Exposing Naked Truths of Northern Ireland : Art: Two non-Irishmen living in Belfast create performance pieces in the polarized society, where love of the written word far outweighs other artistic concerns.

Alistair MacLennan is a bald Scottish Buddhist plunked in the middle of Catholic-Protestant politics in Northern Ireland; Nigel Rolfe is an English Protestant and Dublin family man who sometimes performs in front of conservative Catholic Irish audiences utterly naked.

MacLennan and Rolfe, two of Ireland’s preeminent performance artists and art lecturers, showed slides of their art students’ work and gave a talk Thursday at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to a sparse audience, mostly college art students.

Tonight at 8 MacLennan and Rolfe will present a joint performance-art piece at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), before continuing on tour to Washington and Philadelphia. The LACE work will be an aberration for both men, who ordinarily perform their metaphorical “sculptures in motion” alone.

In fact, the two have never collaborated before and say they have no idea what they’re going to do tonight. When pressed for a plan, they just laugh. “When you’ve been doing performance art as long as we have,” said Rolfe, “we don’t really improvise.”

At the lecture, MacLennan and Rolfe acknowledged that neither is a native Irishman, which they agree is emblematic of the relative weakness of contemporary Irish art. Ireland’s cultural priorities, said Rolfe, a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in Dublin, are “literature first and U2 second--with art somewhere way down the road.”

“There’s such respect for the written word in Ireland, but not for art,” said MacLennan, an art professor at the University of Ulster in Belfast who studied in the late ‘60s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was introduced to Zen. “The Calvinistic traditions are strong among the Protestants--a desire to destroy images, burn images, and place their faith in words.”

MacLennan says Belfast is a uniquely constructive environment for an artist “because it constantly provides ways for your sensibilities to be shocked. You can’t get used to it--the hate, the distrust. It makes you think, have things to say artistically.”

He finds that he must couch ideas in his performance art subtly to raise issues without taking sides, no easy feat in a land with little middle ground. “If some of the people in my neighborhood knew the kind of imagery I was using in my studio in Protestant East Belfast, I’d have a hard time surviving.”

Rolfe found out how powerful symbols and perceptions can be after performing of one of his better-known pieces, “The Rope That Binds Us Makes Them Free” (1983), at the opera house in predominantly Catholic Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city.

The lengthy piece (in which the 39-year-old artist wraps a ball of twine around his head) includes a segment in which Rolfe, nude, lies on a map of Ireland. But what made controversy was the use of a Tricolour, the flag of the Republic of Ireland, as a screen on which to project slides. Opera-house officials called the police, who subjected Rolfe and his friends to “a thorough hassle and search of our van in the rain.”

Rolfe says artists in the south don’t want to address the troubles in Northern Ireland, in part because of the disillusionment--which he shares--that there is no immediate solution.

“Artists want to tell themselves that ‘the troubles’ are actually not happening. It’s a dishonest attitude, but it is common,” he said.

“This tour is not some PR job for Irish art,” said MacLennan. “We are trying to challenge it, to change it into something more substantial and appreciated and free, something more relevant in illuminating the tensions and troubles in our society, which are terrible.”