eamonn fieldday essay

7/24/2019 Eamonn Fieldday Essay

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amonn ODoherty and the Gaze of Common Places

Fig. 1. Mickey and Francie Byrne. Photograph amonODoherty, courtesy Irish Traditional Music Archiv

amonnODohertyand the Gazeof CommonPlaces

Allen Feldman


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amonn ODoherty, born in Derry in 1939,attended St Columbs College, graduated

with a degree in architecture from UniversityCollege Dublin. He created more than thirty

commissioned public sculptures, whichstand in Ireland, the UK, Europe and theUSA. His public work includes GalwayHookers(1984) in Eyre Square, Galway;AnnaLivia(1988) formerly on Dublins OConnellStreet and relocated to Croppy Acre MemorialPark in 2011; Crann an Oir(1991) outside theCentral Bank, Dame Street, Dublin; theJamesConnolly Memorial(1995) beside Liberty Hall,Dublin; Swans(1994) at New Antrim Hospital,Antrim; and The Great Hunger Memorial(2001) at V. E. Macy Park, Westchester, New

York (2001). The Thin Priest with a FowlingNetwon the prestigious Selvaag/Peer Gyntinternational sculpture competition, inOslo in 2006. His last commission wasProtogonos(2010) in St Jamess Hospital,Dublin, unveiled by President MaryMcAleese. He was a painter, printmaker,

musician, photographer, architect andteacher and senior lecturer in architectureat the Dublin Institute of Technology. In197374 he was a visiting scholar at the

Harvard Graduate School of Design, andhe subsequently taught at the Universityof Jordan, the University of Nebraska, thecole Spciale dArchitecture in Paris, andhe was an external examiner at the coleSuprieure dArts Graphiques, Paris. He wasan enabling role-player in, and generoushost to the Dublin traditional music scene,a road manager of Sweeneys Men andclosely connected to the various musicians

who founded, and/or played in Planxty. Heplayed flute, whistle, mandolin and guitarand toured with Liam Clancy. Between 1978and 1980, he and Allen Feldman received afellowship from the Northern Ireland ArtsCouncil to conduct ethnomusicologicaland visual anthropological fieldwork innorthwestern Ireland. amonn ODohertydied 4 August 2011.

Fig. 2. Simey Dohert y. Photographamonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive.


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Silenced Gazes

Not a day goes by that I do not think aboutwhat the late lamented Derry-born amonnODoherty, artist, architect, photographercollaborator and friend, taught me tosee through his photography, drawingsand lithographs of traditional fiddlers innorthwest Ireland. In the late 1970s wetravelled together through a dense labyrinthof backcountry roads, stone walls, Irish placenames, oral histories, and bow-threadedmusic. As we wandered in search of musicand memory amonn spoke of Ireland as asociety that was, in part, structured by thecolonial repression and devaluation of its own

visual culture, an imposed, yet internalized,cultural anaesthesia which inhibited

idiomatic visual engagement with historyand place. It was not that visual meaning

was absent from this society and landscapebut that it had ceased to be a medium ofself-reflexivity for the vernacular culture.During our wanderings amonn taught me

both to listen to and to see how the recessedspaces of Irish soundscapes and the landscapeof stone houses, crop-work, and the engravedfaces of fiddlers were intertwined, all inlaid

with a multiplex history as dense as anytextualized archive.

