the quick and the dead
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Irish Arts Review
The Quick and the DeadAuthor(s): Michael DempseySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 26, No. 2 (SUMMER 2009), pp. 68-69Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25654680 .
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SUMMER 2009
EXHIBITION
The Quick and the Dead Michael Dempsey argues for a reappraisal of the work of Patrick Graham, Brian Maguire, Patrick Hall and
Timothy Hawkesworth, as the four are reunited at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
The fallout of the Irish economic
crisis has brought back to us mem
ories of emigration and the long
dole queues of the 1980s. The authority of
the Catholic church had only just begun to
weaken and Northern Ireland remained in
turmoil, a site of unrelenting violence that
did not agree a cease-fire for another
decade. It was from this anxious, restless
situation a number of incensed artists ?
Patrick Graham, Brian Maguire, Patrick
Hall and Tim Hawkesworth who were till
then somewhat marginalised ?
emerged
and consolidated their position as expo
nents in the postcolonial discourse of
modern Ireland.
Their mutual distrust of the hegemony of
a highly academic approach to art making,
perhaps inevitably, positioned them as pro
ponents of the Irish vernacular of neo
expressionism - an international movement
that emerged concurrendy at the beginning
of the 1980s from Italy, Germany and
America. Though international, the language
of neo-expressionism was uniquely appro
priate in an Irish context and enabled these
four artists to produce aggressive, visceral
and hard-hitting works that conveyed frus
tration and psychological tension. A review
of their early paintings can be described as
visual manifestations of Louis Althusser's
seminal essay, 'Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses' where he makes an argu
ment for the construction of the subject
(here meaning the individual in a civic
state) in that we acquire our identities by
seeing ourselves mirrored in ideologies.1
In 1986 the artists were featured in 'Four
Irish Expressionist Painters', a collaborative
exhibition between Northeastern University
and Boston College. This was a considerable
achievement at the time - when it was hard
to imagine that beyond emigration, Irish
artists would ever take part in international
exhibitions. Showcasing their ambitious
ideological stance, the exhibition under
scored their preoccupations
with identity, some of which
remain contentious. Coming
of age in a time of Ireland's
modernisation, Patrick
Graham mined the unre
solved relationship between
heritage and the construc
tion of a national cultural
identity (Figs 1&2). His
philosophical paintings are
filled with loss of innocence
and pathologies of power
but also speak of the
unknown mystery of death
and transcendence. Gestures
and brushstrokes make evi
dent the time and labour of
their making through the
wake of their trace. One can outline
Graham s position through the theories of
Jacques Lacan by the challenge he sets us
where the self is constituted not only for the
Other but by the Other2 in an endless play of
gaze and counter-gaze. Similar ideas are
explored by Martin Buber in terms of and
Thou* relationships, which Graham himself
has repeatedly drawn upon in his work.3
Like the German expressionist of the
1930s, Brian Maguire's deeply felt social
and political commitments have consis
tently guided his work in pointing to indi
viduals whose needs and desires are
overlooked by the preoccupations of suc
cessive governments (Figs 5&6). Giving
voice to injustices, both at home and
abroad, he has consistently brought his
caustic gaze and conscious fury to bear on
the indignities inflicted on the oppressed individual. A recent exhibition at Dublin's
Kerlin Gallery titled 'Notes from the war
on the poor' confirms art critic Donald
Kuspit's description of Maguire's 'gestural
U
ism as one of the most non-com
pliant in the history of
expressionism'.
In The Magic Mountain, Thomas
Mann wrote: 'Time, we say is Lethe;
but change of air is a similar
draught, and if it works less thor
68 IRISH ARTS REVIEW I SUMMER 2009
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oughly, does so more quickly'.4This may
have been in the mind of Patrick Hall as he
left his cosy studio in Dublin for the solitude
of rural life in Co Sligo. He has travelled far
from the early bonds of domestic affection
and restriction and now paints canvases and
water colours of flowers, mountains, sea and
clouds that are peopled with his own his
tory, dreams and aspirations (Figs 3&4).
