Art Is Not A Mirror It’s A Fucking Hammer

In my emerging performance art practice throughout 1976-1977 I daubed the slogan ‘Art Is Not A Mirror It’s A Fucking Hammer’ on walls and buildings around Belfast. Intentionally crude, the slogans were a provocation that reflected sectarian graffiti prevalent in Belfast at that time. In the autumn of 1978 I finalised these street interventions, or ‘akshuns’17 as I came to call them, with a symbolic ritual immolation that consisted of the burning of my paintings outside the art college in Belfast city centre. The performance was cathartic and transformative; expressed through a purging of traditional formulas and values associated with art making (ie. painting). The eradication of prior artistic concerns through the use of fire to cleanse and purge enabled me as a young artist to break free of traditional art making and to complete a transformation to a more radical and social/political engagement through performance art. The process of burning with petrol (a direct association with the rioting and petrol bombing in Belfast I had experienced and taken part in before going to art school) accompanied by a sloganeering manifesto converged in an act of purification that drew direct relationships between making art and the physical and psychic environment of the Troubles in Belfast in 1978. From that point of departure in 1978 I deliberately engaged in art making that was specific to sites in and around Belfast.

Art Is Not A Mirror It’s A Fucking Hammer reflected a number of concerns regarding territory, political power and the potential for ritual as a means of empowerment and for reclaiming or transforming identity. Although concerned with a transitional state – the seeking out of new ways of artistic expression beyond painting – the work also embraced aspects of ritual from the repetition of tasks, and the way the site was laid out, to the almost ‘religious’ incantation of a manifesto implicit in its title. I personally experienced an overwhelming cathartic release particularly when I let out a primal scream at the start of the ‘akshun’.

Artwork Copyright: STITT Akshun Archive