For ODoherty colonialism had interdictedthe Irish capacity to visually mediatehistorical encounter through local means.Colonial cartographic power and relatedmedia of objectification had eviscerated theability of rural Ireland to constitute itselfin the visible and propelled its strategicretreat into orality, aurality and sonority asineffable, fluid, channels of spectralized timestrategically released in contingent linguistic,narrative and musical intensities. Colonialscopic and spatial domination was resisted bythe securing checkpoint of encrypted sonicmemory from Irish place names to fiddletunes. Unlike the visually objectified artifact,the spectrality of sonic time could not readily

be expropriated by the colonial regime andits politics of sovereign spectatorshipthepower of rigid emplacement by property,geography, religion, class, caste and

nationality. This scopic regime extendedto music itself; in their Europeanizingchromatic distortions and reductions the

visual transcription and archivization of Imusic by 18th- and 19th-century collectorssuch as Bunting and Moore, exemplified timperial literacy of an expropriative gaze.

amonn understood local rural opticalambivalence as a deliberate self-fragmentsurvival strategynot to give up to theimperial gaze any transparency or surface

would deepen its penetration into the spaand soul of the colonized. This iconoclastrelation to the visual was Eamonns Irishrendition and visual ornamentation of W. Du Bois doubled consciousness of coloniAfricans. By the close of the 19thcentury, tfragmentary and fractured optical script o

rural Ireland was a cultural retention divofrom any attentional aspiration; it wassmuggled away into the hinterlands of thpsyche and the habitus like untaxed grainpoteen shebeen.

amonn gazed, photographed anddrew from a tangential perspective

which decisively broke with tourism,nationalist or anti-modern nostalgia andpost-colonial melancholia. He found traceof Irish visuality, subterranean or muted,in an archipelago of common places: in th

tobacco-cured, curving wood counters anglass-encased gantries or back-bar fittingof certain pubs; in stone wall assemblages

whose innards lay bared in their ruinationby emigration; in the weatherproofed canecology of cottages; in the combed finish crackanof cultivated infields, curated withlocal geometric sensibility. A gift he mademany of the fiddlers we visited were precihand-drawn portraits of their families poin front of their houses, or architecturalportraits of the house alone. It was apedagogical gesture as much as anythingthe children of the house and their friendsalways gathered around his easel, magnetand making critical suggestions from thesidelines; they avidly entered into the proof visual imagining with him.

amonns photography and drawings aencounters with, and disclosures of what


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Fig. 3. Francie Quinn. Photographamonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive.


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1 douard Glissant, Introduction une Potique du Divers(Paris, 1995), 27.

2 Glissant, Introduction unePotique du Divers, 27.

3 Christopher Kelty, Geeks,Social Imaginaries, andRecursive Publics,Cultural Anthropology(2005), 185214.

4 douard Glissant, Potique dela Relation(Paris, 1990).

5 Allen Feldman and amonnODoherty, The Northern

Fiddler(Belfast, 1980), 54.

the poet and philosopher Eduaord Glissant(19282011) called cultural commonplaces(lieux-communs), which are not receivedideas, but literally places where one thinkingof the world encounters another thinking ofthe world.1For Glissant, commonplaces areculturally and historically specific conduits

where people under contrary or convergentauspices, think the same things, pose thesame questions.2Commonplaces assemblerecursive publics, affinities who defineand redefine themselves through the mediaof their forms of association.3Glissantidentifies cultural commonplaces with themanifestation of Relation across chasmsfurrowed with fugitive memories.4Manycollection trips amonn and I undertookin rural Ireland assumed this vocation

of mnemic pilgrimage to such relationalcommonplaces. We might set out to attend afleadh-cheoil or pub music session a two- orthree-hour drive away but rarely arrived asplanned, stopping instead at those waysideshrines of Irish visual culture discovered

by amonn. I never regretted his detoursen route; he taught me that within thelabyrinthine fragments and sanctuaries oflocal culture there were no final destinations,only necessary punctuations of unscheduledhistorical encounter.

The Art of Nonsynchronicity

John Simey Doherty (figs 2/8) was thetotemic fiddler of County Donegal and of ourown search for sound, in part driven by theinfluence of his fiddling repertoire, playingtechnique and the wit and authority of hisstories. He related origin tales about hismusic that derived from encounters with theother world of spirits, ghosts, fairies, andnature as in this tale concerning the fiddlelament Paddys Rambles Through the Park.

