Mat Collishaw, “Bullet Hole”, 1988

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“Bullet Hole” was shown in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the (Charles) Saatchi Collection” in 1999 at the Royal Academy of Art in London, but I think I caught up with it later. It’s formidable, a large free standing wall of light boxes with a great sucking wound in the center. It is one of the pieces that makes me beam with weird what feels like conspiratorial pleasure, one of those impossible pictures that violate conventional standards of good taste.

It’s a construction in a number of ways, a clever and graphic, colorful arrangement of found forensic images of a wound actually made with an ice pick, not a bullet. But it speaks to our contemporary wallow in violence. At the same time, this is a great looking work — blood red aperture, lush brown hair full of light and life, in a perfect grid.

The hole itself can be any body orifice, even your mind’s eye, literally celebrated and lit from within: the grid is a series of luminous light boxes.

Sensational.

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