Literacy House photo, G. Loughran.

LIFE:ART - Experiences Of Being Public

Ed Carroll

Introduction

I often wonder what happens while trying to (re)visit and (re)present cultural practice and production embedded in society.  Time moves on and the significance or value of an event, happening or manifestation shifts.  I have worked primarily as a co-producer in such practices and I know how difficult it is to put language and expression to these experiences.   This difficulty and its accompanying attempt to generate meaning partly explains why I developed the ‘Life:Art’ project (www. bienale.lt/lifeart) which was launched during Kaunas Biennial TEXTILE 09 (www.biennial.lt).

In this article I will deal solely with three separate Irish projects that were initiated by artists Seamus McGuinness, Ailbhe Murphy and Glenn Loughran and involved working with many others, myself included, in distinctive contexts.  The first section of this article will document each of the selected art practices, which have a civil orientation.  The second section will introduce an idea of civil society as a space to experience being public with its potential for participation and reasonable discourse.  This section will also draw upon the writing of Emmanuel Lévinas whose work questions the priority given to ‘thought’ and ‘thinking’ over and above our dealings with our fellow human beings, in order to open-up ideas about how to ‘value’ and ‘read’ cultural practices that produce an experience of being public.

Production is a verb usefully employed to describe these cultural practices below, though it is a term that contains an interesting paradox. It can value the mechanics of... Read more