The gallery’s first and second rooms contain two separate and distinct works that appear to be involved in a kind of exchange. The large drawing, Nothing seems normal anymore, is shown in the first room. Here, three sections of heavy paper almost entirely cover one wall, and combine to form the drawing. Clear draws her structures in varied tonal values. Precise, clean, and straight-lined, the work just about resists a reading as a unified, architectural diagram. The structures spill in a curve across the paper, overlaying and obstructing one another. They also mutually obstruct a single interpretation of perspective. Individually, they may be understood as legible, receding models, but in combination, they break down into an abstract, linear image.

In the following room, an installation titled Here’s the thing appears like a startling progression of the previous work. On a wall corresponding to that which supports the drawing in room one, two similar sheets of paper roll down from the ceiling, but now continue past the skirting and extend out across the gallery floor. On that floor, and on the paper itself, Clear’s models stand in three dimensions, constructed with fine wooden sticks. Studio lights cast their shadows on floor and paper alike. Those shadows share a space with the artist’s pencil marks, and the two are not immediately distinguishable. The drawn structures are bolder than those in the previous example and offer more clarity in the way they mirror the tangible wooden models.

This installation seems to suggest that these wooden models inform the design of the other work in the exhibition. This impression is quickly complicated as the viewer progresses through the gallery, however. In Clear’s animation, Blueprint, the artist’s forms appear again, this time emerging frame by frame, along with their shadows, to rotate in an unexpectedly precise circle. This type of stop motion animation is created as a single drawing where the artist repeatedly erases and adds marks for every frame. The technique was pioneered by the South African artist William Kentridge, whose influence is certainly present here. Notable examples of Irish artists who have adopted and innovated on this strategy include David Begley, Eamon O’Kane and Alice Maher. Often made with a soft medium such as charcoal, the erasures are not perfect and every frame leaves its trace. These traces, like the cast shadows of Clear’s real, wooden objects, resemble not just the shadows or footprints of those spatial structures in the normal way a shadow resembles an object; the traces so closely resemble the objects that the two are not easily distinguished. While obviously taking cues from her previous engagement with architectural formations, Clear is also uncovering a subtle means of developing a compelling abstract vernacular of her own. However intuitive and handmade, Clear’s wooden structures are designed; and that design is informed by the nature and behaviour of cast shadows and projected light. Each of Clear’s several modes of drawing (traditional, spatial, animated, or projected) seem to inform the creation of another, in a process that refines the artist’s aesthetics with each reiteration. The temptation to put some sequential or ontological logic to the artist’s productions is repeatedly frustrated.

An object casts a shadow. That shadow is traced or mimicked to create a drawing, and that drawing is animated or projected. Yet the construction of those objects is clearly influenced by the perspectival distortions involved in casting shadows or projecting images. Clear’s approach of closing this loop on the relationship between objects and their indexical signs is an intriguing strategy. It gives a sense of an open-ended proposition, of an artist still in the process of working out her ideas. The strength of this show was that it revealed that process for the viewer. In an installation, To calculate the unforeseen, a slide projection periodically throws images of the artist’s drawings over another drawing made on a wall in the gallery. In a darkened room these projections simultaneously illuminate and obscure the wall drawing itself. The two occasionally correspond; a slide of the wall drawing must have made it into the projector. Or it was used in the creation of the wall drawing.

Clear’s attempt to translate her thinking process is a generous endeavour, and it is effective. A series of small works on one wall did manage to break the sequential nature of a show that otherwise emerged as one continuous, unfolding idea. These six drawings, made with pencil or pen on tracing paper, and titled Plan 1, Plan 2, etc, are also the only inclusion of colour in the exhibition – albeit a somewhat muted colour, thanks to the transparency of the paper. They do, however, maintain the sense of studio activity, of contingency, or a sense of work in progress that is so appealing about drawings in general, and this exhibition in particular. At its centre, this show is concerned with some of the more definitive characteristics of drawing. Paper, pencil, and the artist’s gesture feature prominently, as well as linearity and structure. However, it is Clear’s interest in drawing as a cognitive process, as a means to visually translate abstract ideas, that is most compelling.

Becker’s skillfully composed, high-resolution photographs are in stark contrast to the images Sebald would include in his later prose fiction writings, published mostly throughout the ’90s: neither Vertigo (1990) nor The Emigrants (1992) use plates any more, and many of the reproduced photographs are now taken from newspapers, postcards or family albums found at flea markets. Other images the author took himself, many of them with a small point and shoot camera, a Canon Ixus L1, using colour negative film.1

Sebald’s literary work is exceptionally visual, and his writing from and with images demonstrates an approach to literature not in competition with (or afraid of) the visual, but in dialogue with it, knowing that for both description and photo or drawing there first needs to be careful observation and study. It is in this regard quite significant that Sebald wrote his first published literary text about a botanist who travelled with Vitus Bering’s second expedition to Kamchatka.

Born in Bavaria, Sebald studied German literature in Freiburg im Breisgau and later in Switzerland. Soon afterwards, he moved to Manchester where he received a PhD for a study on Döblin and started to pursue an academic career that brought him to Norwich. As a writer, a bit like the Arctic-explorer Steller, Sebald was drawn to unknown regions and forgotten stories, although the landscapes of his writing proved not to be too far from his home: the world of recent German and European history newly revealed to his expatriate eyes. His prose fiction writings can be described as unique and, apart from their visual component, relatively conservative: all his writings are concerned with the past, particularly the German past and the Shoah, which has been described as a centre that his writings circle around. In particular they are concerned with the broader history of modernity in its multiple, but mostly destructive aspects – imperialism and colonialism, industrialisation and exploitation.

Sebald’s writing style, at once melodic and melancholic, is oriented to 19th and early 20th century literature: he praised the work of Austrian and Swiss writers such as Keller and Stifter, and his language, even in his interviews, has something old fashioned about it (most likely due to the fact that he left southern Germany, where he grew up and studied, in the 60s, and preserved his Bavarian German though all the years he lived in southeast England). What makes Sebald’s prose unique and sets it apart from both his 19th and early 20th century patron saints and other contemporary German writers is a technique of montage, of which the included images are only the most visible expression: the extensive use of quotations and references taken from all kinds of sources, sometimes marked and exposed in the text, sometimes hidden and included like little academic riddles for intertextual research. But because Sebald’s images are the most obvious among the various montaged elements, and because they not only illustrate but influence the narrative, it makes sense to talk about ‘intermedial’ rather than ‘intertextual’ texts.

Austerlitz, Sebald’s fourth and last prose narrative, was published in 2001, 13 years after Nach der Natur. Opening the book, the reader is soon confronted with a series of cropped images of a pair of eyes that are inserted in the text in groups of two, each image filling out a couple lines. The composition clearly refers to André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja with its sequence of ‘fern eyes’ that is repeated multiple times; Sebald’s eyes are all different though, and they serve as an example of how different the sources from which the author took his visual material were. The first grouping shows the wide-open eyes of a small monkey and an owl, both taken from a printed source (an encyclopedia) – in the first one the dot matrix remains visible. The second, human grouping features Sebald’s friend the artist Jan Peter Tripp (they are taken from a portrait drawn by himself) and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Interestingly, in the reproduction, Tripp’s (pencildrawn) eyes are not recognizable as a drawing and seem actually sharper than Wittgenstein’s, taken from a famous, but mediocrely reproduced photograph. In the text framing the images, the narrator, remembering a visit to the Nocturama in the zoo of Antwerp, compares the gaze of the nocturnal animals to that of ‘certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking’.2

While the exclusive listing of these two, ‘painters and philosophers’, might seem odd without recognizing the eyes of Wittgenstein and Tripp, it is significant for Sebald’s literary composition. Image and text here build a reference to Hegel who wrote (in the preface to The Philosophy of Right) the often quoted sentence about the owl of Minerva which ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’. In Hegel’s context, ‘dusk’ or ‘darkness’ refer to the end of an era – which philosophy can no longer rejuvenate, only attempt to understand. In Sebald’s composition (or layout) of the page, this darkness can be seen as the text and its letters, reminding readers that a literary text might hide as much as it reveals, and therefore should as well be subject to the above mentioned ‘looking and thinking’. The eyes of the depicted owl, in this respect, aim through and beyond the literary text. It is no surprise that Austerlitz, the main character of the novel, is an amateur photographer himself, and towards the end of the book he entrusts the narrator with his collection of images which ‘one day would be all that was left of his life’.

Sebald’s publications include over 300 images: they accompany all of his book-length productions, and they are almost always more than mere illustration of the text: they add and alter meaning, open different ways of approaching the text and its narratives, and they often engage critically with the writing. In many respects, photographs and other collected images are essential for the text, as they serve as a point of departure to assemble a story and for the writing itself – as the above mentioned scene from Austerlitz demonstrates. In interviews, Sebald points out how he has always used images for his writings: he eventually found himself without a cogent reason to remove them for publication – it felt only natural to leave the images in the texts. In the old debate about the superiority of the art forms that the Renaissance called paragone, and that was later described by Mieke Bal as an inevitable “war of signs”, it seems clear that Sebald, as a writer, wants to negotiate between the arts, rather than to take a position for any one of them.3

However, in Sebald’s work the text still dominates the images: the text would be changed by the omission of the images, but it would still be readable; the images on their own rarely serve the narrative function. Sebald was a long-time amateur photographer, but it would be an exaggeration to call his work exceptionally ambitious. Travelling with a small film camera, many of his pictures can safely be called snapshots. As a writer though, he takes images quite seriously. His habit of collecting photographs and postcards from flea markets and charity shops inspired Tacita Dean’s fourth artist’s book, FLOH, in 2001. And while it seems remarkable that Dean composes a book exclusively out of portraits, holiday snapshots and other documents of banal occurrences, Sebald, too, is not eager to exhibit his own photographic work, but prefers to use not only different sources (the lack of clarity regarding the pictures’ origins has drawn criticism) but also different media, combined, reflected upon and given a new existence in his narratives.4

In post-war German literature there are surprisingly few writers who experimented with images. The almost-forgotten Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (1940-1975) combined text and image in his wildly collaged scrapbooks, and the renowned filmmaker and author Alexander Kluge (b.1932) has used text and image in his literary work since the ’90s to challenge discursive and narrative constructions.5 While Sebald knew of both authors and while his admiration for Kluge and his historical narratives is known, his interest in the combination of text and image or, more precisely, the principle of montage, can be traced back to his PhD thesis on Alfred Döblin. The crossing of different art forms, genres and media has always been the territory of avant- garde movements. Philippe Soupault’s La Fuite in La Révolution Surrealiste (1926) is often considered the first example of a narrative text with images included for more than just illustrative purposes. Breton’s Nadja was published in 1928, but the introduction of textual montage to the German literary tradition by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was so revolutionary that Walter Benjamin saw it in explosive terms, blowing up the framework and style of the bourgeois novel. Döblin assembles his montaged fragments so densely, Benjamin writes, that the author underneath ‘barely gets a word in edgeways’.6 This is a pretty accurate description of Sebald’s own style of montage and the multiple voices of different narrators in his texts – the only difference being that Sebald adopted the technique of montage so that images, too, are included in the narrative assemblage.

Benjamin not only wrote about montage in Döblin’s work, but adapted its technique for his own theoretical writings. Montage, with its play of distances, transitions and intersections, its perpetually shifting contexts and ironic juxtaposition, had already become a favorite device for him before Döblin wrote his novel.7 For the Arcades Project, the unfinished major philosophical work Benjamin began in the late 1920s, he planned ‘to carry over the principle of montage into history’.8 And, interestingly, he also planned to include images. While for Sebald images are a natural part of the writing process, they are essential for Benjamin’s concept of history. For him, history is not about textbooks and grand narratives, but about images: it is only in an image, in the brief flash of a moment, that we can recognize historical truth – the rest is the long thunder of the following text. When thinking about the past is determined by images, these images merge with our understanding of the present. In other words, there can’t be an image of the past independent from our present world views, and altogether it is hard to grasp an image of the past anyway: Benjamin describes what can be grasped as a brief flash of the past that amalgamates with the present. He calls this flash-like image, preserved or frozen as a still, the dialectical image: ‘it’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’9 ‘For while’, he goes on, ‘the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images […] and the place where one encounters them is language.”10

By including images in his texts – paintings, photographs and reproduced receipts, diaries or diagrams – Sebald reminds his readers of this: first, that the narrative cannot be reduced to pure imagination. The included research and its documents (as well as quotations and even, though rarely, footnotes) bear witness to biographical events and therefore to historical truth. And second, that neither the text nor the images can be fully trusted, since they only create a fictional narrative ‘based on true stories’ and that the readers need to put on an ‘inquiring gaze […] to penetrate the darkness’. The inclusion of images thus not only adds visually to the text and its ‘authenticity’, but at the same time challenges the reader to question the authenticity or, more precisely, to seek further for it.

This modesty of the author is also expressed in one of Sebald’s last books, the posthumously published Unerzählt (Unrecounted): a collection of 33 Haiku-like poems combined with drawings of pairs of eyes, of renowned or less renowned people, made in a photorealistic style by Jan Peter Tripp. Both text and image here are reduced to a minimum of expression: a small section of the head, three lines, five lines of text, a few syllables per line. In a way, this can be regarded as Sebald’s approach to writing: the text begins with an image; realism is combined with invention; and in an attempt to gesture at an untold story they come together, piece by piece.

