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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


10.23.22


The Northside of Dublin: Georgian brick terraces, horse shit-flecked cobblestones, one-pony traps, Korean bbq houses, charity shops, students everywhere, nothing grows except in the rare empty lot or in tiny private back gardens.

We stayed in these austere hotels built in the last decade on or near Smithfield Square; they embody Marc Auge's concept of the non-place, those spaces of human transience in which time has been flattened and all local flavour has been effaced. Smithfield Square itself used to have a weekly horse fair, until a bye-law made it a biannual event in 2013. The square is a vast thoroughfare flanked by antiseptic hotels, apartment buildings, shiny mega shops and restaurants, with a small green area (and most used) crammed at one end.

The husband and I kept seeing the same young man, skinny in a dirty tracksuit, bumming cigarettes and asking for cash to get a cup of tea. I thought of a recent speech by Senator Lynn Ruane in the Seanad, about how some of her friends from the poor neighbourhood of her youth are just waiting to die, asking her fellow policymakers in the end: "How do you solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?"

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The talk went well, although I had thought I was shambolic, rambling, obviously disorganised, missing points. You can't tell how you're doing by looking at your audience's resting-bitch faces. The same people you think are hating you come up to you during coffee break and tell you how fascinating they found your work, and can you tell them more about this or that aspect?

Afterwards R and I checked out the Turner show at the National Gallery of Ireland. It's all so wonderful. Sometimes I think he's the West's first modern abstract painter—some of his works are just washes of colour, just colour. You can tell that he struggled with the academy's prioritisation of history painting over other genres. He's trying to incorporate figures from mythology, but obviously his interest is landscape, in the atmospheric conditions of a place.

John Berger cautions us against only seeing Turner as "a virtuoso painter of natural effects": "Turner lived through the first apocalyptic phase of the British Industrial Revolution. Steam meant more than what filled a barber's shop. Vermillion meant furnaces as well as blood. Wind whistled through valves as well as over the Alps. The light which he thought of as devouring the whole visible world was very similar to the new productive energy which was challenging and destroying all previous ideas about wealth, distance, human labour, the city, nature, the will of God, children, time." In turning away from the priorities of history painting, Turner's oeuvre suggests the new priorities of the age, for which history is irrelevant; it is the totality of what is seen that has become transcendent.





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