The old musicians in them days theywould take music from anything. Theywould take it from the sound of the sea,or they would go alongside of the river atthe time of the flood and they would take

music from that. They would take musfrom the chase of the hound and the haThey would take music from several th... Paddy was a great musical man and agreat singer. And he would stroll awayat night and go away to raketo place

where they had dance parties. Well, hestrolling home at a very late hour one nand was coming past that big demesneat about three oclock at night. But therinside the fence, he hears this lovely si... and what was the singer only a banshIn those days, they wouldnt take stoneaway from the park, any stones they wget they put them in a pile, and they usto call them a cairn. Well he heard thesinger at the first cairn Well, he sayssee if I can get in touch with that singe

He went into the first cairn and the sinwas at the second cairn and when he wthere the singer was at the third cairn;that is how he was kept rambling throuthe park till it was clear daylight. But hmade good and sure that he would havthe air of the song with him in good styindeedand you know by its playing isomething unearthly.5

For John Doherty music-making wasnot a psychological act of creation but

was generated from contact with thecommonplaces of the other, whether natuthe world of spirits or the past. It was fromthat contact with the non-human or theabsent that tunes were, not composed, butransmitted across borderlands. He wasfrequently seen talking to plants and trees

when he took his morning strolls, and thuJohn was affectionately described by hisfriends in Gaelic as oigneliterally meaninglonely, but not in the sense of isolationor social lack. Rather he was oignebecausehe lived the cusp between different anddivergent worlds through music as a vehifor mediating and bridging those gulfs inspace, time and existence, for expressing thresholds between life and death, the hum

world and its alters and doubles, and the lof past tunes and their vanished players.


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amonns photography and lithographicwork with musicians like John Dohertypartakes of that aura of oigne, of beinginvoluntarily situated between two worlds,of capturing a border experience as acommonplace for communicating betweendisparate spaces and times. Through his gazeamonn brought lonely music to place. Hedrew attention to the sonic acceleration ofdisjunctive, singular and uncommodifiedtime and imagined the intrusion of situations

bearing multiple, nonsynchronous yetsaturated chronicity through his rendering ofenacted resonance. amonn crafted glimpsesof the disadjoined time of Irish fiddling inan urbanizing rural margin which radicallydivorced his drawing from modernitys visualrealism and its claims to the immediately

ascertainable fact. The philosopher ErnstBloch implicitly speaks to such aisthesis whenhe dismantles the core myth of realismthegivenness of homogenous contemporaneityas effectuated by synchronizing capitalisteconomies of commensuration or valueequivalence: History is no entity advancingalong a single line, in which capitalism forinstance, as the final stage, has resolved allthe previous ones; but it is a polyrhythmicand multi-spatial entity with enoughunmastered and as yet by no means revealed

and resolved corners.6

For Bloch, the nonsynchronous emergedfrom discarded, skimmed over hollow spacesa mirrored pile of broken pieces in relationto various presumed cultural and economicplenitudes.7For just as nonsynchronousreality itself is interruption[it] takes itsparts from the surface chopped to pieces, butdoes not put them into new closed unities.8The adequate consciousness produced bycapitalist totalization for Bloch was merelya fascination with glittering images anartificed uninterrupted continuum thatcan be reencountered in the more vapiddescriptions of globalization, new mediaand world music today. Bloch resorted tomusical analogies in describing disruptivenonsynchronous time as the acoustics ormulti-voiced dialectics of a non-linearhistorylinearity here being a metaphor for


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directional, continuous, and thus manageableand knowable historical time. Bloch identifiednonsynchronous incertitude and semioticerrancy with organized sound and rejected thenotion of the representational and referentialauditory sign. The echographic ear re-audits

what has been deleted from optically centeredhierarchies and related official channels ofcultural transmission, producing new formsand qualities of events that Glissant associates

with emergent commonplaces. Transmittedsonority has no ground except the not yet-vorschein- or Pre-View which, through thenonsynchronous, could be a prolepsis of thepast as much as of the future. Discordantsonority points to the past and its presentas not fully realized or finalized actualitiesand thus as always to come. One late night in

