The Crisis Becomes Visible: Ireland and the European Project

Following a period of rapid economic growth beginning in the 1990s,Ireland was ranked by management consultants in 2002 as the most’ globally connected’ country in the world¹. With this newly awarded status, Celtic Tiger exceptionalism, and a uniform acceptance of capitalist ideologies among the neo-rich, “a new monetary hero” was spawned – “the brilliant Irish capitalist”.²

Under the centre-right Fianna Fáil, ‘crony capitalism ‘prospered, and was largely defined by mutually beneficial arrangements between government and the corporate elite. The Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority was appointed in 2003, but failed to“impose major sanctions on any Irish institution, even though Ireland had recently experienced several major banking scandals”, prompting the New York Times to dub Ireland “The wild west of Europeanfinance”3. The economic boom, (fuelled by an over activeconstruction sector, extreme house price inflation, an unhealthy dependence on foreign multinationals, and easy access to credit) cameo an end in 2008 when the economy collapsed and Irish banks were unable to refinance their foreign borrowings, exposing corruption inAnglo Irish Bank in the form of hidden money and loans to ‘anonymous ‘businessmen. In order to alleviate fears of a sovereign debt crisis,the Irish government nationalised six banks and issued a spectacular blanket guarantee to pay the bondholders, in the hope that thefinancial markets would regain ‘confidence’ in the euro-zone overall.

Receiving a bailout of €67 billion from the European Central Bank forthis purpose in 2010, the Irish government swiftly shackled this debtonto the public, through the implementation of ‘austerity measures’ –a euphemism across Europe for forced cuts to public services and public ownership. Under such conditions, Ireland’s dire fiscal situation is set to continue for generations, amidst soaring unemployment, tax hikes, shrinking public services, and crumbling infrastructures for health, housing and education; the originalpillars of the Irish free-state and 1937 Irish Constitution.

If Ireland’s boom phase was an exemplary model – an archetypalblueprint from which to observe the extent of ‘functioning Capital’ –then the bust phase will surely provide a necessary gauge to study itseffects and measure its repercussions, not least for those stilladvocating larger doses of the same. Once a small, introverted,post-Imperial4 country on the peripheries of Europe,Ireland, having joined the anti-pluralist ranks of ‘new muscularliberalism’,5 is now compelled to scramble, like the rest,for restitution in the crisis-ridden European project.

Many economists and cultural analysts have ruminated on the systemicfailings of the Celtic Tiger era, and the implications of the subsequent financial collapse for Irish society. “The Celtic Tiger wasn’t just an economic ideology,” wrote Fintan O’Toole, “It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being that arrived just at the point when Catholicism and nationalism were not workinganymore.”6 Describing the Celtic Tiger as a “mirage ”largely defined by social inequality, Peadar Kirby warned of the“social costs of economic success in the era of neoliberalglobalization”7. The main purpose of this text however, isto examine what is happening to the visual arts in Ireland at thispost-bust juncture, with a view to highlighting currentsocio-political, intellectual and artistic concerns.

An emerging ‘political turn’, visible across recent festival formatsin Ireland, will be examined in detail, portraying an institutionalframing of an ‘emergence’ from crisis, supported by discourse onpolitical exhibition making. Most notably, in cultivating a newfidelity to the ‘local’, contemporary Irish art is re-inhabitingfamiliar terrain – that of ‘land’, ‘place’ and the “nativesensibilities of the local genius”8. Concluding thoughtswill draw on a revival of the ‘Irish mind debate’in culturalstudies9, harking back to an earlier, seemingly simpler,era of pre-globalisation. Doing so it will query whether there is aspecifically Irish intellectual tradition counter to a ‘hegemonicrationalism’ of ‘Anglo-Saxon/Ango-American logic’ which might enable“a reinvestment in the notion of what it means to be a republic”.10In framing culture as decisively conditioned by changing economic andsocio-political relations, how are current artistic and curatorialpractices in Ireland producing a “systematic analysis of relationsbetween economic interest and competing versions of identity onoffer”11? In short, I will examine artistic practices whichconsider national psycho-geographies as a supposed counter culture tomaterial interest and burgeoning global hegemony.

