Issue 118, Winter 2006 - the Vacuum and the Vacuous.
Circa 118: Article  |  | | Factotum: cover of ‘Satan’ issue of The Vacuum published June 2004; courtesy Factotum | Factotum: cover of ‘God’ issue of The Vacuum , published June 2004; courtesy Factotum | On 15 December 2004, a grey double-decker bus toured Belfast with the word ‘Sorry’ obscuring its windows at the back and sides. Protesters outside the City Hall carried placards with slogans such as ‘So, So Sorry’, ‘All Apologies’ and, more obscurely,‘Down with that Sort of Thing’. And there was a Sorry Santa. ‘Sorry Day’ was not quite an artistic event, and not quite a protest. It was, though, a physical manifestation on the streets of Belfast of what had previously been mainly confined to the iconoclastic, anarchic and unpredictable pages of The Vacuum , a free ‘arts’ newspaper distributed across the city more or less monthly. Factotum, the organisation behind The Vacuum , had found themselves in dispute with Belfast City Council, who were partial (and slightly unwitting) funders of The Vacuum . Some members of the City Council had taken a dislike to the dual ‘God’/ ‘Satan’ issues of The Vacuum from the summer of 2004. The outcome was that the City Council had demanded an apology from Factotum for the offence it had caused, and said that it would retain payment of a grant already awarded to The Vacuum until an apology was forthcoming. As Richard West, one of the editors of The Vacuum , wryly noted in a letter to the Council, there was no suggestion as to what form this apology might take. So The Vacuum invented its own sardonic apology, and ‘Sorry Day’ and a special ‘Sorry’ issue of the newspaper followed. The story of The Vacuum ’s dispute is unfinished, and has the potential to stretch out for some time to come. Most obviously, the Council’s decision borders on censorship, and for that reason may yet be found to be untenable. However, the case is also a lesson to all artists and arts organisations working in an era in which grant aid is necessarily the main means of financial sustenance. The Vacuum has deliberately pushed at the boundaries of what the arts authorities in Belfast can accept, but in doing so the editors have provoked a reaction which indicates a pressure that is always subtly at work in funded or grant-aided art, and that is that the funder can, in some way or other, be tempted to dictate the nature of what is produced. Belfast City Council’s heavy-handed approach only reveals this in starker terms than usual. Some of the elected members of the Council seem unable to grasp the idea that the art they fund may have things to say or impressions to make which do not reflect what they imagine their electorate to be thinking. In fact, The Vacuum ’s argument with the Council reveals not so much a desire to censor as a desire to make the arts bland and vaguely agreeable to an equally bland political agenda. The Vacuum began life in a haphazard way, piggy-backing on an existing and anodyne publication called Citywide . Having tested the formula, The Vacuum took over and Citywide disappeared, leading to the marvellously resonant and memorable advertising line, “The Vacuum; it’s citywide,” which is still one of the best commentaries on post-Peace Process Belfast to have been formulated. And so themed Vacuums began to appear, leading up to the offending ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ issues, published simultaneously in June 2004. The Vacuum has always been, to use an appropriate metaphor, a broad church, and these two issues were as eclectic as ever. When the storm began about their ‘offensive’ nature, West was at pains to point out, in interviews, that the issues contained serious articles on church architecture and on theology, and a piece by an Assistant Pastor at Jordanstown Christian Centre. Those who came to be outraged pointed to articles such as I peed in church (actually a memoir of childhood) , and others which, in extremis , they imagined were promoting Satanism because discussing it.  | | Factotum: cover of ‘Sorry’ issue of The Vacuum published on 'Sorry Day', 15 December 2004, a satirical response to Belfast City Council's demand that Factotum apologise to the Council and the citizens of Belfast; courtesy Factotum | The controversy first made an appearance in Belfast City Council’s Development Committee on 1 July 2004. After discussing The Vacuum , the committee wanted the Arts Subcommittee to consider asking to have sight of allfunded material before giving out grants. This was obviously preposterous, both practically speaking and for its brazen introduction of censorship, but it did kick off a series of discussions of The Vacuum at Council meetings, while in the media Councillors voiced their (generally religious) objections and offence at the “dirt and filth” in The Vacuum , to quote Councillor Jim Rodgers. On 1 September 2004 the Council overturned its own Arts Committee’s recommendation. Ignoring its own Director of Legal Services, the Council decided to make any further monies granted to The Vacuum dependent on the provision of “an apology for any offence which may have been caused to Members of the Council and the citizens of the City,” and that an undertaking would be given that any future publications would “meet such criteria as may be established by the Council.” Looking back at the controversy, it is easy to be misled into seeing the vociferous, if ill-formed, objections of some of the councillors as demonstrating a kind of DUP/ Free Presbyterian reaction to the arts, in much the same way as that ideological set demonstrated against the Gilbert and George exhibition in Belfast some years ago. However, a look at the division of councillors on the matter is more sobering. All DUP members voted in favour of the resolution, as did the UUP and the PUP. But equally all members of the SDLP also voted in favour, with only the Alliance Party and Sinn Féin against. Quite why this issue should necessarily lead to such a split on party lines is, in one