Past Projects

Material from the Event: Christian Hasucha Bogdan Achimescu Chantal Labinsky Sean Lynch Melissa McDonnell Udo Wid

Discussing Jonathan Raban's 1974 novel Soft City, David Harvey writes that urban space was imagined as "a theatre, a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles." This definition of the city, taken from Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, might also be a fitting definition of 'City Fabric', Firestation Studios' recent "international visual art event". Curated by the Belfast-based artist Brian Kennedy, 'City Fabric' set out to present the work of several Irish and international artists in an unmediated and (as Kennedy termed it) 'hit and run' fashion, each artist's project arriving largely unannounced at various locations around Dublin city centre. Only on the day the work appeared was any press material issued and little contexualising, explanatory material was made available in the vicinity of the works.

The most obviously high profile of the 'City Fabric' projects was Christian Hasucha's 'Mr. Individual Walking', a head-turning public art intervention which has already been seen in a number of European cities. Involving one man walking for several hours on top of an eight-foot treadmill (which resembles, but according to the artist is most certainly not, a sculptural plinth) the work serves to defamiliarise the activity of urban walking and the space in which it is presented. 'Mr. Individual', who was in this instance the Berlin-based curator Marcel Hagar, is nevertheless, dressed in a way which suggests a generic quality rather than personality and individuality, the walker coming across as a somewhat down-at-heel urban everyman. On the other hand, this is not designed to be as universally 'representative' a work as (for instance) Mark Wallinger's 'Ecce Homo' – 'Mr. Individual Walking' is, according to Hasucha, not something that should appear as a centre-piece, but rather it is incidental to the proceedings of city life.

While reactions to the work have varied considerably throughout Europe (in Berlin there was even some anger about the work's presence in the city) the response of Dubliners was for the most part one of delighted bewilderment – in some ways a concentration on walking is entirely appropriate to Dublin, given the lasting profile of Joyce's flaneurs in our cultural landscape. The repeating peregrinations of characters such as Bloom in Ulysses or the 'Two Gallants' of Dubliners create a vision of city life which involves both entrapment and perpetual transition, endless movement while endlessly going nowhere. Unlike Quinn in Paul Auster's 'City of Glass', "who on his best walks ... was able to feel that he was nowhere", 'Mr. Individual' goes nowhere by being rooted to the same spot. Ironically, Hasucha's dramatically mundane work depends on our own relative freedom of movement within the city in order for the work to have any effect. For the Romanian artist Bogdan Achimescu who developed a poster art project for 'City Fabric', such freedom of movement takes on a tremendous significance. As a Romanian, Achimescu (whose work was featured at this year's Venice Biennale), is forced to seek a visa for every country he wishes to visit, which, given current immigration restrictions, is achieved only with considerable difficulty. As his parents originally came from Poland, Achimescu recently acquired a Polish passport, creating increased opportunities for travel; his series of posters show subtly different images of this passport, his blurred photograph buried beneath a dense network stamps and scrawls. It is at once a celebration of his new freedom of movement as well as a disjointed, fragmetary perspective on travel.

By working with street posters Achimescu is also forced to compete with advertising's fusilllade of signs, struggling to find room for his own personality within these chaotic corporate messages. Chantal Labinski's low-key work also contended with the fragmentary nature of the city, on one level attempting to weave together aspects of an unraveling 'city fabric' through the creation of simple connections. After having a lack of success implementing an initial project which involved creating new, abstract signs to be placed on the DART (interrupting the existing symbolic discourse utilised in public places), Labinski instead created a work of Martin Creed–like simplicity and poignancy which involved the placing of small circular patterns on house and shop fronts in the city. Attracted by the changes in colours between various houses, Labinski placed her circles (made from small paper ring-binding stickers) at the points of connection between the buildings. In photographs these locations take on the appearance of national flags, joining two colours with a central circular symbol and so creating a sense of communion and visual conversation between elements of difference in the city.

The evocation of flags in this work indirectly recalls a moment in Wim Wenders Wings of Desire when a taxi-driver comments that Germany has fragmented to the point where every individual has become a form of 'mini-state'. For the Austrian artist Udo Wid, a forum for reconciliation between the city's mini-states was created in that other mini-state in Dublin city centre, the grounds of Trinity College. Wid is a scientist whose artworks are one of his means of presenting the results of his research. Conversation about the implications of this research is crucial to him and during 'City Fabric' Wid showed his work in the open air at Trinity discussing his practice with passersby. By concentrating on the extremely low frequencies which emerge from the centre of the earth (which he suggests is like listening to the heartbeat of the earth) Wid finds an essential point of fact from which to begin a "synergy of disciplines". Such synergy could also arguably be at the heart of Melissa McDonnell and Sean Lynch's works in that they connect art practice with, respectively, religion and architecture. McDonnell's work was a musical composition made to be played on the bells of Christchurch and in the context of 'City Fabric' it fits with the postmodern notion of the contemporary city as being a palimpsest of forms and (to return to David Harvey) "a collage of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral". The superimposition of forms and styles from different eras is in fact the subject of Sean Lynch's work, which in this case took the form of a sculptural structure deriving from baroque architecture being attached to a listed building on Dublin's Sean McDermott street. Walter Benjamin's comment that "it is common practice in baroque literature to pile up fragments incessantly" seems relevant in this context, both in terms of Lynch's own strategy of 'piling up fragments' and in the way that this listed building is protected but left as a ruin. Susan Sontag, writing on Benjamin, notes that "the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment – and therefore collectible" and Lynch's work develops this theme in a fresh visual manner.

It is to the credit of the curator Brian Kennedy and the event's 'executive producer' Tony Sheehan from the Firestation that each of the artists who took part in 'City Fabric' brought genuinely intriguing perspectives on city life and urban space to Dublin. The continuation of such 'hit and run' interactions with the city infrastructure should help to revivify the ongoing debate about public art in Ireland.

Declan Long

Reproduced by kind permission of the author and the Sculptor Society of Ireland.

Thanks to:
Sculptor Society of Ireland
Circa Magazine
Dublin Corporation
Arts Council
Trinity College
An Garda Siochana (Supt. Conway and the team at Pearse Sreet) Christchurch Cathedral