Category Archives: Ealaín (Art)

Imram 2012, Leonard Cohen And More

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Imram 2012 – Féile Litríochta Gaeilge, Túr na nAmhrán, Tionscadal Cohen – Leonard Cohen

Today’s Irish Times has a lengthy examination by Úna Mullally of the Irish arts scene that is well worth reading:

“Imram, the Irish-Language Literature Festival takes place from October 11th to the 20th, and offers a dynamic programme. There are familiar names participating: Louis de Paor, Dairena Ní Chinnéide, Micheál Ó Conghaile. And there are familiar names discussed: Pádraic Ó Conaire and Seán Ó Ríordáin among them. But there is a current of energy flowing through the festival that those used to the traditional narratives of the Irish language in the arts might be surprised by.

There is an indoor and outdoor multimedia installation by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin; a dance piece called Ré written by Daithí Ó Muirí and choreographed by Fearghus Ó Conchúir; contemporary prose from Éilís Ní Anluain; the Mouth On Fire theatre company reading Beckett’s poetry in Irish; The Cohen Project sees poets Liam Ó Muirthile and Gabriel Rosenstock translate some of Leonard Cohen’s work into Irish, with Liam Ó Maonlaí, David Blake, Hilary Bow and the Brad Pitt Light Orchestra providing the music.

Next week, a two-day symposium is being held in Dublin aiming to “explore, challenge and provoke notions of contemporary arts practice in Irish.” The symposium, titled Fás agus Forbairt’ (Grow and Develop) is hoping to bring together contemporary artists who are currently working in Irish and artists who may speak Irish but whose work is in English.

 

In music, the Kilas and the Ó Maonlaís were flying the flag for Irish-inflected contemporary music from the 1990s on, and that’s still the case. The annual Seachtain na Gaeilge Ceol compilation CDs feature contemporary Irish artists singing Irish-language versions of their songs. While the overall result might be nice, there’s a sense of tokenism about it, even if, on occasion, these songs are occasionally brought to a live setting.

But things are changing. Temper-Mental MissElayneous, an upcoming Dublin rapper, has a tendency to drop Irish rhymes into her raps accompanied by bodhrán instead of beats, namely with her track Cailín Rua. And Daithí, a Clare fiddle player who has managed to successfully fuse traditional strains with contemporary electronic music, recently sampled the singer Mary O’Hara in one of his tracks, a trick last pulled by Massachusetts band Passion Pit in their break-out single Sleepyhead.

From the Puball Gaeilge tent at Electric Picnic to Manchán Mangan’s theatre work, there is an edge to the Irish language in a contemporary artistic context, and that edge is growing as those in charge of funding continue to quietly seek out more non-traditional targets. But a new generation of artists also need to take the leap. Perhaps next week’s Fás agus Forbairt symposium will put a real structure around such tentative, yet quickening steps.”

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Swords? Check. Boobs? Check. Giant Gun-Toting Alien Lizards? Check!

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Good Show, Sir – and the cover of Wicked by L.A. Banks

I love book covers, as some of you may know (pop over here to see why). I especially love what some pseudo-intellectuals pigeon-hole as “genre” fiction. That’s Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Horror to you and me (though a lot of other stuff is lumped in there too).

The wonderful website, “Good Show, Sir”, collects some of the best – or rather, worse – book covers out there. Many are very American in style and feel thanks to that nation’s fine tradition in pulp art. One of my joys is taking the same book title from the US and European markets and comparing their frequently quite divergent cover illustrations. Unfortunately, in these increasingly bland and homogeneous times, more and more jacket art is becoming identical, with only details of language and currency to tell works apart.

Enjoy!

Good Show, Sir – The Little People by John Christopher

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The Vandalism Of The Lia Fáil

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Lia Fáil, Teamhair na Rí, An Mhí, Éire (An Sionnach Fionn, 2008)

I didn’t get a chance to post on this last week but the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny at Teamhair, the Hill of Tara, was severely damaged in an attack by at least one person armed with a large hammer in the days leading up to the 13th of June 2012. Eleven blows were struck on the Lia, on all sides, vandalising the granite surface. The stone fragments that would have been left by the destruction seem to have been removed by the perpetrators of the crime.

