Nice building, but what about the art?

Giant furniture, ho-hum paintings, and a curatorial reshuffle: the Mac, Belfast’s ambitious new arts centre, needs a clear direction to go with the bold statements

IS BELFAST’S Metropolitan Arts Centre, the Mac, a template for arts centres to come? True, with its standard mix of art forms and disciplines, plus the conspicuous availability of food and drink, the Mac is in many respects just another variation on the standard arts-centre recipe. Yet some features of its make-up, and the way it presents itself, indicate a shift in emphasis. The website says: “We select, create and mix up music, theatre, dance and art.” Visit the building, is the implication, and you’re in for a varied cultural experience, delivered to you in a package.

This idea is implicit in the building and how it functions as a space. It was designed by the Belfast-based architects Hackett Hall McKnight (now Alistair Hall and Ian McKnight, after the retirement of Mark Hackett in 2010), who won a Riba competition for the project in 2007. Visually, it’s a fairly tactful addition to an existing streetscape. Architecturally, it’s about circulation to an extreme degree. With a labyrinthine, MC Escher-like network of hallways, staircases and landings, it’s conceived as an endless set of overlaps and connections, to the extent that it can be hard to stay still, to feel you’ve arrived at a destination. There’s always the impulse to move on.

Perhaps this restlessness-by-design is engineered to appeal to the reputedly shorter attention span of an important segment of the Mac’s potential audience: young people used to social media and online grazing. If so, it’s a plausible approach to a real issue facing cultural facilities. But the Mac also has more conventional ambitions. The aim of the centre’s galleries is to put Belfast on “the international visual arts circuit”. Three distinct display spaces are knitted into the complex: the Sunken, the Tall and the Upper.

In terms of the visual arts the Mac is well located in the Cathedral Quarter. It is adjacent to the University of Ulster’s Belfast campus and several significant visual-arts venues, including Belfast Exposed Photography, the Fenderesky Gallery and the Golden Thread Gallery. As a contemporary visual-arts venue, it’s a clear successor to the late, lamented Ormeau Baths Gallery, in that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland is part-funding it, together with Belfast City Council and the departments of culture, arts and leisure, and social development. Several charitable foundations also contributed.

As it happens, Hugh Mulholland, the former director of the Ormeau Baths Gallery, is currently fulfilling the role of visual arts curator at the MAC. The original curator, Cassandra Needham, left her job in February and the position has been advertised.

The opening exhibitions strike a populist note, especially with the offerings on view in the Tall and Upper galleries: A People Observed and No Title (Table and Four Chairs). The first juxtaposes the work of two renowned painters of city life: William Conor of Belfast and Lancashire-born LS Lowry. Both are fondly regarded for their sympathetic depictions of working-class life, but both tend to be pictorially anodyne.

Conor comes across as a kind of Ulster socialist realist in his paintings of sturdy, good-natured workers and families, not a million miles removed from Seán Keating’s idealisations of rugged west of Ireland dwellers, with more than a touch of Hollywood about them. One or two of the early works on view by Lowry (who was taught by a French impressionist) suggest real ability and promise, but it more or less disappears as he settled into his trademark formulaic streetscapes, usually inhabited by hordes of “matchstick” people and animals.

People like these faux-naif pictures, but they lack any hint of passion. That was suppressed, and its artistic expression was discovered only after Lowry’s death in a series of hitherto unseen works that indicated his frustrations and desires. Nothing like them is included. The Mac’s selection of work by both artists settles for blandness and doesn’t add up to a substantial exhibition in any sense.

No Title, in the handsome Upper Gallery, the best of the three spaces, is an installation by the American artist Robert Therrien, whose sculptures re-create everyday objects; in this case a table and chairs, on a vast scale. It’s at the Mac by virtue of a touring scheme that draws on works in a public Scottish-English partnership, Artist Rooms. Therrien’s piece is a one-liner. You look at it, you get the joke, you have your picture taken standing beside a giant dining table. End of story.

