Phoenix Rising at Production Sites conference, UCL

Logan Sisley presenting ‘Phoenix Rising’ at the conference, Production Sites: Resituating the Culture of Architectural Knowledge, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, 30 July 2015.

Missing Titles in The Blue Notebook

This article on Vagabond Reviews‘ installation, Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles, by Logan Sisley was originally published in The Blue Notebook: Journal for artists’ books, Volume 9 No 2, April 2015. See http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/bnotebk.htm for further information.

The Blue Notebook, Volume 9 No 2, April 2015

Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles is an imaginary library of knowledge about cities which was realised by Vagabond Reviews for the exhibition, Phoenix Rising: Art and Civic Imagination, at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.[1] The work comprises 48 books which are exhibited face-out on a shelf running around the walls of a gallery. These are books that are intended to be looked at – not opened – as they are as yet unwritten. The titles were contributed by various individuals following an invitation from Vagabond Reviews, which comprises Ailbhe Murphy and Ciaran Smyth. They have written that the work ‘explores the city as an object of scientific knowledge and imagination, on the boundary between the thought and the unthought, the written and the unwritten, the real and the imagined.’ (Vagabond Reviews exhibition text).

Phoenix Rising: Art and Civic Imagination references the 1914 Dublin Civic Exhibition and the work of Scottish biologist, sociologist and planner Patrick Geddes. The Civic Exhibition attempted to re-imagine Dublin as ‘the phoenix of cities’ during a period of economic, social and political strife. Phoenix Rising did not seek to replicate or simply commemorate the Civic Exhibition, but aimed to reflect, through the work of contemporary artists, on certain aspects of the work of Patrick Geddes and broader questions of how we understand and represent cities. The exhibition opened in November 2014 following another period of economic crisis in Ireland and a re-emergence of the term ‘civic’ in public debate. Alongside Vagabond Reviews, Phoenix Rising featured work by Stephen Brandes, Mark Clare, Cliona Harmey, Stéphanie Nava and Mary-Ruth Walsh, whose works in various media respond both to Dublin itself and to imaginary, historical and ideal cities. A series of films, talks and tours was intended to echo The Summer School of Civics, held under the Directorship of Patrick Geddes in conjunction with the 1914 Civic Exhibition. A Phoenix Rising newsletter was produced throughout the exhibition period in order to extend the scope of the project and make available research generated by the exhibition process.

In response to an invitation to participate in Phoenix Rising, Vagabond Reviews developed Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles, taking a cue from the interdisciplinary methodologies of Patrick Geddes in gathering a broad spectrum of perspectives on the city. Vagabond Reviews is an interdisciplinary arts initiative established in 2007 by artist Ailbhe Murphy and independent researcher Ciaran Smyth that harnesses the creative potential of both art and social science. They have sought to develop imaginative and collaborative models of knowledge production, representation and distribution through a combination of art practice, research strategies and critical review. Previous projects have investigated particular urban contexts, such as City (Re)Searches: Experiences of Being Public, an interdisciplinary arts-based inquiry into different typologies of being public in the Šančiai district of Kaunas, Lithuania. Other projects that reflect on urban experiences include a city-wide dialogue on public art in the city of Galway, Ireland, and a cultural archaeology of the Rialto area of Dublin in partnership with Fatima Groups United. Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles was also informed by their ongoing research into the idea of the capital city and the various forms of capital – economic, political, and symbolic – that are embedded in the urban sphere.

In gathering the Missing Titles, Vagabond Reviews sought a ‘diagnostic snapshot’ from various disciplines of the thinking required to understand Dublin, or the contemporary city in general. They extended an invitation to people working in the fields of geography, architecture, political science, planning, medicine, sociology and other human sciences asking each for ‘a work that’s needed, even urgent, but unwritten in their field. It can be practical, provocative, revolutionary or otherwise immoderate in its ambition for the city.’ (Vagabond Reviews exhibition text) It was not long before titles were sent in and the response rate was high; they had clearly tapped into a rich store of unwritten knowledge.

Vagabond Reviews created an imaginary publishing house, Scientia Civitatis, as a mechanism through which to present the Missing Titles to the public. The name, translated from the Latin, means knowledge of the city. The covers of the books were designed with graphic designer Val Bogan and a consistent appearance was used in order to emphasise the titles rather than any visual imagery that might have been incorporated. Nonetheless, the appearance of the books is particular, resembling a series of texts that might have been produced by an academic publisher. They are hardcover, substantial and weighty in appearance. Along with the title and author information, each dust jacket is decorated with an abstract graphic, appropriately resembling a map of a city or an information network, and a green, yellow or blue coloured band. The titles were each allocated a colour by Vagabond Reviews, hinting at their own system of classification, although one which is not explicit. While the books themselves provided no information about the authors other than their names, a panel with an alphabetical list of contributors identified their field of enquiry and academic affiliation, if applicable.

Vagabond Reviews, Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles, 2014; installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © the artists; photograph by Ros Kavanagh

The books were displayed with the covers facing out on a shelf 140cm from the floor – eye level rather than desk level. They were positioned to be looked at – the traditional mode of looking at art in a gallery – rather than read as a book. While the potential content might have been tempting for some, a glimpse inside would simply reveal the blank pages of the sketchbooks around which the dust jackets were wrapped. In some cases the titles provoked a double-take for visitors who were familiar with one or more of the ‘authors’ but unfamiliar with the title in question.

The titles themselves provide a tantalising glimpse of each author’s thinking, highlighting the expressive potential of a few well chosen words. The Missing Titles also range from the concise – Ghettopia by architect/artist/theorist/activist Kyong Park – to the more ample – Missing Trains of Thought (A Trilogy): Connolly Station (The Departure of Melancholy); Below the Loopline (The Beauties of Butt Bridge); Westland Row (And Other Arguments with the City) by architect John Tuomey. Some make literary references – The Social Geography of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin by geographer Gerry Kearns and The Dragon Sandstrewer by filmmaker Patrick Keiller (a reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses). Others are more polemical, such as Kylie Mangan’s proposed Sedating the Slums: How Drugs Maintain Social Order. The arrangement of the books along the shelves resulted in interesting adjacencies: for example, Hyden Plenvue’s Eternal City is followed by John Bissett’s STOP.

Some titles are local – Is Binn Béal Ina Thost: Fathoming Silences in South Dublin by anthropologist Steve Coleman – while others are applicable globally – The City which Mistook its Crisis for a Plan by architect Gráinne Shaffrey. This shift from the Dublin-specific to the general is present in Stephen Marshall’s title, The Atlas of All Town Plans (Actual and Possible), Vol 4: Dublin to Eutopia, and this echoes the transition from the local to the global that Geddes used to structure his Outlook Tower. This was an observatory in Edinburgh that Geddes developed into a ‘sociological laboratory’ in the 1890s. The visitor progressed through a series of exhibits extending from the street to the city to the nation and beyond: from the known to the increasingly unknown.

Geddes had an ongoing interest in using experimental exhibition formats to convey complex ideas and encourage public engagement. He employed the principle of an Index Museum – both an encyclopaedia graphica and an encyclopaedia methodica in which knowledge of the world was structured rationally using things and diagrams instead of words. His touring Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, which he brought to Dublin in 1911, was organised along these lines. In each location special emphasis would also be given to an analysis of the city in question. On viewing the exhibition in London in 1910, the planner Patrick Abercrombie noted that: ‘visitors could criticise his show – the merest hotchpotch – picture postcards – newspaper cuttings – crude old woodcuts – strange diagrams – archaeological reconstructions… many of them not even framed.’ (Abercrombie, 1959, p. 159) Geddes encouraged the viewer to actively engage with the material on display. He wrote that the 1911 Dublin exhibition would be ‘of service to the active worker no less than the studious enquirer into social questions’. (Patrick Geddes, Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, Dublin, 1911, p. ix) An updated version of Geddes’s Cities Exhibition was included in the 1914 Civic Exhibition alongside other diverse exhibits and entertainments.

Around 1902 Geddes had outlined his thinking on these issues in a manuscript Museum: Actual and Possible, a selection of which was recently published in Assemblage. He wrote of the potential for the Index Museum at its largest scale to be ‘not only a Museum and Library, but… also so far a technical and scientific College, and this in the widest sense: that is, with the history of culture, the humanities, the ideals no longer left out… Museum and Gallery, Library and College are thus more and more clearly seen to be capable of essential expression and summary within a single culture-organisation, to be capable of generalised representation in culture within a single building.’ (Geddes, 1989, p. 69) Such a total project is ultimately unrealisable, an eternal quest, but the expansiveness of the thinking and the linkages between disciplines is translated in some degree into Scientia Civitatis; Missing Titles.