From the Irish Times:

“A national monument that is said to have served as the coronation stone for the High Kings of Tara has been vandalised, it was revealed today.

Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan condemned the attack on the Lia Fáil (stone of destiny) Standing Stone, which is situated on the Hill of Tara in Co Meath.

The standing stone, which is believed to date from 3,500BC, is considered an extremely important national monument and features extensively in ancient texts. The granite stone is associated with the inauguration rites for the Kings of Tara and was moved to its current position in the early 19th century.

The monument was reported to be damaged last weekend, but it is unknown when the attack occurred.

An archaeologist from the National Monuments Service examined the monument this week and concluded it had been struck – possibly with a hammer or similar instrument – at 11 places on all four faces of the stone. Fragments of the standing stone were also removed.

Speaking today, Mr Deenihan said the national monuments at Tara, which include the standing stone, are nationally and internationally renowned.

“These monuments are a fundamental part of our shared heritage and history, and I condemn in the strongest terms the damage that has been caused to this monument,” he said.”

The Herald carries a commentary that will echo the feelings of many in the country, and beyond:

“IT wasn’t beautiful, the Lia Fáil. Just a tall, rounded monument like a primeval penis, standing upright on the Hill of Tara in Co Meath.

But to see it as the sun rose or set was to be connected with five thousand years of Irish history, because this is the spot where kings were crowned.

The stone carried writing from a time we can barely imagine. A time when Ireland was filled with mystery and myth. It caused visitors to realise just how small they are, in the long, long story of this island.

Until someone took a lump hammer to it. Some anonymous vandal struck the monument at least eleven times. Oh, the power that vandal must have felt, destroying history with each blow.

And the secret power the vandal may still feel, clutching some of the pieces chipped off the stone.

Souvenirs to be boasted of with drinking buddies, or maybe just savoured in private to prove how heroic the vandal is, in his own eyes. (Sorry to be sexist, but the chances that the perp was a woman are pretty small.)

This was vandalism on a different scale. Whoever did this has a pathetic need to prove themselves bigger than history. And they succeeded.

They erased some of the work of a craftsman who reached out to us across the centuries. They severed a link that mattered. Let’s face it, if you drop a glass bought in IKEA last week, you sweep it up and forget about it.

If you drop a glass left to you by your grandmother, you’re furious with yourself; some part of your family past has been accidentally destroyed.

But you’d never, ever take a hammer to a family heirloom. Of course, more Irish people go to Disneyland in any given year than ever visited the Lia Fáil in Meath, and many of those who have visited were not that moved by the tall rounded lump of stone.

For many, this was a “whatever” moment, rather than a shock-and-awe issue. And now, some expert will assess what can be done and the majority will forget about it, because we have more immediate fish to fry.

We’ve lost monuments before and their loss hasn’t done us enormous harm.

Someone with more fire power than a lump hammer decided to take down Nelson’s Pillar in the middle of Dublin and a fair few Irish people thought “good riddance,” because, although climbing all the steps to the top was a rite of passage for tourists, many locals didn’t particularly like having a British admiral, however heroic, dominating the capital’s streetscape.

But Nelson had been up there for nearly two hundred years. Not thousands of years. Nelson linked us with a period of our history we hated. So we got over his fall.

But here’s the reality. The lads who sang The Fields Of Athenry this week in the face of sporting humiliation were following a great tradition. Making a statement in song about who we are, as a nation.

Ireland’s story is told in song, in story — and in stone. That some fool with a lump hammer destroyed one of the great stone chapters in our history is stupid, shameful — and sad.”

Teamhair, the ritual capital of Ireland, is one of the most important sites on the island of Ireland; it connects us to our Gaelic and Celtic identity. The Lia Fáil was part of that identity and the damage done to it was not just a series of physical blows to a granite stone but a blow at the very foundations of the Irish nation. Of who we are as a people.

