In many ways, the front cover of Abandoned Mansions of Ireland provides the most arresting image of the book, not simply because of the beauty of the stark black and white photograph of the Grange in County Limerick, but also because of the glowing red seething in the background. This serves as a visual reminder that so many of these Big Houses had been burnt out during the War of Independence and the Civil War, when the anger and resentment of the surrounding landscape seemed to be vented on the houses themselves and thus houses were, as W.B. Yeats put it, executed by the revolutionaries. This book of photographs provides a fascinating history of the ruined homes of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy: in the accompanying notes the author details the various twists and turns by which each of these houses became abandoned, either by financial ruin, political upheaval or the ending of the family line. In his preface, Tarquin Blake tells us that he had been exploring the ‘lost and fallen architecture’ of other countries, ‘blissfully unaware that some of the most amazing things I have ever seen were almost on my own doorstep’. He began his task of photographing these houses in 2008 and this beautifully produced book, full of high quality photos, is the fruit of his exploration.
 
Structurally, the book divides county by county, and the photos are accompanied by a useful history of each house, including a list of residents as recorded by the 1901 census. It seems to me that the prevailing atmosphere around the Irish Big House always had that sense of alienation and abandonment, even when the houses were still standing and the households supported by income from the surrounding farms. In terms of Irish writing, this sense of alienation was responsible for nurturing some of our best novelists.

The loneliness of my house, as of many others, is more an effect than a reality. But it is the effect that is interesting. When I visit other big houses I am struck by some quality that they all have – not so much isolation as mystery. Each house seems to live under its own spell, and that is the spell that falls on the visitor from the moment he passes in at the gates.

Thus wrote Elizabeth Bowen of her own home Bowen’s Court in 1940. By 1960, her house was a ruin, lost because of her inability to keep it going, despite years of struggle and precarious survival.
 
As I looked at these photographs of collapsed floors, rotting timbers, foliage run riot, I kept thinking about the recent National Library exhibition Power and Privilege: photographs of the Big House in Ireland 1858-1922. The photographs of the National Library allow us access to a radically contrasting view of the interior worlds, the pastimes, and the amusements of this very same world. We see large numbers of staff, the latest in expensive clothes, domestic luxury and the toys and gadgets of the rich. Those earlier photographs show us the wealthy Anglo-Irish in the period of greatest prosperity, right before the ravages of the Land Wars and the First World War. Here in Blake’s world, we have a post-apocalyptic view of the same houses and his connection and reverence for this world is seen in his introduction – ‘I will end this note with a plea for lost heritage; the abandoned mansions of Ireland are slowly disintegrating and memory of them fading’. His photographs will do much to preserve and hold this world.

Directors Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine subtly follow the technological flaws and never-ending maintenance of the house, dramatized by Guadalupe’s outmoded cleaning techniques. Twenty-four thematic film chapters each focus on specific elements or traits of the building that, combined, form the honest and playful interpretation of what constitutes a living space. Guadalupe drags a vacuum cleaner up the triangular precipices of the narrow, metal spiral staircase while window washers perform acrobatics on the large ceiling and wall windows. The huge metal door reflects the summer sun to burn the lawn and the ‘joystick’, an illuminated, slightly phallic lever designed to automate the front door, allows entry of its own accord. A troupe of handymen attempt to determine the source of the many leaks dripping throughout the house, but aiming a hose at the structure only encourages cascades of water to drench the living room walls. The technical systems of the house, originally designed to make the occupants’ lives easier, seem now to require a veritable team of professionals to keep them functioning.

 
Koolhaas Houselife exemplifies such difficulties of living in a constant show house in what constitutes a contemporary reprise of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958). The building, exhilarating for its sheer modernist ambition and design, is breaking down at a dramatic rate. This is the first in a series of films, titled Living Architectures, to have directly explored this tension and represented architecture, to perhaps many architects’ disapproval, as a living organism. Rem Koolhaas, although initially surprised, shares this interest – referring to it as post-occupancy – during the accompanying ten-minute interview between him and the filmmakers.
 
