Curated and Edited by Anthony Haughey in Association with Photoireland Festival 2010 KP/SH 01

Frag– ments From a Broken

KP/SH 01 —

Fragments From Curated and edited a Broken World by Anthony Haughey

kennardphillipps In association with and Séan Hillen PhotoIreland Festival 2010

World. PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

KP/SH 01 — A newspaper featuring art works by Fragments From a Broken World Séan Hillen and kennardphillipps, with contributions Fragments From from John Berger, Mic Moroney, John Slyce and National Photographic Archive, a Broken World Doireann Wallace Meeting House Sq, Temple Bar Dublin 2, Ireland kennardphillipps of 3,000 and Séan Hillen Date: 01.7.10 — 02.8.10

Special Thanks

kennardphillipps, Séan Hillen, John Berger, John Slyce, Mic Moroney, PhotoIreland, Angel, Val Connor, Trish Lambe, Sara Smyth, Keith Nally, Elizabeth Kirwan, and all the staff at the National Photographic Archive

Curated and edited by Anthony Haughey

Publication design by Keith & Jamie at www.makeitworkdesign.com — [email protected] +353 (0)87 278 2658

Printed on 45gsm Newsprint by Datascope

“I Never Read, I Just Look At Pictures” — Andy Warhol

KP/SH 01 —

02/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Fragments From But surely one thing art can still do is to take a stand, and Séan Hillen is well known for his witty and sardonic a Broken World to do this in a concrete register that brings together photomontages dealing with issues of the Northern Ireland by the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical. And conflict. Hillen spent his childhood and teenage years during Anthony Haughey formlessness in society might be a condition to contest the height of the Troubles living in Newry. In several early works rather than to celebrate in art — a condition to make over Hillen combines images of the gritty reality of living in a highly into form for the purposes of reflection and resistance.1 militarised border town with images of 1970s television heroes, detectives Bodie and Doyle — The Professionals, who visit The three artists in this exhibition, Séan Hillen and Hill Street in Newry, (where the artists grandparents lived) to kennardphillips share a common interest in searching archives investigate a series of psychic disturbances. The juxtaposition for source material to generate their vision of the world. A world of fantasy and ‘reality’ in Hillen’s montages is not as absurd as it that appears strangely familiar despite being turned on its axis first seems. Living in a small town in the midst of a violent conflict to ask the difficult questions that politicians and their PR teams required a fertile imagination and a sense of humour in order to are expert at deflecting. The images they retrieve have previously escape the oppressive presence of armed forces. His Troubles circulated widely in the media, reporting international conflicts, series give form to the artist’s resistance, despite early attempts in advertising campaigns and as popular tourist imagery before to censor this work. being archived in picture libraries, private collections and His later work, IRELANTIS was described by Mic electronic databases. Moroney (a contributor to this edition) as ‘a psychoactive They consider these retrieved images as inherently tourist idyll, with citizens strolling past sunlit wonders’.5 More unstable and open to manipulation to generate new meanings. recently his work investigates the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Using photomontage, collage and installation methods the artists Tiger economy, drawing attention to the anomalies between set out to rupture the natural order of things by reworking images the utopian worlds envisaged in advertising images used by and documents that pervade and shape our perception of world corporations and financial institutions and the shocking reality events and bear witness to official histories. In a time of political of economic collapse. For this exhibition in the NPA Hillen uncertainty and corporate unaccountability these art works are will include original photomontages from his Northern Ireland an ethical counterpoint to ubiquitous images that advertise and Troubles series as well as more recent work. promote excessive consumerism and corporate greed. Their By plundering these unofficial and emerging archives, the art process is one of postproduction, constantly drawing on artist's disturb the smooth surface of official histories, echoing their own expanding archives using new forms and production Stuart Hall’s interpretation of ‘living archives’ as a field of… methods, echoing Walter Benjamin’s insistence that in order rupture, significant breaks, transformations, new and unpredicted to avoid reification it is vital to continually update the form and departures’.6 Reworking images in this way is transformative; an means of production, to stay ahead of the system that threatens act of resistance. to assimilate radical critique. The written contributions in this edition feature Fragments From a Broken World is installed in articles by John Berger and John Slyce, both respond to the National Photographic Archive (part of the National Library kennardphillipps’ installations and iconic protest images. Mic of Ireland), an institution associated with broadening knowledge Moroney’s article ‘Rumblings in the Dreamland’ considers of the past, where photographs and associated documents Séan Hillen’s photomontages based on the Northern Ireland are carefully catalogued, historicized and mediated for the Troubles, his iconic IRELANTIS series and recent work dealing viewer. For this exhibition however, the artists consider material with the collapse of Ireland’s 'Celtic Tiger' economy. A specially from archives as sites of contestation and resistance. This is commissioned essay by Doireann Wallace investigates the particularly pertinent in a time of the so-called ‘global crisis’, significance of the three artist’s work in relation to political where systemic failures of governance and attempts to paper montage and archives. over the ensuing cracks barely contain the anger and frustration of millions of people. Kennardphillipps have produced a new site-specific installation for the National Photographic Archive exhibition space. This immersive piece places the viewer in the centre of the Iraq Inquiry. The title for this work, “We hope to be finished by lunchtime”… is borrowed from a statement made by Sir 2 John Chilcot, chairman of the Iraq Inquiry during his opening remarks, introducing the ‘evidence’ from former Labour Party spin doctor Alastair Campbell.2 Chilcot’s words resonate with the rhetoric and expediency of the Iraq invasion itself. The artists have searched extensive volumes of written testimonies from the inquiry and juxtaposed these printed transcripts with images taken from archives of press imagery generated in Iraq to produce the work. The use of testimonies recall’s Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur’s account of ethical memory and archives. Memory that is ‘not so much locked into the past, but is concerned with opening the past as mechanism to release the future’3 and recalling John Taylor’s comment that ‘the act of remembrance is also the payment of a debt owed to the dead’.4 In this way kennardphillips’ installation is a counter-memorial to the victims of an unwarranted invasion.

