DESIREIN LOOKING

UNIVERSITYOF WESTMINSTER School of Communication & Creative Industries Department of Design, Digital Media & Photography MAPhotographicStudies1 Module Code; 2PHOM04 Module Leader; David Bate AESTHETICSand RHETORIC Brief: Examine the issue of identification in Willie Doherty's work.

DESIREIN LOOKING
By William J.Vincent Word count, 3,015 Date; 18th May 2002

My essay is centred on why I object to Willie Doherty's photographs. The position that I feel most passionately with is the subjective view, were the desire to see what pleases the eye is placed in the position of the observer. In my understanding, aesthetics is the nature of art and the criteria of artistic judgement, in relation to what is deemed as beautiful. The classical conception of art as the imitation of nature was formulated by Plato and developed by Aristotle in his Poetics, while modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, F. W. Schelling, Benedetto Croce, and Ernst Cassirer have emphasised the creative and symbolic aspects of art.1 My interest in artistic photographic representation and inquiry of art and rhetorical symbolic meanings led me to the work of Willie Doherty. In his photographs, the viewer is presented with images which have text (that appear to imply a political suggestive interpretation) placed on the work. To understand the work, one must have some knowledge of the culture and the location. This poem locates the place, as being near the seaside in Ireland. The Planter's Daughter When night stirred at sea And the fire brought a crowd in, They say that her beauty Was music in mouth And few in the candlelight Thought her too proud, For the house of the planter Is known by the trees. Men that had seen her Drank deep and were silent,

The women were speaking Wherever she went As a bell that is rung Or a wonder told shyly And O she was the Sunday In every week. 1 In this simple lyric by Austin Clarke (born in Dublin, 1896 - 1974), one can get the feeling of mixed emotions (admiration, jealously, envy) for a beautiful maiden living in a community in seventeenth Ireland. Why in Ireland you may ask? The rhetorical codes (metaphor, simile, and alliteration) for understanding the meanings implied in this instance give us clues to the sort of simple community that the poem evokes. For example Sunday, (metaphor) a day of worship and rest being the high point of the week. The planter's daughter described as a bell, (simile, belle - beautiful in French), the community is centred around a bell. In this case, she was the centre of attraction. Drank deep (alliteration) implying a speechless admiration. The analysis could go on, however, the point that I feel links this poem to Willie Doherty's photographs has to be local knowledge or at least some historical insight of Irish history. The ambiguity starts in the title of the poem and is reinforced in lines seven and eight because the word 'planter' (metaphor) does not refer to planting trees but the fact that settlers (Scottish and English) planted conifers around their farmsteads, and to this day in Donegal and other parts of Ireland trees denote the homes of planter stock.2 For my own part, after living in Ireland for twenty-one years, the everyday words (used in a metaphorical sense) that we used, related to particular meanings, which I feel outsiders would have some difficulty in understanding. Photographs of Ireland and any work relating to Irish culture recall happy events of my childhood growing up in County Cavan (one of the nine counties of Ulster, ancestral home of Edgar Allen Poe and Henry James) in the Irish Republic. The photographs that Willie Doherty made in and around his home city of Derry (Londonderry, Northern Ireland.) interest me because they seem to evoke a curiosity within the spectator, so as to make one consciously aware of identity. The innate feelings that I perceived after viewing Doherty's work are not however the romantic memories that I have of Irishness and Irish culture. The intrusion of text onto the surface of the image has produced a new layer of confusion to the photographic work, one which I feel causes a certain ambiguity regarding the interpretation in political meaning and a certain ambivalence regarding ones own position through identification with the photographs as a viewer. The geographical location of the city on the border between the Irish Republic and the state of Northern Ireland has had some significance in the problems that faced the community as both sides in the conflict have historical claim in their respective cultures (In the catholic tradition, St Columba founded the first Christian church in Derry in the middle of the sixth century AD In the Protestant tradition the city walls stands as an emblem to their victory over Catholicism after they successful defended the city from the siege by the Catholic Jacobite army in 1688-89.) . It was the key area that sparked the violence that has haunted the province since 1968.1

