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With the 25th Anniversary of British Army involvement in the conflict in Northern Ireland in August 1994, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) made use of the opportunity to fill some of its summer schedules with documentaries it had made about the province over the period. The schedulers perhaps accomplished a different insight than intended by their retrospective, for, on a general level, that which was most in evidence was not the development of the conflict over twenty-five years, but the development of the representation of the conflict. Inscribed within the often grainy, black and white footage of the late sixties and early seventies was the sense of human tragedy unfolding, with reporters describing injury, death and destruction as these were happening on the screen. By contrast, the images of the late eighties and early nineties showed none of the immediacy of the violence and its effects on human subjects: the cameras were kept at a distance until the site of violence was carefully manicured. Death had been rendered invisible, not just in the interests of the state but also, apparently, through the strategies and counter-strategies of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and various other para-military groupings. The scenario after twenty-five years was that the ultimate sign of the conflict, violent death, had been reduced to theatrical funerals specifically stage-managed for the media and its distribution system.

Northern Ireland had come to be maintained and contained as a 'controlled' zone. A status quo was established between the military and para-military forces, and events, or signs of the continuation of conflict, were channelled by the information offices of the state, political parties and para-militaries to the media. Since no side could claim victory, the struggle was played out in the media as either a war for freedom against imperialism, or as a need to defend citizens against terrorism. In global terms, there is nothing particularly unique in this except that the 'controls' imposed are as close to being complete as anywhere in the world, and, as part of the United Kingdom and of the European Union, Northern Ireland is posited by the forces of the state as a free and democratic society, that is to say, as a western society. The former sustains the latter through the application of state-of-the-art electronic surveillance techniques. Containment is not so much a result of overt military activity but of covert intelligence, and the camera is the most pervasive symbol.

One of the issues underpinning this essay is the extent to which Northern Ireland (but also, given the inter-connectedness across the borders, the Republic of Ireland and Britain), has entered a situation where surveillance techniques and the media are covert and overt operations that affect how the individual subject thinks and behaves at conscious and unconscious levels. If so, then a Baudrillardian account of the world seems plausible, and the more traditional concepts of reality, where fiction and representations are merely adjuncts, are inadequate. This is a world where simulation and the 'hyperreal' replace the real, where digital and electronic technology are the basis of the codes of the social system. The signifier and signified are not simply in an unstable relationship to one another but, as the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre put it, we are contemplating 'the decline of the referentials'. Clearly such an extreme view is problematic; for example, not only in terms of Ireland's tenuous relationship with modernity, much less the excessive modernity advanced by Baudrillard--but also in the implicit reduction of art to social circumstances. An address of these larger issues is beyond the scope of this essay, yet they form part of the considerations involved in a reading of the Irish art in this exhibition. The six artists see their work in terms of a number of practices and with a number of reference points, which together involve contradiction and, as will be indicated, a radical closure of these frameworks and reference points is neither desirable nor possible.

In 1993, artist Willie Doherty made a video-sound installation entitled The Only Good One Is a Dead One. On adjacent walls the two video projections show, in one, a street at night in a suburban area with the camera in a fixed position (similar to a surveillance camera), and, in the other, a car being driven down deserted country roads at night from the point of view of a passenger looking ahead at the limited, fleeting sight of what the car's headlights pick up through the darkness. In this sequence, the reflection of the lights of a town or city is occasionally registered in the night sky. The sound tape is a narrative by a male narrator who describes, on the one hand, his experience of surveilling his victim over a period of time as he schemes the best opportunity to kill him and what that will be like, and who, on the other, describes either his own assassination/murder or has assumed the identity of another person who is killed. The narrator is therefore more or less simultaneously in the position of watching and being watched, of killing and being killed. The narrator, far from being an existential or transcendental figure, is decentered and, as in the title of the piece, he talks in terms of clichés; he describes killing or being killed in terms of a Hollywood movie. The installation is not so much about human tragedy as about playing back a tape which simulates human tragedy. If, in one sense, the installation is banal as 'art', with its use of Hollywood-like representations (albeit with multiple story lines), at the same time it raises questions of who is inside or outside the spectre of events, or is everyone implicated; who, if anyone, is witness to what; whether the person(s) in the moving car is (are) outside the known twenty-four-hour surveillance taking place within the urban environment, and for the time being, is (are) outside the limit of the law. On another level, there is the significant question of the extent to which Hollywood movies permeate the social fabric and the individuals therein, and whether this touches on ways in which we represent the sense of self to ourselves. From time to time we imagine ourselves, in an ideal way, as we might be seen by the camera.