It is very seldom that the living, maintenance, preservation and decline of a building is documented or recorded. Modernism never strove to do so. Instead, as Owen Hatherley notes in his book Militant Modernism, the main ethos of ‘outrunning the old world before it has the chance to catch up with you’, encouraged slick glass and concrete structures unsuited to the buildup of human traces formed by day-to-day living. Guadalupe, although sometimes a little dramatic and traditional, highlights several of the responsibilities bestowed when living in, maintaining or conserving protected structures, which were never intended to last but rather to represent an avant-garde in permanent revolution. The late critic Martin Pawley blasted modernist conservationists as ‘quislings’, surrendering their futurist birthright for history. Similarly, the ever-growing empire of architectural heritage may mean more time conserving, and less developing. Koolhaas spoke at his and OMA’s recent exhibition in the New Museum, New York, and addressed the stagnation that ties itself to this current interest in architectural preservation: ‘A huge section of our world (about 12%) is now off-limits, submitted to regimes we don’t know, have not thought through, cannot influence.’ He continues to explain how the current fascination with the hypnotic lure of history has broadened the type of key items considered worthy of preservation. Additionally, the time span necessary to warrant official status as heritage has shortened, in some cases from centuries to just a few years. Koolhaas hypothesizes that eventually ‘we will preserve things before they are even finished.’ The once progressive cycle of design, construction, occupancy, demolition/decline has caved in and, to continue building, we may need to build space. Koolhaas Houselife does not suggest the answers. Instead, the thoughtful and playful narrative reminds us to question and re-examine many important architectural concerns, and that itself is definitely something worth holding on to.
 
 
Koolhaas Houselife featured at The Fourth Wall, Irish Film Institute,  5 – 16 May 2011. Further information can be found at www.koolhaashouselife.com

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

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

In contrast, the technically exquisite canvases of Gillian Carnegie are ostensibly more conventional. Carnegie’s work attends with almost compulsive focus to the traditional still life theme of the vase of flowers, her subject here a decidedly shrivelled and bedraggled bunch lodged in a truncated plastic bottle. Carnegie has made some twenty studies of the arrangement, four of which are exhibited. Ranging from the subtle opalescent grey green palette of Fleur de Huile (2001) to the crepuscular, low contrast grey-scale of P104 (2008), Carnegie’s canvases suggest that she submits photographs of her still life to various digital treatments before painting them. In a subtle rhyming with Price’s plastic panels, Carnegie’s paintings also grow into three dimensions; two canvases have been partially built up into a thick impasto so that the brittle and desiccated arrangement seems to grow or lean out into the space of the gallery, making the dead materiality of the flowers manifest in our space.

 
Decay and transience are implicit also in Richard Wright’s site specific work set deep in the castle grounds in the fantastically named Monkey House. Wright, who won the Turner Prize in 2009 for his temporary wall drawings, makes a considered and thoughtful intervention in this dramatic architectural setting. The Monkey House is a turret-like folly entered through a gothic arched doorway, mirrored by a deeply recessed niche, and further articulated by another wider doorway and a slender arrow slit. The walls have been smoothly plastered and white painted to within a foot of the poured concrete ceiling, where the even precision of the finish gives way to ancient, pitted stone. Wright has colonized the white walls with a continuous pattern of black isosceles triangles, convex on both diagonal planes, as if to mirror the elegant lozenges of the leaded glass panels above the doorway. On closer inspection, each element has been patiently hand painted, revealing small imperfections and individualities. The damp conditions are already causing the mural to flake and peel, it is ultimately fated to be painted over at the show’s end, only to exist as a photographic trace or memory.
 
Wright’s mural and its melancholy fate form a fitting end to a subtle and elegantly devised show that wears its conceptual nature lightly. Despite the rigorous re-negotiations of the nature and status of the image, and the sometimes-claustrophobic intensity of each artist’s exhaustive scrutiny of their subject matter, there is much here that is playful and visually compelling. The sombre curatorial concerns of transience and absence are counterbalanced by each works’ dramatization of the evident pleasures and absorptions of perception; ultimately the show’s pensive meditation on decay and finitude is leavened by its celebration of the joys of looking.
 
