CULTURE SHOCK:Conceptual art isn't necessarily abstract or a playground for poseurs, but has shown a capacity to engage with communities, writes Fintan O'Toole
AMONG THE many bad things about the hype that surrounds the likes of Damien Hirst, about whom I wrote here last week, is the way it distracts from the real vibrancy of conceptual art.
When both the art market and some great public collections are infected with what Robert Hughes memorably described in his film on Channel 4 last Sunday as "the self-aggrandisement of the rich and ignorant", it is hard not to become cynical. The old philistine cry of "Sure, I could do that myself" acquires a degree of validity.
The ordinary understanding of art as something that most of us can't do is not such a bad benchmark, after all - if something looks facile, it probably is. Traditional skills and forms at least provide a guarantee of some kind of seriousness and commitment in a world of dupes and chancers.
It's important, though, that the reaction doesn't go too far. The fact is that conceptual art - in the sense of art whose primary aim is to produce ideas rather than permanent, physical objects - isn't just a playground for poseurs, pseuds and parasites. Nor is it necessarily abstract. Actually, in recent years, this kind of work has often shown a capacity for real, on-the-ground engagement with local communities. Most of it has happened outside the realm of galleries and dealers. It is public work, paid for through the "percent for art" scheme and often encouraged by county council arts officers with the wit to understand that public art doesn't have to be monumental.
It's striking that a lot of this work deals with the area where art and reality meet - memory. Conceptual art, with its fleeting, evanescent presence and deliberate lack of interest in the creation of fixed, collectible objects, can engage with one of the most fundamental human experiences - the passage of time. Where great physical works of art - from Lascaux to Rothko - arrest time, conceptual art goes with its flow. In recent years, Irish artists have been using this capacity to create work that is haunted by memory and mournful of its loss.
There's a lot of this work, but a few examples highlight the consistency of these themes. Clare County Council has just published a catalogue of its Ground Up four-year project of temporary public artworks in rural areas. It is striking how much of it is concerned with the idea of capturing the traces of what has been and gone.
Áine Phillips, for example, built simple wooden shelters at the sites of three killeens (unmarked burial grounds for unbaptised children) and invited people to leave tokens of their own choosing. Strikingly, although the sheds were meant to be temporary installations, they have been left standing by public demand. Given a real context, people don't find anything abstract in giving expression to the unseen and almost forgotten.
This notion of salvaging memory was also at the heart of Michael Durand's project at the Mater Hospital nurses' home in Dublin, which stood from 1920 until its recent demolition. Durand's pictures, also recently published in book form, are at one level photographs of photographs.
As well as recording the empty building on the eve of its extinction, capturing its resonant absences, he also used formal group portraits of generations of nurses who had passed through it.
These images were projected into the empty rooms and onto objects within them and he photographed the ghostly, ethereal and sometimes eerie results. These pictures were themselves displayed in the hospital during the demolition work. Again, the idea of the world, not just as a physical space, but as the traces of what has passed through it, is at play.
Perhaps the most striking of all of these projects is Catherine Delaney's Inside-Outside in Baltinglass, Co Wicklow (also published recently in book form). Taking her cue from two aspects of the town's history - the once-thriving textile printing industry and St Joseph's convent, which became an asylum hostel in the 1990s and is now awaiting demolition - Delaney came to focus on the ideas of patterns. As well as producing photographs of the abandoned convent, picking up on the vestiges of its life as both a school and a refuge for Kosovars fleeing the conflict in their country, she used the patterns of textiles to reflect the universal desire for connection.
Delaney used these patterns for street drawings and light projections at five sites around the town. Working with locals, ex-refugees, and newer migrants, she transferred the pattern of the wallpaper from the convent onto a Baltinglass footpath, and that of an Indian man's carpet on another. She set up visual dialogues between the lace-making patterns of local woman Phyllis Flanagan and the elaborate figure-of-eight interlacing of a refugee's Islamic prayer mat, projected in light onto the space in front of the public library.
As well as connecting the public and the domestic (all the patterns were found indoors and displayed outdoors), the project rather beautifully suggested the richness and underlying similarity of the cultures that have shaped the town's past and present.
Delaney's project also, incidentally, reminded us of two things that can help to ward off cynicism about contemporary art. One is that visual complexity is everywhere around us, and that art can work sometimes by creating a context that allows us to see it. The other is that so-called ordinary people don't find this art all that weird - so long as it makes an effort to connect with their own experiences.