Anne Collier
Woman Crying, Comic (for Texte zur Kunst) (2020)
The weeping woman is a recurring motif in art (and not only in art). It feeds into the misogynistic fantasy of the so-called “weak” sex and its propensity for hysteria and madness. In her “Women Crying” series, the artist Anne Collier, who was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and now lives in New York, probes the clichéd image of the dame breaking out in tears. With an analog camera, she photographs existing depictions of women crying, as found on vinyl record covers and in newspapers and romancecomic strips, focusing on material from the Cold War era with its traditional gender roles and isolating certain details such as the area around the eye or individual teardrops. The specific quality of the series is unmistakable in her anniversary edition “Woman Crying, Comic (for Texte zur Kunst)”: On the one hand, the close-up on the detail of the tear-filled and fear-stricken eye fringed by a dense cornice of lashes brings out the dot pattern of the four-color print, a characteristic process in newspaper and comic-strip production. On the other hand, it shatters the patriarchal frame that contains the woman in the image, extricating her from her assigned place in society.