John Kelly - an Awkward Bugger

An edited version of this piece was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 3rd August 2014

Take the right turn for Union Hall on the road from Skibereen to Roscarberry and head south towards the sea. After many twists and turns you'll find yourself on the Reen Peninsula. This is the spectacularly scenic home of the artist John Kelly. A stroll around his extensive property yields many interesting and some downright surreal sights. As a herd of amiable Friesians graze nearby, you encounter a large bronze gum tree with a stylised Friesian lodged in its branches. This is Kelly's iconic Cow Up a Tree a version of which once graced the Champs Elysses in Paris. Nearby is a scale model of the Tate Gallery in London - the size of a small bungalow - and scattered around his gardens are sundry bronze kangaroos and startling abstract pieces.

 

Kelly has been living in Ireland for over ten years but is better known in Sydney and Melbourne than he is in Dublin and Cork. His affiliations are complicated and it shows in his retention of three passports - as if he's still making up his own mind. His father is from Cork (near Mallow) and his mother is English but the family went to Australia when he was six months old. The artist in him emerged in that country and it still remains his primary audience although he also shows regularly in London including at the Royal Academy. His web site describes him as "living in West Cork currently". The last word suggesting a provisional relationship with his father's home county. This identity issue amuses him. "I am the best known Irish Artist in Australia or alternatively a well known contemporary Australian artist here in Ireland". His disparate loyalties were demonstrated at his first Dublin solo show in the prestigious Oliver Sears Gallery in 2013. While viewers glided around sipping wine and admiring his cool spare seascapes of Castlehaven and its environs, he was tossing about in the middle of the Southern Ocean, one of the roughest and most dangerous in the world. He had taken up the position of artist in residence on the icebreaker Aurora Australis on an Australian Antarctic mission. Ahead lay a Shackelton-like experience with the enveloping ice and many adventures where his very survival was a matter of concern. The art he created on and from this trip will be shown in Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2015.

Cows loom large in Kelly's story. His mother won a Win a Wish competition advertised on the side of milk carton that enabled her to send her talented son to art school. One of Kelly's early shows in Australia was ungratefully entitled More Fucking Cows and he's best known for his playful paintings and sculpture based on the stylised papier-mache cows created by the Australian artist Sir William Dobell - supposedly as part of a camouflage project during World War II. No large mammal was safe from his gaze. In 1997 he did a show on Phar Lap - Australia's most famous race horse - called Painting the Dead Horse (the poor creature stands stuffed in a glass case in a Melbourne Museum). That show was opened by Barry Humpheries who is a fan, as is another famous Australian Rupert Murdoch. A pivotal moment in his career came in 1999 when he was asked by the City of Paris to exhibit in a sculpture exhibition, Champs del la Sculpture II, held on the Champs-Élysées to mark the millennium. This exhibition included internationally recognised artists such as Red Grooms, Nam June Paik, Tony Cragg, and Barry Flanagan. His work caught the attention of Time magazine and his reputation was launched.

A subsequent knotty legal imbroglio with his French agent "took the air out of my ascent" and Kelly, exhausted and dispirited by these travails, initially came to Ireland 10 years ago to get away from it all. He and his wife Christina happened upon a house amid the scenic splendours of Reen and he continued his international career from this West Cork base.

Kelly's creativity has many outlets. He paints, he sculpts, he prints, he enlists the aid of computers for his steel cutouts, he flirts with installations and the conceptual and he also writes about art and art history. When asked about Australian art many of us struggle to get beyond Sidney Nolan so it's interesting to hear his views on the likes of William Dobell, Brett Whitely, and Fred Williams. He recounts at length a wonderful story about how Dobell won the Archibald Prize for a portrait of his alleged lover Joshua Smith - who came second in the competition. Dobell was then sued by Smith's followers as they felt it was a caricature not a portrait and thus ineligible for the prize. Kelly was so taken by this story that he took the Australian art historian Elizabeth Donaldson to task in a letter to Art Monthly Australia (AMA) in 2011 for her homogenised history of the incident.

