*FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT VILLAGE MAGAZINE (OCT-NOV 2023) LINK

WE 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 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 off-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 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-off. They are introverts, nerdy about the internal mechanics of an effective image that plays with AFFECT.

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 proffers 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●