After the IRA cease-fire commenced in September 1994, the British Government was under pressure to relax some of its Emergency Legislation, especially its media ban on the Irish political party, Sinn Fein, which is alleged to have links with the IRA. Since 1988 members of Sinn Fein were prevented from direct speech on television or radio, and the response of the media companies was to use actors to dub the words spoken to microphone. The situation was regarded as a farcical government mistake, and the overdubbing ironically regarded as an artform. On one occasion Gerry Adams is reported to have said, on finding out which of the actors was going to dub his interview, "Dead on. He does it better than me". The lifting of the ban in mid-September 1994 is seen as part of the 'normalisation' process.

Artist David Fox's documentary, Trouble the Calm (1988), is not a portrayal of 'normal' society, not in the sense of a community at home with itself. Fox focuses on a number of aspects of society in the Republic of Ireland. The dominant opposition he establishes is that between the power currently exerted by corporate interests and the multi-nationals over Irish politics and the Irish economy, and the loss of the politics of a new society in the Republic fought for by Sinn Fein in the period between the Easter Rising against British Rule (1916) and the Civil War (1922-23) over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Fox suggests that Ireland is a puppet in the global economy, while at the same time it mythologises its Republican legacy and silences its dispossessed through its Emergency Legislation ostensibly aimed against terrorism emanating from Northern Ireland. Fox assumes a position in regard to power relations: power operates through the global communication networks and the economic determinants that sustain them. In this sense, the overdubbing performed by actors on Sinn Fein members is a metaphor for Irish politics. Trouble the Calm is an investigation of the public world, or at least a public world as circumscribed by censorship; the private is suggested through the editing techniques as a media bombardment takes effect in the consciousness of the Irish subject. Fox recognises the complexity of the situation, though he does not foreclose the possibility of an alternative social structure.

In a sequence in Trouble the Calm, women (outsiders) approach the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the day as he attends a reception at a high-powered corporate conference held in a Killarney hotel in the south-west of Ireland. The women are wives of prisoners in the Republic who have been issued with extradition orders to Northern Ireland, where they will face charges connected with alleged IRA activity, pending their appeal against extradition. The women make it clear that there are political, legal and personal issues at stake. One woman asks, "What's going to happen to us? That's what I want to know". The woman is resident in the extreme south of the Republic, and she may be alluding to, among other things, the prospect of a split in the family if her husband is moved North. Women are still expected to assume most of the responsibility for the family unit.

In Turas (Journey) (1990, see page 120), video artist Frances Hegarty opens the visual sequences of her video with shots of the estuary of the River Foyle as the former site of mass emigration from Ireland. Since 1921 it represents the furthest north-western point of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. In Hegarty's terms, this forms only the starting point for an exploration of the reconciliation of the fact of exile in the re-tracing of the river back to its source. The English language is used symbolically as that which is to be worked through in order to return to the source, to the mother. The Irish language is identified as a different form of communication, which is part of the process of reclamation. Hegarty's editing is employed in a different way to that of David Fox: here the editing adopts gaps and fissures but most particularly, rhythms. The rhythms of the work, in sight and sound, are constitutive of bodily rhythms. Where Doherty's narrator is without a center, without a body, Hegarty wishes to forefront the materiality of the body of the woman.

In his installation Apparatus II (1994, see page 125), installation artist Philip Napier adopts the scroll-like devices used at the front of public buses in Northern Ireland to identify the destination of the route followed. These are lengths of black fabric wrapped around a cardboard tube with the place-names of all possible destinations in the network painted on in white. The place-name is highlighted at a window in front of the bus by manually turning a handle above the driver's seat. Napier has installed the rolls in rows on the floor in a vertical--as opposed to their usual horizontal --position so that the two place-names actually visible on each roll are read on their side. Emanating through each of the tubes in the darkened space is an audio-taped male voice stammering the place names. This is not, however, quite what it might seem. In Ireland, all non-modern place-names pre-date the predominance of the English language, and most place-names derive from English translations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which were usually mis-translations. The stammering voice in the audio-tape is not naming the places as identified in English on the rolls, but he names the places as retranslated from Irish into English. Apparatus II is about disjunction between languages, and between speech, act and thing: the name for a place is a symbol for a loosely defined geographic area. In Ireland, this assumes geo-political significance in both local and national terms. The symbol signifies more than that which it represents.

Napier is interested in manual and mechanised tools, and he views the digitalisation of the destination signs at the front of Northern Ireland's buses as symptomatic of a process which involves the loss of one kind of relationship between humans and their tools, and its replacement with another. Until the early twentieth century, Belfast and its outreach of the Lagan Valley was the only part of Ireland which could be said to be industrialised. Ireland was largely agrarian, and the majority of its population rarely travelled beyond townlands and the immediate countryside, except to emigrate. Ireland was hardly industrialised before becoming, in many respects, post-industrial during the last three decades.

