аЯрЁБс>ўџ ƒ…ўџџџ‚џџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџџьЅС@ јП![jbjb‹ю‹ю РсŒсŒ!UџџџџџџlЂЂЂЂЂЂЂ^^^^^r$^Ѕ$ЂИИИИИИИbdddddd,Щ щhЂИИИИИЮЂЂИИЂЮЮЮИRЂИЂИbЮЖT TЂЂЂЂИbЮ”ЮbЂЂb– ˆР?П^^ ФbbЅЅbQЮQbЮУхMaking a living from Art: Eamon O'Kane interviewed by Anja Musjat ' Q - In the introduction to the 2nd edition of A Buyer’s Guide to Irish Art, editor Jane Humphries notes that the days when Irish artists were working in the shadow of the big literary tradition are long gone and that Irish artists are now receiving some long overdue attention from the world’s art critics. Not only older artists are being rediscovered in recent years. A lot of the interest in Irish art nationally and internationally is due to the ascendance of younger generations of artists. Do you think the current climate is a particularly exciting one for Irish artists? A -I think there’s a lot happening in Irish art at the moment because a lot of younger Irish artists feel that they can make an impact through the fact that the Irish economy is buoyant and there’s a lot of opportunities available to them through the Arts Council and different awards that were not necessarily there before. So I think in the next few years we’ll see a lot of these artists having more possibilities on the international stage rather that being confined to a purely Irish context. I don’t necessarily think that the current climate is as interesting as some might say in terms of Irish artists, because there have always been Irish artists working. I just think that there is now a tendency to view Irish art as being Irish without having to connect it to what’s going on in Britain. There is more of a tendency to see someone like Willie Doherty as a Northern Irish artist rather than being a British artist. I think, with the drive to promote the older generations of Irish artists such as Tony O’Malley in places like the U.S. and Denmark, there has been created a healthy climate in which Irish art can be viewed in relation to what was going on during those artists’ careers and the careers of more international artists such as Asger Jorn for example. I think people like James Coleman, a more contemporary artist, has always been recognised and respected as an artist and that is shown through his inclusion in the last two Documenta exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. The most striking difference I see in the last few years, and I think the same goes for many other sectors in Ireland, is that Irish artists don’t feel the need to move abroad. There is still quite a strong grouping of Irish artists living in England and in the U.S., but there is less of a tendency for Irish artists to feel that they have to move abroad in order to make it on the international scene. This has partly got to do with the institutions within Ireland gaining a lot more respect through the exhibitions they organise. Places like the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Ormeau Baths Gallery (Belfast), and the long track record of the Orchard Gallery (Derry) in showing big and emerging international names as well as emerging national artists, have allowed Irish artists to be seen within an international context. But you are based in England at the moment – why is that? I think it is incredibly important for a young artist to move around and to get their work seen – why do it otherwise? I have used various travel awards to do this – with the Tony O’Malley Award for instance, I spent seven weeks travelling across fourteen states in America researching a major project which I am still working on three years later. A few years ago I was based in Cheltenham in England for nine months doing a research fellowship and I had my own studio within an art college. I had to teach one day a week which provided me with invaluable experience and I could work in the studio 24 hours a day if I wanted to. I decided that England would be a good place to spend some more time as there are a lot of major competitions and other opportunities available to artists based in England that were not available to me when I was in Ireland. I also felt I needed a distance from the Irish art scene for a while to develop as a professional artist. Being in close proximity to London is incredibly important as it enables me to keep up with what’s going on there in terms of exhibitions as well as developing contacts and approaching galleries there. I have recently been taken on by a gallery in Frankfurt and Berlin and being closer to mainland Europe is a significant bonus. I also wanted to lecture in Fine Art and it is incredibly competitive to get a position in this area both in England and in Ireland so when I got the opportunity to do so in Bristol I felt it was the right decision to make. Balancing a full-time lecturing position and a full-time art practice demands a lot of discipline and support. But because the university I work for is keen to have their academics engage in research I am able to get time off to have exhibitions and make work. I am currently in charge of over a hundred students, which is both challenging and rewarding. Regular contact with the students keeps me critically aware but also opens up new ways of looking at things. And it doesn’t look as if student numbers are likely to decrease either in England or in Ireland. Why do you think so many young people choose to go to art college at the moment? I think the reason young people go to art college has more to do with a natural urge