Ridiculous Exhibition At Carnegie

Well . . .

What had been promoted as the re-opening of the Carnegie Gallery was the biggest suck-in I ever got from any event in Limerick.
And that’s saying something in a city of nonsense Belltable productions, hopeless jazz gigs and foolish church concerts.

Basically it was a pallet of black and white shrunk-down photocopies of plans, builder’s details and photos from the work of de Blacam and Meagher, a firm of architects in Dublin.
We are told that this pallet of paper represents an “archive” of the architects’ work and we “are invited to read and take away copies”. In this way the entire archive will be “consumed” by the public and all that is then left would be the mountings . . .

What a load of absolute rubbish.
Firstly, there is a website for the aforesaid architects in which anyone interested can look at their work in full colour detail and read about it in normal sized script : there’s no need to waste such a load of paper on this.
Secondly, if this office’s work is so important, why not go on the road and give slideshow lectures, Q & A sessions and truly engage with the wider public ? (This is more in the way of what I expected when I prepared for this event.)

On the way home from this depressing spectacle of curatorial failure I passed by Savage Smyth Architects’ offices in a basement in Barrington’s Street. Inside through the windows, I saw that they were still hard at it at nearly 8 p.m. — recession notwithstanding.
It struck me that I’d witnessed in that evening the two extremes of architecture in Ireland : the bloated – almost mystical – pretentiousness of the “important” firms and the selfless sweat and toil of the ordinary plain one or two-man small practice.
It took me two hours and 2 mugs of jasmine tea to recover my good spirits.
Surely be to God, the City Gallery people can do better than this . . .