NOTES
1. See the exhibition catalogue Wandernde Schatten. W. G. Sebalds Unterwelt, Marbach 2008, p.77
2. Sebald: Austerlitz, New York 2001, p. 5
3. Mieke Bal: Reading Rembrandt. Beyond theWord- Image Opposition, Cambridge 1991, p. 47.
4. The various origins of Sebald’s scanned or otherwise reproduced images are often ignored when scholars talk generally about Sebald’s ‘photo texts’ – the only purely photographic book is After Nature (Nach der Natur, 1988), where the photographs are not directly included in the text.
5. See, for example, Alexander Kluge: The Devil’s Blind Spot, translated by Martin Chalmers and Michael Hulse, 2004 (2003).
6. Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. III, Frankfurt a.M. 1991, p. 233, my translation, N.P.
7. See Translator’s Foreword, in Benjamin: Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA and London 1999, p.xi.
8. Benjamin: Arcades Project, p.461.
9. Benjamin: Arcades Project, p.462
10. Ibid.

Located in the idyllic grounds of the castle, the gallery itself provides a counterpoint to the darker themes in Sasnal’s work. The space is attractive and bright with wood floors, rustic attic beams, exposed brick features, and clean white walls where shadows form and fade as the sun slips behind the clouds and day cedes to night. On entering the space, one takes inordinate pleasure in the unexpectedness of this fresh and modern gallery tucked into the grounds of a centuries-old castle, but that mere minute of reverie is rudely interrupted by an angry surge of music growling from a TV screen. As one registers the aggressive twang of electric guitar filtering though the serene surroundings of the gallery, a whole new unexpectedness takes shape whereby the vigour and potency of this choice of music heightens the experience and energy of the exhibition throughout.

Since the beginning of his career, music has been an essential reference point for Sasnal and, indeed, the title of this exhibition is borrowed from that of a song by English alternative rock band, Spacemen 3. Therefore, Sasnal’s use of music here is almost certainly a calculated move on his part. And what a choice of music it is: ‘Dirt’ by The Stooges, taken from their 1970 proto-punk album, Fun House, hailed by critics as a landmark composition in avant-garde rock. In using music as raw and reckless as this to play on loop and aloud, Sasnal right away makes it clear that the journey to the ‘Other Side’ is going to be bold and bumpy one.

The sweaty urgency of The Stooges’ music befits Sasnal’s edgy and unpolished style of painting, particularly corresponding with the sort of smudgy imprecision of his portraits. For example, his pair of paintings of Valdemar Hjartvar Købke hanging on opposite walls, present the seaman as emerging from a mud-brown sludge where skin and background melt into one another in grimy uncertainty. What makes these small but compelling portraits all the more interesting is their history: Købke has been preserved in paint before by his brother, the Danish painter, Christen Købke – a contemporary of Andersen’s. In a portrait dating from 1838, Valdemar is depicted similarly in his naval attire, but with striking clarity and compelling likeness. In comparison, Sasnal’s portraits share none of the original’s luminosity or psychological intensity. Indeed, these portraits veer dramatically from the history of portraiture in that they do not seek to capture any innate ‘essence’ of the sitter’s character or self. Rather, Sasnal’s portraits appear to share more in common with hasty, hollow caricatures rather than the grandiose genre of naturalistic portraiture, whereby the mucky daubs of brown paint, which crudely resemble smears of bodily waste, sneer at the seeming impossibility of reproducing that mode in current conditions.

On the front facing wall, a series of paintings more explicitly engage with the Andersen theme. Among these is a square painting of a shoemaker, naively rendered in broad, sloppy brushstrokes of monochromatic greys and blacks, and a corresponding painting of pixie boots. Cobblers and shoes are common tropes in Andersen’s tales such as ‘The Red Shoes’, recalling his own personal heritage as a shoemaker’s son. Nearby, a purplish-hued painting presents a winged orb hovering listlessly in an airless twilight realm, like a planet in outer space. Titled J. Ch. Andersen 5, the work not only references Andersen in its name, but the image itself is almost directly lifted from an illustration of Andersen’s tale, ‘The Top and Ball’, in a collection of stories published during Sasnal’s childhood in 1970s’ Poland. In its magnified scale (150 x 150 cms), the image assumes a new sinister significance.

Mid-flight, the ball is a bad omen, and with bated breath we wait for it plummet and crash to earth.

Indeed, Take Me To The Other Side operates precisely on these tenuous feelings of fear and trepidation, seizing on our anxieties about what it is that we do not know. A startling untitled landscape of mismatched styles further works to intensify and cement this sense of dread curdling at the base of the exhibition. Here, in a similarly ominous vein to J. Ch. Andersen 5, a black, anthropomorphic object resembling some sort of bird or aviation mechanism (in fact, it is the saddle of the artist’s bike) lingers in low flight against a blue sky and cotton wool clouds – a skyscape that eerily recalls those of René Magritte. This uncanny object is the emblem of the exhibition: a strange achievement of engineering that bears an unsettling likeness to an oversized black crow – a creature symbolically linked to death and sadness. In another work, Autumn Landscape with a Man Gathering Wood, a flock, or rather a ‘murder’ of crows, descends on the frozen grey landscape as the very harbingers of death and destruction.

Soon that destruction becomes much less a fear than a reality. Autumn Landscape with a Man Gathering Wood is a re-working of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich destroyed in a fire in Munich in 1931. Hanging directly opposite this work, is a large scale, ink-on-paper poster depicting a labourer driving a horse-drawn cart with an inked rendition of the Friedrich painting in the background. Aptly titled, Burned Painting, this work anticipates apocalypse. As the brash speech bubbles read: ‘Let the fire burn the sky first the ground and the man. Let it then burn the birds’. We are in no doubt then that doom is upon us, and still Iggy Pop drawls: ‘I don’t care, ‘cause I’m burning inside’.

Somehow, Sasnal has achieved it: he has taken us to the other side, an absurd, dark and frightful place where once-picturesque landscapes are now saturated in toxic, acidic green (as in an untitled work from 2012). In Sasnal’s world, Romanticism has collided with careless rebellion: a smouldering skull, that icon of immortality and of vanitas, floats in a similarly poisonous mist of lurid, unreal green, and menacing hooded-figures are reflected in the eye sockets. It is only then that we can finally concentrate on what is unfolding on the TV screen: close-up shots of Nike running shoes repeatedly stuffed with crusts of white bread and the leaves of a book – The Business Solution to Poverty – squashed with slices of the loaf. The video titled Unreal Hunger (2014) is loosely based on the Andersen story, ‘The Girl Who Trod On The Loaf’, about a vain girl who steps on a loaf of bread in order to keep her shoes clean – an action that ultimately brings about her muddy descent into the underworld. It becomes apparent then that Sasnal is not merely preoccupied with re-creating fairytales and history, but is concerned with our current situation of poverty versus wastefulness, and more generally, what is to become of this world as we know it. Like the girl who trod on the loaf, we will need to be more careful.

The title of Nolan’s show was derived from a poem by Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, written on the cusp of the nineteenth century, in which the sun is described as ‘The weakening eye of day’. This metaphor becomes an emblem of a desolate wintry world, which in turn corresponds with the state of the speaker’s inner life. In the poem, the bleak mood is punctured by the strange song of a thrush, who had chosen ‘to fl ing his soul / Upon the growing gloom.’ Nolan’s exhibition was comprised of four main rooms containing work in a variety of media: mild steel sculptures (freestanding and on plinths); printed text pinned to the wall; modestly scaled paintings on canvas; delicately rendered coloured-pencil drawings; a brightly coloured, hand-tufted wool rug; nine ceramic bowls; and a large-scale digital photograph that covered the last wall (plus a less striking small sculpture of a donkey stationed outside). Linking these rooms were alcoves containing single works, and the exhibition was accompanied by a series of talks, screenings and events, plus a 38-minute audio work written by the artist, available online. These supplements explicitly drew in an array of scientifi c and philosophical ideas that had informed the development of Nolan’s work.

The four rooms charted a narrative of cosmic proportions. The first, titled ‘The visible edge of what can be known’, announced the arrival of the first solid rock on Earth, which for Nolan becomes a metaphor for the beginnings of reflective thought; second, ‘The invisible and the visible’, engaged medieval cosmology as a system for understanding the universe; ‘A structure for reality revealed’ explored scientific methods of observing, measuring and charting of space; and, lastly, ‘The shadow of future events: well what do you expect?’, obliquely, but with a strong deflationary energy, presented the death of the Sun and the end of evolution.

There were twenty works in all, each made as a result of Nolan’s recent residency at IMMA. Sculpture was the dominant medium, and the constant in each room was a biomorphic vegetal form, built from a wire armature coated in plaster, painted, and set onto a handsome stone plinth. These other-worldly protagonists grew in stature as their plinths got taller, until in the final room the support had been toppled. The other work in the exhibition was largely nonfigurative, although the paintings evoke sunrises and sunsets, and the drawings were seemingly made after astronomical photographs; indeed, the idea of a ‘non-figurative’ art was itself put under some pressure by the landscape of concepts spread out around the show, lending a ready set of associations and symbolic possibilities to each piece.

Nolan’s relationship to the history of abstraction becomes significant here: on one hand, she seems fascinated by the cosmic aspirations of late Symbolism and early pioneers of abstract painting (Piet Mondrian before World War I, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka); on the other, her relation to late Modernist and Minimalist sculpture was even stronger. The brightly coloured steel lattices invoked Anthony Caro, and the eponymous work in the final room, The weakening eye of day, perhaps the most impressive moment of the exhibition, recalled the awkward elegance of Eva Hesse’s Hang Up. Here a great spiralling mild steel rod, clad in wadding that has been laboriously hand-stitched by the artist, looped and lolled across the room, like a cosmic force misshapen by fatigue or laughter.

Hesse’s work has a kind of formal irony built into its mode of sincerity; but what is Nolan’s comportment towards the cosmic rhetoric of the Orphists and Theosophists to which her paintings, rugs and drawings seemed to make reference? The potent finale of the last room, in which this spiral girates before a giant photograph of two donkeys confronting us from the graveyard at Bully’s Acre (The view from nowhen, 2014), suggests an ironic and even derisive conclusion to this survey of humanity’s attempts to grasp at ontological mysteries. But the overall tone of the exhibition, and especially its accompanying texts, was one of an avowedly uncynical, unselfconscious embrace of art’s capacity to explore the fascinating productions of science and philosophy.

For me, however, the consistency and force of the exhibition was at times compromised by this same lack of self-consciousness, which sometimes manifested itself in a less rigorous approach. The artist’s parable-like, quasi-scientific, quasiphilosophical written text in the first room, for example, lacked the formal subtlety and boldness characteristic of her sculpture (I thought the latter could have been left to evoke concepts of genesis and reflection without this kind of explicit signalling). Neither, for me, did the three paintings in the exhibition make a substantial address to the medium’s own conventions and history (and I am not sure that this was even their aim). Unlike the drawings, though, they stood up only as elements within the ensemble of the room, rather than hold their own ground as individual artworks (Nolan’s best work does both).

Nevertheless, there was an overall conceptual consistency lent to the various terms by the structure of the exhibition: not that each element stood for a specific concept (the tedium of contemporary art as scientific or philosophical illustration), but that artworks found their place within an ordered arrangement, a composition analogous to a musical work. This was one of Nolan’s main propositions, I felt (and it is by no means hers alone): the exhibition as a figure of thought, a relational space of flexible dimensions that could serve to connect and cohere, imaginatively, the individual elements within it. The last two rooms achieved this particularly powerfully. Abstraction may have lost faith in its own utopian myths, but its capacity to compellingly organise a world of forms and thoughts using a minimum of means continues undiminished.

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s exhibition at TBGS, This attentive place, was curated by Rayne Booth and accompanied by a thoughtful essay by John Hutchinson. It consisted of seven artworks, the most striking of which was at first the least prepossessing. Entering the gallery from the street, the viewer was confronted by a rather dull makeshift wall of thin material hanging in vertical strips from a steel rod above. This screen created a corridor along the inside of the wall-length window, and it was only upon entering the inner space of the gallery that the viewer could turn back to look at the translucent strips of oiled and pigmented paper, and be struck by the luminous way in which they filtered the light of day. Transformed into a subtle gradation of blues, varying in hue and saturation, the fragile paper was not fixed at the bottom, and so was left to respond to the movements of the air as well as changes in daylight. The work is titled, The rigid thing, the moving act, and was made to specifically for the space at TBGS.

Before turning to see this lambent screen, however, the viewer might first have paused to examine one of two large-scale black and white photographs (At the end of his nature [I] and [II]). The second was hung some distance away, but each presented the same carefully-framed scene of patio doors looking onto a paved yard in a state of mild disrepair. This unspectacular scene recalls the courtyards of Pieter de Hooch, working in Delft in the 17th century, which present an outside that is more an extension of the domestic realm, but whose order was always threatened by an encroaching and disruptive nature. Kilfeather’s two images are likewise carefully framed: in one the doors are open, in the other they are closed. This shift changes the image completely, and the images therefore quietly explore what is after all a fundamental spatial opposition.

