eamonn o'doherty: genius loci

Irish Arts Review

Eamonn O'Doherty: Genius LociAuthor(s): Brian LynchSource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 84-87Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493276 .

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EAMONN O'DOHERTY: GENIUS LOCI

SCULPTURE

Eamonn O'Doherty: I~~~

genius foci BRIAN LYNCH examines the work of Eamonn O'Doherty, whose style captures the spirit of his era

It could be said without undue exaggeration that the work of Eamonn O'Doherty is the best-known of any

living Irish artist (Fig 2). He may also be, as far as name-recognition is concerned, the least famous. To be

the creator of some of the most readily identifiable icons of late 20th-century Ireland and yet to remain

almost anonymous in the midst of his creation is a curious fate. Being hidden in plain sight, as O'Doherty

is, constitutes a complex series of ironies that reveals a good deal about how Irish society thinks of itself. The

explanation for the anonymity is, on the face of it, straightforward. An architect by profession, O'Doherty has

had a conventional but limited artistic career: as well as his public sculpture, he has exhibited widely, if sporad

ically, as a painter, printmaker, and small-scale sculptor. He is also an outstanding photographer with an abiding

interest in traditional music - in 2002 an exhibition of his photographs from the Irish Traditional Music Archive

travelled to Glucksman House in New York, the Fowler Museum in California, and the University of Virginia.

But the apparent insider is actually an outsider. Fiercely critical of elitism (a charge he levels particularly at

Aosdana), he has never had a gallery or, more importantly, a proper solo show, though one is planned for later

this year and there is also in prospect an exhibition of design drawings and maquettes of his public work.

However, while these exclusions have restricted his reputation, they are not untypical of the experience of sculp tors in Ireland - the stone-carver Seamus Murphy, for instance, had only one exhibition in a long career.

These two artists, although their work is as different as chalk and cheese, have something in common:

Murphy defined the mid-century rather as O'Doherty defines his own era. Their differences are also instructive: the hand-made, self-sufficient, insular but complex upper-case Catholicism that informed Murphy's world-view, which centered on the Virgin Mother,

is the bipolar opposite of O'Doherty's constructed, self-questioning, inter nationalist, lower-case catholic eclecticism, which is centered, if at all, on Eros. A transposition makes the point: had Murphy in his day produced the

epicene Fellini-like dancing priest in O'Doherty's Peer Gynt piece in Oslo

(Fig 10), which seems to us gaily perverse (gay in the old sense), it is

unlikely he would have ever again worked for the Catholic Church.

But too much can be made of the contrasts between insularity and

internationalism. The work of both artists is, in fact, deeply involved with

the formulation of concepts of Irishness. And a sense of the island, of being

on its edge, of leaving it and setting out, is an important if hidden motif in

O'Doherty's work. In the component of his output that comes closest to

pure abstraction, for instance the rust-red sails of the Galway Hookers

monument in Eyre Square (Fig 5), or the silvery wings of the swans in

Passage at Antrim hospital (Fig 9), both the geometry and the ideas are

on the move, as fluid as the constantly changing light that informs them.

1 EAMONN O'DOHERTY

Fauscailt (detail)

1998 bronze figures

2.5m high. Barntown,

Co Wexford

2 Eamonn O'Doherty working on the bronze

figures for the Great

Hunger Memorial,

2001 Westchester,

New York

3 Fauscailt 1998

bronze figures 2.5m

high. Barntown,

Co Wexford

SPRING 2008 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | 85



E EAMONN O'DOHERTY: GENIUS LOCI

SCULPTURE

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40~~~~~~14

Pure abstraction however is not O'Doherty's thing. Unlike,

say, Michael Warren, whose monuments are almost as ubiquitous,

O'Doherty has always been willing to engage with the figuration

inevitably favoured for commemorative art. This willingness may

derive from his understanding of the importance of negotiation in

the architectuiral process -when a building is being developed,

whether it be a cottage or a World Trade Center, the least useful

weapon in the architect's armoury is the romance of his autonomy

as a creative artist. On the other hand, the ability to negotiate is

irrelevant in persuading the commissioners of a monument to

choose one submission over another. The choice then comes

down to the power of visual ideas. But just as pure abstraction is

not value-free - far from it - the identification of ideas cannot be

calculated, certainly not in the way that an architect calculates,

say, the value of marble over marmoleum. Nor is Ireland a mono

lithic society with a centralised aesthetic, as was, for instance, the

Soviet Union when socialist realism ruled the roost. The fact,

therefore, that O'Doherty has won an extraordinary number of

_ . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

4 Crann an Oir 1991 polished

bronze & Wicklow

granite 4m high

Central Bank Plaza,

Dublin

5 Galway Hookers

1984 corten steel

plates 10m high

Quincentennial

sculpture and

fountain, Eyre

Square, Galway

6 Na hOileanaigh

2007 bronze 2m

lnishturk Island,

Co Mayo

7 Armoured Pram

1991 tracked wheels

and ersatz miltary

accoutrements

painted steel

6m high

8 Skellig 1995

bronze 5m high

Cahirciveen

Co Kerry

9 Passage 1994

cast and fabricated

aluminium 3m high

New Antrim

Hospital, Co Antrim

10 Model for Peer

Gynt, 2007; the

launch date of the

full-size figure in

Oslo is August 2008

open competitions and that he is the creator of some thirty large

scale public sculptures both here and abroad amounts to evidence

not just of superior technical or presentational skills, or of excep

tional talents as a craftsman, but of a special kind of historical sen

sitivity, an instinct for materialising the zeitgeist, a genius for

making objects out of inchoate contemporary concepts.

