NORTHERN LIGHTS.

Troubled: Photography, Film and Video from Northern Ireland 

The Light Factory

Charlotte, North Carolina 

September 12-November 1, 1998

The Tire Shop

Raleigh, North Carolina 

May 31-July 31, 1999

Manbites Dog Theater

Durham, North Carolina 

May 31-July 31, 1999

Center for Documentary Studies

Durham, North Carolina

May 7-July 31, 1999

Wake Forest University

Fine Arts Gallery

Winston-Salem, North Carolina 

August 25-September 26, 1999

"The Troubles" is the name the Irish have pinned on the struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland's six counties. Although such a tidy euphemism perhaps suggests a sundered family in denial, the residents of Northern Ireland nurse no delusions about the suffering caused by their Thirty Years War. With more than 3200 lives lost in three decades, the majorities on both sides have finally pushed partisans to the peace table.

"Troubled," a selection of photographs, films and videos from Northern Ireland organized by Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum and Charlotte's The Light Factory, addressed the psychological distress and disruption of daily life caused by violence. The photography in "Troubled" spoke to the psychological condition, while the film and video portions of the program examined the impediments bedeviling the lives of Northern Ireland's residents.

In the small studio space of The Tire Shop, Victor Sloan's banner-like, water-colored digital prints of Protestant marches, Gate in Derry (1998) and Drummers at Parade (1998), proclaimed defiance in confrontational fashion, and Moira Mclver's Memory Memorial (1995-96), large close-up photographs of World War II veterans' uniforms paired with video relaying their memories of war, proved unsettling. Paul Seawright's "Police Force" (1995) C-prints projected a baleful air. His large (40 to 60" wide) color photographs, shown in the more spacious but still awkward setting of the Manbites Dog Theater, are of frank and stark details-the glistening lip of a restrained police dog, an earpiece clipped to a policeman's capped head, the battered footwell of a paddy wagon. Seawright examines areas most people do not see, such as a storage rack in a police station, bearing a black coat and folded Union Jack, or, more sinister, a patched and well-pierced target depicting a gun-toting, helmeted man, suspended in the foregrou nd of an indoor firing range. Even the ordinary takes on a malign aspect when Seawright aims his lens upward at two temperature gauges, one of which reads "Made in England." This is also the case with John Duncan's Fast Friend Les Dawson (1994), a grid of 20 x 24" color prints that catch urban life in a state of decay. The Protestant rallying cry, "LOYALTY," painted on a building wall, resonates alongside such everyday objects as two old air-handling units in an alley, the comer of a monument's plinth and browning rolls of sod. An atmosphere is created in which nearly everything gathers unpleasant connotations, in which scribbles on a piece of cardboard reading, "Fast friend Les Dawson" and a crude street map come together as the outline of a vengeful plot.

In this context Nigel Rolfe's elegant C-print diptych of calla lilies, Life After Death (1997), one showing the flower in bloom, the other after it has withered, inevitably invite a mournful reading. A wall label points out that in Ireland the lily is associated with the 1916 Easter uprising against British rule, and Rolfe is memorializing a Catholic friend in his photographs.

Also shown in the tight quarters of The Tire Shop, Mary Mcintyre's Elaborate Constructions Engineered on a Massive Scale in order to Create the Proper Images (1997), consisting of four lightboxes displaying photographs taken inside a church, addressed the religious divisions behind "The Troubles." Apparently work is being done to the church, for the statuary is out of place; three saints stand like parishioners behind a pew, a Pieta is in the first pew and Christ occupies a stand at the rear. These displaced figures seem to question the power of the church to support angry allegiances.

Such unsettling images and loaded symbology of sectarian unrest are absent from Tim Loane's Academy Award-nominated short, Dance Lexie Dance (1996), making this pleasant tale of a widowed father indulging his daughter's passion for Irish "riverdancing" seem almost surreal in context. The missing mother is the film's only sorrow, and one wonders if she was one of the 3200 casualties. The religious background of the family is never revealed. That alone is a blow struck for peace, and so, perhaps, is the hint that Northern Ireland is Irish, too, whatever its government.