The most imposing presence in Kilfeather’s exhibition was the enormous, A shade (2014), a dyed cast concrete monolith encircled a few times by a slender brass ribbon. Trapezoid in shape, and measuring 270 x 102 x 79 cm, its ominous blackness was sheer and big and silent. The trompe l’oeil textured surface, which seemed to sag gently as if it were made of plastic netting, disguised a solid, strong, obdurate mass, and lent this looming presence an even more enigmatic air, like something ancestral perhaps.

These works were accompanied by three more modest sculptural pieces: one, a five-part series of intricate grids woven from steel and copper wire, infinitely sensitive to the light and shifts in the viewer’s position; another, a column of white slipcast ceramic tiles, like a delicate and domestic Endless Column. And thirdly, and for me perhaps the most difficult work in the show, The kind thought that sent them there (2014), a drop-leaf wooden table, onto which had been placed four black cast bronze balls, each one hollow, with an aperture and with a distinctive surface texture, not quite natural and not quite artificial. For me this work posed a few too many questions (why that table, why one leaf down, why these textures, why the apertures, why brass, etc), answers to which I was not able to readily derive from the aesthetic and associative qualities of the piece itself.

Together the works evoked the domestic while at the same time keeping to a compressed, at times austere and archaic, formal language. For me, the spareness, potency and intelligence of this presentation were remarkable, conjoining opposing formal, material and conceptual terms: inside and outside, public and domestic, chance and design, movement and stillness, literalism and illusion, light and dark, slightness and monumentality, etc. Again, Hesse was perhaps the most astute post-war sculptor to stage these kinds of compressed formal oppositions, and her spatial sensitivity, extending to an architectural awareness in late works such as Expanded Expansion and Contingent (both 1969), seems a presiding influence on Kilfeather’s work. Indeed, Hesse’s intense investment in the handmade, so different from her Minimalist contemporaries, seems equally crucial to both Kilfeather and Nolan.

Both of these exhibitions achieved a kind of intensity arrived at by other means than personal expressivity. Equally, and importantly, the two presentations did not suppose that the viewer’s encounter with the work would finish when the he or she physically left the space; each courted aesthetic and conceptual reflection as an intrinsic part of the experience of the work, which lasts as long as its mental residues. At their best, both exhibitions achieved a power and complexity that was the opposite of ingratiating.

The candelabra are ready to receive whatever mental sacrifice we choose. We look across the river at the painted terraces of a newly unfamiliar Cork at the champagne hour, the cameraman’s perfect moment. A container ship about to dock goes by; most of the crew only have eyes for their berth, upstream, but a few sailors look our way as fresh bags of coal are emptied into the furnace and the gas pump is primed for a season in hell.

We have no idea how long it takes to melt iron or what temperature you have to reach. United by our ignorance, our patience, our optimism, waiting makes us an audience, a pair of multiple eyes looking north, looking east, looking at each other, at ease as long as the evening is fine, as long as we ignore what else we might be doing this evening, what we must do when we get back. As Vulcan stokes his fire, pumps his furnace, we rustle and sway with the prospect of melting metal: the hard made soft, the cold made hot then cold again, the life we’ll return to, made hot then cold again.

A film crew dallies with a stylish woman striking nouvelle vague poses in the foreground. The swing of the camera boom anticipates the swing of the contraption behind them. Serious melting is slow. We start to think about iron, and, by extension of unexpected frailty, other solids on the brink of dissolution elsewhere in the world for even less reason; our audience, our semi-circularity, our permeability, will be resolved somewhere between the furnace and the three candelabra, along the contraption to its fulcrum, favouring now one end, now the other, the one with the bucket.

The contraption is native Tinguely; the counterbalance will do one thing, three times: fill and turn and tip the bucket, then go silent.

A signal from Vulcan to the soundscapers. Acolytes ready their implements. Drum roll. Places everybody. Action. Clustered behind the crowd fence, we pull out some disused elemental stops. How much danger do we want? What passes for unmediated? How close would we want to be without the crowd fence?

The molten moment is brief, sluggish, relentless, like a Super 8 film of Etna erupting. Some of the molten misses the bucket and falls on the ground, to be taken away and sprinkled with sand. The contraption swings round on its fulcrum and the bucket tips molten iron onto the first candelabrum; the pallet wood catches fire, dropping redhot slops onto the ground. The leavings can be read as in molybdomancy or tea leaves. Already as it burns we start to think what will be left next day, what curiosity it will draw. We all like to linger by a charred site. If you’re Cornelia Parker it might be the start of a whole new work.

Few if any of us have ever stoked a furnace (Richard Gere in Days of Heaven), worked in a steelworks or an iron smelter. Birthday treats for small boys no longer include five minutes in the engine room of a steam train followed by a photograph. There are bonfires on St John’s Eve, and smokeless fuel in livingroom fireplaces (perhaps); otherwise most of us have a fire deficit. This is no country for pyromaniacs or volcanologists.

Three times, three candelabra. ‘Take three as the subject to reason about’, says the Beaver in The Hunting of the Snark. ‘The snark was a boojum, you see.’ We’ll get on our bikes and go home after an evening well spent. It’s pointless but satisfying because in the wrong place at the wrong time, or adjacent to the right place but a long way from the right time, in half-used docklands, where molten iron falls not amiss.

Some people leave after the first flow of molten, more after the second when the pointlessness and also the point have settled in. Maybe the hubris. Or we have found we’re not wearing enough clothes for a cool evening. We have gathered and now we ungather. The empty quayside, like a film set for Cannery Row, all buddleia and bollards swept by the smell of urea from the fertilizer depot, sees us out.

Expanded Traces is a small show but, sensitively curated by Eimear Redmond, it presents a thoughtful and often witty exploration of contemporary approaches to drawing that challenges received ideas about what drawing is or can be, while focusing on approaches that are frequently in dialogue with art historical precedent. Shane Murphy’s site-specific installation, Untitled (2014), rehearses a strategy of extending drawing into three dimensional space, first explored by Marcel Duchamp with his Mile of String in 1942, and furthered by Eva Hesse in the 1960s, and by Gego, Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback in the 1970s. Murphy’s installation more specifically brings to mind Anthony McCall’s projected beam of light in Line Describing a Cone (1973), albeit updated for the digital age. In a corner of the gallery he constructed a cat’s cradle of taut filaments to make a series of intersecting screens. These were interposed by suspended cubes made in wire, and the whole assemblage was shot through with a projection of spinning linear elements. The work was pixelated, immersive and visually complex, but also beguilingly retro, like stepping into an early computer animation or CAD drawing. More simply, but no less effectively, Emma Roche’s playful tactic in the cryptically titled, There’s Nothing Complicated About a Bed (2013), is to project a tangle of coloured cable from the wall on a wooden cross bar, illuminated by a raking light that flattens the mass to draw its shadow on the wall. Looking closer, the cables turn out to be strands of extruded paint, it’s a clever jumbling of media – paint repurposed as a sculptural medium, but used here to trace an immaterial shadow.

Laura Kelly uses the gallery wall as her drawing support, marking it with a faint blurred track as if made by a bicycle wheel, and interspersing this with vivid orange embroidery hoops that hold softly crimpled newsprint. Disposable Boundaries (2013) seems to zoom in and out of focus, the pale track tracing in the abstract the outline of a jagged summit and the hoops containing minutely detailed drawings of fir trees and rocky peaks. Perhaps obliquely referencing unmarked geographical borders, Kelly’s piece also calls to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s evocation of the romantic sublime through landscape. More prosaically, with A Malin to Mizen Head Approach (2012), Susan Lynch plots her walk between Ireland’s northernmost and southern most points on the gallery wall – cleverly inverting Paul Klee’s quip of drawing entailing ‘taking a line for a walk’. She uses a pleasingly scribbley line about a centimetre thick made with a hard, sharp pencil to transcribe a map of her journey, which is punctuated by text messages received along the way. Her exploration of drawing as a tactic is multi-faceted: it is a map, a record and a timeline, as well a diary that connects threads of conversations.

Many of these pieces rehearse familiar strategies: drawing emancipated from the two dimensional, explored as action, as labor, as a way of marking or recording time, narrative and memory, as a means of documenting journeys both real and imagined. But this is a show shot through with wit and intelligence, where hand, line, trace and gesture are explored and re-imagined. Moreover, Expansive Traces presented the viewer with a resonant, lively and satisfying dialogue with a history of practice.

To begin with, it is necessary to say something of the figure who accompanied Riegl and Dvořák in Lukács’s statement, namely the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), whose ideas were hugely influential in German language social thought in the early twentieth century. Dilthey’s lifelong project was to complement Kant’s critique of pure reason with a critique of historical reason. In realizing this Dilthey introduced a psychological dimension to cognition that Kant’s system had eschewed in its critique of empiricism. For Dilthey knowledge of the social world falls largely outside the domain of pure reason and is grounded in the Erlebnis (lived experience) of the subject. A complex concept, Erlebnis encompasses both inner experience and the ways this is shaped by external circumstances; it is also constantly informed by a socio-historical component of the mind that Dilthey called ‘acquired psychic nexus’ (erworbener seelischer Zusammenhang). In contrast to the natural sciences, what Dilthey designated as the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) – a term that covers both the social sciences and humanities – establish their truths not through mathematical proofs, the positing of cause and effect relationships, and the establishment of law-like regularities, but through reflective judgments and hermeneutic procedures that are empathetic and intuitional. While Dilthey was strongly affected by Hegel’s historicization of philosophy, he rejected the metaphysical scheme in which Hegel framed it and insisted that all philosophies are grounded in lived experience. In Dilthey’s conception of history there are three recurrent types of metaphysics, or Weltanschauungen, which he designated as naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and objective idealism. None of these has more than relative validity and they cannot be reconciled through synthesis.5

Kant’s aesthetic was central to Dilthey’s concept of historical judgment. But he was also deeply interested in the arts, and especially in literature, to which he accorded high cognitive status and about which he wrote extensively. His Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung – a volume of essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Lessing, and Novalis published in 1906 – sought to demonstrate a consistent Weltanschauung in each author that arose out of their individual life experiences and penetrated the form of their work. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung made a large impact and was one of the models for the pre-Marxist work Die Seele und die Formen (1911), which established Lukács’s reputation.6 Weltanschauung and style are the ‘structural forms’ that Lukács was referring to in the quotation with which I opened this essay.

It was Dilthey, Lukács wrote in 1918, who had awakened ‘my interest in cultural-historical interconnections.’7 But his positive reference to Dilthey in History and Class Consciousness stands in stark contrast to the evaluation of him in his 1954 book The Destruction of Reason, where Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie represents a key stage in the succession of irrationalist philosophies that make up ‘Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy’, and is seen to correspond with the needs of German imperialism under the Second Reich.8 Although Lukács conceded that Dilthey was ‘a man of exceptional knowledge and genuine learning,’ his attempt to maintain a suprahistorical conception of human character while at the same time asserting the inherent relativism of philosophical systems effectively brought him to an antinomy that he was unable to resolve.9 In Lukács’s words, ‘His efforts led only to the achievement of a psychological and historical typology of philosophical outlooks.’10 The denial of any principles behind history or of any ascertainable progress within it removed all circumstances, his methodology offered no instruments for comprehending them.11

Lukács’s critique of Dilthey was not new. He had attacked the idealist tendencies in German thought as preparing the ground for the ‘fascist counterrevolution’ twenty years before in a self-criticism of History and Class Consciousness delivered before the philosophical section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and explicitly associated Dilthey with the course of reaction in a manuscript essay on the historical origins of German fascist philosophy written contemporaneously.12 As such, Lukács’s change of mind on Dilthey belongs with the renunciation of his greatest work for its ‘disharmonious dualism,’ that is for the way in which it registered ‘the objective internal contradictions’ that marked his transition from what he called the ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ of his ethical critique of bourgeois society in the pre-1917 period to his embrace of Marxism in December 1918.13

Yet in fact it was partly the presence of romantic anti-capitalist elements in History and Class Consciousness that made it such a fertile source for the development of Western Marxism, and that both contributed to its renaissance of key themes in Marx’s own work occluded within the positivistic Marxism of the Second International, and at the same time supplemented the Marxist corpus with new insights into the ideology and culture of capitalism. Correspondingly, we may acknowledge the rightness of Lukács’s critique of internal contradictions in Dilthey’s philosophy without sharing his view that it played a necessary role in an ineluctable line of descent in German thought that could only issue in fascism. At the same time we may question whether Lukács’s distrust of the role of intuition in Dilthey’s thought led him to put certain kinds of productive cultural analysis out of bounds.

