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62 July-August
Thoughs of
mnesi nd
blindness
But hisory’s
monsers my be
prilly med
by rereding
of work of
myhology by
genius described
by Shw s “he
grees living
Irishwomn”
E
ven if you’ve never seen The
Third Man, you’ve heard the
line: “In Italy for thirty years
under the Borgias they had
warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had
brotherly love – they had five hundred years
of democracy and peace, and what did that
produce? The cuckoo clock”.
Northern Ireland, by that bloody metric,
is overdue a Renaissance.
In literature, drama and music, Ulster
punches above its weight – Heaney, Friel
and Van Morrison are household names. In
visual art, it’s mostly shooting blanks.
There was a time that it never missed the
target. Just before Marching Season last
year I paused before Belfast City Hall to
admire one such bullseye from 1920. The
people of Belfast mourned the Titanic
magnificently. They hired a great
undertaker: sculptor Sir Thomas Brock.
Where his imperial monuments elsewhere
are bullishly confident, the Titanic
Memorial is tender and human. Thanatos,
death personified as a solemn Grecian
beauty, lowers a wreath onto a sailor
whose corpse is cradled by sea nymphs.
Sculpted in deathly white marble, it has the
lofty idealism characteristic of the New
Sculpture movement.
Pondering icebergs, I sauntered over to
Queen’s University. I wanted to see the
recently installed bust of George Mitchell,
the US senator who’d played referee during
the Peace Process.
It wasn’t bad, but I found more to admire
By Aidn Hre
in the 1924 monument – also by Brock –
which honours graduates who died on the
Western Front. A bare-breasted angel
maternally supports a dying soldier. He
clings to his sword. She holds aloft a laurel
of victory. It has a similarly elegiac mood
to the Titanic memorial.
The Edwardians did Death splendidly.
Their art is one we must relearn. 1500
Titanic passengers drowned in one night
while the deadliest year of the Troubles
killed 472. Comparing tragedies by body
count would be asinine but it is instructive
to compare how we remember, and forgot.
From Queen’s, my path took me through
the Loyalist Village, I crept along the Union-
Jack-painted pavement under the watch of
murals devoted to King Billy and UDA
gunmen. The last time I’d felt quite so
Catholic was the day of my First Communion.
I was glad to reach the Westlink junction.
Beyond that patch of no-man’s land, lay the
Nationalist heartland, streets where murals
celebrate Hunger Strikers and the IRA.
Before venturing on, I stopped to gawp
at RISE. There is nothing else to do with an
artwork that stands almost 40 meters tall.
Constructed in 2012 for £486,000, it’s one
giant steel lattice ball within another still-
larger ball. Belfast City Council boasts that
it is the city’s biggest public sculpture. They
can boast of nothing else. This sculpture,
instead of having a point, has scale. That it
says nothing is not a criticism of the artist
Wolfgang Buttress. If RISE meant anything,
it would not have been commissioned.
Back in the city centre, there was
another big blank abstract sculpture called
The Spirit of Belfast. This knot of steel cost
CULTURE
July-August 63
£200,000 and was commissioned at the
same time as RISE. The Council maintain
locals have aectionately nicknamed it “the
onion rings”. I asked a well-informed
Belfast man if that was true. Oblivious to the
naming, he’d never even noticed it.
This forgettability is by design. A similar
blandness disfigures the figurative
sculpture commissioned in that post-Good
Friday period when British and EU money
was hosed into the province to paper over
the cracks in the peace. Public sculpture
today requires permission and funding of
Wr Memoril: Sir Thoms Brock, 1924
– Queen’s University Belfst
RISE: Wolfgng Buttress, 2012
– Brodwy Junctio, Belfst
The Titnic Memoril: Sir Thoms Brock, 1920
– Donegl Squre, Belfst
Bust of Ldy August Gregory: Guy Reid, 2023
– Trinity College, Dublin
Bust of Sentor George Mitchell:
Colin Dvidson, 2023
– Queen’s University Belfst
The Spirit of Belfst known loclly s “Onion Rings”: Dn George, 2009
– Victori Squre, Belfst
64 July-August
the State and so must align with its
priorities. In the North, the prime directive
is keeping the peace. Irenic art, art that
unambiguously promotes reconciliation, is
funded. Everything else is taboo.
That includes the anti-Catholic marching
songs of Orangemen and the Rebel songs
of the Wolfe Tones. Also on the naughty list
are Belfast’s avowedly tribal local murals.
Later that day on the Falls Road, I passed
one celebrating dissident Republicans: it
showed a woman firing an Armalite rifle
beneath the frank if alarming slogan,
“Salute the men and women of violence”.
