Reviewed: The Sea & The Sky, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Ely Place, Dublin (01-6612558), until August 27th
The Sea & The Sky is an oasis of calm in a hectic city, appositely scheduled given that sea and sky are high priorities for most people during the summer months. Of course, the exhibition sets its sights on loftier themes than escape and recreation, but one of the points it makes is that, no matter what circumstances in which we encounter it, that boundary between sea and sky has an uncanny resonance. When our eyes meet that horizon line, we are glimpsing the idea of infinity and our own minor role in the scheme of things.
"The scheme of things" - it's a reassuring expression and an obvious response to the disturbingly boundless reaches of space and time that have progressively opened up to our questioning of the natural world. In her wide-ranging catalogue essay, Susan Stewart uses Blaise Pascal's remark as an epigram: "I fear the silence of those infinite spaces." The Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin, poised on the cusp between religious and scientific world views, could not, understandably enough, reconcile the two and, delighting in the beauty of nature as God's handiwork entire and complete, bitterly resented the dawning awareness of the vastness of geological time. He simply chose to reject it. It is ironic that Ruskin, the brilliant observer, could not believe the evidence of his own eyes.
Goethe was on surer ground when he said: "Do not try to get behind the phenomena. They themselves are the doctrine."
That was exactly what John Constable did in his extraordinary series of cloud studies, made in a concerted burst of activity over 1821 and 1822. He described making them as "skying". They were painted very quickly and dated, often, to the hour. In the 1970s a researcher cross-checked the studies against meteorological records of the time and confirmed their exceptional accuracy.
But what is most amazing about them is Constable's formulation of a painterly language that is faithful to the phenomena and aesthetically outstanding. In making them he marked out an aspirational middle ground between art and science that has attracted proponents and critics in equal measure.
Goethe's is pretty much the line followed by the artists in this show, though often in quirky ways. Offhand, you would not really expect such a range of contemporary responses to themes veering close to notions of the sublime. In their printed conversation, the two curators, Richard Torchia and Patrick T. Murphy, acknowledge that they were themselves surprised by "the number of artists turning their gaze upon the ocean, atmosphere and cosmos." Actually they should give themselves a little credit here. They have selected and edited very rigorously to produce a show that is unusually concentrated in its focus.
Quirkiness is evident in the case of Russell Crotty, whose Atlas of Galactic and Globular Star Cluster Drawings, 1997-98 is quite beautiful. Yet they are based on "thumbnail sketches and journal entries documenting his telescope observations" made from an observatory he built himself in the Santa Barbara Mountains.
He is one of many exhibitors who set out to personalise the infinite, and he exemplifies a certain autodidactic strand.
Faced with expanses of space and time that dwarf us, or perhaps with unruly, amorphous natural phenomena that allow us no accredited point of view, it seems that a common response, as with Constable, is to pin down where, when and how.
There is a recurrent emphasis on precision of detail in terms of time and place, like Richard Misrach's time-lapse exposure tracking the progress of Venus across the sky, or Hiroshi Sugimoto's horizon series that, paradoxically, pins down the location while reducing it to a generalised blur.
Spencer Finch went to exceptional lengths to pin-point the precise blue of the sky at the location where the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1996.
By contrast, Michael Blodget's Cross Sea is an apparently specific snapshot of a turbulent section of ocean. But it is drawn - beautifully - entirely from memory.
It looks convincing but it is not true in the sense that Constable's skies are true.
Similarly, Vija Celmins's drawing of stars has a compellingly authentic look, but it is not. Karen Butler pushes illusionistic suggestion further.
Using commercially-printed sky backdrops, she simulates exotic locations on a tabletop. Yet here her evocation of space or place is so vague that it doesn't have anything like the compulsive quality of Blodget. Bradley Wind's video inventory of 600 cloud samples is caught between pure randomness and an urge to classify - the soundtrack, it is suggested offers oblique clues to location.
The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres mimics the sea with his unlimited edition of lithographs depicting the surface of the ocean. Visitors are free to take copies of the lithograph and perhaps, as they do, the level will drop, as though the tide is ebbing, while the pattern of waves endures.
Willie McKeown's Sea Drawing likewise suggests an enduring pattern underlying the transience of momentary atmospheric effects.
As plain and direct as McKeown, Donald Moffett's cibachrome of a pure blue sky is exceptionally effective, and Elger Esser's photographic seascape is extraordinarily atmospheric and subtle. Grace Weir provides a good thematic summary with her 360 degree pan that plunges us into the water and releases us into the sky. Give the show a little time and that is pretty much what it does, as well.