sense, unimaginable, except that party politics work thus in Northern Ireland. That the SDLP joined in the vote which punished The Vacuum suggests that the confessional (as opposed to purely sectarian) aspects of Northern politics are strong as ever, and that the mainstream parties have a fear that if they are not seen to defend the religious sensibilities which they think their electorate has, then they will be punished for their laxity. Obviously, yet ironically, it was this pervasive and in many ways unexamined religiosity which The Vacuum was poking at with its ‘God’/ ‘Satan’ issues. A different perspective is provided by thinking about numbers. The Vacuum distributes a print run of 20,000, meaning that, by most media audience measurements, somewhere near 30,000 people potentially read the newspaper. The total votes for all DUP candidates in the 2005 elections to Belfast City Council was 25,722, and only Sinn Féin had a larger vote at 30,351. We can safely assume that the possible 30,000 Vacuum readers are not the same 30,000 people who voted for Sinn Féin, and the conclusion then must be that there is a serious democratic deficit somewhere in the city. The Vacuum ’s vibrancy, its satirization of parochialism and yet its retention of a sense of Belfast as a living city, mean that it represents Belfast in a way that its councillors never could. The ‘God’/ ‘Satan’ controversy brought these two constituencies of the city into frictional and direct contact, making it all the more darkly humorous that the Council had been blithely funding a publication which it did not like without really giving it any consideration. West eventually applied for a Judicial Review of the City Council’s decision to withhold further funding while waiting for an apology, citing, in short, the freedom-ofthought- and-conscience and freedom-of-speech Articles (9 and 10) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The verdict, delivered on 4 May 2006, was that judicial review would not be granted. The judge held that Factotum (publishers of The Vacuum ) had not been prevented in their freedom of speech, since they had gone on publishing The Vacuum (and, as the judge noted, making fun of the Council in the process). And their freedom of thought, conscience and religion was unaffected, according to the judge, because they had not been compelled to or prevented from practising any religion (a curiously Northern Irish way to read Article 9, assuming that it only refers to religious and not critical conscience). This judgement may not be the end of the legal process. The practical outcome, for all the hysteria, is that Belfast City Council’s Annual Funding for Culture and Arts, Guidance Notes , state that on published material associated with grant-aided projects the following words shall appear: “The views expressed are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Council.” A long way from the madness of proposing that the Council vet every word, image, opinion and sentiment which it funds.  | | A group photo for the press of demonstrators on Sorry Day, 15 December 2004 ;courtesy Factotum | The Vacuum ’s ability to ruffle the feathers of some members of Belfast City Council is really a measure of the newspaper’s success, and that it became caught up in such a fracas is a sign of how ‘culture’ is becoming a dead sign of the marketing of Belfast by the City Council. Interestingly, the Development Committee of the Council, way back in July 2004, had an objection to The Vacuum which was subsequently lost in the process which saw the ‘offence’ turned into a purely religious one. The Development Committee were equally worried that The Vacuum did not “contribute positively to the image of Belfast.” This notion 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). Culture in the city is now to 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 – ‘bed nights’ (ie hotel stays) is a favoured mechanism. That ‘positive’ image is not long turning into an always utterly neutral one, afraid of causing offence both in the city and for outsiders. Strangely, Belfast has found a way of turning its militaristic murals into the highlight of the city tour – that The Vacuum exists in a mode outside the recognised ‘communities’ (nationalist, unionist and liberal) makes it incapable of such assimilation. The peace dividend for Northern Ireland may eventually be financial. Most obviously at the moment, it is more simply in the fact that a substantial number of people are alive now who wouldn’t have been otherwise. But it is glaringly the case that Belfast, and the Northern Ireland in general, are more starkly divided in sectarian terms than they ever have been. According to some evidence, the city is even more rigidly sectarianised by geographical area than ever. The result for culture and the arts is that post-Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland has tended to settle into cultural forms which confirm what sociological studies show – that the two sectarian identities are stronger and further apart now than ever. The Vacuum does not take part in this quiet apartheid; nor does it gently cajole from some liberal position which assumes that the people of Belfast have a shared history around which they can rally. It does not encourage the citizens of Belfast to forget their past and live happily in an ecumenical future. In fact, it does not really engage with politics in a narrow sense at all. Instead, The Vacuum is gloriously unrecognisable to mainstream Northern Irish ‘culture’. Adopting Roland Barthes’ rather despairing notion that sarcasm is now the only condition of truth, The Vacuum uses irony, parody, seriousness and above all an unsuppressable energy, not to make a point, but to make itself. In this it has more to say, and to say better, about Belfast than arts which might, conceivably, contribute ‘positively’ to Belfast’s image. Colin Graham is Lecturer in English at NUI Maynooth and co-editor of The Irish Review .
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