The material for this exhibition comes from objects created for decoration: sparkly hanging things, patterned clothing, carpets, wallpaper, curtains. However, Angela Fulcher treats something potentially trivial with intelligence and delicacy, intervening with a touch light enough to avoid a kind of kitchen sink drama of scattered interiors and instead only implying a human narrative of the domestic as lived space, and one primarily focused upon the strangeness of its artefacts. Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #2), a photographic collage, is the only direct imaging of people in the exhibition. Small black and white photographs of what appears to be a dinner party sit underneath flocked wallpaper, cut to give a glimpse of finely dressed figures who seem strangely dissociated from each other. It is a good example of the way in which form is used to resist hackneyed narratives, the sharp geometric cuts into the wallpaper which reveal the image below allow both elements to exist materially and conceptually, creating thematic coherence, but avoiding straightforward conflation.

 
What is interesting in Fulcher’s treatment of her materials is that it is the material itself that really comes to the fore; this exhibition is compelling because of the unexpected sharpness and precision with which she approaches familiar objects. One of the standout pieces is the three-metre triangle of carpet that sits in the centre of the gallery. Simple in its conception, this worn piece of patterned carpet is inset with a smaller triangular section of similar pattern that highlights the geometric against the ornamentation of the original. This intervention is seemingly straightforward, but it does much to such a loaded artefact. Fulcher chooses a section of carpet that is patterned according to the ubiquitous fashions of the recent past; it is strikingly familiar but equally nonspecific. That the pattern is cut into in an exercise of precise shape-making means that the busy visuals of the carpet are sharply brought to a halt, the contemporary popular interest in clean straight lines obliquely superseding the more florid decoration of the past. The wear and fraying that subtly mark the material makes it seem lived with, perhaps for too long. This treatment of materials is repeated in Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #3). This synthetic satin curtain material is carefully scored with sharp lines, a regular and repeated pattern that is echoed in the strange wallpaper construction that sits on the floor in front of it. Looking more organic than synthetic, the folded wallpaper resembles an origami hedgehog in pale pink. Again, the curtain is marked by age; rust coloured stains discolour the cloth, barely perceptible from a distance, but complicating the surface of the piece from close up. Where it would be easy for Fulcher to emphasise the kitschness of the materials she chooses, encouraging disdain for chintz and tastelessness in her viewers, instead she considers these things seriously, showing them as everyday items well used, appreciated, but also loaded with meanings not often regarded.
 
The photographic collage Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #6) shows images of the front walls and gates of northside estate houses, the little details that individualise the photographs: pillars, cars, gates and satellite dishes again portray mass design and lived in and personal. Cut across the images is a thin white line, scoring a gap into the representation of familiar environments. It is a line thin enough that it does not obscure that which it represents, but instead reminds the viewer of the representational, the white of the gap echoing the white of the gallery wall. Again, loaded and familiar imagery competes with formal concerns, the straightness of the line highlighting a grid like pattern in the work, the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines of the photographs become visual echoes of the patterns that Fulcher scores onto materials elsewhere.
 
In this way Crystal Cabinet is a coherent and condensed exhibition. The precision of line and pattern in the interventions that Fulcher makes to all of her materials (whether found, like the carpet and curtains, or made by the artists, as in the photographs), a visual language is established that repeats across the detritus used to construct the exhibition. Fulcher’s skill is to make familiar items strange enough that we can perceive them without being overwhelmed by their initial associations, but not so strange that these resonances are removed completely. In this way we are given a means to approach these ubiquitous objects so that we can appreciate their peculiarity, but we are also invited to analyse, connect and reimagine them within new aesthetic and symbolic frames.
 
 
Angela Fulcher: Crystal Cabinet was on view 19 January – 23 February 2012.

The Sunken Gallery is located on the ground floor of the MAC. As the viewer descends the stairs to the split-level gallery, she can at a glance consider the entire space and survey the gallery from a different perspective, given that the sightline upon entry is almost at ceiling height. On this occasion the gallery is full to capacity with a densely ordered assemblage of domestic furniture, suggestive of an architectural structure. In 2010, Somewhere but here… had been exhibited at the LAB, Dublin, where the mezzanine floor provided a balcony view of the piece. This architectural feature afforded a new vantage point which was crucial to fully appreciate the arrangement of McKinney’s strategically stacked tables, and the jigsaws of the dramatic and ostentatious Neuschwanstein Castle that they support.

McKinney’s installation is comprised of a motley collection of assorted tables – including robust dining tables, functional and practical kitchen tables, and delicate side tables atop spindly legs – creating a diverse and idiosyncratic balance of a multitude of styles and tastes. They could be seen to satirise and mirror the eclectic range of different periods and architectural styles, including Baroque, Gothic and Romanesque, illustrated in the grandiose jigsaw representations of Neuschwanstein Castle that adorn each table top. Ludvig II, the Bavarian monarch, shortly after becoming king began a project that he would never live to see completed, on account of his mysterious, premature death. The German legacy, however, is the world-famous, fairytale Neuschwanstein Castle – the dramatic, Alpine citadel built in homage to Wagner and his operas. The palace is largely Romanesque in style, a picturesque, romantic interpretation of the architectural fashion favoured in the 19th Century. The sculptural assemblage of the tables, arranged to form turreted components of the installation, could be seen as a device to draw attention to the architecture of the fantastical castle.

The recurring castle jigsaw puzzles cover every available table surface, each jigsaw featuring the castle observed from varied angles, in all seasons and climatic conditions. The time and attention taken to source such a diverse selection of jigsaws featuring the same motif is highlighted, but in particular it is difficult to ignore the laborious task required to complete quite so many. Meditative and even transcendental qualities can be attributed to the process of assembling the wooden tiles to complete the image; this recreational activity becomes a site of reflection, creating a temporary distance from everyday reality. The inherent escapism of this exercise is encapsulated as the maker becomes totally engrossed, daydreaming of the idealistic, utopian scene they are slowly constructing. Lost from their immediate surroundings – perhaps the kitchen table where all of the pieces are laid out before them – their rapt attention is focused solely on the puzzle, oblivious to the progression of time.

While the form of McKinney’s installation enables it to be adapted to suit different surroundings, the depth of the Sunken Gallery is not quite profound enough to offer the same aerial vista as in its earlier incarnation. In response, McKinney has altered this particular manifestation of the work, incorporating a stairway at the far end of the installation to facilitate a viewing platform. The gallery’s architectural limitations prevent viewers from standing at full height at a position that would enable sufficient space to assess the entire structure as a single entity. McKinney counters this impediment by deliberately choosing to build the stairway feature at close proximity to the ceiling, as this work in particular is concerned with responding to the scale and movement of the viewer’s body.

