Ballymun is not the most likely venue for an exhibition of contemporary Irish art, but next Saturday evening between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., a wall of Thomas Clark Tower will become a giant projection screen for Ascend, a collaborative show of video, computer animation and slide works by at least 15 - and possibly more - young artists. The event is the brainchild of one of those artists, Mark Garry, a graduate of Dun Laoghaire College of Art, Design and Technology who has been teaching art in Ballymun for over a year now, as part of the Youthreach project.
Remarkably, he has organised the whole thing on a shoestring, working since before Christmas, largely from the living room of his flat in Rathmines which, he notes, doesn't even have a phone line. But he's not grumbling. "I'm not one of those people who can complain about a lack of support from the Arts Council, because I've never asked them for anything. I've never approached them in any way." In fact, part of the whole point of Ascend is that it functions outside of the existing art world institutions. "I wanted to see art outside the gallery space."
Appropriately enough, Ascend follows on Descend, a similar though smaller event last Hallowe'en that served as a dry run. The absence of funding meant he had to reach into his own pocket - "I suppose you could say that making art is essentially like a very expensive hobby" - and, when it came to organising facilities, he had to beg, borrow and steal. The Ballymun Multi-Media Co-op obliged with editing services, and others have provided power. He was also dependent on the enthusiasm and goodwill of his fellow artists, but that wasn't a problem. "In the end I had more people than I could take and ended up having to turn them away." Artists were very keen to become involved and, he says, he can see why. "Everyone says art is booming, but in a way it's more difficult than ever for younger, contemporary artists to get solo shows in Dublin. Usually you're left with the option of being a small part of a large group show. So there are a lot of people there without any outlet." Besides that, there is a shortage of what he describes as interesting spaces, venues that are out of the ordinary.
You need unorthodox venues, he feels, to reach beyond art's traditional audience. He knows artists who do some of their work in a club context. When he was involved in organising Click, a group show at Arthouse last summer, they deliberately tried to cultivate a club atmosphere. "So that people don't think, oh, it's art, so they don't get worried about it, and that's what I'm trying to do in Ballymun as well. I don't want people to feel they have to start thinking about it because it's art. Instead, they can just experience it as images."
He was deliberately catholic in recruiting artists, and didn't specify the kind of work he wanted, partly because he generally knew what to expect. Some among the participants also work as graphic designers, others as musicians. One of them, Dave McGinn, lived in Ballymun until he was nine years old, and has been back there during the past two years making work inspired by the environment. "The total brief I gave was that it was for Ballymun, but the work didn't have to be about Ballymun. People were free to do whatever they liked. I wanted to keep it as broad as possible, to get a sense of what contemporary art means in Dublin at the moment."
His own contribution is a sequence of 50 transparencies that puts the viewer inside the tower blocks, looking out. He snapped the views from inside 50 different apartments in various parts of the complex. "If you're used to looking at the towers from the outside, in passing, it's a bit of a shock to see that when you're inside you have these stunning views, right over the city to the mountains, and out to sea. It's glorious."
Garry also appears as the model in a series of photographs by Sinead Burt Odea. Coiffed, made-up and bejewelled as a feminine model, his paradoxical masculinity presents us with a gender conundrum: "The starting point was a consideration of how the Irish male seems to be uncomfortable with a certain kind of heterosexual beauty."
Oonagh Young literally deconstructs the printed statements of architects involved in the regeneration of Ballymun and presents us with typographic snippets that themselves resemble plans.
In Brian Duggan's video it seems as if the Dart is climbing the wall of the block, then the view from the Dart scrolls past. Karl Burke placed a substantial cube in the middle of Temple Bar and then retired to video the responses of passers by to its unexplained presence. Nina Hynes's collaborative photographic work projects images of imagined life in a Georgian townhouse. Leah Hillyard's slide-sequence breaks down a performance piece into a narrative, while Alan Lambert's does the same thing for a conversation overheard in a Taiwanese restaurant.
"I think it's fair to say that the general assumption is that people who live in Ballymun hate the apartments, but that's not the case. Certainly I've come across people who are in favour of the blocks being demolished, but for others the prospect is quite frightening. That is their home, their community, their way of life." Ascend, he emphasises is not anti-tower block, and it's not an elegy focusing on the fact that the blocks are marked for demolition, albeit at some indeterminate stage in the future.
Ascend will incorporate some of the work made by Youthreach programme participants in response to the Ballymun regeneration project. "It's very much in that context; it's a reaffirmation of where they live."
While he regards the Dublin art establishment as being a closed book when it comes to most young, experimental artists, he points out that there is an alternative art scene, exemplified by Pallas Studios and the shows it organises, that exists pretty much outside the normal art world loop. "The advantage is that it gives you a lot of freedom; the drawback is that there is no money, and little likelihood of selling your work."
He recently had a painting exhibition at H2K in New York, where he met the American artist Tim Rollins. Rollins, in his collaborative projects with teenagers, produced under the collective name Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), has long laboured to break the conventional art mould. To his delight, Rollins bought one of his paintings and, to his surprise, he turned out to know several artists living and working in Dublin. Rollins made the point that, while the presumption is that artists receive the trickle-down benefit of an economic boom, the truth is that it is often harder to survive in a boom economy, because living costs rise and even studios become an expensive luxury.
Despite this, Garry is content to remain outside the gallery system, free to intervene in diverse contexts. "I've always been interested in something like Richard Hamilton's approach, where you only focus on a particular medium for as long as the piece necessitates it." He sees that happening among younger artists.
"With the Darklight festival of experimental film, for example. I know people who are not filmmakers per se, but they saw that was on and said `there's an outlet for my work' and made something for it. So there are alternative ways of making and showing art. Maybe it has to do with the post-modern condition, you know? Living in an age of anxiety, your instinct is to try to keep all your options open."
Ascend takes place at Thomas Clark Tower and Coultry Road Flats, on Saturday, March 25th, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Anyone is welcome to attend
