In windows opposite Dublin City Hall are 68 Warhol-like portraits of figures from 1916. How did they get there? Gerard Mannix Flynn has been at it again. He tells Gemma Tiptonabout Far Cry Productions.
If you have recently passed Thomas Read, the pub on the corner of Parliament Street and Dame Street in central Dublin, you've probably noticed the faces in the upstairs windows, some of them immediately recognisable, some less so. Brightly coloured and lit up at night, the 68 faces belong to people who played a part in the formative years of the Republic. The installation, Something to Live For, is the work of Gerard Mannix Flynn's Far Cry Productions, and it celebrates, he says, the idea of building a cause to celebrate rather than finding one to struggle and die for.
Something to Live For is part of 1916 One Hundred, a 10-year project leading up to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Initially, Flynn created an installation called Thank You. Sited on Leeson Street, it was a series of texts of the Proclamation, translated into six languages, including Polish and Mandarin. It was on show for about five months; it was removed recently, after complaints led to the discovery that it contravened a minor planning law. The objections, suggests Flynn, were probably from somebody who took exception to one person's making such a display.
"Everyone's grabbing ownership of 1916 now," he says. "Six months before, you could have bought it for nothing. You could have had a six-pack of Irish heroes for 10 pence. Now they're a rare commodity. They're on a par with residences in Dublin 4."
Despite its removal, Flynn is confident that Thank You will reappear some time, somewhere else, and when it does it will do so quietly. "We don't make big announcements, don't have any fanfare. We like the public to come across our work and be attracted to it, be intrigued by it."
Flynn himself is intriguing, hard to pin down. A member of Aosdána and a director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, he was, for a while, best known as a playwright, actor and author. James X, a semi-autobiographical performance (and then a book) that documents a child's abuse at the hands of the State, was described by Fintan O'Toole in this newspaper as "like nothing we have seen before". It used records released under the Freedom of Information Act to lay bare the way some institutions treated the children in their care.
Flynn, who spent time in the industrial schools at Goldenbridge and Letterfrack, and in Mountjoy Prison, explains his motivation for writing James X. "I'm not doing this for my career, my ego or for theatrical reasons. I'm doing this because it's necessary. If anybody wants to figure out how [ the institutional abuse] happened, at least there will be one document out there that shows why it happened and what the character of James X did with it." The James X project might have sown the seeds for 1916 One Hundred; James X panels appeared for a while on the Leeson Street site, before Thank You took over, marking a move from performance and literature to contemporary art.
But all of this goes only so far in revealing where Flynn is coming from, and that's how he likes to keep it. "People are so busy with an idea of me, and a projection of me, that they don't actually see me," he says. It's the same with Far Cry Productions. "We're coming in under the radar. The whole idea of conforming is in question," he says. "We're living in a very conservative place, probably far more conservative than when we were under the jackboot of Catholicism."
Nonconformist he may be, but he's also aware of reactions to him and his work, especially in relation to the contemporary art world. "There's nothing worse than dealing with people's resentment," he says. "Because I've been in the media for various reasons in my life, people think they know me, that they have some kind of stakehold in me. It took me 40-odd years to get a stakehold in my own life, so they don't understand a ha'pence worth. It's not that they want to pigeonhole you, but they can't comprehend where I'm coming from - I'm the only person from my background coming into this world - and when you scratch the surface it is a ball of nothing. It's a self-congratulatory, cosy cartel - and we're making that a bit more real, a bit more uncomfortable. And we're dealing directly with the public. You can go under as many names and guises as you want to deliver what you want to the people."
The guises in which 1916 One Hundred is appearing are as varied as Flynn's own practice. Letting Go of That Which You Most Ardently Desire, which was part of last year's Dublin Theatre Festival, involved taking the audience to a secret location to see decommissioned paramilitary weapons. "They were deactivated, but they were genuine firearms." How did he come across them? "You can pick up that kind of equipment in the North of Ireland without any certificates, without anything untoward," he says. "You can never get murder out of a country, but you can get a gun out of politics, and that's what we've moved towards. We're led to believe that a large number of guns were taken out of service, but the public had no knowledge of it. There was no artistic practice around it, no artist took up the challenge, but we did. We took 150 people and took them through a process. We asked them to let go of their own resentments - because guns don't pull their own triggers, resentments do."
The next project on Far Cry's agenda is a celebration of Cumann na mBan, to remember women's contribution to the foundation of the Republic. Flynn envisages huge lampshades inspired by the lives of the women in Cumann na mBan. They could be on St Stephen's Green, they could be in Limerick, they could be in London. "We see all space as space we can operate in. We're hoping to do it in October. Yes, if we do it in Dublin from October to January," he says, imagining the process as he goes, "it would mingle with the Christmas lights and become ornate. And we want that. You'll be able to buy the lampshades. We can bring them down to all sizes. Most people will look up, maybe cop to what they are. It's not something you have to stand there and examine. It's more like a falling leaf that catches the eye. And that's the interaction you want. Everyone's questioning the gallery space, the museum space, the idea of institution - they're all being torn to smithereens by contemporary arts practice. We don't get into that business. We get out there and do the business."
Women also take centre stage in Something to Live For. Most of the faces in the windows are female. "The majority of the women there would have been of the Protestant faith," says Flynn. "They were also ardent Republicans, and they continued that struggle - they built hospitals and gave an enormous amount of service to the poor - but they were largely uncelebrated."
In Flynn's tableau Eamon de Valera is flanked by women. "De Valera said he wouldn't be interested in having women in his garrison, so we surrounded him with some fine things, and he seems the better for it." This intelligent wit - Flynn is also, by turns, charming and extremely intense - provides another clue to understanding not only how Flynn has come to terms with his history but also how he is so adept at understanding the contradictions of our shared past.
"We've just come out of a 30-year war. You might call it the Troubles, but it was a war. We're great for those generalisations in Ireland, saying 'it's a soft day' when there's hailstones happening. But for 30 years normality was disrupted, truth went out the door, and murder and deception were the order of the day. And now we have an opportunity to engage with something to live for rather than something to sacrifice and die for.
"I was reared in an Ireland where being anti-Brit, and the whole idea of the struggle, was paramount in the education. I was a young child - I was 15 when the war broke out in the North - and I was very influenced by that. There wasn't any counterbalance to it. And the whole of Ireland has been affected."
But, as he points out, you have to look at the contradictions: Edward Carson was a Dubliner, born on Harcourt Street. Roger Casement was British; he was also gay. Both men will form part of future 1916 One Hundred projects. "We have to reclaim them. Whatever about the politics, it's that business of taking something that's potent and making it into a civil, cultural thing, and then letting it go."
What about this Easter? The windows of Thomas Read will be illuminated, flags will fly there, and about 50,000 cards will be handed out. But it's important to remember that Easter week "isn't the only time you can celebrate this process," says Flynn. "We're trying to bring it into an everyday situation. You can look and say 'what's going on here?' and then you'll go and find out. What these projects do is give people a sense of a massive horizon. It doesn't just boil it down to a military event in the GPO. Not everybody reads history or intellectualises it. But we all live it."
Flynn's website is www.farcryproductions.ie