today

The sun is out and the weather feels warm. Back in my hotel room, after a day of walking about in Dublin, I take off my shoes and pad about in bare feet, it's Spring.

In Dublin I have what is a familiar sensation for me in Europe - that of the loss of my sense of scale. I don't know what it is - it is just that, when I get to places they somehow seem to be bigger in certain directions than I expect them to be. From Australia, European cities look small. When you get there (here) they seem huge.

I visited the Irish Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition by Orla Barry called Portable Stones - which featured a film of the same name, and a selection of text based works.



There was also a retrospective of work by Howard Hodgkin - who interests me because his works are just so - err, wilfully wrong, and he uses colour in such exciting ways, reminding me of adventurous home decor in the late 1970's and early 1980's (without being retro, that is) & there was also a collection of photography from the school of "isn't it interesting how people who aren't part of the middle classes live" which makes me feel that I should be making comments like "I feel blessed to have a University education".

I'm still thinking about the Orla Barry film. It is unusual for me to sit through any video piece that is longer than a few minutes, but with this film I sat through the entire hour and five minutes. It is a story involving implausible situations, anachronisms; it has the quality of those old, old myths that survive only as fragments. I'm still not sure if I like it. There is one image that stands out in my memory; two men walking through sand dunes on a deserted island, a wild place, the track littered with discarded water bottles. Which sums up – something, - the impossibility of a wilderness existing in this modern age, without people to see it. This is perhaps the key to why I liked the film.

The film deals with aloneness, with being without speech, -a state that the artist suggests repeatedly as being different from being without means for communication,and a state that is different from being silent. It seems like a plea for something like poetry, ‘letting words speak their meaning’ rather than trying to force them to conform to our own intentions. But also, the film deals with the fascination that aloneness has for us, - like the wilderness, we cannot imagine someone (or something) existing without human witness. The acknowledgement that someone or, the world, might not exist for us, but despite us is terrifying and almost impossible to conceive of; … and the fear that if we abandon the state of being in society with others (other humans) we become something less-than-human.