Irish Arts Review

4 for MayAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 2, No. 2, Celebrating the 20th Irish AntiqueDealers' Fair, 5th-10th August 1985, Dublin (Summer, 1985), p. 65Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491779 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS VISITED

4 for May Mary Burke, Eithne Carr, Jane Proctor, Maeve Monahan: four young women artists who work in the New Art Studios, a space subsidized by the Arts Council, were showing recent work in May. The most interesting work was that of the print-maker Maeve Monahan, who combined text and images in a humour ous, sharp, clear style. Mary Burke showed a series of paintings of stylized bedclothes, the planes of the crumpled sheets depicted for their formal cubistic plasticity. These paintings reminded me of the series of black and white photo graphs of unmade beds by the American artist-photographer Diana Michener, but they were altogether richer, firstly in the pure formalism of the shadow-and-white planes of the sheets, and secondly in the strong presence of the absent sleepers

who had left their imprint on sheets and pillows, so that the works had both a sculptutal and graphic quality. Photo graphy has this ability to be sculptural in a conceptual manner by depicting interior and exterior volumes, simultaneous absence and presence, in a way that 'hand-made' media such as painting or drawing cannot do.

The medium itself interferes with the concept. Mary Burke's paintings, for example, are almost too engrossed with the painterly aspects of colour and painted surface to be able to explore the further dimensions of her subject matter.

Dorothy Walker

Tomi Ungerer Tomi Ungerer's show at the Guinness Hop Store, Dublin, was an incredibly tasteless mess. It had been banned in

London by the GLC. Even Ken Living stone couldn't stomach it. Ungerer is an idiosyncratic mixture of Beatrix Potter and Grosz, with some contemporary trendy touches, just to show that he's a

NOW artist. His sculpture, aside from a few cute

animal pieces, is of the limp-penis and death variety. A veritable array of objets trouve's faces: mop-face, brush-face, rake face, shovel-face, trowel-face; all of them

with a limp-penis nose and no testicles. Then there are the death pieces: a shot undershirt, an undershirt stabbed with a

blunt table knife, a circular saw mutila tion 'a la James Bond, and giant nails through see-no-evil eyes. And if all that castration stuff might seem a bit over done, what about the big black American football player, all hulking body and giant hands, with a long snout with a rhino horn? You might find it just a trifle racist? But then how about the baseball player, his grinning white teeth set in that black-face, the animal grace? You know what they say about blacks, don't you?

A considerable amount of the material in the show is North American. He has a series of studies of dilapidated beach shacks and some miserable pieces of industrial junk. Ungerer is kind to the junk; it's the people he treats as trash,

mainly the women. Ungerer's men are seen as victims or props. What he is doing is a cheap-shot but he doesn't really pull it off because it's lopsided.

If Ungerer sees men as castrated, he makes no bones about women as cas trators. Take his Venus in Furs, the sado

masochist schtick. She's skeletal, so you feel she's rotten under the skin; blame it all on Mame boys. Ungerer has a whole wall of truly hideous women. I could practically smell the corruption; those with flesh have breasts that assault rather than nurture, nipples like bullets.

Ungerer's women are dead or dying but they are destroyers rather than victims.

He gets his own back with a Barbie-doll series: a Barbie legs and bottom impaled on a douche nozzle, a Barbie-doll hooked up to a sodomizing machine, another with a hose-pipe up her funda ment, and one with her head connected to her genitals. It was quite the sickest stuff I've seen and made his Story of 0 drawings look like illustrations for a bed time story; maybe they are. Just to show that he's really a nice family man,

Ungerer included a few pencil drawings of ducks, cats, kids, and his passively pre gnant wife. Ungerer doesn't dislike all women; he only dislikes those he doesn't control.

A competent illustrator, if a bit old fashioned, Ungerer produces cartoons that are clever and a bit nasty; but they lack the insight of cartoons by Thurber or Steinberg or Steig. As to his women, Ungerer calls himself a feminist. But as any child can tell you, it's not the words that count; just look at the pictures.

H-ar-iet Cooke

-65

The Irish Jewish Museum The Irish-Jewish Museum, at Walworth Road, Dublin 8, was founded with the aim of recording the cultural and artistic history of Irish Jews from the 1660s to the present day.

The Museum contains art objects such as synagogue jewellery, silverware, old Hebrew and Jewish religious books, his toric documents, photos, and paintings by Jewish artists in Ireland from the 18th century onwards.

The official opening ceremony, and unveiling of the Foundation Stone, are to be performed by H.E. Chaim Herzog, President of Israel, during his state visit to Ireland from June 17th to 20th 1985.

Should any readers of Irish Arts Review possess articles of Jewish religious cultural interest in the above-mentioned categories, which they might be prepared to donate or else lend to the Museum, please could they contact:

Dr. G. Tolkin, Chairman, Irish-Jewish Museum Committee, 12 Greenfield Crescent,

Dublin 4.

R.H.A. This June the R.H.A. exhibition is to be held in the new R.H.A. Gallery in Ely Place, Dublin. The new building is, as yet, unfinished, but it is useable. Thomas Ryan the President of the Royal Hiber nian Academy of Arts intends to start using the building pending its comple tion so that the public can realize the scale and potential of the place and the service it can bring to the visual arts in Ireland. In the next issue of Irish Arts Review Thomas Ryan, P.R.H.A. will be writing about the history of the Academy and its vicissitudes. There will also be a review of the Summer exhibition.

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