Continued from Weekend 1
I walked there from St Stephen's Green, the beautiful 17th century hospital shone in the sun. Contemporary art from Ireland and the world was adroitly installed (understated, nice spacing, dignity, etc.) in the main building around that wonderful open quad.
The two exhibitions in the coach house were exceptional: works on paper by Picasso, and the maybe/maybe-not works on paper by Francis Bacon. (Whether IMMA took a flyer on bogus goods is beside the point; the material was presented clearly, the case in its favour made judiciously; I thought about it all the way back to New York.)
In short, IMMA seemed to me a nice combination of connoisseurship and openness, of pride and intelligent modesty, a jewel of a place to contemplate art that's on a par with (to name a couple of my favourites) the Kunsthalle in Bregenz, Austria, and the Kimbell Museum (of Impressionists and Old Masters) in Texas. If McGonagle was all the while grinding down the subtle pleasures of art by playing a version of Fred Kite, Peter Sellers's crudely Marxist shop-steward character in I'm All Right, Jack, he sure fooled me.
At the time of his leveraged resignation as IMMA director, I sent McGonagle a private e-mail saying he was right and "they" were wrong. I didn't go public with it because I work for a news magazine where other writers in other fields refrain - with good journalistic reason - from signing petitions and such about personnel changes in institutions they cover. But now I've been asked to editorialise, so I'll say it in print: I think McGonagle was right and whoever was responsible for him feeling forced to resign was wrong.
True, 10 years is usually long enough for anybody to run anything. But McGonagle is young, energetic, and was doing a fine job, at least content-wise - which is what museums directors were supposed to do before their boards started asking them to be like movie studio CEOs: sell tickets and make money. (Has anybody on IMMA's board ever heard of a marketing campaign?)
What the new board at IMMA seems to want is that the museum become another characterless stop on the international contemporary art cow trail, where, as in the Hamburger Banhof Museum in Berlin, there's an initial "Gosh!" at the spectacular architectural conversion and then - clunk! - the same kind of sampling of oversized Warhols, familiar Rauschenbergs, totemic Beuyses, fashion-magazine-radical Hirsts, and prematurely venerated Whoevers that the peripatetic art-lover can see in any sizeable city in the Western world and in a growing number of metropoli without. "Oh, there's a Christian Boltanski retrospective in Dusseldorf? Why, we've got Anselm Kiefer in Dublin!"
Out the door goes that peculiar mix of social conscience and art-world perspicacity that McGonagle brought to IMMA; in comes a probable advance exhibition calendar that could be photocopied, on IMMA letterhead, from that of 20 other museums.
Am I being patronisingly selfish here? Am I arguing, at bottom, for a certain quaintness at IMMA so that, while the citizens of Dublin go hungry for enough Warhols and Boltanskis to keep them in the swim of contemporary art, I can occasionally hop across the Atlantic and enjoy the museum's uncrowded off-beatness? And am I not aware of the economic benefits to a city that accrue when it's "on the map" for cultural tourists?
As for the first: possibly, in the same way that a Dublin art aficionado might love - heedless of the social cost of more crushing gargantuanism in New York - to have Frank Gehry's proposed billion-dollar Guggenheim Museum at the tip of Manhattan actually built. But one could, I'm guessing, more or less keep up with contemporary art (if not its attendant glitzy parties) by going to McGonagle's IMMA - which had, for lack of a more precise term, special character.
As to the second: I'm doubtful about statistics that purport to prove that an exhibition of Gerhard Richter that costs $3 million to produce brings in $100 million in extra revenue to its venue city's hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. (It's not true in the US about sports stadiums, and special pleading for the arts isn't very convincing.) I'd also surmise that Dublin - with its theatres, literary sites, clubs and sheer density of history and heritage - is hardly hurting for cultural tourists.
Even if it is, it's not the job of the contemporary art museum director to bring them in. Their job is to create and sustain (intellectually, aesthetically, administratively; sufficient funds are for the board and the government to provide) something different, something that will stand out in the long run. I hope that Ireland's art community doesn't end up five or 10 years down the road looking back at McGonagle's IMMA and saying, "Had it, and - damn! - lost it."
Now, please excuse me while I repack my parachute.
Peter Plagens is Art Critic of Newsweek magazine. He will visit Dublin in the autumn as part of the Arts Council's Critical Voices programme, in partnership with The Irish Times and Lyric FM. The programme will bring international writers, critics and artists to observe the cultural scene in the Republic and to participate in public debate. Further information on www.artscounci.ie