C99 Article: "'Perhaps is practically a lie"

 

"'Perhaps' is practically a lie"¹

 

How do you make art now that is true to a trauma that is more than 30 years old? Declan Sheehan has been talking with artist Willie Doherty and writer Dave Duggan about the constructive power of doubt.

 

Since 3rd April 1998, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, also known as the Saville Inquiry, has been sitting in the Guildhall in Derry. Over 381 statements on Bloody Sunday's events have been taken to date, and the Inquiry is still only mid-way through its state-appointed process of establishing the 'truth' about Bloody Sunday². January 2002 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, and the release of two films about the day: Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass, and Sunday, written by Jimmy McGovern. Both, to a greater or lesser extent, involved reconstructions of the day's events shot in situ, in Derry's Bogside, using large numbers of the Derry public as cast and extras.

In late 2001, the Ormeau Baths Gallery featured Double Take, an exhibition of work by the Derry artist Willie Doherty. Double Take featured the work How It Was, a series of digitally manipulated photographs and video installation "set in an abandoned mechanic's garage...two video projections dominate the gallery as a series of voiceovers describe the incidents we witness on screen as something remembered from another time."³ The work was the first time Willie Doherty has collaborated with a writer: the voiceovers were written by Derry writer Dave Duggan, whose recent play based on the Inquiry, Scenes From An Inquiry, premiered on the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Derry.

Doherty and Duggan discussed How It Was with Declan Sheehan in Derry in early February 2002.

 

Willie Doherty: We were both interested in the Inquiry. There it was forming a kind of background for everyone in the town, and we also knew that these two films were being made in and around Derry, and that kind of coincidence was interesting. I was interested in that whole process, that whole dynamic, but I didn't want to make a piece of work that reconstructed any of the events in any way, but that would be more about the larger issues related to that. That idea of trying to restage something, the impact of memory, our inability to remember. I was also interested in staging something in a way, but I wanted to avoid going too much in the direction of set building - so I found a compromise with the abandoned, semi-derelict garage. It had the kind of quality I was looking for - it felt authentic enough as some kind of set, as if someone had used it and then abandoned it, but it also felt kind of artificial enough in some ways. So then, as Dave has said, we devised a scenario or two scenarios around two figures and this place. So it was all tangentially related to these bigger events. It was an attempt to look at the larger issues of restaging things, what that might mean in terms of an artist's output or production, or that of a writer, in relation to this traumatic event that happened thirty years ago.

 

Declan Sheehan: There's perhaps less specificity in your works now. Have changes in your works and changes in the larger political climate here occurred in parallel or have you been feeding off changes in the political climate? A lot of your earlier works were to do with identifying...

 

WD: Yes, specific places, labels...

 

DS: Yes, individuals.

 

WD: Yes, I'm still interested in that, but I think the work changed when at some point I felt that that was very restrictive in terms of what the viewer could do with it. It seemed to close down possibilities for reading the work. I was interested in opening that up again. That's really when I started to shift the work in that other direction. Although I am still quite interested in making the work specific and relevant here, but without the necessity of picking up on specific streets, people or events.

 

Dave Duggan: I think, just to go back to How It Was, and what Willie was saying, one of the critical phases in the thing was when Willie came up with the location. We'd written a couple of scenarios, and they were heading in the right direction but still kind of removed. But the minute Willie got the location, the garage, and we got out there - well the thing for artists, for me, is the search for form. "I have this thing, how do we make it?" So the arrival at the location gave a form to the nascent ideas. That was a defining moment.

 

DS: Willie, in your original idea, and in the scenario, is there only a MacGuffin in the mystery of what actually occurred in that place, or does the original brief state x happened but y and z question themselves about it and never find out? Did you start with a story and then erase?

WD: I think we always had this shared idea that there were certain issues brought up by the Inquiry which were of mutual concern. We both recognised strengths in each other's work that made us think there could be a shared process. We moved on from there, and then we responded to the space. I suppose we responded to the space in different ways. I was responding to it as a visual feast, very excited by a lot of the possibilities in formal ways, how it would look through a lens. And I think Dave was interested in that but also interested in the narrative potential of the space.

