Hilary Robinson
My talk contains snapshots about living and working in Belfast and I want to begin by making five brief points. In a timeslot of 15 minutes, I could have selected to discuss any number of different points or snapshots, what I have selected represents only one particular slice, a selection. Secondly, this word "internationalism" is a word I have always had real problems with and prefer to resist using it if at all possible because if you buy into the concept of internationalism, you buy into the concept of nation states and that’s quite a difficult concept to deal with and one that needs disrupting. So I prefer to think of things locally and globally rather than internationally.
The third point is, when I come to North America - though this is my first time in Canada - in the United States, when I come to speak about Irish artists and Irish women artists in particular I find I have to both disrupt and resist certain expectations. I find that I have to disrupt an assumption about Irishness which is generally steeped in a kind of sentimental attachment to notions of authenticity , of primitivism, which I think is a form of racism, even if it’s couched in "positive" terms. Part of my resistance is that I do not want to be seen as representing Irish women as I’ve said its not a view I can put forward in such a timespan. I have brought a booklist for those who are interested. The fourth point I want to make is that feminism is not a methodology, it’s a politics and as such it takes its place in a web of other political positions so I will be discussing the day-to-day political positions within Belfast and fold this back onto a feminist position.
My last point is, if I lose any friends by the end of what I have to say, I am not talking in simple terms of positions within a binary opposition, I am speaking from one position within a web of other power positions - so even the accent I speak with and the complexity of my own position , needs to be considered. You will understand this when I get to the end......
The whole of Northern Ireland might be described as a border between notions of Irishness and notions of Britishness. Borders imply a strengthening of identity, not a weakening: it is at the border that the identity is defined, given its edge. Thus in Belfast you will find, for example, a loyalty to the constitutional monarchy more fervent than that found in London, where monarchism tends to be replaced with a sentimental attachment to an individual backed up with spurious references to the tourist trade. Another example could be a commitment to the Irish language that many in Dublin would find bemusing or shrug off as an unwelcome reminder of schooldays. Borders also imply a binary opposition - polarity rather than plurality - and a slippage into identity politics, rather than articulation of developed, and developing, political positions. And yet there are artists working here, people making art, which, if it means anything at all, must surely mean the articulation of possibilities. The task for me in trying to provide an audience In the USA context, this is to do so without pandering to voyeurism, sensationalism, or over-simplification. Art after ail is not a symptom of its context, but the result of choices made and practices engaged with. It feeds back into its context and thus is co-productive of its future Context.
Snapshot 1: At a conference in Now York I meet an art historian and exchange pleasantries. 'Oh goodness, you live in Belfast! she exclaims. 'Do you feel safe there?'. She didn't realize I would find her question deeply ironic.
This essay is being written in Belfast just a couple of weeks after particular sets of imagery from here have been sent around the world by news and current affairs media. The stand-off at Drumcree, the Orange Order parades, the throwing of petrol bombs, the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) beating protestors or barricading people in their homes, the leafy roadside where a taxi driver was shot: I wonder what the images were that were given priority by the news programmes in the USA, and what terminology the news readers used when discussing them. I wonder also which scenarios will have stayed in the minds of those elsewhere whose understanting of events here is of necessity based upon sound bite, image bite reportage. I try to think of an equivalent, a mirror to the gap between the media's inevitably sensationalist reporting of spectacle, and the everyday subtleties of a given situation. The one that returns to my mind is the reporting here of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the subsequent events - brutal, sensationalist, and apart from the rare five or ten minute 'in-depth report', superficial. I can only guess at tho complexities and realities lying behind those events, and can do little better than recognize that the histories and politics will be different from those that have led to similar scenes on the streets of Northern Ireland being shown on the TVs of the USA.
Snapshot 2: On the local TV news one night are scenes of the RUC. In riot gear in confrontation with young men throwing petrol bombs. Armoured RUC vehicles have barricaded the road and will barricade many roads in this area over the next few days. I recognise the church on the corner: it is just 200 yards from the house of a friend. The next day when I speak to him, he is surprised. 'Didn't know a thing about it' he says. A couple of days later he says 'We go out to the local shops once or twice a day for for a pint of milk or a newspaper, just to make the point that we will get through '.
