The Irish Century 6

The Passion For the Real and the Montage of Semblance
Twentieth century Marxists across Europe wrote at length about the concept of ideology. It was transformed from a minor gloss in Marx's own writings to a major conceptual framework. The key critical experience was of a consciousness which expresses a reality from which it is separated. In this century, the efficacy of misrepresentation is repeatedly experienced. Thus in the famous Moscow showtrials, a process is gone through which, at least on the face of it, can only convince the already-convinced ...... and yet the process was gone through.

The hunger to engage with the real and transform it, went hand in hand, in the twentieth century, with a deep suspicion of all apparent realities. It seemed that only by pushing past appearances could reality be grasped, and only by imposing death could one's grasp of reality be assured.

There was an alternative to this approach, an alternative of what Badiou calls 'subtraction', of measuring the obstacles in our path, rather than destroying them. When we notice how the twentieth century talked about the death of the novel and how the novel survived that death, we see the difference between these two options. As Joyce apparently culminated the novel and then slipped into the on-going history of the novel we see the destruction transforming into subtraction.

Badiou thinks he can see in Malevich's painting White on White (1918) 'the origin of a subtractive protocol of thought' (P.56). malevich, he thinks has reduced the difference he observes to the difference between a place and what takes place there. So writes Badiou: "There is another passion for the real, a differential and differenting passion devoted to the construction of a minimal difference, to the delineation of its axiomatic."(P56) Malevich wishes to erase the past, but by seeing differently.

Reading this, I cannot but recall Nights Candle are Blown Out by Sean Keating; this great work of Irish Independence which should stand in our National Museum and which instead glorifies the private board room of the Electricity Supply Board, erases the past and sees all Ireland in the promise of electricity. It is socialist realism without the socialism and it recalls Lenin's famous definition of socialism as 'Soviet Power Plus Electrification'.

Keating stands well above the mediocre Irish representatives of modernism, allowing only that the Turneresque Jack B yeats stands above them all. But as Ernie O'Malley, the former I.R.A. man, pointed out in his notes for an exhibition of Jack B. Yeats' works, Yeats turned away from reality to an interior world at the very moment of Irish independence. He did not belong.

It is Keating who tells the tale of what painting meant to this neo-colonial society. Keating's burst of enthusiasm, his escape from a provincial naturalism into an almost surrealistic glorification of the Shannon Electrification Scheme in this painting means more to us now than it did for much of the twentieth century. As Badiou prioritises Malevich in retrospect, Irish people can now see in Keating's painting, the post colonial pride and independence of spirit which eluded the independent Irish for so long. This is not about inventing content, it is not about learning how to see what was there, unnoticed, it is about the hunger for the new, ecstatically sated. Maybe more importantly, it is about the insertion of the poetic as a moment of allegory which subverts the dominant ideology from within. As with Malevich, there is here a frozen, subtractive expression of difference. The characters meet like the accidental collisions of a surrealist work suggesting things are afoot that are other than they seem. They meet because electrification was different.

This was a characteristic twentieth century experience in Ireland which takes on new meanings for us, as watchers. Irish artists like Flann O'Brien, Louis le Brocquoy, Patrick Kavanagh, Sheamus Heaney play constantly with this danger of historical meaning in the surreal and the confessional and retreat again and again into the personal and the humorous. Keating let the discipline slip. The reality that only history sees is given to us by Keating's momentary effusiveness about the Shannon electrification scheme.

Keating's painting risies above the academic realism that was his metier and as a result it rises above the conservatism within which he was confined. For a moment he is no longer a visual counterpart to O'Riada's belated celebratory music. This is achieved by the simple mechanism of inserting a vibrant allegory within the strictures of realism. But there is nothing new in Keating, except that his work is not older. It is not distance that his paintings measure, but presence. In this painting Keating measures who installed electricity in Ireland. There is no intellectual break-through. Rather, there is a pose, an aspiring pose that means more to us than to him. With all the heroism that Malevich used to try and see the real world, rather than merely to destroy it, Keating tried to insist on a reality that must be there, but defies measurement. He insisted: this must be a nation, for we have declared a nation; men such as these real men have died for this nation; it builds, it walks and talks like a nation so it must be a nation. If we would only say that it is, it would be.

But it was not enough.