Fifty thousand pounds is a lot of money, at least in terms of a temporary contemporary art project. Any commercial enterprise willing to involve itself to such an extent in a field of art which, despite its long years of existence, remains a contentious one, has to be applauded, if simply for an inventive use of their public relations budget.
Given this adventurousness, it seems, on the surface at least, slightly disappointing that the first project initiated by the Nissan Public Art Project, administered by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, can be described as simply as involving "presenting extracts of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses in neon in selected locations in Dublin city centre". The work in question, For Dublin, a collaboration between Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, won the prize over around 90 entries from Irish and international artists. Even if Hegarty and Stones's work had not yet been inaugurated when this piece was written, there are nevertheless some very obvious problematic aspects to the project. After seeing various computer-generated mock-up images showing the texts in situ, it still remains hard to see how the work can escape some of the unavoidable difficulties, the cultural quicksand, which exists around making art about James Joyce. Even if its authors can provide a convincing explanation of the conceptual fleet-footedness of the work, something extraordinary would have to happen before a large scale installation of fragments from Ulysses would be seen as doing anything but playing a role in the ongoing creation of a Joycean hagiography.
Hegarty and Stones may explain, as they have several times in interviews with this writer, that their work has a usefully ironic and angular attitude to Joyce and the Joyce industry. Nevertheless, the work is still likely to be read as another step in the celebration of Joyce, which has recently made the Dublin writer closer in cultural stature to saint Patrick than Shakespeare. Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic stance; perhaps when passers-by see the words "O that awful deepdown torrent O . . ." they will notice the slippage, the sexual appetites that are necessarily satisfied when a male author begins to create a female persona, but it seems unlikely.
Hegarty was born in Teelan in Co. Donegal, but is now based in England, where she is Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. A previous public art work by the artist currently greets those using flights between Dublin and Heathrow airport, while she was one of the artists selected last year to take part in the major group show of Irish artists held at the Musee des Beaux Arts in Paris as part of L'Imaginaire Irlandais.
Born in Sheffield in 1960, Stones is the younger of the pair. His artistic practice has mostly been in the area of video, installation and performance art. He also once produced a limited edition of beer mats with the words "you are here" printed on them and placed them in various bar locations in Britain. His work has often been interested, he says, in the idea of Britishness.
Hegarty and Stones first began working together 10 years ago, but For Dublin is the first time they produced a work entirely in collaboration. Previously, Stones had worked as a technical manager on pieces by Hegarty, which often involve complex sound and video elements.
Hegarty and Stones's project would seem to have performed the first task of a public art piece. Its form and the ideas behind it are capable of being seen in several different ways by several different publics. From the point of view of art criticism, the work explores the interaction of texts that have almost passed into common knowledge with certain specific sites that may or may not have an interesting relationship with what the texts say. These site-specific works seem to come in a lineage that runs from Lawrence Weiner, the American conceptualist, some of whose texts can be found in embedded in the plaster at IMMA, to perhaps Jenny Holzer, who often uses electrically illuminated texts displaying a range of slogans in her very successful work from the 1980s.
These are not, however, the most obvious points of reference for Hegarty and Stones's work, since many plaques, posters and framed images in pubs across the city feature, like For Dublin, extracts from the written work of James Joyce. Over the years since the publication of Ulysses, Joyce, his likeness and his words have been co-opted both by the Irish tourist industry and Irish academia. This adoption of Joyce has been so strong that the brand name now has a definite, if hard to assess, value. The process by which Joyce has been made a symbol of Dublin has proved so effective that Dublin has, in many respects , become a symbol for Joyce.
For an artist this has profound implications. For Dublin is inevitably going to become part of the Joyce industry. While this may have pleased those whose interests are vested in re-enforcing the connection between Joyce and Dublin, it seems to mark a distinct caution on the part of those who made the decision. It is not simply that, in advertising terms, neon is now a rather quaint medium, long ago all but replaced for illuminated signage by walls of LEDs capable of full colour and motion. A work of art based on the text of a "great" writer and a local hero to boot, seems in a very real way pre-digested.
"I've often tried to get some critical purchase on the idea of certain things being brought in under the umbrella of `heritage'. All kinds of things can be re-represented in ways that they were certainly not intended," says Andrew Stone, addressing the questions of what he has described as the interrogative irony of the work. "I've tried to get some purchase on the way that certain ideas, political, parts of popular culture, or the presentation of fact and the way that has been reordered as heritage in a very reductive way."
If, for example, Joyce had a spiky relationship with Ireland, that is very rarely part of the communication of his importance in Ireland now. The idea of "James Joyce" these days is frequently used to underline some dubious ideas, such as the "intrinsic" literary nature of the people of Ireland.
"If you talk about these two factions who tend to claim Joyce, Irish academia and Irish tourism, I'm quite interested in that in relation to the way that I've found English things to be claimed in very much the same way. I tend to look at Joyce now from a very distant academic point of view, and read about his problems with Irishness.
"We started off looking for pieces in Ulysses which were very non-specific. I was interested in the way that this female persona could exist in any city in the world. So we looked for an extract which didn't make particular references," says Hegarty. "But then, when we got to Dublin, all that changed. We really had to take on references to Joyce, bronze plaques, and trails for tourists to follow, from physical marks on the city to guided history and literary tours. This makes it very difficult to create a work that doesn't become just another piece of tourism. But we tried to build in some kind of awkwardness in it, a sense of resistance to that very easy way of dealing with Joyce."
Which is a typically admirable aspiration from the pair. But it seems Hegarty and Stones, and indeed the organisers of the event, have made life much more difficult for themselves than necessary. The winter season, for example, with its long nights and its low tourist population might have made a more obvious time to commission a work in neon that wanted to escape being seen as part of a tourist trail. It might also have been a more obvious time to create a work that is entitled For Dublin.
The nine neon signs of In Dublin may be seen in sites around the city until October 31st.
