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’