EVEN a decade ago the idea of mounting a large scale exhibition of contemporary culture which favoured the visual over the verbal arts would have been odd, if not unthinkable. Yet, despite some heavyweight literary content, this in effect, is what the commissioners of L'Imaginaire Irlandais have done. The obvious choice of a one venue extravaganza was rejected early on. Instead, a decision was taken to organise or facilitate the insinuation of a selection of contemporary Irish art into a variety of French museums and galleries.
The timing was right for at least two reasons. Confidence in Irish art at home and interest in it abroad have increased markedly in recent times. One feeds off the other, and work of indisputable quality has benefited from such enlightened initiatives as Ireland's resumed participation in international Biennial exhibitions.
Meanwhile, the international art world has undergone a vigorous internal audit. This has been partly fuelled by two separate but related academic debates. One addresses the troubled legacy of colonialism. The other concerns the exclusions effected by certain partial but influential accounts of modernism in the visual arts.
One happy result of both debates has been a notable increase in the aid to art produced in attention places far from such traditional centres of influence as Paris or New York. This may signal a genuine broadening of interests. Or it may amount to no more than a jaded cosmopolitan art world's latest trawl for fresh exotica. Either way, it promises a more receptive international response to new Irish art than might have been expected in the past.
At first glance the programme of L'Imaginaire Irlandais would appear to confirm this line of thinking. The most prestigious venues involved are the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and its younger rival, the Centre Georges Pompidou. Willie Doherty and Nigel Rolfe feature at the former, while the latter plays host to James Coleman. Doherty is showing a selection of large cibachrome images and the latest in the series of video works with which he has augmented his photographic output in recent years. Rolfe's contribution is even more obviously retrospective and provides a useful overview of the career and concerns of this performance artist turned photographer. Both artists are adept at producing arresting images and narratives in an idiom familiar to audiences for advanced art the world over. But they do so while remaining true to the specifics of the sociopolitical situation which inspired the work in the first place.
Derry born Doherty's chosen area of enquiry is the media representation of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The considerable charge packed by his work is emulative. This has allowed his increasingly subtle photographs to communicate their feelings of unease and foreboding without the accompanying, superimposed texts which formerly helped to spell things out.
Rolfe's most recent work like wise indicates that his investigations of the symbolic representations of Irish culture from the vantage point of an Englishman living in Ireland continue apace. In the most succinct and focused work in the show, the image of an abandoned bodhran, caught in an endlessly decelerating spin, is complemented by a disembodied voice portentously declaiming a passage from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
THE presentation of both bodies of work strives to ensure that the French public pays due attention to the particularities of this art's initial context. This is less obviously the case with James Coleman. Like Beckett before him, the fact that his work became international property early on has tended to obscure the Irish elements often hidden in its folds. The mesmerising INITIALS is made up of a series of tableaux on projected photographic slides which take place in the unplaceable nowhere of a series of shabby hospital rooms. Yet the work's urgent soundtrack draws much of its power from its interpolation of extracts from Yeats's The Dreaming of the Bones. Elsewhere in the Pompidou Centre the visceral assault of the same artist's Box is conscripted by star curators Rosalind Krauss and Yves Alain Bois for a complex rereading of 20th century art which plays scant attention to issues of original provenance.
But the work most likely to suffer from readings insufficiently attentive to, or understandably ignorant of, its contextual meanings is that in the ambitious group show at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. One example will suffice. Locky Morris's Comm has been described as a "big installation piece of numerous bladder like shapes in plastic by a seasoned and knowledgeable Irish commentator who go on to assess its formal impact judiciously. Yet its title refers explicitly to the smuggled communications of republican prisoners which, like Morris's tongue like shapes, were sealed in cellophane and delivered with a kiss. One wonders how many French visitors to this exhibition will be in a position to decipher this particular communication.
