Brian O’Doherty: Reading Time

Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland presents Reading Time, an exhibition by the Irish artist Brian O’Doherty, the first since his passing on November 7, 2022. The works featured in this exhibition are layered in time and space, and concern the building Sirius Arts Centre occupies, Irish history, and literature as a medium that unfolds durationally. They are a selection of drawings, prints, sculptures, and installations borrowed from Irish museums and private collections, particularly holdings of O’Doherty’s close collaborators. Together, they reiterate his key themes: self, language, perception, and ideology.

O’Doherty was born in Ireland in 1928. He studied medicine and emigrated to the United States in 1957, where he furthered his studies at Harvard University. He then embarked on an art-related career, and in the 1960s became influential in the New York art scene in multiple functions, all of which served his vision of the importance of art in society. He invented multiple personae for his various roles within and beyond the art sector—for instance, between 1972 and 2008, he worked under the moniker Patrick Ireland, which he adopted in protest against the British colonization and ongoing partition of Ireland. He anticipated various current questions in art and research, whether reflecting on the institution and advancing institutional critique, or examining the interplay of word and image.

Like many other Irish emigrants, O’Doherty departed Ireland from Cobh, and the building Sirius Arts Centre occupies was likely one of the last he saw. This is the former clubhouse of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, built by and for the Anglo-Irish in the 1850s. For O’Doherty, issues surrounding identities became urgent after he arrived in New York, now that he was exiled, and this building arguably symbolized Ireland’s social divides for most of his life.

O’Doherty’s recent death makes the existence of a permanent set of colorful, floor-to-ceiling wall paintings at Sirius Arts Centre all the more poignant. He completed this mural in 1996, during a residency. The work is part of a bygone era yet prioritizes the present: One, Here, Now is its title, and it references Ogham, an ancient alphabet once popular in Ireland that O’Doherty used across his oeuvre. Conceivably, through this work, O’Doherty reclaimed Ireland from its contested status as an “internal colony” of Britain, and reconciled his feelings toward his own story of displacement.

O’Doherty problematized the supposed “neutrality” of art in his “Inside the White Cube” essays published in Artforum in 1976. There he argued that the spare and pristine white walls of galleries, as much as the works shown there, have defined what art is. He saw such features invested with political and economic agendas—the macro-level stories in our connected, polluted, warring world. Sirius Arts Centre, as both an institution operating in the art sector and the former clubhouse of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, is inevitably entangled in these realities. It is thus fitting that O’Doherty filled its white walls with color, and it is ironic that his mural has lived, for most of its existence, hidden. It is as if Sirius Arts Centre encapsulates the intrinsic contradictions of art’s presentation.

O’Doherty was an avid reader of James Joyce, appreciating his manipulation of time and use of the (expanded) English language. Joyce’s literary output, also generated in exile, gave O’Doherty a framework to think of home away from home. O’Doherty’s iconic installations, known as “rope drawings,” comment on the unsettling but true-to-life experience of engaging with Joyce’s writings, especially Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. O’Doherty approached reading it in two ways: sometimes as disabling and annoying, making him silent, and sometimes as fostering lively, crooked lines in the world, as in the rope drawings, but also lines of text.

O’Doherty’s links to Ireland extend through the layers of Sirius Arts Centre and along and across the time he lived. This exhibition “reads” his practice in and through time, highlighting the vital relationship that he establishes with each and every one of us, here and now.

Brian O’Doherty: Reading Time is produced by Sirius Arts Centre and guest-curated by Christa-Marie Lerm Hayes, in dialogue with Miguel Amado, director.

March 11, 3–5pm
​Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Brenda Moore-McCann, and Sarah Wilson in conversation
Scholars Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Brenda Moore-McCann, and Sarah Wilson discuss Brian O’Doherty’s practice, from his former Patrick Ireland moniker to his institutional critique and the legacy of his ideas, writings, and works.

About Sirius Arts Centre
Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, approaches art through the lens of society. It organizes focused, artist-driven projects and collaborative, community-oriented projects. It facilitates the production and presentation of, and public engagement with, art and knowledge, and offers professional development opportunities to artists through commissions and residencies. It operates across all art forms—visual, performing, live, film, sound, vocal, written, and born-digital—programming a mix of exhibitions, performances, events, activities, and publications both on-site and online.

Sirius Arts Centre’s operating capacity and programming are made possible with public funds from the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council.