Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Dublin - Willie Doherty: Empty - Kerlin Gallery - October, November 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | Willie Doherty: Local solution II, 2006 c print on aluminum with plexiglass, 121.9 x 152.4 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery | 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… This, perhaps apocryphal, clash of fictional necessity with something like elemental reality, where media stereotyping meets the messy contingencies of everyday life, comes to mind in contemplating an unlikely outbreak of fine weather in the recent work of Willie Doherty. In Local solution and Show of strength , two series of absorbing new photographs, Doherty has set representative bits and pieces of the customary iconography of ‘conflict’ in contemporary Northern Ireland – flagpoles, security cameras – against great expanses of open sky. Blunt symbols of social control and the aggressive defense of nonnegotiable limits are therefore combined with potentially pleasing evocations of an unbounded world beyond. And yet, despite the difficulty and danger implied by the edgy, often off-kilter, close-ups of brutalizing mechanisms and materials of conflict, it may be the dominant stretches of the great blue yonder that are most profoundly jarring.  | | Willie Doherty: Local solution IV , 2006, c print on aluminum with plexiglass, 121.9 x 152.4 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery | Just as these skies seduce, they mystify. There is a captivating chromatic intensity to these cobalt skyscapes; but what is it exactly that we are drawn towards? Does this newly dominant non territorial – nonterrestrial – context offer a refreshing, urgently sought, reminder of a bigger picture, suggesting a space that persists above and beyond our restricting sign-systems and human squabbles? And so, perhaps, is a liberating metaphor of post-Troubles optimism proposed? Or, frustratingly, have we encountered a further ‘fiction’: a fantasy rooted in quite conventional and thoroughly ‘cultural’ associations of nature’s scale and splendour? Such a construct, of course, may continue to mask social division where it is mobilized in the service of trade and tourism – vital considerations in the context of post-ceasefire economic regeneration. (And perhaps it is worth noting in passing that the term ‘blue-sky thinking’ is a recently popularized and fatuous addition to the banal lexicon of business management, identifying a kind of open-ended corporate brain-storming.) Doherty’s densely layered manipulations of media codes and viewer expectations have long involved the holding of contradictory messages and incompatible meanings in an uneasy balance – his work functioning, as Caoimhín McGiolla Léith has observed, according to a logic of “dual articulation.” As such, photographs such as these, which appear to plunder an all-too-familiar image repertoire, are ultimately resistant to easy categorization and premature critical ‘closure’. The anxieties prompted by Doherty’s ongoing interest in exploring a terrain vague between image and reality were also to be experienced in viewing the film Empty , which premièred alongside the sky photographs at Doherty’s recent Kerlin Gallery exhibition. In Empty we see a series of fixed views of an office block and its environs, the scenes showing the imposing building in a state of steadily advancing dereliction and decay. The looped film moves again and again from dawn through to dusk and as the light and surrounding weather conditions slowly change, we repeatedly scrutinize the building’s exterior, examining it for any further revealing information, hoping, perhaps, for clues as to the former function of this abandoned structure. Immediately, given the longstanding concerns of Doherty’s work, it would seem reasonable to suppose that the fragmentary views of this forgotten place allow us to piece together a metaphor of contemporary Northern Ireland as a crumbling bureaucratic (or corporate) edifice. Doherty’s considered formal focus on architectural features – order and organization being measured against disorder and dilapidation – might in this light be understood as a strongly focused symbolic reflection on political entropy. Yet, there seems 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 insist on the stubborn withholding of evidence in Doherty’s film – the protracted gazing on the deserted building ultimately being a process of surveillance without end, research without resolution. Rather than practicing confident socio-political critique, then, Doherty’s film enters the realm of the unknown: the secret history of the unidentified building will remain ever unavailable and the role and value of visual documentation is potentially brought into question. In this regard, Empty might recall the disquieting, lingering view of a Paris home that opens Michael Haneke’s disturbing surveillance drama Caché – a film centering on how the private past of a media personality is intimately connected with repressed elements of French history. Or, perhaps, there is an echo of Tacita Dean’s elegiac recent work Palast , in which the former government building of the German Democratic Republic is observed from a distance, the film contemplating how this crumbling building “concealed its history in the opacity of its surface.” In Palast there is a play of reflections on the windows of this modern ruin that has an almost spectral effect and there is arguably a corresponding ghostliness to the manner in which reflected images of moving clouds and darkening skies in Empty turn the solid structure into a highly unstable, shape-shifting semblance of actual, physical presence. Doherty’s haunting of a nowunpopulated place has therefore an outcome which is itself somehow haunted by the instability of any effort to capture any tangible present moment. In this regard the film Empty and its affiliated series of photographic works bring to mind Fredric Jameson’s description of the spectral: it 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.” Declan Long is a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Dublin - Willie Doherty: Empty - Kerlin Gallery -
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