Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty, The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (installation view)  Courtesy of Matt's Gallery

Willie Doherty, The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (installation view) As above.

We have been talking about the distinction between collective and collected memory in class recently and the latter has been making me think about Willie Doherty, whose work I have been revisiting since his talk at the RCA last week.

James E. Young wrote:

...in an increasingly democratic age, in which the stories of nations are being told in the multiple voices of its everyday historians - i.e., its individual citizens - monolithic meaning and national narratives are as difficult to pin down as they may be nostalgically longed for. The result has been a shift away from the notion of national 'collective memory'. Here we recognize that we never really shared each others actual memory of past or recent events, but that in sharing common spaces in which we collect our disparate and competing memories, we find common (perhaps even a national) understanding of widely disparate experiences and our very reasons for recalling them. (From Memory and Monuments after 9/11, pp80-81 in Crownshaw, Kilby and Rowland (2010) The Future of Memory Oxford: Berghahn Books pp77-92)

Young advocates for the creation of spaces that understand memory as inherently disparate, instead of Halbwachs model which despite its allowance for individuals to belong to multiple groups insists on a unified memory within that group. Essentially collected memory makes allowances for conflicting memories thereby acknowledging that it is an inherent part of memory.

This brings me back to Doherty and his work The Only Good One is a Dead One, described on the Matt's Gallery website thus:

The Only Good One is a Dead One is a double screen video projection installation. On one screen the artist uses a handheld video camera to record a night time car journey, while the second screen shows the view from inside a car which is stationary on the street. The accompanying soundtrack is constructed from the interior monologue of a man who is vacillating back and forth between the fear of being the victim and the fantasy of being an assassin... The Only Good One is a Dead One forces the viewer to speculate about what might happen and to choose between innocence and guilt, Catholic or Protestant. It undermines any certainties about the truth and exists in parallel with mainstream mediated images of Ireland.This co-existence creates a gap where the unspeakable and unspeaking face of violence is given a voice, where the victim and killer confront each other and the identities of murderer and volunteer are questioned.To do otherwise is to accept the status of ‘legitimate target’.

The viewer of this work is brought into a space of directed conflict between cultural memory in Northern Ireland, with the Northern Irish viewer especially forced to recognise the violent and ugly truth of their own assumptions. In so doing the piece creates a space of collected memory, foregrounding the conflict and demanding acknowledgement of it.