IRISH
TIMES The Arts- Culture Shock:
Fintan
O'Toole
Sat, Sep 22, 2007
Omagh is rising to the
tough task of creating a memorial that doesn't seem trite and cliched
If
you think public monuments in Dublin such as the Spire or the proposed Anthony
Gormley sculpture in the Liffey have divided people, imagine how hard it is
to conceive a memorial to the victims of a violent sectarian conflict. The
Troubles reminded us, again and again, that even the basic rituals of burying
and remembering the dead could themselves become occasions of violence. The
IRA killed 11 people attending a Remembrance Sunday ceremony in Enniskillen
in 1987. Loyalist Michael Stone killed three men at a Republican funeral in
Milltown cemetery in Belfast in 1988. The Somme commemoration at Drumcree
churchyard turned, throughout the mid-1990s, into a proxy war.
It
is not surprising, then, that it has been so difficult to find ways of marking
atrocities. Words still come easier than visual images. Evelyn Conlon's memorial
anthology, Later On, is a superb verbal response to the Monaghan bombing.
The extraordinary book, Lost Lives, with its accounts of the deaths
of every victim of the Troubles, is perhaps the finest record of any conflict
compiled. But physical monuments have been harder to envisage. The memorial
to the victims of the Dublin bombing in Talbot Street, for example, has a
simple and austere dignity, but it seems too small and too insignificant to
do justice to the scale of the atrocity.
A
look at the brief for the Omagh memorial, which is to be erected in time for
next August's 10th anniversary of the Real IRA's assault on the town, gives
some idea of the conceptual and, in the narrow sense, political challenge.
The Omagh Memorial Working Group, which is running the project, consists of
community groups, churches, local government and business interests. It in
turn is overseen by the British, Irish and Spanish governments - representing
the nationalities of the victims - and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
There
is no avoiding this kind of complexity of consultation, but it does remind
one of the old saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. How
do you get a genuine artistic statement, adequate to the grief and outrage
that linger after the atrocity, out of such an inevitably bureaucratic process?
And that's even before you start to think about the physical and emotional
constraints. The space for the monument on Market Street, where the bombs
exploded, is limited, so it has to be split between that site and the temporary
Memorial Garden 300 metres away. The message that the monument must give is
equally divided.
The brief sets out what seem to be contradictory demands: "we must move
forward in a positive and progressive manner but all the while remembering
the atrocity inflicted and the carnage suffered." The monument must be
"reflective and reverential but positive, optimistic and forward-looking".
The sensitivity of the task is underlined by the row that has already broken
out about the wording on the monument and how explicitly it will name the
perpetrators.
Yet,
in the seeming impossibility of meeting all these demands, there is a reminder
that art can reach the parts that other ways of thinking cannot. The impossible
is what art does best. The resolution - or at least the containment - of contradictions
is its natural element. And the very complexity of the brief - two sites,
opposing impulses, a wide range of interests to be satisfied - rules out the
obvious.
It leaves no room for the sculptural realism that so often turns trauma into
kitsch and cliche. Whatever was going to emerge from this process would have
to be abstract, fluid, metaphorical.
There
is thus something wonderfully appropriate in the fact that the winner of the
competition is an artist whose metier has been the subversion of literal realism.
Sean Hillen, who designed the winning project with landscape architect Desmond
Fitzgerald, is best known for his brilliant series of photomontages, Irelantis,
Newry Gagarin and LondoNewry. All of them
work by exploiting incongruity: the Great Pyramids in Carlingford Lough, cosmonauts
splashing down in Annalong Harbour, the Virgin Mary appearing above a British
Army patrol, watchtowers in Piccadilly Circus and London buses in Newry.
Hillen
has visualised contradictions by splicing together the mythic and the mundane,
hilarity and horror, the local and the global, vitality and violence.
What his work most emphatically is not is reverential or solemn. Yet, he's
managed with Fitzgerald to distil some of his capacity for myth-making and
playfulness while adding the necessary sense of gravity.
The
design centres on that most primal yet mobile of elements: light. A heliostatic
mirror in the memorial park tracks the sun, and directs a constant beam of
sunlight onto 31 small mirrors, each etched with the name of a victim. They
in turn bounce the light via another hidden mirror onto a heart-shaped crystal
in an obelisk at the bomb site, which is almost constantly in the shade.
The
light suggests optimism, but not in a trite way. The ideas of reflection and
connection have obvious symbolic meaning. The design quietly fuses different
traditions: the obelisk references Great War memorials, while the passage
of light is reminiscent of Newgrange. The whole thing is complex in its resonances
yet simple in its content, reconciling diverse demands.
It shows why we need public art to do what politics struggles to achieve.
©
2007 The Irish Times