Monday Night 12.09.02 — Conor McGrady + Kevin Noble of Culture & Conflict
Comments Off on Monday Night 12.09.02 — Conor McGrady + Kevin Noble of Culture & ConflictMonday Night 12.09.02 — Conor McGrady + Kevin Noble of Culture & Conflict
Group
CONTENTS:
1. About this Monday
2. Article for Culture & Conflict Group
3. Interview: Kevin Noble / Conor McGrady
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1. About this Monday
Monday December 9, 7pm
When: 7pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 5th Floor
Who: Open to All
A presentation by Conor McGrady and Kevin Noble of their individual
artwork and of the four exhibitions they have organized since 1998 as part
of the Culture & Conflict Group. The most recent exhibition is Settlement
shown at the Gallery 400 at University of Illinois in Chicago
Settlement: A Project of the Culture & Conflict Group
Ayreen Anastas, Shane Cullen, Emily Jacir, Cynthia Large, Conor McGrady,
Kevin Noble, Frankie Quinn and Nasri Zakharia
Settlement brings together the work of eight artists from Palestine,
Ireland and the United States. The exhibition explores the impact and
effects of military occupation, faltering attempts at settlement, and the
importance of history and memory in both regions. This project
acknowledges that artists are not ‘neutral’ beings divorced from social
and political realities, but often hold partisan viewpoints which are
articulated through numerous and complex strategies. Public space, such as
that which is characterized through the format of the exhibition, is often
shaped through debate and conflicting views and it is the aim of the
exhibition to forge public space by raising questions on issues of
history, war and representation.
The Culture & Conflict Group was formed in 1998 with the intent to explore
the intersection between art and politics in contemporary society and to
challenge the assumption that art is neutral in any given context. The
group has organized a number of exhibitions specifically focusing on the
Irish conflict. British Architecture in Ireland was shown at the Puffin
Room in New York in 1998. In 2000, Ambiguous Authority , a group show
featuring artists from Ireland, Britain and the U.S. was held at Beacon
Street gallery in Chicago and the same year Unlimited Partnerships was
shown at Cepa Gallery in Buffalo, NY.
Conor McGrady is an artist from from Castlewellan, Co. Down near Belfast
in the north of Ireland. He has lived in Chicago since 1996 and recently
moved to New York. His drawings on the subjects of state violence, torture
and interrogation were exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Kevin Noble began exhibiting at Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo NY in 1975.
Since 1989 he has been making work about military occupation, prisons and
low intensity warfare. His most recent exhibition of photographs titled,
The American Face of Irish Republicanism was at Glucksmans Ireland House
at NYU.
___________________________________________
2. Article for Culture & Conflict Group
An essay to accompany video installation by Kevin Noble and Lyell Davies
in Culture & Conflict Group Exhibition at Cepa Gallery.
Do Machines Make Revolutions?
Essay by Lyell Davies
In America, popular understanding of the conflict in Northern Ireland has
been shaped by various representations – news media reports of riots and
“sectarian” hostility; actor Stephen Rea’s portrayal of a kindly IRA
gunman in The Crying Game; distant memories of civil rights marches led by
a young and charismatic Bernadette Devlin, and – dominating the popular
imagination – images of our society’s greatest bugaboo – “terrorism”.
What these various images have in common is that they have all been
filtered and shaped by the commonly homogeneous Anglo-American mass media.
Thus, the mainstream news media may occasionally present divergent
viewpoints on events in Ireland, but most frequently turns its attention
to the region when there is violence to report. In parallel, the
entertainment industry usually views the conflict only as a sensational
location for dramas about secret agents and terrorists. This framing has
consistently misrepresented the true nature of the conflict in Ireland,
and failed to acknowledge the varied viewpoints of people living in the
region – whether political activists, dissident group participants, or
community members – thus depriving people outside Northern Ireland an
opportunity to understand exactly what is going on there.
