GARY FARRELLY 
+
LAURA FITZGERALD
in conversation

IN FEBRUARY 2020, DURING THE ONSLAUGHT OF A SERIES OF PERSONABLE STORMS (DENNIS, JORGE), BRUSSELS-BASED ARTIST GARY FARRELLY AND DUBLIN-BASED ARTIST LAURA FITZGERALD MET IN LAURA'S CAR IN WEXFORD. GARY PRACTICES SELF-INSTITUTIONALISATION, BOTH INDIVIDUALLY IN HIS LIFE AND IN COLLABORATION WITH CHRIS DREIER THROUGH THE OFFICE FOR JOINT ADMINISTRATIVE INTELLIGENCE (OJAI), WHICH OPERATES OUT OF BRUSSELS AND BERLIN. IN RESIDENCE AT FIRESTATION ARTISTS' STUDIOS IN DUBLIN, LAURA WORKS WITH TEXT, VIDEO AND DRAWING. IN 2015, SHE BEGAN FILMING WALKS SHE TAKES IN THE COUNTRYSIDE TO THINK ABOUT ART MAKING AND HER PLACE IN THE ART WORLD.
GARY AND LAURA AUDIO RECORDING
Gary: Hi!

Laura: Hello, come on in!

G: Oh it’s fucking wild out there!

L: Yeah, it’s horrible out. Horrible.

G: Hi, Gary. Nice to meet you!

L: Hello, Laura, nice to meet you!

G: I think we know each other from a very, very long time ago – I think we’re passing ships in the night from NCAD.

L: I think so, many moons ago, in better weather.

G: When I had jet black hair and a 15 inch waist.

L: That is right. Yeah, yeah I do remember that. You had a glamorous air to you.

G: I still have a glamorous air! So how are you doing?

L: Good yes. It’s a rainy night in Wexford and it's a good night for chatting about art I guess.

G: I’m glad we’re going to do this in the car.

L: Yeah, yeah, cosy. It feels a little bit like a film actually. 

G: Yeah, well I think a lot of good exchanges happen in cars… strangers exchanging things in cars – drugs, sex, political secrets and now an artist blind date.

L: An artist blind date, yeah totally, it’s like art dogging sort of, right? Kind of? Just lock the central lock there. [laughing]
GARY AND LAURA MEETING IN A CAR
G: So I’ve been watching lots of your videos and I’m really, really fascinated by them. I’m very interested in this narrating of the experience of being an artist and the experience of kind of navigating the mechanisms and hierarchies and control mechanisms of the art world. But you’re narrating these things like, in the countryside using like, natural element and farm elements to tell these stories. I mean this is a really, really, really strange angle to take on things. I don’t know.

L: Yeah, I hope it can get stranger, maybe. I hope that maybe I can continue the narrative because I think those videos were made at a particular time when I felt very like angry and frustrated at the art world. But maybe in the last like two years suddenly I’m much more part of an art world. So I do have to deal with changing the energy slightly in the pieces. So it wouldn’t be fair for me to continue to channel frustration because now I am more involved in it. So it’s having to evolve a bit.

G: Sure, well the impulse of need has changed. 

L: It has, it has.

G: But what I thought was really interesting about these things, because I think this kind of work that somehow tackles head on the machinations of being an artist and being kind of disenfranchised and disempowered by like bigger, more powerful mechanisms than you and your practice… Or like, when people make work that  does a meta-criticism of that, it can often be kind of super cynical and somehow, I don’t know… a bit gross. But I found there was something quite sincere in these works that you’re making and I found them really fascinating, because I didn’t see them as critical or performative works, I saw them as totally delusional works. I saw you in a field engaging with like, limpets on rocks and dwarf ponies in fields, talking about them as curators, but I didn’t think that this was some kind of shady comment on how the art world works. I really felt that in that moment you were actually like, simulating an art world experience that you were kind of longing for. I suppose I found that… yeah what’s the word… I find that ability to produce your own reality through your work to be really, really, well, useful.

I saw you in a field engaging with limpets on rocks and dwarf ponies in fields, talking about them as curators...
​> GARY

L: Yeah, but maybe I did it because it made it useful for me because I really wanted… or maybe I didn’t even know at the time what I wanted, but once I started making them I realised they were very useful for me and that they were making me laugh. Like I found them quite funny when I started to like watch them back. So I would go for walks and then start to sort of act out scenarios depending on what happened on a given walk. So for example if cows broke out of a field and started walking across the road, I would pretend they were classmates from the Royal College of Art or competitive peers from Goldsmiths.

