Johns’ play with representation is well evidenced in the exhibition which shows 150 of the artist’s sculptures, paintings and drawings and is the first major retrospective of his work to be shown in the UK for 40 years. The flags, maps, and numbers for which the artist is most well known are all abundantly represented, as are his bright, colourful canvases with words stencilled into the background, his painted bronzes, his graphite drawings and lithographs. In each example there is an investigation into the nature of the relationship between signs and their referents that remains a central concern of the artist’s work. The complexity of these experiments vary, but they are always interesting, evidencing the turn in the 1950s towards a consideration of the nature of symbols, developed throughout the decades of Johns’ career to include attention to numerous influences, ranging from Ballantine beer to Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles.

 
Although this is interesting to consider, what stands out in the exhibition is not the artist’s conceptual play but his formal investigations. Encaustic is the material particularly associated with Johns, and his varied experiments with this mix of wax and pigment is visible throughout the show with works like Painting Bitten by a Man (1961) in which a deep and abject waxy grey surface is scraped through by the teeth of the artist, Usuyuki (1977- 8), a white cross-hatched triptych with brighter colours visible underneath the dull short lines on the surface, and Untitled (1988) one of his bathtub series that depicts a melting version of Picasso’s Woman in a Straw Hat and a figure abstracted from the Isenheim Altarpiece. More than just encaustic, this exhibition shows his experiments with the formal qualities of a range of materials. In a room dedicated to his depictions of numbers, there is included his Number 0-9 (2011). This twelve panel bronze work made more than fifty years after his iconic Flag demonstrates a similar interest in surface and material. The patination on the bronze ranges from excremental brown to blackened silver, not the smooth surface often associated with bronze, instead the surfaces are marked with drips and splodges, sometimes smooth, sometimes rough and messy. Oil paint too is examined. In Untitled (1964- 5), colour is put on display in large panels of blue, red and yellow interrupted by swatches of rainbow colour and grey stencilled letters. Skin with O’Hara Poem (1963-5) demonstrates an investigation of lithography, recording the smudged and scumbled index of his own face and hands that contrast with the neat printing of Frank O’Hara’s ‘The Clouds Go Soft’.

 
This play with form is best demonstrated in one of the most recognisable works included in the exhibition. In the room entitled ‘Things the Mind Already Knows’, a quote taken from a 1959 article by the artist on his own work, the first artwork we encounter is Flag (1958). Though not the 1954-5 original that first offered a way out of the Greenbergian cul-de-sac of flatness that was dominating the American art world at the time, still this work demonstrates much of what was so significant about the gesture. Hung in a way that facilitates a close engagement with the object itself, the encaustic with which it is painted is textured and matt, a visually rich surface that draws the eye into its details and rewards close attention. Indeed, the rest of the quote from which the title of the room is taken asserts this attention to the material presence of the work; in a 1953 edition of TIME Magazine Johns stated ‘I’ve always thought of a painting as a surface’. Seeing Flag in person allows a detailed consideration of this contention; its texture and colour, its record of brushstrokes, and the trace of the artist’s hand are made more apparent in their relationship to the assumed flatness and smoothness of flag-as-symbol.

 
The Stars and Stripes is a form that is so overdetermined in its meaning as to negate any fixed claims for its significance; even if we are dubious of its capacity to be separated from its associations with nationhood and patriotism that would render it merely a sign, hanging on the wall of the gallery it can be read as affirmation, negation, critique, such a mute gesture as is impossible to decipher. Considering Flag in light of the claims made for painting around the same time (Greenberg’s radio address that formed the basis of the essay ‘Modernist Painting’ and asserted flatness as the major condition of painting was delivered in 1960) this is a painting that proposes a way for the lessons of formalism to be brought back into contact with the world, using the flag as an apparently arbitrary vehicle for a sustained consideration of form made apparent through the insistent materiality of the surface. Seen in this exhibition, we are able to engage fully with the implications of the collision of sign and surface, investigating the interaction through sustained attention.

 
This is the strength of Something Resembling Truth: it offers the viewer the opportunity to dwell on the complex materiality of Johns’ oeuvre. Throughout the exhibition, we can see Johns returning again and again to the same subjects and approaches, combining and complicating them as his practice develops. With the amount of work on show this builds to offer the viewer a keen and valuable insight into Johns’ experimental, formal practice.

 
Rachel Warriner teaches art history at City & Guilds of London Art School. Her book, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero, is forthcoming with I B Tauris in 2018. Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth was on view 23 September – 10 December 2017.

 
The show opened with a large digital print, Human Eyes (Corpus: The Humans) (all works 2017), installed in the reception area of the gallery and visible from the street. Drawn from a series Paglen terms ‘Hallucinations’ (more on these later), the image alarmed for its ‘fleshy’ viscerality, depicting two disembodied, unblinking eyeballs peering out from a pink, digitally-rendered epidermis. Its placement in the gallery was strategic, introducing visitors to the barely comprehensible and deeply uncanny concept structuring the following three galleries: that a new sort of bodiless being has learned to look back at us through algorithmic non-eyes.

 
In the first gallery, Paglen curated a selection of images that spoke to the prehistory and early days of ‘invisible images.’ Included here was Megalith, a grid of roughly 70,000 examples of handwritten numbers (0-9) gathered by machines in order to recognize human writing gestures. The links to Minimalist and Conceptual practices were clear. But if Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings or Eva Hesse’s diagrammatic drawing acts of the 1960s and 1970s spoke to a latent irrationality underlying systems of order and regulation, Paglen’s print evinced a machine logic in which the irrationality of the handwritten mark—and its attachment to the libidinal drives of the body—no longer has a place in a society of control.

 
On an adjacent wall, Paglen included It Began as a Military Experiment, a series of ten photographic portraits of employees at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Selected from thousands of volunteers for an early foray into facial recognition software, these ten subjects represented what Paglen calls in the accompanying text the ‘Adams and Eves’ of machine learning: the first subjects fully enrolled into the fallen world of machine omniscience (‘Checklist with Artist’s Notes: A Study of Invisible Images’). Paglen submitted the portraits— curated so as to include different genders, ethnicities, and age groups—to newfangled forms of AI, running the 1990s-era images through face recognition software that overlay diagrammatic patterns over the physiognomic features. Such pseudo-drawings also lined the surface of Four Clouds, installed on a facing wall. These four cloudscapes trafficked in a romanticist aesthetic similar to Paglen’s earlier series of drones navigating weather patterns. Those earlier images resemble Turner-esque compositions in which technology, nature, and atmosphere have merged into some new ecosystem of control. In the new cloud series, Paglen dug deeper into the long history of drawing, asking his AI to find patterns in the clouds, and thereby riffing on age-old artistic practices of cloudwatching.

 
On the gallery’s end wall, Paglen installed his playful Machine Readable Hito, a grid of hundreds of portraits of fellow artist and writer Hito Steyerl playacting for face recognition AI. Her seemingly infinite expressions were submitted to algorithms that attempted to decode her gender, emotional state, age, and so on, leading to guesses (listed as percentages below each portrait) that could verge on the slapstick. Such casual humour in the face, as it were, of technological control brought an added question to Paglen’s researches: what moments of humour, even pleasure, might arise from slippages between seemingly irrational human gestures and the forms of machine learning trained to decode them? Might such moments of misrecognition generate critical, oppositional laughter from within systems of control? These questions haunted the final room, which included the most provocative series in the show: the ‘Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations,’ or simply, ‘Hallucinations.’

 
Before entering this last gallery, however, visitors passed through the film installation Behold These Glorious Times! Bathed in a seductive electronic score composed by Holly Herndon, viewers watched AI cycle through grids of images drawn from ‘training libraries’: banks of images that machines use to learn how to recognize objects, faces, and gestures (‘Checklist’). The result frightened in at least two ways: while the film confronted viewers with a seemingly random selection of the infinite movements and behaviors that make up human social interaction, it also revealed the coldness of a machine perspective that transforms, at inhuman speeds, all manoeuvres into instruments of control. The installation, in short, reminded viewers of a central premise of the show— that machines don’t see images but instead, as Paglen discussed at a recent talk at New York University, do things with them (‘Invisible Images: Aesthetics and Politics of Autonomous Vision’). His ‘Hallucinations’ series seemed to offer one, potentially humorous, tactic for a human mode of détourning the lightningquick movements of the machinic gaze.

 
The process Paglen invented for constructing these images is complex. Essentially, he created a ‘training set’ similar to those in Behold These Glorious Times! but drew his categories from human discursive structures and the ‘irrational things’ populating them (‘Checklist’). These included ‘Omens and Portents,’ ‘Monsters of Capitalism,’ ‘American Predators,’ and the very Freudian ‘Interpretations of Dreams.’ Building image ‘corpuses’ based around these and other categories, Paglen trained an AI, which he called the ‘Discriminator,’ to recognize iterations of these fantastical beings and events. A second, ‘adversarial’ AI (the ‘Generator’) was then tasked with drawing pictures capable of tricking the first AI into recognizing ‘ false’ versions of these categories. Over millions of interactions, the Generator and Discriminator dialogued with one another until the latter assumed, wrongly of course, that it was seeing something it had been trained to recognize. Paglen termed the resulting images ‘ hallucinations’ because they emerged mirage-like from out of the domain of invisibility that structured his AI adversaries.

 
The work at the entrance of the exhibition, Human Eyes, was generated in this fashion (from a ‘corpus’ called ‘The Humans’), and it emblematized the paradoxical self-reflexivity of Paglen’s endeavour. Here was an almost painterly depiction of the instruments of human vision but one hallucinated by non-visual, nonhuman means. The final gallery included ten further iterations, and the results mixed horror with dark laughter. On one wall, Paglen paired Highway of Death (Corpus: The Aftermath of the First Smart War) with the decidedly Foucauldian A Prison Without Guards (Corpus: Eye Machines). The former presented the viewer with a matte-grey sky hanging over what appeared to be a barren, crudely-rendered desert landscape, its wide expanse streaked with jarring red-pink pigmentation. In its hallucinated neighbor, the AI’s empty prison was all enclosure, a suffocating grey interior loosely conforming to perspectival space. Situated within the long history of the landscape or interior scene, these works were made uncanny by the knowledge that they had been generated by the automated logic of machine actors, who also, Paglen was quick to remind us, surveil and patrol, IRL, the very sceneries they have hallucinated here. Across the way, Paglen curated a number of other images drawn from the various corpuses that guided his AI adversaries. One of the most striking was Comet (Corpus: Omens and Portents), a representation of a cascading white form falling onto a thin sliver of horizon. Paglen’s earlier images of drones and black sites, which also trafficked in painterly traditions of the sublime, were clearly forerunners. But a new form of awe now seemed to have displaced the nature-based sublimity that still haunted those earlier series: What entranced here was not the magnificent scale of the vista unfolding before us but the incomprehensible, alien speeds and computations that went into manufacturing and preparing this image for human eyes.

 
The most striking, and darkly comic, juxtaposition in the gallery involved Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism) and Porn (Corpus: The Humans), both of which were centered on opposite walls so that they faced off across the room. The vampire, Paglen notes in his text, has often served as a metaphor for, among many other things, capitalism run amok, and in this uncanny portrait, AI has given us its best rendition of the immortal monster’s physiognomy. Made up of a lone, seemingly surgically removed eye, a bloodsoaked maw, and grey, feathery skin, the image, which included both a profile view and a frontal one, peered, many-faced, across the gallery. The leering placement of the image, which struck one as both campy and visceral, pointed to the sinister humour of a machine consciousness that had been pushed to ‘hallucinate’ a being that is itself a hallucination of human imagination. There was also something obscene about this ‘Monster of Capitalism’ staring across the gallery at an image of machine-hallucinated ‘porn.’ Here was the fruit of a situation in which the operations of power that these machines normally serve—namely, surveillance and marketisation—have been momentarily suspended, given over instead to a broken, dysfunctional erotic imagination. A kind of dark, critical laughter could be detected here, and yet, if any humour was to be found, it was one accompanied by horror. With the latter image in particular, Paglen’s adversaries brought out the centrality of violence within pornography, giving us nothing but a mutant image of disfigured pink meat, splayed within some red interior. Paglen, in other words, made the vampiric male gaze that structures pornographic imagery encounter its new adversary: a sort of undead, zombie porn fantasized by machine overlords.

 
The eroticism of machine-to-machine interaction seemed to be at play in Paglen’s ‘Invisible Images’, intensified by the clear links to painters like Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, or Yves Tanguy. But searching for art historical references would be to miss the point: Though they might draw on its myths and icons, Paglen’s are, at their core, not images drawn from the ‘ fleshy’ realm of human visual culture. They are instead active datapoints exchanged between machines, temporarily made over into images for the benefit of human visitors to an exhibition. Paglen’s provocation is existential, then, forcing us to reevaluate both the centrality of the exhibition format as well as the function of the artist within a postvisual culture of information and machine learning.

 
How, for example, are we to conceptualize Paglen’s artistic subjectivity here, especially when we take into account his cross-disciplinary activities as artist and writer, researcher and technologist? Mediating between the realm of machine learning and the human world of the senses, Paglen seems keen on making visible the invisible machinations of power that organize everyday life at all levels. The urgency of these concerns has intensified for a present in which technology and neoliberal capital have conspired to forge neo-fascist organisations that no longer keep their racist, xenophobic, or sexist ideologies ‘invisible.’ As Paglen noted recently, these latter ideologies have become internalized by ‘machine-to-machine’ interactions, no longer requiring human input at all (‘Invisible Images’). In this logic, neo-fascist forms of populism that have seized the reins of power in the United States and elsewhere might be seen as expressions of this underlying machinic order.