1979, after a collecting visit to Ballygawley,as we drove trepidatiously through the foggy

back roads and Ulster Defence Regimentcheckpoints around Carrickmore, Co.Tyrone (loaded as we were with weapon-like

black leather flute, banjo, fiddle and taperecorder cases), amonn remarked: Thefuture of Ireland is certain, its past is whatis unpredictable.

amonns art work in northwest Irelandsustained an abiding engagement withthe photo-politicala politics of light and

non-light as an historical materiality withoutmatter. The photo-political is a neologismof the Greekphosandpoliteathat impliesa political economy ofphos and aphos, for

within this economy non-light (aphos) is asmuch a constitutive practice of power andprivation as is light. To engage the structuralrelationship between light/nonlight andpower is to speak of the historical violenceof light as a foundational metaphor oftruth-claiming, facticity, objectification andtechno-political appropriation. I have inmind the scopic technologies of colonial andneocolonial regimes traversing, among otherpractices, cultural stereotyping, policing,rent rolls, census-taking and congesteddistricts boards, ordnance survey maps, thecartographic power of enclosing commonsand related land-improvement schemes,and the arbitrary drawing of national

borders around culture, language, religioand ethnicity. A critical photo-politicscannot avoid the shadows thrown bypoliticized light, which is to address boththe occlusions and openings of light, wha

borders light and how light/nonlight shappolitical-cultural legibility and illegibilityas both technics of domination and as thelatters contrarythe subjugated knowledof the colonized subaltern.

In our Northern Fiddler project,amonns drawings are light and lineinfused by sonority and remapped as

visually crafted soundscapes.9A criticalpolitics of light was mobilized in hisexclusive use of black-and-white tonalityin both his photography and drawing.amonn gazed, photographed and render

in black and gray in a world of late modertechnicoloura sensorium that brandedIrish culture as the commodifiable andconsumable archaic through the glaringlight and universalizing cosmetic of thetourist postcard. amonn, in contrast,

wanted his visual engagement with themusicians and their music to be marked bthe semi-concealment and self-withdrawiof envisioned historical distance andcontemporary disjuncture, a line of sightas deliberately instituted nonlight that he

delimited through the absence of colouras the absence of completed presenceachromatic iconoclasm that stood for therefusal of functionalized integration withthe visual empire of mass-mediated signs

amonn broke with the touristmise-en-scneand related mediatic fetishes

by photographing and drawing opacityas a cultural and aesthetic right of theoptically colonizedthe right to opacity,first identified by Glissant, is claimedagainst the false objectivity, economicutilities and visually enabled levellingof the colonial and the commodified.10Glissant theorizes colonial and neocolonipenetration as a subjugating project ofimposed transparency that proceededthrough its own occluding mystificationsand ethno-racial reductions and frames. Tpractices of opacity of colonized subaltern

Fig. 4. John Doherty. Photographamonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive.

6 Ernst Bloch, Heritage ofOur Times, trans. RodneyLivingstone (Cambridge,Mass., 1991), 62

7 Bloch, 62

8 Bloch, 2079 Feldman and O Doherty, 1980.10 Glissant , For Opacity, in

Over Here: International

Perspectives on Art and

Culture, ed. GerardoMosquera and Jean Fisher(Cambridge, Mass.,2004), 253.


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contested, resisted and re-mediatedimperial compulsory visibility throughstrategies and aesthetics of disappearance,code switching and, particularly in ruralIreland, misdirecting practices of hospitalityas a mimed transparency offered to theexpropriating Other. amonns image workrecognized that closed interiority, recursiveself-referentiality, and aesthetic inwardness

were essential dimensions of rural Irishcultural production as a boundary-settingmechanism between colonizer and colonizedthat arrived camouflaged and anomalous as athousand welcomes.

