The Becoming of Art / The Decommissioning of Art – The Dyad Artist-Curator.

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 19.10.11

 

 

 

The work of art is a communicative creature , it longs to communicate ,to open up and, like us, occasionally change its surroundings.’ (Jean–Christophe Ammann) (1)

In this paper I propose to analyse the extent to which an artwork conceived initially for one particular space changes when exhibited in different circumstances and in a differing ensemble of other works by the same artist. I will also evaluate the development of politically engaged works of art that are conceived initially to interrogate the nature of buildings and/or where the building plays a contributing role as a protagonist integral to the societal/political charge of the artwork. I will also probe the extent to which the same artwork is capable of accumulating meanings in different presentations both inside and outside the gallery context i.e. the artwork’s capacity for extended dialogue and continuing relevance.

To do this I have chosen to evaluate two works by Irish artist Philip Napier that have been exhibited in different locations – in Rome, Dublin, Derry and South Africa. A former Rome Scholar (1991) Professor Napier is currently the Head of the Faculty of Fine Art at the National college of Art and Design, Dublin.

Philip Napier’s art practice has often explored the association between language, identity, trauma and power. In a number of projects he has used the emotional or politically invested fabric of buildings and social spaces to “sound out” from.

In Ballad 1 and 2, a cognate work (1992), for example, the architecture of the British School in Rome (2), designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens, (who also designed the government buildings in New Delhi, India) is deployed as a natural ‘sound box’ to hold and amplify the wheezing death rattle of an installed image of Bobby Sands (Ballad 1) at the rear of the building and an image of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (Ballad 2) within the front portico at frieze level – both, in different ways, icons of counter culture. Bobby Sands (3) was the first hunger-striker to die during The Maze prison hunger strike of 1981. With others he was demanding political status from Margaret Thatcher’s government. The British School, of course, is located on Via Antonio Gramsci. The work, then, was conceived in Rome in response to the city as a model of monumental history of empire. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and his view that culture – patronage, power and capital – was in the service of the ruling class is all important in the Rome location. As with Sands, Gramsci’s image potently interrogates the building.

Bobby Sands, who was democratically elected strategically as an MP to the Westminster parliament in London, while in prison, is an iconic figure in Irish Republican who has been memorialised through wall murals, folk songs and ballads, hence the title of the work. In Ballad 1 an accordion is fitted to the image of Sands. The image of Sands is based on a widely disseminated duo-tone photograph and is constructed, reflecting the photograph’s pixilation, using the instrument’s buttons. The accordion is powered from the battery of a car borrowed from the British Council in Rome and parked in Henry Moore’s former studio in the School. References to the body abound – the car ‘feeds’ the image; the wheezing of the accordion sustaining the lungs of the dying Sands.

Then as part of the exhibition ‘Beyond the Pale’ at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 1994 Ballad 1 was installed into the museum building set up to have the image of Bobby Sands looking out into the inner courtyard and a duplicate image of him looking into the an interior corridor. IMMA is housed in a former retirement home for British Solders called the Royal Hospital Kilmainham – a four square, very situated neo-classical building. When the new Irish state decommissioned British sculptures this hospital became a repository for them. There is a sense in which the soldiers never looked out to the city beyond but inward to a courtyard life. As members of the British crown they were dislocated by the establishment a new Irish Republic and indeed shots were fired in this building during the 1916 Easter Rising. So like the Lutyens’ building in Rome the Royal hospital building in Dublin offers a very strong symbol of Britishness and the former ruling class.

The Janus-like image of Irish Republican Sands, then, de-stabilizes the fabric of the colonialist project in Ireland. Military history and high culture associations, as symbolically represented by the building, cannot absorb the twin image attack of rebel Sands’ republicanism. The vested interests of the building are consequently neutered. The former hospital building also carries and registers thoughts of healing and nourishment. Cultural critic Luke Gibbons noted Ballad 1’s power in this location, inter alia, by extending the reading of the emaciated body of the hunger striker and making a link to the Irish Famine of the nineteenth century still registered in the Irish collective memory.

