Figure 3.16
Seán Hillen: From 4 Ideas for a New Town
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In the 1980's, Seán Hillen was an Irish art
student from Newry, a town just north of the Irish
border and very much in the center of "The Troubles."
He photographed many scenes of occupation and strife,
and began to elaborate the photographs with bits of
others, gradually adopting collage of photos (with
scalpel and paste) as his medium. He has on display on
the web 39 of these, which were exhibited in smaller
groups, but have in common his technique of
juxtaposition of war-zone documentary (mostly black and
white) with touristy images, figures from TV and comic
books, religious images and astronauts (mainly Yuri
Gagarin). Hillen does not expect these fragments of
worlds, topical as they are, to identify themselves;
rather, he provides a paragraph or two of explanation
for each image, which explanation is crucial to
grasping the "dialectic and political satire" that he
acknowledges became their informing purpose. He hopes
for a resonance in these works which goes beyond
political satire (in the sense of summoning a pious
outrage or contempt). They are nonetheless made up of
only a few sharply contrasted pieces pasted together to
suggest a single space. In Figure 3.16, there are only
three segments. The St. Pauls -Newry street opposition
needs no comment, but the anatomized corpse figure
illustrating wounds, which appears a second pedestrian,
is a bit phantasmagorial since it doesn't appear to
touch ground (the black stain beneath it being a
plausible "shadow"). It saves the image from being
simply a sardonic pointer to British hypocrisy.
Similar effects are obtained in other collages in
the series, as for example in "Who is My Enemy?" (click
the " up" arrow and then scroll to the bottom right of
the display). This piece juxtaposes an ordinary street
scene with the image of a sentry guard-house found out
along the road to the city, creating an extraordinary
image of life under occupation. Again, the third figure
added--that of the movie-poster bad guy pointing a gun
at us--displaces us from a polemical stance, pointing
perhaps to a culture of violence in which we are all
implicated rather than resting in a denunciation of the
British occupiers.
Like Victor Burgin and Geoff Broadway, Hillen makes these
images to "show the contradictions" between oppressor
and oppressed. Unlike them, he does not use language to
put voices in opposition to images; his main means for
showing the contradictions is the cut, the edge of
juxtaposition, that seems to lie at the very heart of
collage. The contradictions are certainly present even
in Hannah Höch's "Schnitt" with which we began the
section. What keeps us from calling the "Schnitt"
polemical is its love of energetic, playful absurdity
and whimsy, and indeed there is a streak of whimsy in
Hillen's various apparitions in the midst of these
highly contested spaces.
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