DANIEL JEWESBURY
This is an extended version of the text that was read out at the Launch of Fugitive Papers #4 at CCA Derry~Londonderry on the 15 June 2013.
SITTING in the Hugh Lane looking at Monet’s painting of Waterloo Bridge, I realise that I am being impelled backwards to my own point of embarkation, sitting underneath the same bridge and drawing its massiveness for my Art A-Level. What did I believe was the purpose of my intended career then, and why did I think I would become an artist, about 90 years after Monet painted his view of the bridge? What do I think now, 20-odd years later?
For more than 15 years I have been writing about a few things that are, to me, inextricably interrelated. These are, firstly, the recent historiography and institutional history of Northern Irish art; secondly, the various ways in which Northern Irish art has been positioned and presented in relation to broader historical and political factors; and thirdly, the ongoing privatisation of the Northern Irish public and political spheres. Over many years, I have encountered a general apathy towards the connection of these three strands; Northern Irish art[1] is particularly reluctant to politicise its own processes of representation, or the conditions of its production. There’s some irony in this given that, for such a long time, it was characterised as inherently ‘political’; but this calls to mind Victor Burgin’s famous distinction between the mere ‘representation of politics’, which is always a superficial affair, and the more complex, involved ‘politics of representation’. I have very often been nonplussed by the responses of Northern Irish arts institutions to social, political and economic conditions here. I have found inexplicable, or at least inexcusable, the poverty of imagination amongst our cultural policymakers. But I have never been as disillusioned and disappointed as I am now.
When I consider the landscape of Northern Irish art now, I see something that is thoroughly compromised, complicit with policy agendas that were designed exclusively to benefit private interests and private capital. In the decade after the Good Friday Agreement, the institutions of art deserted completely the notion of public critique, or even public relevance; this goes for the galleries and the policy agencies as well as the artists and curators. I find it breathtaking that five years on from a crash that might reasonably have been expected to bring about the collapse of Peace Process Plan A, nothing has changed; in fact artists and their institutions seem more supine and redundant than ever.
You’ll remember Peace Process Plan A; essentially, it was the rapid privatisation of public life in the North, through clever things such as ‘retail-led regeneration’; any opportunity that ‘peace’ may have presented – for, say, constructing a genuinely democratic and inclusive civil society – was colonised immediately by developers and speculators, facilitated by their friends in political office. A narrative quickly developed that there could be no social regeneration save that brought about by private development, urban regeneration and property speculation. Accordingly, all these things acquired a morality of which they would ordinarily be assumed to be devoid; shopping centres and unwanted apartment blocks became the preconditions of social cohesion in this new moral economy. Northern Ireland after the Agreement resembled a rapidly liberalising former Eastern-bloc state; while details like democratic oversight and participation were stalled indefinitely, while the sectarianism of representative politics was enshrined in the very workings of the Assembly, brown envelopes were changing hands, planning permissions were being granted, and massive parts of the city were being torn down and rebuilt.
This all happened in ways that were so obscured from public scrutiny, that to some degree it’s no surprise that there was a failure to respond to it. Plan after plan was unveiled; the city was branded into quarters, beginning with the Cathedral Quarter, a ‘cultural district’ dreamed up by the unelected redevelopment quango Laganside Corporation; the enormous Victorian sheds in the shipyards were demolished, literally overnight, and replaced with the privately-owned, publicly-serviced financial instrument known as Titanic Quarter (now crowned with a museum that swallowed up £90m of public money); after the fiasco of Imagine Belfast’s failed bid to host the European Capital of Culture 2008, government agencies decided that the entirety of 2012 should be a Titanic-themed festival, liberally dotted with opportunities to waste money, and leading seamlessly into Derry’s 12 months as ‘UK City of Culture’ this year. More insidiously and invisibly, large amounts of previously public space in the city centre have been turned over to private hands: most would assume that Lanyon Quay, the land around Belfast City Council’s Waterfront Hall, was in public hands, but in fact it is owned by two of Northern Ireland’s wealthiest property developers, whose company is responsible for most of the unoccupied and incomplete office space lining its perimeter. Victoria Square, a covered shopping plaza beset by financial problems since its opening just in time for the financial crash in early 2008, occupies a chunk of land that used to be public streets, and is policed by private security guards. Meanwhile, the city continues to be more divided by class and ethnoreligious affiliation than at any time during the conflict.
A number of years ago I wrote about the failure of artists in Northern Ireland, in the years of the Troubles, to make any genuinely insightful or useful responses to the political situation; with very few exceptions, curators and artists dwelt on giving vent to anguished, expressionistic wails of incomprehension. This was probably understandable but it gave the lie to the claim by some that artists in the North were the conscience of their society; they were no more articulate or insightful than anyone else. The reason, for me, that Willie Doherty was singled out early on in his career is that he was one of the very few artists of his generation, in the North, even attempting to make the job of representing what was happening more, not less complex.