3 Images 02 – 03/16

1 kennardphillipps, Soldier #01, 270cm x 700cm, pigment, charcoal, paper, on newspaper, 2006 2 kennardphillipps, Capital Expense, pigment print, 2006 3 Séan Hillen, The Professionals #2, 1989

1 Foster, H. (2004) 2 For further information 3 Whelan, K. (2005) 4 Taylor, J. (1999) 5 Moroney, M. (2001-4) 6 Hall, S. (2001) ‘Chat Rooms’, published about the Iraq Inquiry Conference Report ‘Shock Photos’, ‘Mic Moroney peers into Constituting an Archive. as ‘Arty Party’, London: visit www.iraqinquiry.org. ‘Rights of Memory’, in D. Brittain (ed.), the bewildering, hilarious Third Text, 84: 89 – 92 London Review of Books uk/transcripts/ in Storytelling as the Creative Camera: and destabilising collages oralevidence-bydate/ Vehicle, pp.11 – 20, 30 Years of Writing. of Newry-born artist Seán 100112.aspx. Healing Through Remembering Manchester: Manchester Hillen’. Available at The transcript of Conference, Dunadry Hotel, University Press, 296 – 300 www.irelantis.com/ Alastair Campbell’s Dunadry, County Antrim, MicMoroney.html. evidence and Sir John N. Ireland 29.11.05. Paul Accessed 8.06.10 Chilcot’s opening remarks Ricoeur refers to testimony is available at www. as ‘ethical or political iraqinquiry.org.uk/ memory’ Paul Ricoeur, media/42384/20100112am- Memory, history, campbell-final.pdf. forgetting, (trans), Accessed 8.6.10 Kathleen Blamey and David 03/16 Pellauer (Chicago, 2004) PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Blood On The series of prints in ‘Award’ arose out of our need We gritted the scanner; bled on it; threw torn up rags, The Scanner to find a way to express our disgust with the war against Iraq flags and ribbons on it; poured oil, then stamped on the by and attempt to revoke our impotence in the face of the raging stuff, burnt it and spat on the lot. On some of the images we kennardphillipps terrorism committed in the name of democracy. We wanted used photographs taken with great bravery by documentary to use digital technology to make visceral images that used photographers in Iraq. Their commitment to keeping us informed everyday stuff as directly as we could in order to respond to the often showed us the extreme degradation that this war has war’s full horror with thousands of Iraqis being killed. brought upon the Iraqi people. We had been on the anti-war demos. Now the flat bed It is a continuing process as we search for images that scanner became our stage on which we could let rip with our can represent our fury and the fury of the millions who oppose feelings of outrage. We placed medals and bandages, threw dust this action. Also we are attempting to make images that can and blood on to the scanner. We were told the war was over, as represent the people of Iraq, who have fast become discardable the Occupation continued with more and more killing and torture, pawns of Western leaders playing a deadly game called profit. we covered the scanner with the grit and grime of the street outside our studio, asking how to represent this filthy war from a street in East London . As the Occupation became filthier our prints became 1 denser and denser. The scanner became like an etching plate and using the newest technology our practice became strangely more and more connected to printmakers of the past. We looked at Rembrandt and Goya etchings, at how the etching, aquatint and drypoint layers on their metal plates became our dust and fabric, set layer upon layer on the computer. We looked at how their etchings developed from state to state becoming darker, denser and more concentrated. Some of our prints went through twenty states becoming more and more imbued with physical matter.

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1 Award #03 4 Award #10 2 Award #09 5 Award #04

04/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

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Images 05/16

1 EASTinternational 05, 5 “We hope to be War on War Room, finished by lunchtime”... Norwich Gallery, 2005 installation detail, 2 Control Room 2, National Photographic Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin, Archive, Dublin, 2010 Germany, 2009. pigment ink, newsprint, 6m x 18m, oil, acrylic, A4 white paper, pigment ink, paper on burnt insulation board billboard print 6 Work in Progress, 3 Who’s Paying for this? “We hope to be finished by Adhesive backed print on lunchtime”... “apartheid wall”, Bethlehem, artist's studio, London Palestine, 2007 pigment ink, newsprint, 4 Who’s Paying for this? A4 white paper, Adhesive backed print on burnt insulation board “apartheid wall”, Bethlehem, 7 Palestine Gallery 6 Palestine, 2007 commission, London, 2008, Dimensions variable, mixed media

05/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Words “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” Although the assertion that Iraq had weapons of massive by — George W. Bush destruction was the so-called justification for the country’s John Berger invasion, there has perhaps never been a war in which the There are certain moments of looking at a familiar inequality of firepower between the combatants has been so great. mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, On one hand satellite surveillance night and day, B52s, Tomahawk an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven missiles, cluster bombs, shells with depleted uranium and lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; it’s face is computerised weapons which are so sophisticated that they give as specific as a momentary glance across a table at breakfast. A rise to the theory (and virtual dream) of a no-contact war; on the mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered other hand, sandbags, elderly men brandishing the pistols of their immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never youth and handfuls of fedayeen, wearing torn shirts and sneakers, repeats itself. It has another time scale. armed with a few Kalashnikovs. The comparative casualty rates Each day and night of the ongoing situation in Iraq is between the Iraqi people on the one hand and the forces of different with different griefs, different acts of defiance, different the Coalition on the other will probably turn out to be, as in the stupidities. It remains, however, the same war, the war which operation, whose logo was Desert Storm, something approaching almost everyone in the world perceived, before it began, as 1000:1. an aggression of unprecedented cynicism (the ravine between Let us return to the mountain, which proposes another 1 declared principles and real aims), undertaken to seize control of time-scale. From there the victors, with their historically one of the world’s richest oil reserves, to test out new weapons, unprecedented superiority of weapons, the victors who were like the microwave bomb, weapons of pitiless destruction, many bound to be victors, appear frightened. The leaders of the of which were offered free to the Pentagon by the manufacturers New World Order are married to Fear and their subordinate in the hope of winning substantial contracts for wars to come, but Commanders and Sergeants are indoctrinated from above with the principally and above all undertaken to demonstrate to the present same fear. fragmented, globalised world what Shock and Awe is! The practices of their marriage? Day and night the partners The primary aim of the war, launched in defiance of the of Fear are obsessively preoccupied with telling themselves and UN, was to demonstrate what is likely to happen to any leader, their subordinates, the right half-truths, half-truths which hope to nation, community, or people, who persist in refusing to comply change the world from what it is into something which it is not! with U.S. interests. Many propositions and memos about the vital It takes about three half-truths to make a lie. As a result, they need for such a demonstration were being discussed in corporate become unfamiliar with reality. Above all they cannot come to and operational planning circles before Bush’s fraudulent election. terms with, or find a place for, death. Fear keeps death out. And so The term U.S. interests can lead to confusion. It does not the Dead desert them. They are alone on this planet — as the rest refer to the direct interest of U.S. citizens, whether poor or well-off, of the people in the world are not. This is why, considering all the but to the interests of extensive multinational corporations, often power they wield, military and otherwise, the victors are dangerous. 2 dominated by U.S. capital, and now, when necessary, defended by Terrifyingly dangerous. It is also why they cannot survive. The Dead U.S. armed forces. have abandoned them. What Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle and Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps in these Co. have succeeded in doing since September 11th is to close memorable images, in these images that refuse to be forgotten, any debate about the legitimacy or ultimate efficacy of such a goes very close to the griefs being inflicted — they are still-lifes threatening deployment of power. They have used the fear, set off of grief, and, at the same time includes the time-scale of the by the Twin Towers attack, to try to enlist the media and public mountain. They are the opposite of news flashes. They are full opinion in support of unilaterally decided pre-emptive strikes of history's irony, fury, and anger at the mistakes made in its against any target they name terrorist. As a result, the world name. They reveal the tawdriness of the Gang’s half-truths. They market with its spin is being woven into the Stars and Stripes, and acknowledge the pain of what is happening. They might be quoting the making of profit (for the few who can) is becoming the only Simone Weil who wrote: “There is a natural alliance between truth inalienable right. and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” And they are “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism exemplary because, in face of such inevitable speechlessness, of the rich.” they remind us of the need to speak out in protest, the protests of — Peter Ustinov the playwright recently observed with the dead and the living. succinct clarity.

