MSLL
index
05-06
LENDING LIBRARY
MOORE STREET
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY index 05–06
THIS SERIES:–
2......................................BEATTIE/CLARE/CROWLEY/desperate
3......................................desperate/GOGAN
4......................................GREAVU
9......................................GROUP/HEALY
10....................................INDYMEDIA
11....................................KENNY
12....................................McELLIGOTT
13....................................MAGEE
14....................................METROPOLITAN
15....................................NÍ CUILIBIN
16....................................POTLATCH
21....................................SANKEY
22....................................SLOAN/WALSH
23....................................WALSH/end
TEXTS:
5–6..................................[INDEX]
7–8..................................[McCABE]
17....................................[JEWESBURY]
18–19..............................[MULLOY]
20....................................[PHELAN]
24....................................[COLOPHON]
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX BEATTIE – desperate
AB
Beattie, John
John Beattie at MSLL,
an appendage to a conversation,
or,
extended Extensions
For MSLL John Beattie took on a studio in Moore Street.
His initial intent, that his presence there would provoke
questioning, faced a turnabout and this fired a need to
explore more direct exchanges than some vague expression
of curiosity.
This lively street demanded of him a more direct
engagement, buy, sell, browse, chat…
Conversations with traders initiated a more informal
approach to research. With his perspective facing outward
he became more responsive to the everyday discussions
and transactions: someone hands him a photo of the
lime yards and this provides fodder for a performance/
drawing…someone else calls out “phone card phone card
phone card” incessantly and so he records her calling and
buys a card. The art action and the everyday action running
parallel.
Being accepted into the everyday milieu of this changing
street provided a challenge to the artist and an extension
to his practice. Did his audience experience the same shift
through his being there? Perhaps this is where Extension
becomes conversation becomes written word becomes…
Some questions as extensions…..
How are you? (you answer….a conversation ensues…)
How does this process extend? And to where and what
end? Out of ones practice and into the lives of others? Is
that quantifiable and how? From practice to the written
word? From the written word to…?
Fiona Larkin
left: Extension (hand)
top: Extension (trace)
above: Extension (hand) DVD
C
Clare, Mark
see Potlatch Foundation, The
Crowley, Duncan
see Indymedia
D
desperate optimists (see also McCabe, Martin; and Healy, Amanda)
desperate – gogan INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY EFG
Gogan, Susan
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX
greavu
Greavu, Sara
NA BUACHAILLÍ BÁNA 1 & 2
During the South African War of 1899-1902 two regiments
of Irish nationalist volunteers were raised to help fight the
English for ‘self government’ and language rights. Irish
people identified strongly with the Boers in this ‘White
Man’s War’. In Easter 1916 the insurgents wore Boer-style
‘de Wet’ caps and a number of Boer rifles were captured
upon their surrender.
In July 1984, 10 Mandate union members employed in the
Henry Street branch of Dunnes Stores supermarket went
on official strike in support of a colleague who had been
suspended for refusing to handle South African produce
in accordance with their union’s anti-apartheid policy. The
strike lasted for two years and nine months until the Irish
government introduced sanctions bannning the importation
of all South African agricultural produce.
INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY Moore Street Lending Library
Index
This list indicates the exact order of contents as they are listed in the
MSLL index card box. It is an eccentric, non-alphabetic archive
list, which corresponds to the five file boxes that contain the various
items which make up the Moore Street Lending Library. The
contents were indexed and filed upon receipt of each donation.
AUDIO VISUAL:
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 1. FILM: THE STREET, LIAM NOLAN,
2003
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 2. FILM: LOOKING ON, SÉ MERRY
DOYLE
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 3. FILM: CIVIC LIFE: MOORE STREET,
DESPERATE OPTIMISTS, CHRISTINE MOLLOYAND JOE
LAWLOR
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 5. 9AUDIO CASSETTE TAPES
DOCUMENTING DAILY BUSINESS & PRICE REDUCTIONS
IN MARTIN’S BUTCHERSAT NUMBER 55 MOORE STREET
SINCE 1937
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 6. DVD. O’RAHILLY MEMORIAL
PROJECT 31/3/06 (SHANE CULLENAND MARK PRICE)
MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL 7. 2 x MINI DV TAPES: MSLL
DOCUMENTATION (WEEKS 1,2AND 3).
KEYTEXTS:
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 1. IRISH ORIENTALISM,ALITERARYAND
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:ABOUT
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 2. WHERE EASTAND WESTARE ONE:
COLIN GRAHAM; THE IRISH REVIEW, JUNE 25TH, 2005
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 3. PRODUCING SOCIAL SPACE,AUTHOR
UNKNOWN
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 4. PILGRIMAGE TOAL – MADINAHAND
MECCAH; RICHARD BURTON; FROM CHAPTER FIVE THE
RAMAZAN p 81 – 84
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 5. VISUAL CULTUREAND TOURISM;
EDITED BY DAVID CROUCHAND NINALÜBBREN; BERG;
OXFORD, 2003. ISBN 1859735886
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 6. OCTOBER 80; SPRING 1997; MIT
PRESSAND INTRODUCTION TOACRITIQUE OF URBAN
GEOGRAPHY; GUY DEBORD
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 7. IRISH ORIENTALISM;ALITERARYAND
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY; SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS;
REVIEW
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 8. NEGOTIATING THE ‘DOUBLE POSITION’;
ROBIN WESTCOTT MACQUAIRE UNIVERSITY/AUSTRALIAN
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 9. EXILE MOORE STREET, POL Ó
CONGHAILE, 31ST JULY 2004, IRISH INDEPENDENT
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 10. CULTURAL IDENTITYAND DIASPORA,
STUART HALL ‘FRAMEWORK’(NO. 36)
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 11. THE THIRD SPACE. INTERVIEW WITH
HOMI BHABHA
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 12. THE BINARY CITY. DAVID SIBLEY.
URBAN STUDIES VOL 38, NO 2, P 239 – 250, 2001
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 13. IDENTITY, DIVERSITYAND
CITIZENSHIP. ISSC, GEARY INSTITUTE. UCD, 16TH
SEPTEMBER. 2004
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 14. CHINESE NEWYEAR. WWW.
SOCIALSTUDIESFORKIDS.COM/ARTICLES/CULTURES/
CHINESENEWYEAR1.HTM
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 15. RAISE THE RED LANTERNS. ZHANG
QIAN. SHANGHAI STAR. 18/1/2001
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 16. RE-DEVELOPMENT PLANS UNVEILED
FOR THE ILAC CENTRE IN DUBLIN. BRITISH LAND. 8/2/05
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 17. TROUBLED TIMES FOR TRADITIONAL
TRADERS ON MOORE STREET. ROSE DOYLE. THE IRISH
TIMES. WED JULY 13TH, 2005
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 18. GHOSTS OF MOORE STREET, THE
DUBLIN ROVER, TARABOOKS, DUBLIN 1991, SEAMUS
SCULLY
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 19. SCULLY SEAMUS, REPORT READ TO
THE OLD DUBLIN SOCIETY, 14TH DECEMBER 1983
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 20. RYAN, PAUL, DUBLIN WIT, THE OBRIEN
PRESS.
MSLL/KEYTEXTS 21. O’CASEY, SEAN, THE PLOUGHAND
THE STARS, FABERAND FABER
MEMBERS:
BEATTIE, JOHN
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 1.ARTIST’S PROPOSALAND
PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION OFACTIVITIES FOR
MSLL
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 2.ARTIST’S CV
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 3. DOCUMENTATION OF
PERFORMANCEANDACTIONS ON MOORE STREET
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 4. VIDEO PIECE INSTALLED IN
DOYLE’S SHOP, NO. 5 MOORE STREET
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 5. SLIDE PROJECTION ON SHOP
FRONTAT ‘OCEANIC SUPERSTORE’, MOORE STREET
MSLL/MEMBERS/BEAT 6. DOCUMENTATION OF MONITOR
AND HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPH INSTALLED IN ILAC
CENTRE, 5TH OCTOBER 2005 (PERFORMANCE).
CLARE, MARK
MSLL/MEMBERS/CLARE 1.ARTIST’S CV
MSLL/MEMBERS/CLARE 2. MOORE STREET L.E.T.S.
INFORMATION
MSLL/MEMBERS/CLARE 3. MSLLAND POTLATCH
FOUNDATION –ADVERTISEMENT INFO IN METRO ÉIREANN
NEWS
MSLL/MEMBERS/CLARE 4. MOORE L.E.T.S VIDEO/DVD
13.29MINUTES (TALK EVENTAND POSTER DISTRIBUTION) –
PUBLIC WERE INVITED TOATTENDATALK IN ‘TOP CHAPEL’
ON MOORE LANE. KERRY E’LYN LARKIN INTRODUCED
‘LOCAL EXCHANGE TRADE SYSTEMS’DURINGAN
INFORMAL SESSION.
CULLEN, SHANE
MSLL/MEMBERS/CULL 1. FLYER FOR O’RAHILLY
MEMORIAL SCULPTURE’
MSLL/MEMBERS/CULL 2. HISTORY IRELAND, JULY/AUGUST
2005,ARTICLEABOUT O’RAHILLY MONUMENT, P11.
MSLL/MEMBERS/CULL 3. DVD DOCUMENTARY FILM OF
O’RAHILLY PROJECT (SEEALSOAUDIO VISUAL INDEX
CARD NO. 6)
DUNNE, DOMINIC
MSLL/MEMBERS/DUN 1. CONVERSATION BETWEEN
SALLYTIMMONSAND DOMINIC DUNNE IN MSLL 29/9/05
(HANDWRITTEN NOTES)
FARRELL, IMELDA
MSLL/MEMBERS/FAR 1. NOTES FROM VARIOUS VISITSAND
CONVERSATIONS WITH IMMELDAFARRELLTO MOORE
STREET LENDING LIBRARY SPACE. (FARRELL ISAMEMBER
OF THE O’LEARY FAMILYWHO RANABUTCHER’S SHOP ON
MOORE STREET)
MSLL/MEMBERS/FAR 2. PHOTOGRAPH OF JANE O’LEARY
(AUNT OF IMELDAFARRELL) OF O’LEARY’S BUTCHERS ON
MOORE STREET (SEEALSO MSLL/MEMBERS/CURATORS
1. FOR SCANNED PHOTOGRAPHS FORM FARRELL’S
PERSONALARCHIVE)
CROWLEY, DUNCAN
MSLL/MEMBERS/CRO 1. ‘RADIO BROADCAST’SEE MINI DV
TAPES WITH DOCUMENTATION OFACTIVITIES IN MOORE
STREET LENDING LIBRARY (SEE INDEX CARD: MSLL/
AUDIOVISUAL 7)
CURATORS
MSLL/MEMBERS/CURATORS 1. FOLDER CONTAINING
ORIGINAL PROJECT PLAN FOR LENDING LIBRARY
ON MOORE STREET. CONTAINING CDs WITH IMAGES,
ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS, MESSAGESAND NOTES FROM
LIBRARY SPACE.
