Klaus Ottmann: A Sense of PLace

A SENSE OF PLACE

KLAUS OTTMANN

Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

In his Preschool for Aesthetics (1804), the German Romantic writer Jean Paul (e.g., Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) defined true poetic spirit as such:

Every novel must accommodate a universal spirit, which, without hampering the free flow of movement, like God vis-à-vis free mankind, will stealthily draw the historical whole together and toward a single goal, just as according to Boyle every true structure must respond in a particular tone; a merely historical novel is only a story.¹

Ireland (and Irish art) seems deeply rooted in a collective historical experience and has long been defined by difference, geographically as well culturally: the colonialists versus the colonists; the North versus the Republic; Irish (Gaelic) versus English; Catholicism vs. Protestantism. What unifies these differences with respect to a universal Irish spirit is a strong sense of Place.

For art to be experienced or observed, it has to be emplaced—put in place, however temporarily. A national exhibition with an international character such as ev+a, which is entrenched in one place, one history, and one culture, yet embraces the right to diversity within its borders, must inevitably focus on the dialectic of emplacement and displacement. The poet Seamus Heaney speaks of the “two often contradictory demands” under which Irish poets labour: “To be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self.” According to Heaney, the two ways in which a place is known—one is the lived and illiterate; the other, learned and literate—co-exist “in a conscious and unconscious tension” in the artistic sensibility.

Today Ireland is no longer an insular, postcolonial community with an ingrained distrust of strangers, but a modern global society that is as much defined by its history as it is by its new affinity with the European Union and openness to the world at large.

In the works of Irish painters Tony Gunning and Eithna Joyce a certain urgency is evident that is prompted by the newfound affluence of the Irish economy and its impact on the land. While Gunning’s colourful paintings depict mostly scenes of urbanization and alienation, Joyce’s delicate canvases celebrate the poetry of nature and the simple life. Neither artist, however, contents himself or herself with a Romantic mythologizing of peasant life in the tradition of “colonial” Irish landscape painting. Rather, both artists show us a damaged idyll. Joyce uses, in her own words, “a mixture of realistic and abstract images to create a tension within the picture, mirroring the current tensions we find between man and nature.” In Ardour (fig. 1), she divides a rural landscape into two canvases framed side by side. On the left, a telegraph pole rise above the ink-drawn horizon line, which continues over both canvases. The lines from the telegraph pole, drawn in ink, extend from the “spoiled” half of the landscape into the bucolic, unspoiled half. Both sides are further distinguished by different overlaid abstract patterns, stripes in the left and dots on the right. The use of abstract patterns, the drawn ink lines, and the fissure created by the adjacent two canvases lend a conceptual, ironic dimension to her painting.

Fig. 1 Eithna Joyce, Ardour, 2006
Oil and ink on canvas
Image courtesy of the artist

Similarly, Tony Gunning’s realist observations on the impact of economic prosperity on the Irish landscape reflect a growing concern with the urbanization and materialization of modern life. His style is reminiscent of the “primitive” yet decidedly modernist canvases of the French postimpressionist painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) who, like Gunning, was entirely self-taught and thus had created for himself a unique style of his own. Like Rousseau’s, the vivid colors in Gunning’s paintings are flat and uniformly distributed, which keeps them isolated from each other. And incidentally, just as Rousseau took up painting seriously only in his late forties after retiring from his job at the toll collector’s office in Paris (thus his sobriquet Le Douanier, “the customs officer”), Gunning entered artistic life relatively late, after retiring in 2000 from the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, the Irish Government agency responsible for customs and taxation. But unlike Rousseau’s imaginative and, later, surreal landscapes, Gunning’s arresting land- and urbanscapes have a social-realist undertone that belies their “naïve” painting style. One of his most remarkable paintings, Lay-Bye (2006) (fig. 2), depicts a discarded couch and a broken chair that is missing one leg and is standing on a small rug in front of the couch. Abandoned on an idyllic Irish lay-bye near a green and rocky coastline, it is a reminder of the fragility of a society that was once deeply emplaced and isolated and is now a formidable force in a global economics. Here the worn, displaced couch becomes a symbol for the increasing displacement of the Irish soul.

Fig. 2 Tony Gunning, Lay-Bye, 2006
Acrylic on linen
Image courtesy of the artist

In his most recent series of paintings, Gunning conjures up this displacement of the Irish soul felicitously with depictions of generic shopping malls and urban situations (fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Tony Gunning, Shopping Mall, 2007
Acrylic on linen
Image courtesy of the artist

WHO’S AFRAID OF LOCAL ART?

