STRONTIUM DOGS
— Austin Ivers
20 September 2024 – 10 November 2024
Strontium Dogs takes its name from the Starlord comic strip (later in 2000AD). The exhibition surveys Austin Ivers' investigation into how culture reflects societal anxiety, focusing on ideas around modernism, automotive design, and alienation. Incorporating Mad Max camera angles, Baader-Meinhof style, and abandoned man-made spaces, the work suggests an era when the Cold War's impending threat loomed over both the bleak cultural landscape of Ireland and the optimism of the USA.
Ivers was also thinking about the parapolitical conflict waged between the superpowers, not with military threat but with cultural and social weapons. While a ridiculous nuclear stockpile lay dormant and the Cold War was waged in the Third World, the clash of civilisations took place on newsstands, in cinemas, in bookshops, on TV, and on tape decks. While the CIA funded 'Encounter' magazine and facilitated the promotion of Abstract Expressionism and the USSR marketed itself as the home of security and equality through the World Peace Council, popular culture responded with the novels of John Le Carré, the films of Roger Corman and James Cameron, 'Threads', 'Quatermass', and 'V' on TV, and with This Heat, Billy Bragg, The Redskins, and Frankie on our stereos. This is the work that informed this exhibition.
The cultural representations of the end of the world all reflect the existential anxieties of the time and are thus locked in at the point of production but often have a tail: 'Global Thermonuclear War' is a game presented to Matthew Broderick in 1983's War Games, a Disney movie for kids that considers the pointlessness of mutually assured destruction and how one might teach that to an AI by comparing it to 'X's & O's'. This stark choice is reflected in the stark representation of the work, vinyl on unpainted plaster, listing the options on the way to the end: Bridge... Poker... Global Thermonuclear War. 'Strontium Dogs', a sequence of 4 standard definition videos presented on CRT surveillance monitors (previously owned by the British West Midlands Police), presents newer and older works, unfinished and literally cut up. These reflect a Cold War aesthetic, specific ideas around Modernism, engineering, architecture, design, and spy films, yet still remain in the 'video installation' world, rather than the film/proscenium world.
In the pre-war period, Modernism expressed itself through extremist politics, heightened self-aggrandisement via World's Fairs and the Olympics, late colonial adventurism, and capitalist expansion. Ireland, barely a decade free, celebrated the 1500th anniversary of the arrival of St Patrick with the 31st International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. While ocean liners clogged the capital's quays, acting as hotels for the thousands of international clergy present, and many masses were held in Dublin, the final public mass in Phoenix Park reputedly attracted over 1 million congregants, including a live radio link-up with Pope VI and necessitating the establishment of Radio Athlone (previously 2RN and subsequently Radió Éireann, RTE) and a parallel edition of the Irish Independent. One issue of this includes a whole-page photo captioned 'Dublin's greeting to the papal legate. The SS Cambria, on which the Papal Legate travelled from Holyhead approaching Dun Laoghaire with its escort of Saorstat Army aeroplanes in the form of a cross.'
The development of atomic and nuclear power has always existed in conjunction with nuclear weapons: the promise of cheap, clean, easy power coupled with potentially unlimited destructive possibility! At its peak, a hydrogen explosion will reach 100 million degrees Celsius, five times that of the centre of the sun. Simultaneously, research continues into the potentially endless and self-sustaining fusion reaction, the power of the endless sun.
Austin Ivers is an artist and a lecturer in Contemporary Art at Atlantic Technological University. He has exhibited widely in Ireland, Europe, and the USA. He is co-founder (with Ben Geoghegan) of 126 Artist Run Gallery in Galway. His work considers the relationship between technology, memory, and culture, primarily via video installation.
Having initially studied printmaking in Limerick LSAD and Cork CCAD, his practice has been almost exclusively digital (durational and still) objects for over 20 years. Austin has had one-person shows in the Galway Arts Centre, 126, and the Dock, Carrick-on Shannon, and exhibited in group shows including the RHA Dublin & Tulca, Galway, as well as CIACLA, Los Angeles. He is also a participant in Greg Sholette's Imaginary Archive, a curatorial concept which toured to Graz, Philadelphia, Kiev, and Friedrichshafen. This is his first exhibition in Gort.
www.austinivers.com