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Ian Breakwell
God, as well as having
human mouthpieces transmit His voice from pulpits,
on street corners, on radio and television,
also seemingly communicates through dummies:
usually weeping, bleeding, nodding, swaying
or in other ways animated statues.
A statue I know well is that of the Virgin Mary
in a roadside grotto at Ballinspittle in County
Cork, Ireland. In the summer of 1984 I had been
preparing to have myself photographed for the
holiday snaps in a compromising position with
the statue, before having to prematurely abandon
my little jape because of the arrival of a coach-load
of nuns. The fact that I did not interfere with
the figure at all absolves me from any connection
with what happened next, which was that in 1985
the statue began, according to local people,
to move.
The first sighting
of the Ballinspittle phenomenon came on the
evening of Monday July 22, when two women who
were praying in front of the shrine, which is
an approximation of the one at Lourdes, noticed
a movement of the head of the illuminated statue.
Word spread rapidly around the village and 11
more people claimed to have seen the statue
move during the same night. The following evening
at 10 pm a large group assembled at the site,
some of whom saw the movement, while others
did not. By the weekend 15,000 pilgrims had
gathered at the shrine and the lanes were blocked
with traffic for miles around.
A succession of visitors
to Ballinspittle, none of whom wished to be
named, described the phenomenon to the local
newspaper. A swaying of the statue’s head
from side to side then changed to a forward
movement of the whole figure, as if shuddering
in an earth tremor, which gave the impression
that it was going to fall. There were no discernible
life-like movements of parts of the figure of
the Virgin, and some onlookers’ accounts
of seeing her skirt blow up were dismissed as
mass hysteria.
A husband maintained
that he “absolutely” saw the statue
move, while his wife who accompanied him saw
nothing but nevertheless believed that something
was happening even though she could not see
it. The husband asked, “If it’s an
optical illusion why isn’t everybody seeing
it?” He went on to stress that he was not
a religious fanatic but had experienced a “presence”
at the grotto, and believed that he had witnessed,
during a period of 10 minutes, the transfiguration
of the face of Our Lady into the image of the
Sacred Heart. Another interpretation, widely
held, was that the movement indicated a message
from Our Lady for a revival of the Family Rosary.
Phenomena are contagious, especially those with
the potential for drawing 15,000 people to a
nondescript village previously unvisited by
tourists, and soon statues began to move all
over Ireland. Many were perceived to display
lifelike movements of limbs; one man reported
the Virgin Mary waving passengers goodbye as
they left Limerick bus station. Once the threshold
of absurdity had been crossed, the story ran
its course and eventually even Ballinspittle
returned to sleepy anonymity and its statue
to dignified stillness.
The Ballinspittle
episode reveals some pointers to the nature
of illusion and the attendant suspension of
disbelief, which in a religious context can
be called faith.
The fact that some
people saw the statue’s movement, while
others at the same moment did not, could be
partly explained by varied quality of eyesight
or viewpoint, but casts doubt on the most obvious
physical cause of the apparition: tremor of
the earth due to local subsidence, which ought
to have been apparent to all.
Yet, think of the
times when you have said to someone, “Look,
look!” and they say, “What? Where?”
They don’t see it, yet to you it is obvious.
Or you say something you think is perfectly
clear and it is met with incomprehension, or
misinterpreted, then further distorted by retelling
like Chinese whispers. To a degree, we see what
we want to see and hear what we want to hear,
within the parameters of what we are cognitively
capable.
Whatever the cause,
something made people in Ballinspittle bear
witness to a phenomenon, and the degree to which
they perceived it probably depended on their
willingness to do so. P.T. Barnum’s famous
dictum that “You can fool all of the people
some of the time, and some of the people all
of the time, but you can’t fool all of
the people all of the time” is, like most
clichés, demonstrably true.
Consequent interpretation
of perceived phenomena has to be considered
within a wider social context. Ballinspittle
was a small village in an undeveloped rural
community which, by the mid 1980s, was on the
verge of radical change. Eager participation
in the European Union would bring an influx
of funding which halted the seemingly endless
emigration, creating countless public works
and job creation schemes, bringing in their
wake private corporate investment which eventually
would result in a Celtic Tiger boom economy
and a rapid escalation of the nation’s
monetary standard of living.
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Ian Breakwell
Phenomenon at Ballinspittle, 2001
Courtesy of the artist
and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
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click on image to enlarge
This capitalist flux would also help kick-start
the gradual secularisation of a previously theocratic
state, aided by a lessening of belief in papal
infallibility as the initially adulated Pope
John Paul II came to be revealed as an ultra-conservative
dogmatist who was unsympathetic to increasing
demands for relaxation of Ireland’s draconian
divorce, contraception and abortion laws. The
Pope’s human dummies, the priests, nuns
and teaching brothers, were in turn to be exposed
in an unending succession of highly publicised
court cases as variously venal, sadistic and
sexually abusive tyrants. The whole religious
fabric of a previously unquestioning and quiescent
society began to erode.
Even for those members of Irish society who
had been in the forefront of dissension, questioning
and alternative thinking-the writers, artists,
political activists and social campaigners-the
rapid rate of change would be bewildering. For
Mr. and Mrs. Average in villages like Ballinspittle
there would have been apprehension of potential
upheaval, and those people understandably looked
for a signal, a direction, a sign.
An old friend of mine from County Cork, a pillar
of the local community in his village, put it
succinctly when he said: “I don’t
care if it’s an optical illusion or not.
I think that, in the times we live in, to see
15,000 people gather together in a field to
express their faith is a wonderful phenomenon
in itself.”
Postscript
In 1988, the composer
Ron Geesin and I made the first version of what
would later develop into Auditorium, our large-screen
video projection work with multi-phonic sound.
The prototype version,
for the Edge ’88 Festival in London, used
comparatively unsophisticated technical means.
I entirely blackened out my studio and converted
it into a small theatre with rows of seats,
in which live audiences sat initially in pitch
darkness. Through hidden speakers came Ron’s
soundtrack of another audience assembling, taking
seats, coughing and chattering until, cued by
a pit orchestra, eventually reacting to an unseen
performance. During this soundscape, the end
wall of the studio, framed by a proscenium arch,
was gradually illuminated by a row of progressively
brightening theatre footlights, which revealed
rows of white, lifesize faces, reverse painted
out of a black background. The live audience
stared back, as in a mirror, at a painted audience,
and as the luminosity of the footlights intensified
then prolonged staring produced the illusion
that the disembodied painted faces were moving
in space: sideways, up and down, back and forth.
I operated the light
and sound equipment from behind a false wall,
and afterwards would often talk to visitors
to the installation, who included many different
nationalities. After one performance a man with
an Irish accent came up to me and inquired:
“Tell me, have you ever been to a place
called Ballinspittle?”
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Close-up
of statue at Ballinspittle
Photo: Southern Star, July 1985
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Ian Breakwell
and Ron Geesin Auditorium
Edge Festival, London, 1988
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click on images to enlarge
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