The new Hugh Lane extension opens with a show by writer, artist, film-maker and doctor Brian O'Doherty. The multi-monikered polymath talks to Aidan Dunne
When he wakes up in the morning, Brian O'Doherty must occasionally wonder who he is. A man with no fewer than four aliases, more identities than David Bowie in his heyday, he is also that increasingly rare phenomenon, a polymath. A doctor by training but not, pretty soon thereafter, by inclination, he has also established himself as an art critic and theorist, a film-maker, an arts administrator and teacher, and, not least, a novelist who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His best known and easily most contentious alias is Patrick Ireland, a name he adopted ceremonially in 1972 in protest at the British military presence in Northern Ireland, in the aftermath of the shootings on Bloody Sunday.
That he was inclined toward this particular response is not surprising, perhaps, given that it is clearly part of a pattern of reinvention. Equally, when he was drawn toward the land of personal reinvention, the United States, quite early on, he had a vague notion of making it there as an actor. The very title of the Hugh Lane's current exhibition, Beyond the White Cube: A Retrospective of Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, throws into question the idea of one, fixed identity. One of the works in the show Five Identities, features all five of his alter egos - one of them female - appropriately costumed.
Patrick Ireland has taken a lot of stick for calling himself Patrick Ireland, not least in Ireland itself. Even his dealer at the time, Betty Parsons, was horrified, pointing out that the effective demise of Brian O'Doherty and his replacement by an unknown artist might pose insurmountable problems career-wise. But then again, by virtue of his multiplicity in name, word and deed, O'Doherty/ Ireland/etc has made a career out of creating such obstacles for himself or, more accurately, himselves.
Born in Co Roscommon, he grew up in a family of doctors and went on to study medicine, though he was intensely interested in art and remained so throughout his medical studies. A year working in a hospital convinced him that medicine was not for him. Art was what appealed, but he found the cultural climate in Ireland in the 1950s unduly restrictive.
While admiring such contemporaries as Louis le Brocquy, Patrick Collins and Patrick Scott, he was increasingly taken with the radical theorising characteristic of the Russian avant garde and the conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp, none of which was quite catered for in Irish art of the time. "The art world here stumbled around on three legs," as he puts it now, "the Living Art, the Oireachtas and the RHA." A protege of Thomas McGreevey, a one-time director of the National Gallery of Ireland, he credits McGreevey with opening his eyes and his mind to the possibilities of what art might be.
Wanting to "shake the dust off my heels," he landed first in England, working for a time on the psychology of perception, then on to Harvard, where he studied public hygiene. The experience taught him, as he recalls, "the difference between sewage and sewerage". (The latter refers to the pipes, he explains, the former to what goes through them.)
The Hugh Lane show is a gratifyingly comprehensive retrospective and it includes significant new works, including one of his large-scale Rope Drawings, Golden Door, a wall painting, and a labyrinth. It also inaugurates the gallery's handsome new extension, designed by Gilroy McMahon, but it is not confined to the new galleries. Very appropriately for a show that spans more than four decades of work, it occupies both old and new spaces. One of the most impressive features of the extension is how smoothly it integrates with the existing building, how seamlessly the show flows from Charlemont House into the new wing.
O'Doherty is one of the seminal figures of the advent of conceptualism in the 1960s. His edition as guest editor of the unorthodox periodical Aspen (following on from Andy Warhol), is widely regarded as the first conceptual exhibition, literally a gallery in a box, since the issue took the form of a white box containing manuscripts, musical scores and records. The line-up of contributors is extraordinary: cultural theorist Roland Barthes ("a glum fellow"), writer Susan Sontag, composer Morton Feldman, Samuel Beckett as performed by Jack McGowran. Most subscribers, he concludes, didn't know what to make of it and threw it away, making it a highly prized item today.
Another series of works from the time, based around a strikingly original portrait of the godfather of conceptualism, Marcel Duchamp, is typical of O'Doherty's approach. The original portrait is a replay of an electrocardiograph recording of Duchamp's heartbeat. O'Doherty looked him up in the phone book and built up a relationship with him. Encapsulating the essence of an artist known for using his head by recording the pulse of an organ associated with the emotions is a nicely provocative gesture.
It is well nigh impossible to corral O'Doherty within the boundaries of any stylistic label. The work he makes has a conceptual basis but extends into other areas. He has owned up to being a post-minimalist in certain respects and the term sits quite comfortably with a great deal of what he has done. With that are the several bodies of work he has built up around a number of consistent themes and forms. There is one important caveat implied by that "post-". His work is always historically layered and textured, it appeals to the world beyond the borders of the artwork itself in myriad ways that do not accord with minimalism per se.
The categories of work you will find at the Hugh Lane include Ogham pieces based on the fifth-century system of notation; his Rope Drawings, installations which transform rooms into "meditative spaces of a Euclidean order tenuously defined" as Jan van der Marck concisely put it; his labyrinths in two- and three-dimensional form, originally triggered by the pattern of the St Brigid's cross; his beautiful Box and Book drawings, which variously explode and explore the White Cube, the pristine gallery space he famously defined in a landmark essay, Inside the White Cube. There are, in fact, other categories of work as well. Latterly, for example, he has made easel paintings.
Although, as he says, he couldn't wait to get out of Ireland in the 1950s, it has been a consistent source of inspiration for him. "Absolutely," he acknowledges. "Even in anger and fury." The St Brigid's Cross, Ogham, Newgrange, turf ricks have all been integral to his artistic language and, presumably, to who he is.
"Ah," he says, "the old question of identity. I think it was Emil Nolde who said identity is worth talking about - if you tell the truth."
The problem with alternative identities is that they can take on lives of their own, which can be useful or difficult. It was useful when, casting around for an authoritative text to back up a conceptual scheme he was positing, he "made up a quote from a fictitious book, Language as Placement by Sigmund Bode, an alias I'd used before."
It became potentially difficult when, writing criticism under the alias Mary Josephson for Art in America, edited at the time by one Brian O'Doherty, his creation attracted the attention of other editors, including one who resented the fact that O'Doherty was thwarting his efforts to get in touch with the fictitious writer.
A farcical conclusion was engineered when O'Doherty enlisted the help of a friend of his wife to play the part of Josephson. She explained to the bemused editor that she had no interest whatsoever in writing for anyone other than the charismatic O'Doherty.
Not that he takes the issue of identity lightly. "If you take on an identity, it can't just be a lark," he contends, going on to paraphrase Delmore Schwartz: "In identities begin responsibilities." He was taken aback at how writing "as a woman" was an enlightening experience. "I surprised myself."
He has a great deal of time for the structuralist and post-structuralist view that identity is a social and cultural construct. "People tend to accept the identities assigned to them, and I've found that people are usually capable of more than they achieve - if they are allowed." And he has certainly been allowed.
• Beyond the White Cube: A Retrospective of Patrick Ireland/Brian O'Doherty is at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane until Aug 27. Patrick Ireland - Drawings from Four Series is at the Fenton Gallery, Wandesford Quay, Cork until May 26