 
What might this mean for the system of art in which Paglen’s work participates? In the artist’s crosshairs, I think, is not only the regime of human visuality that has structured western culture since at least the Renaissance but, more specifically, the institution of art and the privileged mode of display and curation that buttresses it: the exhibition format. Though the Metro Pictures show amounted to a seemingly traditional exhibition of pictures (and a video installation) staged within a white cube space, it was haunted, I think, by a kind of institutional critique. If the gallery system depends on the staging of discrete exhibition events catering to the visual capabilities of human bodies, it has already begun, Paglen’s show implies, to adapt to new, ‘invisible’ forms of image processing and control. This has and will occur, no doubt, alongside systems of policing and marketisation that have from the beginning made use of ‘invisible images’ to better surveil, control, and capitalise activities of pleasure, sociality, or resistance.

 
Within the privileged spaces of the art system, the exhibition—as a form that almost categorically depends on the presence of the body in space— might become a key interface in which to test new artistic practices (and new artistic subjects) capable of intervening in the shadow world of invisible images. For help, Paglen might look to the anti-aesthetic exhibition design practices of Marcel Duchamp and other members of the historical avant-gardes (indeed, during his NYU talk Paglen discussed his growing interest in Surrealism, and in René Magritte’s ‘treacherous’ images in particular). For Duchamp and his colleagues, vision was never presumed to be the domain of the human being alone. Those ‘fleshy things’ in our heads and our presumed ownership over them had to be negated and instead revealed to be intimately intertwined with whole media ensembles. The camera, screen, factory, machine and of course, the eye all had to be considered as equal partners in a complex of technological gestures. But this was only the first step. Behind it lay a utopian attempt to produce lived opportunities for spectators to construct resistant forms of subjectivity within systems of control. In conjuring the invisible movements of power, Paglen takes a significant step in this direction, though we will have to wait and see whether this path results in critique and resistance or mere ‘hallucination.’

 
Trevor Paglen: A Study of Invisible Images was on view at Metro Pictures, New York, 8 September – 21 October 2017. Paglen’s essay, ‘Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)’ is accessible at https://thenewinquiry.com/invisibleimages- your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/

 
One of the ways in which a word is identifiable as a keyword is in its simultaneous ‘obviousness’ – it seems to naturally present itself when we undertake to understand certain social phenomena – and difficulty of definition. We all reach for ‘culture’ at certain moments of interpretation, but what does ‘culture’ actually mean? Can one extrapolate from the, presumably basic, meaning implicit in ‘bacterial culture’, to a highly complex affair like ‘modern culture’ (there are people who would say ‘yes’)? Why is it that when some people say ‘culture’ they automatically think of something which focuses on eating and listening to music, while others think of museums and canonical books? Others again will naturally incline to concepts of national or ethnic difference – food again, but also language, dress, ‘folkishness’. Listening to the word it becomes clear that there is a struggle for definition going on inside, a debate that is a continuation of debates and conversations that have sometimes been active for two and a half millennia, but may have taken radical turns at different points in history, often in response to whole new social experiences.

 
Williams found himself out of step with the cultural mainstream – that is, on the other side of a threshold of social experience – not once, but twice in his early adult life. He entered the university system between the World Wars from a workingclass, provincial background: his father was a railway worker from Abergavenny. His academic career was interrupted by World War II, in which he fought, and when he returned he found himself again somehow on the other side of a cultural shift, that marking the emergence of the post-war generation, one radical enough to change the very ‘language’ spoken among the new students. This made him particularly sensitive to interpretative language’s continual selftransformation, and not merely as a matter of technical advance, but as something socially responsive and active. Through these words the structures of society were being reproduced and transformed; often the same word was being brandished by mutually antagonistic cultural forces, so that quite different meanings resonated in the same word when examined. Which is not to say that words are merely ideological, the tools of political movements and parties – Williams mentions at one point how a particular word use has collapsed from its operation as a keyword into being ‘mere rhetoric’ – an ideological label to be slapped onto an opponent with little or no effort of understanding (‘populist’, for instance, is such a usage since at least the mid-2000s). Rather, there is a continuity with that Marxist analysis of inherent social ‘contradictions’, working themselves out and initiating crises, though in Williams the contradictions are not just functions of the productive base of capitalism, but are pressure points within the legislative, political and interpretative sphere responding to, maintaining, and sometimes reacting against that transforming material base and the relations it produces. And pace Williams’ ‘mere rhetoric’, I think there is also an element of rhetoric, that is, the study of public, persuasive language, in Keywords: the book is certainly no manual for speech-makers, but the way in which keywords work places them, I think, in that dynamic territory between theoretical discourse and political action tout court. Historicised, non-instrumental rhetoric, perhaps – what you cannot avoid if you are to take a position within society’s formations and transformations – a rhetoric you believe in (and even among the most cynical of politicians, masters of ‘mere rhetoric’, those keywords can be found which reflect their underlying understanding of the public world).

 
One of Williams’ keywords dominated the framing texts produced by the curators of the 57th Venice Biennale, and was felt throughout the giant concatenation of exhibitions: ‘human’. As one would expect from Williams, the keyword was surrounded, like satellites, by cognates and synonyms, some given the status of slogans, some unvoiced but operative all the same: ‘humanism’, ‘mankind’, ‘inhuman’, ‘anthropos’. Rhetorically, one might reduce the curatorial thinking behind the Biennale to a dynamic constellation of three keywords – crisis, humanism, artist – given succinct expression in the first sentence of curator Christine Macel’s ‘Introduction’:

Today, in a world of conflicts and shocks, art bears witness to the most precious part of what makes us human.

We are immediately in the territory of the simultaneously obvious – our being human, the value of our humanity, the most precious part of that value – and of difficulty of definition – ‘being human’, what does that actually mean? What is it that gives it value (while the images and headlines shouting from the media repeatedly suggest that it is everywhere devalued)? What is the essence of that thing, referred to in terms of intimacy or sacredness: the most precious part? President of the Board of the Biennale, Paolo Baratta, developed Macel’s opening:

. . . this humanism, through art, celebrates man’s ability to avoid being dominated by the powers governing world affairs.

 
‘The powers governing world affairs’ not being the directors, curators and corporate and governmental sponsors of the Venice Biennale, presumably: Japan International Tobacco, Illy, real estate investment company COIMA, the state foundations behind the various national pavilions, ex-mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic foundation, Russian gas billionaire Leonid Michelson’s V-A-C art foundation, etc. Not to mention the financial power represented by the super-yachts moored before the entrance to the Giardini for the festival’s duration.

 
The sense of crisis, and its relation to world political power, was impossible to ignore in the period when the 57th Biennale was being organised. What happened in world politics in late 2016 hardly needs to be repeated here, but what was equally momentous in that period was the extreme reaction of what might be described as the progressive establishment: that of utter disbelief, as if not only a political status quo, but a basic understanding of how the world worked, had collapsed. The reaction of the Biennale’s executive seems to have been very similar – a shocked distancing from something inescapable. The blatancy of austerity politics, the world’s increasing economic inequality and its open enforcement by national and international governance, still allowed space for a response in the spirit of left-wing idealism by Enwezor Okwui’s invocation of Marx in the Biennale of 2015 (even under pressure from the obvious dependence of the exhibition on the same reservoirs of wealth). But how to come to terms with the sudden running backwards of historical progress itself, the victory in world politics of rhetoric devoid of any notion of social enlightenment? The light of good intentions that had accompanied Western power and capital had been abruptly switched off. One option would have been to embrace a spirit of doom apparent in much international art, but this was hardly a formula for La Biennale. Venice’s answer bore all the hallmarks of a sense of trauma: the bad stuff, for the time being, was to be ‘avoided’, to use Baratta’s word – this was to be a Biennale where one did not speak of ‘politics’, and one could take a break from constant awareness of the dark, regressive side of human nature. Ironically, it was the artwork that most unashamedly took on the themes of dark humanity and darker politics, Anne Imhof’s Faust in the German Pavilion, that was to prove the Biennale’s greatest success. I will return to this piece later.

 
So what is one left with, that all art-lovers visiting dream-like, crumbling Venice with its jeweled interiors can agree upon, if not the value of ‘art’ itself? ‘Viva Arte!’, as the not-altogether convincing typography announced: in these dark times let us celebrate something that brightens all our lives (why else would we be here in Venice?). The selfexplanatory formula – ‘let’s have an art exhibition celebrating art’ – encountered difficulties, however, in trying to maintain its distance from the ongoing source of trauma, and the pressures involved resulted in a subtle shift from ‘art’ to ‘the artist’, and a reaching about for a positive value upon which the shows in the Central Pavilion and Arsenale might be built (‘humanism’).

 
In the first place, self-consciously modern art, from its beginnings in the illusionless gaze of Manet and Baudelaire, has often been anything but ‘ celebratory’ – a cold, destructive strain has been synonymous with much of modernism in art. The figure of the modern artist, on the other hand, is something that may more easily be identified with the good life, with freedom of expression, distance from the stresses and emptiness of modern work, and a creativity that includes slow time and idleness. This ‘otium’ (leisure or idle time) was celebrated in the ‘Pavilion of Artists and Books’, by, among others, Kazakh artists Yelena Vorobyeva and Victor Vorobyev’s recreation of their 1996 installation, The Artist is Asleep. With its dull wall-hanging of a generic landscape, and comfortless iron bed and thin blanket, this piece introduced an interesting note of local and temporal specificity, expanded extravagantly in the Georgian Pavilion with the folk-gothic poetry of Vajiko Chachkhiani’s A Living Dog Among Dead Lions (it would take some time to describe this piece – a Georgian rural hut reconstructed in the Arsenale with all its furniture, and with a constant interior downpour of ‘rain’).

 
‘The artist’ appeared in the most stunningly literal form in the inclusion of an actual working artist, New York-based performance and installation artist Dawn Kasper, in a recreation of her studio in the Central Pavilion’s Belle Époque octagonal hall (incidentally, the Belle Époque was a classic period of monetary inequality and art for art’s sake). About this figure were a number of rooms dedicated to ‘the book’, a timely subject that promised much. Unfortunately, as the odd linkage of ‘artists’ and ‘books’ suggested (both involved in ‘slow time’? both precious affairs in danger of being declared obsolescent?), it was hard to ascertain what had occurred in the way of serious thought. The equation ‘books + art’ boiled down to a library of books chosen by the Biennale’s artists (touchstones for the artist’s inner life, perhaps?), and some rooms of art made from books. Despite some powerful work being included in the latter, it was hard to sense any thread of curatorial inquiry to the placement together, for instance, of John Latham’s violent wall-hung assemblages, and crude, Sputniklike hanging Dark Stars, from the early sixties and nineties respectively, and the delicately dyed pages of Geng Jianyi’s The Reason Why Classic Is, from around 2001. It was a pleasure in particular to see all those Lathams together, to sense the strain between the rigorous formalism of the sculptural composition and the aggressiveness of the treatment of the material, but the two senses of ‘book’ represented in the room were incapable of entering into any dialogue.

 
Macel’s ‘humanism’, the value intended to bind the figure of the artist to the spirit of celebration, and to stand somehow in resistance to the values of those in power, manifested itself, more often than not, as a kind of sixties revival. Was there an element of nostalgia here for the atmosphere in which the baby boomer generation – the world’s custodians since at least the nineties, and now on the edge of retirement – had grown up, the time of their youth and uncompromised ideals? Much of the Arsenale felt like the giant expansion of the interior of a hippierun community centre (or an extension of Biennale artist Nancy Shaver’s New York curio shop), the visitor constantly having to negotiate small jungles of hanging fabrics, textiles and recycled knick knacks, while being presented with images of communal ‘healing’ ceremonies. It came as a relief when things took a less reassuring, Wicker Man turn, as did the video of Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra’s 1972 Ritual in Four Colours.

 
After the ‘Pavilion of the Common’ came the ‘Pavilion of the Earth’ where, in keeping with the general hippie-inflected feel, a concern for nature was in evidence, followed by Pavilions dedicated to ‘traditions’ (art inspired by folk-craft), ‘shamans’ and even Jim Morrison’s favourite deity, Dionysus. The lofty tunnel of the ancient naval complex’s rope factory ended in an admittedly spectacular reiteration of the woolly, non-specific positivity of what had gone before: Sheila Hicks’ towering, chromatically resonating wall of bales of fibre (in the ‘Pavilion of Colors’). Repeatedly we were introduced to artists who worked communally, healed, offered therapy, or simply wished the world well. When, in the midst of the earnestness of it all, the deadpan over-logic of Shimabuku’s interventions in the natural and technological environment appeared (‘a Macbook is the modern equivalent of Stone Age tools – what if I were to use it as an axe?’) it prompted, in me at least, what may have been excessive hilarity.

 
What ‘humanism’ amounted to, then, was a warm fellow-feeling, for man and nature; the kind of small-scale lifestyle and gentle habits that might go with such a feeling; and a wish for better things in the world that might take on a quasi-spiritual power to realise itself, á la the magical rites of pre-modern or ‘non-civilized’ peoples. This is a version of ‘human’ that Williams associates with the older meanings of the word ‘humane’, before the idea of ‘humane killing’ added a particularly modern inflection. To act ‘humanely’ meant to withhold from acts and behaviour that might be classed as ‘animalistic’, ‘bestial’, ‘machine-like’, ‘demonic’ – in short, harder, colder, more savage classes of conscious being. It is a return to limits, or a refusal to exceed them – a detachment from those areas of modern life that implicitly lead to the inhuman. All well and good, but what the legacy of the baby boomers made clear was the compatibility of such well-wishing and therapeutic spaces with power, often violent power, at a distance – perhaps that generation’s most important legacy – and the unconscious reproduction of privilege. This is the generation that invented ‘ humanitarian intervention’, a phrase typical in its abstract wellwishing and ‘avoidance’ of acknowledgement of brutal, local consequences.

