Mind the Red Dots

Yesterday, I left my cluttered and stuffy studio space in the box room of our house and cycled into town on my son’s blue bike. I love cycling: the freedom of it, especially in the city, where in winter you can be bound to buses and other forms of public transport. It’s amazing in Dublin compared to London. I can get into the city centre in twenty to twenty-five minutes max, cycling through Templeogue, Terenure, Rathgar, Rathmines and up Camden Street into the city centre.

When I got into the city, I locked the bike with two locks, feeling protective in case anybody stole it. It was a gift from Santa. I love the energy in the city on a hot day. There is something lethargic and, at the same time, frenetic about it.

I met a friend whom I first met two years ago at an art and psychoanalysis summer school weekend. We walked through a city park, sat on a bench and complained about our teenage daughters before going to an exhibition.

The exhibition was expansive: rooms and rooms of painting, sculpture, drawing and photography. I have become shameless when I go to exhibitions like this. I walk through quickly and zone in on pieces that intrigue me before moving on. I can cover an exhibition of this size in this way in an hour, two hours max.

What I felt about the exhibition was that it was slightly daunting to see all this artwork crammed into these rooms, some of it with red dots and some of it without. I wanted the works with red dots to be less visibly marked by them, and the works without red dots to carry less of their absence. The red dots became very distracting.

I also felt it was very difficult to take in a piece of work when there were so many different pieces surrounding it. I listened to a podcast recently in which the host, as a joke, described sculpture as something you bang up against while looking at a painting, and I couldn’t help thinking of that line in this space.

When I was on my master’s course, I wrote an essay about the Salon des Refusés and curating failure. It would intrigue me to see an exhibition of all the works refused from this large group exhibition in Dublin city centre.

I recently spoke to a local man who told me that he had been accepted to the RHA Summer Exhibition six times and had only been rejected once in the seven years he had applied. It made me happy for him, but it also made me think about all the artists I know who have been rejected year after year, some of them great painters, and it made me question who the arbiters of taste are and what they base their choices on.

The rooms I enjoyed most were the small one next to the doorway and the large foyer, perhaps because I entered fresh and could still see the exit. Overall, I felt there was something slightly disorderly about seeing an exhibition in this way, and it made me smile to see that the bathroom tap, if no one else, agreed with me. The smile faded a little when I remembered the journey home: a gnarly, sweaty climb back to the burbs.

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