In keeping with his interest in ‘over-looked, forgotten and highly layered narratives’, Sean Lynch conducted a research-based, archival inquiry entitled The Project (continued…). In 1988 American artist Jimmie Durham created a temporary, site-specific artwork within Derry’s city walls, based on local information gathered from the public. Reviving the intrigue surrounding Durham’s sculptural intervention, Lynch produced and distributed a publication featuring an assemblage of images from local newspapers portraying events that took place in Derry in the late 80s. In animating these forgotten fragments or frozen historical moments, ‘potential synchronicities are revealed’, as Lynch articulated in a public conversation with Declan McGonagle at the CCA.

 
For his contribution to the exhibition, Séamus Nolan facilitated View Points: a series of walking tours based on suggestions from participants about good vantage points in the city. It was an invitation to wander and to take in the sights (such as Austin’s department store, which provided a panoramic view from the 5th floor) but also to chat with fellow walkers, discussing the topics relevant to us as a semi-random gathering of strangers in an artistic context. Anyone who is familiar with Nolan’s previous work will know that he has a real skill for filtering complexity through blindingly simple channels. Like Francis Alÿs’ ‘simple acts’, this urban wandering – part flânerie, part dérive – leads to an experience of local insights and temporary or changing narratives within the city.
 
As a method of creative production, this model acknowledges the value in human interaction, and gathers inspiration from the digital commons (crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, user-generated content). Cultural theory, such as that surrounding the concepts of ‘social capital’ and the ‘rhetorical public sphere’, seemed to underpin much of the exhibition, with an emphasis on the interactive role of the audience in completing the artworks on a personal and collective level.
 
Seán Lynch’s conversation with Declan McGonagle, already referred to, provided a fitting close to the exhibition. McGonagle talked about his involvement in Derry’s Orchard Gallery in the 80s, which involvement issued from a sense of ‘responsibility to the locality’. In 1987 the gallery commissioned Anthony Gormley’s Untitled (Sculpture for City Walls), which remains Derry’s most culturally significant public artwork. Originally consisting of three cruciform cast-iron men, and symbolising divisions within the city, the sculptures suffered a turbulent history of graffiti, fire and vandalism. ‘The knowledge and meaning surrounding the city walls could only be generated from within Derry,’ stated McGonagle, adding that ‘the Peace Process was as much a cultural process as it was a political one – the division was not just about territory, but the identity that could be claimed, with a “cultural baseline” eventually being reached’.
 
Potentially the upcoming Derry-Londonderry City of Culture 2013 will be an extension of post-conflict regeneration. When asked how a role for art might be negotiated in relation to economics and culture-branding, Declan declared his faith that ‘art will always find a way to take the form it needs’. Perhaps all that is required is a vantage point, from which to negotiate, and to watch form unfold.
 
 
Contour of the Commons ran from 22 September – 28 October 2012.

Two works concerned with time travel both making their debut here are Sean Lynch’s DeLorean Progress Report (2010), and Jeremy Millar’s The Man who Looked Back (2010). Lynch’s project traces the DeLorean car to the bottom of the Irish Sea, combining photographs of the rusty material on the sea bed with hand pressed stainless steel models of the DeLorean roof and wing panels. These models are instantly recognisable as an icon of time travel from the 1980s, made famous by Spielberg’s Back to the Future trilogy. Millar’s archival work The Man Who Looked Back continues the artist’s preoccupation with German art historian Aby Warburg. Photographic reproductions of images taken from art history (all relating to the myth of Orpheus, for whom ‘looking back’ had tragic consequences) are posted onto hessian covered free-standing boards, giving the project the aged look of an historical museum display. Among these older images are a number of stills taken from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), one of the most convincing expressions of time-travel in film.

 
As Starling anticipates CAC’s future programme with works by Lynch and Millar, Graham Gussin’s Fall (7200-1) (1998) exploits an agitated sense of expectation concerning a future event. Fall dominates the main gallery space and consists of a large projection of a lake coupled with a hard drive and computer that houses generating software randomly triggering an event in which we see something fall out of the sky, dramatically disturbing the surface of the lake. This event occurs so infrequently that the work becomes not so much about the disturbance but about the possibility of witnessing it, the state of anticipation holding the viewer in front of the tranquil scene for long periods of time, often with no reward.
 
Starling’s show works coherently on many levels, engaging the viewer’s collective and social memory whilst also engaging with the memories and objects that haunt CAC’s history. Starling himself is one such ghostly figure, now returning to the centre after a residency in 1999 and a solo show in 2000. For his solo show Starling had installed a roughly-built stove entitled Burn-Time in Gallery 3. When CAC was refurbished soon after, the architects, without realising the stove to be a temporary edition, included it in their plans. Starling’s own work is now an integral part of CAC’s structure, a strange coincidence because his great-great-uncle was the architect of the original building. Starling’s project is inspired by this meeting across time, between the architect who designed the Centre’s outer space and his future nephew, who time and again has transformed its inner space.
 
