Identity/Hybridity:

Ideas Behind This Project

Trisha Ziff


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We live in a confusing world of criss-crossed economies, intersecting systems of meaning and fragmented identities. Suddenly, the comforting modern imagery of nation states and national languages of coherent communities and consistent subjectivities, of dominant centers and distant margins no longer seems adequate. . . . we have all moved irrevocably into a new kind of social space, one which our modern sensibilities leave us unable to comprehend.1

 

Introduction:

It is four years since this project began to evolve, and as it begins to take shape just a few months before the exhibition opens at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, I am also entering the last few days of a long- awaited pregnancy. I know I am going to have a boy--we, that is my partner Pedro and myself, have decided to call him Julio Ernesto Patrick. His father is Mexican, his mother English, and he will probably grow up in California. Like many children today, his identity will reflect the complexity of the world he arrives into. How will he describe himself?

My son will be born into a new era, far less clear than the postwar world I arrived in forty years ago. Identity can no longer be defined by geographic borders--they mean less and less--and yet despite this, nationalism remains a powerful focus. Perhaps it is the erosion of what distinguishes us that makes our desire to place ourselves even more intense. Information, emigration, communication, and new technologies are redefining our worlds at an ever-increasing speed, and although we remain products of our histories, defined by class, colour, religion, and language, we are also caught up in these new nets and webs of change. Our cultures meet, cross, interact, influence. What emerges are new hybrid forms, from language to ritual, "high" and "low" art forms: kitsch, rasquache,2 Irishness, and Mexicanidad. The Mexican/Irish relationship explored in this project is not unique, but a specific example of the "border-blurring analyses that fuel the postmodernist pastiche," described by Lucy Lippard in her introduction, "Distant Relations."3

The idea for this publication evolved over the last two years. Our intention has been to create an anthology of critical writing reflecting parallel issues to those addressed by the participating artists. Lucy Lippard synthesises the ideas behind this project in her introduction, and authors Cuauhtémoc Medina, Joan Fowler, and Max Benavidez have written specifically about the artists. Other essays included provide a framework, extending the themes and issues of colonialism in which this exhibition is sited into a broader context.

In editing this anthology we were confronted by the issue of which version of the English language we should use: European English (the English written by the authors from Ireland and England), or American English (used by the Chicano and Mexican writers), a choice made more complex by authors Garrett O'Connor and David Lloyd and myself who now write in a hybrid style of both. The histories of our own lives are reflected through the placement of our dots and commas, z's or s's. Certain spellings and punctuation that the reader will come across are not proofing oversights; they reflect evolving forms of the English language as it has changed from "home" to "colony" to "diaspora."

The artists, authors, and composers participating in this project come from different sides of the world: Ireland and Mexico; England and the United States. What they share in common is how their work has been marked by the experience of colonialism, whether as members of a dominant culture, whether they emigrated and became part of a minority culture far from home, or whether they were born in a country where the dominant culture was not theirs. All the contributions to this project are marked by the colonial experience. It is precisely this experience that places these contributors outside the mainstream; it is their knowing the edge, the border, the periphery, the sense of exile from the dominant point of view that drew me to their work. These experiences emerge through the essays reproduced in this anthology, the artwork in the accompanying exhibition, the sounds and music recorded on the enclosed CD. Some of the texts and work reflect personal experiences and intuitive responses; others are more theoretical or analytical in both their form and content. This project is about identity, culture, and colonialism, a dialogue relevant to the Irish and Mexican experience.

 

Why Ireland and Mexico?

In her introduction to this book, Lucy Lippard eloquently explores the common ground between Ireland and Mexico, looking at the cultural, colonial, and historical parallels. Since this project was initiated four years ago, this common ground has shifted dramatically, yet the parallels remain in place (although moving in opposite directions): peace talks in Ireland, rebellion in Mexico, economic development in the south of Ireland, post-NAFTA economic chaos in Mexico. These events have affected both the form and content of this project, at moments throwing its very existence into jeopardy, and demanding of the artists and authors alike a need to address these changes within their work.

