Enduring Irish sculpture - Village Magazine

VILLAGEAugust/September 

UBLIC sculpture in Ireland includes

many monstrosities that are heavy

and clumpy in their use of materials

and ultimately non-artistic. The heavy-

gang includes Edward Delaney, John Behan,

Rowan Gillespie and Conor Fallon, but there

are plenty of others.

Delaney is egregious; his ‘Wolfe Tone’

and ‘Thomas Davis’ are part of street-lore.

Tone begat ‘Tone-henge’ and Davis with

his attendant ﬁgures, is ‘the piddlers on

the Green’.

They are objects of public derision, and

the critical establishment alone consist-

ently pays them homage.

Leading art critics Roisín Kennedy, Judith

Hill and Peter Murray never question the

numbing monolithic dullness. Murray has

claimed that Tone and Davis “convey an

earthy solidity, a connection with the earth,

emphasised by their heavy legs”. Eamon

Delaney in ‘Breaking the Mould’, a lengthy

paean to his father Edward Delaney, not sur-

prisingly supports Murray who eulogises

his Davis as representing “a farmer in from

the ﬁelds: a man oﬀ the bog and on to a ped-

estal”. The Davis statue does not reﬂect this,

nor does it invoke the Davis of history.

Eamon Delaney lauds his father’s

‘Davis’ as superior to works by John Henry

Foley: “there is none of the shrill theatre

of Grattan, or the arrogant certainty of

Burke”.

This bludgeoning is untenable. Foley may

be eighteenth-century but his O’Connell,

Grattan, Burke and Goldsmith retain a

transcendent beauty, elegance, and imag-

inative artistry in execution, expression

and realism. Tone and Davis are excessively

bulky and heavy. Delaney quotes Aidan

Dunne who ﬁnds Tone and Davis “frayed

by mortality and uncertainty”. But impreci-

sion is Dunne’s actual medium: artspeak.

The problem is that in-depth criticism of

sculpture is nowhere found. The Irish Arts

Review and the Irish Times are not really in

the business of criticism. Circa, and maga-

zines like it, feature art and artists, exalted

and carefully ‘criticised’ using quotations

from international art critics. Circa’s pre-

sumption to interrogate is spurious. When

(recently) the magazine asked the question:

“What is the role and value of art criticism at

present?”, it passed responsibility, by reply-

ing with a question: ‘What art?’

Meanwhile, the RHA and commissioned

artists link arms, laughing all the way to the

pork barrel in this porcine climate of plas-

tic criticism.

You will not ﬁnd any adverse critiques

of John Behan’s ‘Famine Ship’ that faces

Croagh Patrick where the heavy ghost-ﬁg-

ures shrouding the three heavy masts are

what can only be honestly described as gate-

like. ‘The Flight of the Earls’ (Rathmullan,

County. Donegal) with its three Irish chief-

tains on a gangplank of bronze, waving

‘goodbye’ is not evocative in any way of

this major historical event. Behan fails the

Famine as subject matter, and fails ‘The

Flight of the Earls’. He simply does not ﬁnd

any artistic pitch that could be said to be

sublime, haunting, or even satisfying.

‘The Flight of the Earls’ was funded by A.J.

O’Reilly and in general funding is plentiful,

boosted by the OPW and its capital fund. In

 this amounted to € million. The

OPW has a design and project management

service for public-sector building, heritage

and art projects.

Arts Council payments to sculpture in

 amounted to €,. County coun-

cils play their part in commissioning public

works. The Per Cent for Art Scheme, since

, “approves the inclusion in budgets

for all publicly funded capital construc-

tion projects up to % as funding for an art

project”. The maximum for projects over

€ million is an art budget of €,.

Public sculpture is generally administered

by time-servers without a critical faculty,

people like the selection panels, the RHA,

and the artists who have lent their names to

the pervasive lugubriousness.

Alex Pentek’s ‘Rabbit’ on the Ashbourne

Road (in Meath) cost €, and has no

distinguishing features whatsoever. In

essence it is a giant rusty rabbit that any

sheet-metal worker or gate-maker could

have designed far more subtly and much

more cheaply. Pentek is responsible too

CULTURE

Also in this section:

Review: ‘Tickling the Palate’ 50

In the sticks: Shirley Clerkin 52

Dairy stand-oﬀ 54

Arts Council 56

Review: ‘Seeing is Believing’ 58

Enduring Irish

sculpture

Heavy-handed and artless, though the critics

only ever coo. By Kevin Kiely

John

Behan’s

‘Famine

Ship’

August/September VILLAGE

for ‘Hedgehog’ costing €, along

the Gorey Bypass. ‘Rabbit’ and ‘Hedgehog’

are vaguely ﬁgurative though their artis-

tic merit is better described as ﬁgmentary.

The eight-metre-long, four-and-a-half-me-

tre-tall hedgehog is also funded by Per Cent

for Art.

Pentek’s ‘Violin’ on the N by-pass around

Longford evokes a minimum of imagina-

tion to make it a whole. ‘Perpetual Motion’

by Rachael Joynt and Remco de Fouw is a

familiar giant ball with road markings out-

side Naas. The obvious visual statement

may be fun, but is innocuous. It is meant to

be art. ‘Dancing at the Crossroads’ on the

Carrickmacross Bypass by David Annand is

grotesque. “Inspired” by the words “cavort-

ing on mile-high stilts” from a poem by

Patrick Kavanagh, it depicts three ‘green’

life-size adults crudely attached to tilted

stilts. Debased.

