Opinion: What we have seen these past few weeks is an artist who has actually created an image so potent and so powerful as to shock us back from complacency, writes artist Aideen Barry.
I am jaded. I am tired of state sanctioned evictions, homeless figures depicted as pie charts, statistics and percentages showing the number of children growing up in homelessness and the apathy by the electorate towards this kind of violence perpetrated on our citizens by the state.
Often the visualisations are excel sheet art, flowcharts, or a soft pull lens of an out of focus tent sited in an urban area, an empty sleeping bag discarded at the foot of a street scape, a figure with a hood pulled up over their face to hide the "shame" of being without a home. This is a kind of visualising that is violent, in a way that makes the problem seem "them", not "us", the others, "the people who couldn't get it together enough to keep the wolf from the door".
This is a trope that has unfortunately blurred the lens of our reality to the problem and to our accountability.
It is a weaponised visual language, used by the government and by the media to put the blame elsewhere and not on those who have caused the situation. Sometimes the soft, blurred shot of the blanket is overlaid with a quote from a housing minister stating how the current government commits to the next housing report, focus group or how a certain percentage of housing developments will be put aside for affordable units, empty promises carefully photoshopped to assure society that the problem is in hand and that there is nothing to see here. The anonymised figure, the blurred image, this is visual lingualism weaponised to depict otherness.
The image-making of homelessness has become so ubiquitous as to make us blind and apathetic to the problem and completely in denial of the consequences of letting a whole generation of children grow up without a home, not being cherished equally by the state.
What we have seen these past few weeks is an artist who has actually created an image so potent and so powerful as to shock us back from complacency. Mála Spíosraí / Spicebag aka Adam Doyle, who created a reinvention of the famine era artist Daniel MacDonald’s depiction of an eviction, has single-handedly reinvigorated the debate around the homelessness crisis and the role of art in times of great societal debate. It caused a Twitter storm after being shared by Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin. It has also ignited discourse in the public consciousness to the role of the Gardaí in these evictions.
The work is a seismic antidote to the assault of the blurred, out of focus, homeless-themed shot, and with a stroke of socio-political genius has caused us to examine the state of neo-colonialism we seem to be sleepwalking through in contemporary Ireland. The reappropriation of the image has cut close to the bone of our inherited trauma. Spicebag has used a methodology that is commonplace: adopting the tools that marketing strategists and designers use to create the narrative of the "them" not "us" has in actuality created a work potent with rebellion and fact.
The key to any great artwork is how it permeates the zeitgeist, how it becomes a talking point to us all, traversing popular culture and reaching us as a way to affect an emotional reaction. In a way we do not realise how visual culture has such an important role in informing our inherited trauma. Think back to the days of primary and post primary school when we learned of the famine, the cause, colonisation and oppression, otherness, inequality. The image of MacDonald’s original eviction painting is in our subconscious because it is a part of of visual culture that is taught to every school child in the state married together with our history, visual culture and fact presenting the lived experience of our past selves. What Spicebag has created is a psychological call to arms with this work, humanising the story, refocusing the lens, revolting some but removing the blur from the opportunity to look to the past to recognised our complacency and act accordingly, galvanising a societal question about the role of the Gardaí in contemporary evictions.
"[If] you get upset about the fact that the Gardaí are in it - that might not be the correct emotional response to a bunch of people getting thrown out of their home"
— TonightVMTV (@TonightVMTV) April 3, 2023
- Visual Artist Adam Doyle, also known as Spicebag, on his eviction image retweeted by @EOBroin #TonightVMTV pic.twitter.com/fE9oaZ1eD4
The larger question though is how we ignore the momentary virality of this debate and make a more meaningful affect to end homelessness. Mála Spíosraí has stated that the message in the work is being lost to anger over the presence of the Gardaí as protagonists in the reappropriated image. Largely the issue has focused on offense caused to the Gardaí rather than what should be offending to us all: the shocking statistic of nearly 12,000 people homeless and nearly four thousand of these being minors.
Aideen Barry is a practicing visual artist based between Ireland, Lithuania and the United States. In 2020 she was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy as an ARHA member. She is also a member of Aosdána. Aideen teaches in several universities and schools of visual art in Ireland, America and Europe.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