 
I’m raising the matter of the ethics of the boomer generation in power because of a repeated, truly jarring phenomenon in the Biennale’s non-national exhibitions, also bound up with, as far as I can see, the aporias resulting from the engagement of a decontextualised, well-wishing self with the greater sphere of structural, cross-cultural and institutional human relations. The effect in the Biennale was ‘ anthropological’, to introduce the Greek synonym for the keyword ‘human’ – it involved a gaze, like that of the anthropologist, that objectified its human focus, despite the fact that the gazer, obviously, was also human. I’ve already mentioned the strange ‘exhibition’ of a, presumably, representative artist (Dawn Kasper) in the Central Pavilion – this was not performance, nor was it a function of a relational aesthetic of some kind, it was simply a matter of an artist, and perhaps more importantly her lifestyle, being on display as part of an exhibition dedicated to ‘the artist’. Spoken of simply as a ‘residency’, the context of gallery space and viewing public shifted the private and inter-personal into the public and made every one of the artist’s movements a kind of counter-performance, attempting to fend off the logical conversion of a sizeable chunk of her life into a kind of displayed object.

 
Even more bizarre were Olafur Eliasson’s space – a workshop and exhibition area for his Green Light project – and Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Space), in association with the Brazilian Huni Kuin people. Both had humanitarian intentions, both had anthropological effects. The former revolved around a commodity for sale – a variety of geometrically severe green lamps – the proceeds going to two ‘NGOs that work with refugees’. And here were ‘the refugees’, taking a break or crafting a lamp. Again a tension was evident – as their objectification as ‘ refugees’ (and why else were they here? and it was unavoidably ‘they’) was felt by the visitor within the invitation to gaze offered by the environment. Neto’s caul-like crocheted wigwam was a focal point for the more magical aspirations of the exhibition: a recreation of a core social and religious space of an indigenous people, it seemed to radiate all the deep, life-sustaining values still adhered to by humans close to nature. And there in the middle of it were, yes, humans close to nature, two Huni Kuin Indians, representative ‘indigenous people’, in short. Seeing them waiting there came as a shock: how did they understand their involvement among the complex of discourses and motifs that make up contemporary art? If Neto had been there to mediate with the viewer (now more cultural tourist than humanitarian donor) the jarring objectification of the transplanted Huni Kuin might have been circumvented somehow. But as it was, the dark memory of the ‘ethnological exposition’, the ‘human zoo’ of the high imperialist period, kept rising despite all the good intentions.

 
Which brings us to the German Pavilion. Anne Imhof’s was an advanced piece of work, worthy of the attention it received – the ‘constructed situations’ of Tino Sehgal and occupation of space explored by contemporary dance were combined with architectural modification to produce something quite new and complete. After its intensity and coherence most of the other national pavilions felt scrappy, unfocused and derivitive. It was not without flaws – Benjamin Buchloh has written (in Artforum) a scathing review of the corporate fascist aesthetics of Imhof’s ‘panzerglas’ interiors. Buchloh has a nose for art that draws on the allure of totalitarian relics, having grown up in Germany in the age of Beuys and Kiefer, and, yes, there were times when Faust positively bellowed ‘Feel My Totalitarianism!’ to a soundtrack by Rammstein. But there were also ways in which the use of a new idiom to forge the same linkage between the events of the thirties and forties and a contemporary urban experience allowed something about our current situation to come through, something that issued from a level deeper than that set out by the Biennale’s curatorial agenda.

 
Faust essentially involved the ‘activation’ of the German Pavilion. A small, severe neoclassical building, the pavilion was built in 1938 in a style approved by the Nazi regime of the time, as a text distributed at Faust reminded the visitor. The building’s origins have long haunted the Biennale, and in 1993 Hans Haacke (sharing the building with Nam June Paik) smashed up the floor, leaving the viewer with its fragmented remains under the word ‘Germania’, spelled out in imposing letters on the central space’s wall. If Haacke’s intervention was like an explosive release of tension, making no attempt to side-step the building’s connotations, Imhof’s modifications and occupations (by collaborating performance artists) increases the same historical tension, make it palpable until it obtrudes into the present and finds an echo. The visiting crowds (and it was crowds, willing to queue for over an hour beyond the show’s official starting time in stifling heat – a certain ‘art reverence’ clung to the whole affair) found themselves in a doubled space – by the use of reinforced glass walls and floors Imhof’s performers could move through different spaces and levels, inside and out, inaccessible to the viewer. They also moved among the observing crowd, or perched above as well as below them in slowly changing poses, making no sign of acknowledgement of the viewer, with a dual-dimensional effect. Both groups of people were in the same building simultaneously, but not in the same space, and sometimes not in the same temporal flow – an idea that has its forerunners in the image of unseen angels moving among the readers in a Berlin library in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire or, more traditionally, and with endless re-echoes in popular culture, from My Little Pony to Star Trek, Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas leading Scrooge through scenes from different temporalities, unobservable by the inhabitants. The latter brings in the theme of haunting again.

 
The ‘second dimension’ was very much in the tradition of Beuys and Kiefer – industrial equipment, rooms with hoses, what looked like lecterns, and what might have been mortuary slabs – but without the consolation of Imhof’s predecessors’ ‘impoverished’ materials – the lead, straw, felt, etc. Everything, as Buchloh noted, was stripped to a harsh, steely minimum. Along with these suggestive industrial fragments were electronic accessories – a player with headphones, a guitar and amp. What the viewer was left with was a sense of a living space, but one with some kind of cruel, institutional physical regime in place. The age, dress and movement of the performers – young but severe, in down-at-heel casual sportswear, making gestures or interacting in ways that suggested physical discomfort, pain and aggression – brought together the imagery of inner city subculture (that portrayed in Uli Edel’s 1971 Christiane F., perhaps) and some kind of fascist experiment (with echoes of Pasolini’s Salo [1975]). This was a human zoo pure and simple, but one in which the spaces of observed and observer had somehow been juxtaposed. What was disturbing was how the concept managed to attach itself to figures representing young urban adults, and rippled out to both the surrounding exhibitions’ unreflective presentation of fellow humans as objects of observation (‘persons’, clearly, but depersonalised by the context – ‘humans’ among ‘persons’?) and more widely to the violent economic ‘experiments’ visited on various countries since 1989: Russia’s ‘shock therapy’; the post-industrialisation of the West; austerity; the ‘water-boarding’ of Greece; the laissez-faire response to record homelessness in Ireland.

 
Faust wasn’t perfect, and in a certain drawing on forms and attitudes from the world of modeling (most obvious in the ‘detached’ movement through the crowd by the athletically built performers – might there be a ‘totalitarian chic’ in the offing?) it colluded with, rather than reflected on dominant social structures. But some kind of structural exposition at least was achieved, in stark contrast to the policy of political ‘looking away’, from oneself as well as the ‘bad stuff going on’, evident in the Arsenale and Central Pavilion.

 

NOTES
1. Geng Jianyi, a pioneer of Chinese art from the eighties onwards, died this December at the age of 55.

 
The Other Dark brought together pieces by Dean, Skaer / Nashashibi and Jeremy Millar that revisit or reach back to particular works from art history. The two pieces featured by Jeremy Millar reference German art historian Aby Warburg. The Man Who Looked Back (2010) is based on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), a project described by Christopher D. Johnson as an ‘attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity,” or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times’. Millar’s panel ‘map’ of images, based on the format of Warburg’s Atlas, consists of representations of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice from throughout history. In this legend, Orpheus is allowed to reclaim Eurydice from the afterlife provided he does not look back at her, which he does with dire consequences. This citation problematizes the act of ‘looking back’ while granting ambiguous success to the Orphic journey of reclamation. In the context of this show, it could be read as saying that it is possible to approach objects and moments lost in the past, but it is the process of doing so and the distance covered that offer rewards. The original ‘look’ upon the work that inspired this process is impossible to replicate with the passage of time.

 
Rather than a direct ‘look back’ at any of the artworks they reference, the pieces in this exhibition did mainly approach them as beacons to navigate a journey through space (Dean) or time (Nashashibi / Skaer). Dean’s audio documentation of her search for the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the narrative of a journey, even contains the suggestion that Smithson’s directions were simply a ruse to allow people to experience the beautiful landscape she passes through. Nashashibi / Skaer’s film Our Magnolia (2009) sees Paul Nash’s 1944 painting Flight of the Magnolia, created under the shadow of anticipated German invasion, through the filter of more recent contexts such as the Iraq War and Thatcherism. Yet it is filmed and projected on the increasingly rare medium of 16mm, which lends it a sense of operating outside of the contemporary moment, especially when it shows computer monitors shot on grainy celluloid in a reversal of the now usual sight of digitized celluloid images. Rather than speaking from one point in time or the other, this aesthetic decision allows the artists to gather and encompass multiple moments without quite belonging to any. Millar’s Melancholy Mobile (2017) sculptures translate a mysterious polyhedron that appears in an Albrecht Dürer engraving through Alexander Calder’s suspended shapes. The resulting forms reverse the ‘looking back’ found in the rest of the show to instead present an object that has travelled through art history and arrived with us reshaped by it along the way.

 
Now Wakes the Sea was to be found some miles inland from the Sirius, at a distance from the coast that turned out to be quite appropriate. This take on ‘contemporary art and the ocean’ borrowed its title from a J.G. Ballard story in which an ancient sea is now the site of a suburb. For one of its residents, however, this ocean returns every night and threatens to engulf the neighbourhood. This exhibition likewise addressed the sea as something distant and other, a haunting concept that readily acts as medium for ideas and sensations of submersion and salvage, as well as the seduction of oblivion.

 
Tacita Dean’s photographs concerning the disappearance of Donald Crowhurst effectively rely on the absence of the ocean for their power. Crowhurst was an amateur sailor who succumbed to insanity and suicide in 1969 while attempting to circumnavigate the world alone on a trimaran. Dean bookends this archetypal narrative with one archive shot of Crowhurst setting out on his voyage and two contemporary photographs of Berwick Lighthouse, as if still awaiting his safe arrival. Between these discreet documentary images, the ocean is a vast and chilling lacuna that has swallowed the man and his story whole. Andreas Kindler von Knobloch, by contrast, enacts the simple desire for sublime experience through photo-documenting his sailing excursions around Dublin Bay. These images resemble nothing so much as advertising for an outdoor pursuits line. He references another disappearance at sea, that of conceptual artist Bas Jan Adler, but does so as a sort of elusive experiential horizon to which his overbearingly emphasized presence can only provide an ironic counterpoint.

 
Marcel Dinahet approaches disappearance at sea from an arguably more poignant angle, although in this case the disappearance is of his art works in the ocean depths rather than of people. His two videos featured in the exhibition document sculptural pieces installed at the bottom of the sea. These stone objects have a deceptively functional appearance that makes them feel part of their marine surroundings in the way that old wreckage might, their texture blending well with the surrounding sands. The underwater camera in these looped videos repeatedly passes over the works, unable to find a fixed position in the current and thus giving the impression of an obsessively repeated final glance at objects that the artist can’t quite bring himself to definitively relinquish to the anonymity of the seabed. Sean Lynch’s photographs only seem to confirm Dinahet’s anxieties. The history behind his pictures of metal casts from a bankrupt Belfast DeLorean factory repurposed as anchors in Galway Bay is provided in print, but the testimony of his images is pure texture. The leveling power of the rusting seawater prevails and seems to erase any trace of prior histories.

 
Back on the water’s surface, an installation by Conrad Shawcross documents a rowing trip he took up the River Lea, a tributary of the Thames, with almost parodic literalness. Its centerpiece is a video emitting from a projector mounted in a boat. This rotates 360 degrees like an earnest little robot replicating the circular movement of Shawcross’ camcorder recording the journey in real time.

 
Lucy Skaer also presents us with a ‘boat’ but one that is still journeying. Her Good Ship Blank and Ballast (2010-2018) is part of an ongoing project based on Plato’s Ship of Fools that evolves as it moves from gallery to gallery. In this iteration, it is a small boat-shaped object with cloth sails, and concrete blocks around its base. The pattern in the sails is actually a reflection of the floor tile pattern featured in a previous installation of this project. Without that context, however, it immediately evokes a more general sense of the urban, domestic and manmade, as suggested by the materials she employs. Reshaped as a boat, these elements are set adrift by the sea as a subconscious image of instability. It was the first work that visitors encountered on entering the exhibition and perfectly encapsulated this uncanny Ballardian thematic that ran through the show. If drift underlies Skaer’s pieces, Maria McKinney’s troubling Abyssals (2014) are more suggestive of submergence. These are large net sculptures containing materials such as fruit and vegetables, false nails, expanding foam and concrete, as well as the artist’s breath. Large in scale and unsettlingly intimate in material, their shapes resemble organic undersea growths, as if supported and formed by water on all sides. Yet these cloying forms are composed of manmade detritus, combining edible, cosmetic, building and bodily elements in a way that suggests an oneiric and startling reconfiguring of discarded matter that is still invisibly clinging to us.

 
The seductive lure of the sea also flowed through the exhibition thanks to the presence of Janaina Tschäpe’s work. Not only were her paintings hung at intervals throughout the show, but the liltingly woozy Russian sailor’s song that accompanies her wonderful video He Drowned in Her Eyes as She Called Him to Follow (2000) also drifted across the whole gallery, a siren song drawing visitors towards this last piece in the show. It is a semi-narrative work that suggests mermaid legends as it follows the dazed wanderings of a woman apparently fished from the sea. Its infectious atmosphere of sea, sun and sensuousness effortlessly absorbs kitsch and nostalgia into a shimmering and fragile lo-fi visual texture which seems constantly on the point of dissolving everything in light and water. The joy of dissolving is, however, ultimately linked to loss and death. Tschäpe’s video is an appropriately celebratory summation of the ambivalent attraction of this watery oblivion that flowed throughout Now Wakes the Sea.