Vagabond Reviews, and their collaborators, created a library within a gallery – at once artwork, exhibition, network and catalyst. Although the name Missing Titles implies a lack, the project is in fact open and generous. The inquisitiveness that the project inspires demonstrates the potential for such a library of the imagination. It stimulates discussion among visitors, and provides a potential framework for events and for further imaginary libraries. Viewers – or ‘readers’ – might reflect on what they consider to be urgent knowledge for the city of today, and – who knows – the project may prompt contributors to write the unwritten books of their imagination.

Bibliography

Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, Geddes, G. and Mears, F.C. (1911), Dublin
Town and Country Planning, Abercrombie, P. (3rd edition, 1959) Oxford University Press, London
The Index Museum: Chapters from an Unpublished Manuscript, Geddes, P., in Assemblage (No. 10, December 1989) pp. 65-9

[1] The exhibition took place at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland from 6 November 2014 to 29 March 2015.

Phoenix Rising at Production Sites

Logan Sisley will present a reflection on the Phoenix Rising exhibition at the forthcoming conference, Production Sites: Resituating the Culture of Architectural Knowledge, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, 29-30 July. See the Bartlett’s website for further information.

Production Sites: Resituating the Culture of Architectural Knowledge

Cliona Harmey: Dublin Ships

Read Sara O’Brien’s review of Cliona Harmey’s Dublin Ships, which also references her work in Phoenix Rising: http://wearecollected.com/articles/cliona-harmey-dublin-ships. For more on Dublin Ships see http://www.dublinships.ie.

Stéphanie Nava in conversation with Logan Sisley, March 2015

I wanted to ask you about Dig for Victory overall and your interest in the allotment tradition. Is that a culture that exists in France? What drew you to looking to the allotment and the government programmes that encouraged people to grow their own food?

I guess the start of it all is my interest in gardening; I like to garden and somehow I wanted to do something with gardening and art. I applied in 2004 for a bursary to go to England for a residency in London and I needed a project. It was evident for me that the project I would do in England was going to be related to gardens as gardening is such a prominent part of English culture. Then I thought about allotments because even though we have this same tradition in France, the worker’s garden —le jardin ouvrier— the way they’re organised make them a bit different than the ones in England. When I was in London, I started researching about the history of allotments for my project and I came across the Dig for Victory programme, which I didn’t know at all about. It kind of shifted my interest, made it broader and in fact more interesting for me because it wasn’t just about horticulture anymore. Suddenly the whole political level of the idea of allotment was unveiled and it became a much more sophisticated and dense subject in which I could dig and bring in a lot of very different things, not just about plants and horticultural matters.

It’s something that’s grown – excuse the pun – over time. How has your thinking evolved as you’ve worked?

Well it did grow over time and really the pun is very well put because I actually started the idea to grow my own; the first idea of the project was to have a real garden, a real allotment but of course I was on the waiting list. I guess I’m still on this waiting list… So the idea was: OK, I can’t get earth so I’ll do it on my own on paper and I started without really knowing where I was going to. I never expected it to be that scale. At the moment I think it’s more or less about 400 square metres, it’s a huge project. When I started, I just wanted to draw a little garden and draw all the plants that I needed for it. But of course the more I dug into history, the more I looked into all this information, all these layers, all these subjects… there were new boxes opening, new fields to investigate and new things to be added to the garden that made it grow over time.

Also it did grow in relation to the places I’ve shown the garden in. For example when the garden went to Detroit, I added a whole new extension, The Crises Bureau. It had started in Brest with only a few drawings, but once in Detroit, it strongly echoed the problems of the city and the rise of the urban agriculture and took a whole new dimension… Every time I show the piece, I try to make it grow in conjunction with the place it is exhibited in. In Cottbus in Germany, where it was last shown, there’s a little museum about pharmacy, so I took that as a starting point for expanding a whole section that I had planned but never had the opportunity to develop. I had in mind a section about the relationship between the body and the plants in terms of medicine, and that appeared in Cottbus because it was in relationship to the city as well.

