| Introduction From the experience of my childhood and my discovery of the Holocaust a new measure was required on which to base judgements. Later, I became aware that the art I was studying at the National College of Art, Dublin, was steeped in the values of the two cultures that I was determined to oppose: Roman Catholicism and nationalism, i.e. Anglo-Germanic Realism.The predominant schema in the College at that time was taught mainly through the art of anatomical representation, underpinning a sentimental, mystical view of the world. My first installation, Folded/Unfolded ,1972, was an attempt to find a new ground for my position outside of the picture plane of illusion. This new position, in the rough space of experience, established my visual understanding of flatness, and its ironic nature… to appear to be flat only when it is seen to be un-flat. This Porous Plane establishes a field for an embodied eye between the flat surface of the painting and the viewers’ private inner world of feelings and judgements. These installations were made to establish a new and constrained relationship to the givens of painting, i.e. primarily the flat plane of illusion (sculpture having no givens). It was imperative that I step out of the space of traditional painting which under-pinned the culture that caused the chaos, mayhem and horror that was WWII and the Holocaust, just as I had socially wrenched myself from my nationalist, Catholic upbringing. Postscript The freedom and independence thus regained had its precedent established in the 15th century when, for example Jan Van Eycke’s Ghent Altarpiece was painted on wooden panels (c. 1492) and later the landscapes of Albrecht Dürer painted on portable stretched canvases (c. 1496). I regained for my art the independence and freedom that these, and other artists, first won for artists in their time. Epilogue I simply returned these walls back to architecture and established my independent ‘plane-to- viewer’ ‘rough space’ of engagement in a peripatetic relationship to architecture. This installation-site-specific-collaborative-art-form that was emerging at that time became part of the fall to advertising of the discipline of Semiotics. At the core of Porous Plane is Berkely’s Puzzle: how does the inner mind create the mind-independent outer reality? Dublin, 2015 |
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