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British Journal of Photography, 25 May 1989
Troubled Times
Brian
McAvera reviews the work of Victor Sloan in the context of the
‘Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.
And Find Me, The Birches, Portadown
John
Russell Taylor once headed a review of Peter Brook’s film of
Lord of the Flies with the legend: ‘the limitations of
intelligence’, picking up on the truism that a cultured and
intelligent sensitivity did not necessarily produce an artwork. At
the other end of the scale, the exuberant, overwhelming
imagination which spawns remarkable images with the fecundity of a
rabbit, needs discipline: Orson Welles, speaking of his Chimes
of Midnight – that remarkable Shakespearian adaptation - noted
that he had edited out many of his most compelling and
beguiling visual images because they were extraneous to the
central trust of the film.
Much
so-called 'art’ photography slides between these two oppositions.
On the one hand the images can make us aware of the intelligence,
the cultured finesse, the sensitivity of the photographer; on the
other hand a different set of images pitchfork us into a visually
inventive potpourri – the unrestrained and undisciplined
imagination cresting a wave without substance. Often, especially
with the former, more austere, often documentary-in-style work,
the response has more to do with the sheer appreciation of craft
than with aesthetics. I remember Richard Hamilton, discussing the
various print-making processes that he used, remarking that his
main audience was probably print connoisseurs or people like the
local letterpress printer who would exclaim: ‘How on earth did you
do that!’ The seduction of craft can easily mesmerise the
cognoscenti into substituting the word ‘art’ for ‘craft’. But
technically is only a means to an end.
Authenticity
Obviously the old chestnut of form and content is being dangled
for resuscitation. What Peter Turner would call authenticity,
honesty and truth need to be co-mingled with artifice in order to
produce that exploration of experience and perception that we call
art. And artists in the photographic medium are as rare as they
are in any other medium. It’s at this point that I would like to
discuss the notion of the manipulated image, especially in
relation to notions of authenticity, honesty and truth. Virtually
since photography began – but in particular in the latter end of
the twentieth century – manipulated photography has become
fashionable. Over the years artists/photographers have learnt that
the pristine photographic image can be a template for their
concerns – rather like the baseline of a fugue. They interfere
either with the negative or finished print or both, layering it
(toners, watercolour or any other additive process);
subcutaneously reinventing its seeming two-dimensional anatomy
(slicing, scraping, incising, rubbing); using it as the pretext
for major surgery or a transplant (tearing it, burning it, or
collaging); and even breaking free from the confines of the single
frame by juxtaposing or sequencing, be it a simple narrative or
associative sequencing, a frenzied overlapping layering, or even
an explosion which partakes of the nature of a mural-like
installation. Obviously, much of this is an attempt to simulate
the images, processes and status of fine art, especially in its
late twentieth century manifestations of the combine, collage,
mixed-media work, and more traditional photomontage.
At
the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest the following as a
speculative proposal. Manipulated images in the vein of toning,
hand-colouring, or use gum bichromate printing, tend to simulate
or aim for the aesthetic charge of painting, whereas photomontage
and allied forms tend to thrust towards social or political
comment – the content is predominant. The latter also emerges
strongly in times of social and political stress be it a
Heartfield or the photo-montage tradition in Eastern Europe. At
which point I end up in Northern Ireland, clearly an area under
stress; a pressure cooker in which truth, honesty, integrity and
likeminded concerns are strained to their utmost. In the north 20
years of photojournalism and television pictures have reinforced
the truism that photography lies; that the single pristine image
is converted to propaganda with the utmost of ease (England has
the Falklands for comparative purposes). Seeing is believing only
to the innocent eye. The single image simplifies substance into an
ideology. The soldier with his looming weapon, dominating a small
child (to take only a recognised cliché) is a propaganda
statement, not an exploration. Such images are incapable of
breathing the oxygen of content; they deracinate the complexities
of history and politics and social articulation; they fasten onto
myth, propaganda and state control with the ease of the practised
liar.
In
the north of Ireland the response to this is various. Someone like
Willie Doherty uses images and (often poetic) text, to point up
the variant possible readings; to locate political and historical
undercurrents; to set up a resonance, like the spark of metaphor
between image and text. A Paul Seawright extends the textual idea
by photographing places where sectarian murders took place in such
a way that they could be anywhere – Leeds, Manchester or Glasgow,
as well as Belfast – but appending cool yet horrific narratives of
the murders themselves. A Peter Neill tries two strategies: that
of setting up a tableau to be photographed which acts as a form of
sociological iconography of the North, or by sequencing his images
into metaphorical narrative.
Combinations
With
Victor Sloan, to my mind the most powerful photographer/artist
working in Ireland, there is a combination of techniques. As if to
confound my earlier formulations, he blends the aesthetic/painting
tradition with that of sequencing and multiple imagery, within the
one frame. His search is for honesty, truth and authenticity amid
the quagmire of myth, dissimilation and revisionist history that
is the lot of the North. He works in series. Each exhibition is a
controlled exploration of part of the Northern psyche. The
Walk, the Platform and the Field series, in which he
manipulated both negative and finished print, had as his baseline
his photographic images of the Twelfth of July celebrations: the
glorious history of King Billy as perceived by one section of the
population. The surface festivities bedecked with celebratory
Orangemen in bowler hats and proudly-held swords were manipulated
to reveal the latent violence underneath: the latent became
patent. In his next series, Drumming he took on the entire
siege mentality of the Unionist North, revealing it as a
millennial state of apocalypse. With Birches he extended
his range by taking on the myths of that most potent of images:
the rural Irish countryside; that idyllic paradise of blue skis
and seeming innocence. Consider one image:
Turf.
In
its cold sepia look, its classical framing (a curving diagonal
almost bisecting the frame) and its seemingly traditional subject
– a pallet of recently dug peat, straw, a rural landscape with
creamy skies – this could almost be an image belonging to the
oeuvre of those traditional Irish photographers such as Welsh,
French or Alexander Hogg. But its attitudes, its tone and its
means are modern. Sloan no more believes in the myths of rural
romanticism or domesticity than you or I. Peat may indicate
romantic boglands, but the pallet indicates hard backbreaking work
and cash crop.
Relevance
The
Twelfth marchers proudly carry their Twelfth of July banners,
asserting their tradition, unbroken from King Billy to the
present, but the tone - undogmatic, questioning – asks the
essential question of any tradition: is it still relevant to the
here-and-now? The means – the toners, the scrake of hand-made mark
– both assert and reassess the nature of political commitment:
idealism or intransigence; traditional strengths or archaic
survivals. Thus the sky blends the red, white and blue in loyal
affirmation, while the few scrakes that rend the surface suggest
the possible fragility of the marchers’ position.
It is
both critique and celebration, rather than a romantic gloss or
tacky ‘promo’, Sloan is sufficiently committed to his heritage to
explore it honestly, weighing up the freightage of the past but
sieving it for the benefit of the present. Tradition cannot be
blinkered he seems to say; but its strengths are the building
blocks of the future.
The
point of this analysis lies in the nature of the complexity of
response required. The manipulated image is the method by which
he bypasses the soiled coinage of photographic ‘honesty’, ‘truth’
and ‘authenticity’; the method by which he explores the context of
the North; the method by which he introduces a complex personal
response into a seemingly documentary photograph. The gift that he
has been given – though it is a double-edged one – is the gift of
the Troubles; his response is the production of work whose
meaning, and aesthetic charge, operates like that of an artwork –
leaching out slowly each time that you gaze upon it.
Brian
McAvera
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