DOMINIC THORPE @ G126

This sort of dovetails neatly with something I've been mulling over a little lately: that the artistic response to AIDS was fairly didactic agit prop stuff seems a logical response to Reaganian silence, an attempt at institution building when establishment power was doing its best to ignore a devastating catastrophe for an inconvenient constituency. It is not that cataclysmic events naturally produce politically motivated art, but silenced voices might find articulation in artistic expression.

With the exception of Mannix Flynn whose work has persistently agitated the religious/political/social forces in the systematising of clerical abuse, I can't really think of many Irish artists who are making work that tries to grapple with an issue that leaves a major scar on the national psyche as well as, in its unfolding, become symbolic of the ways in which contemporary Ireland has come to view itself. I mean maybe this disconnection w/ pre-90s ireland is a major source of a younger generation not really feeling any real relationship w/ this stuff, but even then it sort of helps psychically structure how we see ourselves now "as distinct from then"

Which is why its especially cool to see a young artist who tries to access the trauma of Abuse, and more specifically its broader abusive context of silence, in a way that is ambiguous wrt to historical specificity and vivid in its depiction of its emotional wounding.

I'm lucky, I saw this on the last day as a performance, though the exhibition continued as a display of the residue. The performance itself is an impressive condensation of bad vibes, the claustrophobically blacked out performance space lit only by handheld torches, like a fresh crime scene. The artist, somnambulantly but noisily trying to escape the gallery, scraping against the walls, splattered w/ his characteristically fractured drawing/writing on the wall (though to be honest I like that aspect more when I saw it included in the g126 group show earlier this year.)

Thorpe seems to draw on early Paul McCarthy, the phase of his career that was at once more formalist and more insidious in its intimations of violence, and the immersive horror of this show is impressive and engaging.

The residue is on display until the end of this week at g126.

Imgs courtesy Dominic Thorpe

http://www.dominicthorpe.net/