I urge anyone who has information in relation to this grotesque act of vandalism to contact the Gardaí. Or if reluctant to do so you may contact me in confidence at the email address of An Sionnach Fionn and I will take the matter from there.

An Garda Síochána can be contacted at:

Ashbourne Garda Station, Ashbourne, Co. Meath

Tel: +353 1 8010600

Fax: +353 1 8352837 (Public Office)

Fax: +353 1 8010603 (District Office)

District HQ: Ashbourne

District HQ Tel: +353 1 8010600

Divisional HQ: Navan

Divisional HQ Tel: +353 46 9036300

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Come Here To Me!

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Two great posts from the always interesting Come Here To Me! blog in their Statues of Dublin series: The Phibsborough Volunteer and Constance Markiewicz and Poppet. Also have a look at their Lanes of Dublin series. It’s far better than it sounds!

Some Classic Irish Language Book Covers

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I love books, especially old books (much to the detriment of my bank account). I’ve managed to gather a wide and varied collection of my own, from 19th century Fenian memoirs to mid-20th century Sci-Fi pulps, and lately I’ve started looking around for more Irish language publications (particularly the various Seanchló editions). Happily one can often combine a love for books with an interest in illustration and design (though as any SF fan can tell you, great covers don’t always make for great books. Chris Foss has a lot to answer for!).

So it was great to come across this posting on 50Watts of a series of Irish language books covers from the 1930s. Some really interesting finds here, all of which were published by the Irish state through Oifig An tSoltáthair or Oifig Díolta Foillseacháin Rialtais (this back in the day when governments cared about culture and learning). It well worth taking a look for anyone with an interest in the Irish writing or graphic design. More can be seen here on Hitone, with a wide variety of Irish publications in Irish and English.

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The Contrasting Fortunes Of Gaelic Scotland And Gaelic Ireland

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Scotland is to create its first Scottish-speaking museum, one primarily dedicated to its native language and culture. From Culture24:

“The first museum in the UK to use Gaelic as its first language is to open on the Isle of Lewis.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has announced that it is investing £4.6 million in a new museum and visitor accommodation in Stornoway. It is hoped that the museum will become a key destination and encourage tourism in the Western Isles.

The new museum will display the collections of Museum nan Eilean, as well as supporting the work of more than 20 different heritage organisations which have been collecting material relating to Gaelic communities during the past 30 years…”

The BBC also reports that:

“Stornoway’s Lews Castle will use Gaelic as its first language and will also offer four-star hotel accommodation.

About £14m is to be spent on restoring and converting the property, which has been shut since 1988.

The islands’ local authority is involved in finding £1.6m, which is needed to complete the funding package.

Comhairle nan Eilean Siar has committed £4.5m and Highlands and Islands Enterprise £1m to the project.”

Meanwhile in Ireland Fergal Quinn, long-time entrepreneur and member of Seanad Éireann, has emphasised the unrealised value of the Irish language for businesses at the fifth annual Good Food Ireland conference, featured in the Irish Times:

“Senator Feragal Quinn told attendees that using the Irish language made Superquinn, the supermarket chain he founded, different to its competitors.

He said: “I believe the Irish language gives us an advantage that we haven’t always used and we can use more.””

Indeed. Yet again, the Scots seem to be leaving the Irish trailing in their wake.

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Cearta Teanga, Cearta Daonna – Draft Poster

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There are some striking images emerging from the Occupy movements in the United States and Spain, particularly the comic and manga-inspired illustrations from Oakland, so I’d thought I’d experiment with some adaptations for the Irish-speaking community and our own struggle for equality. This is a simple first draft to see what people think, in a big old gif format. In the next while (work permitting!) I’ll sit down and come up with some artwork of my own.

The Occupy movement has several voluntary artist and graphic design collectives working on these images in several countries and they are being freely posted for internet and printing use. Where is Irish Ireland’s equivalent?