DESPERATE OPTIMISTS
MSLL/MEMBERS/DESP 1. DESPERATE OPTIMISTSARTISTS’
INFORMATION (SEEALSO, MSLL/AUDIO/VISUAL 3. DVD OF
FILM: ‘CIVIC LIFE’MOORE STREET
GOGAN, SUSAN
MSLL/MEMBERS/GOGA1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL, CD ROM OF
IMAGESANDARTISTS CV
MSLL/MEMBERS/GOGA2. EMAIL: BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
REFERENCES
MSLL/MEMBERS/GOGA3.ARTIST’S STATEMENT
GREAVU, SARA
MSLL.MEMBERS/GREA1. NABUACHAILLÍ BÁNA1
MSLL/MEMBERS/GREA2. NABUACHAILLÍ BÁNA2
HEALY,AMANDA
MSLL/MEMBERS/HEAL 1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL
MSLL/MEMBERS/HEAL 2. RESEARCH FILE CONTAINING
VARIOUSDOCUMENTATION OF MOORE STREET HISTORIES
MSLL/MEMBERS/HEAL 3. 13:1 LOOSE LEAF PUBLICATION:
AUTHOR
MSLL/MEMBERS/HEAL 4. ‘SAFE’THE PROLIFERATION OF
GATED COMMUNITIES IN DUBLIN CITY:AUTHOR
MSLL/MEMBERS/HEAL 5. FLYER PROMOTING SCREENINGS
WHICH TOOK PLACE OVER THREE WEEKS IN MSLL (SEE
ALSO: MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL INDEX CARD FOR SCREENING
CONTENT)
JEWESBURY, DANIEL
MSLL/MEMBERS/JEWE 1. CD ROM WITHARTIST’S CV, BIOG
ANDARCHIVE OF IMAGES
KENNY, SARAH
MSLL.MEMBERS/KENN 1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL
MSLL.MEMBERS/KENN 2.ARTIST’S CV
LOUGHRAN, GLENN
MSLL/MEMBERS/LOUG 1.ARTISTS PROPOSAL
MSLL/MEMBERS/LOUG 2. POSTCARD DEPICTING IMAGE
OF ROSIE JOHNSON: THE FIRST QUEEN OF MOORE STREET.
‘GROUP FIDELITY’(GLENN LOUGHRANAND EMER
O’BOYLE) - AWORKING RESEARCH GROUP BASED IN
THE MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY - DISTRIBUTED
THE POSTCARDSAMONG LOCALTRADERS TO NOMINATE
CANDIDATES FORAMOORE STREET TRADERS PAGEANT
(SEEALSO, DOCUMENTATION IN MSLL PUBLICATIONAND
NATIONWIDE TELEVISION PROGRAMME, RTE, SCREENED
IN 2005)
MAGEE,ALAN
MSLL/MEMBERS/MAGE 1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL
MARTIN, EAMON
MSLL/MEMBERS/MART 1. PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPH
ALBUM DOCUMENTING MARTIN’S BUTCHERSAT 55
MOORE STREET SINCE 1937. SOME PAGES HAVE BEEN
Index /contd.
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX
SCANNEDAS DIGITAL IMAGES (ALBUM IN POSSESSION OF
EAMON MARTIN)
MSLL/MEMBERS/MART 2.AUDIO CASSETTE TAPES
DOCUMENTING DAILY BUSINESS IN MARTIN’S BUTCHERS (
SEEALSO MSLL/AUDIOVISUAL INDEX CARD NO.5)
METROPOLITAN COMPLEX
MSLL/MEMBERS/METR 1. PAPER NO. 5 (DOWNLOADED
FROM WEBSITE: WWW.THE METROPOLITANCOMPLEX.
COM)
MSLL/MEMBERS/METR 2. PAPER NO. 1 (DOWNLOADED
FROM WEBSITE: WWW.THE METROPOLITANCOMPLEX.
COM)
MSLL/MEMBERS/METR 3. PAPER NO. 7 (DOWNLOADED
FROM WEBSITE: WWW.THE METROPOLITANCOMPLEX.
COM)
MSLL/MEMBERS/METR 4. PAPER NO. 11 (HARD COPY
– CONVERSATION WHICH TOOK PLACE IN THE MOORE
STREET LENDING LIBRARY BETWEEN, SARAH PIERCE,
SALLYTIMMONS, KEN MC’CUE, JESSE JONESAND WES
WILKE)
MCELLIGOTT, MAEVE
MSLL/MEMBERS/MCEL 1.ARTIST’S CVAND STATEMENT
(SEEALSO MSLL/MEMBERS/MO&MC INDEX CARD)
MCELLIGOTT, MAEVE - MORLEY, MEGS
MSLL/MEMBERS/MO&MC 1. EIGHT POLAROID
PHOTOGRAPHS OFARTWORKS ON MOORE STREET
MSLL/MEMBERS/MO&MC 2. CD ROM WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
MSLL/MEMBERS/MO&MC 3. STENCIL OF ‘MOORE STREET
LENDING LIBRARY’MANDARIN SCRIPT SIGN
MSLL/MEMBERS/MO&MC 4. ENVELOPE CONTAINING CD
ROM WITH PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION OF PROJECT
ON MOORE STREET (WITH LETTER TO SALLYTIMMONS)
SLOAN, LOUISA
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA2. DOCUMENTATIONOF ‘R ROLLING’
PRACTICE SESSION/ DATE RECORDED 5/10/2005, TIME
RECORDED 8AM – 8.30AM
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA3. THE TRILLED ‘R’AND THE
GENETICS IT RODE IN ON
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA4. TIPS FOR ROLLING (AND
PRONOUNCING) THE SPANISH ‘R’AND ‘RR’
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA5. TRILL CONSONANT
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA6.ALVEOLAR TRILL
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA7. BILABIALTRILL
MSLL/MEMBERS/SLOA8. CD ROM WITH DOCUMENTATION
OF ‘R’ROLLING PROJECT, BROADCAST FROM THE MOORE
STREET LENDING LIBRARY, OCTOBER 2005.
SANKEY, KATHERINE
MSLL/MEMBERS/SANK 1.ARTIST’S PROPOSAL
MSLL/MEMBERS/SANK 2. CVAND DOCUMENTATION OF
PREVIOUS WORK (SEEALSO: MSLL/MEMBERS/CURATORS
INDEX CARD FOR DOCUMENTATION IMAGES OF VIDEO
PROJECTION ON MOORE STREET)
TIMMONS, SALLY - CLARKE, DEARBHLA
MSLL/MEMBERS/TIMCLAR 1. NOTESAND DESIGNS FOR
SIGNS ON MOORE STREET. PROPOSED RE-DESIGN OF
GENEVIVE KEARINS CHIROPODY CLINIC SIGNSAT NO. 55
MOORE STREET.
WALSH, CIARAN
MSLL/MEMBERS/WALS 1. HAND DRAWNAND WRITTEN
PROPOSAL ‘PROPOSED MOORE STREETAGORA, IN
RELATION TO EXISTING PARKSAND MAIN RETAIL
AREA, 30/9/05’(SEEALSO: MSLL/MEMBERS/CURATORS
INDEX CARD FOR DOCUMENTATION IMAGES OF MODEL
ASSEMBLY IN MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY SPACE)
ORGANISATIONS/BUSINESS DIRECTORY:
MSLL/ORGANISATIONS/INSTITUTIONS/BUSINESSES 1.
BUSINESS DIRECTORY OF MOORE STREET (BOUND IMAGE
DIRECTORY COMPILED BY SANDRAGROZDANIC)
PRESS:
MSLL/PRESS 1. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) THE MOORES OF
MOORE STREETAND OTHERS (TWO HUNDRED YEARS
AGOAND LESS), CITYTIMES, VOL 3, JUNE 1991 b) MOORE
STREET DECLINEAND FALL? 13/8/1974 c) THE LAST SAD
DAYS OFAFLEAMARKET d) FROM MOORE STREET TO
THE GREEN (NEW PLACES) e) MOORE STREET, FRANCIS
DRAKE DRAWINGS, THE IRISH TIMES, DECEMBER 28TH, 1972
f) BIG NEW PLAN FOR MOORE STREETAREA, OFFERS TO
PROPERTY OWNERS g) HOW MOORE STREET PROJECT WILL
LOOK WHEN COMPLETED.
MSLL/PRESS 2. TENDERS FOR MASSIVE MOORE STREET
PROJECT MUST BE IN BY MAY 25TH (16/5/1973)
MSLL/PRESS 3. MOORE STREET MARKET, PAT LIDDY, 4TH
SEPTEMBER 1995 (2 COPIES)
MSLL/PRESS 4. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) DUBLINS MOST
FORGOTTEN STREET (‘TATTY IMAGE RUINS THE CITY’S
FAIREST) b) MOORE STREET PLANS PATHETIC c) TRADERS
PLEAD WITH QUINN TO SAVE MOORE STREET
MSLL/PRESS 5. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) MOORE STREET,
GOOD, BAD, OR INDIFFERENT? JANUARY 1973 b) TIMES
PAST, FAMOUS MARKET DROPSAN OLD CUSTOM c) FRUITY
FACE FOR FIESTA21/4/1993 IRISH TIMES
MSLL/PRESS 6. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) DISCOVERING THE
NATIONAL MUSEUM, MAIREAD REYNOLDS, DECEMBER
17TH 1982 b) MOORE STREET TRADERS UNHAPPY, ELGY
GILLESPIE, DECEMBER 1ST 1982 c) PLANS TO DEVELOP
MOORE STREET
MSLL/PRESS 7. SOMETIMES SHELTER IS ONLY COMFORT…
(PHOTOGRAPH) DONAL DOHERTY
MSLL/PRESS 8. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) MOORE STREET
SCHEME IN PLANNING CRUX? b) ILAC CENTRE PURCHASES
WILL BENEFIT PUBLIC
MSLL/PRESS 9. STUDENTSAREANGRY OVER RAGING OF
MOORE STREET. KEVIN MOORE, IRISH INDEPENDENT,
FRIDAY, MAY 2ND.