 
The Other Dark and Now Wakes the Sea approached their subjects obliquely, as reflections or echoes. The primary concerns relating to both the ocean and to art historical landmarks were presented not as isolated or discrete points of interest, but as having been fully absorbed by contemporary forms of artistic awareness, while remaining resonant within them. The way in which the vastness of the sea and the deep reservoir of art historical tradition haunt contemporary art and culture was subtly articulated by both of these exhibitions.

 
The Other Dark was on view 16 July – 26 August 2017. Now Wakes the Sea was on view 4 August – 5 November 2017.

 
As Curgenven’s first solo exhibition, Locate Yourself bore the heavy burden of representing a decade of his sound and video installations, commercial record releases, live performance, and collaborations with visual artists. The theme was indicated by the title and the artist’s description of his work as ‘spatial research’. Curgenven investigates how place is constituted through our perception. Underlying this is a radical rethinking of what constitutes ‘place’ in the first instance.

 
When we study the world and its effects we are engaging with the discipline Ptolemy codified in his Geographica. Our world of Google mapping and satellite imagery is predicated on a model of space as isometric, homogeneous, and universal, an empty medium waiting to be filled with places as secondary attributes. The dominance of this model of place is a measure of the success of empiricism in Western philosophy.

 
Yet geography was only one approach to place known to the ancient Greeks. Ptolemy also wrote the Apotelesmatika, a catalogue of effects that identified klimata, regions of the Earth associated with Gods of varying temperaments. Where the geographic lines of longitude and latitude measure and delineate, providing a universal grid, klimata act as regions of difference, psychic zones of influence. This concept permeated Curgenven’s exhibit. Visitors entering Wandesford Quay Gallery were confronted by a maze of black screens. Navigating these passages put them in proximity to voices issuing from ten hidden loudspeakers. Babel (2017) consisted of a thousand tongue-twisters, delivered in over thirty languages. The piece plays on the sensual experience of voices tickling your ears, while also being a positive and playful response to the increasing cultural diversity of Ireland.

 
While living in Cornwall, Curgenven discovered a Skyspace, an architectural light installation designed by American artist James Turrell. Curgenven subsequently traveled to fifteen of these structures worldwide, activating the interior volume of each space with oscillators tuned to produce beat frequencies. Back in the studio, Curgenven mixed these heterogeneous recordings into an integrated musical piece. The title of the album, Climata (2016), explicitly acknowledges Ptolemy’s alternative formulation of place. This project asserts that, though geographically dispersed, the Skyspaces nonetheless create a zone of similarity. Climata was presented in the current exhibit as an ‘interactive sound atlas’. Visitors could mix sounds from different locations by selecting them on a computerised representation of a map. This experience seemed superfluous to the original piece, the arbitrary interactivity reasserting a perspectival hierarchy.

 
Walking into the darkened crypt, Unbalanced Architecture (2016) was apprehended first through a surge of low frequency energy, issuing from a hidden subwoofer. The darkened stone walls were illustrated with collages by Marta Kowalczyk, dystopian visions of futuristic cities. Four soundtracks were available through headphones situated about the space. The listener’s sound perception was hence a combination of the bass waves, experienced in and through the body, and binaural sounds located in the middle of the skull. It was fascinating to explore different volumes of air in the crypt, listening with the headphone off and then on again. There was indeed something sciencefictional about this encounter, the crypt providing a perfect venue.

 
Less satisfying was Dances & Airs (2017), three previously-released sound works combined with large video projections. Fog Line consists of drone footage of enormous flowering plants (filmed in Tasmania), paired with Climata drones. Excerpts from the album Sirène (2014), itself a wonderful exploration of organ timbres, were used alongside footage of the Cornwall coast for Cornubia / Imperial Horizon (For Caliban). Similarly, A Room at the End of the Earth matched footage from Patagonia with music from Oltre (2010). The project as a whole resembled a nature documentary: beautiful sounds repurposed from previous projects to accompany landscape imagery.

 
Less conventional was They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them (2014). This piece has a long history, beginning with field recordings made over a period of twelve years at thirty remote Australian locations. The results were compiled as the twelve-channel installation Unsilenced Landscape in 2009. These field recordings were subsequently augmented with musical instruments (guitar, piano, organ) for an album released in 2014. The artist continues to add new material, in an ongoing process of accretion. For this exhibit, the work was presented with three screens of video. Bookings were taken for this installation, which seated only three people, in close proximity to vivid visual stimulation.

 
The sonic material contrasts drones with harsh, textural fragments, generated from contact microphones and dub plate scratches. This material is an expression of a tactile engagement with place. Abandoned buildings are left to rot in the dry heat, and we hear the wind through wooden apertures and the creak of a rusty hinge. Sculpted riverbanks of dry red grit funnel sound from hidden banks. Their sculptural forms are proof that water once coursed here. When the first-person camera tracks suddenly, it follows a possible walking path through a history of erosion and deposition. Harsh overtones emulate the burning sun. Scratches and clicks build as wind whips sand into cyclones. They tore the earth articulates the way we encounter and remake place at every moment.

 
No human or animal life is seen in the footage, but traces are everywhere: burning bushes, abandoned lots, whitened skeletons, a buzzing insect. Nonetheless, the piece is all about presence, not least the artist’s own interventions in a land that seems to actively reject occupation. The piece suggests that Australia is pregnant with a violence that issues from the terrain itself.

 
They tore the earth is explicitly about colonialism, the ‘mortal struggle’ of settlers and an ‘arid interior’ (these quotes from the artist’s notes). The land is alien to them, and their engagement with it will always be confrontational. This conflict extends to the brutal treatment of the native peoples, a history that Curgenven documents on his website with a list of suggested readings. This raises fundamental questions: Does the same adversarial relationship exist between the native peoples and this place? Is it equally as ‘alien’ to them?

 
In this way, this piece both addresses contemporary political concerns and also challenges the assumptions of post-colonial discourse. It embeds this analysis in a phenomenological model of place as the accumulated record of all those who have gone before, who have shaped the land, and been shaped by it. The sonic record that Curgenven retrieves and then constructs, over years of mixing and augmentation, belies any simplistic interpretation of field recording as being inherently documentary. With its irruptions and interruptions, the sonic result refutes the soundscape model of harmonious composition. It is an important work, a fruitful approach for further provocations.

 
Finally, this review must note the curatorial problem inherent in sound installations. These pieces need space, not only to support the volume of air they shape as material, but also to provide a suitable acoustic buffer between individual works. Even the largest galleries do not always provide sound works a fitting home. In Wandesford Quay Gallery the six works that made up Locate Yourself were, despite some ingenious constructions, cramped. This was occasionally distracting but could not, in the final analysis, detract significantly from such a strong show.

 
Locate Yourself was on view 8 – 30 September 2017.

 
We are not short of books on contemporary music and sound art. Unfortunately, substantial monographs on the work of living artists remain a rarity, conferred parsimoniously upon the anointed few. The absence of concentrated studies impedes substantive knowledge of the most compelling current music. In place of focused inquiry, historical accounts rush to force the entirety of contemporary sonic arts into a thematically sound digest of collective creative practices. The thematic undergirding varies, but the overarching goal of inclusivity remains. In order to undertake a decent musical survey, the author is compelled to identify a theme of best fit. Given the many and varied practices that characterise contemporary music, this is no easy task. A line must be drawn. As in the case of Rutherford-Johnson’s book, such lightfooted adaptability can lead to tendentious links being forced on disparate practices, all in the service of a thematic through-line that can only fail to live up to its purpose.

 
Historical surveys tend to depart from a geographical, philosophical or chronological premise, of which the Music Since… strain is the most straightforward example of chronology. The Music Since… model is, at first blush, least open to running afoul of its own limitations and could not be any clearer in its intentions. Arnold Whittall’s Music since the First World War, Paul Griffith’s Modern Music: The avant garde since 1945 and Jennie Gottschalk’s recent experimental music since 1970 are all valuable surveys of important music made by important composers.

 
Whittall and Griffiths identify seismic sociopolitical events as coincident with the beginnings of musical modernism and the avant-garde. Gottschalk suggests 1970 as a useful start date for the straightforward reason that it is the point at which Michael Nyman’s still influential book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond left off. Her book is a sequel of sorts to Nyman’s seminal text. Unlike Gottschalk’s eminently practical choice of 1970 as the start line for her survey of Experimental Music, Rutherford- Johnson attaches great expository import to 1989. The book is worse for it. His choice betrays a psychic need to identify the singular instant from which current intellectual trends originated. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that singular events, real or imagined, enable us to procure the heroes, icons, relics and sacred places that good storytelling demands. Processes such as those that characterise artistic development are more accurately described as fuzzy continua that devolve evolutionary responsibility to a nebulous collection of loosely affiliated occurrences.

 
The sanctified moments of the Western canon, codified by historicist narratives, feed the psychic need for a good creation myth. We are drawn to the historical big bang event whose aftershock continues to resonate. It links the present to the past, providing reassuring continuity, and direction. A line must be drawn. When chroniclers of twenty-first century culture cast about for a suitable origin story, the fall of the Berlin Wall is a seductive signifier. Rutherford-Johnson is so in thrall to the partitional logic of Soviet collapse that it obstructs what could otherwise have been an enlightening tour of the experimental margins of music. The book begins with an exploration of a single work by each of a diverse set of five composers: minimalist pioneer Steve Reich; sound ecologist and radio artist Hildegard Westerkamp; Chinese bi-cultural modern classicist Bright Sheng; trenchant Russian iconoclast Galina Ustvolskaya; and Japanese noise artist Merzbow. He contends that trauma is imprinted upon the work of these signature artists and demonstrates how each piece of music in turn betrays its traumatic conditioning – all except for that of Merzbow, whose work is determinedly non-programmatic. In spite of Merzbow’s explicit renunciation of links between his work and real world events, the author speculatively asserts that the harshness of Merzbow’s recordings ‘imitate trauma’ and that ‘this shared ground may suggest a connecting force.’ Here, and throughout, the reader can’t help but feel that the author is stretching his thesis a little thin to fit the material. Yet his deeper point, that trauma is a condition of groups that have historically been marginalised by mainstream culture, whether as a consequence of gender or racial discrimination or economic inequality, is salient. Though still insufficient, there is, thankfully, increased opportunity for these voices to be heard.

 
This is one of a number of broad observations that suggest interesting avenues of exploration. Unfortunately, time and again, Rutherford-Johnson contorts the narrative to demonstrate that neoliberalist market forces direct the creative impulse of composers. He equates the understated, tonal eccentricity of Laurence Crane’s music ‘to a pole of maximal accessibility and therefore acquiescence to the desires of the listener and of the market.’ Though Crane bases his music on basic, even ordinary harmonies, the original contexts in which he places them make the ordinary extraordinary. The clarity and conviction of his music demonstrate a singular, and brave, compositional voice. It is not easy or acquiescent in the least.

 
Elsewhere the author asserts that the common theme, underlying the transformational stream of variations in Enno Poppe’s Thema mit 840 Variatonen and the unfolding loops in the music of Carl Stone, is that of a relation ‘to the identity, freedom and movement of the unencumbered individual, a story belonging to the decades after the Cold War rather than during it.’ It is true that economic patronage and authoritarian diktat have historically had a significant say in music and in art more broadly, but does the starting condition of unencumbered individuality not characterise any amount of art-works, whether originating before, during, or after the Cold War? The question of globalisation is certainly a pertinent one, but the author strikes the wrong note here also. He says that ‘[g]lobalisation today is almost synonymous with the Internet,’ a remarkable assertion in light of the present questioning on both the left and right of many of its doctrines, a direct result of the real-world effects of trade and migration.

 
Throughout the book Rutherford-Johnson downplays the influence of composers whose work precedes 1989. Ironically, the author’s wilful negation of the past is more evocative of the historical tenets of modernism than the trends he documents. As discussed, these lines are both arbitrary and necessary if we are to avoid absurd degrees of abstraction. However, the whole premise of Rutherford-Johnson’s book is explicitly tied to the musicohistorical significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately the book is at its most problematic when trying to substantiate its geo-political claims and their effects on music.

 
When not accounting for its locus of origin, the book has many instructive observations of current practices. In her text The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1994), the musicologist Lydia Goehr observed that musical works ‘are treated as ready-made or as belonging to the past, rather than as existing in the process of their being crafted or constructed.’ Rutherford-Johnson’s book illuminates the ways in which composers are now explicitly examining the creative process, playfully pulling at the processual thread to see what artistic opportunities might be revealed. The author identifies a number of dominant themes that have grown from this interest in process and translation. He lists them as Transmediation, Transcription, Transformation and Wandering. Each of these categories of activity emphasises a desire to conceive of music as an open, dynamic continuum, a journey which is in ongoing dialogue with the modifying feedback of lived experience. Translation is at the historical core of the musical process (notation undergoes translation by a performer into sound). The author shows that digital technology affords users new and efficient tools by which to effect this process while at the same time bringing the act itself into renewed focus. It is in his discussion of this ‘ontological dissonance’ between object and process, and the creative impetus that many contemporary composers have derived from it, that Rutherford- Johnson’s book is at its most compelling.