 

Unapproved Roads(4) and Superhighways:

Five years ago, while driving through the back roads of the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca in the south of Mexico, my thoughts were constantly interrupted with images from earlier travels through the wilds of Donegal and Bloody Foreland in the northwest of Ireland. Listening to the spoken pre-Hispanic Mixtec language transported me back to the Gaeltachts in the west of Ireland, shrinking communities of traditional Irish-language speakers. Colonial languages (both Spanish and English), have replaced Irish, Zapotec, Mixtec, Tzotziles, and Tzeltales, and many other Indigenous idioms. They have become endangered languages, which will eventually disappear without conscious efforts to preserve them. Gerry Adams in his essay "S é an rud é, cultúr, ná an méid a dhéanann sé (Culture Is What Culture Does)" describes the contemporary Irish language movement as part of "the reconquest of Ireland"; he sees the rekindling of interest in the language as inseparable from the nationalist desire for reunification, North and South. Elena Poniatowska, in her text "Subcom-andante Marcos and Culture" writes about the Zapatistas' demand that all fifty-seven Indigenous languages be made official Mexican languages. The government, while vigourously celebrating its Indigenous heritage, deprives many groups of Indigenous peoples within Mexico of their basic rights to land, education, and health care. Cuauhtémoc Medina, in his text "Irony, Barbary, and Sacrilege," writes:

The government of the world's oldest revolution attempted to alleviate the absence of an image of the future by trying to reaffirm the thesis of the continuity of the culture's past without conflicts or divisions, since, from the perspective of power, Mexico is an entity where massacre and pillage are hidden behind an image of docility.

The Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) in Chiapas in southern Mexico is clearly aware of the differences that separate them from modernity. As the first liberation movement to emerge in this post-Cold War era, they have managed to capture the attention of the world. Their world, on the other hand, is isolated, remote; nothing much has improved in the last 500 years for the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas. Yet, despite their lack of access to electricity, formal education, health care, basic resources, they are linked to the rest of the world via the Internet; a modem has become their most effective weapon. As they walk from one village to another passing on information, and maintaining control of Zapatista-held areas, they keep the rest of us informed via the superhighway.

Along the back roads of rural Ireland, two architectures dominate: tumbledown ruins of stone "famine cottages" stand within view of modern ranch, country, and western-style bay-windowed farmhouses built with funds from European grants designed to ebb the flow of people deserting the farms for the cities. Replete with satellite dishes, their inhabitants receive CNN and reruns of old American sitcoms. In Oaxaca, Mexico, on the other side of the world, crumbling adobe homes mark abandoned pueblos where the young and able-bodied have left, first to the city, then to the capital, and then northwards to the United States: migration, then emigration. Many return to build new homes for those who stayed behind and for their own old age.

Breeze block replaces adobe; those who can afford it install electricity, water, and even satellite dishes, where they watch the same news reports and sitcoms as in Ireland. Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, Lion Kings, and Pocahontases are transformed into piñatas in Mexican markets, defying international copyright, to become the characters of the latest children's street games.

This exhibition of Irish, Mexican, and Chicano art was conceived as a dialogue to explore the parallels of these cultures in the context of their colonial experiences, rather than as a survey exhibition. The twelve participating artists were chosen primarily because the ideas that drive their practices complement one another and echo parallel themes. There are many fine contemporary artists working in Ireland, Mexico, the United States, and England, whose absence from this show is only a reflection of the limitations placed on any exhibition.

After much discussion in the early stages of the development of this project, I chose to limit the group of artists to four geographic centres: Ireland, Mexico, California (Chicano), and England (Irish diaspora). The obvious omission was the exclusion of Irish American artists. The clear parallel I found was between Chicano artists of Mexican descent and Irish artists in Britain. Both groups of artists clearly identify themselves with their cultural histories and see themselves as working outside of the mainstream: participation without assimilation. Their work and concerns are primarily informed through their experience of colonisation, exile, memory, and myth. The majority of Irish American artists have through time become absorbed into mainstream American culture, and while individual artists like Mark Alice Durant, Patrick Ireland, and Michael Tracy reveal through their work a conscious relationship to their Irish heritage, their experience as Irish Americans today does not place them outside the dominant culture in the way in which Chicana/o artists have systematically been excluded or Irish artists in Britain have been marginalised. Irish people in Britain and Chicanos/Latinos in the United States share a common experience of discrimination, politically, economically, culturally, and linguistically.

Proposition 187, a California statute introduced in 1994, was designed to undermine and destabilise the Latino community. Rubén Martínez, in his text "The Tense Embrace of the 'Other'," describes how Proposition 187 "clearly targets one ethnic group . . . and sets in motion forces that have already begun to affect not only those 'illegals' that the law singles out, but anyone with a brown skin or with a slightly accented English."

The border between the United States and Mexico is not a natural border, but a political and economic space where the first and third worlds meet. Separated by a thin no-man's-land, heavily patrolled by police, helicopters, and constantly updated border architecture, it looks more like Berlin than Southern California, more like South Armagh, bandit country, just on a larger scale. Depending on the political or economic climate on the U.S. side, the border becomes more rigidly defined or withers away into mere formality.