Festival Formats: Curating the Political Turn

2011 was defined by waves of political protest and sustained campaignsof civil resistance, whose groupings were perceived as largelynon-hierarchical in structure, characterised by a heavy reliance oninternet technology and social networking sites for communication,mobilisation and reportage. Describing the Arab Spring protestors as“democracy’s new pioneers”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri outlinedhow the self-organised, leaderless “multitudes in Tunis, Cairo andBenghazi” have the capacity to “invent a common plan to manage naturalresources and social production”, concluding that “This is a thresholdthrough which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put toquestion…Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums ofnorth Africa and the Middle East but also the global system ofeconomic governance…raising aspirations for freedom and democracybeyond the region.”12

Inspired in part by Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the global Occupy Movementspatchily called for an examination of alternatives to capitalism,reactivating modes of resistance in the public consciousness withdemonstrations, sit-ins and occupations of work places, corporatebuildings and civic spaces. In an Irish context, Occupy protests inDublin’s financial district and other parts of the country aligned inopposition to the State sale of Ireland’s oil and gas reserves, andthe burden of ‘private debt’, referring to the billions currentlybeing paid in increments to the unsecured bondholders of defunctbanks. As redundant workers of the Vita Cortex factory continue tooccupy the Cork premises in an on-going dispute over the terms oftheir dismissals, an Anti-Eviction Taskforce13 seeks toprevent county sheriffs from carrying out ‘unlawful andunconstitutional’ repossessions and evictions, while Occupy protestorsseek to ‘liberate’ NAMA14 property, retaining vacantbuildings as community centres and civic spaces, highlighting NAMA’sfailure to deliver on a promised ‘social dividend’.15

In February 2011 the governing Fianna Fáil party suffereddefeat on a historic scale. The new Fine Gael/Labour coalition,inheriting the post-Celtic Tiger economic wasteland, have subsequentlyreneged on many pre-election promises, most notably on politicalreform and the elimination of (crony) political patronage. Historicstate visits from Queen Elizabeth II and Barack Obama articulatedinternational statements of solidarity with Ireland, but the strategicinterests behind the visits went largely unchallenged, with mainstreammedia coverage centring on the morale-boosting effects of thesesymbolic gestures. Visiting his great-great-great-great grandfather’sancestral home in Moneygall, Country Offaly, Barack Obama spoke aboutIrish-American connections, blood lineage and the (voting?) IrishDiaspora for whom the ‘homeland’ symbolised such extraordinarytraditions and people. The Queen’s visit in May, the first by aBritish sovereign to the Republic since 1911 when Ireland was stillunder British rule, was a powerful reminder of the troubledrelationship between the two nations. Poignantly, Ireland’s colonialpast and history of mass emigration found contemporary resonance belowthe glossy media veneer, against the current backdrop of increasinglydepleted national sovereignty, Europeanisation and financial ruin.

As 2011 drew to a close, several prominent Irish art events utilisedtheir respective exhibition and seminar platforms to consider thecurrent Irish situation, citing art’s potential to navigate politicalterrain. The curatorial framing of this ‘emergence from crisis’centred largely on negotiating a position for art within this periodof ‘re-building’. References to local and global networks of exchangepersisted as a reoccurring theme. Curator driven statements gesturedtowards something radical, while substance was delivered with varyingdegrees of success.

Irit Rogoff recently described the process of ‘turning’ as not only amove away from out-dated modes of doing towards something more urgent,but also a means of propelling an audience towards active engagement.“In a ‘turn’, we shift away from something or towards oraround something, and it is we who are in movement,rather than it. Something is activated in us, perhaps evenactualized, as we move.”16 In reading ‘the political’across curatorial formats, how were new perspectives generated? Howwere audiences engaged, forcing “these spaces to be more active, morequestioning, less insular, and more challenging”?

Dublin Contemporary 2011: ‘Terrible Beauty – Art, Crisis, Change & The Office ofNon-Compliance’

Dublin Contemporary 2011 marked Ireland’s inauguration onto theinternational art circuit, promising a “quinquennial art exhibition ofglobal magnitude and local consequence”. But while lavishinternational launches and optimistic visitor/revenue statisticscreated a celebratory veneer, tensions (both internal and external)over-shadowed the ambitious project. Resistance had built up among thearts community in Ireland, who generally felt that the lack ofinformation and communication projected an air of exclusivity. Inearly 2011 the original management board was dissolved17and new curators were appointed. New York-based curator and critic,Christian Viveros-Fauné, and Franco-Peruvian artist and curator, JotaCastro, swiftly assembled the ‘Terrible Beauty’ theme, referencingYeats and the 1916 Rising, alluding to the current climate ofausterity, which could hardly go unnoticed.

