Despite a show closing early because of an internal row, the visual arts in Galway Arts Festival goes from challenging to eerie, writes Aidan Dunne
An arts festival isn't complete without a dash of controversy and the visual arts strand of this year's Galway Arts Festival was, alas, accompanied by an unwelcome one. The opening of Galway Arts Centre's Rooms for Waiting In coincided with the news that the show's curator, and indeed the centre's director of visual arts, Michael Dempsey, had been told in summary fashion that his contract would not be renewed when it is up at the end of next month.
The immediate reaction of the four artists in the show was that, unless the board clarified its position in relation to visual arts policy, they would withdraw their work.
They did so on Tuesday afternoon. The show, which has been open since June 27th and was scheduled to run until July 23rd, will not reopen. And while the artists' reaction is understandable, it is not necessarily the best one in the circumstances, having an impact as it does both on themselves and on the public who might see and, one would hope, benefit from it.
It is a challenging, even edgy show, one that elicits involvement and reflection on the part of its audience and it is symbolic, in that regard, of the impact Dempsey has had on the visual arts in Galway in general.
Coming in the midst of the festival, the news inevitably sounded echoes of two earlier art-world controversies, one surrounding the departure of Declan MacGonagle from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), the other relating to the decision not to renew the contract of Project Arts Centre's visual arts curator, Valerie Connor. Both these disputes had legacies of great bitterness and it would be a shame to see the same thing happen in Galway, where it is widely acknowledged that the visual arts have traditionally had too low a profile and where Dempsey has made considerable impact, both through his role at the Arts Centre and through his pivotal position in the city's fledgling festival of visual arts, Tulca. There may be real budgetary issues involved in the background, but it would be sad if the visual arts in Galway were to find themselves taking one step forwards and two steps backwards.
In a statement, the arts centre said it was "undergoing a process of consideration and consultation on how best to deploy its resources to optimum effect in the area of the visual arts. It reserves the right to conduct its internal affairs through internal structures." Managing director Tomas Hardiman yesterday the centre and the visual art environment were evolving, and he reaffirmed the centre's committment to the visual arts and said someone else would be appointed to programme visual art.
What of Rooms for Waiting In, though, for which each participating artist has made a room? Appropriately, perhaps, Dempsey's idea was to reflect the uneasy state of waiting to which life consigns us from time to time, and to show how our attempts at normality overlie the often significant internal strains associated with waiting.
Garrett Phelan most directly addresses this idea in his recollection of protesters installed in a makeshift waiting community while trying to stall the road-widening at the Glen of the Downs. He juxtaposes the reality of conflict and modernity with a nostalgic but still barbed lament for an idealised view of nature.
Corban Walker takes his usual measure, his "corbanscale" at a height of four feet, and ticks off time along it in vertical strokes, like a prisoner or, as it happens, a school pupil. He points to the fact that, though born left-handed, he was impelled to switch to writing right-handed at school by the time he made his First Communion. In his room at the show, he has marked off time right- and left-handedly on opposite sides, meeting in a kind of reconciliation perhaps. Incidentally, he points to the Jesuits as the culprits, but in the interest of objectivity it's only fair to point out that the same order didn't object to your correspondent writing left-handed.
Willie McKeown abstains from his trademark pictures of clear skies and lets the plentiful summer sunlight do the painting. He closes the shutters in one of the building's best rooms and suspends a light bulb of meagre wattage from the ceiling. He cites the love and ecstasy of the poems of St John of the Cross, written in circumstances of inhuman confinement, but Beckett looks like a stronger influence. The bare bulb is surprisingly strongly evocative of that Godot-like state of absence, waiting and expectation.
In Grace Weir's short film, Dust defying gravity, the camera explores, at a leisurely, meditative pace, a room in Dunsink Observatory. Various books and notebooks of observations and calculations are open on a desk. There are beautiful, elaborate models of the solar system. These hugely ambitious attempts to map the scale of space and time dissolve into an intimation of timelessness as the camera focuses on particles of dust drifting slowly through the air, leaving us with an abiding sense of mystery.
