V22 ASHWINSTREET

DOG YEARS

Received opinion has it that one human year equates to seven dog years. This allows me to believe that my beloved spaniel Dillan (1985-2001) lived to the venerable age of 112––though it also forces me to accept that his brother Chester (1985-1993) was gathered to God at the pre-retirement age of 56. The fact that dogs boast so many centenarians perhaps casts some doubt on the accuracy of human-canine longevity quotients. When quizzed about the title of his and Eoin Donnelly’s show, Alex Robbins replied that the phrase ‘Dog Years’ was less a declaration of interest in the anthropomorphising of canine longevity than ‘a familiar way to render time as a mutable entity, based on a different perspective.’ ‘The mammal connection’, he added, ‘is not specifically important.’ Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wondering where other living things might fit into this temporal picture. Trees, for example, which seem mere accretions of time, yardsticks by which the longevity of all other life is measured. Robbins’ large sculptural drawing Redwood (2006) is based on a cross section of a tree, using wire to depict the years of growth. Rather than being seduced, as too many sculptors have been, by the fibrous solidity of that growth, by its tactile ‘integrity’, Robbins ignores it, extracting the dendrological information and reconstituting it diagrammatically as a concentric arrangement of fences––the kind of man-made object that might once have existed in proximity to the original tree.

Elsewhere, Robbins explores different ways of confronting the propriety of a material with the identity of an object. In Sceptre (2005), a rope-like implement made from scrap copper cable, the associations of the work’s title are skewed by an elegantly primitive construction, making the object more like the incantatory device of some freelance urban shaman than an item of monarchic pomp. Closer examination reveals it to be a sort of portmanteau object: one end is clearly a noose, while the other resembles a loo brush. The copper is not used to imply a symbolic ‘conducting of spiritual energy’, but rather mediates bathetically between two contrasting functions: execution and cleaning a toilet. The tool of a genuine multi-tasker, then. But this rhetoric of function is built ‘from the ground up’ (as Robbins puts it) rather than by using that more traditional format of the composite object, the assisted readymade: the unlikely conjoining of objects has been ‘discovered’ empirically in the material itself rather than established at the outset and merely executed.

Despite their more schematic appearance, a similarly organic empiricism pervades Eoin Donnelly’s paintings, which deploy symbolic language while holding allegory at bay––sometimes by undermining the specificity of a given motif with the use of divergent pictorial values. This latter tendency is most explicit in Mammoth (2006), in which the outline of the prehistoric mammal has been cut out of board. Within this mammoth-shaped ‘canvas’ we see an area of landscape where, logically, the animal’s body should continue; the bristles of its back are readable as a grassy horizon, the shaped canvas being used to create a figure-ground ambiguity. In the more enigmatic The Thought Unthunk (2006), two Aztec-style pyramids float one above the other against a Rothko-esque background. The lower pyramid, constructed of stone, contains a furnace whose convection, it seems, enables the upper (wooden) one to levitate. This gauche conjuring trick is glossed by the title, whose vernacular participle suggests that the ‘thought’––and by implication the ‘subject’ of the painting––has not yet come to pass, the initially literal teleology of the two elements being denied by a negational proposition. Pedants may be tempted to correct the title to ‘unthought’, which is presumably exactly what Donnelly wants. But this isn’t a ‘proper’ word either: the fact that the grammar of ‘unthunk’ is more comprehensively wrong better emulates the grammar of the painting than would the use of a standard participle, and perhaps better consolidates Donnelly’s stated desire to depict ‘a cleavage between an idea and its realisation’. Other paintings pursue this aim in less gnomic fashion. In the round Earth Painting, the red circle that contains the Earth prevents us from reading the surrounding black as outer space, changing its representational timbre from something seen ‘from the moon’ to a motif on a bowling ball. Crooked Houses (2006) depicts two houses arranged in apparent rotational symmetry, but the visual transposition implied by the rotational symmetry is countered by the obvious subtle differences in handling: laying one house on the other would undermine rather than uphold the geometric logic that is being invoked. And yet it is our anticipation of this undermining that gives the painting its autonomy.

Alongside these paintings are two more pictorially straightforward ones that preside over the show with a sense of implied historical narrative, perhaps helping to ground Donnelly’s interest in esoteric symbolism. The inscrutable beast-like man in Cynic (2006) refers directly to the itinerant and (apparently) ‘dog-like’ Cynics, who practiced an often perverse philosophy noted for its bizarre pedagogical methods. Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, was reputed to have died from eating raw octopus in order to demonstrate a point about the ‘unnaturalness’ of cooking, and was also (according to the 2005 edition of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) once caught masturbating in a market square, remarking that ‘it was a pity hunger could not be assuaged so easily’. Duns (2006) obviously refers to John Duns Scotus. He invented the dunce’s cap, whose conical form would, maintained the scholastic theologian, facilitate the efficient channelling of knowledge into his pupils’ minds. It has since endured as a signifier of stupidity––perhaps, we may dare to venture, as a result of his pupils’ initial failure to grasp his notoriously hair-splitting hermeneutics. Such inadvertent subversion is clearly significant for Donnelly, who professes an interest in ‘how something dumbly literal can prick the seriousness of something weighty and oblique.

Scotus’s dunce’s cap was an early example of pseudo-science, a theme that also informs some of Alex Robbins’ work (most notably Sceptre). When I visited Robbins’ studio he described, at some length, his fascination with an early 20 th Century faith healer, Dr. Ruth B. Drown, who constructed a device that she believed could heal patients on the other side of the world. On being contacted by a sick patient in, say, Calcutta , Dr. Drown would place a sample of that patient’s blood in her device and then transmit the ‘cure’ for their ailment in the form of radio waves. Basically, Robbins explained, her ‘surgery’ was a small broadcasting room, filled with many knobs and valves. ‘Sounds very much like 20 th Century sculpture to me,’ I replied, mentally arraigning examples that ran from Beuys’s Earth Telephone to Brian Griffiths’s early work. The appeal of Drown’s device, we seemed to agree, lay in the subjective consideration of a thing made for entirely objective reasons, albeit highly contentious and indeed delusional ones. There are few things more aesthetically compelling than the paraphernalia of the pseudo-scientist, being as they often are of a complexity designed to divert our attention from a bogus objectivity. Not that Robbins’ interest in Drown’s work lies in its status as ‘flawed science’: ‘If it was art, I would not pay as much attention to it. It is the element of true faith in the materiality of radio waves that makes her practice intriguing to me. While her practice was eventually dispelled as pseudo-science by the scientific community, she never admitted defeat. Faith can never be tested empirically, and will always reign supreme.’

The relationship between aesthetic intent and a perceived objectivity clearly preoccupies Robbins, but is explored in more subtle fashion than by simply invoking the visual rhetoric of pseudo-science. Rather, a ‘truth to materials’ (which we might call an ‘intuitive’ objectivity) is offset by a conceptual/semantic infidelity. The lead piece Shield (2006), for example, explores the difference between the abstract and concrete definitions of its title: lead is thought of as a highly efficient ‘protective’ barrier in a general sense, and yet is also the worst possible metal for the specific combat object we see depicted here. Even when used ‘nominally’, titles perform an important role in Robbins’ work, in this instance allowing him to conflate material propriety and material impropriety. Majestic (2006), for which he has simply carved the one-word title out of a plaster block, seems an acknowledgement of the importance of language in the work.

Sean Ashton - 02 June 2006