After a year as director of IMMA, Enrique Juncosa is finally getting his chance to shape the museum's future. Essentially this year's programme is the first outline of Juncosa's intentions as director. Aidan Dunne reports.
Enrique Juncosa took up his post as director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art almost a year ago, and this week John O'Donoghue, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, launched the museum's programme for 2004. Essentially this year's programme is the first outline of Juncosa's intentions as director. Although many onlookers may presume he has been responsible for every exhibition at IMMA since his arrival, the reality is rather different. Museums programme years, not months, in advance, and even most of the current shows at IMMA were scheduled before his arrival. During the coming year, however, his input becomes more apparent and will be fully so throughout 2005.
In fact, he says: "Ideally I would like the programme to be seen in terms of two years at a time. It's easier to plan over a period of two years. You can see emphases emerging, you know? Three of that kind of show, four of those."
He also points out, up front, that although IMMA will host several exhibitions of Irish art, none will be a solo show by an Irish artist, which may irk some observers. "That's largely because I was keen to tour them. It's much better in every respect if a show travels to other venues. So, for example, we are doing a major Dorothy Cross retrospective in 2005, and we are trying to arrange that it will tour to the UK and to Spain. At this stage we're fairly confident that it will. But those things take time to set up, so it had to be next year rather than this year."
From 2005 the aim is to programme a comparable retrospective by an Irish artist each year. Two more are already under discussion. Incidentally, next year also sees a large show of work by the late Tony O'Malley.
Given the period of fierce acrimony at IMMA before Juncosa's appointment, the job might have proved something of a poisoned chalice. But from the first Juncosa has been disarmingly likeable, relaxed and quietly enthusiastic, and he has inspired a great deal of good will. When he arrived he candidly admitted that he knew little of the Irish art scene - but he has learned a great deal in the meantime. "I think a year is enough to get a good idea of things. And I have to say I've been favourably surprised. I've met a lot of people and seen a lot of good work." His positive impressions led him to accept an invitation to select an exhibition of work by Irish artists for next year's ARCO, the international art fair, in Madrid.
It has become apparent that, through his curatorial experience in Spain and in London, he has built up an extensive network of contacts in the art world. "Because I worked as a freelance curator for a number of years, from the early 1990s, I got to know a lot of artists as friends. When it's on that personal level it's a different kind of contact to one emanating from an institution, which tends to be more businesslike. And I moved on from that to a job in a museum but maintained friendships."
Among this year's highlights are the current show by the US artist Martin Puryear, next month's Francesco Clemente, which features work made for the exhibition, a retrospective of the enigmatic and fascinating French artist Sophie Calle and the first Irish solo show of work by the highly regarded sculptor Marc Quinn, whose Self features his head cast in his own frozen blood. These high-profile names are supplemented by the Brazilian photographer Vik Muniz, the Italian painter Margherita Manzelli and the Spanish abstract painter Juan Usle, who gets a retrospective. There will be a tribute to the late Dorothy Walker, and the Joyce-themed High Falutin Stuff marks the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.
Clemente is perhaps the best-known international artist to feature at IMMA this year. The show that still stands out as spectacularly successful there is the one of work by Andy Warhol. Last year's Gary Hume was also a big draw. Early next year a Jasper Johns show could also prove popular. Juncosa is alert to the way high-profile artists draw visitors, but he is also pragmatic. "People will come to see the big names, but in fact there aren't really that many big names in contemporary art in that sense."
In any event it is evident he has no intention of drifting towards a lowest-common-denominator approach. "One of the reasons I took the job is because the nature of the space allows us to run three or four exhibitions at once. So we can have Louise Bourgeois and when people come to see her we can offer them work by artists they perhaps haven't heard of but might like to discover. That's the nature of what we do. If you are programming a gallery like the Whitechapel in London you don't have that flexibility. For me the situation here is more rewarding in terms of opportunities for programming."
There are three main strands to IMMA's programme: exhibitions at the museum, education and community activities, and the collection. Juncosa hasn't tried to fix anything that wasn't broken. "Part of what attracted me to the museum is that I liked what was going on here, so I haven't stopped anything from happening." In terms of the community and the national programme, under which works from the collection are exhibited at venues around the country, "there is a greater demand than we can satisfy, an enormous demand."
Given that the museum is not much more than 10 years old, and that resources are limited, he thinks the collection is pretty good in that it reflects the main figures and facets of Irish art from the 1950s on. A more substantial catalogue of the collection than the existing, sketchy publication is promised by the end of the year. Among the acquisitions in 2003 were a Cristina Iglesias installation, Anthony Hobbs and Fergus Martin's Frieze, a photographic work from their Green on Red Gallery exhibition, a painting by Oliver Comerford, Dorothy Cross's video Ghost Ship, works by Willie Doherty, Clare Langan and David Timmons and a large film installation by Jaki Irvine called The Silver Bridge.
Juncosa is keen to target significant work by Irish artists, hence acquisitions on the scale of the Irvine and the Hobbs and Martin. At least such works are relatively affordable. The same would not necessarily apply elsewhere. "Prices in London are crazy, for example." Many of these substantial acquisitions will form the core of a significant exhibition of work by contemporary Irish artists next autumn, organised to coincide with a curators' conference at the museum.
The idea of hosting a curators' conference is obvious, sensible and slightly cheeky. It's a good way of putting the museum on the mental maps of curators all over the world - and of introducing them to the state of play in Irish art. "Rather than aiming at freelance curators we have invited those from the big museums. In the case of smaller institutions we've invited the directors." Juncosa would like to make such conferences an annual event, with the focus on a different kind of participant each year. "But we'll have to see whether that is possible in terms of funding."
There has been huge interest in contemporary Chinese art internationally, and autumn at IMMA sees a substantial show of Chinese art as part of Ireland's cultural exchange with China. It will feature major projects by 15 artists, including Liu Xiadong and Yang Fudong. Earlier in the year 30 works by Irish artists from the IMMA collection will travel to China. Views From An Island will show at venues in Beijing and Shanghai.
Visitors to Ireland frequently bemoan the lack of a gallery where they can see a representative exhibition of 20th-century Irish art. Although IMMA holds regular thematic shows that cover some of this ground, the museum is not really equipped to have a space dedicated to the task all the time.
Juncosa is aware of the perceived need but says he doesn't like the idea of a permanent display. "But given that, I would certainly like to be able to show the Irish collection, so that you can always see works by key figures, like Yeats or le Brocquy or James Coleman, for example, or a Felim Egan or a Patrick Scott. But we don't really have the room to do that at the moment."
On the whole, though, he's more than happy with his first year at the museum and says he has been able to do more or less anything he wanted to, given realistic constraints. "I knew that we could do with more money, obviously. But I like the building: the architecture is wonderful, though there are limitations. It has its peculiarities. The lack of a large room, for example. And the difficulty of moving things around - it's not very high-tech from a practical point of view. But then the nature of the space allows us to keep several things going at once, and that is really what I wanted to do."