towards creativity that is then supported through an interest in the arts nationally and internationally. I think art students or parents for that matter have caught up with the fact that a student doing an art degree will have a lot of possibilities afterwards. They are definitely not confined to becoming an artist – in fact only a very small minority do go on to become artists afterwards. All young children experience art in primary school and I think that this early period of creative energy stays with some children through secondary school and they feel an impulse to act on it. How did your own primary degree at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin prepare you for becoming a practising artist? During the final year of my degree in Painting and Art History at NCAD we had a lot of encouragement to document our work as good documentation is paramount to presenting your work to galleries etc. But there was not much support in going about that and finding out how one documents the work. That sort of information was given on an ad hoc basis which meant that if a student asked a staff member to help them document the work or wanted to talk about the documentation they would - but there was no sort of drive to actually teach all students how to document the work properly. Later on in the final year at NCAD we were given lectures about preparing for becoming artists, but these were few and far between and usually involved a guest speaker coming in to talk about either an art magazine or a museum or a gallery and the emphasis was not on students putting together a professional practice folder which I have come across within teaching since. This has possibly changed over the years but a lot of my peers and myself would have greatly benefited from taking part in some sort of professional practice structure running through the course. During the BA degree I got into the habit of putting applications together for bursaries and travel awards whereas a lot of other people would not have had to deal with writing up their CV until they had to do it for the final degree catalogue. Because I started applying for awards quite early on, in a very organic way I began to also apply for exhibitions and introducing my work to galleries. It seemed quite logical to begin exhibiting whilst I was a student. What happened after the BA? Did a lot of people see themselves as full-time artists or did they go into post-graduate studying or changed direction completely? It wasn’t necessarily so predictable as to who was to continue making art work, but in terms of the amount of people who got into post-graduate studying in the years after, I would say that compared to other years, a lot of students from my year, at least from the painting department, did go on to either post-graduate courses or continued working on their practice. The most recognised post-graduate course in Ireland at that time was in Belfast at the University of Ulster. Now the NCAD MA degree has got a lot bigger than it used to be and there are other emerging MA’s throughout Ireland. In Limerick, where I taught last year, there’s a new MA by research and a proposed taught MA. There are also a lot of MA’s in Multimedia which quite a number of students that were on my course enrolled on. As an artist you have constantly kept up to date with the development of the multimedia world in relation to fine art. Why do you think it’s so attractive to combine the two worlds? The thing about art colleges today and fine art degrees in particular is that over the last number of years fine art has been viewed as being a corner stone for multimedia companies, not just within Ireland but also internationally. The potential of fine artists for coming up with ideas and new ways of looking at the world which are not connected to a certain type of established design practice has been latched on to by a lot of multimedia institutions and this means that students have a lot of possibilities when graduating from a Fine Art degree that they would not have had ten years ago. Both established and emerging companies have realised that it’s so important to have a visual identity which is largely promoted through the web but also in hard copy, magazines etc, and that means they want new ways of looking at things, not necessarily linked to traditional design strategies. Graphic Design students will of course react to and work with this trend but Fine Art graduates, especially if they do an additional post-graduate course in Multimedia, have the potential to look at the set of problems and work with a team in a completely different way. I personally did an MFA in Design Technology in New York in order to make my video work and find new ways to document, show and promote my art work. I also realised that there are lots of issues within new technology that are of interest to artists and this has come to play a key role in my art work. Compared to other countries, do you think Ireland has enough support and opportunities for the country’s younger artists? Yes, Ireland has got quite a lot of opportunities most of which come out of the Arts Councils in the South and the North which are directed at supporting artists in their practice and these range from travel awards and material awards to residences and so on. And there is also a number of corporate awards like the AIB Award which is primarily given to emerging artists. As well as those there are awards that come out of different institutions – the Royal Hibernian Academy has the Elizabeth Fitzpatrick Bursary, the Royal Dublin Society offers the Taylor Art Award which has grown over the years and become important for recognising young artists and then the Tony O’Malley Award which is administered by the Butler Gallery. I received all three of those at different stages in my early career and they have had a huge impact on my art practice. Furthermore, Ireland has a long tradition for open submission competitions that cover a wide range of levels. Yes, there’s a chance to practice submitting art work already at a young age with the Texaco Art Awards. This competition attracts a huge number of submissions each year and awards prizes in different age groups for 5 to 18 year-olds. Children and teenagers are often encouraged to submit paintings they have worked on at school. Then there is the Taylor competition, Iontas, Oireachtas, and RHA open submission exhibitions, all of which attract submissions from professional as well as amateur artists. On a more contemporary art level there is the EV+A and Perspective which both have very international profiles. Perspective is a very different exhibition from EV+A because there is a lot less artists involved in the show and it takes place in one gallery, i.e. the Ormeau Baths, whereas the EV+A exhibition is displayed in a large number of venues throughout the city. EV+A furthermore has several smaller prizes where Perspective has one major Ѓ6,000 prize. There are of course never as many winners as one would like, but one has to be persistent and determined and just keep applying for awards and submitting work for competitions. I have been lucky to get some awards, but the number of rejection letters I have received greatly exceeds the number of awards. And these exhibitions are not all centered in Dublin or Belfast? Every region seems to be getting a very strong arts centre or gallery these years. A lot of these exhibitions allow artists to disseminate their work to a much wider audience by touring round the country. This has a knock-on effect not only in terms of what the participating artists’ CVs look like and the possible commercial success of the work, but also in terms of introducing art into a much wider general public awareness. The EV+A has a very strong presence in Limerick each year because it is spread out in a relatively small city. The Crawford Open in Cork is also an emerging open exhibition which is similar to but not as well funded as Perspective. And people do travel to the openings of these shows which gives a great dynamic to the regional art scene. Both new art centres emerge such as Draэocht and older ones like the Limerick City Gallery of Art, and the Model Arts Centre in Sligo etc. have been given funding to develop and be redesigned. The Letterkenny Arts Centre is going to be redeveloped significantly in the near future and so there’s generally more support for artists working in rural areas. Part of their agenda is to get the local community involved both through the exhibitions and performances and through workshops and talks, but not all places are perhaps successful in that respect. Residences also form an important part of the Irish art culture. Yes there are several residency programmes artists can apply for both in Ireland and abroad. In recent years EV+A for instance has developed their cash prizes into residency prizes giving artists the opportunity to go to places such as Trinidad and South Africa. There are more established residency programmes such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Artist’s Work Programme and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan. For many years artists from both the South and the North of Ireland have been able to apply for a fantastic opportunity through their respective Arts Council, i.e. the PS1 Programme in New York. The selected artists are able to spend a year working in a studio at the PS1 Museum of Modern Art in Queen’s University (Belfast) and are given accommodation and material support. Such an experience is invaluable for any artist and this type of support should be greatly encouraged and built on within both Arts Councils as it hugely increases the profile of Irish art internationally. Does the Irish government provide other forms of financial support for artists? Fortunately the Irish government has decided, for some reason, that the arts form a very important part of the Irish cultural heritage. So they have made the income artists gain from the sale of their art work tax exempt up to a certain level. There was even a rumour at one point that the German artist Anselm Kiefer considered moving to Ireland because of that rule, but he ended up going to France because they have a rule about artists getting a percentage of the profits when their work is being re-sold. The Irish government has also been quite forward-thinking in trying to attract film-making companies to Ireland and I think it is great to acknowledge that Ireland can only improve as a country through allowing that form of creativity to flourish. It’s one of the great strengths of Irish culture that we do have that creativity. But do you think that, realistically, Irish artists are able to support themselves solely through making their art work? There has certainly been more money going towards art in recent years because of the general well-being of the economy, but realistically, no, very few artists are able to live comfortably off their