This brings me on to Arnold Hauser and the role of Diltheyan motifs in his thought, motifs that I will argue were partly mediated to him through Karl Mannheim and Max Dvořák. I will begin with Mannheim, since he has precedence in terms of his role in Hauser’s formation and may have influenced his reception of Dvořák’s work. Mannheim has been described as being, with Lukács, the ‘spiritus rector’ of the Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaften (Free University of the Human Sciences) that emerged out of the famous Budapest Sonntagskreis (Sunday Circle) in 1917-18 – although Lukács himself was, Hauser recalled, its unquestioned leader from beginning to end.14 Born in 1893, Mannheim was eight years Lukács’s junior, and one year younger than Hauser. He and Hauser met as students at the University of Budapest and became best friends,15 while Hauser and Lukács did not meet until 1917.16 Mannheim had studied with Simmel in Berlin and was a fervent proselytizer for the Geisteswissenschaft school of German sociology, on which Dilthey had such a formative influence.

At first Lukács and Mannheim were bound in a kind of master-pupil relationship, with the latter accepting a commission to translate Lukács’s 1911 History of Modern Drama from Hungarian into German, although this was never realized.17 Both Mannheim and Hauser were ardent admirers of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, first published in 1916, a book that its author himself later admitted was written under the spell of the Diltheyan method.18 However, personal relations between Mannheim and Lukács subsequently cooled and by Hauser’s account eventually transformed into something approaching animosity.19 Although all three were forced into exile after the Hungarian counter- revolution of 1919, neither Hauser nor Mannheim took anything like the prominent role Lukács played in the Council Republic, and neither joined the Communist Party.20 In 1938 when Hauser fled Austria after the Anschluss, he went to London at Mannheim’s invitation to compile an anthology of writings on the sociology of art, for which he was also to have written the introduction. (Mannheim had settled in Britain after being forced out of his professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt after the Nazi takeover in 1933 and held a lectureship at the London School of Economics). According to Peter Christian Ludz, Mannheim’s friendship gave Hauser the courage and strength to begin his The Social History of Art in 1941. However, while Mannheim explicitly distanced himself from Marxism, Hauser presented himself as a nonorthodox Marxist – in that he separated Marxism as a science from Marxism as a political practice – but as a Marxist none the less.21

More than thirty years after the Hungarian counter-revolution Lukács would attack Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge (particularly as represented in his widely read 1929 book Ideologie und Utopie) as representing, like the sociology of his University of Heidelberg mentor and colleague Alfred Weber, the ‘defenselessness’ of German liberal sociology in the face of the reactionary tendencies of German imperialism and fascism.22 Symptoms of its functions in the downward drift of German thought were the relativism of the sociology of knowledge and Mannheim’s notion of a ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ (freischwebende Intelligenz) able to rise above the partisanship of other social groups in the realm of ideas, as well as his recommendation in later writings of social planning by an elite of experts as the way of the future.23 In the early 1920s, however, Mannheim’s thinking was still oriented to a romantic anti-capitalist project of redeeming the fragmentation of society through philosophy and culture and he did not posit the sociology of knowledge as a political solution to the crisis of the bourgeois liberal state as he would in the very different circumstances of 1929. While he subsequently placed far more stress on the social determination of cultural production than on its redemptive powers, in his first years of German exile Mannheim advocated a verstehende (interpretative) approach to art and other cultural products grounded in the principles of the Diltheyan Geisteswissenschaften.24

The Mannheim texts I am particularly concerned with are two articles published in 1923 and 1924 respectively, that is, while their author was based at the University of Heidelberg and Hauser was studying in Berlin. The first of them (which may have been written even earlier) is titled ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,’ and was published in the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte. The second, ‘Historicism,’ was published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal edited by Edgar Jaffé, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, in which Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism had first appeared.25 What makes the ‘Historicism’ essay especially pertinent in relation to Hauser is that Mannheim takes as the paradigmatic statement of contemporary historicism Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1921) by the theologian, philosopher and historian Ernst Troeltsch, whose lectures Hauser attended in Berlin in the early 1920s and whose Die Sozialgeschichte der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912) he cites a number of times in The Social History of Art.26

For Mannheim, the historicist outlook is the Weltanschauung of the age in that it ‘not only organizes, like an invisible hand, the work of the Geisteswissenschaften, but also permeates everyday thinking’; it is an ‘organically developed basic pattern’ that has ‘the same universality as that of the religious Weltanschauung of the past.’27 Like all Weltanschauungen, it not only dominates ‘our inner reactions and our external responses, but also determines our forms of thought.’ All of which partly means that ‘our view of life has… become thoroughly sociological.’28 A basic consequence of this is a rejection of the static Enlightenment conception of reason with its false claims to universality and the replacement of epistemology by the philosophy of history.29 However, this does not make historicism itself a transcendent truth, since it will in turn be superseded: the ‘fact’ is that ‘sociology and all the other cultural science must necessarily always be written anew.’30 Truth has a dynamic character, although within a given ‘historical constellation only one perspectivistic conclusion can be correct’ and historicism is not an absolute relativism.31

From the perspective of historicism, ‘every segment of the spiritual-intellectual world… [is] in a state of flux and growth.’32 It is the role of historicist theory to establish an ‘ordering principle’ in the seeming anarchy of this flux, that is, to identify ‘an ultimate basic process which is the real “subject” undergoing the change.’ And this cannot be determined merely by establishing the causal relations behind events, but only by asking what they mean, since for Mannheim, following Dilthey, the problems of philosophy arise out of life, in which fact and value are inextricably interwoven.33 According to Mannheim, the decline of religion, ‘the hierarchical determination of all the departments of life in the Middle Ages,’ led to both the dominance of ‘an historico-philosophical vision’ and the emergence of seemingly autonomous spheres of life that have become hypostatized. Correspondingly, historicism undertakes to show that ‘the individual historico-cultural spheres, in art history, in the history of religion, in sociology, etc.,’ are each ‘an integrative part of a totality.’34 Such thinking wreaks havoc with all static categories of reason because it assumes that content and form are an inseparable unity, so that the model for thinking their relationship must be that of the Gestalt and the life and growth of plants. The ‘analyzing, atomizing, isolating tendency’ of the natural sciences, the model in which complex forms are compounded from ‘the simplest elements’ will not work since totalities are ‘primary and irreducible.’35

Drawing on Troeltsch’s Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), Mannheim points up the distinction between the historicism of Hegelianism (now ‘accentuated’ in the historicist Marxisms of Lukács and Karl Korsch)36 and that of Lebensphilosophie thinkers such as Dilthey and Simmel. Whereas
Hegel’s dialectic makes history ‘too logical,’ the irrationalist thinkers excel in ‘the intuitive assimilation of concrete phenomena,’ which permits them to establish ‘the subtle correlations between various manifestations of life within the same epoch.’ But they are unable to discern any ‘meaningful evolutionary pattern’ in history as a whole. The ‘conceptual- systematic method’ of the first is best suited to representing the ‘evolution of philosophy,’ but is not suited to the analysis of the history of art, for example. Any ‘extreme logification does… violence’ to spheres such as ‘religion and art, ethos and erotic,’ which are ‘actually understandable less as systems than as “parts” of the unified psychological Gestalt of the various epochs.’37

While Mannheim maintained (wrongly) that ‘technology or exact science…“progresses” in a straight line and merely develops one and the same system,’38 philosophy could be adequately comprehended only through a quasi-Hegelian dialectic, and ‘“irrational” fields of culture’ such as art through ‘Gestalt type concepts’ in which the key question was not that of causality but of the relation of part to whole. The measure of adequacy in such analysis was the degree of penetration into the object the analysis achieved, and the test here lay in an engagement with the ‘“material” evidence.’ From such a perspective Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness represented a one-sided ‘elaboration of the rational dialectic method, expressed in an absolutist language,’ and Mannheim – contradicting the key claim of that work – explicitly rejected the idea that any one class was ‘the bearer of the total movement.’ Mannheim’s assertion that ‘the harmony of the whole can be grasped only by taking into account the whole contrapuntal pattern of all the voices’ points towards his essentially liberal conception of politics and the parting of ways with his one-time mentor.39

If Mannheim’s ‘Historicism’ essay establishes the type of science to which art history belongs, ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’ speaks more directly of the discipline’s conceptual tools. Mannheim starts by saying that he will not provide ‘a substantive definition’ of the concept ‘based upon definite philosophical premises,’ since experience is resistant to theory’s categories and ‘many things are “given” of which no clear theoretical account can be rendered.’40 As an object of this type, the concept of Weltanschauung ‘lies outside the province of theory,’ or at least theory understood as ‘the methodological principles of the natural sciences.’41 This is because the ‘ultimate object of historical knowledge… is the historical process as a whole,’ and abstraction always tends to do violence to the ‘the concrete experiential whole.’42 Mannheim explicitly associates Dilthey with the formulation of these insights and with the spread of ‘the anti-rationalist movement’ in the Geisteswissenschaften.43 However, he also associates Weltanschaaung and the imperative to totalize specific phenomena into a ‘global historical scheme’ with the style researches of Riegl, which epitomize ‘the essence of the procedure of interpretation which has no counterpart in the natural sciences – the latter only “explain” things.’44

Theory, Mannheim argues in a fine phrase, ‘must achieve something else besides chilling the authentic experience with the cold blast of reflection.’ In fact, the life of the mind continually oscillates between theoretical and a-theoretical poles, and Weltanschauung belongs to the latter in that as ‘an unformed and wholly germinal entity,’ it is beyond rationality and exceeds every cultural objectification.45 So if Weltanschauung is defined as something ‘a-theoretical,’ the question that remains is ‘whether and how the a-theoretical can be “translated” into theory.’46 To this question Mannheim responds by asserting that while aesthetic and religious experiences are not formless, the types of form they take are radically different from those of theory as such.47 Works of art may be a-theoretical and a-logical, but they are not irrational in that they are endowed with ‘explicitly interpretable meaning.’48 They issue from a ‘submerged culture’ that is ‘meaninglike in structure’ and which can be apprehended through ‘intellectual intuition.’49

In a schema that anticipates Panofsky’s tripartite levels of analysis in Studies in Iconology,50 Mannheim proposes that there are three types of meaning in the ‘intentional object’: (1) an ‘objective meaning,’ which in the visual arts is the ‘purely visual content’ as defined by Konrad Fiedler’s notion of ‘pure visibility’ – although since this is a meaning it is not simply optical and Mannheim does not propose ‘some unique and universally valid “visual universe”.’51 (2) ‘Expressive meaning,’ which comprises ‘a second stratum of meaning superimposed, as it were’ upon the first, and arising from the specific experiences of the individual subject.52 It is inescapably historical and has to be analyzed as such.53 (3) ‘Documentary meaning,’ which is distinguished from ‘expressiveintentional’ meaning by the fact it is unlikely to be wholly present to our consciousness and may indeed appear strange to us. This is the Weltanschauung, the totality that represents the ‘“genius” or “spirit”’ of an epoch,54 as it is present in the ‘“ethos” of the subject which manifests itself in artistic creation.’55 Documentary meaning pervades the work in its entirety and can be arrived at through fragmentary aspects of it, since in documentary interpretation, ‘we understand the whole from the part, and the part from the whole.’56 Such interpretations are so ‘profoundly influenced’ by the positioning of the interpreter in his or her own culture that they must be ‘performed anew in each period.’

If, as Mannheim claimed, Weltanschauung was a kind of ‘submerged culture which also is meaninglike in structure,’ then it was ‘located beyond the level of cultural objectification’ and could not be ‘conveyed by any of the cultural spheres taken in isolation.’ This left the problem of how to develop concepts that would be applicable across the whole range of cultural spheres, and be pertinent to ‘art as well as literature, philosophy as well as political ideology, and so on.’57 Dilthey’s model of Weltanschauungen was too narrowly philosophical to be of much use in the ‘elucidation of a-theoretical fields’ such as the visual arts and in any case Dilthey had explicitly denied the validity of philosophical models in interpreting the visual arts of the modern period.58 To Mannheim, it seemed more promising to ‘start from art and analyze all other fields of culture in terms of concepts derived from a study of plastic arts.’59 This sounds today like a startling claim, but when we consider it in relation to the quotation from Lukács with which I began, one can see that from the perspective of early twentieth-century romantic anti-capitalism it did not appear so. As an early step in the realization of such a method, Mannheim cites Riegl’s ‘heroic’ attempt to link the developmental stages of late Roman art to Weltanschauung in his Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie. But he found Riegl’s exposition too logical and theoretical, lacking in that quality of vital intuition that linked part to whole and whole to part.60 Instead he recommended the example of ‘“synthesizing” historians’ such as Dvořák and Max Weber, who though they were specialists in particular fields, had ‘a strong sense of universal history which impels them to correlate their chosen subject with the “total constellation.”’ While Weber sought to establish the relation between ‘various cultural fields’ in terms of ‘causality’ and ‘function’ – and Mannheim acknowledged such explanations had their place – he made clear that Dvořák, with his preference for ‘correspondence’ or ‘parallelism,’ practiced the kind of interpretative method that was both distinctive of the Geisteswissenschaften and fundamental to their truth claims.61

Earlier in the essay, Mannheim had illustrated his claim that in documentary interpretation ‘we understand the whole from the part and the part form the whole’ through Dvořák’s argument concerning the significance of the compositional structure in El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586; Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain) in an article published in the same issue of the Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, where ‘an exposition of the layer of objective meaning in the shaping of both the subject-matter and the medium is immediately followed by a specification of the corresponding documentary meaning.’62 According to Dvořák, the disappearance in El Greco’s picture – and other works by him – of ‘the solid spacious structure, which, since Giotto, had formed the essential basis of all pictorial representation,’ together with their anti-naturalism and visionary qualities, were symptomatic of the artist having undergone a spiritual crisis symptomatic of the larger religious and theological crisis of the Reformation, one that led to ‘skepticism and doubt as to the value of any theory of moral law based on reason, and to a keen awareness of the limitations of man’s perception and the relativity of knowledge.’ 63 That which found expression in mannerism was ‘not something limited to art,’ but was rather ‘the very criterion’ of the artist’s age.64

Dvořák’s essay supported Mannheim’s thesis that ‘to understand the spirit of an age we must fall back on the spirit of our own,’ so that documentary interpretation must be ‘performed anew in each period.’ At several points Dvořák remarked on the similarity he perceived between the spiritual crisis of the fifteenth century and that of his own time – the former issuing in a revulsion against the ‘widespread spirit of materialism’ within the church and the latter in a revulsion against capitalism.65 He concluded by suggesting that two centuries dominated by ‘the natural sciences… mathematical thought and a superstitious regard for causality, for technical development and the mechanization of culture’ explained the long-term neglect of El Greco.