Today, in the midst of the current information revolution, “fewer and
fewer discussions or oppositions occur without leaving traces in
cyberspace” , and web pages and hypertext links provide an immediate and
previously unseen form of media interactivity for those interested in
Irish politics. This new visibility allows commentary, statements,
photographs, and analysis posted by groups involved within the conflict,
to be instantly available to anyone with Internet access. Thus, we are
witnessing the emergence of a new form of political visualization – part
political pamphlet, part electronic graffiti – and one as ephemeral as say
a flyer for a political rally. Instantly available, web pages are
snapshots of ideology at work, and self-made articulations of an ongoing
cultural/political conflict. If “culture is a system of discriminations
and evaluationsS (and thus) culture is a system of exclusion”,2 access to
this kind of Internet information moves the site of “evaluation” away from
the traditional media gatekeepers, and into the hands of the individual
Internet reader. Within a global media culture where mainstream story
telling often speaks simplistically of good and evil, these web pages
illustrate that there are many more than two sides to a story, and reveal
the complexity and turmoil of a culture in conflict.
The Installation
In this installation the Culture and Conflict Group has roughly divided
Irish political web pages into three groups. The first group contains
sites loosely identified as Irish Nationalist or Republican, and posted by
groups who favor the reunification of all of Ireland as an Irish Republic.
This includes web pages by radical political groups like Sinn Fein (SF),
the 32 County Solidarity Committee, and the more mainstream Social
Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) – right through to web pages sponsored by
the government of the Republic of Ireland.
The second group comprises Unionist and Loyalist groups, who are loyal to,
and seek continued union with, Britain. These groups encompass government
agencies like the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), through political
parties, to sites sponsored by extremist paramilitary groups like the
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defense Association (UDA).
The third grouping – and the one representing the group most frequently
omitted from discussions of events in Northern Ireland – are the web pages
posted by British media, government, and military organizations.
While it is obvious that these three divisions are a simplification of the
political fault lines existing in Northern Ireland, our aim has been to
contrast how different groups – which we have broadly defined as Irish
identified, Unionist/Loyalist identified, and British identified – have
represented themselves and their political views on the Internet. Can we,
through these competing viewpoints, begin to see more clearly the
political and ideological struggles going on within Northern Ireland?
Given that for many years the government of Northern Ireland has dedicated
considerable resources to the control of information coming out of this
region, this free flow of information seems to be a major breakthrough.
The Web Pages
Sinn Feín, the leading Irish Republican group in the north of Ireland, has
faced institutional censorship of one kind or another for most of the last
thirty years. Section 31 (1972-1994) of the Irish Republic’s Broadcasting
Act, and the British Broadcasting Ban (1988-1994) prevented Sinn Feín from
appearing on television or radio – all despite Sinn Feín’s legal status as
a political party with elected officers. Today, Sinn Feín’s web page
provides a history of the organization, information about the Good Friday
Agreement and the current peace process, hosts personal profiles of their
Ard Chomhairle (leadership) and provides links to sympathetic
organizations worldwide – including the British based Troops Out Movement
and the American Irish Northern Aid. Stylistically, Sinn Feín’s web pages
are serious but not austere. An informal photograph of party president
Gerry Adams is located beside a quotation from the martyred hunger striker
Bobby Sands – “everyone, republican or otherwise, has their own particular
part to play” – all set on a noticeably green background.
Viewing these web pages, the importance of color is immediately clear.
Throughout Northern Ireland the curbstones of Loyalist neighborhoods are
painted with the red, white and blue of the British Union Jack, while the
curbs of Republican neighborhoods are painted with the green, white and
orange of the Irish tricolor. It seems this long established iconography
of flags/emblems and the colors associated with them have been easily
absorbed into this new medium. The Loyalist sites in particular are
dominated by red, white and blue coloration – often coupled with actual
displays of the Union Jack, Red Hand of Ulster, and other banners
illustrating loyalty to the Unionist Orange Order or British Crown.
Notably, Loyalist sites also frequently contain menacing images of armed
masked members of their organizations, and currently, air the accusations
and counter accusations driving the violent fratricidal feuding between
the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).
Northern Ireland’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC),
maintains a web page offering an “adult free zone”. Here children can take
a virtual tour of a cartoon police station, and get road safety advice
from cartoon Constables Webster and Matrix. The site also features an
extensive “museum”, with images of weapons confiscated from paramilitary
groups. In the past it also provided links to streamed video images from
RUC surveillance cameras at traffic junctions. Given that this region is
one of the most heavily surveilled regions in the world, this live camera
link was perhaps intended to make the use of cameras seem less Orwellian.