work. From my own experience, I find that whatever money I have been able to make from sales just goes straight into producing more work. Before the Celtic Tiger, there was hardly any money in Irish art. In the 1980’s when artists were rocketing to super-stardom in places like New York and London that just didn’t happen in Ireland because for many years it was just a complete desert in terms of visual culture. You do have big sales and so on in Ireland, and the market is growing, but I don’t think it’s ever going to reach the same level as big American or European collectors for example. You do have Irish collectors but they are on a completely different scale. Previously, when I have exhibited in Dublin, I may have sold individual pieces to collectors, whereas I recently had the experience of selling a large number of works to one collector in Europe through my German gallery. How would you describe a typical Irish art collector? From my experience Irish collectors tend to be a lot more conservative than their American or European counterparts. There seems to be an urge to collect works that are safe bets, works that connect with older traditions within Irish art. This is both because of a certain element of nostalgia for times gone by and also because people buy to invest – works that have become part of the Irish history of painting through art critics’ evaluations will inevitably be more sought after and thus fetch higher prices. I find that private collectors who have bought my work have done so because they liked it, not because they saw it as an investment. There seems to be developing a younger generation of collectors who have grown up during the economic boom and come into money and they are excited by contemporary art and go to galleries and museums and want to own young artists’ work. This is mainly happening in Dublin I think, not so much in Belfast. But there is still not enough support towards keeping important works by young artists in the country. Is there a discrepancy between how much the disposable income the private collectors have gained in recent years and how much (or little) the funding for museums’ collections has increased? You have got somewhere like the Irish Museum of Modern Art which has a great international reputation and yet depends largely on donations of artworks or borrowing artworks to beef up the collection, which is a very precarious way of developing the museum. IMMA’s budget for acquiring new work is pretty appalling and it hasn’t had the years to build a collection like its European counterparts. It makes it very difficult to provide a context in which Irish art can be seen on an international stage within Ireland and it can become problematic in later years when gaps become more evident. But on the other hand younger artists such as yourself do get represented in the collections of public buildings with commissions through the Per Cent for the Arts scheme. Yes that is good – you have various educational institutions and government buildings and also collections such as the Bank of Ireland and the AIB will probably be quite representative of what’s going on, but it seems as if these places only buy because they have to. I’d be concerned that if something like the Per Cent for the Arts scheme became unfashionable people wouldn’t continue to do that. And it’s one thing having dispersed collections of art that have been built up over the years throughout Ireland – it will be difficult ever to show such a collection in its entirety. It’s different if you’ve got a collection in a museum like IMMA where at least they can show their works on a rotation. There is not enough forward-thinking in this respect and also media-based art forms such as video and photography are not as well represented as they should be, although there has been quite a good drive to fill in those gaps within institutions. Hopefully this will continue in the future. We thank Eamon O'Kane for supplying the images used in this article. They are all from the AKA series' Acrylic on board, 17 X 12cm, 1999-2001 Eamon O’Kane was born in Belfast in 1974. He graduated from The National College of Art & Design in Dublin 1996. He received a Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Ulster in 1998. In 2001 he completed a second Masters Degree in Design Technology at Parsons School of Design, New York, USA. He has had over fifteen solo exhibitions including shows at 011 Podium, Tilburg, Holland; Neuffer am Park, Pirmasens, Germany; Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast; Orchard Gallery, Derry; Butler Gallery Kilkenny; IAC, New York; Galerie 21, Malmo, Sweden; Overgaden, Copenhagen; Galerie Schuster, Frankfurt. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Galerie Schuster & Scheuermann, Berlin; Galerie Lutz & Thalman, Zurich. Group exhibitions include: 12th Mostyn Open, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno; Crawford Open 2, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork; EV+A 1999, 2001, 2002, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick; Perspective 1998, 2000, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast. He lives in Bristol and lectures at the University of the West of England. Anja Musiat is the Project Administrator for Picture This Moving Image, a Bristol-based organisation that promotes artists’ film and video and is the Overseas Editor of the Danish dance magazine Terpsichore. 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