Ghost-haunted land: Contemporary art and post-Troubles Northern Ireland 9781526121851

Citation preview

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Ghost-​haunted land

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Ghost-​haunted land Contemporary art and post-​Troubles Northern Ireland

Declan Long

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Declan Long 2017 The right of Declan Long to be identified as the author of this ​ work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, ​ Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 7849 9144 9 hardback First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of ​ URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in ​ this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites ​ is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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Contents

List of plates List of figures Acknowledgements

page vi viii x

Introduction

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1 Same difference: post-​Troubles contexts and contradictions

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2 New terrains: ‘Northern Irish art’ in the wider world

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3 The post-​Troubles art of Willie Doherty

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4 That which was: histories, documents, archives

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5 Phantom publics: imagining ways of ‘being together’

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Conclusion –​or against conclusions

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Bibliography Index

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Plates

1 Jesse Jones, The Other North, 2013. Production still; film duration ​ 59 minutes. Photo: Jin-​hee Kim. 2 Willie Doherty, Remains (Kneecapping behind Creggan Shops), 2013. ​ C-​print mounted on aluminium, 120 x 160 cm. 3 Phil Collins, The marches, 2000. Production still, Belfast and ​ Portadown. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin. 4 Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, from the photographic series Archive Lisburn Road, 2005. Courtesy the artists. 5 Paul Seawright, ‘White Flag’; from the photographic series Conflicting Account, 2009. 6 William McKeown, Nest (The Bravery of Birds), 2005. Installation view of the exhibition The Nature of Things, curated by Hugh Mulholland, Northern Ireland Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and the William McKeown Foundation. 7 William McKeown, installation view of The Sky Begins at Our Feet, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, 2002. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and the William McKeown Foundation. 8 Darren Murray, Brassocattleya clifton magnifica, 2005. Oil on canvas, ​ 152 x 213 cm. 9 Mary McIntyre, Threshold, 2004. C-​type photographic print, ​ 100 x 84 cm. Courtesy the artist. 10 Paddy Bloomer and Nicholas Keogh, Bin Boat, 2005. Mixed media (inc. wheelie bins, washing machine parts, oil barrels, wheel-​barrow, two-​cylinder diesel engine fuelled by chip fat). Presented as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy the artists. 11 John Duncan, ‘Sandy Row’, from the photographic series Bonfires, 2008. C-​type photographic print, 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist. 12 John Duncan, ‘Newtonards Road’, from the photographic series Bonfires, 2008. C-​type photographic print, 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist. vi

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List of plates

13 Willie Doherty, Show of Strength I, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated ​ c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and ​ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 14 Willie Doherty, Local Solution IV, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated ​ c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and ​ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 15 Willie Doherty, Show of Strength III, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated ​ c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and ​ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 16 Miriam de Búrca, Go Home, 2003. Video still. Courtesy the artist. 17 Miriam de Búrca, Dogs Have No Religion, 2003. Video still. ​ Courtesy the artist. 18 Phil Collins, Holiday in someone else’s misery #1, 2001. Lightjet print, ​ 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin. 19 Factotum, cover of the ‘God’ issue of The Vacuum, 2004. Courtesy Factotum (Stephen Hackett and Richard West). ​ Illustration: Duncan Ross.

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Figures

1 Shane Cullen, The Agreement, 2002–​4. 11,500 words of the ​ British-​Irish Peace Treaty of 1998, digitally etched into fifty-​five polyurethane panels, total length 67 m. Courtesy the artist and Beaconsfield Arts, London. page 24 2 Phil Collins, The marches, 2000. Production still, Belfast and ​ Portadown. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin. 29 3 Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, from the photographic series Archive Lisburn Road, 2005. Courtesy the artists. 33 4 Paul Seawright, ‘Wire’, from the photographic series Conflicting Account, 2009. 36 5 Seamus Harahan, video still from Before Sunrise, 2007. Video, duration 3 mins 45 secs. 40 6 Seamus Harahan, Holylands, 2004. Video still; duration 32 mins. Courtesy the artist. 68 7 Sandra Johnston, In Light of Everything, 2005. Performance as part of The Long Weekend, a performance event as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy the artist. 72 8 Aisling O’Beirn, Stories for Venetians and Tourists, intervention in Piazzo San Marco, Venice, 2005. Staged as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy the artist. 73 9 Aisling O’Beirn, Stories for Venetians and Tourists, bags for pigeon feed, used during intervention in Piazzo San Marco, Venice, 2005. Staged as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy the artist. 74 10 Susan MacWilliam, F-​L-​A-​M-​M-​A-​R-​I-​O-​N, 2009. Video still; Blu-​ray, colour, stereo, duration 17 mins 13 secs. Courtesy the artist. 81

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List of figures

11 Willie Doherty, Empty, 2006. Video still; super 16mm film transferred to video (colour and sound), duration 8 mins. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 12 Willie Doherty, Ghost Story, 2007. Video still; high definition video (colour and sound, stereo), projection, duration 15 mins. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 13 Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2008. Film still; 16mm film transferred to digital video, duration 38 mins 10 secs. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, London. 14 Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2008. Film still; 16mm film transferred to digital video, duration 38 mins 10 secs. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, London. 15 Duncan Campbell, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles, 2004. SD video, B&W/​ colour, duration 33 mins. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo ​ Gallery, London. 16 Aisling O’Beirn, detail of ‘Waterworks Park’ from Improbable Landmarks, 2010. Acoustic foam, plastic plants. Courtesy the artist. 17 Daniel Jewesbury, NLR, 2010. Video still; 16mm digitally transferred, duration 31 mins. Courtesy the artist. 18 Una Walker, Surveiller, 2004. Detail of installation at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Courtesy the artist. 19 Susan Philipsz, Filter, 1998. Single channel sound installation through the PA system. Installation shot: Resonate, Laganside Buscentre, Belfast. Photo: Eoghan McTigue. Courtesy the artist. 20 Esther Ferrer, performance as part of the Bbeyond and Interface event In Place of Passing, St. George’s Market Belfast, 2005. 21 Ursula Burke, from the photographic series Routes, 2003. Courtesy the artist. 22 Phil Collins, Holiday in someone else’s misery, 2001. T-​shirt giveaway, Liberty Blue, Belfast. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin. 23 Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, installation view of The Soft Estate, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2006. Courtesy the artists and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. 24 Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, installation view of The Soft Estate, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2006. Courtesy the artists and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin. 25 Factotum, cover of the ‘Satan’ issue of The Vacuum, 2004. Courtesy Factotum (Stephen Hackett and Richard West).

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109 112 132 133 135 148 150 158 172 174 177 180 188 189 193

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Acknowledgements

This book is a reflection on what came after a momentous historical event, but it was completed just before other history-​making events took place. On 22nd May 1998, a referendum on the Good Friday Agreement was held simultaneously in both parts of Ireland, North and South, ratifying a peace deal with significant cross-​party support. Eighteen years later, on 23rd June 2016, a referendum on membership of the European Union was held across the United Kingdom. In England and Wales a majority voted to leave the EU; in Scotland and Northern Ireland, a majority voted to remain. The overall outcome was to be ‘Brexit’: the UK’s extraordinary, unexpected decision to leave the European Union, a referendum result that initiated deep constitutional crisis with far-​reaching ramifications for North-​South relations in Ireland. Long after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the potential of a return to a ‘hard’ militarised border between the North and the Republic  –​ marking a line of separation between ‘British’ and European territory –​ was being anxiously debated. It suddenly seemed possible that old forms of division could yet reappear, under new conditions, for unexpected reasons. Keeping apace with change in the North of Ireland –​ and remaining attentive to what stays unchanged –​ has been one of the challenges in writing this book. At its centre is a reflection on how the new always crosses over with the old, how time, in a period of apparent ‘aftermath’ always seems to flow in more than one direction. The artists studied in the book have been especially astute at capturing or questioning aspects of this disconcerting, backwards-​and-​forwards post-​Troubles reality. I have learned a great deal from reflecting on their work, and, in many cases, from conversations with them about their experiences and perspectives. Among those artists –​ along with curators and gallery staff –​ who I would like to thank for various types of support, large and small, are: Patrick Bloomer, Ursula Burke, Duncan Campbell (and Rodeo Gallery, London), Phil Collins (and Siniša Mitrovic´), Brian Connolly/​Bbeyond, Shane Cullen (& David Crawforth of Beaconsfield Gallery, London), Miriam de Búrca, John Duncan, Seamus Harahan, Mike Hogg, Daniel Jewesbury, Sandra Johnston, Jesse Jones, x

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Acknowledgements

Nicholas Keogh, Woodrow Kernohan (and the EVA International team), Robin Klassnik (and all at Matt’s Gallery), Mary McIntyre, Eoin McTigue, Hugh Mulholland, Darren Murray, Matt Packer, Peter Richards, Aisling O’Beirn, Susan Philipsz, Paul Seawright, Richard West. Two artists merit special mention: Willie Doherty deserves considerable thanks for offering profoundly important support throughout the entire research process; and particular tribute is also due to the late William McKeown whose distinctive vision of art helped to expand my own way of seeing. Important to note here too is the assistance given at various stages by past and present colleagues at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin: thanks are due to Kevin Atherton, Lisa Godson, Siún Hanrahan, Jessica Hemmings, Susan MacWilliam, Declan McGonagle, Philip Napier, Anna Moran, Paul O’Brien, Niamh O’Sullivan, Neasa Travers and Mick Wilson. Extended thanks, however, should go to Feargal Fitzpatrick, Head of Media at NCAD & Francis Halsall, my fellow director of the MA Art in the Contemporary World (and to the students of this course) from whom I have learnt a great deal. Many other friends, fellow scholars and occasional collaborators deserve thanks for input, guidance, good ideas, practical assistance and, when required, robust argument; these include: Vaari Claffey, Maeve Connolly, Fergus Feehily, Emily Mark Fitzgerald, Luke Gibbons, Tessa Giblin, Colin Graham, Conor Hanna, Darragh Hogan (plus David Fitzgerald, John Kennedy, Lee Welch and all at the Kerlin Gallery), John Hutchinson (and all at the Douglas Hyde Gallery), Richard Kirkland, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Philip McGowan, Henrietta McKervey, Isabel Nolan, Tim Stott and Kitty Zijlmans. For their skill and commitment in bringing the book to publication, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Emma Brennan and Paul Clarke at Manchester University Press. Finally, for their infinite patience and endless understanding I’d like to thank my parents James & Dolores Long, my sister Bronagh and brother Kieran, my two sons George & Seamus and, most of all, my wife Jeana.

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‘John Hewitt called it “our ghost-haunted land”. The past refuses to go away however we try to banish it. Every journey through the North brings you past places where atrocities were committed. Sometimes you see a withered wreath in a ditch, sometimes a monument, sometimes nothing at all marking the spot where blood was spilt ...’ —Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead

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Introduction

I returned many times to the same site until another fence was erected and a new building was put in place of the empty, silent reminder. I wondered about what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there. Had it absorbed or filtered into the ground, or was it possible for others to sense it as I did?1 If it –​learning to live –​remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between the two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghosts.2 Two places at once, was it, or one place twice?3

In 2013, a decade and a half after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, ‘Derry-​Londonderry’ made headlines as the first UK City of Culture. Strategically branding itself as a town-​with-​two-​names –​ granting parity-​of-​esteem to historically polarised perspectives on one place –​ Northern Ireland’s second city used this civic accolade to demonstrate (and build on) many positive developments of the ‘peace’ era. The official logo for the year-​long programme of cultural events, for instance, took the city’s striking ‘peace bridge’ as its inspiration. Opened in 2011, this dramatic, winding walkway over the river Foyle –​ connecting Derry’s broadly nationalist Cityside with its traditionally unionist Waterside  –​ was an urban regeneration initiative emerging directly from the financial dividends of the momentous, multi-​party political Agreement of 1998. For years, the geography of Derry had been restrictively defined by sectarian conflict, territorial division and military control. The peace bridge was, therefore, a spectacular and liberating addition to the urban landscape (intentionally ‘iconic’ in a style similar to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge in the North of England, designed by the same architects) and so too a strong symbol of free movement, social unification and political progress. In the context of the UK City of Culture year, the bridge was also important as a main route to the revitalised and newly accessible area of Ebrington: a former British army barracks chosen as the setting for key events in the 2013 programme. A long-​closed site, associated with the enduring conditions of conflict, Ebrington had been opened up as a public space in the context 1

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Ghost-haunted land

of gradual ‘post-​Troubles’ demilitarisation; and it became, temporarily at least, highly promising as a location for cultural activity and civic encounter.4 For some local observers, indeed, access to such previously unused areas of public space in Derry was one of the primary achievements of the City of Culture experience. A Derry arts officer, quoted by the Guardian, proposed as a personal highlight of 2013 the fact that ‘his 17-​year-​old son sat out in the park with other teenagers in the sunshine … something that would have been unthinkable when he was growing up in the shadow of the Troubles, when gatherings in the streets meant only riots. “The young people have repossessed the city,” he said’.5 Among the cultural events held at Ebrington during 2013 was the Turner Prize exhibition (the Tate’s annual award to a British artist under fifty) which had travelled to a venue outside England for the first time. Presented in a specially renovated historical building on the Ebrington site, and featuring work by the four short-​listed artists (each of whom was well-​known internationally), the exhibition offered a fascinating group snapshot of ‘British’ contemporary art at that moment. The diversity of the selected artists –​in both biographical and artistic terms –​ implicitly emphasised plural perspectives and complex identities in a manner that was surely relevant to the Northern Irish context.6 If, however, the Turner Prize was the most high-​profile exhibition on the City of Culture calendar, it was only one part of a very strong visual arts programme. And, crucially, a notable tendency within this programme –​one that corresponds to the wider interests of artists engaging with the culture and politics of Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement –​was a focus on finding new ways to reflect on and represent the traumatic legacies of the Troubles. In diverse exhibitions by artists both from Ireland and elsewhere, there were idiosyncratic efforts to bring the complex underlying issues of the post-​conflict reality into new varieties of visibility. These assorted shows and artworks sought to situate the problems of the past within the tensions of the supposedly ‘peaceful’ present, while also, at times, proposing altered frameworks and shifting contexts of understanding. So, for example, a film installation by the Dublin artist Jesse Jones –​The Other North (2013) shown at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry/​Londonderry –​ used appropriated dialogue from a Troubles-​era documentary about conflict resolution therapy sessions as the script for a radical re-​make set entirely in South Korea (Plate 1). Translated into Korean, and spoken by Korean actors, the contents of the original transcript  –​ which concerned specific experiences of sectarianism and violence in Northern Ireland –​were displaced and defamiliarised. New geographical connections were made just as a jolting disconnection with a prior means of narrating the Troubles was proposed. In a project for the Void Gallery by Spanish conceptual provocateur Santiago Sierra (known for deliberately staging ethically questionable performative situations, often with groups of people drawn from socially marginalised or underprivileged backgrounds) the history of the Troubles was addressed through discomfiting engagement with former combatants. Recorded inside one of the derelict, demilitarised Ebrington buildings, Sierra’s intense, frightening film Veterans (2013) featured a noisily buzzing drone-​camera flying along corridors 2

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Introduction

and into run-​down rooms where it encountered strange human presences, all with their faces to the wall and backs to the camera. These were British soldiers who had previously been based at the barracks; but here they are uncomfortably confronted from the perspective of an intimidating, hovering, disembodied gaze. Sierra brings them ambiguously into view, but via an invasive medium of contemporary surveillance that is increasingly central to the depersonalised engagements of twenty-​first century warfare. Numerous other projects during 2013 sought to take on the historical leftovers of the Troubles in unconventional terms.7 But, without doubt, it was a retrospective of work by Derry artist Willie Doherty that had the most profound meaning and impact in the City of Culture context. Entitled Unseen, this survey show covered a range of important pieces, from early black-​and-​white photographs of urban backstreets and borderlands, through to the remarkable 2013 film Remains: a chilling account of the ongoing phenomenon of punishment shootings in Derry that is, in a manner consistent with Doherty’s long-​standing methods, both elliptical and hard-​hitting (Plate 2). In the context of the justifiable celebrations and excitements of the City of Culture year, Doherty’s Unseen made a distinct, disruptive claim for cultural attention. Here was evidence of a stubborn need to confront the unsettling presence of the traumatic past. Despite, in 2013, an understandable, broad-​based effort on the part of City of Culture organisers to show the positive outcomes of the peace process in Derry –​ and in the North of Ireland more generally –​ artists such as Doherty were insistent in their desire to open up problematic, unresolved issues. Doherty’s work has long maintained such commitments, consistently searching for traces of ‘that which is forgotten’, for ‘something that evades language’.8 In his work –​ and in that of other visual artists prominently represented in Derry’s City of Culture programme –​it is the ghosts haunting the spaces of the progressive present that are of most pressing interest. It is all that can’t be left behind, all that remains traumatically unanswered in private lives or in the collective history, that becomes the essential subject and shaping influence for art.9 If the City of Culture year offered opportunities to look ahead hopefully, it also included artists who turned our attention to lasting effects of the past, and to the paradoxes and uncertainties of present-​day, ‘post-​Troubles’ Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 marked the culmination of a long, difficult peace process and, it was hoped, the conclusion of the thirty-​year Troubles. But progress since then has been uneven, and the outcomes of political deals often ambiguous or unstable. There has been no official process of ‘truth and reconciliation’. Many facts about the painful past remain undiscovered or undeclared. So much that has troubled the society remains unsaid or unseen. The work of Willie Doherty and other artists in Northern Ireland has therefore been recurrently engaged with the anxieties of progress and with the uneasiness of peace. A great deal of art during this period has required returning to the neglected histories of particular places. It has been an art of compulsive repetition that at times resembles the types of wayward ‘ghost-​hunting’ identified by Hal Foster as central to 3

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the work of artists from other parts of the world such as Tacita Dean and Joachim Koester –​ artists who, Foster writes, are ‘drawn to blind spots in which the turns that history has taken, and might still take, are sometimes revealed to us’.10 Foster’s use of the anachronistic and superstituous metaphor of the spectre is more than incidental to the contents of this book. Indeed a specific interest in the figure of the ghost has been inspired by the identifiable spectral turn in Willie Doherty’s work. During what I am hesitantly calling here the ‘post-​Troubles’ period, Doherty’s film works have sought to draw attention to all that haunts the present moment and the promise of progress –​ and this persistent interest has been both prompt and pivot in the preparation of the broader discussion developed here. In films such as Closure (2005), Empty (2006), Ghost Story (2007), The Visitor (2009) and Buried (2009) there is an explicit effort to create images, narratives and atmospheres with strongly spectral associations. These features of Doherty’s film works unsettle any straightforward sense of material and spatial reality. In such films –​ and related photographic series –​ we see how Doherty is almost always concerned with ‘old haunts’: his works often depend on repeat visits to places that are well-​known to the artist. There is a compulsion to return, to move forward by going back. So too then his art deals with the potentially uncanny effects on consciousness of the most familiar locations. Nicholas Royle writes of how ‘it is impossible to conceive of the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a sense of strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self’.11 In Doherty’s work –​ and most especially in Ghost Story, a film which will be the subject of extended discussion in Chapter 3 –​a sense of subjective and spatial uncertainty is linked to the challenge of registering the lingering significance of historical events in specific places, at a time when, in the context of post-​ conflict regeneration, many traces of past events are in the process of being erased. These particular points of symbolic reference in Doherty have also, however, become crucial in creating a more general approach to reflecting on art from the North of Ireland during this period. For in considering the art that has appeared in the ‘post-​Troubles’ years, Jacques Derrida’s comment that we must ‘learn to live with ghosts’ has become acutely relevant.12 This claim is, first of all, a call for fidelity in politics to those ‘who are not there … those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living’: a commitment of anxious allegiance to the ghosts of our histories and our possible futures.13 And secondly, the insistence on ‘living with ghosts’ implies a requirement in theory that we address the ‘spectral’ element that haunts our knowledge of the world –​ what we might also think of as the ‘blind spots’ in our vision –​and as such it necessitates attending to ‘the non-​contemporaneity with itself of the living present’, and to ‘that which secretly unhinges it’.14 This is, then, a book about art and haunting. It is an argument for haunting, and for the contemporary art field as a specific sphere of haunting and hauntedness. The book proposes that the art of the post-​Troubles period addresses itself to a speculative ‘public space’ in which certain spectres, often unwelcome elsewhere in the culture, might be accommodated or confronted. At the same time, the artworks selected for discussion here can also have their own spectral quality. They 4

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Introduction

are characterised by a heightened sense of in-​betweenness and representational, spatial or temporal instability. Caught in the anxious present, between a troubled past and an uncertain future, positioned between difficulties and identities determined by local conditions and the pressures and possibilities of increasingly evident global forces, much of the art discussed here is not sure of its place in the world.15 The work of many contemporary artists during this period has involved tentative investigation of how we might access or address what has been repressed in order to facilitate progress. Often it has been an art of uneasy experimentation with ways of making visible the lost, forgotten or the marginalised: those stray images, issues or stories that are now incompatible with official visions of the post-​ conflict society. These offbeat aftermath studies undertaken by visual artists have sometimes shadowed more mainstream forms. In some instances, visions of the changing (and in important ways unchanging) society are proposed that acknowledge the conventions of wider media coverage but that operate with different intentions, employing alternative models of presentation and distribution  –​ in ways that may have disconcerting, unpredictable and defamiliarising effects. Such artworks are determinedly indeterminate ‘after-​images’ that may prioritise fretfully subjective forms of viewing or precarious modes of composition and display. They are strategically uncertain in forming an account of the historical moment.16 Equally, artists have been driven again and again to seek out what may persist in the shadows of the new post-​conflict landscapes. The art of the post-​Troubles era in Northern Ireland has been acutely concerned with uncertain conditions of site and situation. This focus is consistent with a widespread emphasis in contemporary art on ‘experience as a state of flux which acknowledges place as a shifting and fragmented entity’, as Claire Doherty has noted in her introduction to a collection of essays, interviews and case studies reflecting on models of ‘situated’ aesthetics.17 Such practices, Doherty says, frequently involve heightened attention to the paradoxical condition of being simultaneously situated and ‘displaced’. In an essay included in the same volume, Miwon Kwon observes that the breakdown of spatial experience in both perceptual and cognitive registers –​ being lost, disoriented, alienated, feeling out of place, and consequently unable to make coherent meaning out of our relation to our physical surroundings –​ is the cultural symptom of late capitalism’s political and social reality.18

Such a condition of being ‘out of place’ can of course be understood in negative terms: these circumstances may have radically debilitating effects on ‘our psyches, our sense of self, our sense of well-​being, our sense of belonging to a place and culture’.19 And yet, as Kwon argues, contemporary artists might choose to make a virtue of being in ‘the wrong place’: acknowledging that ‘it is only from the position of being out of place that we can attempt to develop new skills … to map the new hyperspaces wherein we have to survive’.20 Conscious of bearing ‘the burden of the necessity and impossibility of modelling new forms of being in-​place, new forms of belonging’21 [my italics], many contemporary artists in Northern Ireland 5

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Ghost-haunted land

have recognised the disruptive, productive potential in becoming alert to what we might also call here the ‘unhomeliness’ of home. Related bodies of place-​based (or ‘wrong-​place-​based’) art from Northern Ireland have been devoted to searching through neglected zones of towns and cities, imagining ‘other’ geographies, conceiving of alternative, subjective and collective, senses and sign-​systems of place to those shaped by sectarian identifications or prescribed ‘from above’  –​ from, that is, those potentially repressive influences on the shape and experience of city space, ranging from residual Troubles-​era security protocols to post-​Troubles urban regeneration planning. This has been an art of patient street-​level detective work, an art of estranged ordinariness discovered through idiosyncratic urban wandering.22 Absorbed by evidence of the past as well as sensitive to shifts in the present, these multiple versions of post-​Troubles flânerie have involved extensive travel through time as well as space. If such artists have found ways to become both deeply embedded in place and strategically ‘out of place’, they are also, like ghosts, out of sync with the ordinary flow of time. In articulating this view of art in Northern Ireland since the 1990s, there is an implicit presumption that the activities of contemporary artists might have critical potential and political relevance. In advancing such positions, I have drawn from arguments made by Chantal Mouffe both about the possible role of a ‘critical art’ –​ as a means of finding ways to ‘make visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’23 –​and the need for a ‘return of the political’, understood as a crucial requirement of an expanded, more inclusive and open-​ended version of democracy. For Mouffe, the political is defined as ‘the ineradicable dimension of antagonism that exists in human societies’ and a post-​political society –​which is, she argues, the ideological orientation of neo-​liberal globalisation –​is thus one in which productive opportunities for disagreement are diminished.24 A function of ‘critical art’ can be to ‘foment dissensus’25; but this must be understood as having necessarily ambiguous and disorientating effects. The range of artistic reflections and interventions addressed here includes much that is concerned with locating or creating cultural space for alternative perspectives. These are often contrary or uncomfortable responses to situations of change and stasis in the post-​Troubles period. In such art there is an emphasis on apprehensively making visible information which may otherwise be neglected in wider mass media contexts. An inevitable complication in considering contempoary art on these terms arises from the question of how today’s artworks might claim to instantiate ‘political’ potential while being at the same time specific expressions of the current conditions of cultural globalisation. To ask this question is not merely to acknowledge the lessons of a ‘social history of art’, which remind us that any work of art must be understood in terms of its complex situatedness, its unique position at a specific historical conjuncture. Rather, there is a need, as Mouffe indicates, to signal the extent to which the forms and methods of contemporary art (at all levels, from production to distribution) have become intricately intertwined with the ‘flexible’, ‘creative’ systems of late capitalism: ‘nowadays artistic and cultural production play a central role in the process of capital valorisation 6

7

Introduction

and, through “neo-​management”, artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity’.26 On the one hand, the much-​debated ‘end of art’ (prominently theorised by Arthur Danto as the post-​pop, postmodern ‘paradigm-​ of-​no-​paradigm’ that marks a departure from a modernist focus on the constraints of certain disciplines and mediums27) can be seen to correspond to the conditions of capitalism at the ‘end of history’; the former following the rules of the latter. As Hal Foster writes, ‘this “end of art” is presented as benignly liberal  –​ art is pluralistic, its practice pragmatic, and its field multicultural  –​ but this position is also not-​so-​benignly neo-​liberal, in the sense that its relativism is what the rule of the market requires’.28 On the other hand, important trends and attitudes within the field of art since the 1960s (its era of unending aftermath according to Danto) can be seen to have in fact influenced key contemporary capitalist practices in profound ways. Mouffe’s allusion to the relation of ‘artistic critique’ to ‘capitalist productivity’ comes via sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello whose arguments concerning ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ include the proposition that the critical values informing the work of progressive cultural producers in the 1960s have been incorporated into today’s corporate discourses.29 Where once ‘the values of expressive creativity, fluid identity, autonomy and self-​development were touted against the constraints of bureaucratic discipline, bourgeois hypocrisy and consumer conformity’, such libertarian commitments are now absorbed into an ‘emergent order whose ideal figure is a nomadic “network-​extender”, light and mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence’.30 We might easily be confused today as to whether this description of the perfect ‘producer’ within what Boltanski and Chiappello call today’s ‘connexionist’ systems, represents the quintessential corporate capitalist or the globally networked, post-​conceptual artist. With such complications and compromising situations in mind, how should we understand the place of a critical art practice today? And how should we assess the potential of the ‘haunting’ of the structures of the stable present that has defined the recent era of art in Northern Ireland? If the art field is to be appealed to as a distinctive form of ‘public space’ it must also surely be recognised as a problem space,31 circumscribed by forms of capitalism that neutralise critique through incorporation. As the artist Liam Gillick has written, ‘art is nurtured via cultural permission to be the space for what cannot be tolerated but can be accommodated under the conditions of neo-​liberal globalization’.32 This is, he adds, art’s ‘strength and weakness’.33 Contradiction is crucial to our understanding of what the critical, political and public potential of contemporary art might be. Gillick advocates in this regard that artists must both parallel the systems of the dominant culture and at the same time seek out ‘grey areas’, which he claims ‘are easier to expose and occupy through art than with most other activities’.34 Stefan Jonsson has written in related terms about the widespread and often politically motivated employment of documentary modes in the work of contemporary artists over recent years (a subject which, in relation to the art of Northern Ireland, forms the content of Chapter 4 here). Jonsson argues that unorthodox documentary forms such as these –​ occupying a hesitant position between art and non-​art, existing on the 7

8

Ghost-haunted land

edges of established disciplinary definitions –​ assist in creating and contributing to ‘a public sphere of inbetweenness’: a place where ‘the contradictions and potentialities of globalisation’, might be made, temporarily at least, differently visible.35 Gillick’s interest in ‘grey areas’ and Jonsson’s emphasis on the ‘in-​between’ are pertinent as we begin this extended reflection on the predicament of art in Northern Ireland in the ‘post-​Troubles’ era. These are terms that connect usefully to immediate concerns of this book regarding, for instance, the relation of local to global, the contest between historical fact and representational fiction, and the tension between the burdens of the traumatic past and the forces of the progressive present. Moreover, the shaded spaces proposed in these commentaries on contemporary art, with their suggestion of productive paradox and affirmative indeterminacy, also of course correspond to the Derridean understanding of spectrality. The undecidable figure of the ghost –​‘a paradoxical incorporation’, neither entirely past nor present, neither fully in one place nor another, ‘neither soul nor body and both one and the other’36 –​gives rise in Derrida’s thought to a shift from ‘ontology’ to ‘hauntology’: the spectre serving as a vital figure for the subversion of any final resolution of a meaning, identity or philosophical position, arising out of the deferral of full closure, representing the impossibility of complete, authoritative presence. The spectral then, provides vital means of challenging, as Fredric Jameson has written, ‘belief in the stability in reality’, unsettling our sure sense of a ‘reality that is supposed to rebuke us by its changelessness’.37 Derrida’s ghosts are, Jameson says, ‘these moments in which the present –​ and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new world system of capitalism –​unexpectedly betrays us’.38 So in proposing contemporary art practice as a form of cultural production and provocation that might allow for the ‘making visible’ of repressed elements within the current post-​Troubles socio-​political circumstances, while acknowledging that the global art world is itself one significant system within the globalised fields of force shaping these new circumstances in Northern Ireland, this book will stress a certain power of instability and indeterminacy in art’s appeals to politics and public representation. Following a ‘spectral’ deconstructive logic, it is necessary to acknowledge the impossibility as much as the possibility of art as a ‘public space’. Indeed, in a way that accords with Mouffe’s argument that the impossibility of ‘full’ democratic presence –​a politics free of all antagonism –​is in fact the very basis of a progressive case for a radicalised and pluralised definition of democracy, this book echoes those theories that have emphasised the value of a ‘phantasmal’ concept of public space. In asking what it might mean today for art to adopt a public role, Rosalyn Deutsche, for instance, draws on Claude Lefort’s understanding of public space as the product of the necessarily uncertain conditions of democracy as a form of social organisation. Democracy, Lefort says, is a system ‘instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty’, which in the modern era has inaugurated ‘a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other’.39 Out of this basic difficulty –​ and 8

9

Introduction

unpredictable potentiality –​of democracy arises ‘public space’ which, as Deutsche notes in response to Lefort, ‘is the social space where, in the absence of a foundation, the meaning and unity of the social is negotiated –​ at once constituted and put at risk’.40 With this notional ‘space’ of common encounter what is at stake is ‘the legitimacy of debate about what is legitimate and what is illegitimate’.41 This is therefore one way in which a notion of ‘the public’ and a ‘sphere’ of inclusive public participation and representation may be understood and valued as phantasmal:  ‘democratic public space’, Deutsche says, ‘might be called a phantom because while it appears, it has no substantive identity and is, as a consequence, enigmatic’.42 Such ‘enigma’ offers a point of vital correspondence back to the proposition that contemporary art might offer, in its most potent critical moments, appropriately contingent spaces of complex public address and encounter. For the recent art practices that constitute the primary subject of this book reflexively offer, in relation to the post-​Troubles predicament, contingent formations, speculative articulations, provisional proposals:  they are often obliquely dissenting forms of practice that echo aspects of Deutsche’s preferred vision of phantom public space: If the public space of debate appears with the disappearance of an absolute social basis, public space is where meaning continuously appears and continuously fades. The phantom public sphere is thus inaccessible to theories that refuse to recognise events –​ like new social movements –​ that cannot be grasped in preconceived conceptual terms or without recourse to final intentions. The phantom public sphere is invisible from political viewpoints that limit social reality to the contents that fill social space but ignore the principles generating that space.43

The art to be considered here certainly connects, in various ways, to these suggestions of precarious meaning or indeterminate intention and effect. Equally, these forms of art diversely demonstrate attention to conditions of medium, institution or situation –​ to the ‘principles generating’ the specific ‘spaces’ they have sought to provisionally construct or occupy.44 Artists in Northern Ireland have developed a deep understanding of the institutional and social frameworks within which their work is formed –​ and their efforts have often prioritised creating unexpected effects and unusual actions in carefully acknowledged contexts. The stress throughout this book on the uncanny unpredictability of the spectral –​ in proposing an approach to space and ideas of the public that are (in a phrase of Nicholas Royle’s) ‘affirmatively phantomistic’45 –​is, then, to prioritise, to promote, doubt and difficulty. In imagining a ‘phantom public sphere’, Deutsche says, ‘man is deprived of the objectified, distanced, knowable world on whose existence he depends and is presented instead with unknowability, the proximity of otherness, and, consequently, uncertainty in the self’.46 Such disorientating circumstances are central to the predicament contemplated by the significant art to have emerged ‘after’ the Troubles in Northern Ireland: a range of art that potentially ‘harbours threats and arouses anxieties’ as it offers alternative, unorthodox reflection on the uncanny landscapes of returning ‘normality’, on the ghostly interference of

9

10

Ghost-haunted land

the past in the smooth progress of the present, and on unavoidably phantomistic forms of public collectivity at this supposed ‘post-​political’ moment.47 This book’s propositions arise from sustained engagement with the ongoing practices of contemporary artists. The points of departure for the analyses and arguments have been found in the particular challenges of artworks, projects or exhibitions, as well as from ongoing conversations with art practitioners working in Northern Ireland. A majority of the artists (and curators) addressed in the book have been spoken to about the key concerns of their work and about the artistic priorities of particular films, photographs, paintings, installations, exhibitions or events. Though I have not always stayed true to the main motivations of these artists (developing ideas in a manner that sometimes departs significantly from their declared intentions), learning from each about ongoing and varied interests has been a source of continuing inspiration. A related point, perhaps, is that the book does not set out to provide a comprehensive account of contemporary art from Northern Ireland during this period. Rather, I  have followed particular paths, scrutinising specific evidence and making a case for the importance of certain recurring tendencies. The book might be thought of less as an historical overview –​ in the manner of Fionna Barber’s impressively expansive Art in Ireland Since 1910 (2013) –​and more as a tendentious historical underview, at least in the sense that the priority has been to highlight art concerned with what present-​day history in the North of Ireland might sooner forget. (And a worthwhile future project would be to build on the historical work done in Barber’s text and study further the art of the Irish Republic during the Celtic Tiger era: the period that ran roughly in parallel with post-​Troubles developments in the North.) Worth noting too is that in this study of post-​Troubles issues, the art of the prior Troubles era in Northern Ireland is not addressed in depth, though some examples of relevant artists’ work appear where appropriate. (Many of the main themes relating to Troubles art are explored in Liam Kelly’s Thinking Long:  Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland, published in 1996.) But the book is in other ways a wide-​ranging account. An effort has been made, for instance, to represent the work of artists who are at different stages in their careers and who have gained different levels of profile and critical acclaim. A generous spectrum of art media is also covered: from video and photography (which undoubtedly dominate) to painting, sculpture, performance and other forms of social, situated aesthetics. (Arguably the most thoroughgoing, medium-​specific research on Northern Irish art of this era has been in the area of photography –​and Colin Graham’s Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography is the most substantial work produced yet in this field.48) What’s more, among the case studies included here are several group exhibition projects that have themselves offered differently ‘representative’ accounts of art from Northern Ireland. These exhibitions (as we shall see in Chapter 2) aimed to present distinctive group portraits of art from Northern Ireland in international settings. A vital issue in discussing such group shows has been to explore how ‘Northern Irish art’ has emerged in dialogue with international art during this post-​Troubles period. Indeed, it has been important to ask what happens when we 10

11

Introduction

see post-​Troubles artworks as specific manifestations of a complex global network of cultural production and promotion –​as forms of art shaped in profound ways by broader considerations. In this regard many of the key points of reference in the book come from debates about the predicament of contemporary art today –​ about art’s current place and purpose in the world, and about the politics and aesthetics of its dominant modes of display and distribution. But just as importantly, it has been essential to acknowledge the distinctive challenges of the social, political and cultural situations faced and foregrounded by artists in the wake of a major ‘local’ conflict. For this reason, Chapter 1 concentrates on the social and political developments pertinent to a study of post-​Troubles art –​pondering what it means to talk in ‘post’ Troubles terms at all –​and turning at various moments to consider especially relevant contemporary art examples (projects by Shane Cullen, Phil Collins, Paul Seawright and Seamus Harahan) that offer distinctive, purposefully plural and ambivalent perspectives on post-​Troubles realities. An effort has been made here to weave together fundamental background details on the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement with questions regarding the political and theoretical framing of this process of negotiation –​keeping in mind the broader international contexts of a notional ‘post-​Troubles’ situation. This widening of the frame has been understood as vital in developing an adequate account of the art of this era, but diverse local outcomes of the Agreement are nonetheless acknowledged: from ongoing political problems caused by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the accord, to material manifestations of ‘peace’ in the built environment. Chapter 2 begins with thoughts on how ‘Northern Irish art’ of the post-​Troubles era might be critically approached and appraised in light of broader contemporary conditions, before moving on to discuss ways in which artists from Northern Ireland have been positioned and presented internationally over recent years. This chapter takes the 2005 exhibition of art from Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale as the departure point for an extended examination of how the representation of ‘local’ concerns is shaped in relation to wider cultural and economic forces. Much of the book, however, concentrates more directly on the manifold forms of ‘ghost-​hunting’ undertaken by artists during the post-​Troubles period. In Chapter 3, several significant works by Willie Doherty are singled out for close-​ reading: photographic series and film narratives that are powerfully undecidable and uncanny in their oblique, unnerving evocations of the landscapes of Belfast and Derry. This extended reflection on Doherty’s work considers in detail the strategic indeterminacy of his photographic art and addresses the shift in key film works towards explicitly ‘spectral’ themes. Chapter 4 follows this discussion of the haunted spaces of Doherty’s practice by reflecting on artists’ approaches to time and history. (If the spectral is an idea that proposes disturbances in the perception and condition of material reality, it also introduces problems about temporality: about the certainty of a linear unfolding of time.) This part of the book highlights artists who have adapted conventional forms of documenting and archiving in order to speculate on alternative temporalities and histories of 11

12

Ghost-haunted land

Troubles and post-​Troubles life. In addition to analyses of artworks by Duncan Campbell, Miriam de Búrca, Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O’Beirn, attention is also paid to some curatorial attempts to historicise Northern Ireland’s art. The final fifth chapter then turns to the unpredictable sphere of the socius, taking case studies of wide-​ranging art projects –​ by Susan Philipsz, the Bbeyond collective, Phil Collins, Brian O’Doherty, Philip Napier and Mike Hogg and artist-​group Factotum –​ that, in variously performative and relational modes, have involved staging, proposing or entering provisional situations of social encounter and collectivity. These events and interventions, it will be suggested, exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity to the challenges of the uneasy post-​Troubles predicament. But in notable instances we find artists striving to make space for unorthodox perspectives and unheard voices, asking what it might mean to be part of a ‘public’ in post-​Troubles Northern Ireland, and attempting to making visible –​ often in understated, ambiguous or anxious ways –​what might otherwise remain hidden. Notes 1 Willie Doherty, text from the film Ghost Story (2007), printed in Willie Doherty: Ghost Story (Belfast: British Council, Arts Council Northern Ireland & Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure, 2007)  [Artist pages unpaginated], published on the occasion of the Northern Ireland exhibition at the 51st Venice Biennale, curated by Hugh Mulholland. 2 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. xvii–​xviii. 3 Paul Muldoon, ‘Twice’, in The Annals of Chile (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 12. 4 For many Derry-​based artists and arts professionals, plans for the long-​term future of Ebrington as a cultural site failed to build on the major investment that had been made. Rather than maintaining the area as an arts and culture destination in Derry, the organisational body responsible for realising City of Culture plans had decided that the museum standard galleries developed to host the Turner Prize (at a cost of £2.5 million) would become office-​space at the end of 2013. Interviewed by the Guardian, Willie Doherty argued that it was ‘ludicrous that a town spending that amount of money would let it last just four months and not take the opportunity to build upon it’. Following the City of Culture year, Doherty said, ‘it will feel like the lights have been switched off again in Derry’. See Charlotte Higgins, ‘Derry artists fear triumphal gains from City of Culture title will be squandered’, Guardian (21st October 2013). 5 Higgins, ‘Derry artists fear triumphal gains from City of Culture title will be squandered’. 6 I will declare an interest here as one of the four judges of the 2013 prize. The other judges were: Annie Fletcher, curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art; Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, London. The four selected artists were: Lynette Yiadom-​Boakye, who has a Ghanaian family background; Laure Prouvost, born in France but based for some years in London; Tino Sehgal, born in London, but brought up abroad and now based in Berlin; and David Shrigley, born in Macclesfield but based for many years in Glasgow, and, subsequently, Brighton.

12

13

Introduction

7 Among the numerous other projects that could be cited here are several commissioned and staged by the Void gallery as part of the 2013 programme. These include Jonathan Cummins’s When I Leave These Landings: a series of film-​installations based on conversations with four anti-​Agreement Republican prisoners; these challenging recordings, presented on a large scale across multiple screens, provocatively ask us to consider what political viewpoints can be accommodated in public discourse during the post-​ Agreement period. Other notable Void commissions include three projects relating to gardens by Katie Holten, Locky Morris and artist duo Ackroyd & Harvey: public artworks that, respectively, created a new community garden space in a gap between neighbouring factory buildings (Holten’s Factory Garden), developed a site-​specific sound installation for a dead tree in a city park (Morris’s Dead On) and entirely covered a former military barracks building at Ebrington with grass (Ackroyd & Harvey’s Cunningham). In addition to these Void contributions, visual art programming in Derry during 2013 also featured Rita Duffy’s Shirt Factory project –​ a temporary, playfully mocked-​up museum concerned with the history of female labour in Derry. 8 Willie Doherty, ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’, in Willie Doherty: Buried (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009), p. 155. 9 This is also the case for some of the ways that art has been represented and historicised during the post-​Troubles period. An ongoing exhibition series at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery entitled Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art has sought to quite deliberately embrace ‘overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions of history’; see Peter Richards, ‘Foreword’, in Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art: Icons of the North (Belfast: Golden Thread Gallery, 2006), p. 7. Exhibitions from this series will be discussed in Chapter 4. 10 Hal Foster, ‘Blind spots: on the art of Joachim Koester’, Artforum, April 2006, 212–​17. 11 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 16. 12 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, pp. xvii–​xviii. 13 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. xviii. 14 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. xviii. 15 Another useful resource in developing these ideas has been Mark Fisher’s writing on ‘hauntology’ and popular culture. Some of his essays on this topic have been collected in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). 16 In this way, they correspond, on occasion, to tendencies such as that identified by Nicholas Bourriaud in post-​1990s international video art, in which an artist might self-​consciously shape their practice according to an ‘amateur’ logic: ‘privileging raw documents and shaky images and restricting itself to the most rudimentary editing’; see Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (Berlin:  Sternberg Press, 2009), p.  88. Similarly, Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl have described other manifestations of contemporary lens-​based art which involve artists drawing on the ‘ambivalent nature’ of documentary as a means of representing and constructing reality. ‘Hovering between art and non-​art’, Lind and Steyerl say, documentary has ‘contributed to creating new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic and the ethic, between artifice and authenticity, between fiction and fact’; see Lind and Steyerl’s introduction to The Green Room:  Reconsidering the Documentary in Contemporary Art (Berlin/​New York: Sternberg Press/​Bard College, 2008), p. 16. 17 Claire Doherty, ‘The new Situationists’, introduction to Claire Doherty (ed.), Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), p. 10. 13

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Ghost-haunted land

1 8 19 20 21 22 23 2 4 25 26 27

2 8 29 30 31

32 3 3 34

35

Miwon Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, in Doherty, Contemporary Art, pp. 34–​5. Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, p. 30. Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, p. 35. Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, p. 41. Nicholas Bourriaud suggests that in a wider context art processes of this kind have become central ‘compositional models’ within international contemporary art. See Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 98. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art and Research, 1:2 (2007). Available at www.artandresearch.org.uk/​v1n2/​mouffe.html [last accessed 02/​08/​16]. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 119. Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’. Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’. Danto’s version of an ‘end-​of-​art’ narrative is recounted in After the End of Art:  Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1997). The phrase ‘paradigm of no paradigm’ is used by Foster in the essay ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, a text which has been a useful prompt for a number of the ideas explored in this book. See Hal Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002) p. 128. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 125. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007). Sebastian Budgen, ‘A new spirit of capitalism’, New Left Review, January–​February 2000, 153. Though I am using ‘problem space’ here merely to signify a sense of the somewhat problematic disciplinary/​ideological context for ‘critical’ contemporary art, it is a phrase that also has a more precise usage, which has some relevance. David Scott has outlined a use of this phrase which entails the demarcation of ‘a discursive context’ for critical practice. A  ‘problem-​space’ is thus understood as ‘an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes … hangs’. For Scott, ‘what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed as problems as such … but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kind of answers that seem worth having’. See Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 4. Liam Gillick, ‘Berlin statement’, in Nicolaus Schafhausen (ed.), How Are You Going to Behave? A Kitchen Cat Speaks (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 98. Gillick, ‘Berlin statement’, p. 98. Gillick, ‘Berlin statement’, p. 105. Gillick’s reference to ‘grey areas’ also calls to mind an allusion to the writing of Primo Levi in Susan McKay’s explorations of the legacies of Troubles violence: ‘Primo Levi wrote about the impact brutality had on relationships between people in the concentration camp. It was not black and white, he said. There was a “grey zone” which we needed to try to understand “if we want to know the human species, if we want to know how to defend our souls …” ’; see Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead (London:  Faber & Faber, 2008), p.  11; and Primo Levi, ‘The grey zone’, in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 26. McKay’s powerful book has been another important inspiration for my own responses to post-​Troubles culture. Stefan Jonsson, ‘Facts of aesthetics and fictions of journalism’, in Lind and Steyerl, The Green Room, p. 179. 14

15

Introduction

3 6 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 5. 37 Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999) p. 38. 38 Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, p. 39. 39 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1988), p. 19. 40 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions:  Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass./​London:  MIT Press, 1996), p. 273. 41 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 273. 42 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 324. 43 Deutsche, Evictions, pp. 324–​5. 44 Where there is concern for medium-​specific questions in the book, the tendency is towards a ‘worldly’ understanding and positioning of medium. There is, as Hal Foster has noted of wider strains of contemporary art, a commitment to ‘formal transformations  –​ as long as these transformations also speak to extrinsic concerns’; this is ‘formal transformation that is also social engagement’; see Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 130. 45 Royle, The Uncanny, p. 67. 46 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 325. 47 Deutsche, Evictions, p. 325. 48 It is also worth giving credit here to Justin Carville who has produced a number of significant essays on photography in Northern Ireland, including ‘Re-​negotiated territory’, Afterimage, 29:1 (2001), 5–​9. Source Photographic Review, under the editorship of John Duncan and Richard West, has also supported a great deal of work on the subject: in addition to texts by contributors such as Colin Graham, Aaron Kelly and Daniel Jewesbury, examples of other relevant work include Fiona Kearney’s ‘Alternatives to propaganda’, Source, 17 (1998). The book Where are the People? Contemporary Photographs of Belfast 2002–​2010, edited by Karen Downey (Belfast:  Belfast Exposed, 2010), is another intervention in this area, featuring texts by Graham, Kelly, Jewesbury, Pauline Hadaway, Stephen Bull, Liam O’Dowd and poet Ciaran Carson. (Notably, Bull’s essay is entitled ‘Spectres and the city’.) Outside of specific critical discourses on photography there is also valuable scholarship within the wider field of Visual Culture studies: such as, for instance, Vikki Bell’s discussion of Anthony Haughey’s post-​Troubles photographs in the essay, ‘Contemporary art and transitional justice in Northern Ireland: the consolation of form’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10:3 (2011), 324–​53, and Derek Gladwin’s essay ‘Third space in Willie Doherty’s photo-​text diptychs’, Visual Culture in Britain, 15 (2014), 104–​22. A special issue of Visual Culture in Britain (10:3, 2009), edited by Fionna Barber, focused on ‘Visual Culture in Northern Ireland since the ceasefires’ and included Colin Graham’s essay ‘Luxury, peace and photography in Northern Ireland’, alongside contributions from David Brett, Suzanna Chan, Sarah Edge and Aisling O’Beirn dedicated to other art forms.

15

16

B1B Same difference: post-​Troubles contexts and contradictions

The uneasy peace of ‘post-​political’ Northern Ireland. Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 –​ the formal end-​point of the thirty-​year ‘Troubles’  –​ there has been extraordinary transformation in Northern Ireland’s society and culture. A protracted peace process, fraught with disturbances and setbacks, led to an internationally celebrated accord between political parties and the eventual establishment of new devolved institutions of government. The ‘Good Friday’ (or ‘Belfast’) Agreement, approved in referenda on both sides of the Irish border, inaugurated a ‘post-​Troubles’ period of hoped-​ for economic prosperity and urban regeneration. The city spaces and the public image of Northern Ireland underwent a process of radical rebuilding and rebranding. But if this has been a period of unprecedented political progress, of publicly proclaimed peace and widely manifested peace dividend, it has also been one of recurrent political crises, of sporadic but serious violence and of enduring sectarian tension. The Troubles appeared to reach an official conclusion as a result of the political parties and national governments arriving at an agreed solution, but many underlying problems have stubbornly persisted. Indeed, for some commentators, it has been important to ask if the strategic emphases and structural outcomes of the peace process –​ and the dominant discursive formations regarding progress more generally, shaped to a significant degree by the capitalist imperatives of corporate investment and commercial development –​ have in fact masked the ongoing difficulties and unresolved aspects of the long-​running conflict in ways that might be deeply damaging in the longer term. Colin Graham, for instance, has drawn attention to how in the Good Friday Agreement itself, the matter of ‘history’ was  –​ aptly if problematically  –​ ‘shuffled into the past’:  paragraph two of the Agreement’s opening declaration proposes that we can best honour the dead and injured of the Troubles ‘through a fresh start’.1 Such well-​meaning, future-​oriented rhetoric, Graham suggests, is nevertheless indicative of fundamental emphases in the process that have forced ‘the entanglements of everyday existence to remain outside the dominant political 16

17

Same difference

discourse’.2 Similarly, Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker have argued that a prominent and powerful ‘propaganda of peace’ provided the consensual vocabulary for a much-​needed political settlement, and so also helped boost Northern Ireland’s image abroad (attracting tourism and securing economic development packages), but it has subsequently served to truncate political debate more locally. The peace process, they argue, has been constructed within official spheres of political discourse and through the mainstream media as ‘the only show in town’, to the extent that ‘dissenting voices have been marginalised or maligned, political activism viewed as disruptive of the social order and pacified domesticity presented as the preferred model of citizenship’.3 Moving to a post-​Troubles moment in Northern Ireland’s politics, it is implied, has entailed a shift towards what we might call, following Chantal Mouffe, a ‘post-​political’ situation, in which causes of awkward or unruly antagonism might be contained or marginalised, rather than addressed. Mouffe’s disconcerting view of the ‘political’, as ‘the ineradicable dimension of antagonism which exists in human societies’, might suggest that the initiation of a ‘post-​political’ paradigm in a society such as Northern Ireland is to be welcomed. Who could, for instance, reasonably object to bringing an end to the politics of conflict –​ to eliminating the effects of those extreme antagonisms (manifested in forms such as paramilitarism and state violence) that have warped and wounded Northern Irish society in brutal and traumatic ways over the preceding Troubles decades? But to prioritise this ‘antagonistic’ model of the ‘political’ is rather to suggest that any process of ‘conflict resolution’ ought not, or cannot, be about the elimination of all forms of conflict. A recognition of the inevitability of a degree of conflict, and a proper channelling of ‘antagonism’ into the more productive, affirmative mode of ‘agonism’ may (in Mouffe’s view) allow for radically pluralised and open-​ended democratic possibility: the ever present possibility of antagonism requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and acknowledging the dimension of undecidability which pervades every order. It requires in other words recognising the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and the fact that every society is the product of a series of practices attempting to establish order in a context of contingency.4

To see ‘every order [as] the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices’ means, for Mouffe, acknowledging that ‘there are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated’.5 Hence, then, a great deal is at stake in how the ‘end’ of the Troubles and ‘post’ Troubles politics are viewed and understood –​and in how we might understand the relation of current models of progress to ‘other possibilities’. For McLaughlin and Baker the term ‘peace’ in particular has come to signify ‘the absence of politics’ as opposed to a restaging, reimagining or expanding of political processes, arrangements and positions. Moreover, and again paralleling the logic of thinkers such as Mouffe, this post-​political orientation of the peace process and its aftermath suggests to McLaughlin and Baker motives on the part of governments (and

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other stake-​holding groups) that go beyond the ostensible primary objective of resolving a complex long-​running conflict, one that has variously involved, or been interpreted in terms of, national and regional allegiances, sectarian prejudices and post-​colonial legacies. These writers consider ‘the possibility of a deeper ideological purpose’ to the ‘propaganda of peace’, which may be ‘to interpellate Northern Ireland within the political and cultural milieu of contemporary capitalism; after all its denial of politics may be conducive to this end’.6 In this way an important association is made between the complex, incomplete ‘end’ of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the broader ‘end of history’ that has been proclaimed as the achievement of neo-​liberal globalisation. This much-​celebrated moment of historical closure is widely constructed in contemporary political discourse as the ultimate terminal point for antagonistic politics –​ this is a ‘common sense’ view in Western societies, as Mouffe suggests, that sees individuals as ‘liberated from collective ties’, free to dedicate themselves ‘to cultivating a diversity of lifestyles, unhindered by antiquated attachments’.7 The value of finding alternatives to ‘antiquated attachments’ cannot, of course, be underestimated in Northern Irish society. And yet this global ‘end of history’ can also be thought of as implying the eradication of real alternatives. Describing the current conditions of capitalist globalisation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri contend that this new all-​pervasive and all-​consuming ‘Empire’ presents itself as: an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history.8

New modes of being and belonging arise alongside a nullification of ‘other possibilities’. Crucially, these contradictory developments correspond to aspects of the Troubles’ tortured end. For though ‘Empire is continually bathed in blood’, Hardt and Negri argue, ‘the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace –​a perpetual and universal peace outside of history’.9 In Mouffe’s view the ‘post-​political vision’ of globalised liberal democracy imagines that ‘a world without enemies’ is now possible and that ‘partisan conflicts are a thing of the past and consensus can now be obtained through dialogue’.10 But Mouffe argues for the ongoing need to make visible rather than mask the plural dimensions of conflict within democracy. Such propositions, concerning the need for a radicalised and pluralised democratic model –​a democracy that is always, in its manifest insufficiency, a ‘democracy to come’11 –​are, as Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd have argued, acutely relevant to how we might comprehend the ongoing vulnerabilities of the peace process and the question of ‘conflict resolution’ in Northern Ireland. Indeed, Little and Lloyd argue that ‘the repeated suspensions of the democratic institutions and outbreaks of disagreement that have marked the post-​Agreement period are [best] interpreted through the “paradigm of radical

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democracy”, with its emphasis on democracy as a fragile, contingent, always incomplete project’.12 In other words, the failures of the process, the setbacks that disrupt the smooth operations of government, however frustrating and traumatic, can raise (if only at the theoretical level) important ongoing questions about how models of democratic representation and engagement can be critiqued, revised or enhanced.13 A related argument is made by sociologist Vikki Bell, who has proposed that the ‘suspensions’ which interest Little and Lloyd as moments of agonistic potentiality, offer us a way of considering the discursive construct of ‘peace’ in terms other than those of achieved ‘presence’ and conclusive political resolution. Drawing on Derrida’s writings in Spectres of Marx, Bell proposes that: Suspension suggests a suspicion that the ghost still whispers, as he did to Hamlet, ‘mark me /​ I am thy father’s spirit’, such that devolution has not banished the spectres of the past. The logic of suspension suggests that Peace requires people to sincerely reject the spirit of the past, to refuse to follow the spirit of the past into the future. Those desires for the future of Northern Ireland that the Belfast Agreement has meant to consign to history cannot continue to reign over the present. Peace, it seems cannot be haunted. But as Derrida eloquently argues … the distinction between past and future cannot be drawn so starkly. This being so, one may ask: does the pursuit of peace mean that ghosts must be banished, that no spirits can be heard?14

Bell argues that peace must be re-​conceived in terms of its very lack of presence, as a concept, like Derrida’s democracy, that is always ‘to come’ –​a proposition she develops with reference to the psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose, who has observed that the word ‘peace’ threatens to ‘empty itself of content at the very moment when it is declared’.15 Peace can be understood as ‘a call to the future, a performative that orientates itself to a newly imagined future’. But this is not the future of the Good Friday Agreement’s proposed ‘fresh start’: that call to the future … cannot be thought of as a break with the past. It is entwined with and dependent on the past … to call that future into being even requires that past as an internal and necessary condition. Not simply because past beliefs are tenacious and past desires rarely relinquished in the signing of Peace Agreements, but because to insist on the death of ghosts will always fail.16

Bell’s arguments are to some extent echoed by Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker in The Propaganda of Peace. For McLaughlin and Baker, the language of peace can seem to ‘promote the abandonment of a politically engaged public sphere’ at a time when powerful pressures altering the conditions of life in Northern Ireland –​ ‘neo-​liberalism, financial meltdown and social and economic inequality’ –​ make such a notional sphere most necessary.17 Shifting ground: a local agreement and a new global reality Questions raised by various critical commentators about the forms and effects of the peace process are, as we shall see, relevant to some of the responses to 19

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shifting circumstances in Northern Ireland that have been offered by contemporary artists. But before beginning to consider the distinctive contribution of artists to a ‘post-​Troubles’ culture it is worth commenting further on certain notable characteristics of the peace process in general and of the Good Friday Agreement in particular. In so doing, it is useful to consider how these features of Northern Ireland’s peace negotiations and subsequent settlement have been formed in the context of the wider, international ‘post-​political’ conditions analysed by thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe. Reflecting on the complexities and difficulties of the post-​Troubles period, however, it is important not to undervalue the considerable achievements of those involved in the long, arduous process of negotiating a form of peace in Northern Ireland: individuals and groups who took risky steps towards creating a more inclusive and progressive programme of political dialogue. For the peace process –​ in its intensity of direct and indirect contact between political parties and its gradual delivery of unprecedented outcomes (most notably the IRA’s ‘complete cessation of all military operations’ on 31st August 1994) –​ has been widely and credibly viewed as ‘the first serious and sustained attempt to resolve the Irish Troubles in [the] twenty years’ since the Sunningdale agreement of 1973.18 After two agonising decades, during which politicians in Northern Ireland had struggled to find productive middle ground, the early 1990s saw the emergence of a negotiation process, which, as Graham Dawson says, ‘broke new ground in seeking an inclusive settlement involving all parties to the conflict, including those previously excluded due to their close connection to paramilitary organisations’.19 As such the ‘peace process’ marked profound shifts in political rhetoric, strategy, mood and momentum, despite the protracted difficulties and devastating atrocities that accompanied it.20 The resulting Agreement, published in April 1998, was not, in the end, achieved with the participation of all political parties in the region (representatives of the Democratic Unionist Party and the United Kingdom Unionist Party had refused to co-​operate with Sinn Féin until the decommissioning of IRA weapons had taken place) but it was nevertheless, as Dawson records, ‘supported by a significant majority right across the political spectrum in the North, including political representatives in touch with the views of both Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries’.21 In May 1998, the agreement was overwhelmingly approved in referenda North and South of the border. In an essay on the post-​Agreement transition from ‘war to uneasy peace’, Caroline Kennedy-​Pipe describes the negotiation process, and this landmark electoral outcome, as marking ‘a profound transformation in the politics of Northern Ireland’, breaking up ‘the stagnation that had long paralysed the region’.22 Among the reasons she cites for this paradigm shift within the realm of practical politics was the willingness of Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, to ‘break with the British past in Ireland’ in a more radical manner than his predecessors had been willing to do, recognising both that ‘the history of the Troubles affected the peace in complex ways’, and that influences from beyond the British-​Irish archipelago would be vital in making meaningful progress: 20

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The re-​opening of an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, the establishment of both the Bloomfield and the Patten commission, plus his willingness to openly address the tragedies of Anglo-​Irish relations demonstrated an awareness that the peace process should address some of the outstanding issues which had long prevented nationalists from developing a positive view of British governments. Another of Blair’s departures on Britain’s position on Ireland was more pragmatic: he embraced outside intervention in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Previous Prime Ministers had been sensitive to the importance of keeping the management of the region a domestic affair. Blair, however, actively enlisted the help of the Democratic US president, Bill Clinton, in bringing about peace.23

The combined impact of initiating inquiries into Troubles history (here we have a break with the past that is dependent on fresh scrutiny of the past) and strategic internationalising of the Troubles geography is worth highlighting here. Both are issues that have, in more general ways, underpinned efforts to achieve resolution and been vital in determining the specific characteristics of the current state of anxious aftermath. Both issues, addressing the contested history and geography of the Troubles, relate to key questions. Firstly, could reconciliation be achieved without public expression and shared acceptance of crucial ‘truths’ relating to the history of the conflict? (Requiring us to also ask how such truths would be definitively established and to consider what might be the psychic and social implications of such facts coming into the open.) Secondly, in what way could the advocates of two polarised nationalisms find a mechanism for agreement, and even envisage a future method of defining and governing a specific regional territory, at an historical moment schizophrenically characterised by both intensified national confrontation in post-​1989 Europe, and ‘post-​national’ cultural and economic conditions across the globe? In these ways the Good Friday Agreement faced, and was formed in relation to, dual contemporary tests about how to understand and define the Troubles’ history and geography. With regard to geographical considerations, and incidentally echoing the sentiments of Kennedy-​Pipe, Michael Cox has argued that the Agreement and the overall journey towards ‘uneasy peace’ in Northern Ireland must, in fact, be seen in the light of the ‘new global realities’ which took shape in the wake of the Cold War:  the ‘quite revolutionary transformation in the international landscape’  –​ Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ moment  –​ which, he says, ‘fed into the situation in Northern Ireland more generally and into IRA thinking more specifically’.24 Other commentators such as Paul Dixon have, by comparison, urged caution about granting excessive credit to the role of international influences on the outcome of the peace negotiations, beyond their ‘choreographic’ or ‘theatrical’ value.25 Nonetheless elements and emphases of the peace process such as those foregrounded by Cox and Kennedy-​Pipe –​allusions to instances of transformation in formerly rigid models of national sovereignty and to circumstances of renewed attention to once strictly controlled zones of public memory  –​ are useful to acknowledge here, offering (as we shall see) points of correspondence to subjects and situations that have been of sustained relevance to the work of visual artists in the post-​Troubles era. 21

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The question of how, and to what extent, international influences helped to shape the peace process and to inform the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, is a challenging one in other ways. Indeed, the internationalisation of the Northern Ireland situation could, perhaps, be seen to be just as problematic as it has been progressive. In this regard, and taking into account, for instance, the steady neo-​ liberalising of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair during the 1990s, we might bear in mind Chantal Mouffe’s apprehension about a new mode of capitalist internationalism that, she argues, erases politics through ‘deterritorialisation’. Such an ideological tendency, in Mouffe’s view, works to deny the value of ‘all regional forms of belonging’, celebrating only ‘a global world without borders, where the “nomadic multitude” will be able to circulate freely according to its desire’.26 Within the peace process, and within the art that has been engaged, however obliquely, in conceiving of responses to this process (and to the landscapes of Northern Ireland which have been significantly shaped by its successes and failures), there is evidence of the broader trends and effects of such deterritorialising cultural and political globalisation. The commencement of new enquiries into controversial events of the Troubles years, for instance, now takes place in an era of unprecedented circulation, storage and mediation of information. This is an era in which (largely through routine use of the internet’s near-​infinite resources, but also as a result of today’s elaborate and intensive systems of surveillance) the visual and textual records of past events are now sought or circulated at an extraordinary rate. At the same time, we might also argue that as our sources of information are now more diverse and distracting than ever, it is increasingly likely that matters of considerable potential import to a ‘public sphere’ can become marginalised or forgotten. New forms of remembering arise in dialectical relation to contemporary conditions of amnesia. As Andreas Huyssen has written, ‘the past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in early centuries’ but as a consequence ‘temporal boundaries have weakened just as the experience of space has shrunk as a result of modern means of transportation and communication’.27 Once a source of confirmation with regard to identity and nationality, a means of conceiving of collectivity and public space, historical pasts are now increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings, which are reorganised in the process of cultural globalisation. This may mean that these groundings are written over, erased and forgotten, as the defenders of local heritage and authenticity lament. Or it may mean that they are being renegotiated in the clash between globalising forces and new productions and practices of local cultures. The form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders. Modernity has brought with it a very real compression of time and space. But in the register of imaginaries, it has also expanded our horizons of time and space beyond the local, the national and even the international.28

As we consider the shifting ground of the Troubles’ territories –​while weighing up the possible ‘theatricality’ or ‘choreography’ of the Northern Ireland peace process –​it is difficult to avoid the knowledge that the era of globalisation is one 22

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in which politics is shaped and emptied of substantive content on the stage of spectacle, today’s ‘non-​place of politics’ as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described our contemporary upgrade of Guy Debord’s vision.29 Indeed, for the sociologist Hugh Mackay, ‘whatever globalisation has been achieved … can be seen as a result of the growing significance of the symbolic, of the power of the cultural’.30 Whether we are reflecting on the systems and scenes of local politics (including perceived long-​term continuities in political policy or rhetoric), or on the conditions of maintaining and representing public memory and of constructing an historical record, or again on the means by which we imagine a specific territory, all might now be considered differently in light of wider global transformations. Crucially, the place of the national is radically altered in the age of what Hardt and Negri characterise as globalisation’s ‘Empire’: In contrast to Imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command.31

Thought of in connection with the long-​standing dynamics and positions of the Northern Ireland conflict, there is undoubtedly something compelling about this disorientating  –​ but also potentially liberating  –​ vision. For those weary of the constraining, dominant designations of identity in Northern Ireland –​and of the deep social divisions they perpetuate –​such terms as ‘hybrid’, ‘flexible’ and ‘plural’ would surely be welcome. Yet such deterritorialising upheaval is of course accompanied within the flux of contemporary capitalism by inevitable occasions of reterritorialisation. Part of the challenge in assessing art’s agency with respect to these new conditions of history and geography is to take sufficient account of the contradictions implied by any departure from former realities, and to be aware of the nature of eventual destinations. Reflecting on ‘culture and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Aaron Kelly has, for instance, insisted that the perpetual de-​ and re-​centring of the global economy, according to the movements of capital and its continual scrambling of codes and peripheries, represents an unsettling and underlying dynamic that problematises any straightforwardly affirmative interpretation of spatial and political reorganisation.32

In significant measure, it is to the difficulties and potentialities of this ongoing to and fro motion, this persistent de and re process, that this book attends –​insofar as they relate to the political anxieties and ambiguities of contemporary art practice. Constructive ambiguity: art and ‘activated contradiction’ in the post-​Agreement moment One often remarked-​on feature of the Good Friday Agreement is the ‘constructive ambiguity’ (to borrow a phrase coined by Arthur Aughey)33 of the text itself. For 23

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Figure 1  Shane Cullen, The Agreement, 2002–​4.

the wording of the resulting, hard-​won accord was sufficiently ‘open’ to allow for somewhat different, even opposing, interpretations of certain central issues such as ‘the British Government’s strategic intentions regarding the constitutional question and partition’.34 The written outcome of these complex political negotiations could be understood therefore as at once a monumental achievement, representing confirmed common ground, and as a shrewd deferral of conclusiveness. ‘Constructive’ ambiguity then; but also, perhaps, ‘deconstructive’: the text’s ostensibly definite set of resolutions and propositions being articulated in such a way as to accommodate a play of meanings, the actual commitments of the agreement being at once decided and ‘undecidable’, fixed yet flexible, potentially reassuring within the rhetoric of ‘peace’ and ‘parity of esteem’ but resistant to the ascription of any final meaning.35 Such ambiguity could of course be a cause for either celebration or frustration. This was a tension made materially manifest on a grand scale by the artist Shane Cullen between 2002 and 2004, when he presented (in a series of spaces in Belfast, Derry, Dublin, London and Portadown) a constructed sculptural version of this complex political construct. Cullen’s artwork The Agreement was an elaborate production, featuring the entire 11,500 word text of the negotiated 24

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settlement mechanically inscribed onto fifty-​five four-​foot wide polyurethane panels (Figure 1). Described as giving ‘the legalities within a highly charged document concrete form’ the work had the appearance of a massive, imposing historical monument.36 It was also, though, an uncertain and in some ways precarious installation –​as had been the case with several previous large-​scale works by Shane Cullen.37 The Agreement incidentally alluded to the formal and material weight of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC; yet relative to this iconic site-​ specific structure it was actually light, temporary and mobile: a mock-​up, maybe, of a more permanent public sculpture, a monument yet to be fully realised or ‘settled’ –​a promise of a moment, a monument, ‘to come’. These physical properties were of course analogues of the Agreement’s discursive characteristics, allowing us to see the text, in potentially positive or negative terms, as interpretatively open-​ended.38 Daniel Jewesbury has noted how Cullen’s work can be thought of as ‘a clever simulation, just as the Agreement is a simulation of politics, a work of sophistry designed not to reconstitute Northern Ireland but to defer indefinitely the moment of reconstitution and definition’.39 And yet, as Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith has written, we might also choose to see Cullen’s response as more affirmative, seeing potential in the fact that ‘the precise but not especially elegant language of the Belfast Agreement bears all the marks of communal effort … rather than of a single authorial voice’.40 Moreover, Mac Giolla Léith adds, it is precisely in this lack of individuality that its greatest strength resides. By registering the contributions of divergent opinions it offers a more flexible and accommodating alternative to the hardened political rhetoric of Northern Ireland’s various conflicting interests.41

A correspondence, if not quite an overlap, might be proposed here to Liam Gillick’s promotion of the ‘discursive’ in contemporary art practice. This is a means of producing as an artist, which is also a means of reflexively revising the established role of the ‘producer’ within the art field. It is, Gillick says, ‘a mode of generating ideas and placing structures into the culture that emerges from collaborative, collective, or negotiated positions rather than as varied forms of “pure” expression or super-​subjectivity’.42 Within this variant of contemporary art practice, Gillick notes, there is a ‘proliferation of the short text and statement’, which, he suggests, both ‘cover up and announce’  –​ an observation that is surely comparable, despite the stark difference in scale, to Cullen’s implicit highlighting of constructed, constructive and deconstructive ambiguity within the Agreement’s negotiated statements. In appropriately Foucauldian terms, Gillick expresses an interest in how Statements depend on the conditions from which they emerge, and begin their existence within a field of discourse. Statements as events are important within the discursive –​they provide a ‘location’ from which to propose a physical potential beyond the immediate art context. Putting a statement into play will create an event ‘at some point’ –​ or a series of events projected into the near future to recuperate the recent past.43

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In this mode, art potentially proposes, at the levels of production and reception, a provisional public space of collectivity and exchange –​ emerging from dialogue and creating the conditions for further dialogue. We might, nevertheless, commend a work of collaborative authorship just as we could remain concerned about a confused rather than empowered readership. As Hal Foster has enquired in response to Nicholas Bourriaud’s proposal that art such as Gillick’s can be understood as ‘an ensemble of units to be reactivated by the beholder-​manipulator’, when is such ‘reactivation’ too great a burden to place on the viewer, too ambiguous a test? As with previous attempts to involve the audience directly … there is a risk of illegibility here, which might reintroduce the artist as the principal figure and the primary exegete of the work. At times, ‘the death of the author’ has meant not ‘the birth of the reader’, as Barthes speculated, so much as the befuddlement of the viewer.44

Cullen’s The Agreement seems to create and occupy a public space that brings into play all the possibilities and problems of the above positions. It creates further, intensified ambiguity from the ‘ambiguous test’ that is the Good Friday Agreement itself, just as it makes theatrically ‘concrete’ the document’s claims and proposals. In so doing it presents the difficulties and potentialities of agreement and disagreement, communication and miscommunication, deferred and defined meaning. ‘Constructive ambiguity’ itself becomes ambiguous:  the work makes pronounced, through its imposing presentation, the combined sense in which such open-​ended meaning might have a certain ‘activating’ civic value while also potentially re-​asserting the inaccessibility of power through manipulative political obfuscation. Pitched decisively between the discursive domains of art and politics (the latter being understood here in Mouffe’s terms as ‘the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organising human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’45) the work may prompt or allow for speculative reflections on progress, conflict and civic participation, beyond the exigencies of realpolitik. The direct impact of the lingering différance arising out of the text of the actual Good Friday Agreement itself was that the parties who had initially signed up to the pact, as Graham Dawson reminds us, ‘quickly became involved in fighting their own corners with respect to its implementation rather than becoming genuine “partners for peace” ’.46 The principal after-​effect of the Agreement’s strategic indeterminacies was, therefore, that ‘progress in implementing the Agreement has been slow and precarious, to the extent that the particularly protracted character of efforts to achieve political transition to a new dispensation has become one of the defining features of the Irish peace process’.47 In the introduction to their anthology of texts on post-​Troubles politics and culture, A Farewell to Arms? Beyond the Good Friday Agreement, Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen set this protracted negotiation –​this agonising deferral of resolution –​in an international context: 26

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with the exception of the peace process in South Africa … peace processes worldwide since the mid-​1990s fall into one of two categories:  those which, like the Middle East peace process, have collapsed almost entirely; and those interesting few that have neither imploded nor as yet been able to achieve their full political potential by establishing the conditions for a final settlement.48

The Good Friday Agreement is, they suggest, a product (and producer) of the latter kind of process. This is a political deal with an ambiguous outcome; a momentous accord followed by ongoing, arduous disagreement and disengagement. Immediately following the signing of the Agreement, a significant amount of this debate centred on a quartet of core local issues: parades, policing, prisoners and the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. Though each of these, to some extent, has continued to be a source of dispute, the first has been among the most deeply and recurrently divisive. Closely related to later discord concerning the flying of flags on public buildings (which involved a series of large-​scale public disturbances in 201249) the post-​Agreement parades issue has persistently raised the very contentious question of what can and should be made visible in public space. Bill Rolston has written of how, from the founding of the Unionist-​dominated Northern Ireland, the Nationalist minority were afforded few opportunities for public displays of interests or allegiances: if the state’s first prime minister ‘could boast of having “a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state”, [then] marching, flying flags and painting murals took on extra significance’. Such expressions and performances, Rolston says, ‘became in effect a civic duty, recognised and legitimised as such by the state and its governing party’. As such, ‘the streets and public places were unionist’.50 The continuing, problematic legacy of this tradition since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (and it should be noted, as Neil Jarman and others have pointed out, that the Unionist case for parades has tended to employ the language of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ rather than politics51) certainly demonstrates the difficulty of imagining public space in a post-​Troubles, post Unionist-​domination/​Nationalist-​exclusion era, beyond prior geographical and sectarian models of collectivity. To some degree, Shane Cullen’s deliberately provisional monument to the ambiguities of the Good Friday Agreement is itself a tentative, alternative vision of how to intervene in, or symbolically represent, public space. It is a maquette for a public sculpture to come, one that might declare –​ ambiguously, in a spirit of conscious contradiction –​an openness as to how collective public space might be imagined. But it would, even so, demonstrate only an anxious commitment to such potential collective expression. Within visual art the complicated question of what is at stake in the public forms of visibility represented by parades (and Orange Order parades in particular) was an important point of reference for artists throughout the Troubles years. Numerous artists turned their attention at different times towards the rituals and iconography of Orange Order parades –​and, crucially, within practices that were self-​consciously concerned with the ideological conditions of representation. Victor Sloan’s 1986 series of mixed media photographic works The Walk, The Platform, The Field –​in which images of the annual 27

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12th of July parades are violently scratched by the artist –​added discordant uncertainty to the documenting of ‘a ritualised process’ enacted in Unionism’s ‘hallowed spaces’.52 Somewhat differently, Paul Seawright’s Orange Order photographs from 1990–​91, observed parades from the ‘inside’. In these works, the artist lowers his camera to child’s-​eye level, returning to an earlier moment in his own life to look newly at this authoritarian, patriarchal cultural realm. Seawright’s close-​ up views transform symbols of identity and power within an established system of public display into a series of inscrutable and anachronistic fragments. This was an offbeat view of the internal realities of this world. At the point of the Troubles’ notional resolution in 1998, however, the artist Phil Collins (born in England, but based for several years in Belfast) developed a video project entitled The marches that set some of these realities and rituals in relation to broader questions (Figure 2). Collins is an artist who has risen to international prominence with a lens-​based and event-​based practice equally characterised by tender intimacy and purposeful provocation in its use of the still and moving image. (This is an opposition that has long been historically relevant to the ethics and aesthetics of photography; the writer Lincoln Kirstein, for instance, famously described the attitude of Walker Evans’s images in the 1930s as one of ‘tender cruelty’.53) Curator Kate Bush has noted how ‘Collins is aware of photography’s historically deep and difficult contradictions’ and he has arguably become a widely acclaimed artist on the international stage precisely because of the extent to which he has sought to ‘activate those contradictions, to embrace them, exaggerate them, embed them as fault lines in his practice’.54 Such a spirit of ‘activated contradiction’ was essential to Collins’s perspective on Orange Order rituals in The marches: a work which juxtaposed documentary footage of parades (focusing attention on the marginal or background elements of the festivities) with first-​hand interviews conducted with Belfast-​based acquaintances. In these conversations, the artist asked questions that ranged from the apparently relevant (‘Do you think the media supports the violence?’) to the evidently inconsequential (‘Do you like supermarkets?’). Presented together as a four-​monitor video installation, these scenes were accompanied by sound recordings of the ‘eleventh night’ bonfire parties that are standard fixtures of the annual Orange marching season in July –​ rowdy, often markedly sectarian public gatherings that are also visible in the documentary montage of The marches, but that would be less likely to feature within any TV news coverage. What emerges through this curious and disconcerting combination, is a purposeful disruption of any simple, stereotypical representation of Loyalist identity. As Bill Horrigan proposes, The marches ‘renders the events in its title as thoroughly dispersed, resistant to efforts to reduce or explain them according to a journalistic template’.55 This sense of ‘dispersal’ is significant insofar as the intimacy of the interview form and the numerous conversational tangents (Collins has said that he makes work merely to ‘meet people’) suggest an artistic and social striving for new connections, or for new understandings of the affiliative basis of existing social bonds. But the activity of making visible (and audible) details that are ordinarily not featured in media coverage of Orange parades is also, for Collins, 28

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a purposefully inconvenient intervention in the context of wider narratives of peace-​era progress (Plate 3). (Subsequent work by Collins has explicitly attended to what television coverage ignores or forgets: for instance, The Return of the Real, his 2007 Turner Prize exhibition, focused on former contestants from reality TV shows who had been, in various ways, damaged by their experience of appearing on such programmes.) Collins takes an agonistic interest in visualising what might otherwise evade visibility. In The marches, he asserts representational contradiction in the context of post-​conflict resolution. As he sees it, there is, in the moment of peace, a need to highlight rather than negate difference –​pluralising our sense of identity, subjectivity, solidarity and affiliation. There is a need to create new visibilities of difference. As Claire Bishop (a prominent critical advocate of Collins’s work) has said: a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are being drawn and brought into debate –​ in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained not erased.56

The application of such terms to the practical field of politics in Northern Ireland is, of course, extremely challenging and unsettling. The complex social and cultural issues relating to Orange parades  –​ and to other matters of grave concern and consequence that have continued to be further negotiated in the post-​ Troubles period –​ have certainly made ‘difference’ visible, but in ways that have

Figure 2  Phil Collins, The marches, 2000. 29

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drastically impeded or interrupted the implementation and steady functioning of devolved government institutions. Equally, however, where newfound political stability has been secured it has been within a governmental/​institutional framework that enshrines the pre-​existing, normative sectarian identities of the Troubles years into the practical workings of the system. (In the current Stormont Assembly, parties and representatives must identify as ‘Nationalist’, ‘Unionist’ or ‘Other’ to ensure ‘cross-​community’ support in certain voting processes.) Possibilities for the future –​ and for ideas of political representation and public space –​ are created on terms largely defined by the very divisions underpinning the region’s longest-​running problems. The Good Friday Agreement –​and, then, some of the art that has responded to its immediate qualities and circumstances –​ thus activates contradictions in ways that might be seen as either liberating or newly restrictive. It is to further visual and material contradictions, as they are manifested in the landscapes of Northern Ireland and the city of Belfast in particular, that I now wish to turn. A different place? Change and stasis in the post-​Troubles city Despite recurrent failures in the efforts to create a stable, functional regional assembly in the post-​Agreement period, and despite, during some traumatic historical moments, obvious reasons for extreme pessimism, it is difficult not to have noticed substantial, gradual change in many parts of Northern Ireland.57 Indeed, for Michael Cox et al., ‘anyone who lived through the Troubles, and did not expect to see peace in the first place, cannot but be struck by how much has changed since the late 1990s’.58 Northern Ireland, Cox suggests, ‘feels a very different place in the early part of the twenty-​first century than it did before the agreement was signed in 1998’.59 At the opening of the book Making Peace With the Past: Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles, Graham Dawson offers his own observations on the ‘different place’ that the city of Belfast in particular has become: Since the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, the centre of ‘post-​conflict’ Belfast, between the City Hall and the River Lagan, has been a site of redevelopment and modernisation. Through the construction of new buildings like the Waterside Centre [sic] and the Hilton Hotel, the regeneration of the old, largely derelict commercial district and the opening up of riverside walkways, the proliferation of new shops, bars and restaurants, and the promotion of Belfast’s unique cultural heritage, visitors have been drawn to the city and the normality of free market capitalism has been restored.60

This ‘restoration’ has taken place at a remarkable pace. As the novelist Glenn Patterson has written ‘it’s not the fact of change that is new in Belfast, it’s the speed’.61 In the post-​Agreement period, the built environment in Belfast became subject to profound transformation, with urban planning schemes and private sector developments rapidly erasing traces of much that dominated life in the city for decades. Regions of Troubles-​era neglect have been made-​over into heavily

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marketed ‘heritage’ districts such as ‘The Titanic Quarter’ and ‘The Cathedral Quarter’:  regeneration zones featuring numerous high-​end living and leisure opportunities targeted at locals and tourists crowds flocking in at weekends to sample Belfast as a city-​break option.62 In the central shopping district (once an area bordered by security gates and closed to the public outside trading hours) new architectural additions declare a shift from security-​led urban landscape to commerce-​driven city of glass. One notable example of this material shift is the Victoria Square shopping complex in Belfast’s City Centre, opened in March 2008: a dramatic intervention into the city fabric, capped with a grand glass dome, that highlights in prominent style the changing urban planning priorities and possibilities. As William J.V. Neill and Geraint Ellis have argued, such building projects exemplify the extraordinary fact that ‘glass is now the representational form of choice for development in the post-​conflict city, offering as it does an obvious contrast to the brutalist terror-​proofed buildings of the “troubles” ’.63 Of course, such glassy, gleaming, variously reflective and transparent structures and spaces, do more than contrast with the old: in many ways they smoothly obliterate it, despite their ‘clarity’ of form. In The Future of Nostalgia, a rich study of the longing for the past that has accompanied modern progress (focusing especially on the art, life and literature of post-​Communist cities such as Berlin and Moscow), Svetlana Boym has given an account of the comparable (albeit much more ambitious and high-​profile) transformation of the Berlin Reichstag, the ‘historical heaviness’ of which has been alleviated with the addition of a huge glass dome. Glass in this instance, is not merely chosen, Boym says, as ‘the preferred material of modern architecture,’ but is also a ‘symbol of the new democratic openness and transparency of German public institutions’.64 If Belfast’s new domineering dome crowns a palace of consumerism rather than a house of government, the experience of entering the Reichstag has nevertheless revealing resemblances to the architectural messages of Victoria Square, this new Northern Irish consumer attraction with its much-​publicised sky-​high viewing platforms: So the visitor comes to tour the new, improved Reichstag, and she is directed upward, away from ambivalent historical memories, straight into the glass dome for a quick sublation of the past … Then she enjoys the panoramic view of the city and takes pictures with the new Berlin in the background. It no longer matters that one is on top of the Reichstag, no historical reminders spoil the enjoyment … a healthy climb and a beautiful view relieve the visitor from all the burdens of history.65

Visiting the Reichstag now, Boym argues, is not about the past, not about a building’s ‘shattered history’, but about ‘cheerful collective narcissism in the present’.66 There are undoubted correspondences here with Victoria Square’s PR-​friendly panoramic views of the changing city (lending a whole new dimension to debates about surveillance and visuality in a once conflict-​defined built environment67) and its literal covering over of Belfast’s streets, Belfast’s past, with a state-​of-​the-​art structure. (The building is effectively a grand glass canopy placed over a series of

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existing lanes.) Victoria Square is a structure that is, in a sense, both highly visible and notionally ‘invisible’, merging and confusing inside and outside in a manner largely new to this location. Moreover, this new glass emphasis in architecture throughout the city of Belfast, and most profoundly in those newly defined terrains of commercial and corporate development, has the potential to disturb not only our sense of place and history, but also, perhaps, our experience of subjectivity, with the seductions and clarifications of transparent surfaces quickly becoming perils of obscurity and reflectivity, depending on the levels of available light.68 As Anthony Vidler has written, the participation of such an aesthetic in a society of spectacle committed to the suppression of all phenomenological depth, would indicate that the long tradition of anthropomorphic embodiment in architecture has been finally broken, with spatially uncanny consequences.69

Under conditions of simultaneous post-​Troubles regeneration and ‘normalisation’ (a term which Boym says is not merely used as a ‘slogan of forgetting’ in the new Berlin, but forms part of the attempt to ‘get away from the extremes that haunted postwar German History’70) such uncanny effects will surely be profoundly registered. Nevertheless, as has been earlier suggested, if Northern Ireland is a place that has become markedly ‘different’, it has done so while in many ways staying the same. This is, perhaps, a paradoxical proposition that further resonates with Vidler’s enduring interest in an experience of the ‘architectural uncanny’ particular to modern city spaces. As Nicholas Royle has said, the uncanny is ‘not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation … it is a peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar’.71 Hal Foster too notes how the Freudian understanding of the uncanny centres on ‘the return of a familiar phenomenon (image, object, person, or event) made strange by repression’.72 This is a ‘return of the repressed’, Foster says, that ‘renders the subject anxious, and this anxious ambiguity produces the primary effects of the uncanny’.73 Via surrealism’s fascination with ‘outmoded spaces’, Foster nevertheless finds that ‘the uncanny return of past states … may also occur in a social register’ –​a viewpoint shared by Vidler, whose main fascination is with ‘the relations between psyche and dwelling, the body and the house, the individual and the metropolis’.74 In art’s evocations of the uncanny, Foster sees the potential for the recovery of ‘repressed historical as well as psychic materials’ both as ‘disruptive return’ and ‘transformative working through’.75 Such potential ‘returns’ consequently signal a combination of aesthetic and political disturbance, perhaps corresponding to Chantal Mouffe’s interest in a critical art that might reveal the exclusions and repressions of democratic society and that might therefore ‘make visible’ what is otherwise obliterated.76 Such a sense of psychological ambivalence offers a way of describing change –​ and simultaneous, suspenseful stasis  –​ in Northern Ireland that brings out the uneasiness underlying the purported, returning normality of post-​Troubles society:  a normality that is constituted through the managing and masking of 32

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Figure 3  Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, from the photographic series Archive Lisburn Road, 2005.

otherwise abnormal elements. In the contemporary art of the post-​Troubles era there has been an acute alertness to uncanny resonances: a sensitivity to the sudden ‘unhomeliness’ of home, to that unheimlich dimension of a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar. As towns and cities appear to change as a consequence of peace-​ea progress, inhabitants of these adjusting places suffer the strangeness of a normality that is unrecognisable. Many people must struggle, therefore, to deal with the painful persistent presence of both the private and the public past while the society officially ‘moves on’. This strange normality of aftermath has been a subject of sustained interest for artists working in various media. In painting, for instance, Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony series (shown at the Ulster Museum in 2014) is composed of unusually large portraits showing, in studied close-​up, the superficially peaceful faces of people who, in one way or another, experienced loss during the Troubles.77 But the uncanny reverberations of the changing (and unchanging) society have been especially felt in the work of artists working with photography. Significant photographic works (and photographic series) by artists such as Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, Willie Doherty, John Duncan, Kai Olaf Hesse, Mary McIntyre, Eoghan McTigue, Paul Seawright, Hannah Starkey and Donovan Wylie have differently inspired a sense of psychological disturbance in their pictures of 33

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the most ordinary of urban and suburban settings (Figure 3). These artists gauge a freakish, haunted quality in the banal landscapes of ordinary life and urban regeneration (as in the work of Burke and Jewesbury, Duncan, or McTigue), or at the blurry border-​lines between city and country (as in McIntyre and Seawright) or in vacated industrial or institutional spaces (as in Wylie or Hesse). Photography of this kind –​sometimes showing quotidian places in a state of apparent shut-​down or suspended reality –​can present city space as out-​of-​order and city-​time as ‘out-​ of-​joint’. The urgency of contemporary existence is slowed or stalled; an unsettling stillness reigns within the ordinary (Plate 4). As Aaron Kelly has written, such works and series ‘achieve a collision between a fragmented past and a fractious future’, and rather than there being any ‘clear dividing line in these images between the decay and the progress of redevelopment … the photos disturb any clear distinction between the supposed backwardness of the past and the gentrified improvement of the present’.78 Tellingly, and recalling Walter Benjamin’s often-​cited comment that Eugène Atget photographed all streets as if they were crime scenes, some of these artists picture the city as an empty place, devoid of the enlivening presence of a population, a visible public.79 This trend in photography has shown us territories that seem recognisably ‘real’, that may even be immediately familiar as something like ‘home’, but that also appear to imagine an entire urban environment, as Kelly has conjectured, that has ‘become the film set for some science fiction movie in which humanity has mysteriously disappeared or been transported to another planet’.80 One collection of essays on ‘contemporary photographs of Belfast 2001–​2010’ even prioritised this uncanny orientation of images of the city as the core concern of its survey, taking as its title the necessary question Where are the People? Discussing the work of the Danish artist Joachim Koester, Hal Foster has written of how ‘even as modernisation obliterates history, it can also produce “points of suspension” that expose its uneven development –​or, perhaps better, its uneven devolution into so many ruins’.81 Such instances of anxious suspension (a word of course that returns us to Vikki Bell’s argument concerning ‘spectres of peace’) can also be thought of as ‘blind spots’: a term, Foster says, that Koester applies to ‘sites that, normally overlooked, might still provide insights’. As Koester captures them, ‘they are unsettled, an unusual mix of the banal and the uncanny, evocative of an everyday kind of historical unconscious’.82 In post-​Troubles Northern Ireland, artistic analysts of the changing city have maintained an ongoing commitment towards discovering and studying such ‘suspended’, uncanny sites. Books such as Where are the People? (and other key texts on Troubles and post-​Troubles images such as Colin Graham’s substantial study Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography) have covered the recurring interest in this type of unpeopled, uncertain ground very thoroughly.83 But, by way of recalling a representative artist’s practice, it is worth re-​emphasising here that among those who have engaged with the paradoxical challenge of picturing ‘blind spots’, Paul Seawright has remained an essential investigator and influence. Seawright’s photographs have been concerned –​ in the context of trauma-​sites, conflict spaces, divided terrains –​ with what cannot 34

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be easily seen, or with what lingers in a landscape when the world looks away. In this regard, like the other artists he has influenced or learned from in the North of Ireland (though, crucially, he has created work in wide-​ranging global situations throughout his internationally celebrated career) his photographs involve a deep and complex apprehension of how time is registered in space –​ of how, as James Joyce wrote, ‘places remember events’. Seawright’s pioneering 1988 series Sectarian Murders pictured lonely places on the fringes of Belfast where, over a decade previously, dead bodies had been found. In these ghoulish return visits to crime scenes, Seawright emphasised desolate banality in the representation of landscape while also creating an undeniable eeriness through the use of curious camera angles and peculiar plays of light. As Colin Graham has written, Seawright’s (literal) spot-​ lighting of ‘empty spaces’ suggests a need to cast light and create lines of sight in ways that allude to those forcefully made ‘absent’ in these places. Seawright distils his photographic account of landscape to a bare minimum, but in a manner that makes the apparent emptiness of a scene charged up with the stirring sense of what, or who, is no longer present. In Graham’s view, ‘Seawright seems to project his dead as ghosts whose vision we take up as observer’.84 He is engaged with the meaning, in the present, of ‘the emptied out victim position; he uses photography as a means of reminding us that their lost lives haunt these places and the city’s history’.85 Gazing on ‘empty space’ becomes a means to compose, as Graham suggests, ‘an act of remembrance for those whose deaths momentarily dominated these spaces’.86 In so doing, Seawright’s account of emptiness in the landscape is developed in a manner that resonates with Derrida’s injunction that we must ‘learn to live with ghosts’: we must conceive of a politics of memory that is dependent on a ‘being-​with spectres’.87 Such ghostly commitments have continually been at the core of Seawright’s work. His art is attentive to the odd specificity of geographical and historical ‘blind-​spots’ –​he creates gripping images of the grim materiality of quietly unsettled landscapes –​while also urging reflection on what is not visible, on what escapes representation. These reflections might well make us uneasy: who knows what spectres we might meet in these locations? As anxious acts of remembrance they could bring to light memories that will not be welcomed by all. In some of Seawright’s post-​Troubles photography –​ such as Conflicting Account from 2009, a series made in ‘history classes of Protestant and Catholic Schools and on housing projects from both communities’88 –​ the problem of public remembering is presented as a central concern in the era of post-​conflict progress. Conflicting Account maps traces of the past’s presence and simultaneous erasure in the built environment. The fastidiously minimal shots show places where paramilitary slogans and icons have been painted over on the sides of buildings; but it is an incomplete process of eradication, and within​ the fastidiously minimal and neatly balanced compositions, there is evidence​ of underlying disorder. Images of a cleaned-​up, promisingly forward-​looking city cannot be realised; rather we are allowed to see disconnected bits-​and-​pieces of a society that is full of competing –​ appearing and disappearing –​ texts, of many kinds (Plate 5). We see fragments of sentences on school blackboards or of names 35

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Figure 4  Paul Seawright, ‘Wire’, from the photographic series Conflicting Account, 2009.

carved into memorials: glimpses of messages, lessons, stated allegiances, that simultaneously –​ and incomprehensibly –​ point to future potential and to the past’s persistence (Figure 4). The effect of this temporal discontinuity, or suspension, is disconcerting. As Colin Graham has noted, Seawright’s engagements with peace process and post-​Troubles landscapes have involved confronting the ‘detritus of conflict … asking questions about whether endings are possible in history’ and prompting us to wonder what might happen ‘to the unpalatable past when the future arrives’.89 Back to the future, forward to the past In June 2010, the most important international news story relating to Northern Ireland concerned the landmark publication of the Saville Inquiry’s conclusions regarding the killing of unarmed civilians by British soldiers in Derry in 1972. This long-​awaited report was, as indicated earlier, an important outcome of Blair administration policies and concessions that, on its publication, brought some degree of resolution to a matter of great ongoing grief and controversy. Here, from a certain perspective, was a process of political exorcism (providing undoubted private and public consolation) that sought to rid the society of troubling ghosts. 36

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The extent of the report’s break with previous assessments of this tragedy was made sharply clear by the British Government right away, with the newly elected Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron emphasising ‘clarity’ and the need to resist ‘equivocal’ responses. ‘There are no ambiguities’, Cameron insisted, in a manner that incidentally brought to mind the ‘constructive ambiguities’ of the Good Friday Agreement: What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong … Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The Government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of our armed forces and for that, on behalf of the Government –​and indeed our country –​I am deeply sorry.90

In addition to this overt and highly unusual admission of significant wrongdoing, one minor element of this self-​assuredly unambiguous speech was a curious breach of standard Tory Party protocol that paradoxically introduced a novel aspect of ambiguity into the British Government’s attitude to the city in question. For rather than strictly adhering to the standard Unionist place-​name ‘Londonderry’, David Cameron chose to refer to ‘the City of Derry’.91 In these circumstances, with a long-​buried truth coming into the open, this city could now indeed be thought of as ‘a different place’  –​ if only in the sense that already existing realities and rights to the city were being formally acknowledged by those in power. Weeks later, this different place would become (with the strategic designation of ‘Derry/​ Londonderry’) the inaugural winner of the coveted UK City of Culture award, beating Birmingham, Norwich and Sheffield in the race for this new, investment-​ attracting title. Eimear O’Callaghan of the Irish Times commented in response: the city of paradoxes is celebrating an injection of promise and possibility, the likes of which it has never experienced before. For the second time in a month, a trickle of uncharacteristic optimism had begun to seep into the minds of its inhabitants. Spurred on by press speculation that Derry had already clinched the cultural accolade, people more accustomed to knock-​backs and rejection dared to believe. And just as it had when the Saville report was published, the trickle of optimism turned into a torrent of euphoria … An instantly galvanised and energised community metaphorically punched the air with a communal ‘Yes!’.92

How often, we might ask, has the word ‘Yes’ been associated with the public image of Northern Ireland? For many, this was a moment of profound, celebratory progress. But in the same week, in the wake of the annual 12th of July parades, a series of nightly riots on the streets of Belfast, Lurgan, Armagh and Derry showed the world –​ with vividly familiar imagery –​ that much was still to be resolved in this ‘post-​conflict’ society. As gangs of so-​called Republican ‘dissidents’ entered into violent clashes with officers of the newly formed Police Service of Northern Ireland, photographs and videos began to appear in countless media reports across the globe. One Guardian headline, ‘Belfast Burns for Third Night’, would not have been out of place during almost any year of the Troubles. But in 2010? What was impossible throughout the Troubles years, however, would have been a New York Times headline such as that from 14th July 2010: ‘Belfast Riots 37

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Morph for YouTube Generation’  –​ a story which gave details not only of how the streets of Ardoyne, North Belfast, had come to resemble, in the words of one community leader, ‘a Euro Disney theme park for rioters’, but also that teenagers involved in the disturbances had been posting raw and frightening camera-​phone footage from the events onto YouTube and other social media sites. This is clearly one occasion when we ‘cannot but be struck by how much has changed since the late 1990s’. The radical contemporary edge to this ‘same old story’ (the title, incidentally, of another work by Willie Doherty) suggests the need to take the wider conditions of global communicative capitalism into account in contemplating the Troubles aftermath. And yet, at the same time this nihilistic uploading of post-​ Troubles violence into virtual territory also had its problematic genesis in familiar, stubbornly local predicaments. Just as the urban landscape of Northern Ireland has, in certain areas, changed to accommodate new commercial ventures and lifestyle options, the region has also regressively developed in ways that demonstrate the intensified management of sectarian geography, rather than any determined planning for the eradication of this fundamental problem. Undoubtedly the most disturbing indications of this stubbornly unyielding social division are found in the many ‘interface areas’ of towns and cities in Northern Ireland: the types of places, in most cases, where the violent flare-​ups of 2010 occurred. The term ‘interface area’ (ubiquitous in post-​ Troubles media representations) has been defined by Neil Jarman as ‘the intersection of segregated and polarised working class residential zones, in areas with a strong link between territory and ethno-​political identity’.93 It is clear from the discrete components of this definition that such anxious terrains in the everyday life of many of Northern Ireland’s citizens are not just fractious meeting points between neighbouring communities, but also calamitous conjunctions between local situations and the broader economic forces and systems upon which each of these communities’ fortunes are ultimately contingent. Peter Shirlow has written that in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, ‘the key ideological message driven by both the Irish and the British States is that peace dividends are to be achieved through economic upgrading and the related benefits of global living’.94 And yet, he says, there is no permitted space within current visions for such serious ongoing or emergent factors as the growth in relative poverty in particular parts of the North, the mounting levels of racist attacks, the increasing exploitation of sex workers and, most of all perhaps, the terrible effects of ‘enduring ethno-​sectarian separation’.95 So once again, therefore, the most important ‘changes’ to the physical environment in Northern Ireland during the peace process and post-​Troubles years might be those that most fully represent a lack of change –​ and even a freakish, estranging extension and intensification of the ‘familiar’. In Belfast, for instance, as Shirlow notes, the most evident interfaces are those marked by high walls that both sunder and demarcate the boundaries between communities … somewhat ominously,

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there were sixteen interface walls in 1994, the year in which almost all the principal paramilitaries in the region announced a ceasefire. Since then most of these constructions have been either extended or heightened. Nine additional walls have been constructed owing to interface-​related violence since 1998. The first meeting of the Northern Ireland assembly in 1998 was held on the same day as an interface wall was built through Alexander Park, a public park located in north Belfast.96

Here, then, with the disuniting of a valued space of communal public interaction within a contemporary city  –​ at the precise moment when new institutions of agreed government are enabled –​is the counter-​and under-​side to urban regeneration: ‘normalisation’ as managed marginalisation, containment and repression. Close to two decades since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, there are now more miles of ‘peace line’ (the euphemism for the security walls separating communities) across the divided territories of Northern Ireland than were present at any stage during the Troubles. The politics, the society, the urban landscape: all are, once again, ‘different’ while remaining in many ways the same. The example of Alexander Park is particularly striking here, insofar as it seems at once both an absurd separation of communal public space and an utterly mundane, uncontroversial division within an area of ordinary, everyday leisure. We see here something that is offensively out-​of-​the-​ordinary and at the same time entirely ‘normalised’. It is simultaneously a security barrier constructed in order to prevent violent conflict and a banal fence built along a stretch of pleasant public parkland: a dreary, unremarkable structure to be encountered during the course of a casual stroll. Seamus Harahan’s 2007 film Before Sunrise treated the Alexander Park interface wall as a place of unusual pilgrimage (Figure 5). Harahan is an artist whose work has often been firmly grounded in the ordinary reality of his everyday observations in Belfast. His use of the camera as he captures his highly subjective documentary memories of life in the city tends to be determinedly casual, always open to the accidents of perception and recording. His films combine periods of protracted focus on overlooked elements of the urban landscape with countless fleeting, distracted glances. Distraction or diversion from the immediate, ‘present’ geography is further encouraged in the films through the incorporation of multiple other points of tangential reference, often provided through the intricate sequencing of eclectic snippets of appropriated music. As Isobel Harbison has said, Harahan’s work seems to present the ‘the viewpoint of a fascinated bystander –​ one whose environment is in a constant state of unravelling’.97 As such, the fluid, fugitive plurality and unpredictability of his responses to place (as we shall also see in a subsequent chapter with regard to his 2004 film Holylands) in fact removes any sure sense of reliable grounding. His work takes us beyond the particular stabilities of place, towards the potentials of a public space re-​imagined in terms of the productive ambiguity of a ‘groundless ground’ (to borrow a phrase employed by Ernesto Laclau in a discussion of how ‘the political’ might arise out of ‘the subversion and dislocation of the social’98). In Before Sunrise, this tendency to both 39

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Figure 5  Seamus Harahan, video still from Before Sunrise, 2007.

point to and depart from precise, ontologically stable conditions of social reality, is evident in numerous ways: partly, for instance, through the film’s presentation (the work has been shown as a two-​channel installation, a form that necessarily presents a divided world to the viewer) and as a result of the distinctive compositional mode chosen by the artist. For in his approach to the making of this work Harahan has arrived at a perspective on spatial division that is based on temporal duplication. The inspiration for his journey through the city is a previous walk taken by German artist K.P. Brehmer along one side of the Berlin Wall for his 1969 film On a Beautiful Day. As such, Harahan’s film is about both Belfast and Berlin, pointing to one place and simultaneously departing to another, re-​locating a Berlin experience into contemporary Belfast. Other telling factors amplify the project’s involving ambiguity. Most obviously, Brehmer’s original film was made in a city once defined by division but that is now a byword for post-​Cold War ‘freedom’ –​ an historic shift, which, as has been suggested here, helped prompt and shape the Northern Ireland peace process. Also, of course, the original 1969 walk was staged at the very time when Belfast was descending into the sectarian turmoil of the Troubles, a conflict that is now supposedly also in its ‘post’ period, but that has since seen more walls going up than coming down. Adding nuance to these questions is the fact that Brehmer’s walk was made as an act of friendship to a fellow

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artist –​with whom the artist had walked along this route at an earlier time –​and Harahan’s Before Sunrise was similarly undertaken at the urging of an artist-​friend. In this way we can note a connection to Phil Collins’s The marches, via the sense of heightened contradiction between modest acts of affiliation/​friendship and wider socio-​political separation (here manifested in both Belfast and Berlin landscapes). What is more, the title Before Sunrise introduces another degree of textual ‘dispersal’, further ungrounding the film through reference to Richard Linklater’s 1995 film of the same name –​ a Hollywood ‘indie’ movie in which two young people from different continents develop an intimate but temporary connection over a single night of walking and talking through the city of Vienna. This citation is intriguing in its allusion to a form of provisional or precarious attachment, and also, more simply, in its framing of urban documentary ‘fact’ in terms of urban cinematic ‘fiction’. Something else obviously pertinent to the main themes of this book is of course signalled by this title: the words ‘before sunrise’ speak of a period of transition, of a passage of time spent in anticipation of an ‘enlightening’ moment that is yet to fully arrive. Harahan’s filmic response to Alexander Park offers an especially absurd instance of how present-​day Belfast has become a ‘different’ place but often in ways that amount to an intensified, even more localised repetition of patterns from the past. Before Sunrise may therefore be viewed as an attempt, via another, idiosyncratic version of repetition, to retrieve lost possibility from an alternate approach to place: to find difference through repetition. The film presents a challenge as we face the wider effort to reflect on the distinctiveness –​the notional historical and social ‘difference’ –​of the post-​Troubles period in Northern Ireland. Michael Ignatieff has written of how post-​conflict zones are places ‘not living in a serial order of time but a simultaneous one, in which the past and present are … continuous’.99 Places such as Belfast insistently compel us therefore to negotiate the ‘present past’ in ways that might be traumatic or that might, yet, offer up new possibility –​ just at the moment when the drift towards the logic of the non-​place has become ever stronger.100 Notes 1 Colin Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit? Archive fever, photography and the peace in Belfast’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 567. 2 Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit?’, 567. 3 Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker, The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2009) p. 13. 4 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005) p. 17. 5 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 18. 6 McLaughlin and Baker, The Propaganda of Peace, p. 15. 7 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 1. 8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xv. 9 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. xv. 10 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 1. 41

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11 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005; first edition 1997), p. 306. 12 Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd, introduction to Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Radical Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 10–​11. 13 What the practical application of such lessons might be is a particularly troubling question, given the potentially damaging effects of actual breakdowns in the political process. Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd argue in this regard ‘that although radical democracy has undoubted strengths as an interpretative frame, particularly for divided societies in the midst of political transformation and as a critique of liberal democracy … it needs to be clearer in its critique of democracy (including its exploration of popular sovereignty and rule of the people)’; Little and Lloyd, The Politics of Radical Democracy, p. 11. 14 Vikki Bell, ‘Spectres of peace: civic participation in Northern Ireland’, Social and Legal Studies, 13:3 (2004), 403. 15 Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 80. 16 Bell, ‘Spectres of peace’, p. 404. 17 McLaughlin and Baker, The Propaganda of Peace, p. 15. 18 Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past:  Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 21. 19 Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p.  21. It is worth adding here that this process also included the newly founded Women’s Coalition, a group who sought to offer a non-​sectarian alternative to the polarised and predominantly patriarchal positions of the mainstream parties. For an account of the role of the Women’s Coalition in the peace negotiations, see Kate Fearon and Rachel Rebouche, ‘What happened to the women? Promises, reality and the Women’s Coalition’, in Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephens (eds), A Farewell to Arms? Beyond the Good Friday Agreement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 280–​301. 20 A detailed chronology of the conflict is available as part of CAIN: the University of Ulster’s ‘Conflict archive on the internet’. See http://​cain.ulst.ac.uk [last accessed 02/​ 08/​16]. 21 Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p. 21. 22 Caroline Kennedy-​Pipe, ‘From war to uneasy peace in Northern Ireland’, in Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 53. 23 Kennedy-​Pipe, ‘From war to uneasy peace in Northern Ireland’, p. 53. 24 Michael Cox, ‘Rethinking the international: a defence’, in Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 429. 25 Dixon prefers to argue that ‘internal’ British and Irish political manoeuvres remained central and it was less a radical break with ‘the British past in Ireland’ than ‘tactical adjustments’ in the general continuity of the British position that facilitated change. Almost the same policies, he notes, were held in the 1990s to those which helped forge the similar Sunningdale Agreement in 1973, without any international assistance; the Good Friday Agreement effectively being, as former SDLP Deputy Leader Seamus Mallon famously described it, ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. See Paul Dixon, ‘Rethinking the international: a critique’, in Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 410. 26 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 128. 27 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 1. 28 Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 4. 42

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2 9 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 188. 30 Hugh Mackay, ‘The globalisation of culture?’ in D. Held (ed.), A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics and Politics (London/​New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 48. 31 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. xiii. 32 Aaron Kelly, ‘Geopolitical eclipse: culture and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 546. 33 In Aughey’s The Politics of Northern Ireland:  Beyond the Belfast Agreement he discusses some of the consequences of the Agreement in terms of ‘constructive ambiguity’, broadening the discussion beyond attributes of the actual accord. See Aughey, The Politics of Northern Ireland: Beyond the Belfast Agreement (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 148–​54. 34 Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p. 23. 35 For another view of the implications of the Agreement’s ‘constructive ambiguity’ see David Mitchell, ‘Cooking the fudge: constructive ambiguity and the implementation of the Northern Ireland Agreement, 1998–​2007’, Irish Political Studies, 24:3 (2009), 321–​36. 36 These and other details on the project are available at www.theagreement.org/​main. php [last accessed 02/​08/​16]. 37 A prominent prior example of this aspect of his practice is Fragments sur les Institutions Républicaines IV (1993–​97):  a massive monumentalising of the tiny secret messages smuggled out of the Maze prison by IRA prisoners. 38 Cullen cites Jacques Derrida’s notes on ‘The Post Card’ in accompanying comments on the sculpture, identifying a self-​consciously deconstructive conceptual orientation (www.theagreement.org/​sculpture.php). Derrida’s writings are found in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987). 39 Daniel Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here, or, the end of the history of Northern Irish art’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 528. 40 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Review:  Shane Cullen 114 Sheriff Street  –​ Dublin’, Artforum, May 2003, 182. 41 Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Review: Shane Cullen’. 42 Liam Gillick, ‘Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part  1 of 2:  the discursive’, e-​flux journal, 2 (2009). Available at www.e-​flux.com/​journal/​ maybe-​it-​would-​be-​better-​if-​we-​worked-​in-​groups-​of-​three-​part-​1-​of-​2-​the-​discursive/​ [last accessed 02/​08/​16]. 43 Gillick, ‘Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three’. 44 See Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), p. 20; and Hal Foster, ‘Arty party’, London Review of Books, 25:23 (2003), 22. 45 Mouffe, On the Political, p. 9. 46 Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p.  23. A  minor, though certainly typical, issue here is that the Agreement itself is referred to as either the ‘Good Friday’ or ‘Belfast’ Agreement:  Nationalists and Republicans generally apply the former name and Unionists the latter. The ‘Stormont’ Agreement is a third name used for this single ‘unifying’ document. 47 Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p. x. 48 Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 1. 49 These disturbances were prompted by a Belfast City Council decision to cease flying the Union Jack on all days of the year and to instead raise it only on specific, agreed 43

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50 51

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54 55 56 57 5 8 59 60 61 62 63

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days. See ‘Belfast flag protests: Loyalists clash with police after rally’, BBC News (8th December 2012). Available at www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-​northern-​ireland-​20652968 [last accessed 02/​08/​16]. Bill Rolston, Drawing Support 2:  Murals of War and Peace (Belfast:  Beyond the Pale Publications, 1995), p. 1. See Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts:  Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1997). Terry Eagleton makes a related point in his Field Day pamphlet on Nationalism: ‘One can make rational choices between forms of politics, but not for the most part between forms of cultures, so that to redefine the political in cultural terms  –​ to call Orange marches a celebration of one’s cultural heritage, for ­example –​is to render one’s politics far less vulnerable to critique’; Eagleton, Nationalism:  Irony and Commitment (Derry:  Field Day Theatre Company, 1988), pp. 7–​8. Aidan Dunne’s substantial essay on Sloan’s work (published in the accompanying catalogue to the latter’s retrospective at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and Orchard Gallery in Derry) has been very useful here; see Aidan Dunne, ‘A broken surface: Victor Sloan’s photographic work’, in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980–​2000 (Belfast/​Derry: Ormeau Baths Gallery/​Orchard Gallery, 2001), p. 66. This term was used as the inspiration for the first major photographic exhibition at Tate Modern, Cruel and Tender, in 2003. Curator Emma Dexter notes that ‘in the introductory text for [Walker] Evans’s first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993, Photographs of Nineteenth Century Houses, [Lincoln Kirstein wrote], “Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia await the tender cruelty of Evans’s camera” ’; cited in Emma Dexter, Cruel and Tender:  Photography and the Real (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), p. 21. Kate Bush, ‘This unfortunate thing between us’, in Phil Collins: Yeah … You, Baby, You (Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Gallery & Shady Lane Productions, 2005), pp. 13–​26. Bill Horrigan, in Phil Collins: Yeah … You, Baby, You (Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Gallery & Shady Lane Productions, 2005), p. 35. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October, 110 (2004), 65. Bishop cites the theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as a significant influence. It is important to recall here the Real IRA bombing of Omagh town centre on 15th August 1998, only a few months after the Agreement was signed. Twenty-​nine people died in the bombing and close to three hundred were injured. Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 1. Cox et al., A Farewell to Arms, p. 1. Dawson, Making Peace with the Past, p. 1 Glenn Patterson, ‘I’m a stranger here myself’, Guardian (6th August 2005). Available at www.theguardian.com/​travel/​2005/​aug/​06/​belfast.unitedkingdom.guardiansaturdaytravelsection [last accessed: 08/​08/​16]. See Alan Bairner, ‘The flâneur and the city: reading the “new” Belfast’s leisure spaces’, Space and Polity, 10:2 (2006), 121–​34. William J.V. Neill and Geraint Ellis, ‘Spatial planning in contested territory:  the search for a place vision in “Post-​Troubles” Northern Ireland’, in Colin Coulter and Michael Murray (eds), Northern Ireland after the Troubles:  A  Society in Transition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 99. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (London: Basic Books, 2001), p. 216. 44

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6 5 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 216. 66 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 217. 67 In this regard a necessary task is to update the type of analysis of ‘visual regimes’ in Northern Ireland that characterised Troubles-​era accounts such as Liam Kelly’s Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland (Cork: Gandon Editions, 1996). 68 Anthony Vidler writes of how ‘Modernity has been haunted … by a myth of transparency: transparency of the self to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this represented, if not constructed, from Jeremy Bentham to Le Corbusier, by a universal transparency of building materials, spatial penetration, and the ubiquitous flow of air, light and physical movement’; see Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 217. 69 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. xiv. 70 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 216. 71 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1. 72 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 7. 73 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 7. 74 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. x. 75 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 157. 76 See Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art and Research, 1:2 (2007). Available at www.artandresearch.org.uk/​v1n2/​mouffe.html [last accessed 02/​ 08/​16]. 77 Colin Davidson, Silent Testimony, shown at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, 5th June 2015 –​ Sunday 17th January 2016. See also my essay ‘The double demand of Silent Testimony’ in the accompanying exhibition catalogue: Colin Davidson: Silent Testimony (Belfast: Ulster Museum, 2015). 78 Aaron Kelly, ‘Spaces of politics’, in Karen Downey (ed.), Where Are the People? Contemporary Photographs of Belfast, 2002–​2010 (Belfast: Belfast Exposed, 2010), p. 96. 79 In ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Benjamin wrote, ‘Atget … around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-​floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.’ See Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999; first UK edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 220. 80 Kelly, ‘Spaces of politics’, p. 96. 81 Hal Foster, ‘Blind spots: on the art of Joachim Koester’, Artforum, April 2006, 216. 82 Foster, ‘Blind spots’, p. 216. 83 The 30  years in the title of Graham’s book Northern Ireland:  30 Years of Photography referred to the life-​span of Belfast Exposed: an organisation founded in 1983 as a community photography initiative, but that has also since flourished as a gallery and commissioning agency for varied forms of contemporary practice. The book accompanied an exhibition at Belfast Exposed itself and at the MAC, Belfast’s Metropolitan Arts Centre. The exhibition ran from 10th May to 7th July 2013. 84 Colin Graham, ‘Belfast in photographs’, in Aaron Kelly and Nicholas Allen (eds), Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 157. 45

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85 Graham, ‘Belfast in photographs’, p. 158. 86 Graham, ‘Belfast in photographs’, p. 157. 87 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii. 88 Paul Seawright, notes on the photographic series Conflicting Account, available at www.paulseawright.com/​conflictingaccount/​[last accessed 08/​07/​16]. 89 Graham, ‘Belfast in photographs’, p. 158. 90 ‘Saville: Bloody Sunday killings unjustifiable’, RTE News (15th June 2010). Available at www.rte.ie/​news/​2010/​0615/​bloodysunday.html [last accessed 12/​06/​16]. 91 Matthew Moore, ‘Saville inquiry: David Cameron breaks with tradition by calling city Derry in Commons’, Telegraph (16th June 2010). Available at www.telegraph. co.uk/​news/​u knews/​n orthernireland/​7 830849/​Saville-​Inquiry-​David-​Cameron-​ breaks-​with-​tradition-​by-​calling-​city-​Derry-​in-​Commons.html [last accessed 10/​05/​ 16]. 92 Eimear O’Callaghan, ‘City of Culture hope scales walls of Derry’, Irish Times (24th July 2010). Available at www.irishtimes.com/​opinion/​city-​of-​culture-​hope-​scales-​ walls-​of-​derry-​1.626715 [last accessed 12/​05/​16]. 93 Neil Jarman, ‘Changing places, moving boundaries: the development of new interface areas’, Shared Space, 1 (2004), 5. 94 Peter Shirlow, ‘Belfast: a segregated city’, in Colin Coulter and Michael Murray (eds), Northern Ireland after the Troubles:  A  Society in Transition (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 73. 95 Shirlow, ‘Belfast: a segregated city’, p. 74. 96 Shirlow, ‘Belfast: a segregated city’, p. 73. 97 Isobel Harbison, ‘Seamus Harahan’, text included in the accompanying guides for Nought to Sixty at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 5th May to 2nd November 2008. 98 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990),​ p. 61. 99 Michael Ignatieff, ‘The elusive goal of war trials’, Harper’s, March 1996, pp. 15–​17. 100 The term ‘present-​past’ figures centrally in both Graham Dawson’s Making Peace with the Past and Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida also talks of ‘the persistence of a present past, which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of’; see Spectres of Marx, p. 126.

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B2B New terrains: ‘Northern Irish art’ ​ in the wider world

What gives place its specificity is not some internalised history but the fact that it is construed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. Instead then of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around them, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, or a region, or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of space which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.1 Belfast is finished and Belfast is under construction.2

Precarious positioning: local practice, international language This book has a straightforward focus:  the contemporary art of post-​Troubles Northern Ireland. But one challenge faced in addressing this subject has been to ask how best to critically contextualise Northern Ireland’s art within an expanded sphere of international visual art practice, especially given the extent to which this wider field has changed during the peace process and post-​Troubles years. Contemporary art during this period is generally considered to have become a profoundly global field of cultural production. In reflecting on the range of interests and issues that are relevant to post-​Troubles art, it is not only very clear that broader global developments in art have affected ‘local’ practices, institutions and critical discourses in important ways, but also that a significant amount of Northern Ireland’s art of this period has been presented in a range of prominent situations on the international stage. Moreover, heightened alertness to the intersections of local concerns and international connections is one of the defining characteristics of much of the most significant Northern Irish art of the last two decades –​a consideration that points to the potential hazard of placing ‘Northern Irish art’ within a too-​tightly constructed ‘local’ frame. 47

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One point worth making in relation to these issues is that the time-​scale covered by this book follows directly from the period covered in Liam Kelly’s Thinking Long: Contemporary Art from the North of Ireland. Kelly’s book is an ambitious survey, attempting to be ‘comprehensive in range’ and providing coverage of the most prominent, acclaimed or otherwise influential art from (or relating to) Northern Ireland, during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Published in 1996, Kelly’s history concludes in 1994, at a point when he was evidently unable to include (in a volume which is effectively a study of art’s relationship with the Troubles) references to such pivotal late-​Troubles and early peace-​process moments as the 1994 IRA ceasefire, which enabled much subsequent negotiation and gradual, anxious change. For Daniel Jewesbury, therefore, Kelly’s book failed to consider ‘crucial developments that had started to affect the production of art in Northern Ireland by the mid-​1990s’ and as such his ‘supposedly contemporary analysis was already out of date by the time it was published’.3 In one simple sense, then, the present book can be seen to continue Kelly’s process of addressing ‘contemporary art from the North of Ireland’ by considering developments in the wake of his conclusions. (It is worth noting that Thinking Long was itself conceived of as the next episode in the Art in Ulster survey series which began with John Hewitt’s 1957 summary of art from the previous four hundred years, and continued with Mike Catto’s account, published in 1977, of the next twenty.) Several issues vital to Kelly’s account of the art of the Troubles are inevitably still important. Most particularly, for instance, the emphasis in Thinking Long on artistic representations of, and interventions in, urban space has continued to be relevant: representations of the city have formed a major strand of art practice from Northern Ireland in subsequent years. But whereas Kelly’s interest in this topic was more or less exclusively defined by the immediate territorial and sectarian tensions of the conflict (taking into account important questions concerning art’s relation to ‘the physical environments’ of the Troubles and exploring the traumatic effects of violence on cities and citizens) there is a need now to acknowledge changes in city life, in Northern Ireland and beyond. Post-​Troubles art has often self-​consciously contemplated the city in adjusted terms: as a terrain of uneasy peace that requires wider frames of reference for comprehending its current forms and experiences. Some sense of this expanded scenario of social change has been offered by Aaron Kelly, who stresses the essential influence of wider, international ‘post-​historical’ thinking on the shaping of the present reality and on the envisioning of the future in Northern Ireland: It is noteworthy that the current storm we call progress in the North seeks to assure us not merely that it demarcates a development but also that it is inevitable … The quartering of Belfast, its mutating skyline and increasingly globalised space all implore us that this progress  –​ which purportedly is for the benefit of everyone  –​ is fated and inexorable as the progressive alternative to conflict. But this alternative is a remedy that serves to deny alternatives to anything but itself. Such a position typifies the hegemony of neo-​liberal economics in this multi-​national moment, the belief that the ​ 48

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market proffers not merely the most preferable way to order a society but the only one.4

Despite the apparent certainty and solidity of this reality there is (as Aaron Kelly adds, and as we will continue to see throughout this book), ‘a profound fear in this end-​of-​history narrative of the “ghostly” return, what Derrida terms the revenant, an insecurity that history is not dead and buried and cannot simply be ­​ co-​opted to secure the encirclement of the present state of affairs’.5 Consciousness of the complex contradictions, pressures and potentialities of this historical burden (or of this end-​of-​history ‘unburdening’) is therefore vital in imagining how art might now be contextualised and critiqued. Fundamental to this challenge is a need to reflect on altered conditions not just for the production of space but also for the production of art in the contemporary world, registering the importance of circumstances that are not specifically ‘local’ but that shape –​ and even erase –​ the particularity of the local in powerful ways. In Daniel Jewesbury’s view, crucial developments in art from Northern Ireland coincided with the peace process and the post-​Agreement predicament, and these developments in art are conditions of these wider circumstances. This series of developments includes the founding and fostering of adventurous, independent artist-​led initiatives such as Catalyst Arts, the Golden Thread Gallery and Grassy Knoll Productions, as well as the emergence of several artists whose work demonstrated an increasingly diverse range of interests, as compared with the prominent art of the Troubles era. Such projects and practices require, Jewesbury argues, a critical shift away from a reductive form of Irish or Northern Irish art history (of which, he claims, Liam Kelly’s Thinking Long is a high-​profile example), that locates art ‘not just broadly “in reference to the conflict” but within the narrow spectrum of either “nationalist:unionist” or “conflictual:anti-​conflictual” political discourses’.6 Going further, Jewesbury proposes that ‘any meaningful examination of art production in the North today must inevitably exceed the historiography not just of Northern Irish art but of Northern Ireland itself  –​ the busted flush that yet frames a moribund binaristic political culture’.7 In ways that correspond to the overall arguments of this book, Jewesbury points to both the changes in art in Northern Ireland and the failure of criticism and art history to ‘find a methodology even to comprehend a position that might be offered as a critique of … pre-​existing contexts’.8 Crucially, he claims, there is a need to ‘argue for a critical position that is somewhere between a simplistic grouping-​by-​geography or a potentially parochial set of concerns, and a glib “international language” ’.9 Indeed one appropriate point of reference, with respect to how specific contemporary art projects might prompt such a shift in critical emphasis, would be the site-​specific ‘International Language’ project (2001), curated by Grassy Knoll Productions (Eoghan McTigue, Annie Fletcher and Phil Collins). Situated across various Belfast locations, this was an event that involved ten local and international artists (including Susan Philipsz, Sislej Xhafa, Jeremy Deller, Heather Allen and Liam Gillick) who were invited to ‘come and interpret Northern Ireland’s present historical positioning’, and were thus encouraged to respond ‘to Belfast’s 49

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current state of political and economic flux’.10 The resulting works, staged in a series of very different settings across the city, combined attention to idiosyncratic aspects of a conflict-​blighted city (such as the then-​persistent urban soundtrack of surveillance helicopters, addressed in a work by Xhafa) with gestures towards expanded or transformed understandings of the immediately present reality. Perhaps the key example of the latter was the Kissarama event co-​ordinated by Basque artist Asier Perez Gonzalez: a failed attempt to achieve the world record for the number of couples kissing simultaneously in one place. If nothing else, this was an intriguing, if disappointing, effort to change the terms on which mass public gathering might be possible in Belfast. It should be stressed, then, that in any challenge to a reductive account of Northern Ireland’s contemporary art and its relation to the legacies of the Troubles, we must adequately take account of shifts in global culture and broader shifts in art practice. Since the 1990s there have been profound changes in the way that contemporary art has come to be made, presented, distributed, promoted and mediated. These are not, in a proper consideration of Northern Irish art’s contemporary predicament, peripheral matters. Indeed critical reflection on contemporary art from any particular geographical region surely needs to now acknowledge the extent to which art practitioners and institutions have had to diversely adapt to a number of powerful influences. Firstly, there are the challenges of both cultural and economic globalisation, a phenomenon either initiated or accelerated in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall –​ a period roughly corresponding to the first stages of the Northern Ireland peace process. (The momentous historical impact of the former situation arguably helping to determine the latter’s outcome.) Secondly, there is the impact of broader global conflicts and crises in the long wake of 11th September 2001  –​ and to related matters of social inequity and civil liberty (if questions of security and the control of public and private space have had for instance, particular meanings and effects in the Troubles era, new ‘extrinsic’ pressures might be seen to apply in the post-​ Troubles years). Thirdly, we must take account of the pervasive impact of powerful innovations in communication technology: the rise of the internet and other accelerations of ‘the integrated spectacle’.11 These have not only altered how art is perceived, produced, disseminated and defined, but transformed the range of ways in which individuals and cultures can now relate and remember –​notions that have unavoidable relevance to questions of conflict and its aftermath.12 To think, therefore, about ‘contemporary art from Northern Ireland’, partly requires new responses to the question of what the word contemporary might now mean, and of how we might conceive of an art prepared for the pressures and potentialities of the twenty-​first century. How does the ‘contemporary’ manifest itself in one place as compared to the multiplicity of other, increasingly interlinked, places around the globe? And what, under these ever more intricately networked contemporary conditions, would now constitute a distinct ‘place’ at all? Terry Smith has argued in his 2009 book What is Contemporary Art? that an alertness to the complexities of ‘contemporaneity’ is fundamental to the formation 50

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of any adequate critique of the art of ‘the present’. To talk of the ‘contemporary’ is not, for Smith, to imply a singular sense of being ‘up to date’. Rather ‘contemporary’ now signifies ‘multiple ways of being with, in, and out of time, separately at once, with others and without them’.13 Emphasising ‘contemporaneity’ announces the need to move beyond long-​standing historical and philosophical markers such as ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ and towards the intensive antinomies of ‘the current world picture’.14 Recognising the vital specificity of ‘the contemporary’ allows us to see a spectrum of concerns ranging from, as Smith notes, ‘the interactions between humans and the geosphere, through the multeity of cultures and the ideoscape of global politics to the interiority of individual being’.15 Such contingencies of the contemporary world provide the essential context for art, while also determining its questioning content and precarious forms: Contemporary art has become –​in its forms and its contents, its meanings and its usages –​thoroughly questioning in nature, extremely wide-​ranging in its modes of asking and in the scope if its inquiries. At the same time, in the absence of historical guarantees and the half-​light of the deadly competition for global control, art, like every other human activity, can be no more than provisional as to its expectations about answers. Provocative testers, doubt-​filled gestures, equivocal objects, tentative projections, diffident propositions, or hopeful anticipations: these are the most common forms of art today. What makes these concerns distinct from the contemporary preoccupations of previous art is that they are addressed –​ explicitly, although more often implicitly –​ not only by each work of art to itself and to its contemporaries but also, and definitively, as an interrogation of the ontology of the present, one that asks: What is it to exist in the conditions of contemporaneity?16

The states of precariousness and provisionality pointed to here might seem to limit scope for art to be, in fact, reliably or representatively ‘contemporary’ in any useful sense at all –​ for it to achieve, as Hal Foster has suggested, the ‘symbolic weightiness’ necessary to be a signpost to historical conditions; for it to attain, in other words, ‘a privileged purchase on the present’.17 And yet, as Foster has elsewhere argued, it is this very precariousness of art –​with its formal and conceptual emphasis on incompletion, fragility, failure, indeterminacy and disaggregation –​ that holds the promise of criticality with regard to contemporary conditions. ‘Precariousness seems almost constitutive of much art’, Foster says, ‘yet sometimes in a manner that transforms this debilitating affliction into a compelling appeal’.18 For curator and writer Nicholas Bourriaud, this precarious character of the contemporary world is nevertheless paradoxical: Social life seems more fragile than ever, and the bonds that make it up seem increasingly tenuous. The contracts that govern the labour market merely reflect this general precariousness, which mirrors that of commodities whose rapid expiration now permeates our perception of the world. Originally, the term ‘precarious’ referred to a right of use that could be evoked at any time. It must now be admitted that each of us now intuitively perceives existence as a collection of ephemeral entities, far from the impression of permanence that our ancestors, 51

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whether rightly or wrongly, formed of their environment. Paradoxically, however, the political order that governs this chaos has never seemed so solid: everything is constantly changing, but within an immutable and untouchable global framework to which there no longer seems to be any credible alternative.19

This dialectical sense that all life is constituted by permanent upheaval, but is at that same time lacking any possibility for substantive political change –​ that flexibility and fluidity define the individual experience of work and relationships while forms of control become ever more insidious and invasive –​is characteristic of the contemporary condition that Mark Fisher has labelled ‘capitalist realism’. This is defined as ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’.20 Such a shrugging ‘realism’ is easily related to manifestations of post-​history and post-​politics in Northern Ireland  –​ and with the efforts of artists to find appropriate means to ‘respond’ to these uneasily ‘resolved’ conditions, or to somehow speculate on otherwise unavailable alternatives. For Bourriaud (as, to a degree, for Foster) art remains a viable space for such speculation. Today’s art, Bourriaud argues, offers ways of discovering if there are ‘cutting edges to be found in the precarious universe’: Art has found a way not only to resist this new unstable environment but also to draw new strength from it, and that new forms of culture … could very well be developed in a mental and material universe whose backdrop is precariousness. For this is the situation in these early years of the twentieth-​first century, in which transience, speed and fragility reign in all domains of thought and cultural production giving rise to what might be described as a precarious aesthetic regime.21

But art is also at all times thoroughly implicated:  a product of the system we might wish it to contest (and indeed Bourriaud himself has been accused of being somewhat too comfortably supported within the neo-​liberal order as, formerly, Gulbenkian Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Britain22). If the term ‘contemporary art’ means anything, Terry Smith suggests, it is most obviously the name for the institutionalised network through which the art of today presents itself to itself and to its interested audiences all over the world. It is an intense, expansionist, proliferating global subculture, with its own values and discourse; communicative networks; heroes, heroines, and renegades; professional organisations; defining events; meetings and monuments; markets and museums –​in sum, distinctive structures of stasis and change.23

These various possibilities and problems recall Liam Gillick’s contention that art is a ‘space for what cannot be tolerated but can be accommodated under the conditions of neo-​liberal globalisation’; a cultural split personality which is, he concludes, ‘its strength and weakness’.24 Whether or not Gillick’s paradoxical view makes a convincing case for art’s political agency today, the dilemmas and difficulties he identifies are nevertheless critical to the predicament contextualising any ‘local’ investigation of properly contemporary practices. In the subsequent 52

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sections of this chapter, I want now to consider some of the ways in which the representation of art from Northern Ireland can be seen in light of these wider contexts of production and distribution, just as we remain acutely aware of the distinctive historical circumstances ‘closer to home’ that are also essential in framing a critical appraisal of Troubles and post-​Troubles art. The Nature of Things: Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale In 2005, a group exhibition of contemporary art from Northern Ireland was staged for the first time at the Venice Biennale. It wasn’t unusual to find artists from (or based in) the region featuring in the line-​up of this prestigious international show. Since 1993, when Ireland had returned to national participation in the Biennale after a gap of over thirty years (a return initiated and led by influential Derry-​born curator Declan McGonagle, then director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art) five artists linked significantly with the North had been selected for the Venice exhibitions. These artists were Willie Doherty, Shane Cullen, Alastair MacLennan, Anne Tallentire and Siobhán Hapaska (the recurring, unofficial policy at that time appeared to involve pairing an artist from the North with one from the South in a two-​person national representation25). In addition, artists from Northern Ireland had sometimes been invited to contribute to other regional representations at the Biennale: in 2005 and 2007, respectively, Cathy Wilkes and Tony Swain were included in Scotland at Venice shows and Paul Seawright featured in the 2003 Welsh exhibition.26 On rare occasions too, a fortunate few have even reached the vertiginous and auspicious heights of the high profile central presentations at La Biennale –​ the grandly themed group exhibitions that every two years purport to present a plausible up-​to-​the-​moment survey of contemporary art’s current preoccupations and manifestations.27 These monumental surveys and signature curatorial ‘statements’ have been a vital feature of the Venice Biennale since 1980 when the Biennale’s artistic directors, Harald Szeeman and Achille Bonita Oliva, introduced the Aperto: a group exhibition initially staged as a showcase for the work of younger artists. The Aperto evolved in such a way as to eventually supersede the long-​established array of national pavilions, becoming the dominant feature and principal focus of the overall Biennale. Since then, as Charlotte Bydler writes, the presence of ‘permanent national pavilions’ at the Venice Biennale, has been ‘constantly criticised but … tolerated as an eccentric feature’.28 Until 2005, however, no exhibition dedicated exclusively to art practice from Northern Ireland had been proposed for this illustrious art-​world arena, the decision to stage a stand-​alone show, and so to break from the relatively long-​standing all-​Ireland arrangement, being portentously characterised by one concerned commentator as ‘a major paradigm shift in the national and international presentation and reception of artists from this island’.29 The strategic devolving of Irish art’s representation on this occasion was, as Gavin Murphy comments, ‘very Good Friday’.30 Yet the desire for self-​determination on the part of certain Northern Irish curators and artists was less inspired by political realities and questions of cultural 53

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identity than it was prompted by art-​world exigencies and opportunities. The perceived successes in the promotion of artists from Scotland and Wales at previous Venice Biennales had appeared to offer a valuable model for establishing a visible and memorable presence on this crowded international stage. The curators of Scotland’s first independent showcase at Venice in 2003, Kay Pallister and Francis McKee (the latter is another influential Northern Irish presence within the Scottish art scene), had, for instance, developed their group project in order to celebrate the depth and quality of a local, but vibrantly cosmopolitan, art community, resisting the more traditional emphasis in recognised national representations at the Biennale on honouring a single established, exemplary figure. In an essay looking back on their exhibition, McKee and Pallister recall their curatorial motives: Rather than follow the model used by many other countries of presenting the work of a single, senior artist, we wanted to provide a more generous platform for several artists to show their work to the Biennale’s vast international audience (figures for recent Biennales were around 400,000 visitors). This also suited what we saw as a new fluidity in the approach to the Biennale, prevalent in Venice since the late 1990s, and discernible in the rise of group shows, selections of younger artists, nations choosing artists from other countries, and through that, displaying a more complex approach to national boundaries.31

Their Zenomap exhibition was widely praised for what Frieze writer Dan Fox called the ‘sagacious charm’ of its contents: variously complex and crowd-​pleasing works by Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling, plus a rich complementary programme of newly commissioned performances and films by numerous emerging artists.32 But the show also received plaudits as a result of the organisers’ canny marketing abilities, with McKee and Pallister successfully creating a critical and social buzz about the exhibition –​so adding to the already significantly reputation of Scottish contemporary art. Essential to these efforts was, for example, the hosting of a lively post-​opening party, which was, the curators remember, ‘attended by over 1000 people, including not only all our Scottish artists and their friends and families … but also a huge international contingent of museum directors, art collectors, journalists and gallerists’. Key art-​world stakeholders and opinion-​formers were thus ‘immediately aware of Scotland in Venice as the city buzzed for days after about the event’.33 Such promotional strategies undoubtedly helped to boost the Scottish contingent’s profile and appeal on their Venice debut. One reviewer, for instance, seemed as satisfied with the aesthetic sophistication of Zenomap  –​ praising its combination of ‘the rational and reasonable with the imaginative and uncertain’ –​ as he was with the warm feeling that ‘Scotland provided the friendliest welcome’, recalling with delight how visitors to the show were presented ‘with an appropriately sponsored Glenfiddich “doggy bag” of artists’ prints and posters’.34 This first Scottish outing in Venice was an ‘independent’ showcase insofar as it was classified not as an official national representation –​a formal ambassadorial 54

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‘pavilion’ –​but rather as a so-​called ‘collateral event’: one of the exhibitions that feature in an eclectic and extensive schedule of cultural activities presented in association with, but running parallel to, the mainstream Biennale programme at various venues throughout the city. Northern Ireland’s debut had this same independent, and therefore institutionally marginal, status. Positioned ambiguously in relation to the overarching Biennale structure as one of a significant number of group representations of geographically related art practices (which that year also included Scotland and Venice 2005: Selective Memory and Somewhere Else: Artists from Wales), it was a semi-​autonomous regional assembly designed as an addition to, but separate from (and without the accepted ‘authority’ of), the official selections from Ireland and Britain. Entitled The Nature of Things, Northern Ireland’s ‘collateral’ participation was curated by Hugh Mulholland, then the director of the Ormeau Baths Gallery –​ at that time Belfast’s major contemporary art space and a key hub of the local scene.35 Mulholland’s strategy, following Scotland’s example, was to use this rare opportunity to profile a sizeable, varied range of current practices, dividing his selection into a two-​stage project that comprised both a gallery exhibition, which would run for the duration of the Biennale period (June to November), and a weekend-​long mini-​festival of performances and site-​ specific interventions in non-​art spaces, scheduled to take place close to the exhibition’s conclusion. In this way Mulholland made room for a total of thirteen artists, the majority of whom were largely unknown on the international art scene. Committed to declaring diversity as a positive value, the exhibition presented work that to an important extent also reflected the anxious ‘public’ perspectives of much contemporary art from the North.36 Electing to show such an abundance of new work in such an exhibition context was undoubtedly ambitious. Biennales are often overwhelming events for even the most invested art-​world insider or committed art-​tourist  –​ and have been condemned by some for facilitating only superficial cultural experiences. This form of large-​scale exhibition has proliferated significantly over the last two decades. For the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, the Biennale paradigm represents a moment of frivolous ‘festivalism’ in art: a phenomenon that Schjeldahl suggests was in fact ‘invented’ by former Venice director Harald Szeemann with his ‘fiercely avant-​garde’ show Live in Your Head:  When Attitudes Become Form in 1969.37 Festivalism is, Schjeldahl says, ‘anything that commands a particular space in a way that is instantly diverting but not too absorbing … the drill is ambulatory consumption: a little of this, a little of that’.38 Understood in these sceptical terms, as Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø write in their introduction to a compilation of essays analysing the Biennial form and phenomenon: the word biennial has come to signify nothing more than an overblown symptom of spectacular event culture, the result of some of the most specious transformations of the world in the age of late capitalism –​ in short a Western typology whose proliferation has infiltrated even the most far-​reaching parts of the world, where such events are little more than entertaining or commercially driven showcases designed to feed an ever-​expanding tourist industry.39 55

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Such systems and symptoms are, for critics of this form of art distribution and display, ‘dangerous to the development of serious art’.40 Reflecting on his own experience of curating the 2007 Venice Biennale, Robert Storr has acknowledged the challenges of this exhibition context, suggesting that while biennials are not ‘for people in a hurry’ it is very difficult to break ‘the public of its habit of rapidly consuming images, rather than fully registering them at a pace dictated by the medium and the uses of it made by the artist’.41 Such a challenge is certainly pronounced in Venice, given the grand scale of the central programme and the increasing multiplicity of official and unofficial fringe activity. Northern Ireland’s intentionally plural representation in 2005 was one of thirty collateral events seeking to catch the attention of Biennale audiences. Moreover, these events were staged alongside fifty-​five national pavilion exhibitions and at the margins of two main Biennale exhibitions (curated by Spaniards Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez) which together included substantial presentations by a total of ninety-​five artists. The dedicated visitor to the Biennale, hoping for something close to a complete picture of the overall event, must be, therefore, almost necessarily in a hurry, despite any wish to avoid ‘rapidly consuming images’. And indeed, as Charlotte Bydler suggests, it may even be the case that ‘the sheer magnitude of the event matters’  –​ in ways that have significant ideological import within the wider frame of the globalised art world. The Venice Biennale is ‘overwhelming’, Bydler says; ‘it has become successively larger with each edition, and it should be –​it should not be possible to master’.42 Against this characterisation of an exhibition like the Venice Biennale as a place of dizzying spectacle and distracting leisure, specifically designed to be daunting and overwhelming, there is also an argument that such significant presentations of contemporary art can still hold out progressive cultural promise. Okwui Enwezor, curator of the main exhibition in 2015, has argued that large-​scale exhibitions can ‘create possible uses for spectacle’, allowing artists and curators to make ‘interventions in culture’. As curator of Documenta 11 in 2002, Enwezor made a determined effort to foreground reflection on the political conditions of globalisation, while remaining fully conscious that he was working within a specific exhibition model that had emerged as a ‘promotional’ mechanism for Western values in the wake of the Second World War. Documenta was, as Niru Ratnam has noted, ‘a Cold War project designed to … showcase Western capitalist culture to those living under Stalinist rule’.43 For Enwezor, the scale and reach of such foundationally ‘compromised’ occasions can nevertheless allow for radically plural artistic propositions and unanticipated outcomes: When done properly, large-​scale shows create the conditions for introducing new possibilities in artistic practice, and for rethinking prevailing conditions of production at the same time as creating a rich ground for curatorial experimentation. Of the species of large-​scale exhibitions, biennials in particular remain unique laboratories from which we constantly learn.44

In the case of Venice, one of the conditions for ‘rethinking conditions of production’ arises out of the expansion of the wider exhibition programme. For if

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biennial exhibitions can be accused of promoting superficial ‘festivalism’, a strong dialectical counter-​tendency to the increasing ‘homogeneity’ of cultural globalisation involves the production of new local and regional visibilities. A key characteristic of Venice Biennale exhibitions since the 1990s has been the abundance of regionally identified projects that exist outside of the traditional ‘national representation model’ as collateral events. The presence of such projects valuably makes visible less acknowledged ‘art worlds’ from around the globe, and so too therefore, makes space for the articulation of politically pressing questions from specific places that might be otherwise under-​represented in the mainstream media (revealing ‘that which the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’, to return again to Chantal Mouffe). But it is also vital to understand such projects, without necessarily negating their potential critical function, as part of ‘the production of locality’ that, as Hardt and Negri argue, arises out of the forces of globalisation: ‘The globalisation or deterritorialisation operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localisation or reterritorialisation, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of differentiation and identification.’45 The meaning and value of such ‘regional’ or ‘local’ representations in the context of broader economic and cultural networks is a subject we will return to, but it is useful to note at this stage that though the new ‘partition’ in the representation of Ireland’s art at Venice was a predictably controversial manoeuvre ‘at home’, this was a shift that resonated in relation to wider changes in the global art world –​one that presented new possibilities and that at the same time introduced new anxieties about place and representation. For curator Hugh Mulholland, Northern Ireland’s guest pass for the art world’s most influential gala was to be viewed as an entirely unprecedented chance to speak up for a selection of distinctive practices that might otherwise have been overlooked as possible Venice selections: Promoting the idea of separate participation for Northern Ireland did raise concerns for me. However, even with the open-​handedness of including a thirty-​two county Ireland, there is no guarantee that artists working in Northern Ireland would be considered. I think it is vital that we continue to create opportunities for ourselves. This is of much greater importance to us because we’ve always been isolated in Northern Ireland, even when we’ve been included in cultural or political thinking related to Ireland or Britain.46

Much seems wrapped up in Mulholland’s ‘ourselves’: his imagined community being regionally delimited and self-​consciously peripheral but founded on peer solidarity and the exigencies of professional progress. Local specificity is invoked and at the same time disavowed. The notion of ‘national representation’ was not, Mulholland argued, a defining consideration: ‘we are not participating as a nation-​ state … our exhibition presents artists working in Northern Ireland but does not represent Northern Ireland’. The core issue was, therefore, supporting ‘artists who have made a significant contribution to artistic practice in Northern Ireland’.47 Nevertheless, if this commitment to a regional emphasis was principally founded

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on the need to secure an international platform to promote highly valued local practice –​while remaining uneasy about the historical and political burden associated with representing ‘Northern Ireland’ –​a shared concentration on very diverse aspects of Northern Irish life, especially cultural phenomena usually hidden from a broader international gaze, was still a significant feature of the exhibition. ‘I didn’t want to produce a “Northern Irish” show that offers a very trite view of the Northern Irish troubles’, Mulholland said. He did however wish ‘to reflect on things I think are particular to Northern Ireland’.48 So, as the exhibition statement was to make clear, The Nature of Things would present ‘a view of Northern Ireland that may not be known internationally’.49 Subjects and debates hitherto unacknowledged about Northern Irish society could be addressed and, in turn, an imbalance created by dominant representations could, potentially, be redressed. Such aspirations make an intriguing, complicated and contradictory case for the continued importance of ‘particular’ aspects of life in Northern Ireland: implying a need to differently represent that which is perhaps most generically particular to Northern Ireland –​ the causes and conditions of the Troubles and their fraught legacies –​while on the other indicating that in the ‘post-​Troubles’ situation there is need, perhaps, for a particular generality (presenting artists working in Northern Ireland, not representing Northern Ireland), dealing with the fact that the concerns of an emergent generation of artists are today somewhat different in relation to the contemporary experience of location (these artists are, Mulholland has said, ‘part of a wider conversation, one that is both local and international’). As with Scotland’s interest in ‘a more complex approach to national boundaries’, and with regard to the more ‘placeless’ spaces of the global art world, it is not difficult to see tensions regarding the changing situations of art practice, and their representation, becoming evident. Writing about the subsequent presentations by the internationally established artists Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne at the 2007 Venice Biennale –​the former representing Northern Ireland in a ‘collateral’ exhibition, with the latter featuring as the Republic’s official pavilion selection (but both showing in the same rented venue in the city) –​ Gavin Murphy proposed that these two important artists’ work ‘can be located within the drift from a concern with place-​bound politics and cultural difference towards more globalised and homogenous forms of subjectivity and identity’.50 Despite the fact that Doherty, in particular, maintains, on one level, a determined locatedness in his practice, returning again and again to the same sites in his native Derry to re-​examine and re-​imagine specific territories, his cinematic landscapes have also over the last decade or so been allowed to become, on occasion, more decisively ‘abstract’ and amenable to expanded interpretation, as works such as the pointedly titled Non-​Specific Threat (2005) would suggest. In this film we gaze only on an image of a quintessential movie thug –​ the camera circling a solitary male skinhead –​ while listening to a voiceover that provides no definitive information as to who this man is, where he is, or where he is from, and as to what manner of ‘threat’ we are facing. Though Non-​Specific Threat begins from a very specific source, insofar as the actor focused on in the film was chosen as a result 58

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of a prior role he played in a TV drama about interface violence in Belfast, this originating source and subject is abstracted as the figure is isolated, creating a referentially unstable situation for viewers as a result of this radical shift from the specific to the generic. Aptly, this film was selected for inclusion within the central exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale: appearing in the designated space of non-​ specificity within the Biennale territory. The steady shift in Doherty’s work should, of course, be partly understood in the context of the transforming post-​Agreement society of Northern Ireland: with its palpable, lasting tensions between the need to remember and the pressure to forget; between private silences and the public rhetoric of consensus; with its precarious combination of lingering, living ruins  –​ such as the still-​standing ‘peace-​lines’  –​ and its shimmering new architectural monuments to a commercially vibrant, ‘politics-​free’ future.51 But while local socio-​political realities are a vital consideration, the rapid changes in how art is now produced, distributed and consumed globally is certainly of equal relevance to how we view any ‘drift from place-​bound politics’. A typical view is expressed by the curator Uta Meta Bauer, who has argued (as a co-​curator of Documenta 11 with Okwui Enwezor) that today’s art should not expand its territory, but abandon it.52 Gavin Murphy rightly notes that Willie Doherty now negotiates ‘an international circuit less bound by the subtleties of geopolitical difference’.53 As such, a challenge becomes obvious with regard to how he (and fellow high-​profile artists from other parts of Ireland, such as Gerard Byrne) can be most productively contextualised by contemporary art criticism and art history  –​ and by the less domain-​specific proponents of a broader Irish studies. The ‘discernible drift’ from the local, Murphy argues, ‘goes against the grain of critical voices insisting on the centrality of Irishness as a marker of value in contemporary art practice’.54 Such practices navigate ‘a new terrain that is as yet uncharted by contemporary criticism in Ireland’ and urge us to acknowledge ‘the limits of Irishness as a marker of value in contemporary circumstances’.55 All of which has of course further repercussions for critical reflection on the staging of exhibitions of art from or about Northern Ireland, and on the subjects and strategies adopted in ‘specific’ practices. ‘New terrains’ in the work of William McKeown and Darren Murray Northern Ireland’s Venice 2005 exhibition The Nature of Things was undoubtedly a venture into ‘new terrain’. As the debut instance of a dedicated Northern Irish representation at the Biennale, this was an introduction to a sphere of cultural display that might be thought of as problematically ‘globalised’ or that might offer, as Arthur Danto has dreamily proposed, ‘a glimpse of a transnational utopia’.56 But the selected works themselves also explored new terrains. Among the works chosen by Mulholland were several that articulated idiosyncratic understandings of location and locatedness. Some sought to initiate expanded, diversified or radically altered processes of mapping and imagining terrains of multiple kinds. There were diverse efforts to explore the specific conditions of a location, and to newly 59

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understand the relationship between one place and another. Significant too were efforts made by certain artists to speculate on how spatial and territorial realities shape conditions of subjectivity. Some such works were explicitly engaged with conditions of place in Northern Ireland. Others dealt more obliquely with this ‘troubled’ geography. Others again departed altogether from territorial specificity, reflecting on questions of space and landscape within a wider art historical or philosophical frame –​linking to ideas of other places, and to other ideas of place. In this section I  want to begin a closer look at aspects and implications of the art chosen for The Nature of Things by addressing in some detail the work of two artists, William McKeown and Darren Murray, whose practices have this third orientation: their work investigating our relation to place and to ideas of landscape, but without referring directly to recognisable local contexts and to current socio-​political realities. These two artists, working predominantly within the medium of painting, offer neither overt consideration of post-​Troubles themes, nor ‘pictures’ of anything immediately connected to the geography of Northern Ireland. Their art directs our attention to terrain quite differently: looking either upwards or outwards, gazing into the ‘actual’ distance or towards imagined versions of real destinations. In different ways, both McKeown and Murray offer perspectives into spaces that exist beyond the constraints of local landscapes. Their work proposes visions of appealing or mysterious distant spaces. Each artist repeatedly concentrates on ideas of elsewhere and otherness, but each reaches a unique artistic position. They come to distinct, and not quite compatible, conclusions. In highly individual ways, then, these painters made intriguing arguments, within a broadly ‘post-​Troubles’ exhibition, for alternative understandings of the experience and representation of territory –​ complementing more direct engagements with post-​Troubles landscapes manifested in several of the other selected artists’ work (some of which we will turn to shortly). One important matter, as we begin to look closely at aspects of The Nature of Things –​ and most particularly at the practices of McKeown and Murray –​ is a clear preference in Mulholland’s curation of The Nature of Things for a revitalised idea of the aesthetic. Moreover, in proposing that art from Northern Ireland has entered a period of ‘reflection’, Mulholland made use of terms that suggested a merging of aesthetic interests with ethical motivations. The shared compulsion inspiring the selected practices was, he argued, ‘a desire to promote inclusion, hope and freedom through acceptance, love and beauty’.57 If we are seeing here a seemingly misty-​eyed move ‘from the political to the poetic’ –​ to invert the title of a high-​profile touring exhibition of Irish art from the late 1990s58 –​it is not an especially unusual shift or an isolated incident in the context of developments in contemporary art, since one of the characteristics of this expanded field since the 1990s has been a much-​debated return to investigations and celebrations of aesthetic possibility –​ a return, it might be noted, that follows a long period of ‘anti-​aestheticism’ arising from the legacies of 1970s conceptual art. In the introduction to their volume The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon record that 60

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from the 1970s through to the early 1990s prevailing tendencies in art theory rejected the discourse of aesthetics on the grounds that it was politically or ethically regressive. It was argued that claims for the aesthetic value of art were little more than covert ways of blocking the critical analysis of artworks and sustaining cultural elitism, traditional authority and the market.59

More recently, they contend, there has been a series of critical attempts to ‘rethink the relationship between ethics and aesthetics’ –​widely divergent efforts that they divide into three broad categories: the return to beauty, engaged art and participatory practice. Each of these trends in art practice involves ‘a concern with how the mode or manner in which the work treats its content, and the point of view from which it is addressed, disposes its viewers to see the world’.60 Within The Nature of Things, variations on aesthetic possibility proposed related and enlivening challenges to routine ‘dispositions’ towards the world. Some of the selected artists offered determinedly expansive, open-​ended or pluralistic visions, evoking spaces that are ‘real’ but also in excess of reality’s representation, while also at times problematising the aesthetic representation of place in a more critical mode. Artistic ‘excess’ is important in each of these instances, insofar as the works which spanned this range of aesthetically reflexive modes often had an affective dimension that was dislocating and disorientating (frustrating easy legibility) but that remained, to return to an earlier-​quoted comment from Terry Smith, determinedly concerned with ‘an interrogation of the ontology of the present, one that asks: What is it to exist in the conditions of contemporaneity?’.61 In the work of William McKeown, an artist who arguably had the most overt bearing on Mulholland’s curatorial vocabulary in the preparation of The Nature of Things (despite his work having the least explicit relevance to the post-​Troubles situation in Northern Ireland), such a worldly sense of aesthetic possibility is central, and the role of the aesthetic is precisely that of radically expanding how someone might see the world.62 ‘Beauty’ was regularly cited by this artist as the profound basis of an idea of freedom, but one that was seen to exist as a possibility only in an encounter between the presence of an available here and the potentiality of a hoped-​for elsewhere –​an ‘other’ space that is nonetheless ‘actual’. Through a variously configured installation-​based combination of large-​scale monochrome painting, small-​scale drawing (often focusing on frail botanical content) and specially constructed or altered spaces of display (often based on dimensions referring to pivotal rooms from the artist’s past), McKeown’s art demonstrates commitment to a dual sense of distance (Plates 6 and 7). There is enchantment, on the one hand, with the furthest reaches of our potential experience –​ a cherished idea of unbounded geographical and psychological terrain alluded to in the ‘open spaces’ of the paintings –​and, on the other, a fascination with precise elements of natural reality and with the exact and exacting circumstances of our embodied subjectivity in the world. In considering the contemplative ‘distance’ in the paintings, however, one could presume the work to be categorisable as a type of refined, formal abstraction. A likely, undemanding point of comparison (given the evident simplicity, the compositional and material restraint, of many of his monochrome 61

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canvases) might well be the post-​painterly or colour-​field styles of the 1960s that, for Clement Greenberg, were a lucid continuation, and perhaps a culmination, of the modernist pursuit of formal purity: modes of minimal art-​making that preferred ‘openness and clarity’ to an earlier era’s privileging of ‘density and compactness’.63 Yet the extreme openness of McKeown’s paintings in fact reveals an ebullient hospitality towards much that is often judged alien to abstraction (certainly in Greenberg’s account). The luminous ‘clarity’ of his paintings does not result from a refusal of representation, a radical elimination of all recognisable ‘content’, but rather it is a central quality in a vision of opened-​out worldly reality. McKeown’s colour-​fields are conceived of not merely as spaces of intense formal concentration but as fields of expansive natural possibility, referring directly to environmental phenomena, and in particular to morning or evening skies. But they are also vitally contextualised beyond the frame by crucial other elements of the installations (the drawings, for example, which appear to breach stylistic consistency and continuity but are planned to be conceptually complementary) each creating allusive connections to a world beyond. The often appealed-​to ‘beauty’ of the work is understood, then, as pointing towards a contingent, indeterminate state and situation rather than designating a self-​evident value or lasting ideal. It is less about fixing a perfect form than proposing a desirably liberating condition of in-​betweenness. One corresponding understanding of beauty, somewhat at odds with traditional accounts, is found in the writing of Alexander Nehamas, for whom the identification of beauty is theorised in contingent, speculative terms, as ‘a guess, a suspicion, a dim awareness’. To find something beautiful Nehamas says, is ‘to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile’; but this belief ‘goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future’. As such, ‘aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment’.64 Thought of in this relatively ‘open’ manner, the ‘beautiful’ identifies an anxiously or deliriously anterior situation –​ a vertigo of expectation –​ that is perhaps relevant to the decisive predicament of art such as that made by McKeown. And indeed, the numerous, quite general, references to imminent mornings and new beginnings (in exhibition titles such as The Sky Begins at Our Feet), to hope and to eternity (as in the Hope Paintings and the Forever Paintings), and to a situation of anxious expectation (as in the title of his 2008 Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Waiting for the Corncrake) were explicitly linked by McKeown to a desire to imagine a sense of space and identity alternative to that which shaped the Northern Irish world of his upbringing, and to that which arises out of restrictive, oppressive categories of sexuality.65 The clear spaces of McKeown’s paintings propose a meditative means of looking towards an open vision of nature, freed from the constraining categories of contemporary culture. McKeown believed that the ‘space’ of his work was ‘a space where there are no rules, no morals, no laws, no judgements, no systems. A space that is unconditional, all-​embracing and free’.66 What may be additionally disorientating about the vision of ‘free’ space in McKeown’s paintings  –​ at once grounded in material realities but also fully 62

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liberated from any conventional or static foundational ground to identity –​is how closely this expansive aesthetic vision might seem to be in tune with a broader rhetoric of postmodern (and post-​political) freedom, consistent with the deterritorialising conditions of contemporary capitalism. Hal Foster has insisted, for instance, that one influential voice in the related ‘return to beauty’ debate, the American critic Dave Hickey (who was a trusted critical touchstone for McKeown) merely offers, despite his appeal to the dissensual potential of a revived attention to the beautiful in art, ‘a sort of pop-​libertarian aesthetic, a neoliberal aesthetic very attuned to the market’.67 Potentially, we might be concerned that the libertarian aspirations of McKeown’s paintings could be subject to similar criticism. But in this regard, perhaps, the self-​conscious staging of these ‘freeing’ visions is an especially significant factor. For the specifically constructed architectures of display (or other adjustments to conventional white-​cube conditions of gallery viewing that McKeown has undertaken, such as wallpapering or repainting walls in ways that make the supporting or surrounding surfaces visible as part of the work) are employed to highlight the entirely structured conditions of viewing within the art field. McKeown asserts, therefore, the importance of creating, in these uncertain, anticipatory reflections on subjectivity and space, a changed, outward-​looking but still-​constrained situation. Crucial to the image of ‘new terrain’ in The Nature of Things was therefore a sense of spatial and ontological uncertainty, with works such as McKeown’s installation –​ a compact, austere chamber built within the existing rooms of the exhibition space –​ figuring as a provisional zone of in-​betweenness. There was a contemplative but tense to-​ing and fro-​ing between ‘here’ and ‘there’ within this individual artist’s work, but the exhibition also presented anxious shifts between differently nuanced states of space in the move from one artist to another. In this regard it is possible to follow connections from McKeown to the work of Darren Murray (Plate 8). Murray’s is a much more ironic, allegorical painting practice, concentrating on diverse caricatures and dense accumulations of desirable landscape imagery. It has an ‘excessive’ quality quite different to McKeown’s, but a useful link can be drawn to the latter on the basis of the work’s intended sensual richness. Murray’s style might easily refer us to claims about the ‘determinedly gratuitous’ or ‘anti-​essentialist’ condition of contemporary painting: the argument that ‘art is not one thing and that therefore no one way of looking is sufficient’.68 Equally, there are correspondences in Murray’s strategies of stylistic patterning and appropriation to Craig Owens’s view that ‘hybridisation’ is central to the ‘allegorical’ art of the postmodern –​an art characterised by ‘eclectic works which ostentatiously combine previously distinct art mediums’.69 There is a manifest multiplicity to Murray’s visual rhetoric: he carefully grafts contrasting pictorial modes onto one another, creating unlikely combinations of styles from contradictory traditions. In works such as Pays du Mont Blanc (2003), delicately rendered floral motifs, evoking a reserved and decorative practice of botanical illustration (echoing McKeown’s content, but in general contrasting with his tone),70 are brought 63

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together with outline images of mountain landscapes, indexing much greater natural grandeur; the domesticity of the former at variance with the wilder, sublime associations of the latter. Such contending components may then be interrupted by paint spills, suggesting energetic expressive experimentation, and the whole layered ‘scene’ will be captured in exuberant primary colours, that could, on the one hand, call to mind the refined purity of late modernist abstraction (again, loosely relating to McKeown) or, alternatively, suggest mass-​produced Pop tones. There is certainly a critical view of the cultural ‘constructedness’ of landscape in these works (and as such we can see relevant connections to the wider curatorial effort behind The Nature of Things to contemplate alternative visions of place) but their effect exceeds the comprehensible messages of an ideological critique of representation. Rather, Murray’s plurality of compacted and contrasted visions instils a sense of semiotic superfluity and affective intensity that is potentially disorientating in its bold over-​abundance. This is ‘new terrain’ that is, all at once, many alluring but incompatible terrains. It is also no precise terrain at all. It is utopian –​ both ‘beautiful’ and non-​existent –​but at the same time these are paintings often composed of uncannily familiar sights from our everyday travels in the mediated image-​world of late modernity. There is not only ‘mixture’ in Murray’s work –​not only hybrid forms, layered landscapes and multiple, criss-​crossing perspectives –​but also an emphatic, even simplistic, repetitiveness. Though these works draw on and force together forms and references from different geographical and historical sources (from Japanese illustration to European Romantic landscape painting to American Abstract Expressionism) the sense of visual stylistic heterogeneity they present is not quite as self-​consciously extreme as it might be in, say, the all-​over super-​hybrid compositions of mega-​artists of globalised contemporaneity such as Julie Mehretu, Matthew Ritchie or Franz Ackermann. Indeed, despite the apparent opening out onto multiple other worlds that we at first detect in Murray’s paintings, there is also a vital paring back and closing down. For one thing, his work involves recurring obsessions that in combination approach becoming a ‘signature style’. But the continually returned-​to tropes and techniques are also, crucially, influenced by another key set of repeating cultural forms that are about limited, inadvertently constrained visions: Western society’s forever recycled visions of ‘elsewhere’ in the form of the tourist paradise. Murray’s landscapes certainly allude to the major international art historical points of reference for the imagination of dramatic or distant place, and to the significant shifts in avant-​garde painting away from any connection to empirical reality. But in fact the particular content of his paintings can just as easily be drawn from the translation of these high-​cultural visual vocabularies into low-​cultural languages: his work drawing from omnipresent, commodified constructions of perfect places (slick advertising pics, glossy calendar scenes, travel brochure vistas, even the corny stock landscape views used on biscuit tins), so playing, therefore, on the visual pleasure we find even in the most unchanging, unchallenging representations of desired destinations. The paintings take us again and again to dream locations, offering tempting views of a ‘nature’ 64

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that has been made generically pleasing: designed, marketable and hyper-​real. In coupling these fascinations with his continued scrutiny of the capacities of painting itself, Murray seems, therefore, to anxiously relate our tourist experiences and expectations to artistic appeals (within modernism) to a notion of ‘transcendence’. But both sets of aspirations, both approaches to the relation between here and an ideal ‘there’ –​commercial and aesthetic –​are nevertheless found wanting, understood to be necessarily compromised efforts to ‘get-​away-​from-​it-​all’. Neither McKeown nor Murray’s works entirely need, then, the post-​Troubles situation in Northern Ireland as their interpretative context. Indeed they escape the specificity of this background in important ways. Like other significant painters with strong connections to Northern Ireland –​ such as Elizabeth Magill, Dougal McKenzie or Mark McGreevy –​it is arguably just as interesting to see their work in terms of a commitment, widely evident elsewhere in contemporary art (as Jason Gaiger has noted), towards ‘continuing to work with the limited means of painting in full cognisance of the challenges with which it is confronted, while yet maintaining a dogged belief in its critical and emancipatory potential’.71 Nevertheless, these critical contexts for their work need not be entirely exclusive. Indeed this sense of departure from recognisable points of reference with respect to the post-​ Troubles predicament was evidently fundamental to Hugh Mulholland’s selection of McKeown and Murray for The Nature of Things. McKeown and Murray are artists who dramatise in different ways a spirit of seeking out yet-​to-​be-​defined space within the complex, constraining structures of contemporary experience –​and in the context of this regional representation at the Venice Biennale their non-​specific speculations on landscape and locatedness assisted in expanding the overall exhibition’s vision of place. As such, their interests usefully correspond to other featured artists’ more overt explorations of both the particularity and non-​particularity of place in contemporary Northern Ireland –​investigations that, as we shall see, frequently seem to arise out of the problems and potentials of a post-​political ‘drift’ from grounded belonging. An art of ‘setting roots in motion’ The curator Nicholas Bourriaud has proposed the metaphor of the ‘radicant’ as a means of describing and categorising place-​related practices within contemporary art. This is a botanical designation relating to a plant such as an ivy which is not fixed to any one founding, rooted location, but rather becomes re-​rooted according to its spreading growth over an extended surface. Opposed to the ‘radical’, which in botanical terms refers to a single root system at the base of a stem, and that in historical terms Bourriaud relates to modernism’s interest in a ‘return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence’, the notion of the radicant is understood to facilitate greater mobility and flexibility in the understanding of how identity and knowledge are ‘grounded’.72 ‘To be radicant’, Bourriaud argues, ‘means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the 65

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power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing’.73 There is much that is potentially useful and appealing in this analogy with regard to the interests of some art practices from Northern Ireland –​ not least of all its specific relevance to the botanical imagery in McKeown and Murray’s de-​and re-​territorialising work and to the curatorial framing theme of ‘the nature of things’. But more importantly, if the advanced art of the twenty-​first century can be thought of as ‘invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favour of simultaneous or successive uprootings’, then there are certainly correspondences to be found in the ways that contemporary art from Northern Ireland often seeks to contest imposed structures of origin or unsettle received means of identifying with place.74 In this section I want to further survey and critically analyse some work by artists from Northern Ireland who all featured in The Nature of Things, tracing across several diverse practices some of the various ways in which relations to place are understood to be, or are encouraged into becoming, ‘unsettled’. The divergent approaches to be addressed here will include: a scrambling and blurring of local reference (in the work of Ian Charlesworth); protracted and estranging forms of observing specific locations (in videos and photographs by Seamus Harahan, Mary McIntyre); an emphasis on historical dislocation (in sculptural and video work by Katrina Moorhead, Sandra Johnston); incongruent juxtapositions of distinctive markers of place (sculpture and social interventions by Michael Hogg, Aisling O’Beirn and Bloomer and Keogh). One point that might be borne in mind as we begin to address this range of place-​related art from The Nature of Things, is that the ‘radicant’ idea with which I have prefaced this part of the discussion, is a largely celebratory take on ‘uprooting’ that could be interpreted as offering only a limited sense that strong tensions might exist in situations of ‘translating, transcoding and transplanting’ from one language or location to another. Indeed despite his interest in art’s value as a means of redefining social bonds, a common criticism of Bourriaud’s curatorial and critical work has been that he inadequately accounts for the political complexities of the issues he refers to and in certain cases also insufficiently acknowledges the (often vital) political paradoxes of the work he promotes.75 Bourriaud’s book The Radicant is an account of contemporary art’s ‘wandering forms’ that seeks to find ‘cutting edges’ in the ‘precarious universe’ of cultural globalisation.76 His contention is ‘that art has found a new way not only to resist this new unstable environment but also to draw strength from it’.77 Yet he often smoothes out edges in his largely euphoric accounts of art’s potential, underestimating the ambiguous effects of precariousness as it manifests itself in today’s art forms. In the case of artists from Northern Ireland, there is often a strong sense of roots being set ‘in motion’, of markers of position and place being staged ‘in heterogeneous contexts and formats’ (and so resisting the power of location to ‘completely define one’s identity’) but such uprootings are always to some degree disturbing processes, liberating and alarming at the same time. 66

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Related concerns, for instance, inform the practice of Ian Charlesworth, who demonstrates an always-​anxious relation between art and the world. In the case of the series I Know Who You Are (2003) and Some of My Friends (2002) –​among those featured in The Nature of Things –​his interests more directly concern a disjuncture between signature art practice and social context. Charlesworth has often taken as his starting point a very precise territorial marker, uncomfortably familiar to viewers in Northern Ireland, which is then transformed into unrecognisable, dense patterns –​ setting the ‘local’ in motion –​ his crucial recurring motif being a scrawled Ulster Volunteer Force graffito that he steadily multiplies to the point of blurred abstraction. Remarkably (but also unremarkably) Charlesworth found this ongoing source and focus of his distinctive critique of representation, artistic gesture, and the broader historical conditions of artistic production and reception, on the ceiling of a pub toilet near to his Belfast studio –​ and he has fixed on this crude low-​key trace of ‘Northern Irish life’ only to repeatedly re-​present it in an illegibly plural form. In his wall drawings, installations and ‘paintings’ (which are most often made with the flame of a cigarette lighter, in full tribute to the working methods of the vernacular socially engaged artists of his ‘local’) the artist’s mark is not merely an original aesthetic gesture but also an appropriation and troubling echo of another lone individual’s scrawled mark of political affiliation in a public place. Allusions to high modernist appeals for art’s ultimate separation from lived experience are evident here (Charlesworth’s art, in this sense like William McKeown’s, can in certain extreme iterations superficially resemble abstraction) but there is a constant, unresolved tension between such purely formal aspirations and a crudely resistant material and social reality. This resistant reality, in its random, unspectacular, quotidian manifestations, is also, but in a very different way, the continuing focus of Seamus Harahan’s video works. In the projected video installation Holylands (featured as a large, single screen projection within The Nature of Things, but previously presented as a multi-​channel video installation at Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2004) we are given access to a fragmentary and poetically inflected year-​long record of the comings and goings within a Belfast locality, presented predominantly from a hidden viewing position inside the artist’s home (Figure 6).78 As such, there is an edgy implication of disengagement from an external reality, an unsettling awareness that a wholly voyeuristic safe distance is being maintained. In the Northern Irish context such ongoing ‘surveillance’ might have especially sinister associations –​ even if Harahan’s film is less suggestive of the forces of Panoptic state observation than of the curtain-​twitching neighbourhood snooper –​ and so the film not only reflects on the changing ‘nature’ of social space but also foregrounds the viewing of such spaces. Though this film’s fascinations demonstrate a creditable commitment to representing largely unrepresented aspects of city life (recalling Hugh Mulholland’s curatorial premise: ‘a view of Northern Ireland that may not be known internationally’), these responses to, or reflections on, fleeting urban micro-​dramas invoke specific conventions and contexts of spectatorship in a troubling manner. Gallery viewers are granted access to a position of clandestine 67

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Figure 6  Seamus Harahan, Holylands, 2004.

observation  –​ and such a point of view cannot be a neutral one. Nevertheless what may be most remarkable about this protracted gaze on a distinctive region of Belfast (it is a residential zone near Queen’s University, characterised by problematic contact between a temporary, often unruly, student population and a more obviously rooted community) is that ‘Belfast’, in any recognisable sense, is almost nowhere to be seen. The name ‘Holylands’ instantly signals this strange dislocatedness: it is the local nickname for a network of streets named after areas in the Middle East (‘Jerusalem St.’, ‘Palestine St.’ etc.) and so by beginning ‘here’ Harahan right away insists on the importance of elsewhere. What’s more, much of the film is shot in near-​darkness, so offering obscure views of a series of decontextualised and potentially sinister, but most probably innocuous, activities. Even daylight footage grants only the slightest sense of any sure location. People come and go. Traffic passes. The weather changes. Nothing adds up to anything definitive or is predictably revealing about the details of this location. It is a hypnotically ‘unsatisfying’ experience, like channel-​hopping, the camera cutting into and out of scenes with abrupt, disruptive force. Throughout, Harahan soundtracks the footage with eclectic samples of music from around the globe. An Irish traditional lament on uilleann pipes accompanies a hazy slow-​motion shot of a 68

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teenage trespasser scaling a security fence. A verbally and rhythmically aggressive US hip-​hop track adds hard-​edged sonic dissonance to nocturnal views of vehicles coming and going without incident. The spare, spectral country-​folk music of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’ plays as the camera concentrates for a spell of stretched-​out time on simple garden flora: wind-​blown weeds and spreading spores that are a literal manifestation of ‘the nature of things’, so intensifying the sense of the fragmentary and the fugitive in this vision of place. With its simultaneously hopeful and heartbroken refrain of ‘maybe everything that dies someday comes back’, the Springsteen song has haunting relevance to post-​Troubles trauma, should we wish to interpretatively locate the footage in this way. And yet ‘Belfast’ as we encounter it here becomes profoundly ‘other’: deterritorialised both as ‘Holy Land’ and ‘Atlantic City’. Belfast here is deprived of distinctiveness, shaped by forces beyond itself, while nevertheless offering lines of flight in any number of directions. Each excerpt of music influences our reading of the captured incidents in distinct and manipulative ways, but each fragment also sets these spaces free from locally-​given associations and meanings. The multiple samples gathered on this soundtrack create altered atmospheres that assist in focusing our attention on the immediacy of the pictured place, while providing access to another series of divergent audio ‘elsewheres’. These aural mediations are carefully chosen by Harahan to suit each sequence; but they might also seem, just as aptly, to be purposefully accidental: arranged to create an effect like that of moving through the sonic heterotopia of a radio in its ‘search’ mode, or like setting an iPod on shuffle. Anxieties of viewing prompted by an uneasy opening up and ‘unfixing’ of space were also evident elsewhere within the Nature of Things. In photographic works by Mary McIntyre, for example, we are presented with ‘spaces of doubt’ (to adapt the title of one of her photographs from 2000). McIntyre’s works are staged, highly aestheticised images of marginal territories and institutional spaces and they connect with wider strains in contemporary photography –​from the urban-​ nocturne style of an artist such as Rut Blees Luxemburg, to the austere, uncanny images of institutional interiors in the art of Candida Höfer, to the constructed everyday scenarios in the photographs of fellow Belfast-​born photographer Hannah Starkey. McIntyre’s practice builds on such influences and connections in such a way as to prioritise a self-​conscious play on uncertainties regarding spectatorship and location. In many of her photographs the borders between what is real and what is imagined in the subjective encounter with place begin to seem increasingly blurred. There are repeated suggestions of ‘sublime’ possibility, the images situating the viewer on the verge of nebulous spaces beyond –​ indistinct realms that cannot be wholly grasped by representation, and that, in their evocations of oblivion, may threaten the supposed coherence of the observing subject. Belfast, and the urban built environment more generally, are vital but implied or minor presences in her landscape scenes. The places pictured are edge-​terrains, areas where urban meets rural: a roadway turning towards countryside in Threshold (2004; Plate 9), for instance, or a tree-​shrouded Night Building (2003) protected​ 69

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by a high fence and lit by a single security light. These nocturnal scenes find their visual clarity and create their distinctive effects only from whatever illumination is available as a result of human involvement in the landscape –​ a streetlight at the edge of suburbia, for instance –​but the effect is nevertheless spectral: ‘empty’ space becoming evocative of some otherworldly danger. The photographs have, therefore, a considerable psychological intensity, recalling Anthony Vidler’s comments in The Architectural Uncanny that the ‘forgotten margins’ of lived space hide ‘all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness’.79 There is a sense here, as in some sequences of Harahan’s Holylands of ‘space as threat, as harbinger of the unseen’80 –​and so these uncertain scenes from the edge of the city may carry warnings about confident pronouncements of progress within the wider culture. As in several important works by Willie Doherty (such as the film Ghost Story which premiered at the next Venice Biennale as the centrepiece of Northern Ireland’s official representation in 2007, and which will be the subject of extended discussion in the next chapter), the seeming ‘solidity’ of the present is subverted in McIntyre’s photographs through evocations of Gothic mystery and excess: through imagined spaces of atmospheric indeterminacy. The stable ‘actuality’ of pictured landscapes –​at the uncertain geographical edge of Belfast, at the blurred historical ‘end’ of the Northern Ireland Troubles –​becomes, as with so many differently imagined settings here, purposefully unsettled. Such disquiet with regard to place and progress was a recurring theme in The Nature of Things. Katrina Moorhead, for instance, focused on the gull-​wing doors of the DeLorean sports car that were once a curious element in the most unusual of real-​life Belfast dramas:  the entrepreneur John DeLorean having chosen Northern Ireland –​at the height of the Troubles –​as the region responsible for the manufacture of a famously eccentric sports car. This venture had promised a transformation of the local economy, guaranteeing equal employment for Catholics and Protestants, but had come to a disastrous, controversial end. Moorhead’s sculpture On or about December 1981 revisited the planning stage, prior to the unravelling of this absurd, ambitious industrial enterprise, in order to look back at a failed look forward. Using model-​making materials, Moorhead recreated the distinctive, futuristic car doors, constructing a ‘retro-​type’ version of this iconic feature of a technological and economic dream that had failed to find realisation in Belfast. This interest in the historical wrong turns of the DeLorean car saga has, as we shall see later, been echoed in an acclaimed film by the Glasgow-​based Irish artist Duncan Campbell (as well as in notable pieces by artists John Duncan, Sean Lynch and Grace Weir), but in Moorhead’s case the presenting of a revived/​revised version of these iconic design objects in a radically simplified form offered a curious material focus for converging spatial and temporal forces. These odd, handmade objects –​these newly crafted ‘relics’ –​pointed to a moment in time at which the future of society in Northern Ireland, so long defined in terms of sectarian identity, was being entrusted to the supposedly democratic, non-​discriminatory 70

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dynamism of international capitalism. In this regard, Moorehead was seeking to ‘make visible’ a symbol of certain underpinning systems of power and economic circulation that continue to have (often under-​discussed) influence in the Troubles and post-​Troubles contexts. As we will see again later in relation to the work of Duncan Campbell, this deliberate expanding of the referential framework around the conflict, potentially allows for alternative contextualisations of Northern Ireland’s current political predicament. Much of the other art featured in The Nature of Things –​this ‘view of Northern Ireland that may not be known internationally’ –​seemed similarly concerned with confounding or contesting obvious or oppressive identifications with place, with several artists fixing on the ‘unfixed’, finding ambiguous potential in the uncertain conditions of Northern Ireland’s contemporary predicament in the world. Michael Hogg’s participation, for example, involved assembling a strange, gawky structure entitled ‘Pivot’ which held a bundle of outdated party-​political posters in precarious balance overhead. (It might be noted in passing here that Katrina Moorhead has also described her practice as being based around the production of ‘precarious objects’). This tense arrangement was then accompanied by video footage of youths making the traditional jump from the magnificent bridge at Mostar in Bosnia-​Herzegovina –​a structure that was demolished during the Bosnian war and which has since been rebuilt. In Hogg’s installation, the sign-​systems of an unstable democratic set-​up are juxtaposed with exhilarating scenes from beyond the Northern Irish situation, but in a manner that connects the position of the individual, private subject to broader public tension and trauma.81 Other artists explored the potential of differently jarring juxtapositions of place and time. Sandra Johnston (one of the most prominent figures within the field of contemporary performance art in Northern Ireland, but also an accomplished video artist (Figure  7)) linked aspects of present-​day public life with historical catastrophe and confusion in her film Conduct Best Calculated for Achieving Victory (2005). This work combined texts detailing the protocols underpinning centuries-​old stories of conflict with protracted subjective observation of contentious present-​day urban spectacle –​ concentrating, like Phil Collins’s film The marches, on Orange Order bands and sectarian demonstrations. Aisling O’Beirn, another of the Northern Ireland representatives in Venice has, like Sandra Johnston, developed a successful practice based on what Suzanna Chan refers to as ‘critical engagements with the social politics of their location/​s’ that articulate ‘spatial negotiations and explorations around subjectivity … indicating marginalised histories and experiences, particularly those of women’.82 In Venice, O’Beirn used humble means to probe understandings of the ‘local’. Her work centred on folk-​stories from Belfast which were introduced into the fabric of Venice in two ways: firstly, by inscribing narrative fragments onto cappuccino cups used in a café popular with Venetians and secondly, by printing the stories onto bags of pigeon feed sold to tourists in Piazza San Marco (Figures 8 and 9). By so doing, O’Beirn sought to prompt interest in the ways that folklore from one location relates to the culture and history of another. (O’Beirn’s broader 71

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Figure 7  Sandra Johnston, In Light of Everything, 2005. Performance as part of The Long Weekend, a performance event as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale.

practice will be discussed at greater length in a later chapter.) Most remarkably as a demonstration of Northern Irish self-​conscious movement beyond its ‘home’ territory, Patrick Bloomer and Nicholas Keogh (an anarchic, neo-​Situationist duo, renowned for unruly guerrilla interventions in the public spaces of Belfast) constructed a ‘party’ boat for the canals of Venice, the essential component of which was, with wilful absurdity, a large Belfast ‘wheelie bin’ (Plate 10). Bloomer and Keogh brought Belfast ‘trash’ containers to the home of high culture and high-​ price international art –​ sailing their ‘junk’ down the grand canal with reckless disregard for local, Venetian decorum. Such a bold manifestation of art that sets local ‘roots’ in motion is certainly in the spirit of Nicholas Bourriaud’s ‘radicant aesthetics’, presenting versions of the ‘wandering forms’ and ‘homeless materials’ that he sees as essential elements of today’s ‘alter-​modern’ avant-​garde. But it is important to stress the variously anxious, discordant or uncomfortable ways in which these works are cut loose from origins. In addition to assessing the benefits of ‘wandering’ and ‘uprooting’ we can, for instance, explore the ambivalent effects of situated ‘incongruity’ (or of intentionally occupying the ‘wrong place’, to cite again Miwon Kwon’s argument concerning the uncanny discordances of today’s situated aesthetics). Hal Foster argues that contemporary art has long-​existed in a troubled state of ‘living on’ after the postmodernist ‘end of art’;

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Figure 8  Aisling O’Beirn, Stories for Venetians and Tourists, intervention in Piazzo San Marco, Venice, 2005. Staged as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale.

as such, he says, it can take forms which are ‘traumatic’ or ‘spectral’: their uncertain presence demonstrating a concern for that which is not present, in ways that might suggest either the potential return of the repressed or the ‘persistence of the lost’.83 Equally, Foster suggests, the condition of ‘coming after’ the modern and the postmodern may allow practices to emerge which propose problems about time and progress –​ problematising prior chronological understandings of art’s development. Many of today’s ‘non-​synchronous’ approaches to art-​making thus seize on the unrealised possibilities of outmoded cultural ideas, objects or projects, in ways that result in types of art that are about ‘holding together different temporal markers within a single visual structure’.84 But in addition, Foster says, there is the vital role of the ‘incongruent’ in contemporary art:  one of the most prevalent modes of contemporary practice being an art of clashing forms and unsettled 73

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Figure 9  Aisling O’Beirn, Stories for Venetians and Tourists, bags for pigeon feed, used during intervention in Piazzo San Marco, Venice, 2005. Staged as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale.

situations, of unnerving proximity and productive ‘dislocation’. Such aesthetic incongruence involves ‘juxtaposing traces of different spaces’. Work of this kind, Foster says, is ‘often performative and provisional’ and ‘projects a lyrical kind of criticality’.85 In this regard there are clear connections to the low-​key or intrusive interventions in the city of Venice undertaken by artists such as Aisling O’Beirn or Patrick Bloomer and Nicholas Keogh. Procedures and provocations of this kind surely operate according to an ‘incongruent’ logic, instantiating Foster’s interest in a mode of art that ‘complicates found things with invented ones, reframes given spaces, and frequently leaves behind site-​specific souvenirs as it does so’.86 In considering what may be at stake in the public staging of such incongruence, Foster quotes the artist Jimmie Durham who has argued for ‘an eccentric discourse of art’ that seeks to find distinctive ways of posing ‘investigatory questions about what sort of thing [art] might be, but always within a political situation of the time’.87 As it has been important to identify here, nevertheless, the ‘political situation’ relevant to our reading of The Nature of Things is plural, expansive, ambiguous and shifting. The set of social issues ‘particular to Northern Ireland’ can be seen to diversify in relation to an expanded sense of situation. And yet, considered as effects of a putative end-​of-​history predicament, these ‘issues’ also contract:  the 74

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ability to imagine ‘alternatives’ to the current world system, to the framing of any ‘local’ everyday reality, reducing in the context of ‘non-​place’ geography and ‘post-​historical’ temporality. In a corresponding way, then, we must take account of how these world situations relate to validating situations for art such as the Biennale context and the global art system. These are worlds that, from a sceptical perspective, might be seen to welcome eccentric ‘incongruity’ as part of a normative process of promoting spectacular novelty. Viewed more positively, however, these occasions and arenas that claim to facilitate ‘juxtapositions of different spaces’, that promote radically incongruent cultural arrangements, might somehow still allow for the emergence of unpredictable, disruptive connections, that have effects other than those hoped for as part of the instrumentalising agendas with which the (inter)national presentation of art today may well be associated. Presenting ‘positive post-​Troubles images’ to the world Though the staging of The Nature of Things at the Venice Biennale provided an almost unprecedented, dedicated platform for emerging artists, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in the years since the Good Friday Agreement there have been a number of other international group representations of contemporary art from Northern Ireland, composed of several of the same key players and concentrating on closely related core themes. In this section I want to first of all reflect on how one evident feature of such exhibitions has been a recurrent emphasis on newly troubled relationships with territory. Following this, however, I  will look beyond the interests and effects of specific artworks and exhibition projects towards questions of how these forms of culture production and display are to be related to broader public issues about the value of art in the context of post-​Troubles regeneration and international ‘urban branding’ agendas. In the era of ‘peace’ a great deal is at stake in how images of Northern Ireland, and of Belfast and Derry most especially, are imagined and disseminated. It is thus highly significant that in some post-​Troubles exhibitions of art from Northern Ireland there has been a notable tendency towards anxious reflection on the relationship of the individual subject to the shifting conditions of urban space. Repeated examples of protracted viewing in and at the edges of the city partly signal a yearning to archive, to remember, to analyse or unearth historical evidence at the margins of the society’s post-​conflict regeneration processes. But there is also, once again, an effort on the part of artists and curators to open up the subjective and collective experience of urban space to new possibilities, to ‘unsettle’ relationships to place and to speculate on fresh ways of thinking through the connections between identity, community and locale. Artists in this era have been paying close attention to situations where the corporate and the globalised map onto, or come up against, the geography of sectarianism, noting the points where the design culture of apartment living and leisure capital meet the architecture of post-​Troubles security. Often, existing non-​art modes of ‘observation’ become vital points of reference. Artists refer to or appropriate practices of surveillance, or address situations 75

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of display and spectacle that are well established as part of everyday ‘local’ life in Northern Ireland (that are, in other words, identifiable aspects of a ‘Troubles’ reality). But there is also a keen alertness to emergent socio-​cultural tendencies in Northern Ireland; as we have seen, there is a determination to highlight the increasingly dominant presence of other, more evidently ‘global’ influences. This latter, expanded context is, as shall be emphasised here, vital to the wider framing of the place of contemporary art as it relates to the changing terrains of Northern Ireland, and, indeed, to the changing ways in which these terrains are being presented and promoted in the world. The issue of querying and contesting representations of the city in the post-​ Troubles era, was, for instance, central to the exhibition The Belfast Way:  Young Artists From Northern Ireland which was staged at the Herliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel in 2005:  a group show planned as part of ‘a larger programme of events aimed at introducing Israeli audiences to the rich culture of Northern Ireland’.88 Curator Sergei Edelsztein stated that The Belfast Way was concerned with presenting an array of outstanding artists operating from this city, all of them endowed with a certain sensibility that seems to be prevalent in the Belfast artistic milieu, and with a clear bond to its political atmosphere. Rather than addressing the Northern Irish conflict in its direct political aspects, however, these artists choose to focus on different cultural ‘battlefields’ where this conflict was –​ and still is –​ being fought. Thus, one may find affiliation and history on the one hand, territory –​ namely the urban sphere where most of the popular debate takes place and where subtle changes bear witness to political developments –​on the other.89

In selecting work for the exhibition Edelsztein noted the ‘widespread allusions to the city, its streets pathways and alleyways, found in Northern Irish art’,90 and included once again those artists such as Seamus Harahan and Mary McIntyre, for whom the picturing of elements of the city has been of sustained interest, alongside others who did not feature in the Venice exhibition The Nature of Things, such as photographer John Duncan and video artist Miriam de Búrca. In the work of the former, and in particular series such as Boom Town (2002), Trees from Germany (2003) and We Are Here (2006), alterations in Belfast’s appearance are carefully catalogued. As David Brett writes, Duncan observes a ‘process of becoming –​the steady appearance of a new Belfast amidst the old’.91 But this is a concentration on growth that also makes evident signs of decay and dereliction. His images show us ‘new kinds of sights we could not have looked at a few years ago’, while reminding us that ‘Old Belfast is still with us, unregenerate’.92 Duncan contemplates the city in the style of much European ‘deadpan’ photography of the 1990s, often presenting banal areas of the built or semi-​built environment seemingly emptied out of their inhabitants. At times his practice has prioritised a typological take on urban forms, most obviously in the series Bonfires (2008), which recalls the methodical procedures of German photo-​conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher, replacing their focus on the ‘anonymous sculpture’ of industrial cooling towers with views 76

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of the most famous vernacular architecture of the Northern Irish landscape: the vast pyres constructed from wooden pallets, car tyres and assorted domestic junk that are built each summer for the Loyalist 12th of July celebrations (Plates 11 and 12). In other cases, the emphasis in Duncan’s work has been on maintaining a searching gaze on territories scattered with the exploded fragments of the recent past:  one photograph in the Boom Town series, for instance, shows a suburban street that seems ordinary in all respects, save for the scattered traces of what may be riot rubble. In this regard Duncan’s work often has many of the hallmarks of what David Campany has characterised as ‘late photography’: images of apparent aftermath in which any ‘decisive moment’ is only suggested by material and visual traces. As Campany argues, such images have ‘a reticent muteness … that leaves them open to interpretation’.93 Yet the absence of incident in many of Duncan’s images also sometimes implies an unusual patience in the observing gaze, a kind of steady surveillance; there is something ‘expectant’ about these city views (a 1998 body of work was tellingly titled Be Prepared). Not only can we note, for instance, that those Loyalist bonfires are ready to be lit for the 12th of July ‘festivities’ –​the mundane daylight scene contrasting with the imagined spectacle to come –​but elsewhere Duncan concentrates on making images of images, focusing on signs for new developments in the city: billboard sized posters showing architects’ visions of a future Belfast. In this way Duncan’s photographic gaze becomes captivated by the manner in which the present-​tense spaces of the urban sphere are caught between a traumatic past and an unwritten but daunting future. Concerns of this kind are also relevant to the ‘archival impulses’ (to borrow Hal Foster’s term94) evident in video work by Miriam de Búrca. Her practice has included recorded encounters with places and people that range from deadpan studies of deserted urban spaces to, for example, a filmed conversation with a veteran Belfast taxi driver who adds an anecdotal commentary as the artist records an afternoon’s journey through key ‘troubles’ territories –​de Búrca taking one of the informal, historical ‘terror’ tours now offered in post-​conflict Belfast. These works will be returned to in Chapter 4, but it is useful to note at this stage that the title of the latter video, Dogs Have No Religion (deriving from fact that during the troubles, a greyhound track in Belfast became one place where sectarian tensions were understood to be irrelevant) was borrowed to name another group representation of Northern Ireland’s contemporary artists, shown at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague during the summer of 2006. This exhibition also made a case for correcting a distorted view, as the show’s introductory curatorial statement made clear: the opening up of European borders has led to improved levels of how countries are informed about each other. Despite this, Northern Ireland remains to a large degree the subject of stereotypical assumptions often based on the tunnel-​vision of news media.95

This self-​conscious commitment towards bypassing or subverting dominant representational regimes seems itself, therefore, a dominant theme in the 77

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representation of twenty-​first century art from Northern Ireland. Representing the art of the region regularly becomes about scrutinising representations of the place itself, with public space (understood both as a material, physical location and as a vital concept) being the domain of greatest concentration in these debates. Such group exhibitions demonstrate (as their curators consistently claim) that there have been, in the post-​Agreement period, waves of art practice emerging from Belfast that are very attuned to current conversations within contemporary art more broadly, but it is also very clear that art practitioners in Belfast visibly invest a great deal in the public representation of their own city. Here, for instance, we might cite the example of Catalyst Arts, an evolving artists’ network and exhibition space founded in 1993, that has claimed to be motivated by ‘an intense interest in the cultural development of Belfast, as well as the representation of N. Irish culture globally’.96 Similarly, Belfast Exposed, a gallery and commissioning organisation dealing principally with contemporary photography but also with documentary video, archival research and various ‘art’ iterations of each of these, has declared an ongoing commitment to socially and politically engaged work. Dialogue with diverse constituencies and partners is understood as integral to their commissioning and programming policies (one relevant element of their programming in the post-​Troubles period, for instance, was a discussion series involving a range of local and international artists and curators, called Producing Publics: Debates on Art and the Public Sphere). Yet, as indicated at the opening of this section, if artists and curators have undertaken to examine, challenge and even shape the image of the city, it is important to note that such projects have also often evolved in complex inter-​relation with the broader ‘imaging’ agenda of government policy and the commercial sector. Pauline Hadaway, former director of Belfast Exposed, has noted, for example, how the funding of arts organisations in the North has often been explicitly linked to potential benefits with regard to urban branding. Hadaway draws attention to the ‘unanimity between otherwise implacable enemies’ in the debating chambers of Belfast City Council on the matter of culture’s instrumental function, noting that one Democratic Unionist Party chair of Belfast City Council’s Development (Arts) Subcommittee has cited the creation of ‘positive images of Belfast’ as a key benefit of cultural activity in the city, while his successor (from the opposing end of the sectarian ‘spectrum’) stressed the importance of bringing ‘culture to a more central position on the urban regeneration agenda’.97 Such uses of culture in the post-​Troubles resolution and regeneration context are, therefore, unavoidable reference points in considering contemporary art from Northern Ireland, offering a sense of what may be up for grabs when ‘views of Northern Ireland that may not be known internationally’ (to return to Hugh Mulholland’s stated claim for The Nature of Things) are officially promoted. As long ago as 1999 (a crux time in the emergence of a post-​Troubles paradigm) the critic Maeve Connolly raised related questions while discussing two relatively high profile group exhibitions of contemporary art in Belfast: the first of the annual Perspectives shows at the Ormeau Baths Gallery (a showcase of emerging 78

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art selected from open submission by an international curator) and the one-​off Resonate project curated by Catalyst Arts offshoot Grassy Knoll productions, led in this instance by artists Susan Philipsz and Eoghan McTigue –​the latter of these two projects being specifically aimed at raising questions ‘relating to the profile of, and possible function for contemporary art beyond the gallery space, and ultimately to the role of the artist in the city’.98 Though Perspectives was, on the one hand, part of the exhibition programme of a (relatively) established institution while Resonate emerged as a result of independent artist-​initiated activity, Connolly nevertheless saw an important point of connection between these seemingly opposed approaches insofar as both of these presentations of new art in Belfast could be understood as ‘playing a significant part in the re-​presentation of the city’.99 Such survey shows, Connolly argued, ‘play a part in the symbolic economy, contributing to the promotion of the city as a cultural capital’.100 Citing the post-​ceasefire, post-​Agreement emphases on tourism and urban planning projects such as the ‘Cathedral Quarter’ scheme (the redevelopment of a run-​down city-​centre district that, as in the case of Dublin’s Temple Bar, had gained increased cultural kudos as a result of the presence of a small number of independent artists’ initiatives in low-​rent spaces), Connolly expressed concern about the role that art and artists might yet play with regard to the production of official and unofficial images of the city. The various site-​specific projects and outdoor displays that featured in Resonate were in particular, Connolly proposed, ‘ideally positioned to explore the re-​construction of the city as tourist destination but, although the project placed the role of the artist in the city on the critical agenda, many of the works stopped short of addressing problematic issues, such as urban regeneration’.101 If in subsequent years such issues have gained increased prominence in Northern Ireland’s art practice and critical discourse, Connolly’s point (that there is a need to carefully attend to the conditions of art’s changing contexts in Belfast) clearly remains valid: ‘work which actively engages with the production of meaning, whether inside or outside the gallery, can contribute to a much-​needed critical interrogation of the artist’s role in the symbolic economy’.102 Once again, the point is to question the manner in which ‘alternative’ or unfamiliar views of life in Northern Ireland are presented –​and to identify the components of the trap in which forms of ‘critical’ art can find themselves caught. As Connolly suggests, ‘the role that artists and artists’ initiatives, even those which appear to function outside the “mainstream”, play in the re-​imagining and re-​presentation of the city, still requires critical interrogation’.103 Central to Connolly’s critique is a reading of Sharon Zukin’s arguments regarding ‘the symbolic capital of the city’, a concept relating to the marketing of city culture in the era of global capital. As Zukin writes in her essay ‘Whose Culture? Whose City?’, Culture is a powerful means of controlling cities. As a source of images and memories, it symbolises ‘who belongs’ in specific places. As a set of architectural themes, it plays a leading role in urban development strategies based on historic preservation or local ‘heritage’. With the disappearance of government and finance, culture is more and more the business of cities –​the basis of their tourist 79

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attractions and their unique competitive edge. The growth of cultural consumption (of art, food, fashion, music, tourism) and the industries that cater to it fuels the city’s symbolic economy, its visible ability to produce both symbols and space.104

Drawing on examples of ‘place entrepreneurship’ in the United States, Zukin identifies distinct trends in the privatisation of the public spaces of American cities. But as Connolly rightly identifies, such currents have growing relevance to how urban space in Ireland, Britain and Europe is configured and represented. Crucially, Zukin’s analysis raises concerns about the potential contentiousness of the aesthetic in (or in relation to) contemporary urban environments: ‘the look and feel of cities reflects decisions about what –​and who –​should be visible and what should not, on concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power’.105 Acknowledging the influence of theories of the postmodern, Zukin argues that the production and power of images has been vital to the transformation of cities since the 1970s: ‘what is new about the symbolic economy’, she claims, ‘is its symbiosis of image and product, the scope and scale of selling images on a national and even a global level, and the role of the symbolic economy in speaking for or representing the city’.106 In Belfast such issues were brought into sharp relief in 2002 with the city’s failed bid for the title of 2008 European Capital of Culture. Assembled by a limited company working under the name of Imagine Belfast, the Capital of Culture bid proposed to transform the image of the city from one of internecine conflict, narrowly defined cultural horizons and geographical no-​go areas into ‘a centre for investment as a global cultural destination’.107 One of the more headline-​grabbing points in the submission was a plan to remove the notorious ‘peace walls’ that divide troubled districts in the city –​an undoubtedly well-​intended idea that was nevertheless determined by a problematic, quick-​fix ‘spectacular’ logic (despite being about the actual erasure of a visually dominant element in the cityscape). Such strategies for revitalising the ‘symbolic capital’ of Belfast were met with scepticism and hostility by many arts practitioners in the city. John Gray has noted that Belfast City Council and its private partners in the scheme ‘were unwilling to entrust the development of the bid to the creative forces already available in the cultural and arts sector’.108 Imagine Belfast included in its twenty-​five-​member board only two participants with connections to arts practice and so, Gray argues, the group ‘struggled with the crucial question asked of them:  “What do you understand by culture?” ’.109 Moreover, as Daniel Jewesbury commented in the wake of the bid’s failure, what many found particularly galling about Imagine’s schemes was the application of ‘cultural’ activity to the ends of inward investment and economic and social regeneration. This instrumentalised approach to culture is to be found in any city desperately trying to reinvent itself after years of industrial or social decay, so it’s hardly a surprise that it’s become virulent across the North in the last eight years. But the collective sigh of relief that many artists released when

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Figure 10  Susan MacWilliam, F-​L-​A-​M-​M-​A-​R-​I-​O-​N, 2009.

the bid failed was a recognition of the fact that culture is not a panacea, something exclusively benign that speaks to everyone and no-​one.110

There are, therefore, a number of potential points of tension between the ongoing ‘investment’ on the part of artists and curators in reflecting on images of the city, and the broader uses of culture in the contemporary world. Such complexities are not, of course, particular to the urban scene in Belfast (and we can note again, by comparison, the success of Derry’s bid to become the first ‘UK City of Culture’) but broadly applicable to the culture of cities more generally and to the powerful function of the major institutional frameworks of contemporary art. Julian Stallabrass has, for instance, detailed ways in which the phenomenon of the contemporary art Biennale exhibition is itself determined by the need to build city brands and to attract investment. Referring to the first Liverpool Biennial in 1999, Stallabrass notes how the list of exhibition sponsors is a telling mix ‘of the kind of alliances that a biennale produces: businesses, large and small, wanting to boost their brand recognition; nations pushing their cultural products; regional bodies hoping for regeneration; and universities wanting to raise their research ratings’.111 The economic exigencies underlying such large-​scale group representations of ‘cutting edge’ cultural activity involve the ongoing requirement of creating an appealing urban brand. Related aims no doubt apply to support for national or ‘collateral’ regional participation in such high profile events. Though

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we may, like Arthur Danto, see the enticing promise of a ‘transnational utopia’ in the Biennale experience, participation in these culturally and politically complex ‘festivals’ undoubtedly serves multiple, often contending, national –​ and intra-​ national –​interests as well as contributing to the ‘glocal’ mix. In the next chapter I want to consider some of the issues covered here concerning the contemporary intersection of local and the global, but in a focused discussion of the work of Willie Doherty, the artist chosen by curator Hugh Mulholland to represent Northern Ireland at the subsequent Venice Biennale in 2007. Mulholland’s first Venice exhibition as curator was declared as an attempt to present an alternative image of life in Northern Ireland. His second, a representation of Doherty’s practice, centring on the specially commissioned film Ghost Story, emphasised the haunting of post-​Troubles society by stubborn traces of the past. Two years later in 2009, the Northern Ireland Venice exhibition (curated by Karen Downey) featured the work of Susan MacWilliam: an artist interested in exploring ‘ghostly’ phenomena in a manner that links real-​life accounts of paranormal experience to questions about lens-​based art’s representational and affective capacities (Figure 10). In what is perhaps a telling shift, MacWilliam’s main work for the exhibition –​ though featuring the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson in a central role  –​ offered a much less pronounced engagement with the types of post-​Troubles themes contemplated in the two previous Venice exhibitions.112 Thinking again, then, of Gavin Murphy’s identification of a ‘drift from a concern with place-​bound politics and cultural difference towards more globalised and homogenous forms of subjectivity and identity’, it is incidentally revealing that a gradual shift took place in representing Northern Ireland internationally.113 The story of Northern Ireland in Venice begins in 2005 with Mulholland’s expansive set of ‘alternative views’, continues in 2007 with Doherty’s haunted visions of post-​Troubles landscapes, and concludes in 2009 with Susan MacWilliam’s invocation of less localised spectres. By the time of the 2011 Biennale, newly constrained arts-​funding circumstances in the wake of the global economic crisis had forced an abandonment of Northern Ireland’s representation in this international context. Since then, Northern Ireland has had no stand-​alone show in Venice: a step backwards for local art in the global arena, brought about by the local financial effects of far-​reaching global change. Notes 1 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 154–​5. 2 Leontia Flynn, Drives (London: Cape Poetry, 2008), p. 2. 3 Daniel Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here, or, the end of the history of Northern Irish art’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 525. 4 Aaron Kelly, ‘Geopolitical eclipse: culture and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 550. 5 Kelly, ‘Geopolitical eclipse’, p. 550.

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Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 527. Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 526. Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 527. Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 525. Miriam De Búrca, ‘Review: The International Language’, Circa, Autumn 2001. Benjamin Buchloh identifies Guy Debord’s defining characteristic of late capitalism as the unavoidable context for ‘the predicament of contemporary art’ in his roundtable discussion with Yve-​Alain Bois, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss at the conclusion to Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism: ‘The postwar situation can be described as a negative teleology:  a steady dismantling of the autonomous practices, spaces and spheres of culture, and a perpetual intensification of assimilation and homogenization, to the point where today we witness what Debord called “the integrated spectacle” ’. This ‘dire diagnostic’ (to borrow Yve-​Alain Bois’s response) is resisted by Hal Foster in the same roundtable, who argues, in a manner relevant to this book, that ‘some artists find productive cracks within this condition [of spectacle]; it’s not as seamless as Benjamin makes it out to be’. See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-​Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Roundtable: the predicament of contemporary art’, in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-​ Modernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), pp. 671–​9. Questions of memory and archiving in post-​Troubles art will be addressed in detail in Chapter 4. Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 6. Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, p. 5. Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, p. 5. Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, p. 2. Hal Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002), p. 124. Hal Foster, ‘Precarious’, Artforum, December 2009. Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), pp. 79–​80. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism:  Is There No Alternative? (Winchester:  Zero Books, 2009), p. 2. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 85. This accusation is one of several levelled at Bourriaud by Owen Hatherley in a hostile review of Bourriaud’s book The Radicant and his Tate Triennial exhibition Alter-​ modern –​both of which are said to be guilty of ‘empty anti-​neo-​liberal posturing’; see Owen Hatherley, ‘Post-​postmodernism?’, New Left Review, 59 (2009), 160. Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, p. 241. Liam Gillick, ‘Berlin statement’, in Nicolas Schafhausen (ed.), How Are You Going to Behave? A Kitchen Cat Speaks (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 98. For a survey of Ireland at Venice exhibitions from 1993–​2005 see Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Ireland at Venice since 1993’, in Gavin Delahunty and Sarah Glennie (eds), Ireland at Venice 2005 (Dublin/​Cork: Culture Ireland/​Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 2005), pp. 72–​7. Cathy Wilkes was included (alongside Alex Pollard and Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan) in Scotland and Venice: Selective Memory, curated by Jason E. Bowman and Rachel Bradley in 2005. Paul Seawright featured alongside Cerith Wyn Evans, Simon Pope and Bethan Huws at Wales’s first exhibition at the Biennale in 2003. 83

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27 The Derry-​based artists Colin Darke and Willie Doherty were selected for central Venice exhibitions in, respectively, 2003 and 2005; Dublin-​based Gerard Byrne was selected to feature in the 2011 exhibition; Dublin-​based French film-​maker Aurelien Froment was included in the main show in 2013. 28 Charlotte Bydler, Global Art World Inc. (Uppsala University, 2004; published PhD), p. 100. Peter Schjeldahl has also suggested that there is a widespread art-​world sense of ‘chronic embarrassment’ regarding ‘those funny national pavilions’; see ‘Festivalism’, in Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), p. 200. However it might be argued that the influence of the national pavilions has returned (partly in the wake of political uprisings, especially in the Arab world, and in response to the post-​2008 crises in capitalism) with many reviews of the 2011 Biennale concentrating on the highlights of the national shows rather than mainly focusing on the (somewhat low-​key and muted) central exhibitions curated by Bice Curiger. 29 Declan Sheehan, ‘What is my nation? Who talks of my nation?’, Circa, 114 (2005), 25. 30 Gavin Murphy, ‘Global enterprise:  Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty at the 2007 Venice Biennale’, Circa, 120 (2007), 31. 31 Francis McKee and Kay Pallister, ‘Zenomap: maiden voyage’, in Fiona Bradley (ed.), Scotland at Venice 2003–​2005–​2007 (Glasgow: Scottish Arts Council, 2007), p. 49. 32 Dan Fox, ‘50th Venice Biennale’, Frieze, 77 (2003). 33 McKee and Pallister, ‘Zenomap’, p. 57. 34 Bruce Haines, ‘50th Venice Biennale’, Frieze, 77 (2003). 35 In February 2006, the Ormeau Baths Gallery closed following the withdrawal of funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Gallery staff –​ including director Hugh Mulholland  –​ were made redundant. For more details see Slavka Sverakova, ‘Threepenny essay: the case of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Ormeau Baths Gallery’ [and a response from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland], Circa, 116 (2006). Mulholland has since become the curator of visual arts at the MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre), now the most high-​profile space for contemporary art in Belfast. 36 The full list of selected artists for the Northern Ireland exhibition was:  Patrick Bloomer/​Nicholas Keogh, Ian Charlesworth, Factotum, Seamus Harahan, Michael Hogg, Sandra Johnston, Mary McIntyre, Katrina Moorhead, William McKeown, Darren Murray, Aisling O’Beirn, Peter Richards and Alistair Wilson. In the same year the Republic of Ireland representation was also based on a substantial group exhibition, though without the additional performative and public dimensions. Artists featured in the Ireland exhibition in 2005 were Stephen Brandes, Mark Garry, Ronan McCrea, Isabel Nolan, Sarah Pierce/​The Metropolitan Complex and Walker & Walker. 37 Schjeldahl, ‘Festivalism’, p. 200. 38 Schjeldahl, ‘Festivalism’, p. 200. 39 Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø, The Biennial Reader (Ostfildern/​ Bergen: Hatje Kanz/​Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), p. 4. 40 Filipovic et al., The Biennial Reader, p. 4. 41 Robert Storr, ‘Think with the senses, feel with the mind’ (2007), essay in the catalogue for the 52nd Venice Biennale (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia /​ Marsillo, 2007) [unpaginated]. 42 Bydler, Global Art World Inc, p. 109. 43 Niru Ratnam, ‘Globalisation and contemporary art’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds), Themes in Contemporary Art (New Haven/​London:  Yale University Press/​The Open University, 2004), pp. 277–​8. 84

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44 Okwui Enwezor in conversation with Tim Griffin, ‘The medium and the message: Tim Griffin talks with Okwui Enwezor about the Gwangju Biennale’, Artforum, September 2008. 45 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 45. 46 Hugh Mulholland in conversation with Suzanna Chan, ‘A conversation on The Nature of Things’, in Hugh Mulholland (ed.), The Nature of Things: Artists From Northern Ireland (Belfast: British Council/​Arts Council Of Northern Ireland, 2005), pp. 149–​50. 47 These comments were made during a public discussion between the curators of the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish exhibitions, held at Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in February 2005. 48 Mulholland, ‘A conversation on The Nature of Things’, p. 150. 49 From the press release for The Nature of Things: Artists from Northern Ireland, collateral event exhibition at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. 50 Murphy, ‘Global enterprise’, 32. 51 One facet of the post-​political consumer culture of the peace era has been well-​caught by the poet Leontia Flynn: ‘Belfast is finished and Belfast is under construction. /​What was mixed grills and whiskeys (cultureless, graceless, leisureless) /​is now concerts and walking tours (Friendly! Dynamic! Various!)’; see Leontia Flynn, ‘Belfast’, in Drives (London: Cape Poetry, 2008), p. 2. 52 Uta Meta Bauer, ‘The space of Documenta 11: Documenta 11 as a zone of activity’, in H. Ander and N. Kottner, Documenta 11: Platform 5, exhibition catalogue (Ostfildern-​ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), p. 104. 53 Murphy, ‘Global enterprise’, 32. 54 Murphy, ‘Global enterprise’, 32. 55 Murphy, ‘Global enterprise’, 33. 56 Arthur Danto is quoted by Rosa Martinez (overall curator, along with Maria de Corral, of the 2005 Venice Biennale). See Carlos Basualdo, ‘Launching site’, Artforum, Summer 1999, 39–​40. 57 From the press release for The Nature of Things: Artists from Northern Ireland, collateral event exhibition at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. 58 This is a reference to Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, a travelling exhibition organised and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), guest curated by Declan McGonagle (Boston, Newfoundland, Chicago, 1999–​2001). 59 Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, ‘Introduction’, in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 8. 60 Costello and Willsdon, The Life and Death of Images, p. 13. 61 Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, p. 2. The artistic ‘excess’ referred to here might be understood as an idea or phenomenon akin to that version of the aesthetic described by Simon O’Sullivan in a response to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Such excess, he suggests, ‘is not a glimpse of the transcendent’; rather we should ‘think the aesthetic power of art very much in an immanent sense, as offering an excess not somehow beyond the world but an excess of the world, the world here understood as the sum total of potentialities of which our typical experience is merely an extraction’; see Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 40. 62 Given the nature of McKeown’s written statements and interviews during his life-​ time, it seems clear that Mulholland’s curatorial emphasis on ‘a desire to promote 85

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inclusion, hope and freedom through acceptance, love and beauty’ very closely corresponds to McKeown’s insistently maintained arguments about the purpose and potential of art. Tragically, McKeown died at the age of forty-​nine at his home in Edinburgh in November 2011. Clement Greenberg, ‘Post-​painterly abstraction’, in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg:  The Collected Essays and Criticism:  Volume IV, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969 (Chicago/​London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 196. Alexander Nehamas, ‘An essay on beauty and judgment’, Threepenny Review, 80 (2000). Available at www.threepennyreview.com/​samples/​nehamas_​w00.html [last accessed 08/​08/​16]. See also Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (New York: Princeton University Press, 2007). From a public conversation between the author and William McKeown, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, December 2010. Quoted in Isabel Nolan, ‘The sky begins at our feet’, in the exhibition catalogue William McKeown (Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2002). Hal Foster, ‘Round table:  the present conditions of art criticism’, October, 100 (2002), 204. Barry Schwabsky, ‘Painting in the interrogative mode’, in Valérie Breuvart (ed.), Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (London: Phaidon, 2002), p. 7. Craig Owens, ‘The allegorical impulse:  towards a theory of postmodernism’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–​2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 1028 (first published in two parts in October, issues 12 and 13, 1980). The aforementioned ‘wallpaper’ elements to McKeown’s work have on occasion been executed in a more extravagant manner (as in, for instance, his installation at the Douglas Hyde Gallery 2004) which suggests that the contrast in tone with Murray is not always quite so pointed. Jason Gaiger, ‘Post-​conceptual painting:  Gerhard Richter’s extended leave-​taking’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds), Themes in Contemporary Art (Yale/​London/​Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2004), p. 98. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 22. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 22. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 22. The criticism that Bourriaud’s work lacks political complexity has been made, for example, by Claire Bishop in her essay ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’. Bishop’s principle issues are, firstly, Bourriaud’s insufficiently rigourous examination of the quality of the relationships that might be produced by ‘relational’ artworks, and, secondly, his somewhat loose understanding, in her view, of the ‘democratic’ character of such practices. See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October, 110 (2004), 65. In his response to Bishop’s article, Liam Gillick defends Bourriaud, but nevertheless acknowledges that the latter’s much-​cited first book Relational Aesthetics (2002) contained ‘major contradictions and serious problems of incompatibility with regard to the artists repeatedly listed together as exemplars of certain tendencies’; Liam Gillick, ‘Contingent factors: a response to Claire Bishop’s “Antagonism and relational aesthetics” ’, October, 115 (2006), 96. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 84. Bourriaud, The Radicant, p. 85. It is worth mentioning here that Harahan’s self-​consciously amateurish documentary method corresponds to one of the prominent varieties of the resurgent interest in 86

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aesthetics that have been identified by Costello and Willsdon as marked trends in twenty-​first century contemporary art (in this instance the model is that of ‘engaged art’). For Costello and Willsdon, a prior generation’s confrontation between aesthetics and anti-​aesthetics is now a secondary issue to the greater need to create ‘representations and counter-​representations of points of political fracture’. Today’s ‘aesthetics’, they argue, are considered distinct from outdated ‘immanent art world politics’ and are rather about investigating ‘how regimes of representation operate’. Documentary is, they argue, a main genre within such a paradigm of ‘engaged’ practice; see Costello and Willsdon, The Life and Death of Images, p. 12. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.:  MIT Press, 1992), p. 167. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 167. This is a connection echoed by Susan McKay, who writes in Bear in Mind These Dead of how she ‘visited Mostar in Bosnia not long after the second war ended there in 1994 and … felt the same demented energy’ that she had ‘known in Belfast in the 1980s’; see Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 5. Suzanna Chan, ‘Women and cities: selected artworks from Belfast’, in Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (eds), Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 211. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 135. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 137. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 141. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 141. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 142. Ruth Ur, essay in the exhibition catalogue for The Belfast Way: Young Art From Northern Ireland, Herliya Museum of Contemporary Art, March–​May 2005. Sergei Edelsztein, essay in the exhibition catalogue for The Belfast Way: Young Art From Northern Ireland, Herliya Museum of Contemporary Art, March–​May 2005. Edelsztein, The Belfast Way. David Brett, ‘The spaces in between’, in John Duncan, Trees from Germany (Belfast:  Belfast Exposed, 2003) [unpaginated]. Brett, ‘The spaces in between’. David Campany, ‘Safety in numbness:  some remarks on problems of “late photography” ’, in David Campany (ed.), The Cinematic (London/​Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel Gallery/​MIT Press, 2007), p. 191. Hal Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, October, 110 (2004), 3–​22. From the exhibition press release for Dogs Have No Religion at Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague, June–​September, 2006. This text was formerly posted on the homepage of Catalyst Arts, Belfast. That the text is no longer posted is perhaps apt  –​ since one of the main characteristics of Catalyst Arts is its changeability. As a later website states, it is ‘run by unpaid volunteers’ and rather than having a static, long-​term board or executive, this organisation regularly changes its entire management personnel. The ongoing ethos of this artist-​ led initiative is based on a desire to ‘adopt a poly-​vocal strategy towards the promotion of contemporary art practices by large selection of artists and projects from the widest possible range of disciplines’. See www.catalystarts.org.uk/​[last accessed 03/​ 08/​16]. Pauline Hadaway, ‘Soul searching and soul-​selling: the new accountability in the arts’, Circa, 114 (2005), 56. 87

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98 Press release for Resonate, curated by Grassy Knoll Productions, various sites, Belfast, 7th November to 5th December 1998. 99 Maeve Connolly, ‘Siting Belfast: context, audience and the symbolic economy of the city’, Variant, 2:7 (1999), 1. 100 Connolly, ‘Siting Belfast’, p. 2. 101 Connolly, ‘Siting Belfast’, p. 2. 102 Connolly, ‘Siting Belfast’, p. 2. We might acknowledge here the influence of independent publishing project The Vacuum (which will be the subject of further discussion in Chapter 5), and, under the editorial influence of Belfast-​based artist and writer, Daniel Jewesbury, Variant magazine, an art-​related journal which, though principally grounded in Scottish contexts, has published a significant number of articles critically addressing cultural change in Belfast. See www.variant.org.uk. 103 Connolly, ‘Siting Belfast’, p. 2. 104 Sharon Zukin, ‘Whose culture? Whose city?’, in Richard T. Le Gates and Frederic Stout (eds), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 2003; third edition), p. 138. 105 Zukin, ‘Whose culture? Whose city?’ p. 138. 106 Zukin, ‘Whose culture? Whose city?’ p. 138. 107 Michael McGimpsey, Statement made to the Northern Ireland Assembly by the Minister for Arts, Culture and Leisure, Michael McGimpsey, 19 March 2002. 108 John Gray, ‘City of culture: we mean it literally’, Variant 2:16 (2002), 38. 109 Gray, ‘City of culture: we mean it literally’, 38. 110 Daniel Jewesbury, ‘No matter. Try again. Fail spectacularly. (No sanctuary from caricature, parody and oblivion…)’, Variant, 2:16 (2002), 5. 111 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated:  The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 33. 112 The subject of MacWilliam’s Biennale film F-​L-​A-​M-​M-​A-​R-​I-​O-​N (2009) was a 1931 séance in Winnipeg, Canada, during which the name ‘Flammarion’, presumed to refer to Camille Flammarion (‘a French astronomer and psychical researcher’) appeared on the wall in the form of a teleplasm. For further details see www.susanmacwilliam.com/​flammarion.htm [last accessed 10/​04/​16]. 113 Murphy, ‘Global enterprise’, 32.

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B3B The post-​Troubles art of Willie Doherty

Out of the darkness? In 1982, a Yorkshire Television film crew arrived in Belfast to shoot the espionage and assassination thriller Harry’s Game. Expecting a city of perpetual gloom, of unbroken cloud cover and never-​ending drizzle, the production team’s location requirements were abruptly thrown into crisis –​ the city was enjoying a sudden, unseasonal heatwave. Out of the blue (as it were) the makers of a gritty Troubles tale were compelled to negotiate with the unthinkable: a Belfast lit by glorious sunshine, its contented citizens happily baking under clear skies.1 Here was an accidental clash of fictional and visual expectation with an apparently unavoidable and elemental reality: media stereotyping meeting the messy contingencies of everyday life. Such an unanticipated ‘alternative’ image of the city (ultimately avoided, of course, in the resulting TV drama) may well, of course, be thought of as less unlikely, less startling, today: sunlit scenes of Belfast undoubtedly having greater visual or narrative currency in the changing political, economic and cultural climate of a purportedly ‘post-​Troubles’ Northern Ireland (a possibility, at least, in terms of the city’s newly invigorated potential as a tourist resort and indeed as a prime location for the production of diverse new film projects). The anomalously cheering weather conditions that almost subverted the required crepuscular staging for Harry’s Game (during, it should be said, a particularly dark period in Troubles history) perhaps provide, then, a curious point of atmospheric comparison and contradiction for a striking body of photographic work from 2006 by the Derry artist Willie Doherty. These works, by the North’s most acclaimed artist since the 1980s, are dazzling, dramatic photographs featuring intense views of open blue skies, each perspective being partially interrupted by more ‘typical’ details of the trappings of territorial control and defence commonly found in the public spaces of Northern Ireland. This body of work is composed of two interconnected series of photographs, Local Solution and Show of Strength, which present, in a self-​consciously limited, hesitant and ambiguous way, ‘alternative’ Troubles/​Post-​Troubles images. They propose untypical views of and 89

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from the Northern Ireland context; and, what is more, they are to a degree untypical views within Doherty’s oeuvre, distinctive in the extent that they push in an abstract direction, while at the same time remaining connected to core content associated with his practice. These are images that we might quickly associate with a moment of post-​Troubles optimism: presenting scenes of unbounded space, beyond residual and possibly redundant traces of territorial demarcation. Or, in that they also picture communication cables against these stunning expanses of open sky, they might be seen as identifying lines of connection beyond a specific, settled, grounded position. Yet these are also deeply paradoxical photographs –​in many ways as ‘troubled’ as any from Doherty’s career. In this chapter, I want to first of all address these photographs in depth, considering various factors relevant to our response to them, and proposing numerous ways in which they might be read. As ‘post-​Troubles’ images, they are viewed here as determinedly resistant to closure, exceeding any straightforward apprehension of their meaning in multiple ways. Despite being amongst the most ‘minimal’ works Doherty has made, there is a sense both of unnerving lack and of sublime surplus in these images. They are both radically reduced as ‘representations’ of the Northern Ireland situation, and they are powerfully present as artworks: large-​scale photographic objects with profound affective impact. Moreover, we can detect in these bodies of work a complex set of intertextual dependencies and possibilities that, as the associations accumulate and diversify, become more disorientating than illuminating –​the contexts for understanding their meanings multiplying beyond any ‘local solutions’. Nevertheless, this ‘ungrounding’ of the images takes place just as Doherty maintains a dogged commitment to returning again and again to old ground, remaining strategically repetitive in his practice, looking over and over at familiar material, creating an uncanny sense difference from what seems to stay the same (Same Difference is the title of a notable early work by Doherty). As in much of Doherty’s practice, there is therefore a determined seriality to the working process, the photographs functioning conceptually in a restless mode, their meanings and effects altered by connection and situation, each image never quite existing in a manner that is fully ‘present’, despite its apparent immediacy. This spirit of ambiguous presence and strategic indeterminacy is vital to Doherty’s work, and allows for art encounters relating to the post-​ Troubles moment that are crucially provisional in their meanings and effects.2 In the later parts of this chapter, moving-​image works by Doherty are considered in similar terms –​although, given their ever-​shifting meanings and serialised formats, we might also view Doherty’s photographs as types of ‘moving image’. In particular, close attention is paid here to the films Empty (2006) and Ghost Story (2007), both of which, and the latter most obviously, extend the self-​conscious conceptual instabilities of the photographs and films through the introduction of ‘spectral’ forms and figures. Ghost Story was commissioned for presentation as the core element of Northern Ireland’s ‘collateral’ exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale  –​ a solo show by Doherty, once again curated by Hugh Mulholland, that followed up the ‘alternative images’ proposed in 2005’s debut regional 90

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representation The Nature of Things. Questions raised in the previous chapter about the relation between local concerns and international situations of art presentation and perception are therefore also relevant to how such reflections on the post-​Troubles predicament might be read: the dark filmic spaces of Doherty’s spectral visions of anxious aftermath arguably having had strong context-​specific effects beneath the blue skies of Venice during their Biennale premiere.

Between critique and encounter Since the early 1980s, Willie Doherty’s work has sought to critique and re-​cast specific characteristics of the dominant visual regimes that arise from or determine (often from beyond ‘local’ boundaries) the conditions of conflict in the North of Ireland. His art practice has learnt much from (and therefore can be valuably contextualised in relation to) the strategies of influential 1970s photo-​conceptualists such as Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler and Victor Burgin, for whom an interplay of text and image often worked to undermine any ‘straightforward’ pre-​ideological reading of the photographic image, especially in its documentary mode. As Allan Sekula proposed, the ‘general terms’ of the discourse of documentary inevitably involve ‘a kind of disclaimer, an assertion of neutrality, in short the overall function of photographic discourse is to render itself transparent’.3 Bringing texts together with images was thus understood as a valuable means of registering and undermining the dominance of ‘common sense’ readings of photographs, connecting with conceptual art’s related scrutiny of ‘the deep seated idea that art and language belonged to distinct realms of experience, which had become part of the common sense of modernist theory and practice’.4 A version of the scripto-​visual strategies adopted by such artists arguably served as the supporting methodological framework for Doherty’s early path-​breaking (re) readings of Ireland/​Northern Ireland’s visual-​cultural landscapes: his work appropriating and reconfiguring elements of the collective image-​repertoire and rhetorical lexicon of Nationalism, Republicanism, Unionism and Loyalism, exploring government propaganda, scrutinising the practices of the mainstream media from Ireland, Britain and beyond. Undoubtedly, therefore, his combination of astute conceptual and political critique has contributed to his resulting and lasting position as a major figure within international neo-​conceptual practice.5 As with those other key figures working within this field of conceptual photography, the making of images sits for Doherty in critical or antagonistic  –​ but nonetheless vital –​ relation to traditions of documentary reportage, placing the possibility of an unmediated reality in necessary quotation marks. In a similar way, Doherty’s film works, which have increasingly become the dominant strand of his practice, have often subversively employed, with critical reflexivity and with cryptic effects, procedures and references from cinema and television drama. He has, therefore, explored with great rigour the power of the ‘Troubles’ image, interrogating the way in which media and fictional imagery perpetuate ‘partial views’ (in both 91

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senses:  fragmentary and tendentious).6 His chosen subjects and appropriated modes of representation are rendered less clear-​cut or communicatively direct than they might be in their usual cultural contexts or forms:  the photographic image offers no reliable truths about an objective, stable reality; the filmic narrative offers no conventional depth, development or resolution. Messages become purposefully mixed; meanings remain indeterminate. Fundamentally, as Jean Fisher has noted (citing Adorno on Beckett), Doherty’s is a form of art that ‘puts meaning on trial’.7 For over three decades, then, Doherty’s work has maintained an ongoing commitment towards critically examining hegemonic representational regimes relating to territory and conflict in Northern Ireland. As such his work might, in one sense, be understood as an exemplary manifestation of Declan McGonagle’s notion of a shift in Irish art at the end of the twentieth century ‘from the poetic to the political’ –​ and indeed Doherty figures centrally within this account.8 Yet Doherty has added to this picture in significant ways since the 1990s, undoubtedly maintaining a spirit of probing political interrogation, but often doing so by introducing new ‘poetic’ intensities into his work. In a number of the photographic series that have actively sought to address the socio-​cultural circumstances of the post-​Troubles period, there has been a notable, heightened interest in the presentation of aesthetically absorbing scenes that are disorientating in their visual sophistication and seductive power –​and it is in relation to this development that we can locate the extraordinary images of open blue skies that compose the 2005 series Local Solution and Show of Strength. These newer works retain residual harsh elements familiar from the range of politically charged subjects closely associated with Doherty’s practice (from, that is to say, the iconography of the Troubles) but they also exemplify a marked tendency towards exploring an expanded and enriched notion of the ambiguous effects of the aesthetic. It should be said of course that these aesthetic priorities constitute a steady development from the prior modes and moods of Doherty’s work rather than constituting a break from a former method: these later interests nuance and extend existing content in relation to altered political contexts. In this regard it is worth noting that although critical accounts of Doherty’s career have tended to direct themselves towards important political-​conceptual concerns, the gradual shift away from the strict 1980s and early 1990s vocabulary of scripto-​visual combinations has on occasion been described in such a way as to both highlight the very complex visual effects evident in Doherty’s increasingly dramatic artworks and also register the sensuous affects they create. For example, in one short commentary on Doherty, Louisa Buck takes note of the sensitive use of visual detail in the 1994 series of colour photographs No Smoke Without Fire –​ a set of images which ‘scrutinises the environs of Derry with such forensic intensity that even an empty road, a tyre-​tread or a parked car become rife with potential danger’ –​hailing their ‘rich tones and luxurious quality’, before going on to describe another photograph No Visible Signs from 1997 as typical of a turn at this time which involved the emergence of ‘a problematic beauty’.9 Similarly, in his essay for Somewhere Else, Doherty’s 1998 92

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exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Ian Hunt draws our attention to ‘works that pull a perplexing aesthetic appeal from their subject’, even going so far as to propose that within such vistas we are ‘seeing beauty for what it is even in this location’.10 Claims about problematic and inscrutable beauty in Doherty’s work are not unproblematic –​ it would surely be inappropriate to limit his critically complex aesthetic engagements to a celebration of beauty ‘for what it is’ –​ but they nonetheless offer useful points of connection and comparison in relation to the noticeable outbreak of fine weather that has gradually become apparent in Doherty’s practice in the post-​Troubles years. First shown at Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery in 2006, Local Solution and Show of Strength set representative bits-​and-​pieces of the customary iconography of conflict in contemporary Northern Ireland (flags and flagpoles, security fences and cameras) against great expanses of open sky. Blunt symbols of social control, territorial marking and the aggressive defence of non-​negotiable limits are therefore combined with potentially pleasing or aesthetically overwhelming evocations of a limitless world beyond. These photographs collectively seek to explore, as a gallery statement proposed, ‘the continuing ghettoisation of post-​ceasefire Northern Ireland’, but they do so not only by addressing particular ongoing problems in the region but also by proposing wider contexts for their reception and understanding, offering, potentially, a broader ‘reflection of our handling of general frontiers and controlling the hope of being free’.11 Central to these specific and general enquiries is attention to multiple possibilities, limits and uses of cultural representation: ‘The beautiful but poignant photographs embrace the optimistic abstraction of modernist photography and the cynicism of tourism and political spin’.12 The combined references here to frontiers and freedom, constricted situations and expanded spaces, of course echo central themes of Northern Ireland’s 2005 Venice Biennale exhibition The Nature of Things, which explicitly sought to present an ‘alternative’ view of Northern Ireland –​partly by departing from discourses concerning ‘Northern Ireland’ altogether. And though similarly contextualised by new circumstances of the post-​Troubles period, we have clearly been ‘here’ before in Doherty’s work. Any suggestion of development or departure is accompanied by an unsettling sense of déjà vu. Indeed, ‘progress’ –​ whether in terms of the advancement of art styles and concepts or with respect to the changes in the wider society –​is a very problematic issue for Doherty. He is almost always keen to revisit locations, to re-​use images, to consistently create new versions or altered views of the same or similar scenarios: difference is achieved through repetition.13 In photography, working with the paired and compared information of the diptych form or with the accumulating and deconstructing meanings of an image series, he has developed vital means of undermining the autonomy and integrity of the single view. In video works, multiple screens are often used to offer plural, simultaneous, dislocated takes on events, and we must physically orientate ourselves to these mixed messages in the installation space –​ we must, in other words, ‘take a position’ on the action.14 One view of a location is never adequate, in space or in time. Certain installations such as Same Old Story (1997), 93

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Re-​Run (2002) and Retraces (2002), or exhibitions such as Double Take (2001), Replays (2008), explicitly signal in their titles the ongoing interest in repeat investigations of images, narratives or histories; these works and these titles being emblematic of a tendency towards thinking in ‘after-​images’ –​Doherty constructing representations that are never fully ‘present’ in relation to their subject. They are necessarily ‘late’ –​to again borrow David Campany’s characterisation of contemporary photography’s ‘aftermath’ mode (a photographic designation cited earlier in relation to the work of John Duncan). In this regard then, it is important to draw attention to how Local Solution and Show of Strength have a strong relation to moments within Doherty’s earlier work where evocative natural imagery –​ such as a view of open sky –​is utilised. The diptych Longing/​Lamenting from 1991 seems, for instance, an important precursor and point of retrospective reference for the later (re)turn to natural imagery. This earlier pairing of image-​text compositions features in one photograph a close-​up view of a patch of bright green grass overlaid with the word ‘Lamenting’ in a simple sans serif font, while in another photograph there is an expanse of clear sky, against which we see, in the same script, the word ‘Longing’.15 In this work, the romantic potential of these natural views is both bluntly made evident and at the same time instantly undercut through the defining imprint of the overlaid text: a single reading of each image is demanded, the text branding onto the picture a word which signifies a cultural myth that is connected historically with these forms of representation. The clear associations of these sets of terms and images in the context of territorial claims and cultural histories in Ireland, North and South, is therefore subject to a form of structuralist decoding. Declan McGonagle, for instance, views this work as ‘an unambiguous statement that landscape is ideological, that we constantly project meaning onto nature and that this has been a particularly visible and damaging feature of the Irish situation’.16 As such Longing/​Lamenting is, in a manner that is exemplary of the conceptual photography of the 1980s, resolutely anti-​aesthetic in character –​a term that partly signals, as Hal Foster has written, ‘a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them’.17 The more large-​scale sky photographs in Local Solution and Show of Strength might reasonably be understood as maintaining this critical relationship to dominant, widely distributed forms of image-​making and conventions of image-​meaning. But in offering ‘alternative’ images of Northern Ireland they also appear to extend this criticality in unpredictable and less direct ways. Despite the difficulty and danger implied by the edgy, often off-​kilter close-​ups of brutalising mechanisms and materials of conflict that feature in cut-​off form at the corners and margins of the photographs, and despite any extent to which we may be attuned to how Doherty explores and decodes apparently ‘natural’ views, the dominant stretches of sky presented in these photographs are more profoundly jarring and confusing than in the earlier work. The ‘unambiguous statements’ that might be seen in previous pieces become replaced by instances of intensified, disconcerting ambiguity, with Doherty arguably developing the tendency towards the ‘radically indecipherable’ that Ian Hunt has identified even in the early photographs.18 For the skies in Local 94

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Solution and Show of Strength are deeply seductive, ‘sublime’ scenes, and as such their presence potentially comes to seem both pleasurable and problematic, and their meaning more indeterminate, especially in relation to the anxious ‘progress’ of the post-​Troubles moment. What may have once seemed a ‘problematic beauty’ in Doherty’s imagery has in these works become more determinedly ‘convulsive’ in spirit: ‘convulsive beauty’ being that notion from Bretonian surrealism which is in fact, as Foster notes, ‘less to do with the beautiful than with the sublime’; it is an aesthetic that ‘stresses the formless and evokes the unrepresentable, as with the sublime, but it also mixes dread and delight, attraction and repulsion: it too involves “a momentary check to the vital forces,” “a negative pleasure” ’.19 A relevant consideration in this regard is the manner of presentation of these photographs: they are produced as large-​scale plexiglas and laminated cibachrome prints on aluminum, all with dimensions of 121.9 x 152.4 cm. The specific technology of display and the chosen scale, therefore, stage these photographic images as powerfully vivid and physically grand presences in the gallery space. Doherty here employs, to striking effect, a mode of photographic reproduction that only fully emerged as an accepted, mainstream format for art during the 1990s, when photography properly began to take its place as a medium to rival painting within major museum collections and exhibitions. This type of very large-​scale, exquisitely detailed photograph is a now-​common contemporary form that carries with it an undoubted and important level of ‘content’ –​insofar as crucial meanings and affects result from the embodied encounter with these physically impressive and imposing image-​objects in the exhibition space. As Charlotte Cotton has noted in a discussion of contemporary large-​scale colour photography, ‘the monumental scale and breathtaking visual clarity that predominate when one experiences the photographic print need to be kept in mind’.20 This phenomenological aspect of the photograph’s presence is of course important to acknowledge given that there is an ongoing commitment in Doherty’s film and video work towards addressing the predicament of the viewer within a space of display. Undoubtedly, he has approached the matter of the photograph’s ‘appearance’ in the world on related terms. For Jean Fisher this sense of the demanding empirical encounter with the work is critical to the poetics/​politics dialogue in Doherty’s art: What we understand from Doherty’s poetics is that the affectivity of art lies less in what it purportedly says than in what it does: it opens a passage to our understanding of what is at stake when we surrender our own experience of life as shared human existence to the divisive realities promoted by hegemonic power. It exercises the right to critique the representations of existing social narratives in order to pave the way for more productive reconfigurations of reality.21

But, as Fisher’s comments here suggest, additional issues regarding this specific contemporary mode of photographic production and display (issues that call for an expanded critical frame) might also require acknowledgement, as the immediate, primary impact of these extravagantly realised images can also be related to wider contemporary experiences and understandings of space  –​ to other 95

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‘reconfigurations of reality’. Indeed, it has been claimed, for instance, that much of the new large-​scale photography of the 1990s can be closely associated with the emergence of the ‘delirious spaces’ of the postmodern city:22 spaces that cannot be cognitively mapped, to use a phrase Fredric Jameson adapts from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of The City, and that thus threaten not only the maintenance of a coherent, unitary subjectivity but also frustrate any effort to grasp ‘our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities’.23 Among the most significant figures in the development of this dramatic mode of photography is Andreas Gursky whose technically and aesthetically elaborate photographs respond to ‘a postmodern world in which media and environment are often difficult to distinguish’.24 His extreme, digitally enhanced visions of hyperreal spaces (whether architecturally disorientating urban environments or radically ‘engineered’ natural terrains) suggest that ‘this world cannot be imaged by the old means of painting and photography, which still tend to locate viewers punctually, in one place’.25 Gursky offers visions that ‘exceed any human perspective, any physical placement’.26 Though he is an artist with whom Doherty appears to have little directly in common (widescreen ‘global’ visions perhaps contrasting with forensic ‘local’ obsessions) Gursky’s interest in employing large-​scale photographs to evoke and provoke spatial, and to some extent explicitly architectural, dislocation (exemplary as this is of broader tendencies in contemporary art photography) suggests a potentially useful correspondence to the merging of physical structures with a potentially ‘sublime’ spatial view found in Local Solution and Show of Strength. Discussing Doherty’s images from the late 1990s, Ian Hunt has written of how the photographs are ‘large in scale and are usually placed on the wall at a surprisingly low height so that one feels lost in them rather than being able to master or contain them’.27 This experience of being subjectively ‘lost’, spatially and interpretively, is intensified in the later work. Arguably, indeed, there is a type of ‘delirium’ to be experienced in seeing these later images by Doherty.28 These photographs present a dizzying spectacle, or a disorientating, nebulous anti-​spectacle, showing upward views of the heavens that are on the one hand anchored and on the other disrupted by the various conflict-​suggestive physical fragments that we see: items largely ripped free from any fully grounded context, that refuse a clear sense of ‘any physical placement’, just as they signal defensive adherence to strict geographical and social positioning. Viewing these photographs then, we are faced with numerous, simultaneous meanings and potential experiences. Doherty’s work, for instance, might be seen to operate on the basis of enabling a critical alienation-​effect (Local Solution and Show of Strength arguably are set up to subvert legible conventions of representation). At the same time, there is the sense that these photographs are immersive, seductive, powerfully affective art objects –​ moreover, they both heighten the embodied dimension of spectatorship and instil a spirit of ‘disembodiment’ as they unsettle the ground of viewing. This unsettling of the space and experience of viewing is both a phenomenologically immediate matter –​an aspect of the first-​hand experience of seeing the images –​and perhaps 96

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a feature of photography’s twenty-​first century relationship with location more generally. But in considering the ‘ambiguous presence’ and ‘strategic indeterminacy’ of these and related later works by Doherty, numerous other issues and correspondences (that offer other means of simultaneously locating and ‘dislocating’ the work) also require consideration.

Between the lines In the photograph Show of Strength I (Plate 13) there is a captivating chromatic intensity to the cobalt sky-​scape caught by Doherty, that is confusing and delirium-​ inducing in its excessive visual force: a depth of sumptuously hyper-​real colour that is radically at odds with the rough, weathered materiality of the pictured object. This object is a sunlit telegraph pole, to which is crudely clasped a small piece of timber that is punctured and marked at various points, suggesting that something such as a flag (as we might suppose, based on the relationship of the image to other works in the series) was until recently attached. Communication cables stretch off from the telegraph pole at various sharp angles, creating within the broad expanse of blue a series of differently sized polygons. There is, therefore, not only an obvious tension between the densely alluring, more-​real-​than-​reality sky blue and the worn pole and its wires, but also a contrast between an idea of depth and distance in the pictured space beyond, and a two-​dimensional visual plane that is divided into a series of interconnecting shapes: between, in other words, a disconcerting representational view, and a fractured abstract arrangement. This formal approach is played out again in the brighter spaces of Local Solution V, which again fixes on a view of a telegraph pole with a series of wires once again reaching out in various directions, so creating geometrical shapes within the photograph. Here, though, the pole is in shadow and one of the communication wires gleams with reflected sunlight. As such these two images directly and quite subtly inter-​relate, creating a muted conversation –​ and a gradual confusion –​ between dark and light, and also between the two related series of photographs. More or less the same view is offered in each instance, but the light may be ‘coded’ differently each time (partly through the differing connotations of the separate ‘strength’ and ‘solution’ series titles). Any straightforward allegorical reading of each single image is thus potentially frustrated. As Jean Fisher has noted, ‘light –​or its absence –​and the specifics of framing and focus are destabilising components of [Doherty’s] images; they allude to the limitations of the image, its intrinsic indeterminacy’.29 In other works such as Local Solution IV (Plate 14), an extraordinary deep blue sky-​scape is interrupted by another set of strongly contrasting elements. Here a security camera encased in a protective metal cage –​ photographed from below and so appearing from the (gallery) viewer’s point of view to be looking almost vertically upwards, searching the skies much as we are doing as viewers –​presents, with its sturdy gridded structure, a starkly opposing form to the accompanying 97

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wisps of cloud that are spread unevenly over the visual plane. Formally and materially, therefore, several varieties of a tension between structure and ‘freedom’, and between surface and depth, seem to emerge. These images set up contrasts between formal organisation and visual ‘openness’, between tangibility and intangibility, between fixed material presence and a compelling ‘absence’ or seeming ‘immateriality’. An apparent interest in ‘significant form’ (found through attention to everyday objects and structures) is set against a fascination for the ‘formless’. In these ways, the photographs at once suggest and confound readings informed by certain historically conventional ideas of ‘form’ and ‘content’. Arguably, the formal allusions to modernist abstraction can associatively connect us to a principle of art as aspirationally ‘pure’, free of ‘content’ and so transcendently distinct from the lived contingencies of the world (the scale of the work also offers, of course, an implicit correspondence with high modernist abstract painting). Yet, if the careful formal ordering of the images might suggest such a notion of art as self-​enclosing, preoccupied only with itself and its own inner relationships, we might well remember, as Anthony Vidler points out, how modernism, while displacing many … spatial fears to the domain of psychoanalysis, was nevertheless equally subject to fears newly identified as endemic to the metropolis, forming its notions of abstraction under the sign of neurasthenia and agoraphobia and calculating its modes of representation according to the psychological disturbances of an alienated subject.30

Moreover, in alluding to the ‘unsettling of representation’ that characterised the modernist progression towards ‘an always ambiguous abstraction’, Vidler employs terms that seem strikingly pertinent to the tensions of Doherty’s most allusively ‘abstract’ photographs: Such abstraction, analysed in the context of the new psychologies of perception, seemed to many to be itself born out of spatial fear, ‘the spiritual dread of space’ that the art historian Wilhelm Worringer saw as the motive for the use of the ‘defensive’ forms of geometry, as opposed to the more natural, empathetic forms of a society at one with its surroundings.31

The struggle between ‘defensive’ and ‘natural’ forms cited here has, of course, a curious correlation to the contrasting elements found in Local Solution and Show of Strength. For there is certainly a critically useful tension to be felt in the relation between the abstract qualities of several of the photographs and other aspects of the series, other visual details, that offer stubborn resistance to any contemplation of purely formal relationships. Such important features return us to connection and communication with the world (making ‘content’ a problematic priority) or urging us to see ‘vision’ and ‘representation’ as wholly constructed through historical circumstance, as sets of ideologically determined formations, suited to and circumscribed by the interests of power. So, while we might gaze (perhaps in a mood of ‘longing’) at the stunning open sky in Local Solution IV, the sidelined image of a security camera invokes a controversial contemporary manifestation of 98

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the politics of vision. We see here forceful evidence of a specific regime of observation. But any interpretative opposition between this armoured surveillance machine and the unhindered surrounding sky-​view (within which the security camera is ambiguously ‘located’) must be a false one, since this broader look at the world is also a product of lens-​based perspective; it is an outcome of essentially the same technology of the visible, a manifestation of related conditions of modern visuality. Equally though, as we consider questions of ‘connection’ with the world in these photographs, it is worth making the obvious point that the pictured telephone cables –​ in certain images subtly but strictly defining areas of visual space –​are also literally and figuratively lines of communication beyond the blue colour-​ field. They lead to points unseen beyond the frame, linking with the world and, functionally, linking people in the world. In this regard, we might be reminded of the iconic photographs of telephone wires set against empty skies taken by the US photographer Harry Callahan between 1945 and 1976: ‘abstract’ works of great formal elegance that are nevertheless images that can reasonably be seen as referring to the possibilities and anxieties of inter-​human connection in the modern world. Similarly, many of the later but also very minimal photographic works of the acclaimed US artist Robert Adams show communication cables stretching across vast and ‘empty’ North American territories, the pared-​back compositions identifying slender, fragile connections between isolated places while also demonstrating the extent to which such ‘natural’ spaces are now permanently ‘man-​ altered’ landscapes.32 A further, more contemporaneous, correspondence with Doherty’s approach to capturing communication cables might also be found in the photographic work of German artist Frank Breuer (one of the last photographers to study with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Dusseldorf Academy) who has, like Doherty, created images of contemporary places and non-​places in such a way as to make subtle connections with the formal rigour of abstract modernism, while subverting the aspirations of such art by simultaneously evoking the desolation of urban environments. Breuer’s work might, perhaps, be seen to have closer affinity with the practice of John Duncan, the younger Northern Irish photographer whose downbeat and detached Becher-​inspired, cataloguing of post-​conflict Belfast, we have touched on already. For, like Duncan, Breuer maintains a commitment to presenting his subjects against ‘neutral’ grey skies, a policy that obviously runs counter to the highly loaded aesthetic strategy adopted by Doherty. Nevertheless as Brian Sholis writes, Breuer’s approach does lead to ‘radical confusions of scale’ and to ‘something approaching abstraction’ (characteristics that are clearly echoed in Doherty’s distorted views) and that allow Breuer to sneak ‘a palpable subjectivity into his seemingly deadpan images’.33 Moreover, in his ‘partial’ focus on communication wires, Doherty gestures towards the local/​non-​local issues that we have identified as relevant from other perspectives here and that are also of apparent importance to Breuer. Once again the need to extend our reading of these images beyond ‘local solutions’ –​and the need to understand the formation of the local as contingent upon extra-​local situations and forces –​ becomes 99

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important. Sholis writes of how Breuer is interested in the way that ‘methods of distribution, whether of material goods or immaterial “meaning” have replaced the sites of industrial production the Bechers recorded for posterity’; and, by concentrating his and our gaze on wires that disperse power and information into and out of city spaces, Breuer alerts us to how ‘First World Societies take the free flow of goods and information for granted’, so encouraging us ‘to not only see what we would normally ignore but, through repetition, teaching us to look at it closely, searching for marks of distinction’.34 As correspondences of these kinds accumulate, it should be noted that there is another ‘repetition’ in the making of Doherty’s photographs, one that again prompts questions about engaging the ‘local’, and that has not been thus far acknowledged. For in thinking about the ‘abstraction’ of Doherty’s images in relation to the ‘marks of distinction’ of a changed situation in Northern Ireland, it is important to acknowledge another significant photographic precursor for these series. This other, anxious influence is surely British photographer Paul Graham’s series Ceasefire from 1994:  a body of work made when Graham (a prominent presence in the history of picturing Troubles landscapes) returned to Northern Ireland in the tense, hopeful period following the IRA ceasefire. Graham’s earlier Troubled Land photographs from 1984–​86 had taken a distant view of landscapes altered by the conflict, showing lush natural settings (‘beautifully’ captured in full colour, a documentary mode in which Graham has been a pioneer) or locations of humdrum suburban existence. In these photographs, Graham picked out small details in a way that inflected and emphasised these otherwise unremarkable locations as sites of contestation and social tension. So we see isolated rural landscapes that nevertheless bear the marks of the Northern Ireland conflict through the subtle presence of, for instance, a Union Jack flying from a solitary tree. Elsewhere in Troubled Land there are shots of kerbstones on ordinary streets and stretches of country road painted with the divisive tri-​colours of Nationalist/​Unionist political affiliation. In these images, there is little that is different from any familiar forms of landscape imagery, urban or rural, and yet by making visible Troubles traces, Graham communicates a strong sense of how a harsh abnormality has invaded and transformed even the most mundane scenarios of everyday life. Moreover, to point to these political incisions in the landscape is also, of course, to implicitly address the manner in which the representational art genre of ‘landscape’ has often itself arisen from political and economic demarcations of territory. In other words, throughout the history of art, landscapes have always been delineated politically, even if the specific circumstances of division and exclusion pertaining to any particular scene have tended to be ideologically masked.35 In this regard it is not difficult to see connections both to Doherty’s photo-​conceptualist re-​coding of landscape imagery, and to some strategies adopted by Paul Seawright, who has also acknowledged a debt to Graham.36 But by the time of the later, 1994 Ceasefire work, it was not quite landscape that held Graham’s attention. Rather, as in Doherty’s 2006 projects, the focus was sky. The Ceasefire series featured nine photographs composed entirely of uninterrupted expanses of sky; the work showing 100

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only, at this pivotal political moment, a space of unrestricted openness, utterly unbounded by local, regional division:  observed realms in which the separateness set by sectarian geography would, presumably, have no relevance. Equally, such open space could be understood as a zone of aesthetic doubt for the documentary photographer concerned with seizing the Zeitgeist –​for how best might the ‘ghostly’ actuality of such an uncertain historical present be captured? Such aesthetic concerns are acutely important here, given the heavy burden imposed by photographic histories. As Mark Durden commented in a review for Frieze Magazine in 1995, Graham’s subject could be located, as with Doherty’s later post-​Troubles views of communication wires, within a long-​standing photographic micro-​genre, one that carried specifically charged aesthetic connotations: In the 20s and 30s, Alfred Stieglitz made Equivalents, a series of small, intense black and white sky pictures. Closer to home, William Eggleston took several hundred pictures of the sky, colour prints he likened to fragments of frescoes, a series of which he titled Wedgewood Blue. To turn the camera away from the world to the sky marks an aestheticising vision which is the furthest remove from the status of the photograph as document. What all these celestial images have in common is the desire for a heightened and purified view through photography –​ an essentially modernist gesture. The sky, like the sea, is an archetypal modernist subject: an empty expanse, deaf to history and politics.37

But as Durden points out, Graham’s images of sky resisted such customary or implied aesthetic rejection of the ‘ground’ of politics, even as they created a groundless photographic space. For in titling the works, Graham chose to anchor each ‘abstract’ or non-​specific, non-​locatable image in relation to a particular location: each image being named after a noted Northern Ireland Trouble-​spot, easily recognisable as an index of territorial demarcation and social division (such as, for example: Andersonstown, Belfast; Shankill, Belfast; or Bogside, Derry). The titles in these works therefore created, in a manner loosely akin to aspects of Doherty’s work, a text-​image interplay that undermined the purity of the photograph’s non-​ territorial perspective. These dauntingly uncertain but still-​open views (as compared to Doherty’s skies, Graham mostly offered images of heavy cloud cover) were to be understood in relation to the negotiations of the Troubled Land below. Graham’s pictures therefore proposed a problem of aesthetic representation as ‘peace’ approached, but depended on a reliable, perhaps even interpretatively reassuring, place-​name resonance for their ‘political’ effect –​ presuming connections between text and image, and between image and ‘reality’, that have been more comprehensively tested in Doherty’s practice.38 Doherty’s own sky pictures do not offer the same satisfactorily ‘real’ and grounding dimension as they seek to contemplate and propose alternative views. Rather we are caught between one abstraction and another, between beguiling/​bewildering bright sky and a series of ‘local’-​signalling captions that offer no interpretative ‘solution’. We encounter photographs concerned with the ‘local’ and with territorial ‘strength’ that provide no true sign of identifiable localness, that show structures employed for territory marking and defending that are, however, wholly ‘unfixed’ from the solidity of 101

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‘the land itself’.39 Here we are in stranger, starker territory, even as we contemplate scenes in which many of the clouds that filled Graham’s skies in a moment of political expectation have been blown away. Doherty’s sky/​ground dislocations and disconnections offer up spaces and images that perhaps respond to Graham’s Ceasefire propositions, but present us with material that is more radically uncertain and unsettling in both its meanings and effects. These various critical connections and speculations are perhaps most relevant not as a means of canonically locating Doherty’s practice or of art-​historically categorising and ‘grounding’ it, but rather, on the one hand, to signal the power of the photographs to send us in any number of directions simultaneously –​to frustrate any ‘settling’ on a point of view or particular reading  –​ and consequently, on the other hand, to demonstrate the difficulty of ‘making sense’ of the heightened spirit of ambiguous dislocation these post-​Troubles series promote and prompt.40 If, as Roland Barthes once wrote, ‘Society is concerned to tame the Photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it’, such works by Doherty as those discussed here surely indicate a struggle against such regulating influences.41 These are photographic representations relating to a specific historical moment and arising out of a specific geography that render all specific certainty unstable: despite their ‘minimal’ character and content they become incorrigibly plural in their capacity for dissemination and communicative ‘deviance’, just as, at the same time, they also hold back or defer the possibility of ‘meaningful’ presence, articulating tense conditions of delay. Even the meanings of their most obviously denotative features become somehow ‘unfixed’ at the point of being ‘fixed’ in time and space by the lens. The Irish flag that marks territorial specificity in Show of Strength III (Plate 15) for instance, is caught by the gaze of the camera in a moment of wind-​blown motion and as such it is ‘held’ in a blurred state, its ‘reality’ both captured and unsteadied by an effect of photographic viewing, the flag having here the wispy inconsistency of the clouds that float unattached from terrestrial grounding in other photographs from these series. The flag’s referential clarity –​ its place-​based ‘show of strength’ –​is also therefore weakened in this image. Yet just as these photographs appear designed to resist closure, and as much as they prompt plural interpretative digressions, they are best characterised, as has been already indicated, by an always uneasy idea of openness. The photographs in Local Solution and Show of Strength are concerned with restless, fraught shifting between representation and abstraction, between the particular and the universal, between the local and the global, between constraint and freedom, between political and existential concerns. And they are photographs, therefore, that create a space of ontological ‘suspension’ –​re-​emphasising and intensifying the prevailing spirit of disturbing aesthetic ambiguity in Doherty’s work that has been of such sustained interest for Jean Fisher and others. It is clearly important, then, to remain alert to how Doherty’s densely layered manipulations of media codes and viewer expectations consistently involve the holding of multiple contradictory messages and incompatible meanings in precarious balance. Doherty’s art functions, as Caoimhín Mac 102

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Giolla Léith has astutely observed, according to a logic of ‘dual articulation’ that is ‘radically contestatory’ and ‘anti-​authoritative’.42 Compulsive negotiations: unsettled subjectivities and haunted spaces Whether obliquely or more directly, much of Doherty’s later work has responded to the anxiety and trauma of the post-​Troubles period. As Carolyn Christov-​ Bakargiev has noted in an essay accompanying a survey of the artist’s practice at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2002, it is evident that from as early as 1994 –​the year of the first IRA ceasefire –​‘Doherty’s art has been about trauma, and exploring the past’.43 And as the past is explored, unsettling effects on the present are registered. Doherty’s reflections on the post-​Troubles period offer no consoling sense of closure. Everything is held in a state of anxious uncertainty; the meanings of all representations, all positions, all identities, must be continuously negotiated. At the same time, Doherty’s films and photographs maintain unceasing alertness to all that has not been, or cannot be, made present within available forms of cultural and political representation. In Doherty’s work, what is ‘present’ is insistently communicated to us as incomplete. These recurring concerns and obsessive-​compulsive rituals of Doherty’s art are developed in ways that address profound questions regarding both subjectivity and space.44 In terms of the former focus, Christov-​Bakargiev argues, for instance, that in the post-​Troubles period, ‘a more existential position has emerged’ in Doherty’s work.45 This view is best supported with reference to a number of suspenseful ‘portrait’ films which concentrate on the plight of single individuals studiously observed in circumstances of chilling constraint, panicked flight or unnaturally stasis. Films, for example, such as Re-​Run (2002): a looped two-​screen installation showing a suited man running across the Craigavon Bridge in Derry at night, a structure within this charged and divided urban environment which had featured in several prior works by Doherty, from the 1992 photographic diptych The Bridge to video works Same Old Story (1997) and Control Zone (1999). In Re-​Run, the viewer observes the isolated man racing in apparent terror towards the camera on one screen and sprinting away from the camera’s position on the other. As these screens are installed at opposite ends of a narrow exhibition space, both versions of the character’s run cannot be viewed simultaneously. Viewers are thus forced to turn and turn again to take in both looping sequences; so potentially positioning the gallery visitor as either pursuer or pursued in each case. As we move to adjust our gaze, a ‘position’ on the action becomes apparent, we become active spectators (as Claire Bishop has argued, definitive characteristics of today’s installation art include the promotion of ‘embodied viewing’ and ‘activated spectatorship’46). The ‘existential position’ of this film might, therefore, be understood in relation to the mysterious predicament of the lone runner in this dual-​perspective film fragment  –​ even if we can draw on knowledge about the film’s location, or on perceived connections with Doherty’s other work, the withholding of specific narrative content and context arguably render the protagonist 103

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‘a universal figure, caught in a perpetual no-​man’s-​land, never reaching his destination or escaping his pursuer’ (as was noted in the exhibition text accompanying Doherty’s participation in the 2003 Turner Prize). But equally, this ‘existential’ dimension applies to the anxious circumstances of our own viewing:  our ‘freedom’ of perspective remaining contingent upon the complex situatedness of our existence in the world. Other works from the last decade arguably advance these existential interests in powerful ways. In the 2004 film Non-​Specific Threat, a single camera circles around a lone male standing in a deserted, non-​descript industrial space.47 The man is an intimidating presence; shaven-​headed and stern-​faced, he maintains a fixed, intense stare, never once altering his severe expression as the camera slowly pans around. This menacing figure has the look of a stock villain, an all-​ too-​familiar and even stereotypical thug. Yet Doherty subjects him to sustained scrutiny, bringing us up-​close-​and-​personal with an instantly recognisable form of contemporary ‘monster’. As we watch, a quiet, steady voice in the background makes a series of strange and disturbing statements –​ terse, ominous claims that we might easily presume are the imagined thoughts of the solitary man under observation. This unsettling commentary combines alarming predictions of a radically transformed future society (‘there will be no television, there will be no radio’) with complex and often sinister references to the relationship between the viewer and this apparently threatening ‘other’. ‘I am the face of evil’, the voice chillingly insists, and yet equally this ‘alien’ consciousness supposes to ‘share your fears’, to ‘know your desires’. A troubling and unexpected intimacy is identified and any comfortable, comforting sense of distance between viewer and viewed is refused: ‘I live alongside you. I am inside you.’ In this situation, as in other work by Doherty, the concentrated focus on the face of another, the face of an assumed threat, results in no certainties. Messages are mixed. Contradictory assertions cancel each other out:  ‘I am your victim … you are my victim’, ‘I am fictional … I am real’. Nothing, ultimately, is clear. As we follow its patient, prowling point-​ of-​view, Non-​Specific Threat becomes an engrossing but unsolvable mystery about how we might meaningfully define our subjectivity in relation to that of others. ‘You think you know me’, the voice says, ‘I am unknowable’. This focused face-​to-​face scenario is the basis of an ethical and existential challenge that is of profound importance to Doherty’s art. Judith Butler has observed that ‘to respond to the face, to understand its meaning means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself’; and such sentiments can surely be viewed as highly appropriate to the ‘ambiguous presence’ of the figure observed in Non-​Specific Threat.48 Building on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Butler argues that such comprehension of precariousness is fundamental to the emergence of a viable, ‘open’ form of ethics, one that is formed through struggle (rather than being about the eradication of struggle) and one that is, therefore, relevant to ‘those cultural analyses that seek to understand how best to depict the human, human grief and suffering, and how best to admit the “faces” of those against whom war is waged into public representation’.49 104

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Crucially, with acute relevance to the aesthetic-​political strategies employed in Doherty’s practice, Butler adds that in the cultural transposition of philosophical speculations of this kind, ‘it is possible to see how dominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended’; a proposition that has, she says, ‘implications … for the boundaries that constitute what will and will not appear within public life, the limits of a publicly acknowledged field of appearance’.50 In a related way, again responding to Levinas but making direct connections to Doherty, Jean Fisher has written of how in certain forms of contemporary art that propose a visual relation of ‘I’ and ‘You’, ‘the viewer is confronted “face to face” with an inescapable other, the experience of which is intended to expose and cut through those prejudices and dogmas of received opinion that cast a shadow between self and other’.51 For Fisher, these uneasy circumstances of encounter remind us that ‘our sense of selfhood and meaning are not generated internally from a sovereign self but are the effects of a continuous negotiation with others and the world’ [emphasis added].52 Fisher’s view is also, of course, akin to Chantal Mouffe’s conviction concerning the pluralising and re-​politicising of the concept of democracy: a belief that ‘every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity’.53 Appropriate to its Lacanian provenance, such a commitment is underpinned by a necessary sense of lack, meaning that every order, every political identity, remains forever incomplete. While there are undoubtedly differences in emphasis and orientation between thinkers such as Butler and Mouffe,54 these various positions have a general shared relevance to the spirit of non-​closure that haunts Doherty’s art: his approach to ‘representation’ being one that seeks to disturb received forms of meaning and to unsettle all presumptions of ontological presence. If this is the disposition of Doherty’s work towards the politics of personhood, it is equally so with regard to place. Indeed, we might relate these points to how Doherty conjures indeterminacy out of what in other ways appears as ‘definite’ within his work: that is, the regularly returned-​to ground of territories in Belfast and Derry. For Maeve Connolly, Doherty’s work can be partly understood as a ‘sustained investigation of “site-​specificity” ’, but as his career has developed, the relationship with local specificity has altered and opened out.55 Citing an interview with Doherty, Connolly describes how there has been an acknowledgement of an ‘emphasis on “local knowledge” in his early images of Derry’ –​ Doherty noting how the pictured ‘place’ in the earlier works is ‘very specifically Derry’, with a ‘detailed local knowledge’ almost being required to pick up some of the work’s references.56 But in various ways over subsequent years, the work has adopted a different, expanded sense of framing, and has, on occasion, taken an alternative focus. Connolly, for instance, points to how Doherty has ‘reconsidered his exclusive focus on Derry, extending his exploration of place and identity to other locations’.57 Doherty himself has described how he felt the need to change from directing his work towards ‘specific places, labels … when at some point I felt that that was very restrictive in terms of what the viewer could do with it. It seemed to 105

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close down possibilities for reading the work. I was interested in opening that up again’.58 But if, as Caomhín Mac Giolla Léith has also indicated, there has been ‘a movement, or rather a series of movements, from the specific to the generic’ as the work has progressed, these are uneasy back and forth progressions: processes of repetition, frustration and suspension as much as any departure from one defined territory of investigation to another.59 In many ways, as might be suggested by the frenetic, frustrated transit of a film such as Re-​Run, it is the hesitant, always negotiated and negotiable space between places that is Doherty’s subject: ‘negotiation’ being a concept and practice that, for Derrida, signals ‘not-​ease, not-​quiet’.60 ‘Negotiation’ is a circumstance of ‘un-​leisure’, which implies ‘the impossibility of stopping, of settling in a position’.61 In a manner, then, closely corresponding to Doherty’s concerns, particularly in Re-​Run, Derrida reflects that whether one wants it or not, one is always working in the mobility between several positions, stations, places, between which a shuttle is needed. The first image that comes to me when one speaks of negotiations is that of the shuttle, la navette, and what the word conveys of to-​and-​fro between two positions, two places, two choices. One must always go from one to the other, and for me negotiation is the impossibility of establishing oneself anywhere.62

What persists, then, across the range of Doherty’s earlier and later work  –​ from forensic Troubles analyses, to reflections on the post-​Troubles era of uneasy ‘peace’ –​ is an unsettling, crucially anxious and continuously negotiated attitude to the politics of place and identity. What such strategies might reveal is, of course, uncertain, and it is important to signal the extent of the potential ‘disturbance’ they might prompt, just as some degree of political potentiality is also sought within these newly negotiated conceptual/​aesthetic spaces. Ian Hunt has, for instance, argued that: The suspension of identity and identification that his video works and photography can produce is traumatic, not inclusive. He operates at levels where to ‘share’ another’s point of view is to participate in those feelings of everyday fear and anxiety where both sides are already substantially reduced to a set of routine twitches: dreams of getting out, replayed anticipations and dread of what’s around the corner.63

‘What’s around the corner’, may of course mean the future  –​ that ‘spectre of thought’, as Vladimir Nabokov once described it  –​ or it may refer us more literally to the tensions of lived space, identifying the steadily dislocating strain in Doherty’s practice that turns each encountered territory into a disquieting terrain vague. As Jean Fisher writes, ‘if space is seen as disturbingly ambiguous’ by Doherty, it is a view that is due in part to the way we populate it with unseen and potentially malignant ‘others’ that are ungraspable precisely because … in all likelihood they are phantoms conjured by an increasingly paranoid public imagination undoubtedly fuelled by state interests and a complicit media. But as the boundaries of the city 106

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are never strictly determinable, so those between self and other are constantly slipping, which undermines our sense of a coherent, stable world.64

Fisher’s response underestimates the extent to which ‘phantoms’ may themselves point us to a form of ‘unsettling’ political promise. But her comments offer a useful connection to another vital negotiation occurring within Doherty’s art: that between what may be conceived of or experienced as the real and the imagined. In considering the anxieties of Doherty’s ‘post-​Troubles’ works, we can prioritise the sense of subjective and social uncertainty described above, foregrounding an idea of anxiety as a ‘state of alert’ and ‘signal of danger’, while also emphasising the extent to which in viewing Doherty’s representations of places and people, we may become alarmed by the paradoxical ‘presence’ and influence of what is not there, of what we cannot see or cannot know, but may imagine or intuit.65 This blurring of the rational and the irrational relates to a more general observation offered by Anthony Vidler that space has been ‘increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and introjection, as opposed to a stable container of objects and bodies’.66 Lived spaces are shaped psychologically and discursively as much as they are composed of physically tangible features. They are conceived of and experienced through a subtle interplay of real and imagined. In his writings on art and architecture, Vidler fuses social and psychoanalytical themes, drawing on the Freudian notion of anxiety both as part of an effort to delineate the characteristics of what he terms the ‘warped space’ of the contemporary urbanised and globalised world (‘the landscapes of fear and the topographies of despair created as a result of modern technological and capitalist development from Metropolis to Megalopolis’67) but also in making a case for the importance within modernity of an ‘architectural uncanny’. Vidler offers a reading of Freud’s writings on the uncanny that builds on the domestic, or even architectural, associations of the term, seeing how its source in the term ‘unheimlich’ (unhomely) opens up theoretical space to consider ‘the relations between the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house, the individual and the metropolis’.68 In that it is said to involve the disruptive return of what lies hidden beneath the surfaces of everyday life, of what is psychically or perhaps socially repressed, the uncanny can be viewed as a potent indicator of the ‘peculiarly unstable nature of house and home’.69 (Freud’s exploration of the term plays on the strange etymological proximity of homely and unhomely, what is private and precious quickly transforming into what is hidden and threatening.) But, Vidler proposes, the uncanny potentially allows for more general reflection on ‘questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile and homelessness’.70 If, as Hal Foster writes in Compulsive Beauty (a study of surrealism energised by the relevance of the uncanny), ‘[the] return of the repressed renders the subject anxious, and this anxious ambiguity produces the primary effects of the uncanny’,71 it is worth speculating (as indeed Foster does) on the connection of these psychic intensities to ways in which ‘the labyrinthine spaces of the modern city have been construed as the sources of modern anxiety, from revolution and epidemic to phobia and alienation’.72 Out of this anxious modern condition, Vidler traces a ‘contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny 107

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erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-​down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l’oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of post-​industrial culture’.73 In this way, it can be argued that, as Mladen Dolar writes, ‘there is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity’; or, going further, ‘it is modernity itself which is uncanny’.74 Thus as Nicholas Royle notes, in a manner appropriate to Doherty’s photographic subject matter, ‘the ghostliness of the uncanny creeps, slowly but irrepressibly, into the common light of day’.75 At the same time, Vidler is keen to note that within this familiar, everyday world, particular types of social or architectural space do not necessarily give rise to such effects: the uncanny is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.76

This ‘disturbing ambiguity’ of the uncanny (a term echoed, of course, in Fisher’s writing on Doherty) and the accompanying sense of an anxious negotiation between states of reality and unreality, has significant bearing on certain post-​ Troubles film works by Doherty. It is perhaps worth noting, though, how rarely such frames of reference have been acknowledged as relevant to the analysis of Doherty’s practice; perhaps the title of Ian Hunt’s 1998 essay, ‘Familiar and Unknowable’, comes closest to implying a connection. But Doherty himself began to subsequently signal an interest in more Gothic associations of this kind, his evocations of sublime visions or haunted spaces offering alternative means to reflect on the strange ‘normalisations’ of the new peace-​era reality. Despite the ‘abnormality’ of the terminology with regard to the post-​Troubles context, Vidler’s arguments concerning an ‘architectural uncanny’ correspond to Doherty’s changing thematic fascinations: Vidler holding the view that the term ‘uncanny’ might currently ‘regain a political connotation as the very condition of contemporary haunting’.77 This ‘condition’ is thought of by Vidler as a ‘distancing from reality forced by reality’:78 a situation which surely seems pertinent to the anxious ‘after-​ images’, such as those created by Doherty, that have appeared as ‘shadows’ of mainstream media imagery in contemporary art from Northern Ireland. To invoke notions of haunting is to hint, as Slavoj Žižek notes (paraphrasing Derrida), at the ambiguous presence of a ‘pseudo-​materiality that subverts the classical ontological oppositions of reality and illusion’.79 This is a force of spectral subversion that surges through Doherty’s films. In the short, contemplative 2006 work Empty (Figure 11), for example, a continuous, disquieting negotiation between image and reality is once again foregrounded and a related ‘spirit’ of material/​immaterial in-​betweenness is evident in the manner of the film’s forensic concentration on an architectural structure and physical location. Empty is a study of a region of built space that is determinedly specific in its enquiry  –​ paying close attention to the precise conditions of a particular place –​while being at the 108

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Figure 11  Willie Doherty, Empty, 2006.

same time an almost entirely abstract encounter with architecture, Doherty’s unidentified object of analysis being depicted in such a way as to present a fugitive, ungrounded and unreliable ‘reality’.80 The film features a series of fixed-​camera views of an anonymous, corporate-​modernist office block and of its non-​descript environs; these views are fragmentary and fleeting, constructing an accumulative but incomplete picture –​Doherty breaking the building down into pieces just as an attempt to assemble a perspective is made. The character and condition of the actual building itself are also suggestive of paradox: in its design, it is obviously in general terms suggestive of the promise and progress of the ‘modern’, yet it is in a state of steadily advancing decay and there is little evidence of recent use or present purpose. Moreover, the paint that we see flaking from the structure’s deteriorating exterior is, perhaps unusually for a building of this kind, a strong bold blue: a shade that is not so distant from the dramatic azure and cobalt skies that have such a disorientating effect and indeterminate meaning in series such as Local Solution and Show of Strength (alongside which, it should be noted, Empty was premiered at the Kerlin Gallery in 2006). Doherty offers close-​ups of the building’s decaying coating –​this disintegrating industrial rendering of a ‘natural’ tone –​ but alongside these details we also see the sky reflected in the horizontal lines of side-​by-​side office-​block windows, and so we see serial captured ‘shots’ of natural space, pieced together within the wider ‘picture’, in a form that resembles the frame-​by-​frame worldview of the analogue film strip. This is an allusion (and illusion) that seems particularly apt given the rigorous self-​reflexivity of Doherty’s art. As Jean Fisher writes (with reference to Gilles Deleuze’s theories of ‘the movement image’), there is a fundamental impulse in cinema that arises from an unavoidable lack, from the need to fill an evident absence, so that ‘each frame 109

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demands the next in order to bring what is outside the visual field into view, and to complete a movement that constantly remains unresolved’.81 One possible approach to Empty, bearing in mind the primary thematic concerns and contexts of Doherty’s work over the years, might be to suppose that the assembled fragmentary views of this forgotten place compose a metaphor for contemporary Northern Ireland as a crumbling bureaucratic (or corporate) edifice: a notion that is not without foundation, we might say, in light of the recurring use of architectural metaphors in the construction of Northern Ireland’s political discourse (‘framework documents’, ‘blue-​prints for discussion’ etc.) and indeed this view of the work was articulated in Aidan Dunne’s Irish Times review of the 2006 Kerlin Gallery exhibition. As Dunne proposed, Doherty’s formal focus on architectural features (order and organisation being measured against disorder and dilapidation) can be understood as a symbolic reflection on political entropy. Yet there is surely something unsatisfactory (or excessively satisfactory) in such a reading, suggesting a too-​perfect plenitude of available meaning in a film tellingly titled Empty. Instead, it seems important to register the profound uncertainties of the film; to insist, despite the compulsive gathering of visual information, on a stubborn withholding of evidence: the protracted gazing on the deserted building ultimately being a process of surveillance without end, research without resolution. As the looped film moves again and again through the observed day, and as the light and surrounding weather conditions slowly change, creating multiple individually framed shots of turbulent or serene skies in the mirroring glass, we repeatedly scrutinise the structure’s opaque outside, examining it for any further revealing information, hoping, maybe, for clues as to the significance of this vacated structure. But the history and ‘meaning’ of this unidentified building will remain ever-​unavailable and the role, value, form and perspective of visual documentation are potentially brought into question. In these ways, Empty could recall the disquieting, lingering view of a Paris home that opens Austrian director Michael Haneke’s disturbing surveillance drama Hidden: an ‘unhomely’ scene of puzzling, sustained observation that is not ‘answered’ in any reassuring, resolving way as the elliptical narrative progresses and digresses.82 But much closer correspondences to Doherty’s film might also be found in the widespread tendency of contemporary art film-​makers to offer contemplative perspectives on relics of architectural modernism. Within this strain of art, Tacita Dean’s elegiac film Palast, seems an especially close aesthetic relation. The gaze of Palast is on the former government building of the German Democratic Republic in Berlin, the Palast der Republik: an icon of East European architectural modernism that is observed by Dean at a time just prior to its then-​ planned demolition. Brian Dillon’s description of Dean’s ‘effort to frame this doomed edifice, briefly, in the rear-​view mirror of history’ identifies obvious correlations with the content and style of Empty: On the soundtrack … the traffic circles noisily out of shot, and occasional voices rise above it for a moment. But the building, clad in a pale brown glass that turns

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everything to gold, reflects mostly, at first, empty sky. Or rather, a sky roiling with ravishing, golden cloudscapes: the Modernist grid of the building’s façade encloses a slowly swirling turbulence that is practically Romantic in its hazy allure.83

As in Empty ‘each expanse of glass is a screen’ onto which viewers might project visions of the future or memories of the past; and in Dillon’s view, ‘Dean’s film sets this perplex of historical emotions into spectral movement’.84 Both films contemplate a disordered, out-​of-​joint sense of ‘modern’ time but in the play of reflections on the windows of these modern ruins, there is also a disordering of space: these works create a hauntological ‘pseudo-​materiality’ out of strict architectural form by turning solid structure into a highly unstable, shape-​shifting semblance of actual, physical presence. Doherty’s haunting of an unpopulated place has therefore an outcome which is itself somehow haunted by the instability of any effort to capture the tangible circumstances of a present moment or a particular location. In this regard Empty brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s thoughts on what ‘spectrality’ may mean as a theme within contemporary theory, thoughts which may, incidentally, also bring to mind key visual emphases of Doherty’s ‘alternative’ visions of Northern Ireland. The spectral, Jameson says, is ‘what makes the present waver: like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world –​indeed of matter itself –​now shimmers like a mirage’.85 Invisible matter: Ghost Story Questions of ‘contemporary haunting’ have to a considerable extent inflected the evolving and interconnected anxieties regarding place, the built environment and unsettled subjectivity in Doherty’s work. This is a theme that can be loosely associated with films such as Closure, Re-​Run or Non-​Specific Threat –​works in which solitary and enigmatic figures are studied in situations of purgatorial in-​betweenness. But haunting has been more directly the subject of several key films that have been made since Empty appeared in 2006. The Visitor, for instance, a video installation first shown at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2008, features another strange presence haunting the fringes of the city, with another relic of late-​modernist architectural design –​a block of suburban flats –​providing the setting for further ambiguous reflection on the ‘presence’ of the past. Similarly in Buried from 2009 (commissioned by Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery) edge-​ city territory is explored in explicitly gothic terms. Here a woodland landscape on the margins of Derry becomes a deeply sinister space, littered with the remnants of unknown activities, Doherty alerting us once again to the contentious, complicated relationship of landscape and memory –​ the sense prevailing as we watch, that what may be ‘buried’ in this post-​Troubles landscape does not yet ‘rest in peace’.86 Through adherence to his customary strategy of working with a film crew directly in response to the landscape –​Doherty’s is an unconventional, reverse-​engineered production method which takes location as a starting point

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Figure 12  Willie Doherty, Ghost Story, 2007.

rather than script87 –​Buried emerged as a continuation of matters first explored in the internationally acclaimed work Ghost Story, which (as has been noted already) premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2007 –​ and it is here that we see the most full and focused treatment of the theme of spectrality within this recent sequence of films. In this last section on Doherty I want to offer a close reading of certain aspects of Ghost Story (or of certain uncertain aspects) but in beginning to do so, a somewhat tangential reference may assist in setting the scene. ‘At first it was a form. Or not even that. A weight, an extra weight; a ballast.’88 Here, in the halting opening moments of John Banville’s mesmerising and melancholy ghost story Eclipse, a seeming manifestation of the supernatural is described in terms that, curiously, relate less to ‘spirit’ than to physical presence –​the unsettled narrator stressing substance over shadow. And yet, in this unearthly visitation, the material conditions of empirical reality are transgressed. Accepted states of being are disturbed. ‘I felt it that first day out in the fields’, the speaker recalls, ‘It was as if someone had fallen silently into step beside me, or inside me, rather, someone who was else, another, and yet familiar’.89 A  disconcertingly intimate connection is made; a fleeting possession takes place. Instantly in Banville’s tale, this otherworldly interloper in everyday reality is made ambiguously worldly: its ontological status is insistently uncertain. As such, it is a cause of creeping confusion between the corporeal and the ethereal, breaching the boundary between inner and outer existence, challenging the perceived autonomy and integrity of the self. In this fragment from a haunted life (as we presently learn, Banville’s protagonist is an ageing actor who must confront the ghosts of his past and the agonies of the present when he makes a long-​postponed return to his childhood home) there are discreet intimations of the profound anxieties prompted by allusions to 112

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spectral phenomena. The figure of the ghost frightens and bewilders through its impossible merging of being with non-​being, of past with present; but in an obvious way too it momentarily excites (and perhaps consoles) through its disruptive capacity to transcend mortal limits: it could be confirmation of an afterlife, signalling that those once lost may yet return, that the dead may speak again. From either perspective, ‘time is out of joint’ and lived space loses some of its sturdiness and definition. The arrival of the spectre therefore implies an abrupt undoing of customary distinctions between presence and absence –​as Derrida reasoned, the spectre is ‘some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other’90 –​and so it may open traumatic or productive spaces of uncertainty, troubling us psychologically, philosophically or even politically. Such anxieties are deeply felt in the subtly disquieting visions of Ghost Story, a strange, understated film in which ongoing thematic concerns –​the complexities of place, identity and memory, the fraught relations between experience and representation, between reality and illusion –​are extended and transformed within a spectrally-​inflected narrative context. Here, as in Banville’s Eclipse, we encounter a narrator who is mysteriously ‘assailed in the midst of the world’: haunted by distressing memories, harried by vague presences. Crucially, the settings for this lone figure’s fretful reflections are both superficially mundane and highly charged with threatening possibility. They are ambiguous spaces, unpopulated terrain vague on the fringes of the city, generic marginal territories of a kind that (as we have seen) has been studied before in Doherty’s films and photographs, but that here take on renewed hallucinatory intensity, the manner of their depiction sitting restlessly between document and dreamscape. We see, first of all, a long, narrow path, bordered thickly on each side by bushes and tall trees (Figure 12). The sky is overcast; there is only low, dusky light along the deserted route. Any facts that can be gathered about this location remain faint (twice in the first three sentences the narrator employs this word:  ‘Through the trees on one side I  could faintly make out a river in the distance. On the other side I could hear the faint rumble of far away traffic’). Movement on the track is slow and more-​or-​less steady, but there is a certain disorienting wooziness to the view. Doherty’s use of a Steadicam allows for a gliding, ghostly, disembodied form of motion, yet there remains discernible resistance, a slight sense of nervous searching around; the gravitational pull of what remains invisible acting as a drag on our easy progression. For what is hidden from our view is, we quickly learn, unnervingly out of the ordinary and yet powerfully ‘real’: ‘I looked over my shoulder and saw that the trees behind me were filled with shadow-​like figures. Looks of terror and bewilderment filled their eyes and they silently screamed, as if already aware of their fate.’ Immediately, our anguished narrator recognises these tormented, fantastical forms as resembling ‘faces in a running crowd that I had once seen on a bright but cold January afternoon’ –​so returning us, as we might quickly deduce, to the harrowing scenes of Derry’s Bloody Sunday in 1972, devastating events that to this day loom large in both private and public memory. These recollected moments (so extensively mediated and modified over time) are described in evocative, sometimes lurid, 113

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terms –​ victims were tossed into ‘frosty air’, troops ‘spewed’ from an armoured vehicle –​ but any definitive, clarifying information is withheld. And, fundamentally, of course, we see nothing. The camera continues its quiet journey through ostensibly ‘empty’ spaces, the screen failing to satisfy our fearful craving for action and visual evidence. As Hal Foster has said of Danish artist Joachim Koester’s occult explorations of specific geographies, ‘an essential enigma remains, one that can be used to test the limits of what can be seen, represented, narrated, known’.91 Indeed as in Koester’s practice –​ with its frequent combination of unrevealing-​but-​intriguing documentary photographs of obscure, unspectacular places and intricate accounts of repressed historical narratives or unacknowledged connections  –​ Ghost Story keeps us suspended between text and image, between now and then, and between the visible and the invisible. At every stage, however, there is the sense that whatever lies out of sight may finally surge into view, that there will be an eruption of long-​repressed energies. There is an always-​intensifying mood of unease, as if the ‘unconscious’ of these scenes will rise to the surface at any second. For Doherty’s narrator, this alarming process has already begun. He wanders the forgotten margins of the changing city, contemplating how the painful, unresolved past is buried beneath the monuments to a glowing present, but finding in back streets and desolate laneways traces of ‘invisible matter that could no longer be contained’. Edging along one gloomy alley, he describes this spectral ‘substance’  –​ this ‘pseudo-​materiality’  –​ in language that becomes increasingly characterised by Gothic excess: ‘it seeped through every crack and fissure in the worn pavements and crumbling walls’; it is ‘a viscous secretion’ that ‘oozed from the hidden depths’; he smells ‘ancient mould’ mingling with ‘the odour of dead flesh’. Again, the superficial normality of the scenario is startlingly transformed, the initially presumed realism of the representation becoming overwhelmed by irrational associations. Meaningful ‘reality’ loses its solidity, its structure, under pressure from a nightmare return: ‘The ground was often slippery under foot as if the surface of the road was no longer thick enough to conceal the contents of the tomb that lay beneath the whole city.’ There is a discomfiting, abhorrent liquidity to these imaginings: an unpleasant ectoplasmic slipperiness and stickiness, inevitably at odds with our presumed psychological and social need for stable forms. Placed in relation to peace-​era political progress in Northern Ireland  –​ the essential, but not exclusive, context for the film’s themes –​these liquid moments undoubtedly play on concerns about current stability and respond ambivalently to the impact of long-​standing and newly proposed structures within this society. On the one hand, an understandable dread of disintegration at a time of widespread optimism could well be detected. Yet on the other, these volatile elements may not be entirely malevolent or unwelcome: they register as after-​effects of all that has been overlooked and undervalued during decades of brutality, tragedy and secrecy. No single meaning applies: the ‘invisible matter’ is both a subversion of solidity and a materialisation of the immaterial. The narrator’s words warp the space we wander through; we are set adrift between the real and the imagined. 114

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But this perturbed and absurd account of shifting, fluid forms may also incidentally remind us of other more depressingly static structures in the cities of the North: the still-​unyielding ‘peace lines’ for instance, imposing physical barriers that are, as one journalistic commentator has noted, ‘mini Berlin walls’ that nevertheless remain ‘popular on either side’. These formidable features of the urban landscape, fixed in place for the time being, are ‘a measure of the deeply embedded sectarianism still running like a geopolitical fault-​line under the surface of a prosperous, peaceful society’.92 The tension created in Ghost Story between lingering images of apparently real locations and repeated, chilling allusions to otherworldly forces is consistent with the traditions of the ghost story itself: a form that was popularised in the nineteenth century ‘as realism’s uncanny shadow’ –​ a highly fraught mode of modern story-​telling that sought to present a ‘definite idea of reality’ but that caused ‘gentle tremors along the line separating the supernatural world from that of Victorian empirical and domestic order’.93 Doherty’s compelling meditation on matter and memory is therefore knowingly affiliated to a cultural form that gained extraordinary strength during emergent modernity –​eager readers drawn again and again to the irrational underside of social and scientific progress –​ but Ghost Story also connects in intriguing ways with complex efforts to think through the relevance of the spectral in contemporary theory. For instance, in responding to Jacques Derrida’s controversial Spectres of Marx (undoubtedly the key intervention in this area, but much-​disputed for its close coupling of Marxism and deconstruction94) Fredric Jameson has employed terms that strongly correspond to recurring tropes in Ghost Story. ‘The central problem of the constellation called spectrality’, Jameson argues, ‘is that of matter itself’.95 The spectral, he says, upsets our common-​sense belief in ‘the stability of reality, being and matter’, forcing supposedly secure structures of experience and understanding ‘to waver visibly’.96 Derrida’s infamous manoeuvre in challenging any foundational ground to being is, of course, to shift from ontology to ‘hauntology’, outlining a fascination for ‘spectral’ possibilities in philosophy, poetics and politics –​ proposing a principle of undecidability that has little, ultimately, to do with the paranormal. Rather, Derrida’s interest is ‘straightforwardly’ deconstructive: ‘to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology’.97 The figure of the spectre alerts us, then, to how, as Jameson writes, ‘the living present is scarcely as self-​sufficient as it claims to be’ and so ‘we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us’.98 Such cautionary words resonate revealingly in relation to the haunted, corroded ‘substance’ of Doherty’s film: uncanny sensations make the world of these images unsteady, spectral effects distressing the seamless surface of the present. The spectre is a ‘present absence’ –​ it is ‘nothing visible’, Derrida says.99 In Ghost Story every detail of the passing world is scrupulously depicted in such paradoxical or in-​between terms:  everything is elusive and indistinct; everywhere 115

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is nowhere. We journey from the lonely tree-​lined lane, to a dismal and dread-​ inducing urban underpass (here we encounter the aftermath of unexplained, potentially traumatic events: it is ‘a scorched corner where broken glass sparkled on the blackened ground’), slowly moving on to a wide expanse of open space with a cracked, uncared-​for concrete surface  –​ this strange, neglected zone may once have served some public or industrial purpose but its founding specificity has long been left behind. We travel in twilight or under late-​night darkness; ghosts, we are told, are all around, touching everything: ‘They move between the trees. Caressing every branch. Breathing, day and night, on every flickering leaf.’ But if in these scenes an all-​pervasive spectral energy undermines any trustworthy sense of location, worrying and confusing us about where in the world this is, there is an equal agitation about exactly when this is. The coming-​and-​going of ghostly figures throws chronology into crisis: these revenants are ‘memories’ from another historical moment that have inexplicably (and out of sight to us) gained material form in the present. Ghosts are emissaries from a vanished time, yet they are not quite ‘themselves’:  the spectral apparition is something other than the person that it appears to represent; it is simultaneously a ‘return’ and an inaugural coming-​into-​being –​ existing in each of two eras at once, and in neither.100 In the face of this irresolvable contradiction, our standard apprehension of temporality seems suddenly insufficient, limited by linearity. As Ernesto Laclau has written, ‘anachronism is essential to spectrality: the spectre, interrupting all specularity, desynchronises time’.101 Critically, the spectral distortions of time in Ghost Story are related to acute concerns about reality and representation in the contemporary world, signalling, in particular, apprehensions about memory and the public sphere. The film’s disturbing, puzzling ‘returns’ are not solely based on private grief; these are not pained recollections and reincarnations of lost loved-​ones, but rather there is a significant sense of distance to these hauntings: the narrator seeing in the living present the faces of deceased individuals and finding traces of tragic events only known to him through media reports. At one point, he recognises a man’s face ‘from the small black and white newspaper photograph that had accompanied the story of his murder’; at another, he remembers, ‘shapes and colours from a flickering television screen’. In each occurrence, there is a necessary re-​opening of closed cases, a re-​imagining of horrors that may have escaped the formal record –​the ghosts calling out for a revision of the past that must mean, as Jameson says, ‘a thoroughgoing reinvention of our sense of the past altogether’.102 Yet as this unidentified narrator retraces his steps ‘along paths and streets that I thought I had forgotten’, becoming gradually, overwhelmingly lost in his memories of ‘the minute details of photographs of people and places that I did not know’, there are references to ways in which Willie Doherty has retraced his own steps, returning, as he so often and so assiduously does, to images and to places he has come to know with great, anxious intimacy. One memory begins, for instance, with ‘a car silhouetted against a grey sky … skewed awkwardly into a shallow ditch’ –​a mise-​en-​scène not unlike one interrogated at an earlier stage in Doherty’s career (we might recall at this point the photographs Incident and Border Incident, 116

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from 1993 and 1994) but that here is subject to further scrutiny, prompting other, surprising elaborations. The details of the abandoned car are linked, via dreamlike association, to another hazily recalled and ‘faintly’ experienced incident: ‘At first, I didn’t see or hear the car. It seemed to appear from nowhere. In the evening twilight it was difficult to make out who was driving. The car slowed down and waited for me to approach.’ The initial echo of an earlier subject has unpredictable reverberations in this new, expanded narrative setting: our guide, no longer a mere observer, now seems somehow more implicated in events. But nebulous as the narrative landscape remains in these sequences, Doherty’s associative journey eventually takes us definitively beyond familiar territory. Though we stare once again into the trees that obscure the view from our isolated path, the ground continues to shift beneath our feet as we hear not just of lethal car bombings and of horrifying kidnappings but of grotesquely piled up bodies and of gleefully sadistic prison guards with snapping cameras. Beyond the well-​trodden paths, beyond the local and the particular problematics of post-​Troubles Northern Ireland, we can sense still more ghosts, revenants from across a global field, clamouring to have their say. Notes 1 This story is referred to in Edna Longley’s essay ‘A barbarous nook:  the writer and Belfast’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), pp. 88–​9. 2 It should be noted that given the extensive critical commentary already available on Doherty’s art from the 1980s and 1990s, I have chosen to principally focus on works and series made and shown since Doherty’s major retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2002. 3 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–​1983 (Novia Scotia: Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art & Design, 1974), p. 6. 4 Steve Edwards, ‘Photography out of conceptual art’, in Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds), Themes in Contemporary Art (New Haven/​London:  Yale University Press/​The Open University, 2004), p. 152. 5 Doherty’s inclusion in The Experience of Art, Maria de Corral’s survey of international contemporary practice for the Italian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale is one obvious indication of this status within the international scene. He is also included, alongside French artist Sophie Calle, in the ‘Afterwards’ section of Peter Osborne’s Phaidon-​published survey Conceptual Art, as one of the key examples of artists who have ‘explored the legacy of the photo-​text’; see Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art (London:  Phaidon, 2002), p. 177. 6 A publication entitled Partial View was published in 1993 to accompany exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, and Matt’s Gallery, London. 7 Jean Fisher, ‘Willie Doherty’, in Maria de Corral (curator/​editor), The Experience of Art (Venice: Venice Biennale, 2005): artist-​page text in Biennale exhibition catalogue, p. 70. 8 Declan McGonagle, Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (Dublin/​London: IMMA/​ Merrell, 1999). 117

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9 Louisa Buck, Moving Targets 2 (London: Tate Publishing, 2000), pp. 54–​6. 10 Ian Hunt, ‘Familiar and unknowable’, in Willie Doherty: Somewhere Else (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1998), p. 48. 11 Exhibition press release for Willie Doherty: Empty, 1st October to 10th November 2006. 12 Exhibition press release for Willie Doherty:  Empty. This is a duality that returns us to tensions evident in works featured in The Nature of Things, and in particular to the comparisons drawn in the previous chapter between the tentative optimism of William McKeown and the critical detachment of Darren Murray. 13 There have been exceptions, however, to his usual ‘local’ focus:  these include True Nature (1999), which was partly filmed in Chicago; Extracts from a File (2001), a body of work Doherty made while on a DAAD residency in Berlin; Segura (2010), a film commissioned for Manifesta 8 and shot in the Spanish region of Murcia where the exhibition was to take place; and Secretion (2012), Doherty’s commission for Documenta 13, filmed in rural areas close to Kassel in central Germany. 14 Carolyn Christov-​Bakargiev makes the point that this interest in spatial orientation in Doherty’s work may be viewed as a result both of the artist’s background in sculpture and of the physical conditions of Derry where a strictly defined sectarian geography and security-​force surveillance regime constantly create a heightened and yet unsettling sense of positionality; see Carolyn Christov-​Bakargiev, ‘The art of Willie Doherty’, in Willie Doherty: False Memory (Dublin/​London: IMMA/​Merrell, 2002), p. 13. 15 Longing/​Lamenting, 1991, colour photographs with superimposed text, Two Panels 30 x 40 inches each. 16 McGonagle, Irish Art Now, p. 11. 17 Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, in The Anti-​Aesthetic:  Essays in Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. xvi. 18 Hunt, ‘Familiar and unknowable’, p. 45. 19 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 28. 20 Charlotte Cotton, Photography as Contemporary Art (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2004), p. 81. 21 Jean Fisher, Willie Doherty: Out of Position (Mexico: Laboratorio Arte Alameda, 2007). 22 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-​Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-​Modernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), pp. 661–​3. 23 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 52. 24 Foster et al., Art Since 1900, p. 663. 25 Foster et al., Art Since 1900, p. 663. 26 Foster et al., Art Since 1900, p. 663. Foster et al. also express concerns about the forms of spectacular delirium explored and presented by Gursky: ‘the danger is that such vision might render this [postmodern] world natural, even beautiful or again sublime, all in fetishistic manner that fully delivers on the appearances of the image but otherwise obscures the reality of labour … in other words these beautiful images might help to reconcile us to a world without qualities where the human subject has little place’; Foster et al., Art Since 1900, p. 663. See also Caroline Levine, ‘Gursky’s sublime’, Postmodern Culture, 12:3 (2002). 27 Hunt, ‘Familiar and unknowable’, p. 48. 28 In passing, it can be noted that the word ‘delirium’ carries a trace of an older idea of stability and rootedness: the word’s Latin source being a metaphor of breaking from 118

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the path of the plough; as in Doherty’s recent work there are contained here dual traces of grounding and ‘deterritorialising’. Fisher, ‘Willie Doherty’, p. 70. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture & Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 1. Vidler, Warped Space, p. 3. Adams’s work was featured in the influential exhibiton New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-​Altered Landscape, first shown at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New  York in 1975. The exhibition combined emerging US documentary-​style photographers (including, alongside Adams, Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore) with the German conceptual photography pioneers Bernd and Hilla Becher. For a commentary on the historical significance of this exhibition see: Greg Foster Rice, Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2011). Brian Sholis, ‘Frank Breuer’, in Vitamin Ph. (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 42. Sholis, ‘Frank Breuer’, p.  42. Another dimension of Breuer’s and Doherty’s photographs is that, given the shared visual emphasis on lines of communication, these stark visuals of connecting telephone wires also suggest the ‘presence’ of sound, or, indeed, the lack of such presence, These series of photographs allude to impossible-​to-​hear voices, urging us to concentrate on constructed mechanisms of exchange and conversation but crucially leaving us in spaces of silent uncertainty. Such a notion has relevance both to Breuer’s implied context of global networks of communication and control, and to Doherty’s ongoing reflections on the ‘silences’ within situations of post-​conflict progress. A very direct interpretation of this idea in Irish photography is David Farrell’s documentary series Innocent Landscapes (2001), which pictured ‘sites of the disappeared’: locations within the rural Irish landscape that have been identified as containing the unmarked graves of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s or 1980s. See David Farrell, Innocent Landscapes (Dublin: Gallery of Photography, 2001). Val Williams quotes Seawright on the importance of this influence in her essay ‘Circumstantial evidence’:  ‘By the mid 1980s, Seawright … had begun to abandon … black and white documentary. Significant in this development of a new way of working was Paul Graham’s series on Northern Ireland, Troubled Land. Disturbed at first by this “outsider’s” view of his homeland, Graham’s piece became a catalyst for his own explorations of a personal history: “I realised for the first time you could use photographs to tackle a very emotive subject. I realised that Paul Graham was creating a new dialogue –​in response to photojournalism” ’; Val Williams, ‘Circumstantial evidence’, in Paul Seawright: Inside Information (Dublin/​London, Gallery of Photography/​ Photographers’ Gallery, 1995) [unpaginated]. Mark Durden, ‘Review:  Paul Graham, Anthony Reynolds Gallery’, Frieze, 20 (January 1995). Jean Fisher says that text in Doherty’s text-​images pieces ‘floats on the image but cannot anchor it’; see ‘Conversation pieces’, in Vampire in the Text: Narratives of Contemporary Art (London, INIVA, 2003), p. 276. The phrase is Seamus Heaney’s from the essay ‘The sense of place’, in Preoccupations (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), p. 149. Eamonn Hughes has challenged this ‘customary, conventional and communal’ attitude to place in Heaney –​ and in Irish writing more generally –​ contesting the notion that ‘place is always tacitly capable of being 119

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itself and a microcosm of the nation’ and arguing that the urban, and Belfast in particular, ‘reminds us that other ways of organizing, conceptualizing and representing place exist’. In making this case, Hughes emphasises the combined sense of potentially unsettling contact and ongoing social ‘negotiation’ that characterises city life, citing Roland Barthes and Richard Sennett’s respective views that the city is ‘the place of our meeting with the other’ and a ‘human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet’. Such aspects of the city, Hughes says, oppose ‘the idea of the rural which always has at its root an allegedly organicist social structure in which relationships are always familiar. The city affronts the sense of the nation as homogenous’. See Eamon Hughes, ‘What itch of contradiction: Belfast in poetry’, in Aaron Kelly and Nicholas Allen (eds), Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 115; Roland Barthes, ‘Semiology and the urban’, in M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Logopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign:  An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 96; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1991; first published 1974), p. 39. In his book Confronting Images, Georges Didi-​Huberman seeks to emphasise the contradictoriness of art, challenging the appeal to ‘certainty’ in art history. In doing so, he employs terms that arguably correspond to some of the effects and interests of Doherty’s work. Didi-​Huberman seeks to move our attention ‘beyond knowledge itself’ and so, proceeding dialectically, ‘to commit ourselves to the paradoxical ordeal not to know (which amounts precisely to denying it), but to think the element of not-​knowledge that dazzles us whenever we pose our gaze to an art image. Not to think a perimeter, a closure –​as in Kant –​but to experience a constitutive and central rift:  there where self-​evidence, breaking apart, empties and goes dark’; see George Didi-​Huberman, Confronting Images (Pennsylvania:  Penn State University Press, 2005), p. 7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 115. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Troubled memories’, in Willie Doherty:  False Memory (Dublin/​London: IMMA/​Merrell, 2002), p. 23 Christov-​Bakargiev, ‘The art of Willie Doherty’, p. 14. Another relevant frame of reference here may be the ‘traumatic realism’ that Hal Foster associates with the compulsive repetitions of Warhol’s Death in America works. Drawing on Lacan’s definiton of trauma as a ‘missed encounter with the real’ (the real being understood in psychoanalytic terms pertinent to Doherty’s photographs, as all that cannot be figured into our structures of representation), Foster describes Warhol’s repetition not as ‘reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier)’ but rather as a repetition that ‘serves to screen the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition’; Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 132. Christov-​Bakargiev, ‘The art of Willie Doherty’, p. 14. In an essay from 1997, Jeffrey Kastner also notes a shift during the 1990s towards a more ‘intimate’ approach. See Willie Doherty: Same Old Story (London: Matt’s Gallery, 1997). See Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005). The source of the ‘non-​specific’ presence is significant in that the actor selected for this unusually static role was chosen as a result of the ‘stereotypical’ part he had played in a post-​Troubles drama entitled Holycross (dir. Mark Brozel, BBC Northern Ireland, 2003). This was a television film based on a real-​life interface confrontation arising from abuse targeted at children and their parents as they walked to a primary school 120

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in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast. Doherty notes that ‘the idea came about because I  discovered that I  had access to an actor, Colin Stewart, who actually appeared in another dramatisation so I was interested in using the character that he had played in another piece to form the basis of the character in this piece’; from an interview with the artist made for Channel 4 ideas factory website, available at www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=ysMwmfzjfDQ [last accessed 12/​11/​11]. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 134. Butler, Precarious Life, p. xviii. Butler, Precarious Life, p. xviii. Fisher, ‘Conversation pieces’, p. 275. Fisher, ‘Conversation pieces’, p. 276. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 15. An exchange of views between Mouffe’s co-​theorist of ‘agonism’ Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler can be found in Contingency, Universality and Hegemony, a series of statements and responses to each other’s work by Butler, Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. A key point of difference between Laclau and Butler (in a manner obviously relevant to Mouffe’s position) concerns the value of Lacanian concepts such as ‘the Real’, which for Butler is a problematically ‘ahistorical’ category and for Laclau signals the destabilising of all historical continuity; see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony and Unversality (London: Verso, 2000), p. 66. Maeve Connolly, ‘The doubled space of Willie Doherty’s Re-​Run’, Filmwaves 23 (2004), 9. Aidan Dunne, ‘Exposing memory’s limitations’, Irish Times (11th November 2002). Connolly, ‘Doubled space’, p. 9. Willie Doherty interviewed by Declan Sheehan, Circa, 99 (2002). Available at http://​circaartmagazine.website/​backissues/​spring-​2002-​c99-​article-​quotperhaps-​is-​ practically-​a-​liequot/​[last accessed 18/​08/​16]. Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Troubled memories’, p. 23. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations:  Interventions and Interviews, 1971–​2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 11. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 12. Derrida, Negotiations, p. 12. Hunt, ‘Familiar and unknowable’, p. 43. Fisher, ‘Willie Doherty’, p. 70. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 224; Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 194. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture & Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 1. Vidler, Warped Space, p. 1. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. x. Vidler also draws directly on a Lacanian ‘framing’ of anxiety: ‘In his seminar on angoisse … Lacan himself tied anxiety directly to the experience of the uncanny, claiming indeed that it was through the very structure of the unheimlich that anxiety might be theorized. The “field of anxiety” is framed by the uncanny so to speak, even as the uncanny itself is framed as a sudden apparition seen, as it were, through a window. “The horrible, the suspicious, the uncanny, everything by which we translate as we can into French this magisterial word ‘unheimlich,’ presenting itself through the skylights [lucarnes] by which it is framed, situates for us the 121

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field of anxiety” ’; Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 224 (quotes from Lacan are from an unpublished seminar of 1962). The references to fields and frames of vision, and also, more specifically, the metaphorical allusion to a ‘skylight’ view, are revealing in relation to Doherty’s carefully ‘framed’ sky-​views. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. ix. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. ix. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 7. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. ix. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 3. Mladen Dolar, ‘ “I shall be with you on your wedding night”: Lacan and the uncanny’, October, 58 (1991), 7.  Dolar’s comment relates to the problem of the ‘unplaceable’ character of the uncanny in the wake of the Enlightenment, a point that can be related to other arguments about different moments and aspects of the ‘haunted’ condition of modernity. See for instance, Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer, Eighteenth-​Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings:  Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 21. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 11. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 14. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 6. Slavoj Žižek, ‘The spectre of ideology’, in Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (eds), The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 73. Žižek, as in all his work, also draws heavily on Lacan in his use of the figure of the spectre. Spectrality assists us, he suggests, in describing how ‘reality is never directly itself; it presents itself only via its incomplete-​failed symbolization’. Thus, for Žižek, ‘spectral apparitions’ are to be understood as emerging ‘in this very gap that forever separates reality from the real, and on account of which reality has the character of a (symbolic) fiction: the spectre gives body to that which escapes (the symbolically structured) reality’; see ‘The spectre of ideology’, pp. 73–​4. The building featured in the film is located on the fringes of the Adelaide Industrial Park in South Belfast. It is thus adjacent to the Westlink motorway route that divides parts of ‘Loyalist’ South Belfast (and the City Centre) from areas of ‘Republican’ West Belfast. Daniel Jewesbury and Robert Porter have written about the changing planning issues relating to this area, highlighting political and economic aspects of how contemporary Belfast is strategically shaped ‘as a post-​conflict city’. The structural adjustments to this division of the city now indicate, they argue, a ‘depoliticisation of public space, or at least the neutralization of a space previously traversed by sectarian antagonism’. This ‘normative promise’ is, they add, ‘very much at the heart of government, media and commercial discourses that, since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, have constructed Belfast as a post-​conflict city’; Daniel Jewesbury and Robert Porter, ‘On Broadway’, in The Centrifugal Book of Europe (Belfast: Centrifugal, 2010), p. 35. Jean Fisher, ‘Re-​framing the subject’, in Vampire in the Text (London:  INIVA, 2003), p. 171. Hidden, directed by Michael Haneke (2005). The scene referenced here is one that centres on a situation of reflexive viewing: we watch a cinema screen seeming to show a static shot of a building, but we soon realise that the ‘film’ is showing us previously video-​taped footage. We, as cinema viewers, become aware that we are watching 122

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a video that is being watched by the movie’s mystified main characters. Haneke’s Hidden is in such ways highly conscious of the codes and conventions that determine cinematic meaning. It also makes sense as a point of comparison with Doherty insofar as it is a film that is reflexively concerned with the manipulations of the media, focusing on strange events in the life of a media personality whose private past is intimately connected with repressed elements of French history. As such, the film occupies related anxious and critical thematic territory:  engaged with questions of extended traumatic aftermath and fraught relations between home, history and identity. For an analysis of the film that raises points relevant to Doherty’s practice, see Catherine Wheatley, ‘Secrets, lies and videotape’, Sight and Sound, February 2006. Brian Dillon, ‘The history of future technology’, Tate Etc, 5 (2005). Available at www. tate.org.uk/​context-​comment/​articles/​history-​future-​technology [last accessed 10/​06/​ 16]. Dillon, ‘The history of future technology’. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999), p. 38. A text entitled ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’ accompanied the exhibition of Buried at the Fruitmarket Gallery. As curator Fiona Bradley commented in her catalogue essay, this text ‘deals with the importance of place in the artist’s work, of the continuous slippage between the specific and the universal, the real and the metaphorical, the practical and the poetic’; see Fiona Bradley, Willie Doherty: Buried (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009), p. 7. This is one way in which it might be argued that Doherty’s is primarily a site-​based rather than medium-​based practice. These aspects of his work were addressed in a public conversation with the author at the Foyle Festival in November 2009. John Banville, Eclipse (London: Picador, 2001), p. 3. Banville, Eclipse, p. 3. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 6. Hal Foster, ‘Blind spots: on the art of Joachim Koester’, Artforum, April 2006, p. 213. Henry McDonald, ‘The stomach for armed struggle is gone’, Observer (6th May 2006). Available at www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2007/​may/​06/​uk.northernireland2 [last accessed 12/​06/​16]. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 126. Terry Eagleton, for instance, argues that Derrida introduces deconstruction into debates about the ‘end of history’ in such a way as to offer only a ‘Marxism without Marxism’. See Eagleton, ‘Marxism without Marxism’, in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 83–​7. Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, p. 35. Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, p. 38. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 202. Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, p. 39. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 6. Ideas of this kind are explored by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott in their introduction to Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (London: Macmillan, 1999), see pp. 9–​10 especially. Ernesto Laclau, ‘The time is out of joint’, Diacritics, 25:2 (1995), 87. Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, p. 43. 123

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B4B That which was: histories, ​ documents, archives

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.1

History in the making ‘I retraced my footsteps along paths and streets that I thought I had forgotten …’ In a manner appropriate to the recurring compulsions of Willie Doherty’s art, let us now return right away to familiar ground –​ let us revisit already well-​covered terrain. For what is required, at present, is to begin again, but with a repetition of the recent past: a re-​run. Let us briefly reflect once more on the anguished narrator of Ghost Story, journeying alone, or apparently alone, through marginal or derelict stretches of the city, an invisible character who travels, as we have seen, in time as well as space. Wandering along the unpopulated, unpatrolled perimeter of the city, moving through desolate urban and suburban zones that seem emptied out of obvious status or significance, he returns to places that he, and the world, have long since left behind. (Prompting question after question: Why have these pathways been forgotten? What once happened here? What has prompted this anxious return?). In choosing these neglected routes –​ both spatial and temporal –​he is confronted by spectral presences, shadowy revenants that stir in him disturbing memories of public terror and tragedy. Despite their ostensible emptiness, the more-​or-​less abandoned terrains temporarily occupied in Ghost Story are in this way psychologically charged, and they are the source of strange historical reverberations. Within the self-​consciously Gothic frame of this film, these ‘nothing’ places (like the open skies of Local Solution or Show of Strength, like the modern ruin of Empty) give a sense of a powerful, repressed, obliterated or neglected something. They are invested with uncertain, uncanny ‘potential’: ‘I wondered about what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there’ our tormented narrator​

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tells us, ‘had it been absorbed or filtered into the ground or was it possible for others to sense it as I did?’ These fraught perambulations through forgotten places present, then, a problem about place and haunting that is also a problem about history, or about the representation of history. The idea of haunted space, as we have seen, implies a haunted time, troubling any clear understanding of chronology, so testing the usually resilient modern idea of history as ‘one damn thing after another’ (to borrow Arnold Toynbee’s famously reductive aphorism). In this way the Gothic manner of Doherty’s reflection on location and aftermath anxiety connects with a wider tendency in contemporary art towards engagement with uncanny, spectral and occult images and themes; as Lars Bang Larsen has written, ‘many artists have recently been turning to the unseen as a means of short-​circuiting the spectacle, searching out occult gaps in modernity to evoke an acute sense of historical space’.2 Larsen seeks to distinguish between the use of spectral tropes and more thoroughly counter-​cultural engagements with occultist practices:  the former, he suggests, indicates an interest in the non-​substantial quality of images, while​ the latter guides us ‘towards the embodied notion of affect’.3 Both tendencies, as the previous chapter indicated, have relevance to Doherty’s practice. With respect to Ghost Story we have observed the extent to which questions of substantiality and insubstantiality and of reality and illusion might be important; but we might also argue, as Daniel Jewesbury has done, that this is a film that takes as its focus ‘an entire realm of affect that is otherwise virtually undocumented’.4 It is a work, Jewesbury says, that attempts ‘to convey a viscerally experienced horror, a dread of the past and of memory in its undimmed immediateness’.5 Larsen’s pairing of the ‘unseen’ with ‘historical space’ seems therefore like a useful combination here. Doherty’s Ghost Story is evidently concerned with what is and is not possible within dominant regimes of the visual; but it is also engaged with the questions of how remembering takes place and of how the experience of place is taken into memory. For in part, to restate an earlier point, this film is evidently a reflection on the subjective impression versus the official record: the narrator drawing repeatedly on his private memories of public media imagery. Furthermore, the sense of a frustrated individual effort to gain a total picture, a comprehensive account, is intensified on a formal level through protracted use of Steadicam footage:  the camera propelling us forwards within the filmic space, while also imprisoning us for extended periods within one fixed view. The result, as Slavoj Žižek has found in contemplating Robert Montgomery’s 1947 noir experiment The Lady in the Lake (in which all events are seen ‘through the eyes’ of detective Philip Marlowe) is an effect of paranoia: ‘the field of what is seen is continually menaced by the unseen’.6 We progress ‘freely’ through an undefined space, but our position is at all times constrained. The particular type of physical ‘field’ envisioned by Doherty also seems vital to the questions about historical consciousness (or unconsciousness) posed in Ghost Story. We find ourselves gazing at scruffy, dilapidated spaces, looking at length across cracking, crumbling ground and along unmanaged, overgrown pathways –​places that are 125

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unmistakably, materially there but that are resolutely unreadable in relation to the fragments of historical narrative that are recounted on this journey. We can never quite be clear as to the exact significance of these locations, and just as we think we may have grasped at least a confirmed local context (therefore adding a reassuring level of meaning to these landscape images), the narrator’s ‘memories’ begin to stray and we hear unexpected references to present-​day global conflict –​ allowing for an unlikely move from unapproved roads on the edge of Derry to, as we would be likely to presume, the hell-​house of Abu Ghraib. Ghost Story may therefore offer an oblique, cautious critique of conventions of historical representation, the film both locking us in (to a point of view, to a way of seeing) and locking us out, resisting our efforts to assemble a meaningful narrative from the various physical traces and fragments of memory that are gathered. In establishing a narrative frame and form (this is a ghost story7) while simultaneously disavowing it through the assembly of looping, mysteriously disconnected fragments this film might well be seen to play against standard means of organising the elements that constitute what Hayden White has termed the ‘historical field’.8 In his influential work Metahistory, White outlined the importance of narrative and poetic devices in shaping the ‘explanatory strategies’ of historians, noting, for instance, how a temporally arranged ‘chronicle’ becomes transformed into a more complex ‘story’ through use of such literary mechanisms as inaugural and terminating motifs. As such, he proposes, ‘invention … plays a part in the historian’s operations’.9 The historian creates ‘hierarchies of significance’ and strives for ‘formal coherence’, White suggests, and in this regard, the obstructive effects and opaque elements of an artwork such as Ghost Story –​ the resistance towards drawing conclusions, the refusal of narrative consolations  –​ seem to combine as an intriguingly disruptive, ambiguous kind of historiography, the film seeming uncertain about the implications of accessing painful memories, while being implicitly critical about certain forms of remembering. Parallels can undoubtedly be drawn between these ideas and other strong currents in contemporary art. Indeed in the context of contemplating representations of history and histories of representation in the changing (though in some respects unchanging) Northern Ireland, there are numerous works by other artists, many of which bear Doherty’s direct influence, that struggle with anxieties of remembering and forgetting, testing means of recording or seeking evidence, investigating archives and exploring the ‘potentiality’ of testimony. Against the grain of the officially upbeat post-​Agreement era, artists from different generations (among them Duncan Campbell, Miriam de Búrca, Una Walker, Aisling O’Beirn, John Duncan, Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury) have felt the need to idiosyncratically assemble and scrutinise stubborn or surprising remnants of the awkward past. Fragmentary ‘memories’ are accumulated. Diverse visual records are re-​evaluated. Subjective points of view –​however inexact, inconclusive or out-​ of-​the-​ordinary –​ are respected. Yet the abundance of proliferating imagery and raw data seems, in such work, impossible to process. We are left to wonder if any new perspectives on Northern Ireland’s long-​running conflict –​ if any new 126

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submissions to the ‘archive’ –​ bring us at all closer to the ultimate truth of ‘that which was’ or if (as in the Glenn Patterson novel of that name) we are forced further into the historical unknown. In his book The Curtain, Milan Kundera has reasoned that ‘man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)’.10 What lies beyond ‘the slender margin of the incontestable’ Kundera says, is an infinite realm: ‘the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-​truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal’.11 A fascination with this curious, strained relationship between the ‘approximate’ and ‘the ‘incontestable’  –​ and with the ghostly traces of what may be lost or erased in media accounts of change and regeneration in Northern Ireland  –​ has motivated many artists working through the lasting effects of the Troubles. Such artists follow overlooked historical pathways, differently considering the capacity of art to maintain a critical relation to dominant regimes of remembrance. One aspect of this trend in post-​Troubles art has involved the speculative re-​ordering or re-​imagining of the relation between the past, the present and the future within this notionally settled contemporary period. Several significant projects have sought to highlight disconcerting manifestations of the ‘present past’ and to recall older, lost or undervalued historical visions of Northern Irish life, politics and landscape at odds with some of what is promised within current discourses of progress. In a discussion of what he has termed (after Derrida) an ‘archive fever’ in recent photography in Northern Ireland, Colin Graham praises a range of productively self-​reflexive documentary projects (including series by John Duncan, Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury) that, he proposes, ‘offer a deeply ethical way of seeing a specific historical place’.12 Graham singles out series such as Archive Lisburn Road, in which Burke and Jewesbury together attempted (as they have said) to ‘document a previously unrepresented segment of Belfast’, creating and collating photographs which, in their focus on middle-​class normality and everyday mundanity, contrasted sharply with hackneyed ‘divided city’ imagery. This compilation of photographs also was produced as a means of ‘render[ing] visible a community that would rather be invisible’, turning an unusual gaze on ‘an area of very considerable affluence’ which, the artists argue, has been ‘able to extract itself from the “political problem”, and to absolve itself of any responsibility in its solution’.13 Modes of visualising and archiving of this kind, Graham suggests, work against an ‘official’ archival ideology, straining to somehow ‘take account of the full weight of memory which the archive seeks to lighten’.14 There is, undoubtedly, much at stake here. As Graham says, ‘to point to, or even test out, the fragile post-​consociational consensus would be to remember a future that is now consigned to history’.15 And yet, recent art concerned with the changing landsape of Northern Ireland’s cities will often strive to fill ‘the archival frame with subjects that undermine the archive’s capacity to hold the past, or by ironising and questioning the archive itself’.16 127

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Graham is right to recognise this ambition as crucial to the art of Northern Ireland during this decade  –​ a substantial body of work testing the conditions of history-​making just as it also seeks to query conventions and expectations of art-​making in a context of aftermath and regeneration We should be careful, nonetheless, of connecting these archival proclivities too particularly to the specifics of the Northern Ireland situation. An ‘archival impulse’, as it has been termed by Hal Foster, is often seen as one of the general, defining tendencies of international art in our present era.17 And indeed one artist who is especially representative of this phenomenon, Foster suggests, is the Dublin-​based artist Gerard Byrne, whose films and photographs ambivalently address the construction of ‘the present tense through the ages’.18 (Byrne’s work, it should be added, does not engage with issues relating to culture and politics in the North of Ireland.) This widely-​found version of ‘archive fever’ is understood by Foster as ‘a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history’.19 It is, he proposes, about making ‘historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’.20 At the same time, nevertheless, the informal archives that are drawn on by artists as diverse in their interests as Tacita Dean, Sam Durant and Thomas Hirschhorn, are not merely presented as arrangements of the pure, unrefined ‘facts’ of history. Rather, these archives are variously ‘produced’ as part of resolutely indeterminate, enigmatic and creatively anti-​monumental art processes –​so underscoring ‘the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.21 In these practices, the representation of the past remains up for negotiation:  history is mystery. The art historian Mark Godfrey has also highlighted manifestations of this general phenomenon, identifying versions of what he labels ‘The Artist as Historian’, assessing a pervasive effort on the part of contemporary artists to imaginatively revisit specific moments, to explore the lacunae in historical narratives and to study and critique the forms of representation through which the past is made ‘present’ to us. In Godfrey’s view ‘historical representation’ has until recently had ‘only peripheral importance in contemporary practice’.22 History, he argues, had been ‘abstracted’ out of modernism, obliterated by the permanent present-​tense of Pop, and critically and conceptually distanced during the ‘end-​ of-​history’ postmodern period of depthlessness and pastiche. Today however, ‘historical research and representation’ are now ‘central to contemporary art’ with many of today’s most acclaimed artists concentrating on making works ‘that invite viewers to think about the past; and to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways the past is represented in the wider culture’.23 Though to a significant extent this crucial wave of artistic engagement with historical representation suggests that contemporary ‘past-​tense’ art involves artists practicing less as historians than as historiographers –​or, following Hayden White, as ‘meta-​historians’ –​and are thus, to a degree, still alert to and bound by vital postmodern anxieties concerning access to an authentic past, the notable difference argued for by Godfrey is in the 128

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eagerness of recent artists to make visible undervalued or ‘unrealised’ aspects of history. Many artists today seek to make public –​ in what we will think of here as ‘phantom’ form –​ other cultural and political possibilities to those that define the present predicament. One comparable way of labelling this phenomenon is Svetlana Boym’s designation ‘off-​modern’: a category of practice and analysis which serves to ‘confuse our sense of direction; [making] us explore sideshadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress’.24 Ideas of this kind have strong relevance to an artist such as Matthew Buckingham, a US-​based practitioner working with text, photography and film, who is, for Godfrey, among the most important exemplars of the recent historical turn in art. Buckingham, whose ‘address to history’ (as another advocate, MOMA film curator Stuart Comer, has written) ‘seeks to problematise the “amnesia of the present” ’, has developed a celebrated body of work concerned with engaging ‘influential figures whose historical position has always remained unresolved, if not uncertain’.25 His ‘haunted’ narratives (and spectrality, as with Doherty, has been a specific, self-​conscious point of reference) demonstrate, for Godfrey and others, the possibilities offered by today’s art in contending with the contingency of historical knowledge. These denaturalising forms of storytelling and ‘deep-​time cartography’ will often detail ‘the way in which … events have formerly been narrated or indeed ignored in received historical writing’.26 Equally, through this retracing, there may also be ‘reshaping’: our everyday understanding of the relationship between past and present, fact and fiction, even time and space, becoming, perhaps, momentarily reconfigured. Work in this ‘historical field’, may therefore connect us newly and intimately to discrete moments in the past, but it may also allow us to discover new correspondences, to create new constellations. These perspectives on the past are, moreover, also precariously positioned within a particular geographical field –​one shaped by global contemporary conditions. In this respect, one of Godfrey’s insights in setting out the terms under which ‘artists as historians’ are now gaining significance, concerns an important paradox, one relevant to the question of how Colin Graham’s comments on Post-​Troubles archival art might relate to broader strains of similar practice. Godfrey notes, firstly, that ‘it is important not to lose sight of the localised conditions’ that many of his selected examples ‘confront’.27 A good example here, he claims, is the issue of post-​Communist memory that is central to the Albanian artist Anri Sala’s 1998 film Intervista –​a work which connects the artist’s own family history with more public, national issues through reflection on found archival footage of his mother’s youthful Communist Party activism. In one sense, these are personal, local matters. But at the same time, Godfrey says, the film must be considered within an expanded frame. ‘The centrality of historical representation in contemporary film and photographic practices’, Godfrey argues, draws our attention to a ‘seemingly paradoxical situation concerning the status of historical consciousness in the wider global culture’: On the one hand globalised culture is increasingly amnesiac, increasingly focused on newer markets, products and experiences. On the other hand, this

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same culture produces ever more spectacular and romantic representations of the past –​particularly in film. And in an era of political catastrophe, these representations appear more and more politically suspect.28

It is in this in-​between space of the local and the global –​in a contemporary condition of being caught between forced forgetting and formulaic remembering –​that we should place the historical visions and revisions arising out of post-​Troubles circumstances. Documentary doubt In taking account of these various concerns and conflicts about remembering and forgetting, official and unofficial accounts, the personal and the public (and bearing in mind the inevitable interconnection between ‘local considerations’ and wider interests) I want to now comment on the work of two artists whose work with film and video has engaged quite differently with historical narratives in the North of Ireland. The first of these artist-​historians is Glasgow-​based, Dublin-​ born artist Duncan Campbell:  an internationally prominent figure (winner of the Turner Prize in 2014) who has received widespread acclaim for astutely constructed essay-​films that combine found documentary footage with constructed scenes. The second is German-​born, Irish-​based artist Miriam de Búrca: a less well-​ known practitioner whose early-​career film-​works nonetheless have strong relevance to the themes of this book. Despite the clear differences in the approaches adopted by these artists in addressing historical material, an ‘archival impulse’ is manifested in two notable ways. Firstly, both have produced idiosyncratic documentary reflections on particular individuals whose ‘story’ allows for a partial complicating of orthodox Troubles narratives. Secondly, in very distinct ways, both have also created self-​reflexive, subjective documentary records of ‘troubled’ landscapes in Northern Ireland: their jarring, edgy perspectives making evident anxieties about occupying a detached, objective position as they study specific settings in Belfast. There is a strong sense of frustration, suspension and uncertainty in each of these artists’ work: a tension in their apprehension of people, places and images that arises from a simultaneous desire to gather facts, to know more about the past, and an awareness of inevitable failure, an inability to gain confirmation or closure on historical matters. Such effects might, perhaps, return us to the vital indeterminacy that, for Chantal Mouffe, is to be associated with the concept of ‘the political’. To recall Mouffe’s view, it is through the force and uncanny return of the political that we might recognise the ‘lack of a final ground’ and detect ‘the dimension of undecidability’ in every social order. Becoming open to the necessary instabilities of the political, Mouffe says, is to be alert to how ‘things could always be otherwise’ and to how ‘every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities’. Such a view of the political shares with recent archival art the hope that ‘there are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated’.29 130

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Since the early 2000s, Duncan Campbell has been widely celebrated as one of the most exciting film artists on the international art scene. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2014 he has also featured in such major exhibitions as the 2010 Gwangju Biennale (curated by Massimiliano Gioni), the 2010–​11 British Art Show 7 (curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton) and, alongside Hayley Tompkins and Corin Sworn, in the Scotland at Venice exhibition in 2013 (curated by The Common Guild). Campbell’s films are wayward documentary ‘fictions’, often deftly assembled from sundry scraps of found footage. His style of film-​making (and film-​taking) corresponds on occasion to the extreme creative collage found in the work of fellow Glasgow-​based artist Luke Fowler, a ‘meta-​documentarist’ and eccentric ‘portraitist’ who, as James Meyer has written, seeks to retrieve ‘obscure histories’ so as to encourage us ‘to imagine alternative models of being’.30 Where Fowler’s radical alternatives are sought in such lost counter-​cultural icons as composer Cornelius Cardew and anti-​psychiatry figurehead R.D. Laing,31 Campbell has maintained quite a different interest  –​ one that is perhaps surprising as a subject of fascination within the international art-​world at this time. For crucial across Campbell’s career thus far has been an artistic investment in archives relating to life in the North of Ireland during the Troubles years. Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), Bernadette (2008) and Make it New, John (2010), for example, variously draw on grassroots archival materials (sourced from the well-​stocked but undervalued storehouses of community photography groups) and from the more mainstream public cache of media clips and cuttings relating to recent decades in Northern Ireland. Campbell studies these leftovers of abandoned news stories in order to discover different ways to ‘re-​collect’ this turbulent history. The films are obviously, then, grounded in the representation of real events, real places and real people –​ and as such they might refer us again to Mark Godfrey’s view that contemporary artists have learnt from, but also diverted from, a previous postmodern generation’s engagements with historical references as elusive and eclectic simulacra. As Campbell himself has said of his films:  ‘I’m interested in the specific histories that they deal with. They’re very important in their own right, and I feel a responsibility to them as such. I’m not simply using them as a device to state that historical meaning is contested, there is a balance to be had.’32 This ‘balance’ represents the crucial, precarious position of the ‘past’ in contemporary art. The prominence of the documentary mode, in particular, makes pronounced the dual, contradictory urge to confront or reveal ‘specific histories’ and to simultaneously contest dominant means of representation, or indeed, to reflexively cast doubt on the possibility of ‘representation’ altogether. As Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl have suggested, today’s documentary modes might ‘appeal to institutional modes of power/​knowledge and cite their authority, but the effect is rather a perpetual doubt’; and so we encounter in such work a ‘blurred and agitated documentary uncertainty, which, paradoxically is extremely pertinent as an image of our times’.33 Evident here is a combination of ‘public’ spirit –​a desire to create alternative spaces of communication that are also spaces for the communication of alternatives –​with a reflexive emphasis on ‘phantom’ form: artists such 131

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Figure 13  Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2008.

as Campbell seeking to make historical information newly visible but in a documentary style that is uncertain in its grasp on reality, and self-​conscious about its anxiously subjective ‘creation’ of historical subjects. So if, as Nicholas Bourriaud has suggested, ‘the proliferation of the documentary genre that has taken place since the beginning of the 1990s’ is an artistic response ‘to a dual need for information and thorough re-​examination’ (that is partly prompted by the failure of cinema to function as ‘anything but a storehouse of settings and people’) we see in Campbell’s practice an especially tense manifestation of this current cultural requirement –​ one made all the more charged by its connection with the problems of remembering and forgetting in post-​conflict Northern Ireland.34 Campbell’s film-​making method heightens the tension between what we perceive to be ‘real’ and what is more obviously ‘constructed’ through the mediating process of documentary. Bernadette, most notably, is a beguiling, personal ‘edit’ of the life of Bernadette Devlin, the electrifying, provocative and rarely-​conforming socialist and Republican activist who seized the public stage during the onset of the Troubles. Much of the film is composed of available archive news footage of Devlin (Figure 13). Campbell assembles these documentary fragments in a manner that honours her distinctive actuality within this history (a history, of course, overwhelmingly dominated by much older male presences) while also showing us a character performing a role in public: creating herself as a public figure, while being created for a public by the camera. And although to an extent we​ 132

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Figure 14  Duncan Campbell, Bernadette, 2008.

see a familiar framing of Devlin within this blitz of footage –​ a strikingly youthful but compelling and rhetorically powerful public figure, a popular, passionate defender of civil liberties and social justice in the face of increasing aggression from the British authorities –​ there are also striking and strange additions to the existing record. For, at several points, Campbell introduces his own disjunctive creative touches to this fragmentary reconstruction of her life. In a peculiar opening sequence, for instance, Campbell retrieves found footage of Devlin caught in a state of calm contemplation (rather uncharacteristic in relation to her public persona) and merges it with newly filmed shots that allow us to imagine both an extended, expanded view of this scene, and an impossibly intimate and ‘immediate’ point of view, out-​of-​sync with the conventions of constructed objectivity in news reportage. In these moments the camera tracks across the surface of walls, drifts to corners, and finally lingers on the hands, hair and feet of a fictional stand-​in for Devlin (Figure 14). Each shift or addition takes us well beyond what is ‘proper’ within established genre parameters. In the combination of unusual attention and eccentric distraction in the camera’s gaze, we gain fresh alertness to the standard media habit of anchoring historical events, and ideologically masking their political dimension, through a concentration on ‘personalities’. Nevertheless, a more extreme departure from the existing historical script is still to come. For following the frenetic run-​through of selected scenes from Devlin’s extraordinary rise to prominence and gradual return to relative anonymity (as her brand of anti-​sectarian radical dissension is marginalised by more orthodox nationalist perspectives), Campbell moves towards a determinedly inconclusive conclusion, shifting​ 133

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the ground of this documentary portrait towards more poetically abstract territory. At this point, in fact, Campbell proposes a daring historical ‘ungrounding’ of his subject, taking some stray, de-​contextualised lines from Devlin’s autobiography as the point of departure for disconcerting stream-​of-​consciousness speculations on the inner world of this complex historical ‘presence’. Almost all imagery is erased from the screen as this Beckettian passage progresses –​ and we are left with a woman’s voice, offering a series of hesitant, doubt-​filled speculations on her life. If Bernadette has been to this point, as Martin Herbert notes, a film that ‘performs the idea of trying to understand the meaning of a life –​and a time –​based on existing materials relating to it’, then the final sequence takes us beyond what exists, beyond the desired authenticity and truth-​value of available visual materials, and definitively beyond ‘understanding’, emphasising intensifying confusion rather than increased clarity.35 The self-​interrogations of this dramatic monologue suggest to us, Herbert proposes, that ‘if she can’t wholly know herself –​as nobody truly can, and first-​person testimonies too are hardly above suspicion –​what hope do we have of knowing her in thirty-​seven invariably slantwise minutes?’36 It is, nevertheless, precisely a drive to ‘know her’ –​ and a declared responsibility to a historical subject –​that has brought Campbell to this place within his film. What results is an historically committed but contradictory, dialogical document: The last lines of Bernadette, then, are spoken by an actress performing a ventriloquist monologue, written by a man seeking to locate (or really deny) the objective meaning of events occurring before his birth with the conclusions he discovered –​if any –​distorted by being pushed through the scrim of media. The last lines we hear ‘Bernadette’ speak are these ‘A voice, not your own. You don’t know.’ It never really is and you never really do.37

To ‘locate’ or to ‘deny’ meaning: this difficult duality, this incompatible combination of options, fully characterises the vital impossibility of what is undertaken in contemporary art ‘documentary’ of this kind. This spirit of anguished uncertainty has haunted each of Campbell’s agitated interventions in –​and activations of –​the visual archive of the Troubles. Whether Campbell is contemplating the entanglements within a life-​story such as that of the eccentric, over-​reaching entrepreneur John DeLorean  –​ the subject of the film Make it New John, and the controversial figure at the heart of one of the strangest stories in the history of the Troubles years38 –​ or assembling eccentric compilations of amateur photographs of life in Belfast’s working-​class estates in the 1970s and 1980s –​ the recognisable ‘ground’ of the cryptic, manic visual essay Falls Burns Malone Fiddles39 –​ these works pivot on the paradoxes of historical representation. Campbell’s stated aim is to ‘open up these histories rather than reveal their truth’.40 And in a film such as Make it New John, with its attention to extraordinary convergences of local sectarian politics, state interests and global financial wheeler-​dealing, there is undoubtedly an effort to pluralise and re-​position the narrative of the Troubles years, signalling repressed historical connections and possibilities. Yet despite the ‘opening up’, there is an inevitable

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Figure 15  Duncan Campbell, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles, 2004.

‘closing down’ too. Not only are these selective and subjective interactions with archival material  –​ Campbell’s compelling, forceful montage-​making, necessarily involves cutting: violent forgetting is the unavoidable supplement of each act of visual remembering –​ they also generate a surfeit of colliding historical material which, in the inserted or appended moments of ‘fictionalised’ mediation, is declared as impossible to process. So, for instance, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles can be seen from one perspective to ‘open up’ the past. This frenzied film offers an alternative to conventional modes of visually narrating Troubles history by appropriating and sequencing archived black and white community photographs of life around the Divis Flats complex in West Belfast (Figure 15). These images, taken decades previously by the teenage residents of Divis (as part of projects that were, as Campbell notes, ‘set up to counteract Belfast’s image as seen through the prism of the mainstream media’41) now serve to make visible the everyday conditions of urban life at that time, avoiding Troubles clichés and instead allowing us to reflect on the legacies of late-​modernist public housing for contemporary urban planning, or on the fleeting style preferences of youth subcultures. But these pictures of a specific place, taken at a now-​ distant time, are altered through their relation to visual effects and features that frustrate any efforts to render the scenes tidily intelligible. As we watch, the photographic imagery is punctuated by pseudo-​scientific scrawlings and animations (including approximations of standard statistical diagrams) that perhaps hint at a means of explaining and containing the represented world, but that are chaotic 135

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and confusing additions to the already abundant visual information. Responding to, and aggravating, this sense of data overload is the narrator, voiced with compelling hyper-​active intensity by Scottish actor Ewen Bremner. Bremner’s ranting monologue ranges across theories of social and cultural analysis, liberally quoting the American writer Howard Becker, who as Campbell comments, ‘pioneered an observational approach to sociology-​participant observation, where he would observe by becoming part of what was observing’.42 But no conclusions, no consolations, arise out of what is presented and perceived. The narrator’s most decisive response comes in the form of a question that we ourselves as viewers must also inevitably ask: How can I hope to deal with this complexity? Falls Burns Malone Fiddles centres on frustrated efforts of interpretation:  for the narrator, it is impossible to find a position to settle on. There is a perpetual negotiation of different ways of thinking, ways of representing: a restless shuttling between one image and another, between one space and another, between traces of the past and responses in the present. It is a film, as we can recall again from Derrida, which might be thought of as ‘working in the mobility between several positions’, a work concerned with discovering ‘the impossibility of establishing oneself anywhere’.43 In certain short film works by Miriam de Búrca, related issues are faced. De Búrca’s work has not had quite the kind of coverage and profile achieved by Duncan Campbell in recent years, but she has nevertheless featured in significant exhibitions of art from (and about) Northern Ireland during the post-​Troubles period. (As was noted in an earlier chapter, her film Dogs Have No Religion became the title piece in a survey show of art from Northern Ireland at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in 2006.) Two films by de Búrca in particular –​Go Home (2006) and Dogs Have No Religion (2006) –​ are specifically useful points of reference as a result of their puzzled, searching studies of Belfast characters and landscapes. In Go Home (Plate 16) a bleak stretch of road close to the western region of the city is subjected to an intense, lingering gaze. The film presents a form of pedestrian-​level surveillance, documenting the everyday details of a somewhat desolate, divided landscape. The focus is a strictly demarcated terrain vague dominated by a graffiti-​scrawled security fence of extraordinary proportions. Unusual attention is paid to this unwelcoming location, this bordered non-​place, but these mundane daylight scenes are utterly devoid of incident. As an ominous and unidentifiable sound beats steadily in the background (created by slowing down the recorded thumps of a Lambeg Drum) we wait anxiously to discover what we will meet on this deserted roadway. This curious surveillance situation has, however, no culminating visual pay-​off. As in Willie Doherty’s Empty, no new information emerges, no event occurs to prompt a resolution of this extended observation process.44 Instead, situated nervously in this interstitial stretch of inner city roadway, the trembling hand-​held camera presents only a restricted choice, showing us the grim, narrow route that might be taken in each direction, the film cutting back and forth, from one unpromising point of view to the other. This daunting dilemma necessarily complicates, of course, the uncompromising directive of the film’s title. And given that the specific location under investigation 136

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occupies a troubled position within the ‘settled’, normalised, sectarian geography of Belfast (we are on Lanark Way, a link-​road slotted between largely Nationalist and Loyalist districts) the central, implied question ‘Which way now?’ becomes easily burdened with political significance. A significant feature of this unrevealing document of the urban landscape is that the frustration in seeking to find a way forward in the city appears to be paradoxically presented by de Búrca in terms of an uncertain look backwards. Go Home has a self-​consciously archival quality: this is a ‘document’ of the contemporary city that resembles antique footage. It is something ‘new’ that has the effect of seeming to be also both old and borrowed. The footage that we see projected resembles retrieved archive material rather than an up-​to-​date representation of twenty-​first century reality. De Búrca here employs the flickering imperfections of outmoded Super 8 recording in her visual document of a Belfast roadway –​an anachronistic formal strategy that is, however, consistent with strong strains in contemporary art practice. As Mark Godfrey, Hal Foster and others have noted, many contemporary artists over recent years have placed at the centre of their work an effort to mine the aesthetic and political potential of outdated film-​making and film-​projecting equipment. Artists such Stan Douglas and Tacita Dean, or younger acclaimed presences such as Rosa Barba and Rosalind Nashashibi, have looked, from quite different perspectives, towards the disappearing world of analogue film, pondering at this current point in ‘post-​historical’ time the former-​ and after-​life of left-​ behind technology, contemplating the lasting relevance and value of these forms at their moment of cultural passing. For Tacita Dean a commitment to specific film-​media, such as her favoured 16mm, involves resistance to narrow definitions of ‘progress’: although the now-​dominant digital mode is, Dean says, a ‘great enabler of immediacy, reproduction and convenience and has radicalised our times’, she remains anxious about the extent to which ‘we are being frogmarched towards its sparkling revolution without a backward turn, without a sigh or a nod to all we are losing’.45 In other cases, the attention to prior-​generation media is less a matter of what has been lost, than of what was never quite achieved. To again cite Svetlana Boym’s useful term, numerous contemporary film-​based practices concentrate on locating or creating ‘off-​modern’ moments. There is widespread and determined ‘detouring’ from customary historical routes in recent art: tangential forays ‘into the unexplored potentials of the modern project’.46 For Boym this emergent, insistently provisional ‘off-​modern’ worldview ‘took shape in the “zero” decade of the twenty-​first century’ and is one that allows us to recapture different, often eccentric aspects of earlier modernities, to ‘brush history against the grain’ –​ to use Walter Benjamin’s expression –​in order to understand the preposterous aspects of our present. In other words, off-​modern is not an ‘ism’ but a prism of vision and a mode of acting and creating in the world that tries to remap the contemporary landscape filled with the ruins of spectacular real estate development and the construction sites of the newly rediscovered national heritage. The off-​modern project is still off-​brand; it is a performance-​in-​progress, a rehearsal of possible forms and common places. In 137

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this sense off-modern is at once con-​temporary and off-​beat vis-​à-​vis the present moment. It explores interstices, disjunctures, and gaps in the present in order to co-​create the future.47

Both the time-​frame identified by Boym and the attention to particular urban conditions resonate usefully in relation to post-​Troubles circumstances and, more specifically, in relation to what we might even choose to call here ‘off-​Troubles’ artworks such as Miriam de Búrca’s paralysed but probing picture of a Belfast ‘interstice’.48 In exploring aspects of the same cultural terrain, Hal Foster has also alluded to Walter Benjamin, seeing in recent artistic efforts to source possible ‘lost futures’ something of Benjamin’s fascination with ‘the revolutionary energy of the outmoded’.49 The pervasive, self-​conscious ‘return’ of analogue film (and other such forms) in recent art practices is, for Foster, an important ‘non-​synchronous’ tendency that has its source in the stresses of ‘coming after’ or ‘living on’ in the wake of the expired twentieth century avant-​gardes. However, as the reference to Benjamin indicates, the reach of these concerns is not restricted to the aesthetic. In this field of contemporary ‘outmoded’ practice, Foster argues, artistic medium is ‘reconstituted in a (re)cursive way that is nonetheless open to social content –​in a way, moreover, that reminds us that “form” is nothing but “content” that has become historically sedimented’.50 In speculatively positioning analogue media in a situation that is ‘out-​of-​time’ (both, that is, at the end of its time and outside of any orthodox chronology), artists have sought to release and pluralise repressed dimensions of this ‘content’. Recalling the interests of Benjamin and the surrealists in studying, for instance, the spaces of the Parisian arcades long after the moment of grandeur and futuristic promise associated with these architectural novelties had passed (these were ‘residues of a dream world’, neglected ‘wish symbols’ of a previous century, that allowed Benjamin in his own historical moment ‘to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’51) Foster notes how artists today contemplate the former dominance and significance of cultural forms, such as film, in related terms: Not long ago film was the medium of the future; now it is a privileged index of the recent past, and so a primary element in a non-​synchronous protest against the presentist totality of design culture. In this regard what early arcades were for the surrealists, early cinema is for contemporary artists like Stan Douglas and Janet Cardiff: a repository of old sensations, private fantasies and collective hopes –​‘residues of a dream world’.52

Thinking and practicing in a ‘non-​synchronous’ mode, Foster argues, ‘pressures the totalist assumptions of capitalist culture, and questions its claims to be timeless’.53 Here again there is an effort to reveal the contingency of that which is seemingly consistent within the social, and permanent with respect to the post-​political. A crucial influence in Foster’s modestly optimistic account of the agency of art practices in this contemporary context has been the approach articulated by the Canadian film-​artist Stan Douglas, for whom ‘obsolete forms of communication 138

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become an index of an understanding of the world lost to us’.54 In Douglas’s work there is an effort to understand why, for example, certain ‘utopian moments did not fulfil themselves’ and to reconsider these situations to assess ‘what was valuable there, what might still be useful today’. Fundamental, then, is a wish to ‘address moments when history could have gone one way or another’55 –​and this is a commitment that certainly connects back to Duncan Campbell’s fascination with such differently dynamic figures from the past as Bernadette Devlin and John DeLorean. But there is also a relevance to de Búrca’s taut reflection on the urban present in Go Home. ‘Which way now?’ de Búrca’s film asks, as the out-​of-​place camera offers ‘one way or another’ to the bewildered viewer. But in adopting a technology evocative of the late 1960s and early 1970s –​Super 8 film was launched in 1965 –​ and so associated locally, perhaps, with moving-​image memories relating to the period of the modern Troubles’ traumatic inception, it may also trigger thoughts concerning ‘which way then?’ In this film a grim ‘post-​Troubles’ landscape is presented, one in which routes forward appear to be fixed in strict binary terms. And yet the scenes are shown to us with the (once-​advanced) technological apparatus of a ‘pre-​Troubles’ time. The film is thus linked to an earlier historical predicament and so, potentially, an element of ‘non-​synchronous’ temporal uncertainty is introduced into this spatially constrained situation. These anxious archival impulses of de Búrca’s work are similarly vital to the closely related film Dogs Have No Religion: an informal recording of a real-​life tour of Belfast’s ‘Troubles’ territories in the company of an avuncular story-​telling taxi-​ driver (Plate 17). Once again, there is a profound interest in unorthodox documenting; the film offers a cautious, subjective and unofficial record of one aspect of the city’s traumatic history. (It is also worth acknowledging here the ‘unofficial’ quality of Go Home as a record of spatial experience, its Super 8 style carrying obvious ‘home-​movie’ connotations). In Dogs Have No Religion, de Búrca’s inquisitive gaze is more frenetically mobile than in Go Home. At times, the camera films Belfast through the window of the moving car, capturing glimpses of the depressingly familiar iconography of conflict in Northern Ireland (the tired spectacle of flags, murals and painted kerbstones). But de Búrca’s camera also focuses on the car’s interior, turning to study in close-​up the burly presence of her taxi driver Jimmy as he chronicles his own mixed-​up experience of life in Belfast. Jimmy’s tone is by turns comic and melancholic, defiant and despairing, his anecdotes combining rarely recorded horrors with tales of the routine absurdity of ‘Troubles’ reality –​a ‘reality’ therefore given to us here as a deliberate counter-​reality, constructed within this rehearsed anecdotal account in such a way as to reveal apparent truths about the times that may not be otherwise available through media or scholarly sources. Here, within the intimate space of this touring taxi, a unique type of insider access with on-​the-​ground history becomes available –​ or this is, at least, what the documentary set-​up might lead us to believe. What we in fact get from the film is a confusing, contradictory gathering of information and opinion: an intriguing pairing of the tangential and the tendentious. So we learn, for example, that a strict sectarian code once applied to shopping in Belfast’s bakeries: and the unbreakable 139

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consumer rule, Jimmy tells us, was that ‘hard baps’ were to be sold only to ‘hard’ Protestants. We hear too of how the extreme and long-​standing antagonisms of the Troubles disappeared on the common ground of the greyhound track –​dogs, Jimmy surmises, have no religion. Aphorisms of this kind punctuate the narratives, offering local ‘truths’ that are used to patch together assorted stray and perhaps incompatible pieces of the past. In the recounting of these fragmentary histories, however, uncompromising convictions also surface, unwavering beliefs held by Jimmy about the rights and wrongs of the Troubles years, that hint, as Chantal Mouffe would say, at the ultimate ineradicability of all antagonism. The overall effect of Jimmy’s tour and testimony  –​ intensified by the formal coupling of an agitated, searching gaze on the city with often uncomfortably close-​up views of our genial, non-​objective guide –​ is therefore a disconcerting, distancing one, despite the intimacy of the portrait. As in Duncan Campbell’s perplexing/​perplexed encounters with history, what results, and what is seemingly valued, is an inconsistent, uncertain form of document. Drawing on multifarious, marginal details of Troubles-​era lives and landscapes, and creating space for other, subjective, idiosyncratic and eccentric speculations, these cautious and inquiring artist-​historians anxiously emphasise the inevitability of conflicting accounts rather than proposing accounts of the conflict.56 Instead of reaching an historical ‘ending’, there remains the hard, persistent work of historical amending. I want now to consider further examples of such speculative history-​making in the work of two more artists –​ Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O’Beirn –​ who have been engaged with the effect of the past on the landscapes of the present. In both their collaborative and individual work these artists have sought to find –​often through diverse forms of archival research –​alternative ways of negotiating, mapping and remembering the ‘post-​Troubles’ city. Walking in the city: exploring the everyday urban archive Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events and in this way he hoped to see into the future.57

Impossible, inadvisable or improbable:  at the Belfast Exposed Gallery in July 2010 three disconcerting adjectives accompanied Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O’Beirn’s invitation to embark on a series of unorthodox urban heritage tours –​ low-​key explorations of everyday landscapes –​that proposed to take the changing city region of North Belfast as their chosen historical terrain. These artists’ interest in North Belfast had been inspired, as the exhibition information explained, by the extent to which the area is now, in this era of uneasy and unending regeneration, ‘overwritten with many conflicting inscriptions’, with those multiple, contending versions and visions of what the city is, or of what it might become, that are to be found ‘in written and visual archives, in maps and master-​plans, and most importantly in everyday use’.58 So in imagining new, idiosyncratic tours of

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the diverse northern districts of Belfast, and in designing and distributing a series of small pamphlets containing sketches, photographs and short, handwritten texts that set out in a loose, non-​linear manner, the options for each proposed journey, Jewesbury and O’Beirn chose to draw on that fragmentary and fractious multiplicity of archival, administrative and conversational material that creates such heterogeneous images of the city –​ thus attempting to address the complex discursive shaping of contemporary urban life, a subject so vital, and so contentious, in the context of ‘post-​Troubles’ Belfast. But their project also pointed us towards the plural peculiarities of the city’s physical form, towards miscellaneous eccentricities of the built environment. The tours turned our attention to marginal, minor geographical landmarks, to overlooked and ordinarily unremarkable elements of the landscape, asking us to reflect, for instance, on the type of unlikely informal and industrial ‘monuments’ that once fascinated Robert Smithson. These are the leftovers or unpromising beginnings (what Smithson called ‘ruins in reverse’) of urban development –​variously melancholy or absurd material manifestations of history’s contradictions that litter inner and outer city spaces; ubiquitous and contradictory symbols of both progress and decay, regeneration and degeneration.59 Hence, then, the significance of the trio of negative terms that Jewesbury and O’Beirn attached to their tour concept: terms printed in unmissable bold on the front of each of their take-​away tour guides. In mapping the variety (and measuring the intensity) of the city’s ‘inscriptions’, these artists were determined to highlight paradoxes, problems and unrealised possibilities in the conception, representation and experience of these North Belfast landscapes. Crucially, Jewesbury and O’Beirn chose to foreground the impediments to any objective survey –​ instead prioritising subjective, selective viewing, ‘sketchy’ anecdotal recollection or whimsical speculation –​ and concentrated on the obstacles to any easy negotiation of these places. They delineated journeys that were, to varying degrees, ‘impossible’. Journeys that have, for instance, barriers as their most prominent feature. So in their ‘Midtown’ trip, for example, walkers were directed both towards a stretch of fence in the Ballysillan Park that prevents access to a river culvert (presumably in the interests of public safety) and towards a much more visually imposing section of the ‘interface’ wall on the Springfield Road that marks, and so also maintains, sectarian division in the area. However different in type and scale, both fences are manifestations of the intricate management of public space, demarcating limits at micro-​ and macro-​levels: defining what forms of movement in the city are either possible or impossible. (Notably, among the images the artists used of these segregated landscapes are views from high above, perspectives accessed from different archival sources that nevertheless carry shared connotations of the totalising gaze of aerial surveillance.) Other Belfast journeys proposed by Jewesbury and O’Beirn were deemed ‘impossible’ –​ insofar as the artists’ directions send us towards historically unrealised destinations that now exist only in forsaken planning documents. An entry in a guide entitled ‘Out-​of-​Towners’ pointed potential walkers towards an ‘amazing futuristic roundabout’ on the fringes of the city that, unfortunately, ‘leads 141

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nowhere’. A solitary sign at the location, we were told, displays the words ‘Invest NI’ –​ but there are no further routes to follow. Attention to such atypical tourist landmarks may be one reason why these tours might also be thought of as ‘inadvisable’ or ‘improbable’. Such a trek to the city margins is not likely to be realistically recommended to the eager tourist in Belfast, offering little of substantial local interest, addressing nothing much of established historical significance. Sites of pilgrimage such as roundabouts or typical suburban super-​stores (the North Belfast B&Q Warehouse is described in the accompanying text as ‘an emporium for the fetishisation of home improvement’) are in any ordinary understanding of tourist expectations, banal prospects, powerfully boring places. And yet to travel with analytical purpose through these dispiriting territories may be, perhaps, to properly sense the alarming profundity of such boredom. These are the types of terrains once studied –​and even celebrated –​by the late J.G. Ballard; and indeed another of Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s selected sites of interest, the wide, multi-​lane motorway going north from Belfast towards Northern Ireland’s International Airport is another obvious and extreme Ballard-​scape. The fear expressed in Ballard’s dystopian tales of affectless (post)modern existence was, as he once said, that ‘everything has happened, [that] nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again’; the future, he predicted, would be nothing more than ‘a vast, conforming suburb of the soul’.60 Paying tribute to Ballard following his death in 2009, the film-​maker Chris Petit looked to London’s Westway for inspiration –​ the ‘three-​mile elevated expressway singled out by Ballard as a rare example of the modern city that London never became’  –​ in order to capture something of the late writer’s bleak but ambiguous premonition of permanent, edge-​city boredom. Overlooked now by its new skyline, the Westway feels much slower and smaller than it did when Ballard wrote Concrete Island. No longer a grand folly –​ a flyover that went nowhere –​ its status has been reduced to that of service road for Europe’s largest (ailing) shopping mall. In London Orbital, a film Iain Sinclair and I made, Ballard declared that the future will be boring. Malls are boredom’s cathedrals. Boredom underpins consumerism. It defines leisure (and desire), which collapses into shopping. Boredom invites terror (as its only cure).61

These end-​of-​history evocations of cultural and social uniformity, of an eventless horizon of leisure and shopping, with boredom as the standard and terror as the only release, carry a particularly unsettling charge in these North Belfast settings and in this Northern Ireland situation. (It is worth noting, in passing, that another suburban Belfast setting was used as the location for a 2016 movie version of Ballard’s 1975 novel High-​Rise.) Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s tours often take us to places where traumatic or restrictive remainders of the ‘old’ history in Belfast meet the new consumerist imperatives of social organisation  –​ where ‘enemy’ could be replaced by ‘anomie’, perhaps –​ and where the resultant, ‘triumphant’ models of urban planning and commercial development have actually failed or faltered. These are locations where the landscape seems readied for a post-​Troubles 142

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future that will combine the worst of both worlds, past and present. With their purposeful drift (and knowing dérive) between interface and investment territories, these tours offer glimpses of a lasting disciplinary regime of surveillance, of highly regulated geography and security-​led design, as well as ensuring that we gain a sense of the even more insidious ‘society of control’ fostered by corporations and fervent consumerism. Reflecting on what he saw as a shift from the former, Foucauldian understanding of power’s effects to the latter, seemingly freer and more flexible late-​capitalist dispensation, Gilles Deleuze saw increasing evidence of ‘a new system of domination’, of a more ‘dispersed’ form of social control determined by the contingencies of the market –​a system which is ‘free-​floating’ and ‘short-​term’ but which is nevertheless ‘continuous and without limit’. Under these new conditions, Deleuze argued, ‘man is no longer man enclosed but man in debt’.62 Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s fascination with the non-​place landscapes of North Belfast –​ rather than, on this occasion, with any of the more prominent, Troubles-​related histories of these places –​is in part a revealing quest for the uneven, ambiguous, even contradictory effects of recent post-​Troubles shifts. Perhaps Ballard’s words in a late preface to Crash, his classic nightmare vision of traffic and transgression, have, therefore, a degree of relevance to the strange types of ghosts being hunted in Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s peculiar urban trails: ‘across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy’.63 Within such urban ‘junkspace’ (to borrow the architect Rem Koolhaas’s term for ‘what remains after modernisation has run its course, or more precisely, what coagulates while modernisation is in progress’64) there may also be traces of lost possibility. A photocollage in the ‘Out-​of-​Towners’ tour pamphlet clusters together snapshots of leftover concrete pipes on a patch of suburban wasteground; this bulky industrial litter has no apparent current value, it relates to no immediate construction need. Nevertheless the presence of these forlorn waste-​products prompts reflection on the recent past’s unrealised possibilities and enables speculation on an alternative, though vitally ‘improbable’, future. On this neglected ground, Jewesbury and O’Beirn write, ‘the University of Ulster was going to build a new “Springvale” campus … in the 90s. Mo Mowlam and Billy Hutchinson actually turned the first sod together in April 1998. Then nothing happened’. Here is a history of something that could have been, but that somehow became ‘impossible’, at the moment of the Troubles’ conclusion. Now, perceived differently as a series of side-​by-​side and overlapping rings on the landscape, these discarded pipes prompt an absurd, upbeat vision, converging in such a way as to begin forming a familiar symbol of cultural unification, suggesting –​ preposterously and amusingly –​ that ‘this site could be the Olympic Park for the Belfast Olympics in 2028’. Catching sight of this partial Olympic image, craftily created through photographic juxtaposition of found elements in the urban landscape, calls to mind, in passing, arguments concerning actual Olympic development. As the quintessential contemporary psycho-​geographer Iain Sinclair witnessed before and after the 2012 London games, the eradication of distinctive topography and 143

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the erasure of local memory became inevitable after-​effects of the Olympics’ massive ‘engine of regeneration’.65 Regularly exploring certain East London locations, particularly during the preparatory period before the events, Sinclair was eager to capture memories of these places before they were transformed into new terrains of twenty-​first century progress. Like Jewesbury and O’Beirn in Belfast, Sinclair covered much ground in campaigning to make visible the historical ghosts haunting land that developers and planners often understand to be merely ‘empty’. And intriguingly, as he went looking for images of the East London Olympic development settings within old movies, Sinclair found traces of Belfast, and of the expanded field of the Troubles. He saw Bethnal Green masquerading as ‘an Expressionist Belfast’ in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out.66 He found ‘rogue Irish Republicans’ playing a vital criminal part in John MacKenzie’s premonitory tale of docklands land-​piracy, The Long Good Friday.67 It is perhaps an intended effect of Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s psycho-​geographic journeys that such unanticipated connections between time and space, between place and image, are gradually created; new routes are constructed as we newly map present and past, real and imagined, city landscapes. But we might also wonder if in Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s re-​envisioning of abandoned construction materials as an odd icon of reconciled cultural difference –​ those five, pathetic concrete rings becoming an accidental Olympic symbol –​there is still also a glimmer of utopian possibility. Even if the reference to the Olympic symbol is satirical, we might yet recognise the simultaneous importance of imagining situations well beyond anything that might be ‘reasonably’ predicted for these Belfast locations. Considering fragments of former historical promise –​ such as a lost plan for a new university campus or, going further, the absurd dream of a Belfast unified in civic celebration by the Olympic games –​might be, in ‘utopian’ terms, less a matter of remembering a future destination as of regaining political determination. ‘Utopianism’, in this regard, is a form of thought and an instinct of politics that dreams up options for otherwise unanticipated and ‘unrealistic’ change. It is a faint, fleeting glow of out-​of-​the-​ordinary illumination that, as Fredric Jameson has argued, concentrates our attention on the idea of a ‘break’ with the present, forcing us to think beyond ‘the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system’.68 As with the defining description and the essential details of Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s distinctive, difficult historical urban tours, utopian form demands, as Jameson says, ‘meditation on the impossible, on the unrealisable in its own right’.69 Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s historical tour project for Belfast Exposed was conducive to imaginative digression as much as to actual physical wandering. The artists’ small, cheaply printed pamphlets –​disposable, ephemeral things, rather than authoritative-​seeming publications –​ functioned along the lines of what Rebecca Solnit has called ‘field guides to getting lost’: unofficial itineraries that allow us to knowingly lose our way, helping us to form unlikely connections between under-​ analysed features of the urban landscape as we drift away from established paths set by city planners.70 Such activity might well accord with Walter Benjamin’s 144

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conviction, quoted by Solnit, that an urban wanderer must aim to ‘lose oneself in a city –​as one loses oneself in a forest’.71 This is, famously in Benjamin’s writing, a practice of transgressing the governing expectations of urban life, of learning to circumvent the city’s fixed patterns and hierarchies of experience. It is a technique of apprehending the built environments of modernity that extends and challenges our comprehension of ‘modern’ time and space; a process of exploring the everyday in which, as Benjamin says, ‘signboards and street names, passers-​by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre’.72 As Susan Sontag has said, Benjamin’s ‘goal is to be a competent street-​map reader who knows how to stray. And to locate himself with imaginary maps’.73 Moreover, Sontag continues, [Benjamin’s] recurrent metaphors of maps and diagrams, memories and dreams, labyrinths and arcades, vistas and panoramas, evoke a certain vision of cities as well as a certain kind of life … With these metaphors he is indicating a general problem about orientation and erecting a standard of difficulty and complexity. (A labyrinth is a place where one gets lost.) He is also suggesting a notion about the forbidden, and how to gain access to it: through an act of the mind that is the same as a physical act.74

There are suggestive parallels here with Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s proposals for newly negotiating the fractured geography of Belfast.75 Their gallery-​promoted trips around the northern districts of the city simultaneously encourage freer forms of urban meandering and lead us to territories that may be, in one way or another, difficult to traverse. These guides to irregular routes through the city promise obstruction as much as improved circumstances of movement, opening up potentially undiscovered pathways while ‘indicating a general problem about orientation’. Fundamentally, as in Benjamin, the tours combine an aspiration towards productive lostness and unconventional locatedness: this is ‘an art of straying’ made possible by ‘imaginary maps’. For Rebecca Solnit, the principles of idiosyncratic perambulation that can be pointed to in Benjamin’s reflections on urban experience –​and that we see echoed in Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s art practices –​can be understood in relation to a loose lineage of artists who have set themselves on an intentional trajectory towards a state of alert lostness. And so she not only cites, for instance, Edgar Allen Poe’s apparently paradoxical wish to ‘calculate upon the unforeseen’, to ‘collaborate with chance’, but also Keats’s investment in ‘negative capability’: ‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.76 But in a way that is incidentally pertinent to the post-​Troubles predicament underpinning Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s investigations, it is also worth noting how Solnit emphasises that the word ‘lost’ has its distant roots in ‘the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wider world’.77 In the cities of the twenty-​first century world, nevertheless, opportunities 145

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for getting creatively lost  –​ for what we might thing of as digressive wandering, for simultaneous imaginative and physical straying, for seeking a psychic state of uncertainty that is ‘achievable through geography’ –​are, Solnit suggests, increasingly rare:  ‘advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so’.78 From one perspective, then, to strive towards being ‘lost’ in a city such as Belfast today –​in the wake of an extended conflict and under pressure from those forces and factors identified by Solnit as more generally arising out of contemporary conditions  –​ may be especially meaningful. In their Belfast Exposed exhibition, however, Jewesbury and O’Beirn were, as already indicated, equally interested in non-​conformist locatedness –​ in mapping unofficial co-​ordinates within the changing city, in seeking significant bearings but under newly imagined terms –​each artist singling out particular objects, images and sites that might allow for out-​of-​the-​ordinary speculation on positionality, and for the proposal of alternative means of orientation and identification to those models ideologically set by existing orthodoxies of public planning and private development. (We might draw a link here to Irit Rogoff’s interest in ‘unhomed geographies’: ‘a possibility of redefining issues of location away from concrete coercions of belonging and not belonging determined by the state’.79) Essential to these combined lost-​and-​located enquiries was the inclination towards anxiously negotiating and imaginatively constructing city space as an archive. Or, rather, towards seeing the city as composed of and containing multiple archives: its landscapes appearing to these artists as labyrinthine sources of data storage, repositories of countless secret histories. As Michael Sheringham has written in an essay on the city as archive in literature, such strange forms of aesthetic attention are productive of a crucial estrangement: to expose the hidden histories relating to an urban setting may be, he says, ‘to defamiliarise the city we thought we knew, and to wrench us out of the present into an intermediate zone of interlapping timescales’.80 And although ‘in its materiality, its layeredness, its endless transformations’, the ‘archival’ is a dimension that all cities share, Sheringham suggests that this sphere of information and experience is not always immediately available to us: it is a realm that we learn to access, he argues, ‘by consenting to let go of our familiar reference points in personal and collective time and space’.81 This is, once again, a version of Benjamin’s willed lostness; and it perhaps privileges most of all the subjective perspective of the lone flâneur. But there is also a more unusually located and alternatively ‘collective’ case to be made for artists’ urban archival work. For what if ‘our familiar reference points’ were not just those ‘coerced’ from above and applied broadly across a city or a society, but were those pertaining to the particular habitus of an area  –​ to the peculiar, everyday life and language of a locality? And could tactics of highlighting and holding on to these ‘minor’ modes of spatial negotiation offer more political potential than ‘letting go’? Collecting and discussing the distinctive details of such unofficial, less-​documented relationships with place has long been at the core of Aisling O’Beirn’s 146

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art-​making. The diverse elements of her determinedly situated practice draw extensively on the lore and lexicon of the local, in Belfast and elsewhere. Many of the material outcomes of her work have therefore emerged as manifestations of more immaterial urban substance. So, for instance, her content has been derived from such everyday conversational ‘stuff’ as commonly ​used, wise-​crack nicknames for pathways and landmarks in and around neighbourhoods or from the area-​specific superstitions and urban myths so vital to a genius loci –​ but also, potentially, so alien to the needs and interests of the forces of rational authority. Indeed, Michel de Certeau has defined one characteristic of ‘totalitarian’ urban governance as a tendency to attack what can be called ‘superstitions’: ‘supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves “over and above” and “in excess,” and annex to a past or a poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves’.82 It is such superstitions, however, that de Certeau says make places ‘habitable’: ‘there is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not’; ‘haunted places’, he argues, ‘are the only ones people can live in –​and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon’.83 Moreover, we can think of these ‘stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants’ as constituting the basis of a type of informal public sphere.84 They form locally-​defined geographical markers and historical reference points that create the co-​ordinates for numerous, overlapping counter-​hegemonic ‘common spaces’ within vernacular discourse. Within de Certeau’s theories concerning the dissensual potential of everyday life, such local spaces of culture are crucially viewed as not only phantasmal but also precarious:  ‘stories about places are makeshift things’, de Certeau suggests, ‘they are composed of the world’s debris’.85 Though immediately resonant in relation to the notionally ‘immaterial’ narrative and textual elements of O’Beirn’s practice –​her work has often featured lists of bizarre names, compilations of odd anecdotes, gathered fragments of casual conversations –​ de Certeau’s vocabulary here also corresponds to key characteristics of her installation-​based and sculptural work, which in many instances prioritises physical fragility, instability and vulnerability:  a ‘making do’ mode of assembling and crafting, based on cheap, ‘preparatory’ types of materials. In this way, it is worth noting, there is a logical link to the types of ‘unmonumental’ sculpture that have appeared in international art since the 1990s:  ‘a sculpture of fragments, a debased, precarious, trembling form’, according to Richard Flood, which gives us objects and arrangements that ‘are cobbled together, pushed and prodded into a state of suspended animation’.86 So by comparison, for example, ordinary cardboard has been a favoured medium for O’Beirn:  a basic, unglamorous product of modern, material reality that is also, more specifically, a fundamental component of architectural model-​making, allowing her to fashion provisional and non-​precious mini-​versions of actual, historically evocative objects in the world; such as, on one occasion, a replica of a cannon from Derry’s walls or, on another, a miniature copy of Belfast’s iconic ‘Samson and Goliath’ ship-​building cranes. 147

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Figure 16  Aisling O’Beirn, detail of ‘Waterworks Park’ from Improbable Landmarks, 2010.

At Belfast Exposed in 2010, the reconstructed form was based on the more quotidian and less obviously iconic landscapes of the North Belfast ‘Waterworks Park’ (Figure  16). Designated within the context of this exhibition as one of a number of ‘improbable landmarks’, the park is alluded to by O’Beirn as a routine urban destination for diverse Belfast constituencies: ‘from families to fishermen to dog walkers to glue sniffers’. It is a place that officially and unofficially accommodates multiple layers of the ‘local’ –​as a result, O’Beirn adds, it can appear ‘idyllic or threatening depending on the time of day’  –​ and it might, in this way hint at alternative identifications with territory to those generally associated with the landscapes of a ‘divided Belfast’.87 The Waterworks is a space of man-​made, ‘urban nature’. It is a fixed, bordered, planned resource within the geography of North Belfast (it was built in the nineteenth century as a reservoir and later became a public park). But it is also a developing eco-​system and multi-​layered arena of marginal production and occasional encounter –​an ever-​evolving domain of what Robert MacFarlane has called ‘improvised ecologies’, a terrain of unanticipated becoming, both ‘human and natural’, containing both tremendous biodiversity and some very varied zones of civic activity, from children’s playgrounds to working community gardens: cherished spaces of spare-​time contact or ‘makeshift’ cultivation.88 (Coincidentally, MacFarlane describes the allotment landscapes arising out of traditions of urban farming in terms that correspond to Flood’s comments on contemporary sculpture: they are, he says, ‘beautifully chronic places: developed over time, cobbled lovingly into being’.89) As a subject for O’Beirn’s ongoing 148

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urban investigations, the park ‘becomes’ therefore both a recognisable object of representation and a more ‘open’ focus: a measurable, ‘fixed’ territory on the city map, and a space of socio-​cultural plurality and contingency. In this light, it is telling that the building material for her reconstruction of this urban landmark was a ‘soft’ substance with strong associations beyond the physical and the visual. Rather than selecting cardboard this time, O’Beirn employed acoustic foam in creating her rudimentary model of the Waterworks, the properties of which allowed for a still-​more insubstantial ‘solidity’ than in many of her previous sculptural experiments. The foam maquette –​monolithically gun-​metal grey and somewhat melancholically adorned with a small selection of plastic plants –​ was a quite ungainly, inelegant presence in the gallery space, a purposefully inadequate and oddly gloomy architectural display, implicitly contrasting, surely, with slickly realised future-​vision models of the new building schemes of regeneration-​era Belfast that no doubt form part of the city’s planning and promotional apparatus. The ‘acoustic’ foam also signalled, of course, a second-​order relation to sound –​and, in particular, to its strategic dampening, to the industrial purpose of deadening all unwelcome traces of the audible world. This foam is a substance used in buildings only to break down sound waves: and in some ways we could understand this ‘muted’ status of O’Beirn’s sculpture as conceptually functioning in direct, deliberate contrast to the multi-​vocal, story-​telling, information-​ sharing aspirations that are fundamental to her wider place-​based practice. Crucially, therefore, the Waterworks model was complemented within the exhibition space by two connected representations of the more discursive inputs and outputs of her research. On one wall a long, vertical banner of white printed paper displayed a list of words and phrases describing the principal visible characteristics of yet more ‘improbable landmarks’ –​ among them motorway lanes, a B&Q warehouse, suburban gardens, a derelict former dance hall –​ and across the gallery, faintly present in the un-​darkened space, an animated sequence of steadily emerging and quickly disappearing line drawings was projected, the simple pencil sketches giving a fleeting visual impression of the assorted places listed on the nearby poster. The form and content of each component of this spatially separated text-​image pairing was based on filed imagery from the Belfast Exposed community photography archive, but each also came with extra associations that created a paradoxical sense of simultaneous communicative clarity and increasing uncertainty. The ‘facts’ of the text compilation demonstrated dedication to recording and making visible low-​key aspects of life in the urban landscape, but the naming of precise attributes of places also at times rendered the points of reference poetically elusive (‘city council crest/​faded/​congealed’ stated one entry; ‘doubled glazed windows /​ lace curtains tapering off towards window frames’ offered another). The animation too suggested exacting attention to micro-​geographical ordinariness in the patient recreation of the archived photograph: an honouring of fragments and traces of the marginal and the neglected within a transforming locale. But at the moment when each picture of a place, object or person from the city’s past became more-​or-​less fully legible within the 149

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Figure 17  Daniel Jewesbury, NLR, 2010.

sequence, at the culmination of an almost line-​by-​line emergence of the complete drawing, the image would abruptly disappear, to be replaced on this projected drawing pad, by another nascent, returning ‘memory’. Any sense of stable, factual presence was refused, just as physical presence was rendered precarious elsewhere within the gallery space. O’Beirn’s Improbable Landmarks twinned and intertwined ‘facts’ with ‘fictions’ of place, her animated, fragmentary history of these North Belfast locations offering a faint coming-​and-​going of re-​traced photographic traces: spectral apparitions called and created from the archive. A related spirit of uneasy coming-​and-​going with respect to specific places (and a shared concern for the coming-​and-​going spirits of place) also characterised Daniel Jewesbury’s haunting film NLR (Figure 17). This was another solo contribution within the two artists’ combined Belfast Exposed project, but one that nevertheless included a crucial additional dimension of two-​person dialogue –​ the film layering onto real-​life footage of the contemporary city a contemplative fictional soundtrack consisting of two voices that articulated back and forth testimonies concerned with the relation of individual lives to particular locations. The interconnecting male and female audio commentaries in Jewesbury’s NLR articulate profoundly uncertain perspectives: they are 150

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imagined ruminations on places and people that are composed of unavoidably ‘make-​shift’ memories. The speakers try to recall pivotal moments in intimate relationships or catalogue noteworthy events in the private and public history of a locality. But there is, throughout, an intensifying sense of the mental ‘lostness’ of melancholic reverie. Four slowly spoken words are repeated many times, and bookend the film’s oblique narratives: ‘I had no idea.’ And yet, this is also, in other insistent ways, a very precisely located film. The visual content of NLR is to a large extent a straightforward, strictly delimited picture of place, documenting a journey from one end of North Belfast’s New Lodge Road to the other (a place-​name tightly encased, of course, within the title’s capitalised initials). Distanced establishing shots and obscure close-​ups of the street fleetingly come and go at first, flashing into vision in different film formats, before a Steadicam view gradually guides us at a sauntering pace  –​ under the undramatic light of an ordinary day  –​ along this historically conflict-​afflicted working-​class avenue. Indeed, ‘saunter’ is a useful term here, since one possible etymology of the word is the French sans-​terre, suggesting a degree of separation from place in the process of its traversal –​a condition of being without a territory while also moving through one90 –​ and as such, it might be added that this is a term both applicable and at odds with Jewesbury’s simultaneously drifting and engaged gaze. The movement of the camera, in its passages of Steadicam glide, has something of the disembodied detachment from location found in Willie Doherty’s Ghost Story. As with Ghost Story, however, Jewesbury’s ambulatory, anxiously ‘weightless’ first-​person perspective on the impact of the past on landscapes of the present also includes pauses in the recorded progression along this city street that suggest something of Doherty’s quest for new anchorage in the landscape: an obsessive but always frustrated pursuit of the definite. In NLR, a ghostly, ungrounded perspective is combined, then, with a fascination for grounded actuality. At certain moments, the head-​on vista and floating movement might almost recall the airy virtuality of travel by Google Street View (an upgrade, perhaps, of those ‘sinister technologies’, that according to Ballard move spectrally across the contemporary communications landscape), and yet at others, the view is stubborn and static in its riveted attention to the particular physical details of the passing environment. Jewesbury zooms in on just-​about identifiable traces of the Troubles –​suggestions of historical hard evidence –​and points to signs and symbols that announce assorted legacies of conflict. There are bullet marks in patches of brickwork. There are wall murals with messages diversely relating to Republican solidarity or to more non-​partisan peace-​era public interest (we see both Bobby Sands as an icon of ‘POW’ freedom, and footballer Roy Keane as a cartoon representative for children’s rights). And there are also other, newly sinister, inscriptions on the urban surface. One blurry black graffito reads, for instance, ‘PSNI/​SF Be-​fucking-​ware’. These markers of time and place are presented to us in disconnected fragments –​despite the spatial continuity and geographical clarity of the journey. The details are rendered curious and cryptic rather than coherent as the characteristic signifying elements of an easily 151

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categorisable ‘zone’ within the city’s sectarian geography (e.g. a ‘Catholic area’). Moreover, the meaning and relevance of their filmic documentation is potentially altered in juxtaposition with the patient attention given to many other forms and features of the street:  the other ‘improbable landmarks’ that substantially constitute the material culture of the area. Michael Sheringham has written of how ‘one of the city’s archives is its detritus’: a resource that might include ‘hieroglyphic blobs of gum splattering the sidewalk’ or ‘runic streaks and crevices on pavements or blank facades’.91 Among the objects of both protracted and passing analysis in Jewesbury’s visual survey are such constellations of discarded gum on well-​trodden tarmac or those anonymous, inscrutable scrawlings and miscellaneous manifestations of decay or damage that crudely decorate the edges of paths or the sides of buildings in any city. These casual leftovers of urban life –​registering former human presence, but nothing in particular of current consequence –​ are perhaps marks of generic modernity (‘the fleeting and the contingent’ according to Baudelaire’s famous definition) rather than clues to something of the specificity of this unique place, the New Lodge Road. Similarly, the multiple shots of satellite dishes clipped to the facades of terraced houses and tower blocks, assist in making this geographically fixed ‘here’ seem less a defined, distinctive post-​conflict territory than a deterritorialised, globalised ‘anywhere’. Tensions of this kind serve to intensify the unsettled tone and indeterminate meaning of NLR’s two-​character drama. As we take in the slowly changing street scene, with its lingering views of the historically altering design features of public space –​ the camera inspecting the assorted styles of low-​ and high-​rise public housing that dominate this North Belfast landscape and that have, therefore, so profoundly influenced conditions and possibilities of community over successive generations –​ we hear isolated voices that describe and dispute various attitudes to location, their words speaking of eccentric or strenuous individual efforts to establish a significant sense of position within time and space. The unnamed male narrator muses on remembered conversations with an anonymous woman, recalling that ‘she used to tell me that she recognised some place or other, that she knew where she was, by the shape of the clouds’. This was a ‘perception of the world’, we are told, which had ‘only the most tenuous connection with anything actual’. The female narrator, by comparison, talks of how she would explain to ‘him’ (the inter-​subjective connections are ‘tenuous’ too: we cannot know for sure if these characters are referring to each other) that ‘even the most complex, detailed surface, a wall or a skin, conceals something else that lies beneath’. Another of the short, disjointed speeches makes clear an unflinching commitment to a philosophy of territorial attachment: ‘You’re one of us. It’s the way it is … You persist, in the unchangingness of this place.’ And yet this forceful message about unmistakable presence seems to arise out of incidental absence –​ this solid opinion is aired as the camera gazes at a now-​empty mural space on a gable wall –​while also rhetorically registering a spirit of inevitable disintegration: ‘even if there’s nothing left’, the voice insists, ‘it’s still the same’. Another speech haltingly articulates a desire to identify unacknowledged connections within this location, to discover 152

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occult dimensions beneath the familiar geography:  ‘I thought I’d started to … comprehend the movements, and the relations, which were invisible, not there if you only saw the surface. I thought I’d started to discern them –​ patterns, flows, relationships.’ All such discovery, all conclusive revelation, is however, provisional and contingent (we can note the twice-​repeated, doubly hesitant phrase ‘I thought I’d started to …’). These are speculative realisations, meanings-​in-​motion, precariously pieced-​together truths about place that are the products of the unavoidably subjective inventions of mental travel. As Iain Sinclair writes, the process of ‘drifting purposefully’ as we strive to ‘explore and exploit the city’, the action of ‘tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie’, allows ‘the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself’.92 As in the wider body of work represented by O’Beirn and Jewesbury, we are again given clues here towards alternative methods of mapping, negotiating and imagining the city. The informal archives of the neglected and the inconsequential, the repressed or the unrealised, in private and public memory, potentially offer up points of connection within the strange, unofficial cartographies of subjective and collective city experience. But there can be no final confirmation, no certainty in these reconstructed visions of place. These are stories of the city that are stories of complex plurality, of sought-​after difference and difficulty –​ stories that anxiously alert us to the irreducible dimension of antagonism which is so often erased within the consensual propagandising of the ‘peace’ era. As the narrator says of the scenario prompting another of Jewesbury’s elliptical narratives in the film Irish Lights from 2009, ‘It doesn’t add up … and it doesn’t have to … it’s about contradictions. It’s all about contradictions, conflicts, contests’.

