Billy Quinn: An Artist for a Time of Plague, Work from the 1990s

Abstract

This thesis concerns the work of the artist Billy Quinn during the decade of the 1990s. It was a very productive time for him, and a period during which he returned to a much-changed Ireland having spent a number of years in London and New York. On first looking at Billy Quinn’s work, it does not surrender any suggestion of Irish roots but rather of the artistic and intellectual environments of London, New York City and specifically the gay-AIDS support community in New York during the 1980s and early 1990s. It also displays his deep familiarity with Western art, literature and philosophy. Since childhood, Quinn, as he emphasised in his interview, has had a love of reading and ideas. This was the time of AIDS and its devastation. It was a time when Michel Foucault’s ideas were discussed and reviewed in the New York Native1 along with statistics about infections and T-cell counts. Foucault’s ideas were used as a way of making sense out of the chaos in which the gay community found itself. It provided strategies to combat institutionalised indifference and homophobia. Aiding in that battle was the work of Eve Sedgwick (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 3) and Judith Butler (Butler, 1999). Their writings on gender worked out Foucault’s ideas in a way that had immediate relevance for the gay community and its survival. Quinn’s work is about AIDS but also about faith and family. It addresses more issues than what a paper of this size allows time and space for. Billy Quinn was born in Dublin in 1954. In 1973 and 1974 he attended the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) Foundation Year Programme. Before finishing he left Ireland and moved to London. Between 1977 and 1979 he studied for a diploma in fine art at City and Guilds in London. He continued his studies at North East London Polytechnic, gaining a BA in Fine Art and Film in 1982. In 1984 he started an MA in Theatre at the University of London. Shortly after, he went to New York where he lived until his return to Ireland in 1995. In New York, he supported himself with interior design projects and became involved in community activism as an early member of Act Up.2 By 1990 he was back making art. From 1990 to 1995 he participated in a number of group and individual shows in New York, Chicago and Atlanta. All these shows were of works mostly concerned with the AIDS crisis and how people responded to it. His work was his response to the crisis. On his return to Ireland he was an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and displayed work with Out Art3 and at the Temple Bar Gallery in 1996 and 1998. During his stay in Dublin he worked on material that contributed to his PhD at East London University. The following year he returned to London and completed his PhD in Fine Art in 2000. The title of his dissertation is ‘More Life: Towards a Vitalist Manifesto or Bifurcation, Pseudopodia and the worm, Jane Seymour and me, even’. Since then he has lived and worked in the Netherlands.