Remember - The Golden Bough
For the Golden Bough series of exhibitions at The Hugh Lane, curator Michael Dempsey invited 12 contemporary Irish artists to create installations in close proximity to the Hugh Lane collection of Impressionist paintings – they could either acknowledge the canon or reject it in consideration of the value and function of the museum in society.
For his exhibition, Gavin Murphy used critical and historical documents, texts from Flaubert to Fellini, Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino, and the hidden fabric of Charlemont House itself, to consider specifically the arts as system – ordering knowledge, ideas, and cultural history.
‘Against our real world, which by its very nature is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it – every word, every phrase – deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived as such.’
Milan Kundera, The Curtain
The exhibition was constructed around an audio piece The Necessity of Ruins – a spoken work, made of collected fragments of texts and documents pertaining to the ruin, art and literature, the museum, and the novel – and Eulogy to the Blank Page, a sculptural rendering of a section of dialogue from Fellini’s 8 1/2, for which the artist commissioned a new typeface Personal (Stencil).
A publication, featuring all 12 artists: Dorothy Cross, Garrett Phelan, Grace Weir, Brian Duggan, Corban Walker, Katie Holten, Niamh McCann, Ronnie Hughes, Gavin Murphy, William McKeown, Séan Shanahan, Tim Robinson, and contributions by Theo Dorgan and Richard Tuttle, was published in 2011.
Thanks to:
Oran Day, Karl Burke, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Robert Costello, Anne Maree Barry, and Diane Butler. Thanks also to Michael Dempsey, Logan Sisley, and Joanna Shepard of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane for their assistance while researching the history of Charlemont House.
Acknowledgements:
Supported through an Arts Council Bursary Award, and an artist residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
Installation photography: Denis Mortell 2010
Remember
The Golden Bough curated by Michael Dempsey
Hugh Lane Gallery
November 2010–January 2011
Charlemont House
Parnell Square North
Dublin 1
Reviews
“A Magpie’s Eye for Appropriation” Review by James Merrigan, +Billion- Art, January 2011
Gavin Murphy: Remember, review by John Gayer, Paper Visual Art Journal, 6 February 2011
More
Eulogy to the Blank Page in the Hugh Lane Gallery collection