A blow by blow

account of stonecarving
in Oxford
Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch
A blow by blow
account of
stonecarving
in Oxford
Modern Art Oxford
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Many versions of the rise and fall of
OShea and his brother could be told.
Where exactly did they come from?
Their origins seem obscure.
Accounts vary.
Sentiment inevitably abounds.
Close by, down at the bottom of a laneway, the brothers
were found carving a piece of wood so cleverly that
they were brought directly to the building site to work.
Growing up during the famine, new stone quarries were
opened to provide employment for many men of the
country. The ground was dug and carved up to shape
new buildings, buildings hammered and grappled out
of stone and rock.
Spiky grasses, forget-me-nots,
lilies and crocuses,
folded petals and leaves,
young shoots and ferns furled like tightly
coiled springs twist with rhythmic tension,
the oak,
the ivy,

acanthus,
a daodil,
As one learns a language, the OSheas did imitate
the sounds and grammar of their world, repeating it
as an obsessive routine and replicating all in stone.
How did the OSheas craft evolve? Did they remake
all that they saw, listening to birdsong while they
gazed into a ditch and bushes swaying in the breeze?
shamrock, lilies,

every variety of wreath,
squirrels,

snakes,
frogs,
Their native skill was uncorrupted by any modern world.
They conjured up an Ireland crammed with lively,
rude, imaginative craftsmen, all displaying a kind of
ruthlessness, a determination not to let taste interfere
with their conviction.
mice,

cats,



foxes,
all birds and insects
depicted in random
clusters as they would be
found on any wayside.
They only saw the clash of interrupted rhythms, the same
as it pulsed in nature, indigestible in its detail.
They had heard of one true being, but never saw him,
on their walks they never came by any tidy story he had
made of the world. Each blow to the stone
They could never repress and contaminate what they
carved into an ordered pattern, repeating it neatly like
the wheels and cogs of their time. Instead, hours were
spent orchestrating with an elementary level of form,
rather than waiting for divine inspiration.
In the jungle of detail a monkeyman was found, clutching
his feet and scratching his back. Did the OSheas know of
Darwin, and the theory of human evolution from the ape?
Were the OSheas carving the Darwinian theory?
They always avoided the boredom of waiting around for
the next world. The OSheas reality was more dense,
more fundamental than Gods.
now reverberating and echoing.
Monkey do? Monkey see?
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Soon the OSheas were called to Britain.
Getting o at the docks in Liverpool, they met the
rebellious Paddy, the hybrid ape-man notorious
for his violent ways,
The OSheas caught them in movement, evolving from
one shape into another.
High up on the building, out of the way and hard to
spot, the OSheas could get away with things.
Instead, the OSheas brought in, from their morning
walks, the owers and plants that they carved into
stone with vigour. At the top of the scaold, animals
would never stay so still to be carved.
No preparatory models. No clay mock-ups. Never waste
time copying detailed drawings.
New employers in Oxford soon boasted of the punctual
rapidity of the OSheas work, delighting in their liberty
of action and power in improvisation that increased
eciency and reduced costs.
Stone is a hard material,
and is hard to look at.
Aected lightness,