Stéphanie Nava, Garden Cities or Urban Farming? The Crises Bureau (detail), 2011-14; An extract from Considering a Plot (Dig for Victory); installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © the artist ; photograph by Ros Kavanagh

We have a part of The Crises Bureau on display here and you added a drawing of Marino to it for Dublin. In a way by adding The Crises Bureau and looking at the city more broadly, you’ve kind of expanded this notion of growing your own food from the site of the allotment itself. Was that the intention – to expand it from the very local site to the city as a whole?

I think it all came out of researching the place where allotments sit. From the very beginning the idea was that it was going to be an urban garden. An allotment is not this idyllic garden, you know, ideally situated in lush countryside. Of course an allotment can be beautiful and fun but it’s set in a tough surrounding, in suburbs, often by railways. You have this idea of nature that has to fight somehow or has to grow against a very grey background or a very industrial background. From the beginning they are also workers’ plots; I mean, the bourgeoisie doesn’t grow food in allotments. They do now because it’s hip, but it used to really only be subsistence gardens: you grow your own food because you can’t buy any. It was very important for me from the start to place it within the urban context: the big skyline in the installation reminds you where you are. So its nature and its location made the connection between the garden and the city, the way it functions within the city is of great interest to me. When I started to look into urban agriculture more precisely for the Detroit exhibition, all the questions about making space for vegetable gardens in the city emerged. Do you put them near homes, far from them, creating clusters of gardens?… It wasn’t just about thinking of the planning of a plot anymore, there was a need to reflect on the city planning too. So in a way, the plot is a sort of core that is looked at as linked to a much broader system.

And the idea of crisis, where does that come in? Particularly with Detroit, in the media it’s often represented as a city in crisis, but also in the time you’ve been making this we’ve had this kind of global crisis. Particularly in Ireland crisis is a word that seems to surround us. What were you thinking in calling it The Crises Bureau?

Well, the first thing that got me to this idea of The Crises Bureau was prophylaxis. When drawing the vegetables in the plot I always add imperfections and tiny diseases as when you use garden manuals, there’s always a section about how to fight disease. Actually, in the Dig for Victory programme, there are a lot of leaflets that picture the ‘soldier-gardener’ fighting the ‘enemies of the plot’ that are the bugs and the diseases. So I wanted something about the idea of prophylaxis and the idea of how a disease can cause huge damage to the crop and start a real crisis not only in the crop but also beyond, in society. One of the first events I thought about was the potato blight and the Great Famine in Ireland. I didn’t know anything about this when I was in France; it’s not really a topic that’s taught in school in history class. I learned about it during my research in England and was really interested to learn how such a massive crisis could have initiated in a disease affecting one plant only and how it terribly worsened because of all the other – mostly political – factors. It triggered my desire to include a section about crises that initiate with plants, thinking also of the first ‘financial’ crisis that came with the tulips in 17th Century Holland.

So I started the Bureau and I made a part about the Irish Great Famine and another one about the shortage of food during the blitz during the Second World War because that’s what had led the government to set up the Dig for Victory programme. Before the War, the Brits weren’t growing enough food in their own country; they were relying on imports far too much. They weren’t self sufficient and as all the ships were used for the war, they couldn’t import food anymore, so setting the Dig for Victory programme was a way to alleviate the problem. In Detroit, it’s another type of crisis, where urban gardening is partly used to fight the food desert that the city has become, and to empower poor, mostly black, people. It was very interesting for me to look at how all this works in a system. When you are in your little garden doing your own little thing on a very individual level, you don’t always realise that you’re actually caught in a much wider system and decisions belong to you but also to much broader and bigger groups, especially the political system. In Detroit for example, one problem about the urban agricultural utopia is that there’s actually no zoning possibility for agriculture. The city is organised in zones for particular professional activities and you have parks, you have shops, you have everything, but… you don’t have agriculture, so it’s actually illegal to grow food in a field in Detroit.

Because it’s perceived as rural, I guess; agriculture is something that happens outside the city?

Yes, and when they did the zoning planning for the city they didn’t include agriculture because agriculture doesn’t belong in the city.

You’ve reworked a series of plans of cities – both real and imaginary. I guess these maps embody some of the ideology or the thinking or culture around city planning and city organisation. Can you talk through the process of selecting the particular places that you’ve mapped out and why you were drawn to those?