The majority of Mexican people are driven north because the economy at home is not able to sustain their basic needs. In the United States there is a possibility of work, and at times the opportunity to save and send money home. For young people, crossing the border is also a rite of passage, an adventure. Those who return bring back the spoils of their personal conquests: electrical goods, videos, and new ideas. Traditions back home are influenced by these new experiences, and the past syncretism with Spanish culture shifts; new hybrids emerge, a blend of Indigenous, Spanish, and North American, which influence every aspect of daily life.

This works both ways; as author Juan Villoro writes, "East L.A. is the second largest Mexican city and guacamole is the second favorite snack for Superbowl Sunday." The long and meandering U.S./Mexico border extends northwards into the city. Los Angeles is no different than Belfast in this respect, a city divided, separated by motorways (freeways). "There are those--mostly older, white Americans--who would seal off the border with Mexico and the rest of Latin America," writes Rubén Martínez, "because they fear being overwhelmed by the immigrants."

In Britain, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), an act of parliament introduced over twenty years ago and ratified each year, discriminates against all Irish people entering Britain, and has created a climate of intense suspicion towards anyone with an Irish accent. The institutionalised racism of the PTA has (in identical ways to Prop. 187) attacked the Irish in England, who from an Anglo perspective are perceived as a suspect community.5 The PTA allows for people to be arrested and held for up to eight days without being charged. In reality this law is used to harass young Irish people, predominantly at ports of entry. Mary Hickman writes in her essay "Differences, Boundaries, Community: The Irish in Britain," "The way in which the PTA was implemented fueled anti-Irish racism, with the oft-repeated injunctions of the police after various incidents to 'Keep an eye on Irish neighbours and watch out for Irish accents'."6

The psychological effects of such discrimination, coupled with transported residues of colonial oppression, have created complex problems of denial and shame in diasporic communities. The residual effects continue generations after independence.

Dr. Garrett O'Connor, writing for this anthology in his text on "Malignant Shame," describes impressions from his own childhood:

At school, the Irish history I was taught included robbery of our lands by plantations of English colonists, deliberate impoverishment of Irish Catholics through the Penal Laws, and near-elimination of the Irish peasantry by planned neglect and forced emigration during the Famine. Despite this knowledge, I had by the age of eight developed a conviction that England was a source of higher (and better) authority on nearly all matters except Catholicism. In my early teens I came to believe that everything Irish (including myself) was in some way defective or second rate in comparison to England.

 

The Artists:

The satirical visions of Mexican artist Rubén Ortiz Tórres and Irish artist John Kindness share a common visual language. Ortiz's Baseball Cap Series and Kindness's Ninja Turtle Harp are ironic and contradictory icons of popular culture reinvented within a framework of history and nationalism creating bizarre self-conscious hybrids. Ortiz's baseball caps are transformed from fashion accessories into fine art objects; symbols and letters, signifiers of allegiance, are converted into sociopolitical commentary; LA becomes ChiLAngo;7 an X in reference to Malcolm X becomes MeXico. The symbol of the "Fighting Irish" becomes a memorial cap to the San Patricio Brigade. Commenting on his work, Ortiz has said:

In Los Angeles different sports teams emblems have been reappropriated by different local communities and gangs. Bloods wear red like the Chicago Bulls, and the Crips wear blue from the sportswear of the Georgetown Hoyas. Chicanos like to sport Cleveland Browns paraphernalia, giving expression to pride in brown color, while L.A. Kings caps are now associated with Rodney King and Martin Luther King Jr. . . . by altering, recodifying, and recontextualizing signs already given in baseball caps, I want to comment on the relation between aesthetics and history, mass media, culture, fashion, politics, etc. . . .8

John Kindness has previously stated, "I am always bemoaning the fact that there is so little art being made about daily life. Something in the art world despises the details of living on the edge of the capitalist abyss. For this reason political humour in art is a scarcity, since one has to know life to dissect it."9 Kindness's work might be termed Irish Rasquachismo: Ninja Turtles, fragments of merchandising, symbols of American culture are fused with the symbol of Ireland--the harp--resulting in a sculpture that humorously juxtaposes the so-called "purity" of national culture against the perceived negative influences of the invasion of American culture. The warring ninjas fighting amongst themselves as they clamber up the front of the harp are a less than subtle reference to the "troubles" in the North.

Mexican artists Silvia Gruner and Javier de la Garza are also preoccupied with nationalism. Like Kindness, they use icons entrenched in the nation's psyche to comment on issues of cultural identity. They recycle objects of Mexico's archeological heritage, from the splendid Olmec heads and Chaac Mools depicted in de la Garza's paintings to the shards of pottery collected by Gruner, who binds them together to create new fictional goddesses, investing them with new meanings and fabricated mythologies.

