REVIEWS.
First published in Model 'A', Model 'B' Designed by Mike Dwyer; edited by Mark Durkan, with essays by Joan Fowler, John Holten and Mark Durkan. (Parking Meter Press, Dublin) 2007.
3 Acts in the Contemporary:
Mark Durkan and the Unprotected Building Sites of Tomorrow
CURTAIN
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about five seconds.
Trying to remember the intricacies of many illuminating, engaging conversations is a difficult task, I’m sure however that I have reiterated to Mark Durkan many times the importance I have attributed to Samuel Beckett’s shortest stage play Breath. Mark, I can see myself exclaim, after this there isn’t much left one can do: with its emaciated, pared down starkness – coupled with the plenum of rubbish on stage – it shows up not only the accumulated future at the outskirts of our towns, but the silence and brevity of life, a tautological cliché of the grandest dimensions that rings true the way artists only thought their art could do in the highest days of assured Modernism. I do remember with clarity one conversation with Mark, it was when he was putting me up for a night in his South Circular Road abode, when sometime near the earlier hours of morning, catching up after several months, he told me about his current practice and direction, and thinking with delight that he too had obviously forgotten the conversations I had only dreamed up. For me, today, in the second quarter of 2007, there is nothing more pertinent, exciting, and essential than an artist working with the discarded remains of households, society, builders’ rubble, out dated political short-sightedness and everything else that Durkan’s inexhaustible acumen can zone in on along the way. From the detritus of modernity, postmodernity, Durkan opened a new stage full of his characteristic carnival aesthetic that was taking social art to the performance it seems it now must.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light
together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and
hold for about five seconds.One big departure I felt was his move away from les objets trouvés to something a lot more identifiable as realist: the ready made brings us to the realm of pure ideology – it is not a procurement of the art object that occurs on the rubbish site today, but rather the procurement of the idea of what the art object ought to be, or could be, or even paradoxically, what it was in the past. Further, taking the ready-made into the world or the throwaway (or vice versa the world of the thrown away into the art space and terming it a [ready-made] art object) shows the at base inutility of figurative art. Vis-à-vis the contemporary subject, adrift in the heady fight of liberal global culture, disenfranchised electorates, and total wars on abstract nouns (itself a manifestation of the inutitlity of the ideology of the ‘free world’) this inutility begins to find its true purpose – that is, confronting the spectator with the uselessness of their everyday, the lack of value to their true production (waste, detritus) as well as the lack of value – and disability – for exchange. But what then is the value of imbuing the thrown away with the term art object, what is the ambiguous value, if any, that an artist can bring to these useless discarded objects of the day before? This is not to say that what is left is mere pessimism or cynicism: as I’ve said in April I discerned the characteristic ludic element of Durkan’s work at play, digging up questions about Irish society and urbanisation with belief and rigour.
What the result is could be seen to be two divergent ideas of the contemporary and its position with the yet to come: the play of placing the discarded into the white space of the art space started as a gesture of defiance, of repositioning the line of art, what it has become is a questioning of the line of the everyday and this everyday’s defiance of the future status quo so under attack. From a sheer joy in the exchangeable object and its present utility – economic, symbolic, political (this being the joy of Dadaism, Futurism, et al right up to the present day consummation in the face of global meltdown) – the second idea of the contemporary, radically more contemporary for its being so future oriented, is that playfulness of appropriating the everyday discard and placing it as art object in order to highlight the absurdity of not only the reversal contemporary art can produce to the useless and valueless, but also the absurdity and terminal nature of modern/contemporary life. Overflowing landfill sites, polluted river basins and seas, drought, floods, peak oil and general ecological collapse: all badges of the contemporary as much as the War on Terrorism, Starbucks Coffee, a Teflon Taoisech or contaminated water supplies.
And it is this second idea of the contemporary and its position with the yet to come (realist, non-consumerist, self-questioning) that was always so admirably perceptive about Beckett’s Breath; the visual arts started doing likewise ever since Duchamp – the only difference being the price tag and the confusion (not that Beckett was free of this) of the mass spectating public.