Certainly it reflects a pattern within the British police of relying on
cameras and surveillance as a method of solving crime. Either way, it
illustrated (and perhaps this is why it is no longer available) a concern
held by many in Northern Ireland and Britain that “military-style systems
(have been) transplanted to an urban environment” .
In decisive contrast to the RUC web page is the web page of the Garvaghy
Road Residents Coalition. This group has received widespread attention in
recent years by resisting Unionist Orange Order parades through the
predominantly Nationalist Garvaghy Road district. Their web page displays
photographs of the RUC removing protestors on the Garvaghy Road. One image
shows an RUC officer in riot gear dragging a protester away by the throat.
Another depicts a young couple – the woman is in tears, while her partner
has blood streaming from his head following a police baton charge.
Contrasts of this nature reveal what is most interesting and yet
questionable about the content of these web pages – that they have not
been filtered through an intermediary on their way to us. They are raw
artifacts, and if they are not quite (or always) propaganda, they can
certainly be defined (to varying degrees) as aggressive public relations.
Conclusion
The inherent trans-border information flow of the Internet severely
curtails the power of the state to control what people do and do not hear
and see. Keyword searches of specific events may take the Internet reader
simultaneously to competing governmental, media and dissident reports,
revealing an electronic collage from which they can draw their own
conclusions. Concurrently, this use of web pages also enables groups to
bypass the economic as well as ideological constraints of the commercial
media, where “the need to secure large audiencesS limits the production of
innovative or risky programming” .
However, before we naively race to adopt technology as the guarantor of
democracy in a world where truth is available at the click of a button,
there are some issues to be mindful of. The fact that information is
accessible does not mean that it is accessed. And, if accessed, will these
extra bites of information lead a better-informed citizenry to greater
political or community engagement? Undoubtedly, now and in the future,
part of our work and leisure will take place in virtual environments – as
will our political life – but “people make revolutions, machines don’t” .
Also, despite assurances by some of the internet’s strongest advocates
that we need not fear a divide between the information rich and the
information poor, the fact remains that a significant number of this
planet’s inhabitants have yet to make a telephone call, much less post or
visit a web page. Indeed the proliferation of political web pages in
Ireland illustrates one of the idiosyncrasies of this conflict – here,
close to the technologically advanced center of the European first world,
an unreconciled colonial conflict continues.
___________________________________________
3. Interview: Kevin Noble / Conor McGrady
The Thing – 06/05/2002
Questioning Subject
An interview with Conor McGrady
by Kevin Noble
[interviews]
The drawings by Conor McGrady exhibited in the Whitney Museum of
American Art’s 2002 Biennial are stark and simple in their
execution. Drawn in gouache or compressed charcoal on white paper,
the images use a distilled line to explore the impact of military
control on domestic and public space. Inherent in the seemingly
innocuous objects and places depicted is the latent residue of fear
and trauma.
Born in the rural town of Castlewellan, 20 miles south of Belfast,
McGrady’s paintings and drawings are based on first-hand experience and on
oral histories of his community’s encounters with state political
violence. In the drawings, violence becomes a form of omission pertaining
to a sense of the removal of self worth and dignity. The empty space that
permeates the drawings resonates with a sense of disquiet and unease.
McGrady has been living in Chicago for the past six years. McGrady and
Kevin Noble are members of the Culture & Conflict Group.
Kevin Noble: In a recent commentary on National Public Radio, Matt Miller,
a Senior Fellow at Occidental College in Los Angeles, advocated the use of
torture to obtain information from suspected Al Qaeda members in US
custody. Miller also thought that he “wouldn’t mind being kept in the
dark” regarding the use of torture by American officials. How is this
desire for secrecy and silence regarding the use of torture by the state
manifested in your painting and drawings?
