Flanntasmagoria! (original) (raw)
Related papers
Note: Reflections on the First Decade of the International Flann O’Brien Society
The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O'Brien Studies, 2021
2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of both the International Flann O’Brien Society and its peer-reviewed journal The Parish Review. The work that has been undertaken by the society and its members in this decade has significantly expanded the scope and profile of Flann O’Brien studies, but also changed how we understand the author Brian O’Nolan and his works in their historical, social, political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts, as well as their legacy to contemporary letters and theory.This note uses the occasion of this anniversary to take stock of these changes and to consider what avenues lie open to the future of the field.
FLANN O’BRIEN NOTES AND REVIEWS READINGS AND VIEWINGS
Irish Studies university specialists find the extremely gross at times black humor of O’Brien as being nothing but funny and they laugh. They laugh at the vision of the Irish as complete primitive people and they do not see the didactic level of it, the necessary epiphany any Irishman should feel and experience when confronted to that kind of a picture. All Irish are drunkards. All Irish are liars and phantasmagoric tall tale tellers that they believe are true. All Irish are violent. All Irish are attached to their mother their father and locked up in some kind of mental closet which they cannot come out of. ETC. They even do not confront the rewriting of some old Irish myths and tales by O’Brien and do not find out the rich anthropological matter O’Brien is transporting in his lines. That conference was a real experience, first of all because Vienna is a magic place and secondly because of the side events but most of the presentations only wanted to make the apology of O’Brien with at times very primitive tools. But let me be clear about another element. When we know the tremendous sectarianism and fundamentalism of Samuel Becket and his post-mortem representative, the manager of Editions de Minuit in Paris, we can wonder if it is not part of the Irish inferiority complex to stick to one reading and nothing else. Though at times some innovations are useless. For example to have the four male characters of Waiting for Godot played by women does not add anything. To have them played by four male transvestites does not add anything, except a comic aspect that is not contained in this play which is a tragic drama after the Second World War and under the menace of the nuclear holocaust. To have the two master played by either women or men and simultaneously the two servants played by either men and women respectively introduce a real new meaning of some kind of sexual oppression of women or men according to who the masters are played by. But to forbid by principle all variation in the cast is just plain fundamentalism. Luckily this postmortem representative does not have any power beyond French borders. So that in Germany for example Samuel Becket can be read with tinted glasses. But apparently these tinted glasses had not reached Vienna. Too bad. And no one could explain me why in all souvenir stands I have looked at, at the main station of on the main squares like next to the Votive Church, all souvenirs are in English and never in German. When I asked once an Austrian organizer of the conference, the young woman nearly told me I was insulting her while a Scotsman next to her laughed as if I had produced the most intelligent joke of the year. An inside joke for sure.
Aloysius O’Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire by Niamh O’Sullivan
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2017
Niamh O'Sullivan's book forms part of a sustained development in scholarship on the history of art in Ireland. This expansion continues apace: the department of art history at University College Dublin was fifty years old in 2016, and the year before saw the publication of the five-volume Art and Architecture of Ireland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), showcasing the research of a multitude of specialists, O'Sullivan included. Modern Irish culture has been defined by its literary contributions: everyone knows Irish poets and writers, but relatively few are acquainted with Irish painters, sculptors, architects, or draftsmen. The forms of Irish visual art that are widely known are generally perceived to convey Celtic roots: the Book of Kells (ca. 800 C. E.), for instance, and other illuminated manuscripts, along with examples of ninth-century enamel work, such as the Ardagh Chalice. A bias against more recent art crept in: as in any colonial situation, art tends to be associated with works commissioned by the ruling class, leading to irresolvable questions of what counts as authentically Irish. The Sam Maguire Cup, commissioned five years after the establishment of the Irish Free State and awarded every year to the winners of the All-Ireland Final in Gaelic football, is a copy of the Ardagh Chalice. Patronage, and the entire market system, had to be seen through a different lens, and much interpretation needed to be done on work by artists from neglected centuries. Scholars across Ireland took up the challenge-the last several years in particular, have been rich in published evidence of what is now a newly substantial tradition of research. Niamh O'Sullivan (pronounced "Neeve") has become one of the most influential voices in this renascence. An inspirational force for the study of art history and visual culture during her teaching career at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, O'Sullivan has now brought her considerable energies to a curatorial role in Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University. Since the museum's founding its publications have included essays from the leading voices in Irish Studies, including Luke Gibbons, Christine Kinealy, and
‘[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives’: An Interview with Emma O’Toole
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2019
The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin recently mounted an exhibition entitled '[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives' (19 July 2018-3 March 2019). 1 It showed material from two little-known but highly important repositories: the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art, and the Yeats Archive, both of which relate to Irish women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From these archives, letters, scrapbooks, and photographs, as well as some works of art, including embroideries, were put on show, all made by women artists including Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett, Susan Yeats, and Evie Hone. The aim was to shed light on their education and artistic practice and to think further about the contribution they made both to major exhibitions and longer lasting artistic initiatives and movements. This interest in their lives and legacy is new; despite being some of the most progressive people in Ireland before and after independence-the suffragette movement and Revolutionary period were contemporaneous-they were overlooked by the Irish arts institutions of the day which were male dominated.
Terrible Beauty-Art, Crisis, Change and the Office of Non-Compliance was the inaugural exhibition of Dublin Contemporary, a new high-profile international art exhibition that featured over a hundred artists, forty of them Irish. The main venue spanned eighty-four rooms, three floors and two wings of Earlsfort Terrace, a deceptively large neo-classical building, formerly belonging to University College Dublin. The theme was inspired by William Butler Yeats' poem Easter 1916, suggesting that contemporary art has reached a critical point. The Office of Non-Compliance, a forum for artist-led discourse and discussion, was an on-going element throughout the exhibition that allowed for a dialogic exchange. This aspect of the exhibition presented an exciting possibility for a deeper engagement with contemporary art practice, however, it did not appear to be immediately accessible to the average viewer, nor was its function entirely clear. The sheer size and breadth of the exhibition
art and the post-famine Irish diaspora in America.docx
The Great Irish Famine, eds.M. Corporaal, O. Frawley and E. Mark-FitzGerald; published by Liverpool University Press, 2018
Essay in Book, see title below, two Boston paintings of early twentieth century that, it is suggested, represent Irish domestic servants. Essay discusses what is American art and what is Irish art. Illustrations not included: Edmund Tarbell, The Breakfast Room, c.1903, Penn. Academy of Arts, Philadelphia; Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, The Blue Cup, 1909, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; George Bellows, Paddy Flannigan, 1905, private collection.
Artefact 8: Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians.pdf
Artefact 8, 2016
Nancy Princenthal's biography significantly broadens the narrative on Agnes Martin's life and art from the perception of " desert sage " or " modern mystic, " a discursive thread that undergirds much of the art criticism and past curatorship on Martin. Princenthal intricates the myth of Martin's persona with the undeniable ambition and pragmatism of her character that led to her becoming one of the most important figures amongst twentieth-century artists pursuing pure abstraction. The artist led a long and full life in her ninety-two years, and Princenthal orchestrates an impressive weaving together of biographical records with insightful analyses of Martin's paintings, drawing upon her critical expertise on the tensions between abstraction and the semantics of representation so central to Martin's output.