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1/ 2 Artist's book, 3/4 “We hope to be 'Times World Atlas', finished by lunchtime”... produced during a installation details, residency at Interface National Photographic Centre for Research in Archive, Dublin, 2010, Art and Design, pigment ink, newsprint, 06/16 University of Ulster, A4 white paper, Belfast, 2008 burnt insulation board PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Welcome to An aphorism from Bertolt Brecht has it that ‘you can't write On March 12, 2003, George W Bush signed an executive the Occupation poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.’ Peter order establishing the Global War on Terrorism Medals — one by Kennard possesses a poet’s sensitivities and yet has never lived expeditionary, and one for combat service. In less than a week, John Slyce or made work in a time when the woods were not full of them. His Iraq would be invaded. Section 2 of the order reads as follows: art — centred on montage and collage, each an allegorical and ‘There is hereby established the Global War on Terrorism Service thus highly poetic visual form — is therefore built upon a surplus Medal with suitable appurtenances. Except as limited in section of fragments from our broken world, its representation and the 3 of this order, and under uniform regulations to be prescribed very present — if often rendered invisible — material reality of a by the Secretaries of the military departments and approved by politics and its policies which hold the safety, care, and desires of the Secretary of Defense, or under regulations to be prescribed the world and its inhabitants in utter disregard. Now is not the time by the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the Coast for metaphor. Too many have died. Too many are dying still. It is Guard when it is not operating as a service in the Navy, the Global perhaps even less a time for art criticism. I could, with a strained War on Terrorism Service Medal shall be awarded to members of face, rehearse the arguments of the past waged over instrumental the Armed Forces of the United States who serve or have served and autonomous art in the space provided here. There is as much in military operations to combat terrorism, as defined by such to be learned from the exchanges of Adorno and Benjamin, Bloch, regulations, on or after September 11, 2001, and before a terminal Brecht and Lukacs as has already been forgotten. Ernst Bloch’s date to be prescribed by the Secretary of Defense.’ efforts to jar socialist thought loose from its narrow self-definition Late in February of 2004, the Ministry of Defence in in terms that prolong the categories — if not indeed the structures Whitehall established the Iraq Medal. Early estimates were — of capitalism itself are worth revisiting. In light of Kennard’s work that some 48,000 would be issued, with at least 150 offered to in the group of painted images that comprise Decoration and in qualifying members of the embedded media. As if to lend flesh to his collaboration with Cat Picton Phillips in the series of densely a line from Benjamin’s fragmentary notes for an unwritten book on layered digital prints Award, I will only offer that you consider a Baudelaire — ‘Allegorical emblems return as commodities’ — you somewhat enigmatic line from Adorno’s essay on Commitment: ‘it now can buy a genuine facsimile of an Iraq Medal on eBay for a is to works of art that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting little less than a fiver. what is barred to politics.’ The Iraq Medal has been struck for those who have served in what the MoD named ‘Operation Telic’. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary suggests someone in Whitehall might have been taking the piss: Telic a. M19. [Gk telikos final, f. elost end: see — ic] 1 Gram. Of a conjunction or clause: expressing purpose. M19. 2 Directed or tending to a definite end; purposive. L19. Telic finds its antonym in the word ecbatic which denotes a mere result or consequence. These paired terms are eerily shadowed by the values enumerated in those of instrumental and autonomous as applied to art. Both Peter Kennard and Picton Phillips are committed artists and activists. The work in Decoration and Award began on the streets in protest against an impending war long before any blood hit the scanner. Kennard’s art has for long operated in fusing together seemingly disparate elements. The allegorical tension which binds Kennard’s images together is located in the tangible recognition we feel when we realise that very little actually separates the combined fragments of, in the case of these works, death and glory. The military commemoration is perhaps the ultimate allegorical emblem. The Purple Heart, the United States’ oldest service medal decreed by Washington himself, represents an undisclosed personal sacrifice but has come to signify the loss of blood and limb. These images explode the architecture of a symbol. As the fragments of dust and oil, spit, blood, and bile settle, a clear and present picture of what actually stands behind this allegorical emblem forms. It is the suitable appurtenances of war lodged in hate, torture, exploitation, and death. The terminal date of these terms and categories will not be prescribed by any Secretary of Defense but by each of us — both individually and collectively. The war on terror is of necessity a war without end. Do not be deceived. The only enemy worth having these days is one that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Rather than making anyone safe, the war on terror finds its ‘definite end’ in the reproduction of fear. Fear extends the politics of distraction beyond the limits of a sound bite to create unlimited space in which to pursue narrow interests and person profit. Do not be afraid. A line from an earlier war inaugurated by terror might be a guide: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

Main Image — 07/16

“We hope to be finished by lunchtime”... installation detail #05, National Photographic Archive, Dublin, 2010

