Ape Opera House

Project Partner:
Austin McQuinn

Date: 1 April – 1 May 2005
Venue: ESB Building, Caroline Street

Project Description:
An old ESB power house in Cork’s city centre was transformed into the exhibition space for a strange, baroque and thought-provoking exhibition ‘Ape Opera House’.

The ESB building, once the power house for the whole city, took on the elements of an opera house but with a twist. All the players were monkeys and the artist himself in various guises.

Artist Austin McQuinn created a series of installations and video projections that played with the ideas of what Opera Houses and Ape Houses represent. The result was a peculiar hybrid that had many layers – humour, obsession, fantasy, pathos and, crucially, in the Capital of Culture, a dark and quite personal journey into the nature of culture itself.

The whole piece centred on the maxim of “Ars Simia Naturae”, the Aristotelian statement that has dominated the history of art for centuries. McQuinn pointed to the literal translation that art mimics or ‘monkeys’ nature and how the ape has long been used by ‘human animals’ to separate themselves from their primal origins and define themselves as cultural beings.

Commenting on the background to the project, Austin McQuinn commented: “The ape became, in mediaeval times, a symbol for everything from wisdom to sexuality and served a serious, philosophical purpose in art and emblems since then. The use of anthropomorphic apes and monkeys in the decorative arts was most popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it often represented playfulness, or danger or mischievous activity. Artists like Watteau and Chardin created “Singeries” or painted worlds in which apes took on the social personas of high standing members of society like doctors and lawyers. These paintings were very radical and very popular. Around the same time porcelain ornaments of monkey people were much sought after and this idea of the mimicking ape as an expression of culture was re-invented.”

Outlining the operatic connection, he said: “When baroque opera, (which is the period that interests me most), was getting off the ground in Venice around 1700 with Vivaldi in particular, exotic animals started to arrive into the city. Both the new opera and the new animals caused a sensation. No one had heard such music, or seen such creatures. Daily life was over-whelming. It’s the collision of these two cultural events that interests me.”

“The conventional Opera House must always appear to uphold the cultural ambition and persona of a city. Ape Opera House is a kind of playful masque with a dark centre, full of pathos and questions about artist/creator, the mimicking ape and the exotic strangeness of the Opera performance. There is an awareness of the exaggerated reality that occurs in both operas and zoos. The desire is really to look at what are our expectations of culture, how we are we culturally separate from other animals and what is the individual artists’ role within the creation of human cultural activity.”

Austin McQuinn graduated from the Crawford College of Art in 1989. He works in a broad range of media: painting, sculpture, video and live performance. He has had several solo shows in Ireland including three at Project, Dublin and has exhibited in Spain, France, and Korea and more recently at Shanghai Short Film Festival. He was Irish artist in residence for the World Expo 2000 in Hanover, and has been commissioned to make new work for International Dance Festival Ireland and for the Robert Emmet Bi-Centenary, Kilmainham Gaol Dublin, as well as many permanent public sculpture commissions in Ireland.

Ape Opera House

Credit: Austin McQuinnn