 
The author develops the overarching theme of translation with accounts of disparate pieces such as Peter Ablinger’s Piano and Record (2012), Jennifer Walshe’s examination of transmediation THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS/AND JUMP FROM THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE (2004) and Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag (2000). Each of the composers discussed playfully explores the creative journey, in their work, from inception to realisation.This journey endures from the initial seed idea through to the performance, the recording, retrospective editing, score revision or any other action associated with the work. The embodied presence of the performer or composer underpins all of these compositional states. It is the central structure upon which the music is founded and which gives it meaning. The genes of this self-reflexive sonic exploration of process can be traced back before the fall of the Berlin Wall to works like visual artist Robert Morris’s Box with the sound of its Own Making (1961), and pieces by John Cage such as 0’0’’ (1962), Et Cetera (1973) and Et Cetera 2/4 Orchestras (1985).

 
It is notable that the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe does not limit herself in her work to interrogating the creative act. Her interventionist impetus extends to a mischievous re-write of the historical narrative. In 2014, Walshe launched the Aisteach Foundation, a fictional history of the Irish avant-garde which she, and a number of co-conspirators, documented in a book, website and hours of recordings, available through the website www.aisteach.org. The foundation is, in the words of the composer, ‘a revisionist exercise in “what if?”’. Walshe’s project is perhaps the inevitable rhetorical climax of the creative myth-making used to craft and sustain the type of good origin story that Rutherford-Johnson’s book aspires to provide.

 
Rutherford-Johnson’s book is certainly a useful overview of current practice and no doubt a helpful first introduction for many readers too. However, though promising much, its failure to convincingly substantiate its overarching theme leads to as much frustration as enlightenment. A line must be drawn.

 
Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 was published by University of California Press in 2017. It is available in a number of formats, including paperback (ISBN 9780520283152), which costs €28.50.

Sir—Ralph Kenna (December 15th) calls for the return of two Sheela na Gig figures from the British Museum to their places of origin in Westmeath. During many centuries of British exploration and conquest, it was inevitable that a large number of artefacts would find their way back to museums and private collections. It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the British only took things away. They also brought things with them: law, the conventions of civilized conduct and, perhaps most importantly, the language in which Mr. Kenna expresses his opinions, in which Pearse phrased his Proclamation, and without which it is hard to imagine the prosperous, modern nation we know today. Let us hope they do not come looking for these things back. —yours, etc.

 
This crass letter, sent by a reader with an address in Wales to the Irish Times in 2001, demonstrates the persistence of a colonial-racist mindset with a long lineage back to Giraldus Cambrensis and his infamous Topographia Hibernica written in about 1188. That such dogmatic attitudes still exist in the 21st century is a state of affairs that finds broader political resonance in developments such as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of populism in Europe. However, for me the letter is also intriguing because, by situating the Sheela-na-gig within this extended trajectory of English colonial narratives relating to Ireland, it reminds us of the prolonged presence of the Sheela, no matter how seemingly peripheral, in the affairs of both countries.

 
About ten years ago, having come across a rather enigmatic Sheela-na-gig on display in Rothe House, Kilkenny, I was struck by the thought that these strange carvings could offer me as a composer a rich source of thematic material. For many, this might seem an unusual idea; and some might legitimately ask how the rather crude and distorted physiognomy of these stone figures could ever translate into music. However, I am a composer who needs to do a lot of thinking around my music before I can think in it; and my compositions have always caught fire from extramusical disciplines and modes of thought such as myth, literature, symbol, feminism and post-colonial theory. Many of my large-scale works were deeply influenced by such perspectives. Umbilical (2011), for example, is a retelling of the Oedipus story from the perspective of Jocasta (Oedipus’ mother and lover); Scenes from Crow (2000) is an extended response to Ted Hughes’s Crow poems, and my percussion concerto, Rajas, Sattva, Tamas (2000), is inspired by Vedic philosophy. So it did not take long, in fact, for these strange carvings to cast their spell on me; and over the following five years I embarked on an intense investigation into them that took me all over Ireland and parts of Britain. A number of pieces emerged out of that exploration that radically altered my thinking in terms of music and of its function and place in our contemporary world. Today, I am still working on Sheela-inspired music.
 

* * * *

 
What are Sheela-na-gigs? They are stone carvings of naked female figures that prominently depict oversized vulvas. In contrast, the rest of the body is often emaciated or even skeletal, with sagging, diminutive or missing breasts. Their bodies thus present images of both death and life regeneration. The figures are often balding with wrinkled foreheads and chevron-shaped striations on their faces. In addition to their extravagant vulvas, Sheelas often have excessively large heads, eyes and ears. The quality of the carvings varies from rough-hewn to well crafted, though very few have the aesthetic finesse of the delicately carved gargoyles seen on European medieval churches and cathedrals.

 
Sheela-na-gigs are found on medieval churches, castles and town walls, and near ancient wells, with over one hundred figures found in Ireland and around forty uncovered in Britain (often on or close to monastic sites). Their origins are unclear because many were discovered ex situ, having been hidden in fields or dumped into rivers; or because they were carved from stone different to that forming the structures in which they were found. Their placement above church doorways or close to wells (often situated on ancient roads) suggests that in some periods they were venerated. In other contexts, their intentional destruction tells a different story. It is quite impossible, therefore, to establish for certain when, how, where or why they originated. While there is much disagreement among experts, most anthropologists agree that they date from between the 11th and 17th centuries, though it is perfectly plausible to suggest an earlier period, as many of the medieval churches where Sheelas are located were built to replace former pagan sites of worship; and there is a distinctly credible hypothesis that Sheelas were placed on church doorways as a means of appropriating residual pagan elements — the powerful female icon of a pagan communal society becomes the powerful female icon of the ‘Mother Church’.

 
Sheela-na-gigs are not mentioned by name in written records until about the mid-1800s after the Ordnance Survey of Ireland had been initiated by the English (in 1825), triggering an increase in antiquarian writing. Since then, anthropologists, archeologists and historians have offered numerous theories pertaining to their potential meaning and function. Among these is that they are icons of fertility that facilitate conception and childbirth. Another is that they are warnings against lust or the transgression of religious taboos. Opposing these propositions is the notion that they are Celtic Goddesses of female empowerment and untamed sexuality. They are also seen as symbols of the power of nature to give and take life, as defensive talismans against the evil eye, or as emblems and facilitators of sovereignty over land or communities. The liminal location of many Sheelas (above church doorways or windows) and their occasionally concealed (or semi-concealed) placement within castles and church walls suggests that, for some, they had an apotropaic function (intended to ward off evil) or that they facilitated rights of passage from one state to another — from life to death, a spiritual transformation, or an elevation to higher social or political status.

 
The lack of a dominant theory of what Sheelanagigs truly represent fascinated me; in fact, it seemed to me that their value lay specifically in their semiotic ambiguity, which challenges the veracity of those wishing to pin her down to one static meaning. That was when I started searching for them throughout Ireland (and later, Britain). I must have driven five thousand miles seeking them out, photographing them and sketching them. I saw them in garden walls, driveways to farmyards, in sheds, on medieval churches and Anglo-Norman castles, over old church doors and windows, and on roof apexes, on bridges, buried under wild ivy on town walls, placed into cathedral walls in the ‘occluded’ position (sideways, so as not to be immediately observable), and built into homemade grottos. I met those who cared for them —farmers, rural families, young kids, elderly men and women, graveyard caretakers and priests. I studied those held in the National Museum of Ireland, in the British Museum, and in numerous smaller rural community centres that had acquired them. All in all, I photographed and sketched nearly seventy Sheelas in my travels. Each one was more fascinating than the last; each seemed to have her own story; each had seen things we could only imagine.

 
The more Sheelas I photographed and sketched, and the more related literature I read, the more I realized that they would remain ultimately unknowable, that their nebulous semiotic complexity would never be fully untangled. So I neither rejected nor accepted any one interpretation. What is important for me is that Sheela-na-gigs clearly were at one time deeply significant to early (and later) Gaelic communities, and likely representative of potent female agency within them. Indeed, they are so long part of the Irish cultural and psychic landscape that I began to appreciate them as witnesses to its shifting cultures, its transformational histories and its ongoing traumas. Significantly, for me, that witnessing is not to be misunderstood as a powerless or silent one. I sense this because of a salient feature of the Sheelas — their intense stare. Nearly all Sheelas stare defiantly and austerely back at those looking at them. That insolent, unflinching stare is often reinforced by either a scowling grimace or a wry smirk (sometimes it is deeply inscrutable). In my view, this is one of the really enigmatic aspects of the Sheela — her outrageous insolence, her ‘what-are-you-lookingat’ impudence; the power she exudes in returning the gaze upon her with an audacious ‘fuck off’.

 
Once I started thinking about the Sheela-nagig in this sense, it became clear to me that this abject though mysterious figure, because of her very complexity, had an extraordinary associative power. What could she represent as witness to Ireland’s unfolding political, religious and social histories? It intrigued me that her perennial presence on the Irish landscape — at the very least, throughout the last millennium —ran concurrently with the entire English (later British) colonial project in Ireland. Within this context she would, for example, have witnessed the devastation of relentless war, plantation and ethnic cleansing, and the enforcement of English Common Law and economic systems, all of which led to the near complete appropriation of Irish lands (85% of which were in English hands by 1700). She would also have witnessed the elimination of the Irish language as a dominant cultural form and the near destruction of other Gaelic cultural modes such as bardic poetry and orally transmitted music. Ultimately, she would witness the annihilation of the entire structure of Gaelic civilization — a series of actions that can only be described as cultural genocide. At times, as I thought about this disastrous history, I began to project onto her inscrutable face a contempt for what she had witnessed.

 
Looking from the perspective of her abjection and her own history of destruction, the Sheela could perfectly represent the ongoing uglification of the Irish in the wake of the unremitting racist-colonial narratives I’ve mentioned above — to the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis we can add much more; from the calm contemplation of genocide by that refined man of letters Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599) to the barely concealed bigotry of the contemporary letter writer with whom I open this piece. The damage done to the Sheela could also be seen as resonating with the detrimental impact that political and religious history had on spiritual practices in Ireland: firstly, with the conquest of Roman Catholicism over Irish ‘ Celtic’ Christianity, permeated as it was with pagan and druidic philosophies and practices; and secondly, with the aggressive English policy of plantation in Ireland, which divided Irish society along religious and class lines, and which can still be seen as a divisive factor in the contemporary Irish politics of the North. From yet another perspective, the Sheela’s defiant repulsiveness and abject bodily features could be seen as a powerful critique and rejection of centuries of imposed notions of female beauty, not least contemporary versions with their rampant messages of body fascism so ubiquitous today.

 
Suddenly, because of her semiotic ambiguity, and thus her ability to acquire and project numerous associative meanings, the Sheela-na-gig became a tremendous icon for me. She’s an underdog to fight for; she’s a defiant hag that rejects colonial narratives; while she’s a witness that shows her scars of damage, she also rebelliously spits back in the faces of her oppressors; disrupting dominant notions of beauty and feminine grace, she is an ‘ugly’ feminist that asserts her sexual agency and defiantly returns the gaze of the male uncomfortably back at him. What did all this mean to me as a musician?

 
As a classically trained composer and guitarist, I had had only a peripheral interest in traditional Irish music; indeed, I tended to steer clear of it, as intuitively I was uncomfortable with the easy appropriation of largely oral traditional practices within the constraints of European notated music disciplines — what Adorno calls the ‘crystallization of the creative impulse’. I had (and still have) the same misgivings about the appropriation of jazz in similar ways. But my fascination with the Sheela forced me to reconsider Ireland’s indigenous music — what was it? What happened to it? How had it been preserved? In what ways was it being distorted in contemporary reiterations of it, particularly in its highly stylized, musically sumptuous and commercially acclaimed incarnations? Furthermore, what did these new manifestations of an ancient music tradition say about how we wanted to portray ourselves to the world? To what degree was this new-old music rewriting narratives about us as new-old Irish that reflected a desire to embrace neoliberal values at all costs and to verify us as a pure nation with a special lineage unscathed by outside forces. Proximity to the Sheela forced me for the first time to question this ancient musical tradition, and to scrutinize its re-packaging today in traditional, commercial and contemporary art music genres.

 
While the vibrant resurgence of traditional Irish music in recent decades is, of course, to be celebrated, it seems to me that there remains a disturbing breach between the unquestioned positivity of this revival in all its forms and the actual history of destruction of the Gaelic culture from which it has emerged. The distortions of traditional Irish music seen in its more commercial exploitations speak for themselves. However, even within more purist traditional practices, there seems to me to be a tremendous effort to present Irish music as constantly celebratory, positive and culturally intact in ways that run contrary to the facts of our colonial history. The large-scale participation of highly skilled and well-known traditional Irish musicians in music projects of an overtly commercial nature does not help matters. This omission of historically-informed perspectives also occurs when contemporary art composers appropriate traditional Irish materials in ways that imply a rich and culturally undisturbed historical trajectory.

 
My encounter with the Sheela made me want to engage with, to re-invoke, my traditional Gaelic music inheritance but only in ways that took cognizance of the real story of the decline and destruction of that heritage. It seems to me that in confronting the music practices of Gaelic society, we cannot evade the inconvenient truth that many have been effectively destroyed and many of its oral practices lost. It is this salient fact, the profound damage done to Gaelic culture, which forms the basis for my own artistic engagement with it. My work is not only an honest response to the historical damage that took place but also acts as a critique of some current forms of cultural reconstruction of Gaelic musical and dance traditions. It is my contention that much of what remains of this tradition is further subject to exploitation. In some cases, even non-commercial artistic attempts to reinvigorate Gaelic musical culture through the incorporation of indigenous materials into palatably reified art-music aesthetic practices remain problematic for me.