 

DS: I presume the actors were asking the usual questions - character, motivation, etc.

 

DD: The really interesting thing in terms of the script is that what we actually handed the actors had no big details in terms of character, motivation, no instructions to become a character or take on a persona. Really the instruction was to perform a set of actions, really to de-saturate the acting job down to just performing a set of actions in, I suppose, as muted a manner as possible.

 

WD: The other interesting thing with regard to the actors is that we separated the script from the action. We didn't actually give them the dialogue until the day we recorded after the four days of shooting in the garage.

 

DS: So in a way the video piece is in fact a true document - the cast when acting didn't know what had happened - it's a true record of events. To open it up a bit, in terms of the thematic of the piece, the work seems to reflect just where this state is at the moment - as does the Bloody Sunday Inquiry really - reflecting that move from in your earlier work identifying individuals, places, groups to now identifying the truth, a direction - although that search for direction you've examined previously (in At the end of the day, 1994).

 

WD: I think How It Was is a piece that's both specific and non-specific. Specific in that it came out of this sense of unease that most people feel around the Inquiry, this idea of a search for this objective truth, that there is this thing, this truth which can be found, can be achieved, and if we can get there it'll automatically be some kind of closure. That notion of a search for truth and closure against the unreliability of human experience, and memory. This is something that Dave is highlighting, in terms of his observing, sitting in the Inquiry, the struggle of witnesses to remember accurately, especially under cross-examination.

That's one strand of it, and looking at the larger political arena, there's this idea again of a kind of resolution, that we could achieve truth or peace or all these larger concepts that seem to provide both an aspiration, but also in some ways hold us back at the same time. I think that's something that we're both interested in. After I made this piece I couldn't really comment on it, I was too closely involved in it. But I think in retrospect it was a useful thing to do. I don't really know where it sits in relation to the two films or the Inquiry itself. I never really wanted it to be part of that framework. It was aimed at being a much more low-key thing, somewhere on the edge of all that. But I still think that some of the issues that we were attempting to point out, about that sense of doubt, and the other side of that, our desire to find a kind of truth in some way, are important issues.

And I think the whole business of making a drama, or not-a-drama, and of using film and video and photography is in some ways central to that. I think the piece is as much about a kind of an absence as what is actually there. Probably more about what's not there. And I felt that very strongly in the photographs, that they were about this absence, spaces rather than the detail you could see. I feel the same about the video piece - the gaps in the dialogue, the discontinuity between the two sequences are the interesting part. For me I think that's maybe where the work is different from the ground that's been covered by the two films, they seem to be driven by narrative. Obviously because of the nature of what they are, they have to fill other agendas as well. At the end of the day they have to be entertainment, people will watch them on TV or rent them from Xtravision or pay for cinema tickets. There's an element within them - I mean entertainment is a crude word - but they have to fulfil another job and we didn't really have to fulfil that requirement.

 

DD: I actually heard the director of one of the Bloody Sunday films talk about arriving at a shared narrative. My own interests are about seeing a multiplicity of narratives. An event will occur and there could be so many different tellings of it, mediated by people's different experiences of it and also their different memories of it.

 

DS: That reference to a shared narrative brings up a reference to William James that I was looking at as background to this:

"Our responsibility to truth is not, for [William] James, a responsibility to get things right. Rather, it is a responsibility to ourselves to make our beliefs cohere with one another, and to our fellow human beings to make them cohere with theirs"⁴

Forget the idea of a fixed concrete truth, or a fixed concrete reality, or a fixed concrete chronicle of events, if we can establish a consensus of events. That's a very dangerous path to go down. If the main aim is to establish a consensus...

 

DD:....then things get left out. And to go back to Willie's point about the search for an objective truth: in a legal process, there are political and social pressures on that. In an art process, those questions are to the one side and there's the possibility of highlighting a multiplicity of narratives and readings that are going to be present and somehow forming a mechanism of holding them all equally, valuing them in some kind of way in a mutual sense. It's very difficult to know how that connects with the public world. But the sense that viewers will see How It Was and that what they make of it is as valid as the next set of people who see it, and that sense of holding those sets of narratives in that form in the video piece, I think is a contribution to the wider process. And I think, with regard to your earlier remarks about doubt, that somehow, if it's not a wrong way to put things, somehow affirming doubt is quite a positive thing.

