Kiera O’Toole’s exhibition
“Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone” opened last Saturday and gave rise to a few thoughts, as did her accompanying text. Apologies for the length of this post, but it contains a few notes I promised to some of you.
Part 1 this week.
The relation between the written and literary forms of art on the one hand, and that of imagery and the visual on the other, has long been a matter of conjecture in art.
While it is common to have some text or catalogue essay accompany an exhibition, these are often merely explanatory of process and technique, or of the exhibition’s conceptual underpinnings. Frequently they contain gratuitous biography, offering an explanation for the origin of the “inspiration”, and give voice to the exhibiting artist’s self interpretation and theoretical contexturalising - however as Freud warned us, artists are not reliable in representing themselves outside their work. There are exceptions of course, Mike Parr being an example.
Kiera’s graphic images, based on bluebottles, show a refined drawing technique and feeling for materials. The organic drifting shapes are metaphors for the dispersal of the Irish people around the world.
In the exhibition Kiera also uses literary text in a powerful and evocative way. A poem by W.B.Yeats,
September 1913, from which the title of the exhibition,
Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone was taken, is presented together with the drawings, but the relationship is not one of illustration or the expression of parallel concepts, but of a concurrence of values and emotion expanding out from that passionate centre; back into the history of Ireland on the one hand, and on the other, forward into the familiar world of globalised consumer culture and (collateral) forced migration.
Kiera has managed to link Yeats’ dark and cynical view of commerce driven culture and its extinguishing of the heroic and romantic shared Irish cultural identity, with drawings based on the organic forms of bluebottles; those little drifters on the tides of chance and circumstance, who like the Irish and others before and since, have washed up and been grounded on the Australian shore.
Australia, being as it is “girt by sea”, has always been a haven for those displaced and adrift who, like the Irish, are "beyond the pale”. [“Beyond the Pale” was term for those living outside the Pale of Dublin, the fence around Dublin Castle dating from the 14th century within which the English were supposedly safe from the barbarous Irish.]
Perhaps Australia itself could be the ‘Pacific (peaceful) Solution’. 120 different nationalities were represented at the ABC last week to celebrate the diversity of Sydney culture.
'We must tolerate each other or we must tolerate the common enemy,' [Thomas Davis, quoted by John O'Leary]
The Irish are certainly not now beyond the pale in terms of literary reputation, but the question has been asked why the visual arts have been so relatively undeveloped in a nation with such a rich creative culture. Perhaps it is simply a reflection of cultural tradition, given that both (or all) forms of art spring from the poetic imagination (a common language and structuring of thought processing; a unique and recognisable blend of cognitive, perceptual and affective skills).
Could it be that language is more ‘slippery’ and elusive as a means of communication, these being useful attributes in a society, like that of Ireland, that has been in constant rebellion for so long, and that the printed text is more democratic/subversive, being both affordable, mass produced and transportable?
To quote Seamus Heaney in
England’s Difficulty.
“I moved like a double agent among the big concepts……
An adept at banter, I crossed the lines with carefully enunciated passwords, manned every speech with checkpoints and reported back to nobody.”
And also from Heaney – “What ever you say, say nothing.”
Many Irish have lived in forced or self-imposed exile yet continued to engage with Irish issues through their words in a way that, in the past at least, images would not have been able to do. Indeed Joyce and Beckett were able to radically change the English literary world from ‘exile’ in France.
Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone opened the door for us to the power of the Irish poetic tradition without being overwhelmed by it – the connection between the images and text being almost paradoxical, given the apolitical nature of bluebottles. But the buoyant little bladders adrift in the flux and flow of their watery world, are also grounded in the physical world of pain and death by stranding; a return to the earth.
This connection with the earth, the soil, is a noticeable theme in Irish writing.
To stick with Yeats, he writes in
The Municipal Gallery Revisited:
"(An image out of Spencer and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong…."
And Seamus Heaney, (excerpts) from
Digging:
"By god, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man."
"The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it."
And in consigning “Romantic Ireland” to the earth in O’Leary’s grave, we come back to Kiera’s quote from Yeats’
September 1913.
(First stanza)
“What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were meant to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
[Ironically Yeats was later a Senator of the Irish Free State and chairman of the Commission of Coinage.]
O’Leary, was a poet and Fenian, sentenced to penal servitude by the English and then exiled to France. He returned to Ireland and died in 1907. He wrote:
“It seems a very simple thing to say that the first thing an Irishman should feel is that he is an Irishman. But, unfortunately, the matter is not so plain after all, and certainly not plain to all, for there are many men, not only born in Ireland, but whose ancestors have been there for generations, who foolishly, not to say wickedly, fancy that they are, after all, only some sort of Englishmen.” These days we might say, in agreement with Kiera’s view as I understand it, that they are some sort of Europeans or consumers of global culture.
Next week – Part 2. Some notes on the Celtic Tiger and Creative Industries.
