London Art Worlds by Applin Jo Spencer Catherine Tobin Amy & Catherine Spencer & Amy Tobin

Author:Applin, Jo,Spencer, Catherine,Tobin, Amy & Catherine Spencer & Amy Tobin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Transmissions: Northern Ireland in and out of the News

Although Donagh’s change in focus from the space of the studio to the theater of war in Northern Ireland might seem unexpected, Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 and her later works share a consistent engagement with civil resistance. As Caroline Tisdall observes, Donagh’s reference to Thoreau in the 1971 painting might invoke his 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government as much as Walden.49 Together with the crumpled mass of newspaper derived from reportage of the Dublin bombs in 1974, Evening Papers (Ulster 1972–74) contains two other elements that relate to the emergence of the civil-rights movement in Northern Ireland and to the events that ensued in the Bogside area of Derry between 1968 and 1972. These two elements are the dark-blue trapezoid just below the center left of the image, marked by a black cross in one corner, and the upper left-hand rectangle containing the blinding flash of an explosion surrounded by a shimmering penumbra of cloud.

The image of the explosion, rendered in dark brown and tinged with bruised purples and blues, is one that Donagh returned to elsewhere. A year after she finished Evening Papers, Donagh used it as the basis for an experimental display at The Gallery in London. Founded by Nicholas Wegner in 1972 and directed collaboratively with other artists, including the sculptor Vaughan Grylls, The Gallery promoted ironic conceptual gestures and, after the autumn of 1973, adopted photography as the format for all its shows. They also began displaying, within aluminium frames, photographs and photographic reproductions of works in other media, resulting in what Tisdall has described as an “enterprising programme of processing and packaging,” which by the time of Donagh’s exhibit in 1975 had “become the closest to a house style that any London gallery” had.50 The curator and critic Catherine Lampert observes that these strategies allowed each of the exhibitions “to be treated with the same professional detachment and emphasis on the non-exclusive.”51 Donagh’s decision, however, to use a drawing of an explosion entitled Car Bomb (1973) as the basis of her display disturbed this detachment. Car Bomb was photographed and enlarged, then printed in reverse so that it could be mounted on the back as well as the front of a freestanding display panel. The source image came from the photojournalist Clive Limpkin’s book The Battle of Bogside, published in 1972.52 By taking a piece of photojournalism republished in a book and subjecting it to further reproductions through pencil and then rephotography, Donagh seems to have tried to bring these gradations of distance to the surface of the image.

Yet despite this percolation, it evidently retained a charge: Lampert recounts that the sharpened contrast endowed by black-and-white photography, when combined with the “provocative subject matter,” achieved “the starkness and brevity of an underground political poster.” Lampert was not wholly convinced by this shift from what she considered the “broader visual language” of Evening Papers (Ulster 1972–74), but the comparison between Donagh’s photographed drawing and

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