‘ The wheezing moans of the accordion extend beyond the individual body, however, evoking some of the more discordant strains in Irish vernacular culture. Not only do the eerie sounds waft through museum space like the wail of the mythical banshee in Irish folklore but the instrument itself signifies traditional music, more particularly the street singer and the popular ballads that were repeatedly targeted by the authorities as cultural expressions of insurgency. By linking the famished body with mourning and collective memory, the off key image becomes, in effect, a living monument for the famine and the dark shadow which it cast on the lung of the Irish body politic.’ (4)

In relation to this it is, perhaps, worth recalling Maud Ellmann’s (5) insightful observation that the more the body becomes emaciated by hunger strike the more loquacious the person becomes -there is an urgency in the need to communicate: words spill out. Sands’ wheezing death rattle may also be seen as an attempt, to the last, of enunciating a political petition. Gibbons’ extended reading, then, demonstrates the accumulation of meanings related to situatededness and the investments in location.

As we move from conflict to post conflict in N.Ireland with the decommissioning of weapons and the Good Friday Agreement (6) questions related to commemoration and anniversary have become significant and testing in what is still in many respects a divided community. Napier believes, however, that meanings and associations in works like Ballad 1 and 2 are alive and not fixed, and therefore still capable of being operative over the 20 year period since they were first shown. He is not quite ready to decommission them because in Ireland with the economic collapse people are looking for alternative ways of thinking and living and he thinks Gramsci’s ideas on hegemony and the popular consumption of ideas are relevant again.

More recently Ballad 1 and 2 were incorporated into a large project Expecting the Terror by Napier exhibited at Ormeau Baths Gallery (OBG) in Belfast in 2011. The exhibition was ambitious in scale and wide ranging in references.

The terror refers to a doomed effort by a ship HMS Terror in the 19th century where all on board eventually perished in an attempt to connect Europe to China via the North West Passage north of Canada. The captain was a Northern Irishman Francis Crosier. This doomed voyage forms a central pivot around which Napier installs a range of structures – amongst them an enlarged model of a Chinese fork lift, a transport container and an amended rickshaw, working ensemble as images of manufacture and distribution. As Napier explains:

‘The project is exploring a connection between the civil engineering of future space of the estate of N.Ireland and the immanent opening up of the North West Passage as a major seaway in the ‘high north’ of the arctic linking Europe to the far and near east. The North West Passage has occupied a significant and shifting relationship in successive imaginations for both the potentials of hard economic advantage and the imaginative spacial zone of discovery, terror and the romantic imagination’ (7)

It should be noted that post conflict discourse by government ministers in N.Ireland is often littered with references to civil engineering and architecture such as ‘blue print for the future’ or ‘bridge building’. And of course the notion of terror relates not only to the French revolution but to the recent emergence of N.Ireland from terror. 2011 was the 30th anniversary of the Maze prison Hunger Strikes and like Sands those on board The Terror died of starvation. References to consumption, reconstruction and power abound. Napier references Gramsci’s inclusion in this ensemble exhibition:

‘…in relation to the construction of Chinese communist command authority facilitating capitalist deregulated expansion in a pincer movement that is irresistible and which suppresses human rights’. (8)

These works then have straddled the development of a political strategy by the republican movement in Ireland and an end to violence and the problematics of economic boom and burst in Ireland. Napier recognises that

‘…post conflict Northern Ireland has been characterised by a new architecture of conspicuous consumption such as shopping malls, replacing the former security vernacular architecture of military/police defence and control’. (9)

Their inclusion in the Belfast exhibition was evidence again that Sands and Gramsci are not fixed cultural icons but resound with fluid, social, associative constructions.

Philip Napier’s art practice is not only an interrogation, but a detonation of language around and through an axis of power. His 1997 work Gauge, commissioned and developed for the Orchard Gallery, Derry, when I was Director of the gallery, was conceived as a two-part project.

Part 1 occurred as an installation in the Orchard Gallery space, whilst part II was presented as a temporary site-specific public artwork in the Bogside area of Derry. It was also driven around town and sounded out from a public address system attached to a mask-like tower structure. Initially the events of Bloody Sunday (10) (the 25th anniversary was in1997) provided the contextual point of reference for this work. It was conceived against a backdrop of sustained calls for an apology from the British Government for the events of Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972, when 14 unarmed civilians were shot dead by the British Army.