Soundscapes of Disapparition

The musicians depicted in amonnsphotography and drawings were poisedat an historical precipice which most didnot step across. His eye encountered aperformance culture that was nurtured, fromthe middle of the 20th century onward, asan intensely private space of intimate craftand in reaction to the attrition of publiccommunal performance spaces. Mostfiddlers were unable to return to publicperformance with the resurgence of Irishtraditional music in the 1970s. Only a few

were subsequently to bridge this chasm, in

Fig. 5. Francie and Mickey Byrne.Photograph: amonn ODoherty,courtesy Irish TraditionalMusic Archive.


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part due to the publication of our book, TheNorthern Fiddler, and through other concertedinterventions by younger local and visitingmusicians. The performance settings of theseimages were not accidental nor were theythe result of arbitrary aesthetic choice by thephotographer. By the late 1970s, the musiciansdepicted by the Northern Fiddler project hadretreated to private musical recesses due tohistorical forces beyond their control. Manyof these players had emerged as musiciansin the first decades of the 20th century asthe direct beneficiaries of previous fiddlers

whose music went back uninterrupted to atleast the mid-nineteenth century, and in some

cases to the eighteenth century. Most of thfiddlers depicted by amonn were born ina world when Irish dance music was still apublic performance practice associated whouse, barn, pier and parish hall dances.Their music emerged from archaic settlempatterns and precapitalist economies suchthe kinship-inflectedclachanhouse-clusteand its rundale land-sharing system. It waalso a practice marked by the restless pasteconomy of transhumance in Tyrone andDonegalthe seasonal movement of herdof cattle and later sheep from lowlands or(in Donegal) coastal margins to highlandor island commons in summer and the

Fig. 6. John Loughran. Photograph:amonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive.


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11 Ciarn Carson, Last NightsFun: A Book About Irish

Traditional Music(NewYork, 1998), 11113; originalnarrative by the late JohnLoughran, Pomeroy, CountyTyrone, in Feldman and

ODoherty, 1980, 21719.

subsequent return to lowland householdfields with the coming of winter. (Winter,in turn, marked another season of intensivelocal music making that served as the rootfor the exclusively housebound music of thecultural winter we encountered in the 1970s.)Fiddlers Francie and Mickey Byrne (figs. 1/5)in Donegal and John Loughran (figs. 6/7) andPeter Turbit in Tyrone associated fiddling,singing and dancing with this summermovement to the upland commons and withthe musical bonding that occurred between

young men from diverse townships as theyherded sheep, songs and tunes in remotemountain interiors. Poet and musician CiarnCarson, who was instrumental in fundingthe Northern Fiddler project, created his ownlyric setting for an oral history concerning

this nomadic economy given to amonn andmyself by the Tyrone fiddler and songster

John Loughran. Carson re-envisioned,through spacing and silence, the musicand syncopation of the spoken originalhe called it Rubber Legs. It can serve as ahomage to Glissants commonplaces, theirsights, sounds, and tactile memory in labour,landscape and dance. In the interplay ofLoughrans telling and Carsons typographicpoetics, the net of connections spun out bythe call of a common place becomes infinite.

But then I mind Keenan and this manBrian McAleer,there was a big barn dance in it one nightand the thing got going that goodand Brian came out of the kitchen.Och! He was going on maybe seventy yearsof age at the time.But a light, thin man, ye know,and always with good spirit.Great singer too.And him and Keenan hit the floor fora reel.

