Trish
Morrissey, Seven Years, Gallery of Photography, Dublin,
4 March to 3 April 2005
'Unpleasant' is perhaps
a sufficient description of my first encounter with Trish Morrissey's
current exhibition in the Gallery of Photography. The gallery
was more a grey vacuum than a 'white space' as the wet, dreary
day outside loomed in oppressively into the exhibition space.
The pale faces of Morrissey and her sister, clad in the garish
garments of the pre-nineties boom, coupled with their gender-bending
performances, disturbed me. Not being in the frame of mind for
prolonged viewing, I left. However, and this is a big 'however',
I decided to persist with the show. On the day of my return
a sunny, bustling market day vibrated outside the gallery window,
and far from being alone I was surrounded by smiles and chitter
chatter. My previous bemusement melted into amusement...
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Trish Morrissey: October
1st 1987, 2004,
Image courtesy of the Gallery of Photography
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Morrissey's new works,
entitled Seven years and consisting of ten large-format
photographs, individually and collectively re-enact, re-invent
and re-invigorate the stereotype of domestic photography. Morrissey,
enlisting the help of her sister (her senior by Seven Years),
using the template of the family photograph, performed, staged
and produced a synthetic and generic family photo album.
The decisions surrounding
Morrissey's preparation and field work for Seven Years
reflect the overall blend of fact and fiction within the work.
Morrissey gathered together the clothes and props from the primary
source of her family attic and also from the theatrical wardrobe
that are the charity shops and overpriced retro clothing shops
in Dublin. She also used as her stage her former suburban family
home and surrounding area. The combination of real and imaginary
not only add up to an exercise in autofiction, but also allow
the viewer in.
The voyeurism particularly
associated with the medium of photography is counteracted by
Morrissey, as she openly invites us to participate in the fun.
The works, just like those 'out-take' photographs (of the browning,
bending, furling, stowed-away-in-an-old-suitcase nature) which
Morrissey's emulate, act as catalysts to our own memories. The
imagery; the settings and the characters are familiar to us
all. The semi-detached redbrick houses, the white rusting garden
gates, the busily patterned sitting-room curtains, the ever-evolving
fashions we all love to cringe at, the dog that looks like our
old one, the chopper bike (the vintage Volkswagen beetle of
the two wheel variety), the pallid faces and milky skin of a
time before our prevalent 'fake and bake' culture... the list
goes on. It is as though Morrissey wanted to create something
akin to the faceless life-size cardboard figures or 'standees'
into which we stick our inane faces at the fairground.
No names, real or imaginary,
appear beneath the photographs, just dates; dates potentially
common to us all. One delighted co-viewer of the exhibition
exclaimed that 'January 25th 1979' ( the date under one photograph)
was her wedding anniversary; another beside me, pointing excitedly,
apparently had "that very same coat." Smiles of reverie
all around.
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Trish Morrissey: January
25th 1979, 2004,
Image courtesy of the Gallery of Photography
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As is often the case
with a lighthearted delivery, something deeper lurks within
the photographs. According to Morrissey herself, this serious
undercurrent lies in her aim to expose what she feels is hidden
behind the incidental finger over the lens and concealed in
the body language and gestures of those photographed; namely
the tensions and anxieties which exist in any relationship and
especially within the family. The vacant expressions of Morrissey
and her sister can thereby be construed as a deliberate device.
They serve as a constant reminder that the photographs are fabrications,
but also they allow us to concentrate on the gestural language
and stances of the characters. The awkward hand-on-shoulder
pose, the coy eye anticipating the click of the camera and the
barely restrained recoil of the embarrassed teenager as her
uninhibited auntie enthuses an embrace; all these scenes are
performed with the express aim of exploration and exposure of
agitated or uneasy familial bonds.
Morrissey in her adept
denunciation of the innocent moment simultaneously exposes our
common careless disregard for the subtleties and shrouded insights
contained in these familiar images. Nonetheless, Morrissey must
surely be aware that performance is not unique to her recreations.
Even in non-art, snap photography (and possibly even more so
in the days before digital technology), the moment a camera
is produced, people react, sometimes cowering on the side of
shyness, other times playing up, revelling in the attention
of the camera and the photographer. As many of the photographs
in Seven Years deal with childhood and the 'coming of
age' period, natural reticence and even mortification common
to this age are likely to obliterate any revelations to be discerned
from gestures and poses, thus limiting the possible insights
Morrissey strives to alert us to.
That which I initially
found disturbing about the exhibition, Morrissey's androgynous
and ambiguously gendered characters, was what came to intrigue
me. Women with facial hair, a previous work by Morrissey,
consisted of a series of headshots of women with moustaches.
But these were not freak-show characters, not easily dismissable
as they were not presented in a comedic context. The women's
facial hair was their own and they wore it nonchalantly, as
much a conscious choice as were their plucked eyebrows and red
glossy lips. Morrissey, recalling this earlier work in her current
show, continues this preoccupation and addresses the issue of
gender expectations again. Exploiting her own and her sister's
slight physique, often taking on male personae, Morrissey confronts
and confounds our need to assign to a person a definite gender.
