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An Artist & His Aliases - Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland
Art in America, May, 1999 by Thomas Mcevilley
Functioning in many guises, artist and writer Brian O'Doherty has produced a varied body of visual works--most of them, since 1972, under the politically inspired name Patrick Ireland. An exhibition in Northern Ireland provided the first broad overview of his pseudonymous activities.
It's fairly common knowledge that Patrick Ireland, the artist, and Brian O'Doherty, the art critic, are one and the same person. Far less known are the stow and the political stance behind this double identity, and the fact that Ireland/O'Doherty has assumed a number of other personae during his career.
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Born in Ireland in 1928, O'Doherty emigrated to the U.S. in 1957. Fifteen years later, events in Northern Ireland led to his formal change of identity as an artist. On a day in 1972 that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, hundreds of Irish civilians were marching in the Bogside section of Derry to protest the internment of political activists. British soldiers opened fire on the marchers. Thirteen were killed. Later that same year, at the Project Art Center in Dublin, O'Doherty pledged, before 30 witnesses and a notary, to sign his art works with the name Patrick Ireland "until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights." In this identity-change performance, he had his naked body painted orange (the color associated with Northern Ireland's Protestants) from the head down and green (the color of Ireland's Catholic nationalists) from the feet up. Each color was carried through to the other end of his body until it was uniformly covered with a muddy tertiary blend of the two. Ireland recalls that he looked like an atrocity victim.
Against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland peace process, in the summer of 1998 Ireland traveled to Derry for an exhibition of his work at the Orchard Gallery, a municipally funded, internationally known venue for contemporary art. Should the continuing negotiations between the Unionists and Nationalists succeed, it will presumably be time for Patrick Ireland to revert to his original identity as Brian O'Doherty; that was not the occasion of the Orchard Gallery show but still, typically, the exhibition centered on the theme of identity and its mutability.
A key piece in the exhibition was Five Identities, in which Ireland documents his artistic guises. Interestingly, he includes "Brian O'Doherty" as one of the five, implying that his birth name is no less of an assumed identity than those he has invented. "Sigmund Bode," the earliest of O'Doherty's alter egos, dates from his years as a student in Dublin in the 1950s. As well as pursuing medical studies, O'Doherty was exhibiting paintings in both Dublin and London and was irritated by the limits on taste in those two cities, especially Dublin, where the only acceptable art was, he recalls, "third-generation Cubism." The name Sigmund Bode derives from Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Bode; the latter was director of a Berlin museum in the early 20th century and also an artist. As Sigmund Bode, O'Doherty would make art works--small, Klee-like drawings--that were entirely different from what was acceptable in Dublin. O'Doherty created the drawings, signed them with Bode's name and submitted them to galleries; no one would exhibit them, which was the point--a cultural dividing line had been located and confronted.
In the early 1970s, O'Doherty, whose writings on art include the influential volume Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, published a few parables and pieces of art criticism (some of it in Art in America, where he served as editor from 1971 to 1973) under the name "Mary Josephson." The child of devout Catholics, O'Doherty was given the name Brian Mary, and his confirmation name was Joseph: he was Brian Mary Joseph. More than a simple switch of gender, his Mary-and-Joseph-and-son persona represented the holy family as a universal principle incarnate in the individual.
"William Maginn," yet another of O'Doherty's identities, was a nod to a 19th-century Irish poet who himself wrote under various pseudonyms, including Morgan O'Doherty. An emigre like Brian O'Doherty, Maginn lived mostly in London, where his circle of friends included Coleridge, Southey and Thackeray. After years of collecting material on Maginn, O'Doherty is about to publish a novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, parts of which he attributes to his 19th-century doppelganger.
The Orchard exhibition was the first public disclosure of the Bode, Josephson and Maginn impostures. Beneath photographs of O'Doherty in the guise of each persona--as Maginn, he sports a wide-brimmed hat; as Josephson, he appears in drag--was a vitrine containing examples or accounts of "their" activities: articles, reviews, etc. One understood that these were not mere pranks but a way of commenting on the nature of identity. The subject was also explored in The Transformation, Discontinuity and Degradation of the Image, which consists of six strips of photobooth portraits of O'Doherty taken between 1969 and 1998. These have a strange quality;, affectless, they are like mug shots or passport photos but even more impersonal--like laboratory shots of a specimen from various angles.