Figurative iconic sculpture is prob-

lematical as exempliﬁed by ‘Joe Dolan’ by

Carol Payne. The thickness and density of

the statue with an outstretched arm makes

Dolan a lumpish Irish tenor not the show-

band star of Mullingar. Rory Gallagher in

Ballyshannon and Phil Lynnot in Dublin

are better iconic renderings. Rory is in a

Chuck Berry hunched pose with guitar.

Lynnot’s bronzed chic-look with guitar is

a stylised eﬀort. Joyce’s bust in the Green

and full-length treatment on Talbot Street

by Marjorie Fitzgibbon are both clumsy,

heavy and dull – little wonder Dubliners call

the latter ‘the prick with the stick’. It can-

not compare to the Swiss Joyce in Fluntern

Cemetery by Milton Hebald, imaginatively

provocative with the cane, book and ciga-

rette midst the cemetery that now holds

him.

‘Brendan Behan’ on the Royal Canal by

John Coll fails in realist resemblance. The

‘narrative’ of ‘Behan’ looking at a sculpted

blackbird perched on the bronze bench

is sentimental. The reference to “The

Auld Triangle” from ‘The Quare Fellow’

is awkward, using four triangles welded

to the bench. Coll’s ‘Patrick Kavanagh’ is

equally ludicrous. The fact that the hands

and shoes approximate lifesize dimensions

is no claim to artistry. Coll disastrously

follows Fitzgibbon’s style which is far bet-

ter done by her in now peripatetic ‘Molly

Malone’ ‘the tart with the cart’. The gur-

rier versions expose the triteness, even as

they grow tiring.

Conor Fallon is also a Titan of Heavy.

‘Pegasus’ at City West, another O’Reilly

commission, is a triptych suggesting the

mythological horse on three high pillars.

Pillar one: horse. Pillar two: horse with

wings. Pillar three: horse about to ﬂy.

That’s it. Fallon is not good at equine rep-

resentation or stylisation compared to the

mythic-majesty of Andy Scott’s ‘Kelpies’,

the  metre-high horses on the Forth and

Clyde Canal. Rowan Gillespie’s ‘Blackrock

Dolmen’ (Southside Dublin) perpetuates

the Delaney tradition with bronze anae-

mic ﬁgures leaking through their metal

and holding a big black rock above their

heads. Gillespie’s ‘Yeats’ in Sligo stands on

two pipe-legs with a ‘daft’ cloak on which

is written lines of poetry. It is an appalling

piece of ﬁguration. Patrick O’Reilly joins

the heavy-gang with his bears. A giant bear

with a sand bucket and spade, outsized feet

and a ﬁerce countenance on the promenade

in Greystones, Co Wicklow cost €,.

Three (almost) similar goofy bronze-bears

are outside the  in Dublin.

There are also, of course, major works of

public sculpture. Jerome Connor’s ‘Robert

Emmet’ is internationally renowned; his

‘James Clarence Mangan’ (Stephen’s Green)

and the Lusitania memorial in Cobh are

part of the national consciousness. Oliver

Sheppard’s bronze Cúchulain (despite its

dimensions) resonates of  in the GPO.

Albert Power’s ‘Pádraic Ó Conaire’ in Eyre

Square (Galway) hails from the golden era

of Saorstát Éireann currency when Percy

Metcalfe’s Irish animals were commissioned

by WB Yeats and the Commission on

Coinage.

Oisín Kelly’s ‘The Children of Lir’ (Garden

of Remembrance) has stylistic similarities

to his James Larkin, despite the problem-

atic size of the statue’s hands. After Kelly’s

work, the artistic rot began in public

sculpture with some exceptions, includ-

ing Éamonn O’Doherty’s ‘James Connolly’

inappropriately or not, thrust under Butt

Bridge. O’Doherty’s ‘Anna Livia’ was relo-

cated to make way for the Dublin Spire, and

currently festers above the artiﬁcial lake

(Croppies’ Memorial Park) downriver near

Heuston Station – phallocracy

supplanting femininity. Andrew

O’Connor’s ‘Christ the King’ in

Dún Laoghaire, and his ‘Victims’

in Merrion Square are astonish-

ing works of art. Rachel Joynt’s

‘Noah’s Egg’ (Belﬁeld) manages

to avoid the epidemic lumbering

overwroughtness.

Ardee has the ‘Norman

Helmet’ that looks like a bus-

shelter ready for the scrap

heap. Roundabout art tends to

the dodgy, as in Locky Morris’s

‘Polestar’ (Letterkenny) cost-

ing an estimated €,,

and basically a kerplonk clump

of  telegraph poles.

Dolmens, passage graves, stone circles,

Iron Age and Bronze Age art, round towers,

castles, big Houses and historic buildings

we have aplenty.

Most bad public sculpture has less impact

than the Marian Grottoes, or the prover-

bial town-names sculpted in tulips, pansies

and begonias. The proliferation of hanging

baskets, half-barrels and urns of ﬂowers

outside pubs and hotels, ﬂowerbeds in boats

and tractor tyres around villages, towns

and roundabouts, gives ephemeral relief

from much of our sculpture that looks as

if it has been illegally dumped, or fallen oﬀ

the back of a quarryman’s truck. •

It is a giant

rusty rabbit

that any sheet-

metal worker

could have

designed far

more subtly

and much more

cheaply

“

Conor

Fallon’s

‘Pegasus’

Edward Delaney’s ‘Wolfe Tone’