In de la Garza's paintings, these objects become Warholesque symbols of popular culture, self-conscious surrogates that appear lost in their new environment. As art historian Olivier Debroise noted in a 1992 catalogue text for the artist, "Javier de la Garza's work is situated on a razor's edge, on a border between what is technically kitsch (or neo-Mexicanist) and what can be read as bitter criticism of the Mexican cultural scene which revolves around these signs of identity."10 De la Garza's paintings play with the ambiguous positioning of Mexico as it fluctuates from representing itself through its past and heritage, and presenting itself as modern. The confusion cries out in his painting HELP!, which although painted in 1992, takes on a prophetic quality in 1995 as Mexico lurches from one crisis to another in its post&endash;NAFTA chaos.

Objects that are sacred in one culture become kitsch objects of mass appeal in another. The Virgin of Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo are transformed in the United States, becoming objects of mass consumption: stencilled onto denim jackets and sold as earrings, the merchandising of these images resembles the latest Disney film. The potato, a cultural symbol of the Great Famine of 1845, Ireland's holocaust, is recreated in the United States as a chocolate "spud" packaged with leprechauns and sold for St. Patrick's Day, like an early Easter egg. Everything is recoupable; nothing is sacred.

David Lloyd, in his essay "The Recovery of Kitsch," writes:

An irrepressible conundrum mocks national cultures, all the more so when, overshadowed by more powerful neighbours, culture is all the nation has to distinguish it. That conundrum is the apparently inevitable declension of the icons of authentic national culture into kitsch. The images proliferate: round towers and wolfhounds, harps and shamrocks, la Virgen de Guadalupe and pyramids in Yucatán, Aztec masks and feathered serpents. And they have their histories, disinterred and shaped in the projects of cultural nationalism to symbolize the primordial origins of the spirit of the nation, la raza. But long before their visible commodification as signals of safe exoticism deployed by our tourist boards, breweries, or airlines, the logic of their standardization and circulation was embedded in the nationalist project.

Artist and author Amalia Mesa-Bains, in her essay "Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache," sees the appropriation of everyday objects as a self-conscious act: "The political positioning of Chicanos emerging from a working-class sensibility called for just such a defiant stance. Raised in barrios, many Chicano artists have lived through and from a rasquache consciousness."

Mesa-Bains has been both a producer and protagonist of Chicano/a work for many years. Using traditional art forms practiced predominantly by women, she describes herself as having "created a hybrid form of ephemeral installation." Her work has an urban sensibility, loaded with ephemera from markets and swap meets. She consciously uses objects associated with women's personal space in her installations--knick-knacks, jewelry, photographs, beads, boxes, religious prayer cards--that evoke the familiarity of a mother's bedroom or a family kitchen. For this exhibition these altars have been transformed from a shrine and take the form of a circle of chairs, entitled The Circle of the Ancestors. Each chair is symbolic of a different woman, historical and personal, real and mythical, heroines and anonymous women within Chicana culture. Describing the piece, Mesa-Bains says this series "extends this Domesticana into the importance of women's role in the life of the family, in the history of resistance, and in the tradition of labor connected to the Mexicano/Chicano cultures."

Ritual and counter-ritual are themes that echo throughout the work of the women artists. Through her use of candles and chairs (both are objects that function as symbols of absent people), Amalia Mesa-Bains creates a memorial, embedded in the traditions of her own Chicana culture. While Mexican artist Silvia Gruner--in her sequence of still images taken from video--is engaged in the process of rupturing history, she also appears to deconstruct ritual. Her physical intervention with the objects functions as the antithesis of Mesa-Bains's work--the destruction of her created object, the fictional fertility goddess. Alice Maher, in her work Folt, alludes to myth and ritual in her sequence of drawings of hairstyles that take the viewer again into the private space of women--the bedroom or bathroom --to conjure up fantasies of combing, braiding, and pinning hair. At the same time we are reminded of the mythical role of women's hair in western culture: Medusa, Rapunzel, and the seduction and destruction from the male gaze. In Turas (Journey) by Frances Hegarty, the ritual return is present throughout the piece--reflected through the gathering of water from the Foyle river and the repetition of the Irish language.

The work of all these women artists is informed by their own histories and experiences, and while this exhibition addresses broader issues of cultural identity, these artists do not separate issues of cultural identity from gender or personal history. This is not the case for the majority of the male artists in this exhibition, whose work functions in the public arena more than it reflects their own histories. It is interesting to observe that, despite the very different visual languages adopted in their practices, all these women artists see gender as being integral to their expression.

