ArtScape: When you phone the number, you get a friendly female voice regretting that the Artists' Association of Ireland ceased trading on March 8th. The woman adds, however: "The board of directors hopes, with the support of its members and others, that we will be able to re-establish the association in the coming time. May I suggest that you call back in a few weeks."
Call back and see. Only time will tell if the association can whack itself back into shape. The acting chairperson, John Langan, says the Arts Council has been positive about the possibility of funding the association to shape a new plan for its future.
It was the failure to fundraise as stipulated in the Arts Council's three-year funding agreement with the association which, more than anything else, caused the demise of the AAI. It seems positive that the AAI's board has already organised an innovative fundraising event to try to get the organisation working again. From 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. today, you can call into the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar and buy a €60 ticket for an art lottery. You may win one of over 1,000 artworks tha have been donated to this special fund-raising exhibition under the title Buoy. Among the artists who have donated work are Robert Ballagh, Eamon Coleman, Paddy Jolley, Marie Foley and Nigel Rolfe.
I called into the exhibition earlier in the week, and found an incredible mixture of work, ranging from the sublime to the cryptic. They included a little line-drawing by Patrick Pye entitled Transfiguration, a gorgeous crimson and green orientally formal flower painting by Cliona Doyle entitled Rhododendron, and two haikus written in biro on paper by Seán Mac Mathúna ('Annaghmakerrig Lake': "Deep in this lake/ the meaning/ of ancient moons."
It's Lotto with a difference. Get down and win a wonderful piece of art, or at least a comic talking-point for you and your friends in years to come.
IF YOU'RE looking for another fundraising event to prop up another arts organisation whose three-year funding agreement with the Arts Council has gone awry, you need wait no longer than tomorrow evening. Among the artists taking part in the fundraising gala for Opera Ireland at the Gaiety are Suzanne Murphy, Regina Nathan, Leandra Overmann, Dennis O'Neill and Gerard O'Connor, and along with the Opera Ireland chorus, they're sure to rattle the chandeliers. The programme is one of firm favourites, with well-loved Italians like Verdi, Puccini and Rossini featuring prominently.
The company will have to sell a lot of €33/€57 tickets to make a dent in its financial troubles, however. Its winter season was to have consisted of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades and Giordano's Andrea Chénier, but unless a lot of money appears from somewhere fast, it is not going to happen. The company has informed the Arts Council that it will need "additional funding from bank borrowings or other sources" to mount the season, because its allocation for this year is already spent.
The Arts Council is not without blame in the matter. It indicated, in a letter seen by our Music Critic, Michael Dervan, that its grant of €2,407,000 to Opera Ireland for a two-year period until September of this year might be supplemented with more money before the end of the year. "The level of funding offered by this decision does not represent the maximum amount of grant-aid potentially available to Opera Ireland between now and the end of 2002," was the line in question.
Opera Ireland has been bailed out by the council on more than more occasion. And of course it got a supplementary grant of, as far as we can ascertain, €600,000 from the Department of Arts in 2001 to save it from crisis. This means one of two things: that Opera Ireland is not running its financial affairs efficiently or that its funding levels are just not realistic, given the high artistic standards it now achieves. Actually, it probably means both things at the same time.
See Monday's arts page for Michael Dervan's assessment of Opera Ireland's position, by comparison with UK companies.
IT'S a huge "soft triangle" with orange and chocolate icing swirling around on it. It tastes of orange and cardamom. But is it art? I hear you cry. Who cares? - it's very, very nice. Design lecturer Brian Leech's cookie won Carlow's "Visual Cookie" competition with ease, and will go on to a future life in the largest contemporary art gallery in the country.
This will open in Carlow in 2004. The "Visual Cookie" competition was a project by architect and artist Apolonija Sustersic, and will culminate in August in a "Simulation Café", in which you can, be assured, drink real coffee, eat those cookies and consult information on the forthcoming gallery. A second temporary art project run by Carlow County Council this year, to whet appetites for the gallery, is Paul Gregg's photographs of Carlow landmarks, illuminated by pyrotechnics with the help of an explosives expert. They're currently hanging in the County Council offices. A third project, by Brian Hand, ran last autumn and involved a car ride through the town with a special tape playing on the stereo.
A catalogue of the three projects will be available from April 29th, and a series of new temporary projects is to be announced.
artscape@irish-times.ie