Tom Fitzgerald John O’Regan (ed) Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 84 p/b €15.00 ISBN 0946846618 Amanda Coogan John O’Regan (ed) Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 72 p/b €15.00 ISBN 0948037172 Jack Donovan John O’Regan (ed) Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 84 p/b €15.00 ISBN 0946846200 Figure and Ground: Rembrandt to Mondrian Peter Murray (ed) Crawford Gallery/Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 72 p/b €15.00 ISBN 0948037199 After the Thaw: Recent Art from the AIB Art Collection Aidan Dunne Crawford Gallery/Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 84 p/b €8.00 ISBN 0948037180 Contemporary Art from Cork John O’Regan, Nicola Dearey (eds) Crawford Gallery/Gandon Editions, 2005 pp 336 p/b €20.00 ISBN 0948037164 Limerick City Gallery of Art Mike Fitzpatrick (ed) Gandon Editions/Limerick City Gallery, 2004 pp 72 p/b €8.00 ISBN 0948037156 Gandon Editions labels itself as the ‘leading producer of books on Irish art and architecture’, and with over 280 titles to date, it probably is. Its Profile series, which started in 1996, uses the format of the medium-sized paperback, and according to the publisher, the recent expansion in pages, and in the colour content, has been entirely due to feedback from readers. Usually the books consist of an interview and one or two short essays, a generous selection of images, and a CV with a brief bibliography. They are clearly designed, even when produced on the occasion of a retrospective as with the Jack Donovan volume, to be an accessible introduction to an artist, rather than a sustained critique. The strongest suite is the design which has improved enormously since the early days, and also the reference aspect: there is a cross-referenced list of illustrations, pages are clearly numbered, and the CV section is laid out simply but effectively, rather than being squashed into the usual minute print. As a result the books look attractive and have a shelf life. There’s probably not much rhyme or reason to the content of the series as a whole, as the books largely evolve from the vagaries of individual exhibitions at particular galleries. You won’t, for example, get an overview of Irish art from perusing the volumes published so far, but that is not necessarily a negative, as one is never entirely sure what is going to come out next! Art publishing, at this level, means that you are always going to get entirely positive views of the artists themselves or, to put it another way, awkward questions are simply airbrushed out of existence. It also means that where an artist opts for sensationalist subject matter, as in Amanda Coogan’s nudity, the media pick up on those aspects, and everything else slides into the shade. It’s no accident that the Coogan book got more coverage than anything else produced in the series. In the greater scheme of things, this is probably not of great importance, but bearing in mind that these books go into schools and institutions, and do have distribution outside Ireland, there are some slightly unsettling aspects. Coogan’s work is presented as if she were some kind of trailblazer in the performance world in relation to her use of the body, and in relation to the supposedly iconoclastic elements of her work, but there’s little in the book, in terms of the images presented or the elements described, that hasn’t been a staple of, especially, East European Performance practice for many decades. Equally there is not even any consideration of her art in relation to obvious topics such as exhibitionism, or art as therapy. Therefore, part of the job of the critic is to demonstrate why such a Performance functions as art, and not as anything else. In this respect, that of ‘explaining to the public’, the Tom Fitzgerald title is admirable with an excellent interview by Jim Savage, and sharp, tight essays by Sean O’Laoire and Suzanne O’Shea. With the Jack Donovan book, the best bit is the interview by Mike Fitzpatrick. The reproductions in all are extremely good, though the Coogan one is rather more variable. In Figure and Ground, which looks rather like a slightly larger format version of the Profile series, we have a catalogue to an exhibition at the Cork Municipal. It is a delightful publication which looks at prints and drawings of the landscape and people in the Netherlands between 1520 and 1920. Peter Murray is warmly at ease in the introductory essay and the detailed notes on the illustrations are accessible and carefully judged. The remaining three books are in a small, square format. The most substantial is the 320-page Contemporary Art from Cork which is a bit like a recent ev+a catalogue. Each artist gets anywhere from one to four pages, with images being predominant. There is an alphabetical index of artists, and appendices listing organisations and galleries in Cork, city and county. The AIB Art Collection gives us a brief essay by Aidan Dunne and full-page images, but no information about the artists, though it is indexed. The Limerick City Gallery of Art guide, which is billed as ‘a young people’s educational guide to the permanent collection’ is wholly delightful. Under the persona of a virtually unknown poet Gerard Ryan, the artist and writer Ciara Finnegan leads us around the collection simply but evocatively. Buy it! Brian McAvera is a playwright and art critic.