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Imre Makovecz – A Loss To Architecture And Design

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Just a few weeks ago I wrote about my love for the works of the little known Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz so it is with deep sadness that I learned of his passing this week. A Guardian obituary tells most of his life story and why he was so important:

“The Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz has died at the age of 75. Makovecz headed a loose-knit band of architects, designers and craft workers who established an alternative way of building, thinking and existing during the long years of communist rule and soulless, Soviet-style architecture forced on Hungary and Russia. A fierce critic of communism, materialism and globalism, he was banned from working in Budapest in 1976 and moved north to Visegrád, a beautiful stretch of countryside by the Danube. There, he developed his compelling, idiosyncratic and organic style, borrowing from nature and re-interpreting the ideas of, among others, Rudolf Steiner, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Gaudí and the Hungarian architect ödön Lechner.

Makovecz shaped holiday shelters, restaurants, camping grounds and visitor centres that were as highly charged aesthetically as their purposes were low-key. These designs were what he described as “building beings”. Erring on the folkloric and looking a little like trees in children’s stories, sprouting arms and sporting faces, they really did feel alive. Wooden shingles might be made to resemble the feathers of a bird’s wings. Some buildings appeared to grow like plants. Windows were like eyes.

Makovecz returned to Budapest in the 1980s, after the communism system collapsed, set up his own studio, Makona, and became something of a national hero. Alongside the low-cost community centres he built in villages, and a string of spirited new Roman Catholic churches, he was commissioned to design the Hungarian Pavilion for the Seville Expo of 1992. From the outside, the building resembled a cluster of fairytale church steeples. Inside, real trees were reflected in a mirrored floor. Like so much of Makovecz’s work, it was strangely lyrical and curiously beautiful.

Makovecz was born and educated in Budapest. His father was a carpenter. Imre spent much of his boyhood in and around Nagykapornak, to the west of Lake Balaton. He helped his father sabotage German tanks during the second world war. He studied architecture at Budapest’s technical university, graduating in 1959. When asked to design a fish restaurant as part of his training, he shaped one in the form of a pair of interlocking fish. His tutors were not amused.

He sensed a guiding creative spirit in the patterns found in nature, such as the shapes of trees, and in Celtic carvings and Scottish reels. “My buildings and architectural designs do not come from me,” he said. “They come from the landscape, from the local environment and from the ancient human spirit.”

In the early 1980s, as an assistant editor of the Architectural Review, I went to meet Makovecz in Hungary during a heavy storm.

A profoundly and defiantly individual architect and philosopher, Makovecz was a warm and friendly man with a powerful build, pronounced Magyar moustache and a love of God, Celtic and Scythian culture and Scotch whisky. He was at once fierce and kind, intensely serious and very funny.

In 2010, he closed his studio and retired to focus on the Hungarian Art Academy he founded in 1992. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and, in 1997, recipient of the gold medal of the Académie d’Architecture.

He is survived by Marianne and three children.”

For me, growing up in an Ireland dominated by the soulless zombie works of a generation of wannabe Anglo-American architects and designers, the buildings of Imre Makovecz were a revelation. He showed people like myself the power of human scale architecture and the joy of reinterpreting vernacular styles in a modern setting. Because of him I was able to understand the imaginative and cultural poverty of contemporary Irish architecture, the derivative hollowness of it all. However I also came to understand what could be achieved had we but the self-confidence to reimagine our history and heritage in a modern setting.

He will be sorely missed.

Imre Makovecz, 20-11-1935 – 27-09- 2011. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

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In Praise Of The Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin

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Journalist Fionntán Ó Tuathail Fintan O’Toole writes a lengthy piece celebrating the award-winning architecture of the Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin in Doire (Derry), the heart of the city’s Irish language community.

