Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography, and Popular Culture

8. The Art of Resistance: Visual Iconography and the Northern “Troubles”

125 8 The Art of Resistance Visual Iconography and the Northern “Troubles” Eóin Flannery The “excess” meaning conveyed by representation creates a supplement that makes multiple and resistant readings possible. Despite this excess, representation produces ruptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly. Precisely because of representation’s supplemental excess and its failure to be totalizing, close readings of the logic of representation can produce psychic resistance and, possibly, political change. (Phelan 1993, 2) POD [Painters of Derry] has consistently refused to hand over its large stockpiles of white gloss, claiming justifiably that all persons have the right to bear brushes and rollers against British imperialism. (Republican News, 20 Apr. 1995) Peggy Phelan’s comments on the “excessive” potential of all modes of representation intersect with many of the concerns of recent, and ongoing, challenges to the governing narratives of modernity, Western historiography, and the nation-state itself. Of immediate relevance to our discussion, however, are the theoretical, ethical, and historiographical questions raised by postcolonial studies. The ensuing chapter extracts its theoretical impetus from the shared solidarity of transnational, and transhistorical, experiences of localized colonial oppression and occupation. Accordingly, the cultural artifacts under discussion in this chapter are constituents of the affective, performative politics of counter-modern solidarity. Therefore, my consideration of political murals in Northern Ireland is an effort to divine alternative theoretical and 126   |   Popular Culture ethical vectors with which to confront imperial modernity in both its historical and contemporary guises. Such an undertaking naturally involves an interrogation of the rememorative procedures of the communities implicated in the striven history of the Northern “Troubles.” While, at one level, Ireland possesses a limited visual history, in contrast to a prodigious verbal narrative history, the competing muralistic effusions that have manifested during the contested resolution of Northern Ireland’s late colonial experience are significant constituents of a “lived” visual economy.1 Cultural historian Joep Leerssen contrasts the Nietzschean notion of “monumental history,” or “society remembrancing,” with a version of subaltern memory, which he terms “community remembrancing” (Leerssen 2001, 215). The modes of such “community remembrancing” are, Leerssen suggests, “rebel songs, paramilitary murals in Belfast housing estates, and Orange Lodge parades” (Leerssen 2001, 215). Although he does acknowledge that instances of “community remembrancing” can exhibit traces of triumphalism usually associated with “society remembrancing,” Leerssen’s schematic argument signally fails to differentiate between the origins, structures , and legitimacy of the rival mural traditions in Northern Ireland. While the stealthy spontaneity and the historical thematics of republican murals accord with Leerssen’s profile of “community remembrancing,” loyalist murals, which assumed a distinctly homogenous visage, were traditionally implicated in the “monumental” historical continuum of the sectarian statelet. In alluding to “rebel songs,” Leerssen is clearly building on the ideas presented by post­ colonial critics of elite or bourgeois nationalism, anticolonial representation and subaltern, or submerged, nationalist communities. However, even to suggest that both communities could occupy comparable political positions or that they conducted memorial practices in equivalent atmospheres is simply unsustainable. As we shall discuss, the tradition of republican mural art is very much in line with the guerrilla tactics of a military campaign. In contrast, the celebrations of Orangeism and loyalism were integral to the logic of the defense of the statelet. Leerssen subsequently proposes “community remembrancing” belongs to the tradition of history’s “losers,” the oppressed and victims of 1. On the history of Irish visual art see, Cullen 1997 and 2005. The Art of Resistance   |   127 historical trauma: “the demotic, and in many cases the subaltern nature of ‘community remembrancing’ in very many cases evinces a different sense of history, one which sees history from the point of view of the losers, the bereaved, the victims” (Leerssen 2001, 215).2 How he can reconcile such an otherwise reasonable conclusion with the historically dominant rationale of the Unionist Northern statelet and its competing communities is unclear. One avenue through which the divergent political circumstances, memorial procedures, and ethical imaginations of both communities appear is in their respective traditions of mural art. As we shall see, one of the most remarkable aspects of these forms of lieux de memoire is the extent to which the murals reveal the “rooted cosmopolitanism” of republican visual art, which is the primary concern of this chapter, and the relative tenor of defiance characteristic of the loyalist aesthetic.3 Visions of the Future Perfect, or the Perfect Future In his celebrated speech from...