It “asks us to reconsider household items that we often overlook as adults”, stirring “memories of childhood”. Maybe, maybe not, but it’s all very prosaic. At least the installation makes you look at the gallery space and look forward to seeing it used in other ways.

The accurately named Sunken Gallery features Maria McKinney’s outstanding work Somewhere but here, another other place. It’s a variation on an installation originally seen at the Lab in Dublin.

Because the Lab has a mezzanine with a view on to the gallery below, the logic of McKinney’s piece worked perfectly. From above you found yourself looking down on a stack of domestic tables. On the top of each is a completed jigsaw of Neuschwanstein Castle, in Bavaria, a fairytale castle. McKinney’s work is about boredom, fantasy and daydreams of escape.

Although an improvised staircase is included to provide perspective at the Mac, it’s not at all as effective as it was at the Lab, but it’s still a startling, impressive piece, even one worthy of inclusion in a national collection.

The final work on view, Nicholas Keogh’s A Removals Job is a commissioned film that elegantly reveals the hidden expertise and accord of a group of workers as they clear “a traditional two-up, two-down” redbrick terraced house in Belfast.

The Mac is a promising visual arts venue with one very good space. One of the next shows in prospect is by Eithne Jordan, which augurs well. But its future, and that “international” cachet, depend on the quality of the programme devised by whoever takes on the curatorship.

Stage set: strong ‘Titanic’ bodes well for the Mac’s theatrical future

The theatre spaces of the new Metropolitan Arts Centre would be impressive even without a direct comparison, but it's worth considering what the Old Museum Arts Centre (Omac) achieved with much more meagre resources. A tiny building, with a performance space that could accommodate just 90 spectators, it nonetheless brought a charged intimacy to premieres of work by Marina Carr, Gary Mitchell, Owen McCafferty, Darragh Carville and Rosemary Jenkinson. It supplied the launch pad for such catch-fire successes as Richard Dormer's Hurricane for Ransom and was a catalyst for the flourishing of Northern Ireland's independent scene since 1990. Its impact, in other words, extended far beyond its physical confines.

Now, with two state-of-the-art performance spaces, the more modest of which (the 120-seat studio theatre) could still swallow the Omac's space whole, the Mac has entered the big league. With more space to fill, in every respect, it is understandably intent on meeting its full potential without diffusing its energy. At 350 seats, its larger theatre is just a little smaller than the new Lyric's Northern Bank stage. It remains to be seem whether, as two modern venues of comparable size with main and studio spaces and year-round programming, they will be complementary, competitive or, perhaps more productively, both.

The Mac's inaugural production is a good indicator, already distinguishing a more formally ambitious agenda. Owen McCafferty's Titanic (Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry, 1912), directed by Charlotte Westenra, manages to explore the towering dimensions of its stage with Richard Kent's set, yet it admirably refrains from show-off monumentalism. A courageous blend of verbatim theatre and historic salvage operation, it raises the human tragedy and responsibility of an event that could otherwise be entombed in centenary memorials. Despite its scale, it also secures the sense of intimacy and urgency that sympathetic theatre architecture brings to energetic programming. It bodes extremely well for the Mac's future.

Even more encouraging for a multidisciplinary arts centre is the prominence of the Mac's own commissions and coproductions in its programming. Bruiser Theatre Company, whose new take on the Broadway standard Sweet Charity opens late this month, Prime Cut Productions, Ponydance (currently readying the centre's first dance commission, Straight to DVD) and Tinderbox Theatre Company will be the Mac's associate artists over the next three years. These are companies of different statures and expertise. Putting them in close proximity to three gallery spaces, a dance studio, a well-resourced education programme and each other means the potential for artistic cross-pollination is almost unbearably promising. Size is one thing, the Mac has always known. It's what you do with it that counts.

Peter Crawley