Culture ShockGerard Mannix Flynn's conceptual art events and installations constitute a guerilla history of the State, writes Fintan O'Toole
In an honest and thoughtful speech delivered in 2004 at the opening of one of Gerard Mannix Flynn's art installations, the then Arts minister John O'Donoghue noted that Flynn's book, Nothing to Say, was, at the time of its publication in 1983, "unbelievable and unacceptable. It was to take almost two decades more before we as a nation finally came to accept that the unbelievable not only could happen, but had indeed happened."
The incredible reality in this case was the incarceration of thousands of children in abusive institutions. Flynn, in Nothing to Say and in his more recent theatre piece James X, broke that particular silence, using his personal experience of being locked up, declared a lunatic and abused to make the unbelievable undeniable.
Every now and then, the unbelievable can be not a nightmare, but a dream. That which is hidden, invisible and scarcely credible is usually monstrous. But one of the key events of recent Irish history had all of these qualities except that it was not monstrous but marvellous. The IRA's decommissioning of its arsenal of weapons happened off-stage, beyond the range of visible reality. Most people believed that it would never happen and many had trouble believing that it ever did. It was, and remains, a strange event - highly symbolic and of immense public significance, but also secret, clandestine and furtive. In a media-saturated age where even hidden events like the execution of Saddam Hussein end up on YouTube via someone's mobile phone camera, decommissioning produced no images.
There is a wonderful aptness to Mannix Flynn's brilliant intervention in this strange reality. He knows, more viscerally than any other contemporary Irish artist, about the ways art can be used to make the invisible visible. In the way he explored institutional abuse, he also managed to turn the revelation of awful crimes into an act of healing. Who better to give us through art what the political process denied us - the visual "proof" of decommissioning, presented as a token of trust and of healing.
If you're in Dublin and you wander down Dame Street, you'll come to a small cafe called Gruel. The place doesn't draw much attention to itself, and neither does the No Ifs, No Butts, No Violence exhibition in its basement seating area. But if you go down the stairs you'll see a very simple and moving image. Stacked on shelves around the walls are pieces of wood carved in the shape of rifle butts. On one of the walls is a very large framed colour photograph. It shows a room full of metal storage units. Neatly piled on them are dozens of real rifles and submachine guns. Hanging from a hook near the front is a green balaclava. The picture takes us, imaginatively, inside one of the IRA's underground arsenals.
The room where this exhibition can be found is not a gallery, but a working, often crowded cafe space. Diners walking down the stairs with their soup and sandwiches suddenly find themselves in a secret and resonant space, replaying, however inadvertently, the experience of members of John de Chastelain's decommissioning body who were whisked off to unknown locations and taken into buried bunkers.
They are also replaying, at one remove, the experience of 150 people who took part in Flynn's Letting Go Of That Which You Most Ardently Desire project during the 2006 Dublin Theatre Festival. They were given a number to ring, taken to a secret location, and shown the real weapons represented in the photograph on display in Gruel. The guns were deactivated but genuine. The idea, as Flynn explained, was not just a literal recreation of the decommissioning experience, but a broader image of the idea of letting go. "We asked them to let go of their own resentments - because guns don't pull their own triggers, resentments do."
That idea linked very obviously into Flynn's earlier work of confronting and letting go his own experiences of institutional abuse by the State. It also related to Flynn's installation earlier this year called Thank You. Sited on Leeson Street, it was a series of texts of the 1916 Proclamation, printed in Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Polish as well as Irish and English. And to his installation, in the windows of a building opposite Dublin City Hall, one of the sites of the fighting in 1916, of 68 illuminated Warhol-like portraits of figures from the Rising. Taken together, all this work constitutes a kind of guerrilla history of the State, from the idealism of 1916, to the horrific distortions of institutional abuse and IRA violence, to the hope implicit both in the acknowledgment of abuse and the end of the IRA campaign. It works cumulatively and almost subliminally, but it builds into a very powerful ritual of public and private healing.
With the generosity that marks real art, Flynn has been giving us images of the way a society can move beyond the false alternatives of denying its dark secrets or wallowing in grievance. He has also, in the week when the Turner Prize in the UK has added to scepticism about conceptual art, reminded us that, in the right hands, it can still be a powerful tool for infusing reality with the imaginative truths without which it remains inert and incomplete.
No Ifs, No Butts, No Violence by Gerard Mannix Flynn is at Gruel, Dame Street, Dublin 2, until Jan 31, 2008