Crowds assemble on the old heart of Limerick- Nicholas Street, to welcome back theatre to the area. Impact Theatre's 'Problem Child' runs from Tuesday to Saturday in the upstairs of Stix, where the snooker hall used be. The building also used house the Thomond Cinema and even saw Phil Lynott play there as well! The play is directed by visiting Canadian director, Jeff Culbert, it promises to be one of the major highlights of week two of the unfringed. More details here and here. Thanks to Robin Parmar for the excellent photo.
The first week has already given us some very enjoyable events, Teaspach's "Pied Piper" is excellent, with a fantastic performance from all four on stage. It's telling in the Leamy House setting is very apt with it's walls containing so many other stories of promises broken. Last performance Monday 18th. Kevin Barry's reading from There are little Kingdoms attracted large numbers to Little Catherine Street on Saturday and great crowds also braced the cold to view Aine O Dwyers piece, over three nights in the Potato Market. "Strangers in the Night" featured two cars getting it on to the sound of planets orbiting them. Snatches of classic crooning, celestial hymns and even Aaliyah, the night I was there, all improvised by local performers. Only negative was that niggling thought on why is the Potato Market such a sorely under utilised space.
Limerick filmmaker Celene Natasha Murphy has her three films to date showing on Tuesday night in the Belltable.
Events in the Belltable, over the last week have of course helped to spread the unfringed name, even in Cork. We have a review of Wednesday night's events coming, just going to leave the dust settle a little. If you are at any other event over the next week and would like to submit a review, we would love to hear from you, get in contact
Shane
Open Drawing Awards exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery Pery Square
This annual exhibition presents aspects of the act of drawing that embraces traditional media with examples of work utilising Technology. Once again it is a strong,well curated and varied show and its healthy to see the work and representation of young Limerick Artists alongside Professionals. It is an essential visit particularly for anyone who practices any variant of mark making as the diverse range amongst the artists in the show display a range of quite innovative techniques.
Upstairs in the Gallery there is a table like structure made from wooden packing board where you are invited to leave your mark with crayons provided. A perfect size for the primary school kids that were busy at work a couple of weeks ago when I passed, leaving the structure well covered with coloured marks and providing a live element to the shows theme.
Revisiting the show last week there was a distinctly older child's mark on the structure, in writing it stated ‘Its only children of the (fu**ing) wealthy who tend to be good looking’. The benign interactivity provided by the gallery just got a good misanthropic kicking.
While exhibitions in this space have been subject to previous interventions, the intention in those official and unofficial acts was to in some way partake in the ‘is it Art if its in a designated space’ debate that was efficiently highlighted by Duchamp in 1917.
The dangerously bitter comment left by the indivdual was I presume intended to envoke the toxic ‘Arts only for the rich’ pub chat designation that is still found knocking around. This would then progress to concern about innocents at work.
Each year as the local press singles out a particular ‘head scratcher’ of an art piece in a public space usually around Eva time, the responsibility of artists, curators, and perhaps in this case cleaners, grows in respect to defending and managing the discursive space.
Paul Tarpey
Bock has some good pictures of the market and environs from that day here.
Shane
The hierarchy in regarding urban markmaking is of course based on the intention and social position of the instigator. I believe the individual who authorised the two story canvas that covers the top of a prominent electrical store on O Connell st would not consider that this ‘business solution’ in any way corresponds with the permanent marker script that announces, on another small space nearby, Lorraine's love for Andrew.
This teenager, Lorraine, in graff speak is ‘all city’ (i.e. she tags as much of the city centre as possible). She displays an honesty in her work that the cynical blighting of the building ‘enhanced’ by this canvas refutes. As such she simply announces a truth in the public space that the shops mimicking of Times square does not , irrespective of their different agendas.
I believe you need planning permission to construct advertising on that scale, I wonder was this sought? If not, it displays its triumphal sheen as visual Pollution.
There is no such ambiguity in Lorraine's work. If your social standing leads you to accept a gaping canvas that defaces the already battered upper O'Connell streetscape as legitimate, then the marks of a teenager on shards of the leftover architecture of Cruises st are the marks of an outlaw. Some perhaps see a geography creative with an always present black marker.
In regarding unsolicited markmaking I find the declarations from Lorraines group(s) personally more interesting than the tentative generic sub-Bansky stensil work that tends to circle the streets around the Art College. Equally depressing from a graphic point of view are the large bubble work pieces that skulk around the alleyways off O'Connell st. These ones alert us to the fact that us to someone has spent time and money on silver spray paint and not enough of time and effort over sketchbooks. Consequently, the latter two's attempts display over referential and stylised attention seeking marks that now read predominantly as therapeutic posts rather than considered progressive pieces.