In an age of corporate art curated for the
very rich, these murals are rare Irish
examples of homegrown, spontaneous
creativity. In a way that bemuses and
sometimes appals outsiders, they speak
frankly to their audience in their own
accent. They are in turn loved for that raw
honesty. Beyond that I cannot praise them;
they are largely the naïve work of amateurs
and, like all propaganda, fundamentally
unoriginal.
The point however is that Belfast Council
would love to paint over every damn one of
them. They can’t because the owners of
each wall gave the muralist permission.
That’s not the case with the newer
commissioned murals in the city centre,
which are the domesticated ‘street art’
familiar to tourists of any European city:
doves, rainbows and ecological homilies
by Banksy wannabees.
It’s unrealistic to expect great insight
into art’s possibilities from elected
Councillors – to politicians, sculpture is
something to stand in front of as you cut
the string and grin at the camera – but arts
ocers responsible for writing briefs and
commissioning work should be more
ambitious.
They might remember how many of
history’s greatest sculptures are tragic –
The Laocoön, Michelangelo’s Pieta, Rodin’s
Burghers of Calais – and move beyond a
paternalistic notion of sculpture as three-
dimensional motivational posters. Without
truth there is no catharsis. Ask a therapist.
Ignoring the pain, expedient in the short
term, finally breeds monsters.
South of the border we have an excellent
example of tragic catharsis, one that
ordinary Dubliners know and appreciate –
Oliver Sheppard’s statue, The Death of
Cúchulainn is in the GPO building. Though
sculpted before the Easter Rising, it was
only erected in 1935. It’s a painful piece,
beautifully executed. A valorous youth
cruelly cut down, it was an attempt by the
fledgeling state to celebrate its founders
and deal with the angst of the Civil War.
Twentieth Century Dublin produced few
other notable public statues with a national
consciousness. This too is by design. If the
North now feigns amnesia, the South has
for decades aected blindness – to its
neighbour, to history. Earlier this year,
Trinity College tried to correct the gender
balance in the Old Library’s Long Room
with the addition to the marble old boys’
club of the busts of three Londoners – Ada
Lovelace, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosalind
Franklin – and a Galway girl, Lady Augusta
Gregory.
It was curious that only one Irishwoman
made the cut but if it had to be anyone,
Lady Gregory, a woman who revolutionised
Irish letters and was described by Shaw as
“the greatest living Irishwoman”, certainly
deserved the belated honour.
The Irish cultural renaissance of the
1900s still reverberates both sides of the
border. Many still fall into the trap of
seeing Lady Gregory as a godmother-
muse, with limitless patience and purse for
the mostly male writers of the Celtic Revival
and Abbey Theatre. Her own literary talent
is underappreciated. Her 1902 translation
of the Táin Bó Cúailnge was an international
sensation, drawing plaudits from Mark
Twain and Theodore Roosevelt.
What a pity then that her new bust in
Trinity College was bungled. Those who
suppose that all artistic judgements are
subjective are encouraged to visit Trinity’s
Library and see the scene of the crime. The
resemblance is poor; the execution clumsy.
The artist responsible (a man if it matters)
has my sympathy – portraiture is
demanding – but Dublin deserves better.
Lady Gregory certainly does. The
centenary of her 1932 death is just under
a decade away, ample time to commission
and erect a city-centre monument and to
do the job handsomely.
Like her fellow folklorists Douglas Hyde
and WB Yeats, Lady Gregory was
Protestant. Her enthusiasm for Gaelic
culture did not conflict with her faith. So
why mention it? Well, in the Dublin of 2023,
the R-word might not count anymore but,
in other parts of this island, it still matters
greatly. There’s a more practical reason, if
needed, to honour Gregory; the epic she
restored to us, of the boy-hero and his
nemesis Queen Maeve, is the story of a
proud defiant Ulster. In the coming years
we will need strong symbols to unite and
reconcile our war-weary tribes. What’s
more, the chaotic, contradictory and
amoral characters she reanimated are
entirely pre-Christian, and can be claimed
with equal validity by people of any
confession, or none. Lady Gregory’s
Cuchulain of Muirthemne has all the great
mythical themes: greed, grudges and grief.
Heroism and tragedy. Gregory also
vernacularised and Bowdlerised it. It is a
metaphor for all Ireland’s art.
Aidan Harte is a sculptor, best known for the
Púca of Co Clare. He writes on art for
Quillette, Law & Liberty and The Critic.
If the North now feigns amnesia, the
South has for decades affected blindness
– to its neighbour, to history
The Deth of Cu Chulinn Oliver Shephrd 1911
GPO, Dublin
Irenic art, art that unambiguously promotes
reconciliation, is funded in the North.
Everything else is taboo
