Ciarán Lennon’s Hidden Scripts

CIARÁN LENNON’S HIDDEN SCRIPTS KATHERINE HARDING NAHUM What are we to make of the minimalist art of Ciarán Lennon when it contains no more than overlapping brushstrokes of paint? Minimalism, which uses minimal means for its effects, is an international development held in high regard in the history of modernism. Respected artists like Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin work in this stylistic language. Perhaps that’s it: Lennon is an Irish artist and we expect something else, something more of his work that is identifiably Irish. Whatever could be Irish about these inscrutable foldings of paint? Our response to Lennon’s art, after we suppress the secret panic of incomprehension, after feeling rebuffed by it, is to move on in silence, to dismiss it. It does not matter; it has no meaning. But minimalism is said to use minimal means to provide maximal aesthetic stimulation, to be an art whereby the spectator creates meaning along with the artist (Colpitt 134). If we are to get to the bottom of Lennon’s art—What is the nature of its meaning? What relation does it have to Ireland?—we must do what is recommended to all students of art: look at it closely. Lennon’s 1972 Folded/Unfolded (Burnt Sienna) (figure 1) measures 9 feet by 75 feet and shows a swath of canvas, one end attached to the wall and painted with 4-foot-wide expressionist brushstrokes, the other end draped in folds onto a stretcher on the floor. The title makes sense. Such largescale works vitalize the space of a room; here, we see an installation that enacts the process of painting, and it does not look very minimalist. Rather, Lennon’s expressive brushstrokes—wide swaths of paint directly registering the artist’s gesture and feeling—look like abstract expressionism. Apparently these were the years of Lennon’s “flirtations with installation work and process art” (Clancy 12), a time that he spent exploring other styles and developments. Concurrently Lennon was also making small drawings on paper that depicted grids overlaid with faint gestural marks. He was taking sheets of paper and folding the edges inward, hiding their imaged interiors and makCIAR ÁN LENNON’S HIDDEN SCRIPTS 234 CIARÁN LENNON’S HIDDEN SCRIPTS 235 ing tight geometrical shapes. These images embody a kind of withdrawal from the spectator, an experience like the one that we initially encountered , of being rebuffed. Furthermore, the folded papers are hard to define as to medium. Painted grids cover their hidden enfolded surfaces, but are they painting or sculpture? In M-Day (1987) (figure 2) a thick, warm brown pigment is spread over the canvas with horizontal and vertical hatchings cut into it. Some are faint lines, some cut so deep they create troughs along which residues of paint have built up into small sculptural forms. The result is something between painting and bas-relief sculpture; this “painting” projects a few inches from the wall to create shadow. Lennon seems to play with definitions of painting and sculpture, testing the limits of each medium. The next step in Lennon’s coherent stylistic development occurred in 1988, with Ranelagh (figure 3), a two-foot-long vertical sculpture/painting, almost a three-sided stone post covered with messy, sticky gray paint. The artist incised the gooey surface with interrupted diagonal lines, both deep and shallow, the deeper ones revealing underneath the same red-brown color of M-Day—as if he wanted to expose something hidden or to suggest the passage of time. Despite Lennon’s assertions that his painted surfaces represent non-referential abstractions, Ranelagh evokes Ireland’s anfigure 1 Ciarán Lennon, Folded/Unfolded (Burnt Sienna) (1972), 9 x 75 ft. Acrylic on cotton duck. (Courtesy of Ciarán Lennon) CIARÁN LENNON’S HIDDEN SCRIPTS 236 cient ogham stones, stone pillars incised with inscrutable alphabets—the earliest form of writing known in Ireland. The ogham script comprises sometimes diagonal linear symbols cut on either side of, or across, a stem line. Furthermore, many of these pillars are carved with later, often Christian, symbols that interrupt and overlie the ogham alphabet, requiring discernment in dating and identifying the...