Rita Donagh
Camden Arts Centre, London, UK
An inevitability in the resolution of any peace process is the withdrawal of coverage by the media. Whole peoples grown accustomed to the patronage of airtime out of all proportion to their actual geopolitical stature suddenly face media-wrought extinction. Their marginality, once rendered so obscenely ritualistic in war, has yet again become their crisis of representation. For an artist who has drawn her entire body of work from the outflow of media imagery of the last 25 years of civil war in Northern Ireland, Rita Donagh’s current retrospective ‘197419841994’ has, more than any moment during The Troubles, been defined by the surreal media hush that has grown-up since the cease-fire was announced last August.
‘197419841994’ collates some of the most common currencies of State and factional terrorist imagery that has so preoccupied the press, and thus Donagh, since the early 70s: H Block prisons, street carnage, sprawled soldiers and the geopolitical outline of Ulster. In muted paintings like Long Meadow (1982) or Compound (1985), a multiple fixation with the H Block form is endlessly folded-out across the picture plane. In photographic works such as Six Counties (1983), the container metaphor is entirely apt; time and time again Donagh recasts the depiction of life in Ulster as a siege mentality constantly having to justify its uniqueness in relation to its borders. As the dispensaries of British prison control, the H Blocks came to signify not only the human dog kennels that they resembled but the brutal embodiment of Protestant retribution. The death of hunger-striker Bobby Sands in 1981 further invested the H Block as a monument to nationalist persecution and martyrdom. Today it remains the epitome of an aggravated symbol of the conflicting ideologies inherent in so much Northern Irish imagery.
A level of metaphoric analysis in grappling with such complexities is subsumed under a soft and airless formalism in Donagh’s painting. Her tentative approach to critique in works like Counterpane (1987-88) or Bandsman (1988), for example, appears simply as a desperate ploy to hitch her artistic practice to an already established set of powerfully connotational images. Only Loch Neah (1984) comes close to resolving that dilemma. Here colour, for once, flares up as a burning sky while the same H Block formations soar over the offshore outline of Ulster below. Reminiscent of the new internationalism of post-war BOAC travel posters in its depiction of Ulster as a bewilderingly exotic, far-flung colonial stopover, the painting is a biting swipe at Britain’s still-latent colonial pretensions.
The second, smaller gallery at Camden is an altogether more crowded affair almost entirely given over to newspaper-inspired photography and collage. Again, images of the H Block predominate, but this time Donagh is concerned not with abstracting form but retaining the media format of the images as she originally found them. Much of this work relies, in its construction and composition, on her appropriation of the media’s own interpretative codes. Through the use of newsprint in works like Car Bomb (1973) or Aftermath (1975) she extracts and isolates any number of powerful images and, by investing them with a degree of autonomy, reveals them as weightless ciphers empty of interpretative integrity. Each is an abbreviation of mediated experience that is understood on the mainland simply as a hermetically secured and alienated ‘reality’ beyond the screen. Donagh has realised that to oppose the duplicity inherent in the system it is not enough merely to take an oppositional stand against it. Rather, one must enter into its codes and subvert by assuming its own manifestations.
The context of the last seven months professes an uncertain future for a practice whose close and dependant relationship is with a continually present and engaged media. However Donagh can ill-afford to starve herself waiting for the media to become animated again. It is not a simple choice of pursuing one concern over another: media representation or the direct rendering of life in Northern Ireland. ‘197419841994’ is founded on the premise that those distinctions have, up to now, been so closely entwined as to amount to the same thing. This exhibition can either be seen as an appropriately timed desire for reassessment, or a seemingly desperate measure to buy time. If it is the latter, then this show might be remembered less as Donagh’s retrospective than her obituary.
Nigel Warwick
