Editors’ Introduction

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION* In view of our persistent call for interdisciplinarity in these pages, our readers may well ask why we are dedicating this issue to the visual arts—a single field in Irish Studies. Certainly the timing for the issue is appropriate; no fewer than four exhibitions of Irish art will have traveled through North America in 1999,1 a phenomenon that marks a growing interest in the visual tradition of a nation more often celebrated for its literature than for its art. In providing a selection of essays about contemporary painters, sculptors, and installation artists, many of them represented in Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political—the last of the major exhibitions crossing the Atlantic in 1999—we seek to provide a context for readers interested in innovative developments in Irish visual culture. No less important, however , is the opportunity to illustrate the benefits of interdisciplinarity in recovering often-neglected areas of critical inquiry and scholarship for Irish Studies. Our focus on visual art therefore gives substance to our vision for ÉIRE-IRELAND. We believe that this issue offers nonspecialists—both scholars and general readers alike—various approaches to interpreting Irish art. But as Seamus Heaney puts it in the first essay of the journal, the problem of “getting the picture” is a complex matter, intertwined not only with politics and history, but also with the ways we see what is before us and then reEDITORS ’ INTRODUCTION 5 * This special issue was initiated and supervised by the literature and arts editor, Vera Kreilkamp. 1 “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland : Berkeley Art Museum (10 February to 1 May 1999); Grey Art Gallery, New York University (25 May to 24 July 1999); University of Michigan Museum of Art (25 September 1999 to 2 January 2000). A Measured Quietude: Contemporary Irish Drawings, Matrix Gallery, Berkeley (16 January to 25 April 1999); the Drawing Center/Drawing Room, New York (22 June to 30 July 1999). 0044: Contemporary Irish Art in Britain: P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (20 June to 1 September 1999); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (17 September to 8 November 1999). Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College (3 October to 12 December 1999); Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s, Newfoundland (30 January to 9 April 2000). imagine what we have seen. Heaney’s warning against a too insistent ideological decoding of a painting encourages us to respond to what he at one point terms the “dream images” that art embodies. In other words, he urges us to trust the power of the picture, to register its effect on us as we respond to its emanations, rather than simply to impose a political and social reading on it. A more finely tuned response will recognize that what we know (politically and ideologically) can become incorporated into what we see in a picture. In a sense each writer for this issue, like those of us who visit galleries or museums or use visual material in our research and teaching, is striving to get the picture right, to balance knowledge and affect—what we know and what we feel—as we stand before a successful work of art. Consider many of the contributors here as standing for the general public, ourselves, in striving to get the picture. Artists and those who make and report on arts policy remind us that the public is no passive consumer of the visual object, but rather an expected participant in a dialogic cultural process. Particularly with contemporary art, as Declan McGonagle and Anne Kelly point out, the challenge is to bridge the gap between viewer and object—sometimes caused by the humility or heuristic uncertainty that viewers bring to the process. Too often the public avoids engagement for fear of exposing ignorance—of supposedly getting the picture “wrong.” But in the best of circumstances—again in Heaney’s words—art “gets at life, blinks us alive to it, makes us aware suddenly of how aware we have been all the time.” Or as artist Alice Maher notes in...