Fig.1. Willie Doherty, The Other Side. B + W photograph, 1988. My first impression of this photograph has to be the cultivated farmland and the hedge dividing the upland from the lowland. The high vantagepoint offered overlooks the cluster of houses in the hollow (probably originally bogland). The words imply a division of territory (constructing a form of reality). How would we know that there were separate communities living in this area if the text was not there to inform the viewer? This relay or anchorage of meaning noted by Roland Barthes rules out some of the alternative signifieds, as he puts it, all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a floating chain of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.1 On introspection if the text were removed, my perception would be of an ordinary urban/rural scene, where communities live in harmony, without one side looking towards the other and noting their differences. If this verse of poetry were placed on the image, instead of what is presently used, the ideological implications would be reduced dramatically. My father worked with a horse-plough, His shoulders globed like a full sail strung Between the shafts and the furrow. The horses strained at his clicking tongue.2 Text and Identity This verse from a poem (entitled, Follower.) by Seamus Heaney (born in County Derry, 1938) draws on memories of his father ploughing a field. My recollection is of similar parental scenes; I can identify with Heaney's words more so than Doherty's words placed on top of the ploughed area. The position that the photograph places me in here is in the south looking north. The text states that to the West is South (South, location of Irish Republic) to which the Nationalists would like to join, and the east (Loyalist side) is Northern Ireland part of Great Britain. The other side means literally that and is seen here placed on the loyalist side with the viewer of the photograph positioned in the scene/seen looking towards the Nationalist side. Jean Fisher makes the point regarding this text in its positioning (on the East Side) by questioning whether we are on the other side or looking at the other side? 1

In reading the image as a text, this, therefore, is one of the ambiguities where the spectator is left to choose their own identity within the spatial enclosure. Without the text (words on top of the photographs), the view would be a pictorial scene. Doherty produced this photograph overlooking the city in a way that poses this problem of identity conflict using words with dual meanings. In the photograph 'UNDERCOVER' by the river, a more sinister aspect seems to be applied. The spectator is unsure of which position to take whether that of the authorities or the terrorists.

Fig. 2. Photo by Willie Doherty.UNDERCOVER. Disused railway, Ireland 1985. The viewer is positioned in a scene, which is unnerving, and to some extent imaginary. Jean Fisher wrote; Doherty's image of an (almost) anywhere-in-particular lacks those specific signs that would enable identification between place and spectator. The featureless roadside, riverside, housing estate or scrubland typical of the edge of urban centres, are wastelands of undecidability marking the limit of the organised control of the city, and by implication a limit of legibility in the relationship between the Other and the imaginary self.1 What inhibits the viewer is the view presented by the position of the camera. The undergrowth camouflages the view in a way that prevents us from moving around with our eyes within the scene. We cannot do this according to Victor Burgin because the lens arranges all information according to laws of projection which place the subject as geometric point of origin of the scene in an imaginary relationship of real space, but facts intrude to deconstruct the initial response: the eye (I) cannot move within the depicted space (which offers itself precisely to such movement) it can only move across it to the point of the frame.2 Identification with the object Therefore, is it not crucial, that the object depicted is clearly displayed within the frame, so that one can see and make out what it is? It is almost as if there was something there that we have to see (a murder victim or a weapon used in the attack). Is there someone taking cover there in order to spy on the citizens? These are perceptions that enable the photographs to hinder the direct interpretation as to the true identification one can adopt with the photographs. Doherty's work bears some resemblance to Walter Benjamin's description of Eugene Atget's photographs of Old Paris, "The scene of a crime too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. 1

How would Atget's photographs have been received if he had included text on top of the images? Atget proclaimed to Man Ray that his photographs were documents. In a way they were text in their own right. Victor Burgin states, photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call 'photographic discourses', but this discourse, like any other engages discourses beyond itself, the 'photographic text', like any other is the site of complex 'intertextuality', an overlapping series of previous texts 'taken for granted' at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture.1 The question of meaning and interpretation is therefore subjective and referred to the reader of the photograph. Identification with the viewpoint