Kelly is a fine writer with a colourful turn of phrase. While in the Antarctic he wrote a hair-raising blog for the Guardian and has also written extensively for AMA and Circa. He also likes to engage with the art community both here and in Australia and is not afraid to speak his mind. When the Australia Council for the Arts brought in Saatchi and Saatchi to review arts policy in Australia, the agency advocated that Australian art be branded. Kelly wrote directly to the Prime Minister of the day pointing out the blatant folly of this policy. Closer to home he wrote an open letter to the Crawford Open in 2007 taking its organisers to task over what he saw as a flawed open submission competition. Amongst other criticisms he felt that the selection process was questionable. The absence of robust reviewing of artists and art institutions in Ireland is a particular concern of his. He is very critical of the Arts Council decision to cut its funding for Circa while during the same period increasing that of the Irish Arts Review. The latter is essentially, he suggests, a commercial enterprise which famously confines its criticism to dead artists and past infamies (such as Peter Murray's excellent piece on the Bantry House collection). No contemporary gallery or art institution need fear its bite. Kelly feels that there is a clique running the art institutions that are happy to host big names from the international circuit but don't do enough to foster contemporary Irish art, and don't take kindly to questions about their stewardship.

His current show in the Doswell Gallery in Roscarbery demonstrates his love affair with the landscape of West Cork. Kelly felt his studio was becoming "like a padded cell" and decided to "be creative in front of the landscape". So he took his field easel up Ceim Hill for views of Castlehaven Harbour and the Stags and set to work. Most of the works you see were painted from there or from his perch in Myross Cemetery - high above Reen. In the cemetery he began using the grave stone of an Anne Sullivan as a plinth to hold his easel - going a bit further along the memento mori route than those writers who keep a skull on their desks. In an eerie twist he discovered from a neighbour that the same Anne Sullivan lived in the house that he now occupies. The show also features some images of his Antarctic encounters with penguins and a new series of prints done with the Stony Road Press that revisit some of his recent West Cork paintings. Kelly has also taken a keen interest in the tragic history of his locale. The scale model of the Tate Modern on his land was originally intended for a show in Melbourne where it would house a letter written in 1846 by a justice of the peace in Reen, N. M. Cummins. This letter recounted in horror the affects of the famine in Myross and South Reen. Kelly had been much engaged by the fact that Irish art has left no contemporary record of the famine such as Jean-Francois Millet's Prayer for a Potato Crop.The establishment shills that made art in the Ireland of the time would not have wanted to rock the boat. He chose the Tate because it owed its existence to a fortune made from food (initially a string of greengrocers around Liverpool) at a time when Ireland was starving.

John Kelly has been described by an Irish academic as "an awkward and obsessive artist". That statement is almost tautologous, or at least a good working definition of what an artist should be. Obsession is surely necessary to pursue any art form and being awkward means that you don't necessarily abide by the status quo or follow received wisdom. The artist as outsider has many illustrious precedents. Caravaggio was an awkward customer, as was Van Gogh. For domestic reasons Kelly plans to spend more time in Dublin over the next few years and those who care about Irish art in the capitol should welcome both his multi-faceted art and his trenchant critical contributions. Meanwhile some of our art institutions, especially those down south, should perhaps pay more attention to an artist of Irish origin honoured internationally but largely ignored here.

 

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Waving and Drowning

An edited version of this appeared in the Sunday Times on the 6th July 2014

When I was seven or eight years old (top row four to the right of icon) we lived in the Curragh Camp where my father, an army officer, was stationed. Down the road from our house was a large swimming pool. It measured 40 yards by 14 yards making it the largest in the country at the time. The army used it for recreation and for training its soldiers. I frequently went there on my own as all of my schoolmates were the sons of private soldiers or NCOs, and officer's sons and soldier's sons didn't mix in those socially stratified days. I had never had lessons and so just paddled around in the shallow end - enjoying the novelty of being immersed and the smell of the chlorine. One day as I was leaving the pool area to change, four soldiers in uniform decided to have some fun at my expense. They grabbed a limb each, swung me back and forth a few times, and launched me into the middle of the deep end. I came up to the surface, screaming and promptly sank again. Luckily there was someone in the pool nearby and he pulled me out - deeply traumatised and crying hysterically. The four by now discomfited villains tried to placate me and followed me into the changing room to console me while I got dressed. When I was ready they escorted me to a nearby sweet shop and asked me what I wanted. The price of my silence was to be two marshmallow mice - a sweet shop option long gone. When I got home I kept my little misadventure to myself and never told anyone what happened. I was regularly bullied at school because of my father's rank and considered this merely more of the same.

Things rested so. I tended to avoid occasions of swimming. However when I was around 14, we went on holiday to Spanish Point - all nine of us. My parents enjoyed the use of a house there for a month. Most days us children went to the beach, one of the most lethal on the west coast, while my parents spent the day golfing at nearby Lahinch. A lot of convents had summer houses nearby and you'd see the nuns in their long black swimming costumes lying on the rocks like so many seals. Paddy Hillary, Minister for Education at the time, also had a house there and I'd often see him on romantic walks arm in arm with his wife.

