On a Model Art Scene — Small Night Projects

S & L, from screenprinted zine Summer 2019.

Playing Snakes & Ladders the other day with my wife and kids I realise in split moment I’m having fun, before returning to having fun again. Flatness of the board game and crab-like race to the top—full of oxymoron and irony—made me think of Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive freeplay in terms of language, competition, centres and agents of influence, and artistic freedom in the art scene. I love Derrida, almost irrationally, somewhere between head and heart and head. I have read and reread him for 20-odd years, from the purity of Of Grammatology to its opposite—biography, and never really caught the tail never mind the body and head of his thought. He haunts with his ontology; ladders always lead to snakes to ladders, excessive signifiers reproducing like rabbits, cotton and cruel. It’s always Spring in Derrida. Birth, family, wild abandon of language both reproductive and pleasurable, but always surgical, forever suspicious. Lambs give birth here too; to more lambs. Language never grows up; establishes itself, institutes itself. Meaning and understanding and truth, those things we are most committed to, suspicious of and insecure about, in art, in life, are always elusive (or illusive) in Derrida because the excess of meaning in language—inside and outside the text, as much as written as spoken—and the mannerist spine of signifiers—never signified, sidewinding with arabesque patterns blurring with helical and horizontal movement and turns in time towards a tail (stay with me) weaving side-to-side in the blue-haze future of space and time, farther and further, leaving textural traces in the sand. I love the dance of Derrida because concrete meaning is oversubscribed to. We want meaning from life the same way we want careers from art. Not gonna happen! Derrida’s difficult language was invented to intervene and exploit and draw out the insecurities of language, the thing we place too much stress on to find the presence of meaning and measurement of value to fill the absence of understanding and function in art. On the night of the birth of my son—the most visceral of dreams—I was reading Derrida. The other night—5-years on—I posed a question to some Dublin-based artists (with Derrida in mind) when I attended the exhibition opening and pub-afters of Periodical Review #8, which I was invited to co-curate this year by Pallas Projects Dublin directors and artists Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy. “A new model for the art scene?” I said. The question was not altogether rhetorical, and did not come out of the experience of curating Periodical Review, although being named in the mission statement an “agent within the field” like every Periodical Review curator for the last 8 years did get me thinking about power and agency and how artists, more often than not, are not named agents themselves. We are in a moment, it seems, that power is not equated with artist; when artists speed curate. Ugh. I'd been thinking for some time about the model of being an artist, and the toy model of the art scene in which the model artist moves and shakes, from art school to rented studio to exhibition to bare-faced whiteness of the gallery. Lie? It seems to me to be a toy model beset by corners and angles of influence; L-shaped without the Knight’s move. Art, for the most part, becomes art when it is seen by others, the long-haired process trimmed square leaving the buzz-cut results exhibited squarely against a clean white wall in front of eyes that know or are in the know. Art with a capital A is not a hobby shoehorned into a bedroom, a windowless garage, a domestic or rural life... underground. Art is an urbanite, a socialite, a careerist, a sacrifice. Art is all these things until it becomes bound by a certain shape that loses its malleability and mobility to become, inevitably, over the grind of time and cumulative responsibilities, self-imitation. When artists achieve something they have something to lose. Vladimir Nabokov, the exquisite writer of Lolita, said somewhere that his favourite chess piece was the Knight with its L-shaped movement. Vladimir’s love and respect for the Knight’s unusual attack and defense wasn’t exclusive to chess, but to literature too, Lolita being a house of sharp left and right turns, from past to present to future to bedroom to bathroom to love to abuse. We have lots of movers and shakers in our art scene but most choose the same narrow and vertical path, online and off—the only paths at their disposal? I don’t know… Year on year more and more artists emerge from the college woodwork to first wriggle and crawl, left and right, their flesh visible beneath the loose articulation of their newly formed shells, until they secure homes a little more solid, sturdy, architectonic, established, institutional (you see where I am going) with studs and struts that lead this way and that, that way and this—upwardly mobile—to form a house with L-shapes that become more □, more structural, as if the uncanny corner of freeplay were nailed shut. This is the model of the artist, to first make L-shape movements and then build a house with them. With Snakes & Ladders spread out before me and the Derridean trace of childhood and now fatherhood drawing out a curvature of time that bites its own tail, I wonder about the possibility of flatness, that gorgeous Snakes & Ladders flatness spanning 100 squares and games over a lifetime. Is it all a game? and if so, why did our art game become so vertical. Vertiginous social media has made its own high-rise institutions and reputations and flat-pack artists. But I have to trust the integrity of the artist who has chosen this impossible life with an impossible vernacular that buckles and bends our view of the world. Artists that make the Knight’s move. 3 snakes await my son on this board on the top row; 180 applications for a 10-slot annual programme await the artist-directors of Pallas Projects Dublin where the shadow of capitalism makes its encroaching presence felt in the faceless hotels and matchbox student accommodation that looms large over the future of our art scene. We move on, move on up. But we ought to aspire to a horizontal art scene where tables are turned and artists are doing the turning, not just in their work, but on the art scene, turning tables that tilt and flip the pieces, the players, the curators, flattening expectation and fostering a horizontal growth outwards, expanding, thinning, balding, prostrate, looking up at the sun where clouds make temporary shapes against the blue, where possibility is wispy, upward, not built of blocks, of reputations, but of vision. See how far I can see, not how far I can piss gold. Come the day when every agent-artist, with their own relative agency, contributes their time and energy and power outside of their own concentrated circle to other circles and other circles and other circles until the sky is teeming and the liquid field is flat and unified by recessed centres—lots and lots and lots of centres of influence and the artist’s tide is the thing that comes to shore and inevitably razes what has gone before and what is to come. A reproductive community. Lambs lambing. Unity.