 
Central to this are questions arising out of the validity of (re)presenting this culture in ways that are exclusively attractive from an aesthetic perspective and syntactically coherent. While many compositions by Irish and non-Irish composers alike invoke ancient Gaelic mythologies via thoroughly integrated, cohesive and acceptable compositional languages, my encounter with Irish traditions builds upon an integral ‘aesthetic of damage’. I am not convinced, even from an ethical perspective, that what remains of this damaged Gaelic source material should be constantly and exclusively revitalized and presented as entirely coherent and celebratory. For me, such artistic renovations run the risk of creating narratives of Gaelic culture that are not only ahistorical but further airbrush over actual histories of oppression and destruction.

 
If my ‘aesthetic of damage’-perspective puts me at odds with many of those active in both traditional and contemporary music circles, it also runs contrary to the trajectory of Western art music generally. A tension is created between the tradition of its heightened beauty and sought-for cohesion on the one hand and, on the other, the search for a broken and crude aesthetics, a damaged musical syntax and grammar commensurate to the task of addressing and contemplating the complex trauma of the destruction that occurred. It results in music that, like the Sheelas’ crude abjection, is antagonistic to notions of what Walter Benjamin called ‘auratic art’, that is, works that emerge out of a self-conscious creativity seeking a heightened aesthetic essence. In effect, this music refuses Western civilization’s cult of beauty.

 
At this point, perhaps some examples of how my encounter with Sheela-na-gigs has impacted my ‘aesthetic of damage’-approach to composition would be instructive. Fragmentation, disintegration and abjection form the aesthetic tenets of my work for solo viola in four movements entitled imagines obesae et aspectui ingratae.¹ The title is taken from documentation indicating that in 1631 parish priests in Tuam were instructed by a Catholic Church edict to hide or destroy Sheela-na-gigs — the ‘gross images with unpleasant aspects’. Now music, being inherently abstract, presents a challenge when it comes to remodeling something as physically solid as these stone carvings and their rich cultural and semiotic complexities. The Sheela-na-gig’s associative themes of crudity, damage, loss, unknown origins and functions, abjection and oppression have thus to be realized through purely compositional devices such as structure, timbre, juxtaposition, the use of modal or quasi-modal constructs, extended techniques and even the employment of noise.

 
One of the very first responses I had to the Sheelas was a desire to represent their sheer coarseness. The unrefined craftsmanship of many of the carvings suggests that they were not created for aesthetic pleasure but rather for more symbolic uses connected to smaller community units. The very crudity of the Sheela carvings and the image of their being chiseled were early touchstones in finding both the sound I was looking for and a method by which melodic fragments might be chiseled into form in the opening movement, Chloran. While coarse timbral, textural and percussive elements are central to an aesthetic that is inherently antagonistic to received notions of artistic beauty, they are wholly justified here as a means of remodeling the crudity of the Sheelas into music. The opening repeated notes of the movement are unpitched sounds (as the left hand dampens all the strings; see x-shaped note heads in example below), crudely ‘hammered out’ by the bow in a noisy, percussive manner. Only after twenty or so repetitions do sounds, actual pitched notes begin to be carved out by the bow (as the left hand releases the strings and allows them to resonate):

 
A further process in Chloran subjects its melody to sundering, a separation of its parts so that only fragments of it may be gleaned; the listener struggles to piece together the broken shards. The music itself enacts a severing process — a potentially coherent melody is aggressively damaged by violent interventions. Thus, the music both represents that damage and enacts it:

 
In the second movement, ‘St. John’s Well’, I developed my own variant of an isorhythmic motet, a compositional process thought to have been devised by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377). An isorhythmic motet is constructed around two central principles: the talea (or the order of rhythms) and the colour (or pitch series of the melody). Where a long colour is repeated several times according to mensuration rules that make its execution faster by a fixed proportion each time, a Diminution Motet is created. This is somewhat akin to a series of matryoshka dolls — each variation on its return is identical to the last though smaller (that is, shorter in terms of length) than its predecessor. Running in parallel to this diminution process is one where fundamental notes are increasingly transformed into lighter grace notes (ornaments). The progressive effect is that each repetition of the melody sees not only a reduction of its rhythmic values, but also (in time) a constant reduction of its notes, accompanied by an exponential increase of ornamental material. This results in a shift from established and recognizable melodies towards more ephemeral and ineffable textures of ornamental figurations:

 
The above example indicates that the first talea comprises 65 syllables, the second talea has 64, the third is reduced to 47, the fourth has 36, and the fifth has 21. In addition, starting from about the 3rd talea, a slow transformation from fundamental notes to trilled harmonics further diminishes the tangible, grammatical aspects of the music, which disperse into ephemeral textures and timbres. Something akin to the process of a developing photograph in reverse, this inbuilt process of decay in ‘St. John’s Well’ also disrupts spatiotemporal perceptions in ways that I hope resonate with the Sheelas’ vigorous presence and mysterious past. This process of decay enacts the opposite to that which we heard in Chloran, where notes are chiseled into existence. Here, notes dissolve into the ether, into an intangible form creating a sonic resonance with the Sheelas’ inscrutability, their elusive meanings, their effacement.

 
By creating music from an ‘aesthetics of damage’ and by subjecting it to processes of decay and transformation, I’ve tried to echo sonically, to transmit into sound the cultural loss the Sheela has both endured and witnessed. While it may seem to some that the conscious embedding of damage into music signifies a wilful and pointless embrace of the negative, I see it as a necessity, if it is not to fall into a soporific slumber of conforming privilege devoid of political consciousness. As the most ambiguous of the arts, music tends to be seen as transcendental, as that which soars above the murky and mundane world of everyday life; but I follow Adrienne Rich’s formation in believing that music needs to ‘ account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language.’² My engagement with Sheela-na-gigs has further underpinned my conviction that music can conduct autopsies on received historical narratives and current ideologies of power and politics, it can dislodge the ‘desperate logic of therefore and thus’,³ and it can tell things as they were and as they are, warts and all.

 
Benjamin Dwyer is a composer, guitarist and author. He is Professor of Music at Middlesex University, guitarist in Barry Guy’s Blue Shroud Band and a founder member of the multi-disciplinary ensemble Coterminous. His CD recordings include Twelve Études (Gamelan Records) and Scenes from Crow and Umbilical (Diatribe Records). Publications include Britten and the Guitar: Critical Perspectives for Performers (Carysfort Press, 2017); Different Voices: Irish Music and Music in Ireland (Wolke-Verlag, 2014); and Constellations: The Life and Music of John Buckley (Carysfort Press, 2011).

 
NOTES
1. imagines obesae et aspectui ingratae was commissioned by Garth Knox with assistance from the Irish Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon. It was composed at the Heinrich Böll Artists Residency, Achill Island (8—22 June, 2013). Knox premiered the work on 15 November 2014 at the Bernaola Festival, Spain. The score is available from the Contemporary Music Centre (Ireland). See: https://www.cmc.ie.
2. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986), 174.
3. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (London: Vintage, 1999), 176.

* * * *

 
If, for the moment at least, we accept what is asserted by the book’s title, the primary function of The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland 1916-2016 must be to make the invisible visible, to draw our attention to a neglected sector in Irish cultural life – in effect, to advertise the qualities and pleasures of the country’s classical music.³

 
It is the promotional function of the book that explains its size and shape, the care lavished on its design (recurrent decorative motifs; use of space; font size; colour), and the notable richness of the illustrations.⁴ Even the casual browser would want to linger over the wonderful selection of programme notes, book covers, cartoons, portraits, photographs, advertisements and scores. From William Orpen’s portrait of a stately Charles Villiers Stanford a few years before his death (in 1924), we can flick to Sarah Cecilia Harrison’s almost contemporary portrait of Michele Esposito in relaxed physical pose but with restlessness in his eyes. Stanford had left Ireland as a young man in the 1870s to pursue a musical career in England; Esposito, an Italian, would come to Ireland about a decade later and become an industrious and influential figure in musical Dublin, but would return to Italy in the late 1920s.

 
As his son would to an even greater extent, the German Aloys Fleischmann played an Esposito-like role in Cork. A photograph taken by his wife Tilly in 1936 captures the relaxed togetherness of musical friends: Aloys; the composer of light music Herbert Hughes and his wife; Arnold Bax, a prominent English composer who maintained strong connections with Ireland after a youthful period of near-immersion. This contrasts nicely with another photo from 1938 where the four composers Tilly has lined up – E.J. Moeran (an English composer of part-Irish heritage who became even more settled in Ireland than Bax); the young Irish composer Frederick May (who, tragically, would not sustain his early promise); Elizabeth Maconchy, who would be at the centre of English musical life for decades; and the gifted but self-effacing Ina Boyle – seem to have had togetherness thrust upon them.

 
The stories and networks behind the figures in these portraits and photographs would alone do much to illuminate the nature of the classical music world in Ireland (and to quite an extent in Britain) in the first half of the twentieth century. Lives and careers across the two islands were interwoven in the 1920s and ’30s – as they had been in the 1880s, the 1830s, the 1780s… The patriotic Irish unionist Stanford had travelled not into exile but to England as a young man; it was there, he had quite reasonably calculated (as had numerous dramatic, literary and musical talents over the previous century and more), that his talents might develop. He achieved eminence as composer and teacher and avoided the atrophy of talent he had seen in his senior, Robert Prescott Stewart. The coming to Ireland of Fleischmann and Esposito followed another long established British/Irish pattern of importing foreign musical talent and teachers, and the consolidation of the Catholic middle-class and the need to provide music in Catholic churches in Ireland in the later nineteenth century led to increased demand.⁵ Is there much difference between an Irish urban middle-class artist or composer discovering the landscape and inhabitants of the impoverished west of Ireland and Arnold Bax travelling to Ireland (then part of the United Kingdom of course) from England? And apart from his being now middle-aged and less impetuous, is Bax’s experience of Ireland in the 1930s radically changed by the fact that he is visiting an independent state (though he had of course been deeply affected by the execution of Patrick Pearse)? Is Moeran’s deep engagement with folksong to be described as pastoral where Norfolk is concerned, but exotic in the case of Wicklow or Kerry? It almost goes without saying that, with whatever adjustment for passport identity, the un-industrialised, under-populated and strongly rural society of the Free State would attract English romantic-pastoralists, while an English composer like Vaughan Williams could serve as a musical model for Irish composers, working in a conservative idiom that reflected Irish classical music’s long-standing position as a satellite of the metropolis.⁶

 
The vision of an Irish music for the urban middleclasses that Patrick Pearse articulated in the 1900s – one that, like the standardised Irish and new litereary idiom he also worked for, would gradually move from its peasant roots towards autonomy – would have cohabited comfortably with English pastoralism, once the small matter of allowing Irish people to have the freedom they desired had been taken care of. This is perhaps to underline the point that starting the clock at 1916 is an arbitrary choice where classical music is concerned, and that different sectors of national life need not follow the same clock and calendar. Provided an excessive focus on passport and state-centred identity is avoided, however, there is no reason not to begin loosely with that date.

 
Let us turn to the written content of The Invisible Art. It offers a number of features on individual composers. As befits the genre – some first appeared as newspaper articles – these tend to be entirely positive towards their subjects. Ita Beausang provides a very sympathetic profile of Ina Boyle, whose work in recent years has been emerging from obscurity. Given the encouragement she received from Vaughan Williams in England and from her peers in Ireland, her obscurity can, initially at least, be ascribed more to family circumstance and individual character than to institutionalised prejudice. Michael Murphy is warmly sympathetic in introducing two of the elder statesmen of Irish composition, John Kinsella and Seóirse Bodley. Younger composers are presented in the same manner: the lively Andrew Hamilton by Dervan; the more subdued Ann Cleare by a very enthusiastic Carol McGonnell, herself a musician of quality. Uniquely, the shapeshifting post-modernist Jennifer Walshe gets to speak for herselves, without an interlocutor and – not surprisingly given her visual/theatrical qualities – attracts more than her share of photographic attention. These composer profiles reveal the diversity within the field and may well arouse curiosity about the music.

 
Endorsements are an integral part of product promotion. It is no surprise that Michael Dervan invited a number of high-profile outsiders to vouch for the quality of the contemporary Irish product. Thus, the pianist Joanna MacGregor tells of her first encounter with the young Donnacha Dennehy and the process of working on pAt (2001), the piece he subsequently wrote for her. The fearless American soprano Barbara Hannigan enthuses about the pleasure and challenge of working with Gerald Barry. (A photograph attests to their relaxed understanding.) David Harrington of the (still-supercool?) Kronos Quartet remembers with gratitude the part played by Kevin Volans in establishing their reputation. The New York radio broadcaster John Schaefer goes ‘[i]n Search of the Irish Philip Glass or Meredith Monk’ – America coming to Ireland to find the America in Ireland? Raymond Deane has referred to ‘ turning Dublin into a corner of downtown New York.’⁷

 
We have strayed into matters of critical culture. One would not expect The Invisible Art to lash the internal weaknesses of the sector. What we could look to find, however, is a hint of self-questioning, some awareness of how exactly the history of classical music in Ireland flows with or against other currents in Irish history – and perhaps a fresh idea or two here, a new spin on an old idea there. Even better would be evidence that those who neglect this sector are depriving themselves of intellectual as well as musical stimulation. For such stimulation, it is to the editor’s introduction, to the survey chapters and to the article on the historiography of the period that we should look – though of course composers too have their own insights to offer.

