Irish Arts Review

The Decade ShowAuthor(s): Dorothy WalkerSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), p. 62Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491956 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

EXHIBITIONS

are too! A symphony of brocades, se quins, gold, silver and jewels, all so splendid, so opulent, as to border on ostentation . . . among them stands su preme the magnificent silver brocade court gown (Cat. No. 85) dating from the second half of the nineteenth cent ury. It was during this period that the well-heeled, fashion-conscious Russians began to buy foreign clothes. Paris became all the rage and several examples by Pacquin, Poiret and the especially resplendent English-born Charles Worth are included in the exhibition. But a very strong autochthonous school of designers was also emerging at that time and with the likes of Nadezhda Lamateva, perhaps the greatest of all Russian couturiers, it proved no mean competi tion to the West.

Apart from the court and the aristo cracy, there are also examples of costume of the newly emerging middle classes, as well as folk costumes worn on festive occasions from different regions of the Soviet Union. And, to

my mind, they are the most endearing examples in the exhibition, for it is the sarafan (dress without sleeves), the ponyova (homespun skirt of checked or striped pattern fabric) and especially the glorious kokoshnik (crown-like head dress) worn by Russian women through which the true Russian spirit lives and speaks to us.

Sanda Miller

Baghdad International Festival of Arts

1986 was designated a year of the arts by the Iraqi Government, which, in spite of the escalating war with Iran, organized festivals of music, drama, art and poetry. The Art Festival took place from October 25th to November 4th. Robert Ballagh from Ireland and three hundred and fifty other artists from all over the world, from all continents, all oceans, all races, were invited to Bagh dad for ten days with fares and all expenses paid. They were housed in 5 star hotels, transported around the city and on trips out into the country, entertained to street festivals, ban quets, and dancing, and finally given going-home presents by the Minister for Culture. No matter how much one real izes that this was a propaganda exercise, it was a remarkable exercise. It was remarkable that a government should

put such faith in the power of art as to spend so much money in the middle of a war, and in the middle of a calamitous drop in the price of its principal means of livelihood, oil.

President Saddam is undoubtedly the single greatest patron of the portrait artist. Gigantic billboard portraits of him appear on every street in the city and on every highway and every village out in the country.

The very number of these images and their insistent repetition leads one to suppose that the political reality of the country is that all political power re sides in that one man. There are no rival portraits, and no graffitti or signs of dissent or opposition on those of the President. All government ministers, including the Minister for Culture, wear

military uniform which, with its black beret and dark green shirt, looks un comfortably like an unofficial army nearer home.

New monuments and public statuary abound: the vast, newly-built monu ment to the Unknown Soldier with a war museum underneath it, and the quite beautiful and impressive Monu ment to the Martyrs, a huge blue-green tiled Islamic dome in two halves, about one hundred feet high, each half just over-lapping the other, designed by the Iraqi artist, Ismail Fattah Al Turk, and built with exquisite precision by a Japanese contractor.

The art exhibitions of the Festival were all in new buildings. The art shown was not the crest of the wave of contemporary art but nevertheless re presented a substantial groundswell of art from around the world. Who knows that there are modern painters in Saudi

Arabia, in Bangladesh, in Ireland? The most interesting work from the Arab world was that of artists like Yusuf

Ahmed from Qatar, Rafar Nasiri from Iraq, or Naja Mahdawi from Tunisia,

who all used the traditional and ex

tremely beautiful Arabic calligraphy in exciting and imaginative new ways.

Other than that, it was mostly the usual international mix, with new ver sions of Munch, Bacon, Rothko, Riley. There was a very accomplished Czech printmaker, Dusan Kallay, intriguing works by the always-surprising South Koreans, and fine, impressive collage/ paintings by the Dominican artist, Silvano Lvora.

Dorothy Walker

The Decade Show The National College of Art and Design showed what it called a 'Decade Show' at the Guinness Hop Store during De cember 1986. It was not the work of a decade 1975-1985, which would have been really interesting, since artists' concerns changed so completely within that decade; it was the current work of students who graduated within that decade, and more or less current work of staff members and external assessors at the College within the same period.

So what had the NCAD got to show for itself for that ten years? I don't think one can review this exhibition like any normal group show but as one would judge the results of any other third level institution, its contribution to the

welfare of the community, its advance ment of educational standards, its achievements in research, its deepening of philosophy and its development of science and technology. To some ex tent, by not showing the work of the decade, the College sold itself seriously short. For it has advanced art education standards light years ahead of the pre vious five decades. It has produced major young artists in that time for the benefit of the whole community, like Cecily Brennan, Eithne Jordan, Alanna O'Kelly; members of its teaching staff like Brian King and Nigel Rolfe have developed exciting and courageous new forms of art practice; it has had some of the very best artists in the world as visiting lecturers and it has had external assessors, both Irish and foreign, of the very highest calibre, Sean Scully, William Scott, James Coleman and Patrick Ire land, to name a few.

In terms of research and develop ment, the students have undertaken work in all new media, in film, video, performance, photography, and have been very successful in gaining scholar ships and entrance to advanced post graduate colleges and schools abroad.

Part of what was wrong with the Decade Show was that it was a 1983

Show, mostly still wallowing in very self-indulgent Expressionism, not even all that New, and that it hardly showed at all the very interesting work done in

the College from 1975-80.

Dorothy Walker

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