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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
64 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 65
W
E ARE ALL TOURISTS HERE.
Contemporary art makes us so.
Castles too...art and castle,
antiquity and money keep a
spring-through-autumn tryst
every year in the village of Lismore, Waterford.
Here, the international artworld vacations at
Lismore Castle Arts (LCA), castle-camouflaged
from the village where people go about their
workaday lives. It’s a classic juxtaposition.
Setting out on a road trip to LCA always feels
like a false pilgrimage, due in part to the
disbelief that bluechip artworks — under a
sophisticatedly curated art programme — await
you beyond old trees and older stone walls. But
there art lies, incubated in the familiar white
shoebox of contemporary art, and, for the most
part, elegantly shielded from the period-drama
setting that encroaches on all sides with
The beautiful oddness of
crying to symbolise trauma’s
vestige and refuge
Collier’s images don’t show-off. They are
introverts, nerdy about the internal mechanics
of an effective image that plays with Affect
James Merrigan reviews Anne Collier: leaking,
as analogy, to overcome its cold stare
Downton Abbey verisimilitude.
Currently on view in the main gallery at LCA
are chromogenic prints by the New York-based
artist, Anne Collier. And in the dusty light of a
dark round tower at the rear of the gallery, a
solitary carousel slide-projection noisily
crunches images of a lens-forward and
paparazzi-close handheld camera.
At first glance this is a simple and minimal
exhibition, one that is secure in its formal
consistency and obsessional gaze. Collier’s
c-prints, like obsolescent technologies,
transformed and orphaned from their previous
purpose, are imbued with a particular sense of
time and memory that keeps nostalgia at bay
and the future in the mind’s eye. And the Eye is
what persists here, both in the exhibition title
and the ocular locus of the artist’s attention.
The clarity, precision and cut is so surgical in
these c-prints that I find myself desiring the o-
cuts imagined discarded on the artist’s studio
floor. They are aloof and technical artworks,
like artists themselves in social gatherings.
Collier herself says she’s “interested in creating
CULTURE
64 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 65
a sense of emotional or psychological
uncertainty” in her work. I’m not sure what
emotional or psychological uncertainty Collier
is directing us towards at LCA. Is it mixed
feelings, or any feeling at all?
Such a statement about emotional ambiguity
is textbook Andy Warhol (who has a big show
coming this autumn to the Hugh Lane Gallery
Dublin). Warhol, when the eyes of the media
beamed down on his sunglasses-wearing
celebrity, transmuted into a seemingly
insensate entity: he became his own work, as
if he needed to under the glare of too many
eyes.
Like Warhol’s screen-printed appropriations,
you have to meet Collier’s c-print appropriations
Beyond half-way. If you don’t, you will pass by
these images without pause or reflection (as
two tourists did on my visit, as they tunnelled
their way towards the next-listed castle
attraction). Collier’s images don’t show-o.
They are introverts, nerdy about the internal
mechanics of an eective image that plays with
Aect.
I always feel that contemporary art has to
leak for it to overcome its cold stare. Collier’s
work leaks, but as representation, or more
distant still, analogy. Perhaps the artist and the
curator have picked up on this consistent
subjectivity in the work, by singling out what
Roland Barthes coined the photographic
Punctum — “the incidental but personally
poignant detail in a photograph which ‘pierces’
or ‘pricks’ a particular viewer, constituting a
private meaning unrelated to any cultural
code”.
Collier’s Punctum at LCA is not the eye per se,
but the crying or leaking tear duct, depending
on the spectrum of your detached or empathetic
gaze. You could argue that to focus on crying
subjects, the detached voyeurism of Collier’s
appropriations — from comics to magazines to
album covers — is made vulnerable and thus
emotive through a leaky tear duct. Admittedly,
there is something beautiful and sympathetic
about the crying female subject beyond a
feminist reading. Collier’s feminist politics is
evident but not forceful. Her subjects don’t
protest; they languish in the ambiguity of
emotion and social messaging.
The sepia-toned “Crying (Painting)”, the only
c-print named after the act of crying rather than
the subject (“Woman Crying”), focuses on a
single, runny “face egg” leaking a milky tear.
An image that would make French philosopher
of the erotic and the abject George Bataille
happy, but Lady Caroline — of HBO series
Succession — disgusted: “There’s just
something about eyes. They just kind of, ugh,
revolt me… I don’t like to think of all these blobs
of jelly rolling around in your head, just, face
eggs”. Lady Caroline as the artist par
excellence, an observer that looks hard but
feels less. Sometimes I wonder if contemporary
art can elicit feelings; that is the question
posited when I come eye-to-eye with Collier’s
work.
Contemporary art institutions try their very
best to humanise contemporary art with their
artist biographies, smiling administrators and
Art is for Everyone propaganda. And yet there
is something really cold about contemporary
art’s stare. Art looks back at you, gimlet-eyed,
without protest or self-awareness, like AI. And
yet it is contemporary art’s unwillingness to be
up front in its abstractions of the world around
us that makes it so enigmatic.
Formally, the ghosts of Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein are here in colour, repetition and
sequencing. Whereas Christopher Williams, an
American photographic generation ahead of
Collier, is here in the analytic precision and
meta-conversation with the framing techniques
of conceptual versus commercial photography.
This is most explicitly adumbrated in the
centrepiece photographic sequence of six
colourful c-prints under the series name
“Filter”. The use of a framing device (“Kodak
Colour Print Viewing Filter”) doubles down on
the commercial framing. But this pictorial
abstraction helps eliminate the latter, so the
artwork can be released from its determined
fate as an object to be bought, over one to be
experienced, albeit in a detached immediacy.
So perhaps Collier’s focus on lachrymose
subjects is the punctum at its most
psychologically potent. There are lots of
contradictions when it comes to a clear
definition of the punctum. But if we relate it to
the fetish, manifested here as a cropped image
of an eye in the sequential process of crying,
there is something moving about that
interrelationship, where trauma is represented
but not felt.
Anne Collier’s work at LCA proers the
moment when the traumatic event has been
processed, like the analogue photograph
bathing in chemicals in the wine-drunk
darkroom after the fact of its capture. You don’t
come away wanting to know more about the
artist to enrich your experience of the images.
The artist is a greyed-out shadow behind the
opacity of big, direct and colourful works,
which come dressed in serious black and white
conceptual and puerile Technicolor comicstrip.
These artworks are more about the culture
we live in than the artist making them. You can
take them, or leave them; and leaving them
doesn’t force a tear. The representation of
trauma may be impossible in art, but at least
we have the beautiful oddness of crying to
symbolise trauma’s vestige and refuge.
Anne Collier’s Eye is at Lismore Castle Arts, Co.
Waterford until 29 October
Sometimes I wonder if
contemporary art can elicit
feelings; that is the question
posited when I come eye-
to-eye with Collier’s work