 
The writers of survey chapters appear to have been offered some latitude as to the approach adopted. Those who focus almost entirely on musical works, or on the seedbed from which these grew, emerge with the greatest credit. The 1916-1922 period is assigned to Joseph Ryan. As 1916 was of no particular significance for classical music, and as little could reasonably be expected to happen while large-scale officially-blessed slaughter proceeded in Europe, while Britain resisted the Irish demand for a separate state, and while the Free State took its first tottering steps away from civil war, Ryan can do little at first but ramble disapprovingly back and forth along the Irish musical front, then go on to camp in earlier decades, with some sorties into the Free State years. It is worth mentioning that this chapter is less sententious in tone, and somewhat less dismissive of nationalist cultural endeavour, than Ryan’s earlier writings on related subjects.

 
The Free State years are covered by Axel Klein, an admirable chronicler and unearther of Irish music and musicians. He is right to sense that something broader than a chronicle of works is needed in order to understand the music culture of the Free State. (No serious questions are asked in this volume regarding classical music in Northern Ireland.) Unfortunately, his command of sociocultural and political history is limited.⁸ Though, as always, he can summon up littleknown information, Klein’s explanatory powers are curbed by his general acceptance of the historically blinkered current academic orthodoxy in matters of Irish classical music history. As it happens, its foundational document (a 1990 doctorate) was composed by the above-mentioned Joseph Ryan. This was heavily drawn on for Harry White’s later and more directly influential volume, the Keeper’s Recital (1998), and has been variously elaborated on, repeated, referenced, enshrined and echoed since then. A brief summary of this orthodoxy – here, for convenience, referred to as Ryan/White – may be useful to those unfamiliar with the area, as it suffuses certain contributions to the volume and chimes with the editor’s perspective.

 
The absence of an infrastructure for classical music in modern Ireland; Ireland’s failure to produce composers of world stature or renown; the low presence of classical music in Irish critical discourse; and the low presence of classical music in the symbolic projection of the state and of Irish culture, at home and abroad: according to Ryan/White, these phenomena can be explained by the fact that the rise of Irish nationalism, cultural and political, polarised classical music between narrow political demands (music as reinforcement or symbol of the national cause) and a cosmopolitan European cultural form that in Ireland was damaged by its introduction through, and association with, Ascendancy and British power. The Ryan/White theory has two major attractions: it encapsulates centuries of music history in a simple binary formula, and it puts an intellectual gloss on what is a comforting victim narrative. Its credibility is enhanced by the fact that its chief exponent, Professor Harry White, has an outstanding record of achievement: founding Ireland’s first musicological society; initiating the first series of musicological books in Ireland; proposing, driving for and (with Barra Boydell and others) eventually realising the milestone publication of the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (EMIR); and writing numerous books and articles as well as giving Irish musicology an international profile.

 
This constructive and infrastructural achievement is accompanied in the field of music scholarship, unfortunately, by a number of historical and conceptual flaws. Put bluntly, these flaws include: a reductive and under-contextualised understanding of the phenomena gathered under the label of Irish nationalism; a practice of history that entails attaching examples to preconceived notions rather than a constant dialectic between paradigms and available knowledge; misinterpretation of key figures (too often on the basis of a handful of – again – decontextualised quotations); lack of acknowledgement of Anglophone Ireland’s satellite status in relation to the metropolis during the centuries after conquest; assumption of the existence of a creative/critical culture that was suffocated by Irish nationalism (without demonstration of same); almost no consideration of the social and economic factors that significantly shape cultural opportunity and activity; lack of reflection on the musical life that (regardless of ideology) town- and city-dwellers had in common (in this, we might include working-class interest in opera); lack of consideration of anything other than ideological difference when seeking to explain the divergence between musical developments in Britain and Ireland in the later nineteenth century; the omission from the discussion of the effect of the long slump in English classical music after Purcell on music in Ireland; little thought on the factors underlying the struggle to emerge from that slump (the English Musical Renaissance); a real blindness to nationalist interest in classical music; an underestimation of musical initiative in the Revival period; and a failure to think about classical music and the projection of power in post-Union Ireland. A detailed exposition of these many issues (characteristic of a school of thought and not merely of an individual) cannot be offered here, but some will be evoked in passing as we proceed. Some of them were raised by me in 1999 in the journal Graph (3.3), and a few years later by Patrick Zuk, Benjamin Dwyer and myself in the Journal of Music in Ireland.

 
We can now return to the survey chapters of The Invisible Art. Kevin O’Connell is admirably fair-minded on the composers of the 1950s and 1960s. Though a brief nod to Mark Fitzgerald’s researches on Frederick May might have been in order, O’Connell comments interestingly on May’s ‘sometimes overwhelming’ debt to Vaughan Williams (an example of ‘the dangerous phenomenon of a great composer who is a bad model’) in contrast with his friend Brian Boydell, who managed to steer a more independent course. In the literary and literary-critical worlds (or, where the visual arts are concerned, in events like the IMMA exhibition on Irish modernism some years ago), there has been a tendency to blow any spark of Irish protomodernism into a full burning bush. The sprouting of a cult of May as modernist victim of a backward state has been curtailed by clear-eyed examination of the evidence – which is not at all to diminish May’s best work and critical writing. On Seán Ó Riada as classical composer, O’Connell is entirely unsentimental. (We shall, however, return to one small but significant point of disagreement below.)

 
Mark Fitzgerald offers a judicious and closely detailed assessment of the composers of the 1970s and 80s, and of such changes as there were in the formation of a supportive infrastructure. The point on which he finishes is thoughtprovoking. He reminds us that in the mid-1980s (for well-intentioned budgetary reasons perhaps) the CMC (Contemporary Music Centre) ceased its advocacy for international music through festivals and composer exchanges in order to concentrate on promoting and supporting Irish composers. An unfortunate side-effect may have been to narrow horizons and to reduce interchange and initiative.

 
Michael Dungan offers a cheerier survey of the 1990s, focusing on senior figures like Barry and Deane but noting the emergence of younger composers, including voices from Northern Ireland like Deirdre Gribbin and Ian Wilson. Liam Cagney offers a rather similar survey of the post-2000 period, and mentions enough contemporaries to ensure himself safe passage through Dublin. A gently questioning note may hover over, for example, the section on Ergodos (a small school of composers of broadly ECM-ish sensibility and ethos) and what he calls the New Sincerity (a rather soft-eggish term, surely, that invites a bashing from any passing wooden spoon).⁹ In fairness to Cagney, however, curious readers will have a usable map of the current scene and enough information to guide their sampling of the talents and genres on offer.

 
How does the activity (and inactivity) described in these survey chapters relate to music life in general and to Irish society? The point of disagreement with Kevin O’Connell mentioned above may be enlightening at this point. A passage on attitudes to Ó Riada the composer in the world of traditional music reads thus:

[…] in an atmosphere where ‘classical music’, tainted with the legacy of west-Britonism, held a questionable place, his very success was suspect, for the better you are at doing something of which people are suspicious, the more suspicious they become.

 
This is a polarised two-cultures misunderstanding of the period of change across all genres of music that we might call the long 1960s. The reality is more interesting. Even if the attitudes and practices of most non-professional players were little affected by Ó Riada’s innovations, his rise to national prominence as a cultural activist and broadcaster and as a composer across various genres was morale-boosting for the traditional music sector – and for the nationally-minded section of the newly-expanding urban middle class. Ó Riada’s presumed eminence in another sector, along with his capture of public space such as the Gaiety Theatre for concerts by Ceoltóiri Chualann that were almost state occasions, only added to his lustre among those who sought or saw a renewal of traditional music and of Irish-language culture. His classical work was itself little known or heard but, on the basis of the affecting music based on ‘Sliabh na mBan’ that he wrote for the film Mise Éire, one could imagine, as some (including Martin Adams in his contribution to The Invisible Art) do to this day, that his general practice as classical composer attempts to wed the traditional and the classical.

 
What is important here is not the West-Brit taunt with which, when his pride was hurt, Ó Riada once lashed out at the Irish Times critic Charles Acton – in fact, the highly theatrical Ó Riada had only recently gone through a tweedy fishing-rod-andshotgun country-gent phase himself.¹⁰ More important by far than this dispute is the move towards a group- and concert-based, touring-professional model by a sector of traditional music (in other words, its alignment with other forms of popular music internationally) and the boost in selfesteem and international attention that occurred across the genre as a whole. This cultural pattern (part of a societal shift) chimes with Ó Riada’s interest in radio, TV and film, with Claddagh Records’ modernist cover designs, and with the role of a member of Ceoltóirí Chualann, Éamon de Buitléir, in popularising an interest in animal and birdlife (previously, as in Britain, more the domain of the gentry, the leisured classes and rural clergymen) through his bi-lingual TV programme Amuigh Faoin Spéir.

 
The space for a revitalised traditional music, for showbands, for rock and pop, was opened by a phenomenon noted elsewhere in his chapter by O’Connell: the general fading of the older style of light music. We could stretch that term to include such things as operatic highlights, light opera, popular hits (American and other) sung by opera stars, Brendan O’Dowda’s recordings of Percy French and other parlour music – in other words, a version of the predominant musical culture of both Britain and English-speaking Ireland going back to the nineteenth century. The fading of both light classical music, and the semi-classicised, parlourised version of traditional music that had dominated stage and radio, eroded the musical territory where older forms of popular culture and classical music met. These factors and the simultaneous rise of the folk movement, of international popular culture and of mass media proved more advantageous to traditional music than to classical music.

 
It does not seem that Michael Dervan had given much thought to such matters or, as a journalist specialising in classical music, had read or remembered the relevant articles in the JMI before planning the survey chapters in The Invisible Art.¹¹ And if he had read Different Voices – Benjamin Dwyer’s 2014 collection of interviews with composers (un-reviewed in the Irish Times, the newspaper which also neglected to include any Irish composition in its 100 epoch-defining art works of the last century) – he certainly had not paid any attention to the author/editor’s 40-page historical introduction. Dervan’s own introduction deplores the failures of independent Ireland in relation to classical music but offers no insight into it; one could be reading a translation into the cultural sphere of one of Stephen Collins’s opinion pieces.¹² His belief that Ireland shunned Stanford’s music for political reasons is unfounded. Stanford’s position and reputation in Britain had already (like Parry’s) declined with the rise of Elgar. As the nearentirety of Stanford’s career was lived out in England, there is no particular reason why Ireland should berate itself for following the English example. But Stanford had a continuing low-level presence: for example, an opera of his was staged as part of the Tailteann festival in 1924, his ‘My Love is an Arbutus’ was sung in a pairing with Éamonn Ó Gallchobhair’s ‘Óró Mo Churaichín’ by the soprano Eibhlín Ní Ghiollmáin in a vocal and instrumental concert in the City Hall in Cork in April 1945, and in the lead-up to 1966 he featured alongside Moore and various patriotic ballads in a recording by Our Lady’s Choral Society and the RESO & Sextet ¹³ One might venture that the Free State rejected Stanford less than Stanford rejected the idea of a non-British Irish state.

 
Lacking a historical compass, Dervan wanders into autobiographical mode. When well used, this can open pathways to understanding; here, despite some wellapplied local colour, it too easily becomes a recasting of the mode of complaint. Effectively, seeing classical music culture in Ireland as a victim of narrow-minded cultural nationalism, and therefore predisposed to take current academic orthodoxy as truth, Dervan appears not to have engaged in any way with alternative perspectives.

 
In the search for illumination on the sector as a whole, we are then left with Martin Adams’ chapter on the historiography of classical music in Ireland. This is a useful enough survey in certain regards, a curiously incomplete one in others. Who would dispute that this field lay largely fallow until recently? Who would dispute the surge in publications and organisation that has taken place in the last 25 years? Does this mean that all the big questions have been answered? Adams is theoretically in favour of debate but describes some of what has occurred as ‘lively, sometimes abusive’. At another point he describes some of the objections to White’s ideas – he does not clarify which objections and who proposed them – as ‘built on sandy foundations and superficial argument’ and suggests that this may explain White’s refusal to answer his critics. Prof. White’s choices in this regard are entirely a matter for himself. It is not entirely clear that he has even read the critiques of his work, and it is not at all unusual for academic authors to avoid debate in non-academic outlets. Vigorously expressed criticism of an author (or composer) may indeed be perceived as disrespectful by that individual. But no personal issue or entanglement preceded the first expression of criticism.¹⁴

 
Beyond all personal concerns, the circulation and testing of theories against the available evidence should be the primary concern of intellectuals. It is the absence of debate within this musicological subculture as a whole that is striking. The complete absence of response to the issues raised must be what matters after the best part of twenty years. An intellectual subculture that complains of neglect and that purports to be interested in developing a critical culture is not putting itself in the best position when it resorts to silence or silencing on encountering disagreement ¹⁵

 
In Adams’s survey of the historiography, another omission is inexplicable. The multi-volume Oxford New History of Ireland has had its fair share of criticism over the years, but in one regard – the space it devotes to the history of literature, painting and music – it merits great praise. For the non-specialised reader, Brian Boydell’s two chapters on classical music up to 1850 can be recommended over any of his more specialised books. Similarly, despite some naive formulations, Aloys Fleischmann’s chapter on the period up to 1920 situates music of various kinds – including opera and popular song – in a broad societal context. And for the post-1916 period, how can one ignore Roy Johnston’s chapter on music in Northern Ireland – or indeed Joseph Ryan’s on independent Ireland?

 
Was Martin Adams unaware of this material? Whatever the cause of the omission, the effect of the removal of this mature growth is to present the dramatic sprouting of the 1990s school of musicology in an even more flattering light. The presence in the Oxford New History of these chapters on music points to the need for Irish musicology to emerge from its compound, to engage in truly comparative history (not merely coded tut-tutting), to engage in dialogue with other musical sectors, to acknowledge the importance of class and location, and to engage with social, political, economic, institutional and cultural history.