So if we were to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard 1 and say that ‘Contemporary Art’ is perhaps afterall only contemporary with itself – a third way of viewing the contemporary: static, non-historical, myopic – we could also say that the artist and their society are in danger of failing to be contemporary with what they face toward, today and in the future. A lot of Durkan’s concerns at present are those remnants that society leave behind, today, and that will irrevocably still be there tomorrow. To be contemporary only with yourself today: what would this entail? I remember the first years of when the landscape around me started to change in Ireland, buildings went up, greenfields converted, the bungalow blitzkrieg of early Celtic Tiger headiness; I used to wonder what would happen to all the plastic left behind, the Lucozade bottles thrown out the car window, the plastic sheeting, the builders’ flotsam and jetsam so blazenly left to blow along in the wind and get turned into the recently cloven earth (if it wasn’t illegally burned). And that was just it I decided: it would become part of the earth, the plastic bottle would lie beneath the fresh foundations, pockets of air encapsulated, someday perhaps to give out, destabilising the land, the house, the motorway. Or they would be recovered like archaeologists recover ancient artefacts today, meaningful middens everywhere telling us about one more lost civilisation.To be contemporary with only the present today in Ireland (alike in most of the Western World) is to believe the dogma of exponential growth and construction, of the builders feeding the market and the buyers; it is to believe the builders, the engineers, the architects, painters, furniture shop owners and all the other endless services that benefit from the strong property market will continue to be well paid and that this sector will in then use their money to buy pints at the weekend, to buy services; it is to believe in money circling and circling in endless joyful daytime; it is to believe in the inevitability of the country becoming one big commuter town, of green becoming the quaint hue of yesterday, the island an conurbation where everyone has their fortress and the shit and debris and misery are all buried under ground, holding the foundations up, in place, steady, for one more day maybe, but certainly at least for today.
But it is not like that, nor can it be: who would wish it to be? Durkan works with this system of blind belief: much of contemporary Ireland is contemporary only with itself, like a child that thinks the known world lies in its grasp. Ireland, it most me remembered, gave the world George Berkeley: perhaps it is in need of a more realist, less idealist national philosophy. But static materialism is safe, it is comforting; realist, ‘kinetic’ art is the opposite, it moves into the future, grasping at precisely that which can’t be seen, digging up what can’t be grasped, but which is necessary to believe exists
Such is the power and audacity of placing rubbish on stage and calling it theatre, of placing the left behind collective waste of a system that is so myopic it is blind to the contemporaneous and even ineluctable nature of the day after tomorrow into the domain of active creation such as Durkan has been attempting with his residency in a Meath landfill sight, his public performances and photographic work recording one way of looking into tomorrow, namely the Irish building site.
The art object is due an overhaul in terms of calling itself a commodity, a mere readymade, a thing at once removed and yet discarded by the great (indifferent) public. No, things work today in relation to one another with a much greater and important proximity than such modalities; to be contemporary is to be future orientated like never before, the time of discarding side produce to the side, or utilising blindly the discarded as a means of being active and creative in current, real time, is over, finished, redundant and most of all dangerously ignorant of reality. The great public audience walk into contemporary art galleries and disclaim the non-art status of the great majority of ‘Contemporary Art’ –they’ll do likewise soon, as they have started to do, confronted with short-term political giveaways and fraudulence.3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum
together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as
before. Silence and hold about five seconds.The conversation and résumé I enjoyed throughout that April night alerted me to Durkan’s latest line of work, installations at the Meath landfill site and his continuing ability to render building sites as fascinating loci of the contemporary, money driven and executively planned (themselves worked out, planned and granted permission without the consultation of the disenfranchised public). Along with his wider engagement with the Irish political infrastructure his work becomes a very exciting, ludic example of how it is possible to combine the two problems stressed above in the second act of this article: presenting the greater public, who think little of ‘Contemporary Art’, with realist, future oriented works of art that represent contemporary Ireland and which highlight the inherent disenfranchising mechanisms that organises and manages so much of today’s planning and construction. The carnivelesque in Ireland finds a good landscape in its unguarded building sites, moving through that moment before they become the rubbish dump of tomorrow, one more spoilt, pockmarked edge of town.
CURTAIN
(note: in bold italics is the complete version of Samuel Beckett’s Breath)
1 Finie l’aventure de l’art moderne. L’art contemporain n’est contemporain que de lui-même. Il ne connaît plus de transcendance vers le passé ou le futur, sa seule réalité est celle de son opération en temps réel, et de sa confusion avec cette réalité. Le Pacte de lucidité (Galilée, 2004) pages 89 à 96.