The curatorial vision for the large scale event aimed to provide adeparture from the flashy, conventional biennial or art fair model,drawing inspiration from the principles of the Italian Arte PoveraMovement of the 1960s, which had reacted against the corporatisationof art and culture. This positioning aligned with a growingacknowledgement that the global art biennial format is a product ofthe “distorted relationship between art and market” – a value systembased on “west-eurocentrism”18 – which is currentlyexperiencing retrenchment in an age of “art-fundingausterity”19.

As a platform for contemporary practices and periphery events,Dublin Contemporary 2011 was critically relatively wellreceived. 20 Certainly, there was an acknowledgement of thequality of the work produced by artists in Ireland, when viewed onthis international stage. An emerging kind of ‘constructionist’21aesthetic was discernable, suggesting an impulse to deconstruct, tosalvage, and to clear, privileging an active ‘learning throughbuilding’ over a transmission of existing limiting forms ofknowledge.

The Danish Art collective Superflex provided the most biting prognosisof the current Irish predicament, with a video-installation entitledThe Financial Crisis (Session I-IV). A space, containing hundredsof euro coins (which were glued to the floor), provided a backdropfor a video projection, which presented crisis in the euro-zone from a “therapeuticperspective”: “A hypnotist guides us through our worst nightmares toreveal the crisis without as the psychosis within. During 4 sessionsyou will experience the fascination of speculation and power, toofear, anxieties and frustration of losing control, economic loss andpersonal disaster. In Session 1 ‘The Invisible Hand’ we are introducedto the backbone of capitalism, the idea of the ‘invisible hand’ as thebenign faith in self-regulation that prevents markets and people fromspinning out of economic control. Under hypnosis we are asked tointerrogate that faith and to imagine a world no longer governed bythe invisible hand. In the following Sessions we go deeper and deeperinto the financial crisis…”22

Declarations that Dublin Contemporary could engage with “art and itsplace in society” or operate as a hub for “non-conformist artproposals”23 proved unconvincing. Occasional glimpses ofcurator-centred hierarchies, and knowledge that the event was executedwith a heavy reliance on internship staff, made it difficult toreconcile such a radical preamble with the hostile atmosphere palpablewithin the venues. Most disappointing was the format of the event,which did not deviate from the typical biennial model, doing little tocircumvent notions of art as entertainment. Art market rhetoric andtourism statistics took precedence over any politically motivatedcuration, bypassing any opportunity to engender political agencythrough the implementation of robust exhibition making strategies.Slogans reminding us that “art has the capacity to imagine and effectchange in the social sphere” adorned the walls of the main venue atEarlsfort Terrace, while graffiti ‘subverted’ the walls of theNational Gallery, producing a lack-lustre veneer, conveying vaguegestures towards institutional critique that were never formallyrealised.

Tulca Festival of Visual Arts24, 2011 – ‘After TheFall’

Tulca 2011, curated by Megs Morley, embarked on a socio-politicalinquiry into the world ‘After the Fall’, which negotiated imaginedpasts and dystopian futures, producing an experience that wasunequivocally of the moment. The programme was tightly under-pinned byan incisive curatorial statement, framing the event as a “pause in anendless circulation of ideas… positioning itself in the juncture atthe end of one era and the beginning of the next”. The exhibitionfunctioned as a point of convergence for many relevant conversations –civil protest, emigration, how capital moves – referencing land,territory and nationhood, punctuated with potent imagery such as‘flag’, ‘border’, ‘island’, and ‘counter-monument’. These imagesresonated within an immediately perceived and conceived surrounding‘Irish landscape’, while also offering access to wider geo-politicaldiscourse.

Filip Berta’s single channel video, Homo Homini Lupus (2011)gestured towards conflict in the euro-zone, with a depiction of wolvesfighting over an Italian flag. A symbol of territory, the flag,luminous against the desolate landscape, is decimated, as the wolveseach display their instinct to survive and dominate. In Elaine Byrne’sA Message to Salinas (2010), Mexican citizens articulated theirdesire to retain national sovereignty in the face of US interventionand state privatisation. A border is a defining national andgeographical feature. The border zone, as place and ‘non-place’, as asite of migration, surveillance, and a threshold betweennative/foreigner, enemy/ally, import/export, has been revived as asource of study within geography and wider fields of social theory,providing a counter-culture to ‘borderless’ transnationalism. To thesimple construction of binary terms – Good? Evil? Terrorist?25– the notion of borderlands enables a more nuanced engagement.

