re-workings of unrealised art projects
commissioned by NO RESPECT
curated by Alan Phelan and Jane Speller
June 26 - August 22 2004

This temporary public art project took over three years to reach the streets. After several refusals and delays in grant decisions it final received funding through the Arts Council Exhibitions Assistance Award scheme. With a very modest budget the project produced six new works sited around Dublin city centre in a park, travel agent, pub, bookshop, office atrium and university campus. With the works based on failed projects by international artists there was a point when it looked like the show would suffer the same fate but the commitment from the artists to the project was extraordinary, we only lost one of the original artists during the delay. Each responded thoughtfully and sometimes provocatively with new works that still keep within their own practice despite the heavy handed curatorial theme. The show also emerged from various limits within the structure of the OutArt series of annual exhibitions, mixing more fluidly the open and selected formats to generate new work instead of being a diverse round-up of queer works and themes. Artists involved were Oreet Ashery, Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt, Karen Henderson, Ronan McCrea, Vanessa O'Reilly and a collaborative piece by the curators Alan Phelan and Jane Speller. As Cherry Smyth writes in the catalogue essay "Failure drives the engine of this No Respect exhibition: each artist has been invited to respond to a public artwork that failed to fully materialise in Ireland and propose one of their own that plays with ideas of elusiveness and temporality. Public art remains provisional until it is installed."