They say that art flourishes in tough economic times. So it’s appropriate that Ireland is currently represented at the Venice Biennale by a work about the imploded tiger economy.

The Biennale is the largest, most famous and most prestigious art event in the world. This year, England has brought Caméra d’Or winning film-maker Steve McQueen (Hunger) to Venice, while Wales is represented by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale (whose 45-minute abstract film on Welsh identity has not received the most forgiving reviews).
Somewhat anachronistically in the globalised world of contemporary art, the Biennale is all about national representation.
Gareth Kennedy is representing Ireland at the event by bringing Dublin’s busking culture to Venice, where playing music on the street is an alien concept. His piece, Immediate Money (Dublin Docklands), contrasts the small-scale, localised, cash economy of busking with the large-scale speculation- and credit-fuelled Celtic Tiger (RIP).
It’s not the first time Kennedy has looked to the economy for inspiration. Two years ago, he brought an inflatable bandstand on tour around north-west Ireland, to towns that had become part of the sprawling “yellow housing estates” phenomenon. Composer Ian Wilson was commissioned to create a composition about the growing (inflated, geddit?) Irish economy.
“That [the bandstand] was 2007 before we knew how big this dark hole was,” says Kennedy, “So it’s kind of that moment of zeitgeist that I’m quite interested in.”
Kennedy works from a studio in Temple Bar square, and it was the constant sound of buskers outside that gave him the idea for Immediate Money.
“I approached eight musicians, people who I spent a lot of time oberving on the street and looking at the kind of impact their music had,” says Kennedy, who believes buskers are “almost like urban specialists.”
“They know what acoustics work in an urban space, and they know about flows of people. There’s urban planners and urban designers, architects and all these other guys that work almost from the vantage point of the drawing board — but these guys, they’re really at the coal face of what makes urban space read or work,” he explains.
The first phase of the Immediate Money project was to bring the buskers away from the city centre and see how their music worked in a new and different space – the echoing semi-ghost town that is the newly-developed Dublin Docklands. Envisaged as a thriving new urban quarter, the Docklands are a labyrinth of half-empty apartment and office blocks. These are the real world ‘bad assets’ that NAMA is currently mopping up.
“The promise of the Docklands was so great. With 30,000 people living in the core of Dublin, it would become a self-sustainable environment. It would arrest urban sprawl, it would stop people having to drive from Navan and County Cavan and all sort of places to get to work,” says Kennedy.
“Now, with the change in our economic climate, the gravity there has kind of changed. It’s quite vacuous now. The future is uncertain because the architecture there was based on speculation. It was based on a credit system that has now ceased to exist and many of those buildings that are now lying empty, they’re almost black holes in the economy.” he says.
Kennedy commissioned an architectural photographer, Russ Kavanagh, to take a series of photos of the buskers against the backdrop of the newly-constructed buildings of the Docklands.
The resulting images have been set up on lightboxes in the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. These light boxes shine into a glass box in the middle of the room which is filled with money that the eight buskers, transplanted to Venice in rotation over the course of the exhibition, have earned on the streets of the Italian city. (Don’t worry, the buskers are reimbursed.)
“There are buskers in Venice but they operate differently,” says Kennedy. “They play more to people in restaurants and they’re moving around so they’ve a different way of doing it to what we see in Ireland where a guy opens up his case and plays, he stands and delivers,” he says.
“Nobody knows how much is in the box. This is very important. It’s all this legal tender taken out of circulation and held in stasis. I wonder how the meaning of money can change? We can consider other kinds of values than immediate ones.
“The name of the work is Immediate Money because we’re in quite an urgent situation. Suddenly, cash is back – credit is unstable. The banks’ credit ratings are maxed out, people’s credit ratings are maxed out. So suddenly money is material and real again, rather than you just give someone a plastic card and they swipe it and you get goods,” says Kennedy.