Edited by Declan Meade and Peter FitzGerald
Marks ★★★★
This is the last such publication for a while – as editor Declan Meade informed us mournfully at the launch. The Arts Council funding – without which this handsome but entirely non-commercial collaboration between literary magazine the Stinging Fly and art magazine Circa could not have happened – was cut to ribbons in Budget 2009. Unlike OAPs, artists don’t have the ear or the sympathy of the Irish people.
Already an artefact, this slim publication of stories/poems/photos/prints/collages thus becomes, by virtue of its date of delivery, a curio, last testament of the boom, and a reminder that – for all the carping – the boom wasn’t just bling, and lining the pockets of property developers. Some of the money trickled down. Some of the money went to earnest aestheticism.
Six writers were hooked up with six artists and given the brief to fill four pages in whatever way they liked. Two of the collaborations are artist-driven, with the writers responding to the works of art; one is writer-driven, with the non-intrusive artist trying to present the text in the best possible way; in two the writer and artist decided the theme together. And I’m not sure how the last came about, but, bizarrely and amusingly, it features a sketch of Tom Cruise, legs akimbo, straddling a space, with what looks like toilet roll coming out of his mouth.
Perhaps the two most successful collaborations are those where writer and artist decided the theme jointly – Kevin Barry and Sean Lynch tracked down the statue of Anna Livia, better known as the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’, and Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Cora Cummins commemorated Liberty Hall.
Readers may recall that the Floozie was removed from O’Connell Street in the early-1990s because everyone thought her hideous. Barry and Lynch tracked her down to St Anne’s Park in Rathgar, where she is kept in a box in a shed. Barry wrote her a hilarious, and characteristically zesty stream-of-consciousness and Lynch took a photo of the fallen statue in her shed – probably the book’s most beautiful image.
Ní Chonchúir and Cummins were inspired by the imminent demise of Liberty Hall to write short, haiku-style poems and take photos of, and from, the tower. Both these collaborations – by, I presume, pure coincidence – deal with the removal for aesthetic reasons of well-known landmarks from the Dublin cityscape. Both question – without trying to answer – how these aesthetic judgements were reached; and both allow the derided landmark full weight and consideration, which, in the case especially of Anna Livia, is comical and moving.
The way those two collaborations reinforce each other suggests that an overall theme extended to the other entries might have helped pull the whole publication together. But that may be me trying to impose a novelistic cohesion on what is essentially a magazine format.
Perhaps it is enough to say that this publication is stylish and elegant and does what the Stinging Fly and Circa do best – it brings to the forefront new names in the Irish arts in a way that is fresh, surprising, and serious. I’m happy they got the proposal in before Budget 2009.
Comments