From the Poetic to the Political

FROM THE POETIC TO THE POLITICAL DECLAN MCGONAGLE Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political is an exhibition made up of works from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The museum opened in 1991 as the first national institution concerned with the collection and programming of modern and contemporary art. The realization in the late 1990s of this long-standing idea of a Museum of Modern Art in Ireland is a result of the same social, political, and cultural forces at work today—in this island and in this society—that have also conditioned the ideas and practice of the artists in the exhibition. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is housed in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, one of the most important, and therefore problematic, buildings and contexts in the country. The Royal Hospital was designed and built in the late-seventeenth century to provide “hospitality,” not just medical care, for the pensioner soldiers of the British Army. From the lateseventeenth century onward, the building also provided living accommodations for the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in Ireland, who was also master of the hospital. It is therefore a highly charged cultural and political site. The late-seventeenth century was a period of political turmoil in Ireland , a period akin to the turmoil of recent decades, during which the political/cultural terrain that Ireland inhabits today was mapped. The Royal Hospital grounds also contained pre-Christian and pagan sites as well as the remains of a twelfth-century monastery founded by the Knights Hospitallers as a hospice. In its “modern” phase, the Royal Hospital has witnessed the problematic relationships between Ireland and England, between Protestant and Catholic, between Ireland and Europe. These relationships have persisted and have only recently been reconfigured as Ireland —in a new European context—renegotiates its historical identity and sense of itself as victim. The museum and the artists in this exhibition are contemporary witnesses and beneficiaries, but also contributors, to this process of renegotiation of identity and of change that is now going on in Irish society and culture. FROM THE POETIC TO THE POLITICAL 189 One of the founding principles of the museum, for example, is to purchase for the collection only current work by living artists, without reference to gender, subject, media, race, or nationality. The museum’s intention is to live and operate in a continuous present tense. Therefore, the museum now has very strong holdings by a group of Irish artists who, in both their ideas and practice, reflect a panoramic sense of Irishness that includes interaction with the world. This process of change has accelerated and has been particularly marked over the last decade or so and is reflected in those artists, who, in some cases, have found their voice in the nineties and in others who have matured in the period of the eighties into the nineties. They do not form any sort of artists’ grouping, nor do they share a manifesto in relation to art, Ireland, or their own identity; but they do seem to me to draw on the same reservoir of meaning that informs being Irish and being artists in the world at the end of the twentieth century. The linkage between Ireland and the world is critical in reading the work in the exhibition Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political. For previous generations of artists in Ireland such a linkage would have been a contradiction in terms and, with little structural support, an impossibility in reality. This impossibility led many artists to take James Joyce’s advice and become silent or cunning—or go into exile. The core of the new exhibition is the body of work from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection—an assembly of statements already made and collected since the early nineties—to which have been added more recent works from the artists’ studios. These works are diverse in nature and meaning; some were made to describe experience, others as a result of experience , but they do represent points of interaction between the visual arts in Ireland in this particular period and visual arts activity elsewhere in the...