IT IS a shame that one of the most ambitious exhibitions about the Irish presence in the US should have begun and ended with recriminations. This was "Gaelic Gotham: A History of the Irish in New York" which ran in the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) from March to the end of October of last year.
Now comes the Gaelic Gotham Report which in 177 pages is "assessing a controversial exhibition and finding it sadly lacking. But lacking in what
The reader would find it hard to know precisely what after ploughing through the report. It has been drawn up by the Council for Scholarly Evaluation of Gaelic Gotham which consisted of scholars and experts on the history of the Irish who withdrew their support from the exhibition when it was being prepared.
Given its authorship, it would be difficult for the report to be objective, but it does try to be fair. The experts involved resented the way the curator of MCNY, Robert Macdonald, suddenly decided to scale back the original plan for the exhibition and remove the guest curator, Marion Casey, who had made the successful application for funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities which made the exhibition possible.
Ms Casey seemed 10 be well qualified for the job as an acknowledged scholar in the history of the Irish community in New York and the organiser of a previous exhibition on Irish music and dance.
Why Mr McDonald dismissed her from the Gaelic Got ham while scaling it down is not explained in the report, but his actions resulted in the withdrawal of the support of other leading experts in the field. A war of words broke out. The Irish Consul, Donal Hamill, tried to mediate, without success. The New York Times editorialised on "The Fighting Irish".
Mr McDonald proved to be a stubborn opponent as, he went ahead with the exhibition insisting it was not "for" the Irish but "about" the Irish. He accused the Irish Institute of New York of trying to "manipulate" the museum's decisions and charged his critics with anti semitism, McCarthyism" and "anti-intellectualism".
When the exhibition opened, the critics organised a public forum at Columbia University to which they invited a representative of the museum to discuss the issues raised in the dispute with the "scholarly community".
The chairman of MCNY, Louis Auchincloss, let fly at the critics in his letter, rebuffing the invitation and accusing Ms Casey and her supporters of having "carried on a year-long programme of disinformation ultimatums calls for boycotts and closure and slurs on the qualifications of the scholars and museum professionals who are members of the Gaelic Gotham project team.
Mr Auchincloss described the tactics of the opponents as "abhorrent" and claimed that "that belief is shared by all those who know the facts of the controversy, from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the cultural leaders of New York, to our peers and colleagues throughout the United States".
In the forum, which the museum refused to attend, the exhibition was severely criticised by Dr Allen Feldman, a cultural anthropologist and author of a book on "political terror" in Northern Ireland, and by Dr John Tchen, an expert in Asian-American culture and editor of The Chinese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation.
Dr Feldman belaboured the exhibition as a "failed interpretive effort". On the exhibit showing the Irish performing in negro minstrel shows, he wrote: "The presence of Irish performers indicates a crucial cultural moment of slippage and transformation when an ethnic group subject to many of the same stigmas and stereotyping as African-Americans began to de-Other itself by putting on black faces and inventing an African-American Other to parody."
ANOTHER area where the exhibition failed to interpret adequately, he said, was the "simian imagery imposed on the Irish by British visual culture". Thus, in the print showing police subduing "simian-like Irish rioters" during a St Patrick's Day melee, Dr Feldman was "fascinated" by this "19th-century version of the film Planet of the Apes, with the police embodying the Charlton Heston visage with all of its moral subtexts".
Dr Tchen regretted that, where the exhibition portrayed the Irish role in the Civil War draft riots when 11 blacks were lynched, there was not greater scrutiny which would have opened an exploration of the construction of whiteness': the `othering of others' among the city's ethnic groups and the implications of this in the power dynamics of New York.
It is impossible to do justice to the detailed arguments of the two critics, but one can see how the "dispute" over the exhibition moved into deep sociological waters.
The report, incidentally, reproduces newspaper reviews of the exhibition, most of them critical. A colleague on The Irish Times, found it a "timid, unimaginative, dull exhibition, thoroughly unworthy of its subject".
Five months later this correspondent visited it and described it as "excellent".
I think I'll have to de-Other that guy when I see him.