G: Or some broken down house that becomes like the embodiment of your practice, and you’re talking about how you’ve stepped away from your practice, and this broken down house, you’re afraid if you go inside the broken down house, which is your own practice, somebody might disturb you or there might be rats inside or it might be unsafe or whatever…  yeah, like, it’s really, as you say, there’s a lot of humour there but there’s also I think something psychologically very interesting happening. 

L: But I think it gave me like a rupture, it allowed for something to come in to my experience of being in that environment and then thinking about the like apparatus of the art world and in doing these kinds of acts, it gave me a sense of like release or relief, you know that kind of feeling you get after you laugh, something has moved somewhere, the thought process… it gave a bit of space for me and in doing that I kept wanting to do more of that, I wanted to find ways in which I could sort of cosmically rip my sort of feelings of gravity I had around making art and the art world. So I really believed it, you know?
STILL FROM FIELD RESEARCH CTD. BY LAURA FITZGERALD
G: Yeah no no, that’s the essential part. That’s what I meant when I said you produced reality.

L: They were very real in that I did feel very vulnerable when I was doing them. I think I became more empowered the more I made those gestures, but I think there were times when I really felt real fear of being caught in the act, making those videos. Because like I was out in public, in inverted commas, in the countryside. But in the countryside you are surveilled by the other people who live in those communities.

G: Oh yeah there’s your one out for a walk again now… oh something’s not gone right in the home for her.

L: She’s walking the roads.

G: Damaged in the nest. That’s a bird that got damaged in the nest. Yeah, no, the countryside is a very tyrannical place.
EXTRACT FROM FIELD RESEARCH CTD. BY LAURA FITZGERALD
L: Yeah, I was really worried about that, that I would be… I remember once I was out on one of my performative walks and I think I had just talked about the Mars residency, the new Mars residency.

G: Because you spotted an aircraft overhead and you were basically proposing that that aircraft overhead was the 2025 launch mission of Elon Musk’s new artist residency and he’s sending two people into space, “because budgetary constraints can only send two into space initially”.

L: Only two, only two, yeah. So simultaneously, just as I’d done that piece, or just as I gestured, pointed to the trail of the plane heading along up out west, one of the neighbours was like driving in the road and pulled up and out the window she was like Why don’t you ever ask me to like come for a walk with you? I really like walking”. And I was like, for fuck sake… I’m working here. I’m doing my fucking art like. But I didn’t say that of course, I didn’t. I was like “I like to go for walks on my own.”

G: Why didn’t you say that?

L: I was really scared because I just thought they wouldn’t get it, they just wouldn’t understand.

For FUCk SAKE, I'M WORKING HERE. I'm DOING MY FUCKING ART LIKE.
​> LAURA

G: Were you protecting yourself or protecting them?

L: I don’t know, maybe a bit of both, possibly. I think I had decided that Kerry was a safe place to come back and try things but I was sort of like doing things that I hadn’t expected I’d ever do in terms of like being performative.

G: I totally get what you mean by… and I don’t think it’s just a rural phenomenon. Cos I’m designing a series of walking… A lot of the work that the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence does is that we kind of programme walks around cities and we talk about buildings that have ceased to exist and buildings that are still there and we talk about kind of like esoteric information and hidden information that is embedded in the buildings, that, according to the conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper, can predict the future. And how do you predict the future if you don’t know this esoteric language that the buildings are constructed in? Well we’ve decided that there are certain postures that you can do against the buildings, so certain physical interactions with the buildings that you can do that will release certain knowledges… 

L: That’s really interesting, yeah.
GARY IN WUPPERTAL, A STILL FROM GLUE BY OÍSIN BYRNE
G: And so this involves me like rubbing… you know not like rubbing my dick on the building or anything but like that, but rubbing and licking and tasting and smelling and sniffing buildings and kind of like… talking to buildings and listening to buildings and using devices to listen to buildings. And yeah there is this kind of element of like, people walking by and it’s not just I want to save myself from being you know, somehow like yeah… I don’t want to be scrutinised, that’s a problem, but I also don’t… there’s something else, there’s some sort of feeling that like I want to protect them. But you know what, fuck them, really, I think that agreeability is a really, really poor indicator of poor social skills and I think that I’m too agreeable sometimes. 

L: It’s funny, you know what you’re saying about the buildings, and one video piece I made it was called Ploughing Up My Practice, but in one section I go for a walk and then end up by a standing stone… and then… 

G: Ploughing Up Your Practice is quite a long video.

