C105 review

Belfast: Golden Mile

Miriam de Búrca: Silver service, 2003, video still; courtesy the artist

The Golden Mile is the nickname for the commercial strip running from University Road to Great Victoria Street in Belfast, which is also the heart of Belfast’s nightlife. Angela Darby of Fully Formed Projects commissioned nine artists based in Belfast to respond to the Golden Mile’s “present usage within the context of urban development.”

According to the cab driver filmed by Miriam de Búrca from inside the black cab, in her video work Silver service installed in Bookfinder’s café, the name ‘the Golden Mile’ refers to the area as a property developers’ heaven. If you had a nose for business in the eighties and invested here, you could become one of Belfast’s Property Gods, such as O’Connor, Kennedy and Turtle or McKibbin and Co. According to the taxi driver, the Leslie Tower opposite MGM cinema was named after one of the developers’ wives: “not a bit of real flesh on her – a Barbie doll.” In contrast, de Búrca’s other video work, non-mile, presents super-8 footage of the quiet side streets which run perpendicular to the endless and frantic flow of energy which constitutes the Golden Mile, reminding us that if property costs a few million here, two minutes away, on Donegall Road, you can purchase a house for a few thousand.

Clive Murphy: Why, oh why, oh why?, 2003; courtesy the artist

Using silver tags and nails, Clive Murphy spells out the mournful words ‘Why, Oh Why, Oh Why?’ on an empty shop front. The origin of the text (the title of a Methodist sermon), and its siting in proximity to a Presbyterian Church and an Apostolic Church, encourage a moralistic reading. However, the quivering silver tags beginning to turn rusty against a black background are more reminiscent of the fading glamour of cabaret and live entertainment. Perhaps what is being mourned here is not the lack of faith in God, but the loss of individual expression and the lack of faith in the particular and the local in the face of corporate multi-nationalism.

Continuing on with her fascination for urban myths, Aisling O’Beirn collected anecdotes about people’s experiences on the Golden Mile, which were then disseminated by means of customised mugs and screen savers in i-Browse Internet Café. While remaining light-hearted in content, these tales offer an alternative form of mapping the city and its inhabitants, one which uses humour to challenge the position of power assumed by developers and business men. We are told, for instance, that the public sculpture Airborne Men by Elizabeth Frink, which dorns the outside of the Ulsterbank at Shaftsbury Square, was commonly known by those who worked there as ‘Draft and Overdraft’.

aimnín: Pactolus, gold casting; photo Rory Moore; courtesy the artist

Inside the Ulsterbank, in a glass security box, rested a piece of honeycomb cast in gold, the work of the artist aimnín. Beside it is a piece of text by Ovid relating the story of King Midas, who is invited by Bacchus to choose a gift for himself. Midas asks that all he touch be turned to gold, and is at first delighted with his choice until he finds that he can neither eat nor drink, since everything he tastes turned to gold when it touched his lips. Whilst on a simplistic level the work could be read as a warning to all those who worship gold, it operates more subtly as a reminder that the status of cash in our society is based on an elaborate process of exchange in which receipt of the ‘goods’ (or gold) is forever deferred. The beautifully crafted honeycomb invokes a much more basic desire to possess this object, simply because it is shiny and it sparkles, which was probably why gold was valued in the first place.

John Mathews: from Tonight, let’s get lost, 2003, film still; courtesy the artist

Gold is associated with Apollo, who is also the god of the arts, music and poetry. He is the favoured god of aristocrats and intellectuals, often pitched in polarity with Dionysos (of whom Bacchus is the Roman version), the god of ecstatic and orgiastic union, inebriation and chaotic loss of identity. The Golden Mile could be seen as the battleground where the ongoing conflict between these two forces is played out. As John Mathews’s press release states, this area represents “Commerce by day chaos by night.” Mathews distributed free matches around the cafés and bars of the Golden Mile with a phone number included. The number connected to an answering machine which recorded messages from those roaming the streets in search of a good time. The title of Mathews’s film, Tonight, let’s get lost (screened on the roof of Queen’s Street Studios at twilight) suggests a celebration of the overthrow of Apollonian wisdom in favour of Dionysion reverie, but the film’s imagery presents a more private reflection on the isolation and loneliness of night activity in the centre of town, in which emotions are internalised and communication breaks down.

Helen Sharp: CASUAL REALISM PART iii 'If you can keep your head while all about are losing theirs', installation, 2003; courtesy the artist

In Casual Realism III, Helen Sharp claims that ‘perverseration’, that is: “the application of perverse thought processes in an everyday urban environment,” is to blame for the breakdown of meaningful communication between individuals. Characteristic of her recent work, this installation in Bookfinders asks the viewer to piece together meaning from a number of seemingly random objects and texts, while the performer we expect to unite these disparate elements remains frustratingly absent. The sheet music from Smoke gets in your eyes, a metronome, and a poem by Bukowski which asks why a single dog “appears to have the power of ten thousand gods,” are among the objects included.

The relationship between gods, gold and power is one thread which runs through many of the works in the Golden Mile project. Without falling into the dubious position of presenting themselves as ‘artists with a social conscience’, questions are nonetheless being asked by the artists involved in this project about the nature of power relationships within the city and how it may or may not be possible to make choices as an individual within its systems.

Ruth Jones is a practising artist, writer and curator based in Belfast.

The Golden Mile, Belfast, April 2003

Article reproduced from CIRCA 105, Autumn 2003, pp.82-83.

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