GOMA Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford presents The Old and the Weary a solo exhibition by Ben Reilly. Gallery opening hours: 1pm to 6pm from Thursday to Sunday.
Opening on 11th March 2.30-5.30 pm- all welcome
The Old and the Weary
"The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectation",
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life.
Dara Waldron
A few weeks ago I wrote a column that made reference to a theorist who died tragically in January and an artwork that was given to me as a present from a colleague and friend. The theorist is Mark Fisher and my attraction to his writings comes from his ongoing emphasis on a weariness that we’re living through culturally. Fisher wrote with much passion about the lack of the new that pervades contemporary Western culture; in its preoccupation with retro, with the already done, and focused on a weariness that seems endemic to our current cultural constellation: a consequence of what he famously called the ‘slow cancellation of the future.’
I return from walking the grounds of Glenstal Abbey, near where I live, and I start a fire in my sitting room. The phone rings and it’s the artist ‘Ben Reilly.’ We talk about the column I’d written and other pieces and he wonders whether I’d be interested in writing about his upcoming show. I’m weary, tired, and a little short of inspiration. But later I begin thinking about Ben’s use of materials that seem genuinely old in his sculptures, as in curiously old, and his preoccupation with weary figures, that seems all too aware of the weariness Fisher is – in his writing – trying to combat. Ben is working against the impulse to zoom in on the past as if it is something we can just dip into at will. Instead, he wants us to think about the old, not as a condition of what can be done again, the reworking of an influence that comes from the past, but as an ambience, a feel; that of a world not ours yet there still: within touching distance.
The world stepped into when we explore Ben’s work is made up of things, materials, objects, stuff. Is it a door handle? A leather boot? A bag of materials that looks like but isn’t quite coal? Does it matter? These are old things. But the sense of the old is that of time as something pure. Unlike the reworking of the past we find in so much popular culture, this is a sensuous oldness; we want to touch and explore. We want to feel the object of time itself. The installation Zeppelin is one example. The title refers to the object of the zeppelin itself with all its historical associations. But when engaging the sculpture, we are drawn to its clunky feel, its use of essentially old materials, bringing us back to that sensuous oldness that is not the past but time.
Another example is Bladderhead, a head cast of a weary, beaten down man; his eyes shut as if turning away from the sparkling newness of a world that confronts him at every turn. Perhaps this man is defeated by the glittering objects that surround him; the weariness he feels because of this. This weary figure pervades Ben’s practice across media. It feels as if he’s shutting his eyes in the hope that he can retreat into a world where the old is not the past but the shimmer of time itself. I wonder if this man is Ben, weary with this world and therefore making another. Or maybe he represents a part of me that wants to tune out of the present, if only for a moment. But then a light bulb goes off and I think that Bladderhead is in fact us all, cast in that cultural constellation Fisher writes about as so obsessed with recycling the past, and therefore looking to retreat into a world both sensuous and old: the feeling of time itself.
Dara Waldron lectures in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design. He is the author of Cinema and Evil: Moral Responsibility and the “Dangerous” Film, and is currently working on his second book for Bloomsbury, New York. He is the author of the fortnightly column Art Encounters, for Headstuff.ie, which explores how we respond to the everyday experience of art objects.