Issue 4: Summer 2009
Video, Landscape and the Politics & Poetics of Place in Ireland
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
A look back at notes for a paper delivered at Peripheral Visions, Cork Film Centre's International Video Art Symposium, November 2005
This symposium is concerned, to some degree at least, with the increasingly vexed question of medium-specificity in an ostensibly post-medium era, and with the relatively brief history and particular properties of video within the wider domain of what would traditionally be termed fine art. This particular session is devoted to "Landscape: the Politics [but perhaps also the Poetics] of Place", and my individual remit was to attend briefly to the Irish dimension of these intersecting areas of inquiry.
To present even a potted history of video art in Ireland would be impossible within the time allotted, and would in any case be beyond my own limited expertise, that is to say as a jobbing critic of contemporary art, rather than a historian of the medium. Various contributions towards such a history have been published over the years, most notably in the pages of Circa. A number of these contributions are usefully summarised by Shirley McWilliam in an article published in 2002 entitled Screen and Screen Again, to which my remarks here today are indebted. One common tendency epitomised by that particular article is for discussions of the history of video within an Irish context to be subsumed into broader categories such as time-based art, lens-based art, technology-based art, new media and so forth. Despite assertions by writers like Martin McCabe and Joan Fowler that video is "the ur-electronic medium" (McCabe) or a "primary form" (Fowler), and as such, by implication, arguably on a par with such historically autonomous forms as painting and sculpture, the fact is that in Ireland, as elsewhere, video has been both shadowed and infected by other art forms from the very beginning.
Having exercised the lazy option and simply asked a number of prominent Irish artists, over the past week or two, what they felt the defining characteristics of video are in 2005 I was left with the distinct impression that they were largely a matter of the pragmatics of production rather than having to do with what one might call the syntax or semantics of either production or presentation, (with the possible exception of the significance of the video loop). I imagine, however, that this is something that might be contested in the open discussion a little later.
If one were to focus on individual practitioners (and for convenience's sake I intend to do so, in full knowledge of the crucial role played by a succession of artists' intitiatives and facilitating bodies in the development of video art in this country) one would have to acknowledge, as McWilliam put it, "that moving-image art practices in Ireland have consistently been strongly marked by performance". She cites as examples "the impact of Alastair MacLennan and Nigel Rolfe, who as performance practitioners fostered educational contexts for technological art production". The powerful presence of the work of James Coleman from the 1970s on should also be registered. Despite Rosalind Krauss's argument that Coleman's achievement be assessed primarily in terms of his invention of a new medium, the slide-tape installation ("projected images" is the artist's own preferred term), Coleman has also had recourse to video on several occasions. His installation Strongbow, for example, a mordant rumination on Ireland's colonial legacy, was on continuous display for several years after the opening of IMMA in 1991 and this same work was startlingly reconfigured at the same venue in 2000 as part of the Shifting Ground exhibition, a survey of Irish art in the second half of the 20th century. In the intervening years, which is to say the 1990s, video became an ever more prominent art form in Ireland, around the same time as the question of the landscape was being reconsidered from the perspective of a younger generation of artists than those already cited.
Numerous commentators have noted the shift in Irish art in various media, traditional and otherwise, between the 1970s and the 1990s from a celebration of the landscape as a natural, given terrain, to the interrogation of the landscape as a sociopolitical construction, and this development coincided with a general shift in focus from depictions of the rural to the urban landscape. Some years ago I published an article on this topic entitled Six Artists in Search of a Landscape and three of the artists I was concerned with at the time, Caroline McCarthy, Alannah O'Kelly and Willie Doherty, happen to use video as one strand of a multi-media practice, which in McCarthy's case also includes sculpture and sculptural installation, in Doherty's case photography, and in O'Kelly's case performance.
