We're Not Really Here
'The cobbled maze between Dame Street and the River Liffey is
Dublin's most cultural quarter. Theatres, galleries, clubs and pubs
flourish in a refreshingly uncommercialised and bohemian atmosphere.
Aromas wafting from exotic eating-places, music drifting from street
and studio, provocative sculptures and experimental exhibitions -
all weave the unique spell of this colourful, vibrant part of the
city.'
(Printed postcard text found in Temple Bar, Dublin 2001)
OK. Then*
"You're not from round here are you?"
How do they know? Is it my accent? The colour of my skin? The make
of my shirt? My religious beliefs (or possible lack of them)?
Am I using the city at the wrong speed?
Maybe it's because I'm typing this at an unfamiliar desk in an unfamiliar
office in a city different from the one I usually sleep in. The papers
strewn round the desk are for projects other than my own. My familiars
aren't here. My kitchen's not four steps to my back and the books
on the shelves over to my left have unfamiliar spines. I'm not from
round here am I?
'Here' is Temple Bar. And what and where is here exactly? If there's
a physical aggregate is it the river and rock? The point where the
buildings meet the ground? Or the point five feet above it where they're
numbered? Is the essence of Temple Bar the first historical claim
that was made on this section of urban space in Ireland, or the most
recent and vehement? If these things could be ordered would this place
be first and foremost a historical, political or economic idea? Is
Temple Bar the same place at night? At a time of war, or recession,
or global TV network events? And how might I go about knowing it or
marking it personally - what's the best way in for an artist/tourist
who's arriving with baggage? And how did I get here?
I'm an artist and sometime curator based in Manchester, England (sample
recent postcard: 'Cottonopolis, United, Oasis, Queer as Folk'). I
make work across a range of media and timescales - from anecdote to
video to public art projects. All my work has a sense of watching
numerous allegations and fictions (graffiti, charity collectors, drumlins,
two month billboard lifespans, late night drunks, hotels*) somehow
occupying the same local space, whether in confrontation or apparently
oblivious to each others' existence or right to be there. It's a sense
probably most heightened in cities and the particular city I live
and work in has been a constant touchstone for my practice. In one
of my most recent projects 'Square
City' I have become artist-in-residence in the Ordnance
survey grid square I live in and have made numerous works within that
1km square of central Manchester. These works have been a mixture
of deliberate responses to the very specific built environment and
communities of people living and working within it, with more generic
activities which somehow reveal themselves against the particular
relief of the square (patrolling the invisible border; sending groups
out to sprint in it). As part of Square City I curated a show at the
Metropolitan University Galleries within the square - which likewise
was a mix of works made within or pertinent to the orthodoxies and
popular mythologies of that part of the city and more generic tactics
and urban rituals suggested by other artists. The show was called
'You are Here', after both the familiar slogan on street maps anywhere
and the then Vodaphone advertising slogan dotted on taxis around the
city that month.
Vodaphone are the sponsors of Manchester United - a football team
whose fortunes have been one of Manchester's most prominent sources
of folklore in the post-war years. On my first walk through Temple
Bar (having been invited by Project to adapt the Square City model
for this charged area of Dublin) I circled the prescribed boundaries
of the area. In their own way of course these borders are as arbitrary
as the cartographer's grid line and they happen to fall in such a
way that the Manchester United superstore was just out of the area
across a main road. There's an initial indulgent period where you're
working on an idea and seeking significance in the most chance of
events (thoughts unlikely to survive much critical scrutiny) and I
suppose for a moment I tried to make some sense of this example of
a physical outpost of my adopted home city's mythologies. But what
came to mind more was a sense of distance - that particular sweet
melancholy you get in an unfamiliar city when you walk to get lost.
And I found myself thinking less of definitive statements such as
'You are Here' and more of a song sung by the long suffering band
of supporters of Manchester's other team, Manchester City - a self-deprecating
chant to soundtrack another defeat. 'We're not really here.'
And that became the refrain for navigating Temple Bar and its history
and environment of claim and counter claim and decay and reinvention.
For being a self-conscious tourist who faced with so many official
routes in and unofficial desire paths, chooses to think 'What happens
if we believe the claims of postcards?' Or who punctuates that tourist's
drift of erratic speeds and trajectories and of looking up or sideways
more than usual, with requests from near strangers that they allow
their work to be part of a map of a place. A provisional map and subject
to change, like the one one of those late night drunks might scribble
on the back of a fag packet, but one which makes a fleeting claim
to its own accuracy and right to exist, even as it keeps incorporating
new landmarks.