John Valadez is based in Los Angeles, California. He is a painter, and for him the ritual of painting is crucial to his practice. He is primarily involved in making public art works that take the form of complexly constructed murals depicting the history of the Mexican American community in the USA, and the political and cultural development of the Chicano movement. This work is painstakingly slow, and the commissions take three or four years to complete. His personal work is on a smaller scale, and allows him to take more risks. In recent years, his pastel and oil paintings have intimately explored ideas concerning his identity and sexuality, reflecting on both the power and shame of the Latino male. The shame he describes is an internalised racism, as a Mexican born in California, of not speaking Spanish, of a sense of inferiority foisted on him from the mainstream community. Max Benavidez, in his text "Chicano Montage," describes Valadez as angry; Valadez describes himself and his work as a product of "schizo-ethnicity."

Daniel J. Martinez belongs to a new generation of Chicano cultural activists. He works with a multitude of different media in his site-specific installations, employing video, photography, sound, and found materials. He argues that political action and making art are intrinsically linked. His work leaves a trail of thought-provoking debate and action behind him as he moves from one project to the next: he is "a cultural provocateur."

Martinez grew up in postwar Los Angeles, a time when the pressure to assimilate--the melting pot theory--was at its most intense. Cut off from his own Mexican heritage and language, he experienced a sense of loss similar to Frances Hegarty's experience in England. Martinez has always felt that it is important to employ new methods to communicate his ideas. Influenced by the Situationalists, he rejects stereotypical Chicano art forms from his practice, fearing that they might entrench the view of Mexican Americans as quaint, exotic, and folkloric.

Martinez operates on two distinct scales. He creates large site- specific pieces, such as his temporary installation at Cornell University, The Castle Is Burning (1994), where a high wall separated one half of the university's quadrangle from the other. (The work became a catalyst for existing campus grievances and was reported on in the New York Times when it was attacked by right-wing students; this, in turn led to a student sit-in in support of the piece, an action that culminated in the establishment of a Chicano Studies program.) His smaller scale works have been equally controversial; for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Martinez produced new admission buttons for the show. On each button was printed a word, from the statement "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white," a sentiment that directly reflects his own coming to terms with his family history of assimilation.

Event for (class) compression or what defense can one mount against an avalanche is a site-specific installation of sound and video that Martinez will adapt at each venue of the exhibition tour. Through these changing installations, Martinez will explore at various times issues of class, labour, racism, education, and imperialism, as well as the northern Irish and Chicano urban experience. Event also deals with the physical separation of communities, a reality as much in the artist's native city of Los Angeles as in Belfast, where walls, borders, freeways, and cul-de-sacs act as barriers between people of different race, class, and ideological allegiance. At the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, the first venue, images will be projected through gaps in a brick wall, becoming fragmented and distorted projections. These images echo a symbolic pattern of the history of British disinformation in relation to the war in Ireland.

Throughout this project, the issue of language is a recurring theme. Adopting the language of the coloniser, or severing oneself from one's linguistic history in the diaspora occurs for complex and differing reasons, both imposed and self-imposed. Adams describes the decline of the Irish language in the nineteenth century "during which the emerging middle class strongly rejected the Irish language and customs. They embraced the 'new order' and rejected the 'old values'. To succeed meant speaking English. To be Irish was to be ignorant." The Mexican-American experience in the United States is not dissimilar. Where racism and discrimination are prevalent, one way of dealing with this is to repress one's own history and identity. The pressure to assimilate is part of the American experience. Writing about his childhood in Sacramento in the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Rodriguez, in his essay "Irish Catholic," describes his friendship with an American boy, Larry:

Larry scorns me for not taking chances. I refuse to hitchhike. I refuse to smoke cigarettes. I refuse Spanish. And yet, I think, Larry senses Mexico in me; I am his way of escaping Sacramento. But if I am his Negro, he is mine too. His casual relationship to money, his house with a swimming pool, these I take as ethnic traits. What dooms our friendship is that we stare past one another. What he sees in me is innocence, an inferiority complex, Mexico. He is all casualness about the things I intend to have. I want what he claims to discard.

Fionnula Flanagan, in her text "Culture Shock," describes her response as a young Irish actress looking for "digs" in London when she sees a sign in the window of a boardinghouse that reads, "No Coloureds or Irish."

The air is all of a sudden chilled, still. In the eye of that stillness there is no sound. Only the sign. Watching my confusion. To see what I in my Irish foolishness will do. Next. Must tell someone. Who? Panic. Someone. There must be someone to . . . Why is my heart going so fast? Scalding.Tell them. Can't think of. What? Who? Your credentials girl and be quick about it! My-mother's-sister-served-as-a-nurse-in-the-Royal-Alexandras! My-father's-father-fought-in-India!

Her immediate response is less one of anger but more the need to prove her equality, a sense of inadequacy, inferiority. It is out of these experiences, these "culture shocks," that cultural shame develops. The pressure to give up one's own identity (language and culture) and participate in the dominant culture is enormous.