Correspondingly, it was contemporary circumstances that made possible the reappraisal of his art and of mannerism more generally, since ‘today this materialistic culture is approaching its end.’ In both art and literature there had been ‘a turning towards a spirituality freed from all dependence on naturalism, a tendency similar to that of the Middle Ages and the mannerist period.’66 Dvořák was of course referring to Expressionism; in 1921 he wrote a foreward to a book of reproductions of Kokoschka’s work.67

* * * *

This evaluation of mannerism seems to have made an enduring impression on Hauser, who reiterated Dvořák’s key claims in The Social History of Art, and then expanded on them at length in his 1964 book Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art.68 In an interview of 1973 Hauser recalled that initially art history had been for him a history of forms and structures on the Wölfflinian model, and that he began to comprehend the visual arts as a historical product only through the influence of Dvořák’s writings. In retrospect Hauser judged Dvořák ‘a thoroughly undialectical thinker,’ an art historian who for all his sensitivity in analyses of form and expression lacked any sense of art’s sociological grounding.69 Nonetheless, in his 1964 book he credited Dvořák with the fundamental insight that mannerism could not be comprehended solely as a reversion to a medieval ‘other-worldliness,’ and that its spiritual side was interlocked with ‘the empiricism of the new scientific age.’70 The movement thus represented a contradictory unity – ‘a union of apparently irreconcilable opposites’ – that encompassed artists as different as El Greco, Bruegel, and Bronzino, and entailed conflictual stylistic elements of both ‘naturalism and formalism,’ corresponding to the dual impulses of ‘sensuousness and transcendentalism.’71

Hauser’s fundamental claim is that ‘the spirit of modern times’ did not begin in the Renaissance, but in the crisis or ‘break-up’ of Renaissance humanism.72 Out of the ruins left when this ‘faith in man’ collapsed, ‘there arose the anti-humanist spirit of the Reformation, of Machiavellism, and of the mannerist sense of life.’73 In a kind of dialectical movement, the ‘spirit of modern times’ is like the Renaissance (and unlike that of medieval times) in being ‘rationalist, empirical, anti-traditionalist, and individualist,’ but is also unlike it in that ‘it tends irresistibly towards irrationalism, anti-naturalism, traditionalism, and anti-individualism,’ leading to repeated crises.74 In line with the conception of Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte – to borrow Dvořák’s term – Hauser posited what is essentially a Weltanschauung that stretched across the domains of what would come to be called the natural sciences, philosophy, religion, and politics, and encompassed equally the visual arts, literature, and theatre. Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, Luther, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Donne and Shakespeare – the ‘first modern thinkers’75 – are as much mannerists as Pontormo, Parmigianino, El Greco, and Tintoretto. As if echoing Mannheim, he claimed that priority was only given to the visual arts because in no other field can ‘the relevant historical processes be so immediately and vividly displayed.’76

For Hauser, ‘the key to mannerism’ is alienation. Following Werner Sombart, he dated the beginnings of capitalist economic relations to around 1300 and presented the Renaissance as corresponding to the first stages of the capitalist Weltanschauung. Mannerism, by contrast, coincided with the moment at which capitalist accumulation first became ‘perceptible’ in the sixteenth century, that is, when ‘capitalism in the real sense of the word’ came into being. And that which really marked out the capitalist economy was not so much changes in the structure of economic relations as the ‘completely new outlook’ of ‘economic rationalism,’ which superseded any respect for tradition and led to a culture in which ‘every factor in the process of production was considered on material grounds alone,’ quite independent of larger human concerns. Increasingly viewed solely in terms of the abstractions of the market, the commodity’s value became divorced from the complex tissue of human relations through which it was produced. Not only is this a position that in its stress on rationalization is as much indebted to Weber and Simmel as to Marx, it also renders capitalism inseparable from Weltanschauung and ‘a much broader trend of the age towards complication and abstraction.’ 77

Already in the sixteenth century, then, the reification of life was so advanced that the products of human action assumed an apparent autonomy that rendered human beings dependent on their own creations, so that ‘the self loses itself in its objectifications.’ Essentially, ‘alienation means the loss of the wholeness or… the universal nature of man’ in that ‘men whose world is still homogenous and undivided are not yet alienated and are still whole.’ To face a world made up of ‘independent and autonomous cultural phenomena’ such as the state, the economy, the sciences and art, is to experience it as a fragmented and alienated self.78 For Hauser, such alienation is seen ‘in its most unmistakable form’ in the portraits of Bronzino, Salviati, or Coello, with their ‘cool, rigid, glassy expressions’ and ‘lifeless “armour-like” masks,’ which suggest both ‘mystery’ and ‘a complete withdrawal from the world.’ Lack of concern with character representation is matched by the care lavished on ‘incidentals,’ with the result that ‘it is impossible to feel at home among the things of this world or to make friends with them.’79

A key register of the mannerist outlook is the representation of space. Thus, discussing how murals by Andrea del Sarto in the courtyard of the Compagnia dello Scalzo prepared the way for the treatment of space in Pontormo’s work, Hauser pointed to their effect of spatial dissolution: ‘The principal figures are displaced to one side, and unimportant subsidiary figures are excessively emphasized by assonances or contrasts; symmetrical and axial arrangement is disturbed by lights irregularly distributed over the whole composition; and the main action takes place in a shallow plane right in the foreground.’ These features combine to impart ‘an abstract, unreal, inhospitable character to space, which becomes a medium in which men move as in an alien world; figure and space, man and his environment, do not really belong together.’80 Hauser was clear that the space of mannerist painting cannot correspond to the infinite space of the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution; one must wait for the landscape space of baroque art to find an equivalent to that. However, following Dvořák, he saw the landscapes of both Bruegel and Tintoretto as figuring a new ‘cosmographical vision’ that ‘burst the bonds of the category of space in classical painting.’81 In Tintoretto’s case it is space presented ‘on a scale that surpasses ordinary experience,’ but that does not for all that ‘overstep the limits of the human intelligence and imagination.’82

Although Hauser presented the depersonalization of social and legal relations and the rise of bureaucratic institutions as causes of alienation, he posited the key to its specifically modern form of reification in explicitly Marxist terms, as arising from the fetishism of commodities. This is truly a Weltanschauung in that ‘the way of thinking of the whole of society was based on the ideology of commodities.’ Alienation entered into artistic production too, in that the middle years of the sixteenth century saw the beginnings of the art trade and the subjection of art itself to the commodity form. Correspondingly, it is the period that represents ‘the birth hour’ of the modern artist.83 The new uncertainty and contradictoriness in the realm of ideas was matched by an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in relation to artistic style; for the first time in the history of art there was no single artistic path ahead for artists, and the question of choice between different styles became acutely problematical.84 This unsettled the relationship between the individual personality of the artist and the character of his works.85

Following Dvořák, Hauser claimed that it was similarities between the crisis of the Renaissance and his own times that had made the ‘rehabilitation’ of mannerism possible. Expressionism, surrealism and abstract art permitted the qualities of earlier ‘non-naturalistic and anti-naturalistic art’ (art that does not set out from nature but from earlier art) to be valued.86 Indeed, modernism and mannerism share a kindred attitude to medium in that in both ‘the instrument of expression and the element in which the representation moves is to an extent end as well as means, content as well as form,’ with the result that ‘all kinds of mannerist representation are in a sense metaphorical.’87 Although Hauser made this point more in relation to literary style than style in the visual arts, he also asserted – as indeed the spirit of holistic analysis required – that metaphor ‘more or less performs the function of irrational treatment of space, distorted proportions, and twisted forms in the visual arts.’88

Particularly revealing of Hauser’s relationship to Lukács’s pre-Marxist vision is his characterization of the ‘symbolic naturalism’ of Bruegel’s work, with which, he claimed, the history of modern art began. Bruegel’s style ‘originates in the mannerist view of life, its dualism, its dialectic, its paradoxical combination of opposites, and involves on the one hand the complete overthrow of the blissfully naïve faith, say, of the Homeric age in the homogeneity of things, the meaningfulness of life, and the presence of the gods in this world, and on the other the end of the clean and neat distinction drawn by medieval Christianity between the true and the false, the real and unreal. The world is no longer meaningful just because it exists, as in Homer, and works of art are not the truer the more they depart from ordinary reality, as in the Middle Ages. But, because of their imperfection and inherent meaninglessness, they point towards a fuller and more meaningful whole, which is not there for the taking, but has to be striven for.’ 89 This was clearly written with the argument of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel in mind, but with the difference that while shortly after the composition of that work in 1914-15 Lukács came to the view that the fate of humanity under the condition of modernity could be remedied – with negative implications for his evaluation of modernist art – Hauser was less confident about human prospects, leading him to a position that was more affirmative of modernism’s (and mannerism’s) Weltanschauung.

At two points in the book Hauser made clear that his defense of mannerism and modernism was directed against Lukács, something that in any case might be guessed from his long enthusiastic analyses of Proust and Kafka.90 Thus, near the outset, he conceded that while irrationalism in philosophy and science led to what Lukács called ‘the destruction of reason,’ the ‘artistic intelligence’ and the ‘theoretical intelligence’ are quite different things, so that irrationalism in the realm of philosophy and political thought does not necessarily lead to bad art, as ‘left wing art criticism’ too often assumed.91 In contrast to the classical model of the work of art as a ‘synthesis’ and a whole, Hauser emphasized the fragmentary character of the mannerist artwork: ‘In contrast to this synthesis, the objective of an anti-classical mannerist work of art is the analysis of reality. Its aim is not the seizure of any essence, or the condensation of the separate aspects of reality into a compact whole; instead it aspires to riches, multiplicity, variety, and exquisiteness in the things to be rendered. It moves for preference on the periphery of the area of life with which it is concerned, and not only in order to include as many original elements as possible, but also to indicate that the life it renders has no centre anywhere. A mannerist work is not so much a picture of reality as a collection of contributions to such a picture.’92 As if to affront the ideologues of Socialist Realism, in addition to treating aestheticism and surrealism as stages in a revival of the mannerist sensibility appropriate to the age, Hauser explicitly affirmed the formalism of mannerist art, interpreting it in a quite different way from its realist critics, not as reflecting a ‘belief in the predominance of form over matter,’ but as a ‘compensation, or rather an overcompensation’ for the lack of a sense of order in the social world.93 This is not to say that mannerism is only ‘a symptom and product of alienation… an art that has become soulless, extroverted and shallow.’ Although there may be many works that unreflexively manifest alienation, the artist’s sense of his alienation could also lead to ‘the most profoundly self-revelatory creations,’ becoming the ‘raw material’ of the work – a conclusion that points towards an Adornian rather than a Lukácsian aesthetic.94

Despite all his efforts to connect the sixteenth century to the present, when Hauser’s Mannerism was published in English in 1965, it seemed a book out of time – as Francis Haskell observed in an acerbic review.95 Seemingly unaware of much recent literature, Hauser appeared locked in the mindset of an earlier age of German language art historicalscholarship. Historians in the English-speaking world were becoming increasingly skeptical of mannerism as a category; John Sherman’s 1967 study – which made no reference to Hauser’s work – seems like the concept’s last hurrah.96 Moreover, to read through Hauser’s endnotes to The Social History of Art or Mannerism is to be confronted everywhere with the names of Simmel, Sombart, Troeltsch, and the Webers. In other words, not just with Marxists but with representatives of the tradition of German social thought whose tenor Michael Löwy has described as one of ‘resigned romanticism,’97 to characterize its simultaneous aversion to and resignation before capitalist development. Such thinking in all its philosophical complexity was deeply alien to British empiricist art history. But Haskell was certainly correct that Hauser’s grand generalizations needed to be tested against detailed research of individual cases. Confident in the principle of holistic critique Mannheim had laid out in the early 1920s, Hauser had delivered a tour de force of premature totalization.98 The immediate future of the social history of art lay not with such grand ‘intuitive analogies between form and ideological content’ as T.J. Clark put it, but with detailed studies of ‘the network of real complex relations’ between them and the ‘concrete transactions’ on which they rested.99

Yet despite the seeming anachronisms of Hauser’s argument and his failure to support his claims with detailed analyses of patronage relations or other evidence, even Haskell acknowledged that the problems he tried to tackle ‘are amongst the most interesting and important that can face any student of cultural history.’100 And the challenge of what Clark called Lukács’s ‘difficult and fertile thesis’ remains for us today. If its realization seems more difficult than ever – and vastly more complex than Hauser imagined – that may be because the acute fragmentation of our own world has made us too leery of totalizing critique despite the elusive truths it promises.

