For three years or so I have admired the exquisite relief constructions, paintings of a sort, of a self-taught Dubliner named Joe Mcgill, several of which were exhibited in New York last spring. On one wall of the smaller room at LedisFlam hung three typical works of 1988-89, the first one part of a series, and the second and third close kin to others, together showing where Mcgill "has been" in the later '80s, when he began to achieve alternative notice in Ireland. Fossil, with a feather swamped in paint, white tinged with red, relates to a whole series of 20th-century Fossils by Mcgill if not also to Joseph Beuys's Fossil, 1975, a chunk of Irish peat split to reveal fossilized leaf (plus an auto-souvenir toenail) shown at the Bank of Ireland, Dublin, in 1977, when Joe Mcgill was 22. Torso has thin reeds impaled through half the length of a spine-like vertical fold. Then there was the snippet of barbed wire, as inescapably political from afar as close to home, of Strip of Gaza.
Aware as Mcgill is of producing a pointedly diminutive rather than will imposing art, he obviously doesn't mind, either, engaging the stereotypically feminine in choice and deployment of his little "thingly" motifs here, as against barbed wire, not only the rather millinery feather of Fossil but, in Torso, the structure of the standard sewing-needle packet. Related, I think, is the confident and unashamed religiosity of roughly half of Mcgill's production, which was manifest in a trio of pieces from 1989 Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection whose rotation of an oblong cut from a white mat board ground obviously refers to the dislocation of the sepulchral slab. More ambiguous, as if vibrating between religious and political evocations, was Reprieve (1990-91), where what seems like a peculiarly wild bit of sheep's wool is snagged on a twig from the botanical gardens of Phoenix Park, in Dublin.
Other works, including Food for Thought (also shown), are less ostensibly al-allegorical, hence less escapably formal. In that piece one encounters a literal grid in a fragment of frail, rusted, found metal mesh, two of the squares of which have been micro-upholstered, each with a tiny snippet of cloth, one black, one white, attached with heartfelt, super hobbyistic fineness. But even here, I am beginning to think that it is not merely for specific elements or themes but in its overall stance that Joe Mcgill's art has a political aspect. Its sheer and risky personalism, far from generic or rhetorical, might also be neo-Maoist. At least the fact that Mcgill is simply not afraid of delicacy, or a look of delicacy, is an implicit comment on much pushily imposing "masculine" art.
.The question of Mcgill's materials as thingly in their pre-poetic state concerns the whole modern issue of found objects in an acutely imagist and perhaps essentially "paintingly" (but not pictorial) way. In an aside on painting Galileo once claimed, "It is necessary that none of the things imitated nor parts of them" be directly deployed "if you want to be able to represent everything," since "if there were feathers, for instance, these would not do to depict anything but birds or feather dusters." But what happens under the condition of abstraction when such things (with McGill, as likely to be late-industrial as "natural") come into conjunction, or even when a single feather gets to be as abstractly pretextual (for painting) as .it does in Fossil? Here is something like the economy of the ballad form in poetry and music, where every little nominal thing is as vital as an electronic micro component; also like balladry are the linked sequences of repeated units in many of the constructions, or from one to another.
For readers old enough to remember when the concept was raked over in every other article on contemporary art, I need to deny that McGill is a bricoleur. He is an assembler, but his found elements ignite in a fresh preciosity that has nothing to do with "junk." You may wonder how coarse you must be to have overlooked such things your-self. Compared to a McGill in its terseness, a Cornell box is as clunky as a windup phonograph. McGill is less mini-Kieferesque (he hates Kiefer) than micro-Kieslerian, and his specific intimism is also in line with Max Ernst's, in the Surrealist department, especially for Ernst's grattage technique of toweling paint over objects beneath the canvas of a painting. At points, today, McGill's production also bears comparison with that of Georg Herold, especially Herold's little paintings with screws, buttons, and such stitched directly on. In any case, when his location in the historical matrix is established, it will be remote from Expressionism but curiously close to German Dada and Surrealist tradition.
Despite the palpable and inescapable visuality of his "poetry," McGill can expect some semiautomatic, anti-romantic flak in New York even if he is cast as a charming wild-artist type at home. Yet his art argues sharply against the enduring, essentially anti-modernist, literary bias of Irish culture by implicit stress on the very discontinuities that allow its "poetic" conjunctions significance. Nabokov, who found something of the kind in Ulysses, and suggested that because of it Joyce's so-called stream of consciousness might better be considered a matter of "step-ping stones of consciousness," insisted: "Man thinks not only in words but also in images." Just so, the severe, Imagist condensation of Joe Mcgill's constructions is visually compelling.
It is as one who is himself half Irish that I cannot in this case overlook the fact that when such a vigorous and uncompromising art as McGill's appears, it should come, not just dogged but inspired, and quite without asking permission, from the hands of a working class artist—as did, for that matter, Sean Scully's before it. If there ought to be "culture," as the businessmen say they want, it will have to be more unsettling than dinner theater for executives. Well, there has already been U2. It should be interesting to see whether Mcgill's showing in New York counts back home, or if it is considered out of proper consensus control and thus out-of-bounds.
Joseph D. Masheck