Artists create A Dark Space at the Project Arts Centre and the public ask what is it all about.
A ‘Dark Space’ the programme of installation and performance art at the Project Arts Centre has nine artists from Ireland and abroad creating work.
Performance art invites a response from the onlooker the usual response is, ‘What the hell is it all about?’ This is the very question the people at the Project mean us to ask.
New York artist Charles Simonds builds imaginary civilisations on the street. Working in a Temple Bar Street members of the public stop to contemplate and comment on his work.
You wouldn’t know what’s in another fellas mind when he’s creating a thing like that.
Charles Simonds enjoys the process of making the dwellings and does not mind what happens to them when he is finished. He says many people project his work into their own past. One passer-by likens the miniature civilisation outside the Project to Wood Quay.
Inside the Project Arts Centre, sculptor and performance artist Nigel Rolfe is working on ‘Attack/Defence’ which combines an installation and a performance. Actor Gerard Mannix Flynn sits on a roughly built wooden platform in a corner area of the room. Over a five day period he will be imprisoned in a web-like network of ropes and will balance stacks of timber on various parts of his body.
As part of a performance piece entitled ‘Go On’ National College of Art and Design sculpture student Dave Clifford is hammering a hole in the wall in his own shape in the running position. His performance also involves a slide and video installation, filleting and frying rainbow trout and running eight miles to the Phoenix Park and back again each night.
A 'PM' report broadcast on 13 March 1979. The reporter is Nuala Hayes.