Well, if you seen them two mendancing, boy,they were dancing from when they were

young fellows you know,in their youth,and still this was a great meeting for themto meet again,

two old men, ye know, theyd been dancingwhenever they were young fellows.Ill tell you what they done tooand they sung together, and they herded,

when there was no ditches and nofences aboutand you went out and herded your cattlethe whole dayand him and Brian was raised together.That was Keenans farm thereand McAleers farm was hereand the two men was herding on the onemountain togetherand they sung together the whole day andexchanged songs.And Brian and Keenan going out that nighton the floorand if you seen them boys

you would just think their legs was rubber.I could mind Brian McAleer,

you want to see that man and himover eightyand the thin light legs of him,and I can see him yet.And Keenan was down below,and Keenan was a small man,a small tight wee man,sort of wee pernickety man, you know,and he was down there dancing.And Keenan and McAleer was up

and then they would change places.Well, you want to see McAleer;youd think the legs was rubber,for a man like that, no pains, nor arthritisnor rheumatismnor damn else.He was quivering and carrying on withhis feetand Keenan was down belowand Keenan was putting in nice fancysteps, you know.Ah Jesus youd want to see them two mendancing, you could have played for themfor a week.11

In amonns visual ethnography themusicians are shown holding that carveddark wooden, rosin-stained artifactthefiddle. This creolized-celticized, baroqueartifact is posed as more than just a utensil


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Fig. 7. John Loughran. Drawing:amonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive.


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Fig. 8. Simey Doherty. Drawing:amonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive


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for making pleasing sound. As they eachcradle their instrument, it is apparent that thefiddle harbours the layered stratigraphy of anarcheological site, and each time these menpicked up the instrument to play they wereexcavating hidden and personalized culturalmaterial bringing up depth-memory intothe acoustic clearing of a problematic and,if not deaf, muting present. Secreted withinthe photographs and drawings, lodged just

behind the words and music of the fiddlers,are a complicated set of connections between

wood, earth, stone, and inscriptive memory.The landscape is imprinted with the manualmemory of the generations who struggled

with its intractability, sustaining the landas an agricultural and cultural interiority.And if one examines the portraits of the

fiddlers the memory of that labour, of thatrelationship to landscape, is imprinted ontheir faces with a power of recall amplified inand by the body caught up in the intensity of

bow-work, fingering and melodic complexity.Each fiddle cradled in the hands of thesemusicians was the key to opening the voiceof recall and the resonant wood of the violinhere reassembles and conveys the variouselements that appear at first glance to lie inruins and abandonment: houses, fields, andmusic. Rather than bringing the unseen to

the surface, rendering it amenable to a purelyoptical expropriation, amonn buried hisvision in earth, wood, stone and sound as thefilm through which his gaze passed throughto the image.

The signature of the private historicalmargin, inhabited by these fiddlers withdignity and incisive self-sufficiency, pervadesamonns image work and more subtly inflectsthe recordings we made. The fiddlers areshown playing in the resonant, often half-lit,recesses of their kitchens and living rooms;they are self-posed, house-proud, at doorwaythresholds, standing in front of their homes,or as they depart to visit another fiddler, thusconnoting a fragile web of such commonprivate spaces in which cultural affinity

was nourished and exchanged. Two of thesefiddlers, John Doherty and his nephew SimonDoherty, who were frequently without a roof

over their heads, appear in these photograas edifices unto their selves and as even moisolated in the self-fashioned shelter of theconsummate music making. The photogracapture these moments and events as terrathe face and postures of the fiddler appeara topography that has been shaped, carvedploughed by sound memory.

There is notoriously no text fromwhich most of these tunes could have beeextracted with any fidelity, but amonn,grasped the gestural embodiment of themusicians as an archive into which theatmospherics of bowed intonation had bedeposited like the wafts of rosin exuded

by the bow. It is as if amonns line-workrevisited Flann OBriens treatise concernimolecular exchange espoused in the onto

of The Third Policeman. Between the musicand his organ of sound, any boundary

between subject and instrument is collapproducing a third scene. The lines of hisdrawings-lithographs follow the space-ticurvatures of sound and bow. If thephotographs spatialized music through land shadow, the drawn line kept musicaltime. The bow in his drawings is held angupward, dividing the ether with its ownscripture. The trace work of the bows linof flight is further mirrored through viole

line-cuts, crans and trills in the fiddlerschoreography of embodied gestureacinematography of the bow-work and of ttune being played is repeated by the artisin the corporeal volume of the fiddler asthe mirror of his play. amonn caught thefiddlers in the motion of their own reflecton their fraught relation to imminenthistorical and cultural disapparition whethe bow measured the music it sketchedagainst an historical void.