City planners decide about areas for buildings in relation to areas for parks and gardens, schematically: green space amongst grey space. To translate this relationship, I decided on a very basic process: I would do the drawing with the two colours only, green and grey. This enhances the proportion of one against the other very well. You can see how the ‘green’ can be displayed outside or dotted inside, how much one stands for the other. They become abstractions with questions of composition in a way and this, as a question of drawing, for me is very important for the whole project. In every drawing in the project, every section there are questions of representation, art questions that I ask: how drawing can translate ideas, which technique to use, which size, which structure, etc… For this section, I was of course interested in the garden city movement because of the way they made space for gardens inside cities. I was interested in these utopias, and how it produced some very theoretical drawings and some that are about practical organisation. I looked at Ebenezer Howard’s diagrams; some of them I used. And then I looked at what had been made real from these ideas, so I included Bourneville which is the city that Cadbury built, and Port Sunlight which is Lever from Unilever; both cities that had been built around factories for the welfare of the workers. Some of the drawings are completely utopian like that of Broadacre, a project from Frank Lloyd Wright. Other drawings are also projections, like for Detroit I’ve drawn diagrams of how Detroit could be reshuffled with clusters of houses linked by green spaces, agricultural fields.

The question of representation is there throughout the whole project. At the core is drawing, but it’s not simply a drawing on the wall. The drawing creates an installation; it becomes sculptural or spatial. Can you talk through that process and your approach to the way you use drawing in the wider context?

That was actually a question that I didn’t think of when I started the project. I started the project in a very silly and straightforward way, like: ‘I don’t have the land, so I’m going to draw everything’ without planning much further! I took my rolls of paper and I started drawing everything… After a while, I had accumulated all these drawings and most of them are very big as everything is drawn real size. Some of them are massive: one metre fifty by seven metres long. They were all rolled in my studio, but thankfully, I was lent a big gallery space in Marseille for the summer in 2007 to try to figure out what to do with them. At first I thought about pieces of furniture to show them, but then, very quickly, it became clear that they had to be in the space as to mimic the space of a real allotment. So I found this solution of hanging them on cables, as if they were on production lines. I don’t really know where it came from, I think I was manipulating the drawing and I was just like, ‘What can I do to make them not flat and to make them, you know, hang in space and have a presence in space that is not this completely flat land?’…

It also became clear that there was this element of decor that was going to be part of the nature of the piece. It’s like a decor but it is an allotment as well, I mean you can go inside it. It has the real size of an allotment and everything is kind of real but fake at the same time. Beside the drawings, I needed to have some volumetric objects to make it work in space and to host some of the smallest drawings, like the little forts I built for the insects, that I started to mix with real objects… Some come from real gardens: there is a small glasshouse, little kind of heating tunnels, a wheelbarrow. This last one, for example, is in use when I install the show. I carry my stuff around in it so it’s actually not just there to say, ‘Oh, in the garden there is a wheelbarrow’, but it’s actually a useful tool for me when I’m ‘working in the plot’. Same for the crates that have the stamp ‘Dig for Victory’ written on them. They look like ammunition boxes; they are props like in a theatre or on a cinema set but at the same time I do use them to carry and store part of the work… One of the objects I really like is the umpire chair from a tennis court that sits in the middle of the installation. When you’re on it, you get a sense of the whole plot. I also needed to have a way to look at the garden from above which is actually a view you’d get if you looked at a drawing of a floor plan, a comprehensive way. When you look at it from above, you see all the drawings laid down, like pages opened around you. Its encyclopaedic nature becomes visible; I could say it’s a book that you could walk in.

That’s a nice analogy. That question of viewpoint is there in the work; there’s a drawing that you made in Dublin, Rear Window, and the title points to the fact that it’s from a very particular view. I wanted to ask you about your time in Dublin when you were resident at IMMA in the artists’ residency programme – some thoughts on making that work looking out from Kilmainham across the city, but also your response to Dublin. When you arrive in a place that’s unknown, what is the process of getting to know and responding to it?

