ABSTRACT

Seán Hillen is Ireland’s most important photocollage artist and acutely aware of how aesthetic forms interact with public discourse. To understand the latter, this article first examines Hillen and Desmond Fitzgerald’s memorial for the Omagh Bombing, which aimed for community reconciliation, but whose reception absorbed the interpretative crisis produced by the bungled police investigation and surrounding conspiracy theories. Hillen’s photomontages, on the contrary, intently expose such interpretative crises. Having learned from Berlin Dada, Hillen’s early photomontages investigate the contradictions of Irish identity that state. After Omagh, Hillen turns explicitly to US conspiracy theory. He transports conspiracy’s subversion of state propaganda to interrogate post-recessionary Irish austerity and to ask whether British complicity in extrajudicial violence has been sufficiently exposed. Yet conspiracy is another false reconciliation, easily appropriated by illiberal politics, and central to authoritarian scapegoating and disregard. This doubled response, attraction to an aesthetic of suspicion and wariness that such technique has been politically appropriated, maps to a discussion of the aesthetic strategies of the writers Hillen’s collages invoke: W.B Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

摘要

塞恩·希伦（SeánHillen）是爱尔兰最重要的摄影拼贴艺术家，敏锐地意识到审美形式如何与公众话语互动。为了理解后者，本文首先考察了希伦和德斯蒙德·菲茨杰拉德（Osgh Bombing）的纪念馆，该纪念馆旨在实现社区和解，但其接受却吸收了拙劣的警察调查和周围的阴谋理论所产生的解释性危机。相反，希伦的照片蒙太奇则专心地暴露了这种解释性危机。希伦从柏林达达中学到了东西，他的早期蒙太奇照片调查了该州爱尔兰身份的矛盾。在奥马格之后，希伦明确地转向美国的阴谋论。他传达了阴谋颠覆国家宣传的意图，以审问衰退后爱尔兰的紧缩政策，并询问英国是否充分参与了法外暴力的同谋活动。然而，串谋是另一种虚假的和解，很容易被自由政治所利用，对威权主义的替罪羊和无视者至关重要。这种加倍的回应，吸引了这种政治上已经适当采用的怀疑和警惕的审美观，映射到了对希伦的拼贴所引用的美学策略的讨论：WB叶芝，詹姆斯·乔伊斯和塞缪尔·贝克特。