07/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Main Image — 08/16

Londonewry #2

08/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

1 Rumblings in It is something of a joy to see here, under the same roof, It was all an angrily honest response to the psychic the Dreamland two of the finest exemplars of contemporary photomontage. scars wrought by that conflict, and it’s important from this by Kennard, whom Hillen knew slightly from the 1980s in London, distance to realise these were live commentaries, as the tally of Mic Moroney is a generation older, but influenced Hillen’s imagination early on, murder and atrocity mounted daily. In the chill atmosphere of the not least with his iconic plundering of Constable, in Haywain with Thatcher years, one critic even described them as “a hymn to Cruise Missiles (1980), in protest against government plans to site Republicanism” which, as Hillen says, “was enough to get me shot nuclear missiles in the English countryside. (Now working with Cat at the time”. Naturally, in England, there was close filtering of any Picton Phillipps in protesting the Iraq war, as here, Kennard still material on the ‘Irish Troubles’. When Hillen did manage to exhibit forges instant popular icons, such as his brutally direct collage in London, his collages aroused a lot of interest, and indeed mirth of Tony Blair snapping himself and his Peter Pan grin against the - although there was much institutional discomfiture, with many inferno of the Iraqi oil fields). curators seemingly petrified to deal with them, and on at least one Photomontage is as old as photography itself, but stems occasion, they were humiliatingly “deselected” from a show. As largely from the Dada movement, with its anti-art revulsion at the a most remarkable exception, in 1988, Angela Weight, longtime jingoistic colonial, imperial and nationalist cultures which led to Keeper of Art at the Imperial War Museum, bought three, including the squalid outbreak of ‘the Great War’ in 1914. Hillen took his the provocative Trouble in Paradise (1987), which featured the cue from innovators like George Grosz and the visionary John Queen’s own Horse Guards Trooping the Colour, visually upstaged Heartfield, but was also influenced by Pop artists like Richard by a phalanx of INLA Volunteers, men and women, in their Sunday- Hamilton, Peter Blake, even Claes Oldenberg; while being tutored best uniforms, berets perched atop their balaclavas. Needless to at the London College of Printing by Victor Burgin and Ken say, the War Museum Trustees never specifically green-lighted McMullen; and later the radical performance artist Stuart Brisley, these purchases, and during Weight’s years there, they were only who, as a professor, enured that Hillen was admitted to the Slade. exhibited twice, and very quietly at that - in c1990, and then, after While adept at Photoshop, Hillen prefers to tinker gleefully the sting had gone out of the Troubles, in a group show in 2004 with paper collage using scalpels under binocular microscopes, suggestively titled Open Secret (In a final flourish of vindication, all in a workshop like an Aladdin’s cave of eviscerated gadgets three are now on semi-permanent display in the Museum’s latest, and electronic toys. Up one end, he stockpiles his tiny postcard northern branch, in the rather different cultural atmosphere of landscape cut-outs, like the doll’s house stage-scenery of those Manchester, with its deeply ingrained history of migrant Irish folk). miniature Baroque paper-box theatres. But if somewhat radioactive at the time, Hillen’s pictures Photomontage lends itself to the fantastical and allegorical imbued a daftly fond and homey sense to his native place, like as much as the agit-prop. In Hillen’s hands, collage is an oddly Londonewry A Mythical Town # 1 (1983), with its two young Orange divinatory art, mixing and matching miniature worlds in a playful, boys lying flat out in the field, with the imperially looted Cleopatra's almost prophetic elastication of reality; his imagery purloined Needle in the background; Londonewry # 14 (1987), with the young mostly from postcards, and whatever spectacular source catholic lads carrying toddlers on their backs looking down on fascinates his eye and his latest, charmed philosophy. Always London town; or for me, the great chuckler of Londonewry # 8 disarmingly comic, their sheer originality is undeniable; their (1987), with the priest setting up his makeshift Corpus Christi altar beautiful, instinctively Romantic compositions employing unlikely outside Dunnes Stores in Newry, as if to splash a dollop of holy collisions and whirling perpectives to deliver up gripping, terrific water on the ceremonial Horse Guards as they canter decorously little spectacles. past. Hailing from the predominantly Catholic-nationalist border Warmest of all is Natives in a Mystic State (1985), Hillen’s town of Newry, Hillen was eight when the troubles erupted in spectacularly affectionate portrait of his late parents walking the 1969. As a teenager, he began photographing, in black and white, ‘Fairy Glen’ near Rostrevor, while a bunch of traditional ‘Mummers’ the peculiar tribal rituals of Northern Ireland: the nightly riots and work mischief and mumbo-jumbo behind them. With the Palace arrests; Loyal Order parades; the vast republican funeral of hunger of Westminster basking at the foot of California's sacred Mount striker Patsy O’Hara in Derry in 1981; even the atavistic, annual Shasta in the background, it's a beautiful image of a golden Catholic “Mass rock” concelebration up the vertiginous slopes moment — as if trying to capture the essence of a childhood that of the Mourne Mountains. These are now recognised as valuable once might have been. documentary photos in their own right. 2 But travelling between London and home, only an hour’s In 1992, Hillen left London for the more forgiving flight away, Hillen found his métier when he began splicing these environment of Dublin, partly as a last resort. Here he consciously pictures into garish postcard views of London’s sunlit metropole - left behind the problematic politics in his work, and took flight into often transplanting messy scenes of the colonial conflict right into the rampant whimsy of a dreamlandish paradisical isle he dubbed the heart of Empire. IRELANTIS — Ireland as the long-flooded emerald isle of Atlantis, It was an absurdist approach, with a left-field humour a Hy-Brasil made hyperreal through collage. This civilisation forever which I often associate with his compatriots, comedian Kevin teetered on the verge of annihilation — a threat which seemed lost McAleer or painter Dermot Seymour — taking an already bad joke, on its cast of tiny entranced figurines, sun-tranquillised visitors in and pushing it over the brink. In Hillen’s case, the result was often their own overlit tourist idyll. both apocalyptic and transcendent: a carnivalesque upending of Much of the Irish imagery was based on Hillen’s purloining, reality which was irrepressibly comic — and shockingly impudent. to hilarious effect, of John Hinde’s mesmerising colour-saturated Many early collages came under his Londonewry rubric, postcards of a sunlit 1960s Ireland, marooned in perpetual punning on the colonial palimpsest of Londonderry, the Plantation summer. But in Hillenland, impossible wonders were everywhere: title given to the rebuilt old town of Derry (historically, the last IRELANTIS’ legendary Knowth’s and Newgrange’s sweltering purpose-built, fully walled city in Western Europe). If his earliest alongside Delphic Oracles and Apollonic Temples in Mediterranean collages seem rudimentary in the light of his later work, they heat. The skies terminated in gigantic earthrises; or swooped off nonetheless retain a cautionary power. In Four Ideas for a New into awesome star-filled intergalactic perspectives — as if aching Town # 1 (1982), he uses his photographs of teenage stone- to harness the fundamental powers of the Cosmos. throwers after O’Hara’s funeral in the riots that flared for hours in On one level, it was a catastrophic view, a globally warmed the Bogside — young, would-be alpha males who remind one future Ireland teetering on the verge of cataclysm: its tiny denizens sharply of the boys of today's Palestinian refugee camps. One lolling past fiery volcanoes, insensible to the geological or cosmic wee ghoulie stares suspiciously at Hillen's camera from behind eschatology — with Vesuvius sparkling over the ruins of Grafton a Glasgow Celtic scarf, while another balaclava-head primes street, a glacier grinding down Henry Street; or the Taj Mahal of a couple of Molotov milk bottles. Just beyond them, a very Carlingford framing a spectacular meltdown at the THORP plant vulnerable-looking redcoat staggers off on foot towards home, on in Sellafield. the rocky road to London. On another level, they were madly satiric images Elsewhere, he riffs on the profoundly ambivalent popular (the entrance to Trinity College giving onto a vertiginous cliff- junk-culture that flooded the telly with James Bond reruns and drop): crafted with a wild-eyed, impish humour, and a set of English elite CI5 TV heroes like The Professionals — all potentially zesty, fruit-pastille colour schemes which hotwired the visual lethal enemies from a nationalist perspective. One howler is Pat centres at the back of your brain. Meanwhile, a cod-Immanence Jennings Appears In Bolton, Security Forces Investigate (1990) — infused everything, rendering it largely impervious to any literal the stout thighs and lush sideburns of the sainted, green-jerseyed, interpretation. Newry-born goalkeeper for Northern Ireland shimmering into view as a colossal, leprechaunish exhibit in a shopping mall art show, while detective Doyle has the joint covered with his high-velocity rifle. There is less to laugh about in the images of malignant, insectoid SAS commandoes with their beads drawn on your forehead, as in Jesus Appears in Newry (1992); or the gas masked, Messianic horror-snout of The Virgin of Clohogue (1992). One elegant collage, widely reproduced at the time, is The Goddess Appears in Newry, (1993), with its heavily armed teenage English soldier (sporting a bravely attempted moustache) crouched in an entranceway, and overloomed by the great cruciform halo of the sky-borne Virgin Mary. Behind him, some burly RUC hoofers and their armoured vehicle seem mired in Irish gorse — as if lost in a pagan landscape of apparitions and incomprehensible folk religion, utterly impervious to any reason.

