Extract
from
Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland
by Liam
Kelly
Victor Sloan has
produced an impressive body of photoworks which act as a critique of
the Annual Twelfth of July Orange marches which take place at
various venues around the province.
Marching here is a form of staking territorial claims, with the
sound of drums and pipes beating in and rendering that claim,
parading an ideology. And Sloan’s technique of scraping into the
negative, and selectively and subtly overpainting the print, and
selectively overpainting the print, parallels the inherent tensions
and the demonstrative and resounding nature of that claim. The
scraping, dancing static of line that the artist uses draws history
into every image, allowing it to reverberate, call out and echo.
Like Yeat’s liquid use of paint Sloan’s line journeys up from the
past to the present, babbling out in a manic incoherent frenzy.
Commenting on
Walk VIII from the series
The Walk, the Platform and the Field (1986), Brian McAvera
distinguishes Sloan’s techniques and strategy from news media
photographic records of everyday events:
“His framing of the
pictures emphasises the foursquare solidity and determination of the
marchers: part of a never-ending triumph of the will… while his
scraping of the pin on the original negative – a series of violent
diagonal slashes echoing the ceremonial sword – provides an
externalisation of the violence that lies dormant behind the festive
surface.”
It is perhaps
worthwhile comparing Walk
VIII (1985) with Richard Hamilton’s The Subject
(1988/90),
in which the
ceremonial sword remains just that, ceremonial, but the potential
for violence and its ramifications are held within the ‘exploded’
detail of light, transferred to make up the left-hand section of
this diptych. The correspondence in scale and composition to his
earlier painting The Citizen (1981) while allowing some
comparisons in the ideologies behind the respective image can all
too easily draw the criticism of Hamilton, providing something of a
balancing act of appeasement. Is Hamilton falling between
‘civilians’ and ‘barbarians’? But John Roberts, who has accused
McAvera of only seeing Sloan occupying such a comfortable (liberal)
world between ‘civilians’ and ‘barbarians’, reads Sloan’s subversive
photographic work more in ‘committed’ terms. Bracketing him with the
likes of Willie Doherty and Locky Morris, Roberts confidently
states:
“They have resisted
both the sentiment of the ‘atrocity’ image and the overheated
imaginings of mythopoeic typification. In essence there is an
intrusion of history as a space of ideological conflict and struggle
(an empire of signs, so to speak) rather than a farce or inflated
tragedy, in which the artist’s ‘concern’ is flaunted… Sloan’s
adulterated photographs… pinpoints exactly that sense of costiveness
that is the Unionist political mandate.
The title of the
series
The Walk, the Platform and the Field (1986) encapsulates the
political space that Sloan is interrogating. The Walk is
symbolic of freedom and protest (Protestantism); The Platform
becomes the base of broadcast for political rhetoric (echoing all
the way to Rome) and The Field is the emotional ground.
Sloan’s next series
Drumming (1986), continued with the same interests and met
with both critical and popular acclaim. As the series title now
suggested Sloan ‘drummed’ this annual occurrence beyond myth: the
gestural marks now froze the still photograph into a silence that
echoed beyond the day’s event. The nervous energy these works
unloaded could embrace innocence, but above all, ensnare tensions.
They cut new ground.
In
Holding the Rope (1986), a little girl in white dress walks
forward, assisting in the ‘celebration’. Sloan depicts her inclusion
as an initiation rite, where the child unknowingly will thread a
disputed and marshalled route as signified by the black-clad police
who occupy the right half of the picture space. She will eventually
enter the ‘field. Another work entitled
Entering the Field (1986) indeed has an aura of a holy
place. Religion and land always co-habit in Ireland. The sky is
dominant (less than a spatial quarter for the land) and marks the
ground below with its turbulence – like a sign from God. Trust in
God, within loyalism, is seen to ensure freedom and righteousness.
In
The Birches (1988), the artist applied the same overlay
technique to explore more openly the landscape of rural Ulster –
landmined as it is with the relics of history, religion and
conflict. An apparently beautiful and peaceful region of small
farmhouses near Portadown, the Birches, like other areas of rural
Ulster, has deep traces laid down that Victor Sloan brought to the
surface. Spectral images are always refusing to be laid down in his
work, where his prospecting technique is always rinsing them up.
In
Seek Me (1988), the biblical attached to a tree claims its
territory and acts as a flashpoint for the field to embody the
marcher (the Orangeman) – an act of miraculous transubstantiation
and revelation as provided by way of the secrets of the darkroom.
From the same series of work, both
Dogs (1988) and
Checkpoint extend beyond the local terrain of Portadown to
carry a charge that is all too easily recognisable from periods of
suppression in twentieth-century European history. They fall into
line with other events in other places; other claims on territory.
Along with Willie Doherty, Victor Sloan has offered us a new way of
seeing, by way of persistent and ultimately penetrating manner of
questioning…
Thinking Long:
Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland
by Liam Kelly
This publication
examines art practice in, and in relation to, the North of Ireland
during a period of acute political and social change - from the late
1970s to the early 1990s. It demonstrates that artists during this
period sustained a penetrating enquiry into Irish cultural tradition
and identities, producing art that is much more didactic and
discursive that at any other time in Northern Ireland's short and
problematic history. The work of some 80 artists in a wide variety
of media is surveyed, all with full colour reproductions of their
work. The book focuses on the work of 80 key artists:
Billy Adams, Denis
Adams, Sophie Aghajanian, John Aiken, James Allen, Marie Barrett,
Deborah Brown, Roderick Buchanan, Barry Callaghan, Anne Carlisle,
John Carson, Brian Connolly, David Crone, Anthony Davis, Diarmuid
Delargy, Fergus Delargy, Willie Doherty, Rita Donagh, Micky
Donnelly, Rita Duffy, Felam Egan, Brendan Ellis, Brian Ferran, TP
Flanagan, Barbara Freeman, Graham Gingles, Gerry Gleason, Douglas
Gordon, Roberta M Graham, Richard Hamilton, Catherine Harper, Willie
Heron, Anthony Hill, Michael Hogg, Ronnie Hughes, Patrick Ireland,
Roy Johnston, Finbar Kelly, Sharon Kelly, Brian Kennedy, John
Kindness, Richard Livingstone, Clement McAleer, Pádraig McCann,
Philip McFadden, Colin McGookin, Moira McIver, Alastair MacLennan,
Catherine McWilliams, Joseph McWilliams, Elizabeth Magill, Alice
Maher, Michael Minnis, Alfonso Monreal, Locky Morris, Philip Napier,
Deirdre O’Connell, Eilís O’Connell, Jack Pakenham, Mark Pepper,
Kathy Pendergast, Clifford Rainey, Paul Seawright, Dermot Seymour,
Neil Shawcross, Paul Sherrard, Bob Sloan, Victor Sloan, Nancy
Spero, Nick Stewart, Una Walker, Louise Walsh, Martin Wedge,
Alastair Wilson, Chris Wilson, Clive Wilson, David Winters, Gordon
Woods.
Published by Gandon
Editions
Oysterhaven
Kinsale
County Cork
Ireland
ISBN: 0946641668
Buy from Amazon>> |
|
