Sculptor, dramatist, poet and political activist - James McKenna was instinctively against the establishment, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
It could be argued that IMMA's current retrospective of James McKenna's work is a long overdue tribute to one of Ireland's great artistic personalities of the 20th century. Poet Desmond Egan, who knew him well and believes passionately in his work, has fought long and hard to win him a prominent place in Irish art history. McKenna, who died in 2000, was a figurative sculptor with an ambitious inclination towards monumental scale and grand statements. He was also a politically engaged, at times obdurate presence in the cultural landscape of his time. Fiercely idealistic, he believed implicitly in art's transformative social mission.
Born in Dublin in 1933, McKenna was brought up on Co Wicklow farm and attended Bray Technical School before going on to the National College of Art and Design. From the late 1950s he was something of a Renaissance man. As well as being a productive sculptor, he was a poet, dramatist, lobbyist and political activist.
For much of his working life he struggled financially. While he was highly regarded as an artist, and did win several significant commissions, he rarely emerged from them with a healthy bank balance. Many sculptors are aware that big projects can all too easily consume big budgets, including their own fees.
McKenna was at the centre of several cultural initiatives, and was a founder member of the Independent Artists' Group, an important movement that sought to negotiate a viable artistic position between the Modernism of the Living Art and the conservatism of the RHA. He lobbied for change in the Arts Council and for other causes.
Energetically committed to writing and the theatre, he wrote more than a dozen plays. Not all of them were performed in his lifetimes and the most successful was his first, The Scatterin', which achieved notable success in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1960. He eventually went on to establish his own theatre company, Rising Ground, in 1967. During the 1970s he stood as an independent candidate in Ballyfermot, Dublin, in two general elections under the slogan "Art for the People."
He was cast in the heroic, 19th century mould of the Romantic artist or, rather, in the mould of that Romantic ideal as it persisted into the 20th century. Think of a cross between Joyce Carey's fictional painter Gully Jimson in The Horse's Mouth and John Berger's portrait of dissident Russian sculptor Ernst Neizvestny in Art and Revolution. The fearless Neizvestny was openly critical of Stalin and challenged the dictator to have him shot. McKenna had that air of being an outsider on the side of the people, instinctively against the establishment.
The uncompromising, roughhewn nature of his work is in keeping with the popular idea of sculpture as an epic, Michelangelesque struggle with an intractable physical material. That sense of struggle is often evident in his carvings, but so too is a compensatory tenderness.
HE WAS, FAIRLY emphatically, a carver, temperamentally remote from the easy fluency of Rodin's modeling, its flowing lines fixed in cast bronze. It should be said, though, that he admired Rodin, was influenced by him and was in sympathy with his sculptural ethos.
McKenna's figures can possess an elegance of line, but it is certainly not one of their defining characteristics. They are closer to the influence of the Gothic evident in the figures of German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbrück than they are to Rodin. More often than not, they are rooted and heavy, corporeal creatures of mass who feel the pull of gravity and test themselves against it.
These qualities are further emphasised by McKenna's use of composite, constructed forms, from the doll-like segmentation of stone blocks in Miss Geraldine Square to the numerous wooden layers of the monumental Oisín Caught in a Time Warp, a work that took five years hard labour towards the end of his life. Oisín (an artistic alter ego of sorts for McKenna) recalls the imposing public sculptures of the Florentine renaissance, and a visit to Florence on a Macaulay Fellowship in 1960 was an enduring influence on his work. For Michelangelo's David, read McKenna's Oisín, in several incarnations.
The idea of construction in McKenna's work, while partly based on economic necessity, is also pertinent in that he favoured static, monumental forms. Even when his figures are depicted in notionally dynamic settings, and on occasion they are, they have a stylised, formalised quality, even an awkwardness, as though they are slightly at odds with the world or their own physical manifestation in it.
This awkwardness might also derive from the fact that for much of the time McKenna worked within the confines of carefully devised allegorical schemes.
His elaborate, self-conscious symbolism reaches an apogee in the complexity of the huge limestone Resurgence made for Limerick University. One of his major commissions, it is a celebration of the Irish educational system and, with its multiple spaces and allegorical figures, an epic piece of work. But it is also, it has to be said, a flawed one, an overly didactic exercise in which the less than compelling ideas severely hobble his sculptural imagination, leaving it vulnerable to the flaws inherent in socialist realism. In his defence, it is only fair to point out that until relatively recently Irish sculptors have not had enough opportunities to work on large-scale public commissions and become comfortable with the demands implicit in them.
AS THE CURATOR of the exhibition Sean Kissane notes, although McKenna came to maturity and studied at the National College of Art and Design in the 1950s, he practiced within the tradition of 19th century figurative sculpture. Modernist developments simply never entered into the picture. While the regime within the NCAD was resolutely conservative in this regard, it is also true that McKenna's art was figurative out of ideological conviction.
Abstraction would not have allowed him to engage with the ideas that interested him. At a time when abstraction was in the ascendant, that made his sculpture seem dated, but this is no longer the case.
Niamh Hoare (who wrote an MA thesis about his work) has argued that he was greatly influenced by the monumental sculptor of choice for the emergent Free State, Oliver Sheppard. As with Sheppard's work, classical and Celtic mythology and nationalist ideology are harnessed in personal, allegorical systems of iconography. How all this works is apparent in Men Entering a City. Featuring several male figures mounted on a horse-like body with a human head, it is an allegory of the 1916 Rising, filtered through, as Hoare notes, "the Greek legend of Oedipus and the Sphinx".
Some of McKenna's finest creations are his blocky, monumental horses. Stoical and dignified, they symbolise resilience and endurance, qualities that he identified historically in the Irish people and that he exemplified himself over the course of his life.
His legacy seems assured on the basis not only of the breadth of his achievement but also on the strength of a number of individual pieces that manage to distill the essence of his vision.
Politcally, that nationalist utopian vision can seem hardly out of step with de Valera's. McKenna's views were decisively shaped by the historical evolution of Irish nationalism, and he saw events in the North of Ireland as a continuation of that struggle. National identity and autonomy remained central to his concerns. At the same time, he was well aware of the failings of the Irish political system, not least through his own experience of the difficulties of making ends meet. Ultimately there is the feeling that his battle was not against social ills or the materials from which he wrested his pieces but, given the sheer scale of his ambitions, against time.
James McKenna: A Retrospective is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, until Mar 8, 2008. Tel 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie