The Suppression and Realisation of my Northern Irish Memory

I've been having a look back through some journal articles that I have collected and found this one [below] by Justin McKeown which has a new relevance for what I am doing at the moment. 

McKeown talks about the problems of 'memory building' and 'normalisation', writing that the former encourages a re-imagining of the past and the latter asks us to remodel ourselves on other Western societies. Both terms suggest a revising of the past in order to form a collective future, which I find extremely problematic.

Northern Ireland crops up in my head a lot when I am thinking and writing these days, maybe because it is a society where memory is very present (in the sense of always being there) and yet very misunderstood. It is rarely framed as an active and temporally present process, as I have come to (re)understand it recently. 

McKeown articulates this when discussing the Troubles Archive, a digital archive about which he writes: 

There is something very attractive about the idea of a digital archive. One of the problems of many archives is that they act primarily as collections and not as discursive bodies. As such, it is hard for users of the archive to enter into direct documented dialogue with the archive. However,with a digital archive the technological potential exists to make it possible for users to not only view the material but also to comment or respond to it and have these responses documented within the archive itself. This is an exciting prospect if one wishes to begin a dialogue surrounding not only the contents of the archive, but also the nature of the Northern Irish imagination as personified through the artworks therein. (2009:3)

I have, and continue to have issues with the idea of the archive, as it triggers an oddly emotional desire to let sleeping dogs lie, to bury the past as it were. My experience of archive in Northern Ireland is as a source of TV news that follows stories of violence, as a way to say, 'the present might be messy, but look how well we are dealing with our past'. My experience of memory work and archiving in Northern Ireland is that it rarely affects my present but constantly reminds me of the conflicted nature of our past, however the digital archive, as articulated by McKeown presents a new potential. 

Ultimately McKeown suggests that instead of trying to create a canon of Northern Irish art we begin to look at the relationship between Northern Irish art and art from elsewhere, and try to understand ourselves in relation to wider cultural production. By doing this we open up the possibility to use culture not as a way to revise our narratives of the past but to understand ourselves through other people's presents and to finally get to grips with the potential of Northern Irish memory.

The Supression and Realisation of the Northern Irish Imagination by Justin McKeown

Mimicing Durham

So my Transultural Memory class will be collaborating with Parasol Unit, creating some sort of event to run alonside Jimmie Durham's show next year. Therefore I have spent some time researching Durham, plotting my approach.

In some ways its a pretty straight forward approach through a shared aesthetic of the unheroic, which I have employed in my practice as a way to talk about the doomed fate of the hero archetype in a contemporary context. Indeed I have echoed many of the material choices he has made in my sculptural practice, though not on purpose. ('Everything has already been said, just not by everyone' Valentin in Erll, Parallax, 2011) And thats the thing about Durham for me. When ever I spend time thinking about his work or his writing or his thinking, I become a perpetual mimic.

I think this is due in part to the fact that I like him most in words. I like him in his own words:

I love plastic of any kind; I like the shape of pipes, tubes […] This plastic tube, I like it very much in the artistic sense, in the art-world sense. It’s very unheroic, unmonumental. A plastic tube is not comical, it’s not strong enough to be comical, but it is never serious. Even the biggest piece of plastic PVC pipe won’t be serious. It will always be plastic tubing, it doesn’t lend itself to being phallic at the same time. You think it would become phallic, but it never does — or only in a silly way, and then it can be a little more humorous. So I like the passivity of it, the non-heroic side of it. (quote from an interview with Rudi Laermans in Afterall)

And here:

The film will not be a documentary, although it will kind of ‘document’ itself. It will be a feature-length film (about 90 minutes) of high artistic merit, and therefore ‘commercial’ in some sense; even if not a ‘summer blockbuster’. We’ll get one of those barges that have no engine, and after taking the stones by truck through the forests to the harbour, load the stones onto the barge and tow them across the Baltic in the direction of Rügen Island and Berlin. Then we’ll sink them, barge and all, in the Baltic Sea (forming a useful artificial deep-water reef to support a variety of marine life). The stones will be free — and light, because they will have been transformed into light and cellulose (the film). But they’ll be eternal, too, as carved granite cannot be, because they will be art, and art is eternal, people say. (J. Durham, Between the Furniture and the Building (Between the Rock and a Hard Place) (exh. cat.), Munich: Kunstverein München, 1998, p.93 taken from Afterall as above)

I especially like him in the words of Anthony Huberman:

Jimmie Durham’s Collected Stones (2002) ...is a series of thirteen short videos that the artist made with his partner Maria Thereza Alves. It doesn’t document performances as much as it asks a video camera to witness small collaborations between the artist and some stones. Since they mostly involve hitting and sometimes breaking objects with different rocks, they seem like small acts of violence, but are nothing of the sort — unless you also say that hitting a nail with a hammer is an act of violence. These collaborations between the artist and his stones involve nothing other than one object defining the state and the shape of another object: the videos capture a moment when a stone alters the configuration of a bed frame, a fridge, a wine glass or a telephone. Some rocks help guide a fridge with a smooth surface to become a fridge with a dented surface, say. Each element, however, has existed in many other states before — this is a story that began thousands of years ago, and Durham is simply adding another chapter to it. - Anthony Huberman, Afterall, Summer 2012

Beyond text he is also pleasing to listen to [from about the 3 min mark]:

However this is all tempered by knowing that in all the ways I like Durham I keep feeling like the butt of the joke:

For Durham, architecture is nothing but organised stone, and language, when it is written down, prevents us from thinking for ourselves. Should a stone get distracted and prefer to deviate, why not listen to it? Did you forget that history is nothing but a collection of stories dancing together?
Unfortunately, if you tell a story long enough, and write it down in enough places, it becomes true. The history of America, for one, began thousands of years before its official story says it did. In quiet protest, Durham keeps telling jokes that only Indians can get, exposing the Western perspective as being written in a language that is incapable of translating concepts alien to it. -  Anthony Huberman, Afterall, Summer 2012

I find myself getting to the end of this post about Durham having made myself into the butt, the problem, the Western perspective personified. And yet I don't really mind, I get it. Or rather I don't get it, and thats ok.  What I have discovered about Durham, my approach, is that I need to look at why I fall dumb around a discussion of his work, why I feel like my voice isn't valid and assume his. His phrase is beautiful, but I think it extends beyond that. And I need to work out if this is a problem, or just the way its supposed to be.

In the meantime I'll just sit here and listen a while longer...

Walid Raad - some sources

A great profile of Raad and the Atlas Group in Bidoun which taught me a lot:

http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/02-we-are-old/profile-walid-raad-the-atlas-group-opens-its-archives-by-kaelen-wilson-goldie/

Also the Art Forum article quoted in the last post:

http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=38161

Walid Raad

A class conversation about Walid Raad has got me thinking. 

While discussing The Atlas Group (www.theatlasgroup.org) and the way which the project uses the formal language of the archive, I wondered whether his work was ever shown in Beirut? It occurred to me that the poignant humour of The Atlas Group makes a lot of sense to an elitist art audience in the West, but I wondered how it played to the viewing public in Beirut, if ever shown there. I was also curious about what the language of archive being used means there and the distance between the interpretations of The Atlas Group's work between its two homes.

Turns out it is currently showing in Beirut! [http://www.sfeir-semler.com/gallery-artists/the-atlas-group-walid-raad/ and [http://www.sfeir-semler.com/beirut/current-exhibition.html] It is more often shown with galleries in Europe than Lebanon and the rest of the region, but what I have read no longer leads me to attribute this to an audience problem. What I have found, instead of an example of art world bias was an example of my own. In looking into this I found myself conducting a (highly unscientific) quantitative analysis of where Raad has shown and scouring articles about his shows trying to create a statistical picture to back up my original theory. What I found instead was that I have little idea of what the arts look like in the Middle East beyond my own assumptions.

Art Forum describe the current improbable growth of the Beirut contemporary art scene thus:

There are more artists, galleries, and nonprofit arts organizations than ever before. Initiatives that began as youthful ambitions and scattershot plans have matured into more or less sustainable institutions. Patrons and financial backers both clean and questionable have begun filtering into the system, offering various forms of funding and support. And still the quality of critical discourse remains bracingly high. “It’s becoming impossible to live here,” the curator Ghada Waked told me two weeks ago, as we were standing outside the opening of a splashy new gallery in Mar Mikhael. “But there is still something about Beirut. There is an urgency to the issues and the discussion of ideas that you don’t find anywhere else. — Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

The article surprised me into acknowledging the extent of my euro-centric bias. I started researching this post looking for proof that Raad’s work only functioned for a Western elite, not because of any cynicism in his work but because of my own assumption that there was no ‘art elite’ in Lebanon to receive the work.  (The idea of art being made for an elite still holds issues for me but that’s for another day.) I am amazed how often this is happening to me recently. I am experiencing a profound and occasionally uncomforatble unpicking of bias since starting my MA. And I couldn’t be happier.

Laundry - Anu Productions

Image: Poster for Laundry by Anu Productions, from http://stagedreaction.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/walking-with-magdalens-laundry-at-the-dublin-theatre-festival/

At The Future State of Ireland Conference Miriam Haughton (UCD) delivered a paper on Anu Productions production Laundry. It was an extremely powerful and emotive paper which led to extensive and valuable discussion of shame in Irish society and how this contributes to the climate of crisis. I am grateful to have heard it.