delicacy,
overrich,
even whimsical.
Infrastructure continued to be built and the new
museum complex took shape. Suce it to say,
commentary on the building was heard near and far,
chatter of styles in and out of fashion were argued.
A trip inside the exhibition hall could help
to gure out what they were up to.
Regardless of these generic descriptions,
the OSheas hammered on.
Maybe massive,
cumbersome
and unwieldy.
Why would people go to stare at dinosaurs if it wasnt for
the uncanny fantasy of them coming back to life again?
Whatever enters any museum is placed in an order
of knowledge, and is xed and identied and labelled.
Objects and life, once free, now conscripted, harden
into institutional values that form the museum itself.
but they dont speak to us.
They have mouths,
Is he dead?
Why doesnt he move?
but they dont speak to us.
They have mouths,
They have eyes,
dont
they
but
They have mouths,
and dont see us.
They have eyes
and
dont
see
us.
speak
us.
to
This impulse might solve questions relating to the shape
and form of humanity itself, an operation in which
something like man can be decided upon and produced.
Once one set of values is established in this way, they
act as the selection criteria for further advancement
in each vitrine.
In a theory of evolution, animals, plants and museums
are not embodiments of eternal essences but slow
accumulations cemented together via reproductive
isolation.
In this case, what is lost along the way? A famous example
is the Oxford dodo. Its bones were brought to Britain and
lodged on the South Lambeth Road in Vauxhall.
The dodo has no present tense.
Its a great heavy bird who can y
Rumours abound of live specimens seen in the city.
When carving a fried chicken out of a dodo, is the
chicken formed inside the dodo, or is it the other
way round?
The site is often described as the rst public museum.
What did the dodo leave behind there?
What inuences remain?
There, a museum formed in the seventeenth century, full
of rarities and curiosities of every sort and kind, displayed
in a room where a fee-paying public could scrutinize.
The OSheas knew these conventions and schemata
were crutches to be dispensed with.
To t in with a cost plan, they were advised by authorities
on economic grounds to only carve a small section of
the window.
Whatever was placed here would spill out of the
capsized vessel.
The museum on the South Lambeth Road was known
as The Ark. OShea and his brother worked another arc,
knowing the theories of Gothic architecture, tracing
the shape of pointed window arches to an upside down
version of Noahs Ark.
I wish I had three or four like myself and we
would carve all the place from time to time.
I would not desire better sport than putting
monkeys, cats, dogs, rabbits and hares, and
so on, in dierent attitudes.
He rushed around the site one afternoon
in a state of wild excitement.
He cried the master found me on my scaold
just now.
What are you at? says he.
Monkeys says I.
Come down directly, says he.
You shall not destroy the property of this
University. Come down directly. Come down.
OShea speaks:
The next day OShea was again on top of the
scaold, hammering furiously at the window.
What are you at?
Cats.
You are doing monkeys when I told you not.
Today its cats.
What are you doing Shea? I thought you were gone.
OShea was dismissed but he appeared on top of a
ladder in the doorway soon after, wielding heavy blows
to the long moulding on the hard green stone.
Parrhots repeating the same
sound until it becomes sacrosanct
Owls as the wise authorities of
the museum
Parrhots and owls made out
Parrhots repeating the same sound
until it becomes sacrosanct
Parrhots and Owwls! Parrhots and Owls!
OShea, you must knock their heads o.
Their heads then went. Their bodies, not yet evolved, now remain.
Finding places to t in for a while,
carving shapes that shouldnt be
The story then fades.
OShea and his brother might have stayed in Oxford, or
left to roam to London, Manchester, Dublin, beyond
Their stone survived. It would never be possible for
it to elevate itself towards the sun in jubilation and to
soar like the lark.
never stopping when they should.
as the solid rock upon which universal human nature
is built.
But the OSheas stone now challenges the laws and
limits that place nature at the very bottom,
Anyway, any respectable ape would deny the link of
a common ancestry with man.
TEXTS
ORIGINS
No records have been found of birthdates for John and James OShea, which
could be anytime in the 1820s and 1830s. There are dual accounts, in Ballyhooly
village in Cork and Callan in Kilkenny, of carvers by the name of OShea growing
up there. Both locations often claim the brothers in local history publications
and in the common knowledge of the area. Thomas Deane, a partner in the archi-
tectural frm Deane and Woodward, is said to have discovered one of the OSheas
as a boy, carving a piece of timber so cleverly, he had him trained. This incident
was recalled in 1950 in the diary of Henrietta Falkiner, Deanes daughter, and
conjures up the young OSheas unequivocal desire for mimesis in a manner
expressed by Umberto Eco where
Man was an artist because he possessed so little: he was born
naked, without tusks or claws, unable to run fast, with no shell
or natural armour. But he could observe the works of nature,
and imitate them. He saw how water ran down the side of a hill
without sinking in, and invented a roof for his house.
Despite Falkiners claim, no evidence has been found of any formal training for
either brother. Perhaps they observed and picked up carving skills from travel-
ling craftsmen passing through the region. They may have learnt part of their
trade as stonecutters in limestone quarries opened to provide employment during
the harsh famine years of 1840s Ireland. Of the work ethic of these places, writer
Kevin Barry gives a counterpoint to earnest accounts of toil and backwrenching
labour, noting persistent rumours heard about a famine-relief quarry sited at the
back of his house in Sligo:
One of the local farmers told me a story about it apparently,
the lads who used to work there would leave down breadcrumbs
for the birds around the entrance, and then theyd laze around
inside and play cards and have a good old talk about things.
When the birds few up into the air, they would know that the
boss-men were on the way, and so they would start breaking
stones. An early-warning system, essentially.
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66 67
SHARP TEETH / FANGS
The portrayal of the nineteenth century Irish as primitives and apelike monsters is
a much-discussed subject. Giambattista della Portas De Humana Physiognomonia
spurred artists on to metamorphosise individual men, classes and races as
animals. By the seventeenth century artists were using animals systematically
as tropes for such states of mind and morality as intelligence (the owl), lust (the
goat), or stupidity (the donkey). A century later the allegorical use of animals
reached the point in English caricature where Frenchmen were regularly portrayed
as foxes or roosters: the Dutch as frogs; Russians as bears; Turks as elephants
or turkeys; and Spanish as wolves.
Giambattista della Porta, De Humana Physiognomonia, 1586
Cartoons of monkey-like Irishmen began to appear in satirical magazines such
as Punch more than a decade before Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species
of 1859, coinciding instead with the advent of the famine and mass immigration
from Ireland to British cities. In his 1971 book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in
Victorian Caricature, Perry Curtis argues that the logic of physiognomy helped
form stereotypical representations of an Irish underclass as a Cultural Other,
far away from any English ethnocentrism, on a periphery of the empire in a land
of hunger. In this distanced primitivism, the slope of the forehead, the curve of
the nose, or the shape of the chin served as skeleton keys to unlock the secrets
of the real character hidden within each individual. While a cartoon can often be
used to expose a myth or make a decisive polemical point, this particular trend
seemed to only reinforce existing colonial prejudice. Curtis defnes several
versions of representation:
Pat: A reasonably good-looking
male. A droll and politically naive
peasant who amuses tourists with
his endless fow of illogical talk.
Clean-shaven. Devoid of sharp teeth.
THE WONDERSMITH AND HIS SON
A TALE FROM THE GOLDEN CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD
RETOLD BY ELLA YOUNG, 1927
It was drawing towards night, and the Gubbaun had not given a thought to his
sleeping place. All about him was sky, and a country that looked as if the People
of the Gods of Dana had been casting shoulder-stones in it since the beginning
of time. As far as the Gubbauns eyes travelled there was nothing but stone; gray
stone, silver stone, stone with veins of crystal and amethyst, stone that was
purple to blackness; tussocks and mounds of stone; plateaus and crags and
jutting peaks of stone; wide endless, spreading deserts of stone. Like a jagged
cloud, far-of, a city climbed the horizon. The Gubbaun sat down. He drew a
barley-cake from his wallet, and some cresses. He ate his fll and stretched
himself to sleep.
The pallor of dawn was in the air when a shriek tore the sleep from him. He
sat up: great wings beat the sky making darkness above him, and something
dropped to the earth within hand-reach. He fngered it a bag of tools! As he
touched them he knew that he had skill to use them though his hands had never
hardened under a tool in his life. He slung the wallet on his shoulder and set of
towards the town.
As he neared it he was aware of a commotion among the townsfolk they
ran hither and thither; they stared at the sky; they clung together in groups.
What has happened to your town? said the Gubbaun to a man he met. A great
misfortune has happened, said the man. This town, as you can see, has the
noblest buildings in the world: poets have made songs about this town. This town
is itself a song, a boast, a splendor, a cry of astonishment!
Three Master-Builders came to this town builders that had not their fellows
on the ridge of the world. They set themselves to the making of a Marvel; a Wonder
of Wonders; a Cause of Astonishment and Envy; a Jewel; a Masterpiece in this
town of Masterpieces this place that is jewelled like the Tree of Heaven and
drunken with Marvels!
One pact alone, one obligation they bound with oath on the townsfolk no
living person was to come within the enclosure where they worked; no living
person man, woman, or child was to set eyes on them when they passed
through the town with the tools of their trade in their hands. It was Geas for them
to be looked on. We cloaked our eyes when they passed, we darkened our windows
when they passed, we closed our doors.
Three days they were working and passing through the town with the tools
of their trade. We had contentment, and luck and prosperity, til the whitening
of this dawn. The a red-polled woman thrust her head forth my curse on the
breed and seed of her for seven generations she set the edge of her eyes on
the Three Master-Builders. They let a screech out of them and rose in the air.
They put the shapes of birds on themselves and few away my grief, three black
crows! Now the stone waits for the hammer: and the hammer is lost with the hand
that held it!
The Gubbaun tightened his grasp on the wallet, and his feet took him of their
own accord away from the town. The tools have come to the man who can handle
them, said the Gubbaun to himself: but Ill handle then for the frst time where
there are fewer tongues to wag.
Punch, 1832
68 69
Paddy: A supporter of self-government for the
Irish, yet against lethal violence to attain this
goal. Despite a protrusive mouth and jaw and
stooped posture he still manages to qualify as
human, even when drunk and disorderly. A virile
and quite menacing creature. Hairy.
Simian Paddy: A dangerous cross
between monstrous ape and primitive
man, a demonised fgure bent on
murder and mayhem. He roars for a
rebellion against the Crown, yet he
would only create chaos and violence
in its place. Sharp teeth / fangs.
As the ideas in On the Origin of Species reached wider audiences, Punch maga-
zine fused the Irish Other into the neo-Darwinian debate. Oxford historian Roy
Foster quotes a diatribe on Irish ghettos and the building industry that appeared
in the magazine in 1862:
A creature manifestly between Gorilla and the Negro is to be
met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool
by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has
contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages;
the lowest species of the Irish Yahoo. When conversing with
its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing
animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder with a
hod of bricks. The Irish Yahoo generally confnes itself within
the confnes of its own colony, except when it goes out of them
to get its living. Sometimes, however, it sallies forth in states
of excitement, and attacks civilised human beings that have
provoked its fury. The somewhat superior ability of the Irish
Yahoo to utter articulate sounds, may sufce to prove that it is
a development, and not, as some imagine, a degeneration of
the Gorilla.
Foster has argued that these cartoons about
Irish ethnicity need to be recast in terms of
class distinction. Were all working-class
types, disenfranchised by the system and left
without a delineated history, not considered
as dark and brutish? The mode of a threat-
ening underclass continued to be updated
into representations of the IRA in the 1970s.
One might speculate that the OSheas encountered Punchs editorial of the 1850s
and were aware of these representations as they consciously incorporated the
carvings of monkeys as part of their repertoire. Certainly, the presence of a stone
monkey with an aggressive appearance on a buildings facade seamlessly fts in
with notions of the grotesque. Here, carvings perceived as demons and monsters
cast out of the inner sanctum of a church or town hall now take refuge high up,
almost out of view yet ready to return with consummate angst and fury. Another
resonance is babewyn, a medieval spelling of baboon and perhaps best inter-
preted as monkeying around or monkey business. Babewyn was the word most
likely used for architectural sculpture by medieval people, and was prominently
featured by Geofrey Chaucer in his poem The House of Fame. Given the interest
of the Gothic Revival in all things medieval, the word might have been shouted
around the OSheas building site.
As for the OSheas appearance, the remaining photographs of James OShea
are in black and white, yet the colour of both brothers beards was recorded by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, cofounder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, every
morning came the handsome red-bearded Irish brothers OShea bearing plants
from the Botanic Garden to re-appear under their chisels in the rough-hewn
capitals of the pillars. Punch, 1870
Houston Chronicle, 1979
James OShea, Oxford, 1859
Fun, 1877
THE GRAND STORY OF THE GOTHIC
Goths and Vandals, after destroying all Greek and Roman architecture, introduced
in its place a fantastical and licentious manner of building, full of fret and
lamentable imagery, sparing neither pains nor cost. Yet soon the melancholic
combinations of ruins, ivy and owls were all exhausted, and the Gothic went into
hiding, waiting to return in the 1740s and onwards. Pamphlets began to appear
promoting the style and fnding it respectable origins. Its pointed arc was traced
to the intersection of boughs in a tranquil forest, to the forms of Solomons Temple
and to the inverted keel of Noahs Ark. Kenneth Clarks introduction in his book
The Gothic Revival notes that many thought the style was hopelessly antiquated,
and that its protagonists such as John Ruskin were romantics out of touch with
the progress of industry and science. Buildings of the Gothic Revival were the
subject of hyena laughter in the highbrow weeklies. Before the prominent rise
of the heritage and conservation industries, it was reported in the Architectural
Review of 1962 that the University of Oxford had voted to tear down the Oxford
Museum building, a prominent example of the style, and replace it with a structure
by Italian modernist Pier Luigi Nervi. Clark concluded his book with a Nietzsche
quote, Blessed are those who have taste, even although it be bad taste.
Trinity College Dublin, with carvings by
John and James OShea, c. 1856
John Ruskin was an art critic and social reformer at the centre of these debates.
His writing on the Venetian Byzantine infuenced the design of the Museum
Building at Trinity College Dublin, completed by architectural frm Deane and
Woodward in 1857. Irish historian Con Curran wrote of Benjamin Woodward, the
principal designer in the frm,
This unknown disciple has swallowed his gospel hook, line
and sinker. His sensitive scholarship had not merely adapted
to a modern purpose the architectural forms of Ruskins
favourite period, but he had practiced in what Ruskin always
maintained was the manner of its working. He gave the craftsman
an artists liberty; he did not control the details of design; the
craftsmen were not his tools, but worked to their own fancy as
his collaborators.
71
Of an Irish craftsmans thirst for alcohol, a ritualistic mid-morning consumption
of pints is recalled by Seamus Murphy in his romantic reminisce on the Irish
stonecarving industry in 1950s Stone Mad. Back when the decoration of churches,
banks and civic buildings were stables of the trade, the youngest apprentice on
site was sent out to bring a tray of drink up the scafold, not daring to spill a drop,
to thirsty carvers already covered in dust from a hectic mornings work.
Instead, the OSheas life in Britain appears more focused and communal,
akin to a small independent colony. In 1854, after years of agitation by physician
and educator Henry Acland, the University of Oxford decided to build a museum
for the study of Natural Science, and began a competition for its design with the
slogan For the better display of materials illustrative of the facts and laws of
the natural world. This ethos was extended to accommodate the work of the
OSheas. A temporary annex for workmen was built onsite with a mess-room and
reading room. There, they could study exotic animal specimens, consult archi-
tectural treatises and gradually think out what they might carve on the building
in front of them. One imagines the trio walking around Oxford in the evenings,
critiquing the plentiful amounts of stonecarving to be seen there. All in all, such
conditions allowed their work to grow from and grapple with the site of Oxford
itself. It granted the group the right to work out an architectural destiny for
themselves in terms of their own experience instead of entrusting it to some
knowledgeable, objective authority.
The Oxford Museum building site, with workmens building in front
While these rewarding forms of research were encouraged, much of the working
day involved repetitive, laborious hammering at stone. A top rate of pay for a
carver of the time was 60 old pence, or todays equivalent of 15 a day.
Accordingly, carvings inside and outside of the building by
John and James OShea are varied and never repetitive. As
an essential part of true Gothic expression, those who
carved ornament should be active intelligences in the design
of their own output. This was in accordance with Ruskins
dictum that workmen should not be treated as machines,
as he believed they were in classical architecture. A useful
comparison to this approach can be found in the stories of
the Renaissance, where architect and engineer Filippo
Brunelleschi walked around the building site with a bag of
turnips, liberally carving shapes into them before handing
the vegetable over to carvers who had strict instructions
to precisely replicate the desired efect in stone.
Some histories have suggested Ruskin came to Dublin,
discovered and recruited the OSheas on the spot, asking
them to move to Oxford and lead the carving on the new
museum complex to be built there. This version of events
was spurred on by Ruskins letter read at the Architectural
Congress in Oxford in 1858, when he claimed that Trinity
was the frst contemporary building where the principle of
the liberty of the workmen had been recognised. It acted
as an example of a site primarily concerned with the ethical
and social responsibilities of public art and the moral conditions of the workmen
who execute it. Yet, Ruskin only visited Dublin and saw Deane and Woodwards
building in person later in September 1861, well after the OSheas arrival in
Britain sometime in 1857. It is much more likely that the OSheas had canvassed
and convinced Ruskin of their skills by way of a photographic portfolio that
represented work samples of corbels and capitals. Such images, including one
of a monkey, were found by Deane and Woodwards biographer Frederick ODwyer
in the University of Oxford archives in the 1990s.
After arriving in Oxford, John and James OShea, accompanied by their
younger stonecarving cousin Edward Whelan, set to work on interior details in
the new museum building. Over thirty capitals were due to be completed, none
to be the same as each other. The group frequented the Universitys botanic
gardens to fetch plants that they subsequently brought onsite, arranged and
copied. Unlike other carvers of the era, no time was spent making up elaborate
preparatory drawings or models in clay. This streamlined approach made Ruskin
consider the OSheas elaborate carvings as an economy. He told an audience
in Manchester in July 1857 that now capitals of various design could be executed
cheaper than capitals of similar design by about 30 percent. Records show
that Ruskin awarded a prize to one of the brothers in a carving competition in
January 1858.
Con Curran, whose father once saw the OSheas carve, wrote in 1940 about
rumours of the heavy drinking habits of the group that led to their eventual
removal from the job.
There is another story now current that the dismissal of the
OSheas was due to their convivial habits. I can fnd in their
fragmentary record no scrap of contemporary evidence to
confrm this but much that goes in disproof.
Carving, possibly by
the OSheas, c. 1857
72 73
gardens to carve, were creating new orders of foliage carving and not working
to set formula. Unlike the Victorian carvers of the time, the OSheas work is not
repetitive and its vitality and enthusiasm set it apart.
Take, for example, the Screw Pine capital in the interior court. The OSheas
had no carved reference of a screw pine. As they walked through Oxford they
would have found many examples of acanthus leaf, oak leaf, ivy, roses, all the
usual suspects in the limited range of carved ornament. With the screw pine,
they are out on their own. They have to resolve how to make it work architec-
turally in stone as a coherent, formal component to do this they must create.
The Leather Fern capital again demonstrates a high level of craftsmanship and
creativity. Here, craft has the upper hand we see deep shadow, composition,
high fnish and detailing the forms are well articulated and an understanding
of how it will read in its architectural setting is apparent. While certainly creative
and particularly dramatic it remains more aligned to the tradition of their craft.
This capital was photographed soon after its realisation and was used to encourage
further potential sponsors of carved ornament at the museum. Perhaps it is
encumbered by this expectant audience. In other works we see the balance move
away from craft, with more liberal expression coming to the fore.
INSIDE THE OSHEAS
STEPHEN BURKE
The OSheas began carving on the Trinity Museum Building in Dublin in 1854.
Deane and Woodward, the architects of the Museum, championed their creative
style that appeared in a free manner quite apart from much Victorian work of the
time. Animals in various mischievous aspects and small incidental foliage carv-
ings on the base of pillars can be found. Monkeys pulling the tails of cats, and
frogs nestling on the banister of the stairs each enrich the heavily ornamented
building. These dynamic and explorative works are all underpinned by the quality
of the OSheas craftsmanship. They built their own language of carving over the
course of their work in Trinity and came to Oxford in 1857 with Deane and Wood-
ward, who had won the competition to design the new Oxford Museum, with a
keen appetite for creativity and a clear vision of how they wanted to work.
The OSheas comprised of brothers James and John OShea and their cousin
Edward Whelan. In analysing their output, I fnd it helpful to look at the OSheas
as a working group and not to focus on them so much as individuals. Having
worked alongside other sculptors on architectural projects I am mindful of the
working dynamic that is developed amongst a group and how much each sculptor
infuences the others. In my experience a discernable micro-identity builds: as
one develops a solution to dealing with a problem, another will employ some of
that new knowledge. Reacting and responding, the group collectively progress
and often elements that can be identifed as a trademark of one carver will appear
in anothers work. There is often much discussion and pooling of information it
is a generous environment. Amongst architectural sculptors the sense of artistic
individuality is not always fully formed. Perhaps this stems from the strong
apprentice tradition, and the understanding that the carved work is serving a
purpose in an overall scheme. Individuality is not placed at the forefront; it is
the act of making that takes precedence. This is evident in the work of the OSheas
and is the prism through which I look at their work. Amongst the many carvings
on the Oxford Museum, forty-fve capitals and corbals are to be found in the
interior court. It is there we can get closer to the OSheas as sculptors, where
their work consists almost exclusively of foliage carving and is unafected by
the colourful, more animalistic history later played out on the buildings facade.
The OSheas stand out from their Victorian sculptor peers whose carving
for the most part is neat, repetitive and prescriptive rather than creative. Much
Victorian work had a misty-eyed relationship with the Gothic era, looking to
stringently recreate rather than forge something new. The Charing Cross monument
in London, a reconstructed version of the original 13th century Walthamstow
Eleanor Cross, is a good example of the work carried out around the period of
the OSheas. Designed by the architect EM Barry, who came third to Deane and
Woodward in the Oxford Museum design competition, the monument is greatly
ornamented. The quality of carving is high form and detailing is coherent and
strong. There are over two thousand oak leaf crockets on the Charing Cross
monument, all conforming to just a few diferent variations. In comparison, at
the Oxford Museum, the OSheas are not carving hundreds of the same form to
a template. Of the capitals within the interior court of the Museum, none are
alike. Many of them represent foliage that has never been conventionally rendered
in stone before. The OSheas, picking specimen samples from Oxfords botanic
74 75
On the Norwegian Spruce capital the efcient process of the OSheas craft is
clear, but it is only present to underpin and facilitate their own explorations.
Firstly, they set out the overall composition onto the stone, then carved the surface
straight back, leaving the stems raised. A v-cut was then carved along the stems.
When this was complete the needles were carved, possibly with a gouge-shaped
chisel. The innovation of drill holes, representing the needles of the spruce seen
on end, were lastly added. The technique of drilling is often deployed within the
skill of stone carving, yet rarely with the intent of representation as here.
The result is impressionistic and not part of a more formal tradition of archi-
tectural carving. Note the clearly unfnished section where the needles were
simply not rendered. Was scafolding restricting their way in did they intend to
fnish at a later date when there was better access? Were they under pressure to
fnish in this work area to allow for other building works to proceed? All these
things are normal on-site and do have an efect on a carvers work. I expect it is
more than that with the OSheas. Perhaps they had satisfed their creative urge
on this capital and were hungry to move to the next to explore further. Maybe their
enthusiasm overrode their professionalism as they eyed the next piece of stone.
Work such as the Norwegian Spruce might initially seem clunky and unre-
solved. However this is not a lack of craftsmanship or an uncaring hurry it is
something more sophisticated. The OSheas are reticent to articulate their
subjects in the tradition of strong architectural carving. They have a diferent
approach, coaxing out the play of leaves and textures as they see ft, allowing
surfaces and forms to be animated and vitalised by the potential they still hold.
It is precisely because they are competent craftsmen that they have no need
to place their craftsmanship on display it is exclusively creativity that matters
to them. They seem to become less concerned about those that will view and
judge their work, fnding greater validation in their own explorations. In the