The faces in his photographs and draware powerful, intense, full of the inwardneof the fiddlers listening to their own musas if it came from elsewhere. Howeveramonns eye uncovered another countryhis portraits that he compulsively exploredirectly in his images of fiddlers, andindirectly in the portraits of houses, wallsfieldsthat of the hand. The hands of the


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12 Daniel Heller-Roazen, TheMatter of Language: Guilhemde Peitieus and the PlatonicTradition, MLN(113), 4 (Sep.1998), 85180, 864.

13 Jacques Derrida, HeideggersHand (Geschlecht II), in

Psyche: Inventions of theOther, Volume II (Stanford,2008), 39.

hard living fiddlers, most of them farmers,a few craftsmen, are graceful, eloquent andauthoritative. In his photographs, when theface recedes into shadows and thought, thehands holding the bow and the fiddle remainlit by narrow shafts of light in the foreground.His images of musicians return the viewerto the priority Aristotle accorded touchhaphewhich encompasses the whole body(pan to soma) and is thus the model of allsensory practice: the possibility of touch isthus strictly correlative with the possibilityof sensuous life as such; the one necessarilyexists and ceases to exist alongside theother. This is the sense of Aristotlesstatement, whose importance here cannot beoverestimated, that all the senses perceive

by touch (haphei).12Jacques Derrida writes:

The hand must be thought. But it cannot bethought as a thing, a being, even less as anobject. The hand thinks before being thought;it is thought, a thought, thinking.13 The hand,in showing, pointing and signaling, shapesand grasps by creating presence-at-hand(vorhandenheit orzuhandenheit). The handsimulates and virtualizes presence and truthin practices of manuscripture, writing

with the hand that includes the invisiblesonic calligraphy of the fiddle bow. In thismanuscripture of traditional music amonn

found a stratigraphy of historical meaningthat had not been occupied by colonialism orcapital, and which vibrated across the haptic,the visual and the sonic without coming torest in any single medium. The common placeof the hand was the idiomatic Irish organ,

where the visual artist and the musical artistcame togetherin his drawings he graspedtheir hands in his.

Gan Ainm

In a pub in Teelin, at the foot of SlieveLeague mountain in southwest Donegal,a half-dozen of amonns photographs oflocal musicians, frame the central bar. Theyappear to be copies of images as printed intheNorthern Fiddlerbook rather than actualphotographic prints. Perhaps they have been

cut out from the book in an act of justifiablecounter-appropriation. The portraits arehung there, posted like a message, a memorialand a prompt for local memory, withoutattribution of who is shown in the frameor who made the photograph, as if this wascommon knowledge beyond remark. Theanonymity that accompanies their display,and which is set off against the prominentposition they occupy in the interiority of thepub, known for its musical sessions, is animportant statement about what amonnhas left us to see. He travelled throughoutsouthwest Donegal and Tyrone to draw outthe memory of its musicians, storytellersand local oral historians and the furtherrecall captured in stone, house and land. Hisgaze, as materialized in these photographs

gan ainm, in that pub has been remediatedas a necessary last monument and livingarchive for the friends and descendants ofthose depicted who still drink and converseunder these musicians gaze. There can be nogreater accolade to amonns image-work inthat land than this silent and signatureless

welcoming integration which bears witnessto the voiding of any interval or variance

between those seen, the act of seeing, andthe seerthe friend and teacher who I canno longer encounter except through the

apertures of light he has left as the imprint ofhis passing by.


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Fig. 9. Con Cassidy. Drawing:amonn ODoherty, courtesy IrishTraditional Music Archive

eamonn fieldday essay

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