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And the Son of God Goes Forth to War in Orange
(Louis
MacNeice, from Zoo, 1938)
Victor Sloan is developing a considerable international reputation
for powerful leit-motifs of cultural phenomena in his Northern
Irish homeland. This exhibition stakes out new directions in the
form and content of his visual narratives, while maintaining a
flow of continuity with the preoccupations and critiques
delineated in earlier work.
The
title Acts of Faith identifies thematic unity across the
range of these new selected works. From Orange marches to the
symbolic defence of Derry’s walls, from sham fighting to the
flaunting of emblematic devices, from gospel crusading to circus
acrobatics and death-defying performances, all these are
theatrical public presentations which darkly engage Victor Sloan’s
imagination and which he punningly encompasses as ‘acts of faith‘.
The pointing-up of religiosity in this phrase is conscious and
intentional, while there is a further frisson in its etymology.
The term ‘act of faith’ originates as the translation of the
Portuguese ‘Auto-Da-Fé’.
This
was a ceremony of the Spanish Inquisition, at which, following a
Procession, Mass and Sermon, death sentences were read and
heretics afterwards burned at the stake.
As in
his earlier works, Sloan responds to the mortal implications of
dramatic display and ritualistic act by deracinating his
originally pristine photographs through a reductive process of
marking, bleaching, toning and colouring. By means of this
interventionist technique, here refined to new levels of subtlety,
Sloan represents the camera-captured appearance of an external
world in complex and compelling photo works which question
hegemonies in the passionate Northern culturescape that the
artist inhabits.
Characterised by a tensioned balance between
figuration and abstraction, these layered and oblique photoworks
are deeply satisfying aesthetically, emotionally and
intellectually Their symbiosis of form and content reflects an
intimate binding of time and place, and so defies a simplistic
response to things which are not simple. In the way of most
significant western art of our time, Victor Sloan’s work insists
on the primacy of meaning while compelling reflection on the means
of expression.
These
works invite mediation on the tribal nature of humanity, our
sacred histories and our expressive capacity to give meaning and
value to life. Sloan’s mysterious images are not easy or
platitudinous, and are suffused with apocalypse rather than
celebration. Yet in their ambiguity they are not without an
affirming sacramental presence, which forces a consciousness of
good and evil in a past-haunted and Christ-haunted land. These
works deal with mythic acts of faith, paradoxically incorporating
both certainty and uncertainty, and all are ritually cast in
Sloan’s chromatically sombre, gothic North.
Michael McCaughan.
One hundred
‘Never on a Sunday’ campaigners were outside the American Circus
Ltd. Big top in a bid to persuade punters to boycott the
afternoon and evening performances. Mr. Woolsey Smith,
Worshipful Master of the Independent Lodge who took part in the
protest described it as a ‘great success’… “What we did not
agree with was this further desecration of the Sabbath and the
breaking of the fourth commandment. As far as we are concerned,
the desecration of the Sabbath has gone far enough. The Sabbath
is part of our heritage and by and large the majority of people
do not want circus performances on a Sunday”
“We can’t understand it”, said ringmaster Philip Hansen. Most of
the circus members had doubts about coming to Northern Ireland.
They thought it was another Beirut. We managed to persuade them
that it wasn’t as bad as it appeared on TV, but since arriving
we have had nothing but hassle.”
Lurgan Mail, July 1990.
The Sham Fight is an annual mock Battle of the Boyne played out
on 13 July at Scarva Demesne, Co. Down. The thirteenth
demonstration has a special atmosphere and even though
Williamite victory over the forces of James in the Sham Fight is
an inevitability, adults and children watch agog as the ‘Royal’
principals jostle in sword play down the green lawns of the
spacious demesne… the old Orange standards of The Sash and
Derry’s Walls bring gaiety to the scene, but there is also the
religious touch with the hymns of Newton and Wesley… It seems
originally to have been an undisciplined affair, with all day
the noise of battle rolling around the fields of Auglish (a
townland beside Scarva village) as the rival ‘armies’ manoeuvred
and ‘massacred’ each other, historians tell us. Only gradually
did it attain the dignity of its present status, sponsored first
by the Orange Order and now by the Black Institution.
Billy Kennedy, A Celebration 1690 – 1990: The Orange
Institution (Belfast 1990), pp. 30-32.
On Sunday 20 November 1983, gunmen entered a Pentecostal
meeting-hall near Darkly, on the border in County Armagh, and
raked the congregation with machine-gun fire Three of the
elders, who were greeting newcomers in the foyer, died. Seven
others were wounded. One of the songs was ‘Have you been to
Jesus for the cleansing power? Are you washed in the blood of the
lamb? In his sermon the following week, Paisley presented the
attack as further evidence of the ‘Antichrist’ in the
‘end-times’. The Darkley massacre was bible prophecy fulfilled.
Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of
Paisleyism (Oxford 1986), p. 197.
Extracts from “Acts of Faith: Victor Sloan” published by the
Gallery
of Photography, Dublin, 1992 |
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