English Yew capital we see a subtle impression of the foliage. All of the informa-
tion is there but achieved by barely releasing shapes from the stone.
The OSheas come into their own when they do not excessively articulate
form. They didnt deem it necessary to fnish, instead embracing texture and
process. I imagine their appetite for this type of work became evermore insatiable
and they use this unfnished aesthetic to facilitate a framework to take on more
creative challenges. The client, having laid the conditions for this freedom of
expression, later found themselves attempting to keep some form of control by
withholding payment for unfnished carving it doesnt seem to have worked.
Almost 2,000 years before the OSheas carved their capitals in Oxford, Vitruvius
wrote his account of the origin of the Corinthian capital, the most ornate of the
classical orders. A girl, a native of Corinth, was attacked by disease and died.
After her funeral, the goblets that delighted her when living were put in a basket
by her nurse, taken and placed at her monument. So that they might remain
longer, as they were exposed to the weather, the nurse covered the basket with
a tile. As it happened the basket was placed upon the root of an acanthus. At
springtime the acanthus, pressed down by the weight of the nurses ofering, put
forth leaves and shoots. They grew up the sides of the basket and, being pressed
down at the angles by the force of the weight of the tile, were compelled to form
the curves of volutes at the extreme parts. Just then sculptor Callimachus,
known for the refnement and delicacy of his artistic work, passed by the tomb
and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing round it. Delighted
with the novel style and form, he carved some capitals after that pattern for
the Corinthians. He determined symmetrical proportions, approved and estab-
lished from that time forth the rules to be followed in fnished works of the
Corinthian order.
Callimachus, having observed nature, puts in place a formal template that
is efectively followed for over two millennia. The OSheas, when they pick samples
from the botanic gardens, revisit the point at which Callimachus discovers the
acanthus growing around the basket
at the moment just before the rules of
carving are approved. Yet the OSheas
dont establish a new formula or doctrine
their work tends towards a true and
unencumbered creativity, leaving many
of their contemporaries to simply follow
the lines of prescribed craft.
76 77
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They nosed at his calves and his thighs,
they breathed on his shoulder,
they nuzzled the back of his neck,
they went bumping of tree-trunks and rock-face,
they spouted and plunged like a waterfall,
until he gave them the slip and escaped
in a swirling tongue of low cloud.
This incident drove Sweeney into another intense ft of madness and lamenting,
and the pages of verse continue to amass as he sees the new Christian hierarchy
alienate and sideline the pagan society of which he was king. His anxieties are
further accelerated in Flann OBriens proto-postmodern telling of the story in
1939s At Swim-Two-Birds. Here, Sweeney shares pages with a devil known as
the Pooka MacPhellimey and Dermot Trellis, a writer of Wild West literature. In
this company Sweeney becomes more exaggerated, foolish and comical, almost
as if he must now fght for attention in his plight. The original an clog nomh re
nomhaibh, (the bell of saints before saints) in JG OKeefes 1913 translation
is frenetically portrayed by OBrien as the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints.
Sweeneys uncomfortable, frenetic pace means he is never fully visualised in
any one place. As he scuttles along, his verses never come to terms with all that
has occurred at any site he encounters. He cannot settle long enough to fnd
focus; instead he resorts to nervous chattering in each location. All he can hope
for is to see something that leads to another place or thought, to continue to
lament the weight of the world before him.
Heaneys 1983 version saw Sweeneys story reaching a larger audience, and
it soon became a popular theme with several neo-expressionist painters in Ireland.
As consensus grew around the necessity of art to return and examine concerns
of the human fgure, what better challenge could there be? How could you paint
half-man, half-bird? In any of the versions of Sweeney, he moves too fast for anyone
to see whether he has a beak or feathers or hands, or even what size he is. Such
plurality of character made him ideal fodder for the artistic mode of the time.
Eventually after years of wandering, Sweeney began to radiate towards a
farm in Carlow where, for the frst time since being cursed, he found kindness
and supper made for him each evening.
There the cook Muirghil would sink her
heel into the nearest cow-dung, shaping
a bowl and flling it up to the brim with
fresh milk. He would then sneak in from
nearby trees and lap it up. While it is
best not to spoil the end of the story,
an evocative appearance occurs in
Tom Fitzgeralds sculpture Sweeneys
Throne, a work sited in Limerick City.
There, upon the seat of the sculpture,
Fitzgerald intervenes into the narrative
to invite Sweeney to rest from his travels
and compose an ode to the welcoming
surroundings he fnds himself in.
AN BUILE SHUIBHNE
Iterations of the wandering spirit, as seen in the life of the OSheas, fnd a kinship
in the medieval epic poem of An Buile Shuibhne. Translated as The Madness of
Sweeney, or Sweeneys Frenzy, it tells the story of a legendary king of Ulster
through a mixture of lyrical laments, rhapsodies and curses. Set in the year 637
in the midst of tensions between ancient Celtic traditions and the newly arrived
Christian domination, the king Sweeney is suddenly angered by the clink of a
bell. He soon learns the sound came from Bishop Ronan who plans to build a
church on Sweeneys territory. At this he storms, naked, out of his castle to fnd
Ronan, taking an illuminated manuscript from him and throwing it into the depths
of a nearby lake where it sinks without trace. Next, he furiously grabs hold of the
bishop, and would have killed him were he not called at that very moment to fght
in battle.
Left alone after the attack, Ronan plotted revenge. He remembered some of
his old pagan tricks, and cursed Sweeney with madness. At that moment at the
Battle of Moira, alleged to be the largest battle ever fought in Ireland, he dropped
his weapon and began to morph in form. Seamus Heaney recalls the scene in his
1983 translation Sweeney Astray:
his brain convulsed,
his mind split open.
Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings
and launchings came over him,
he staggered and fapped desperately,
he was revolted by the thoughts of known places
and dreamed strange migrations.
His fngers stifened,
his feet scufed and furried,
his heart was startled,
his senses were mesmerized,
his sight was bent,
the weapons fell from his hands
and he levitated in a frantic cumbersome motion
like a bird of the air.
From that point on, Sweeney leapt from place to place, naked, lonely and hungry.
Like a bird, he could never trust humans. His old kinsmen and subjects sent him
mad with fear, and he could only scuttle from spot to spot around present-day
Ireland, Scotland and Wales, all the while acting outcast and shifty. The mad
and exiled king composed verse as he travelled. At every stop in his fight, he
pauses to recite a poem describing the countryside and his unfortunate plight.
Ronan continued his agenda against Sweeney, convincing God to send
bleeding, headless torsos and fve goat-bearded disembodied heads after him.
Heaney picks up the story:
The heads were pursuing him,
lolling and baying,
snapping and yelping,
whining and squealing.
78 79
Tom Fitzgerald,
Sweeneys Throne, 1987
IT IS THE TAIL THAT BETRAYS THE SPIDER MONKEY
The Pitt Rivers Museum houses the University of Oxfords collection of anthro-
pology and world archaeology. Established in 1884, it is accessed from the
same entrance as the Museum of Natural History, and visitors must walk by the
OSheas carvings to reach it.
The premise of exhibition case C144A, labeled Forms Suggested by Natural
Shapes, is a series of objects that, by appreciative observation, look like an animal
or other natural forms. Prominent in the display is a stone donated by Henry
Balfour, the inaugural curator of the museum. He found it in 1900 at a location a
few miles outside Oxford. On close inspection it resembles a monkeys head.
Other artefacts in the case from Burma, Canada and Italy have been deliberately
altered to further resemble and accentuate the forms they were frst observed to
look like, such as snakes and pigeons. In Balfours only book, 1893s The Evolution
of Decorative Art, the fuidity of this approach is made evident. In an analogy with
the theory of evolution, the morphology of animal forms is taken as a starting
point to explore objects in the Pitt Rivers Collection and beyond. By the late
nineteenth century, specimens of the arts and crafts of various peoples had long
been collected in museums and were often regarded as little more than curiosities
or trophies. Balfours ideas, developed through his work as a curator and teacher
in the university, helped to dissolve any static sense of stale colonialism.
Firstly, Balfour details methods of unconscious variation where changes in
form are not intentional, but are due to lack of skill or careless copying, difculty
of material, or reproducing from memory. He writes,
Let us suppose that someone, whom I will call A, copies an
object, and B copies As version of it without having seen the
original, and C copies Bs and so on; in each case the new
copy varies from the immediately preceding one more or less
according to the skill of the artist. We can readily see that in
the course of time such successive copying designs can arise,
which may entirely lose all resemblance to the original object,
and to As would-be realistic version of it.
80 81
Another factor is conscious variation, in which development is intentional, and
may be made to serve some useful purpose such as marks of ownership, to
increase ornamental efect or adopt a design to a variety of functions or situations.
For example seeds from Burma in the shape of a snakes head were accordingly
used as a charm to protect against snakebites.
Looking at a collection of ornamental patterns from Papua New Guinea, Balfour
traces modifcations in design from a bird motif to a somewhat abstract version
of a human head.
Balfour makes another keen observation on basketwork design of the same
region. He decodes the pattern present as resembling a spider monkey. Balfour
acknowledges that while the form of the head, body and limbs would by no means
necessarily lead to this conclusion. Instead,
It is the tail that betrays the spider monkey. The characteristic
coil-up extremity of the long tail is well indicated in the neces-
sarily conventional representations in the baskets, and supplies
us with the clue in the design two fgures are brought together
with the idea of symmetry, though we might almost suppose
that the two together represented a monkey on the banks of a
river, with its inverted refection in the water below it.
through very clearly in the heated debate. The argument takes
the course of an arc leading from the problem of the distribu-
tion of wealth through the population explosion, the market
economy, food production, environmental damage and urbanism
to nuclear power, etc. And as the lengthy dispute goes on, with
the two of them moving from place to place in the two-storey
labyrinth of the museum, suddenly the artefacts in the display
cases fnd their voices and start to speak up because theyve
got their own ideas about how the world works. They join in
the conversation, in the strife. Even items of furniture put their
oar in and start to shift around. The noise level increases and
the situation starts getting out of hand.
Suddenly a chair crashes down from a balustrade into the
glass lid of a display case. A neon tube explodes with a loud
bang and the scene is plunged into darkness. Ethnographic
artefacts are tumbling on top of each other and their cries of
protest rise to a Babylonian cacophony. The general consensus
is that the coyote is responsible for the mayhem. So the review
of the origins of the world takes its course. In the end, when
everyone is exhausted but no explanation has been found for
the way the world is, you see the raven from behind, no longer
just a shadow, leaving the museum, getting into a Bentley in the
pouring rain and driving of. That was reference to Joseph Beuys,
of course, our revered teacher. He had a Bentley at the time
and wrote a letter of recommendation for our museum project.
At the beginning of the flm you see the backs of the knees
of some school children, edged by the tops of their socks and
the hems of their school uniforms; and you hear the voice of
their teacher, explaining the huge totem pole of the Haida
Indians. He talks about the signs of diferent tribes with animal
symbols carved into the cedar tree trunk, one above the other,
and painted. You hear him listing the names of the diferent
tribes and the children getting restless.
Very gradually you get to see the whole picture the class
in the museum, with the children between the display cases
standing looking at the totem pole, and you hear the teachers
voice, receding, as he comes to the last symbolic creature on
the totem pole, which is the raven. The camera pans slowly to
the left and stops at a display case. The shadow of the raven
on the glass of the case suddenly moves as it hears the voice
of the coyote, deliberately provoking him. The following dialogue
concerns the masks, fgures, models fetishes, instruments and
costumes in the display case; in their seemingly endless variety
they bear witness to the processes of creation, the origins of
the world.
REPRINTED WITH THE KIND PERMISSION OF THE
WELTKULTUREN MUSEUM, FRANKFURT AM MAIN.
EXTRACT, PAGES 390 391 FROM CONQUERING THE SOUTHERN
CONTINENT IN THE HAZE OF A SIXPENNY CIGAR.
LOTHAR BAUMGARTEN AND MICHAEL OPPITZ IN CONVERSATION
WITH CLMENTINE DELISS PUBLISHED INOBJECT ATLAS
FIELDWORK IN THE MUSEUM, WELTKULTUREN MUSEUM AND
KERBER VERLAG, 2012
Deliss
You mean the flm Der Rabe and der Kojote (The Raven and the
Coyote)? What is that about? Whats in it?
Oppitz
I remember there was a mask from the Kwakiutl tribe, whose
lands are on the west coast of present-day Canada, with a
ravens head, and another one with a coyotes head. In the flm
these masks are worn by two people. The two characters go to
the Pitt Rivers Museum to see their relatives on view in the
display cases, because theyve heard that there are more
coyotes and ravens there. So they go in, walk up to a display
case and are overcome. They think, Whats this? In Europe
our people are locked away behind glass? It seems very strange
to them. They continue their tour and gradually recognise the
system used to arrange things here. They consider whether
they should conform to the same system or stick to their own.
Unable to reach a conclusion, they decide they need some
refreshment. Okay, so lets have a pint in The Three Crowns.
Thats the pub where Evans-Pritchard always used to sit,
tormenting his assistants and students. The flm ends with them
ordering a Guinness at the bar.
Baumgarten
I also remember it was to be a flm about a raven and a coyote:
they were going to be the protagonists in a complex dialogue
on the origins of the world. The starting point was a creation
myth, as told by the Haida, Kwakiutl or the Tlingit. The raven
only appears in the flm as a shadowy shape passing across the
display cases. Hes wearing a raven mask, a trench coat and,
rather unexpectedly, fippers. The Coyote is symbolised by a
piece of red silk, which sometimes lingers on the back of a chair,
sometimes foats through the air; the gleam of the silk is
refected or refracted in the glass panes of the display cases,
sometimes you can only tell where it is by its futtering. Both
of them, our actors, are mythological fgures.
After theyve chatted about the weather, they quickly get
into a dispute about the state of the world, which seems beyond
help, with all its conficts. Their opposing characters come
82 83
Lambeth, alongside a fying squirrel, gourds, olives, a bat as large as a pigeon,
a human bone weighing 42 lbs. and an instrument used in circumcision. On show
were parts of an Agnus Scythicus, a plant that grew a stalk out of the ground
with a lamb attached on top. Once the lamb had eaten all the grass in the vicinity
of the stalk, both it and the plant died.
Ofcially known as Musaeum Tradescantianum, the enterprise gradually
became known as The Ark. While acting as a biblical reference, perhaps this
title was also intended to evoke the cramped inclusiveness of the collection, as
if everything made by civilisation could be found there. Tradescants house was
at 113 119 South Lambeth, and the gardens and orchard ran south from there.
No detailed description has been found on how the rarities were displayed, and
it is unknown if the museum was in the house or in a special building in the
garden. The complex was demolished in 1881 and today visitors can visit several
restaurants, fast food outlets, betting shops, newsagents and a pharmacy at
The Arks location.
Agnus Scythicus
THE ARK
John Tradescant the Elder
Oil on canvas, attributed to Emanuel De Critz
The life of John Tradescant is a well-worn story, but bears repeating. Tradescant
the Elder (c. 1570 1638) was a botanist, importing foreign shrubs and plants to
Britain. From Dutch descent, he confdently made his way around Europe, North
Africa and Siberia, dispatching cherry trees, fgs, peaches and pomegranates
back to his patrons while all the time holding close a covert purpose: the assembly
of a collection of objects that explored all human and natural knowledge of the
time. Wheeling and dealing, he invested in speculative explorations across the
Atlantic to the new world of Virginia.
Tradescant moved into a house in Lambeth on the south side of the Thames
sometime in the 1620s. While the aristocracy of the time often showed of cabi-
nets of curiosities to their social equals, Tradescant now opened his collection
to the public, the frst time this occurred in the anglicised world, predating The
British Museum who opened their doors much later in 1753. Anyone with an
entrance fee of 6 pence (in todays currency around 2.50) could go have a look.
Tradescants activity of collecting and exhibiting might have been infuenced by
the idea of Solomons House, a fctional institution portrayed in Francis Bacons
1627 novel The New Atlantis that acted as a place to study objects and artefacts
from the past along with the new inventions of the present. Fossils, shells, insects,
shoes from afar, dragons eggs, weapons, jewels, the hand of a mermaid, a small
piece of wood from the cross of Christ, hats, an abacus, stones, snake bones,
cheese, feathers from a phoenix and tobacco pipes from Brazil were present in
84 85
86
AFTER THE ARK
SIMON WOODLEY
Prior to 1986 only multi-national companies based in the USA were ofering
franchise opportunities in the fried chicken sector of the British fast food industry.
It was at this time Favorite recognised a substantial gap in the market for high
quality fried chicken stores in neighbourhood-like locations rather than drive-
throughs and commercial high streets. The concept was to open a chain of
professionally run restaurants ofering at least equal quality of food and service
as any brand leader, but at a fraction of the set up cost.
In August 1986 seven stores opened simultaneously under the trading name
Favorite Fried Chicken. All in and around Central London, these consisted of four
company-owned and three franchised units. Some of these original Favorite
stores are still happily trading as part of todays franchise system, including one
on the South Lambeth Road.In the mid-1990s a three-year initiative was imple-
mented, expanding the brand to other locations and launching a new menu. A
major updating of the corporate image took place with all stores undergoing
refurbishment and rebranding as Favorite Chicken & Ribs.Favorite also expanded
out of Britain, opening sites in The Netherlands and Germany.
Favorite ofers a fully structured franchise system. For an initial fee the
franchisee gets twelve months exclusivity to the Favorite brand in a locality while
seeking premises. Favorite also assist with shop ftting through a range of bright
modern store designs, supply staf training, and assistance in organising bank
loans to fund the venture. Once up and running, Favorite continues to liaise with
the store operator via its Field Operation Managers and Quality & Training Team
to provide support for all aspects of the business, from operational matters
through to local advertising and promotion.
Favorite are now one of thelargest UK-owned chicken franchise chains with
over ninety stores. Over the last twenty-eight years it has demonstrated its
success by providing a product menu and operational system to match and exceed
the market leader in the sector, whilst ofering a far more competitive cost to
franchisees. Favorite is still owned and operated by one of the founding directors
and for the last eight years has been wholly owned by one family.
A key part of Favorites brand is the Chuckie motif, which dates from the
companys beginnings and appears on all shopfronts and food packaging. Chuckie
was frst drawn by an art student at Southend Polytechnic in 1986.
THE KNICKKNACKATORY
In 1650, antiquary and politician Elias Ashmole visited The Ark. Soon after, taken
by the apparent mysticism of the collection, he attempted his frst magical
experiment, successfully ridding his house of insects and pests by casting lead
representations of fies, feas, caterpillars and toads. With John Tradescant the
Younger (1608 1662) now running the museum, Ashmole assisted in compiling
and publishing a catalogue in 1656. Iain Sinclair takes up the story in 1997s
Lights out for the Territory,
After a seasonal route in December 1659, when heroic quan-
tities of drink were taken, Ashmole produced a deed of gift
which Tradescant signed in front of witnesses granting the
collection to Ashmole. Within a month of Tradescants death
in 1662, Ashmole preferred a Bill in Chancery against the widow
Hester, a lady of insecure temperament. The case was decided
in Ashmoles favour.
He then moved into a house adjacent to the Tradescants in 1674 and transferred
some items from The Ark into his ownership. In 1678, in the midst of further legal
wrangling, Hester was found drowned in a garden pond. By early 1679, Ashmole
had taken over the lease of the Tradescant property and began merging his own
and their collection into one. He flled up twelve wagons, and transferred it all
to Oxford, donating it to the University on the condition that a suitable building
was made available to house the artefacts. Bearing his name, the Ashmolean
Museum was opened in 1683. With its variety of rarities and curiosities, it was
referred to in some quarters as The Knickknackatory.
Gradually over time, the collection became dispersed around Oxford
geological and zoological specimens went to the Natural History Museum,
manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, and ethnographical items to the Pitt
Rivers. Nowadays, the Ashmolean has a new building where a basement room
remembers The Arks contribution to its beginnings. Most prominent here is
Tradescants acquisition of the mantle of Indian chief Powhaten, featuring four
tanned deer hides sown together with small shells making the shape of a human
fgure surrounded by two animals. Powhaten was the father of Pocahontas, the
romanticised Native American fgure whose integrity to humanism demonstrated
the potential of indigenous peoples to be assimilated into the ideals of the
incoming European society.
88 89
Powhatens Mantle, installed at the Ashmolean Museum
DIDUS INEPTUS / RAPHUS CUCULLATUS
A stufed dodo formed part of Tradescants collec-
tion, as recorded in the 1656 catalogue. From the
island of Mauritius, the fightless bird was frst
found by Dutch colonisers in 1598 and conse-
quently became extinct a century later. While it is
hard to estimate how many live dodos were brought
to London, a 1638 account from theologian Hamon
LEstrange details seeing a poster advertising
strange fowl. Soon he
with one or two more then in com-
pany went in to see it. It was kept
in a chamber, and was a great
fowle somewhat bigger than the
largest Turky Cock, and so legged
and footed, but stouter and thick-
er and of a more erect shape, col-
oured before like the breast of
a young cock fesan, and on the
back of dunn and deare colour.
The keeper called it a Dodo.
Today the dodo often acts as a symbol of obsolescence and is mentioned in
conversations about natural selection and the survival of the fttest. The scientifc
name frst given to the bird by the eighteenth-century Swedish taxonomist Carl
Linnaeus was Didus ineptus, refecting the dodos reputation for being stupid
and ungainly. Recently, revisions to this viewpoint have been aired; perhaps
those birds that did reach Europe were obese because of their confnement and
captive diet in the hold of a ship for many months. Furthermore, measurements
of remaining bones, together with calculations on how much weight the birds
skeleton could have carried, suggest that a dodo was much thinner. The Natural
History Museum in Oxford now houses a slim replica of the bird made by Andrew
Kitchner in the 1990s, and it now has a new and less derogatory scientifc name,
Raphus cucullatus. The dodo is well celebrated in Oxfords culture, appearing in
the story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
The role of the dodo, alongside Tradescant and Ashmole, as a witness and
participant in the beginning of public museum culture in Britain should not be
underestimated. Its presence, as a dead bird, had to be administered into a system
of classifcation. As part of the infrastructure set up around the Ashmolean in
the 1680s, artefacts were divided up into natural and manmade objects. Members
of the University were appointed to be responsible for a particular part of the
collection in a role akin to a present-day curator. A yearly stock-check would
occur, with a commitment to replace an object if it was damaged, destroyed or
stolen. The story goes: as annual inspections happened, the condition of the dodo
specimen slowly degraded. By 1755, the group took a look at the dusty bird and
unanimously voted to discard it. Despite the reality that no living dodos could
be found by the end of the 1600s, the specimen was thrown on top of a fre with
Musaeum Tradescantianum
catalogue, 1656
other decayed specimens, destined to undergo a second ritual extinction. An
unidentifed hero at the scene then realised the folly of this action, and managed
to pull the bird out of the fames, saving only its head and foot.
These specimens now survive in the collection of the Natural History
Museum. There, curator Malgosia Nowak-Kemp notes that this version of the
dodos downfall gained traction as a result of a mistranslation of Latin records
of the university: a phrase for describing the inspection process was instead
understood as meaning fre. It was more likely that the head and foot were the
only parts worth keeping as the specimen degraded by rough handling in damp
spaces in Lambeth and Oxford.
Back in Mauritius, a Dutch sea captain noted even a long boiling would
scarcely make them tender, but they remained tough and hard, with the exception
of the breast and belly, which were very good.
90 91
The dodo beside a small fre,
in Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney Productions, 1951
PARRHOTS AND OWWLS
According to the University of Oxford archives, James OShea began work on
the museum facade in late 1858, assuming the role of sole carver. The choice of
what window to work on was dictated by and dependent on the location of the
building contractors scafold, with OShea ducking and diving around an active
construction site on limited timeframes. A decision had been taken in the inter-
ests of budget restraints that the jambs of the upper windows were to be left
uncarved. OShea, however, proceeded with this work, and appealed to Henry
Acland and John Ruskin for this carving to continue. Once OShea carved extra
on one window, he knew he was likely committing the University to unforeseen
expenditure. To insure a sense of continuity on the facade, all the jambs on twelve
frst foor windows would then have to be carved. An undated letter from OShea
sometime in autumn 1859 states his position:
i am afraid that this Gentleman is a fraid that those orniments
will cost too much money but the Price of the window without
tuching those jambs would be 9 and would be very cheap carving
if i was to Doo all the upper windows i would carv evry Jamb
for nothing for the sake of art a lone rather than Lave them.
The same letter incorporates a sketch for a
window to feature monkeys playfully located
around its arch. Considering OSheas penchant
of never making working drawings for his
carving, this sketch instead may have been
intended as a suggestion for Acland and the
new institution to adopt a progressive stance
around human evolution. TH Huxley, the enfant
terrible of Victorian science, had been giving
lectures about ape ancestors, while Darwins