While The Good Hatchery, informed by their ‘islanded’ position,cultivated a fidelity to micro-geographies with a meditation on thetransportation of cargo and monarú earraí (manufactured goods),Gareth Kennedy referenced 19th century industrialist logic,plotting an average location for all of the cargo pallets currentlytraversing the planet with his folk-fictionalMean Pallet.26 In developing rural ‘folk-fictions’,Kennedy stages encounters between globalised and localised materialcultures, in an attempt to identify social and environmental concernswithin macro-economic contexts. Kennedy often works collaborativelywith Irish artist Sarah Browne, producing temporary occupations whichtrace “alternative historical trajectories linked to contemporaryconcerns”27.

In Oral Hearing (2009), Seamus Nolan re-staged and filmed thefinal session of a Bord Pleanála public hearing, where members of asmall north Mayo community voiced objections to the Corrib Gasproject, and the laying of a production pipeline by Shell Oil to bringhigh pressure gas inland, reaching the Irish coast at Glengad andRossport. Members of the community took part in the re-construction,which took place in a local community centre. Formed out of a deepconnection with their own locality, the contentious ten-year struggleagainst corporate and state forces cited concerns about public safetyand safe-guarding the rights of its farmers and fishermen as theirmain areas of concern, displaying an impressive accumulative knowledgeof judicial and democratic processes. The Irish state, viewing theCorrib gas field as ‘a gateway to sustainability’ deployed Gardaí toheavily police the area, facilitating construction workers to carryout their production schedule. “No matter how much knowledge orinformation people had gathered, it was secondary to a homogeneousglobalised model of how things work”28 stated Nolan. Themyth of progress, enticed by corporate investment and the prospect ofeconomic growth, was upheld, while the endangerment of nationhood,identity and cultural sovereignty declared by those claiminghistorical rights to working the land and seas, was unilaterallydisregarded by an amorphous enemy. The local had become marginal.

Collective modes of resistance, protest and activism were expressed byseveral other artists including Amie Siegal and Jesse Jones. Whenre-appropriated into the present moment, surveillance footage29and megaphones30 – symbols of ‘them and us’; the state andthe disenfranchised classes – become inscribed with the time that haslapsed, calling for new modes of resistance within this post-binarypolitical landscape. Recession in the 1980s was defined by trade unionunrest following the adoption of neoliberal economic policies in thewest, creating a shift from manufacturing and heavy industry intofinance and service industries. The current recession is a product ofthese global economic systems, as the flight of capital shifts to theeast, highlighting the precarious nature of labour within capitalism.Contemporary campaigns of resistance, as already described, arebecoming increasingly self-organised and more informed about law andcivil rights, in trying to hold the state, authorities or corporationsaccountable for breeches of their own policies, relying on thejudicial and democratic systems of international law. “The shift fromthe industrial form of production to the semiotic form of production –the shift from physical labour to cognitive labor – has propelledcapitalism out of itself, out of its ideologicalself-conception”31.

Paul O’Neill has written extensively on the shifting parameters andapparatus of exhibition making, biennial culture, and the emergingrole of the curator as “subject and producer of thisdiscourse”32. Reflecting on O’Neill’s description ofexhibitions as “subjective political tools” and “modern ritualsettings which uphold identities”33, it seems plausiblethat the formation of a ‘political exhibition’ is partially, if notlargely, determined by the radicality of the curators’ own personalpolitics. Insights into Megs Morely’s own political persuasion areprovided not just through her approaches to curation but also in herwork as an artist. Recent works such as Post-Fordlandia34(a film produced in collaboration with Tom Flanagan) portray afidelity to anthropological research, supported by textual analysis inthe critique of capital, which frame the visual and materialnarratives, outlining artistic inquiries that are echoed in herapproaches to curation. Tulca 2011 was a panorama of embedded insightsthat gradually merged, contributing to an over-arching dialogue.O’Neill’s concern that artistic and curatorial practices should not betreated in isolation, but as co-existing spectrums “within the fieldof cultural production”, is further expanded by Boris Groys when hedescribed the interplay between exhibition-making and art as producinga space that “installs everything that usually circulates in ourcivilisation”35. For Groys, the mass of exhibition visitors“…become part of the exhibition …in a way that assists them inreflecting upon their own condition, offering them an opportunity toexhibit themselves to themselves.”

