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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
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