On the Origin of Species was soon to be pub-
lished in November 1859. These were radical
ideas undermining theological belief, and the
appearance of monkeys on the new museum
facade would have been an endorsement of
these discoveries.
OShea began work, but soon his monkeys
were seen and objected to, probably by long-time
Master of University College Oxford, Frederick
Charles Plumptre. Plumptre was involved in the
restoration of several churches and was a
member of the museum building committee. About to be inaugurated as president
of the Oxford Architectural Society for a third term in ofce, he most likely did
not want to be the focus of a scandal with OSheas monkeys. Pressure was
applied from above for OShea to change the carving and the conversion of
roughly blocked monkeys into cats provided a solution.
Since known as The Cat Window, some of the felines are scrawny, their ribs
protruding from skinny fanks. Others are well fed, carrying fsh and birds in their
mouths. Many of the cat carvings have glass eyes, suggesting that OShea might
have been imitating the false eyes of taxidermy
specimens he saw around Oxford (Another possible
infuence might be the tradition of galleting, where
small pieces of glass were pressed into wet mortar
on the front of cottages and farmhouses. Once
sunshine hit the building, the glass would sparkle
and add variety to typically downtrodden structures.
OShea might have enjoyed the transposition of this
vernacular form of decoration onto a prominent civic
building). Yet, elements of the window carving are
incomplete and the shape and form of the cats seem
to still portray aspects of monkey anatomy. Ambi-
guity has always appealed to the artisan, whether
to train perception, stir confusion, or evoke appre-
ciative pleasure, ideals OShea might have valued
as a pragmatic way of keeping some of his original
intentions intact as he was forced to comply with
orders from above. Naturally enough, he probably
felt aggrieved at the transgression of the belief
system where a carver has a free hand in the design
and execution of his work.
According to Aclands account of this event,
written years later in 1893, the censorship of carving
greatly frustrated OShea. He had completed monkey
carvings in Trinity College and his photographic
portfolio featured them. As a prominent part of his
oeuvre he must have wanted to present a monkey
to the Oxford public. According to Acland, reported
intolerable behaviour by OShea led to his dismissal
and the abandonment of The Cat Window. Nonethe-
less, he stayed onsite, and began another unsanc-
tioned carving above the main entrance doorway.
Acland recalls he found OShea on a single ladder
in the porch wielding heavy blows as one imagines
Michael Angelo might have struck when he was
blocking out the design of some immortal work.
When he asked OShea what he was doing, OShea
continued to hammer on, furiously shouting
Parrhots and Owwls! Parrhots and Owwls! Members
of Convocation! As a last act, Acland intervened
and meditatively asked OShea to destroy the heads of each carving, Their heads
went. Their bodies not yet evolved, remain to testify to the humour, the farce, the
woes, the troubles in the character and art of our Irish brethren.
The story often appears in printed matter generated by the Natural History
Museum and is mentioned in publications about the history of Oxford. Phillip
Ophers Oxford Sculpture, An Illustrated Guide to nearly 1000 years of Oxfords
stone and wood architectural carvings, churches and chapel memorials, monumental
brasses, and public sculpture, from Norman times to the present notes that The
OSheas were thrown of the job for some disrespectful caricatures of the senior
staf of the museum, and for spending too long at lunch, drinking Guinness.
92 93
Illustration from
The Architect, 4 May 1872
Detail of OSheas
glass eyes
Blair J Gilberts 2009 article Puncturing an Oxford Myth: the Truth about the
Infamous OSheas and the Oxford University Museum suggests Aclands
account is romanticised and is a story repeated until it achieved canonical status:
Sadly, though delightful, it is not true. If it has any Darwinian
connection, it is that of a creationist myth. Acland had greatly
embellished the facts and theatre of what was undeniably an
interesting thirty-four-year-old story What probably began
as an amusing anecdote in a speech by Acland was repeated
and eventually written down and became fact Many people
today assume that the rough blocking on the inner arch above
the entryway is the place where OShea was attempting his
protest and carving the owls and parrots. That appears to be
another myth.
Gilberts essay, which comprehensively looks at carvings completed by John
and James OShea and Edward Whelan in the museums interior, goes on to claim
that the rough carving visible on the inner arch above the doorway is a remnant
of another decorative scheme by John Hungerford Pollen, a designer associated
with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. In 1860, after the Parrhots and Owwls
incident, Pollen proposed a design that was partly executed by sculptor Thomas
Woolner before funds ran out and it was left uncompleted. Of the detail there
today, Woolner managed to place Adam and Eve on either side of the doorway,
with fowers, thorns and fruit ascending to meet an angel. When looking closely
at Pollens plan, a band of stonecarving was to be executed along the inner arch
on the right. Formally, this initially seems to correlate to the unfnished blocking
now present.
However, one could speculate that elements
of Pollens plan were necessitated by having to
cover up the unkempt blocking caused by the
Parrhots and Owwls incident of the previous year.
Close inspection of the arch reveals a clear formal
relationship to Parrhots and Owwls. Three Parrhots
and three Owwls can be seen. The heads of the
Parrhots, while not fully formed, are still intact and
have not been hacked of. Two Owwls have their
heads removed, with aggressive indentations into
the stone visible. On this basis Aclands account,
although exaggerated, would seem to be partially
verifable. If there was disagreement between
carver and commissioners, it might have been long
drawn out, an antagonism over a period of several
months. OShea may have thought of this situation
as part of his freedom as a carver perhaps it was
up to him to agitate, hustle and argue for what he
wanted on the facade.
Records uncovered by Frederick ODwyer show
the OSheas continued to be involved with Oxford,
a version contradicting Aclands account. Though
the amount of carving slackened of by the end of
Design by
John Hungerford Pollen
for the entrance doorway,
c. 1860
1859, John and James returned at various intervals while also taking on work in
Norfolk, Manchester and possibly Dublin. Cousin Edward Whelan stayed in
Oxford, working on the museum until summer 1861, and their families were
recorded as being resident in Oxford in the 1860 census. Who knows? Perhaps a
temporary dismissal did happen, before a reconciliation was made. Maybe a slow
disenchantment with the restriction of carving led James to fnd work elsewhere.
The core of an endeavour to confrm aspects of this past is to fnd ways to
look at the uncompleted carvings and how they appear today. In the absence of
clear factual information and verifable trajectories, here are some interpretative
options for the site:
1. In appearance Parrhots and Owwls bear a very minor resemblance to a
representation of parrots and owls that cultivates notions of beauty and artisan
integrity it takes time on an initial encounter with the doorway for a similarity
to be noticed, and recognition is assisted by a historical overview of the material
evidence of OSheas activities. Despite his reported shouting while executing
the piece and the near-heroic grandeur of his gesture, Parrhots and Owwls hardly
emit a sense of impassioned beauty or colossal amazement. Since the carvings
avoid such overarching assessments, it places them as a challenge to the medieval
scholasticism that pervaded Gothic thinking, seeking a divine explanation for
everything and resolving any contradiction through its systematic enquiry. For
it is evident, Thomas Aquinas writes in the thirteenth century, that everything
in nature has a certain end, and a fxed rule of size and growth. Thus, representations
of parrots and owls may difer from one another in size and shape, but if the
variations go beyond certain limits there is no longer a true and proper nature,
only a malformed one disregarded by authoritive interpretation.
2. While each Owwl head is now destroyed, the continued presence of Parrhot
heads at the doorway begs the question: what kind of allegorical sound can each
Parrhot voice? They speak to us through a complicated haze of history. Due to
their unfnished status, their presence is irregular in pitch and volume. Whatever
sound might be heard is reliant on how closely we engage and acknowledge
their haphazard shapes. Lend them an ear. The Parrhots spill out rhetorical
syllables, made up of sounds taken from all those that they know: OShea, Acland,
Ruskin, Plumptre, the Oxford museum-going public, you and I. Rhythm and
melody are disrupted, and the message of transgression OShea wished for
Parrhots to chirp lacks clarity. They may act as a glossolalia: a method of speaking
in tongues, lacking any comprehension of meaning. Can the Parrhots and their
heads be heard? Can Parrhots and Owwls be seen? Are they part of a scene?
Are they obscene? In these uncertainties, the Parrhots seem to perversely
uphold elements of OSheas work. Here, the presentation of animals in stone
is not predicated on ideas of natural science as a reductive force based on
survival of the fttest. Such a conceit is jettisoned in favour of play, excessiveness,
and associative digression.
3. With Adam and Eve in close proximity to OSheas stone, agnostic theory may
come to the fore. Here, God made a mess in his job of creating the world; a
half-fnished bundle, full of voids and not entirely constituted. Whats left is a
form of proto-reality, one dense in form and matter yet unable to synthesise into
any clear narrative or version of truth. In considering the imperfect knowledge
94
Parrhot
Parrhot
Parrhot
Owwls Head
Owwls Head
Owwl
Owwl
Owwl
96 97
and limited recall around the making of Parrhots and Owwls, what remains is not
an optimal decision completed by a clear rationality. Rather, Parrhots and Owwls
is a sacrifcial compromise between unresolved conficting constraints; OSheas
fury, the governance of the University of Oxford and Aclands mediation all
participate in its making. As renderings in stone, Parrhots and Owwls are not
only incomplete or partly defaced representations. Ontologically one could go
so far as to say Parrhots and Owls are an exclusion, mute characters rendered
negatively onto the site.
As for The Cat Window, there is one more possible link to consider, as found
in the legend of the Gubbaun Soar. The Gubbaun is a village craftsman who
wanders the countryside using his skills as a builder, often fashioning fantastical
monuments. While the story was written down and published by Irish mystic and
Berkley professor Ella Young in 1927, it may well have been known to James
OShea through aural traditions of his craft. Young recounts the Gubbaun:
Walking at his will, he came to a place where a great chiefs
dune was a-building. The folk that fashioned it were disputing
and arguing among themselves.
It is right, said one who had an air of authority and a red cloak
on him; it is right that on this lintel there should be an emblem
to show the power of the dune an emblem to put loosening of
joints and terrors upon evil-doers.
It is more ftting, said another, that the man who carves the
emblem should be honoured in it.
Nay, said a third, that the man who raised the stone should
be honoured in it. I myself should be honoured. So the clash
of tongues and opinions went on.
The blessing of the sun, and the colours of the day to you,
said the Gubbaun. Have you work for a Craftsman?
What Craftsman are you? said they, that come hither a-begging?
The world runs after the Master-Craftsman we have no need
of bunglers!
I am a Master-Craftsman.
Hear him! cried they all. Where are your apprentices? What
dunes have you built? What jewels have you carved? Tell us that!
A man with ill-cobbled brogues, and burrs in his coat a likely lie!
Put me to the proof, said the Gubbaun, set me a task!
So vagrants talk, said the man in the red cloak, while good
men sweat at labour. Have you the hands of a mason?
What need to waste wit and words on this churl? cried another.
It is time now to stretch our limbs in the sun, and to eat. Let
us go to the stream where the cresses are.
They went.
When they were well out of the way, the Gubbaun took his
tools. He worked with a will. The work was fnished when they
straggled back.
The frst that caught sight of it cried out: the cry ran from man
to man of them. There was hand-clapping and amazement.
The Gubbaun had carved the King-Cat of Keshcorran more
terrible than a tiger! The Cat crouched midway in the lintel, and
on either side of him spread a tail, a tail worthy that Royal One!
Bristling with ferceness it spread; it slid along on either side,
with insinuating grace and with infnite cunning, losing itself
at the last in loops, and twists, and foliations and intricacies
that spread and returned and established themselves in a
mysterious, magical, spell-knotted forest of emblems behind
the fat-eared threatening head.
There is an emblem for the Builder in that, said the Gubbaun,
and an emblem for the Carver, and an emblem for the Man who
planned the Dune, and for the Earth that gave the stone for it.
Is it enough?
It is enough, O Master-Craftsman, our Choice you are! Our
treasure! Stay with us. The chief seat in our assembly shall be
yours. The chief voice in our council shall be yours. Stay with
us, Royal Craftsman.
I have the wisdom of running water and growing grass, said
the Gubbaun, and my feet must carry me further still water
is stagnant! May every day bring laughter to your mouths and
skill to your fngers; may the cloaks of night bring wisdom.
He left them.
Often he was wandering after that when the sun was proud in
the sky and often drank honey-mead in Faery-Mounds. He
saw the Mountain-Sprites dancing.
The King-Cat of Keshcorran? In Irish myth the King-Cat was one of a group of
grotesque animals to be found at caves in County Roscommon and Sligo, each
reputed to be The Hellmouth Door of Ireland. Perhaps OShea, having been
rebutted by Oxford authorities for his attempted monkey carvings, decided to
not arbitrarily choose cats as the form for his monkeys to morph into. Could he
have remembered the story of the Gubbaun and his carving of the keeper of Hell,
and asserted to bring forth evil monstrous cats to the facade of the museum?
98 99
1971
100 101
102 103
MORE STONE CONTROVERSIES (1)
A story heard in 2012: a stonecarver in London was called to treat a weathered
carving of a lionhead high up on a building. As it looked out over the street for
hundreds of years, the carving had slowly eroded; his once-proud face now faded
away by wind and rain. It was decided to replace him with a replica, a new carving
based on how he might have looked back in his heyday. Work began, with funds
supplied by the London Olympics: the building was on a specially-designated
route that VIPs and executives would take in chaufeur-driven cars from hotels
in Mayfair to the stadium in the east, and so qualifed for an upgrade. Soon, a
clay mock up of the carving was complete and Olympic organisers came to the
carvers studio. They examined the proposed restoration before voicing concerns:
why were so many teeth showing? Could the lion be friendlier? The sculptor
made alterations, fattening up the lips to ease the presence of the ofending
molars. A second studio visit resulted in a more stringent request: get rid of the
teeth altogether, they presented an overt sense of aggression that could never
be part of a contemporary civic celebration. The fnal mock-up, then carved in
stone and placed up high in the building, featured no teeth and a subordinated
grin of regulation.
Noel Sheridan, Everybody Must Get Stones
Installation view, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2001
Wall texts, stones on the gallery foor
ULRICH RCKRIEM
EXHIBITION AT MODERN ART OXFORD, 1976
PREPARATORY AND INSTALLATION IMAGES
104 105
MORE STONE CONTROVERSIES (2)
Rosc, translated from the Irish language as the poetry of vision, or a gleam in
the eye, was the frst attempt at a comprehensive exhibition series of international
modern art in Ireland. It was initially presented in Dublin in 1967. The selection
jury, comprising of James Johnson Sweeney (Houston Museum of Fine Arts),
William Sandberg (director of Amsterdams museums) and Jean Leymarie (Louvre,
Paris), were impressed by the relationship between ancient Irish art and modern
painting. As part of the exhibition fve stone artefacts were to be transferred
from sites around the countryside to be exhibited in Dublin, including the Tau
Cross, a T-shaped piece of carved limestone located in Killnaboy, County Clare.
Some experts of the time believed the cross to be of the late Celtic Iron Age of
200 BC, while others suggested it to be 12th century Romanesque. Two carved
heads appear upon the transom. They look in opposite directions, a Janus-like
arrangement peering simultaneously to the future and past. Such symbolism
appealed to the sensibilities of the Rosc jury, and a plan was announced to move
the cross.
The Clare Champions editorial considered the idea as cultural imperialism,
and deplored the removal of the cross from its place in a local feld to be seen
in synthetic surroundings by the cocktail party set in Dublin. The situation
escalated to frontpage news with the disappearance of the cross from its location
at Roughan Hill in early November, when members of the local community covertly
removed and hid the cross, preventing its transportation to Rosc. Fearing similar
reactions nationwide, a police presence was placed on the Carndonagh Cross
near Buncrana, another artefact proposed to be moved.
Eventually, after a standof of thirteen days involving a heavy media presence
reporting from Killnaboy, three local youths, Pat Fogarty (19), Gerard Curtis (22)
and his brother, Michael (19), went to the place where the cross was hidden,
covered with hay and a layer of small stones on top. It was taken back to its site
and cemented back in place, a process documented by press photographer
Padraig Kennelly. A statement from the men said:
We took it on Wednesday night, the holy day, about 4 a.m. We
had to use a chisel to prise it loose but we were very careful
and we moved it in a car protected with sacks to a sand-pit four
miles away. The three of us are members of the Killnaboy Youth
Club and we felt that our parish is having a rough time with
migration to the cities. The Tau Cross is the most distinctive
feature of Killnaboy and we need it here. We could not allow
someone in Dublin to just take it away. By taking it the entire
parish was bonded together and already we feel a great increase
in parish pride here. We decided to bring it back now, at this
stage, because not only local opinion but national opinion as
well will prevent it ever being moved again.
The cross was swiftly dispatched to the exhibition hall in Dublin the next day.
106 107
MORE STONE CONTROVERSIES (3)
Like many Gothic buildings throughout Europe, the 11th century Cathdrale
Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Lyon features hundreds of gargoyles and grotesques
upon its facade. These stone carvings have had numerous allegorical functions
assigned to them over hundreds of years. In French Catholicism, the story goes
that Saint Romain saved the Rouen region from a monster called Gargouille, a
seventh century dragon with batlike wings, a long neck, and the ability to breathe
fre from its mouth. There are multiple versions of the story, all ending with Romain
capturing, killing and setting fre to the creature. Its head and neck would not
burn due to being tempered by its own fre breath, so Romain mounted its remains
on the wall of a newly-built church to scare of evil spirits. Soon, the style took
of and was replicated in stone by carvers throughout Gaul, each representative
of demons being destroyed and cast out. Such stories see gargoyles and grotesques
as subservient victims of the rough and tumble Christian imperialisms of the
time. Yet, as entities cast out of the singularity of Catholic faith, they become
carriers of the Gothic tradition of otherness, open to a plurality of belief systems,
adaptable in shape and form as years go by.
Since August 2010, Lyons cathedral has a new addition a gargoyle
remarkably similar to Ahmed Benzizine, a Muslim foreman who had been restoring
churches and cathedrals in France for the previous forty years and was due to
retire later that year. Carver Emmanuel Fourchet decided to immortalise his boss
in stone. It could have been the face of a Portuguese man or anyone else but it
happens to be an Algerian Muslim Arab my friend Ahmed, he said. The incident
soon began to appear in the international media, with newspapers reporting that
many had praised the initiative as a unifying ecumenical gesture. Yet, the
carving sparked cries of blasphemy among more conservative elements of the
churchgoing community, who sent angry letters of complaint. An anti-immigration
youth group, Jeunes Identitaires Lyonnais, also issued a statement: While in
many Muslim countries, the Christian faith is forbidden and Christians martyred,
in Lyon, Muslims have the luxury of quite calmly taking possession of our churches
with the complicity of the Catholic authorities.
Let those who criticise it tear it down, I dont see the problem, said Mr
Benzizine. Perhaps it should be taken as a symbol for young Arabs from the
suburbs that to integrate you need to get involved. Local clergy also dismissed
the right-wing criticism. The cathedrals Father Cacaud said: They didnt ask
me for my explicit authorisation but when they told me about this friendly nod to
Ahmed, I was very happy. If I took these people who are so ofended by this
beautiful gesture on a tour of the cathedral, I could show them gargoyles that
would shock them far more, ones that are frankly erotic.
108 109
MORE STONE CONTROVERSIES (4)
Vermiculation is an architectural decorative pattern where irregular holes and
tracts are carved onto a facade, intended to represent worms eating their way
through the stone, collapsing a building into rubble and ruin. The efect points
to the impermanence of architecture, and that all the institutions it houses will
gradually crumble away. Prevalent in the nineteenth century and often called
vermicelli rustifcation, the pattern is sometimes simulated in stucco on corner-
stones or on keystones around a doorway, giving a bold texture to otherwise
standardised surfaces and forms derived from classical principles. To fnd an
origin for vermiculation, consider one of the frst forms of architecture, the clay
hut. Back then, wormtracts were visible on the surface of the building as worms
weaved their way in and out of the earth that made up the structure. The suns
rays then dried out the patterns, creating an ornamental efect for all to see.
Over time, as western architecture utilised stone to make larger edifces with
smoother, sanitised surfaces and fagging, vermiculation refused to be obsolete
and was retained as part of the grammar of classical building as a referential
motif. In a decorative sense it
might be a way of rethinking the
composition of antiquated build-
ings that, from todays vantage
point, can often seem austere in
the streetscape. Moreover, it
represents a valuable counter-
point to symbolic representa-
tions of power and authority that
pervade the architecture of many
western cities.
It is difcult to speculate on
the intentions behind the act of
carving vermiculation, and de-
tailed information is hard to fnd,
perhaps as it is often considered
marginal architectural decora-
tion. Maybe the carver on the job
thought of the pattern as an efec-
tive piece of ornament, and did
not concern himself with any
allegorical intent. Conceivably
the chief carver or foreman was
aware of this symbolism and
viewed it as a way of suggesting
the organic growth and subse-
quent decline of the built edifce.
An architect may have seen
vermiculation on a building in
France or Italy on his grand tour,
and made a quick drawing of
the pattern alongside impres-
sions of classical orders and Whitehall, London
proportion. Years later, he rediscov-
ered that page with vermiculated
pattern in an old sketchbook, and
drew it into the blueprints for a new
commission. Everyone might have
copied a much-admired building up
the road and slightly varied the
pattern, adding to vermiculations
mystique as a mutating virus, stylis-
tically different in various locations
but all the time pointing to inevi-
table decay.
Vermiculation is seen on many
domestic dwellings of the nineteenth
century. A survey of the pattern in
London would yield thousands of sites afected. In Oxford, it appears on the gate
into the citys Botanic Gardens, designed by sculptor Nicholas Stone in 1633.
The OSheas walked past it early on workdays as they fetched plants to later
carve up on their scafold. Moreover, vermic-
ulations allegorical intent plays out on the
surface of buildings that represent state and
institutional apparatus. Sites of encounter
include perimeter walls of the now defunct
Crumlin Road Courthouse and Gaol in Belfast
along with many bank buildings in Glasgow.
In London, versions of the pattern can be
spotted at the entrance to the Architectural
Association on Bedford Square and liberally
spread across government buildings at White-
hall that house HM Revenue and Customs
Headquarters and the Department of Culture,
Media and Sport. Run quickly through the
arch onto Pall Mall, avoiding the clumps of
prominent vermiculation above your head
that threaten to collapse the structure. Panels
in front of the Institute of Contemporary Arts
nearby carry the pattern. In Dublin, the Irish
Stock Exchange on Angelsea Street, opened
in 1859 as the citys chamber of commerce,
has strips of vermiculation on its granite
facade. At such a site, where speculation of fnancial markets is the days work,
the pattern might be cast as an unnoticed omen of the neoliberal collapse and
loss of Irish economic sovereignty in late 2010.
In considering vermiculation as an accursed fossil, a dried-out motif imper-
fect within the mainframe of architectural propriety and institutionalised fnan-
cial speculation, a kinship is found in the pages of Manual De Landas A Thousand
Years of Nonlinear History. Written in 1997, the notion of mineralization is a central
conceit for De Landa, where initially casual activities in urban centres gradually
build and solidify into the pillared values of market economy:
110 111
Architectural Association, London
Angelsea Street, Dublin
Banks and stock exchanges emerged frst as informal practices,
becoming institutions as the rules that governed them hardened
into formal procedures. Only later on did these institutional
practices became mineralized as banks and exchanges
acquired their own buildings. For example, stocks on government
loans circulated throughout the commercial hierarchies (ie,
big fairs) as early as the fourteenth century. Early stock
exchanges were like the upper echelons of fairs, only operating
permanently, originally simply as daily meetings of wealthy
merchants and brokers at a given spot in many medieval cities.
By the time special buildings were built to house these meetings,
they had already developed formal rules for conducting their
transactions. This, while the exchange at Antwerp was in
existence by 1460, its mineralization did not occur until 1518.
And a similar point can be made about banks, which emerged
as dispersed practices, whether of money lenders or the services
that merchant companies performed for each other, later
evolving into separate institutions in Florence around the
fourteenth century.
James OShea may have returned to Dublin in 1861, and a series of carvings on
the new Kildare Street Club are frequently attributed to him. One still-notorious
carving on the site lampoons the buildings function as a leisure club for the
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, an institution of card playing and sherry drinking with
a reputation as the only place in Ireland where decent caviar could be had. Its
members were described as having an oyster-like capacity for understanding
one thing: that they should continue to get fat in the bed in which they were born.
With this in mind, three monkeys were rendered playing billiards around a tiny
stone table complete with cues, a rest, balls and pockets. Other depictions on
the facade are less associative with the club members, and have been variously
described as a bear playing a guitar (or maybe a serenading shrew), a hound
chasing a rabbit (possibly a fox chasing a hare), polar bears deciding to confront
a harpoon-wielding mariner, a snake and a frog, lizards, mice, more rabbits, a
hen, a dragon (could be a phoenix) and a dolphin.
The carvings on Kildare Street were the subject of a column by Myles
na gCopaleen in the Irish Times of 1954. He criticised a riddle often heard
around Dublin:
Where in Dublin can you see monkeys playing billiards on
the street?

