Empty Space

We contacted Connaught House after seeing this.

ART SPACE:What's going to happen to all the empty office buildings around the country? Aoife Tunney has filled a vacant cavern with art, writes GEMMA TIPTON

ON THE FLOORS above and below, it’s another day at the office. People are working at their desks, having meetings, making notes, taking calls. To get here, we have signed in at the front desk and taken the lift to the first floor. Anglo Irish has its Private Banking offices here. The carpet is thick and there is art on the walls. Then we open a pair of inlaid wooden doors, and take an unexpected step down, to find a surprise.

We’re in a huge, exciting space that extends off towards distant windows, giving views onto the tops of trees. There are no desks here, no carpets, and the walls aren’t quite finished. But placed around the empty shell there are pieces of art: installations, films, special constructions. As an office space, this floor is on the market and has been for some time. Once let, I’m sure it will make a perfectly fine divisional office, or even a headquarters for some company – but as a contemporary art gallery it’s absolutely phenomenal. I’m here with Aoife Tunney, who has made this place (temporarily) a gallery, and whose exhibition work.in.space runs here until June 18th.

Tunney, a graduate of the MA in visual arts practices at the Institute of Art, Design Technology in Dún Laoghaire, had already curated an exhibition at the Back Loft in Dublin, and had worked at Four Gallery. “I was looking around for spaces to put on a show,” she explains, “and not having much luck. That was before the downturn. I had decided not to approach established galleries because I didn’t feel I was on that level yet, but I also wanted to do something different.”

The first artist Tunney approached was Declan Clarke. “His work often comes from a political perspective, and I wanted an element in the exhibition that addressed the politics of why this space existed at all, and why it is empty. It’s almost as if this space is representative of the bubble we’ve gone through. So Declan came to see the space, saw its potential, and has made a film about it.”

This office-as-art-space phenomenon is not a first: in the empty CA department store on London’s Oxford Street in 2001, Michael Landy famously destroyed (crushed and shredded) his own belongings – including art works, his birth certificate and a coat his father had given him. In the UK, the government is discussing making grants available to people to use vacant retail space for cultural or community purposes. It’s also something that has been happening in an informal way in Ireland, with organisations such as Pallas, G126 and Thisisnotashop operating in otherwise “unwanted” buildings. The origins of Temple Bar were also in abandoned factories – a shirt factory, in the case of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios.

Equally, not all landlords feel comfortable working with artists, who they may feel are a different breed. In New York, Swing Space and Workspace are two initiatives of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) that provide a model we could adopt here. They take advantage of commercial space that is vacant for a variety of reasons, as the LMCC’s residency director, Erin Donnelly, explains: “Many commercial buildings have vacant space locked between tenants with long-term leases that is not really marketable on its own.”

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2009/0606/1224247820020.html