Through works of individual and collective
memory, Hall creates time in space, uncover
ing forces that push in paradoxical direc
tions. 'The painting we look at reflects back
to us that which our eyes will never have
THE LANGUAGE OF NEO-EXPRESSIONISM WAS UNIQUELY APPROPRIATE IN AN IRISH CONTEXT AND ENABLED THESE FOUR ARTISTS TO PRODUCE AGGRESSIVE, VISCERAL AND HARD-HITTING WORKS
their fill'.5 So remarks Walter Benjamin in
Lacanian spirit, and Hall's search for this
expression of the sense of'otherness' has left
him perennially on the edge of the art world
as well as society The lonely figures that are
depicted in isolated landscapes can be seen
as representing, not a forbidding desolation,
but rather a very human one.
After a formative period spent in the
Dublin art scene of the 1970s, Timothy
Hawkesworth emigrated to the USA. As
though a deadline is imminent, there is
pace and urgency to his work (Figs 7&8). His paintings manifest the effort to make
concrete his lived experience and memo
ries of times past. He occupies a paradoxi
cal position in that he merges the
authority of the gesture as an emotionally
authentic and spontaneous vision with his
engagement with the 'Longue Duree'6 in
European classicism. A cultural effort of
this stature is as Seamus Deane charac
terises it, primarily concerned with the
role art can play in 'the ideological convic
tion that a community exists which must
be recovered and restored'.7
A surge of economic and cultural confi
dence grew in the years that followed the
1980s. This was reflected in the adoption
of new media by a younger generation of
artists. Painting was sidelined again for
conceptual instal
lations and partici
patory art projects.
In the wake of
globalisation 'the
peripheral' became
more relevant and
what were once perceived as personal and
professional disadvantages of coming from
a small place on the edge of Europe - or a
minority group within that place ? have
perhaps ceased to be the debilitating fac
tors they once were. Yet, now that we find
ourselves again in a time of economic,
social and political flux, perhaps a reap
praisal not only of the work of these artists
but also the context from which it
emerged, is a timely discourse - a forum
to reconnect with the severed reference
points of our rich and subversive history 'The Quick and the Dead', Dublin City Gallery The
Hugh Lane, until 27 September
Further reading
Graham, Patrick (Interview) Hutchinson J. Irish Arts
f?ewewVoUno4(1987) 16
Maguire, Brian (Interview) McAvera B. Irish Arts Review Vol 20 no (2003) 6
Graham, Patrick (Interview) McAvera B. Irish Arts ReviewVoi 22 no 1 (2005) 70
Hawkesworth, Tim Murphy P. T. Irish Arts ReviewVoi 23 no 3 (2006) 60
Hall, Patrick (Completing the Picture) McAvera B. Irish Arts Review Vol 2k no 3 (2007) 68
MICHAEL DEMPSEY is Head of Exhibitions at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
t4
i$
1 PATRICK GRAHAM Photography Eugene Langan 2009
2 PATRICK GRAHAM IRE/LAND III 1982 oil on canvas 183x122cm
3 PATRICK HALL IN HIS STUDIO Photography Eugene Langan
U, PATRICK HALL SEASTONE 2009 oil on canvas 153x158x3cm The artist, Sligo
5 BRIAN MAGUIRE Photography Eugene Langan 2009
6 BRIAN MAGUIRE DAYRLE 2008 123xU0cm Private collection, USA
7 TIMOTHY HAWKESWORTH IN HIS STUDIO Photography Eugene Langan 2009
8 TIMOTHY HAWKESWORTH SWEET SONG 1992 oil on canvas 183x505.5cmx 5cm (3 panels) The artist, Philadelphia
References
1 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy and other
essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 2 Other: Jacques Lacan argued that ego-formation
occurs through mirror-stage misrecognition, and his theories were applied to politics by Althusser. As the later Lacan said: 'The I is always in the field of the Other.'
3 Martin Buber, and Thou', trans. Walter
Kaufmann, Simon & Schuster; 1st Touchstone Ed edition (1 Feb 1971) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924), trans H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. k. In Classical mythology, Lethe is the river of forgetting.
5 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London,1973), pp.
U6-7. Terry Eagelton, Trouble with Strangers, A
Study in Ethics, (Wiley- lackwell, 2009). 6 The longue duree is a term used by the French
Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history, which gave priority to long-term historical structures over events.
7 Seamus Deane 'Heroic Styles: The Tradition of
Idea', in Ireland's Field Day (London: Hutchinson with the Field Day Theatre Company, 1985), p.45.
U
J; XL.
SUMMER 2009 I IRISH ARTS REVIEW 69
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