A protest against forgetting A few years ago, a Dublin editor responded to my suggestion that I write a report on a commemorative event in Derry with an impatient, ‘These bloody Northerners. The Troubles are finished. Will they never get over it?’93

In addition to the specific artworks and practices discussed in some detail here, there have been a number of archival and history-​related contemporary art curatorial/​research projects made in the context of, or in recognition of, the particular circumstances of post-​Troubles life in Northern Ireland. These are projects that exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity to wider tendencies in contemporary art and to wider circumstances in the contemporary world. We might cite here, for example, the interconnected Performing the Archive and Arkive City projects developed through ‘Interface’, an interdisciplinary and practice-​based research centre based at the University of Ulster (the latter a project/​institute within the college, which among other objectives, sought to examine the role of art in a post-​conflict society). Led by Julie Bacon, Kerstin Mey and Grainne Loughran, Performing the Archive and Arkive City were discursive research initiatives concerned with exploring archiving in the arts; and these matters were studied in a manner that situated 153

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questions about the post-​Troubles predicament in relation to other international issues and examples. The first (‘performing’) stage of the project was a series of public events, held both in Belfast and the North East of England, that addressed critical questions concerning the meaning, value and use of diverse archival resources. It centred on discussion of four themes: ‘investigating archives’; ‘creative approaches’; ‘performing’ archives; and the use of archival resources in ‘consensus contention’.94 Featured speakers included significant Irish-​based (but diversely-​focused) artist-​investigators of the cultural potential of archives who had undertaken research at Interface (for example Sarah Pierce, Justin McKeown and Una Walker) and other influential international presences deemed pertinent to these enquiries, such as the London-​based psycho-​geographical writer Stewart Home and Lebanese archive-​artist Walid Raad, sole agent within the (meta-​)fictional conceptual collective ‘The Atlas Group’. The subsequent Arkive City section of the research was manifested firstly as a website which constituted an archive of archives –​cataloguing international art practices and institutions engaged with the theory and practice of archiving –​and secondly as a publication which attempted to offer ‘deep and contrasting views of archival engagement and discourse’.95 These events, online resources and published texts included an impressive range of contributors and commentaries, demonstrating a capacious understanding of how the archival might be considered within the art field and in connection with the Northern Ireland context. But also, in this wide scope beyond the immediate legacies of ‘The Troubles’, the accumulated outcomes of these projects demonstrated, as Derrida has identified in Archive Fever, how ‘nothing is more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in this word “archive” ’.96 As such, there was an also an implied and deliberate indication of how our condition of being ‘in need of archives’ is one which demands that we are ‘never to rest’: it is to be interminably ‘searching for the archive right where it slips away’, to be always running after the archive, ‘even if there’s too much of it’.97 This is the madness and malady, the fever, which for Derrida arises out of ‘an irrepressible desire to return to the origin’.98 In these respects, Walid Raad was a particularly useful guest at these discussions, since his own practice is an investigation into possibilities of creating viable histories in circumstances of post-​conflict, but one in which any standard comprehension of the definitive origins and reliable ‘truths’ of an historical narrative is subverted. ‘How do we approach facts not in their crude facticity’, Raad asks, ‘but through the complicated mediations by which facts acquire their immediacy?’99 Among his tentative answers has been a rejection of the often reductive distinction between fiction and non-​fiction, developing and presenting archival resources relating to the history of the Lebanese Civil War (the ‘group’s’ primary focus) that are in one sense self-​consciously unreliable but that are in other ways somehow capable of doing ‘justice to the rich and complex stories that circulate widely and capture our attention and belief’.100 Characterising the ‘historical documents’ he makes available as ‘hysterical symptoms’ (‘based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of 154

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collective memories’101), the Atlas Group’s processes play on a kind of mania or indeed a fever (also akin, perhaps, to the earlier-​noted paranoia identified by Žižek in response to Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake) that may result from the drive to see everything, to remember all. This is a point discussed by Charles Merewether in the introduction to a survey of archival practices and ideas: Reminiscent of the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, The Atlas Group files … attempt to address the limits of what is thinkable. At the same time as they open up possibilities for new ways of writing histories, they also intimate that sense of the absurd, the futile, or the impossible, which ultimately haunts the logic of the archive.102

We might recall here the words of the hedge school teacher Hugh in Translations, Brian Friel’s powerful drama about landscape and memory in colonial Ireland: ‘to remember everything is a form of madness’.103 And indeed, if there is self-​conscious madness in the methods of the Atlas Group, it seems likely that the cultural and political background to Raad’s work involves a degree of what Edna Longley has called the ‘historiographical mania’ that has also long defined debates on the history of conflict in Ireland (and so on the history of the history of conflict in Ireland).104 Raad’s archival interventions implicitly propose, of course, a productive form of ‘instability’ –​affirming undecidablity in the distinction between fact and fiction –​and if we turn back once again to specific circumstances in the North of Ireland, corresponding forms of high anxiety can be highlighted in certain post-​ Troubles curatorial initiatives –​projects driven by post-​conflict ‘archival impulses’ and historicising inclinations. A series of exhibitions at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art has displayed interesting varieties of these ‘hysterical symptoms’. Though in most respects a very conventional proposition –​a plan to stage a series of historical surveys of art from Northern Ireland, covering a well-​ defined time period –​ there is something excessive and eccentric about this project. It is a curatorial venture conceived by the Golden Thread Gallery’s Director Peter Richards –​an artist who has for several years explored through performance and photography the complex relation of representation and monument-​making to lived history, and who was included in the public performance/​intervention weekend that accompanied Northern Ireland’s exhibition The Nature of Things at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Richards’s aim –​as artist and curator –​in developing this ongoing series of exhibitions has been to ‘form a significant historical archive of Northern Irish art from 1945 to the present’, providing ‘much-​needed historical context’. In doing so, he has sought to demonstrate, with as much variety as possible, ‘that there are many versions of history’.105 This series, Richards says, ‘embraces the overlapping and sometimes contradictory versions of history’.106 It is therefore set-​up to be at odds with itself, defined by internal dispute. Beginning in 2005 with Post-​War –​Post-​Troubles, curated by S.B. Kennedy and Brian McAvera, the Collective Histories has continued over subsequent years, featuring within the ongoing series such exhibitions as Icons of the North (again with McAvera at the 155

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curatorial helm), Art and the Disembodied Eye (curated by Liam Kelly), The Double Image (curated by Dougal McKenzie), A Shout from the Street (curated by Declan McGonagle) and The Visual Force (curated by Slavka Sverakova). Each has taken a different element or emphasis of Northern Irish art since the 1960s as its theme; and each has espoused, often in very explicit terms, a particular vision of art in relation to the wider history and society.107 Again, this approach may seem curatorially straightforward and familiar in its need to cover terrain that is, for some, well-​travelled. Indeed, we might remind ourselves here of the good arguments made by Daniel Jewesbury for an ‘end of the history of Northern Irish art’. Jewesbury’s wish in this regard is to highlight how this restrictive art historical framing has become ‘far more problematic than it has been customarily portrayed’.108 Jewesbury insists that meaningful examinations of art in the North today ‘must inevitably exceed the historiography not just of Northern Irish art but of Northern Ireland itself’.109 He argues that an excess of art and writing arising out of the Troubles involved ‘over-​simplistic responses’, serving up ‘reiterated banalities of the media’, failing to ‘exceed the two traditions model’.110 By contrast, he proposes that genuinely challenging recent art from Northern Ireland has ‘moved beyond such understandings’; and now, for these reasons, ‘it may no longer be meaningful to talk about Northern Irish art at all, at least not in the same way’.111 To what extent, then, have Peter Richards’s ‘collective histories’ delivered their narrative in ‘the same way’? And if an ‘end of the history of Northern Irish art’ is desirable, what, we might well ask, has been the hoped-​for ‘end’ of this history of art –​what, in other words, is its goal? As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes (echoing Derrida’s counter-​intuitive comments on archival temporality) ‘memories always have a future in mind’.112 Perhaps a useful point of information here concerns the scale of Peter Richards’s scheme. Collective Histories has been planned to run, on and off, for a lengthy extended period, punctuating the Golden Thread Gallery’s programme for some years. This is, without doubt, a considerable undertaking, and, in many respects, a bizarre one for an institution of this scale and type: that is, a modestly-​ sized publicly funded contemporary art space without the resources usually required for a long-​term, museum-​scale national or regional art history project of this kind. Richards has chosen to eschew exclusive commitment to the emergent and the international in his curatorial planning (the type of programming that might be more obviously expected from an independent contemporary art gallery of this kind), privileging instead an ongoing process of examining and re-​ examining local conditions, going over and over the details of an historical period that, more generally, this society is being fervently urged to leave behind (on the basis of the ‘fresh start’ urged by the Good Friday Agreement). From one perspective, therefore, these exhibitions might be understood as rather parochial in outlook, arising from an approach that demonstrates perverse inward-​and-​ backward-​looking tendencies, rejecting the assumed strategic prestige of international art-​world positioning. Yet precisely owing to its apparent perversity, the Collective Histories series might also be valued as a stubborn, unorthodox form of 156

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remembering, a curatorial experiment that gambles on the possibilities for public debate that may emerge through this long-​term commitment to re-​making and persistently re-​staging history. (In this regard we might compare Hans Ulrich Obrist’s framing of an ongoing series of interviews with curatorial pioneers as a ‘protest against forgetting’ –​a slogan he borrows from the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose work has perennially struggled against the way ‘our society is geared to make us forget’.113) Valuing Richards’s Collective Histories project as an experiment might well allow us to consider this component of Golden Thread Gallery programming as an instance of ‘experimental institutionalism’ –​a term coined by the influential curator Charles Esche, and one that has been a source of much debate in European contemporary art since the late 1990s. ‘Experimental institutionalism’ and the related notion of ‘new institutionalism’ declare, as Alex Farquharson notes, a deepened curatorial interest in ‘values of fluidity, discursivity, participation and production’.114 Such practitioners frame the contemporary art institution ‘as a kind of compensatory public space’, an ‘oasis of openness’ or ‘forum of possibility’, in Esche’s hopeful words, where ‘things can be imagined otherwise’.115 This is, in Esche’s case, a curatorial ethos that, as Farquharson adds, seeks to see ‘the dissolution of the homogeneous public sphere of Enlightenment (as theorised by Jürgen Habermas) … [as] an opportunity’, imagining an alternative to long-​ standing, received bourgeois art values ‘in the form of competing publics in the plural, an “agonistic pluralism” of adversaries (rather than enemies) that, according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is a prerequisite of radical democracy’.116 Considering the potential of programming at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, then, we might hope that Richards’s desire for plurality in the imagining of ‘collective histories’ –​ as manifested in his invitation to other, specialist curators to stage a survey or study of art in Northern Ireland since (at least) the 1960s –​might similarly allow for the presentation of new or unexpected perspectives, in new or unexpected forms. Richards has sought to make visible potentially uncomfortable and productively incompatible versions of a regional art history; his project makes space (to borrow again from Jewesbury) for ‘contradictions, conflicts, contests’ in the post-​Troubles period. An appropriate preface to the series, given the stated interest in making evident tensions in the articulation of multiple historical viewpoints, was Una Walker’s specially commissioned installation Surveiller (2004).117 This was an artwork that derived from extensive archival research, presenting (on wall-​mounted perspex displays and in accompanying searchable computer resources) basic reference details relating to all art exhibitions that had taken place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles years (Figure 18). Walker’s unorthodox archive was staged in such a way as to be both educational and conceptually disorientating, combining in its distinctive display style the dry historical data of the research with forceful allusions to systems of control and observation: her conceit being to make the assembled exhibition lists accessible to gallery visitors within a simulation of an austere office setting that was kept under constant observation by 157

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Figure 18  Una Walker, Surveiller, 2004.

surveillance cameras. As such this was a work that, in the broader context of the Golden Thread plan, successfully helped to highlight ‘problematic issues with regards to the construction of histories, in relation to the mediation and compilation of data’.118 Walker’s preview of the Golden Thread’s sequence of retrospective views hinted at unacknowledged links between visual art’s cultural ‘visibility’ and the political developments (and regressions) of the Troubles. An elaborate statistical graphic was produced with each text panel listing exhibition activity in a particular year; and, as the panel sizes varied depending on the amount of featured information, ‘the visual effect’ of the installation resembled ‘an audio wave-​form’, revealing patterns of intensity in the production and promotion of art during the chosen 1968–​2000 period. ‘At times’, Walker noted in response to these peaks and troughs of catalogued events, ‘art activities were curtailed simply because galleries were being bombed, but there also appears to be a more complex relationship between the number of art events and the advancement of political solutions’.119 What remains under-​acknowledged within this system of archival analysis, it should be said, are the multiple other non-​Troubles factors that may condition the visibility or extent of art production within a region at any one time –​there may be, in other words, a too tightly drawn correlation between these exhibition ‘effects’ and specific local causes, despite the suggestion of ‘complex relationships’. In proposing a self-​reflexively ‘fictionalising’ setting for the 158

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archive however –​ the faux-​corporate mise-​en-​scène of the constructed office environment and the theatrically invasive introduction of surveillance technology into the ideologically naturalised ‘neutrality’ of the bourgeois gallery experience –​any ‘factual’ conclusions may be rendered suspect. A degree of unease and antagonism disrupts the communicative clarity that is formally declared by the text elements of the work. The overall form of Walker’s installation suggested that no straightforward, objective delivery of archival detail is possible, and that efforts to source and articulate historical information are necessarily undertaken (and overseen) within networks of power. If aspects of the Collective Histories can be seen to connect with conceptions of art as a ‘compensatory public space’ or ‘forum of possibility’, Walker’s work also, therefore, established from the outset the importance of lessons learned from institutional critique: framing art as a controlled zone, a problem space, rather than as an autonomous sphere of expression and response. The actual opening episode of the Collective Histories was, however, McAvera and Kennedy’s Post-​War –​Pre Troubles: a scene-​setting exhibition offering a chronological kick-​off point that sought to establish place as the central, dominant subject matter of art in Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the accompanying publication the two commissioned curators conversed about the history of this period in terms that gave a strong sense of long-​lasting tensions –​ most especially the relation of local concerns to broader, international influences and contexts. Indeed, a curmudgeonly directness characterised Kennedy’s assessment of artists such as Colin Middleton, Gerard Dillon, John Luke, Tom Carr, Cherith McKinstry, T.P. Flanagan and Basil Blackshaw: ‘I don’t think any of them survives when compared to the British and European artists of the period’, he argued.120 If the attitude expressed in such comments offers contentious critical and historical ‘openness’ –​ resisting the establishment consensus about the perceived importance of certain local artists’ achievements –​ the choice of works for this opening exhibition nevertheless remained focused on key canonical presences and landmark moments. One other factor is nevertheless significant. For this exhibition (and its immediate sequel) presented a specific challenge to ‘received bourgeois art values’ by moving prized works by major artists (and so shifting audiences too) away from established and ‘safe’ spaces of High Art consumption in Belfast. Instead, certain establishment-​approved art was offered up for fresh appraisal in the altered context of the Golden Thread’s Gallery’s (original) Crumlin Road location:  ‘a former linen mill on a contested “peace line” in North Belfast’.121 This was a setting for these art historical exercises that can be obviously associated with the city’s ongoing social problems and still-​present sectarian conflicts. For Kennedy and McAvera, a guiding curatorial principle was that ‘one must look at art through the eyes of the period that formed it’, and yet an eye on (and from) the present is surely also relevant to the historical framing of these art moments from the past. Indeed, by taking account of Peter Richards’s invitation to stage these retrospective reflections in a part of the city landscape that remains contested, we might also become newly alert (in a manner that follows from the implied arguments of Una Walker’s work) to the ways in which histories are conditional on questions 159

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of perception, position and context in the present. As Walter Benjamin once wrote with reference to literary histories, ‘it is not a question of representing works of literature in the context of their time, but to bring to representation, in the time they were produced, the time which recognises them –​that is, our time’.122 Subsequent Collective Histories exhibitions varied in their approach to the positioning of the art of the relatively recent past, and displayed varying degrees of attention to the specific situatedness in space and time of their own perspectives. In Icons of the North, Brian McAvera chose to argue for ‘socio-​political’ art that had been ‘largely ignored by critics, collectors and collecting agencies’ during the Troubles, making a case for the historical importance of painters such as Jack Pakenham and Gerry Gleason, and sculptors Tom Bevan, Graham Gingles and Una Walker.123 This is a case that McAvera had made before, as far back as the 1980s, in books and essays such as Directions Out and Art, Politics and Ireland, and it is one that mainly comprehends the meaning of ‘social-​political’ in relation to the legible content of art objects, rather than with respect to (for instance) situational, social or institutional considerations. Liam Kelly opted for surveillance as his guiding theme in the exhibition The Disembodied Eye, grouping together works dating from the mid-​1980s to 2004, including video and installation pieces by Willie Doherty, Philip Napier and Locky Morris –​ the critical contextualisation for this selection taking the form of a straight re-​stating of ideas from Kelly’s 1996 book Thinking Long (even while accommodating more recent work such as Doherty’s Non-​Specific Threat). As such, therefore, Kelly did little to acknowledge important changes in the period since, despite more than a decade of political wrangling and social change in Northern Ireland, and despite, in direct relation to his chosen theme, increasingly rapid and pervasive normalisation of surveillance systems in most contemporary cities and the proliferation of other, suddenly unavoidable and seductive, technologies that now shape our ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ across the globe. Dougal McKenzie’s exhibition The Double Image alluded, however, to the changing image culture that shapes modes of artistic representation today –​and admitted to being ‘open to W.J.T. Mitchell’s accusation that the framing of our culture in terms of spectacle and surveillance is so commonplace that it ceases to be original’.124 McKenzie’s exhibition concentrated more specifically on the enduring conversation between photography and painting in contemporary art –​a potentially restrictive art historical focus on medium-​specific (or medium-​ related) questions that could, it was argued, conversely provide an expanded context for contemplating the art of Northern Ireland. Through consideration of this art-​media dialogue, McKenzie aimed to present and promote ‘alternative picturings of histories’.125 The diverse practices from the last decade represented here (from the topographical delirium of Mark McGreevy and Darren Murray’s landscape paintings, to the psycho-​social intensities of staged photographs by Susan MacWilliam or Hannah Starkey) offered singular instances of ‘our fascination with the simple power of an image’, while the multiplicity of visions were simultaneously intended to send ‘the eye in several opposite directions’, providing viewers with ‘alternative “image interface” experiences’.126 160

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Such aspirations and approaches seem properly in the spirit of the broader Golden Thread project, and like the strategies employed in Declan McGonagle’s later take on the Troubles and post-​Troubles history of Northern Irish art, they signal doubts and difficulties that might productively inform our broader debates on art practice, history and place. As with McKenzie’s interest in the parallax movement between photography and painting, McGonagle’s exhibition A Shout in the Street manifested a commitment to considering shifting viewpoints, in particular addressing the contingent ideological positionality and relationality of art as a category of cultural practice. The artworks chosen for this history lesson often concentrated on diverse real-​life phenomena of the past and present: bonfire stacks in recent photographs by John Duncan, or casual neighbourhood violence in an ‘amateur’ surveillance video by Sandra Johnston, or the street calls of newspaper sellers in Troubles-​era audio recordings by John Carson and Conor Kelly. Works of this kind, McGonagle argued, required viewers to look into ‘the anxious space between art and non-​art, between the gallery and the street’ –​ an uncertain zone that was further opened up within the exhibition through the inclusion of traces from other forms of cultural production: examples of mural art, for instance, or a list of acronyms relating to the Troubles, taken from the University of Ulster’s ‘Conflict Archive on the Internet’.127 (Such acronyms, in all their bewildering multiplicity, have a pronounced presence within public life in Northern Ireland, whether as graffiti or as elements of media discourse.) This was, then, an exhibition seeking to ‘widen the lens through which the production and distribution of art is conceived, perceived and validated’ and it did so in a manner consistent with McGonagle’s long-​standing interest in working with art ‘as a means of negotiating reality, as a means of dialoguing and as a reciprocal rather than rhetorical process’.128 For Slavka Sverakova, ‘reality’ had a different role and meaning, but there was a related interest in finding ways of widening our ‘lens’ on the world. Her exhibition, The Visual Force, did not, for the most part, seek to feature works that included ‘the given socio-​political context as their subject matter’.129 In her view, the art requiring representation was not that which might turn our attention to the world as it is, or indeed, given the historicising curatorial context, to the world as it was. Rather the emphasis had to be on forms of art that could conjure a realm of ‘ideals’:  ideals that ‘point to a reality that ought to be better than what we experience now’.130 As such, this was an upbeat, modernist view of art’s worldly –​and otherworldly –​capacities. And though the ‘visual force’ of her title carried clear ‘Troubles’ connotations, especially when considered in relation to other themes pursued in the Collective Histories series (such as the authority of capitalist ‘spectacle’ and the penetrating, controlling gaze of surveillance culture), this conceptual framework did not so much emerge from an urge to critique situations of social conflict or dominant visualities but rather from a stated need to celebrate ‘the visual’ as a special source of imaginative power and cultural freedom. The idea of a ‘visual force’ was here a way of pointing to art’s potential for alternative ways of seeing, for imagining other worlds. Sverakova named Joseph 161

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Beuys as a significant point of reference for these reflections, identifying the visit of Beuys to Belfast in 1974 as pivotal to the development of her understanding of art’s presence and purpose in the world. This was, for Sverakova, a revelatory event that can be remembered as an ‘utterly atypical’ occasion, one that had a direct bearing on much of the most independent-​minded art that was to follow in subsequent years.131 For Sverakova, learning from Beuys meant being able to believe in art as a ‘kingdom of freedom’ (a phrase she borrows from Friedrich Schiller).132 Beuys is also cited, in passing, by Declan McGonagle, though the reference on this occasion offers support for a position more hostile to understandings of art as its own independent ‘kingdom’, as a stand-​alone realm of thought or practice. Instead McGonagle takes from Beuys the value of thinking art in co-​operative terms (the viewer is always ‘the co-​producer of meaning in the art process’133) and so too, then, he addresses art as a necessarily provisional, co-​ existent concept. Art is, for McGonagle, an always-​collaborative construct, created dialogically: its meanings and values, its processes and products, all determined in historically-​specific relation to other social systems and structures. Once again, then, here is a glimpse of disagreement between curatorial positions, and they are points of difference that are not only to do with the selection of art appropriate to ‘histories of Northern Irish art’ (in fact, several of the same artists appeared in more than one of the exhibitions), but also about the cultural constitution of such categories and concepts. It is this spirit of disagreement and divergence in the articulation of positions on the past that can be again pointed to as pertinent to the post-​Troubles predicament –​as proper to the cultivation of a ‘public space’ of agonistic contest within, and in relation to, the art field. The specific conclusions and arguments presented by each individual curator might each be challenged on different terms, from different perspectives, but it is perhaps the facilitated variance between different engagements with history-​making, and the associated sense of unending enquiry and impossible resolution, that is most significant here. This sequence of historical snapshots might be seen to function like a series of Willie Doherty photographs: each image captures a ‘partial’ view that is inflected by adjacent views; every new addition alters our perspective on another, but never brings us closer to a ‘complete’ picture. A crucial ‘collective’ element of these histories is, then, the insistent sense of a constitutive lack or resistant ‘outside’ to any constructed representation. We gain in an expanded, unravelling historical project of this kind, an indication of that ‘impossibility’ that, as Charles Merewether says, ‘haunts the logic of the archive’.134 Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever:  A  Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p. 4. 2 Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The other side’, Frieze, 106 (2007). 3 Larsen, ‘The other side’.

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4 Daniel Jewesbury, ‘What we will remember, and what we must forget’, in Willie Doherty:  Ghost Story (Belfast:  British Council, Arts Council Northern Ireland & Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure, 2007), p. 13; published on the occasion of the Northern Ireland exhibition at the 51st Venice Biennale. 5 Jewesbury, ‘What we will remember’, p. 13. 6 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry:  An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/​October Books, 1991), p. 42. 7 We might note the recurring importance of the word ‘story’ to Doherty’s practice: for instance, his 2007 exhibition at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, was entitled Stories; while Same Old Story was the title of an exhibition shown in 1999 at Firstsite, Colchester and in 1997 at Matt’s Gallery, London. 8 Hayden White, Metahistory:  The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 5. 9 White, Metahistory, p. 7. 10 Milan Kundera, The Curtain:  An Essay in Seven Parts (London:  Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 148. 11 Kundera, The Curtain, pp. 148–​9. 12 Colin Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit? Archive fever, photography and the peace in Belfast’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 569. 13 Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, Archive Lisburn Road (Belfast:  Belfast Exposed, 2005), p. 18. 14 Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit?’, 569. 15 Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit?’, 568. 16 Graham, ‘Every passer-​by a culprit?’, 569. Graham also discusses Eoghan McTigue’s All Over Again: a series of photographic investigations of overpainted paramilitary murals made between 2001 and 2003. This work has also been addressed in related terms by Aaron Kelly in his essay ‘Walled communities’, in Eoghan McTigue: All Over Again (Belfast: Belfast Exposed, 2004) [unpaginated]. 17 See Hal Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, October, 110 (2004), 3–​22. The lack of recognition of this wider archival impulse in contemporary art is notable in the essays accompanying the exhibition Archiving Place and Time, a group show of ‘post-​conflict art’ from Northern Ireland curated by Fionna Barber and Megan Johnston and held at Manchester Metropolitan University (November–​December, 2009), Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown (April–​May, 2010) and Wolverhampton Art Gallery (June–​December, 2010). Artists featured in the show were: Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, John Duncan, Sandra Johnston, Conor McFeely, Conor McGrady, Mary McIntyre, Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, Aisling O’Beirn, Paul Seawright. See Fionna Barber and Megan Johnston, Archiving Place and Time (Manchester/​Portadown: Manchester Metropolitan University/​Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2009), pp. 2–​15. 18 See Sarah Pierce and Claire Coombes (eds), Gerard Byrne: On the Present Tense Through the Ages (Cologne/​London: Walther König/​Lisson Gallery, 2007). 19 Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, p.  3. ‘Archive fever’ is also the title given by Okwui Enwezor to his survey of ‘uses of the document in contemporary art’, presented at the International Centre for Photography in New York, January to May 2008. See Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Centre of Photography, 2008). 20 Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, p. 4. 21 Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, p. 5. 163

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Mark Godfrey, ‘The artist as historian’, October, 120 (2007), 140. Godfrey, ‘The artist as historian’, p. 143. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (London: Basic Books, 2001), pp. xvi–​xvii. Stuart Comer, ‘Backward glances’, in the publication accompanying Matthew Buckingham:  Play the Story, curated by Mark Godfrey (London:  Camden Arts Centre, 2007). Melissa Gronlund, ‘Storytelling’, Frieze, 106 (2007). Godfrey, ‘The artist as historian’, p. 146. Godfrey, ‘The artist as historian’, p. 146. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 18. James Meyer, ‘Review: Luke Fowler: Serpentine Gallery, London’, Artforum, September 2009. The films referred to here are, respectively, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) and What You See Is Where You’re At (2001). Duncan Campbell in conversation with Melissa Gronlund, in Steven Bode (ed.), Duncan Campbell (London:  Film and Video Umbrella and Sligo:  The Model, 2010), p. 39. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, introduction to Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (eds), The Green Room:  Reconsidering the Documentary in Contemporary Art (Berlin/​ New York: Sternberg Press/​Bard College, 2008), p. 16. Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant, trans. James Gussen and Lili Porten (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), pp. 30–​1. Martin Herbert, ‘A voice, not your own’, in Steven Bode (ed.), Duncan Campbell (London: Film and Video Umbrella and Sligo: The Model, 2010), p. 8. Herbert, ‘A voice, not your own’, p. 9. Herbert, ‘A voice, not your own’, p. 9. As well as pointing to the numerous other artists who have addressed the DeLorean story (listed in Chapter 4 in relation to Katrina Moorhead’s work for The Nature of Things) it is perhaps worth noting that the poet Paul Muldoon was involved in the production of a BBC drama about DeLorean in the late 1980s that involved a process (if not an outcome) that was to some degree similar to Duncan Campbell’s. As Tim Kendall writes, ‘in 1989 the BBC broadcast Monkeys, a highly acclaimed account of the events leading up to the arrest and subsequent acquittal of the businessman John DeLorean; although Muldoon’s input was “finally very small”, he had edited and adapted the transcripts of the F.B.I. and Drug Enforcement Agency tapes to produce a condensed, coherent narrative’; see Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren/​ Poetry Wales, 1996), p. 21. In addition, Glenn Patterson’s 2016 novel Gull (London: Head of Zeus, 2016) is a fictionalised account of DeLorean’s entrepreneurial endeavours in Belfast; and Stainless Style, the debut recording by the band Neon Neon (Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys and hip-​hop producer Boom Bip) is a concept album focusing on DeLorean’s life. For further cultural-​historical reflections on the DeLorean saga see also Richard Kirkland, ‘That car: modernity, Northern Ireland and the DMC-​12’, Field Day Review, 3 (2007), 95–​108. Martin Herbert notes that the film’s title references Beckett ‘while quoting graffiti about a comfortable Nationalist area of Belfast, where Catholics were thought indifferent to sectarian violence’ (Herbert, ‘A voice, not your own’, p. 7). More accurately, the graffiti refers to those wealthy Nationalists who were living in the Malone Road area, rather than to the Malone Road as a ‘Nationalist area’. The Malone Road has 164

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traditionally been one of the most affluent areas not just of South Belfast, but of all Northern Ireland, and is the geographical base of much of the establishment culture, including two of the city’s most prominent grammar schools. Duncan Campbell in conversation with Melissa Gronlund, p. 39. Tobi Maier, ‘History through peripheries: interview with Duncan Campbell’, Mousse, 18 (April 2009). Available at http://​moussemagazine.it/​articolo.mm?id=77 [last accessed 16/​08/​16]. Campbell in Maier, ‘History through peripheries’. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations:  Interventions and Interviews, 1971–​2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 12. De Búrca has completed a practice-​based PhD at the University of Ulster, supervised by Willie Doherty. Tacita Dean, ‘Analogue’, in the accompanying notes for Tacita Dean at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 22nd March 2007 –​ 17th June 2007 (Dublin: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 2007), p. 42. Svetlana Boym, ‘The off-​modern mirror’, e-​flux journal, 19 (2011). Available at www.e-​ flux.com/​journal/​the-​off-​modern-​mirror/​[last accessed 05/​06/​16]. Boym, ‘The off-​modern mirror’. A productive complication of the category ‘post-​Troubles art’ is prompted by Boym’s playful diversion from the customary use of such labels: ‘Instead of fast-​changing prefixes –​ “post,” “anti,” “neo,” “trans,” and “sub” –​ that suggest an implacable movement forward, against or beyond, and try desperately to be “in,” I  propose to go off: “off” as in “off kilter,” “off Broadway,” “off the map,” or “way off,” “off-​brand,” “off the wall,” and occasionally “off-​color” ’; see Boym, ‘The off-​modern mirror’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’ [1929], in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 181–​2. Hal Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002), p. 137. Foster’s choice of the word ‘sedimented’ here closely corresponds to Chantal Mouffe’s use of the term in her definition of the ‘social’: ‘The social is the realm of sedimented practices, that is, practices that conceal the originary acts of their contingent political institution and which are taken for granted, as if they were self-​grounded.’ What we may perceive, Mouffe suggests, as ‘the “natural” order –​ jointly with the “common sense” which accompanies it  –​ is the result of sedimented practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being’; see On the Political, pp. 17–​18. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, capital of the nineteenth century’ [1939], in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), The Arcades Project (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 13. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 139. Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 139. Quoted in Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 141. Daniel Birnbaum has also drawn attention to this aspect of Douglas’s work, noting two ideas of particular relevance to this chapter. Firstly, as we discuss forms of ‘doubtful’ documentary, we can note, as Birnbaum does, how Douglas declares that ‘the doubt, that pronounal doubt, doubt of pronouns, doubt of the certainty of an I, is the a priori of my work’. Secondly, Birnbaum notes the importance of the spectral to Douglas’s films: films such as Der Sandmann, which draws on Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ and more specifically, Le Detroit, ‘a ghost story about a house that “holds 165

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darkness within” ’, are understood by Douglas as studies in what he refers to as ‘spectrology’. See Birnbaum, Chronology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007), pp. 47–​65. A 2009 show of Paul Seawright’s photographic investigations of urban space in post-​ Troubles Belfast (at the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown) took as its title the phrase ‘Conflicting accounts’. See Colin Darke’s review in Source, 59 (2009). From the film London, written and directed by Patrick Keiller (1994). From the press release for the Belfast Exposed exhibition Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O’Beirn, 2nd July to 13th August 2010. See Robert Smithson, ‘A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson:  The Collected Writings (Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1996), pp. 68–​74. J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview with J.G Ballard’, RE/​Search, 8:9 (1982). Chris Petit, ‘The last Modernist’, online Granta article, 22nd April 2009, www.granta. com/​New-​Writing/​The-​Last-​Modernist [last accessed 04/​01/​16]. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, October, 59 (1992), 7. J.G. Ballard, Preface to Crash (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. i. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October, 100 (2002), 176. Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk:  Calling Time on the Grand Project (London:  Penguin, 2011), p. 60. Sinclair, Ghost Milk, p. 58. Sinclair, Ghost Milk, p. 59. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), p. 232. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 232. See Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (London: Penguin, 2006). Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin chronicle’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), p. 298. Benjamin, ‘A Berlin chronicle’, p. 298. Susan Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, One Way Street, p. 10. Sontag, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–​11. A correspondence might also be drawn between Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s project and the influential writings of Ciaran Carson. In particular, Carson’s 1999 collection Belfast Confetti employs numerous references to maps and labyrinths in poems that chart psycho-​geographic journeys through the changing spaces of Belfast. Benjamin’s comment about learning how to ‘lose oneself in a city’ is quoted at the opening of the book. See Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti (Loughrew, Meath: Gallery Press, 1989). In Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, pp. 5–​6. Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p. 7. Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, p. 7. Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4. Michael Sheringham, ‘Archiving’, in Michael Sheringham (ed.), Restless Cities (London: Verso, 2010), p. 9. Sheringham, ‘Archiving’, p. 14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984), p. 106. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 108. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 106. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 107.

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86 Richard Flood, ‘Not about Mel Gibson’, in Unmonumental:  The Object in the 21st Century (New York: New Museum, 2007), p. 12. 87 This is the particular cliché engaged with by Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury’s Archive Lisburn Road project; see Burke and Jewesbury, Archive Lisburn Road, p. 18. 88 Robert MacFarlane, ‘London Fields’, Guardian, 8th December 2007 [online]. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/​books/​2007/​dec/​08/​photography [last accessed​ 28/​01/​16]. 89 MacFarlane’s essay was written after a walk around the fringe areas of East London with Iain Sinclair, a walk that in some ways resembles aspects of Jewesbury and O’Beirn’s urban tours. ‘The day’s aim was simple’, MacFarlane writes. ‘We would walk the perimeter of London’s “Olympic Park” –​the 500-​acre site in the Lower Lea valley that has been requisitioned, fenced off and depopulated in preparation for its Olympian redevelopment’; see MacFarlane, ‘London Fields’. 90 John Hutchinson’s comments in his essay for the Douglas Hyde Gallery publication Saunter have been helpful here: see John Hutchinson, Saunter (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2010). 91 Sheringham, ‘Archiving’, p. 1. 92 Iain Sinclair, Lights out for the Territory (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 4. 93 Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 11. 94 See Julie Bacon (ed.), Arkive City (Belfast/​Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: Interface/​Locus, 2008). 95 These views were presented ‘with specific reference to six pre-​identified themes: taxonomies, technology, memory and identities, liberty and surveillance, markets and resources, and voids’; see Bacon, Arkive City. 96 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 90. 97 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 91. 98 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 91. 99 The Atlas Group, ‘Let’s be honest, the rain helped’, in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive (London/​Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel/​MIT Press, 2006), p. 179. 100 Atlas Group, ‘Let’s be honest, the rain helped’, p. 179. 101 Atlas Group, ‘Let’s be honest, the rain helped’, p. 180. 102 Charles Merewether, introduction to The Archive, p. 17. 103 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 67. 104 Edna Longley, ‘Northern Irish poetry and the end of history’, in Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), p. 286. 105 Peter Richards, ‘Foreword’, in Brian McAvera, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art: Icons of the North (Belfast: Golden Thread Gallery, 2006), p. 7. 106 Richards, ‘Foreword’, p. 7. 107 It should be noted that the ideas on Collective Histories developed here are less concerned with the particular artworks featured in individual exhibitions than with the broad curatorial agenda of the project and with the specific positions adopted by invited curators. 108 Daniel Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here, or, the end of the history of Northern Irish art’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), 527. 109 Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 527. 110 Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 527. 111 Jewesbury, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’, p. 527.

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112 Adam Phillips, ‘The forgetting museum’, in Side Effects (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), p. 131. 113 Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘A protest against forgetting’, in Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects (London: Open Editions, 2007), p. 149. 114 Alex Farquharson, ‘Bureaux de change’, Frieze, 101 (2006). Available at www.frieze. com/​issue/​article/​bureaux_​de_​change/​[last accessed 19/​11/​14]. 115 Quoted in Farquharson, ‘Bureaux de change’. Farquharson cites as a source for these comments an online resource of the Rooseum in Malmo where Esche was Director from 2000 to 2004. The cited text is no longer accessible on the Rooseum website. 116 Farquharson, ‘Bureaux de change’. 117 Una Walker, Surveiller, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2004 and Static, Liverpool, 2005. For this project, Walker ‘spent 128 days, approximately 1,280 hours, producing an inventory of art exhibitions in Belfast from March 1968 to March 2001’. See www. unawalker.com/​gallery_​325081.html [last accessed 11/​06/​15]. 118 Peter Richards, from the ‘Acknowledgements’ in S.B. Kennedy and Brian McAvera, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art: Post War –​Pre-​Troubles (Belfast: Golden Thread Gallery, 2005), p. 47. 119 Slavka Sverakova ‘Elliptical narratives: a conversation with Una Walker’, Sculpture, 24:1 (2005). Available at www.sculpture.org/​documents/​scmag05/​JanFeb_​05/​una-​ walker/​una-​walker.shtml [last accessed 25/​01/​16]. 120 Kennedy and McAvera, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 121. 121 From information on the gallery website http://​goldenthreadgallery.co.uk/​about/​ [last accessed 01/​12/​11]. 122 Walter Benjamin, ‘Literary history and the study of literature’ [1931], in Selected Writings Volume 2 1927–​34, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Boston:  Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 464. 123 McAvera, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, pp. 10–​11. 124 Dougal McKenzie, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art: The Double Image (Belfast:  Golden Thread Gallery, 2007), p. 13. 125 McKenzie, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 13. 126 McKenzie, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 14. 127 Declan McGonagle, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art: A Shout in the Street (Belfast:  Golden Thread Gallery, 2008), p. 11. 128 McGonagle, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 15. This is a position that has been articulated variously through McGonagle’s curatorial work at institutions such as the Orchard Gallery in Derry in the 1980s and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s. 129 Slavka Sverakova, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art:  The Visual Force (Belfast: Golden Thread Gallery, 2009), p. 11. 130 Sverakova, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 19. 131 Sverakova, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 11. 132 Sverakova, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 29. 133 McGonagle, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, p. 24. 134 Merewether, introduction to The Archive, p. 17.

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B5B Phantom publics: imagining ways of ‘being together’

For democracy remains to come; this is its essence insofar as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-​presentable concept.1 [A]‌n aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms … The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification. In fact this ideal effect is always the object of a negotiation between opposites, between the readability of the message that threatens to destroy the sensible form of art and the radical uncanniness that threatens to destroy all political meaning.2

Social and situational interventions In this final chapter I wish now to shift focus somewhat so as to address examples of art practices that have in various ways sought to create, contemplate and complicate situations of social encounter in relation to various aspects of the post-​ Troubles predicament. The main interest here will be in works and projects that (to borrow from Nicholas Bourriaud’s description of the relational art of the 1990s) attempt to take as their ‘theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context’, or in other words, that take ‘being-​together as a central theme’.3 As before, however (and as we shall see, not always in tune with Bourriaud’s broader reflections on relational aesthetics), the emphasis will 169

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be on highlighting an aesthetically and politically vital level of indeterminacy, precariousness and ‘insufficiency’ in these projects’ positions on (and anxious positions within) peace-​era circumstances. Here we will consider how, in certain artists’ performative, provisional and strategically incongruent appropriation of ‘given perceptual forms’ or of recognisable frameworks for social gathering and interaction, or again in their proposals for out-​of-​the-​ordinary environments of inter-​subjective negotiation, they prompt (intentionally or not, and even on one occasion in direct tension with an obvious ‘message’) difficult questions about ‘progress’ and ‘publicness’.4 In the short case studies of post-​Troubles art projects featured here –​ works which, broadly speaking, aim to differently deploy or disrupt, in Rancière’s terms, ‘the very logic of meaningful situations’5 –​several artistic and political priorities are evident. We see different models of authorship and modes of engagement with audience. We meet with distinct constructions of ‘publics’. We discover wide-​ranging responses to the transformations of the ‘peace’ period in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, in the most compelling of the works discussed, we see attention paid to rapidly changing understandings of community and locational identity that are connected to wider contemporary shifts in the representation and experience of place and locality. The speculative situations of encounter envisaged or tested in these art practices require us, once again, to take account of more than ‘the local’ as we contemplate the post-​Troubles context –​ and, in fact, as we can recall from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, they raise anew the issue of how ‘the production of locality’ occurs under the influence of, and in dialectical relation with, the forces and flows of cultural and economic globalisation. In general terms, ‘situational’ interests have shaped works by several of the artists thus far discussed. Willie Doherty’s art, for instance, is concerned with ‘situations’ of viewing, and so with the social specificity of the art experience, almost as much as it is engaged with problems and politics of visual representation. These ‘situations’ are at once immediate, specific and hard to grasp: we are simultaneously located and dislocated by his films and photographs. Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O’Beirn’s offbeat tours of North Belfast are invitations to newly encounter social settings: to wander the city and come afresh at spaces of familiar activity or to make discoveries beyond habitually travelled routes. Their project holds out the potential of opening up the routine experience of the city (in a quasi-​ Situationist spirit) so as to increase the possibility of unpredictable connections across the often oppressive post-​Troubles landscape and within the subtle and seductive social networks of contemporary capitalism’s ‘society of control’. In addition, Peter Richards’s Collective Histories project is a gallery-​based venture that encourages repeat engagements with a consistent theme, in a spirit of supporting ongoing intellectual encounters within a community of shared interest: creating debate about the representation of the past that, in its resistance to the cultural amnesia of progress, may have slow-​burning public ramifications beyond the art-​centred subjects that are the primary focus of the immediate, participating audience. Moreover, I  have also forced a correspondence between the general 170

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ambitions of this exhibition project (if not the specific styles of its individual episodes) and the curatorial agendas of New (or Experimental) Institutionalism which, as Claire Doherty has noted, prioritises a notion of ‘exhibition as situation’.6 This is a model which, according to Doherty, is about valuing ‘the exhibition as a mutable concept’, that pays ‘due consideration to the context of the group dynamic’, that works ‘to support and engender encounters’ and aims to provoke ‘opportunities for new understandings and responses to context’ –​ tendencies which, once again, surely seem at least partially relevant to the aspirations of the overall Collective Histories scheme.7 But among the art practices that have chosen to respond to changed conditions in Northern Ireland, there has also been an intensified interest in a more focused cultivation of art forms capable of fostering or facilitating out-​of-​the-​ordinary situations of social interaction. Aisling O’Beirn, as we have seen, has individually formed her practice from occasions of direct contact with diverse individuals and constituencies, creating artworks dialogically in response to the personal and collective stories told about particular places. This is a mode of art-​making that is alert to the specificities of ‘situation’ and enlivened by the unpredictability of social encounter. Other examples of ‘peace’-​era art in Northern Ireland suggest similar levels of interest in the aesthetic and political potential of a ‘public’ or ‘social’ art characterised by situated indeterminacy. Projects such as those from the late 1990s curated by Grassy Knoll Productions (alluded to in Chapter 2) demonstrated a determination to create adjusted spaces of social encounter within the city, but in a provisional manner, and often through the appropriation of ‘minor’ social forms that are ordinarily fixed in their purpose and legible in their public presence. So among the pieces commissioned for 1998’s Resonate project, for example (a series of eight temporary public artworks and art events made for numerous locations in Belfast) was Susan Philipsz’s Filter, a work which featured the artist singing several well-​known, melancholic pop songs (such as Radiohead’s ‘Airbag’ and Nirvana’s ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’) through the public address system of the Laganside bus station in Belfast city centre (Figure 19). People arriving into and departing from the station could therefore hear (in addition to the intermittent travel announcements) the unexpected sound of Philipsz’s gentle, untrained singing-​voice delivering songs that, as she noted, are about ‘escapism or longing’. As Jonathan Griffin has noted, such spare, solo performances have repeatedly allowed Philipsz to draw on the ‘communal pool of familiarity’ implied by the use of (relatively) popular songs while at the same time constructing an art experience that is ‘deeply solitary’.8 During Resonate, these curious, softly-​sung moments of isolated yearning were inserted, through an existing, literal mechanism of ‘public address’, into a site of social gathering –​one that is nevertheless largely characterised by solitary waiting or transitory contact. ‘Generally when you’re travelling, or if you’re waiting, you’re in the company of strangers’, Philipsz observed at the time, adding that her interest was in ‘the state of mind you enter into when you disengage from your environment’.9 Filter was thus on one level an attempt to ‘disrupt that ambience or trigger some sort of response within the listener’. 171

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Figure 19  Susan Philipsz, Filter, 1998.

This was a work that drew on the cultural affiliations and fugitive social bonds often created by popular music –​ suggesting unacknowledged, dispersed, intangible and crucially fragile ‘community’ allegiances within the assembled body of travelling citizens (based on shared loves, similar memories) at odds with the mainstream modes of identification officially recognised in the society –​and that directly responded to the specific conditions and moods of the often busy but generally spiritless setting. At the same time, this was a quiet, contemplative intervention into an architectural space that had the potential to stimulate reflection on existential isolation and (despite its site-​specificity) on profound detachment from location  –​ it was about a mental drift towards somewhere else, as much as it was about the experience of a precise, grounded place. As such, and in the combination of these various effects, Philipsz seemed to create a newly anxious in-​between sphere of psychological and situational uncertainty within the frame of the existing physical environment. Philipsz had in mind for this work the inevitability of a ‘passing audience’ –​ and in this respect too we might note an incidental but useful correspondence with a later ‘public’ initiative developed by a different artist collective in 2005, entitled In Place of Passing. This latter project was a performance programme co-​ordinated by the Bbeyond collective (in collaboration with Interface at the University of Ulster) that featured seventy public events over six days and included contributions from eight artists based in Northern Ireland and eight from elsewhere. Conceived of as a ‘mad-​cap interventionist road tour’ by contributing artist-​curator 172

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Brian Connolly, this collaborative art journey sought radical responses from artists to multiple live situations of ordinary experience and to very different urban and rural landscapes, ranging from highly populated city spaces such as St. George’s Market in Belfast or Derry’s Guildhall Square, to quieter locations close to iconic sight-​seeing spots integral to the public image of the region (including the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick-​a-​Rede Rope Bridge). This unorthodox, unpredictable grand tour, which proceeded without a published itinerary was, as Julie Bacon has noted, about ‘making unannounced interventions in public space’ so as to potentially take us ‘beyond the manifest’, disrupting the settled, legible reality of everyday life.10 Citing only a few of the actions undertaken by artists at the very beginning of the performance series in Belfast’s St. George’s Market gives a sense of the manifold interruptions in daily routine that were attempted by the participating artists. Mexican Elvira Santamaria, for instance, proceeded through the bustling spaces of this popular, renovated nineteenth century market, while repeatedly blowing up and then aggressively whacking a tied black bin-​liner in order to create a series of small but impactful ‘explosions’ within the high and airy space of the building. German performance artist Boris Nieslony stood at one of the market’s gates, hitting the ground portentously with a long staff (an act evocative of religious, monarchical or parliamentary rituals) while wearing a mask that featured the face of a murdered man. Parisian Esther Ferrer purchased ordinary household items in the market (such as masking tape and chalk) before creating new marked pathways through the venue with the aid of these humble materials (Figure  20). French-​Canadian artist Myriam Laplante embarked on a bizarre dance as she made her way along the aisles of the market, her moves choreographed partially in relation to a song audible only to her on a personal stereo, but also in response to the occasional, inevitable instances of physical contact with passing shoppers and traders. These numerous interventions (and several more were staged at this location), with their simultaneously out-​of-​place and place-​derived moments of minor sonic violence, obscure public mourning, eccentric territory-​marking and detached, unusually-​dramatised subjectivity, prompted among onlookers and passers-​by a mixture of hilarity, alarm, bemusement, irritation and even fear. What was hoped for by the event curators (and what may, then, have been an aspect of the mixed crowd’s mixed reactions) was, as Mark Ward commented, that the performances might create a sense of the ‘uncanny’ and a sensitivity to the ‘surprising or merely neglected’.11 Such outcomes, Ward suggested, might also then encourage a rethinking of the spaces through which we are ‘habituated to move’, while also, by extension, making ‘the demarcation between public and franchised space available to thought’.12 If there is a sought-​after connection between the psychic and the social in Ward’s aspirations for the ‘uncanny’ here –​ its power of disturbance conceptually positioned in relation to the everyday structures of contemporary capitalism –​this is a correspondence that (as has been argued earlier in this book) is true to existing definitions and discussions. Nicholas Royle has written of how each ‘happening’ of the uncanny ‘is always a kind of un-​happening’: in general terms the uncanny 173

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Figure 20  Esther Ferrer, performance as part of the Bbeyond and Interface event In Place of Passing, St. George’s Market Belfast, 2005.

is about an undoing of habitual circumstances, it ‘unsettles time and space, order and sense’.13 But also, and more particularly in relation to questions about ‘publicness’, among the properties of the uncanny there is, according to Royle, ‘a crisis of the proper: it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper (from the Latin proprius, “own”), a disturbance of the very idea of private or public property’.14 For Julie Bacon, the principle value of the ‘free-​circulating performance art’ of In Place of Passing (and of an associated critical forum which was staged in its wake: an event that added a productive discursive ‘situation’ to the already staged occasions of ephemeral, unpredictable encounter) lay in the way it succeeded in encouraging reflection on urgent questions about the ‘poetic-​political force’ of art in relation to ‘the marketing of citizen consumer culture, and the promise of civil society’.15 This event is therefore indicative of the degree to which public projects of the post-​Troubles era in Northern Ireland often arise out of an engaged 174

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but unorthodox spirit of locatedness (with artists anxiously conscious, in many cases, of the post-​Agreement ‘promise of civil society’) but a spirit that is, it seems, called into being by those uneasy transformations in local circumstances that are effects of the types of extra-​local forces tracked by theorists of globalisation such as Hardt and Negri (and manifested in such phenomena as ‘the marketing of citizen consumer culture’16). The range of interests and activities that directly or indirectly inform and compose post-​1990s socially performative and publicly-​oriented practices, reveal in this respect a sense of the troubling new constraints faced by art as a means of staging interventions in a complex context of ‘aftermath’ –​a constrained post-​Troubles, post-​political context of neo-​liberal regeneration in which the future is, in an apparent paradox, to be imagined almost entirely in terms of market-​driven freedoms (even while many problems of the past awkwardly persist). As we move to consider further works with a specifically social or situational focus, this expanded background is essential to bear in mind –​returning us, crucially, to questions posed at the outset of the book (and appearing here again through Julie Bacon’s prompting) concerning the matter of how today’s artworks might claim any political agency while being, in the broadest sense, micro-​level ‘expressions’ of the current conditions of cultural globalisation. Participation and provocation Reflecting on how artists have been exploring options for negotiating new ‘public’ terrains and for investigating existing scenes of social interaction in post-​Troubles Northern Ireland, it is important to note that contemporary art in general, and new models of social and situated work more specifically, can be understood as plugged into and ambiguously empowered by global capitalism’s ‘modulating circuits of identity and difference’.17 In fact, one of the reasons often cited for the raised profile of ambitious forms of collaborative and public practice since the 1990s has been a dramatically changed and expanded commissioning context, which includes the heightened opportunities offered via the extended programmes of proliferating international Biennial exhibitions; a point made, for example, in texts by Miwon Kwon, Claire Bishop and Claire Doherty.18 New varieties of artistic engagement with specific sites, and new approaches to participatory, experiential collaboration with diverse constituencies –​developments that have been respectively described in terms of a ‘new Situationism’ (by Claire Doherty) or a ‘social turn’ (by Claire Bishop) –​ are today regularly commissioned and coordinated in such a way as to add distinction to large-​scale, city-​ wide cultural projects that are principally targeted (at the higher funding level) towards boosting economic development and building an urban brand on the global stage. Such state-​sponsored shifts in the associations of ‘site-​specificity’ and ‘social engagement’ have nevertheless allowed such modalities of ‘public’ work to become more internationally visible and so also to gain greater levels of official art-​world attention –​ to a degree that has had notable influence on the priorities of art critical discourse. Consequently, as Miwon Kwon has noted, we need today​ 175

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to take account of at least three implications of a ‘reconfiguration’ of art’s public and social role: firstly, in such contemporary art situations, the ‘artist’ has often become a ‘cultural-​artistic service provider rather than a producer of aesthetic objects’; secondly, ‘a new commodity status’ has been uneasily achieved by such art ‘work’; and thirdly, we can note in today’s art, a ‘general shift from the “aesthetics of administration” to the administration of aesthetics’ with artists performing, intentionally or not, in ever more instrumentalised situations.19 But if such circumstances suggest an institutionally expanded but politically constrained context of practice, the efforts of Aisling O’Beirn, Susan Philipsz and those others who have at times pursued a social or situational agenda as part of their work might also point to some of the unusual strengths of art as a field of enquiry and experimentation with respect to existing systems of social encounter and relation. For art practices occupying this terrain may have multiple capabilities –​ and two potential benefits in particular are often advocated. On the one hand, such art might foster under-​developed forms of solidarity between individuals and communities –​ so in the Northern Ireland context potentially creating new routes to reconciliation and offering new strategies for negotiating difference. On the other hand, many contemporary social and sited art projects in their staging of ‘unpredictable’ situations –​often evidently at odds with routine or received expectations of being in a place or of ‘being together’  –​ may provoke an experience of uncertainty, frustration or even disagreement in a manner that, again with respect to the occurrence of such work in Northern Ireland, could become both an artistically compelling and politically unsettling prospect within the post-​ Troubles predicament of ‘propagandised’ peace and often narrowly-​defined progress. The word ‘provoke’ is of more than passing importance here, insofar as the ways in which publicly-​orientated or socially collaborative contemporary art projects can be, or ought to be, provocative has been a key point of disagreement in debates about such forms of art. In his book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Grant Kester celebrates those varieties of today’s art that prioritise dialogue and collaboration, selecting for discussion a series of projects that do not emerge as a result of an artist depositing ‘an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer’ but that instead ‘unfold through a process of performative interaction’.20 For Kester, what unites these selected instances of what he terms ‘dialogical aesthetics’ is ‘a series of provocative assumptions about the relationship between art and the broader social and political world and about the kinds of knowledge that aesthetic experience is capable of producing’ [emphasis added].21 The spirit of ‘provocation’ here, is however, to be understood as distinct from an avant-​gardist instinct towards disrupting communicative possibility: the idea that ‘the avant-​garde work should challenge … faith in the very possibility of rational discourse’.22 The long established modern belief that art should ‘shock us out of … perceptual complacency, [and] force us to see the world anew’ is thus rejected by Kester in favour of a questioning of ‘fixed identities, stereotypical images … through a cumulative process of exchange and dialogue’.23 Aptly, among Kester’s introductory examples is the Belfast-​based 176

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Figure 21  Ursula Burke, from the photographic series Routes, 2003.

ROUTES project from 2002, which involved a series of collaborative encounters between artists and city bus drivers: dialogues which, as Kester records, ‘resulted in a range of works, including film installations, public art projects on the buses, performances and an oral history archive’ (Figure 21).24 Central to all this activity, however, was ‘an extended process of listening and documentation in which the drivers were encouraged to recount their experiences over the past thirty years, specifically in relationship to sectarian violence’.25 As with the taxi-​driver dialogue in Miriam de Búrca’s Dogs Have No Religion (addressed in the previous chapter), these discussions make visible very distinctive points of view on the Troubles, highlighting the vital, risky role played by drivers as they traversed the sectarian geography of the city in order to deliver an essential, communal public service. Critical to Kester’s interest in this project is, though, the rewarding, revelatory nature of the participatory process itself, with its deliberative, democratic reflection on, and reconfiguration of, the terms on which identities can be defined and collectivities constructed: through their shared experience in the workplace the drivers created a provisional community outside the sectarian oppositions of Republican and Loyalist, Catholic and Protestant. These political and religious differences were reconciled through a larger professional identification that was literally embodied in the spatial movement of the buses back and forth across the divided geography of the city: ‘I’m not a Catholic, I’m not a Protestant, I’m a bus driver,’ is how one worker described it. When sectarian conflicts did arise, the drivers and shop stewards developed their own internal mediation techniques to resolve them. These 177

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techniques represent a valuable but unrecognised, cultural practice oriented around the negotiation of difference. The ROUTES project set out to preserve and valorise the historical culture of reconciliation among drivers, but it also sought to ‘re-​purpose’ this accumulated knowledge, to learn from it, and to apply its lessons in the context of present-​day struggles to mediate the nascent peace process.26

Kester concedes that in his account of projects of this kind he concentrates almost exclusively on the matter of ‘dialogical exchange’ and thus ‘neglect[s]‌ other important aspects’.27 His comment that ‘I give very little attention to the significance of visual or sensory experience in many of these projects’ certainly applies to his response to ROUTES.28 There is little evident interest on his part in the various ways in which the project dialogues were carefully mediated and transformed through the encounters with artists, or in the possibility that the chosen sites of display and the situations of performance pertaining to artworks developing from the process may have resulted in plural, unanticipated, and even discordant or discomfiting effects. For Kester, the limited focus is, however, a necessary strategy: his aim is to go beyond ‘the level of analysis at which existing criticism is most comfortable’, and so he instead attends to ‘the experiences in these works’ that ‘contemporary critics and historians have found it particularly difficult to appreciate’.29 For other commentators on this field of social practice, nevertheless, Kester’s strategic omissions are highly problematic with respect to the political potential of such work, his account being seen to underestimate the importance of visual, sensory or other non-​rational effects in relation to circumstances and outcomes of ‘discursive exchange and interaction’. Claire Bishop, notably, argues that by prioritising only the conversational component of social art projects, Kester does not properly build on the potential suggested by the second term in his guiding label, ‘dialogical aesthetics’. In her essay ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, Bishop charges Kester with failing to defend the position that communication itself can be understood as an aesthetic form, contending that in Conversation Pieces he instead offers only ‘a familiar summary of the intellectual trends inaugurated by identity politics: respect for the other, recognition of difference, protection of fundamental liberties, and an inflexible mode of political correctness’.30 Moreover, in principally making a case for the socially unifying and politically empowering benefits of dialogue, Kester’s position requires, Bishop argues, ‘a rejection of any art that might offend or trouble its audience’. What is needed, in her view is an understanding of a different level of ‘provocation’ that might be provided by the ‘aesthetic’ element of collective, co-​authored, participatory practices and projects. ‘Discomfort and frustration  –​ along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt or sheer pleasure’ can, she maintains, ‘be crucial elements of a work’s aesthetic impact and are essential to gaining new perspectives on our condition’.31 The most interesting manifestations of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art are therefore for Bishop those that give rise to provocative, disorientating effects of one kind or another; and these, she says, ‘must be read alongside more 178

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legible intentions such as the recovery of a phantasmic social bond or the sacrifice of authorship in the name of a “true” and respectful collaboration’.32 Bishop is interested in exploring how today’s most challenging examples of ‘engaged’ and ‘situated’ art might force us to ‘think the aesthetic and the social/​political together, rather than subsuming both within the ethical’33 (the latter position characterises, for her, not merely Kester’s writing but also the work of the influential curator Maria Lind, another prominent figure within this sphere of theory and practice34). A key occurrence of the more ‘troubling’ tendency of socially interactive practice is found, for Bishop, in the art of Phil Collins: an internationally acclaimed artist who began forging his particular brand of astute but wilfully perverse political art as a member of the visual art community in Belfast during the late 1990s. Collins, significantly, was a core contributor to the public, situational projects staged by Grassy Knoll Productions, and in 2002, created the work Holiday in someone else’s misery as part of the International Language programme of public events and site-​specific interventions. As is the case with much, if not all, of Collins’s art, Holiday in someone else’s misery occupied what Nicholas Bourriaud designates ‘the sphere of inter-​human-​relations’ by centring on a compromising transaction: the ‘work’ emerging out of a set of foregrounded relations and exchanges that had uneasy implications for both ‘author’ and ‘audience’. Specifically, the piece saw Collins creating a type of pop-​up fashion boutique at which he made available a selection of specially-​made T-​shirts on which were printed photographs of locations relating to then-​recent instances of sectarian violence in Belfast (Figure 22). These images were awkward reminders of the still-​tense conditions of many neighbourhoods; and Collins selected the stricken settings based on stories from the local rather than the national press, picking up on ‘news’ that was becoming marginalised by the mainstream media as public priorities changed (Plate 18). Converging within the work, then, were allusions to conflict and capitalism: elaborately mediated documentary visuals relating to the realities of continuing sectarian violence (the scenes of original photographs having been returned to and re-​photographed by the artist, before being printed on T-​shirts) were inserted into an explicitly consumerist context of display and distribution. Any ordinary art context is, of course, just as easily understood as consumerist (‘art’ itself being a cultural construct founded and maintained through market processes) but crucially, as part of his apparent efforts to foreground the existing systems of relation within which art customarily operates, Collins also took a further step that succeeded in complicating the conditions of exchange pertaining to his ‘product’. For the deal proposed by Collins to prospective consumers was such that a ‘Someone Else’s Misery’ T-​shirt could be taken for free if the interested individual agreed to model the item for another photograph –​the participants in the transaction thus becoming included as follow-​on agents within the work’s extending process, and incorporated into Collins’s work as the subject of a follow-​on photographic ‘product’. As the curator Kate Bush records, ‘Collins’s t-​shirts were snapped up both by locals and Belfast’s tourists’, suggesting ‘how easily … a violent event (and behind those shattered windows [in the photographs], someone’s physical and emotional 179

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Figure 22  Phil Collins, Holiday in someone else’s misery, 2001. T-​shirt giveaway, Liberty Blue, Belfast. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin.

devastation) is able to return as a commodity, sold to us first in the media, and then, at one small remove, as a desirable accessory or a tourist souvenir’.35 Bush’s comments accurately capture the ambivalence of the disruptive ‘return’ proposed by Collins: the relational process of the artwork sets up a provisional system of social encounter that centres on newly promoting images of social division, but does so in a manner that requires the mechanisms of branding and commodity exchange. This is an undoubtedly discomfiting proposition. Collins is responding to local circumstances in a way that is self-​consciously manipulative and mischievous: referencing the neglect of Troubles stories by the media in the post-​Troubles era, but re-​introducing these within a pronounced, but strategically twisted, consumerist context. Straightaway, too, the title of the work may be seen to advertise anxieties regarding the perspectives and claims of ‘social’ art practices:  the slogan ‘holiday in someone else’s misery’ might most overtly mock the values of fast-​moving media interest, but is also surely a self-​critical accusation concerning artists and their audiences, leaving us uneasy about the representation of division and deprivation in art, rather than inaugurating a more optimistically palliative rhetoric of engagement. The provocations, deliberate contradictions and nervy ‘inadequacies’ of such art (for the curator Helen Molesworth, Collins’s work partly succeeds through its many ‘little failures’36) are awkward, disruptive effects and vital imperfections 180

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that trouble any resolved ‘message’ that might appear to be available. Most literally, this work is concerned with how an ongoing social problem might continue to be made visible within popular forms of cultural representation. But Collins adds further ‘problems’ through his manner of engaging with the underlying question. He creates an artwork that directly involves participation, but that also emerges from layered strategies of making and manipulating images, and from the construction of dedicated display and exchange systems appropriated from recognisable consumer culture frameworks –​all of which together create a ‘social’ artwork that cannot be addressed merely in terms of its beneficial ‘dialogical’ potential. We are here edging towards that ‘dream of a suitable political work of art’ as imagined by Jacques Rancière, insofar as fundamental to Collins’s efforts is a ‘rupturing’ of ‘the very logic of meaningful situations’: Holiday in someone else’s misery presents a complicated and complicating consideration of ‘the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable’ that does not simply ‘use the terms of a message as a vehicle’.37 Moreover, as Claire Bishop says in a discussion of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (2004), a filmed eight-​hour dance marathon staged by Collins with young people in Ramallah, this is a form of art that will often ‘[play] off the conventions of benevolent socially collaborative practice’ but without necessarily making the ‘correct ethical choice’.38 There is often, undoubtedly, a degree of aesthetic ‘violence’ in Collins’s engagements with situations of conflict, a determinedly excessive, exploitative ‘inappropriateness’ in his chosen methods of addressing issues of genuine political concern, that contrasts with those varieties of art practice that seem more straightforwardly shaped by ‘belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas’.39 Crucially in Bishop’s view, Collins’s difficult and ‘provocative’ approach, breaks with the normative ‘discursive criteria of socially engaged art’, in ways that chime productively with Rancière’s comments on the relation of politics to ‘the aesthetic’ (the ‘lost’ or undervalued term, for Bishop, within Grant Kester’s critical model). The dominant socially-​engaged ethos, Bishop suggests, prioritises the ‘self-​sacrifice’ of the artist so as to allow ‘participants to speak through him or her’, a policy that is ‘accompanied by the idea that art should extract itself from the “useless” realm of the aesthetic and be fused with social praxis’.40 However among the lessons of Rancière’s writing, Bishop argues, is the idea that a ‘denigration of the aesthetic ignores the fact that the system of art as we understand it in the West … is predicated precisely on a confusion between art’s autonomy (its position at one remove from instrumental rationality) and heteronomy (its blurring of art and life)’.41 By seeking to resolve this tension one way or the other, we might miss the potential, explored by Rancière, in valuing the aesthetic as ‘the ability to think contradiction’.42 Considered in such ways, this version of ‘the aesthetic’ and, more immediately, practices such as Phil Collins’s, seem appropriate and interesting in connection with concerns about how ‘the political’ (understood in its most radically undecidable sense, as a dimension of irreducible antagonism) might ‘appear’ in the post-​Troubles cultural landscape. In reflecting on artworks that intervene in particular places or that involve multiple participants, ‘thinking contradiction’ is 181

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thus vital –​and it is perhaps those projects that are most ambiguously site-​specific or most awkwardly participatory that may most productively ‘open’ gaps for thinking, alerting us to fundamental exclusions and inadequacies in the structures that determine the political (or post-​political) conditions of everyday life at this historical moment. Exit ghost/​enter ghost In the spring of 2008, The Burial of Patrick Ireland (1972–​2008) took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. This was an elaborate simulation of ritual mourning, staged by the veteran Irish-​American artist Brian O’Doherty as a means of publicly proclaiming, in the context of political progress in the North, the passing away of his once-​contentious, ideologically-​explicit alter-​ego Patrick Ireland:  a conceptual ‘identity’ that was assumed as an act of artistic protest against the killing of civilian marchers by British soldiers on the streets of Derry on Sunday, 30th January 1972. By 2008, however, O’Doherty was satisfied that the political circumstances in Northern Ireland were such that it was time to put Patrick Ireland to rest. In arriving at this decision, the artist conceived of a public event that would allow for communal reflection on the historical passage to an era of post-​Troubles peace. The resulting ‘funeral’ was a carefully choreographed participatory performance, involving numerous collaborators. Beginning inside the museum, where a modest exhibition telling the full story of Patrick Ireland had been set out, the event proceeded outdoors, where an unadorned casket containing an effigy of ‘Patrick Ireland’ was carried by six black-​clad local artists who had agreed to perform the role of pallbearers at this self-​proclaimed ‘celebration of peace in Northern Ireland’. O’Doherty himself followed close behind with family and friends, moving slowly from the gallery space to the wide-​open arena of the designated grave-​site: a patch of well-​cared-​for, unconsecrated, grassy ground perched above the museum’s elegantly manicured formal gardens. In this grand setting –​with the cultivated orderliness of the garden’s symmetrical avenues providing a calm immediate backdrop, and the extending, intensifying jumble of the city’s restless margins completing an expansive, variegated mise-​en-​scène –​a number of nominated friends stepped forward to honour the thirty-​six-​year commitment made by O’Doherty, paying a concluding tribute to ‘Patrick Ireland’ now that the once-​required political conditions were believed to have been met (the artist had originally resolved not to use his birth name ‘until such time as the British Military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights’43). Several fitting, hopeful poems, in several languages, were read:  reflections not only on death and the agonies of the solitary artist, but also on moral duty and on the place and potential of art in testing times. No doubt by careful design, a mood of quietly respectful conviviality was maintained for a time, until the Irish artist Alannah O’Kelly approached the microphone to begin a long, heart-​wrenching keening, her surging cries instantly cutting through the relaxed decorum of the occasion. It was an extraordinary, truly unsettling 182

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sound:  the amplified voice rising, roaring, hoarsening, quietening, repeatedly building in anguished strength again and again and then –​unexpectedly –​returning in the form of uncontrollable, insistent echoes as the electrically-​empowered screams were bounced back by the brash new building developments at the borders of IMMA’s land. (O’Doherty later praised O’Kelly’s performance as ‘nearly frightening, very primal’.44) This was, overall, an occasion of explicit intent and meaning, offering a clear ‘message’. It sought to mark a moment of closure, announcing a recognised ending and thus welcoming the settling of northern Irish life into a belated period of peace. (‘Thank you for the peace’ were O’Doherty’s only words to the gathered crowd). But we might also stress how in the tensions and accidents of a featured performance such as that by O’Kelly (with the dominant surrounding architecture exerting an unplanned influence) the structured theatricality of the simulated funeral was opened up to other possibilities, to a significant level of unpredictabilty. During the ebb and flow of O’Kelly’s remarkable keening, the focus shifted from adulatory concentration on O’Doherty’s own artistic struggle, towards a much more abstract, far-​reaching and inclusive process of lamentation: the mighty sounds and silences of these few atmospheric minutes making possible a heightened awareness of one’s own sensory relationship to this environment, and of one’s embodied position within it. At such a point, the prepared, stage-​managed gestures of mourning and commemoration –​the established and comprehensible aspects of the funeral’s symbolic space –​conceivably mattered only as the basis for another aleatory situation, one of undevised, altered connections to the contemporary world. This is, of course, one of the more intriguing outcomes of O’Doherty’s decision to ‘go public’ with the death of Patrick Ireland. At the 2008 event, the artist shifting register from the language/​body interplay of the founding Name-​Change artwork, staged at Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 1972 (during which the artist, masked into anonymity, had his supine body heavily painted with, and so personally obliterated by, overlapping tides of turbulent orange and green as his name underwent a deed-​poll transfer from ‘O’Doherty’ to ‘Ireland’), to an engagement with social ritual and public space at this (again self-​proclaimed) ‘joyous wake and burial’. (Aptly, the first lines of the first poem read at the event ran ‘Let the city be spectacle, circus, arena this evening, /​Its justification sensation, its poetry wonder.’45) In an essay on the use and value of public gesture in art and politics, Jan Verwoert proposes that the ‘performative dynamics of the practices that bind society together’ can be productively understood as ‘inherently chaotic’. Though intricately formalised and ‘regulated’, ritual social forms have a ‘multiplicity and theatricality’ that allows their presentation and reception to remain subject to the contingencies of any given moment.46 It is tempting to see in the more compelling effects of the Patrick Ireland funeral, some trace of this structural chaos: ‘the overall picture of society that you arrive at from this angle’, Verwoert argues, ‘immediately seems less closed, making interventions appear possible’.47 In bringing the ‘life’ of Patrick Ireland to a close not with a revised name-​change but with an emotive, theatrical version of a complex, recognisable social form, 183

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O’Doherty offered a further response to the damaged society of Northern Ireland that implicitly and appropriately prioritised an urgent need for public openness. Yet at the same time the specific form employed by O’Doherty raises other issues in a post-​Troubles context. While we might seek to celebrate the contingent characteristics of the event’s actual occurrence, seeing possibilities for this familiar ritual form to offer up unacknowledged potentiality, we might also question the wisdom of employing a funeral as the chosen form of symbolic articulation and of collective engagement for a post-​Troubles art ‘situation’. As Susan McKay has noted in a chapter on commemoration in her book Bear in Mind These Dead (itself a substantial memorial to the many victims of Troubles violence), ‘the republican tradition is replete with stirring graveside orations [and] the cult of the martyr has been a powerful engine for the “armed struggle” for centuries’.48 Similarly, in their book Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions, Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran describe Irish politics in terms of a ‘cult of death’, identifying a ‘chronic cultural fixation’ on symbolic performances such as processions and funerals which, they suggest, ‘hardly encode a futurological orientation’.49 When considered in the light of this residual, variously macabre and militaristic tendency, O’Doherty’s well-​meaning comment (in the event’s associated artist statement) that ‘we are burying hate’ is rendered somewhat ironical. Feasibly, of course, all established, evocative, persuasive modes of staged public gesture are in some way contaminated by prejudicial previous use but it remains reasonable to ask if indeed ‘a funeral’ as a symbolic framework can best provide the means for challenging pre-​existing discursive alignments defining political issues and identities in Northern Ireland. The Burial of Patrick Ireland was conceived as, and expressed in terms of, a celebration of post-​Troubles peace. But, against its own rhetoric of reconciliation, the burial might carry with it traces of antagonism. Indeed, the overall symbolism of the event has the capacity to complicate and frustrate its own ‘straightforward’ and ‘benevolent’ message. These thoughts on O’Doherty’s wish to return to the full ‘presence’ of his birth identity in the context of the Troubles’ notional conclusion might be usefully compared with Derrida’s concerns in Spectres of Marx regarding a tendency within the ‘body’ of Marxist thought to require the exorcism of ghosts of ‘unreality’. Marx’s writings, as one of the argumentative thrusts of Derrida’s Spectres suggests, are haunted by ghostly metaphors. Most famously, the opening line of the Communist Manifesto tells of how ‘a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism’ –​and this is a call, in Derrida’s view, ‘for a presence to come’: What for the moment figures only as a spectre in the ideological representation of old Europe must become in the future, a present reality, that is, a living reality. The manifesto calls, it calls for this presentation of the living reality: we must see to it that in the future this spectre … becomes a reality, and a living reality. This real life must show itself and manifest itself, it must present itself.50

An implication of the manifesto’s rhetoric –​a call in favour of a ghost, in support of something that must, under ‘realised’ conditions, disappear  –​ might be that 184

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in attaching ‘properly political’ force to the figure of the spectre, a revolutionary trajectory is identified towards ‘the end of the political as such’.51 Consequently, Derrida proposes, ‘since this singular end of the political would correspond to the presentation of an absolute living reality, this is one reason to think that the essence of the political will always have the inessential figure, the very anessence of a ghost’.52 This position on the political constitutes a key aspect of what Fredric Jameson refers to as ‘Derrida’s deepest reproach to Marx’. In Derrida’s view, Jameson writes, a ‘fundamental mistake’ is that [Marx] wants to get rid of ghosts, he not only thinks he can do so, but it is also desirable to do so. But a world cleansed of spectrality is precisely ontology itself, a world of pure presence, of immediate density, of things without a past:  for Derrida, an impossible and noxious nostalgia and the fundamental target of his whole life’s work.53

Brian O’Doherty’s commendable desire to ‘bury hate’ at a public gathering for Partrick Ireland, could perhaps be seen as similarly ‘troubled’ by a related ‘mistake’: one associated with seeking the reinstated certainty of living presence. For in creating a funeral for an ‘unreal’ figure once granted ambiguous ‘life’ in a moment of political crisis, the political itself may be too quickly laid to rest. Other, more purposefully unsettled approaches on the part of contemporary artists to conditions of ‘living on’ in Northern Ireland’s period of fraught aftermath have of course been the central subjects of this book. Collaborative projects by Northern Irish artists Philip Napier and Mike Hogg are also acutely relevant in this regard, offering apposite counter-​points to Brian O’Doherty’s public celebration of artistic and (post-​)political ‘closure’. Their work proposes deliberately precarious, inconclusive and ‘insufficient’ versions of an art that takes (to borrow again from Nicholas Bourriaud) ‘being-​together as a central theme’.54 In certain of Napier and Hogg’s combined endeavours (on occasion they have used ‘Carbon Design’ as the name for their partnership), it is precisely the troubling impossibility of closure that becomes the important precondition to speculations on a vital but uncanny ‘return of the political’ into the restrictive, exclusive circumstances of practical politics. (This latter distinction is an important one for Chantal Mouffe who stresses ‘a difference between two types of approach: political science which deals with the empirical field of “politics”, and political theory which is the domain of philosophers who enquire not about facts of “politics” but about the essence of “the political” ’.55) Napier and Hogg’s 2006 exhibition The Soft Estate (at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery) has particular pertinence here insofar as it was concerned in substantial ways with the fact, necessity and structural conditions of continuous negotiation –​ foregrounding this process within their own ‘negotiated’ partnership and maintaining it as an issue of live public concern during the still-​fractious historical period after the landmark Agreement had officially been reached. Interactive sculptural objects and proposed situations of dialogue were conceived of as part of the Soft Estate concept: each element responding in different ways to problems of political representation and to questions regarding the discursive constitution

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of ‘publics’ in the post-​Troubles era. Crucial here was an anxious awareness of the gaps and exclusions that systematically occur within the heavily administered systems and dominant discourses of a shifting society such as that of contemporary Northern Ireland. This has meant attempting to highlight (via the possibilities for non-​conventional visibility made available within the art field) critical absences in processes of political dialogue or noting the blind-​spots of institutional and democratic structures. As was discussed in a previous chapter, the ‘plural text’ of the ‘constructively ambiguous’ Good Friday Agreement is coupled with a consociational democratic arrangement in which political representatives are required to align themselves within the assembly voting system in relation to either of the dominant binary categories of nationalism or unionism. The terms of political representation and public debate are therefore restrictively pre-​set by the foundational ineluctability of this identitarian dichotomy. As such, Napier and Hogg seem to appeal, through the ‘uncertain’ situations of encounter proposed in their work, for negotiation space to be continually extended and re-​imagined. And yet they do not imagine a final plenitude of ‘presence’ emerging out of altered, improved arrangements: rather, the implication is, we must be alert to the ever-​continuing challenge of a ‘gap’; we must become conscious of a constitutive ‘lack’ in our capacity to make the world visible, and so we must face what Simon Critchley calls in another context, the ‘infinite demand’ of whomever or whatever cannot be currently accommodated within our models of representation.56 It is arguably in relation to these shifting points of ‘absence’ that what has been understood here as the ‘spectre’ of the political becomes most powerfully ‘present’. Napier and Hogg’s collaborative undertakings begin, then, with contemplation of the manner in which processes of negotiation ordinarily take place. What, they ask, are the established formal conventions of negotiation processes? What are the recurring rhetorical patterns in the language of political encounter and contestation? What would a suitably re-​fashioned mechanism for an invigorated, transformed version of negotiation look like? One critical fascination for Napier and Hogg, therefore, has been with how the vocabulary of architecture and construction is used to ‘pave the way’ for political progress. ‘Blueprints’, ‘foundations’, ‘frameworks’, ‘corner-​stones’:  political dialogue, these artists contend, is dependent on positing ‘future formal spaces’. They are interested in how democratic politics looks forward to ‘abstract utopian spaces’ and, consequently, in how it must involve notions of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. These ‘spatialising operations’ produce a particular form of politics, a phenomenon discussed in related terms by Rosalyn Deutsche: however much the democratic public sphere promises openness and accessibility, it can never be a fully inclusive or fully constituted political community. It is from the start a strategy of distinction, dependent on constitutive exclusions, the attempt to place something outside.57

A public sphere, Deutsche argues, ‘remains democratic only insofar as its exclusions are taken into account and open to contestation’.58 What Napier and Hogg 186

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understand as the ‘architecture of negotiation’ in the Northern Irish context is, therefore, attended to in a manner which implies that the gaps in processes of political discussion or development must be somehow made visible –​ but this is allied with the realisation that any attempt to do so will always be itself insufficient. One central component of The Soft Estate was a satirical-​sculptural attempt to meet this challenge –​ and it took the form of specially constructed, dysfunctional negotiation tables (Figures 23 and 24). One of these was modelled on an idiosyncratic antique with an intriguing but marginal historical significance:  the artists having discovered, as Mike Hogg noted, ‘a table in the Customs House (in Belfast) that had been made for the Titanic but arrived too late to get on board … [it] was later returned to Belfast, post disaster, like a kind of relic –​preserved, polished … a kind of kept thing’.59 This curious ‘leftover’ of an historical moment –​ a piece of rogue furniture that managed to escape participation in a central tragedy of modernity –​ may thus be suggestive for these artists of unacknowledged, alternative pathways through ‘troubled’ time to the present. But though this is a quite distinctive table, at least with respect to its resonant historical associations, it is also, an ordinary, unremarkable and recognisable object: an extendable dining or meeting table, providing a setting for convivial or constructive gathering that can accommodate a varying number of participants in an event or discussion. Such ordinariness is nevertheless defamiliarised by Napier and Hogg through a basic but profound adjustment. For a strategic ‘gap’ is asserted in the presentation of this structure: it is an extending table, wound open to its maximum length, but the extra panels that would complete the widened surface are not inserted, so that it fails to become a concluded, closed version of itself. A key element remains missing, signalling an ever-​present absence. Whatever missing persons or ‘pieces’ there may be in a negotiation process have been made negatively ‘visible’ and thus obdurately unavoidable in the staging of this space of civilised, deliberative encounter.60 However, alongside this strategically unfinished and awkwardly ‘open’ table, a second, similar sculptural table featured as part of The Soft Estate, suggesting further alterations to the way in which this fundamental part of the ‘architecture of negotiation’ might function. In this instance a radical adaptability in such a piece of essential ‘being together’ furniture was proposed, the component parts of the second table amended and supplemented in such a way as to allow for considerably increased extension, dramatically improving the capacity for inclusion –​this implausibly practical sculpture opening out to stretch well beyond any customary length. So, at the Golden Thread Gallery exhibition, a situation of exaggerated potential for gathering was actualised, with the table eventually opening out fully to fill the long room of the exhibition space. Nevertheless, in doing so, the table was not only visually defined by the substantial gap that had been created through the make-​shift transformation of the standard fixtures –​ the more space that was around the table, the more the ‘lack’ at its centre became evident –​ but the extended physical structure also became more precarious with the addition of possible ‘positions’ at the negotiations. Though clearly secure, the ‘finished’ object had only a temporary type of stability. Its added, lengthening beams (held together with a series of impermanent 187

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Figure 23  Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, installation view of The Soft Estate, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2006.

clamps) bowed towards the centre without the necessary underpinning support, suggesting a structure that was impressively expanded but still uncertain. Napier and Hogg sought, therefore, to construct a flexible model of political inclusivity that was also an ironical identification of the impossibility of full, stable democratic presence. This was a process concerned with the assertion of a non-​present dimension that at all times threatened the coherence of the current order: this was a commitment in the post-​Troubles context to an inessential or anessential element, a process defined by fidelity, as Derrida says, to those ‘who are not there’, even, indeed, to ‘those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living’.61 And this means, in Derrida’s terms, that we must ‘learn to live with ghosts’ –​we must seek out and acknowledge ‘that which secretly unhinhges’ the structures and systems presented as the true, representative image of our shared social ‘reality’.62 Other criteria? In addition to the negotiation-​table artworks, Napier and Hogg’s collaborative work for The Soft Estate also involved attention to other significant processes of public representation that have arisen in relation to post-​conflict regeneration in 188

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Figure 24  Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, installation view of The Soft Estate, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2006.

