The transformation of visual arts infrastructure in Ireland has put pressure on artists to justify the investment in their work. Yet popularity is not a reliable guide to art, writes Aidan Dunne
Within the last 20 years or so, the visual arts scene in Ireland has undergone a fundamental transformation. It happened in the context of general economic and cultural change, but in a way this transformation can also be characterised in terms of the increasing professionalism of visual arts activity here. This applies not only to the artists themselves, but also, very much and very significantly, to the areas of arts administration and education, to curatorial practice, and to the operation of commercial galleries.
Coming through an increasingly well- resourced education system, younger artists have had easy access to more information and arts activity than ever before, and they have higher expectations than their predecessors. They inhabit a world of ubiquitous air travel and cultural exchange, in which there is both a greater awareness and appreciation of cultural diversity and, oddly enough, a tendency towards conformist uniformity on the international art circuit. The cynical view might even be that Irish artists have become better at addressing the received priorities of the international art world, which is true but by no means the whole story.
One could also point to the considerable number of Irish artists who choose to live, work and thrive abroad, but of course that doesn't signify any great change since Irish artists have traditionally travelled, looked and settled elsewhere.
In fact, from the late 19th century onwards, one of the major issues has been not access to art centres elsewhere, but the development of an indigenous Irish visual culture, traditionally and indeed still routinely ranked a poor second to a celebrated literary heritage. The perceived need for a representative iconography of Irishness was linked to the construction of national identity in an independent Ireland, but the underlying need was and is for a living visual tradition grounded in a heterogeneous Irish art community and Irish society as a whole.
The role of Modernist pioneers like Mainie Jellett and of such organisations as the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, in the early and mid-20th century, is well-documented, but, odd though it might seem to suggest it, in a real sense it is only in the recent past that we have seen a maturation of these efforts. This is not to patronise the major achievements of generations of artists and others, but to point out that a wider framework, encompassing institutional structures, economic circumstances and even communications technology, came into existence over a period of many decades. Nor is it to suggest that contemporary art enjoys a qualitative superiority to the work of, say, Jack B. Yeats or Paul Henry.
Clearly it doesn't, and in several respects its qualitative status is still open to debate. Equally, we have yet to come to terms with the legacy of mid- to late 20th century Irish artists, who are too often and easily damned with faint praise as being lyrical, romantic and Celtic.
What it does mean, though, is a level of artistic literacy within a sizeable community, entailing a general awareness of the issues and debates current in the national and international arena. To be sure, many artists and curators would question the claim that a significant battle has been won in this regard. It is likely that they see themselves as still fighting battles, on several fronts, and that is absolutely true. But they are doing so in transformed circumstances. In any case, many kinds of cultural endeavour will always entail battles because they are inherently critical and situated in a realm where meanings are contested.
Something is at stake.
While the Irish art market is still predominantly conservative (though exceptionally strong given the modest population base), we now live in a society in which provision for visual arts activities have been integrated in the form of a network of municipal art galleries, regional arts centres and local authorities, the latter chiefly through the imaginative administration of the Per Cent For Art scheme. The importance of education programmes has been long realised, and here IMMA has led by example. All major public galleries run lively programmes of talks and discussions. Theoretically, the combination of artists, curators and infrastructure has the capacity to overhaul the cultural landscape. However, if the current situation represents a ground-breaking opportunity, it is also, undeniably, a challenge. It is striking that, despite developments in the sector, the visual arts have as yet attained only a tenuous, limited space in the public consciousness.
It could be argued that fine art is a minority interest, that art has somehow lost the mass audience to popular cultural forms, notably television, not to mention film and music. Reality television attracts audiences in numbers that only exhibitions of the French Impressionists will draw into museums. While a number of British artists have attained a level of celebrity commensurate with stars of popular culture, that has simply not happened in Ireland as yet. Some artists, including Willie Doherty, Dorothy Cross and Paul Seawright, are relatively well known within specific cultural circles at home and abroad, but none has the flamboyant presence and profile of a Damien Hirst or a Tracey Emin.