So 'We're Not Really Here' is a show which combines pre-existing
or predetermined works by a number of Dublin based artists with an
ongoing 'score' of activities within Temple Bar suggested on postcards
for a team of volunteers working with myself from the base of the
gallery. These activities will generate visual and text material which
will have a life within the gallery and perhaps allow the show to
function in the way that a newspaper office might produce six or seven
issues a day, with the same stories appearing in a different order
or updated in the light of new information. The postcards themselves
come from artists, writers, architects, journalists, bakers, geologists,
and friends. Some of these people have a direct connection with Temple
Bar or Project Arts Centre; some are people who have directly or indirectly
influenced my understanding of cities. Some are people who have never
been to Ireland, but believe that it's there. All have suggested activities
to take place in Temple Bar, which will interrogate or consolidate
some of the area's activity.
We're starting in an empty gallery and installing a 'first draft'
of the show alongside a temporary office space. This draft is based
on a series of meetings with artists arranged by independent artist
and curator Aoife Desmond, whose enthusiasm and openness gave me the
opportunity to make an eclectic selection of work for us to start
the project with. It's been an act of curation in that I've selected
certain works to go in the gallery, but it makes no claims to be anything
like an objective qualitative overview of work pertaining to Temple
Bar. In some cases the connection to the area may even appear quite
oblique, but perhaps that's what I mean when I refer to arriving with
baggage - in a very simple way I wanted to reflect the way that on
any one day we can scan the horizon and privilege the visual information
of church towers over gas towers or bedroom windows over gilt lettered
ones, without thinking why. It takes a conscious act of will to maybe
look only for sandstone or Red or movement under 12mph, but it can
be worth the effort.
The artists involved have proved themselves to be extraordinarily
open to this process and of allowing their work to exist in a constantly
shifting show as the various volunteers' activities make several 'sweeps'
of Temple Bar. Just as in the city ornate banks turn into café
bars and red brick gives way to glass and exposed steel, these pre-selected
works will be landmarks in the show and open to change in potential
meaning as the show changes. Eoin Llewellyn's large canvas of a an
abandoned Yemeni city (whose oasis dried up in the 16th century) occupies
the same gallery space as both Gavin Delahunty's shifting portfolio
of photographic documents of an empty Temple Bar and Criodhna Costello's
video of ersatz Irish mobile phone kareoke. John Langan keeps a playful
calendar for the show via his brewing process of the 'spirit of Temple
Bar' - making wine from tourist shop fruit and sodden beer mats. In
another personal chronicling of the immediate environment Roisin Lewis
engages in a private ritual of transcription in the Project foyer
- an act subject to the content of local radio airwaves. Tracy Staunton's
beautiful images on pillows of 'Dublin Sleeping' sit alongside a shifting
painted modular landscape of generic Americana by Wendy Judge (the
events of the past month bear out the power of American iconography
in all our psyches, wherever we are). Tracy's ongoing practice of
screenprinting additional layers of visual history onto charged local
sites is also represented by a work she will be making in the seating
area of the Olympia Theatre (if you want to see it, you can get a
full programme of Olympia events by ringing 677 7744).
Other works exist outside the gallery as well. Mark Cullen's computer
produced abstract squares of confined manic activity make their claim
as just as vital mouse clicks and drags as any other taking place
in this heart of the increasingly patchy Celtic Tiger economy. Conor
McGarrigle's work also exists online at www.temple-bar.org
- though it exists as much as a testimony to the artist's day
job as web design guru as it does to any actual content. "I'm
Temple Bar!" "No, I'M Temple Bar!" "NO! I'M TEMPLE
BAR!" etc. It's a site that exists to proclaim it's there. "Look
no further, this is it" as Forced Entertainment once said.
There are other activities and processes reflected here. Finbar Kelly's
wood and slate roof may have sprawled across the gallery by the time
you read this, or have become an impromptu porch for my working space.
Or the demands we all have on us to make a living elsewhere might
have scaled down what's possible. Whatever, it is activity which sits
alongside the evidence of the painstaking process of Anthony Lyttle's
printmaking. Quick sketches and provisional drawings of vaguely recognisable
urban forms inform layered prints that in this context may allude
to blueprints, or the city grid or satellite imagery. He was one of
the first artists I met and his studio is just round the corner from
Project - one of several I have visited in the past few months on
my various visits. These little glimpses into different working modes
and paces of production have been a privilege and they are practices
and personal histories I might not have come across had I not been
given a guided tour with an agenda. I hope this show might suggest
many such tours and readings of Temple Bar which we might not have
known were really here, if only for a few weeks.
Graham Parker
September 2001
more on temple-bar.org
|