It is within this context that artist Frances Hegarty has made her video installation, Turas (Journey). Frances Hegarty was born in Donegal, a native Irish speaker who moved to the north of Britain as a child in the 1950s. This video piece reflects a literal as well as personal journey from the port of Derry on the Foyle estuary back to the source of the river in Donegal. In the nineteenth century, the port of Derry was a major point for emigration, and is the starting point of her journey "home." This work is in part autobiographical and in part reflects a collective memory, moving beyond Hegarty's own personal experience to address broader issues of loss of identity, loss of home, and loss of the mother tongue. The work is cathartic but not sentimental in that it returns the artist to her native land, and she is able to begin to re-establish her identity as an Irish woman. She writes:

I felt shame at the limited access I had to my own history, and the subtleties of the stories, songs and literature that my friends wanted me to "hand on" or document. It also confirmed growing awareness that in order to reclaim what I knew and gain access to my culture and its literature, I would have to reclaim/relearn my mother tongue.

Writing about her sense of Irishness, Alice Maher says: "Sometimes the 'Irish' costume that I wear doesn't fit me too well: either it's too big for me or I'm too big for it. I learned Irish dance as a child. I love dancing but I don't love wearing stiff artificial garments as a badge of my Irishness. I was born here, I live and work here. My thoughts and works have been influenced by many cultures including my own. . . ."

Alice Maher's work Folt is informed by the memories and sensibilities of her rural childhood, which is reflected throughout all her work. Folt is an Irish word; it translates as "abundance, tresses, forests of hair." A series of six cases contains drawings, "diagrams" of hairstyles, childlike in their simplicity; they invoke fantasies of little girl's dreams of sophistication --"when I grow up." The female child is a constant theme in Maher's work, whether as an actual presence or symbolic, as in her recent piece, Familiar (1994), or Bee Dress (1994). Concerning Folt, Maher writes, ". . . for adults, childhood is certainly an example of 'another' state and many of the figures in my work are of girl children. In childhood one is truly in a state of flux when anything is possible. Even though big people control the actual world, the child's world is bigger and more real with limitless possibilities."

Folt evokes the hidden world of women where creativity for women was confined to the home, a place of expression and a prison. Accompanying the series of drawings is one case that contains one long braid of human hair pressed against the front of the glass case. The hair, writhing like a frenzied animal trying to free itself, appears to rebel against its own claustrophobia. In contrast to the drawings, this disembodied hair evokes snake-like connotations of Medusa. Here, the hair is wild and real: as Maher writes, "Hair is a culturally loaded material; when it's on our heads it's one thing, but when it's separated from our bodies it becomes a repellent detritus."

. . . The many different meanings ascribed to hair, particularly women's hair, as a culturally significant material are a central part of numerous themes in Western folklore, mythology and consciousness. It is this multiplicity of theme and meaning which is addressed in Folt. The images are intended to form a catalogue of identities, values, personae, imaginations and choices that girls and women adopt in order to operate within our culture. They could also be seen as a tribute to inventiveness.

Mexican artist Silvia Gruner has also incorporated human hair into her work, but it reflects different cultural connotations than those mentioned by Alice Maher concerning her work (Rapunzel and Medusa, which are culturally specific to Western folklore). In Gruner's work the disembodied hair is symbolic of the pre-Hispanic ritual of body sacrifice. In contemporary Mexico, when rural women migrate to the city, many of them cut off their braids and place them on altars in churches, as an offering to the saints. It is an act of contrition and castration as well as a symbolic severing with the past; short hair then becomes a symbolic embrace of modernity. These braids, often grown from childhood, are interwoven with ribbons; thick at the top, they trail into thin, baby-like hair at the tip, tracing the history of personal time.

The series of photographs by Silvia Gruner, Don't Fuck With The Past, You Might Get Pregnant, depicts a constructed (fantasy) ritual, created by Gruner. Sexuality, myth, and history are intertwined in these strange constructed idols. "The isolated, anxious gestures of these images are a metaphor for the tentative pursuit one would like to make of identity and history once the official narrative has expired," reflects Cuauhtémoc Medina in his essay "Irony, Barbary, Sacrilege." "It is not in vain: the ancient mythologies tear at us subversively as incest." By presenting us with still images from the video, the viewer is distanced from the artist's intervention, and like the objects, the tepalcates (fragments), we are left with traces of an event; unable to fully comprehend the meaning of the ritual, we create our own mythologies and construct our own versions of history.

