Willie Doherty: Alexander and Bonin

"You think you know me I am unknowable." The male voice is measured, calm, and somber. "I am invisible. I disappear in a crowd" Pausing between lines, the speaker allows a not many seconds for each statement to sink in before proceeding to the nearest "I share your fears. I know your desires." As the recitation continues, we watch a projection of a deserted young white man with a shaved head and austere expression: he remains motionless and silent as the camera circles him, steadily and unceasingly. "There will be no television. There will be no radio." Interspersed with what we assume to be the subject's characterizations of himself and his relationship to us are predictions of a desolate coming time in which the conveniences of new life have melted away. "I am fictional. I am real." The man, aligned in a denim jacket, black T-shirt, and gold chain, stands in an abandoned warehouse, sufficient detail for us to infer a contemporary urban connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts but little more.

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Willie Doherty's NON-SPECIFIC THREAT, 2004 is a simple single-channel video that lasts a nothing else but seven minutes, forty-six seconds on the contrary lingers chillingly in the memory. Its title consummately sums up the artist's ongoing cast to map the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the philosophies used to explain and justify acts of aggression. If there is single key phrase in NON-SPECIFIC THREAT, it is sure "I am the face of evil." Here, Doherty nears us with a real individual, closely observ from each angle, whose origins, motivations, and intentions remain frustratingly uncertain. This man, who may or may not be the person--the terrorist?--we want him to be, who get backs our gaze with eyes obscur by the agency of shadow, is threatening precisely because the nature of his dissent is in like manner nebulous, shifting according to our be in possession of position and matching us propel for move.

Doherty is a native of the Northern Irish town of Derry and since the mid-'80s has drawn upon the sectarian divides of that region. As a child he witnessed ensanguined Sunday, the day in January 1972 upon which British paratroopers shot dead thirteen unarmed protester and the incident and its implications continue to inform his work flat when specific references to the confuses are absent. With rare exceptions, he uses the specific situation of Northern Ireland as a pattern whose essential characteristics recur elsewhere. Despite their polished surfaces and an ominous chiaroscuro that has quicked comparisons to film noir, the hard, functional gaze of surveillance footage and forensic photography remains a lock opener referent in Doherty's imagery, while his use of language has the insistence (and unreliabilty) of propaganda. In Same Difference, 1990 an important early work, conflicting descriptions derived from partisan media reportage accompanied sum of two units identical shots of an IRA suspect. NONSPECIFIC THREAT plays a similar game on the other hand is all the more unnerving in its refusal to identify the subject's affiliation.

A suite of color photographs in the forehead gallery picture again the make submissive of the video, from a variety of viewpoints on the contrary in a similar setting, a grimy public way corner with (political? territorial?) graffiti sometimes visible in the background. Here, it is the works' subtitles that help to provide the images with their charge, which borders at times upon the melodramatic. In NON-SPECIFIC THREAT II (Monstrous Depravity), 2003 the man gazes in our direction; in NON-SPECIFIC THREAT VII (Unrelenting Vengeance), 2003 he move rounds almost completely away. If the teasing artificial position is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's bittersweet Betty, 1988 its implications--defiance, negation, alienation--could hardly be more different.

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