MSLL/PRESS 10. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) MAJOR BRITISH
CHAINS FAILTO WIN SPACE IN NEW ILAC CENTRE, DAVID
PATE 1/11/1981 b) £20M SCHEME FOR DUBLIN CENTRE
MSLL/PRESS 11. VARIOUS NEWS ITEMS: a) FACELIFT BOOST
FOR CITY CENTRE 7/8/1992 b) PROPERTY PLAN DECISION
SOON 16/2/1974 c)ADVERT FORAUCTION OF ‘SHEILS’8/9
MOORE STREET, DUBLIN 1
MSLL/PRESS 12. BATTLEFIELD IRELAND, IRELAND’S TOP
TEN HERITAGE BATTLES, WILLIAM HEDERMAN, VILLAGE
20 – 26 MAY 2005
MSLL/PRESS 13. O’RAHILLY MEMORIAL UNVEILLED IN
DUBLIN,ALISON HEALY
MSLL/PRESS 14. 1916 MEMORIAL: PLAQUE TO BE UNVEILED
TO THE O’RAHILLY, KILLED IN THE EASTER RISING,ALISON
HEALY
MSLL/PRESS 15. FRINGE HIGH FLYER TAKES THE PLUNGE,
BELINDAMCKEON,AUGUST 9TH, 2005. THE IRISH TIMES
MSLL/PRESS 16. HISTORIC MOORE STREET HOUSE MAY
HAVE BEEN RE-NUMBERED. COUNCILTIM O’BRIENAND
RUADHAN MACEOIN,AUGUST 24, 2005, THE IRISH TIMES
MSLL/PRESS 17. NURSE’S GRIPPING STORY PROMPTS
MINISTER TO SAVE ‘RISING’S LAST STAND’, TRACY HOGAN,
25TH AUGUST 2005, IRISH INDEPENDENT
MSLL/PRESS 18. COUNCIL SEEKSADVICE OVER 1916 HOUSE,
JAMES FITZGERALD,AUGUST 22, 2005, THE IRISH TIMES
MSLL/PRESS 19. MORE OR LESS MOORE STREET BY RINO
BREEBAART, 9 FEBRUARY 2005, POP MATTERS, COLUMNS (2
COPIES)
MSLL/PRESS 20. TROUBLED TIMES FOR TRADITIONAL
TRADERS ON MOORE STREET, ROSE DOYLE, THE IRISH
TIMES 13/7/2005 (2 COPIES)
MSLL/PRESS 21. TAOISEACH OPENS JURYS INN HOTEL
ON MOORE STREET, 28 OCTOBER 2004, DUBLIN BUSINESS
ASSOCIATION (2 COPIES)
MSLL/PRESS 22. PRESS RELEASES: BRITISH LAND
SUBSIDARIES PROFIT FROM ILAC CENTRE SALE 30/8/2005.
BRITISH LAND
MSLL/PRESS 23. PATRICK GEDDES – MAKER OF THE
FUTURE, KEN MCCUE, THE VISUALARTISTS NEWSSHEET,
JAN/FEB 2004,
MSLL/PRESS 24. 3 X PROMOTIONAL REVIEWS OF THE
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY: a) EVENT GUIDE
21/9/2005 b) IRISH TIMES OCT 2005 c) VISUALARTISTS
NEWSSHEET, NOV/DEC 2005
URBAN PLANNING:
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 1. MOORE STREET:AREPORT,
PUBLISHED BY SCHOOL OFARCHITECTURE, UCD 1974 (2
COPIES)
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 2. DCC PLANNINGAPPLICATIONS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION REF NO. 5950/04
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 3. STREET MAPS, PLAN 1AND 2
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 4. ‘LOMBARD’ESTATEAGENT
BROCHURE
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 5. BUILD, VOL 10, NO.12, JUNE 1974
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 6. MOORE STREET DEVELOPMENT
PLAN, BUILDINGAND CONTRACT JOURNAL, NOVEMBER
23, 1972
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 7. IRISHARCHITECTURAL
ARCHIVE, STREET PHOTOGRAPHS
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 8. ARCHITECTURAL MODELS
– NEW DEVELOPMENTS, UNREALISED
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 9. MOORE STREET REDEVELOPMENT – IRISH LIFEASSURANCE COMPANY LTD,
(REPORT)
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 10. TENDER FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF THE MOORE STREET CHAPEL LANE
AREA
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 11. CORPORATION OF DUBLIN,
MOORE STREET/CHAPEL LANEAREA, BRIEF FOR REDEVELOPMENT, NOV 1972
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 12. PROPOSED ELEVATION
– MOORE STREET.ASTONDALE CONSTRUCTION LTD
MSLL/URBANPLANNING 13. URBAN PLACE MAP,
ORDNANCE SURVEY IRELAND
“Cities belong to
no-one in particular...”
TEXT: McCABE INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY dislocating and relocating Moore Street
Martin McCabe
‘The city teaches us the arts,
techniques, and the tactics of living
in the present.’1
In recent theorising of urban culture, experience and
representation, Ben Highmore and James Donald
suggest ways we might read, address or analyse the
city. Drawing on Baudelairean modernity, the urban
sociology of Simmel and his students Kracauer and
Benjamin and the analyses of Lefebvre amongst
others, they argue for a consideration of both the
physical and imaginary city in grappling with
the complexities of the urban. Highmore posits
a methodological approach to the city and urban
experience by arguing for “treating cultural texts
not as texts requiring analysis but as analytic texts”2
themselves which can make sense of, produce a
map of, the city. Deploying critical insights from
urban geography and sociology, ethnographic
modes of analysis and cultural studies, Highmore
emphasises “the inextricable convergence of the
imagination and hard facticity of urban life”3 through
Lefebvre’s simultaneous double registering of the
‘representational space’ where experience and
representation cannot be productively separated
out. For Lefebvre, representation is simultaneously
symbolic and practical activity where those who
have the social and economic power to generate
and produce space [representations of space] such
as local city managers, urban planners, architects,
etc. as against those who have far fewer resources
[spaces of representation] all constitute a struggle
over and within space. Lefebvre argues that direct
lived experience is always penetrated by symbols and
images. Representational space is “the dominated
– and hence passively experienced – space which
the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It
overlays physical space making symbolic use of its
objects”.4 It is consequently on the side of the other
and is linked to the clandestine and underground. For
Lefebvre, the symbolic is always at the same time
practical physical use.
Similarly, James Donald offers a point of departure
and argues our experience of the city is mediated
through representations of the city so much so that
he contends the notion of the “urban imaginary”.
He argues that representation of the city (in all
its forms) literally teaches us how to see the city
and how to make sense of it. “It defines”, he says
“the co-ordinates for our imaginative mapping of
urban space”.5 For Donald, the role of the city as
representation, the city as a thing and as a state
of mind all produce a blurring of the boundaries
between the real and the imagined city. “It is true
that what we experience is never the real city, ‘the
thing itself’. It is also true that the everyday reality
of the city is always a space already constituted
and structured by symbolic mechanisms”.6 Another
pertinent aspect of the discourse of the modern city
is elaborated by Robert Parks in the mapping of class
and ethnic difference onto the geography of the city
which Donald further points to in the construction the
city as archive. He argues there is a dialectic at work
where the city of the imagination and the experience
of the city mutually shape and inform each other and
are mediated by this archive city with the experiential
and immediacy of the urban mediated through the
pedagogics and aesthetics of the city.
In this context, the question ‘what is Moore
Street?’ or ‘what does Moore Street mean?’ has no
one answer. It is an urban physical space whose
function is inseparable from the network of spaces
that make up the city of Dublin, a city undergoing
rapid ‘regeneration’. It is the residue and trace of
historical developments in urban planning and design
and it is the product of the institutions and social
interactions that bind a city together. It is a theatre
of sounds, sights and smells, voices, visual and aural
distractions characteristic of the informal commerce
and economy that it exemplifies. Depending on the
particular discursive frame in which it is represented,
it constitutes a ‘problem’ for town planners and
managers as it clogs the smooth flow of bodies and
hence commercial activity in its lack of conformity
to regulation and obduracy to management, or an
‘obstacle’ to multinational retail conglomerates
and developers who undoubtedly view it a prime
real estate site for their encroaching enterprises. It
is a ‘site of resistance’ for local activists, historical
conservationists and the traders who have mounted
and continue to mount campaigns against these
forces of ‘modernisation’ and ‘regeneration’. And it
is a space used and practiced, made and remade by
its inhabitants, traders, their clients and those who
consume it as touristic experience and spectacle. And
it is more than all of these.
Of all the parts of the city, Moore Street has
been so thoroughly mythologised as the repository
of authentic community, that it seems difficult
to disentangle it from how we imagine the city
and consequently how we conceive, use or read
the city. Through popular song and folk memory,
lore, literature and historical accounts, cinematic
narratives and television documentaries, calendars,
brochures, postcards, the street has become an
overdetermined signifier for the city. It functions in
establishing a relation between identity and place,
binding them together in what Derrida refers to as
ontopology.
The visual representation of the street has, in
more recent times, become a trope that figures it as a
metonym for the ‘new’ Ireland of the so-called Celtic
Tiger economy. The transformations undergone over
the last decade in its communities of residents, users,
traders and customers mark a shift in how the image
of Moore Street represents the modern globalised city
of ethnic diversity and difference. The presence of
migrant communities from Eastern and South Eastern
Europe, South and East Asia and Sub-Saharan West
Africa as traders and clients of the street’s various
retail outlets, and the plans to modernise and convert
the street as part of a wider urban ‘regeneration’
process in the north inner city make it a relatively
dynamic but unstable site.
The valency of the street as metonym is
represented in two examples that mark in time this
shift. Sé Merry Doyle’s documentary “Alive Alive
O: A Requiem for Moore Street” (1999), locates
the street in terms of the struggle of the women
traders to maintain their right to trade in the area
through the 1980s and 1990s.7 Clearly exceeding
the literal denomination of a street, it elaborates it
through wider issues such as the ravages of heroin
abuse in north inner city communities, the docklands
redevelopment and the opening of the Irish Financial
Services Centre. Alternating between archival
photographs, contemporary footage, interviews
with protagonists in situ and the evocative singing
of Frank Harte, its aesthetic relies on conventional
documentary structures with poetic interludes
whose tone shuttles between the elegiac and the
nostalgic. It moves between these without being
sentimental, resisting at some level its recuperation
into the Dublin of the ‘rare ‘oul times’, an image
which has been dominant in the heritage and
tourist industries. As an historical text, it performs
a significant memory-work against the erasures of
traditional cultural and socio-economic activity
wrought by Dublin Corporation policy and its
efforts to ‘modernise’ and the forces of national and
international capital.
In contrast with this, I want to refer to the
television advertisement produced three years ago
which evidences the ‘new’ Ireland represented
through a commodification of ethnic difference.
