Six Artists in Search of a Landscape

SIX ARTISTS IN SEARCH OF A LANDSCAPE CAOIMHÍN MAC GIOLLA LÉITH “Landscape has always been a dominant theme in Irish art” observes Liam Kelly in Thinking Long, his account of contemporary art in the North of Ireland from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.1 Unlike their predecessors, the generation of artists he considers “are not content to celebrate landscape ” but rather “regard it not as a given but a constructed reality, and, as such, problematic. Their approach is no longer a topographical journey but a subterranean quest.”2 In Kelly’s account, this move from celebration to interrogation appears inextricably linked with a general shift in focus from the rural to the urban landscape, as evidenced by the overwhelming predominance of urban imagery in Language, Mapping and Power, an exhibition he curated in 1996 as part of L’Imaginaire Irlandais, the extensive festival of contemporary Irish art and culture in France.3 Three years later in 1999, as no fewer than four traveling survey shows of Irish art crisscross the United States,4 North America has replaced SIX ARTISTS IN SEARCH OF A LANDSCAPE 266 1 Liam Kelly, Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1996), 19. 2 Ibid. 3 Langage, Cartographie et Pouvoir/Language, Mapping and Power (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1996). One might argue that to characterize pre-1970s approaches to the landscape in Irish art as uniformly celebratory is misleading, but such an argument lies beyond the scope of this paper. 4 “When Time Began to Rant and Rage”: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland was at Berkeley Art Museum (10 February to 1 May 1999); at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (25 May to 24 July 1999); and then the University of Michigan Museum of Art (25 September 1999 to 2 January 2000). An independently curated companion show of contemporary Irish drawings, A Measured Quietude, Contemporary Drawings, accompanied this exhibition from Berkeley’s Matrix Gallery (16 January to 25 April 1999) to the Drawing Center, New York (22 June to 30 July 1999); 0044:Contemporary Irish Art in Britain, an exhibition of work by contemporary Irish artists living in London was at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (20 June to 1 September 1999) France as the locus for another multifaceted presentation of contemporary Irish visual culture. Although the topic of landscape is not explicitly a focus of these exhibitions, it is a sufficiently central preoccupation of many of the works chosen by the various curators for inclusion in these shows to warrant exploration. Rather than attempt the Sisyphean task of providing a comprehensive overview of contemporary Irish approaches to the landscape , I will discuss, in varying detail, the work of just six artists: Elizabeth Magill, Siobhán Hapaska, Kathy Prendergast, Caroline McCarthy, Alanna O’Kelly, and Willie Doherty. Though necessarily limited in scope, this selection provides ample evidence of the diversity of current practice in Irish visual arts. I include artists who work in the media of drawing (Prendergast ); painting (Magill); sculpture (Hapaska); photography (Doherty); performance (O’Kelly); and video and installation (McCarthy, Doherty, and O’Kelly). Artists from both sides of the border are represented. Three live and work in Ireland, and the other three artists reside in Britain. Most of the art considered postdates the early 1990s, the cut-off point of Kelly’s Northern survey, and, more crucially, addresses the problematic but continuing tradition of depicting the rural, rather than the urban, landscape. Yet in their consideration of landscape, these works more often undermine than affirm the canonical images of rural Ireland, whose currency—despite various attempts at devaluation in recent years—remains largely undiminished in the Irish-American diaspora. In a recent collection of essays entitled Landscape and Power, editor W.J.T. Mitchell asserts that there is no doubt that the classical and romantic genres of landscape painting evolved during the great age of European imperialism now seem exhausted , at least for the purposes of serious painting. Traditional eighteenthand nineteenth-century landscape conventions are now part of the repertory of kitsch. . . .5 SIX ARTISTS IN SEARCH OF A LANDSCAPE 267 before traveling to the Albright...