There were life-guards on duty at the beach but only during certain hours. These I suppose were the hours to which we should have confined our swimming. One desultory afternoon I made my way alone to the beach and started paddling off some rocks. The rest of the family were playing games in the sand dunes. The area was deserted apart from a solitary girl reading on a rock nearby. I paddled out up to my shoulders and then must have stepped off a ledge because suddenly I found myself out of my depth. I bobbed to the surface and yelled out. The girl was off the rocks in a thrice and she swam over strongly and pulled me to the shore. If she hadn't happened to be there I would surely have drowned. Thank you again Irene Kerrison. Of course I never mentioned this incident to my parents either.

You'd imagine that I would subsequently have learned to swim but despite trying on many occasions I have been unable to conquer my fear of water. I can swim on my back as long as I remain in my depth but just cannot put my face in the water. It's beyond cure. As a result of my handicap I was always very aware of keeping my children away from water when they were young lest I find myself in a situation where I would be unable to rescue them. As soon as was decent from an age perspective we got them regular lessons from a very accomplished teacher. Now they are all very strong and confident in the water and can rescue their far from amphibious father if the need arises.

 

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Nihilists at Work in South Dublin: Review of Here Are the Young Men by Rob Doyle

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 6th July 2014

The spirit of Nietzsche looms over the action in Rob Doyle's darkly exhilarating first novel. But don't be alarmed, the book's intellectual architecture is well concealed beneath the boozing and braggadocio of its protagonists. The nearest we get to an explicit acknowledgement of the great German thinker's influence is Scag's philosophical riff half way through which contains a tasty chunk of Nietzsche's apocalyptic prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra - unattributed but with added 'fuckin's.

The novel portrays the antics of four epically disgruntled teenagers in that hiatus between sitting the Leaving Certificate and heading off in the directions designated6 by their results. You may acquire a hangover just by reading about their drug-fuelled ride through late Celtic Tiger Dublin. Drugs and drink are constantly sought and consumed and most of the action stems from their effects. Getting wasted is the one solid ambition they all share. But the boys behaviour is dictated by the cosmic squalor all around them. They are living in the twilight of the idols. God is dead, school is out, Church and State have failed them - the robber barons rule the land. Their irreverence and frantic drinking is a way of dealing with the void. Beneath the surface hedonism there is a dark undercurrent of seething emotions where terror, despair, and violence lurk. We know what we're in for as soon as we reach the fly-leaf. There's a quote from E. M. Cioran - a man famous for bemoaning the "inconvenience of existence". These youthful nihilists casual misogony is only trumped my their sustained misanthropy There are a few superficial similarities to the novels of his namesake Roddy, a writer admired by Rob. They share an ear for dialogue, particularly the oath-laden demotic of Dublin. However while Roddy has colonised the north side, Rob's characters roam between Greystones and Tallaght - with frequent excursions to Temple Bar and to Killiney Hill and its environs. These are south side boys but definitely not D4. One of the quartet's mother is a cleaner for God's sake. This is different territory in other ways also, a realm beyond good and evil.

Early on we encounter a spectacularly vile anti-Bono tirade that will give plenty of readers pause. But these are just the spewings of Kearney the book's resident psychopath. He will get his comeuppance. He's just reflecting darkly the level of invective often directed by Dubliners at this amiable and enormously successful rock musician. Pure Paddy begrudgery. And if that scene disturbs you wait until you get to the snuff movie description.

In addition to the juvenile nihilism of the four characters, there is an attendant sexual anxiety that afflicts all of them except, ironically, Cocker. It's as if this last avenue to escape and transcendence is also closed to them. Matthew is weak and vacillating and he knows it - he has moral fibre issues. He's also timid with girls and when he finally gets his much sought after Jen to bed discovers that he can't perform - not surprising perhaps considering the volume of drugs he has consumed. This is a horror for any man but for the shy teenager it's a trauma that ruins everything. Jen is unfazed by the sexual failure that blights his love for her. The girls in this novel are very relaxed about sex and its trappings compared to the boys. His later encounter with her and Kearney in flagrante merely compounds his misery and rage. This is a tragic unresolved love story at the heart of the action. Cocker seems to be benignly indifferent to the girls. In fact the Cocker character is the least well-drawn of the four, as if Doyle needed a foil for the erratic antics of the other three. He alone doesn't enjoy his own chapter headings which are divided between Matthew's first person agonising and the third person descriptions of the deranged Kearney and the over sensitised Rez. Kearney has a violent streak that emerges early on. He is obsessed with ultra violent computer games and creates alarming personal web cams. His attitude to girls is brutal and pragmatic, date rape is to be admired and eventually practised. Rez is the smartest of the four. He agonises about the human condition and raises the conversation above the bestial level struck by Kearney. His girl-friend dumps him all the better to frolic abroad with a clear conscience and when he discovers her emails to a friend gloating about her pleasuring by some holiday-camp Lothario he is quite undone - most particularly by the unfavourable comparisons she makes with his own sexual ministrations.