 

WD: I think for me that was the main thing the work was trying to achieve or address. A lot of my work revolves around the relationship with the viewer, to create a kind of self-consciousness within the viewer in the terms of the processes of looking, reading and producing meaning. Hopefully that reflects back onto these larger political issues. So if we got a little bit towards that, then maybe that's all right. But in itself, the work didn't have to make sense in terms of a narrative embedded somewhere in its structure. To me that was always largely irrelevant. It flies in the face of trying to make the work work as a piece of art somehow, if on the one hand you're trying to undermine the logic within it but trying to have another logic working alongside it.

 

DS: There's a great quote about affirming the power of the perhaps, examining reaching that point of truth and a certain point of contentment or a certain stability, asking does doubt always have to be a nagging doubt, leaving you edgy and wary, or can you embrace the potential of multiple readings and multiple truths, where does that leave you individually.5 Just today I was thinking that, going through that earlier phase in Willie's work of identifying the other and the self, onto this point now of trying to establish truths of an event or doubts of an event, there seems to be a religiosity to the whole work. Especially as we all come from such a religious place, everyone's background here is religious to a huge degree for life in contemporary western society. We all have this shared background of beliefs and doubts.

 

WD: It's funny looking at the piece again, I hadn't looked at it for a couple of months. Some of the movement within it seems to mimic a ritual quality, which is interesting in terms of beliefs and doubts being tied up with religious matters. I hadn't actually been conscious of that at the time but there is a certain kind of pace within it that seems to reflect that in some way.

 

DS: That's a very difficult force to embrace, that force of doubt - consider the force of doubt in a relationship, or that to doubt your religious beliefs could remove you from your family or community. It's very difficult to establish as a safe means of enquiry.

 

WD: The other issue of doubt around this is the validity of the artwork itself, in the sense of why did we make it in the first place. That was something I experienced after the making of this work, both in relation to these larger events, but also just in terms of why did I make this thing, what's it for or about? Possibly that's related to the process a lot of creators go through, there's an element of self-doubt within the process itself. I didn't look at this thing for two months after it, I didn't really know what it was about or understand it any more, and had to step back from it.

 

DS: How does How It Was - and specifically those doubts about it that you mentioned - fit into the chronology of you coming back to Ireland from Berlin? Was it the first major piece you made since you returned?

 

WD: It was the first video piece I'd made since, yes.

 

DS: Have you felt a different compulsion on you, on your work since you returned here?

 

WD: I've felt quite differently about the work I'm doing now since making this piece. It was something I really wanted to do, to explore the presence of language, spoken or written, in my work. I think of myself primarily as a visual artist, but I'm interested in how language sits within that practice. So this was something I wanted to do, just to explore this process, find out a little bit more about it, play it through to some extent. But in the two other things I've made since November - two video pieces and some photographs - I've felt no compulsion to have any text with them at all, any voiceovers or narrative. For a couple of reasons: I'm quite interested in the visual again, the image standing on its own, and I just need a bit more time to think about this business of writing, that part of the imagination. Because I think that fundamentally what interests me are images, that's how I see things, how I respond to things. But about the Inquiry, to go back to the start of this whole thing, it seems based around language. That's the primary focus of its processes, to acquire this kind of evidence, which is not visual but written in a way or oral.

 

DS: It amazed me, the amount of technology used there in the Inquiry, used to mediate truth, mediate language. Willie, you've covered Bloody Sunday itself in work before, which was on show again at the Orchard last year (30 January 1972, 1993). Again, taking the two together would very clearly highlight changes in your work in terms of that move from specificity.

 

WD: When I made that first piece in '93, that was way before any talk about an Inquiry and Bloody Sunday occupied a much lower-key space in our imagination, and at that time I was interested in possibly the same things - this gap between what we saw, what we believe we saw, and what we thought we might have seen - those different variations on the same thing.