One thing which is hard to explain to people from elsewhere is the utter banality and ordinariness of the day-to-day street scenes we live with here - on the surface Belfast, Derry, Coleraine and the rest are unexceptional small provincial towns. Just a couple of days after the last scenes of protest and riot would have been broadcast worldwide. local areas were 'back to normal'. In the city centre teenagers were just hanging out during their school vacations, and the shops started their annual summer sales, their only concession being to cancel the weekly late-night shopping on Thursday July 11. The only visual reminders a week later were the remaining scars on the road surfaces where vehicles had been burned and petrol bombs thrown, and the newly boarded-up houses (between 300 and 600, depending which newspaper you read) indicating where families have been intimidated out - mainly Catholics living in predominantly Protestant areas; some Protestants in Catholic areas: some mixed marriage families. Another thing hard to explain in its depth to an outsider is the utter distrust and fear that both nationalist and unionist, republican and loyalist communities have of the accommodation that political closure of this particular narrative might mean. It behoves anyone in a position of struggle to keep the narrative open. In Northern Ireland as it is presently constituted, Catholics are some 35% of the population. In a potential united Ireland, Protestants would be about 20% of the population. (Minority groupings - Jewish, Muslim etc - form under 1%.) Both experience their culture as under threat. One thing is certain, in practice 'cultural diversity' means something different here from what it might mean elsewhere,
Snapshot 3: I take a small group of Fine Art students from Belfast to a conference in England, where they hear African-American artist Carrie Mae Weems talking about her work. Afterwards one, a mature student Catholic, married to a Protostant man, says to me 'I've never quits understood before what you meant about the possibility of working with visual cultural identity in Belfast. Now I do'.
The London-based American artist Susan Hiller remarked to me that Belfast is in some ways similar to a city in the US in that the neighbourhoods can change from block to block. Much of the visual coding designating the identity of an area may be missed by outsiders used to other forms of differentiation - such as whether the young men are Wearing the colours of one of the big Glasgow football teams, Celtic (Catholic) or the other, Rangers (Protestant); or the use of Irish script over shop fronts. The most strongly visual codes however are carried out with paint and brush, particularly in working class areas. Kerb stones, lamp-posts, post boxes, road signs and other street furniture will be painted either green, white and gold, or red white and blue, colour-coding the city.
More noticeable still are the murals. Produced by people usually with no formal artistic training, their aim is threefold: to provide visual identity for the community; to comment on particular events; and to warn others away. Many are found on the gable-ends of housing, walls uninterrupted by windows. All are didactic in composition and imagery, with figurative representations or symbols backed up by text. The paint is applied usually on a white background in areas of flat colours, often with black outlines. Some of the types of imagery are similar for both traditions, particularly In tne murals explicitly supporting the paramilitaries - the IRA on one side, the UDA, UVF, UFF and related groups on the other. Here, the murals will have insignia, symbols and colours, images of armed men in combat gear, memorials for those who have died for the struggle, and so forth.
Of the broader historical murals in Protestant communities, some commemorate the hundreds of soldiers from the North who died in the Battle of the Somme fighting for Great Britain in the First World War. Many more depict King Billy. It is interesting to note that it is the Protestant Loyailsts and Unionists who have developed, in their imagery of King Billy, a form of representation akin to the traditions of icon painting. All of the images seen are copies of copies of original paintings of King William III celebrating his victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The Protestant denominations of course were founded upon iconoclasm, leading to a highly austere aesthetic in their places of worship, which is still found in Northern Irish Protestant denominations. The Protestants here have very little visual cultural tradition - the main reason, I think, for the extraordinary strength that the images of King Billy - and the insignia and banners of the Orange Order - have for them. These images form the Northern Irish Protestant visual identity virtually in its entirity; they are the visual representations of the culture they are scared will disappear in a united Ireland. Hence their re-iteration, and emotional and political power.
Republican and Nationalist imagery is more flexible, confident in the wealth of representational forms not only within Catholicism, but also in Irish historical, mythological and Celtic imagery. All those strands are made use of; and sometimes much freer painting styles are used, often expressionistic or romantic. Romanticism is clear, for instance, in many of the representations of women in Republican murals (Incidentally, women are all but absent from Loyalist murals). Woman are there as allegorical figures, as mythological embodiments or as symbols - Mother Ireland, Maeve, and so forth. They are there as foils to the male figures the named historical figures, the men of action. Occasionally those forms of representation are disrupted by a representation of more recent historical events. One on the Falls Road, for instance noting 25 years of resistance, shows women of the late 1 960s banging dustbin lids on the ground - both aural warning of, and unarmed resistance to, the British Army. The mural is painted in black and white in a style that is a bricolage of newspaper photography. Expressionism can be seen particularly in the Famine or Great Hunger commemoration murals; a response, I think, to the huge emotional importance of the Famine in the history of Ireland, and also to the lack of any 'authoritative', Irish, visual imagery of it. The freedom exists to make new populist representations of this Chapter of Irish history
Where the two traditions collide in the murals, they have done so in a manner that is indicative of the complexity of the cultural context. In recent years, Loyalists have done some reclaiming of Ulster mythology, and in particular of the mythological hero, Cuchulainn, the ancient king of Ulster. In a 'gallery' of some five gable ends produced three years ago he has been painted in juxtaposition with a text warning 'Irish out of Ulster: the struggle is about nationality', and naming him as 'defender of Ulster against the Irish' (a reference to his battles against the three other ancient Irish kingdoms of Leinster, Munster and Connaught). The image used of Cuchulainn is (like the images of King Billy) a copy of a previous artwork. Oliver Sheppard's 1912 bronze sculpture of the dying Cuchulainn was installed in the Dublin post office in 1935 to commemorate the site of the 1916 Easter Rising by Republicans in Dublin, and to act as a memorial for those killed by the British. In that instance, the Cuchulainn sculpture was chosen for a symbolic representation as the defender of Ireland against the English - a choice which some Republicans at the time found inappropriate. Since then, it has also been used in Derry in a Republican mural, symbolising the defense of Ulster again, but against the British. While the image of the heroic martyr is a powerful one, and the Image 'works' as well in that respect in Belfast as the original sculpture does in Dublin (though with less poignancy), one can only wonder at the thinking behind its usage here. Is it a sophisticated and subversive appropriation? Or a knowing and cynical move, producing it as an icon for an audience which may well not know the present placing and use of tho original? Or an opportunistic and naively inappropriate adoption of imagery? Whichever, it indicates that the complexities of Irish politics do not stop at issues of culture and representation.