At NUI Galway, Joe Sacco's comic strips with a difference were attracting careful, sustained attention. They are taken from his remarkable books based on his experiences in the Middle East and the Balkans from 1992 onwards. Sacco practices New Journalism with a twist: he puts himself into locations of tension and conflict and reports on what happens to him in terms of exhaustively observed, meticulously detailed comic-book narratives. He doesn't take a magisterial overview; rather, we get first-hand accounts of his encounters with real people. His original artwork is aesthetically pleasing, but what is really fascinating is the immediacy of his reportage, the wealth of compelling detail, the feeling of seeing history at ground level, not to mention the old-fashioned comic-book tactic of suspense (as in, how on earth is he going to get out of this one?).
In Black Country, also at NUI, Richard Billingham shows photographs of aspects of his home town, Cradley Heath, in the Black Country in England's West Midlands. He grew up there and established his reputation with bold, confrontational photographs of the home life of his colourful family. The images in this show are something else again. Sadly, we don't quite see what the festival programme promised, which is two sets of photographs made six years apart, by day and, latterly, by night. We just see the initial series. So some of the work has already been exhibited, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery.
The photographs are low-key but quietly fascinating. Billingham wanders a town in the process of reinvention, picking out oddly anomalous spaces with no visible human inhabitants, just the occasional parked car. Locations throughout the town resemble film sets. There is the way a shopfront is being reworked as a faux-Elizabethan facade, but in a wider sense the planners are creating a set, with bland municipal spaces and urban tree-planting schemes. There are personal intrusions into this calculated scheme in the form of overgrown patches of wasteground or well-worn unofficial paths cutting across green spaces. The images work best en masse, but Billingham has a real eye for landscape.
With In the Studio, at NUI Galway Gallery, Margot Quinn conducts an agreeable, informal inventory of the practical side of making art. The exhibition space has been transformed into a painstaking representation of an artist's studio in which every item is given individual scrutiny. If you are not acquainted with the reality of artists' studios you will probably learn a great deal about the whole business. You may be surprised at the amount of stuff involved in the creation of a finished work that, in the end, aspires to look as if it has shimmied effortlessly and inevitably into existence.
If you are acquainted with artists' studios you may well think that, if the studio concerned is Quinn's own, she is an impressively organised artist, with everything stored, stacked, lined up and labelled with commendable zeal. Her relaxed, anecdotal way of presenting her imagery is engaging and sympathetic. In context, the same informality applied to a number of figurative papier-mâché sculptures is perhaps less convincing, engendering an overall feeling of just too much sketchiness.
Incidentally, her figures are in a way reminiscent of Claude Merle's life-sized puppets, conversational presences encountered in various places throughout the centre of town. They're friendly, but they still have the slightly eerie quality characteristic of dolls and puppets.
There is a fair amount of space over the two floors of the Norman Villa Gallery at Salthill, and it's used to its limit in a substantial show of the work of Michael Kane. It's packed, but it works. Apart from a number of dark paintings, their rugged surfaces built from incredibly broad swathes of tar-like paint, he shows many smaller works on paper, mixed-media drawings that allow him to explore a sensitivity of line and attentiveness to detail pretty much precluded in the more robust paintings.
Kane hasn't lost his propensity for implying a combination of the mythical and the prosaic. His furtive lovers in the forest could well be figures from classical mythology, but they are also real, workaday people. Equally, the theme of the ship, with and without figure, might convey Jason and the Argonauts or else be moored at Dublin docks. There are several of his series of portraits drawn from photographs of people known many years ago in Co Wicklow. A Schoolroom sequence, in which a sinister male figure oversees and dominates a number of children, recalls the brooding, malevolent male who used to appear in his prints several decades ago. In all, it is a powerfully atmospheric show.
In Where I'm At, at the Kenny Gallery, sculptor John Coll gathers together an impressive range of work, from a heroic line-out of sportsmen to iconic literary figures via observations of the natural world, including the caddis fly making an unusual appearance in a piece of garden furniture. Coll likes visual puns, such as the outstretched wings of a cormorant blending with the rays of the setting sun or - a homage to Dorothy Cross? - Marilyn Monroe with a marlin's head, a symbolic trophy.
• All shows run until the end of the festival, July 24, though the artists have withdrawn their work from Rooms for Waiting In. www.galwayartsfestval.ie
