›Selection/Rejection (Dr. Ulrich Wilmes) 
Selection always includes rejection and therefore demands a
great responsibility from the adjudicators, who must choose
paintings, drawings, prints, collages, etc. This leads 
directly to a questioning of the criteria by which a work is
selected or rejected.

The first and most obvious answer to this question is of 
course given through the professional experience of the 
adjudicators and their historical knowledge in the history
of contemporary art. This experience enables the jury to 
select those works that attract interest because of their 
originality, which separates them from the others that 
appear as mere imitations of what has already been done by
other artists.

Such is the background on which the adjudicator draws for 
objectivity in his selection, although selector, artist and
audience should always be aware that the "judgement" on the
artworks remains, to a certain degree, a personal one. 
Therefore, criteria for selection cannot be absolute, and
are always dependant on the specific situation.

Two factors are very important in the case of ICE (Irish
Contemporaries Exhibition): the open submission nature of
the exhibition and the gallery space of the RHA Gallagher
Gallery. But, both are problematic with regard to the 
selection.

As there are no awards given, the participation in the 
exhibition is the only prize to be won. And that is why the 
greatest care had to be taken in the selection, regardless 
of the dimensions of the exhibition space available, a 
factor which might easily have tempted the selectors to 
choose a quantity of works sufficient to fill it. The only
arguement for or against the selection of a work is it's 
intrinsic artistic quality - a quality to which all three 
members of the jury agreed. And it is necessary to mention
that the agreement among the adjudicators was as high as
possible.

With regard to open submission, I learnt that it plays an 
important role in the Irish infrastructure of contemporary 
art exhibitions as a somehow democratic instrument to give
artists - given the lack of a wider range of possibilities - 
a chance to show their work. Criticism of this system is not
within the scope of this essay, however this "openness" is a 
major problem since its function to guarantee an interesting
exhibition on the base of a broad and representative spectrum
of artworks, does not work.

Why? By placing no limitations on artists allowed to submit,
the openness of the submission is seeking to avoid, in 
advance, any system of selection/rejection. But, it is also
true that many artists are not interested or not willing to 
participate in such open projects because, ironically, they
do not want to take the risk of being either rejected or 
selected. This has to do with the dialectic that art always
confronts: individuals take the risk of exposing themselves 
to a public statement. That means that there are definitely
many interesting artists who cannot be convinced to submit,
either because their self-confidence is not strong enough,
or on the contrary, because they do not like to be involved
in an art exhibition whose concept is necessarily open.

And this brings us finally to the reasons why the three 
adjudicators of this first Irish Contemporaries Exhibition
agreed on an exhibition which seems to be quite unusual. Of
course we hope that most of the questions aroused by ICE will
be explained by the exhibition itself. We decided to show the 
unselected works anonymously as part of the exhibition because,
as I already mentioned, we feel responsible not only for the 
selected works but also for the rejected. We wanted to guide
the audience backstage, to enable people understand the 
selective process of an open submission and its problems, not
only for the adjudicators, but also for the artists. So the 
inclusion of the rejected submissions should be understood as 
a gesture of encouragement, in order to bring about more
possibilities and alternative opportunities for artists to show
their work.


Dr. Ulrich Wilmes