Examining civil rights, environmental campaigns, judicial structuresand corporate agendas in proximity to artistic processes, Tulca’svisitors observed tangible connections with the surrounding location.This ‘landscape revival’ is not concerned with nostalgia for celticromanticism, nor has it become interestingly kitsch following decadesof subversion. An island engulfed for so long in cross-border conflictmust now acknowledge that the biggest threat to national sovereigntycomes not simply from the conditions of already having renunciatednational economic sovereignty under globalisation, but from thecontinuing political compliance and the “democratic deficit”36of the ‘flexible developmental state’. EU/ IMF financial logic andrestructuring, enacted through the state via directives for local andregional government, propose another, arguably more intrusive round ofregulating the rural and legislating for the domestic. Multinationals,most topically those in the business of oil and gas exploration andproduction, continue to seek to exploit and monetise the land andwaterways, a prospect welcomed by the Irish government with the sameenthusiasm as it embraced foreign direct investment in its economy.‘After The Fall’, while focusing on these locally sited issues, isquestioning the broader body politic, just as crisis in the euro-zonepoints to a broader systemic concern – that of the ‘utility’37and permanent nature of ‘crisis’ as a function ofcapitalism38.

TRADE Seminar 201139

Foreign multinational gas and oil exploration also became the focus ofa group of artists participating in TRADE residency 2011, inCarrick-on-Shannon, with an examination of the devastation thathydraulic fracturing (a.k.a ‘fracking’40) for gas wouldhave on their locality. Their campaign ‘Talk About Fracking’pertinently demonstrates the tangible links between global practiceand local impact, with the national, (i.e the capacity of stategovernance to implement, mediate or reject those practices) occupyinga determining position. As already outlined, the government stance onthis issue focuses heavily on economic prospects, with Minister ofState at the Department of the Environment, Fergus O’Dowd, recentlystating that “if there was a chance that billions of euros in untappedgas could provide a massive economic boost, the Government must takeaccount of that”41.

The ‘Talk About Fracking’ campaign, while questioning the apparentconsensus of economic necessity that subordinated the local, alsofunctions self-reflexively in its capacity to align artistic activitywith societal concerns. Interrogations regarding the social functionof art have persisted across a spectrum of twentieth centurymovements, from dadaist and constructivist directives towards a newsocial order, to conceptualist and feminist experiments of the 1970sand relational aesthetics practices of the 1990s. Much of thediscussion at the TRADE seminar centred on how art might continue tonegotiate a socially engaged position, and the important role theartist plays in advocating active citizenship, challenging thecommodity and entertainment functions designated by capitalism, whichdefine art as a servant of the economy and support the bourgeois imageof the artist as a ‘creative genius’ existing on the margins ofsociety. Coupled with the proliferation of artist led initiativesacross the country, alternative methods of production and display areemerging as defining features of the “new ecologies of practice”42in contemporary Irish art. Formed largely out of practical necessity -the sharing of space and resources – artist led co-operativestructures have become increasingly associated with seeminglypolitical models of collective self-organisation. Although thesuggestion that art, in this recessionary time, might experience a“renewed purpose” seem patronising, it does seem tenable thatinstitutional and art market hierarchies are less prevalent in thesespaces, with less of an emphasis on commerciality. But that is not tosay they are entirely emancipated. In many Irish urban districts,artistic activity is becoming increasingly intertwined with urbanplanning, with numerous county councils inviting artists totemporarily ‘activate’ vacant commercial spaces in dormant retailsectors. While artistic practices in Ireland appear to be genuinelythriving under these conditions, revealing an underlying capacity forco-operative production, the lingering uneasy relationship betweendeveloper and artist is yet to be tested. Pitched as a ‘win winsituation for everyone’, this arrangement is reminiscent of thegentrification discourse which followed the development of ‘creativequarters’ in Temple Bar, Shoreditch, Soho, etc. ; a debate too lengthyto enter into in this text. By contrast, the image of rural artpractices emerging from the TRADE seminar utilised the distance fromthe (urban) centre as a pensive site for many artistic inquiries –commonage, local infrastructure, connectivity, and temporary publics –producing meditations on ‘the periphery’ and ‘the local’, which aretranslatable across a spectrum of geographies, cartographies andcultural discussions.

