Edge 2 – CLEARY + CONNOLLY: Past + Presence

essays by Thi Bich Doan, Marie Glon & Muriel Venet; interview by Karen Normoyle; intros by Mareta Doyle, Mike Fitzpatrick 

ISBN 978 0948037 511    80 pages (hardback)    22x17cm   115 illus    DVD

This book features a series of technologically challenging projects by Dublin-born, Paris-based artists Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly. From hand-held hidden cameras to interactive video installation, their work has evolved in a very sophisticated, intellectual engage­ment with new technologies, and with a real commitment to how art interacts with our daily lives. The strength of their work is in its fluidity of approach and engagement with the viewer. This book demonstrates a clear and logical development from their early works right through to the present day.

EXTRACTS

"The work of Cleary + Connolly has developed in a varied and exciting manner over the last number of years ... Limerick City Gallery of Art first encountered their work in the winter of 2000 when the Paris-based curator Brigid Harte proposed an exhibition of Les Vraies Histoires – 40 minutes of delirious, if not linear, viewing. Even at this stage the classic characteristics of their work were beginning to emerge. The four-part work included hints of conspiracies, performances, intrigues and crimes, together with slices of life, creating a personal style that they later developed to a high art in Scènes du Boulevard and RVB.
          The themes of the various essays, which cover a decade of work from 1996 to 2006, span the inherent problems of art today. In Thi Bich Doan’s elegant text, where the reader is introduced to Touchy, a video piece from 1998, the apparent lightness of the work is expertly analysed to reveal the deeply hidden layers of meaning. The text continues to demonstrate exactly how these early explorations informed later developments in the artists’ work, and how these developments culminated in their interactive exhibition Here There Now Then at Limerick City Gallery of Art."

— from the introduction by Mike Fitzpatrick

"Far from fitting into a category, Connolly + Cleary’s work is constantly evolving in harmony with their lives, their environment, new technologies. The dynamic architecture of their approach allows them to mingle events from their daily life with the fiction of their art. Their work is often inspired by fundamental questions of perception, relationships between movement, sounds, forms and colours. A set of recent installations, grouped together under the title Here There Now Then, explore the perceptual blind spots that the frantic flow of our activities create...
         Connolly + Cleary have mastered the technique of mixing life with art, of mixing the real with the virtual, of making the virtual more real than the real, of making art more real than the real. They question themselves, and us, on the significance of the word ‘real’ and on what we can legitimately define as real. RVB, their video installation from 2004, takes on this question through a pertinent choice of images which go well beyond trivialities to explore some hidden corners of reality. As the recently deceased art historian Daniel Arasse demonstrated brilliantly in his book on detail, it’s often in these hidden corners that we cut through to the truth, revealing all the richness of the real, of life, often obscured by convention. Is it the role of the artist to free himself from visual convention and to invite us to do the same?"

— from the essay by Thi Bich Doan

"Denis – Performance was a strange world for a couple of architects to drift into. For us it was really just a way of making things happen. For example, one Saturday morning in 1996 we dressed as workmen and closed off the square in front of the Pompidou Centre with red tape. We hung up signs saying Chantier – Interdit au Public (Building Site – No Entry) with the “i” crossed out in Chantier so that it became ‘Public Singing Forbidden’. The Place Beaubourg is, of course, a popular performance space."

"Anne – We used performance and action art to look at social behaviour. In Touchy what interested us was playing on certain limits and looking at how people reacted. The museum context can transform a simple action into a shocking transgression. In Tosser we were amazed by how a simple act was given significance by association with ‘high art’ – in this case, tossing coins in Daniel Buren’s Palais Royal installation. At that point we were performing ourselves in order to control the event so that it would all go in the direction that we planned."

"Denis – For the early performances we didn’t even think of filming the event, and all we have left is a few photos. It was only when we set off to make the first part of Touchy, in New York, that we decided to use a video camera, and that introduced a whole new challenge, which quickly became central – how to film without being seen, and how to edit a film of the performances. In the end, the film became as important as the performance..."

 — from the interview with Karen Normoyle