Well, I applied with a project as for most residencies, and the project was linked to Considering a Plot (Dig for Victory): it was to research further about the Famine, which I did and found other information than what I had expected. I found a lot of things about meteorological, weather data that I’m going to use. I’m very interested in them in terms of drawing, what kind of drawing I can make from them. When I was at the botanical garden, where I found most of these data, I also found out about how much the curator of the garden [David Moore] was very much involved in discovering what the blight was. I got interested in the nature and function of a botanical garden that has this idea of a beautiful garden in which you can come for pleasure, but also is a place for conservation and research. I’ve got a lot of notes and sketches from my visits there that will be put in use in future works.

When I came to Dublin, my idea was to take time, having three months here, not moving much and using that non-disrupted time to resettle my practice and discover the place. I was in a little exhibition at IMMA with the other residents which opened very, very soon after I arrived. I didn’t want to bring pieces I had made before; it wouldn’t make sense, so I had to act quickly and in response to my surroundings. I’m interested in gardens, and of course, there’s this fabulous garden at IMMA, and this fabulous ceiling in the chapel with all the vegetables hanging. I was also very interested in the fact that Dublin has got all these Georgian houses that are very bland on the outside but exactly decorated on the inside with a lot of botanical ornaments… That led to a small group of drawings I called Plant as Food as Garden as Ornament as Decor that is about this garden, its layout, its geometry and plants used in decoration.

You know, I didn’t really want to plan things; I just ended up spending time either working in the studio or going around visiting things. You had pointed to the Casino at Marino which I loved and I went to three times. I don’t know what I’m going to do but this building is going to appear somehow in my work! When you are in a new environment, you look at everything, a lot. Looking around, noticing thing, it’s very important and feeds you for when you go back home. So, for me, there had to be things about the views from the museum and from our house. It was not a joke but with Becca Albee, who was another resident, this view that I ended up depicting in Rear Window, had become something very important for us. Her bedroom would lead onto that view and she was sitting on a windowsill very often, looking at the view from where she made a little video of a fox inhabiting the garden below. From the bathroom you had the same view and when I was brushing my teeth I would always just stare at this view. I really liked it and I just wanted to catch something about it, to remember it. It became clear, looking there, that it had all the ingredients I’m interested in in my work. It displayed the whole structure of the city between individual dwellings, bigger constructions, the massive factory – the Guinness factory – that you can see from there, that is really included within the city, and green spaces. The little garden had everything: a bench to sit on and relax, a little playground for the kids and a bit of vegetable crop in the corner. I decided to draw it, to draw this idea of the city, reshuffling the view a bit to make it all fit in the page and adding the cross-section of our house. It shows more or less all the ingredients that were there to make a city: live, work, rest, feed and play… in a view of this particular Irish city, Dublin.

Stephanie Nava’s participation in Phoenix Rising was supported by the French Embassy in Ireland.

Missing Titles in The Blue Notebook

The installation, Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles, by Vagabond Reviews features in the latest issue of The Blue Notebook: Journal for Artists’ Books, published by the Centre for Fine Print Research at the UWE Bristol School of Creative Arts, Bristol.

The Blue Notebook, Volume 9 No 2, April 2015

Civic Exchanges at ‘art and context’

Read Joan Fowler’s thoughts on Phoenix Rising: Art and Civic Imagination at http://artandcontext.com/civic-exchanges.

 

Images from the Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles Seminar

Some of the contributors to a seminar drawing on the installation ‘Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles’ by Vagabond Reviews, 28 March 2015. Left to right: Kieran Rose, Tara Kennedy and Jo Anne Butler (Culturstruction), Austin O’Carroll and Valerie Connor.

A seminar drawing on the installation ‘Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles’ by Vagabond Reviews, 28 March 2015.

Mark Clare in conversation with Logan Sisley

I wanted to start with Gustave Courbet. Thinking about the two works on show in The Hugh Lane, La Fontaine du Réalisme and Le Fantôme du Réalisme, could you talk through what interests you in him as a figure, as an artist, and talk through the thought process of …

…getting to the piece?

From Courbet to the fountain.

I can’t remember the name of the book I was reading – on art and social practice – and he comes up early on as one of these artists that you could fit into this kind of category due to his interaction with the revolution in Paris and how he participated in that and used his own practice or skills or whatever you want to call it within that area. (1) I was reading about his Manifesto in this particular book and that was the starting point. I was interested in the Manifesto in that it talks about defining your own time and making work you want to make for yourself that represents the time that you are in and that can transfer or translate into any period of time. That’s what interests me about it.