Cultural Geography – Signs, Routes, Perspectives

In his contribution to the TRADE seminar, artist Phillip Napierdescribed the M1 motorway connecting Belfast and Dublin, which formspart of a larger European EU01 route infrastructure connecting Irelandto mainland Europe via land and sea links with Portugal and Spain,facilitating an ease of passage for production and distribution within‘Fortress Europe’. His observations centred on the ‘absent’ bordercheckpoint – no military, no surveillance, no flags – where thetransition from one country to another, north to south, is onlyvisible via the signage denoting either miles or kilometres.[Paraphrasing] “The logic economy has swept away the sovereigns of theforeign. A nation that historically was defined by Unionistintroversion is now being asked to adopt an outward-lookingperspective.”

‘Border-zone’ study within traditional anthropology, which examinedprimitivism and the typology of ethnic groups, seems increasinglystatic in the context of contemporary globalisation. The relationshipsbetween populations and the heterogeneous structures of geography,nation states and international law are becoming correspondinglyblurred. Drawing on the influence of post-structural, post-colonialand Marxist theories, emerging interdisciplinary thought re-assertsthe role of cultural struggle in reproducing social life, while makingapparent the inherent power relations. Much of this deconstructioncentres on a re-examination of cultural convergence and populationmobility. Meanwhile emerging anthropological studies focus on thecultural differences between ethnic groups which persist preciselybecause of border division and examine identity and politicalorganisation across national spaces in the context of global economicexpansion, increased global transportation and telecommunicationtechnologies.

Speaking recently north of the border, at the opening of hisexhibition ‘Recalculating’, at The Void in Derry, Philip Napierexamined the persistent connections between “frontier discovery” andthe “lingering idea of terror in civil society”43.‘Recalculating’ is a continuation of the narratives explored inprevious bodies of work, most recently in his ‘HMS Terror’ series,which examined Franklin’s ill-fated arctic expedition to the NorthWest Passage in the 1840s, headed by Captain Francis Crozier, fromBanbridge, Co.Down. Several countries are currently in competition tolocate the shipwreck, which could establish economic sovereignty overthe major sea way. Suggesting that the Arctic explorers were “thespace men of their time”, Napier considered the HMS Terror expeditionas being enshrined in myth and romantic imagination. With globalwarming the North West Passage has widened, offering potential for theexpansion of a trade route linking Europe to China and the Far East.With dominant global power now shifting eastwards, the industrial andeconomic logic of connecting to China becomes salient, thus“accelerating consumption where the Communist ‘command economy’ meetsand the capitalist ‘laisez faire’ economy”.

The most radical aspect of Napier’s work is the ease with which hissculptural installations oscillate between aesthetic manifestation,site specifity and cognitive abstraction. When linked to contemporaryculture – the “atomisation of human experience, which creates anxietyand then offers a (comforting) resolution to that anxiety, for thepurposes of consumption”44 – any symbolic exploration intounchartered territory, (going without maps or satellite navigationtechnology, being stripped of co-ordinates) reactivates a potential tobe curious; to navigate using fear as an instinctive force; todiscover political alternatives; to observe the spaces where civilresistance occurs before armed combat is deployed; to devise our own‘global positioning systems’. In this way the “expectations of theconditioned mind”45 are disrupted, and there is “noeasy resolution to that anxiety”46. ReferencingFrench philosopher Michel Serres’ analogy of the fly, whose pattern ofdiscovery on a window pane portrays a “speculative route-makingbetween cartographies of knowledge”, it becomes possible to observethe sites where translation between accounts can occur, back and forthbetween domains, without privileging one as accurate or authoritative.

On my journey into Derry city I was aware of the significance ofpainted kerbs stones, and the ceremonial removal of ‘London’ from itsprecursory position on road signs. I had heard about the tours of theBogside, and the murals – enduring icons of the troubles – which haveaccumulated an ironic distance and become in some way kitsch, turningthe residents into tourists of their own history. These “visiblemanifestations of underlying conflicted realties” 47, whichbecame legible externally through the mass media (with its “hunger for‘drama’, a beginning, a middle and an end, heroes and villains and theidea of resolution”48) are still palpable, real, and “notconsigned (completely) to historical abstraction” in present daynorthern Ireland, despite its constant inscription as a post-conflictzone. When competing powers have caused turmoil to erupt, how mightthis ‘discontinuity’ of history and ‘unresolved remembering’ bemeaningfully inhabited? Art, as a site for communally constructed,lateral rather than linear meaning, can pose the question of “…not,what does it mean, but what do we mean?”

