 |  |  |
Seán McSweeney: Saltwater Land, 1990, oil on board, 25.5 x 35.5 cm; courtesy the artist
x 61cms; courtesy the artistTheo McNab: Painting G1/9, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 81 | Seán McSweeney: Bogland, oil on board, 22 x 31 cm; courtesy NCAD |
A View of Post-war
Irish Landscape Painting
In twentieth century post-war Irish painting of the landscape there is a tendency, within diverse artistic styles and over many decades, to produce images of a kind of liminal wasteland. This may be an ingrained semiotic response to the symbolic value the land holds for the post-colonial subject.
In twentieth-century Ireland the visual arts developed in an eccentric way in certain respects. Rather than simply mirroring Modernist developments in Europe or the USA (which it has oft been accused of), the production of art, having been measured against local political and social changes, hybridised in particular ways. This did not happen in a climate of ignorance or indifference. I suggest that it was part of a response to the huge imperative of that part of this island which separated early in the century from the rule of a major colonial power. Thus the identity of Ireland was radically redefined, in real as well as in notional terms, with the formation of the new State in 1922 and the creation of the Republic in 1949. It could be said, therefore, that the term "post-war" has a particular ambiguity in Ireland for it can be read against the theatre of both internal and external redefinition of national boundaries through the violent means of war: post-war in Ireland has a hook of particular significance within the wider boundaries of twentieth century European history.
Perhaps it is to be expected that within the visual arts the most interesting reverberations of this inflection might be sought in the genre of landscape painting. One of the traditional languages of European landscape painting has been that which expresses ownership: it has had an earnest agenda and spoken of territorial possessions whether national or dynastic. Throughout centuries of European painting, from the Classical world on, landscape was used as the setting for the mythological adventures of the superhuman gods and heroes. It was used as the setting for, or as evidence of the spectacular achievements of earthly dispensers of power. Typically it has been used as the backdrop for portraits of the ruling classes. Museums, galleries and private collections are crammed with the pictorial proofs of the cultivation of controlling hierarchies. Take away the fruits of this patronage, whether commanded by Pope, king or multinational banks, so to speak, and the walls of our leading collections will be very much emptier.
Power is written in the landscape around us. For landscape read territory, for territory read possession and for possession read power. This is the way the world goes and it has defined itself to itself in this, as in all respects, through symbol. So how may the genre of landscape painting have shown itself in the particular context of the formation and evolution of the Republic of Ireland? Among varying approaches which are reflected in diverse artistic styles there has been and still is an odd tendency which shows up as a characteristic of several artists' work. This is one in which the landscape has been configured, consciously or unconsciously, as an undifferentiated zone; a place of nothingness. This is conveyed through the literal organisation of the imagery, both in terms of the formal language of painting and the content. Let us view this silent, shadowless, motionless, timeless plateau where there are no tracks to follow and consider whether it can be read as a symbolic space that reflects transition: a threshold.
In the post-WW2 period, throughout the forties and fifties, in an atmosphere of censorship and repression, a number of Irish artists, working in Ireland and abroad, produced work based on the landscape which has been described as poetic and ambiguous in its treatment. 1 Such artists, who included for example Patrick Collins and Tony O'Malley, did not constitute a group but were idiosyncratic and individualistic in their approaches. It has often been contended that it was the oppressive atmosphere which united them insofar as it gave rise to a particular way of working with the landscape which brought about misty, layered imagery; a whatever you say, say nothing kind of thing. And to some extent there might be some truth in this. But rather than, or as well as, this being symptomatic of the residue of evasiveness born of some folk response to colonial domination, reapplied in the context of the new internal machinery of oppression, it may be that this way of representing the landscape came to show a new and specific kind of realisation of its symbolic potential.
As time went on, a new generation of artists engaged enthusiastically for the first time with international ideas. Young artists, who had been born during or after the Second World War, easily absorbed the new cultural values which swept across both Europe and America. Irish versions of Pop art and Abstraction appeared to a largely mystified viewing public and provoked, to the joy of the artists who longed to escape from parental strictures, not to mention what they saw as the tyranny of academicism, severely conservative and poorly informed critical reactions that were easy for them to disregard. 2 But even in these heady times, there continued to be a strand of deeply idiosyncratic painting based on the landscape that carried the liminal resonances of what had come before, even though individual artists produced work which varied in many ways in appearance. It is this kind of painting which brings us back to the question of what sense of Irish identity may be represented.
Let us consider a few examples. Patrick Collins made landscapes which hid in layers or veils of thin paint. The limits of the image were often defined by fractured borders or framing elements. Tony O'Malley often used similar devices of containment, slicing landscape into dark coloured shapes. This creation of a "window" into other worlds can be applied to a surprising number of individuals, who continued to work in otherwise different styles over the last forty or so years in Ireland. Noel Sheridan has consistently produced a kind of 'inside-out', landscaped void, a space which seems about to implode. Theo McNab's images often resemble schematised, undifferentiated empty landscapes which are divided by linear structure and united by layered tones. Oliver Whelan has recently moved towards a more complete abstraction of the visible world into an overall surface pattern of paint. The curious effect is to draw attention to the invisible distance between the constituent marks of the painting. What these artists have in common, although their resulting works are not literally similar, is the creation of a world that appears to hang between the intervals of time and space.
