Art from the edge - part 1 - Report From Ireland

Art in America, Dec, 1995 by Judith Higgins

Irish artists on both sides of the border are showing signs of new vigor and confidence. The first of two articles focuses on recent developments in the Republic--among them the emergence of a number of women artists.

In more ways than one, Irish art of the 1990s is art from the edge. It's from the edge because Ireland is on the geographical periphery of Europe. It's also from the edge because to be in Ireland is to be on a frontline, a "cutting edge." Ireland is a test case in which issues confronting other societies are being worked through. Few instances are more profound, and more watched around the world, than the one-year-old ceasefire in Northern Ireland, ending a quarter century of civil war. And therefore "edge" in the case of contemporary Ireland could also have a third sense: advantage.

In both the North and the Republic, the two generations of Irish artists who have come of age since the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in 1969 are participants in a renaissance that Irish art has enjoyed over the last decade. Contemporary Irish artists are addressing life in their country on a more profound, personal and realistic level than Irish artists have had the freedom and self-confidence to do in the past. Whatever side of the border they are from, whether their art is issue-based or expressionist and whatever the medium, contemporary Irish artists are using their work to examine their sometimes problematic but always vital relationship to their changing country.

Alice Maher's installation in an exhibition on national identity, held in Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol in 1991, was a giant ball of brambles in which the still-living thorns (connoting suffering) grew inward rather than outward toward the light. For Maher, this piece, titled Cell, was a metaphor for what it means to be Irish--to live in a small society of great intensity, substance and complexity. Yet even since 1991, Maher's perception of Ireland has changed. "The most hopeful thing for us today," she recently stated, "is that at last [Irish artists] are beginning to shift outwards . . . . The instinct to mistrust strangers and protect oneself is often typical of an island people (deeply imbedded in colonial history, of course). But at last things are creaking, pushing, yearning towards inclusion and expansion--politically, socially, culturally. The fear of being subsumed or of our culture being diluted is going. In fact, moving outwards serves to underline the strengths of our culture." In other words, Cell may already be a dying metaphor.

Like a Battered Child: Irish Art before the 1980s

As the one country where the art of the Celts was allowed to develop fully, Ireland had a magnificent artistic output from prehistory through the Christian Celtic era. Celtic art flowed in and out of abstraction, fusing human, animal and plant forms, and delighting in ambiguity and metamorphosis. It culminated in the Christian Celtic masterpieces of the 8th and 9th centuries: carved stone crosses; metalwork such as the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch, filigreed in gold and studded with vivid enamels; and illuminated manuscripts of the Gospels, in particular the Book of Kells (800 A.D.) whose pages and great initial letters seethe with activity--plant, animal, human, divine.

But Celtic art in Ireland did not survive the series of invasions that began in the 9th century--by Vikings, the Normans and the English--and the establishment of English dominion over Ireland in 1537. British colonization of Ireland meant the seizure of millions of acres of land, punitive laws against Catholics, centuries of uprisings and crushing defeats, like those by Cromwell (1641-53) and William of Orange (1689-91). Colonization did not stop with physical and economic exploitation; Britain did not consider Ireland truly occupied until it had banned Irish culture and the use of the Irish language and imposed its own-until the spirit of the people was violated, Ireland was further weakened by the Great Potato Famine of 1845-49, which started the Irish diaspora that continues to this day. When executing the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin only served to intensify the separatist movement in the Republic, Britain responded by partitioning the country, in 1922. In the words of Dublin painter Patrick Graham, summing up the history of Irish art before it came into its own in the 1980s: "You're looking at a country that's been politically independent for only 73 years, I look at Ireland like a battered child ... battered for centuries. It has no confidence ... it has always gone for imitation."

While Ireland was a colony and through most of this century, Irish art followed two main directions. One was internationalism, in which Irish artists imitated the styles of, first, London (until the mid-1850s), next the Continent (until the mid-20th century), and then America (during the 1970s). The other direction has been nativism, an Irish school which arose around the time of the partition of Ireland and was the official state art of the Republic in the period when Eamon de Valera dominated Irish politics (1926-59). Committed to a vision of Ireland that mythologized peasant life and the landscape of the rural west of Ireland beyond the Anglo-Irish pale, the art of the Celtic Revival was, in fact, playing to British stereotypes of the Irish and celebrating the economic and cultural marginalization of a people.