Here Comes the Summer

Here Comes The Summer A conversation between Declan Long, Matt Packer, and Jim Ricks M: You described the work to me in its stages of M: It’s impossible to generalise of course, but in my own development as reimagining Derry in the 80s as a thriving experience of living in the city, the access to the beaches surf community. There is a kind of playful revisionism in that of Donegal is part of the fabric of living in the place. In that M: I have a basic leading question, Jim. You’re originally Derry in the 80s was marked by political turmoil. Could you sense, perhaps Jim’s revisionism of Derry in the 80s isn’t from San Francisco Bay Area, based in Ireland for the past just step through some of that thinking and that play on the too much of a stretch after all. One of the issues of the city 11 years. How familiar were you with the history of Derry and political context of the 80s which is so important to your is that it has been plagued by dominant media narratives the traditions of mural painting in the city? design? of conflict; images of kids throwing rocks at the police. I do think it is interesting to contemplate how surfing or surf J: Yeah, coming up on 11. There’s a series of books by Bill J: I think you nailed it. It is a playful revisionism. “Life’s a culture could have coincided with the political turmoils of Rolston about the murals in the North that I discovered beach” that’s obviously a riff on “Life’s a bitch” and maybe the place, without necessarily contradicting it. Similarly, it’s immediately upon arriving in Ireland. Back in San Francisco, that’s the starting point for re-envisioning Derry in the 80’s, a worth recognising the history of Punk and alternative music there is a strong mural culture that tends to be Chicano and time when a lot of people were incarcerated, there was a lot in the city. Latino in character, so it was really interesting to see of violence, there was a lot of fear, and it seems like a something so different with a totally different language and community that was deeply traumatised. There is something D: That’s a really interesting aspect of this, Jim has talked context and purpose. I just found it fascinating. of a friendly absurdity to allowing Derry to imagine its past about the mural as an album cover and this history of music as something different. in Derry would seem to resonate well in that regard. Larne, M: How did you navigate your contribution to that tradition in where I’m from, is routinely mocked as being one of the Derry? M: Seeing it among those other murals in Derry you’re not worst places on this island — mainly because of its dullness. quite sure where this message is coming from; you’re not Throughout all The Troubles years it was dead, dead dreary. J: I don’t know if there is an easy answer to that. It is quite sure what its affirmations are, and maybe that is But below the surface, there were alternative undercurrents something that I was acutely aware of, in terms of being analogous to the reversal of the text in the design. I think that were very important to the narrative of growing up in a respectful of the contested histories of the city. I know there place like that. D: Humour can take us a long way towards real profundity is a whole process of painting over murals, especially those — think of Beckett, or Nauman — but it can of course also that represent the city’s violent past. My approach was to M: I think alternative music in this context makes for an effectively puncture and deflate inherited forms of profun- think less about ‘replacing’ existing murals. Neither argument that politics isn’t something that you necessarily dity. An aspect of this – and I’m quoting or misquoting Oscar contributing nor contradicting those existing traditions, but address, but it’s something that can exist in the shadow of Wilde here – is that literature and art can take trivial things rather to produce another kind of mural and another layer of things. The Undertones singing about girls and whatever is seriously and treat serious things with sincere triviality. In conversation to the mural culture of the city. just an example of that. the sense that you amplify the apparently irrelevant and you diminish things which are deemed to be important or certain D: Can I ask how this particular process came about and, D: Here Comes the Summer, right? or fixed. Those sort of strategies seem valuable to the kind given what you’ve said about the things you noticed in the of mischievousness or impertinence of aspects of your work. city that were different than what you were used to in San M: Yeah, in a way that is happening in Jim’s work too. Where I don’t think in any situation like this ‘lightness’ needs to be Francisco, why you chose to take this approach? you might expect and anticipate some kind of political deemed less important than overt seriousness. There is a address within the template of the ‘mural’ tradition you find value in work being able to, in a sense, just open a window. J: It was an idea that was on the back burner for