The 'ev+a 2007' exhibition features just 32 artists, which is exactly how its curator, Klaus Ottmann, intended it, writes Aidan Dunne
Each year, Limerick's exhibition of "visual+ art", ev+a, takes its character from the curator who is brought in to select it. Coming from an international arena, this curator is likely to be relatively unacquainted with Irish art, a vertical invader who is immune to local hierarchies and prejudices. This year's invader is Klaus Ottmann, a freelance curator and scholar who was born and brought up in Germany but has been based in the United States since 1983.
Arriving in Limerick for the first time, he was greeted with about 550 potential exhibits. From this beginning, he has come up with a show featuring work by 32 artists in all, which means there was quite a rate of attrition.
It sounds drastic and, for all those artists who submitted work and didn't get in, it is. But it is not, ultimately, a case of good and bad, more the nature of the show as it took shape in the selector's mind. "The reason there isn't more work in the show is because I couldn't fit more," Ottmann explains. "For example, I was surprised that there were so many video submissions. That's difficult - you can't show that many. They take up a lot of space." And, he might have added, time. In fact, the relatively low number of exhibitors in his extremely eclectic show is a reflection of his general philosophy.
Ottmann is a lean and bookish-looking man, and a careful, thoughtful speaker. Striding through the city in an elegant black overcoat, he has an almost clerical air about him. "My style as a curator is that if possible you should present more than one work by an artist. That's why I asked for more pictures from several people in ev+a. And I like to give each artist their own space. I like lots of white space, so that it's not too crowded and you can take each work on its own terms." When he selected the prestigious Santa Fe Biennial he took this to extremes, including just 13 artists. "A shockingly low number," he acknowledges, "but no one complained about there being too few."
His approach means that Anthony McCall, for example, has the entire Church Gallery at Limerick's School of Art at his disposal, for just one video installation - but what an installation. In the vast, dark space, McCall's Between You and I is a "solid light work", a dynamic, geometric linear projection in which the moving beams of light, travelling though the mist produced by two hazers, become changing, 10-metre tall forms that the visitor can move through. It's both simple and very complicated, and an amazing piece of work.
In making a point of giving artists space, and giving viewers space to absorb what they are looking at, Ottmann is to some extent going against the grain. The frenzied, crowded format of the international art fair has come to dominate the international art trade. "It has," he says, "and I'm concerned about that. I find it troubling that art fairs are the dominant platform for seeing new art. It's not just the money - which is disturbing - it's the level of installation, the fact that it's one-stop shopping. Then, on the other hand, if you go to MOMA [ the Museum of Modern Art in New York] you pay $20, which is a lot of money, so you want to see everything to get value for your ticket, which is not the way to see art either."
The rise of the art fair has turned the art world on its head in other ways. "It used to be that an artist was taken on by a gallery, given some shows, was noticed by a curator and included in some influential group shows, was noticed by the critics, and came to the attention of the collectors. Now, that process has been reversed.
"The collectors visit the fairs and buy up whatever catches their eye. They are the first to see what is new and if they buy then everyone else, the critics, the curators, the galleries try to hop on the train." In other words, he says, there is no quality control. It's purely market-driven, everything follows the money. "It's no one's fault, but I do think it's dangerous and unhealthy." It is, at any rate, once you regard art as no more than a commodity, a view that has become alarmingly prevalent in Ireland, on the strength of the economic boom.
So Ottmann's approach is always to assign each artist a strong presence, to enable viewers "to focus on the immediate experience of art". Hence, ev+a features several virtual solo shows, such as Tony Gunning's paintings which, made in a simple, storybook style, offer a view of Irish landscape filtered through the property boom. And David Dunne's chillingly effective installation, Station Z, Spirit & Sinew, inspired by visits to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, is an exhibition in itself. All of this work was entirely new to Ottmann. "There was so much work I didn't even have time to read the CVs. But then afterwards I noticed that some artists, like David Dunne and Ronnie Hughes, had been selected several times previously. This is Ronnie's eighth time to be included, each time by a different curator, which surely says something."
The show's subtitle is A Sense of Place, which might sound stereotypically Irish in some respects. Ottmann allows that the title does relate to Ireland, which he thought of as a place defined by differences: "North and South, Irish-English, traditional and modern . . . But everyone gravitates to the landscape as an underlying link. I was struck by how much work related to landscape." Still, the show is emphatically not thematic. "No, there is no theme to the exhibition. The title came after the work was picked."
AMONG THE HIGHLIGHTS is Danish artist Jesper Just's amazing trilogy It Will All End in Tears. With feature-film production values, it is a dreamlike work that evades conventional narrative logic but deals with a relationship between a younger and an older man - who could even be read as one and the same person - very sympathetically and, what's more, is about developing self-awareness. Alix Pearlstein's high-definition video piece, inspired by Michael Snow's seminal experimental film Wavelength, is also very impressive. Titled Distance, it is an elaborately choreographed, stylised drama, shot from two opposite and gradually swapped viewpoints, and is hypnotic.
In relation to the big budgets and professional participants of these works, Marie-Louise O'Dwyer can hold her head high. Her Kitchen Clean, produced for her graduate show at DIT last year, stands as an exceptionally powerful and promising piece of performance video
Siobhán Tattan's Brilliant Failures, on the other hand, is a fascinating piece that would probably benefit from a slightly more elaborate installation, but its fragmentary juxtaposition of footage of a derelict homestead, and comments on a theatrical non-performance, are a haunting portrait of post-Independence Ireland, with relevance to contemporary Ireland. She's someone to watch.
Orla Keeshan's highly promising photographic works, with a strong narrative element, display an exemplary determination to articulate her own experience and viewpoint. Eric Glavin's murals, based on the facades of "worker housing" in Dublin, are pertinently installed in the midst of the City Gallery's permanent collection.
Also outstanding are pieces by Patrick Corcoran, Sean Lynch, Joanne Lefrak, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Eamon O'Kane, Matthew Schenning, Christopher Reid, Shelley Corcoran, Suzannah Vaughan and Amy Hauft. Despite Aura Rosenberg's banners, with their scenes of mayhem and destruction, ev+a is low-key, even introspective in tone, very much in keeping with Ottmann's intentions.
"I told them when they invited me to select ev+a that they weren't getting one of the art-world mafia," he says with a smile. "I don't jet around the world to openings and mix with the stars. I'm not a career curator, in other words. I only do what I want to do."
What he wants to do is quite a lot. When he arrived in the US he worked as a freelance critic and organised "a few small shows". Then he taught and did curatorial works at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
It was a four-year stint at the American Federation of Arts, an independent curatorial organisation, that served as his real curatorial apprenticeship. "It was a great way of learning everything. I've no formal qualification. Now, of course, there are courses and degrees." But he is a free spirit by nature: "I wouldn't be happy as an institutional curator." Instead, "everything I do, I do part-time".
Apart from curatorial projects, Ottmann lectures and teaches, writes, translates and also runs a small publishing imprint - "I just love books." He is wary of overtly political art. "The more simplistically political it is, the less likely it will endure. The more universal the language, the stronger the work. I believe art is universal. All art speaks of the same fundamental human issues, asks the same existential questions. Of course they are unanswerable questions, but you try. You fail and, in Beckett's phrase, you fail better. Our culture is saturated with things that try to make us forget those questions, that divert us, but good art, and not just visual art, I mean good films, novels, music, poetry, all make us more aware of them."
• ev+a 2007: A Sense of Place is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art and other venues until Jun 24
