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PHASE
3 - (ACTIONS)
Formation
of Opinion, 2003- , under which most of my art activities of the
past six or seven years have been subsumed, is an ‘an
exploration in four phases of how morals, values and principles
enter into our society’. Phase 1 included a series of
site-specific drawing installations in locations in Ireland and
Spain as well as a month-long independent FM/online radio
station.
This initial phase, Phase
1,
of ‘formation of Opinion’ was presented under the
general title ‘Reception of Information’.
Phase
2,
which is concerned with ‘Learning, Memory and Cognition’,
is an ongoing series of broadcasts, performances, and
installations, consisting of 26 sound works to be presented over
a five-year period, which will culminate in 2013 in archive form
as a work titled 'At what point will common sense prevail -
ARCHIVE'.
To date one work pertaining to Phase
4,
dealing with ‘Successes and Failures’, has been
presented. It is a collection of portraits of the eleven workers
in the Irish supermarket chain Dunnes Stores who went on strike
in 1984 in support of efforts to end Apartheid in South Africa.
This project, which was officially commissioned for an exhibition
by the RHA, recalled to mind a group of ordinary workers whose
politicization was due to the particular circumstances of their
working environment, and whose exemplary actions have never been
adequately acknowledged.
The work represented here is
Phase
3 and
all of the components go under the covering title of ‘PHASE
3 -(ACTIONS)’.
It shares with Phase 4 a fascination
with the recent history of political activism. Dedicating this
phase to the subject of ‘selflessness in the face of
adversity’, I have chosen several concrete examples as the
basis for various works, the main component being what I would
consider the animation ‘Another Good Man’. One such
exemplary case is that of Kenule ‘Ken’ Beeson
Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and television producer whose
non-violent campaign against the environmental damage caused to
his homeland by the indiscriminate dumping of oil waste by
foreign companies ended in his execution in 1995 by the Nigerian
military government. Another case and one which is central and
inspired the overall work is Ireland’s Rossport Five, five
men from County Mayo who were jailed in June 2005 when they
refused to obey a court injunction forbidding them to interfere
with work being undertaken by Shell Oil on land owned by three of
them.
I am reluctant to don the mantle of the ‘political
artist’. The honouring of these activists proceeds rather
by indirection in the form of a fictive, if not fantastical,
interweaving of strands from these two stories of protest. This
fact-based fabrication is then dispersed across a range of
disparate media, including, screen-printing (inspired by
confiscated home-made screenprinting equipment on view at the
Stasi Museum Berlin), animation, film, a zine, and a mini fm
broadcast sculpture, . The specific flavour of the work owes
something to the fact that all of these media have notable
associations with the history of underground politics.
PHASE
3 - (ACTIONS) Installation Contents:
PHASE
3 - (ACTIONS) SCULPTURE
SELFLESSNESS
IN THE FACE of ADVERSITY
ACTIONS
- FLYERS 1 - 10
Another
Good Man
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Detail
– PHASE 3- (ACTIONS) 4th Auckland Triennial, New Zeland
2010.