Many of Maguire's subjects belong to those groups identified by Michel Foucault as being consigned to a "common homeland" by the state's various ideological apparatuses: the poor, the unemployed, prisoners and the insane. As Foucault has it, their designated status is not ontological but is ideologically constructed. Or, as Maguire observes, referring to a minor spate of films inspired by crime in Ireland, a cynic might say that society seems to be organised in such a way that even activities that are on the face of it subversive end up reinforcing the status quo. How so? Events and actions arising from deprivation end up providing income for the already affluent, through the workings of the criminal justice system and the cultural sector. Nothing changes because it's arranged that way.
Several ambitious projects throughout the 1990s, all rooted in portraiture, indicate the development of his concerns. "Portraiture," he says, "has to do with respect of the individual. It's hard to go wrong with it. It can only go wrong if you get someone who is looking for ego-embellishment." From 1987 he was actively involved in the Artists-in-Prisons scheme, jointly financed by the Department of Justice and the Arts Council. This decisive experience led to Prejudicial Portraits in 1992, in which portraits of a number of prisoners are displayed on a video monitor while a voice neutrally recites the Rules for the Government of Prisons Act, 1947.
Arising from this, photographs of the portraits in the homes of the prisoners were displayed in lightboxes at IMMA in 1993. These moves towards installation and photography could be seen as evidence of a desire on the artist's part to move away from painting because of its diminished status in the international art world. However, drawing and painting remain at the centre of Maguire's procedures. The additional elements in his work develop and amplify the meaning of what he is doing, emphasising that its real significance is often his act of being there, of situating himself in relation to his subjects. The drawing or painting refers to this but shouldn't dispense with the lived experience. In effect the way his work has been structured throughout the 1990s prompts us to consider the conditions of its making.
His participation in the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998 is a good example. Rather than simply import artworks, or remain in the privileged space of an artist's studio, he elected to make portrait drawings of children attending art and theatre workshops in the favelas, the shanty towns. The portraits then belonged to the children and, with their permission, he photographed them in their homes and borrowed them for exhibition.
This work was accompanied by a line-up of drawings, "like a football team", from tabloid newspaper mug-shots of convicted criminals which, he noticed, appeared daily. A large-scale triptych depicts the bodies of men slain in a notorious prison massacre in 1992. Along with a text excerpted from Swift's A Modest Proposal, all of this amounted to an outline description of one of those closed ideological loops. Favela to grave via a route determined by the state. As ever with Maguire, the wider political meaning is intimately entwined with the individual and corporeal. In the processing of the dead following the prison massacre - laying them out in rows, performing autopsies, numbering them, allowing their images to be promulgated - the state continues to determine the meanings of the bodies of the men it has incarcerated and killed. It can be argued that all of this process has nothing to do with determining what actually happened or why. Its real purpose is "To make everyone aware," as Foucault puts it, "of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign" or, in this case, the state.
Maguire is acutely aware that his republican and loyalist subjects also embody ideological positions. One painting, not a portrait as such, graphically illustrates this. Village Grave Republican depicts the grave, marked by a Celtic cross, of the brother of a Long Kesh prisoner. The graveyard is surrounded by houses. "This is someone who was born, grew up, fought, died and is buried all within this small space. That was his world."
The array of UDA portraits bears the caption "Looking ahead". No irony is intended and, as with the UVF caption "Excombatants" the subjects wrote it themselves. He doesn't try to mitigate what was done by the paramilitaries. Some comments in the visitors' book in the Ormeau Baths saw his images as simply glorifying men of violence and ignoring the suffering of victims and their families. But he sees the images as necessarily positive, as literally part of the Peace Process, a means of undemonising the respective enemies. The faces are hard, "what these men have been through leaves its mark," but "they were all, without exception, in favour of the Peace Process. I thought when a war is over you have a ticker-tape parade."
Brian Maguire's exhibition Inside/Out is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin until March 26th