DUBLIN.- Only the fine, the large, the human, the natural, the fundamental, the passionate things. [i]
It's hard not to catastrophise, but it feels almost impossible to write anything meaningful or genuine in the face of a dark and darkening world, without being entirely overwhelmed. The world stands by, watching “weapons grade idiocy”, rampant self-interest, and innocent people dying in the Minnesota snow. But if we don’t, think, speak, we lose. So I’m writing about Love. And Art. About loving art… About optimism. Twenty years of mother’s tankstation, celebrated by sharing it’s collection.
Outside of the museum or corporate contexts, collecting art is (or preferably is) a profoundly personal matter, yet in potential, a shared experience: collecting is a quiet privilege but inessentially about possession or proprietorship, we are mere custodians. Nor do we believe it should be an overtly conscious, carefully curated expression of identity, like Instagram for example, a manufactured vision intended to create a calculated faux[ii] perfect life for exterior consumption, or worse, vain glorification - what a world in which we live. But something altogether more intimate, like love; intangible, un-looked for, surprising, unexpected, unwanted sometimes, but essential. A life partnership is symbiotic, a hand-to-glove, to teacup, to toothbrush. You just don’t think about it, but conversely, you don’t exist without it. I told me not to get overwhelmed. Everything or nothing?
Although Finola Jones and (third person) I, together we, have independently collected art and objects – acquired is such a funny word – before even meeting one another, the collection in question really starts from the early 2000s. And much of it abuts our work and interests internationally through mother’s tankstation; works acquired from exhibitions we have curated, by artists we have worked with, many we don’t, but have admired, wanted to support or have been inspired by, and/or have encountered during our near-perpetual state of travel. There are no themes, few links[iii] no imperatives to be representative or ‘complete’, it is not a collection of this or that, rather, and more simply, a genuine imprint of two people and what they have fallen over or in love with, and have chosen to share a daily life amongst.
The collection range is broad, from the conventional, paintings, drawings, prints, to more ‘challenging’ things, sculpture, moving image, intangible concepts and ideas of invisible forces. Nor will everything appeal to everyone, this is impossible. An example being a large drawing we adored from an early Art Basel Miami Beach container installation. We wake up to it with unending pleasure most mornings we are at home on Ireland’s beautiful south east coast. Jannis Varelas’s fur coated gurrier, bare-arsed (HATE) written across glutes, Untitled, 2006 [iv], is a poster image for both iterations of the show, but anchors the Dublin install. Gurriers, London is 'visualised' by a tiny collaborative painting by Marcel Dzama, Michael Dumontier, and Neil Farber, working in the early noughties as Royal Art Lodge, travailing through the Winnipeg winters. Its red and black over white colour scheme and defiant attitude makes it an honorary placeholder for Minneapolis.
There are numerous articles, books, agencies even, ready to give sage (chancer is another good Irish word[v]) advice on how to construct and manage a logical art collection; “restrict your theme to an area of specialisation…” “…know your budget…” “…visit studios of emerging artists…get to know gallerists…” oh, that’s us. Then there’s doing it because you don’t know how not to. And in this manner of questionable sanity, mother’s tankstation has ‘acquired’ (there’s that word again) more than four hundred artworks that require regular care, conservation, maintenance, insurance and lots of dusting. But in turn, each piece that makes us poorer and increases the housework, makes us spiritually richer and keeps the lights on in the thunder. All works around us could apply to these shows, but of necessity, space and time, we have made choices, selected ‘favourites’ or ‘most meaningful’ exemplars, amongst all-and-equally-loved ‘children’.
Presently, at home on a quiet Saturday in very wet January, writing this, old-school style; pencil, notepad, leaning on a 2025 issue of Artforum – a scan of the room charts about thirty five works, at least the same upstairs, more in the back, as many again in Dublin, down, up, out the back. A significant number of which are on selection lists – two other pieces of pencilled paper on the coffee table to my side – respectively marked Dublin and London, with numerous crossing arrows backwards and forwards. It’s hard to predict the impact of the missing souls, It might be a good moment to repair and redecorate.