‘MODESTY AND restraint are not the virtues one associates with Irish culture in the Celtic Tiger years. But one of the finest pieces of contemporary Irish design is brilliant in part because it is contained, understated, and so supremely self-confident that it doesn’t have to shout. John Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell’s Cultúrlann building in Derry is on the shortlist for the architectural Oscars, the Stirling Prize. I was in it for the first time last weekend and it deserves all the praise and prizes it can get. Apart from its own merits, it points towards a kind of genuine austerity aesthetic, a way for Irish art to be modest and serious without being dull and impoverished.

The Cultúrlann is the baby of the Stirling shortlist, up against far more opulent projects. Most of the other buildings cost vast amounts of money. The former British Telecoms building in London was refurbished at a cost of £72 million. The refit of the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford cost £60 million. The admittedly stunning Olympic Velodrome in London, which is widely tipped to win, cost around £93 million.

The Cultúrlann cost just £4 million. But it is a wonderful contemporary validation of Mies van der Rohe’s architectural dictum that less is more.

What seems to me to give the building its power is that it emerges, not out of the sense of amplitude that characterised pre-crash Ireland, but out of scarcity – of money and space.

The Cultúrlann was an even more constrained project, built on Great James Street in the old walled city. It had to fit into the site of a burnt-out bakery, on a street of Victorian and Georgian terraced houses. To make matters worse, an electricity substation occupies a third of the site’s street frontage and had to be incorporated in the façade. And there is only one entrance to the site – there’s no view from the back of the building.

In fact, you could easily walk by the building without taking a second look. The outside is wedged between existing buildings, respects the height of the street and is conspicuously inconspicuous. If you do stop and look, you’ll notice the clever way the façade is actually arranged to look smaller than it is, folding in and out, almost like corrugated cardboard. The grey concrete exterior is broken by angular arrangements of yellow-framed windows, so that no one thing presents itself to the eye with any great force. There’s nothing imposing about the way the building sits on the street.

The genius of the design, though, is that O’Donnell and Twomey compensated for this modesty with a lovely paradox – placing the facades on the inside.

This is a great public building that is entirely without pomposity or grandiloquence. It has a genuine austerity, not just in the way it uses cheap materials like plywood and painted plaster in many of its rooms, but in the way it makes the most of every resource of space and light that’s available to it. This kind of austerity isn’t grim, slash-and-burn negativity. It’s the creativity of turning constraints into inspirations and limitations into inventions.’

Having visited the Cultúrlann several times now I think O’Toole has got it right and though my own architectural tastes are somewhat different there is no doubting the impressiveness of the building and the amazing use made of the space available. However, a bit more on what the Cultúrlann actually does, serving as a vibrant cultural centre for the region’s Irish speaking population, would have been appropriate. But then as the Ó Tuathail states:

‘The Cultúrlann is the first publically-funded Irish-language centre in the UK.’

So maybe we shouldn’t expect too much progressiveness from him (or Hiberno-English spelling either, it would seem). However he did deliver the annual lecture to this year’s Féile in the city that makes for some interesting (if familiar) reading.

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Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru – Oireachtas Náisiúnta na Breataine Bige

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The people of Wales have been marking the celebration of their native language and culture in this year’s Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru or the National Eisteddfod of Wales. For the last week festivities focusing on literature, poetry, art and music have been held in Wrecsam (Wrexham) with nearly 150,000 people in attendance. As the BBC reports:

‘Organisers of the National Eisteddfod say they will look back on the Wrexham event with “pride and happy memories”.

Attendance figures for the final day of 18,151 were up 4,500 on the final day in Ebbw Vale in 2010.

Total attendances across the week were more than 9% higher at 149,692.

Aled Roberts, chair of the local executive committee for the Wrexham event said: “It has been a very happy week here in Wrexham, and we have been very lucky with the weather most days.”

He added: “It was great to see a winner in all the main ceremonies during the week – and all of these winning for the first time, and all these winners and their stories have added to the friendly atmosphere of the week.”

Mr Roberts said 4,500 local people took advantage of a buy-one-get-one free scheme at the start of the week and he was “delighted” so many local people attended with a number returning during the week.’