In a campaign for Jacobs’ ‘Thai Bites Crackers’,
two tourists are on holidays in Thailand eating said
snacks but in their navigation of the city, their verbal
interaction with the native Thais is a startling [but
reassuring] encounter, as they turn to the visitors
to exchange banter with a Dublin inner city accent
– clearly referring to the Moore Street ‘experience’.8
This was accompanied by the text “Authentic Thai
With An Irish Accent”. The accent on ‘flavour’ and
the alimentary as markers of ethnic difference but a
difference that is domesticated and non-threatening,
is a mediation that is touristic in its mode of
consumption. This campaign was symptomatic
of the kinds of transformations that the street had
undergone at the level of representation. It could
also be read as suggesting, as contemporary theorists
of the city and urban experience argue, that the city
cannot be analysed apart from the massive upheaval
wrought by global restructuring with its geographies
of power: “[a]s a consequence, urbanisation has
come to mean in this context, the spatial component
of social change rather than simply the formation,
transformation, and development of cities”.9
Further, the representation of the street circulates
in existing visual archives in a global context. The
informal archival formations of the web-based
service Flickr represent the processes of globalisation
through the real time communication and the
intensification of travel and its tourist gaze. This
shift is discernable in a cursory survey of its visual
representations across the site. Texts and comments
accompanying the photos variously compare it to
Chinatown and New York “…with so many different
nationalities and shops”; surprise at the changes is
recorded: “Yes this is Dublin (Moore Street)”; as
well as a comparison with a street market in Asia:
“Becky ponders over some spices. Moore Street
Nepal”. While these image are unremarkable, indeed
they are the tourist gaze manifest in cliché form,
this precisely marks them out as the ground of
common sense around thinking and imagining Moore
Street.10 They operate within a touristic discourse
which is reproduced through brochures, websites
and guides to the city. Significantly these kinds
of images are regularly used in the publicity and
promotional materials of NGOs, governmental and
state-sponsored bodies representing issues around
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX TEXT: McCABE
‘multiculturalism’, migration, human rights, etc. In
these contexts, the image of the street is a visualideological construct now officially framed within
the now state-sanctioned discourse of diversity and
multiculturalism.
This needs to be considered as part of a wider
global branding of Ireland Inc. signalling it a
tolerant, cosmopolitan and globalised society.
Notwithstanding the ‘enforced repatriations’ and
mismanagement of migration, the state is now
showing signs, in terms of policy, of prioritising
the economic imperative. This should not be
underestimated, as inward investment and economic
growth are now seen as crucially contingent on the
Republic’s accommodation of diverse language and
ethnic communities. It is these communities that
make up the reserve migrant labour force servicing
the kinds of industries redolent of the globalised Irish
economy.11 It seems difficult then to separate this
traffic in images, their circulation and use from its
political economic or socio-cultural contexts but it is
clear that the representation of the street is a site for
contest and struggle. Burdened with representations
whose motives and interests are fragmentary,
discontinuous and contradictory, the ‘reality’ and
meanings of the street are overdetermined by its
symbolic value and its metonymic status.
Related but in a different context, the street
constitutes what Mary Louise Pratt calls, in her
theorising of transculturation, a “contact zone”
or “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and
grapple with each other”.12 These are sites of
contestation, exchange and recombination, where
hybridity and transculturation are experienced
negotiated and lived. The significance of the street is
“space as a practiced place”.
Moore Street: the Movie
In late 2005, desperate optimists completed a series
of short films entitled ‘Civic Life’.13 Thematically,
this series explores urban existence and social
relations, the notion of community and leisure time.
According to Sukdhev Sandhu, what is proposed in
the series is a model of civic life that is neither utopia
nor dystopia, but an unfolding drama, a process
“ideally an unceasing conversation – a fractious,
whimsical badly translated audio-flow – rather
than a static thing whose contours or nature can be
taken as a given”.14 ‘Civic Life’ as a series is then
a self-conscious reflection on the republican polis,
the city as agon with its notion of the citizen as its
political and social actor, and the lived city space as
its determining horizon.
Moore Street is one in this series. Shot in one
single take lasting five and a half minutes, it takes
place in said location with the protagonist, a
nameless young African woman, making her way
up the empty street in dark of night for some sort
of rendezvous.15 The street is de-familiarised by
its setting and is emptied of all but the detritus and
remnants of the earlier day’s business. Against the
archive of existing dominant images of the street, the
contrast is clear. The busy market with its energy and
activity, the chatter, calls, slagging, appeals and dealmaking with the robust and caustic wit for which
Dublin street-sellers are famous are replaced with a
quiet, dark, evacuated streetscape. The lone figure
navigates her way without too much urgency. This
startling image appears a strategic abnegation as it
relieves itself of the exoticising reflex of mainstream
media representations. Using the available street
lighting, the mise-en-scene and the use of the
steadicam gliding effortlessly over the cobbled
paving of the street summon an atmosphere of
potential threat, albeit ambiguously. However, such
connotations are short-circuited by what seems to be
the relative ease and comfort that this lone woman
displays. On a wet, dark night she feels comfortable
enough to wait around, to let her hair down and
check her make-up in a store-front mirror. Clearly
she has made the street her own.
The protagonist’s internal monologue in the form
of a voiceover is hushed and whispered, suggesting
an intimacy which is borne out in its contents.
Spoken in Swahili, and translated into Dublinaccented English, it takes the epistolary form of a
love letter addressed to an absent intimate. Thus
migrant subject position is articulated around the
tension of presence and absence – “if you were here”
– and separation from the other, through distance
and dislocation. Walking in the city, it is the smell of
the market, the intoxicating and sensuous aspects of
urban experience that serve as a mnemonic for her
lover and her old home. Her new home however is
one shot through with ambivalence. While she even
“sounds like a local”, she sees “advantages to being
an outsider” and insistently voices a suspicion around
“belonging” and says that “cities belong to no one
in particular”. She senses in ‘belonging’ a stasis and
nostalgia that is troubling. Establishing a relationship
between place and identity has been part of local
political struggles against the forces of transnational
capital as much as it has been a xenophobic response.
The protagonist recognises the risks involved in such
a drive to fix the meanings of places, or as Doreen
Massey argues “to enclose and defend them; [they]
construct singular, fixed and static identities for
places, and they interpret places as bounded enclosed
spaces defined through counter position against the
Other who is outside”.16
Her commitment to the city is conditional and
negotiated. She does ‘belong’ but on her terms.
She embodies how Donald figures the metropolis
as “the conceptual location of a split between the
subjective culture and objective culture produced by
money economy and the division of labour”17 as her
noctambulations afford her a level of invisiblity and
allow her as she says “to get on with her life” but
also practice the ‘will to community’ which urban
cultures enable. She is part of a community but it is
not one fixed by geography or place. It is the survival
strategy of the migrant.
The mise-en-scene functions like an interspace
which the narrator moves through linguistically,
psychically and physically; it does so by
defamiliarising the dominant and received image
of the street to startling effect. It does not erase
the archive of Moore Street’s representation but
it does refuse the dominant media representation
and its use in serving a depoliticised state-friendly
multiculturalist discourse. The articulation of
the migrant subject position goes some way to
demythologising Moore Street by voicing an
ambivalence and resistance to the domestic, the
national and the homely, through the spatial practices
of the subaltern, in a site that is burdened with
meaning, symbolism and history. The film dislocates
Moore Street and relocates it in a present that speaks
back to this history with new unfolding possibilities.
Notes
1. James Donald, 1999, Imagining the Modern City,
Minneapolis: Minnesota, p. 7
2. Ben Highmore, 2005, Cityscapes: cultural readings in
the material and symbolic city, Basingstoke: Palgrave , p.
xiii
3. Highmore, p. 86
4. Henri Lefebvre, 1991, The Production of Space, Oxford:
Blackwell, p. 39
5. Donald, p. 2
6. Donald, p. 8
7. Alive Alive O: A Requiem for Moore Street, dir. Sé
Merry Doyle, 1999, Dublin: Loopline Productions. This
was shown as part of Amanda Healy’s programme of
screenings for the Moore Street Lending Library. (see
Healy, Amanda)
8. This campaign was produced for the British market
and the version broadcast in Ireland was a localised one.
Not surprisingly but worth mentioning as it is germane to
this discussion, the accents for this original version were
Cockney, reinforcing to the authentic London ‘native’
through accent alone. See http://www.visit4info.com/static/
advertiser_pages/JacobsThaiBitesCrackers.cfm?return_
page=com_j.cfm
9. Miwon Kwon, 1995, ‘Imaging an Impossible World
Picture’ in Stan Allen with Kyong Park, eds., Sites and
Stations: Provisional Utopias; Architecture and Utopia
in the Contemporary City (Lusitania #7) New York:
Lusitania, p. 78
10. Whilst most of the images on Flickr can be categorised
in this manner, there are some that focus on the political
historical significance of the street, in particular around the
preservation of No. 16, Moore Street, which was where the
leaders of 1916 decided to surrender.
11. In late 2006, Google announced 500 new jobs in
Dublin for the new year. These will predominantly be in
the international customer services area where the facilities
are linguistically divided. In the accompanying press
interviews, a spokesperson for Google went so far as to call
Ireland “the Ellis Island of the 21st Century”. see http://
www.entemp.ie/press/2006/20061115c.htm
12. Mary Louise Pratt, 1999, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’ in
David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, eds., Ways of
Reading: An Anthology for Writers, Boston: St. Martin’s,
p. 584. I am indebted to Dr. Aine O’Brien for bringing this
reference to my attention.
13. desperate optimists, 2006, Civic Life A Series of Seven
Short Films by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, London:
Arts Council of England. For more information see website
www.desperateoptimists.com. (see desperate optimists)
14. Sukdhev Sandhu, 2006, ‘Once Our Beer Was Frothy:
Civic Life and Nostalgia’ in Civic Life, p. 23
15. Moore Street was originally commissioned by Val
Connor to represent, along with Stephen Loughman and
Dennis McNulty, Ireland at the 2005 Sao Paolo Biennale
and was originally shown as a short before a feature in
cinemas in Sao Paolo.
16. Doreen Massey, 1992, ‘A Place Called Home?’ in New
Formations 17, Summer, p. 12
17. Donald, p. 10
group – HEALY
INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY Group Fidelity
Rather than produce a self-congratulatory text in
defence of our project or The Moore Street Lending
Library, the group prefers to outline some of the
questions posed by the project:
What are the skills that artists need in order to fully
engage in popular experimentation in the social
field?
Does the artist find common ground with participants
in such popular expressions or is separation
necessary?
