AMID all the attempts to interpret Stephen Ireland, I have yet to see anyone broach a possibility that, to me, seems ever more plausible. Namely that, rather than the mere footballer everybody takes him to be, Ireland is a work of art. Yes it sounds a bit wacky, I know, but bear with me while I explain.
For one thing, there is a strikingly similar precedent. Readers may be familiar with the case of his near-namesake, Patrick Ireland, who was “born” a fully-formed adult in 1972 and “died” in 2008, after which he was publicly “buried” in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. All this despite the fact that, strictly speaking, he never existed.
Patrick Ireland was the alter ego of artist Brian O’Doherty, who created him as a protest against the events of Bloody Sunday, and thereafter signed works with that name for 36 years, before finally laying his character to rest in recognition of the peace process.
In between, he used his creation as a vehicle to explore favourite themes. Much influenced by Marcel Duchamp, O’Doherty has been described as “an essentially interrogative artist, constantly questioning artistic conventions and the assumptions on which we base aesthetic judgments”.
Issues of identity – “how people and the works of art they make, once decoded, show themselves inextricably entwined with their origins and locales” – are also a recurring concern.
And there you have Stephen Ireland in a nutshell. It seems to me that, in him, some as-yet-unnamed artist – who also happens to be handy with a football – has taken the O’Doherty concept to another level. This time, it doesn’t just involve a mask or effigy, like the ones buried in Imma.
Here, the artist has become one with the concept. In his day-job, as it were, he plays the role of a typical highly-paid sportsman, with a mansion, a pink-trimmed Bentley, and the rest.
But this is only a disguise for his true mission: the ongoing interrogation of his audience. As with O’Doherty, his recurring questions concern identity – for instance, is it worse when a player named Ireland won’t play for Ireland? – and aesthetic convention. “Can pink trimmings ever be acceptable on a Bentley?” he seems to ask us, and leaves the question hanging.
ACCORDING TOthe standard biographies, Stephen Ireland was "born" in Cork in 1986. Which may well be true, although if his opinions about life on Leeside were candid in his early years as they are now, the wonder is how he escaped alive.
In any case, like most people, I had never heard of him until he appeared, fully-formed, in 2005. This was at the hubristic height of the Celtic Tiger. And posing as a midfielder for Manchester City – his so-called “light-blue period” – he was soon holding up a mirror to the excesses of his motherland.
Celebrating a goal against Sunderland, for example, he dropped his shorts to reveal a pair of Superman underpants – an action that, on two separate levels, now looks like a devastating critique of Ireland’s inflated self-assessment at that time.
As well as being satire, the incident suggested the influence of Dadaism, the 20th-century movement whose practitioners aimed to deflate the status of the art object, if necessary through calculatedly absurd behaviour. This would be a regular feature of Ireland’s work from here on.
But it was as an international – and then an ex-international – that the young man addressed his most profound questions, and not just about identity.
My suspicion that there was an artist at work here first arose during the celebrated “dead grandmothers” episode. In this, he seemed to be playing around with the very idea of existence: his grannies’ fate – appearing to be dead and alive at the same time – amusingly echoing the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat.
In his recent output at club level, Ireland seems to be deliberately reflecting the fate of his namesake country. Certainly, his own downturn at Man City followed closely upon that of the Irish economy. Within months of being player of the year in 2009, he was dropped. And in an ominous comment, new manager Robert Mancini suggested that, to have a future, Ireland needed to “change his head”.
Most people took this to be just the sort of colourful thing Italian managers with imperfect English say. But I suspect Mancini had rumbled the truth – that Ireland was primarily an art-work – and his comment was a deliberately coded warning to the man behind the mask. The message was: concentrate on football, or else.
Happily for art lovers, Ireland has not changed his head. He continues to be a subversive voice, posing awkward questions, challenging conventions, and mirroring the state of his country in pithy ways, especially through those newspaper headlines saying: “Ireland for sale”.
Yet the genius who created him remains unmasked. Perhaps we won’t find out who he really is until the footballer, like Patrick Ireland, turns 36, at which time he too may have to be retired. For the moment, Stephen Ireland has gone on loan to a gallery in Newcastle, where an exhibition is expected shortly. There are also rumours of a planned public hanging in Cork later this year.