Snapshot 4: Landing at Belfast City Airport, I take a taxi to the city centre. The taxi-driver, hearing my non-irish accent, asks me where I'm from. I play the unknowing visitor, telling him (truthfully) I've flown in from Edinburgh. After saying what a lovely place Scotland is, he confides in a broad Belfast accent: 'Of course, I'm not Irish; I'm 'Ulster-Scots'.
For its small population - 1.5 million - Northern Ireland has a healthy number of people practicing as artists, mainly concentrated in Derry and Belfast. Most are from the North ; but a good number are from elsewhere, particularly from the Republic or from Britain - England, Scotland, Wales ; usually people who have come here for their BA or MFA Fine Art education and stayed on. After 26 years of 'The Troubles', all Northern Irish artists aged up to their mid+40s will have matured as artists against a background of what can best be described as chronic low-grade civil war. What might surprise the visitor to the School of Fine and Applied Art at the University of Ulster is how infrequently these issues of identity from Other tradition or of conflict are played out in the work of students - it contrasts markedly with the number of women students who deal overtly with issues of female experience or femininity. This is partly, I think, due to the didactic fixity of most of the visual markers in the North sitting uneasily with even the broadest notions of what constitutes Fine Art practice or even the aesthetic mediation of lived experience. But it is also due to an understandable reticence with schooling even more extremely segregated than housing, for most students University provides their first sustained contact with individuals from 'the other side'. Tho Belfast proverb 'whatever you say, say nothing' kicks in, as the students don't know who their peers are, what their family connections and 'involvements' might be. Visual markers are illegal in the workplace as they can constitute harassment or intimidation - this includes not only the most overtly sectarian imagery, but also religious tokens and certain sporting tokens. While staff would interpret this liberally in terms of imagery in art work, it clearly takes a level of confidence and maturity in a student to begin to engage with the issues and imagery in tho open environment of Fine Art Education, with its group crits, student presentations and so forth.
Snapshot 5 : I read an article by 2 U.S. writers which comments on English feminist art criticism. I wonder whether they are deliberately excluding writers from Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
'Permission', in the form of work dealing with such issues by
established artists, may also be needed. Among the artists in Ireland
dealing with broadly political concerns overtly in their work, it is the
men who are more likely to deal with the up-front politics of nationality,
history and political violence (see Willie Doherty's photoworks and video
installations [shortlisted for the 1994 Turner prize], Ken Hardy's work
deconstructing colonialism, Micky Donnelly's palnterly recreation of
republican symbolism, Paul Seawright's documentation of the Orange Order).
Women artists are more likely to deal with the politics of identities and
cultural changes as they manifest on place and body. Many Irish women
return again and again to the body as the place from which - and the
medium through which they must speak. Not as an unproblematic, pre-verbal
or pre-patriarchal place of retreat, but as a site of struggle - struggle
for control, strange for meaning - from which it is important not to
become alienated.
If Irish women have turned to the poetics and politics of the body,
rather than the body politic, then the impetus is not to be found in a
lack of political activist but it’s to be found in the occupation of
the site of some of the fiercest of Ireland’s political battles,
precisely the female body. An occupation enforced by the Church, both
Protestant and Catholic, and policed by the state to be disempowered and
silent. And Ireland is not particularly retrograde in this matter.
Snapshots 6,7,8 & 9 Towards a feminist family album of Belfast.
Snapshot 6. I read another US article berating the English art historian Griselda Pollock - who is in fact from South Africa - for her concentration on the English artist Mary Kelly who is in fact Canadian.
Snapshot 7. My bookshelves at home spilling over with books on women’s art. Many wonderful books by many wonderful American women. I flick through the pages and note that in the American publications the images are almost exclusively of works by American women artists. The new Jo-Ann Isaak book is an exception to prove the rule here. I could not function without the contribution these women make to our debate. I wonder could they function without our contributions.
Snapshot 8. In San Antonio I meet another art historian known for her insightful writing about issues of identity in Chicano and Mexican artists. ‘Ah, Belfast’ she says, ‘I’ve never yet visited Scotland’.
Snapshot 9. I have to ask someone about the difference between
Chicano and Latino.
End.
Copyright © : Hilary Robinson,1996
N.Paradoxa Issue 2 : February 1997