 
As acknowledged in this review, The Invisible Art is in many ways an attractive and useful volume. It would have been of greater value if it had demonstrated the courage and curiosity to be more than a bulletin from within the compound.

 
Barra Ó Seaghdha has written widely on literature, cultural and intellectual history, and music. His work has appeared in the Dublin Review of Books, the Journal of Music in Ireland, the Journal of Music (http://journalofmusic.com), Irish Left Review, etc. He is the former editor of Graph magazine (1986- 1998). His recently completed PhD looks at the place of classical music in Irish socio-cultural history. The Invisible Art was published by New Island Books in 2016. It is available in a hardback edition (ISBN 9781848405660) for €29.95.
 

NOTES

1. See Adrian Smith’s review here: http://www.aicnewmusicjournal.com/articles/what-shouldwe- make-%E2%80%98composing-island%E2%80%99. My review here: http://journalofmusic.com/criticism/century-irishclassics.
2. I should state at this point that my name appears in the book’s acknowledgements. The interaction involved was minor and very late in the book’s production; as will become clear, it does not preclude critical distance.
3. Was it advisable to antagonise other sectors by claiming total ownership of the term ‘music’?
4. Designer Fidelma Slattery and, even more so perhaps, illustrations researcher Caitríona Ní Dhunáin deserve individual mention.
5. Conquest and the sectarian nature of the 18th-century state eliminated the possibility of a continuous ecclesiastical as opposed to a
vernacular Irish-language Catholic music tradition.
6. ‘Romantic pastoralists’: the term is shorthand for a more complex reality; it can be taken to reflect a tendency rather than as a description of any individual career as a whole.
7. The point about Ireland’s growing enslavement to the American model is only a detail in a wideranging and searching article in issue 12 of this magazine (http://enclavereview. org/uneventful-music-ineventful- times/). Something more unpredictably poetic and exuberant seemed in prospect when I interviewed Donnacha Dennehy in 1999 (Graph, 3.3).
8. To take one small example, he and others who believe that World War II was referred to exclusively as the Emergency (presumably, in some act of collective denial) should examine the title of the 1945 volume Ireland’s Stand: Being a Selection of the Speeches of Eamon de Valera During the War (1939- 1945) and then count the number of times de Valera refers to the war as ‘the war’.
9. ECM is a German record label, founded in 1969, famous for its recordings of the classical music of Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, György Kurtág, etc., alongside jazz luminaries like Keith Jarrett, and crossover projects like Jan Garbarek’s collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble. Ergodos (as ever, generalisations can be crude, and certain works of Simon O’Connor’s, for example, may fall entirely outside this categorisation) would share with ECM an element of holy minimalism and an aesthetic that extends to all aspects of production, writing and design. Some Ergodos members participated in a celebration of ECM in Cork in 2015.
10. Charles Acton’s lengthy interviews with Irish composers – a delightfully frank one with Archie Potter is a highlight – for Éire /Ireland in the late 1960s and early 70s demand resurrection. I gave copies of several to the CMC some years ago.
11. I have often maintained
(both to Dervan himself and to composer friends) that some of the negativity directed at him as a music critic should be directed at other media outlets that provide little or no coverage of contemporary/classical music.
12. Stephen Collins: former political editor for the Irish Times, Sunday Tribune and Sunday Press.
13. Éamonn Ó Gallchobhair is known more for his cultural attitudes than for his music; his strictures regarding orchestral standards in his concert reviews for Ireland Today show another side of the man.
14. This is certainly true in my own case. Though I had attended contemporary/classical music events for years, and had interviewed Gerald Barry soon after the premiere of The Intelligence Park, I knew almost nobody in the contemporary/ classical music world and had written only about literature and history before tackling music in Graph through the review of The Keeper’s Recital and interviews with Barry Guy and Donnacha Dennehy. The exasperation expressed in an article of mine in the March-April 2007 issue of the JMI was a response to the failure of anybody from within the Ryan/White orthodoxy to respond to any of the critiques I listed. It was because of this that I took the unusual step of expressing concern about how the Encyclopedia (EMIR) would treat important issues in Irish cultural history and non-classical forms of music.
15. A review that incorporates a brief survey of the historiography can be found here: http://www.drb.ie/essays/ silent-symphony. More recent thoughts – expressed politely enough to pass the editorial scrutiny of the courteous and respectful Eve Patten and Aidan O’Malley – may be found in ‘A Journey Eastward: Reframing the History of Irish Classical Music’, in Ireland, West to East : Irish Cultural Connections with Central and Eastern Europe. Though it has been necessary on various occasions in recent years to explain my reservations re. Ryan/White, the process of tackling un- or under-explored questions has been been far more rewarding.

 
As part of her recent show at the Galway Arts Centre, Something Momentous Germinating, RetroReflection was screened in its most recent 16mm print. In it, University College Cork’s Environmental Research Institute is observed, primarily as a location/destination in itself rather than as a home or workplace. A recent, modern building, we can assume it possesses all the efficiencies and compliances of such things, all science and angles. There is glass and brick, measuring instruments and institutional furniture. The colour looks to have been desaturated somewhere between the camera and the screen, thus flattening the building further, putting the place at another remove. The colour is further soaked out by the relative absence of humans for large parts of the film: there are views out of windows, views through doorways and implements observed, but people are largely absent from the narrative. That is not to say that there is no-one on the frame, rather that they appear largely as parts of the building, as extensions of the institution, not vice versa.

 
As RetroFlection continues, we begin to notice that, although we are in a new build, many of the tools employed in the Institute’s work seem antiquated or at odds with the obvious claims to cutting-edge status of the place. (Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no expertise in the matter of the lay-out of a contemporary professional laboratory! I suppose I was expecting robot arms and lasers, however unlikely.) The apparatus mightn’t look out of place in a secondary school science lab and with it, character begins to seep into the work. A bubbling beaker is lovingly observed at length and there are recurring appearances by humble plastic water bottles, elevated to starring roles in untitled science thrillers. This humility allows the human elements of the building to participate in the story: a stereotypical scientist, glasses and lab coat, appears to work on a theorem or formula in marker on a window, itself a gesture towards the representation of scientists in cinema: another crouches over some unseen task in a lab, the picture of dedication. The workers here flow to a logic set by the place, they take on the mien of the institution and its work.

 
However, over time, this down-at-heel appearance, coupled with the dry colours, began to feel uncanny – I found myself becoming uneasy. This was exacerbated by the camera, which is often looking up from an angle, making clandestine documents. As this has been shot and presented in 16mm, it carries an historic weight, especially within a monolithic setting such as this. The story of the public service film and tyrannical repression is here, so is the history of documentary filmmaking and dinky school projectors. Any flaws in the stock or impurities in the chemicals are coupled with the exigencies of shooting film, the limits of the lenses, the fragility of the camera to push us a little further back from the subject. We are kept at arm’s length by the camera, which never appears to leave the tripod: forced to stare, compassion is absent in the viewing, just as warmth is absent from the print. Throughout the film, a male voice provides a monotonous, discontinuous commentary on the building and its place in its surroundings, on the building and its place in relation to the camera. This, in conjunction with local field recordings and soundtrack provide a thread running throughout the work, which amplifies the space between us and the building.

 
Science, cinema and architecture are all obvious modern themes and here they come together in a vision which, in its particular balance of warmth and space, sentiment and observation, might owe more to Nigel Kneale than to the more obvious JG Ballard. This is the case despite the flatness and subdued colour of the print, and the effect of distancing caused by the camera positioning – the homeliness of the familiar scientific imagery draws us in. RetroReflection doesn’t present itself as cynical observation – it’s an act of engagement and warmth, not a stab at cold and dispassionate science, but open armed. We aren’t looking, we are participating.

 
The tropes of science fiction (in its very broadest sense) are constantly evident in contemporary video and film arts: Jesse Jones’ Against the Realm of the Absolute, referencing Joanna Russ’ feminist provocation The Female Man; various Martin Healy works referencing ‘mad scientist’ and ‘last man on Earth’ ideas; the improbable, uninhabited landscapes of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, all these can be seen as echoes of the Cold War anxiety expressed in the less lurid corners of science fiction cinema of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Society driven underground and deindividuated (Logans Run, THX 1138), post-apocalyptic collapse and survival (everything from On The Beach, Stalker, Quatermass, Threads), the distressed loner, doing what (usually) he has to do in a changed world (Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, The Omega Man, Elephant). I’m not trying to suggest that these works belong on the same shelf but much of their aesthetics have been appropriated or assimilated into the moving images of contemporary art – for the viewer of a contemporary art film the imagery of science fiction film-making is waiting in the wings. Yet it is characteristic of RetroReflection that the depiction of the relation of humans to science witholds any hint of this science fiction storehouse of pessimism and anxiety. Instead, optimism is the defining tenor: while visually we are reminded of a public service broadcast from another time, the subject (both material and human) is expressed as benign, ultimately kind. Which, in short, is what made me uneasy.

 
Desmond’s film has a lightness of touch that comes from the conditions of its making: a confident maker embedded in a community. This gives the viewer (and the work) a simple sense of itself, a wohlbefinden. However, it is this very sense of comfort in a simultaneously homely and scientific environment that I found discomfiting: behind the unassuming plastic water bottles and familiar Bunsen burners lies a tension, ready to disrupt this dream. RetroReflection, despite its strengths, asked for an extra dimension: the presentation of both itself and its mirror – the eerie creep of science past, of failed humanity.

 
RetroReflection was shown as part of the solo exhibition of Aoife Desmond’s work, Something Momentous Germinating, on 30 September 2017.

 
On entering the gallery I was greeted by a large number of CRT monitors of varying sizes, placed together at alternating angles on the floor. An image of a woman in period costume by a tree, falling to the ground in a moment of lost consciousness, was shown from a number of camera angles and repeats across all the screens simultaneously. As I looked across the screens I became aware of a flashing in the corner of my eyes. Wherever my focus rested the displays in my peripheral vision began to flicker and blur. A property distinct to cathode ray tube displays and plasma screens, this flicker was a result of the physiological effect of frame-rate on human vision. In the context of MacWilliams’ research into anomalies of perception it was an astute revisiting of this work, Faint, from 1999, previously displayed as projected film or single channel display. The scene was dreamy and romantic, the image fading to bare perceptibility at the farther corners of my gaze.

 
Also on display in the ground floor gallery is a video installation, Explaining Magic to Mercer (2005). Continuing the ground-level perspective a video sat at no more than hip height, flanked by three low plywood boxes, which functioned as seats. The audio played through a pair of headphones. Something about the low angle of vision put me in mind of a child’s eye view (I later noted that the same low perspective was employed at a number of other points in the exhibition). In the video the artist discusses a number of historical figures from the history of the occult with her five-year-old nephew, Mercer. The artist’s voice is represented by on-screen subtitles, the only audible speech is Mercer’s series of responses. At the same time we observe Mercer ‘listening’ to an implied voice, his brow furrowing with curiosity and frustration as he attends to the task of drawing a picture. Interestingly, Mercer rarely looks direct to camera. Throughout the video he focuses on the task at hand, the drawing on the table, however frequently the conversation breaks his concentration, and he gazes off to the left of the screen as if searching for answers on the distant horizon. This strange visuospatial correspondence with the act of thinking is mirrored in the boy’s tactile relation to his drawing, which he scans absentmindedly with his finger tips as he draws. The conversation settles on Rosa Kuleshova who the artist says could ‘read with her hands’. ‘You’re doing it right now,’ she tells Mercer. There is a visible suggestion that such mystical phenomena might share traits with the physical world of human gesture. One wonders if Mercer finds the notion credible, from the reaction on his face we can almost see his imagination visibly expand.

 
As I moved to the upstairs gallery I noticed the sonic bleed from other video works which seemed to increase in ambient drama the further one traveled into the show, lending an atmosphere of circus and spectacle which is accented by a number of neon text pieces. Upstairs in a darkened projection space I encountered F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N (2009), a work originally shown at The Venice Biennale, with MacWilliam representing Northern Ireland. Much like the dangerous powers of incantation believed to be possessed by the medieval Irish bards, the poetic aspects of the voice in F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N generates much anticipation and suspense. The title refers to an event in Winnipeg in 1931 involving the sudden appearance of the word ‘Flammarion’ on the wall of a séance cabinet. Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was a French astronomer and psychical researcher who had died six years previously, in 1925. The event is reconstructed on screen and discussed by a number of individuals, including a poet, a poltergeist investigator and the granddaughter of a famous medium.

 
F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N is an extension of MacWilliam’s research into the spirit photography archive of T. G. Hamilton. The work is as much an investigation into the power of lens-based media, capturing a transient moment, as it is a marking of the historic beginning of the art object’s consciousness of itself as ‘the departed’, an abstraction from the realm of the living. At one point some younger voices become audible in the background and we hear them deliberating over the sudden appearance of the word, optimistic in their belief that what they have glimpsed is a communication from beyond. This is oddly apposite to Roland Barthes’ idea in Camera Lucida, that the stillness of snapshots marks a cessation of movement and hence an instance of death. Described as ‘teleplasmic text’, the repeated questioning regarding a visible paper-like string that the word F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N appears to hang from gives poetic form to a shared hope of connection by way of psychic translation. Written language is a cultural tool which has enabled communication at a distance, and carries an implicit expectation that it refer to things actual or anticipated. The power of the mind to transform a barely perceptible abstract form, a crumpled piece of fabric, a barely audible sound into ‘anything you want really’ reminds us of the ever tenuous division between narrative faith and wishful thinking.

 
Susan MacWilliam: Modern Experiments was on view 9 September – 18 October 2017. The exhibition, which had previously been shown in Banbridge and Drogheda, moved on to The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, where it ran until 17 December 2017.