10. enter empire (writer’s cut)
This is not a catalogue essay, or a history lesson. It is a critical confrontation with a question I have on the occasion & occupancy of a Dublin heritage site by two artists, Alan Phelan & Mark Swords:
What does it mean to make, place & be solicited by contemporary art in a heritage site (i.e., history)?
I am directing this question (which is made up of many other questions) at these two artists, who are two ‘art friends’ — friendships built on art, not on other social bonds. Although I am conscious of being critical for the sake of criticality in a performative way, I see this invitation to write as a rare opportunity to ask questions about art conditioned & made in response to its setting & site-specificity. Is this an occasion of contemporary art, or merely decoration?
The heritage site in question is named the “Casino at Marino”, a Neoclassical temple doing what postmodern architecture has been accused of doing for the last 50 years, robbing the culture of the past, augmenting it, & slapping it back onto the present, like Doric columns & golden eagles on a 1970’s semi-detached.
And yet we have been postmodern — ‘post’ for short — ever since the Romans rebooted the Greeks. That fact is not in question. The question in question is: Is something lost in the reboot, what some call the originary context, motivation, passion, soul? What is lost in the shuffle of past & present?
Words like “shuffle” come easy when discussing a building named “Casino” (“Little House” in Italian; “gambling establishment” in English elsewhere in space & time). The cards shuffled in this pleasure house from the feudal years of its colonial conception, were dealt by the lords if not ladies of the manor. The Casino provided R&R for the few who ruled & harvested the resources & cultures of others, reified in the Casino's five-pointed star parquet floor (presented in the Casino as deepfake lino), but underneath made from inlaid timber procured from the near & far reaches of the British Empire.
Yet beyond the leisure & pleasure economy of the colonial class, far, far away from the Little House on the Prairie, the modern English word ‘casino’, located underneath its idyllic & modest Italian etymology, interests me most in respect to the two artists, Phelan & Swords, who are responding to this building with its architectural slights of hand & conservational deepfakes.
The so-called “little house” built on the big house of colonialism seems like the biggest excess. From sniper range the Casino at Marino seems modest relative to the mother Empire that gave birth to it. But this is an illusion; an aesthetic indulgence of the bored.
Within Swiss-army-knife range the devil is in the unfolding detail. The little house becomes (pick your Empire metaphor) a Tardis, a Matryoshka, a clown car. What looks like one grand door fitting of the rhizomatic roots of colonialism, is in fact a small door within a big door. What looks like one storey with one room is in fact three stories & sixteen rooms. If there is anything functional here, like the column drain pipes, it is disguised by the decorative, which brings me back to one of two questions posed earlier (with a slight addition): Is this an occasion of contemporary art, or merely decoration upon decoration?
Speaking with the artists Phelan & Swords, who are responding to the Casino with both existing & new work, they speak of history, mending & repair within the context of a building which, for an age, looked out on an empire where the sun never set. Phelan & Swords come wrapped up in their own histories & contemporary anxieties, which they have been invited to transpose onto a historical trinket that casts colonial shadows in all directions, a building celebrated today for its architecture & survival of war & rebellion that transitioned this country from colony to independence.
What I do know at this juncture (January 2024), when the artists are still discussing their work-in-progress in an effort to try to habituate themselves to the space & context, is that Swords is a crafter gone rogue, & Phelan is an archivist gone off script. The Casino at Marino proffers an opportunity to go rogue & off script; yet within the constraints & compromises of a heritage site with its do-not-tamper walls & picture hanging systems, how rogue & off script can Phelan & Swords go?
The whole heritage situation brings to mind the recent memory of Berlin Opticians, a curator-led online gallery that occasionally had group exhibitions at heritage sites in Dublin & neighbouring counties. Berlin Opticians accidentally found themselves in heritage sites because the curator’s day job as executive officer of the Royal Society of Antiquaries was interconnected with heritage sites. The Berlin Opticians exhibitions were not radical per se, involving a stable of individual artists that were not driven by a collective purpose or ideology, except for perhaps a market-driven one. But their art openings somehow radically enticed artists to turn up in their droves, like an accidental relational aesthetics.
Phelan & Swords find themselves in a heritage site on the roll of a dice. Which begs the question, is this an opportunistic or authentic response? And in the gamble & risk of the opportunist, what results in terms of contemporary art? John C. Welchman uses gambling to explore the “cathartic effect” in The Aesthetics of Risk:
“The cathartic effect of the experience is confirmed even in circumstances in which the odds of success are calculable, such as gambling, as the individual is connected to chance operations that provide other-worldly stimulus in an otherwise controlled environment.”