The installation consisted of fourteen audio speakers suspended by wire from circular dialled weighing scales, the traditional type you once saw in grocery stores. These speakers relayed a continuous litany of spoken apologies, “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… I’m sorry about that…. Sorry… I apologise”. The sincerity of these apologies was apparently being measured by way of the agitation of the needle on the face of the dial. The slipperiness of language, its ambiguous disposition, especially in colonialist or conflict situations, was in effect being ‘gauged’. The work evolved as a proposition that language alone cannot be adequate, indeed that no measure of language can be enough because it is always contextual and conditional. It is a question of power relations, and if indeed a bureaucratic apology could ever be enough to eradicate a communal wrong.

In part II, this work was reconceived and installed in a derelict social housing dwelling in Glenfada Park in the Bogside, Derry. The installation faced a courtyard, which was the site of some of the shootings and one of the last architectural remnants of the events of 1972, lingering now amidst widespread redevelopment. The work was installed as though in hiding in this largely unreconstructed derelict house, and was encountered through torchlight amidst unsettling blanket darkness.

The house chosen for the installation was itself, amidst other houses in the area, subject to the panoramic surveillance by the British army from the old city walls above walls. However, with Gauge there is the shift from ‘seeing’ to ‘listening’, and an eavesdropping on ‘…a profound uneasiness.’ There is also a spiritual fatigue in the repetitiveness of the rhetorical language and in its interrogating litany.

The central theme of these two presentations of the work focused on the value and nature of an apology. Who is apologising and to whom? Can mere words be adequate? Are words measured or can they be ‘measured’? The discourse surrounding the problematics of the nature of apology echoes with the registers of colonial and post-colonial situations the world over. In that year alone, to my knowledge, this debate about apologising had stretched from Japan and its treatment of World War II POW’s, to South Africa and its Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, to the Bosnia War Crimes tribunal in the Hague.

In Philip Napier’s Gauge, it is not specified who is asking for an apology, who is apologising or to whom they are apologising. This public and private experience is left to address the cultural and political baggage of its audience. The act of mediation here arises from its local and universal outreach. Tom McEvilley acknowledges this issue of both local and global relevance in his catalogue essay on Gauge, as he experienced at first hand this site-specific work.

“Encountered in Glenfada Park, the piece seemed to refer to the Irish demand that the British apologise for Bloody Sunday. Indeed its appropriateness to the site combined with its sense of dark hiddenness – was uncanny, almost eerie. Still, as one listened, its resonances seemed to pass beyond the specific situation and approach the universal. Not only the British relation to the Irish seemed involved, but the relationship of all colonisers to all the colonised peoples everywhere. It reminded me of Hegel’s parable of the Master and the Slave, from the second book of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where History is seen as a long slow shift of relationship through struggle, in which the antagonists’ attempts to overcome one another through annihilation culminate in a mutual overcoming through a kind of absorption, a reception of the other as the negation which completes oneself.” (11)

McEvilley raises two pertinent points here. Firstly, the universal outreach of Napier’s work beyond but extending out of the local, the immediately known. Secondly, the role or possibilities of language in bringing about wholeness or resolution between colonised and coloniser or resolution within a state of interdependence. In this he embraces, by way of Hegel, Homi K. Bhabba’s ‘Third space of Enunciation’, a necessary ambivalent space.

There is a sense in which Napier views Gauge like an alternative tribunal as It attempts to develop who needs an apology rather than who deserves or requests an apology and what that notion of an apology means through the vagaries of language. Vikki Bell notes the binary dilemma the work intriguingly provokes:

‘Like a visual duet with the text of Derrida (2001), the work meditates on the impossibility of forgiving the unforgiveable while still recognising its un-forgiveability.’ (12)

Subsequently Gauge has been exhibited at The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in 2006 and installed in 2010 in Robin Island prison, South Africa. The installation of the work was set up in Mandella’s former prison to anticipate the immanent publication of the Saville report (13). Gauge was specifically installed in the visitors’ centre which was a highly regulated space and adjacent to the lawyers consultation rooms. Many visits were cancelled at the last minute in the prison as a weapon of repression. Gauge was set up in a linear formation (unlike its Derry disposition) running past the lawyers rooms with an added adjacent series of paper sheets with ‘Reserved’ written on them to eventually be filled with a downloaded version of the Saville report. When Napier came back to Ireland Saville reported and David Cameron the British Prime Minister apologlsed to the relatives of the deceased on Bloody Sunday on behalf of the British army and the British people.