Dorothy Cross's Ghost Ship was probably the highest-profile Irish public art project of the last decade. More recently, Shane Cullen's The Agreement has also reached a wider audience. Yet a populist, unchallenging artist like Graham Knuttel - one who conforms to the stereotype of the lone, eccentric genius - is certainly better known in Ireland than any of the foregoing. Celebrity has its own logic, and this is a problematic area. Ratings are no more a reliable guide to good art than to good television programmes.
If the visual arts in Ireland are experiencing something like a coming of age, it is not a straightforward or unproblematic process. Although IMMA's survey of 50 years of Irish art, Shifting Ground, effectively sidestepped its own premise, it did provide markers for current artistic practice by pointing out that pretty much everything, these days, is open to question, including such core concepts as art and Irishness. This proposition can be viewed as not so much an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the museum as an honourable effort to stir up the familiar and the received, to generate a potentially productive flux.
In the event, unfortunately, the show proved to have a rather half-hearted predictability about it, combining the worst of both worlds. But it is true that younger artists inherit few certainties about their practice.
Apart from questions posed by their Irish cultural inheritance and the realities of contemporary Ireland, younger Irish artists find themselves equipped as never before to take their place in an international scene that, as it happens, turns out to be chronically uneasy and uncertain. The uncertainty of fragmented postmodernity is often reflected in the restricted ambition, the sheer inconsequential banality, the laughable hubris or the various other perplexing facets of the kind of work you are likely to encounter from Venice to Tokyo. Or, for that matter, in IMMA's own judiciously nervy, provisional survey of work by younger Irish artists last year, How Things Turn Out.
The dissolution of boundaries, the difficulties of formulating qualitative judgements, the pervasive uncertainty as to what art is, might or should be doing, means that the visual arts have never been more open, but this openness comes with a high price. If meaning is everywhere and multifarious, it is devalued. It is tempting, perhaps too tempting, to speak of the visual arts as being in crisis. If there is a crisis, it has been going on for some time. Perhaps the only kind of management that pertains in the fine art business is crisis management. Certainly art gets made quite a lot in extremis.
In the 1940s Willem de Kooning spoke of working from a position of desperation. German painter Gerhard Richter wrote that the work eventually made is usually a last despairing lunge in the darkness, a Beckettian throw of the dice.
Against this background, what sort of world would we be living in if the agendas of every visual arts group and organisation and individual were realised? Or, to put it another way, would it make any difference to the world, and to our lives, if that were to happen? It is a question worth asking because, with a renewed emphasis on public art, so much of contemporary visual art activity comes across as being purposive, not, in the Kantian formulation, purposive without purpose but, on the contrary, purposive in a concrete, social sense. That is, it seems to aspire to have a transformative impact on a wide audience, and it seems to address issues relating to the structures and constraints within which the members of that potential audience live.
The aspiration to influence or shape social reality has been built into a great deal of visual art for a long time. Yet, while the evangelist always speaks from a position of certainty, art is more usually made in uncertainty. Many curators and practitioners espouse their ideas with an evangelical conviction, and a sense of moral righteousness, perhaps unconsciously reflecting the widely held assumption that art is good for you - good for the individual you and for the plural, social you. There is an echo here of the Modernist belief that art might contribute to shaping a better, perfectible world, even if that process begins with a critical aim, an instructive disenchantment. But perhaps art will never change anything much about the world, other than the ways we look at it.
About 35 years ago Sean Keating dismissed Picasso as a conman. Underlying the popular suspicion, still extant, that modern art is a con, is the fact that art does occupy an odd, anomalous place in our lives and our culture. Iconic figures like Duchamp, Warhol, Beuys, and Hirst are provocative. But rather than simply presuming that they must be charlatans, we have to admit the possibility that aspects of themselves and what they did actually pose relevant questions that direct us to the heart of what art is. They focus our minds on something important. There are kinds of art practice that have to do with questioning or probing social or other aspects of reality and are inherently critical and perhaps provocative. The boundaries between art and non-art are contested.
It is, it seems, in the nature of art always to outflank its own positions, to exist, at least when viewed from the outside looking in, in a state of perpetual unease.
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