The emphasis on sensory involvement is a fundamental concern of McKinney’s installation. The playfulness of everyday spatial aesthetics in this work seek to engage the viewer, as the piece is subject to the perception of space, considered from a bodily perspective. Elements of Somewhere but here… , have drawn influence from Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). McKinney wants the viewer to feel the comparative discomfort of the giant Alice, as she remains cramped in a tiny room after she has grown to enormous proportions. The line ‘. . . she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken’, succinctly captures the constricted experience felt when surveying the structure from the top of the stairs. However, McKinney wants to play with the idea of scale yet again, when the installation is assessed from ground level and the viewer is now dwarfed by the towering mound of tables, mimicking the perspective of a shrunken Alice. These, then, are simple, subtle interventions that alter the viewer’s corporeal experience: from feeling tiny at one moment to gigantic the next. McKinney carefully injects an everyday, domestic undercurrent into the installation, inviting the viewer to construct meanings on several levels regarding systems of perception and space. The phenomenological nature of this work explores the ways we experience things, and their associated meanings. McKinney directs the viewers sensory perspective toward her installation, prompting consideration of memory, imagination, thought and emotion through the physical components of the piece.The viewer’s kinesthetic engagement involves a physical negotiation of the work and therefore a shifting perception of its structure. McKinney makes good, then, on philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s assertion that ‘The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen; but to think what nobody yet has thought, about that which everybody sees.’ (The World as Will and Representation, 1818).

Anyone then who did not reject the complex texts of Mallarmé became insensibly involved in learning to read again. To wish to endow them with a sense that was not unworthy of their admirable form and of the trouble that such precious verbal figures had certainly cost led infallibly to associating the labour pursued by the spirit and its combinatory capacities with poetic delight. Consequently, Syntax, which is calculation, regained the rank of Muse.³

Valéry’s account of the young admirer’s learning to read Mallarmé accords with the latter’s poetic program to which Manson alludes in citing from his ‘Crise de Vers’ in a luminous and generous ‘Afterword’. Mallarmé sought to shape a poetic ‘music’ in which relation displaces reference, just as the mere material sonorities of ‘brass, strings, wood’ give way to ‘the totality of relations’ that compose the actual symphony, or the poem. Mallarmé in the same essay suggests a specific account of the musicality of his own verse, one which helps to explain what Alain Badiou has referred to as the insistent ‘obliquity’ (as opposed to hermeticism) of his poems:

All becomes suspension, fragmentary arrangement with alternation and face-to-faceness, converging in the total rhythm, that which would be the poem silenced, in its blank spaces.⁴

Suspense, delay, the suspension of reference or the spacing of subject and predicate through extended apposition or implied parenthesis that allow for multiple potential directions for meaning (les sens du sens) – all are characteristic of Mallarmé’s work and of the peculiarly elusive quality of his lyric works in particular. Embedded as these effects are in the possibilities allowed by French syntax, they pose the most intractable difficulties for the English translator. By the same token, the effort to approach this dimension of Mallarmé’s work can lead to the most estranging effects on the English language, to that aspect of French, or of this particular poetic work at least, that most fully tests and supplements the resources of English as a medium for poetry.
 
What Manson remarks of his decision neither to emulate the French alexandrine nor to substitute for it the pentameter as its English equivalent could be extended to what seems to be the procedure, or at least the outcome, of most of the translations in what is surely a momentous achievement in English poetic translation. Where his metrical decisions come to ‘form an interference pattern between English pentameter and French alexandrine’, one might say that the translations by and large constitute a similar interference pattern between French and English as a whole. Given that the translations have been composed over some twenty years, it is hardly surprising that the procedures that produce this effect of interference, of a third term between Schleiermacher’s creative options, will vary from poem to poem. Generally speaking, Manson refuses the temptation to produce mellifluous, smoothed-out versions of Mallarmé that conform to the expectations of English syntax and even rhyme. Compare for a moment some quatrains from Manson’s translation of the ineffably ‘oblique’ ‘Prose, pour des Esseintes’, with the corresponding version in Keith Bosley’s Penguin Mallarmé:

Telles, immenses, que chacune
Ordinairement se para
D’un lucide contour, lacune
Qui des jardins la sépara,
 
Gloire du long désir, Idées
Tout en moi s’exaltait de voir
La famille des iridées
Surgir à ce nouveau devoir,
(Mallarmé)
 
All so immense that each one ordinarily paraded
in a lucid contour, lacuna se-
parating it from the gardens.
 
Glory of the long desire, Ideas
all of them in me leapt to see
the family of the irides
arise to this new duty
(Manson)
 
So that they all, enormous,
Were adorned with clear outlines
Commonly, a hiatus
Between them and the gardens.
 
Ideas, glory of long
Longing, my all leapt to see
 
The tribe of the iris throng
To fulfill this fresh duty
(Bosley)⁵

It may be admitted that Bosley’s versions of Mallarmé are themselves a remarkable achievement, succeeding in finding time and again admirably unforced rhymes and half-rhymes to match rhymes in the original French that are, as Manson remarks, ‘a fundamental property of Mallarmé’s poetry.’ Nonetheless, the overall effect of Bosley’s translations is to transpose Mallarmé’s work, in all its knotty syntactical and semantic difficulty, into a legible surface that reads like a slightly halting Wordsworthian lyrical ballad. Manson sets himself a different task, insisting from the start that ‘a translation of Mallarmé should at least be allowed to sound like interesting modern poetry.’ For him, ‘the strict (or even the very lax) use of rhyme and regular metre is one of the surest ways of forbidding that from happening.’ Instead, he opts for what he calls ‘unashamedly semantic translations of a poet whose best writing seems designed to put a semantic translator to shame.’ In consequence, Manson’s versions of Mallarmé seem to obey for the most part the logic of the scriptible, in Roland Barthes’ sense, rather than aiming for easy legibility.⁶ That is, they map for us as readers the track of his own arduous and intense reading of Mallarmé and oblige us in turn to follow the track of that reading, with all its hesitations and even, occasionally, false starts. Thus, while Bosley’s ‘were adorned’ might be the closer translation of se para according to the dictionary, Manson’s reading as ‘paraded’ nicely picks up on his retention of Mallarmé’s ordinairement in ‘ordinarily’, with its echoes of the ordinal series as well as the ceremonial regularity of the liturgy. The witty decision to divide the word se-parating then not only allows for the internal rhyme between paraded and –parating, but performs precisely what the word does while recuperating the French rhyming pun on se para and sépara.
 