Don't Fuck With The Past, You Might Get Pregnant is an angry title, a warning. Behave! Absorb the official version of your history (be it government or familial history): don't explore your own identity, the title warns, or you might get pregnant, you might be changed, you might grow. Presented as a wall of photographs, resembling a bank of television screens, these ancient objects are thrust into the present: a rebirth. Removed from the context of their own history, they appear lost, swimming hopelessly in their modernity.

Gruner's work forms an interesting counterpoint to Willie Doherty's seemingly empty landscapes. Their work, although emerging from vastly different realities, addresses a similar concern with the way in which history and information are presented within cultural boundaries. Gruner writes:

We are taught in Mexico to look into the past in a very contrived way, and it's a way that assumes many assumptions, not only about a notion of a "glorious past," our archeology, our big culture, the treasures of the last thirty centuries, etc., but we are also taught to look at all these things in a very conservative way, as if they were outside of ourselves. This was the way I was taught to look at Mexican culture.

Willie Doherty has been making photography-based works in Derry for over fifteen years. His work is rooted in Ireland's contemporary history of the "troubles," although many of his images convey a timeless quality. In contrast to most photographic images of the "troubles," which might be described as "reportage," Doherty's photographs appear to owe more to a landscape tradition. A documentary photographer whose images are without news value, his photographs are self-consciously understated and often visually anonymous; by superimposing a text onto these landscapes, he changes the way in which the viewer reads the image. He writes:

I am writing from a place with two names. Derry and Londonderry. The same place. Here things are never what they seem and always have more than one name. To understand this duality is to begin to understand how this place functions and lives are lived here. Failure to recognise this duality is to miss the essential dynamic of what has been called a microcosm of the Northern Irish problem.11

The current cease-fire in the North of Ireland, while creating the potential for change, has at this time only facilitated cosmetic changes; some military checkpoints have been removed, closed country roads reopened, and berets have replaced the helmets of the occupying forces. However, the power structures imposed by the British--the troops, the prisons, the armed police force--remain in place. A policy of normalisation initiated in the 1980s is responsible for the current strategy of sanitisation and political gentrification. In the name of progress, recent history is being rendered invisible in the landscape. Doherty's photographs scratch away this veneer.

Doherty's work has always been concerned with the subconscious, the hidden landscape hovering below the surface, the invisible. In the current climate of attempted denial and amnesia of the last twenty-five years, his images take on a new resonance; open-ended, they ask more questions than they reveal answers. Doherty's work continues to move against the dominant flow, his images locate the "psychological relics" of colonialism rather than erase them. Garrett O'Connor, in his text "Recognising and Healing Malignant Shame," is aware of these patterns of post-colonial thinking:

Even though the current peace process in Northern Ireland may soon result in the departure of British troops from the six counties, the occupation of the Irish mind by psychological relics of colonialism, including malignant shame and the capacity for self-deceit contained in the national tendency to say one thing and do another, will continue indefinitely.

Doherty writes of his own work, "Their job is to be there. They occupy space in an uncertain present, a past which is in the process of being denied and a future without history."

Philip Napier is from Belfast, and like Doherty, his work is informed by the current situation; he, too, has lived most of his life in a climate of war. Napier creates his works from the relics of colonialism, be they real or imagined. Like Doherty, he is concerned with the current climate of "amnesia," a term both artists have used in their descriptions of the present situation. He writes, "the interesting thing about living in Ireland is that nothing is perceived as neutral. This is as much a psychological state as it is a built, physical environment." Apparatus V, an installation piece commissioned for this exhibition, will continue to explore the ideas in his recent work using computerised "bus signage" and audio equipment; the work will explore iconography of place names in the context of history, past and present.

In Black Top, a site-specific work, Napier covered the floor of a Belfast gallery with a tar road surface, a symbolic gesture generating layers of invisible references to labour, history, and the current situation in the North. The act of changing the usage of a space from a public art gallery to a car park is more likely to be the decision of a local government bureaucrat than of an artist; however, in creating this piece Napier drew attention to the way in which buildings change their function, especially in a landscape of bombed-out, burned-out, and abandoned buildings that have accrued over the last twenty-five years. The "official" emphasis on urban renewal as part of the government policy of normalisation and the desire to eradicate traces of the troubles is changing the architecture of the city of Belfast. Today, the city centre begins to looks like any other "English" city, a repository of chain stores and fast food restaurants. In a move to establish normality, the city is becoming anonymous.