Northern Ireland. A further feature of the exhibition, for instance, was a series of unusual ‘measuring’ rulers, displaying idiosyncratic terms used in influential current forms of population analysis; these lists of unconventional names for societal categories connected with more directly participatory endeavours that had been undertaken by the artists in discussion with community groups in the Craigavon area of Northern Ireland. Craigavon is a historically distinctive and yet also geographically indistinct region of Northern Ireland. Prior to the onset of the Troubles in the 1960s, it had been planned as a dedicated, modern, urban development zone, but it remained incomplete and unfulfilled as a coherent vision: its radical and optimistic plans largely failing or remaining unrealised.63 Today, the identity of Craigavon is a substantially liminal one, existing as an extended urban interstice between the more prominent regional centres of Lurgan and Portadown. Napier and Hogg began conversations with specific residents of this in-​between area, seeking to address, through the development of a dialogical art project, questions concerning the ways in which communities –​ who in the context of the Troubles would have often held to (or been categorised in terms of) sectarian codes of allegiance and identity –​might now wish to find renewed forms of communal representation within the altered ‘framework’ of the peace era. The conversations did not, in the end, lead to the satisfactory realisation of specific 189

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community-​based collaborative artworks. Rather a more dispersed set of follow-​ on urban interventions resulted –​ a partially incomplete and undefined overall outcome that in Napier’s view was perhaps fitting, given the geographical context for these endeavours, but also with regard to these artists’ wider acknowledgement of a necessary, constitutive inadequacy in structures of public representation.64 In developing dialogues around the questions of how communities might newly identify cultural co-​ordinates and create alternative terms of identity in the post-​Troubles period, Napier and Hogg also became interested, however, in these other, aforementioned codes and vocabularies that were to later provide the content for the measuring-​ruler text-​pieces within the Soft Estate show. The terms and tabulations displayed on these objects related to emergent models of social analysis and description that have arisen as part of consumer research processes undertaken by corporations, but that have also, within the ‘new’ Northern Ireland, begun to inform approaches to political representation and policy-​making. The particular mechanisms of assessing (but also shaping) social demographics that became relevant in this situation were the ‘mosaic’ systems that are employed in the corporate sphere to identify and name evolving patterns of identity in relation to habits, and corresponding aspirations, of consumption. More specifically, Napier and Hogg’s point of reference was the annually updated ‘Mosaic Northern Ireland’, a consumer classification system produced by the private company Expedia, who as ‘the world’s leading supplier of consumer segmentation’ have claimed to be providing research that can ‘provide decision-​makers with the tools and services they need to successfully implement micromarketing strategies within their business’.65 This information and this process, moreover, was not only said by its promoters to be taking its place ‘amongst a global network of Mosaic segmentation systems that classify a billion people worldwide’, but it was also beginning to become a resource for public officials and political representatives in Northern Ireland.66 In an interview relating to the Golden Thread Gallery exhibition, Napier explained the background to this aspect of The Soft Estate: around the time of the [2005] general election … it emerged that both the major British political parties had been using these commercially available demographic ‘mosaics’. That is, they buy commercial intelligence designed to help you pitch your product towards targeted population groups. This means that political messages were being targeted to specific demographic groups and I think there is some discomfort in this use of consumer profiles for issues of governance. What is really interesting, I think, is the quality of language that is used in the titles and the descriptors. They are really urban funky patronising labels describing 100% of the population, betraying an American origin … You know like ‘white van culture’, ‘rustbelt residualists’, ‘new urban colonists’, ‘metro multiculture’.67

What is of primary importance here is the manner in which the cultural geography of post-​Troubles Northern Ireland is now being mapped through modes of corporate-​led governance and analysis that explore and quantify sections of the population in terms of spending power and associated calibrations of class, social 190

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mobility and cultural capital. ‘Groups’ are identified within these mosaics that are founded on shared patterns of purchasing, social position or lifestyle preferences. Sectarian identity, with all its associations of social conflict, is largely replaced with another structure of identification, one that may be a great deal more pluralistic, but that may imply other forms of stereotyping restriction. The artists’ contact with community groups in Craigavon, itself a space signifying a prior era’s ‘progressive’ non-​sectarian promise and a resulting historical and geographical in-​ betweenness, could thus be understood as a process concerned with negotiating the gap between Troubles-​related models of social affiliation and new categories of social and cultural similarity that are dependent on the imperatives of consumer culture. Napier and Hogg, once again, demonstrate a desire to situate their practice within what may be inconvenient, uncertain spaces arising out of the era of progress and peace, though in this instance we are brought towards the specific difficulty of determining criteria by which solidarities within, and between, possible ‘publics’ might be fostered in the wake of the conflict. Another project situated within the post-​Troubles art-​field that is also pertinent to addressing such problems (one also implicitly engaged with questions of collective belonging and which aims to explore alternate or unacknowledged lines of social and cultural affiliation) has been undertaken as an open-​ended venture by the Belfast-​based artist-​group Factotum, led by Stephen Hackett and Richard West. Since 2003, Factotum have produced over thirty issues of The Vacuum, a free satirical newspaper, each issue of which is uniquely themed in a manner that demonstrates determination to create new types of conversations that are broadly relevant –​ or tellingly non-​relevant –​ to how the history and culture of contemporary Northern Ireland might be analysed or framed. This ongoing series of publications makes space for reflection on marginal subjects, minor concerns, subcultural identifications and curious, sometimes dissident, varieties of cultural expression. Consequently therefore, the editorial/​curatorial ethos underpinning the project is one led by a wish to keep open (in variously antic, anarchic and perverse modes) questions of how locational being and belonging, of civic expression and participation, might be conceptualised. Contributors to the newspapers have included local artists, novelists, poets and academics, and the content has ranged from light-​hearted, whimsical and wilfully eccentric reflections on local life, to quite ‘straight’ discussions of obscure historical subjects as they relate to the selected theme (topics have included ‘Money’, ‘Underground’, ‘Stereotype’, ‘Sex’ and ‘The English’). As a free-​sheet made available in bars, restaurants, galleries and other such social settings across the city, and as a publication presenting commentaries drawing on vernacular knowledge of Belfast pop and folk culture (in a way that often corresponds with the interests of Aisling O’Beirn’s art practice, for instance) or that in general proposes alternative ways of talking about history or contemporary experience, The Vacuum has played a singular, if mostly unassuming, ‘public’ role in the post-​Troubles years. As such, it sits in awkward or even antagonistic relation to the official discourses of urban promotion or established politics in Northern Ireland. Given the fostering of 191

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discursive exchange in its production and form, and given its ‘coffee-​house conversation’ context of reception, The Vacuum can be seen to make a normally low-​ key claim on a form of unofficial public sphere, often facilitating new ways of talking about familiar facets of Northern Irish politics and society and dealing in under-​recognised or ‘occult’ understandings of place. This approach has, perhaps inevitably, led to situations of conflict with the ‘official’ public culture. Most particularly, an odd convergence of Northern Ireland’s established and emergent discourses of public representation –​ Conservative Christian rhetoric and public relations propagandising –​ came together in 2004 when members of Belfast City Council (and of the Council’s ‘Development Committee’) objected to the contents of two simultaneously published issues of The Vacuum centring on the themes of ‘God’ (Plate 19) and ‘Satan’ (Figure 25). Not only were certain articles in the magazines condemned from the religious perspective as blasphemous, but the publication was also criticised from an urban branding point-​of-​view for failing to ‘contribute positively to the image of Belfast’.68 As Colin Graham has written, this latter attitude ‘has become settled in the language and thinking of Belfast City Council over some years now, and its intent is to market Belfast as a tourist destination (perhaps in tandem with marketing the city as a place for investors)’.69 Culture, Graham says, must now serve a prescribed role within the regeneration process: it must ‘fulfil its part as a tourist attraction, and art of all kinds is increasingly in danger of being measured by the same quantitative means which are used for assessing the value of theatres and sports venues’.70 Even the iconography of the Troubles can contribute to this instrumental agenda. ‘Strangely’, Graham says, ‘Belfast has found a way of turning its militaristic murals into the highlight of the city tour’.71 What may make a project such as The Vacuum so important, therefore, is that it chooses to exist ‘in a mode outside the recognised “communities” (nationalist, unionist and liberal)’, which, Graham concludes, ‘makes it incapable of such assimilation’.72 It is a project that is ‘gloriously unrecognisable to mainstream Northern Irish “culture” ’.73 This ‘unrecognisable’ element is significantly ambiguous, since the cultural out-​of-​the-​ordinariness that The Vacuum promotes is so fully grounded in facts, histories and experiences that are, in other respects, often entirely recognisable, relating to the rich plurality of unacknowledged landmarks, informal vocabularies and unofficial narratives of the city and the wider region. Within the publication’s eclectic commentaries, provisional criteria are implicitly proposed for diverse, alternative ways of perceiving and communicating the conditions of this cultural landscape. The revered architectural writer David Brett, for instance, contributed a series of articles on the built environment in which he criticised dominant and (in his view) disastrous forms of architecture in Belfast –​ his columns presenting a version of history which tracks under-​analysed trends in how the image of the city has changed. So, for instance, in a piece devoted to the blandly ostentatious bulk of the Hilton Hotel building at Belfast’s waterfront, Brett noted that

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Figure 25  Factotum, cover of the ‘Satan’ issue of The Vacuum, 2004.

the secret history of Belfast is written in hotels. When the peace process was no more than a gleam in some very secretive eyes, someone or other thought it would be a great idea, in defiance of all the obvious evidence, to start building hotels. … The city’s little building boom is popularly supposed to be the result of the Good Friday Agreement; but I suspect it to be the other way round. Around 1990 a huge amount of money was looking to be transformed into hardware; and Belfast was the most undeveloped city in the U.K. Hence hotels, office blocks etc. even if they could not yet be filled. Hence something like civic peace.74

Such fascination with ‘secret history’ is typical of The Vacuum’s wayward, consensus-​unsettling style. Brett’s line, ‘I suspect it to be the other way around’,

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might even suffice as a general subtitle for the magazine, given the penchant of contributors to propose contrarian positions and to present seemingly familiar subjects in unexpected orientations. The main title itself, of course, is playful and important as both a comment on a perceived emptiness in the city’s cultural life and an indication of a crucial gap, a sign of space-​yet-​to-​be-​filled. The project is therefore perhaps akin to certain of Philip Napier and Mike Hogg’s collaborative works in the foregrounding of a vital ‘absence’, but also in the sense of a self-​conscious effort being made in the post-​Troubles context to contemplate the present era’s ‘concrete coercions of belonging’ and to imagine how these might be diversely contested, escaped or creatively replaced.75 In these versions of socially and situationally responsive art practices in contemporary Northern Ireland, one critical issue of concern, then, might potentially be articulated as a two-​part question regarding how we might imagine new conceptions and situations of commonality and publicness. Firstly, how might such conceptions break with long-​standing identitarian orthodoxies of the Troubles period? Secondly, how could identities function as alternatives to those structures of subjectivity and collectivity that are prioritised or even imposed within the terms of the present ‘reality’? The motivating engagement with communities in this instance not only raises the general question of how a ‘community’ might be defined (or might define itself) in the first place, but also prompts, more specifically, consideration of how to resist or evade the complex socio-​cultural ‘re-​branding’ operations taking place in this period of change. Has it been possible to imagine, in other words, alternative forms of ‘public space’ –​in which to explore provisional understandings of social relation distinct from either sectarian or consumerist models –​ during this time of uneasy transition? One crucial emphasis of contemporary artists’ interest in collectivity and community in these contexts should nevertheless be once again underlined. For if alternative forms and ‘other criteria’ are matters of central import, the ‘political’ priority that nevertheless emerges from some of the key art practices concerned with these aspects of the post-​Troubles predicament is that of proposing determinedly inconclusive modes of enquiry, negotiation and contestation with respect to how ‘publics’ might be constituted. As has been suggested, a number of artists’ interests and interventions have tended towards emphasising and keeping open a ‘gap’ in collective representation. Constructs of ‘being together’ are creatively re-​imagined but also considered in terms of inadequacy or discontinuity. An ultimate, fundamental ‘disunity’ in social structures is taken account of, without a final, resolving moment of closure being sought. Thus a theoretical image of publicness that might be valuable here is one that highlights the ‘phantasmal’ dimension of this difficult concept. Rosalyn Deutsche has, for instance, asked if the central apparent problem with contemporary art’s contemplation of collective ‘public space’ –​ that sufficient models and manifestations of the latter do not currently exist –​is in fact its most vital characteristic:76 What if this peculiarity of the public  –​ that it is not here  –​ is not inimical to, but the condition of democracy? This, of course, is exactly what [Claude] Lefort asserts when he defines public space as the open, contingent space that emerges 194

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with the disappearance of the thought of presence –​the presence of an absolute foundation unifying society and making it coincide harmoniously with itself. If ‘the dissolution of the markers of certainty’ [for Lefort the essential basis of democracy’s modern form] calls us into public space, then public space is crucial to democracy not despite but because it is a phantom –​ though not in the sense of pure delusion, false impression or misleading appearance.77

Described in this way, the concept of ‘democratic public space’ has therefore an important deconstructive dimension: it emerges out of the necessity of difference and yet its notional ‘presence’ is in a state of constant deferral. As such, Deutsche suggests, it is a ‘phantom … because while it appears it has no substantive identity and is, as a consequence, enigmatic’.78 It is a means of comprehending collectivity in which ‘meaning continuously appears and continuously fades’.79 Similarly, in her writing on ‘locational identity’ and contemporary art, Miwon Kwon makes the case for a definition of ‘community’ that is determined by its undecidability. For Kwon, ‘the very concept of “community” remains highly ambiguous and problematic in public art today’, and with reference to Jean-​Luc Nancy she conceives of ‘the idea of community as a necessarily unstable and “inoperative” spectre in order to think beyond formulaic prescriptions … to open onto an altogether different model of collectivity and belonging’.80 For Kwon, the concept of ‘community’, like that of ‘the public sphere’, ‘may be seen as a phantom, an elusive discursive formation that, as [Jean-​Luc] Nancy puts it, is not a “common being” but a nonessential “being-​in-​common” ’.81 As for many of the artists working in social or situational modes in Northern Ireland, such ‘phantom’ publicness is an ‘always insufficient’, but still vital and valued prospect. Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005; first edition 1997), p. 306. 2 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 63. 3 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), p. 15. 4 Some of the descriptive terms used here refer to Hal Foster’s four categories for contemporary art in its condition of ‘coming after’: the traumatic, the spectral, the non-​synchronous and the incongruent, the last of which, he says, is characterised by ‘performative and provisional’ interventions; see Hal Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002), p. 141. The phrase ‘given perceptual forms’ is Jacques Rancière’s: see Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic, p. 63. 5 Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic, p. 63. 6 Claire Doherty, ‘New institutionalism and the exhibition as situation’, in Protections Reader (Graz:  Kunsthaus Graz, 2006). For Doherty, such approaches may too closely ‘mimic the experience economy of the “real” world’ –​so running the risk of becoming a new convention of art making and art-​mediating; a convention, that is, of ‘role-​play or prescribed participation in a wider socio-​political context of impotent democracy’. Considering the gap ‘between conventional exhibition-​making and “performative curating” ’ may be one critical issue here, so helping to ensure that the basis of a new or 195

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7 8 9 10 1 1 12 13

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19 20 2 1 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

experimental curatorial methodology is not a simple ‘privileging of the social over the visual’; another critical issue is the need to strive for advanced understanding of what Doherty refers to as ‘the aesthetics of engagement’; see Doherty, ‘New institutionalism and the exhibition as situation’. Doherty, ‘New institutionalism and the exhibition as situation’. Jonathan Griffin, ‘Susan Philipsz’, Frieze, 116 (2008). Susan Philipsz in conversation with Martina Coyle; included in the publication documenting the public art project Resonate, curated by Grassy Knoll Productions, various sites, Belfast (7th November 1998 to 5th December 1998), p. 8. Julie Bacon, ‘Silence, failure and non-​participation’, in Julie Bacon (ed.), In Place of Passing (Belfast: University of Ulster/​Bbeyond, 2007), p. 107. Mark Ward, ‘In place of passing’, in Bacon, In Place of Passing, p. 22. Ward, ‘In place of passing’, p. 22. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2. The use of terms here incidentally echoes important ideas from the history of performance and participatory art: ‘happenings’ being the crucial collaborative art form conceptualised by Allan Kaprow in the 1950s that would be memorably described by Susan Sontag in her 1965 essay on the subject as as ‘an art of radical juxtaposition’; see Against Interpretation (London: Penguin Classics, 2009; first published 1966), p. 263. Sontag’s terms closely correspond to Hal Foster’s description of contemporary ‘incongruent’ art practices that ‘juxtapose traces of different spaces’ and that are ‘often performative and provisional’. Such work, he says, ‘projects a lyrical kind of criticality: it complicates found things with invented ones, reframes given spaces, and frequently leaves behind enigmantic site-​specific souvenirs as it does so’; Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, p. 141. Royle, The Uncanny, p. 1. Bacon, ‘Silence, failure and non-​participation’, p. 107. Bacon, ‘Silence, failure and non-​participation’, p. 107. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 45. See Miwon Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, in Claire Doherty (ed.), Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), pp. 29–​41; Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, 179–​85; Claire Doherty, ‘The new situationists’, in Doherty, Contemporary Art, pp. 8–​13. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 4. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces:  Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 10. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 9. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 7. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 7. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 8. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 12. 196

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3 0 31 32 33 34 35 36 3 7 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 4 7 48 49 50 5 1 52 53 5 4 55 56 57 5 8 59 60

Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 181. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 181 Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 181. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, pp. 181–​2. See Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), with selections and responses by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood and Tirdad Zolghadr. Kate Bush, ‘This unfortunate thing between us’, in Phil Collins, Yeah … You, Baby, You (Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Gallery & Shady Lane Productions, 2005), p. 19. Helen Molesworth, ‘Man with a movie camera: on the art of Phil Collins’, Artforum, January 2008, 232–​9. Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetic, p. 63. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 182. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 179. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 183. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 183. Bishop, ‘The social turn’, p. 183. From the text accompanying Brian O’Doherty’s original Name Change performance at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 1972. The performance (first entitled Maze) took place as part of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Brian O’Doherty, comments on the funeral of Patrick Ireland, as told to Brian Sholis, Artforum online (29 May 2008). Available at http://​artforum.com/​words/​id=20219 [last accessed 12/​08/​16]. The poem was Anthony Cronin’s ‘Sonnet 93’ from The End of the Modern World (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989). Jan Verwoert, ‘Private lives, public gestures’, Frieze, 113 (2008). Available at https://​ frieze.com/​article/​private-​lives-​public-​gestures-​2 [last accessed 12/​08/​16]. Verwoert, ‘Private lives, public gestures’. Susan McKay, Bear in Mind These Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 319. Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam/​Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), p. 4. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 126. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 127. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 127. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999), p. 58. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 15. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/​New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 8. See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding:  Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions:  Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass./​London:  MIT Press, 1996), p. 289. Deutsche, Evictions, p. 289. Philip Napier and Michael Hogg, The Soft Estate (Belfast:  Golden Thread Gallery, 2006), p. 30. The gap that is emphatically framed here can also be seen to correspond with the focus on constitutive exclusion and repression that is for Chantal Mouffe fundamental to an 197

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6 1 62 63

6 4 65 6 6 67 68

6 9 70 71 72 73 74 7 5 76

understanding of the political. This is a theoretical position that (particularly in her work with Ernesto Laclau) draws on the psychoanalytical definition of the individual subject as a symbolic formation characterised by lack –​ as a necessarily relational but fundamentally empty entity –​and crucially for Mouffe, the provenance of such political thought in psychoanalysis leads also to consideration of the non-​rational ‘supplement’ of deliberative political engagement. Her position requires us to take account of what may remain unaddressed or unacknowledged within the discourse of democratic politics, and among these ‘repressions’ may be what she designates ‘the passions’ of politics –​ those various ‘affective forces which are at the origin of collective forms of identifications’ –​ and which, she argues, current democracy in its prevailing forms is ‘unable to acknowledge’. Through this attention to ‘lack’ Mouffe wishes to assert the relevance of ‘one of the main moving forces in the field of politics’ and ‘democratic political theory … finds itself disarmed when faced with its diverse manifestations’; see Mouffe, On the Political, p. 24. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. xviii. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. xviii. This unrealised vision is the subject of The Lost City of Craigavon, a 2007 film for BBC television made by the satirical writer Newton Emerson. The film marked the 40th anniversary of the initiation of construction work in Armagh on what had been conceived as a pioneering, modern new town in Northern Ireland, one that would answer widespread housing and employment needs and begin a transformation of the region’s social and industrial landscape. Consideration of this moment in the history of Northern Ireland suggests correspondences with Duncan Campbell’s interest in the story of John DeLorean, as outlined in Chapter 4. Conversation with the artist, 7th November 2011. See Mosaic Northern Ireland: The Consumer Classification for Northern Ireland. Available at www.experian.co.uk/​assets/​business-​strategies/​brochures/​Mosaic_​NI_​brochure[1]. pdf [last accessed 12/​08/​16]. Mosaic Northern Ireland. Napier and Hogg, The Soft Estate, pp. 30–​1. Following a request for an ‘apology’ from the City Council for the perceived offence caused by the ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ issues, the Vacuum editors Richard West and Stephen Hackett decided, as an ironic riposte, to stage a ‘Sorry Day’ festival –​so bringing the dissenting spirit of the publication’s contents out into the streets, creating a different type of public situation to that in which The Vacuum would ordinarily be found. See Colin Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, Circa, 118 (2006), 54–​9. Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, p. 56. Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, p. 56. Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, p. 56. Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, p. 56. Graham, ‘The Vacuum and the vacuous’, p. 56. David Brett, ‘What did they build that for? The Hilton Hotel’, The Vacuum, 4 (2003). Available at www.thevacuum.org.uk/​issues/​issues0120/​issue04/​is04artwhadid.html [last accessed 12/​08/​16]. Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4. Deutsche’s essay ‘Agoraphobia’ included in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics maps out a series of ways in which theories of ‘publicness’ can inform critical debate about art and the public realm. Her text draws to a significant extent on theorisations of democracy 198

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7 7 78 79 80 81

and on the framing of the political in the work of Claude Lefort and in that of Mouffe and Laclau. The specific use of the figure of the ‘phantom’ in her discussion of public space comes in response to Thomas Keenan, Bruce Robbins and other contributors to a collection of essays on the subject of The Phantom Public Sphere: a volume in which writers on the left ‘look beyond laments for a lone lost public’ and seek to retain a commitment to the concept of a democratic public sphere, while often applying this commitment in a deconstructive spirit. See Bruce Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Deutsche, Evictions, p. 324. Deutsche, Evictions, p. 324. Deutsche, Evictions, p. 324. Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, p. 7. Kwon, ‘The wrong place’, p. 7.

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In his short, fragmentary text ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’, Willie Doherty writes of ‘the impossibility of the task /​to find a trace of some essential matter /​ to make an image’. What results, he suggests, is ‘barely emerging //​ an inadequate response’.1 In addressing the art of Northern Ireland’s post-​Troubles period in this book, it has been essential to acknowledge something of this impossibility and inadequacy. It has been vital to stress how the perspectives of Doherty and others are insistently partial and provisional, open to question, resistant to closure. These are surely appropriate characteristics to re-​emphasise as an attempt is made to bring this discussion to a close –​a discussion which, however detailed in parts, could only ever be ‘barely emerging’ in relation to the complexities of this time and place. Intrinsic to these chapters has been a need to point to a number of interconnected problems. It has been important to indicate that proposing ‘post-​Troubles’ as a framing paradigm is fraught with difficulty. To begin with a ‘post’ of this kind –​and in this context –​is to right away introduce a problem about time: it is to suggest that a break has occurred and that the characteristics of a ‘new era’ can be identified. Yet much of the art that has responded to the circumstances of what has been characterised here as the post-​Troubles predicament is created in a spirit of heightened anxiety with respect to the implications of such an historical shift. A central issue has been that in talking of ‘aftermath’ it is necessary to address a set of paradoxical circumstances that combine indications and images of progress, with disquieting traces of ongoing conflict and trauma. The achievements and outcomes of the peace processes have brought extraordinary hope and relief to many. An unprecedented accord between political rivals has been reached. Arms have been put ‘beyond use’. Processes of demilitarisation have been paralleled by strategies of regeneration. And so, in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, a steady transformation has occurred in the landscapes of Northern Irish society. At the same time, however, the dominant rhetoric of progress has often masked or marginalised awkward facts about the legacies of conflict. This is a situation of aftermath that involves both the pressure to move 200

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on and the related repression of much that cannot fit within dominant discourses of progress. The Good Friday Agreement called for a ‘fresh start’ but the society has remained perturbed by what Derrida refers to in another context as ‘the persistence of the present past’.2 As Willie Doherty notes, this is a simultaneously ‘settled’ and unsettling predicament in which it is ‘impossible to escape //​ the problem with forgetting /​ the problem with remembering’.3 In this way, as we have seen, the specific ‘peace’ of contemporary Northern Irish life remains curiously troubled. It is a haunted peace, a society of the spectre. These anxious conditions have been the principle focus of the most prominent and important contemporary art of the post-​Troubles years. Inconclusiveness has been a necessary feature of the artistic engagement with the conditions of this ‘new era’, to the extent that my categorising term ‘post-​Troubles’ is best placed under erasure, even as a critical attempt is made to establish its validity. If the designation ‘post-​Troubles’ has led us towards historical problems (issues approached in diverse ways by artists such as Duncan Campbell and Aisling O’Beirn, who have contemplated the possibilities for creative history-​making and unofficial archiving in the wake of the public resolution of the conflict), so too the focus on Northern Ireland has presented geographical difficulties. An underlying question here has been that of how to address the particularity of art relating to a place such as Northern Ireland –​ already, obviously, a potentially contentious territorial designation –​ in the context of wider international social and cultural change. Territory and its representation (via multiple media) have arguably been the predominant preoccupation of the visual art of this contested province over recent years, but in many cases we can note that this is an area of artistic analysis not entirely delimited by the borderlines of ‘Troubles’ geography. Rather, one of the matters of pressing relevance in taking account of the post-​Troubles situation in Northern Ireland, is the increasing sense of this as a space opened up to other spaces: the society and culture of this small, historically distinctive region of Western Europe having become (as the peace process gained momentum in parallel with wider shifts in the post-​Cold War world) increasingly shaped by the forces and flows of ‘globalisation’. Without doubt, such ‘external’ factors have been powerfully influential in determining the particular characteristics of post-​ Troubles society. A crucial interest of this book has been to assess how, in the period since the Good Friday Agreement, artists have registered the lingering effects of the Troubles: scrutinising, for example, the status of spaces in the city where systems of control, security and segregation –​ fundamental factors in the appearance and experience of urban space during the Troubles decades –​ retain a stubborn presence, despite the many marked signs of peace and progress elsewhere. But it has also been necessary in establishing the priorities of a post-​Troubles critique, to take account of the ambiguous freedoms of a society in official ‘fresh start’ mode –​noting, for instance, how Northern Ireland today might just as easily be represented in terms of newly prominent and widespread ‘non-​place’ landscapes of consumerism, leisure and corporate development. Such change has significantly altered the 201

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appearance of parts of Northern Ireland. The resulting new terrains of enterprise and entertainment have been heavily promoted both locally and abroad, just as, at the same time, the residually ‘troubled’ zones at the margins of towns and cities are of ever-​lessening interest to the once-​eager media, remaining all-​too-​often hidden from the public eye of the peace era (an aspect of post-​Troubles reality registered, for instance, in Phil Collins’s project Holiday in someone else’s misery). The changing relation of people to these changing places has also then been a vital issue. As we have seen in relation to the work of artists such as Philip Napier and Mike Hogg, long-​debated questions of affiliation and identity are now taking on disconcerting new dimensions. There is now the potential for the society to break with its long-​standing dependence on traditional sectarian attachments to territory, but the terms on which new definitions of community and new articulations of citizenship might be founded are being rapidly set through the imposition of consumerist models of identity drawn-​up in multi-​national corporate contexts. (In some ways, we can argue that the class dimensions of this ‘troubled society’, too-​often underplayed, are becoming visible in new and unexpected ways.) Today, artists have often been among those who have sought to create spaces of alternative questioning with regard to the conditions of subjectivity and collectivity in this precarious post-​Troubles moment: an era doubly defined by processes of post-​ conflict resolution, and strategies of societal regeneration formed under the influence of neo-​liberal ideology. Such socio-​economic factors of post-​Troubles reality compel us, therefore, to map contexts for the contemporary art of Northern Ireland in relation to what has been perceived, by Chantal Mouffe and others, as the ‘post-​political’ condition of globalised liberal democracy. An important proposition at the heart of this book is that the art of the post-​Troubles years cannot be addressed in strictly local terms. In thinking of the broad socio-​economic context for the work produced in this period, we must negotiate between local and international. This is a principle that applies equally to the more specific contexts within which contemporary art practices are forged. Contemplating the varieties of form and content, the systems of display and distribution, and the situations of production and reception for art from Northern Ireland since the 1990s, requires alertness to the many ways that local responses to post-​Troubles circumstances are (more than ever) shaped under the influence of global movements, tendencies and networks. The likely modes and emphases of local response are conditional on international frameworks, influences and opportunities. To name the most prevalent and important ways in which post-​ Troubles realities have been addressed by contemporary artists  –​ such as, for example, in varieties of large-​scale or ‘late’ photography, in film and video installation (often knowingly employing ‘outmoded’ media), or through strategies of ‘situated’ and ‘social’ practice –​is to also identify cultural forms and even specific themes with potent meaning and significant value within the global art world. Indeed, it is important to add that many of the recurrent problems posed by the art of the post-​Troubles years –​ the issues ostensibly deriving from the particularity of a distinct history and location –​have become, within almost exactly 202

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the same time frame, some of the central areas of concentration and contention within contemporary art more generally. Each of the four last manifestations of Documenta, the international art world’s most monumental survey exhibition (numbers X, XI, XII and XIII in 1997, 2002, 2007 and 2012 respectively) have, for instance, asserted in different ways the need for new understandings of the relation between aesthetics and politics, for new engagements between the art and the conditions of everyday life, and for alternative framings of art’s relation to history and location. Each of these grand curatorial statements have had far-​ reaching effects on the forms of art securing prominence internationally, and on the forms of critical debate surrounding, supporting and interrogating these practices. So, for example, in her role as curator of Documenta in 1997, Catherine David called for art to be viewed in the light of ‘the age of globalisation and of the sometimes violent social, economic and cultural transformations it entails’.4 Such a view is surely also relevant to the process of critically perceiving and ‘placing’ the art that has emerged during the peace process and post-​Agreement periods in Northern Ireland. Contemporary art, as Hal Foster has maintained, exists in an enduring state of ‘coming after’ in the wake of the modernist avant-​gardes and the postmodern neo-​avant-​gardes.5 Its status as art is uncertain, its place in the world unclear. But, in part at least, it is in the very spectral in-​betweenness of its ontology and its anxious relation to historical reality that new possibilities may arise. So too then with the different situation of ‘aftermath’ that has been the subject of this book. If clear problems have presented themselves in the attempt to comment on ‘post-​ Troubles’ art, then it should be finally re-​emphasised that these problems are also the source of new possibilities. As with Foster’s tentative claims for the prospect that art might find ways of ‘living on’ after its widely proclaimed ‘end’, there is a strong related sense in which the ‘spirit’ of art in Northern Ireland in the years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, has been a restless one.6 The period following the formal ‘end’ of the Troubles has seen the emergence of an art of engagingly agitated ‘afterlife’. This has been an art that is pointedly undecided and unsettled: a determinedly uncertain art that asks questions of the certainties of progress; an art concerned to make difficult that which has, in some other contexts, been made to seem straightforward (to invoke here a comment made by Michel Foucault on the idea of critique7). It is, therefore, through an insistence on avoiding closure, on aesthetic qualities of provisionality and precariousness, on constant alertness to the haunting of the present, that art can, potentially at least, point us towards the necessary antagonism of ‘the political’ –​ making inconveniently visible, as Chantal Mouffe has said, ‘what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’.8 Notes 1 Willie Doherty, ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’, in Willie Doherty:  Buried (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009), p. 156. 203

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2 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 126. 3 Doherty, ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’, p. 156. 4 Catherine David, ‘Introduction’, in P. Sztulman, Documenta 10 Short Guide (Stuttgart:  Edition Cantz, 1997), p. 7. 5 Hal Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2002), p. 130. 6 Foster, ‘This funeral is for the wrong corpse’, pp. 129–​30. 7 In ‘So is it important to think?’ Foucault argues that ‘a critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based … To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy’. See Michel Foucault, ‘So is it important to think?’, in J.D. Faubin (ed.), Power: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–​1984 (London: Penguin, 2000; first published 1981), p. 456. 8 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art and Research, 1:2 (2007) [online]. Available at www.artandresearch.org.uk/​v1n2/​mouffe.html [last accessed 05/​ 08/​16].

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218

219

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. Ackermann, Franz 64 Ackroyd & Harvey 13n7 Adams, Robert 99, 119n.32 aesthetics 5, 60–​1, 62 aftermath studies 5 ambiguous presence 97 archive fever 77, 127–​8, 154, 163n.19 Arkive City project 153, 154–​5 art agency 23 end of 7 value of 75–​6, 79–​82 Art and the Disembodied Eye exhibition 156 Art in Ulster survey series 48 art media 9 artist-​led initiatives 49 artistic critique 7 artists, role 5 Arts Council of Northern Ireland 84n.35 Atlas Group, the 154–​5 Bacon, Julie 153, 173, 174, 175 Baker, Stephen 17, 17–​18, 19 Ballard, J.G. 142, 143, 151 Banville, John 112, 113 Barba, Rosa 137 Barber, Fionna 9 Barthes, Roland 102, 120n.39 Bauer, Uta Meta 59 beyond collective 172–​5, 174 beauty 62

Becher, Bernd and Hilla 76–​7, 99 Becker, Howard 136 Belfast 35, 38–​9, 49–​50, 67–​9, 68, 76–​8, 85n.51, 89, 127, 140–​3, 164–​5n.39, 192–​3 Alexander Park 39–​41, 40 Ballysillan Park 141 European Capital of Culture 80 everyday urban archive 140–​53, 148, 150, 170 Golden Thread Gallery 13n.9, 155–​62, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190 heritage districts 31 New Lodge Road 150, 151–​3 Ormeau Baths Gallery 78–​9, 84n.35 peace line 39 regeneration 30–​2 riots, 12 July, 2010 37–​8, 43–​4n.49 St. George’s Market 173, 174 Springfield Road 141 Victoria Square shopping complex 31–​2 Waterworks Park 148–​9 Belfast City Council 78, 80, 192 Belfast Exposed 45n.83, 78, 140–​53 Belfast Way: Young Artists from Northern Ireland, The, exhibition 76–​7 Bell, Vikki 19, 34 belonging, sense of 5–​6 Benjamin, Walter 34, 138, 144–​5, 146, 160 Berlin 31, 32, 40, 110, 118n.13 219

220

Index

Beuys, Joseph 161–​2 biennales 54–​5, 81–​2, 175 Bishop, Claire 29, 103, 175, 178–​9, 181 Blair, Tony 20, 22 Bloody Sunday 36–​7, 182 Bloomer, Patrick 72, 74 Boltanski, Luc 7 Bourriaud, Nicholas 13n.16, 14n.22, 26, 51–​2, 65–​6, 72, 83n.22, 86n.75, 132, 169–​70, 179 Boym, Svetlana 31, 32, 129, 137–​8 Bradley, Fiona 123n.86 Brehmer, K.P 40 Bremner, Ewan 136 Brett, David 192–​3 Breuer, Frank 99, 119n.34 British Art Show 7 131 Buchloh, Benjamin 83n.11 Buckingham, Matthew 129 Burgin, Victor 91 Burial of Patrick Ireland (1972–​2008), The 182–​5 Burke, Ursula 33, 33–​4, 126, 127, 177 Bush, Kate 28, 179–​80 Butler, Judith 104–​5 Bydler, Charlotte 53, 56 Byrne, Gerard 58, 59, 84n.27, 128 Callahan, Harry 99 Cameron, David 37 Campany, David 77 Campbell, Duncan 70, 71, 126, 130–​6, 139, 140, 201 Bernadette 131, 132, 132–​4, 133 Falls Burns Malone Fiddles 131, 134, 135, 135–​6 Make it New, John 131, 134–​5 capitalism 6–​7, 83n.11 capitalist realism 52 Carson, Ciaran 82, 166n.75 Carville, Justin 15n.48 Catalyst Arts 78, 79, 87n96 Catto, Mike 48 Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry-​Londonderry 2 Charlesworth, Ian 66, 67 Chiapello, Eve 7 Christov-​Bakargiev, Carolyn 103, 118n.14

civil liberty 50 Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art exhibition 13n.9, 155–​62, 170–​1 Collins, Phil 49 Holiday in Someone Else’s Misery 179–​81, 180, 202 The marches 28–​9, 29, 41, 71 The Return of the Real 29 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They 181 Comer, Stuart 129 commercial development 16 conflict resolution 17 conflict resolution therapy 2 Connolly, Brian 172–​3 Connolly, Maeve 78–​9, 105–​6 constructive ambiguity 23–​30, 24, 29 contemporary art 47, 50–​2, 66, 72–​3, 203 corporate investment 16 Corral, Maria de 117n.5 Costello, Diarmuid 60–​1 Cotton, Charlotte 95 Cox, Michael 21, 26–​7, 30 Craigavon 189, 191, 198n.63 Critchley, Simon 186 critical art 6–​8 Cullen, Shane 27, 53 The Agreement 24, 24–​6 cultural production 6–​7, 8, 11 Cummins, Jonathan 13n.7 curatorial attempts 12 curatorial/​research projects 153–​62, 158 Danto, Arthur 7, 59, 82 Darke, Colin 84n.27 David, Catherine 203 Davidson, Colin 33 Dawson, Graham 20, 26, 30 de Búrca, Miriam 76, 126, 130, 136–​40 Dogs Have No Religion 77, 136, 139–​40, 177 Go Home 136–​9 de Certeau, Michel 147 Dean, Tacita 4, 110–​11, 128, 137 Debord, Guy 23, 83n.11 defamiliarising effects 5 Deleuze, Gilles 143 demilitarisation 1–​2 democracy 18–​19, 42n.13 220

221

Index

democratic public space 8–​9, 194–​5 Derrida, Jacques 4, 8, 19, 35, 49, 106, 113, 115, 154, 184–​5, 201 Derry-​Londonderry 1–​3, 12n.4, 37 Deutsche, Rosalyn 8, 9, 186–​7, 195, 198–​9n.76 Devlin, Bernadette 132, 132–​4, 133, 139 Didi-​Huberman, Georges 120n.40 difference, visibility 29–​30 Dillon, Brian 110–​11 discursive, the 25–​6 Disembodied Eye, The, exhibition 160 distribution, models of 5 Dixon, Paul 21, 42n.25 Documenta 203 Doherty, Claire 5, 171, 175, 195–​6n.6 Doherty, Willie 3–​4, 11, 33–​4, 38, 53, 58, 82, 84n.27, 89–​117, 124–​5, 129, 162, 170, 200, 201 aesthetic-​political strategies 104–​11 art practice 91–​3, 94–​5, 101–​2, 103–​4, 118n.14, 123n.86 Bridge, The 103 Buried 111–​12 Closure 111 Control Zone 103 critical connections 99–​102, 110–​11, 119n.34 Double Take 94 Empty 90, 108–​11, 109, 136 Extracts from a File 118n.13 Ghost Story 4, 70, 82, 90, 112, 112–​17, 124, 125–​6, 151 Local Solution 89–​90, 92, 93–​7, 97–​102, 109, 124 Longing/​Lamenting 94 Manifesta 8 118n.13 narrative content 103–​4 No Smoke Without Fire 92 No Visible Signs 92 Non-​Specific Threat 58–​9, 104–​5, 111, 160 Re-​Run 94, 103, 106, 111 Replays 94 Retraces 94 Same Difference 90 Same Old Story 93–​4, 103, 163n.7 Secretion 118n.13

Show of Strength 89–​90, 92, 93–​7, 97, 98, 102, 109, 124 Somewhere Else 92 True Nature 118n.13 Unseen 3–​4 Visitor, The 111 Dolar, Mladen 108, 122n.74 Double Image, The exhibition 156, 160 Douglas, Stan 137, 138–​9, 165–​6n.55 Downey, Karen 82 Dublin 182–​5 Duncan, John 33–​4, 76–​7, 94, 99, 126, 127, 161 Dunne, Aidan 110 Durant, Sam 128 Durden, Mark 101 Eagleton, Terry 44n.51 Ebrington 1–​2, 2–​3, 12n.4 Edelsztein, Sergei 76 Ellis, Geraint 31 Empty (Doherty) 4 empty spaces 35–​6, 36 Enwezor, Okwui 56 Esche, Charles 157 ethno-​political identity 38 excess 85n.61 experimental institutionalism 157, 171 Factotum 191–​4, 193 Farquharson, Alex 157 Farrell, David 119n.35 Ferrer, Esther 173, 174 Filipovic, Elena 54 Fisher, Jean 92, 95, 97, 102, 105, 106–​7, 109–​10 Fisher, Mark 13n.15, 52 Fletcher, Annie 49 Flood, Richard 147, 148 Flynn, Leontia 85n.51 forgotten places, perambulations through 124–​5 Foster, Hal 3–​4, 7, 15n.44, 26, 32, 34, 51, 63, 72–​4, 83n.11, 94, 107, 114, 120n.44, 128, 137, 138, 165n.50, 195n.4, 203 Foucault, Michel 203, 204n.7 Fowler, Luke 131 221

222

Index

Fox, Dan 54 Freud, Sigmund 107 Froment, Aurelien 84n.27 Fukuyama, Francis 21 Fulton, Hamish 91 funding 78 Gaiger, Jason 65 Gateshead Millennium Bridge 1 ghost-​hunting 3–​4, 11–​12, 36–​7, 81, 82 ghosts 8, 111–​17, 182–​8, 188 Gillick, Liam 7, 8, 25–​6, 52 globalisation 22–​3, 50, 57, 66, 175, 203 Godfrey, Mark 128–​30, 131, 137 Good Friday Agreement, 1998 3, 11, 16, 18–​19, 30, 43n.46, 156, 200–​1, 203 ambiguous outcome 26–​7 characteristics of 20–​3 constructive ambiguity 23–​7, 24 and history 16–​17 implementation 26–​7 international influences 22, 42n.25 negotiation process 20–​1, 42n.25, 186–​8, 188 Graham, Colin 9, 16–​17, 34, 35, 36, 127–​8, 129, 192 Graham, Paul Ceasefire 100–​2 Troubled Land 100, 119n.36 Grassy Knoll Productions 49–​50, 79, 171, 179 Gray, John 80 Greenberg, Clement 62 group representations, international 75–​9 Guardian, the 2, 37 Guelke, Adrian 26–​7 Gursky, Andreas 96, 118n.26 Gwangju Biennale 131 Hackett, Stephen 191 Hadaway, Pauline 78 Hal, Marieke van 54 Haneke, Michael 110, 122–​3n.82 Hapaska, Siobhán 53 Harahan, Seamus 66, 76, 86–​7n.78 Before Sunrise 39–​41, 40 Holylands 39, 67–​9, 68, 70 Harbison, Isobel 39 Hardt, Michael 18, 23, 57, 170, 175

Harry’s Game (TV drama) 89 haunting 7, 111, 111–​17, 125 hauntology 8, 13n.15, 115 Heaney, Seamus 119–​20n.39 Herbert, Martin 134, 164–​5n.39 Hesse, Kai Olaf 33–​4 Hewitt, John 48 Hickey, Dave 63 Hidden (film) 110, 122–​3n.82 Hirschhorn, Thomas 128 historical leftovers 3 lingering significance 4 historical representation 124–​30, 130–​40 history 11–​12, 16–​17, 132–​4 Hogg, Michael 66, 71, 185–​91, 188, 189, 194, 202 Holten, Katie 13n.7 Holycross (TV drama) 120n.44 Horrigan, Bill 28 Hughes, Eamonn 119–​20n.39 Hunt, Ian 93, 94, 96, 106, 108 Huyssen, Andreas 22 Icons of the North exhibition 155–​6, 160 identity 22, 28–​9, 38, 62–​3, 66, 106, 177–​8, 182, 190, 202 Ignatieff, Michael 41 In Place of Passing project 172–​5, 174 inconclusiveness 201 indeterminacy, power of 8 instability, power of 8 institutional frameworks 9 interface areas 38 international art, dialogue with 10–​11 International Language programme 49–​50, 179–​82, 180 internet, the 50 IRA, cessation of military operations 20 Irish Republic 9 Jameson, Fredric 8, 96, 110–​11, 115, 185 Jarman, Neil 27, 38 Jewesbury, Daniel 25, 48–​9, 80–​1, 125, 126, 127, 140–​6, 153, 156, 170 Archive Lisburn Road 33, 33–​4 NLR 150, 150–​3 Johnston, Sandra 66, 71, 72 Jones, Jesse 2 Jonsson, Stefan 7–​8 222

223

Index

Kelly, Aaron 23, 34, 49 Kelly, Liam 9, 48, 49, 156, 160 Kennedy, S.B. 155, 159–​60 Kennedy-​Pipe, Caroline 20, 21 Keogh, Nicholas 72, 74 Kester, Grant 176–​9, 181 Kirkland, Richard 164n.38 Kirstein, Lincoln 28 Koester, Joachim 4, 34, 114 Koolhaas, Rem 143 Kundera, Milan 127 Kwon, Miwon 5, 72, 175, 175–​6, 195 Laclau, Ernesto 116 Laplante, Myriam 173 Larsen, Lars Bang 125 Lefort, Claude 8, 194–​5 lens-​based art 13n.16 Levi, Primo 14n.34 Levinas, Emmanuel 104, 105 Lin, Maya 25 Lind, Maria 131, 179 Little, Adrian 18–​19, 42n.13 Liverpool Biennale 81 Lloyd, Moya 18–​19, 42n.13 local practices 47 local solutions 90 local specificity 57–​8 London 142, 143–​4 Long, Richard 91 Loughran, Grainne 153 Lynch, Kevin 96 Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín 25, 102–​3, 106 McAvera, Brian 155–​6, 159–​60 McGonagle, Declan 53, 92, 94, 156, 161, 162 McGreevy, Mark 65 McIntyre, Mary 33–​4, 66, 69–​70, 76 Mackay, Hugh 23 McKay, Susan 14n.34, 184 McKee, Francis 54 McKenzie, Dougal 65, 156, 160 McKeown, William 60, 61–​3, 65, 66, 85–​6n.62, 86n.70 McLaughlin, Greg 17, 17–​18, 19 MacLennan, Alastair 53 McTigue, Eoghan 33–​4, 49, 79 MacWilliam, Susan 81, 82

Magill, Elizabeth 65 Mallon, Seamus 42n.25 medium, positioning of 15n.44 Mehretu, Julie 64 memories 125–​7 Merewether, Charles 155, 162 Mey, Kerstin 153 Meyer, James 131 Molesworth, Helen 180–​1 Montgomery, Robert 125 Moorhead, Katrina 66, 70–​1 Morris, Locky 13n.7 ‘Mosaic Northern Ireland’ (Expedia) 190 Mouffe, Chantal 6–​7, 8, 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 32, 57, 105, 130, 165n.50, 185, 197–​8n.60, 202, 203 Muldoon, Paul 12n.3, 164n.38 Mulholland, Hugh 54, 57–​8, 59, 65, 78, 82, 84n.35, 85–​6n.62, 90–​1 murals 151 Murphy, Gavin 53, 58, 59, 82 Murray, Darren 60, 63–​5, 66 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 195 Napier, Philip 185–​91, 188, 189, 194, 202 Nashashibi, Rosalind 137 nationalisms 21 nationality, and identity 22 Nature of Things, The, exhibition 59–​65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 91, 93, 155 Negri, Antonio 18, 23, 57, 170, 175 Nehamas, Alexander 62 Neill, William J.V. 31 new institutionalism 157, 171 New York Times 37–​8 Nieslony, Boris 173 non-​closure 105 normalisation 32, 39 Northern Irish art, positioning 47–​53 nostalgia 31–​2 O’Beirn, Aisling 66, 71–​2, 126, 140–​50, 153, 170, 171, 176, 191, 201 Improbable Landmarks 150 Stories for Venetians and Tourists 73, 74, 74 ‘Waterworks Park’ 148, 148–​9 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 157 O’Callaghan, Eimear 37 O’Doherty, Brian 182–​5 223

224

Index

off-​modern moments 137–​8 O’Kelly, Alannah 182–​3 Oliva, Achille Bonita 53 Omagh, Real IRA bombing, 1998 44n.57 Orange Order 27–​30, 30, 71 O’Sullivan, Simon 85n.61 Øvstebø, Solveig 54 Owens, Craig 63 Palast (film) 110–​11 Pallister, Kay 54 parades 27–​30, 29, 37, 71 past, the presence 35–​6, 36 relationship with 124–​8 peace post-​political 16–​19 propaganda of 17, 18 understandings of 18–​19 uneasiness of 3 peace line, the 39 peace process 19–​23, 49, 200 Performing the Archive project 153–​4 Perspectives shows 78–​9 Petit, Chris 142 Philips, Adam 156 Philipsz, Susan 79, 171–​2, 172, 176 photography 9, 15n.48, 33–​6 conceptual 91–​2 display 95–​6 ethics of 28 late 77, 202 scripto-​visual strategies 91–​2 place, sense of 5–​6 place entrepreneurship 80 place-​related art 5–​6, 59–​65, 65–​6 political, the 6–​7 political exorcism 36–​7 political potential 6–​7 positive post-​Troubles images 75–​82 post-​conflict zones 41 post-​political paradigm 17 post-​political peace 16–​9 post-​Troubles optimism 89–​90 post-​Troubles period 4, 8, 200–​3 Post-​War –​Post-​Troubles exhibition 155, 159–​60 precariousness 51–​2

presentation, models of 5 problem space 14n.31 progress 3, 5 psychological disturbance 33–​4 public representation processes 188–​91, 189 public space 8, 8–​9, 27, 194–​5 Raad, Walid 154–​5 radicant, the 65–​6 Rancière, Jacques 181 Ratnam, Niru 56 realpolitik 26 Remains (Doherty) 3 Resonate project 79, 171 Richards, Peter 155–​62, 170–​1 Ritchie, Matthew 64 Rolston, Bill 27 Rose, Jacqueline 19 Rosler, Martha 91 ROUTES project 177, 177, 178 Royle, Nicholas 4, 32, 108, 173–​4 Sala, Anri 129 Santamaria, Elvira 173 Saville Inquiry report 36–​7 Schjeldahl, Peter 54 Scotland 54–​5, 58, 83n.26, 131 scripto-​visual strategies 91–​2 Seawright, Paul 33–​4, 34–​6, 53, 83n.26, 119n.36 Conflicting Account 35–​6, 36 Orange Order 28 Sectarian Murders 35 sectarian identifications 6 security protocols 6 Sekula, Allan 91 Sheringham, Michael 152 Shirlow, Peter 38–​9 Sholis, Brian 99 Shout from the Street exhibition 156, 161 Sierra, Santiago 2–​3 sign-​systems 6 Sinclair, Iain 143–​4, 153, 167n.89 site-​specificity 105, 123n.86, 175–​81, 190 situated aesthetics 5 situational interventions 169–​75, 172, 174, 185–​95, 188, 189, 191–​4, 193

224

225

Index

Sloan, Victor 27–​8 Smith, Terry 50–​1, 52, 61 Smithson, Robert 141 social frameworks 9 social history of art 6–​7 social inequity 50 socially interactive practice 175–​81, 177, 180 socius, the 12 Soft Estate, The, exhibition 185–​91, 188, 189 Solnit, Rebecca 144–​6 Sontag, Susan 145 space 61–​5, 69–​70, 90, 95–​6, 96–​7, 106–​8 spectre, the 4, 4–​5, 8, 82, 82, 115–​17, 122n.79 Stallabrass, Julian 81 Starkey, Hannah 33–​4 Stephen, Fiona 26–​7 Steyerl, Hito 131 Stormont Assembly 30 Storr, Robert 56 strategic indeterminacy 97 Sunningdale Agreement, 1973 20, 42n.25 surveillance 67–​9, 68, 75, 110, 157–​9, 158, 160 Sverakova, Slavka 156, 161–​2 Swain, Tony 53 Sworn, Corin 131 Szeeman, Harald 53, 54 Tallentire, Anne 53 time, approaches to 11–​12 time-​scale 48 Tompkins, Hayley 131 trauma-​sites 34–​6, 36 traumatic realism 120n.44 Troubles, the 3, 48 end of 16, 18, 203 geography 21, 201 Turner Prize 2, 12n.6, 29, 104, 130, 131

UK City of Culture 1–​3, 12n.4 uncanny, the 121–​2n.68, 122n.74 evocations of 32, 33–​4, 107–​8, 124–​5, 173–​4 unresolved issues 3 urban branding 75 urban junkspace 143–​4 urban landscape 32–​6, 33, 36 urban regeneration 6, 16, 30–​2 Vacuum, The (newspaper) 191–​4, 193, 198n.68 Venice Biennale 11, 53–​9, 59–​65, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 76, 82, 83n.26, 84n.27, 84n.28, 90–​1, 93, 112, 117n.5, 155 Verwoert, Jan 183–​4 video art 13n.16 Vidler, Anthony 32, 70, 98, 107–​8, 121–​2n.68 Visual Force, The exhibition 156, 161–​2 Void Gallery 2–​3, 13n.7 Wales 54, 83n.26 Walker, Una 126, 154, 160 Surveiller 157–​9, 158, 159 Ward, Mark 173 Washington, DC, Vietnam memorial 25 West, Richard 15n.48, 191, 198n.68 White, Hayden 126, 128 Wilkes, Cathy 53, 83n.26 Willsdon, Dominic 60–​1 Witoszek, Nina 184 Women’s Coalition 42n.19 Wylie, Donovan 33–​4 Žižek, Slavoj 108, 122n.79, 125, 155 Zukin, Sharon 79–​80

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1  Jesse Jones, The Other North, 2013. Production still; film duration 59 minutes. Photo: Jin-​hee Kim.

2  Willie Doherty, Remains (Kneecapping behind Creggan Shops), 2013. C-​print mounted on aluminium, 120 x 160 cm.

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3  Phil Collins, The marches, 2000. Production still, Belfast and Portadown. Courtesy Shady  Lane Productions, Berlin.

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4  Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury, from the photographic series Archive Lisburn Road, 2005. Courtesy the artists.

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5  Paul Seawright, ‘White Flag’; from the photographic series Conflicting Account, 2009.

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6  William McKeown, Nest (The Bravery of Birds), 2005. Installation view of the exhibition The Nature of Things, curated by Hugh Mulholland, Northern Ireland Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and the William McKeown Foundation.

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7  William McKeown, installation view of The Sky Begins at Our Feet, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, 2002. Courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and the William McKeown Foundation.

8  Darren Murray, Brassocattleya clifton magnifica, 2005. Oil on canvas, 152 x 213 cm.

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9  Mary McIntyre, Threshold, 2004. C-​type photographic print, 100 x 84 cm. Courtesy the artist.

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10  Paddy Bloomer and Nicholas Keogh, Bin Boat, 2005. Mixed media (inc. wheelie bins, washing machine parts, oil barrels, wheel-​barrow, two-​cylinder diesel engine fuelled by chip fat). Presented as part of the Northern Ireland exhibition The Nature of Things at the 51st Venice Biennale. Courtesy the artists.

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11  John Duncan, ‘Sandy Row’, from the photographic series Bonfires, 2008. C-​type photographic print, 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist.

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12  John Duncan, ‘Newtonards Road’, from the photographic series Bonfires, 2008. C-​type photographic print, 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist.

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13  Willie Doherty, Show of Strength I, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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14  Willie Doherty, Local Solution IV, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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15  Willie Doherty, Show of Strength III, 2006. Plexiglas and laminated c-​print on aluminium, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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16  Miriam de Búrca, Go Home, 2003. Video still. Courtesy the artist.

17  Miriam de Búrca, Dogs Have No Religion, 2003. Video still. Courtesy the artist.

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18  Phil Collins, Holiday in someone else’s misery #1, 2001. Lightjet print, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin.

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19  Factotum, cover of the ‘God’ issue of The Vacuum, 2004. Courtesy Factotum (Stephen Hackett and Richard West). Illustration: Duncan Ross.