Living in an environment of conflict such as Northern Ireland not only has an impact on the works artists create, but can change the way art and the built environment is perceived by the public. This was the argument of an American photographic artist, Dennis Adams, at an international gathering of artists and art critics last week.
The International Association of Art Critics (AICA), which gathers visual-art critics from all over the world, held its week-long annual congress on the theme "Art and Centres of Conflict - Outer and Inner Realities" in Belfast's Waterfront Hall and Derry's Guildhall. It was the first time the congress has been held in the North, bringing up to 120 delegates from cultures as artistically diverse as the Far East, South America and Russia. This year's theme attracted speakers with immediate experience of conflict from cities such as Zagreb and Jerusalem.
Dr Liam Kelly, president of AICA Ireland and director of the Orchard Gallery in Derry, said the aim of the congress was "to share experiences and to allow critics to bring different kinds of cultural experiences to persistent international issues to do with visual arts". It also gave delegates the opportunity to see Northern Irish art at first hand, as the programme included visits to all the main galleries in both cities.
Dennis Adams spoke on "Contested Territories" under the Colloquium 2 theme of "The City as a Locus for Conflict". Speaking in Derry, where eight years ago he mounted a temporary piece of street art entitled Siege, the artist said he believed there was a different kind of street audience in Northern Ireland. "My impression is that people are very astute readers of the built environment. People historically have been conditioned to look at their environment . . . to detect various kinds of territorial lines."
His work Siege consisted of full-scale Gaelic football posts, framing a huge picture of a flat complex in the nationalist Bogside area, erected directly in front of Butcher Gate in the city walls. It was an attempt "to talk back to the walls" which, for nationalist citizens, represented British and Protestant authority. "My role as an artist is to make visible what is invisible or hidden." Adams also outlined his view that people with a long experience of conflict were more resistant to consumer culture "because of the way the city has been manipulated with barricades, and defence systems and the construction of architecture around tribal conflict".
Dr Liam Kelly, who said he believed it was timely to invite the association to hold its congress in the North because of "a new confidence" in the visual arts, spoke on "Northern Irish Art - Acts of Interrogation", taken mainly from his recently-published book, Thinking Long. He said "a new period of intensive self-interrogation" was evident throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and that the political troubles had acted as a catalyst. It was recognised among artists that for too long people from elsewhere, particularly in the news media, were telling their story.
"We, as it were, wanted to tell our own story, and consequently have a very discursive art, which has been produced over the last 20 years, reflecting the nature of identity and place." While a previous generation of artists had been content to celebrate the formal features of landscape, a new generation was interrogating that landscape. "Landscape is recognised not to be a given, but a constructed reality and, as such, problematic."
Using illustrations of work by a range of artists including Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright, Dr Kelly said artists from both sides of the political divide were reflecting on their own identity and "trying to understand themselves vis-a-vis this culture and the problems of this culture". Willie Doherty, in his work, The Only Good One Is A Dead One, had shown himself to be "compelled by the complexities of language as mediated in the press and on television, and the dangers of stereotyping as a barrier to understanding".
While "siege" was a word often used in discussions relating to Derry, Berislav Valusek, a museum director from Croatia, explored the effects on artists of "a medieval-like siege" of the cities of Osijek and Dubrovnik during the war in former Yugoslavia. The experience was "all the more terrifying because the inhabitants could, almost daily, watch, transmitted by television, their own dying".
One example of art produced during the war cited by Valusek was a performance by Dubrovnik artist, Bozidar Jurjevic, which drew from the fact that art was being taken from the museums and put in metallic boxes for protection. Jurjevic used a similar box "to save the artist", and to highlight "a bitter irony in which the whole world cared for Dubrovnik as a monument to culture, but did not take into consideration the destiny of its inhabitants". During the period of the war, between 60 and 70 per cent of artists in Croatia were producing pieces on war-related themes, but within the context of their previous work, Valusek said. The theme of conflict drew many diverse responses and interpretations throughout the day. The US-based, German artist, Hans Haacke, chose to focus on conflict within the art world, particularly in relation to commercial sponsorship of museums, galleries and specific exhibitions. In a powerful argument, which generated a lot of discussion, he warned that sponsors have been "gaining indirect veto power over programming in many institutions". He accused the political class in Europe of shirking its democratic responsibilities by "allowing or even advocating the de facto take-over" of museums, which were "being expropriated and made to serve business interests".
Haacke said exhibition programmes in the US and in other parts of the world were being increasingly determined by "the degree to which they lend themselves to a positive image-transfer for sponsoring corporations". . . "or the public relations needs of politicians". Quoting examples of exhibitions sponsored by oil companies and cigarette manufacturers, Haacke warned of the consequences of handing control over to the sponsors. In one case an artist, on discovering that an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was sponsored by the Philip Morris corporation, asked to have her piece replaced by a work commemorating her parents, both of whom had died from smoking-related illnesses. The museum refused and she lost the opportunity to have her work shown.
Haacke also pointed out that since corporate contributions were generally tax-deductible, "we pay for the campaigns that influence how we live. We underwrite the expenses of our own seduction,", he concluded.