Half way through Doyle introduces the book's most likeable character, the old punk and stoner socialist Scag - who "dreamt of the day when the working classes refuse to work". He acts as Matthew's mentor and guide around Dublin in a way that faintly echoes Bloom and Daedulus's more restrained peregrinations. He points Matthew along the path of true stoner righteousness, which means avoiding a career at all costs.

The novel turns even darker in the latter stages. A trip to the US exposes Kearney to a snuff movie and he returns to Dublin with his vicious urges cranked up a few notches. The occasional outbursts of casual violence become more regular and more extreme - his inner psychopath comes out to play. He tricks Matthew into complicity in one of his crimes and from there things escalate to a murderous and fiery denouement - in Greystones of all places. This is a fine debut from Doyle. It shines a light into a relatively unexplored region: the psyches of our youth, adrift in a world where the old verities no longer exist. And its fast-moving episodic structure makes it a rollicking good read. God may be dead, but a new literary star is born.

 

Lilliput Press

304 pp

€13.99

John P. O'Sullivan

July 2014

 

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Lithe Young Men Cavorting in Their Underpants

If your fancy turns towards lithe young men cavorting in their underpants then the Abbey's current production of Twelfth Night is the place for you. Even if it doesn't, I'd go along anyway. The director Wayne Jordan (sounds like an early Sixties pop star) lays on the homosexual sub-text with a trowel. We even get a finale where the entire cast cavort in their underpants like followers of Isadora Duncan and then bizarrely all take a shower together - a bathhouse reference no doubt.  But in the meantime we all, gay and straight, have a lot of fun. It's hard not to love this play for the language alone: the rapid fire badinage and the memorable lines. Sir Toby Belch providing many of them describing Maria as: "a beagle through bred". You may have qualms about  the prolonged abuse of poor Malvolio but we're not really taking any of it too seriously - just enjoying the ride. There are of course lacunae and it's too bloody long. The main technical problem is convincing the audience that Sebastian and Viola are as identical as all the characters in the play regard them. This production gets closer than most in this regard - but it's always an issue. Nick Dunning is brilliant as Sir Toby Belch even if I would expect someone as partial to "cakes and ale" to be a tad more rotund. Maybe they should have given him a pillow - but then of course he couldn't have done his climactic shower scene at the end. Malvolio played by Mark O'Halloran damn nearly steals the show - he's every inch the actor, down to his yellow stockings and cross-garters. Anyone who doubts Shakespeare's ability to give us a good laugh these days should head along there. Avoid the coffee in the bar though - probably the worst in Dublin - coloured water. And as for the bombastic prick doing the pre-show announcements, somebody needs to retune him. If we want to be hectored we'll go to a Greek tragedy.

Cow Dung at IMMA

Sheela Gowda's Cow Dung

This piece was published in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 20 April 2014

Spring is upon us. Parents with young children can grab a cultural fix and at the same time keep their little darlings amused by heading up to IMMA. The layout of the glorious formal gardens is ideal for games of hide and seek and, inside, IMMA's educational programmes provide artistic diversion should the weather not play fair.

There's usually art worth seeing as well. Sheela Gowda's Open Eye Policy is an overview of the celebrated Indian artist’s work over the past 20 years. Trained as a painter, she's a versatile artist who has expanded her reach into sculpture, installation, and photography to engage more directly with the politics of her homeland. Heartland, a manipulated newspaper image, shows a Naxalite suspect in the hands of the Indian military. Her cow dung confections and flattened tar drum installations bring us a taste of a society where the creative reuse of waste materials is key to survival. The dull browns and blacks of their daily grind are relieved here and there by the shocking red of kumkum - blood amid the sweat and tears.


IMMA
Dublin
Tue-Fri: 11.30am - 5.30pm
Sat: 10am-5.30pm
Sun:12am-5.30pm
Tel: 01-6129900

John P. O'Sullivan

A Playful Provocation?