L: It’s quite long and there’s different sections, so there’s one bit where it’s like a rap video, where I'm like rapping and there's ploughed soil, and I talk about how I’ve been like, hiding and ploughing up my practice… and then I go for a further walk and I talk about exercise and how like, in the art world it’s best not have, like weight's a problem, so you’re better off not having any bum at all, just two legs that stick onto your torso, and then I get further.

G: Well that’s all the rage these days – flat is where it’s at.

it actually seemed like quite a like reasonable thing to do, TO go up to the standing stone and ask it for a bit of help with my feckin’ art career.
​> LAURA

L: And then I get further and I get to the standing stone, and at the standing stone I say this sort of prayer thing, where I thank the standing stone for its powers and then I kind of ask it to send me solo shows and a show at Matt’s Gallery. I’m still waiting on the Matt’s Gallery show. But like, I think it was kind of like, not taking too much time to worry about the fact that I was doing something highly ridiculous. But then at the same token, it actually seemed like quite a reasonable thing to do, go up to the standing stone and ask it…

G: And talk to them, ask them things, yeah…

L: Ask it for a bit of help with my feckin’ art career, which was the the time, like, you know… I needed some extraterrestrial, like ancestral help in the matter.
​
G: Sure… so when we made this project in the pedestrian tunnel in Wuppertal, the so-called ‘angst tunnel’, where all of the locals in Wuppertal are flipping out because they’ve got these tunnels that smell of piss, because they’ve been badly maintained and all the old ladies don’t want to go walking there at night, so they’re beginning to close this pedestrian tunnel system, section by section by section, and this is part of a larger research that myself and OJAI have done related to pedestrian tunnels. But what we’ve noticed is that tunnels that don’t carry names tend to be more degraded and cause more anxiety than tunnels that are named. 
OJAI NAMING A TUNNEL IN WUPPERTAL

G: So for example, the tunnels in Wuppertal are not named infrastructures, but let’s say in Berlin they are named, the like … there’s the Otto Leventhal Pedestrian Tunnel and there’s, you know, what’s his name, Gerhard Schröder Tunnel underneath the Potsdamer Platz, so what we did was we used this technology which involved… we constructed this esoteric meter which involved mirrors, Toblerone bars, phones and old electronics. And we built this technology to ask the building… “is your name...” and then we were listening for a yes or no. So, we were like, Is your name, the Shirley Chisholm Tunnel? No! Is your name, the Jan Roland Tunnel? No! Is it the Dario Argento Tunnel? No! Is it the Margot Honecker Tunnel? No! Is it the Myles Na gCopaleen Tunnel. No! And we went through over 250 names until it finally responded yes to the Chesley Sullenberger Tunnel. And you might remember that Chesley Sullenberger was the US airways pilot who managed to successfully land… 

L: Sully!

G: …his airplane in the Hudson river after his plane hit a flock of birds! 

L: Tom Hanks.

G: Which was a really miraculous event.

L: It seems very fitting the Toblerone bars would have the power to channel…  I think it might be the nougat…  noo-gah, is that how you say it?
G: I think it’s the sacred geometry in the chocolate itself and it’s a geometry that… it’s the basic kind of, fuckin first grade, bubble gum economics of occult architecture is you know, the pyramids. A pyramid shaped chocolate has a lot of power.

L: It does though when dissolved… Those pieces do fit so well into the centre on the top of your tooth… 

G: Into the hollowed out parts of your teeth.

L: And I feel that somehow might transmit… or might be some sort of cavity filling device that could also tap into your…

G: Well it would be a good way of administering fillings in the future, to put soft enamel in Toblerone bars.

L: Yeah that is a good idea. Something you made me think of there when you were describing talking to the tunnels… but also, like it’s something I’m really interested in, and I think it is… like I hate talking about my work being against neoliberalism, like it is, but it’s so overused these days that it starts to lose potency. Sometimes, you know, like when you start talking about being an anti-capitalist and all this, which I am… But, there’s a book by a guy called Alan Counihan where he basically recorded all the field names in west Kerry, and so when I was doing these walking videos…

G: Oh wow, the disappearing field names.

L: Yeah…

G: Ancient knowledges and all that.

it’s the basic kind of, fuckin first grade, bubble gum economics of occult architecture, you know - the pyramids.
​> GARY

L: Ancient knowledge… and so in one of our fields we would have had a flour mill that was run by monks…. it was very small, but that was there. So, there’s all these really amazing traces that were there, and they’re kind of recorded in field names, but those field names are no longer referred to… like I know them because my father's told me them. But then, maybe… through my research and writings about my practice, I refer to them. But it’s things like that that I find helped activate some of my… even though I didn’t directly refer to the field names, the idea of story-telling, if you like, about these places, or kind of using them almost like canvases was something to do with those field names. I used them as like activation agents to fuel where I was going even though I took it in a very kind of ‘art world’ type narrative. But they were very important for me to know that those had existed, because I think sometimes there’s nothing more boring these days than a big fuckin massive field of 25 acres, which you get more and more commonly, you know. Because this is due to like… erasure…

G: Because that’s a sort of less ancient kind of standardised form of the countryside, is these big square fields.