Mark Clare, La Fontaine du Réalisme, 2014 © the artist

We’re probably talking four or five years ago when I came to that and even then in the process of putting forward a proposal to the Centre Culturel Irlandais [CCI] based on Courbet and the Manifesto I would have changed the way I was thinking about it a lot. That was the starting point and I used it as a proposal to the Centre Culturel Irlandais to do a three month residency there. The proposal I put forward was to research the temporary pavilion that he built. Courbet put in 14 paintings to the 1855 Universal Exhibition; 11 were chosen and three weren’t. He was put out by that so he took all of them and he built a temporary pavilion right next to the main pavilion and he exhibited his work and that’s when he produced this pamphlet – the Manifesto – that would act as a kind of catalogue to the work. (2)

So the pavilion is an act of protest? The provision of an alternative space?

Absolutely. Building his own space to exhibit his work the way he wanted because to him the paintings are all seen or they’re not seen; do you know what I mean? What I was originally interested in was the temporary space because it fits into what I’ve been doing – building temporary structures, in Georgia, in museum grounds, in St Anne’s Park. So I was interested in that aspect of it. When I went out to Paris I was toying with the idea of making a film and I was going to all these different locations and reading… and along the way kept coming up with all this information about fountains and how fountains were used at these expositions as markers for the event. They were very spectacular markers for the event, to show off technology, new designs and new materials, which again would be something I would be very interested in and caught my attention. You’ll see fountains in most cities but in Paris in particular you can’t go down a street without seeing a fountain; it might not be working but you’ll see the remains of the fountain. So you have the architectural aspect to it and obviously on the social level these fountains were being produced to bring clean water to the city, to stop disease, so it’s about the development of the city as well and looking after your citizens. That’s what really interested me.

So I was going out and documenting these fountains, the few that remained from these expositions – some had been put out in parks and things like that – and it just wasn’t working for me. This film that I was trying to make just seemed really staid and dry; then I starting playing around with the idea of actually building a fountain. Because it relates very much to the site that I was in, which is something that is important to me. You have this beautiful courtyard in the CCI that is nearly begging for this sculptural piece of work. So after thinking about it and researching it I got to that point I talked to Nora [Hickey M’Sichili] who’s the Director and put forward the proposal to do this particular piece of work for their courtyard, which she was happy to do.

And the fountain [La Fontaine du Réalisme] was made from items you found locally, items from the centre and items you purchased or found. Going back to the idea of Courbet making paintings of his time, this is a fountain that is unmistakably from now as opposed to a nineteenth century fountain.

Very much so.

Some of the materials you use – like the paddling pools – they degrade or they burst. When you think of public fountains they can be hugely elaborate permanent structures, however, your fountain was only installed as a temporary structure. I was thinking about time in relation to your work and it seems to percolate through it, and with this work you have the phantom, the ghost of the sculpture installed in the gallery space [Le Fantôme du Réalisme]; there’s this relationship between the original construction of the fountain and the way it is shown in the exhibition.

It’s all of those things – moving it forward or moving it sideways – I don’t know what you want to call it. It’s trying to build upon in some way but it also relates back to that notion of the maintenance of historical statues. I was talking to you before about how they wrap statues in these gardens and that really interests me. It’s hard to describe; it is a ghost in some ways. It’s just a remnant of something and yet it has this kind of presence. Again the materials are really important because in some ways they’re really cheap disposable materials but on an environmental level they’re not very disposable.

Mark Clare, La Fontaine du Réalisme, and Le Fantôme du Réalisme, 2014; installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © the artist ; photograph by Ros Kavanagh

Again in your work DemocraCity (3) there is a waste disposal site and there is a reference to time, almost beyond a human sense of time.

Or a slippage between history and the future and where we find ourselves in that conversation. Obviously I draw on history to produce works that I think in some way reflect where I am or where we are.

Speaking of history is the fountain a kind of monument to Courbet?

I don’t know if it’s a monument to Courbet. I think it’s more a monument to monuments or a monument to civilisation. The development of civilisation is something that really interests me. Even in that notion of discussing environmental issues, it’s the development of civilisation that has brought us to that kind of conversation.

And certain processes or products that we think of as very civilised are actually very destructive?