O'Doherty has, as almost all significant monumentalists have

had, a genius loci, that is a respect for the guardian spirit of place.

An exemplary possessor of that genius, the Dublin-born but quin

tessentially American Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907),

designed the Parnell monument in O'Connell Street, a work

which seems to me to find an echo in O'Doherty's memorial to

James Connolly in Beresford Place. While the situation is, to say

the least of it, awkward (on one of Dublin's busiest junctions, stuck

in under the Loopline Bridge), the representation of Connolly

himself, by infusing the figure with a clerkly ordinariness, signifi

cantly avoids romantic revolutionary fervour. Whether conscious

or not, this is an example of O'Doherty's sensitivity to the spirit

of the age. His Connolly is still heroic, but he is troubled by a past

more recent than 1916 or, indeed, the glorifications that accom

panied the 1966 anniversary: his Parnell-like step forward into

the future is made hesitant by the conflict in Northern Ireland.

O'Doherty is a man of the left. Derry-born, his early sympa

thies lay with the Marxist Official Sinn Fein faction in that city, rather than with the Provisional IRA. But the politics of his large-scale public work are not obvious; they have to be probed for and then decoded. This is true even in relation to the overtly political Annoured Pram of 1991 (Fig 7), which O'Doherty describes as 'a wry allusion to the need for vulnerable, soft fleshed, humanity to encase itself in armour to protect against the murderous batterings of one against the other'. The critic

Aidan Dunne said at the time that 'jokes don't come more



O'Doherty has always been willing to engage with the figuration inevitably favoured for commemorative art

heavy-handed than this'. Far from being jokey, the surrealism was deadly serious, particularly in 1991, a year when fifty-three

people were killed by Republicans. Nor was it unsubtle: a tank

is, after all, an offensive not a defensive weapon. Now, with the

passage of time, the piece has become at once totemic and curi

ously forlom. (It is worth noting, incidentally, that when the

piece was offered to IMMA by a third party, the gift was refused.

In my opinion it deserves a home in some public collection.)

O'Doherty's most prominent Dublin monument, Crann an Oir (tree of gold) in front of the Central Bank (Fig 4), is,

notwithstanding the title, even less easy to read. Despite the

bus-stop-like pole holding up the polished bronze globe, an ugli ness which could yet be remedied, this symbol of a newly gilded

Ireland, semi-contained by a kind of folly, continues to be

provocative of thought. The chief political irony in O'Doherty's career was, of course,

the debacle of the 1988 Anna Livia fountain, the 'floozie in the jacuzzi' (a nickname first used by the artist himself). Having been inserted into the heart of 'dear old dirty Dublin' with breath-taking speed - a mere six months from commissioning to installation - it was then removed with indecent haste (in 2002). The hurry to build it, as O'Doherty readily admits, 'led to a lack of refinement in some details of the stonework and the fig ure, particularly the head'. But the problem was not one of detail. Nor did it relate to the funding of the fountain by the Smurfit family, though that munificence was in itself significant,

F.'F

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since it heralded the arrival of the Celtic Tiger. Nor would the

fact that the commission was awarded without consultation or

open competition have mattered in the end - O'Doherty didn't

approve of this either, but what was he to do: reject the offer?

Nor were the sexual politics problematic: the replacement of an

erect and particular man, Admiral Nelson, with a recumbent

and general woman, Anna Livia, showed, once again, how

closely in tune O'Doherty was with the spirit of the age. No,

the problem seems, ironically, to have been at once undemoc

ratic and populist: the powers-that-be in Dublin Corporation

and a vocal minority of the citizenry coalesced in dislodging the

fountain because they associated it with the litter and lawless

ness of the city centre. That problem was solved not by substi

tuting the woman with a spire but by the addition to the street

of a police station and squads of cleaners.

One final irony: the Corporation is now considering yet

another Liffey monument, this time by Anthony Gormley, a

genius with antennae as sensitive to the English zeitgeist

as O'Doherty's are to the Irish variety. Gormley

proposes a male figure not symboli

cally bathing, like the Anna Livia, but

standing knee-deep in the river itself.

Shakespeare said, 'A rose by any other name/ would smell as sweet'. That truth may have_/ a rueful ring to Eamonn O'Doherty's/ ears; but he has, and will con-/ tinue to have, adequate / compensation in the ideas/ he has built Into the world. Si/ monumentum requiris, circumspice.E*

BRIAN LYNCH is a novelist, poet and art critic.a/ All imagesO The Artist.v

SPRING 2008 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 1 87



eamonn o'doherty: genius loci

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