When asked how art might navigate a position for the historical,national or local within globalised or post-colonial contexts, Napiersuggested that these structures can be redefined through emphasis on‘the particular’ through the embedded processes of situation, and the“transference of agency to place and context”. By constructing‘psycho-geographies’, which engage across the symbolic structures ofland, religion, place names, language and identity, micro-politicallandscapes can be represented while also acknowledging those “deepseated fault-lines which, like trade routes, are local and global, atthe same time.” In this way, art practice becomes “local, but legibleand meaningful elsewhere”, and the land becomes an active culturalforce, rather than merely a subject of monetisation, consumption andpolitical division. ‘Territoriality’, as an epistemological principle,provides a “cognitive framework through which the world isobserved” 49, while it nonetheless remains a concept thatneeds careful attention and critique.

Concluding Thoughts – Art, Ethnocentrism, and the Future

Cultural accounts of ‘Irishness’ projected internationally viareferences to the land and territory have historically persistedthrough romanticism, celtic revival and nationalism, conveying anethnocentric mindset constructed largely through an introvertedfidelity to the native landscape. The idea that Irish culturaltradition is a product of specific (and previously unacknowledged)intellectual traits was the focus of the Richard Kearney’s ‘Irish MindDebate’ of the mid-1980s.50 With reference to Ireland’sstrong literary tradition, Kearney suggested that the Irish position –of periphery and exile –produced an intrinsic ‘decentredness’ in theIrish population, generating a stereotype of the geographical orlinguistic ‘other’, with a capacity to “respond creatively todislocation and incongruity”51. The border, as a partitionbetween Gael and Saxon, colonised and coloniser, catholic andprotestant, was a geographical division that further permeated theIrish intellect, producing a distinct capacity to identify the‘foreign’ over the ‘familiar’. Kearney also proposed that doublevision – a Joycean kind of lateral thinking which simultaneously holdstwo contradicting thoughts in the mind – demonstrated a ‘dialecticallogic’ characterised by an “intellectual ability to hold thetraditional oppositions of classical reason together in creativeconfluence”, providing a counter-movement to the “mainstream hegemonicrationalism” and “linear, centralising logic of the Greco-Romanculture which dominated most of Western Europe”.

The main oppositions to this classification of ‘the Irish mind’,centred on a rejection of these proposed ethnic characteristics, whichultimately reinforced the celtic racial stereo-types devised underEnglish rule, formed out of an enduring master/slave colonial selfimage. “…Kearney, in the cause of Irish nationalism, hadessentialised Irishness and simply reversed the usual colonial claimsthat Ireland was full of people who simply couldn’t think straight,privileging this inability as an ‘alternative system of thought’.”52

In attempts to identify a particular native sensibility in Irish artin the 1970s and ‘80s, ‘poetic, passive and introspective’interpretations were positioned within nationalist, anti-modernist andromantic stylistic and iconographic contexts and aligned with adistinct lack of scholarly analysis in art criticism pre 1990. Thesein turn contributed to the marginalised position of the visual arts incomparison with a strong literary tradition53. Under theseconditions, the Irish landscape, as a site of artistic, ‘nativeimagination’, assumed priority over any reference to increasingmodernisation, or the influence of economic and consumerist forces.

Calling for a balanced assessment of ‘provincialism’ in art criticismin the 1980s, Tom Duddy highlighted a need for lateral thinking in the‘local versus global’ dichotomy. In carving out an identity for ‘Irishart’ at that time, Duddy insisted that the ‘geographical aesthetic’should resonate within the local, but must endeavour to resist clichésof Celtic mysticism and Nationalism (a ‘provincialism of the right’).Similarly, for Irish art to convey a ‘sense of place’, it shouldarticulate an awareness of international influence, global issues, andthe economic realities of modernism (a ‘provincialism of the left’)without pandering to trends.

