PORTFOLIO — Architecture, Paintings, Sculpture and Time-Based Media in Ireland

ed. John O’Regan

art essays by Aidan Dunne, Marianne Hartigan, Liam Kelly, Margaret MacNamidhe, Susan Newell, Maeve Ruane, et al; architectural essays by Shane O’Toole, Raymund Ryan, Robin Walker, et al

ISBN 978 0946641 185 (pb)  //  978 0946641 178 (hb)    
148 pages  30x23.5cm   185 illus (57 col)  index

Portfolio is a review of contemporary visual art and architecture in Ireland from the early 1990s, carrying a wide range of interesting and authoritative colour-illustrated features, and specially commissioned cover and artists’ pages. It includes features on Irish architecture, painting, photography, scuplture and time-based media.

EXTRACTS

"In my work and generally in the work of our firm we have followed the lead given by Mies van der Rohe. In many ways we might be considered mere copyists; although I think we have extended his vocabulary, if not his grammar, of form. We have followed Mies in the conviction that his work is the right way and by that I mean the religious way just as for the Japanese the ‘organic’ and for Western man the ‘geometric’ way became the religious or right way. And here, straightaway, I touch on the main theme of this paper – aesthetic morality and its connections with religion. And the crux of this problem/connection lies in the debate which has proceeded in philosophy, overtly and by implication on the question of free-will, since the scientific revolution of the 17th century. We suffer today under the misconception that there is some essential conflict between science and religion – between science and metaphysics. I am loath to accept this view. To my mind there is nothing in the scientifically based philosophy of the scientific revolution of the 17th century which supports this view – nothing which is contradictory to the religious, metaphysical view of the world held by previous cultures or indeed by many of the proponents, notably Mies, who in our own period have propounded that ours is essentially a scientific and technological epoch, giving rise to the notion that this must exclude metaphysical even mystical qualities. Mies, after all, said ‘God is in the details.’"

— from the essay by Robin Walker

"In recent years, Irish art has been more ambitious, conceptually and contextually, than that of the previous generation. Landscape painting, for example, which used to be a sensual, poetic response to the land, having its roots in the work of Jack B Yeats, has invested here and there with aspects of international modernism, has been subverted. In Northern Ireland, in particular, the ‘New Landscape’ is landmined by ambiguity, inversions, subversions and tensions. This essay will examine the use of words and image with particular reference to developments in Irish art. The latter will be compared with the work of English artists who have exhibited in Ireland and who explore meanings and feelings through the juxtaposition of image and text. In this way, the literary bias of much Irish art will be probed. Irish art has been both praised and criticised for having a literary bias. And it is true that there is an easy relationship between poet and painter in Ireland. The name Rosc chosen for our international exhibition held in Dublin means ‘poetry of vision’ in Gaelic and testifies to the literary thinking of the original organisers. It is curious then that some Irish artists have never produced any manifestoes so beloved by modernists. Things are changing however. The shift from Modernism to Post-Modernism in Irish art has been marked by a more conscious search for a personally tailored idiom that is much more ambitious conceptually and contextually than the art-making of a previous generation: The soft lyrics, once sung, have given way to a new agony in the garden. There is now more open examination of Irish cultural tradition – the political troubles acting as a raw catalyst. And within this tendency, text has become important either as carefully considered titles or words superimposed on images or words and slogans worked up from the landscape or townscape itself."

— from the essay by Liam Kelly