Some Buildings Die of Old Age by Micheál O'Connell: C-Type Print, 1m by 2m, completed 11th September 2006
Daniel Pryde-Jarman, Grey Area Gallery, December 2006:
Micheál O’Connell’s work ‘Some Buildings Die of Old Age’ is a striking thing. The high-resolution digital drawing is mounted on aluminium, physically large and well-executed enough to demand attention. The work was completed on the 5th anniversary of 9/11, and this seems important, not as a cleaving to political substance, but more as a psychological memento to a personal experiencing of a shared event. On approaching the work, the vertical structures present themselves as resemblances to the World Trade Towers, standing symmetrically in a controlled landscape of two. The ‘buildings’ have been rendered with a meshed wire of plotted points, scaffolded into internal angles of twisted cables and rigid fractures. A distancing from the seductive intricacies of the smaller details is required to try to make sense of these lines and place a probing finger on the shape of their origin. At the top of both of the columns, an outline of a shoe can be identified, and more specifically a child’s shoe. Once found, this template can be seen to be the source of all of the mapped points that combine to assemble the constructions. The overlaid shape of the shoe or shoes is continually repeated, increasing in number from top to bottom in frames of sequence. Shoes appear to have fallen from an uppermost starting point, and the weight of their subsequent stumbles, pulls the structures down to their standing rest, which is itself suspended in a green field. The downward movement does not appear dynamic or animate, but instead seems statuesque in a blanket transparency whereby mass pathways are seen simultaneously without rank or affect. The shoes no longer appear to be falling; they have settled in two continuous piles in which they forever play-out the loop of how they formed, fell and heaped, all at the same time.
The archetypal children’s shoes that have been particularised for this work are coloured with sentiment; those on the left are blue shoes for boys, and to complete the pair, those on the right are pink shoes for girls. Childhoods tied with innocence and then untied as monumental edifices, this work directs us to the indissociable relationship between an object’s internal components and formative decisions, and its existence as a summative whole. The repeated stencils circumscribe the two towers, giving them a dualistic semblance. Boys and Girls, left and right, standing up and falling down; how far does this Echophilia extend into the stock of affiliated signs and lay claim to their posting? The work calls to mind the urban tradition of knotted footwear hanging from phone and power cables, whereby the laces are either taught with the weight of the hanging body, or draping below it to trace the shapes of the overhead environment. The folklore surrounding the ritual of ‘Shoefiti’, which originates from the US, identifies drug dealing, gang related murder, and rites of passage as being potentially represented events. Further flung onto this edifice of signification is the Arab tradition of shoe throwing as an act of extreme disrespect, which was perhaps most famously portrayed by the mass of sandals that came crashing down onto the statue of Sadaam Hussein as soon as it was felled. Such associations are addressed in the work, or at least seem to be, by way of an oblique picturing of immense sentiment, born in a conflict/concur dichotomy and drawn with the simplicity of one object amassing to become another.
These bundled shoes are held together by stitching only, their skeletal forms yet to be fleshed-out rather than having been decomposed by use. They have been collected, but the motive and possessor is unknown. Have these piles been acquired through desire or necessity? The shoes seem to have organised themselves by each following a set rule of behaviour, like the footsteps around a tourist attraction. The trail ground to zero by the funnelled trampling of visitors and guiding hands. We are bound to the image of these two towers with a visceral intimacy that resonates with the absolute ‘in our lifetime’. Are these shoes or their owners victims of accumulation, or do either fit comfortably as human by-products to an inhumane act? The two towers have a symbiotic relationship; not quite repetition and not quite difference. But instead binary machines brought to a mutual standstill by ‘sabotage’, the meaning of which derived from the practice of workers throwing wooden shoes into machinery to halt production during the Industrial Revolution in France. So where are our ‘saboteurs’?
The high-resolution detail of the work gives the impression of graft and craftsmanship, and thankfully this does not seem to be of primary concern to the artist but more a necessity. The artist has managed to avoid the digital pitfall of attempting to integrate the justification of the medium itself into the work by way of spurious ‘detail’ or graphic over-complexity, and although such anxieties may be at large in the scale or aluminium backbone of the print, the artist appears to have sacrificed ‘medium is the message’ advocacy for a genuine ‘play’ and draftsmanship of an idea. Each space within the constructions has been scrutinised and pierced with translucence, allowing light and its own supporting lines to pass through itself and settle upon stanchion or speculated internal frameworks. The refuge of walled spaces and the comfort of fabricated shoes are forgone to emphasise the cutting-pattern of these designs. Van Gogh’s boots were painted with earth, Warhol’s characterised with delicate fetish, but in this work we are left without the privilege of a known foot to fit, only nameless children to arbitrarily tumble with them. No sooner have they been thrown or removed, noticed or not, the shoes appear again in another sky-high pile in another identical avenue.