When I was asked to curate the 2007 edition of Ireland’s only annual international exhibition of contemporary art in Limerick, the theme of Place was an obvious choice. Long poverty-stricken, politically oppressed, and largely isolated from the world, Ireland has now grown into the most affluent country in the European Union. Its three airports have become major hubs for European and international airlines, and the rise of the euro and fall of the American dollar have transformed Ireland into a global society, whose members are as much at home in the shops in New York’s Time Warner Center as they are on Gratton Street in Dublin. Yet Ireland still manifests a strong sense of place; for instance, most of its food is locally produced and proudly identified as such on restaurant menus throughout Ireland: lamb from Roscommon; fresh oysters from the shore of County Clare; salmon from the River Shannon; potatoes from Tipperary. Like other international annuals or biennials of contemporary art, such as the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial in New York, or the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Limerick’s ev+ a (exhibition of visual+ art), now in its 32nd year, is curated each year by a different, single, invited curator of international standing and presents the work of Irish and international contemporary artists. Unlike them, however, ev+ a (the plus sign is meant to call attention to the fact that art engages and integrates all the senses, not mainly or only the visual sense), alternates between two distinct formats: the traditional “invited” format, in which each curator selects the artists at his or her discretion based on his or her curatorial vision and personal preferences, and, every alternate year, the “open” format, in which the artists are chosen by the curator from proposals submitted by artists. The “open” format is usually shunned in the curatorial world, since it is thought to exclude what has been sanctioned by the art market and museum worlds as “good art” and opens the exhibition to the much-dreaded “local artist.”

“Local art” is a dirty word in the art world, especially in the U.S., where the art market is concentrated in New York and Los Angeles, and up-and-coming artists are more or less forced to move to one of these two cities to be recognized as serious artists. In many European countries, such as Germany or Italy, this negative notion of local artists does not exist, since there are no distinct art centers or, as in the case of Paris, such centers no longer have the same centralized importance as they did in the past.

With increasing globalization, the art market, which at the beginning of the 20th century was centered in only two cities, Paris and New York, now encompasses Beijing and Shanghai, London, Dubai, Berlin, Mexico City, and Mumbai. While globalization can benefit local situations (in this case, artists working in geographical regions previously ignored by curators, critics, and galleries), it can also dilute local traditions. And since these newly discovered regions often do not yet have a critical structure in place (art magazines, contemporary art museums), these global markets are mostly driven by art fairs, auction houses, and galleries from New York or London. A case in point is the proliferation of contemporary Chinese art that is currently flooding the art world—a phenomenon that has almost no support from critics or curators but has become one of the major exports of the Chinese economy (almost on par with the sale of arms to the Sudanese regime that is committing genocide in Darfur). Moreover, most of the works by these new Chinese artists, which are too numerous to keep track of, even for longtime art professionals like myself, seem to have little to do with Chinese traditions; instead, many just seem to be copying 1960s American pop art. Last year, at SITE Santa Fe, an alternative exhibition space that hosts the only international biennial of contemporary art in the United States, I was joined (as the curator of the 2006 SITE Santa Fe biennial) by other previous curators on a panel whose subject was “global art.” I decided to play devil’s advocate and stated that “globalism is the death of art” and that art needs “place.” One of my esteemed colleagues, the critic and curator Dave Hickey, immediately assumed that I was talking about “local artists” and dismissed my pronouncement with the assertion that “good” art does not need a place. He confused the notion of “global” with “universal.” Of course, “good” art has to have a universal appeal that transcends its specific, localized origins. However, art cannot have universal appeal without being local. In fact, the more local it is, that is, the more it is “in its place,” the more “global” art becomes in a transcendent sense). Or, in the language of archetypal psychology, art needs to be ensouled. Much of the Chinese contemporary art that is entering the global art market appears to be “emptied of soul”—it is mere commodity, and having no roots in local traditions, it is out of place without ever being in place.

The new buzzword in economics is “glocalism,"” which is defined by CERFE, an Italian economics and social science research organization, “as a social process that is especially evident in cities where it consists of the concurrent drives toward globalization and localization … [as a] diffused social action … that can be interpreted as a kind of ideal and cultural movement oriented towards linking the benefits of globalization to local situations, and toward governing globalization also through local situations.”² No one speaks yet of “glocal art”; perhaps it sounds too uncomfortably close to “local art” to be embraced by art professionals.

For me, the experience of working, in Limerick, with an exhibition model that is open to local art on an international scale has been highly rewarding. I ended up selecting 32 artists, of which 18 were of Irish descent. The remaining 14 artists were from the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Canada, and the United States (all chosen from submitted proposals). For three months, from March 29 through June 24, 2007, the place (the city of Limerick and the traditional and nontraditional venues chosen by me and the artists) became the limit and the condition of all the art and related events, where the artistic sensibilities of those at home and those displaced co-existed in a conscious and unconscious tension.

NOTES

This essay has been adapted from the catalogue essay for the 2007 ev+ a exhibition of visual art in Limerick, Ireland.

1. Jean Paul: A Reader, edited by Timothy J. Casey; translated by Erika Casey (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 262.

2. James L. Koch and Uri Savir, “Glocalism and Our Networked World,” online at https://www.millersocent.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/GlocalismandOurNetworkedWorld-KochandSavir2003.pdf