NOTES
1. T.J. Clark, ‘The Conditions of Artistic Creation,’ Times Literary Supplement (24 May 1974): pp. 561-2; Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. Rodney Livingstone (1923; London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 153.
2. This essay began life as a paper delivered at the Colloque international: ‘L’histoire de l’art:
généalogies et enjeux d’une pratique,’ Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 11 December 2009.
3. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, tr. Arnold Hauser and Stanley Godman, 2 vols.
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).
4. The most compendious account of romantic anti-capitalism is Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre,
Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, tr. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001).
5. My presentation of Dilthey draws heavily on Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For Dilthey’s conception of Weltanschauung, see Dilthey’s Philosophy of Existence: Introduction to Weltanschauungslehre, tr. William Kluback and Martin Weinbaum (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957). I have followed Makkreel’s translations of most of Dilthey’s key terms.
6. For the chapters on Goethe and Hölderlin, see Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf
A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Selected Works, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), part 2. Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, tr. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1974).
7. In the Curriculum Vitae Lukács prepared to support his bid for Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg in 1918. See Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tar (ed.), Georg Lukács: Selected Correspondence, 1902-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 286.
8. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, tr. Peter Palmer (1954; London: Merlin Press, 1980), pp. 4, 434.
9. Ibid., pp. 430, 432-4, 440.
10. Ibid., p. 436.
11. Ibid., p. 439.
12. Michael Löwy, George Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism, tr. Patrick Camiller(London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 169-70, 170 n.7.
13. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, x, xiv. For Lukács and romantic anti-capitalism, see Michael Löwy, ‘Naphta or Settembrini? Lukács and Romantic Anticapitalism,’ New German Critique 42 (Fall 1987), pp. 17-31.
14. Löwy, Georg Lukács, p. 86; Arnold Hauser, Im Gespräch mit Georg Lukács (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1978), p. 54. The fullest picture of the circle is given in Éva Karádi and Erzseébet Vezér (ed.), Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis (Frankfurt a.M.: Sendler, 1985).
15. Hauser, Im Gespräch, pp. 29, 49. Although Mannheim’s published correspondence provides testimony of his warm friendships with the art historians Lajos Fülep and Charles de Tolnay (both members of the Sonntagskreis) it contains no mention of Hauser. See Selected Correspondence (1911-1946) of Karl Mannheim, Scientist, Philosopher, and Sociologist, ed. Éva Gábor (Lewiston: Edward Mellen Press, 2003). Neither does Hauser feature in the most substantial historical account of his intellectual formation: Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics, and Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
16. Hauser, Im Gespräch, p. 112.
17. This is confirmed by the tone of the eight letters from Mannheim from 1910-16 in Georg Lukács: Selected Correspondence. On Mannheim and Lukács, see David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, Karl Mannheim (Chichester: Ellis Horwood Ltd., and London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1984), pp. 35-9.
18. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico- Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 12-13.In 1887, Dilthey had described the ‘theory of the novel’ as ‘the most pressing and important task of contemporary poetics’ – Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, p. 172. Mannheim’s review of The Theory of the Novel reveals just how intellectually close he and Lukács were at this time. See From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, second edition, introduced by Volker Meja and David Kettler (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1993),pp. 131-35.
19. Hauser, Im Gespräch, p. 58. For a rather different picture, see Michael Löwy, ‘Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács. The Lost Heritage of Heretical Historicism,’ in Frank Benseler and Werner Jung (ed.), Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg- Lukács-Gesellschaft, vol. 6 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002), pp. 61-77. Loader emphasizes their intellectual differences – see Intellectual Development, pp. 62-65, 96-101.
20. For this phase in their lives, see David Kettler, Marxismus und Kultur. Mannheim und Lukács in den ungarischen Revolutionen 1918/19 (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967).
21. Hauser, Im Gespräch, pp. 37-38, 115, 14, 16. Significantly, Hauser rejected Mannheim’s notion of a free-floating intelligentsia (pp. 43-44).
22. The English edition, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936), differs in important respects from original German text. See Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, Karl Mannheim, pp. 111-16; Loader, Intellectual Development, pp. 95-96. Mannheim was a student and then Privatdozent at Heidelberg from 1922-30.
23. Lukács, Destruction, pp. 632-41.
24. For Mannheim’s intellectual trajectory in this period, see Loader, Intellectual Development, chapters 2-4. Although Mannheim presents Ideologie und Utopie as an attempt to define a science of politics, romantic and holistic themes remained central to his thinking, and correspondingly Weltanschauung continued to be part of his conceptual armoury.
25. ‘Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation’ and ‘Historismus,’ to give them their German titles, in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 33-83, 84-133. The German text of the former is reprinted in Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Berlin and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1964), pp.91-154.
26. Mannheim, Essays, p. 97-108. For Troeltsch, see Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking, tr. Hayden V. White (London: Merlin Press, 1959), chapter 2.
27. Mannheim, Essays, pp. 84, 85.
28. Ibid., pp. 84, 85.
29. Ibid., pp. 87-8, 91, 97. Cf. p. 100.
30. Ibid., p. 126.
31. Ibid., pp. 130, 104-5. My emphasis.
32. Ibid., p. 86.
33. Ibid., pp. 86, 87.
34. Ibid., pp. 94, 95.
35. Ibid., pp. 91-2, 95-6.
36. Ibid., p. 106 n.2.
37. Ibid., pp. 106, 107, 109. 111.
38. Ibid., pp. 116-17.
39. Ibid., pp. 121, 122-23, 124, 125.
40. Ibid., pp. 33, 39.
41. Ibid., pp. 36, 37.
42. Ibid., pp. 34, 36.
43. Ibid., p. 38.
44. Ibid., p. 36.
45. Ibid., pp. 40, 41, 42.
46. Ibid., pp. 38, 39.
47. Ibid., p. 39.
48. Ibid., p. 41.
49. Ibid., pp. 66, 67.
50. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Introductory,’ in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp. 3-31. Mannheim refers to Panofsky’s writings twice in the essay – Mannheim, Essays, pp. 58 n.1, 73, n.1. For the interplay of Panofsky and Mannheim, see Joan Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19, no.3 (Spring 1993), pp. 534-66.
51. Ibid., pp. 43, 51.
52. Ibid., pp. 46-47.
53. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
54. Ibid., p. 48.
55. Ibid., pp. 55, 56, 58.
56. Ibid., p. 74. Dilthey was profoundly influenced by the hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher –on whom much of his early scholarly work focused – but advocated a more open and less deterministic theory. See Makkreel, Dilthey, pp. 255-72.
57. Mannheim, Essays, pp. 66, 74.
58. Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, p. 5. On the attempt of his student Herman Nohl to correlate pictorial styles with Weltanschauungen, see Makkreel, Dilthey, pp. 410-12.
59. Mannheim, Essays, pp. 75, 76.
60. Ibid., pp. 76-80.
61. Ibid., pp. 80-82.
62. Ibid., p. 56 n.1. Mannheim refers to the lecture ‘Über Greco und den Manierismus’, published in the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 1 (XV), 1921/22, and reprinted in a revised form in Dvořák’s Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1924), pp. 261-76. See Max Dvořák, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, tr. John Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), chapter 6. For Dvořák, see Matthew Rampley’s fine article ‘Max Dvořák: Art History and the Crisis of Modernity,’ Art History 26, no.2 (April 2003), pp. 214-37.
63. Dvořák, History of Art, pp. 98, 99.
64. Ibid., p. 104.
65. Ibid., pp. 103, 104.
66. Ibid., p. 108.
67. ‘Vorwort’, in Oskar Kokoschka: Variationen über ein Thema (Vienna: Richard Lányi, 1921). On the perceived affinity between Expressionism and Gothic, see Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst, Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie 1911-1925 (Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1990).
68. Arnold Hauser, Die Manierismus. Der Krise der Renaissance und der Ursprung der modernen Kunst (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1964); Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, tr. Eric Mosbacher (1965; Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1986).
69. Hauser, Im Gespräch, p. 35.
70. Hauser, Mannerism, p. 16.
71. Ibid., pp. 12, 17.
72. Ibid., p. 31.
73. Ibid., pp. 7, 8.
74. Ibid., p. 33.
75. Ibid., p. 36.
76. Ibid., pp. xvliii-xix.
77. Ibid., p. 55-56.
78. Ibid., pp. 95-96. See also pp. 105-08, 108.
79. Ibid., p. 114. Cf. pp. 119-200.
80. Ibid, p. 189.
81. Ibid., pp. 230, 51.
82. Ibid., p. 230.
83. Ibid., p. 102.
84. Ibid., pp. 23-4, 28.
85. Ibid., p. 33.
86. Ibid., pp. 3-4, 29, 40.
87. Ibid., pp. 286, 291.
88. Ibid., p. 291.
89. Ibid., pp. 245-6. Cf. p. 295.
90. Lukács acknowledged the greatness of both authors, but argued that their vision of contemporary society was partial and limited. See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, tr. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1963).
91. Hauser, Mannerism, pp. 15-16.
92. Ibid., p. 25.
93. Ibid., p. 27.
94. Ibid., p. 111.
95. Francis Haskell, ‘Generalisations,’ Encounter, vol. 25, no. 1 (July 1965), pp. 78-82.
96. John Sherman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967).
97. Löwy, Georg Lukács, pp. 30-49.
98. Ironically, Hauser acknowledged the dangers of this – Mannerism, p. 108.
99. T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 10, 12.
100. Haskell, ‘Generalisations,’ p. 80

These preoccupations and production methods set her practice at odds with dominant trends in the contemporary art world and recommend her work to critical curiosity. For There Is Always Something More Important, the artist has brought together a body of sculpture, painting, video and photographic works produced between 2010 and 2014. Although the work on show was made neither all at once, nor all for this show, the effect is pleasingly unified. Notwithstanding this formal and conceptual congruity, we leave the gallery perturbed by a sense of notquiteness, prickled by a semi-sated suspicion that something promised has been not entirely delivered. And it is exactly that state – of frozen imminence, irked by foreclosed incipience – that is, I believe, what Neudecker seeks to induce in her audience.

Entering the gallery, it is impossible not to be struck by the 2012 sculpture that gives the exhibition its name. A fibre-glass glacier stands proud on the gallery floor. Opaquely white, faintly stained with turquoise in reflection of an absent sky, it trails a fragmented coda of broken glacier bits. At both front and back, the awesome ice-mass shows a surgically sheer aspect. Reminiscent of theatrical or TV sets, these flats make perverse the extraordinary ‘authenticity’ of the craggy finish elsewhere attained. Consummately carved textural exactitude is rendered absurd by blatantly machinic perfection. There is no viewing point from which these blank facie cannot be seen; no vista from which the spectacle looks whole. Solicited to suspend disbelief, to give in to illusionistic spectacle and see a glacier, the viewer is forced simultaneously to keep in view the intractable evidence of the fraud. It tantalizes us with a prospect of sublime experience and, in denying us its consummation, makes us uncomfortably aware of the drive generating that desire.

The glacier is at once notionally massive and physically too small: its proportions modeled on a banalizingly human scale. On the wall directly behind it two 10.2 inch monitors are mounted – further blighting the already compromised view. They show a two-channel video depicting a pair of glacier-populated seascapes. Soundtracked by a broad blur of boat engines, wind, and water, the human population absent from both object and images is aurally invoked by the incidental noise of their vessels and the unfiltered harvestings of their recording devices.

To the right, Recent Futures, twelve sets of paired giclée prints present 24 crayon-adjusted photographs of the arctic sky – recalling, in their solar focus, earlier works such as Another Day (2000). The mixed-media works (drawings, and pinhole, polaroid and over-painted photographs) of Between Two Tides (2014) occupy other walls. As well as land, sea and skyscapes, this constellation of 2D works includes various drawn and painted studies made by the artist in the course of her journey to the Arctic. Some of these images have been obscured or defaced by drips or splatters. Others, made on gridded paper, connote scientific experiment while documentary-style photographs from the artist’s expedition to Greenland mix exteriors of Inuit dwellings with intimate shots of domestic interiors. In images which immediately evoke the dubious ethics and nostalgic discourses of anthropological travelogues, self-consciously candid portraits of traditional familial lifeways are depicted in clichéd juxtaposition with jarring traces of consumer capitalism.

In an antechamber adjoining the primary space, another of Neudecker’s astonishing topographical effigies is installed. A tiny mauve and violet mountain range is connected via four slender steel stanchions to a white cenotaph. This sits, in turn, atop a heavy wooden box. Thus triply reified (or more, if we count the bevelled strata of the intermediate layer), the meticulously detailed mass appears to float even as it exposes the tripartite architecture of its elevation. This magic mountain-come-to-earth is marked, as per Neudecker’s custom, with the traces of human intervention: a series of tiny posts (indicators of altitude) protrude from a number of its peaks.