 

DS: Dave, you've tackled this theme as well, in the new play.

 

DD: In Scene No. 5, A Library, the witness is asserting that it's ok to have read the books and seen the videos (on Bloody Sunday) and they are trying to separate out the two things - memory and knowledge. But even as the witness asserts that, for me they are two separate things in abstract terms but in real terms, they all end up inside your head and things get mixed. To go back to the doubt theme, I would be cautious about doubting the credibility of a witness in any event just because they read a book about it afterwards. There is a way in which the two things complicate each other, and that piece in the play acknowledges this complication. The search for truth, in the wider sense, is probably better served by at least acknowledging this complication between memory and knowledge and how they weave together.

 

DS: In terms of consensus value - perhaps it seems to be a very specific consensus I suppose, because even in the Loyalist community there isn't that consensus - but there is in the majority community on the West Bank of the Foyle the sense that this is the consensus - like the idea that truth should be the shared experience, it's almost like the shared narrative is the search for the narrative.

 

WD: In a lot of the work that I now make, which you characterized as being the second phase of my work, one of the things I try to find in the kind of images I use is something akin to that, this idea of images we plug into as shared experience, whether that's as a result of our shared experience as cinema-goers or that we all watch certain kind of television programmes or that we read newspapers and magazines, and consume advertising in a particular kind of way. But I think, as Dave said, at the end of the day all these various strands of information, no matter what source they come from, whether from fiction or from fact or through other forms of retelling, they end up in your head. A lot of the work I make tends to tap into this, what I call these kinds of pre-existing images, you know. That's something that I try to bring to bear on all the work I make, but I think it was also to some extent present within this work, in the sense that when I saw the location I thought, well, we all know what this place is about already, we could all bring various stories to bear on it, which allowed us to not have to tell the story. That kind of dynamic is something which is very present, and I think it's something we both understood and acknowledged about each other's work. The work I've just finished making (RE-RUN, which will represent Britain at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, this March 23 to June 2) has a central image of a man in a suit running at night across the lower deck of Craigavon Bridge, which is this kind of industrial landscape, and our scene is the man in a kind of red light, a kind of urban scene which could be a scene in any number of movies.

But there are other kinds of possibilities within it. The piece is being shown as two video projections, one where the guy is running towards the camera, the other where he is running away, and the camera is moving with him in both cases. It could be read specifically in the context of here, even in the context of Bloody Sunday, or it may not. But I'm interested in that kind of possibility of touching on those kinds of experiences and the way in which we process images. For me with this new work, the guy running over the bridge, there's a kind of nightmarish vision, and I spoke to Charles Merriweather about it last weekend, who's writing a text about it. He was sitting somewhere in LA, and it was interesting what he had to say about it, in relation to some of my other work, the work you mentioned, At The End Of The Day, where the car is trapped on a road, and I don't really see this new work in the same way as him, as being about being caught in one position, not able to make progress. There could be a way in which this work How It Was could be seen as similarly pessimistic, in the sense that there is no kind of resolution to it, it just repeats and repeats, it doesn't take us anywhere - but in taking us nowhere it doesn't actually take us anywhere bad either.

¹Jacques Derrida, trans. George Collins, Politics of Friendship, London: Verso, 1997. An old German proverb, quoted by philosopher Rodolphe Gasche.
²See the Inquiry website for full details, transcripts, background etc: http://www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk.
³Gallery information sheet on Double Take, Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2001.
⁴Richard Rorty, Religious faith, intellectual responsibility and romance, in Ruth Anne Putnam (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
⁵"The rap of the 'perhaps' not only effects a catastrophic inversion, a reversal of the tradition - already paradoxical ('O my friends, there is no friend') - it provokes the avowal of the opposite, the confession of an error that is not foreign to the truth." Jacques Derrida, op. cit.; see also all of Chapter 2, Loving in Friendship: Perhaps - the Noun and the Adverb, featuring Derrida's analysis of Nietzsche's use of 'perhaps'.

Declan Sheehan is a writer on art and film, and Director of the Context Gallery.