The failure persists today, if anything in a more egregious form, because it has about it none of the impotence and naivety of before. Just as artists failed to say much that was relevant about the war, so they’ve failed to confront the terms of the peace, to object to its inequalities and disparities. Curatorship in the North, to the extent that it exists at all, is a consensual, unchallenging, forelock-tugging affair. Curators and gallery managers, from the youngest to the most established, have not sought to question the terms by which they are expected to operate, which is as content providers to an economy of cultural tourism, spectacle and lifestyle consumption; they seem happy to be the midwives of mediocrity. Looking around me now I see a visual arts ecology which has become entirely irrelevant to Northern Irish life. It has made itself irrelevant, by parroting obediently a celebratory, boosterist line handed down directly from the Executive and the political establishment, via tourism agencies and cultural quangoes. It’s not just that artists are failing to say anything relevant, or critical, it’s that it is now impossible for them even to attempt to do so.
It must be early morning in Monet’s painting, the sun seems to be in front of him, low in the south-east, and there’s a pink glow in the sky and on the figures on the bridge. I know this view, well, not exactly this view, since Monet painted it from his room in the Savoy.
The enterprise of art and its discourses, the whole edifice, now seems shabby and dishonest, merely banal. The worst one could say about it is that it’s inconsequential, a bit distasteful, a self-satisfied industry more than happy with the crumbs that are swept to it from the table of public policymaking.
I was going to write that there is no institutional critique, no self-awareness in the institutions of art now. That’s not true: in fact the galleries and museums make self-critique a kind of fetishised part of their existence: “let’s stage an event to talk about how and why the enterprise we’re engaged in is compromised and ineffectual; but let’s do it in an essentially polite and unchallenging way”. This goes beyond the hand-wringing of so much multi-million-Euro discussion of ‘bare life’ in the kunsthalles and biennales of Europe. It goes beyond Eurocurating and its pompous self-justifications. It’s now an utterly corrosive thing. Critique is colonised and repackaged, and made vacuous too. What is there left for ‘art’ to pretend to do, and who cares?
I was included in an exhibition this year documenting thirty years of Northern Irish photography.[2] After seeing the show, I felt embarrassed to be part of it. On one level it was just another excuse for a celebration: not, this time, of the all-round splendidness of Belfast, but of itself, an opportunity for artists and curators to remind themselves how important they are and have been. No problems are raised with the course of Northern Irish photography during the period; no uncomfortable questions are asked of its different strategies. Works which ask those questions are themselves neutralised through the manner of their inclusion and presentation. It’s as if this is a Whig version of photographic history, like Hegel’s defence of the perfectness of the Prussian state: we could never have had peace if we hadn’t had dull pictures of the Maze. But beyond this pointlessness is a kind of desperation; because although the work is badly contextualised and badly presented, artists have learned not to criticise things out loud. This is true even when they’re not in the show; you wouldn’t want to risk alienating a particular gallery or curator, after all, because you just might get a show from them at some point.
We need the courage to stop joining in, or just to disagree. We – resolutely ‘we’, since individual voices are irrelevant, just like this one – we need to ask whether every city-of-culture gimmick is always a good thing, whether every million-pound firework display brings peace a step closer, whether all the millions spent on staging the Turner Prize in Derry are worth it (or whether they are a slap in the face to every artist who’s tried to make a living in Derry, only to be told that visual art in the city began in 2013). We have to stop desperately seeking affirmation with every ‘opportunity’ offered, and to stop speaking the language of complicity in our funding applications and public statements. I used to celebrate artist-led and artist-run activity in Belfast because as far as I could make out it didn’t have the same characteristics as artist-led activity in Britain, where it was generally used as a fast-track into the commercial mainstream. We didn’t have a commercial mainstream; we had nothing, which was why artist-run activity was both necessary and important – without it, you just couldn’t make or show work. Today, much artist-run activity seems designed in part to bring the young curator to the attention of someone who might be able to get them a proper paid gig elsewhere; except that there are no proper paid gigs elsewhere. So why are we still playing the game? The less said about the disabling power of the big institutions, meanwhile, the better; what are they for, other than to make art safe, to sterilise it, and ultimately annihilate it?
If it’s early summer (and if the sun is rising at that angle, it must be), then it could be about 6 am in the painting. This is the beginning of a century. An old, reclusive queen is in the last years, the last months of her life. Crowds flow across Waterloo Bridge (so many; death has undone so many). Monet will paint this scene again and again. The bridge was designed by John Rennie, who also designed London Bridge; ironically, Rennie’s London Bridge destabilised his Waterloo Bridge, since the current upstream was increased when Old London Bridge was demolished. Both bridges are gone now. London Bridge is in the desert in Arizona; stones from Waterloo Bridge were sent to countries around the world when the new bridge was built.
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Notes
1 I mean, the institutions, critical discourses and practices of Northern Irish art.
2 The exhibition was staged to accompany the launch of a detailed and considered book examining the same subject.
Comments in this text relate to the exhibition only, and not to the publication.