Here in Paradise

One recurrent sentiment is that the selfishness of the Celtic Tiger damaged, perhaps permanently, the traditional warmth of our social relationships and communal responsibility. Rather than regretting the loss of financial wealth, people regret what was lost in pursuit of that wealth… By redistributing the responses, Gerz is emphasising the fact that these diverse personalities and opinions all make up a community. He sees each person as symbolically minding the opinion of another. “The idea of being a keeper of the other, of taking responsibility for the other, is very important,” he says… Gerz sees it as very much in keeping with his own belief in an aesthetics of production, not consumption. It is up to people to shape their culture, not passively accept what others decide.

Aidan Dunne 2014

It was not unusual to pass through Sneem and on your return trip see the people you noticed earlier reading the portraits were still in that green reading some half hour or more later.

Vincent O’ Leary 2014

It is impossible to discuss or interpret Jochen Gerz’s work without at the same time responding to major issues on democracy and culture: the right to speak and be heard, and the role of social experience in the public sphere. Yet even though many of his works are, in effect, created by participants, this cannot be described as some kind of democratic art production. The asymmetry between artist and public is not abolished. All actions by the participants are still happening within the framework provided by the artist (Rebentisch 2014, 36). Rather, the democratic power of the artworks lies in the conflicts that the participants address through their contribution, and in the conflicts among themselves, and with the artist that might evolve in the process. In this way Jochen Gerz avoids the pitfalls where the participative work becomes a caricature of democracy (Diederichsen2008, 275) or a new means to increase economic efficiency (Miessen 2010).

Mechtild Manus and Jonathan Vickery 2016