Back in the main room, three components (1, 3, 4) of the five-channel video installation, Horizontal Vertical (2013), are installed on three small screens. The deep-sea footage they show was filmed by remotely operated vehicles as part of a research project developed in collaboration with Neudecker by the Oxford University marine biologist, Dr. Alex Rogers. All three videos show the sea-floor, and not much else – eschewing, with their tight vertical frame, any sense of the immense depth (3,000 metres below) at which they were gathered. One (no.3) is shot at a disorientatingly oblique angle. The fourth, in which the camera seems to move with increased kinetic agency, has apparently been reversed, as fish swim backwards across the screen. Wavering images evocative of an abstract flat-bed picture plane are intermittently intruded upon. Moving slowly over the subaqua surface, we see rocks, sea urchins, a scintillatingly metallic shoal of fish, seagrasses, indistinctly sparkly floating particles, and an unexpectedly high proportion of man-made objects: pipes, cages, machine-parts. In addition to these relics of past industry, the camera’s coppery armature frequently comes into view, and flickering red dots remind us of the recording technologies by which the footage was collected. Whereas the soundtrack of the two-channel video was temporally coherent with the visuals it accompanied, the soundscape in this instance is constituted of sounds collected during the editing process. The sounds of elsewhere, added after the fact, these traffic sounds, muffled heartbeats and other ambient urban humdrum overlay the moving images with banal incongruities. Sonically citing the extradiegetic context of the production process, this soundtrack draws attention yet again to the subjective interventions made by an unseen, but repeatedly implicated, human editor. Recently, Neudecker described a move away from a practice based on research ‘that is looking at representations, photographs, paintings and other data’ and towards the ‘subjective experience that was so fundamental to the Romantic Sublime of the 19th Century’. These videos articulate that subjective perception and its processes of re-presentation.

The last piece, Dark Years Away (2013) comprises a projected video (6 mins) below which a small monitor plays another video (5 mins). The dark box within which it is housed has been fitted out with a grey, nylon office carpet: introduced, presumably, to absorb both sound and any stray resonances of transcendental experience. This time, the visuals are accompanied by a hyperbolically epic and spacey classical score by Peteris Vasks. Back once again, at the bottom of the south-west Indian Ocean, we watch a looped sequence in which a remotely operated machine scoops matter, ineffectually, from the seafloor. Acting to no obvious end, it scrapes clumsily, sending sprays of dust into a slow-settling motion. The disturbed silt suspension repeatedly obscures our view of the robotic arm’s ineffable functioning. Humans are active in this submarine sector too, then, but it is unclear what, if anything, they are achieving there. The soundtrack invites the listener to experience an epic encounter with the sublime, even as the Sisyphean repetition onscreen rescinds that invitation. Sonically cued to anticipate sight – if not of infinitude then at least of some deep-sea leviathan – we witness only the grasping of a mechanical claw.

On the floor the lower monitor relays a still less dynamic scene. In footage from another zone, suspended stuff floats, we see again the bracket supporting the recording device and, too, the visual markers (red guide lights, lines of light) of its operation. Relaying footage from a quiet zone, the monitor proposes itself as a scientific ‘control’ of a sort: a suggestion overturned by the unyielding arbitrariness of its content. Again, as in Horizontal Vertical, we are denied the specular experience of the expanse available to the camera’s lens. The frame fixates on a distinctly non-spectacular scene. Recalling her first experience of the Arctic landscape, Neudecker writes: ‘Somehow the sockets of my eyes suddenly seem to be too small, close, too tight and deep. I want to have 360-degree vision. Needless to say: my camera lens frames and crops everything way too small and too tightly’. As Eszter Barbarczy has observed, ‘If there is one great enemy of Romanticism, it is containment’, and Neudecker frequently re-enacts this opposition.

There is Always Something More Important might be read as the concrete evocation of this condition of sensory inadequacy: a playful dramatization of the impossibility of seeing all of it, all of the time. There is no way adequately to ‘take in’ the sublime spectacle of an Arctic seascape; no hope for a single viewer, a single set of senses, to encompass the totality of such immense topographies – below or above sea level. Even the ideal monadic wanderer of the 19th century Romantic imagination is doomed, like that hopelessly scraping mechanical claw, to fail in this effort. What we get instead, and what we can absorb, is a semi-shoddy fibreglass replica, an utterly boring dig at the murky bottom of the sea. This exhibition constructs a viewing and, crucially, a listening regime that responds to the futility of the attempt to grasp what is, categorically, beyond us. Neudecker’s work does not just point up the fallacy of sublime experience. It compels our confounded recognition – Over And Over, Again And Again and contra the evidence assembled – of the will to the sublime.

Likewise he doesn’t hunt and begins to starve. The previously astonishing ability to change colour and shape to blend in with the surrounding environment dims. Coordination of those remarkable, labile tentacles also degrades as movement slows and the process of rapid senescence begins. He too will be dead very soon.

It’s tempting, of course, to read the condition of octopuses as an allegory for the human condition, especially, perhaps, for people lurching reluctantly away from youth toward their own senescence. Octopuses are, after all, the most intelligent invertebrates in the world, likely to have the cognitive capacity of a 4-year-old human. They have a rich aesthetic life and possess highly developed optical, tactile and (their equivalent of) olfactory systems. Like humans they are known to decorate their living spaces. But it’s not that straightforward to map the human onto the animal world. Animals and their environments are radically different to us humans and our environments; and whilst their behaviours and milieus might point toward some strange residual animal core of our own natures, there remains a weirdness to animals’ worlds which means they will, at least in part, remain untamed by narratives and metaphor.

There are no octopuses in Fieldworks but it does bring the audience face-to-face with a menagerie of other beasts and their habitats. This smart, witty and handsome show curated by Chris Clarke (senior curator at the Glucksman) is clustered around several well-chosen themes all pertinent to the relationships and acts of reciprocal observation taking place between animals, humans and their respective environments. And it looks great. Clarke has used the architecture to the show’s advantage, with many works gesturing through the large windows to the green and leafy grounds of UCC which surround the building. Another benefit of the university setting that’s been well used is its ecology of research and education. Here Clarke has also been canny in his use of a light touch that has resisted didacticism or the heavy-handed illustration of theories. Instead the show is presented in the spirit of fascination with, and playful investigation into, animal worlds. All the work is, thankfully, not too reverential to its subject matter(s) but rather uses creaturely concerns as jumping-off points into speculations on the relationships between animals and their habitats; each other; humans; and, consequently, humans to one another.

Several artists look at those acts of observation that go back and forth between animals and humans. Chris Marker’s modest yet beautiful little films show animals in their surroundings, including his own cat lolling on a keyboard, owls and creatures in a zoo. The divide between human and animal observation is underwritten by the quality of both the video and accompanying treated electronic sound, which feel lossy and crummy to today’s ears and hence declare their artificiality. Adam Chodzko presents photographs which hint, through the covert surveillance of nocturnal activities, that some sort of unsanctioned behaviour is going on, whilst in Jochen Lempert’s black and white documentary images creatures are tiny, almost insignificant specks amidst indistinct, quotidian landscapes. This difficulty in observing natural activities is revisited by Ho Rui An’s film in which two filmmakers struggle against annoying human interruptions to film some deer. In this context Ruth van Beek’s odd and choppy photo-collages, in which animals are twisted into themselves; Julia Schmid’s delicate yet large drawings; and Ciarán Murphy’s exquisite painting of birds, beasts and display cabinets, presented through muted palettes and delicate details, all also suggest that acts of observation are going on which may or may not be inhuman. Other artists reflect on the patterns and orders that can be produced through these acts of observation, including Vanessa Safavi’s scattering of stuffed birds around a gallery wall, and Petra Ferianocova’s reprinting of colour photos of birds taken by a relative in Africa in the 1970s to produce an off-kilter yet intimate taxonomy. Equally personal is Petrit Halilaj’s installation (including a bird sculpted from cow dung, soil and metal, in front of a faded fragment of a diorama) drawn from objects such as inventory cards borrowed from the Natural History Museum of Kosovo. He grew up during the Serbian-Kosovar war and spent time as a refugee in Albania. His work points to the many different histories and borders (personal, national, ethnic) that, whilst traumatic for humans, animals may freely range across.

Other artists find ways to imagine the environments in which these two-way acts of observation might take place. Flo Maak, for instance, uses c-prints and manipulated images to produce impossible spaces in which various beasts sit, somewhat uneasily, in artificial scenarios. Wesley Meuris on the other hand both draws and literally constructs exhibition spaces such as enclosures, tanks, and cages where life might be enclosed and studied, whilst Sonia Shiel has made a crappy, riotous habitat from detritus; it hovers perilously yet comically between constructed and natural worlds.

Nestled within these more overt subject matters and concerns is a tacit theme: nature presents humans with an ontological threat. Our humanity is enfolded within nature and inseparable from it. Hence, easy distinctions such as those between creature / environment; natural / artificial; animal / human become increasingly fluid; untenable even. Inevitably, nature will get us in the end.

As I finish writing this I’m looking over at the dog who’s sharing the room with me. Just now she’s resolutely and stubbornly refusing to be a metaphor for anything in particular. I don’t see anything being signified but rather a shitting bundle of fur, teeth and barks that dozes in the corner occasionally looking up at me bored and askance. If animals are an allegory for anything, then perhaps it is what I want art to be like. If art is the creation of new things in the world that we don’t understand then perhaps art is creaturely and feral. Animals, like the best art, are not reducible to metaphorical meaning; they have lives that sit outside human systems of reference and signification. They are lawless little perverts running amok leaving their fluids and faeces all over the shiny surfaces we spend our lives struggling to keep clean.

Birnbaum’s argument turned on a clearly defined sense of the biennial as more than a mere cyclical art exhibition, and this definition came across in his comparison of the condition of the biennial to that of a literary form, the novel. In other words, the biennial was also a kind of cultural ‘form’, comprising various genres perhaps: it was practiced in a self-conscious way; it had a history; it developed over time; it had certain essential characteristics. So what is a biennial in these terms? We can safely say that it has a prehistory leading back to Venice’s grand old mother of biennials, which prehistory is inflected by enterprises from the Cold War years like Documenta and the Bienal de São Paulo, but that it really got underway in the nineties, with flagship events like Manifesta and the Berlin Biennial (both associated with the aforementioned Swiss-born curator Obrist, who left his finger-prints all over the period) sparking off an astonishing spread of biennials across the planet: over a hundred and fifty if one goes by the list offered by the Biennial Foundation (see biennialfoundation. org), although a third of these probably do not conform to the ‘biennial form’ as we are describing it. Very roughly, the essential characteristics of this form as it developed were: it was of-the-moment – there was a sense of the unprecedented about the show; it was city-based, and in some way drew attention to the city; it was large-scale, and often utilised industrial-scale exhibition spaces; it generated the two Ds, discourse and discussion – for every biennial there were innumerable photographs or video clips of artists, curators and theorists sitting behind a microphone- and water-bottle-topped table – and from every biennial a stream of texts flowed, to be collected in a catalogue of some kind. Finally, it was committed to social ‘transformation’, and it was from the interaction of this last element with the others that the vitality and problematic nature of the biennial issued.

The historic moment of the ‘biennial boom’ was also that of post-Berlin Wall Europe: in other words, after the collapse of the model of existent European socialism. The biennial, in some respects, was instituted on this no man’s land of left-wing political thought, an occasion for new models and manifestations of the counter-capitalist tradition. The artistic neo-avant-garde seemed to provide an environment for such a ‘reimagination’. Early on (2001’s Berlin Biennial, for example, curated by Saskia Bos, who incidentally acted as outside curator for Eva in 1990) the idea of ‘sociable’ or ‘relational’ art, independent of production (Rikrit Tiravanija’s ‘meals’ were highly influential in this regard), seemed to suggest the way forward; by the 2000s the biennials hosted the meeting of art and politics in terms of ‘utopianism’ (e.g. Obrist, Birnbaum and Molly Nesbit’s Utopia Stations at Venice in 2003). These curatorial themes (and criteria for the promotion of particular artists, artistic tendencies and analogous theoretical discourse), however, though the most articulate and explicit dimension of the biennial, remained only part of a greater set of cultural operations. The biennial was to interact with the city – and it was from the city that most of the considerable funding came – in such a way as to make that city internationally apparent: as someplace on the map, ‘the map’ now being increasingly global and polycentric. In a simple way the biennial as spectacle (historians often point out the continuity between the biennial and the old ‘world’s fair’) achieved this aim: the city looked different while a biennial was in town, and the crowds of visitors, media coverage and giant, startling public sculptures (Luc Deleu’s Construction X, originally hosted by Eva in 1994 and reconstructed in the first Eva international in 2012, is typical) offered a temporary vision of the city transformed, if not politically, at least economically – the terms in which such events are pitched to prospective municipal funders.

