A visit to the Arts Council web site informs you that: “Diversity is a core organisational value in the Arts Council’s 10-year strategy to 2025”. This aspiration tells us that if you are an organisation that hopes to receive Arts Council funding you should make sure that your activities are inclusive. This embraces gender balance, the inclusion of racial minorities and those with physical handicaps amongst other criteria. A recent exhibition by members of Graphic Studio Dublin (GSD) caught my eye in this regard. I was a board member of GSD for many years and so continue to take an interest in its activities. The exhibition that got my attention was Geomancy – The Printmakers Garden curated by Aoife Scott at the University of West England (UWE) in Bristol from the 21st to the 25th September 2022. My issue wasn’t the missing apostrophe in the sub-title, although I admit that pained me, it was the fact that an exhibition that was a showcase for GSD featured 16 women and nary a man. Now I realise that there are far more women than men in GSD (the proportion is roughly 75-25%) but unless the show was confined to women (and it didn’t seem to be) you’d expect two or three men at least. Also, amongst the surviving males in GSD are four of the major print makers in the country: Robert Russell, Niall Naessens, Stephen Lawlor, and James McCreary.
I was curious about the reasons for this omission so I contacted Aoife Scott, a member of GSD (and a recent board member) via Instagram. She responded that “the male artists just choose (sic) not to respond or be in the exhibition.” Passing strange, I felt, that any Irish artist would pass up on an opportunity to show in England. I contacted, through a mutual friend, the four male GSD artists I mentioned earlier and none of them had been contacted. It’s perfectly possible that she contacted other male artists that suited her vision (ignoring what could be considered the cream of the current crop) who all eschewed the opportunity. But here’s the nub of the matter: realising that she was going to have an all-female lineup she should have made an effort to find alternative male representation. Especially as she was a board member and so someone who should be aware of the responsibilities of her organisation. The four I had contacted said they would have jumped at the opportunity to show there. A curator is entitled to select the artists she feels best suit her project, but when a specific studio is involved, with male and female members, she should ensure that representation is inclusive. Otherwise declare the exhibition a women only event. The other option of course is to claim that all the men are shite artists and that they were rejected on aesthetic grounds.
Being the nuisance that I am I contacted Aoife Scott again and this time didn’t get a polite response but rather an outburst of childish invective. I quote:
“Are you threatened by female artists exhibiting together and supporting each other John? Is it that you are worried that the arts are being taken over by women…I’d say you weren’t a bit worried when the art world was dominated by males for centuries.”
We’ll pass over the inference that I am centuries old in this cheeky response but here, naked and unadorned is our curator’s rationale for male exclusion. She is seemingly intent, through her choices, in redressing the balance after centuries of imbalance - of visiting the sins of their fathers on the current crop of male artists. In doing so she is of course repeating historical injustices. More significantly she is using an Arts Council funded organisation to carry out a political agenda that goes very much against the Arts Council’s advocacy of inclusion.
However, she is just one individual with a palpable agenda. Where was the GSD board when all this happened. For that matter, where were all the male members? I had occasion at a recent funeral to quote Dante on those who remain silent in the face of wrong-doing:
“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”
This is hardly a great moral conflict, but it should be addressed by those charged with running GSD and by its members. It was noticeable in the recent RDS Visual Awards exhibition for art student graduates how few male artists there were. I was told that this reflected the diminishing number of men attending art college. We should be encouraging more male engagement with the arts rather than ostracising men for the sins of their fathers.
