‘Perpetual Motion’, or the Naas Ball, a hollow sphere of plastic cast over a skeleton of metal, is approximately nine metres in diameter. It was commissioned in 1996 by the National Roads Authority and Kildare County Council, who chose Remco de Fouw and Rachel Joynt’s submission from a list of thirty. The sculpture is between the Dublin Road roundabout and the N7 which forms a part of the broader M7, beginning at the Naas bypass and continuing to Rossbrien outside Limerick, bypassing towns in the counties Laois, Offaly and Tipperary. Composed of functional materials, traffic markings in thermoplastic, fragments of yellow boxes, intermittent dividing lines, contrasts of white and yellow reflective surfaces, the Naas ball is from one point of view an extrusion from its surroundings, a moment in the efflux of commuters from Naas to Dublin and back, as well as the broader expanding network of carriageways.
Road infrastructure developed under British rule was designed to establish military supremacy, boost trade between plantation towns and extract resources — agricultural products, labour and timber. The persisting legacy British domination is why the first dual carriageway and section of motorway in Ireland, the Sydenham bypass and the M1, were constructed in the six counties. It was not until 1983 that this first section of motorway in the Saorstát opened, a late but important symptom of the statelet’s re-fashioning as a USian beachhead into European markets, allowing it to roll back the more obvious symptoms of underdevelopment to outpace the six counties in just a few years. Taken with the lack of accommodation and public transport, these roads transformed Leinster into an effective suburb of the capital. The modes of being associated with this process — two-storey, terraced or semi-detached individual houses with pocket front and back gardens, driveways, women as privatised stay-at-home caregivers — represent the hard limits of the world most people who will read this post live in, and offer a number of insights into its ongoing collapse.
The early twentieth century granted sculpture, along with drama, film, literature and painting greater amounts of reflexivity, emphases on colour, form, ornament and expression over referent. Sculpture is therefore no longer a specific product of human labour, or an object in multiple dimensions. It may be an experience, a found object, a process. The ascension of the values associated with the avant-garde to the level of an ideological default was fraught in an Irish context. The anti-colonial tendencies of twentieth-century Ireland registered a challenge to established forms of authority, but deserting convention for newness would validate the social forces that had undone indigenous forms of cultural and social life in the first place. It is this impulse towards conservation, as well as a new bourgeoisie securing its position by riding the back of multi-national capital, and not mere backwardness, behind Ireland’s belated Cubism and Pop Art.
This ambivalence was also present in public sculpture, given its historic role in pledging loyalty to monarchical authority against the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century. Even with the emergence of more widespread commemorative practice, following the centenary of the 1798 Rebellion and Emancipation, statues representing Erin, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell held with the realism and theatricality of Victorian sculpture even as they rejected the Nelson and Wellington. Later statues of Thomas Davis and Wolfe Tone register the unsustainability of venerative sculpture but revivalism remains present in the works of Oisín Kelly, Oliver Sheppard as well as the more vernacular expressions of the Republican Graves Association.
Roadside art, consumed by people moving along primary roads at speed, make claims on public attention. Being exposed to the Irish weather, they are made from durable materials. When County Council websites blurb them, they emphasise their accessibility and light-heartedness, defensive against accusations of wasting public money.
Maurice Harron’s four and a half metres tall representation of Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill was unveiled in 1999 on the highest point of the Curlew Mountains, along the N4 outside Boyle in County Roscommon, to commemorate the 400th anniversary a successful Irish rebel ambush of a relief force under Sir Conyers Clifford during the Nine Years War; English forces suffered heavy casualties, while Irish losses were minimal. A post-modern equestrian statue, two kilometres south-west of the actual site of the battle, the sharp and irregular pieces of steel and bronz, in tension with the visible wire skeleton, symbolise weaponry and armour. While the angularity of the panels capture the living flesh of both figures, implying movement and agitation, the stance is relaxed and contained . Though the episode takes place in the remote past, the hit-and-run attacks on the English formation, harassed from woods alongside their route to the point of exhaustion, resonates across centuries of irregular warfare, a doctrine conceived in response to occupation by a foreign power with greater military capacity.