Is it possible that, due to their temporary nature,
such interventions never realise their potential for
engagement with the issues at the heart of such
projects?
What is the potential of artistic/political fidelity to
such interventions?
What sort of division is fundamental for the
development of global capital itself, and do artists
feed those divisions?
Group Fidelity are Glenn Loughran, Emer O’Boyle,
Cica Moraes, Raul Arojo,
H
Healy, Amanda
Amanda Healy’s screenings for Moore Street Lending
Library were a response to the visual history of Moore
Street. The free screenings of three documentaries, a short
film and a film montage took place in two venues, the
Library itself and the central public library, located next
door to Moore Street, in the ILAC shopping centre.
The screenings as an event encouraged people to
participate in the Library and develop relationships with
the participating artists, and also gain an insight into the
cultural terrain that the Library wished actively to map.
The screenings stimulated unexpected debates exploring
the role and position of the participants in Moore Street
Lending Library
Micheal Ryan
Films screened:
Civic Life (desperate optimists)
The Street (Liam Nolan)
Looking On (Sé Merry Doyle)
Moore St. Montage (assembled from the IFI archives, with
thanks to Sunniva O’Flynn)
10 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEx indymedia
I
Indymedia
JK
kenny INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 11
Kenny, Sarah
Review of Sarah Kenny’s work in Moore Street
Lending Library
by Haras Ynnek
Kenny’s work is, in one surmising word, ‘juvenile’;
that is probably the kindest thing that can be said
about the childish mini-theatres which she had
installed on the stairway leading up the Lending
Library. In the context of other more cerebral
artists Ms Kenny is very out of synch with what her
contemporaries are up to. She seems to be stuck in
some nostalgia-influenced type of visual narrative,
the images are literal, there is no broad hinted-at
concept behind them.It really seems that whilst
Kenny as an artist is having fun with the work,
she is having perhaps too much fun: where is the
misery? Art can’t all be about fun, there has to be
some evidence that the artist went through some
sort of mental pain and sufffering to arrive at their
conclusions. She might be well advised to take up
découpage as a leisurely hobby, and leave ‘thinking
art’ to the thinking artist!
Images: laserprint on board,
20 cm x 12 cm.
12 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY
Mc
INDEX
McELLIGOTT
McElligott, Maeve
Urban Intervention
The ‘Moore Street Lending Library’ sign in
Mandarin Chinese was erected as an urban
intervention into Moore St. The sign was an
almost unnoticeable alteration to the everyday
life of the street, and proposed the creation of an
invisible network. The sign braved the otherwise
ever-controlled public space of Dublin city. Urban
environments are forever changing, however both
the problematic disappearance of public space, and
freedom of movement, are urgent problems within
this space. A sign is simply an indicator to a place but
the act of making and erecting it can be thought of as
socially helpful or a utilitarian civic duty.
A laminate sign of a space ship was also installed on
a building site on Moore St. The sign was a pun on
public space and perhaps what lands there: a concrete
mass of urban renewal.
These acts are not to function as templates of
strategies for public space, but rather to examine the
freedom of the individual in public space, and the
interests of the authorities to regulate and control
public order. This was not an anarchist action but an
attempt to highlight some of these concerns. What
are my responsibilities as a citizen in the urban
environment and what are ‘our’ rights within public
space?
Which leaves me wondering if any of this had an
input into the life of Moore St and it’s inhabitants?
Two months after erecting the space ship sign, the
words ‘the mother ship’ were scrawled underneath it.
Others, making the work somewhat more relevant to
them and the community of Moore Street, had altered
and claimed the sign.
magee INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 13
M
Magee, Alan
Interviews: June 13th 2006
Security Guard, Ilac Shopping Centre
How ‘re you doing. I’m just giving you a run down on my
opinion of the sculpture outside the Moore Street doors...
There was things like people coming in cracking jokes
about the fella going to jump off the side of the building.
Things like that, which was a bit of craic and gave a bit of
kick to the place. Ehm, there was actually times when the
security had to run some young lads away from it, they
stoned it with apples and oranges. Heh heh. We got the
craic going. There’s a lot of builders working on site here,
told the foreman there was a chap working on the side of
the building with no safety harness, running out left, right
and centre for the safety people panicking, cracking the
jokes.
The Moore Street traders got great craic out of it as the
day went on, it would come in to it…. it was part of the
daily trading and things like that.
G4 Cleaner
I think the ‘21st Century Flaneur’ project was a fabulous
idea. I’d like to see projects done in this particular part of the city on a more regular basis. A great success, absolutely
fabulous.
Moore Street Council Member
Everybody enjoyed this because, no one seen it going up
and everyone wanted to know how it got there… So after
that wore off initially the jokes started, that he was up
there for 3 days and he hasn’t gone to the toilet yet. And
everyone wanted to know was he real. A lot of people
thought he was real. People thought he was genuinely
real at first. A lot of tourists were amused by it as well.
They thought that it was, well, they couldn’t figure it out
really. Nobody knew, nobody could quite put their finger
on it and the biggest laugh of the whole lot was we had a
little drugs issue here in Moore Street from some foreign
nationals selling drugs and they thought that it was some
sort of undercover surveillance camera built in to his head
and they cleared off. I swear to God, they cleared off.
I hadn’t seen them for about 2 weeks and then as time
progressed they creeped back again and they realised it
wasn’t an undercover garda sitting on a chair, going a
couple of weeks without going to the toilet. But the amount
of interest that it gathered was phenomenal. Nobody had
any answers ‘cos nobody knew how it got there including
myself and I am a member of the committee, so I went
to the Residents Committee and said ‘Could we find out
what happened ?’ So we went to the Ilac centre, and we
asked them, and they explained to us that youse needed
permission to put it up, and it was an arts project and so on.
So, we let everybody believe that it was belonging to the
gards. And it worked wonders for us. The street was grand
for a good period of time. But, I think most of all, was how
realistic it looked and how real it looked. People would
talk for hours if you would talk to them but you just didn’t
have the time working on the stalls and that. I found that
most of the time, the conversation was, ‘Is he real, or is he
not real?’ That’s what it was. And the wind caught it one
day and blew it a different direction and we were totally
convinced that there was definitely some sort of remote
control system in it, it was definitely real and didn’t know
what to do. Every day there was at least twenty to thirty
conversations about it.
Trader
Well, we thought it was great interest in the street.
Everyone came along and had a look at it and kept saying
‘Who is it?’,‘Who is it supposed to be?’, ‘Is he real?’
And then a lot of them that do be down here thought it
was a camera for the gards watching them and they were
absolutely terrified and they moved away. Some of them
were dealing drugs and it kept them out of the street
which was great and we wanted it left up there ‘cos then
decent people came back in to the street. And, it was really
interesting, it really was. Everyone who came along, ‘Who
was he?’ ‘Did he used to work here?’ We told them that he
used to work in the Horse and Cart years ago and the horse
died there and now he’s after dying. Hahahaha. It was a bit
of fun and then we just had the bit of banter about it. It was
interesting. Maybe you could do another one and leave it
there all the time.
14 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX
metropolitan
Metropolitan Complex, The
The Metropolitan Complex
Front cover from Paper No. 11 in a series of
discussions published by The Metropolitan Complex
that circulate as free publications.
Roundtable discussion: Wes Wilkie, Sally Timmons,
Ken McCue, Jesse Jones and Sarah Pierce.
Printed on the occasion of The Moore Street Lending
Library, curated by Sandra Grozdanic, Declan
Sheehan, and Sally Timmons, 27 September – 15
October, 2005, at 55 Moore Street in Dublin.
Front cover: Moore Street, Dublin, 2005
The Metropolitan Complex is a Dublin-based project
by Sarah Pierce. It organizes around a range of
activities such as exhibitions, talks and publications. These structures often open up to the
personal and the incidental.
ní cuilibin INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 15
N
Ní Cuilibin, Sharon
Mine was a spontaneous contribution on the last day that
the library was open to the public, and came about through
conversation with Sandra Grozdanic, taking the form of a kind
of mind map of ideas and free associations generated from the
idea of MSLL.
I met with Sandra some time later and discussed possible
development of my contribution...to extend and develop the
mapping of associations in conversation with the other artists
involved. I could not continue in that vein, however, due to
other pressures and demands.
A kind of performance of thinking, conscious of the immediate
environment and interacting with others is traced in the post-its
and bits of paper that remain of that moment.
I have attached a digital image that I have to document
what happened. I am not certain yet if it would be helpful or
appropriate to redo a kind of mind map to make things clearer.
http://www.freewebs.com/erinog/MSLL.html
16 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX potlatch
P
Potlatch Foundation, The
In September 2005 the Potlatch Foundation
in collaboration with the Moore Street
Lending Library invited the local residents
and traders of Moore
Street to avail of an unprecedented
opportunity to establish a Local
Exchange Trade System (LETS) for the
Moore Street area. A number of adverts
were run in local newspapers, while a
selection of hand-printed posters advertising
the project were posted around the Moore
Street area.
LETS are local, non-profit exchange
networks in which all kinds of goods and
services can be traded without the need for
money. A LETS network uses an interestfree local credit or currency so direct swaps
do not need to be made. LETS can help
a wide cross-section of the community –
individuals, small businesses, local services
and voluntary groups – to save money
and resources and extend their purchasing
power.
Other benefits include social contact, health
care, tuition and training,
support for local enterprise and new
businesses, and a revitalised
community.
On October 12th 2005 the Potlatch
Foundation invited all interested parties to
attend a free public talk on the establishment
of a LETS in the Moore Street area, to be
given by Kerry E’lyn Larkin, a founder
member of the
Galway City LETS.
On the drawbacks
of artistic ‘vision’
text: jewesbury INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 17
Daniel Jewesbury
What are you doing here?