A really important and unusual characteristic of this kind of work is the featureless quality of the landscapes: no man-made structures, no figures or birds or animals, no trees, no fields, no houses, no traces of Man's presence in signs of cultivation, no narrative. Nothing. No-man's-land. Charles Brady's landscapes, especially his earliest works, epitomise this lack. Often the small images are simply divided by a horizon line and the rest is treated as a stark sweep of uninterrupted land or sky. Seán MacSweeney's representations of the land or sea often show the same ascetic harshness: undifferentiated nature. And yet, in spite of their apparent emptiness, such paintings are somehow capable of exerting a hypnotic fascination and contain a deeply emotional undertow.
What is most striking is the metaphorical silence which is generated and to understand this we must enter the symbolic world and come to terms with the existential semiotics which empower an individual viewer's potential to take charge of the signifying process. The strategies of our instincts and intellect are formed inside the cultural space. Consider the quotation chosen by Luke Gibbons to introduce his article on post-colonialism and Irish identity:
There might be more to be learned through a careful tracing, along paths not already guarded by the intellectual patrols of neo-imperialism, of the border lines where comparative experiences of imperial victimisation and resistance meet and separate. These paths and borders, of course, are not to be found on any Cartesian plane, nor will they stay in the same place as we change our relation to them... 3
It seems that what we have here is an elegant metaphorical description of a strategy for dealing with and subverting the language of colonisation. In order to grasp the sign, to undo the codes of the system, to escape the muteness of the colonised subject, a semiotic space has to be found. This involves a moment of existential choice and the breaking-free from ready-made meaning. For our purposes of literally turning this concept into a painted-landscape equivalence, the words of Eero Tarasti can be borrowed. First he reminds us that a discursive space has to be taken in the same way as physical space, quoting Le Corbusier along the way: the first cultural act of man is to take possession of space. Then he explains how to influence the signifying process and create a new (transcendental [ sic ]) space:
one has to leave space around every subject and society, a space which transcends words, gestures, signs and objects. That space must be, first of all, empty; it is not the same as the semiosphere, which is already filled with signs and signifying units. 4
That an awareness of the power of the sign has been deeply ingrained, one way or another, in the Irish psyche can be shown through more than the representations of the last century of the second millennium. It echoes further than Beckett's silences. For instance ancient Irish mythology and early hagiography is full of symbolism designed to ease the passage of change from paganism to christianity. During this period there is the constant invocation of the symbolic potency of "liminality" or rites of passage or border crossings: "the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling...therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world." 5
A rather startling, literal demonstration of this concept occurs in an account of how St. Brigit was born: "...in the morning when the sun had risen, the druid's bondmaiden came home carrying a vessel of fresh milk and, when she had put one foot across the threshold ( trans limen ) of the house and the other foot outside, she fell into a sitting position upon the threshold ( super limen ) and bore a daughter. 6 Numerous examples exist of liminal symblism in Irish myth. The message, which persuades belief towards a new system, is written in the mechanism of the colonising act of signification.
The particular kind of no-man's-land Irish landscape painting which concerns us here, shows both timeless, primal, atavistic characteristics together with--and here's the paradox--expressions of belonging to a liminal world; a world of borderlands, of transition. The word "threshold" implies something exists on either side; transition implies something before and after. In this zone, as in the unconscious if it exists, time is and is not. So there is an exquisite contradiction in this approach to painting: these spaces are existentially void; they are semiotically blank and therefore essentially unbounded. What has this to say about the definition of Irish identity in the changing historical twists of the last century? It has to do with deferring the answer.
Acknowledgment: Thank you Seán and Sheila McSweeney for your kind assistance.
1 The so-called poetic genre was first evaluated by Frances Ruane in the essay The Celtic Imagination in The Delighted Eye catalogue, The Arts Council of Ireland, 1980, no page numbers. A similar analysis persists: "Nowhere is the ambivalence of the land as a subject stronger than in Ireland."--Christina Bridgwater in the catalogue Poetic Land--Political Territory, Contemporary Art from Ireland , Sunderland 1995, no page numbers.
2 The phenomenon of youth culture was invented and pervaded every aspect (fashion, music, etc.) of everyday life.
3 Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise , 1992, cited by Luke Gibbons, Unapproved Roads: Post-colonialism and Irish Identity, Distant Relations , ed. Trisha Ziff, New York, 1996, p. 56.
4 Eero Tarasti, On post-colonial semiotics, European Journal of Arts Education , Vol. 2, Issue 2, July 1999, pp. 70-71.
5 A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (English translation of 1908 original Les rites de passage ), 1960, pp. 20-21.
6 Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature , Maynooth, 1990, p. 185ff.
Dr. Sue McNab is a lecturer in the history of art and research supervisor at the NCAD. She specialises in medieval and modern Irish art.