The notion that modernism represents a friction-based model of literary, sculptural or cinematic production can begin to ring hollow as it remains a global artistic lingua franca deployed for the purposes of chemical or pharmaceutical factories, assembly plants in industrial parks, shopping centres and office towers, repeatable and functional enough for further expansion, maximising rentable spaces and ironing out cultural particularity.
When consumerism and technology have allowed the ephemeral and middlebrow to predominate, artists find it difficult to define themselves and I personally expect that the present period will be regarded as noteworthy by its plainness, uniformity and lack of engagement with place, climate or history. The Spire stands out here, to read it as post-national on a street offering a pantheon of national figures would seem to grant it too much credit, rather than an uncritical monument to Celtic Tiger hubris becoming more risible the more the social fabric in the northside of the city erodes.
As an entity, the sculptor is here at once central and subordinate, retaining a relationship with the two prime movers of contemporaneity; state institutions and private capital. The experience of these artworks, in retail parks or corporate premises, are unconscious ones. They offer themselves up as exogenous shock; a refurbishment, a stray look while waiting at reception, the occasion of inconvenient glare on a screen. This grants sculptors a prominence unimaginable to a poet or playwright but brings with it a vulnerability to flows of construction and property speculation.
As a critique, reaction and reproduction of modernism, post-modernism offers some means of challenging these universalist tendencies, even if its privileging of the local over the global, the exception over the rule can terminate in a lack of ambition. Some attempts to mediate the gap can be seen in Fouw and Joynt’s other works which draw light through the monumentality of bronze, fibre optics, glass, quartz, steel and stone through which natural forms — the brain, coastlines, the heart, ocean currents, ova — encounter one another.
Two further other collaborations:
1. ‘Waggle Dance’, in plate bronze. Like ‘Perpetual Motion’ spherical, but partial. Set in a water feature designed by Scott Tallon Walker outside the Iontas Building in Maynooth University. It affords a view into its internal bee-hive structure, reflecting the aspirations of the interdisciplinary institute outside of which it is set.
2. ‘Eccentric Orbit’, limestone, bronze, stainless steel and cement. The playfulness of it being tipped on its side, the modelling of global currents, the compass needle pointing in the direction of the north star, offering a broader, cosmic significance.
These are instances in which i) a work of art changes its meaning over time, from developmentalism to ecology, ii) subsequent stages of an artists’ career recapitulating concerns latent in those previous and making them different in the repetition, the reason why, from my perspective, these things are worth paying attention to. Perpetual motion is impossible and if there is an analogy posited between the movement of the arrows over the concrete surface simulating the texture of tarmacadam, and currents in the air or sea, given that exhaust from car engines and construction together compose nearly half of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Naas Ball has become sardonic.
The prominence of animals in roadside sculpture, Jarlath Daly’s Salmon, Kevin Holland’s Irish elk, Dick Joynt’s ram, Lynn Kirkham’s horses, have encouraged critics to regard them as regressive celebrations of national identity, criticisms that seem ready to hand whenever subjects regarded as specifically Irish are under consideration, but given the precarity of Ireland’s bio-diversity, they begin to take on a new significance, a giving way to particularity and detail away from administrative overtones. A positing of these synthesis of these two, a dependence on some notion of rootedness can lead one to very dubious conclusions, no relationship between human beings and ‘the world’ can ever be natural, but finding some means of threading these two is going to be fundamental, not just from the point of view of climate, but the artistic and cultural project that attends the athghábhail.
In January of this year a Green Party councillor Colm Kenny sought information from Kildare County Council about leveraging the visitor attraction potential of the Naas Ball. Here we have a new turning point, from patterns of consumption associated with capital investment to service economy, not a roadside sculpture, but a roadside tourist attraction. Just like they have in America.
Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Field Day, 2005.
Chris Beausang 