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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
60 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 61
Hung not
tough enough
T
he recent closure of the Dublin City
commercial gallery Hang Tough
Contemporary on Exchequer St in
Dublin 2, through the forced or
voluntary process of liquidation,
provoked me to question what constitutes
‘contemporary art’ in Ireland today. Especially
when we frame the same question against the
late Sinéad O’Connor’s words: “I come from a
country where there were riots in the streets over
plays. That’s what art is for… Artists are agitators”.
Hang Tough Contemporary opened its doors in
2021 to a public under the masks and regulations
of the pandemic. The director, Michael ‘Rubio’
Hennigan, described the gallery as the “natural
evolution from his Hang Tough Fine Art printing
and framing studios”. The announcement of the
closure of Hennigan’s printing and framing
studios, which were in business for over a decade,
preceded the announcement on social media of
the gallery’s closure.
Gossip surrounding the gallery’s closure was
shared and discussed privately in my Instagram
DMs and WhatsApp groups weeks before the
o cial announcement on social media. “Sad”
was the common adjective used in the artists’
reactions, voiced in respect of the sta and the
artists who would experience the fi nancial and
emotional fallout from the closure.
Was the gallery an act of blind ambition? Heart
over head? A badly timed business move?
It was undeniably an ambitious enterprise,
rolling out successive solo exhibitions on a three-
week turnaround basis. The societal context from
which the gallery emerged painted it as a
pandemic art gallery fl ing. Yet it could also be
judged as a labour of love, as all art a airs are, or
an act of business bravery or foolhardiness on the
part of its director. However the current liquidation
of Hennigan’s business triumvirate does relegate
the gallery to the straw that broke the horse’s
back, even if it didn’t.
Opinions vary regarding the gallery’s critical
By James Merrigan
value to the Irish art scene. It was defi nitely a
much-needed new gallery space, for painters
primarily, to support and exhibit their work in an
urban environment of extortionate rents and a
city culture devoid of gallery and studio spaces.
That said, I know artists who turned down
exhibition offers due mainly to a critical
perception they had of the gallery.
It’s di cult to describe what that critical
perception might be without getting deep in the
weeds. To my mind the gallery lacked, or didn’t
get the opportunity to consummate a vision
beyond its “sleek, well designed purpose fi tted
exhibition space… With large arresting windows”,
The swift demise of the voguish,
diamantine Hang Tough Contemporary
commercial gallery is sad
CULTURE
60 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 61
Commercial galleries are
a mainstay of cultural
production. My main fear is
that the only template for
artists in Ireland today is
commodifi cation via social
media and the commercial
gallery space
The bright and airy Hang Tough
Contemporary brought to mind the
galleries that populate Walter Benjamin’s
arcades of consumer capitalism at its
most diamantine
which sounds a lot like an estate agent’s pitch.
From the perspective of an art critic rather than
an artist, the gallery’s “natural evolution” from
the printing and framing studios lacked
something meaningful or critical beyond the sale
and framing of art objects for those who can
a ord them. But was Hang Tough Contemporary
any di erent from more established and critically
recognised commercial galleries in Dublin or in
any other cosmopolitan metropolis?
The di erence is perceptual, not structural. The
commercial gallery will always be what it is, a
business at the centre of consumer capitalism. If
you ever visit New York City, head down to
Rockefeller Plaza to check out the scale and bling
of Christie’s Auction House. Art is big business.
During the global fi nancial crisis of 2008, the art
market boomed at the same time as the housing
market crashed. The top-tier commercial gallery
is the ever-fl owing and starlit tributary towards
Christie’s and the 1%.
If I were to distinguish Hang Tough
Contemporary from another commercial gallery
in Dublin, like Mother’s Tankstation Limited,
located down by the quays and the smell of
Guinness (some might say a case of apples and
oranges), I would say the mercantile wizard is
fully hidden behind the curtain at the latter. Sure,
it is a cover story, but it is a sophisticated one.
