At the beginning of one of his films, Eric Rohmer quoted a saying that goes something like this: "A man with two wives loses his soul, but a man with two houses loses his mind." Patrick Ireland could probably add a third example, about what happens to a man with two names. His decision to change his name from Brian O'Doherty to Patrick Ireland in 1972 has left him with two identities and, he says ruefully, "caused me all sorts of grief".
It was a political act, the gesture of an Irish expatriate in the US in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. "You felt this terrible impotence. It seemed to me that one thing the British didn't want to hear anything about at the time was Ireland, so I took the name Ireland. And what name was more typical of the Irish in Britain than Patrick?" So, in a documented ceremony in 1972, he adopted the name Patrick Ireland until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland. It's something that has drawn flak from all quarters, including from Ireland, and from his dealer at the time, Betty Parsons, who despaired of having to acquaint collectors with a reinvented artist. But he is staying true to his word, although "I'd like to have my name back before I take the celestial stroll." On the plus side, he notes that "several people have told me I bear a striking similarity to Brian O'Doherty, except that I'm much nicer."
Born in Roscommon, he studied medicine but was intensely interested in art. However, he found the cultural climate in Ireland stultifying in the 1950s. "This is not to say that there weren't good artists here. There were; Pat Collins was at his apogee, Louis le Brocquy was doing beautiful work, Pat Scott was maintaining his customary high standard." But he resisted the influence of Paris. Temperamentally, he seems to have been drawn to the radical theorising of the Russian avant garde. He went to America not to be an artist but "to seek my fortune."
Like many another emigrant, he harboured dreams of making it as an actor. In the event, he spent a year at Harvard studying Public Health. "I can tell the difference between sewerage and sewage. Sewage is the pipes, sewerage is what flows through them. A year at Harvard will do that for you." He never worked in the area of public health. Instead he went to New York. "New York changed my life. It taught me how to be an artist."
Last week he was in Ireland to deliver the inaugural lecture in a new annual series organised by the Irish Association of Art Historians. As it happens, he is uniquely well qualified to speak on the theme The Birth of Conceptual Art, because he was intimately involved from conception to birth. Some commentators describe his edition of Aspen magazine, which took the form of a box, as the first conceptual exhibition - a gallery in a box, following on from Marcel Duchamp's museum in a suitcase.
Duchamp is famously known as the father of Conceptual Art and is generally regarded as the artist whose influence dominates the latter half of the century. Certainly Vladimir Nabakov's observation that there is no such thing as reading, only re-reading, finds an echo in the procession of 20th century avant garde movements in the visual arts. The explosive developments of the first couple of decades of the century have been successively re-read throughout the remainder of the century. And the process is continuing even now. The conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s was revisited in the form of 1990s' Neo-conceptualism, although the aesthetic austerity and theoretical rigour of the former was largely supplanted by streetwise irony.
"According to the scholars who are now digging it all up, that phase of conceptual art extended from 1967 to 1973. The exhilaration of that time has never left me. As modernism was coming to an end and the avant garde movements were overheating, there was an extraordinary paradigm shift, a shift as significant as Cubism earlier in the century, I think." Art was knocked off its pedestal and had to fend for itself. In his lecture, Ireland described the intellectual turmoil of the New York art scene as a kind of gang warfare.
In 1967 he was contacted by Phyllis Johnson, who published a magazine with a difference called Aspen. Andy Warhol had edited the first edition and Johnson offered Ireland the chance to be editor, and he accepted. Deciding that it should take the form of a plain white box, he set about enlisting contributors. He aimed high, and came up with an impressive line-up.
"I got in touch with Roland Barthes, who was teaching in the States, and he said I think I have something for you." The something was the influential text The Death of the Author. Barthes came to visit. "He was a classic Gallic character: vest spilling over his waistband, cigarette in his mouth, glum. We had a little dog, Cuchulainn, who didn't like the look of him at all and just went straight for him."
He rang Samuel Beckett. Beckett had just published Text For Nothing. "I remember he said `I haven't a scrap'. But he agreed to a recording of a piece from Text for Nothing and suggested Jack McGowran. Jack insisted on money up front, so I sent him some money - there wasn't a lot - and he sent back the tape. To my dismay it suddenly broke off in the middle. I rang him to ask what had happened. `That's as far as the money brought me,' he said."
Susan Sontag, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Hans Richter, Tony Smith, Dan Graham, Merce Cunningham, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo and several others all had some involvement in Aspen 5+6, as the finished product was called. The box contained texts, musical scores and records. It was duly produced and dispatched to subscribers, most of whom didn't know what to make of it. "Most of them simply threw it away, so that it has become extremely difficult to get hold of one now."
Ireland regards the episode as his naturalisation as an American artist. "A friend of mine, the composer Morton Feldman, said that you had to pass through something, go through a process, to become part of the New York ethos. After that, I felt I belonged. Although it is ironic that there I was, striving to be an American artist, and as it transpired my work is known for being full of Irish references. It's just something that comes through."
PARTLY because conceptual art is rooted so much in language and meaning, it tends to produce extreme views and statements. Just think of the seminal conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, who has shown at IMMA, and is, like the embodiment of one of Patrick Ireland's aesthetic street gang-members, extremely intolerant of any other means of making art. Ireland has never been so inclined. "I was never that violently polemical about it. For one thing, I had friends in the older generation of artists. Then, it's other people who apply labels to you. Lately I've been doing painting, for example. I just don't pay much attention to labels. They don't mean much when you're actually making the work. You're just an artist."
In the mid-1960s in New York he looked up Marcel Duchamp in the phone directory and rang him, beginning an acquaintanceship that resulted in his "portrait" of the artist. He made the portrait by hooking Duchamp up to an electro-cardiograph machine and printing out the rhythm of his heartbeat. From this he made fixed images of Duchamp's cardiogram. But he also made an ingeniously animated version, and exhibited it as a portrait of Duchamp. "Duchamp would meet my wife on the street and inquire of her whether his heart was still beating. I liked that, because it hinted at the element of power, even magic that is there in art. It's something that is largely smoothed out or suppressed in contemporary culture, and it's good to be reminded of it."
Patrick Ireland's film on the artist Edward Hopper, Hopper's Silence is being screened twice daily at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery until the end of March.