Throughout its recent history the idea of ‘threat’ has
constantly been linked to Moore Street, as the quickest
glance through the press clippings listed in the MSLL
Index confirms. While 1966’s celebrations for the fiftieth
anniversary of the Easter Rising were still fresh in the
memory, plans were being drawn up for demolitions and
clearances, shopping centres and pedestrian zones, plans
which have themselves been constantly regenerated and
renewed, such that the denizens of the street complain of
the fatigue that this state of permanent capitalist revolution
brings, and the newspaper-reading inhabitants of the
city at large tut-tut as they learn of the latest speculative
developments dreamed for the area. This ongoing
‘threat’ to the street was itself, in part, a response to the
perceived threat from the street – Moore Street being
regularly characterised as dirty and chaotic, lined with
tottering buildings that shelter the undesirable and the
undocumented, a place where illegal immigrants and drug
dealers concentrate their erosion of the respectable city,
seemingly without check – a place, in short, in need of a
good hosing down. And both these ideas, of the threat to
and the threat from, linger on still, feeding and sustaining
one another, and informing or colouring any contemporary
conversation about the street and its ‘character’
Earlier in this publication, Martin McCabe lists the
multiplicity of ways in which Moore Street operates and is
read – as place of work, as physical residue of the overlaid
generations of urban planning and design (like some
above-ground archaeology of civic failure), as economic,
cultural and political battleground, as theatre. In thinking
about this last sense, Moore Street can seem somehow
temporally adrift, both anachronistic – a sort of preserved
‘modern’ urban bourgeois space, where distinctly nonbourgeois ‘uses’ and their attendant bustle and noise serve
as spectacle – and contemporary – for who is the spectator
but the financially reinvigorated Irish flâneur? McCabe
writes,
It seems difficult then to separate this traffic in images,
their circulation and use from its political economic
or socio-cultural contexts but it is clear that the
representation of the street is a site for contest and
struggle. Burdened with representations whose motives
and interests are fragmentary, discontinuous and
contradictory, the ‘reality’ and meanings of the street are
overdetermined by its symbolic value and its metonymic
status.
The representations of the street that are documented in
this index both question and contribute to this already
‘burdensome’ archive of images and associations. They are
oddly doubled in this way, balancing within themselves the
‘productive tension’ between being reiterations (repetitions)
of representations, and rearticulations, new constructions,
of Moore Street. But perhaps we can draw out Lefebvre’s
distinction between the ‘representation of spaces’ and
more marginal, interruptive ‘spaces of representation’. The
speculators, developers and city planners all have their
own competing ‘alternative’ representations of the street
(which they all customarily refer to, using that appropriated
religious imagery that comes so easily to capital, as their
‘visions’). We are not faced, then, with a pure dichotomy
– between a uniform centre composed of all those who
would impose change or redevelopment, and a multiple,
radical periphery, engaged in symbolically and creatively
undoing and unravelling these imposed ‘representations’.
The centre is also multiple; radicality, we can see, belongs
to capital too – it too seeks to subvert, but its target is
regulation and state provision and bureaucracy (which is
perhaps the only ‘centre’ there is, caught trying to regulate
between the the citizens and the market). The impossible
view, the third space, might just as easily be an ‘artist’s
impression’ (they have artists too, as well as visions) of a
new development rendered into an impossible perspective,
or seen from an impossible vantage point, in order to make
it more spectacular.
In B. S. Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double
Entry, the hero, who has been nurturing a nascent bad
feeling at the wrongs inflicted upon him by the world,
pauses to consider who it was that decided that a particular
Edwardian office block in Hammersmith should be erected
exactly where it was, thus forcing him, many years later,
to skirt around it in order to reach his destination. Christie
ponders that all such decisions must have been taken by
someone, even if they lived centuries ago; and since all
decisions are the result of someone having owned the land,
or having the right to grant permission, we can continue the
train of Christie’s thinking and conclude that everything
in the modern city is the visible result of a contest, very
often one that took place far in the past. All urban space
is the naturalisation of a particularly mundane ‘violence’
of ownership and exclusion. Christie’s response to this
ancient violence is to take from his pocket a sharp 50 pence
piece and to hold it in his hand as he walks along the street,
scratching a line along the facade of the offending edifice.1
We might view Christie’s action as art, and if we were
to, we might comment that it is a particularly subtle form
of intervention in public space, one which not only does
not add unnecessarily to that which is already there, but
which actually removes something from it – a few microns
of Portland stone from an Edwardian office building – in
order to make its mark. The contemporary artist, walking
unsuspecting into Moore Street with an intention to
interact with it somehow, enters a zone where the multiplycontested ‘visions’ and ‘revisions’ so far discussed are,
perhaps only for a short time, more visible than is usual
elsewhere in the city. The ‘interruptions’ made by the
participants in the Moore Street Lending Library were all,
by and large, transient expressions of some ‘potential state’
of the street; one would not wish them to be fixed or made
permanent, as if they now were themselves to become the
subjects of future representations of the street. The best of
them helped to focus attention on that which was already
there; some had no physical trace at all, except in the
memory of a conversation or an interaction.
Learning by doing
Again and again, in ‘white’, working class, urban
communities across western Europe, fears about
regeneration and gentrification, rather than focusing on
the increasing privatisation of ‘public’ space and the
public sphere, are sublimated into racist resentment of uninvited ‘newcomers’, even when the communities thus
targeted are relatively settled. Rather than exploring the
common ideological and institutional underpinnings
of both racism and working class disenfranchisement
or ‘deterritorialisation’ (and thus suggesting that active
anti-racism might actually be helpful in building broader
solidarities based on both race and class), many critics,
commentators and even sociologists have instead tried
to ‘understand’ expressions of racism as arising from a
perfectly reasonable fear of the ‘many changes’ in the
socio-economic order that have been thrust on working
class communities in the last twenty or so years. Of
course it is easier, as an artist making an ethnographic
foray into the urban environment, to ‘idealise’ one’s
working class subjects, and to suggest that working class
racism isn’t ‘really’ racism at all, but merely a misplaced
misarticulation of other worries, a confused reaction
against a perceived lack of consultation or involvement
in important matters. And so it could have been in Moore
Street, where racist tensions certainly exist, and where
different groups stake their claims to be Irish, or more Irish,
or as Irish. With the State still operating in an explicitly
racist way in its framing not only of law, but also in its
conceptualisation of what ‘Ireland’ is and who the Irish
are, it is not surprising that this simplistic understanding of
racism is so widespread, and so naturalised in our thinking.
With so many participating artists each experiencing
different aspects of Moore Street’s many sites, the Lending
Library, as a collective entity, became the accumulation
of all these sometimes ‘contradictory’ contacts. In its
multidisciplinarity, and its multivocality, its own internal
inconsistency and messy inconclusiveness, the Lending
Library thus found a way to counter the demand for
uniform ‘visions’, and replaced it with a model of
intervention, one which is the basis for further engagement
and not an ‘end’ in itself.
The result is not a lazy pseudo-situationism, a detached
gaze at the street as ‘theatre’, but a short-lived, focused
community of artists learning about the life of one of the
city’s many streets through engagement with its day-to-day
conflicts and contests. One example serves to illustrate this.
A participating artist, having negotiated the siting of their
work (a photograph of the street) in a Chinese grocer’s
shop, was dismayed to find it defaced with a small strip
of black insulation tape. Upon enquiring of the owners
what had happened, the curators learned that the tape
was covering over an illuminated sign in the photograph,
the sign of a competing shop further down the street.
The owner - notwithstanding the possibility that the two
traders may have been friends - didn’t want to advertise the
competition in his own shop.
What is striking about this is the manner in which it
moves the art object from something which ‘frames’ the
Chinese inhabitants of the street, to something which is
framed by them, for they, and not the artist or curators, are
able to read the small piece of text that until then was an
incidental detail. Thus, the question of who ‘belongs’ in
and to this street, and who is constructed as the outsider, is
opened up in an extremely immediate way.
Art must meet and respond to these conflicts that the
contemporary city throws up if it is to have relevance as a
public form, one that is capable of exerting some leverage
on the tired formulations of who, and where, we are, and
what we’re doing here.
Notes
1. B. S. Johnson, 1973, Christie Malry’s Own Double
Entry, London: Collins.
Art, Order and other
Diseased
18 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY
INDEX text: mulloy
John Mulloy
The regulation of bodies and the management of
populations are key issues in contemporary societies and
cultures, dominating both politics and the arts. As a result,
metaphors of the body can be a useful starting point for
exploring current problems around immigration, ‘race’,
community and the local, especially insofar as they impact
on art practices. In particular our physiological model
determines how we read the body, what we think it is and
what we believe creates a diseased state. Is the Irish ‘body
politic’, the politics of Irishness, a static autonomous
system, or can it be re-envisioned as part of a chaotic,
non-linear dynamic whole? Can art practices that focus
on marginalisation be unwittingly complicit in the state’s
production of national identity through categorisation and
exclusion?
Edgar Allan Poe in his classic Gothic horror story of the
Inquisition, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) suggests
that “He who has never swooned, is not he who finds
strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that
glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad
visions that the many may not view.” The ‘swoon’ begins
with a ‘deadly nausea’ followed by a thrill in every fibre
of his body “as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic
battery”. In essence, Poe, in common with much Romantic
thought, is ascribing the roots of creativity to epilepsy and
other forms of ‘divine madness’ usually associated with
notions of freedom and autonomy – a blast of non-rational
inspiration. Recent shifts in thinking in physiology and
pathology however suggest that epilepsy “is finally being
recognized for what it is: an acute attack of order.”1
The basic concept in modernist physiology was that
of ‘homeostasis’, the maintenance of metabolic balance
within an animal by a tendency to compensate for
disrupting changes. The originator of this concept, Claude
Bernard (1813 – 1878) insisted that “the constancy of
the internal environment is the condition for free and
independent life.”2 This idea of a constant internal
environment, unrelated to the external world, in turn
suggested that disease always came from the outside,
from an invasion by some unspecified Other. Homeostasis
implies that the autonomous organism is essentially
passive – rather than being productive of its environment,
it is only capable of minor responses and adjustments to
external changes, and the focus of medicine as a result
switched to identifying new categories of external threat
and developing new strategies to eliminate them. The
role of the physician also changed, becoming autonomous
from the patient, practicing in an interventionist and
experimental manner. The concept of homeostasis was also
applied to sociology, referring to the maintenance
of equilibrium within a social group. In particular, there is a
core ethnos within a nation-state that is seen as eternal and
unchanging. As John O’Donoghue put it recently, “every
new state needs definition.”3 The homeostatic ‘nation’ is
defined by its citizens, those who, in Irish terms, possess
‘Irishness’. Michael McDowell has helpfully defined for us
just exactly what this is: “Irishness is a complex tapestry of
Gaels, Scandinavians, Normans, English, Scots and AngloIrish. Irish culture reflects that complexity and diversity.”4 Thus the Irish ‘body politic’ was born in the period around
1000 - 1600 and has supposedly remained unchanged
since, and of course always excluded the idea of Travellers
having their own space within this static concept.
In the mid-19th century, at the period when Poe was
writing his horror stories and Bernard was developing
his theory, Ireland was routinely portrayed as a prostrate
body suffering the ravages of famine and mass emigration.