Often these imitative artpieces hit the street well before the artist develops either their own style or accepts responsibility regarding their position in the canon of ‘street art’ should they intend to quote from this repository. It is also disappointing that Banksy's socio-political influence doesn't seem to permeate the Limerick stencillers which leaves a lot of the subject matter of the work visually resembling the clothing companies ‘street’ aesthetic. Ironically the display in one of these companies new shops (on Bedford row), exhorts the youth to ‘think outside the box’. I think they should set up a research meeting with Lorraine's people.
The secondary ‘School’ Limerick taggers like Lorraine are of course carrying out in context, the legacy of the 70s New York instigator Taki. This Ghetto youth, who by simply writing his name all (over the) city conceptualised a notion of an individuals sense of existence in an environment that denied its citizens many basic social rights (thus labelling them as outsiders). The case of Taki is generally regarded as year zero in the history of the subject in and this was outlined in, (the much quoted by graff books..) contemporary New York times article(pdf here) . In introducing Taki to the world his basic endeavour registered as significantly confrontational and as equal to Gallery orientated types of urban Art that were being practised at the time. In equivalent work in the Takis stomping ground the conceptual artist Hans Hacke undertook a photo-text project that traced the identity and practices of slum landlords to be presented as documents for viewing in (at that time) radical NY Art gallery spaces.
In the work of the anonymous Artist in the above photo there is an interesting stylistic development. Here is a re-categorising of the ‘bunching of names’ technique that Lorraine's group tend to adopt when announcing a collective presence. The intention in ‘do you want a smoke’ is now processed into a single visual, the signification of similar territorial values, now dramatised singularly as an outlined cartoon narrative.
Where previously the bunching of names had the visual quality of a white message board or an unsupervised blackboard, the carefully drawn figure projects a quiet, more focused tone. In the rougher contemporary ‘Estate’ version of this subject matter that I have seen, there is painted a distorted smiley face with a oversized spliff dangling from a twisted mouth. This ‘In your faceness’ is not in evidence with the blue outline man.
"Do you want a smoke?" The figure carefully asks, of tobacco? Perhaps, but the inference is not just in the act of smoking but an invite to stop and share a certain cultural designated weed with a similar minded individual.
This call for a particular act of bonding is signposted discreetly in an alcove on the border territory of the City's equivalent to Temple Bar. The depicted figure stands neatly with branded cap, top, and understated jewellery. However the depiction of his trousers is vague and this denies a reading that might ‘label’ the figure as a tracksuited individual and of course one of a ‘tribe’ (their term) that the bouncers of large bars in this area have very little time for.
By this rendering he seems to float, hinting at the choice of a smoke that would allow him by depiction , to beatifically interact with passing individuals. This is in contrast to the floating late weekend behaviour of the more respectable members of the middle class, who frequent this area and are in thrall to their sanctioned choice of weekend pint n' short measured oblivion.
This sentinel, carefully in place on the wall of the now closed mecca of spraypaint and markers that was Newsoms shop, can be regarded as (a) an extension of the visual territorialism instigated by Lorraine and her team and (b) as an exercise in understated lifestyle advertising for a non aggressive alternative to the Lager(s)and Coke(s) weekend diet of Limericks Temple Bar.
Imagine transferring ‘do you want a smoke’ as an large image above the shop in O'connell st and swopping the bland vulgarity of the present affront there, in a miniaturised version to the location outside Newsoms.
A public art brief anyone?
Paul Tarpey
Launched tonight in the Belltable, a large programme of events over 10 days in February celebrates Unfringed ' Eleven years a Leaping'. The music programme doesn't seem to be as high profile as last year but an interesting one on opening night, 13th February entitled, "Word on the Beat". Commissioned by Unfringed, size2shoes invite Limerick fabcity Rap artists (little did this subeditor know what he was doing back in 2002) for a night of homegrown hip-hop/acoustic crossover. The O'Suilleabhain brothers (Eoin & Moley) are really talented and it should be good to see Jay Red and co in this environment.
Other highlights that grabbed my attention are also local, Teaspach have a Naomi O' Kelly directed 'The Pied Piper' in Leamy House, while Kevin Barry reads from 'There are Little Kingdoms' in Little Catherine Bookshop on Saturday 16th. Last year on the view Katie Verling seemed to speculate that one of Kevin's stories could easily be set on a snooker hall in Nicholas Street and it is to this snooker hall, Stix, that Impact bring their new production, Problem Child, directed by Canadian Jeff Culbert, who also hosts a workshop during the festival. Staying with theatre, Galway based company, Mephisto, will premier two plays by Limerick born playwright Padraig Meehan in the Belltable.
Much more as well, make a date,
Shane
The New Bridge by the Jurys roundabout functionally, briskly, accommodates the daily trail of traffic from Cork to Galway. The bridge itself is an anonymous Celtic bar off the Tigers cage, and when built briefly earned itself a moniker as the wind ‘whistled’ through its metal bars. Last summer I noticed the whistling
bridge was sporting a decidedly un-corporation shade of pink, that neatly covered the Ennis side support. Was this the beginning of a radical makeover for the whole bridge? Were MAC cosmetics sponsoring the Munster Team? Had someone bought a job lot of the landscape artist Christo's vast pink curtain? Art wise, there was a beginning of something no doubt. However, this gash of colour stalled on the Ennis road bank as a beginning of sorts. The bridge could whistle now if it wanted the job finished.
