The other morning, walking into Dublin city centre, I decided to take the scenic route along the Grand Canal. When I got to Leeson Street Bridge, I saw that the canal’s banks were lined on either side with metal fencing all the way down to Baggot Street. The fencing was composed of large interlocking metal panels, about two metres in height: the sort of thing you see used as crowd-control barriers at festivals and other large public events, or to cordon off construction sites.
I walked a little way along Mespil Road until I came to an opening in the fencing, allowing access to the path along the canal. The narrow paved walkway was enclosed on both sides by these high fences, barring access to both the bank of the canal and the grassy area between the path and the street. As I walked toward Baggot Street Bridge, I found myself so appalled by this new development that I actually laughed out loud.
The whole thing was so ugly, so farcically crude, that it verged on the comical. At one point, I stopped and marvelled at the spectacle of a single tree cordoned off by three of these panels, with their ungainly weighted rubber bases. I felt like I was looking at a particularly uninspired work of conceptual art.
I half expected to see a little white card on the other side of the tree, explaining how the work “forces the viewer to confront an unstable ontological hierarchy, interrogating the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ structures” or whatever. It was horr.