Metaphors of fluidity, which commonly dominate
discussions of migration, took on Gothic overtones among
nationalist writers lamenting the draining of the life-blood
of the country, the haemorrhaging of the nation’s youth
and the splintering of its bone and sinew.5 The alternative
to this view was a form of providential Social Darwinism,
mainly confined to writers from England, suggesting that it
was a “stern decree of Providence” that the Irish along with
all the other “feeble tribes” should melt away “like snow
before the sun.”6 Jason King points out that both the Social
Darwinist and Gothic methodologies were dialectically
related to one another, “as enlightenment and counterEnlightenment discourses that illustrate either the rigid
social application or obverse reaction against the rise of
‘instrumental rationality’.”7
As globalisation has developed a pattern of transnational
economics and law-making, the power of the nation-state
has declined, particularly within the EU, increasingly
restricting its sphere of action to the cultural, with an
intense focus on ‘national identity’ and the defence of
external borders. Exacerbated by the so-called ‘War
on Terror’, this has fed into a resurgence of racism,
particularly in the developed countries, and an obsession
with the supposed perils of immigration. During the same
period, the Republic of Ireland has transformed into a
location of net immigration, producing a shift from the
dominance of Gothic imagery in discussing emigration to
Social Darwinism in discussions of immigration. Thus
we are now suffering from ‘floods’, ‘tides’ and other
natural disasters. Gothicism is still around though, with
the ‘haemorrhage’ of old giving way to the ‘vampires’,
‘spongers’ and ‘parasites’ of today. The key issue in both
sets of imagery is “the fundamental passivity of the Irish
nation before migratory pressures that render it prostrate.”8
This passive entity, homeostatically conceived, is
therefore prone to attack by all sorts of alien influences,
which have to be defined and categorised so that the Irish
nation can be inoculated against the various forms of ‘nonnationals’. The state has developed a whole barrage of
powers of exclusion and control, from Direct Provision for
asylum-seekers to the myriad of work permits, work visas,
safe third country agreements, ID cards for non-EU citizens
and so forth, with the level of risk of each group carefully
balanced and managed by the centralised bureaucracy. The
state is therefore continually producing new varieties of
‘non-nationals’, all of whom require special measures and
attention. This endless division of people into categories
is based on the Liberal value that suggests that recognition
of difference will afford respect. In practice it replicates
the power structures of Western imperialism in new forms
of multiculturalism and ‘tolerance’ – ‘putting up with’
the Other. The one thing it guarantees is that the Jews,
the Nigerians, the Polish, the Rumanians, the Chinese
and all the Others can never take part fully in Irishness
–homeostatically fixed as it is at the status quo of four
hundred years ago.
Ronit Lentin argues that the multiculturalist approach,
based on this politics of recognition, “is failing to intervene
in the uneasy interface of minority and majority relations
in Ireland”, and argues for a “politics of interrogation”.9 The politics of recognition has pervaded contemporary
art practices, especially those that seek to be dialogic or
‘socially engaged’, such as the community arts movement.
The problems of such art practices are linked to those
of all movements that seek to use collective action for
social change, such as being prone to exaggerating its own
benefits, being inefficient and even counter-productive.
Much of this stems from the root idea that dialogue is
sufficient: “The multicultural illusion is that dominant
and subordinate can somehow swap places and learn how
the other half lives, whilst leaving the structures of power
intact. As if power relations could be magically suspended
through the direct exchange of experience, and ideology
dissolve into the thin air of face-to-face communication.”10
This politics of recognition underpins many ideas in
contemporary aesthetics. In a detailed exploration of the
notion of fragmentation in art, following the ideas of JeanLuc Nancy, Simon Malpas concludes that art responds
to contemporary fragmentation by activating a sense
of difference – “Art, whether it is classified as high or
popular, activates the sense that difference is. If it doesn’t
do this, it isn’t art.”11 This difference is supposed to show
us the necessity of being in common, similar to the rhetoric
of multiculturalism. While he argues
text: mulloy INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 19
States
that this recognition can then be used as a ground for
questioning the rules and conventions that govern
this differentiated world, experience would seem to
teach otherwise. Relying on the means of distribution
generated by the existing artworld to promote cultural
democracyseems very unwise, and may be simply reprising
the colonial experience, as “sites of cultural difference
too easily become part of the globalizing West’s thirst for
its own ethnicity, for citation and simulacral echoes from
Elsewhere.” 12
The insistence on difference and fragmentation is not
new to the arts, and was particularly championed by the
Goncourt brothers in the mid-19th century. Close friends
of Claude Bernard, they argued that “when the Novel has
undertaken the studies and duties of science, it is able
to claim the liberties and immunities of the former.”13 This autonomy for the artist would then enable him to
display to “the fortunate ones of Paris…miseries that it
is good not to forget”, and this is directly compared to
the actions of “ladies of charity.”14 Thus the artist, like
the scientist can intervene and experiment, guided by a
spirit of benevolence and paternalism towards his passive
subjects. As part of this they promoted the obsession
with difference inherent to modernism, setting the Gothic
and Oriental together and endlessly examining supposed
‘national types’ – creating the categories of Otherness
beloved of ‘scientific’ racism. In their personal lives they
“made a fetish of orderly housekeeping” and suffered
from neurasthenia, the classic disease of the 19th century
bourgeoisie.15 Neurasthenia was regarded as a disease of
civilisation, caused by the body being unable to cope with
the stresses of urban life.
In postmodern physiology, which applies chaos theory
and relativity to the human body, such multi-system
conditions are characterised as “dynamic disorders”,
characterised by a loss of deterministic chaos or
complexity. In this model, a healthy system is chaotic, and
non-linear, by its very variability capable of withstanding
jolts and changes in environmental conditions, being at
once constitutive of and responsive to its environment.16
In contrast, a diseased state is characterised by order,
predictability and stasis. Thus an epileptic seizure can be
predicted by tracking the decrease in chaos and an increase
in order in the epileptic’s brain “as neurons at the seizure’s
focus begin to entice other neurons to fire in sync with
them. This condition, called dynamical entrainment, can
start days before the attack.”17 The ‘blast from God’ is thus
exposed as an attack of order on the dynamic,
chaotic body. In the same way, institutional racism can
be seen as an attack of order on the healthily dynamic,
chaotic body politic, caused by a misreading of variable
environmental changes as an alien attack on a homeostatic
state.
The arts, by focusing obsessively on difference, and by
using the categories developed by the state apparatus in
order to create ‘target groups’ which attract funding, can
exacerbate this misreading. By choosing one or maybe two
contingent aspects of identity in order to create what Grant
Kester calls ‘politically coherent communities’,18 and then
performing their activities in an orthopedic manner, as if
participation in the arts were somehow inherently a moral
good, artists may in fact be operating in contradiction
to their most cherished principles. By becoming part
of a ‘target group’ involved in an art project, people in
marginalized groups may lose some of their freedom
of manoeuvre, and have their position of inequality
emphasised and rendered visible. Thus real equality
of dialogue is rendered impossible while offering the
illusion of access to it. The encounter is then aestheticised,
made into art, and becomes a representation of dialogue.
The image of dialogue can even be confused with the
concept of dialogue, a confusion Levinas describes as
amphibology.19 Dialogues dialogue, but representations of
dialogue just represent. This reading of artistic complicity with the racial state
takes a relatively benign view, rooting it in mistakes caused
by pragmatism when faced with pressure from funders,
from failures in analysis and also the active and ongoing
attempts by the hegemonic systems to incorporate and
neutralise oppositional tendencies. It is possible to be
even more depressingly cynical however. For example,
Julia Kristeva wrote in 1995 that culture and art were
now “impossible”, and that new forms were necessary. Her solution lay in a “culture of revolt”, because “if
the deprived abandoned by the standardizing order, the
jobless young, the homeless, the unemployed, foreigners
and all the rest, have no culture of revolt, they turn to
vandalism.”20 The role of this culture of revolt was to
ensure “the survival of the most free and enlightened
elements of our civilization”, by enabling a cathartic
release that would ensure the maintenance of the status
quo.21 The revolution can then be continually performed
and represented to ensure that it will never really happen,
thus protecting the homeostatic elite. In the end, can
aesthetic acts be seen as an attack of order, interrupting the
health of a locally self-managed chaotic system? Is ‘art’ a
symptom of a diseased state of being?
Notes
1. Crystal Ives, Human Beings as Chaotic Systems, online at http://
www.physics.orst.edu/~stetza/COURSES/ph407h/Chaos.pdf
2. Claude Bernard, 1865, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental
Medicine, quoted in Jonathan Treasure, Physiology and Paradigm 1,
2000, American Herbalists Guild Seminar, Chicago, online at http://
www.herbological.com/herblog/?p=10 3. John O’Donoghue, Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, speaking
on Rattlebag, RTE Radio 1, 25th August 2006. 4. Michael McDowell, 2006, ‘Free from the shackles of nationalist
rhetoric’, Sunday Independent, April 16.
5. Jason King, 2000, ‘Asylum –Seekers and Irish National Sovereignty:
Globalisation, International Migration, and Ireland’s “Refugee Crisis”’
in Ropes (Review of Postgraduate Studies) 8, Galway: National
University of Ireland, pp. 39-53. 6. Sir Francis B. Head, 1852, A Fortnight in Ireland, John Murray,
London, p. 148.
7. King, ‘Asylum –Seekers and Irish National Sovereignty:
Globalisation, International Migration, and Ireland’s “Refugee Crisis”’,
p. 43.
8. Ibid.
9. Ronit Lentin, 2002, ‘Anti-racist responses to the racialisation of
Irishness: Disavowed multiculturalism and its discontents”, in Ronit
Lentin and Robbie McVeigh, eds., Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland,
Belfast: Beyond The Pale , p. 228.
10. Phil Cohen, 1988, ‘Perversions of inheritance: studies in the
making of multi-racist Britain’ in Phil Cohen and H. Baines, eds.,
Multi-Racist Britain, Macmillan, London, quoted in Lentin, p. 229.
11. Simon Malpas, 2003, ‘Touching art: aesthetics, fragmentation and
community’, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The new
aestheticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 93.
12. Homi K. Bhabha, 2003, ‘Postmodernism/Postcolonialism’ in
Robert S.Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2nd Edition), p 449.
13. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1864, Preface to Germinie
Lacerteux, quoted in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger,
eds., 1998, Art in Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 419.
14. Ibid.
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th Edition), 1993, Chicago, Vol. 5, p.
356.
16. Ives.
17. Ives.
18. Grant H. Kester, 2004, Conversation Pieces: Community +
Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California
Press, p. 150.
19. B. C. Hutchens, 2004, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, London:
Continuum, pp. 60-61, 141-143.
20. Julia Kristeva, “What Good Are Artists Today?” in Chambert, ed.,
Strategies for Survival-Now!, p. 32.