Though muted rhyme emerges (arises?) in the following stanza, by and large ideational or conceptual rhyme of this kind, rather than strictly aural rhyming, is the mode in which Manson transposes Mallarmé’s prominent and quite insistent rhymes. This is not inappropriate, since for Mallarmé rhyme tends to provoke and perform intellectual work, not merely mark and control repetition. Compare Mallarmé’s procedure to that of the possibly most remarkable of English rhymers, Tennyson, and the difference is profoundly marked. To remain with the stanzas cited above, the rhyme on chacune and lacune underscores not only Mallarmé’s precise notation of the way in which each flower, by virtue of its size and intense color, produces a halo-like effect that ‘separates it from the gardens’, but also the differential relation that individuates chacune/each one only through the establishment of an empty space within which that singularity can appear. This in turn is surely a reflection on the conditions of verse itself, where the ‘ordinal’ series of lines requires the blank spaces around it to signify at all, a dialectical condition Mallarmé famously exploited from the inaugural ‘Rien’ (‘No thing’, in Manson’s version) of ‘Salut’ to the radical spatial experiment of the Coup de Dés. Manson’s achievement, surely enabled by the decision to eschew systematically rhymed translation, is to find an alternative set of echoes and correspondences at the conceptual level of the poetry that function at least partially as rhyme does for Mallarmé.
 
More taxing, though, than the issue of rhyme for the English translator of French poetry is that of syntax. Manson’s consistent translation of grimoire, which derives from grammaire but can mean spell-book (‘gramarye’ in medieval English) or scribble, as ‘grammar’ captures what is at stake. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has noted in Musica Ficta, one of Mallarmé’s earliest writings, ‘Artistic Heresies—Art for All’ insisted on the necessity for art to retain its ‘mystery’—like religion and like magical rites, it demands initiation and veiling.⁷ Sortilege, sorcery or the reading of lots, is one of Mallarmé’s favoured analogies for poetic practice. But poetry is threatened by its apparently easy availability to the general and uninitiated public and can only be warded by its auratic difficulty of access, the lacuna by which it is hedged. Valéry notes both the approximation of Mallarmé’s verse to ‘magic formula’ and the quality of incantation that it invoked, as well as the ascetic labour that it demanded both of the poet and the reader.⁸ Mallarmé’s difficulty is of course notorious, but it is not, for example the kind of difficulty that might face the reader of the early Yeats, where most difficulty can be resolved by turning to a handbook of Irish myths or of Theosophical symbols. Difficulties of that kind there certainly are in Mallarmé, and Manson’s tactful and unburdened ‘Scholia’ go a long way towards relieving the reader of such contingent difficulties. But the crucial source of difficulty lies precisely in what Mallarmé terms suspens, suspension or delay, which is the practical poetic means for enacting ‘mystery’ or warding against that too instantaneous consumption of the work which would convert it into a mere commodity form, a source of distraction or of information. The effect of delayed and gradual precipitation of meaning is frequently enabled in the poems, and indeed in the prose, by Mallarmé’s exacting extension of the syntactical possibilities of French almost to their limits. To take a relatively simple instance, the exquisite ‘Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé)’:

Avec comme pour langage
Rien qu’un battement aux cieux
Le future vers se dégage
Du logis très précieux
 
Aile tout bas la courrière
Cet éventail si c’est lui
Le même par qui derrière
Toi quelque miroir a lui
 
Limpide (ou va redescendre
Pourchassée en chaque grain
Un peu d’invisible cendre
Seule à me rendre chagrin)
Toujours tel il apparaisse
Entre tes mains sans paresse

Manson’s translation would be hard to better:

Fan (of Madame Mallarmé)
With for language nothing
but a beat in the sky
the future verse breaks free
of the most precious dwelling
 
quiet wing the courier
this fan if it is the
same through which behind
you some mirror gleamed
 
limpidly (where invisible
ash pursued to the last grain
will fall back again
only to cause me pain)
 
may it always appear so
between your unlazy hands

While it risks sacrificing for a moment the ongoing analogy between the spread of the fan and the wings of a dove, biblical messenger and iconic angel of annunciation, Manson’s ‘beat in the sky’ (for the more exact ‘beating [as of wings]’) finely inserts a Mallarmean conceptual pun on poetic rhythm that anticipates the breaking free of verse. The poem, in whose title one might discern a muted pun on évènement, event, is about the advent of the poem through the most oblique of glimpses, that of a fan seen as a momentary reflection passing across a mirror in the depths of a room. It is also a poem that seems to count the cost of poetic refinement, of its limpidity, precisely in a parenthesis that inserts both mortality and the temporality of delay into what might otherwise be an instantaneous epiphany. In French, the arrival of the subject of the parenthesis is delayed by inversion: the verbal phrase ‘va descendre’ precedes, even if rhyme predicts its subject ‘Un peu d’invisible cendre’, melancholy reminder of death or of what cannot be taken up into the limpidity of the deeply reflected poem. In English, that effect of delayed advent of the subject is virtually impossible to reproduce without extreme syntactic strain that would do violence to what is far from violent in the French. Perhaps that is why, here, Manson allows a rare rhyme pattern to emerge, the three rhymes in ‘–ain’ introducing something like an effect of delay into the English despite the necessity to begin the parenthetical clause with its subject. For rhyme does not only predict the phonetic patterns of the verse, as Manson reminds us in his afterword; it introduces, by its insistent recursive patterns, hesitation and slowing as the ear harks back as well as forward to establish the regularity of the rhyme scheme.
 
There is of course an erotic as well as mortal frisson embedded in this temporality of suspension, as ‘Quelle soie aux baumes du temps’ makes abundantly clear in final lines that reproduce the syntactic inversions of ‘Éventail’:

Non. La bouche ne sera sûre
De rien goûter à sa morsure,
S’il ne fait, ton princier amant,
 
Dans la considérable touffe
Expirer, comme un diamant,
Le cri des Gloires qu’il étouffe.
 
No. The biting mouth will not
be sure of tasting anything
if your princely lover does not make
 
the cry of Glory he stifles
expire, like a diamond
in the considerable tuft.

Again, English syntax seems incapable of supporting the inversion that French allows, this time the suspension of the object, le cri, rather than the subject. These are relatively simple examples, though they do indicate the intrinsic difficulties of a syntactical rather than a semantic translation. What they do not reveal is the extent to which this quality of delay in Mallarmé’s poetry enables another musical effect—and as the passage Manson cites from Crise de Vers suggests, music for Mallarmé has less to do with material soundscape or with individual notes or timbres than with the formal accomplishment of music, what he refers to as ‘orchestration’. Music, like poetry, takes place in time, but the suspension of the development of any motif or the recurrence of a given theme demand that the auditor hold in mind, as across a broad space, several musical ‘ideas’ at one time. Mallarmé’s verse at its most complex—and most notably in the Coup de Dés, which notoriously spatializes several thematic threads, using typographical scoring to assist the reader’s forward movement—seeks to extend to the maximum the condensation of ideas that a single phrase can accommodate, including ambiguities and contradictions.
 