Conor McGrady: Power relies inherently on strategies of secrecy, and
forces its acceptance through the manifestation of silence. This is
usually part of a strategy to ensure hegemony. Through censorship,
carefully mediated news reportage, spin, and massive amounts of
propaganda, states ensure that silence as to their abusive policies is
enforced, or through legitimization of their actions. It’s a case of ‘What
they don’t know won’t hurt them.’ Silence is one of the state’s most
important weapons in the propaganda war. In the north of Ireland, the
British were very conscious of waging a propaganda war for the ‘hearts and
minds’ of the population. The views of those who disagreed with British
policy, or who opposed it, were silenced through outright media censorship
and constant demonization and dehumanization in the media, to render their
voices invalid. During torture, bodily and psychological violence are used
to obtain information, that in turn is used to remove and permanently
silence activists and combatants who oppose the state. The state silenced
those opposed to it through imprisonment or assassination by covert death
squads. The point is essentially to make a substantial sector of the
population, those who oppose the state, disappear, to make them invisible,
to remove them either physically or though hegemony. In my drawings, this
process of removal is referred to through the use of ‘incompleteness’ or
‘absence’ as a technique. The drawings are austere, usually with fairly
simple or economical lines emphasizing the white void space of the paper.
I deliberately use white paper as whiteness has connotations of purity, of
sterility, of the ‘sanitized’ space. In most of the drawings people are
absent, alluding to state policies that attempt to contain and remove
them. These policies, like torture, are in a sense surgical, in that
something has to be extracted and removed in order for the state to heal
what it perceives to be the cancer attacking it. Some of the drawings
refer to prisons, interrogation centers and military bases, which are
designed to keep people out and away from them, as much as to keep people
in. The secrecy that shrouds these institutions serves to keep the
population silent and encourage passive acceptance of their existence. I
have no doubt that if the population could witness torture sessions at
first hand, or daily on their television screens, that the hegemonic
silence would begin to break up. These drawings employ silence and absence
as strategies to get the viewer to look closer and to consider what is
missing, what is absent, and to examine the role of the state in enforcing
this absence.
KN: Having spent most of your life in a place where a significant
percentage of the population has been at war with the state for thirty
years, how did your work develop in relation to the mainstream culture?
CM: Mainstream artistic practice in the north of Ireland essentially drew
its impetus from international currents in the art world, in particular
the US. Early on I made a conscious decision not to align myself with such
current trends and fashions in the contemporary art world, and to look
further afield for sources of inspiration. There were artists who
addressed the conflict in painting at the end of the 1980’s and into the
early 90’s, and their work did make it seem possible to explore the impact
of the conflict through painting. What they had in common though was
reluctance to assume any point of view other than that of the neutral
observer. Having a particular point of view as an artist was equated with
being a propagandist for a ’cause’. The notion existed that art and
politics do not mix. While the work of these artists may look political,
as it takes issues surrounding the conflict as its subject, one usually
finds upon closer inspection that generally speaking, the works reveal
only a personal response to the horror of war, which is perfectly valid in
itself, but they take no risks in going further and exploring the causes
of the war, or the gross imbalance in forces and tactics, or the removal
of human rights and legal rights from a large sector of the population.
This is in contradiction to broader trends in the art world at the time,
in particular the US, where many artists also viewed themselves as
activists and were reexamining the role of art and social responsibility.
So, in a sense, artists in the north were responding to some trends in the
mainstream visual culture, but not all, in particular not those that
examined the social responsibility of the artist.
My response was to look to Europe and to art history, in particular to the
Weimar Republic period in Germany. Artists like Käthe Kollwitz, George
Grosz, and John Heartfield, and others from the Neue Sachlichkeit
movement, as well as the work of Bertholt Brecht, were important in
helping me formulate my own ideas and strategies as a student. Also of
importance at this time was the work of Ken Currie, the Scottish painter,
whose socialist politics were firmly embedded in his work. Like that of
the Weimar artists, his work made it possible to conceive of a practice
that was politically engaged, not neutral, but also not one-dimensional.
KN: When we speak of the subject of a painting or a drawing we normally
refer to that which is depicted in the work or an idea expressed, but in
some of your paintings the idea of subject reaches into the core of the
conflict. If the idea of subject in art implies making a choice, how does
the idea of subject in your work imply a restriction or lack of choice?