Whereas the bright and airy Hang Tough
Contemporary brought to mind the galleries that
populate Walter Benjamin’s arcades of consumer
capitalism at its most diamantine; the place
where you procure the seasonal art gift that
comes with a bespoke frame, or a mirror that
refl ects the room not the person.
Bottom line, all commercial galleries are places
where people of money and power consume and
collect objects to decorate their homes or fl ip on
the secondary market for more money. As one
New York artist says in the infamous essay by
Graig Owns entitled The Problem with Puerilism,
written in 1984, at a time when the bohemian
East Village of New York was being fl ooded by
new art market forces: “Paintings are doorways
to collectors’ homes.” The artist is a pawn in this
elitist empire.
Art with a capital A — what was once called the
‘avant garde’ — has never been immune to
becoming the status quo, especially in a world
that increasingly deals in pretty and happily
framed pictures. The avant-garde artist is a
contradictory fi gure, working both sides of the
divide of subcultural and economic allegiances,
and smiling with their mouth if not their eyes.
Such facial gymnastics remind me of what
Theodor Adorno once wrote about art’s purpose
being to make us unhappy, so we can sober up to
our drunken production and consumption of
culture. According to the early philosophy of the
Frankfurt School, the only hope for society was
culture’s opposition to the economy. Culture’s
mission was to critically question society, not to
passively merge with the image-drunk society we
unavoidably guzzle down today.
The fact is the commercial gallery is a gloved
claw in respect to the artist who wants to critique
the societal status quo, not massage it. We have
to turn a blind eye, artist and audience, in our
experience of contemporary art in a commercial
setting. The commercial gallery represents
acceptance and a rmation for the artist, but also
a compromise in the artist’s critical engagement
with the world. If we view contemporary art as
more than its exchangeability, and envisage its
critical purpose in opposition to a passive and
a rmative alignment with the status quo, then
culture can come before money. However, we
need more art spaces that are not so integrated
with a commercial agenda.
But that’s all well and good for the artist who
has been born into money, or acquired it through
the lottery of life. You have to pay to be an artist
in this world. For those artists who do not have
financial backing, the commercial gallery
represents hope where hope is in short supply.
From the ever-dwindling hope of the artist’s
parents, to the self-infl icted hope that is always
tainted with hopelessness in the artist’s psyche.
Hang Tough Contemporary opened at the
moment when hope was on its last legs culturally.
The gallery made its presence felt on the local art
scene. It’s petty, but the name was a put o , an
obvious pun and brand extension of the framing
studios. I was indi erent to the gallery until I
recognised artists whom I would categorise as
‘critical’ appearing on the gallery’s exhibition
roster. Then I noticed, in my role as art lecturer,
younger students listing Hang Tough
Contemporary as a gallery they recognised,
ahead of the more established Dublin galleries,
such as Kevin Kavanagh, Green on Red or Kerlin
Gallery, which they didn’t list at all.
Commercial galleries are a mainstay of cultural
production. My main fear is that the only
alternative and template for artists in Ireland
today is the commodifi cation of their art via
social media and the commercial gallery space.
Karl Marx called commodity a fetish, an object
not valued in and of itself, but in its
exchangeability. The image of the artwork on
Instagram is a commodity fetish that artists now
deal in promotionally, and deal with
psychologically.
For someone without the means or predilection
to collect art, which was an explicit focus in the
mainstream newspaper coverage of Hang Tough
Contemporary, galleries can become places, free
places, where people (including artists) can
critically reflect on their own natures and
complicity with a consumer capitalist society that
rewards the rich and devours the poor. Art can be
a rmative, but it can also be critical of itself and
society at large.
In an interview with the novelist Martin Amis
on the occasion of the publication of his novel
Money, the author says to Germaine Greer:
“Money — in short-hand — is the opposite of
culture”. That was 1984. That said, artists have
to survive if not live in a consumer capitalist
society. It’s up to the artist, however, how far they
lean into such a society without bearing their
critical teeth.