As Lacoue-Labarthe argues, it is to the challenge—both aesthetic and national— of Wagner’s music, or rather to its ‘total art’, that Mallarmé responds by seeking to compose a poetry that would achieve a purer musicality, an ‘archi-music’.⁹ Not surprisingly, then, it is in his ‘Hommage’ to Wagner that we can find one of his most complicated and ironically layered orchestrations. Manson’s note to this poem alerts us to Mallarmé’s own judgment that the poem is imbued with ‘the melancholy of a poet who sees the old poetic confrontations collapse, and the magnificence of words fade, before the sunrise of contemporary Music, of which Wagner is the latest God.’ But, like melancholy in general, the poem has a biting edge that belies its writer’s humility in the face of music. Much as does the early essay, ‘Artistic Heresies’, the poem takes its distance from a poetry that pleases the crowd:

Our so old triumphal frolic of the grammar,
hieroglyphs the multitude exalts in
to spread with a wing the familiar shiver!
Bury it for me rather in a cupboard.

Manson adroitly captures here, in the implicit play on exalts and exults and in the use of the familiar ‘cupboard’ for what might tempt a poet less attuned to Mallarmé’s own shifts of register to armoire, the poet’s dismissive contempt for the vulgar. Such vulgarity is what has reduced poetry, including even the ‘nouveau frisson‘ of Baudelaire, to an all-too-accessible art, devoid, as Manson’s notes observe, of the comparatively arcane script that is musical notation. The octet devoted to this ‘crise de vers’ is correspondingly relatively straightforward. It is in the sestet, where the poet must confront the rise of Wagner, that Mallarmé engages in a tour-de-force of syntactic complexity:

Du souriant fracas originel haï
Entre elles de clartés maîtresses a jailli
Jusque vers un parvis né pour leur simulacre,
 
Trompettes tout haut d’or pâmé sur les vélins,
Le dieu Richard Wagner irradiant un sacre
Mal tu par l’encre même en sanglots sibyllins.
 
From the original smiling uproar hated
among them, of master clarities, has burst
as far as a parvis born for their simulacrum,
 
gold trumpets swooning out loud on vellum,
the god Richard Wagner irradiating a sacrament
unmuted even by ink in sibylline sobs.

It is not only that the past tense verb, a jailli, must wait three lines before finding its subject, the god Wagner, but moreover that almost every word in the sestet seems to refer at once forward and back, leaving a peculiar uncertainty as to referent. Ironically, the most difficult of all to assign a fixed place to are ‘elles de clartés maîtresses’ [‘those, mistresses of clarity’] who, if haï [hated] is past participle in the passive mood rather than an adjective simply qualifying fracas along with souriant and originel, would appear to hate what could either be the Wagnerian music that is on the horizon or the ‘frisson familier’ of the multitude. But if elles points forward to trompettes, as logically it should, given that that is the only feminine plural noun other than maîtresses that appears in the poem, then it is the very signature of Wagnerian music, its triumphal, brassy climaxes, that would seem to value the clarity eschewed by Mallarmé, master of the obscure and the oblique.¹⁰ That this is a real crux is confirmed by comparing Manson’s with two other translations, that given in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Musica Ficta by Felicia McCarren and, once again, Bosley’s:

From the smiling, hated, originary fracas,
Amongst themselves, masterful clarities
To a parvis created for their simulacrum,
(McCarren)
 
Out of the smiling ancient din detested
Among themselves by powers in brightness vested,
Up to a court made for their imitating, (Bosley)

English syntax seems unable to accommodate the ambivalent energies that course through this poem, a poem that suggests, at least in one possible reading, that Wagner is no more than a simulacrum of art, that the ‘central pillar’ indeed subsides as the curtain falls in the theatre. Poetry, in praising Caesar, also buries him, implying the secret superiority of the music of ambiguous orchestration over the brassy climaxes of an over-dramatic total art.
 
One of the great virtues of Manson’s translations is that they do not obscure the turbulence, even at times the turbidity of Mallarmé’s poetry. There is a tendency in English translations of his work to imagine a greater degree of purity and abstraction than is actually there. At times, especially as in the work of Brian Coffey, the Irish modernist poet who made extensive and very fine translations of Mallarmé, that tendency towards abstraction becomes the integral basis for a poetic devoted to a reduction and simplification of the writer’s own poetic in English. Manson, on the other hand, captures continually the dimensions of Mallarmé that are so often overlooked, so powerful is his reputation for asceticism and other-worldliness. Mallarmé is, in fact, a highly erotic poet, given, as Manson’s scolia often enough point out, to double entendres and to a quite systematic meditation on the relation between erotic desire and poetic creation. He is also, as even the few citations here of his verse would indicate, an exceptionally sensuous as well as sensual poet, even if that sensuality succumbs to a fin-de-siecle headiness often enough. But what there is of decadence is at the very least counterpointed by a sailor’s startling investment in sea and spray, as both ‘Brise marine’ and Un Coup de Dés testify. His work furnishes, accordingly, a rich field for ‘interference patterns’, drawing to the fore through translation qualities of English that are the more marked the less the translator seeks to reproduce the superficial abstractions and refinements of the verse.
 
This could be evidenced all over Manson’s translations and it is possible here to give only one instance, drawn from that icon of symbolist decadence, the fragment of the unfinished Hérodiade. In the first part, the ‘Old Overture of Hérodiade’, the ancient nurse speaks, in rhymed alexandrines, lines that resume so many of the properties of Mallarmé’s verse:

Ombre magicienne aux symboliques charmes!
Cette voix, du passé longue évocation,
Est-ce la mienne prête à l’incantation?
Encore dans les plis jaunes de la pensée
Traînant, antique, ainsi qu’une toile encensée
Sur un confus amas d’encensoirs refroidis,
Par les trous anciens et par les plis roidis
Percés selon le rythme et les dentelles pures
Du suaire laissant par ses belles guipures
Désespéré monter le vieil éclat voilé
S’élève, (ô quel lointain en ces appels celé!)
Le vieil éclat voilé du vermeil insolite,
De la voix languissant, nulle, sans acolyte,
Jettera-t-il son or par dernières splendeurs,
Elle, encore, l’antienne aux versets demandeurs,
A l’heure d’agonie et de luttes funèbres!
 
