You must be careful what you say in Northern Ireland. We are dangerous people. You have to know your way around a divided city and know how not to give offence to either side. They used to shoot each other here, you know.
Conflict in Northern Ireland has produced a culture of extraordinary civility, and the obliging nature of the people is often commented on by outsiders. Because we have our cultural roots in mutual animosities, we have developed sophisticated ways of signalling our friendly intentions. Because we are pugnacious, we are polite.
We are at a strange stage in the trajectory of our abrasive relationship with each other. We have come out of a turbulent and violent phase which was truly much too miasmic to be labelled as merely 'the conflict'. Now we are making peace with each other and an important part of that peacemaking is that we advertise to the world our openness, our withdrawn threat. And you can see in all sorts of ways how we handle the past with care and how the world handles us with care.
We have, for instance, numerous dramas and films being made in Northern Ireland but almost never about Northern Ireland. Directors and commissioning editors feel that the wellsprings of cultural and political energy which flowed into violence and division should be simply ignored. So Northern Ireland thrives not as subject matter for film, but simply as a film set, one in which any alternative world might be constructed.
You see in the new public art of Belfast that it makes only the most neutral or gracious comment on the unconscious motivations of our people. Art is, in a public space, anodyne and twee. Better that than to give offence, and there is no way to represent the historic energies of Northern Ireland without giving offence to someone.
I want to illustrate my point with reference to recent photographic work and the suggestions I find in them of a muffled or restrained engagement. Recent photographic representations of Belfast have shown little regard for people. This contrasts with much that is in archive, mostly derived from journalism and portraiture, which always sought to have a person in the picture.
Donovan Wylie's The Maze makes the point as clearly as any of the half dozen books I am thinking about. He gives us there, depopulated images of the prison which housed most of the Republican and Loyalist prisoners over a period of 30 years. The Maze has been a font of stories, and many of those stories have been widely told, and flexed to serve political perspectives too. Where an artist might be wary of being judged to be making a political statement, the avoidance of such rich narrative content seems a high price to pay for neutrality or objectivity.
His images are of a vacated space which has lost its relevance and begun to succumb to nature as weeds reclaim pathways and oxidation stains the walls. I wonder if, when he presents us with the browning of the concrete he is inviting us to remember the dirty protest that preceded the hunger strikes, when prisoners smeared faeces on the walls of their cells.
By contrast, the actual interior cell walls seem bleached, perhaps slightly overexposed to create that effect.
I am intrigued to understand why a photographer thinks that architecture, topography, landscape and artefact tell more about human experience than human faces might.
The pictures in many of these books say; 'humans were here'. But where are the humans now? That is the question these images wring from us. And maybe that is the question we wrestle with anyway, when the implications of such a past must be that our future is not assured of being different or better. The humans don't know where they are; they are still trying to find out for themselves, still whistling political slogans by rote to help themselves feel safe.
There is that same silence, suffusing Wylie's pictures of British Watchtowers. He leaves us no choice but to ask why there are no people here, neither in the towers nor in the fields, streets and houses below. Might it be that he fears that to present a person in action is to invite empathy and suggest affiliation or bias? Some of the pictures are stark and wondrous. In G 6 5 0. W,N / W. the prominence of a tower in the middle of a housing estate conveys a sense that the primary concern of the state is the surveillance of the people. Perhaps the absence of people in the picture suggests also that the citizens are in hiding.
As landscape shots, the pictures in this book contrast with the common approach of the tour brochure or the postcard, which seek to portray rural Ireland as beautiful and sunlit. Indeed there is an avoidance of light here. Wylie gives up the chance to play with shade and contrast.
All of the pictures were taken on cloudy overcast days. Did he deliberately wait for bad weather, or was he just lucky? We see low mists on a shabby terrain, and one suggestion of these images is that the heather and the weather endure forever but that these people-made casings, like watchtowers and streets, are transient.
Claudio Hils does much the same as Wylie, in looking at detritus. He walks among dusty clutter, a shambolic storeroom in Costello House, another in Fernhill House, the People's Museum. Again, the suggestion in many of the pictures is of spent or dormant energies. The sinister penultimate image, of police monitor screens in Musgrave Street police station, suggests that one consciousness remains alert while the remnants of an old conflict stagnate. Is this a touch of satire, the refuge of the artist who is afraid to speak plainly?
John Duncan's strangely named Trees From Germany is distinctive in that it presents a sterile Belfast. Unlike the other two artists' exploration of secret spaces, Duncan takes us out into the open to show us the shape of the city. But it is a city after a calamity, in which all the people have been erased, as if by a neutron bomb. Some of the images resonate with Wylie's in that they show dilapidation, moss on waste ground for instance. But the general impression is of a city only recently vacated. Duncan marvels at squalor where he finds it, as in the profusion of hoarded growth in Berry St. But the point in this picture is that the anarchic weeds are contained behind barriers. A signpost directs us safely away from them into a deserted car park. Is he saying that he has noticed that there is cultural wild growth being tamed here? If so, I am on his side.
There is more of a sense of vitality expressed through artefact in John Duncan's Bonfires. Paradoxically the book opens with an old newspaper photograph to acquaint the reader with the bonfire culture. It is a picture from the Belfast Telegraph in 1970 showing four boys shunting old chairs on their castors along a city footpath. The picture shows us the enthusiasm and endeavour of the boys and fragments of text included with it tell us that even in the early days of the Troubles, the building of factional bonfires in Protestant communities was benignly regarded in some of the Belfast media: 'anything goes on the 11th'; 'this is one way to get rid of old furniture'; 'these youngsters are delighted...'. The use of this clipping is surely a concession to the idea that we need to see people and faces and action if we are to comprehend intentions. But Duncan's camera never poses the question to a person. This is merely a photographic record of the fact of bonfires having been built. So the focus is on the impact of the building of these heaps of rubble, pallets and old tyres has on the landscape of urban residential areas. But we never see one lit. We never see the crowds that gather around them. In one, Glencairn Way, Belfast 2004, we see two bored dogs, waiting for some distraction. The reader sympathises.
What is so unattractive about life, that its presence has to be inferred through what people did as they passed from our sight? These photographers are behaving like archaeologists, or visitors to a strange planet, tentatively examining the works of the aliens prior to, or instead of, making contact. They are like explorers who can tell us everything about the dwellings and customs of the natives but admit to never having spoken to them. Maybe our artists feel that photography from here has been over-peopled in the past; all those vast riot scenes and pictures of sullen soldiers; all those images of grief and sectarian exultation. Then again, there are good practical reasons why you have to be wary of people. Some are dangerous or sometimes have rules you don't understand.
Even if Donovan Wylie had wanted to show us a prison service official who let him into the empty prison, would the official have obliged? Similarly, when he photographed the watchtowers of South Armagh, what chance was there that soldiers would have posed or allowed intrusion on the secret work?
Duncan, standing back from bonfires so that we hardly see faces, might have been observing a similar discretion. The picture of a sanitised Belfast in Trees From Germany make us wonder if he is commenting on the unapproachability of people. Despite all that, making still life out of cityscapes seems an evasion of opportunity as much as of responsibility.
Who told these artists to approach us with such care and discretion? Perhaps no one. But they are only small examples of a wider determination to avoid our faces and our attitudes. Some kind of signal has gone out to suffuse the civic space and the arts world itself with the idea that contention is to be avoided and that engagement, therefore, must be restrained. It amounts to the institutionalisation of the old knowing joke, 'whatever you say say nothing'.
