Strange brew

A view of The Candahar, a portable art installation that is actually a functioning Irish-themed pub. (Alberta College of Art and Design)

Theo Sims’s installation artwork, The Candahar, asks one big question, which leads to a lot of other questions: What makes an authentic Irish pub?

If you walk into The Candahar, which is named after an artist-friendly street in Belfast, you’ll find Jameson whiskey, beer on tap, ham baps with Colman’s mustard, and sometimes, a genuine Irish barman. (His name is Chris Roddy, and he’s been pulling pints since he was 12.) There are buzzers behind the benches — in Ireland they’re used to tell the barman to pour your next Guinness and let it settle for five minutes while you finish your current one. There are framed photos of champion horses on the walls, and British horseracing on the TV over the door. When the announcers get high-voiced with excitement, you might find yourself drawn to the screen to see who wins.

Where The Candahar stands apart from your typical local pub is that all this “authenticity” can be broken down into flat-packed units, loaded into a crate — except for the barman, of course — shipped across the country, and set up again in 14 days. It is portable, transient and global — like a lot of its 21st-century patrons. 

Rather than being a bleak comment on the dislocations of our accelerated, decentralized, contemporary world, The Candahar is actually very hopeful. It’s astonishing how quickly this fake bar builds a sense of real community. It might start out looking like a precise physical replica of someplace else, but it soon becomes an open-ended, here-and-now collaborative project, given unpredictable life by the people who prop up the dark wooden bar or crowd onto the hard-backed benches. “The only authentic thing about The Candahar is what happens inside it,” Sims suggests. “People talking and drinking and hanging out.”  

First set up at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design in September, 2006, The Candahar later took its hybrid art-and-alcohol experience to the very sociable 2007 Montreal Biennial. Right now it’s installed on the gallery floor of Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, the city where Sims lives and works. It’s near the street entrance, like any bar that wants to draw in customers, but at the same time it’s part of a larger show called Pretend: Theatre & Video, which focuses on performance-inspired art. The Candahar will travel to St. John’s, N.L., and Cambridge, Ont., (where it will be outside) in the coming year. Each time it’s constructed, the context is different.

The 38-year-old English-born Sims, who’s been based in Canada since 1998, is known as a neo-conceptual artist, part of a movement that constantly tests the borders between reality and representation, art and life. Of course, not everyone cares about these nice distinctions: “Some people wander in and they think it’s a new bar that’s just opened up in the neighbourhood,” Sims admits. But it’s this very literal feel — the solid, ornate bar, the wooden benches and tables (all constructed from scratch by Sims), the everyday look of glasses upended on an old towel — that makes The Candahar so intriguing. These plausible surfaces cover a lot of layers.

An external view of the Candahar exhibit at the Alberta College of Art. (Alberta College of Art and Design)

Take this odd situation: At the Winnipeg opening of The Candahar, the Irish-born barman from the King’s Head, an actual pub about half a block away from the Plug In gallery, seemed a little miffed that Sims had flown Roddy in from Belfast to work behind the bar. Standing in the middle of an artificial space, he was intent on demonstrating his “real Irish barman” credentials. 

“I’m doing something absurd, really,” Sims admits. “I’m an Englishman building a Belfast bar in the middle of Canada.” But it’s not just any bar. Though Sims works within the outline of conceptualism, there is always a strong emotional tug in his work. The Candahar draws on Sims’ experience of moving from England to Northern Ireland, where he took his MFA, and then to Canada. “This bar is a kind of vessel for carrying that experience around,” Sims suggests. It plays on cultural differences between Ireland and Canada — which can become very obvious in the elaborate rituals of social drinking — while bringing the two places together in an act of remembering and re-creating. 

The work started fermenting more than 10 years ago, when Sims heard that Benny’s Bar, an old Belfast watering hole, was being torn down. Sims loved the place so much he wanted to dismantle it piece by piece and set it up again as a piece of art. A bunch of regulars beat him to it. They reinstated the spirit of Benny’s in a portable trailer on the demolition site. “I went in there and the place was blue with smoke, and there’s this guy, yellow from liver failure, with two oxygen tubes up his nose, and he was drinking a Guinness and smoking a cigarette. And I thought, ‘Now that is hardcore dedication to your pub.’”

In the last decade, even more Belfast pubs have been lost to the wrecking ball, a side-effect of Northern Ireland’s economic recovery, which started with the Good Friday peace accord in 1998. In some ways, The Candahar is a nod to the changing landscape of that city. When Sims lived there in the early ’90s, there was a curfew in effect and fairly grim economic conditions. “Now it’s so opened up,” says Sims. “And the cars, the suits, the food!” 

The Candahar’s elaborate ceiling is based on the ceiling of a bar called The Garrick. The hard benches, narrow tables and red velvet curtains are from The Kitchen Bar. The general layout is from The Blackthorn, which was created as a quasi-historical cosy pub in the 1980s, then changed to a chic martini bar in the ’90s, and then switched back to a cosy pub (proving that it’s not just bars by artists that get created out of whole cloth).

Sims references things that are meaningful to him, but he’s careful to avoid anything resembling Irish blarney. He doesn’t want to encourage the kind of over-the-top nostalgia that leads North Americans to drink green beer on St. Patrick’s Day and get all goopy over Danny Boy. Yes, there is a shamrock, Sims concedes: “But it’s a functional shamrock — it holds matches. Plus, it was handmade in Saskatchewan, and whoever made it got it upside-down, so it’s all wrong.”

A detail of The Canadahar art exhibit. (Plug In ICA)

Paralleling the immigrant experience, the work starts with an Irish framework, but has been accumulating its own history as it moves around Canada. The Quebec liquor licence from the Montreal Biennial is framed near the bar. In Calgary, Sims was given horseracing pictures and an amateur painting of what looks like an Irish coastal town. In Winnipeg, the work has picked up a photograph of Walter Lewyk, a longtime friend of the arts community who died last year.

Like any good pub, The Candahar has also been collecting anecdotes, jokes, exaggerations and rumours, stories about good behaviour and bad. (They’ve had to kick a few people out.) The space affects people, Sims suggests: “It’s amazing how quickly people relax and start nattering.” And it’s not just the liquor — it’s not as if it’s a novelty for the art crowd to have a few drinks. “There’s something about the physical layout of the place, something about the way it’s set up, that gets people talking — and talking to different people, not just the people they know.” 

Everyone who walks into The Candahar becomes part of the work. “Some people act up,” Sims explains. “Or they’ll play a role, put on a bit of a performance.” Certainly there seems to be a flowering of expansiveness and gregariousness, of shoulder-rubbing friendliness under its burnished wood ceiling.

Maybe the work simply makes us more aware of what we’re looking for in our shared social spaces. In its 24-day run in Winnipeg, The Candahar seems to have absorbed a deep collective yearning for familiarity and belonging, for a place “where everybody knows your name” — a place that many North Americans now find on their televisions instead of in their cities. In that sense, The Candahar is a lot more substantial than a lot of bars that claim to be real.  

The Candahar is on display at Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA until Aug. 18.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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