etched into a grid of paving slabs. Its base is aluminium and it catches the light in different ways depending on whether the ground is wet or dry. Either way, it makes the most of the ambient light, as though it is a pool, as Breaking Ground's artistic director Aisling Prior puts it, "of molten aluminium". Its intricate patterning recalls the effect of sea water cutting channels and pools through a skin of sand. It is a piece that brings an intimation of nature into the heart of an urban space, one that will generate an infinity of changing images by day and night.
In terms of public art programmes, Breaking Ground is huge. John O'Donoghue described it as "by far the most cohesive and ambitious local authority art commissioning programme under the Government's Per Cent for Art Scheme". It is also, he said, a flagship project that should set an example.
Certainly in its unprecedented level of detail, its sustained, long-term character and its sheer diversity of approach, incorporating everything from lengthy, community-based projects to autonomous artworks by highly regarded artists, it can plausibly claim to be exceptional.
It's still easy to mock public art. In fact, it's far easier to mock it than to face up to the issues and ideas it brings into play.Mocking it, and worse, has in the past been something of a national pastime. Early on, Gerz made the pertinent observation that Irish people still had a poorly developed sense of communal space, arising out of our history as well perhaps as more recent social and political factors.
A failure to identify with the communal arises partly from lack of a sense of ownership of public space. In fact the notional term "public" might even symbolise exclusion from just that. Those sponsoring trees were asked to respond to a question: if the tree could speak, what would itsay? Gerz points to the fact that some sponsors remarked that they had themselves vandalised trees in their youth. What do they imagine their trees saying to young people now? Have the courage not to.
