At Lismore Castle, the Irish home of the Dukes of Devonshire, the eyes of history are always upon you. Built by King John in the 12th century and owned for a time by Elizabethan buccaneer-settler Walter Raleigh, it rises like a turreted fairytale confection above the River Blackwater in County Waterford. In the 19th century it received a full Victorian Gothic makeover from architects Joseph Paxton and AWN Pugin, the latter best known for his ornate interiors of the Palace of Westminster in London.
In 1932, Lismore got a further upgrade when he was given as a wedding present by the ninth Duke to his younger son Charles Cavendish on his marriage to Adele Astaire, Fred’s brother and dancing partner. Astaire balked for its comfort: as a contemporary prankster observed, the castle was built by King John and leaded by Adele Astaire.
Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Irish residence of the Dukes of Devonshire
Such a weight of heritage makes Lismore an essential but also formidable context for contemporary art. Since 2005, current heir William Cavendish and his wife Laura have invited a diverse list of artists ranging from Matthew Barney and Rashid Johnson to Richard Long, Eddie Peake and Superflex to participate in the Lismore Castle Arts program, in exhibitions curated by guests, solo performances or special commissions. In some cases, the work was directly influenced by the environment, as in The Heir and Astaire (2010), TJ Wilcox’s short about Lismore’s jazz-age fusion of aristocracy and showbiz, while others sounded more obliquely with Lismore, such as Sean Lynch’s band show Reverse!Puginwho took the ornamental design of the castle as a starting point to investigate the human use and misuse of the landscape, both for art and for profit, in Ireland and beyond.
at Anne Collier Shutter (2022)
All artwork courtesy of the artist; The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Neu Gallery, Berlin; and Galerie Gladstone, Brussels
Anne Collier, who currently exhibits in the converted galleries of the castle’s west wing, did not work specifically for Lismore. But that does not prevent its exposure Eye to resonate powerfully with its context. Born in California and based in New York, Collier has always had a particular interest in exploring how the act of looking or being looked at is integrated into the photographic process, while examining the ambivalent role of the camera as a as an instrument of both emancipation and subjugation.
Impassive representation
According to its title, Eye is dominated by images of female eyes from comics, film stills, advertisements and photography manuals, as well as shots of the artist’s eye. Clichés, tropes, assumptions and stereotypes swirl around Collier’s tongue-in-cheek portrayals of these women, many of whom are portrayed as weeping and distraught. The cold and objective way in which these in extremis emotional images have been reframed only accentuates their tense and often problematic subject/object nature.
Collier also comes under scrutiny with a trio of works where black-and-white photographs of her own eye appear variously in a developing tray, being held aloft by a disembodied arm and, most disconcertingly , being slashed with a paper cutter – recalls the excruciating eyeball razor scene in Luis Buñuel’s classic 1929 film An Andalusian dog.
Installation view of Ann Collier: Eye at Lismore Arts Castle
Collier wears her historical, feminist and theoretical artistic references lightly, but the proximity of these complex and discursive works to the abundance of family portraits peering out from the walls of Lismore – including glamorous photographs of Astaire in her role of Lady Charles – undoubtedly gives them an added advantage. Engaged to the fullest to display their wealth and privilege, many of Lismore’s lavishly depicted duchesses and wives were nonetheless largely powerless instruments in securing dynastic lineages and/or forming lucrative family alliances.
It is impossible not to see correspondences between the mixed messages embedded in these historic images of the ladies of Lismore and Collier’s sardonic look at more modern but no less reductive female sexual and emotional archetypes. I am sure that Eye also reportedly rang with Astaire, who had more than his share of grief but was by no means a victim. After ceasing to be the castellan of Lismore, she made a deal with the Devonshires to return to the castle each summer, which she did regularly for the next three decades, even after remarriing and living between New York , Phoenix and Jamaica. The pool she created may now be full, but the plumbing still works great.
• Anne Collier: Eye, Lismore Castle Arts, March 25-October 29
