Art and the Contemporary World is hosting a forum of the public role of the critic on Monday, February 15, at the NCAD.
What is the public role of the critic? What are the expectations and responsibilities of criticism today? And is it possible to conceive of a coherent public to which critical practices would in fact be responsible?
Alliance Française, to launch the celebrations of its 50th anniversary in Dublin, is exhibiting a collection of work by Seán Hillen for the first time in Dublin since the 1990s. The exhibit opens on February 12 and runs until April 10. From the AF website:
Best known for his Irelantis series, where competing myths and visions cohabit a deliciously witty montage, Hillen is one of the most significant artists of his generation.
For what Seán Hillen does is in fact the opposite of what might be expected. The normal, and now rather safe, subversive gesture would be to contrast the unreal fakery of the postcard imagery with a hard-edged, allegedly more authentic realism. That kind of easy mockery, though, has no place in Hillen’s vision. For instead of taking the myth out of the romantic postcards, he puts a lot more in. Instead of cutting the dreamscape down to size, he ups the ante all the way to a cosmic extravaganza that is at once joyously funny, deeply disorienting and dizzyingly rapturous.
It’s often hard to dampen a smile, peering into the daft, visionary wonderland of Seán Hillen’s Irelantis. His humorous little paper collages of an imaginary Ireland have successfully burrowed into the public mind, popping up in art galleries and web pages, or bleeding out through Irish magazines and newspapers. Indeed, one little original graces the Taoiseach’s (Irish Prime Minister’s) office in Dublin – however it influences Bertie Ahern’s judgement.
Some Blind Alleys is a site that’s dedicated to supporting the real and true (though we support other stuff too). The Dublin Film Festival 2010 programme is out. Check out the Documentary programme: From Real to Reel.
Notables films on the list:
Beautifully photographed by Ross McDonnell and skilfully edited by Carter Gunn, Colony follows several American beekeepers during 2008 and 2009 as the country’s economy spiralled downward. A recent and unexplainable phenomenon, colony collapse disorder saw a drop in almost a quarter of the number of bees in the United States. This mystery is akin to something out of science fiction and has dark implications for the future. Because our agriculture depends on pollination, when bees are in trouble, so is society.
Nobody can tune a piano like Stefan Knupfer, head technician at Steinway in Vienna and indispensable tuner to some of the world’s most eminent pianists. Eschewing measuring instruments, Stefan uses his ears and often unusual tools such as tennis balls to find the perfect tone. With each piano producing vastly different sounds and every pianist holding a different opinion, he has his work cut out for him. In Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis’ lovingly crafted documentary, we step into Stefan’s remarkable world for a year, and observe him behind the scenes as he scrambles to please his distinguished clients. Chief amongst them is Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is preparing some Bach recordings and sets Stefan the seemingly impossible task of making his piano sound like a harpsichord. A joyful, funny look at a majestic instrument and men who have devoted their lives to it.
With his customary grace and skill, acclaimed Irish documentary maker Desmond Bell has mixed early cinema archive film and new material to retrace the story of navvy poet, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter Patrick MacGill. Born in 1889 into crushing poverty in Donegal in the west of Ireland, MacGill went on to become one of Ireland’s most successful authors. His autobiographical novels penned in Scotland and hugely popular at the time, paint a vibrant picture of the life of the navvy, the labourer and the whore, “the outcasts of a mighty industrial society”. MacGill lived the life of a navvy in the Scottish highlands and in his writing fact and fiction, social report and love story mingle. Director Bell, alongside his collaborator Stephen Rea has fashioned an elegant and engaging portrait, while also interrogating the basic principals by which biographies are told and retold.
Poetry Ireland in association with the National Gallery of Ireland presents a lunchtime reading series every Wednesday throughout February. Readings will start at 1.05pm and will be held in the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion SquareWest, D2. No booking is necessary and all events are free.
Poetry Ireland has recently redesigned their home page.
“The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.” – Mark Twain
Angry intelligences, who want the world to fit into systems, hate Montaigne. So do the finger-wagging proselytisers. Four people with extremely proper accents discuss the inventor of the essay.
At around the 25-minute mark there’s an interesting distinction between Montaigne and other essayists, including Hazlitt, Orwell, Boswell, and Johnson.
I don’t exactly know what Chaos Thaoghaire is, but it has quickly become the Studio 54 of the good-looking Dublin arts & letters scene, and the theme of the next big night (Feb 17, at the Odessa Club) is Sex, or “Would you?”
Chaos Thaoghaire has been profiled in the Irish Times, and events get booked out quickly.
Circa Art Magazine’s editor, Peter FitzGerald, had a physical aversion to the above image, and has taken a bold but refreshing step by naming – as an editor of a major art magazine – irony-only art cowardice.
Read Don Paterson’s 2004 TS Eliot lecture on the way forward for poetry:
The way forward, it seems to me, lies in the redefinition of ‘risk’ To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how dreadful the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world’s greatest living playwright. This kind of poetry is really nothing but a kind of inverse sentimentalism – that’s to say by the time it reaches the page, it’s less real anger than a celebration of one’s own strength of feeling. Since it tries to provoke an emotion of which its target readers are already in high possession, it will change no-one’s mind about anything; more to the point, anyone can do it. Neither is ‘risk’ the deployment of disjunctive syntax, innovatory punctuation or wee apropos-of-nothing allusions to Heisenberg and Lacan; because anyone can do that, too. Risk, of the sort that makes readers feel genuinely uncomfortable, excited, open to suggestion, vulnerable to reprogramming, complicit in the creative business of their self-transformation is quite different.
And…
I wholly agree with the Postmodern diagnosis made in the sixties that our poetry was becoming domestic, subjective and trivial. But if anything that situation is now far worse. Back then, your post-Movement poem about moving the settee was at least really about a failed relationship. Crippled by the sense of our own cultural irrelevance, we now write poems about moving the settee that are just about moving the settee – or if you’re a Postmodern, about ‘moving the settee’.
And…
On the one side those self-appointed popularisers, who, by insisting on nothing but dumb sense, have alienated poetry’s natural intelligent and literate constituency by infantilising our art; and on the other, those exegetes in whose adolescent, retentive self-interest it is to keep poetry as mysterious as possible, that they might project nothing into it but their own wholly novel and ingenious interpretations.
I went to the library in the Ilac centre today – based on a recommendation received in a comment here some time ago – in search of classical music. It took me a long time to go, partly out of laziness and partly out of disbelief – and of course eternally out of my irrational fear of libraries. Anyway, it’s true. A large selection of great CDs for anyone who likes classical music.
I picked up four CDs, including one that includes the below: Evgeny Kissing playing Scriabin’s Etude Op. 8 No. 12. Those of you who know how libraries work will laugh when I tell you that I pulled a bunch of coins out of my pocket and asked how much it cost to borrow the CDs.