 
Still Life was on view at Lismore Castle Arts Gallery, 9 April – 30 September 2011.

In a corner of the gallery a space roughly the dimensions of the Situation Room painting has been painted blue. The paint strokes are very visible, immediately signalling the artist at work but also recalling the smeared dirty protests of hunger strikers. The expanse of blue might suggest the beyond to which the body of bin Laden has been dispatched: the deep blue sea, down where no one will be able to visit the grave of the great martyr; or perhaps it is the beyond of the heaven where bin Laden will frolic; or perhaps most of all it will constitute the blue screen upon which collective fantasies can be projected.

 
A TV monitor facing this wall plays a loop of what appears to be a CNN out-take involving one of the presenters from the other video. His dialogue is a parody of a particular idea of America. ‘I’m going to get my hamburger and coffee,’ he quacks like a duck and holds what looks like papier-mâché replica of a Scud missile. The video reflexively acknowledges the apparatus of production, the presenter messing around, dragging the cameraman into shot. The crew become actors playing in a movie called War in the Gulf or No Problem, or Operation Enduring Pizza brought to you by YouTube.
 
The artists employ a kind of slapstick that oscillates between despair and fury, and describe in an accompanying statement their attempt to confront their own ‘relevance, redundancy and reluctance to shape anything of any real significance.’ The show communicates an impotent rage against the numero uno artist in the world, the all-powerful image-producing machine of the mass media. All other artists are but little fleas, trying to draw some blood from the gargantuan mega-artist. The overall affect produced by the exhibition is one of cluster phobia. As a show it holds up its hands and surrenders to the impossibility of getting to grips with this story or indeed any story in our over-stimulated image-saturated world. And gets shot through the eye.
 
 
A Title in a Haystack was on view 12 June – 30 July.

Weems’s photographs from the series The Louisiana Project match the spookiness of Evans’s South, conjuring a past that seeps into the present through the barely healed scars of racial segregation. A young black woman clad in a Victorian cotton dress is the protagonist of these photos, a lone figure who wanders through an array of Southern spaces, from railroads to cemeteries. In the exquisitely composed A Distant View, the woman languidly reclines on the grass under a tree pondering a gleaming mansion, in a scene that recalls the bucolic serenity of Pictorialist photographers like Clarence White or Gertrude Käsebier. As this building is in fine repair, the effect is that past and present are blurred, and so the scene becomes essentially timeless. In this instance a ruined house might pander to liberal sympathies by insisting upon a facile dialogue of progress and redemption. Furthermore the viewer of these photographs is unwittingly rendered a voyeur by the positioning of the subject. Regardless of the background, the woman looks or walks away, like a spectre crossing the photographic frame, somehow inhabiting these homeless places that recall the crime scene quality of some of Evans’s architectural images (following his enthusiastic discovery of Eugene Atget’s Parisian studies). However the gentle lyricism of these images refuses any monolithic accusation of the crimes of the past, but indicates a more profoundly engrained trauma, a haunting that cannot be exorcised.

 
Susan Lipper’s grotesque investigations into caricatural perceptions of the South consist of ersatz documents of the Grapevine Hollow area of West Virginia, where friends and neighbours perform staged scenarios that work, as Davies puts it, by ‘playing to our own stereotyped understandings’ of poor whites. A deer hangs from the gallows of a basketball goal as if lynched, two burly bikers adorned with leather caps, one armed with a handgun and a beer can, perform a homoerotic blowback on a joint, and a terrifying disfigured man stands in an open doorway with a Magnum pistol on his hand looking ready to coldly waste the (implied) cowering viewer. These snippets from the fractured narrative of a contemporary gothic saga are brutal, alluring, and comical. Lipper uses the rhetoric of the reality effect of documentary photography to create a portfolio of fictional episodes that tell possible truths about the habits and fantasies of a small segment of the white working class of the South. By spending several months in Grapevine her immersion into the community mirrors Evans and Agee’s embedded stay with the sharecroppers, and whilst the photographs develop the latent dark humour of Evans’s work there are also hints of Cindy Sherman’s imaginary movie scenes, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and the frantic and ribald opening credits of the TV series True Blood, a gruesomely erotic montage that pastiches the mythology of the South.
 