Well there’s slippage on that always. Technology has done so much for us but it has also put us in this situation where we’re uncertain about our climate. But we also went to the moon and we have exciting adventures based on this drive that we have. So that notion of technology is very simplistic in that sense but it’s that drive by humans to advance constantly which I think is really, really interesting. Obviously we’re living in a time where that advancement is so rapid, even from when I was a kid ‘til now. I’m kind of in awe of that and yet I pick these materials that are throwaway. I build really throwaway, disposable objects and materials even though they might have quite monumental aspects to them. Whereas in Cliona’s piece where she’s really using today’s technology to create work, I’m not. (4) I’m kind of toying and dabbling and pretending, which is fine as well. And that I guess is theatrical and in some ways – not magical but illusionary. Again with the piece in the CCI the use of the theatre lights represents an aspect of that environment, because they were there.

And it’s installed in The Hugh Lane in a theatrical manner.

To try and enhance it… and what starts as one object, a three dimensional sculpture, is exhibited here first of all as a photographic work, which I don’t consider documentation; I consider that a piece of work. Then we have this sculptural piece which was built for here, for this show. That again somehow relates back to the two earlier works but moves it somewhere else.

And you’re going to remake the fountain in Paris. So it almost comes full circle? (5)

It’s a funny one in that sense. I don’t have a problem doing it because it’s part of an exhibition of a body of work and because it was built there it’s fine. In some ways I’d like to build it in a totally different environment to see to how…

How it translates?

If it does or it doesn’t. I think very much that the courtyard at the CCI gives it a presence as well. Maybe that’s in my own head… It’s in an incredible area; the Sorbonne… this site built for the development of knowledge, when it was what we would consider barbaric, yet that part of the city is all about that.

In putting together the Phoenix Rising exhibition, and maybe it’s not explicit, one of the things I was thinking about in relation to cities was how ideas translate between different places or don’t, and also how they translate across time historically. Working in an art museum you are aware of the shifts in the reception of certain artworks. This is maybe something in the other works you’ve made around monuments – the way that objects can embody certain values but then those values are degraded – or the opposite.

And you throw a different material into that kind of conversation – like using plastic instead of bronze. I guess that’s what I’m very interested in: that notion of history but trying to make it contemporary it in some way as in how that ideology got us to this point and how you represent that in some way. I’m not saying I do that but that’s part of the process for me.

And the audience for your work – is that part of the process?

Absolutely, when you stick something into a courtyard, particularly a place that has a library and students who are studying law or accountancy or whatever, you have a very different audience going through that building than something that’s exhibited in a gallery space that’s defined in a particular way. So that’s important. And again how that translates into different environments I find really interesting.

Notes

(1) The painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) played an active role in the Paris Commune of 1871.

(2) The works rejected by the jury of the Universal Exposition included Courbet’s major works, A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) and The Artist’s Studio (1854-5). His own exhibition building was constructed on the Avenue Montaigne. The introduction to the catalogue of this solo exhibition is usually known as the “Realist Manifesto”.

(3) DemocraCity (2011), single channel animation, 7.35mins.

(4) La Fontaine du Réalisme is included in the exhibition, Mark Clare : Que sais-je ? at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris from 13 March to 16 April 2015.

(5) Cliona Harmey’s installation, Fixed Elsewhere (2014) is also included in Phoenix Rising.

See www.markclare.com for further information on the artist’s work.

SEMINAR: Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles

2 to 4pm, 28 March 2015

A seminar drawing on the installation Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles by Vagabond Reviews evoking an inter-disciplinary prism on Dublin and the contemporary city.

Chaired by independent curator Valerie Connor, this seminar sets out to make a reading of the contemporary city through the prism of the Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles installation. The installation, part of the Phoenix Rising: Art and Civic Imagination exhibition, presents 48 titles for as yet unwritten books about the city from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives within the human sciences. Vagabond Reviews has invited the contributors of those missing titles to participate in an interdisciplinary reading of the city including individual interpretations from:
Mary Corcoran (Sociology)
Philip Crowe (Architecture)
Culturstruction (Art and Architecture)
Jenny McElwain (Paleobotany)
Austin O’Carroll (General Medicine)
Kieran Rose (Urban Planning)
Jamie Saris (Anthropology)

Vagabond Reviews, Scientia Civitatis: Missing Titles, 2014; installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane © the artists; photograph by Ros Kavanagh