VISUAL ARTS / Aidan Dunne: Reviewed: Slant, David Stephenson, Gallery of Photography, until Sept 12th (01-6714654); Something above the sofa, Rubicon Gallery, until Aug 21st (01-6708055)
During the recent local and European elections, the political campaign poster came into its own. A record number of the things festooned every available lamp-post and surface. It was as if the available technology, of printing on lightweight corrugated card, and fixing the images to posts with plastic ties, suddenly connected with the anxieties and ambitions of parties and individual politicians, and the whole process went slightly crazy. Whatever the inks used, as the weeks passed either time or exposure deepened the colour on many posters, and some contenders looked increasingly embarrassed, ending up with lobster-like complexions.
Worse was to come, though. Throughout the campaign, as throughout the 2002 general election campaign, David Stephenson was photographing the life and death of political posters, from their fresh-faced pristine beginnings, with easy promises of better things to come, to their ignominious endings, whether trashed by the elements or consigned to recycling bales with the rest of the rubbish. To see his show Slant at the Gallery of Photography is to experience a distanced, perhaps jaundiced view of an election campaign, enacted on the level of images rather than people.
Recycling is exactly what should become of the posters, of course, though one suspects that, in Ireland, "recycling" sometimes has a euphemistic ring to it and may signify something rather less environmentally friendly than it sounds. Inevitably, Stephenson found images that point up some of the contradictions in the political process. But when we see a Green Party poster lodged among the ugly detritus of consumerism on a dumping ground in one of those bleak urban no-man's-land expanses, it seems like rather a cheap shot. It would be amazing if such a thing didn't happen, many times, given the nature of the business.
The better images are more subtle, even ambiguous. There is a Big Brotherish undertone to some, as though the politicians, ostensibly servants of the electorate, are watching us. And while the words used on the posters relate to seriousness, honesty, integrity and vision, there is the implication that a degree of cynicism is involved in the evocation of such concepts, that grim pragmatism is the name of the game. For, as we witness the images become worn, mangled, mutilated - deliberately, in at least one case - and degraded, there is a sense of politics as a battleground.
So it's not just a case of sneering at politicians and the political circus. While there is a level of falseness, of theatricality, built into the whole process, into the manufacture and projection of idealised images and the aspirational rhetoric, it is all grounded in a limiting, intractable reality. In other words, it's a political arms race, and the politicians have to go through it all. That conclusion can certainly be drawn from Stephenson's images, though it's not the only one. He has an eye for a picture, and a flair for texture and brash colours. He particularly likes compositions in which pictorial information is distorted to the point of incoherence, battered and eroded. There is an abiding feeling that he takes a long view, noting the ephemeral nature of political sound and fury. Whether or not you voted back in May, and regardless of who you voted for, it's a show worth seeing.
Something above the Sofa, at the Rubicon Gallery, is an extension of the gallery's Flix project, which usually takes place on Saturdays and involves work by more than 50 artists, emerging and established. The idea is that people can view their work outside the formality of an exhibition setting, leaf through a portfolio or look in the drawers of a cabinet. Now, in co-operation with 2coolDesign in Temple Bar, the Rubicon has taken the process a stage further, showing work by several Flix artists in a quasi-domestic setting, having drafted in two substantial contemporary sofas, a leather armchair and footstool and a table to simulate "three lifestyle scenarios".
They've woven a substantial amount of work in between these stylish domestic trappings, but the gallery feels comfortable and approachable rather than crowded. In part it's like an edited reprise of some recent solo shows, with pieces by Rolf Bier, Tom Molloy and Amelia Stein. It's interesting to see how even familiar pieces fare in the domesticated context and, on the whole, they fare very well.
Molloy's dollar bill paper airplane and Amanda Coogan's extraordinary video The Quiet Man are not quite your orthodox domestic pieces, but they are presented here in a way that makes you think, well, why not?
Mind you, if you put Nick Millar's large-scale painting Whitethorn in your livingroom it's probably going to dominate with its vision of the sheer abundant richness of nature. There are other fine works, including those by Madeleine Moore, Patrick M. Fitzgerald, Stephen Brandes, Alice Peilion and Ronnie Hughes.
