VISUAL ART/Aidan Dunne: Michael Kane has been a distinctive, slightly truculent presence on the Irish art scene since the 1960s. Over the intervening years he may, for quite long periods, have maintained a relatively low profile but, to paraphrase Gerry Adams, he didn't go away, you know. He was always there, working and exhibiting, usually independently of any faction, apparently destined to be more thorn in the side than jewel in the crown of the Irish art establishment.
Reviewed: Michael Kane: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until Saturday (01-6708055)
If it seems unfair to introduce him in those terms, consider the evidence provided by his work at the Rubicon Gallery, in the form of his stubbornly uningratiating, rough-hewn paintings, with their muddied surfaces and difficult, choppy rhythms, their looming stick figures and blocky heads.
They recall 1980s neo-expressionism and, even more, and more to the point, the fresh, gestural fierceness of the prototypical German expressionists from the first two decades of the 20th century. Then, artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner allied elements of "primitivism" with aspects of a contemporary, urban sensibility. That, in a way, is what Kane is doing in his paintings, and his temperamental and visual links with the work of Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff are striking, although he remains authentically of his moment.
The expressionist badge of identity is not all there is to him. Presumably based on the template created by James Joyce in Ulysses, there is also the marriage of classical mythology to urban mythology, not urban myth of the fanciful variety but of the kind that forms when a place accumulates a history that shades over into mystique. That place, for Kane, is an area of Dublin, around Baggot Street, Waterloo Road and environs, where he has lived since settling in the city.
Its personal and literary associations - addressed explicitly in many of his paintings - and its pleasantly urbane qualities made and continue to make it, for him, an emblematic urban setting, not only a stage on which life's dramas are played out, but also a living, changing character in itself. Baggot Street Bridge becomes the setting for Icarus's fall to earth. Herbert Park is a Garden of Eden where we might learn about good and evil.
Kane still, literally and figuratively, inhabits this distinctive urban terrain. And he still regards it ambivalently, on the one hand relishing and loving it, on the other recognising that all is certainly not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is a dark, mercenary underside to the invigorating pulse of city life.
The artistic models he looks to, notably Max Beckman and Oscar Kokoschka, while not directly influencing the details of his visual style, do influence his idea of what an artist is or should be. Their propensity to intertwine the personal and the public, associating their private lives and the wider canvas of their times, is echoed in Kane's output, a compendious rattle bag in which elements of urban geography, political satire, social observation, frank confessional and probing self-analysis jostle for our attention.
When Kane emerged as an artist in the 1960s, the Irish art world could be characterised by the simplistic opposition between the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy, one underwritten by modernist abstraction, the other by academic figuration. While Kane's work is traditional in the sense that it is strongly craft-based and built on the use of conventional techniques and materials, it firmly aligns itself with a European tradition that is distinct from the School of Paris, a tradition based on expressionist figuration and sociopolitical engagement. Like many of his contemporaries, he felt the need to formulate what might now be called, in Blair-speak, a third way for Irish art, an art that recognised the changing political and social conditions and demographics of Irish life.
Kane's instincts and sympathies led to his involvement in some of the most significant and far-reaching cultural initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Independent Artists, the Project Arts Centre and his radical magazine, Structure. The latter foregrounded not only his writing, in verse and prose, but also his considerable skills as a printmaker. These skills are indicated in the selection of print works in the Rubicon show. It is particularly noteworthy that, over the years, he took one of the simplest print forms, the humble linocut, and made an exceptional body of work, ranging from neat iconic symbols to ambitious sequences of narrative images.
In some respects, Kane has not followed an obvious or logical line of development. At stages he has displayed an ability to dismay some of his admirers with the twists and turns of his progress, dictated by his uncompromising commitment to the ideas that drive him. But, in the long term, a consistency emerges, and in retrospect it is clear that the twists and turns don't so much branch off into incidental diversity as repeatedly loop back to embrace enduring concerns.
