Little Interview

Over the last number of years, we have interviewed diverse members of the Glucksman community - artists, academics, staff members, guests, audiences and workshop participants. The responses are funny, inspiring, revealing and always a great read.

This month, we hear from Michael Canning. Michael Canning is an artist based in County Limerick. His work is included in Panorama Europa at The Glucksman until November 1st. His solo exhibition Subterfuge is at Reiter Galleries, Berlin until July 25th. He is a Lecturer in Painting at Limerick School of Art & Design, Technological University of The Shannon.

What are you reading? Suspicion, by Seicho Matsumoto. It’s a very short novel, ostensibly a crime drama, and one that I’ve been saving up for a while. I’ve read almost everything by him that’s been translated into English. Unfortunately, I’m a completist, so if I enjoy one thing by an author I’m not happy until I’ve read everything by them, even though they may not all be great. Matsumoto is consistently excellent however; his writing is elegant and attractive, efficient, composed, and a little strange. Like all good art his subject matter isn’t really the content. His stories haunt you, or rather his characters do. I’ve lined up another one for when this one is finished.

Favourite museum?
The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Going to great galleries and museums is a way of meeting your heroes. It’s a way of seeing the very best of a city and its culture, and the treasures it prizes most deeply. These great collections are not always perfect. The ethics of how many of the greatest works were gathered together are often questionable. Occasionally the works themselves don’t speak as you hoped they might. One has to actually choose
to be receptive to what great works have to offer. Sometimes a work will practically call to you from across a room in a museum; sometimes they only have to whisper, sometimes they give you nothing at all.

A few weeks ago I was able to visit the Gemäldegalerie again. As with any museum visit I plan in advance which works I want to see – overwhelm is what overtakes so many museum visitors. Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Petrus Christus, and Rogier van der Weyden are always on my list, but walking to visit them, and walking back out again, I’ll probably bump into a Caravaggio, a Vermeer or a Rembrandt. On this visit Titian really impressed me. I’ll see a work in the distance, allow myself to be drawn to it as an image with a magnetic pull upon me, and then find out who painted it. You’d think that works from previous centuries would have little to say to us about our lives today but experiencing them tells me otherwise. The greatest artists have something to say about our shared humanity across the ages that defies certain kinds of logic. But not the logic of poetics.

Best performance?
I’m not sure what a best performance actually is. I’m not impressed by light shows, theatricality or dance routines (dance and choreography is my cultural blind spot). I prefer musicians who compress their emotional energy into their work. I mostly listen to classical music, JS Bach is a favourite I return to often, but usually only when played by Glenn Gould (I have almost all of his recordings of Bach), and I listen to medieval choral music by Taverner and Tallis and Byrd in the studio when I’m working. Lately I’ve also been listening to a lot of Kraftwerk. When visiting a new city I’m always on the look-out for jazz venues. But to answer the strange question, I really enjoyed seeing Air in Vienna on a beautiful summers evening last year.

Most treasured possession? I lose all reason whenever I misplace my wedding ring, which happens only once in a blue moon.

Work(s) of art that inspire you? 

Artists inspire me more than individual works of art. What I mean is that knowing that artists are going to their studio, whatever form that studio takes, every day, or at least as often as can possibly be managed, is inspiring to me. To make things, to resolve ideas, to find language to ascribe to those activities, in the face of a world that finds artists to be troublesome, inconvenient and something of an embarrassment until they need gentle words at a funeral, joyful songs for a wedding, or an image to salve their soul. It’s so difficult to be an artist today, and for those who are just embarking on their pathway it must seem daunting.

Taking all that into account, the artists I return to again and again are many and various. I’m very receptive to works of visual art, and I enjoy that feeling of being knocked sideways by them. Piero della Francesca’s Nativity from the early 1480’s at the National Gallery in London always brings me to the GAA pitch in Cappamore in the early 1980’s. Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, 1950–52, at MoMA in New York always shocks me for de Kooning’s technical command of paint, gesture, and the sheer visual dynamism of the painting. The most important work of the 21st Century, so far, is, for me, Tino Sehgal’s 2006 situational performance event This Progress at the Guggenheim in New York. I won’t presume to describe it, but the history of art and literature resides within it on the upward sloping ramp of that beautiful building.

A lightbulb moment?

A moment of recognition is always wonderful, but I don’t believe in inspiration, and not as a flash or a bolt of lightning. There isn’t any such thing, I’m afraid. Artists just go to the studio and get to work. An artist is someone who is noticing things constantly, but their studio activity is where the intermingling or distillation of those noticings, those observations, takes place. Artists absorb things that they experience in the world, process through working with simple materials, in the making and crafting of their work, with the intention of sharing with others, in an effort to communicate something that they sense needs to be shared.

The closest thing to a lightbulb moment came when one of my teachers, after various jigs and reels, introduced me to the idea that my audience is not everyone; it is only those people who choose to engage with my work. That was helpful. It means that one’s audience is much, much smaller than one might hope it to be. What counts is the quality of the audience’s engagement. In today’s parlance, it means that it doesn’t matter how many likes your Instagram post gets, what matters is the first introduction with just that one person out there who begins to develop a meaningful personal relationship with the work that you are committed to making.

Guilty pleasure? Chocolate. I consume almost none nowadays, but very, very occasionally I have a piece and it makes me feel guilty.

What would you like to be doing right now? Lying on a sunny beach reading a novel.