Laundry (from what I have learned since - I regrettably didn't know about the work until after its run had ended) is an immersive and intimate experience of performance which leads the viewer individually through a former Magdalene laundry on Sean MacDermot street and encounters with actors playing 'Maggies', women  perceived to be fallen, who were incarcerated in work asylums. Lisa Fitzgerald writes: 

The Laundries took their name from Mary Magdalene, who in popular Christian lore is a former prostitute or immoral woman who repents and becomes one of Christ’s disciples. The philosophy behind the Laundries was that ‘fallen’ women – women who had engaged in sexual behaviour outside of marriage – could work and repent there and so be redeemed... They were a response to prostitution and were intended as a rehabilitative response to unsanctioned female sexuality . By the twentieth century the Laundries in Ireland were housed in Convents and offered a community laundry service, though it is well documented that the women working there were not paid for their labour, and by the 1930s were often or normally prevented from leaving the Laundry unless a family member – in some places, a male family member– signed them out. Women were signed into the Laundries because they became pregnant outside of marriage, or were victims of rape or sexual abuse, or were orphaned, or were in various ways disruptive of the dominant social order (including, it seems, that they were too pretty and likely to be a temptation to men). Those entering the Laundries were renamed, and in at least some cases their own names were lost – a number were buried in mass graves within the Convent grounds, their deaths not registered with the State and their given names not recorded.
Fitzpatrick, Lisa (2012) Representing Systemic Violence: The Example of Laundry by Anu Productions. Warwick Politics and Performance Network Working Papers Vol 1:4, University of Warwick, pp.1-2 [Internet publication]

The production by Anu gives voice to the Maggies, as they became known colloquially, but also allows for a  working through of the cultural memory by the audience. The shame of the Magdalene laundries continues to run deep through Irish society. The huge institutions, like the Gloucester Street laundry below, the site of Laundry, dominated the the tenement landscape around it, demonstrating a community complicity in what was happening o the women who were imprison, and often died there.

Image: John Fitzpatrick/Twitter via ibtimes.co.uk

By presenting the performance in the original site of trauma and by leading the audience through intimate encounters with Maggie's it allows for a much needed personal and cultural confrontation of the memory and the culture of complicity. It denies the temptation to relegate the chapter to history, but instead asserts that it must be confronted as a lived and active experience. This is vital considering that the last Magdalene was committed as recently as 1995, and the effects of it still resonate throughout Irish society.

On a personal note Miriam Haughton's paper on the performance brought the tragedy of the Magdalene's back into my consciousness and begged me to engage with it. Previously I had viewed the laundry's a 'the South's shame' something that didn't penetrate the border. Researching this post however I found that there had also been these laundries in Belfast, and that they were not only run by Catholics, but also the Presbyterian church, my religious community. Now more than ever I wished I had experienced Laundry. As it turns out I have my own cultural complicity to bear.

Watch an excerpt of Laundry here, courtesy of Anu Productions:

Looking Back to New Beginnings

A merry confluence of happenstance, luck and inspiration found me working as an intern on The Future State of Ireland conference (www.thefuturestate.org.uk) at Goldsmiths on the 17-18th November 2012. I found myself suddenly engaged with my island in a way that I haven't been since moving from politics into art 4 years ago. In fact I don't think I have ever truly engaged with Ireland as I find myself doing now.

Simultaneously my MA in Contemporary Art Theory has been helping me to deconstruct a number of unhelpful, and frankly judgemental, positions that I have backed myself into. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing I see now, as I work the kinks of these unhelpful contortions out of my system. 

And so I find myself in the most open and affirmative frame of mind that I can ever remember being in. Which is good, since I am also flooded with ideas for writing and projects, overwhelmed with creative drive and a need to make.

The conference left me captured by the troublesome idea of 'Irishness' and more precisely the burden of those seeking to capture or represent it. I want to talk to them, to 'trouble' the idea of Irishness and to start a discussion around the violence that this concept is doing to the collective self-worth of the island. (Thank you www.troublingireland.com bringing the concept of 'troubling into my life! It has fundamentally changed my practice.)

It is unhelpfully easy to communicate Irishness, to make it translate across cultures, with the creators and users of stereotype having much to answer for. For me even thinking about it presents a problem, with the crushing self-doubt of the impostor seeking to block my every advance into the subject. I must continually remind myself that this is a part of the modern discussion of Irishness, the conflicted emotions of an outsider within and an insider without.

So I want to use this blog as a pinboard where I can feel my way through these questions of Irishness, where I can discuss, collect and form ideas that will influence my practice. It will perform as a creative journal, charting my way through the Transcultural Memory module of my MA and hopefully helping me to knit my research and my practice.