The physical laying of the tar on the gallery floor can be interpreted as a homage to the faceless Irish workers, the "navvies" who built miles of motorways in England and in the North of Ireland for the British government. I have always been conscious of the contrast between the heavily utilised roads in England and the empty motorways in the North of Ireland; one built for traffic, the other for strategic reasons, to shift troops quickly from one location to another. The funding of road building by the British dates back to the time of the Famine in Ireland. As Napier writes, "There remain Famine roads which simply end where the labour died on its feet." Included in this exhibition is his piece Ballad no. 1, where echoes of the Famine are relived through the rasping sounds of a bellows-driven image of Bobby Sands. Luke Gibbons describes this piece in his text "Unapproved Roads: Post-Colonialism and Irish Identity:" "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."

David Fox, an Irish artist and filmmaker living in Britain, takes up the theme of "apparent" change that is taking place in Ireland. He prefers to use the term "smokescreen" in talking about the current situation in the North of Ireland, which for him implies a conscious act, created to prevent people from seeing things as they really are. Amnesia, he argues, describes more the act of forgetting than a willful act of being prevented from seeing.

This series of paintings on aluminum is entitled Tricolour: Watching Paint Dry. The work consists of reflected images. Despite the chaos and disjuncture, despite the apparent shift of boundaries, Fox argues that while on the surface the narrative has changed, it has always been an invention; in essence, the power structure remains in place. He writes:

Military conquest, Penal Laws, Partition and "Low Intensity Operations" are easy to see even through the smokescreen. . . . In Ireland we're in a state of suspended animation. So perhaps painting is reasonable in these circumstances. The surface of these paintings is hard and reflective: empty spaces, divided in three, a few empty landscapes, a street, a telegraph pole, an interrupted message, parts of a flag, a broken electronic image, a few hastily compiled words form a subtext: Free All POW's . . . "What should I wear?," "I hope Gerry knows what he's doing . . ."

 

Compact Disc:

At the back of this publication is a compact disc containing new works by two contemporary composers, Manuel Rocha Iturbide from Mexico, and Roger Doyle from Ireland. Both composers were invited to make work using the sounds of their own and each other's cultures. Manuel Rocha travelled to Ireland and recorded music, sounds, voices, and the spoken Irish language. These recordings have become the basis for his work. Roger Doyle did not have the opportunity to travel to Mexico; instead he created a work based primarily on his own culture, and has woven flute and voice to form a musical dialogue with Uilleann pipes, bringing together sounds from Ireland and Mexico.

 

Conclusions:

The works chosen for this exhibition reflect off one another, creating a dialogue of themes and tensions that resonate throughout. Inevitably, different responses and ideas will be generated as the exhibition moves from one location to another, one country to another, one culture to another. "Distant Relations/Cercanías Distantes/Clann i gCéin" brings together two diverse cultures that share historic and contemporary tangents where ideas meet and cross as they clamber out of their colonial pasts, then carry on their independent ways.

Irish and Mexican art and the art of the diasporas are as different as they are informed by their parallel histories. This exhibition is not intended as a neat and tidy package of similarities. The intention is not to create an in-depth understanding of contemporary Irish, Mexican, or Chicano art--but rather to create a platform for discussion of these ideas, and to create a dialogue. These relationships are fragile, and as this last year indicates, both Ireland and Mexico are changing at such a rapid pace that perhaps what they share most in common is the experience of chaotic change. For now, the art presented in this exhibition occupies the same physical space. When this exhibition tour ends, some of the work will move on to future destinations. Others will cease to exist.

 

 

Notes:

1 Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991).

2 Rasquache is a Chicano term equivalent to kitsch that has been defined by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as "an underdog perspective . . . it presupposes a world view of the have not, but it is a quality exemplified in objects and places and social comportment." It also refers to "bad taste" and a self-conscious recouping of a perception of inferiority. See Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache," p. 156.

3 Lucy Lippard, "Distant Relations," see page 15.

4 Luke Gibbons, "Unapproved Roads: Post-Colonialism and Irish Identity," see p. 56.

5 By the end of 1991, 7,052 Irish were detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act; of these, 6,097, or 86 percent, were released without being charged. For more in-depth information, see Paddy Hillyard, Suspect Community: People's Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1993).

6 Dr. Mary J. Hickman, "Differences, Boundaries, Community: The Irish in Britain," see p. 44.

7 Chilango -- slang, a person from Mexico City.

8 Armando Rascón, Xicano Progeny, Investigative Agents, Executive Council, and other Representatives from the Sovereign State of Aztlán (San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1995), p. 17.

9 Lucy Lippard, "Critical Kindness," in Treasures of New York (Dublin, Ireland: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Kerlin Gallery, 1990).

10 Olivier Debroise, "Javier de la Garza: fusiones," in Javier de la Garza (Mexico City: Galería OMR, 1992).

11 Willie Doherty, "Two Names . . . Two Places. . . Two Minds," Camera Austria, no. 37: 11-17.

 

 


Trisha Ziff can be reached at: trishziff@directnet.com