Fig. 3. Willie Doherty, Last Hours of Daylight. The bogside, Derry 1985. In 'Last Hours of Daylight' the smoke from the chimneys blocks the spectators from seeing beyond the first row of houses. Fisher noted also the quote from Michel Foucault's 'Panopticism' where he argued that "visibility is a trap" in relation to hegemonic control in state power relations.1 Foucault stated; The plague stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilised by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.2 Foucault essay focused on the contagion (communication of disease, moral corruption) that was seen as detrimental to society and the principles that was put into operation to combat the spread of disease and the implications of an hierarchical authority. The angle of view in this photograph positions us looking down onto the rooftops. We can identify with the surveillance operation of the authorities, in its task of monitoring the movements of people. Fisher pointed out that the outbreak of terrorism was at best only symptoms of the problems of the city. She states that; The significance of Doherty's usurpation' must therefore be understood in the context of a city that still bears the imprint of a colonial structure of power which represents the Irish Nationalist as Other at the same time as it actively prohibits it access to the means of representing itself- in effect, of the freedom to construct its own identity as an equal speaking subject.1

In Doherty's photograph the houses denote a housing estate that is synonymous with industrial areas that appear as Fisher says, of an anywhere-in-particular place and lacks any signs to location. The sense of location must be paramount in order to be convincing as a rhetorical document. Doherty stated in an interview with Joan Rothfuss that, "the concept of place was crucial and I added a text that was descriptive of the place, trying to map out how the territory worked. The viewer was implicated in the reading of the text and in the process of identification and in positioning himself in relation to the viewpoint of the camera. I suppose at some point I realised that this work was very dependent on local knowledge, both in terms of the history and the geography of the place.2 Conceptual Ideas In another interview he admitted to Tim Maul that his photographs had an obvious superficial resemblance with Richard Long's narrative work. Doherty said, " I appropriated that language and used it as a device that would allow me to have a level of participation before I even started. I subsequently got rid of it but it was useful device at the time, it was very easy for an audience within the art world to locate this work somewhere.1

Fig. 4 Richard Long, Untitled, England, 1967 Long's work challenges the viewer's perspective in relation to the object within the photograph, for instance in these two images, a black rectangle appears to have been drawn on top of the image. In the first picture a circle is enclosed within the drawing, but is outside of it in the second landscape scene. The second disturbs the photographic illusion of the first through a shift in the viewpoint of the camera/spectator that reveals the black rectangle to be, like the circle, an actual object in the field.2 Is it this combination of uncertainty regarding the position of the object within the photographs of Long's work, that Doherty has appropriated with regard to the position of identity, that the viewing subject is at times unsure of which form of identification one must choose? In psychoanalytic theory Jacques Lacan introduced what he termed the mirror stage. 2 The infant at an early age recognised/misregonised itself as a separate subject from surrounding objects. Jacqueline Rose used the theory to explain how the Freudian concept of narcissism, (self love) in relating to identification, work in relation to Lacianian thinking.1 In illustrating her theoretical ideas, she explained how this theory of identification emerges as imaginary, like the visual phenomena that is seen by

inverting a vase out of sight and using a mirror and a convex mirror, an optical illusion can be achieved in the reflection.

Fig. 5 Experiment of the inverted vase It is obvious that the viewer takes the correct viewpoint to see the vase in an upright position. Victor Burgin emphasised the importance of the 'look' in relation to the objects represented within the photographic representation.2 His emphasis was primarily on the meaning that the spectator could construct from the object-text relationship being presented. Stylistically, this process of an object-text representation can be seen in the work of artist's such as Barbara Kruger where she has used overlaying slogans on the photographs, which imply by reasoning a specific interpretation.

Fig. 6 Barbara Kruger, Untitled 1983 My impression is, that, this photographs works with or without text, mainly because of the nuance of expression of the fair young maiden (like the planters daughter) as she is transfixed in a look while displaying a conscious awareness of been the object of the gaze. The addition of words reinforces this reading. Jacqueline Rose stated that, this is an artistic practice which crosses the postmodern 'dissolution of art into social life ' (the rejection of high culture) with a sexual politics and crosses the modernist fragmentation of the image with a critical distance produced out of a very logic of the sign (that 'You' of so many of Kruger's slogans which uses the 'agonistics' of language to accuse and draw the spectator into the visual space). 1 Dan Cameron pointed out that there was a similar challenge implicit to Doherty's incorporation of the language-art strategies such as those of Americans like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger into his array of references.1 Cameron wrote,

