PDF – Joanne Laws – ‘Small City Becomes Huge – Artist as Negotiator’ Art Papers March April 2013
“We are from the past, but we echo and reverberate in the present. What a responsibility!… We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew.”
Jimmie Durham
A Certain Lack of Coherence (London: Kala Press, 1993)
PDF – Joanne Laws ‘Commemoration: A Forward Looking Act’
Limerick Soviet – Ten Shillings Promissory Note, 1919. Image courtesy of Limerick City Council.At a national level, commemoration becomes a complex proposition, existing not just in history, but across modern-day social, cultural, political, economic and religious spectrums. In areas of post-conflict, where these factors offer contested and multiple readings of events, the commemorative task often necessitates difficult questions, such as “how do we remember?” or even “what should we chose to forget?”. Last year Ireland entered a decade-long phase of historically significant centenary dates (2012 – 2022); and the concept of commemoration has been intensely scrutinised, with fear of turbulence in Northern Ireland remaining of upmost concern.
In producing exhibition reviews for the Critique section, writers are deployed in unexpected places, armed with little more than willingness for critical engagement and a disposition towards artistic appraisal. This commissioning process has proved relatively successful, allowing reviewers to engage with artwork that they might not have otherwise chosen to write about, with a degree of honest reflection beginning to emerge out of art-writing in Ireland. Best practice suggests that criticality is not defined by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reviews and ‘taking a stance’ potentially releases us from the voids of neutrality or cronyism. On this occasion, I left the exhibition in question feeling disappointed, but also grateful, because now I have the opportunity to explain why.
With the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry in the process of relocating to new premises, ‘Contours of the Commons’ was reconceptualised as an exhibition woven into the fabric of the city, with its artworks dispersed over a large area.
http://enclavereview.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/laws-contour-of-the-commons.pdf
Ballina Arts Centre
July 5 – July 29 2012
When asked to review this exhibition I thought it necessary to come prepared, so within my notebook I concealed a magnifying glass. I knew little about the history of miniature painting, other than vague correlations with Persian and Ottoman empires, and wasn’t overly enthused about learning more. I certainly couldn’t envisage what contemporary drawing of this genre could offer me, other than a serious case of eye-strain. However, since viewing the exhibition and attending the artist’s public talk, I have thought about this work quite a lot, ruminating on the dense relationship between visuality and meaning, wrapped up in my own experience of ‘close-looking’.
Project: EXIT Limerick 2012, facilitated by Static Gallery Liverpool for EVA International 2012.
Synopsis: A number of writers were asked to review works in EVA, Fringe Events, and Limerick School of Art and Design Graduate Show.
Publication: 14 June 2012, Limerick Leader
Discussion: Friday 15 June 2012 at the Visual Artist Ireland Get Together event
Read All Reviews: http://www.eva.ie/after-the-future-reviews
Just one hundred words. Condensing the formal and technical elements, a ‘bare-bones’ criticism reveals its inner-workings. Describe. Contextualise. Analyse. Interpret. Strengths, flaws, limitations, become apparent. The meeting of the dual reviewers and the reviewed. Taste. Opinion. Who has critical authority? Who has ethics? You mean the writers actually got paid?! What if attendance at a comedy show had lifted her mood – would her reviews seem joyous? The plaintiff conveys mistrust – he refutes the ‘privilege’. The defendant maintains a critical position. Judgement. Deflated, the jury concedes “there is no truth only subjectivity”. If I had more words I could say more…
Joanne Laws 