09/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Despite being subversive as ever, Hillen’s IRELANTIS But what finally jolted Hillen to the 9/11 subject was the pictures quickly achieved real psychic purchase in Dublin, and shock at learning, from a newspaper, of the death of a young indeed elsewhere. Art colleges teemed with student theses, while woman — a London picture-researcher with whom he was in the pictures were widely reproduced in newspapers, magazines, regular contact — who was blown up on the upper floor of the bus TV. They even graced the Taoiseach’s office, however it refracted on Tavistock Square on 7/7 in London 2005. This brought the new Bertie Ahern’s view of his golden realm — and even surrounded the paradigm of “war of terror” home to him. And then came the gaps entrance to the EU presidency office, when Bertie went to Brussels and inconsistencies in the official account, and the refusal to set up in 2004. an official inquiry… Hillen earned another seemingly unlikely champion in the These suspicions and anxieties now darken Hillen’s ‘revisionist’ Irish historian, Roy Foster (who has dubbed Hillen far more paranoid vision of the Emerald Isle — and it matches “a national treasure”, and has begun collecting his work) since the general switch to a constant drumbeat of crisis and fear in Hillen’s Great Pyramids of Carlingford Lough (1994), spangled the the media, along with the global war on terror, which has been cover of Foster’s book, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making confidently projected by security analysts to last for at least the it Up in Ireland (2001). Hillen’s collages also exercise the wits of next 15 years. Meanwhile, we endure a constantly encroaching other members of the Irish Studies brigade, blossoming across state surveillance and retention of our data, from full-body X-ray the flyleaves of countless media and cultural studies volumes — scanners at airports to our entire phone, Internet, financial and Luke Gibbons’ Tranformations in Irish Culture (1996) among many health records, while our movements are monitored and mapped other deconstructions of what it means to be Irish today. Hillen by our mobile telephony and GPS navigation systems. We are is also often invited to give his tuppence-worth at symposia on constantly reminded how the global economic crisis will demand everything from conflict culture to art-and-science collaborations; more painful sacrifices to come; and how growing human and was recently airlifted to Spain to share his wisdom with the 7th populations and dwindling energy and food reserves threaten a International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society. Malthusian meltdown any time soon. At one stage, Hillen even considered branding IRELANTIS, Hillen began his latest series of collages in 2007 at the as it was being constantly plagiarised by advertising agencies. Cill Rialaig artists’ retreat in Kerry, when he was stationed up a Instead, he ended up designing a series of posters for Bank of bothairín that ended in a 150-foot drop into the Atlantic. Nearby Ireland at Dublin airport, to direct tourists towards their ATM’s. With were ruined cottages which looked as if their occupants had simply merry sacrilege, he montaged ATM’s onto archetypal beauty spots walked out the door a century ago, never to return. Meanwhile, like the Blarney Stone, the side of a round tower and even the leg the daily news from Iraq evoked their descendants fighting in of a dolmen, which must surely have furrowed the brow of many’s that conflict, like the US 69th Infantry Regiment (nicknamed the a banker’s clerk. ‘Fighting Irish’) who are forever ducking snipers and IED’s on the But eventually the steam leaked out of IRELANTIS, around lethal road from Baghdad airport to the Green zone, known as 2005. Perhaps it was ultimately an unsustainable fantasy. One ‘Route Irish’. very late piece may provide a clue, The Launch Pad at O'Connell Where once in IRELANTIS, red-haired, freckle-faced St, Dublin (2005), with the prospect of an advanced civilisation children gathered meteorites at Knowth, now the peasants are finally jettisoning its earthly paradise once it had been all used up; Collecting Evidence of Controlled Demolition in Connemara overheated and over-consumed. (2007) in their donkey carts. The sky is indeed falling in on the 3 dreamworld, the smoke plumes from the Twin Towers plainly visible For Hillen, the defining disaster arrived with 9/11. The across the sky. Indeed, one Tower has fetched up on an insanely official 9/11 Commission Report of 2004, while mildly criticising overdeveloped isle on the Upper Lake in Killarney (2007), where it federal agencies and two administrations for failing to heed blazes and sputters its toxic payload into the misted Kerry hills. intelligence, is now widely seen as very scant on answers. Why Again, the denizens of these tropicalised Irish landscapes did the US Air Force not intercept any of the hijacked planes? wilfully ignore the menace. In Evidence of Controlled Demolition More obviously, how on earth did the Twin Towers, two colossal at Castle Green, Ballybunion (2007), the day tripping couple gaze buildings, pancake so perfectly into their own footprints in less at the strand, oblivious to the conflagration erupting from the than 12 seconds — as did, eight hours later, the nearby ‘Building upper storeys of a nearby high-rise (where a Geraldine castle ruin 7’ of the World Trade Centre, even though it seemed to suffer no actually stands). Similarliwise, in one breathtakingly elegaic image, structural damage. A growing number of architects, engineers and Evidence of Controlled Demolition at The Rose Garden, Tralee, physicists have admitted that they very quickly concluded these Co. Kerry (2007), the tatterdemalion shell of a partly demolished were controlled demolitions. residential building reveals its interior walls, hauntingly stained with The internet is alive with videos scrutinising every frame of the lives of its former inhabitants. Meanwhile, two young ladies the footage, pointing out the explosive dust puffs from each floor gaze in a fugue of admiration at the rose beds, while the lava of as the building collapsed; eyewitness reports of hearing multiple ruination laps at their heels. Beyond the low-walled garden, an explosions as the buildings were evacuated, the molten metal approaching tornado rattles the foundations of the horizon. in the ruins which smouldered for months, and the fact that no Another John Hinde-derived heartbreaker is the hilarious modern high rise had ever heretofore or since collapsed from fire Evidence of Controlled Demolition at Fr. McDyer's Folk Village, damage. One group of physicists, led by the Dane Niels Harrit, Glencolmcille, Co. Donegal (2007) — this last a sanitised Clachán reported the chemical signature of ‘nano-thermite’ in the Ground settlement dreamt up by the Glenties-born priest in 1967, to draw Zero debris — an experimental explosive only developed since the tourist dollars into the impoverished area. Here, earnest sightseers 1990s, which could have generated temperatures high enough to consult their guidebooks while inspecting a blankly inanimate melt the buildings’ reinforced steel infrastructures. jaunting car; while beyond the roped-down thatched cottages, a Many have pointed to the gung-ho geostrategic right-wing series of high-rise blocks careen and stagger over like ninepins. Republican think tank, ‘Project for a New American Century’ (many Towers, it seems, are toppling all over Ireland, like men shot in the of whose signatories, including Cheney, went on to form the Bush head: one keels over gracefully in Killiney Bay; another crumples administration) which, in aiming to copper fasten American victory like sweet paper at The Silver Strand, Co. Wicklow (2007). in the Cold War, recommended (in a 2000 document Rebuilding Elsewhere, Hillen tilts satire at our national cravenness America's Defenses) the desirability of “some catastrophic and before the new imperial power in Raising the White Flag on catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor". Tramore Beach (2007), with the popular resort recast as a sun- Many commentators on the Left, including Noam kissed Normandy. Squint into this tiny collage, and you will espy Chomsky, John Pilger and Naomi Klein — while castigating the the invading US force that scarcely perturbs the two milk bottle Bush administration’s immeasurable cynicism in using 9/11 as an pallid youngsters playing ball on the beach. Meanwhile, half-lost in excuse to invade Iraq and rollback countless domestic civil liberties their gossip, a little flotilla of three maiden aunts stroll flirtatiously (in the US Patriot Acts of 2001 and 2006) — have refused to even up past a squadron of GI’s discuss the suspicions — almost too horrendous to contemplate — that on some level, 9/11 was sanctioned, tolerated or even orchestrated by elements close to the administration. If it is scary to even utter it, its implications make it border on the unthinkable. But the unthinkable is precisely Hillen’s chosen territory (he often cites the line from Alice Through the Looking Glass about the gift of being able to imagine six impossible things before breakfast). As a native of Northern Ireland, he is also skeptically acclimatised over the years to the fug of state disinformation; and is even sensitised to the idea of a state being involved in lethal action against its own civilians. Indeed, there have been many paradigmatic shifts over the years in Northern Ireland in terms of what is mentionable — from the idea of British security forces colluding with paramilitaries, to the now widely accepted fact that they even ran murderous operations.

