‘Art that helps keep the shame in our minds’: Civil Rights ect, Richard Hamilton and Rita Donagh at The Hugh Lane

A retrospective of the work of Richard Hamilton and Rita Donagh finds a temporary home in the Hugh Lane Gallery until January 15^th of 2012; curated by Barbara Dawson the exhibition has a particularity poignant feel to it considering that Hamilton died a week after the opening. The show addresses ideas concerning conflict, politics, citizenship, popular culture, control and social injustice. Underpinning the work presented is a concern in how mass media seeks to manipulate the truth as a means to mislead and divert attention away from the anxiety and alarm of political and social injustices which remain a constant. This point is further highlighted by the variety of historical moments accounted for over numerous decades. The work also raises the question of an artist’s responsibility in society today to engage in the discourse surrounding conflict and to not allow (as the establishment might like us) to forget

Kent State 1970

While mostly associated as anticipating Pop Art, the political informed a great deal of the work of Hamilton.  With Kent State we are presented with the image of a student who was shot by the National Guard during anti-war protests on the Kent State University campus Ohio. This image along with many others in the exhibition was taken directly from news coverage stills. Upon viewing I immediately thought of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, with car crash victims strewn across the roadside, taken entirely from newspaper pictures, and, similarly I thought of  the slang language of  A Clockwork Orange, which allows the reader (if they choose to)  to be distracted from the ultra violence of the protagonist. In a similar technique and style to Warhol, Hamilton draws attention to the almost trivial way the mass media depicts brutality and injustice through using the images spawned by news reels. The screen prints are presented in such a manner that we remain at a distance from the horror of the scene as the result of an over familiarity with consumer driven posters advertising useless objects, coupled with the blurring of the image and the gentle blue hues that work their way through each print . This leaves the viewer with an unnerving sense that perhaps one has become completely desensitized to images of strewn bodies, which sit side by side in newspaper stands with glossy images persuading you to embrace the Capitalist dream, and maybe this in part has led to a complacency within society that such images of the student lying on the ground are just part of the order of things

The Citizen 1981

Both artists, like many others watched the news coverage of the dirty protests of IRA inmates in the Maze prison at the beginning of the 1980s. Remarking upon what he saw he said “It was a strange image of human dignity in the midst of self created squalor and it was endowed with a mythic power...” In The Citizen the hunger striker does indeed appear on the canvas with dignity and an almost Christ like stance staring unrelentingly at the viewer.  It may seem like a romantic version of the truth of the situation but it does reflect what many people will have felt was in a war rooted in religious repression against an invading empire. Hamilton is clearly reacting against the prevailing attitudes that the British establishment had at the time regarding IRA prisoners, and challenging the biased media coverage of the event. In contrast, hanging on the opposite side of the room we find the series Swinging London based around the arrest of Mick Jagger and other members of The Rolling Stones for possession of cannabis I felt the positioning of these prints opposite the heavy subject matter of the Northern troubles helped to highlight the absurdity of the situation and the wasteful media circus which occurred after it. I must say I laughed when I read one of the newspaper clippings which told of the prisoners receiving a three course meal into their prison cells. It seems the status of celebrity allows for some lenience when behind bars, whereas others are driven to smearing excrement on the walls of their prison cell to try to find a medium through which to get their message across, which, was unsuccessful in the British press

Shock and Awe 2007/8

Where Hamilton’s critiques might be somewhat in your face, comical and apparent (I am thinking ‘Shock and Awe’ and ‘War Games’ here) one can find contrast in the work of Hamilton’s wife Rita Donagh. Donagh has become well known for her work on the Northern Troubles. While tilling the same moral and political territory, her exploration and technique is quieter, abstract and geometric, this allows for meditation upon the information presented in a less sensational way than that of the previous works discussed. For example in her process of the mapping of the six counties over the H Block towers stays away from the sensational, the emotive. Yet it embodies a dark, uncanny, claustrophobic feel, possibly it is the knowledge of knowing people are locked up down there in those blocks. We seem to form an intentional presence as we hover above the aerial view of the prison we begin to view the (political) landscape in a more analytical or clinical way. Her process of using mapping techniques leads us to the conclusion that boarders seem meaningless and illogical. We begin to ask the question who imposes such boarders and why? Her work sits in opposition to the sensationalism mass media engages in. Her drawings regarding the Talbot Street bombings are stark, with little colour or detail, the focus is on the reality of violence and its aftermath. But where Donagh’s greatness lies is that she manages to evoke a strong sense empathy and dissatisfaction in her work despite the scientific, geometric style to her work.

Long Meadow 1982

Shadow of six counties c1980

  The retrospective serves as a reminder of our part as viewers and consumers of images and information. We must consider how we perceive and digest images of events and how this separates us from thinking about the events themselves. Even as we are inundated with images of war, social unrest, and protest it should provoke no lesser shock.  And while it might be inevitable that we receive and experience events and history through a mediated form, we can still look deeper and beyond the superficial, and in some ways that responsibility lies with the artist too.