In examining the influence of the Irish intellectual tradition onnational identity, much of the discourse generated in the fields ofcultural theory has historically privileged the ‘literary imaginativevision’ of traditional intellectual thought, which addressednationalist, political and cultural concerns but “left the analysis ofeconomic and class issues to others.”54 Conversely, theemerging ‘specialist’ intellectual stratum of economic modernisation,reliant on state institutions, delivered only the technicalrequirements of nationalism (trade, economy, etc.) that were based ona generated ideological consensus, while marginalising socialist orradical alternatives. How can contemporary debates on nationalism (orlocalism?), as a counter to neoliberal globalised positions, movebeyond historical abstraction, nostalgia or idealism? Fundamental tothis debate must be a self-reflexivity regarding Ireland’s newlyassumed national role in continuing to reproduce a competitiveglobalised space favourable to transnational capital, underscored byan acknowledgement of the power relations already put in place by acolonial past. How can “nationalism, culture and even racialstereotyping”55 endure amidst current portrayals of Europeas one big “Western tribe” – a model conceived for thecollectivisation of trade and resources, implemented through themodernisation of infrastructures, in the pursuit of a single Europeanfinancial market over the last fifty years. The recent relegation ofthe older periphery states such as Ireland, Italy, Greece, andPortugal – which remain comparatively central given the new easterneuropean periphery56 – and the socialising or‘nationalisation’ of their respective debts have caused many culturalcommentators to describe the European project as fundamentally flawedand unsustainable57, with German philosopher JürgenHabermas warning that present policies are leading to the “creepingdeath” of the European Union and the “sinking [of] 50 years ofEuropean history”. This ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe isrepresentative not only of the increasingly precarious relationshipbetween citizen and nation state, but also of the increasingly visiblediscrepancies between economic forces and societal realities,something which has arguably been at the core of the European commonmarket/ currency from its conception.

This ideological void was the basis of (post-) autonomist mediatheorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s recent ruminations on ‘The FutureAfter the End of the Economy’. Aligning economics not with the logicof science but with religious doctrine, he outlined an ideology basedon “profits, accumulation, and power”, which gives credence to thefuture as a site of “infinite expansion”. Economists, akin to priests,“worship the dogmas of growth and competition, denounce the badbehaviour of society, require repentance for your debts, threateninflation and misery for your sins, and profess social reality to bein crisis if it is does not conform to the dictates of thesenotions.”58 The implications of his argument are furtherevident not only in the ‘crucifixion’ of Ireland59 but alsoin the sacrifice of Greece to the economic gods of the EuropeanUnion.60 The future orientated ideology of finance, whichdraws its momentum from the philosophy of flexible accumulation,cannot evolve self-reflexively in response to “changes in the socialparadigm”.

Current economic ‘solutions’ to the global recession – that inrefinancing the banks, credit will flow again, and consumption willresume, thus re-activating a stagnant economy, returning it to a pathof exponential accumulation – place infinite faith in an ideologydefined by the conceptual framework of future growth, with aninsistence that society comply. But what if, as Berardi suggests, thisversion of ‘the future’ is actually over and we are “living in a spacethat is beyond the future?” This question forms a point of departurefor the upcoming EVA International, in Limerick (19th May – 12thAugust 2012) curated by Annie Fletcher, and provides a few shortthoughts on which to conclude this text. In the EVA press releaseAnnie Fletcher states that “aesthetic practices and artistic thinkinghave an integral role at the juncture of the present and past, ratherthan as part of a prophetic future fantasy”61, supportingBerardi’s advocacy “for living slowly in the infinite present”. Theactive, contemporary Irish arts community, more educated and outwardlyaware than previous generations, is displaying a capacity to engagenot only with enduring legacies of the past, but with thedestabilising and complex current realities of permanent crisis in apost-industrial era.

In distilling the present moment through historical, geographical andsocial lenses, identity unfolds within the vernacular of profit,privatisation and economic transnationalism with increasing ambiguity.A distinct connection with wider art practices reveals a congruitywith international discourse, the elevation of the curator, thefluctuating form and function of the biennial, the temporarypublic62, the welcoming of the ‘political’ into the galleryspace63, supported and extended by a return to substance inart criticism. Echoing the politically self-organised and thehorizontally collectivised, supplanting the alienated and exploitableindividual, a reorganisation of the production process attests to theimplications of community, which searches for alternative modes ofbeing – exploring, living, acknowledging fear, in being, for themoment, bereft of the answers previously provided by a linear andunconscious belief in the future. Drawing on this ‘present collectiveintelligence’, alternative routes can be found, proposing that, likeSerres’ fly, we might experience “abrupt, unexpected, diagonaltransitions of the mind” and “oblique accidental insights” which leadus up “the zigzagging but royal road to the understanding of howthings come, and cease, to be.”64

Notes