Magician shadow with symbolic charms!
This voice, long evocation of the past,
is it mine, ready for the incantation?
Still dragging in the yellow folds of thought,
antique, as a cloth of incense
on a confused mass of cooling church utensils,
through ancient holes and through the stiffened folds
pierced rhythmically and the pure lace
of the shroud, allowing through its fine crochet
the old veiled brilliance desperately to climb,
it is raised: (o, what a distance hidden in these calls!)
the old veiled brilliance of the unwonted gilding
of the voice, languishing, null, without acolyte,
will it throw down its gold among final splendours,
over the antiphon to plaintiff hymns
in the hour of agony and death-struggles!

In accord with the grounding principles of his translations, Manson lets drop both the alexandrine line (or any pentametric equivalent) and the rhymes of the couplets. What occurs then in the transposition seems an instructive instance of the ways in which interference patterns operate to draw out or highlight quite distinct qualities in each language. The French is a classic instance of Mallarméan delay, the steady pace of the alexandrine and the arresting repetition of the rhymes allowing the build up through seven lines of apposition and parenthesis before the main active verb, s’éleve, is reached, then a further parenthesis before the complex subject of the whole sentence (Le vieil éclat voilé du vermeil insolite,/ De la voix languissant) is attained. It accords precisely with the sterility and paralysis that afflicts the nurse as she waits for the entrance of Hérodiade, better known to English readers as Salomé. Manson’s lines, abnegating the restraining resources of rhyme and regular metre, seem rather to engage in a hurtling feat of vertiginous enjambement arrested only by a brief submission to the exigencies of English syntax and usage in the ‘it is raised’, before launching again into a further onrush of appositions. A breathless energy overtakes the lines that draws to the surface what an incantatory reading (as indeed, for instance, Bosley’s translation of the same passage more nearly is) fails to remark, the wild (farouche or fauve) and sensuous energies that lurk in Mallarmé’s apparently world-weary texts.
 
I would readily admit that I am influenced in this reading of Manson’s translation by hearing him read aloud from his then ongoing translation of the Hérodiade at the 2006 Soundeye Festival of Poetry in Cork. Mallarmé is famous for a line from his ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ that T.S. Eliot steals in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘Donner un sens plus pur au mots de la tribu.’¹¹ Manson’s achievement in these translations seems to me in part the rigorous avoidance of any attempt to emulate a poésie pure, or to engage in ‘purifying the dialect of the tribe’. Rather, he allows Mallarmé’s often too muted demotic accents to rub shoulders brusquely with his recherché idiom in a way that releases into English something utterly different that is none the less an impeccable homage to the Master. For this reason, it is perhaps permissible to lament that Manson did not include, even as an appendix, the versions published earlier, along the way, in various periodicals and in one chapbook collection, Before and After Mallarmé (Survivor’s Press, 2005). These earlier translations – deliberately rougher and freer in their way, which include Manson’s wonderful writing-through of Mallarmé’s most famous, or most memorable, poem ‘Salut’ [‘Rien, cet écume, vierge vers….’] – demonstrate beyond all that Mallarmé does not suffer from being a little roughed up, whether by irreverence or by interpolation. It opens with the slight but haunting sonnet ‘Tout l’âme résumée’, which was apparently the first that Manson tried to translate. There, the final lines include a hesitation that is precise in its way:

so if the volatile chorus
of love-songs leap to your lip
begin by spitting
back the real because sick
too precise sense [erasure]
your vague literature

There is, of course, nothing ‘vague’ about ‘spitting back the real because sick’: it plays exactly against the tropism towards the abstract that this sonnet might seem to represent, even if its opening lines resume perfectly the sensuous and meditative pleasures of the dedicated smoker. Manson transposes some of the wit of the poem into English puns that sadly do not survive into the collected translations, the cigar ‘burning sagely’, the smoke rings ‘snuffed out.’ And yet that bracketed erasure bears with it the sense of what continually happens in the reading of Mallarmé’s poetry in all its delays and suspensions: a peculiar sense of being haunted by lines whose sense has already been altered, erased, or abolished, in what has slipped into place in their wake:

Tout l’âme resumée
Quand lente nous l’expirons
Dans plusieurs ronds de fumée
Abolis en autres ronds
 
All soul (summed up
when slowly we expire it
in divers rings of smoke
snuffed out by other rings)

Manson’s translations of Mallarmé never pretend to the Romantic ambition of recreating the poem from its origins, nor do they entirely estrange the English language from itself. What they do achieve is the creation of a contemporary English poetry that stands in tension with Mallarmé’s own in a way that deepens and highlights the potentialities of both. They will stand as a mark, singular and idiosyncratic rather than blandly definitive, of what translation can and should attain to.
 
 
Peter Manson’s translation of Mallarmé’s Poems in Verse is published by Miami University Press, Ohio. It is available from Small Press Publishers and Amazon.
 
 
Notes
 
1 For Schleiermacher’s theory of translation, see his ‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’ [‘On the Different Methods of Translation’], in André Lefevere, ed. Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen, Amsterdam : Van Gorcum, 1977), pp. 80-86.
2 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 73.
3 Paul Valéry, ‘Je disais quelquefois à Stéphane Mallarmé…’, in Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, volume 1 of 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 646.
4 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de Vers’, in Oeuvres Complétes: Poésie-Prose, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris; Gallimard, 1945), p. 367. For Badiou’s remarks, see Alain Badiou, ‘A French Philosopher Responds to a Polish Poet’ in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 29.
5 Keith Bosley, trans. and intro., Mallarmé: The Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 137.
6 For ‘le scriptible’, or the ‘writerly’ as opposed to the ‘readerly’ (reader-friendly) text, see Roland Barthes, The pleasure of the text, trans. Richard Miller and Richard Howard (New York : Hill and Wang, 1975).
7 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 43.
8 Valéry, ‘Je disais quelquefois…’, p. 649.
9 Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, p. 82.
10 Lacoue-Labarthe points out that its instrumentation itself that undermines the ‘pure musicality’ of music itself, being ‘only a means to fake or reproduce’: Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, p. 79.
11 ‘speech impelled us/ To purify the dialect of the tribe’: T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 39.

This is where this exhibition’s surprise may lie. If it didn’t already do enough in intertwining life-, art- and curatorial history as a farewell to and plea for the museum – as site of a public art collection and playing a vital part in recording and forging the cultural memory and identity of a society – it also suggests that König’s brother Walther’s bookshop in the same building is not just a coincidental money-spinner for the institution, but a necessity for a museum that understands itself as a driver of discourse concerning important societal issues. That König began his career as professor at Düsseldorf and Frankfurt Academies goes some way to explain his desire to draw exhibition-goers into engagement with various texts. For the present viewer, there could hardly be a clearer ‘case study’ of the currency and strength of the European tradition of ‘literary art exhibitions’. The Before the Law catalogue is an admirable addition to this tradition, and the beautiful and important volume documenting Paul Chan’s staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, on display in the bookshop, provided a particularly successful example of the extension of visual art into the realm of the discursive, existing beyond the exhibition.