If we dramatise the clandestine & subterranean gambling activity that might take place in such an establishment, casino in today’s parlance suggests a den of possible iniquity. The modern casino spins on a die; this little casino overlooking Marino is a five-pointed star pointing to the losers & ‘Charlie Sheens’ of colonialism.
If we use “cathartic effect” to question Phelan & Swords’ proposal to exhibit in this space, not just as an opportunity to politely & obediently display work within the display constraints of a heritage site, but to conceptually & aesthetically reflect & interrupt the socio-historical script that the tour guides will surely perform during the summer months run of the exhibition, we might get a little closer to why institutional constraints & limits lead us to produce catharsis, whereas freedom to do what one wants induces the vertigo that comes with such freedom.
In this respect, masochism has close ties to the aesthetic of constraint, or what the original masochist, Sacher Masoch called a “contract”. The masochist was born into the literal Law of the father (Sacher Masoch’s dad was police). We can get all Freudian here, but putting dad aside, masochism, which has its own aesthetic enriched by Masoch’s literary leanings, needs institutional constraints & limits in order for an aesthetic of arousal to take hold.
What cathartic effect or aesthetic of arousal undergirds Phelan & Swords’ motivation to exhibit work at the Casino at Marino? Is it significant that Phelan & Swords are artists represented by commercial galleries, where other display constraints based on market-driven forces condition the state of play? Is the Casino at Marino a novel opportunity to display work in a setting that is not refrigerated from the outside world, but comes with its own aesthetic & historic strangleholds? And more generally, what pleasure does the artist get from the public display of their work in either commercial or heritage spaces?
Contemporary art is both built on a rejection of the institution & its acceptance. The fleeting moment of art needs a house, a home, a museum to protect it from here into perpetuity. But what is art after the event of its lively & public intrusion upon the world? What does art become? An object? A memory? An artefact that represents a time, a people, a place, a class, a race, a trauma… When Swords’ work, in its rogue craftiness, speaks of mending & repair (we can include ‘reparation’ here) in the colonial context of its display, would a more felt cathartic effect & response be the razing of the Casino at Marino out of existence? Welchman again:
“Cathartic experience grants permission for institutionalised experiences of freedom, outpourings of grief, fear, or happiness that are generally transacted in specified temporal and spatial zones.”
Is this outpouring of emotion within the constrained yet cathartic limits of the institution, therapeutic, cultural or just something to document & archive for future generations to experience under the helm of an AI tour guide? Should we raze history or archive it? What side of history are Phelan & Swords on?
Such absence, combined with the fleeting life of live culture & art, the need to document & archive is always present in order to make present, to make history. Yet all documentation cannot become part of the archive, a history, with so much history up for grabs. The final archive can only document some & leave out others. The administration always prioritises the visible over the invisible when it comes to the dead.
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher of deconstruction & différance, fell into an intellectual fever when the prospect of death could not be denied anymore due to oncoming old age & illness. The spectre of his father's death of pancreatic cancer aged 74 would be doubly fated when Derrida would die by the same disease at the same age. Towards death Derrida became obsessed with the idea of the archive in the heated arching of his own work. He even wrote a book named Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression in 1995.
The archive for Derrida is “a compulsive, repetitive, nostalgic, irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement”? It is also “a question of the future, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow”?
Is the Casino at Marino an archive? Derrida again: “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret. It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds’ last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.”
Institution begets institution, artist begets art, culture begets archive, life begets death, Phelan begets Swords, question begets question: What does it mean to make, place & be solicited by contemporary art in a heritage site?
Culture’s conservation as dusty civilisation, or civilisation’s subjugation as lively culture? In an imaginary sense, the word “casino”, presided over by the uptight and tightlipped functionary of the eighteenth-century Casino, versus the gasping heart and sweaty brain of the modern casino goer and gambler, summons time travel. The casino of time’s past and present brings to mind the risk and radicality and catharsis of the gamble of contemporary art. To gamble the present and the future on the throw of a dice, or on the flip of a card, is a radical act; to make art in the present without distance, reflection and history on your side is also a radical act. There is nothing to lose: the present is all that matters; the future reception of art by the public is speculative at best in the artist’s absence. Artists are forever throwing dice. What side the die lands on is dependent on where you stand in relation to where the die lies.