Na Gopaleen answered by reminding readers of the mimetic values of art:
I am not trying to be rude: I am really probing at an aesthetic
problem. I have minutely examined the carvings. The characters
engaged in play are not monkeys, and they are not playing
billiards the old-timers did not bother about how the monkeys
were constructed they just remembered monkeys knowing
that every beholder would merely remember. There you have
the intrusion of art.
LEFT TO ROAM
The Oxford Museum was the scene, at its public inauguration in June 1860, of
a celebrated debate on evolution between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce
and Darwins bulldog TH Huxley. Huxley famously responded to a belittling
remark of the bishops by saying: I should be sorry to demolish so eminent a
prelate, but for myself I would rather be descended from an ape than from a divine
who employs authority to stife the truth. The incident helped identify the museum
as the site of a new secularism in Oxford, one holding many resonances with the
story of the OSheas. Their work could well be considered central to these debates.
Their carvings may be understood not only as a decorative scheme, but as having
a didactic purpose to the public who encounter it to this day.
Yet, Ruskins 1877 Slade lectures at the Oxford Museum dismissed the work
of the OSheas as a misinterpretation of Gothic ideals:
In saying that ornament should be founded on natural form, I
no more meant that a mason could carve a capital by merely
looking at a leaf, than a painter could paint a Madonna by merely
looking at a young lady. And when I said that the workman
should be left free to design his work as he went on, I never
meant that you should secure a great national monument of art
by letting loose the frst lively Irishman you could get hold of
to do what he liked in it.
Ruskin continued to speak of James OShea:
He was a man of true genius, and of the kindest nature. Not
only the best, but the only person who could have done anything
of what we wanted to do here. But, he could have done anything
of it after many years of honest learning; and he too easily
thought in the pleasure of his frst essays that he had nothing
to learn. The delight of the freedom and power which would
have been the elements of all health to a trained workman were
destruction to him, and the more that he would have studied,
there was none to teach him I hoped he would fnd his way in
time, but hoped, as so often in vain.
The OShea brothers carved on Manchester Assize Courts, designed by Alfred
Waterhouse and completed in 1864. The building was damaged during World
War II and subsequently demolished. Its replacement, now Manchester Crown
Court, incorporated salvaged OShea carvings into a museum space, located in
the basement of the building. Today, with budget cutbacks in the court services,
the museum is rarely opened. Most prominent behind the locked door of the
room are the grim humour of The Punishment Capitals, once positioned at the
main entrance doorway of Waterhouses building. Scenes detail a variety of
medieval torture techniques, each with an introductionary slogan: Ye Punishment
by Weight, Ye Stocks, Ye Pillory, Torture by pouring water down ye throat, For
Scolding Women, Saxon Hanging, Ye Guillotine, and Ye Punishment of Ye Wheel.
112 113
He also noted the advantage monkeys have at playing billards, as the rules of
the game do not say what may be done with the tail.
Similar metaphysical leanings arise with na gCopaleens other pseudonym,
Flann OBrien, in his 1967 novel The Third Policeman. There, a theory about the
life of atoms is described and enacted at length. A condemned murderer, the
local constabulary and an eccentric scientist each speculate on how the world
is construed, deconstructed, reconstituted and navigated. Scenarios appear
that deal with how substance and physical matter are generated and organised:
Did you ever study atomics when you were a lad? asked the
Sergeant, giving me a look of great enquiry and surprise.
No I answered.
That is a very serious defalcation, he said, but all the same
I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small
particles of itself and they are fying around in concentric
circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geomet-
rical fgures too numerous to mention collectively, never
standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither
and thither and back again, all the time on the go.
Atomic theory forces local police to keep surveillance on possible side efects
of individuals having prolonged contact with objects. A man who mounts his
bicycle for an hour a day for, say ten years, will sufer from a condition where he
takes on the characteristics of a bicycle, as atoms are exchanged each day
through saddle and crotch.
You can tell it unmistakably from his walk. He will walk smartly
always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with
his elbow out and stay like that all night in his kitchen instead
of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of
the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted
and set in motion again by some extraneous party.
In 1983 a monument appeared on the summit
of Carauntoohil, Irelands highest mountain.
Consisting of a bicycle raised up on an iron
pole with a plaque dedicated to OBrien and
The Third Policeman, its appearance went unno-
ticed outside of the local climbing community
until a letter and photograph were printed by
the Irish Times in 1986. Written by JJ Toomey
of Cork, it detailed his encounter with the monu-
ment that had since disappeared. Toomey
appealed to the newspapers readership for
further information and shortly after, he
received a note and photographs from one
Sabine Schmidt of Hattenheim, Germany,
detailing the installation of the monument by
her and a male accomplice. They were assisted
by Dublin climber Michael Kellett, who carried
114 115
the bicycle up the Devils Ladder ravine for the
couple after fnding them weighed down on the
steep ascent.
An overarching theme of these events is
the metanarrative of Christianity supplanted
by an unsanctioned action spurred on by nar-
rative strains of OBriens writing. The ges-
ture to place a monument on the summit was
preceded in the 1950s by the erection of a
wooden crucifx at what was perceived as the
nearest place in Ireland to heaven. Its rapid
disintegration in the harsh mountaintop climate
resulted in a steel replacement in 1976, invol-
ving a religious procession up the mountain
and the placement of a wind-driven turbine to
power lights attached to a new illuminated
cross, intended to be visible from a great dis-
tance. The lights and turbine mechanism had
since been blown away, leaving an empty iron
pole that the monument to Flann then colonised. The bicycles appearance caused
jovial speculation between members of Tralee Mountaineering Club: was it to be
used as a generator for a new lighting system on the cross? Subsequently, the
bicycle made an involuntary descent after a two-month residence on the summit.
Local accounts describe the monuments demise as being the work of either
mindless vandals or feckin purists. Current reconnaissance suggests that
the bike might be buried beneath rocks further down the mountain.
Reading between the lines of the Atomic Theory, one might speculate that
the whole mountain has, since 1983, shared in a molecular exchange with the
buried bicycle through their physical contact over time. If the bicycle was once
intended to be the monument, maybe now the entire mountain can be a dedication
to OBrien? A system of interpretation was suggested by JJ Toomey in recent
correspondence:
Apropos atomic theory, you may be interested in my personal
view, based on Vedic theories of consciousness being the
basic fundamental aspect of all creation and existence.This
viewpoint considers consciousness permeates all, in a quite
difuse strength in solid materials, from mountains to bicycles,
to a more concentrated, stronger, ascending degree in the
animal chain, culminating most densely in human beings. If
such is the case, it seems to provide a better basis for some
exchange between bicycle and policeman than a plain atomic
exchange theory.
With both monkeys playing billiards and the bicycle lost on the mountain, the
tradition of the public monument as a chronicle of man and his historical
achievements is negated. Instead, established belief systems can be challenged,
and mediations on the history of matter-energy and the interaction of forms might
occur one thing touches another thing that in turn is touching everything else,
all interconnected as a formless whole.
116 117
Carauntoohil, 23 May 1983
THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN OTHERWISE
JOSEPH BEUYS IN CONVERSATION WITH FLANN OBRIEN,
MODERATED BY MICHAEL DEMPSEY
DUBLIN CITY GALLERY THE HUGH LANE, SOMETIME
14 FEBRUARY 1940 15 OCTOBER 1974 14 FEBRUARY 2014

