C104
article
Willie Doherty:
language, imagery and the real
Words are
a frequent aspects of the artworks of Willie Doherty.
Here Paul O'Brien explores how they function together.
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Willie
Doherty: The walls, 1987, black-and-white
photograph with text
mounted
on masonite, 61 x 152.5 cm; courtesy the artist
/ Alexander
and Bonin, New York / Kerlin Gallery, Dublin /
Matt's Gallery, London
/ Irish Museum of Modern Art
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A few years
ago I had a conversation with a Northern Irish Protestant
friend with some nationalist sympathies. I remarked that
the on-going conflicts in Northern Ireland and (former)
Yugoslavia represented an outmoded tribalism specific
to the "ass-end of Europe" and that people should instead
direct their political energies against global warming.
She replied, "that sounds like the politics of a fourteen-year-old."
Since then, Green politics has edged into government in
Germany, swung (albeit for the worse) the last US Presidential
election, and become a significant part of the political
scene in the Irish Republic. Meanwhile, like an aging
rocker who refuses to leave the stage, the Northern conflict
staggers on from one hoary song to the next, clutching
the remnants of its original sexiness.
Such, anyway,
is one view of the turmoil that has gone on above the
'dotted line' to the north for a generation. When confronted
with a history of Protestant repression on the one hand
and Catholic repression - with which we are more intimately
familiar - on the other, many Southerners are inclined
to call down a plague on both houses. The underlying Northern
bitterness, we have come to realise, may have roots in
the Plantation of Ulster and the activities of Cromwell,
but it reaches back further than that as well, to the
outrages of Torquemada and Queen Mary. This skeptical
view is intensified by the stereotype-reversing reality
of a prosperous South and a basket-case North, reliant
on London handouts. And the bad news for Northern nationalists,
which Sinn Féin have no doubt become bitterly aware
of since they entered the Dáil, is that there is
no game-plan for Irish unity. (It would wreck the Irish
economy, and a lot of civil servants on both sides of
the border would lose their jobs.) Protestant freedom
versus Catholic conformity, or Protestant alienation versus
Catholic community: each side can see the speck of dust
in the other's eye, but not the log in its own. In Willie
Doherty's terms, each side in the conflict has an inability
to see clearly, a 'blind spot'.1
Doherty, a primarily conceptual
artist working mainly with photography and video, has
been compared variously to Chris Marker, Barbara Kruger,
Gerhard Richter, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. His photographic
work, some of which is included in a major retrospective
at IMMA, raises questions about the relationship between
word and image, language and truth, aesthetics and politics,
conceptualism and representation in the context of the
Northern conflict. Much of it is focused on the city of
Londonderry/Derry (otherwise known as 'stroke city') which,
like other contested sites such as Gdansk/Danzig, has
alternative names, evidencing a schizoid state explored
in works like The Walls and The other side.
Doherty's
work The blue skies of Ulster, a black-and-white photograph
of a misty scene, includes the text printed in blue capitals:
WE SHALL NEVER FORSAKE THE BLUE SKIES OF ULSTER FOR THE
GREY MISTS OF AN IRISH REPUBLIC. The well-known quote
is from Ian Paisley. Is this a reference to Protestant
textuality versus Catholic iconography, the preference
of the Reformers for language, the 'word of God', over
images? Blue represents not just the subject of the text
but also the British connection (red, white and blue).
The colour was also favoured by the anti-clerical secularists
of the French revolution (who would no doubt have had
an ambivalent response to Paisley). But in fact the colour
we associate most closely with Northern loyalism is orange,
while that of nationalism or republicanism is not grey
but green. (The latter, though, is often the subject of
confusion since the rise of political ecology. The republican
greens and the ecological Greens currently form parts
of a technical group in the Irish parliament, the latter
trying to keep the former at arm's length so as not to
alienate their own middle-class support.)
But things
get even more complex. Historically, republicanism is
Protestant in inspiration (the American revolution) while
monarchy is, again historically, a Catholic institution
- an ironic reversal of Northern political alignments.
If King James had won the Battle of the Boyne, would 1916
ever have happened? Would it not be more likely that the
Irish of the South would support a Catholic establishment
in London in trying to keep those recalcitrant Northern
Protestants in line?
For me, the
questions raised by Doherty's work escape the Catholic/Protestant
duality to raise issues concerning the political construction
of that duality in the first place. If one query raised
by the work is 'which side are you on?' another possible
question is 'why either'? This latter is already keenly
felt by Northern Irish Buddhists or atheists forced into
one traditional category or the other by well-meaning
government questionnaires. One recalls the postmodern
escape of meaning from language: meanings always slide
away from the attempt of language to pin them down, whether
the language is that of pictures or words or both. East
is North and West is South (the East Bank of the River
Foyle is in the North and the West Bank is in the South,
as other photos in the IMMA exhibition point out). If
politics escapes language, so does geography. In terms
of sectarian politics, perhaps the problem goes back to
language itself: the futile, millennia-old Western attempt
to pin down definitive meanings.
The troubles
in Northern Ireland may be seen as rooted in a mishmash
of economic inequality, seventeenth-century sectarianism,
and ancient tribal conflicts (not to mention masculine
'phallic panic'), a cocktail in which the religious theme
predominates - substantiating Huntington's argument that
the roots of political strife are civilisational and ultimately
religious.2 In
Swift's terms, the struggle is between the 'big-endians'
and the 'little endians', the two split-apart branches
of Christianity. This tension has its roots in the literal
versus metaphorical interpretations of the biblical text
"this is my body" - a direct theological antecedent of
current theoretical struggles between realism and postmodernism
(though with far bloodier consequences). As a twelve-year-old
in Derry, the artist witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday,
and consequently experienced directly the dichotomy between
his experience and its representation in the media.3
The question arises, though, whether anything can close
that gap. Did the IRA fire first? Did any of the soldiers
believe they were under attack? Representations, whether
in 'art' or the mass media, open up issues rather than
closing them off - no completely definitive answer can
ever be given. Baudrillard's notorious statement that
the Gulf War did not take place is, one hopes, hyperbolic;
but it illustrates the very great difficulty of moving
from language and imagery to pin down any stable reality
behind them. Doherty's work exists in that zone where
attempts to isolate the reality of what happened come
up against questions concerning the reliability of language
and imagery to represent the real. Is the female face
in the Same difference illustration deserving of the positive
or negative epithets projected thereon, epithets which
swing our response to the image? The popular malapropism
of the title may hint at the possible range of answers
to the question: positive, negative, both, neither. Again,
this lifts our response from the confining level of duality
to the realm where the construction of that duality may
itself be called in question.
The (textless)
images of burnt-out cars, blocked roads and the aftermath
of terrorist crime-scenes in Doherty's photographs raise
the question of how we fill in meanings to images, in
the context of the set of accepted ideological responses.
They also raise the issue of the relationship between
aesthetics and politics, terrorism after all being a kind
of street theatre which relies on the society of the spectacle
for survival. (Aware of this, governments in Ireland and
the UK instituted censorship of those they regarded as
subversive, the farcical consequences of which have also
influenced Doherty's work.) The reliance of terrorism
on the spectacular society for the fuel of publicity illustrates
Walter Benjamin's notorious remark about human beings
taking aesthetic pleasure in the contemplation of their
own destruction.4
Doherty's photographs are themselves
cool and contemplative, far from exploitative - they raise
the issues without indulging in them. In terms of content
they are both minimalist and marginal. They could as easily
be scenes from the Balkans as from Northern Ireland, or
indeed from anywhere where fratricide (the gendered noun
is appropriate) is the order of the day. This culture
is referred to by the foreboding, sinister video of a
murdered body with banal traffic noises in the background,
entitled Sometimes I imagine it's my turn (echoes of David
Lynch's film Blue Velvet).
Personally,
I think of the burnt-out cars as a metaphor for global
warming - an over-determination of meaning which illustrates
the irrelevance of notions of authorial intentionality.
And the destroyed interiors in the Factory series of 1994
and 1995 could be seen as raising issues of rust-belt
obsolescence and unemployment, ultimating in the widespread
problem of an otiose machismo that finds release in terror
and violence.
A central
theme in the work is the questioning of media-generated
textual interpretations of images. Doherty is quoted as
saying, "I think the reputation of photography as a vehicle
of truth is completely in tatters...I present photographs
as unreliable witnesses."5
The use of photography to illustrate
the unreliability of photography first of all raises the
question of the 'truth' that lies behind the distortions
of representation. But it then goes on to raise the more
awkward question as to where, if anywhere, truth may be
found. If the mass media take visual imagery crassly as
reflecting reality, the ostensible interpretation of Doherty's
work is that it exposes this as the misrepresentation
of reality. But from a more radical deconstructive viewpoint,
the image can also be seen as having a deeply problematic
relationship to any kind of 'reality', raising the question
as to whether truth or the real is in any meaningful sense
accessible. (This relativist position, of course, raises
in turn the issue of its own claim to validity...)
Similar issues
are raised in Doherty's video work. In Re-run a well dressed
man is running across a bridge. On one wall, he's running
towards you - on the opposite wall, away. The work ostensibly
forces the spectator to take a position either as welcoming
or pursuing. But what if you want to do neither? What
if you reject the 'either/or' choice between Loyalism
and Nationalism? Of course, any political choices or analyses
presuppose (extra-linguistic) political realities. If
the truth is out there, however, it may be quite different
from the 'truths' presented either by the hegemonic media
or by its opponents. Perhaps all political stances come
down in the last analysis to a more-or-less arbitrary
decision for one position over another. It is the merit
of Doherty's work that it enables the issue of the relation
between language, imagery and the real to be opened up
to interrogation, so that the perspectives presented by
either side in the conflict may be seen as precisely that:
perspectives.
Paul O'Brien
(obrienp@ncad.ie)
teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
