1.

In Belfast City in 1989, three murals appeared on the same city wall during the course of three days. This was a wall on a local headquarters of Sinn Fein, the party that constituted the legitimate political wing of the two front ("Armalite and Ballot Box") republican assault on the hegemony of the English-backed loyalist, Protestant statelet of Ulster. Within hours of each work’s appearance a passing army patrol defaced it by means of "paint bombs." Within hours another mural appeared, and when it was defaced, another. And so on. Each painting, a communal effort supervised by a single artisan acting according to the ideological dictates of Sinn Fein, showed a clear command of mural vernacular, employing the color-to-detail ratio of the comic book and the immediate delivery of modern advertising. Each mural plainly depicted armed resistance and revolution.

In general, by their very coming-into-being and their destruction, republican murals symbolize uprising, just as loyalist murals (permanent, labored, unburdened by police censorship) represent stasis. The murals increasingly come to define the cultural environment that has spawned them, not re-building but re-signifying the collapsing urban economies they exploit into gestures toward private, ideal cities.

2.

Among the first casualties of terrorist conflict is certainty. A war erupts from a secret army into its media interpretation by way of a criminal act, but that interpretation comes destabilized by the primacy of the act of violence. The terrorist act constitutes a black hole in ordinary disinformation. Rhetoric implodes into violent action. Once terror-speech is engaged, the forms of discourse surrounding it threaten to lose specificity. Interpretation is rendered ever-speculative, remote from the "army" always out of view.

Simply to survive, the leaders of an organization as underground as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) must be unsure of just what their army signifies. This relation of word to action creates a world for the activist radical (like Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams) where truth is only performance, knowledge propaganda—consistent expression in the quicksilver hysteria of global communication. To this day, an Adams appearance on Larry King Live constitutes a performative act beyond the specifics of the rhetoric it presents. A republican has gained access to the networks: his speech is action.

This is true, at first glance, for the murals, which from a distance appear (from opposite extremes of the sectarian divide) as one another’s disabling doppelganger. The murals occupy a space of non-communication, of language armed to devour the discourse it enters. The signified performance, all-consuming and radical, reoccurs as a larger cultural event in the present every time it is perceived, and purports to erect a private history into public space.

3.

Republican murals, promoting and drawing upon a pan-Irish tradition of "politics of force," attempt to place specific political demands (the release of hostages), issues (urban squalor), and events into the discourse gap left in the wake of terror, re-contextualizing specific events into a mythic teleology: Ireland’s unification and the messianic future return of a pre-colonial, utopic Eire.

Across town, the silencing, secret-society violence of loyalist murals seeks to implode all discourse in defense of a hierarchical past utopia, to collapse and invalidate historical "progress" by way of totalizing regression.

Both utopias are made "real" on the steel of modern weaponry. The technology of death implants ancient heraldic fictions onto an urban wasteland abandoned by conventional politics, industry, and even by the colonial power that first established its working-class rift.

4.

The back-and-forth communication between sectarian muralists, an artistic discourse made war, reverses the typical structure of the terrorist speech act. Action is turned rhetoric, imploding among other things the art/real categorization upon which so much expression of the West is conveniently de-fanged. The Yeatsian "terrible beauty" of these artworks comes as an after-effect of performance, a side-issue un-related to the artisan’s immediate concerns. The quasi-fascist high-romanticism of this art-effect constitutes the schizoid face of secret war as death lust. The beauty of torn, interrupted flow, of death itself.

5.

Meanwhile, despite the sectarian death-wish opened by its rhetoric, the Irish mural participates actively in the local real. Visitors to Belfast and Derry speak of the "life" the works bring to the harsh grays of their grim post-industrial wasteland, spotting their cities with a color, tradition, myth, and heroism that clearly articulate a vision left blank by the necessities of terror.

In the street battles of 1970’s Londonderry, the slogan "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" proved able, scrawled on stone and steel, to transform failed public-housing and the architecture of ghetto oppression into a living mythic city contained by makeshift barricade and petrol bomb. Since the ’70s, republican murals continue to intervene architecturally, manipulating the surrounding structures into incriminating evidence of oppression, instigating immediate, ever-active, self-aware rebellion.

This resistance is matched by the motionless kitsch with which loyalist painters "preserve" sectarian communities by careful, ritual adornment. Private, conservative heraldry, threatening primitivist depictions of black-clad bazooka men and execution squads purport to "keep alive" an ever more remote and imaginary past.

6.

Only without author can the mural purport to be the expression of an entire community. When Derry’s accomplished "Bogside Artists" formed a collective and began exhibiting as mainstream artists in the 1990s, their work’s pan-cultural immediacy deteriorated into New Age Celticism. The authorless street painting, relieving the speech implosion initiated by terrorism, performs with an extraordinary range. Shot through a million TV sets, satellites, and newspapers throughout the global diaspora, it communicates a radical clarity unavailable to political leaders enmeshed in the complications of negotiation.

The international press, dominated by English interests, turns to the murals to fill the coverage gaps resulting from its consistent censorship of Sinn Fein. The paradoxical result is that instead of reasonably seasoned politicians the global viewer is addressed by anonymous extremists unconcerned with the niceties of public discourse. The political articulation is made strange by art even as it succeeds in dispersing itself immediately into thousands and millions of homes. The sectarian gulfs appear wedged infinitely wide.

Still more oddly, the murals have gained a modest international celebrity, stretching deep into high and low culture. Tourists are bused into isolated communities to take snap-shots of warring street paintings. International artists such as Willy Doherty, Paul Graham, Les Levine, and Reuben Ortiz Torres incorporate Ulsterology into conceptual and theoretical art-world discourse.

7.

The war in art, unlike the political secret war that still sputters in Northern Ireland, presents an unavoidable teleology.

Today, republican murals, still consistently entering the streams of global communications, grow more and more self-consciously artistic, bold, and accomplished, gesturing beyond armed conflict into raw cultural celebration, while loyalist works, fewer and fewer in number, grow increasingly violent.

For some twenty years (since, in particular, the hunger strikes of 1981), the muralists of republican Ulster have consistently laced a message of peace into their rhetoric of war. When ex-IRA Sinn Fein politicians Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and IRA commander P. O’Neill resolved to support the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 by calling for an end to the 20th-century’s "politics of force," the murals (painted by disaffected youth and unemployed urban poor committed to the paintbrush, not the Armalite) had long articulated a dove rising from the flames of war. This articulation of peace has proven invaluable as the republican movement struggles to extricate itself from the mires of its secret war.

8.

Are politicians real-world puppets of a more actual, though paradoxically fictional, history in art?

The sophisticated war machine of the English anti-terrorist "community" can work reasonably efficiently to roust out a criminal organization, but it has proved helpless against the paintcans of an efficient, sophisticated street artist able to imbue the most sinister of engagements with the rich invincibility of myth. With politicians relatively impotent, the street mural has proved able to transform the face of the city, to endow it with the pride and purpose of a movement that terror has threatened to devolve into death-lust, and to twist and manipulate the architectures of the present into articulations of a real, possible future.

Bibliographical Note:

All observations depend in great part on the masterly work on the Irish murals by Bill Rolston of Belfast, from which the photographs accompanying this article have been extracted. See in particular his books Drawing Support: Murals in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1992) and Drawing Support II: Murals of War and Peace (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1995).

For revealing discourse on the Irish "troubles," see Geraghty, Tony, The Irish War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000); Coogan, Tim Pat, The IRA: A History (London: Ingram, 1996); and the web compendium of Ulsterania at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk.