An Open Art Show
SCAMP’s roving reporter, Mario Sughi, takes us on an open air art trail through Dublin City.
There are days when the option to visit a museum or an art gallery either is not there or is not the most appealing one. If the sun is out (as has been the case this February) and you opt rather for a walk on the streets of Dublin you could reinvent yourself as an open art reviewer, whose name could be Mr Magoo, and nobody would blame you.
Today I start from Hannover Quay. It is lunch time and when I enter the place the venue is already full of people, all dressed (it must be for the occasion) in their clerical suits. Right in the middle lies a big army in yellow luminous jackets, the builders’ army, and as in some contemporary paintings where everything is about a high tech-society sorely afflicted by a lack of communication, the two groups walk side by side, they smell and look at each other… and yet they don’t either touch or mix.
I look around. I hardly recognise the place it used to be. Even worse I am becoming aware that I have completely lost the memory of it. Certainly now it looks like what it wants to be: only a modern place. The place is so anonymously fashionable that it could be anywhere but when finally I bump into a series of tall red plastic tubes, I think I must have finished at IMMA, at one of its madder installations. The only difference is that in IMMA (despite the curators’ greatest, desperate efforts) you are and remain a pure spectator whereas here in Hanover Quay, finally you are part of the painting. This is astonishing! For this reason alone, I would love to be able to talk to some of the artists involved in the project.
There is a group of giant illustrations just at the end of a little square, laid out with dark coloured plastic grass. The figures (in the illustration) look even more real than the people at Hanover Quay A revival of hyper realistic art. But none of the illustrators have signed their work, after all the rights of the images do not belong to them. (Would a free artist, I think when I leave, have ever wanted to depict today’s persons, the ones from the offices and the ones from the builders’ army, in such a happy and celebratory mood!!)
I cross the river and on the Docklands I find another, similar exhibition. Though not by the same illustrators. But because I am getting quickly tired of all those leitmotifs of joy and happiness, I move quickly to the “poster exhibition” that is permanently on show in all the train and DART stations of our city.
In fairness once I arrive I stop thinking and I just look at them.
I move away again, this time I jump on the LUAS and first I go to the very end of a sadly derelict Thomas Street, just outside St James’s Hospital, where a residential group of young artists have an interesting installation, in a very traditional style situated on the hill overlooking the old Kilmainham hospital.
Before I finish my tour I would like to see the projection show on display at the Digital Hub. Ten minutes away from the old Guinness Brewery, but when I arrive the screen is so small and so bright that you can hardly see anything. It’s only when I go closer that I notice that the screen has not even been turned on. This show, like all the open air art shows in town, is free, and you know that in our society you can hardly complain when you pay for something, not even dream to do that when the show is for free, despite the possibility that you might be one of the artists involved.
Now it really is time to leave the great open art gallery. And the last thing I would like to do is to buy a book about today’s show. Now the only place where I am sure I will find a good book is the old shop, Greene’s in Clare Street.
I jump off the bus there and as I am passing by I throw a quick look at the entrance to the national gallery. Finally when I am about to enter Greene’s, I notice the place is hosting… some Pop Art Show… or something like that. It looks great I will certainly come and visit it tomorrow…
Mario Sughi
www.nerosunero.org
docklands illustrations by IGI illustrator Chris Judge