Months later curiosity led me to check out what is now a pink wall,spat with daubs, scrawls of ‘f ck u’, names in paint etc.The bright base work appears to be the work of a civilian. The neatness of the execution and its unintentional conceptual audacity left it as a blank canvas for months until it reverted back to a concrete bush drinking backdrop.
Underpasses are traditional Graffiti flex points. Over the years the Drogheda painters convention has thrown up many an impressive piece under and around concrete‘non-spaces, and these days its almost expected to get the graff wink on turning of the bypass entering any Irish city. Its a visibility issue with urban artists.When the NY transport authority cleaned up the trains in the 80's the New York artists hit the walls and rooftops around the tracks. Because they were prevented in viewing their rolling own Art Gallery, the rolling commuters could check their static endeavors instead. Limericks greeting (or wave good bye) to commuters for summer and Autumn was a pink salute.
The whistling bridge's landscape throws up some authorship clues for all this curiosity in the shape of a large,neat but discreet graff piece to the right of this pinkness. Up the embankment and hidden from four wheel dictated eyes there is a traditional graff bubble topped letter name. The traditional elegance of this piece is built up from at least 3 paint layers and tellingly the base colour is the same tone of pinkness as flagged under the underpass. What ever conceptual romanticism I had wished of the slab of colour (something along the lines of the french artist Kliens situationist colour biz, mashed with a tribute to graff icon,NY,s Lady Pink) was dashed as it became evident that some New york school follower painted a base colour for an attempted traditional work and then didn’t follow through. End of.
Still, it’s a hint. Limerick has a sublime graff B boy painter/ breakdancer whos always on the down low by the name of Baz. He has got some striking canvas pieces that I came across one night in a window on a street facing Corbally.Huge, spraycanned, glossy portraits leaned against his rented walls magnolia backdrop colour . But Baz is not our mystery interventionist, not his style. Is it some Banksy follower, loose from the Art college? No, too much work. Once kids found out you can download stencil graff imagery from the net, the exaust sputtered on that vibe.
I feel our follower of the old schools classic graff era is long gone.
Unintentionally this pinkpainting trooper is my artist of 2007. The artist spotted the conduit from Cork to Galway and the start of a piece became an unusual finish.
‘Technically. by its own definition, the word ‘Art’defines practically every thing in the universe and couldn’t possibly exclude if anything, our contribution to the world at large.’ Phase 2. Classic old school NY graffiti painter.
Paul Tarpey
Late cancellation of DJ Mek tomorrow night, December 14th in Mickey Martins due to unforeseen circumstances. Expect a reschedule for New Year. However if you are out and about check Mamuska in St Johns Church, Daghdha's Christmas edition, part of the Gravity and Grace festival. Watch out for new music by Jon Greenwood as part of the weekend, which Club BVM's, Mark will dance to on Sunday at 3 pm.
Shane
Impact Theatre are back this Thursday, 6th December, with a rehearsed reading of a play by Toronto playwright George F Walker. Directed by Ann Blake the reading takes place at Limerick Printmakers. For your 5 euros , expect a bellyful of laughs and warm wine. More details here
Also at the printmakers the annual members exhibition is under way. Running until 23 rd of December, worth visiting with work from a lot of different artists including Paul Tarpey, on display.
Shane
Making a film without support from a significant film institution is notoriously difficult, but after 2 and a half years, "Drawing the Line", an independent film about graffiti, is close to completion. An early version of the film was shown last year at DEAF and Limerick filmmaker Yolanda Barker is now finalizing it for a full DVD release. A fundraiser happens in Dublin next Tuesday evening with a host of DJs and VJs including Peter Curtin and Cool C. Adm 7 euro. We will be doing more on this film soon.
While Barker documents these alternative voices, Phillip King's 'other voices' series has for some time taken the national limelight. However while it's sacred location in Dingle is attractive we are more fond of a small chuch in the square in Listowel which over the years has programmed an excellent artistic lineup in an idyllic setting. Lorcan over at eagsúil describes the night when Malian musician Baba Salah came to town, fresh from Crawdaddy.
While some churches now pack them in for gigs, their previous administrators have dwindled in numbers but can still have influence. The franciscan brothers who arrived in Moyross last winter have probably been the success story of 2007 in our city. Brother Shawn O Connor was on RTE Radio's 'This week' last Sunday. In a six minute interview he exuded a calm and belief which many of our politicians sorely lack. However it was the last minute of the interview which really grabbed my attention as he alluded to the deplorable tabloidesque practice of labelling people as scum. Worth listening to- click on this link- requires real player.
Shane
July 04 & 05:Trinity Rooms 5th birthday check beat torrent (dmc champions) and Kym Mazelle!
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