 
Simon Starling: Never the Same River was on view 16 December 2010 – 20 February 2011.

Also  in  the  same  concrete,  unfinished  offices  (a  Creative Limerick space at the centre of this EV+A) with  their  Banham-­style  Brutalism,  Loretto  Cooney’s  delicate oil paintings (Did you mean fir tree), their imagery  sifted  from  the  Web,  echoed  the  desaturated  hues of Simon English’s Klee-­sized Untitled Scenes from a Journey.

 
Actually,  the  entire  Catherine  Street  and  Faber  Studios (another new Limerick art space run by graduates) were at the centre of many events organized by Spiritstore’s  Culture  Dig  Weekend  which  transformed  an anonymous street into relationships between people,  with  flamenco,  astronomy  talks,  ghost  walks,  poetry readings, street theatre, film shorts, and an Art in The Making  do,  where  Limerick  and  Crawford  art  students met for Kevin Flanagan’s talk ‘Copyleft and Creative Commons’ and to plan ahead.
 
Finally,  the  LSAD  Church  Gallery  exhibited  Shin Egashira’s Beauty of Our Pain, a set of wooden sculptures  whose  ancient  craft  shuns  screws  or  nails.  Monumental objects that would look more in a place at  a  siege  than  at  a  work-­out,  these  full-­size  fitness  machines were complemented by a video showing them in use in a real fitness centre next to modern day contraptions.  The  accompanying  isometric  drawings  take the medieval association further, suggesting that what  people  accept  in  trying  to  conform  to  contemporary norms of alienated beauty is tantamount to torture.
 
 
Surplus Value
Occupy Space, Limerick
David Brancaleone
 
Curated  by  Michelle  Horrigan,  Surplus  Value  was  hosted by Occupy Space, one of the many new art spaces  in  empty  shops  and  offices,  made  available  thanks to Creative Limerick. Technically, surplus value is what is left over after the worker has been paid her wage in the capitalist mode of production, in which labour power becomes a commodity with an exchange value. To me, the phrase ‘surplus value’ brings to mind the  consequences  today  of  the  logic  of  profit:  for  instance, the madness of tough-love capitalism and a thirty-­year headlong plunge into financialization (speculation  on  derivatives,  hedge  funds,  and  profiteering  from interest on debt). In today’s context (economic meltdown),  only  the  risk  of  impending  bankruptcy  makes imaginable that privately owned banks can be purchased by public funds (and somehow, it is All Our Fault).
 
Playful irony issues from Sean Lynch’s The Bandits Live Comfortably  in  the  Ruin  (2006),  which  appropriates  vintage footage of the failed demolition of a Limerick mill  in  the  1980s  –  and  puts  it  on  a  loop.  So  it  keeps  failing. The value of Hayek’s and then Friedman’s Chicago  School  neoliberal  economics  are  also  on  a  loop and keep failing; meantime, speculation replaces production  (here)  and  exploitation  of  manual  labour  has mostly shifted to where we cannot see it (the Majority  World).  In  the  West,  following  the  downsizing, restructuring and collapse of manufacturing, white collar surplus value is extracted increasingly  (but  not  exclusively)  from  social  communication or ‘immaterial labour’. Its exploitation is much harder to measure, because it always exceeds the working day.
 
As for exploitation, Mike Fitzpatrick’s  Dealer  Ties  (1996-­97), a rack of sixty white ties, each sporting the photograph  of  a  New  York  art  dealer,  brings  to  mind  greedy gallery takings and Anglo Saxon ‘club ties’, thus conjuring  up  the  intimate  atmosphere  of  the  art  market – with an exception, a homeless woman slightly set apart. Perhaps what the clique excludes is her  value.  That  concept  of  ‘exclusion’  was  a  (moral)  fallback position in the 1990s, after any notion of (social  and  political)  emancipation  had  been  abandoned. For The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), the  ‘artistic  critique’  of  capitalism  has  always  hinged  on consumption and alienation, but Surplus Value draws  my  attention  to  the  ‘social  critique’  also  discussed by Boltanski and Chiapello, aimed at production, labour and exploitation.
 
Angela  Fulcher’s  Hurry  On  Sundown  is  an  afterthought on such matters. It hangs from above, making a second ceiling out of what looked like a large multi coloured kite, stretching from white wall to white wall, stitched together from after‐the‐event tents, leftovers from  a  music  festival.  Some  circa  ’68  music  festivals  reclaimed public space, but then business got in on the act and something bigger than just the show was suppressed. An afterthought. In many ways, theory is also  just  that:  an  afterthought,  a  fidelity;  what  still  needs to be said (and done) after the event. It thinks again,  suggesting  the  possibility  of  intervention,  not  nostalgia.
 
 
Surplus Value was on view 7 May–7 June 2010.