Tuesday June 2nd 2009 Intentional Fallacy and the Stinky Fish

by Conor Kelly, 3 Jun 2009

During several days of warm sunshine local interventionists have decided to devise their own alternative approach to art within the public realm by installing a dead fish in Cushendall’s only public telephone box, next to Curfew Tower. The smell of the decomposing mackerel has rendered the iconic red booth completely defunct in the hot sunshine. Given the fact my mobile phone receives little or no signal and the tower has no telephone connection, the symbolism and the practicalities of the gesture are not lost on me. In a way it’s quite powerful.

The fish incident seems to point back somehow to my revision of the mutilated cross (or phase 3) that once resided above Murlough Bay and the notion of the ‘intentional fallacy’. The ‘intentional fallacy’ was a term first employed by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946 to question the complete legitimacy of the intentions of the author. They claimed that the design or intention of the author was ‘neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’ We cannot know the intentions of the author of the sea creature in the booth and therefore must attempt to reconcile the aggressivity of the intervention to gain further and clearer readings of the work.

Introducing this line of argument to the outcome of the mutilated sculpture also calls for a leap beyond the aggressivity inherent in the genesis of the work. It is this leap that could liberate the viewer/public in overcoming an act so heavily imbued in violence. There is something fascinating and oddly fitting about this half-destroyed monument, the near-erasure of this mnemonic device. It seems to position itself somewhere in the no-man’s-land of these divisive histories and memories: a muted, yet powerful and provocative image.

The superimposing of a muted post-monumental aesthetics onto a landscape may, of course, prove itself incapable of transcending the violence of its origins. Like the stinky fish, an attempt to articulate the multi-faceted, problematic history of an individual may always sit at odds with this locality. The potential of an artwork to provoke is key but how does this operate in a landscape attempting to overcome centuries of accumulated division. The practicalities of living inhibit recollection in certain spheres; I have spoken to some people in the Glens who would rather forget someone like Casement, particularly if his memory could be the vehicle for sectarianism.