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 13 April 2014

The Books that Define Ireland
by Bryan Fanning and Tom Garvin

The definite article in this book's title is either an indicator of presumptuousness or a playful provocation. The appropriate response therefore is to scoff at the selection and to come up with a better one of your own. So let's get started. Most people seeking out books that define Ireland would probably look to literature first and supplement it with historical and political works. The authors, an historian and a political scientist, have taken the opposite tack in selecting books that they claim "have had an impact on Irish opinion." Their selection is heavy on their own disciplines and light on the literary front. The literary works they have selected we are told were "chosen for the social and political arguments they provoked". So where is O'Casey? And the absence of Joyce seems particularly perverse. His protean novel Ulysses in all its colour and garrulousness surely meets these criteria. Despite their protestations about being non-literary the authors have included Jonathan Swift, Frank O'Connor, John McGahern, and Flann O'Brien - the latter for that most literary of novels At Swim Two Birds.

Another limitation is the seemingly arbitrary decision to confine the selection to post-Reformation publications. In fact of the 31 books mentioned in the table of contents all but six are 20th Century or later. Where's Goldsmith's Deserted Village? Where's The Táin from the 12th century? Where are Diarmuid and Gráinne? Cúchulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill? Or if we accept the time constraint why not include Samuel Ferguson and Standish O'Grady's later popular versions of these Irish myths? Olivia O'Leary in a characteristically incisive and polished speech launching the book gently chided the authors for omitting such texts as these - surely formative for the Irish psyche. They are also crucial indicators of a thriving civilisation pre-dating that of our subsequent oppressors. The book was launched in the Royal Irish Academy where, ironically, many of these old Irish manuscripts are housed.

Many would be surprised to see a book by Todd Andrew's in a list of 30 books that define Ireland. I suspect that joint author Tom Garvin's family connection with Andrews rather than the intrinsic merit of Dublin Made Me prompted its inclusion. If they wanted old-IRA memoirs, Dan Breen or Ernie O'Malley would have been better choices. However it does give Garvin the opportunity to suggest the real reason for the controversial closing of the Bray-Harcourt railway line. In an unbuttoned moment Andrews told him that: "I got fed up of watching those Freemasons going in to Trinity from Foxrock at the taxpayers expense".

While applauding the inclusion of Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger you could simultaneously bemoan the exclusion of Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger published 20 years earlier. This epic poem depicted the sexually arid lives of the priest-ridden and mother manacled farmers who worked our fecund land:

"He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season."

But if your stifle your quibbles about the selection and go with the flow there's plenty of enjoyment to be had from the book. Don't be put off by the academic background of the authors. This is entertainment with erudition rather than a dry and worthy tome. Its 30 self-contained chapters of about 10 pages are ideal for reading in short chunks. Each chapter gives some biographical data and a summary of the relevant book and related works. The authors have an eye for a telling quote that will encourage you to revisit many of the books mentioned. One such is Noel Browne's Against the Tide. His descriptions of the luxurious lifestyle of his namesake Cardinal Michael Browne, all champagne and hand-rolled cigarettes, and of the Labour Party leader William Norton pigging out at a state banquet, are worth the price of admission. Here's a flavour:

"Like a hungry suckling piglet, frantically probing the fat sow's belly, spoon and fork were followed by his chubby fingers and last of all his thumb, each of them lovingly and lingeringly licked dry. Fingers licked clean, he would hold a lighted scarlet and gold-labelled Havana in one sticky hand and caress his well-filled brandy glass in the other. Norton lived Larkin's 'Nothing is too good for the working classes'."

There's a strong sense of plus ca change about many of the entries. These books may or may not define Ireland but it's certain sure they didn't change anything. Fintan O'Toole's excoriating critique of Larry Goodman and beef industry is one of the best pieces of forensic investigative journalism in the history of the state. The Government's connivance in using the tax payer to rescue a flawed operation run by its supporters has obvious contemporary parallels. We seem not to have taken much heed of O'Toole's dire conclusions. And of course Nell McCafferty's Kerry babies saga uncovered a culture within the Gardai that preferred to proclaim biological miracles (twins with different fathers) rather than accept they might have been over zealous in their investigative methods.

There are many tasty morsels to be extracted from this Irish stew. Who would have known that Wolf Tone was such a good writer and such a conniving lady's man? Does this side of him get an airing amongst our prim republicans every Easter I wonder. Of his many liaisons with English ladies he prided himself on his discretion:

"Not one of those to whom I had the good fortune to render myself agreeable ever suffered the slightest blemish in her reputation on my account."

The book was planned and developed over copious pints of Guinness (according to one of the authors) and I'm sure they had great fun arriving at their conclusions. Their enthusiasm for the selected texts is infectious and you'll leave their company well entertained and better informed.


Merrion
274 pp
€19.95

John P. O'Sullivan