Doug Fishbone: An outside artist's view on an Irish ghost estate
Doug Fishbone at the Crawford Art Gallery. Picture: Stuart Leech
From placing 30,000 bananas in London's Trafalgar Square years ago to portraying a Cork ghost estate at the Crawford Art Gallery, London-based American artist, Doug Fishbone, likes to get people talking. In the case of the bananas in 2004, Fishbone was drawing attention to the fragility of economics in South America that was based on perishable goods. He was living in Ecuador at the time.
In his first solo exhibition in Ireland, entitled Please Gamble Responsibly, Fishbone was commissioned by the Crawford to create work that would be apposite and provocative. From his research, he says he was "amazed to see how much the housing market in Ireland has seemed to return to the boom. Certainly, prices are back to quite alarming levels."
Implicit in the title of his installation is the notion that buying property is a gamble. "Who knows? Maybe long term you can be on the right side of things. But imagine all the people who might still be dealing with negative equity in Ireland because they bought at the wrong time. It can be enough to basically destroy your life. Buying a house doesn't seem like a gamble and that's what's so interesting about it. It has the veneer of solidity."
When Fishbone came to Cork to research his project, he was told by a Crawford staff member that the Castle Lake apartment complex in Carrigtwohill, outside the city, is now a ghost estate, a remnant of the folly of Ireland's dizzying boom. It inspired the artist, with the help of designer, Jay Cole, to create the installation on the first floor of the gallery. It is Fishbone's largest and most challenging work to date. It comprises corrugated iron encircling a structure of an unfinished apartment block with broken windows, reeking of desolation. It's a formal sculpture in its own right, capturing the empty eeriness of the original complex.
"It was the perfect inspiration for the project I had in mind. I thought it was such an amazing structure architecturally. It's a dramatic building that is really quite ominous and menacing in the state it has been left in. I was fortunate to find out about it."
As is his wont, Fishbone has also used film in his installation which is both humorous and informative. His work can also include performance leading one critic to call him "a stand-up conceptual artist."
Viewers at the Crawford can step inside the structure where there is a film on a loop that pokes fun at the strange rules of economics while making serious points. In the film, the artist points out if grocery prices in the UK had kept abreast with property prices, a chicken would cost £63. Instead, what we get are cheap "jacked-up chickens on steroids" that inevitably "keel over."
Fishbone talks about "phantom money." The financial system, going back to the seventies, ends in cyclical crashes. "At least it keeps a lot of people busy."
There is, says Fishbone, more money in the system than ever with accompanying over-priced houses. "I think we know how this story will end. It's mostly an Anglo-Saxon fetish, this desire to own property. And coming from the US, I can see that in Ireland, the notion of home ownership is a very central social ideal.
"You see people caught up on this treadmill. If it works well, great. But it works badly often enough so that I think we should be concerned. I'm not slagging off the whole idea of owning a home as such. It's just far more dangerous than we're led to believe."
When Fishbone started to research boom and bust cycles, "it seemed to me that these things are built into the system. It strikes me as a really mad way to run an economy and a society that a financial system puts people at risk. It looks like we're now in boom territory. It's not in the control of the little guy unless he opts out. But to get a house, if you need to borrow money, that's the way the system works. You either play along with it or you go live in a cave somewhere - which might not be such a bad option."
Describing himself as "quite a liberal guy with left wing politics," Fishbone doesn't purport to have the answers. "I don't know what the answer is to the question, how do we build a just society? But I'd like to think we can get closer to that."
Please Gamble Responsibly continues at the Crawford until August 29.