For instance, Doherty's unusual application of text to his images - as a sort of screen through which visual perception must pass before it can come to terms with the image itself - initially recalls the work of Holzer and Kruger, who began in the late 70s to propose a greatly expanded, almost theatrical use of written languagedrawing our attention to certain interstices where language effectively confronts its own limits.1 Kruger's text overlay is clearly set within the image as a feminist criticism of the way women are represented as objects of desire within the advertising industry. Doherty's use of words overlaying the images recall earlier uses of photography with text in early conceptual art, such as Kruger's work. Ambivalent Meanings The difference between Willie Doherty's work and Barbara Kruger's use of text, is, in Doherty's photographs the words overlaying the pictures present the viewer with an identity struggle, because of 'the absence of people in the pictures, the stillness of the scene and the camera's position, we are engaged and become the character identifying alternately with the surveillor or the surveilled, experiencing the anxiety of being under observation, the paranoia of perceiving a hostile "other" always disturbing, present, at times even the feeling that we are breaking the law or that our gaze is surreptitious and somehow unauthorised, as if sight were in itself a form of border running.2 Many of Doherty's images have been taken on the outskirts of the city and especially on roads leading towards the border area. In figure seven the photograph shows a deserted road, with the word 'PROTECTING' inscribed on top of the image. Who is protecting? The security forces or the terrorist organisations?

Fig. 7 Willie Doherty, Protecting, Braehead Road, Derry, 1987 There are no clues in the photograph to indicate the anxiety implied in the text. No uniforms, no people, only a quite country lane. It could, however, in the context of the Northern Irish situation be an ideal spot for an ambush by the paramilitary or a Special Forces undercover operation. This implied meaning is not how I see it. My perception is more to do with having been there before at some time as the terrain has a familiar homely appeal to me. The lane and the hedge have combined to indicate a constructed environment, indicating the presence of people, and communication by means of motor vehicles. To an extent Doherty's text is ironical, as the tracks on the road could be army transports, farm machinery or terrorist road running operations. My Conclusion

In concluding, Doherty's work is embedded with meaning. This is made through the presence of implied text where the photograph denotes a regular vernacular scene mainly on the perimeter of human habitation. At a connotational level the identity one is endowed with simultaneously are that of the victim and the aggressor which leaves one in an uneasy situation. It is within this ambiguity of identification that disturbs my viewing of the work. What Doherty's is trying to show us in his work could be summoned up in a quote from Terry Eagleton, "there comes a point at which 'pure' difference merely collapses back into 'pure' identity, united as they are in their utter indeterminancy."1 My objection to Willie Doherty's work is, therefore, the use of implied meanings in the text that alludes to my own perceptions of Irish culture and Irishness. However take this away and the ideological implications of the Northern Irish situation are removed. Bibliography
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Fontana Press, London, 1977. Victor Burgin, Thinking Photography, Macmillan Press, London, 1982. Dan Cameron, Willie Doherty, Partial View, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1993. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Willie Doherty, Kunstalle Bern und Autoren, Switzerland, 1996. Austin Clarke, The Planter's Daughter, in Soundings, edited by Augustine Martin, Gill and Macmillan Ltd, Dublin, 1969. Willie Doherty, interviewed by Joan Rothfuss 8/7/1996, No Place Like Home, Walker Art Centre Minneapolis, 1997. Terry Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment , Field Day Pamphlet, No.13, 1988. Jean Fisher, Seeing Beyond the Pale, The Photographic Works of Willie Doherty, in Willie Doherty, Unknown Depths, Orchard Gallery Derry, 1990. Michel Foucault, Panopticism, Visual Pleasure, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, Sage Publications, London. G. Gietmann, The Catholic Encyclopaedia, Volume I. Appleton Company Online Edition 1999. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer. Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965- 1975, The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angles, 1995. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996,The New York Times Company, 1998 Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage, in Identity, edited by Paul du gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman, Sage Publications London, 2000. Jacqueline Rose, ' The man who mistook his wife for a hat' or ' a wife is like an umbrella': fantasies of the Modern and Postmodern, in ICA IDENTITY 6, 1987. Page 17 Jacqueline Rose, The Imaginary in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso, London, 1991. Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin, London, 1977. http://www.jca-online.com/doherty.html Journal of Contemporary Art, 1985.