L: They’re also just much more… They’re kind of stripped out of a lot of character and a lot of information – they’re kind of emptied out, ya know?

G: Yeah, I think there are definitely important things that are lost. And I think the loss of the original field infrastructure sounds like a real loss, but are you being nostalgic in some way? And is nostalgia, by the way, some sort of like… I don’t know what your experience is in education but when I was doing my Masters degree in Belgium, and they were kind of asking me if I was a nostalgic person, they may as well have been asking me if I’m like a registered sex offender or if I’m a fucking suicide bomber. I mean, to be accused of being nostalgic is like being accused of having perpetuated a crime against humanity or having intentionally brought bed bugs into someone’s home.
AN OJAI METER FOR NAMING A TUNNEL, INVOLVING TOBLERONE
L: Yeah, it had that connotation in the Royal College of Art for sure as well… I remember one of the tutors just saying, whatever it is you’re looking for it’s in the room. That was one of his statements he drove home to us. And like, I think it was very healthy for me to get out of Ireland.

G: I think it was very healthy for me to be shamed for nostalgia

L: Yeah absolutely. If I hadn’t been nostalgia shamed, I would be making very different work now. 

G: Nostal-shamed… nostal-shamed. I think it should be a thing, and I think we should do it in our lives. I’m gonna nostal-shame everybody I know.

L: Yeah I think like… cos it’s very hard. Nostalgia, it doesn’t like think… you can’t create outwardly, it’s very interior, like it’s a different kind of practice.

G: It engenders a kind of claustrophobia and it’s because it’s not particularly critical I suppose.

L: I think to be honest Ireland did suffer from it like a bad bout of cancer or gout. Like I think some of the Irish trajectory of art making along the line has been stuck in it.

G: Yeah… I have no comment to make on that subject whatsoever other than to say… yeah possibly.

L: But I think going away helps massively. I think it’s a good cure for a nostalgic person is to go away and to think about work and art in a very different way. And like the idea of sincerity versus nostalgia…

G: I think people should, if it all possible should, yeah, should leave the country for a while.

L: Mmm…  mandatory?

G: Not mandatory but… but you know what, if leaving Ireland is part of a process of doing a wider inventory of what the world has to offer, I quite like the idea that people consider Ireland a place that is their leaving where they come from.

I THINK IT WAS VERY HEALTHY FOR ME TO GET OUT OF IRELAND.
​> LAURA

L: There’s a really good song called St Brendan the Navigator, and it’s about St Brendan and he’s mad to leave the tiny village where he’s from so he wants to go off and be a saint abroad over in America and he goes off and after a while, god, he’s missing home and he wants to come home and, he has an albatross with him the whole time. So, he sails back home and all the village are out and they have great craic and loads of pints. And then he gives loads of masses and everyone’s mad about the mass, and then after about two weeks, he says to the albatross, fuck this, I need to get out of here and off he goes again. So, I think backwards and forwards is very good also. Or maybe it should be sideways. You know like… I think that thing about Irish people where they look to America and they look to Europe to like kind of segue across things.

G: Yeah, and maybe some wider, not so American or European-centric view of things…

L: Yeah totally.

G: I think there are so many places where good material can be found and good kind of communities can be formed, and discourses…

L: And new things brought into discourses… I think that’s what I’m interested in thinking about for my own work going forward is how I can kind of keep going with the work. Like in my most recent work I’ve brought in a lot about motorways and I made a meditation piece where I’m talking about the motorway being a pilgrim route and then the M50 being a national park and that dairy cows are an endangered species now, so sort of like I guess maybe trying to play with things… because I don’t think it’s a utopia, because nowadays the future feels like sort of… like there is no future… like the idea of the future is halted for us a little bit. You know, so, historically there was always this idea of future, and Hito Steyerl talks about how we’re in this vertigo, that we don’t kind of have any, for the first time in like a long, long time, like there’s no horizon line.

G: Who stole the future from us do you think?