10/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

It’s more difficult to orient yourself temporally in A Certainly Hillen’s stature has grown with several large Squadron of Bradleys Intercepts Natives Carrying Home Evidence public commissions, by far the most significant being his design of Controlled Demolition in Sackville Street, Dublin (2007). The (with Desmond Fitzgerald) for the Omagh Bomb Memoria — an sight of these American tanks shrieking and chundering across the elaborate sculptural mechanism of 31 mirrors (each marking grassy Georgian thoroughfare of Sackville Street must be a seismic the lost life of a victim) which tracks the sun across the sky, and experience for the Irish peasantry (here liberated from an English channels its beams of light into a sculptured ‘heart’ housed inside ‘view card’ from 1902). These stand confronted as ne’er-do-wells, a huge glass pillar on the site of the atrocity. possibly insurgents, hauling home smouldering debris in their Although it had no bearing on his dedicatory design, Hillen sacks and panniers. Weirdly, amongst the Victorian street furniture, of course, was not insensible to the fact that this horrific event — the Great Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, looks on forlornly from atop the largest single terrorist attack on this island — is still shrouded his monument (unveiled in 1882, this was regarded as perhaps in mystery and bitterness. Once again, there are severe holes in the finest work by the great Dublin-born sculptor of Empire, John the official version of events, and both Britain and the Republic Henry Foley). Just around the corner, in No Evidence of a 757 near have signally failed to bring anyone to justice, despite much The Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin? (2007), the Pentagon collapses circumstantial evidence, and reported warnings beforehand from messily into Liffey Street, as modern shoppers and office workers at least two police informants. These testimonies have been taken hurry to keep to their schedule. very seriously by Michael Gallagher (whose son Aidan died in the Such a mirthsome Armageddon may seem like career- tragedy), the spokesperson for many families of the victims. threatening material, but there is sheer visual delight here in some Along with many other families of victims of violence of the most masterful and accomplished collages Hillen has yet widely suspected to be state-sanctioned (such as those of produced. According to himself, the real subject is “the powerful the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974), these families disinclination to believe one’s eyes in the face of overwhelming agonisingly await some of the vindication and “closure” afforded evidence for an unacceptable reality”. last month to the relatives of the dead of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Derry 4 in 1972. While predictably exonerating senior political and military While photomontage is demonstrably a noble art, paper leaders, Lord Saville’s report concluded that the killings had been collage malingers somewhere in the shadowlands between “unjustified” (not “unlawful”, as had first been leaked to the media photography and art, and is rather looked down upon by the art — but the soldiers are still potentially open to prosecution). Most establishment. But even if there are conservation issues with paper importantly, it trumpeted the absolute innocence of the victims, and glue, it seems extraordinary that no major Irish collection, such and nailed the “Big Lie” — resolutely maintained by the British as IMMA or the Ulster Museum, has acquired any of Hillen’s works state for 38 years since Widgery — that these people were killed — even as there is renewed interest in the US and UK, including because they were “nail bombers and gunmen”. the museum in his native Newry.

