With its 2001 artists award, to be announced at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin tomorrow evening, Glen Dimplex bows out of a substantial and fruitful eight-year run of sponsorship. The annual shortlist exhibitions have had their ups and downs, but their basic usefulness and value are beyond question, and over the years there have been worthy winners and worthy artists who didn't win but contributed greatly to the overall high quality of the exhibitions.
The eligibility of both Irish and international artists was a basic facet of the award. There is an obvious point in placing contemporary Irish art in an international context, though one felt the bracketing of established international artists with considerably less well known practitioners must have prompted vigorous debate among the panel of jurors. The £15,000 award obviously means a great deal more to a younger artist than to one well into a successful career. The issue arises this year with the inclusion of the American artist Matthew Barney, renowned for his Cremaster series of surreal fantasy films, and perhaps the inclusion of Richard Billingham, one of the Young British Artists.
In a way, the Glen Dimplex can be seen as a successor to the GPA Emerging Artists Awards. Which played an extremely useful role in Irish artistic life throughout the 1980s. One of the winners of the GPA awards was Elizabeth Magill. Though she is from Northern Ireland, Magill has spent most of her working life based in London, though it was her participation in a Belfast, Places in Mind at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, that prompted her nomination here.
From the start, her work was characterised by innate technical skill, considerable energy and a liking for a strong conceptual framework. Over the years the conceptual framework has tended to come to the fore while energy, as a quality of the work, has ebbed and conspicuous skill has been subordinated to subtlety. This is true of the exhibited work that has preoccupied her over the past couple of years, and that might be titled, en masse, The Romantic Landscape Revisited. Revisited, that is, with the scepticism of a post-modern sensibility and an awareness of the 20th=century mass media, including photography, television and film.
Magill's melancholy twilight vistas, usually either fragmentary or with the feeling of being at the edges, the periphery, come with the import of being backgrounds to unspecified narrative events. They work on that level because they are half familiar to us in the same way that Michael Raedecker's mixed-media pictures evoke a world familiar from similar, second-hand sources. We can fit into their moody world.
Peter Goig also comes to mind as a reference, for much the same reasons, as well as the variety of surface textures that Magill chooses to employ. One obvious difference is her relative restraint, her penchant for understatement.
Where Doig likes to conjure images out of considerable surface complexity, she goes for sparsity. There is a continuing dialectic in he landscapes between the illusionistic potential of technique and materials and the desire to undercut illusion.
It is as if the artist is both making representations and working against the possibility of representation. You get a real sense that she likes making representations, that she really enjoys devising ways of describing the effects of clouds and trees subject to various lighting conditions in paint, while simultaneously distrusting both her own facility and the business of representation. Hence the that declare themselves as cheap glitter, the atmospheric shadows that dribble away as passages of overly fluid paint work, the lumps and splodges that insolently declare themselves lumps and splodges.
The paintings certainly work on both levels. The only thing is that it is a limited game to play, and to keep playing. Though there as signs of movement, in a beautiful composition based on overhead power cables for example. It is probably true that Magill, a fine, subtle artist, has not had quite the level of acclaim that is her due. Partly for that reason, it has been suggested that, not just the work included here, or in Belfast, but for the sustained quality of her achievement over a longer span, she deserves the award. It is a reasonable argument, but even apart from such considerations she would be a reasonable winner.
Thanks to Temple Bar Properties and the unstinting efforts of Aileen Corkery, we have had, in the recent past, the opportunity of seeing most of Barney's magnum opus, the Cremaster series, a kind of personal, wildly idiosyncratic Star Wars. Barney makes images and sculptures as well as films, but the images are effectively stills and the sculptures props, though he would dispute this, not least as these portable products are saleable items that help to finance the films.
The films are the heart of what he is about, if they fall, so does everything else. So it is particularly disappointing that his exhibition consists solely of still images from several of the Cremaster titles. A film, or even a section of a work in progress, would have been a boon. But there is a lax, offhand air to the bunch of photographs on offer.
"Cremaster" refers to the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles, and all of Barney's works engage with gender in the most extraordinarily internalised, visceral, bizarre way. One principal area of preoccupation seems to be stages of human development preceding the determination of gender. This undifferentiated era is visualised and dramatised with reference to realms of human cultural activity, from American football to opera to the TT Races in the Isle of Man.
There are also indications that the Cremaster cycle will chart the life of an individual, from before conception to after death, in an oblique highly mannerised way. If that were the case, Barney could be authoring a masterpiece in some respects a kind of art-film Finnegan's Wake.
Everything in the garden is not quite so rosy, however. Among the problems are the fact that, while Barney's visual imagination is conspicuously even floridly, fecund. His sense of film for is disappointingly pedestrian. A dominant tactic is elementary but relentlessly repetitious cross-cutting. If the argument is that its supposed to be boring, there's no answer to it, but now is it convincing.
Another glitch is Barney's propensity to rationalise at the drop of a hat. He'll offer incredibly cluttered and convoluted analyses of the form and content of what he is doing, analyses that initially sound plausible, even authoritative, but cumulatively become self-contradictory and opaque, so that you begin to doubt the overall vision. Which leads to another problem, when any and every flight of fancy is possible, when it can be accommodated apparently at random in any off-the-peg theoretical framework, it means less and less - and, eventually, means nothing. The jury is still out on Cremaster, but Barney has an uphill struggle ahead.
Richard Billingham is an artist in the awkward position of having become known for a singular body of work that he does not want to replicate and that shows no promising line of potential development. That work, previously exhibited here at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, consists of a series of brash photographs of his family at home in the West Midlands council flat. In its unblinking examination of a way of life that few aspiring Young British Artists would be inclined to advertise, it is a disturbing body of work and inevitably, prompted debate about exploitation and voyeurism.
One extension that Billingham has explored is a series of related video pieces; they are, reasonably, generally reckoned to be inferior to the photographs. But he has also made another distinct series of photographs, some which were also shown at the Douglas Hyde, exploring and documenting deserted streetscapes, bleak, peripheral realms of concrete and wasteland, uniform housing estates, municipal parks. These looked very promising though they didn't offer much in the way of cheap thrills, and none of them is included here.
Billingham is an artist at a crossroads. There was some talk of him working on paintings (he apparently painted at one stage), but it is difficult to see how he would approach painting on the basis of his other work. What we see here is essentially retrospective. Like it or loathe it, what he has dome so far amounts to a substantial valuable achievement and, whatever the uncertainties of his predicament, that will stand.
Susan Phillipsz comes as near as possible to being a singer without being a singer. She sings songs, she records, she sells recordings. Who knows? Perhaps, in time, she will edge her way over into being a singer. Her voice isn't bad. But she is an artist, and her interest in singing and song is related to "the emotive and psychological properties of sound", to in one sense, what Noel Coward described as the remarkable potency of cheap music. Or how song and music generally affect us greatly in ways that bypass our usual defences.
She has marshalled a diverse and fairly convincing range of work for the IMMA show, It includes an imaginative play on the use of the singing of a ballad in James Joyce's story The Dead and John Huston's film of it. Perhaps this choice was a mistake, because it is telling that none of Phillipsz' pieces, including this one, dramatises the material she deals with as effectively as does Joyce's story. Still, her video installation is thoroughly enjoyable, and it is good to encounter her pieces in the entrance arch and the museum's entrance hall.
The Glen Dimplex Artists Award Exhibition is at IMMA (01-6129900) Dublin, until October 29th.