If Dublin is anchored by the Gurrier with a bare arse, then the London installation is conceptualised by Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure. A work that cost nothing, other than its protective overcoat (frame), was originally made for a 1974 exhibition at the ground-breaking Konrad Fischer Gallery, Düsseldorf [vi]. Created as an idea, a text made tangible, sculptural, an unframed off-set litho print on wall instructs a viewer to press their body as hard as possible to that wall. Copies in a stack on the floor are at liberty (crucial) to participants. A point being, well-made amongst others, that great art is not defined by scarcity or value - as the advising agencies might suggest as a principle goal - but irrepressible intent and irresistible communication[vii]. Another point about Body Pressure, is the desire to see the work of great artists like Nauman involves effort, collective engagement and shared values - remember a world with those? The un-ownable ‘original’ work has only been fully installed in a handful of mainly museum shows over its fifty year life, and this retrieved and treasured unlimited copy was collected by a friend over twenty years ago, who pressed herself against a New York wall, took two copies from the stack, one to keep and the other to share as a gesture of bond and friendship. It’s hard to beat that for an elucidation of art’s democratic, humanistic potential, what it is, does, can and should be. We don’t have further copies to take away[viii] but space to liberally (there’s another important, endangered word and concept) apply yourself to the gallery wall. Come as often as you want - it costs nothing, nothing for sale, nothing to lose and everything to gain. Like home, we can repaint after.
Gurrier/s - London includes works by:
Ryko Aoki, Uri Aran, Louise Bourgeois, Nina Canell, Matt Bollinger, Simon Denny, Prudence Filnt, Jessie Homer French, Yona Lee, Atsushi Kaga, Hun Kyu Kim, Lee Kit, Noel McKenna, Yuko Mohri, Bruce Nauman, Yuri Pattison, Royal Art Lodge, William Schaeuble, Norbert Schwontkowski.
Gurrier/s - Dublin includes works by:
Uri Aran, Nina Canell, Matt Bollinger, Mark Dion, Prudence Flint, Atsushi Kaga, Hannah Levy, A.Mac Giolla Bhríde, Noel McKenna, Yuko Mohri (yes there’s fruit), Yuri Pattison, Raymond Pettibon, Michael Dumontier - Royal Art Lodge, William Schaeuble, Peter Stichbury, Jannis Varelas, Trevor Yeung.
[i] Raymond Pettibon, Untitled (Only the fine), serigraph on paper, 1991.
[ii] Faux was the title of an inspirational group exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, around 1994/5. It, in a manner that influenced, mother’s tankstation in Gurrier/s was followed by a sequel show; MO FO.
[iii] Light, is an obvious one in hindsight, so is the hand made, improvised, low-tech, quotidian, the real, …the large, fine, the natural…
[iv] For the past two decades, Vareleas’s Untitled, 2006, has hung (at home) above a Gunther Hoffstead, Q-series sideboard – an architect and designer who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s – upon which rests a Dolmen Press copy of Joyce’s Dubliners (lithographs by Louis Le Brocquy). That is being scoured in search of Joyceian references to Gurriers – surely. Gurrier/s is a pejorative Dublin expression for a young, usually male, streetwise ‘buck’ upon whom the world has not yet “put manners”. In significant respects this a defining characteristic, analogy or attitude of many of the artworks in the collection. A frontally, directness, privileged over grace, restraint, refinement, elegance. For which “neck” is another fine Irish term. Sadly the closest Joyce comes are Corley and Lenehan in Two Gallants, who are definitely Gurriers in character, but not quite so named. I’m going into this detail to illustrate that collecting and its attendant detail and histories, gets into the blood stream, and, that the ‘collection’ expands beyond art, to books, furniture, glassware, ceramics, etc,. every detail of daily living, essentially. Each artwork and object has a backstory and significance.
There is a distinct sliding scale of reference in Irish linguistic personal affront, upon which the comedian Jarlath Regan gives a masterclass, on a Late, Late Show interview: To paraphrase, its entry level is ejit, which comes with a degree of affection or endearment. It is also temporal, as in ‘they used to be a bit of an ejit…’ implying a situation or event has passed. Next is fecking ejit, which is all frustration, annoyance, and no love. Then we have Gurrier, which again carries the potential for enlightenment or salvation. Bit of a Gurrier also applies... Finally and irrevocably, there’s Gobshite: Never knowing, therefore never knowing how not to be. It’s said that everybody knows a Gobshite, and if you say you don’t, then you probably are one.
[v] See above.
[vi] Again an influential force upon us, like Ronald Feldman Gallery, American Fine Arts – Colin Deland, NY, Matt’s Gallery, London, Art Concept, Paris, I-8, Reykjavik, etc,. etc,.
[vii] I’ve just found another hindsight theme, see iii above.
[viii] You’ll have to wait for the next Nauman retrospective or buy one on Artsy.
