CULTURE SHOCK:IT IS NOT unreasonable that, in presenting the largest Irish exhibition so far of the work of James Coleman, the director of IMMA, Enrique Juncosa, should want to emphasise the influence of the Ballaghaderreen-born artist on the development of the contemporary avant garde. Coleman really is, after all, a highly influential figure in the international visual arts world and his pivotal role in the development of multi-media forms is undoubtedly underappreciated in his native land. Juncosa has done a superb service in putting together the stunning array of six pieces across three galleries (IMMA, the Project and the RHA), writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
The one drawback with this emphasis on Coleman’s standing in the international art world, his high reputation among curators, critics and trendy young artists, though, is that it makes him seem rather less interesting than he really is. The world to which it aligns Coleman is so full of charlatanism and self-promotion that it is not necessarily a compliment to be held up as one of its more renowned denizens. His work is, moreover, generally written about (including in much of the beautifully produced book that accompanies the exhibitions) in the obtuse argot of critical theory. It lends itself to being bombarded with all the heavy artillery of postmodern and deconstructionist thought – Barthes, Deluze, Foucault. And all of this makes it sound difficult, utterly abstract, up itself.
If you were told that Coleman was of no great importance and you’d never heard of deconstructionism, you might wander into IMMA, the Project or the RHA and find work that is often very funny, always witty, theatrically compelling, concerned as much with low as with high art, breathtakingly skilful and – whisper it – actually rather accessible. You might find that where it is difficult, it is so in good ways – those that have to do with genuine complexities rather than with artistic solipsism, with the agile exploration of ambiguities and contradictions rather than self-indulgent obscurantism. Above all, you might find, rather than just the shock of the new, an obvious continuity with 19th century culture.
This disjunction between the way Coleman tends to be represented and the way his work can be experienced is rooted in the problems Irish culture poses for critical theory. The Irish context often messes up neat symmetries of art and society. Modernism is a response to the emergence of the massive, anonymous city – but James Joyce comes from and writes about a city that is barely more than a string of villages. Postmodernism is a response to the mediated culture of late capitalism – but Flann O’Brien practically invents it in 1939 in an economic backwater.
Something similar happens with Coleman. He is unquestionably a pioneer of the use of new technologies to explore in art the nature of a world in which nature has been subsumed into culture, language has been sundered from its referent and the body has been dissolved into imagery. But he’s also something else – a literary dramatist in a fruitful dialogue, not just with Beckett, Yeats and Joyce, but with the whole Gothic tradition that is so influential in 19th century Irish writing.
To see Coleman only through the prism of postmodernism is to miss both his rich relationship with history and his astonishingly polymorphous talent. There’s no doubt that Coleman makes brilliant use of the detritus of a consumer culture that is saturated in mediated imagery – in Charon, for example, there are eerie riffs on mail-order clothes, interior design photos, mug-shots and car wrecks. No doubt either that he is deeply engaged in the play of forms.
The famous Box (ahhareturnabout) is a conscious act of deconstruction, using film of the 1927 fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney to create a compelling formalist spectacle in which image, gesture, sound and rhythm are sublimely fused. It is perfectly valid to see him in a line between Walter Benjamin and JG Ballard.
There are other lines, though, and they stretch further back. Coleman is a writer as well as a visual artist. He is engaged in what has been called an “archaeology of narrative”, digging through the layers of poetry, theatre, film, television, pulp fiction and photo-novels and holding shards of buried language up to the light. The ghosts of stories hover around his works. In So Different . . . And Yet, the male and female performers run through a fragmentary series of melodramatic poses and verbal gestures, tantalisingly hinting at a pulp fiction narrative that remains just beyond reach. In the simultaneously funny and unsettling photo-novel Seeing for Oneself, a bad gothic novel of mad scientists, strange elixirs, mysterious hieroglyphics and endangered maidens is frozen into a succession of obsessively reconstructed still images, acquiring the melancholy dignity of lost memories. Both that piece and Charon are shot through with the 19th century and early 20th century Gothic of Sheridan le Fanu, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Jekyll and Hyde and HG Wells. It is the Gothic aesthetic of the uncanny, so brilliantly analysed by Sigmund Freud, that links the old and the new, the pre-modern and the postmodern in Coleman’s approach.
And all of this unfolds in the essentially theatrical context of the live viewer encountering Coleman’s spectacles in large, open spaces. It is not for nothing that Coleman’s collaboration with Roger Doyle and Olwen Fouere (of which So Different . . . And Yet is the fruit) was under the rubric of Operating Theatre. Much of his work remains imbued with the Enlightenment notion of the operating theatre, the anatomist’s arena of dissection, display and possible healing as a theatre in both senses, one in which the human body becomes an object of observation.
I suspect that viewers more steeped in the theatre than in the contemporary art scene can approach Coleman with fewer preconceptions and more openness to the variety and richness of his work. To think of him as an Irish dramatist may be just as confining as to see him as an international avant garde artist. But it is perhaps a lot more fun, a lot less daunting and a lot more faithful to the dazzling copiousness of an outstanding artist.