Pic: Brian Gavin/ Press 22
FROM the Irish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale where it magnetised 400,000 visitors, at Pery Square we can finally journey with Sean Lynch’s ‘Adventure: Capital’.
It’s open house at Limerick City Gallery of Art, eight days a week to his sprawling, varied works set up on plinths, alternating with video. Lynch, LSAD educated, represented our country at the Venetian waltz, commissioned by Dr Mike Fitzpatrick as the Biennale’s man here in Ireland.
Be guided by Lynch’s wicked mock-up of the Financial Times. Photos and pink print tell the ‘Adventure: Capital’ tales of this Gobán Saor and his picaresque plod through islands and time. Hear about the church with no steeple, grub around motorway debris, examine the brick salute to The Daily Mail. There’s even a free DVD of his film-house flickers.
Note the nod to the European grand tour loved by old grandées in this movement from Venice to Limerick, where ‘Aventure: Capital’ rest on the cusp of further roving funded by The Arts Council. Inverting cliché and snobbery, Lynch’s tagline to his Times is ‘The Irish Tour Supplement’.
But we all love a good scéal – clock Eddie Lenihan and the Latoon fairies’ vengeance. Fitzpatrick makes the point that “Sean is a Moyvane man, and was schooled by Gabriel Fitzmaurice”, charismatic poet and scholar. Class must have been a riot.
The videos were made at other times but function adroitly with suggestions arising from these sculptural, moulded, metal, photographic pieces.
There’s a turf and butter sandwich after Joseph Beuys (‘Ireland Energies’), cartoons to puncture pomp and a bacchanalian spill of fruit for River Gods of plenty.
Each art-work in its way references the individual within successive cycles of commerce. Scan the newspaper for gems: Lennon’s “petrified” statue at Liverpool John Lennon Airport and its strapline, ‘Above Us Only Sky’. The poor man, “now paralysed in bronze he can no longer speak, or sing.”
EV+A’s Woodrow Kernohan curated this wild eclecticism and penned insights. Look for collaborations with stone mason Stephen Bourke; territories scored by the Peregrine Falcons of Moyross; Bill Clinton’s bronze ball extracted “under cover of darkness” from Ballybunion; this year’s cursing-stone.
T
here are sharp points to the metal beast derived from sculptor John Burke’s original ‘Uniflo’, submerged with its cider parties during time as a village totem. Outmoded now, a Dodo of a thing.
Themes? “Cultural history, societal structures or the contemporary environment and the role of the individual within it”.
No, don’t wither, this is a fun and telling adventure. Make capital of its presence in our city until the end of March. Throughout the real joy is Sean Lynch’s sunny, inventive stroll through England and Ireland.
An enquiring mind and piratical nature assembled stories and artefacts; his ability to create (carved deities, cartoon craic, alternative documentary) is pulley between art, trade and Everyman.
We speculate on utilitarian angles to garbage and to fine works, and how artists and various communities in several centuries get it on or not.
