Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
What’s he Building in There?

On the usual haunt around the Charity Shops and thrift Emporiums of the east of Belfast, the Woodstock and Cregagh Roads boast some of the city’s finest outlets. When times are hard or not, rummaging through other people’s (and I have to admit, sometimes dead people’s) cast-offs and unwanted novelty kitchen items is a fine way to spend a Saturday afternoon. These two particular roads share about 8 different Charity Shops, a reflection, perhaps, of East Belfast property prices and the benevolence of the nearby community.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
Facial Fashions

Facial hair and fashion have had a longstanding relationship. Throughout the history of Western civilization, this has had its ups and downs, but like all the best couples, they always seem to wind up back together. Of course, for much of Western history, the word ‘fashion’ has been something of an acronym for ‘normal’ or ‘step out of line and you’ll die’, with religious or regal leaders generally setting the trends.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
The Devil: Alive and Well in Ulster

The devil is alive and well and coming to a picnic area near you! Or so it seemed as a teenager growing up in the ‘burbs of stormy south Belfast, where rumors were rife of dark deeds taking place at pretty much any given stretch of parkland in the area.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
What’s He Building in There?

Upon being asked by The Vacuum to write an article on a local asylum, the first images that sprang to mind were from Sam Fuller’s eerie black and white 1960’s melodrama Shock Corridor. It is in this film that a journalist (played by Peter Breck) gains admission to a lunatic asylum by feigning mental illness in order to solve a murder but is subjected to electro-shock therapy and subsequently fragments, albeit rather unconvincingly. Rather, my visit to Knockbracken Healthcare Park (formerly Purdysburn Asylum) was a lot more kosher, with Communications Manager Brian McDermott stepping far beyond the call of duty to drive me around the 600-acre site and divulge much fascinating information along the way.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
Living Underground

Hobbits, Teletubbies, and attention-seeking magicians have all promoted it in recent times, but this is not a new idea. Our ancestors, having weighed up the options, risked becoming dinner by sharing caves with sabre-toothed beasts in order to gain shelter from the elements and have somewhere they could hang their coats.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
A.R.E. – Acronyms, Community Arts and Stiff Little Fingers

Art & Research Exchange (A.R.E.) was always a mouthful. But at the time that the organisation was formed in Belfast in 1978, conceptual art and rigorous theoretical debate were very much the guiding principles that dominated the vanguard visual arts, certainly amongst the younger generation of artists and the more radically-minded veterans. In no small way, the name reflected and symbolised that ethos. Looking back, the designation appears and sounds absurdly portentous.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
My Beef – Shouting at Christians

Lately I have started shouting back at Christians. I can tell you exactly when it started. Some months ago I was walking through Portadown minding my own business when the drone of praise suddenly deadened the air, for the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle porta-pulpit was back in town. The porta-pulpit is like one of those trailers country DJs own, with ‘Soupy’s disco’ or (more latterly) ‘DJ Soupy’ on the side, except that this trailer rolls only for Jesus. “We are all sinners!” yelled some fat guy in a sweater as I walked past and for some reason, after 34 years of ignoring this stuff completely, I turned to him and said “I’m not, and I don’t like having your religion forced down my throat.

“Ah!” the fat guy in a sweater said with sombre earnestness. “I see you’re not saved.” Yes – it was exactly at that point that I started shouting. It all came out, the years of judgements and condescension and insults, that time in primary school when the headmaster told us God sank the Titanic because a baggage porter said he couldn’t, all the sex I never had because nice Tandragee girls don’t do that sort of thing – he got it with both barrels. And then something amazing happened. The fat guy in the sweater turned around, packed up his porta-pulpit and left. If only I’d always known it was that easy I might have had an easier time growing up an atheist in Northern Ireland.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
Pravda – The Wetherspoons Magazine

It is rather instructive to let one’s view stray when one stands in front of the yards and yards of magazines of a larger newsagent. The journals on woodturning, cross-stitching, long-wave radio and four-wheel drive cars are the manifestation of the multitude of interests that makes people’s lives worthwhile. And this is only the visible tip of the iceberg – if one considers the multitude of specialists’ journals available through subscription alone.

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
Pet Death

Pets have become honorary people. We talk to them, give them personal names, their own dishes and beds and buy them their own food and clothing. They may sleep on their owner’s bed and regularly sit with them. We have a great deal of contact with them, stroking and, as the word has it, ‘petting’ them. Pets become so important to some of us that when they die we feel bereaved. The gloom that descends upon a house and family can easily carry the shadow of the cloud brought when a human family member dies. The comfort and friendship brought by the pet, especially by dogs and cats, now becomes a notable absence. But is it really appropriate to talk of such feelings as grief? Some might say that we have become far too sentimental and take pets, especially dogs, far too much into our own lives. For others this bonding between human and animals is perfectly acceptable, reflecting as it does a relationship with roots deep in our prehistory. In many corners of western worlds is it appropriate to see pet death framed by a kind of bereavement and its experience of grief

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Author Image Posted By : thevacu823 2 Apr
The Agreement An Exhibition by Shane Cullen – Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast – 22nd of February to 23rd of March

Language – its mediation, distance, plurality, its uncertainty of meaning and its political implications have been exercised throughout the intellectual history of western civilisation. This examination has been done mainly by social theorists, philosophers and feminists but very rarely directly by an artist. The Agreement is an art work by Shane Cullen which in terms of scale and material is immediately impressive. The sculptural work installed at the Golden Thread Gallery is 67 metres in length presenting the 11,500 words of the British-Irish Peace Treaty of 1998 through digitally routing into 56 panels. With regard to scale the floor to ceiling panels brings to mind commemorative monuments such as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Replicate monuments through pre-existing text are recurrent in Cullen’s work such as Fragmens Sur Les Institutions Républicaines IV, 1997 and it is a significant antecedent to this exhibition. It was a transcription of the written comms, messages written on cigarette papers by IRA prisoners which were smuggled through bodily orifices from the Maze prison during the hunger strikes of 1981. More importantly the work through presentation strategies gave the observer the opportunity to consider what is at stake in allowing these re-presentation to make itself present, allowing oneself to see the lack of fixity in the meaning of things, and it this lack of fixity which is a fundamental element of The Agreement.

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