Caroline McCarthy was probably the least representative of these three artists. McCarthy's mischievously subversive video installation Greetings (1996) succinctly dramatises the uneasy relationship of the contemporary Irish artist to the native landscape and its traditional representations. On each of two monitors, placed side by side on plinths, we see a video depicting an unremarkable but somehow typical view of the Irish countryside. Shot from a fixed angle the films appear at first to be devoid of incident and only gradually does the viewer realise that every now and then a human head is popping into view at the bottom of the screen only to disappear almost instantly. Finding that these views of the Irish landscape have literally gone over her head, and pushed her out of the picture, the artist seems to be vainly trying to reinsert herself - a living, breathing, jumping, creative contemporary presence - into the putatively timeless Irish landscape. McCarthy's slice of Irish countryside is employed as a synecdoche for the whole country - or at least, the popular, received images thereof. Its comic tone is somewhat out of kilter with the prevailing mood of Irish video art in the mid-1990s, which is perhaps better exemplified by O'Kelly and Doherty (who, incidentally are also key artists in the article by McWilliam to which I have already referred).
Alanna O'Kelly at this same time preferred to focus on the historical particularity of individual places in a series of elegiac, if not funereal works, which used slide and audio installation as well as performance and video to address the geographic specifics of the legacy of the Great Famine of the 1840s.
In 1993 Willie Doherty's breakthrough two-screen video installation, The Only Good One is a Dead One, extended into what was for him a new medium the investigations he had begun in the 1980s, using photography and text, into the problem of representation (in all senses of the word) and the phenomenon of surveillance within the context of the then ongoing Northern Irish conflict. Much of Doherty's investigation concentrated on the inscription into the landscape itself of the painful history and contested geography of the region. Five years later the work entitled Somewhere Else (1998), was a determinedly theatrical installation that used multiple projections of various views of different landscapes, and soundtracks emanating from disparate sources. It sought to emphasise the highly mediated nature of our perception of cataclysmic or disturbing events that happen, almost by definition, "elsewhere". While a voice-over offers the most promising means to make sense of the plot ("a straightforward story with a twist", we are misleadingly told), this voice-over also continually draws attention to the narrative's own means of production by punctuating an interior monologue with various directions: "Fade up to a scene in the forest", "the camera follows him from behind", "A high crane-shot gives us this unnatural viewpoint". Voice-over and video combine to offer the viewer alternating scenarios of foreboding and reprieve, extreme violence and imaginary escape into a less troubled world than that of contemporary Northern Ireland, represented in this instance by the sea-lapped shore of the West Donegal coastline.
The degree of critical reflexivity evident in this and other works by Doherty is especially noteworthy in the light of some influential characterisations of video art during its short history. Rosalind Krauss famously described the condition of video in the 1970s as one of pure narcissism. Unlike the reflexivity of modernist painting, in which the conventions of an art medium are identified and represented as that medium's content, early video exhibited a fascination with mere reflection, which according to Krauss, "is a mode of appropriation, of illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object". Such works are in perpetual danger of collapsing into what David Joselit has described as an undifferentiated ooze of subjectivity. Commentators on video from the last decade, on the other hand, have tended discuss it in terms of a re-enchantment with spectacle as derived from cinema. For better or worse, Irish video art seems not to have been so affected by what Chrissie Isles has referred to as "The New Cinema Aesthetic", evident in the work of artists such as Douglas Gordon, Diana Thater, Sharon Lockhart, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe and Stan Douglas. (Questions of budget may come into play here, of course.) It continues, on the other hand, to be beholden, to some extent at least, to television and to the tradition of documentary media, as well as, more distantly, to literature and to a distinctly "literary" national theatre.
It is perhaps inevitable that the spatialisation of narrative within a famously literary culture should exhibit such influences. Thus, the endurance of a storytelling culture into the information age, to invoke Walter Benjamin's classic distinction, manifests itself in various ways including the deployment of self-consciously "poetic" narrative in the works of artists as different as James Coleman, Willie Doherty and Jaki Irvine.