C105 review

Belfast: Connor Caffrey at Golden Thread

Connor Caffrey's Autodecay, a series of photographs depicting the burnt-out corpses of cars stolen and abandoned by 'joyriders' in the Wicklow National Park, is first and foremost a very beautiful exhibition. The photographs appeal to the viewer in much the same way as untamed nature, ancient ruins and crumbling castles did previously. This new sublime allows the viewer to feel a momentary - but ultimately castrated - sense of unease. It is fear at a safe distance. Haunted castles in this instance have been replaced by burnt-out cars on an edge of a self-consciously Irish National Park, bodies temporarily possessed then destroyed by contemporary young ghosts. The trouble with Caffrey's images is that they have been so sugared by aesthetic considerations they have lost any teeth.

In Autodecay the cars seem perfectly at home in their surroundings, evoking a sense of naturally ordered decoration, instead of outrage or fear at such social and environmental delinquency. True, the elemental assault on the cars will produce toxins which eventually will poison their surroundings, but the beauty of the images anaesthetises even this fact. This is certainly not the exhibition's intent, but in producing such aesthetically charged photographs the artist has effectively neutered any other reading of them. That is not for one moment to suggest that the exhibition glamorises joyriding. It certainly does not. It, however, does romanticise the 'wrecks', as so often the bogland into which they rust has been romanticised. The heightened use of colour gives the images a surreal and semi-abstract feel that is delightful to look at but rips them away from the intended context.

To be fair, Dennis O'Driscoll's poems (on display adjacent to the photographs), in particular What she does not know is..., ties the works to the often tragic consequences of joyriding. But the very fact of their inclusion seems to suggest that the images themselves fail to convey their intended message. Poetry accompanying visual imagery has always, to my mind, been problematic, as it tends to be judged on its own merits rather than as part of the exhibition as a whole, and as often as not seems an unnecessary add-on. O'Driscoll's poems provide an effective point of entry to the show, enabling the viewer to identify with the pain that joyriding can cause. The trouble is, they are trite and brimful of cliché. A list of statistics of those killed, cars stolen and cost to property would have been a crude but just as effective accompaniment to the images.

Caffrey has produced a series of some of the most beautiful images that I've seen in quite a while. It is unfortunate that he attempts to portray them as a response to environmental negligence and and that he ties them to the emotive but weak poetry of O'Driscoll in order to highlight the social disruption joyriding causes. The images themselves are able to stand on their own and indeed reject any interpretation other than the decorative. Being decorative is not the cardinal sin that many would have us believe. It certainly isn't in my book.

Gregory McCartney is a curator and writer based in Ireland and Wales.

Connor Caffrey: Auto Decay, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, May/June 2003

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