Political art on the doorstep: ‘You’re going to find my work in surprising locations’

Earlier this week, Conor McCabe launched his latest book, The Lost & Early Writings of James Connolly, at Kilmainham Gaol. “When I started it, I was hoping to collect his known works,” McCabe says, “then I found one letter that was new, fantastic, then 18 different pieces of wiring that were completely new; 11 newspaper articles, four short stories and three letters.”
McCabe is a writer and research fellow at Queens University Belfast. He is the author of Sins of the Father (2013) and Money (2018). He also leads “radical walks” through Dublin. One walking tour on “financial flows” focused on aircraft leasing and institutional landlordism. Another walking tour examined the dynamics between property developers, artist-led studios and Dublin City Council. Another walk along the Royal Canal, in collaboration with the DIY arts space, Daylight in Glasnevin, covered trade unions and agrarian secret societies.
His latest work on Connolly both collects and uncovers the author’s lesser-known (and sometimes unknown) writings. “What I found was the humour of the man has been lost over the decades,” McCabe says, with Connolly often painted as “as a dour trade unionist. But you just do not get that from his writing. He’s quite witty, sarcastic, biting, funny. He uses humour to make political points.”
McCabe found short stories by Connolly written under a pseudonym, and matched some phrases in Connolly’s writing to reveal the author, “In terms of one of the stories, there’s a key phrase: ‘a face like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in’. It’s such a unique use of words that it jumps out at you. So it’s like, okay, is this anywhere else?”
[ The James Connolly papers: ‘Wasn’t it a full life? Isn’t this a good end?Opens in new window ]
McCabe gravitated as a teenager towards Connolly’s writings. “I actually still have my copy of Labour in Irish History I bought as a teenager. I have it marked where I was trying to start to put notes. I gave up after five pages because I didn’t have the skill. But now, after 25 years as a researcher, it’s second nature.” Key to his research on Connolly was having a strong sense of Connolly’s writing. McCabe has also transcribed all of Connolly’s known writings between 1889 and 1916, about 840,000 words. “There is a vast wealth of writings that we know about that haven’t been reprinted. By doing that, you get a sense of the writing and the man.”
McCabe often works in collaboration with Augustine O’Donoghue, an artist based in Dublin working across forms, from photography to documentary film, performance and installation. “I’m not someone into putting a piece of art on a wall, it’s all about public engagement in the work,” O’Donoghue says, “public-facing, off-site in unusual locations, you’re going to find my work in surprising locations rather than in galleries.”
Her work includes Power Relations (2021), exploring neoliberalism, environmental destruction and the links between a coal mine in Colombia and the Moneypoint Power Station in Ireland. Stand Up Fight Back was an installation at Rua Red in Tallaght about the Debenhams strikers. Another of O’Donoghue’s pieces, the Urban Gull Rising – which was shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) – imagined Dublin’s seagulls having their own rising, “and telling their side of the story. It was a sound piece. It had a newspaper – every revolution has to have its own media! It was using humour to look at an issue in a different way”.
McCabe and O’Donoghue are recipients of Common Ground’s Collective Futures Residency Award. One of their projects that captured the imagination of the Liberties earlier this year was a series of door mats titled: Artwork In Anticipation Of Door-Knocking Politicians. The mats, which carried messages such as “No place to play in Dublin 8″ and “Sweat the Asset”, were a local hit.
“It’s a piece people took to their hearts, and that’s what we wanted to do,” O’Donoghue said. “For us, it’s about opening up a conversation and posing a question. We knew in the run-up to the [local and European] elections, the far-right were taking a space. One of the ideas we were thinking about was that it’s foreign capital responsible for the housing crisis, not foreigners … With ideas around housing, it’s very depressing for people, so you have to find a new way of engaging them, use a bit of imagination, bring that story to the public.”
O’Donoghue’s art, she says, is “always about social transformation. Social change is at the heart of it. Looking at social and political ideas and trying to say: we can do better than this, let’s change. I’m trying to draw people in … It’s about getting people to think another world is possible and we can do things differently. It’s coming from the motivation of trying to create a better world, and more equal world, whether that’s trying to take on issues locally, internationally or trying to link local and global issues.”
When they set up the mats stall on Meath Street in the Liberties, “What happened straight away was people were starting to engage, telling us their housing crisis story. It became a conversation and an exchange. One woman was delighted [with the mat] because she says the politicians don’t even knock on her door, they just throw the leaflet in.”
Now, they have a new initiative: Counter-Culture Nights. “It came out of the idea that a lot of artists aren’t happy with Culture Night,” O’Donoghue says of the Counter-Culture Nights, “It’s a quiet discontent,” she explains, “because at the same time, we work in culture, it’s [Culture Night] a celebration of culture, but a lot of artists don’t get paid, or there are only token fees.”
[ Una Mullally: Dublin’s Liberties has everything. Except vision, planning, care and attentionOpens in new window ]
The first event is on Saturday, November 23rd, at Studio 468 in St. Andrews, Rialto, Dublin 8, featuring a walk through Dublin 8, and a screening of PUSH, a documentary by Fredrik Gertten on the financialisation of housing. As the cranes loom over Dublin 8, this approach to public art as both a political and creative practice is certainly resonating.