The very positive media coverage of the Eisteddfod has not been matched of course in England’s Britain’s national (and nationalist) media. From the right-wing Express:

‘THE BBC sent more than 200 staff to cover the National Eisteddfod of Wales, a bigger team than was dispatched to Wimbledon.

Despite being in the midst of major cost-cutting, the corporation sent 238 people to cover the singing and cultural festival which ended yesterday.

The figure was revealed as the broadcaster slashed other services, including coverage of Formula 1 motor racing, in an attempt to find savings of at least 25 per cent.

The resources used to report the week-long festival from the Maes in Wrexham, north Wales, rank it alongside the BBC’s other main outside broadcasting operations.

Figures for 2010 show that the corporation sent 185 staff to the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which was watched by 29.3 million people, 274 to the Glastonbury music festival and 292 to the World Cup.’

Horror of horrors. The BBC expending the same sort of resources on the national festival of Wales as on England’s Britain’s holy of holies, tennis at Wimbledon. No mention of the millions spent by the BBC on a recent royal jamboree by the Express hacks of course but hey, that’s a celebration of English British culture: that’s different.

But there is a reply:

‘John Osmond, director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, insisted that the number of BBC staff involved should be seen in the context of the cultural importance of the National Eisteddfod of Wales.

He added: “There’s nowhere else in the European Union that holds an event of this size, range and scope, and certainly not in relation to a minority language.”’

On a side-note check out the web presence of BBC Cymru. The webpage of a media company serving a Celtic nation in a Celtic language. Then have a look at RTÉ in our free and independent Celtic nation. Pathetic.

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Imre Makovecz And The Wonders of Organic Architecture

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One of my favourite architects is also one of Europe’s least known, Hungary’s Imre Makovecz, a proponent of organic architecture who has created some of the most distinctive, beautiful and humanistic buildings to be found anywhere in the world. An article in the Guardian from 2004 gives an excellent summation:

‘Makovecz, born in 1935 and educated in Budapest, was himself imprisoned at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and had the death penalty hovering over his head for some years afterwards. One of the former Soviet satellite’s most creative dissidents, he developed and built his own form of organic architecture from the late 1960s onwards, in direct and timbered opposition to the communist love of four-square, pre-fabricated Soviet-style concrete blocks.

The Robin Hood of Hungarian architecture, Makovecz was banned from working in cities and teaching, and nurtured his highly personal and engagingly spiritual form of organic design in forest settlements and villages, themselves under threat of demolition. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Hungary became a democracy, Makovecz became a national hero. He represented his country with the design of the popular Hungarian pavilion – part barn, part cathedral – at the 1992 Seville Expo, while his firm, Makona, and his many disciples, who had taught illicitly in the compartments of cross-country trains, began to spread his brand of architecture across Hungary.

Makovecz is, moreover, much influenced by the anthroposophic theories of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the Austrian “spiritual scientist”, whose schools are well known worldwide today. Steiner held that our spiritual evolution is held back by being mired in the material world; in the leaning domes of Piliscsaba, it is possible, perhaps, to see the architecture that frames our spiritual education, struggling with the mire.

Makovecz’s rise to prominence has clearly owed as much to his skill in creating a folkloric architecture that conjures Hungary’s struggle for independence, while challenging the materialist values of both communist and capitalist ways of life, as to his artistic imagination and integrity.’

Makovecz’s combination of native Magyar architectural styles with an almost Celtic infusion is unforgettable and his buildings resemble images constructed from the distillation of medieval European legend, natural, instinctive and familiar. For some more reading on a man regarded by many as an architectural genius try visiting this photo gallery, or here. It is a crying shame that Makovecz has been rejected by some in his home country in Hungary’s rampant drive to become just another Anglo-American clone in Eastern Europe, with the embracing of a sham modernity that is a hollow and meaningless as a McDonald’s sign.

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Chris Foss

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The Guardian features a piece on legendary Science-Fiction artist Chris Foss, whose work illustrated some of the best SF book covers of the 1970s and ’80s (most of which are still dotted around my bookshelves). Here is a link to the fantastic official site too.