The Galleries Are Closed Again
This piece was first written for the podcast, What Buildings Do. You can listen to this being read at the link below the text. The text was later published in PVA Journal, Volume 12 at the invitation of editor Adrian Duncan. You can buy a copy of the journal here.
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The galleries are closed again.
As the year began, we turned down the lights, we shut the doors and locked the gates to our rooms for art. Such civic buildings are designed to host and I imagine they and the works that reside within them - the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and films - must be, by now, quite lonely. Like many, these days, unable to visit, I sit at home drawing upon memories, waiting.
Growing up outside Cork but schooling in the city, at each day’s end, I would walk from school to station to get home. I took time - about half an hour – to stop at the red-brick Crawford Gallery on Emmet place. They spelt the name a little differently to mine, sure, but it was close enough to think it home. Built in 1724, it was once that city’s Custom’s House. In 1830 the building was given to the Royal Cork Institution, to become, as was reported then, a building for “diffusing knowledge”.
On entering, to the right was a white shop and office, with a white, carved glass and timber screen between you and a collection of odd, confusing books, and a smiling friendly man, that when I later met as an adult, had kindly said that he remembered me on my visits, my back weighed down with books and boyhood.
Some days left and some days right, I took the stairs and leapt each creaking, brown tread in turn, lustrous with lacquer and with life, the rooms above opening ahead of me, as I rose toward the roof.
Climbing as high as I could and working top down, up there in the attic lived American artist James Turrell, or not exactly him, but rather, one of his Wedge Work installations.
As his ambassador, the artist had dispatched light to fill a room, buried in the building. Inside light hummed blue and white. With eyes adjusted, the limits of the room dissolved, the floor itself vanishing some steps ahead. I would stand, hesitant at that edge, thrilled and terrified.
I would soon step down to another room, one that I recall was once a kind of Christmas green, long and lined with paintings. Here, on surer footing, the floor turned up on sides of walls, like a wooden tray, designed to carry me to each canvass. Yeats and Jellet, others too, remained in place, always pleased to see me, patiently waiting in line to nod and say hello, one by one. It was almost like I was a dignitary, visiting for the first time, each time.
Then I had to catch my bus, but before I stomped down that metal ramp that bridged gallery and street, I moved right and into a tall white room with sky-high windows. This room often hosted sunshine, the dusty, hospitable light gathering wall, and cloth, and flesh and plinth and floor in a distinct but unifying embrace. This plastered room was full of plaster casts of human heads and bodies and depending on the light it appeared that either the body-forms themselves had stepped out of the walls, or that the enclosed plaster room was made from and of these very plaster-people.
At first, the casts had been created just to be seen, to act as guides for students to understand and draw the form of the body, long before photographic or digital reproductions existed. Part of the Canova Cast collection, they had been in Cork since 1818 and their arrival triggered the founding of the Cork Art School and the infamous saloon of sculpture.
Arriving to the station, I would drop my heavy bag, and lean against a gold-mosaic column. I recalled the plaster-casts I had left behind in the dark. Far from inert or static things, those casts helped start an artistic revolution in my city, laying foundations for the school and gallery that are still active today.
Art marks time, it is always of its time, but it also transcends it – those plaster-casts actually travelled across sea and centuries to keep company first with a city and then a child. And like the attic-blue light-room of James Turrell, art usefully holds time, in that case with light, making a horizon line so clear and present there remained no choice but to move forward toward a future.
On these pandemic days, with galleries closed, perhaps we miss the warm hand that just one painting or drawing extends to us to travel with it, back and forth through time. These days, we are so exhaustingly aware of where we are, what distance we are, how far we can’t be, that I long for a moment in a gallery again when I have no idea WHEN I am.
I know, when the doors open, art will afford me a chance to be that boy again, having the Crawford to myself, my home in the city, a place in the safe company of art to grow accustomed to the boy I was and prepare for the man I might become. The Crawford is a building that taught me that galleries and the works they contain, have never really been in the business of diffusing knowledge as once intended, but rather in the more profound business of diffusing and dissolving time.
The galleries are closed again.
But the buildings are waiting.
It is perhaps what buildings do all day.
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