A FEW years ago, if you sat naked, covered in dead fish, insisted on continually sticking your head in a bucket or devoted your time to sticking cows udders on to Guinness bottles, you might readily be diagnosed as being in the late stages of dementia praecox, today you are more likely to be rewarded with an Arts Council grant and invited to represent your country at international art festivals. Chances are, your work will be bought by IMMA, shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery and documented in CIRCA magazine.
If, on the other hand, you were one of a group of artists who founded modern art in this country, your work probably cannot be seen in any public collection. While our main modern art institutions seem, to be falling over themselves to bring us the dernier cri in World art, they are showing reprehensible neglect in showing and curating the best of modern Irish art. This negligence has allowed for grievous gaps in our collections that make it impossible, without recourse to private collections, for the present generation to get an idea of the scope and development of our own, 20th century artists.
Let us take 1943 as a significant date for the modern art movement in this country. In that year, a group of artists that included Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Louis le Brocquy, Norah McGuinness, Hilary Heron and Jack Hanlon started the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. In the 40 or so years of its existence, it showed every major contemporary Irish artist. It also invited guest painters and sculptors from abroad to show their work to an Irish audience.
The year 1960 saw the first Independent Artists exhibition, set up by yet another group of young lions. It went on to include Michael Kane, Barrie Cooke, John Kelly, Camille Souter and Noel Sheridan. Members of the Independent Artists and the subsequent Group 65 were, in their torn, to form the nucleus of the Project Arts Centre.
Many of the artists involved made substantial contributions to the formation of contemporary Irish art. While their work was bought individually by discerning private buyers the establishment for the most part, resolutely ignored them.
WHILE it is well nigh impossible and certainly invidious to attempt an exhaustive list, let me cite a group of names from the Living Art days: Colin Middleton, Nano Reid, Norah McGuinness, Beatrice Glenavy, Gerard Dillon, Patrick Collins, George Campbell, Patrick Hennessy, Arthur Armstrong, Daniel O'Neill, Noreen Rice, F.E. McWilliam, Edward Maguire, Hilary Heron.
Now let me list another, group, all of them, thankfully, alive and currently working: Edward Delaney, Patrick Pye, Patrick Scott, John Kelly, Martin Gale, Brian Bourke, Trevor Geoghegan, T.P. Flanagan, Tom Carr, Anne Yeats Barrie Cooke, John Behan, Charles Brady, Patrick Connor, Charles Harper, Michael Farrell, Charles Tyrrell, Mary Fitzgerald, Carey Clarke, Andrew Folan, Patrick Hickey, Grace Weir, Mary Lohan, Sean McSweeney, Donald Teskey. The list goes on.
Most of these artists, covering more than 50 years of Irish art, have something in common: while they are all fine practitioners, you won't find substantial representation of any of them in a public collection in this country, other than the odd piece of their work here or there.
Some years ago, in spite of repeated attempts by the arts advisory committee of Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery to remedy this situation, there was great curatorial resistance to buying current works by Irish artists. Many opportunities were lost to procure works that could have, at least, formed the nucleus of a representative collection of contemporary Irish art.
Trinity College's Douglas Hyde Gallery does not buy art but it does get an annual grant of £140,000 from the Arts Council. With this, it stages a series of exhibitions which, the curator once informed me, Were "the cutting edge of world art". The tired old parade of contemporary art cliche's - that have been trotted out by the gallery over the last couple of years looks less to me like a cutting edge than someone trying to commit hara kiri with a butter knife.
Their policy espouses the worst excesses of provincialism: a belief that what is newest is best and the more foreign the better. All this is presented with expensively produced catalogues containing essays that are masterpieces of such obscurantist elitism that comprehension is almost always guaranteed to be eschewed.
The policy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, while, similarly employing artspeak dissimulation, seemingly ignores anything other than a contemporary historical Irish role. Last week, in announcing a Nissan sponsorship, Declan McGonagle said the work selected would become an intervention in the public domain", where the public is allowed "unmediated access to it. The work becomes a part of community and education strategies and will its part in confirming IMMA's status as a national institution." Given these terms of reference it will, no doubt, help McGonagle's agenda that a museum is a function, not just a building.
The policy of Curator as Creator is becoming increasingly predominant in the world of contemporary art practice: it is insidious and dangerous and there is the frightening possibility, that, if allowed to be pursued, it will rob us of our artistic heritage.
In the case of IMMA in particular, the board members should remind themselves that they are the custodians of the Irish Museum of Modern Art not the "Kilmainham Gallery of Contemporary Art". And they should tell their curator that too!