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1 4 Ideas For A New Town #1 2 Bank Ad. Woman as Goddess of Destruction #2 3 Evidence of Controlled Demolition at Fr. McDyer’s Folk Village, Glencolumbcille, Co. Donegal 4 Bank Ad. Woman as Goddess of Destruction #1

11/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

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1 Who Is My Enemy? 4 No Evidence of a 757 near 2 Northern Sunsets #3 The Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin? 3 Collecting Evidence of 5 Collecting Evidence of Controlled Controlled Demolition at Demolition in Connemara Castle Green, Ballybunion 6 Sr. Faustina 12/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

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7 A Squadron of Bradleys 9 Newry Gagarin #6 Intercepts Natives Carrying 10 Londonewry, A Mythical Town, #6 Home Evidence of Controlled 11 Cosmonaut Lands in Annalong Harbour, Demolition in Sackville Security Forces Investigate... Street, Dublin 12 Newry Gagarin #8 13/16 8 The Executioners PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

Storming the Archive History is ‘a knowledge by traces’, and the archive actively Kennardphillipps’ constellation attacks the dynamics of by produces such traces through processes of archivisation.1 In the archival stratification — and the obfuscation involved — strikingly Doireann Wallace inscription of oral testimony or the gathering together of such evident in the Iraq Inquiry. The title of their new work, "We hope accidental or incidental witnesses as photographs, documents are to be finished by lunchtime"… highlights this aspiration towards brought into being at a remove from events. Archival classification hasty closure by appropriating and magnifying a passing comment and storage practices assign documents a place within a system, made by chairman Sir John Chilcot while opening the hearing of, and the historian exscribes a body of knowledge, supposedly of somewhat uncannily, Tony Blair’s spin doctor leading up to and the past, on the basis of pursuing these traces, endeavouring to during the Iraq war, Alastair Campbell.8 make them speak again. From non-stratified events to testimonial Ostensibly making the process transparent, the public accounts and their tracing by documents; from classificatory website is indicative of the extent to which the spectacle is already schema to the interpretation of archival corpora by researchers; engaged in the production and legitimation of official histories. each level overcodes the previous one, attempting to stabilise its Testimonies are solicited in order immediately to be archived, and meaning and settle its contents. are constantly conflated with ‘evidence’: the politicians responsible Working against the stratifying pull of the archive, the for the war are designated ‘witnesses’, and their statements ‘oral political montage practices of kennardphillipps and Seán Hillen evidence’, while the activity of the sessions is described as ‘taking engage in a radical cartography. In opposition to archival tracings, evidence’. The interface of the website is the visual equivalent they draw new maps. Despite connotations of conquest, the of elevator music, though a little more solemn: blue-on-white, concept of the map can be torn away from this semantic fixing. with a gentle wave logo resembling a PowerPoint template and The map can acquire a subversive and generative potential, harmoniously echoing the rolling tail of the distinctly orientalist where it becomes a figure of exploration rather than capture, an ‘Q’ in both keywords.9 The intention appears to be to pacify the ‘experimentation in contact with the real’. British public as much through the tedium of the bureaucratic environment as by the endless hours of questioning that constitute The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it the ‘investigation’. is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant The Iraq inquiry is not, as is frequently reiterated, a trial. modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind If its purpose is not to assign responsibility, then the archive it of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social constructs, as kennardphillipps are painfully aware, merely allows function. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work the self-serving conditional (im)perfect of political actors like Blair of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.2 (his mantra that “things would have been worse if I hadn’t acted thus”) to enter into history as ‘evidence’ and thus to shape the This serves as a useful model for critique between two very course of future events.10 Contesting the documentary production different artistic practices with a shared interest in destabilising that attempts to lay the war to rest by treating it as a past event, the processes by which selective interpretations of the present addressable by traces (so-called ‘evidence’), kennardphillipps become, through archiving, supposedly authoritative records of the create a constellation in which the illusion is forced into contact past. with press images depicting the ongoing suffering and violence Before the archive there is struggle. The strata that ensuing from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The images of constitute historical knowledge ‘merely collected and solidified the war are dredged from the electronic databases into which the vast visual dust and the sonic echo of the battle raging above them’.3 majority of them are destined to settle without even being widely The mass media and popular culture in general constitute, for seen — a process which itself produces them as ‘of the past’, or the montage artist, a vast resource to mine in the construction having passed. Drawing photographic documents into a conflictual of the personal archives out of which work will be created. But dyad with the sanitised bureaucratic tracings of the inquiry makes more importantly it is also the very realm of contestation within it far more difficult to dismiss them as yet more depressing and against which montage operates. Between the ‘absolute indexes of the eternal misery of the world, or to consume them as outside’ (the unknown or unknowable) and the congealed forms of spectacle. It demands that they enter into history irrevocably linked knowledge that serve as the basis for the writing of history, there is to the decisions that initiated and perpetuated the conditions they a strategic zone in which maps are drawn and redrawn, competing portray, along with the subsequent attempts to close the book on for posterity.4 these even as their catastrophic consequences show no sign of Undoubtedly the production and circulation of images ending. and information on a daily basis is not yet stratified, even if current There is no telos to the signs and strategies of montage. modes of selection and presentation are highly conventional. If it Rearranging things in an oppositional manner, it pulls against any is possible to speak of the ‘archives’ of mass media or of mass attempt to archive the present. One thing or another might become culture, it is because there is a force of stratification at work. history, but it is not predetermined. Even if certain interests seem to History is being made. Consensus is being forged. What will have have a quasi-natural force working in their favour, ‘History’ will not been archived is being fought over in the here and now. necessarily or inevitably vindicate anybody in particular. It is still up Yet because of this turbulence, there remains the for grabs. possibility of drawing alternative maps. This is the wager of these Many of Hillen’s diagrams are explicitly presented as artists. If the archive allows things to settle, they raise the dust, kick sketches for possible worlds. In the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ up a semantic storm. era works in particular (but also in Irelantis), mythical places There are two principle ways in which montage works (LondonNewry) are elaborately mapped, and ‘ideas for a new against archival stratification — two cartographies of resistance. town’ proposed. But the mantle of cartographer or urban planner The first creates constellations; a mapping of relations. is adopted as a parody of the colonising gaze, which invariably Material from various stages of the processes of archival creates spaces of violent collision. There is also, however, the stratification are gathered into a new corpus in which diverse recurring presence of another alternative cartographer: Newry images and information coexist. A new principle of selection Gagarin, the artist’s alter-ego, who embodies a viewpoint at times and combination is invented for this corpus. In opposition to confusedly rooted in the local conflict, but often distant enough the endless amassing of data, this is ‘based on a constructive to map the relations between these earthly powers from space, a principle’, one that acknowledges thinking to involve ‘not only vantage point from which other possibilities are conceivable. the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well’.5 The constellation Hillen’s new works are a strategic engagement with resembles a mind-map, an image of investigative thought: traces the problem of truth and truth-deficit in modern societies. In are seized upon, drawn out of their archival slumber, laid out particular, the images deal with the challenges posed by open and overlaid. Possible connections are proposed, by adding and channels of communication (like the Internet) to official histories juxtaposing documents, filling the available space. This rendering and versions of events as well as to efforts to determine the truth of thought in space insists upon the urgency of its associations. of such accounts. The problem, as we are constantly reminded, The second way creates diagrams. Its strategies are more is that there is simply too much information. It is difficult to sort concerned with undermining the forces of stratification by which the ‘good’ information from the ‘bad’, and of course even harder photographs themselves archive and are archived, the manner to distinguish either from deliberate disinformation, which by in which they fix an image of the world through framing and multiplying the signposts undermines any prospect of evidence selection, pointing and designating, and are themselves fixed by — the one category that, for Hillen, might ground claims to the archival taxonomies and interpretive frames. The diagram cuts into truth — being found or believed. Inevitably, we filter information in every such mode of fixing. The unity of the frame is punctuated. accordance with our own suppositions about the world; what we The image is altered, speculatively spliced with other fragments are inclined or willing to believe. In the acknowledged absence of to create impossible worlds that remain, nonetheless, pictorially answers, Hillen’s alternative worlds insist upon the contingency of and conceptually cogent. There is a sense in which every image the maps drawn and filters provided by mainstream political and — through the repetition of a scene — involves an archiving of media consensus. This is not to claim that there is no truth, but possibilities. The iconic character of the photograph — its basic that any truth we are confronted with is somebody’s truth, and not perceptual resemblance to what it depicts — coupled with its nobody’s. Creating a microworld in which attractive models cut vexed but persistent status as an indexical trace, bound by a from bank leaflets advertising loans and mortgages ecstatically necessary relation of physical proximity to its object, tends to stumble upon evidence of crimes against democracy, while tourists anchor the possible in the actual in a common-sense fashion. It extracted from postcards look to their guide books as buildings should be remembered, however, that possibility is nothing but crumble behind them, his cartography theatrically foregrounds the an after-image of reality. The future is not yet possible, but it will intrinsic but often hidden connections between capitalism, state have been possible, and what we assume to be possible in the violence, spectacle and disengaged citizenship. More importantly, present is often merely a reproduction of the extant.6 Indexical it questions the social forces that actively (and often violently) icons are particularly well suited to this. In opposition to the icon, establish the parameters of what we accept as reasonable and the diagram is oriented towards the future. It ‘constructs a real that what we reject as madness. is yet to come, a new type of reality’.7 The impossible worlds that diagrams map expand the question of what it is possible to think.