CM: There always seems to be a choice involved when it comes to matters of
cultural production. This in itself belies the luxury that cultural
production entails, when in many situations globally, people are directly
denied choice in terms of the basic conditions of their existence, such as
meeting daily needs. In many cases the luxury of cultural production and
consumption cannot be divorced from its class bias. Middle class
existence, that largely makes claims on what is referred to as
‘legitimate’ culture, is largely responsible for setting the agenda and
controlling what is deemed to be culturally valid. The idea of ‘choice’ is
paramount in Western models of artistic practice, and artists feel ‘free’
to choose any subject matter from the gamut of experience that constitutes
contemporary existence. What is not often discussed though is that the
idea of power is never far from the surface. Art almost always serves some
form of power, be it that of the market, that of courting contemporary
fashions to advance the career of the artist, or that which stands in
opposition to the dominant model. Even if artists are not making overt
political statements in their work, it contains important clues as to the
nature of the society that gives rise to its production and the agendas
that sustain it. If the authority being served is not that of governments
and the agenda of wealthy funders, it is that of the current canon of
aesthetics, which is never fully divorced from the agendas of the elites
and their backers who largely shape it, despite claims of artistic
autonomy from social conditions at large. So the artist feels himself or
herself to have a choice in terms of subject matter, but this choice is
always dictated and shaped by social factors. In the north of Ireland, and
in a conflict situation, the agenda of the middle class art establishment
was fairly closely aligned with that of the state. Artists who wish to
make strong political comments were dismissed as propagandists and
permanently excluded from the narrowly defined cultural arena. In my own
work the subject is the conflict and an exploration of many of its
manifestations. My personal experience growing up working class in one of
the communities deemed subversive or illegitimate has shaped my
consciousness to such a point that in my work I feel compelled to address
issues around military occupation and the idea of power. Taking this
subject matter as the basis for my work, it can only refer, at various
points, to physical or psychological restriction, bodily confinement,
removal, stasis, disappearance, and the sense of liminal time forced upon
a sector of the population who do not accept the state. Restriction of
choice, enforced by the state, was an inherent part of the reason for the
conflict, and was employed in an attempt to squash the insurgent
population. If the work claims to address the conflict in depth, it cannot
avoid these issues. As a product of art school education, I am aware that
I have a choice in terms of even whether to address this subject matter or
not, and I know what this choice entails. It’s something akin to US
citizens acting and feeling in accordance with the notion that they are
free, when in fact desires, aspirations, and choices are carefully
conditioned and relatively narrow, geared to produce docile, uncritical
consumers. I am making a conscious choice to address this subject matter
as I am strongly opposed to the effects of British military occupation,
and the forms of state violence, domination, and abuse that come with it.
In part this is because I am from a sector of the population that has
borne the brunt of rule by a foreign military and political power for
generations. I would like the work that I produce to generate debate as to
the effects of the power of the state on the subject population and the
role that it has played in this conflict.
KN: How do the cultural, the military, and the political interact in your
background? CM: In the north of Ireland there has been no escaping
military occupation and resistance for the past thirty years or so, and
with it the political dimension that this entails. Very few people are not
politically aware, or are not politicized. From early on I knew that
politics was not about distant talking heads on the television, as it is
often perceived in the US, but about real issues of power being played out
all around me on a daily basis. Politics can be said to be vital, or
alive, in the north, carrying a certain amount of gravity. This contrasts
with other countries or states where less than half the population turns
out to vote, for example. For the better part of the last thirty years the
north of Ireland can only be described as a police state. With the
constant military presence, stop-and-search procedures, harassment,
questioning, and persistent surveillance there was little escaping this
reality. Culture itself was also a battleground, with officially
sanctioned British culture standing in opposition to the resurgent Irish
cultural practices in resistant communities. As working class I found the
culture of galleries and the theater to be intimidating and largely
reflective of the Unionist ethos. In a sense the official culture that
characterized middle class existence was used to exclude and marginalize,
and to provide entertainment and ‘normality’ for those party to it. It was
as much a weapon as was the military, and part of a defensive strategy
that aimed at preserving the status quo of the Unionist state. Some of the
north’s leading Unionist politicians are also major art collectors, and
until very recently exerted considerable power over cultural policy.
Essentially the military, political, and cultural were inextricably
intertwined until recently. This alliance is crumbling with the changes
that have taken place since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.