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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