Harsh images also are scarce in the work of filmmakers Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt, but they loom off-screen. The Trouble with Art (1994) and Women's Work (1997) explore the lives of artists and women, respectively. One senses that these two 40-minute documentaries, occasionally witty and off-hand, want to be untroubled--to be about artists who paint and women who strive with only the usual distractions. The laments of the artists in The Trouble with Art are mostly feckless and one need not live in Northern Ireland to feel alienated from the general culture. Cohn McGookin, an artist interviewed in the documentary, notes the additional complication of artists feeling trapped "between the devil and the deep blue sea," susceptible to accusations of either exploiting or ignoring "The Troubles." Artist Gerard Devlin, who survived a sectarian attack, reveals that he avoided the topic for years, and only with maturity has felt able to process his memories in a series of paintings about the assumed home life of his attacker.

Women's Work chronicles a more complicated strain--the history of women's involvement in politics. The first to rise against violence were those women appalled by the tide of children's white coffins, Mairead Maguire of Peace People, a group that organized these voices, tells the filmmakers. But women have played a role on both sides of Northern Ireland's politics at least since Bernadette Devlin won parliamentary election. As a republican unaffiliated with Sinn Fein, the official nationalist party, Devlin, whose married surname is McAliskey, has long been a critic of the stalemate politics of the nationalist-unionist divide. Little wonder, then, that she questions the desire of women to play the same game: "Why do women waste so much energy actually trying to individually transform themselves into acceptable packages for a system that is now obsolete?" They expend a great deal of energy doing just that, whether knocking on doors, bellowing into microphones or sustaining the abuse of male colleagues on local councils, and to little effect. Not one of the 18 people elected from Northern Ireland to the British Parliament in 1997 was a woman.

But women are effective in other ways, as Women's Work demonstrates. Pauline Gilmore is a member of the more strident Right to March campaign, a group composed of both sexes, which advocates the rights of Protestants to stage marches that aggravate Catholics. While she admits politics is "a very dirty game," she clearly revels in it. She grumbles that Catholics are 'shocked that Protestants started to address their civil rights."

This remark echoes the "anti-discrimination" line taken by opponents of affirmative action in the United States, and not surprisingly, given that Northern Ireland's Catholics drew inspiration in the 1960s from the American Civil Rights movement. This point is made clear in Bogwoman (1997), Derry documentarian Tom Collins's first narrative film. From a present-day time frame, the female protagonist Maureen reflects on her life after emigrating from the Republic of Ireland to Derry in the 1950s to marry a good-hearted wastrel. Scrabbling to feed her family and attempting to get her husband who is dying of cancer to level with her are principal preoccupations, but the accelerating "Troubles" nudge into Maureen's concerns as she receives visits from the Royal Ulster Constabulary and hears radio reports about Catholic demonstrations routed by that Unionist force. While at one point she throws away a gun apparently found by her son and moves the family to keep her son from getting involved in the violence, she eve ntually returns to Derry to join others in filling Molotov cocktails behind a barricade. Yet at the end she comments, "All I know is our desire for peace is as strong as ever.

In an interview in the Irish film quarterly, film west, Collins asserts, "I wrote that line and I agree with it. I think it's current currency among women of that generation who have lived through the last 25 years." But Collins also stresses that he cannot pretend objectivity: "I really have never had the advantage of being balanced in the sense of going into a situation and looking at it and leaving it ambivalent. I find it quite difficult not to have a perspective." [1] In this regard, it is hardly amazing that earlier this year An Phoblacht, the Republican. weekly newspaper published in Belfast and Dublin, urged "all you republicans in Dublin" to see the film, which it labeled "as much a feminist as a republican story." [2]

This tension between aspirations for peace and the persistence of partisan identification runs as an undercurrent through most of the work in "Troubled." The partisan murals blaring like ineradicable pentimenti through the photographs of Duncan's Fast Friend Les Dawson seem to stress this point Sloan's large-scale prints of Protestant marches seem neither to endorse nor condemn the conflict, but rather to hammer home the simple fact of its disruptive reality. With the exception of Bogwoman, which seems to struggle with the tension, the photographs and films and videos are not particularly activist, but are more concerned with the effects of strife than with its causes or resolution.

CHUCK TWARDY, a former art and architecture critic for several newspapers in the southeast, lives and writes in Greenville, NC.

NOTES

(1.) film west, Summer 1997.

(2.) An Phoblacht, Republican News, Feb. 4, 1999.