It's said that at Kokoschka's summer school for painters in Salzburg back in the 1950s, the ultimate disparagement was for the great man to look at your work and pronounce: "You could frame that and put it in an exhibition." On the face of it that's nonsense, since his students presumably saw their time there as a step on the path towards just that: frames, exhibitions, acclaim. Admittedly, Kokoschka liked work with a certain roughness and immediacy. But perhaps he had an additional meaning in mind: that students should be free to try things out, free to develop without the pressures of public exposure.
Just as they are in today's art schools and colleges, to a surprising extent. Until, that is, the graduation show, which has come to assume ever-greater importance as a rite of passage - though truth be told, the few years immediately afterwards are what count in the long run, once the student is away from institutional support systems. This year's graduate show at the School of Art, Design and Media in Dun Laoghaire's Institute of Art, Design and Technology marked several milestones in the school's development. It included work by students aiming for either of two new qualifications: a Fine Art Degree and a Diploma in Photography. The degree show was installed in a big, brand new, lightfilled building on the campus.
The sheer scale of what is happening at Dun Laoghaire is hard to grasp. It is developing and expanding at an exponential rate, and its art school is pushing hard to capitalise on its combined art and technology resources to cater for the changing shape of the fine art and media landscape in the world outside - often in unexpected ways. It runs what looks like a very good two-year certificate course, for example, in make-up for theatre, television and film (one of only two such courses in the UK and Ireland), with some obviously talented students.
There is a lot of sense in establishing a diploma in photography in a fine art context. Usually photography at third level is regarded as primarily a technical subject, but it's become a ubiquitous fine art medium, both in its own right and in a variety of supplementary roles. Of course, as with any fine art category these days, photography needn't mean what we expect it to.
One student, Michael Durand, showed a five-minute videotape loop of planes flying overhead, a prelude to three lightbox portraits of air stewardesses - in all, an evocation of the days when glamour and even magic still attached to commercial flight. Paul Conell also showed a video, in which the tables are turned on the voyeuristic viewer. Oonagh O'Brien and Joeleen Codd exemplified the continuing vogue for brash, thematic reportage projects, but it's worth mentioning that Jennifer Russell, for one, produced classically beautiful black-and-white images.
As if to confirm its centrality, photography was prominent in the work of the degree fine art students, including Philip Clark's recycled media representations of masculinity, Alexandra Clarke's reflections on choice and chance in articulating identity, Annemarie Durcan's exploration of domesticity and family, and Carmel Fanning's images of marginal urban spaces.
Photography also plays a significant role in the Crawford's degree show, Teanga, which is currently open. There, Louise Croke deals inventively with a relatively simple idea in multiple, ambiguous images of cats and humans. In a way the subject is less important than her flair for making us look at something familiar in a new way. Leanne Keaney photographs deserted industrial spaces in coloured light, giving them a displaced, eerie resonance. Alice Ring displays considerable maturity in knowing when to stop. The basic elements of her work are close-up, textural photographs of skin, and her main piece is a simple grid of pale images that bears some resemblance to X-rays and is also ethereal and beautiful.
As is pair of understated, unphotographic pieces by Emma Klemencic: two pencil drawings on tracing paper. Overall her display is a little thin, but these two pieces, strange, obsessive, delicate renderings of moths on wallpaper, are outstanding. A comparably fine-tuned sensibility was apparent in Grainne Doolins's perfectly judged fabric and porcelain pieces at Dun Laoghaire. Painter Grainne Ryan in Cork is another artist who exhibits a complex, sensitive feeling for a very specific range of materials and textures in subtle works that bring to mind Anselm Kiefer's metaphorical use of the idea of alchemy - though she is by no means yet another Kiefer clone.
Kiefer's earthy, monochromatic work also came to mind in relation to Dun Laoghaire's Neil Carroll, who produced a couple of very impressive large-scale landscapebased works.
Cork is quite strong on painting. It's hard to miss Anthony Ruby's good-natured, picaresque narrative pictures, though they are perhaps a little too calculated in their appeal. He could easily push his relaxed, illustrative style, reminiscent of Steven Campbell back in the 1980s, that little bit further. In a way his work is indicative of the colour and personality of the Crawford show in general. Karina Feirtear provides good, straightforward painting in her cake studies, admittedly a well-tried theme, but vigorously done. Similarly, Julie Brazil tackles familiar terrain, but emerges as a persuasive colourist. At Dun Laoghaire, incidentally, John Bourke showed a remarkable group of hard-edged spatial abstracts, perfectly judged and crisply made.
A sense of deja vu attends Linda Quinlan's video installation at the Crawford, with its evocation of a childhood notion of fetishised femininity, all glitz and glitter with a music box soundtrack, but it is an accomplished installation. Clara McAuliffe perhaps over-complicates the realisation of some terrific ideas. The notion of a life-size grass of leaf figure, for example, is fine - particularly when she seems to have figured out an ingenious way of achieving the effect. Michelle Whooley's ambitious, didactic work sets out to question the codes by which we habitually understand the world.
Heaven knows how Kokoschka would have felt about it all, but he would probably be surprised by the sheer numbers of art students coming through the system. So many that, while all the degree and diploma shows merit attention, it is simply impossible to cover all of them.
This week, fine art graduate exhibitions are on view at Cork's Crawford College, Limerick's School of Art and Design and Gal- way and Mayo's Institute of Technology