L: We probably did it to ourselves. I think maybe we kind of just fucked it up in the neoliberalism of everything.
STILL FROM FIELD RESEARCH CTD. BY LAURA FITZGERALD
G: But I didn’t design neoliberalism, everyone I know is a fucking foaming-at-the-mouth full blown, full blooded commie, or at least a green-y or socialist… I think it’s our parents who threw us under the bus if I’m going to be completely honest with you, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a line of conversation that’s going to produce any healthy fruit… but about the motorways, I produced a kind of a conference lecture in 2009, because Ireland was building the motorway infrastructure back then and it was a new kind of way of categorising time and distance and contracting… and also a new polarity between region and centre which was like very much cast out by the motorway construction programme. And so I had this idea that these shouldn’t be anonymously numbered routes, for example, these should be roads that carry names, like with the tunnels.

L: Yeah, yeah, I think that would be so different if we’d had the Mourne Mountain Passageway instead of…

G: Like a Solidarity Autobahn and a Reunification Autobahn and a Regeneration Autobahn. And I really think that if you’re going to spend billions of dollars constructing these very, very heavy-handed interventions, they should be programmed with as much storytelling and performative capacity as possible. I’ve never understood why they don’t kind of take that extra step in Ireland. Everything that we build, all of our greatest erections should be you know mythologised and if you think that’s a bit kind of like, ya know, retro-modernistic, well then you can also… it could be quite a critical performativity and a critical storytelling.

L: It’s really interesting as well when you think about things like the railroad system in Ireland…

G: Like the Great Southern Railway and the Great Northern Railway. Even within that there’s this proposition of something kind of aggrandising and somehow something that is future orientated or progress orientated… 

L: But the M8 doesn’t bang of that.
GARY AND LAURA MEETING IN WEXFORD
G: No, that’s because it’s not called the Victory Autobahn, and the M1 running straight into the north should be called Reunification Autobahn…

L: Yeah, but I think…

G: Why autobahn?

L: I don’t… yeah… or the Red Cow, I mean the Red Cow…

G: Ah Jesus, Red Cow, Purple Onion, Red Cow, you know, Crazy Rhubarb… not into it. These are terms that make me feel like, you know, reality is being crumpled up in a fucking wet carpet and clubbed to death with the pipe from the vacuum cleaner.

L: But I do feel like… I was driving through somewhere recently, and it’s a small village outside Limerick, past Adare… but they’re looking for a bypass to bypass Adare, but there’s already a bypass there, so it would be their second bypass for this little village. So, the little village is only like four things and a nursing home, but they have little signs up now saying please don’t double bypass us. Because like a really weird thing happens when you bypass villages, like they do sort of die, like they go somewhere else, they become sort of like shadow villages. Ok, yeah, we get to places faster, and maybe you don’t want to spend a whole day driving from Kerry to Dublin, but in my meditation, in that piece, in recent work, I talked about how it takes three months to get from Kerry to Dublin. So, there’s this kind of playing with like, you know, this idea of stretching out time again, because I think I was really thinking about, you know, our time these days is being so kind of like squished and fragmented, and just like there’s not much of it. So, all the things in the meditation, I was trying to play with that. 

G: So you’re going to be in Belgium at some point?

L: Yeah, I’m doing a show with Warp. In St Nicholas.

reality is being crumpled up in a fucking wet carpet and clubbed to death with the pipe from the vacuum cleaner.
​> Gary

G: So, when you come to Belgium, I’m researching a walking tour of this city called Charleroi, which people mostly know from the airport. And Charleroi is the city that was built for like… in the 1970s, they projected that by the year 2000 there’d be a million people living there, but in fact the population shrunk and they’ve got about 150,000 people living there. But they’ve got a full-blown subway system and this really big aggressive elevated ring road that kind of squeezes the city centre, like kind of somebody wringing someone’s neck. And then there’s a lot of like dynamic material, so there's a lot of cooling towers and smoke and scrap metal and barges with cranes dropping scrap metal into them…  and then a lot of wildlife, because most of the city’s abandoned, there’s a lot of wildlife that’s coming back, kind of rewilding in like a Chernobyl effect… but will you come and maybe we’ll walk through Charleroi together?
GARY'S CHARLEROI WALKING TOUR ITINERARY
L: Totally, yeah I’d love that. 

G: Basically we ride the subway, we walk back along the deserted river, we see the cooling towers, we see the scrap metal barges… and then there’s a Tiki bar that I like to end at where they serve cocktails where there are light bulbs embedded in the drinks. In the ice cubes of the drinks.

L: Great, that sounds brilliant.

G: Cool. Any last comments for the recorder?

L: Eh no, I think good? Yeah brilliant.
More on Gary Farrelly here, and on the Office of Joint Administrative Intelligence [OJAI] here. You can also find out more on Laura Fitzgerald, including her various field work videos, here.