FOB It began with the hedge schools they say all that classical
learning and then Heidegger looking to Sophocles and you
looking to Ulysses I suppose? That fellow messing things up
to get at the thing itself, stop explaining and just walk and your
walk will have revolution.
JB When the OShea brothers left there was a trail of dust not
so much with me. There was very little dust left despite my
persistence in explaining and drawing diagrams.
FOB Thats what you get for explaining things in the meantime. Its
the beginning of the unfnished, the re-discovery of the familiar,
the re-experience of the already sufered, the fresh-forgetting
of the unremembered.
1

MD After your 1974 lecture at the Municipal Gallery in Dublin was
there a sense of revolution evolving?
JB There were a lot of angry artists. But movement comes about
through a provocation, through an inauguration, through an
initiation into the purpose of movement. One creates something.
The principle of movement itself. And here other infuences
become apparent will and energy.
2

FOB A concern with heat and temperature and their relationship to
energy and work. I have a theory about that!
MD Is this the potential for a political movement? A Utopia? Or art
as idea, or cultural identity?
FOB Thermodynamics.
JB No I would say it is the expanded concept of art. Its here and now.
FOB I remember a summer spin up north, Hill had invited me to his
beloved Tory
3
to see the bloody painters, I stopped to have a
breath in sight of Errigal and opened the car boot for the sand-
wiches, but all those pages few in the movement of the wind.
Scattered and re-edited by a moments lack of will it became
the book the one about a bicycle.
JB For me it was the crashing of my Stuka. As far out as one can
go, before losing it.

