False Memory, the name of Willie Doherty's retrospective at IMMA, is an encapsulation of the recurring issues in his work, especially those relating to the recent history of the North, he tells Aidan Dunne
Since he began exhibiting in the mid-1980s, Willie Doherty has become one of the most highly regarded and influential Irish artists of his generation, with a formidable reputation nationally and internationally and a voluminous, impressive body of work to his credit. In False Memory, a compact retrospective of his work at IMMA, certain themes recur.
"The title," he says, "came out of thinking what a show like this should be about. I wanted it to be about more than just a chronological account of the work. And False Memory hopefully related to these issues that are running through it."
Those issues, generally explored against the background of the North's troubled recent history, have to do with the way meaning is never neutral, how it is culturally and ideologically constructed.
For Doherty, the photograph is literally a false memory - strangely so, perhaps, given that his work is fundamentally based on the photographic image. The view that photographs lie is uncontentious in a digital age but, he argues, "socially, there is a still a belief in photography as a tool for telling the truth, for the photograph as a reliable witness". Yet, all the uses of the photographic image - including reportage, documentation, surveillance and indeed fine art - are partial, loaded and unreliable. And written into all of Doherty's photographic work is a fundamental scepticism about photography's claim to veracity.
Increasingly, his work seems to acknowledge the limitations of memory itself. In his dramatised video installation, How it Was, made in 2001, three individuals mull over something that may or may not have happened in the space of a murkily lit workshop. Although the installation is atmospheric and hypnotically watchable, as they go through a series of repetitive actions with an overlaid, disjointed commentary, you come to realise that there is no chance of extracting a coherent narrative from the cyclical pattern of overlapping fragments on offer. No resolution is possible - a pessimistic conclusion in the context of Northern Ireland.
Born in Derry in 1959, Doherty grew up with daily reality of The Troubles. He watched the events of Bloody Sunday from a window of his home. It is hardly surprising that, when he came to study art, he should question the relevance of an artistic tradition based on formal and pastoral concerns to a fraught, divisive urban reality. He chose to engage with that troublesome reality, from an intimate, local perspective and, throughout his career, despite a few notable forays further afield, he has remained not so much committed as in thrall to that initial viewpoint. Not least, he has explored the anonymous spaces at the edge of the city, its ruins and wastelands, and the highlands beyond, with great feeling for rough, down-at-heel beauty.
His most recent piece in the show, Re-Run, features a man running across a deserted bridge by night - the same bridge over the River Foyle that featured in a photographic work 10 years ago. However, his work has, he feels, grown less dependent on local knowledge: "The terrain functions differently in the later work. It's very specifically Derry in the earlier pieces, and you'd almost need a detailed local knowledge to pick up the references. And as it came to be exhibited more and more in different places, it seemed to me that you'd almost need to provide the audience with a crash course on the history of the North. But I think it's more open now."
Fidelity to his given local viewpoint may sound like a recipe for blinkered, partisan engagement, but, from the outset, Doherty's work has been characterised by its measured analytical approach. He tends to treat the tenets of Northern history, the sacred cows of identity and tradition, as myths to be investigated with scepticism rather than deference. From the mid-1980s, he started making photo-text works, black-and-white photographs of Derry on which were overlaid terse, cryptic messages in single words or phrases. Taken cumulatively, these photo-texts can be seen as exploring the way we inscribe meaning on to the landscape.
Except that, as is the case in the North, and by no means uniquely, different cultures imbue the landscape with opposed, perhaps incompatible meanings. The fallacy of the liberal view of the North's problems is that there must be a rational middle ground of compromise on which agreement can be based. Historical evidence, and current politics, suggests that little such ground exists.
Doherty demonstrates this with his recurrent device using two related images co-opted to symbolise opposed ideological meanings. The west bank of the Foyle is viewed as embodying nationalist aspirations, the east bank as indicative of unionist determination to hold fast. A simple shift in point of view engenders a diametrically opposed meaning or, for that matter, transforms an assassin into a victim, as in the video piece, The Only Good One is a Dead One, from 1993.
For, of course, meanings are projected on to more than the landscape itself, on to people and events. In a slide-tape installation, Same Difference, opposed descriptions are juxtaposed against an identical mug-shot of Donna Maguire following her arrest as an IRA suspect. One person's terrorist is another's patriot. In a more complex way, another installation (using another mug-shot, of Nessan Quinlivan), They're All the Same, interweaves a romanticised view of Ireland with various poetical sentiments to generate composites of the ideas, impulses and external perceptions that might represent an individual and an individual point of view.
The man in Re-Run is caught in a loop that has him running simultaneously towards both ends of the bridge. This cyclical device recurs in Doherty's work and suggests an underlying futility. It also relates to his definitive inconclusiveness. Although he has come more and more to use elements of cinematic language, as with How it Was, and the rich, complex installation, Somewhere Else (1998), he has no inclination to construct a conventional cinematic narrative.
"I don't have any desire to make a film. I refer to those structures, but I don't really have a story that I want to tell. I might come out of a cinema and say, well, I really liked that bit where the guy was walking along with the trees in the background. Narratively, it may be insignificant, a five-second scene, but it's those moments within cinematic narrative that I draw on." In fact, everything he has done is against the authoritative, linear narrative typical of mainstream cinema.
He is similarly uneasy with photographic convention: "One can talk about the artist's ability to get beyond the limitation of normal vision, to offer an insight or intimacy that may be normally lacking, but I think that images are, by their nature, formal constructions and you cannot get around that." Hence his current Kerlin Gallery show, Unidentified Male Subject, which is at least in part a critique of the genre of the photographic portrait.
As he puts it, there is always a layer of subjectivity that eludes representation, and his "portraits" are about what cannot be represented, about the limitations of representation.
Yet something strange happened when he came to put the work together for False Memory. "To some extent it surprised me how the same things come up again and again, but what really surprised me was the extent to which things had changed," he says. "I found that the photographs I took in 1986 have become documents despite themselves, in a way, peculiar kinds of document. Derry just looked so different at that time, so they have become documents of place."
True, but theyare documents that always come with an inbuilt note of caution for the viewer.
• False Memory is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until March 2nd, 2003. Unidentified Male Subject is at the Kerlin Gallery until November 16th