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james merrigan
James Merrigan is a video/ installation artist and art writer. He is the creator of +BILLION-, a bi-weekly online art journal. Future art projects include So Long Roger Fenton... at Monster Truck, curated by Claire Feeley, Futures 11 at the RHA, and a solo show at the LAB in 2012. He is the recipient of the 2010/11 Irish Residential Studios Award at the Red Stables. The following text needed to be conducted in an orderly fashion. The reasoning behind this effort to create order will become clear when you discover, through reading the following textthe predicament of an artist writing on a group show that he is also a part of... James Merrigan 1 This talk is refusing to be led in the direction I set myself. Italo Calvino 2 I, I!...the filthiest of all the pronouns!... The Pronouns! They are the lice of thought. When a thought has lice it scratches, like everyone with lice...and in your fingernails, then...you find pronouns: the personal pronouns. Carlo Emilio Gadda 3 An orderly preface Italo Calvino diagnoses Gaddas irritation with his own self in the above quotation when he writes: The passion for knowledge therefore carries Gadda from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity.4 Taken from Calvinos proposed lectures for Harvard University in 1985 under the optimistic banner of SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUMto cut a short story even shorter, the lectures never took place and the sixth chapter on consistency was never finished due to Calvinos sudden death in 1985. Calvinos Six Memos, like the art object, is a meditation on Potential and the figuring out of the objective arbitrary rules that the writer sets for him- herself in the process of writing and thinking. Shinnors Scholar Mary Conlon is a curator based at Limerick City Gallery of Art. Calvinos existing Five Memos underpin her curatorial project so far, which were published in 1988. Trompe Le Monde, translated as Fool the World, is the title of Conlons third installment of her Six Memos project, and was played out at Occupy Space, Limerick, in 2011. The group show included five artists: Juan Fontanive, Dana Gentile, Helen Horgan, Michael Murphy and myself or I; the subjective personal pronoun that Gadda would rather have deleted from existence. I with Two Apostrophes The irony of this text is that it is near to impossible to avoid the Ithat subjective self, ego, id, thinking substance, that gets in the way of our view of the world, especially in the case of my participation as an artist in Trompe Le Monde. Paradoxically, what makes Gaddas prose so compulsive is his effort to get rid of himself. Using Calvino as a point of entrance rather than departure, I will start with four of the five artist that made up Trompe Le Monde, and see what I can do with I. To grasp this concept of I with both hands lets start with identity in the context of Dana Gentiles art practice and photography in general. Because photography can exist outside the tight parameters of the art world, there is a

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apostrophes everywhere

James Merrigan, My Mother is a Fish (2010), 1min 38sec audio, 2 chairs, William Faulkners novel As I Lay Dying, plywood, corrugated plastic, Gorilla Tape, led lights

fundamental split between its position in art and popular culture. In an article for Frieze Magazine titled Snap Shot, Christy Lange writes how Isabelle Graws 2009 book, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, claims the commercial success of Andreas Gurskys photographs has been confused with artistic achievement.5 There is also the case of the narcissistic discourse that has been triggered by Jeff Walls photography, which has prevented any other artist who utilises photography solely, or as part of their art practice, to be separated from his godlike presence. Identity as Slavoj iek describes via Jacques Lacan is a complex issue; he

writes: Il ny a pas de rapport sexual implies, among other things, that balanced co-ordination is missing, that nature, within the realm of human existence, is anything but a harmonious and whole OneAll. As Lacan expresses it...nature does not copulate in order to generate the fictitious, perfected unity of a spherical totality. Lacan is great on anything to do with the fractured self. His analysis of identity is further split with ieks usual tinkering with the paradoxical. Fracturing is an important aspect of postmodernism and contemporary art. Although this is nothing new, the image has been fractured since Cubism, but what makes art today more difficult to piece

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TITLE(basenine)

Dana Gentile,Birdbath (2005), C-Print, 20x20, Scarf Head (2006), C-Print, 20x20 Tree House (2004), C-Print, 20x20

together is the teaming of the fractured image with the fractured identity; combining to create a perpetually fracturing narrative that is always missing a piece of the jigsaw. Artists who use photography as one aspect of their art practice, such as Shannon Ebner, are particularly good at revealing both an identity and hiding behind some signifier that spells out FRACTURE. Dana Gentile, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, is also one of those artists. In an earlier work, Plate Tectonics, 2008, Gentile literalised this idea of fracture or shift in the display of found porcelain plates that were repaired with inserts of maple. This specific work sets up a premise for Gentiles photographic images at Occupy Space. Personally, the photographs offer much more because of the artists consistent control and deliberate articulation of the formal construction of the image, against the shattered narratives of the broken landscape and the staged human elements within the image.

