Entering room five of the National Gallery of Ireland, you’re met with a large and imposing canvas. This painting is the abstract-geometric work On the Quai (2006), by Shirley Jaffe.
Running across the top of the canvas is an intermittent line of bright, colourful rectangles: train carriage windows. The heart of the painting is surrounded by deep browns; we are underground. In the centre of the painting is a golden plate: pieces of Paris set against the white of a mind’s eye. In the bright shapes, hard edges, and unfinished symbols we see the Seine, the intense orange of a Parisian sunset, a window, tree branches, the searing red of its late cafés, the solemn blues and purples of nights alone in its hotel rooms. In On the Quai, we are in the mind of Jaffe, riding the Paris metro underground, visualising her experiences in the city above her through memory and imagination.
Dublin’s own metro, “MetroLink”, will run from Swords to Charlemont via Dublin Airport. According to Transport Minister Darragh O’Brien, construction work is due to begin in 2027. The line has no clear opening date, but given that it was initially proposed in 2001, and adopted as official government policy in 2005, deadlines seem more like suggestions and grant us little cause for nervous anticipation. Still, we must consider how MetroLink will change how Dublin feels, and the artistic opportunity it provides.
Riding the metro is often referred to as “fast travelling” by those lucky enough to live in cities with them. It provides a means to get from point A to point B with nothing in between. The carriage of a metro is a non-place. All transit, be it the Luas, buses, or trains are alike in this aspect. They are non-destinations. When you are in transit you are not “being somewhere”, rather you are “being not-yet-somewhere-else”. The transit is not a place, but an intermediary experience. However, in above-ground transit, while in this non-place experience, you are still immersed in the place-experience of the city. You see the architecture, the landmarks, you hear the voices, the motors, the music. A metro removes this. While on an underground metro, you are entirely in the non-place transit, detached from the sensory experience of the city while you are ferried between stops. Your only view of the city, other than the stops, is through imagination and memory, as explored in Jaffe’s On the Quai. MetroLink will provide this non-place transitory experience, and with its 25-minute end-to-end runtime, it will shrink the feeling of distance between our neighbourhoods.
MetroLink also provides an exciting artistic opportunity for Dublin. Given that it is entirely detached from our sensory experience of the city, it provides a new space to represent the culture, history, and artistic voice of Dublin. To see examples of this, all we must do is look to other metro systems around the world.
Stockholm’s metro system provides a space for public art. Stockholm has integrated public art into 94 of its 100 stations, providing each with its own identity. Since 2015, the city has selected artists through public competitions. The artwork reflects the local culture, history, and natural surroundings of each station, also incorporating themes of feminism, urbanisation, environmentalism, labour, peace, and more. Moscow, the city with the busiest metro system in Europe, similarly reflects the country’s history and culture in its elegant, palace-like stations through facades, inscriptions, architectural features, and public art installations. Metro systems such as these provide more than just a “fast travel”, offering a location in themselves, and providing an artistic unity to their cities. They grant us an example of what MetroLink could do for Dublin.
This is already done in the current Irish passport. Introduced in 2013 and designed by Absolute Graphics, the Irish passport includes Irish poetry (by WB Yeats, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and James Orr), and images of Irish architecture, natural landmarks, and folklore. Through this cultural consideration and artistic vision, an otherwise banal document was transformed into a beautiful representation of our country. MetroLink provides a similar opportunity: to showcase Irish artists, culture, and history, in what would otherwise be a banal transit non-place.