14/16 PhotoIreland Fragments From kennardphillipps Festival 2010 a Broken World and Séan Hillen

It is intriguing that the most striking iconographic overlap In the directness of its formal means and message and between kennardphillipps’ constellations and Hillen’s diagrams is in the violence of its representational tactics, montage seems the prevalence of dust and fire, mostly consequences of buildings designed to have a perlocutionary effect on its viewer — a physical collapsing or bombs exploding. First and foremost, this represents impact.11 The ‘self’ thus addressed is not a profoundly interior soul, the violence of the power against which the works are pitched. or mere interpreting mind, but a body crossed by social forces But it is also an active representational violence. On this level it and situated within a social field. Perhaps any genuine ethics must becomes a metaphor for the activity of the artists themselves; in begin with a bodily empathy. Benjamin’s comment (often cited by their assaults on the stratifying force of the archive, the speed with Hillen) that ‘convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better which what is current becomes archived and addressable as trace opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul’12 is pertinent or evidence; on the strategies by which oppositional views are not only in asserting the value of laughter in bursting apart the consigned to oblivion while official perspectives are constituted hierarchy of contiguities, but also because the diaphragm is the as history and tradition; and on attempts to lay the recent past to organ of breath — where we feel fear and constriction in the face rest through inquiries, commissions and reports that appear to of heteronomous forces that assert a power over life and death. We be yet another technique of consensus — repetition with minor are reminded of the extent to which this inevitably constrains how concessions designed to prevent simmering public resentment and what we are willing to accept. and mistrust from boiling over into rage. This is an attack on acquiescence.

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Londonnewry, A Mythical Town, #3

1 Paul Ricoeur, 2 Gilles Deleuze and 3 Gilles Deleuze, 4 Here, I am adopting some 5 Walter Benjamin, 6 Henri Bergson, Time and Narrative, Felix Guattari, Foucault key aspects of a schema ‘Theses on the Philosophy of ‘The Possible and the Real’, Volume 3 (London and A Thousand Plateaus (London and New York: created by Deleuze to History’,in Illuminations in Key Writings Chicago: University of (London and New York: Continuum, 1999): 99 describe the relations be (London: Pimlico, 1999): 254 (New York and London: Chicago Press, 1988): 120. Continuum, 2004): 14 tween Foucault’s conception Continuum, 2002) For further discussion of of the ‘archive’, which the role of the trace in is a set of limits govern– the processes of archivisa– ing what can be seen or tion and the production of said in a given historical documentary knowledge, see period, and his theories Paul Ricoeur, Memory, of power as a kind of History, Forgetting microphysics that always (Chicago and London: produces its own resistances University of Chicago Press, 2004)

7 Deleuze and Guattari, 8 The hearing can be viewed 9 See www.iraqinquiry.org. 10 The future perfect of 11 On the perlocutionary 12 Walter Benjamin, A Thousand Plateaus: 157 at http://www.iraqinquiry. The font appears to belong history’s victors is also effect of language see ‘The Author as Producer’, org.uk/transcripts/ to a family of typefaces summoned in Chilcot’s J.A. Austin, in Walter Benjamin, oralevidence-bydate/100112. derived from Arabic script opening remarks on March How to Do Selected Writings, Volume 2 aspx and the transcript 8th 2010, in which he Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard Univer– is available at http:// states that the future (Cambridge: Harvard sity Press, 1999): 779 www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/ success of the Iraqi University Press, 1975) media/42384/20100112 elections will (ret– am-campbell-final.pdf rospectively) determine the righteousness of the invasion. The invasion will have been successful. This is particularly wor– rying in light of Tony Blair’s opportunistic and aggressive posturing to– wards Iran during the hearing on Iraq

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Frag– KP/SH 01 — ments From a Broken World.