MD Why did you choose Ireland?
JB It was Mr Ireland that invited me. Caroline and I were working
on the show for Modern Art Oxford with Nick Serota. I liked the
association with academia. All that knowledge preserved and
fossilised in its petrifed state, dormant but there to be awoken.
In the Ark museum, on South Lambeth Road, you can see a dodo.
FOB Travel does elongate the time dass Ich mein Herz / in Heidelberg
verloren. The Plain People of Ireland: Isnt German very like
Irish? Very guttural and so on? The work of the OSheas can
still be seen on the Museum Building in Trinity College, and
after Oxford, they came back dragging their monkey tails behind
them to the Kildare Street Club.
JB A very obliging young curator named Oliver Dowling drove us
around in his car everywhere. North + South, East + West. We
were so lost to Irish signage. Maybe that is why I decided to
call the show The Secret Block For a Secret Person in Ireland?
MD It would seem a curators evolvement goes well beyond installing
art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Now we are expected
to do a lot more fnding peat briquettes and kerrygold
4
We
have become intermediaries between producers of art and the
structures of power within our society. Your blackboards caused
quite a stir when you left them in Dublin.
Frontpage of The Irish Times, 28 June 1977
119 118
JB Yes at frst I wondered did they know my gift it was left
dormant for three years in Chambers basement. But then a
committee was formed, an advisory committee and they had to
be heard. Poor Ethna, she had a fght. But she held frm and
her manager supported her.
5
MD Curators mediate the experience of art by selecting what is
represented, contextualise and frame the production of artists
and their works.
FOB (aloud)
The Museums will transform into entertainment centres
MD So where is the site for art? As art in museums morphs from
elitism to democracy, the hole deepens between conventional
exhibition making and new ideas about relational aesthetics.
Is this your revolution?
JB Where are the bees of Europe? There is a decline along with
the disappearance of collective ideologies of social transfor-
mation. They have become unwell with the Varroa mite along
with the rise of pollution and the collapse of the political and
aesthetic sensation.
FOB To be a pilgrim in search of a future elsewhere, always another
project, perhaps a better more ambitious project, is a failure to
notice the rhythm of the immediate environment.
JB There is a balance between creativity and criticism as the
Doctor Faustus implied much rebellion in strict obedience is
needed but perhaps there is a danger of becoming uncreative?
I would like very much to set up a Free International University
here to be the brain of Europe.
MD Through the historical there is a linear narrative all production
processes take place over time.
JB It is also a chain. Art is not a truth or a reality of something or
something that took place in the past, like my blackboards for
instance, it is something that happens and in its turn it stirs
the production of other things, a form that is capable of
producing future forms.
FOB Is that why they let those kids loose with chalk and do their
rubbings?
JB To draw a line is to have an idea to pass on Lehmbrucks fame
for the future.
MD In her essay, Selected Nodes in a Network of Thoughts on
Sean Lynch, Reconstruction of Irish Energies, 2007
Peat briquettes, Kerrygold butter, 19 x 7 x 12cm

5 After his lecture in Dublin, Beuys left
blackboards, complete with chalk drawings
illustrating his ideas, with the Municipal
Gallery. The blackboards were put in storage,
until 1977 when curator Ethna Waldron
decided to put them on exhibition. The
display of blackboards caused some
consternation at a meeting of the Cultural
Committee of Dublin Corporation. The
committees concerns hinged both on the
eligibility of the blackboards as works of
art, and also the difculties of conservation
of the delicate chalk drawings. Councillor
PJ OMahony said, I have seen the piece
of alleged art. If a piece had been rubbed
out and a child added chalk marks to it, I
doubt if the artist would know it. Councillor
Alice Glenn declared, I believe a man has
to watch it all the time because kids are
coming in from school and rubbing bits out
and adding new bits. The Committee called
for the immediate removal of the blackboards.
Dublin City Manager JB Molloy refused their
request, and the blackboards remained on
show. Source: Irish Times, 27 29 June 1977.
6 Maria Lind, Selected Nodes in a Network of
Thoughts on Curating in Carin Kuoni
(editor), Words of Wisdom: A Curators Vade
Mecum on Contemporary Art, New York, 2001.
7 Sleepwalkers is an investigational
programming format based on exhibition
making What is an exhibition? How does
the form of an exhibition come into being?
Six artists Clodagh Emoe, Lee Welch,
Sean Lynch, Linda Quinlan, Gavin Murphy,
Jim Ricks used Gallery 8 at Dublin City
Gallery The Hugh Lane to develop their ideas
and materials into six separate site-specifc
installations exhibited in 2012, 2013 and
2014. The artists worked with curators
Michael Dempsey, Logan Sisley and Marysia
Wieckiewicz-Carroll. A blog documented the
process at http://hughlane.wordpress.com
8 OBrien, ibid.
9 We are not in the world; we become with
the world; we become by contemplating
it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become
universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular,
becoming Zero. This is true of all the arts
Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the
triple organisation of perceptions, afections
and opinions in order to substitute a monument
composed of percepts, afects and blocks of
sensations that takes the place of language.
It is about listening. Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York,
1994, pp 170 177.
10 Joseph Beuys, The Secret Block For a Secret
Person in Ireland, exhibition catalogue,
Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1974.
Curating,
6
Maria Lind views art as being in competition with
other phenomena and means of understanding, the most
complex and challenging form for processing the experience
of being human.

JB The analogy of Becoming, I fnd it intriguing in your Sleepwalkers
7

programme. But how can it start revolution if its not moving and
is stuck in a gallery?
MD The themes explored were the complexities of relationships
between individuals and institutions in an exchange transcending
traditional inside / outside or unique / universal binaries. We
wanted to create a space for self refection or research and
development or something to stop the endless programming!
FOB Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature
it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.
8
MD Its not circular, but a simultaneous realisation of the constituent
parts in the programme. There is no theme, no critical context,
and no text. It is about fnding a space and giving it signifcance.
Sleepwalkers is a perception not a process.
9
JB and so there is a chance for interchangeability formulated
by Novalis and Goethe: if god could become man, then he could
equally appear as a stone or plant or anything else. Have I
explained my walking stick it is a link between heaven and
earth, spirit and matter (Warm time machinewarmth ferry-
warmth sculpture-towards the future: Sun State)
10
120 121
1 Flann OBrien in a letter to William Saroyan,
14 February 1940.
2 Joseph Beuys in conversation with Friehelm
Mennekes in Joseph Beuys, Wilfried
Wiegand, Klaus Staeck et al, In Memoriam
Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches,
Bonn, 1986, p 33.
3 Tory Island of the coast of Donegal is the
unlikely home of a celebrated school of
painters, who work in a primitive style and
whose art is extremely sought after. The
tradition of painting is relatively recent, and
started after a local man commented, on
looking at the work of a distinguished visiting
artist, Derek Hill, that he could do just as
well. He had a go, so did others and now there
are regular exhibitions of Tory Islanders all
over the world.
4 On leaving Dublin he asked me to stop and
he went into a shop and came out with two
bales of briquettes and some packets of
butter which were carried into his hotel in
Limerick and then back to my car next
morning and into his hotel in Cork and then
back to the car the next morning. The frst
peat and butter sculptures were made in my
car on the journey from Cork back to Dublin
and he was delighted with himself he had
obviously been experimenting in his hotel
rooms. Oliver Dowling in Mike Fitzpatrick
(editor), Sean Lynch: Retrieval Unit, Limerick
City Gallery of Art, 2007, p 66.
122 123
A monkey is making his tamer jump through a hoop
Detail of a catchpenny print entitled: Le Monde Renvers
Published by AF Hurez, Cambrai, France, 1817
Source: SGKJ / AGJMBorms
Wood cutting a lumberjack
Detail of a catchpenny print entitled: Verkehrte Welt
Published by Oehmigke & Riemschneider, Neuruppin, Germany, c. 1860
Source: SGKJ / AGJMBorms
THE REVERSED WORLD
FREEK WAMBACQ
124 125
1 Hugh Lane, Prefatory Notice, Catalogue of
the Exhibition of Works by Irish Painters,
Guildhall Art Gallery, London, 1904, p ix.
2 Lane, Prefatory Notice, p x.
3 PC Connell, An Abortive Enterprise and
its Possible Results, Brush and Pencil,
vol 15, no 3 (March 1905) p 176.
4 Hugh Lane, Appendix: Note 1, in Sarah
Cecilia Harrison (editor), Municipal Gallery
of Modern Art: illustrated catalogue with
biographical and critical notes, Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1908.
5 As Director of the Museum of Science and
Art, Plunkett had commissioned plaster
casts of medieval Irish high crosses. In this
case the copy is legitimated, although the
history of plaster casts in museums and
academies is not without controversy. See
for example Johannes Siapkas, Genealogies,
in Johannes Siapkas and Lena Sjgren,
Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The
Petrifed Gaze, Routledge, New York, 2014,
pp 81 111.