21. Kristeva., p. 33.
Memory is more
than an index card
20 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY INDEX text: phelan
Alan Phelan
As someone who works part-time as an archivist, the recent
popularity of archive practice within art has always been of
interest to me. I have myself even used the archive concept,
for one project in particular which utilised archive records
and as a whole presented itself as a kind of ‘living archive’.
Generally archives are repositories, meaning places
where stuff goes to ‘repose’ or lie dormant. But archives
are also places where information can be accessed – not
hermetically sealed for posterity.
The way much archive material is presented in the
art context has to do with presenting raw information.
There is something strangely ‘objective’, it would seem,
about the implications of the archive. I reckon this can
be traced back through contemporary history to the early
days of conceptual art, when lists and index cards were all
the rage. Within most of this work there was the urge to
present pure information without any decorative nonsense.
Stanley Brouwn’s filling drawer piece springs to mind, one
of which was purchased by Tate Modern last year to the
horror of the press and blog community, which contains
1,000 blank index cards.
But there have always been colourful debates criticising
early conceptual work by many of its proponents. Mel
Bochner, for example, never trusted in the transparency
that was being mooted by these artists. As he saw it
there was no new objectivity being forged through these
‘language games’. Other attempts in the 1980s to revive
objectivity by, for example, curator Jean Francois Chevrier,
proved to be short-lived and somewhat faddish. His fetish
for the large, over-sized photograph, provided another
possible trajectory from the Bechers’ deliberate descriptive
images, but art photos have long since shrunk. Maybe I am
being harsh here, as ideas do change and are played out
or acted out over only a limited amount of time. To keep
things fresh ideas are tweaked and morphed into new ones
– which sometimes say the same stuff, but at least the new
language games keep things interesting.
The archive is a useful tool or model in the presentation
of factual information. The pedantic professional archivist
inside me, however, looks at many of these art archives
and scoffs. Too often the ‘archive’ gets used to locate a few
files or documents and this in no way resembles the reality
of any archive, which generally is stuffed to the seams with
hundreds of thousands of documents, many lying around
uncatalogued or non-retrievable for decades. What the
archivist does is provide routes to and into this mass of
information for the researcher.
With art though, it’s all different. The artist is not trying
to be an archivist, and the audience are not researchers.
But in reality that is what is being proposed, as many of
the activities are similar. With much archive-related art
practice, a selection of records are ordered, or numbered,
and sometimes catalogued or at least listed. The key here
is the selection which is presented to an audience. Calling
the selection an ‘archive’ implies that there is much more
stuff somewhere else, but the artist has selected a range of
material for the audience. Rarely are there enough records
to create that the critical information-mass that an archive
should contain.
What these selections or partial archives present is
the opposite of objective raw information, but rather
a subjective glimpse for the viewer / researcher. If the
archive model is taken to the next logical turn, the viewer /
researcher surveys the material and goes off and writes up
the research. Now this is foolish in an art context, as what
happens is that the viewer has to decide where meaning lies
from the clues presented by the artist. The narrative is not
directly centred on the raw material but in the space around
and between it.
There have been many incidents recently where this has
worked and others where the archive becomes something
else entirely. The General Idea archive material presented
at Project recently created an odd hagiography to queer
art practice, and although dubbed ‘a partial retrospective’,
it left out decades of actual practice to make its few but
interesting observations. Neva Elliot’s Archiving Limerick
project as part of the Fresh collections show at LCGA used
the archive model to document numerous encounters the
artist had with local leisure and hobbyist groups. Many of
the files however were pretty empty and it was far more
interesting hearing from the artist herself about her many
strange and wonderful experiences ranging from youth
drama to retired writing clubs. The Moore Street Lending
Library collected information rather than presenting an
existing archive – similar to Elliot but with tighter sociogeographical limits. The results were also presented on
site and not in a gallery, maintaining a strong link between
site and content. This is where the living archive remains
as true as possible to its participants, and where there is
no attempt to translate or distil the material for an art
audience. What happens next with the MSLL will be
interesting to see.
It was also refreshing to see Sarah Pierce’s approach in
her recent Project show in complicating further the notion
of the archive, by mixing remakes of iconic sculptures with
borrowed maquettes, drawings from her mother and letters
from a Kent State University archive. Theodor Adorno may
have described the museum a mausoleum of artworks, but
when there is a good range of material presented, life can
be again infused into dead old records.
First published in the Sept / Oct 2006 edition of the Visual
Artists News Sheet, published by Visual Artists’ Ireland.
www.visualartists.ie
SANKEY INDEX
QRS
MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 21
Sankey, Katherine
I visited the Moore Street Lending Library, hosted
by The Firestation Artists’ Studios, during the
autumn of 2005. The archive element of the project
appeared to be integrating successfully with the
local shops and traders, with commercial ephemera
and old photographs being donated. Katherine
Sankey, an Australian artist who lives in the area, had
initiated the proposal for a public street art project,
in this busy shopping precinct. The later curatorial
structures of the project, when applied by the team at
Firestation Studios, appeared to separate the elements
of the street into a distinctly articulated process. The
street performance characteristics were subsumed in
some sense into formal sensibilities of an interesting
archive project.
Having a conversation with Katherine Sankey
about her work, and visiting her video installation
in a nearby Chinese supermarket, persuaded me
that I should further this conversation at her studio,
which is in Summerhill. The initial interpersonal
elements of the video, which was projected internally
onto an elliptical screen in the front window of the
shop, involved collaboration and negotiation with
the Chinese owners. I was struck by the sense of
enjoyment and respect with which these people
assisted with the installation. She explained the
long process, whereby not only the shop, but also
the stallholders on the street were an element of the
negotiation, for the flower- and vegetable-sellers
essentially control the space in front of the shop, the
street itself. To allow the viewers to watch the video,
it was necessary to stand in the middle of the flowersellers’ street space. These negotiations and personal
interventions with the local community are an
essential element of Sankey’s practice, accentuated
by her personal involvement over the years with
the local community in the socially diverse vicinity
of the north inner city.
In her studio, there was a real sense of development,
from performance work she had made in Poland,
to more fine art-orientated subject matter of her
Paris period. These appeared to coalesce, through a
process of observation and integration, around her
own personal exploration of identity. Having an
Australian mother, and an Irish father, being brought
up and educated in Sydney, and afterwards travelling
and living in Europe, her art process seemed to
reflect these diverse elements. These multi-layered
cultural and geographical sources of her practice
are latent characteristics of such experiences. The
diverse motifs of an iconographical nature in her
older work, where Aboriginal symbols appear
organically to interface with a sense of remembered
place, also espouse a landscape tradition, distinctly
related to the fine art practices of Western art. This
evocation of other elements not notionally considered
sympathetic have, in her formal two-dimensional
work, intriguingly diverse appropriations of material
and ritual objects, which coalesce into a personalized
motif, within the context of iconography and
symbolic structure.
I think that this process appears to have discovered
its own methodology in the practice of Public Art.
The integration of multiple perspectives from diverse
groups of people in a given place, or space, directly
reference her own internal dynamic.
Ciaran Bennett
President, International Association of Art Critics /
AICA (Ireland)
22 MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY
Louisa Sloan
INDEX
sloan – walsh
text: Susan Gogan
TUVW
Walsh, Ciaran
An informal opportunity arising out of the first few
days of the MSLL project led to me spending about
a week and a half of October 2005 down in the
space working on a sort of aspirational model for the
Moore Street area. A lot of time was spent interacting
with the activities of the MSLL space on site, as well
as conversing with the other artists, local people and
curious passers-by.
Part of the point of the model project was to source
all the materials from the street itself; the thick
gauge, gaudily-coloured cardboard of the friut
packaging that dictated an aesthetic that was almost
child-like in its representation. A memory of the
childhood joy experienced in the construction of
this kind of model forms part of the appeal of such a
work, and this provides for an interplay with the core
concepts of local concerns over gentrification and
public space use.
For me, these kind of models, fictional architecture
based on existing and familiar locations, operate as
part of a triangle of locations:
Location 1 The real world familiar locale - let’s call
it place X.
Location 2 The modified represenation (incorporating
fictional architectural or geographic elements) of
place X in the form of a model or architectural
sketch.
Location 3 A synthesis of the two in the mind of the
viewer, creating a fused third space. This third space
has binary properties; it is at one time a negotiation
of the drawing/model in relation to the viewer’s own
memory and experience of place X, and then also a
memory of the model/drawing on the next occasion
that the viewer is actually in place X.
walsh – end INDEX MOORE STREET LENDING LIBRARY 23
www.ciaranwalsh.com
XYZ
/end
MOORE STREET
LENDING LIBRARY
MSLL/CREDITS 1
1/2
Moore Street Lending Library was initiated by Firestation
Artists’Studios and Katherine Sankey, and curated by
Sandra Grozdanic, Declan Sheehan and Sally Timmons,
assisted by Minna Oberg. It was open from September 27th to
October 15th 2005, at 55 Moore Street, Dublin 1.
This index was designed and edited by Daniel Jewesbury, and
printed by Spectator Newspapers, Bangor, Co. Down.
Thanks to all of the artists and writers who participated:
John Beattie, Mark Clare, Duncan Crowley, desperate
optimists, Susan Gogan, Sara Greavu, Amanda Healy, Daniel
Jewesbury, Glenn Loughran, Emer O’Boyle, Cica Moraes, Raul
Arojo, Feme Latief, Katherine Sankey, Sarah Kenny, Maeve
´ Cuilibin, Sarah Pierce,
McElligott, Alan Magee, Sharon Ni
Louisa Sloan, Ciaran Walsh, Martin McCabe, John Mulloy,
Alan Phelan, Fiona Larkin, Micheal Ryan, Haras Ynnek and
Ciaran Bennett.
/contd.
MSLL/CREDITS 2
2/2
Clodagh Kenny & Liz Burns at Firestation; Finola Jones;
Imelda Farrell; Eamon Martin; Mannan; Songa; Genevieve
Kearins; Margaret Buckley; May Gorman, Queen of Moore
´ Merry Doyle; Shane
Street;Val Connor; Liam Nolan; Se
Cullen; Ken McCue; Sunniva O’Flynn; Mandy O’Neill; Ethna
O’Regan. Richmond Marketing; Dublin Fringe Festival; AOS
Planning; Jane Speller + City Arts Archive.
And to the sellers, buyers, dealers, traders, footpads,
patriots, pickpockets, heroes, drunks, idlers, scholars and
passers-by of MOORE STREET, DUBLIN ONE.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Sarah
Kenny: her work on msll was just one part an art career full
of memorable work looking at contemporary ireland with a
uniquely caustic, incisive, and savagely funny vision: her
death is a real loss to us all.