 
To include Kafka in a visual art exhibition is to point to certain intellectual roots: Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’, for instance – immediately political, de-territorializing and community-forging. Contemporary artists have often found this to be a liberating conceptual framework – hence (to put it too simply) their interest in literature and the now obsolete form of the book. Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘plateaux’, ‘rhizomes’ etc., have frequently been employed for exhibitions, thought of in Deleuzian terms as a temporary coming together in a thoughtful, rhizomatic knot, only to disperse again. There was even something like an explosion of Deleuze and Guattari references in the mega-exhibitions of 2001. To deploy the intellectual tools of guerrilla warfare in multi-million euro art events is problematic, of course, and the new, engaged institutionalism characterized by this conflation is also clearly aspired-to here in Cologne. The reference to Kafka, therefore, enabled König to curate a temporary ‘rhizome’ of intellectual credibility, while at the same time ‘taking flight’: the Deleuze and Guattari reference is rendered indirect through the foregrounding of Kafka, thus faithfully/unfaithfully signalling independence, and possibly re-instating the ‘minor’, too. Quite a shrewd move!
 
What is missing from this show? Sculpture (when even remotely figurative) places emphasis on gesture (there is also the reconstruction of an exhibition on the pathosformula by the concept’s innovator, the art historian Aby Warburg, to be viewed in Cologne at the moment). One could have imagined performance art as a valid addition and counterpoint to practice addressing post-war matters – or am following too personal a predilection? Boris Nieslony lives in Cologne, but is absent from exhibition and catalogue. In her text, Penelope Curtis elaborates on the role of sculpture in ruined, German cityscapes (Documenta 1), focussing particularly on Cologne and Heinrich Böll’s keen interest in ruins. She does not, however, mention Declan Clarke’s Cologne Overnight (2010) which curator Regina Barunke has nevertheless already shown here at Kölner Kunstverein.
 
To refer to Kafka explicitly in an exhibition is to represent the curatorial undertaking as tentative and probing. This is desirable: despite all the logistical and legal manoeuvring needed to bring a large exhibition such as this to fruition, in the final count no engagement with art can make claim to perfect control and comprehension. Art ‘skims along the edges of what is permissible’, as the exhibition guide tells the viewer. In this case, König’s Kafka reference is of fortuitous complexity: on the one hand a humility trope, it becomes a canonical reference on the other, giving the ‘group show’ blockbuster qualities (the English language catalogue has already sold out). It also contains an argument for art’s appropriateness and strength in dealing with difficult subject matter, while simultaneously displaying art’s productive weakness. It may also be a slightly nostalgic gesture towards the ideals of König’s youth around 1968. That Kasper König can foreground through Kafka the tentative, unfinished and ‘edgy’ in his last conceptual exhibition honours him, and it is only slightly ironic that – unlike the writer – a curator can never bring his works to the public posthumously.
 
 
Before the Law: Post-War Sculptures and Spaces of Contemporary Art. Exhibition catalogue ed. Kasper König, Thomas D. Trummer et al. Museum Ludwig, Museumsdienst Köln: Köln 2011. Before the Law ran from 17 December 2011 – 22 April 2012.

Fletcher’s skill throughout the biennial was to articulate art’s critical potential – especially in political terms – whilst also maintaining a varied yet coherent sense of what the specific contribution of art, as distinguished from say photojournalism or political campaigning, might yet be. This had not only to do with overt expressions of protest, but also with the affirmation of alternative, less instrumental ways of thinking; of an enlivened attention to the material fabric of everyday life; and of an unruly way of drawing images and things into the charged field between thought and sensation.

That the concern with politics would not be trained upon class and economics alone was immediately evident upon entering Limerick City Gallery of Art. Iveković’s Shadow Report (the first manifestation of which appeared in 1998) straight away brings the issue of violence against women in Ireland into visibility. Strewn across the floor of the first room, and scattered further afield by the time of my second visit, were scores of scrunched up pieces of red paper printed with a disturbing report provided by the National Women’s Council of Ireland. These crumpled sheets, coloured an angry red and casually kicked and buffeted around the gallery, constituted a precarious yet indignant gesture; and its weight became more insistent as it was encountered repeatedly throughout eva’s main exhibition spaces.

Iveković’s piece provided a frame for understanding the formally very different work of Kate Davis in an adjacent room. Curtain I-VII (Die Schönste Frau in der Geschichte der Mythologie) (2011) comprised seven copies of a poster of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, with a differently degraded image of the infamous slash made by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914 superimposed onto each. Here Davis alerts us both to art’s historical complicity with patriarchal forms of representation, and to examples of radical, violent models of spectatorship. Which is more precious, the rights of Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘the most beautiful character in modern history’ – or a painting of ‘the most beautiful woman in mythological history’?

Also at the LCGA was a suggestive juxtaposition of three artworks exploring the basic operations of architectural, semiotic and pedagogic structures. Emma Houlihan’s stark, cast concrete Arch (2010) presented a monument to the utter failure of social cohesion attending the progress of the Celtic Tiger. The arch, dependent for its defeat of gravity on the mutual support of each stone by its neighbours, is here reduced to a lumpen rubble of disassembled units. This work shared a space with Broodthaers’ slide piece, Images d’Épinal (1974). Broodthaers sequenced images from mid-nineteenth century lithographs produced in the French town of Épinal, pictures that became so popular that image d’Épinal is still used in French as a synonym for the stereotyped image. It is from such images that as children we learn to connect words with images and things: the world becomes intelligible, but only by way of our submission to systems of classification and stereotyping that are implicated in the exercise of power. Broodthaers alludes to this discursive function while also reveling in the suggestive potential of the juxtaposition of these image-emblems. Pedagogy, classification, rudimentary architecture and an interrogation of creative expression are enfolded in a third work in this cluster: Priscila Fernandes’ Product of Play (2011). This video projection observes a boy arranging a set of coloured building bricks and an older girl who, having riotously scattered a set of such blocks, laughs playfully before uncannily breaking into the song of a trained operatic voice. Here the disciplinary shaping of children produces unsettling results.