a while; something else which is no less political. As someone who something that would connect my background as a graffiti lives and works in the city I’m often frustrated by the binary M: I think with Jim’s work, there are no jokes. Part of the artist with my interests in language that’s more rooted in a ways in which politics is addressed or avoided. There’s a humour in the work is its apparent sincerity; a proposition history of Conceptual Art. The idea became possible through part of the effect of the work is in de-stabilising the position ’detour and access’ approach to Jim’s work, to borrow from that seems off balance and hopelessly unrealistic. The my residency at the FabLab Nerve Centre in Derry, of the receiver. In making it unclear how you’re supposed to Francois Jullien. You don’t address the subject, you just humour is not really contained within the work therefore, but experimenting with vinyl stencils and the laser cutter, which stand in relation to it, a different kind of community becomes create a space in which that politics can be reentered maybe exists at its edges or at the level of its site-specificity in turn led to a partnership with a graffiti group in the city imagined. without the identifications and registers of ‘politics’ as we and the cultural moment which it incongruously appears. called UV.  already recognise it. D: The beach is an interesting thing to position at the centre D: How long will the work exist for? What’s the meaning of D: Could talk us through the actual mural and what it con- of this. One reference that comes to mind here is Édouard D: I really like, in a similar way, how when you look at this that length of time? Is it just practical? tains? Glissant’s book Poetics of Relation. Part of Glissant’s book mural it has a corner-of-the-eye hint of paramilitary insignia is a reflection on the beach as a place of undecidability. The or lettering, but it’s not that. And the actual text is instead a J: It is a temporary mural and that was always clear from the J: The starting point was the word play of art and trá, being beach is a place of complexity, friction and intersection — a pun about the state of things, not a declaration of any kind beginning, although there is no fixed date for when it will be reversible, and trá meaning beach in Irish. I associate beach place where there are accumulating and disintegrating trac- of certainty. Beyond that text, there’s a beach which itself painted over. It’s lifetime is also limited by the materials I scenes with this really idealised version of what a beach es of perpetual crossing and journeying. Such liminal has its own subtly and complexity —  as well as used; spray paint isn’t something that will last. It will is. People in Ireland often ask me “Why would you come to territory is not, if you’ll excuse the pun, an entirely pacific. being somewhere that appears to be absolutely open. So literally fade in the sunlight (or the rain). It’s not designed to Ireland from California? It must be freezing here” and I’m like It’s full of richness and strangeness: at the beach, Glissant the deeper you go in to the mural’s design, there seems to last forever. You can see the Bogside Artists and the “Well, I’m from Northern California and it’s not Baywatch”. says, human society contemplates, and attempts to be more play, more nuance. That seems to suggest an Waterside artists fix them every year. I won’t be doing that. So everybody has this idea of what a beach is and it’s like manage, “constant movement between threatening chaos appealing way of thinking about politics: it’s an appealing Hawaii or Venice Beach or something like that. So I thought and dreamy fragility”. Maybe, in your work, the beach be- form of public display that doesn’t necessarily arise from any M: Of course there is a risk the work gets ‘worked over’. I’d go the route of representing a beach that delivered that comes a reference that can free us from restrictive, defen- certainty, any fixity of position. How do you feel about that? fantasy. And I suppose there was an inappropriate aspect sive codings around the politics of territory. Maybe thinking to it. The scene painted on the mural is not an immediately about the beach allows us to think differently — and better—  M: To a certain extent that is kind of consistent with some of J: That’s part of it. I think I have a very different approach to convincing image of what Derry is, or was. To frame it as an about politics — not in an idyllic, utopian way, but with an your other work Jim, The Truth Booth, for instance. art making because of that. Graffiti and my particular graffiti 80’s idealised beach scene, like an airbrushed album cover, appreciation for constantly shifting senses and possibilities career was marked by a lot of incidents either with the city I further played off the words by adding ‘Life’s a Beach’ in a of contact and relation. J: That’s a really basic issue I’m interested in, of fixed identi- or other graffiti artists, and I painted a lot of trains. These gestural ‘Purple Rain’ type