Last Sunday (August 22nd) marked the beginning of Heritage Week 2009, and the great series of events and open houses taking place around the country. There’s hundreds of activities happening over the coming week– worth taking a look at the comprehensive listing on the Heritage Council’s dedicated site.
The Arts Council, in collaboration with Temple Bar Cultural Trust, has rolled out a new site focused on Irish arts audience development, www.artsaudiences.ie. Here’s the skinny on their rationale for the initiative:
(see the full manifesto here.)
Plans so far include:
Future plans include online resource material, and new training & mentoring programmes.
More imminent, however, is a series of one-day workshops on Web 2.0 and audience development to be offered in Dublin, Galway and Cork in September. They’re looking for registration ASAP, unless the slots have been filled already… it’s only €45 for a full day session, and looks to be a promising build on the excellent Arts Council-sponsored New Media & the Arts conference held last November.
Yesterday’s Irish Times carried a story about plans afoot by the Arts Council to merge Wexford Festival Opera, Opera Ireland, and Opera Theatre Company:
The Arts Council is working on a proposal that would see all three companies, whose combined track record of opera production runs to nearly 150 years, cease to exist.
The companies’ current functions would not be lost, however.
A new company would be set up to mount productions in Dublin, run the Wexford festival, and provide small-scale productions to tour around the country. Staff in the existing companies would not automatically transfer to the new company, which would be based in the new €33 million Wexford Opera House.
This is one of the most dramatic cost-saving measures yet to emerge, although according to the piece the AC has been in discussion with the three since the beginning of the year. With opera comprising an underfunded art form which has struggled historically to find audiences in Ireland, the merge makes some amount of sense (more so than, for instance, the proposed merging of the national art institutions)– however the differences between Wexford Festival Opera (much more international in its programme, talent and target audience) and OI/OTC (largely Dublin-based, and focused on Irish talent, although OTC does tour more) are significant enough. And it certainly sounds like job losses would be part of the equation, no matter how the merger shakes down.
The McCarthy report has recommended slicing the AC’s budget by €6.1 million, meaning there are undoubtedly more cuts in the pipeline… frustrating and anxious times for any organisation heavily dependent on an annual grant.
The long-anticipated site www.publicart.ie has recently launched. Sponsored by the Arts Council and DAST, the site’s aims include:
Vision
• To build a solid body of information and knowledge on public art practice
• To place public art within a critical context
• To provide information on commissions, projects and news
• To develop a growing directory of commissions, projects and artworks
• To provide a curatorial approach to mapping public art practice
• To support information exchange, debate and news from the field
• To offer information on commissioning procedures
• To provide a space for new on-line artworks
I’ve been waiting for this site to launch for some time, especially given that I teach on some aspects of public art here at UCD. The site does have some good information on about 60 different projects, stretching acros the country. However the vast majority of these were temporary, time-based or performative works. There’s very little by way of more ‘traditional’ public art– and I’m not clear how far back in time the site’s designers intend to go. As much of the content seems to be based on submissions from various project coordinators, it would appear that this is a tiny snapshot of public art in Ireland, and probably not the most visible segment of that sector either (which is both a good and bad thing!) While it’s a great idea to give temporary projects added visibility (especially given that documentation can be hard to come by for such work), to neglect permanent art & sculpture (and any mention of the historical context of public art in Ireland) is a massive oversight. Additonally, I would expect to see on such a site links to excellent local authority websites and/or listings of regional public art, such as Donegal CC‘s efforts towards this end.
Most distressing from my own point of view, there seems to have been little consultation with the many academics on this island working on the subject of public art. While a few of the extracts on the ‘Writings’ section of the site are very interesting and influential (particularly Claire Bishop’s article on the Social Turn), most of the pieces here are journalistic in tone (or alternatively very shallow in terms of their research and scope), and include no reference to the many outstanding pieces of Irish academic writing and research on the subject (in both journal and monographic forms). This is not to suggest academics hold some kind of monopoly on commentary, but as I’ve worked myself in this area in Ireland for the last seven years and am aware of much current and recent research on Irish public art, I do find their exclusion very puzzling. On a related note, the Library section is patchy and also primarily international (no mention of Judith Hill’s landmark book on Irish public sculpture, for example) and would benefit from a read of the various syllabi of university courses on public art offered at Trinity, UCD, UCC, NCAD and elsewhere. As the range of publications on international public art is vast, why not elect to focus on work here in Ireland (do we really need another link to Maya Lin)?
Perhaps the designers & administrators of this site might elect to circumscribe their project more clearly? If the intent is to focus on very recent, ‘new genre’ (to borrow Suzanne Lacy’s term) public art, it would be more effective to note this. I don’t mean to be entirely negative about the site, as a centralised website on Irish public art is much needed and will prove valuable (especially to practitioners), given time and additional contributions. I also understand that this is a site in progress, without a dedicated administrative team (or so the website would suggest?), and is very much still evolving. I just can’t help feeling disappointed, given the great need to make information on Irish public art more accessible, web-based and richer in content and relevance.
After a break for holidays the blog is back online… jobs were updated today, and a post to come soon on the budget woes facing the sector…
arts management ireland 