Gauge, conceived and exhibited in 1997 symbolically as a ‘measuring’ device still operated, in the condition of an artwork and in a sense as an alternative form of tribunal ,concurrently during the 13 years of the Saville Inquiry which itself was a form of legal ‘measurement’. The work in its differing versions then book-ended Saville and to that extent the artist feels it has done its job and perhaps should be decommissioned. Napier tactically choose to exhibit Gauge on Robin Island around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings in South Africa as well as in anticipation of Saville reporting. It should be noted that the Sharpeville shootings were similar to those on Bloody Sunday in that people were shot by the authorities on the occasion of a peaceful demonstration. Both events created a military response. Both the ANC and those in Ireland felt that there was not a peaceful alternative. There is then this connection between these emblematic events which marked the end of the possibility of peaceful negotiations and created a military phase.

Now that the Saville Inquiry has reported at a time when the IRA military campaign is over and The Good Friday Agreement is in place and we are back in a dialogical phase. Napier, therefore, considers that Gauge has done its work and could be ‘decommissioned’. The building in the Bogside in Derry where Gauge was originally shown has now become The Museum of Free Derry and he would like it decommissioned there as a cultural artefact ( as opposed to a weapon) but redolent with and richer for its accumulated knowledge by way of journeying.

The emotional force or charge of these installation works is registered in their complicity or working partnership with the haunted fabric of particular buildings and sites. As such there is a conspiracy in their ‘becoming’ as art works. The decision as to whether one work should be ‘decommissioned’ and stationed and another allowed continued free passage to travel has less to do with a job well done but more to do with the vagaries of time and place.

 

Notes/references

(1) Jean-Christophe Amman, L’Exposition imaginaire – The discrepancy between idea and reality in L’Exposition imaginaire, SDU Uitgeverij ‘s-Gravenhage, Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst ‘s-Gravenhage,1989 .

(2) ) The British School Rome was founded in 1901 as a British research centre for archaeology, history and the fine arts. It moved into the Edwin Lutyens designed building in 1916, its current home in via Gramsci, in Rome’s Valle Giulia.

(3) Bobby Sands was a member of the IRA who in 1981, along with other republican prisoners, went on hunger strike in The Maze prison, located outside Belfast in a demand to be recognised as political prisoners with Special Category Status. Margaret Thatcher refused to recognise their demands. Sands was elected as a member of the British parliament while on hunger strike and the first of 10 fellow prisoners to die on hunger strike. His death drew a lot of sympathy from the nationalist community as well as international media attention and prompted more recruitment into the IRA.

(4) Luke Gibbons, ‘Unapproved Roads: Ireland and Post-Colonial Identity’ in Transformations in Irish Culture, Luke Gibbons, Cork University Press in association with Field Day,1966

(5)Maud Ellmann, ‘The Hunger Artists, Starving, Writing and Imprisonment, Virago, 1993.

(6) The Belfast Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments which became operative in1999 was the keystone of the peace process in providing for devolved cross community governance in Northern Ireland and led to the decommissioning of weapons in 2005 by the IRA.

(7) Artist’s statement

(8) ibid

(9) ibid

(10) Bloody Sunday is one of the most significant and lingering events of the Northern Irish troubles when on 30 January 1972,14 unarmed civilians were shot dead by the British Army.

Soon after the events of that fateful day the Widgery Tribunal was set up. Considered a ‘whitewash’ by many it largely exonerated the army of any blame. But after a focussed and sustained campaign by the families of the victims, the Saville Inquiry was established – see below.

(11) Tom McEvilley, Philip Napier, Gauge exhibition catalogue, Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1998.

(12) Vicki Bell, ‘Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form’, in The Journal of Visual Culture, 2011.

(13) The British government then led by Tony Blair set up an official inquiry, under the chairmanship of Lord Saville, in 1998 to inquire into the shootings by the British army of 14 civilians, who were on a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972. The Saville Inquiry, as it became known, reported in 2010. The report established that the shootings were unjustified and unlawful. The current Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologised for the shootings on behalf of the British people.

 

© Liam Kelly

Back