During a conversation with Gentile, the artist described that the three colour photographs that inhabited the first room of Occupy Space were humourous efforts to control the environment. Birdbath, 2005, shows Gentile standing in her familys upstate New York home, dressed in a bathing suit with a glass bowl full of water in hand. Her pose is expectant. Her eyes look toward a hanging bird-house feeder. All the lines drag your eye to the hole in the feeder. The hole is also placed where the traditional nail for hanging framed photographs is found on the back. The composition is all about balance and expectation. A view from back to front, or the potential for expanding beyond the frame of representation, or one point of view is also offered in Tree House, 2004. A tree is positioned awkwardly before a timber house in either a failed attempt at elegant landscaping, a humorous effort to control the environment, or just laziness on the part of the house owners. The

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Colorado sun flattens all the objects before the artists lens. Although, from Gentiles camera view the tree blocks our full view of the house, the sun sneaks through easily to light up the wooden gable of the house. The tree is a failed sunshade. Again, like Bird Bath, we can imagine Gentile waiting for the sun to reveal some failure, and then point and shoot. A chance element within the picture frame is a glimpse of a concrete rim of a road that cuts the picture diagonally in half. The rim reads as a series of dashes, semiotic openings that offer the viewer an escape from the frame; in the sense of talking or writing oneself out of a closed space. Helen Horgans The Horses Mouths (2011) is like a big brain; a contained and protected island of absurdity. A perspex triangular bath filled with water

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and floating islands that look like brain matter, are straddled by model boats with stilt-legged lanterns and motorised rotating lights. But like Gentiles semiotic opening in the decorative substructure of the road, Horgans giant fabricated apostrophe punctuated the contained sculpture to offer potential. Calvino writes We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.6 Horgans sculpture for Trompe Le Monde was both diaristic and encyclopedic. Calvino also discusses how the encyclopedia etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle.7 Horgans work literally illustrated this point, but it is the diaristic form of her art practice that torments the ordering of her centrally focused structures. But, from someone who experienced Horgan installing her own

Helen Horgan, The Horses Mouths (2009-2011), mixed media installation, dimensions variable

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Michael Murphy: We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues (2011), Mixed media sculpture, 2.5m x 2m x 30cm

work, she is an artist who has her own rule book, nothing is arbitraryjust like Georg Perec, who Calvino describes as creating his own arbitrary rules to produce inexhaustible freedom.8 Gadda is also in Horgans sculpture, but he , as was mentioned above, didnt realise the I was a rupture rather than a prison. Why is it that the art-object can always get away with being unfinished, and if questioned about this fact the critic is rebuked with the philosophical objection nothing is ever finished. If the art object is framed properly and the context is right, whether that context is shaped by looking backward for some precursor in the history of the art object, or indulging in the hubris of looking forward for something new or original, the art work in essence has to appear unfinished or unresolved to offer potential for expanded narratives. These considerations came to the fore during the installation of Michael Murphys large

potential dance floor structure. Before the opening night, the installation of the work was partnered by a conversation about whether to leave the I out, or leave it in? The I in Murphys case was a stack of Shoot football magazines that he collected as a young lad. The strong formalism of the artists work at Occupy Space also referenced the past, but not Murphys past: the art of the past in the minimalist purity of Donald Judds sculpture. Judd himself defined this mode of art object as a simple expression of complex thought. Would the addition of the Shoot Magazines have acted as an apostrophe in the same way as Horgans? The title of Murphys work We still have the Taste of Dancing on our Tongues, offered (to my mind), a more rewarding apostrophe. Juan Fontanives kinetic wall work seemed modest at first glance. My immediate presumption that a rectangular white box housed a moving image was soon enough

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Juan Fontanive: Illuminated (2011), Mixed media sculpture, 32h x 26w cm

debunked as I moved closer to the object. Instead of a LED screen, a series of motors acted like pulleys, threading a dashed black and white cord up and down in an aesthetically pleasing but also workman-like movement (echoing the concrete road rim of Gentiles Tree house). This is what Bridget Reilly would make if she could work motors. The title of the work, Illuminated, also pointed back to an Op art fascination with the shifting light. But what saved this work from being overly indulgent in optics and aesthetics was the profile of a head that framed the moving cords. You can imagine Fontanives object as something that a psychoanalyst would have as a desk ornament in their Manhattan office, like the clichd Newtons Cradle. Fontanives art object seemed to be enacting a thread that connected all the works under Calvinos view of the world as a system of systems.9 One question that I am left with relating to the New York artists work (but which is best left unanswered), was the profile of the head that framed the shifting cords the artists own profile?

And finally my own work, but in keeping with Calvinos unfinished Five of Six Memos, an apostrophe will do.

1. James Merrigan, Apostophes Everywhere, April 2011 2. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Modern Classics, 1998, p.51 3. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.108 4. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.108 5. Christy Lange, Snap shot, Frieze Magazine, Issue 131, May 2010 6. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.111 7. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.116 8. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.122 9. Ibid., Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p.105-6