These factors are crucial to much of John Kindness's practice. In, for example, Ninja Turtle Harp (1991, see back cover), the harp, as the official symbol of Ireland and a symbol of traditional Irish music (i.e., 'authentic Irish music'), is painstakingly re-presented in ceramics (a traditional craft), and embellished with decoration depicting the Ninja Turtles, who had their fifteen minutes of fame in recent pulp culture. The work is not so much about a cultural clash between old and new, tradition and modernity, as about an accommodation or even the collapse of one into the other: values are indeed relative as far as the consumer society is concerned. Kindness is not being entirely ironic, because he has a commitment toward revitalising old crafts in his work. In Belfast Frescoes (1994, see also page 65), he uses the fresco technique to tell a story in words and images about a boy in Belfast, a Belfast which is pre-1969, still a predominantly industrial city of industrialists, workers and traders, and its economic wealth still determined by its shipyard. Belfast Frescoes could be interpreted as nostalgia for a bygone era, but it might be read more accurately as an attempt to represent, from a viewpoint somewhere between fiction and autobiography, specific aspects of life within a culture which has been under-represented because it was marginalised both politically and culturally by both London and Dublin. The more complex, though related point is the fragility of the sense of identity (or identities) in Northern Ireland, which has gone from a position where, pre-1969, it was under- represented in relation to the outside world, to the recent position where it is represented mostly in terms of a tribal conflict.

A common feature of the work under discussion is the relationship between history and modernity, and contingent on this, the possibility of critical intervention in an art context. While the former might be described as a condition of postmodernity, the latter is problematised because of the dominance of the aestheticisation of both past and present in the mass media. In her recent work, Alice Maher examines this condition by, on the one hand, drawing attention to the work's status as 'art' through the evidence of the process of its making in combinations of drawing, painting and sculpture, and, on the other, paring away at the notion of content with an insistence on radical disjunctions between the signifiers of meaning. This is not, however, the self- referential goal of abstract art. In Folt (1993) (translation adopted by the artist: 'abundance, tresses, forest of hair'), Maher creates sets of small paintings on paper to mimic graphical representations of different hairstyles, as well as including human hair within one of the six boxed frames. In these, the woman/model is absent but the sign of the feminine is undeniably present. We recognise the signification going on in these small paintings, not through overt means employed by the artist, but precisely through the recall of the ideal models of femininity represented in all aspects of the mass media. When Folt was originally exhibited, an extension of the level of meaning was presented through the accompanying catalogue: two illustrations, examples of late nineteenth-century women's hairstyles and examples of the instruments required to construct hairstyles.1 These belong to an era that not only produced the growth of mass distribution systems for goods and, by extension, mass advertising, but also the theories of commodity fetishism by both Freud and Veblen, and later, a theory of sexual fetishism by Freud. The graphical hairstyle is a sign of both woman and commodity, and woman as commodity, though the opaqueness of these works as paintings also reflect back at the viewer. Maher sees these images as simultaneously repellent and fascinating, negative and positive, because, while they regulate, the hairstyles can also be reinvented.

Maher's recent work pushes the limits of signification between art and the social, not as transcendental categories, but as specific and gendered. The issue is the power of the media to appropriate everything, including--or especially--art into a system where difference is elided through the perpetuation of stereotypes. Maher's response has to be one of problematisation, not a withdrawal into an artificial maintenance of high culture, or an ironic play of signifiers which characterises so much postmodernist art, but an attempt to expand the possibilities of language. Something similar occurs with Willie Doherty's recent photographs. In Border Incident (1993), for example, a burnt-out car has been left in a ditch at the side of a deserted country road. The artist provides no contextualisation beyond the image and the title. The contextualisation already exists; it is provided by the media system. This is further extended in Incident (1993, see page 76), which shows another burnt-out car at the side of a deserted country road: the removal of the word 'border' reduces the already minimalist references. It is not, as one commentator put it in another context, that art photography appeals to 'memory, history, cultural convention, and language itself', while the news photograph or the snapshot, 'with its prerequisites of instantaneity, sharpness, and precision, initially inhibits speech'; it is the other way round. This is to suggest that avant-garde concepts about the role of art live on and, while the Baudrillardian scenario of the total system looms large, so too does the optimism about the possibility of meaning and transformation in art.

Notes:

1 Relocating History: An Exhibition of Work by Seven Irish Women Artists (Belfast: The Federesky Gallery at Queen's University, and Derry: The Orchard Gallery, 1993).

2 Maurice Berger, "Visual Terrorism," in David J. Brown and Robert Merrill, eds., Violent Persuasions: The Politics and Imagery of Terrorism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1993), p. 22.

Trouble the calm (film still), David Fox,1988