Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty interview: Visiting ghosts

http://living.scotsman.com/features/Willie-Doherty-interview-Visiting-ghosts.5173989.jp

Published Date: 18 April 2009
By SUSAN MANSFIELD
YOU'RE WALKING DOWN A COUNTRY lane between two banks of trees. Somewhere in the distance you can hear the drone of traffic. It's nearly twilight. The landscape is not dramatic, but it broods. The hypnotic voice of actor Stephen Rea begins to talk about lingering acts of violence, spectral figures, restive ghosts.
I first saw Willie Doherty's film Ghost Story during the 2007 Venice Biennale, where he represented Northern Ireland. Even on a shimmering summer afternoon in the Adriatic, it sent shivers down the spine. It tugs at the imagination in ways you don't ADVERTISEMENT

expect it to be tugged.

Doherty is one of Northern Ireland's best known contemporary artists. He's been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, has had a brace of prestigious shows. Fiona Bradley of Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery saw Ghost Story in Venice and immediately started planning to bring it to Scotland. The show opens next Saturday (25 April) and includes earlier Doherty films and photographs and the premiere of a new film, Buried.

I meet Willie Doherty at the University of Ulster School of Art & Design, where he is Professor of Video Art. It's a plush new multi-storey building in the heart of Belfast, one of many new buildings proclaiming the message of a prosperous Northern Ireland, thriving on peace.

But there is something else here which is less tangible. A sense of memories which linger. Names carry stories: Omagh, Enniskillen, Falls, Shankhill. Places that can't quite shake off their significance. Places with ghosts.

The infamous Maze Prison has now been largely demolished, but it won't go away. "There was a proposal to make it a national sports stadium," says Doherty. "But Sinn Fein argued that part of that should be a museum which would commemorate the H-blocks, which of course was a big red flag to the Democratic Unionist Party. It's a question of: whose history should we remember? Who gets to write that history? What do we forget?"

That, he says, is where Northern Ireland is right now. Politicians shake hands and smile across the divide, everyone else hopes peace will hold, tries to put the past behind them. But the past keeps coming back.

"There's this sense that we should focus on economic prosperity, but we're being asked to forget about the collective experience of 30 years of conflict, pretend it didn't happen," he says. "It's very, very difficult, because unlike South Africa we haven't had the equivalent of the Peace & Reconciliation Commission. There's been no mechanism where the victim can hear the account of the perpetrator and the perpetrator can be held accountable. Ghost Story was about me trying to find a means to talk about that."

Doherty grew up in Derry, a city where you display your political allegiance as soon as you speak its name. When he was 12, he watched the events of Bloody Sunday (when troops fired on civil rights protesters killing 13 people) from an upstairs window.

It was an early lesson in the indiscriminate nature of conflict, and in the difficulty of telling the truth. "It destroyed any notion I had about the state being fair, or the press being about telling the truth, because the events that I witnessed were not the events that were subsequently reported." It left him with both a desire to tell the story as he saw it and a deep distrust of the means for doing so.

He was an art student in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. "This conflict was raging in the streets and you'd be in a group crit or a seminar talking about abstract expressionism. How do you put these two realities together?"

He graduated in 1981, a summer dominated by IRA hunger strikes. "We were trying to get work finished for our degree show the day of one of the hunger strike funerals. Belfast was closed down, people were so frightened about what was going to happen. The art school security guards came and told us they were closing the building, we had five minutes to get out.

"I was the last person down the stairs and when I got to the front of the building it was locked. I had to break out of the building at the back, climb over a 12ft wall and jump into the lane, while the British Army helicopter circled the sky above. It was a strange time.

"Like most art students I was asking: what could an art work be, and should it take any account of the reality that's happening outside the building? For me, ultimately, it had to. It didn't make sense to do otherwise."

He tried getting out, going to live in Dublin after he graduated, but soon he was back in Derry taking photographs. He wanted to say something about what it was like to live there, go beyond the cliched images from the media piloted in to cover the Troubles. He set himself some ground rules: no pictures of soldiers at checkpoints, no children playing next to barricades.

The results were bleaker, emptier, enhanced by phrases of text he imposed on them. Most of his work, he says, is "landscape", but they are contested landscapes, places which can't forget.

He is careful not to say that all art should be as engaged as his. Plenty alumni of Ulster – Christine Borland, Phil Collins, Cathy Wilkes to name three – have chosen other paths. "There's a lot of bad art that's made about social situations and political situations. I'm concerned about the integrity of the work, and about representation. Photographic work or video work should say something about how artists are using these media. If it doesn't do that, it fails."

But he doesn't deny that the unfolding situation galvanised him. In 1988, when Margaret Thatcher issued a broadcasting ban on 11 loyalist and republican organisations believed to support terrorism, he introduced voice-overs into his work. "It made me want to explore the possibility of using that voice. What would this person sound like, this terrorist who was so beyond the pale he couldn't have a voice?"

But the message was never simple. Often there were two screens, multiple viewpoints. There were loops and repetitions, journeys which started but did not conclude. In The Only Good One is a Dead One (1993) a terrorist seems to speak, but soon sounds like both victim and perpetrator. Why, we ask ourselves, did we think it was so easy to tell them apart?

"Events of the last 30 years are so messy and bloody and controversial on so many levels it's difficult to simplify it. Often journalists communicate in black and white. What I try to do is open up some of the grey areas between the black and white."

Post peace process, Doherty has been accused of "clinging to old concerns", of "inflexible pessimism". He shrugs, levelly. "I'm not cynical about the future. I'm more concerned about the present, and the presence of the past. To say that Ireland is going to be 100 per cent peaceful from now on because Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley shook hands and smiled is naive to say the least. But I'm not cynical about the achievements that have been made."

Meanwhile, his work is reaching far beyond Ireland. It has been feted in Paris, Berlin and Sao Paolo. Ghost Story is about Ireland, but it is also about Iraq. Ireland is not alone in trying to bury its past.

Non-Specific Threat (2004) explores the voice of an unnamed terrorist. While the camera circles a scarred face (actor Colin Stewart who was cast as a thug in the BBC drama Holy Cross) the voiceover (Kenneth Branagh) challenges and taunts us: "I am any colour you want me to be"; "I am the embodiment of everything you despise"; "I disappear in a crowd"; "I am everywhere".

"When we're told that the terrorist threat is unknowable, the fear, the paranoia is very familiar to anyone who lived in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. We all know what that's about now, that sense of feeling vulnerable. Whether you're a person on a plane thinking: 'Could this plane be hijacked?' or sitting on the tube a week after the London bombings thinking: 'Does the person beside me have a bomb?' It's about how to cope with that, live with it, assimilate it into everyday life."

• Willie Doherty is at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 25 April until 12 July.
http://living.scotsman.com/features/Willie-Doherty-interview-Visiting-ghosts.5173989.jp