Indeed, with its garish ensemble of a polite yet visceral southern gentleman vampire, a telepathic waitress, a Cajun serial killer, a faith healing supermarket worker, and a bar-owning canine doppelganger, True Blood has cheerfully riffed on myth, manners, and memory by indulging such metaphors with the subtlety of an automatic shotgun, ironically producing a nuanced yet consistently entertaining take on the social fissures of the South. Whilst similar notes are struck in photos by Lipper and Soth, this exhibition by contrast offers a more elegiac meditation on an area that was only an actual place for a short while in the secession, but that nonetheless echoes menacingly yet majestically in the contemporary imaginations of both its populace and outside observers.
 
 
‘Myth, Manners, and Memory: Photographers of the American South’ was on view 1 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.

Paul Clarke’s early commitment to the notebook began while studying architecture in Glasgow. Here, he had the good fortune to access the architectural and design notebooks of Charles Rennie Mackintosh held at the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery. Facilitated by Pamela Robertson, the museum’s senior curator, he was able to handle these objects, something, he admits, a young architectural student could not do nowadays. Mackintosh sketched from his youth until, in his late forties, painting came to dominate his artistic output. He toured extensively throughout Scotland and England during the 1890s and early 1900s with one very significant trip abroad on a scholarship to Italy in 1891. His drawings were private and rarely exhibited or published in his lifetime. These informal pencil studies, executed free from the constraints of academic supervision, are amongst the earliest works to show his evolving individuality. The Italian drawings show his understanding of classical principles, whilst his British wanderings reveal his fascination with vernacular traditions and the countryside around Walberswick in Suffolk which were to yield the highly individual botanical studies which lead up to his most famous works as exemplified by The Room de Luxe at The Willow Tearooms in Glasgow and the Glasgow School of Art.

 
A theme resonating throughout the exhibition is the idea of notebook as conceptual ‘tool’ or ‘device’. The characteristic of the contemporary age, argues Ivan Illich, is ‘system’, understood through the language of cybernetics as a comprehensive metaphor to describe the information revolution. This term ‘system’ marks the end of what Illich called ‘The Age of Instrumentality’, which he understood as a time where our relationship to the world was primarily mediated by tools. Illich uses the term ‘tool’ to signify any engineered instrument of mediation, and argues that a tool is characterised by what makes it distinct from its user. By contrast, a ‘system’ lacks this distinction because it integrates user intentions within itself. In cybernetics the world system, metaphorically, becomes a ‘network’ and ‘ecosphere’ whereby the computer becomes increasingly identified with the self (David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, 2005). To Paul Virilio, optical devices attached to the latest military missiles illustrate how the eye, through technological mediation, has become a weapon (Paul Virilio War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, 1989). The cybernetic system is a form of technological prosthesis.
 
Compact sketchpads and disposable notebooks may seem to be increasingly anachronistic in contemporary digital culture, but Clarke values the unique characteristics of every notebook as a counterweight to the homogeneous ‘flattening’ tendencies of digital design software now ubiquitous in architectural education. Others also value the recovery of disappearing analogue practices. A renewed interest in the educational potential of notebooks is shared by Mark Dyer and his team at TrinityHaus, a research centre of the School of Engineering in Trinity College Dublin. The centre aims to promote sustainability in buildings, neighbourhoods and cities. Its ethos derives from a holistic and multidisciplinary approach underpinned by creative thinking. Central to this process is the notebook. One project, ‘Shelters for the Homeless’, which works towards designs for sustainable night shelters, has benefited from a renewed interest in the notebook as a scaffolding device helping to stimulate enquiry and assisting engineering students to work through a design brief. There is something essentially countercultural in attempting to recover and find value in a forgotten process or lost practice. This particular sense of the countercultural pervades The Secret Laboratory.
 
 
The Secret Laboratory: Notebooks and Narratives was on view 12 May – 5 August 2011.