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CURATOR'S TEXT :
Danger Museum / Cork
You can use the technique of collage in different ways, but usually due to its quick and decisive rearrangement of things what is produced is highly subjective. Sometimes its jagged cut up effect can make for discordant images that refuse to be pinned down to any particular meaning. Or through its instant juxtaposition of far-flung elements it can demonstrate connections that have previously been hidden by the normal appearance of things – and by bringing these elements together reveal the artifice of their prior separation. Elsewhere, collage can be used to describe something from all of its angles like a still life where the objects under consideration are fragmented, opened up and then shown in the round.

Concept Illustration 1 and 2 are works that use a collage technique in order to put a finger on something somewhat vague and diffused; that is a certain aspect of a city’s art scene, its artists and the type of cultural milieu which these artists inhabit. These two works are produced by the Danger Museum, a duo that form a sort of mobile institution and a peripatetic institutional critique wherever they are invited to do so, and who often proceed in a gentle and laconic fashion to highlight certain histories and characteristics of the situations into which they have been invited. In Cork, I made this invitation on behalf of the Cork Midsummer Festival and this commission has then become part of the programme of events that constitute the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. But despite working within a context characterised by a heightened state of rhetoric swirling beneath the big umbrella of this title, the Danger Museum have pulled back from the temptation to directly challenge what a Capital of Culture might be and what purpose it is there to serve.

Instead they have taken a more offbeat approach, a scattered set of responses that come together in an informal display housed in Cork’s Public Museum. Principal amongst these are the two collage works that depict the city as sitting beneath a fog whose whiteness covers the buildings and seems to cast a blanket of silence over all the discursiveness thrown up by the year's events. This cloud is punctuated here and there by tall buildings and also by isolated figures that quietly ruminate on the scene but also to some extent present themselves as Cork archetypes or at least invested participants in the city’s cultural life. This then is a somewhat oblique and poetic portrait, more the production of atmosphere than the articulation of an opinion, it is a device that taps into certain energy points and reveals some of the subtle vibrations that the city gives off - like a side effect. Perhaps this side effect is one of the city’s more mysterious aspects, one of the things that you can’t quite grasp as an outsider, such as the city’s physical geography, which though ostensibly simple contains a number of puzzling aspects. What is the city’s actual size? How do you navigate the puzzling network of streets and alleys that constitute the city centre? In these images, seen from above, the boundaries of the city and its internal layout are almost completely obscured. Close at hand the buildings are dignified but anarchic and there are whole streets where no two buildings are the same or even aligned. Instead they concertina, collapse and slide away, merging into one another. And what about the climate? Is it really that foggy? Out from centre there are grey pebble dash houses and red brick Victorian terraces with lush sub-tropical gardens - palm trees growing between ferns like miniature cold climate rain forests. And what about the city’s culture, which this year is being celebrated?

The Danger Museum, maintaining the air of polite guests in somebody else’s home decline to comment directly on this but create within the context of their own practice a series of propositions or fragments that add up to a tentative statement about the city and their temporary engagement with it. These fragments include:

1. The two collages - Concept Illustration 1 and 2.
2. A publication containing a series of interviews with people who have some stake in the city’s cultural life (or the project itself) as well as photographs of the city taken by the Danger Museum.
3. An outsized fabric cigar.
4. A one off spectacular event that will take the following form. On the day of the opening an aeroplane takes off from Cork airport. When the plane reaches the Cork Museum, the hatch will open and a man will jump out, inflate the parachute and land in the nearby cricket field. Then approaching the crowd who have shown up to watch, he will deliver to the Cork Public Museum’s director the outsized fabric cigar – a gift from one museum to another and in a more general sense to the city itself. The precursor of this cigar is another cigar which was also a gift. This was given by King Edward VII to Edward Fitzgerald, the City Mayor, on the occasion of the Great Exhibition that took place in Cork in 1902/03, and this cigar is now housed amongst other memorabilia in the Cork Public Museum at the site of the Danger Museum’s intervention and display.

Grant Watson, June 2005