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...