I found the remaining works downstairs at LCGA a little less convincing. Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee (2008) documents a performative attempt to disturb the smooth running of the marketing department of Deloitte, during which the artist lingered in odd places (she spent one day in a lift, for example) and conspicuously performed no tasks. While her presence certainly provoked concerned reactions from her co-workers, these were not of a particularly surprising kind, and the artist seemed rather too keen to alert the other employees to her odd, Bartleby-like behaviour for it all to avoid the air of self-conscious wackiness. Anibal Catalan’s site-specific installation, Morphological Zone (2011-12), which combined pictorial, sculptural and architectural elements, carried some of the formal dynamism of Russian Constructivism. However, almost 100 years on, and with those forms of immersive dynamic abstraction so familiar to design and product showrooms, the utopian charge of the original avant-garde project does not carry over here. Upstairs at the LCGA, however, Hyewon Kwon’s unemphatic video, Untitled ♯1 (2010-11), was particularly powerful. Kwon looped some archival footage filmed in Seoul’s Municipal Workers’ Dormitory in 1962 with various newsreel voiceovers and musical scores. These offered dramatically different narratives and, oddly and disturbingly, the footage was able to act as convincing backdrop to each one.

Moving away from the LCGA, Marcus Coates’ video The Plover’s Wing (The Palestinian/Israeli Crisis) (2008), on view at the Belltable, was absurd, bewildering and provocative, but not very good. Coates, dressed in a light blue Adidas tracksuit, wearing a badger skin on his head, and with a stuffed hare’s head poking out of his jacket, is meeting with Moti Sasson, mayor of the Israeli city of Holon. Coates, earnest in both his published interviews and on-screen demeanour, offers his shamanic services to Sasson, and the wisdom derived from his access to the world of animal spirits. We see an apparently sincere Coates act out his entry into this world and, returning back to us after a staccato sequence of shrieks and grunts, he brings with him the tale of the plover bird, the behaviour of which he then allegorizes to inform the mayor that Israel has a victim complex. Not perhaps the most subtle piece of political analysis ever delivered, and Sasson, a bit bewildered but remaining surprisingly well disposed, does not feel the need to ask Coates any further questions. Like an imagined meeting of Joseph Beuys, Ali G and The Mighty Boosh, the piece carried considerable entertainment value, and was certainly more telling than the ignorable work on the 10th floor of Riverpoint. Here, José Carlos Martinat’s Vandalized Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 (2012), like many relational artworks, failed to deliver on the liberatory claims made on its behalf.
Along with the LCGA, eva’s second major exhibition space was 103-104 O’Connell Street. Dozens of artworks were installed over four floors and, while not all the juxtapositions were equally illuminating, there were some brilliant moments. The different floors were linked by the recurrence of Iveković’s Shadow Report, and by the lengthy interviews filmed by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh (of the latter, the one featuring Sylvère Lotringer was particularly compelling).

Seeing Mark O’Kelly’s work on the 2nd floor made me aware of how little painting featured in the exhibition, although the slow tempo of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s digital video collages elicited the kind of prolonged, decelerated attention often characteristic of that medium. On the 1st floor a spare, elegant sculpture by Greg Howie, simply titled ( (2011), used ratchet straps to bend a sheet of glass into a shallow arc, its curve supplying enough stability for the sheet to stand precariously upright. Attending to this work – a combination of ubiquitous building materials and a delicate formal solution – made me suddenly more alive to the nature of materials. The tension, poise and spareness of this piece approached something of the charge of Tatlin’s revolutionary experiments, which Catalan’s more spectacular installation at LCGA failed to achieve.

Art’s proximity to political activism was perhaps closest in Zanny Begg and Oliver Resler’s satisfyingly outraged film, The Bull Laid Bare (2012). Effective as a mode of consciousness-raising, its formal innovations were enlisted in the service of reinforcing the exposure of the psychopathic logic of corporate capitalism, and its devastating effects on the Irish economy. In comparison, Sarah Pierce’s It’s Time Man, It Feels Imminent (2008) was much more sober and reflexive, seemingly driven less by an agitational agenda and more by an interest in interrogating the relationship of Conceptual Art to contemporaneous moments of popular political protest. While Pierce’s project felt rather knowing and careful, her interview with Mary Kelly, in which the latter remarks upon the replacement of the slogan, ‘Make love not war’ by the blunter imperative to ‘Stop the war, have sex!’ rivets us to the texture of language and its importance for activist protest.

For me, however, the most potent artwork in the biennial was the haunting, enlivening slide piece by KwieKulik, Activities with Dobromierz (1972-4). Here the long-marginalized experimental Polish artists Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik took nearly 900 photographs in which their own infant son appears positioned alongside various everyday household and natural objects. The means are very modest (a baby, a blanket, some onions, some ice, a bucket, etc.), and the spatial and relational propositions very systematic (the artists were reading the linguistic theory of Adam Weinsberg); but the visual, psychological and conceptual effects of seeing this baby uncannily made over into something like a lexical unit were both unsettling and somehow visionary. The rigours of logic, set theory and linguistic typology are held up against the affective dynamics of family life and the crystalline beauty of natural fragments. Dobromierz returns the viewer’s gaze, but blankly, as he is taken up in the ambitious (and sometimes disturbing) experimental games of his parents, who were forced to explore the universal in private, excluded as they were from the public sphere by a cruelly bureaucratic and repressive state apparatus.

The preponderance of lengthy video pieces in Fletcher’s show might have seemed odd, given Berardi’s emphasis on the importance of taking control of one’s own experience of time. The open temporality of the sculptural pieces, however, made up for the absence of painting in this regard, and the predominance of the projected image also leant the installation a presentational coherence. Characterised by aesthetic conviction and ethical commitment, the best moments of the biennial offered encounters that were both arresting and galvanizing. At these points, contemporary art’s ability to maintain contact with broader social and political dynamics was affirmed, without it becoming a mere instrument of other kinds of project.

eva International – After the Future was on view 19 May – 12 August 2012.

Inside the pavilion, a wall panel entitled A Trip to the Imperial Capital (2011) by a Viennese artists’ collective exposed capitalist neo-coloniality across the former-East, by charting the role played by foundations such as Soros and Erste in re-writing central European art history since 1989. Nearby, a can of spray-paint and a stencil, propped casually up against a wall, became another talking point. The stencil, also sprayed on the wall above, read Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art. János Sugár’s piece was conceived as an interactive offering. People could take the stencil, use it to spray the sign wherever they liked, and bring it back. In so doing, they marked their solidarity with the artist’s right to freedom of expression – a freedom whose limits, in the Hungarian context, were rendered very clear when, after spraying his invocation on the walls of two cultural institutions in Budapest in 2008, the artist was sued and landed a five year jail sentence (later suspended).