Science and Art.
5
Plunkett hung photographs of the Corot and a work by Mszly
at the entrance to the exhibition, in order to discredit the Princes gift.
6
Similarly
the Irish Independent published reproductions of the two paintings so that its
readers might judge for themselves.
7
The evidence presented took the form of a
black and white line drawing of each composition copies mobilised to expose
a copy. Even though experts at the time concluded that the work was by Corot,
the Gallery Committee decided to ask the Prince of Wales to transfer his name
to another picture and presented the debated picture themselves, so that the
unpleasant recollection of this inartistic controversy might in no way be identifed
with the Princes gift.
8
The inauthentic was perceived as tainted, and furthermore
had the power to pollute those with which it was associated.
The idea that the copy, the inauthentic or the unoriginal taints or pollutes
appears in the 1953 flm Statues Also Die by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and
Ghislain Clocquet. The flm critiques the place of African culture in European
museums (including the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) and employs the concept
of the authentic in relation to the global impact of European market values. The
flmmakers argue that, in the wake of colonisation and tourism, economic
requirements usurp religious imperatives and art becomes indigenous handicraft:
We buy their art, and degrade it.
9

While this analysis has since been called into question for imposing a
troublesome, Western notion of authenticity,
10
Statues Also Die demonstrates
that the transition from the world at large to the museum is never neutral:
Classifed, labelled, conserved in the ice of showcases and collections, they
enter into the history of art, paradise of forms where the most mysterious
relationships are established.
11
Or, as Lynch puts it: Objects in life, once free
now conscripted, harden into institutional values that form the museum itself.
In both works too there are questions of translation between cultures, between
times, between materials. Both the statues in Resnais, Marker and Clocquets
flm and the animals in Lynchs installation are mute; both works borrow from
Psalm 135s caution on the folly of idols: They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see. In Lynchs story, though, the OSheas are grounded in the
world, neither waiting for divine inspiration nor fearing divine retribution. On
their walks they had never come by any tidy story they had made of the world.
Originality and authenticity may seem like tidy concepts with fxed boundaries,
yet the messy relationship to their apparent opposites, reveals otherwise, both
inside and outside of the museum.
DEAD RINGERS:
THOUGHTS ON AUTHENTICITY AND ITS OPPOSITES
LOGAN SISLEY
The complex relationship between originals and their copies have generated
anxiety, praise, wonder, delight, disappointment and fear. While the original
object is usually venerated, anxiety can often surround the inauthentic or the
copy, especially given the proliferation of technologies of reproduction since
the industrial revolution.
When Auguste Rodin frst exhibited his Age of Bronze in 1877 he was accused
of casting from a live model, a practice frowned upon. In order to prove the
originality of the work, he turned to another method of reproduction, commissioning
Gaudenzio Marconi to take photographs of the naked model, Auguste Neyt. The
sculpture itself was cast in bronze many times, all original copies, and Hugh Lane
paid Rodin 200 for a cast for his new Gallery of Modern Art (now Dublin City
Gallery The Hugh Lane) which opened in 1908.
Museums, generally, are repositories of authentic objects. This is heightened
in art museums where authorship and uniqueness are prized (whereas natural
history museums often collect multiple specimens). In the art world the exposure
of fakes destabilises the authority of cultural institutions and the market, and
frequently generates controversy. The successful circulation of fakes dupes
the viewer and their exposure destroys trust and reputation. Within museums
curatorial time and energy is devoted to confrming the legitimacy of objects
both prior to and after their entry into the institution. This rigour can help guard
against the distortion of history, but it also can produce forms of history that
privilege or exclude certain narratives.
In A blow by blow account of stone carving in Oxford, Sean Lynch refects
on how history is assembled and the role museums play through the story of
the OShea brothers, who in the 1850s travelled from Ireland to Oxford to work
on the new Museum of Natural History. Lynch uses a story about a museums
physical construction to refect on its ideological infrastructure. He unsettles
ideas about authenticity, a concept applied to things of undisputed origin. The
origins of the OShea brothers themselves seem obscure, in contrast to the
authenticity of their work, a product of their uncorrupted native skill.
A similar language of purity and native Irish creativity is found in Hugh
Lanes narrative of the development of the arts in Ireland. This he outlined at an
exhibition of Irish art at Guildhall Art Gallery, London, in 1904. He argued that
the arts were moving towards their perfect form when the Anglo-Norman
invasion laid its forbidding hand so that painting did not develop from
illumination but as an ofshoot of other nations.
1
Lanes gathering of Irish
painters was in part aimed at discovering their common or race qualities
2

although this was contested at the time.
3
Encouraged by the Guildhall venture, Lane exhibited in Dublin a collection
of works that would form the basis for the gallery that today bears his name (and
where A blow by blow account of stone carving in Oxford was frst exhibited). In
1905 a violent controversy
4
occurred over the authenticity of a painting by
Corot (now attributed to Gza Mszly), which had been selected for purchase
for the new gallery by the visiting Prince of Wales. Among those contesting the
origins of the painting was Lt-ColonelGTPlunkett, Director of the Museum of
THE HISTORY OF A RUSSIAN DOLL
BEN ROBERTS
The compulsion to gather collections together, to create a narrative from the
apparently unconnected, is the root of the 17th Century Wunderkammer. Proto
museums such as these, in their original conception, were places for muses and
musing; a combination of rigour and carefree extrapolations. Today, visitors
continue to approach the museum in much the same spirit, as a source of didactic
narratives. Museums in this sense are microcosms of geography and history;
collections of multiple places and narratives arranged to suggest a particular
history yet also allowing for infnite readings and connections for the curious.
In the postmodern era, the great Victorian age of collecting long behind us,
often it is the history of a collection itself as much as the objects it contains that
command attention. The British Museum for example, with its history of
controversies and cultural imperialism is often mired in the contemporary
revisions of history. The narratives such collections suggest, and indeed how
they came to be, are rarely objective or impartial. There are always alternate
versions of these stories, sometimes unfashionable, uncomfortable or unloved
but lurking in the background nonetheless. They are what Sean Lynch referred
to as subplots when discussing his 2007 exhibition Retrieval Unit.
The subplot, the hidden history became relevant, as a way of
seeing the worldI am interested in loose ends of stories, the
footnotes that tend to get lost, and how to mediate their presence
through shining a spotlight on them. What I fnd is often a
peripheral story to the main event.
1
In the John W Walter documentary How to Draw a Bunny
2
Ray Johnson talks of
a similar element within his practice he refers to as moticos. Johnson likens
these small packets of material to the fashing glimpses between the cars of a
passing freight train: a moment in which the majority of our vision is temporarily
obscured, save for a tantalising sliver of detail at the edge of the image. He
claimed they were everywhere in our daily life; all we needed to do was learn to
see them and wed be richer for it.
Lynchs exhibition at Modern Art Oxford A blow by blow account of stone
carving in Oxford, is a partial history of the museums in the city for which he has
been glancing between the display cases of their collective story. However,
evident though they are, it is neither a portrait of the Pitt Rivers or the narrative
evolution of how Tradescants collection came to be the current Ashmolean,
that is the main attraction here. Within the rigour and elegance of this story
telling, it is the articulation of the possible narratives wrapped within the objects
and their histories which are most compelling. Installed at Modern Art Oxford
and free from the strictures of museological display, the interrelation, real and
imagined between object, history and site stacks up like a Russian Doll. A
museum within an exhibition within an art gallery. From a south London chicken
shop, via Dublin and the stone carving OShea Brothers, to the partially-executed
sculptures of Oxfords Natural History Museum portico the whole implausible
string of connections brought together in perfect sense on the site of an old
126 127
6 See Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Lane and his
Pictures, Pegasus Press for the government
of the Irish Free State, c. 1932, p 15. See
also John Hutchison, Sir Hugh Lane and the
Gift of the Prince of Wales to the Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Studies,
Winter 1979, pp 277 287.
7 Corot or No Corot, Irish Independent, 12 May
1905, p 7.
8 Hugh P Lane, Appendix: Note 1, Illustrated
Catalogue, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art,
Dublin, 1908, p 56
9 Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain
Clocquet, Les Statues Meurent Aussi
(Statues Also Die), Tadi-Cinma-
Production, 1953, c. 25:22.
10 See for example James Cliford, The
Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard
University Press, 1988.
11 Resnais, Marker and Clocquet, Statues Also
Die, c. 19:40.
128
brewery in Oxford. Here they are to be unpacked, puzzled over, and reconfgured
in the mind of the visitor.
But rather than become lost in this refective labyrinth of narrative complexity,
or even try to impose a new system upon it, Lynch has found a way to tell the
story of the museum, however extraordinarily, though its physical self; its objects
and its site, and in doing so dissolve the tension between the history of a
collection and the history which it chooses to describe.
1 Lets have attitude rather than identity!
Sean Lynch and Mike Fitzpatrick in
conversation, in Mike Fitzpatrick (editor),
Retrieval Unit, Limerick City Gallery of
Art, 2007, p 4.
2 John W Walter (director), How to Draw a
Bunny, Elevator Pictures, 2002.
Above: Installation view at Modern Art Oxford,
before carving by Stephen Burke and Andy
Tanser begins
Preceding pages: Photographs detailing various
stages of a stone carving by Stephen Burke
Installation views of sculptures and photographs
at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Following pages: Installation views at Modern
Art Oxford of a 35mm slide projection with
voiceover, placed beside taxidermy owls of the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Installation views of objects placed throughout
the cafe and bookshop of Modern Art Oxford
Opposite top: A plastic sign, c. 1995, donated by
Favorite Chicken & Ribs following renovations
at the South Lambeth Road branch in early 2014
Opposite bottom: Documents from the Favorite
business archive, from 1986 onwards
Above: Natural fint resembling a monkeys head,
artefact of the Pitt Rivers Museum
Overleaf: Various pieces of Favorite Chicken &
Ribs packaging
Published on the occasion of
A blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford
Sean Lynch
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 10 July 29 September 2013
Modern Art Oxford, 12 April 8 June 2014
Featured is a printed version of a 35mm slide projection with scripted
narration, alongside the artists research and contributions by Stephen
Burke, Michael Dempsey, Ben Roberts, Logan Sisley, Simon Woodley and
Freek Wambacq. Accompanying installation images record the placement
of sculptures, photographs, archival material and projections in Dublin
and Oxford.
Stonecarving: Stephen Burke, Andy Tanser
Script narration: Gina Moxley, Stephen Burke
Slide projector synchronisation: Matt Gidney
Installation fabrication: Ray Grifn
35mm slide printing: Michael Dyer Associates, London
Installation photography: Stuart Whipps, Ross Kavanagh
Additional photography: Matt Gidney, Michael Holly
Publication editor: Michele Horrigan
Publication design: Wayne Daly
Publication printing: Cassochrome, Beveren-Leie, Belgium
Publication distribution: Cornerhouse, Manchester
Stone was supplied and sponsored by: The Bath Stone Group,
Cotswold Natural Stone and McKeon Stone
Further acknowledgements: Alessio Antoniolli, Artisan Frames Clonmel,
Michael Asbury, Benjamin de Burca, Andrew Cashin, Carl Doran, Mike
Fitzpatrick, Rowan Geddis, Richie Healy, Ben Harman, Dan Hicks, John
Holmes, Alexia Holt, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Niall Kavanagh, Jim Kennedy,
Mary Lynch, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Patrick Murphy, Frederick ODwyer,
Amanda Ralph, Mark Ranalow, Malgosia Nowak-Kemp, Nuno Sacramento
and Dan Scully.
Research and production: Favorite Chicken & Ribs, Essex; Gasworks,
London; University of the Arts TrAIN Research Centre for Transnational Art,
Identity and Nation, London; Cove Park, Scotland; Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford; Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Particular thanks to Michele Horrigan, Paul Luckraft, Michael Stanley,
Lawrence Taylor and Simon Woodley.
Image credits: Oxford University Museum Archives pp 69, 70, 72, 73, 91;
Stephen Burke pp 75, 76, 77; Tom Fitzgerald p 79; Favorite Chicken & Ribs
p 87; Jim Kennedy p 92; Liz and Japonica Sheridan pp 98 101; Royal
Hibernian Academy, Dublin p 102; Modern Art Oxford pp 104 5; Kennelly
Archive p 107; Agence France-Presse p 108; JJ Toomey pp 114, 116;
Irish Times pp 115, 118
DUBLIN CITY GALLERY THE HUGH LANE
Director: Barbara Dawson
Deputy Director and Head of Collections: Margarita Cappock
General Manager: Grinne Kelly
Head of Exhibitions: Michael Dempsey
Head of Security: Tim Haier
Exhibitions Curator: Logan Sisley
Collections Curator: Jessica ODonnell
Conservator: Jane McCree
Education Curator: Sile McNulty Goodwin
Staf Ofcer: Liz Forster
Assistant to the Director: Dolores Fogarty
Exhibitions Intern: Marysia Wieckiewicz - Carroll
Collections Intern: Geofrey Prendergast
Education Intern: Lyn Kennedy
Attendants: Daron Smyth, Anthony Donegan, Patrick Fitzgerald,
Gerard Crotty, Jurgita Savickaite, Simon Lawlor, Niall OConnor,
Mary Broome, Christopher Ford, Derek OKeefe, Peter Belling
MODERN ART OXFORD
Director: Paul Hobson
Assistant to the Director: Hayley Raines
Head of Programmes: Sally Shaw
Curator of Exhibitions and Projects: Ciara Moloney
Curator of Education and Public Programming: Ben Roberts
Programme Coordinator: Jon Weston
Production Manager: Paul Teigh
Assistant Gallery Manager: Seb Thomas
Director, Development and Communications: Verity Slater
Communications Manager: Hannah Evans
Development and Communications Assistant: Helen Corley
Director, Commercial and Operations: John Hobart
Operations and Visitor Services Manager: Helen Shilton
Finance Manager: Lorraine Stone
Retail Manager: Charlotte White
Operations Duty Manager: Flora Cranmer - Perrier
Duty Manager: Jack Eden
Duty Manager: Kay Sentence
Technician: Scot Blyth
Maintenance Assistant: David Healy
Visitor Assistants: Mohamed Bushara, Isabella Carreras, Andrew
Charlwood, Sarah Elingworth, Amanda Jempson, Deborah Martindale,
Robert Mead, Matthew Retallick, Lois Sadler, Sam St Varnham,
Daisy Webb, Joe Wilson, Nick Wood
ISBN 978-1-901352-60-3
2014 Modern Art Oxford, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, the artist and
authors. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part
in any form.
Modern Art Oxford is supported by Oxford City Council and Arts Council England.
Museum of Modern Art Limited. Registered charity no. 313035
ISBN 978-1-901352-60-3