Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Martyrs &SatyrsAuthor(s): Mic MoroneySource: Fortnight, No. 341 (Jul. - Aug., 1995), pp. 30-31Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25558509 .

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~~~~MrtysARsayr

MIC MORONEY gasps at the artwork by

Shane Cullen which was sent to Venice as

Ireland's official entry to the world's largest curatorial art festival, the Venice Biennale.

In her Oireachtas speech last February, President

Mary Robinson, referring to the weight of the past

on this island made an extraordinary comment:

"Commemoration," she said, "is a moral act."

It's certainly the position taken by the Dublin

based artist, Shane Cullen, in his monumental paint

ing, FragmntssurlesInstitutionsRepublicaines, agigantic

work-in-progress so far consisting of three 8ft x 16ft

blocks, each containing eight columns of text against

a dark green background-the day-by-day commu

niques of the Long Kesh hunger-strikers in 1981.

Written on toilet paper, wrapped in clingfilm, and

smuggled internally out of the prisons, the textswere

borrowed from David Beresford's emotive account

of the hunger strikes, Ten Men Dead. Sifting through

these newly monumentalised 'comms', with their

mixture of slang, military, religious and socialist

jargon, the benighted horror of the H-Blocks pro

tests seep into your mind, with an inevitable gasping

admiration at such an ultimate sacrifice.

It's an extraordinary act of commemoration-all

the more so considering that this work, alongside

the work of Kathy Prendergast, was selected by a

subcommittee of the Cultural Relations Committee

of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin

as Ireland's official entry to the Venice Biennale.

Begun by the artist before the ceasefires, the piece

is a kind of history painting-a self-appointed task,

rather then a state commission-behind which the

government seems to row in support, almost as if

back-tracking on 'revisionist' tendencies.

If the concept of a nation is a kind of necessary

fiction, Cullen draws attention to this by half-ironi

cally hijacking the logography of the Irish state in his

work. The harp, which is the official seal of the

republic, is also an identifying emblem for his no

tional Council for the Preservation of Public Martyr

dom and Resistance, an umbrella title for a body of

work which enshrines reformulations of the symbols

and core ideologies of the French, Irish, American

and classical republics.

The catalogue for the Venice show bears the

translation of this Council's title in Irish as 'An

Chomhairle um Chaomhnui Seadcharthai don

Mhairtireacht agus Don Fhrithansmacht'-and re

markably, considering Irish historical traditions, a

new Irish word had to be cobbled together for the

word 'resistance'.

To contribute further to this dizzying broth of

emblems, the seal on the cover is a lion's head of the

Zodiac-festooned god, Aion, ringed with the text of

Aleister Crowley's phalloidal invocation of the god

Jupiter: Thus the Bard purifies the boy with foaming semen,

while the other in his orgasm receives the waters.

OmnipotentJupiter, king of men and the Gods, Sprin

kle, I pray, thy golden gifts upon thy servants.

A century ago, the Venice Biennale began as a

triumphalist display of the art of nations under King

Umberto I and Margherita di Savoia, and it has been

laden with political and diplomatic irony ever since.

In the late 20s, the fascist administrators, despite

themselves, had to hand it to the Soviets and their

new official state art. Today it is where the nations'

art-politicos converge for one of the greatest pile-ups

of art in the western world.

In the sprawling Giardini, the detritus of com

memorative stone statuary (including a bust of

Wagner) littered the grounds between the pavilions,

grand gestures of austere neo-classical chic among

the trees, builtwith imperial sensibilitieswhich bluntly

belie the bland peace-propaganda of the event. As

one Dutch sculptor remarked, there should be fences

between the pavilions, with border guards stamping

passports as visitors stray from one to the other.

Partly due to a minuscule budget, and partly

because the Irish did not want their work to visually

disappeal (as the pieces by Willie Doherty and

Dorothy Cross tended to in the Italian pavilion two

years ago), the Irish 'pavilion', is a private gallery,

Vittorio Urbani's Nuova Icona, where the quiet

shade of a courtyard leads you into the cool, white

shade of the gallery and where the work of the two

Irish will continue to show until August 12th.

Certainly, the atmosphere helped the interna

tional Biennale jury to focus on Kathy Prendergast's

work, and the Irish presence became a big deal after

they awarded her the prestigious Premio Duemila

prize which attracted a steady flow of critics, media,

curators and art-tourists.

Naked on the wall, Cullen's piece elicited a lot of

curious questions about the hunger strikes (one

French woman at the opening was moved to tears):

a complex, emotive narrative which now transformed

into legend, moving out of the hearts and minds of

the relatives and into the public domain (there is

even a feature film on the hunger strikes in prepara

tion).

There it appeared without historical, political or

cultural context-and context has always been a

problem for artists from Northern Ireland, where

centuries of violence and segregation have given a

very loaded significance to flags, emblems, and such

symbolic narratives.

There is a strong continuing seam of work by

northern artists dealing with the hunger strikes

(Gerry Gleeson, Jim Campbell), as though they speak of things which politics cannot with a kind of

30 FORTNIGHT JULY/AUGUST 1995

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_ ~ARTS_

_ _~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jl __~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~c Bo _olt_i atSaeCle

delirious glossolalia of the image. Yet symbols,

architectures and words which have such concrete,

specific meaning in, say, Belfast, often drain of their

significance once the work travels even as far as

Dublin, where even clearly politicised work seems to

slumber in the specialised (or is it anaesthetised?)

conditions of a gallery.

I have seen this contextual shift mystifying the

deeply coded yet rarely ambiguous work of Aisling

O'Beirn, or even Philip Napier's Ballad (1983), the

lugubrious motorised button accordion of Bobby

Sands which graced the quadrangle in IMMA in

Dublin for some months.

Also in IMMA right now, the work of Rita Donagh

seemed to recede into a kind of prettified impres

sionism. Ironically, her husband, Richard Hamil

ton's painting The Citizen, a proud and beautiful

image of a Blanketman on the dirty protest (now a

central image among the devotional iconography

produced by today's republican prisoners) was ex

hibited as part of his travelling roadshow retrospec

tive in the British pavilion at the 1993 Biennale,

where he won the coveted Golden Lion Award.

Perhaps, as Cullen himself is wont to remark: "The

highest form of art is politics, and the highest form

of politics is art."

Before Cullen was ever really recognised in Dublin,

his work was very readily received in a number of

former eastern bloc countries and, as writer in

residence of the Irish Writers' Museum in Dublin, he

is re-rendering another text, Reginald E Ropers

trembling paean to Constance Markievicz, where it

will be exhibited in Poland, birthplace of the Count

who married this Anglo-Irish firebrand of the 1916

Easter Rising.

Nextyear Cullen's Biennale piece will be shown in

the Douglas Hyde gallery in Dublin (the full piece

will consist of 11 large blocks, containing 88 panels

of text); but even there, it will lack the symbolic

potency of Belfast, where the artist ultimately in

tends to display it.

Elsewhere in President Robinson's speech, she

described arriving in heavy rain (Irish-style) at an

island on the St Lawrence river near Quebec city,

where mounds and white crosses were all that marked

the mass graves of five thousand or more Irish:

I was struck by the sheer power of commemoration. I was

also aware that, even across time and distance, tragedy

must be seen as human and not historic, and that to

think of it in national terms alone can obscure that fact.

Even at this distance in time, the hunger strikes is a

staggering, shocking tale, and it will be interesting to

see whether Cullen's piece, if shown in Belfast, in the

context of next year's events, can be more than a

hurtful, divisive reminder of a year in Irish politics,

which set the north ablaze.

JULY/AUGUST 1995 FO R T N I G H T 31

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