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| Sunday World, 28th June, 1998 |
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| The Gilbert and George furore is of course far from unique. During the Fix 98 exhibition Catalyst Arts were the subject of an article by the Sunday World, which took voyeuristic delight in scandalising its no doubt agog readership with lurid tales of a naked artist frolicking with a pig in North Street Arcade at taxpayers' expense. The Old Museum arts centre (OMAC) have not had television coverage of a visual arts event since 1997, and the mural outside the Community Arts Forum was totally ignored until Sammy Wilson (the D.U.P. councillor) decided it was 'Republican' and all the usual suspects became involved. |
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| It is unfortunate that the visual arts must revel in its own notoriety as a means to publicity. There is however a flipside to all of this when one considers the publicity generated by such coverage. If it is left to the Free Presbyterian Church to act as chief publicity agents for exhibitions, is there not perhaps something wrong with some galleries and both their links to the community and their communication in general? |
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| Nevertheless, for an organisation such as OMAC, which does take a proactive approach to press releases and involving the public, one major frustration is the lack of professional visual arts journalists within the media. When asked if the local media's attitude to the visual arts was serious enough, OMAC rejoined that the press 'had no attitude, serious or otherwise'. Similarly, the Fenderesky Gallery complains of amateurism pervading visual arts coverage which lacks an interest in or an engagement with the art. Undoubtedly a massive problem is the fact that although newspapers such as the Belfast Telegraph or the Irish News do have arts sections, due to an absence of professional, skilled journalists or designated visual arts editors, they fail, as Ian Hill (arts writer for the Newsletter) notes, 'to keep adequate space for visual art in a dedicated arts slot'. |
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| In the fiercely competitive area of television, neither the BBC nor UTV have specific visual arts producers. What is notable throughout the media is that visual art suffers not only in 'What's On'-type arts and entertainment pages but also when coverage is filtered through Features Editors more interested in magazine or lifestyle angles. Both UTV Life and the Metro section of the Irish News report that they regard visual art as a 'minority' interest and that the 'jargon' involved in dealing with it is not in keeping with their designated audiences. At the Music and Arts Unit of the BBC, David Byers notes that the only real outlet for visual art is the Evening Extra slot on radio, (for which Ian Hill conducted a 15 minute interview with Gilbert and George). Although the programme does attempt to cover most major exhibitions, David Byers says that radio is not the ideal medium for visual arts coverage. It is noteworthy that the only regular televisual outlet is The Eleventh Hour on BBC Digital, a channel and programming slot guaranteed to maintain perceptions of visual art as a minority interest. |
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| The Ormeau Baths Gallery operate what they term a 'cultivation process' with the press, designed to build up relationships, which includes providing mainstream, non-specialist journalists with briefings and portfolios for high-profile installations, such as Gilbert and George or Yoko Ono, that offer a grounding in the actual content and concepts behind the work itself. The Ormeau Baths attempts to reach its various publics by not only courting professional reviews and art criticism for what it sees as an established art community, but also utilising the newsworthy to attract new audiences in the wider public. |
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| Chris Bailey of Belfast City Council asserts that the media could be more constructive in providing an understanding of the art itself but he also notes an 'arcane institutionalism' residually clinging to some galleries which impairs their communication with the general public and which ultimately necessitates a reliance on exploiting the newsworthy by galleries themselves. It is this sense that the art world cannot have it both ways with regard to publicity which motivates the criticisms of Damien Smyth, press officer of the Northern Ireland Arts Council, who complains of publicly-funded galleries incestuously operating like small private galleries. Accusing many artists of Romantic individualism, Damien Smyth contends that galleries often lack organic links to the community and that the artist's immediate audience should be 'yer ma and yer da' rather than some local celebrity. However, particularly coming from the Arts Council, it is worth considering how far Damien Smyth's 'get them in the door' approach will repair such organic community links and engagement with visual art, or whether this form of populism is not in itself a market-forces driven, managerial level reification and disruption of precisely such organic community attachments. |
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| I began this article by noting the invisibility of the visual arts in Belfast. This paradox goes right to the heart of a broader crisis of the visual in Northern Ireland: a failure of various stultified, dominant ideological positions to recognise, acknowledge and chart the entire range of cultural production, affiliation and endeavour in the North. This myopia applies equally to Irish Nationalism and Unionism, to sections of the arts establishment, to the press and their constructions of audience, to the vacuous populism of post-Thatcherite managerial doctrine pervading various funding and arts bodies. In the Gilbert and George controversy the art itself remained an invisible image trapped in the penumbra between two more pervasive, stereotyped images in the North. Firstly, through the religious protest, the familiar image of Northern Ireland as an anachronistic, philistine backwater; and secondly, the reverse yet complimentary image of art as ridiculous, pointless or elitist. The image of the art itself was occluded just as the work of many very talented visual artists in the North is neglected. Dave Hyman of Northern Visions notes that 'those who live by the media die by the media' and that media coverage, given the dearth of a credible, ongoing arts programming, should only be what he terms 'the icing on the cake' in any project. Whilst more arts editors are required throughout the media, perhaps it is time for visual artists to take a more collective approach within the broader community and allow their work to speak for itself. |
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