At Dublin Airport, the first and last image one sees is a giant photograph of the Financial Services Centre towering over Rowan Gillespie's bronze famine memorial. From the miserable to the magnificent in one visual leap; the bedraggled emigrants trudge down the quays without a backward glance at the blank face of the modernist building. Shades of caricature lurk in this history of Ireland as a drama of opposites. Past bad - present good. In fact neither image presents an accurate view of its time, just as neither visual language (architecture nor sculpture), expresses more than the literal and the illustrative. This is something to be profoundly worried about as we turn over into another era with no visual sense of ourselves other than this simplistic use of simplistic imagery.
Is our country getting richer and fatter while our contemporary culture is being displaced and marginalised? Pockets continue to expand while minds continue to contract, and art is just about where it was before people started talking about traffic and house prices. One would think that new wealth would lead to an embrace of the wonderful and the contemporary when it comes to art. But it seems the more affluent we get, the less imagination we show. Bland conservatism tempered with bald commercialism still reign supreme. This is nowhere more evident than in the kind of public art that is commissioned here as well as the official picture of ourselves that is sold abroad.
When the Celtic Revival happened in the 1920s, nationalistic concerns took precedence over artistic freedom. Paintings and sculptures in the style of the 19th century promoted the moralistic ideals of a new nation. Maids of Erin abounded, as did sturdy peasants, and handsome martyrs. Revivalist artists pictured Ireland's future, but used the language of the past to do so.
The same lack of vision is still evident today. The public face of our culture is still mired down in academic and borrowed styles and has never taken that leap into inventiveness and the use of contemporary languages. We were perfectly placed to do so when the post-revolutionary state was born. But like Russia, we chose to use our artists as illustrators of the State ideal. Rather than encourage completely new forms of expression, Ireland opted for the reinvention of old ideas.
The lack of trust in things visual has been running deep for many generations. The education system has failed to break the stranglehold of the literal on the imagination, and this is a problem that leads to an ongoing preference for the banal when it comes to art in our lives. Great wealth hasn't given us amazing new buildings or fabulous original monuments. Great wealth has not given us great art foundations or passionate private collectors. Property and cars are the preferred collectables of the new rich.
Art in Ireland has been trying to recover from conservatism since the foundation of the State. Early and subsequent searches for Irishness in Irish art have all failed. The fundamentalism which underlined that self-searching implied that some unique ingredient lay at the core of our artistic personality, one which had to do with race, not place. The very same implication exists today, except today it's based on sameness, not difference. Back then we were the guardians of the old way at the edges of the continent. Today we are the busy bees of Europe beavering away behind reflective windows, not a bother on us but where to put the new TV.
The wealthy young couple in the advertisement are perfectly satisfied with a flat-screen TV as their most prized possession. And of course what they see on that screen would hardly change their minds, since the commitment of RTE to the arts is nil. In fact our national television station continues to do untold harm by diluting the content of art and misrepresenting the aims of artists. Television is an important mediation point between artist and public, where critical thinking can help move us away from the imposition of literary expectations on visual imagery. Irish TV starts from the premise that our eyes are not to be trusted when it comes to art, and huge efforts are made to explain it away rather than to elucidate its existence.
We are so blinded by media pictures of ourselves as successful, that we cannot read the signs of cultural failure. An ornamental form of Irishness is still the preferred image of ourselves. This can never change while we are surrounded by the cautious, the conservative, and the promotion of outmoded ways of seeing.
Alice Maher's most recent exhibition was Knot at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery.