In one particular photograph of two young men, January 25th
1979, as the two sisters become two brothers, Morrissey
herself has a moustache. It is not, as you might expect, of
the 'sticky tape-fake' variety, but her very own unplucked,
unbleached, and unfettered facial hair. Again fact and fiction
are blended.
The same young male
character sports a thick mane, fashionable in the seventies,
which in its time was a protest, "a sign that [this generation]
did not accept the morality of the crop haired generation of
bureaucrats which sired them"
We are reminded of the significance of hair as an identity marker
through the vehicle of nostalgia-inspired hairstyles and fashions.
Dating back to the seventies also, a fertile period for identity
crises, we find the emerging movement of feminist art, and it
is in the work of the female artists Adrian Piper and Cindy
Sherman that we find the precedents for Trish Morrissey's art.
Sherman was too a mistress of disguise, and Piper would often
adopt an androgynous, culturally ambiguous persona. She would
then walk through crowded streets, exploring the extent of beliefs
and attitudes revolving around such identity markers as race
and gender and the seeming superficialities of hair and clothing.
Morrissey has included
two video works in the show, Eleven and three quarters
and Eighteen and forty-five. Again, intentionally vague
and unspecific titles. The former shows a young child chasing
a rabbit outside, around a back garden. The unseen but audible
noise and hustle-bustle of the antics inside remind us of the
behind-the-scenes, the 'what's not seen' of any footage. The
piece, shown on a domestic-scale television screen, does little
more than remind of us just how boring other people's home videos
can be to non-family members.
Eighteen and forty-five,
however, is a thoroughly enchanting video piece. Undemanding
time-wise, at just two minutes long, the almost hypnotic effect
of the film leaves one wanting at least one more viewing. Waltzing,
gramaphone-esque music begins, transporting us to a place of
reverie and wistfulness as a headless figure (which brings to
mind Kathy Prendergast's delicate fibreglass work Waiting,
in the collection of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery) appears
in a pale satin ball dress and pink slippers. As the figure
dances so does the dress. Full of life, it swings and sways
like an animate entity in itself. After we adjust to the lively
movement and changing postures of the sprightly body, we become
aware of the static environment. The harsh concrete paving,
darkened pebbledash wall and the exposed drainage piping are
the antithesis of the aspiring glamour of the bridal / ball-gown.
The young body that inhabits the dress slowly becomes the body
of an elderly lady. At first unsure and reluctant, the older
figure steps back, perhaps away from the camera, the viewer
or the memories, but then slowly her aging and frail limbs succumb
to the music and begin to relive
the romance. The old dress was worn by both Morrissey and her
mother, respectively eighteen years ago on the occasion of her
debutante ball and forty-five years ago at Mrs Morrissey's wedding.
As the two women re-enact their time in the dress, the garment
takes the place of the photograph as the memory trigger. As
is the case with Seven Years, the most pertinent themes
are time, time lapsing and of course memory. It does not seem
over zealous to suggest another agenda; once again, the female
condition. Though the body clearly changes, the unyielding domestic
setting does not. It appears that the two figures are surrounded,
enclosed by a cage of domesticity, as a clothes line, complete
with tawdry underwear pegged on, completes the circumference
begun by the back wall of the family house. The figures are
imprisoned; reliving moments of escapism, which are but that,
fugitive and fleeting.
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Kathy Prendergast:
Waiting, 1980, mixed media; 184 x 230 cm.
Image held here |
Throughout the exhibition
it is insightful to take note of the choices Morrissey has made,
her conscious inclusions and exclusions. Male characters are
represented as opposed to present; there is a clear avoidance
of using any real male figures. She has worked with and within
the environment which she knows best, in which she grew up,
middle-class suburbia in the seventies and eighties. Morrissey's
work is therefore extremely self-reflective. Not only is she
examining the everyday fruits of her own chosen art medium in
the hands of the layperson and the covert significance of these
images, but Seven Years and the accompanying two video
pieces imitate and deconstruct the parameters of her own family
life as she saw it growing up. For this reason 'autofiction',
a term normally associated with literature, seems appropriate.
Morrissey's exhibition
undoubtedly works. It works on different levels. If you wish
to merely enjoy the whimsy, the humour, or the contagious nostalgia,
fine. If you wish to dig deeper, look longer and think a little
harder that's also fine, Seven Years will reward you
for doing so. As potential co-producers and not mere voyeurs
of the works in the exhibition, the choice is ours. Lucidity,
lack of pretension and the combination of a genuine interest
in the stuff of everyday life and the more profound questions
which bridle our often oblivious existence, might suffice to
replace my hasty judgement, and 'unpleasant' branding of this
exhibition. One photograph, October 1st 1987, differing
significantly from the others, shows another photograph being
taken. Within this tangible photograph, and excluded from the
imaginary one the performers are mid-composing, is the striking
image of a thin, fresh and green tree growing outwards and upwards
from within a girthy, dark tree. Apart from the tree within
a tree, photograph within a photograph analogy, there must surely
be a poetic metaphor for Morrissey's Seven Years to be
teased out.
Claire Flannery
is a critic based in Dublin.