 
Sugár’s dramatic story echoed the story of Adamciak’s precarious existence on the margins of provincial Slovakia. In a piece called Trans-Action. Altruism as Art – Art as Philanthropy. Social Sculpture vs. Social Care, the younger artist Michal Murin described the perpetuities that led him to raise money to buy Adamciak a house near the mountains, when he discovered, in 2005, that his older colleague was destitute. Murin describes his form of Social Sculpture as a ‘targeted, rational, managerial intervention’ simulating ‘the role of a private gallery manager’ in a country with an inadequate cultural infrastructure. Its goal? To enable an important artist, in danger of being forgotten artist, but once a key player, to reappear on the art scene, and to survive, in real terms. Murin’s pragmatism makes for an interesting dialogue with the Viennese critique of private capital’s interventions in the cultural field.
 
For all the concerns it brought to the fore, the show suggested restorative potentialities. And for the early birds, there was even pre-congress peace on offer, as each day began at 7am with an hour-long meditation designed ‘to remove all fears and fulfil all wishes’ in a Japanese garden. The sessions were led by U We Claus, a member of the FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY collective, and one-time collaborator of Joseph Beuys. It was perhaps the collective’s other member, Anna Tretter, who provided the punctum of the exhibition, however: an extraordinary video examining the archive of journalist Erich Everth – a forgotten Weimar Republic critic of Nazism. Echoes of a darker history haunting Central Europe lent the contemporary themes in the show disturbing depth.
 
 
10×10: See You There was on show 8 – 11 September 2011 (visit www.culturecongress.eu).

And what strange objects these were. Rekab’s Protos hanging above the fabric were a series of odd shaped things that seemed to be designed to be held in the hand but whose function and meaning was uncertain. In the accompanying video pieces Rekab performed with them by following the cues of a Tai Chi master in an instructional video. She seemed to be following the script but to what end we can only speculate. Lucy Andrew’s Law of Contagion was a roiling mass of rockwool and bubbles that simmered in the corner whilst threatening to infect the whole space with an alien presence. In another corner a tap merrily burbled to itself in its own thingly language on a TV screen, which slowly filled with water and then drained away. When the piece was first shown on Scottish television in 1971, as one of David Hall’s 7 TV Interruptions, it was, Hall has said, ‘unannounced and uncredited – a total surprise and mystery’. Then, each interruption disrupted the normal human flow of information, news and drama for just a moment. Here, another disruption took place in which a micro-narrative of things and of conversations between taps and televisions screens, became briefly visible.

 
There was a more obvious, although no less obscure, narrative in Isil Egrikavuk’s film Infamous Library in which a man recounts in Turkish a story of being taken forcefully to a library to undertake unspecified research. The film is diverted from its obvious Borgesian and Kafka-esque inflections through the presence of the film-maker who prompts the actor on how and what to say. She hands him an unidentifiable object – a macguffin – telling him that it will help the audience believe the story.
 
Another unidentifiable object was suspended above the fabric divide. This was Judith Scott’s untitled piece which had emerged from accretions and clusters of different types of materials such as string, paper and audio tape. In her work hidden articles are wrapped away under surfaces that offer only a hint of what lies beneath. One can only imagine what stories this thing might reveal if we could only find a way to question it in a manner that it could understand.
 
Go to any national gallery in Europe and you’ll be confronted by walls and walls of paintings which demand a certain level of conceptual understanding from their audience. The paintings of Fine Art are not, and never can be, neutral objects free from theoretical meanings. They are rather painstakingly built up, layer by layer, from a complex palette of learned practices, pigmented with received histories and protected from their environment by the yellowing varnish of culture.
 
This show offered a different proposition: a chance to imagine objects that had been untethered from their everyday relations and allowed, just briefly, to run amok. It didn’t weigh down objects with familiar concepts or narratives. Rather it gifted them a holiday from the banal and petty systems they inhabit day after day.
 
 
A Macguffin and Some Other Things was on view 12 April – 16 June 2012.

These fragments punctuate a selection of work from a number of Crawford lecturers and tutors. As the overriding impression is one of modesty (apart from a few pieces, such as Pádraigh Trehy’s short film dramatising the psychological relationship of James Joyce to John McCormack in terms of the Shem and Shaun characters of Finnegans Wake, a sense of strong art-practical ambition is lacking) the viewer’s thoughts naturally wander to the question of the relation of art teaching to art practice. On the basis of one or two artworks and a list of names, of course, this is never likely to amount to anything more than idle speculation, but it’s tempting to see in the solid technical accomplishment of Colin Crotty’s or Eileen Healy’s paintings suitable models for a teaching practice.

 
The works were generally well-displayed, and I was particularly happy to have the opportunity to view Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s collaged digital video Emigrant III (2010), in ample space in one of the gallery’s two arched cellars. This is the third time I’ve encountered her work, the first being at the Darkness Visible show in Galway in 2008. The second, at this year’s eva, was sufficiently recent for it to be still active in my thinking. It’s intriguing stuff, one of the best engagements with the possibilities of digital video I’ve come across. The capacity for image manipulation and collage runs the risk of producing a new literalness – fantastic or hallucinatory scenes that merely reinforce ingrained, prosaic understanding by extending it out to unencountered experiences. This is the weakness of much of Dali’s painting (when it isn’t being out and out kitsch) – a floppy watch or melting body keeps the naturalistically represented watch or recognisable body firmly in place, it simply adds the diversion of the distorting mirror to its perception and raises the result to the status of the truly reimagined. Ní Bhriain’s work has more in common with pre-war De Chirico (via the closing sequence of Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, perhaps), those paintings which justify the epithet ‘metaphysical’, and cast the viewer back on a consideration of temporality and spatiality.
 
As in De Chirico different experiences of space are combined in the same image, with each being given discrete zones (bordered by a curtain, screen, corner or horizon – this is clearer in eva’s Great Good Places), sometimes gently transgressed (e.g. water laps from behind a screen through which the open sea can be discerned). The addition of motion to Ní Bhriain’s images brings in another kind of zoning – layering. Drifting minutiae on the image’s surface, for instance, give the impression of underwater currents, though the objects behind belong to an indoors scene and may be disturbed from time to time by what appears to be a breeze. The juxtaposition of different spatial experiences places emphasis on the images’ temporality – a slow duration that includes motion, but not change, a kind of extended pause between acts (Virginia Woolf’s intermediating section in To the Lighthouse comes to mind). In contrast to post-Newtonian concepts, time is understood by Aristotle to be a function of the innate changeability of the various beings. Such a way of thinking raises the question whether without change there could be any time. In Ní Bhriain’s digital videos such an impossible, ‘timeless’ universe is made apparent.
 
 
Crawford 100 was on view 24 May – 23 June 2012.