That a city should see itself in need of transformation connects to that question of ‘scale’, and to the use of industrial-sized exhibition spaces. Biennials generally occur where there is an industrial deficit of some kind, linked to a city’s status as part of a major, international economic network. Venice provides the model: the Arsenale has been described (by Lewis Mumford in The City in History [1961]) as the first modern factory site – its giant, assembly line-like shipbuilding facility was certainly the centre for European trade with the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia for centuries. The temptation here is to talk in terms of ‘post-industrialism’, but the fact is that venues like Guangzhou are, if anything, ‘protoindustrial’, fast-growing centres of mammoth new economic networks whose biennial announces their expanded mercantile and industrial ambitions and global arrival. The left-wing conceptualities of the biennial sit even less easily in such contexts, but for a while at least it seemed that the wave of globalisation, and the consequent bringing together of cosmopolitan creative professionals from different social systems, retained a certain promise of transformative enclaves scattered across the increasingly urban world.

In 2012 Limerick’s 35-year-old exhibition joined this world of the international biennial, and now proclaims its status as ‘Ireland’s biennial’ (a title that hints at the perceived failure of 2011’s Dublin Contemporary, and suggests that Ireland can be treated as a single city-state, perhaps as it operated economically in the boom period, a Singapore or Hong Kong off the west of Europe). This year, with the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni at the helm, that sense of approximation to the transportable international model felt particularly strong. Much of the reason for this was the inclusion of a new exhibition site: the former Golden Vale Milk Plant across the Shannon from the town centre. An abandoned industrial zone, with buildings going back to the 19th century, it allowed for the presentation of large-scale works in even larger-scale, raw spaces that is a trademark of the contemporary cyclical exhibition (Eva’s director, Woodrow Kernohan, even referred in the press to the Arsenale, along with Tate’s Turbine Hall). The works presented there, and at Limerick’s City Gallery (and to a lesser extent at three other sites), were emphatically ‘international’: in line with the tendency since 2000 to present the contemporary art world as one no longer centred in the old ‘First World’, there were representatives of contemporary artistic cultures from across the globe (with the exception of East Asia and Oceania), with as many artists associated with the Eastern Mediterranean as with Ireland. The old biennial core, the European cities associated with the first ‘curators’ in the modern sense, nevertheless furnished about half the participants. The reduced proportion of Irish artists was a sharp break with Eva tradition, but like the first biennial edition, and in line with the tendency of Eva’s tradition of ‘colloquies’, the two Ds were well represented, with texts being issued to tease out the concept of ‘agitationism’ and major seminars under the banner of ‘Artistic Justice’ being held in Limerick, Dublin and Marrakech respectively. Eva formally aimed at being a model biennial and, in so far as this was the purpose of the show, Eva 2014 was a success.

Problems arose, however, with the actual effect of that formal success, that is, in coming to terms with the experience of viewing the assembled artworks. The late Patrick Jolley’s This Monkey (2009), a large digital video projection shown to great effect in a concrete industrial space in the Golden Vale complex, encapsulated a pervasive spirit. Shot on 16mm film in New Delhi the seven-minute piece followed a rhesus monkey from a sandy wasteland into empty, claustrophobic backstreets and even more claustrophobic interiors. All the time the sense of the animal’s close relation to us humans grew – the interior shots suggested psychological states, in which human fabrications placed alien restrictions on a natural, sympathetic subject. This growing identification led to the piece’s final shock: returning to the wasteland, the focus of the piece is joined by other monkeys to feast on what turns out to be human carcasses. This economic, grim metaphor for human entrapment moved through sequences that echoed wildlife documentaries, indie music videos, especially from the eighties, and eventually the opening sequence of Kubrick’s 2001, but without the sci-fi film’s transcendental dimension; in other words, it aggressively combined isolated subjectivity with matters of identity at the level of the species. It was hard not to feel that an historic sense of disillusionment had been focused, through a neo-Darwinian lens, into a statement of existential pessimism. Which is to say, in the context of the model of the biennial, it presented a vision of human affairs beyond hope of real transformation by human actors.

El Baroni’s introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue presented his curatorial thinking in terms of a resistance to the temptation, in the face of a constant ‘flow of agitations’ – social and political upheavals, for instance – to give in to ‘romanticisms, utopias, ideologies and nostalgias’ – social emotions and conceptualities, in other words, that remove our sense of agitation by subsuming it within a complete and satisfying scheme, or by escaping from the present and its demands on us. But the etymological root of the word ‘agitation’, shared by the word ‘action’, points to a sense of disappointment and loss behind this conceptual positioning. Political upheavals would not be mere agitations if they brought about the political transformation for which they had ‘agitated’. This understandable gloom, generated by recent revolutionary failures, like that of El Baroni’s own Egypt – now back under an authoritarian government, one possibly worse than that of Mubarak against which the Tahrir Square occupiers had demonstrated – seems to underlie the sense of upheaval and change as agitation, and pervades the exhibition. The pessimistic fatalism of Jolley’s This Monkey was echoed in Doa Aly’s disturbing H.C.F. (2014), which turned the fearful, pro-authoritarian crowd that gathered at Tahrir Square to celebrate the third anniversary of the original uprising, into a choir of young women calmly chanting a murderous excerpt from De Sade. This making explicit of the spirit of the occasion may have been intended as a bringing of the ‘Hysterical Choir of the Frightened’ in some way to account, but the actual experience was one of disillusioned youth (women specifically) demonically relinquishing moral responsibility, and somehow becoming empowered in the process – a truly dark image. Amanda Beech’s almost psychedelic video installation Final Machine (2013) inter-cut 1960s Marxist political theory with the discourse of espionage and counter-espionage, images of the desert and violent sonic interruptions, to generate a sense of paranoid, impossible quest for political resolution in conditions where reality is patently unreal. Michael Patterson-Carver’s disarmingly simple and direct depictions of political dissent in the US promised to slice through the involuted and highly reflexive working of art like Beech’s, to a plain account of direct action, but his naive and obsessive drawings had an automatic distancing effect (which I assumed was not intentional – this work had a certain ‘found art’ quality), placing the political action depicted within a psychological and behaviouristic frame. Where political ideals did appear they were often in the form of archives and memorials – Nicoline Van Harskamp’s archive of the Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger; Per-Oskar Leu’s riffing on Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the Un- American Activities Committee in 1947 – or strangely echoed the aesthetics and accessories of jihadist terrorism (Metahaven’s Black Transparency).

In terms of medium there was a predominance of video-work, which set the artistic subject-matter and pervasive mood in a particular frame. Even with non-screen based works – e.g. with Sophie Loscher’s Waiting in the Wings (2013), Pauline M’Barek’s Showcase (2012) and Trophy Stands (2011), and Raqs Media Collective with Iswanto Hartono’s 5 Principle No-s, For a New Pancasila (2012-2013) – what might be termed a ‘screen aesthetics’ operated. All involved light and mirror effects, dependent upon the viewer’s position and playing with the limits of ocular perception, the very bases of our capacity to read and view into the two dimensional electronic or coloured light-reflecting screen of the digital world. The result was that the exhibition environment seemed to mimic that most obvious change in our social environment of the last decade: the growing ubiquity of screens – handheld, domestic, commercial and public. Just as the experience of an average day may be factually described in terms of a navigation through and between digital screens, so too our experience of the biennial was a matter of screen-defined perception.

This merging of the physical environment with that of electronic communications, reproduced by the exhibition’s dominant media, resonated with Zacahary Formwalt’s video installation based around images of a soon-to-be-activated stock exchange in Shenzen, China. In Light of the Arc (2013) engaged with a central technological mediation of reality – the screen of a stock exchange, manipulating the processes of economically bound life through its flickering matrix of abstract valuations. Formwalt’s installation pinned the image to a real, material basis – the construction, materials, engineering, machinery and unfinished interiors of the located, physical exchange-building – in a gesture that recalled old Marxist ideas of the ‘material base’ beneath the cultural ‘superstructure’. But the gesture simultaneously conveyed the sense that the same site threatened, once the switches were thrown, to withdraw from physical terms into a purely symbolic realm, its communications with us mediated by algorithms and abstract economic terms. This treatment of the most essential of electronic screens pointed to the Janus character of the display screen in general – including that carrying Formwalt’s images – as a material site of ‘pinning’, a final tension between a non-human symbolic and the most basic human environment – positioned, physical occupancy of space – a ‘skin of light’, as it were, between the symbolic and the material. The screen is both the last hold of the ancien régime of materiality, to which we are physically bound, and the site and emblem of the apparent withdrawal of the technologically determined motors of control from our grasp.

This is a far cry from the rhetoric of technology, of social technology in particular, propagated during the optimistic days of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring. Then, new digital communications and networking were a means to empowerment the disempowered: technological advance seemed almost capable, by and in itself, of bringing about democratic social transformation. But already there was a sense in which digital technology’s simple instrumentality was exceeded: it was a driver of a social ‘evolution’ – the invention of the instrument and its enabling apps preceded, indeed determined, the emergence of the revolutionary actions. All that was needed for the change from optimism to fatalism was the failure of this secondary social behaviour. The consequent supplement to the fatalistic mood of Agitationism provided by the hegemony of the screen was a sense of the evacuation of time, as a dimension responsive to human action – its reduction to a technological change as inscrutable as the raw nature to which Jolley’s monkey returns. Transformation and revolution give way to evolution and adaptation to an endlessly agitating environment.

There is a disturbing passivity about all of this, which makes it very hard to judge Agitationism a success, despite the ticking of all the biennial boxes. El Baroni, or the artworks selected, however, should not be singled out in this regard: Rem Koolhaas’ current Venice Architectural Biennale, for instance, is premised on the similarly pessimistic grounds of the impotence of the architect. It is a perfectly understandable attitude that seems to be seeping into much of the socially engaged artworld. (My own first experience of this new attitude came at Terminal Convention in Cork in 2011, when curator and museum director Charles Esche proclaimed the end of the avant-garde: advanced capitalism was simply way ahead of art when it came to innovation and radical change.) And it is possible that I am dwelling too exclusively on one, albeit highly significant, aspect of Eva 2014. I have had little to say about the semiotic sophistication of much of the work (but then, a certain kind of semiotic sophistication seems to be inextricably linked with the withdrawal or deferral of the possibility of action); or, for that matter, the amped-up, return-to-punk and DIY feel of the graphic work, like Garret Phelan’s, that sought to celebrate an ‘agitated’ life. But the question remains: what is the point of a biennial model without any commitment to transformation? If we ignore, for the moment, ‘boosts for the economy’, ‘urban branding’ and the like, we have to agree with Birnbaum that the biennial is showing distinct signs of (dispirited) fatigue – that too much has happened since the nineties for the format to absorb and incorporate successfully. But what of Birnbaum’s conclusion, that the format may yet be re-forged, away from the old centres; perhaps even in an uneasy city on the west coast of Ireland?

The new exhibition site, the Golden Vale Milk Plant, is hardly a place conducive to feelings of hope and new beginnings. The absence of industry and employment is palpable – it felt like the machinery had been removed and the workers had departed only days before the exhibition had been installed (Golden Vale’s new owners, the multinational Kerry Group, had sold on the milk supply rights, but not the buildings, to another multinational of Irish origin, Glanbia, in 2011). A little investigation paints an even bleaker picture: around 1900 there were close to 2000 locals employed here (the headquarters of the Condensed Milk Company of Ireland Ltd.) by the Canadian Cleeve family, of toffee fame. If the closure of this original giant dairy processing plant can be excused on the grounds of early twentieth century historical upheaval, the loss of hundreds of jobs (documented in the proceedings of the dismal 1970s Dáil debates over the privatisation of the semi-state Dairy Disposal Company, that had employed over 500 workers at the site) was inexcusable, its mechanics depressing. But at least we are in the realm of politics and human decisions, and not some impassive, technologically driven ‘evolution’. Much of what happened to what was originally known as the Landsdowne site was a matter of over-exposure to international economic scale, showing little consideration for the local or regional conditions. The kind of economics, driven more by expansion through acquisitions than any ‘organic growth’, as it is termed, that devastated Landsdowne (and a large part of Limerick’s workforce), made the Kerry Group, a former dairy co-operative, into a global player in the food industry, with offices in forty-three countries and manufacturing facilities in twenty-three. Here is the very site where the conflicts of such economic policy were played out, and corporate empires were maintained. There is much for an art of social transformation, and resistance for that matter, to get its teeth into. And if one wants an image of possibility associated with the same site, one already involved in public display, why not resurrect the banner placed over a Cleeve-owned rural dairy during the short-lived Limerick soviet: ‘We Make Butter Not Profits’?

The word ‘dystopia’ has its origins in Ireland, coined in the British parliament by statesman and philosopher John Stuart Mill to describe the policies of colonial landlords in post-Famine Ireland (he contrasted their activities with the supposed ‘utopianism’ of the policies of his faction, which included granting reclaimed lands to peasant proprietors). Ireland might be the right place for breaking out of the dystopianism cultivated by the current biennial model, and for the renewal of the transformative (if not necessarily utopian) thinking of the biennials of twenty years ago. To achieve that, a way of simultaneously being ‘eva international’ and ‘Ireland’s biennial’ would have to be found.