script. It further developed into a ties and finding the cracks in that, exploiting them a bit, and things just disappear, but it can be quite liberating just to circuit of references and representations, by adding ‘Art J: I wouldn’t say that was something I was overtly taking aim opening them up. Obvious examples are the make something and let it go. So, I think I have a different imitates life’ at the bottom of the work, in a retro 8 Bit at, but the idea of being in flux and in movement and not a misrepresentation of people in the Middle East for instance, relationship to making art objects than other artists. This typeface. Life’s a beach. Art imitates life. Therefore art is a fixed point as well, is something I was very interested in which have become so limited and so damaging on so many ties into the issue of humour as well, as I don’t subscribe to beach; I am very interested in things that bite their own tail. conveying. levels. As a result, I’ve been just drawn to go to Palestine, to the idea that art is important by it’s very nature; with go to Afghanistan and to work on projects there. permanent or inherent value. Traditionally the artist is D: Can you say something about the immediate context for D: I have family in Derry, and used to visit a lot, but oddly I positioned as an authority figure, his gestures to be decoded the work, in terms of what it faces onto or what it sits don’t have a strong awareness of the the geography of the M: Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning the humour of the seriously by a willing, able, and generously minded public. beside? city and its hinterlands. I’ve never made it to the beach work. I think humour has a really sticky relationship to con- I don’t think I naturally subscribe to this, instead maybe I landscapes that are closest to Derry. And I have no real temporary art and contemporary art discourse, partly steer towards a kind of popular consensus or populist J: The mural is about 30 feet high and sits on a gable end on sense of the meaning of those landscapes to the city . What because because humour is a deflative mechanism of acceptance. “What do the people want?” “What do people Abercorn Road, facing onto a children’s park. It’s not an area kind of relation does the beach have to the urban population criteria, of values, of judgement. It can completely undo the have to say?” I’m very interested in public art, not just as a that would have been known for it’s murals, but it has of Derry —  is it part of the ‘self-image’ of the city? frame of things. And yet, of course, we all know how humour former graffiti artist, but politically. It’s about access. Tricolours at the top end of the street and red, white, and can be used to counter dominant identities and authorities. blue curbstones at the bottom, near a junction connects up to The Fountain. In this way, the mural stands at a crossroads. D: One detail that I’m interested in is the presence of three large letters on the sides of a wall. There are, of course, lots of other three-letter combinations connected with certain kinds of allegiances in The North. How conscious were you of that in this situation? Did people make reference to the lettering? It’s certainly something that might register as related to paramilitarism if you were to drive past it quickly. If you glance at the ‘TRA’ letters agains the beach painting, you might think you see a very unusual or cheerful paramilitary declaration… J: I was conscious of the formatting of the text, certainly. the acronyms that exist on murals in Derry and Belfast, that denote particular groups, can be pretty undecipherable to an outsider. During the process of painting, while the text and image was still taking shape I did get kids coming up to me saying “Cool are you painting an IRA mural?”. At that point I did have a bit of a panic attack up on the scaffold, by my- self, and I quickly worked in the other elements of the mural. Ultimately, however, the work is designed to play off those tensions. It does say “Art imitates life”, so it is imitative of the existing mural culture, but it does so by bypassing it, or going back in time and reinventing what murals could be in Derry. D: But the other obvious aspect of this, just to finish on the large text aspect, is that it is an Irish word. J: I made a political statement there. I took a side. D: Well there’s so many potential pitfalls here. Whatever choice you make can take on a political import that ramifies beyond your immediate awareness. J: Another example of that was pointed out to me, where the design of the mural reminded them of The Good Friday Agreement advertisements which were of a family looking into the sunset. Anecdotally, I was reading Sarah Tuck’s thesis about how the image used for the Good Friday Agreement was actually a stock photo taken in South Africa and that you technically couldn’t get that kind of sunset from the way the family were positioned within the frame. Life’s a Beach (Art Imitates Life), mural on Abercorn Road, Derry, NI, 2016, Jim Ricks. Photo: Lorcan Doherty